VIRGINIA
WOOLF

Complete Works

Version 10.0 [February 2016] by pynch

Virginia Woolf—Works

contents

The Voyage Out (1915)

Night and Day (1919)

Monday or Tuesday (1921)

Jacob’s Room (1922)

Mrs. Dalloway (1925)

The Common Reader I (1925)

To the Lighthouse (1927)

Orlando: a biography (1928)

A Room of One’s Own (1929)

On Being Ill (1930)

The Waves (1931)

The Common Reader II (1932)

Flush: a biography (1933)

The Years (1937)

Three Guineas (1938)

Roger Fry: a biography (1940)

Between the Acts (1941)

The Death of the Moth, and other essays (1942)

A Haunted House, and other short stories (1944)

The Moment, and other essays (1947)

The Captain’s Death Bed, and other essays (1950)

A Writer’s Diary (1953)

The Letters of Virginia Woolf & Lytton Strachey (1956)

Granite and Rainbow (1958)

Mrs Dalloway’s Party (1973)

The London Scene (1931)

The Letters (6 vols., 1975–80)

Moments of Being (1976)

Freshwater: A Comedy (1976)

The Diary (5 vols., 1977–84)

Books and Portraits (1978)

Women And Writing (1979)

The Complete Shorter Fiction (1985, 1987)

The Essays (6 vols., 1986–2011)

A Passionate Apprentice. The Early Journals (1990)

Index

THE
VOYAGE
OUT

by
Virginia Woolf

To L. W.

published
March 26, 1915
by
Duckworth & Co., London

the voyage out

Ch. I    Ch. II    Ch. III    Ch. IV

Ch. V    Ch. VI    Ch. VII    Ch. VIII

Ch. IX    Ch. X    Ch. XI    Ch. XII

Ch. XIII    Ch. XIV    Ch. XV    Ch. XVI

Ch. XVII    Ch. XVIII    Ch. XIX    Ch. XX

Ch. XXI    Ch. XXII    Ch. XXIII    Ch. XXIV

Ch. XXV    Ch. XXVI    Ch. XXVII

[]

[The text follows the 1949 Hogarth Press edition.]

Chapter I

As the streets that lead from the Strand to the Embankment are very narrow, it is better not to walk down them arm-in-arm. If you persist, lawyers’ clerks will have to make flying leaps into the mud; young lady typists will have to fidget behind you. In the streets of London where beauty goes unregarded, eccentricity must pay the penalty, and it is better not to be very tall, to wear a long blue cloak, or to beat the air with your left hand.

One afternoon in the beginning of October when the traffic was becoming brisk a tall man strode along the edge of the pavement with a lady on his arm. Angry glances struck upon their backs. The small, agitated figures—for in comparison with this couple most people looked small—decorated with fountain pens, and burdened with despatch-boxes, had appointments to keep, and drew a weekly salary, so that there was some reason for the unfriendly stare which was bestowed upon Mr. Ambrose’s height and upon Mrs. Ambrose’s cloak. But some enchantment had put both man and woman beyond the reach of malice and unpopularity. In his case one might guess from the moving lips that it was thought; and in hers from the eyes fixed stonily straight in front of her at a level above the eyes of most that it was sorrow. It was only by scorning all she met that she kept herself from tears, and the friction of people brushing past her was evidently painful. After watching the traffic on the Embankment for a minute or two with a stoical gaze she twitched her husband’s sleeve, and they crossed between the swift discharge of motor cars. When they were safe on the further side, she gently withdrew her arm from his, allowing her mouth at the same time to relax, to tremble; then tears rolled down, and, leaning her elbows on the balustrade, she shielded her face from the curious. Mr. Ambrose attempted consolation; he patted her shoulder; but she showed no signs of admitting him, and feeling it awkward to stand beside a grief that was greater than his, he crossed his arms behind him, and took a turn along the pavement.

The embankment juts out in angles here and there, like pulpits; instead of preachers, however, small boys occupy them, dangling string, dropping pebbles, or launching wads of paper for a cruise. With their sharp eye for eccentricity, they were inclined to think Mr. Ambrose awful; but the quickest witted cried “Bluebeard!” as he passed. In case they should proceed to tease his wife, Mr. Ambrose flourished his stick at them, upon which they decided that he was grotesque merely, and four instead of one cried “Bluebeard!” in chorus.

Although Mrs. Ambrose stood quite still, much longer than is natural, the little boys let her be. Some one is always looking into the river near Waterloo Bridge; a couple will stand there talking for half an hour on a fine afternoon; most people, walking for pleasure, contemplate for three minutes; when, having compared the occasion with other occasions, or made some sentence, they pass on. Sometimes the flats and churches and hotels of Westminster are like the outlines of Constantinople in a mist; sometimes the river is an opulent purple, sometimes mud-coloured, sometimes sparkling blue like the sea. It is always worth while to look down and see what is happening. But this lady looked neither up nor down; the only thing she had seen, since she stood there, was a circular iridescent patch slowly floating past with a straw in the middle of it. The straw and the patch swam again and again behind the tremulous medium of a great welling tear, and the tear rose and fell and dropped into the river. Then there struck close upon her ears—

Lars Porsena of Clusium

By the nine Gods he swore—

and then more faintly, as if the speaker had passed her on his walk—

That the Great House of Tarquin

Should suffer wrong no more.

Yes, she knew she must go back to all that, but at present she must weep. Screening her face she sobbed more steadily than she had yet done, her shoulders rising and falling with great regularity. It was this figure that her husband saw when, having reached the polished Sphinx, having entangled himself with a man selling picture postcards, he turned; the stanza instantly stopped. He came up to her, laid his hand on her shoulder, and said, “Dearest.” His voice was supplicating. But she shut her face away from him, as much as to say, “You can’t possibly understand.”

As he did not leave her, however, she had to wipe her eyes, and to raise them to the level of the factory chimneys on the other bank. She saw also the arches of Waterloo Bridge and the carts moving across them, like the line of animals in a shooting gallery. They were seen blankly, but to see anything was of course to end her weeping and begin to walk.

“I would rather walk,” she said, her husband having hailed a cab already occupied by two city men.

The fixity of her mood was broken by the action of walking. The shooting motor cars, more like spiders in the moon than terrestrial objects, the thundering drays, the jingling hansoms, and little black broughams, made her think of the world she lived in. Somewhere up there above the pinnacles where the smoke rose in a pointed hill, her children were now asking for her, and getting a soothing reply. As for the mass of streets, squares, and public buildings which parted them, she only felt at this moment how little London had done to make her love it, although thirty of her forty years had been spent in a street. She knew how to read the people who were passing her; there were the rich who were running to and from each others’ houses at this hour; there were the bigoted workers driving in a straight line to their offices; there were the poor who were unhappy and rightly malignant. Already, though there was sunlight in the haze, tattered old men and women were nodding off to sleep upon the seats. When one gave up seeing the beauty that clothed things, this was the skeleton beneath.

A fine rain now made her still more dismal; vans with the odd names of those engaged in odd industries—Sprules, Manufacturer of Saw-dust; Grabb, to whom no piece of waste paper comes amiss—fell flat as a bad joke; bold lovers, sheltered behind one cloak, seemed to her sordid, past their passion; the flower women, a contented company, whose talk is always worth hearing, were sodden hags; the red, yellow, and blue flowers, whose heads were pressed together, would not blaze. Moreover, her husband walking with a quick rhythmic stride, jerking his free hand occasionally, was either a Viking or a stricken Nelson; the sea-gulls had changed his note.

“Ridley, shall we drive? Shall we drive, Ridley?”

Mrs. Ambrose had to speak sharply; by this time he was far away.

The cab, by trotting steadily along the same road soon withdrew them from the West End, and plunged them into London. It appeared that this was a great manufacturing place, where the people were engaged in making things, as though the West End, with its electric lamps, its vast plate-glass windows all shining yellow, its carefully-finished houses, and tiny live figures trotting on the pavement, or bowled along on wheels in the road, was the finished work. It appeared to her a very small bit of work for such an enormous factory to have made. For some reason it appeared to her as a small golden tassel on the edge of a vast black cloak.

Observing that they passed no other hansom cab, but only vans and waggons, and that not one of the thousand men and women she saw was either a gentleman or a lady, Mrs. Ambrose understood that after all it is the ordinary thing to be poor, and that London is the city of innumerable poor people. Startled by this discovery and seeing herself pacing a circle all the days of her life round Piccadilly Circus she was greatly relieved to pass a building put up by the London County Council for Night Schools.

“Lord, how gloomy it is!” her husband groaned. “Poor creatures!”

What with misery for her children, the poor, and the rain, her mind was like a wound exposed to dry in the air.

At this point the cab stopped, for it was in danger of being crushed like an egg-shell. The wide Embankment which had had room for cannonballs and squadrons, had now shrunk to a cobbled lane steaming with smells of malt and oil and blocked by waggons. While her husband read the placards pasted on the brick announcing the hours at which certain ships would sail for Scotland, Mrs. Ambrose did her best to find information. From a world exclusively occupied in feeding waggons with sacks, half obliterated too in a fine yellow fog, they got neither help nor attention. It seemed a miracle when an old man approached, guessed their condition, and proposed to row them out to their ship in the little boat which he kept moored at the bottom of a flight of steps. With some hesitation they trusted themselves to him, took their places, and were soon waving up and down upon the water, London having shrunk to two lines of buildings on either side of them, square buildings and oblong buildings placed in rows like a child’s avenue of bricks.

The river, which had a certain amount of troubled yellow light in it, ran with great force; bulky barges floated down swiftly escorted by tugs; police boats shot past everything; the wind went with the current. The open rowing-boat in which they sat bobbed and curtseyed across the line of traffic. In mid-stream the old man stayed his hands upon the oars, and as the water rushed past them, remarked that once he had taken many passengers across, where now he took scarcely any. He seemed to recall an age when his boat, moored among rushes, carried delicate feet across to lawns at Rotherhithe.

“They want bridges now,” he said, indicating the monstrous outline of the Tower Bridge. Mournfully Helen regarded him, who was putting water between her and her children. Mournfully she gazed at the ship they were approaching; anchored in the middle of the stream they could dimly read her name—Euphrosyne.

Very dimly in the falling dusk they could see the lines of the rigging, the masts and the dark flag which the breeze blew out squarely behind.

As the little boat sidled up to the steamer, and the old man shipped his oars, he remarked once more pointing above, that ships all the world over flew that flag the day they sailed. In the minds of both the passengers the blue flag appeared a sinister token, and this the moment for presentiments, but nevertheless they rose, gathered their things together, and climbed on deck.

Down in the saloon of her father’s ship, Miss Rachel Vinrace, aged twenty-four, stood waiting her uncle and aunt nervously. To begin with, though nearly related, she scarcely remembered them; to go on with, they were elderly people, and finally, as her father’s daughter she must be in some sort prepared to entertain them. She looked forward to seeing them as civilised people generally look forward to the first sight of civilised people, as though they were of the nature of an approaching physical discomfort,—a tight shoe or a draughty window. She was already unnaturally braced to receive them. As she occupied herself in laying forks severely straight by the side of knives, she heard a man’s voice saying gloomily:

“On a dark night one would fall down these stairs head foremost,” to which a woman’s voice added, “And be killed.”

As she spoke the last words the woman stood in the doorway. Tall, large-eyed, draped in purple shawls, Mrs. Ambrose was romantic and beautiful; not perhaps sympathetic, for her eyes looked straight and considered what they saw. Her face was much warmer than a Greek face; on the other hand it was much bolder than the face of the usual pretty Englishwoman.

“Oh, Rachel, how d’you do,” she said, shaking hands.

“How are you, dear,” said Mr. Ambrose, inclining his forehead to be kissed. His niece instinctively liked his thin angular body, and the big head with its sweeping features, and the acute, innocent eyes.

“Tell Mr. Pepper,” Rachel bade the servant. Husband and wife then sat down on one side of the table, with their niece opposite to them.

“My father told me to begin,” she explained. “He is very busy with the men…. You know Mr. Pepper?”

A little man who was bent as some trees are by a gale on one side of them had slipped in. Nodding to Mr. Ambrose, he shook hands with Helen.

“Draughts,” he said, erecting the collar of his coat.

“You are still rheumatic?” asked Helen. Her voice was low and seductive, though she spoke absently enough, the sight of town and river being still present to her mind.

“Once rheumatic, always rheumatic, I fear,” he replied. “To some extent it depends on the weather, though not so much as people are apt to think.”

“One does not die of it, at any rate,” said Helen.

“As a general rule—no,” said Mr. Pepper.

“Soup, Uncle Ridley?” asked Rachel.

“Thank you, dear,” he said, and, as he held his plate out, sighed audibly, “Ah! she’s not like her mother.” Helen was just too late in thumping her tumbler on the table to prevent Rachel from hearing, and from blushing scarlet with embarrassment.

“The way servants treat flowers!” she said hastily. She drew a green vase with a crinkled lip towards her, and began pulling out the tight little chrysanthemums, which she laid on the table-cloth, arranging them fastidiously side by side.

There was a pause.

“You knew Jenkinson, didn’t you, Ambrose?” asked Mr. Pepper across the table.

“Jenkinson of Peterhouse?”

“He’s dead,” said Mr. Pepper.

“Ah, dear!—I knew him—ages ago,” said Ridley. “He was the hero of the punt accident, you remember? A queer card. Married a young woman out of a tobacconist’s, and lived in the Fens—never heard what became of him.”

“Drink—drugs,” said Mr. Pepper with sinister conciseness. “He left a commentary. Hopeless muddle, I’m told.”

“The man had really great abilities,” said Ridley.

“His introduction to Jellaby holds its own still,” went on Mr. Pepper, “which is surprising, seeing how text-books change.”

“There was a theory about the planets, wasn’t there?” asked Ridley.

“A screw loose somewhere, no doubt of it,” said Mr. Pepper, shaking his head.

Now a tremor ran through the table, and a light outside swerved. At the same time an electric bell rang sharply again and again.

“We’re off,” said Ridley.

A slight but perceptible wave seemed to roll beneath the floor; then it sank; then another came, more perceptible. Lights slid right across the uncurtained window. The ship gave a loud melancholy moan.

“We’re off!” said Mr. Pepper. Other ships, as sad as she, answered her outside on the river. The chuckling and hissing of water could be plainly heard, and the ship heaved so that the steward bringing plates had to balance himself as he drew the curtain. There was a pause.

“Jenkinson of Cats—d’you still keep up with him?” asked Ambrose.

“As much as one ever does,” said Mr. Pepper. “We meet annually. This year he has had the misfortune to lose his wife, which made it painful, of course.”

“Very painful,” Ridley agreed.

“There’s an unmarried daughter who keeps house for him, I believe, but it’s never the same, not at his age.”

Both gentlemen nodded sagely as they carved their apples.

“There was a book, wasn’t there?” Ridley enquired.

“There was a book, but there never will be a book,” said Mr. Pepper with such fierceness that both ladies looked up at him.

“There never will be a book, because some one else has written it for him,” said Mr. Pepper with considerable acidity. “That’s what comes of putting things off, and collecting fossils, and sticking Norman arches on one’s pigsties.”

“I confess I sympathise,” said Ridley with a melancholy sigh. “I have a weakness for people who can’t begin.”

“… The accumulations of a lifetime wasted,” continued Mr. Pepper. “He had accumulations enough to fill a barn.”

“It’s a vice that some of us escape,” said Ridley. “Our friend Miles has another work out to-day.”

Mr. Pepper gave an acid little laugh. “According to my calculations,” he said, “he has produced two volumes and a half annually, which, allowing for time spent in the cradle and so forth, shows a commendable industry.”

“Yes, the old Master’s saying of him has been pretty well realised,” said Ridley.

“A way they had,” said Mr. Pepper. “You know the Bruce collection?—not for publication, of course.”

“I should suppose not,” said Ridley significantly. “For a Divine he was—remarkably free.”

“The Pump in Neville’s Row, for example?” enquired Mr. Pepper.

“Precisely,” said Ambrose.

Each of the ladies, being after the fashion of their sex, highly trained in promoting men’s talk without listening to it, could think—about the education of children, about the use of fog sirens in an opera—without betraying herself. Only it struck Helen that Rachel was perhaps too still for a hostess, and that she might have done something with her hands.

“Perhaps——?” she said at length, upon which they rose and left, vaguely to the surprise of the gentlemen, who had either thought them attentive or had forgotten their presence.

“Ah, one could tell strange stories of the old days,” they heard Ridley say, as he sank into his chair again. Glancing back, at the doorway, they saw Mr. Pepper as though he had suddenly loosened his clothes, and had become a vivacious and malicious old ape.

Winding veils round their heads, the women walked on deck. They were now moving steadily down the river, passing the dark shapes of ships at anchor, and London was a swarm of lights with a pale yellow canopy drooping above it. There were the lights of the great theatres, the lights of the long streets, lights that indicated huge squares of domestic comfort, lights that hung high in air. No darkness would ever settle upon those lamps, as no darkness had settled upon them for hundreds of years. It seemed dreadful that the town should blaze for ever in the same spot; dreadful at least to people going away to adventure upon the sea, and beholding it as a circumscribed mound, eternally burnt, eternally scarred. From the deck of the ship the great city appeared a crouched and cowardly figure, a sedentary miser.

Leaning over the rail, side by side, Helen said, “Won’t you be cold?” Rachel replied, “No…. How beautiful!” she added a moment later. Very little was visible—a few masts, a shadow of land here, a line of brilliant windows there. They tried to make head against the wind.

“It blows—it blows!” gasped Rachel, the words rammed down her throat. Struggling by her side, Helen was suddenly overcome by the spirit of movement, and pushed along with her skirts wrapping themselves round her knees, and both arms to her hair. But slowly the intoxication of movement died down, and the wind became rough and chilly. They looked through a chink in the blind and saw that long cigars were being smoked in the dining-room; they saw Mr. Ambrose throw himself violently against the back of his chair, while Mr. Pepper crinkled his cheeks as though they had been cut in wood. The ghost of a roar of laughter came out to them, and was drowned at once in the wind. In the dry yellow-lighted room Mr. Pepper and Mr. Ambrose were oblivious of all tumult; they were in Cambridge, and it was probably about the year 1875.

“They’re old friends,” said Helen, smiling at the sight. “Now, is there a room for us to sit in?”

Rachel opened a door.

“It’s more like a landing than a room,” she said. Indeed it had nothing of the shut stationary character of a room on shore. A table was rooted in the middle, and seats were stuck to the sides. Happily the tropical suns had bleached the tapestries to a faded blue-green colour, and the mirror with its frame of shells, the work of the steward’s love, when the time hung heavy in the southern seas, was quaint rather than ugly. Twisted shells with red lips like unicorn’s horns ornamented the mantelpiece, which was draped by a pall of purple plush from which depended a certain number of balls. Two windows opened on to the deck, and the light beating through them when the ship was roasted on the Amazons had turned the prints on the opposite wall to a faint yellow colour, so that “The Coliseum” was scarcely to be distinguished from Queen Alexandra playing with her Spaniels. A pair of wicker armchairs by the fireside invited one to warm one’s hands at a grate full of gilt shavings; a great lamp swung above the table—the kind of lamp which makes the light of civilisation across dark fields to one walking in the country.

“It’s odd that every one should be an old friend of Mr. Pepper’s,” Rachel started nervously, for the situation was difficult, the room cold, and Helen curiously silent.

“I suppose you take him for granted?” said her aunt.

“He’s like this,” said Rachel, lighting on a fossilised fish in a basin, and displaying it.

“I expect you’re too severe,” Helen remarked.

Rachel immediately tried to qualify what she had said against her belief.

“I don’t really know him,” she said, and took refuge in facts, believing that elderly people really like them better than feelings. She produced what she knew of William Pepper. She told Helen that he always called on Sundays when they were at home; he knew about a great many things—about mathematics, history, Greek, zoology, economics, and the Icelandic Sagas. He had turned Persian poetry into English prose, and English prose into Greek iambics; he was an authority upon coins, and—one other thing—oh yes, she thought it was vehicular traffic.

He was here either to get things out of the sea, or to write upon the probable course of Odysseus, for Greek after all was his hobby.

“I’ve got all his pamphlets,” she said. “Little pamphlets. Little yellow books.” It did not appear that she had read them.

“Has he ever been in love?” asked Helen, who had chosen a seat.

This was unexpectedly to the point.

“His heart’s a piece of old shoe leather,” Rachel declared, dropping the fish. But when questioned she had to own that she had never asked him.

“I shall ask him,” said Helen.

“The last time I saw you, you were buying a piano,” she continued. “Do you remember—the piano, the room in the attic, and the great plants with the prickles?”

“Yes, and my aunts said the piano would come through the floor, but at their age one wouldn’t mind being killed in the night?” she enquired.

“I heard from Aunt Bessie not long ago,” Helen stated. “She is afraid that you will spoil your arms if you insist upon so much practising.”

“The muscles of the forearm—and then one won’t marry?”

“She didn’t put it quite like that,” replied Mrs. Ambrose.

“Oh, no—of course she wouldn’t,” said Rachel with a sigh.

Helen looked at her. Her face was weak rather than decided, saved from insipidity by the large enquiring eyes; denied beauty, now that she was sheltered indoors, by the lack of colour and definite outline. Moreover, a hesitation in speaking, or rather a tendency to use the wrong words, made her seem more than normally incompetent for her years. Mrs. Ambrose, who had been speaking much at random, now reflected that she certainly did not look forward to the intimacy of three or fours [four] weeks on board ship which was threatened. Women of her own age usually boring her, she supposed that girls would be worse. She glanced at Rachel again. Yes! how clear it was that she would be vacillating, emotional, and when you said something to her it would make no more lasting impression than the stroke of a stick upon water. There was nothing to take hold of in girls—nothing hard, permanent, satisfactory. Did Willoughby say three weeks, or did he say four? She tried to remember.

At this point, however, the door opened and a tall burly man entered the room, came forward and shook Helen’s hand with an emotional kind of heartiness, Willoughby himself, Rachel’s father, Helen’s brother-in-law. As a great deal of flesh would have been needed to make a fat man of him, his frame being so large, he was not fat; his face was a large framework too, looking, by the smallness of the features and the glow in the hollow of the cheek, more fitted to withstand assaults of the weather than to express sentiments and emotions, or to respond to them in others.

“It is a great pleasure that you have come,” he said, “for both of us.”

Rachel murmured in obedience to her father’s glance.

“We’ll do our best to make you comfortable. And Ridley. We think it an honour to have charge of him. Pepper’ll have some one to contradict him—which I daren’t do. You find this child grown, don’t you? A young woman, eh?”

Still holding Helen’s hand he drew his arm round Rachel’s shoulder, thus making them come uncomfortably close, but Helen forbore to look.

“You think she does us credit?” he asked.

“Oh yes,” said Helen.

“Because we expect great things of her,” he continued, squeezing his daughter’s arm and releasing her. “But about you now.” They sat down side by side on the little sofa. “Did you leave the children well? They’ll be ready for school, I suppose. Do they take after you or Ambrose? They’ve got good heads on their shoulders, I’ll be bound?”

At this Helen immediately brightened more than she had yet done, and explained that her son was six and her daughter ten. Everybody said that her boy was like her and her girl like Ridley. As for brains, they were quick brats, she thought, and modestly she ventured on a little story about her son,—how left alone for a minute he had taken the pat of butter in his fingers, run across the room with it, and put it on the fire—merely for the fun of the thing, a feeling which she could understand.

“And you had to show the young rascal that these tricks wouldn’t do, eh?”

“A child of six? I don’t think they matter.”

“I’m an old-fashioned father.”

“Nonsense, Willoughby; Rachel knows better.”

Much as Willoughby would doubtless have liked his daughter to praise him she did not; her eyes were unreflecting as water, her fingers still toying with the fossilised fish, her mind absent. The elder people went on to speak of arrangements that could be made for Ridley’s comfort—a table placed where he couldn’t help looking at the sea, far from boilers, at the same time sheltered from the view of people passing. Unless he made this a holiday, when his books were all packed, he would have no holiday whatever; for out at Santa Marina Helen knew, by experience, that he would work all day; his boxes, she said, were packed with books.

“Leave it to me—leave it to me!” said Willoughby, obviously intending to do much more than she asked of him. But Ridley and Mr. Pepper were heard fumbling at the door.

“How are you, Vinrace?” said Ridley, extending a limp hand as he came in, as though the meeting were melancholy to both, but on the whole more so to him.

Willoughby preserved his heartiness, tempered by respect. For the moment nothing was said.

“We looked in and saw you laughing,” Helen remarked. “Mr. Pepper had just told a very good story.”

“Pish. None of the stories were good,” said her husband peevishly.

“Still a severe judge, Ridley?” enquired Mr. Vinrace.

“We bored you so that you left,” said Ridley, speaking directly to his wife.

As this was quite true Helen did not attempt to deny it, and her next remark, “But didn’t they improve after we’d gone?” was unfortunate, for her husband answered with a droop of his shoulders, “If possible they got worse.”

The situation was now one of considerable discomfort for every one concerned, as was proved by a long interval of constraint and silence. Mr. Pepper, indeed, created a diversion of a kind by leaping on to his seat, both feet tucked under him, with the action of a spinster who detects a mouse, as the draught struck at his ankles. Drawn up there, sucking at his cigar, with his arms encircling his knees, he looked like the image of Buddha, and from this elevation began a discourse, addressed to nobody, for nobody had called for it, upon the unplumbed depths of ocean. He professed himself surprised to learn that although Mr. Vinrace possessed ten ships, regularly plying between London and Buenos Aires, not one of them was bidden to investigate the great white monsters of the lower waters.

“No, no,” laughed Willoughby, “the monsters of the earth are too many for me!”

Rachel was heard to sigh, “Poor little goats!”

“If it weren’t for the goats there’d be no music, my dear; music depends upon goats,” said her father rather sharply, and Mr. Pepper went on to describe the white, hairless, blind monsters lying curled on the ridges of sand at the bottom of the sea, which would explode if you brought them to the surface, their sides bursting asunder and scattering entrails to the winds when released from pressure, with considerable detail and with such show of knowledge, that Ridley was disgusted, and begged him to stop.

From all this Helen drew her own conclusions, which were gloomy enough. Pepper was a bore; Rachel was an unlicked girl, no doubt prolific of confidences, the very first of which would be: “You see, I don’t get on with my father.” Willoughby, as usual, loved his business and built his Empire, and between them all she would be considerably bored. Being a woman of action, however, she rose, and said that for her part she was going to bed. At the door she glanced back instinctively at Rachel, expecting that as two of the same sex they would leave the room together. Rachel rose, looked vaguely into Helen’s face and remarked with her slight stammer, “I’m going out to t-t-triumph in the wind.”

Mrs. Ambrose’s worst suspicions were confirmed; she went down the passage lurching from side to side, and fending off the wall now with her right arm, now with her left; at each lurch she exclaimed emphatically, “Damn!”

[]

Chapter II

Uncomfortable as the night, with its rocking movement, and salt smells, may have been, and in one case undoubtedly was, for Mr. Pepper had insufficient clothes upon his bed, the breakfast next morning wore a kind of beauty. The voyage had begun, and had begun happily with a soft blue sky, and a calm sea. The sense of untapped resources, things to say as yet unsaid, made the hour significant, so that in future years the entire journey perhaps would be represented by this one scene, with the sound of sirens hooting in the river the night before, somehow mixing in.

The table was cheerful with apples and bread and eggs. Helen handed Willoughby the butter, and as she did so cast her eye on him and reflected, “And she married you, and she was happy, I suppose.”

She went off on a familiar train of thought, leading on to all kinds of well-known reflections, from the old wonder, why Theresa had married Willoughby?

“Of course, one sees all that,” she thought, meaning that one sees that he is big and burly, and has a great booming voice, and a fist and a will of his own; “but——” here she slipped into a fine analysis of him which is best represented by one word, “sentimental,” by which she meant that he was never simple and honest about his feelings. For example, he seldom spoke of the dead, but kept anniversaries with singular pomp. She suspected him of nameless atrocities with regard to his daughter, as indeed she had always suspected him of bullying his wife. Naturally she fell to comparing her own fortunes with the fortunes of her friend, for Willoughby’s wife had been perhaps the one woman Helen called friend, and this comparison often made the staple of their talk. Ridley was a scholar, and Willoughby was a man of business. Ridley was bringing out the third volume of Pindar when Willoughby was launching his first ship. They built a new factory the very year the commentary on Aristotle—was it?—appeared at the University Press. “And Rachel,” she looked at her, meaning, no doubt, to decide the argument, which was otherwise too evenly balanced, by declaring that Rachel was not comparable to her own children. “She really might be six years old,” was all she said, however, this judgment referring to the smooth unmarked outline of the girl’s face, and not condemning her otherwise, for if Rachel were ever to think, feel, laugh, or express herself, instead of dropping milk from a height as though to see what kind of drops it made, she might be interesting though never exactly pretty. She was like her mother, as the image in a pool on a still summer’s day is like the vivid flushed face that hangs over it.

Meanwhile Helen herself was under examination, though not from either of her victims. Mr. Pepper considered her; and his meditations, carried on while he cut his toast into bars and neatly buttered them, took him through a considerable stretch of autobiography. One of his penetrating glances assured him that he was right last night in judging that Helen was beautiful. Blandly he passed her the jam. She was talking nonsense, but not worse nonsense than people usually do talk at breakfast, the cerebral circulation, as he knew to his cost, being apt to give trouble at that hour. He went on saying “No” to her, on principle, for he never yielded to a woman on account of her sex. And here, dropping his eyes to his plate, he became autobiographical. He had not married himself for the sufficient reason that he had never met a woman who commanded his respect. Condemned to pass the susceptible years of youth in a railway station in Bombay, he had seen only coloured women, military women, official women; and his ideal was a woman who could read Greek, if not Persian, was irreproachably fair in the face, and able to understand the small things he let fall while undressing. As it was he had contracted habits of which he was not in the least ashamed. Certain odd minutes every day went to learning things by heart; he never took a ticket without noting the number; he devoted January to Petronius, February to Catullus, March to the Etruscan vases perhaps; anyhow he had done good work in India, and there was nothing to regret in his life except the fundamental defects which no wise man regrets, when the present is still his. So concluding he looked up suddenly and smiled. Rachel caught his eye.

“And now you’ve chewed something thirty-seven times, I suppose?” she thought, but said politely aloud, “Are your legs troubling you to-day, Mr. Pepper?”

“My shoulder blades?” he asked, shifting them painfully. “Beauty has no effect upon uric acid that I’m aware of,” he sighed, contemplating the round pane opposite, through which the sky and sea showed blue. At the same time he took a little parchment volume from his pocket and laid it on the table. As it was clear that he invited comment, Helen asked him the name of it. She got the name; but she got also a disquisition upon the proper method of making roads. Beginning with the Greeks, who had, he said, many difficulties to contend with, he continued with the Romans, passed to England and the right method, which speedily became the wrong method, and wound up with such a fury of denunciation directed against the road-makers of the present day in general, and the road-makers of Richmond Park in particular, where Mr. Pepper had the habit of cycling every morning before breakfast, that the spoons fairly jingled against the coffee cups, and the insides of at least four rolls mounted in a heap beside Mr. Pepper’s plate.

“Pebbles!” he concluded, viciously dropping another bread pellet upon the heap. “The roads of England are mended with pebbles! ‘With the first heavy rainfall,’ I’ve told ’em, ‘your road will be a swamp.’ Again and again my words have proved true. But d’you suppose they listen to me when I tell ’em so, when I point out the consequences, the consequences to the public purse, when I recommend ’em to read Coryphæus? Not a bit of it; they’ve other interests to attend to. No, Mrs. Ambrose, you will form no just opinion of the stupidity of mankind until you have sat upon a Borough Council!” The little man fixed her with a glance of ferocious energy.

“I have had servants,” said Mrs. Ambrose, concentrating her gaze. “At this moment I have a nurse. She’s a good woman as they go, but she’s determined to make my children pray. So far, owing to great care on my part, they think of God as a kind of walrus; but now that my back’s turned——Ridley,” she demanded, swinging round upon her husband, “what shall we do if we find them saying the Lord’s Prayer when we get home again?”

Ridley made the sound which is represented by “Tush.”

But Willoughby, whose discomfort as he listened was manifested by a slight movement rocking of his body, said awkwardly, “Oh, surely, Helen, a little religion hurts nobody.”

“I would rather my children told lies,” she replied, and while Willoughby was reflecting that his sister-in-law was even more eccentric than he remembered, pushed her chair back and swept upstairs. In a second they heard her calling back, “Oh, look! We’re out at sea!”

They followed her on to the deck. All the smoke and the houses had disappeared, and the ship was out in a wide space of sea very fresh and clear though pale in the early light. They had left London sitting on its mud. A very thin line of shadow tapered on the horizon, scarcely thick enough to stand the burden of Paris, which nevertheless rested upon it. They were free of roads, free of mankind, and the same exhilaration at their freedom ran through them all. The ship was making her way steadily through small waves which slapped her and then fizzled like effervescing water, leaving a little border of bubbles and foam on either side. The colourless October sky above was thinly clouded as if by the trail of wood-fire smoke, and the air was wonderfully salt and brisk. Indeed it was too cold to stand still. Mrs. Ambrose drew her arm within her husband’s, and as they moved off it could be seen from the way in which her sloping cheek turned up to his that she had something private to communicate. They went a few paces and Rachel saw them kiss.

Down she looked into the depth of the sea. While it was slightly disturbed on the surface by the passage of the Euphrosyne, beneath it was green and dim, and it grew dimmer and dimmer until the sand at the bottom was only a pale blur. One could scarcely see the black ribs of wrecked ships, or the spiral towers made by the burrowings of great eels, or the smooth green-sided monsters who came by flickering this way and that.

——“And, Rachel, if any one wants me, I’m busy till one,” said her father, enforcing his words as he often did, when he spoke to his daughter, by a smart blow upon the shoulder.

“Until one,” he repeated. “And you’ll find yourself some employment, eh? Scales, French, a little German, eh? There’s Mr. Pepper who knows more about separable verbs than any man in Europe, eh?” and he went off laughing. Rachel laughed, too, as indeed she had laughed ever since she could remember, without thinking it funny, but because she admired her father.

But just as she was turning with a view perhaps to finding some employment, she was intercepted by a woman who was so broad and so thick that to be intercepted by her was inevitable. The discreet tentative way in which she moved, together with her sober black dress, showed that she belonged to the lower orders; nevertheless she took up a rock-like position, looking about her to see that no gentry were near before she delivered her message, which had reference to the state of the sheets, and was of the utmost gravity.

“How ever we’re to get through this voyage, Miss Rachel, I really can’t tell,” she began with a shake of her head. “There’s only just sheets enough to go round, and the master’s has a rotten place you could put your fingers through. And the counterpanes. Did you notice the counterpanes? I thought to myself a poor person would have been ashamed of them. The one I gave Mr. Pepper was hardly fit to cover a dog…. No, Miss Rachel, they could not be mended; they’re only fit for dust sheets. Why, if one sewed one’s finger to the bone, one would have one’s work undone the next time they went to the laundry.”

Her voice in its indignation wavered as if tears were near.

There was nothing for it but to descend and inspect a large pile of linen heaped upon a table. Mrs. Chailey handled the sheets as if she knew each by name, character, and constitution. Some had yellow stains, others had places where the threads made long ladders; but to the ordinary eye they looked much as sheets usually do look, very chill, white, cold, and irreproachably clean.

Suddenly Mrs. Chailey, turning from the subject of sheets, dismissing them entirely, clenched her fists on the top of them, and proclaimed, “And you couldn’t ask a living creature to sit where I sit!”

Mrs. Chailey was expected to sit in a cabin which was large enough, but too near the boilers, so that after five minutes she could hear her heart “go,” she complained, putting her hand above it, which was a state of things that Mrs. Vinrace, Rachel’s mother, would never have dreamt of inflicting—Mrs. Vinrace who knew every sheet in her house, and expected of every one the best they could do, but no more.

It was the easiest thing in the world to grant another room, and the problem of sheets simultaneously and miraculously solved itself, the spots and ladders not being past cure after all, but——

“Lies! Lies! Lies!” exclaimed the mistress indignantly, as she ran up on to the deck. “What’s the use of telling me lies?”

In her anger that a woman of fifty should behave like a child and come cringing to a girl because she wanted to sit where she had not leave to sit, she did not think of the particular case, and, unpacking her music, soon forgot all about the old woman and her sheets.

Mrs. Chailey folded her sheets, but her expression testified to flatness within. The world no longer cared about her, and a ship was not a home. When the lamps were lit yesterday, and the sailors went tumbling above her head, she had cried; she would cry this evening; she would cry to-morrow. It was not home. Meanwhile she arranged her ornaments in the room which she had won too easily. They were strange ornaments to bring on a sea voyage—china pugs, tea-sets in miniature, cups stamped floridly with the arms of the city of Bristol, hair-pin boxes crusted with shamrock, antelopes’ heads in coloured plaster, together with a multitude of tiny photographs, representing downright workmen in their Sunday best, and women holding white babies. But there was one portrait in a gilt frame, for which a nail was needed, and before she sought it Mrs. Chailey put on her spectacles and read what was written on a slip of paper at the back:

“This picture of her mistress is given to Emma Chailey by Willoughby Vinrace in gratitude for thirty years of devoted service.”

Tears obliterated the words and the head of the nail.

“So long as I can do something for your family,” she was saying, as she hammered at it, when a voice called melodiously in the passage.

“Mrs. Chailey! Mrs. Chailey!”

Chailey instantly tidied her dress, composed her face, and opened the door.

“I’m in a fix,” said Mrs. Ambrose, who was flushed and out of breath. “You know what gentlemen are. The chairs too high—the tables too low—there’s six inches between the floor and the door. What I want’s a hammer, an old quilt, and have you such a thing as a kitchen table? Anyhow, between us”——she now flung open the door of her husband’s sitting-room, and revealed Ridley pacing up and down, his forehead all wrinkled, and the collar of his coat turned up.

“It’s as though they’d taken pains to torment me!” he cried, stopping dead. “Did I come on this voyage in order to catch rheumatism and pneumonia? Really one might have credited Vinrace with more sense. My dear,” Helen was on her knees under a table, “you are only making yourself untidy, and we had much better recognise the fact that we are condemned to six weeks of unspeakable misery. To come at all was the height of folly, but now that we are here I suppose that I can face it like a man. My diseases of course will be increased—I feel already worse than I did yesterday, but we’ve only ourselves to thank, and the children happily——”

“Move! Move! Move!” cried Helen, chasing him from corner to corner with a chair as though he were an errant hen. “Out of the way, Ridley, and in half an hour you’ll find it ready.”

She turned him out of the room, and they could hear him groaning and swearing as he went along the passage.

“I daresay he isn’t very strong,” said Mrs. Chailey, looking at Mrs. Ambrose compassionately, as she helped to shift and carry.

“It’s books,” sighed Helen, lifting an armful of sad volumes from the floor to the shelf. “Greek from morning to night. If ever Miss Rachel marries, Chailey, pray that she may marry a man who doesn’t know his ABC.”

The preliminary discomforts and harshnesses, which generally make the first days of a sea voyage so cheerless and trying to the temper, being somehow lived through, the succeeding days passed pleasantly enough. October was well advanced, but steadily burning with a warmth that made the early months of the summer appear very young and capricious. Great tracts of the earth lay now beneath the autumn sun, and the whole of England, from the bald moors to the Cornish rocks, was lit up from dawn to sunset, and showed in stretches of yellow, green, and purple. Under that illumination even the roofs of the great towns glittered. In thousands of small gardens, millions of dark-red flowers were blooming, until the old ladies who had tended them so carefully came down the paths with their scissors, snipped through their juicy stalks, and laid them upon cold stone ledges in the village church. Innumerable parties of picnickers coming home at sunset cried, “Was there ever such a day as this?” “It’s you,” the young men whispered; “Oh, it’s you,” the young women replied. All old people and many sick people were drawn, were it only for a foot or two, into the open air, and prognosticated pleasant things about the course of the world. As for the confidences and expressions of love that were heard not only in cornfields but in lamplit rooms, where the windows opened on the garden, and men with cigars kissed women with grey hairs, they were not to be counted. Some said that the sky was an emblem of the life they had had; others that it was the promise of the life to come. Long-tailed birds clattered and screamed, and crossed from wood to wood, with golden eyes in their plumage.

But while all this went on by land, very few people thought about the sea. They took it for granted that the sea was calm; and there was no need, as there is in many houses when the creeper taps on the bedroom windows, for the couples to murmur before they kiss, “Think of the ships to-night,” or “Thank Heaven, I’m not the man in the lighthouse!” For all they imagined, the ships when they vanished on the sky-line dissolved, like snow in water. The grown-up view, indeed, was not much clearer than the view of the little creatures in bathing drawers who were trotting in to the foam all along the coasts of England, and scooping up buckets full of water. They saw white sails or tufts of smoke pass across the horizon, and if you had said that these were waterspouts, or the petals of white sea flowers, they would have agreed.

The people in ships, however, took an equally singular view of England. Not only did it appear to them to be an island, and a very small island, but it was a shrinking island in which people were imprisoned. One figured them first swarming about like aimless ants, and almost pressing each other over the edge; and then, as the ship withdrew, one figured them making a vain clamour, which, being unheard, either ceased, or rose into a brawl. Finally, when the ship was out of sight of land, it became plain that the people of England were completely mute. The disease attacked other parts of the earth; Europe shrank, Asia shrank, Africa and America shrank, until it seemed doubtful whether the ship would ever run against any of those wrinkled little rocks again. But, on the other hand, an immense dignity had descended upon her; she was an inhabitant of the great world, which has so few inhabitants, travelling all day across an empty universe, with veils drawn before her and behind. She was more lonely than the caravan crossing the desert; she was infinitely more mysterious, moving by her own power and sustained by her own resources. The sea might give her death or some unexampled joy, and none would know of it. She was a bride going forth to her husband, a virgin unknown of men; in her vigour and purity she might be likened to all beautiful things, for as a ship she had a life of her own.

Indeed if they had not been blessed in their weather, one blue day being bowled up after another, smooth, round, and flawless, Mrs. Ambrose would have found it very dull. As it was, she had her embroidery frame set up on deck, with a little table by her side on which lay open a black volume of philosophy. She chose a thread from the vari-coloured tangle that lay in her lap, and sewed red into the bark of a tree, or yellow into the river torrent. She was working at a great design of a tropical river running through a tropical forest, where spotted deer would eventually browse upon masses of fruit, bananas, oranges, and giant pomegranates, while a troop of naked natives whirled darts into the air. Between the stitches she looked to one side and read a sentence about the Reality of Matter, or the Nature of Good. Round her men in blue jerseys knelt and scrubbed the boards, or leant over the rails and whistled, and not far off Mr. Pepper sat cutting up roots with a penknife. The rest were occupied in other parts of the ship: Ridley at his Greek—he had never found quarters more to his liking; Willoughby at his documents, for he used a voyage to work off arrears of business; and Rachel—Helen, between her sentences of philosophy, wondered sometimes what Rachel did do with herself? She meant vaguely to go and see. They had scarcely spoken two words to each other since that first evening; they were polite when they met, but there had been no confidence of any kind. Rachel seemed to get on very well with her father—much better, Helen thought, than she ought to—and was as ready to let Helen alone as Helen was to let her alone.

At that moment Rachel was sitting in her room doing absolutely nothing. When the ship was full this apartment bore some magnificent title and was the resort of elderly sea-sick ladies who left the deck to their youngers. By virtue of the piano, and a mess of books on the floor, Rachel considered it her room, and there she would sit for hours playing very difficult music, reading a little German, or a little English when the mood took her, and doing—as at this moment—absolutely nothing.

The way she had been educated, joined to a fine natural indolence, was of course partly the reason of it, for she had been educated as the majority of well-to-do girls in the last part of the nineteenth century were educated. Kindly doctors and gentle old professors had taught her the rudiments of about ten different branches of knowledge, but they would as soon have forced her to go through one piece of drudgery thoroughly as they would have told her that her hands were dirty. The one hour or the two hours weekly passed very pleasantly, partly owing to the other pupils, partly to the fact that the window looked upon the back of a shop, where figures appeared against the red windows in winter, partly to the accidents that are bound to happen when more than two people are in the same room together. But there was no subject in the world which she knew accurately. Her mind was in the state of an intelligent man’s in the beginning of the reign of Queen Elizabeth; she would believe practically anything she was told, invent reasons for anything she said. The shape of the earth, the history of the world, how trains worked, or money was invested, what laws were in force, which people wanted what, and why they wanted it, the most elementary idea of a system in modern life—none of this had been imparted to her by any of her professors or mistresses. But this system of education had one great advantage. It did not teach anything, but it put no obstacle in the way of any real talent that the pupil might chance to have. Rachel, being musical, was allowed to learn nothing but music; she became a fanatic about music. All the energies that might have gone into languages, science, or literature, that might have made her friends, or shown her the world, poured straight into music. Finding her teachers inadequate, she had practically taught herself. At the age of twenty-four she knew as much about music as most people do when they are thirty; and could play as well as nature allowed her to, which, as became daily more obvious, was a really generous allowance. If this one definite gift was surrounded by dreams and ideas of the most extravagant and foolish description, no one was any the wiser.

Her education being thus ordinary, her circumstances were no more out of the common. She was an only child and had never been bullied and laughed at by brothers and sisters. Her mother having died when she was eleven, two aunts, the sisters of her father, brought her up, and they lived for the sake of the air in a comfortable house in Richmond. She was of course brought up with excessive care, which as a child was for her health; as a girl and a young woman was for what it seems almost crude to call her morals. Until quite lately she had been completely ignorant that for women such things existed. She groped for knowledge in old books, and found it in repulsive chunks, but she did not naturally care for books and thus never troubled her head about the censorship which was exercised first by her aunts, later by her father. Friends might have told her things, but she had few of her own age,—Richmond being an awkward place to reach,—and, as it happened, the only girl she knew well was a religious zealot, who in the fervour of intimacy talked about God, and the best ways of taking up one’s cross, a topic only fitfully interesting to one whose mind reached other stages at other times.

But lying in her chair, with one hand behind her head, the other grasping the knob on the arm, she was clearly following her thoughts intently. Her education left her abundant time for thinking. Her eyes were fixed so steadily upon a ball on the rail of the ship that she would have been startled and annoyed if anything had chanced to obscure it for a second. She had begun her meditations with a shout of laughter, caused by the following translation from Tristan:

In shrinking trepidation

His shame he seems to hide

While to the king his relation

He brings the corpse-like Bride.

Seems it so senseless what I say?

She cried that it did, and threw down the book. Next she had picked up Cowper’s Letters, the classic prescribed by her father which had bored her, so that one sentence chancing to say something about the smell of broom in his garden, she had thereupon seen the little hall at Richmond laden with flowers on the day of her mother’s funeral, smelling so strong that now any flower-scent brought back the sickly horrible sensation; and so from one scene she passed, half-hearing, half-seeing, to another. She saw her Aunt Lucy arranging flowers in the drawing-room.

“Aunt Lucy,” she volunteered, “I don’t like the smell of broom; it reminds me of funerals.”

“Nonsense, Rachel,” Aunt Lucy replied; “don’t say such foolish things, dear. I always think it a particularly cheerful plant.”

Lying in the hot sun her mind was fixed upon the characters of her aunts, their views, and the way they lived. Indeed this was a subject that lasted her hundreds of morning walks round Richmond Park, and blotted out the trees and the people and the deer. Why did they do the things they did, and what did they feel, and what was it all about? Again she heard Aunt Lucy talking to Aunt Eleanor. She had been that morning to take up the character of a servant, “And, of course, at half-past ten in the morning one expects to find the housemaid brushing the stairs.” How odd! How unspeakably odd! But she could not explain to herself why suddenly as her aunt spoke the whole system in which they lived had appeared before her eyes as something quite unfamiliar and inexplicable, and themselves as chairs or umbrellas dropped about here and there without any reason. She could only say with her slight stammer, “Are you f-f-fond of Aunt Eleanor, Aunt Lucy?” to which her aunt replied, with her nervous hen-like twitter of a laugh, “My dear child, what questions you do ask!”

“How fond? Very fond?” Rachel pursued.

“I can’t say I’ve ever thought ‘how,’” said Miss Vinrace. “If one cares one doesn’t think ‘how,’ Rachel,” which was aimed at the niece who had never yet “come” to her aunts as cordially as they wished.

“But you know I care for you, don’t you, dear, because you’re your mother’s daughter, if for no other reason, and there are plenty of other reasons”—and she leant over and kissed her with some emotion, and the argument was spilt irretrievably about the place like a bucket of milk.

By these means Rachel reached that stage in thinking, if thinking it can be called, when the eyes are intent upon a ball or a knob and the lips cease to move. Her efforts to come to an understanding had only hurt her aunt’s feelings, and the conclusion must be that it is better not to try. To feel anything strongly was to create an abyss between oneself and others who feel strongly perhaps but differently. It was far better to play the piano and forget all the rest. The conclusion was very welcome. Let these odd men and women—her aunts, the Hunts, Ridley, Helen, Mr. Pepper, and the rest—be symbols,—featureless but dignified, symbols of age, of youth, of motherhood, of learning, and beautiful often as people upon the stage are beautiful. It appeared that nobody ever said a thing they meant, or ever talked of a feeling they felt, but that was what music was for. Reality dwelling in what one saw and felt, but did not talk about, one could accept a system in which things went round and round quite satisfactorily to other people, without often troubling to think about it, except as something superficially strange. Absorbed by her music she accepted her lot very complacently, blazing into indignation perhaps once a fortnight, and subsiding as she subsided now. Inextricably mixed in dreamy confusion, her mind seemed to enter into communion, to be delightfully expanded and combined with the spirit of the whitish boards on deck, with the spirit of the sea, with the spirit of Beethoven Op. 112, even with the spirit of poor William Cowper there at Olney. Like a ball of thistledown it kissed the sea, rose, kissed it again, and thus rising and kissing passed finally out of sight. The rising and falling of the ball of thistledown was represented by the sudden droop forward of her own head, and when it passed out of sight she was asleep.

Ten minutes later Mrs. Ambrose opened the door and looked at her. It did not surprise her to find that this was the way in which Rachel passed her mornings. She glanced round the room at the piano, at the books, at the general mess. In the first place she considered Rachel æsthetically; lying unprotected she looked somehow like a victim dropped from the claws of a bird of prey, but considered as a woman, a young woman of twenty-four, the sight gave rise to reflections. Mrs. Ambrose stood thinking for at least two minutes. She then smiled, turned noiselessly away and went, lest the sleeper should waken, and there should be the awkwardness of speech between them.

[]

Chapter III

Early next morning there was a sound as of chains being drawn roughly overhead; the steady heart of the Euphrosyne slowly ceased to beat; and Helen, poking her nose above deck, saw a stationary castle upon a stationary hill. They had dropped anchor in the mouth of the Tagus, and instead of cleaving new waves perpetually, the same waves kept returning and washing against the sides of the ship.

As soon as breakfast was done, Willoughby disappeared over the vessel’s side, carrying a brown leather case, shouting over his shoulder that every one was to mind and behave themselves, for he would be kept in Lisbon doing business until five o’clock that afternoon.

At about that hour he reappeared, carrying his case, professing himself tired, bothered, hungry, thirsty, cold, and in immediate need of his tea. Rubbing his hands, he told them the adventures of the day: how he had come upon poor old Jackson combing his moustache before the glass in the office, little expecting his descent, had put him through such a morning’s work as seldom came his way; then treated him to a lunch of champagne and ortolans; paid a call upon Mrs. Jackson, who was fatter than ever, poor woman, but asked kindly after Rachel—and O Lord, little Jackson had confessed to a confounded piece of weakness—well, well, no harm was done, he supposed, but what was the use of his giving orders if they were promptly disobeyed? He had said distinctly that he would take no passengers on this trip. Here he began searching in his pockets and eventually discovered a card, which he planked down on the table before Rachel. On it she read, “Mr. and Mrs. Richard Dalloway, 23 Browne Street, Mayfair.”

“Mr. Richard Dalloway,” continued Vinrace, “seems to be a gentleman who thinks that because he was once a member of Parliament, and his wife’s the daughter of a peer, they can have what they like for the asking. They got round poor little Jackson anyhow. Said they must have passages—produced a letter from Lord Glenaway, asking me as a personal favour—overruled any objections Jackson made (I don’t believe they came to much), and so there’s nothing for it but to submit, I suppose.”

But it was evident that for some reason or other Willoughby was quite pleased to submit, although he made a show of growling.

The truth was that Mr. and Mrs. Dalloway had found themselves stranded in Lisbon. They had been travelling on the Continent for some weeks, chiefly with a view to broadening Mr. Dalloway’s mind. Unable for a season, by one of the accidents of political life, to serve his country in Parliament, Mr. Dalloway was doing the best he could to serve it out of Parliament. For that purpose the Latin countries did very well, although the East, of course, would have done better.

“Expect to hear of me next in Petersburg or Teheran,” he had said, turning to wave farewell from the steps of the Travellers’. But a disease had broken out in the East, there was cholera in Russia, and he was heard of, not so romantically, in Lisbon. They had been through France; he had stopped at manufacturing centres where, producing letters of introduction, he had been shown over works, and noted facts in a pocket-book. In Spain he and Mrs. Dalloway had mounted mules, for they wished to understand how the peasants live. Are they ripe for rebellion, for example? Mrs. Dalloway had then insisted upon a day or two at Madrid with the pictures. Finally they arrived in Lisbon and spent six days which, in a journal privately issued afterwards, they described as of “unique interest.” Richard had audiences with ministers, and foretold a crisis at no distant date, “the foundations of government being incurably corrupt. Yet how blame, etc.”; while Clarissa inspected the royal stables, and took several snapshots showing men now exiled and windows now broken. Among other things she photographed Fielding’s grave, and let loose a small bird which some ruffian had trapped, “because one hates to think of anything in a cage where English people lie buried,” the diary stated. Their tour was thoroughly unconventional, and followed no meditated plan. The foreign correspondents of the Times decided their route as much as anything else. Mr. Dalloway wished to look at certain guns, and was of opinion that the African coast is far more unsettled than people at home were inclined to believe. For these reasons they wanted a slow inquisitive kind of ship, comfortable, for they were bad sailors, but not extravagant, which would stop for a day or two at this port and at that, taking in coal while the Dalloways saw things for themselves. Meanwhile they found themselves stranded in Lisbon, unable for the moment to lay hands upon the precise vessel they wanted. They heard of the Euphrosyne, but heard also that she was primarily a cargo boat, and only took passengers by special arrangement, her business being to carry dry goods to the Amazons, and rubber home again. “By special arrangement,” however, were words of high encouragement to them, for they came of a class where almost everything was specially arranged, or could be if necessary. On this occasion all that Richard did was to write a note to Lord Glenaway, the head of the line which bears his title; to call on poor old Jackson; to represent to him how Mrs. Dalloway was so-and-so, and he had been something or other else, and what they wanted was such and such a thing. It was done. They parted with compliments and pleasure on both sides, and here, a week later, came the boat rowing up to the ship in the dusk with the Dalloways on board of it; in three minutes they were standing together on the deck of the Euphrosyne. Their arrival, of course, created some stir, and it was seen by several pairs of eyes that Mrs. Dalloway was a tall slight woman, her body wrapped in furs, her head in veils, while Mr. Dalloway appeared to be a middle-sized man of sturdy build, dressed like a sportsman on an autumnal moor. Many solid leather bags of a rich brown hue soon surrounded them, in addition to which Mr. Dalloway carried a despatch box, and his wife a dressing-case suggestive of a diamond necklace and bottles with silver tops.

“It’s so like Whistler!” she exclaimed, with a wave towards the shore, as she shook Rachel by the hand, and Rachel had only time to look at the grey hills on one side of her before Willoughby introduced Mrs. Chailey, who took the lady to her cabin.

Momentary though it seemed, nevertheless the interruption was upsetting; every one was more or less put out by it, from Mr. Grice, the steward, to Ridley himself. A few minutes later Rachel passed the smoking-room, and found Helen moving armchairs. She was absorbed in her rearrangements, and on seeing Rachel remarked confidentially:

“If one can give men a room to themselves where they will sit, it’s all to the good. Arm-chairs are the important things——” She began wheeling them about. “Now, does it still look like a bar at a railway station?”

She whipped a plush cover off a table. The appearance of the place was marvellously improved.

Again, the arrival of the strangers made it obvious to Rachel, as the hour of dinner approached, that she must change her dress; and the ringing of the great bell found her sitting on the edge of her berth in such a position that the little glass above the washstand reflected her head and shoulders. In the glass she wore an expression of tense melancholy, for she had come to the depressing conclusion, since the arrival of the Dalloways, that her face was not the face she wanted, and in all probability never would be.

However, punctuality had been impressed on her, and whatever face she had, she must go in to dinner.

These few minutes had been used by Willoughby in sketching to the Dalloways the people they were to meet, and checking them upon his fingers.

“There’s my brother-in-law, Ambrose, the scholar (I daresay you’ve heard his name), his wife, my old friend Pepper, a very quiet fellow, but knows everything, I’m told. And that’s all. We’re a very small party. I’m dropping them on the coast.”

Mrs. Dalloway, with her head a little on one side, did her best to recollect Ambrose—was it a surname?—but failed. She was made slightly uneasy by what she had heard. She knew that scholars married any one—girls they met in farms on reading parties; or little suburban women who said disagreeably, “Of course I know it’s my husband you want; not me.”

But Helen came in at that point, and Mrs. Dalloway saw with relief that though slightly eccentric in appearance, she was not untidy, held herself well, and her voice had restraint in it, which she held to be the sign of a lady. Mr. Pepper had not troubled to change his neat ugly suit.

“But after all,” Clarissa thought to herself as she followed Vinrace in to dinner, “every one’s interesting really.”

When seated at the table she had some need of that assurance, chiefly because of Ridley, who came in late, looked decidedly unkempt, and took to his soup in profound gloom.

An imperceptible signal passed between husband and wife, meaning that they grasped the situation and would stand by each other loyally. With scarcely a pause Mrs. Dalloway turned to Willoughby and began:

“What I find so tiresome about the sea is that there are no flowers in it. Imagine fields of hollyhocks and violets in mid-ocean! How divine!”

“But somewhat dangerous to navigation,” boomed Richard, in the bass, like the bassoon to the flourish of his wife’s violin. “Why, weeds can be bad enough, can’t they, Vinrace? I remember crossing in the Mauretania once, and saying to the Captain—Richards—did you know him?—‘Now tell me what perils you really dread most for your ship, Captain Richards?’ expecting him to say icebergs, or derelicts, or fog, or something of that sort. Not a bit of it. I’ve always remembered his answer. ‘Sedgius aquatici,’ he said, which I take to be a kind of duck-weed.”

Mr. Pepper looked up sharply, and was about to put a question when Willoughby continued:

“They’ve an awful time of it—those captains! Three thousand souls on board!”

“Yes, indeed,” said Clarissa. She turned to Helen with an air of profundity. “I’m convinced people are wrong when they say it’s work that wears one; it’s responsibility. That’s why one pays one’s cook more than one’s housemaid, I suppose.”

“According to that, one ought to pay one’s nurse double; but one doesn’t,” said Helen.

“No; but think what a joy to have to do with babies, instead of saucepans!” said Mrs. Dalloway, looking with more interest at Helen, a probable mother.

“I’d much rather be a cook than a nurse,” said Helen. “Nothing would induce me to take charge of children.”

“Mothers always exaggerate,” said Ridley. “A well-bred child is no responsibility. I’ve travelled all over Europe with mine. You just wrap ’em up warm and put ’em in the rack.”

Helen laughed at that. Mrs. Dalloway exclaimed, looking at Ridley:

“How like a father! My husband’s just the same. And then one talks of the equality of the sexes!”

“Does one?” said Mr. Pepper.

“Oh, some do!” cried Clarissa. “My husband had to pass an irate lady every afternoon last session who said nothing else, I imagine.”

“She sat outside the house; it was very awkward,” said Dalloway. “At last I plucked up courage and said to her, ‘My good creature, you’re only in the way where you are. You’re hindering me, and you’re doing no good to yourself.’”

“And then she caught him by the coat, and would have scratched his eyes out——” Mrs. Dalloway put in.

“Pooh—that’s been exaggerated,” said Richard. “No, I pity them, I confess. The discomfort of sitting on those steps must be awful.”

“Serve them right,” said Willoughby curtly.

“Oh, I’m entirely with you there,” said Dalloway. “Nobody can condemn the utter folly and futility of such behaviour more than I do; and as for the whole agitation, well! may I be in my grave before a woman has the right to vote in England! That’s all I say.”

The solemnity of her husband’s assertion made Clarissa grave.

“It’s unthinkable,” she said. “Don’t tell me you’re a suffragist?” she turned to Ridley.

“I don’t care a fig one way or t’other,” said Ambrose. “If any creature is so deluded as to think that a vote does him or her any good, let him have it. He’ll soon learn better.”

“You’re not a politician, I see,” she smiled.

“Goodness, no,” said Ridley.

“I’m afraid your husband won’t approve of me,” said Dalloway aside, to Mrs. Ambrose. She suddenly recollected that he had been in Parliament.

“Don’t you ever find it rather dull?” she asked, not knowing exactly what to say.

Richard spread his hands before him, as if inscriptions were to be read in the palms of them.

“If you ask me whether I ever find it rather dull,” he said, “I am bound to say yes; on the other hand, if you ask me what career do you consider on the whole, taking the good with the bad, the most enjoyable and enviable, not to speak of its more serious side, of all careers, for a man, I am bound to say, ‘The Politician’s.’”

“The Bar or politics, I agree,” said Willoughby. “You get more run for your money.”

“All one’s faculties have their play,” said Richard. “I may be treading on dangerous ground; but what I feel about poets and artists in general is this: on your own lines, you can’t be beaten—granted; but off your own lines—puff—one has to make allowances. Now, I shouldn’t like to think that any one had to make allowances for me.”

“I don’t quite agree, Richard,” said Mrs. Dalloway. “Think of Shelley. I feel that there’s almost everything one wants in ‘Adonais.’”

“Read ‘Adonais’ by all means,” Richard conceded. “But whenever I hear of Shelley I repeat to myself the words of Matthew Arnold, ‘What a set! What a set!’”

This roused Ridley’s attention. “Matthew Arnold? A detestable prig!” he snapped.

“A prig—granted,” said Richard; “but, I think, a man of the world. That’s where my point comes in. We politicians doubtless seem to you” (he grasped somehow that Helen was the representative of the arts) “a gross commonplace set of people; but we see both sides; we may be clumsy, but we do our best to get a grasp of things. Now your artists find things in a mess, shrug their shoulders, turn aside to their visions—which I grant may be very beautiful—and leave things in a mess. Now that seems to me evading one’s responsibilities. Besides, we aren’t all born with the artistic faculty.”

“It’s dreadful,” said Mrs. Dalloway, who, while her husband spoke, had been thinking. “When I’m with artists I feel so intensely the delights of shutting oneself up in a little world of one’s own, with pictures and music and everything beautiful, and then I go out into the streets and the first child I meet with its poor, hungry, dirty little face makes me turn round and say, ‘No, I can’t shut myself up—I won’t live in a world of my own. I should like to stop all the painting and writing and music until this kind of thing exists no longer.’ Don’t you feel,” she wound up, addressing Helen, “that life’s a perpetual conflict?”

Helen considered for a moment. “No,” she said. “I don’t think I do.”

There was a pause, which was decidedly uncomfortable. Mrs. Dalloway then gave a little shiver, and asked whether she might have her fur cloak brought to her. As she adjusted the soft brown fur about her neck a fresh topic struck her.

“I own,” she said, “that I shall never forget the Antigone. I saw it at Cambridge years ago, and it’s haunted me ever since. Don’t you think it’s quite the most modern thing you ever saw?” she asked Ridley. “It seemed to me I’d known twenty Clytemnestras. Old Lady Ditchling for one. I don’t know a word of Greek, but I could listen to it for ever——”

Here Mr. Pepper struck up:

πολλὰ τὰ δεινὰ κοὐδὲν ἀν-

θρώπου δεινότερον πέλει.

τοῦτο καὶ πολιοῦ πέραν

πόντου χειμερίῳ νότῳ

χωρεῖ, περιβρυχίοισιν

περῶν ὑπ’ οἴδμασιν

Mrs. Dalloway looked at him with compressed lips.

“I’d give ten years of my life to know Greek,” she said, when he had done.

“I could teach you the alphabet in half an hour,” said Ridley, “and you’d read Homer in a month. I should think it an honour to instruct you.”

Helen, engaged with Mr. Dalloway and the habit, now fallen into decline, of quoting Greek in the House of Commons, noted, in the great commonplace book that lies open beside us as we talk, the fact that all men, even men like Ridley, really prefer women to be fashionable.

Clarissa exclaimed that she could think of nothing more delightful. For an instant she saw herself in her drawing-room in Browne Street with a Plato open on her knees—Plato in the original Greek. She could not help believing that a real scholar, if specially interested, could slip Greek into her head with scarcely any trouble.

Ridley engaged her to come to-morrow.

“If only your ship is going to treat us kindly!” she exclaimed, drawing Willoughby into play. For the sake of guests, and these were distinguished, Willoughby was ready with a bow of his head to vouch for the good behaviour even of the waves.

“I’m dreadfully bad; and my husband’s not very good,” sighed Clarissa.

“I am never sick,” Richard explained. “At least, I have only been actually sick once,” he corrected himself. “That was crossing the Channel. But a choppy sea, I confess, or still worse, a swell, makes me distinctly uncomfortable. The great thing is never to miss a meal. You look at the food, and you say, ‘I can’t’; you take a mouthful, and Lord knows how you’re going to swallow it; but persevere, and you often settle the attack for good. My wife’s a coward.”

They were pushing back their chairs. The ladies were hesitating at the doorway.

“I’d better show the way,” said Helen, advancing.

Rachel followed. She had taken no part in the talk; no one had spoken to her; but she had listened to every word that was said. She had looked from Mrs. Dalloway to Mr. Dalloway, and from Mr. Dalloway back again. Clarissa, indeed, was a fascinating spectacle. She wore a white dress and a long glittering necklace. What with her clothes, and her arch delicate face, which showed exquisitely pink beneath hair turning grey, she was astonishingly like an eighteenth-century masterpiece—a Reynolds or a Romney. She made Helen and the others look coarse and slovenly beside her. Sitting lightly upright she seemed to be dealing with the world as she chose; the enormous solid globe spun round this way and that beneath her fingers. And her husband! Mr. Dalloway rolling that rich deliberate voice was even more inpressive. [impressive.] He seemed to come from the humming oily centre of the machine where the polished rods are sliding, and the pistons thumping; he grasped things so firmly but so loosely; he made the others appear like old maids cheapening remnants. Rachel followed in the wake of the matrons, as if in a trance; a curious scent of violets came back from Mrs. Dalloway, mingling with the soft rustling of her skirts, and the tinkling of her chains. As she followed, Rachel thought with supreme self-abasement, taking in the whole course of her life and the lives of all her friends, “She said we lived in a world of our own. It’s true. We’re perfectly absurd.”

“We sit in here,” said Helen, opening the door of the saloon.

“You play?” said Mrs. Dalloway to Mrs. Ambrose, taking up the score of Tristan which lay on the table.

“My niece does,” said Helen, laying her hand on Rachel’s shoulder.

“Oh, how I envy you!” Clarissa addressed Rachel for the first time. “D’you remember this? Isn’t it divine?” She played a bar or two with ringed fingers upon the page.

“And then Tristan goes like this, and Isolde—oh!—it’s all too thrilling! Have you been to Bayreuth?”

“No, I haven’t,” said Rachel.

“Then that’s still to come. I shall never forget my first Parsifal—a grilling August day, and those fat old German women, come in their stuffy high frocks, and then the dark theatre, and the music beginning, and one couldn’t help sobbing. A kind man went and fetched me water, I remember; and I could only cry on his shoulder! It caught me here” (she touched her throat). “It’s like nothing else in the world! But where’s your piano?”

“It’s in another room,” Rachel explained.

“But you will play to us?” Clarissa entreated. “I can’t imagine anything nicer than to sit out in the moonlight and listen to music—only that sounds too like a schoolgirl! You know,” she said, turning to Helen, “I don’t think music’s altogether good for people—I’m afraid not.”

“Too great a strain?” asked Helen.

“Too emotional, somehow,” said Clarissa. “One notices it at once when a boy or girl takes up music as a profession. Sir William Broadley told me just the same thing. Don’t you hate the kind of attitudes people go into over Wagner—like this—” She cast her eyes to the ceiling, clasped her hands, and assumed a look of intensity. “It really doesn’t mean that they appreciate him; in fact, I always think it’s the other way round. The people who really care about an art are always the least affected. D’you know Henry Philips, the painter?” she asked.

“I have seen him,” said Helen.

“To look at, one might think he was a successful stockbroker, and not one of the greatest painters of the age. That’s what I like.”

“There are a great many successful stockbrokers, if you like looking at them,” said Helen.

Rachel wished vehemently that her aunt would not be so perverse.

“When you see a musician with long hair, don’t you know instinctively that he’s bad?” Clarissa asked, turning to Rachel. “Watts and Joachim—they looked just like you and me.”

“And how much nicer they’d have looked with curls!” said Helen. “The question is, are you going to aim at beauty or are you not?”

“Cleanliness!” said Clarissa, “I do want a man to look clean!”

“By cleanliness you really mean well-cut clothes,” said Helen.

“There’s something one knows a gentleman by,” said Clarissa, “but one can’t say what it is.”

“Take my husband now, does he look like a gentleman?”

The question seemed to Clarissa in extraordinarily bad taste. “One of the things that can’t be said,” she would have put it. She could find no answer, but a laugh.

“Well, anyhow,” she said, turning to Rachel, “I shall insist upon your playing to me to-morrow.”

There was that in her manner that made Rachel love her.

Mrs. Dalloway hid a tiny yawn, a mere dilation of the nostrils.

“D’you know,” she said, “I’m extraordinarily sleepy. It’s the sea air. I think I shall escape.”

A man’s voice, which she took to be that of Mr. Pepper, strident in discussion, and advancing upon the saloon, gave her the alarm.

“Good-night—good-night!” she said. “Oh, I know my way—do pray for calm! Good-night!”

Her yawn must have been the image of a yawn. Instead of letting her mouth droop, dropping all her clothes in a bunch as though they depended on one string, and stretching her limbs to the utmost end of her berth, she merely changed her dress for a dressing-gown, with innumerable frills, and wrapping her feet in a rug, sat down with a writing-pad on her knee. Already this cramped little cabin was the dressing-room of a lady of quality. There were bottles containing liquids; there were trays, boxes, brushes, pins. Evidently not an inch of her person lacked its proper instrument. The scent which had intoxicated Rachel pervaded the air. Thus established, Mrs. Dalloway began to write. A pen in her hands became a thing one caressed paper with, and she might have been stroking and tickling a kitten as she wrote:

Picture us, my dear, afloat in the very oddest ship you can imagine. It’s not the ship, so much as the people. One does come across queer sorts as one travels. I must say I find it hugely amusing. There’s the manager of the line—called Vinrace—a nice big Englishman, doesn’t say much—you know the sort. As for the rest—they might have come trailing out of an old number of Punch. They’re like people playing croquet in the ’sixties. How long they’ve all been shut up in this ship I don’t know—years and years I should say—but one feels as though one had boarded a little separate world, and they’d never been on shore, or done ordinary things in their lives. It’s what I’ve always said about literary people—they’re far the hardest of any to get on with. The worst of it is, these people—a man and his wife and a niece—might have been, one feels, just like everybody else, if they hadn’t got swallowed up by Oxford or Cambridge or some such place, and been made cranks of. The man’s really delightful (if he’d cut his nails), and the woman has quite a fine face, only she dresses, of course, in a potato sack, and wears her hair like a Liberty shopgirl’s. They talk about art, and think us such poops for dressing in the evening. However, I can’t help that; I’d rather die than come in to dinner without changing—wouldn’t you? It matters ever so much more than the soup. (It’s odd how things like that do matter so much more than what’s generally supposed to matter. I’d rather have my head cut off than wear flannel next the skin.) Then there’s a nice shy girl—poor thing—I wish one could rake her out before it’s too late. She has quite nice eyes and hair, only, of course, she’ll get funny too. We ought to start a society for broadening the minds of the young—much more useful than missionaries, Hester! Oh, I’d forgotten, there’s a dreadful little thing called Pepper. He’s just like his name. He’s indescribably insignificant, and rather queer in his temper, poor dear. It’s like sitting down to dinner with an ill-conditioned fox-terrier, only one can’t comb him out, and sprinkle him with powder, as one would one’s dog. It’s a pity, sometimes, one can’t treat people like dogs! The great comfort is that we’re away from newspapers, so that Richard will have a real holiday this time. Spain wasn’t a holiday….

“You coward!” said Richard, almost filling the room with his sturdy figure.

“I did my duty at dinner!” cried Clarissa.

“You’ve let yourself in for the Greek alphabet, anyhow.”

“Oh, my dear! Who is Ambrose?”

“I gather that he was a Cambridge don; lives in London now, and edits classics.”

“Did you ever see such a set of cranks? The woman asked me if I thought her husband looked like a gentleman!”

“It was hard to keep the ball rolling at dinner, certainly,” said Richard. “Why is it that the women, in that class, are so much queerer than the men?”

“They’re not half bad-looking, really—only—they’re so odd!”

They both laughed, thinking of the same things, so that there was no need to compare their impressions.

“I see I shall have quite a lot to say to Vinrace,” said Richard. “He knows Sutton and all that set. He can tell me a good deal about the conditions of shipbuilding in the North.”

“Oh, I’m glad. The men always are so much better than the women.”

“One always has something to say to a man certainly,” said Richard. “But I’ve no doubt you’ll chatter away fast enough about the babies, Clarice.”

“Has she got children? She doesn’t look like it somehow.”

“Two. A boy and girl.”

A pang of envy shot through Mrs. Dalloway’s heart.

“We must have a son, Dick,” she said.

“Good Lord, what opportunities there are now for young men!” said Dalloway, for his talk had set him thinking. “I don’t suppose there’s been so good an opening since the days of Pitt.”

“And it’s yours!” said Clarissa.

“To be a leader of men,” Richard soliloquised. “It’s a fine career. My God—what a career!”

The chest slowly curved beneath his waistcoat.

“D’you know, Dick, I can’t help thinking of England,” said his wife meditatively, leaning her head against his chest. “Being on this ship seems to make it so much more vivid—what it really means to be English. One thinks of all we’ve done, and our navies, and the people in India and Africa, and how we’ve gone on century after century, sending out boys from little country villages—and of men like you, Dick, and it makes one feel as if one couldn’t bear not to be English! Think of the light burning over the House, Dick! When I stood on deck just now I seemed to see it. It’s what one means by London.”

“It’s the continuity,” said Richard sententiously. A vision of English history, King following King, Prime Minister Prime Minister, and Law Law had come over him while his wife spoke. He ran his mind along the line of conservative policy, which went steadily from Lord Salisbury to Alfred, and gradually enclosed, as though it were a lasso that opened and caught things, enormous chunks of the habitable globe.

“It’s taken a long time, but we’ve pretty nearly done it,” he said; “it remains to consolidate.”

“And these people don’t see it!” Clarissa exclaimed.

“It takes all sorts to make a world,” said her husband. “There would never be a government if there weren’t an opposition.”

“Dick, you’re better than I am,” said Clarissa. “You see round, where I only see there.” She pressed a point on the back of his hand.

“That’s my business, as I tried to explain at dinner.”

“What I like about you, Dick,” she continued, “is that you’re always the same, and I’m a creature of moods.”

“You’re a pretty creature, anyhow,” he said, gazing at her with deeper eyes.

“You think so, do you? Then kiss me.”

He kissed her passionately, so that her half-written letter slid to the ground. Picking it up, he read it without asking leave.

“Where’s your pen?” he said; and added in his little masculine hand:

R. D. loquitur: Clarice has omitted to tell you that she looked exceedingly pretty at dinner, and made a conquest by which she has bound herself to learn the Greek alphabet. I will take this occasion of adding that we are both enjoying ourselves in these outlandish parts, and only wish for the presence of our friends (yourself and John, to wit) to make the trip perfectly enjoyable as it promises to be instructive….

Voices were heard at the end of the corridor. Mrs. Ambrose was speaking low; William Pepper was remarking in his definite and rather acid voice, “That is the type of lady with whom I find myself distinctly out of sympathy. She——”

But neither Richard nor Clarissa profited by the verdict, for directly it seemed likely that they would overhear, Richard crackled a sheet of paper.

“I often wonder,” Clarissa mused in bed, over the little white volume of Pascal which went with her everywhere, “whether it is really good for a woman to live with a man who is morally her superior, as Richard is mine. It makes one so dependent. I suppose I feel for him what my mother and women of her generation felt for Christ. It just shows that one can’t do without something.” She then fell into a sleep, which was as usual extremely sound and refreshing, but visited by fantastic dreams of great Greek letters stalking round the room, when she woke up and laughed to herself, remembering where she was and that the Greek letters were real people, lying asleep not many yards away. Then, thinking of the black sea outside tossing beneath the moon, she shuddered, and thought of her husband and the others as companions on the voyage. The dreams were not confined to her indeed, but went from one brain to another. They all dreamt of each other that night, as was natural, considering how thin the partitions were between them, and how strangely they had been lifted off the earth to sit next each other in mid-ocean, and see every detail of each others’ faces, and hear whatever they chanced to say.

[]

Chapter IV

Next morning Clarissa was up before any one else. She dressed, and was out on deck, breathing the fresh air of a calm morning, and, making the circuit of the ship for the second time, she ran straight into the lean person of Mr. Grice, the steward. She apologised, and at the same time asked him to enlighten her: what were those shiny brass stands for, half glass on the top? She had been wondering, and could not guess. When he had done explaining, she cried enthusiastically:

“I do think that to be a sailor must be the finest thing in the world!”

“And what d’you know about it?” said Mr. Grice, kindling in a strange manner. “Pardon me. What does any man or woman brought up in England know about the sea? They profess to know; but they don’t.”

The bitterness with which he spoke was ominous of what was to come. He led her off to his own quarters, and, sitting on the edge of a brass-bound table, looking uncommonly like a sea-gull, with her white tapering body and thin alert face, Mrs. Dalloway had to listen to the tirade of a fanatical man. Did she realise, to begin with, what a very small part of the world the land was? How peaceful, how beautiful, how benignant in comparison the sea? The deep waters could sustain Europe unaided if every earthly animal died of the plague to-morrow. Mr. Grice recalled dreadful sights which he had seen in the richest city of the world—men and women standing in line hour after hour to receive a mug of greasy soup. “And I thought of the good flesh down here waiting and asking to be caught. I’m not exactly a Protestant, and I’m not a Catholic, but I could almost pray for the days of popery to come again—because of the fasts.”

As he talked he kept opening drawers and moving little glass jars. Here were the treasures which the great ocean had bestowed upon him—pale fish in greenish liquids, blobs of jelly with streaming tresses, fish with lights in their heads, they lived so deep.

“They have swum about among bones,” Clarissa sighed.

“You’re thinking of Shakespeare,” said Mr. Grice, and taking down a copy from a shelf well lined with books, recited in an emphatic nasal voice:

Full fathom five thy father lies,

“A grand fellow, Shakespeare,” he said, replacing the volume.

Clarissa was so glad to hear him say so.

“Which is your favourite play? I wonder if it’s the same as mine?”

“Henry the Fifth,” said Mr. Grice.

“Joy!” cried Clarissa. “It is!”

Hamlet was what you might call too introspective for Mr. Grice, the sonnets too passionate; Henry the Fifth was to him the model of an English gentleman. But his favourite reading was Huxley, Herbert Spencer, and Henry George; while Emerson and Thomas Hardy he read for relaxation. He was giving Mrs. Dalloway his views upon the present state of England when the breakfast bell rung so imperiously that she had to tear herself away, promising to come back and be shown his sea-weeds.

The party, which had seemed so odd to her the night before, was already gathered round the table, still under the influence of sleep, and therefore uncommunicative, but her entrance sent a little flutter like a breath of air through them all.

“I’ve had the most interesting talk of my life!” she exclaimed, taking her seat beside Willoughby. “D’you realise that one of your men is a philosopher and a poet?”

“A very interesting fellow—that’s what I always say,” said Willoughby, distinguishing Mr. Grice. “Though Rachel finds him a bore.”

“He’s a bore when he talks about currents,” said Rachel. Her eyes were full of sleep, but Mrs. Dalloway still seemed to her wonderful.

“I’ve never met a bore yet!” said Clarissa.

“And I should say the world was full of them!” exclaimed Helen. But her beauty, which was radiant in the morning light, took the contrariness from her words.

“I agree that it’s the worst one can possibly say of any one,” said Clarissa. “How much rather one would be a murderer than a bore!” she added, with her usual air of saying something profound. “One can fancy liking a murderer. It’s the same with dogs. Some dogs are awful bores, poor dears.”

It happened that Richard was sitting next to Rachel. She was curiously conscious of his presence and appearance—his well-cut clothes, his crackling shirt-front, his cuffs with blue rings round them, and the square-tipped, very clean fingers, with the red stone on the little finger of the left hand.

“We had a dog who was a bore and knew it,” he said, addressing her in cool, easy tones. “He was a Skye terrier, one of those long chaps, with little feet poking out from their hair like—like caterpillars—no, like sofas I should say. Well, we had another dog at the same time, a black brisk animal—a Schipperke, I think, you call them. You can’t imagine a greater contrast. The Skye so slow and deliberate, looking up at you like some old gentleman in the club, as much as to say, ‘You don’t really mean it, do you?’ and the Schipperke as quick as a knife. I liked the Skye best, I must confess. There was something pathetic about him.”

The story seemed to have no climax.

“What happened to him?” Rachel asked.

“That’s a very sad story,” said Richard, lowering his voice and peeling an apple. “He followed my wife in the car one day and got run over by a brute of a cyclist.”

“Was he killed?” asked Rachel.

But Clarissa at her end of the table had overheard.

“Don’t talk of it!” she cried. “It’s a thing I can’t bear to think of to this day.”

Surely the tears stood in her eyes?

“That’s the painful thing about pets,” said Mr. Dalloway; “they die. The first sorrow I can remember was for the death of a dormouse. I regret to say that I sat upon it. Still, that didn’t make one any the less sorry. Here lies the duck that Samuel Johnson sat on, eh? I was big for my age.”

“Then we had canaries,” he continued, “a pair of ring-doves, a lemur, and at one time a martin.”

“Did you live in the country?” Rachel asked him.

“We lived in the country for six months of the year. When I say ‘we’ I mean four sisters, a brother, and myself. There’s nothing like coming of a large family. Sisters particularly are delightful.”

“Dick, you were horribly spoilt!” cried Clarissa across the table.

“No, no. Appreciated,” said Richard.

Rachel had other questions on the tip of her tongue; or rather one enormous question, which she did not in the least know how to put into words. The talk appeared too airy to admit of it.

“Please tell me—everything.” That was what she wanted to say. He had drawn apart one little chink and showed astonishing treasures. It seemed to her incredible that a man like that should be willing to talk to her. He had sisters and pets, and once lived in the country. She stirred her tea round and round; the bubbles which swam and clustered in the cup seemed to her like the union of their minds.

The talk meanwhile raced past her, and when Richard suddenly stated in a jocular tone of voice, “I’m sure Miss Vinrace, now, has secret leanings towards Catholicism,” she had no idea what to answer, and Helen could not help laughing at the start she gave.

However, breakfast was over and Mrs. Dalloway was rising. “I always think religion’s like collecting beetles,” she said, summing up the discussion as she went up the stairs with Helen. “One person has a passion for black beetles; another hasn’t; it’s no good arguing about it. What’s your black beetle now?”

“I suppose it’s my children,” said Helen.

“Ah—that’s different,” Clarissa breathed. “Do tell me. You have a boy, haven’t you? Isn’t it detestable, leaving them?”

It was as though a blue shadow had fallen across a pool. Their eyes became deeper, and their voices more cordial.

Instead of joining them as they began to pace the deck, Rachel was indignant with the prosperous matrons, who made her feel outside their world and motherless, and turning back, she left them abruptly. She slammed the door of her room, and pulled out her music. It was all old music—Bach and Beethoven, Mozart and Purcell—the pages yellow, the engraving rough to the finger. In three minutes she was deep in a very difficult, very classical fugue in A, and over her face came a queer remote impersonal expression of complete absorption and anxious satisfaction. Now she stumbled; now she faltered and had to play the same bar twice over; but an invisible line seemed to string the notes together, from which rose a shape, a building. She was so far absorbed in this work, for it was really difficult to find how all these sounds should stand together, and drew upon the whole of her faculties, that she never heard a knock at the door. It was burst impulsively open, and Mrs. Dalloway stood in the room, leaving the door open, so that a strip of the white deck and of the blue sea appeared through the opening. The shape of the Bach fugue crashed to the ground.

“Don’t let me interrupt,” Clarissa implored. “I heard you playing, and I couldn’t resist. I adore Bach!”

Rachel flushed and fumbled her fingers in her lap. She stood up awkwardly.

“It’s too difficult,” she said.

“But you were playing quite splendidly! I ought to have stayed outside.”

“No,” said Rachel.

She slid Cowper’s Letters and Wuthering Heights out of the arm-chair, so that Clarissa was invited to sit there.

“What a dear little room!” she said, looking round. “Oh, Cowper’s Letters! I’ve never read them. Are they nice?”

“Rather dull,” said Rachel.

“He wrote awfully well, didn’t he?” said Clarissa; “—if one likes that kind of thing—finished his sentences and all that. Wuthering Heights! Ah—that’s more in my line. I really couldn’t exist without the Brontës! Don’t you love them? Still, on the whole, I’d rather live without them than without Jane Austen.”

Lightly and at random though she spoke, her manner conveyed an extraordinary degree of sympathy and desire to befriend.

“Jane Austen? I don’t like Jane Austen,” said Rachel.

“You monster!” Clarissa exclaimed. “I can only just forgive you. Tell me why?”

“She’s so—so—well, so like a tight plait,” Rachel floundered.

“Ah—I see what you mean. But I don’t agree. And you won’t when you’re older. At your age I only liked Shelley. I can remember sobbing over him in the garden.

He has outsoared the shadow of our night,

Envy and calumny and hate and pain—

you remember?

Can touch him not and torture not again

From the contagion of the world’s slow stain.

How divine!—and yet what nonsense!” She looked lightly round the room. “I always think it’s living, not dying, that counts. I really respect some snuffy old stockbroker who’s gone on adding up column after column all his days, and trotting back to his villa at Brixton with some old pug dog he worships, and a dreary little wife sitting at the end of the table, and going off to Margate for a fortnight—I assure you I know heaps like that—well, they seem to me really nobler than poets whom every one worships, just because they’re geniuses and die young. But I don’t expect you to agree with me!”

She pressed Rachel’s shoulder.

“Um-m-m—” she went on quoting—

Unrest which men miscall delight—

“when you’re my age you’ll see that the world is crammed with delightful things. I think young people make such a mistake about that—not letting themselves be happy. I sometimes think that happiness is the only thing that counts. I don’t know you well enough to say, but I should guess you might be a little inclined to—when one’s young and attractive—I’m going to say it!—everything’s at one’s feet.” She glanced round as much as to say, “not only a few stuffy books and Bach.”

“I long to ask questions,” she continued. “You interest me so much. If I’m impertinent, you must just box my ears.”

“And I—I want to ask questions,” said Rachel with such earnestness that Mrs. Dalloway had to check her smile.

“D’you mind if we walk?” she said. “The air’s so delicious.”

She snuffed it like a racehorse as they shut the door and stood on deck.

“Isn’t it good to be alive?” she exclaimed, and drew Rachel’s arm within hers.

“Look, look! How exquisite!”

The shores of Portugal were beginning to lose their substance; but the land was still the land, though at a great distance. They could distinguish the little towns that were sprinkled in the folds of the hills, and the smoke rising faintly. The towns appeared to be very small in comparison with the great purple mountains behind them.

“Honestly, though,” said Clarissa, having looked, “I don’t like views. They’re too inhuman.” They walked on.

“How odd it is!” she continued impulsively. “This time yesterday we’d never met. I was packing in a stuffy little room in the hotel. We know absolutely nothing about each other—and yet—I feel as if I did know you!”

“You have children—your husband was in Parliament?”

“You’ve never been to school, and you live——?”

“With my aunts at Richmond.”

“Richmond?”

“You see, my aunts like the Park. They like the quiet.”

“And you don’t! I understand!” Clarissa laughed.

“I like walking in the Park alone; but not—with the dogs,” she finished.

“No; and some people are dogs; aren’t they?” said Clarissa, as if she had guessed a secret. “But not every one—oh no, not every one.”

“Not every one,” said Rachel, and stopped.

“I can quite imagine you walking alone,” said Clarissa; “and thinking—in a little world of your own. But how you will enjoy it—some day!”

“I shall enjoy walking with a man—is that what you mean?” said Rachel, regarding Mrs. Dalloway with her large enquiring eyes.

“I wasn’t thinking of a man particularly,” said Clarissa. “But you will.”

“No. I shall never marry,” Rachel determined.

“I shouldn’t be so sure of that,” said Clarissa. Her sidelong glance told Rachel that she found her attractive although she was inexplicably amused.

“Why do people marry?” Rachel asked.

“That’s what you’re going to find out,” Clarissa laughed.

Rachel followed her eyes and found that they rested, for a second, on the robust figure of Richard Dalloway, who was engaged in striking a match on the sole of his boot; while Willoughby expounded something, which seemed to be of great interest to them both.

“There’s nothing like it,” she concluded. “Do tell me about the Ambroses. Or am I asking too many questions?”

“I find you easy to talk to,” said Rachel.

The short sketch of the Ambroses was, however, somewhat perfunctory, and contained little but the fact that Mr. Ambrose was her uncle.

“Your mother’s brother?”

When a name has dropped out of use, the lightest touch upon it tells. Mrs. Dalloway went on:

“Are you like your mother?”

“No; she was different,” said Rachel.

She was overcome by an intense desire to tell Mrs. Dalloway things she had never told any one—things she had not realised herself until this moment.

“I am lonely,” she began. “I want—” She did not know what she wanted, so that she could not finish the sentence; but her lip quivered.

But it seemed that Mrs. Dalloway was able to understand without words.

“I know,” she said, actually putting one arm round Rachel’s shoulder. “When I was your age I wanted too. No one understood until I met Richard. He gave me all I wanted. He’s man and woman as well.” Her eyes rested upon Mr. Dalloway, leaning upon the rail, still talking. “Don’t think I say that because I’m his wife—I see his faults more clearly than I see any one else’s. What one wants in the person one lives with is that they should keep one at one’s best. I often wonder what I’ve done to be so happy!” she exclaimed, and a tear slid down her cheek. She wiped it away, squeezed Rachel’s hand, and exclaimed:

“How good life is!” At that moment, standing out in the fresh breeze, with the sun upon the waves, and Mrs. Dalloway’s hand upon her arm, it seemed indeed as if life which had been unnamed before was infinitely wonderful, and too good to be true.

Here Helen passed them, and seeing Rachel arm-in-arm with a comparative stranger, looking excited, was amused, but at the same time slightly irritated. But they were immediately joined by Richard, who had enjoyed a very interesting talk with Willoughby and was in a sociable mood.

“Observe my Panama,” he said, touching the brim of his hat. “Are you aware, Miss Vinrace, how much can be done to induce fine weather by appropriate headdress? I have determined that it is a hot summer day; I warn you that nothing you can say will shake me. Therefore I am going to sit down. I advise you to follow my example.” Three chairs in a row invited them to be seated.

Leaning back, Richard surveyed the waves.

“That’s a very pretty blue,” he said. “But there’s a little too much of it. Variety is essential to a view. Thus, if you have hills you ought to have a river; if a river, hills. The best view in the world in my opinion is that from Boars Hill on a fine day—it must be a fine day, mark you—A rug?—Oh, thank you, my dear…. In that case you have also the advantage of associations—the Past.”

“D’you want to talk, Dick, or shall I read aloud?”

Clarissa had fetched a book with the rugs.

“Persuasion,” announced Richard, examining the volume.

“That’s for Miss Vinrace,” said Clarissa. “She can’t bear our beloved Jane.”

“That—if I may say so—is because you have not read her,” said Richard. “She is incomparably the greatest female writer we possess.”

“She is the greatest,” he continued, “and for this reason: she does not attempt to write like a man. Every other woman does; on that account, I don’t read ’em.”

“Produce your instances, Miss Vinrace,” he went on, joining his finger-tips. “I’m ready to be converted.”

He waited, while Rachel vainly tried to vindicate her sex from the slight he put upon it.

“I’m afraid he’s right,” said Clarissa. “He generally is—the wretch!”

“I brought Persuasion,” she went on, “because I thought it was a little less threadbare than the others—though, Dick, it’s no good your pretending to know Jane by heart, considering that she always sends you to sleep!”

“After the labours of legislation, I deserve sleep,” said Richard.

“You’re not to think about those guns,” said Clarissa, seeing that his eye, passing over the waves, still sought the land meditatively, “or about navies, or empires, or anything.” So saying she opened the book and began to read:

“‘Sir Walter Elliott, of Kellynch Hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage’—don’t you know Sir Walter?—‘There he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one.’ She does write well, doesn’t she? ‘There—’” She read on in a light humorous voice. She was determined that Sir Walter should take her husband’s mind off the guns of Britain, and divert him in an exquisite, quaint, sprightly, and slightly ridiculous world. After a time it appeared that the sun was sinking in that world, and the points becoming softer. Rachel looked up to see what caused the change. Richard’s eyelids were closing and opening; opening and closing. A loud nasal breath announced that he no longer considered appearances, that he was sound asleep.

“Triumph!” Clarissa whispered at the end of a sentence. Suddenly she raised her hand in protest. A sailor hesitated; she gave the book to Rachel, and stepped lightly to take the message—“Mr. Grice wished to know if it was convenient,” etc. She followed him. Ridley, who had prowled unheeded, started forward, stopped, and, with a gesture of disgust, strode off to his study. The sleeping politician was left in Rachel’s charge. She read a sentence, and took a look at him. In sleep he looked like a coat hanging at the end of a bed; there were all the wrinkles, and the sleeves and trousers kept their shape though no longer filled out by legs and arms. You can then best judge the age and state of the coat. She looked him all over until it seemed to her that he must protest.

He was a man of forty perhaps; and here there were lines round his eyes, and there curious clefts in his cheeks. Slightly battered he appeared, but dogged and in the prime of life.

“Sisters and a dormouse and some canaries,” Rachel murmured, never taking her eyes off him. “I wonder, I wonder” She ceased, her chin upon her hand, still looking at him. A bell chimed behind them, and Richard raised his head. Then he opened his eyes which wore for a second the queer look of a short-sighted person’s whose spectacles are lost. It took him a moment to recover from the impropriety of having snored, and possibly grunted, before a young lady. To wake and find oneself left alone with one was also slightly disconcerting.

“I suppose I’ve been dozing,” he said. “What’s happened to every one? Clarissa?”

“Mrs. Dalloway has gone to look at Mr. Grice’s fish,” Rachel replied.

“I might have guessed,” said Richard. “It’s a common occurrence. And how have you improved the shining hour? Have you become a convert?”

“I don’t think I’ve read a line,” said Rachel.

“That’s what I always find. There are too many things to look at. I find nature very stimulating myself. My best ideas have come to me out of doors.”

“When you were walking?”

“Walking—riding—yachting—I suppose the most momentous conversations of my life took place while perambulating the great court at Trinity. I was at both universities. It was a fad of my father’s. He thought it broadening to the mind. I think I agree with him. I can remember—what an age ago it seems!—settling the basis of a future state with the present Secretary for India. We thought ourselves very wise. I’m not sure we weren’t. We were happy, Miss Vinrace, and we were young—gifts which make for wisdom.”

“Have you done what you said you’d do?” she asked.

“A searching question! I answer—Yes and No. If on the one hand I have not accomplished what I set out to accomplish—which of us does?—on the other I can fairly say this: I have not lowered my ideal.”

He looked resolutely at a sea-gull, as though his ideal flew on the wings of the bird.

“But,” said Rachel, “what is your ideal?”

“There you ask too much, Miss Vinrace,” said Richard playfully.

She could only say that she wanted to know, and Richard was sufficiently amused to answer.

“Well, how shall I reply? In one word—Unity. Unity of aim, of dominion, of progress. The dispersion of the best ideas over the greatest area.”

“The English?”

“I grant that the English seem, on the whole, whiter than most men, their records cleaner. But, good Lord, don’t run away with the idea that I don’t see the drawbacks—horrors—unmentionable things done in our very midst! I’m under no illusions. Few people, I suppose, have fewer illusions than I have. Have you ever been in a factory, Miss Vinrace?—No, I suppose not—I may say I hope not.”

As for Rachel, she had scarcely walked through a poor street, and always under the escort of father, maid, or aunts.

“I was going to say that if you’d ever seen the kind of thing that’s going on round you, you’d understand what it is that makes me and men like me politicians. You asked me a moment ago whether I’d done what I set out to do. Well, when I consider my life, there is one fact I admit that I’m proud of; owing to me some thousands of girls in Lancashire—and many thousands to come after them—can spend an hour every day in the open air which their mothers had to spend over their looms. I’m prouder of that, I own, than I should be of writing Keats and Shelley into the bargain!”

It became painful to Rachel to be one of those who write Keats and Shelley. She liked Richard Dalloway, and warmed as he warmed. He seemed to mean what he said.

“I know nothing!” she exclaimed.

“It’s far better that you should know nothing,” he said paternally, “and you wrong yourself, I’m sure. You play very nicely, I’m told, and I’ve no doubt you’ve read heaps of learned books.”

Elderly banter would no longer check her.

“You talk of unity,” she said. “You ought to make me understand.”

“I never allow my wife to talk politics,” he said seriously. “For this reason. It is impossible for human beings, constituted as they are, both to fight and to have ideals. If I have preserved mine, as I am thankful to say that in great measure I have, it is due to the fact that I have been able to come home to my wife in the evening and to find that she has spent her day in calling, music, play with the children, domestic duties—what you will; her illusions have not been destroyed. She gives me courage to go on. The strain of public life is very great,” he added.

This made him appear a battered martyr, parting every day with some of the finest gold, in the service of mankind.

“I can’t think,” Rachel exclaimed, “how any one does it!”

“Explain, Miss Vinrace,” said Richard. “This is a matter I want to clear up.”

His kindness was genuine, and she determined to take the chance he gave her, although to talk to a man of such worth and authority made her heart beat.

“It seems to me like this,” she began, doing her best first to recollect and then to expose her shivering private visions.

“There’s an old widow in her room, somewhere, let us suppose in the suburbs of Leeds.”

Richard bent his head to show that he accepted the widow.

“In London you’re spending your life, talking, writing things, getting bills through, missing what seems natural. The result of it all is that she goes to her cupboard and finds a little more tea, a few lumps of sugar, or a little less tea and a newspaper. Widows all over the country I admit do this. Still, there’s the mind of the widow—the affections; those you leave untouched. But you waste your own.”

“If the widow goes to her cupboard and finds it bare,” Richard answered, “her spiritual outlook we may admit will be affected. If I may pick holes in your philosophy, Miss Vinrace, which has its merits, I would point out that a human being is not a set of compartments, but an organism. Imagination, Miss Vinrace; use your imagination; that’s where you young Liberals fail. Conceive the world as a whole. Now for your second point; when you assert that in trying to set the house in order for the benefit of the young generation I am wasting my higher capabilities, I totally disagree with you. I can conceive no more exalted aim—to be the citizen of the Empire. Look at it in this way, Miss Vinrace; conceive the state as a complicated machine; we citizens are parts of that machine; some fulfil more important duties; others (perhaps I am one of them) serve only to connect some obscure parts of the mechanism, concealed from the public eye. Yet if the meanest screw fails in its task, the proper working of the whole is imperilled.”

It was impossible to combine the image of a lean black widow, gazing out of her window, and longing for some one to talk to, with the image of a vast machine, such as one sees at South Kensington, thumping, thumping, thumping. The attempt at communication had been a failure.

“We don’t seem to understand each other,” she said.

“Shall I say something that will make you very angry?” he replied.

“It won’t,” said Rachel.

“Well, then; no woman has what I may call the political instinct. You have very great virtues; I am the first, I hope, to admit that; but I have never met a woman who even saw what is meant by statesmanship. I am going to make you still more angry. I hope that I never shall meet such a woman. Now, Miss Vinrace, are we enemies for life?”

Vanity, irritation, and a thrusting desire to be understood, urged her to make another attempt.

“Under the streets, in the sewers, in the wires, in the telephones, there is something alive; is that what you mean? In things like dust-carts, and men mending roads? You feel that all the time when you walk about London, and when you turn on a tap and the water comes?”

“Certainly,” said Richard. “I understand you to mean that the whole of modern society is based upon co-operative effort. If only more people would realise that, Miss Vinrace, there would be fewer of your old widows in solitary lodgings!”

Rachel considered.

“Are you a Liberal or are you a Conservative?” she asked.

“I call myself a Conservative for convenience sake,” said Richard, smiling. “But there is more in common between the two parties than people generally allow.”

There was a pause, which did not come on Rachel’s side from any lack of things to say; as usual she could not say them, and was further confused by the fact that the time for talking probably ran short. She was haunted by absurd jumbled ideas—how, if one went back far enough, everything perhaps was intelligible; everything was in common; for the mammoths who pastured in the fields of Richmond High Street had turned into paving stones and boxes full of ribbon, and her aunts.

“Did you say you lived in the country when you were a child?” she asked.

Crude as her manners seemed to him, Richard was flattered. There could be no doubt that her interest was genuine.

“I did,” he smiled.

“And what happened?” she asked. “Or do I ask too many questions?”

“I’m flattered, I assure you. But—let me see—what happened? Well, riding, lessons, sisters. There was an enchanted rubbish heap, I remember, where all kinds of queer things happened. Odd, what things impress children! I can remember the look of the place to this day. It’s a fallacy to think that children are happy. They’re not; they’re unhappy. I’ve never suffered so much as I did when I was a child.”

“Why?” she asked.

“I didn’t get on well with my father,” said Richard shortly. “He was a very able man, but hard. Well—it makes one determined not to sin in that way oneself. Children never forget injustice. They forgive heaps of things grown-up people mind; but that sin is the unpardonable sin. Mind you—I daresay I was a difficult child to manage; but when I think what I was ready to give! No, I was more sinned against than sinning. And then I went to school, where I did very fairly well; and then, as I say, my father sent me to both universities…. D’you know, Miss Vinrace, you’ve made me think? How little, after all, one can tell anybody about one’s life! Here I sit; there you sit; both, I doubt not, chock-full of the most interesting experiences, ideas, emotions; yet how communicate? I’ve told you what every second person you meet might tell you.”

“I don’t think so,” she said. “It’s the way of saying things, isn’t it, not the things?”

“True,” said Richard. “Perfectly true.” He paused. “When I look back over my life—I’m forty-two—what are the great facts that stand out? What were the revelations, if I may call them so? The misery of the poor and—(he hesitated and pitched over) “love”!

Upon that word he lowered his voice; it was a word that seemed to unveil the skies for Rachel.

“It’s an odd thing to say to a young lady,” he continued. “But have you any idea what—what I mean by that? No; of course not. I don’t use the word in a conventional sense. I use it as young men use it. Girls are kept very ignorant, aren’t they? Perhaps it’s wise—perhaps—You don’t know?”

He spoke as if he had lost consciousness of what he was saying.

“No; I don’t,” she said, scarcely speaking above her breath.

“Warships, Dick! Over there! Look!” Clarissa, released from Mr. Grice, appreciative of all his seaweeds, skimmed towards them, gesticulating.

She had sighted two sinister grey vessels, low in the water, and bald as bone, one closely following the other with the look of eyeless beasts seeking their prey. Consciousness returned to Richard instantly.

“By George!” he exclaimed, and stood shielding his eyes.

“Ours, Dick?” said Clarissa.

“The Mediterranean Fleet,” he answered.

The Euphrosyne was slowly dipping her flag. Richard raised his hat. Convulsively Clarissa squeezed Rachel’s hand.

“Aren’t you glad to be English!” she said.

The warships drew past, casting a curious effect of discipline and sadness upon the waters, and it was not until they were again invisible that people spoke to each other naturally. At lunch the talk was all of valour and death, and the magnificent qualities of British admirals. Clarissa quoted one poet, Willoughby quoted another. Life on board a man-of-war was splendid, so they agreed, and sailors, whenever one met them, were quite especially nice and simple.

This being so, no one liked it when Helen remarked that it seemed to her as wrong to keep sailors as to keep a Zoo, and that as for dying on a battle-field, surely it was time we ceased to praise courage—“or to write bad poetry about it,” snarled Pepper.

But Helen was really wondering why Rachel, sitting silent, looked so queer and flushed.

[]

Chapter V

She was not able to follow up her observations, however, or to come to any conclusion, for by one of those accidents which are liable to happen at sea, the whole course of their lives was now put out of order.

Even at tea the floor rose beneath their feet and pitched too low again, and at dinner the ship seemed to groan and strain as though a lash were descending. She who had been a broad-backed dray-horse, upon whose hind-quarters pierrots might waltz, became a colt in a field. The plates slanted away from the knives, and Mrs. Dalloway’s face blanched for a second as she helped herself and saw the potatoes roll this way and that. Willoughby, of course, extolled the virtues of his ship, and quoted what had been said of her by experts and distinguished passengers, for he loved his own possessions. Still, dinner was uneasy, and directly the ladies were alone Clarissa owned that she would be better off in bed, and went, smiling bravely.

Next morning the storm was on them, and no politeness could ignore it. Mrs. Dalloway stayed in her room. Richard faced three meals, eating valiantly at each; but at the third, certain glazed asparagus swimming in oil finally conquered him.

“That beats me,” he said, and withdrew.

“Now we are alone once more,” remarked William Pepper, looking round the table; but no one was ready to engage him in talk, and the meal ended in silence.

On the following day they met—but as flying leaves meet in the air. Sick they were not; but the wind propelled them hastily into rooms, violently downstairs. They passed each other gasping on deck; they shouted across tables. They wore fur coats; and Helen was never seen without a bandanna on her head. For comfort they retreated to their cabins, where with tightly wedged feet they let the ship bounce and tumble. Their sensations were the sensations of potatoes in a sack on a galloping horse. The world outside was merely a violent grey tumult. For two days they had a perfect rest from their old emotions. Rachel had just enough consciousness to suppose herself a donkey on the summit of a moor in a hail-storm, with its coat blown into furrows; then she became a wizened tree, perpetually driven back by the salt Atlantic gale.

Helen, on the other hand, staggered to Mrs. Dalloway’s door, knocked, could not be heard for the slamming of doors and the battering of wind, and entered.

There were basins, of course. Mrs. Dalloway lay half-raised on a pillow, and did not open her eyes. Then she murmured, “Oh, Dick, is that you?”

Helen shouted—for she was thrown against the washstand—“How are you?”

Clarissa opened one eye. It gave her an incredibly dissipated appearance. “Awful!” she gasped. Her lips were white inside.

Planting her feet wide, Helen contrived to pour champagne into a tumbler with a tooth-brush in it.

“Champagne,” she said.

“There’s a tooth-brush in it,” murmured Clarissa, and smiled; it might have been the contortion of one weeping. She drank.

“Disgusting,” she whispered, indicating the basins. Relics of humour still played over her face like moonshine.

“Want more?” Helen shouted. Speech was again beyond Clarissa’s reach. The wind laid the ship shivering on her side. Pale agonies crossed Mrs. Dalloway in waves. When the curtains flapped, grey lights puffed across her. Between the spasms of the storm, Helen made the curtain fast, shook the pillows, stretched the bed-clothes, and smoothed the hot nostrils and forehead with cold scent.

“You are good!” Clarissa gasped. “Horrid mess!”

She was trying to apologise for white underclothes fallen and scattered on the floor. For one second she opened a single eye, and saw that the room was tidy. “That’s nice,” she gasped.

Helen left her; far, far away she knew that she felt a kind of liking for Mrs. Dalloway. She could not help respecting her spirit and her desire, even in the throes of sickness, for a tidy bedroom. Her petticoats, however, rose above her knees.

Quite suddenly the storm relaxed its grasp. It happened at tea; the expected paroxysm of the blast gave out just as it reached its climax and dwindled away, and the ship instead of taking the usual plunge went steadily. The monotonous order of plunging and rising, roaring and relaxing, was interfered with, and every one at table looked up and felt something loosen within them. The strain was slackened and human feelings began to peep again, as they do when daylight shows at the end of a tunnel.

“Try a turn with me,” Ridley called across to Rachel.

“Foolish!” cried Helen, but they went stumbling up the ladder. Choked by the wind their spirits rose with a rush, for on the skirts of all the grey tumult was a misty spot of gold. Instantly the world dropped into shape; they were no longer atoms flying in the void, but people riding a triumphant ship on the back of the sea. Wind and space were banished; the world floated like an apple in a tub, and the mind of man, which had been unmoored also, once more attached itself to the old beliefs.

Having scrambled twice round the ship and received many sound cuffs from the wind, they saw a sailor’s face positively shine golden. They looked, and beheld a complete yellow circle of sun; next minute it was traversed by sailing strands of cloud, and then completely hidden. By breakfast the next morning, however, the sky was swept clean, the waves, although steep, were blue, and after their view of the strange under-world, inhabited by phantoms, people began to live among tea-pots and loaves of bread with greater zest than ever.

Richard and Clarissa, however, still remained on the borderland. She did not attempt to sit up; her husband stood on his feet, contemplated his waistcoat and trousers, shook his head, and then lay down again. The inside of his brain was still rising and falling like the sea on the stage. At four o’clock he woke from sleep and saw the sunlight make a vivid angle across the red plush curtains and the grey tweed trousers. The ordinary world outside slid into his mind, and by the time he was dressed he was an English gentleman again.

He stood beside his wife. She pulled him down to her by the lapel of his coat, kissed him, and held him fast for a minute.

“Go and get a breath of air, Dick,” she said. “You look quite washed out…. How nice you smell! … And be polite to that woman. She was so kind to me.”

Thereupon Mrs. Dalloway turned to the cool side of her pillow, terribly flattened but still invincible.

Richard found Helen talking to her brother-in-law, over two dishes of yellow cake and smooth bread and butter.

“You look very ill!” she exclaimed on seeing him. “Come and have some tea.”

He remarked that the hands that moved about the cups were beautiful.

“I hear you’ve been very good to my wife,” he said. “She’s had an awful time of it. You came in and fed her with champagne. Were you among the saved yourself?”

“I? Oh, I haven’t been sick for twenty years—sea-sick, I mean.”

“There are three stages of convalescence, I always say,” broke in the hearty voice of Willoughby. “The milk stage, the bread-and-butter stage, and the roast-beef stage. I should say you were at the bread-and-butter stage.” He handed him the plate.

“Now, I should advise a hearty tea, then a brisk walk on deck; and by dinner-time you’ll be clamouring for beef, eh?” He went off laughing, excusing himself on the score of business.

“What a splendid fellow he is!” said Richard. “Always keen on something.”

“Yes,” said Helen, “he’s always been like that.”

“This is a great undertaking of his,” Richard continued. “It’s a business that won’t stop with ships, I should say. We shall see him in Parliament, or I’m much mistaken. He’s the kind of man we want in Parliament—the man who has done things.”

But Helen was not much interested in her brother-in-law.

“I expect your head’s aching, isn’t it?” she asked, pouring a fresh cup.

“Well, it is,” said Richard. “It’s humiliating to find what a slave one is to one’s body in this world. D’you know, I can never work without a kettle on the hob. As often as not I don’t drink tea, but I must feel that I can if I want to.”

“That’s very bad for you,” said Helen.

“It shortens one’s life; but I’m afraid, Mrs. Ambrose, we politicians must make up our minds to that at the outset. We’ve got to burn the candle at both ends, or——”

“You’ve cooked your goose!” said Helen brightly.

“We can’t make you take us seriously, Mrs. Ambrose,” he protested. “May I ask how you’ve spent your time? Reading—philosophy?” (He saw the black book.) “Metaphysics and fishing!” he exclaimed. “If I had to live again I believe I should devote myself to one or the other.” He began turning the pages.

“‘Good, then, is indefinable,’” he read out. “How jolly to think that’s going on still! ‘So far as I know there is only one ethical writer, Professor Henry Sidgwick, who has clearly recognised and stated this fact.’ That’s just the kind of thing we used to talk about when we were boys. I can remember arguing until five in the morning with Duffy—now Secretary for India—pacing round and round those cloisters until we decided it was too late to go to bed, and we went for a ride instead. Whether we ever came to any conclusion—that’s another matter. Still, it’s the arguing that counts. It’s things like that that stand out in life. Nothing’s been quite so vivid since. It’s the philosophers, it’s the scholars,” he continued, “they’re the people who pass the torch, who keep the light burning by which we live. Being a politician doesn’t necessarily blind one to that, Mrs. Ambrose.”

“No. Why should it?” said Helen. “But can you remember if your wife takes sugar?”

She lifted the tray and went off with it to Mrs. Dalloway.

Richard twisted a muffler twice round his throat and struggled up on deck. His body, which had grown white and tender in a dark room, tingled all over in the fresh air. He felt himself a man undoubtedly in the prime of life. Pride glowed in his eye as he let the wind buffet him and stood firm. With his head slightly lowered he sheered round corners, strode uphill, and met the blast. There was a collision. For a second he could not see what the body was he had run into. “Sorry.” “Sorry.” It was Rachel who apologised. They both laughed, too much blown about to speak. She drove open the door of her room and stepped into its calm. In order to speak to her, it was necessary that Richard should follow. They stood in a whirlpool of wind; papers began flying round in circles, the door crashed to, and they tumbled, laughing, into chairs. Richard sat upon Bach.

“My word! What a tempest!” he exclaimed.

“Fine, isn’t it?” said Rachel. Certainly the struggle and wind had given her a decision she lacked; red was in her cheeks, and her hair was down.

“Oh, what fun!” he cried. “What am I sitting on? Is this your room? How jolly!”

“There—sit there,” she commanded. Cowper slid once more.

“How jolly to meet again,” said Richard. “It seems an age. Cowper’s Letters? … Bach? … Wuthering Heights? … Is this where you meditate on the world, and then come out and pose poor politicians with questions? In the intervals of sea-sickness I’ve thought a lot of our talk. I assure you, you made me think.”

“I made you think! But why?”

“What solitary icebergs we are, Miss Vinrace! How little we can communicate! There are lots of things I should like to tell you about—to hear your opinion of. Have you ever read Burke?”

“Burke?” she repeated. “Who was Burke?”

“No? Well, then, I shall make a point of sending you a copy. The Speech on the French Revolution—The American Rebellion? Which shall it be, I wonder?” He noted something in his pocket-book. “And then you must write and tell me what you think of it. This reticence—this isolation—that’s what’s the matter with modern life! Now, tell me about yourself. What are your interests and occupations? I should imagine that you were a person with very strong interests. Of course you are! Good God! When I think of the age we live in, with its opportunities and possibilities, the mass of things to be done and enjoyed—why haven’t we ten lives instead of one? But about yourself?”

“You see, I’m a woman,” said Rachel.

“I know—I know,” said Richard, throwing his head back, and drawing his fingers across his eyes.

“How strange to be a woman! A young and beautiful woman,” he continued sententiously, “has the whole world at her feet. That’s true, Miss Vinrace. You have an inestimable power—for good or for evil. What couldn’t you do——” he broke off.

“What?” asked Rachel.

“You have beauty,” he said. The ship lurched. Rachel fell slightly forward. Richard took her in his arms and kissed her. Holding her tight, he kissed her passionately, so that she felt the hardness of his body and the roughness of his cheek printed upon hers. She fell back in her chair, with tremendous beats of the heart, each of which sent black waves across her eyes. He clasped his forehead in his hands.

“You tempt me,” he said. The tone of his voice was terrifying. He seemed choked in fight. [fright.] They were both trembling. Rachel stood up and went. Her head was cold, her knees shaking, and the physical pain of the emotion was so great that she could only keep herself moving above the great leaps of her heart. She leant upon the rail of the ship, and gradually ceased to feel, for a chill of body and mind crept over her. Far out between the waves little black and white sea-birds were riding. Rising and falling with smooth and graceful movements in the hollows of the waves they seemed singularly detached and unconcerned.

“You’re peaceful,” she said. She became peaceful too, at the same time possessed with a strange exultation. Life seemed to hold infinite possibilities she had never guessed at. She leant upon the rail and looked over the troubled grey waters, where the sunlight was fitfully scattered upon the crests of the waves, until she was cold and absolutely calm again. Nevertheless something wonderful had happened.

At dinner, however, she did not feel exalted, but merely uncomfortable, as if she and Richard had seen something together which is hidden in ordinary life, so that they did not like to look at each other. Richard slid his eyes over her uneasily once, and never looked at her again. Formal platitudes were manufactured with effort, but Willoughby was kindled.

“Beef for Mr. Dalloway!” he shouted. “Come now—after that walk you’re at the beef stage, Dalloway!”

Wonderful masculine stories followed about Bright and Disraeli and coalition governments, wonderful stories which made the people at the dinner-table seem featureless and small. After dinner, sitting alone with Rachel under the great swinging lamp, Helen was struck by her pallor. It once more occurred to her that there was something strange in the girl’s behaviour.

“You look tired. Are you tired?” she asked.

“Not tired,” said Rachel. “Oh yes, I suppose I am tired.”

Helen advised bed, and she went, not seeing Richard again. She must have been very tired for she fell asleep at once, but after an hour or two of dreamless sleep, she dreamt. She dreamt that she was walking down a long tunnel, which grew so narrow by degrees that she could touch the damp bricks on either side. At length the tunnel opened and became a vault; she found herself trapped in it, bricks meeting her wherever she turned, alone with a little deformed man who squatted on the floor gibbering, with long nails. His face was pitted and like the face of an animal. The wall behind him oozed with damp, which collected into drops and slid down. Still and cold as death she lay, not daring to move, until she broke the agony by tossing herself across the bed, and woke crying “Oh!”

Light showed her the familiar things: her clothes, fallen off the chair; the water jug gleaming white; but the horror did not go at once. She felt herself pursued, so that she got up and actually locked her door. A voice moaned for her; eyes desired her. All night long barbarian men harassed the ship; they came scuffling down the passages, and stopped to snuffle at her door. She could not sleep again.

[]

Chapter VI

“That’s the tragedy of life—as I always say!” said Mrs. Dalloway. “Beginning things and having to end them. Still, I’m not going to let this end, if you’re willing.” It was the morning, the sea was calm, and the ship once again was anchored not far from another shore.

She was dressed in her long fur cloak, with the veils wound round her head, and once more the rich boxes stood on top of each other so that the scene of a few days back seemed to be repeated.

“D’you suppose we shall ever meet in London?” said Ridley ironically. “You’ll have forgotten all about me by the time you step out there.”

He pointed to the shore of the little bay, where they could now see the separate trees with moving branches.

“How horrid you are!” she laughed. “Rachel’s coming to see me anyhow—the instant you get back,” she said, pressing Rachel’s arm. “Now—you’ve no excuse!”

With a silver pencil she wrote her name and address on the flyleaf of Persuasion, and gave the book to Rachel. Sailors were shouldering the luggage, and people were beginning to congregate. There were Captain Cobbold, Mr. Grice, Willoughby, Helen, and an obscure grateful man in a blue jersey.

“Oh, it’s time,” said Clarissa. “Well, good-bye. I do like you,” she murmured as she kissed Rachel. People in the way made it unnecessary for Richard to shake Rachel by the hand; he managed to look at her very stiffly for a second before he followed his wife down the ship’s side.

The boat separating from the vessel made off towards the land, and for some minutes Helen, Ridley, and Rachel leant over the rail, watching. Once Mrs. Dalloway turned and waved; but the boat steadily grew smaller and smaller until it ceased to rise and fall, and nothing could be seen save two resolute backs.

“Well, that’s over,” said Ridley after a long silence. “We shall never see them again,” he added, turning to go to his books. A feeling of emptiness and melancholy came over them; they knew in their hearts that it was over, and that they had parted for ever, and the knowledge filled them with far greater depression than the length of their acquaintance seemed to justify. Even as the boat pulled away they could feel other sights and sounds beginning to take the place of the Dalloways, and the feeling was so unpleasant that they tried to resist it. For so, too, would they be forgotten.

In much the same way as Mrs. Chailey downstairs was sweeping the withered rose-leaves off the dressing-table, so Helen was anxious to make things straight again after the visitors had gone. Rachel’s obvious languor and listlessness made her an easy prey, and indeed Helen had devised a kind of trap. That something had happened she now felt pretty certain; moreover, she had come to think that they had been strangers long enough; she wished to know what the girl was like, partly of course because Rachel showed no disposition to be known. So, as they turned from the rail, she said:

“Come and talk to me instead of practising,” and led the way to the sheltered side where the deck-chairs were stretched in the sun. Rachel followed her indifferently. Her mind was absorbed by Richard; by the extreme strangeness of what had happened, and by a thousand feelings of which she had not been conscious before. She made scarcely any attempt to listen to what Helen was saying, as Helen indulged in commonplaces to begin with. While Mrs. Ambrose arranged her embroidery, sucked her silk, and threaded her needle, she lay back gazing at the horizon.

“Did you like those people?” Helen asked her casually.

“Yes,” she replied blankly.

“You talked to him, didn’t you?”

She said nothing for a minute.

“He kissed me,” she said without any change of tone.

Helen started, looked at her, but could not make out what she felt.

“M-m-m’yes,” she said, after a pause. “I thought he was that kind of man.”

“What kind of man?” said Rachel.

“Pompous and sentimental.”

“I liked him,” said Rachel.

“So you really didn’t mind?”

For the first time since Helen had known her Rachel’s eyes lit up brightly.

“I did mind,” she said vehemently. “I dreamt. I couldn’t sleep.”

“Tell me what happened,” said Helen. She had to keep her lips from twitching as she listened to Rachel’s story. It was poured out abruptly with great seriousness and no sense of humour.

“We talked about politics. He told me what he had done for the poor somewhere. I asked him all sorts of questions. He told me about his own life. The day before yesterday, after the storm, he came in to see me. It happened then, quite suddenly. He kissed me. I don’t know why.” As she spoke she grew flushed. “I was a good deal excited,” she continued. “But I didn’t mind till afterwards; when—” she paused, and saw the figure of the bloated little man again—“I became terrified.”

From the look in her eyes it was evident she was again terrified. Helen was really at a loss what to say. From the little she knew of Rachel’s upbringing she supposed that she had been kept entirely ignorant as to the relations of men with women. With a shyness which she felt with women and not with men she did not like to explain simply what these are. Therefore she took the other course and belittled the whole affair.

“Oh, well,” she said, “he was a silly creature, and if I were you, I’d think no more about it.”

“No,” said Rachel, sitting bolt upright, “I shan’t do that. I shall think about it all day and all night until I find out exactly what it does mean.”

“Don’t you ever read?” Helen asked tentatively.

“Cowper’s Letters—that kind of thing. Father gets them for me or my Aunts.”

Helen could hardly restrain herself from saying out loud what she thought of a man who brought up his daughter so that at the age of twenty-four she scarcely knew that men desired women and was terrified by a kiss. She had good reason to fear that Rachel had made herself incredibly ridiculous.

“You don’t know many men?” she asked.

“Mr. Pepper,” said Rachel ironically.

“So no one’s ever wanted to marry you?”

“No,” she answered ingenuously.

Helen reflected that as, from what she had said, Rachel certainly would think these things out, it might be as well to help her.

“You oughtn’t to be frightened,” she said. “It’s the most natural thing in the world. Men will want to kiss you, just as they’ll want to marry you. The pity is to get things out of proportion. It’s like noticing the noises people make when they eat, or men spitting; or, in short, any small thing that gets on one’s nerves.”

Rachel seemed to be inattentive to these remarks. “Tell me,” she said suddenly, “what are those women in Piccadilly?”

“In Piccadilly? They are prostitutes,” said Helen.

“It is terrifying—it is disgusting,” Rachel asserted, as if she included Helen in her hatred.

“It is,” said Helen. “But——”

“I did like him,” Rachel mused, as if speaking to herself. “I wanted to talk to him; I wanted to know what he’d done. The women in Lancashire——”

It seemed to her as she recalled their talk that there was something lovable about Richard, good in their attempted friendship, and strangely piteous in the way they had parted.

The softening of her mood was apparent to Helen.

“You see,” she said, “you must take things as they are; and if you want friendship with men you must run risks. Personally,” she continued, breaking into a smile, “I think it’s worth it; I don’t mind being kissed; I’m rather jealous, I believe, that Mr. Dalloway kissed you and didn’t kiss me. Though,” she added, “he bored me considerably.”

But Rachel did not return the smile or dismiss the whole affair, as Helen meant her to. Her mind was working very quickly, inconsistently and painfully. Helen’s words hewed down great blocks which had stood there always, and the light which came in was cold. After sitting for a time with fixed eyes, she burst out:

“So that’s why I can’t walk alone!”

By this new light she saw her life for the first time a creeping hedged-in thing, driven cautiously between high walls, here turned aside, there plunged in darkness, made dull and crippled for ever—her life that was the only chance she had—a thousand words and actions became plain to her.

“Because men are brutes! I hate men!” she exclaimed.

“I thought you said you liked him?” said Helen.

“I liked him, and I liked being kissed,” she answered, as if that only added more difficulties to her problem.

Helen was surprised to see how genuine both shock and problem were, but she could think of no way of easing the difficulty except by going on talking. She wanted to make her niece talk, and so to understand why this rather dull, kindly, plausible politician had made so deep an impression on her, for surely at the age of twenty-four this was not natural.

“And did you like Mrs. Dalloway too?” she asked.

As she spoke she saw Rachel redden; for she remembered silly things she had said, and also, it occurred to her that she treated this exquisite woman rather badly, for Mrs. Dalloway had said that she loved her husband.

“She was quite nice, but a thimble-pated creature,” Helen continued. “I never heard such nonsense! Chitter-chatter-chitter-chatter—fish and the Greek alphabet—never listened to a word any one said—chock-full of idiotic theories about the way to bring up children—I’d far rather talk to him any day. He was pompous, but he did at least understand what was said to him.”

The glamour insensibly faded a little both from Richard and Clarissa. They had not been so wonderful after all, then, in the eyes of a mature person.

“It’s very difficult to know what people are like,” Rachel remarked, and Helen saw with pleasure that she spoke more naturally. “I suppose I was taken in.”

There was little doubt about that according to Helen, but she restrained herself and said aloud:

“One has to make experiments.”

“And they were nice,” said Rachel. “They were extraordinarily interesting.” She tried to recall the image of the world as a live thing that Richard had given her, with drains like nerves, and bad houses like patches of diseased skin. She recalled his watchwords—Unity—Imagination, and saw again the bubbles meeting in her tea-cup as he spoke of sisters and canaries, boyhood and his father, her small world becoming wonderfully enlarged.

“But all people don’t seem to you equally interesting, do they?” asked Mrs. Ambrose.

Rachel explained that most people had hitherto been symbols; but that when they talked to one they ceased to be symbols, and became—— “I could listen to them for ever!” she exclaimed. She then jumped up, disappeared downstairs for a minute, and came back with a fat red book.

“Who’s Who,” she said, laying it upon Helen’s knee and turning the pages. “It gives short lives of people—for instance: ‘Sir Roland Beal; born 1852; parents from Moffatt; educated at Rugby; passed first into R.E.; married 1878 the daughter of T. Fishwick; served in the Bechuanaland Expedition 1884-85 (honourably mentioned). Clubs: United Service, Naval and Military. Recreations: an enthusiastic curler.’”

Sitting on the deck at Helen’s feet she went on turning the pages and reading biographies of bankers, writers, clergymen, sailors, surgeons, judges, professors, statesmen, editors, philanthropists, merchants, and actresses; what clubs they belonged to, where they lived, what games they played, and how many acres they owned.

She became absorbed in the book.

Helen meanwhile stitched at her embroidery and thought over the things they had said. Her conclusion was that she would very much like to show her niece, if it were possible, how to live, or as she put it, how to be a reasonable person. She thought that there must be something wrong in this confusion between politics and kissing politicians, and that an elder person ought to be able to help.

“I quite agree,” she said, “that people are very interesting; only—” Rachel, putting her finger between the pages, looked up enquiringly.

“Only I think you ought to discriminate,” she ended. “It’s a pity to be intimate with people who are—well, rather second-rate, like the Dalloways, and to find it out later.”

“But how does one know?” Rachel asked.

“I really can’t tell you,” replied Helen candidly, after a moment’s thought. “You’ll have to find out for yourself. But try and—Why don’t you call me Helen?” she added. “‘Aunt’s’ a horrid name. I never liked my Aunts.”

“I should like to call you Helen,” Rachel answered.

“D’you think me very unsympathetic?”

Rachel reviewed the points which Helen had certainly failed to understand; they arose chiefly from the difference of nearly twenty years in age between them, which made Mrs. Ambrose appear too humorous and cool in a matter of such moment.

“No,” she said. “Some things you don’t understand, of course.”

“Of course,” Helen agreed. “So now you can go ahead and be a person on your own account,” she added.

The vision of her own personality, of herself as a real everlasting thing, different from anything else, unmergeable, like the sea or the wind, flashed into Rachel’s mind, and she became profoundly excited at the thought of living.

“I can be m-m-myself,” she stammered, “in spite of you, in spite of the Dalloways, and Mr. Pepper, and Father, and my Aunts, in spite of these?” She swept her hand across a whole page of statesmen and soldiers.

“In spite of them all,” said Helen gravely. She then put down her needle, and explained a plan which had come into her head as they talked. Instead of wandering on down the Amazons until she reached some sulphurous tropical port, where one had to lie within doors all day beating off insects with a fan, the sensible thing to do surely was to spend the season with them in their villa by the seaside, where among other advantages Mrs. Ambrose herself would be at hand to——

“After all, Rachel,” she broke off, “it’s silly to pretend that because there’s twenty years’ difference between us we therefore can’t talk to each other like human beings.”

“No; because we like each other,” said Rachel.

“Yes,” Mrs. Ambrose agreed.

That fact, together with other facts, had been made clear by their twenty minutes’ talk, although how they had come to these conclusions they could not have said.

However they were come by, they were sufficiently serious to send Mrs. Ambrose a day or two later in search of her brother-in-law. She found him sitting in his room working, applying a stout blue pencil authoritatively to bundles of filmy paper. Papers lay to left and to right of him, there were great envelopes so gorged with papers that they spilt papers on to the table. Above him hung a photograph of a woman’s head. The need of sitting absolutely still before a Cockney photographer had given her lips a queer little pucker, and her eyes for the same reason looked as though she thought the whole situation ridiculous. Nevertheless it was the head of an individual and interesting woman, who would no doubt have turned and laughed at Willoughby if she could have caught his eye; but when he looked up at her he sighed profoundly. In his mind this work of his, the great factories at Hull which showed like mountains at night, the ships that crossed the ocean punctually, the schemes for combining this and that and building up a solid mass of industry, was all an offering to her; he laid his success at her feet; and was always thinking how to educate his daughter so that Theresa might be glad. He was a very ambitious man; and although he had not been particularly kind to her while she lived, as Helen thought, he now believed that she watched him from Heaven, and inspired what was good in him.

Mrs. Ambrose apologised for the interruption, and asked whether she might speak to him about a plan of hers. Would he consent to leave his daughter with them when they landed, instead of taking her on up the Amazons?

“We would take great care of her,” she added, “and we should really like it.”

Willoughby looked very grave and carefully laid aside his papers.

“She’s a good girl,” he said at length. “There is a likeness?”—he nodded his head at the photograph of Theresa and sighed. Helen looked at Theresa pursing up her lips before the Cockney photographer. It suggested her in an absurd human way, and she felt an intense desire to share some joke.

“She’s the only thing that’s left to me,” sighed Willoughby. “We go on year after year without talking about these things—” He broke off. “But it’s better so. Only, life’s very hard.”

Helen was sorry for him, and patted him on the shoulder, but she felt uncomfortable when her brother-in-law expressed his feelings, and took refuge in praising Rachel, and explaining why she thought her plan might be a good one.

“True,” said Willoughby when she had done. “The social conditions are bound to be primitive. I should be out a good deal. I agreed because she wished it. And of course I have complete confidence in you…. You see, Helen,” he continued, becoming confidential, “I want to bring her up as her mother would have wished. I don’t hold with these modern views—any more than you do, eh? She’s a nice quiet girl, devoted to her music—a little less of that would do no harm. Still, it’s kept her happy, and we lead a very quiet life at Richmond. I should like her to begin to see more people. I want to take her about with me when I get home. I’ve half a mind to rent a house in London, leaving my sisters at Richmond, and take her to see one or two people who’d be kind to her for my sake. I’m beginning to realise,” he continued, stretching himself out, “that all this is tending to Parliament, Helen. It’s the only way to get things done as one wants them done. I talked to Dalloway about it. In that case, of course, I should want Rachel to be able to take more part in things. A certain amount of entertaining would be necessary—dinners, an occasional evening party. One’s constituents like to be fed, I believe. In all these ways Rachel could be of great help to me. So,” he wound up, “I should be very glad, if we arrange this visit (which must be upon a business footing, mind), if you could see your way to helping my girl, bringing her out,—she’s a little shy now,—making a woman of her, the kind of woman her mother would have liked her to be,” he ended, jerking his head at the photograph.

Willoughby’s selfishness, though consistent as Helen saw with real affection for his daughter, made her determined to have the girl to stay with her, even if she had to promise a complete course of instruction in the feminine graces. She could not help laughing at the notion of it—Rachel a Tory hostess!—and marvelling as she left him at the astonishing ignorance of a father.

Rachel, when consulted, showed less enthusiasm than Helen could have wished. One moment she was eager, the next doubtful. Visions of a great river, now blue, now yellow in the tropical sun and crossed by bright birds, now white in the moon, now deep in shade with moving trees and canoes sliding out from the tangled banks, beset her. Helen promised a river. Then she did not want to leave her father. That feeling seemed genuine too, but in the end Helen prevailed, although when she had won her case she was beset by doubts, and more than once regretted the impulse which had entangled her with the fortunes of another human being.

[]

Chapter VII

From a distance the Euphrosyne looked very small. Glasses were turned upon her from the decks of great liners, and she was pronounced a tramp, a cargo-boat, or one of those wretched little passenger steamers where people rolled about among the cattle on deck. The insect-like figures of Dalloways, Ambroses, and Vinraces were also derided, both from the extreme smallness of their persons and the doubt which only strong glasses could dispel as to whether they were really live creatures or only lumps on the rigging. Mr. Pepper with all his learning had been mistaken for a cormorant, and then, as unjustly, transformed into a cow. At night, indeed, when the waltzes were swinging in the saloon, and gifted passengers reciting, the little ship—shrunk to a few beads of light out among the dark waves, and one high in air upon the mast-head—seemed something mysterious and impressive to heated partners resting from the dance. She became a ship passing in the night—an emblem of the loneliness of human life, an occasion for queer confidences and sudden appeals for sympathy.

On and on she went, by day and by night, following her path, until one morning broke and showed the land. Losing its shadow-like appearance it became first cleft and mountainous, next coloured grey and purple, next scattered with white blocks which gradually separated themselves, and then, as the progress of the ship acted upon the view like a field-glass of increasing power, became streets of houses. By nine o’clock the Euphrosyne had taken up her position in the middle of a great bay; she dropped her anchor; immediately, as if she were a recumbent giant requiring examination, small boats came swarming about her. She rang with cries; men jumped on to her; her deck was thumped by feet. The lonely little island was invaded from all quarters at once, and after four weeks of silence it was bewildering to hear human speech. Mrs. Ambrose alone heeded none of this stir. She was pale with suspense while the boat with mail bags was making towards them. Absorbed in her letters she did not notice that she had left the Euphrosyne, and felt no sadness when the ship lifted up her voice and bellowed thrice like a cow separated from its calf.

“The children are well!” she exclaimed. Mr. Pepper, who sat opposite with a great mound of bag and rug upon his knees, said, “Gratifying.” Rachel, to whom the end of the voyage meant a complete change of perspective, was too much bewildered by the approach of the shore to realise what children were well or why it was gratifying. Helen went on reading.

Moving very slowly, and rearing absurdly high over each wave, the little boat was now approaching a white crescent of sand. Behind this was a deep green valley, with distinct hills on either side. On the slope of the right-hand hill white houses with brown roofs were settled, like nesting sea-birds, and at intervals cypresses striped the hill with black bars. Mountains whose sides were flushed with red, but whose crowns were bald, rose as a pinnacle, half-concealing another pinnacle behind it. The hour being still early, the whole view was exquisitely light and airy; the blues and greens of sky and tree were intense but not sultry. As they drew nearer and could distinguish details, the effect of the earth with its minute objects and colours and different forms of life was overwhelming after four weeks of the sea, and kept them silent.

“Three hundred years odd,” said Mr. Pepper meditatively at length.

As nobody said “What?” he merely extracted a bottle and swallowed a pill. The piece of information that died within him was to the effect that three hundred years ago five Elizabethan barques had anchored where the Euphrosyne now floated. Half-drawn up upon the beach lay an equal number of Spanish galleons, unmanned, for the country was still a virgin land behind a veil. Slipping across the water, the English sailors bore away bars of silver, bales of linen, timbers of cedar wood, golden crucifixes knobbed with emeralds. When the Spaniards came down from their drinking, a fight ensued, the two parties churning up the sand, and driving each other into the surf. The Spaniards, bloated with fine living upon the fruits of the miraculous land, fell in heaps; but the hardy Englishmen, tawny with sea-voyaging, hairy for lack of razors, with muscles like wire, fangs greedy for flesh, and fingers itching for gold, despatched the wounded, drove the dying into the sea, and soon reduced the natives to a state of superstitious wonderment. Here a settlement was made; women were imported; children grew. All seemed to favour the expansion of the British Empire, and had there been men like Richard Dalloway in the time of Charles the First, the map would undoubtedly be red where it is now an odious green. But it must be supposed that the political mind of that age lacked imagination, and, merely for want of a few thousand pounds and a few thousand men, the spark died that should have been a conflagration. From the interior came Indians with subtle poisons, naked bodies, and painted idols; from the sea came vengeful Spaniards and rapacious Portuguese; exposed to all these enemies (though the climate proved wonderfully kind and the earth abundant) the English dwindled away and all but disappeared. Somewhere about the middle of the seventeenth century a single sloop watched its season and slipped out by night, bearing within it all that was left of the great British colony, a few men, a few women, and perhaps a dozen dusky children. English history then denies all knowledge of the place. Owing to one cause and another civilisation shifted its centre to a spot some four or five hundred miles to the south, and to-day Santa Marina is not much larger than it was three hundred years ago. In population it is a happy compromise, for Portuguese fathers wed Indian mothers, and their children intermarry with the Spanish. Although they get their ploughs from Manchester, they make their coats from their own sheep, their silk from their own worms, and their furniture from their own cedar trees, so that in arts and industries the place is still much where it was in Elizabethan days.

The reasons which had drawn the English across the sea to found a small colony within the last ten years are not so easily described, and will never perhaps be recorded in history books. Granted facility of travel, peace, good trade, and so on, there was besides a kind of dissatisfaction among the English with the older countries and the enormous accumulations of carved stone, stained glass, and rich brown painting which they offered to the tourist. The movement in search of something new was of course infinitely small, affecting only a handful of well-to-do people. It began by a few schoolmasters serving their passage out to South America as the pursers of tramp steamers. They returned in time for the summer term, when their stories of the splendours and hardships of life at sea, the humours of sea-captains, the wonders of night and dawn, and the marvels of the place delighted outsiders, and sometimes found their way into print. The country itself taxed all their powers of description, for they said it was much bigger than Italy, and really nobler than Greece. Again, they declared that the natives were strangely beautiful, very big in stature, dark, passionate, and quick to seize the knife. The place seemed new and full of new forms of beauty, in proof of which they showed handkerchiefs which the women had worn round their heads, and primitive carvings coloured bright greens and blues. Somehow or other, as fashions do, the fashion spread; an old monastery was quickly turned into a hotel, while a famous line of steamships altered its route for the convenience of passengers.

Oddly enough it happened that the least satisfactory of Helen Ambrose’s brothers had been sent out years before to make his fortune, at any rate to keep clear of race-horses, in the very spot which had now become so popular. Often, leaning upon the column in the verandah, he had watched the English ships with English schoolmasters for pursers steaming into the bay. Having at length earned enough to take a holiday, and being sick of the place, he proposed to put his villa, on the slope of the mountain, at his sister’s disposal. She, too, had been a little stirred by the talk of a new world, where there was always sun and never a fog, which went on around her, and the chance, when they were planning where to spend the winter out of England, seemed too good to be missed. For these reasons she determined to accept Willoughby’s offer of free passages on his ship, to place the children with their grand-parents, and to do the thing thoroughly while she was about it.

Taking seats in a carriage drawn by long-tailed horses with pheasants’ feathers erect between their ears, the Ambroses, Mr. Pepper, and Rachel rattled out of the harbour. The day increased in heat as they drove up the hill. The road passed through the town, where men seemed to be beating brass and crying “Water,” where the passage was blocked by mules and cleared by whips and curses, where the women walked barefoot, their heads balancing baskets, and cripples hastily displayed mutilated members; it issued among steep green fields, not so green but that the earth showed through. Great trees now shaded all but the centre of the road, and a mountain stream, so shallow and so swift that it plaited itself into strands as it ran, raced along the edge. Higher they went, until Ridley and Rachel walked behind; next they turned along a lane scattered with stones, where Mr. Pepper raised his stick and silently indicated a shrub, bearing among sparse leaves a voluminous purple blossom; and at a rickety canter the last stage of the way was accomplished.

The villa was a roomy white house, which, as is the case with most continental houses, looked to an English eye frail, ramshackle, and absurdly frivolous, more like a pagoda in a tea-garden than a place where one slept. The garden called urgently for the services of gardener. Bushes waved their branches across the paths, and the blades of grass, with spaces of earth between them, could be counted. In the circular piece of ground in front of the verandah were two cracked vases, from which red flowers drooped, with a stone fountain between them, now parched in the sun. The circular garden led to a long garden, where the gardener’s shears had scarcely been, unless now and then, when he cut a bough of blossom for his beloved. A few tall trees shaded it, and round bushes with wax-like flowers mobbed their heads together in a row. A garden smoothly laid with turf, divided by thick hedges, with raised beds of bright flowers, such as we keep within walls in England, would have been out of place upon the side of this bare hill. There was no ugliness to shut out, and the villa looked straight across the shoulder of a slope, ribbed with olive trees, to the sea.

The indecency of the whole place struck Mrs. Chailey forcibly. There were no blinds to shut out the sun, nor was there any furniture to speak of for the sun to spoil. Standing in the bare stone hall, and surveying a staircase of superb breadth, but cracked and carpetless, she further ventured the opinion that there were rats, as large as terriers at home, and that if one put one’s foot down with any force one would come through the floor. As for hot water—at this point her investigations left her speechless.

“Poor creature!” she murmured to the sallow Spanish servant-girl who came out with the pigs and hens to receive them, “no wonder you hardly look like a human being!” Maria accepted the compliment with an exquisite Spanish grace. In Chailey’s opinion they would have done better to stay on board an English ship, but none knew better than she that her duty commanded her to stay.

When they were settled in, and in train to find daily occupation, there was some speculation as to the reasons which induced Mr. Pepper to stay, taking up his lodging in the Ambrose’s house. Efforts had been made for some days before landing to impress upon him the advantages of the Amazons.

“That great stream!” Helen would begin, gazing as if she saw a visionary cascade, “I’ve a good mind to go with you myself, Willoughby—only I can’t. Think of the sunsets and the moonrises—I believe the colours are unimaginable.”

“There are wild peacocks,” Rachel hazarded.

“And marvellous creatures in the water,” Helen asserted.

“One might discover a new reptile,” Rachel continued.

“There’s certain to be a revolution, I’m told,” Helen urged.

The effect of these subterfuges was a little dashed by Ridley, who, after regarding Pepper for some moments, sighed aloud, “Poor fellow!” and inwardly speculated upon the unkindness of women.

He stayed, however, in apparent contentment for six days, playing with a microscope and a notebook in one of the many sparsely furnished sitting-rooms, but on the evening of the seventh day, as they sat at dinner, he appeared more restless than usual. The dinner-table was set between two long windows which were left uncurtained by Helen’s orders. Darkness fell as sharply as a knife in this climate, and the town then sprang out in circles and lines of bright dots beneath them. Buildings which never showed by day showed by night, and the sea flowed right over the land judging by the moving lights of the steamers. The sight fulfilled the same purpose as an orchestra in a London restaurant, and silence had its setting. William Pepper observed it for some time; he put on his spectacles to contemplate the scene.

“I’ve identified the big block to the left,” he observed, and pointed with his fork at a square formed by several rows of lights.

“One should infer that they can cook vegetables,” he added.

“An hotel?” said Helen.

“Once a monastery,” said Mr. Pepper.

Nothing more was said then, but, the day after, Mr. Pepper returned from a midday walk, and stood silently before Helen who was reading in the verandah.

“I’ve taken a room over there,” he said.

“You’re not going?” she exclaimed.

“On the whole—yes,” he remarked. “No private cook can cook vegetables.”

Knowing his dislike of questions, which she to some extent shared, Helen asked no more. Still, an uneasy suspicion lurked in her mind that William was hiding a wound. She flushed to think that her words, or her husband’s, or Rachel’s had penetrated and stung. She was half-moved to cry, “Stop, William; explain!” and would have returned to the subject at luncheon if William had not shown himself inscrutable and chill, lifting fragments of salad on the point of his fork, with the gesture of a man pronging seaweed, detecting gravel, suspecting germs.

“If you all die of typhoid I won’t be responsible!” he snapped.

“If you die of dulness, neither will I,” Helen echoed in her heart.

She reflected that she had never yet asked him whether he had been in love. They had got further and further from that subject instead of drawing nearer to it, and she could not help feeling it a relief when William Pepper, with all his knowledge, his microscope, his note-books, his genuine kindliness and good sense, but a certain dryness of soul, took his departure. Also she could not help feeling it sad that friendships should end thus, although in this case to have the room empty was something of a comfort, and she tried to console herself with the reflection that one never knows how far other people feel the things they might be supposed to feel.

[]

Chapter VIII

The next few months passed away, as many years can pass away, without definite events, and yet, if suddenly disturbed, it would be seen that such months or years had a character unlike others. The three months which had passed had brought them to the beginning of March. The climate had kept its promise, and the change of season from winter to spring had made very little difference, so that Helen, who was sitting in the drawing-room with a pen in her hand, could keep the windows open though a great fire of logs burnt on one side of her. Below, the sea was still blue and the roofs still brown and white, though the day was fading rapidly. It was dusk in the room, which, large and empty at all times, now appeared larger and emptier than usual. Her own figure, as she sat writing with a pad on her knee, shared the general effect of size and lack of detail, for the flames which ran along the branches, suddenly devouring little green tufts, burnt intermittently and sent irregular illuminations across her face and the plaster walls. There were no pictures on the walls but here and there boughs laden with heavy-petalled flowers spread widely against them. Of the books fallen on the bare floor and heaped upon the large table, it was only possible in this light to trace the outline.

Mrs. Ambrose was writing a very long letter. Beginning “Dear Bernard,” it went on to describe what had been happening in the Villa San Gervasio during the past three months, as, for instance, that they had had the British Consul to dinner, and had been taken over a Spanish man-of-war, and had seen a great many processions and religious festivals, which were so beautiful that Mrs. Ambrose couldn’t conceive why, if people must have a religion, they didn’t all become Roman Catholics. They had made several expeditions though none of any length. It was worth coming if only for the sake of the flowering trees which grew wild quite near the house, and the amazing colours of sea and earth. The earth, instead of being brown, was red, purple, green. “You won’t believe me,” she added, “there is no colour like it in England.” She adopted, indeed, a condescending tone towards that poor island, which was now advancing chilly crocuses and nipped violets in nooks, in copses, in cosy corners, tended by rosy old gardeners in mufflers, who were always touching their hats and bobbing obsequiously. She went on to deride the islanders themselves. Rumours of London all in a ferment over a General Election had reached them even out here. “It seems incredible,” she went on, “that people should care whether Asquith is in or Austen Chamberlain out, and while you scream yourselves hoarse about politics you let the only people who are trying for something good starve or simply laugh at them. When have you ever encouraged a living artist? Or bought his best work? Why are you all so ugly and so servile? Here the servants are human beings. They talk to one as if they were equals. As far as I can tell there are no aristocrats.”

Perhaps it was the mention of aristocrats that reminded her of Richard Dalloway and Rachel, for she ran on with the same penful to describe her niece.

“It’s an odd fate that has put me in charge of a girl,” she wrote, “considering that I have never got on well with women, or had much to do with them. However, I must retract some of the things that I have said against them. If they were properly educated I don’t see why they shouldn’t be much the same as men—as satisfactory I mean; though, of course, very different. The question is, how should one educate them? The present method seems to me abominable. This girl, though twenty-four, had never heard that men desired women, and, until I explained it, did not know how children were born. Her ignorance upon other matters as important” (here Mrs. Ambrose’s letter may not be quoted) … “was complete. It seems to me not merely foolish but criminal to bring people up like that. Let alone the suffering to them, it explains why women are what they are—the wonder is they’re no worse. I have taken it upon myself to enlighten her, and now, though still a good deal prejudiced and liable to exaggerate, she is more or less a reasonable human being. Keeping them ignorant, of course, defeats its own object, and when they begin to understand they take it all much too seriously. My brother-in-law really deserved a catastrophe—which he won’t get. I now pray for a young man to come to my help; some one, I mean, who would talk to her openly, and prove how absurd most of her ideas about life are. Unluckily such men seem almost as rare as the women. The English colony certainly doesn’t provide one; artists, merchants, cultivated people—they are stupid, conventional, and flirtatious….” She ceased, and with her pen in her hand sat looking into the fire, making the logs into caves and mountains, for it had grown too dark to go on writing. Moreover, the house began to stir as the hour of dinner approached; she could hear the plates being chinked in the dining-room next door, and Chailey instructing the Spanish girl where to put things down in vigorous English. The bell rang; she rose, met Ridley and Rachel outside, and they all went in to dinner.

Three months had made but little difference in the appearance either of Ridley or Rachel; yet a keen observer might have thought that the girl was more definite and self-confident in her manner than before. Her skin was brown, her eyes certainly brighter, and she attended to what was said as though she might be going to contradict it. The meal began with the comfortable silence of people who are quite at their ease together. Then Ridley, leaning on his elbow and looking out of the window, observed that it was a lovely night.

“Yes,” said Helen. She added, “The season’s begun,” looking at the lights beneath them. She asked Maria in Spanish whether the hotel was not filling up with visitors. Maria informed her with pride that there would come a time when it was positively difficult to buy eggs—the shopkeepers would not mind what prices they asked; they would get them, at any rate, from the English.

“That’s an English steamer in the bay,” said Rachel, looking at a triangle of lights below. “She came in early this morning.”

“Then we may hope for some letters and send ours back,” said Helen.

For some reason the mention of letters always made Ridley groan, and the rest of the meal passed in a brisk argument between husband and wife as to whether he was or was not wholly ignored by the entire civilised world.

“Considering the last batch,” said Helen, “you deserve beating. You were asked to lecture, you were offered a degree, and some silly woman praised not only your books but your beauty—she said he was what Shelley would have been if Shelley had lived to fifty-five and grown a beard. Really, Ridley, I think you’re the vainest man I know,” she ended, rising from the table, “which I may tell you is saying a good deal.”

Finding her letter lying before the fire she added a few lines to it, and then announced that she was going to take the letters now—Ridley must bring his—and Rachel?

“I hope you’ve written to your Aunts? It’s high time.”

The women put on cloaks and hats, and after inviting Ridley to come with them, which he emphatically refused to do, exclaiming that Rachel he expected to be a fool, but Helen surely knew better, they turned to go. He stood over the fire gazing into the depths of the looking-glass, and compressing his face into the likeness of a commander surveying a field of battle, or a martyr watching the flames lick his toes, rather than that of a secluded Professor.

Helen laid hold of his beard.

“Am I a fool?” she said.

“Let me go, Helen.”

“Am I a fool?” she repeated.

“Vile woman!” he exclaimed, and kissed her.

“We’ll leave you to your vanities,” she called back as they went out of the door.

It was a beautiful evening, still light enough to see a long way down the road, though the stars were coming out. The pillar-box was let into a high yellow wall where the lane met the road, and having dropped the letters into it, Helen was for turning back.

“No, no,” said Rachel, taking her by the wrist. “We’re going to see life. You promised.”

“Seeing life” was the phrase they used for their habit of strolling through the town after dark. The social life of Santa Marina was carried on almost entirely by lamp-light, which the warmth of the nights and the scents culled from flowers made pleasant enough. The young women, with their hair magnificently swept in coils, a red flower behind the ear, sat on the doorsteps, or issued out on to balconies, while the young men ranged up and down beneath, shouting up a greeting from time to time and stopping here and there to enter into amorous talk. At the open windows merchants could be seen making up the day’s account, and older women lifting jars from shelf to shelf. The streets were full of people, men for the most part, who interchanged their views of the world as they walked, or gathered round the wine-tables at the street corner, where an old cripple was twanging his guitar strings, while a poor girl cried her passionate song in the gutter. The two Englishwomen excited some friendly curiosity, but no one molested them.

Helen sauntered on, observing the different people in their shabby clothes, who seemed so careless and so natural, with satisfaction.

“Just think of the Mall to-night!” she exclaimed at length. “It’s the fifteenth of March. Perhaps there’s a Court.” She thought of the crowd waiting in the cold spring air to see the grand carriages go by. “It’s very cold, if it’s not raining,” she said. “First there are men selling picture postcards; then there are wretched little shop-girls with round bandboxes; then there are bank clerks in tail coats; and then—any number of dressmakers. People from South Kensington drive up in a hired fly; officials have a pair of bays; earls, on the other hand, are allowed one footman to stand up behind; dukes have two, royal dukes—so I was told—have three; the king, I suppose, can have as many as he likes. And the people believe in it!”

Out here it seemed as though the people of England must be shaped in the body like the kings and queens, knights and pawns of the chessboard, so strange were their differences, so marked and so implicitly believed in.

They had to part in order to circumvent a crowd.

“They believe in God,” said Rachel as they regained each other. She meant that the people in the crowd believed in Him; for she remembered the crosses with bleeding plaster figures that stood where foot-paths joined, and the inexplicable mystery of a service in a Roman Catholic church.

“We shall never understand!” she sighed.

They had walked some way and it was now night, but they could see a large iron gate a little way farther down the road on their left.

“Do you mean to go right up to the hotel?” Helen asked.

Rachel gave the gate a push; it swung open, and, seeing no one about and judging that nothing was private in this country, they walked straight on. An avenue of trees ran along the road, which was completely straight. The trees suddenly came to an end; the road turned a corner, and they found themselves confronted by a large square building. They had come out upon the broad terrace which ran round the hotel and were only a few feet distant from the windows. A row of long windows opened almost to the ground. They were all of them uncurtained, and all brilliantly lighted, so that they could see everything inside. Each window revealed a different section of the life of the hotel. They drew into one of the broad columns of shadow which separated the windows and gazed in. They found themselves just outside the dining-room. It was being swept; a waiter was eating a bunch of grapes with his leg across the corner of a table. Next door was the kitchen, where they were washing up; white cooks were dipping their arms into cauldrons, while the waiters made their meal voraciously off broken meats, sopping up the gravy with bits of crumb. Moving on, they became lost in a plantation of bushes, and then suddenly found themselves outside the drawing-room, where the ladies and gentlemen, having dined well, lay back in deep arm-chairs, occasionally speaking or turning over the pages of magazines. A thin woman was flourishing up and down the piano.

“What is a dahabeeyah, Charles?” the distinct voice of a widow, seated in an arm-chair by the window, asked her son.

It was the end of the piece, and his answer was lost in the general clearing of throats and tapping of knees.

“They’re all old in this room,” Rachel whispered.

Creeping on, they found that the next window revealed two men in shirt-sleeves playing billiards with two young ladies.

“He pinched my arm!” the plump young woman cried, as she missed her stroke.

“Now you two—no ragging,” the young man with the red face reproved them, who was marking.

“Take care or we shall be seen,” whispered Helen, plucking Rachel by the arm. Incautiously her head had risen to the middle of the window.

Turning the corner they came to the largest room in the hotel, which was supplied with four windows, and was called the Lounge, although it was really a hall. Hung with armour and native embroideries, furnished with divans and screens, which shut off convenient corners, the room was less formal than the others, and was evidently the haunt of youth. Signor Rodriguez, whom they knew to be the manager of the hotel, stood quite near them in the doorway surveying the scene—the gentlemen lounging in chairs, the couples leaning over coffee-cups, the game of cards in the centre under profuse clusters of electric light. He was congratulating himself upon the enterprise which had turned the refectory, a cold stone room with pots on trestles, into the most comfortable room in the house. The hotel was very full, and proved his wisdom in decreeing that no hotel can flourish without a lounge.

The people were scattered about in couples or parties of four, and either they were actually better acquainted, or the informal room made their manners easier. Through the open window came an uneven humming sound like that which rises from a flock of sheep pent within hurdles at dusk. The card-party occupied the centre of the foreground.

Helen and Rachel watched them play for some minutes without being able to distinguish a word. Helen was observing one of the men intently. He was a lean, somewhat cadaverous man of about her own age, whose profile was turned to them, and he was the partner of a highly-coloured girl, obviously English by birth.

Suddenly, in the strange way in which some words detach themselves from the rest, they heard him say quite distinctly:—

“All you want is practice, Miss Warrington; courage and practice—one’s no good without the other.”

“Hughling Elliot! Of course!” Helen exclaimed. She ducked her head immediately, for at the sound of his name he looked up. The game went on for a few minutes, and was then broken up by the approach of a wheeled chair, containing a voluminous old lady who paused by the table and said:—

“Better luck to-night, Susan?”

“All the luck’s on our side,” said a young man who until now had kept his back turned to the window. He appeared to be rather stout, and had a thick crop of hair.

“Luck, Mr. Hewet?” said his partner, a middle-aged lady with spectacles. “I assure you, Mrs. Paley, our success is due solely to our brilliant play.”

“Unless I go to bed early I get practically no sleep at all,” Mrs. Paley was heard to explain, as if to justify her seizure of Susan, who got up and proceeded to wheel the chair to the door.

“They’ll get some one else to take my place,” she said cheerfully. But she was wrong. No attempt was made to find another player, and after the young man had built three stories of a card-house, which fell down, the players strolled off in different directions.

Mr. Hewet turned his full face towards the window. They could see that he had large eyes obscured by glasses; his complexion was rosy; his lips clean-shaven; and, seen among ordinary people, it appeared to be an interesting face. He came straight towards them, but his eyes were fixed not upon the eavesdroppers but upon a spot where the curtain hung in folds.

“Asleep?” he said.

Helen and Rachel started to think that some one had been sitting near to them unobserved all the time. There were legs in the shadow. A melancholy voice issued from above them.

“Two women,” it said.

A scuffling was heard on the gravel. The women had fled. They did not stop running until they felt certain that no eye could penetrate the darkness and the hotel was only a square shadow in the distance, with red holes regularly cut in it.

[]

Chapter IX

An hour passed, and the downstairs rooms at the hotel grew dim and were almost deserted, while the little box-like squares above them were brilliantly irradiated. Some forty or fifty people were going to bed. The thump of jugs set down on the floor above could be heard and the chink of china, for there was not as thick a partition between the rooms as one might wish, so Miss Allan, the elderly lady who had been playing bridge, determined, giving the wall a smart rap with her knuckles. It was only matchboard, she decided, run up to make many little rooms of one large one. Her grey petticoats slipped to the ground, and, stooping, she folded her clothes with neat, if not loving fingers, screwed her hair into a plait, wound her father’s great gold watch, and opened the complete works of Wordsworth. She was reading the “Prelude,” partly because she always read the “Prelude” abroad, and partly because she was engaged in writing a short Primer of English Literature—Beöwulf to Swinburne—which would have a paragraph on Wordsworth. She was deep in the fifth book, stopping indeed to pencil a note, when a pair of boots dropped, one after another, on the floor above her. She looked up and speculated. Whose boots were they, she wondered. She then became aware of a swishing sound next door—a woman, clearly, putting away her dress. It was succeeded by a gentle tapping sound, such as that which accompanies hair-dressing. It was very difficult to keep her attention fixed upon the “Prelude.” Was it Susan Warrington tapping? She forced herself, however, to read to the end of the book, when she placed a mark between the pages, sighed contentedly, and then turned out the light.

Very different was the room through the wall, though as like in shape as one egg-box is like another. As Miss Allan read her book, Susan Warrington was brushing her hair. Ages have consecrated this hour, and the most majestic of all domestic actions, to talk of love between women; but Miss Warrington being alone could not talk; she could only look with extreme solicitude at her own face in the glass. She turned her head from side to side, tossing heavy locks now this way now that; and then withdrew a pace or two, and considered herself seriously.

“I’m nice-looking,” she determined. “Not pretty—possibly,” she drew herself up a little. “Yes—most people would say I was handsome.”

She was really wondering what Arthur Venning would say she was. Her feeling about him was decidedly queer. She would not admit to herself that she was in love with him or that she wanted to marry him, yet she spent every minute when she was alone in wondering what he thought of her, and in comparing what they had done to-day with what they had done the day before.

“He didn’t ask me to play, but he certainly followed me into the hall,” she meditated, summing up the evening. She was thirty years of age, and owing to the number of her sisters and the seclusion of life in a country parsonage had as yet had no proposal of marriage. The hour of confidences was often a sad one, and she had been known to jump into bed, treating her hair unkindly, feeling herself overlooked by life in comparison with others. She was a big, well-made woman, the red lying upon her cheeks in patches that were too well defined, but her serious anxiety gave her a kind of beauty.

She was just about to pull back the bed-clothes when she exclaimed, “Oh, but I’m forgetting,” and went to her writing-table. A brown volume lay there stamped with the figure of the year. She proceeded to write in the square ugly hand of a mature child, as she wrote daily year after year, keeping the diaries, though she seldom looked at them.

“a.m.—Talked to Mrs. H. Elliot about country neighbours. She knows the Manns; also the Selby-Carroways. How small the world is! Like her. Read a chapter of Miss Appleby’s Adventure to Aunt E. p.m.—Played lawn-tennis with Mr. Perrott and Evelyn M. Don’t like Mr. P. Have a feeling that he is not ‘quite,’ though clever certainly. Beat them. Day splendid, view wonderful. One gets used to no trees, though much too bare at first. Cards after dinner. Aunt E. cheerful, though twingy, she says. Mem.: ask about damp sheets.”

She knelt in prayer, and then lay down in bed, tucking the blankets comfortably about her, and in a few minutes her breathing showed that she was asleep. With its profoundly peaceful sighs and hesitations it resembled that of a cow standing up to its knees all night through in the long grass.

A glance into the next room revealed little more than a nose, prominent above the sheets. Growing accustomed to the darkness, for the windows were open and showed grey squares with splinters of starlight, one could distinguish a lean form, terribly like the body of a dead person, the body indeed of William Pepper, asleep too. Thirty-six, thirty-seven, thirty-eight—here were three Portuguese men of business, asleep presumably, since a snore came with the regularity of a great ticking clock. Thirty-nine was a corner room, at the end of the passage, but late though it was—“one” struck gently downstairs—a line of light under the door showed that some one was still awake.

“How late you are, Hugh!” a woman, lying in bed, said in a peevish but solicitous voice. Her husband was brushing his teeth, and for some moments did not answer.

“You should have gone to sleep,” he replied. “I was talking to Thornbury.”

“But you know that I never can sleep when I’m waiting for you,” she said.

To that he made no answer, but only remarked, “Well then, we’ll turn out the light.” They were silent.

The faint but penetrating pulse of an electric bell could now be heard in the corridor. Old Mrs. Paley, having woken hungry but without her spectacles, was summoning her maid to find the biscuit-box. The maid having answered the bell, drearily respectful even at this hour though muffled in a mackintosh, the passage was left in silence. Downstairs all was empty and dark; but on the upper floor a light still burnt in the room where the boots had dropped so heavily above Miss Allan’s head. Here was the gentleman who, a few hours previously, in the shade of the curtain, had seemed to consist entirely of legs. Deep in an arm-chair he was reading the third volume of Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of Rome by candle-light. As he read he knocked the ash automatically, now and again, from his cigarette and turned the page, while a whole procession of splendid sentences entered his capacious brow and went marching through his brain in order. It seemed likely that this process might continue for an hour or more, until the entire regiment had shifted its quarters, had not the door opened, and the young man, who was inclined to be stout, come in with large naked feet.

“Oh, Hirst, what I forgot to say was——”

“Two minutes,” said Hirst, raising his finger.

He safely stowed away the last words of the paragraph.

“What was it you forgot to say?” he asked.

“D’you think you do make enough allowance for feelings?” asked Mr. Hewet. He had again forgotten what he had meant to say.

After intense contemplation of the immaculate Gibbon Mr. Hirst smiled at the question of his friend. He laid aside his book and considered.

“I should call yours a singularly untidy mind,” he observed. “Feelings? Aren’t they just what we do allow for? We put love up there, and all the rest somewhere down below.” With his left hand he indicated the top of a pyramid, and with his right the base.

“But you didn’t get out of bed to tell me that,” he added severely.

“I got out of bed,” said Hewet vaguely, “merely to talk I suppose.”

“Meanwhile I shall undress,” said Hirst. When naked of all but his shirt, and bent over the basin, Mr. Hirst no longer impressed one with the majesty of his intellect, but with the pathos of his young yet ugly body, for he stooped, and he was so thin that there were dark lines between the different bones of his neck and shoulders.

“Women interest me,” said Hewet, who, sitting on the bed with his chin resting on his knees, paid no attention to the undressing of Mr. Hirst.

“They’re so stupid,” said Hirst. “You’re sitting on my pyjamas.”

“I suppose they are stupid?” Hewet wondered.

“There can’t be two opinions about that, I imagine,” said Hirst, hopping briskly across the room, “unless you’re in love—that fat woman Warrington?” he enquired.

“Not one fat woman—all fat women,” Hewet sighed.

“The women I saw to-night were not fat,” said Hirst, who was taking advantage of Hewet’s company to cut his toe-nails.

“Describe them,” said Hewet.

“You know I can’t describe things!” said Hirst. “They were much like other women, I should think. They always are.”

“No; that’s where we differ,” said Hewet. “I say everything’s different. No two people are in the least the same. Take you and me now.”

“So I used to think once,” said Hirst. “But now they’re all types. Don’t take us,—take this hotel. You could draw circles round the whole lot of them, and they’d never stray outside.”

(“You can kill a hen by doing that”), Hewet murmured.

“Mr. Hughling Elliot, Mrs. Hughling Elliot, Miss Allan, Mr. and Mrs. Thornbury—one circle,” Hirst continued. “Miss Warrington, Mr. Arthur Venning, Mr. Perrott, Evelyn M. another circle; then there are a whole lot of natives; finally ourselves.”

“Are we all alone in our circle?” asked Hewet.

“Quite alone,” said Hirst. “You try to get out, but you can’t. You only make a mess of things by trying.”

“I’m not a hen in a circle,” said Hewet. “I’m a dove on a tree-top.”

“I wonder if this is what they call an ingrowing toe-nail?” said Hirst, examining the big toe on his left foot.

“I flit from branch to branch,” continued Hewet. “The world is profoundly pleasant.” He lay back on the bed, upon his arms.

“I wonder if it’s really nice to be as vague as you are?” asked Hirst, looking at him. “It’s the lack of continuity—that’s what’s so odd about you,” he went on. “At the age of twenty-seven, which is nearly thirty, you seem to have drawn no conclusions. A party of old women excites you still as though you were three.”

Hewet contemplated the angular young man who was neatly brushing the rims of his toe-nails into the fireplace in silence for a moment.

“I respect you, Hirst,” he remarked.

“I envy you—some things,” said Hirst. “One: your capacity for not thinking; two: people like you better than they like me. Women like you, I suppose.”

“I wonder whether that isn’t really what matters most?” said Hewet. Lying now flat on the bed he waved his hand in vague circles above him.

“Of course it is,” said Hirst. “But that’s not the difficulty. The difficulty is, isn’t it, to find an appropriate object?”

“There are no female hens in your circle?” asked Hewet.

“Not the ghost of one,” said Hirst.

Although they had known each other for three years Hirst had never yet heard the true story of Hewet’s loves. In general conversation it was taken for granted that they were many, but in private the subject was allowed to lapse. The fact that he had money enough to do no work, and that he had left Cambridge after two terms owing to a difference with the authorities, and had then travelled and drifted, made his life strange at many points where his friends’ lives were much of a piece.

“I don’t see your circles—I don’t see them,” Hewet continued. “I see a thing like a teetotum spinning in and out—knocking into things—dashing from side to side—collecting numbers—more and more and more, till the whole place is thick with them. Round and round they go—out there, over the rim—out of sight.”

His fingers showed that the waltzing teetotums had spun over the edge of the counterpane and fallen off the bed into infinity.

“Could you contemplate three weeks alone in this hotel?” asked Hirst, after a moment’s pause.

Hewet proceeded to think.

“The truth of it is that one never is alone, and one never is in company,” he concluded.

“Meaning?” said Hirst.

“Meaning? Oh, something about bubbles—auras—what d’you call ’em? You can’t see my bubble; I can’t see yours; all we see of each other is a speck, like the wick in the middle of that flame. The flame goes about with us everywhere; it’s not ourselves exactly, but what we feel; the world is short, or people mainly; all kinds of people.”

“A nice streaky bubble yours must be!” said Hirst.

“And supposing my bubble could run into some one else’s bubble——”

“And they both burst?” put in Hirst.

“Then—then—then—” pondered Hewet, as if to himself, “it would be an e—nor—mous world,” he said, stretching his arms to their full width, as though even so they could hardly clasp the billowy universe, for when he was with Hirst he always felt unusually sanguine and vague.

“I don’t think you altogether as foolish as I used to, Hewet,” said Hirst. “You don’t know what you mean but you try to say it.”

“But aren’t you enjoying yourself here?” asked Hewet.

“On the whole—yes,” said Hirst. “I like observing people. I like looking at things. This country is amazingly beautiful. Did you notice how the top of the mountain turned yellow to-night? Really we must take our lunch and spend the day out. You’re getting disgustingly fat.” He pointed at the calf of Hewet’s bare leg.

“We’ll get up an expedition,” said Hewet energetically. “We’ll ask the entire hotel. We’ll hire donkeys and——”

“Oh, Lord!” said Hirst, “do shut it! I can see Miss Warrington and Miss Allan and Mrs. Elliot and the rest squatting on the stones and quacking, ‘How jolly!’”

“We’ll ask Venning and Perrott and Miss Murgatroyd—every one we can lay hands on,” went on Hewet. “What’s the name of the little old grasshopper with the eyeglasses? Pepper?—Pepper shall lead us.”

“Thank God, you’ll never get the donkeys,” said Hirst.

“I must make a note of that,” said Hewet, slowly dropping his feet to the floor. “Hirst escorts Miss Warrington; Pepper advances alone on a white ass; provisions equally distributed—or shall we hire a mule? The matrons—there’s Mrs. Paley, by Jove!—share a carriage.”

“That’s where you’ll go wrong,” said Hirst. “Putting virgins among matrons.”

“How long should you think that an expedition like that would take, Hirst?” asked Hewet.

“From twelve to sixteen hours I should say,” said Hirst. “The time usually occupied by a first confinement.”

“It will need considerable organisation,” said Hewet. He was now padding softly round the room, and stopped to stir the books on the table. They lay heaped one upon another.

“We shall want some poets too,” he remarked. “Not Gibbon; no; d’you happen to have Modern Love or John Donne? You see, I contemplate pauses when people get tired of looking at the view, and then it would be nice to read something rather difficult aloud.”

“Mrs. Paley will enjoy herself,” said Hirst.

“Mrs. Paley will enjoy it certainly,” said Hewet. “It’s one of the saddest things I know—the way elderly ladies cease to read poetry. And yet how appropriate this is:

I speak as one who plumbs

Life’s dim profound,

One who at length can sound

Clear views and certain.

But—after love what comes?

A scene that lours,

A few sad vacant hours,

And then, the Curtain.

I daresay Mrs. Paley is the only one of us who can really understand that.”

“We’ll ask her,” said Hirst. “Please, Hewet, if you must go to bed, draw my curtain. Few things distress me more than the moonlight.”

Hewet retreated, pressing the poems of Thomas Hardy beneath his arm, and in their beds next door to each other both the young men were soon asleep.

Between the extinction of Hewet’s candle and the rising of a dusky Spanish boy who was the first to survey the desolation of the hotel in the early morning, a few hours of silence intervened. One could almost hear a hundred people breathing deeply, and however wakeful and restless it would have been hard to escape sleep in the middle of so much sleep. Looking out of the windows, there was only darkness to be seen. All over the shadowed half of the world people lay prone, and a few flickering lights in empty streets marked the places where their cities were built. Red and yellow omnibuses were crowding each other in Piccadilly; sumptuous women were rocking at a standstill; but here in the darkness an owl flitted from tree to tree, and when the breeze lifted the branches the moon flashed as if it were a torch. Until all people should awake again the houseless animals were abroad, the tigers and the stags, and the elephants coming down in the darkness to drink at pools. The wind at night blowing over the hills and woods was purer and fresher than the wind by day, and the earth, robbed of detail, more mysterious than the earth coloured and divided by roads and fields. For six hours this profound beauty existed, and then as the east grew whiter and whiter the ground swam to the surface, the roads were revealed, the smoke rose and the people stirred, and the sun shone upon the windows of the hotel at Santa Marina until they were uncurtained, and the gong blaring all through the house gave notice of breakfast.

Directly breakfast was over, the ladies as usual circled vaguely, picking up papers and putting them down again, about the hall.

“And what are you going to do to-day?” asked Mrs. Elliot drifting up against Miss Warrington.

Mrs. Elliot, the wife of Hughling the Oxford Don, was a short woman, whose expression was habitually plaintive. Her eyes moved from thing to thing as though they never found anything sufficiently pleasant to rest upon for any length of time.

“I’m going to try to get Aunt Emma out into the town,” said Susan. “She’s not seen a thing yet.”

“I call it so spirited of her at her age,” said Mrs. Elliot, “coming all this way from her own fireside.”

“Yes, we always tell her she’ll die on board ship,” Susan replied. “She was born on one,” she added.

“In the old days,” said Mrs. Elliot, “a great many people were. I always pity the poor women so! We’ve got a lot to complain of!” She shook her head. Her eyes wandered about the table, and she remarked irrelevantly, “The poor little Queen of Holland! Newspaper reporters practically, one may say, at her bedroom door!”

“Were you talking of the Queen of Holland?” said the pleasant voice of Miss Allan, who was searching for the thick pages of The Times among a litter of thin foreign sheets.

“I always envy any one who lives in such an excessively flat country,” she remarked.

“How very strange!” said Mrs. Elliot. “I find a flat country so depressing.”

“I’m afraid you can’t be very happy here then, Miss Allan,” said Susan.

“On the contrary,” said Miss Allan, “I am exceedingly fond of mountains.” Perceiving The Times at some distance, she moved off to secure it.

“Well, I must find my husband,” said Mrs. Elliot, fidgeting away.

“And I must go to my aunt,” said Miss Warrington, and taking up the duties of the day they moved away.

Whether the flimsiness of foreign sheets and the coarseness of their type is any proof of frivolity and ignorance, there is no doubt that English people scarce consider news read there as news, any more than a programme bought from a man in the street inspires confidence in what it says. A very respectable elderly pair, having inspected the long tables of newspapers, did not think it worth their while to read more than the headlines.

“The debate on the fifteenth should have reached us by now,” Mrs. Thornbury murmured. Mr. Thornbury, who was beautifully clean and had red rubbed into his handsome worn face like traces of paint on a weather-beaten wooden figure, looked over his glasses and saw that Miss Allan had The Times.

The couple therefore sat themselves down in arm-chairs and waited.

“Ah, there’s Mr. Hewet,” said Mrs. Thornbury. “Mr. Hewet,” she continued, “do come and sit by us. I was telling my husband how much you reminded me of a dear old friend of mine—Mary Umpleby. She was a most delightful woman, I assure you. She grew roses. We used to stay with her in the old days.”

“No young man likes to have it said that he resembles an elderly spinster,” said Mr. Thornbury.

“On the contrary,” said Mr. Hewet, “I always think it a compliment to remind people of some one else. But Miss Umpleby—why did she grow roses?”

“Ah, poor thing,” said Mrs. Thornbury, “that’s a long story. She had gone through dreadful sorrows. At one time I think she would have lost her senses if it hadn’t been for her garden. The soil was very much against her—a blessing in disguise; she had to be up at dawn—out in all weathers. And then there are creatures that eat roses. But she triumphed. She always did. She was a brave soul.” She sighed deeply but at the same time with resignation.

“I did not realise that I was monopolising the paper,” said Miss Allan, coming up to them.

“We were so anxious to read about the debate,” said Mrs. Thornbury, accepting it on behalf of her husband.

“One doesn’t realise how interesting a debate can be until one has sons in the navy. My interests are equally balanced, though; I have sons in the army too; and one son who makes speeches at the Union—my baby!”

“Hirst would know him, I expect,” said Hewet.

“Mr. Hirst has such an interesting face,” said Mrs. Thornbury. “But I feel one ought to be very clever to talk to him. Well, William?” she enquired, for Mr. Thornbury grunted.

“They’re making a mess of it,” said Mr. Thornbury. He had reached the second column of the report, a spasmodic column, for the Irish members had been brawling three weeks ago at Westminster over a question of naval efficiency. After a disturbed paragraph or two, the column of print once more ran smoothly.

“You have read it?” Mrs. Thornbury asked Miss Allan.

“No, I am ashamed to say I have only read about the discoveries in Crete,” said Miss Allan.

“Oh, but I would give so much to realise the ancient world!” cried Mrs. Thornbury. “Now that we old people are alone,—we’re on our second honeymoon,—I am really going to put myself to school again. After all we are founded on the past, aren’t we, Mr. Hewet? My soldier son says that there is still a great deal to be learnt from Hannibal. One ought to know so much more than one does. Somehow when I read the paper, I begin with the debates first, and, before I’ve done, the door always opens—we’re a very large party at home—and so one never does think enough about the ancients and all they’ve done for us. But you begin at the beginning, Miss Allan.”

“When I think of the Greeks I think of them as naked black men,” said Miss Allan, “which is quite incorrect, I’m sure.”

“And you, Mr. Hirst?” said Mrs. Thornbury, perceiving that the gaunt young man was near. “I’m sure you read everything.”

“I confine myself to cricket and crime,” said Hirst. “The worst of coming from the upper classes,” he continued, “is that one’s friends are never killed in railway accidents.”

Mr. Thornbury threw down the paper, and emphatically dropped his eyeglasses. The sheets fell in the middle of the group, and were eyed by them all.

“It’s not gone well?” asked his wife solicitously.

Hewet picked up one sheet and read, “A lady was walking yesterday in the streets of Westminster when she perceived a cat in the window of a deserted house. The famished animal——”

“I shall be out of it anyway,” Mr. Thornbury interrupted peevishly.

“Cats are often forgotten,” Miss Allan remarked.

“Remember, William, the Prime Minister has reserved his answer,” said Mrs. Thornbury.

“At the age of eighty, Mr. Joshua Harris of Eeles Park, Brondesbury, has had a son,” said Hirst.

“… The famished animal, which had been noticed by workmen for some days, was rescued, but—by Jove! it bit the man’s hand to pieces!”

“Wild with hunger, I suppose,” commented Miss Allan.

“You’re all neglecting the chief advantage of being abroad,” said Mr. Hughling Elliot, who had joined the group. “You might read your news in French, which is equivalent to reading no news at all.”

Mr. Elliot had a profound knowledge of Coptic, which he concealed as far as possible, and quoted French phrases so exquisitely that it was hard to believe that he could also speak the ordinary tongue. He had an immense respect for the French.

“Coming?” he asked the two young men. “We ought to start before it’s really hot.”

“I beg of you not to walk in the heat, Hugh,” his wife pleaded, giving him an angular parcel enclosing half a chicken and some raisins.

“Hewet will be our barometer,” said Mr. Elliot. “He will melt before I shall.”

Indeed, if so much as a drop had melted off his spare ribs, the bones would have lain bare. The ladies were left alone now, surrounding The Times which lay upon the floor. Miss Allan looked at her father’s watch.

“Ten minutes to eleven,” she observed.

“Work?” asked Mrs. Thornbury.

“Work,” replied Miss Allan.

“What a fine creature she is!” murmured Mrs. Thornbury, as the square figure in its manly coat withdrew.

“And I’m sure she has a hard life,” sighed Mrs. Elliot.

“Oh, it is a hard life,” said Mrs. Thornbury. “Unmarried women—earning their livings—it’s the hardest life of all.”

“Yet she seems pretty cheerful,” said Mrs. Elliot.

“It must be very interesting,” said Mrs. Thornbury. “I envy her her knowledge.”

“But that isn’t what women want,” said Mrs. Elliot.

“I’m afraid it’s all a great many can hope to have,” sighed Mrs. Thornbury. “I believe that there are more of us than ever now. Sir Harley Lethbridge was telling me only the other day how difficult it is to find boys for the navy—partly because of their teeth, it is true. And I have heard young women talk quite openly of——”

“Dreadful, dreadful!” exclaimed Mrs. Elliot. “The crown, as one may call it, of a woman’s life. I, who know what it is to be childless——” she sighed and ceased.

“But we must not be hard,” said Mrs. Thornbury. “The conditions are so much changed since I was a young woman.”

“Surely maternity does not change,” said Mrs. Elliot.

“In some ways we can learn a great deal from the young,” said Mrs. Thornbury. “I learn so much from my own daughters.”

“I believe that Hughling really doesn’t mind,” said Mrs. Elliot. “But then he has his work.”

“Women without children can do so much for the children of others,” observed Mrs. Thornbury gently.

“I sketch a great deal,” said Mrs. Elliot, “but that isn’t really an occupation. It’s so disconcerting to find girls just beginning doing better than one does oneself! And nature’s difficult—very difficult!”

“Are there not institutions—clubs—that you could help?” asked Mrs. Thornbury.

“They are so exhausting,” said Mrs. Elliot. “I look strong, because of my colour; but I’m not; the youngest of eleven never is.”

“If the mother is careful before,” said Mrs. Thornbury judicially, “there is no reason why the size of the family should make any difference. And there is no training like the training that brothers and sisters give each other. I am sure of that. I have seen it with my own children. My eldest boy Ralph, for instance——”

But Mrs. Elliot was inattentive to the elder lady’s experience, and her eyes wandered about the hall.

“My mother had two miscarriages, I know,” she said suddenly. “The first because she met one of those great dancing bears—they shouldn’t be allowed; the other—it was a horrid story—our cook had a child and there was a dinner party. So I put my dyspepsia down to that.”

“And a miscarriage is so much worse than a confinement,” Mrs. Thornbury murmured absentmindedly, adjusting her spectacles and picking up The Times. Mrs. Elliot rose and fluttered away.

When she had heard what one of the million voices speaking in the paper had to say, and noticed that a cousin of hers had married a clergyman at Minehead—ignoring the drunken women, the golden animals of Crete, the movements of battalions, the dinners, the reforms, the fires, the indignant, the learned and benevolent, Mrs. Thornbury went upstairs to write a letter for the mail.

The paper lay directly beneath the clock, the two together seeming to represent stability in a changing world. Mr. Perrott passed through; Mr. Venning poised for a second on the edge of a table. Mrs. Paley was wheeled past. Susan followed. Mr. Venning strolled after her. Portuguese military families, their clothes suggesting late rising in untidy bedrooms, trailed across, attended by confidential nurses carrying noisy children. As midday drew on, and the sun beat straight upon the roof, an eddy of great flies droned in a circle; iced drinks were served under the palms; the long blinds were pulled down with a shriek, turning all the light yellow. The clock now had a silent hall to tick in, and an audience of four or five somnolent merchants. By degrees white figures with shady hats came in at the door, admitting a wedge of the hot summer day, and shutting it out again. After resting in the dimness for a minute, they went upstairs. Simultaneously, the clock wheezed one, and the gong sounded, beginning softly, working itself into a frenzy, and ceasing. There was a pause. Then all those who had gone upstairs came down; cripples came, planting both feet on the same step lest they should slip; prim little girls came, holding the nurse’s finger; fat old men came still buttoning waistcoats. The gong had been sounded in the garden, and by degrees recumbent figures rose and strolled in to eat, since the time had come for them to feed again. There were pools and bars of shade in the garden even at midday, where two or three visitors could lie working or talking at their ease.

Owing to the heat of the day, luncheon was generally a silent meal, when people observed their neighbours and took stock of any new faces there might be, hazarding guesses as to who they were and what they did. Mrs. Paley, although well over seventy and crippled in the legs, enjoyed her food and the peculiarities of her fellow-beings. She was seated at a small table with Susan.

“I shouldn’t like to say what she is!” she chuckled, surveying a tall woman dressed conspicuously in white, with paint in the hollows of her cheeks, who was always late, and always attended by a shabby female follower, at which remark Susan blushed, and wondered why her aunt said such things.

Lunch went on methodically, until each of the seven courses was left in fragments and the fruit was merely a toy, to be peeled and sliced as a child destroys a daisy, petal by petal. The food served as an extinguisher upon any faint flame of the human spirit that might survive the midday heat, but Susan sat in her room afterwards, turning over and over the delightful fact that Mr. Venning had come to her in the garden, and had sat there quite half an hour while she read aloud to her aunt. Men and women sought different corners where they could lie unobserved, and from two to four it might be said without exaggeration that the hotel was inhabited by bodies without souls. Disastrous would have been the result if a fire or a death had suddenly demanded something heroic of human nature, but tragedies come in the hungry hours. Towards four o’clock the human spirit again began to lick the body, as a flame licks a black promontory of coal. Mrs. Paley felt it unseemly to open her toothless jaw so widely, though there was no one near, and Mrs. Elliot surveyed her round flushed face anxiously in the looking-glass.

Half an hour later, having removed the traces of sleep, they met each other in the hall, and Mrs. Paley observed that she was going to have her tea.

“You like your tea too, don’t you?” she said, and invited Mrs. Elliot, whose husband was still out, to join her at a special table which she had placed for her under a tree.

“A little silver goes a long way in this country,” she chuckled.

She sent Susan back to fetch another cup.

“They have such excellent biscuits here,” she said, contemplating a plateful. “Not sweet biscuits, which I don’t like—dry biscuits…. Have you been sketching?”

“Oh, I’ve done two or three little daubs,” said Mrs. Elliot, speaking rather louder than usual. “But it’s so difficult after Oxfordshire, where there are so many trees. The light’s so strong here. Some people admire it, I know, but I find it very fatiguing.”

“I really don’t need cooking, Susan,” said Mrs. Paley, when her niece returned. “I must trouble you to move me.”

Everything had to be moved. Finally the old lady was placed so that the light wavered over her, as though she were a fish in a net. Susan poured out tea, and was just remarking that they were having hot weather in Wiltshire too, when Mr. Venning asked whether he might join them.

“It’s so nice to find a young man who doesn’t despise tea,” said Mrs. Paley, regaining her good humour. “One of my nephews the other day asked for a glass of sherry—at five o’clock! I told him he could get it at the public-house round the corner, but not in my drawing-room.”

“I’d rather go without lunch than tea,” said Mr. Venning. “That’s not strictly true. I want both.”

Mr. Venning was a dark young man, about thirty-two years of age, very slapdash and confident in his manner, although at this moment obviously a little excited. His friend Mr. Perrott was a barrister, and as Mr. Perrott refused to go anywhere without Mr. Venning it was necessary, when Mr. Perrott came to Santa Marina about a Company, for Mr. Venning to come too. He was a barrister also, but he loathed a profession which kept him indoors over books, and directly his widowed mother died he was going, so he confided to Susan, to take up flying seriously, and become partner in a large business for making aeroplanes. The talk rambled on. It dealt, of course, with the beauties and singularities of the place, the streets, the people, and the quantities of unowned yellow dogs.

“Don’t you think it dreadfully cruel the way they treat dogs in this country?” asked Mrs. Paley.

“I’d have ’em all shot,” said Mr. Venning.

“Oh, but the darling puppies,” said Susan.

“Jolly little chaps,” said Mr. Venning. “Look here, you’ve got nothing to eat.” A great wedge of cake was handed Susan on the point of a trembling knife. Her hand trembled too as she took it.

“I have such a dear dog at home,” said Mrs. Elliot.

“My parrot can’t bear dogs,” said Mrs. Paley, with the air of one making a confidence. “I always suspect that he (or she) was teased by a dog when I was abroad.”

“You didn’t get far this morning, Miss Warrington,” said Mr. Venning.

“It was hot,” she answered. Their conversation became private, owing to Mrs. Paley’s deafness and the long sad history which Mrs. Elliot had embarked upon of a wire-haired terrier, white with just one black spot, belonging to an uncle of hers, which had committed suicide. “Animals do commit suicide,” she sighed, as if she asserted a painful fact.

“Couldn’t we explore the town this evening?” Mr. Venning suggested.

“My aunt——” Susan began.

“You deserve a holiday,” he said. “You’re always doing things for other people.”

“But that’s my life,” she said, under cover of refilling the teapot.

“That’s no one’s life,” he returned, “no young person’s. You’ll come?”

“I should like to come,” she murmured.

At this moment Mrs. Elliot looked up and exclaimed, “Oh, Hugh! He’s bringing some one,” she added.

“He would like some tea,” said Mrs. Paley. “Susan, run and get some cups—there are the two young men.”

“We’re thirsting for tea,” said Mr. Elliot. “You know Mr. Ambrose, Hilda? We met on the hill.”

“He dragged me in,” said Ridley, “or I should have been ashamed. I’m dusty and dirty and disagreeable.” He pointed to his boots which were white with dust, while a dejected flower drooping in his buttonhole, like an exhausted animal over a gate, added to the effect of length and untidiness. He was introduced to the others. Mr. Hewet and Mr. Hirst brought chairs, and tea began again, Susan pouring cascades of water from pot to pot, always cheerfully, and with the competence of long use.

“My wife’s brother,” Ridley explained to Hilda, whom he failed to remember, “has a house here, which he has lent us. I was sitting on a rock thinking of nothing at all when Elliot started up like a fairy in a pantomime.”

“Our chicken got into the salt,” Hewet said dolefully to Susan. “Nor is it true that bananas include moisture as well as sustenance.”

Hirst was already drinking.

“We’ve been cursing you,” said Ridley in answer to Mrs. Elliot’s kind enquiries about his wife. “You tourists eat up all the eggs, Helen tells me. That’s an eyesore too”—he nodded his head at the hotel. “Disgusting luxury, I call it. We live with pigs in the drawing-room.”

“The food is not at all what it ought to be, considering the price,” said Mrs. Paley seriously. “But unless one goes to a hotel where is one to go to?”

“Stay at home,” said Ridley. “I often wish I had! Every one ought to stay at home. But, of course, they won’t.”

Mrs. Paley conceived a certain grudge against Ridley, who seemed to be criticising her habits after an acquaintance of five minutes.

“I believe in foreign travel myself,” she stated, “if one knows one’s native land, which I think I can honestly say I do. I should not allow any one to travel until they had visited Kent and Dorsetshire—Kent for the hops, and Dorsetshire for its old stone cottages. There is nothing to compare with them here.”

“Yes—I always think that some people like the flat and other people like the downs,” said Mrs. Elliot rather vaguely.

Hirst, who had been eating and drinking without interruption, now lit a cigarette, and observed, “Oh, but we’re all agreed by this time that nature’s a mistake. She’s either very ugly, appallingly uncomfortable, or absolutely terrifying. I don’t know which alarms me most—a cow or a tree. I once met a cow in a field by night. The creature looked at me. I assure you it turned my hair grey. It’s a disgrace that the animals should be allowed to go at large.”

“And what did the cow think of him?” Venning mumbled to Susan, who immediately decided in her own mind that Mr. Hirst was a dreadful young man, and that although he had such an air of being clever he probably wasn’t as clever as Arthur, in the ways that really matter.

“Wasn’t it Wilde who discovered the fact that nature makes no allowance for hip-bones?” enquired Hughling Elliot. He knew by this time exactly what scholarships and distinction Hirst enjoyed, and had formed a very high opinion of his capacities.

But Hirst merely drew his lips together very tightly and made no reply.

Ridley conjectured that it was now permissible for him to take his leave. Politeness required him to thank Mrs. Elliot for his tea, and to add, with a wave of his hand, “You must come up and see us.”

The wave included both Hirst and Hewet, and Hewet answered, “I should like it immensely.”

The party broke up, and Susan, who had never felt so happy in her life, was just about to start for her walk in the town with Arthur, when Mrs. Paley beckoned her back. She could not understand from the book how Double Demon patience is played; and suggested that if they sat down and worked it out together it would fill up the time nicely before dinner.

[]

Chapter X

Among the promises which Mrs. Ambrose had made her niece should she stay was a room cut off from the rest of the house, large, private—a room in which she could play, read, think, defy the world, a fortress as well as a sanctuary. Rooms, she knew, became more like worlds than rooms at the age of twenty-four. Her judgment was correct, and when she shut the door Rachel entered an enchanted place, where the poets sang and things fell into their right proportions. Some days after the vision of the hotel by night she was sitting alone, sunk in an arm-chair, reading a brightly-covered red volume lettered on the back Works of Henrik Ibsen. Music was open on the piano, and books of music rose in two jagged pillars on the floor; but for the moment music was deserted.

Far from looking bored or absent-minded, her eyes were concentrated almost sternly upon the page, and from her breathing, which was slow but repressed, it could be seen that her whole body was constrained by the working of her mind. At last she shut the book sharply, lay back, and drew a deep breath, expressive of the wonder which always marks the transition from the imaginary world to the real world.

“What I want to know,” she said aloud, “is this: What is the truth? What’s the truth of it all?” She was speaking partly as herself, and partly as the heroine of the play she had just read. The landscape outside, because she had seen nothing but print for the space of two hours, now appeared amazingly solid and clear, but although there were men on the hill washing the trunks of olive trees with a white liquid, for the moment she herself was the most vivid thing in it—an heroic statue in the middle of the foreground, dominating the view. Ibsen’s plays always left her in that condition. She acted them for days at a time, greatly to Helen’s amusement; and then it would be Meredith’s turn and she became Diana of the Crossways. But Helen was aware that it was not all acting, and that some sort of change was taking place in the human being. When Rachel became tired of the rigidity of her pose on the back of the chair, she turned round, slid comfortably down into it, and gazed out over the furniture through the window opposite which opened on the garden. (Her mind wandered away from Nora, but she went on thinking of things that the book suggested to her, of women and life.)

During the three months she had been here she had made up considerably, as Helen meant she should, for time spent in interminable walks round sheltered gardens, and the household gossip of her aunts. But Mrs. Ambrose would have been the first to disclaim any influence, or indeed any belief that to influence was within her power. She saw her less shy, and less serious, which was all to the good, and the violent leaps and the interminable mazes which had led to that result were usually not even guessed at by her. Talk was the medicine she trusted to, talk about everything, talk that was free, unguarded, and as candid as a habit of talking with men made natural in her own case. Nor did she encourage those habits of unselfishness and amiability founded upon insincerity which are put at so high a value in mixed households of men and women. She desired that Rachel should think, and for this reason offered books and discouraged too entire a dependence upon Bach and Beethoven and Wagner. But when Mrs. Ambrose would have suggested Defoe, Maupassant, or some spacious chronicle of family life, Rachel chose modern books, books in shiny yellow covers, books with a great deal of gilding on the back, which were tokens in her aunts’ eyes of harsh wrangling and disputes about facts which had no such importance as the moderns claimed for them. But she did not interfere. Rachel read what she chose, reading with the curious literalness of one to whom written sentences are unfamiliar, and handling words as though they were made of wood, separately of great importance, and possessed of shapes like tables or chairs. In this way she came to conclusions, which had to be remodelled according to the adventures of the day, and were indeed recast as liberally as any one could desire, leaving always a small grain of belief behind them.

Ibsen was succeeded by a novel such as Mrs. Ambrose detested, whose purpose was to distribute the guilt of a woman’s downfall upon the right shoulders; a purpose which was achieved, if the reader’s discomfort were any proof of it. She threw the book down, looked out of the window, turned away from the window, and relapsed into an arm-chair.

The morning was hot, and the exercise of reading left her mind contracting and expanding like the mainspring of a clock. The sounds in the garden outside joined with the clock, and the small noises of midday, which one can ascribe to no definite cause, in a regular rhythm. It was all very real, very big, very impersonal, and after a moment or two she began to raise her first finger and to let it fall on the arm of her chair so as to bring back to herself some consciousness of her own existence. She was next overcome by the unspeakable queerness of the fact that she should be sitting in an arm-chair, in the morning, in the middle of the world. Who were the people moving in the house—moving things from one place to another? And life, what was that? It was only a light passing over the surface and vanishing, as in time she would vanish, though the furniture in the room would remain. Her dissolution became so complete that she could not raise her finger any more, and sat perfectly still, listening and looking always at the same spot. It became stranger and stranger. She was overcome with awe that things should exist at all…. She forgot that she had any fingers to raise…. The things that existed were so immense and so desolate…. She continued to be conscious of these vast masses of substance for a long stretch of time, the clock still ticking in the midst of the universal silence.

“Come in,” she said mechanically, for a string in her brain seemed to be pulled by a persistent knocking at the door. With great slowness the door opened and a tall human being came towards her, holding out her arm and saying:

“What am I to say to this?”

The utter absurdity of a woman coming into a room with a piece of paper in her hand amazed Rachel.

“I don’t know what to answer, or who Terence Hewet is,” Helen continued, in the toneless voice of a ghost. She put a paper before Rachel on which were written the incredible words:

Dear Mrs. Ambrose—I am getting up a picnic for next Friday, when we propose to start at eleven-thirty if the weather is fine, and to make the ascent of Monte Rosa. It will take some time, but the view should be magnificent. It would give me great pleasure if you and Miss Vinrace would consent to be of the party.—

Yours sincerely, Terence Hewet.

Rachel read the words aloud to make herself believe in them. For the same reason she put her hand on Helen’s shoulder.

“Books—books—books,” said Helen, in her absent-minded way. “More new books—I wonder what you find in them….”

For the second time Rachel read the letter, but to herself. This time, instead of seeming vague as ghosts, each word was astonishingly prominent; they came out as the tops of mountains come through a mist. Friday—eleven-thirty—Miss Vinrace. The blood began to run in her veins; she felt her eyes brighten.

“We must go,” she said, rather surprising Helen by her decision. “We must certainly go”—such was the relief of finding that things still happened, and indeed they appeared the brighter for the mist surrounding them.

“Monte Rosa—that’s the mountain over there, isn’t it?” said Helen; “but Hewet—who’s he? One of the young men Ridley met, I suppose. Shall I say yes, then? It may be dreadfully dull.”

She took the letter back and went, for the messenger was waiting for her answer.

The party which had been suggested a few nights ago in Mr. Hirst’s bedroom had taken shape and was the source of great satisfaction to Mr. Hewet, who had seldom used his practical abilities, and was pleased to find them equal to the strain. His invitations had been universally accepted, which was the more encouraging as they had been issued against Hirst’s advice to people who were very dull, not at all suited to each other, and sure not to come.

“Undoubtedly,” he said, as he twirled and untwirled a note signed Helen Ambrose, “the gifts needed to make a great commander have been absurdly overrated. About half the intellectual effort which is needed to review a book of modern poetry has enabled me to get together seven or eight people, of opposite sexes, at the same spot at the same hour on the same day. What else is generalship, Hirst? What more did Wellington do on the field of Waterloo? It’s like counting the number of pebbles of a path, tedious but not difficult.”

He was sitting in his bedroom, one leg over the arm of the chair, and Hirst was writing a letter opposite. Hirst was quick to point out that all the difficulties remained.

“For instance, here are two women you’ve never seen. Suppose one of them suffers from mountain-sickness, as my sister does, and the other——”

“Oh, the women are for you,” Hewet interrupted. “I asked them solely for your benefit. What you want, Hirst, you know, is the society of young women of your own age. You don’t know how to get on with women, which is a great defect, considering that half the world consists of women.”

Hirst groaned that he was quite aware of that.

But Hewet’s complacency was a little chilled as he walked with Hirst to the place where a general meeting had been appointed. He wondered why on earth he had asked these people, and what one really expected to get from bunching human beings up together.

“Cows,” he reflected, “draw together in a field; ships in a calm; and we’re just the same when we’ve nothing else to do. But why do we do it?—is it to prevent ourselves from seeing to the bottom of things” (he stopped by a stream and began stirring it with his walking-stick and clouding the water with mud), “making cities and mountains and whole universes out of nothing, or do we really love each other, or do we, on the other hand, live in a state of perpetual uncertainty, knowing nothing, leaping from moment to moment as from world to world?—which is, on the whole, the view I incline to.”

He jumped over the stream; Hirst went round and joined him, remarking that he had long ceased to look for the reason of any human action.

Half a mile further, they came to a group of plane trees and the salmon-pink farmhouse standing by the stream which had been chosen as meeting-place. It was a shady spot, lying conveniently just where the hill sprung out from the flat. Between the thin stems of the plane trees the young men could see little knots of donkeys pasturing, and a tall woman rubbing the nose of one of them, while another woman was kneeling by the stream lapping water out of her palms.

As they entered the shady place, Helen looked up and then held out her hand.

“I must introduce myself,” she said. “I am Mrs. Ambrose.”

Having shaken hands, she said, “That’s my niece.”

Rachel approached awkwardly. She held out her hand, but withdrew it. “It’s all wet,” she said.

Scarcely had they spoken, when the first carriage drew up.

The donkeys were quickly jerked into attention, and the second carriage arrived. By degrees the grove filled with people—the Elliots, the Thornburys, Mr. Venning and Susan, Miss Allan, Evelyn Murgatroyd, and Mr. Perrott. Mr. Hirst acted the part of hoarse energetic sheep-dog. By means of a few words of caustic Latin he had the animals marshalled, and by inclining a sharp shoulder he lifted the ladies. “What Hewet fails to understand,” he remarked, “is that we must break the back of the ascent before midday.” He was assisting a young lady, by name Evelyn Murgatroyd, as he spoke. She rose light as a bubble to her seat. With a feather drooping from a broad-brimmed hat, in white from top to toe, she looked like a gallant lady of the time of Charles the First leading royalist troops into action.

“Ride with me,” she commanded; and, as soon as Hirst had swung himself across a mule, the two started, leading the cavalcade.

“You’re not to call me Miss Murgatroyd. I hate it,” she said. “My name’s Evelyn. What’s yours?”

“St. John,” he said.

“I like that,” said Evelyn. “And what’s your friend’s name?”

“His initials being R. S. T., we call him Monk,” said Hirst.

“Oh, you’re all too clever,” she said. “Which way? Pick me a branch. Let’s canter.”

She gave her donkey a sharp cut with a switch and started forward. The full and romantic career of Evelyn Murgatroyd is best hit off by her own words, “Call me Evelyn and I’ll call you St. John.” She said that on very slight provocation—her surname was enough—but although a great many young men had answered her already with considerable spirit she went on saying it and making choice of none. But her donkey stumbled to a jog-trot, and she had to ride in advance alone, for the path when it began to ascend one of the spines of the hill became narrow and scattered with stones. The cavalcade wound on like a jointed caterpillar, tufted with the white parasols of the ladies, and the panama hats of the gentlemen. At one point where the ground rose sharply, Evelyn M. jumped off, threw her reins to the native boy, and adjured St. John Hirst to dismount too. Their example was followed by those who felt the need of stretching.

“I don’t see any need to get off,” said Miss Allan to Mrs. Elliot just behind her, “considering the difficulty I had in getting on.”

“These little donkeys stand anything, n’est-ce pas?” Mrs. Elliot addressed the guide, who obligingly bowed his head.

“Flowers,” said Helen, stooping to pick the lovely little bright flowers which grew separately here and there. “You pinch their leaves and then they smell,” she said, laying one on Miss Allan’s knee.

“Haven’t we met before?” asked Miss Allan, looking at her.

“I was taking it for granted,” Helen laughed, for in the confusion of meeting they had not been introduced.

“How sensible!” chirped Mrs. Elliot. “That’s just what one would always like—only unfortunately it’s not possible.”

“Not possible?” said Helen. “Everything’s possible. Who knows what mayn’t happen before nightfall?” she continued, mocking the poor lady’s timidity, who depended so implicitly upon one thing following another that the mere glimpse of a world where dinner could be disregarded, or the table moved one inch from its accustomed place, filled her with fears for her own stability.

Higher and higher they went, becoming separated from the world. The world, when they turned to look back, flattened itself out, and was marked with squares of thin green and grey.

“Towns are very small,” Rachel remarked, obscuring the whole of Santa Marina and its suburbs with one hand. The sea filled in all the angles of the coast smoothly, breaking in a white frill, and here and there ships were set firmly in the blue. The sea was stained with purple and green blots, and there was a glittering line upon the rim where it met the sky. The air was very clear and silent save for the sharp noise of grasshoppers and the hum of bees, which sounded loud in the ear as they shot past and vanished. The party halted and sat for a time in a quarry on the hillside.

“Amazingly clear,” exclaimed St. John, identifying one cleft in the land after another.

Evelyn M. sat beside him, propping her chin on her hand. She surveyed the view with a certain look of triumph.

“D’you think Garibaldi was ever up here?” she asked Mr. Hirst. Oh, if she had been his bride! If, instead of a picnic party, this was a party of patriots, and she, red-shirted like the rest, had lain among grim men, flat on the turf, aiming her gun at the white turrets beneath them, screening her eyes to pierce through the smoke! So thinking, her foot stirred restlessly, and she exclaimed:

“I don’t call this life, do you?”

“What do you call life?” said St. John.

“Fighting—revolution,” she said, still gazing at the doomed city. “You only care for books, I know.”

“You’re quite wrong,” said St. John.

“Explain,” she urged, for there were no guns to be aimed at bodies, and she turned to another kind of warfare.

“What do I care for? People,” he said.

“Well, I am surprised!” she exclaimed. “You look so awfully serious. Do let’s be friends and tell each other what we’re like. I hate being cautious, don’t you?”

But St. John was decidedly cautious, as she could see by the sudden constriction of his lips, and had no intention of revealing his soul to a young lady.

“The ass is eating my hat,” he remarked, and stretched out for it instead of answering her. Evelyn blushed very slightly and then turned with some impetuosity upon Mr. Perrott, and when they mounted again it was Mr. Perrott who lifted her to her seat.

“When one has laid the eggs one eats the omelette,” said Hughling Elliot, exquisitely in French, a hint to the rest of them that it was time to ride on again.

The midday sun which Hirst had foretold was beginning to beat down hotly. The higher they got the more of the sky appeared, until the mountain was only a small tent of earth against an enormous blue background. The English fell silent; the natives who walked beside the donkeys broke into queer wavering songs and tossed jokes from one to the other. The way grew very steep, and each rider kept his eyes fixed on the hobbling curved form of the rider and donkey directly in front of him. Rather more strain was being put upon their bodies than is quite legitimate in a party of pleasure, and Hewet overheard one or two slightly grumbling remarks.

“Expeditions in such heat are perhaps a little unwise,” Mrs. Elliot murmured to Miss Allan.

But Miss Allan returned, “I always like to get to the top”; and it was true, although she was a big woman, stiff in the joints, and unused to donkey-riding, but as her holidays were few she made the most of them.

The vivacious white figure rode well in front; she had somehow possessed herself of a leafy branch and wore it round her hat like a garland. They went on for a few minutes in silence.

“The view will be wonderful,” Hewet assured them, turning round in his saddle and smiling encouragement. Rachel caught his eye and smiled too. They struggled on for some time longer, nothing being heard but the clatter of hooves striving on the loose stones. Then they saw that Evelyn was off her ass, and that Mr. Perrott was standing in the attitude of a statesman in Parliament Square, stretching an arm of stone towards the view. A little to the left of them was a low ruined wall, the stump of an Elizabethan watch-tower.

“I couldn’t have stood it much longer,” Mrs. Elliot confided to Mrs. Thornbury, but the excitement of being at the top in another moment and seeing the view prevented any one from answering her. One after another they came out on the flat space on the top and stood overcome with wonder. Before them they beheld an immense space—grey sands running into forest, and forest merging in mountains, and mountains washed by air, the infinite distances of South America. A river ran across the plain, as flat as the land, and appearing quite as stationary. The effect of so much space was at first rather chilling. They felt themselves very small, and for some time no one said anything. Then Evelyn exclaimed, “Splendid!” She took hold of the hand that was next her; it chanced to be Miss Allan’s hand.

“North—South—East—West,” said Miss Allan, jerking her head slightly towards the points of the compass.

Hewet, who had gone a little in front, looked up at his guests as if to justify himself for having brought them. He observed how strangely the people standing in a row with their figures bent slightly forward and their clothes plastered by the wind to the shape of their bodies resembled naked statues. On their pedestal of earth they looked unfamiliar and noble, but in another moment they had broken their rank, and he had to see to the laying out of food. Hirst came to his help, and they handed packets of chicken and bread from one to another.

As St. John gave Helen her packet she looked him full in the face and said:

“Do you remember—two women?”

He looked at her sharply.

“I do,” he answered.

“So you’re the two women!” Hewet exclaimed, looking from Helen to Rachel.

“Your lights tempted us,” said Helen. “We watched you playing cards, but we never knew that we were being watched.”

“It was like a thing in a play,” Rachel added.

“And Hirst couldn’t describe you,” said Hewet.

It was certainly odd to have seen Helen and to find nothing to say about her.

Hughling Elliot put up his eyeglass and grasped the situation.

“I don’t know anything more dreadful,” he said, pulling at the joint of a chicken’s leg, “than being seen when one isn’t conscious of it. One feels sure one has been caught doing something ridiculous—looking at one’s tongue in a hansom, for instance.”

Now the others ceased to look at the view, and drawing together sat down in a circle round the baskets.

“And yet those little looking-glasses in hansoms have a fascination of their own,” said Mrs. Thornbury. “One’s features look so different when one can only see a bit of them.”

“There will soon be very few hansom cabs left,” said Mrs. Elliot. “And four-wheeled cabs—I assure you even at Oxford it’s almost impossible to get a four-wheeled cab.”

“I wonder what happens to the horses,” said Susan.

“Veal pie,” said Arthur.

“It’s high time that horses should become extinct anyhow,” said Hirst. “They’re distressingly ugly, besides being vicious.”

But Susan, who had been brought up to understand that the horse is the noblest of God’s creatures, could not agree, and Venning thought Hirst an unspeakable ass, but was too polite not to continue the conversation.

“When they see us falling out of aeroplanes they get some of their own back, I expect,” he remarked.

“You fly?” said old Mr. Thornbury, putting on his spectacles to look at him.

“I hope to, some day,” said Arthur.

Here flying was discussed at length, and Mrs. Thornbury delivered an opinion which was almost a speech to the effect that it would be quite necessary in time of war, and in England we were terribly behindhand. “If I were a young fellow,” she concluded, “I should certainly qualify.” It was odd to look at the little elderly lady, in her grey coat and skirt, with a sandwich in her hand, her eyes lighting up with zeal as she imagined herself a young man in an aeroplane. For some reason, however, the talk did not run easily after this, and all they said was about drink and salt and the view. Suddenly Miss Allan, who was seated with her back to the ruined wall, put down her sandwich, picked something off her neck, and remarked, “I’m covered with little creatures.” It was true, and the discovery was very welcome. The ants were pouring down a glacier of loose earth heaped between the stones of the ruin—large brown ants with polished bodies. She held out one on the back of her hand for Helen to look at.

“Suppose they sting?” said Helen.

“They will not sting, but they may infest the victuals,” said Miss Allan, and measures were taken at once to divert the ants from their course. At Hewet’s suggestion it was decided to adopt the methods of modern warfare against an invading army. The table-cloth represented the invaded country, and round it they built barricades of baskets, set up the wine bottles in a rampart, made fortifications of bread and dug fosses of salt. When an ant got through it was exposed to a fire of bread-crumbs, until Susan pronounced that that was cruel, and rewarded those brave spirits with spoil in the shape of tongue. Playing this game they lost their stiffness, and even became unusually daring, for Mr. Perrott, who was very shy, said, “Permit me,” and removed an ant from Evelyn’s neck.

“It would be no laughing matter really,” said Mrs. Elliot confidentially to Mrs. Thornbury, “if an ant did get between the vest and the skin.”

The noise grew suddenly more clamorous, for it was discovered that a long line of ants had found their way on to the table-cloth by a back entrance, and if success could be gauged by noise, Hewet had every reason to think his party a success. Nevertheless he became, for no reason at all, profoundly depressed.

“They are not satisfactory; they are ignoble,” he thought, surveying his guests from a little distance, where he was gathering together the plates. He glanced at them all, stooping and swaying and gesticulating round the table-cloth. Amiable and modest, respectable in many ways, lovable even in their contentment and desire to be kind, how mediocre they all were, and capable of what insipid cruelty to one another! There was Mrs. Thornbury, sweet but trivial in her maternal egoism; Mrs. Elliot, perpetually complaining of her lot; her husband a mere pea in a pod; and Susan—she had no self, and counted neither one way nor the other; Venning was as honest and as brutal as a schoolboy; poor old Thornbury merely trod his round like a horse in a mill; and the less one examined into Evelyn’s character the better, he suspected. Yet these were the people with money, and to them rather than to others was given the management of the world. Put among them some one more vital, who cared for life or for beauty, and what an agony, what a waste would they inflict on him if he tried to share with them and not to scourge!

“There’s Hirst,” he concluded, coming to the figure of his friend; with his usual little frown of concentration upon his forehead he was peeling the skin off a banana. “And he’s as ugly as sin.” For the ugliness of St. John Hirst, and the limitations that went with it, he made the rest in some way responsible. It was their fault that he had to live alone. Then he came to Helen, attracted to her by the sound of her laugh. She was laughing at Miss Allan. “You wear combinations in this heat?” she said in a voice which was meant to be private. He liked the look of her immensely, not so much her beauty, but her largeness and simplicity, which made her stand out from the rest like a great stone woman, and he passed on in a gentler mood. His eye fell upon Rachel. She was lying back rather behind the others resting on one elbow; she might have been thinking precisely the same thoughts as Hewet himself. Her eyes were fixed rather sadly but not intently upon the row of people opposite her. Hewet crawled up to her on his knees, with a piece of bread in his hand.

“What are you looking at?” he asked.

She was a little startled, but answered directly, “Human beings.”

[]

Chapter XI

One after another they rose and stretched themselves, and in a few minutes divided more or less into two separate parties. One of these parties was dominated by Hughling Elliot and Mrs. Thornbury, who, having both read the same books and considered the same questions, were now anxious to name the places beneath them and to hang upon them stores of information about navies and armies, political parties, natives and mineral products—all of which combined, they said, to prove that South America was the country of the future.

Evelyn M. listened with her bright blue eyes fixed upon the oracles.

“How it makes one long to be a man!” she exclaimed.

Mr. Perrott answered, surveying the plain, that a country with a future was a very fine thing.

“If I were you,” said Evelyn, turning to him and drawing her glove vehemently through her fingers, “I’d raise a troop and conquer some great territory and make it splendid. You’d want women for that. I’d love to start life from the very beginning as it ought to be—nothing squalid—but great halls and gardens and splendid men and women. But you—you only like Law Courts!”

“And would you really be content without pretty frocks and sweets and all the things young ladies like?” asked Mr. Perrott, concealing a certain amount of pain beneath his ironical manner.

“I’m not a young lady,” Evelyn flashed; she bit her underlip. “Just because I like splendid things you laugh at me. Why are there no men like Garibaldi now?” she demanded.

“Look here,” said Mr. Perrott, “you don’t give me a chance. You think we ought to begin things fresh. Good. But I don’t see precisely—conquer a territory? They’re all conquered already, aren’t they?”

“It’s not any territory in particular,” Evelyn explained. “It’s the idea, don’t you see? We lead such tame lives. And I feel sure you’ve got splendid things in you.”

Hewet saw the scars and hollows in Mr. Perrott’s sagacious face relax pathetically. He could imagine the calculations which even then went on within his mind, as to whether he would be justified in asking a woman to marry him, considering that he made no more than five hundred a year at the Bar, owned no private means, and had an invalid sister to support. Mr. Perrott again knew that he was not “quite,” as Susan stated in her diary; not quite a gentleman she meant, for he was the son of a grocer in Leeds, had started life with a basket on his back, and now, though practically indistinguishable from a born gentleman, showed his origin to keen eyes in an impeccable neatness of dress, lack of freedom in manner, extreme cleanliness of person, and a certain indescribable timidity and precision with his knife and fork which might be the relic of days when meat was rare, and the way of handling it by no means gingerly.

The two parties who were strolling about and losing their unity now came together, and joined each other in a long stare over the yellow and green patches of the heated landscape below. The hot air danced across it, making it impossible to see the roofs of a village on the plain distinctly. Even on the top of the mountain where a breeze played lightly, it was very hot, and the heat, the food, the immense space, and perhaps some less well-defined cause produced a comfortable drowsiness and a sense of happy relaxation in them. They did not say much, but felt no constraint in being silent.

“Suppose we go and see what’s to be seen over there?” said Arthur to Susan, and the pair walked off together, their departure certainly sending some thrill of emotion through the rest.

“An odd lot, aren’t they?” said Arthur. “I thought we should never get ’em all to the top. But I’m glad we came, by Jove! I wouldn’t have missed this for something.”

“I don’t like Mr. Hirst,” said Susan inconsequently. “I suppose he’s very clever, but why should clever people be so—I expect he’s awfully nice, really,” she added, instinctively qualifying what might have seemed an unkind remark.

“Hirst? Oh, he’s one of these learned chaps,” said Arthur indifferently. “He don’t look as if he enjoyed it. You should hear him talking to Elliot. It’s as much as I can do to follow ’em at all…. I was never good at my books.”

With these sentences and the pauses that came between them they reached a little hillock, on the top of which grew several slim trees.

“D’you mind if we sit down here?” said Arthur, looking about him. “It’s jolly in the shade—and the view—” They sat down, and looked straight ahead of them in silence for some time.

“But I do envy those clever chaps sometimes,” Arthur remarked. “I don’t suppose they ever …” He did not finish his sentence.

“I can’t see why you should envy them,” said Susan, with great sincerity.

“Odd things happen to one,” said Arthur. “One goes along smoothly enough, one thing following another, and it’s all very jolly and plain sailing, and you think you know all about it, and suddenly one doesn’t know where one is a bit, and everything seems different from what it used to seem. Now to-day, coming up that path, riding behind you, I seemed to see everything as if—” he paused and plucked a piece of grass up by the roots. He scattered the little lumps of earth which were sticking to the roots—“As if it had a kind of meaning. You’ve made the difference to me,” he jerked out, “I don’t see why I shouldn’t tell you. I’ve felt it ever since I knew you…. It’s because I love you.”

Even while they had been saying commonplace things Susan had been conscious of the excitement of intimacy, which seemed not only to lay bare something in her, but in the trees and the sky, and the progress of his speech which seemed inevitable was positively painful to her, for no human being had ever come so close to her before.

She was struck motionless as his speech went on, and her heart gave great separate leaps at the last words. She sat with her fingers curled round a stone, looking straight in front of her down the mountain over the plain. So then, it had actually happened to her, a proposal of marriage.

Arthur looked round at her; his face was oddly twisted. She was drawing her breath with such difficulty that she could hardly answer.

“You might have known.” He seized her in his arms; again and again and again they clasped each other, murmuring inarticulately.

“Well,” sighed Arthur, sinking back on the ground, “that’s the most wonderful thing that’s ever happened to me.” He looked as if he were trying to put things seen in a dream beside real things.

There was a long silence.

“It’s the most perfect thing in the world,” Susan stated, very gently and with great conviction. It was no longer merely a proposal of marriage, but of marriage with Arthur, with whom she was in love.

In the silence that followed, holding his hand tightly in hers, she prayed to God that she might make him a good wife.

“And what will Mr. Perrott say?” she asked at the end of it.

“Dear old fellow,” said Arthur who, now that the first shock was over, was relaxing into an enormous sense of pleasure and contentment. “We must be very nice to him, Susan.”

He told her how hard Perrott’s life had been, and how absurdly devoted he was to Arthur himself. He went on to tell her about his mother, a widow lady, of strong character. In return Susan sketched the portraits of her own family—Edith in particular, her youngest sister, whom she loved better than any one else, “except you, Arthur…. Arthur,” she continued, “what was it that you first liked me for?”

“It was a buckle you wore one night at sea,” said Arthur, after due consideration. “I remember noticing—it’s an absurd thing to notice!—that you didn’t take peas, because I don’t either.”

From this they went on to compare their more serious tastes, or rather Susan ascertained what Arthur cared about, and professed herself very fond of the same thing. They would live in London, perhaps have a cottage in the country near Susan’s family, for they would find it strange without her at first. Her mind, stunned to begin with, now flew to the various changes that her engagement would make—how delightful it would be to join the ranks of the married women—no longer to hang on to groups of girls much younger than herself—to escape the long solitude of an old maid’s life. Now and then her amazing good fortune overcame her, and she turned to Arthur with an exclamation of love.

They lay in each other’s arms and had no notion that they were observed. Yet two figures suddenly appeared among the trees above them.

“Here’s shade,” began Hewet, when Rachel suddenly stopped dead. They saw a man and woman lying on the ground beneath them, rolling slightly this way and that as the embrace tightened and slackened. The man then sat upright and the woman, who now appeared to be Susan Warrington, lay back upon the ground, with her eyes shut and an absorbed look upon her face, as though she were not altogether conscious. Nor could you tell from her expression whether she was happy, or had suffered something. When Arthur again turned to her, butting her as a lamb butts a ewe, Hewet and Rachel retreated without a word. Hewet felt uncomfortably shy.

“I don’t like that,” said Rachel after a moment.

“I can remember not liking it either,” said Hewet. “I can remember—” but he changed his mind and continued in an ordinary tone of voice, “Well, we may take it for granted that they’re engaged. D’you think he’ll ever fly, or will she put a stop to that?”

But Rachel was still agitated; she could not get away from the sight they had just seen. Instead of answering Hewet she persisted:

“Love’s an odd thing, isn’t it, making one’s heart beat.”

“It’s so enormously important, you see,” Hewet replied. “Their lives are now changed for ever.”

“And it makes one sorry for them too,” Rachel continued, as though she were tracing the course of her feelings. “I don’t know either of them, but I could almost burst into tears. That’s silly, isn’t it?”

“Just because they’re in love,” said Hewet. “Yes,” he added after a moment’s consideration, “there’s something horribly pathetic about it, I agree.”

And now, as they had walked some way from the grove of trees, and had come to a rounded hollow very tempting to the back, they proceeded to sit down, and the impression of the lovers lost some of its force, though a certain intensity of vision, which was probably the result of the sight, remained with them. As a day upon which any emotion has been repressed is different from other days, so this day was now different, merely because they had seen other people at a crisis of their lives.

“A great encampment of tents they might be,” said Hewet, looking in front of him at the mountains. “Isn’t it like a water-colour too—you know the way water-colours dry in ridges all across the paper—I’ve been wondering what they looked like.”

His eyes became dreamy, as though he were matching things, and reminded Rachel in their colour of the green flesh of a snail. She sat beside him looking at the mountains too. When it became painful to look any longer, the great size of the view seeming to enlarge her eyes beyond their natural limit, she looked at the ground; it pleased her to scrutinise this inch of the soil of South America so minutely that she noticed every grain of earth and made it into a world where she was endowed with the supreme power. She bent a blade of grass, and set an insect on the utmost tassel of it, and wondered if the insect realised his strange adventure, and thought how strange it was that she should have bent that tassel rather than any other of the million tassels.

“You’ve never told me your name,” said Hewet suddenly. “Miss Somebody Vinrace…. I like to know people’s Christian names.”

“Rachel,” she replied.

“Rachel,” he repeated. “I have an aunt called Rachel, who put the life of Father Damien into verse. She is a religious fanatic—the result of the way she was brought up, down in Northamptonshire, never seeing a soul. Have you any aunts?”

“I live with them,” said Rachel.

“And I wonder what they’re doing now?” Hewet enquired.

“They are probably buying wool,” Rachel determined. She tried to describe them. “They are small, rather pale women,” she began, “very clean. We live in Richmond. They have an old dog, too, who will only eat the marrow out of bones…. They are always going to church. They tidy their drawers a good deal.” But here she was overcome by the difficulty of describing people.

“It’s impossible to believe that it’s all going on still!” she exclaimed.

The sun was behind them and two long shadows suddenly lay upon the ground in front of them, one waving because it was made by a skirt, and the other stationary, because thrown by a pair of legs in trousers.

“You look very comfortable!” said Helen’s voice above them.

“Hirst,” said Hewet, pointing at the scissor-like shadow; he then rolled round to look up at them.

“There’s room for us all here,” he said.

When Hirst had seated himself comfortably, he said:

“Did you congratulate the young couple?”

It appeared that, coming to the same spot a few minutes after Hewet and Rachel, Helen and Hirst had seen precisely the same thing.

“No, we didn’t congratulate them,” said Hewet. “They seemed very happy.”

“Well,” said Hirst, pursing up his lips, “so long as I needn’t marry either of them——”

“We were very much moved,” said Hewet.

“I thought you would be,” said Hirst. “Which was it, Monk? The thought of the immortal passions, or the thought of new-born males to keep the Roman Catholics out? I assure you,” he said to Helen, “he’s capable of being moved by either.”

Rachel was a good deal stung by his banter, which she felt to be directed equally against them both, but she could think of no repartee.

“Nothing moves Hirst,” Hewet laughed; he did not seem to be stung at all. “Unless it were a transfinite number falling in love with a finite one—I suppose such things do happen, even in mathematics.”

“On the contrary,” said Hirst with a touch of annoyance, “I consider myself a person of very strong passions.” It was clear from the way he spoke that he meant it seriously; he spoke of course for the benefit of the ladies.

“By the way, Hirst,” said Hewet, after a pause, “I have a terrible confession to make. Your book—the poems of Wordsworth, which if you remember I took off your table just as we were starting, and certainly put in my pocket here——”

“Is lost,” Hirst finished for him.

“I consider that there is still a chance,” Hewet urged, slapping himself to right and left, “that I never did take it after all.”

“No,” said Hirst. “It is here.” He pointed to his breast.

“Thank God,” Hewet exclaimed. “I need no longer feel as though I’d murdered a child!”

“I should think you were always losing things,” Helen remarked, looking at him meditatively.

“I don’t lose things,” said Hewet. “I mislay them. That was the reason why Hirst refused to share a cabin with me on the voyage out.”

“You came out together?” Helen enquired.

“I propose that each member of this party now gives a short biographical sketch of himself or herself,” said Hirst, sitting upright. “Miss Vinrace, you come first; begin.”

Rachel stated that she was twenty-four years of age, the daughter of a ship-owner, that she had never been properly educated; played the piano, had no brothers or sisters, and lived at Richmond with aunts, her mother being dead.

“Next,” said Hirst, having taken in these facts; he pointed at Hewet.

“I am the son of an English gentleman. I am twenty-seven,” Hewet began. “My father was a fox-hunting squire. He died when I was ten in the hunting field. I can remember his body coming home, on a shutter I suppose, just as I was going down to tea, and noticing that there was jam for tea, and wondering whether I should be allowed—”

“Yes; but keep to the facts,” Hirst put in.

“I was educated at Winchester and Cambridge, which I had to leave after a time. I have done a good many things since——”

“Profession?”

“None—at least——”

“Tastes?”

“Literary. I’m writing a novel.”

“Brothers and sisters?”

“Three sisters, no brother, and a mother.”

“Is that all we’re to hear about you?” said Helen. She stated that she was very old—forty last October, and her father had been a solicitor in the city who had gone bankrupt, for which reason she had never had much education—they lived in one place after another—but an elder brother used to lend her books.

“If I were to tell you everything——” she stopped and smiled. “It would take too long,” she concluded. “I married when I was thirty, and I have two children. My husband is a scholar. And now—it’s your turn,” she nodded at Hirst.

“You’ve left out a great deal,” he reproved her. “My name is St. John Alaric Hirst,” he began in a jaunty tone of voice. “I’m twenty-four years old. I’m the son of the Reverend Sidney Hirst, vicar of Great Wappyng in Norfolk. Oh, I got scholarships everywhere—Westminster—King’s. I’m now a fellow of King’s. Don’t it sound dreary? Parents both alive (alas). Two brothers and one sister. I’m a very distinguished young man,” he added.

“One of the three, or is it five, most distinguished men in England,” Hewet remarked.

“Quite correct,” said Hirst.

“That’s all very interesting,” said Helen after a pause. “But of course we’ve left out the only questions that matter. For instance, are we Christians?”

“I am not,” “I am not,” both the young men replied.

“I am,” Rachel stated.

“You believe in a personal God?” Hirst demanded, turning round and fixing her with his eyeglasses.

“I believe—I believe,” Rachel stammered, “I believe there are things we don’t know about, and the world might change in a minute and anything appear.”

At this Helen laughed outright. “Nonsense,” she said. “You’re not a Christian. You’ve never thought what you are.—And there are lots of other questions,” she continued, “though perhaps we can’t ask them yet.” Although they had talked so freely they were all uncomfortably conscious that they really knew nothing about each other.

“The important questions,” Hewet pondered, “the really interesting ones. I doubt that one ever does ask them.”

Rachel, who was slow to accept the fact that only a very few things can be said even by people who know each other well, insisted on knowing what he meant.

“Whether we’ve ever been in love?” she enquired. “Is that the kind of question you mean?”

Again Helen laughed at her, benignantly strewing her with handfuls of the long tasselled grass, for she was so brave and so foolish.

“Oh, Rachel,” she cried. “It’s like having a puppy in the house having you with one—a puppy that brings one’s underclothes down into the hall.”

But again the sunny earth in front of them was crossed by fantastic wavering figures, the shadows of men and women.

“There they are!” exclaimed Mrs. Elliot. There was a touch of peevishness in her voice. “And we’ve had such a hunt to find you. Do you know what the time is?”

Mrs. Elliot and Mr. and Mrs. Thornbury now confronted them; Mrs. Elliot was holding out her watch, and playfully tapping it upon the face. Hewet was recalled to the fact that this was a party for which he was responsible, and he immediately led them back to the watch-tower, where they were to have tea before starting home again. A bright crimson scarf fluttered from the top of the wall, which Mr. Perrott and Evelyn were tying to a stone as the others came up. The heat had changed just so far that instead of sitting in the shadow they sat in the sun, which was still hot enough to paint their faces red and yellow, and to colour great sections of the earth beneath them.

“There’s nothing half so nice as tea!” said Mrs. Thornbury, taking her cup.

“Nothing,” said Helen. “Can’t you remember as a child chopping up hay—” she spoke much more quickly than usual, and kept her eye fixed upon Mrs. Thornbury. “and pretending it was tea, and getting scolded by the nurses—why I can’t imagine, except that nurses are such brutes, won’t allow pepper instead of salt though there’s no earthly harm in it. Weren’t your nurses just the same?”

During this speech Susan came into the group, and sat down by Helen’s side. A few minutes later Mr. Venning strolled up from the opposite direction. He was a little flushed, and in the mood to answer hilariously whatever was said to him.

“What have you been doing to that old chap’s grave?” he asked, pointing to the red flag which floated from the top of the stones.

“We have tried to make him forget his misfortune in having died three hundred years ago,” said Mr. Perrott.

“It would be awful—to be dead!” ejaculated Evelyn M.

“To be dead?” said Hewet. “I don’t think it would be awful. It’s quite easy to imagine. When you go to bed to-night fold your hands so—breathe slower and slower—” He lay back with his hands clasped upon his breast, and his eyes shut, “Now,” he murmured in an even, monotonous voice, “I shall never, never, never move again.” His body, lying flat among them, did for a moment suggest death.

“This is a horrible exhibition, Mr. Hewet!” cried Mrs. Thornbury.

“More cake for us!” said Arthur.

“I assure you there’s nothing horrible about it,” said Hewet, sitting up and laying hands upon the cake.

“It’s so natural,” he repeated. “People with children should make them do that exercise every night…. Not that I look forward to being dead.”

“And when you allude to a grave,” said Mr. Thornbury, who spoke almost for the first time, “have you any authority for calling that ruin a grave? I am quite with you in refusing to accept the common interpretation which declares it to be the remains of an Elizabethan watch-tower—any more than I believe that the circular mounds or barrows which we find on the top of our English downs were camps. The antiquaries call everything a camp. I am always asking them, Well then, where do you think our ancestors kept their cattle? Half the camps in England are merely the ancient pound or barton as we call it in my part of the world. The argument that no one would keep his cattle in such exposed and inaccessible spots has no weight at all, if you reflect that in those days a man’s cattle were his capital, his stock-in-trade, his daughter’s dowries. Without cattle he was a serf, another man’s man….” His eyes slowly lost their intensity, and he muttered a few concluding words under his breath, looking curiously old and forlorn.

Hughling Elliot, who might have been expected to engage the old gentleman in argument, was absent at the moment. He now came up holding out a large square of cotton upon which a fine design was printed in pleasant bright colours that made his hand look pale.

“A bargain,” he announced, laying it down on the cloth. “I’ve just bought it from the big man with the ear-rings. Fine, isn’t it? It wouldn’t suit every one, of course, but it’s just the thing—isn’t it, Hilda?—for Mrs. Raymond Parry.”

“Mrs. Raymond Parry!” cried Helen and Mrs. Thornbury at the same moment.

They looked at each other as though a mist hitherto obscuring their faces had been blown away.

“Ah—you have been to those wonderful parties too?” Mrs. Elliot asked with interest.

Mrs. Parry’s drawing-room, though thousands of miles away, behind a vast curve of water on a tiny piece of earth, came before their eyes. They who had had no solidity or anchorage before seemed to be attached to it somehow, and at once grown more substantial. Perhaps they had been in the drawing-room at the same moment; perhaps they had passed each other on the stairs; at any rate they knew some of the same people. They looked one another up and down with new interest. But they could do no more than look at each other, for there was no time to enjoy the fruits of the discovery. The donkeys were advancing, and it was advisable to begin the descent immediately, for the night fell so quickly that it would be dark before they were home again.

Accordingly, remounting in order, they filed off down the hillside. Scraps of talk came floating back from one to another. There were jokes to begin with, and laughter; some walked part of the way, and picked flowers, and sent stones bounding before them.

“Who writes the best Latin verse in your college, Hirst?” Mr. Elliot called back incongruously, and Mr. Hirst returned that he had no idea.

The dusk fell as suddenly as the natives had warned them, the hollows of the mountain on either side filling up with darkness and the path becoming so dim that it was surprising to hear the donkeys’ hooves still striking on hard rock. Silence fell upon one, and then upon another, until they were all silent, their minds spilling out into the deep blue air. The way seemed shorter in the dark than in the day; and soon the lights of the town were seen on the flat far beneath them.

Suddenly some one cried, “Ah!”

In a moment the slow yellow drop rose again from the plain below; it rose, paused, opened like a flower, and fell in a shower of drops.

“Fireworks,” they cried.

Another went up more quickly; and then another; they could almost hear it twist and roar.

“Some Saint’s day, I suppose,” said a voice.

The rush and embrace of the rockets as they soared up into the air seemed like the fiery way in which lovers suddenly rose and united, leaving the crowd gazing up at them with strained white faces. But Susan and Arthur, riding down the hill, never said a word to each other, and kept accurately apart.

Then the fireworks became erratic, and soon they ceased altogether, and the rest of the journey was made almost in darkness, the mountain being a great shadow behind them, and bushes and trees little shadows which threw darkness across the road. Among the plane-trees they separated, bundling into carriages and driving off, without saying good-night, or saying it only in a half-muffled way.

It was so late that there was no time for normal conversation between their arrival at the hotel and their retirement to bed. But Hirst wandered into Hewet’s room, with a collar in his hand.

“Well, Hewet,” he remarked, on the crest of a gigantic yawn, “that was a great success, I consider.” He yawned. “But take care you’re not landed with that young woman…. I don’t really like young women….”

Hewet was too much drugged by hours in the open air to make any reply. In fact every one of the party was sound asleep within ten minutes or so of each other, with the exception of Susan Warrington. She lay for a considerable time looking blankly at the wall opposite, her hands clasped above her heart, and her light burning by her side. All articulate thought had long ago deserted her; her heart seemed to have grown to the size of a sun, and to illuminate her entire body, shedding like the sun a steady tide of warmth.

“I’m happy, I’m happy, I’m happy,” she repeated. “I love every one. I’m happy.”

[]

Chapter XII

When Susan’s engagement had been approved at home, and made public to any one who took an interest in it at the hotel—and by this time the society at the hotel was divided so as to point to invisible chalk-marks such as Mr. Hirst had described, the news was felt to justify some celebration—an expedition? That had been done already. A dance then. The advantage of a dance was that it abolished one of those long evenings which were apt to become tedious and lead to absurdly early hours in spite of bridge.

Two or three people standing under the erect body of the stuffed leopard in the hall very soon had the matter decided. Evelyn slid a pace or two this way and that, and pronounced that the floor was excellent. Signor Rodriguez informed them of an old Spaniard who fiddled at weddings—fiddled so as to make a tortoise waltz; and his daughter, although endowed with eyes as black as coal-scuttles had the same power over the piano. If there were any so sick or so surly as to prefer sedentary occupations on the night in question to spinning and watching others spin, the drawing-room and billiard-room were theirs. Hewet made it his business to conciliate the outsiders as much as possible. To Hirst’s theory of the invisible chalk-marks he would pay no attention whatever. He was treated to a snub or two, but, in reward, found obscure lonely gentlemen delighted to have this opportunity of talking to their kind, and the lady of doubtful character showed every symptom of confiding her case to him in the near future. Indeed it was made quite obvious to him that the two or three hours between dinner and bed contained an amount of unhappiness, which was really pitiable, so many people had not succeeded in making friends.

It was settled that the dance was to be on Friday, one week after the engagement, and at dinner Hewet declared himself satisfied.

“They’re all coming!” he told Hirst. “Pepper!” he called, seeing William Pepper slip past in the wake of the soup with a pamphlet beneath his arm, “We’re counting on you to open the ball.”

“You will certainly put sleep out of the question,” Pepper returned.

“You are to take the floor with Miss Allan,” Hewet continued, consulting a sheet of pencilled notes.

Pepper stopped and began a discourse upon round dances, country dances, morris dances, and quadrilles, all of which are entirely superior to the bastard waltz and spurious polka which have ousted them most unjustly in contemporary popularity—when the waiters gently pushed him on to his table in the corner.

The dining-room at this moment had a certain fantastic resemblance to a farmyard scattered with grain on which bright pigeons kept descending. Almost all the ladies wore dresses which they had not yet displayed, and their hair rose in waves and scrolls so as to appear like carved wood in Gothic churches rather than hair. The dinner was shorter and less formal than usual, even the waiters seeming to be affected with the general excitement. Ten minutes before the clock struck nine the committee made a tour through the ballroom. The hall, when emptied of its furniture, brilliantly lit, adorned with flowers whose scent tinged the air, presented a wonderful appearance of ethereal gaiety.

“It’s like a starlit sky on an absolutely cloudless night,” Hewet murmured, looking about him, at the airy empty room.

“A heavenly floor, anyhow,” Evelyn added, taking a run and sliding two or three feet along.

“What about those curtains?” asked Hirst. The crimson curtains were drawn across the long windows. “It’s a perfect night outside.”

“Yes, but curtains inspire confidence,” Miss Allan decided. “When the ball is in full swing it will be time to draw them. We might even open the windows a little…. If we do it now elderly people will imagine there are draughts.”

Her wisdom had come to be recognised, and held in respect. Meanwhile as they stood talking, the musicians were unwrapping their instruments, and the violin was repeating again and again a note struck upon the piano. Everything was ready to begin.

After a few minutes’ pause, the father, the daughter, and the son-in-law who played the horn flourished with one accord. Like the rats who followed the piper, heads instantly appeared in the doorway. There was another flourish; and then the trio dashed spontaneously into the triumphant swing of the waltz. It was as though the room were instantly flooded with water. After a moment’s hesitation first one couple, then another, leapt into mid-stream, and went round and round in the eddies. The rhythmic swish of the dancers sounded like a swirling pool. By degrees the room grew perceptibly hotter. The smell of kid gloves mingled with the strong scent of flowers. The eddies seemed to circle faster and faster, until the music wrought itself into a crash, ceased, and the circles were smashed into little separate bits. The couples struck off in different directions, leaving a thin row of elderly people stuck fast to the walls, and here and there a piece of trimming or a handkerchief or a flower lay upon the floor. There was a pause, and then the music started again, the eddies whirled, the couples circled round in them, until there was a crash, and the circles were broken up into separate pieces.

When this had happened about five times, Hirst, who leant against a window-frame, like some singular gargoyle, perceived that Helen Ambrose and Rachel stood in the doorway. The crowd was such that they could not move, but he recognised them by a piece of Helen’s shoulder and a glimpse of Rachel’s head turning round. He made his way to them; they greeted him with relief.

“We are suffering the tortures of the damned,” said Helen.

“This is my idea of hell,” said Rachel.

Her eyes were bright and she looked bewildered.

Hewet and Miss Allan, who had been waltzing somewhat laboriously, paused and greeted the new-comers.

“This is nice,” said Hewet. “But where is Mr. Ambrose?”

“Pindar,” said Helen. “May a married woman who was forty in October dance? I can’t stand still.” She seemed to fade into Hewet, and they both dissolved in the crowd.

“We must follow suit,” said Hirst to Rachel, and he took her resolutely by the elbow. Rachel, without being expert, danced well, because of a good ear for rhythm, but Hirst had no taste for music, and a few dancing lessons at Cambridge had only put him into possession of the anatomy of a waltz, without imparting any of its spirit. A single turn proved to them that their methods were incompatible; instead of fitting into each other their bones seemed to jut out in angles making smooth turning an impossibility, and cutting, moreover, into the circular progress of the other dancers.

“Shall we stop?” said Hirst. Rachel gathered from his expression that he was annoyed.

They staggered to seats in the corner, from which they had a view of the room. It was still surging, in waves of blue and yellow, striped by the black evening-clothes of the gentlemen.

“An amazing spectacle,” Hirst remarked. “Do you dance much in London?” They were both breathing fast, and both a little excited, though each was determined not to show any excitement at all.

“Scarcely ever. Do you?”

“My people give a dance every Christmas.”

“This isn’t half a bad floor,” Rachel said. Hirst did not attempt to answer her platitude. He sat quite silent, staring at the dancers. After three minutes the silence became so intolerable to Rachel that she was goaded to advance another commonplace about the beauty of the night. Hirst interrupted her ruthlessly.

“Was that all nonsense what you said the other day about being a Christian and having no education?” he asked.

“It was practically true,” she replied. “But I also play the piano very well,” she said, “better, I expect, than any one in this room. You are the most distinguished man in England, aren’t you?” she asked shyly.

“One of the three,” he corrected.

Helen whirling past here tossed a fan into Rachel’s lap.

“She is very beautiful,” Hirst remarked.

They were again silent. Rachel was wondering whether he thought her also nice-looking; St. John was considering the immense difficulty of talking to girls who had no experience of life. Rachel had obviously never thought or felt or seen anything, and she might be intelligent or she might be just like all the rest. But Hewet’s taunt rankled in his mind—“you don’t know how to get on with women,” and he was determined to profit by this opportunity. Her evening-clothes bestowed on her just that degree of unreality and distinction which made it romantic to speak to her, and stirred a desire to talk, which irritated him because he did not know how to begin. He glanced at her, and she seemed to him very remote and inexplicable, very young and chaste. He drew a sigh, and began.

“About books now. What have you read? Just Shakespeare and the Bible?”

“I haven’t read many classics,” Rachel stated. She was slightly annoyed by his jaunty and rather unnatural manner, while his masculine acquirements induced her to take a very modest view of her own power.

“D’you mean to tell me you’ve reached the age of twenty-four without reading Gibbon?” he demanded.

“Yes, I have,” she answered.

“Mon Dieu!” he exclaimed, throwing out his hands. “You must begin to-morrow. I shall send you my copy. What I want to know is——” he looked at her critically. “You see, the problem is, can one really talk to you? Have you got a mind, or are you like the rest of your sex? You seem to me absurdly young compared with men of your age.”

Rachel looked at him but said nothing.

“About Gibbon,” he continued. “D’you think you’ll be able to appreciate him? He’s the test, of course. It’s awfully difficult to tell about women,” he continued, “how much, I mean, is due to lack of training, and how much is native incapacity. I don’t see myself why you shouldn’t understand—only I suppose you’ve led an absurd life until now—you’ve just walked in a crocodile, I suppose, with your hair down your back.”

The music was again beginning. Hirst’s eye wandered about the room in search of Mrs. Ambrose. With the best will in the world he was conscious that they were not getting on well together.

“I’d like awfully to lend you books,” he said, buttoning his gloves, and rising from his seat. “We shall meet again. I’m going to leave you now.”

He got up and left her.

Rachel looked round. She felt herself surrounded, like a child at a party, by the faces of strangers all hostile to her, with hooked noses and sneering, indifferent eyes. She was by a window, she pushed it open with a jerk, and stepped out into the garden. Her eyes swam with tears of rage.

“Damn that man!” she exclaimed, having acquired some of Helen’s words. “Damn his insolence!”

She stood in the middle of the pale square of light which the window she had opened threw upon the grass. The forms of great black trees rose massively in front of her. She stood still, looking at them, shivering slightly with anger and excitement. She heard the trampling and swinging of the dancers behind her, and the rhythmic sway of the waltz music.

“There are trees,” she said aloud. Would the trees make up for St. John Hirst? She would be a Persian princess far from civilisation, riding her horse upon the mountains alone, and making her women sing to her in the evening, far from all this, from the strife and men and women—a form came out of the shadow; a little red light burnt high up in its blackness.

“Miss Vinrace, is it?” said Hewet, peering at her. “You were dancing with Hirst?”

“He’s made me furious!” she cried vehemently. “No one’s any right to be insolent!”

“Insolent?” Hewet repeated, taking his cigar from his mouth in surprise. “Hirst—insolent?”

“It’s insolent to——” said Rachel, and stopped. She did not know exactly why she had been made so angry. With a great effort she pulled herself together.

“Oh, well,” she added, the vision of Helen and her mockery before her, “I dare say I’m a fool.” She made as though she were going back into the ballroom, but Hewet stopped her.

“Please explain to me,” he said. “I feel sure Hirst didn’t mean to hurt you.”

When Rachel tried to explain, she found it very difficult. She could not say that she found the vision of herself walking in a crocodile with her hair down her back peculiarly unjust and horrible, nor could she explain why Hirst’s assumption of the superiority of his nature and experience had seemed to her not only galling but terrible—as if a gate had clanged in her face. Pacing up and down the terrace beside Hewet she said bitterly:

“It’s no good; we should live separate; we cannot understand each other; we only bring out what’s worst.”

Hewet brushed aside her generalisation as to the natures of the two sexes, for such generalisations bored him and seemed to him generally untrue. But, knowing Hirst, he guessed fairly accurately what had happened, and, though secretly much amused, was determined that Rachel should not store the incident away in her mind to take its place in the view she had of life.

“Now you’ll hate him,” he said, “which is wrong. Poor old Hirst—he can’t help his method. And really, Miss Vinrace, he was doing his best; he was paying you a compliment—he was trying—he was trying——” he could not finish for the laughter that overcame him.

Rachel veered round suddenly and laughed out too. She saw that there was something ridiculous about Hirst, and perhaps about herself.

“It’s his way of making friends, I suppose,” she laughed. “Well—I shall do my part. I shall begin—‘Ugly in body, repulsive in mind as you are, Mr. Hirst——’”

“Hear, hear!” cried Hewet. “That’s the way to treat him. You see, Miss Vinrace, you must make allowances for Hirst. He’s lived all his life in front of a looking-glass, so to speak, in a beautiful panelled room, hung with Japanese prints and lovely old chairs and tables, just one splash of colour, you know, in the right place,—between the windows I think it is,—and there he sits hour after hour with his toes on the fender, talking about philosophy and God and his liver and his heart and the hearts of his friends. They’re all broken. You can’t expect him to be at his best in a ballroom. He wants a cosy, smoky, masculine place, where he can stretch his legs out, and only speak when he’s got something to say. For myself, I find it rather dreary. But I do respect it. They’re all so much in earnest. They do take the serious things very seriously.”

The description of Hirst’s way of life interested Rachel so much that she almost forgot her private grudge against him, and her respect revived.

“They are really very clever then?” she asked.

“Of course they are. So far as brains go I think it’s true what he said the other day; they’re the cleverest people in England. But—you ought to take him in hand,” he added. “There’s a great deal more in him than’s ever been got at. He wants some one to laugh at him…. The idea of Hirst telling you that you’ve had no experiences! Poor old Hirst!”

They had been pacing up and down the terrace while they talked, and now one by one the dark windows were uncurtained by an invisible hand, and panes of light fell regularly at equal intervals upon the grass. They stopped to look in at the drawing-room, and perceived Mr. Pepper writing alone at a table.

“There’s Pepper writing to his aunt,” said Hewet. “She must be a very remarkable old lady, eighty-five he tells me, and he takes her for walking tours in the New Forest…. Pepper!” he cried, rapping on the window. “Go and do your duty. Miss Allan expects you.”

When they came to the windows of the ballroom, the swing of the dancers and the lilt of the music was irresistible.

“Shall we?” said Hewet, and they clasped hands and swept off magnificently into the great swirling pool. Although this was only the second time they had met, the first time they had seen a man and woman kissing each other, and the second time Mr. Hewet had found that a young woman angry is very like a child. So that when they joined hands in the dance they felt more at their ease than is usual.

It was midnight and the dance was now at its height. Servants were peeping in at the windows; the garden was sprinkled with the white shapes of couples sitting out. Mrs. Thornbury and Mrs. Elliot sat side by side under a palm tree, holding fans, handkerchiefs, and brooches deposited in their laps by flushed maidens. Occasionally they exchanged comments.

“Miss Warrington does look happy,” said Mrs. Elliot; they both smiled; they both sighed.

“He has a great deal of character,” said Mrs. Thornbury, alluding to Arthur.

“And character is what one wants,” said Mrs. Elliot. “Now that young man is clever enough,” she added, nodding at Hirst, who came past with Miss Allan on his arm.

“He does not look strong,” said Mrs. Thornbury. “His complexion is not good.—Shall I tear it off?” she asked, for Rachel had stopped, conscious of a long strip trailing behind her.

“I hope you are enjoying yourselves?” Hewet asked the ladies.

“This is a very familiar position for me!” smiled Mrs. Thornbury. “I have brought out five daughters—and they all loved dancing! You love it too, Miss Vinrace?” she asked, looking at Rachel with maternal eyes. “I know I did when I was your age. How I used to beg my mother to let me stay—and now I sympathise with the poor mothers—but I sympathise with the daughters too!”

She smiled sympathetically, and at the same time rather keenly, at Rachel.

“They seem to find a great deal to say to each other,” said Mrs. Elliot, looking significantly at the backs of the couple as they turned away. “Did you notice at the picnic? He was the only person who could make her utter.”

“Her father is a very interesting man,” said Mrs. Thornbury. “He has one of the largest shipping businesses in Hull. He made a very able reply, you remember, to Mr. Asquith at the last election. It is so interesting to find that a man of his experience is a strong Protectionist.”

She would have liked to discuss politics, which interested her more than personalities, but Mrs. Elliot would only talk about the Empire in a less abstract form.

“I hear there are dreadful accounts from England about the rats,” she said. “A sister-in-law, who lives at Norwich, tells me it has been quite unsafe to order poultry. The plague—you see. It attacks the rats, and through them other creatures.”

“And the local authorities are not taking proper steps?” asked Mrs. Thornbury.

“That she does not say. But she describes the attitude of the educated people—who should know better—as callous in the extreme. Of course, my sister-in-law is one of those active modern women, who always takes things up, you know—the kind of woman one admires, though one does not feel, at least I do not feel—but then she has a constitution of iron.”

Mrs. Elliot, brought back to the consideration of her own delicacy, here sighed.

“A very animated face,” said Mrs. Thornbury, looking at Evelyn M. who had stopped near them to pin tight a scarlet flower at her breast. It would not stay, and, with a spirited gesture of impatience, she thrust it into her partner’s button-hole. He was a tall melancholy youth, who received the gift as a knight might receive his lady’s token.

“Very trying to the eyes,” was Mrs. Elliot’s next remark, after watching the yellow whirl in which so few of the whirlers had either name or character for her, for a few minutes. Bursting out of the crowd, Helen approached them, and took a vacant chair.

“May I sit by you?” she said, smiling and breathing fast, “I suppose I ought to be ashamed of myself,” she went on, sitting down, “at my age.”

Her beauty, now that she was flushed and animated, was more expansive than usual, and both the ladies felt the same desire to touch her.

“I am enjoying myself,” she panted. “Movement—isn’t it amazing?”

“I have always heard that nothing comes up to dancing if one is a good dancer,” said Mrs. Thornbury, looking at her with a smile.

Helen swayed slightly as if she sat on wires.

“I could dance for ever!” she said. “They ought to let themselves go more!” she exclaimed. “They ought to leap and swing. Look! How they mince!”

“Have you seen those wonderful Russian dancers?” began Mrs. Elliot. But Helen saw her partner coming and rose as the moon rises. She was half round the room before they took their eyes off her, for they could not help admiring her, although they thought it a little odd that a woman of her age should enjoy dancing.

Directly Helen was left alone for a minute she was joined by St. John Hirst, who had been watching for an opportunity.

“Should you mind sitting out with me?” he asked. “I’m quite incapable of dancing.” He piloted Helen to a corner which was supplied with two arm-chairs, and thus enjoyed the advantage of semi-privacy. They sat down, and for a few minutes Helen was too much under the influence of dancing to speak.

“Astonishing!” she exclaimed at last. “What sort of shape can she think her body is?” This remark was called forth by a lady who came past them, waddling rather than walking, and leaning on the arm of a stout man with globular green eyes set in a fat white face. Some support was necessary, for she was very stout, and so compressed that the upper part of her body hung considerably in advance of her feet, which could only trip in tiny steps, owing to the tightness of the skirt round her ankles. The dress itself consisted of a small piece of shiny yellow satin, adorned here and there indiscriminately with round shields of blue and green beads made to imitate the hues of a peacock’s breast. On the summit of a frothy castle of hair a purple plume stood erect, while her short neck was encircled by a black velvet ribbon knobbed with gems, and golden bracelets were tightly wedged into the flesh of her fat gloved arms. She had the face of an impertinent but jolly little pig, mottled red under a dusting of powder.

St. John could not join in Helen’s laughter.

“It makes me sick,” he declared. “The whole thing makes me sick…. Consider the minds of those people—their feelings. Don’t you agree?”

“I always make a vow never to go to another party of any description,” Helen replied, “and I always break it.”

She leant back in her chair and looked laughingly at the young man. She could see that he was genuinely cross, if at the same time slightly excited.

“However,” he said, resuming his jaunty tone, “I suppose one must just make up one’s mind to it.”

“To what?”

“There never will be more than five people in the world worth talking to.”

Slowly the flush and sparkle in Helen’s face died away, and she looked as quiet and as observant as usual.

“Five people?” she remarked. “I should say there were more than five.”

“You’ve been very fortunate, then,” said Hirst. “Or perhaps I’ve been very unfortunate.” He became silent.

“Should you say I was a difficult kind of person to get on with?” he asked abruptly.

“Most clever people are when they’re young,” Helen replied.

“And of course I am—immensely clever,” said Hirst. “I’m infinitely cleverer than Hewet. It’s quite possible,” he continued in his curiously impersonal manner, “that I’m going to be one of the people who really matter. That’s utterly different from being clever, though one can’t expect one’s family to see it,” he added bitterly.

Helen thought herself justified in asking, “Do you find your family difficult to get on with?”

“Intolerable…. They want me to be a peer and a privy councillor. I’ve come out here partly in order to settle the matter. It’s got to be settled. Either I must go to the bar, or I must stay on in Cambridge. Of course, there are obvious drawbacks to each, but the arguments certainly do seem to me in favour of Cambridge. This kind of thing!” he waved his hand at the crowded ballroom. “Repulsive. I’m conscious of great powers of affection too. I’m not susceptible, of course, in the way Hewet is. I’m very fond of a few people. I think, for example, that there’s something to be said for my mother, though she is in many ways so deplorable…. At Cambridge, of course, I should inevitably become the most important man in the place, but there are other reasons why I dread Cambridge——” he ceased.

“Are you finding me a dreadful bore?” he asked. He changed curiously from a friend confiding in a friend to a conventional young man at a party.

“Not in the least,” said Helen. “I like it very much.”

“You can’t think,” he exclaimed, speaking almost with emotion, “what a difference it makes finding some one to talk to! Directly I saw you I felt you might possibly understand me. I’m very fond of Hewet, but he hasn’t the remotest idea what I’m like. You’re the only woman I’ve ever met who seems to have the faintest conception of what I mean when I say a thing.”

The next dance was beginning; it was the Barcarolle out of Hoffman, which made Helen beat her toe in time to it; but she felt that after such a compliment it was impossible to get up and go, and, besides being amused, she was really flattered, and the honesty of his conceit attracted her. She suspected that he was not happy, and was sufficiently feminine to wish to receive confidences.

“I’m very old,” she sighed.

“The odd thing is that I don’t find you old at all,” he replied. “I feel as though we were exactly the same age. Moreover—” here he hesitated, but took courage from a glance at her face, “I feel as if I could talk quite plainly to you as one does to a man—about the relations between the sexes, about … and …”

In spite of his certainty a slight redness came into his face as he spoke the last two words.

She reassured him at once by the laugh with which she exclaimed, “I should hope so!”

He looked at her with real cordiality, and the lines which were drawn about his nose and lips slackened for the first time.

“Thank God!” he exclaimed. “Now we can behave like civilised human beings.”

Certainly a barrier which usually stands fast had fallen, and it was possible to speak of matters which are generally only alluded to between men and women when doctors are present, or the shadow of death. In five minutes he was telling her the history of his life. It was long, for it was full of extremely elaborate incidents, which led on to a discussion of the principles on which morality is founded, and thus to several very interesting matters, which even in this ballroom had to be discussed in a whisper, lest one of the pouter pigeon ladies or resplendent merchants should overhear them, and proceed to demand that they should leave the place. When they had come to an end, or, to speak more accurately, when Helen intimated by a slight slackening of her attention that they had sat there long enough, Hirst rose, exclaiming, “So there’s no reason whatever for all this mystery!”

“None, except that we are English people,” she answered. She took his arm and they crossed the ballroom, making their way with difficulty between the spinning couples, who were now perceptibly dishevelled, and certainly to a critical eye by no means lovely in their shapes. The excitement of undertaking a friendship and the length of their talk had made them hungry, and they went in search of food to the dining-room, which was now full of people eating at little separate tables. In the doorway they met Rachel, going up to dance again with Arthur Venning. She was flushed and looked very happy, and Helen was struck by the fact that in this mood she was certainly more attractive than the generality of young women. She had never noticed it so clearly before.

“Enjoying yourself?” she asked, as they stopped for a second.

“Miss Vinrace,” Arthur answered for her, “has just made a confession; she’d no idea that dances could be so delightful.”

“Yes!” Rachel exclaimed. “I’ve changed my view of life completely!”

“You don’t say so!” Helen mocked. They passed on.

“That’s typical of Rachel,” she said. “She changes her view of life about every other day. D’you know, I believe you’re just the person I want,” she said, as they sat down, “to help me to complete her education? She’s been brought up practically in a nunnery. Her father’s too absurd. I’ve been doing what I can—but I’m too old, and I’m a woman. Why shouldn’t you talk to her—explain things to her—talk to her, I mean, as you talk to me?”

“I have made one attempt already this evening,” said St. John. “I rather doubt that it was successful. She seems to me so very young and inexperienced. I have promised to lend her Gibbon.”

“It’s not Gibbon exactly,” Helen pondered. “It’s the facts of life, I think—d’you see what I mean? What really goes on, what people feel, although they generally try to hide it? There’s nothing to be frightened of. It’s so much more beautiful than the pretences—always more interesting—always better, I should say, than that kind of thing.”

She nodded her head at a table near them, where two girls and two young men were chaffing each other very loudly, and carrying on an arch insinuating dialogue, sprinkled with endearments, about, it seemed, a pair of stockings or a pair of legs. One of the girls was flirting a fan and pretending to be shocked, and the sight was very unpleasant, partly because it was obvious that the girls were secretly hostile to each other.

“In my old age, however,” Helen sighed, “I’m coming to think that it doesn’t much matter in the long run what one does: people always go their own way—nothing will ever influence them.” She nodded her head at the supper party.

But St. John did not agree. He said that he thought one could really make a great deal of difference by one’s point of view, books and so on, and added that few things at the present time mattered more than the enlightenment of women. He sometimes thought that almost everything was due to education.

In the ballroom, meanwhile, the dancers were being formed into squares for the lancers. Arthur and Rachel, Susan and Hewet, Miss Allan and Hughling Elliot found themselves together.

Miss Allan looked at her watch.

“Half-past one,” she stated. “And I have to despatch Alexander Pope to-morrow.”

“Pope!” snorted Mr. Elliot. “Who reads Pope, I should like to know? And as for reading about him—— No, no, Miss Allan; be persuaded you will benefit the world much more by dancing than by writing.” It was one of Mr. Elliot’s affectations that nothing in the world could compare with the delights of dancing—nothing in the world was so tedious as literature. Thus he sought pathetically enough to ingratiate himself with the young, and to prove to them beyond a doubt that though married to a ninny of a wife, and rather pale and bent and careworn by his weight of learning, he was as much alive as the youngest of them all.

“It’s a question of bread and butter,” said Miss Allan calmly. “However, they seem to expect me.” She took up her position and pointed a square black toe.

“Mr. Hewet, you bow to me.” It was evident at once that Miss Allan was the only one of them who had a thoroughly sound knowledge of the figures of the dance.

After the lancers there was a waltz; after the waltz a polka; and then a terrible thing happened; the music, which had been sounding regularly with five-minute pauses, stopped suddenly. The lady with the great dark eyes began to swathe her violin in silk, and the gentleman placed his horn carefully in its case. They were surrounded by couples imploring them in English, in French, in Spanish, for one more dance, one only; it was still early. But the old man at the piano merely exhibited his watch and shook his head. He turned up the collar of his coat and produced a red silk muffler, which completely dashed his festive appearance. Strange as it seemed, the musicians were pale and heavy-eyed; they looked bored and prosaic, as if the summit of their desire was cold meat and beer, succeeded immediately by bed.

Rachel was one of those who had begged them to continue. When they refused she began turning over the sheets of dance music which lay upon the piano. The pieces were generally bound in coloured covers, with pictures on them of romantic scenes—gondoliers astride on the crescent of the moon, nuns peering through the bars of a convent window, or young women with their hair down pointing a gun at the stars. She remembered that the general effect of the music to which they had danced so gaily was one of passionate regret for dead love and the innocent years of youth; dreadful sorrows had always separated the dancers from their past happiness.

“No wonder they get sick of playing stuff like this,” she remarked, reading a bar or two; “they’re really hymn tunes, played very fast, with bits out of Wagner and Beethoven.”

“Do you play? Would you play? Anything, so long as we can dance to it!” From all sides her gift for playing the piano was insisted upon, and she had to consent. As very soon she had played the only pieces of dance music she could remember, she went on to play an air from a sonata by Mozart.

“But that’s not a dance,” said some one pausing by the piano.

“It is,” she replied, emphatically nodding her head. “Invent the steps.” Sure of her melody she marked the rhythm boldly so as to simplify the way. Helen caught the idea; seized Miss Allan by the arm, and whirled round the room, now curtseying, now spinning round, now tripping this way and that like a child skipping through a meadow.

“This is the dance for people who don’t know how to dance!” she cried. The tune changed to a minuet; St. John hopped with incredible swiftness first on his left leg, then on his right; the tune flowed melodiously; Hewet, swaying his arms and holding out the tails of his coat, swam down the room in imitation of the voluptuous dreamy dance of an Indian maiden dancing before her Rajah. The tune marched; and Miss Allan advanced with skirts extended and bowed profoundly to the engaged pair. Once their feet fell in with the rhythm they showed a complete lack of self-consciousness. From Mozart Rachel passed without stopping to old English hunting songs, carols, and hymn tunes, for, as she had observed, any good tune, with a little management, became a tune one could dance to. By degrees every person in the room was tripping and turning in pairs or alone. Mr. Pepper executed an ingenious pointed step derived from figure-skating, for which he once held some local championship; while Mrs. Thornbury tried to recall an old country dance which she had seen danced by her father’s tenants in Dorsetshire in the old days. As for Mr. and Mrs. Elliot, they gallopaded round and round the room with such impetuosity that the other dancers shivered at their approach. Some people were heard to criticise the performance as a romp; to others it was the most enjoyable part of the evening.

“Now for the great round dance!” Hewet shouted. Instantly a gigantic circle was formed, the dancers holding hands and shouting out, “D’you ken John Peel,” as they swung faster and faster and faster, until the strain was too great, and one link of the chain—Mrs. Thornbury—gave way, and the rest went flying across the room in all directions, to land upon the floor or the chairs or in each other’s arms as seemed most convenient.

Rising from these positions, breathless and unkempt, it struck them for the first time that the electric lights pricked the air very vainly, and instinctively a great many eyes turned to the windows. Yes—there was the dawn. While they had been dancing the night had passed, and it had come. Outside, the mountains showed very pure and remote; the dew was sparkling on the grass, and the sky was flushed with blue, save for the pale yellows and pinks in the East. The dancers came crowding to the windows, pushed them open, and here and there ventured a foot upon the grass.

“How silly the poor old lights look!” said Evelyn M. in a curiously subdued tone of voice. “And ourselves; it isn’t becoming.” It was true; the untidy hair, and the green and yellow gems, which had seemed so festive half an hour ago, now looked cheap and slovenly. The complexions of the elder ladies suffered terribly, and, as if conscious that a cold eye had been turned upon them, they began to say good-night and to make their way up to bed.

Rachel, though robbed of her audience, had gone on playing to herself. From John Peel she passed to Bach, who was at this time the subject of her intense enthusiasm, and one by one some of the younger dancers came in from the garden and sat upon the deserted gilt chairs round the piano, the room being now so clear that they turned out the lights. As they sat and listened, their nerves were quieted; the heat and soreness of their lips, the result of incessant talking and laughing, was smoothed away. They sat very still as if they saw a building with spaces and columns succeeding each other rising in the empty space. Then they began to see themselves and their lives, and the whole of human life advancing very nobly under the direction of the music. They felt themselves ennobled, and when Rachel stopped playing they desired nothing but sleep.

Susan rose. “I think this has been the happiest night of my life!” she exclaimed. “I do adore music,” she said, as she thanked Rachel. “It just seems to say all the things one can’t say oneself.” She gave a nervous little laugh and looked from one to another with great benignity, as though she would like to say something but could not find the words in which to express it. “Every one’s been so kind—so very kind,” she said. Then she too went to bed.

The party having ended in the very abrupt way in which parties do end, Helen and Rachel stood by the door with their cloaks on, looking for a carriage.

“I suppose you realise that there are no carriages left?” said St. John, who had been out to look. “You must sleep here.”

“Oh, no,” said Helen; “we shall walk.”

“May we come too?” Hewet asked. “We can’t go to bed. Imagine lying among bolsters and looking at one’s washstand on a morning like this—Is that where you live?”

They had begun to walk down the avenue, and he turned and pointed at the white and green villa on the hillside, which seemed to have its eyes shut.

“That’s not a light burning, is it?” Helen asked anxiously.

“It’s the sun,” said St. John. The upper windows had each a spot of gold on them.

“I was afraid it was my husband, still reading Greek,” she said. “All this time he’s been editing Pindar.”

They passed through the town and turned up the steep road, which was perfectly clear, though still unbordered by shadows. Partly because they were tired, and partly because the early light subdued them, they scarcely spoke, but breathed in the delicious fresh air, which seemed to belong to a different state of life from the air at midday. When they came to the high yellow wall, where the lane turned off from the road, Helen was for dismissing the two young men.

“You’ve come far enough,” she said. “Go back to bed.”

But they seemed unwilling to move.

“Let’s sit down a moment,” said Hewet. He spread his coat on the ground. “Let’s sit down and consider.” They sat down and looked out over the bay; it was very still, the sea was rippling faintly, and lines of green and blue were beginning to stripe it. There were no sailing boats as yet, but a steamer was anchored in the bay, looking very ghostly in the mist; it gave one unearthly cry, and then all was silent.

Rachel occupied herself in collecting one grey stone after another and building them into a little cairn; she did it very quietly and carefully.

“And so you’ve changed your view of life, Rachel?” said Helen.

Rachel added another stone and yawned. “I don’t remember,” she said, “I feel like a fish at the bottom of the sea.” She yawned again. None of these people possessed any power to frighten her out here in the dawn, and she felt perfectly familiar even with Mr. Hirst.

“My brain, on the contrary,” said Hirst, “is in a condition of abnormal activity.” He sat in his favourite position with his arms binding his legs together and his chin resting on the top of his knees. “I see through everything—absolutely everything. Life has no more mysteries for me.” He spoke with conviction, but did not appear to wish for an answer. Near though they sat, and familiar though they felt, they seemed mere shadows to each other.

“And all those people down there going to sleep,” Hewet began dreamily, “thinking such different things,—Miss Warrington, I suppose, is now on her knees; the Elliots are a little startled, it’s not often they get out of breath, and they want to get to sleep as quickly as possible; then there’s the poor lean young man who danced all night with Evelyn; he’s putting his flower in water and asking himself, ‘Is this love?’—and poor old Perrott, I daresay, can’t get to sleep at all, and is reading his favourite Greek book to console himself—and the others—no, Hirst,” he wound up, “I don’t find it simple at all.”

“I have a key,” said Hirst cryptically. His chin was still upon his knees and his eyes fixed in front of him.

A silence followed. Then Helen rose and bade them good-night. “But,” she said, “remember that you’ve got to come and see us.”

They waved good-night and parted, but the two young men did not go back to the hotel; they went for a walk, during which they scarcely spoke, and never mentioned the names of the two women, who were, to a considerable extent, the subject of their thoughts. They did not wish to share their impressions. They returned to the hotel in time for breakfast.

[]

Chapter XIII

There were many rooms in the villa, but one room which possessed a character of its own because the door was always shut, and no sound of music or laughter issued from it. Every one in the house was vaguely conscious that something went on behind that door, and without in the least knowing what it was, were influenced in their own thoughts by the knowledge that if they passed it the door would be shut, and if they made a noise Mr. Ambrose inside would be disturbed. Certain acts therefore possessed merit, and others were bad, so that life became more harmonious and less disconnected than it would have been had Mr. Ambrose given up editing Pindar, and taken to a nomad existence, in and out of every room in the house. As it was, every one was conscious that by observing certain rules, such as punctuality and quiet, by cooking well, and performing other small duties, one ode after another was satisfactorily restored to the world, and they shared the continuity of the scholar’s life. Unfortunately, as age puts one barrier between human beings, and learning another, and sex a third, Mr. Ambrose in his study was some thousand miles distant from the nearest human being, who in this household was inevitably a woman. He sat hour after hour among white-leaved books, alone like an idol in an empty church, still except for the passage of his hand from one side of the sheet to another, silent save for an occasional choke, which drove him to extend his pipe a moment in the air. As he worked his way further and further into the heart of the poet, his chair became more and more deeply encircled by books, which lay open on the floor, and could only be crossed by a careful process of stepping, so delicate that his visitors generally stopped and addressed him from the outskirts.

On the morning after the dance, however, Rachel came into her uncle’s room and hailed him twice, “Uncle Ridley,” before he paid her any attention.

At length he looked over his spectacles.

“Well?” he asked.

“I want a book,” she replied. “Gibbon’s History of the Roman Empire. May I have it?”

She watched the lines on her uncle’s face gradually rearrange themselves at her question. It had been smooth as a mask before she spoke.

“Please say that again,” said her uncle, either because he had not heard or because he had not understood.

She repeated the same words and reddened slightly as she did so.

“Gibbon! What on earth d’you want him for?” he enquired.

“Somebody advised me to read it,” Rachel stammered.

“But I don’t travel about with a miscellaneous collection of eighteenth-century historians!” her uncle exclaimed. “Gibbon! Ten big volumes at least.”

Rachel said that she was sorry to interrupt, and was turning to go.

“Stop!” cried her uncle. He put down his pipe, placed his book on one side, and rose and led her slowly round the room, holding her by the arm. “Plato,” he said, laying one finger on the first of a row of small dark books, “and Jorrocks next door, which is wrong. Sophocles, Swift. You don’t care for German commentators, I presume. French, then. You read French? You should read Balzac. Then we come to Wordsworth and Coleridge. Pope, Johnson, Addison, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats. One thing leads to another. Why is Marlowe here? Mrs. Chailey, I presume. But what’s the use of reading if you don’t read Greek? After all, if you read Greek, you need never read anything else, pure waste of time—pure waste of time,” thus speaking half to himself, with quick movements of his hands; they had come round again to the circle of books on the floor, and their progress was stopped.

“Well,” he demanded, “which shall it be?”

“Balzac,” said Rachel, “or have you the Speech on the American Revolution, Uncle Ridley?”

“The Speech on the American Revolution?” he asked. He looked at her very keenly again. “Another young man at the dance?”

“No. That was Mr. Dalloway,” she confessed.

“Good Lord!” he flung back his head in recollection of Mr. Dalloway.

She chose for herself a volume at random, submitted it to her uncle, who, seeing that it was La Cousine Bette, bade her throw it away if she found it too horrible, and was about to leave him when he demanded whether she had enjoyed her dance?

He then wanted to know what people did at dances, seeing that he had only been to one thirty-five years ago, when nothing had seemed to him more meaningless and idiotic. Did they enjoy turning round and round to the screech of a fiddle? Did they talk, and say pretty things, and if so, why didn’t they do it, under reasonable conditions? As for himself—he sighed, and pointed at the signs of industry lying all about him, which, in spite of his sigh, filled his face with such satisfaction that his niece thought good to leave. On bestowing a kiss she was allowed to go, but not until she had bound herself to learn at any rate the Greek alphabet, and to return her French novel when done with, upon which something more suitable would be found for her.

As the rooms in which people live are apt to give off something of the same shock as their faces when seen for the first time, Rachel walked very slowly downstairs, lost in wonder at her uncle, and his books, and his neglect of dances, and his queer, utterly inexplicable, but apparently satisfactory view of life, when her eye was caught by a note with her name on it lying in the hall. The address was written in a small strong hand unknown to her, and the note, which had no beginning, ran:—

I send the first volume of Gibbon as I promised. Personally I find little to be said for the moderns, but I’m going to send you Wedekind when I’ve done him. Donne? Have you read Webster and all that set? I envy you reading them for the first time. Completely exhausted after last night. And you?

The flourish of initials which she took to be St. J. A. H., wound up the letter. She was very much flattered that Mr. Hirst should have remembered her, and fulfilled his promise so quickly.

There was still an hour to luncheon, and with Gibbon in one hand, and Balzac in the other she strolled out of the gate and down the little path of beaten mud between the olive trees on the slope of the hill. It was too hot for climbing hills, but along the valley there were trees and a grass path running by the river bed. In this land where the population was centred in the towns it was possible to lose sight of civilisation in a very short time, passing only an occasional farmhouse, where the women were handling red roots in the courtyard; or a little boy lying on his elbows on the hillside surrounded by a flock of black strong-smelling goats. Save for a thread of water at the bottom, the river was merely a deep channel of dry yellow stones. On the bank grew those trees which Helen had said it was worth the voyage out merely to see. April had burst their buds, and they bore large blossoms among their glossy green leaves with petals of a thick wax-like substance coloured an exquisite cream or pink or deep crimson. But filled with one of those unreasonable exultations which start generally from an unknown cause, and sweep whole countries and skies into their embrace, she walked without seeing. The night was encroaching upon the day. Her ears hummed with the tunes she had played the night before; she sang, and the singing made her walk faster and faster. She did not see distinctly where she was going, the trees and the landscape appearing only as masses of green and blue, with an occasional space of differently coloured sky. Faces of people she had seen last night came before her; she heard their voices; she stopped singing, and began saying things over again or saying things differently, or inventing things that might have been said. The constraint of being among strangers in a long silk dress made it unusually exciting to stride thus alone. Hewet, Hirst, Mr. Venning, Miss Allan, the music, the light, the dark trees in the garden, the dawn,—as she walked they went surging round in her head, a tumultuous background from which the present moment, with its opportunity for doing exactly as she liked, sprung more wonderfully vivid even than the night before.

So she might have walked until she had lost all knowledge of her way, had it not been for the interruption of a tree, which, although it did not grow across her path, stopped her as effectively as if the branches had struck her in the face. It was an ordinary tree, but to her it appeared so strange that it might have been the only tree in the world. Dark was the trunk in the middle, and the branches sprang here and there, leaving jagged intervals of light between them as distinctly as if it had but that second risen from the ground. Having seen a sight that would last her for a lifetime, and for a lifetime would preserve that second, the tree once more sank into the ordinary ranks of trees, and she was able to seat herself in its shade and to pick the red flowers with the thin green leaves which were growing beneath it. She laid them side by side, flower to flower and stalk to stalk, caressing them for walking alone. Flowers and even pebbles in the earth had their own life and disposition, and brought back the feelings of a child to whom they were companions. Looking up, her eye was caught by the line of the mountains flying out energetically across the sky like the lash of a curling whip. She looked at the pale distant sky, and the high bare places on the mountain-tops lying exposed to the sun. When she sat down she had dropped her books on to the earth at her feet, and now she looked down on them lying there, so square in the grass, a tall stem bending over and tickling the smooth brown cover of Gibbon, while the mottled blue Balzac lay naked in the sun. With a feeling that to open and read would certainly be a surprising experience, she turned the historian’s page and read that—

His generals, in the early part of his reign, attempted the reduction of Aethiopia and Arabia Felix. They marched near a thousand miles to the south of the tropic; but the heat of the climate soon repelled the invaders and protected the unwarlike natives of those sequestered regions…. The northern countries of Europe scarcely deserved the expense and labour of conquest. The forests and morasses of Germany were filled with a hardy race of barbarians, who despised life when it was separated from freedom.

Never had any words been so vivid and so beautiful—Arabia Felix—Aethiopia. But those were not more noble than the others, hardy barbarians, forests, and morasses. They seemed to drive roads back to the very beginning of the world, on either side of which the populations of all times and countries stood in avenues, and by passing down them all knowledge would be hers, and the book of the world turned back to the very first page. Such was her excitement at the possibilities of knowledge now opening before her that she ceased to read, and a breeze turning the page, the covers of Gibbon gently ruffled and closed together. She then rose again and walked on. Slowly her mind became less confused and sought the origins of her exaltation, which were twofold and could be limited by an effort to the persons of Mr. Hirst and Mr. Hewet. Any clear analysis of them was impossible owing to the haze of wonder in which they were enveloped. She could not reason about them as about people whose feelings went by the same rule as her own did, and her mind dwelt on them with a kind of physical pleasure such as is caused by the contemplation of bright things hanging in the sun. From them all life seemed to radiate; the very words of books were steeped in radiance. She then became haunted by a suspicion which she was so reluctant to face that she welcomed a trip and stumble over the grass because thus her attention was dispersed, but in a second it had collected itself again. Unconsciously she had been walking faster and faster, her body trying to outrun her mind; but she was now on the summit of a little hillock of earth which rose above the river and displayed the valley. She was no longer able to juggle with several ideas, but must deal with the most persistent, and a kind of melancholy replaced her excitement. She sank down on to the earth, clasping her knees together, and looking blankly in front of her. For some time she observed a great yellow butterfly, which was opening and closing its wings very slowly on a little flat stone.

“What is it to be in love?” she demanded, after a long silence; each word as it came into being seemed to shove itself out into an unknown sea. Hypnotised by the wings of the butterfly, and awed by the discovery of a terrible possibility in life, she sat for some time longer. When the butterfly flew away, she rose, and with her two books beneath her arm returned home again, much as a soldier prepared for battle.

[]

Chapter XIV

The sun of that same day going down, dusk was saluted as usual at the hotel by an instantaneous sparkle of electric lights. The hours between dinner and bedtime were always difficult enough to kill, and the night after the dance they were further tarnished by the peevishness of dissipation. Certainly, in the opinion of Hirst and Hewet, who lay back in long arm-chairs in the middle of the hall, with their coffee-cups beside them, and their cigarettes in their hands, the evening was unusually dull, the women unusually badly dressed, the men unusually fatuous. Moreover, when the mail had been distributed half an hour ago there were no letters for either of the two young men. As every other person, practically, had received two or three plump letters from England, which they were now engaged in reading, this seemed hard, and prompted Hirst to make the caustic remark that the animals had been fed. Their silence, he said, reminded him of the silence in the lion-house when each beast holds a lump of raw meat in its paws. He went on, stimulated by this comparison, to liken some to hippopotamuses, some to canary birds, some to swine, some to parrots, and some to loathsome reptiles curled round the half-decayed bodies of sheep. The intermittent sounds—now a cough, now a horrible wheezing or throat-clearing, now a little patter of conversation—were just, he declared, what you hear if you stand in the lion-house when the bones are being mauled. But these comparisons did not rouse Hewet, who, after a careless glance round the room, fixed his eyes upon a thicket of native spears which were so ingeniously arranged as to run their points at you whichever way you approached them. He was clearly oblivious of his surroundings; whereupon Hirst, perceiving that Hewet’s mind was a complete blank, fixed his attention more closely upon his fellow-creatures. He was too far from them, however, to hear what they were saying, but it pleased him to construct little theories about them from their gestures and appearance.

Mrs. Thornbury had received a great many letters. She was completely engrossed in them. When she had finished a page she handed it to her husband, or gave him the sense of what she was reading in a series of short quotations linked together by a sound at the back of her throat. “Evie writes that George has gone to Glasgow. ‘He finds Mr. Chadbourne so nice to work with, and we hope to spend Christmas together, but I should not like to move Betty and Alfred any great distance (no, quite right), though it is difficult to imagine cold weather in this heat…. Eleanor and Roger drove over in the new trap…. Eleanor certainly looked more like herself than I’ve seen her since the winter. She has put Baby on three bottles now, which I’m sure is wise (I’m sure it is too), and so gets better nights…. My hair still falls out. I find it on the pillow! But I am cheered by hearing from Tottie Hall Green…. Muriel is in Torquay enjoying herself greatly at dances. She is going to show her black pug after all.’ … A line from Herbert—so busy, poor fellow! Ah! Margaret says, ‘Poor old Mrs. Fairbank died on the eighth, quite suddenly in the conservatory, only a maid in the house, who hadn’t the presence of mind to lift her up, which they think might have saved her, but the doctor says it might have come at any moment, and one can only feel thankful that it was in her house and not in the street (I should think so!). The pigeons have increased terribly, just as the rabbits did five years ago …’” While she read her husband kept nodding his head very slightly, but very steadily in sign of approval.

Near by, Miss Allan was reading her letters too. They were not altogether pleasant, as could be seen from the slight rigidity which came over her large fine face as she finished reading them and replaced them neatly in their envelopes. The lines of care and responsibility on her face made her resemble an elderly man rather than a woman. The letters brought her news of the failure of last year’s fruit crop in New Zealand, which was a serious matter, for Hubert, her only brother, made his living on a fruit farm, and if it failed again, of course, he would throw up his place, come back to England, and what were they to do with him this time? The journey out here, which meant the loss of a term’s work, became an extravagance and not the just and wonderful holiday due to her after fifteen years of punctual lecturing and correcting essays upon English literature. Emily, her sister, who was a teacher also, wrote: “We ought to be prepared, though I have no doubt Hubert will be more reasonable this time.” And then went on in her sensible way to say that she was enjoying a very jolly time in the Lakes. “They are looking exceedingly pretty just now. I have seldom seen the trees so forward at this time of year. We have taken our lunch out several days. Old Alice is as young as ever, and asks after every one affectionately. The days pass very quickly, and term will soon be here. Political prospects not good, I think privately, but do not like to damp Ellen’s enthusiasm. Lloyd George has taken the Bill up, but so have many before now, and we are where we are; but trust to find myself mistaken. Anyhow, we have our work cut out for us…. Surely Meredith lacks the human note one likes in W. W.?” she concluded, and went on to discuss some questions of English literature which Miss Allan had raised in her last letter.

At a little distance from Miss Allan, on a seat shaded and made semi-private by a thick clump of palm trees, Arthur and Susan were reading each other’s letters. The big slashing manuscripts of hockey-playing young women in Wiltshire lay on Arthur’s knee, while Susan deciphered tight little legal hands which rarely filled more than a page, and always conveyed the same impression of jocular and breezy goodwill.

“I do hope Mr. Hutchinson will like me, Arthur,” she said, looking up.

“Who’s your loving Flo?” asked Arthur.

“Flo Graves—the girl I told you about, who was engaged to that dreadful Mr. Vincent,” said Susan. “Is Mr. Hutchinson married?” she asked.

Already her mind was busy with benevolent plans for her friends, or rather with one mangificent [magnificent] plan—which was simple too—they were all to get married—at once—directly she got back. Marriage, marriage, that was the right thing, the only thing, the solution required by every one she knew, and a great part of her meditations was spent in tracing every instance of discomfort, loneliness, ill-health, unsatisfied ambition, restlessness, eccentricity, taking things up and dropping them again, public speaking, and philanthropic activity on the part of men and particularly on the part of women to the fact that they wanted to marry, were trying to marry, and had not succeeded in getting married. If, as she was bound to own, these symptoms sometimes persisted after marriage, she could only ascribe them to the unhappy law of nature which decreed that there was only one Arthur Venning, and only one Susan who could marry him. Her theory, of course, had the merit of being fully supported by her own case. She had been vaguely uncomfortable at home for two or three years now, and a voyage like this with her selfish old aunt, who paid her fare but treated her as servant and companion in one, was typical of the kind of thing people expected of her. Directly she became engaged, Mrs. Paley behaved with instinctive respect, positively protested when Susan as usual knelt down to lace her shoes, and appeared really grateful for an hour of Susan’s company where she had been used to exact two or three as her right. She therefore foresaw a life of far greater comfort than she had been used to, and the change had already produced a great increase of warmth in her feelings towards other people.

It was close on twenty years now since Mrs. Paley had been able to lace her own shoes or even to see them, the disappearance of her feet having coincided more or less accurately with the death of her husband, a man of business, soon after which event Mrs. Paley began to grow stout. She was a selfish, independent old woman, possessed of a considerable income, which she spent upon the upkeep of a house that needed seven servants and a charwoman in Lancaster Gate, and another with a garden and carriage-horses in Surrey. Susan’s engagement relieved her of the one great anxiety of her life—that her son Christopher should “entangle himself” with his cousin. Now that this familiar source of interest was removed, she felt a little low and inclined to see more in Susan than she used to. She had decided to give her a very handsome wedding present, a cheque for two hundred, two hundred and fifty, or possibly, conceivably—it depended upon the under-gardener and Huths’ bill for doing up the drawing-room—three hundred pounds sterling.

She was thinking of this very question, revolving the figures, as she sat in her wheeled chair with a table spread with cards by her side. The Patience had somehow got into a muddle, and she did not like to call for Susan to help her, as Susan seemed to be busy with Arthur.

“She’s every right to expect a handsome present from me, of course,” she thought, looking vaguely at the leopard on its hind legs, “and I’ve no doubt she does! Money goes a long way with every one. The young are very selfish. If I were to die, nobody would miss me but Dakyns, and she’ll be consoled by the will! However, I’ve got no reason to complain…. I can still enjoy myself. I’m not a burden to any one…. I like a great many things a good deal, in spite of my legs.”

Being slightly depressed, however, she went on to think of the only people she had known who had not seemed to her at all selfish or fond of money, who had seemed to her somehow rather finer than the general run; people, she willingly acknowledged, who were finer than she was. There were only two of them. One was her brother, who had been drowned before her eyes, the other was a girl, her greatest friend, who had died in giving birth to her first child. These things had happened some fifty years ago.

“They ought not to have died,” she thought. “However, they did—and we selfish old creatures go on.” The tears came to her eyes; she felt a genuine regret for them, a kind of respect for their youth and beauty, and a kind of shame for herself; but the tears did not fall; and she opened one of those innumerable novels which she used to pronounce good or bad, or pretty middling, or really wonderful. “I can’t think how people come to imagine such things,” she would say, taking off her spectacles and looking up with the old faded eyes, that were becoming ringed with white.

Just behind the stuffed leopard Mr. Elliot was playing chess with Mr. Pepper. He was being defeated, naturally, for Mr. Pepper scarcely took his eyes off the board, and Mr. Elliot kept leaning back in his chair and throwing out remarks to a gentleman who had only arrived the night before, a tall handsome man, with a head resembling the head of an intellectual ram. After a few remarks of a general nature had passed, they were discovering that they knew some of the same people, as indeed had been obvious from their appearance directly they saw each other.

“Ah yes, old Truefit,” said Mr. Elliot. “He has a son at Oxford. I’ve often stayed with them. It’s a lovely old Jacobean house. Some exquisite Greuzes—one or two Dutch pictures which the old boy kept in the cellars. Then there were stacks upon stacks of prints. Oh, the dirt in that house! He was a miser, you know. The boy married a daughter of Lord Pinwells. I know them too. The collecting mania tends to run in families. This chap collects buckles—men’s shoe-buckles they must be, in use between the years 1580 and 1660; the dates mayn’t be right, but the fact’s as I say. Your true collector always has some unaccountable fad of that kind. On other points he’s as level-headed as a breeder of shorthorns, which is what he happens to be. Then the Pinwells, as you probably know, have their share of eccentricity too. Lady Maud, for instance——” he was interrupted here by the necessity of considering his move,—“Lady Maud has a horror of cats and clergymen, and people with big front teeth. I’ve heard her shout across a table, ‘Keep your mouth shut, Miss Smith; they’re as yellow as carrots!’ across a table, mind you. To me she’s always been civility itself. She dabbles in literature, likes to collect a few of us in her drawing-room, but mention a clergyman, a bishop even, nay, the Archbishop himself, and she gobbles like a turkey-cock. I’ve been told it’s a family feud—something to do with an ancestor in the reign of Charles the First. Yes,” he continued, suffering check after check, “I always like to know something of the grandmothers of our fashionable young men. In my opinion they preserve all that we admire in the eighteenth century, with the advantage, in the majority of cases, that they are personally clean. Not that one would insult old Lady Barborough by calling her clean. How often d’you think, Hilda,” he called out to his wife, “her ladyship takes a bath?”

“I should hardly like to say, Hugh,” Mrs. Elliot tittered, “but wearing puce velvet, as she does even on the hottest August day, it somehow doesn’t show.”

“Pepper, you have me,” said Mr. Elliot. “My chess is even worse than I remembered.” He accepted his defeat with great equanimity, because he really wished to talk.

He drew his chair beside Mr. Wilfred Flushing, the newcomer.

“Are these at all in your line?” he asked, pointing at a case in front of them, where highly polished crosses, jewels, and bits of embroidery, the work of the natives, were displayed to tempt visitors.

“Shams, all of them,” said Mr. Flushing briefly. “This rug, now, isn’t at all bad.” He stooped and picked up a piece of the rug at their feet. “Not old, of course, but the design is quite in the right tradition. Alice, lend me your brooch. See the difference between the old work and the new.”

A lady, who was reading with great concentration, unfastened her brooch and gave it to her husband without looking at him or acknowledging the tentative bow which Mr. Elliot was desirous of giving her. If she had listened, she might have been amused by the reference to old Lady Barborough, her great-aunt, but, oblivious of her surroundings, she went on reading.

The clock, which had been wheezing for some minutes like an old man preparing to cough, now struck nine. The sound slightly disturbed certain somnolent merchants, government officials, and men of independent means who were lying back in their chairs, chatting, smoking, ruminating about their affairs, with their eyes half shut; they raised their lids for an instant at the sound and then closed them again. They had the appearance of crocodiles so fully gorged by their last meal that the future of the world gives them no anxiety whatever. The only disturbance in the placid bright room was caused by a large moth which shot from light to light, whizzing over elaborate heads of hair, and causing several young women to raise their hands nervously and exclaim, “Some one ought to kill it!”

Absorbed in their own thoughts, Hewet and Hirst had not spoken for a long time.

When the clock struck, Hirst said:

“Ah, the creatures begin to stir….” He watched them raise themselves, look about them, and settle down again. “What I abhor most of all,” he concluded, “is the female breast. Imagine being Venning and having to get into bed with Susan! But the really repulsive thing is that they feel nothing at all—about what I do when I have a hot bath. They’re gross, they’re absurd, they’re utterly intolerable!”

So saying, and drawing no reply from Hewet, he proceeded to think about himself, about science, about Cambridge, about the Bar, about Helen and what she thought of him, until, being very tired, he was nodding off to sleep.

Suddenly Hewet woke him up.

“How d’you know what you feel, Hirst?”

“Are you in love?” asked Hirst. He put in his eyeglass.

“Don’t be a fool,” said Hewet.

“Well, I’ll sit down and think about it,” said Hirst. “One really ought to. If these people would only think about things, the world would be a far better place for us all to live in. Are you trying to think?”

That was exactly what Hewet had been doing for the last half-hour, but he did not find Hirst sympathetic at the moment.

“I shall go for a walk,” he said.

“Remember we weren’t in bed last night,” said Hirst with a prodigious yawn.

Hewet rose and stretched himself.

“I want to go and get a breath of air,” he said.

An unusual feeling had been bothering him all the evening and forbidding him to settle into any one train of thought. It was precisely as if he had been in the middle of a talk which interested him profoundly when some one came up and interrupted him. He could not finish the talk, and the longer he sat there the more he wanted to finish it. As the talk that had been interrupted was a talk with Rachel, he had to ask himself why he felt this, and why he wanted to go on talking to her. Hirst would merely say that he was in love with her. But he was not in love with her. Did love begin in that way, with the wish to go on talking? No. It always began in his case with definite physical sensations, and these were now absent, he did not even find her physically attractive. There was something, of course, unusual about her—she was young, inexperienced, and inquisitive, they had been more open with each other than was usually possible. He always found girls interesting to talk to, and surely these were good reasons why he should wish to go on talking to her; and last night, what with the crowd and the confusion, he had only been able to begin to talk to her. What was she doing now? Lying on a sofa and looking at the ceiling, perhaps. He could imagine her doing that, and Helen in an arm-chair, with her hands on the arm of it, so—looking ahead of her, with her great big eyes—oh no, they’d be talking, of course, about the dance. But suppose Rachel was going away in a day or two, suppose this was the end of her visit, and her father had arrived in one of the steamers anchored in the bay,—it was intolerable to know so little. Therefore he exclaimed, “How d’you know what you feel, Hirst?” to stop himself from thinking.

But Hirst did not help him, and the other people with their aimless movements and their unknown lives were disturbing, so that he longed for the empty darkness. The first thing he looked for when he stepped out of the hall door was the light of the Ambrose’s villa. When he had definitely decided that a certain light apart from the others higher up the hill was their light, he was considerably reassured. There seemed to be at once a little stability in all this incoherence. Without any definite plan in his head, he took the turning to the right and walked through the town and came to the wall by the meeting of the roads, where he stopped. The booming of the sea was audible. The dark-blue mass of the mountains rose against the paler blue of the sky. There was no moon, but myriads of stars, and lights were anchored up and down in the dark waves of earth all round him. He had meant to go back, but the single light of the Ambrose’s villa had now become three separate lights, and he was tempted to go on. He might as well make sure that Rachel was still there. Walking fast, he soon stood by the iron gate of their garden, and pushed it open; the outline of the house suddenly appeared sharply before his eyes, and the thin column of the verandah cutting across the palely lit gravel of the terrace. He hesitated. At the back of the house some one was rattling cans. He approached the front; the light on the terrace showed him that the sitting-rooms were on that side. He stood as near the light as he could by the corner of the house, the leaves of a creeper brushing his face. After a moment he could hear a voice. The voice went on steadily; it was not talking, but from the continuity of the sound it was a voice reading aloud. He crept a little closer; he crumpled the leaves together so as to stop their rustling about his ears. It might be Rachel’s voice. He left the shadow and stepped into the radius of the light, and then heard a sentence spoken quite distinctly.

“And there we lived from the year 1860 to 1895, the happiest years of my parents’ lives, and there in 1862 my brother Maurice was born, to the delight of his parents, as he was destined to be the delight of all who knew him.”

The voice quickened, and the tone became conclusive, rising slightly in pitch, as if these words were at the end of the chapter. Hewet drew back again into the shadow. There was a long silence. He could just hear chairs being moved inside. He had almost decided to go back, when suddenly two figures appeared at the window, not six feet from him.

“It was Maurice Fielding, of course, that your mother was engaged to,” said Helen’s voice. She spoke reflectively, looking out into the dark garden, and thinking evidently as much of the look of the night as of what she was saying.

“Mother?” said Rachel. Hewet’s heart leapt, and he noticed the fact. Her voice, though low, was full of surprise.

“You didn’t know that?” said Helen.

“I never knew there’d been any one else,” said Rachel. She was clearly surprised, but all they said was said low and inexpressively, because they were speaking out into the cool dark night.

“More people were in love with her than with any one I’ve ever known,” Helen stated. “She had that power—she enjoyed things. She wasn’t beautiful, but—I was thinking of her last night at the dance. She got on with every kind of person, and then she made it all so amazingly—funny.”

It appeared that Helen was going back into the past, choosing her words deliberately, comparing Theresa with the people she had known since Theresa died.

“I don’t know how she did it,” she continued, and ceased, and there was a long pause, in which a little owl called first here, then there, as it moved from tree to tree in the garden.

“That’s so like Aunt Lucy and Aunt Katie,” said Rachel at last. “They always make out that she was very sad and very good.”

“Then why, for goodness’ sake, did they do nothing but criticize her when she was alive?” said Helen. Very gentle their voices sounded, as if they fell through the waves of the sea.

“If I were to die to-morrow …” she began.

The broken sentences had an extraordinary beauty and detachment in Hewet’s ears, and a kind of mystery too, as though they were spoken by people in their sleep.

“No, Rachel,” Helen’s voice continued, “I’m not going to walk in the garden; it’s damp—it’s sure to be damp; besides, I see at least a dozen toads.”

“Toads? Those are stones, Helen. Come out. It’s nicer out. The flowers smell,” Rachel replied.

Hewet drew still farther back. His heart was beating very quickly. Apparently Rachel tried to pull Helen out on to the terrace, and Helen resisted. There was a certain amount of scuffling, entreating, resisting, and laughter from both of them. Then a man’s form appeared. Hewet could not hear what they were all saying. In a minute they had gone in; he could hear bolts grating then; there was dead silence, and all the lights went out.

He turned away, still crumpling and uncrumpling a handful of leaves which he had torn from the wall. An exquisite sense of pleasure and relief possessed him; it was all so solid and peaceful after the ball at the hotel, whether he was in love with them or not, and he was not in love with them; no, but it was good that they should be alive.

After standing still for a minute or two he turned and began to walk towards the gate. With the movement of his body, the excitement, the romance and the richness of life crowded into his brain. He shouted out a line of poetry, but the words escaped him, and he stumbled among lines and fragments of lines which had no meaning at all except for the beauty of the words. He shut the gate, and ran swinging from side to side down the hill, shouting any nonsense that came into his head. “Here am I,” he cried rhythmically, as his feet pounded to the left and to the right, “plunging along, like an elephant in the jungle, stripping the branches as I go (he snatched at the twigs of a bush at the roadside), roaring innumerable words, lovely words about innumerable things, running downhill and talking nonsense aloud to myself about roads and leaves and lights and women coming out into the darkness—about women—about Rachel, about Rachel.” He stopped and drew a deep breath. The night seemed immense and hospitable, and although so dark there seemed to be things moving down there in the harbour and movement out at sea. He gazed until the darkness numbed him, and then he walked on quickly, still murmuring to himself. “And I ought to be in bed, snoring and dreaming, dreaming, dreaming. Dreams and realities, dreams and realities, dreams and realities,” he repeated all the way up the avenue, scarcely knowing what he said, until he reached the front door. Here he paused for a second, and collected himself before he opened the door.

His eyes were dazed, his hands very cold, and his brain excited and yet half asleep. Inside the door everything was as he had left it except that the hall was now empty. There were the chairs turning in towards each other where people had sat talking, and the empty glasses on little tables, and the newspapers scattered on the floor. As he shut the door he felt as if he were enclosed in a square box, and instantly shrivelled up. It was all very bright and very small. He stopped for a minute by the long table to find a paper which he had meant to read, but he was still too much under the influence of the dark and the fresh air to consider carefully which paper it was or where he had seen it.

As he fumbled vaguely among the papers he saw a figure cross the tail of his eye, coming downstairs. He heard the swishing sound of skirts, and to his great surprise, Evelyn M. came up to him, laid her hand on the table as if to prevent him from taking up a paper, and said:

“You’re just the person I wanted to talk to.” Her voice was a little unpleasant and metallic, her eyes were very bright, and she kept them fixed upon him.

“To talk to me?” he repeated. “But I’m half asleep.”

“But I think you understand better than most people,” she answered, and sat down on a little chair placed beside a big leather chair so that Hewet had to sit down beside her.

“Well?” he said. He yawned openly, and lit a cigarette. He could not believe that this was really happening to him. “What is it?”

“Are you really sympathetic, or is it just a pose?” she demanded.

“It’s for you to say,” he replied. “I’m interested, I think.” He still felt numb all over and as if she was much too close to him.

“Any one can be interested!” she cried impatiently. “Your friend Mr. Hirst’s interested, I daresay. However, I do believe in you. You look as if you’d got a nice sister, somehow.” She paused, picking at some sequins on her knees, and then, as if she had made up her mind, she started off, “Anyhow, I’m going to ask your advice. D’you ever get into a state where you don’t know your own mind? That’s the state I’m in now. You see, last night at the dance Raymond Oliver,—he’s the tall dark boy who looks as if he had Indian blood in him, but he says he’s not really,—well, we were sitting out together, and he told me all about himself, how unhappy he is at home, and how he hates being out here. They’ve put him into some beastly mining business. He says it’s beastly—I should like it, I know, but that’s neither here nor there. And I felt awfully sorry for him, one couldn’t help being sorry for him, and when he asked me to let him kiss me, I did. I don’t see any harm in that, do you? And then this morning he said he’d thought I meant something more, and I wasn’t the sort to let any one kiss me. And we talked and talked. I daresay I was very silly, but one can’t help liking people when one’s sorry for them. I do like him most awfully——” She paused. “So I gave him half a promise, and then, you see, there’s Alfred Perrott.”

“Oh, Perrott,” said Hewet.

“We got to know each other on that picnic the other day,” she continued. “He seemed so lonely, especially as Arthur had gone off with Susan, and one couldn’t help guessing what was in his mind. So we had quite a long talk when you were looking at the ruins, and he told me all about his life, and his struggles, and how fearfully hard it had been. D’you know, he was a boy in a grocer’s shop and took parcels to people’s houses in a basket? That interested me awfully, because I always say it doesn’t matter how you’re born if you’ve got the right stuff in you. And he told me about his sister who’s paralysed, poor girl, and one can see she’s a great trial, though he’s evidently very devoted to her. I must say I do admire people like that! I don’t expect you do because you’re so clever. Well, last night we sat out in the garden together, and I couldn’t help seeing what he wanted to say, and comforting him a little, and telling him I did care—I really do—only, then, there’s Raymond Oliver. What I want you to tell me is, can one be in love with two people at once, or can’t one?”

She became silent, and sat with her chin on her hands, looking very intent, as if she were facing a real problem which had to be discussed between them.

“I think it depends what sort of person you are,” said Hewet. He looked at her. She was small and pretty, aged perhaps twenty-eight or twenty-nine, but though dashing and sharply cut, her features expressed nothing very clearly, except a great deal of spirit and good health.

“Who are you, what are you; you see, I know nothing about you,” he continued.

“Well, I was coming to that,” said Evelyn M. She continued to rest her chin on her hands and to look intently ahead of her. “I’m the daughter of a mother and no father, if that interests you,” she said. “It’s not a very nice thing to be. It’s what often happens in the country. She was a farmer’s daughter, and he was rather a swell—the young man up at the great house. He never made things straight—never married her—though he allowed us quite a lot of money. His people wouldn’t let him. Poor father! I can’t help liking him. Mother wasn’t the sort of woman who could keep him straight, anyhow. He was killed in the war. I believe his men worshipped him. They say great big troopers broke down and cried over his body on the battlefield. I wish I’d known him. Mother had all the life crushed out of her. The world—” She clenched her fist. “Oh, people can be horrid to a woman like that!” She turned upon Hewet.

“Well,” she said, “d’you want to know any more about me?”

“But you?” he asked. “Who looked after you?”

“I’ve looked after myself mostly,” she laughed. “I’ve had splendid friends. I do like people! That’s the trouble. What would you do if you liked two people, both of them tremendously, and you couldn’t tell which most?”

“I should go on liking them—I should wait and see. Why not?”

“But one has to make up one’s mind,” said Evelyn. “Or are you one of the people who doesn’t believe in marriages and all that? Look here—this isn’t fair, I do all the telling, and you tell nothing. Perhaps you’re the same as your friend”—she looked at him suspiciously; “perhaps you don’t like me?”

“I don’t know you,” said Hewet.

“I know when I like a person directly I see them! I knew I liked you the very first night at dinner. Oh dear,” she continued impatiently, “what a lot of bother would be saved if only people would say the things they think straight out! I’m made like that. I can’t help it.”

“But don’t you find it leads to difficulties?” Hewet asked.

“That’s men’s fault,” she answered. “They always drag it in—love, I mean.”

“And so you’ve gone on having one proposal after another,” said Hewet.

“I don’t suppose I’ve had more proposals than most women,” said Evelyn, but she spoke without conviction.

“Five, six, ten?” Hewet ventured.

Evelyn seemed to intimate that perhaps ten was the right figure, but that it really was not a high one.

“I believe you’re thinking me a heartless flirt,” she protested. “But I don’t care if you are. I don’t care what any one thinks of me. Just because one’s interested and likes to be friends with men, and talk to them as one talks to women, one’s called a flirt.”

“But Miss Murgatroyd——”

“I wish you’d call me Evelyn,” she interrupted.

“After ten proposals do you honestly think that men are the same as women?”

“Honestly, honestly,—how I hate that word! It’s always used by prigs,” cried Evelyn. “Honestly I think they ought to be. That’s what’s so disappointing. Every time one thinks it’s not going to happen, and every time it does.”

“The pursuit of Friendship,” said Hewet. “The title of a comedy.”

“You’re horrid,” she cried. “You don’t care a bit really. You might be Mr. Hirst.”

“Well,” said Hewet, “let’s consider. Let us consider—” He paused, because for the moment he could not remember what it was that they had to consider. He was far more interested in her than in her story, for as she went on speaking his numbness had disappeared, and he was conscious of a mixture of liking, pity, and distrust. “You’ve promised to marry both Oliver and Perrott?” he concluded.

“Not exactly promised,” said Evelyn. “I can’t make up my mind which I really like best. Oh how I detest modern life!” she flung off. “It must have been so much easier for the Elizabethans! I thought the other day on that mountain how I’d have liked to be one of those colonists, to cut down trees and make laws and all that, instead of fooling about with all these people who think one’s just a pretty young lady. Though I’m not. I really might do something.” She reflected in silence for a minute. Then she said:

“I’m afraid right down in my heart that Alfred Perrott won’t do. He’s not strong, is he?”

“Perhaps he couldn’t cut down a tree,” said Hewet. “Have you never cared for anybody?” he asked.

“I’ve cared for heaps of people, but not to marry them,” she said. “I suppose I’m too fastidious. All my life I’ve wanted somebody I could look up to, somebody great and big and splendid. Most men are so small.”

“What d’you mean by splendid?” Hewet asked. “People are—nothing more.”

Evelyn was puzzled.

“We don’t care for people because of their qualities,” he tried to explain. “It’s just them that we care for,”—he struck a match—“just that,” he said, pointing to the flames.

“I see what you mean,” she said, “but I don’t agree. I do know why I care for people, and I think I’m hardly ever wrong. I see at once what they’ve got in them. Now I think you must be rather splendid; but not Mr. Hirst.”

Hewet shook his head.

“He’s not nearly so unselfish, or so sympathetic, or so big, or so understanding,” Evelyn continued.

Hewet sat silent, smoking his cigarette.

“I should hate cutting down trees,” he remarked.

“I’m not trying to flirt with you, though I suppose you think I am!” Evelyn shot out. “I’d never have come to you if I’d thought you’d merely think odious things of me!” The tears came into her eyes.

“Do you never flirt?” he asked.

“Of course I don’t,” she protested. “Haven’t I told you? I want friendship; I want to care for some one greater and nobler than I am, and if they fall in love with me it isn’t my fault; I don’t want it; I positively hate it.”

Hewet could see that there was very little use in going on with the conversation, for it was obvious that Evelyn did not wish to say anything in particular, but to impress upon him an image of herself, being, for some reason which she would not reveal, unhappy, or insecure. He was very tired, and a pale waiter kept walking ostentatiously into the middle of the room and looking at them meaningly.

“They want to shut up,” he said. “My advice is that you should tell Oliver and Perrott to-morrow that you’ve made up your mind that you don’t mean to marry either of them. I’m certain you don’t. If you change your mind you can always tell them so. They’re both sensible men; they’ll understand. And then all this bother will be over.” He got up.

But Evelyn did not move. She sat looking up at him with her bright eager eyes, in the depths of which he thought he detected some disappointment, or dissatisfaction.

“Good-night,” he said.

“There are heaps of things I want to say to you still,” she said. “And I’m going to, some time. I suppose you must go to bed now?”

“Yes,” said Hewet. “I’m half asleep.” He left her still sitting by herself in the empty hall.

“Why is it that they won’t be honest?” he muttered to himself as he went upstairs. Why was it that relations between different people were so unsatisfactory, so fragmentary, so hazardous, and words so dangerous that the instinct to sympathise with another human being was an instinct to be examined carefully and probably crushed? What had Evelyn really wished to say to him? What was she feeling left alone in the empty hall? The mystery of life and the unreality even of one’s own sensations overcame him as he walked down the corridor which led to his room. It was dimly lighted, but sufficiently for him to see a figure in a bright dressing-gown pass swiftly in front of him, the figure of a woman crossing from one room to another.

[]

Chapter XV

Whether too slight or too vague the ties that bind people casually meeting in a hotel at midnight, they possess one advantage at least over the bonds which unite the elderly, who have lived together once and so must live for ever. Slight they may be, but vivid and genuine, merely because the power to break them is within the grasp of each, and there is no reason for continuance except a true desire that continue they shall. When two people have been married for years they seem to become unconscious of each other’s bodily presence so that they move as if alone, speak aloud things which they do not expect to be answered, and in general seem to experience all the comfort of solitude without its loneliness. The joint lives of Ridley and Helen had arrived at this stage of community, and it was often necessary for one or the other to recall with an effort whether a thing had been said or only thought, shared or dreamt in private. At four o’clock in the afternoon two or three days later Mrs. Ambrose was standing brushing her hair, while her husband was in the dressing-room which opened out of her room, and occasionally, through the cascade of water—he was washing his face—she caught exclamations, “So it goes on year after year; I wish, I wish, I wish I could make an end of it,” to which she paid no attention.

“It’s white? Or only brown?” Thus she herself murmured, examining a hair which gleamed suspiciously among the brown. She pulled it out and laid it on the dressing-table. She was criticising her own appearance, or rather approving of it, standing a little way back from the glass and looking at her own face with superb pride and melancholy, when her husband appeared in the doorway in his shirt sleeves, his face half obscured by a towel.

“You often tell me I don’t notice things,” he remarked.

“Tell me if this is a white hair, then?” she replied. She laid the hair on his hand.

“There’s not a white hair on your head,” he exclaimed.

“Ah, Ridley, I begin to doubt,” she sighed; and bowed her head under his eyes so that he might judge, but the inspection produced only a kiss where the line of parting ran, and husband and wife then proceeded to move about the room, casually murmuring.

“What was that you were saying?” Helen remarked, after an interval of conversation which no third person could have understood.

“Rachel—you ought to keep an eye upon Rachel,” he observed significantly, and Helen, though she went on brushing her hair, looked at him. His observations were apt to be true.

“Young gentlemen don’t interest themselves in young women’s education without a motive,” he remarked.

“Oh, Hirst,” said Helen.

“Hirst and Hewet, they’re all the same to me—all covered with spots,” he replied. “He advises her to read Gibbon. Did you know that?”

Helen did not know that, but she would not allow herself inferior to her husband in powers of observation. She merely said:

“Nothing would surprise me. Even that dreadful flying man we met at the dance—even Mr. Dalloway—even——”

“I advise you to be circumspect,” said Ridley. “There’s Willoughby, remember—Willoughby”; he pointed at a letter.

Helen looked with a sigh at an envelope which lay upon her dressing-table. Yes, there lay Willoughby, curt, inexpressive, perpetually jocular, robbing a whole continent of mystery, enquiring after his daughter’s manners and morals—hoping she wasn’t a bore, and bidding them pack her off to him on board the very next ship if she were—and then grateful and affectionate with suppressed emotion, and then half a page about his own triumphs over wretched little natives who went on strike and refused to load his ships, until he roared English oaths at them, “popping my head out of the window just as I was, in my shirt sleeves. The beggars had the sense to scatter.”

“If Theresa married Willoughby,” she remarked, turning the page with a hairpin, “one doesn’t see what’s to prevent Rachel——”

But Ridley was now off on grievances of his own connected with the washing of his shirts, which somehow led to the frequent visits of Hughling Elliot, who was a bore, a pedant, a dry stick of a man, and yet Ridley couldn’t simply point at the door and tell him to go. The truth of it was, they saw too many people. And so on and so on, more conjugal talk pattering softly and unintelligibly, until they were both ready to go down to tea.

The first thing that caught Helen’s eye as she came downstairs was a carriage at the door, filled with skirts and feathers nodding on the tops of hats. She had only time to gain the drawing-room before two names were oddly mispronounced by the Spanish maid, and Mrs. Thornbury came in slightly in advance of Mrs. Wilfrid Flushing.

“Mrs. Wilfrid Flushing,” said Mrs. Thornbury, with a wave of her hand. “A friend of our common friend Mrs. Raymond Parry.”

Mrs. Flushing shook hands energetically. She was a woman of forty perhaps, very well set up and erect, splendidly robust, though not as tall as the upright carriage of her body made her appear.

She looked Helen straight in the face and said, “You have a charmin’ house.”

She had a strongly marked face, her eyes looked straight at you, and though naturally she was imperious in her manner she was nervous at the same time. Mrs. Thornbury acted as interpreter, making things smooth all round by a series of charming commonplace remarks.

“I’ve taken it upon myself, Mr. Ambrose,” she said, “to promise that you will be so kind as to give Mrs. Flushing the benefit of your experience. I’m sure no one here knows the country as well as you do. No one takes such wonderful long walks. No one, I’m sure, has your encyclopaedic knowledge upon every subject. Mr. Wilfrid Flushing is a collector. He has discovered really beautiful things already. I had no notion that the peasants were so artistic—though of course in the past——”

“Not old things—new things,” interrupted Mrs. Flushing curtly. “That is, if he takes my advice.”

The Ambroses had not lived for many years in London without knowing something of a good many people, by name at least, and Helen remembered hearing of the Flushings. Mr. Flushing was a man who kept an old furniture shop; he had always said he would not marry because most women have red cheeks, and would not take a house because most houses have narrow staircases, and would not eat meat because most animals bleed when they are killed; and then he had married an eccentric aristocratic lady, who certainly was not pale, who looked as if she ate meat, who had forced him to do all the things he most disliked—and this then was the lady. Helen looked at her with interest. They had moved out into the garden, where the tea was laid under a tree, and Mrs. Flushing was helping herself to cherry jam. She had a peculiar jerking movement of the body when she spoke, which caused the canary-coloured plume on her hat to jerk too. Her small but finely cut and vigorous features, together with the deep red of lips and cheeks, pointed to many generations of well-trained and well-nourished ancestors behind her.

“Nothin’ that’s more than twenty years old interests me,” she continued. “Mouldy old pictures, dirty old books, they stick ’em in museums when they’re only fit for burnin’.”

“I quite agree,” Helen laughed. “But my husband spends his life in digging up manuscripts which nobody wants.” She was amused by Ridley’s expression of startled disapproval.

“There’s a clever man in London called John who paints ever so much better than the old masters,” Mrs. Flushing continued. “His pictures excite me—nothin’ that’s old excites me.”

“But even his pictures will become old,” Mrs. Thornbury intervened.

“Then I’ll have ’em burnt, or I’ll put it in my will,” said Mrs. Flushing.

“And Mrs. Flushing lived in one of the most beautiful old houses in England—Chillingley,” Mrs. Thornbury explained to the rest of them.

“If I’d my way I’d burn that to-morrow,” Mrs. Flushing laughed. She had a laugh like the cry of a jay, at once startling and joyless.

“What does any sane person want with those great big houses?” she demanded. “If you go downstairs after dark you’re covered with black beetles, and the electric lights always goin’ out. What would you do if spiders came out of the tap when you turned on the hot water?” she demanded, fixing her eye on Helen.

Mrs. Ambrose shrugged her shoulders with a smile.

“This is what I like,” said Mrs. Flushing. She jerked her head at the Villa. “A little house in a garden. I had one once in Ireland. One could lie in bed in the mornin’ and pick the roses outside the window with one’s toes.”

“And the gardeners, weren’t they surprised?” Mrs. Thornbury enquired.

“There were no gardeners,” Mrs. Flushing chuckled. “Nobody but me and an old woman without any teeth. You know the poor in Ireland lose their teeth after they’re twenty. But you wouldn’t expect a politician to understand that—Arthur Balfour wouldn’t understand that.”

Ridley sighed that he never expected any one to understand anything, least of all politicians.

“However,” he concluded, “there’s one advantage I find in extreme old age—nothing matters a hang except one’s food and one’s digestion. All I ask is to be left alone to moulder away in solitude. It’s obvious that the world’s going as fast as it can to—the Nethermost Pit, and all I can do is to sit still and consume as much of my own smoke as possible.” He groaned, and with a melancholy glance laid the jam on his bread, for he felt the atmosphere of this abrupt lady distinctly unsympathetic.

“I always contradict my husband when he says that,” said Mrs. Thornbury sweetly. “You men! Where would you be if it weren’t for the women!”

“Read the Symposium,” said Ridley grimly.

“Symposium?” cried Mrs. Flushing. “That’s Latin or Greek? Tell me, is there a good translation?”

“No,” said Ridley. “You will have to learn Greek.”

Mrs. Flushing cried, “Ah, ah, ah! I’d rather break stones in the road. I always envy the men who break stones and sit on those nice little heaps all day wearin’ spectacles. I’d infinitely rather break stones than clean out poultry runs, or feed the cows, or——”

Here Rachel came up from the lower garden with a book in her hand.

“What’s that book?” said Ridley, when she had shaken hands.

“It’s Gibbon,” said Rachel as she sat down.

“The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire?” said Mrs. Thornbury. “A very wonderful book, I know. My dear father was always quoting it at us, with the result that we resolved never to read a line.”

“Gibbon the historian?” enquired Mrs. Flushing. “I connect him with some of the happiest hours of my life. We used to lie in bed and read Gibbon—about the massacres of the Christians, I remember—when we were supposed to be asleep. It’s no joke, I can tell you, readin’ a great big book, in double columns, by a night-light, and the light that comes through a chink in the door. Then there were the moths—tiger moths, yellow moths, and horrid cockchafers. Louisa, my sister, would have the window open. I wanted it shut. We fought every night of our lives over that window. Have you ever seen a moth dyin’ in a night-light?” she enquired.

Again there was an interruption. Hewet and Hirst appeared at the drawing-room window and came up to the tea-table.

Rachel’s heart beat hard. She was conscious of an extraordinary intensity in everything, as though their presence stripped some cover off the surface of things; but the greetings were remarkably commonplace.

“Excuse me,” said Hirst, rising from his chair directly he had sat down. He went into the drawing-room, and returned with a cushion which he placed carefully upon his seat.

“Rheumatism,” he remarked, as he sat down for the second time.

“The result of the dance?” Helen enquired.

“Whenever I get at all run down I tend to be rheumatic,” Hirst stated. He bent his wrist back sharply. “I hear little pieces of chalk grinding together!”

Rachel looked at him. She was amused, and yet she was respectful; if such a thing could be, the upper part of her face seemed to laugh, and the lower part to check its laughter.

Hewet picked up the book that lay on the ground.

“You like this?” he asked in an undertone.

“No, I don’t like it,” she replied. She had indeed been trying all the afternoon to read it, and for some reason the glory which she had perceived at first had faded, and, read as she would, she could not grasp the meaning with her mind.

“It goes round, round, round, like a roll of oil-cloth,” she hazarded. Evidently she meant Hewet alone to hear her words, but Hirst demanded, “What d’you mean?”

She was instantly ashamed of her figure of speech, for she could not explain it in words of sober criticism.

“Surely it’s the most perfect style, so far as style goes, that’s ever been invented,” he continued. “Every sentence is practically perfect, and the wit——”

“Ugly in body, repulsive in mind,” she thought, instead of thinking about Gibbon’s style. “Yes, but strong, searching, unyielding in mind.” She looked at his big head, a disproportionate part of which was occupied by the forehead, and at the direct, severe eyes.

“I give you up in despair,” he said. He meant it lightly, but she took it seriously, and believed that her value as a human being was lessened because she did not happen to admire the style of Gibbon. The others were talking now in a group about the native villages which Mrs. Flushing ought to visit.

“I despair too,” she said impetuously. “How are you going to judge people merely by their minds?”

“You agree with my spinster Aunt, I expect,” said St. John in his jaunty manner, which was always irritating because it made the person he talked to appear unduly clumsy and in earnest. “‘Be good, sweet maid’—I thought Mr. Kingsley and my Aunt were now obsolete.”

“One can be very nice without having read a book,” she asserted. Very silly and simple her words sounded, and laid her open to derision.

“Did I ever deny it?” Hirst enquired, raising his eyebrows.

Most unexpectedly Mrs. Thornbury here intervened, either because it was her mission to keep things smooth or because she had long wished to speak to Mr. Hirst, feeling as she did that young men were her sons.

“I have lived all my life with people like your Aunt, Mr. Hirst,” she said, leaning forward in her chair. Her brown squirrel-like eyes became even brighter than usual. “They have never heard of Gibbon. They only care for their pheasants and their peasants. They are great big men who look so fine on horseback, as people must have done, I think, in the days of the great wars. Say what you like against them—they are animal, they are unintellectual; they don’t read themselves, and they don’t want others to read, but they are some of the finest and the kindest human beings on the face of the earth! You would be surprised at some of the stories I could tell. You have never guessed, perhaps, at all the romances that go on in the heart of the country. There are the people, I feel, among whom Shakespeare will be born if he is ever born again. In those old houses, up among the Downs——”

“My Aunt,” Hirst interrupted, “spends her life in East Lambeth among the degraded poor. I only quoted my Aunt because she is inclined to persecute people she calls ‘intellectual,’ which is what I suspect Miss Vinrace of doing. It’s all the fashion now. If you’re clever it’s always taken for granted that you’re completely without sympathy, understanding, affection—all the things that really matter. Oh, you Christians! You’re the most conceited, patronising, hypocritical set of old humbugs in the kingdom! Of course,” he continued, “I’m the first to allow your country gentlemen great merits. For one thing, they’re probably quite frank about their passions, which we are not. My father, who is a clergyman in Norfolk, says that there is hardly a squire in the county who does not——”

“But about Gibbon?” Hewet interrupted. The look of nervous tension which had come over every face was relaxed by the interruption.

“You find him monotonous, I suppose. But you know——” He opened the book, and began searching for passages to read aloud, and in a little time he found a good one which he considered suitable. But there was nothing in the world that bored Ridley more than being read aloud to, and he was besides scrupulously fastidious as to the dress and behaviour of ladies. In the space of fifteen minutes he had decided against Mrs. Flushing on the ground that her orange plume did not suit her complexion, that she spoke too loud, that she crossed her legs, and finally, when he saw her accept a cigarette that Hewet offered her, he jumped up, exclaiming something about “bar parlours,” and left them. Mrs. Flushing was evidently relieved by his departure. She puffed her cigarette, stuck her legs out, and examined Helen closely as to the character and reputation of their common friend Mrs. Raymond Parry. By a series of little stratagems she drove her to define Mrs. Parry as somewhat elderly, by no means beautiful, very much made up—an insolent old harridan, in short, whose parties were amusing because one met odd people; but Helen herself always pitied poor Mr. Parry, who was understood to be shut up downstairs with cases full of gems, while his wife enjoyed herself in the drawing-room. “Not that I believe what people say against her—although she hints, of course—” Upon which Mrs. Flushing cried out with delight:

“She’s my first cousin! Go on—go on!”

When Mrs. Flushing rose to go she was obviously delighted with her new acquaintances. She made three or four different plans for meeting or going on an expedition, or showing Helen the things they had bought, on her way to the carriage. She included them all in a vague but magnificent invitation.

As Helen returned to the garden again, Ridley’s words of warning came into her head, and she hesitated a moment and looked at Rachel sitting between Hirst and Hewet. But she could draw no conclusions, for Hewet was still reading Gibbon aloud, and Rachel, for all the expression she had, might have been a shell, and his words water rubbing against her ears, as water rubs a shell on the edge of a rock.

Hewet’s voice was very pleasant. When he reached the end of the period Hewet stopped, and no one volunteered any criticism.

“I do adore the aristocracy!” Hirst exclaimed after a moment’s pause. “They’re so amazingly unscrupulous. None of us would dare to behave as that woman behaves.”

“What I like about them,” said Helen as she sat down, “is that they’re so well put together. Naked, Mrs. Flushing would be superb. Dressed as she dresses, it’s absurd, of course.”

“Yes,” said Hirst. A shade of depression crossed his face. “I’ve never weighed more than ten stone in my life,” he said, “which is ridiculous, considering my height, and I’ve actually gone down in weight since we came here. I daresay that accounts for the rheumatism.” Again he jerked his wrist back sharply, so that Helen might hear the grinding of the chalk stones. She could not help smiling.

“It’s no laughing matter for me, I assure you,” he protested. “My mother’s a chronic invalid, and I’m always expecting to be told that I’ve got heart disease myself. Rheumatism always goes to the heart in the end.”

“For goodness’ sake, Hirst,” Hewet protested; “one might think you were an old cripple of eighty. If it comes to that, I had an aunt who died of cancer myself, but I put a bold face on it—” He rose and began tilting his chair backwards and forwards on its hind legs. “Is any one here inclined for a walk?” he said. “There’s a magnificent walk, up behind the house. You come out on to a cliff and look right down into the sea. The rocks are all red; you can see them through the water. The other day I saw a sight that fairly took my breath away—about twenty jelly-fish, semi-transparent, pink, with long streamers, floating on the top of the waves.”

“Sure they weren’t mermaids?” said Hirst. “It’s much too hot to climb uphill.” He looked at Helen, who showed no signs of moving.

“Yes, it’s too hot,” Helen decided.

There was a short silence.

“I’d like to come,” said Rachel.

“But she might have said that anyhow,” Helen thought to herself as Hewet and Rachel went away together, and Helen was left alone with St. John, to St. John’s obvious satisfaction.

He may have been satisfied, but his usual difficulty in deciding that one subject was more deserving of notice than another prevented him from speaking for some time. He sat staring intently at the head of a dead match, while Helen considered—so it seemed from the expression of her eyes—something not closely connected with the present moment.

At last St. John exclaimed, “Damn! Damn everything! Damn everybody!” he added. “At Cambridge there are people to talk to.”

“At Cambridge there are people to talk to,” Helen echoed him, rhythmically and absent-mindedly. Then she woke up.

“By the way, have you settled what you’re going to do—is it to be Cambridge or the Bar?”

He pursed his lips, but made no immediate answer, for Helen was still slightly inattentive. She had been thinking about Rachel and which of the two young men she was likely to fall in love with, and now sitting opposite to Hirst she thought, “He’s ugly. It’s a pity they’re so ugly.”

She did not include Hewet in this criticism; she was thinking of the clever, honest, interesting young men she knew, of whom Hirst was a good example, and wondering whether it was necessary that thought and scholarship should thus maltreat their bodies, and should thus elevate their minds to a very high tower from which the human race appeared to them like rats and mice squirming on the flat.

“And the future?” she reflected, vaguely envisaging a race of men becoming more and more like Hirst, and a race of women becoming more and more like Rachel. “Oh no,” she concluded, glancing at him, “one wouldn’t marry you. Well, then, the future of the race is in the hands of Susan and Arthur; no—that’s dreadful. Of farm labourers; no—not of the English at all, but of Russians and Chinese.” This train of thought did not satisfy her, and was interrupted by St. John, who began again:

“I wish you knew Bennett. He’s the greatest man in the world.”

“Bennett?” she enquired. Becoming more at his ease, St. John dropped the concentrated abruptness of his manner, and explained that Bennett was a man who lived in an old windmill six miles out of Cambridge. He lived the perfect life, according to St. John, very lonely, very simple, caring only for the truth of things, always ready to talk, and extraordinarily modest, though his mind was of the greatest.

“Don’t you think,” said St. John, when he had done describing him, “that kind of thing makes this kind of thing rather flimsy? Did you notice at tea how poor old Hewet had to change the conversation? How they were all ready to pounce upon me because they thought I was going to say something improper? It wasn’t anything, really. If Bennett had been there he’d have said exactly what he meant to say, or he’d have got up and gone. But there’s something rather bad for the character in that—I mean if one hasn’t got Bennett’s character. It’s inclined to make one bitter. Should you say that I was bitter?”

Helen did not answer, and he continued:

“Of course I am, disgustingly bitter, and it’s a beastly thing to be. But the worst of me is that I’m so envious. I envy every one. I can’t endure people who do things better than I do—perfectly absurd things too—waiters balancing piles of plates—even Arthur, because Susan’s in love with him. I want people to like me, and they don’t. It’s partly my appearance, I expect,” he continued, “though it’s an absolute lie to say I’ve Jewish blood in me—as a matter of fact we’ve been in Norfolk, Hirst of Hirstbourne Hall, for three centuries at least. It must be awfully soothing to be like you—every one liking one at once.”

“I assure you they don’t,” Helen laughed.

“They do,” said Hirst with conviction. “In the first place, you’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen; in the second, you have an exceptionally nice nature.”

If Hirst had looked at her instead of looking intently at his teacup he would have seen Helen blush, partly with pleasure, partly with an impulse of affection towards the young man who had seemed, and would seem again, so ugly and so limited. She pitied him, for she suspected that he suffered, and she was interested in him, for many of the things he said seemed to her true; she admired the morality of youth, and yet she felt imprisoned. As if her instinct were to escape to something brightly coloured and impersonal, which she could hold in her hands, she went into the house and returned with her embroidery. But he was not interested in her embroidery; he did not even look at it.

“About Miss Vinrace,” he began,—“oh, look here, do let’s be St. John and Helen, and Rachel and Terence—what’s she like? Does she reason, does she feel, or is she merely a kind of footstool?”

“Oh no,” said Helen, with great decision. From her observations at tea she was inclined to doubt whether Hirst was the person to educate Rachel. She had gradually come to be interested in her niece, and fond of her; she disliked some things about her very much, she was amused by others; but she felt her, on the whole, a live if unformed human being, experimental, and not always fortunate in her experiments, but with powers of some kind, and a capacity for feeling. Somewhere in the depths of her, too, she was bound to Rachel by the indestructible if inexplicable ties of sex. “She seems vague, but she’s a will of her own,” she said, as if in the interval she had run through her qualities.

The embroidery, which was a matter for thought, the design being difficult and the colours wanting consideration, brought lapses into the dialogue when she seemed to be engrossed in her skeins of silk, or, with head a little drawn back and eyes narrowed, considered the effect of the whole. Thus she merely said “Um—m—m” to St. John’s next remark, “I shall ask her to go for a walk with me.”

Perhaps he resented this division of attention. He sat silent watching Helen closely.

“You’re absolutely happy,” he proclaimed at last.

“Yes?” Helen enquired, sticking in her needle.

“Marriage, I suppose,” said St. John.

“Yes,” said Helen, gently drawing her needle out.

“Children?” St. John enquired.

“Yes,” said Helen, sticking her needle in again. “I don’t know why I’m happy,” she suddenly laughed, looking him full in the face. There was a considerable pause.

“There’s an abyss between us,” said St. John. His voice sounded as if it issued from the depths of a cavern in the rocks. “You’re infinitely simpler than I am. Women always are, of course. That’s the difficulty. One never knows how a woman gets there. Supposing all the time you’re thinking, ‘Oh, what a morbid young man!’”

Helen sat and looked at him with her needle in her hand. From her position she saw his head in front of the dark pyramid of a magnolia-tree. With one foot raised on the rung of a chair, and her elbow out in the attitude for sewing, her own figure possessed the sublimity of a woman’s of the early world, spinning the thread of fate—the sublimity possessed by many women of the present day who fall into the attitude required by scrubbing or sewing. St. John looked at her.

“I suppose you’ve never paid any one a compliment in the course of your life,” he said irrelevantly.

“I spoil Ridley rather,” Helen considered.

“I’m going to ask you point blank—do you like me?”

After a certain pause, she replied, “Yes, certainly.”

“Thank God!” he exclaimed. “That’s one mercy. You see,” he continued with emotion, “I’d rather you liked me than any one I’ve ever met.”

“What about the five philosophers?” said Helen, with a laugh, stitching firmly and swiftly at her canvas. “I wish you’d describe them.”

Hirst had no particular wish to describe them, but when he began to consider them he found himself soothed and strengthened. Far away on the other side of the world as they were, in smoky rooms, and grey medieval courts, they appeared remarkable figures, free-spoken men with whom one could be at ease; incomparably more subtle in emotion than the people here. They gave him, certainly, what no woman could give him, not Helen even. Warming at the thought of them, he went on to lay his own case before Mrs. Ambrose. Should he stay on at Cambridge or should he go to the Bar? One day he thought one thing, another day another. Helen listened attentively. At last, without any preface, she pronounced her decision.

“Leave Cambridge and go to the Bar,” she said. He pressed her for her reasons.

“I think you’d enjoy London more,” she said. It did not seem a very subtle reason, but she appeared to think it sufficient. She looked at him against the background of flowering magnolia. There was something curious in the sight. Perhaps it was that the heavy wax-like flowers were so smooth and inarticulate, and his face—he had thrown his hat away, his hair was rumpled, he held his eye-glasses in his hand, so that a red mark appeared on either side of his nose—was so worried and garrulous. It was a beautiful bush, spreading very widely, and all the time she had sat there talking she had been noticing the patches of shade and the shape of the leaves, and the way the great white flowers sat in the midst of the green. She had noticed it half-consciously, nevertheless the pattern had become part of their talk. She laid down her sewing, and began to walk up and down the garden, and Hirst rose too and paced by her side. He was rather disturbed, uncomfortable, and full of thought. Neither of them spoke.

The sun was beginning to go down, and a change had come over the mountains, as if they were robbed of their earthy substance, and composed merely of intense blue mist. Long thin clouds of flamingo red, with edges like the edges of curled ostrich feathers, lay up and down the sky at different altitudes. The roofs of the town seemed to have sunk lower than usual; the cypresses appeared very black between the roofs, and the roofs themselves were brown and white. As usual in the evening, single cries and single bells became audible rising from beneath.

St. John stopped suddenly.

“Well, you must take the responsibility,” he said. “I’ve made up my mind; I shall go to the Bar.”

His words were very serious, almost emotional; they recalled Helen after a second’s hesitation.

“I’m sure you’re right,” she said warmly, and shook the hand he held out. “You’ll be a great man, I’m certain.”

Then, as if to make him look at the scene, she swept her hand round the immense circumference of the view. From the sea, over the roofs of the town, across the crests of the mountains, over the river and the plain, and again across the crests of the mountains it swept until it reached the villa, the garden, the magnolia-tree, and the figures of Hirst and herself standing together, when it dropped to her side.

[]

Chapter XVI

Hewet and Rachel had long ago reached the particular place on the edge of the cliff where, looking down into the sea, you might chance on jelly-fish and dolphins. Looking the other way, the vast expanse of land gave them a sensation which is given by no view, however extended, in England; the villages and the hills there having names, and the farthest horizon of hills as often as not dipping and showing a line of mist which is the sea; here the view was one of infinite sun-dried earth, earth pointed in pinnacles, heaped in vast barriers, earth widening and spreading away and away like the immense floor of the sea, earth chequered by day and by night, and partitioned into different lands, where famous cities were founded, and the races of men changed from dark savages to white civilised men, and back to dark savages again. Perhaps their English blood made this prospect uncomfortably impersonal and hostile to them, for having once turned their faces that way they next turned them to the sea, and for the rest of the time sat looking at the sea. The sea, though it was a thin and sparkling water here, which seemed incapable of surge or anger, eventually narrowed itself, clouded its pure tint with grey, and swirled through narrow channels and dashed in a shiver of broken waters against massive granite rocks. It was this sea that flowed up to the mouth of the Thames; and the Thames washed the roots of the city of London.

Hewet’s thoughts had followed some such course as this, for the first thing he said as they stood on the edge of the cliff was—

“I’d like to be in England!”

Rachel lay down on her elbow, and parted the tall grasses which grew on the edge, so that she might have a clear view. The water was very calm; rocking up and down at the base of the cliff, and so clear that one could see the red of the stones at the bottom of it. So it had been at the birth of the world, and so it had remained ever since. Probably no human being had ever broken that water with boat or with body. Obeying some impulse, she determined to mar that eternity of peace, and threw the largest pebble she could find. It struck the water, and the ripples spread out and out. Hewet looked down too.

“It’s wonderful,” he said, as they widened and ceased. The freshness and the newness seemed to him wonderful. He threw a pebble next. There was scarcely any sound.

“But England,” Rachel murmured in the absorbed tone of one whose eyes are concentrated upon some sight. “What d’you want with England?”

“My friends chiefly,” he said, “and all the things one does.”

He could look at Rachel without her noticing it. She was still absorbed in the water and the exquisitely pleasant sensations which a little depth of the sea washing over rocks suggests. He noticed that she was wearing a dress of deep blue colour, made of a soft thin cotton stuff, which clung to the shape of her body. It was a body with the angles and hollows of a young woman’s body not yet developed, but in no way distorted, and thus interesting and even lovable. Raising his eyes Hewet observed her head; she had taken her hat off, and the face rested on her hand. As she looked down into the sea, her lips were slightly parted. The expression was one of childlike intentness, as if she were watching for a fish to swim past over the clear red rocks. Nevertheless her twenty-four years of life had given her a look of reserve. Her hand, which lay on the ground, the fingers curling slightly in, was well shaped and competent; the square-tipped and nervous fingers were the fingers of a musician. With something like anguish Hewet realised that, far from being unattractive, her body was very attractive to him. She looked up suddenly. Her eyes were full of eagerness and interest.

“You write novels?” she asked.

For the moment he could not think what he was saying. He was overcome with the desire to hold her in his arms.

“Oh yes,” he said. “That is, I want to write them.”

She would not take her large grey eyes off his face.

“Novels,” she repeated. “Why do you write novels? You ought to write music. Music, you see”—she shifted her eyes, and became less desirable as her brain began to work, inflicting a certain change upon her face—“music goes straight for things. It says all there is to say at once. With writing it seems to me there’s so much”—she paused for an expression, and rubbed her fingers in the earth—“scratching on the match-box. Most of the time when I was reading Gibbon this afternoon I was horribly, oh infernally, damnably bored!” She gave a shake of laughter, looking at Hewet, who laughed too.

“I shan’t lend you books,” he remarked.

“Why is it,” Rachel continued, “that I can laugh at Mr. Hirst to you, but not to his face? At tea I was completely overwhelmed, not by his ugliness—by his mind.” She enclosed a circle in the air with her hands. She realised with a great sense of comfort how easily she could talk to Hewet, those thorns or ragged corners which tear the surface of some relationships being smoothed away.

“So I observed,” said Hewet. “That’s a thing that never ceases to amaze me.” He had recovered his composure to such an extent that he could light and smoke a cigarette, and feeling her ease, became happy and easy himself.

“The respect that women, even well-educated, very able women, have for men,” he went on. “I believe we must have the sort of power over you that we’re said to have over horses. They see us three times as big as we are or they’d never obey us. For that very reason, I’m inclined to doubt that you’ll ever do anything even when you have the vote.” He looked at her reflectively. She appeared very smooth and sensitive and young. “It’ll take at least six generations before you’re sufficiently thick-skinned to go into law courts and business offices. Consider what a bully the ordinary man is,” he continued, “the ordinary hard-working, rather ambitious solicitor or man of business with a family to bring up and a certain position to maintain. And then, of course, the daughters have to give way to the sons; the sons have to be educated; they have to bully and shove for their wives and families, and so it all comes over again. And meanwhile there are the women in the background…. Do you really think that the vote will do you any good?”

“The vote?” Rachel repeated. She had to visualise it as a little bit of paper which she dropped into a box before she understood his question, and looking at each other they smiled at something absurd in the question.

“Not to me,” she said. “But I play the piano…. Are men really like that?” she asked, returning to the question that interested her. “I’m not afraid of you.” She looked at him easily.

“Oh, I’m different,” Hewet replied. “I’ve got between six and seven hundred a year of my own. And then no one takes a novelist seriously, thank heavens. There’s no doubt it helps to make up for the drudgery of a profession if a man’s taken very, very seriously by every one—if he gets appointments, and has offices and a title, and lots of letters after his name, and bits of ribbon and degrees. I don’t grudge it ’em, though sometimes it comes over me—what an amazing concoction! What a miracle the masculine conception of life is—judges, civil servants, army, navy, Houses of Parliament, lord mayors—what a world we’ve made of it! Look at Hirst now. I assure you,” he said, “not a day’s passed since we came here without a discussion as to whether he’s to stay on at Cambridge or to go to the Bar. It’s his career—his sacred career. And if I’ve heard it twenty times, I’m sure his mother and sister have heard it five hundred times. Can’t you imagine the family conclaves, and the sister told to run out and feed the rabbits because St. John must have the school-room to himself—‘St. John’s working,’ ‘St. John wants his tea brought to him.’ Don’t you know the kind of thing? No wonder that St. John thinks it a matter of considerable importance. It is too. He has to earn his living. But St. John’s sister—” Hewet puffed in silence. “No one takes her seriously, poor dear. She feeds the rabbits.”

“Yes,” said Rachel. “I’ve fed rabbits for twenty-four years; it seems odd now.” She looked meditative, and Hewet, who had been talking much at random and instinctively adopting the feminine point of view, saw that she would now talk about herself, which was what he wanted, for so they might come to know each other.

She looked back meditatively upon her past life.

“How do you spend your day?” he asked.

She meditated still. When she thought of their day it seemed to her that it was cut into four pieces by their meals. These divisions were absolutely rigid, the contents of the day having to accommodate themselves within the four rigid bars. Looking back at her life, that was what she saw.

“Breakfast nine; luncheon one; tea five; dinner eight,” she said.

“Well,” said Hewet, “what d’you do in the morning?”

“I used to play the piano for hours and hours.”

“And after luncheon?”

“Then I went shopping with one of my aunts. Or we went to see some one, or we took a message; or we did something that had to be done—the taps might be leaking. They visit the poor a good deal—old charwomen with bad legs, women who want tickets for hospitals. Or I used to walk in the park by myself. And after tea people sometimes called; or in summer we sat in the garden or played croquet; in winter I read aloud, while they worked; after dinner I played the piano and they wrote letters. If father was at home we had friends of his to dinner, and about once a month we went up to the play. Every now and then we dined out; sometimes I went to a dance in London, but that was difficult because of getting back. The people we saw were old family friends, and relations, but we didn’t see many people. There was the clergyman, Mr. Pepper, and the Hunts. Father generally wanted to be quiet when he came home, because he works very hard at Hull. Also my aunts aren’t very strong. A house takes up a lot of time if you do it properly. Our servants were always bad, and so Aunt Lucy used to do a good deal in the kitchen, and Aunt Clara, I think, spent most of the morning dusting the drawing-room and going through the linen and silver. Then there were the dogs. They had to be exercised, besides being washed and brushed. Now Sandy’s dead, but Aunt Clara has a very old cockatoo that came from India. Everything in our house,” she exclaimed, “comes from somewhere! It’s full of old furniture, not really old, Victorian, things mother’s family had or father’s family had, which they didn’t like to get rid of, I suppose, though we’ve really no room for them. It’s rather a nice house,” she continued, “except that it’s a little dingy—dull I should say.” She called up before her eyes a vision of the drawing-room at home; it was a large oblong room, with a square window opening on the garden. Green plush chairs stood against the wall; there was a heavy carved book-case, with glass doors, and a general impression of faded sofa covers, large spaces of pale green, and baskets with pieces of wool-work dropping out of them. Photographs from old Italian masterpieces hung on the walls, and views of Venetian bridges and Swedish waterfalls which members of the family had seen years ago. There were also one or two portraits of fathers and grandmothers, and an engraving of John Stuart Mill, after the picture by Watts. It was a room without definite character, being neither typically and openly hideous, nor strenuously artistic, nor really comfortable. Rachel roused herself from the contemplation of this familiar picture.

“But this isn’t very interesting for you,” she said, looking up.

“Good Lord!” Hewet exclaimed, “I’ve never been so much interested in my life.” She then realised that while she had been thinking of Richmond, his eyes had never left her face. The knowledge of this excited her.

“Go on, please go on,” he urged. “Let’s imagine it’s a Wednesday. You’re all at luncheon. You sit there, and Aunt Lucy there, and Aunt Clara here;” he arranged three pebbles on the grass between them.

“Aunt Clara carves the neck of lamb,” Rachel continued. She fixed her gaze upon the pebbles. “There’s a very ugly yellow china stand in front of me, called a dumb waiter, on which are three dishes, one for biscuits, one for butter, and one for cheese. There’s a pot of ferns. Then there’s Blanche the maid, who snuffles because of her nose. We talk—oh yes, it’s Aunt Lucy’s afternoon at Walworth, so we’re rather quick over luncheon. She goes off. She has a purple bag, and a black notebook. Aunt Clara has what they call a G.F.S. meeting in the drawing-room on Wednesday, so I take the dogs out. I go up Richmond Hill, along the terrace, into the park. It’s the 18th of April—the same day as it is here. It’s spring in England. The ground is rather damp. However, I cross the road and get on to the grass and we walk along, and I sing as I always do when I’m alone, until we come to the open place where you can see the whole of London beneath you on a clear day. Hampstead Church spire there, Westminster Cathedral over there, and factory chimneys about here. There’s generally a haze over the low parts of London; but it’s often blue over the park when London’s in a mist. It’s the open place that the balloons cross going over to Hurlingham. They’re pale yellow. Well, then, it smells very good, particularly if they happen to be burning wood in the keeper’s lodge which is there. I could tell you now how to get from place to place, and exactly what trees you’d pass, and where you’d cross the roads. You see, I played there when I was small. Spring is good, but it’s best in the autumn when the deer are barking; then it gets dusky, and I go back through the streets, and you can’t see people properly; they come past very quick, you just see their faces and then they’re gone—that’s what I like—and no one knows in the least what you’re doing——”

“But you have to be back for tea, I suppose?” Hewet checked her.

“Tea? Oh yes. Five o’clock. Then I say what I’ve done, and my aunts say what they’ve done, and perhaps some one comes in: Mrs. Hunt, let’s suppose. She’s an old lady with a lame leg. She has or she once had eight children; so we ask after them. They’re all over the world; so we ask where they are, and sometimes they’re ill, or they’re stationed in a cholera district, or in some place where it only rains once in five months. Mrs. Hunt,” she said with a smile, “had a son who was hugged to death by a bear.”

Here she stopped and looked at Hewet to see whether he was amused by the same things that amused her. She was reassured. But she thought it necessary to apologise again; she had been talking too much.

“You can’t conceive how it interests me,” he said. Indeed, his cigarette had gone out, and he had to light another.

“Why does it interest you?” she asked.

“Partly because you’re a woman,” he replied. When he said this, Rachel, who had become oblivious of anything, and had reverted to a childlike state of interest and pleasure, lost her freedom and became self-conscious. She felt herself at once singular and under observation, as she felt with St. John Hirst. She was about to launch into an argument which would have made them both feel bitterly against each other, and to define sensations which had no such importance as words were bound to give them when Hewet led her thoughts in a different direction.

“I’ve often walked along the streets where people live all in a row, and one house is exactly like another house, and wondered what on earth the women were doing inside,” he said. “Just consider: it’s the beginning of the twentieth century, and until a few years ago no woman had ever come out by herself and said things at all. There it was going on in the background, for all those thousands of years, this curious silent unrepresented life. Of course we’re always writing about women—abusing them, or jeering at them, or worshipping them; but it’s never come from women themselves. I believe we still don’t know in the least how they live, or what they feel, or what they do precisely. If one’s a man, the only confidences one gets are from young women about their love affairs. But the lives of women of forty, of unmarried women, of working women, of women who keep shops and bring up children, of women like your aunts or Mrs. Thornbury or Miss Allan—one knows nothing whatever about them. They won’t tell you. Either they’re afraid, or they’ve got a way of treating men. It’s the man’s view that’s represented, you see. Think of a railway train: fifteen carriages for men who want to smoke. Doesn’t it make your blood boil? If I were a woman I’d blow some one’s brains out. Don’t you laugh at us a great deal? Don’t you think it all a great humbug? You, I mean—how does it all strike you?”

His determination to know, while it gave meaning to their talk, hampered her; he seemed to press further and further, and made it appear so important. She took some time to answer, and during that time she went over and over the course of her twenty-four years, lighting now on one point, now on another—on her aunts, her mother, her father, and at last her mind fixed upon her aunts and her father, and she tried to describe them as at this distance they appeared to her.

They were very much afraid of her father. He was a great dim force in the house, by means of which they held on to the great world which is represented every morning in the Times. But the real life of the house was something quite different from this. It went on independently of Mr. Vinrace, and tended to hide itself from him. He was good-humoured towards them, but contemptuous. She had always taken it for granted that his point of view was just, and founded upon an ideal scale of things where the life of one person was absolutely more important than the life of another, and that in that scale they were of much less importance than he was. But did she really believe that? Hewet’s words made her think. She always submitted to her father, just as they did, but it was her aunts who influenced her really; her aunts who built up the fine, closely woven substance of their life at home. They were less splendid but more natural than her father was. All her rages had been against them; it was their world with its four meals, its punctuality, and servants on the stairs at half-past ten, that she examined so closely and wanted so vehemently to smash to atoms. Following these thoughts she looked up and said:

“And there’s a sort of beauty in it—there they are at Richmond at this very moment building things up. They’re all wrong, perhaps, but there’s a sort of beauty in it,” she repeated. “It’s so unconscious, so modest. And yet they feel things. They do mind if people die. Old spinsters are always doing things. I don’t quite know what they do. Only that was what I felt when I lived with them. It was very real.”

She reviewed their little journeys to and fro, to Walworth, to charwomen with bad legs, to meetings for this and that, their minute acts of charity and unselfishness which flowered punctually from a definite view of what they ought to do, their friendships, their tastes and habits; she saw all these things like grains of sand falling, falling through innumerable days, making an atmosphere and building up a solid mass, a background. Hewet observed her as she considered this.

“Were you happy?” he demanded.

Again she had become absorbed in something else, and he called her back to an unusually vivid consciousness of herself.

“I was both,” she replied. “I was happy and I was miserable. You’ve no conception what it’s like—to be a young woman.” She looked straight at him. “There are terrors and agonies,” she said, keeping her eye on him as if to detect the slightest hint of laughter.

“I can believe it,” he said. He returned her look with perfect sincerity.

“Women one sees in the streets,” she said.

“Prostitutes?”

“Men kissing one.”

He nodded his head.

“Things one guesses at.”

“You were never told?”

She shook her head.

“And then,” she began and stopped. Here came in the great space of life into which no one had ever penetrated. All that she had been saying about her father and her aunts and walks in Richmond Park, and what they did from hour to hour, was merely on the surface. Hewet was watching her. Did he demand that she should describe that also? Why did he sit so near and keep his eye on her? Why did they not have done with this searching and agony? Why did they not kiss each other simply? She wished to kiss him. But all the time she went on spinning out words.

“A girl is more lonely than a boy. No one cares in the least what she does. Nothing’s expected of her. Unless one’s very pretty people don’t listen to what you say…. And that is what I like,” she added energetically, as if the memory were very happy. “I like walking in Richmond Park and singing to myself and knowing it doesn’t matter a damn to anybody. I like seeing things go on—as we saw you that night when you didn’t see us—I love the freedom of it—it’s like being the wind or the sea.” She turned with a curious fling of her hands and looked at the sea. It was still very blue, dancing away as far as the eye could reach, but the light on it was yellower, and the clouds were turning flamingo red.

A feeling of intense depression crossed Hewet’s mind as she spoke. It seemed plain that she would never care for one person rather than another; she was evidently quite indifferent to him; they seemed to come very near, and then they were as far apart as ever again; and her gesture as she turned away had been oddly beautiful.

“Nonsense,” he said abruptly. “You like people. You like admiration. Your real grudge against Hirst is that he doesn’t admire you.”

She made no answer for some time. Then she said:

“That’s probably true. Of course I like people—I like almost every one I’ve ever met.”

She turned her back on the sea and regarded Hewet with friendly if critical eyes. He was good-looking in the sense that he had always had a sufficiency of beef to eat and fresh air to breathe. His head was big; the eyes were also large; though generally vague they could be forcible; and the lips were sensitive. One might account him a man of considerable passion and fitful energy, likely to be at the mercy of moods which had little relation to facts; at once tolerant and fastidious. The breadth of his forehead showed capacity for thought. The interest with which Rachel looked at him was heard in her voice.

“What novels do you write?” she asked.

“I want to write a novel about Silence,” he said; “the things people don’t say. But the difficulty is immense.” He sighed. “However, you don’t care,” he continued. He looked at her almost severely. “Nobody cares. All you read a novel for is to see what sort of person the writer is, and, if you know him, which of his friends he’s put in. As for the novel itself, the whole conception, the way one’s seen the thing, felt about it, made it stand in relation to other things, not one in a million cares for that. And yet I sometimes wonder whether there’s anything else in the whole world worth doing. These other people,” he indicated the hotel, “are always wanting something they can’t get. But there’s an extraordinary satisfaction in writing, even in the attempt to write. What you said just now is true: one doesn’t want to be things; one wants merely to be allowed to see them.”

Some of the satisfaction of which he spoke came into his face as he gazed out to sea.

It was Rachel’s turn now to feel depressed. As he talked of writing he had become suddenly impersonal. He might never care for any one; all that desire to know her and get at her, which she had felt pressing on her almost painfully, had completely vanished.

“Are you a good writer?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. “I’m not first-rate, of course; I’m good second-rate; about as good as Thackeray, I should say.”

Rachel was amazed. For one thing it amazed her to hear Thackeray called second-rate; and then she could not widen her point of view to believe that there could be great writers in existence at the present day, or if there were, that any one she knew could be a great writer; and his self-confidence astounded her, and he became more and more remote.

“My other novel,” Hewet continued, “is about a young man who is obsessed by an idea—the idea of being a gentleman. He manages to exist at Cambridge on a hundred pounds a year. He has a coat; it was once a very good coat. But the trousers—they’re not so good. Well, he goes up to London, gets into good society, owing to an early-morning adventure on the banks of the Serpentine. He is led into telling lies—my idea, you see, is to show the gradual corruption of the soul—calls himself the son of some great landed proprietor in Devonshire. Meanwhile the coat becomes older and older, and he hardly dares to wear the trousers. Can’t you imagine the wretched man, after some splendid evening of debauchery, contemplating these garments—hanging them over the end of the bed, arranging them now in full light, now in shade, and wondering whether they will survive him, or he will survive them? Thoughts of suicide cross his mind. He has a friend, too, a man who somehow subsists upon selling small birds, for which he sets traps in the fields near Uxbridge. They’re scholars, both of them. I know one or two wretched starving creatures like that who quote Aristotle at you over a fried herring and a pint of porter. Fashionable life, too, I have to represent at some length, in order to show my hero under all circumstances. Lady Theo Bingham Bingley, whose bay mare he had the good fortune to stop, is the daughter of a very fine old Tory peer. I’m going to describe the kind of parties I once went to—the fashionable intellectuals, you know, who like to have the latest book on their tables. They give parties, river parties, parties where you play games. There’s no difficulty in conceiving incidents; the difficulty is to put them into shape—not to get run away with, as Lady Theo was. It ended disastrously for her, poor woman, for the book, as I planned it, was going to end in profound and sordid respectability. Disowned by her father, she marries my hero, and they live in a snug little villa outside Croydon, in which town he is set up as a house agent. He never succeeds in becoming a real gentleman after all. That’s the interesting part of it. Does that seem to you the kind of book you’d like to read?” he enquired; “or perhaps you’d like my Stuart tragedy better,” he continued, without waiting for her to answer him. “My idea is that there’s a certain quality of beauty in the past, which the ordinary historical novelist completely ruins by his absurd conventions. The moon becomes the Regent of the Skies. People clap spurs to their horses, and so on. I’m going to treat people as though they were exactly the same as we are. The advantage is that, detached from modern conditions, one can make them more intense and more abstract than people who live as we do.”

Rachel had listened to all this with attention, but with a certain amount of bewilderment. They both sat thinking their own thoughts.

“I’m not like Hirst,” said Hewet, after a pause; he spoke meditatively; “I don’t see circles of chalk between people’s feet. I sometimes wish I did. It seems to me so tremendously complicated and confused. One can’t come to any decision at all; one’s less and less capable of making judgments. D’you find that? And then one never knows what any one feels. We’re all in the dark. We try to find out, but can you imagine anything more ludicrous than one person’s opinion of another person? One goes along thinking one knows; but one really doesn’t know.”

As he said this he was leaning on his elbow arranging and rearranging in the grass the stones which had represented Rachel and her aunts at luncheon. He was speaking as much to himself as to Rachel. He was reasoning against the desire, which had returned with intensity, to take her in his arms; to have done with indirectness; to explain exactly what he felt. What he said was against his belief; all the things that were important about her he knew; he felt them in the air around them; but he said nothing; he went on arranging the stones.

“I like you; d’you like me?” Rachel suddenly observed.

“I like you immensely,” Hewet replied, speaking with the relief of a person who is unexpectedly given an opportunity of saying what he wants to say. He stopped moving the pebbles.

“Mightn’t we call each other Rachel and Terence?” he asked.

“Terence,” Rachel repeated. “Terence—that’s like the cry of an owl.”

She looked up with a sudden rush of delight, and in looking at Terence with eyes widened by pleasure she was struck by the change that had come over the sky behind them. The substantial blue day had faded to a paler and more ethereal blue; the clouds were pink, far away and closely packed together; and the peace of evening had replaced the heat of the southern afternoon, in which they had started on their walk.

“It must be late!” she exclaimed.

It was nearly eight o’clock.

“But eight o’clock doesn’t count here, does it?” Terence asked, as they got up and turned inland again. They began to walk rather quickly down the hill on a little path between the olive trees.

They felt more intimate because they shared the knowledge of what eight o’clock in Richmond meant. Terence walked in front, for there was not room for them side by side.

“What I want to do in writing novels is very much what you want to do when you play the piano, I expect,” he began, turning and speaking over his shoulder. “We want to find out what’s behind things, don’t we?—Look at the lights down there,” he continued, “scattered about anyhow. Things I feel come to me like lights…. I want to combine them…. Have you ever seen fireworks that make figures? … I want to make figures…. Is that what you want to do?”

Now they were out on the road and could walk side by side.

“When I play the piano? Music is different…. But I see what you mean.” They tried to invent theories and to make their theories agree. As Hewet had no knowledge of music, Rachel took his stick and drew figures in the thin white dust to explain how Bach wrote his fugues.

“My musical gift was ruined,” he explained, as they walked on after one of these demonstrations, “by the village organist at home, who had invented a system of notation which he tried to teach me, with the result that I never got to the tune-playing at all. My mother thought music wasn’t manly for boys; she wanted me to kill rats and birds—that’s the worst of living in the country. We live in Devonshire. It’s the loveliest place in the world. Only—it’s always difficult at home when one’s grown up. I’d like you to know one of my sisters…. Oh, here’s your gate—” He pushed it open. They paused for a moment. She could not ask him to come in. She could not say that she hoped they would meet again; there was nothing to be said, and so without a word she went through the gate, and was soon invisible. Directly Hewet lost sight of her, he felt the old discomfort return, even more strongly than before. Their talk had been interrupted in the middle, just as he was beginning to say the things he wanted to say. After all, what had they been able to say? He ran his mind over the things they had said, the random, unnecessary things which had eddied round and round and used up all the time, and drawn them so close together and flung them so far apart, and left him in the end unsatisfied, ignorant still of what she felt and of what she was like. What was the use of talking, talking, merely talking?

[]

Chapter XVII

It was now the height of the season, and every ship that came from England left a few people on the shores of Santa Marina who drove up to the hotel. The fact that the Ambroses had a house where one could escape momentarily from the slightly inhuman atmosphere of an hotel was a source of genuine pleasure not only to Hirst and Hewet, but to the Elliots, the Thornburys, the Flushings, Miss Allan, Evelyn M., together with other people whose identity was so little developed that the Ambroses did not discover that they possessed names. By degrees there was established a kind of correspondence between the two houses, the big and the small, so that at most hours of the day one house could guess what was going on in the other, and the words “the villa” and “the hotel” called up the idea of two separate systems of life. Acquaintances showed signs of developing into friends, for that one tie to Mrs. Parry’s drawing-room had inevitably split into many other ties attached to different parts of England, and sometimes these alliances seemed cynically fragile, and sometimes painfully acute, lacking as they did the supporting background of organised English life. One night when the moon was round between the trees, Evelyn M. told Helen the story of her life, and claimed her everlasting friendship; on another occasion, merely because of a sigh, or a pause, or a word thoughtlessly dropped, poor Mrs. Elliot left the villa half in tears, vowing never again to meet the cold and scornful woman who had insulted her, and in truth, meet again they never did. It did not seem worth while to piece together so slight a friendship.

Hewet, indeed, might have found excellent material at this time up at the villa for some chapters in the novel which was to be called “Silence, or the Things People don’t say.” Helen and Rachel had become very silent. Having detected, as she thought, a secret, and judging that Rachel meant to keep it from her, Mrs. Ambrose respected it carefully, but from that cause, though unintentionally, a curious atmosphere of reserve grew up between them. Instead of sharing their views upon all subjects, and plunging after an idea wherever it might lead, they spoke chiefly in comment upon the people they saw, and the secret between them made itself felt in what they said even of Thornburys and Elliots. Always calm and unemotional in her judgments, Mrs. Ambrose was now inclined to be definitely pessimistic. She was not severe upon individuals so much as incredulous of the kindness of destiny, fate, what happens in the long run, and apt to insist that this was generally adverse to people in proportion as they deserved well. Even this theory she was ready to discard in favour of one which made chaos triumphant, things happening for no reason at all, and every one groping about in illusion and ignorance. With a certain pleasure she developed these views to her niece, taking a letter from home as her text: which gave good news, but might just as well have given bad. How did she know that at this very moment both her children were not lying dead, crushed by motor omnibuses? “It’s happening to somebody: why shouldn’t it happen to me?” she would argue, her face taking on the stoical expression of anticipated sorrow. However sincere these views may have been, they were undoubtedly called forth by the irrational state of her niece’s mind. It was so fluctuating, and went so quickly from joy to despair, that it seemed necessary to confront it with some stable opinion which naturally became dark as well as stable. Perhaps Mrs. Ambrose had some idea that in leading the talk into these quarters she might discover what was in Rachel’s mind, but it was difficult to judge, for sometimes she would agree with the gloomiest thing that was said, at other times she refused to listen, and rammed Helen’s theories down her throat with laughter, chatter, ridicule of the wildest, and fierce bursts of anger even at what she called the “croaking of a raven in the mud.”

“It’s hard enough without that,” she asserted.

“What’s hard?” Helen demanded.

“Life,” she replied, and then they both became silent.

Helen might draw her own conclusions as to why life was hard, as to why an hour later, perhaps, life was something so wonderful and vivid that the eyes of Rachel beholding it were positively exhilarating to a spectator. True to her creed, she did not attempt to interfere, although there were enough of those weak moments of depression to make it perfectly easy for a less scrupulous person to press through and know all, and perhaps Rachel was sorry that she did not choose. All these moods ran themselves into one general effect, which Helen compared to the sliding of a river, quick, quicker, quicker still, as it races to a waterfall. Her instinct was to cry out Stop! but even had there been any use in crying Stop! she would have refrained, thinking it best that things should take their way, the water racing because the earth was shaped to make it race.

It seemed that Rachel herself had no suspicion that she was watched, or that there was anything in her manner likely to draw attention to her. What had happened to her she did not know. Her mind was very much in the condition of the racing water to which Helen compared it. She wanted to see Terence; she was perpetually wishing to see him when he was not there; it was an agony to miss seeing him; agonies were strewn all about her day on account of him, but she never asked herself what this force driving through her life arose from. She thought of no result any more than a tree perpetually pressed downwards by the wind considers the result of being pressed downwards by the wind.

During the two or three weeks which had passed since their walk, half a dozen notes from him had accumulated in her drawer. She would read them, and spend the whole morning in a daze of happiness; the sunny land outside the window being no less capable of analysing its own colour and heat than she was of analysing hers. In these moods she found it impossible to read or play the piano, even to move being beyond her inclination. The time passed without her noticing it. When it was dark she was drawn to the window by the lights of the hotel. A light that went in and out was the light in Terence’s window: there he sat, reading perhaps, or now he was walking up and down pulling out one book after another; and now he was seated in his chair again, and she tried to imagine what he was thinking about. The steady lights marked the rooms where Terence sat with people moving round him. Every one who stayed in the hotel had a peculiar romance and interest about them. They were not ordinary people. She would attribute wisdom to Mrs. Elliot, beauty to Susan Warrington, a splendid vitality to Evelyn M., because Terence spoke to them. As unreflecting and pervasive were the moods of depression. Her mind was as the landscape outside when dark beneath clouds and straitly lashed by wind and hail. Again she would sit passive in her chair exposed to pain, and Helen’s fantastical or gloomy words were like so many darts goading her to cry out against the hardness of life. Best of all were the moods when for no reason again this stress of feeling slackened, and life went on as usual, only with a joy and colour in its events that was unknown before; they had a significance like that which she had seen in the tree: the nights were black bars separating her from the days; she would have liked to run all the days into one long continuity of sensation. Although these moods were directly or indirectly caused by the presence of Terence or the thought of him, she never said to herself that she was in love with him, or considered what was to happen if she continued to feel such things, so that Helen’s image of the river sliding on to the waterfall had a great likeness to the facts, and the alarm which Helen sometimes felt was justified.

In her curious condition of unanalysed sensations she was incapable of making a plan which should have any effect upon her state of mind. She abandoned herself to the mercy of accidents, missing Terence one day, meeting him the next, receiving his letters always with a start of surprise. Any woman experienced in the progress of courtship would have come by certain opinions from all this which would have given her at least a theory to go upon; but no one had ever been in love with Rachel, and she had never been in love with any one. Moreover, none of the books she read, from Wuthering Heights to Man and Superman, and the plays of Ibsen, suggested from their analysis of love that what their heroines felt was what she was feeling now. It seemed to her that her sensations had no name.

She met Terence frequently. When they did not meet, he was apt to send a note with a book or about a book, for he had not been able after all to neglect that approach to intimacy. But sometimes he did not come or did not write for several days at a time. Again when they met their meeting might be one of inspiriting joy or of harassing despair. Over all their partings hung the sense of interruption, leaving them both unsatisfied, though ignorant that the other shared the feeling.

If Rachel was ignorant of her own feelings, she was even more completely ignorant of his. At first he moved as a god; as she came to know him better he was still the centre of light, but combined with this beauty a wonderful power of making her daring and confident of herself. She was conscious of emotions and powers which she had never suspected in herself, and of a depth in the world hitherto unknown. When she thought of their relationship she saw rather than reasoned, representing her view of what Terence felt by a picture of him drawn across the room to stand by her side. This passage across the room amounted to a physical sensation, but what it meant she did not know.

Thus the time went on, wearing a calm, bright look upon its surface. Letters came from England, letters came from Willoughby, and the days accumulated their small events which shaped the year. Superficially, three odes of Pindar were mended, Helen covered about five inches of her embroidery, and St. John completed the first two acts of a play. He and Rachel being now very good friends, he read them aloud to her, and she was so genuinely impressed by the skill of his rhythms and the variety of his adjectives, as well as by the fact that he was Terence’s friend, that he began to wonder whether he was not intended for literature rather than for law. It was a time of profound thought and sudden revelations for more than one couple, and several single people.

A Sunday came, which no one in the villa with the exception of Rachel and the Spanish maid proposed to recognise. Rachel still went to church, because she had never, according to Helen, taken the trouble to think about it. Since they had celebrated the service at the hotel she went there expecting to get some pleasure from her passage across the garden and through the hall of the hotel, although it was very doubtful whether she would see Terence, or at any rate have the chance of speaking to him.

As the greater number of visitors at the hotel were English, there was almost as much difference between Sunday and Wednesday as there is in England, and Sunday appeared here as there, the mute black ghost or penitent spirit of the busy weekday. The English could not pale the sunshine, but they could in some miraculous way slow down the hours, dull the incidents, lengthen the meals, and make even the servants and page-boys wear a look of boredom and propriety. The best clothes which every one put on helped the general effect; it seemed that no lady could sit down without bending a clean starched petticoat, and no gentleman could breathe without a sudden crackle from a stiff shirt-front.

As the hands of the clock neared eleven, on this particular Sunday, various people tended to draw together in the hall, clasping little red-leaved books in their hands. The clock marked a few minutes to the hour when a stout black figure passed through the hall with a preoccupied expression, as though he would rather not recognise salutations, although aware of them, and disappeared down the corridor which led from it.

“Mr. Bax,” Mrs. Thornbury whispered.

The little group of people then began to move off in the same direction as the stout black figure. Looked at in an odd way by people who made no effort to join them, they moved with one exception slowly and consciously towards the stairs. Mrs. Flushing was the exception. She came running downstairs, strode across the hall, joined the procession much out of breath, demanding of Mrs. Thornbury in an agitated whisper, “Where, where?”

“We are all going,” said Mrs. Thornbury gently, and soon they were descending the stairs two by two. Rachel was among the first to descend. She did not see that Terence and Hirst came in at the rear possessed of no black volume, but of one thin book bound in light-blue cloth, which St. John carried under his arm.

The chapel was the old chapel of the monks. It was a profound cool place where they had said Mass for hundreds of years, and done penance in the cold moonlight, and worshipped old brown pictures and carved saints which stood with upraised hands of blessing in the hollows in the walls. The transition from Catholic to Protestant worship had been bridged by a time of disuse, when there were no services, and the place was used for storing jars of oil, liqueur, and deck-chairs; the hotel flourishing, some religious body had taken the place in hand, and it was now fitted out with a number of glazed yellow benches, claret-coloured footstools; it had a small pulpit, and a brass eagle carrying the Bible on its back, while the piety of different women had supplied ugly squares of carpet, and long strips of embroidery heavily wrought with monograms in gold.

As the congregation entered they were met by mild sweet chords issuing from a harmonium, where Miss Willett, concealed from view by a baize curtain, struck emphatic chords with uncertain fingers. The sound spread through the chapel as the rings of water spread from a fallen stone. The twenty or twenty-five people who composed the congregation first bowed their heads and then sat up and looked about them. It was very quiet, and the light down here seemed paler than the light above. The usual bows and smiles were dispensed with, but they recognised each other. The Lord’s Prayer was read over them. As the childlike babble of voices rose, the congregation, many of whom had only met on the staircase, felt themselves pathetically united and well-disposed towards each other. As if the prayer were a torch applied to fuel, a smoke seemed to rise automatically and fill the place with the ghosts of innumerable services on innumerable Sunday mornings at home. Susan Warrington in particular was conscious of the sweetest sense of sisterhood, as she covered her face with her hands and saw slips of bent backs through the chinks between her fingers. Her emotions rose calmly and evenly, approving of herself and of life at the same time. It was all so quiet and so good. But having created this peaceful atmosphere Mr. Bax suddenly turned the page and read a psalm. Though he read it with no change of voice the mood was broken.

“Be merciful unto me, O God,” he read, “for man goeth about to devour me: he is daily fighting and troubling me…. They daily mistake my words: all that they imagine is to do me evil. They hold all together and keep themselves close…. Break their teeth, O God, in their mouths; smite the jaw-bones of the lions, O Lord: let them fall away like water that runneth apace; and when they shoot their arrows let them be rooted out.”

Nothing in Susan’s experience at all corresponded with this, and as she had no love of language she had long ceased to attend to such remarks, although she followed them with the same kind of mechanical respect with which she heard many of Lear’s speeches read aloud. Her mind was still serene and really occupied with praise of her own nature and praise of God, that is of the solemn and satisfactory order of the world.

But it could be seen from a glance at their faces that most of the others, the men in particular, felt the inconvenience of the sudden intrusion of this old savage. They looked more secular and critical as they listened to the ravings of the old black man with a cloth round his loins cursing with vehement gesture by a camp-fire in the desert. After that there was a general sound of pages being turned as if they were in class, and then they read a little bit of the Old Testament about making a well, very much as school boys translate an easy passage from the Anabasis when they have shut up their French grammar. Then they returned to the New Testament and the sad and beautiful figure of Christ. While Christ spoke they made another effort to fit his interpretation of life upon the lives they lived, but as they were all very different, some practical, some ambitious, some stupid, some wild and experimental, some in love, and others long past any feeling except a feeling of comfort, they did very different things with the words of Christ.

From their faces it seemed that for the most part they made no effort at all, and, recumbent as it were, accepted the ideas that the words gave as representing goodness, in the same way, no doubt, as one of those industrious needlewomen had accepted the bright ugly pattern on her mat as beauty.

Whatever the reason might be, for the first time in her life, instead of slipping at once into some curious pleasant cloud of emotion, too familiar to be considered, Rachel listened critically to what was being said. By the time they had swung in an irregular way from prayer to psalm, from psalm to history, from history to poetry, and Mr. Bax was giving out his text, she was in a state of acute discomfort. Such was the discomfort she felt when forced to sit through an unsatisfactory piece of music badly played. Tantalised, enraged by the clumsy insensitiveness of the conductor, who put the stress on the wrong places, and annoyed by the vast flock of the audience tamely praising and acquiescing without knowing or caring, so she was now tantalised and enraged, only here, with eyes half-shut and lips pursed together, the atmosphere of forced solemnity increased her anger. All round her were people pretending to feel what they did not feel, while somewhere above her floated the idea which they could none of them grasp, which they pretended to grasp, always escaping out of reach, a beautiful idea, an idea like a butterfly. One after another, vast and hard and cold, appeared to her the churches all over the world where this blundering effort and misunderstanding were perpetually going on, great buildings, filled with innumerable men and women, not seeing clearly, who finally gave up the effort to see, and relapsed tamely into praise and acquiescence, half-shutting their eyes and pursing up their lips. The thought had the same sort of physical discomfort as is caused by a film of mist always coming between the eyes and the printed page. She did her best to brush away the film and to conceive something to be worshipped as the service went on, but failed, always misled by the voice of Mr. Bax saying things which misrepresented the idea, and by the patter of baaing inexpressive human voices falling round her like damp leaves. The effort was tiring and dispiriting. She ceased to listen, and fixed her eyes on the face of a woman near her, a hospital nurse, whose expression of devout attention seemed to prove that she was at any rate receiving satisfaction. But looking at her carefully she came to the conclusion that the hospital nurse was only slavishly acquiescent, and that the look of satisfaction was produced by no splendid conception of God within her. How, indeed, could she conceive anything far outside her own experience, a woman with a commonplace face like hers, a little round red face, upon which trivial duties and trivial spites had drawn lines, whose weak blue eyes saw without intensity or individuality, whose features were blurred, insensitive, and callous? She was adoring something shallow and smug, clinging to it, so the obstinate mouth witnessed, with the assiduity of a limpet; nothing would tear her from her demure belief in her own virtue and the virtues of her religion. She was a limpet, with the sensitive side of her stuck to a rock, for ever dead to the rush of fresh and beautiful things past her. The face of this single worshipper became printed on Rachel’s mind with an impression of keen horror, and she had it suddenly revealed to her what Helen meant and St. John meant when they proclaimed their hatred of Christianity. With the violence that now marked her feelings, she rejected all that she had implicitly believed.

Meanwhile Mr. Bax was half-way through the second lesson. She looked at him. He was a man of the world with supple lips and an agreeable manner, he was indeed a man of much kindliness and simplicity, though by no means clever, but she was not in the mood to give any one credit for such qualities, and examined him as though he were an epitome of all the vices of his service.

Right at the back of the chapel Mrs. Flushing, Hirst, and Hewet sat in a row in a very different frame of mind. Hewet was staring at the roof with his legs stuck out in front of him, for as he had never tried to make the service fit any feeling or idea of his, he was able to enjoy the beauty of the language without hindrance. His mind was occupied first with accidental things, such as the women’s hair in front of him, the light on the faces, then with the words which seemed to him magnificent, and then more vaguely with the characters of the other worshippers. But when he suddenly perceived Rachel, all these thoughts were driven out of his head, and he thought only of her. The psalms, the prayers, the Litany, and the sermon were all reduced to one chanting sound which paused, and then renewed itself, a little higher or a little lower. He stared alternately at Rachel and at the ceiling, but his expression was now produced not by what he saw but by something in his mind. He was almost as painfully disturbed by his thoughts as she was by hers.

Early in the service Mrs. Flushing had discovered that she had taken up a Bible instead of a prayer-book, and, as she was sitting next to Hirst, she stole a glance over his shoulder. He was reading steadily in the thin pale-blue volume. Unable to understand, she peered closer, upon which Hirst politely laid the book before her, pointing to the first line of a Greek poem and then to the translation opposite.

“What’s that?” she whispered inquisitively.

“Sappho,” he replied. “The one Swinburne did—the best thing that’s ever been written.”

Mrs. Flushing could not resist such an opportunity. She gulped down the Ode to Aphrodite during the Litany, keeping herself with difficulty from asking when Sappho lived, and what else she wrote worth reading, and contriving to come in punctually at the end with “the forgiveness of sins, the Resurrection of the body, and the life everlastin’. Amen.”

Meanwhile Hirst took out an envelope and began scribbling on the back of it. When Mr. Bax mounted the pulpit he shut up Sappho with his envelope between the pages, settled his spectacles, and fixed his gaze intently upon the clergyman. Standing in the pulpit he looked very large and fat; the light coming through the greenish unstained window-glass made his face appear smooth and white like a very large egg.

He looked round at all the faces looking mildly up at him, although some of them were the faces of men and women old enough to be his grandparents, and gave out his text with weighty significance. The argument of the sermon was that visitors to this beautiful land, although they were on a holiday, owed a duty to the natives. It did not, in truth, differ very much from a leading article upon topics of general interest in the weekly newspapers. It rambled with a kind of amiable verbosity from one heading to another, suggesting that all human beings are very much the same under their skins, illustrating this by the resemblance of the games which little Spanish boys play to the games little boys in London streets play, observing that very small things do influence people, particularly natives; in fact, a very dear friend of Mr Bax’s had told him that the success of our rule in India, that vast country, largely depended upon the strict code of politeness which the English adopted towards the natives, which led to the remark that small things were not necessarily small, and that somehow to the virtue of sympathy, which was a virtue never more needed than to-day, when we lived in a time of experiment and upheaval—witness the aeroplane and wireless telegraph, and there were other problems which hardly presented themselves to our fathers, but which no man who called himself a man could leave unsettled. Here Mr. Bax became more definitely clerical, if it were possible, he seemed to speak with a certain innocent craftiness, as he pointed out that all this laid a special duty upon earnest Christians. What men were inclined to say now was, “Oh, that fellow—he’s a parson.” What we want them to say is, “He’s a good fellow”—in other words, “He is my brother.” He exhorted them to keep in touch with men of the modern type; they must sympathise with their multifarious interests in order to keep before their eyes that whatever discoveries were made there was one discovery which could not be superseded, which was indeed as much of a necessity to the most successful and most brilliant of them all as it had been to their fathers. The humblest could help; the least important things had an influence (here his manner became definitely priestly and his remarks seemed to be directed to women, for indeed Mr. Bax’s congregations were mainly composed of women, and he was used to assigning them their duties in his innocent clerical campaigns). Leaving more definite instruction, he passed on, and his theme broadened into a peroration for which he drew a long breath and stood very upright,—“As a drop of water, detached, alone, separate from others, falling from the cloud and entering the great ocean, alters, so scientists tell us, not only the immediate spot in the ocean where it falls, but all the myriad drops which together compose the great universe of waters, and by this means alters the configuration of the globe and the lives of millions of sea creatures, and finally the lives of the men and women who seek their living upon the shores—as all this is within the compass of a single drop of water, such as any rain shower sends in millions to lose themselves in the earth, to lose themselves we say, but we know very well that the fruits of the earth could not flourish without them—so is a marvel comparable to this within the reach of each one of us, who dropping a little word or a little deed into the great universe alters it; yea, it is a solemn thought, alters it, for good or for evil, not for one instant, or in one vicinity, but throughout the entire race, and for all eternity.” Whipping round as though to avoid applause, he continued with the same breath, but in a different tone of voice,—“And now to God the Father …”

He gave his blessing, and then, while the solemn chords again issued from the harmonium behind the curtain, the different people began scraping and fumbling and moving very awkwardly and consciously towards the door. Half-way upstairs, at a point where the lights and sounds of the upper world conflicted with the dimness and the dying hymn-tune of the under, Rachel felt a hand drop upon her shoulder.

“Miss Vinrace,” Mrs. Flushing whispered peremptorily, “stay to luncheon. It’s such a dismal day. They don’t even give one beef for luncheon. Please stay.”

Here they came out into the hall, where once more the little band was greeted with curious respectful glances by the people who had not gone to church, although their clothing made it clear that they approved of Sunday to the very verge of going to church. Rachel felt unable to stand any more of this particular atmosphere, and was about to say she must go back, when Terence passed them, drawn along in talk with Evelyn M. Rachel thereupon contented herself with saying that the people looked very respectable, which negative remark Mrs. Flushing interpreted to mean that she would stay.

“English people abroad!” she returned with a vivid flash of malice. “Ain’t they awful! But we won’t stay here,” she continued, plucking at Rachel’s arm. “Come up to my room.”

She bore her past Hewet and Evelyn and the Thornburys and the Elliots. Hewet stepped forward.

“Luncheon——” he began.

“Miss Vinrace has promised to lunch with me,” said Mrs. Flushing, and began to pound energetically up the staircase, as though the middle classes of England were in pursuit. She did not stop until she had slammed her bedroom door behind them.

“Well, what did you think of it?” she demanded, panting slightly.

All the disgust and horror which Rachel had been accumulating burst forth beyond her control.

“I thought it the most loathsome exhibition I’d ever seen!” she broke out. “How can they—how dare they—what do they mean by it—Mr. Bax, hospital nurses, old men, prostitutes, disgusting——”

She hit off the points she remembered as fast as she could, but she was too indignant to stop to analyse her feelings. Mrs. Flushing watched her with keen gusto as she stood ejaculating with emphatic movements of her head and hands in the middle of the room.

“Go on, go on, do go on,” she laughed, clapping her hands. “It’s delightful to hear you!”

“But why do you go?” Rachel demanded.

“I’ve been every Sunday of my life ever since I can remember,” Mrs. Flushing chuckled, as though that were a reason by itself.

Rachel turned abruptly to the window. She did not know now what it was that had put her into such a passion; the sight of Terence in the hall had confused her thoughts, leaving her merely indignant. She looked straight at their own villa, half-way up the side of the mountain. The most familiar view seen framed through glass has a certain unfamiliar distinction, and she grew calm as she gazed. Then she remembered that she was in the presence of some one she did not know well, and she turned and looked at Mrs. Flushing. Mrs. Flushing was still sitting on the edge of the bed, looking up, with her lips parted, so that her strong white teeth showed in two rows.

“Tell me,” she said, “which d’you like best, Mr. Hewet or Mr. Hirst?”

“Mr. Hewet,” Rachel replied, but her voice did not sound natural.

“Which is the one who reads Greek in church?” Mrs. Flushing demanded.

It might have been either of them, and while Mrs. Flushing proceeded to describe them both, and to say that both frightened her, but one frightened her more than the other, Rachel looked for a chair. The room, of course, was one of the largest and most luxurious in the hotel. There were a great many arm-chairs and settees covered in brown holland, but each of these was occupied by a large square piece of yellow cardboard, and all the pieces of cardboard were dotted or lined with spots or dashes of bright oil paint.

“But you’re not to look at those,” said Mrs. Flushing as she saw Rachel’s eye wander. She jumped up, and turned as many as she could, face downwards, upon the floor. Rachel, however, managed to possess herself of one of them, and, with the vanity of an artist, Mrs. Flushing demanded anxiously, “Well, well?”

“It’s a hill,” Rachel replied. There could be no doubt that Mrs. Flushing had represented the vigorous and abrupt fling of the earth up into the air; you could almost see the clods flying as it whirled.

Rachel passed from one to another. They were all marked by something of the jerk and decision of their maker; they were all perfectly untrained onslaughts of the brush upon some half-realised idea suggested by hill or tree; and they were all in some way characteristic of Mrs. Flushing.

“I see things movin’,” Mrs. Flushing explained. “So”—she swept her hand through a yard of the air. She then took up one of the cardboards which Rachel had laid aside, seated herself on a stool, and began to flourish a stump of charcoal. While she occupied herself in strokes which seemed to serve her as speech serves others, Rachel, who was very restless, looked about her.

“Open the wardrobe,” said Mrs. Flushing after a pause, speaking indistinctly because of a paint-brush in her mouth, “and look at the things.”

As Rachel hesitated, Mrs. Flushing came forward, still with a paint-brush in her mouth, flung open the wings of her wardrobe, and tossed a quantity of shawls, stuffs, cloaks, embroideries, on to the bed. Rachel began to finger them. Mrs. Flushing came up once more, and dropped a quantity of beads, brooches, earrings, bracelets, tassels, and combs among the draperies. Then she went back to her stool and began to paint in silence. The stuffs were coloured and dark and pale; they made a curious swarm of lines and colours upon the counterpane, with the reddish lumps of stone and peacocks’ feathers and clear pale tortoise-shell combs lying among them.

“The women wore them hundred of years ago, they wear ’em still,” Mrs. Flushing remarked. “My husband rides about and finds ’em; they don’t know what they’re worth, so we get ’em cheap. And we shall sell ’em to smart women in London,” she chuckled, as though the thought of these ladies and their absurd appearance amused her. After painting for some minutes, she suddenly laid down her brush and fixed her eyes upon Rachel.

“I tell you what I want to do,” she said. “I want to go up there and see things for myself. It’s silly stayin’ here with a pack of old maids as though we were at the seaside in England. I want to go up the river and see the natives in their camps. It’s only a matter of ten days under canvas. My husband’s done it. One would lie out under the trees at night and be towed down the river by day, and if we saw anythin’ nice we’d shout out and tell ’em to stop.” She rose and began piercing the bed again and again with a long golden pin, as she watched to see what effect her suggestion had upon Rachel.

“We must make up a party,” she went on. “Ten people could hire a launch. Now you’ll come, and Mrs. Ambrose’ll come, and will Mr. Hirst and t’other gentleman come? Where’s a pencil?”

She became more and more determined and excited as she evolved her plan. She sat on the edge of the bed and wrote down a list of surnames, which she invariably spelt wrong. Rachel was enthusiastic, for indeed the idea was immeasurably delightful to her. She had always had a great desire to see the river, and the name of Terence threw a lustre over the prospect, which made it almost too good to come true. She did what she could to help Mrs. Flushing by suggesting names, helping her to spell them, and counting up the days of the week upon her fingers. As Mrs. Flushing wanted to know all she could tell her about the birth and pursuits of every person she suggested, and threw in wild stories of her own as to the temperaments and habits of artists, and people of the same name who used to come to Chillingley in the old days, but were doubtless not the same, though they too were very clever men interested in Egyptology, the business took some time. At last Mrs. Flushing sought her diary for help, the method of reckoning dates on the fingers proving unsatisfactory. She opened and shut every drawer in her writing-table, and then cried furiously, “Yarmouth! Yarmouth! Drat the woman! She’s always out of the way when she’s wanted!”

At this moment the luncheon gong began to work itself into its midday frenzy. Mrs. Flushing rang her bell violently. The door was opened by a handsome maid who was almost as upright as her mistress.

“Oh, Yarmouth,” said Mrs. Flushing, “just find my diary and see where ten days from now would bring us to, and ask the hall porter how many men ’ud be wanted to row eight people up the river for a week, and what it ’ud cost, and put it on a slip of paper and leave it on my dressing-table. Now—” she pointed at the door with a superb forefinger so that Rachel had to lead the way.

“Oh, and Yarmouth,” Mrs. Flushing called back over her shoulder. “Put those things away and hang ’em in their right places, there’s a good girl, or it fusses Mr. Flushin’.”

To all of which Yarmouth merely replied, “Yes, ma’am.”

As they entered the long dining-room it was obvious that the day was still Sunday, although the mood was slightly abating. The Flushings’ table was set by the side in the window, so that Mrs. Flushing could scrutinise each figure as it entered, and her curiosity seemed to be intense.

“Old Mrs. Paley,” she whispered as the wheeled chair slowly made its way through the door, Arthur pushing behind. “Thornburys” came next. “That nice woman,” she nudged Rachel to look at Miss Allan. “What’s her name?” The painted lady who always came in late, tripping into the room with a prepared smile as though she came out upon a stage, might well have quailed before Mrs. Flushing’s stare, which expressed her steely hostility to the whole tribe of painted ladies. Next came the two young men whom Mrs. Flushing called collectively the Hirsts. They sat down opposite, across the gangway.

Mr. Flushing treated his wife with a mixture of admiration and indulgence, making up by the suavity and fluency of his speech for the abruptness of hers. While she darted and ejaculated he gave Rachel a sketch of the history of South American art. He would deal with one of his wife’s exclamations, and then return as smoothly as ever to his theme. He knew very well how to make a luncheon pass agreeably, without being dull or intimate. He had formed the opinion, so he told Rachel, that wonderful treasures lay hid in the depths of the land; the things Rachel had seen were merely trifles picked up in the course of one short journey. He thought there might be giant gods hewn out of stone in the mountain-side; and colossal figures standing by themselves in the middle of vast green pasture lands, where none but natives had ever trod. Before the dawn of European art he believed that the primitive huntsmen and priests had built temples of massive stone slabs, had formed out of the dark rocks and the great cedar trees majestic figures of gods and of beasts, and symbols of the great forces, water, air, and forest among which they lived. There might be prehistoric towns, like those in Greece and Asia, standing in open places among the trees, filled with the works of this early race. Nobody had been there; scarcely anything was known. Thus talking and displaying the most picturesque of his theories, Rachel’s attention was fixed upon him.

She did not see that Hewet kept looking at her across the gangway, between the figures of waiters hurrying past with plates. He was inattentive, and Hirst was finding him also very cross and disagreeable. They had touched upon all the usual topics—upon politics and literature, gossip and Christianity. They had quarrelled over the service, which was every bit as fine as Sappho, according to Hewet; so that Hirst’s paganism was mere ostentation. Why go to church, he demanded, merely in order to read Sappho? Hirst observed that he had listened to every word of the sermon, as he could prove if Hewet would like a repetition of it; and he went to church in order to realise the nature of his Creator, which he had done very vividly that morning, thanks to Mr. Bax, who had inspired him to write three of the most superb lines in English literature, an invocation to the Deity.

“I wrote ’em on the back of the envelope of my aunt’s last letter,” he said, and pulled it from between the pages of Sappho.

“Well, let’s hear them,” said Hewet, slightly mollified by the prospect of a literary discussion.

“My dear Hewet, do you wish us both to be flung out of the hotel by an enraged mob of Thornburys and Elliots?” Hirst enquired. “The merest whisper would be sufficient to incriminate me for ever. God!” he broke out, “what’s the use of attempting to write when the world’s peopled by such damned fools? Seriously, Hewet, I advise you to give up literature. What’s the good of it? There’s your audience.”

He nodded his head at the tables where a very miscellaneous collection of Europeans were now engaged in eating, in some cases in gnawing, the stringy foreign fowls. Hewet looked, and grew more out of temper than ever. Hirst looked too. His eyes fell upon Rachel, and he bowed to her.

“I rather think Rachel’s in love with me,” he remarked, as his eyes returned to his plate. “That’s the worst of friendships with young women—they tend to fall in love with one.”

To that Hewet made no answer whatever, and sat singularly still. Hirst did not seem to mind getting no answer, for he returned to Mr. Bax again, quoting the peroration about the drop of water; and when Hewet scarcely replied to these remarks either, he merely pursed his lips, chose a fig, and relapsed quite contentedly into his own thoughts, of which he always had a very large supply. When luncheon was over they separated, taking their cups of coffee to different parts of the hall.

From his chair beneath the palm-tree Hewet saw Rachel come out of the dining-room with the Flushings; he saw them look round for chairs, and choose three in a corner where they could go on talking in private. Mr. Flushing was now in the full tide of his discourse. He produced a sheet of paper upon which he made drawings as he went on with his talk. He saw Rachel lean over and look, pointing to this and that with her finger. Hewet unkindly compared Mr. Flushing, who was extremely well dressed for a hot climate, and rather elaborate in his manner, to a very persuasive shop-keeper. Meanwhile, as he sat looking at them, he was entangled in the Thornburys and Miss Allan, who, after hovering about for a minute or two, settled in chairs round him, holding their cups in their hands. They wanted to know whether he could tell them anything about Mr. Bax. Mr. Thornbury as usual sat saying nothing, looking vaguely ahead of him, occasionally raising his eye-glasses, as if to put them on, but always thinking better of it at the last moment, and letting them fall again. After some discussion, the ladies put it beyond a doubt that Mr. Bax was not the son of Mr. William Bax. There was a pause. Then Mrs. Thornbury remarked that she was still in the habit of saying Queen instead of King in the National Anthem. There was another pause. Then Miss Allan observed reflectively that going to church abroad always made her feel as if she had been to a sailor’s funeral. There was then a very long pause, which threatened to be final, when, mercifully, a bird about the size of a magpie, but of a metallic blue colour, appeared on the section of the terrace that could be seen from where they sat. Mrs. Thornbury was led to enquire whether we should like it if all our rooks were blue—“What do you think, William?” she asked, touching her husband on the knee.

“If all our rooks were blue,” he said,—he raised his glasses; he actually placed them on his nose,—“they would not live long in Wiltshire,” he concluded; he dropped his glasses to his side again. The three elderly people now gazed meditatively at the bird, which was so obliging as to stay in the middle of the view for a considerable space of time, thus making it unnecessary for them to speak again. Hewet began to wonder whether he might not cross over to the Flushings’ corner, when Hirst appeared from the background, slipped into a chair by Rachel’s side, and began to talk to her with every appearance of familiarity. Hewet could stand it no longer. He rose, took his hat and dashed out of doors.

[]

Chapter XVIII

Everything he saw was distasteful to him. He hated the blue and white, the intensity and definiteness, the hum and heat of the south; the landscape seemed to him as hard and as romantic as a cardboard background on the stage, and the mountain but a wooden screen against a sheet painted blue. He walked fast in spite of the heat of the sun.

Two roads led out of the town on the eastern side; one branched off towards the Ambroses’ villa, the other struck into the country, eventually reaching a village on the plain, but many footpaths, which had been stamped in the earth when it was wet, led off from it, across great dry fields, to scattered farmhouses, and the villas of rich natives. Hewet stepped off the road on to one of these, in order to avoid the hardness and heat of the main road, the dust of which was always being raised in small clouds by carts and ramshackle flies which carried parties of festive peasants, or turkeys swelling unevenly like a bundle of air balls beneath a net, or the brass bedstead and black wooden boxes of some newly wedded pair.

The exercise indeed served to clear away the superficial irritations of the morning, but he remained miserable. It seemed proved beyond a doubt that Rachel was indifferent to him, for she had scarcely looked at him, and she had talked to Mr. Flushing with just the same interest with which she talked to him. Finally, Hirst’s odious words flicked his mind like a whip, and he remembered that he had left her talking to Hirst. She was at this moment talking to him, and it might be true, as he said, that she was in love with him. He went over all the evidence for this supposition—her sudden interest in Hirst’s writing, her way of quoting his opinions respectfully, or with only half a laugh; her very nickname for him, “the great Man,” might have some serious meaning in it. Supposing that there were an understanding between them, what would it mean to him?

“Damn it all!” he demanded, “am I in love with her?” To that he could only return himself one answer. He certainly was in love with her, if he knew what love meant. Ever since he had first seen her he had been interested and attracted, more and more interested and attracted, until he was scarcely able to think of anything except Rachel. But just as he was sliding into one of the long feasts of meditation about them both, he checked himself by asking whether he wanted to marry her? That was the real problem, for these miseries and agonies could not be endured, and it was necessary that he should make up his mind. He instantly decided that he did not want to marry any one. Partly because he was irritated by Rachel the idea of marriage irritated him. It immediately suggested the picture of two people sitting alone over the fire; the man was reading, the woman sewing. There was a second picture. He saw a man jump up, say good-night, leave the company and hasten away with the quiet secret look of one who is stealing to certain happiness. Both these pictures were very unpleasant, and even more so was a third picture, of husband and wife and friend; and the married people glancing at each other as though they were content to let something pass unquestioned, being themselves possessed of the deeper truth. Other pictures—he was walking very fast in his irritation, and they came before him without any conscious effort, like pictures on a sheet—succeeded these. Here were the worn husband and wife sitting with their children round them, very patient, tolerant, and wise. But that, too, was an unpleasant picture. He tried all sorts of pictures, taking them from the lives of friends of his, for he knew many different married couples; but he saw them always, walled up in a warm firelit room. When, on the other hand, he began to think of unmarried people, he saw them active in an unlimited world; above all, standing on the same ground as the rest, without shelter or advantage. All the most individual and humane of his friends were bachelors and spinsters; indeed he was surprised to find that the women he most admired and knew best were unmarried women. Marriage seemed to be worse for them than it was for men. Leaving these general pictures he considered the people whom he had been observing lately at the hotel. He had often revolved these questions in his mind, as he watched Susan and Arthur, or Mr. and Mrs. Thornbury, or Mr. and Mrs. Elliot. He had observed how the shy happiness and surprise of the engaged couple had gradually been replaced by a comfortable, tolerant state of mind, as if they had already done with the adventure of intimacy and were taking up their parts. Susan used to pursue Arthur about with a sweater, because he had one day let slip that a brother of his had died of pneumonia. The sight amused him, but was not pleasant if you substituted Terence and Rachel for Arthur and Susan; and Arthur was far less eager to get you in a corner and talk about flying and the mechanics of aeroplanes. They would settle down. He then looked at the couples who had been married for several years. It was true that Mrs. Thornbury had a husband, and that for the most part she was wonderfully successful in bringing him into the conversation, but one could not imagine what they said to each other when they were alone. There was the same difficulty with regard to the Elliots, except that they probably bickered openly in private. They sometimes bickered in public, though these disagreements were painfully covered over by little insincerities on the part of the wife, who was afraid of public opinion, because she was much stupider than her husband, and had to make efforts to keep hold of him. There could be no doubt, he decided, that it would have been far better for the world if these couples had separated. Even the Ambroses, whom he admired and respected profoundly—in spite of all the love between them, was not their marriage too a compromise? She gave way to him; she spoilt him; she arranged things for him; she who was all truth to others was not true to her husband, was not true to her friends if they came in conflict with her husband. It was a strange and piteous flaw in her nature. Perhaps Rachel had been right, then, when she said that night in the garden, “We bring out what’s worst in each other—we should live separate.”

No, Rachel had been utterly wrong! Every argument seemed to be against undertaking the burden of marriage until he came to Rachel’s argument, which was manifestly absurd. From having been the pursued, he turned and became the pursuer. Allowing the case against marriage to lapse, he began to consider the peculiarities of character which had led to her saying that. Had she meant it? Surely one ought to know the character of the person with whom one might spend all one’s life; being a novelist, let him try to discover what sort of person she was. When he was with her he could not analyse her qualities, because he seemed to know them instinctively, but when he was away from her it sometimes seemed to him that he did not know her at all. She was young, but she was also old; she had little self-confidence, and yet she was a good judge of people. She was happy; but what made her happy? If they were alone and the excitement had worn off, and they had to deal with the ordinary facts of the day, what would happen? Casting his eye upon his own character, two things appeared to him: that he was very unpunctual, and that he disliked answering notes. As far as he knew Rachel was inclined to be punctual, but he could not remember that he had ever seen her with a pen in her hand. Let him next imagine a dinner-party, say at the Crooms, and Wilson, who had taken her down, talking about the state of the Liberal party. She would say—of course she was absolutely ignorant of politics. Nevertheless she was intelligent certainly, and honest too. Her temper was uncertain—that he had noticed—and she was not domestic, and she was not easy, and she was not quiet, or beautiful, except in some dresses in some lights. But the great gift she had was that she understood what was said to her; there had never been any one like her for talking to. You could say anything—you could say everything, and yet she was never servile. Here he pulled himself up, for it seemed to him suddenly that he knew less about her than about any one. All these thoughts had occurred to him many times already; often had he tried to argue and reason; and again he had reached the old state of doubt. He did not know her, and he did not know what she felt, or whether they could live together, or whether he wanted to marry her, and yet he was in love with her.

Supposing he went to her and said (he slackened his pace and began to speak aloud, as if he were speaking to Rachel):

“I worship you, but I loathe marriage, I hate its smugness, its safety, its compromise, and the thought of you interfering in my work, hindering me; what would you answer?”

He stopped, leant against the trunk of a tree, and gazed without seeing them at some stones scattered on the bank of the dry river-bed. He saw Rachel’s face distinctly, the grey eyes, the hair, the mouth; the face that could look so many things—plain, vacant, almost insignificant, or wild, passionate, almost beautiful, yet in his eyes was always the same because of the extraordinary freedom with which she looked at him, and spoke as she felt. What would she answer? What did she feel? Did she love him, or did she feel nothing at all for him or for any other man, being, as she had said that afternoon, free, like the wind or the sea?

“Oh, you’re free!” he exclaimed, in exultation at the thought of her, “and I’d keep you free. We’d be free together. We’d share everything together. No happiness would be like ours. No lives would compare with ours.” He opened his arms wide as if to hold her and the world in one embrace.

No longer able to consider marriage, or to weigh coolly what her nature was, or how it would be if they lived together, he dropped to the ground and sat absorbed in the thought of her, and soon tormented by the desire to be in her presence again.

[]

Chapter XIX

But Hewet need not have increased his torments by imagining that Hirst was still talking to Rachel. The party very soon broke up, the Flushings going in one direction, Hirst in another, and Rachel remaining in the hall, pulling the illustrated papers about, turning from one to another, her movements expressing the unformed restless desire in her mind. She did not know whether to go or to stay, though Mrs. Flushing had commanded her to appear at tea. The hall was empty, save for Miss Willett who was playing scales with her fingers upon a sheet of sacred music, and the Carters, an opulent couple who disliked the girl, because her shoe laces were untied, and she did not look sufficiently cheery, which by some indirect process of thought led them to think that she would not like them. Rachel certainly would not have liked them, if she had seen them, for the excellent reason that Mr. Carter waxed his moustache, and Mrs. Carter wore bracelets, and they were evidently the kind of people who would not like her; but she was too much absorbed by her own restlessness to think or to look.

She was turning over the slippery pages of an American magazine, when the hall door swung, a wedge of light fell upon the floor, and a small white figure upon whom the light seemed focussed, made straight across the room to her.

“What! You here?” Evelyn exclaimed. “Just caught a glimpse of you at lunch; but you wouldn’t condescend to look at me.”

It was part of Evelyn’s character that in spite of many snubs which she received or imagined, she never gave up the pursuit of people she wanted to know, and in the long run generally succeeded in knowing them and even in making them like her.

She looked round her. “I hate this place. I hate these people,” she said. “I wish you’d come up to my room with me. I do want to talk to you.”

As Rachel had no wish to go or to stay, Evelyn took her by the wrist and drew her out of the hall and up the stairs. As they went upstairs two steps at a time, Evelyn, who still kept hold of Rachel’s hand, ejaculated broken sentences about not caring a hang what people said. “Why should one, if one knows one’s right? And let ’em all go to blazes! Them’s my opinions!”

She was in a state of great excitement, and the muscles of her arms were twitching nervously. It was evident that she was only waiting for the door to shut to tell Rachel all about it. Indeed, directly they were inside her room, she sat on the end of the bed and said, “I suppose you think I’m mad?”

Rachel was not in the mood to think clearly about any one’s state of mind. She was however in the mood to say straight out whatever occurred to her without fear of the consequences.

“Somebody’s proposed to you,” she remarked.

“How on earth did you guess that?” Evelyn exclaimed, some pleasure mingling with her surprise. “Do I look as if I’d just had a proposal?”

“You look as if you had them every day,” Rachel replied.

“But I don’t suppose I’ve had more than you’ve had,” Evelyn laughed rather insincerely.

“I’ve never had one.”

“But you will—lots—it’s the easiest thing in the world—But that’s not what’s happened this afternoon exactly. It’s—Oh, it’s a muddle, a detestable, horrible, disgusting muddle!”

She went to the wash-stand and began sponging her cheeks with cold water; for they were burning hot. Still sponging them and trembling slightly she turned and explained in the high pitched voice of nervous excitement: “Alfred Perrott says I’ve promised to marry him, and I say I never did. Sinclair says he’ll shoot himself if I don’t marry him, and I say, ‘Well, shoot yourself!’ But of course he doesn’t—they never do. And Sinclair got hold of me this afternoon and began bothering me to give an answer, and accusing me of flirting with Alfred Perrott, and told me I’d no heart, and was merely a Siren, oh, and quantities of pleasant things like that. So at last I said to him, ‘Well, Sinclair, you’ve said enough now. You can just let me go.’ And then he caught me and kissed me—the disgusting brute—I can still feel his nasty hairy face just there—as if he’d any right to, after what he’d said!”

She sponged a spot on her left cheek energetically.

“I’ve never met a man that was fit to compare with a woman!” she cried; “they’ve no dignity, they’ve no courage, they’ve nothing but their beastly passions and their brute strength! Would any woman have behaved like that—if a man had said he didn’t want her? We’ve too much self-respect; we’re infinitely finer than they are.”

She walked about the room, dabbing her wet cheeks with a towel. Tears were now running down with the drops of cold water.

“It makes me angry,” she explained, drying her eyes.

Rachel sat watching her. She did not think of Evelyn’s position; she only thought that the world was full of people in torment.

“There’s only one man here I really like,” Evelyn continued; “Terence Hewet. One feels as if one could trust him.”

At these words Rachel suffered an indescribable chill; her heart seemed to be pressed together by cold hands.

“Why?” she asked. “Why can you trust him?”

“I don’t know,” said Evelyn. “Don’t you have feelings about people? Feelings you’re absolutely certain are right? I had a long talk with Terence the other night. I felt we really were friends after that. There’s something of a woman in him—” She paused as though she were thinking of very intimate things that Terence had told her, so at least Rachel interpreted her gaze.

She tried to force herself to say, “Has he proposed to you?” but the question was too tremendous, and in another moment Evelyn was saying that the finest men were like women, and women were nobler than men—for example, one couldn’t imagine a woman like Lillah Harrison thinking a mean thing or having anything base about her.

“How I’d like you to know her!” she exclaimed.

She was becoming much calmer, and her cheeks were now quite dry. Her eyes had regained their usual expression of keen vitality, and she seemed to have forgotten Alfred and Sinclair and her emotion.

“Lillah runs a home for inebriate women in the Deptford Road,” she continued. “She started it, managed it, did everything off her own bat, and it’s now the biggest of its kind in England. You can’t think what those women are like—and their homes. But she goes among them at all hours of the day and night. I’ve often been with her…. That’s what’s the matter with us…. We don’t do things. What do you do?” she demanded, looking at Rachel with a slightly ironical smile. Rachel had scarcely listened to any of this, and her expression was vacant and unhappy. She had conceived an equal dislike for Lillah Harrison and her work in the Deptford Road, and for Evelyn M. and her profusion of love affairs.

“I play,” she said with an affectation of stolid composure.

“That’s about it!” Evelyn laughed. “We none of us do anything but play. And that’s why women like Lillah Harrison, who’s worth twenty of you and me, have to work themselves to the bone. But I’m tired of playing,” she went on, lying flat on the bed, and raising her arms above her head. Thus stretched out, she looked more diminutive than ever.

“I’m going to do something. I’ve got a splendid idea. Look here, you must join. I’m sure you’ve got any amount of stuff in you, though you look—well, as if you’d lived all your life in a garden.” She sat up, and began to explain with animation. “I belong to a club in London. It meets every Saturday, so it’s called the Saturday Club. We’re supposed to talk about art, but I’m sick of talking about art—what’s the good of it? With all kinds of real things going on round one? It isn’t as if they’d got anything to say about art, either. So what I’m going to tell ’em is that we’ve talked enough about art, and we’d better talk about life for a change. Questions that really matter to people’s lives, the White Slave Traffic, Women Suffrage, the Insurance Bill, and so on. And when we’ve made up our mind what we want to do we could form ourselves into a society for doing it…. I’m certain that if people like ourselves were to take things in hand instead of leaving it to policemen and magistrates, we could put a stop to—prostitution”—she lowered her voice at the ugly word—“in six months. My idea is that men and women ought to join in these matters. We ought to go into Piccadilly and stop one of these poor wretches and say: ‘Now, look here, I’m no better than you are, and I don’t pretend to be any better, but you’re doing what you know to be beastly, and I won’t have you doing beastly things, because we’re all the same under our skins, and if you do a beastly thing it does matter to me.’ That’s what Mr. Bax was saying this morning, and it’s true, though you clever people—you’re clever too, aren’t you?—don’t believe it.”

When Evelyn began talking—it was a fact she often regretted—her thoughts came so quickly that she never had any time to listen to other people’s thoughts. She continued without more pause than was needed for taking breath.

“I don’t see why the Saturday club people shouldn’t do a really great work in that way,” she went on. “Of course it would want organisation, some one to give their life to it, but I’m ready to do that. My notion’s to think of the human beings first and let the abstract ideas take care of themselves. What’s wrong with Lillah—if there is anything wrong—is that she thinks of Temperance first and the women afterwards. Now there’s one thing I’ll say to my credit,” she continued; “I’m not intellectual or artistic or anything of that sort, but I’m jolly human.” She slipped off the bed and sat on the floor, looking up at Rachel. She searched up into her face as if she were trying to read what kind of character was concealed behind the face. She put her hand on Rachel’s knee.

“It is being human that counts, isn’t it?” she continued. “Being real, whatever Mr. Hirst may say. Are you real?”

Rachel felt much as Terence had felt that Evelyn was too close to her, and that there was something exciting in this closeness, although it was also disagreeable. She was spared the need of finding an answer to the question, for Evelyn proceeded, “Do you believe in anything?”

In order to put an end to the scrutiny of these bright blue eyes, and to relieve her own physical restlessness, Rachel pushed back her chair and exclaimed, “In everything!” and began to finger different objects, the books on the table, the photographs, the fleshly [freshly] leaved plant with the stiff bristles, which stood in a large earthenware pot in the window.

“I believe in the bed, in the photographs, in the pot, in the balcony, in the sun, in Mrs. Flushing,” she remarked, still speaking recklessly, with something at the back of her mind forcing her to say the things that one usually does not say. “But I don’t believe in God, I don’t believe in Mr. Bax, I don’t believe in the hospital nurse. I don’t believe—” She took up a photograph and, looking at it, did not finish her sentence.

“That’s my mother,” said Evelyn, who remained sitting on the floor binding her knees together with her arms, and watching Rachel curiously.

Rachel considered the portrait. “Well, I don’t much believe in her,” she remarked after a time in a low tone of voice.

Mrs. Murgatroyd looked indeed as if the life had been crushed out of her; she knelt on a chair, gazing piteously from behind the body of a Pomeranian dog which she clasped to her cheek, as if for protection.

“And that’s my dad,” said Evelyn, for there were two photographs in one frame. The second photograph represented a handsome soldier with high regular features and a heavy black moustache; his hand rested on the hilt of his sword; there was a decided likeness between him and Evelyn.

“And it’s because of them,” said Evelyn, “that I’m going to help the other women. You’ve heard about me, I suppose? They weren’t married, you see; I’m not anybody in particular. I’m not a bit ashamed of it. They loved each other anyhow, and that’s more than most people can say of their parents.”

Rachel sat down on the bed, with the two pictures in her hands, and compared them—the man and the woman who had, so Evelyn said, loved each other. That fact interested her more than the campaign on behalf of unfortunate women which Evelyn was once more beginning to describe. She looked again from one to the other.

“What d’you think it’s like,” she asked, as Evelyn paused for a minute, “being in love?”

“Have you never been in love?” Evelyn asked. “Oh no—one’s only got to look at you to see that,” she added. She considered. “I really was in love once,” she said. She fell into reflection, her eyes losing their bright vitality and approaching something like an expression of tenderness. “It was heavenly!—while it lasted. The worst of it is it don’t last, not with me. That’s the bother.”

She went on to consider the difficulty with Alfred and Sinclair about which she had pretended to ask Rachel’s advice. But she did not want advice; she wanted intimacy. When she looked at Rachel, who was still looking at the photographs on the bed, she could not help seeing that Rachel was not thinking about her. What was she thinking about, then? Evelyn was tormented by the little spark of life in her which was always trying to work through to other people, and was always being rebuffed. Falling silent she looked at her visitor, her shoes, her stockings, the combs in her hair, all the details of her dress in short, as though by seizing every detail she might get closer to the life within.

Rachel at last put down the photographs, walked to the window and remarked, “It’s odd. People talk as much about love as they do about religion.”

“I wish you’d sit down and talk,” said Evelyn impatiently.

Instead Rachel opened the window, which was made in two long panes, and looked down into the garden below.

“That’s where we got lost the first night,” she said. “It must have been in those bushes.”

“They kill hens down there,” said Evelyn. “They cut their heads off with a knife—disgusting! But tell me—what——”

“I’d like to explore the hotel,” Rachel interrupted. She drew her head in and looked at Evelyn, who still sat on the floor.

“It’s just like other hotels,” said Evelyn.

That might be, although every room and passage and chair in the place had a character of its own in Rachel’s eyes; but she could not bring herself to stay in one place any longer. She moved slowly towards the door.

“What is it you want?” said Evelyn. “You make me feel as if you were always thinking of something you don’t say…. Do say it!”

But Rachel made no response to this invitation either. She stopped with her fingers on the handle of the door, as if she remembered that some sort of pronouncement was due from her.

“I suppose you’ll marry one of them,” she said, and then turned the handle and shut the door behind her. She walked slowly down the passage, running her hand along the wall beside her. She did not think which way she was going, and therefore walked down a passage which only led to a window and a balcony. She looked down at the kitchen premises, the wrong side of hotel life, which was cut off from the right side by a maze of small bushes. The ground was bare, old tins were scattered about, and the bushes wore towels and aprons upon their heads to dry. Every now and then a waiter came out in a white apron and threw rubbish on to a heap. Two large women in cotton dresses were sitting on a bench with blood-smeared tin trays in front of them and yellow bodies across their knees. They were plucking the birds, and talking as they plucked. Suddenly a chicken came floundering, half flying, half running into the space, pursued by a third woman whose age could hardly be under eighty. Although wizened and unsteady on her legs she kept up the chase, egged on by the laughter of the others; her face was expressive of furious rage, and as she ran she swore in Spanish. Frightened by hand-clapping here, a napkin there, the bird ran this way and that in sharp angles, and finally fluttered straight at the old woman, who opened her scanty grey skirts to enclose it, dropped upon it in a bundle, and then holding it out cut its head off with an expression of vindictive energy and triumph combined. The blood and the ugly wriggling fascinated Rachel, so that although she knew that some one had come up behind and was standing beside her, she did not turn round until the old woman had settled down on the bench beside the others. Then she looked up sharply, because of the ugliness of what she had seen. It was Miss Allan who stood beside her.

“Not a pretty sight,” said Miss Allan, “although I daresay it’s really more humane than our method…. I don’t believe you’ve ever been in my room,” she added, and turned away as if she meant Rachel to follow her. Rachel followed, for it seemed possible that each new person might remove the mystery which burdened her.

The bedrooms at the hotel were all on the same pattern, save that some were larger and some smaller; they had a floor of dark red tiles; they had a high bed, draped in mosquito curtains; they had each a writing-table and a dressing-table, and a couple of arm-chairs. But directly a box was unpacked the rooms became very different, so that Miss Allan’s room was very unlike Evelyn’s room. There were no variously coloured hatpins on her dressing-table; no scent-bottles; no narrow curved pairs of scissors; no great variety of shoes and boots; no silk petticoats lying on the chairs. The room was extremely neat. There seemed to be two pairs of everything. The writing-table, however, was piled with manuscript, and a table was drawn out to stand by the arm-chair on which were two separate heaps of dark library books, in which there were many slips of paper sticking out at different degrees of thickness. Miss Allan had asked Rachel to come in out of kindness, thinking that she was waiting about with nothing to do. Moreover, she liked young women, for she had taught many of them, and having received so much hospitality from the Ambroses she was glad to be able to repay a minute part of it. She looked about accordingly for something to show her. The room did not provide much entertainment. She touched her manuscript. “Age of Chaucer; Age of Elizabeth; Age of Dryden,” she reflected; “I’m glad there aren’t many more ages. I’m still in the middle of the eighteenth century. Won’t you sit down, Miss Vinrace? The chair, though small, is firm…. Euphues. The germ of the English novel,” she continued, glancing at another page. “Is that the kind of thing that interests you?”

She looked at Rachel with great kindness and simplicity, as though she would do her utmost to provide anything she wished to have. This expression had a remarkable charm in a face otherwise much lined with care and thought.

“Oh no, it’s music with you, isn’t it?” she continued, recollecting, “and I generally find that they don’t go together. Sometimes of course we have prodigies—” She was looking about her for something and now saw a jar on the mantelpiece which she reached down and gave to Rachel. “If you put your finger into this jar you may be able to extract a piece of preserved ginger. Are you a prodigy?”

But the ginger was deep and could not be reached.

“Don’t bother,” she said, as Miss Allan looked about for some other implement. “I daresay I shouldn’t like preserved ginger.”

“You’ve never tried?” enquired Miss Allan. “Then I consider that it is your duty to try now. Why, you may add a new pleasure to life, and as you are still young—” She wondered whether a button-hook would do. “I make it a rule to try everything,” she said. “Don’t you think it would be very annoying if you tasted ginger for the first time on your death-bed, and found you never liked anything so much? I should be so exceedingly annoyed that I think I should get well on that account alone.”

She was now successful, and a lump of ginger emerged on the end of the button-hook. While she went to wipe the button-hook, Rachel bit the ginger and at once cried, “I must spit it out!”

“Are you sure you have really tasted it?” Miss Allan demanded.

For answer Rachel threw it out of the window.

“An experience anyhow,” said Miss Allan calmly. “Let me see—I have nothing else to offer you, unless you would like to taste this.” A small cupboard hung above her bed, and she took out of it a slim elegant jar filled with a bright green fluid.

“Crême de Menthe,” she said. “Liqueur, you know. It looks as if I drank, doesn’t it? As a matter of fact it goes to prove what an exceptionally abstemious person I am. I’ve had that jar for six-and-twenty years,” she added, looking at it with pride, as she tipped it over, and from the height of the liquid it could be seen that the bottle was still untouched.

“Twenty-six years?” Rachel exclaimed.

Miss Allan was gratified, for she had meant Rachel to be surprised.

“When I went to Dresden six-and-twenty years ago,” she said, “a certain friend of mine announced her intention of making me a present. She thought that in the event of shipwreck or accident a stimulant might be useful. However, as I had no occasion for it, I gave it back on my return. On the eve of any foreign journey the same bottle always makes its appearance, with the same note; on my return in safety it is always handed back. I consider it a kind of charm against accidents. Though I was once detained twenty-four hours by an accident to the train in front of me, I have never met with any accident myself. Yes,” she continued, now addressing the bottle, “we have seen many climes and cupboards together, have we not? I intend one of these days to have a silver label made with an inscription. It is a gentleman, as you may observe, and his name is Oliver…. I do not think I could forgive you, Miss Vinrace, if you broke my Oliver,” she said, firmly taking the bottle out of Rachel’s hands and replacing it in the cupboard.

Rachel was swinging the bottle by the neck. She was interested by Miss Allan to the point of forgetting the bottle.

“Well,” she exclaimed, “I do think that odd; to have had a friend for twenty-six years, and a bottle, and—to have made all those journeys.”

“Not at all; I call it the reverse of odd,” Miss Allan replied. “I always consider myself the most ordinary person I know. It’s rather distinguished to be as ordinary as I am. I forget—are you a prodigy, or did you say you were not a prodigy?”

She smiled at Rachel very kindly. She seemed to have known and experienced so much, as she moved cumbrously about the room, that surely there must be balm for all anguish in her words, could one induce her to have recourse to them. But Miss Allan, who was now locking the cupboard door, showed no signs of breaking the reticence which had snowed her under for years. An uncomfortable sensation kept Rachel silent; on the one hand, she wished to whirl high and strike a spark out of the cool pink flesh; on the other she perceived there was nothing to be done but to drift past each other in silence.

“I’m not a prodigy. I find it very difficult to say what I mean—” she observed at length.

“It’s a matter of temperament, I believe,” Miss Allan helped her. “There are some people who have no difficulty; for myself I find there are a great many things I simply cannot say. But then I consider myself very slow. One of my colleagues now, knows whether she likes you or not—let me see, how does she do it?—by the way you say good-morning at breakfast. It is sometimes a matter of years before I can make up my mind. But most young people seem to find it easy?”

“Oh no,” said Rachel. “It’s hard!”

Miss Allan looked at Rachel quietly, saying nothing; she suspected that there were difficulties of some kind. Then she put her hand to the back of her head, and discovered that one of the grey coils of hair had come loose.

“I must ask you to be so kind as to excuse me,” she said, rising, “if I do my hair. I have never yet found a satisfactory type of hairpin. I must change my dress, too, for the matter of that; and I should be particularly glad of your assistance, because there is a tiresome set of hooks which I can fasten for myself, but it takes from ten to fifteen minutes; whereas with your help——”

She slipped off her coat and skirt and blouse, and stood doing her hair before the glass, a massive homely figure, her petticoat being so short that she stood on a pair of thick slate-grey legs.

“People say youth is pleasant; I myself find middle age far pleasanter,” she remarked, removing hair pins and combs, and taking up her brush. When it fell loose her hair only came down to her neck.

“When one was young,” she continued, “things could seem so very serious if one was made that way…. And now my dress.”

In a wonderfully short space of time her hair had been reformed in its usual loops. The upper half of her body now became dark green with black stripes on it; the skirt, however, needed hooking at various angles, and Rachel had to kneel on the floor, fitting the eyes to the hooks.

“Our Miss Johnson used to find life very unsatisfactory, I remember,” Miss Allan continued. She turned her back to the light. “And then she took to breeding guinea-pigs for their spots, and became absorbed in that. I have just heard that the yellow guinea-pig has had a black baby. We had a bet of sixpence on about it. She will be very triumphant.”

The skirt was fastened. She looked at herself in the glass with the curious stiffening of her face generally caused by looking in the glass.

“Am I in a fit state to encounter my fellow-beings?” she asked. “I forget which way it is—but they find black animals very rarely have coloured babies—it may be the other way round. I have had it so often explained to me that it is very stupid of me to have forgotten again.”

She moved about the room acquiring small objects with quiet force, and fixing them about her—a locket, a watch and chain, a heavy gold bracelet, and the parti-coloured button of a suffrage society. Finally, completely equipped for Sunday tea, she stood before Rachel, and smiled at her kindly. She was not an impulsive woman, and her life had schooled her to restrain her tongue. At the same time, she was possessed of an amount of good-will towards others, and in particular towards the young, which often made her regret that speech was so difficult.

“Shall we descend?” she said.

She put one hand upon Rachel’s shoulder, and stooping, picked up a pair of walking-shoes with the other, and placed them neatly side by side outside her door. As they walked down the passage they passed many pairs of boots and shoes, some black and some brown, all side by side, and all different, even to the way in which they lay together.

“I always think that people are so like their boots,” said Miss Allan. “That is Mrs. Paley’s—” but as she spoke the door opened, and Mrs. Paley rolled out in her chair, equipped also for tea.

She greeted Miss Allan and Rachel.

“I was just saying that people are so like their boots,” said Miss Allan. Mrs. Paley did not hear. She repeated it more loudly still. Mrs. Paley did not hear. She repeated it a third time. Mrs. Paley heard, but she did not understand. She was apparently about to repeat it for the fourth time, when Rachel suddenly said something inarticulate, and disappeared down the corridor. This misunderstanding, which involved a complete block in the passage, seemed to her unbearable. She walked quickly and blindly in the opposite direction, and found herself at the end of a cul de sac. There was a window, and a table and a chair in the window, and upon the table stood a rusty inkstand, an ashtray, an old copy of a French newspaper, and a pen with a broken nib. Rachel sat down, as if to study the French newspaper, but a tear fell on the blurred French print, raising a soft blot. She lifted her head sharply, exclaiming aloud, “It’s intolerable!” Looking out of the window with eyes that would have seen nothing even had they not been dazed by tears, she indulged herself at last in violent abuse of the entire day. It had been miserable from start to finish; first, the service in the chapel; then luncheon; then Evelyn; then Miss Allan; then old Mrs. Paley blocking up the passage. All day long she had been tantalized and put off. She had now reached one of those eminences, the result of some crisis, from which the world is finally displayed in its true proportions. She disliked the look of it immensely—churches, politicians, misfits, and huge impostures—men like Mr. Dalloway, men like Mr. Bax, Evelyn and her chatter, Mrs. Paley blocking up the passage. Meanwhile the steady beat of her own pulse represented the hot current of feeling that ran down beneath; beating, struggling, fretting. For the time, her own body was the source of all the life in the world, which tried to burst forth here—there—and was repressed now by Mr. Bax, now by Evelyn, now by the imposition of ponderous stupidity, the weight of the entire world. Thus tormented, she would twist her hands together, for all things were wrong, all people stupid. Vaguely seeing that there were people down in the garden beneath she represented them as aimless masses of matter, floating hither and thither, without aim except to impede her. What were they doing, those other people in the world?

“Nobody knows,” she said. The force of her rage was beginning to spend itself, and the vision of the world which had been so vivid became dim.

“It’s a dream,” she murmured. She considered the rusty inkstand, the pen, the ash-tray, and the old French newspaper. These small and worthless objects seemed to her to represent human lives.

“We’re asleep and dreaming,” she repeated. But the possibility which now suggested itself that one of the shapes might be the shape of Terence roused her from her melancholy lethargy. She became as restless as she had been before she sat down. She was no longer able to see the world as a town laid out beneath her. It was covered instead by a haze of feverish red mist. She had returned to the state in which she had been all day. Thinking was no escape. Physical movement was the only refuge, in and out of rooms, in and out of peoples’ minds, seeking she knew not what. Therefore she rose, pushed back the table, and went downstairs. She went out of the hall door, and, turning the corner of the hotel, found herself among the people whom she had seen from the window. But owing to the broad sunshine after shaded passages, and to the substance of living people after dreams, the group appeared with startling intensity, as though the dusty surface had been peeled off everything, leaving only the reality and the instant. It had the look of a vision printed on the dark at night. White and grey and purple figures were scattered on the green, round wicker tables, in the middle the flame of the tea-urn made the air waver like a faulty sheet of glass, a massive green tree stood over them as if it were a moving force held at rest. As she approached, she could hear Evelyn’s voice repeating monotonously, “Here then—here—good doggie, come here;” for a moment nothing seemed to happen; it all stood still, and then she realised that one of the figures was Helen Ambrose; and the dust again began to settle.

The group indeed had come together in a miscellaneous way; one tea-table joining to another tea-table, and deck-chairs serving to connect two groups. But even at a distance it could be seen that Mrs. Flushing, upright and imperious, dominated the party. She was talking vehemently to Helen across the table.

“Ten days under canvas,” she was saying. “No comforts. If you want comforts, don’t come. But I may tell you, if you don’t come you’ll regret it all your life. You say yes?”

At this moment Mrs. Flushing caught sight of Rachel.

“Ah, there’s your niece. She’s promised. You’re coming, aren’t you?” Having adopted the plan, she pursued it with the energy of a child.

Rachel took her part with eagerness.

“Of course I’m coming. So are you, Helen. And Mr. Pepper too.” As she sat ^down she realised that she was surrounded by people she knew, but that Terence was not among them. From various angles people began saying what they thought of the proposed expedition. According to some it would be hot, but the nights would be cold; according to others, the difficulties would lie rather in getting a boat, and in speaking the language. Mrs. Flushing disposed of all objections, whether due to man or due to nature, by announcing that her husband would settle all that.

Meanwhile Mr. Flushing quietly explained to Helen that the expedition was really a simple matter; it took five days at the outside; and the place—a native village—was certainly well worth seeing before she returned to England. Helen murmured ambiguously, and did not commit herself to one answer rather than to another.

The tea-party, however, included too many different kinds of people for general conversation to flourish; and from Rachel’s point of view possessed the great advantage that it was quite unnecessary for her to talk. Over there Susan and Arthur were explaining to Mrs. Paley that an expedition had been proposed; and Mrs. Paley having grasped the fact, gave the advice of an old traveller that they should take nice canned vegetables, fur cloaks, and insect powder. She leant over to Mrs. Flushing and whispered something which from the twinkle in her eyes probably had reference to bugs. Then Helen was reciting “Toll for the Brave” to St. John Hirst, in order apparently to win a sixpence which lay upon the table; while Mr. Hughling Elliot imposed silence upon his section of the audience by his fascinating anecdote of Lord Curzon and the undergraduate’s bicycle. Mrs. Thornbury was trying to remember the name of a man who might have been another Garibaldi, and had written a book which they ought to read; and Mr. Thornbury recollected that he had a pair of binoculars at anybody’s service. Miss Allan meanwhile murmured with the curious intimacy which a spinster often achieves with dogs, to the fox-terrier which Evelyn had at last induced to come over to them. Little particles of dust or blossom fell on the plates now and then when the branches sighed above. Rachel seemed to see and hear a little of everything, much as a river feels the twigs that fall into it and sees the sky above, but her eyes were too vague for Evelyn’s liking. She came across, and sat on the ground at Rachel’s feet.

“Well?” she asked suddenly. “What are you thinking about?

“Miss Warrington,” Rachel replied rashly, because she had to say something. She did indeed see Susan murmuring to Mrs. Elliot, while Arthur stared at her with complete confidence in his own love. Both Rachel and Evelyn then began to listen to what Susan was saying.

“There’s the ordering and the dogs and the garden, and the children coming to be taught,” her voice proceeded rhythmically as if checking the list, “and my tennis, and the village, and letters to write for father, and a thousand little things that don’t sound much; but I never have a moment to myself, and when I go to bed, I’m so sleepy I’m off before my head touches the pillow. Besides I like to be a great deal with my Aunts—I’m a great bore, aren’t I, Aunt Emma?” (she smiled at old Mrs. Paley, who with head slightly drooped was regarding the cake with speculative affection), “and father has to be very careful about chills in winter which means a great deal of running about, because he won’t look after himself, any more than you will, Arthur! So it all mounts up!”

Her voice mounted too, in a mild ecstasy of satisfaction with her life and her own nature. Rachel suddenly took a violent dislike to Susan, ignoring all that was kindly, modest, and even pathetic about her. She appeared insincere and cruel; she saw her grown stout and prolific, the kind blue eyes now shallow and watery, the bloom of the cheeks congealed to a network of dry red canals.

Helen turned to her. “Did you go to church?” she asked. She had won her sixpence and seemed making ready to go.

“Yes,” said Rachel. “For the last time,” she added.

In preparing to put on her gloves, Helen dropped one.

“You’re not going?” Evelyn asked, taking hold of one glove as if to keep them.

“It’s high time we went,” said Helen. “Don’t you see how silent every one’s getting——?”

A silence had fallen upon them all, caused partly by one of the accidents of talk, and partly because they saw some one approaching. Helen could not see who it was, but keeping her eyes fixed upon Rachel observed something which made her say to herself, “So it’s Hewet.” She drew on her gloves with a curious sense of the significance of the moment. Then she rose, for Mrs. Flushing had seen Hewet too, and was demanding information about rivers and boats which showed that the whole conversation would now come over again.

Rachel followed her, and they walked in silence down the avenue. In spite of what Helen had seen and understood, the feeling that was uppermost in her mind was now curiously perverse; if she went on this expedition, she would not be able to have a bath, the effort appeared to her to be great and disagreeable.

“It’s so unpleasant, being cooped up with people one hardly knows,” she remarked. “People who mind being seen naked.”

“You don’t mean to go?” Rachel asked.

The intensity with which this was spoken, irritated Mrs. Ambrose.

“I don’t mean to go, and I don’t mean not to go,” she replied. She became more and more casual and indifferent.

“After all, I daresay we’ve seen all there is to be seen; and there’s the bother of getting there, and whatever they may say it’s bound to be vilely uncomfortable.”

For some time Rachel made no reply; but every sentence Helen spoke increased her bitterness. At last she broke out—

“Thank God, Helen, I’m not like you! I sometimes think you don’t think or feel or care or do anything but exist! You’re like Mr. Hirst. You see that things are bad, and you pride yourself on saying so. It’s what you call being honest; as a matter of fact it’s being lazy, being dull, being nothing. You don’t help; you put an end to things.”

Helen smiled as if she rather enjoyed the attack.

“Well?” she enquired.

“It seems to me bad—that’s all,” Rachel replied.

“Quite likely,” said Helen.

At any other time Rachel would probably have been silenced by her Aunt’s candour; but this afternoon she was not in the mood to be silenced by any one. A quarrel would be welcome.

“You’re only half alive,” she continued.

“Is that because I didn’t accept Mr. Flushing’s invitation?” Helen asked, “or do you always think that?”

At the moment it appeared to Rachel that she had always seen the same faults in Helen, from the very first night on board the Euphrosyne, in spite of her beauty, in spite of her magnanimity and their love.

“Oh, it’s only what’s the matter with every one!” she exclaimed. “No one feels—no one does anything but hurt. I tell you, Helen, the world’s bad. It’s an agony, living, wanting——”

Here she tore a handful of leaves from a bush and crushed them to control herself.

“The lives of these people,” she tried to explain, “the aimlessness, the way they live. One goes from one to another, and it’s all the same. One never gets what one wants out of any of them.”

Her emotional state and her confusion would have made her an easy prey if Helen had wished to argue or had wished to draw confidences. But instead of talking she fell into a profound silence as they walked on. Aimless, trivial, meaningless, oh no—what she had seen at tea made it impossible for her to believe that. The little jokes, the chatter, the inanities of the afternoon had shrivelled up before her eyes. Underneath the likings and spites, the comings together and partings, great things were happening—terrible things, because they were so great. Her sense of safety was shaken, as if beneath twigs and dead leaves she had seen the movement of a snake. It seemed to her that a moment’s respite was allowed, a moment’s make-believe, and then again the profound and reasonless law asserted itself, moulding them all to its liking, making and destroying.

She looked at Rachel walking beside her, still crushing the leaves in her fingers and absorbed in her own thoughts. She was in love, and she pitied her profoundly. But she roused herself from these thoughts and apologised. “I’m very sorry,” she said. “but if I’m dull, it’s my nature, and it can’t be helped.” If it was a natural defect, however, she found an easy remedy, for she went on to say that she thought Mr. Flushing’s scheme a very good one, only needing a little consideration, which it appeared she had given it by the time they reached home. By that time they had settled that if anything more was said, they would accept the invitation.

[]

Chapter XX

When considered in detail by Mr. Flushing and Mrs. Ambrose the expedition proved neither dangerous nor difficult. They found also that it was not even unusual. Every year at this season English people made parties which steamed a short way up the river, landed, and looked at the native village, bought a certain number of things from the natives, and returned again without damage done to mind or body. When it was discovered that six people really wished the same thing the arrangements were soon carried out.

Since the time of Elizabeth very few people had seen the river, and nothing had been done to change its appearance from what it was to the eyes of the Elizabethan voyagers. The time of Elizabeth was only distant from the present time by a moment of space compared with the ages which had passed since the water had run between those banks, and the green thickets swarmed there, and the small trees had grown to huge wrinkled trees in solitude. Changing only with the change of the sun and the clouds, the waving green mass had stood there for century after century, and the water had run between its banks ceaselessly, sometimes washing away earth and sometimes the branches of trees, while in other parts of the world one town had risen upon the ruins of another town, and the men in the towns had become more and more articulate and unlike each other. A few miles of this river were visible from the top of the mountain where some weeks before the party from the hotel had picnicked. Susan and Arthur had seen it as they kissed each other, and Terence and Rachel as they sat talking about Richmond, and Evelyn and Perrott as they strolled about, imagining that they were great captains sent to colonise the world. They had seen the broad blue mark across the sand where it flowed into the sea, and the green cloud of trees mass themselves about it farther up, and finally hide its waters altogether from sight. At intervals for the first twenty miles or so houses were scattered on the bank; by degrees the houses became huts, and, later still, there was neither hut nor house, but trees and grass, which were seen only by hunters, explorers, or merchants, marching or sailing, but making no settlement.

By leaving Santa Marina early in the morning, driving twenty miles and riding eight, the party, which was composed finally of six English people, reached the river-side as the night fell. They came cantering through the trees—Mr. and Mrs. Flushing, Helen Ambrose, Rachel, Terence, and St. John. The tired little horses then stopped automatically, and the English dismounted. Mrs. Flushing strode to the river-bank in high spirits. The day had been long and hot, but she had enjoyed the speed and the open air; she had left the hotel which she hated, and she found the company to her liking. The river was swirling past in the darkness; they could just distinguish the smooth moving surface of the water, and the air was full of the sound of it. They stood in an empty space in the midst of great tree-trunks, and out there a little green light moving slightly up and down showed them where the steamer lay in which they were to embark.

When they all stood upon its deck they found that it was a very small boat which throbbed gently beneath them for a few minutes, and then shoved smoothly through the water. They seemed to be driving into the heart of the night, for the trees closed in front of them, and they could hear all round them the rustling of leaves. The great darkness had the usual effect of taking away all desire for communication by making their words sound thin and small; and, after walking round the deck three or four times, they clustered together, yawning deeply, and looking at the same spot of deep gloom on the banks. Murmuring very low in the rhythmical tone of one oppressed by the air, Mrs. Flushing began to wonder where they were to sleep, for they could not sleep downstairs, they could not sleep in a doghole smelling of oil, they could not sleep on deck, they could not sleep—She yawned profoundly. It was as Helen had foreseen; the question of nakedness had risen already, although they were half asleep, and almost invisible to each other. With St. John’s help she stretched an awning, and persuaded Mrs. Flushing that she could take off her clothes behind this, and that no one would notice if by chance some part of her which had been concealed for forty-five years was laid bare to the human eye. Mattresses were thrown down, rugs provided, and the three women lay near each other in the soft open air.

The gentlemen, having smoked a certain number of cigarettes, dropped the glowing ends into the river, and looked for a time at the ripples wrinkling the black water beneath them, undressed too, and lay down at the other end of the boat. They were very tired, and curtained from each other by the darkness. The light from one lantern fell upon a few ropes, a few planks of the deck, and the rail of the boat, but beyond that there was unbroken darkness, no light reached their faces, or the trees which were massed on the sides of the river.

Soon Wilfred Flushing slept, and Hirst slept. Hewet alone lay awake looking straight up into the sky. The gentle motion and the black shapes that were drawn ceaselessly across his eyes had the effect of making it impossible for him to think. Rachel’s presence so near him lulled thought asleep. Being so near him, only a few paces off at the other end of the boat, she made it as impossible for him to think about her as it would have been impossible to see her if she had stood quite close to him, her forehead against his forehead. In some strange way the boat became identified with himself, and just as it would have been useless for him to get up and steer the boat, so was it useless for him to struggle any longer with the irresistible force of his own feelings. He was drawn on and on away from all he knew, slipping over barriers and past landmarks into unknown waters as the boat glided over the smooth surface of the river. In profound peace, enveloped in deeper unconsciousness than had been his for many nights, he lay on deck watching the tree-tops change their position slightly against the sky, and arch themselves, and sink and tower huge, until he passed from seeing them into dreams where he lay beneath the shadow of vast trees, looking up into the sky.

When they woke next morning they had gone a considerable way up the river; on the right was a high yellow bank of sand tufted with trees, on the left a swamp quivering with long reeds and tall bamboos on the top of which, swaying slightly, perched vivid green and yellow birds. The morning was hot and still. After breakfast they drew chairs together and sat in an irregular semicircle in the bow. An awning above their heads protected them from the heat of the sun, and the breeze which the boat made aired them softly. Mrs. Flushing was already dotting and striping her canvas, her head jerking this way and that with the action of a bird nervously picking up grain; the others had books or pieces of paper or embroidery on their knees, at which they looked fitfully and again looked at the river ahead. At one point Hewet read part of a poem aloud, but the number of moving things entirely vanquished his words. He ceased to read, and no one spoke. They moved on under the shelter of the trees. There was now a covey of red birds feeding on one of the little islets to the left, or again a blue-green parrot flew shrieking from tree to tree. As they moved on the country grew wilder and wilder. The trees and the undergrowth seemed to be strangling each other near the ground in a multitudinous wrestle; while here and there a splendid tree towered high above the swarm, shaking its thin green umbrellas lightly in the upper air. Hewet looked at his books again. The morning was peaceful as the night had been, only it was very strange because he could see it was light, and he could see Rachel and hear her voice and be near to her. He felt as if he were waiting, as if somehow he were stationary among things that passed over him and around him, voices, people’s bodies, birds, only Rachel too was waiting with him. He looked at her sometimes as if she must know that they were waiting together, and being drawn on together, without being able to offer any resistance. Again he read from his book:

Whoever you are holding me now in your hand,

Without one thing all will be useless.

A bird gave a wild laugh, a monkey chuckled a malicious question, and, as fire fades in the hot sunshine, his words flickered and went out.

By degrees as the river narrowed, and the high sandbanks fell to level ground thickly grown with trees, the sounds of the forest could be heard. It echoed like a hall. There were sudden cries; and then long spaces of silence, such as there are in a cathedral when a boy’s voice has ceased and the echo of it still seems to haunt about the remote places of the roof. Once Mr. Flushing rose and spoke to a sailor, and even announced that some time after luncheon the steamer would stop, and they could walk a little way through the forest.

“There are tracks all through the trees there,” he explained. “We’re no distance from civilisation yet.”

He scrutinised his wife’s painting. Too polite to praise it openly, he contented himself with cutting off one half of the picture with one hand, and giving a flourish in the air with the other.

“God!” Hirst exclaimed, staring straight ahead. “Don’t you think it’s amazingly beautiful?”

“Beautiful?” Helen enquired. It seemed a strange little word, and Hirst and herself both so small that she forgot to answer him.

Hewet felt that he must speak.

“That’s where the Elizabethans got their style,” he mused, staring into the profusion of leaves and blossoms and prodigious fruits.

“Shakespeare? I hate Shakespeare!” Mrs. Flushing exclaimed; and Wilfred returned admiringly, “I believe you’re the only person who dares to say that, Alice.” But Mrs. Flushing went on painting. She did not appear to attach much value to her husband’s compliment, and painted steadily, sometimes muttering a half-audible word or groan.

The morning was now very hot.

“Look at Hirst!” Mr. Flushing whispered. His sheet of paper had slipped on to the deck, his head lay back, and he drew a long snoring breath.

Terence picked up the sheet of paper and spread it out before Rachel. It was a continuation of the poem on God which he had begun in the chapel, and it was so indecent that Rachel did not understand half of it although she saw that it was indecent. Hewet began to fill in words where Hirst had left spaces, but he soon ceased; his pencil rolled on deck. Gradually they approached nearer and nearer to the bank on the right-hand side, so that the light which covered them became definitely green, falling through a shade of green leaves, and Mrs. Flushing set aside her sketch and stared ahead of her in silence. Hirst woke up; they were then called to luncheon, and while they ate it, the steamer came to a standstill a little way out from the bank. The boat which was towed behind them was brought to the side, and the ladies were helped into it.

For protection against boredom, Helen put a book of memoirs beneath her arm, and Mrs. Flushing her paint-box, and, thus equipped, they allowed themselves to be set on shore on the verge of the forest.

They had not strolled more than a few hundred yards along the track which ran parallel with the river before Helen professed to find it was unbearably hot. The river breeze had ceased, and a hot steamy atmosphere, thick with scents, came from the forest.

“I shall sit down here,” she announced, pointing to the trunk of a tree which had fallen long ago and was now laced across and across by creepers and thong-like brambles. She seated herself, opened her parasol, and looked at the river which was barred by the stems of trees. She turned her back to the trees which disappeared in black shadow behind her.

“I quite agree,” said Mrs. Flushing, and proceeded to undo her paint-box. Her husband strolled about to select an interesting point of view for her. Hirst cleared a space on the ground by Helen’s side, and seated himself with great deliberation, as if he did not mean to move until he had talked to her for a long time. Terence and Rachel were left standing by themselves without occupation. Terence saw that the time had come as it was fated to come, but although he realised this he was completely calm and master of himself. He chose to stand for a few moments talking to Helen, and persuading her to leave her seat. Rachel joined him too in advising her to come with them.

“Of all the people I’ve ever met,” he said, “you’re the least adventurous. You might be sitting on green chairs in Hyde Park. Are you going to sit there the whole afternoon? Aren’t you going to walk?”

“Oh, no,” said Helen, “one’s only got to use one’s eye. There’s everything here—everything,” she repeated in a drowsy tone of voice. “What will you gain by walking?”

“You’ll be hot and disagreeable by tea-time, we shall be cool and sweet,” put in Hirst. Into his eyes as he looked up at them had come yellow and green reflections from the sky and the branches, robbing them of their intentness, and he seemed to think what he did not say. It was thus taken for granted by them both that Terence and Rachel proposed to walk into the woods together; with one look at each other they turned away.

“Good-bye!” cried Rachel.

“Good-bye. Beware of snakes,” Hirst replied. He settled himself still more comfortably under the shade of the fallen tree and Helen’s figure. As they went, Mr. Flushing called after them, “We must start in an hour. Hewet, please remember that. An hour.”

Whether made by man, or for some reason preserved by nature, there was a wide pathway striking through the forest at right angles to the river. It resembled a drive in an English forest, save that tropical bushes with their sword-like leaves grew at the side, and the ground was covered with an unmarked springy moss instead of grass, starred with little yellow flowers. As they passed into the depths of the forest the light grew dimmer, and the noises of the ordinary world were replaced by those creaking and sighing sounds which suggest to the traveller in a forest that he is walking at the bottom of the sea. The path narrowed and turned; it was hedged in by dense creepers which knotted tree to tree, and burst here and there into star-shaped crimson blossoms. The sighing and creaking up above were broken every now and then by the jarring cry of some startled animal. The atmosphere was close and the air came at them in languid puffs of scent. The vast green light was broken here and there by a round of pure yellow sunlight which fell through some gap in the immense umbrella of green above, and in these yellow spaces crimson and black butterflies were circling and settling. Terence and Rachel hardly spoke.

Not only did the silence weigh upon them, but they were both unable to frame any thoughts. There was something between them which had to be spoken of. One of them had to begin, but which of them was it to be? Then Hewet picked up a red fruit and threw it as high as he could. When it dropped, he would speak. They heard the flapping of great wings; they heard the fruit go pattering through the leaves and eventually fall with a thud. The silence was again profound.

“Does this frighten you?” Terence asked when the sound of the fruit falling had completely died away.

“No,” she answered. “I like it.”

She repeated “I like it.” She was walking fast, and holding herself more erect than usual. There was another pause.

“You like being with me?” Terence asked.

“Yes, with you,” she replied.

He was silent for a moment. Silence seemed to have fallen upon the world.

“That is what I have felt ever since I knew you,” he replied. “We are happy together.” He did not seem to be speaking, or she to be hearing.

“Very happy,” she answered.

They continued to walk for some time in silence. Their steps unconsciously quickened.

“We love each other,” Terence said.

“We love each other,” she repeated.

The silence was then broken by their voices which joined in tones of strange unfamiliar sound which formed no words. Faster and faster they walked; simultaneously they stopped, clasped each other in their arms, then, releasing themselves, dropped to the earth. They sat side by side. Sounds stood out from the background making a bridge across their silence; they heard the swish of the trees and some beast croaking in a remote world.

“We love each other,” Terence repeated, searching into her face. Their faces were both very pale and quiet, and they said nothing. He was afraid to kiss her again. By degrees she drew close to him, and rested against him. In this position they sat for some time. She said “Terence” once; he answered “Rachel.”

“Terrible—terrible,” she murmured after another pause, but in saying this she was thinking as much of the persistent churning of the water as of her own feeling. On and on it went in the distance, the senseless and cruel churning of the water. She observed that the tears were running down Terence’s cheeks.

The next movement was on his part. A very long time seemed to have passed. He took out his watch.

“Flushing said an hour. We’ve been gone more than half an hour.”

“And it takes that to get back,” said Rachel. She raised herself very slowly. When she was standing up she stretched her arms and drew a deep breath, half a sigh, half a yawn. She appeared to be very tired. Her cheeks were white. “Which way?” she asked.

“There,” said Terence.

They began to walk back down the mossy path again. The sighing and creaking continued far overhead, and the jarring cries of animals. The butterflies were circling still in the patches of yellow sunlight. At first Terence was certain of his way, but as they walked he became doubtful. They had to stop to consider, and then to return and start once more, for although he was certain of the direction of the river he was not certain of striking the point where they had left the others. Rachel followed him, stopping where he stopped, turning where he turned, ignorant of the way, ignorant why he stopped or why he turned.

“I don’t want to be late,” he said, “because—” He put a flower into her hand and her fingers closed upon it quietly. “We’re so late—so late—so horribly late,” he repeated as if he were talking in his sleep. “Ah—this is right. We turn here.”

They found themselves again in the broad path, like the drive in an English forest, where they had started when they left the others. They walked on in silence as people walking in their sleep, and were oddly conscious now and again of the mass of their bodies. Then Rachel exclaimed suddenly, “Helen!”

In the sunny space at the edge of the forest they saw Helen still sitting on the tree-trunk, her dress showing very white in the sun, with Hirst still propped on his elbow by her side. They stopped instinctively. At the sight of other people they could not go on. They stood hand in hand for a minute or two in silence. They could not bear to face other people.

“But we must go on,” Rachel insisted at last, in the curious dull tone of voice in which they had both been speaking, and with a great effort they forced themselves to cover the short distance which lay between them and the pair sitting on the tree-trunk.

As they approached, Helen turned round and looked at them. She looked at them for some time without speaking, and when they were close to her she said quietly:

“Did you meet Mr. Flushing? He has gone to find you. He thought you must be lost, though I told him you weren’t lost.”

Hirst half turned round and threw his head back so that he looked at the branches crossing themselves in the air above him.

“Well, was it worth the effort?” he enquired dreamily.

Hewet sat down on the grass by his side and began to fan himself.

“Hot,” he said.

Rachel had balanced herself near Helen on the end of the tree trunk.

“Very hot,” she said.

“You look exhausted anyhow,” said Hirst.

“It’s fearfully close in those trees,” Helen remarked, picking up her book and shaking it free from the dried blades of grass which had fallen between the leaves. Then they were all silent, looking at the river swirling past in front of them between the trunks of the trees until Mr. Flushing interrupted them. He broke out of the trees a hundred yards to the left, exclaiming sharply:

“Ah, so you found the way after all. But it’s late—much later than we arranged, Hewet.”

He was slightly annoyed, and in his capacity as leader of the expedition, inclined to be dictatorial. He spoke quickly, using curiously sharp, meaningless words.

“Being late wouldn’t matter normally, of course,” he said, “but when it’s a question of keeping the men up to time——”

He gathered them together and made them come down to the river-bank, where the boat was waiting to row them out to the steamer.

The heat of the day was going down, and over their cups of tea the Flushings tended to become communicative. It seemed to Terence as he listened to them talking, that existence now went on in two different layers. Here were the Flushings talking, talking somewhere high up in the air above him, and he and Rachel had dropped to the bottom of the world together. But with something of a child’s directness, Mrs. Flushing had also the instinct which leads a child to suspect what its elders wish to keep hidden. She fixed Terence with her vivid blue eyes and addressed herself to him in particular. What would he do, she wanted to know, if the boat ran upon a rock and sank.

“Would you care for anythin’ but savin’ yourself? Should I? No, no,” she laughed, “not one scrap—don’t tell me. There’s only two creatures the ordinary woman cares about,” she continued, “her child and her dog; and I don’t believe it’s even two with men. One reads a lot about love—that’s why poetry’s so dull. But what happens in real life, eh? It ain’t love!” she cried.

Terence murmured something unintelligible. Mr. Flushing, however, had recovered his urbanity. He was smoking a cigarette, and he now answered his wife.

“You must always remember, Alice,” he said, “that your upbringing was very unnatural—unusual, I should say. They had no mother,” he explained, dropping something of the formality of his tone; “and a father—he was a very delightful man, I’ve no doubt, but he cared only for racehorses and Greek statues. Tell them about the bath, Alice.”

“In the stable-yard,” said Mrs. Flushing. “Covered with ice in winter. We had to get in; if we didn’t, we were whipped. The strong ones lived—the others died. What you call the survival of the fittest—a most excellent plan, I daresay, if you’ve thirteen children!”

“And all this going on in the heart of England, in the nineteenth century!” Mr. Flushing exclaimed, turning to Helen.

“I’d treat my children just the same if I had any,” said Mrs. Flushing.

Every word sounded quite distinctly in Terence’s ears; but what were they saying, and who were they talking to, and who were they, these fantastic people, detached somewhere high up in the air? Now that they had drunk their tea, they rose and leant over the bow of the boat. The sun was going down, and the water was dark and crimson. The river had widened again, and they were passing a little island set like a dark wedge in the middle of the stream. Two great white birds with red lights on them stood there on stilt-like legs, and the beach of the island was unmarked, save by the skeleton print of birds’ feet. The branches of the trees on the bank looked more twisted and angular than ever, and the green of the leaves was lurid and splashed with gold. Then Hirst began to talk, leaning over the bow.

“It makes one awfully queer, don’t you find?” he complained. “These trees get on one’s nerves—it’s all so crazy. God’s undoubtedly mad. What sane person could have conceived a wilderness like this, and peopled it with apes and alligators? I should go mad if I lived here—raving mad.”

Terence attempted to answer him, but Mrs. Ambrose replied instead. She bade him look at the way things massed themselves—look at the amazing colours, look at the shapes of the trees. She seemed to be protecting Terence from the approach of the others.

“Yes,” said Mr. Flushing. “And in my opinion,” he continued, “the absence of population to which Hirst objects is precisely the significant touch. You must admit, Hirst, that a little Italian town even would vulgarise the whole scene, would detract from the vastness—the sense of elemental grandeur.” He swept his hand towards the forest, and paused for a moment, looking at the great green mass, which was now falling silent. “I own it makes us seem pretty small—us, but not them.” He nodded his head at a sailor who leant over the side spitting into the river. “And that, I think, is what my wife feels, the essential superiority of the peasant——”

Under cover of Mr. Flushing’s words, which continued now gently reasoning with St. John and persuading him, Terence drew Rachel to the side, pointing ostensibly to a great gnarled tree-trunk which had fallen and lay half in the water. He wished, at any rate, to be near her, but he found that he could say nothing. They could hear Mr. Flushing flowing on, now about his wife, now about art, now about the future of the country, little meaningless words floating high in air. As it was becoming cold he began to pace the deck with Hirst. Fragments of their talk came out distinctly as they passed—art, emotion, truth, reality.

“Is it true, or is it a dream?” Rachel murmured, when they had passed.

“It’s true, it’s true,” he replied.

But the breeze freshened, and there was a general desire for movement. When the party rearranged themselves under cover of rugs and cloaks, Terence and Rachel were at opposite ends of the circle, and could not speak to each other. But as the dark descended, the words of the others seemed to curl up and vanish as the ashes of burnt paper, and left them sitting perfectly silent at the bottom of the world. Occasional starts of exquisite joy ran through them, and then they were peaceful again.

[]

Chapter XXI

Thanks to Mr. Flushing’s discipline, the right stages of the river were reached at the right hours, and when next morning after breakfast the chairs were again drawn out in a semicircle in the bow, the launch was within a few miles of the native camp which was the limit of the journey. Mr. Flushing, as he sat down, advised them to keep their eyes fixed on the left bank, where they would soon pass a clearing, and in that clearing was a hut where Mackenzie, the famous explorer, had died of fever some ten years ago, almost within reach of civilisation—Mackenzie, he repeated, the man who went farther inland than any one’s been yet. Their eyes turned that way obediently. The eyes of Rachel saw nothing. Yellow and green shapes did, it is true, pass before them, but she only knew that one was large and another small; she did not know that they were trees. These directions to look here and there irritated her, as interruptions irritate a person absorbed in thought, although she was not thinking of anything. She was annoyed with all that was said, and with the aimless movements of people’s bodies, because they seemed to interfere with her and to prevent her from speaking to Terence. Very soon Helen saw her staring moodily at a coil of rope, and making no effort to listen. Mr. Flushing and St. John were engaged in more or less continuous conversation about the future of the country from a political point of view, and the degree to which it had been explored; the others, with their legs stretched out, or chins poised on the hands, gazed in silence.

Mrs. Ambrose looked and listened obediently enough, but inwardly she was a prey to an uneasy mood not readily to be ascribed to any one cause. Looking on shore as Mr. Flushing bade her, she thought the country very beautiful, but also sultry and alarming. She did not like to feel herself the victim of unclassified emotions, and certainly as the launch slipped on and on, in the hot morning sun, she felt herself unreasonably moved. Whether the unfamiliarity of the forest was the cause of it, or something less definite, she could not determine. Her mind left the scene and occupied itself with anxieties for Ridley, for her children, for far-off things, such as old age and poverty and death. Hirst, too, was depressed. He had been looking forward to this expedition as to a holiday, for, once away from the hotel, surely wonderful things would happen, instead of which nothing happened, and here they were as uncomfortable, as restrained, as self-conscious as ever. That, of course, was what came of looking forward to anything; one was always disappointed. He blamed Wilfrid Flushing, who was so well dressed and so formal; he blamed Hewet and Rachel. Why didn’t they talk? He looked at them sitting silent and self-absorbed, and the sight annoyed him. He supposed that they were engaged, or about to become engaged, but instead of being in the least romantic or exciting, that was as dull as everything else; it annoyed him, too, to think that they were in love. He drew close to Helen and began to tell her how uncomfortable his night had been, lying on the deck, sometimes too hot, sometimes too cold, and the stars so bright that he couldn’t get to sleep. He had lain awake all night thinking, and when it was light enough to see, he had written twenty lines of his poem on God, and the awful thing was that he’d practically proved the fact that God did exist. He did not see that he was teasing her, and he went on to wonder what would happen if God did exist—“an old gentleman in a beard and a long blue dressing-gown, extremely testy and disagreeable as he’s bound to be? Can you suggest a rhyme? God, rod, sod—all used; any others?”

Although he spoke much as usual, Helen could have seen, had she looked, that he was also impatient and disturbed. But she was not called upon to answer, for Mr. Flushing now exclaimed “There!” They looked at the hut on the bank, a desolate place with a large rent in the roof, and the ground round it yellow, scarred with fires and scattered with rusty open tins.

“Did they find his dead body there?” Mrs. Flushing exclaimed, leaning forward in her eagerness to see the spot where the explorer had died.

“They found his body and his skins and a notebook,” her husband replied. But the boat had soon carried them on and left the place behind.

It was so hot that they scarcely moved, except now to change a foot, or, again, to strike a match. Their eyes, concentrated upon the bank, were full of the same green reflections, and their lips were slightly pressed together as though the sights they were passing gave rise to thoughts, save that Hirst’s lips moved intermittently as half consciously he sought rhymes for God. Whatever the thoughts of the others, no one said anything for a considerable space. They had grown so accustomed to the wall of trees on either side that they looked up with a start when the light suddenly widened out and the trees came to an end.

“It almost reminds one of an English park,” said Mr. Flushing.

Indeed no change could have been greater. On both banks of the river lay an open lawn-like space, grass covered and planted, for the gentleness and order of the place suggested human care, with graceful trees on the top of little mounds. As far as they could gaze, this lawn rose and sank with the undulating motion of an old English park. The change of scene naturally suggested a change of position, grateful to most of them. They rose and leant over the rail.

“It might be Arundel or Windsor,” Mr. Flushing continued, “if you cut down that bush with the yellow flowers; and, by Jove, look!”

Rows of brown backs paused for a moment and then leapt with a motion as if they were springing over waves out of sight.

For a moment no one of them could believe that they had really seen live animals in the open—a herd of wild deer, and the sight aroused a childlike excitement in them, dissipating their gloom.

“I’ve never in my life seen anything bigger than a hare!” Hirst exclaimed with genuine excitement. “What an ass I was not to bring my Kodak!”

Soon afterwards the launch came gradually to a standstill, and the captain explained to Mr. Flushing that it would be pleasant for the passengers if they now went for a stroll on shore; if they chose to return within an hour, he would take them on to the village; if they chose to walk—it was only a mile or two farther on—he would meet them at the landing-place.

The matter being settled, they were once more put on shore: the sailors, producing raisins and tobacco, leant upon the rail and watched the six English, whose coats and dresses looked so strange upon the green, wander off. A joke that was by no means proper set them all laughing, and then they turned round and lay at their ease upon the deck.

Directly they landed, Terence and Rachel drew together slightly in advance of the others.

“Thank God!” Terence exclaimed, drawing a long breath. “At last we’re alone.”

“And if we keep ahead we can talk,” said Rachel.

Nevertheless, although their position some yards in advance of the others made it possible for them to say anything they chose, they were both silent.

“You love me?” Terence asked at length, breaking the silence painfully. To speak or to be silent was equally an effort, for when they were silent they were keenly conscious of each other’s presence, and yet words were either too trivial or too large.

She murmured inarticulately, ending, “And you?”

“Yes, yes,” he replied; but there were so many things to be said, and now that they were alone it seemed necessary to bring themselves still more near, and to surmount a barrier which had grown up since they had last spoken. It was difficult, frightening even, oddly embarrassing. At one moment he was clear-sighted, and, at the next, confused.

“Now I’m going to begin at the beginning,” he said resolutely. “I’m going to tell you what I ought to have told you before. In the first place, I’ve never been in love with other women, but I’ve had other women. Then I’ve great faults. I’m very lazy, I’m moody—” He persisted, in spite of her exclamation, “You’ve got to know the worst of me. I’m lustful. I’m overcome by a sense of futility—incompetence. I ought never to have asked you to marry me, I expect. I’m a bit of a snob; I’m ambitious——”

“Oh, our faults!” she cried. “What do they matter?” Then she demanded, “Am I in love—is this being in love—are we to marry each other?”

Overcome by the charm of her voice and her presence, he exclaimed, “Oh, you’re free, Rachel. To you, time will make no difference, or marriage or——”

The voices of the others behind them kept floating, now farther, now nearer, and Mrs. Flushing’s laugh rose clearly by itself.

“Marriage?” Rachel repeated.

The shouts were renewed behind, warning them that they were bearing too far to the left. Improving their course, he continued, “Yes, marriage.” The feeling that they could not be united until she knew all about him made him again endeavour to explain.

“All that’s been bad in me, the things I’ve put up with—the second best——”

She murmured, considered her own life, but could not describe how it looked to her now.

“And the loneliness!” he continued. A vision of walking with her through the streets of London came before his eyes. “We will go for walks together,” he said. The simplicity of the idea relieved them, and for the first time they laughed. They would have liked had they dared to take each other by the hand, but the consciousness of eyes fixed on them from behind had not yet deserted them.

“Books, people, sights—Mrs. Nutt, Greeley, Hutchinson,” Hewet murmured.

With every word the mist which had enveloped them, making them seem unreal to each other, since the previous afternoon melted a little further, and their contact became more and more natural. Up through the sultry southern landscape they saw the world they knew appear clearer and more vividly than it had ever appeared before. As upon that occasion at the hotel when she had sat in the window, the world once more arranged itself beneath her gaze very vividly and in its true proportions. She glanced curiously at Terence from time to time, observing his grey coat and his purple tie; observing the man with whom she was to spend the rest of her life.

After one of these glances she murmured, “Yes, I’m in love. There’s no doubt; I’m in love with you.”

Nevertheless, they remained uncomfortably apart; drawn so close together, as she spoke, that there seemed no division between them, and the next moment separate and far away again. Feeling this painfully, she exclaimed, “It will be a fight.”

But as she looked at him she perceived from the shape of his eyes, the lines about his mouth, and other peculiarities that he pleased her, and she added:

“Where I want to fight, you have compassion. You’re finer than I am; you’re much finer.”

He returned her glance and smiled, perceiving, much as she had done, the very small individual things about her which made her delightful to him. She was his for ever. This barrier being surmounted, innumerable delights lay before them both.

“I’m not finer,” he answered. “I’m only older, lazier; a man, not a woman.”

“A man,” she repeated, and a curious sense of possession coming over her, it struck her that she might now touch him; she put out her hand and lightly touched his cheek. His fingers followed where hers had been, and the touch of his hand upon his face brought back the overpowering sense of unreality. This body of his was unreal; the whole world was unreal.

“What’s happened?” he began. “Why did I ask you to marry me? How did it happen?”

“Did you ask me to marry you?” she wondered. They faded far away from each other, and neither of them could remember what had been said.

“We sat upon the ground,” he recollected.

“We sat upon the ground,” she confirmed him. The recollection of sitting upon the ground, such as it was, seemed to unite them again, and they walked on in silence, their minds sometimes working with difficulty and sometimes ceasing to work, their eyes alone perceiving the things round them. Now he would attempt again to tell her his faults, and why he loved her; and she would describe what she had felt at this time or at that time, and together they would interpret her feeling. So beautiful was the sound of their voices that by degrees they scarcely listened to the words they framed. Long silences came between their words, which were no longer silences of struggle and confusion but refreshing silences, in which trivial thoughts moved easily. They began to speak naturally of ordinary things, of the flowers and the trees, how they grew there so red, like garden flowers at home, and there bent and crooked like the arm of a twisted old man.

Very gently and quietly, almost as if it were the blood singing in her veins, or the water of the stream running over stones, Rachel became conscious of a new feeling within her. She wondered for a moment what it was, and then said to herself, with a little surprise at recognising in her own person so famous a thing:

“This is happiness, I suppose.” And aloud to Terence she spoke, “This is happiness.”

On the heels of her words he answered, “This is happiness,” upon which they guessed that the feeling had sprung in both of them the same time. They began therefore to describe how this felt and that felt, how like it was and yet how different; for they were very different.

Voices crying behind them never reached through the waters in which they were now sunk. The repetition of Hewet’s name in short, dissevered syllables was to them the crack of a dry branch or the laughter of a bird. The grasses and breezes sounding and murmuring all round them, they never noticed that the swishing of the grasses grew louder and louder, and did not cease with the lapse of the breeze. A hand dropped abrupt as iron on Rachel’s shoulder; it might have been a bolt from heaven. She fell beneath it, and the grass whipped across her eyes and filled her mouth and ears. Through the waving stems she saw a figure, large and shapeless against the sky. Helen was upon her. Rolled this way and that, now seeing only forests of green, and now the high blue heaven; she was speechless and almost without sense. At last she lay still, all the grasses shaken round her and before her by her panting. Over her loomed two great heads, the heads of a man and woman, of Terence and Helen.

Both were flushed, both laughing, and the lips were moving; they came together and kissed in the air above her. Broken fragments of speech came down to her on the ground. She thought she heard them speak of love and then of marriage. Raising herself and sitting up, she too realised Helen’s soft body, the strong and hospitable arms, and happiness swelling and breaking in one vast wave. When this fell away, and the grasses once more lay low, and the sky became horizontal, and the earth rolled out flat on each side, and the trees stood upright, she was the first to perceive a little row of human figures standing patiently in the distance. For the moment she could not remember who they were.

“Who are they?” she asked, and then recollected.

Falling into line behind Mr. Flushing, they were careful to leave at least three yards’ distance between the toe of his boot and the rim of her skirt.

He led them across a stretch of green by the river-bank and then through a grove of trees, and bade them remark the signs of human habitation, the blackened grass, the charred tree-stumps, and there, through the trees, strange wooden nests, drawn together in an arch where the trees drew apart, the village which was the goal of their journey.

Stepping cautiously, they observed the women, who were squatting on the ground in triangular shapes, moving their hands, either plaiting straw or in kneading something in bowls. But when they had looked for a moment undiscovered, they were seen, and Mr. Flushing, advancing into the centre of the clearing, was engaged in talk with a lean majestic man, whose bones and hollows at once made the shapes of the Englishman’s body appear ugly and unnatural. The women took no notice of the strangers, except that their hands paused for a moment and their long narrow eyes slid round and fixed upon them with the motionless inexpressive gaze of those removed from each other far far beyond the plunge of speech. Their hands moved again, but the stare continued. It followed them as they walked, as they peered into the huts where they could distinguish guns leaning in the corner, and bowls upon the floor, and stacks of rushes; in the dusk the solemn eyes of babies regarded them, and old women stared out too. As they sauntered about, the stare followed them, passing over their legs, their bodies, their heads, curiously not without hostility, like the crawl of a winter fly. As she drew apart her shawl and uncovered her breast to the lips of her baby, the eyes of a woman never left their faces, although they moved uneasily under her stare, and finally turned away, rather than stand there looking at her any longer. When sweetmeats were offered them, they put out great red hands to take them, and felt themselves treading cumbrously like tight-coated soldiers among these soft instinctive people. But soon the life of the village took no notice of them; they had become absorbed into it. The women’s hands became busy again with the straw; their eyes dropped. If they moved, it was to fetch something from the hut, or to catch a straying child, or to cross the space with a jar balanced on their heads; if they spoke, it was to cry some harsh unintelligible cry. Voices rose when a child was beaten, and fell again; voices rose in song, which slid up a little way and down a little way, and settled again upon the same low and melancholy note. Seeking each other, Terence and Rachel drew together under a tree. Peaceful, and even beautiful at first, the sight of the women, who had given up looking at them, made them now feel very cold and melancholy.

“Well,” Terence sighed at length, “it makes us seem insignificant, doesn’t it?”

Rachel agreed. So it would go on for ever and ever, she said, those women sitting under the trees, the trees and the river. They turned away and began to walk through the trees, leaning, without fear of discovery, upon each other’s arms. They had not gone far before they began to assure each other once more that they were in love, were happy, were content; but why was it so painful being in love, why was there so much pain in happiness?

The sight of the village indeed affected them all curiously though all differently. St. John had left the others and was walking slowly down to the river, absorbed in his own thoughts, which were bitter and unhappy, for he felt himself alone; and Helen, standing by herself in the sunny space among the native women, was exposed to presentiments of disaster. The cries of the senseless beasts rang in her ears high and low in the air, as they ran from tree-trunk to tree-top. How small the little figures looked wandering through the trees! She became acutely conscious of the little limbs, the thin veins, the delicate flesh of men and women, which breaks so easily and lets the life escape compared with these great trees and deep waters. A falling branch, a foot that slips, and the earth has crushed them or the water drowned them. Thus thinking, she kept her eyes anxiously fixed upon the lovers, as if by doing so she could protect them from their fate. Turning, she found the Flushings by her side.

They were talking about the things they had bought and arguing whether they were really old, and whether there were not signs here and there of European influence. Helen was appealed to. She was made to look at a brooch, and then at a pair of ear-rings. But all the time she blamed them for having come on this expedition, for having ventured too far and exposed themselves. Then she roused herself and tried to talk, but in a few moments she caught herself seeing a picture of a boat upset on the river in England, at midday. It was morbid, she knew, to imagine such things; nevertheless she sought out the figures of the others between the trees, and whenever she saw them she kept her eyes fixed on them, so that she might be able to protect them from disaster.

But when the sun went down and the steamer turned and began to steam back towards civilisation, again her fears were calmed. In the semi-darkness the chairs on deck and the people sitting in them were angular shapes, the mouth being indicated by a tiny burning spot, and the arm by the same spot moving up or down as the cigar or cigarette was lifted to and from the lips. Words crossed the darkness, but, not knowing where they fell, seemed to lack energy and substance. Deep sighs proceeded regularly, although with some attempt at suppression, from the large white mound which represented the person of Mrs. Flushing. The day had been long and very hot, and now that all the colours were blotted out the cool night air seemed to press soft fingers upon the eyelids, sealing them down. Some philosophical remark directed, apparently, at St. John Hirst missed its aim, and hung so long suspended in the air until it was engulfed by a yawn, that it was considered dead, and this gave the signal for stirring of legs and murmurs about sleep. The white mound moved, finally lengthened itself and disappeared, and after a few turns and paces St. John and Mr. Flushing withdrew, leaving three chairs still occupied by three silent bodies. The light which came from a lamp high on the mast and a sky pale with stars left them with shapes but without features; but even in this darkness the withdrawal of the others made them feel each other very near, for they were all thinking of the same thing. For some time no one spoke, then Helen said with a sigh, “So you’re both very happy?”

As if washed by the air her voice sounded more spiritual and softer than usual. Voices at a little distance answered her, “Yes.”

Through the darkness she was looking at them both, and trying to distinguish him. What was there for her to say? Rachel had passed beyond her guardianship. A voice might reach her ears, but never again would it carry as far as it had carried twenty-four hours ago. Nevertheless, speech seemed to be due from her before she went to bed. She wished to speak, but she felt strangely old and depressed.

“D’you realise what you’re doing?” she demanded. “She’s young, you’re both young; and marriage—” Here she ceased. They begged her, however, to continue, with such earnestness in their voices, as if they only craved advice, that she was led to add:

“Marriage! well, it’s not easy.”

“That’s what we want to know,” they answered, and she guessed that now they were looking at each other.

“It depends on both of you,” she stated. Her face was turned towards Terence, and although he could hardly see her, he believed that her words really covered a genuine desire to know more about him. He raised himself from his semi-recumbent position and proceeded to tell her what she wanted to know. He spoke as lightly as he could in order to take away her depression.

“I’m twenty-seven, and I’ve about seven hundred a year,” he began. “My temper is good on the whole, and health excellent, though Hirst detects a gouty tendency. Well, then, I think I’m very intelligent.” He paused as if for confirmation.

Helen agreed.

“Though, unfortunately, rather lazy. I intend to allow Rachel to be a fool if she wants to, and—Do you find me on the whole satisfactory in other respects?” he asked shyly.

“Yes, I like what I know of you,” Helen replied. “But then—one knows so little.”

“We shall live in London,” he continued, “and—” With one voice they suddenly enquired whether she did not think them the happiest people that she had ever known.

“Hush,” she checked them, “Mrs. Flushing, remember. She’s behind us.”

Then they fell silent, and Terence and Rachel felt instinctively that their happiness had made her sad, and, while they were anxious to go on talking about themselves, they did not like to.

“We’ve talked too much about ourselves,” Terence said. “Tell us——”

“Yes, tell us—” Rachel echoed. They were both in the mood to believe that every one was capable of saying something very profound.

“What can I tell you?” Helen reflected, speaking more to herself in a rambling style than as a prophetess delivering a message. She forced herself to speak.

“After all, though I scold Rachel, I’m not much wiser myself. I’m older, of course, I’m half-way through, and you’re just beginning. It’s puzzling—sometimes, I think, disappointing; the great things aren’t as great, perhaps, as one expects—but it’s interesting—Oh, yes you’re certain to find it interesting—— And so it goes on,” they became conscious here of the procession of dark trees into which, as far as they could see, Helen was now looking, “and there are pleasures where one doesn’t expect them (you must write to your father), and you’ll be very happy, I’ve no doubt. But I must go to bed, and if you are sensible you will follow in ten minutes, and so,” she rose and stood before them, almost featureless and very large, “Good-night.” She passed behind the curtain.

After sitting in silence for the greater part of the ten minutes she allowed them, they rose and hung over the rail. Beneath them the smooth black water slipped away very fast and silently. The spark of a cigarette vanished behind them. “A beautiful voice,” Terence murmured.

Rachel assented. Helen had a beautiful voice.

After a silence she asked, looking up into the sky, “Are we on the deck of a steamer on a river in South America? Am I Rachel, are you Terence?”

The great black world lay round them. As they were drawn smoothly along it seemed possessed of immense thickness and endurance. They could discern pointed tree-tops and blunt rounded tree-tops. Raising their eyes above the trees, they fixed them on the stars and the pale border of sky above the trees. The little points of frosty light infinitely far away drew their eyes and held them fixed, so that it seemed as if they stayed a long time and fell a great distance when once more they realised their hands grasping the rail and their separate bodies standing side by side.

“You’d forgotten completely about me,” Terence reproached her, taking her arm and beginning to pace the deck, “and I never forget you.”

“Oh, no,” she whispered, she had not forgotten, only the stars—the night—the dark——

“You’re like a bird half asleep in its nest, Rachel. You’re asleep. You’re talking in your sleep.”

Half asleep, and murmuring broken words, they stood in the angle made by the bow of the boat. It slipped on down the river. Now a bell struck on the bridge, and they heard the lapping of water as it rippled away on either side, and once a bird startled in its sleep creaked, flew on to the next tree, and was silent again. The darkness poured down profusely, and left them with scarcely any feeling of life, except that they were standing there together in the darkness.

[]

Chapter XXII

The darkness fell, but rose again, and as each day spread widely over the earth and parted them from the strange day in the forest when they had been forced to tell each other what they wanted, this wish of theirs was revealed to other people, and in the process became slightly strange to themselves. Apparently it was not anything unusual that had happened; it was that they had become engaged to marry each other. The world, which consisted for the most part of the hotel and the villa, expressed itself glad on the whole that two people should marry, and allowed them to see that they were not expected to take part in the work which has to be done in order that the world shall go on, but might absent themselves for a time. They were accordingly left alone until they felt the silence as if, playing in a vast church, the door had been shut on them. They were driven to walk alone, and sit alone, to visit secret places where the flowers had never been picked and the trees were solitary. In solitude they could express those beautiful but too vast desires which were so oddly uncomfortable to the ears of other men and women—desires for a world, such as their own world which contained two people seemed to them to be, where people knew each other intimately and thus judged each other by what was good, and never quarrelled, because that was waste of time.

They would talk of such questions among books, or out in the sun, or sitting in the shade of a tree undisturbed. They were no longer embarrassed, or half-choked with meaning which could not express itself; they were not afraid of each other, or, like travellers down a twisting river, dazzled with sudden beauties when the corner is turned; the unexpected happened, but even the ordinary was lovable, and in many ways preferable to the ecstatic and mysterious, for it was refreshingly solid, and called out effort, and effort under such circumstances was not effort but delight.

While Rachel played the piano, Terence sat near her, engaged, as far as the occasional writing of a word in pencil testified, in shaping the world as it appeared to him now that he and Rachel were going to be married. It was different certainly. The book called Silence would not now be the same book that it would have been. He would then put down his pencil and stare in front of him, and wonder in what respects the world was different—it had, perhaps, more solidity, more coherence, more importance, greater depth. Why, even the earth sometimes seemed to him very deep; not carved into hills and cities and fields, but heaped in great masses. He would look out of the window for ten minutes at a time; but no, he did not care for the earth swept of human beings. He liked human beings—he liked them, he suspected, better than Rachel did. There she was, swaying enthusiastically over her music, quite forgetful of him,—but he liked that quality in her. He liked the impersonality which it produced in her. At last, having written down a series of little sentences, with notes of interrogation attached to them, he observed aloud, “‘Women—under the heading Women I’ve written:

“‘Not really vainer than men. Lack of self-confidence at the base of most serious faults. Dislike of own sex traditional, or founded on fact? Every woman not so much a rake at heart, as an optimist, because they don’t think.’ What do you say, Rachel?” He paused with his pencil in his hand and a sheet of paper on his knee.

Rachel said nothing. Up and up the steep spiral of a very late Beethoven sonata she climbed, like a person ascending a ruined staircase, energetically at first, then more laboriously advancing her feet with effort until she could go no higher and returned with a run to begin at the very bottom again.

“‘Again, it’s the fashion now to say that women are more practical and less idealistic than men, also that they have considerable organising ability but no sense of honour’—query, what is meant by masculine term, honour?—what corresponds to it in your sex? Eh?”

Attacking her staircase once more, Rachel again neglected this opportunity of revealing the secrets of her sex. She had, indeed, advanced so far in the pursuit of wisdom that she allowed these secrets to rest undisturbed; it seemed to be reserved for a later generation to discuss them philosophically.

Crashing down a final chord with her left hand, she exclaimed at last, swinging round upon him:

“No, Terence, it’s no good; here am I, the best musician in South America, not to speak of Europe and Asia, and I can’t play a note because of you in the room interrupting me every other second.”

“You don’t seem to realise that that’s what I’ve been aiming at for the last half-hour,” he remarked. “I’ve no objection to nice simple tunes—indeed, I find them very helpful to my literary composition, but that kind of thing is merely like an unfortunate old dog going round on its hind legs in the rain.”

He began turning over the little sheets of note-paper which were scattered on the table, conveying the congratulations of their friends.

“‘——all possible wishes for all possible happiness,’” he read; “correct, but not very vivid, are they?”

“They’re sheer nonsense!” Rachel exclaimed. “Think of words compared with sounds!” she continued. “Think of novels and plays and histories——” Perched on the edge of the table, she stirred the red and yellow volumes contemptuously. She seemed to herself to be in a position where she could despise all human learning. Terence looked at them too.

“God, Rachel, you do read trash!” he exclaimed. “And you’re behind the times too, my dear. No one dreams of reading this kind of thing now—antiquated problem plays, harrowing descriptions of life in the east end—oh, no, we’ve exploded all that. Read poetry, Rachel, poetry, poetry, poetry!”

Picking up one of the books, he began to read aloud, his intention being to satirise the short sharp bark of the writer’s English; but she paid no attention, and after an interval of meditation exclaimed:

“Does it ever seem to you, Terence, that the world is composed entirely of vast blocks of matter, and that we’re nothing but patches of light—” she looked at the soft spots of sun wavering over the carpet and up the wall—“like that?”

“No,” said Terence, “I feel solid; immensely solid; the legs of my chair might be rooted in the bowels of the earth. But at Cambridge, I can remember, there were times when one fell into ridiculous states of semi-coma about five o’clock in the morning. Hirst does now, I expect—oh, no, Hirst wouldn’t.”

Rachel continued, “The day your note came, asking us to go on the picnic, I was sitting where you’re sitting now, thinking that; I wonder if I could think that again? I wonder if the world’s changed? and if so, when it’ll stop changing, and which is the real world?”

“When I first saw you,” he began, “I thought you were like a creature who’d lived all its life among pearls and old bones. Your hands were wet, d’you remember, and you never said a word until I gave you a bit of bread, and then you said, ‘Human Beings!’”

“And I thought you—a prig,” she recollected. “No; that’s not quite it. There were the ants who stole the tongue, and I thought you and St. John were like those ants—very big, very ugly, very energetic, with all your virtues on your backs. However, when I talked to you I liked you——”

“You fell in love with me,” he corrected her. “You were in love with me all the time, only you didn’t know it.”

“No, I never fell in love with you,” she asserted.

“Rachel—what a lie—didn’t you sit here looking at my window—didn’t you wander about the hotel like an owl in the sun——?”

“No,” she repeated, “I never fell in love, if falling in love is what people say it is, and it’s the world that tells the lies and I tell the truth. Oh, what lies—what lies!”

She crumpled together a handful of letters from Evelyn M., from Mr. Pepper, from Mrs. Thornbury and Miss Allan, and Susan Warrington. It was strange, considering how very different these people were, that they used almost the same sentences when they wrote to congratulate her upon her engagement.

That any one of these people had ever felt what she felt, or could ever feel it, or had even the right to pretend for a single second that they were capable of feeling it, appalled her much as the church service had done, much as the face of the hospital nurse had done; and if they didn’t feel a thing why did they go and pretend to? The simplicity and arrogance and hardness of her youth, now concentrated into a single spark as it was by her love of him, puzzled Terence; being engaged had not that effect on him; the world was different, but not in that way; he still wanted the things he had always wanted, and in particular he wanted the companionship of other people more than ever perhaps. He took the letters out of her hand, and protested:

“Of course they’re absurd, Rachel; of course they say things just because other people say them, but even so, what a nice woman Miss Allan is; you can’t deny that; and Mrs. Thornbury too; she’s got too many children I grant you, but if half-a-dozen of them had gone to the bad instead of rising infallibly to the tops of their trees—hasn’t she a kind of beauty—of elemental simplicity as Flushing would say? Isn’t she rather like a large old tree murmuring in the moonlight, or a river going on and on and on? By the way, Ralph’s been made governor of the Carroway Islands—the youngest governor in the service; very good, isn’t it?”

But Rachel was at present unable to conceive that the vast majority of the affairs of the world went on unconnected by a single thread with her own destiny.

“I won’t have eleven children” she asserted; “I won’t have the eyes of an old woman. She looks at one up and down, up and down, as if one were a horse.”

“We must have a son and we must have a daughter,” said Terence, putting down the letters, “because, let alone the inestimable advantage of being our children, they’d be so well brought up.” They went on to sketch an outline of the ideal education—how their daughter should be required from infancy to gaze at a large square of cardboard, painted blue, to suggest thoughts of infinity, for women were grown too practical; and their son—he should be taught to laugh at great men, that is, at distinguished successful men, at men who wore ribands and rose to the tops of their trees. He should in no way resemble (Rachel added) St. John Hirst.

At this Terence professed the greatest admiration for St. John Hirst. Dwelling upon his good qualities he became seriously convinced of them; he had a mind like a torpedo, he declared, aimed at falsehood. Where should we all be without him and his like? Choked in weeds; Christians, bigots,—why, Rachel herself, would be a slave with a fan to sing songs to men when they felt drowsy.

“But you’ll never see it!” he exclaimed; “because with all your virtues you don’t, and you never will, care with every fibre of your being for the pursuit of truth! You’ve no respect for facts, Rachel; you’re essentially feminine.”

She did not trouble to deny it, nor did she think good to produce the one unanswerable argument against the merits which Terence admired. St. John had said that she was in love with him; she would never forgive that; but the argument was not one to appeal to a man.

“But I like him,” she said, and she thought to herself that she also pitied him, as one pities those unfortunate people who are outside the warm mysterious globe full of changes and miracles in which we ourselves move about; she thought that it must be very dull to be St. John Hirst.

She summed up what she felt about him by saying that she would not kiss him supposing he wished it, which was not likely.

As if some apology were due to Hirst for the kiss which she then bestowed upon him, Terence protested:

“And compared with Hirst I’m a perfect Zany.”

The clock here struck twelve instead of eleven.

“We’re wasting the morning—I ought to be writing my book, and you ought to be answering these.”

“We’ve only got twenty-one whole mornings left,” said Rachel. “And my father’ll be here in a day or two.”

However, she drew a pen and paper towards her and began to write laboriously,

“My dear Evelyn——”

Terence, meanwhile, read a novel which some one else had written, a process which he found essential to the composition of his own. For a considerable time nothing was to be heard but the ticking of the clock and the fitful scratch of Rachel’s pen, as she produced phrases which bore a considerable likeness to those which she had condemned. She was struck by it herself, for she stopped writing and looked up; looked at Terence deep in the arm-chair, looked at the different pieces of furniture, at her bed in the corner, at the window-pane which showed the branches of a tree filled in with sky, heard the clock ticking, and was amazed at the gulf which lay between all that and her sheet of paper. Would there ever be a time when the world was one and indivisible? Even with Terence himself—how far apart they could be, how little she knew what was passing in his brain now! She then finished her sentence, which was awkward and ugly, and stated that they were “both very happy, and are going to be married in the autumn probably and hope to live in London, where we hope you will come and see us when we get back.” Choosing “affectionately,” after some further speculation, rather than sincerely, she signed the letter and was doggedly beginning on another when Terence remarked, quoting from his book:

“Listen to this, Rachel. ‘It is probable that Hugh’ (he’s the hero, a literary man), ‘had not realised at the time of his marriage, any more than the young man of parts and imagination usually does realise, the nature of the gulf which separates the needs and desires of the male from the needs and desires of the female…. At first they had been very happy. The walking tour in Switzerland had been a time of jolly companionship and stimulating revelations for both of them. Betty had proved herself the ideal comrade…. They had shouted Love in the Valley to each other across the snowy slopes of the Riffelhorn’ (and so on, and so on—I’ll skip the descriptions)…. ‘But in London, after the boy’s birth, all was changed. Betty was an admirable mother; but it did not take her long to find out that motherhood, as that function is understood by the mother of the upper middle classes, did not absorb the whole of her energies. She was young and strong, with healthy limbs and a body and brain that called urgently for exercise….’ (In short she began to give tea-parties.) … ‘Coming in late from this singular talk with old Bob Murphy in his smoky, book-lined room, where the two men had each unloosened his soul to the other, with the sound of the traffic humming in his ears, and the foggy London sky slung tragically across his mind … he found women’s hats dotted about among his papers. Women’s wraps and absurd little feminine shoes and umbrellas were in the hall…. Then the bills began to come in…. He tried to speak frankly to her. He found her lying on the great polar-bear skin in their bedroom, half-undressed, for they were dining with the Greens in Wilton Crescent, the ruddy firelight making the diamonds wink and twinkle on her bare arms and in the delicious curve of her breast—a vision of adorable femininity. He forgave her all.’ (Well, this goes from bad to worse, and finally, about fifty pages later, Hugh takes a week-end ticket to Swanage and ‘has it out with himself on the downs above Corfe.’ … Here there’s fifteen pages or so which we’ll skip. The conclusion is …) ‘They were different. Perhaps, in the far future, when generations of men had struggled and failed as he must now struggle and fail, woman would be, indeed, what she now made a pretence of being—the friend and companion—not the enemy and parasite of man.’

“The end of it is, you see, Hugh went back to his wife, poor fellow. It was his duty, as a married man. Lord, Rachel,” he concluded, “will it be like that when we’re married?”

Instead of answering him she asked,

“Why don’t people write about the things they do feel?”

“Ah, that’s the difficulty!” he sighed, tossing the book away.

“Well, then, what will it be like when we’re married? What are the things people do feel?”

She seemed doubtful.

“Sit on the floor and let me look at you,” he commanded. Resting her chin on his knee, she looked straight at him.

He examined her curiously.

“You’re not beautiful,” he began, “but I like your face. I like the way your hair grows down in a point, and your eyes too—they never see anything. Your mouth’s too big, and your cheeks would be better if they had more colour in them. But what I like about your face is that it makes one wonder what the devil you’re thinking about—it makes me want to do that—” He clenched his fist and shook it so near her that she started back, “because now you look as if you’d blow my brains out. There are moments,” he continued, “when, if we stood on a rock together, you’d throw me into the sea.”

Hypnotised by the force of his eyes in hers, she repeated, “If we stood on a rock together——”

To be flung into the sea, to be washed hither and thither, and driven about the roots of the world—the idea was incoherently delightful. She sprang up, and began moving about the room, bending and thrusting aside the chairs and tables as if she were indeed striking through the waters. He watched her with pleasure; she seemed to be cleaving a passage for herself, and dealing triumphantly with the obstacles which would hinder their passage through life.

“It does seem possible!” he exclaimed, “though I’ve always thought it the most unlikely thing in the world—I shall be in love with you all my life, and our marriage will be the most exciting thing that’s ever been done! We’ll never have a moment’s peace—” He caught her in his arms as she passed him, and they fought for mastery, imagining a rock, and the sea heaving beneath them. At last she was thrown to the floor, where she lay gasping, and crying for mercy.

“I’m a mermaid! I can swim,” she cried, “so the game’s up.” Her dress was torn across, and peace being established, she fetched a needle and thread and began to mend the tear.

“And now,” she said, “be quiet and tell me about the world; tell me about everything that’s ever happened, and I’ll tell you—let me see, what can I tell you?—I’ll tell you about Miss Montgomerie and the river party. She was left, you see, with one foot in the boat, and the other on shore.”

They had spent much time already in thus filling out for the other the course of their past lives, and the characters of their friends and relations, so that very soon Terence knew not only what Rachel’s aunts might be expected to say upon every occasion, but also how their bedrooms were furnished, and what kind of bonnets they wore. He could sustain a conversation between Mrs. Hunt and Rachel, and carry on a tea-party including the Rev. William Johnson and Miss Macquoid, the Christian Scientists, with remarkable likeness to the truth. But he had known many more people, and was far more highly skilled in the art of narrative than Rachel was, whose experiences were, for the most part, of a curiously childlike and humorous kind, so that it generally fell to her lot to listen and ask questions.

He told her not only what had happened, but what he had thought and felt, and sketched for her portraits which fascinated her of what other men and women might be supposed to be thinking and feeling, so that she became very anxious to go back to England, which was full of people, where she could merely stand in the streets and look at them. According to him, too, there was an order, a pattern which made life reasonable, or, if that word was foolish, made it of deep interest anyhow, for sometimes it seemed possible to understand why things happened as they did. Nor were people so solitary and uncommunicative as she believed. She should look for vanity—for vanity was a common quality—first in herself, and then in Helen, in Ridley, in St. John, they all had their share of it—and she would find it in ten people out of every twelve she met; and once linked together by one such tie she would find them not separate and formidable, but practically indistinguishable, and she would come to love them when she found that they were like herself. If she denied this, she must defend her belief that human beings were as various as the beasts at the Zoo, which had stripes and manes, and horns and humps; and so, wrestling over the entire list of their acquaintances, and diverging into anecdote and theory and speculation, they came to know each other. The hours passed quickly, and seemed to them full to leaking-point. After a night’s solitude they were always ready to begin again.

The virtues which Mrs. Ambrose had once believed to exist in free talk between men and women did in truth exist for both of them, although not quite in the measure she prescribed. Far more than upon the nature of sex they dwelt upon the nature of poetry, but it was true that talk which had no boundaries deepened and enlarged the strangely small bright view of a girl. In return for what he could tell her she brought him such curiosity and sensitiveness of perception, that he was led to doubt whether any gift bestowed by much reading and living was quite the equal of that for pleasure and pain. What would experience give her after all, except a kind of ridiculous formal balance, like that of a drilled dog in the street? He looked at her face and wondered how it would look in twenty years’ time, when the eyes had dulled, and the forehead wore those little persistent wrinkles which seem to show that the middle-aged are facing something hard which the young do not see? What would the hard thing be for them, he wondered? Then his thoughts turned to their life in England.

The thought of England was delightful, for together they would see the old things freshly; it would be England in June, and there would be June nights in the country; and the nightingales singing in the lanes, into which they could steal when the room grew hot; and there would be English meadows gleaming with water and set with stolid cows, and clouds dipping low and trailing across the green hills. As he sat in the room with her, he wished very often to be back again in the thick of life, doing things with Rachel.

He crossed to the window and exclaimed, “Lord, how good it is to think of lanes, muddy lanes, with brambles and nettles, you know, and real grass fields, and farmyards with pigs and cows, and men walking beside carts with pitchforks—there’s nothing to compare with that here—look at the stony red earth, and the bright blue sea, and the glaring white houses—how tired one gets of it! And the air, without a stain or a wrinkle. I’d give anything for a sea mist.”

Rachel, too, had been thinking of the English country: the flat land rolling away to the sea, and the woods and the long straight roads, where one can walk for miles without seeing any one, and the great church towers and the curious houses clustered in the valleys, and the birds, and the dusk, and the rain falling against the windows.

“But London, London’s the place,” Terence continued. They looked together at the carpet, as though London itself were to be seen there lying on the floor, with all its spires and pinnacles pricking through the smoke.

“On the whole, what I should like best at this moment,” Terence pondered, “would be to find myself walking down Kingsway, by those big placards, you know, and turning into the Strand. Perhaps I might go and look over Waterloo Bridge for a moment. Then I’d go along the Strand past the shops with all the new books in them, and through the little archway into the Temple. I always like the quiet after the uproar. You hear your own footsteps suddenly quite loud. The Temple’s very pleasant. I think I should go and see if I could find dear old Hodgkin—the man who writes books about Van Eyck, you know. When I left England he was very sad about his tame magpie. He suspected that a man had poisoned it. And then Russell lives on the next staircase. I think you’d like him. He’s a passion for Handel. Well, Rachel,” he concluded, dismissing the vision of London, “we shall be doing that together in six weeks’ time, and it’ll be the middle of June then,—and June in London—my God! how pleasant it all is!”

“And we’re certain to have it too,” she said. “It isn’t as if we were expecting a great deal—only to walk about and look at things.”

“Only a thousand a year and perfect freedom,” he replied. “How many people in London d’you think have that?”

“And now you’ve spoilt it,” she complained. “Now we’ve got to think of the horrors.” She looked grudgingly at the novel which had once caused her perhaps an hour’s discomfort, so that she had never opened it again, but kept it on her table, and looked at it occasionally, as some medieval monk kept a skull, or a crucifix to remind him of the frailty of the body.

“Is it true, Terence,” she demanded, “that women die with bugs crawling across their faces?”

“I think it’s very probable,” he said. “But you must admit, Rachel, that we so seldom think of anything but ourselves that an occasional twinge is really rather pleasant.”

Accusing him of an affectation of cynicism which was just as bad as sentimentality itself, she left her position by his side and knelt upon the window sill, twisting the curtain tassels between her fingers. A vague sense of dissatisfaction filled her.

“What’s so detestable in this country,” she exclaimed, “is the blue—always blue sky and blue sea. It’s like a curtain—all the things one wants are on the other side of that. I want to know what’s going on behind it. I hate these divisions, don’t you, Terence? One person all in the dark about another person. Now I liked the Dalloways,” she continued, “and they’re gone. I shall never see them again. Just by going on a ship we cut ourselves off entirely from the rest of the world. I want to see England there—London there—all sorts of people—why shouldn’t one? why should one be shut up all by oneself in a room?”

While she spoke thus half to herself and with increasing vagueness, because her eye was caught by a ship that had just come into the bay, she did not see that Terence had ceased to stare contentedly in front of him, and was looking at her keenly and with dissatisfaction. She seemed to be able to cut herself adrift from him, and to pass away to unknown places where she had no need of him. The thought roused his jealousy.

“I sometimes think you’re not in love with me and never will be,” he said energetically. She started and turned round at his words.

“I don’t satisfy you in the way you satisfy me,” he continued. “There’s something I can’t get hold of in you. You don’t want me as I want you—you’re always wanting something else.”

He began pacing up and down the room.

“Perhaps I ask too much,” he went on. “Perhaps it isn’t really possible to have what I want. Men and women are too different. You can’t understand—you don’t understand——”

He came up to where she stood looking at him in silence.

It seemed to her now that what he was saying was perfectly true, and that she wanted many more things than the love of one human being—the sea, the sky. She turned again and looked at the distant blue, which was so smooth and serene where the sky met the sea; she could not possibly want only one human being.

“Or is it only this damnable engagement?” he continued. “Let’s be married here, before we go back—or is it too great a risk? Are we sure we want to marry each other?”

They began pacing up and down the room, but although they came very near each other in their pacing, they took care not to touch each other. The hopelessness of their position overcame them both. They were impotent; they could never love each other sufficiently to overcome all these barriers, and they could never be satisfied with less. Realising this with intolerable keenness she stopped in front of him and exclaimed:

“Let’s break it off, then.”

The words did more to unite them than any amount of argument. As if they stood on the edge of a precipice they clung together. They knew that they could not separate; painful and terrible it might be, but they were joined for ever. They lapsed into silence, and after a time crept together in silence. Merely to be so close soothed them, and sitting side by side the divisions disappeared, and it seemed as if the world were once more solid and entire, and as if, in some strange way, they had grown larger and stronger.

It was long before they moved, and when they moved it was with great reluctance. They stood together in front of the looking-glass, and with a brush tried to make themselves look as if they had been feeling nothing all the morning, neither pain nor happiness. But it chilled them to see themselves in the glass, for instead of being vast and indivisible they were really very small and separate, the size of the glass leaving a large space for the reflection of other things.

[]

Chapter XXIII

But no brush was able to efface completely the expression of happiness, so that Mrs. Ambrose could not treat them when they came downstairs as if they had spent the morning in a way that could be discussed naturally. This being so, she joined in the world’s conspiracy to consider them for the time incapacitated from the business of life, struck by their intensity of feeling into enmity against life, and almost succeeded in dismissing them from her thoughts.

She reflected that she had done all that it was necessary to do in practical matters. She had written a great many letters, and had obtained Willoughby’s consent. She had dwelt so often upon Mr. Hewet’s prospects, his profession, his birth, appearance, and temperament, that she had almost forgotten what he was really like. When she refreshed herself by a look at him, she used to wonder again what he was like, and then, concluding that they were happy at any rate, thought no more about it.

She might more profitably consider what would happen in three years’ time, or what might have happened if Rachel had been left to explore the world under her father’s guidance. The result, she was honest enough to own, might have been better—who knows? She did not disguise from herself that Terence had faults. She was inclined to think him too easy and tolerant, just as he was inclined to think her perhaps a trifle hard—no, it was rather that she was uncompromising. In some ways she found St. John preferable; but then, of course, he would never have suited Rachel. Her friendship with St. John was established, for although she fluctuated between irritation and interest in a way that did credit to the candour of her disposition, she liked his company on the whole. He took her outside this little world of love and emotion. He had a grasp of facts. Supposing, for instance, that England made a sudden move towards some unknown port on the coast of Morocco, St. John knew what was at the back of it, and to hear him engaged with her husband in argument about finance and the balance of power, gave her an odd sense of stability. She respected their arguments without always listening to them, much as she respected a solid brick wall, or one of those immense municipal buildings which, although they compose the greater part of our cities, have been built day after day and year after year by unknown hands. She liked to sit and listen, and even felt a little elated when the engaged couple, after showing their profound lack of interest, slipped from the room, and were seen pulling flowers to pieces in the garden. It was not that she was jealous of them, but she did undoubtedly envy them their great unknown future that lay before them. Slipping from one such thought to another, she was at the present moment wandering from drawing-room to dining-room with fruit in her hands. Sometimes she stopped to straighten a candle stooping with the heat, or disturbed some too rigid arrangement of the chairs. She had reason to suspect that Chailey had been balancing herself on the top of a ladder with a wet duster during their absence, and the room had never been quite like itself since. Returning from the dining-room for the third time, she perceived that one of the arm-chairs was now occupied by St. John. He lay back in it, with his eyes half shut, looking, as he always did, curiously buttoned up in a neat grey suit, and fenced against the exuberance of a foreign climate which might at any moment proceed to take liberties with him. Her eyes rested on him gently and then passed on over his head. Finally she took the chair opposite.

“I didn’t want to come here,” he said at last, “but I was positively driven to it…. Evelyn M.,” he groaned.

He sat up, and began to explain with mock solemnity how the detestable woman was set upon marrying him.

“She pursues me about the place. This morning she appeared in the smoking-room. All I could do was to seize my hat and fly. I didn’t want to come, but I couldn’t stay and face another meal with her.”

“Well, we must make the best of it,” Helen replied philosophically. It was very hot, and they were indifferent to any amount of silence, so that they lay back in their chairs waiting for something to happen. The bell rang for luncheon, but there was no sound of movement in the house. Was there any news? Helen asked; anything in the papers? St. John shook his head. O yes, he had a letter from home, a letter from his mother, describing the suicide of the parlour-maid. She was called Susan Jane, and she came into the kitchen one afternoon, and said that she wanted cook to keep her money for her; she had twenty pounds in gold. Then she went out to buy herself a hat. She came in at half-past five and said that she had taken poison. They had only just time to get her into bed and call a doctor before she died.

“Well?” Helen enquired.

“There’ll have to be an inquest,” said St. John.

Why had she done it? He shrugged his shoulders. Why do people kill themselves? Why do the lower orders do any of the things they do do? Nobody knows. They sat in silence.

“The bell’s rung fifteen minutes and they’re not down,” said Helen at length.

When they appeared, St. John explained why it had been necessary for him to come to luncheon. He imitated Evelyn’s enthusiastic tone as she confronted him in the smoking-room. “She thinks there can be nothing quite so thrilling as mathematics, so I’ve lent her a large work in two volumes. It’ll be interesting to see what she makes of it.”

Rachel could now afford to laugh at him. She reminded him of Gibbon; she had the first volume somewhere still; if he were undertaking the education of Evelyn, that surely was the test; or she had heard that Burke, upon the American Rebellion—Evelyn ought to read them both simultaneously. When St. John had disposed of her argument and had satisfied his hunger, he proceeded to tell them that the hotel was seething with scandals, some of the most appalling kind, which had happened in their absence; he was indeed much given to the study of his kind.

“Evelyn M., for example—but that was told me in confidence.”

“Nonsense!” Terence interposed.

“You’ve heard about poor Sinclair, too?”

“Oh, yes, I’ve heard about Sinclair. He’s retired to his mine with a revolver. He writes to Evelyn daily that he’s thinking of committing suicide. I’ve assured her that he’s never been so happy in his life, and, on the whole, she’s inclined to agree with me.”

“But then she’s entangled herself with Perrott,” St. John continued; “and I have reason to think, from something I saw in the passage, that everything isn’t as it should be between Arthur and Susan. There’s a young female lately arrived from Manchester. A very good thing if it were broken off, in my opinion. Their married life is something too horrible to contemplate. Oh, and I distinctly heard old Mrs. Paley rapping out the most fearful oaths as I passed her bedroom door. It’s supposed that she tortures her maid in private—it’s practically certain she does. One can tell it from the look in her eyes.”

“When you’re eighty and the gout tweezes you, you’ll be swearing like a trooper,” Terence remarked. “You’ll be very fat, very testy, very disagreeable. Can’t you imagine him—bald as a coot, with a pair of sponge-bag trousers, a little spotted tie, and a corporation?”

After a pause Hirst remarked that the worst infamy had still to be told. He addressed himself to Helen.

“They’ve hoofed out the prostitute. One night while we were away that old numskull Thornbury was doddering about the passages very late. (Nobody seems to have asked him what he was up to.) He saw the Signora Lola Mendoza, as she calls herself, cross the passage in her nightgown. He communicated his suspicions next morning to Elliot, with the result that Rodriguez went to the woman and gave her twenty-four hours in which to clear out of the place. No one seems to have enquired into the truth of the story, or to have asked Thornbury and Elliot what business it was of theirs; they had it entirely their own way. I propose that we should all sign a Round Robin, go to Rodriguez in a body, and insist upon a full enquiry. Something’s got to be done, don’t you agree?”

Hewet remarked that there could be no doubt as to the lady’s profession.

“Still,” he added, “it’s a great shame, poor woman; only I don’t see what’s to be done——”

“I quite agree with you, St. John,” Helen burst out. “It’s monstrous. The hypocritical smugness of the English makes my blood boil. A man who’s made a fortune in trade as Mr. Thornbury has is bound to be twice as bad as any prostitute.”

She respected St. John’s morality, which she took far more seriously than any one else did, and now entered into a discussion with him as to the steps that were to be taken to enforce their peculiar view of what was right. The argument led to some profoundly gloomy statements of a general nature. Who were they, after all—what authority had they—what power against the mass of superstition and ignorance? It was the English, of course; there must be something wrong in the English blood. Directly you met an English person, of the middle classes, you were conscious of an indefinable sensation of loathing; directly you saw the brown crescent of houses above Dover, the same thing came over you. But unfortunately St. John added, you couldn’t trust these foreigners——

They were interrupted by sounds of strife at the further end of the table. Rachel appealed to her aunt.

“Terence says we must go to tea with Mrs. Thornbury because she’s been so kind, but I don’t see it; in fact, I’d rather have my right hand sawn in pieces—just imagine! the eyes of all those women!”

“Fiddlesticks, Rachel,” Terence replied. “Who wants to look at you? You’re consumed with vanity! You’re a monster of conceit! Surely, Helen, you ought to have taught her by this time that she’s a person of no conceivable importance whatever—not beautiful, or well dressed, or conspicuous for elegance or intellect, or deportment. A more ordinary sight than you are,” he concluded, “except for the tear across your dress has never been seen. However, stay at home if you want to. I’m going.”

She appealed again to her aunt. It wasn’t the being looked at, she explained, but the things people were sure to say. The women in particular. She liked women, but where emotion was concerned they were as flies on a lump of sugar. They would be certain to ask her questions. Evelyn M. would say: “Are you in love? Is it nice being in love?” And Mrs. Thornbury—her eyes would go up and down, up and down—she shuddered at the thought of it. Indeed, the retirement of their life since their engagement had made her so sensitive, that she was not exaggerating her case.

She found an ally in Helen, who proceeded to expound her views of the human race, as she regarded with complacency the pyramid of variegated fruits in the centre of the table. It wasn’t that they were cruel, or meant to hurt, or even stupid exactly; but she had always found that the ordinary person had so little emotion in his own life that the scent of it in the lives of others was like the scent of blood in the nostrils of a bloodhound. Warming to the theme, she continued:

“Directly anything happens—it may be a marriage, or a birth, or a death—on the whole they prefer it to be death—every one wants to see you. They insist upon seeing you. They’ve got nothing to say; they don’t care a rap for you; but you’ve got to go to lunch or to tea or to dinner, and if you don’t you’re damned. It’s the smell of blood,” she continued; “I don’t blame ’em; only they shan’t have mine if I know it!”

She looked about her as if she had called up a legion of human beings, all hostile and all disagreeable, who encircled the table, with mouths gaping for blood, and made it appear a little island of neutral country in the midst of the enemy’s country.

Her words roused her husband, who had been muttering rhythmically to himself, surveying his guests and his food and his wife with eyes that were now melancholy and now fierce, according to the fortunes of the lady in his ballad. He cut Helen short with a protest. He hated even the semblance of cynicism in women. “Nonsense, nonsense,” he remarked abruptly.

Terence and Rachel glanced at each other across the table, which meant that when they were married they would not behave like that. The entrance of Ridley into the conversation had a strange effect. It became at once more formal and more polite. It would have been impossible to talk quite easily of anything that came into their heads, and to say the word prostitute as simply as any other word. The talk now turned upon literature and politics, and Ridley told stories of the distinguished people he had known in his youth. Such talk was of the nature of an art, and the personalities and informalities of the young were silenced. As they rose to go, Helen stopped for a moment, leaning her elbows on the table.

“You’ve all been sitting here,” she said, “for almost an hour, and you haven’t noticed my figs, or my flowers, or the way the light comes through, or anything. I haven’t been listening, because I’ve been looking at you. You looked very beautiful; I wish you’d go on sitting for ever.”

She led the way to the drawing-room, where she took up her embroidery, and began again to dissuade Terence from walking down to the hotel in this heat. But the more she dissuaded, the more he was determined to go. He became irritated and obstinate. There were moments when they almost disliked each other. He wanted other people; he wanted Rachel, to see them with him. He suspected that Mrs. Ambrose would now try to dissuade her from going. He was annoyed by all this space and shade and beauty, and Hirst, recumbent, drooping a magazine from his wrist.

“I’m going,” he repeated. “Rachel needn’t come unless she wants to.”

“If you go, Hewet, I wish you’d make enquiries about the prostitute,” said Hirst. “Look here,” he added, “I’ll walk half the way with you.”

Greatly to their surprise he raised himself, looked at his watch, and remarked that, as it was now half an hour since luncheon, the gastric juices had had sufficient time to secrete; he was trying a system, he explained, which involved short spells of exercise interspaced by longer intervals of rest.

“I shall be back at four,” he remarked to Helen, “when I shall lie down on the sofa and relax all my muscles completely.”

“So you’re going, Rachel?” Helen asked. “You won’t stay with me?”

She smiled, but she might have been sad.

Was she sad, or was she really laughing? Rachel could not tell, and she felt for the moment very uncomfortable between Helen and Terence. Then she turned away, saying merely that she would go with Terence, on condition that he did all the talking.

A narrow border of shadow ran along the road, which was broad enough for two, but not broad enough for three. St. John therefore dropped a little behind the pair, and the distance between them increased by degrees. Walking with a view to digestion, and with one eye upon his watch, he looked from time to time at the pair in front of him. They seemed to be so happy, so intimate, although they were walking side by side much as other people walk. They turned slightly toward each other now and then, and said something which he thought must be something very private. They were really disputing about Helen’s character, and Terence was trying to explain why it was that she annoyed him so much sometimes. But St. John thought that they were saying things which they did not want him to hear, and was led to think of his own isolation. These people were happy, and in some ways he despised them for being made happy so simply, and in other ways he envied them. He was much more remarkable than they were, but he was not happy. People never liked him; he doubted sometimes whether even Helen liked him. To be simple, to be able to say simply what one felt, without the terrific self-consciousness which possessed him, and showed him his own face and words perpetually in a mirror, that would be worth almost any other gift, for it made one happy. Happiness, happiness, what was happiness? He was never happy. He saw too clearly the little vices and deceits and flaws of life, and, seeing them, it seemed to him honest to take notice of them. That was the reason, no doubt, why people generally disliked him, and complained that he was heartless and bitter. Certainly they never told him the things he wanted to be told, that he was nice and kind, and that they liked him. But it was true that half the sharp things that he said about them were said because he was unhappy or hurt himself. But he admitted that he had very seldom told any one that he cared for them, and when he had been demonstrative, he had generally regretted it afterwards. His feelings about Terence and Rachel were so complicated that he had never yet been able to bring himself to say that he was glad that they were going to be married. He saw their faults so clearly, and the inferior nature of a great deal of their feeling for each other, and he expected that their love would not last. He looked at them again, and, very strangely, for he was so used to thinking that he very seldom saw anything, the look of them filled him with a simple emotion of affection in which there were some traces of pity also. What, after all, did people’s faults matter in comparison with what was good in them? He resolved that he would now tell them what he felt. He quickened his pace and came up with them just as they reached the corner where the lane joined the main road. They stood still and began to laugh at him, and to ask him whether the gastric juices——but he stopped them and began to speak very quickly and stiffly.

“D’you remember the morning after the dance?” he demanded. “It was here we sat, and you talked nonsense, and Rachel made little heaps of stones. I, on the other hand, had the whole meaning of life revealed to me in a flash.” He paused for a second, and drew his lips together in a tight little purse. “Love,” he said. “It seems to me to explain everything. So, on the whole, I’m very glad that you two are going to be married.” He then turned round abruptly, without looking at them, and walked back to the villa. He felt both exalted and ashamed of himself for having thus said what he felt. Probably they were laughing at him, probably they thought him a fool, and, after all, had he really said what he felt?

It was true that they laughed when he was gone; but the dispute about Helen which had become rather sharp, ceased, and they became peaceful and friendly.

[]

Chapter XXIV

They reached the hotel rather early in the afternoon, so that most people were still lying down, or sitting speechless in their bedrooms, and Mrs. Thornbury, although she had asked them to tea, was nowhere to be seen. They sat down, therefore, in the shady hall, which was almost empty, and full of the light swishing sounds of air going to and fro in a large, empty space. Yes, this arm-chair was the same arm-chair in which Rachel had sat that afternoon when Evelyn came up, and this was the magazine she had been looking at, and this the very picture, a picture of New York by lamplight. How odd it seemed—nothing had changed.

By degrees a certain number of people began to come down the stairs and to pass through the hall, and in this dim light their figures possessed a sort of grace and beauty, although they were all unknown people. Sometimes they went straight through and out into the garden by the swing door, sometimes they stopped for a few minutes and bent over the tables and began turning over the newspapers. Terence and Rachel sat watching them through their half-closed eyelids—the Johnsons, the Parkers, the Baileys, the Simmons’, the Lees, the Morleys, the Campbells, the Gardiners. Some were dressed in white flannels and were carrying racquets under their arms, some were short, some tall, some were only children, and some perhaps were servants, but they all had their standing, their reason for following each other through the hall, their money, their position, whatever it might be. Terence soon gave up looking at them, for he was tired; and, closing his eyes, he fell half asleep in his chair. Rachel watched the people for some time longer; she was fascinated by the certainty and the grace of their movements, and by the inevitable way in which they seemed to follow each other, and loiter and pass on and disappear. But after a time her thoughts wandered, and she began to think of the dance, which had been held in this room, only then the room itself looked quite different. Glancing round, she could hardly believe that it was the same room. It had looked so bare and so bright and formal on that night when they came into it out of the darkness; it had been filled, too, with little red, excited faces, always moving, and people so brightly dressed and so animated that they did not seem in the least like real people, nor did you feel that you could talk to them. And now the room was dim and quiet, and beautiful silent people passed through it, to whom you could go and say anything you liked. She felt herself amazingly secure as she sat in her arm-chair, and able to review not only the night of the dance, but the entire past, tenderly and humorously, as if she had been turning in a fog for a long time, and could now see exactly where she had turned. For the methods by which she had reached her present position, seemed to her very strange, and the strangest thing about them was that she had not known where they were leading her. That was the strange thing, that one did not know where one was going, or what one wanted, and followed blindly, suffering so much in secret, always unprepared and amazed and knowing nothing; but one thing led to another and by degrees something had formed itself out of nothing, and so one reached at last this calm, this quiet, this certainty, and it was this process that people called living. Perhaps, then, every one really knew as she knew now where they were going; and things formed themselves into a pattern not only for her, but for them, and in that pattern lay satisfaction and meaning. When she looked back she could see that a meaning of some kind was apparent in the lives of her aunts, and in the brief visit of the Dalloways whom she would never see again, and in the life of her father.

The sound of Terence, breathing deep in his slumber, confirmed her in her calm. She was not sleepy although she did not see anything very distinctly, but although the figures passing through the hall became vaguer and vaguer, she believed that they all knew exactly where they were going, and the sense of their certainty filled her with comfort. For the moment she was as detached and disinterested as if she had no longer any lot in life, and she thought that she could now accept anything that came to her without being perplexed by the form in which it appeared. What was there to frighten or to perplex in the prospect of life? Why should this insight ever again desert her? The world was in truth so large, so hospitable, and after all it was so simple. “Love,” St. John had said, “that seems to explain it all.” Yes, but it was not the love of man for woman, of Terence for Rachel. Although they sat so close together, they had ceased to be little separate bodies; they had ceased to struggle and desire one another. There seemed to be peace between them. It might be love, but it was not the love of man for woman.

Through her half-closed eyelids she watched Terence lying back in his chair, and she smiled as she saw how big his mouth was, and his chin so small, and his nose curved like a switchback with a knob at the end. Naturally, looking like that he was lazy, and ambitious, and full of moods and faults. She remembered their quarrels, and in particular how they had been quarrelling about Helen that very afternoon, and she thought how often they would quarrel in the thirty, or forty, or fifty years in which they would be living in the same house together, catching trains together, and getting annoyed because they were so different. But all this was superficial, and had nothing to do with the life that went on beneath the eyes and the mouth and the chin, for that life was independent of her, and independent of everything else. So too, although she was going to marry him and to live with him for thirty, or forty, or fifty years, and to quarrel, and to be so close to him, she was independent of him; she was independent of everything else. Nevertheless, as St. John said, it was love that made her understand this, for she had never felt this independence, this calm, and this certainty until she fell in love with him, and perhaps this too was love. She wanted nothing else.

For perhaps two minutes Miss Allan had been standing at a little distance looking at the couple lying back so peacefully in their arm-chairs. She could not make up her mind whether to disturb them or not, and then, seeming to recollect something, she came across the hall. The sound of her approach woke Terence, who sat up and rubbed his eyes. He heard Miss Allan talking to Rachel.

“Well,” she was saying, “this is very nice. It is very nice indeed. Getting engaged seems to be quite the fashion. It cannot often happen that two couples who have never seen each other before meet in the same hotel and decide to get married.” Then she paused and smiled, and seemed to have nothing more to say, so that Terence rose and asked her whether it was true that she had finished her book. Some one had said that she had really finished it. Her face lit up; she turned to him with a livelier expression than usual.

“Yes, I think I can fairly say I have finished it,” she said. “That is, omitting Swinburne—Beowulf to Browning—I rather like the two B’s myself. Beowulf to Browning,” she repeated, “I think that is the kind of title which might catch one’s eye on a railway bookstall.”

She was indeed very proud that she had finished her book, for no one knew what an amount of determination had gone to the making of it. Also she thought that it was a good piece of work, and, considering what anxiety she had been in about her brother while she wrote it, she could not resist telling them a little more about it.

“I must confess,” she continued, “that if I had known how many classics there are in English literature, and how verbose the best of them contrive to be, I should never have undertaken the work. They only allow one seventy thousand words, you see.”

“Only seventy thousand words!” Terence exclaimed.

“Yes, and one has to say something about everybody,” Miss Allan added. “That is what I find so difficult, saying something different about everybody.” Then she thought that she had said enough about herself, and she asked whether they had come down to join the tennis tournament. “The young people are very keen about it. It begins again in half an hour.”

Her gaze rested benevolently upon them both, and, after a momentary pause, she remarked, looking at Rachel as if she had remembered something that would serve to keep her distinct from other people:

“You’re the remarkable person who doesn’t like ginger.” But the kindness of the smile in her rather worn and courageous face made them feel that although she would scarcely remember them as individuals, she had laid upon them the burden of the new generation.

“And in that I quite agree with her,” said a voice behind; Mrs. Thornbury had overheard the last few words about not liking ginger. “It’s associated in my mind with a horrid old aunt of ours (poor thing, she suffered dreadfully, so it isn’t fair to call her horrid) who used to give it us when we were small, and we never had the courage to tell her we didn’t like it. We just had to put it out in the shrubbery—she had a big house near Bath.”

They began moving slowly across the hall, when they were stopped by the impact of Evelyn, who dashed into them, as though in running downstairs to catch them her legs had got beyond her control.

“Well,” she exclaimed, with her usual enthusiasm, seizing Rachel by the arm, “I call this splendid! I guessed it was going to happen from the very beginning! I saw you two were made for each other. Now you’ve just got to tell me all about it—when’s it to be, where are you going to live—are you both tremendously happy?”

But the attention of the group was diverted to Mrs. Elliot, who was passing them with her eager but uncertain movement, carrying in her hands a plate and an empty hot-water bottle. She would have passed them, but Mrs. Thornbury went up and stopped her.

“Thank you, Hughling’s better,” she replied, in answer to Mrs. Thornbury’s enquiry, “but he’s not an easy patient. He wants to know what his temperature is, and if I tell him he gets anxious, and if I don’t tell him he suspects. You know what men are when they’re ill! And of course there are none of the proper appliances, and, though he seems very willing and anxious to help” (here she lowered her voice mysteriously), “one can’t feel that Dr. Rodriguez is the same as a proper doctor. If you would come and see him, Mr. Hewet,” she added, “I know it would cheer him up—lying there in bed all day—and the flies—But I must go and find Angelo—the food here—of course, with an invalid, one wants things particularly nice.” And she hurried past them in search of the head waiter. The worry of nursing her husband had fixed a plaintive frown upon her forehead; she was pale and looked unhappy and more than usually inefficient, and her eyes wandered more vaguely than ever from point to point.

“Poor thing!” Mrs. Thornbury exclaimed. She told them that for some days Hughling Elliot had been ill, and the only doctor available was the brother of the proprietor, or so the proprietor said, whose right to the title of doctor was not above suspicion.

“I know how wretched it is to be ill in a hotel,” Mrs. Thornbury remarked, once more leading the way with Rachel to the garden. “I spent six weeks on my honeymoon in having typhoid at Venice,” she continued. “But even so, I look back upon them as some of the happiest weeks in my life. Ah, yes,” she said, taking Rachel’s arm, “you think yourself happy now, but it’s nothing to the happiness that comes afterwards. And I assure you I could find it in my heart to envy you young people! You’ve a much better time than we had, I may tell you. When I look back upon it, I can hardly believe how things have changed. When we were engaged I wasn’t allowed to go for walks with William alone—some one had always to be in the room with us—I really believe I had to show my parents all his letters!—though they were very fond of him too. Indeed, I may say they looked upon him as their own son. It amuses me,” she continued, “to think how strict they were to us, when I see how they spoil their grandchildren!”

The table was laid under the tree again, and taking her place before the teacups, Mrs. Thornbury beckoned and nodded until she had collected quite a number of people, Susan and Arthur and Mr. Pepper, who were strolling about, waiting for the tournament to begin. A murmuring tree, a river brimming in the moonlight, Terence’s words came back to Rachel as she sat drinking the tea and listening to the words which flowed on so lightly, so kindly, and with such silvery smoothness. This long life and all these children had left her very smooth; they seemed to have rubbed away the marks of individuality, and to have left only what was old and maternal.

“And the things you young people are going to see!” Mrs. Thornbury continued. She included them all in her forecast, she included them all in her maternity, although the party comprised William Pepper and Miss Allan, both of whom might have been supposed to have seen a fair share of the panorama. “When I see how the world has changed in my lifetime,” she went on, “I can set no limit to what may happen in the next fifty years. Ah, no, Mr. Pepper, I don’t agree with you in the least,” she laughed, interrupting his gloomy remark about things going steadily from bad to worse. “I know I ought to feel that, but I don’t, I’m afraid. They’re going to be much better people than we were. Surely everything goes to prove that. All round me I see women, young women, women with household cares of every sort, going out and doing things that we should not have thought it possible to do.”

Mr. Pepper thought her sentimental and irrational like all old women, but her manner of treating him as if he were a cross old baby baffled him and charmed him, and he could only reply to her with a curious grimace which was more a smile than a frown.

“And they remain women,” Mrs. Thornbury added. “They give a great deal to their children.”

As she said this she smiled slightly in the direction of Susan and Rachel. They did not like to be included in the same lot, but they both smiled a little self-consciously, and Arthur and Terence glanced at each other too. She made them feel that they were all in the same boat together, and they looked at the women they were going to marry and compared them. It was inexplicable how any one could wish to marry Rachel, incredible that any one should be ready to spend his life with Susan; but singular though the other’s taste must be, they bore each other no ill-will on account of it; indeed, they liked each other rather the better for the eccentricity of their choice.

“I really must congratulate you,” Susan remarked, as she leant across the table for the jam.

There seemed to be no foundation for St. John’s gossip about Arthur and Susan. Sunburnt and vigorous they sat side by side, with their racquets across their knees, not saying much but smiling slightly all the time. Through the thin white clothes which they wore, it was possible to see the lines of their bodies and legs, the beautiful curves of their muscles, his leanness and her flesh, and it was natural to think of the firm-fleshed sturdy children that would be theirs. Their faces had too little shape in them to be beautiful, but they had clear eyes and an appearance of great health and power of endurance, for it seemed as if the blood would never cease to run in his veins, or to lie deeply and calmly in her cheeks. Their eyes at the present moment were brighter than usual, and wore the peculiar expression of pleasure and self-confidence which is seen in the eyes of athletes, for they had been playing tennis, and they were both first-rate at the game.

Evelyn had not spoken, but she had been looking from Susan to Rachel. Well—they had both made up their minds very easily, they had done in a very few weeks what it sometimes seemed to her that she would never be able to do. Although they were so different, she thought that she could see in each the same look of satisfaction and completion, the same calmness of manner, and the same slowness of movement. It was that slowness, that confidence, that content which she hated, she thought to herself. They moved so slowly because they were not single but double, and Susan was attached to Arthur, and Rachel to Terence, and for the sake of this one man they had renounced all other men, and movement, and the real things of life. Love was all very well, and those snug domestic houses, with the kitchen below and the nursery above, which were so secluded and self-contained, like little islands in the torrents of the world; but the real things were surely the things that happened, the causes, the wars, the ideals, which happened in the great world outside, and went on independently of these women, turning so quietly and beautifully towards the men. She looked at them sharply. Of course they were happy and content, but there must be better things than that. Surely one could get nearer to life, one could get more out of life, one could enjoy more and feel more than they would ever do. Rachel in particular looked so young—what could she know of life? She became restless, and getting up, crossed over to sit beside Rachel. She reminded her that she had promised to join her club.

“The bother is,” she went on, “that I mayn’t be able to start work seriously till October. I’ve just had a letter from a friend of mine whose brother is in business in Moscow. They want me to stay with them, and as they’re in the thick of all the conspiracies and anarchists, I’ve a good mind to stop on my way home. It sounds too thrilling.” She wanted to make Rachel see how thrilling it was. “My friend knows a girl of fifteen who’s been sent to Siberia for life merely because they caught her addressing a letter to an anarchist. And the letter wasn’t from her, either. I’d give all I have in the world to help on a revolution against the Russian government, and it’s bound to come.”

She looked from Rachel to Terence. They were both a little touched by the sight of her remembering how lately they had been listening to evil words about her, and Terence asked her what her scheme was, and she explained that she was going to found a club—a club for doing things, really doing them. She became very animated, as she talked on and on, for she professed herself certain that if once twenty people—no, ten would be enough if they were keen—set about doing things instead of talking about doing them, they could abolish almost every evil that exists. It was brains that were needed. If only people with brains—of course they would want a room, a nice room, in Bloomsbury preferably, where they could meet once a week….

As she talked Terence could see the traces of fading youth in her face, the lines that were being drawn by talk and excitement round her mouth and eyes, but he did not pity her; looking into those bright, rather hard, and very courageous eyes, he saw that she did not pity herself, or feel any desire to exchange her own life for the more refined and orderly lives of people like himself and St. John, although, as the years went by, the fight would become harder and harder. Perhaps, though, she would settle down; perhaps, after all, she would marry Perrott. While his mind was half occupied with what she was saying, he thought of her probable destiny, the light clouds of tobacco smoke serving to obscure his face from her eyes.

Terence smoked and Arthur smoked and Evelyn smoked, so that the air was full of the mist and fragrance of good tobacco. In the intervals when no one spoke, they heard far off the low murmur of the sea, as the waves quietly broke and spread the beach with a film of water, and withdrew to break again. The cool green light fell through the leaves of the tree, and there were soft crescents and diamonds of sunshine upon the plates and the tablecloth. Mrs. Thornbury, after watching them all for a time in silence, began to ask Rachel kindly questions—When did they all go back? Oh, they expected her father. She must want to see her father—there would be a great deal to tell him, and (she looked sympathetically at Terence) he would be so happy, she felt sure. Years ago, she continued, it might have been ten or even twenty years ago, she remembered meeting Mr. Vinrace at a party, and, being so much struck by his face, which was so unlike the ordinary face one sees at a party, that she had asked who he was, and she was told that it was Mr. Vinrace, and she had always remembered the name,—an uncommon name,—and he had a lady with him, a very sweet-looking woman, but it was one of those dreadful London crushes, where you don’t talk,—you only look at each other,—and though she had shaken hands with Mr. Vinrace, she didn’t think they had said anything. She sighed very slightly, remembering the past.

Then she turned to Mr. Pepper, who had become very dependent on her, so that he always chose a seat near her, and attended to what she was saying, although he did not often make any remark of his own.

“You who know everything, Mr. Pepper,” she said, “tell us how did those wonderful French ladies manage their salons? Did we ever do anything of the same kind in England, or do you think that there is some reason why we cannot do it in England?”

Mr. Pepper was pleased to explain very accurately why there has never been an English salon. There were three reasons, and they were very good ones, he said. As for himself, when he went to go to a party, as one was sometimes obliged to, from a wish not to give offence—his niece, for example, had been married the other day—he walked into the middle of the room, said “Ha! ha!” as loud as ever he could, considered that he had done his duty, and walked away again. Mrs. Thornbury protested. She was going to give a party directly she got back, and they were all to be invited, and she should set people to watch Mr. Pepper, and if she heard that he had been caught saying “Ha! ha!” she would—she would do something very dreadful indeed to him. Arthur Venning suggested that what she must do was to rig up something in the nature of a surprise—a portrait, for example, of a nice old lady in a lace cap, concealing a bath of cold water, which at a signal could be sprung on Pepper’s head; or they’d have a chair which shot him twenty feet high directly he sat on it.

Susan laughed. She had done her tea; she was feeling very well contented, partly because she had been playing tennis brilliantly, and then every one was so nice; she was beginning to find it so much easier to talk, and to hold her own even with quite clever people, for somehow clever people did not frighten her any more. Even Mr. Hirst, whom she had disliked when she first met him, really wasn’t disagreeable; and, poor man, he always looked so ill; perhaps he was in love; perhaps he had been in love with Rachel—she really shouldn’t wonder; or perhaps it was Evelyn—she was of course very attractive to men. Leaning forward, she went on with the conversation. She said that she thought that the reason why parties were so dull was mainly because gentlemen will not dress: even in London, she stated, it struck her very much how people don’t think it necessary to dress in the evening, and of course if they don’t dress in London they won’t dress in the country. It was really quite a treat at Christmas-time when there were the Hunt balls, and the gentlemen wore nice red coats, but Arthur didn’t care for dancing, so she supposed that they wouldn’t go even to the ball in their little country town. She didn’t think that people who were fond of one sport often care for another, although her father was an exception. But then he was an exception in every way—such a gardener, and he knew all about birds and animals, and of course he was simply adored by all the old women in the village, and at the same time what he really liked best was a book. You always knew where to find him if he were wanted; he would be in his study with a book. Very likely it would be an old, old book, some fusty old thing that no one else would dream of reading. She used to tell him that he would have made a first-rate old bookworm if only he hadn’t had a family of six to support, and six children, she added, charmingly confident of universal sympathy, didn’t leave one much time for being a bookworm.

Still talking about her father, of whom she was very proud, she rose, for Arthur upon looking at his watch found that it was time they went back again to the tennis court. The others did not move.

“They’re very happy!” said Mrs. Thornbury, looking benignantly after them. Rachel agreed; they seemed to be so certain of themselves; they seemed to know exactly what they wanted.

“D’you think they are happy?” Evelyn murmured to Terence in an undertone, and she hoped that he would say that he did not think them happy; but, instead, he said that they must go too—go home, for they were always being late for meals, and Mrs. Ambrose, who was very stern and particular, didn’t like that. Evelyn laid hold of Rachel’s skirt and protested. Why should they go? It was still early, and she had so many things to say to them.

“No,” said Terence, “we must go, because we walk so slowly. We stop and look at things, and we talk.”

“What d’you talk about?” Evelyn enquired, upon which he laughed and said that they talked about everything.

Mrs. Thornbury went with them to the gate, trailing very slowly and gracefully across the grass and the gravel, and talking all the time about flowers and birds. She told them that she had taken up the study of botany since her daughter married, and it was wonderful what a number of flowers there were which she had never seen, although she had lived in the country all her life and she was now seventy-two. It was a good thing to have some occupation which was quite independent of other people, she said, when one got old. But the odd thing was that one never felt old. She always felt that she was twenty-five, not a day more or a day less, but, of course, one couldn’t expect other people to agree to that.

“It must be very wonderful to be twenty-five, and not merely to imagine that you’re twenty-five,” she said, looking from one to the other with her smooth, bright glance. “It must be very wonderful, very wonderful indeed.” She stood talking to them at the gate for a long time; she seemed reluctant that they should go.

[]

Chapter XXV

The afternoon was very hot, so hot that the breaking of the waves on the shore sounded like the repeated sigh of some exhausted creature, and even on the terrace under an awning the bricks were hot, and the air danced perpetually over the short dry grass. The red flowers in the stone basins were drooping with the heat, and the white blossoms which had been so smooth and thick only a few weeks ago were now dry, and their edges were curled and yellow. Only the stiff and hostile plants of the south, whose fleshy leaves seemed to be grown upon spines, still remained standing upright and defied the sun to beat them down. It was too hot to talk, and it was not easy to find any book that would withstand the power of the sun. Many books had been tried and then let fall, and now Terence was reading Milton aloud, because he said the words of Milton had substance and shape, so that it was not necessary to understand what he was saying; one could merely listen to his words; one could almost handle them.

There is a gentle nymph not far from hence,

he read,

That with moist curb sways the smooth Severn stream.

Sabrina is her name, a virgin pure;

Whilom she was the daughter of Locrine,

That had the sceptre from his father Brute.

The words, in spite of what Terence had said, seemed to be laden with meaning, and perhaps it was for this reason that it was painful to listen to them; they sounded strange; they meant different things from what they usually meant. Rachel at any rate could not keep her attention fixed upon them, but went off upon curious trains of thought suggested by words such as “curb” and “Locrine” and “Brute,” which brought unpleasant sights before her eyes, independently of their meaning. Owing to the heat and the dancing air the garden too looked strange—the trees were either too near or too far, and her head almost certainly ached. She was not quite certain, and therefore she did not know, whether to tell Terence now, or to let him go on reading. She decided that she would wait until he came to the end of a stanza, and if by that time she had turned her head this way and that, and it ached in every position undoubtedly, she would say very calmly that her head ached.

Sabrina fair,

Listen where thou art sitting

Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave,

In twisted braids of lilies knitting

The loose train of thy amber dropping hair,

Listen for dear honour’s sake,

Goddess of the silver lake,

Listen and save!

But her head ached; it ached whichever way she turned it.

She sat up and said as she had determined, “My head aches so that I shall go indoors.”

He was half-way through the next verse, but he dropped the book instantly.

“Your head aches?” he repeated.

For a few moments they sat looking at one another in silence, holding each other’s hands. During this time his sense of dismay and catastrophe were almost physically painful; all round him he seemed to hear the shiver of broken glass which, as it fell to earth, left him sitting in the open air. But at the end of two minutes, noticing that she was not sharing his dismay, but was only rather more languid and heavy-eyed than usual, he recovered, fetched Helen, and asked her to tell them what they had better do, for Rachel had a headache.

Mrs. Ambrose was not discomposed, but advised that she should go to bed, and added that she must expect her head to ache if she sat up to all hours and went out in the heat, but a few hours in bed would cure it completely. Terence was unreasonably reassured by her words, as he had been unreasonably depressed the moment before. Helen’s sense seemed to have much in common with the ruthless good sense of nature, which avenged rashness by a headache, and, like nature’s good sense, might be depended upon.

Rachel went to bed; she lay in the dark, it seemed to her, for a very long time, but at length, waking from a transparent kind of sleep, she saw the windows white in front of her, and recollected that some time before she had gone to bed with a headache, and that Helen had said it would be gone when she woke. She supposed, therefore, that she was now quite well again. At the same time the wall of her room was painfully white, and curved slightly, instead of being straight and flat. Turning her eyes to the window, she was not reassured by what she saw there. The movement of the blind as it filled with air and blew slowly out, drawing the cord with a little trailing sound along the floor, seemed to her terrifying, as if it were the movement of an animal in the room. She shut her eyes, and the pulse in her head beat so strongly that each thump seemed to tread upon a nerve, piercing her forehead with a little stab of pain. It might not be the same headache, but she certainly had a headache. She turned from side to side, in the hope that the coolness of the sheets would cure her, and that when she next opened her eyes to look the room would be as usual. After a considerable number of vain experiments, she resolved to put the matter beyond a doubt. She got out of bed and stood upright, holding on to the brass ball at the end of the bedstead. Ice-cold at first, it soon became as hot as the palm of her hand, and as the pains in her head and body and the instability of the floor proved that it would be far more intolerable to stand and walk than to lie in bed, she got into bed again; but though the change was refreshing at first, the discomfort of bed was soon as great as the discomfort of standing up. She accepted the idea that she would have to stay in bed all day long, and as she laid her head on the pillow, relinquished the happiness of the day.

When Helen came in an hour or two later, suddenly stopped her cheerful words, looked startled for a second and then unnaturally calm, the fact that she was ill was put beyond a doubt. It was confirmed when the whole household knew of it, when the song that some one was singing in the garden stopped suddenly, and when Maria, as she brought water, slipped past the bed with averted eyes. There was all the morning to get through, and then all the afternoon, and at intervals she made an effort to cross over into the ordinary world, but she found that her heat and discomfort had put a gulf between her world and the ordinary world which she could not bridge. At one point the door opened, and Helen came in with a little dark man who had—it was the chief thing she noticed about him—very hairy hands. She was drowsy and intolerably hot, and as he seemed shy and obsequious she scarcely troubled to answer him, although she understood that he was a doctor. At another point the door opened and Terence came in very gently, smiling too steadily, as she realised, for it to be natural. He sat down and talked to her, stroking her hands until it became irksome to her to lie any more in the same position and she turned round, and when she looked up again Helen was beside her and Terence had gone. It did not matter; she would see him to-morrow when things would be ordinary again. Her chief occupation during the day was to try to remember how the lines went:

Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave,

In twisted braids of lilies knitting

The loose train of thy amber dropping hair;

and the effort worried her because the adjectives persisted in getting into the wrong places.

The second day did not differ very much from the first day, except that her bed had become very important, and the world outside, when she tried to think of it, appeared distinctly further off. The glassy, cool, translucent wave was almost visible before her, curling up at the end of the bed, and as it was refreshingly cool she tried to keep her mind fixed upon it. Helen was here, and Helen was there all day long; sometimes she said that it was lunchtime, and sometimes that it was teatime; but by the next day all landmarks were obliterated, and the outer world was so far away that the different sounds, such as the sounds of people passing on the stairs, and the sounds of people moving overhead, could only be ascribed to their cause by a great effort of memory. The recollection of what she had felt, or of what she had been doing and thinking three days before, had faded entirely. On the other hand, every object in the room, and the bed itself, and her own body with its various limbs and their different sensations were more and more important each day. She was completely cut off, and unable to communicate with the rest of the world, isolated alone with her body.

Hours and hours would pass thus, without getting any further through the morning, or again a few minutes would lead from broad daylight to the depths of the night. One evening when the room appeared very dim, either because it was evening or because the blinds were drawn, Helen said to her, “Some one is going to sit here to-night. You won’t mind?”

Opening her eyes, Rachel saw not only Helen but a nurse in spectacles, whose face vaguely recalled something that she had once seen. She had seen her in the chapel.

“Nurse McInnis,” said Helen, and the nurse smiled steadily as they all did, and said that she did not find many people who were frightened of her. After waiting for a moment they both disappeared, and having turned on her pillow Rachel woke to find herself in the midst of one of those interminable nights which do not end at twelve, but go on into the double figures—thirteen, fourteen, and so on until they reach the twenties, and then the thirties, and then the forties. She realised that there is nothing to prevent nights from doing this if they choose. At a great distance an elderly woman sat with her head bent down; Rachel raised herself slightly and saw with dismay that she was playing cards by the light of a candle which stood in the hollow of a newspaper. The sight had something inexplicably sinister about it, and she was terrified and cried out, upon which the woman laid down her cards and came across the room, shading the candle with her hands. Coming nearer and nearer across the great space of the room, she stood at last above Rachel’s head and said, “Not asleep? Let me make you comfortable.”

She put down the candle and began to arrange the bedclothes. It struck Rachel that a woman who sat playing cards in a cavern all night long would have very cold hands, and she shrunk from the touch of them.

“Why, there’s a toe all the way down there!” the woman said, proceeding to tuck in the bedclothes. Rachel did not realise that the toe was hers.

“You must try and lie still,” she proceeded, “because if you lie still you will be less hot, and if you toss about you will make yourself more hot, and we don’t want you to be any hotter than you are.” She stood looking down upon Rachel for an enormous length of time.

“And the quieter you lie the sooner you will be well,” she repeated.

Rachel kept her eyes fixed upon the peaked shadow on the ceiling, and all her energy was concentrated upon the desire that this shadow should move. But the shadow and the woman seemed to be eternally fixed above her. She shut her eyes. When she opened them again several more hours had passed, but the night still lasted interminably. The woman was still playing cards, only she sat now in a tunnel under a river, and the light stood in a little archway in the wall above her. She cried “Terence!” and the peaked shadow again moved across the ceiling, as the woman with an enormous slow movement rose, and they both stood still above her.

“It’s just as difficult to keep you in bed as it was to keep Mr. Forrest in bed,” the woman said, “and he was such a tall gentleman.”

In order to get rid of this terrible stationary sight Rachel again shut her eyes, and found herself walking through a tunnel under the Thames, where there were little deformed women sitting in archways playing cards, while the bricks of which the wall was made oozed with damp, which collected into drops and slid down the wall. But the little old women became Helen and Nurse McInnis after a time, standing in the window together whispering, whispering incessantly.

Meanwhile outside her room the sounds, the movements, and the lives of the other people in the house went on in the ordinary light of the sun, throughout the usual succession of hours. When, on the first day of her illness, it became clear that she would not be absolutely well, for her temperature was very high, until Friday, that day being Tuesday, Terence was filled with resentment, not against her, but against the force outside them which was separating them. He counted up the number of days that would almost certainly be spoilt for them. He realised, with an odd mixture of pleasure and annoyance, that, for the first time in his life, he was so dependent upon another person that his happiness was in her keeping. The days were completely wasted upon trifling, immaterial things, for after three weeks of such intimacy and intensity all the usual occupations were unbearably flat and beside the point. The least intolerable occupation was to talk to St. John about Rachel’s illness, and to discuss every symptom and its meaning, and, when this subject was exhausted, to discuss illness of all kinds, and what caused them, and what cured them.

Twice every day he went in to sit with Rachel, and twice every day the same thing happened. On going into her room, which was not very dark, where the music was lying about as usual, and her books and letters, his spirits rose instantly. When he saw her he felt completely reassured. She did not look very ill. Sitting by her side he would tell her what he had been doing, using his natural voice to speak to her, only a few tones lower down than usual; but by the time he had sat there for five minutes he was plunged in the deepest gloom. She was not the same; he could not bring them back to their old relationship; but although he knew that it was foolish he could not prevent himself from endeavouring to bring her back, to make her remember, and when this failed he was in despair. He always concluded as he left her room that it was worse to see her than not to see her, but by degrees, as the day wore on, the desire to see her returned and became almost too great to be borne.

On Thursday morning when Terence went into her room he felt the usual increase of confidence. She turned round and made an effort to remember certain facts from the world that was so many millions of miles away.

“You have come up from the hotel?” she asked.

“No; I’m staying here for the present,” he said. “We’ve just had luncheon,” he continued, “and the mail has come in. There’s a bundle of letters for you—letters from England.”

Instead of saying, as he meant her to say, that she wished to see them, she said nothing for some time.

“You see, there they go, rolling off the edge of the hill,” she said suddenly.

“Rolling, Rachel? What do you see rolling? There’s nothing rolling.”

“The old woman with the knife,” she replied, not speaking to Terence in particular, and looking past him. As she appeared to be looking at a vase on the shelf opposite, he rose and took it down.

“Now they can’t roll any more,” he said cheerfully. Nevertheless she lay gazing at the same spot, and paid him no further attention although he spoke to her. He became so profoundly wretched that he could not endure to sit with her, but wandered about until he found St. John, who was reading The Times in the verandah. He laid it aside patiently, and heard all that Terence had to say about delirium. He was very patient with Terence. He treated him like a child.

By Friday it could not be denied that the illness was no longer an attack that would pass off in a day or two; it was a real illness that required a good deal of organisation, and engrossed the attention of at least five people, but there was no reason to be anxious. Instead of lasting five days it was going to last ten days. Rodriguez was understood to say that there were well-known varieties of this illness. Rodriguez appeared to think that they were treating the illness with undue anxiety. His visits were always marked by the same show of confidence, and in his interviews with Terence he always waved aside his anxious and minute questions with a kind of flourish which seemed to indicate that they were all taking it much too seriously. He seemed curiously unwilling to sit down.

“A high temperature,” he said, looking furtively about the room, and appearing to be more interested in the furniture and in Helen’s embroidery than in anything else. “In this climate you must expect a high temperature. You need not be alarmed by that. It is the pulse we go by” (he tapped his own hairy wrist), “and the pulse continues excellent.”

Thereupon he bowed and slipped out. The interview was conducted laboriously upon both sides in French, and this, together with the fact that he was optimistic, and that Terence respected the medical profession from hearsay, made him less critical than he would have been had he encountered the doctor in any other capacity. Unconsciously he took Rodriguez’ side against Helen, who seemed to have taken an unreasonable prejudice against him.

When Saturday came it was evident that the hours of the day must be more strictly organised than they had been. St. John offered his services; he said that he had nothing to do, and that he might as well spend the day at the villa if he could be of use. As if they were starting on a difficult expedition together, they parcelled out their duties between them, writing out an elaborate scheme of hours upon a large sheet of paper which was pinned to the drawing-room door. Their distance from the town, and the difficulty of procuring rare things with unknown names from the most unexpected places, made it necessary to think very carefully, and they found it unexpectedly difficult to do the simple but practical things that were required of them, as if they, being very tall, were asked to stoop down and arrange minute grains of sand in a pattern on the ground.

It was St. John’s duty to fetch what was needed from the town, so that Terence would sit all through the long hot hours alone in the drawing-room, near the open door, listening for any movement upstairs, or call from Helen. He always forgot to pull down the blinds, so that he sat in bright sunshine, which worried him without his knowing what was the cause of it. The room was terribly stiff and uncomfortable. There were hats in the chairs, and medicine bottles among the books. He tried to read, but good books were too good, and bad books were too bad, and the only thing he could tolerate was the newspaper, which with its news of London, and the movements of real people who were giving dinner-parties and making speeches, seemed to give a little background of reality to what was otherwise mere nightmare. Then, just as his attention was fixed on the print, a soft call would come from Helen, or Mrs. Chailey would bring in something which was wanted upstairs, and he would run up very quietly in his socks, and put the jug on the little table which stood crowded with jugs and cups outside the bedroom door; or if he could catch Helen for a moment he would ask, “How is she?”

“Rather restless…. On the whole, quieter, I think.”

The answer would be one or the other.

As usual she seemed to reserve something which she did not say, and Terence was conscious that they disagreed, and, without saying it aloud, were arguing against each other. But she was too hurried and preoccupied to talk.

The strain of listening, and the effort of making practical arrangements and seeing that things worked smoothly, absorbed all Terence’s power. Involved in this long dreary nightmare, he did not attempt to think what it amounted to. Rachel was ill; that was all; he must see that there was medicine and milk, and that things were ready when they were wanted. Thought had ceased; life itself had come to a standstill. Sunday was rather worse than Saturday had been, simply because the strain was a little greater every day, although nothing else had changed. The separate feelings of pleasure, interest, and pain, which combine to make up the ordinary day, were merged in one long-drawn sensation of sordid misery and profound boredom. He had never been so bored since he was shut up in the nursery alone as a child. The vision of Rachel as she was now, confused and heedless, had almost obliterated the vision of her as she had been once long ago; he could hardly believe that they had ever been happy, or engaged to be married, for what were feelings, what was there to be felt? Confusion covered every sight and person, and he seemed to see St. John, Ridley, and the stray people who came up now and then from the hotel to enquire, through a mist; the only people who were not hidden in this mist were Helen and Rodriguez, because they could tell him something definite about Rachel.

Nevertheless the day followed the usual forms. At certain hours they went into the dining-room, and when they sat round the table they talked about indifferent things. St. John generally made it his business to start the talk and to keep it from dying out.

“I’ve discovered the way to get Sancho past the white house,” said St. John on Sunday at luncheon. “You crackle a piece of paper in his ear, then he bolts for about a hundred yards, but he goes on quite well after that.”

“Yes, but he wants corn. You should see that he has corn.”

“I don’t think much of the stuff they give him; and Angelo seems a dirty little rascal.”

There was then a long silence. Ridley murmured a few lines of poetry under his breath, and remarked, as if to conceal the fact that he had done so, “Very hot to-day.”

“Two degrees higher than it was yesterday,” said St. John. “I wonder where these nuts come from,” he observed, taking a nut out of the plate, turning it over in his fingers, and looking at it curiously.

“London, I should think,” said Terence, looking at the nut too.

“A competent man of business could make a fortune here in no time,” St. John continued. “I suppose the heat does something funny to people’s brains. Even the English go a little queer. Anyhow they’re hopeless people to deal with. They kept me three-quarters of an hour waiting at the chemist’s this morning, for no reason whatever.”

There was another long pause. Then Ridley enquired, “Rodriguez seems satisfied?”

“Quite,” said Terence with decision. “It’s just got to run its course.” Whereupon Ridley heaved a deep sigh. He was genuinely sorry for every one, but at the same time he missed Helen considerably, and was a little aggrieved by the constant presence of the two young men.

They moved back into the drawing-room.

“Look here, Hirst,” said Terence, “there’s nothing to be done for two hours.” He consulted the sheet pinned to the door. “You go and lie down. I’ll wait here. Chailey sits with Rachel while Helen has her luncheon.”

It was asking a good deal of Hirst to tell him to go without waiting for a sight of Helen. These little glimpses of Helen were the only respites from strain and boredom, and very often they seemed to make up for the discomfort of the day, although she might not have anything to tell them. However, as they were on an expedition together, he had made up his mind to obey.

Helen was very late in coming down. She looked like a person who has been sitting for a long time in the dark. She was pale and thinner, and the expression of her eyes was harassed but determined. She ate her luncheon quickly, and seemed indifferent to what she was doing. She brushed aside Terence’s enquiries, and at last, as if he had not spoken, she looked at him with a slight frown and said:

“We can’t go on like this, Terence. Either you’ve got to find another doctor, or you must tell Rodriguez to stop coming, and I’ll manage for myself. It’s no use for him to say that Rachel’s better; she’s not better; she’s worse.”

Terence suffered a terrific shock, like that which he had suffered when Rachel said, “My head aches.” He stilled it by reflecting that Helen was overwrought, and he was upheld in this opinion by his obstinate sense that she was opposed to him in the argument.

“Do you think she’s in danger?” he asked.

“No one can go on being as ill as that day after day—” Helen replied. She looked at him, and spoke as if she felt some indignation with somebody.

“Very well, I’ll talk to Rodriguez this afternoon,” he replied.

Helen went upstairs at once.

Nothing now could assuage Terence’s anxiety. He could not read, nor could he sit still, and his sense of security was shaken, in spite of the fact that he was determined that Helen was exaggerating, and that Rachel was not very ill. But he wanted a third person to confirm him in his belief.

Directly Rodriguez came down he demanded, “Well, how is she? Do you think her worse?”

“There is no reason for anxiety, I tell you—none,” Rodriguez replied in his execrable French, smiling uneasily, and making little movements all the time as if to get away.

Hewet stood firmly between him and the door. He was determined to see for himself what kind of man he was. His confidence in the man vanished as he looked at him and saw his insignificance, his dirty appearance, his shiftiness, and his unintelligent, hairy face. It was strange that he had never seen this before.

“You won’t object, of course, if we ask you to consult another doctor?” he continued.

At this the little man became openly incensed.

“Ah!” he cried. “You have not confidence in me? You object to my treatment? You wish me to give up the case?”

“Not at all,” Terence replied, “but in serious illness of this kind——”

Rodriguez shrugged his shoulders.

“It is not serious, I assure you. You are overanxious. The young lady is not seriously ill, and I am a doctor. The lady of course is frightened,” he sneered. “I understand that perfectly.”

“The name and address of the doctor is——?” Terence continued.

“There is no other doctor,” Rodriguez replied sullenly. “Every one has confidence in me. Look! I will show you.”

He took out a packet of old letters and began turning them over as if in search of one that would confute Terence’s suspicions. As he searched, he began to tell a story about an English lord who had trusted him—a great English lord, whose name he had, unfortunately, forgotten.

“There is no other doctor in the place,” he concluded, still turning over the letters.

“Never mind,” said Terence shortly. “I will make enquiries for myself.” Rodriguez put the letters back in his pocket.

“Very well,” he remarked. “I have no objection.”

He lifted his eyebrows, shrugged his shoulders, as if to repeat that they took the illness much too seriously and that there was no other doctor, and slipped out, leaving behind him an impression that he was conscious that he was distrusted, and that his malice was aroused.

After this Terence could no longer stay downstairs. He went up, knocked at Rachel’s door, and asked Helen whether he might see her for a few minutes. He had not seen her yesterday. She made no objection, and went and sat at a table in the window.

Terence sat down by the bedside. Rachel’s face was changed. She looked as though she were entirely concentrated upon the effort of keeping alive. Her lips were drawn, and her cheeks were sunken and flushed, though without colour. Her eyes were not entirely shut, the lower half of the white part showing, not as if she saw, but as if they remained open because she was too much exhausted to close them. She opened them completely when he kissed her. But she only saw an old woman slicing a man’s head off with a knife.

“There it falls!” she murmured. She then turned to Terence and asked him anxiously some question about a man with mules, which he could not understand. “Why doesn’t he come? Why doesn’t he come?” she repeated. He was appalled to think of the dirty little man downstairs in connection with illness like this, and turned instinctively to Helen, but she was doing something at a table in the window, and did not seem to realise how great the shock to him must be. He rose to go, for he could not endure to listen any longer; his heart beat quickly and painfully with anger and misery. As he passed Helen she asked him in the same weary, unnatural, but determined voice to fetch her more ice, and to have the jug outside filled with fresh milk.

When he had done these errands he went to find Hirst. Exhausted and very hot, St. John had fallen asleep on a bed, but Terence woke him without scruple.

“Helen thinks she’s worse,” he said. “There’s no doubt she’s frightfully ill. Rodriguez is useless. We must get another doctor.”

“But there is no other doctor,” said Hirst drowsily, sitting up and rubbing his eyes.

“Don’t be a damned fool!” Terence exclaimed. “Of course there’s another doctor, and, if there isn’t, you’ve got to find one. It ought to have been done days ago. I’m going down to saddle the horse.” He could not stay still in one place.

In less than ten minutes St. John was riding to the town in the scorching heat in search of a doctor, his orders being to find one and bring him back if he had to be fetched in a special train.

“We ought to have done it days ago,” Hewet repeated angrily.

When he went back into the drawing-room he found that Mrs. Flushing was there, standing very erect in the middle of the room, having arrived, as people did in these days, by the kitchen or through the garden unannounced.

“She’s better?” Mrs. Flushing enquired abruptly; they did not attempt to shake hands.

“No,” said Terence. “If anything, they think she’s worse.”

Mrs. Flushing seemed to consider for a moment or two, looking straight at Terence all the time.

“Let me tell you,” she said, speaking in nervous jerks, “it’s always about the seventh day one begins to get anxious. I daresay you’ve been sittin’ here worryin’ by yourself. You think she’s bad, but any one comin’ with a fresh eye would see she was better. Mr. Elliot’s had fever; he’s all right now,” she threw out. “It wasn’t anythin’ she caught on the expedition. What’s it matter—a few days’ fever? My brother had fever for twenty-six days once. And in a week or two he was up and about. We gave him nothin’ but milk and arrowroot——”

Here Mrs. Chailey came in with a message.

“I’m wanted upstairs,” said Terence.

“You see—she’ll be better,” Mrs. Flushing jerked out as he left the room. Her anxiety to persuade Terence was very great, and when he left her without saying anything she felt dissatisfied and restless; she did not like to stay, but she could not bear to go. She wandered from room to room looking for some one to talk to, but all the rooms were empty.

Terence went upstairs, stood inside the door to take Helen’s directions, looked over at Rachel, but did not attempt to speak to her. She appeared vaguely conscious of his presence, but it seemed to disturb her, and she turned, so that she lay with her back to him.

For six days indeed she had been oblivious of the world outside, because it needed all her attention to follow the hot, red, quick sights which passed incessantly before her eyes. She knew that it was of enormous importance that she should attend to these sights and grasp their meaning, but she was always being just too late to hear or see something which would explain it all. For this reason, the faces,—Helen’s face, the nurse’s, Terence’s, the doctor’s,—which occasionally forced themselves very close to her, were worrying because they distracted her attention and she might miss the clue. However, on the fourth afternoon she was suddenly unable to keep Helen’s face distinct from the sights themselves; her lips widened as she bent down over the bed, and she began to gabble unintelligibly like the rest. The sights were all concerned in some plot, some adventure, some escape. The nature of what they were doing changed incessantly, although there was always a reason behind it, which she must endeavour to grasp. Now they were among trees and savages, now they were on the sea, now they were on the tops of high towers; now they jumped; now they flew. But just as the crisis was about to happen, something invariably slipped in her brain, so that the whole effort had to begin over again. The heat was suffocating. At last the faces went further away; she fell into a deep pool of sticky water, which eventually closed over her head. She saw nothing and heard nothing but a faint booming sound, which was the sound of the sea rolling over her head. While all her tormentors thought that she was dead, she was not dead, but curled up at the bottom of the sea. There she lay, sometimes seeing darkness, sometimes light, while every now and then some one turned her over at the bottom of the sea.

After St. John had spent some hours in the heat of the sun wrangling with evasive and very garrulous natives, he extracted the information that there was a doctor, a French doctor, who was at present away on a holiday in the hills. It was quite impossible, so they said, to find him. With his experience of the country, St. John thought it unlikely that a telegram would either be sent or received; but having reduced the distance of the hill town, in which he was staying, from a hundred miles to thirty miles, and having hired a carriage and horses, he started at once to fetch the doctor himself. He succeeded in finding him, and eventually forced the unwilling man to leave his young wife and return forthwith. They reached the villa at midday on Tuesday.

Terence came out to receive them, and St. John was struck by the fact that he had grown perceptibly thinner in the interval; he was white too; his eyes looked strange. But the curt speech and the sulky masterful manner of Dr. Lesage impressed them both favourably, although at the same time it was obvious that he was very much annoyed at the whole affair. Coming downstairs he gave his directions emphatically, but it never occurred to him to give an opinion either because of the presence of Rodriguez who was now obsequious as well as malicious, or because he took it for granted that they knew already what was to be known.

“Of course,” he said with a shrug of his shoulders, when Terence asked him, “Is she very ill?”

They were both conscious of a certain sense of relief when Dr. Lesage was gone, leaving explicit directions, and promising another visit in a few hours’ time; but, unfortunately, the rise of their spirits led them to talk more than usual, and in talking they quarrelled. They quarrelled about a road, the Portsmouth Road. St. John said that it is macadamised where it passes Hindhead, and Terence knew as well as he knew his own name that it is not macadamised at that point. In the course of the argument they said some very sharp things to each other, and the rest of the dinner was eaten in silence, save for an occasional half-stifled reflection from Ridley.

When it grew dark and the lamps were brought in, Terence felt unable to control his irritation any longer. St. John went to bed in a state of complete exhaustion, bidding Terence good-night with rather more affection than usual because of their quarrel, and Ridley retired to his books. Left alone, Terence walked up and down the room; he stood at the open window.

The lights were coming out one after another in the town beneath, and it was very peaceful and cool in the garden, so that he stepped out on to the terrace. As he stood there in the darkness, able only to see the shapes of trees through the fine grey light, he was overcome by a desire to escape, to have done with this suffering, to forget that Rachel was ill. He allowed himself to lapse into forgetfulness of everything. As if a wind that had been raging incessantly suddenly fell asleep, the fret and strain and anxiety which had been pressing on him passed away. He seemed to stand in an unvexed space of air, on a little island by himself; he was free and immune from pain. It did not matter whether Rachel was well or ill; it did not matter whether they were apart or together; nothing mattered—nothing mattered. The waves beat on the shore far away, and the soft wind passed through the branches of the trees, seeming to encircle him with peace and security, with dark and nothingness. Surely the world of strife and fret and anxiety was not the real world, but this was the real world, the world that lay beneath the superficial world, so that, whatever happened, one was secure. The quiet and peace seemed to lap his body in a fine cool sheet, soothing every nerve; his mind seemed once more to expand, and become natural.

But when he had stood thus for a time a noise in the house roused him; he turned instinctively and went into the drawing-room. The sight of the lamp-lit room brought back so abruptly all that he had forgotten that he stood for a moment unable to move. He remembered everything, the hour, the minute even, what point they had reached, and what was to come. He cursed himself for making believe for a minute that things were different from what they are. The night was now harder to face than ever.

Unable to stay in the empty drawing-room, he wandered out and sat on the stairs half-way up to Rachel’s room. He longed for some one to talk to, but Hirst was asleep, and Ridley was asleep; there was no sound in Rachel’s room. The only sound in the house was the sound of Chailey moving in the kitchen. At last there was a rustling on the stairs overhead, and Nurse McInnis came down fastening the links in her cuffs, in preparation for the night’s watch. Terence rose and stopped her. He had scarcely spoken to her, but it was possible that she might confirm him in the belief which still persisted in his own mind that Rachel was not seriously ill. He told her in a whisper that Dr. Lesage had been and what he had said.

“Now, Nurse,” he whispered, “please tell me your opinion. Do you consider that she is very seriously ill? Is she in any danger?”

“The doctor has said——” she began.

“Yes, but I want your opinion. You have had experience of many cases like this?”

“I could not tell you more than Dr. Lesage, Mr. Hewet,” she replied cautiously, as though her words might be used against her. “The case is serious, but you may feel quite certain that we are doing all we can for Miss Vinrace.” She spoke with some professional self-approbation. But she realised perhaps that she did not satisfy the young man, who still blocked her way, for she shifted her feet slightly upon the stair and looked out of the window where they could see the moon over the sea.

“If you ask me,” she began in a curiously stealthy tone, “I never like May for my patients.”

“May?” Terence repeated.

“It may be a fancy, but I don’t like to see anybody fall ill in May,” she continued. “Things seem to go wrong in May. Perhaps it’s the moon. They say the moon affects the brain, don’t they, Sir?”

He looked at her but he could not answer her; like all the others, when one looked at her she seemed to shrivel beneath one’s eyes and become worthless, malicious, and untrustworthy.

She slipped past him and disappeared.

Though he went to his room he was unable even to take his clothes off. For a long time he paced up and down, and then leaning out of the window gazed at the earth which lay so dark against the paler blue of the sky. With a mixture of fear and loathing he looked at the slim black cypress trees which were still visible in the garden, and heard the unfamiliar creaking and grating sounds which show that the earth is still hot. All these sights and sounds appeared sinister and full of hostility and foreboding; together with the natives and the nurse and the doctor and the terrible force of the illness itself they seemed to be in conspiracy against him. They seemed to join together in their effort to extract the greatest possible amount of suffering from him. He could not get used to his pain, it was a revelation to him. He had never realised before that underneath every action, underneath the life of every day, pain lies, quiescent, but ready to devour; he seemed to be able to see suffering, as if it were a fire, curling up over the edges of all action, eating away the lives of men and women. He thought for the first time with understanding of words which had before seemed to him empty: the struggle of life; the hardness of life. Now he knew for himself that life is hard and full of suffering. He looked at the scattered lights in the town beneath, and thought of Arthur and Susan, or Evelyn and Perrott venturing out unwittingly, and by their happiness laying themselves open to suffering such as this. How did they dare to love each other, he wondered; how had he himself dared to live as he had lived, rapidly and carelessly, passing from one thing to another, loving Rachel as he had loved her? Never again would he feel secure; he would never believe in the stability of life, or forget what depths of pain lie beneath small happiness and feelings of content and safety. It seemed to him as he looked back that their happiness had never been so great as his pain was now. There had always been something imperfect in their happiness, something they had wanted and had not been able to get. It had been fragmentary and incomplete, because they were so young and had not known what they were doing.

The light of his candle flickered over the boughs of a tree outside the window, and as the branch swayed in the darkness there came before his mind a picture of all the world that lay outside his window; he thought of the immense river and the immense forest, the vast stretches of dry earth and the plains of the sea that encircled the earth; from the sea the sky rose steep and enormous, and the air washed profoundly between the sky and the sea. How vast and dark it must be to-night, lying exposed to the wind; and in all this great space it was curious to think how few the towns were, and how small little rings of light, or single glow-worms he figured them, scattered here and there, among the swelling uncultivated folds of the world. And in those towns were little men and women, tiny men and women. Oh, it was absurd, when one thought of it, to sit here in a little room suffering and caring. What did anything matter? Rachel, a tiny creature, lay ill beneath him, and here in his little room he suffered on her account. The nearness of their bodies in this vast universe, and the minuteness of their bodies, seemed to him absurd and laughable. Nothing mattered, he repeated; they had no power, no hope. He leant on the window-sill, thinking, until he almost forgot the time and the place. Nevertheless, although he was convinced that it was absurd and laughable, and that they were small and hopeless, he never lost the sense that these thoughts somehow formed part of a life which he and Rachel would live together.

Owing perhaps to the change of doctor, Rachel appeared to be rather better next day. Terribly pale and worn though Helen looked, there was a slight lifting of the cloud which had hung all these days in her eyes.

“She talked to me,” she said voluntarily. “She asked me what day of the week it was, like herself.”

Then suddenly, without any warning or any apparent reason, the tears formed in her eyes and rolled steadily down her cheeks. She cried with scarcely any attempt at movement of her features, and without any attempt to stop herself, as if she did not know that she was crying. In spite of the relief which her words gave him, Terence was dismayed by the sight; had everything given way? Were there no limits to the power of this illness? Would everything go down before it? Helen had always seemed to him strong and determined, and now she was like a child. He took her in his arms, and she clung to him like a child, crying softly and quietly upon his shoulder. Then she roused herself and wiped her tears away; it was silly to behave like that, she said; very silly, she repeated, when there could be no doubt that Rachel was better. She asked Terence to forgive her for her folly. She stopped at the door and came back and kissed him without saying anything.

On this day indeed Rachel was conscious of what went on round her. She had come to the surface of the dark, sticky pool, and a wave seemed to bear her up and down with it; she had ceased to have any will of her own; she lay on the top of the wave conscious of some pain, but chiefly of weakness. The wave was replaced by the side of a mountain. Her body became a drift of melting snow, above which her knees rose in huge peaked mountains of bare bone. It was true that she saw Helen and saw her room, but everything had become very pale and semi-transparent. Sometimes she could see through the wall in front of her. Sometimes when Helen went away she seemed to go so far that Rachel’s eyes could hardly follow her. The room also had an odd power of expanding, and though she pushed her voice out as far as possible until sometimes it became a bird and flew away, she thought it doubtful whether it ever reached the person she was talking to. There were immense intervals or chasms, for things still had the power to appear visibly before her, between one moment and the next; it sometimes took an hour for Helen to raise her arm, pausing long between each jerky movement, and pour out medicine. Helen’s form stooping to raise her in bed appeared of gigantic size, and came down upon her like the ceiling falling. But for long spaces of time she would merely lie conscious of her body floating on the top of the bed and her mind driven to some remote corner of her body, or escaped and gone flitting round the room. All sights were something of an effort, but the sight of Terence was the greatest effort, because he forced her to join mind to body in the desire to remember something. She did not wish to remember; it troubled her when people tried to disturb her loneliness; she wished to be alone. She wished for nothing else in the world.

Although she had cried, Terence observed Helen’s greater hopefulness with something like triumph; in the argument between them she had made the first sign of admitting herself in the wrong. He waited for Dr. Lesage to come down that afternoon with considerable anxiety, but with the same certainty at the back of his mind that he would in time force them all to admit that they were in the wrong.

As usual, Dr. Lesage was sulky in his manner and very short in his answers. To Terence’s demand, “She seems to be better?” he replied, looking at him in an odd way, “She has a chance of life.”

The door shut and Terence walked across to the window. He leant his forehead against the pane.

“Rachel,” he repeated to himself. “She has a chance of life. Rachel.”

How could they say these things of Rachel? Had any one yesterday seriously believed that Rachel was dying? They had been engaged for four weeks. A fortnight ago she had been perfectly well. What could fourteen days have done to bring her from that state to this? To realise what they meant by saying that she had a chance of life was beyond him, knowing as he did that they were engaged. He turned, still enveloped in the same dreary mist, and walked towards the door. Suddenly he saw it all. He saw the room and the garden, and the trees moving in the air, they could go on without her; she could die. For the first time since she fell ill he remembered exactly what she looked like and the way in which they cared for each other. The intense happiness of feeling her close to him mingled with a more intense anxiety than he had felt yet. He could not let her die; he could not live without her. But after a momentary struggle, the curtain fell again, and he saw nothing and felt nothing clearly. It was all going on—going on still, in the same way as before. Save for a physical pain when his heart beat, and the fact that his fingers were icy cold, he did not realise that he was anxious about anything. Within his mind he seemed to feel nothing about Rachel or about any one or anything in the world. He went on giving orders, arranging with Mrs. Chailey, writing out lists, and every now and then he went upstairs and put something quietly on the table outside Rachel’s door. That night Dr. Lesage seemed to be less sulky than usual. He stayed voluntarily for a few moments, and, addressing St. John and Terence equally, as if he did not remember which of them was engaged to the young lady, said, “I consider that her condition to-night is very grave.”

Neither of them went to bed or suggested that the other should go to bed. They sat in the drawing-room playing picquet with the door open. St. John made up a bed upon the sofa, and when it was ready insisted that Terence should lie upon it. They began to quarrel as to who should lie on the sofa and who should lie upon a couple of chairs covered with rugs. St. John forced Terence at last to lie down upon the sofa.

“Don’t be a fool, Terence,” he said. “You’ll only get ill if you don’t sleep.”

“Old fellow,” he began, as Terence still refused, and stopped abruptly, fearing sentimentality; he found that he was on the verge of tears.

He began to say what he had long been wanting to say, that he was sorry for Terence, that he cared for him, that he cared for Rachel. Did she know how much he cared for her—had she said anything, asked perhaps? He was very anxious to say this, but he refrained, thinking that it was a selfish question after all, and what was the use of bothering Terence to talk about such things? He was already half asleep. But St. John could not sleep at once. If only, he thought to himself, as he lay in the darkness, something would happen—if only this strain would come to an end. He did not mind what happened, so long as the succession of these hard and dreary days was broken; he did not mind if she died. He felt himself disloyal in not minding it, but it seemed to him that he had no feelings left.

All night long there was no call or movement, except the opening and shutting of the bedroom door once. By degrees the light returned into the untidy room. At six the servants began to move; at seven they crept downstairs into the kitchen; and half an hour later the day began again.

Nevertheless it was not the same as the days that had gone before, although it would have been hard to say in what the difference consisted. Perhaps it was that they seemed to be waiting for something. There were certainly fewer things to be done than usual. People drifted through the drawing-room—Mr. Flushing, Mr. and Mrs. Thornbury. They spoke very apologetically in low tones, refusing to sit down, but remaining for a considerable time standing up, although the only thing they had to say was, “Is there anything we can do?” and there was nothing they could do.

Feeling oddly detached from it all, Terence remembered how Helen had said that whenever anything happened to you this was how people behaved. Was she right, or was she wrong? He was too little interested to frame an opinion of his own. He put things away in his mind, as if one of these days he would think about them, but not now. The mist of unreality had deepened and deepened until it had produced a feeling of numbness all over his body. Was it his body? Were those really his own hands?

This morning also for the first time Ridley found it impossible to sit alone in his room. He was very uncomfortable downstairs, and, as he did not know what was going on, constantly in the way; but he would not leave the drawing-room. Too restless to read, and having nothing to do, he began to pace up and down reciting poetry in an undertone. Occupied in various ways—now in undoing parcels, now in uncorking bottles, now in writing directions, the sound of Ridley’s song and the beat of his pacing worked into the minds of Terence and St. John all the morning as a half comprehended refrain.

They wrestled up, they wrestled down,

They wrestled sore and still:

The fiend who blinds the eyes of men,

That night he had his will.

Like stags full spent, among the bent

They dropped awhile to rest——

“Oh, it’s intolerable!” Hirst exclaimed, and then checked himself, as if it were a breach of their agreement. Again and again Terence would creep half-way up the stairs in case he might be able to glean news of Rachel. But the only news now was of a very fragmentary kind; she had drunk something; she had slept a little; she seemed quieter. In the same way, Dr. Lesage confined himself to talking about details, save once when he volunteered the information that he had just been called in to ascertain, by severing a vein in the wrist, that an old lady of eighty-five was really dead. She had a horror of being buried alive.

“It is a horror,” he remarked, “that we generally find in the very old, and seldom in the young.” They both expressed their interest in what he told them; it seemed to them very strange. Another strange thing about the day was that the luncheon was forgotten by all of them until it was late in the afternoon, and then Mrs. Chailey waited on them, and looked strange too, because she wore a stiff print dress, and her sleeves were rolled up above her elbows. She seemed as oblivious of her appearance, however, as if she had been called out of her bed by a midnight alarm of fire, and she had forgotten, too, her reserve and her composure; she talked to them quite familiarly as if she had nursed them and held them naked on her knee. She assured them over and over again that it was their duty to eat.

The afternoon, being thus shortened, passed more quickly than they expected. Once Mrs. Flushing opened the door, but on seeing them shut it again quickly; once Helen came down to fetch something, but she stopped as she left the room to look at a letter addressed to her. She stood for a moment turning it over, and the extraordinary and mournful beauty of her attitude struck Terence in the way things struck him now—as something to be put away in his mind and to be thought about afterwards. They scarcely spoke, the argument between them seeming to be suspended or forgotten.

Now that the afternoon sun had left the front of the house, Ridley paced up and down the terrace repeating stanzas of a long poem, in a subdued but suddenly sonorous voice. Fragments of the poem were wafted in at the open window as he passed and repassed.

Peor and Baalim

Forsake their Temples dim,

With that twice batter’d God of Palestine

And mooned Astaroth—

The sound of these words were strangely discomforting to both the young men, but they had to be borne. As the evening drew on and the red light of the sunset glittered far away on the sea, the same sense of desperation attacked both Terence and St. John at the thought that the day was nearly over, and that another night was at hand. The appearance of one light after another in the town beneath them produced in Hirst a repetition of his terrible and disgusting desire to break down and sob. Then the lamps were brought in by Chailey. She explained that Maria, in opening a bottle, had been so foolish as to cut her arm badly, but she had bound it up; it was unfortunate when there was so much work to be done. Chailey herself limped because of the rheumatism in her feet, but it appeared to her mere waste of time to take any notice of the unruly flesh of servants. The evening went on. Dr. Lesage arrived unexpectedly, and stayed upstairs a very long time. He came down once and drank a cup of coffee.

“She is very ill,” he said in answer to Ridley’s question. All the annoyance had by this time left his manner, he was grave and formal, but at the same time it was full of consideration, which had not marked it before. He went upstairs again. The three men sat together in the drawing-room. Ridley was quite quiet now, and his attention seemed to be thoroughly awakened. Save for little half-voluntary movements and exclamations that were stifled at once, they waited in complete silence. It seemed as if they were at last brought together face to face with something definite.

It was nearly eleven o’clock when Dr. Lesage again appeared in the room. He approached them very slowly, and did not speak at once. He looked first at St. John and then at Terence, and said to Terence, “Mr. Hewet, I think you should go upstairs now.”

Terence rose immediately, leaving the others seated with Dr. Lesage standing motionless between them.

Chailey was in the passage outside, repeating over and over again, “It’s wicked—it’s wicked.”

Terence paid her no attention; he heard what she was saying, but it conveyed no meaning to his mind. All the way upstairs he kept saying to himself, “This has not happened to me. It is not possible that this has happened to me.”

He looked curiously at his own hand on the banisters. The stairs were very steep, and it seemed to take him a long time to surmount them. Instead of feeling keenly, as he knew that he ought to feel, he felt nothing at all. When he opened the door he saw Helen sitting by the bedside. There were shaded lights on the table, and the room, though it seemed to be full of a great many things, was very tidy. There was a faint and not unpleasant smell of disinfectants. Helen rose and gave up her chair to him in silence. As they passed each other their eyes met in a peculiar level glance, he wondered at the extraordinary clearness of her eyes, and at the deep calm and sadness that dwelt in them. He sat down by the bedside, and a moment afterwards heard the door shut gently behind her. He was alone with Rachel, and a faint reflection of the sense of relief that they used to feel when they were left alone possessed him. He looked at her. He expected to find some terrible change in her, but there was none. She looked indeed very thin, and, as far as he could see, very tired, but she was the same as she had always been. Moreover, she saw him and knew him. She smiled at him and said, “Hullo, Terence.”

The curtain which had been drawn between them for so long vanished immediately.

“Well, Rachel,” he replied in his usual voice, upon which she opened her eyes quite widely and smiled with her familiar smile. He kissed her and took her hand.

“It’s been wretched without you,” he said.

She still looked at him and smiled, but soon a slight look of fatigue or perplexity came into her eyes and she shut them again.

“But when we’re together we’re perfectly happy,” he said. He continued to hold her hand.

The light being dim, it was impossible to see any change in her face. An immense feeling of peace came over Terence, so that he had no wish to move or to speak. The terrible torture and unreality of the last days were over, and he had come out now into perfect certainty and peace. His mind began to work naturally again and with great ease. The longer he sat there the more profoundly was he conscious of the peace invading every corner of his soul. Once he held his breath and listened acutely; she was still breathing; he went on thinking for some time; they seemed to be thinking together; he seemed to be Rachel as well as himself; and then he listened again; no, she had ceased to breathe. So much the better—this was death. It was nothing; it was to cease to breathe. It was happiness, it was perfect happiness. They had now what they had always wanted to have, the union which had been impossible while they lived. Unconscious whether he thought the words or spoke them aloud, he said, “No two people have ever been so happy as we have been. No one has ever loved as we have loved.”

It seemed to him that their complete union and happiness filled the room with rings eddying more and more widely. He had no wish in the world left unfulfilled. They possessed what could never be taken from them.

He was not conscious that any one had come into the room, but later, moments later, or hours later perhaps, he felt an arm behind him. The arms were round him. He did not want to have arms round him, and the mysterious whispering voices annoyed him. He laid Rachel’s hand, which was now cold, upon the counterpane, and rose from his chair, and walked across to the window. The windows were uncurtained, and showed the moon, and a long silver pathway upon the surface of the waves.

“Why,” he said, in his ordinary tone of voice, “look at the moon. There’s a halo round the moon. We shall have rain to-morrow.”

The arms, whether they were the arms of man or of woman, were round him again; they were pushing him gently towards the door. He turned of his own accord and walked steadily in advance of the arms, conscious of a little amusement at the strange way in which people behaved merely because some one was dead. He would go if they wished it, but nothing they could do would disturb his happiness.

As he saw the passage outside the room, and the table with the cups and the plates, it suddenly came over him that here was a world in which he would never see Rachel again.

“Rachel! Rachel!” he shrieked, trying to rush back to her. But they prevented him, and pushed him down the passage and into a bedroom far from her room. Downstairs they could hear the thud of his feet on the floor, as he struggled to break free; and twice they heard him shout, “Rachel, Rachel!”

[]

Chapter XXVI

For two or three hours longer the moon poured its light through the empty air. Unbroken by clouds it fell straightly, and lay almost like a chill white frost over the sea and the earth. During these hours the silence was not broken, and the only movement was caused by the movement of trees and branches which stirred slightly, and then the shadows that lay across the white spaces of the land moved too. In this profound silence one sound only was audible, the sound of a slight but continuous breathing which never ceased, although it never rose and never fell. It continued after the birds had begun to flutter from branch to branch, and could be heard behind the first thin notes of their voices. It continued all through the hours when the east whitened, and grew red, and a faint blue tinged the sky, but when the sun rose it ceased, and gave place to other sounds.

The first sounds that were heard were little inarticulate cries, the cries, it seemed, of children or of the very poor, of people who were very weak or in pain. But when the sun was above the horizon, the air which had been thin and pale grew every moment richer and warmer, and the sounds of life became bolder and more full of courage and authority. By degrees the smoke began to ascend in wavering breaths over the houses, and these slowly thickened, until they were as round and straight as columns, and instead of striking upon pale white blinds, the sun shone upon dark windows, beyond which there was depth and space.

The sun had been up for many hours, and the great dome of air was warmed through and glittering with thin gold threads of sunlight, before any one moved in the hotel. White and massive it stood in the early light, half asleep with its blinds down.

At about half-past nine Miss Allan came very slowly into the hall, and walked very slowly to the table where the morning papers were laid, but she did not put out her hand to take one; she stood still, thinking, with her head a little sunk upon her shoulders. She looked curiously old, and from the way in which she stood, a little hunched together and very massive, you could see what she would be like when she was really old, how she would sit day after day in her chair looking placidly in front of her. Other people began to come into the room, and to pass her, but she did not speak to any of them or even look at them, and at last, as if it were necessary to do something, she sat down in a chair, and looked quietly and fixedly in front of her. She felt very old this morning, and useless too, as if her life had been a failure, as if it had been hard and laborious to no purpose. She did not want to go on living, and yet she knew that she would. She was so strong that she would live to be a very old woman. She would probably live to be eighty, and as she was now fifty, that left thirty years more for her to live. She turned her hands over and over in her lap and looked at them curiously; her old hands, that had done so much work for her. There did not seem to be much point in it all; one went on, of course one went on…. She looked up to see Mrs. Thornbury standing beside her, with lines drawn upon her forehead, and her lips parted as if she were about to ask a question.

Miss Allan anticipated her.

“Yes,” she said. “She died this morning, very early, about three o’clock.”

Mrs. Thornbury made a little exclamation, drew her lips together, and the tears rose in her eyes. Through them she looked at the hall which was now laid with great breadths of sunlight, and at the careless, casual groups of people who were standing beside the solid arm-chairs and tables. They looked to her unreal, or as people look who remain unconscious that some great explosion is about to take place beside them. But there was no explosion, and they went on standing by the chairs and the tables. Mrs. Thornbury no longer saw them, but, penetrating through them as though they were without substance, she saw the house, the people in the house, the room, the bed in the room, and the figure of the dead lying still in the dark beneath the sheets. She could almost see the dead. She could almost hear the voices of the mourners.

“They expected it?” she asked at length.

Miss Allan could only shake her head.

“I know nothing,” she replied, “except what Mrs. Flushing’s maid told me. She died early this morning.”

The two women looked at each other with a quiet significant gaze, and then, feeling oddly dazed, and seeking she did not know exactly what, Mrs. Thornbury went slowly upstairs and walked quietly along the passages, touching the wall with her fingers as if to guide herself. Housemaids were passing briskly from room to room, but Mrs. Thornbury avoided them; she hardly saw them; they seemed to her to be in another world. She did not even look up directly when Evelyn stopped her. It was evident that Evelyn had been lately in tears, and when she looked at Mrs. Thornbury she began to cry again. Together they drew into the hollow of a window, and stood there in silence. Broken words formed themselves at last among Evelyn’s sobs. “It was wicked,” she sobbed, “it was cruel—they were so happy.”

Mrs. Thornbury patted her on the shoulder.

“It seems hard—very hard,” she said. She paused and looked out over the slope of the hill at the Ambrose’s villa; the windows were blazing in the sun, and she thought how the soul of the dead had passed from those windows. Something had passed from the world. It seemed to her strangely empty.

“And yet the older one grows,” she continued, her eyes regaining more than their usual brightness, “the more certain one becomes that there is a reason. How could one go on if there were no reason?” she asked.

She asked the question of some one, but she did not ask it of Evelyn. Evelyn’s sobs were becoming quieter. “There must be a reason,” she said. “It can’t only be an accident. For it was an accident—it need never have happened.”

Mrs. Thornbury sighed deeply.

“But we must not let ourselves think of that,” she added, “and let us hope that they don’t either. Whatever they had done it might have been the same. These terrible illnesses——”

“There’s no reason—I don’t believe there’s any reason at all!” Evelyn broke out, pulling the blind down and letting it fly back with a little snap.

“Why should these things happen? Why should people suffer? I honestly believe,” she went on, lowering her voice slightly, “that Rachel’s in Heaven, but Terence….”

“What’s the good of it all?” she demanded.

Mrs. Thornbury shook her head slightly but made no reply, and pressing Evelyn’s hand she went on down the passage. Impelled by a strong desire to hear something, although she did not know exactly what there was to hear, she was making her way to the Flushing’s room. As she opened their door she felt that she had interrupted some argument between husband and wife. Mrs. Flushing was sitting with her back to the light, and Mr. Flushing was standing near her, arguing and trying to persuade her of something.

“Ah, here is Mrs. Thornbury,” he began with some relief in his voice. “You have heard, of course. My wife feels that she was in some way responsible. She urged poor Miss Vinrace to come on the expedition. I’m sure you will agree with me that it is most unreasonable to feel that. We don’t even know—in fact I think it most unlikely—that she caught her illness there. These diseases—Besides, she was set on going. She would have gone whether you asked her or not, Alice.”

“Don’t, Wilfrid,” said Mrs. Flushing, neither moving nor taking her eyes off the spot on the floor upon which they rested. “What’s the use of talking? What’s the use——?” She ceased.

“I was coming to ask you,” said Mrs. Thornbury, addressing Wilfrid, for it was useless to speak to his wife. “Is there anything you think that one could do? Has the father arrived? Could one go and see?”

The strongest wish in her being at this moment was to be able to do something for the unhappy people—to see them—to assure them—to help them. It was dreadful to be so far away from them. But Mr. Flushing shook his head; he did not think that now—later perhaps one might be able to help. Here Mrs. Flushing rose stiffly, turned her back to them, and walked to the dressing-room opposite. As she walked, they could see her breast slowly rise and slowly fall. But her grief was silent. She shut the door behind her.

When she was alone by herself she clenched her fists together, and began beating the back of a chair with them. She was like a wounded animal. She hated death; she was furious, outraged, indignant with death, as if it were a living creature. She refused to relinquish her friends to death. She would not submit to dark and nothingness. She began to pace up and down, clenching her hands, and making no attempt to stop the quick tears which raced down her cheeks. She sat still at last, but she did not submit. She looked stubborn and strong when she had ceased to cry.

In the next room, meanwhile, Wilfrid was talking to Mrs. Thornbury with greater freedom now that his wife was not sitting there.

“That’s the worst of these places,” he said. “People will behave as though they were in England, and they’re not. I’ve no doubt myself that Miss Vinrace caught the infection up at the villa itself. She probably ran risks a dozen times a day that might have given her the illness. It’s absurd to say she caught it with us.”

If he had not been sincerely sorry for them he would have been annoyed. “Pepper tells me,” he continued, “that he left the house because he thought them so careless. He says they never washed their vegetables properly. Poor people! It’s a fearful price to pay. But it’s only what I’ve seen over and over again—people seem to forget that these things happen, and then they do happen, and they’re surprised.”

Mrs. Thornbury agreed with him that they had been very careless, and that there was no reason whatever to think that she had caught the fever on the expedition; and after talking about other things for a short time, she left him and went sadly along the passage to her own room. There must be some reason why such things happen, she thought to herself, as she shut the door. Only at first it was not easy to understand what it was. It seemed so strange—so unbelievable. Why, only three weeks ago—only a fortnight ago, she had seen Rachel; when she shut her eyes she could almost see her now, the quiet, shy girl who was going to be married. She thought of all that she would have missed had she died at Rachel’s age, the children, the married life, the unimaginable depths and miracles that seemed to her, as she looked back, to have lain about her, day after day, and year after year. The stunned feeling, which had been making it difficult for her to think, gradually gave way to a feeling of the opposite nature; she thought very quickly and very clearly, and, looking back over all her experiences, tried to fit them into a kind of order. There was undoubtedly much suffering, much struggling, but, on the whole, surely there was a balance of happiness—surely order did prevail. Nor were the deaths of young people really the saddest things in life—they were saved so much; they kept so much. The dead—she called to mind those who had died early, accidentally—were beautiful; she often dreamt of the dead. And in time Terence himself would come to feel—— She got up and began to wander restlessly about the room.

For an old woman of her age she was very restless, and for one of her clear, quick mind she was unusually perplexed. She could not settle to anything, so that she was relieved when the door opened. She went up to her husband, took him in her arms, and kissed him with unusual intensity, and then as they sat down together she began to pat him and question him as if he were a baby, an old, tired, querulous baby. She did not tell him about Miss Vinrace’s death, for that would only disturb him, and he was put out already. She tried to discover why he was uneasy. Politics again? What were those horrid people doing? She spent the whole morning in discussing politics with her husband, and by degrees she became deeply interested in what they were saying. But every now and then what she was saying seemed to her oddly empty of meaning.

At luncheon it was remarked by several people that the visitors at the hotel were beginning to leave; there were fewer every day. There were only forty people at luncheon, instead of the sixty that there had been. So old Mrs. Paley computed, gazing about her with her faded eyes, as she took her seat at her own table in the window. Her party generally consisted of Mr. Perrott as well as Arthur and Susan, and to-day Evelyn was lunching with them also.

She was unusually subdued. Having noticed that her eyes were red, and guessing the reason, the others took pains to keep up an elaborate conversation between themselves. She suffered it to go on for a few minutes, leaning both elbows on the table, and leaving her soup untouched, when she exclaimed suddenly, “I don’t know how you feel, but I can simply think of nothing else!”

The gentlemen murmured sympathetically, and looked grave.

Susan replied, “Yes—isn’t it perfectly awful? When you think what a nice girl she was—only just engaged, and this need never have happened—it seems too tragic.” She looked at Arthur as though he might be able to help her with something more suitable.

“Hard lines,” said Arthur briefly. “But it was a foolish thing to do—to go up that river.” He shook his head. “They should have known better. You can’t expect Englishwomen to stand roughing it as the natives do who’ve been acclimatised. I’d half a mind to warn them at tea that day when it was being discussed. But it’s no good saying these sort of things—it only puts people’s backs up—it never makes any difference.”

Old Mrs. Paley, hitherto contented with her soup, here intimated, by raising one hand to her ear, that she wished to know what was being said.

“You heard, Aunt Emma, that poor Miss Vinrace has died of the fever,” Susan informed her gently. She could not speak of death loudly or even in her usual voice, so that Mrs. Paley did not catch a word. Arthur came to the rescue.

“Miss Vinrace is dead,” he said very distinctly.

Mrs. Paley merely bent a little towards him and asked, “Eh?”

“Miss Vinrace is dead,” he repeated. It was only by stiffening all the muscles round his mouth that he could prevent himself from bursting into laughter, and force himself to repeat for the third time, “Miss Vinrace…. She’s dead.”

Let alone the difficulty of hearing the exact words, facts that were outside her daily experience took some time to reach Mrs. Paley’s consciousness. A weight seemed to rest upon her brain, impeding, though not damaging, its action. She sat vague-eyed for at least a minute before she realised what Arthur meant.

“Dead?” she said vaguely. “Miss Vinrace dead? Dear me … that’s very sad. But I don’t at the moment remember which she was. We seem to have made so many new acquaintances here.” She looked at Susan for help. “A tall dark girl, who just missed being handsome, with a high colour?”

“No,” Susan interposed. “She was——” then she gave it up in despair. There was no use in explaining that Mrs. Paley was thinking of the wrong person.

“She ought not to have died,” Mrs. Paley continued. “She looked so strong. But people will drink the water. I can never make out why. It seems such a simple thing to tell them to put a bottle of Seltzer water in your bedroom. That’s all the precaution I’ve ever taken, and I’ve been in every part of the world, I may say—Italy a dozen times over…. But young people always think they know better, and then they pay the penalty. Poor thing—I am very sorry for her.” But the difficulty of peering into a dish of potatoes and helping herself engrossed her attention.

Arthur and Susan both secretly hoped that the subject was now disposed of, for there seemed to them something unpleasant in this discussion. But Evelyn was not ready to let it drop. Why would people never talk about the things that mattered?

“I don’t believe you care a bit!” she said, turning savagely upon Mr. Perrott, who had sat all this time in silence.

“I? Oh, yes, I do,” he answered awkwardly, but with obvious sincerity. Evelyn’s questions made him too feel uncomfortable.

“It seems so inexplicable,” Evelyn continued. “Death, I mean. Why should she be dead, and not you or I? It was only a fortnight ago that she was here with the rest of us. What d’you believe?” she demanded of Mr. Perrott. “D’you believe that things go on, that she’s still somewhere—or d’you think it’s simply a game—we crumble up to nothing when we die? I’m positive Rachel’s not dead.”

Mr. Perrott would have said almost anything that Evelyn wanted him to say, but to assert that he believed in the immortality of the soul was not in his power. He sat silent, more deeply wrinkled than usual, crumbling his bread.

Lest Evelyn should next ask him what he believed, Arthur, after making a pause equivalent to a full stop, started a completely different topic.

“Supposing,” he said, “a man were to write and tell you that he wanted five pounds because he had known your grandfather, what would you do? It was this way. My grandfather——”

“Invented a stove,” said Evelyn. “I know all about that. We had one in the conservatory to keep the plants warm.”

“Didn’t know I was so famous,” said Arthur. “Well,” he continued, determined at all costs to spin his story out at length, “the old chap, being about the second best inventor of his day, and a capable lawyer too, died, as they always do, without making a will. Now Fielding, his clerk, with how much justice I don’t know, always claimed that he meant to do something for him. The poor old boy’s come down in the world through trying inventions on his own account, lives in Penge over a tobacconist’s shop. I’ve been to see him there. The question is—must I stump up or not? What does the abstract spirit of justice require, Perrott? Remember, I didn’t benefit under my grandfather’s will, and I’ve no way of testing the truth of the story.”

“I don’t know much about the abstract spirit of justice,” said Susan, smiling complacently at the others, “but I’m certain of one thing—he’ll get his five pounds!”

As Mr. Perrott proceeded to deliver an opinion, and Evelyn insisted that he was much too stingy, like all lawyers, thinking of the letter and not of the spirit, while Mrs. Paley required to be kept informed between the courses as to what they were all saying, the luncheon passed with no interval of silence, and Arthur congratulated himself upon the tact with which the discussion had been smoothed over.

As they left the room it happened that Mrs. Paley’s wheeled chair ran into the Elliotts, who were coming through the door, as she was going out. Brought thus to a standstill for a moment, Arthur and Susan congratulated Hughling Elliot upon his convalescence,—he was down, cadaverous enough, for the first time,—and Mr. Perrott took occasion to say a few words in private to Evelyn.

“Would there be any chance of seeing you this afternoon, about three-thirty say? I shall be in the garden, by the fountain.”

The block dissolved before Evelyn answered. But as she left them in the hall, she looked at him brightly and said, “Half-past three, did you say? That’ll suit me.”

She ran upstairs with the feeling of spiritual exaltation and quickened life which the prospect of an emotional scene always aroused in her. That Mr. Perrot was again about to propose to her, she had no doubt, and she was aware that on this occasion she ought to be prepared with a definite answer, for she was going away in three days’ time. But she could not bring her mind to bear upon the question. To come to a decision was very difficult to her, because she had a natural dislike of anything final and done with; she liked to go on and on—always on and on. She was leaving, and, therefore, she occupied herself in laying her clothes out side by side upon the bed. She observed that some were very shabby. She took the photograph of her father and mother, and, before she laid it away in her box, she held it for a minute in her hand. Rachel had looked at it. Suddenly the keen feeling of some one’s personality, which things that they have owned or handled sometimes preserves, overcame her; she felt Rachel in the room with her; it was as if she were on a ship at sea, and the life of the day was as unreal as the land in the distance. But by degrees the feeling of Rachel’s presence passed away, and she could no longer realise her, for she had scarcely known her. But this momentary sensation left her depressed and fatigued. What had she done with her life? What future was there before her? What was make-believe, and what was real? Were these proposals and intimacies and adventures real, or was the contentment which she had seen on the faces of Susan and Rachel more real than anything she had ever felt?

She made herself ready to go downstairs, absent-mindedly, but her fingers were so well trained that they did the work of preparing her almost of their own accord. When she was actually on the way downstairs, the blood began to circle through her body of its own accord too, for her mind felt very dull.

Mr. Perrott was waiting for her. Indeed, he had gone straight into the garden after luncheon, and had been walking up and down the path for more than half an hour, in a state of acute suspense.

“I’m late as usual!” she exclaimed, as she caught sight of him. “Well, you must forgive me; I had to pack up…. My word! It looks stormy! And that’s a new steamer in the bay, isn’t it?”

She looked at the bay, in which a steamer was just dropping anchor, the smoke still hanging about it, while a swift black shudder ran through the waves. “One’s quite forgotten what rain looks like,” she added.

But Mr. Perrott paid no attention to the steamer or to the weather.

“Miss Murgatroyd,” he began with his usual formality, “I asked you to come here from a very selfish motive, I fear. I do not think you need to be assured once more of my feelings; but, as you are leaving so soon, I felt that I could not let you go without asking you to tell me—have I any reason to hope that you will ever come to care for me?”

He was very pale, and seemed unable to say any more.

The little gush of vitality which had come into Evelyn as she ran downstairs had left her, and she felt herself impotent. There was nothing for her to say; she felt nothing. Now that he was actually asking her, in his elderly gentle words, to marry him, she felt less for him than she had ever felt before.

“Let’s sit down and talk it over,” she said rather unsteadily.

Mr. Perrott followed her to a curved green seat under a tree. They looked at the fountain in front of them, which had long ceased to play. Evelyn kept looking at the fountain instead of thinking of what she was saying; the fountain without any water seemed to be the type of her own being.

“Of course I care for you,” she began, rushing her words out in a hurry; “I should be a brute if I didn’t. I think you’re quite one of the nicest people I’ve ever known, and one of the finest too. But I wish … I wish you didn’t care for me in that way. Are you sure you do?” For the moment she honestly desired that he should say no.

“Quite sure,” said Mr. Perrott.

“You see, I’m not as simple as most women,” Evelyn continued. “I think I want more. I don’t know exactly what I feel.”

He sat by her, watching her and refraining from speech.

“I sometimes think I haven’t got it in me to care very much for one person only. Some one else would make you a better wife. I can imagine you very happy with some one else.”

“If you think that there is any chance that you will come to care for me, I am quite content to wait,” said Mr. Perrott.

“Well—there’s no hurry, is there?” said Evelyn. “Suppose I thought it over and wrote and told you when I get back? I’m going to Moscow; I’ll write from Moscow.”

But Mr. Perrott persisted.

“You cannot give me any kind of idea. I do not ask for a date … that would be most unreasonable.” He paused, looking down at the gravel path.

As she did not immediately answer, he went on.

“I know very well that I am not—that I have not much to offer you either in myself or in my circumstances. And I forget; it cannot seem the miracle to you that it does to me. Until I met you I had gone on in my own quiet way—we are both very quiet people, my sister and I—quite content with my lot. My friendship with Arthur was the most important thing in my life. Now that I know you, all that has changed. You seem to put such a spirit into everything. Life seems to hold so many possibilities that I had never dreamt of.”

“That’s splendid!” Evelyn exclaimed, grasping his hand. “Now you’ll go back and start all kinds of things and make a great name in the world; and we’ll go on being friends, whatever happens … we’ll be great friends, won’t we?”

“Evelyn!” he moaned suddenly, and took her in his arms, and kissed her. She did not resent it, although it made little impression on her.

As she sat upright again, she said, “I never see why one shouldn’t go on being friends—though some people do. And friendships do make a difference, don’t they? They are the kind of things that matter in one’s life?”

He looked at her with a bewildered expression as if he did not really understand what she was saying. With a considerable effort he collected himself, stood up, and said, “Now I think I have told you what I feel, and I will only add that I can wait as long as ever you wish.”

Left alone, Evelyn walked up and down the path. What did matter then? What was the meaning of it all?

[]

Chapter XXVII

All that evening the clouds gathered, until they closed entirely over the blue of the sky. They seemed to narrow the space between earth and heaven, so that there was no room for the air to move in freely; and the waves, too, lay flat, and yet rigid, as if they were restrained. The leaves on the bushes and trees in the garden hung closely together, and the feeling of pressure and restraint was increased by the short chirping sounds which came from birds and insects.

So strange were the lights and the silence that the busy hum of voices which usually filled the dining-room at meal times had distinct gaps in it, and during these silences the clatter of the knives upon plates became audible. The first roll of thunder and the first heavy drop striking the pane caused a little stir.

“It’s coming!” was said simultaneously in many different languages.

There was then a profound silence, as if the thunder had withdrawn into itself. People had just begun to eat again, when a gust of cold air came through the open windows, lifting tablecloths and skirts, a light flashed, and was instantly followed by a clap of thunder right over the hotel. The rain swished with it, and immediately there were all those sounds of windows being shut and doors slamming violently which accompany a storm.

The room grew suddenly several degrees darker, for the wind seemed to be driving waves of darkness across the earth. No one attempted to eat for a time, but sat looking out at the garden, with their forks in the air. The flashes now came frequently, lighting up faces as if they were going to be photographed, surprising them in tense and unnatural expressions. The clap followed close and violently upon them. Several women half rose from their chairs and then sat down again, but dinner was continued uneasily with eyes upon the garden. The bushes outside were ruffled and whitened, and the wind pressed upon them so that they seemed to stoop to the ground. The waiters had to press dishes upon the diners’ notice; and the diners had to draw the attention of waiters, for they were all absorbed in looking at the storm. As the thunder showed no signs of withdrawing, but seemed massed right overhead, while the lightning aimed straight at the garden every time, an uneasy gloom replaced the first excitement.

Finishing the meal very quickly, people congregated in the hall, where they felt more secure than in any other place because they could retreat far from the windows, and although they heard the thunder, they could not see anything. A little boy was carried away sobbing in the arms of his mother.

While the storm continued, no one seemed inclined to sit down, but they collected in little groups under the central skylight, where they stood in a yellow atmosphere, looking upwards. Now and again their faces became white, as the lightning flashed, and finally a terrific crash came, making the panes of the skylight lift at the joints.

“Ah!” several voices exclaimed at the same moment.

“Something struck,” said a man’s voice.

The rain rushed down. The rain seemed now to extinguish the lightning and the thunder, and the hall became almost dark.

After a minute or two, when nothing was heard but the rattle of water upon the glass, there was a perceptible slackening of the sound, and then the atmosphere became lighter.

“It’s over,” said another voice.

At a touch, all the electric lights were turned on, and revealed a crowd of people all standing, all looking with rather strained faces up at the skylight, but when they saw each other in the artificial light they turned at once and began to move away. For some minutes the rain continued to rattle upon the skylight, and the thunder gave another shake or two; but it was evident from the clearing of the darkness and the light drumming of the rain upon the roof, that the great confused ocean of air was travelling away from them, and passing high over head with its clouds and its rods of fire, out to sea. The building, which had seemed so small in the tumult of the storm, now became as square and spacious as usual.

As the storm drew away, the people in the hall of the hotel sat down; and with a comfortable sense of relief, began to tell each other stories about great storms, and produced in many cases their occupations for the evening. The chess-board was brought out, and Mr. Elliot, who wore a stock instead of a collar as a sign of convalescence, but was otherwise much as usual, challenged Mr. Pepper to a final contest. Round them gathered a group of ladies with pieces of needlework, or in default of needlework, with novels, to superintend the game, much as if they were in charge of two small boys playing marbles. Every now and then they looked at the board and made some encouraging remark to the gentlemen.

Mrs. Paley just round the corner had her cards arranged in long ladders before her, with Susan sitting near to sympathise but not to correct, and the merchants and the miscellaneous people who had never been discovered to possess names were stretched in their arm-chairs with their newspapers on their knees. The conversation in these circumstances was very gentle, fragmentary, and intermittent, but the room was full of the indescribable stir of life. Every now and then the moth, which was now grey of wing and shiny of thorax, whizzed over their heads, and hit the lamps with a thud.

A young woman put down her needlework and exclaimed, “Poor creature! it would be kinder to kill it.” But nobody seemed disposed to rouse himself in order to kill the moth. They watched it dash from lamp to lamp, because they were comfortable, and had nothing to do.

On the sofa, beside the chess-players, Mrs. Elliot was imparting a new stitch in knitting to Mrs. Thornbury, so that their heads came very near together, and were only to be distinguished by the old lace cap which Mrs. Thornbury wore in the evening. Mrs. Elliot was an expert at knitting, and disclaimed a compliment to that effect with evident pride.

“I suppose we’re all proud of something,” she said, “and I’m proud of my knitting. I think things like that run in families. We all knit well. I had an uncle who knitted his own socks to the day of his death—and he did it better than any of his daughters, dear old gentleman. Now I wonder that you, Miss Allan, who use your eyes so much, don’t take up knitting in the evenings. You’d find it such a relief, I should say—such a rest to the eyes—and the bazaars are so glad of things.” Her voice dropped into the smooth half-conscious tone of the expert knitter; the words came gently one after another. “As much as I do I can always dispose of, which is a comfort, for then I feel that I am not wasting my time——”

Miss Allan, being thus addressed, shut her novel and observed the others placidly for a time. At last she said, “It is surely not natural to leave your wife because she happens to be in love with you. But that—as far as I can make out—is what the gentleman in my story does.”

“Tut, tut, that doesn’t sound good—no, that doesn’t sound at all natural,” murmured the knitters in their absorbed voices.

“Still, it’s the kind of book people call very clever,” Miss Allan added.

“Maternity—by Michael Jessop—I presume,” Mr. Elliot put in, for he could never resist the temptation of talking while he played chess.

“D’you know,” said Mrs. Elliot, after a moment, “I don’t think people do write good novels now—not as good as they used to, anyhow.”

No one took the trouble to agree with her or to disagree with her. Arthur Venning who was strolling about, sometimes looking at the game, sometimes reading a page of a magazine, looked at Miss Allan, who was half asleep, and said, humorously, “A penny for your thoughts, Miss Allan.”

The others looked up. They were glad that he had not spoken to them. But Miss Allan replied without any hesitation, “I was thinking of my imaginary uncle. Hasn’t every one got an imaginary uncle?” she continued. “I have one—a most delightful old gentleman. He’s always giving me things. Sometimes it’s a gold watch; sometimes it’s a carriage and pair; sometimes it’s a beautiful little cottage in the New Forest; sometimes it’s a ticket to the place I most want to see.”

She set them all thinking vaguely of the things they wanted. Mrs. Elliot knew exactly what she wanted; she wanted a child; and the usual little pucker deepened on her brow.

“We’re such lucky people,” she said, looking at her husband. “We really have no wants.” She was apt to say this, partly in order to convince herself, and partly in order to convince other people. But she was prevented from wondering how far she carried conviction by the entrance of Mr. and Mrs. Flushing, who came through the hall and stopped by the chess-board. Mrs. Flushing looked wilder than ever. A great strand of black hair looped down across her brow, her cheeks were whipped a dark blood red, and drops of rain made wet marks upon them.

Mr. Flushing explained that they had been on the roof watching the storm.

“It was a wonderful sight,” he said. “The lightning went right out over the sea, and lit up the waves and the ships far away. You can’t think how wonderful the mountains looked too, with the lights on them, and the great masses of shadow. It’s all over now.”

He slid down into a chair, becoming interested in the final struggle of the game.

“And you go back to-morrow?” said Mrs. Thornbury, looking at Mrs. Flushing.

“Yes,” she replied.

“And indeed one is not sorry to go back,” said Mrs. Elliot, assuming an air of mournful anxiety, “after all this illness.”

“Are you afraid of dyin’?” Mrs. Flushing demanded scornfully.

“I think we are all afraid of that,” said Mrs. Elliot with dignity.

“I suppose we’re all cowards when it comes to the point,” said Mrs. Flushing, rubbing her cheek against the back of the chair. “I’m sure I am.”

“Not a bit of it!” said Mr. Flushing, turning round, for Mr. Pepper took a very long time to consider his move. “It’s not cowardly to wish to live, Alice. It’s the very reverse of cowardly. Personally, I’d like to go on for a hundred years—granted, of course, that I had the full use of my faculties. Think of all the things that are bound to happen!”

“That is what I feel,” Mrs. Thornbury rejoined. “The changes, the improvements, the inventions—and beauty. D’you know, I feel sometimes that I couldn’t bear to die and cease to see beautiful things about me?”

“It would certainly be very dull to die before they have discovered whether there is life in Mars,” Miss Allan added.

“Do you really believe there’s life in Mars?” asked Mrs. Flushing, turning to her for the first time with keen interest. “Who tells you that? Some one who knows? D’you know a man called——?”

Here Mrs. Thornbury laid down her knitting, and a look of extreme solicitude came into her eyes.

“There is Mr. Hirst,” she said quietly.

St. John had just come through the swing door. He was rather blown about by the wind, and his cheeks looked terribly pale, unshorn, and cavernous. After taking off his coat he was going to pass straight through the hall and up to his room, but he could not ignore the presence of so many people he knew, especially as Mrs. Thornbury rose and went up to him, holding out her hand. But the shock of the warm lamp-lit room, together with the sight of so many cheerful human beings sitting together at their ease, after the dark walk in the rain, and the long days of strain and horror, overcame him completely. He looked at Mrs. Thornbury and could not speak.

Every one was silent. Mr. Pepper’s hand stayed upon his Knight. Mrs. Thornbury somehow moved him to a chair, sat herself beside him, and with tears in her own eyes said gently, “You have done everything for your friend.”

Her action set them all talking again as if they had never stopped, and Mr. Pepper finished the move with his Knight.

“There was nothing to be done,” said St. John. He spoke very slowly. “It seems impossible——”

He drew his hand across his eyes as if some dream came between him and the others and prevented him from seeing where he was.

“And that poor fellow,” said Mrs. Thornbury, the tears falling again down her cheeks.

“Impossible,” St. John repeated.

“Did he have the consolation of knowing——?” Mrs. Thornbury began very tentatively.

But St. John made no reply. He lay back in his chair, half-seeing the others, half-hearing what they said. He was terribly tired, and the light and warmth, the movements of the hands, and the soft communicative voices soothed him; they gave him a strange sense of quiet and relief. As he sat there, motionless, this feeling of relief became a feeling of profound happiness. Without any sense of disloyalty to Terence and Rachel he ceased to think about either of them. The movements and the voices seemed to draw together from different parts of the room, and to combine themselves into a pattern before his eyes; he was content to sit silently watching the pattern build itself up, looking at what he hardly saw.

The game was really a good one, and Mr. Pepper and Mr. Elliot were becoming more and more set upon the struggle. Mrs. Thornbury, seeing that St. John did not wish to talk, resumed her knitting.

“Lightning again!” Mrs. Flushing suddenly exclaimed. A yellow light flashed across the blue window, and for a second they saw the green trees outside. She strode to the door, pushed it open, and stood half out in the open air.

But the light was only the reflection of the storm which was over. The rain had ceased, the heavy clouds were blown away, and the air was thin and clear, although vapourish mists were being driven swiftly across the moon. The sky was once more a deep and solemn blue, and the shape of the earth was visible at the bottom of the air, enormous, dark, and solid, rising into the tapering mass of the mountain, and pricked here and there on the slopes by the tiny lights of villas. The driving air, the drone of the trees, and the flashing light which now and again spread a broad illumination over the earth filled Mrs. Flushing with exultation. Her breasts rose and fell.

“Splendid! Splendid!” she muttered to herself. Then she turned back into the hall and exclaimed in a peremptory voice, “Come outside and see, Wilfrid; it’s wonderful.”

Some half-stirred; some rose; some dropped their balls of wool and began to stoop to look for them.

“To bed—to bed,” said Miss Allan.

“It was the move with your Queen that gave it away, Pepper,” exclaimed Mr. Elliot triumphantly, sweeping the pieces together and standing up. He had won the game.

“What? Pepper beaten at last? I congratulate you!” said Arthur Venning, who was wheeling old Mrs. Paley to bed.

All these voices sounded gratefully in St. John’s ears as he lay half-asleep, and yet vividly conscious of everything around him. Across his eyes passed a procession of objects, black and indistinct, the figures of people picking up their books, their cards, their balls of wool, their work-baskets, and passing him one after another on their way to bed.

the end

[]

NIGHT
AND DAY

by
Virginia Woolf

To Vanessa Bell
But, looking for a phrase,
I found none to stand
Beside your name

published
October 20, 1919
by
Duckworth & Co., London

night and day

Ch. I    Ch. II    Ch. III    Ch. IV    Ch. V

Ch. VI    Ch. VII    Ch. VIII    Ch. IX    Ch. X

Ch. XI    Ch. XII    Ch. XIII    Ch. XIV

Ch. XV    Ch. XVI    Ch. XVII    Ch. XVIII

Ch. XIX    Ch. XX    Ch. XXI    Ch. XXII

Ch. XXIII    Ch. XXIV    Ch. XXV    Ch. XXVI

Ch. XXVII    Ch. XXVIII    Ch. XXIX

Ch. XXX    Ch. XXXI    Ch. XXXII

Ch. XXXIII    Ch. XXXIV

[]

[The text follows the 1919 Duckworth edition.]

Chapter I

It was a Sunday evening in October, and in common with many other young ladies of her class, Katharine Hilbery was pouring out tea. Perhaps a fifth part of her mind was thus occupied, and the remaining parts leapt over the little barrier of day which interposed between Monday morning and this rather subdued moment, and played with the things one does voluntarily and normally in the daylight. But although she was silent, she was evidently mistress of a situation which was familiar enough to her, and inclined to let it take its way for the six hundredth time, perhaps, without bringing into play any of her unoccupied faculties. A single glance was enough to show that Mrs. Hilbery was so rich in the gifts which make tea-parties of elderly distinguished people successful, that she scarcely needed any help from her daughter, provided that the tiresome business of teacups and bread and butter was discharged for her.

Considering that the little party had been seated round the tea-table for less than twenty minutes, the animation observable on their faces, and the amount of sound they were producing collectively, were very creditable to the hostess. It suddenly came into Katharine’s mind that if some one opened the door at this moment he would think that they were enjoying themselves; he would think, “What an extremely nice house to come into!” and instinctively she laughed, and said something to increase the noise, for the credit of the house presumably, since she herself had not been feeling exhilarated. At the very same moment, rather to her amusement, the door was flung open, and a young man entered the room. Katharine, as she shook hands with him, asked him, in her own mind, “Now, do you think we’re enjoying ourselves enormously?” … “Mr. Denham, mother,” she said aloud, for she saw that her mother had forgotten his name.

That fact was perceptible to Mr. Denham also, and increased the awkwardness which inevitably attends the entrance of a stranger into a room full of people much at their ease, and all launched upon sentences. At the same time, it seemed to Mr. Denham as if a thousand softly padded doors had closed between him and the street outside. A fine mist, the etherealized essence of the fog, hung visibly in the wide and rather empty space of the drawing-room, all silver where the candles were grouped on the tea-table, and ruddy again in the firelight. With the omnibuses and cabs still running in his head, and his body still tingling with his quick walk along the streets and in and out of traffic and foot-passengers, this drawing-room seemed very remote and still; and the faces of the elderly people were mellowed, at some distance from each other, and had a bloom on them owing to the fact that the air in the drawing-room was thickened by blue grains of mist. Mr. Denham had come in as Mr. Fortescue, the eminent novelist, reached the middle of a very long sentence. He kept this suspended while the new-comer sat down, and Mrs. Hilbery deftly joined the severed parts by leaning towards him and remarking:

“Now, what would you do if you were married to an engineer, and had to live in Manchester, Mr. Denham?”

“Surely she could learn Persian,” broke in a thin elderly gentleman. “Is there no retired schoolmaster or man of letters in Manchester with whom she could read Persian?”

“A cousin of ours has married and gone to live in Manchester,” Katharine explained. Mr. Denham muttered something, which was indeed all that was required of him, and the novelist went on where he had left off. Privately, Mr. Denham cursed himself very sharply for having exchanged the freedom of the street for this sophisticated drawing-room, where, among other disagreeables, he certainly would not appear at his best. He glanced round him, and saw that, save for Katharine, they were all over forty, the only consolation being that Mr. Fortescue was a considerable celebrity, so that to-morrow one might be glad to have met him.

“Have you ever been to Manchester?” he asked Katharine.

“Never,” she replied.

“Why do you object to it, then?”

Katharine stirred her tea, and seemed to speculate, so Denham thought, upon the duty of filling somebody else’s cup, but she was really wondering how she was going to keep this strange young man in harmony with the rest. She observed that he was compressing his teacup, so that there was danger lest the thin china might cave inwards. She could see that he was nervous; one would expect a bony young man with his face slightly reddened by the wind, and his hair not altogether smooth, to be nervous in such a party. Further, he probably disliked this kind of thing, and had come out of curiosity, or because her father had invited him—anyhow, he would not be easily combined with the rest.

“I should think there would be no one to talk to in Manchester,” she replied at random. Mr. Fortescue had been observing her for a moment or two, as novelists are inclined to observe, and at this remark he smiled, and made it the text for a little further speculation.

“In spite of a slight tendency to exaggeration, Katharine decidedly hits the mark,” he said, and lying back in his chair, with his opaque contemplative eyes fixed on the ceiling, and the tips of his fingers pressed together, he depicted, first the horrors of the streets of Manchester, and then the bare, immense moors on the outskirts of the town, and then the scrubby little house in which the girl would live, and then the professors and the miserable young students devoted to the more strenuous works of our younger dramatists, who would visit her, and how her appearance would change by degrees, and how she would fly to London, and how Katharine would have to lead her about, as one leads an eager dog on a chain, past rows of clamorous butchers’ shops, poor dear creature.

“Oh, Mr. Fortescue,” exclaimed Mrs. Hilbery, as he finished, “I had just written to say how I envied her! I was thinking of the big gardens and the dear old ladies in mittens, who read nothing but the Spectator, and snuff the candles. Have they all disappeared? I told her she would find the nice things of London without the horrid streets that depress one so.”

“There is the University,” said the thin gentleman, who had previously insisted upon the existence of people knowing Persian.

“I know there are moors there, because I read about them in a book the other day,” said Katharine.

“I am grieved and amazed at the ignorance of my family,” Mr. Hilbery remarked. He was an elderly man, with a pair of oval, hazel eyes which were rather bright for his time of life, and relieved the heaviness of his face. He played constantly with a little green stone attached to his watch-chain, thus displaying long and very sensitive fingers, and had a habit of moving his head hither and thither very quickly without altering the position of his large and rather corpulent body, so that he seemed to be providing himself incessantly with food for amusement and reflection with the least possible expenditure of energy. One might suppose that he had passed the time of life when his ambitions were personal, or that he had gratified them as far as he was likely to do, and now employed his considerable acuteness rather to observe and reflect than to attain any result.

Katharine, so Denham decided, while Mr. Fortescue built up another rounded structure of words, had a likeness to each of her parents, and these elements were rather oddly blended. She had the quick, impulsive movements of her mother, the lips parting often to speak, and closing again; and the dark oval eyes of her father brimming with light upon a basis of sadness, or, since she was too young to have acquired a sorrowful point of view, one might say that the basis was not sadness so much as a spirit given to contemplation and self-control. Judging by her hair, her colouring, and the shape of her features, she was striking, if not actually beautiful. Decision and composure stamped her, a combination of qualities that produced a very marked character, and one that was not calculated to put a young man, who scarcely knew her, at his ease. For the rest, she was tall; her dress was of some quiet colour, with old yellow-tinted lace for ornament, to which the spark of an ancient jewel gave its one red gleam. Denham noticed that, although silent, she kept sufficient control of the situation to answer immediately her mother appealed to her for help, and yet it was obvious to him that she attended only with the surface skin of her mind. It struck him that her position at the tea-table, among all these elderly people, was not without its difficulties, and he checked his inclination to find her, or her attitude, generally antipathetic to him. The talk had passed over Manchester, after dealing with it very generously.

“Would it be the Battle of Trafalgar or the Spanish Armada, Katharine?” her mother demanded.

“Trafalgar, mother.”

“Trafalgar, of course! How stupid of me! Another cup of tea, with a thin slice of lemon in it, and then, dear Mr. Fortescue, please explain my absurd little puzzle. One can’t help believing gentlemen with Roman noses, even if one meets them in omnibuses.”

Mr. Hilbery here interposed so far as Denham was concerned, and talked a great deal of sense about the solicitors’ profession, and the changes which he had seen in his lifetime. Indeed, Denham properly fell to his lot, owing to the fact that an article by Denham upon some legal matter, published by Mr. Hilbery in his Review, had brought them acquainted. But when a moment later Mrs. Sutton Bailey was announced, he turned to her, and Mr. Denham found himself sitting silent, rejecting possible things to say, beside Katharine, who was silent too. Being much about the same age and both under thirty, they were prohibited from the use of a great many convenient phrases which launch conversation into smooth waters. They were further silenced by Katharine’s rather malicious determination not to help this young man, in whose upright and resolute bearing she detected something hostile to her surroundings, by any of the usual feminine amenities. They therefore sat silent, Denham controlling his desire to say something abrupt and explosive, which should shock her into life. But Mrs. Hilbery was immediately sensitive to any silence in the drawing-room, as of a dumb note in a sonorous scale, and leaning across the table she observed, in the curiously tentative detached manner which always gave her phrases the likeness of butterflies flaunting from one sunny spot to another, “D’you know, Mr. Denham, you remind me so much of dear Mr. Ruskin…. Is it his tie, Katharine, or his hair, or the way he sits in his chair? Do tell me, Mr. Denham, are you an admirer of Ruskin? Some one, the other day, said to me, ‘Oh no, we don’t read Ruskin, Mrs. Hilbery.’ What do you read, I wonder?—for you can’t spend all your time going up in aeroplanes and burrowing into the bowels of the earth.”

She looked benevolently at Denham, who said nothing articulate, and then at Katharine, who smiled but said nothing either, upon which Mrs. Hilbery seemed possessed by a brilliant idea, and exclaimed:

“I’m sure Mr. Denham would like to see our things, Katharine. I’m sure he’s not like that dreadful young man, Mr. Ponting, who told me that he considered it our duty to live exclusively in the present. After all, what is the present? Half of it’s the past, and the better half, too, I should say,” she added, turning to Mr. Fortescue.

Denham rose, half meaning to go, and thinking that he had seen all that there was to see, but Katharine rose at the same moment, and saying, “Perhaps you would like to see the pictures,” led the way across the drawing-room to a smaller room opening out of it.

The smaller room was something like a chapel in a cathedral, or a grotto in a cave, for the booming sound of the traffic in the distance suggested the soft surge of waters, and the oval mirrors, with their silver surface, were like deep pools trembling beneath starlight. But the comparison to a religious temple of some kind was the more apt of the two, for the little room was crowded with relics.

As Katharine touched different spots, lights sprang here and there, and revealed a square mass of red-and-gold books, and then a long skirt in blue-and-white paint lustrous behind glass, and then a mahogany writing-table, with its orderly equipment, and, finally, a square picture above the table, to which special illumination was accorded. When Katharine had touched these last lights, she stood back, as much as to say, “There!” Denham found himself looked down upon by the eyes of the great poet, Richard Alardyce, and suffered a little shock which would have led him, had he been wearing a hat, to remove it. The eyes looked at him out of the mellow pinks and yellows of the paint with divine friendliness, which embraced him, and passed on to contemplate the entire world. The paint had so faded that very little but the beautiful large eyes were left, dark in the surrounding dimness.

Katharine waited as though for him to receive a full impression, and then she said:

“This is his writing-table. He used this pen,” and she lifted a quill pen and laid it down again. The writing-table was splashed with old ink, and the pen dishevelled in service. There lay the gigantic gold-rimmed spectacles, ready to his hand, and beneath the table was a pair of large, worn slippers, one of which Katharine picked up, remarking:

“I think my grandfather must have been at least twice as large as any one is nowadays. This,” she went on, as if she knew what she had to say by heart, “is the original manuscript of the ‘Ode to Winter.’ The early poems are far less corrected than the later. Would you like to look at it?”

While Mr. Denham examined the manuscript, she glanced up at her grandfather, and, for the thousandth time, fell into a pleasant dreamy state in which she seemed to be the companion of those giant men, of their own lineage, at any rate, and the insignificant present moment was put to shame. That magnificent ghostly head on the canvas, surely, never beheld all the trivialities of a Sunday afternoon, and it did not seem to matter what she and this young man said to each other, for they were only small people.

“This is a copy of the first edition of the poems,” she continued, without considering the fact that Mr. Denham was still occupied with the manuscript, “which contains several poems that have not been reprinted, as well as corrections.” She paused for a minute, and then went on, as if these spaces had all been calculated.

“That lady in blue is my great-grandmother, by Millington. Here is my uncle’s walking-stick—he was Sir Richard Warburton, you know, and rode with Havelock to the Relief of Lucknow. And then, let me see—oh, that’s the original Alardyce, 1697, the founder of the family fortunes, with his wife. Some one gave us this bowl the other day because it has their crest and initials. We think it must have been given them to celebrate their silver wedding-day.”

Here she stopped for a moment, wondering why it was that Mr. Denham said nothing. Her feeling that he was antagonistic to her, which had lapsed while she thought of her family possessions, returned so keenly that she stopped in the middle of her catalogue and looked at him. Her mother, wishing to connect him reputably with the great dead, had compared him with Mr. Ruskin; and the comparison was in Katharine’s mind, and led her to be more critical of the young man than was fair, for a young man paying a call in a tail-coat is in a different element altogether from a head seized at its climax of expressiveness, gazing immutably from behind a sheet of glass, which was all that remained to her of Mr. Ruskin. He had a singular face—a face built for swiftness and decision rather than for massive contemplation; the forehead broad, the nose long and formidable, the lips clean-shaven and at once dogged and sensitive, the cheeks lean, with a deeply running tide of red blood in them. His eyes, expressive now of the usual masculine impersonality and authority, might reveal more subtle emotions under favourable circumstances, for they were large, and of a clear, brown colour—they seemed unexpectedly to hesitate and speculate; but Katharine only looked at him to wonder whether his face would not have come nearer the standard of her dead heroes if it had been adorned with side-whiskers. In his spare build and thin, though healthy, cheeks, she saw tokens of an angular and acrid soul. His voice, she noticed, had a slight vibrating or creaking sound in it, as he laid down the manuscript and said:

“You must be very proud of your family, Miss Hilbery.”

“Yes, I am,” Katharine answered, and she added, “Do you think there’s anything wrong in that?”

“Wrong? How should it be wrong? It must be a bore, though, showing your things to visitors,” he added reflectively.

“Not if the visitors like them.”

“Isn’t it difficult to live up to your ancestors?” he proceeded.

“I dare say I shouldn’t try to write poetry,” Katharine replied.

“No. And that’s what I should hate. I couldn’t bear my grandfather to cut me out. And, after all,” Denham went on, glancing round him satirically, as Katharine thought, “it’s not your grandfather only. You’re cut out all the way round. I suppose you come of one of the most distinguished families in England. There are the Warburtons and the Mannings—and you’re related to the Otways, aren’t you? I read it all in some magazine,” he added.

“The Otways are my cousins,” Katharine replied.

“Well,” said Denham, in a final tone of voice, as if his argument were proved.

“Well,” said Katharine, “I don’t see that you’ve proved anything.”

Denham smiled, in a peculiarly provoking way. He was amused and gratified to find that he had the power to annoy his oblivious, supercilious hostess, if he could not impress her; though he would have preferred to impress her.

He sat silent, holding the precious little book of poems unopened in his hands, and Katharine watched him, the melancholy or contemplative expression deepening in her eyes as her annoyance faded. She appeared to be considering many things. She had forgotten her duties.

“Well,” said Denham again, suddenly opening the little book of poems, as though he had said all that he meant to say or could, with propriety, say. He turned over the pages with great decision, as if he were judging the book in its entirety, the printing and paper and binding, as well as the poetry, and then, having satisfied himself of its good or bad quality, he placed it on the writing-table, and examined the malacca cane with the gold knob which had belonged to the soldier.

“But aren’t you proud of your family?” Katharine demanded.

“No,” said Denham. “We’ve never done anything to be proud of—unless you count paying one’s bills a matter for pride.”

“That sounds rather dull,” Katharine remarked.

“You would think us horribly dull,” Denham agreed.

“Yes, I might find you dull, but I don’t think I should find you ridiculous,” Katharine added, as if Denham had actually brought that charge against her family.

“No—because we’re not in the least ridiculous. We’re a respectable middle-class family, living at Highgate.”

“We don’t live at Highgate, but we’re middle class too, I suppose.”

Denham merely smiled, and replacing the malacca cane on the rack, he drew a sword from its ornamental sheath.

“That belonged to Clive, so we say,” said Katharine, taking up her duties as hostess again automatically.

“Is it a lie?” Denham inquired.

“It’s a family tradition. I don’t know that we can prove it.”

“You see, we don’t have traditions in our family,” said Denham.

“You sound very dull,” Katharine remarked, for the second time.

“Merely middle class,” Denham replied.

“You pay your bills, and you speak the truth. I don’t see why you should despise us.”

Mr. Denham carefully sheathed the sword which the Hilberys said belonged to Clive.

“I shouldn’t like to be you; that’s all I said,” he replied, as if he were saying what he thought as accurately as he could.

“No, but one never would like to be any one else.”

“I should. I should like to be lots of other people.”

“Then why not us?” Katharine asked.

Denham looked at her as she sat in her grandfather’s arm-chair, drawing her great-uncle’s malacca cane smoothly through her fingers, while her background was made up equally of lustrous blue-and-white paint, and crimson books with gilt lines on them. The vitality and composure of her attitude, as of a bright-plumed bird poised easily before further flights, roused him to show her the limitations of her lot. So soon, so easily, would he be forgotten.

“You’ll never know anything at first hand,” he began, almost savagely. “It’s all been done for you. You’ll never know the pleasure of buying things after saving up for them, or reading books for the first time, or making discoveries.”

“Go on,” Katharine observed, as he paused, suddenly doubtful, when he heard his voice proclaiming aloud these facts, whether there was any truth in them.

“Of course, I don’t know how you spend your time,” he continued, a little stiffly, “but I suppose you have to show people round. You are writing a life of your grandfather, aren’t you? And this kind of thing”—he nodded towards the other room, where they could hear bursts of cultivated laughter—“must take up a lot of time.”

She looked at him expectantly, as if between them they were decorating a small figure of herself, and she saw him hesitating in the disposition of some bow or sash.

“You’ve got it very nearly right,” she said, “but I only help my mother. I don’t write myself.”

“Do you do anything yourself?” he demanded.

“What do you mean?” she asked. “I don’t leave the house at ten and come back at six.”

“I don’t mean that.”

Mr. Denham had recovered his self-control; he spoke with a quietness which made Katharine rather anxious that he should explain himself, but at the same time she wished to annoy him, to waft him away from her on some light current of ridicule or satire, as she was wont to do with these intermittent young men of her father’s.

“Nobody ever does do anything worth doing nowadays,” she remarked. “You see”—she tapped the volume of her grandfather’s poems—“we don’t even print as well as they did, and as for poets or painters or novelists—there are none; so, at any rate, I’m not singular.”

“No, we haven’t any great men,” Denham replied. “I’m very glad that we haven’t. I hate great men. The worship of greatness in the nineteenth century seems to me to explain the worthlessness of that generation.”

Katharine opened her lips and drew in her breath, as if to reply with equal vigour, when the shutting of a door in the next room withdrew her attention, and they both became conscious that the voices, which had been rising and falling round the tea-table, had fallen silent; the light, even, seemed to have sunk lower. A moment later Mrs. Hilbery appeared in the doorway of the ante-room. She stood looking at them with a smile of expectancy on her face, as if a scene from the drama of the younger generation were being played for her benefit. She was a remarkable-looking woman, well advanced in the sixties, but owing to the lightness of her frame and the brightness of her eyes she seemed to have been wafted over the surface of the years without taking much harm in the passage. Her face was shrunken and aquiline, but any hint of sharpness was dispelled by the large blue eyes, at once sagacious and innocent, which seemed to regard the world with an enormous desire that it should behave itself nobly, and an entire confidence that it could do so, if it would only take the pains.

Certain lines on the broad forehead and about the lips might be taken to suggest that she had known moments of some difficulty and perplexity in the course of her career, but these had not destroyed her trustfulness, and she was clearly still prepared to give every one any number of fresh chances and the whole system the benefit of the doubt. She wore a great resemblance to her father, and in some way suggested, as he did, the fresh airs and open spaces of a younger world.

“Well,” she said, “how do you like our things, Mr. Denham?”

Mr. Denham rose, put his book down, opened his mouth, but said nothing, as Katharine observed, with some amusement.

Mrs. Hilbery handled the book he had laid down.

“There are some books that live,” she mused. “They are young with us, and they grow old with us. Are you fond of poetry, Mr. Denham? But what an absurd question to ask! The truth is, dear Mr. Fortescue has almost tired me out. He is so eloquent and so witty, so searching and so profound that, after half an hour or so, I feel inclined to turn out all the lights. But perhaps he’d be more wonderful than ever in the dark. What d’you think, Katharine? Shall we give a little party in complete darkness? There’d have to be bright rooms for the bores….”

Here Mr. Denham held out his hand.

“But we’ve any number of things to show you!” Mrs. Hilbery exclaimed, taking no notice of it. “Books, pictures, china, manuscripts, and the very chair that Mary Queen of Scots sat in when she heard of Darnley’s murder. I must lie down for a little, and Katharine must change her dress (though she’s wearing a very pretty one), but if you don’t mind being left alone, supper will be at eight. I dare say you’ll write a poem of your own. Ah, how I love the firelight! Doesn’t our room look charming?”

She stepped back and bade them contemplate the empty drawing-room, with its rich, irregular lights, as the flames leapt and wavered.

“Dear things!” she exclaimed. “Dear chairs and tables! How like old friends they are—faithful, silent friends. Which reminds me, Katharine, little Mr. Anning is coming to-night, and Tite Street, and Cadogan Square…. Do remember to get that drawing of your great-uncle glazed. Aunt Millicent remarked it last time she was here, and I know how it would hurt me to see my father in a broken glass.”

It was like tearing through a maze of diamond-glittering spiders’ webs to say good-bye and escape, for at each movement Mrs. Hilbery remembered something further about the villainies of picture-framers or the delights of poetry, and at one time it seemed to the young man that he would be hypnotized into doing what she pretended to want him to do, for he could not suppose that she attached any value whatever to his presence. Katharine, however, made an opportunity for him to leave, and for that he was grateful to her, as one young person is grateful for the understanding of another.

[]

Chapter II

The young man shut the door with a sharper slam than any visitor had used that afternoon, and walked up the street at a great pace, cutting the air with his walking-stick. He was glad to find himself outside that drawing-room, breathing raw fog, and in contact with unpolished people who only wanted their share of the pavement allowed them. He thought that if he had had Mr. or Mrs. or Miss Hilbery out here he would have made them, somehow, feel his superiority, for he was chafed by the memory of halting awkward sentences which had failed to give even the young woman with the sad, but inwardly ironical, eyes a hint of his force. He tried to recall the actual words of his little outburst, and unconsciously supplemented them by so many words of greater expressiveness that the irritation of his failure was somewhat assuaged. Sudden stabs of the unmitigated truth assailed him now and then, for he was not inclined by nature to take a rosy view of his conduct, but what with the beat of his foot upon the pavement, and the glimpse which half-drawn curtains offered him of kitchens, dining-rooms, and drawing-rooms, illustrating with mute power different scenes from different lives, his own experience lost its sharpness.

His own experience underwent a curious change. His speed slackened, his head sank a little towards his breast, and the lamplight shone now and again upon a face grown strangely tranquil. His thought was so absorbing that when it became necessary to verify the name of a street, he looked at it for a time before he read it; when he came to a crossing, he seemed to have to reassure himself by two or three taps, such as a blind man gives, upon the kerb; and, reaching the Underground station, he blinked in the bright circle of light, glanced at his watch, decided that he might still indulge himself in darkness, and walked straight on.

And yet the thought was the thought with which he had started. He was still thinking about the people in the house which he had left; but instead of remembering, with whatever accuracy he could, their looks and sayings, he had consciously taken leave of the literal truth. A turn of the street, a firelit room, something monumental in the procession of the lamp-posts, who shall say what accident of light or shape had suddenly changed the prospect within his mind, and led him to murmur aloud:

“She’ll do…. Yes, Katharine Hilbery’ll do…. I’ll take Katharine Hilbery.”

As soon as he had said this, his pace slackened, his head fell, his eyes became fixed. The desire to justify himself, which had been so urgent, ceased to torment him, and, as if released from constraint, so that they worked without friction or bidding, his faculties leapt forward and fixed, as a matter of course, upon the form of Katharine Hilbery. It was marvellous how much they found to feed upon, considering the destructive nature of Denham’s criticism in her presence. The charm, which he had tried to disown, when under the effect of it, the beauty, the character, the aloofness, which he had been determined not to feel, now possessed him wholly; and when, as happened by the nature of things, he had exhausted his memory, he went on with his imagination. He was conscious of what he was about, for in thus dwelling upon Miss Hilbery’s qualities, he showed a kind of method, as if he required this vision of her for a particular purpose. He increased her height, he darkened her hair; but physically there was not much to change in her. His most daring liberty was taken with her mind, which, for reasons of his own, he desired to be exalted and infallible, and of such independence that it was only in the case of Ralph Denham that it swerved from its high, swift flight, but where he was concerned, though fastidious at first, she finally swooped from her eminence to crown him with her approval. These delicious details, however, were to be worked out in all their ramifications at his leisure; the main point was that Katharine Hilbery would do; she would do for weeks, perhaps for months. In taking her he had provided himself with something the lack of which had left a bare place in his mind for a considerable time. He gave a sigh of satisfaction; his consciousness of his actual position somewhere in the neighbourhood of Knightsbridge returned to him, and he was soon speeding in the train towards Highgate.

Although thus supported by the knowledge of his new possession of considerable value, he was not proof against the familiar thoughts which the suburban streets and the damp shrubs growing in front gardens and the absurd names painted in white upon the gates of those gardens suggested to him. His walk was uphill, and his mind dwelt gloomily upon the house which he approached, where he would find six or seven brothers and sisters, a widowed mother, and, probably, some aunt or uncle sitting down to an unpleasant meal under a very bright light. Should he put in force the threat which, two weeks ago, some such gathering had wrung from him—the terrible threat that if visitors came on Sunday he should dine alone in his room? A glance in the direction of Miss Hilbery determined him to make his stand this very night, and accordingly, having let himself in, having verified the presence of Uncle Joseph by means of a bowler hat and a very large umbrella, he gave his orders to the maid, and went upstairs to his room.

He went up a great many flights of stairs, and he noticed, as he had very seldom noticed, how the carpet became steadily shabbier, until it ceased altogether, how the walls were discoloured, sometimes by cascades of damp, and sometimes by the outlines of picture-frames since removed, how the paper flapped loose at the corners, and a great flake of plaster had fallen from the ceiling. The room itself was a cheerless one to return to at this inauspicious hour. A flattened sofa would, later in the evening, become a bed; one of the tables concealed a washing apparatus; his clothes and boots were disagreeably mixed with books which bore the gilt of college arms; and, for decoration, there hung upon the wall photographs of bridges and cathedrals and large, unprepossessing groups of insufficiently clothed young men, sitting in rows one above another upon stone steps. There was a look of meanness and shabbiness in the furniture and curtains, and nowhere any sign of luxury or even of a cultivated taste, unless the cheap classics in the book-case were a sign of an effort in that direction. The only object that threw any light upon the character of the room’s owner was a large perch, placed in the window to catch the air and sun, upon which a tame and, apparently, decrepit rook hopped dryly from side to side. The bird, encouraged by a scratch behind the ear, settled upon Denham’s shoulder. He lit his gas-fire and settled down in gloomy patience to await his dinner. After sitting thus for some minutes a small girl popped her head in to say,

“Mother says, aren’t you coming down, Ralph? Uncle Joseph——”

“They’re to bring my dinner up here,” said Ralph, peremptorily; whereupon she vanished, leaving the door ajar in her haste to be gone. After Denham had waited some minutes, in the course of which neither he nor the rook took their eyes off the fire, he muttered a curse, ran downstairs, intercepted the parlour-maid, and cut himself a slice of bread and cold meat. As he did so, the dining-room door sprang open, a voice exclaimed “Ralph!” but Ralph paid no attention to the voice, and made off upstairs with his plate. He set it down in a chair opposite him, and ate with a ferocity that was due partly to anger and partly to hunger. His mother, then, was determined not to respect his wishes; he was a person of no importance in his own family; he was sent for and treated as a child. He reflected, with a growing sense of injury, that almost every one of his actions since opening the door of his room had been won from the grasp of the family system. By rights, he should have been sitting downstairs in the drawing-room describing his afternoon’s adventures, or listening to the afternoon’s adventures of other people; the room itself, the gas-fire, the arm-chair—all had been fought for; the wretched bird, with half its feathers out and one leg lamed by a cat, had been rescued under protest; but what his family most resented, he reflected, was his wish for privacy. To dine alone, or to sit alone after dinner, was flat rebellion, to be fought with every weapon of underhand stealth or of open appeal. Which did he dislike most—deception or tears? But, at any rate, they could not rob him of his thoughts; they could not make him say where he had been or whom he had seen. That was his own affair; that, indeed, was a step entirely in the right direction, and, lighting his pipe, and cutting up the remains of his meal for the benefit of the rook, Ralph calmed his rather excessive irritation and settled down to think over his prospects.

This particular afternoon was a step in the right direction, because it was part of his plan to get to know people beyond the family circuit, just as it was part of his plan to learn German this autumn, and to review legal books for Mr. Hilbery’s Critical Review. He had always made plans since he was a small boy; for poverty, and the fact that he was the eldest son of a large family, had given him the habit of thinking of spring and summer, autumn and winter, as so many stages in a prolonged campaign. Although he was still under thirty, this forecasting habit had marked two semicircular lines above his eyebrows, which threatened, at this moment, to crease into their wonted shapes. But instead of settling down to think, he rose, took a small piece of cardboard marked in large letters with the word OUT, and hung it upon the handle of his door. This done, he sharpened a pencil, lit a reading-lamp, and opened his book. But still he hesitated to take his seat. He scratched the rook, he walked to the window; he parted the curtains, and looked down upon the city which lay, hazily luminous, beneath him. He looked across the vapours in the direction of Chelsea; looked fixedly for a moment, and then returned to his chair. But the whole thickness of some learned counsel’s treatise upon Torts did not screen him satisfactorily. Through the pages he saw a drawing-room, very empty and spacious; he heard low voices, he saw women’s figures, he could even smell the scent of the cedar log which flamed in the grate. His mind relaxed its tension, and seemed to be giving out now what it had taken in unconsciously at the time. He could remember Mr. Fortescue’s exact words, and the rolling emphasis with which he delivered them, and he began to repeat what Mr. Fortescue had said, in Mr. Fortescue’s own manner, about Manchester. His mind then began to wander about the house, and he wondered whether there were other rooms like the drawing-room, and he thought, inconsequently, how beautiful the bathroom must be, and how leisurely it was—the life of these well-kept people, who were, no doubt, still sitting in the same room, only they had changed their clothes, and little Mr. Anning was there, and the aunt who would mind if the glass of her father’s picture was broken. Miss Hilbery had changed her dress (“although she’s wearing such a pretty one,” he heard her mother say), and she was talking to Mr. Anning, who was well over forty, and bald into the bargain, about books. How peaceful and spacious it was; and the peace possessed him so completely that his muscles slackened, his book drooped from his hand, and he forgot that the hour of work was wasting minute by minute.

He was roused by a creak upon the stair. With a guilty start he composed himself, frowned, and looked intently at the fifty-sixth page of his volume. A step paused outside his door, and he knew that the person, whoever it might be, was considering the placard, and debating whether to honour its decree or not. Certainly, policy advised him to sit still in autocratic silence, for no custom can take root in a family unless every breach of it is punished severely for the first six months or so. But Ralph was conscious of a distinct wish to be interrupted, and his disappointment was perceptible when he heard the creaking sound rather farther down the stairs, as if his visitor had decided to withdraw. He rose, opened the door with unnecessary abruptness, and waited on the landing. The person stopped simultaneously half a flight downstairs.

“Ralph?” said a voice, inquiringly.

“Joan?”

“I was coming up, but I saw your notice.”

“Well, come along in, then.” He concealed his desire beneath a tone as grudging as he could make it.

Joan came in, but she was careful to show, by standing upright with one hand upon the mantelpiece, that she was only there for a definite purpose, which discharged, she would go.

She was older than Ralph by some three or four years. Her face was round but worn, and expressed that tolerant but anxious good humour which is the special attribute of elder sisters in large families. Her pleasant brown eyes resembled Ralph’s, save in expression, for whereas he seemed to look straightly and keenly at one object, she appeared to be in the habit of considering everything from many different points of view. This made her appear his elder by more years than existed in fact between them. Her gaze rested for a moment or two upon the rook. She then said, without any preface:

“It’s about Charles and Uncles John’s offer…. Mother’s been talking to me. She says she can’t afford to pay for him after this term. She says she’ll have to ask for an overdraft as it is.”

“That’s simply not true,” said Ralph.

“No. I thought not. But she won’t believe me when I say it.”

Ralph, as if he could foresee the length of this familiar argument, drew up a chair for his sister and sat down himself.

“I’m not interrupting?” she inquired.

Ralph shook his head, and for a time they sat silent. The lines curved themselves in semicircles above their eyes.

“She doesn’t understand that one’s got to take risks,” he observed, finally.

“I believe mother would take risks if she knew that Charles was the sort of boy to profit by it.”

“He’s got brains, hasn’t he?” said Ralph. His tone had taken on that shade of pugnacity which suggested to his sister that some personal grievance drove him to take the line he did. She wondered what it might be, but at once recalled her mind, and assented.

“In some ways he’s fearfully backward, though, compared with what you were at his age. And he’s difficult at home, too. He makes Molly slave for him.”

Ralph made a sound which belittled this particular argument. It was plain to Joan that she had struck one of her brother’s perverse moods, and he was going to oppose whatever his mother said. He called her “she,” which was a proof of it. She sighed involuntarily, and the sigh annoyed Ralph, and he exclaimed with irritation:

“It’s pretty hard lines to stick a boy into an office at seventeen!”

“Nobody wants to stick him into an office,” she said.

She, too, was becoming annoyed. She had spent the whole of the afternoon discussing wearisome details of education and expense with her mother, and she had come to her brother for help, encouraged, rather irrationally, to expect help by the fact that he had been out somewhere, she didn’t know and didn’t mean to ask where, all the afternoon.

Ralph was fond of his sister, and her irritation made him think how unfair it was that all these burdens should be laid on her shoulders.

“The truth is,” he observed gloomily, “that I ought to have accepted Uncle John’s offer. I should have been making six hundred a year by this time.”

“I don’t think that for a moment,” Joan replied quickly, repenting of her annoyance. “The question, to my mind, is, whether we couldn’t cut down our expenses in some way.”

“A smaller house?”

“Fewer servants, perhaps.”

Neither brother nor sister spoke with much conviction, and after reflecting for a moment what these proposed reforms in a strictly economical household meant, Ralph announced very decidedly:

“It’s out of the question.”

It was out of the question that she should put any more household work upon herself. No, the hardship must fall on him, for he was determined that his family should have as many chances of distinguishing themselves as other families had—as the Hilberys had, for example. He believed secretly and rather defiantly, for it was a fact not capable of proof, that there was something very remarkable about his family.

“If mother won’t run risks——”

“You really can’t expect her to sell out again.”

“She ought to look upon it as an investment; but if she won’t, we must find some other way, that’s all.”

A threat was contained in this sentence, and Joan knew, without asking, what the threat was. In the course of his professional life, which now extended over six or seven years, Ralph had saved, perhaps, three or four hundred pounds. Considering the sacrifices he had made in order to put by this sum it always amazed Joan to find that he used it to gamble with, buying shares and selling them again, increasing it sometimes, sometimes diminishing it, and always running the risk of losing every penny of it in a day’s disaster. But although she wondered, she could not help loving him the better for his odd combination of Spartan self-control and what appeared to her romantic and childish folly. Ralph interested her more than any one else in the world, and she often broke off in the middle of one of these economic discussions, in spite of their gravity, to consider some fresh aspect of his character.

“I think you’d be foolish to risk your money on poor old Charles,” she observed. “Fond as I am of him, he doesn’t seem to me exactly brilliant…. Besides, why should you be sacrificed?”

“My dear Joan,” Ralph exclaimed, stretching himself out with a gesture of impatience, “don’t you see that we’ve all got to be sacrificed? What’s the use of denying it? What’s the use of struggling against it? So it always has been, so it always will be. We’ve got no money and we never shall have any money. We shall just turn round in the mill every day of our lives until we drop and die, worn out, as most people do, when one comes to think of it.”

Joan looked at him, opened her lips as if to speak, and closed them again. Then she said, very tentatively:

“Aren’t you happy, Ralph?”

“No. Are you? Perhaps I’m as happy as most people, though. God knows whether I’m happy or not. What is happiness?”

He glanced with half a smile, in spite of his gloomy irritation, at his sister. She looked, as usual, as if she were weighing one thing with another, and balancing them together before she made up her mind.

“Happiness,” she remarked at length enigmatically, rather as if she were sampling the word, and then she paused. She paused for a considerable space, as if she were considering happiness in all its bearings. “Hilda was here to-day,” she suddenly resumed, as if they had never mentioned happiness. “She brought Bobbie—he’s a fine boy now.” Ralph observed, with an amusement that had a tinge of irony in it, that she was now going to sidle away quickly from this dangerous approach to intimacy on to topics of general and family interest. Nevertheless, he reflected, she was the only one of his family with whom he found it possible to discuss happiness, although he might very well have discussed happiness with Miss Hilbery at their first meeting. He looked critically at Joan, and wished that she did not look so provincial or suburban in her high green dress with the faded trimming, so patient, and almost resigned. He began to wish to tell her about the Hilberys in order to abuse them, for in the miniature battle which so often rages between two quickly following impressions of life, the life of the Hilberys was getting the better of the life of the Denhams in his mind, and he wanted to assure himself that there was some quality in which Joan infinitely surpassed Miss Hilbery. He should have felt that his own sister was more original, and had greater vitality than Miss Hilbery had; but his main impression of Katharine now was of a person of great vitality and composure; and at the moment he could not perceive what poor dear Joan had gained from the fact that she was the granddaughter of a man who kept a shop, and herself earned her own living. The infinite dreariness and sordidness of their life oppressed him in spite of his fundamental belief that, as a family, they were somehow remarkable.

“Shall you talk to mother?” Joan inquired. “Because, you see, the thing’s got to be settled, one way or another. Charles must write to Uncle John if he’s going there.”

Ralph sighed impatiently.

“I suppose it doesn’t much matter either way,” he exclaimed. “He’s doomed to misery in the long run.”

A slight flush came into Joan’s cheek.

“You know you’re talking nonsense,” she said. “It doesn’t hurt any one to have to earn their own living. I’m very glad I have to earn mine.”

Ralph was pleased that she should feel this, and wished her to continue, but he went on, perversely enough,

“Isn’t that only because you’ve forgotten how to enjoy yourself? You never have time for anything decent—”

“As for instance?”

“Well, going for walks, or music, or books, or seeing interesting people. You never do anything that’s really worth doing any more than I do.”

“I always think you could make this room much nicer, if you liked,” she observed.

“What does it matter what sort of room I have when I’m forced to spend all the best years of my life drawing up deeds in an office?”

“You said two days ago that you found the law so interesting.”

“So it is if one could afford to know anything about it.”

(“That’s Herbert only just going to bed now,” Joan interposed, as a door on the landing slammed vigorously. “And then he won’t get up in the morning.”)

Ralph looked at the ceiling, and shut his lips closely together. Why, he wondered, could Joan never for one moment detach her mind from the details of domestic life? It seemed to him that she was getting more and more enmeshed in them, and capable of shorter and less frequent flights into the outer world, and yet she was only thirty-three.

“D’you ever pay calls now?” he asked abruptly.

“I don’t often have the time. Why do you ask?”

“It might be a good thing, to get to know new people, that’s all.”

“Poor Ralph!” said Joan suddenly, with a smile. “You think your sister’s getting very old and very dull—that’s it, isn’t it?”

“I don’t think anything of the kind,” he said stoutly, but he flushed. “But you lead a dog’s life, Joan. When you’re not working in an office, you’re worrying over the rest of us. And I’m not much good to you, I’m afraid.”

Joan rose and stood for a moment warming her hands, and, apparently, meditating as to whether she should say anything more or not. A feeling of great intimacy united the brother and sister, and the semicircular lines above their eyebrows disappeared. No, there was nothing more to be said on either side. Joan brushed her brother’s head with her hand as she passed him, murmured good night, and left the room. For some minutes after she had gone Ralph lay quiescent, resting his head on his hand, but gradually his eyes filled with thought, and the line reappeared on his brow, as the pleasant impression of companionship and ancient sympathy waned, and he was left to think on alone.

After a time he opened his book, and read on steadily, glancing once or twice at his watch, as if he had set himself a task to be accomplished in a certain measure of time. Now and then he heard voices in the house, and the closing of bedroom doors, which showed that the building, at the top of which he sat, was inhabited in every one of its cells. When midnight struck, Ralph shut his book, and with a candle in his hand, descended to the ground floor, to ascertain that all lights were extinct and all doors locked. It was a threadbare, well-worn house that he thus examined, as if the inmates had grazed down all luxuriance and plenty to the verge of decency; and in the night, bereft of life, bare places and ancient blemishes were unpleasantly visible. Katharine Hilbery, he thought, would condemn it off-hand.

[]

Chapter III

Denham had accused Katharine Hilbery of belonging to one of the most distinguished families in England, and if any one will take the trouble to consult Mr. Galton’s “Hereditary Genius,” he will find that this assertion is not far from the truth. The Alardyces, the Hilberys, the Millingtons, and the Otways seem to prove that intellect is a possession which can be tossed from one member of a certain group to another almost indefinitely, and with apparent certainty that the brilliant gift will be safely caught and held by nine out of ten of the privileged race. They had been conspicuous judges and admirals, lawyers and servants of the State for some years before the richness of the soil culminated in the rarest flower that any family can boast, a great writer, a poet eminent among the poets of England, a Richard Alardyce; and having produced him, they proved once more the amazing virtues of their race by proceeding unconcernedly again with their usual task of breeding distinguished men. They had sailed with Sir John Franklin to the North Pole, and ridden with Havelock to the Relief of Lucknow, and when they were not lighthouses firmly based on rock for the guidance of their generation, they were steady, serviceable candles, illuminating the ordinary chambers of daily life. Whatever profession you looked at, there was a Warburton or an Alardyce, a Millington or a Hilbery somewhere in authority and prominence.

It may be said, indeed, that English society being what it is, no very great merit is required, once you bear a well-known name, to put you into a position where it is easier on the whole to be eminent than obscure. And if this is true of the sons, even the daughters, even in the nineteenth century, are apt to become people of importance—philanthropists and educationalists if they are spinsters, and the wives of distinguished men if they marry. It is true that there were several lamentable exceptions to this rule in the Alardyce group, which seems to indicate that the cadets of such houses go more rapidly to the bad than the children of ordinary fathers and mothers, as if it were somehow a relief to them. But, on the whole, in these first years of the twentieth century, the Alardyces and their relations were keeping their heads well above water. One finds them at the tops of professions, with letters after their names; they sit in luxurious public offices, with private secretaries attached to them; they write solid books in dark covers, issued by the presses of the two great universities, and when one of them dies the chances are that another of them writes his biography.

Now the source of this nobility was, of course, the poet, and his immediate descendants, therefore, were invested with greater lustre than the collateral branches. Mrs. Hilbery, in virtue of her position as the only child of the poet, was spiritually the head of the family, and Katharine, her daughter, had some superior rank among all the cousins and connexions, the more so because she was an only child. The Alardyces had married and intermarried, and their offspring were generally profuse, and had a way of meeting regularly in each other’s houses for meals and family celebrations which had acquired a semi-sacred character, and were as regularly observed as days of feasting and fasting in the Church.

In times gone by, Mrs. Hilbery had known all the poets, all the novelists, all the beautiful women and distinguished men of her time. These being now either dead or secluded in their infirm glory, she made her house a meeting-place for her own relations, to whom she would lament the passing of the great days of the nineteenth century, when every department of letters and art was represented in England by two or three illustrious names. Where are their successors? she would ask, and the absence of any poet or painter or novelist of the true calibre at the present day was a text upon which she liked to ruminate, in a sunset mood of benignant reminiscence, which it would have been hard to disturb had there been need. But she was far from visiting their inferiority upon the younger generation. She welcomed them very heartily to her house, told them her stories, gave them sovereigns and ices and good advice, and weaved round them romances which had generally no likeness to the truth.

The quality of her birth oozed into Katharine’s consciousness from a dozen different sources as soon as she was able to perceive anything. Above her nursery fireplace hung a photograph of her grandfather’s tomb in Poets’ Corner, and she was told in one of those moments of grown-up confidence which are so tremendously impressive to the child’s mind, that he was buried there because he was a “good and great man.” Later, on an anniversary, she was taken by her mother through the fog in a hansom cab, and given a large bunch of bright, sweet-scented flowers to lay upon his tomb. The candles in the church, the singing and the booming of the organ, were all, she thought, in his honour. Again and again she was brought down into the drawing-room to receive the blessing of some awful distinguished old man, who sat, even to her childish eye, somewhat apart, all gathered together and clutching a stick, unlike an ordinary visitor in her father’s own arm-chair, and her father himself was there, unlike himself, too, a little excited and very polite. These formidable old creatures used to take her in their arms, look very keenly in her eyes, and then to bless her, and tell her that she must mind and be a good girl, or detect a look in her face something like Richard’s as a small boy. That drew down upon her her mother’s fervent embrace, and she was sent back to the nursery very proud, and with a mysterious sense of an important and unexplained state of things, which time, by degrees, unveiled to her.

There were always visitors—uncles and aunts and cousins “from India,” to be reverenced for their relationship alone, and others of the solitary and formidable class, whom she was enjoined by her parents to “remember all your life.” By these means, and from hearing constant talk of great men and their works, her earliest conceptions of the world included an august circle of beings to whom she gave the names of Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley, and so on, who were, for some reason, much more nearly akin to the Hilberys than to other people. They made a kind of boundary to her vision of life, and played a considerable part in determining her scale of good and bad in her own small affairs. Her descent from one of these gods was no surprise to her, but matter for satisfaction, until, as the years wore on, the privileges of her lot were taken for granted, and certain drawbacks made themselves very manifest. Perhaps it is a little depressing to inherit not lands but an example of intellectual and spiritual virtue; perhaps the conclusiveness of a great ancestor is a little discouraging to those who run the risk of comparison with him. It seems as if, having flowered so splendidly, nothing now remained possible but a steady growth of good, green stalk and leaf. For these reasons, and for others, Katharine had her moments of despondency. The glorious past, in which men and women grew to unexampled size, intruded too much upon the present, and dwarfed it too consistently, to be altogether encouraging to one forced to make her experiment in living when the great age was dead.

She was drawn to dwell upon these matters more than was natural, in the first place owing to her mother’s absorption in them, and in the second because a great part of her time was spent in imagination with the dead, since she was helping her mother to produce a life of the great poet. At the age of seventeen or eighteen—that is to say, some ten years ago—her mother had enthusiastically announced that now, with Katharine to help her, the biography would soon be published. Notices to this effect found their way into the literary papers, and for some time Katharine worked with a sense of great pride and achievement.

Lately, however, it had seemed to her that they were making no way at all, and this was the more tantalizing because no one with the ghost of a literary temperament could doubt but that they had materials for one of the greatest biographies that has ever been written. Shelves and boxes bulged with the precious stuff. The most private lives of the most interesting people lay furled in yellow bundles of close-written manuscript. In addition to this Mrs. Hilbery had in her own head as bright a vision of that time as now remained to the living, and could give those flashes and thrills to the old words which gave them almost the substance of flesh. She had no difficulty in writing, and covered a page every morning as instinctively as a thrush sings, but nevertheless, with all this to urge and inspire, and the most devout intention to accomplish the work, the book still remained unwritten. Papers accumulated without much furthering their task, and in dull moments Katharine had her doubts whether they would ever produce anything at all fit to lay before the public. Where did the difficulty lie? Not in their materials, alas! nor in their ambitions, but in something more profound, in her own inaptitude, and above all, in her mother’s temperament. Katharine would calculate that she had never known her write for more than ten minutes at a time. Ideas came to her chiefly when she was in motion. She liked to perambulate the room with a duster in her hand, with which she stopped to polish the backs of already lustrous books, musing and romancing as she did so. Suddenly the right phrase or the penetrating point of view would suggest itself, and she would drop her duster and write ecstatically for a few breathless moments; and then the mood would pass away, and the duster would be sought for, and the old books polished again. These spells of inspiration never burnt steadily, but flickered over the gigantic mass of the subject as capriciously as a will-o’-the-wisp, lighting now on this point, now on that. It was as much as Katharine could do to keep the pages of her mother’s manuscript in order, but to sort them so that the sixteenth year of Richard Alardyce’s life succeeded the fifteenth was beyond her skill. And yet they were so brilliant, these paragraphs, so nobly phrased, so lightning-like in their illumination, that the dead seemed to crowd the very room. Read continuously, they produced a sort of vertigo, and set her asking herself in despair what on earth she was to do with them? Her mother refused, also, to face the radical questions of what to leave in and what to leave out. She could not decide how far the public was to be told the truth about the poet’s separation from his wife. She drafted passages to suit either case, and then liked each so well that she could not decide upon the rejection of either.

But the book must be written. It was a duty that they owed the world, and to Katharine, at least, it meant more than that, for if they could not between them get this one book accomplished they had no right to their privileged position. Their increment became yearly more and more unearned. Besides, it must be established indisputably that her grandfather was a very great man.

By the time she was twenty-seven, these thoughts had become very familiar to her. They trod their way through her mind as she sat opposite her mother of a morning at a table heaped with bundles of old letters and well supplied with pencils, scissors, bottles of gum, india-rubber bands, large envelopes, and other appliances for the manufacture of books. Shortly before Ralph Denham’s visit, Katharine had resolved to try the effect of strict rules upon her mother’s habits of literary composition. They were to be seated at their tables every morning at ten o’clock, with a clean-swept morning of empty, secluded hours before them. They were to keep their eyes fast upon the paper, and nothing was to tempt them to speech, save at the stroke of the hour when ten minutes for relaxation were to be allowed them. If these rules were observed for a year, she made out on a sheet of paper that the completion of the book was certain, and she laid her scheme before her mother with a feeling that much of the task was already accomplished. Mrs. Hilbery examined the sheet of paper very carefully. Then she clapped her hands and exclaimed enthusiastically:

“Well done, Katharine! What a wonderful head for business you’ve got! Now I shall keep this before me, and every day I shall make a little mark in my pocket-book, and on the last day of all—let me think, what shall we do to celebrate the last day of all? If it weren’t the winter we could take a jaunt to Italy. They say Switzerland’s very lovely in the snow, except for the cold. But, as you say, the great thing is to finish the book. Now let me see——”

When they inspected her manuscripts, which Katharine had put in order, they found a state of things well calculated to dash their spirits, if they had not just resolved on reform. They found, to begin with, a great variety of very imposing paragraphs with which the biography was to open; many of these, it is true, were unfinished, and resembled triumphal arches standing upon one leg, but, as Mrs. Hilbery observed, they could be patched up in ten minutes, if she gave her mind to it. Next, there was an account of the ancient home of the Alardyces, or rather, of spring in Suffolk, which was very beautifully written, although not essential to the story. However, Katharine had put together a string of names and dates, so that the poet was capably brought into the world, and his ninth year was reached without further mishap. After that, Mrs. Hilbery wished, for sentimental reasons, to introduce the recollections of a very fluent old lady, who had been brought up in the same village, but these Katharine decided must go. It might be advisable to introduce here a sketch of contemporary poetry contributed by Mr. Hilbery, and thus terse and learned and altogether out of keeping with the rest, but Mrs. Hilbery was of opinion that it was too bare, and made one feel altogether like a good little girl in a lecture-room, which was not at all in keeping with her father. It was put on one side. Now came the period of his early manhood, when various affairs of the heart must either be concealed or revealed; here again Mrs. Hilbery was of two minds, and a thick packet of manuscript was shelved for further consideration.

Several years were now altogether omitted, because Mrs. Hilbery had found something distasteful to her in that period, and had preferred to dwell upon her own recollections as a child. After this, it seemed to Katharine that the book became a wild dance of will-o’-the-wisps, without form or continuity, without coherence even, or any attempt to make a narrative. Here were twenty pages upon her grandfather’s taste in hats, an essay upon contemporary china, a long account of a summer day’s expedition into the country, when they had missed their train, together with fragmentary visions of all sorts of famous men and women, which seemed to be partly imaginary and partly authentic. There were, moreover, thousands of letters, and a mass of faithful recollections contributed by old friends, which had grown yellow now in their envelopes, but must be placed somewhere, or their feelings would be hurt. So many volumes had been written about the poet since his death that she had also to dispose of a great number of misstatements, which involved minute researches and much correspondence. Sometimes Katharine brooded, half crushed, among her papers; sometimes she felt that it was necessary for her very existence that she should free herself from the past; at others, that the past had completely displaced the present, which, when one resumed life after a morning among the dead, proved to be of an utterly thin and inferior composition.

The worst of it was that she had no aptitude for literature. She did not like phrases. She had even some natural antipathy to that process of self-examination, that perpetual effort to understand one’s own feeling, and express it beautifully, fitly, or energetically in language, which constituted so great a part of her mother’s existence. She was, on the contrary, inclined to be silent; she shrank from expressing herself even in talk, let alone in writing. As this disposition was highly convenient in a family much given to the manufacture of phrases, and seemed to argue a corresponding capacity for action, she was, from her childhood even, put in charge of household affairs. She had the reputation, which nothing in her manner contradicted, of being the most practical of people. Ordering meals, directing servants, paying bills, and so contriving that every clock ticked more or less accurately in time, and a number of vases were always full of fresh flowers was supposed to be a natural endowment of hers, and, indeed, Mrs. Hilbery often observed that it was poetry the wrong side out. From a very early age, too, she had to exert herself in another capacity; she had to counsel and help and generally sustain her mother. Mrs. Hilbery would have been perfectly well able to sustain herself if the world had been what the world is not. She was beautifully adapted for life in another planet. But the natural genius she had for conducting affairs there was of no real use to her here. Her watch, for example, was a constant source of surprise to her, and at the age of sixty-five she was still amazed at the ascendancy which rules and reasons exerted over the lives of other people. She had never learnt her lesson, and had constantly to be punished for her ignorance. But as that ignorance was combined with a fine natural insight which saw deep whenever it saw at all, it was not possible to write Mrs. Hilbery off among the dunces; on the contrary, she had a way of seeming the wisest person in the room. But, on the whole, she found it very necessary to seek support in her daughter.

Katharine, thus, was a member of a very great profession which has, as yet, no title and very little recognition, although the labour of mill and factory is, perhaps, no more severe and the results of less benefit to the world. She lived at home. She did it very well, too. Any one coming to the house in Cheyne Walk felt that here was an orderly place, shapely, controlled—a place where life had been trained to show to the best advantage, and, though composed of different elements, made to appear harmonious and with a character of its own. Perhaps it was the chief triumph of Katharine’s art that Mrs. Hilbery’s character predominated. She and Mr. Hilbery appeared to be a rich background for her mother’s more striking qualities.

Silence being, thus, both natural to her and imposed upon her, the only other remark that her mother’s friends were in the habit of making about it was that it was neither a stupid silence nor an indifferent silence. But to what quality it owed its character, since character of some sort it had, no one troubled themselves to inquire. It was understood that she was helping her mother to produce a great book. She was known to manage the household. She was certainly beautiful. That accounted for her satisfactorily. But it would have been a surprise, not only to other people but to Katharine herself, if some magic watch could have taken count of the moments spent in an entirely different occupation from her ostensible one. Sitting with faded papers before her, she took part in a series of scenes such as the taming of wild ponies upon the American prairies, or the conduct of a vast ship in a hurricane round a black promontory of rock, or in others more peaceful, but marked by her complete emancipation from her present surroundings and, needless to say, by her surpassing ability in her new vocation. When she was rid of the pretence of paper and pen, phrase-making and biography, she turned her attention in a more legitimate direction, though, strangely enough, she would rather have confessed her wildest dreams of hurricane and prairie than the fact that, upstairs, alone in her room, she rose early in the morning or sat up late at night to … work at mathematics. No force on earth would have made her confess that. Her actions when thus engaged were furtive and secretive, like those of some nocturnal animal. Steps had only to sound on the staircase, and she slipped her paper between the leaves of a great Greek dictionary which she had purloined from her father’s room for this purpose. It was only at night, indeed, that she felt secure enough from surprise to concentrate her mind to the utmost.

Perhaps the unwomanly nature of the science made her instinctively wish to conceal her love of it. But the more profound reason was that in her mind mathematics were directly opposed to literature. She would not have cared to confess how infinitely she preferred the exactitude, the star-like impersonality, of figures to the confusion, agitation, and vagueness of the finest prose. There was something a little unseemly in thus opposing the tradition of her family; something that made her feel wrong-headed, and thus more than ever disposed to shut her desires away from view and cherish them with extraordinary fondness. Again and again she was thinking of some problem when she should have been thinking of her grandfather. Waking from these trances, she would see that her mother, too, had lapsed into some dream almost as visionary as her own, for the people who played their parts in it had long been numbered among the dead. But, seeing her own state mirrored in her mother’s face, Katharine would shake herself awake with a sense of irritation. Her mother was the last person she wished to resemble, much though she admired her. Her common sense would assert itself almost brutally, and Mrs. Hilbery, looking at her with her odd sidelong glance, that was half malicious and half tender, would liken her to “your wicked old Uncle Judge Peter, who used to be heard delivering sentence of death in the bathroom. Thank Heaven, Katharine, I’ve not a drop of him in me!”

[]

Chapter IV

At about nine o’clock at night, on every alternate Wednesday, Miss Mary Datchet made the same resolve, that she would never again lend her rooms for any purposes whatsoever. Being, as they were, rather large and conveniently situated in a street mostly dedicated to offices off the Strand, people who wished to meet, either for purposes of enjoyment, or to discuss art, or to reform the State, had a way of suggesting that Mary had better be asked to lend them her rooms. She always met the request with the same frown of well-simulated annoyance, which presently dissolved in a kind of half-humorous, half-surly shrug, as of a large dog tormented by children who shakes his ears. She would lend her room, but only on condition that all the arrangements were made by her. This fortnightly meeting of a society for the free discussion of everything entailed a great deal of moving, and pulling, and ranging of furniture against the wall, and placing of breakable and precious things in safe places. Miss Datchet was quite capable of lifting a kitchen table on her back, if need were, for although well-proportioned and dressed becomingly, she had the appearance of unusual strength and determination.

She was some twenty-five years of age, but looked older because she earned, or intended to earn, her own living, and had already lost the look of the irresponsible spectator, and taken on that of the private in the army of workers. Her gestures seemed to have a certain purpose; the muscles round eyes and lips were set rather firmly, as though the senses had undergone some discipline, and were held ready for a call on them. She had contracted two faint lines between her eyebrows, not from anxiety but from thought, and it was quite evident that all the feminine instincts of pleasing, soothing, and charming were crossed by others in no way peculiar to her sex. For the rest she was brown-eyed, a little clumsy in movement, and suggested country birth and a descent from respectable hard-working ancestors, who had been men of faith and integrity rather than doubters or fanatics.

At the end of a fairly hard day’s work it was certainly something of an effort to clear one’s room, to pull the mattress off one’s bed, and lay it on the floor, to fill a pitcher with cold coffee, and to sweep a long table clear for plates and cups and saucers, with pyramids of little pink biscuits between them; but when these alterations were effected, Mary felt a lightness of spirit come to her, as if she had put off the stout stuff of her working hours and slipped over her entire being some vesture of thin, bright silk. She knelt before the fire and looked out into the room. The light fell softly, but with clear radiance, through shades of yellow and blue paper, and the room, which was set with one or two sofas resembling grassy mounds in their lack of shape, looked unusually large and quiet. Mary was led to think of the heights of a Sussex down, and the swelling green circle of some camp of ancient warriors. The moonlight would be falling there so peacefully now, and she could fancy the rough pathway of silver upon the wrinkled skin of the sea.

“And here we are,” she said, half aloud, half satirically, yet with evident pride, “talking about art.”

She pulled a basket containing balls of differently coloured wools and a pair of stockings which needed darning towards her, and began to set her fingers to work; while her mind, reflecting the lassitude of her body, went on perversely, conjuring up visions of solitude and quiet, and she pictured herself laying aside her knitting and walking out on to the down, and hearing nothing but the sheep cropping the grass close to the roots, while the shadows of the little trees moved very slightly this way and that in the moonlight, as the breeze went through them. But she was perfectly conscious of her present situation, and derived some pleasure from the reflection that she could rejoice equally in solitude, and in the presence of the many very different people who were now making their way, by divers paths, across London to the spot where she was sitting.

As she ran her needle in and out of the wool, she thought of the various stages in her own life which made her present position seem the culmination of successive miracles. She thought of her clerical father in his country parsonage, and of her mother’s death, and of her own determination to obtain education, and of her college life, which had merged, not so very long ago, in the wonderful maze of London, which still seemed to her, in spite of her constitutional level-headedness, like a vast electric light, casting radiance upon the myriads of men and women who crowded round it. And here she was at the very centre of it all, that centre which was constantly in the minds of people in remote Canadian forests and on the plains of India, when their thoughts turned to England. The nine mellow strokes, by which she was now apprised of the hour, were a message from the great clock at Westminster itself. As the last of them died away, there was a firm knocking on her own door, and she rose and opened it. She returned to the room, with a look of steady pleasure in her eyes, and she was talking to Ralph Denham, who followed her.

“Alone?” he said, as if he were pleasantly surprised by that fact.

“I am sometimes alone,” she replied.

“But you expect a great many people,” he added, looking round him. “It’s like a room on the stage. Who is it to-night?”

“William Rodney, upon the Elizabethan use of metaphor. I expect a good solid paper, with plenty of quotations from the classics.”

Ralph warmed his hands at the fire, which was flapping bravely in the grate, while Mary took up her stocking again.

“I suppose you are the only woman in London who darns her own stockings,” he observed.

“I’m only one of a great many thousands really,” she replied, “though I must admit that I was thinking myself very remarkable when you came in. And now that you’re here I don’t think myself remarkable at all. How horrid of you! But I’m afraid you’re much more remarkable than I am. You’ve done much more than I’ve done.”

“If that’s your standard, you’ve nothing to be proud of,” said Ralph, grimly.

“Well, I must reflect with Emerson that it’s being and not doing that matters,” she continued.

“Emerson?” Ralph exclaimed, with derision. “You don’t mean to say you read Emerson?”

“Perhaps it wasn’t Emerson; but why shouldn’t I read Emerson?” she asked, with a tinge of anxiety.

“There’s no reason that I know of. It’s the combination that’s odd—books and stockings. The combination is very odd.” But it seemed to recommend itself to him. Mary gave a little laugh, expressive of happiness, and the particular stitches that she was now putting into her work appeared to her to be done with singular grace and felicity. She held out the stocking and looked at it approvingly.

“You always say that,” she said. “I assure you it’s a common ‘combination,’ as you call it, in the houses of the clergy. The only thing that’s odd about me is that I enjoy them both—Emerson and the stocking.”

A knock was heard, and Ralph exclaimed:

“Damn those people! I wish they weren’t coming!”

“It’s only Mr. Turner, on the floor below,” said Mary, and she felt grateful to Mr. Turner for having alarmed Ralph, and for having given a false alarm.

“Will there be a crowd?” Ralph asked, after a pause.

“There’ll be the Morrises and the Crashaws, and Dick Osborne, and Septimus, and all that set. Katharine Hilbery is coming, by the way, so William Rodney told me.”

“Katharine Hilbery!” Ralph exclaimed.

“You know her?” Mary asked, with some surprise.

“I went to a tea-party at her house.”

Mary pressed him to tell her all about it, and Ralph was not at all unwilling to exhibit proofs of the extent of his knowledge. He described the scene with certain additions and exaggerations which interested Mary very much.

“But, in spite of what you say, I do admire her,” she said. “I’ve only seen her once or twice, but she seems to me to be what one calls a ‘personality.’”

“I didn’t mean to abuse her. I only felt that she wasn’t very sympathetic to me.”

“They say she’s going to marry that queer creature Rodney.”

“Marry Rodney? Then she must be more deluded than I thought her.”

“Now that’s my door, all right,” Mary exclaimed, carefully putting her wools away, as a succession of knocks reverberated unnecessarily, accompanied by a sound of people stamping their feet and laughing. A moment later the room was full of young men and women, who came in with a peculiar look of expectation, exclaimed “Oh!” when they saw Denham, and then stood still, gaping rather foolishly.

The room very soon contained between twenty and thirty people, who found seats for the most part upon the floor, occupying the mattresses, and hunching themselves together into triangular shapes. They were all young and some of them seemed to make a protest by their hair and dress, and something sombre and truculent in the expression of their faces, against the more normal type, who would have passed unnoticed in an omnibus or an underground railway. It was notable that the talk was confined to groups, and was, at first, entirely spasmodic in character, and muttered in undertones as if the speakers were suspicious of their fellow-guests.

Katharine Hilbery came in rather late, and took up a position on the floor, with her back against the wall. She looked round quickly, recognized about half a dozen people, to whom she nodded, but failed to see Ralph, or, if so, had already forgotten to attach any name to him. But in a second these heterogeneous elements were all united by the voice of Mr. Rodney, who suddenly strode up to the table, and began very rapidly in high-strained tones:

“In undertaking to speak of the Elizabethan use of metaphor in poetry——”

All the different heads swung slightly or steadied themselves into a position in which they could gaze straight at the speaker’s face; and the same rather solemn expression was visible on all of them. But, at the same time, even the faces that were most exposed to view, and therefore most tautly under control, disclosed a sudden impulsive tremor which, unless directly checked, would have developed into an outburst of laughter. The first sight of Mr. Rodney was irresistibly ludicrous. He was very red in the face, whether from the cool November night or nervousness, and every movement, from the way he wrung his hands to the way he jerked his head to right and left, as though a vision drew him now to the door, now to the window, bespoke his horrible discomfort under the stare of so many eyes. He was scrupulously well dressed, and a pearl in the centre of his tie seemed to give him a touch of aristocratic opulence. But the rather prominent eyes and the impulsive stammering manner, which seemed to indicate a torrent of ideas intermittently pressing for utterance and always checked in their course by a clutch of nervousness, drew no pity, as in the case of a more imposing personage, but a desire to laugh, which was, however, entirely lacking in malice. Mr. Rodney was evidently so painfully conscious of the oddity of his appearance, and his very redness and the starts to which his body was liable gave such proof of his own discomfort, that there was something endearing in this ridiculous susceptibility, although most people would probably have echoed Denham’s private exclamation, “Fancy marrying a creature like that!”

His paper was carefully written out, but in spite of this precaution Mr. Rodney managed to turn over two sheets instead of one, to choose the wrong sentence where two were written together, and to discover his own handwriting suddenly illegible. When he found himself possessed of a coherent passage, he shook it at his audience almost aggressively, and then fumbled for another. After a distressing search a fresh discovery would be made, and produced in the same way, until, by means of repeated attacks, he had stirred his audience to a degree of animation quite remarkable in these gatherings. Whether they were stirred by his enthusiasm for poetry or by the contortions which a human being was going through for their benefit, it would be hard to say. At length Mr. Rodney sat down impulsively in the middle of a sentence, and, after a pause of bewilderment, the audience expressed its relief at being able to laugh aloud in a decided outburst of applause.

Mr. Rodney acknowledged this with a wild glance round him, and, instead of waiting to answer questions, he jumped up, thrust himself through the seated bodies into the corner where Katharine was sitting, and exclaimed, very audibly:

“Well, Katharine, I hope I’ve made a big enough fool of myself even for you! It was terrible! terrible! terrible!”

“Hush! You must answer their questions,” Katharine whispered, desiring, at all costs, to keep him quiet. Oddly enough, when the speaker was no longer in front of them, there seemed to be much that was suggestive in what he had said. At any rate, a pale-faced young man with sad eyes was already on his feet, delivering an accurately worded speech with perfect composure. William Rodney listened with a curious lifting of his upper lip, although his face was still quivering slightly with emotion.

“Idiot!” he whispered. “He’s misunderstood every word I said!”

“Well then, answer him,” Katharine whispered back.

“No, I shan’t! They’d only laugh at me. Why did I let you persuade me that these sort of people care for literature?” he continued.

There was much to be said both for and against Mr. Rodney’s paper. It had been crammed with assertions that such-and-such passages, taken liberally from English, French, and Italian, are the supreme pearls of literature. Further, he was fond of using metaphors which, compounded in the study, were apt to sound either cramped or out of place as he delivered them in fragments. Literature was a fresh garland of spring flowers, he said, in which yew-berries and the purple nightshade mingled with the various tints of the anemone; and somehow or other this garland encircled marble brows. He had read very badly some very beautiful quotations. But through his manner and his confusion of language there had emerged some passion of feeling which, as he spoke, formed in the majority of the audience a little picture or an idea which each now was eager to give expression to. Most of the people there proposed to spend their lives in the practice either of writing or painting, and merely by looking at them it could be seen that, as they listened to Mr. Purvis first, and then to Mr. Greenhalgh, they were seeing something done by these gentlemen to a possession which they thought to be their own. One person after another rose, and, as with an ill-balanced axe, attempted to hew out his conception of art a little more clearly, and sat down with the feeling that, for some reason which he could not grasp, his strokes had gone awry. As they sat down they turned almost invariably to the person sitting next them, and rectified and continued what they had just said in public. Before long, therefore, the groups on the mattresses and the groups on the chairs were all in communication with each other, and Mary Datchet, who had begun to darn stockings again, stooped down and remarked to Ralph:

“That was what I call a first-rate paper.”

Both of them instinctively turned their eyes in the direction of the reader of the paper. He was lying back against the wall, with his eyes apparently shut, and his chin sunk upon his collar. Katharine was turning over the pages of his manuscript as if she were looking for some passage that had particularly struck her, and had a difficulty in finding it.

“Let’s go and tell him how much we liked it,” said Mary, thus suggesting an action which Ralph was anxious to take, though without her he would have been too proud to do it, for he suspected that he had more interest in Katharine than she had in him.

“That was a very interesting paper,” Mary began, without any shyness, seating herself on the floor opposite to Rodney and Katharine. “Will you lend me the manuscript to read in peace?”

Rodney, who had opened his eyes on their approach, regarded her for a moment in suspicious silence.

“Do you say that merely to disguise the fact of my ridiculous failure?” he asked.

Katharine looked up from her reading with a smile.

“He says he doesn’t mind what we think of him,” she remarked. “He says we don’t care a rap for art of any kind.”

“I asked her to pity me, and she teases me!” Rodney exclaimed.

“I don’t intend to pity you, Mr. Rodney,” Mary remarked, kindly, but firmly. “When a paper’s a failure, nobody says anything; whereas now, just listen to them!”

The sound, which filled the room, with its hurry of short syllables, its sudden pauses, and its sudden attacks, might be compared to some animal hubbub, frantic and inarticulate.

“D’you think that’s all about my paper?” Rodney inquired, after a moment’s attention, with a distinct brightening of expression.

“Of course it is,” said Mary. “It was a very suggestive paper.”

She turned to Denham for confirmation, and he corroborated her.

“It’s the ten minutes after a paper is read that proves whether it’s been a success or not,” he said. “If I were you, Rodney, I should be very pleased with myself.”

This commendation seemed to comfort Mr. Rodney completely, and he began to bethink him of all the passages in his paper which deserved to be called “suggestive.”

“Did you agree at all, Denham, with what I said about Shakespeare’s later use of imagery? I’m afraid I didn’t altogether make my meaning plain.”

Here he gathered himself together, and by means of a series of frog-like jerks, succeeded in bringing himself close to Denham.

Denham answered him with the brevity which is the result of having another sentence in the mind to be addressed to another person. He wished to say to Katharine: “Did you remember to get that picture glazed before your aunt came to dinner?” but, besides having to answer Rodney, he was not sure that the remark, with its assertion of intimacy, would not strike Katharine as impertinent. She was listening to what some one in another group was saying. Rodney, meanwhile, was talking about the Elizabethan dramatists.

He was a curious-looking man since, upon first sight, especially if he chanced to be talking with animation, he appeared, in some way, ridiculous; but, next moment, in repose, his face, with its large nose, thin cheeks and lips expressing the utmost sensibility, somehow recalled a Roman head bound with laurel, cut upon a circle of semi-transparent reddish stone. It had dignity and character. By profession a clerk in a Government office, he was one of those martyred spirits to whom literature is at once a source of divine joy and of almost intolerable irritation. Not content to rest in their love of it, they must attempt to practise it themselves, and they are generally endowed with very little facility in composition. They condemn whatever they produce. Moreover, the violence of their feelings is such that they seldom meet with adequate sympathy, and being rendered very sensitive by their cultivated perceptions, suffer constant slights both to their own persons and to the thing they worship. But Rodney could never resist making trial of the sympathies of any one who seemed favourably disposed, and Denham’s praise had stimulated his very susceptible vanity.

“You remember the passage just before the death of the Duchess?” he continued, edging still closer to Denham, and adjusting his elbow and knee in an incredibly angular combination. Here, Katharine, who had been cut off by these manœuvres from all communication with the outer world, rose, and seated herself upon the window-sill, where she was joined by Mary Datchet. The two young women could thus survey the whole party. Denham looked after them, and made as if he were tearing handfuls of grass up by the roots from the carpet. But as it fell in accurately with his conception of life that all one’s desires were bound to be frustrated, he concentrated his mind upon literature, and determined, philosophically, to get what he could out of that.

Katharine was pleasantly excited. A variety of courses was open to her. She knew several people slightly, and at any moment one of them might rise from the floor and come and speak to her; on the other hand, she might select somebody for herself, or she might strike into Rodney’s discourse, to which she was intermittently attentive. She was conscious of Mary’s body beside her, but, at the same time, the consciousness of being both of them women made it unnecessary to speak to her. But Mary, feeling, as she had said, that Katharine was a “personality,” wished so much to speak to her that in a few moments she did.

“They’re exactly like a flock of sheep, aren’t they?” she said, referring to the noise that rose from the scattered bodies beneath her.

Katharine turned and smiled.

“I wonder what they’re making such a noise about?” she said.

“The Elizabethans, I suppose.”

“No, I don’t think it’s got anything to do with the Elizabethans. There! Didn’t you hear them say, ‘Insurance Bill’?”

“I wonder why men always talk about politics?” Mary speculated. “I suppose, if we had votes, we should too.”

“I dare say we should. And you spend your life in getting us votes, don’t you?”

“I do,” said Mary, stoutly. “From ten to six every day I’m at it.”

Katharine looked at Ralph Denham, who was now pounding his way through the metaphysics of metaphor with Rodney, and was reminded of his talk that Sunday afternoon. She connected him vaguely with Mary.

“I suppose you’re one of the people who think we should all have professions,” she said, rather distantly, as if feeling her way among the phantoms of an unknown world.

“Oh dear no,” said Mary at once.

“Well, I think I do,” Katharine continued, with half a sigh. “You will always be able to say that you’ve done something, whereas, in a crowd like this, I feel rather melancholy.”

“In a crowd? Why in a crowd?” Mary asked, deepening the two lines between her eyes, and hoisting herself nearer to Katharine upon the window-sill.

“Don’t you see how many different things these people care about? And I want to beat them down—I only mean,” she corrected herself, “that I want to assert myself, and it’s difficult, if one hasn’t a profession.”

Mary smiled, thinking that to beat people down was a process that should present no difficulty to Miss Katharine Hilbery. They knew each other so slightly that the beginning of intimacy, which Katharine seemed to initiate by talking about herself, had something solemn in it, and they were silent, as if to decide whether to proceed or not. They tested the ground.

“Ah, but I want to trample upon their prostrate bodies!” Katharine announced, a moment later, with a laugh, as if at the train of thought which had led her to this conclusion.

“One doesn’t necessarily trample upon people’s bodies because one runs an office,” Mary remarked.

“No. Perhaps not,” Katharine replied. The conversation lapsed, and Mary saw Katharine looking out into the room rather moodily with closed lips, the desire to talk about herself or to initiate a friendship having, apparently, left her. Mary was struck by her capacity for being thus easily silent, and occupied with her own thoughts. It was a habit that spoke of loneliness and a mind thinking for itself. When Katharine remained silent Mary was slightly embarrassed.

“Yes, they’re very like sheep,” she repeated, foolishly.

“And yet they are very clever—at least,” Katharine added, “I suppose they have all read Webster.”

“Surely you don’t think that a proof of cleverness? I’ve read Webster, I’ve read Ben Jonson, but I don’t think myself clever—not exactly, at least.”

“I think you must be very clever,” Katharine observed.

“Why? Because I run an office?”

“I wasn’t thinking of that. I was thinking how you live alone in this room, and have parties.”

Mary reflected for a second.

“It means, chiefly, a power of being disagreeable to one’s own family, I think. I have that, perhaps. I didn’t want to live at home, and I told my father. He didn’t like it…. But then I have a sister, and you haven’t, have you?”

“No, I haven’t any sisters.”

“You are writing a life of your grandfather?” Mary pursued.

Katharine seemed instantly to be confronted by some familiar thought from which she wished to escape. She replied, “Yes, I am helping my mother,” in such a way that Mary felt herself baffled, and put back again into the position in which she had been at the beginning of their talk. It seemed to her that Katharine possessed a curious power of drawing near and receding, which sent alternate emotions through her far more quickly than was usual, and kept her in a condition of curious alertness. Desiring to classify her, Mary bethought her of the convenient term “egoist.”

“She’s an egoist,” she said to herself, and stored that word up to give to Ralph one day when, as it would certainly fall out, they were discussing Miss Hilbery.

“Heavens, what a mess there’ll be to-morrow morning!” Katharine exclaimed. “I hope you don’t sleep in this room, Miss Datchet?”

Mary laughed.

“What are you laughing at?” Katharine demanded.

“I won’t tell you.”

“Let me guess. You were laughing because you thought I’d changed the conversation?”

“No.”

“Because you think——” She paused.

“If you want to know, I was laughing at the way you said Miss Datchet.”

“Mary, then. Mary, Mary, Mary.”

So saying, Katharine drew back the curtain in order, perhaps, to conceal the momentary flush of pleasure which is caused by coming perceptibly nearer to another person.

“Mary Datchet,” said Mary. “It’s not such an imposing name as Katharine Hilbery, I’m afraid.”

They both looked out of the window, first up at the hard silver moon, stationary among a hurry of little grey-blue clouds, and then down upon the roofs of London, with all their upright chimneys, and then below them at the empty moonlit pavement of the street, upon which the joint of each paving-stone was clearly marked out. Mary then saw Katharine raise her eyes again to the moon, with a contemplative look in them, as though she were setting that moon against the moon of other nights, held in memory. Some one in the room behind them made a joke about star-gazing, which destroyed their pleasure in it, and they looked back into the room again.

Ralph had been watching for this moment, and he instantly produced his sentence.

“I wonder, Miss Hilbery, whether you remembered to get that picture glazed?” His voice showed that the question was one that had been prepared.

“Oh, you idiot!” Mary exclaimed, very nearly aloud, with a sense that Ralph had said something very stupid. So, after three lessons in Latin grammar, one might correct a fellow-student, whose knowledge did not embrace the ablative of mensa.

“Portrait—what portrait?” Katharine asked. “Oh, at home, you mean—that Sunday afternoon. Was it the day Mr. Fortescue came? Yes, I think I remembered it.”

The three of them stood for a moment awkwardly silent, and then Mary left them in order to see that the great pitcher of coffee was properly handled, for beneath all her education she preserved the anxieties of one who owns china.

Ralph could think of nothing further to say; but could one have stripped off his mask of flesh, one would have seen that his will-power was rigidly set upon a single object—that Miss Hilbery should obey him. He wished her to stay there until, by some measures not yet apparent to him, he had conquered her interest. These states of mind transmit themselves very often without the use of language, and it was evident to Katharine that this young man had fixed his mind upon her. She instantly recalled her first impressions of him, and saw herself again proffering family relics. She reverted to the state of mind in which he had left her that Sunday afternoon. She supposed that he judged her very severely. She argued naturally that, if this were the case, the burden of the conversation should rest with him. But she submitted so far as to stand perfectly still, her eyes upon the opposite wall, and her lips very nearly closed, though the desire to laugh stirred them slightly.

“You know the names of the stars, I suppose?” Denham remarked, and from the tone of his voice one might have thought that he grudged Katharine the knowledge he attributed to her.

She kept her voice steady with some difficulty.

“I know how to find the Pole star if I’m lost.”

“I don’t suppose that often happens to you.”

“No. Nothing interesting ever happens to me,” she said.

“I think you make a system of saying disagreeable things, Miss Hilbery,” he broke out, again going further than he meant to. “I suppose it’s one of the characteristics of your class. They never talk seriously to their inferiors.”

Whether it was that they were meeting on neutral ground to-night, or whether the carelessness of an old grey coat that Denham wore gave an ease to his bearing that he lacked in conventional dress, Katharine certainly felt no impulse to consider him outside the particular set in which she lived.

“In what sense are you my inferior?” she asked, looking at him gravely, as though honestly searching for his meaning. The look gave him great pleasure. For the first time he felt himself on perfectly equal terms with a woman whom he wished to think well of him, although he could not have explained why her opinion of him mattered one way or another. Perhaps, after all, he only wanted to have something of her to take home to think about. But he was not destined to profit by his advantage.

“I don’t think I understand what you mean,” Katharine repeated, and then she was obliged to stop and answer some one who wished to know whether she would buy a ticket for an opera from them, at a reduction. Indeed, the temper of the meeting was now unfavourable to separate conversation; it had become rather debauched and hilarious, and people who scarcely knew each other were making use of Christian names with apparent cordiality, and had reached that kind of gay tolerance and general friendliness which human beings in England only attain after sitting together for three hours or so, and the first cold blast in the air of the street freezes them into isolation once more. Cloaks were being flung round the shoulders, hats swiftly pinned to the head; and Denham had the mortification of seeing Katharine helped to prepare herself by the ridiculous Rodney. It was not the convention of the meeting to say good-bye, or necessarily even to nod to the person with whom one was talking; but, nevertheless, Denham was disappointed by the completeness with which Katharine parted from him, without any attempt to finish her sentence. She left with Rodney.

[]

Chapter V

Denham had no conscious intention of following Katharine, but, seeing her depart, he took his hat and ran rather more quickly down the stairs than he would have done if Katharine had not been in front of him. He overtook a friend of his, by name Harry Sandys, who was going the same way, and they walked together a few paces behind Katharine and Rodney.

The night was very still, and on such nights, when the traffic thins away, the walker becomes conscious of the moon in the street, as if the curtains of the sky had been drawn apart, and the heaven lay bare, as it does in the country. The air was softly cool, so that people who had been sitting talking in a crowd found it pleasant to walk a little before deciding to stop an omnibus or encounter light again in an underground railway. Sandys, who was a barrister with a philosophic tendency, took out his pipe, lit it, murmured “hum” and “ha,” and was silent. The couple in front of them kept their distance accurately, and appeared, so far as Denham could judge by the way they turned towards each other, to be talking very constantly. He observed that when a pedestrian going the opposite way forced them to part they came together again directly afterwards. Without intending to watch them he never quite lost sight of the yellow scarf twisted round Katharine’s head, or the light overcoat which made Rodney look fashionable among the crowd. At the Strand he supposed that they would separate, but instead they crossed the road, and took their way down one of the narrow passages which lead through ancient courts to the river. Among the crowd of people in the big thoroughfares Rodney seemed merely to be lending Katharine his escort, but now, when passengers were rare and the footsteps of the couple were distinctly heard in the silence, Denham could not help picturing to himself some change in their conversation. The effect of the light and shadow, which seemed to increase their height, was to make them mysterious and significant, so that Denham had no feeling of irritation with Katharine, but rather a half-dreamy acquiescence in the course of the world. Yes, she did very well to dream about—but Sandys had suddenly begun to talk. He was a solitary man who had made his friends at college and always addressed them as if they were still undergraduates arguing in his room, though many months or even years had passed in some cases between the last sentence and the present one. The method was a little singular, but very restful, for it seemed to ignore completely all accidents of human life, and to span very deep abysses with a few simple words.

On this occasion he began, while they waited for a minute on the edge of the Strand:

“I hear that Bennett has given up his theory of truth.”

Denham returned a suitable answer, and he proceeded to explain how this decision had been arrived at, and what changes it involved in the philosophy which they both accepted. Meanwhile Katharine and Rodney drew further ahead, and Denham kept, if that is the right expression for an involuntary action, one filament of his mind upon them, while with the rest of his intelligence he sought to understand what Sandys was saying.

As they passed through the courts thus talking, Sandys laid the tip of his stick upon one of the stones forming a time-worn arch, and struck it meditatively two or three times in order to illustrate something very obscure about the complex nature of one’s apprehension of facts. During the pause which this necessitated, Katharine and Rodney turned the corner and disappeared. For a moment Denham stopped involuntarily in his sentence, and continued it with a sense of having lost something.

Unconscious that they were observed, Katharine and Rodney had come out on the Embankment. When they had crossed the road, Rodney slapped his hand upon the stone parapet above the river and exclaimed:

“I promise I won’t say another word about it, Katharine! But do stop a minute and look at the moon upon the water.”

Katharine paused, looked up and down the river, and snuffed the air.

“I’m sure one can smell the sea, with the wind blowing this way,” she said.

They stood silent for a few moments while the river shifted in its bed, and the silver and red lights which were laid upon it were torn by the current and joined together again. Very far off up the river a steamer hooted with its hollow voice of unspeakable melancholy, as if from the heart of lonely mist-shrouded voyagings.

“Ah!” Rodney cried, striking his hand once more upon the balustrade, “why can’t one say how beautiful it all is? Why am I condemned for ever, Katharine, to feel what I can’t express? And the things I can give there’s no use in my giving. Trust me, Katharine,” he added hastily, “I won’t speak of it again. But in the presence of beauty—look at the iridescence round the moon!—one feels—one feels—— Perhaps if you married me—I’m half a poet, you see, and I can’t pretend not to feel what I do feel. If I could write—ah, that would be another matter. I shouldn’t bother you to marry me then, Katharine.”

He spoke these disconnected sentences rather abruptly, with his eyes alternately upon the moon and upon the stream.

“But for me I suppose you would recommend marriage?” said Katharine, with her eyes fixed on the moon.

“Certainly I should. Not for you only, but for all women. Why, you’re nothing at all without it; you’re only half alive; using only half your faculties; you must feel that for yourself. That is why——” Here he stopped himself, and they began to walk slowly along the Embankment, the moon fronting them.

“With how sad steps she climbs the sky,

How silently and with how wan a face,”

Rodney quoted.

“I’ve been told a great many unpleasant things about myself to-night,” Katharine stated, without attending to him. “Mr. Denham seems to think it his mission to lecture me, though I hardly know him. By the way, William, you know him; tell me, what is he like?”

William drew a deep sigh.

“We may lecture you till we’re blue in the face——”

“Yes—but what’s he like?”

“And we write sonnets to your eyebrows, you cruel practical creature. Denham?” he added, as Katharine remained silent. “A good fellow, I should think. He cares, naturally, for the right sort of things, I expect. But you mustn’t marry him, though. He scolded you, did he—what did he say?”

“What happens with Mr. Denham is this: He comes to tea. I do all I can to put him at his ease. He merely sits and scowls at me. Then I show him our manuscripts. At this he becomes really angry, and tells me I’ve no business to call myself a middle-class woman. So we part in a huff; and next time we meet, which was to-night, he walks straight up to me, and says, ‘Go to the Devil!’ That’s the sort of behaviour my mother complains of. I want to know, what does it mean?”

She paused and, slackening her steps, looked at the lighted train drawing itself smoothly over Hungerford Bridge.

“It means, I should say, that he finds you chilly and unsympathetic.”

Katharine laughed with round, separate notes of genuine amusement.

“It’s time I jumped into a cab and hid myself in my own house,” she exclaimed.

“Would your mother object to my being seen with you? No one could possibly recognize us, could they?” Rodney inquired, with some solicitude.

Katharine looked at him, and perceiving that his solicitude was genuine, she laughed again, but with an ironical note in her laughter.

“You may laugh, Katharine, but I can tell you that if any of your friends saw us together at this time of night they would talk about it, and I should find that very disagreeable. But why do you laugh?”

“I don’t know. Because you’re such a queer mixture, I think. You’re half poet and half old maid.”

“I know I always seem to you highly ridiculous. But I can’t help having inherited certain traditions and trying to put them into practice.”

“Nonsense, William. You may come of the oldest family in Devonshire, but that’s no reason why you should mind being seen alone with me on the Embankment.”

“I’m ten years older than you are, Katharine, and I know more of the world than you do.”

“Very well. Leave me and go home.”

Rodney looked back over his shoulder and perceived that they were being followed at a short distance by a taxi-cab, which evidently awaited his summons. Katharine saw it too, and exclaimed:

“Don’t call that cab for me, William. I shall walk.”

“Nonsense, Katharine; you’ll do nothing of the kind. It’s nearly twelve o’clock, and we’ve walked too far as it is.”

Katharine laughed and walked on so quickly that both Rodney and the taxi-cab had to increase their pace to keep up with her.

“Now, William,” she said, “if people see me racing along the Embankment like this they will talk. You had far better say good night, if you don’t want people to talk.”

At this William beckoned, with a despotic gesture, to the cab with one hand, and with the other he brought Katharine to a standstill.

“Don’t let the man see us struggling, for God’s sake!” he murmured. Katharine stood for a moment quite still.

“There’s more of the old maid in you than the poet,” she observed briefly.

William shut the door sharply, gave the address to the driver, and turned away, lifting his hat punctiliously high in farewell to the invisible lady.

He looked back after the cab twice, suspiciously, half expecting that she would stop it and dismount; but it bore her swiftly on, and was soon out of sight. William felt in the mood for a short soliloquy of indignation, for Katharine had contrived to exasperate him in more ways than one.

“Of all the unreasonable, inconsiderate creatures I’ve ever known, she’s the worst!” he exclaimed to himself, striding back along the Embankment. “Heaven forbid that I should ever make a fool of myself with her again. Why, I’d sooner marry the daughter of my landlady than Katharine Hilbery! She’d leave me not a moment’s peace—and she’d never understand me—never, never, never!”

Uttered aloud and with vehemence so that the stars of Heaven might hear, for there was no human being at hand, these sentiments sounded satisfactorily irrefutable. Rodney quieted down, and walked on in silence, until he perceived some one approaching him, who had something, either in his walk or his dress, which proclaimed that he was one of William’s acquaintances before it was possible to tell which of them he was. It was Denham who, having parted from Sandys at the bottom of his staircase, was now walking to the Tube at Charing Cross, deep in the thoughts which his talk with Sandys had suggested. He had forgotten the meeting at Mary Datchet’s rooms, he had forgotten Rodney, and metaphors and Elizabethan drama, and could have sworn that he had forgotten Katharine Hilbery too, although that was more disputable. His mind was scaling the highest pinnacles of its alps, where there was only starlight and the untrodden snow. He cast strange eyes upon Rodney, as they encountered each other beneath a lamp-post.

“Ha!” Rodney exclaimed.

If he had been in full possession of his mind, Denham would probably have passed on with a salutation. But the shock of the interruption made him stand still, and before he knew what he was doing, he had turned and was walking with Rodney in obedience to Rodney’s invitation to come to his rooms and have something to drink. Denham had no wish to drink with Rodney, but he followed him passively enough. Rodney was gratified by this obedience. He felt inclined to be communicative with this silent man, who possessed so obviously all the good masculine qualities in which Katharine now seemed lamentably deficient.

“You do well, Denham,” he began impulsively, “to have nothing to do with young women. I offer you my experience—if one trusts them one invariably has cause to repent. Not that I have any reason at this moment,” he added hastily, “to complain of them. It’s a subject that crops up now and again for no particular reason. Miss Datchet, I dare say, is one of the exceptions. Do you like Miss Datchet?”

These remarks indicated clearly enough that Rodney’s nerves were in a state of irritation, and Denham speedily woke to the situation of the world as it had been one hour ago. He had last seen Rodney walking with Katharine. He could not help regretting the eagerness with which his mind returned to these interests, and fretted him with the old trivial anxieties. He sank in his own esteem. Reason bade him break from Rodney, who clearly tended to become confidential, before he had utterly lost touch with the problems of high philosophy. He looked along the road, and marked a lamp-post at a distance of some hundred yards, and decided that he would part from Rodney when they reached this point.

“Yes, I like Mary; I don’t see how one could help liking her,” he remarked cautiously, with his eye on the lamp-post.

“Ah, Denham, you’re so different from me. You never give yourself away. I watched you this evening with Katharine Hilbery. My instinct is to trust the person I’m talking to. That’s why I’m always being taken in, I suppose.”

Denham seemed to be pondering this statement of Rodney’s, but, as a matter of fact, he was hardly conscious of Rodney and his revelations, and was only concerned to make him mention Katharine again before they reached the lamp-post.

“Who’s taken you in now?” he asked. “Katharine Hilbery?”

Rodney stopped and once more began beating a kind of rhythm, as if he were marking a phrase in a symphony, upon the smooth stone balustrade of the Embankment.

“Katharine Hilbery,” he repeated, with a curious little chuckle. “No, Denham, I have no illusions about that young woman. I think I made that plain to her to-night. But don’t run away with a false impression,” he continued eagerly, turning and linking his arm through Denham’s, as though to prevent him from escaping; and, thus compelled, Denham passed the monitory lamp-post, to which, in passing, he breathed an excuse, for how could he break away when Rodney’s arm was actually linked in his? “You must not think that I have any bitterness against her—far from it. It’s not altogether her fault, poor girl. She lives, you know, one of those odious, self-centred lives—at least, I think them odious for a woman—feeding her wits upon everything, having control of everything, getting far too much her own way at home—spoilt, in a sense, feeling that every one is at her feet, and so not realizing how she hurts—that is, how rudely she behaves to people who haven’t all her advantages. Still, to do her justice, she’s no fool,” he added, as if to warn Denham not to take any liberties. “She has taste. She has sense. She can understand you when you talk to her. But she’s a woman, and there’s an end of it,” he added, with another little chuckle, and dropped Denham’s arm.

“And did you tell her all this to-night?” Denham asked.

“Oh dear me, no. I should never think of telling Katharine the truth about herself. That wouldn’t do at all. One has to be in an attitude of adoration in order to get on with Katharine.”

“Now I’ve learnt that she’s refused to marry him why don’t I go home?” Denham thought to himself. But he went on walking beside Rodney, and for a time they did not speak, though Rodney hummed snatches of a tune out of an opera by Mozart. A feeling of contempt and liking combine very naturally in the mind of one to whom another has just spoken unpremeditatedly, revealing rather more of his private feelings than he intended to reveal. Denham began to wonder what sort of person Rodney was, and at the same time Rodney began to think about Denham.

“You’re a slave like me, I suppose?” he asked.

“A solicitor, yes.”

“I sometimes wonder why we don’t chuck it. Why don’t you emigrate, Denham? I should have thought that would suit you.”

“I’ve a family.”

“I’m often on the point of going myself. And then I know I couldn’t live without this”—and he waved his hand towards the City of London, which wore, at this moment, the appearance of a town cut out of grey-blue cardboard, and pasted flat against the sky, which was of a deeper blue.

“There are one or two people I’m fond of, and there’s a little good music, and a few pictures, now and then—just enough to keep one dangling about here. Ah, but I couldn’t live with savages! Are you fond of books? Music? Pictures? D’you care at all for first editions? I’ve got a few nice things up here, things I pick up cheap, for I can’t afford to give what they ask.”

They had reached a small court of high eighteenth-century houses, in one of which Rodney had his rooms. They climbed a very steep staircase, through whose uncurtained windows the moonlight fell, illuminating the banisters with their twisted pillars, and the piles of plates set on the window-sills, and jars half-full of milk. Rodney’s rooms were small, but the sitting-room window looked out into a courtyard, with its flagged pavement, and its single tree, and across to the flat red-brick fronts of the opposite houses, which would not have surprised Dr. Johnson, if he had come out of his grave for a turn in the moonlight. Rodney lit his lamp, pulled his curtains, offered Denham a chair, and, flinging the manuscript of his paper on the Elizabethan use of Metaphor on to the table, exclaimed:

“Oh dear me, what a waste of time! But it’s over now, and so we may think no more about it.”

He then busied himself very dexterously in lighting a fire, producing glasses, whisky, a cake, and cups and saucers. He put on a faded crimson dressing-gown, and a pair of red slippers, and advanced to Denham with a tumbler in one hand and a well-burnished book in the other.

“The Baskerville Congreve,” said Rodney, offering it to his guest. “I couldn’t read him in a cheap edition.”

When he was seen thus among his books and his valuables, amiably anxious to make his visitor comfortable, and moving about with something of the dexterity and grace of a Persian cat, Denham relaxed his critical attitude, and felt more at home with Rodney than he would have done with many men better known to him. Rodney’s room was the room of a person who cherishes a great many personal tastes, guarding them from the rough blasts of the public with scrupulous attention. His papers and his books rose in jagged mounds on table and floor, round which he skirted with nervous care lest his dressing-gown might disarrange them ever so slightly. On a chair stood a stack of photographs of statues and pictures, which it was his habit to exhibit, one by one, for the space of a day or two. The books on his shelves were as orderly as regiments of soldiers, and the backs of them shone like so many bronze beetle-wings; though, if you took one from its place you saw a shabbier volume behind it, since space was limited. An oval Venetian mirror stood above the fireplace, and reflected duskily in its spotted depths the faint yellow and crimson of a jarful of tulips which stood among the letters and pipes and cigarettes upon the mantelpiece. A small piano occupied a corner of the room, with the score of “Don Giovanni” open upon the bracket.

“Well, Rodney,” said Denham, as he filled his pipe and looked about him, “this is all very nice and comfortable.”

Rodney turned his head half round and smiled, with the pride of a proprietor, and then prevented himself from smiling.

“Tolerable,” he muttered.

“But I dare say it’s just as well that you have to earn your own living.”

“If you mean that I shouldn’t do anything good with leisure if I had it, I dare say you’re right. But I should be ten times as happy with my whole day to spend as I liked.”

“I doubt that,” Denham replied.

They sat silent, and the smoke from their pipes joined amicably in a blue vapour above their heads.

“I could spend three hours every day reading Shakespeare,” Rodney remarked. “And there’s music and pictures, let alone the society of the people one likes.”

“You’d be bored to death in a year’s time.”

“Oh, I grant you I should be bored if I did nothing. But I should write plays.”

“H’m!”

“I should write plays,” he repeated. “I’ve written three-quarters of one already, and I’m only waiting for a holiday to finish it. And it’s not bad—no, some of it’s really rather nice.”

The question arose in Denham’s mind whether he should ask to see this play, as, no doubt, he was expected to do. He looked rather stealthily at Rodney, who was tapping the coal nervously with a poker, and quivering almost physically, so Denham thought, with desire to talk about this play of his, and vanity unrequited and urgent. He seemed very much at Denham’s mercy, and Denham could not help liking him, partly on that account.

“Well, … will you let me see the play?” Denham asked, and Rodney looked immediately appeased, but, nevertheless, he sat silent for a moment, holding the poker perfectly upright in the air, regarding it with his rather prominent eyes, and opening his lips and shutting them again.

“Do you really care for this kind of thing?” he asked at length, in a different tone of voice from that in which he had been speaking. And, without waiting for an answer, he went on, rather querulously: “Very few people care for poetry. I dare say it bores you.”

“Perhaps,” Denham remarked.

“Well, I’ll lend it you,” Rodney announced, putting down the poker.

As he moved to fetch the play, Denham stretched a hand to the bookcase beside him, and took down the first volume which his fingers touched. It happened to be a small and very lovely edition of Sir Thomas Browne, containing the “Urn Burial,” the “Hydriotaphia,” the “Quincunx Confuted,” and the “Garden of Cyrus,” and, opening it at a passage which he knew very nearly by heart, Denham began to read and, for some time, continued to read.

Rodney resumed his seat, with his manuscript on his knee, and from time to time he glanced at Denham, and then joined his finger-tips and crossed his thin legs over the fender, as if he experienced a good deal of pleasure. At length Denham shut the book, and stood, with his back to the fireplace, occasionally making an inarticulate humming sound which seemed to refer to Sir Thomas Browne. He put his hat on his head, and stood over Rodney, who still lay stretched back in his chair, with his toes within the fender.

“I shall look in again some time,” Denham remarked, upon which Rodney held up his hand, containing his manuscript, without saying anything except—“If you like.”

Denham took the manuscript and went. Two days later he was much surprised to find a thin parcel on his breakfast-plate, which, on being opened, revealed the very copy of Sir Thomas Browne which he had studied so intently in Rodney’s rooms. From sheer laziness he returned no thanks, but he thought of Rodney from time to time with interest, disconnecting him from Katharine, and meant to go round one evening and smoke a pipe with him. It pleased Rodney thus to give away whatever his friends genuinely admired. His library was constantly being diminished.

[]

Chapter VI

Of all the hours of an ordinary working week-day, which are the pleasantest to look forward to and to look back upon? If a single instance is of use in framing a theory, it may be said that the minutes between nine-twenty-five and nine-thirty in the morning had a singular charm for Mary Datchet. She spent them in a very enviable frame of mind; her contentment was almost unalloyed. High in the air as her flat was, some beams from the morning sun reached her even in November, striking straight at curtain, chair, and carpet, and painting there three bright, true spaces of green, blue, and purple, upon which the eye rested with a pleasure which gave physical warmth to the body.

There were few mornings when Mary did not look up, as she bent to lace her boots, and as she followed the yellow rod from curtain to breakfast-table she usually breathed some sigh of thankfulness that her life provided her with such moments of pure enjoyment. She was robbing no one of anything, and yet, to get so much pleasure from simple things, such as eating one’s breakfast alone in a room which had nice colours in it, clean from the skirting of the boards to the corners of the ceiling, seemed to suit her so thoroughly that she used at first to hunt about for some one to apologize to, or for some flaw in the situation. She had now been six months in London, and she could find no flaw, but that, as she invariably concluded by the time her boots were laced, was solely and entirely due to the fact that she had her work. Every day, as she stood with her dispatch-box in her hand at the door of her flat, and gave one look back into the room to see that everything was straight before she left, she said to herself that she was very glad that she was going to leave it all, that to have sat there all day long, in the enjoyment of leisure, would have been intolerable.

Out in the street she liked to think herself one of the workers who, at this hour, take their way in rapid single file along all the broad pavements of the city, with their heads slightly lowered, as if all their effort were to follow each other as closely as might be; so that Mary used to figure to herself a straight rabbit-run worn by their unswerving feet upon the pavement. But she liked to pretend that she was indistinguishable from the rest, and that when a wet day drove her to the Underground or omnibus, she gave and took her share of crowd and wet with clerks and typists and commercial men, and shared with them the serious business of winding-up the world to tick for another four-and-twenty hours.

Thus thinking, on the particular morning in question, she made her way across Lincoln’s Inn Fields and up Kingsway, and so through Southampton Row until she reached her office in Russell Square. Now and then she would pause and look into the window of some bookseller or flower shop, where, at this early hour, the goods were being arranged, and empty gaps behind the plate glass revealed a state of undress. Mary felt kindly disposed towards the shopkeepers, and hoped that they would trick the midday public into purchasing, for at this hour of the morning she ranged herself entirely on the side of the shopkeepers and bank clerks, and regarded all who slept late and had money to spend as her enemy and natural prey. And directly she had crossed the road at Holborn, her thoughts all came naturally and regularly to roost upon her work, and she forgot that she was, properly speaking, an amateur worker, whose services were unpaid, and could hardly be said to wind the world up for its daily task, since the world, so far, had shown very little desire to take the boons which Mary’s society for woman’s suffrage had offered it.

She was thinking all the way up Southampton Row of notepaper and foolscap, and how an economy in the use of paper might be effected (without, of course, hurting Mrs. Seal’s feelings), for she was certain that the great organizers always pounce, to begin with, upon trifles like these, and build up their triumphant reforms upon a basis of absolute solidity; and, without acknowledging it for a moment, Mary Datchet was determined to be a great organizer, and had already doomed her society to reconstruction of the most radical kind. Once or twice lately, it is true, she had started, broad awake, before turning into Russell Square, and denounced herself rather sharply for being already in a groove, capable, that is, of thinking the same thoughts every morning at the same hour, so that the chestnut-coloured brick of the Russell Square houses had some curious connexion with her thoughts about office economy, and served also as a sign that she should get into trim for meeting Mr. Clacton, or Mrs. Seal, or whoever might be beforehand with her at the office. Having no religious belief, she was the more conscientious about her life, examining her position from time to time very seriously, and nothing annoyed her more than to find one of these bad habits nibbling away unheeded at the precious substance. What was the good, after all, of being a woman if one didn’t keep fresh, and cram one’s life with all sorts of views and experiments? Thus she always gave herself a little shake, as she turned the corner, and, as often as not, reached her own door whistling a snatch of a Somersetshire ballad.

The suffrage office was at the top of one of the large Russell Square houses, which had once been lived in by a great city merchant and his family, and was now let out in slices to a number of societies which displayed assorted initials upon doors of ground glass, and kept, each of them, a typewriter which clicked busily all day long. The old house, with its great stone staircase, echoed hollowly to the sound of typewriters and of errand-boys from ten to six. The noise of different typewriters already at work, disseminating their views upon the protection of native races, or the value of cereals as foodstuffs, quickened Mary’s steps, and she always ran up the last flight of steps which led to her own landing, at whatever hour she came, so as to get her typewriter to take its place in competition with the rest.

She sat herself down to her letters, and very soon all these speculations were forgotten, and the two lines drew themselves between her eyebrows, as the contents of the letters, the office furniture, and the sounds of activity in the next room gradually asserted their sway upon her. By eleven o’clock the atmosphere of concentration was running so strongly in one direction that any thought of a different order could hardly have survived its birth more than a moment or so. The task which lay before her was to organize a series of entertainments, the profits of which were to benefit the society, which drooped for want of funds. It was her first attempt at organization on a large scale, and she meant to achieve something remarkable. She meant to use the cumbrous machine to pick out this, that, and the other interesting person from the muddle of the world, and to set them for a week in a pattern which must catch the eyes of Cabinet Ministers, and the eyes once caught, the old arguments were to be delivered with unexampled originality. Such was the scheme as a whole; and in contemplation of it she would become quite flushed and excited, and have to remind herself of all the details that intervened between her and success.

The door would open, and Mr. Clacton would come in to search for a certain leaflet buried beneath a pyramid of leaflets. He was a thin, sandy-haired man of about thirty-five, spoke with a Cockney accent, and had about him a frugal look, as if nature had not dealt generously with him in any way, which, naturally, prevented him from dealing generously with other people. When he had found his leaflet, and offered a few jocular hints upon keeping papers in order, the typewriting would stop abruptly, and Mrs. Seal would burst into the room with a letter which needed explanation in her hand. This was a more serious interruption than the other, because she never knew exactly what she wanted, and half a dozen requests would bolt from her, no one of which was clearly stated. Dressed in plum-coloured velveteen, with short, grey hair, and a face that seemed permanently flushed with philanthropic enthusiasm, she was always in a hurry, and always in some disorder. She wore two crucifixes, which got themselves entangled in a heavy gold chain upon her breast, and seemed to Mary expressive of her mental ambiguity. Only her vast enthusiasm and her worship of Miss Markham, one of the pioneers of the society, kept her in her place, for which she had no sound qualification.

So the morning wore on, and the pile of letters grew, and Mary felt, at last, that she was the centre ganglion of a very fine network of nerves which fell over England, and one of these days, when she touched the heart of the system, would begin feeling and rushing together and emitting their splendid blaze of revolutionary fireworks—for some such metaphor represents what she felt about her work, when her brain had been heated by three hours of application.

Shortly before one o’clock Mr. Clacton and Mrs. Seal desisted from their labours, and the old joke about luncheon, which came out regularly at this hour, was repeated with scarcely any variation of words. Mr. Clacton patronized a vegetarian restaurant; Mrs. Seal brought sandwiches, which she ate beneath the plane-trees in Russell Square; while Mary generally went to a gaudy establishment, upholstered in red plush, near by, where, much to the vegetarian’s disapproval, you could buy steak, two inches thick, or a roast section of fowl, swimming in a pewter dish.

“The bare branches against the sky do one so much good,” Mrs. Seal asserted, looking out into the Square.

“But one can’t lunch off trees, Sally,” said Mary.

“I confess I don’t know how you manage it, Miss Datchet,” Mr. Clacton remarked. “I should sleep all the afternoon, I know, if I took a heavy meal in the middle of the day.”

“What’s the very latest thing in literature?” Mary asked, good-humouredly pointing to the yellow-covered volume beneath Mr. Clacton’s arm, for he invariably read some new French author at lunch-time, or squeezed in a visit to a picture gallery, balancing his social work with an ardent culture of which he was secretly proud, as Mary had very soon divined.

So they parted and Mary walked away, wondering if they guessed that she really wanted to get away from them, and supposing that they had not quite reached that degree of subtlety. She bought herself an evening paper, which she read as she ate, looking over the top of it again and again at the queer people who were buying cakes or imparting their secrets, until some young woman whom she knew came in, and she called out, “Eleanor, come and sit by me,” and they finished their lunch together, parting on the strip of pavement among the different lines of traffic with a pleasant feeling that they were stepping once more into their separate places in the great and eternally moving pattern of human life.

But, instead of going straight back to the office to-day, Mary turned into the British Museum, and strolled down the gallery with the shapes of stone until she found an empty seat directly beneath the gaze of the Elgin marbles. She looked at them, and seemed, as usual, borne up on some wave of exaltation and emotion, by which her life at once became solemn and beautiful—an impression which was due as much, perhaps, to the solitude and chill and silence of the gallery as to the actual beauty of the statues. One must suppose, at least, that her emotions were not purely æsthetic, because, after she had gazed at the Ulysses for a minute or two, she began to think about Ralph Denham. So secure did she feel with these silent shapes that she almost yielded to an impulse to say “I am in love with you” aloud. The presence of this immense and enduring beauty made her almost alarmingly conscious of her desire, and at the same time proud of a feeling which did not display anything like the same proportions when she was going about her daily work.

She repressed her impulse to speak aloud, and rose and wandered about rather aimlessly among the statues until she found herself in another gallery devoted to engraved obelisks and winged Assyrian bulls, and her emotion took another turn. She began to picture herself travelling with Ralph in a land where these monsters were couchant in the sand. “For,” she thought to herself, as she gazed fixedly at some information printed behind a piece of glass, “the wonderful thing about you is that you’re ready for anything; you’re not in the least conventional, like most clever men.”

And she conjured up a scene of herself on a camel’s back, in the desert, while Ralph commanded a whole tribe of natives.

“That is what you can do,” she went on, moving on to the next statue. “You always make people do what you want.”

A glow spread over her spirit, and filled her eyes with brightness. Nevertheless, before she left the Museum she was very far from saying, even in the privacy of her own mind, “I am in love with you,” and that sentence might very well never have framed itself. She was, indeed, rather annoyed with herself for having allowed such an ill-considered breach of her reserve, weakening her powers of resistance, she felt, should this impulse return again. For, as she walked along the street to her office, the force of all her customary objections to being in love with any one overcame her. She did not want to marry at all. It seemed to her that there was something amateurish in bringing love into touch with a perfectly straightforward friendship, such as hers was with Ralph, which, for two years now, had based itself upon common interests in impersonal topics, such as the housing of the poor, or the taxation of land values.

But the afternoon spirit differed intrinsically from the morning spirit. Mary found herself watching the flight of a bird, or making drawings of the branches of the plane-trees upon her blotting-paper. People came in to see Mr. Clacton on business, and a seductive smell of cigarette smoke issued from his room. Mrs. Seal wandered about with newspaper cuttings, which seemed to her either “quite splendid” or “really too bad for words.” She used to paste these into books, or send them to her friends, having first drawn a broad bar in blue pencil down the margin, a proceeding which signified equally and indistinguishably the depths of her reprobation or the heights of her approval.

About four o’clock on that same afternoon Katharine Hilbery was walking up Kingsway. The question of tea presented itself. The street lamps were being lit already, and as she stood still for a moment beneath one of them, she tried to think of some neighbouring drawing-room where there would be firelight and talk congenial to her mood. That mood, owing to the spinning traffic and the evening veil of unreality, was ill-adapted to her home surroundings. Perhaps, on the whole, a shop was the best place in which to preserve this queer sense of heightened existence. At the same time she wished to talk. Remembering Mary Datchet and her repeated invitations, she crossed the road, turned into Russell Square, and peered about, seeking for numbers with a sense of adventure that was out of all proportion to the deed itself. She found herself in a dimly lighted hall, unguarded by a porter, and pushed open the first swing door. But the office-boy had never heard of Miss Datchet. Did she belong to the S.R.F.R.? Katharine shook her head with a smile of dismay. A voice from within shouted, “No. The S.G.S.—top floor.”

Katharine mounted past innumerable glass doors, with initials on them, and became steadily more and more doubtful of the wisdom of her venture. At the top she paused for a moment to breathe and collect herself. She heard the typewriter and formal professional voices inside, not belonging, she thought, to any one she had ever spoken to. She touched the bell, and the door was opened almost immediately by Mary herself. Her face had to change its expression entirely when she saw Katharine.

“You!” she exclaimed. “We thought you were the printer.” Still holding the door open, she called back, “No, Mr. Clacton, it’s not Penningtons. I should ring them up again—double three double eight, Central. Well, this is a surprise. Come in,” she added. “You’re just in time for tea.”

The light of relief shone in Mary’s eyes. The boredom of the afternoon was dissipated at once, and she was glad that Katharine had found them in a momentary press of activity, owing to the failure of the printer to send back certain proofs.

The unshaded electric light shining upon the table covered with papers dazed Katharine for a moment. After the confusion of her twilight walk, and her random thoughts, life in this small room appeared extremely concentrated and bright. She turned instinctively to look out of the window, which was uncurtained, but Mary immediately recalled her.

“It was very clever of you to find your way,” she said, and Katharine wondered, as she stood there, feeling, for the moment, entirely detached and unabsorbed, why she had come. She looked, indeed, to Mary’s eyes strangely out of place in the office. Her figure in the long cloak, which took deep folds, and her face, which was composed into a mask of sensitive apprehension, disturbed Mary for a moment with a sense of the presence of some one who was of another world, and, therefore, subversive of her world. She became immediately anxious that Katharine should be impressed by the importance of her world, and hoped that neither Mrs. Seal nor Mr. Clacton would appear until the impression of importance had been received. But in this she was disappointed. Mrs. Seal burst into the room holding a kettle in her hand, which she set upon the stove, and then, with inefficient haste, she set light to the gas, which flared up, exploded, and went out.

“Always the way, always the way,” she muttered. “Kit Markham is the only person who knows how to deal with the thing.”

Mary had to go to her help, and together they spread the table, and apologized for the disparity between the cups and the plainness of the food.

“If we had known Miss Hilbery was coming, we should have bought a cake,” said Mary, upon which Mrs. Seal looked at Katharine for the first time, suspiciously, because she was a person who needed cake.

Here Mr. Clacton opened the door, and came in, holding a typewritten letter in his hand, which he was reading aloud.

“Salford’s affiliated,” he said.

“Well done, Salford!” Mrs. Seal exclaimed enthusiastically, thumping the teapot which she held upon the table, in token of applause.

“Yes, these provincial centres seem to be coming into line at last,” said Mr. Clacton, and then Mary introduced him to Miss Hilbery, and he asked her, in a very formal manner, if she were interested “in our work.”

“And the proofs still not come?” said Mrs. Seal, putting both her elbows on the table, and propping her chin on her hands, as Mary began to pour out tea. “It’s too bad—too bad. At this rate we shall miss the country post. Which reminds me, Mr. Clacton, don’t you think we should circularize the provinces with Partridge’s last speech? What? You’ve not read it? Oh, it’s the best thing they’ve had in the House this Session. Even the Prime Minister——”

But Mary cut her short.

“We don’t allow shop at tea, Sally,” she said firmly. “We fine her a penny each time she forgets, and the fines go to buying a plum cake,” she explained, seeking to draw Katharine into the community. She had given up all hope of impressing her.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Mrs. Seal apologized. “It’s my misfortune to be an enthusiast,” she said, turning to Katharine. “My father’s daughter could hardly be anything else. I think I’ve been on as many committees as most people. Waifs and Strays, Rescue Work, Church Work, C.O.S.—local branch—besides the usual civic duties which fall to one as a householder. But I’ve given them all up for our work here, and I don’t regret it for a second,” she added. “This is the root question, I feel; until women have votes——”

“It’ll be sixpence, at least, Sally,” said Mary, bringing her fist down on the table. “And we’re all sick to death of women and their votes.”

Mrs. Seal looked for a moment as though she could hardly believe her ears, and made a deprecating “tut-tut-tut” in her throat, looking alternately at Katharine and Mary, and shaking her head as she did so. Then she remarked, rather confidentially to Katharine, with a little nod in Mary’s direction:

“She’s doing more for the cause than any of us. She’s giving her youth—for, alas! when I was young there were domestic circumstances——” she sighed, and stopped short.

Mr. Clacton hastily reverted to the joke about luncheon, and explained how Mrs. Seal fed on a bag of biscuits under the trees, whatever the weather might be, rather, Katharine thought, as though Mrs. Seal were a pet dog who had convenient tricks.

“Yes, I took my little bag into the square,” said Mrs. Seal, with the self-conscious guilt of a child owning some fault to its elders. “It was really very sustaining, and the bare boughs against the sky do one so much good. But I shall have to give up going into the square,” she proceeded, wrinkling her forehead. “The injustice of it! Why should I have a beautiful square all to myself, when poor women who need rest have nowhere at all to sit?” She looked fiercely at Katharine, giving her short locks a little shake. “It’s dreadful what a tyrant one still is, in spite of all one’s efforts. One tries to lead a decent life, but one can’t. Of course, directly one thinks of it, one sees that all squares should be open to every one. Is there any society with that object, Mr. Clacton? If not, there should be, surely.”

“A most excellent object,” said Mr. Clacton in his professional manner. “At the same time, one must deplore the ramification of organizations, Mrs. Seal. So much excellent effort thrown away, not to speak of pounds, shillings, and pence. Now how many organizations of a philanthropic nature do you suppose there are in the City of London itself, Miss Hilbery?” he added, screwing his mouth into a queer little smile, as if to show that the question had its frivolous side.

Katharine smiled too. Her unlikeness to the rest of them had, by this time, penetrated to Mr. Clacton, who was not naturally observant, and he was wondering who she was; this same unlikeness had subtly stimulated Mrs. Seal to try and make a convert of her. Mary, too, looked at her almost as if she begged her to make things easy. For Katharine had shown no disposition to make things easy. She had scarcely spoken, and her silence, though grave and even thoughtful, seemed to Mary the silence of one who criticizes.

“Well, there are more in this house than I’d any notion of,” she said. “On the ground floor you protect natives, on the next you emigrate women and tell people to eat nuts——”

“Why do you say that ‘we’ do these things?” Mary interposed, rather sharply. “We’re not responsible for all the cranks who choose to lodge in the same house with us.”

Mr. Clacton cleared his throat and looked at each of the young ladies in turn. He was a good deal struck by the appearance and manner of Miss Hilbery, which seemed to him to place her among those cultivated and luxurious people of whom he used to dream. Mary, on the other hand, was more of his own sort, and a little too much inclined to order him about. He picked up crumbs of dry biscuit and put them into his mouth with incredible rapidity.

“You don’t belong to our society, then?” said Mrs. Seal.

“No, I’m afraid I don’t,” said Katharine, with such ready candour that Mrs. Seal was nonplussed, and stared at her with a puzzled expression, as if she could not classify her among the varieties of human beings known to her.

“But surely——” she began.

“Mrs. Seal is an enthusiast in these matters,” said Mr. Clacton, almost apologetically. “We have to remind her sometimes that others have a right to their views even if they differ from our own…. Punch has a very funny picture this week, about a Suffragist and an agricultural labourer. Have you seen this week’s Punch, Miss Datchet?”

Mary laughed, and said “No.”

Mr. Clacton then told them the substance of the joke, which, however, depended a good deal for its success upon the expression which the artist had put into the people’s faces. Mrs. Seal sat all the time perfectly grave. Directly he had done speaking she burst out:

“But surely, if you care about the welfare of your sex at all, you must wish them to have the vote?”

“I never said I didn’t wish them to have the vote,” Katharine protested.

“Then why aren’t you a member of our society?” Mrs. Seal demanded.

Katharine stirred her spoon round and round, stared into the swirl of the tea, and remained silent. Mr. Clacton, meanwhile, framed a question which, after a moment’s hesitation, he put to Katharine.

“Are you in any way related, I wonder, to the poet Alardyce? His daughter, I believe, married a Mr. Hilbery.”

“Yes; I’m the poet’s granddaughter,” said Katharine, with a little sigh, after a pause; and for a moment they were all silent.

“The poet’s granddaughter!” Mrs. Seal repeated, half to herself, with a shake of her head, as if that explained what was otherwise inexplicable.

The light kindled in Mr. Clacton’s eye.

“Ah, indeed. That interests me very much,” he said. “I owe a great debt to your grandfather, Miss Hilbery. At one time I could have repeated the greater part of him by heart. But one gets out of the way of reading poetry, unfortunately. You don’t remember him, I suppose?”

A sharp rap at the door made Katharine’s answer inaudible. Mrs. Seal looked up with renewed hope in her eyes, and exclaiming:

“The proofs at last!” ran to open the door. “Oh, it’s only Mr. Denham!” she cried, without any attempt to conceal her disappointment. Ralph, Katharine supposed, was a frequent visitor, for the only person he thought it necessary to greet was herself, and Mary at once explained the strange fact of her being there by saying:

“Katharine has come to see how one runs an office.”

Ralph felt himself stiffen uncomfortably, as he said:

“I hope Mary hasn’t persuaded you that she knows how to run an office?”

“What, doesn’t she?” said Katharine, looking from one to the other.

At these remarks Mrs. Seal began to exhibit signs of discomposure, which displayed themselves by a tossing movement of her head, and, as Ralph took a letter from his pocket, and placed his finger upon a certain sentence, she forestalled him by exclaiming in confusion:

“Now, I know what you’re going to say, Mr. Denham! But it was the day Kit Markham was here, and she upsets one so—with her wonderful vitality, always thinking of something new that we ought to be doing and arn’t—and I was conscious at the time that my dates were mixed. It had nothing to do with Mary at all, I assure you.”

“My dear Sally, don’t apologize,” said Mary, laughing. “Men are such pedants—they don’t know what things matter, and what things don’t.”

“Now, Denham, speak up for our sex,” said Mr. Clacton in a jocular manner, indeed, but like most insignificant men he was very quick to resent being found fault with by a woman, in argument with whom he was fond of calling himself “a mere man.” He wished, however, to enter into a literary conversation with Miss Hilbery, and thus let the matter drop.

“Doesn’t it seem strange to you, Miss Hilbery,” he siad, “that the French, with all their wealth of illustrious names, have no poet who can compare with your grandfather? Let me see. There’s Chénier and Hugo and Alfred de Musset—wonderful men, but, at the same time, there’s a richness, a freshness about Alardyce——”

Here the telephone bell rang, and he had to absent himself with a smile and a bow which signified that, although literature is delightful, it is not work. Mrs. Seal rose at the same time, but remained hovering over the table, delivering herself of a tirade against party government. “For if I were to tell you what I know of back-stairs intrigue, and what can be done by the power of the purse, you wouldn’t credit me, Mr. Denham, you wouldn’t, indeed. Which is why I feel that the only work for my father’s daughter—for he was one of the pioneers, Mr. Denham, and on his tombstone I had that verse from the Psalms put, about the sowers and the seed…. And what wouldn’t I give that he should be alive now, seeing what we’re going to see——” but reflecting that the glories of the future depended in part upon the activity of her typewriter, she bobbed her head, and hurried back to the seclusion of her little room, from which immediately issued sounds of enthusiastic, but obviously erratic, composition.

Mary made it clear at once, by starting a fresh topic of general interest, that though she saw the humour of her colleague, she did not intend to have her laughed at.

“The standard of morality seems to me frightfully low,” she observed reflectively, pouring out a second cup of tea, “especially among women who aren’t well educated. They don’t see that small things matter, and that’s where the leakage begins, and then we find ourselves in difficulties—I very nearly lost my temper yesterday,” she went on, looking at Ralph with a little smile, as though he knew what happened when she lost her temper. “It makes me very angry when people tell me lies—doesn’t it make you angry?” she asked Katharine.

“But considering that every one tells lies,” Katharine remarked, looking about the room to see where she had put down her umbrella and her parcel, for there was an intimacy in the way in which Mary and Ralph addressed each other which made her wish to leave them. Mary, on the other hand, was anxious, superficially at least, that Katharine should stay and so fortify her in her determination not to be in love with Ralph.

Ralph, while lifting his cup from his lips to the table, had made up his mind that if Miss Hilbery left, he would go with her.

“I don’t think that I tell lies, and I don’t think that Ralph tells lies, do you, Ralph?” Mary continued.

Katharine laughed, with more gaiety, as it seemed to Mary, than she could properly account for. What was she laughing at? At them, presumably. Katharine had risen, and was glancing hither and thither, at the presses and the cupboards, and all the machinery of the office, as if she included them all in her rather malicious amusement, which caused Mary to keep her eyes on her straightly and rather fiercely, as if she were a gay-plumed, mischievous bird, who might light on the topmost bough and pick off the ruddiest cherry, without any warning. Two women less like each other could scarcely be imagined, Ralph thought, looking from one to the other. Next moment he, too, rose, and nodding to Mary, as Katharine said good-bye, opened the door for her, and followed her out.

Mary sat still and made no attempt to prevent them from going. For a second or two after the door had shut on them her eyes rested on the door with a straightforward fierceness in which, for a moment, a certain degree of bewilderment seemed to enter; but, after a brief hesitation, she put down her cup and proceeded to clear away the tea-things.

The impulse which had driven Ralph to take this action was the result of a very swift little piece of reasoning, and thus, perhaps, was not quite so much of an impulse as it seemed. It passed through his mind that if he missed this chance of talking to Katharine, he would have to face an enraged ghost, when he was alone in his room again, demanding an explanation of his cowardly indecision. It was better, on the whole, to risk present discomfiture than to waste an evening bandying excuses and constructing impossible scenes with this uncompromising section of himself. For ever since he had visited the Hilberys he had been much at the mercy of a phantom Katharine, who came to him when he sat alone, and answered him as he would have her answer, and was always beside him to crown those varying triumphs which were transacted almost very night, in imaginary scenes, as he walked through the lamplit streets home from the office. To walk with Katharine in the flesh would either feed that phantom with fresh food, which, as all who nourish dreams are aware, is a process that becomes necessary from time to time, or refine it to such a degree of thinness that it was scarcely serviceable any longer; and that, too, is sometimes a welcome change to a dreamer. And all the time Ralph was well aware that the bulk of Katharine was not represented in his dreams at all, so that when he met her he was bewildered by the fact that she had nothing to do with his dream of her.

When, on reaching the street, Katharine found that Mr. Denham proceeded to keep pace by her side, she was surprised and, perhaps, a little annoyed. She, too, had her margin of imagination, and to-night her activity in this obscure region of the mind required solitude. If she had had her way, she would have walked very fast down the Tottenham Court Road, and then sprung into a cab and raced swiftly home. The view she had had of the inside of an office was of the nature of a dream to her. Shut off up there, she compared Mrs. Seal, and Mary Datchet, and Mr. Clacton to enchanted people in a bewitched tower, with the spiders’ webs looping across the corners of the room, and all the tools of the necromancer’s craft at hand; for so aloof and unreal and apart from the normal world did they seem to her, in the house of innumerable typewriters, murmuring their incantations and concocting their drugs, and flinging their frail spiders’ webs over the torrent of life which rushed down the streets outside.

She may have been conscious that there was some exaggeration in this fancy of hers, for she certainly did not wish to share it with Ralph. To him, she supposed, Mary Datchet, composing leaflets for Cabinet Ministers among her typewriters, represented all that was interesting and genuine; and, accordingly, she shut them both out from all share in the crowded street, with its pendant necklace of lamps, its lighted windows, and its throng of men and women, which exhilarated her to such an extent that she very nearly forgot her companion. She walked very fast, and the effect of people passing in the opposite direction was to produce a queer dizziness both in her head and in Ralph’s, which set their bodies far apart. But she did her duty by her companion almost unconsciously.

“Mary Datchet does that sort of work very well…. She’s responsible for it, I suppose?”

“Yes. The others don’t help at all…. Has she made a convert of you?”

“Oh no. That is, I’m a convert already.”

“But she hasn’t persuaded you to work for them?”

“Oh dear no—that wouldn’t do at all.”

So they walked on down the Tottenham Court Road, parting and coming together again, and Ralph felt much as though he were addressing the summit of a poplar in a high gale of wind.

“Suppose we get on to that omnibus?” he suggested.

Katharine acquiesced, and they climbed up, and found themselves alone on top of it.

“But which way are you going?” Katharine asked, waking a little from the trance into which movement among moving things had thrown her.

“I’m going to the Temple,” Ralph replied, inventing a destination on the spur of the moment. He felt the change come over her as they sat down and the omnibus began to move forward. He imagined her contemplating the avenue in front of them with those honest sad eyes which seemed to set him at such a distance from them. But the breeze was blowing in their faces, and it lifted her hat for a second, and she drew out a pin and stuck it in again, a little action which seemed, for some reason, to make her rather more fallible. Ah, if only her hat would blow off, and leave her altogether dishevelled, accepting it from his hands!

“This is like Venice,” she observed, raising her hand. “The motor-cars, I mean, shooting about so quickly, with their lights.”

“I’ve never seen Venice,” he replied. “I keep that and some other things for my old age.”

“What are the other things?” she asked.

“There’s Venice and India and, I think, Dante, too.”

She laughed.

“Think of providing for one’s old age! And would you refuse to see Venice if you had the chance?”

Instead of answering her, he wondered whether he should tell her something that was quite true about himself; and as he wondered, he told her.

“I’ve planned out my life in sections ever since I was a child, to make it last longer. You see, I’m always afraid that I’m missing something——”

“And so am I!” Katharine exclaimed. “But, after all,” she added, “why should you miss anything?”

“Why? Because I’m poor, for one thing,” Ralph rejoined. “You, I suppose, can have Venice and India and Dante every day of your life.”

She said nothing for a moment, but rested one hand, which was bare of glove, upon the rail in front of her, meditating upon a variety of things, of which one was that this strange young man pronounced Dante as she was used to hearing it pronounced, and another, that he had, most unexpectedly, a feeling about life that was familiar to her. Perhaps, then, he was the sort of person she might take an interest in, if she came to know him better, and as she had placed him among those whom she would never want to know better, this was enough to make her silent. She hastily recalled her first view of him, in the little room where the relics were kept, and ran a bar through half her impressions, as one cancels a badly written sentence, having found the right one.

“But to know that one might have things doesn’t alter the fact that one hasn’t got them,” she said, in some confusion. “How could I go to India, for example? Besides,” she began impulsively, and stopped herself. Here the conductor came round, and interrupted them. Ralph waited for her to resume her sentence, but she said no more.

“I have a message to give your father,” he remarked. “Perhaps you would give it him, or I could come——”

“Yes, do come,” Katharine replied.

“Still, I don’t see why you shouldn’t go to India,” Ralph began, in order to keep her from rising, as she threatened to do.

But she got up in spite of him, and said good-bye with her usual air of decision, and left him with a quickness which Ralph connected now with all her movements. He looked down and saw her standing on the pavement edge, an alert, commanding figure, which waited its season to cross, and then walked boldly and swiftly to the other side. That gesture and action would be added to the picture he had of her, but at present the real woman completely routed the phantom one.

[]

Chapter VII

And little Augustus Pelham said to me, ‘It’s the younger generation knocking at the door,’ and I said to him, ‘Oh, but the younger generation comes in without knocking, Mr. Pelham.’ Such a feeble little joke, wasn’t it, but down it went into his notebook all the same.”

“Let us congratulate ourselves that we shall be in the grave before that work is published,” said Mr. Hilbery.

The elderly couple were waiting for the dinner-bell to ring and for their daughter to come into the room. Their arm-chairs were drawn up on either side of the fire, and each sat in the same slightly crouched position, looking into the coals, with the expressions of people who have had their share of experiences and wait, rather passively, for something to happen. Mr. Hilbery now gave all his attention to a piece of coal which had fallen out of the grate, and to selecting a favourable position for it among the lumps that were burning already. Mrs. Hilbery watched him in silence, and the smile changed on her lips as if her mind still played with the events of the afternoon.

When Mr. Hilbery had accomplished his task, he resumed his crouching position again, and began to toy with the little green stone attached to his watch-chain. His deep, oval-shaped eyes were fixed upon the flames, but behind the superficial glaze seemed to brood an observant and whimsical spirit, which kept the brown of the eye still unusually vivid. But a look of indolence, the result of scepticism or of a taste too fastidious to be satisfied by the prizes and conclusions so easily within his grasp, lent him an expression almost of melancholy. After sitting thus for a time, he seemed to reach some point in his thinking which demonstrated its futility, upon which he sighed and stretched his hand for a book lying on the table by his side.

Directly the door opened he closed the book, and the eyes of father and mother both rested on Katharine as she came towards them. The sight seemed at once to give them a motive which they had not had before. To them she appeared, as she walked towards them in her light evening dress, extremely young, and the sight of her refreshed them, were it only because her youth and ignorance made their knowledge of the world of some value.

“The only excuse for you, Katharine, is that dinner is still later than you are,” said Mr. Hilbery, putting down his spectacles.

“I don’t mind her being late when the result is so charming,” said Mrs. Hilbery, looking with pride at her daughter. “Still, I don’t know that I like your being out so late, Katharine,” she continued. “You took a cab, I hope?”

Here dinner was announced, and Mr. Hilbery formally led his wife downstairs on his arm. They were all dressed for dinner, and, indeed, the prettiness of the dinner-table merited that compliment. There was no cloth upon the table, and the china made regular circles of deep blue upon the shining brown wood. In the middle there was a bowl of tawny red and yellow chrysanthemums, and one of pure white, so fresh that the narrow petals were curved backwards into a firm white ball. From the surrounding walls the heads of three famous Victorian writers surveyed this entertainment, and slips of paper pasted beneath them testified in the great man’s own handwriting that he was always yours sincerely or affectionately or for ever. The father and daughter would have been quite content, apparently, to eat their dinner in silence, or with a few cryptic remarks expressed in a shorthand which could not be understood by the servants. But silence depressed Mrs. Hilbery, and far from minding the presence of maids, she would often address herself to them, and was never altogether unconscious of their approval or disapproval of her remarks. In the first place she called them to witness that the room was darker than usual, and had all the lights turned on.

“That’s more cheerful,” she exclaimed. “D’you know, Katharine, that ridiculous goose came to tea with me? Oh, how I wanted you! He tried to make epigrams all the time, and I got so nervous, expecting them, you know, that I spilt the tea—and he made an epigram about that!”

“Which ridiculous goose?” Katharine asked her father.

“Only one of my geese, happily, makes epigrams—Augustus Pelham, of course,” said Mrs. Hilbery.

“I’m not sorry that I was out,” said Katharine.

“Poor Augustus!” Mrs. Hilbery exclaimed. “But we’re all too hard on him. Remember how devoted he is to his tiresome old mother.”

“That’s only because she is his mother. Any one connected with himself——”

“No, no, Katharine—that’s too bad. That’s—what’s the word I mean, Trevor, something long and Latin—the sort of word you and Katharine know——”

Mr. Hilbery suggested “cynical.”

“Well, that’ll do. I don’t believe in sending girls to college, but I should teach them that sort of thing. It makes one feel so dignified, bringing out these little allusions, and passing on gracefully to the next topic. But I don’t know what’s come over me—I actually had to ask Augustus the name of the lady Hamlet was in love with, as you were out, Katharine, and Heaven knows what he mayn’t put down about me in his diary.”

“I wish,” Katharine started, with great impetuosity, and checked herself. Her mother always stirred her to feel and think quickly, and then she remembered that her father was there, listening with attention.

“What is it you wish?” he asked, as she paused.

He often surprised her, thus, into telling him what she had not meant to tell him; and then they argued, while Mrs. Hilbery went on with her own thoughts.

“I wish mother wasn’t famous. I was out at tea, and they would talk to me about poetry.”

“Thinking you must be poetical, I see—and aren’t you?”

“Who’s been talking to you about poetry, Katharine?” Mrs. Hilbery demanded, and Katharine was committed to giving her parents an account of her visit to the Suffrage office.

“They have an office at the top of one of the old houses in Russell Square. I never saw such queer-looking people. And the man discovered I was related to the poet, and talked to me about poetry. Even Mary Datchet seems different in that atmosphere.”

“Yes, the office atmosphere is very bad for the soul,” said Mr. Hilbery.

“I don’t remember any offices in Russell Square in the old days, when Mamma lived there,” Mrs. Hilbery mused, “and I can’t fancy turning one of those noble great rooms into a stuffy little Suffrage office. Still, if the clerks read poetry there must be something nice about them.”

“No, because they don’t read it as we read it,” Katharine insisted.

“But it’s nice to think of them reading your grandfather, and not filling up those dreadful little forms all day long,” Mrs. Hilbery persisted, her notion of office life being derived from some chance view of a scene behind the counter at her bank, as she slipped her sovereigns into her purse.

“At any rate, they haven’t made a convert of Katharine, which was what I was afraid of,” Mr. Hilbery remarked.

“Oh no,” said Katharine very decidedly, “I wouldn’t work with them for anything.”

“It’s curious,” Mr. Hilbery continued, agreeing with his daughter, “how the sight of one’s fellow-enthusiasts always chokes one off. They show up the faults of one’s cause so much more plainly than one’s antagonists. One can be enthusiastic in one’s study, but directly one comes into touch with the people who agree with one, all the glamour goes. So I’ve always found,” and he proceeded to tell them, as he peeled his apple, how he committed himself once, in his youthful days, to make a speech at a political meeting, and went there ablaze with enthusiasm for the ideals of his own side; but while his leaders spoke, he became gradually converted to the other way of thinking, if thinking it could be called, and had to feign illness in order to avoid making a fool of himself—an experience which had sickened him of public meetings.

Katharine listened and felt as she generally did when her father, and to some extent her mother, described their feelings, that she quite understood and agreed with them, but, at the same time, saw something which they did not see, and always felt some disappointment when they fell short of her vision, as they always did. The plates succeeded each other swiftly and noiselessly in front of her, and the table was decked for dessert, and as the talk murmured on in familiar grooves, she sat there, rather like a judge, listening to her parents, who did, indeed, feel it very pleasant when they made her laugh.

Daily life in a house where there are young and old is full of curious little ceremonies and pieties, which are discharged quite punctually, though the meaning of them is obscure, and a mystery has come to brood over them which lends even a superstitious charm to their performance. Such was the nightly ceremony of the cigar and the glass of port, which were placed on the right hand and on the left hand of Mr. Hilbery, and simultaneously Mrs. Hilbery and Katharine left the room. All the years they had lived together they had never seen Mr. Hilbery smoke his cigar or drink his port, and they would have felt it unseemly if, by chance, they had surprised him as he sat there. These short, but clearly marked, periods of separation between the sexes were always used for an intimate postscript to what had been said at dinner, the sense of being women together coming out most strongly when the male sex was, as if by some religious rite, secluded from the female. Katharine knew by heart the sort of mood that possessed her as she walked upstairs to the drawing-room, her mother’s arm in hers; and she could anticipate the pleasure with which, when she had turned on the lights, they both regarded the drawing-room, fresh swept and set in order for the last section of the day, with the red parrots swinging on the chintz curtains, and the arm-chairs warming in the blaze. Mrs. Hilbery stood over the fire, with one foot on the fender, and her skirts slightly raised.

“Oh, Katharine,” she exclaimed, “how you’ve made me think of Mamma and the old days in Russell Square! I can see the chandeliers, and the green silk of the piano, and Mamma sitting in her cashmere shawl by the window, singing till the little ragamuffin boys outside stopped to listen. Papa sent me in with a bunch of violets while he waited round the corner. It must have been a summer evening. That was before things were hopeless….”

As she spoke an expression of regret, which must have come frequently to cause the lines which now grew deep round the lips and eyes, settled on her face. The poet’s marriage had not been a happy one. He had left his wife, and after some years of a rather reckless existence, she had died, before her time. This disaster had led to great irregularities of education, and, indeed, Mrs. Hilbery might be said to have escaped education altogether. But she had been her father’s companion at the season when he wrote the finest of his poems. She had sat on his knee in taverns and other haunts of drunken poets, and it was for her sake, so people said, that he had cured himself of his dissipation, and become the irreproachable literary character that the world knows, whose inspiration had deserted him. As Mrs. Hilbery grew old she thought more and more of the past, and this ancient disaster seemed at times almost to prey upon her mind, as if she could not pass out of life herself without laying the ghost of her parent’s sorrow to rest.

Katharine wished to comfort her mother, but it was difficult to do this satisfactorily when the facts themselves were so much of a legend. The house in Russell Square, for example, with its noble rooms, and the magnolia-tree in the garden, and the sweet-voiced piano, and the sound of feet coming down the corridors, and other properties of size and romance—had they any existence? Yet why should Mrs. Alardyce live all alone in this gigantic mansion, and, if she did not live alone, with whom did she live? For its own sake, Katharine rather liked this tragic story, and would have been glad to hear the details of it, and to have been able to discuss them frankly. But this it became less and less possible to do, for though Mrs. Hilbery was constantly reverting to the story, it was always in this tentative and restless fashion, as though by a touch here and there she could set things straight which had been crooked these sixty years. Perhaps, indeed, she no longer knew what the truth was.

“If they’d lived now,” she concluded, “I feel it wouldn’t have happened. People aren’t so set upon tragedy as they were then. If my father had been able to go round the world, or if she’d had a rest cure, everything would have come right. But what could I do? And then they had bad friends, both of them, who made mischief. Ah, Katharine, when you marry, be quite, quite sure that you love your husband!”

The tears stood in Mrs. Hilbery’s eyes.

While comforting her, Katharine thought to herself, “Now this is what Mary Datchet and Mr. Denham don’t understand. This is the sort of position I’m always getting into. How simple it must be to live as they do!” for all the evening she had been comparing her home and her father and mother with the Suffrage office and the people there.

“But, Katharine,” Mrs. Hilbery continued, with one of her sudden changes of mood, “though, Heaven knows, I don’t want to see you married, surely if ever a man loved a woman, William loves you. And it’s a nice, rich-sounding name too—Katharine Rodney, which, unfortunately, doesn’t mean that he’s got any money, because he hasn’t.”

The alteration of her name annoyed Katharine, and she observed, rather sharply, that she didn’t want to marry any one.

“It’s very dull that you can only marry one husband, certainly,” Mrs. Hilbery reflected. “I always wish that you could marry everybody who wants to marry you. Perhaps they’ll come to that in time, but meanwhile I confess that dear William—” But here Mr. Hilbery came in, and the more solid part of the evening began. This consisted in the reading aloud by Katharine from some prose work or other, while her mother knitted scarves intermittently on a little circular frame, and her father read the newspaper, not so attentively but that he could comment humorously now and again upon the fortunes of the hero and the heroine. The Hilberys subscribed to a library, which delivered books on Tuesdays and Fridays, and Katharine did her best to interest her parents in the works of living and highly respectable authors; but Mrs. Hilbery was perturbed by the very look of the light, gold-wreathed volumes, and would make little faces as if she tasted something bitter as the reading went on; while Mr. Hilbery would treat the moderns with a curious elaborate banter such as one might apply to the antics of a promising child. So this evening, after five pages or so of one of these masters, Mrs. Hilbery protested that it was all too clever and cheap and nasty for words.

“Please, Katharine, read us something real.”

Katharine had to go to the bookcase and choose a portly volume in sleek, yellow calf, which had directly a sedative effect upon both her parents. But the delivery of the evening post broke in upon the periods of Henry Fielding, and Katharine found that her letters needed all her attention.

[]

Chapter VIII

She took her letters up to her room with her, having persuaded her mother to go to bed directly Mr. Hilbery left them, for so long as she sat in the same room as her mother, Mrs. Hilbery might, at any moment, ask for a sight of the post. A very hasty glance through many sheets had shown Katharine that, by some coincidence, her attention had to be directed to many different anxieties simultaneously. In the first place, Rodney had written a very full account of his state of mind, which was illustrated by a sonnet, and he demanded a reconsideration of their position, which agitated Katharine more than she liked. Then there were two letters which had to be laid side by side and compared before she could make out the truth of their story, and even when she knew the facts she could not decide what to make of them; and finally she had to reflect upon a great many pages from a cousin who found himself in financial difficulties, which forced him to the uncongenial occupation of teaching the young ladies of Bungay to play upon the violin.

But the two letters which each told the same story differently were the chief source of her perplexity. She was really rather shocked to find it definitely established that her own second cousin, Cyril Alardyce, had lived for the last four years with a woman who was not his wife, who had borne him two children, and was now about to bear him another. This state of things had been discovered by Mrs. Milvain, her aunt Celia, a zealous inquirer into such matters, whose letter was also under consideration. Cyril, she said, must be made to marry the woman at once; and Cyril, rightly or wrongly, was indignant with such interference with his affairs, and would not own that he had any cause to be ashamed of himself. Had he any cause to be ashamed of himself, Katharine wondered; and she turned to her aunt again.

“Remember,” she wrote, in her profuse, emphatic statement, “that he bears your grandfather’s name, and so will the child that is to be born. The poor boy is not so much to blame as the woman who deluded him, thinking him a gentleman, which he is, and having money, which he has not.”

“What would Ralph Denham say to this?” thought Katharine, beginning to pace up and down her bedroom. She twitched aside the curtains, so that, on turning, she was faced by darkness, and looking out, could just distinguish the branches of a plane-tree and the yellow lights of some one else’s windows.

“What would Mary Datchet and Ralph Denham say?” she reflected, pausing by the window, which, as the night was warm, she raised, in order to feel the air upon her face, and to lose herself in the nothingness of night. But with the air the distant humming sound of far-off crowded thoroughfares was admitted to the room. The incessant and tumultuous hum of the distant traffic seemed, as she stood there, to represent the thick texture of her life, for her life was so hemmed in with the progress of other lives that the sound of its own advance was inaudible. People like Ralph and Mary, she thought, had it all their own way, and an empty space before them, and, as she envied them, she cast her mind out to imagine an empty land where all this petty intercourse of men and women, this life made up of the dense crossings and entanglements of men and women, had no existence whatever. Even now, alone, at night, looking out into the shapeless mass of London, she was forced to remember that there was one point and here another with which she had some connexion. William Rodney, at this very moment, was seated in a minute speck of light somewhere to the east of her, and his mind was occupied, not with his book, but with her. She wished that no one in the whole world would think of her. However, there was no way of escaping from one’s fellow-beings, she concluded, and shut the window with a sigh, and returned once more to her letters.

She could not doubt but that William’s letter was the most genuine she had yet received from him. He had come to the conclusion that he could not live without her, he wrote. He believed that he knew her, and could give her happiness, and that their marriage would be unlike other marriages. Nor was the sonnet, in spite of its accomplishment, lacking in passion, and Katharine, as she read the pages through again, could see in what direction her feelings ought to flow, supposing they revealed themselves. She would come to feel a humorous sort of tenderness for him, a zealous care for his susceptibilities, and, after all, she considered, thinking of her father and mother, what is love?

Naturally, with her face, position, and background, she had experience of young men who wished to marry her, and made protestations of love, but, perhaps because she did not return the feeling, it remained something of a pageant to her. Not having experience of it herself, her mind had unconsciously occupied itself for some years in dressing up an image of love, and the marriage that was the outcome of love, and the man who inspired love, which naturally dwarfed any examples that came her way. Easily, and without correction by reason, her imagination made pictures, superb backgrounds casting a rich though phantom light upon the facts in the foreground. Splendid as the waters that drop with resounding thunder from high ledges of rock, and plunge downwards into the blue depths of night, was the presence of love she dreamt, drawing into it every drop of the force of life, and dashing them all asunder in the superb catastrophe in which everything was surrendered, and nothing might be reclaimed. The man, too, was some magnanimous hero, riding a great horse by the shore of the sea. They rode through forests together, they galloped by the rim of the sea. But waking, she was able to contemplate a perfectly loveless marriage, as the thing one did actually in real life, for possibly the people who dream thus are those who do the most prosaic things.

At this moment she was much inclined to sit on into the night, spinning her light fabric of thoughts until she tired of their futility, and went to her mathematics; but, as she knew very well, it was necessary that she should see her father before he went to bed. The case of Cyril Alardyce must be discussed, her mother’s illusions and the rights of the family attended to. Being vague herself as to what all this amounted to, she had to take counsel with her father. She took her letters in her hand and went downstairs. It was past eleven, and the clocks had come into their reign, the grandfather’s clock in the hall ticking in competition with the small clock on the landing. Mr. Hilbery’s study ran out behind the rest of the house, on the ground floor, and was a very silent, subterranean place, the sun in daytime casting a mere abstract of light through a skylight upon his books and the large table, with its spread of white papers, now illumined by a green reading-lamp. Here Mr. Hilbery sat editing his review, or placing together documents by means of which it could be proved that Shelley had written “of” instead of “and,” or that the inn in which Byron had slept was called the “Nag’s Head” and not the “Turkish Knight,” or that the Christian name of Keats’s uncle had been John rather than Richard, for he knew more minute details about these poets than any man in England, probably, and was preparing an edition of Shelley which scrupulously observed the poet’s system of punctuation. He saw the humour of these researches, but that did not prevent him from carrying them out with the utmost scrupulosity.

He was lying back comfortably in a deep arm-chair, smoking a cigar, and ruminating the fruitful question as to whether Coleridge had wished to marry Dorothy Wordsworth, and what, if he had done so, would have been the consequences to him in particular, and to literature in general. When Katharine came in he reflected that he knew what she had come for, and he made a pencil note before he spoke to her. Having done this, he saw that she was reading, and he watched her for a moment without saying anything. She was reading “Isabella and the Pot of Basil,” and her mind was full of the Italian hills and the blue daylight, and the hedges set with little rosettes of red and white roses. Feeling that her father waited for her, she sighed and said, shutting her book:

“I’ve had a letter from Aunt Celia about Cyril, father…. It seems to be true—about his marriage. What are we to do?”

“Cyril seems to have been behaving in a very foolish manner,” said Mr. Hilbery, in his pleasant and deliberate tones.

Katharine found some difficulty in carrying on the conversation, while her father balanced his finger-tips so judiciously, and seemed to reserve so many of his thoughts for himself.

“He’s about done for himself, I should say,” he continued. Without saying anything, he took Katharine’s letters out of her hand, adjusted his eyeglasses, and read them through.

At length he said “Humph!” and gave the letters back to her.

“Mother knows nothing about it,” Katharine remarked. “Will you tell her?”

“I shall tell your mother. But I shall tell her that there is nothing whatever for us to do.”

“But the marriage?” Katharine asked, with some diffidence.

Mr. Hilbery said nothing, and stared into the fire.

“What in the name of conscience did he do it for?” he speculated at last, rather to himself than to her.

Katharine had begun to read her aunt’s letter over again, and she now quoted a sentence. “Ibsen and Butler…. He has sent me a letter full of quotations—nonsense, though clever nonsense.”

“Well, if the younger generation want to carry on its life on those lines, it’s none of our affair,” he remarked.

“But isn’t it our affair, perhaps, to make them get married?” Katharine asked rather wearily.

“Why the dickens should they apply to me?” her father demanded with sudden irritation.

“Only as the head of the family——”

“But I’m not the head of the family. Alfred’s the head of the family. Let them apply to Alfred,” said Mr. Hilbery, relapsing again into his arm-chair. Katharine was aware that she had touched a sensitive spot, however, in mentioning the family.

“I think, perhaps, the best thing would be for me to go and see them,” she observed.

“I won’t have you going anywhere near them,” Mr. Hilbery replied with unwonted decision and authority. “Indeed, I don’t understand why they’ve dragged you into the business at all—I don’t see that it’s got anything to do with you.”

“I’ve always been friends with Cyril,” Katharine observed.

“But did he ever tell you anything about this?” Mr. Hilbery asked rather sharply.

Katharine shook her head. She was, indeed, a good deal hurt that Cyril had not confided in her—did he think, as Ralph Denham or Mary Datchet might think, that she was, for some reason, unsympathetic—hostile even?

“As to your mother,” said Mr. Hilbery, after a pause, in which he seemed to be considering the colour of the flames, “you had better tell her the facts. She’d better know the facts before every one begins to talk about it, though why Aunt Celia thinks it necessary to come, I’m sure I don’t know. And the less talk there is the better.”

Granting the assumption that gentlemen of sixty who are highly cultivated, and have had much experience of life, probably think of many things which they do not say, Katharine could not help feeling rather puzzled by her father’s attitude, as she went back to her room. What a distance he was from it all! How superficially he smoothed these events into a semblance of decency which harmonized with his own view of life! He never wondered what Cyril had felt, nor did the hidden aspects of the case tempt him to examine into them. He merely seemed to realize, rather languidly, that Cyril had behaved in a way which was foolish, because other people did not behave in that way. He seemed to be looking through a telescope at little figures hundreds of miles in the distance.

Her selfish anxiety not to have to tell Mrs. Hilbery what had happened made her follow her father into the hall after breakfast the next morning in order to question him.

“Have you told mother?” she asked. Her manner to her father was almost stern, and she seemed to hold endless depths of reflection in the dark of her eyes.

Mr. Hilbery sighed.

“My dear child, it went out of my head.” He smoothed his silk hat energetically, and at once affected an air of hurry. “I’ll send a note round from the office…. I’m late this morning, and I’ve any amount of proofs to get through.”

“That wouldn’t do at all,” Katharine said decidedly. “She must be told—you or I must tell her. We ought to have told her at first.”

Mr. Hilbery had now placed his hat on his head, and his hand was on the door-knob. An expression which Katharine knew well from her childhood, when he asked her to shield him in some neglect of duty, came into his eyes; malice, humour, and irresponsibility were blended in it. He nodded his head to and fro significantly, opened the door with an adroit movement, and stepped out with a lightness unexpected at his age. He waved his hand once to his daughter, and was gone. Left alone, Katharine could not help laughing to find herself cheated as usual in domestic bargainings with her father, and left to do the disagreeable work which belonged, by rights, to him.

[]

Chapter IX

Katharine disliked telling her mother about Cyril’s misbehaviour quite as much as her father did, and for much the same reasons. They both shrank, nervously, as people fear the report of a gun on the stage, from all that would have to be said on this occasion. Katharine, moreover, was unable to decide what she thought of Cyril’s misbehaviour. As usual, she saw something which her father and mother did not see, and the effect of that something was to suspend Cyril’s behaviour in her mind without any qualification at all. They would think whether it was good or bad; to her it was merely a thing that had happened.

When Katharine reached the study, Mrs. Hilbery had already dipped her pen in the ink.

“Katharine,” she said, lifting it in the air, “I’ve just made out such a queer, strange thing about your grandfather. I’m three years and six months older than he was when he died. I couldn’t very well have been his mother, but I might have been his elder sister, and that seems to me such a pleasant fancy. I’m going to start quite fresh this morning, and get a lot done.”

She began her sentence, at any rate, and Katharine sat down at her own table, untied the bundle of old letters upon which she was working, smoothed them out absent-mindedly, and began to decipher the faded script. In a minute she looked across at her mother, to judge her mood. Peace and happiness had relaxed every muscle in her face; her lips were parted very slightly, and her breath came in smooth, controlled inspirations, like those of a child who is surrounding itself with a building of bricks, and increasing in ecstasy as each brick is placed in position. So Mrs. Hilbery was raising round her the skies and trees of the past with every stroke of her pen, and recalling the voices of the dead. Quiet as the room was, and undisturbed by the sounds of the present moment, Katharine could fancy that here was a deep pool of past time, and that she and her mother were bathed in the light of sixty years ago. What could the present give, she wondered, to compare with the rich crowd of gifts bestowed by the past? Here was a Thursday morning in process of manufacture; each second was minted fresh by the clock upon the mantelpiece. She strained her ears and could just hear, far off, the hoot of a motor-car and the rush of wheels coming nearer and dying away again, and the voices of men crying old iron and vegetables in one of the poorer streets at the back of the house. Rooms, of course, accumulate their suggestions, and any room in which one has been used to carry on any particular occupation gives off memories of moods, of ideas, of postures that have been seen in it; so that to attempt any different kind of work there is almost impossible.

Katharine was unconsciously affected, each time she entered her mother’s room, by all these influences, which had had their birth years ago, when she was a child, and had something sweet and solemn about them, and connected themselves with early memories of the cavernous glooms and sonorous echoes of the Abbey where her grandfather lay buried. All the books and pictures, even the chairs and tables, had belonged to him, or had reference to him; even the china dogs on the mantelpiece and the little shepherdesses with their sheep had been bought by him for a penny a piece from a man who used to stand with a tray of toys in Kensington High Street, as Katharine had often heard her mother tell. Often she had sat in this room, with her mind fixed so firmly on those vanished figures that she could almost see the muscles round their eyes and lips, and had given to each his own voice, with its tricks of accent, and his coat and his cravat. Often she had seemed to herself to be moving among them, an invisible ghost among the living, better acquainted with them than with her own friends, because she knew their secrets and possessed a divine foreknowledge of their destiny. They had been so unhappy, such muddlers, so wrong-headed, it seemed to her. She could have told them what to do, and what not to do. It was a melancholy fact that they would pay no heed to her, and were bound to come to grief in their own antiquated way. Their behaviour was often grotesquely irrational; their conventions monstrously absurd; and yet, as she brooded upon them, she felt so closely attached to them that it was useless to try to pass judgment upon them. She very nearly lost consciousness that she was a separate being, with a future of her own. On a morning of slight depression, such as this, she would try to find some sort of clue to the muddle which their old letters presented; some reason which seemed to make it worth while to them; some aim which they kept steadily in view—but she was interrupted.

Mrs. Hilbery had risen from her table, and was standing looking out of the window at a string of barges swimming up the river.

Katharine watched her. Suddenly Mrs. Hilbery turned abruptly, and exclaimed:

“I really believe I’m bewitched! I only want three sentences, you see, something quite straightforward and commonplace, and I can’t find ’em.”

She began to pace up and down the room, snatching up her duster; but she was too much annoyed to find any relief, as yet, in polishing the backs of books.

“Besides,” she said, giving the sheet she had written to Katharine, “I don’t believe this’ll do. Did your grandfather ever visit the Hebrides, Katharine?” She looked in a strangely beseeching way at her daughter. “My mind got running on the Hebrides, and I couldn’t help writing a little description of them. Perhaps it would do at the beginning of a chapter. Chapters often begin quite differently from the way they go on, you know.” Katharine read what her mother had written. She might have been a schoolmaster criticizing a child’s essay. Her face gave Mrs. Hilbery, who watched it anxiously, no ground for hope.

“It’s very beautiful,” she stated, “but, you see, mother, we ought to go from point to point——”

“Oh, I know,” Mrs. Hilbery exclaimed. “And that’s just what I can’t do. Things keep coming into my head. It isn’t that I don’t know everything and feel everything (who did know him, if I didn’t?), but I can’t put it down, you see. There’s a kind of blind spot,” she said, touching her forehead, “there. And when I can’t sleep o’ nights, I fancy I shall die without having done it.”

From exultation she had passed to the depths of depression which the imagination of her death aroused. The depression communicated itself to Katharine. How impotent they were, fiddling about all day long with papers! And the clock was striking eleven and nothing done! She watched her mother, now rummaging in a great brass-bound box which stood by her table, but she did not go to her help. Of course, Katharine reflected, her mother had now lost some paper, and they would waste the rest of the morning looking for it. She cast her eyes down in irritation, and read again her mother’s musical sentences about the silver gulls, and the roots of little pink flowers washed by pellucid streams, and the blue mists of hyacinths, until she was struck by her mother’s silence. She raised her eyes. Mrs. Hilbery had emptied a portfolio containing old photographs over her table, and was looking from one to another.

“Surely, Katharine,” she said, “the men were far handsomer in those days than they are now, in spite of their odious whiskers? Look at old John Graham, in his white waistcoat—look at Uncle Harley. That’s Peter the manservant, I suppose. Uncle John brought him back from India.”

Katharine looked at her mother, but did not stir or answer. She had suddenly become very angry, with a rage which their relationship made silent, and therefore doubly powerful and critical. She felt all the unfairness of the claim which her mother tacitly made to her time and sympathy, and what Mrs. Hilbery took, Katharine thought bitterly, she wasted. Then, in a flash, she remembered that she had still to tell her about Cyril’s misbehaviour. Her anger immediately dissipated itself; it broke like some wave that has gathered itself high above the rest; the waters were resumed into the sea again, and Katharine felt once more full of peace and solicitude, and anxious only that her mother should be protected from pain. She crossed the room instinctively, and sat on the arm of her mother’s chair. Mrs. Hilbery leant her head against her daughter’s body.

“What is nobler,” she mused, turning over the photographs, “than to be a woman to whom every one turns, in sorrow or difficulty? How have the young women of your generation improved upon that, Katharine? I can see them now, sweeping over the lawns at Melbury House, in their flounces and furbelows, so calm and stately and imperial (and the monkey and the little black dwarf following behind), as if nothing mattered in the world but to be beautiful and kind. But they did more than we do, I sometimes think. They were, and that’s better than doing. They seem to me like ships, like majestic ships, holding on their way, not shoving or pushing, not fretted by little things, as we are, but taking their way, like ships with white sails.”

Katharine tried to interrrupt this discourse, but the opportunity did not come, and she could not forbear to turn over the pages of the album in which the old photographs were stored. The faces of these men and women shone forth wonderfully after the hubbub of living faces, and seemed, as her mother had said, to wear a marvellous dignity and calm, as if they had ruled their kingdoms justly and deserved great love. Some were of almost incredible beauty, others were ugly enough in a forcible way, but none were dull or bored or insignificant. The superb stiff folds of the crinolines suited the women; the cloaks and hats of the gentlemen seemed full of character. Once more Katharine felt the serene air all round her, and seemed far off to hear the solemn beating of the sea upon the shore. But she knew that she must join the present on to this past.

Mrs. Hilbery was rambling on, from story to story.

“That’s Janie Mannering,” she said, pointing to a superb, white-haired dame, whose satin robes seemed strung with pearls. “I must have told you how she found her cook drunk under the kitchen table when the Empress was coming to dinner, and tucked up her velvet sleeves (she always dressed like an Empress herself), cooked the whole meal, and appeared in the drawing-room as if she’d been sleeping on a bank of roses all day. She could do anything with her hands—they all could—make a cottage or embroider a petticoat.

“And that’s Queenie Colquhoun,” she went on, turning the pages, “who took her coffin out with her to Jamaica, packed with lovely shawls and bonnets, because you couldn’t get coffins in Jamaica, and she had a horror of dying there (as she did), and being devoured by the white ants. And there’s Sabine, the loveliest of them all; ah! it was like a star rising when she came into the room. And that’s Miriam, in her coachman’s cloak, with all the little capes on, and she wore great top-boots underneath. You young people may say you’re unconventional, but you’re nothing compared with her.”

Turning the page, she came upon the picture of a very masculine, handsome lady, whose head the photographer had adorned with an imperial crown.

“Ah, you wretch!” Mrs. Hilbery exclaimed, “what a wicked old despot you were, in your day! How we all bowed down before you! ‘Maggie,’ she used to say, ‘if it hadn’t been for me, where would you be now?’ And it was true; she brought them together, you know. She said to my father, ‘Marry her,’ and he did; and she said to poor little Clara, ‘Fall down and worship him,’ and she did; but she got up again, of course. What else could one expect? She was a mere child—eighteen—and half dead with fright, too. But that old tyrant never repented. She used to say that she had given them three perfect months, and no one had a right to more; and I sometimes think, Katharine, that’s true, you know. It’s more than most of us have, only we have to pretend, which was a thing neither of them could ever do. I fancy,” Mrs. Hilbery mused, “that there was a kind of sincerity in those days between men and women which, with all your outspokenness, you haven’t got.”

Katharine again tried to interrupt. But Mrs. Hilbery had been gathering impetus from her recollections, and was now in high spirits.

“They must have been good friends at heart,” she resumed, “because she used to sing his songs. Ah, how did it go?” and Mrs. Hilbery, who had a very sweet voice, trolled out a famous lyric of her father’s which had been set to an absurdly and charmingly sentimental air by some early Victorian composer.

“It’s the vitality of them!” she concluded, striking her fist against the table. “That’s what we haven’t got! We’re virtuous, we’re earnest, we go to meetings, we pay the poor their wages, but we don’t live as they lived. As often as not, my father wasn’t in bed three nights out of the seven, but always fresh as paint in the morning. I hear him now, come singing up the stairs to the nursery, and tossing the loaf for breakfast on his sword-stick, and then off we went for a day’s pleasuring—Richmond, Hampton Court, the Surrey Hills. Why shouldn’t we go, Katharine? It’s going to be a fine day.”

At this moment, just as Mrs. Hilbery was examining the weather from the window, there was a knock at the door. A slight, elderly lady came in, and was saluted by Katharine, with very evident dismay, as “Aunt Celia!” She was dismayed because she guessed why Aunt Celia had come. It was certainly in order to discuss the case of Cyril and the woman who was not his wife, and owing to her procrastination Mrs. Hilbery was quite unprepared. Who could be more unprepared? Here she was, suggesting that all three of them should go on a jaunt to Blackfriars to inspect the site of Shakespeare’s theatre, for the weather was hardly settled enough for the country.

To this proposal Mrs. Milvain listened with a patient smile, which indicated that for many years she had accepted such eccentricities in her sister-in-law with bland philosophy. Katharine took up her position at some distance, standing with her foot on the fender, as though by so doing she could get a better view of the matter. But, in spite of her aunt’s presence, how unreal the whole question of Cyril and his morality appeared! The difficulty, it now seemed, was not to break the news gently to Mrs. Hilbery, but to make her understand it. How was one to lasso her mind, and tether it to this minute, unimportant spot? A matter-of-fact statement seemed best.

“I think Aunt Celia has come to talk about Cyril, mother,” she said rather brutally. “Aunt Celia has discovered that Cyril is married. He has a wife and children.”

“No, he is not married,” Mrs. Milvain interposed, in low tones, addressing herself to Mrs. Hilbery. “He has two children, and another on the way.”

Mrs. Hilbery looked from one to the other in bewilderment.

“We thought it better to wait until it was proved before we told you,” Katharine added.

“But I met Cyril only a fortnight ago at the National Gallery!” Mrs. Hilbery exclaimed. “I don’t believe a word of it,” and she tossed her head with a smile on her lips at Mrs. Milvain, as though she could quite understand her mistake, which was a very natural mistake, in the case of a childless woman, whose husband was something very dull in the Board of Trade.

“I didn’t wish to believe it, Maggie,” said Mrs. Milvain. “For a long time I couldn’t believe it. But now I’ve seen, and I have to believe it.”

“Katharine,” Mrs. Hilbery demanded, “does your father know of this?”

Katharine nodded.

“Cyril married!” Mrs. Hilbery repeated. “And never telling us a word, though we’ve had him in our house since he was a child—noble William’s son! I can’t believe my ears!”

Feeling that the burden of proof was laid upon her, Mrs. Milvain now proceeded with her story. She was elderly and fragile, but her childlessness seemed always to impose these painful duties on her, and to revere the family, and to keep it in repair, had now become the chief object of her life. She told her story in a low, spasmodic, and somewhat broken voice.

“I have suspected for some time that he was not happy. There were new lines on his face. So I went to his rooms, when I knew he was engaged at the poor men’s college. He lectures there—Roman law, you know, or it may be Greek. The landlady said Mr. Alardyce only slept there about once a fortnight now. He looked so ill, she said. She had seen him with a young person. I suspected something directly. I went to his room, and there was an envelope on the mantelpiece, and a letter with an address in Seton Street, off the Kennington Road.”

Mrs. Hilbery fidgeted rather restlessly, and hummed fragments of her tune, as if to interrupt.

“I went to Seton Street,” Aunt Celia continued firmly. “A very low place—lodging-houses, you know, with canaries in the window. Number seven just like all the others. I rang, I knocked; no one came. I went down the area. I am certain I saw some one inside—children—a cradle. But no reply—no reply.” She sighed, and looked straight in front of her with a glazed expression in her half-veiled blue eyes.

“I stood in the street,” she resumed, “in case I could catch a sight of one of them. It seemed a very long time. There were rough men singing in the public-house round the corner. At last the door opened, and some one—it must have been the woman herself—came right past me. There was only the pillar-box between us.”

“And what did she look like?” Mrs. Hilbery demanded.

“One could see how the poor boy had been deluded,” was all that Mrs. Milvain vouchsafed by way of description.

“Poor thing!” Mrs. Hilbery exclaimed.

“Poor Cyril!” Mrs. Milvain said, laying a slight emphasis upon Cyril.

“But they’ve got nothing to live upon,” Mrs. Hilbery continued. “If he’d come to us like a man,” she went on, “and said, ‘I’ve been a fool,’ one would have pitied him; one would have tried to help him. There’s nothing so disgraceful after all—But he’s been going about all these years, pretending, letting one take it for granted, that he was single. And the poor deserted little wife—”

“She is not his wife,” Aunt Celia interrupted.

“I’ve never heard anything so detestable!” Mrs. Hilbery wound up, striking her fist on the arm of her chair. As she realized the facts she became thoroughly disgusted, although, perhaps, she was more hurt by the concealment of the sin than by the sin itself. She looked splendidly roused and indignant; and Katharine felt an immense relief and pride in her mother. It was plain that her indignation was very genuine, and that her mind was as perfectly focused upon the facts as any one could wish—more so, by a long way, than Aunt Celia’s mind, which seemed to be timidly circling, with a morbid pleasure, in these unpleasant shades. She and her mother together would take the situation in hand, visit Cyril, and see the whole thing through.

“We must realize Cyril’s point of view first,” she said, speaking directly to her mother, as if to a contemporary, but before the words were out of her mouth, there was more confusion outside, and Cousin Caroline, Mrs. Hilbery’s maiden cousin entered the room. Although she was by birth an Alardyce, and Aunt Celia a Hilbery, the complexities of the family relationship were such that each was at once first and second cousin to the other, and thus aunt and cousin to the culprit Cyril, so that his misbehaviour was almost as much Cousin Caroline’s affair as Aunt Celia’s. Cousin Caroline was a lady of very imposing height and circumference, but in spite of her size and her handsome trappings, there was something exposed and unsheltered in her expression, as if for many summers her thin red skin and hooked nose and reduplication of chins, so much resembling the profile of a cockatoo, had been bared to the weather; she was, indeed, a single lady; but she had, it was the habit to say, “made a life for herself,” and was thus entitled to be heard with respect.

“This unhappy business,” she began, out of breath as she was. “If the train had not gone out of the station just as I arrived, I should have been with you before. Celia has doubtless told you. You will agree with me, Maggie. He must be made to marry her at once—for the sake of the children——”

“But does he refuse to marry her?” Mrs. Hilbery inquired, with a return of her bewilderment.

“He has written an absurd perverted letter, all quotations,” Cousin Caroline puffed. “He thinks he’s doing a very fine thing, where we only see the folly of it…. The girl’s every bit as infatuated as he is—for which I blame him.”

“She entangled him,” Aunt Celia intervened, with a very curious smoothness of intonation, which seemed to convey a vision of threads weaving and interweaving a close, white mesh round their victim.

“It’s no use going into the rights and wrongs of the affair now, Celia,” said Cousin Caroline with some acerbity, for she believed herself the only practical one of the family, and regretted that, owing to the slowness of the kitchen clock, Mrs. Milvain had already confused poor dear Maggie with her own incomplete version of the facts. “The mischief’s done, and very ugly mischief too. Are we to allow the third child to be born out of wedlock? (I am sorry to have to say these things before you, Katharine.) He will bear your name, Maggie—your father’s name, remember.”

“But let us hope it will be a girl,” said Mrs. Hilbery.

Katharine, who had been looking at her mother constantly, while the chatter of tongues held sway, perceived that the look of straightforward indignation had already vanished; her mother was evidently casting about in her mind for some method of escape, or bright spot, or sudden illumination which should show to the satisfaction of everybody that all had happened, miraculously but incontestably, for the best.

“It’s detestable—quite detestable!” she repeated, but in tones of no great assurance; and then her face lit up with a smile which, tentative at first, soon became almost assured. “Nowadays, people don’t think so badly of these things as they used to do,” she began. “It will be horribly uncomfortable for them sometimes, but if they are brave, clever children, as they will be, I dare say it’ll make remarkable people of them in the end. Robert Browning used to say that every great man has Jewish blood in him, and we must try to look at it in that light. And, after all, Cyril has acted on principle. One may disagree with his principle, but, at least, one can respect it—like the French Revolution, or Cromwell cutting the King’s head off. Some of the most terrible things in history have been done on principle,” she concluded.

“I’m afraid I take a very different view of principle,” Cousin Caroline remarked tartly.

“Principle!” Aunt Celia repeated, with an air of deprecating such a word in such a connexion. “I will go to-morrow and see him,” she added.

“But why should you take these disagreeable things upon yourself, Celia?” Mrs. Hilbery interposed, and Cousin Caroline thereupon protested with some further plan involving sacrifice of herself.

Growing weary of it all, Katharine turned to the window, and stood among the folds of the curtain, pressing close to the window-pane, and gazing disconsolately at the river much in the attitude of a child depressed by the meaningless talk of its elders. She was much disappointed in her mother—and in herself too. The little tug which she gave to the blind, letting it fly up to the top with a snap, signified her annoyance. She was very angry, and yet impotent to give expression to her anger, or know with whom she was angry. How they talked and moralized and made up stories to suit their own version of the becoming, and secretly praised their own devotion and tact! No; they had their dwelling in a mist, she decided; hundreds of miles away—away from what? “Perhaps it would be better if I married William,” she thought suddenly, and the thought appeared to loom through the mist like solid ground. She stood there, thinking of her own destiny, and the elder ladies talked on, until they had talked themselves into a decision to ask the young woman to luncheon, and tell her, very friendlily, how such behaviour appeared to women like themselves, who knew the world. And then Mrs. Hilbery was struck by a better idea.

[]

Chapter X

Messrs. Grateley and Hooper, the solicitors in whose firm Ralph Denham was clerk, had their office in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and there Ralph Denham appeared every morning very punctually at ten o’clock. His punctuality, together with other qualities, marked him out among the clerks for success, and indeed it would have been safe to wager that in ten years’ time or so one would find him at the head of his profession, had it not been for a peculiarity which sometimes seemed to make everything about him uncertain and perilous. His sister Joan had already been disturbed by his love of gambling with his savings. Scrutinizing him constantly with the eye of affection, she had become aware of a curious perversity in his temperament which caused her much anxiety, and would have caused her still more if she had not recognized the germs of it in her own nature. She could fancy Ralph suddenly sacrificing his entire career for some fantastic imagination; some cause or idea or even (so her fancy ran) for some woman seen from a railway train hanging up clothes in a back yard. When he had found this beauty or this cause, no force, she knew, would avail to restrain him from pursuit of it. She suspected the East also, and always fidgeted herself when she saw him with a book of Indian travels in his hand, as though he were sucking contagion from the page. On the other hand, no common love affair, had there been such a thing, would have caused her a moment’s uneasiness where Ralph was concerned. He was destined in her fancy for something splendid in the way of success or failure, she knew not which.

And yet nobody could have worked harder or done better in all the recognized stages of a young man’s life than Ralph had done, and Joan had to gather materials for her fears from trifles in her brother’s behaviour which would have escaped any other eye. It was natural that she should be anxious. Life had been so arduous for all of them from the start that she could not help dreading any sudden relaxation of his grasp upon what he held, though, as she knew from inspection of her own life, such sudden impulse to let go and make away from the discipline and the drudgery was sometimes almost irresistible. But with Ralph, if he broke away, she knew that it would be only to put himself under harsher constraint; she figured him toiling through sandy deserts under a tropical sun to find the source of some river or the haunt of some fly; she figured him living by the labour of his hands in some city slum, the victim of one of those terrible theories of right and wrong which were current at the time; she figured him prisoner for life in the house of a woman who had seduced him by her misfortunes. Half proudly, and wholly anxiously, she framed such thoughts, as they sat, late at night, talking together over the gas-stove in Ralph’s bedroom.

It is likely that Ralph would not have recognized his own dream of a future in the forecasts which disturbed his sister’s peace of mind. Certainly, if any one of them had been put before him he would have rejected it with a laugh, as the sort of life that held no attractions for him. He could not have said how it was that he had put these absurd notions into his sister’s head. Indeed, he prided himself upon being well broken into a life of hard work, about which he had no sort of illusions. His vision of his own future, unlike many such forecasts, could have been made public at any moment without a blush; he attributed to himself a strong brain, and conferred on himself a seat in the House of Commons at the age of fifty, a moderate fortune, and, with luck, an unimportant office in a Liberal Government. There was nothing extravagant in a forecast of that kind, and certainly nothing dishonourable. Nevertheless, as his sister guessed, it needed all Ralph’s strength of will, together with the pressure of circumstances, to keep his feet moving in the path which led that way. It needed, in particular, a constant repetition of a phrase to the effect that he shared the common fate, found it best of all, and wished for no other; and by repeating such phrases he acquired punctuality and habits of work, and could very plausibly demonstrate that to be a clerk in a solicitor’s office was the best of all possible lives, and that other ambitions were vain.

But, like all beliefs not genuinely held, this one depended very much upon the amount of acceptance it received from other people, and in private, when the pressure of public opinion was removed, Ralph let himself swing very rapidly away from his actual circumstances upon strange voyages which, indeed, he would have been ashamed to describe. In these dreams, of course, he figured in noble and romantic parts, but self-glorification was not the only motive of them. They gave outlet to some spirit which found no work to do in real life, for, with the pessimism which his lot forced upon him, Ralph had made up his mind that there was no use for what, contemptuously enough, he called dreams, in the world which we inhabit. It sometimes seemed to him that this spirit was the most valuable possession he had; he thought that by means of it he could set flowering waste tracts of the earth, cure many ills, or raise up beauty where none now existed; it was, too, a fierce and potent spirit which would devour the dusty books and parchments on the office wall with one lick of its tongue, and leave him in a minute standing in nakedness, if he gave way to it. His endeavour, for many years, had been to control the spirit, and at the age of twenty-nine he thought he could pride himself upon a life rigidly divided into the hours of work and those of dreams; the two lived side by side without harming each other. As a matter of fact, this effort at discipline had been helped by the interest of a difficult profession, but the old conclusion to which Ralph had come when he left college still held sway in his mind, and tinged his views with the melancholy belief that life for most people compels the exercise of the lower gifts and wastes the precious ones, until it forces us to agree that there is little virtue, as well as little profit, in what once seemed to us the noblest part of our inheritance.

Denham was not altogether popular either in his office or among his family. He was too positive, at this stage of his career, as to what was right and what wrong, too proud of his self-control, and, as is natural in the case of persons not altogether happy or well suited in their conditions, too apt to prove the folly of contentment, if he found any one who confessed to that weakness. In the office his rather ostentatious efficiency annoyed those who took their own work more lightly, and, if they foretold his advancement, it was not altogether sympathetically. Indeed, he appeared to be rather a hard and self-sufficient young man, with a queer temper, and manners that were uncompromisingly abrupt, who was consumed with a desire to get on in the world, which was natural, these critics thought, in a man of no means, but not engaging.

The young men in the office had a perfect right to these opinions, because Denham showed no particular desire for their friendship. He liked them well enough, but shut them up in that compartment of life which was devoted to work. Hitherto, indeed, he had found little difficulty in arranging his life as methodically as he arranged his expenditure, but about this time he began to encounter experiences which were not so easy to classify. Mary Datchet had begun this confusion two years ago by bursting into laughter at some remark of his, almost the first time they met. She could not explain why it was. She thought him quite astonishingly odd. When he knew her well enough to tell her how he spent Monday and Wednesday and Saturday, she was still more amused; she laughed till he laughed, too, without knowing why. It seemed to her very odd that he should know as much about breeding bulldogs as any man in England; that he had a collection of wild flowers found near London; and his weekly visit to old Miss Trotter at Ealing, who was an authority upon the science of Heraldry, never failed to excite her laughter. She wanted to know everything, even the kind of cake which the old lady supplied on these occasions; and their summer excursions to churches in the neighbourhood of London for the purpose of taking rubbings of the brasses became most important festivals, from the interest she took in them. In six months she knew more about his odd friends and hobbies than his own brothers and sisters knew, after living with him all his life; and Ralph found this very pleasant, though disordering, for his own view of himself had always been profoundly serious.

Certainly it was very pleasant to be with Mary Datchet and to become, directly the door was shut, quite a different sort of person, eccentric and lovable, with scarcely any likeness to the self most people knew. He became less serious, and rather less dictatorial at home, for he was apt to hear Mary laughing at him, and telling him, as she was fond of doing, that he knew nothing at all about anything. She made him, also, take an interest in public questions, for which she had a natural liking; and was in process of turning him from Tory to Radical, after a course of public meetings, which began by boring him acutely, and ended by exciting him even more than they excited her.

But he was reserved; when ideas started up in his mind, he divided them automatically into those he could discuss with Mary, and those he must keep for himself. She knew this and it interested her, for she was accustomed to find young men very ready to talk about themselves, and had come to listen to them as one listens to children, without any thought of herself. But with Ralph, she had very little of this maternal feeling, and, in consequence, a much keener sense of her own individuality.

Late one afternoon Ralph stepped along the Strand to an interview with a lawyer upon business. The afternoon light was almost over, and already streams of greenish and yellowish artificial light were being poured into an atmosphere which, in country lanes, would now have been soft with the smoke of wood fires; and on both sides of the road the shop windows were full of sparkling chains and highly polished leather cases, which stood upon shelves made of thick plate-glass. None of these different objects was seen separately by Denham, but from all of them he drew an impression of stir and cheerfulness. Thus it came about that he saw Katharine Hilbery coming towards him, and looked straight at her, as if she were only an illustration of the argument that was going forward in his mind. In this spirit he noticed the rather set expression in her eyes, and the slight, half-conscious movement of her lips, which, together with her height and the distinction of her dress, made her look as if the scurrying crowd impeded her, and her direction were different from theirs. He noticed this calmly; but suddenly, as he passed her, his hands and knees began to tremble, and his heart beat painfully. She did not see him, and went on repeating to herself some lines which had stuck to her memory: “It’s life that matters, nothing but life—the process of discovering—the everlasting and perpetual process, not the discovery itself at all.” Thus occupied, she did not see Denham, and he had not the courage to stop her. But immediately the whole scene in the Strand wore that curious look of order and purpose which is imparted to the most heterogeneous things when music sounds; and so pleasant was this impression that he was very glad that he had not stopped her, after all. It grew slowly fainter, but lasted until he stood outside the barrister’s chambers.

When his interview with the barrister was over, it was too late to go back to the office. His sight of Katharine had put him queerly out of tune for a domestic evening. Where should he go? To walk through the streets of London until he came to Katharine’s house, to look up at the windows and fancy her within, seemed to him possible for a moment; and then he rejected the plan almost with a blush as, with a curious division of consciousness, one plucks a flower sentimentally and throws it away, with a blush, when it is actually picked. No, he would go and see Mary Datchet. By this time she would be back from her work.

To see Ralph appear unexpectedly in her room threw Mary for a second off her balance. She had been cleaning knives in her little scullery, and when she had let him in she went back again, and turned on the cold-water tap to its fullest volume, and then turned it off again. “Now,” she thought to herself, as she screwed it tight, “I’m not going to let these silly ideas come into my head…. Don’t you think Mr. Asquith deserves to be hanged?” she called back into the sitting-room, and when she joined him, drying her hands, she began to tell him about the latest evasion on the part of the Government with respect to the Women’s Suffrage Bill. Ralph did not want to talk about politics, but he could not help respecting Mary for taking such an interest in public questions. He looked at her as she leant forward, poking the fire, and expressing herself very clearly in phrases which bore distantly the taint of the platform, and he thought, “How absurd Mary would think me if she knew that I almost made up my mind to walk all the way to Chelsea in order to look at Katharine’s windows. She wouldn’t understand it, but I like her very much as she is.”

For some time they discussed what the women had better do; and as Ralph became genuinely interested in the question, Mary unconsciously let her attention wander, and a great desire came over her to talk to Ralph about her own feelings; or, at any rate, about something personal, so that she might see what he felt for her; but she resisted this wish. But she could not prevent him from feeling her lack of interest in what he was saying, and gradually they both became silent. One thought after another came up in Ralph’s mind, but they were all, in some way, connected with Katharine, or with vague feelings of romance and adventure such as she inspired. But he could not talk to Mary about such thoughts; and he pitied her for knowing nothing of what he was feeling. “Here,” he thought, “is where we differ from women; they have no sense of romance.”

“Well, Mary,” he said at length, “why don’t you say something amusing?”

His tone was certainly provoking, but, as a general rule, Mary was not easily provoked. This evening, however, she replied rather sharply:

“Because I’ve got nothing amusing to say, I suppose.”

Ralph thought for a moment, and then remarked:

“You work too hard. I don’t mean your health,” he added, as she laughed scornfully, “I mean that you seem to me to be getting wrapped up in your work.”

“And is that a bad thing?” she asked, shading her eyes with her hand.

“I think it is,” he returned abruptly.

“But only a week ago you were saying the opposite.” Her tone was defiant, but she became curiously depressed. Ralph did not perceive it, and took this opportunity of lecturing her, and expressing his latest views upon the proper conduct of life. She listened, but her main impression was that he had been meeting some one who had influenced him. He was telling her that she ought to read more, and to see that there were other points of view as deserving of attention as her own. Naturally, having last seen him as he left the office in company with Katharine, she attributed the change to her; it was likely that Katharine, on leaving the scene which she had so clearly despised, had pronounced some such criticism, or suggested it by her own attitude. But she knew that Ralph would never admit that he had been influenced by anybody.

“You don’t read enough, Mary,” he was saying. “You ought to read more poetry.”

It was true that Mary’s reading had been rather limited to such works as she needed to know for the sake of examinations; and her time for reading in London was very little. For some reason, no one likes to be told that they do not read enough poetry, but her resentment was only visible in the way she changed the position of her hands, and in the fixed look in her eyes. And then she thought to herself, “I’m behaving exactly as I said I wouldn’t behave,” whereupon she relaxed all her muscles and said, in her reasonable way:

“Tell me what I ought to read, then.”

Ralph had unconsciously been irritated by Mary, and he now delivered himself of a few names of great poets which were the text for a discourse upon the imperfection of Mary’s character and way of life.

“You live with your inferiors,” he said, warming unreasonably, as he knew, to his text. “And you get into a groove because, on the whole, it’s rather a pleasant groove. And you tend to forget what you’re there for. You’ve the feminine habit of making much of details. You don’t see when things matter and when they don’t. And that’s what’s the ruin of all these organizations. That’s why the Suffragists have never done anything all these years. What’s the point of drawing-room meetings and bazaars? You want to have ideas, Mary; get hold of something big; never mind making mistakes, but don’t niggle. Why don’t you throw it all up for a year, and travel?—see something of the world. Don’t be content to live with half a dozen people in a backwater all your life. But you won’t,” he concluded.

“I’ve rather come to that way of thinking myself—about myself, I mean,” said Mary, surprising him by her acquiescence. “I should like to go somewhere far away.”

For a moment they were both silent. Ralph then said:

“But look here, Mary, you haven’t been taking this seriously, have you?” His irritation was spent, and the depression, which she could not keep out of her voice, made him feel suddenly with remorse that he had been hurting her.

“You won’t go away, will you?” he asked. And as she said nothing, he added, “Oh no, don’t go away.”

“I don’t know exactly what I mean to do,” she replied. She hovered on the verge of some discussion of her plans, but she received no encouragement. He fell into one of his queer silences, which seemed to Mary, in spite of all her precautions, to have reference to what she also could not prevent herself from thinking about—their feeling for each other and their relationship. She felt that the two lines of thought bored their way in long, parallel tunnels which came very close indeed, but never ran into each other.

When he had gone, and he left her without breaking his silence more than was needed to wish her good night, she sat on for a time, reviewing what he had said. If love is a devastating fire which melts the whole being into one mountain torrent, Mary was no more in love with Denham than she was in love with her poker or her tongs. But probably these extreme passions are very rare, and the state of mind thus depicted belongs to the very last stages of love, when the power to resist has been eaten away, week by week or day by day. Like most intelligent people, Mary was something of an egoist, to the extent, that is, of attaching great importance to what she felt, and she was by nature enough of a moralist to like to make certain, from time to time, that her feelings were creditable to her. When Ralph left her she thought over her state of mind, and came to the conclusion that it would be a good thing to learn a language—say Italian or German. She then went to a drawer, which she had to unlock, and took from it certain deeply scored manuscript pages. She read them through, looking up from her reading every now and then and thinking very intently for a few seconds about Ralph. She did her best to verify all the qualities in him which gave rise to emotions in her; and persuaded herself that she accounted reasonably for them all. Then she looked back again at her manuscript, and decided that to write grammatical English prose is the hardest thing in the world. But she thought about herself a great deal more than she thought about grammatical English prose or about Ralph Denham, and it may therefore be disputed whether she was in love, or, if so, to which branch of the family her passion belonged.

[]

Chapter XI

It’s life that matters, nothing but life—the process of discovering, the everlasting and perpetual process,” said Katharine, as she passed under the archway, and so into the wide space of King’s Bench Walk, “not the discovery itself at all.” She spoke the last words looking up at Rodney’s windows, which were a semilucent red colour, in her honour, as she knew. He had asked her to tea with him. But she was in a mood when it is almost physically disagreeable to interrupt the stride of one’s thought, and she walked up and down two or three times under the trees before approaching his staircase. She liked getting hold of some book which neither her father or mother had read, and keeping it to herself, and gnawing its contents in privacy, and pondering the meaning without sharing her thoughts with any one, or having to decide whether the book was a good one or a bad one. This evening she had twisted the words of Dostoevsky to suit her mood—a fatalistic mood—to proclaim that the process of discovery was life, and that, presumably, the nature of one’s goal mattered not at all. She sat down for a moment upon one of the seats; felt, herself carried along in the swirl of many things; decided, in her sudden way, that it was time to heave all this thinking overboard, and rose, leaving a fishmonger’s basket on the seat behind her. Two minutes later her rap sounded with authority upon Rodney’s door.

“Well, William,” she said, “I’m afraid I’m late.”

It was true, but he was so glad to see her that he forgot his annoyance. He had been occupied for over an hour in making things ready for her, and he now had his reward in seeing her look right and left, as she slipped her cloak from her shoulders, with evident satisfaction, although she said nothing. He had seen that the fire burnt well; jam-pots were on the table, tin covers shone in the fender, and the shabby comfort of the room was extreme. He was dressed in his old crimson dressing-gown, which was faded irregularly, and had bright new patches on it, like the paler grass which one finds on lifting a stone. He made the tea, and Katharine drew off her gloves, and crossed her legs with a gesture that was rather masculine in its ease. Nor did they talk much until they were smoking cigarettes over the fire, having placed their teacups upon the floor between them.

They had not met since they had exchanged letters about their relationship. Katharine’s answer to his protestation had been short and sensible. Half a sheet of notepaper contained the whole of it, for she merely had to say that she was not in love with him, and so could not marry him, but their friendship would continue, she hoped, unchanged. She had added a postscript in which she stated, “I like your sonnet very much.”

So far as William was concerned, this appearance of ease was assumed. Three times that afternoon he had dressed himself in a tail-coat, and three times he had discarded it for an old dressing-gown; three times he had placed his pearl tie-pin in position, and three times he had removed it again, the little looking-glass in his room being the witness of these changes of mind. The question was, which would Katharine prefer on this particular afternoon in December? He read her note once more, and the postscript about the sonnet settled the matter. Evidently she admired most the poet in him; and as this, on the whole, agreed with his own opinion, he decided to err, if anything, on the side of shabbiness. His demeanour was also regulated with premeditation; he spoke little, and only on impersonal matters; he wished her to realize that in visiting him for the first time alone she was doing nothing remarkable, although, in fact, that was a point about which he was not at all sure.

Certainly Katharine seemed quite unmoved by any disturbing thoughts; and if he had been completely master of himself, he might, indeed, have complained that she was a trifle absent-minded. The ease, the familiarity of the situation alone with Rodney, among teacups and candles, had more effect upon her than was apparent. She asked to look at his books, and then at his pictures. It was while she held a photograph from the Greek in her hands that she exclaimed, impulsively, if incongruously:

“My oysters! I had a basket,” she explained, “and I’ve left it somewhere. Uncle Dudley dines with us to-night. What in the world have I done with them?”

She rose and began to wander about the room. William rose also, and stood in front of the fire, muttering, “Oysters, oysters—your basket of oysters!” but though he looked vaguely here and there, as if the oysters might be on the top of the bookshelf, his eyes returned always to Katharine. She drew the curtain and looked out among the scanty leaves of the plane-trees.

“I had them,” she calculated, “in the Strand; I sat on a seat. Well, never mind,” she concluded, turning back into the room abruptly, “I dare say some old creature is enjoying them by this time.”

“I should have thought that you never forgot anything,” William remarked, as they settled down again.

“That’s part of the myth about me, I know,” Katharine replied.

“And I wonder,” William proceeded, with some caution, “what the truth about you is? But I know this sort of thing doesn’t interest you,” he added hastily, with a touch of peevishness.

“No; it doesn’t interest me very much,” she replied candidly.

“What shall we talk about then?” he asked.

She looked rather whimsically round the walls of the room.

“However we start, we end by talking about the same thing—about poetry, I mean. I wonder if you realize, William, that I’ve never read even Shakespeare? It’s rather wonderful how I’ve kept it up all these years.”

“You’ve kept it up for ten years very beautifully, as far as I’m concerned,” he said.

“Ten years? So long as that?”

“And I don’t think it’s always bored you,” he added.

She looked into the fire silently. She could not deny that the surface of her feeling was absolutely unruffled by anything in William’s character; on the contrary, she felt certain that she could deal with whatever turned up. He gave her peace, in which she could think of things that were far removed from what they talked about. Even now, when he sat within a yard of her, how easily her mind ranged hither and thither! Suddenly a picture presented itself before her, without any effort on her part as pictures will, of herself in these very rooms; she had come in from a lecture, and she held a pile of books in her hand, scientific books, and books about mathematics and astronomy which she had mastered. She put them down on the table over there. It was a picture plucked from her life two or three years hence, when she was married to William; but here she checked herself abruptly.

She could not entirely forget William’s presence, because, in spite of his efforts to control himself, his nervousness was apparent. On such occasions his eyes protruded more than ever, and his face had more than ever the appearance of being covered with a thin crackling skin, through which every flush of his volatile blood showed itself instantly. By this time he had shaped so many sentences and rejected them, felt so many impulses and subdued them, that he was a uniform scarlet.

“You may say you don’t read books,” he remarked, “but, all the same, you know about them. Besides, who wants you to be learned? Leave that to the poor devils who’ve got nothing better to do. You—you—ahem!——”

“Well, then, why don’t you read me something before I go?” said Katharine, looking at her watch.

“Katharine, you’ve only just come! Let me see now, what have I got to show you?” He rose, and stirred about the papers on his table, as if in doubt; he then picked up a manuscript, and after spreading it smoothly upon his knee, he looked up at Katharine suspiciously. He caught her smiling.

“I believe you only ask me to read out of kindness,” he burst out. “Let’s find something else to talk about. Who have you been seeing?”

“I don’t generally ask things out of kindness,” Katharine observed; “however, if you don’t want to read, you needn’t.”

William gave a queer snort of exasperation, and opened his manuscript once more, though he kept his eyes upon her face as he did so. No face could have been graver or more judicial.

“One can trust you, certainly, to say unpleasant things,” he said, smoothing out the page, clearing his throat, and reading half a stanza to himself. “Ahem! The Princess is lost in the wood, and she hears the sound of a horn. (This would all be very pretty on the stage, but I can’t get the effect here.) Anyhow, Sylvano enters, accompanied by the rest of the gentlemen of Gratian’s court. I begin where he soliloquizes.” He jerked his head and began to read.

Although Katharine had just disclaimed any knowledge of literature, she listened attentively. At least, she listened to the first twenty-five lines attentively, and then she frowned. Her attention was only aroused again when Rodney raised his finger—a sign, she knew, that the metre was about to change.

His theory was that every mood has its metre. His mastery of metres was very great; and, if the beauty of a drama depended upon the variety of measures in which the personages speak, Rodney’s plays must have challenged the works of Shakespeare. Katharine’s ignorance of Shakespeare did not prevent her from feeling fairly certain that plays should not produce a sense of chill stupor in the audience, such as overcame her as the lines flowed on, sometimes long and sometimes short, but always delivered with the same lilt of voice, which seemed to nail each line firmly on to the same spot in the hearer’s brain. Still, she reflected, these sorts of skill are almost exclusively masculine; women neither practise them nor know how to value them; and one’s husband’s proficiency in this direction might legitimately increase one’s respect for him, since mystification is no bad basis for respect. No one could doubt that William was a scholar. The reading ended with the finish of the Act; Katharine had prepared a little speech.

“That seems to me extremely well written, William; although, of course, I don’t know enough to criticize in detail.”

“But it’s the skill that strikes you—not the emotion?”

“In a fragment like that, of course, the skill strikes one most.”

“But perhaps—have you time to listen to one more short piece? the scene between the lovers? There’s some real feeling in that, I think. Denham agrees that it’s the best thing I’ve done.”

“You’ve read it to Ralph Denham?” Katharine inquired, with surprise. “He’s a better judge than I am. What did he say?”

“My dear Katharine,” Rodney exclaimed, “I don’t ask you for criticism, as I should ask a scholar. I dare say there are only five men in England whose opinion of my work matters a straw to me. But I trust you where feeling is concerned. I had you in my mind often when I was writing those scenes. I kept asking myself, ‘Now is this the sort of thing Katharine would like?’ I always think of you when I’m writing, Katharine, even when it’s the sort of thing you wouldn’t know about. And I’d rather—yes, I really believe I’d rather—you thought well of my writing than any one in the world.”

This was so genuine a tribute to his trust in her that Katharine was touched.

“You think too much of me altogether, William,” she said, forgetting that she had not meant to speak in this way.

“No, Katharine, I don’t,” he replied, replacing his manuscript in the drawer. “It does me good to think of you.”

So quiet an answer, followed as it was by no expression of love, but merely by the statement that if she must go he would take her to the Strand, and would, if she could wait a moment, change his dressing-gown for a coat, moved her to the warmest feeling of affection for him that she had yet experienced. While he changed in the next room, she stood by the bookcase, taking down books and opening them, but reading nothing on their pages.

She felt certain that she would marry Rodney. How could one avoid it? How could one find fault with it? Here she sighed, and, putting the thought of marriage away, fell into a dream state, in which she became another person, and the whole world seemed changed. Being a frequent visitor to that world, she could find her way there unhesitatingly. If she had tried to analyse her impressions, she would have said that there dwelt the realities of the appearances which figure in our world; so direct, powerful, and unimpeded were her sensations there, compared with those called forth in actual life. There dwelt the things one might have felt, had there been cause; the perfect happiness of which here we taste the fragment; the beauty seen here in flying glimpses only. No doubt much of the furniture of this world was drawn directly from the past, and even from the England of the Elizabethan age. However the embellishment of this imaginary world might change, two qualities were constant in it. It was a place where feelings were liberated from the constraint which the real world puts upon them; and the process of awakenment was always marked by resignation and a kind of stoical acceptance of facts. She met no acquaintance there, as Denham did, miraculously transfigured; she played no heroic part. But there certainly she loved some magnanimous hero, and as they swept together among the leaf-hung trees of an unknown world, they shared the feelings which came fresh and fast as the waves on the shore. But the sands of her liberation were running fast; even through the forest branches came sounds of Rodney moving things on his dressing-table; and Katharine woke herself from this excursion by shutting the cover of the book she was holding, and replacing it in the bookshelf.

“William,” she said, speaking rather faintly at first, like one sending a voice from sleep to reach the living. “William,” she repeated firmly, “if you still want me to marry you, I will.”

Perhaps it was that no man could expect to have the most momentous question of his life settled in a voice so level, so toneless, so devoid of joy or energy. At any rate William made no answer. She waited stoically. A moment later he stepped briskly from his dressing-room, and observed that if she wanted to buy more oysters he thought he knew where they could find a fishmonger’s shop still open. She breathed deeply a sigh of relief.

Extract from a letter sent a few days later by Mrs. Hilbery to her sister-in-law, Mrs. Milvain:

“… How stupid of me to forget the name in my telegram. Such a nice, rich, English name, too, and, in addition, he has all the graces of intellect; he has read literally everything. I tell Katharine, I shall always put him on my right side at dinner, so as to have him by me when people begin talking about characters in Shakespeare. They won’t be rich, but they’ll be very, very happy. I was sitting in my room late one night, feeling that nothing nice would ever happen to me again, when I heard Katharine outside in the passage, and I thought to myself, ‘Shall I call her in?’ and then I thought (in that hopeless, dreary way one does think, with the fire going out and one’s birthday just over), ‘Why should I lay my troubles on her?’ But my little self-control had its reward, for next moment she tapped at the door and came in, and sat on the rug, and though we neither of us said anything, I felt so happy all of a second, that I couldn’t help crying, ‘Oh, Katharine, when you come to my age, how I hope you’ll have a daughter, too!’ You know how silent Katharine is. She was so silent, for such a long time, that in my foolish, nervous state I dreaded something, I don’t quite know what. And then she told me how, after all, she had made up her mind. She had written. She expected him to-morrow. At first I wasn’t glad at all. I didn’t want her to marry any one; but when she said, ‘It will make no difference. I shall always care for you and father most,’ then I saw how selfish I was, and I told her she must give him everything, everything, everything! I told her I should be thankful to come second. But why, when everything’s turned out just as one always hoped it would turn out, why then can one do nothing but cry, nothing but feel a desolate old woman whose life’s been a failure, and now is nearly over, and age is so cruel? But Katharine said to me, ‘I am happy. I’m very happy.’ And then I thought, though it all seemed so desperately dismal at the time, Katharine had said she was happy, and I should have a son, and it would all turn out so much more wonderfully than I could possibly imagine, for though the sermons don’t say so, I do believe the world is meant for us to be happy in. She told me that they would live quite near us, and see us every day; and she would go on with the Life, and we should finish it as we had meant to. And, after all, it would be far more horrid if she didn’t marry—or suppose she married some one we couldn’t endure? Suppose she had fallen in love with some one who was married already?

“And though one never thinks any one good enough for the people one’s fond of, he has the kindest, truest instincts, I’m sure, and though he seems nervous and his manner is not commanding, I only think these things because it’s Katharine. And now I’ve written this, it comes over me that, of course, all the time, Katharine has what he hasn’t. She does command, she isn’t nervous; it comes naturally to her to rule and control. It’s time that she should give all this to some one who will need her when we aren’t there, save in our spirits, for whatever people say, I’m sure I shall come back to this wonderful world where one’s been so happy and so miserable, where, even now, I seem to see myself stretching out my hands for another present from the great Fairy Tree whose boughs are still hung with enchanting toys, though they are rarer now, perhaps, and between the branches one sees no longer the blue sky, but the stars and the tops of the mountains.

“One doesn’t know any more, does one? One hasn’t any advice to give one’s children. One can only hope that they will have the same vision and the same power to believe, without which life would be so meaningless. That is what I ask for Katharine and her husband.”

[]

Chapter XII

Is Mr. Hilbery at home, or Mrs. Hilbery?” Denham asked, of the parlourmaid in Chelsea, a week later.

“No, sir. But Miss Hilbery is at home,” the girl answered.

Ralph had anticipated many answers, but not this one, and now it was unexpectedly made plain to him that it was the chance of seeing Katharine that had brought him all the way to Chelsea on pretence of seeing her father.

He made some show of considering the matter, and was taken upstairs to the drawing-room. As upon that first occasion, some weeks ago, the door closed as if it were a thousand doors softly excluding the world; and once more Ralph received an impression of a room full of deep shadows, firelight, unwavering silver candle flames, and empty spaces to be crossed before reaching the round table in the middle of the room, with its frail burden of silver trays and china teacups. But this time Katharine was there by herself; the volume in her hand showed that she expected no visitors.

Ralph said something about hoping to find her father.

“My father is out,” she replied. “But if you can wait, I expect him soon.”

It might have been due merely to politeness, but Ralph felt that she received him almost with cordiality. Perhaps she was bored by drinking tea and reading a book all alone; at any rate, she tossed the book on to a sofa with a gesture of relief.

“Is that one of the moderns whom you despise?” he asked, smiling at the carelessness of her gesture.

“Yes,” she replied. “I think even you would despise him.”

“Even I?” he repeated. “Why even I?”

“You said you liked modern things; I said I hated them.”

This was not a very accurate report of their conversation among the relics, perhaps, but Ralph was flattered to think that she remembered anything about it.

“Or did I confess that I hated all books?” she went on, seeing him look up with an air of inquiry. “I forget——”

“Do you hate all books?” he asked.

“It would be absurd to say that I hate all books when I’ve only read ten, perhaps; but——’ Here she pulled herself up short.

“Well?”

“Yes, I do hate books,” she continued. “Why do you want to be for ever talking about your feelings? That’s what I can’t make out. And poetry’s all about feelings—novels are all about feelings.”

She cut a cake vigorously into slices, and providing a tray with bread and butter for Mrs. Hilbery, who was in her room with a cold, she rose to go upstairs.

Ralph held the door open for her, and then stood with clasped hands in the middle of the room. His eyes were bright, and, indeed, he scarcely knew whether they beheld dreams or realities. All down the street and on the doorstep, and while he mounted the stairs, his dream of Katharine possessed him; on the threshold of the room he had dismissed it, in order to prevent too painful a collision between what he dreamt of her and what she was. And in five minutes she had filled the shell of the old dream with the flesh of life; looked with fire out of phantom eyes. He glanced about him with bewilderment at finding himself among her chairs and tables; they were solid, for he grasped the back of the chair in which Katharine had sat; and yet they were unreal; the atmosphere was that of a dream. He summoned all the faculties of his spirit to seize what the minutes had to give him; and from the depths of his mind there rose unchecked a joyful recognition of the truth that human nature surpasses, in its beauty, all that our wildest dreams bring us hints of.

Katharine came into the room a moment later. He stood watching her come towards him, and thought her more beautiful and strange than his dream of her; for the real Katharine could speak the words which seemed to crowd behind the forehead and in the depths of the eyes, and the commonest sentence would be flashed on by this immortal light. And she overflowed the edges of the dream; he remarked that her softness was like that of some vast snowy owl; she wore a ruby on her finger.

“My mother wants me to tell you,” she said, “that she hopes you have begun your poem. She says every one ought to write poetry…. All my relations write poetry,” she went on. “I can’t bear to think of it sometimes—because, of course, it’s none of it any good. But then one needn’t read it——”

“You don’t encourage me to write a poem,” said Ralph.

“But you’re not a poet, too, are you?” she inquired, turning upon him with a laugh.

“Should I tell you if I were?”

“Yes. Because I think you speak the truth,” she said, searching him for proof of this apparently, with eyes now almost impersonally direct. It would be easy, Ralph thought, to worship one so far removed, and yet of so straight a nature; easy to submit recklessly to her, without thought of future pain.

“Are you a poet?” she demanded. He felt that her question had an unexplained weight of meaning behind it, as if she sought an answer to a question that she did not ask.

“No. I haven’t written any poetry for years,” he replied. “But all the same, I don’t agree with you. I think it’s the only thing worth doing.”

“Why do you say that?” she asked, almost with impatience, tapping her spoon two or three times against the side of her cup.

“Why?” Ralph laid hands on the first words that came to mind. “Because, I suppose, it keeps an ideal alive which might die otherwise.”

A curious change came over her face, as if the flame of her mind were subdued; and she looked at him ironically and with the expression which he had called sad before, for want of a better name for it.

“I don’t know that there’s much sense in having ideals,” she said.

“But you have them,” he replied energetically. “Why do we call them ideals? It’s a stupid word. Dreams, I mean——”

She followed his words with parted lips, as though to answer eagerly when he had done; but as he said, “Dreams, I mean,” the door of the drawing-room swung open, and so remained for a perceptible instant. They both held themselves silent, her lips still parted.

Far off, they heard the rustle of skirts. Then the owner of the skirts appeared in the doorway, which she almost filled, nearly concealing the figure of a very much smaller lady who accompanied her.

“My aunts!” Katharine murmured, under her breath. Her tone had a hint of tragedy in it, but no less, Ralph thought, than the situation required. She addressed the larger lady as Aunt Millicent; the smaller was Aunt Celia, Mrs. Milvain, who had lately undertaken the task of marrying Cyril to his wife. Both ladies, but Mrs. Cosham (Aunt Millicent) in particular, had that look of heightened, smoothed, incarnadined existence which is proper to elderly ladies paying calls in London about five o’clock in the afternoon. Portraits by Romney, seen through glass, have something of their pink, mellow look, their blooming softness, as of apricots hanging upon a red wall in the afternoon sun. Mrs. Cosham was so apparelled with hanging muffs, chains, and swinging draperies that it was impossible to detect the shape of a human being in the mass of brown and black which filled the arm-chair. Mrs. Milvain was a much slighter figure; but the same doubt as to the precise lines of her contour filled Ralph, as he regarded them, with dismal foreboding. What remark of his would ever reach these fabulous and fantastic characters?—for there was something fantastically unreal in the curious swayings and noddings of Mrs. Cosham, as if her equipment included a large wire spring. Her voice had a high-pitched, cooing note, which prolonged words and cut them short until the English language seemed no longer fit for common purposes. In a moment of nervousness, so Ralph thought, Katharine had turned on innumerable electric lights. But Mrs. Cosham had gained impetus (perhaps her swaying movements had that end in view) for sustained speech; and she now addressed Ralph deliberately and elaborately.

“I come from Woking, Mr. Popham. You may well ask me, why Woking? and to that I answer, for perhaps the hundredth time, because of the sunsets. We went there for the sunsets, but that was five-and-twenty years ago. Where are the sunsets now? Alas! There is no sunset now nearer than the South Coast.” Her rich and romantic notes were accompanied by a wave of a long white hand, which, when waved, gave off a flash of diamonds, rubies, and emeralds. Ralph wondered whether she more resembled an elephant, with a jewelled head-dress, or a superb cockatoo, balanced insecurely upon its perch, and pecking capriciously at a lump of sugar.

“Where are the sunsets now?” she repeated. “Do you find sunsets now, Mr. Popham?”

“I live at Highgate,” he replied.

“At Highgate? Yes, Highgate has its charms; your Uncle John lived at Highgate,” she jerked in the direction of Katharine. She sank her head upon her breast, as if for a moment’s meditation, which past, she looked up and observed: “I dare say there are very pretty lanes in Highgate. I can recollect walking with your mother, Katharine, through lanes blossoming with wild hawthorn. But where is the hawthorn now? You remember that exquisite description in De Quincey, Mr. Popham?—but I forget, you, in your generation, with all your activity and enlightenment, at which I can only marvel”—here she displayed both her beautiful white hands—“do not read De Quincey. You have your Belloc, your Chesterton, your Bernard Shaw—why should you read De Quincey?”

“But I do read De Quincey,” Ralph protested, “more than Belloc and Chesterton, anyhow.”

“Indeed!” exclaimed Mrs. Cosham, with a gesture of surprise and relief mingled. “You are, then, a rara avis in your generation. I am delighted to meet any one who reads De Quincey.”

Here she hollowed her hand into a screen, and, leaning towards Katharine, inquired, in a very audible whisper, “Does your friend write?”

“Mr. Denham,” said Katharine, with more than her usual clearness and firmness, “writes for the Review. He is a lawyer.”

“The clean-shaven lips, showing the expression of the mouth! I recognized them at once. I always feel at home with lawyers, Mr. Denham——”

“They used to come about us so much in the old days,” Mrs. Milvain interposed, the frail, silvery notes of her voice falling with the sweet tone of an old bell.

“You say you live at Highgate,” she continued. “I wonder whether you happen to know if there is an old house called Tempest Lodge still in existence—an old white house in a garden?”

Ralph shook his head, and she sighed.

“Ah, no; it must have been pulled down by this time, with all the other old houses. There were such pretty lanes in those days. That was how your uncle met your Aunt Emily, you know,” she addressed Katharine. “They walked home through the lanes.”

“A sprig of May in her bonnet,” Mrs. Cosham ejaculated, reminiscently.

“And next Sunday he had violets in his buttonhole. And that was how we guessed.”

Katharine laughed. She looked at Ralph. His eyes were meditative, and she wondered what he found in this old gossip to make him ponder so contentedly. She felt, she hardly knew why, a curious pity for him.

“Uncle John—yes, ‘poor John,’ you always called him. Why was that?” she asked, to make them go on talking, which, indeed, they needed little invitation to do.

“That was what his father, old Sir Richard, always called him. Poor John, or the fool of the family,” Mrs. Milvain hastened to inform them. “The other boys were so brilliant, and he could never pass his examinations, so they sent him to India—a long voyage in those days, poor fellow. You had your own room, you know, and you did it up. But he will get his knighthood and a pension, I believe,” she said, turning to Ralph, “only it is not England.”

“No,” Mrs. Cosham confirmed her, “it is not England. In those days we thought an Indian Judgeship about equal to a county-court judgeship at home. His Honour—a pretty title, but still, not the top of the tree. However,” she sighed, “if you have a wife and seven children, and people nowadays very quickly forget your father’s name—well, you have to take what you can get,” she concluded.

“And I fancy,” Mrs. Milvain resumed, lowering her voice rather confidentially, “that John would have done more if it hadn’t been for his wife, your Aunt Emily. She was a very good woman, devoted to him, of course, but she was not ambitious for him, and if a wife isn’t ambitious for her husband, especially in a profession like the law, clients soon get to know of it. In our young days, Mr. Denham, we used to say that we knew which of our friends would become judges, by looking at the girls they married. And so it was, and so, I fancy, it always will be. I don’t think,” she added, summing up these scattered remarks, “that any man is really happy unless he succeeds in his profession.”

Mrs. Cosham approved of this sentiment with more ponderous sagacity from her side of the tea-table, in the first place by swaying her head, and in the second by remarking:

“No, men are not the same as women. I fancy Alfred Tennyson spoke the truth about that as about many other things. How I wish he’d lived to write ‘The Prince’—a sequel to ‘The Princess’! I confess I’m almost tired of Princesses. We want some one to show us what a good man can be. We have Laura and Beatrice, Antigone and Cordelia, but we have no heroic man. How do you, as a poet, account for that, Mr. Denham?”

“I’m not a poet,” said Ralph good-humouredly. “I’m only a solicitor.”

“But you write too?” Mrs. Cosham demanded, afraid lest she should be baulked of her priceless discovery, a young man truly devoted to literature.

“In my spare time,” Denham reassured her.

“In your spare time!” Mrs. Cosham echoed. “That is a proof of devotion, indeed.” She half closed her eyes, and indulged herself in a fascinating picture of a briefless barrister lodged in a garret, writing immortal novels by the light of a farthing dip. But the romance which fell upon the figures of great writers and illumined their pages was no false radiance in her case. She carried her pocket Shakespeare about with her, and met life fortified by the words of the poets. How far she saw Denham, and how far she confused him with some hero of fiction, it would be hard to say. Literature had taken possession even of her memories. She was matching him, presumably, with certain characters in the old novels, for she came out, after a pause, with:

“Um—um—Pendennis—Warrington—I could never forgive Laura,” she pronounced energetically, “for not marrying George, in spite of everything. George Eliot did the very same thing; and Lewes was a little frog-faced man, with the manner of a dancing master. But Warrington, now, had everything in his favour; intellect, passion, romance, distinction, and the connexion was a mere piece of undergraduate folly. Arthur, I confess, has always seemed to me a bit of a fop; I can’t imagine how Laura married him. But you say you’re a solicitor, Mr. Denham. Now there are one or two things I should like to ask you—about Shakespeare—” She drew out her small, worn volume with some difficulty, opened it, and shook it in the air. “They say, nowadays, that Shakespeare was a lawyer. They say that accounts for his knowledge of human nature. There’s a fine example for you, Mr. Denham. Study your clients, young man, and the world will be the richer one of these days, I have no doubt. Tell me, how do we come out of it, now; better or worse than you expected?”

Thus called upon to sum up the worth of human nature in a few words, Ralph answered unhesitatingly:

“Worse, Mrs. Cosham, a good deal worse. I’m afraid the ordinary man is a bit of a rascal——”

“And the ordinary woman?”

“No, I don’t like the ordinary woman either——”

Ah, dear me, I’ve no doubt that’s very true, very true.” Mrs. Cosham sighed. “Swift would have agreed with you, anyhow——” She looked at him, and thought that there were signs of distinct power in his brow. He would do well, she thought, to devote himself to satire.

“Charles Lavington, you remember, was a solicitor,” Mrs. Milvain interposed, rather resenting the waste of time involved in talking about fictitious people when you might be talking about real people. “But you wouldn’t remember him, Katharine.”

“Mr. Lavington? Oh yes, I do,” said Katharine, waking from other thoughts with her little start. “The summer we had a house near Tenby. I remember the field and the pond with the tadpoles, and making haystacks with Mr. Lavington.”

“She is right. There was a pond with tadpoles,” Mrs. Cosham corroborated. “Millais made studies of it for ‘Ophelia.’ Some say that is the best picture he ever painted——”

“And I remember the dog chained up in the yard, and the dead snakes hanging in the toolhouse.”

“It was at Tenby that you were chased by the bull,” Mrs. Milvain continued. “But that you couldn’t remember, though it’s true you were a wonderful child. Such eyes she had, Mr. Denham! I used to say to her father, ‘She’s watching us, and summing us all up in her little mind.’ And they had a nurse in those days,” she went on, telling her story with charming solemnity to Ralph, “who was a good woman, but engaged to a sailor. When she ought to have been attending to the baby, her eyes were on the sea. And Mrs. Hilbery allowed this girl—Susan her name was—to have him to stay in the village. They abused her goodness, I’m sorry to say, and while they walked in the lanes, they stood the perambulator alone in a field where there was a bull. The animal became enraged by the red blanket in the perambulator, and Heaven knows what might have happened if a gentleman had not been walking by in the nick of time, and rescued Katharine in his arms!”

“I think the bull was only a cow, Aunt Celia,” said Katharine.

“My darling, it was a great red Devonshire bull, and not long after it gored a man to death and had to be destroyed. And your mother forgave Susan—a thing I could never have done.”

“Maggie’s sympathies were entirely with Susan and the sailor, I am sure,” said Mrs. Cosham, rather tartly. “My sister-in-law,” she continued, “has laid her burdens upon Providence at every crisis in her life, and Providence, I must confess, has responded nobly, so far——”

“Yes,” said Katharine, with a laugh, for she liked the rashness which irritated the rest of the family. “My mother’s bulls always turn into cows at the critical moment.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Milvain, “I’m glad you have some one to protect you from bulls now.”

“I can’t imagine William protecting any one from bulls,” said Katharine.

It happened that Mrs. Cosham had once more produced her pocket volume of Shakespeare, and was consulting Ralph upon an obscure passage in “Measure for Measure.” He did not at once seize the meaning of what Katharine and her aunt were saying; William, he supposed, referred to some small cousin, for he now saw Katharine as a child in a pinafore; but, nevertheless, he was so much distracted that his eye could hardly follow the words on the paper. A moment later he heard them speak distinctly of an engagement-ring.

“I like rubies,” he heard Katharine say.

“To be imprison’d in the viewless winds,

And blown with restless violence round about

The pendant world …”

Mrs. Cosham intoned; at the same instant “Rodney” fitted itself to “William” in Ralph’s mind. He felt convinced that Katharine was engaged to Rodney. His first sensation was one of violent rage with her for having deceived him throughout the visit, fed him with pleasant old wives’ tales, let him see her as a child playing in a meadow, shared her youth with him, while all the time she was a stranger entirely, and engaged to marry Rodney.

But was it possible? Surely it was not possible. For in his eyes she was still a child. He paused so long over the book that Mrs. Cosham had time to look over his shoulder and ask her niece:

“And have you settled upon a house yet, Katharine?”

This convinced him of the truth of the monstrous idea. He looked up at once and said:

“Yes, it’s a difficult passage.”

His voice had changed so much, he spoke with such curtness and even with such contempt, that Mrs. Cosham looked at him fairly puzzled. Happily she belonged to a generation which expected uncouthness in its men, and she merely felt convinced that this Mr. Denham was very, very clever. She took back her Shakespeare, as Denham seemed to have no more to say, and secreted it once more about her person with the infinitely pathetic resignation of the old.

“Katharine’s engaged to William Rodney,” she said, by way of filling in the pause; “a very old friend of ours. He has a wonderful knowledge of literature, too—wonderful.” She nodded her head rather vaguely. “You should meet each other.”

Denham’s one wish was to leave the house as soon as he could; but the elderly ladies had risen, and were proposing to visit Mrs. Hilbery in her bedroom, so that any move on his part was impossible. At the same time, he wished to say something, but he knew not what, to Katharine alone. She took her aunts upstairs, and returned, coming towards him once more with an air of innocence and friendliness that amazed him.

“My father will be back,” she said. “Won’t you sit down?” and she laughed, as if now they might share a perfectly friendly laugh at the tea-party.

But Ralph made no attempt to seat himself.

“I must congratulate you,” he said. “It was news to me.” He saw her face change, but only to become graver than before.

“My engagement?” she asked. “Yes, I am going to marry William Rodney.”

Ralph remained standing with his hand on the back of a chair in absolute silence. Abysses seemed to plunge into darkness between them. He looked at her, but her face showed that she was not thinking of him. No regret or consciousness of wrong disturbed her.

“Well, I must go,” he said at length.

She seemed about to say something, then changed her mind and said merely:

“You will come again, I hope. We always seem—” she hesitated—“to be interrupted.”

He bowed and left the room.

Ralph strode with extreme swiftness along the Embankment. Every muscle was taut and braced as if to resist some sudden attack from outside. For the moment it seemed as if the attack were about to be directed against his body, and his brain thus was on the alert, but without understanding. Finding himself, after a few minutes, no longer under observation, and no attack delivered, he slackened his pace, the pain spread all through him, took possession of every governing seat, and met with scarcely any resistance from powers exhausted by their first effort at defence. He took his way languidly along the river embankment, away from home rather than towards it. The world had him at its mercy. He made no pattern out of the sights he saw. He felt himself now, as he had often fancied other people, adrift on the stream, and far removed from control of it, a man with no grasp upon circumstances any longer. Old battered men loafing at the doors of public-houses now seemed to be his fellows, and he felt, as he supposed them to feel, a mingling of envy and hatred towards those who passed quickly and certainly to a goal of their own. They, too, saw things very thin and shadowy, and were wafted about by the lightest breath of wind. For the substantial world, with its prospect of avenues leading on and on to the invisible distance, had slipped from him, since Katharine was engaged. Now all his life was visible, and the straight, meagre path had its ending soon enough. Katharine was engaged, and she had deceived him, too. He felt for corners of his being untouched by his disaster; but there was no limit to the flood of damage; not one of his possessions was safe now. Katharine had deceived him; she had mixed herself with every thought of his, and reft of her they seemed false thoughts which he would blush to think again. His life seemed immeasurably impoverished.

He sat himself down, in spite of the chilly fog which obscured the farther bank and left its lights suspended upon a blank surface, upon one of the riverside seats, and let the tide of disillusionment sweep through him. For the time being all bright points in his life were blotted out; all prominences levelled. At first he made himself believe that Katharine had treated him badly, and drew comfort from the thought that, left alone, she would recollect this, and think of him and tender him, in silence, at any rate, an apology. But this grain of comfort failed him after a second or two, for, upon reflection, he had to admit that Katharine owed him nothing. Katharine had promised nothing, taken nothing; to her his dreams had meant nothing. This, indeed, was the lowest pitch of his despair. If the best of one’s feelings means nothing to the person most concerned in those feelings, what reality is left us? The old romance which had warmed his days for him, the thoughts of Katharine which had painted every hour, were now made to appear foolish and enfeebled. He rose, and looked into the river, whose swift race of dun-coloured waters seemed the very spirit of futility and oblivion.

“In what can one trust, then?” he thought, as he leant there. So feeble and insubstantial did he feel himself that he repeated the word aloud.

“In what can one trust? Not in men and women. Not in one’s dreams about them. There’s nothing—nothing, nothing left at all.”

Now Denham had reason to know that he could bring to birth and keep alive a fine anger when he chose. Rodney provided a good target for that emotion. And yet at the moment, Rodney and Katharine herself seemed disembodied ghosts. He could scarcely remember the look of them. His mind plunged lower and lower. Their marriage seemed of no importance to him. All things had turned to ghosts; the whole mass of the world was insubstantial vapour, surrounding the solitary spark in his mind, whose burning point he could remember, for it burnt no more. He had once cherished a belief, and Katharine had embodied this belief, and she did so no longer. He did not blame her; he blamed nothing, nobody; he saw the truth. He saw the dun-coloured race of waters and the blank shore. But life is vigorous; the body lives, and the body, no doubt, dictated the reflection, which now urged him to movement, that one may cast away the forms of human beings, and yet retain the passion which seemed inseparable from their existence in the flesh. Now this passion burnt on his horizon, as the winter sun makes a greenish pane in the west through thinning clouds. His eyes were set on something infinitely far and remote; by that light he felt he could walk, and would, in future, have to find his way. But that was all there was left to him of a populous and teeming world.

[]

Chapter XIII

The lunch hour in the office was only partly spent by Denham in the consumption of food. Whether fine or wet, he passed most of it pacing the gravel paths in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The children got to know his figure, and the sparrows expected their daily scattering of bread-crumbs. No doubt, since he often gave a copper and almost always a handful of bread, he was not as blind to his surroundings as he thought himself.

He thought that these winter days were spent in long hours before white papers radiant in electric light; and in short passages through fog-dimmed streets. When he came back to his work after lunch he carried in his head a picture of the Strand, scattered with omnibuses, and of the purple shapes of leaves pressed flat upon the gravel, as if his eyes had always been bent upon the ground. His brain worked incessantly, but his thought was attended with so little joy that he did not willingly recall it; but drove ahead, now in this direction, now in that; and came home laden with dark books borrowed from a library.

Mary Datchet, coming from the Strand at lunch-time, saw him one day taking his turn, closely buttoned in an overcoat, and so lost in thought that he might have been sitting in his own room.

She was overcome by something very like awe by the sight of him; then she felt much inclined to laugh, although her pulse beat faster. She passed him, and he never saw her. She came back and touched him on the shoulder.

“Gracious, Mary!” he exclaimed. “How you startled me!”

“Yes. You looked as if you were walking in your sleep,” she said. “Are you arranging some terrible love affair? Have you got to reconcile a desperate couple?”

“I wasn’t thinking about my work,” Ralph replied, rather hastily. “And, besides, that sort of thing’s not in my line,” he added, rather grimly.

The morning was fine, and they had still some minutes of leisure to spend. They had not met for two or three weeks, and Mary had much to say to Ralph; but she was not certain how far he wished for her company. However, after a turn or two, in which a few facts were communicated, he suggested sitting down, and she took the seat beside him. The sparrows came fluttering about them, and Ralph produced from his pocket the half of a roll saved from his luncheon. He threw a few crumbs among them.

“I’ve never seen sparrows so tame,” Mary observed, by way of saying something.

“No,” said Ralph. “The sparrows in Hyde Park aren’t as tame as this. If we keep perfectly still, I’ll get one to settle on my arm.”

Mary felt that she could have forgone this display of animal good temper, but seeing that Ralph, for some curious reason, took a pride in the sparrows, she bet him sixpence that he would not succeed.

“Done!” he said; and his eye, which had been gloomy, showed a spark of light. His conversation was now addressed entirely to a bald cock-sparrow, who seemed bolder than the rest; and Mary took the opportunity of looking at him. She was not satisfied; his face was worn, and his expression stern. A child came bowling its hoop through the concourse of birds, and Ralph threw his last crumbs of bread into the bushes with a snort of impatience.

“That’s what always happens—just as I’ve almost got him,” he said. “Here’s your sixpence, Mary. But you’ve only got it thanks to that brute of a boy. They oughtn’t to be allowed to bowl hoops here——”

“Oughtn’t to be allowed to bowl hoops! My dear Ralph, what nonsense!”

“You always say that,” he complained; “and it isn’t nonsense. What’s the point of having a garden if one can’t watch birds in it? The street does all right for hoops. And if children can’t be trusted in the streets, their mothers should keep them at home.”

Mary made no answer to this remark, but frowned.

She leant back on the seat and looked about her at the great houses breaking the soft grey-blue sky with their chimneys.

“Ah, well,” she said, “London’s a fine place to live in. I believe I could sit and watch people all day long. I like my fellow-creatures …”

Ralph sighed impatiently.

“Yes, I think so, when you come to know them,” she added, as if his disagreement had been spoken.

“That’s just when I don’t like them,” he replied. “Still, I don’t see why you shouldn’t cherish that illusion, if it pleases you.” He spoke without much vehemence of agreement or disagreement. He seemed chilled.

“Wake up, Ralph! You’re half asleep!” Mary cried, turning and pinching his sleeve. “What have you been doing with yourself? Moping? Working? Despising the world, as usual?”

As he merely shook his head, and filled his pipe, she went on:

“It’s a bit of a pose, isn’t it?”

“Not more than most things,” he said.

“Well,” Mary remarked, “I’ve a great deal to say to you, but I must go on—we have a committee.” She rose, but hesitated, looking down upon him rather gravely. “You don’t look happy, Ralph,” she said. “Is it anything, or is it nothing?”

He did not immediately answer her, but rose, too, and walked with her towards the gate. As usual, he did not speak to her without considering whether what he was about to say was the sort of thing that he could say to her.

“I’ve been bothered,” he said at length. “Partly by work, and partly by family troubles. Charles has been behaving like a fool. He wants to go out to Canada as a farmer——”

“Well, there’s something to be said for that,” said Mary; and they passed the gate, and walked slowly round the Fields again, discussing difficulties which, as a matter of fact, were more or less chronic in the Denham family, and only now brought forward to appease Mary’s sympathy, which, however, soothed Ralph more than he was aware of. She made him at least dwell upon problems which were real in the sense that they were capable of solution; and the true cause of his melancholy, which was not susceptible to such treatment, sank rather more deeply into the shades of his mind.

Mary was attentive; she was helpful. Ralph could not help feeling grateful to her, the more so, perhaps, because he had not told her the truth about his state; and when they reached the gate again he wished to make some affectionate objection to her leaving him. But his affection took the rather uncouth form of expostulating with her about her work.

“What d’you want to sit on a committee for?” he asked. “It’s waste of your time, Mary.”

“I agree with you that a country walk would benefit the world more,” she said. “Look here,” she added suddenly, “why don’t you come to us at Christmas? It’s almost the best time of year.”

“Come to you at Disham?” Ralph repeated.

“Yes. We won’t interfere with you. But you can tell me later,” she said, rather hastily, and then started off in the direction of Russell Square. She had invited him on the impulse of the moment, as a vision of the country came before her; and now she was annoyed with herself for having done so, and then she was annoyed at being annoyed.

“If I can’t face a walk in a field alone with Ralph,” she reasoned, “I’d better buy a cat and live in a lodging at Ealing, like Sally Seal—and he won’t come. Or did he mean that he would come?”

She shook her head. She really did not know what he had meant. She never felt quite certain; but now she was more than usually baffled. Was he concealing something from her? His manner had been odd; his deep absorption had impressed her; there was something in him that she had not fathomed, and the mystery of his nature laid more of a spell upon her than she liked. Moreover, she could not prevent herself from doing now what she had often blamed others of her sex for doing—from endowing her friend with a kind of heavenly fire, and passing her life before it for his sanction.

Under this process, the committee rather dwindled in importance; the Suffrage shrank; she vowed she would work harder at the Italian language; she thought she would take up the study of birds. But this programme for a perfect life threatened to become so absurd that she very soon caught herself out in the evil habit, and was rehearsing her speech to the committee by the time the chestnut-coloured bricks of Russell Square came in sight. Indeed, she never noticed them. She ran upstairs as usual, and was completely awakened to reality by the sight of Mrs. Seal, on the landing outside the office, inducing a very large dog to drink water out of a tumbler.

“Miss Markham has already arrived,” Mrs. Seal remarked, with due solemnity, “and this is her dog.”

“A very fine dog too,” said Mary, patting him on the head.

“Yes. A magnificent fellow,” Mrs. Seal agreed. “A kind of St. Bernard, she tells me—so like Kit to have a St. Bernard. And you guard your mistress well, don’t you, Sailor? You see that wicked men don’t break into her larder when she’s out at her work—helping poor souls who have lost their way…. But we’re late—we must begin!” and scattering the rest of the water indiscriminately over the floor, she hurried Mary into the committee-room.

[]

Chapter XIV

Mr. Clacton was in his glory. The machinery which he had perfected and controlled was now about to turn out its bi-monthly product, a committee meeting; and his pride in the perfect structure of these assemblies was great. He loved the jargon of committee-rooms; he loved the way in which the door kept opening as the clock struck the hour, in obedience to a few strokes of his pen on a piece of paper; and when it had opened sufficiently often, he loved to issue from his inner chamber with documents in his hands, visibly important, with a preoccupied expression on his face that might have suited a Prime Minister advancing to meet his Cabinet. By his orders the table had been decorated beforehand with six sheets of blotting-paper, with six pens, six ink-pots, a tumbler and a jug of water, a bell, and, in deference to the taste of the lady members, a vase of hardy chrysanthemums. He had already surreptitiously straightened the sheets of blotting-paper in relation to the ink-pots, and now stood in front of the fire engaged in conversation with Miss Markham. But his eye was on the door, and when Mary and Mrs. Seal entered, he gave a little laugh and observed to the assembly which was scattered about the room:

“I fancy, ladies and gentlemen, that we are ready to commence.”

So speaking, he took his seat at the head of the table, and arranging one bundle of papers upon his right and another upon his left, called upon Miss Datchet to read the minutes of the previous meeting. Mary obeyed. A keen observer might have wondered why it was necessary for the secretary to knit her brows so closely over the tolerably matter-of-fact statement before her. Could there be any doubt in her mind that it had been resolved to circularize the provinces with Leaflet No. 3, or to issue a statistical diagram showing the proportion of married women to spinsters in New Zealand; or that the net profits of Mrs. Hipsley’s Bazaar had reached a total of five pounds eight shillings and twopence halfpenny?

Could any doubt as to the perfect sense and propriety of these statements be disturbing her? No one could have guessed, from the look of her, that she was disturbed at all. A pleasanter and saner woman than Mary Datchet was never seen within a committee-room. She seemed a compound of the autumn leaves and the winter sunshine; less poetically speaking, she showed both gentleness and strength, an indefinable promise of soft maternity blending with her evident fitness for honest labour. Nevertheless, she had great difficulty in reducing her mind to obedience; and her reading lacked conviction, as if, as was indeed the case, she had lost the power of visualizing what she read. And directly the list was completed, her mind floated to Lincoln’s Inn Fields and the fluttering wings of innumerable sparrows. Was Ralph still enticing the bald-headed cock-sparrow to sit upon his hand? Had he succeeded? Would he ever succeed? She had meant to ask him why it is that the sparrows in Lincoln’s Inn Fields are tamer than the sparrows in Hyde Park—perhaps it is that the passers-by are rarer, and they come to recognize their benefactors. For the first half-hour of the committee meeting, Mary had thus to do battle with the sceptical presence of Ralph Denham, who threatened to have it all his own way. Mary tried half a dozen methods of ousting him. She raised her voice, she articulated distinctly, she looked firmly at Mr. Clacton’s bald head, she began to write a note. To her annoyance, her pencil drew a little round figure on the blotting-paper, which, she could not deny, was really a bald-headed cock-sparrow. She looked again at Mr. Clacton; yes, he was bald, and so are cock-sparrows. Never was a secretary tormented by so many unsuitable suggestions, and they all came, alas! with something ludicrously grotesque about them, which might, at any moment, provoke her to such flippancy as would shock her colleagues for ever. The thought of what she might say made her bite her lips, as if her lips would protect her.

But all these suggestions were but flotsam and jetsam cast to the surface by a more profound disturbance, which, as she could not consider it at present, manifested its existence by these grotesque nods and beckonings. Consider it, she must, when the committee was over. Meanwhile, she was behaving scandalously; she was looking out of the window, and thinking of the colour of the sky, and of the decorations on the Imperial Hotel, when she ought to have been shepherding her colleagues, and pinning them down to the matter in hand. She could not bring herself to attach more weight to one project than to another. Ralph had said—she could not stop to consider what he had said, but he had somehow divested the proceedings of all reality. And then, without conscious effort, by some trick of the brain, she found herself becoming interested in some scheme for organizing a newspaper campaign. Certain articles were to be written; certain editors approached. What line was it advisable to take? She found herself strongly disapproving of what Mr. Clacton was saying. She committed herself to the opinion that now was the time to strike hard. Directly she had said this, she felt that she had turned upon Ralph’s ghost; and she became more and more in earnest, and anxious to bring the others round to her point of view. Once more, she knew exactly and indisputably what is right and what is wrong. As if emerging from a mist, the old foes of the public good loomed ahead of her—capitalists, newspaper proprietors, anti-suffragists, and, in some ways most pernicious of all, the masses who take no interest one way or another—among whom, for the time being, she certainly discerned the features of Ralph Denham. Indeed, when Miss Markham asked her to suggest the names of a few friends of hers, she expressed herself with unusual bitterness:

“My friends think all this kind of thing useless.” She felt that she was really saying that to Ralph himself.

“Oh, they’re that sort, are they?” said Miss Markham, with a little laugh; and with renewed vigour their legions charged the foe.

Mary’s spirits had been low when she entered the committee-room; but now they were considerably improved. She knew the ways of this world; it was a shapely, orderly place; she felt convinced of its right and its wrong; and the feeling that she was fit to deal a heavy blow against her enemies warmed her heart and kindled her eye. In one of those flights of fancy, not characteristic of her but tiresomely frequent this afternoon, she envisaged herself battered with rotten eggs upon a platform, from which Ralph vainly begged her to descend. But—

“What do I matter compared with the cause?” she said, and so on. Much to her credit, however teased by foolish fancies, she kept the surface of her brain moderate and vigilant, and subdued Mrs. Seal very tactfully more than once when she demanded, “Action!—everywhere!—at once!” as became her father’s daughter.

The other members of the committee, who were all rather elderly people, were a good deal impressed by Mary, and inclined to side with her and against each other, partly, perhaps, because of her youth. The feeling that she controlled them all filled Mary with a sense of power; and she felt that no work can equal in importance, or be so exciting as, the work of making other people do what you want them to do. Indeed, when she had won her point she felt a slight degree of contempt for the people who had yielded to her.

The committee now rose, gathered together their papers, shook them straight, placed them in their attaché-cases, snapped the locks firmly together, and hurried away, having, for the most part, to catch trains, in order to keep other appointments with other committees, for they were all busy people. Mary, Mrs. Seal, and Mr. Clacton were left alone; the room was hot and untidy, the pieces of pink blotting-paper were lying at different angles upon the table, and the tumbler was half full of water, which some one had poured out and forgotten to drink.

Mrs. Seal began preparing the tea, while Mr. Clacton retired to his room to file the fresh accumulation of documents. Mary was too much excited even to help Mrs. Seal with the cups and saucers. She flung up the window and stood by it, looking out. The street lamps were already lit; and through the mist in the square one could see little figures hurrying across the road and along the pavement, on the farther side. In her absurd mood of lustful arrogance, Mary looked at the little figures and thought, “If I liked I could make you go in there or stop short; I could make you walk in single file or in double file; I could do what I liked with you.” Then Mrs. Seal came and stood by her.

“Oughtn’t you to put something round your shoulders, Sally?” Mary asked, in rather a condescending tone of voice, feeling a sort of pity for the enthusiastic ineffective little woman. But Mrs. Seal paid no attention to the suggestion.

“Well, did you enjoy yourself?” Mary asked, with a little laugh.

Mrs. Seal drew a deep breath, restrained herself, and then burst out, looking out, too, upon Russell Square and Southampton Row, and at the passers-by, “Ah, if only one could get every one of those people into this room, and make them understand for five minutes! But they must see the truth some day…. If only one could make them see it …”

Mary knew herself to be very much wiser than Mrs. Seal, and when Mrs. Seal said anything, even if it was what Mary herself was feeling, she automatically thought of all that there was to be said against it. On this occasion her arrogant feeling that she could direct everybody, dwindled away.

“Let’s have our tea,” she said, turning back from the window and pulling down the blind. “It was a good meeting—didn’t you think so, Sally?” she let fall, casually, as she sat down at the table. Surely Mrs. Seal must realize that Mary had been extraordinarily efficient?

“But we go at such a snail’s pace,” said Sally, shaking her head impatiently.

At this Mary burst out laughing, and all her arrogance was dissipated.

“You can afford to laugh,” said Sally, with another shake of her head, “but I can’t. I’m fifty-five, and I dare say I shall be in my grave by the time we get it—if we ever do.”

“Oh no, you won’t be in your grave,” said Mary, kindly.

“It’ll be such a great day,” said Mrs. Seal, with a toss of her locks. “A great day, not only for us, but for civilization. That’s what I feel, you know, about these meetings. Each one of them is a step onwards in the great march—humanity, you know. We do want the people after us to have a better time of it—and so many don’t see it. I wonder how it is that they don’t see it?”

She was carrying plates and cups from the cupboard as she spoke, so that her sentences were more than usually broken apart. Mary could not help looking at the odd little priestess of humanity with something like admiration. While she had been thinking about herself, Mrs. Seal had thought of nothing but her vision.

“You mustn’t wear yourself out, Sally, if you want to see the great day,” she said, rising and trying to take a plate of biscuits from Mrs. Seal’s hands.

“My dear child, what else is my old body good for?” she exclaimed, clinging more tightly than before to her plate of biscuits. “Shouldn’t I be proud to give everything I have to the cause?—for I’m not an intelligence like you. There were domestic circumstances—I’d like to tell you one of these days—so I say foolish things. I lose my head, you know. You don’t. Mr. Clacton doesn’t. It’s a great mistake, to lose one’s head. But my heart’s in the right place. And I’m so glad Kit has a big dog, for I didn’t think her looking well.”

They had their tea, and went over many of the points that had been raised in the committee, rather more intimately than had been possible then; and they all felt an agreeable sense of being in some way behind the scenes; of having their hands upon strings which, when pulled, would completely change the pageant exhibited daily to those who read the newspapers. Although their views were very different, this sense united them and made them almost cordial in their manners to each other.

Mary, however, left the tea-party rather early, desiring both to be alone, and then to hear some music at the Queen’s Hall. She fully intended to use her loneliness to think out her position with regard to Ralph; but although she walked back to the Strand with this end in view, she found her mind uncomfortably full of different trains of thought. She started one and then another. They seemed even to take their colour from the street she happened to be in. Thus the vision of humanity appeared to be in some way connected with Bloomsbury, and faded distinctly by the time she crossed the main road; then a belated organ-grinder in Holborn set her thoughts dancing incongruously; and by the time she was crossing the great misty square of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, she was cold and depressed again, and horribly clear-sighted. The dark removed the stimulus of human companionship, and a tear actually slid down her cheek, accompanying a sudden conviction within her that she loved Ralph, and that he didn’t love her. All dark and empty now was the path where they had walked that morning, and the sparrows silent in the bare trees. But the lights in her own building soon cheered her; all these different states of mind were submerged in the deep flood of desires, thoughts, perceptions, antagonisms, which washed perpetually at the base of her being, to rise into prominence in turn when the conditions of the upper world were favourable. She put off the hour of clear thought until Christmas, saying to herself, as she lit her fire, that it is impossible to think anything out in London; and, no doubt, Ralph wouldn’t come at Christmas, and she would take long walks into the heart of the country, and decide this question and all the others that puzzled her. Meanwhile, she thought, drawing her feet up on to the fender, life was full of complexity; life was a thing one must love to the last fibre of it.

She had sat there for five minutes or so, and her thoughts had had time to grow dim, when there came a ring at her bell. Her eye brightened; she felt immediately convinced that Ralph had come to visit her. Accordingly, she waited a moment before opening the door; she wanted to feel her hands secure upon the reins of all the troublesome emotions which the sight of Ralph would certainly arouse. She composed herself unnecessarily, however, for she had to admit, not Ralph, but Katharine and William Rodney. Her first impression was that they were both extremely well dressed. She felt herself shabby and slovenly beside them, and did not know how she should entertain them, nor could she guess why they had come. She had heard nothing of their engagement. But after the first disappointment, she was pleased, for she felt instantly that Katharine was a personality, and, moreover, she need not now exercise her self-control.

“We were passing and saw a light in your window, so we came up,” Katharine explained, standing and looking very tall and distinguished and rather absent-minded.

“We have been to see some pictures,” said William. “Oh dear,” he exclaimed, looking about him, “this room reminds me of one of the worst hours in my existence—when I read a paper, and you all sat round and jeered at me. Katharine was the worst. I could feel her gloating over every mistake I made. Miss Datchet was kind. Miss Datchet just made it possible for me to get through, I remember.”

Sitting down, he drew off his light yellow gloves, and began slapping his knees with them. His vitality was pleasant, Mary thought, although he made her laugh. The very look of him was inclined to make her laugh. His rather prominent eyes passed from one young woman to the other, and his lips perpetually formed words which remained unspoken.

“We have been seeing old masters at the Grafton Gallery,” said Katharine, apparently paying no attention to William, and accepting a cigarette which Mary offered her. She leant back in her chair, and the smoke which hung about her face seemed to withdraw her still further from the others.

“Would you believe it, Miss Datchet,” William continued, “Katharine doesn’t like Titian. She doesn’t like apricots, she doesn’t like peaches, she doesn’t like green peas. She likes the Elgin marbles, and grey days without any sun. She’s a typical example of the cold northern nature. I come from Devonshire——”

Had they been quarrelling, Mary wondered, and had they, for that reason, sought refuge in her room, or were they engaged, or had Katharine just refused him? She was completely baffled.

Katharine now reappeared from her veil of smoke, knocked the ash from her cigarette into the fireplace, and looked, with an odd expression of solicitude, at the irritable man.

“Perhaps, Mary,” she said tentatively, “you wouldn’t mind giving us some tea? We did try to get some, but the shop was so crowded, and in the next one there was a band playing; and most of the pictures, at any rate, were very dull, whatever you may say, William.” She spoke with a kind of guarded gentleness.

Mary, accordingly, retired to make preparations in the pantry.

“What in the world are they after?” she asked of her own reflection in the little looking-glass which hung there. She was not left to doubt much longer, for, on coming back into the sitting-room with the tea-things, Katharine informed her, apparently having been instructed so to do by William, of their engagement.

“William,” she said, “thinks that perhaps you don’t know. We are going to be married.”

Mary found herself shaking William’s hand, and addressing her congratulations to him, as if Katharine were inaccessible; she had, indeed, taken hold of the tea-kettle.

“Let me see,” Katharine said, “one puts hot water into the cups first, doesn’t one? You have some dodge of your own, haven’t you, William, about making tea?”

Mary was half inclined to suspect that this was said in order to conceal nervousness, but if so, the concealment was unusually perfect. Talk of marriage was dismissed. Katharine might have been seated in her own drawing-room, controlling a situation which presented no sort of difficulty to her trained mind. Rather to her surprise, Mary found herself making conversation with William about old Italian pictures, while Katharine poured out tea, cut cake, kept William’s plate supplied, without joining more than was necessary in the conversation. She seemed to have taken possession of Mary’s room, and to handle the cups as if they belonged to her. But it was done so naturally that it bred no resentment in Mary; on the contrary, she found herself putting her hand on Katharine’s knee, affectionately, for an instant. Was there something maternal in this assumption of control? And thinking of Katharine as one who would soon be married, these maternal airs filled Mary’s mind with a new tenderness, and even with awe. Katharine seemed very much older and more experienced than she was.

Meanwhile, Rodney talked. If his appearance was superficially against him, it had the advantage of making his solid merits something of a surprise. He had kept notebooks; he knew a great deal about pictures. He could compare different examples in different galleries, and his authoritative answers to intelligent questions gained not a little, Mary felt, from the smart taps which he dealt, as he delivered them, upon the lumps of coal. She was impressed.

“Your tea, William,” said Katharine gently.

He paused, gulped it down, obediently, and continued.

And then it struck Mary that Katharine, in the shade of her broad-brimmed hat, and in the midst of the smoke, and in the obscurity of her character, was, perhaps, smiling to herself, not altogether in the maternal spirit. What she said was very simple, but her words, even “Your tea, William,” were set down as gently and cautiously and exactly as the feet of a Persian cat stepping among China ornaments. For the second time that day Mary felt herself baffled by something inscrutable in the character of a person to whom she felt herself much attracted. She thought that if she were engaged to Katharine, she, too, would find herself very soon using those fretful questions with which William evidently teased his bride. And yet Katharine’s voice was humble.

“I wonder how you find the time to know all about pictures as well as books?” she asked.

“How do I find the time?” William answered, delighted, Mary guessed, at this little compliment. “Why, I always travel with a notebook. And I ask my way to the picture gallery the very first thing in the morning. And then I meet men, and talk to them. There’s a man in my office who knows all about the Flemish school. I was telling Miss Datchet about the Flemish school. I picked up a lot of it from him—it’s a way men have—Gibbons, his name is. You must meet him. We’ll ask him to lunch. And this not caring about art,” he explained, turning to Mary, “it’s one of Katharine’s poses, Miss Datchet. Did you know she posed? She pretends that she’s never read Shakespeare. And why should she read Shakespeare, since she is Shakespeare—Rosalind, you know,” and he gave his queer little chuckle. Somehow this compliment appeared very old-fashioned and almost in bad taste. Mary actually felt herself blush, as if he had said “the sex” or “the ladies.” Constrained, perhaps, by nervousness, Rodney continued in the same vein.

“She knows enough—enough for all decent purposes. What do you women want with learning, when you have so much else—everything, I should say—everything. Leave us something, eh, Katharine?”

“Leave you something?” said Katharine, apparently waking from a brown study. “I was thinking we must be going——”

“Is it to-night that Lady Ferrilby dines with us? No, we mustn’t be late,” said Rodney, rising. “D’you know the Ferrilbys, Miss Datchet? They own Trantem Abbey,” he added, for her information, as she looked doubtful. “And if Katharine makes herself very charming to-night, perhaps’ll lend it to us for the honeymoon.”

“I agree that may be a reason. Otherwise she’s a dull woman,” said Katharine. “At least,” she added, as if to qaulify her abruptness, “I find it difficult to talk to her.”

“Because you expect every one else to take all the trouble. I’ve seen her sit silent a whole evening,” he said, turning to Mary, as he had frequently done already. “Don’t you find that, too? Sometimes when we’re alone, I’ve counted the time on my watch”—here he took out a large gold watch, and tapped the glass—“the time between one remark and the next. And once I counted ten minutes and twenty seconds, and then, if you’ll believe me, she only said ‘Um!’”

“I’m sure I’m sorry,” Katharine apologized. “I know it’s a bad habit, but then, you see, at home——”

The rest of her excuse was cut short, so far as Mary was concerned, by the closing of the door. She fancied she could hear William finding fresh fault on the stairs. A moment later, the door-bell rang again, and Katharine reappeared, having left her purse on a chair. She soon found it, and said, pausing for a moment at the door, and speaking differently as they were alone:

“I think being engaged is very bad for the character.” She shook her purse in her hand until the coins jingled, as if she alluded merely to this example of her forgetfulness. But the remark puzzled Mary; it seemed to refer to something else; and her manner had changed so strangely, now that William was out of hearing, that she could not help looking at her for an explanation. She looked almost stern, so that Mary, trying to smile at her, only succeeded in producing a silent stare of interrogation.

As the door shut for the second time, she sank on to the floor in front of the fire, trying, now that their bodies were not there to distract her, to piece together her impressions of them as a whole. And, though priding herself, with all other men and women, upon an infallible eye for character, she could not feel at all certain that she knew what motives inspired Katharine Hilbery in life. There was something that carried her on smoothly, out of reach—something, yes, but what?—something that reminded Mary of Ralph. Oddly enough, he gave her the same feeling, too, and with him, too, she felt baffled. Oddly enough, for no two people, she hastily concluded, were more unlike. And yet both had this hidden impulse, this incalculable force—this thing they cared for and didn’t talk about—oh, what was it?

[]

Chapter XV

The village of Disham lies somewhere on the rolling piece of cultivated ground in the neighbourhood of Lincoln, not so far inland but that a sound, bringing rumours of the sea, can be heard on summer nights or when the winter storms fling the waves upon the long beach. So large is the church, and in particular the church tower, in comparison with the little street of cottages which compose the village, that the traveller is apt to cast his mind back to the Middle Ages, as the only time when so much piety could have been kept alive. So great a trust in the Church can surely not belong to our day, and he goes on to conjecture that every one of the villagers has reached the extreme limit of human life. Such are the reflections of the superficial stranger, and his sight of the population, as it is represented by two or three men hoeing in a turnip-field, a small child carrying a jug, and a young woman shaking a piece of carpet outside her cottage door, will not lead him to see anything very much out of keeping with the Middle Ages in the village of Disham as it is to-day. These people, though they seem young enough, look so angular and so crude that they remind him of the little pictures painted by monks in the capital letters of their manuscripts. He only half understands what they say, and speaks very loud and clearly, as though, indeed, his voice had to carry through a hundred years or more before it reached them. He would have a far better chance of understanding some dweller in Paris or Rome, Berlin or Madrid, than these countrymen of his who have lived for the last two thousand years not two hundred miles from the City of London.

The Rectory stands about half a mile beyond the village. It is a large house, and has been growing steadily for some centuries round the great kitchen, with its narrow red tiles, as the Rector would point out to his guests on the first night of their arrival, taking his brass candlestick, and bidding them mind the steps up and the steps down, and notice the immense thickness of the walls, the old beams across the ceiling, the staircases as steep as ladders, and the attics, with their deep, tent-like roofs, in which swallows bred, and once a white owl. But nothing very interesting or very beautiful had resulted from the different additions made by the different rectors.

The house, however, was surrounded by a garden, in which the Rector took considerable pride. The lawn, which fronted the drawing-room windows, was a rich and uniform green, unspotted by a single daisy, and on the other side of it two straight paths led past beds of tall, standing flowers to a charming grassy walk, where the Rev. Wyndham Datchet would pace up and down at the same hour every morning, with a sundial to measure the time for him. As often as not, he carried a book in his hand, into which he would glance, then shut it up, and repeat the rest of the ode from memory. He had most of Horace by heart, and had got into the habit of connecting this particular walk with certain odes which he repeated duly, at the same time noting the condition of his flowers, and stooping now and again to pick any that were withered or overblown. On wet days, such was the power of habit over him, he rose from his chair at the same hour, and paced his study for the same length of time, pausing now and then to straighten some book in the bookcase, or alter the position of the two brass crucifixes standing upon cairns of serpentine stone upon the mantelpiece. His children had a great respect for him, credited him with far more learning than he actually possessed, and saw that his habits were not interfered with, if possible. Like most people who do things methodically, the Rector himself had more strength of purpose and power of self-sacrifice than of intellect or of originality. On cold and windy nights he rode off to visit sick people, who might need him, without a murmur; and by virtue of doing dull duties punctually, he was much employed upon committees and local Boards and Councils; and at this period of his life (he was sixty-eight) he was beginning to be commiserated by tender old ladies for the extreme leanness of his person, which, they said, was worn out upon the roads when it should have been resting before a comfortable fire. His elder daughter, Elizabeth, lived with him and managed the house, and already much resembled him in dry sincerity and methodical habit of mind; of the two sons one, Richard, was an estate agent, the other, Christopher, was reading for the Bar. At Christmas, naturally, they met together; and for a month past the arrangement of the Christmas week had been much in the mind of mistress and maid, who prided themselves every year more confidently upon the excellence of their equipment. The late Mrs. Datchet had left an excellent cupboard of linen, to which Elizabeth had succeeded at the age of nineteen, when her mother died, and the charge of the family rested upon the shoulders of the eldest daughter. She kept a fine flock of yellow chickens, sketched a little, certain rose-trees in the garden were committed specially to her care; and what with the care of the house, the care of the chickens, and the care of the poor, she scarcely knew what it was to have an idle minute. An extreme rectitude of mind, rather than any gift, gave her weight in the family. When Mary wrote to say that she had asked Ralph Denham to stay with them, she added, out of deference to Elizabeth’s character, that he was very nice, though rather queer, and had been overworking himself in London. No doubt Elizabeth would conclude that Ralph was in love with her, but there could be no doubt either that not a word of this would be spoken by either of them, unless, indeed, some catastrophe made mention of it unavoidable.

Mary went down to Disham without knowing whether Ralph intended to come; but two or three days before Christmas she received a telegram from Ralph, asking her to take a room for him in the village. This was followed by a letter explaining that he hoped he might have his meals with them; but quiet, essential for his work, made it necessary to sleep out.

Mary was walking in the garden with Elizabeth, and inspecting the roses, when the letter arrived.

“But that’s absurd,” said Elizabeth decidedly, when the plan was explained to her. “There are five spare rooms, even when the boys are here. Besides, he wouldn’t get a room in the village. And he oughtn’t to work if he’s overworked.”

“But perhaps he doesn’t want to see so much of us,” Mary thought to herself, although outwardly she assented, and felt grateful to Elizabeth for supporting her in what was, of course, her desire. They were cutting roses at the time, and laying them, head by head, in a shallow basket.

“If Ralph were here, he’d find this very dull,” Mary thought, with a little shiver of irritation, which led her to place her rose the wrong way in the basket. Meanwhile, they had come to the end of the path, and while Elizabeth straightened some flowers, and made them stand upright within their fence of string, Mary looked at her father, who was pacing up and down, with his hand behind his back and his head bowed in meditation. Obeying an impulse which sprang from some desire to interrupt this methodical marching, Mary stepped on to the grass walk and put her hand on his arm.

“A flower for your buttonhole, father,” she said, presenting a rose.

“Eh, dear?” said Mr. Datchet, taking the flower, and holding it at an angle which suited his bad eyesight, without pausing in his walk.

“Where does this fellow come from? One of Elizabeth’s roses—I hope you asked her leave. Elizabeth doesn’t like having her roses picked without her leave, and quite right, too.”

He had a habit, Mary remarked, and she had never noticed it so clearly before, of letting his sentences tail away into a continuous murmur, whereupon he passed into a state of abstraction, presumed by his children to indicate some train of thought too profound for utterance.

“What?” said Mary, interrupting, for the first time in her life, perhaps, when the murmur ceased. He made no reply. She knew very well that he wished to be left alone, but she stuck to his side much as she might have stuck to some sleep-walker, whom she thought it right gradually to awaken. She could think of nothing to rouse him with except:

“The garden’s looking very nice, father.”

“Yes, yes, yes,” said Mr. Datchet, running his words together in the same abstracted manner, and sinking his head yet lower upon his breast. And suddenly, as they turned their steps to retrace their way, he jerked out:

“The traffic’s very much increased, you know. More rolling-stock needed already. Forty trucks went down yesterday by the 12.15—counted them myself. They’ve taken off the 9.3, and given us an 8.30 instead—suits the business men, you know. You came by the old 3.10 yesterday, I suppose?”

She said “Yes,” as he seemed to wish for a reply, and then he looked at his watch, and made off down the path towards the house, holding the rose at the same angle in front of him. Elizabeth had gone round to the side of the house, where the chickens lived, so that Mary found herself alone, holding Ralph’s letter in her hand. She was uneasy. She had put off the season for thinking things out very successfully, and now that Ralph was actually coming, the next day, she could only wonder how her family would impress him. She thought it likely that her father would discuss the train service with him; Elizabeth would be bright and sensible, and always leaving the room to give messages to the servants. Her brothers had already said that they would give him a day’s shooting. She was content to leave the problem of Ralph’s relations to the young men obscure, trusting that they would find some common ground of masculine agreement. But what would he think of her? Would he see that she was different from the rest of the family? She devised a plan for taking him to her sitting-room, and artfully leading the talk towards the English poets, who now occupied prominent places in her little bookcase. Moreover, she might give him to understand, privately, that she, too, thought her family a queer one—queer, yes, but not dull. That was the rock past which she was bent on steering him. And she thought how she would draw his attention to Edward’s passion for Jorrocks, and the enthusiasm which led Christopher to collect moths and butterflies, though he was now twenty-two. Perhaps Elizabeth’s sketching, if the fruits were invisible, might lend colour to the general effect which she wished to produce of a family, eccentric and limited, perhaps, but not dull. Edward, she perceived, was rolling the lawn, for the sake of exercise; and the sight of him, with pink cheeks, bright little brown eyes, and a general resemblance to a clumsy young cart-horse in its winter coat of dusty brown hair, made Mary violently ashamed of her ambitious scheming. She loved him precisely as he was; she loved them all; and as she walked by his side, up and down, and down and up, her strong moral sense administered a sound drubbing to the vain and romantic element aroused in her by the mere thought of Ralph. She felt quite certain that, for good or for bad, she was very like the rest of her family.

Sitting in the corner of a third-class railway carriage, on the afternoon of the following day, Ralph made several inquiries of a commercial traveller in the opposite corner. They centred round a village called Lampsher, not three miles, he understood, from Lincoln; was there a big house in Lampsher, he asked, inhabited by a gentleman of the name of Otway?

The traveller knew nothing, but rolled the name of Otway on his tongue, reflectively, and the sound of it gratified Ralph amazingly. It gave him an excuse to take a letter from his pocket in order to verify the address.

“Stogdon House, Lampsher, Lincoln,” he read out.

“You’ll find somebody to direct you at Lincoln,” said the man; and Ralph had to confess that he was not bound there this very evening.

“I’ve got to walk over from Disham,” he said, and in the heart of him could not help marvelling at the pleasure which he derived from making a bagman in a train believe what he himself did not believe. For the letter, though signed by Katharine’s father, contained no invitation or warrant for thinking that Katharine herself was there; the only fact it disclosed was that for a fortnight this address would be Mr. Hilbery’s address. But when he looked out of the window, it was of her he thought; she, too, had seen these grey fields, and, perhaps, she was there where the trees ran up a slope, and one yellow light shone now, and then went out again, at the foot of the hill. The light shone in the windows of an old grey house, he thought. He lay back in his corner and forgot the commercial traveller altogether. The process of visualizing Katharine stopped short at the old grey manor-house; instinct warned him that if he went much further with this process reality would soon force itself in; he could not altogether neglect the figure of William Rodney. Since the day when he had heard from Katharine’s lips of her engagement, he had refrained from investing his dream of her with the details of real life. But the light of the late afternoon glowed green behind the straight trees, and became a symbol of her. The light seemed to expand his heart. She brooded over the grey fields, and was with him now in the railway carriage, thoughtful, silent, and infinitely tender; but the vision pressed too close, and must be dismissed, for the train was slackening. Its abrupt jerks shook him wide awake, and he saw Mary Datchet, a sturdy russet figure, with a dash of scarlet about it, as the carriage slid down the platform. A tall youth who accompanied her shook him by the hand, took his bag, and led the way without uttering one articulate word.

Never are voices so beautiful as on a winter’s evening, when dusk almost hides the body, and they seem to issue from nothingness with a note of intimacy seldom heard by day. Such an edge was there in Mary’s voice when she greeted him. About her seemed to hang the mist of the winter hedges, and the clear red of the bramble leaves. He felt himself at once stepping on to the firm ground of an entirely different world, but he did not allow himself to yield to the pleasure of it directly. They gave him his choice of driving with Edward or of walking home across the fields with Mary—not a shorter way, they explained, but Mary thought it a nicer way. He decided to walk with her, being conscious, indeed, that he got comfort from her presence. What could be the cause of her cheerfulness, he wondered, half ironically, and half enviously, as the pony-cart started briskly away, and the dusk swam between their eyes and the tall form of Edward, standing up to drive, with the reins in one hand and the whip in the other. People from the village, who had been to the market town, were climbing into their gigs, or setting off home down the road together in little parties. Many salutations were addressed to Mary, who shouted back, with the addition of the speaker’s name. But soon she led the way over a stile, and along a path worn slightly darker than the dim green surrounding it. In front of them the sky now showed itself of a reddish-yellow, like a slice of some semilucent stone behind which a lamp burnt, while a fringe of black trees with distinct branches stood against the light, which was obscured in one direction by a hump of earth, in all other directions the land lying flat to the very verge of the sky. One of the swift and noiseless birds of the winter’s night seemed to follow them across the field, circling a few feet in front of them, disappearing and returning again and again.

Mary had gone this walk many hundred times in the course of her life, generally alone, and at different stages the ghosts of past moods would flood her mind with a whole scene or train of thought merely at the sight of three trees from a particular angle, or at the sound of the pheasant clucking in the ditch. But to-night the circumstances were strong enough to oust all other scenes; and she looked at the field and the trees with an involuntary intensity as if they had no such associations for her.

“Well, Ralph,” she said, “this is better than Lincoln’s Inn Fields, isn’t it? Look, there’s a bird for you! Oh, you’ve brought glasses, have you? Edward and Christopher mean to make you shoot. Can you shoot? I shouldn’t think so——”

“Look here, you must explain,” said Ralph. “Who are these young men? Where am I staying?”

“You are staying with us, of course,” she said boldly. “Of course, you’re staying with us—you don’t mind coming, do you?”

“If I had, I shouldn’t have come,” he said sturdily. They walked on in silence; Mary took care not to break it for a time. She wished Ralph to feel, as she thought he would, all the fresh delights of the earth and air. She was right. In a moment he expressed his pleasure, much to her comfort.

“This is the sort of country I thought you’d live in, Mary,” he said, pushing his hat back on his head, and looking about him. “Real country. No gentlemen’s seats.”

He snuffed the air, and felt more keenly than he had done for many weeks the pleasure of owning a body.

“Now we have to find our way through a hedge,” said Mary. In the gap of the hedge Ralph tore up a poacher’s wire, set across a hole to trap a rabbit.

“It’s quite right that they should poach,” said Mary, watching him tugging at the wire. “I wonder whether it was Alfred Duggins or Sid Rankin? How can one expect them not to, when they only make fifteen shillings a week? Fifteen shillings a week,” she repeated, coming out on the other side of the hedge, and running her fingers through her hair to rid herself of a bramble which had attached itself to her. “I could live on fifteen shillings a week—easily.”

“Could you?” said Ralph. “I don’t believe you could,” he added.

“Oh yes. They have a cottage thrown in, and a garden where one can grow vegetables. It wouldn’t be half bad,” said Mary, with a soberness which impressed Ralph very much.

“But you’d get tired of it,” he urged.

“I sometimes think it’s the only thing one would never get tired of,” she replied.

The idea of a cottage where one grew one’s own vegetables and lived on fifteen shillings a week, filled Ralph with an extraordinary sense of rest and satisfaction.

“But wouldn’t it be on the main road, or next door to a woman with six squalling children, who’d always be hanging her washing out to dry across your garden?”

“The cottage I’m thinking of stands by itself in a little orchard.”

“And what about the Suffrage?” he asked, attempting sarcasm.

“Oh, there are other things in the world besides the Suffrage,” she replied, in an off-hand manner which was slightly mysterious.

Ralph fell silent. It annoyed him that she should have plans of which he knew nothing; but he felt that he had no right to press her further. His mind settled upon the idea of life in a country cottage. Conceivably, for he could not examine into it now, here lay a tremendous possibility; a solution of many problems. He struck his stick upon the earth, and stared through the dusk at the shape of the country.

“D’you know the points of the compass?” he asked.

“Well, of course,” said Mary. “What d’you take me for?—a Cockney like you?” She then told him exactly where the north lay, and where the south.

“It’s my native land, this,” she said. “I could smell my way about it blindfold.”

As if to prove this boast, she walked a little quicker, so that Ralph found it difficult to keep pace with her. At the same time, he felt drawn to her as he had never been before; partly, no doubt, because she was more independent of him than in London, and seemed to be attached firmly to a world where he had no place at all. Now the dusk had fallen to such an extent that he had to follow her implicitly, and even lean his hand on her shoulder when they jumped a bank into a very narrow lane. And he felt curiously shy of her when she began to shout through her hands at a spot of light which swung upon the mist in a neighbouring field. He shouted, too, and the light stood still.

“That’s Christopher, come in already, and gone to feed his chickens,” she said.

She introduced him to Ralph, who could see only a tall figure in gaiters, rising from a fluttering circle of soft feathery bodies, upon whom the light fell in wavering discs, calling out now a bright spot of yellow, now one of greenish-black and scarlet. Mary dipped her hand in the bucket he carried, and was at once the centre of a circle also; and as she cast her grain she talked alternately to the birds and to her brother, in the same clucking, half-inarticulate voice, as it sounded to Ralph, standing on the outskirts of the fluttering feathers in his black overcoat.

He had removed his overcoat by the time they sat round the dinner-table, but nevertheless he looked very strange among the others. A country life and breeding had preserved in them all a look which Mary hesitated to call either innocent or youthful, as she compared them, now sitting round in an oval, softly illuminated by candlelight; and yet it was something of the kind, yes, even in the case of the Rector himself. Though superficially marked with lines, his face was a clear pink, and his blue eyes had the long-sighted, peaceful expression of eyes seeking the turn of the road, or a distant light through rain, or the darkness of winter. She looked at Ralph. He had never appeared to her more concentrated and full of purpose; as if behind his forehead were massed so much experience that he could choose for himself which part of it he would display and which part he would keep to himself. Compared with that dark and stern countenance, her brothers’ faces, bending low over their soup-plates, were mere circles of pink, unmoulded flesh.

“You came by the 3.10, Mr. Denham?” said the Reverend Wyndham Datchet, tucking his napkin into his collar, so that almost the whole of his body was concealed by a large white diamond. “They treat us very well, on the whole. Considering the increase of traffic, they treat us very well indeed. I have the curiosity sometimes to count the trucks on the goods’ trains, and they’re well over fifty—well over fifty, at this season of the year.”

The old gentleman had been roused agreeably by the presence of this attentive and well-informed young man, as was evident by the care with which he finished the last words in his sentences, and his slight exaggeration in the number of trucks on the trains. Indeed, the chief burden of the talk fell upon him, and he sustained it to-night in a manner which caused his sons to look at him admiringly now and then; for they felt shy of Denham, and were glad not to have to talk themselves. The store of information about the present and past of this particular corner of Lincolnshire which old Mr. Datchet produced really surprised his children, for though they knew of its existence, they had forgotten its extent, as they might have forgotten the amount of family plate stored in the plate-chest, until some rare celebration brought it forth.

After dinner, parish business took the Rector to his study, and Mary proposed that they should sit in the kitchen.

“It’s not the kitchen really,” Elizabeth hastened to explain to her guest, “but we call it so——”

“It’s the nicest room in the house,” said Edward.

“It’s got the old rests by the side of the fireplace, where the men hung their guns,” said Elizabeth, leading the way, with a tall brass candlestick in her hand, down a passage. “Show Mr. Denham the steps, Christopher…. When the Ecclesiastical Commissioners were here two years ago they said this was the most interesting part of the house. These narow bricks prove that it is five hundred years old—five hundred years, I think—they may have said six.” She, too, felt an impulse to exaggerate the age of the bricks, as her father had exaggerated the number of trucks. A big lamp hung down from the centre of the ceiling and, together with a fine log fire, illuminated a large and lofty room, with rafters running from wall to wall, a floor of red tiles, and a substantial fireplace built up of those narrow red bricks which were said to be five hundred years old. A few rugs and a sprinkling of arm-chairs had made this ancient kitchen into a sitting-room. Elizabeth, after pointing out the gun-racks, and the hooks for smoking hams, and other evidence of incontestable age, and explaining that Mary had had the idea of turning the room into a sitting-room—otherwise it was used for hanging out the wash and for the men to change in after shooting—considered that she had done her duty as hostess, and sat down in an upright chair directly beneath the lamp, beside a very long and narrow oak table. She placed a pair of horn spectacles upon her nose, and drew towards her a basketful of threads and wools. In a few minutes a smile came to her face, and remained there for the rest of the evening.

“Will you come out shooting with us to-morrow?” said Christopher, who had, on the whole, formed a favourable impression of his sister’s friend.

“I won’t shoot, but I’ll come with you,” said Ralph.

“Don’t you care about shooting?” asked Edward, whose suspicions were not yet laid to rest.

“I’ve never shot in my life,” said Ralph, turning and looking him in the face, because he was not sure how this confession would be received.

“You wouldn’t have much chance in London, I suppose,” said Christopher. “But won’t you find it rather dull—just watching us?”

“I shall watch birds,” Ralph replied, with a smile.

“I can show you the place for watching birds,” said Edward, “if that’s what you like doing. I know a fellow who comes down from London about this time every year to watch them. It’s a great place for the wild geese and the ducks. I’ve heard this man say that it’s one of the best places for birds in the country.”

“It’s about the best place in England,” Ralph replied. They were all gratified by this praise of their native county; and Mary now had the pleasure of hearing these short questions and answers lose their undertone of suspicious inspection, so far as her brothers were concerned, and develop into a genuine conversation about the habits of birds which afterwards turned to a discussion as to the habits of solicitors, in which it was scarcely necessary for her to take part. She was pleased to see that her brothers liked Ralph, to the extent, that is, of wishing to secure his good opinion. Whether or not he liked them it was impossible to tell from his kind but experienced manner. Now and then she fed the fire with a fresh log, and as the room filled with the fine, dry heat of burning wood, they all, with the exception of Elizabeth, who was outside the range of the fire, felt less and less anxious about the effect they were making, and more and more inclined for sleep. At this moment a vehement scratching was heard on the door.

“Piper!—oh, damn!—I shall have to get up,” murmured Christopher.

“It’s not Piper, it’s Pitch,” Edward grunted.

“All the same, I shall have to get up,” Christopher grumbled. He let in the dog, and stood for a moment by the door, which opened into the garden, to revive himself with a draught of the black, starlit air.

“Do come in and shut the door!” Mary cried, half turning in her chair.

“We shall have a fine day to-morrow,” said Christopher with complacency, and he sat himself on the floor at her feet, and leant his back against her knees, and stretched out his long stockinged legs to the fire—all signs that he felt no longer any restraint at the presence of the stranger. He was the youngest of the family, and Mary’s favourite, partly because his character resembled hers, as Edward’s character resembled Elizabeth’s. She made her knees a comfortable rest for his head, and ran her fingers through his hair.

“I should like Mary to stroke my head like that,” Ralph thought to himself suddenly, and he looked at Christopher, almost affectionately, for calling forth his sister’s caresses. Instantly he thought of Katharine, the thought of her being surrounded by the spaces of night and the open air; and Mary, watching him, saw the lines upon his forehead suddenly deepen. He stretched out an arm and placed a log upon the fire, constraining himself to fit it carefully into the frail red scaffolding, and also to limit his thoughts to this one room.

Mary had ceased to stroke her brother’s head; he moved it impatiently between her knees, and, much as though he were a child, she began once more to part the thick, reddish-coloured locks this way and that. But a far stronger passion had taken possession of her soul than any her brother could inspire in her, and, seeing Ralph’s change of expression, her hand almost automatically continued its movements, while her mind plunged desperately for some hold upon slippery banks.

[]

Chapter XVI

Into that same black night, almost, indeed, into the very same layer of starlit air, Katharine Hilbery was now gazing, although not with a view to the prospects of a fine day for duck shooting on the morrow. She was walking up and down a gravel path in the garden of Stogdon House, her sight of the heavens being partially intercepted by the light leafless hoops of a pergola. Thus a spray of clematis would completely obscure Cassiopeia, or blot out with its black pattern myriads of miles of the Milky Way. At the end of the pergola, however, there was a stone seat, from which the sky could be seen completely swept clear of any earthly interruption, save to the right, indeed, where a line of elm-trees was beautifully sprinkled with stars, and a low stable building had a full drop of quivering silver just issuing from the mouth of the chimney. It was a moonless night, but the light of the stars was sufficient to show the outline of the young woman’s form, and the shape of her face gazing gravely, indeed almost sternly, into the sky. She had come out into the winter’s night, which was mild enough, not so much to look with scientific eyes upon the stars, as to shake herself free from certain purely terrestrial discontents. Much as a literary person in like circumstances would begin, absent-mindedly, pulling out volume after volume, so she stepped into the garden in order to have the stars at hand, even though she did not look at them. Not to be happy, when she was supposed to be happier than she would ever be again—that, as far as she could see, was the origin of a discontent which had begun almost as soon as she arrived, two days before, and seemed now so intolerable that she had left the family party, and come out here to consider it by herself. It was not she who thought herself unhappy, but her cousins, who thought it for her. The house was full of cousins, much of her age, or even younger, and among them they had some terribly bright eyes. They seemed always on the search for something between her and Rodney, which they expected to find, and yet did not find; and when they searched, Katharine became aware of wanting what she had not been conscious of wanting in London, alone with William and her parents. Or, if she did not want it, she missed it. And this state of mind depressed her, because she had been accustomed always to give complete satisfaction, and her self-love was now a little ruffled. She would have liked to break through the reserve habitual to her in order to justify her engagement to some one whose opinion she valued. No one had spoken a word of criticism, but they left her alone with William; not that that would have mattered, if they had not left her alone so politely; and, perhaps, that would not have mattered if they had not seemed so queerly silent, almost respectful, in her presence, which gave way to criticism, she felt, out of it.

Looking now and then at the sky, she went through the list of her cousins’ names: Eleanor, Humphrey, Marmaduke, Silvia, Henry, Cassandra, Gilbert, and Mostyn—Henry, the cousin who taught the young ladies of Bungay to play upon the violin, was the only one in whom she could confide, and as she walked up and down beneath the hoops of the pergola, she did begin a little speech to him, which ran something like this:

“To begin with, I’m very fond of William. You can’t deny that. I know him better than any one, almost. But why I’m marrying him is, partly, I admit—I’m being quite honest with you, and you mustn’t tell any one—partly because I want to get married. I want to have a house of my own. It isn’t possible at home. It’s all very well for you, Henry; you can go your own way. I have to be there always. Besides, you know what our house is. You wouldn’t be happy either, if you didn’t do something. It isn’t that I haven’t the time at home—it’s the atmosphere.”

Here, presumably, she imagined that her cousin, who had listened with his usual intelligent sympathy, raised his eyebrows a little, and interposed:

“Well, but what do you want to do?”

Even in this purely imaginary dialogue, Katharine found it difficult to confide her ambition to an imaginary companion.

“I should like,” she began, and hesitated quite a long time before she forced herself to add, with a change of voice, “to study mathematics—to know about the stars.”

Henry was clearly amazed, but too kind to express all his doubts; he only said something about the difficulties of mathematics, and remarked that very little was known about the stars.

Katharine thereupon went on with the statement of her case.

“I don’t care much whether I ever get to know anything—but I want to work out something in figures—something that hasn’t got to do with human beings. I don’t want people particularly. In some ways, Henry, I’m a humbug—I mean, I’m not what you all take me for. I’m not domestic, or very practical or sensible, really. And if I could calculate things, and use a telescope, and have to work out figures, and know to a fraction where I was wrong, I should be perfectly happy, and I believe I should give William all he wants.”

Having reached this point, instinct told her that she had passed beyond the region in which Henry’s advice could be of any good; and, having rid her mind of its superficial annoyance, she sat herself upon the stone seat, raised her eyes unconsciously and thought about the deeper questions which she had to decide, she knew, for herself. Would she, indeed, give William all he wanted? In order to decide the question, she ran her mind rapidly over her little collection of significant sayings, looks, compliments, gestures, which had marked their intercourse during the last day or two. He had been annoyed because a box, containing some clothes specially chosen by him for her to wear, had been taken to the wrong station, owing to her neglect in the matter of labels. The box had arrived in the nick of time, and he had remarked, as she came downstairs on the first night, that he had never seen her look more beautiful. She outshone all her cousins. He had discovered that she never made an ugly movement; he also said that the shape of her head made it possible for her, unlike most women, to wear her hair low. He had twice reproved her for being silent at dinner; and once for never attending to what he said. He had been surprised at the excellence of her French accent, but he thought it was selfish of her not to go with her mother to call upon the Middletons, because they were old family friends and very nice people. On the whole, the balance was nearly even; and, writing down a kind of conclusion in her mind which finished the sum for the present, at least, she changed the focus of her eyes, and saw nothing but the stars.

To-night they seemed fixed with unusual firmness in the blue, and flashed back such a ripple of light into her eyes that she found herself thinking that to-night the stars were happy. Without knowing or caring more for Church practices than most people of her age, Katharine could not look into the sky at Christmas time without feeling that, at this one season, the Heavens bend over the earth with sympathy, and signal with immortal radance that they, too, take part in her festival. Somehow, it seemed to her that they were even now beholding the procession of kings and wise men upon some road on a distant part of the earth. And yet, after gazing for another second, the stars did their usual work upon the mind, froze to cinders the whole of our short human history, and reduced the human body to an ape-like, furry form, crouching amid the brushwood of a barbarous clod of mud. This stage was soon succeeded by another, in which there was nothing in the universe save stars and the light of stars; as she looked up the pupils of her eyes so dilated with starlight that the whole of her seemed dissolved in silver and spilt over the ledges of the stars for ever and ever indefinitely through space. Somehow simultaneously, though incongruously, she was riding with the magnanimous hero upon the shore or under forest trees, and so might have continued were it not for the rebuke forcibly administered by the body, which, content with the normal conditions of life, in no way furthers any attempt on the part of the mind to alter them. She grew cold, shook herself, rose, and walked towards the house.

By the light of the stars, Stogdon House looked pale and romantic, and about twice its natural size. Built by a retired admiral in the early years of the nineteenth century, the curving bow windows of the front, now filled with reddish-yellow light, suggested a portly three-decker, sailing seas where those dolphins and narwhals who disport themselves upon the edges of old maps were scattered with an impartial hand. A semicircular flight of shallow steps led to a very large door, which Katharine had left ajar. She hesitated, cast her eyes over the front of the house, marked that a light burnt in one small window upon an upper floor, and pushed the door open. For a moment she stood in the square hall, among many horned skulls, sallow globes, cracked oil-paintings, and stuffed owls, hesitating, it seemed, whether she should open the door on her right, through which the stir of life reached her ears. Listening for a moment, she heard a sound which decided her, apparently, not to enter; her uncle, Sir Francis, was playing his nightly game of whist; it appeared probable that he was losing.

She went up the curving stairway, which represented the one attempt at ceremony in the otherwise rather dilapidated mansion, and down a narrow passage until she came to the room whose light she had seen from the garden. Knocking, she was told to come in. A young man, Henry Otway, was reading, with his feet on the fender. He had a fine head, the brow arched in the Elizabethan manner, but the gentle, honest eyes were rather sceptical than glowing with the Elizabethan vigour. He gave the impression that he had not yet found the cause which suited his temperament.

He turned, put down his book, and looked at her. He noticed her rather pale, dew-drenched look, as of one whose mind is not altogether settled in the body. He had often laid his difficulties before her, and guessed, in some ways hoped, that perhaps she now had need of him. At the same time, she carried on her life with such independence that he scarcely expected any confidence to be expressed in words.

“You have fled, too, then?” he said, looking at her cloak. Katharine had forgotten to remove this token of her star-gazing.

“Fled?” she asked. “From whom d’you mean? Oh, the family party. Yes, it was hot down there, so I went into the garden.”

“And aren’t you very cold?” Henry inquired, placing coal on the fire, drawing a chair up to the grate, and laying aside her cloak. Her indifference to such details often forced Henry to act the part generally taken by women in such dealings. It was one of the ties between them.

“Thank you, Henry,” she said. “I’m not disturbing you?”

“I’m not here. I’m at Bungay,” he replied. “I’m giving a music lesson to Harold and Julia. That was why I had to leave the table with the ladies—I’m spending the night there, and I shan’t be back till late on Christmas Eve.”

“How I wish—” Katharine began, and stopped short. “I think these parties are a great mistake,” she added briefly, and sighed.

“Oh, horrible!” he agreed; and they both fell silent.

Her sigh made him look at her. Should he venture to ask her why she sighed? Was her reticence about her own affairs as inviolable as it had often been convenient for rather an egoistical young man to think it? But since her engagement to Rodney, Henry’s feeling towards her had become rather complex; equally divided between an impulse to hurt her and an impulse to be tender to her; and all the time he suffered a curious irritation from the sense that she was drifting away from him for ever upon unknown seas. On her side, directly Katharine got into his presence, and the sense of the stars dropped from her, she knew that any intercourse between people is extremely partial; from the whole mass of her feelings, only one or two could be selected for Henry’s inspection, and therefore she sighed. Then she looked at him, and their eyes meeting, much more seemed to be in common between them than had appeared possible. At any rate they had a grandfather in common; at any rate there was a kind of loyalty between them sometimes found between relations who have no other cause to like each other, as these two had.

“Well, what’s the date of the wedding?” said Henry, the malicious mood now predominating.

“I think some time in March,” she replied.

“And afterwards?” he asked.

“We take a house, I suppose, somewhere in Chelsea.”

“It’s very interesting,” he observed, stealing another look at her.

She lay back in her arm-chair, her feet high upon the side of the grate, and in front of her, presumably to screen her eyes, she held a newspaper from which she picked up a sentence or two now and again. Observing this, Henry remarked:

“Perhaps marriage will make you more human.”

At this she lowered the newspaper an inch or two, but said nothing. Indeed, she sat quite silent for over a minute.

“When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don’t seem to matter very much, do they?” she said suddenly.

“I don’t think I ever do consider things like the stars,” Henry replied. “I’m not sure that that’s not the explanation, though,” he added, now observing her steadily.

“I doubt whether there is an explanation,” she replied rather hurriedly, not clearly understanding what he meant.

“What? No explanation of anything?” he inquired, with a smile.

“Oh, things happen. That’s about all,” she let drop in her casual, decided way.

“That certainly seems to explain some of your actions,” Henry thought to himself.

“One thing’s about as good as another, and one’s got to do something,” he said aloud, expressing what he supposed to be her attitude, much in her accent. Perhaps she detected the imitation, for looking gently at him, she said, with ironical composure:

“Well, if you believe that your life must be simple, Henry.”

“But I don’t believe it,” he said shortly.

“No more do I,” she replied.

“What about the stars?” he asked. “I understand that you rule your life by the stars?”

She let this pass, either because she did not attend to it, or because the tone was not to her liking.

Once more she paused, and then she inquired:

“But do you always understand why you do everything? Ought one to understand? People like my mother understand,” she reflected. “Now I must go down to them, I suppose, and see what’s happening.”

“What could be happening?” Henry protested.

“Oh, they may want to settle something,” she replied vaguely, putting her feet on the ground, resting her chin on her hands, and looking out of her large dark eyes contemplatively at the fire.

“And then there’s William,” she added, as if by an afterthought.

Henry very nearly laughed, but restrained himself.

“Do they know what coals are made of, Henry?” she asked, a moment later.

“Mares’ tails, I believe,” he hazarded.

“Have you ever been down a coal-mine?” she went on.

“Don’t let’s talk about coal-mines, Katharine,” he protested. “We shall probably never see each other again. When you’re married——”

Tremendously to his surprise, he saw the tears stand in her eyes.

“Why do you all tease me?” she said. “It isn’t kind.”

Henry could not pretend that he was altogether ignorant of her meaning, though, certainly, he had never guessed that she minded the teasing. But before he knew what to say, her eyes were clear again, and the sudden crack in the surface was almost filled up.

“Things aren’t easy, anyhow,” she stated.

Obeying an impulse of genuine affection, Henry spoke.

“Promise me, Katharine, that if I can ever help you, you will let me.”

She seemed to consider, looking once more into the red of the fire, and decided to refrain from any explanation.

“Yes, I promise that,” she said at length, and Henry felt himself gratified by her complete sincerity, and began to tell her now about the coal-mine, in obedience to her love of facts.

They were, indeed, descending the shaft in a small cage, and could hear the picks of the miners, something like the gnawing of rats, in the earth beneath them, when the door was burst open, without any knocking.

“Well, here you are!” Rodney exclaimed. Both Katharine and Henry turned round very quickly and rather guiltily. Rodney was in evening dress. It was clear that his temper was ruffled.

“That’s where you’ve been all the time,” he repeated, looking at Katharine.

“I’ve only been here about ten minutes,” she replied.

“My dear Katharine, you left the drawing-room over an hour ago.”

She said nothing.

“Does it very much matter?” Henry asked.

Rodney found it hard to be unreasonable in the presence of another man, and did not answer him.

“They don’t like it,” he said. “It isn’t kind to old people to leave them alone—although I’ve no doubt it’s much more amusing to sit up here and talk to Henry.”

“We were discussing coal-mines,” said Henry urbanely.

“Yes. But we were talking about much more interesting things before that,” said Katharine.

From the apparent determination to hurt him with which she spoke, Henry thought that some sort of explosion on Rodney’s part was about to take place.

“I can quite understand that,” said Rodney, with his little chuckle, leaning over the back of his chair and tapping the woodwork lightly with his fingers. They were all silent, and the silence was acutely uncomfortable to Henry, at least.

“Was it very dull, William?” Katharine suddenly asked, with a complete change of tone and a little gesture of her hand.

“Of course it was dull,” William said sulkily.

“Well, you stay and talk to Henry, and I’ll go down,” she replied.

She rose as she spoke, and as she turned to leave the room, she laid her hand, with a curiously caressing gesture, upon Rodney’s shoulder. Instantly Rodney clasped her hand in his, with such an impulse of emotion that Henry was annoyed, and rather ostentatiously opened a book.

“I shall come down with you,” said William, as she drew back her hand, and made as if to pass him.

“Oh no,” she said hastily. “You stay here and talk to Henry.”

“Yes, do,” said Henry, shutting up his book again. His invitation was polite, without being precisely cordial. Rodney evidently hesitated as to the course he should pursue, but seeing Katharine at the door, he exclaimed:

“No. I want to come with you.”

She looked back, and said in a very commanding tone, and with an expression of authority upon her face:

“It’s useless for you to come. I shall go to bed in ten minutes. Good night.”

She nodded to them both, but Henry could not help noticing that her last nod was in his direction. Rodney sat down rather heavily.

His mortification was so obvious that Henry scarcely liked to open the conversation with some remark of a literary character. On the other hand, unless he checked him, Rodney might begin to talk about his feelings, and irreticence is apt to be extremely painful, at any rate in prospect. He therefore adopted a middle course; that is to say, he wrote a note upon the fly-leaf of his book, which ran, “The situation is becoming most uncomfortable.” This he decorated with those flourishes and decorative borders which grow of themselves upon these occasions; and as he did so, he thought to himself that whatever Katharine’s difficulties might be, they did not justify her behaviour. She had spoken with a kind of brutality which suggested that, whether it is natural or assumed, women have a peculiar blindness to the feelings of men.

The pencilling of this note gave Rodney time to recover himself. Perhaps, for he was a very vain man, he was more hurt that Henry had seen him rebuffed than by the rebuff itself. He was in love with Katharine, and vanity is not decreased but increased by love, especially, one may hazard, in the presence of one’s own sex. But Rodney enjoyed the courage which springs from that laughable and lovable defect, and when he had mastered his first impulse, in some way to make a fool of himself, he drew inspiration from the perfect fit of his evening dress. He chose a cigarette, tapped it on the back of his hand, displayed his exquisite pumps on the edge of the fender, and summoned his self-respect.

“You’ve several big estates round here, Otway,” he began. “Any good hunting? Let me see, what pack would it be?”

“Sir William Budge, the sugar king, has the biggest estate. He bought out poor Stanham, who went bankrupt.”

“Which Stanham would that be? Verney or Alfred?”

“Alfred…. I don’t hunt myself. You’re a great huntsman, aren’t you? You have a great reputation as a horseman, anyhow,” he added, desiring to help Rodney in his effort to recover his complacency.

“Oh, I love riding,” Rodney replied. “Could I get a horse down here? Stupid of me! I forgot to bring any clothes. I can’t imagine, though, who told you I was anything of a rider.”

To tell the truth, Henry laboured under the same difficulty; he did not wish to introduce Katharine’s name, and, therefore, he replied vaguely that he had always heard that Rodney was a great rider. In truth, he had heard very little about him, one way or another, accepting him as a figure often to be found in the background at his aunt’s house, and inevitably, though inexplicably, engaged to his cousin.

“I don’t care much for shooting,” Rodney continued; “but one has to do it, unless one wants to be altogether out of things. I dare say there’s some very pretty country round here. I stayed once at Bolham Hall. Young Cranthorpe was up with you, wasn’t he? He married old Lord Bolham’s daughter. Very nice people—in their way.”

“I don’t mix in that society,” Henry remarked, rather shortly. But Rodney, now started on an agreeable current of reflection, could not resist the temptation of pursuing it a little further. He appeared to himself as a man who moved easily in very good society, and knew enough about the true values of life to be himself above it.

“Oh, but you should,” he went on. “It’s well worth staying there, anyhow, once a year. They make one very comfortable, and the women are ravishing.”

“The women?” Henry thought to himself, with disgust. “What could any woman see in you?” His tolerance was rapidly becoming exhausted, but he could not help liking Rodney nevertheless, and this appeared to him strange, for he was fastidious, and such words in another mouth would have condemned the speaker irreparably. He began, in short, to wonder what kind of creature this man who was to marry his cousin might be. Could any one, except a rather singular character, afford to be so ridiculously vain?

“I don’t think I should get on in that society,” he replied. “I don’t think I should know what to say to Lady Rose if I met her.”

“I don’t find any difficulty,” Rodney chuckled. “You talk to them about their children, if they have any, or their accomplishments—painting, gardening, poetry—they’re so delightfully sympathetic. Seriously, you know I think a woman’s opinion of one’s poetry is always worth having. Don’t ask them for their reasons. Just ask them for their feelings. Katharine, for example——”

“Katharine,” said Henry, with an emphasis upon the name, almost as if he resented Rodney’s use of it, “Katharine is very unlike most women.”

“Quite,” Rodney agreed. “She is—” He seemed about to describe her, and he hesitated for a long time. “She’s looking very well,” he stated, or rather almost inquired, in a different tone from that in which he had been speaking. Henry bent his head.

“But, as a family, you’re given to moods, eh?”

“Not Katharine,” said Henry, with decision.

“Not Katharine,” Rodney repeated, as if he weighed the meaning of the words. “No, perhaps you’re right. But her engagement has changed her. Naturally,” he added, “one would expect that to be so.” He waited for Henry to confirm this statement, but Henry remained silent.

“Katharine has had a difficult life, in some ways,” he continued. “I expect that marriage will be good for her. She has great powers.”

“Great,” said Henry, with decision.

“Yes—but now what direction d’you think they take?”

Rodney had completely dropped his pose as a man of the world and seemed to be asking Henry to help him in a difficulty.

“I don’t know,” Henry hesitated cautiously.

“D’you think children—a household—that sort of thing—d’you think that’ll satisfy her? Mind, I’m out all day.”

“She would certainly be very competent,” Henry stated.

“Oh, she’s wonderfully competent,” said Rodney. “But—I get absorbed in my poetry. Well, Katharine hasn’t got that. She admires my poetry, you know, but that wouldn’t be enough for her?”

“No,” said Henry. He paused. “I think you’re right,” he added, as if he were summing up his thoughts. “Katharine hasn’t found herself yet. Life isn’t altogether real to her yet—I sometimes think——”

“Yes?” Rodney inquired, as if he were eager for Henry to continue. “That is what I—” he was going on, as Henry remained silent, but the sentence was not finished, for the door opened, and they were interrupted by Henry’s younger brother Gilbert, much to Henry’s relief, for he had already said more than he liked.

[]

Chapter XVII

When the sun shone, as it did with unusual brightness that Christmas week, it revealed much that was faded and not altogether well-kept-up in Stogdon House and its grounds. In truth, Sir Francis had retired from service under the Government of India with a pension that was not adequate, in his opinion, to his services, as it certainly was not adequate to his ambitions. His career had not come up to his expectations, and although he was a very fine, white-whiskered, mahogany-coloured old man to look at, and had laid down a very choice cellar of good reading and good stories, you could not long remain ignorant of the fact that some thunder-storm had soured them; he had a grievance. This grievance dated back to the middle years of the last century, when, owing to some official intrigue, his merits had been passed over in a disgraceful manner in favour of another, his junior.

The rights and wrongs of the story, presuming that they had some existence in fact, were no longer clearly known to his wife and children; but this disappointment had played a very large part in their lives, and had poisoned the life of Sir Francis much as a disappointment in love is said to poison the whole life of a woman. Long brooding on his failure, continual arrangement and rearrangement of his deserts and rebuffs, had made Sir Francis much of an egoist, and in his retirement his temper became increasingly difficult and exacting.

His wife now offered so little resistance to his moods that she was practically useless to him. He made his daughter Euphemia into his chief confidante, and the prime of her life was being rapidly consumed by her father. To her he dictated the memoirs which were to avenge his memory, and she had to assure him constantly that his treatment had been a disgrace. Already, at the age of thirty-five, her cheeks were whitening as her mother’s had whitened, but for her there would be no memories of Indian suns and Indian rivers, and clamour of children in a nursery; she would have very little of substance to think about when she sat, as Lady Otway now sat, knitting white wool, with her eyes fixed almost perpetually upon the same embroidered bird upon the same fire-screen. But then Lady Otway was one of the people for whom the great make-believe game of English social life has been invented; she spent most of her time in pretending to herself and her neighbours that she was a dignified, important, much-occupied person, of considerable social standing and sufficient wealth. In view of the actual state of things this game needed a great deal of skill; and, perhaps, at the age she had reached—she was over sixty—she played far more to deceive herself than to deceive any one else. Moreover, the armour was wearing thin; she forgot to keep up appearances more and more.

The worn patches in the carpets, and the pallor of the drawing-room, where no chair or cover had been renewed for some years, were due not only to the miserable pension, but to the wear and tear of twelve children, eight of whom were sons. As often happens in these large families, a distinct dividing-line could be traced, about half-way in the succession, where the money for educational purposes had run short, and the six younger children had grown up far more economically than the elder. If the boys were clever, they won scholarships, and went to school; if they were not clever, they took what the family connexion had to offer them. The girls accepted situations occasionally, but there were always one or two at home, nursing sick animals, tending silkworms, or playing the flute in their bedrooms. The distinction between the elder children and the younger corresponded almost to the distinction between a higher class and a lower one, for with only a haphazard education and insufficient allowances, the younger children had picked up accomplishments, friends, and points of view which were not to be found within the walls of a public school or of a Government office. Between the two divisions there was considerable hostility, the elder trying to patronize the younger, the younger refusing to respect the elder; but one feeling united them and instantly closed any risk of a breach—their common belief in the superiority of their own family to all others. Henry was the eldest of the younger group, and their leader; he bought strange books and joined odd societies; he went without a tie for a whole year, and had six shirts made of black flannel. He had long refused to take a seat either in a shipping office or in a tea-merchant’s warehouse; and persisted, in spite of the disapproval of uncles and aunts, in practising both violin and piano, with the result that he could not perform professionally upon either. Indeed, for thirty-two years of life he had nothing more substantial to show than a manuscript book containing the score of half an opera. In this protest of his, Katharine had always given him her support, and as she was generally held to be an extremely sensible person, who dressed too well to be eccentric, he had found her support of some use. Indeed, when she came down at Christmas she usually spent a great part of her time in private conferences with Henry and with Cassandra, the youngest girl, to whom the silkworms belonged. With the younger section she had a great reputation for common sense, and for something that they despised but inwardly respected and called knowledge of the world—that is to say, of the way in which respectable elderly people, going to their clubs and dining out with ministers, think and behave. She had more than once played the part of ambassador between Lady Otway and her children. That poor lady, for instance, consulted her for advice when, one day, she opened Cassandra’s bedroom door on a mission of discovery, and found the ceiling hung with mulberry-leaves, the windows blocked with cages, and the tables stacked with home-made machines for the manufacture of silk dresses.

“I wish you could help her to take an interest in something that other people are interested in, Katharine,” she observed, rather plaintively, detailing her grievances. “It’s all Henry’s doing, you know, giving up her parties and taking to these nasty insects. It doesn’t follow that if a man can do a thing a woman may too.”

The morning was sufficiently bright to make the chairs and sofas in Lady Otway’s private sitting-room appear more than usually shabby, and the gallant gentlemen, her brothers and cousins, who had defended the Empire and left their bones on many frontiers, looked at the world through a film of yellow which the morning light seemed to have drawn across their photographs. Lady Otway sighed, it may be at the faded relics, and turned, with resignation, to her balls of wool, which, curiously and characteristically, were not an ivory-white, but rather a tarnished yellow-white. She had called her niece in for a little chat. She had always trusted her, and now more than ever, since her engagement to Rodney, which seemed to Lady Otway extremely suitable, and just what one would wish for one’s own daughter. Katharine unwittingly increased her reputation for wisdom by asking to be given knitting-needles too.

“It’s so very pleasant,” said Lady Otway, “to knit while one’s talking. And now, my dear Katharine, tell me about your plans.”

The emotions of the night before, which she had suppressed in such a way as to keep her awake till dawn, had left Katharine a little jaded, and thus more matter-of-fact than usual. She was quite ready to discuss her plans—houses and rents, servants and economy—without feeling that they concerned her very much. As she spoke, knitting methodically meanwhile, Lady Otway noted, with approval, the upright, responsible bearing of her niece, to whom the prospect of marriage had brought some gravity most becoming in a bride, and yet, in these days, most rare. Yes, Katharine’s engagement had changed her a little.

“What a perfect daughter, or daughter-in-law!” she thought to herself, and could not help contrasting her with Cassandra, surrounded by innumerable silkworms in her bedroom.

“Yes,” she continued, glancing at Katharine, with the round, greenish eyes which were as inexpressive as moist marbles, “Katharine is like the girls of my youth. We took the serious things of life seriously.” But just as she was deriving satisfaction from this thought, and was producing some of the hoarded wisdom which none of her own daughters, alas! seemed now to need, the door opened, and Mrs. Hilbery came in, or rather, did not come in, but stood in the doorway and smiled, having evidently mistaken the room.

“I never shall know my way about this house!” she exclaimed. “I’m on my way to the library, and I don’t want to interrupt. You and Katharine were having a little chat?”

The presence of her sister-in-law made Lady Otway slightly uneasy. How could she go on with what she was saying in Maggie’s presence? for she was saying something that she had never said, all these years, to Maggie herself.

“I was telling Katharine a few little commonplaces about marriage,” she said, with a little laugh. “Are none of my children looking after you, Maggie?”

“Marriage,” said Mrs. Hilbery, coming into the room, and nodding her head once or twice, “I always say marriage is a school. And you don’t get the prizes unless you go to school. Charlotte has won all the prizes,” she added, giving her sister-in-law a little pat, which made Lady Otway more uncomfortable still. She half laughed, muttered something, and ended on a sigh.

“Aunt Charlotte was saying that it’s no good being married unless you submit to your husband,” said Katharine, framing her aunt’s words into a far more definite shape than they had really worn; and when she spoke thus she did not appear at all old-fashioned. Lady Otway looked at her and paused for a moment.

“Well, I really don’t advise a woman who wants to have things her own way to get married,” she said, beginning a fresh row rather elaborately.

Mrs. Hilbery knew something of the circumstances which, as she thought, had inspired this remark. In a moment her face was clouded with sympathy which she did not quite know how to express.

“What a shame it was!” she exclaimed, forgetting that her train of thought might not be obvious to her listeners. “But, Charlotte, it would have been much worse if Frank had disgraced himself in any way. And it isn’t what our husbands get, but what they are. I used to dream of white horses and palanquins, too; but still, I like the ink-pots best. And who knows?” she concluded, looking at Katharine, “your father may be made a baronet to-morrow.”

Lady Otway, who was Mr. Hilbery’s sister, knew quite well that, in private, the Hilberys called Sir Francis “that old Turk,” and though she did not follow the drift of Mrs. Hilbery’s remarks, she knew what prompted them.

“But if you can give way to your husband,” she said, speaking to Katharine, as if there were a separate understanding between them, “a happy marriage is the happiest thing in the world.”

“Yes,” said Katharine, “but—” She did not mean to finish her sentence, she merely wished to induce her mother and her aunt to go on talking about marriage, for she was in the mood to feel that other people could help her if they would. She went on knitting, but her fingers worked with a decision that was oddly unlike the smooth and contemplative sweep of Lady Otway’s plump hand. Now and then she looked swiftly at her mother, then at her aunt. Mrs. Hilbery held a book in her hand, and was on her way, as Katharine guessed, to the library, where another paragraph was to be added to that varied assortment of paragraphs, the Life of Richard Alardyce. Normally, Katharine would have hurried her mother downstairs, and seen that no excuse for distraction came her way. Her attitude towards the poet’s life, however, had changed with other changes; and she was content to forget all about her scheme of hours. Mrs. Hilbery was secretly delighted. Her relief at finding herself excused manifested itself in a series of sidelong glances of sly humour in her daughter’s direction, and the indulgence put her in the best of spirits. Was she to be allowed merely to sit and talk? It was so much pleasanter to sit in a nice room filled with all sorts of interesting odds and ends which she hadn’t looked at for a year, at least, than to seek out one date which contradicted another in a dictionary.

“We’ve all had perfect husbands,” she concluded, generously forgiving Sir Francis all his faults in a lump. “Not that I think a bad temper is really a fault in a man. I don’t mean a bad temper,” she corrected herself, with a glance obviously in the direction of Sir Francis. “I should say a quick, impatient temper. Most, in fact all, great men have had bad tempers—except your grandfather, Katharine,” and here she sighed, and suggested that, perhaps, she ought to go down to the library.

“But in the ordinary marriage, is it necessary to give way to one’s husband?” said Katharine, taking no notice of her mother’s suggestion, blind even to the depression which had now taken possession of her at the thought of her own inevitable death.

“I should say yes, certainly,” said Lady Otway, with a decision most unusual for her.

“Then one ought to make up one’s mind to that before one is married,” Katharine mused, seeming to address herself.

Mrs. Hilbery was not much interested in these remarks, which seemed to have a melancholy tendency, and to revive her spirits she had recourse to an infallible remedy—she looked out of the window.

“Do look at that lovely little blue bird!” she exclaimed, and her eye looked with extreme pleasure at the soft sky, at the trees, at the green fields visible behind those trees, and at the leafless branches which surrounded the body of the small blue tit. Her sympathy with nature was exquisite.

“Most women know by instinct whether they can give it or not,” Lady Otway slipped in quickly, in rather a low voice, as if she wanted to get this said while her sister-in-law’s attention was diverted. “And if not—well then, my advice would be—don’t marry.”

“Oh, but marriage is the happiest life for a woman,” said Mrs. Hilbery, catching the word marriage, as she brought her eyes back to the room again. Then she turned her mind to what she had said.

“It’s the most interesting life,” she corrected herself. She looked at her daughter with a look of vague alarm. It was the kind of maternal scrutiny which suggests that, in looking at her daughter a mother is really looking at herself. She was not altogether satisfied; but she purposely made no attempt to break down the reserve which, as a matter of fact, was a quality she particularly admired and depended upon in her daughter. But when her mother said that marriage was the most interesting life, Katharine felt, as she was apt to do suddenly, for no definite reason, that they understood each other, in spite of differing in every possible way. Yet the wisdom of the old seems to apply more to feelings which we have in common with the rest of the human race than to our feelings as individuals, and Katharine knew that only some one of her own age could follow her meaning. Both these elderly women seemed to her to have been content with so little happiness, and at the moment she had not sufficient force to feel certain that their version of marriage was the wrong one. In London, certainly, this temperate attitude toward her own marriage had seemed to her just. Why had she now changed? Why did it now depress her? It never occurred to her that her own conduct could be anything of a puzzle to her mother, or that elder people are as much affected by the young as the young are by them. And yet it was true that love—passion—whatever one chose to call it, had played far less part in Mrs. Hilbery’s life than might have seemed likely, judging from her enthusiastic and imaginative temperament. She had always been more interested by other things. Lady Otway, strange though it seemed, guessed more accurately at Katharine’s state of mind than her mother did.

“Why don’t we all live in the country?” exclaimed Mrs. Hilbery, once more looking out of the window. “I’m sure one would think such beautiful things if one lived in the country. No horrid slum houses to depress one, no trams or motor-cars; and the people all looking so plump and cheerful. Isn’t there some little cottage near you, Charlotte, which would do for us, with a spare room, perhaps, in case we asked a friend down? And we should save so much money that we should be able to travel——”

“Yes. You would find it very nice for a week or two, no doubt,” said Lady Otway. “But what hour would you like the carriage this morning?” she continued, touching the bell.

“Katharine shall decide,” said Mrs. Hilbery, feeling herself unable to prefer one hour to another. “And I was just going to tell you, Katharine, how, when I woke this morning, everything seemed so clear in my head that if I’d had a pencil I believe I could have written quite a long chapter. When we’re out on our drive I shall find us a house. A few trees round it, and a little garden, a pond with a Chinese duck, a study for your father, a study for me, and a sitting-room for Katharine, because then she’ll be a married lady.”

At this Katharine shivered a little, drew up to the fire, and warmed her hands by spreading them over the topmost peak of the coal. She wished to bring the talk back to marriage again, in order to hear Aunt Charlotte’s views, but she did not know how to do this.

“Let me look at your engagement-ring, Aunt Charlotte,” she said, noticing her own.

She took the cluster of green stones and turned it round and round, but she did not know what to say next.

“That poor old ring was a sad disappointment to me when I first had it,” Lady Otway mused. “I’d set my heart on a diamond ring, but I never liked to tell Frank, naturally. He bought it at Simla.”

Katharine turned the ring round once more, and gave it back to her aunt without speaking. And while she turned it round her lips set themselves firmly together, and it seemed to her that she could satisfy William as these women had satisfied their husbands; she could pretend to like emeralds when she preferred diamonds. Having replaced her ring, Lady Otway remarked that it was chilly, though not more so than one must expect at this time of year. Indeed, one ought to be thankful to see the sun at all, and she advised them both to dress warmly for their drive. Her aunt’s stock of commonplaces, Katharine sometimes suspected, had been laid in on purpose to fill silences with, and had little to do with her private thoughts. But at this moment they seemed terribly in keeping with her own conclusions, so that she took up her knitting again and listened, chiefly with a view to confirming herself in the belief that to be engaged to marry some one with whom you are not in love is an inevitable step in a world where the existence of passion is only a traveller’s story brought from the heart of deep forests and told so rarely that wise people doubt whether the story can be true. She did her best to listen to her mother asking for news of John, and to her aunt replying with the authentic history of Hilda’s engagement to an officer in the Indian Army, but she cast her mind alternately towards forest paths and starry blossoms, and towards pages of neatly written mathematical signs. When her mind took this turn her marriage seemed no more than an archway through which it was necessary to pass in order to have her desire. At such times the current of her nature ran in its deep narrow channel with great force and with an alarming lack of consideration for the feelings of others. Just as the two elder ladies had finished their survey of the family prospects, and Lady Otway was nervously anticipating some general statement as to life and death from her sister-in-law, Cassandra burst into the room with the news that the carriage was at the door.

“Why didn’t Andrews tell me himself?” said Lady Otway, peevishly, blaming her servants for not living up to her ideals.

When Mrs. Hilbery and Katharine arrived in the hall, ready dressed for their drive, they found that the usual discussion was going forward as to the plans of the rest of the family. In token of this, a great many doors were opening and shutting, two or three people stood irresolutely on the stairs, now going a few steps up, and now a few steps down, and Sir Francis himself had come out from his study, with the Times under his arm, and a complaint about noise and draughts from the open door which, at least, had the effect of bundling the people who did not want to go into the carriage, and sending those who did not want to stay back to their rooms. It was decided that Mrs. Hilbery, Katharine, Rodney, and Henry should drive to Lincoln, and any one else who wished to go should follow on bicycles or in the pony-cart. Every one who stayed at Stogdon House had to make this expedition to Lincoln in obedience to Lady Otway’s conception of the right way to entertain her guests, which she had imbibed from reading in fashionable papers of the behaviour of Christmas parties in ducal houses. The carriage horses were both fat and aged, still they matched; the carriage was shaky and uncomfortable, but the Otway arms were visible on the panels. Lady Otway stood on the topmost step, wrapped in a white shawl, and waved her hand almost mechanically until they had turned the corner under the laurel-bushes, when she retired indoors with a sense that she had played her part, and a sigh at the thought that none of her children felt it necessary to play theirs.

The carriage bowled along smoothly over the gently curving road. Mrs. Hilbery dropped into a pleasant, inattentive state of mind, in which she was conscious of the running green lines of the hedges, of the swelling ploughland, and of the mild blue sky, which served her, after the first five minutes, for a pastoral background to the drama of human life; and then she thought of a cottage garden, with the flash of yellow daffodils against blue water; and what with the arrangement of these different prospects, and the shaping of two or three lovely phrases, she did not notice that the young people in the carriage were almost silent. Henry, indeed, had been included against his wish, and revenged himself by observing Katharine and Rodney with disillusioned eyes; while Katharine was in a state of gloomy self-suppression which resulted in complete apathy. When Rodney spoke to her she either said “Hum!” or assented so listlessly that he addressed his next remark to her mother. His deference was agreeable to her, his manners were exemplary; and when the church towers and factory chimneys of the town came into sight, she roused herself, and recalled memories of the fair summer of 1853, which fitted in harmoniously with what she was dreaming of the future.

[]

Chapter XVIII

But other passengers were approaching Lincoln meanwhile by other roads on foot. A county town draws the inhabitants of all vicarages, farms, country houses, and wayside cottages, within a radius of ten miles at least, once or twice a week to its streets; and among them, on this occasion, were Ralph Denham and Mary Datchet. They despised the roads, and took their way across the fields; and yet, from their appearance, it did not seem as if they cared much where they walked so long as the way did not actually trip them up. When they left the Vicarage, they had begun an argument which swung their feet along so rhythmically in time with it that they covered the ground at over four miles an hour, and saw nothing of the hedgerows, the swelling ploughland, or the mild blue sky. What they saw were the Houses of Parliament and the Government Offices in Whitehall. They both belonged to the class which is conscious of having lost its birthright in these great structures and is seeking to build another kind of lodging for its own notion of law and government. Purposely, perhaps, Mary did not agree with Ralph; she loved to feel her mind in conflict with his, and to be certain that he spared her female judgment no ounce of his male muscularity. He seemed to argue as fiercely with her as if she were his brother. They were alike, however, in believing that it behoved them to take in hand the repair and reconstruction of the fabric of England. They agreed in thinking that nature has not been generous in the endowment of our councillors. They agreed, unconsciously, in a mute love for the muddy field through which they tramped, with eyes narrowed close by the concentration of their minds. At length they drew breath, let the argument fly away into the limbo of other good arguments, and, leaning over a gate, opened their eyes for the first time and looked about them. Their feet tingled with warm blood and their breath rose in steam around them. The bodily exercise made them both feel more direct and less self-conscious than usual, and Mary, indeed, was overcome by a sort of light-headedness which made it seem to her that it mattered very little what happened next. It mattered so little, indeed, that she felt herself on the point of saying to Ralph:

“I love you; I shall never love anybody else. Marry me or leave me; think what you like of me—I don’t care a straw.” At the moment, however, speech or silence seemed immaterial, and she merely clapped her hands together, and looked at the distant woods with the rust-like bloom on their brown, and the green and blue landscape through the steam of her own breath. It seemed a mere toss-up whether she said, “I love you,” or whether she said, “I love the beech-trees,” or only “I love—I love.”

“Do you know, Mary,” Ralph suddenly interrupted her, “I’ve made up my mind.”

Her indifference must have been superficial, for it disappeared at once. Indeed, she lost sight of the trees, and saw her own hand upon the topmost bar of the gate with extreme distinctness, while he went on:

“I’ve made up my mind to chuck my work and live down here. I want you to tell me about that cottage you spoke of. However, I suppose there’ll be no difficulty about getting a cottage, will there?” He spoke with an assumption of carelessness as if expecting her to dissuade him.

She still waited, as if for him to continue; she was convinced that in some roundabout way he approached the subject of their marriage.

“I can’t stand the office any longer,” he proceeded. “I don’t know what my family will say; but I’m sure I’m right. Don’t you think so?”

“Live down here by yourself?” she asked.

“Some old woman would do for me, I suppose,” he replied. “I’m sick of the whole thing,” he went on, and opened the gate with a jerk. They began to cross the next field walking side by side.

“I tell you, Mary, it’s utter destruction, working away, day after day, at stuff that doesn’t matter a damn to any one. I’ve stood eight years of it, and I’m not going to stand it any longer. I suppose this all seems to you mad, though?”

By this time, Mary had recovered her self-control.

“No. I thought you weren’t happy,” she said.

“Why did you think that?” he asked, with some surprise.

“Don’t you remember that morning in Lincoln’s Inn Fields?” she asked.

“Yes,” said Ralph, slackening his pace and remembering Katharine and her engagement, the purple leaves stamped into the path, the white paper radiant under the electric light, and the hopelessness which seemed to surround all these things.

“You’re right, Mary,” he said, with something of an effort, “though I don’t know how you guessed it.”

She was silent, hoping that he might tell her the reason of his unhappiness, for his excuses had not deceived her.

“I was unhappy—very unhappy,” he repeated. Some six weeks separated him from that afternoon when he had sat upon the Embankment watching his visions dissolve in mist as the waters swam past and the sense of his desolation still made him shiver. He had not recovered in the least from that depression. Here was an opportunity for making himself face it, as he felt that he ought to; for, by this time, no doubt, it was only a sentimental ghost, better exorcised by ruthless exposure to such an eye as Mary’s, than allowed to underlie all his actions and thoughts as had been the case ever since he first saw Katharine Hilbery pouring out tea. He must begin, however, by mentioning her name, and this he found it impossible to do. He persuaded himself that he could make an honest statement without speaking her name; he persuaded himself that his feeling had very little to do with her.

“Unhappiness is a state of mind,” he said, “by which I mean that it is not necessarily the result of any particular cause.”

This rather stilted beginning did not please him, and it became more and more obvious to him that, whatever he might say, his unhappiness had been directly caused by Katharine.

“I began to find my life unsatisfactory,” he started afresh. “It seemed to me meaningless.” He paused again, but felt that this, at any rate, was true, and that on these lines he could go on.

“All this money-making and working ten hours a day in an office, what’s it for? When one’s a boy, you see, one’s head is so full of dreams that it doesn’t seem to matter what one does. And if you’re ambitious, you’re all right; you’ve got a reason for going on. Now my reasons ceased to satisfy me. Perhaps I never had any. That’s very likely now I come to think of it. (What reason is there for anything, though?) Still, it’s impossible, after a certain age, to take oneself in satisfactorily. And I know what carried me on”—for a good reason now occurred to him—“I wanted to be the saviour of my family and all that kind of thing. I wanted them to get on in the world. That was a lie, of course—a kind of self-glorification, too. Like most people, I suppose, I’ve lived almost entirely among delusions, and now I’m at the awkward stage of finding it out. I want another delusion to go on with. That’s what my unhappiness amounts to, Mary.”

There were two reasons that kept Mary very silent during this speech, and drew curiously straight lines upon her face. In the first place, Ralph made no mention of marriage; in the second, he was not speaking the truth.

“I don’t think it will be difficult to find a cottage,” she said, with cheerful hardness, ignoring the whole of this statement. “You’ve got a little money, haven’t you? Yes,” she concluded, “I don’t see why it shouldn’t be a very good plan.”

They crossed the field in complete silence. Ralph was surprised by her remark and a little hurt, and yet, on the whole, rather pleased. He had convinced himself that it was impossible to lay his case truthfully before Mary, and, secretly, he was relieved to find that he had not parted with his dream to her. She was, as he had always found her, the sensible, loyal friend, the woman he trusted; whose sympathy he could count upon, provided he kept within certain limits. He was not displeased to find that those limits were very clearly marked. When they had crossed the next hedge she said to him:

“Yes, Ralph, it’s time you made a break. I’ve come to the same conclusion myself. Only it won’t be a country cottage in my case; it’ll be America. America!” she cried. “That’s the place for me! They’ll teach me something about organizing a movement there, and I’ll come back and show you how to do it.”

If she meant consciously or unconsciously to belittle the seclusion and security of a country cottage, she did not succeed; for Ralph’s determination was genuine. But she made him visualize her in her own character, so that he looked quickly at her, as she walked a little in front of him across the ploughed field; for the first time that morning he saw her independently of him or of his preoccupation with Katharine. He seemed to see her marching ahead, a rather clumsy but powerful and independent figure, for whose courage he felt the greatest respect.

“Don’t go away, Mary!” he exclaimed, and stopped.

“That’s what you said before, Ralph,” she returned, without looking at him. “You want to go away yourself and you don’t want me to go away. That’s not very sensible, is it?”

“Mary,” he cried, stung by the remembrance of his exacting and dictatorial ways with her, “what a brute I’ve been to you!”

It took all her strength to keep the tears from springing, and to thrust back her assurance that she would forgive him till Doomsday if he chose. She was preserved from doing so only by a stubborn kind of respect for herself which lay at the root of her nature and forbade surrender, even in moments of almost overwhelming passion. Now, when all was tempest and high-running waves, she knew of a land where the sun shone clear upon Italian grammars and files of docketed papers. Nevertheless, from the skeleton pallor of that land and the rocks that broke its surface, she knew that her life there would be harsh and lonely almost beyond endurance. She walked steadily a little in front of him across the ploughed field. Their way took them round the verge of a wood of thin trees standing at the edge of a steep fold in the land. Looking between the tree-trunks, Ralph saw laid out on the perfectly flat and richly green meadow at the bottom of the hill a small grey manor-house, with ponds, terraces, and clipped hedges in front of it, a farm building or so at the side, and a screen of fir-trees rising behind, all perfectly sheltered and self-sufficient. Behind the house the hill rose again, and the trees on the farther summit stood upright against the sky, which appeared of a more intense blue between their trunks. His mind at once was filled with a sense of the actual presence of Katharine; the grey house and the intense blue sky gave him the feeling of her presence close by. He leant against a tree, forming her name beneath his breath:

“Katharine, Katharine,” he said aloud, and then, looking round, saw Mary walking slowly away from him, tearing a long spray of ivy from the trees as she passed them. She seemed so definitely opposed to the vision he held in his mind that he returned to it with a gesture of impatience.

“Katharine, Katharine,” he repeated, and seemed to himself to be with her. He lost his sense of all that surrounded him; all substantial things—the hour of the day, what we have done and are about to do, the presence of other people and the support we derive from seeing their belief in a common reality—all this slipped from him. So he might have felt if the earth had dropped from his feet, and the empty blue had hung all round him, and the air had been steeped in the presence of one woman. The chirp of a robin on the bough above his head awakened him, and his awakenment was accompanied by a sigh. Here was the world in which he had to live; here the ploughed field, the high road yonder, and Mary, stripping ivy from the trees. When he came up with her he linked his arm through hers and said:

“Now, Mary, what’s all this about America?”

There was a brotherly kindness in his voice which seemed to her magnanimous, when she reflected that she had cut short his explanations and shown little interest in his change of plan. She gave him her reasons for thinking that she might profit by such a journey, omitting the one reason which had set all the rest in motion. He listened attentively, and made no attempt to dissuade her. In truth, he found himself curiously eager to make certain of her good sense, and accepted each fresh proof of it with satisfaction, as though it helped him to make up his mind about something. She forgot the pain he had caused her, and in place of it she became conscious of a steady tide of well-being which harmonized very aptly with the tramp of their feet upon the dry road and the support of his arm. The comfort was the more glowing in that it seemed to be the reward of her determination to behave to him simply and without attempting to be other than she was. Instead of making out an interest in the poets, she avoided them instinctively, and dwelt rather insistently upon the practical nature of her gifts.

In a practical way she asked for particulars of his cottage, which hardly existed in his mind, and corrected his vagueness.

“You must see that there’s water,” she insisted, with an exaggeration of interest. She avoided asking him what he meant to do in this cottage, and, at last, when all the practical details had been thrashed out as much as possible, he rewarded her by a more intimate statement.

“One of the rooms,” he said, “must he my study, for, you see, Mary, I’m going to write a book.” Here he withdrew his arm from hers, lit his pipe, and they tramped on in a sagacious kind of comradeship, the most complete they had attained in all their friendship.

“And what’s your book to be about?” she said, as boldly as if she had never come to grief with Ralph in talking about books. He told her unhesitatingly that he meant to write the history of the English village from Saxon days to the present time. Some such plan had lain as a seed in his mind for many years; and now that he had decided, in a flash, to give up his profession, the seed grew in the space of twenty minutes both tall and lusty. He was surprised himself at the positive way in which he spoke. It was the same with the question of his cottage. That had come into existence, too, in an unromantic shape—a square white house standing just off the high road, no doubt, with a neighbour who kept a pig and a dozen squalling children; for these plans were shorn of all romance in his mind, and the pleasure he derived from thinking of them was checked directly it passed a very sober limit. So a sensible man who has lost his chance of some beautiful inheritance might tread out the narrow bounds of his actual dwelling-place, and assure himself that life is supportable within its demesne, only one must grow turnips and cabbages, not melons and pomegranates. Certainly Ralph took some pride in the resources of his mind, and was insensibly helped to right himself by Mary’s trust in him. She wound her ivy spray round her ash-plant, and for the first time for many days, when alone with Ralph, set no spies upon her motives, sayings, and feelings, but surrendered herself to complete happiness.

Thus talking, with easy silences and some pauses to look at the view over the hedge and to decide upon the species of a little grey-brown bird slipping among the twigs, they walked into Lincoln, and after strolling up and down the main street, decided upon an inn where the rounded window suggested substantial fare, nor were they mistaken. For over a hundred and fifty years hot joints, potatoes, greens, and apple puddings had been served to generations of country gentlemen, and now, sitting at a table in the hollow of the bow window, Ralph and Mary took their share of this perennial feast. Looking across the joint, half-way through the meal, Mary wondered whether Ralph would ever come to look quite like the other people in the room. Would he be absorbed among the round pink faces, pricked with little white bristles, the calves fitted in shiny brown leather, the black-and-white check suits, which were sprinkled about in the same room with them? She half hoped so; she thought that it was only in his mind that he was different. She did not wish him to be too different from other people. The walk had given him a ruddy colour, too, and his eyes were lit up by a steady, honest light, which could not make the simplest farmer feel ill at ease, or suggest to the most devout of clergymen a disposition to sneer at his faith. She loved the steep cliff of his forehead, and compared it to the brow of a young Greek horseman, who reins his horse back so sharply that it half falls on its haunches. He always seemed to her like a rider on a spirited horse. And there was an exaltation to her in being with him, because there was a risk that he would not be able to keep to the right pace among other people. Sitting opposite him at the little table in the window, she came back to that state of careless exaltation which had overcome her when they halted by the gate, but now it was accompanied by a sense of sanity and security, for she felt that they had a feeling in common which scarcely needed embodiment in words. How silent he was! leaning his forehead on his hand, now and then, and again looking steadily and gravely at the backs of the two men at the next table, with so little self-consciousness that she could almost watch his mind placing one thought solidly upon the top of another; she thought that she could feel him thinking, through the shade of her fingers, and she could anticipate the exact moment when he would put an end to his thought and turn a little in his chair and say:

“Well, Mary——?” inviting her to take up the thread of thought where he had dropped it.

And at that very moment he turned just so, and said:

“Well, Mary?” with the curious touch of diffidence which she loved in him.

She laughed, and she explained her laugh on the spur of the moment by the look of the people in the street below. There was a motor-car with an old lady swathed in blue veils, and a lady’s maid on the seat opposite, holding a King Charles’s spaniel; there was a country-woman wheeling a perambulator full of sticks down the middle of the road; there was a bailiff in gaiters discussing the state of the cattle market with a dissenting minister—so she defined them.

She ran over this list without any fear that her companion would think her trivial. Indeed, whether it was due to the warmth of the room or to the good roast beef, or whether Ralph had achieved the process which is called making up one’s mind, certainly he had given up testing the good sense, the independent character, the intelligence shown in her remarks. He had been building one of those piles of thought, as ramshackle and fantastic as a Chinese pagoda, half from words let fall by gentlemen in gaiters, half from the litter in his own mind, about duck shooting and legal history, about the Roman occupation of Lincoln and the relations of country gentlemen with their wives, when, from all this disconnected rambling, there suddenly formed itself in his mind the idea that he would ask Mary to marry him. The idea was so spontaneous that it seemed to shape itself of its own accord before his eyes. It was then that he turned round and made use of his old, instinctive phrase:

“Well, Mary——?”

As it presented itself to him at first, the idea was so new and interesting that he was half inclined to address it, without more ado, to Mary herself. His natural instinct to divide his thoughts carefully into two different classes before he expressed them to her prevailed. But as he watched her looking out of the window and describing the old lady, the woman with the perambulator, the bailiff and the dissenting minister, his eyes filled involuntarily with tears. He would have liked to lay his head on her shoulder and sob, while she parted his hair with her fingers and soothed him and said:

“There, there. Don’t cry! Tell me why you’re crying——”; and they would clasp each other tight, and her arms would hold him like his mother’s. He felt that he was very lonely, and that he was afraid of the other people in the room.

“How damnable this all is!” he exclaimed abruptly.

“What are you talking about?” she replied, rather vaguely, still looking out of the window.

He resented this divided attention more than, perhaps, he knew, and he thought how Mary would soon be on her way to America.

“Mary,” he said, “I want to talk to you. Haven’t we nearly done? Why don’t they take away these plates?”

Mary felt his agitation without looking at him; she felt convinced that she knew what it was that he wished to say to her.

“They’ll come all in good time,” she said; and felt it necessary to display her extreme calmness by lifting a salt-cellar and sweeping up a little heap of bread-crumbs.

“I want to apologize,” Ralph continued, not quite knowing what he was about to say, but feeling some curious instinct which urged him to commit himself irrevocably, and to prevent the moment of intimacy from passing.

“I think I’ve treated you very badly. That is, I’ve told you lies. Did you guess that I was lying to you? Once in Lincoln’s Inn Fields and again to-day on our walk. I am a liar, Mary. Did you know that? Do you think you do know me?”

“I think I do,” she said.

At this point the waiter changed their plates.

“It’s true I don’t want you to go to America,” he said, looking fixedly at the table-cloth. “In fact, my feelings towards you seem to be utterly and damnably bad,” he said energetically, although forced to keep his voice low.

“If I weren’t a selfish beast I should tell you to have nothing more to do with me. And yet, Mary, in spite of the fact that I believe what I’m saying, I also believe that it’s good we should know each other—the world being what it is, you see—” and by a nod of his head he indicated the other occupants of the room, “for, of course, in an ideal state of things, in a decent community even, there’s no doubt you shouldn’t have anything to do with me—seriously, that is.”

“You forget that I’m not an ideal character, either,” said Mary, in the same low and very earnest tones, which, in spite of being almost inaudible surrounded their table with an atmosphere of concentration which was quite perceptible to the other diners, who glanced at them now and then with a queer mixture of kindness, amusement, and curiosity.

“I’m much more selfish than I let on, and I’m worldly a little—more than you think, anyhow. I like bossing things—perhaps that’s my greatest fault. I’ve none of your passion for—” here she hesitated, and glanced at him, as if to ascertain what his passion was for—“for the truth,” she added, as if she had found what she sought indisputably.

“I’ve told you I’m a liar,” Ralph repeated obstinately.

“Oh, in little things, I dare say,” she said impatiently. “But not in real ones, and that’s what matters. I dare say I’m more truthful than you are in small ways. But I could never care”—she was surprised to find herself speaking the word, and had to force herself to speak it out—“for any one who was a liar in that way. I love the truth a certain amount—a considerable amount—but not in the way you love it.” Her voice sank, became inaudible, and wavered as if she could scarcely keep herself from tears.

“Good heavens!” Ralph exclaimed to himself. “She loves me! Why did I never see it before? She’s going to cry; no, but she can’t speak.”

The certainty overwhelmed him so that he scarcely knew what he was doing; the blood rushed to his cheeks, and although he had quite made up his mind to ask her to marry him, the certainty that she loved him seemed to change the situation so completely that he could not do it. He did not dare to look at her. If she cried, he did not know what he should do. It seemed to him that something of a terrible and devastating nature had happened. The waiter changed their plates once more.

In his agitation Ralph rose, turned his back upon Mary, and looked out of the window. The people in the street seemed to him only a dissolving and combining pattern of black particles; which, for the moment, represented very well the involuntary procession of feelings and thoughts which formed and dissolved in rapid succession in his own mind. At one moment he exulted in the thought that Mary loved him; at the next, it seemed that he was without feeling for her; her love was repulsive to him. Now he felt urged to marry her at once; now to disappear and never see her again. In order to control this disorderly race of thought he forced himself to read the name on the chemist’s shop directly opposite him; then to examine the objects in the shop windows, and then to focus his eyes exactly upon a little group of women looking in at the great windows of a large draper’s shop. This discipline having given him at least a superficial control of himself, he was about to turn and ask the waiter to bring the bill, when his eye was caught by a tall figure walking quickly along the opposite pavement—a tall figure, upright, dark, and commanding, much detached from her surroundings. She held her gloves in her left hand, and the left hand was bare. All this Ralph noticed and enumerated and recognized before he put a name to the whole—Katharine Hilbery. She seemed to be looking for somebody. Her eyes, in fact, scanned both sides of the street, and for one second were raised directly to the bow window in which Ralph stood; but she looked away again instantly without giving any sign that she had seen him. This sudden apparition had an extraordinary effect upon him. It was as if he had thought of her so intensely that his mind had formed the shape of her, rather than that he had seen her in the flesh outside in the street. And yet he had not been thinking of her at all. The impression was so intense that he could not dismiss it, nor even think whether he had seen her or merely imagined her. He sat down at once, and said, briefly and strangely, rather to himself than to Mary:

“That was Katharine Hilbery.”

“Katharine Hilbery? What do you mean?” she asked, hardly understanding from his manner whether he had seen her or not.

“Katharine Hilbery,” he repeated. “But she’s gone now.”

“Katharine Hilbery!” Mary thought, in an instant of blinding revelation; “I’ve always known it was Katharine Hilbery!” She knew it all now.

After a moment of downcast stupor, she raised her eyes, looked steadily at Ralph, and caught his fixed and dreamy gaze levelled at a point far beyond their surroundings, a point that she had never reached in all the time that she had known him. She noticed the lips just parted, the fingers loosely clenched, the whole attitude of rapt contemplation, which fell like a veil between them. She noticed everything about him; if there had been other signs of his utter alienation she would have sought them out too, for she felt that it was only by heaping one truth upon another that she could keep herself sitting there, upright. The truth seemed to support her; it struck her, even as she looked at his face, that the light of truth was shining far away beyond him; the light of truth, she seemed to frame the words as she rose to go, shines on a world not be shaken by our personal calamities.

Ralph handed her coat and her stick. She took them, fastened the coat securely, grasped the stick firmly. The ivy spray was still twisted about the handle; this one sacrifice, she thought, she might make to sentimentality and personality, and she picked two leaves from the ivy and put them in her pocket before she disencumbered her stick of the rest of it. She grasped the stick in the middle, and settled her fur cap closely upon her head, as if she must be in trim for a long and stormy walk. Next, standing in the middle of the road, she took a slip of paper from her purse, and read out loud a list of commissions entrusted to her—fruit, butter, string, and so on; and all the time she never spoke directly to Ralph or looked at him.

Ralph heard her giving orders to attentive, rosy-cheeked men in white aprons, and in spite of his own preoccupation, he commented upon the determination with which she made her wishes known. Once more he began, automatically, to take stock of her characteristics. Standing thus, superficially observant and stirring the sawdust on the floor meditatively with the toe of his boot, he was roused by a musical and familiar voice behind him, accompanied by a light touch upon his shoulder.

“I’m not mistaken? Surely Mr. Denham? I caught a glimpse of your coat through the window, and I felt sure that I knew your coat. Have you seen Katharine or William? I’m wandering about Lincoln looking for the ruins.”

It was Mrs. Hilbery; her entrance created some stir in the shop; many people looked at her.

“First of all, tell me where I am,” she demanded, but, catching sight of the attentive shopman, she appealed to him. “The ruins—my party is waiting for me at the ruins. The Roman ruins—or Greek, Mr. Denham? Your town has a great many beautiful things in it, but I wish it hadn’t so many ruins. I never saw such delightful little pots of honey in my life—are they made by your own bees? Please give me one of those little pots, and tell me how I shall find my way to the ruins.”

“And now,” she continued, having received the information and the pot of honey, having been introduced to Mary, and having insisted that they should accompany her back to the ruins, since in a town with so many turnings, such prospects, such delightful little half-naked boys dabbling in pools, such Venetian canals, such old blue china in the curiosity shops, it was impossible for one person all alone to find her way to the ruins. “Now,” she exclaimed, “please tell me what you’re doing here, Mr. Denham—for you are Mr. Denham, aren’t you?” she inquired, gazing at him with a sudden suspicion of her own accuracy. “The brilliant young man who writes for the Review, I mean? Only yesterday my husband was telling me he thought you one of the cleverest young men he knew. Certainly, you’ve been the messenger of Providence to me, for unless I’d seen you I’m sure I should never have found the ruins at all.”

They had reached the Roman arch when Mrs. Hilbery caught sight of her own party, standing like sentinels facing up and down the road so as to intercept her if, as they expected, she had got lodged in some shop.

“I’ve found something much better than ruins!” she exclaimed. “I’ve found two friends who told me how to find you, which I could never have done without them. They must come and have tea with us. What a pity that we’ve just had luncheon.” Could they not somehow revoke that meal?

Katharine, who had gone a few steps by herself down the road, and was investigating the window of an ironmonger, as if her mother might have got herself concealed among mowing-machines and garden-shears, turned sharply on hearing her voice, and came towards them. She was a great deal surprised to see Denham and Mary Datchet. Whether the cordiality with which she greeted them was merely that which is natural to a surprise meeting in the country, or whether she was really glad to see them both, at any rate she exclaimed with unusual pleasure as she shook hands:

“I never knew you lived here. Why didn’t you say so, and we could have met? And are you staying with Mary?” she continued, turning to Ralph. “What a pity we didn’t meet before.”

Thus confronted at a distance of only a few feet by the real body of the woman about whom he had dreamt so many million dreams, Ralph stammered; he made a clutch at his self-control; the colour either came to his cheeks or left them, he knew not which; but he was determined to face her and track down in the cold light of day whatever vestige of truth there might be in his persistent imaginations. He did not succeed in saying anything. It was Mary who spoke for both of them. He was struck dumb by finding that Katharine was quite different, in some strange way, from his memory, so that he had to dismiss his old view in order to accept the new one. The wind was blowing her crimson scarf across her face; the wind had already loosened her hair, which looped across the corner of one of the large, dark eyes which, so he used to think, looked sad; now they looked bright with the brightness of the sea struck by an unclouded ray; everything about her seemed rapid, fragmentary, and full of a kind of racing speed. He realized suddenly that he had never seen her in the daylight before.

Meanwhile, it was decided that it was too late to go in search of ruins as they had intended; and the whole party began to walk towards the stables where the carriage had been put up.

“Do you know,” said Katharine, keeping slightly in advance of the rest with Ralph, “I thought I saw you this morning, standing at a window. But I decided that it couldn’t be you. And it must have been you all the same.”

“Yes, I thought I saw you—but it wasn’t you,” he replied.

This remark, and the rough strain in his voice, recalled to her memory so many difficult speeches and abortive meetings that she was jerked directly back to the London drawing-room, the family relics, and the tea-table; and at the same time recalled some half-finished or interrupted remark which she had wanted to make herself or to hear from him—she could not remember what it was.

“I expect it was me,” she said. “I was looking for my mother. It happens every time we come to Lincoln. In fact, there never was a family so unable to take care of itself as ours is. Not that it very much matters, because some one always turns up in the nick of time to help us out of our scrapes. Once I was left in a field with a bull when I was a baby—but where did we leave the carriage? Down that street or the next? The next, I think.” She glanced back and saw that the others were following obediently, listening to certain memories of Lincoln upon which Mrs. Hilbery had started. “But what are you doing here?” she asked.

“I’m buying a cottage. I’m going to live here—as soon as I can find a cottage, and Mary tells me there’ll be no difficulty about that.”

“But,” she exclaimed, almost standing still in her surprise, “you will give up the Bar, then?” It flashed across her mind that he must already be engaged to Mary.

“The solicitor’s office? Yes. I’m giving that up.”

“But why?” she asked. She answered herself at once, with a curious change from rapid speech to an almost melancholy tone. “I think you’re very wise to give it up. You will be much happier.”

At this very moment, when her words seemed to be striking a path into the future for him, they stepped into the yard of an inn, and there beheld the family coach of the Otways, to which one sleek horse was already attached, while the second was being led out of the stable door by the ostler.

“I don’t know what one means by happiness,” he said briefly, having to step aside in order to avoid a groom with a bucket. “Why do you think I shall be happy? I don’t expect to be anything of the kind. I expect to be rather less unhappy. I shall write a book and curse my charwoman—if happiness consists in that. What do you think?”

She could not answer because they were immediately surrounded by other members of the party—by Mrs. Hilbery, and Mary, Henry Otway, and William.

Rodney went up to Katharine immediately and said to her:

“Henry is going to drive home with your mother, and I suggest that they should put us down half-way and let us walk back.”

Katharine nodded her head. She glanced at him with an oddly furtive expression.

“Unfortunately we go in opposite directions, or we might have given you a lift,” he continued to Denham. His manner was unusually peremptory; he seemed anxious to hasten the departure, and Katharine looked at him from time to time, as Denham noticed, with an expression half of inquiry, half of annoyance. She at once helped her mother into her cloak, and said to Mary:

“I want to see you. Are you going back to London at once? I will write.” She half smiled at Ralph, but her look was a little overcast by something she was thinking, and in a very few minutes the Otway carriage rolled out of the stable yard and turned down the high road leading to the village of Lampsher.

The return drive was almost as silent as the drive from home had been in the morning; indeed, Mrs. Hilbery leant back with closed eyes in her corner, and either slept or feigned sleep, as her habit was in the intervals between the seasons of active exertion, or continued the story which she had begun to tell herself that morning.

About two miles from Lampsher the road ran over the rounded summit of the heath, a lonely spot marked by an obelisk of granite, setting forth the gratitude of some great lady of the eighteenth century who had been set upon by highwaymen at this spot and delivered from death just as hope seemed lost. In summer it was a pleasant place, for the deep woods on either side murmured, and the heather, which grew thick round the granite pedestal, made the light breeze taste sweetly; in winter the sighing of the trees was deepened to a hollow sound, and the heath was as grey and almost as solitary as the empty sweep of the clouds above it.

Here Rodney stopped the carriage and helped Katharine to alight. Henry, too, gave her his hand, and fancied that she pressed it very slightly in parting as if she sent him a message. But the carriage rolled on immediately, without wakening Mrs. Hilbery, and left the couple standing by the obelisk. That Rodney was angry with her and had made this opportunity for speaking to her, Katharine knew very well; she was neither glad nor sorry that the time had come, nor, indeed, knew what to expect, and thus remained silent. The carriage grew smaller and smaller upon the dusky road, and still Rodney did not speak. Perhaps, she thought, he waited until the last sign of the carriage had disappeared beneath the curve of the road and they were left entirely alone. To cloak their silence she read the writing on the obelisk, to do which she had to walk completely round it. She was murmuring a word to two of the pious lady’s thanks above her breath when Rodney joined her. In silence they set out along the cart-track which skirted the verge of the trees.

To break the silence was exactly what Rodney wished to do, and yet could not do to his own satisfaction. In company it was far easier to approach Katharine; alone with her, the aloofness and force of her character checked all his natural methods of attack. He believed that she had behaved very badly to him, but each separate instance of unkindness seemed too petty to be advanced when they were alone together.

“There’s no need for us to race,” he complained at last; upon which she immediately slackened her pace, and walked too slowly to suit him. In desperation he said the first thing he thought of, very peevishly and without the dignified prelude which he had intended.

“I’ve not enjoyed my holiday.”

“No?”

“No. I shall be glad to get back to work again.”

“Saturday, Sunday, Monday—there are only three days more,” she counted.

“No one enjoys being made a fool of before other people,” he blurted out, for his irritation rose as she spoke, and got the better of his awe of her, and was inflamed by that awe.

“That refers to me, I suppose,” she said calmly.

“Every day since we’ve been here you’ve done something to make me appear ridiculous,” he went on. “Of course, so long as it amuses you, you’re welcome; but we have to remember that we are going to spend our lives together. I asked you, only this morning, for example, to come out and take a turn with me in the garden. I was waiting for you ten minutes, and you never came. Every one saw me waiting. The stable-boys saw me. I was so ashamed that I went in. Then, on the drive you hardly spoke to me. Henry noticed it. Every one notices it…. You find no difficulty in talking to Henry, though.”

She noted these various complaints and determined philosophically to answer none of them, although the last stung her to considerable irritation. She wished to find out how deep his grievance lay.

“None of these things seem to me to matter,” she said.

“Very well, then. I may as well hold my tongue,” he replied.

“In themselves they don’t seem to me to matter; if they hurt you, of course they matter,” she corrected herself scrupulously. Her tone of consideration touched him, and he walked on in silence for a space.

“And we might be so happy, Katharine!” he exclaimed impulsively, and drew her arm through his. She withdrew it directly.

“As long as you let yourself feel like this we shall never be happy,” she said.

The harshness, which Henry had noticed, was again unmistakable in her manner. William flinched and was silent. Such severity, accompanied by something indescribably cold and impersonal in her manner, had constantly been meted out to him during the last few days, always in the company of others. He had recouped himself by some ridiculous display of vanity which, as he knew, put him still more at her mercy. Now that he was alone with her there was no stimulus from outside to draw his attention from his injury. By a considerable effort of self-control he forced himself to remain silent, and to make himself distinguish what part of his pain was due to vanity, what part to the certainty that no woman really loving him could speak thus.

“What do I feel about Katharine?” he thought to himself. It was clear that she had been a very desirable and distinguished figure, the mistress of her little section of the world; but more than that, she was the person of all others who seemed to him the arbitress of life, the woman whose judgment was naturally right and steady, as his had never been in spite of all his culture. And then he could not see her come into a room without a sense of the flowing of robes, of the flowering of blossoms, of the purple waves of the sea, of all things that are lovely and mutable on the surface but still and passionate in their heart.

“If she were callous all the time and had only led me on to laugh at me I couldn’t have felt that about her,” he thought. “I’m not a fool, after all. I can’t have been utterly mistaken all these years. And yet, when she speaks to me like that! The truth of it is,” he thought, “that I’ve got such despicable faults that no one could help speaking to me like that. Katharine is quite right. And yet those are not my serious feelings, as she knows quite well. How can I change myself? What would make her care for me?” He was terribly tempted here to break the silence by asking Katharine in what respects he could change himself to suit her; but he sought consolation instead by running over the list of his gifts and acquirements, his knowledge of Greek and Latin, his knowledge of art and literature, his skill in the management of metres, and his ancient west-country blood. But the feeling that underlay all these feelings and puzzled him profoundly and kept him silent was the certainty that he loved Katharine as sincerely as he had it in him to love any one. And yet she could speak to him like that! In a sort of bewilderment he lost all desire to speak, and would quite readily have taken up some different topic of conversation if Katharine had started one. This, however, she did not do.

He glanced at her, in case her expression might help him to understand her behaviour. As usual, she had quickened her pace unconsciously, and was now walking a little in front of him; but he could gain little information from her eyes, which looked steadily at the brown heather, or from the lines drawn seriously upon her forehead. Thus to lose touch with her, for he had no idea what she was thinking, was so unpleasant to him that he began to talk about his grievances again, without, however, much conviction in his voice.

“If you have no feeling for me, wouldn’t it be kinder to say so to me in private?”

“Oh, William,” she burst out, as if he had interrupted some absorbing train of thought, “how you go on about feelings! Isn’t it better not to talk so much, not to be worrying always about small things that don’t really matter?”

“That’s the question precisely,” he exclaimed. “I only want you to tell me that they don’t matter. There are times when you seem indifferent to everything. I’m vain, I’ve a thousand faults; but you know they’re not everything; you know I care for you.”

“And if I say that I care for you, don’t you believe me?”

“Say it, Katharine! Say it as if you meant it! Make me feel that you care for me!”

She could not force herself to speak a word. The heather was growing dim around them, and the horizon was blotted out by white mist. To ask her for passion or for certainty seemed like asking that damp prospect for fierce blades of fire, or the faded sky for the intense blue vault of June.

He went on now to tell her of his love for her, in words which bore, even to her critical senses, the stamp of truth; but none of this touched her, until, coming to a gate whose hinge was rusty, he heaved it open with his shoulder, still talking and taking no account of his effort. The virility of this deed impressed her; and yet, normally, she attached no value to the power of opening gates. The strength of muscles has nothing to do on the face of it with the strength of affections; nevertheless, she felt a sudden concern for this power running to waste on her account, which, combined with a desire to keep possession of that strangely attractive masculine power, made her rouse herself from her torpor.

Why should she not simply tell him the truth—which was that she had accepted him in a misty state of mind when nothing had its right shape or size? that it was deplorable, but that with clearer eyesight marriage was out of the question? She did not want to marry any one. She wanted to go away by herself, preferably to some bleak northern moor, and there study mathematics and the science of astronomy. Twenty words would explain the whole situation to him. He had ceased to speak; he had told her once more how he loved her and why. She summoned her courage, fixed her eyes upon a lightning-splintered ash-tree, and, almost as if she were reading a writing fixed to the trunk, began:

“I was wrong to get engaged to you. I shall never make you happy. I have never loved you.”

“Katharine!” he protested.

“No, never,” she repeated obstinately. “Not rightly. Don’t you see, I didn’t know what I was doing?”

“You love some one else?” he cut her short.

“Absolutely no one.”

“Henry?” he demanded.

“Henry? I should have thought, William, even you——”

“There is some one,” he persisted. “There has been a change in the last few weeks. You owe it to me to be honest, Katharine.”

“If I could, I would,” she replied.

“Why did you tell me you would marry me, then?” he demanded.

Why, indeed? A moment of pessimism, a sudden conviction of the undeniable prose of life, a lapse of the illusion which sustains youth midway between heaven and earth, a desperate attempt to reconcile herself with facts—she could only recall a moment, as of waking from a dream, which now seemed to her a moment of surrender. But who could give reasons such as these for doing what she had done? She shook her head very sadly.

“But you’re not a child—you’re not a woman of moods,” Rodney persisted. “You couldn’t have accepted me if you hadn’t loved me!” he cried.

A sense of her own misbehaviour, which she had succeeded in keeping from her by sharpening her consciousness of Rodney’s faults, now swept over her and almost overwhelmed her. What were his faults in comparison with the fact that he cared for her? What were her virtues in comparison with the fact that she did not care for him? In a flash the conviction that not to care is the uttermost sin of all stamped itself upon her inmost thought; and she felt herself branded for ever.

He had taken her arm, and held her hand firmly in his, nor had she the force to resist what now seemed to her his enormously superior strength. Very well; she would submit, as her mother and her aunt and most women, perhaps, had submitted; and yet she knew that every second of such submission to his strength was a second of treachery to him.

“I did say I would marry you, but it was wrong,” she forced herself to say, and she stiffened her arm as if to annul even the seeming submission of that separate part of her; “for I don’t love you, William; you’ve noticed it, every one’s noticed it; why should we go on pretending? When I told you I loved you, I was wrong. I said what I knew to be untrue.”

As none of her words seemed to her at all adequate to represent what she felt, she repeated them, and emphasized them without realizing the effect that they might have upon a man who cared for her. She was completely taken aback by finding her arm suddenly dropped; then she saw his face most strangely contorted; was he laughing, it flashed across her? In another moment she saw that he was in tears. In her bewilderment at this apparition she stood aghast for a second. With a desperate sense that this horror must, at all costs, be stopped, she then put her arms about him, drew his head for a moment upon her shoulder, and led him on, murmuring words of consolation, until he heaved a great sigh. They held fast to each other; her tears, too, ran down her cheeks; and were both quite silent. Noticing the difficulty with which he walked, and feeling the same extreme lassitude in her own limbs, she proposed that they should rest for a moment where the bracken was brown and shrivelled beneath an oak-tree. He assented. Once more he gave a great sigh, and wiped his eyes with a childlike unconsciousness, and began to speak without a trace of his previous anger. The idea came to her that they were like the children in the fairy tale who were lost in a wood, and with this in her mind she noticed the scattering of dead leaves all round them which had been blown by the wind into heaps, a foot or two deep, here and there.

“When did you begin to feel this, Katharine?” he said; “for it isn’t true to say that you’ve always felt it. I admit I was unreasonable the first night when you found that your clothes had been left behind. Still, where’s the fault in that? I could promise you never to interfere with your clothes again. I admit I was cross when I found you upstairs with Henry. Perhaps I showed it too openly. But that’s not unreasonable either when one’s engaged. Ask your mother. And now this terrible thing—” He broke off, unable for the moment to proceed any further. “This decision you say you’ve come to—have you discussed it with any one? Your mother, for example, or Henry?”

“No, no, of course not,” she said, stirring the leaves with her hand. “But you don’t understand me, William——”

“Help me to understand you——”

“You don’t understand, I mean, my real feelings; how could you? I’ve only now faced them myself. But I haven’t got the sort of feeling—love, I mean—I don’t know what to call it”—she looked vaguely towards the horizon sunk under mist—“but, anyhow, without it our marriage would be a farce——”

“How a farce?” he asked. “But this kind of analysis is disastrous!” he exclaimed.

“I should have done it before,” she said gloomily.

“You make yourself think things you don’t think,” he continued, becoming demonstrative with his hands, as his manner was. “Believe me, Katharine, before we came here we were perfectly happy. You were full of plans for our house—the chair-covers, don’t you remember?—like any other woman who is about to be married. Now, for no reason whatever, you begin to fret about your feeling and about my feeling, with the usual result. I assure you, Katharine, I’ve been through it all myself. At one time I was always asking myself absurd questions which came to nothing either. What you want, if I may say so, is some occupation to take you out of yourself when this morbid mood comes on. If it hadn’t been for my poetry, I assure you, I should often have been very much in the same state myself. To let you into a secret,” he continued, with his little chuckle, which now sounded almost assured, “I’ve often gone home from seeing you in such a state of nerves that I had to force myself to write a page or two before I could get you out of my head. Ask Denham; he’ll tell you how he met me one night; he’ll tell you what a state he found me in.”

Katharine started with displeasure at the mention of Ralph’s name. The thought of the conversation in which her conduct had been made a subject for discussion with Denham roused her anger; but, as she instantly felt, she had scarcely the right to grudge William any use of her name, seeing what her fault against him had been from first to last. And yet Denham! She had a view of him as a judge. She figured him sternly weighing instances of her levity in this masculine court of inquiry into feminine morality and gruffly dismissing both her and her family with some half-sarcastic, half-tolerant phrase which sealed her doom, as far as he was concerned, for ever. Having met him so lately, the sense of his character was strong in her. The thought was not a pleasant one for a proud woman, but she had yet to learn the art of subduing her expression. Her eyes fixed upon the ground, her brows drawn together, gave William a very fair picture of the resentment that she was forcing herself to control. A certain degree of apprehension, occasionally culminating in a kind of fear, had always entered into his love for her, and had increased, rather to his surprise, in the greater intimacy of their engagement. Beneath her steady, exemplary surface ran a vein of passion which seemed to him now perverse, now completely irrational, for it never took the normal channel of glorification of him and his doings; and, indeed, he almost preferred the steady good sense, which had always marked their relationship, to a more romantic bond. But passion she had, he could not deny it, and hitherto he had tried to see it employed in his thoughts upon the lives of the children who were to be born to them.

“She will make a perfect mother—a mother of sons,” he thought; but seeing her sitting there, gloomy and silent, he began to have his doubts on this point. “A farce, a farce,” he thought to himself. “She said that our marriage would be a farce,” and he became suddenly aware of their situation, sitting upon the ground, among the dead leaves, not fifty yards from the main road, so that it was quite possible for some one passing to see and recognize them. He brushed off his face any trace that might remain of that unseemly exhibition of emotion. But he was more troubled by Katharine’s appearance, as she sat rapt in thought upon the ground, than by his own; there was something improper to him in her self-forgetfulness. A man naturally alive to the conventions of society, he was strictly conventional where women were concerned, and especially if the women happened to be in any way connected with him. He noticed with distress the long strand of dark hair touching her shoulder and two or three dead beech-leaves attached to her dress; but to recall her mind in their present circumstances to a sense of these details was impossible. She sat there, seeming unconscious of everything. He suspected that in her silence she was reproaching herself; but he wished that she would think of her hair and of the dead beech-leaves, which were of more immediate importance to him that anything else. Indeed, these trifles drew his attention strangely from his own doubtful and uneasy state of mind; for relief, mixing itself with pain, stirred up a most curious hurry and tumult in his breast, almost concealing his first sharp sense of bleak and overwhelming disappointment. In order to relieve this restlessness and close a distressingly ill-ordered scene, he rose abruptly and helped Katharine to her feet. She smiled a little at the minute care with which he tidied her and yet, when he brushed the dead leaves from his own coat, she flinched, seeing in that action the gesture of a lonely man.

“William,” she said, “I will marry you. I will try to make you happy.”

[]

Chapter XIX

The afternoon was already growing dark when the two other wayfarers, Mary and Ralph Denham, came out on the high road beyond the outskirts of Lincoln. The high road, as they both felt, was better suited to this return journey than the open country, and for the first mile or so of the way they spoke little. In his own mind Ralph was following the passage of the Otway carriage over the heath; he then went back to the five or ten minutes that he had spent with Katharine, and examined each word with the care that a scholar displays upon the irregularities of an ancient text. He was determined that the glow, the romance, the atmosphere of this meeting should not paint what he must in future regard as sober facts. On her side Mary was silent, not because her thoughts took much handling, but because her mind seemed empty of thought as her heart of feeling. Only Ralph’s presence, as she knew, preserved this numbness, for she could foresee a time of loneliness when many varieties of pain would beset her. At the present moment her effort was to preserve what she could of the wreck of her self-respect, for such she deemed that momentary glimpse of her love so involuntarily revealed to Ralph. In the light of reason it did not much matter, perhaps, but it was her instinct to be careful of that vision of herself which keeps pace so evenly beside every one of us, and had been damaged by her confession. The grey night coming down over the country was kind to her; and she thought that one of these days she would find comfort in sitting upon the earth, alone, beneath a tree. Looking through the darkness, she marked the swelling ground and the tree. Ralph made her start by saying abruptly:

“What I was going to say when we were interrupted at lunch was that if you go to America I shall come too. It can’t be harder to earn a living there than it is here. However, that’s not the point. The point is, Mary, that I want to marry you. Well, what do you say?” He spoke firmly, waited for no answer, and took her arm in his. “You know me by this time, the good and the bad,” he went on. “You know my tempers. I’ve tried to let you know my faults. Well, what do you say, Mary?”

She said nothing, but this did not seem to strike him.

“In most ways, at least in the important ways, as you said, we know each other and we think alike. I believe you are the only person in the world I could live with happily. And if you feel the same about me—as you do, don’t you, Mary?—we should make each other happy.” Here he paused, and seemed to be in no hurry for an answer; he seemed, indeed, to be continuing his own thoughts.

“Yes, but I’m afraid I couldn’t do it,” Mary said at last. The casual and rather hurried way in which she spoke, together with the fact that she was saying the exact opposite of what he expected her to say, baffled him so much that he instinctively loosened his clasp upon her arm and she withdrew it quietly.

“You couldn’t do it?” he asked.

“No, I couldn’t marry you,” she replied.

“You don’t care for me?”

She made no answer.

“Well, Mary,” he said, with a curious laugh, “I must be an arrant fool, for I thought you did.” They walked for a minute or two in silence, and suddenly he turned to her, looked at her, and exclaimed: “I don’t believe you, Mary. You’re not telling me the truth.”

“I’m too tired to argue, Ralph,” she replied, turning her head away from him. “I ask you to believe what I say. I can’t marry you; I don’t want to marry you.”

The voice in which she stated this was so evidently the voice of one in some extremity of anguish that Ralph had no course but to obey her. And as soon as the tone of her voice had died out, and the surprise faded from his mind, he found himself believing that she had spoken the truth, for he had but little vanity, and soon her refusal seemed a natural thing to him. He slipped through all the grades of despondency until he reached a bottom of absolute gloom. Failure seemed to mark the whole of his life; he had failed with Katharine, and now he had failed with Mary. Up at once sprang the thought of Katharine, and with it a sense of exulting freedom, but this he checked instantly. No good had ever come to him from Katharine; his whole relationship with her had been made up of dreams; and as he thought of the little substance there had been in his dreams he began to lay the blame of the present catastrophe upon his dreams.

“Haven’t I always been thinking of Katharine while I was with Mary? I might have loved Mary if it hadn’t been for that idiocy of mine. She cared for me once, I’m certain of that, but I tormented her so with my humours that I let my chances slip, and now she won’t risk marrying me. And this is what I’ve made of my life—nothing, nothing, nothing.”

The tramp of their boots upon the dry road seemed to asseverate nothing, nothing, nothing. Mary thought that this silence was the silence of relief; his depression she ascribed to the fact that he had seen Katharine, and parted from her, leaving her in the company of William Rodney. She could not blame him for loving Katharine, but that, when he loved another, he should ask her to marry him—that seemed to her the cruellest treachery. Their old friendship and its firm base upon indestructible qualities of character crumbled, and her whole past seemed foolish, herself weak and credulous, and Ralph merely the shell of an honest man. Oh, the past—so much made up of Ralph; and now, as she saw, made up of something strange and false and other than she had thought it. She tried to recapture a saying she had made to help herself that morning, as Ralph paid the bill for luncheon; but she could see him paying the bill more vividly than she could remember the phrase. Something about truth was in it; how to see the truth is our great chance in this world.

“If you don’t want to marry me,” Ralph now began again, without abruptness, with diffidence rather, “there is no need why we should cease to see each other, is there? Or would you rather that we should keep apart for the present?”

“Keep apart? I don’t know—I must think about it.”

“Tell me one thing, Mary,” he resumed; “have I done anything to make you change your mind about me?”

She was immensely tempted to give way to her natural trust in him, revived by the deep and now melancholy tones of his voice, and to tell him of her love, and of what had changed it. But although it seemed likely that she would soon control her anger with him, the certainty that he did not love her, confirmed by every word of his proposal, forbade any freedom of speech. To hear him speak and to feel herself unable to reply, or constrained in her replies, was so painful that she longed for the time when she should be alone. A more pliant woman would have taken this chance of an explanation, whatever risks attached to it; but to one of Mary’s firm and resolute temperament there was degradation in the idea of self-abandonment; let the waves of emotion rise ever so high, she could not shut her eyes to what she conceived to be the truth. Her silence puzzled Ralph. He searched his memory for words or deeds that might have made her think badly of him. In his present mood instances came but too quickly, and on top of them this culminating proof of his baseness—that he had asked her to marry him when his reasons for such a proposal were selfish and half-hearted.

“You needn’t answer,” he said grimly. “There are reasons enough, I know. But must they kill our friendship, Mary? Let me keep that, at least.”

“Oh,” she thought to herself, with a sudden rush of anguish which threatened disaster to her self-respect, “it has come to this—to this—when I could have given him everything!”

“Yes, we can still be friends,” she said, with what firmness she could muster.

“I shall want your friendship,” he said. He added, “If you find it possible, let me see you as often as you can. The oftener the better. I shall want your help.”

She promised this, and they went on to talk calmly of things that had no reference to their feelings—a talk which, in its constraint, was infinitely sad to both of them.

One more reference was made to the state of things between them late that night, when Elizabeth had gone to her room, and the two young men had stumbled off to bed in such a state of sleep that they hardly felt the floor beneath their feet after a day’s shooting.

Mary drew her chair a little nearer to the fire, for the logs were burning low, and at this time of night it was hardly worth while to replenish them. Ralph was reading, but she had noticed for some time that his eyes instead of following the print were fixed rather above the page with an intensity of gloom that came to weigh upon her mind. She had not weakened in her resolve not to give way, for reflection had only made her more bitterly certain that, if she gave way, it would be to her own wish and not to his. But she had determined that there was no reason why he should suffer if her reticence were the cause of his suffering. Therefore, although she found it painful, she spoke:

“You asked me if I had changed my mind about you, Ralph,” she said. “I think there’s only one thing. When you asked me to marry you, I don’t think you meant it. That made me angry—for the moment. Before, you’d always spoken the truth.”

Ralph’s book slid down upon his knee and fell upon the floor. He rested his forehead on his hand and looked into the fire. He was trying to recall the exact words in which he had made his proposal to Mary.

“I never said I loved you,” he said at last.

She winced; but she respected him for saying what he did, for this, after all, was a fragment of the truth which she had vowed to live by.

“And to me marriage without love doesn’t seem worth while,” she said.

“Well, Mary, I’m not going to press you,” he said. “I see you don’t want to marry me. But love—don’t we all talk a great deal of nonsense about it? What does one mean? I believe I care for you more genuinely than nine men out of ten care for the women they’re in love with. It’s only a story one makes up in one’s mind about another person, and one knows all the time it isn’t true. Of course one knows; why, one’s always taking care not to destroy the illusion. One takes care not to see them too often, or to be alone with them for too long together. It’s a pleasant illusion, but if you’re thinking of the risks of marriage, it seems to me that the risk of marrying a person you’re in love with is something colossal.”

“I don’t believe a word of that, and what’s more you don’t either,” she replied with anger. “However, we don’t agree; I only wanted you to understand.” She shifted her position, as if she were about to go. An instinctive desire to prevent her from leaving the room made Ralph rise at this point and begin pacing up and down the nearly empty kitchen, checking his desire, each time he reached the door, to open it and step out into the garden. A moralist might have said that at this point his mind should have been full of self-reproach for the suffering he had caused. On the contrary, he was extremely angry, with the confused impotent anger of one who finds himself unreasonably but efficiently frustrated. He was trapped by the illogicality of human life. The obstacles in the way of his desire seemed to him purely artificial, and yet he could see no way of removing them. Mary’s words, the tone of her voice even, angered him, for she would not help him. She was part of the insanely jumbled muddle of a world which impedes the sensible life. He would have liked to slam the door or break the hind legs of a chair, for the obstacles had taken some such curiously substantial shape in his mind.

“I doubt that one human being ever understands another,” he said, stopping in his march and confronting Mary at a distance of a few feet.

“Such damned liars as we all are, how can we? But we can try. If you don’t want to marry me, don’t; but the position you take up about love, and not seeing each other—isn’t that mere sentimentality? You think I’ve behaved very badly,” he continued, as she did not speak. “Of course I behave badly; but you can’t judge people by what they do. You can’t go through life measuring right and wrong with a foot-rule. That’s what you’re always doing, Mary; that’s what you’re doing now.”

She saw herself in the Suffrage Office, delivering judgment, meting out right and wrong, and there seemed to her to be some justice in the charge, although it did not affect her main position.

“I’m not angry with you,” she said slowly. “I will go on seeing you, as I said I would.”

It was true that she had promised that much already, and it was difficult for him to say what more it was that he wanted—some intimacy, some help against the ghost of Katharine, perhaps, something that he knew he had no right to ask; and yet, as he sank into his chair and looked once more at the dying fire it seemed to him that he had been defeated, not so much by Mary as by life itself. He felt himself thrown back to the beginning of life again, where everything has yet to be won; but in extreme youth one has an ignorant hope. He was no longer certain that he would triumph.

[]

Chapter XX

Happily for Mary Datchet she returned to the office to find that by some obscure Parliamentary manœuvre the vote had once more slipped beyond the attainment of women. Mrs. Seal was in a condition bordering upon frenzy. The duplicity of Ministers, the treachery of mankind, the insult to womanhood, the setback to civilization, the ruin of her life’s work, the feelings of her father’s daughter—all these topics were discussed in turn, and the office was littered with newspaper cuttings branded with the blue, if ambiguous, marks of her displeasure. She confessed herself at fault in her estimate of human nature.

“The simple elementary acts of justice,” she said, waving her hand towards the window, and indicating the foot-passengers and omnibuses then passing down the far side of Russell Square, “are as far beyond them as they ever were. We can only look upon ourselves, Mary, as pioneers in a wilderness. We can only go on patiently putting the truth before them. It isn’t them,” she continued, taking heart from her sight of the traffic, “it’s their leaders. It’s those gentlemen sitting in Parliament and drawing four hundred a year of the people’s money. If we had to put our case to the people, we should soon have justice done to us. I have always believed in the people, and I do so still. But——” She shook her head and implied that she would give them one more chance, and if they didn’t take advantage of that she couldn’t answer for the consequences.

Mr. Clacton’s attitude was more philosophical and better supported by statistics. He came into the room after Mrs. Seal’s outburst and pointed out, with historical illustrations, that such reverses had happened in every political campaign of any importance. If anything, his spirits were improved by the disaster. The enemy, he said, had taken the offensive; and it was now up to the Society to outwit the enemy. He gave Mary to understand that he had taken the measure of their cunning, and had already bent his mind to the task which, so far as she could make out, depended solely upon him. It depended, so she came to think, when invited into his room for a private conference, upon a systematic revision of the card-index, upon the issue of certain new lemon-coloured leaflets, in which the facts were marshalled once more in a very striking way, and upon a large scale map of England dotted with little pins tufted with differently coloured plumes of hair according to their geographical position. Each district, under the new system, had its flag, its bottle of ink, its sheaf of documents tabulated and filed for reference in a drawer, so that by looking under M or S, as the case might be, you had all the facts with respect to the Suffrage organizations of that county at your fingers’ ends. This would require a great deal of work, of course.

“We must try to consider ourselves rather in the light of a telephone exchange—for the exchange of ideas, Miss Datchet,” he said; and taking pleasure in his image, he continued it. “We should consider ourselves the centre of an enormous system of wires, connecting us up with every district of the country. We must have our fingers upon the pulse of the community; we want to know what people all over England are thinking; we wantt o put them in the way of thinking rightly.” The system, of course, was only roughly sketched so far—jotted down, in fact, during the Christmas holidays.

“When you ought to have been taking a rest, Mr. Clacton,” said Mary dutifully, but her tone was flat and tired.

“We learn to do without holidays, Miss Datchet,” said Mr. Clacton, with a spark of satisfaction in his eye.

He wished particularly to have her opinion of the lemon-coloured leaflet. According to his plan, it was to be distributed in immense quantities immediately, in order to stimulate and generate, “to generate and stimulate,” he repeated, “right thoughts in the country before the meeting of Parliament.”

“We have to take the enemy by surprise,” he said. “They don’t let the grass grow under their feet. Have you seen Bingham’s address to his constituents? That’s a hint of the sort of thing we’ve got to meet, Miss Datchet.”

He handed her a great bundle of newspaper cuttings, and, begging her to give him her views upon the yellow leaflet before lunch-time, he turned with alacrity to his different sheets of paper and his different bottles of ink.

Mary shut the door, laid the documents upon her table, and sank her head on her hands. Her brain was curiously empty of any thought. She listened, as if, perhaps, by listening she would become merged again in the atmosphere of the office. From the next room came the rapid spasmodic sounds of Mrs. Seal’s erratic typewriting; she, doubtless, was already hard at work helping the people of England, as Mr. Clacton put it, to think rightly; “generating and stimulating,” those were his words. She was striking a blow against the enemy, no doubt, who didn’t let the grass grow beneath their feet. Mr. Clacton’s words repeated themselves accurately in her brain. She pushed the papers wearily over to the farther side of the table. It was no use, though; something or other had happened to her brain—a change of focus so that near things were indistinct again. The same thing had happened to her once before, she remembered, after she had met Ralph in the gardens of Lincoln’s Inn Fields; she had spent the whole of a committee meeting in thinking about sparrows and colours, until, almost at the end of the meeting, her old convictions had all come back to her. But they had only come back, she thought with scorn at her feebleness, because she wanted to use them to fight against Ralph. They weren’t, rightly speaking, convictions at all. She could not see the world divided into separate compartments of good people and bad people, any more than she could believe so implicitly in the rightness of her own thought as to wish to bring the population of the British Isles into agreement with it. She looked at the lemon-coloured leaflet, and thought almost enviously of the faith which could find comfort in the issue of such documents; for herself she would be content to remain silent for ever if a share of personal happiness were granted her. She read Mr. Clacton’s statement with a curious division of judgment, noting its weak and pompous verbosity on the one hand, and, at the same time, feeling that faith, faith in an illusion, perhaps, but, at any rate, faith in something, was of all gifts the most to be envied. An illusion it was, no doubt. She looked curiously round her at the furniture of the office, at the machinery in which she had taken so much pride, and marvelled to think that once the copying-presses, the card-index, the files of documents, had all been shrouded, wrapped in some mist which gave them a unity and a general dignity and purpose independently of their separate significance. The ugly cumbersomeness of the furniture alone impressed her now. Her attitude had become very lax and despondent when the typewriter stopped in the next room. Mary immediately drew up to the table, laid hands on an unopened envelope, and adopted an expression which might hide her state of mind from Mrs. Seal. Some instinct of decency required that she should not allow Mrs. Seal to see her face. Shading her eyes with her fingers, she watched Mrs. Seal pull out one drawer after another in her search for some envelope or leaflet. She was tempted to drop her fingers and exclaim:

“Do sit down, Sally, and tell me how you manage it—how you manage, that is, to bustle about with perfect confidence in the necessity of your own activities, which to me seem as futile as the buzzing of a belated blue-bottle.” She said nothing of the kind, however, and the pretence of industry which she preserved so long as Mrs. Seal was in the room served to set her brain in motion, so that she dispatched her morning’s work much as usual. At one o’clock she was surprised to find how efficiently she had dealt with the morning. As she put her hat on she determined to lunch at a shop in the Strand, so as to set that other piece of mechanism, her body, into action. With a brain working and a body working one could keep step with the crowd and never be found out for the hollow machine, lacking the essential thing, that one was conscious of being.

She considered her case as she walked down the Charing Cross Road. She put to herself a series of questions. Would she mind, for example, if the wheels of that motor-omnibus passed over her and crushed her to death? No, not in the least; or an adventure with that disagreeable-looking man hanging about the entrance of the Tube station? No; she could not conceive fear or excitement. Did suffering in any form appal her? No, suffering was neither good nor bad. And this essential thing? In the eyes of every single person she detected a flame; as if a spark in the brain ignited spontaneously at contact with the things they met and drove them on. The young women looking into the milliners’ windows had that look in their eyes; and elderly men turning over books in the second-hand bookshops, and eagerly waiting to hear what the price was—the very lowest price—they had it too. But she cared nothing at all for clothes or for money either. Books she shrank from, for they were connected too closely with Ralph. She kept on her way resolutely through the crowd of people, among whom she was so much of an alien, feeling them cleave and give way before her.

Strange thoughts are bred in passing through crowded streets should the passenger, by chance, have no exact destination in front of him, much as the mind shapes all kinds of forms, solutions, images when listening inattentively to music. From an acute consciousness of herself as an individual, Mary passed to a conception of the scheme of things in which, as a human being, she must have her share. She half held a vision; the vision shaped and dwindled. She wished she had a pencil and a piece of paper to help her to give a form to this conception which composed itself as she walked down the Charing Cross Road. But if she talked to any one, the conception might escape her. Her vision seemed to lay out the lines of her life until death in a way which satisfied her sense of harmony. It only needed a persistent effort of thought, stimulated in this strange way by the crowd and the noise, to climb the crest of existence and see it all laid out once and for ever. Already her suffering as an individual was left behind her. Of this process, which was to her so full of effort, which comprised infinitely swift and full passages of thought, leading from one crest to another, as she shaped her conception of life in this world, only two articulate words escaped her, muttered beneath her breath—“Not happiness—not happiness.”

She sat down on a seat opposite the statue of one of London’s heroes upon the Embankment, and spoke the words aloud. To her they represented the rare flower or splinter of rock brought down by a climber in proof that he has stood for a moment, at least, upon the highest peak of the mountain. She had been up there and seen the world spread to the horizon. It was now necessary to alter her course to some extent, according to her new resolve. Her post should be in one of those exposed and desolate stations which are shunned naturally by happy people. She arranged the details of the new plan in her mind, not without a grim satisfaction.

“Now,” she said to herself, rising from her seat, “I’ll think of Ralph.”

Where was he to be placed in the new scale of life? Her exalted mood seemed to make it safe to handle the question. But she was dismayed to find how quickly her passions leapt forward the moment she sanctioned this line of thought. Now she was identified with him and rethought his thoughts with complete self-surrender; now, with a sudden cleavage of spirit, she turned upon him and denounced him for his cruelty.

“But I refuse—I refuse to hate any one,” she said aloud; chose the moment to cross the road with circumspection, and ten minutes later lunched in the Strand, cutting her meat firmly into small pieces, but giving her fellow-diners no further cause to judge her eccentric. Her soliloquy crystallized itself into little fragmentary phrases emerging suddenly from the turbulence of her thought, particularly when she had to exert herself in any way, either to move, to count money, or to choose a turning. “To know the truth—to accept without bitterness”—those, perhaps, were the most articulate of her utterances, for no one could have made head or tail of the queer gibberish murmured in front of the statue of Francis, Duke of Bedford, save that the name of Ralph occurred frequently in very strange connexions, as if, having spoken it, she wished, superstitiously, to cancel it by adding some other word that robbed the sentence with his name in it of any meaning.

Those champions of the cause of women, Mr. Clacton, and Mrs. Seal, did not perceive anything strange in Mary’s behaviour, save that she was almost half an hour later than usual in coming back to the office. Happily, their own affairs kept them busy, and she was free from their inspection. If they had surprised her they would have found her lost, apparently, in admiration of the large hotel across the square, for, after writing a few words, her pen rested upon the paper, and her mind pursued its own journey among the sun-blazoned windows and the drifts of purplish smoke which formed her view. And, indeed, this background was by no means out of keeping with her thoughts. She saw to the remote spaces behind the strife of the foreground, enabled now to gaze there, since she had renounced her own demands, privileged to see the larger view, to share the vast desires and sufferings of the mass of mankind. She had been too lately and too roughly mastered by facts to take an easy pleasure in the relief of renunciation; such satisfaction as she felt came only from the discovery that, having renounced everything that made life happy, easy, splendid, individual, there remained a hard reality, unimpaired by one’s personal adventures, remote as the stars, unquenchable as they are.

While Mary Datchet was undergoing this curious transformation from the particular to the universal, Mrs. Seal remembered her duties with regard to the kettle and the gas-fire. She was a little surprised to find that Mary had drawn her chair to the window, and, having lit the gas, she raised herself from a stooping posture and looked at her. The most obvious reason for such an attitude in a secretary was some kind of indisposition. But Mary, rousing herself with an effort, denied that she was indisposed.

“I’m frightfully lazy this afternoon,” she added, with a glance at her table. “You must really get another secretary, Sally.”

The words were meant to be taken lightly, but something in the tone of them roused a jealous fear which was always dormant in Mrs. Seal’s breast. She was terribly afraid that one of these days Mary, the young woman who typified so many rather sentimental and enthusiastic ideas, who had some sort of visionary existence in white with a sheaf of lilies in her hand, would announce, in a jaunty way, that she was about to be married.

“You don’t mean that you’re going to leave us?” she said.

“I’ve not made up my mind about anything,” said Mary—a remark which could be taken as a generalization.

Mrs. Seal got the teacups out of the cupboard and set them on the table.

“You’re not going to be married, are you?” she asked, pronouncing the words with nervous speed.

“Why are you asking such absurd questions this afternoon, Sally?” Mary asked, not very steadily. “Must we all get married?”

Mrs. Seal emitted a most peculiar chuckle. She seemed for one moment to acknowledge the terrible side of life which is concerned with the emotions, the private lives, of the sexes, and then to sheer off from it with all possible speed into the shades of her own shivering virginity. She was made so uncomfortable by the turn the conversation had taken, that she plunged her head into the cupboard, and endeavoured to abstract some very obscure piece of china.

“We have our work,” she said, withdrawing her head, displaying cheeks more than usually crimson, and placing a jam-pot emphatically upon the table. But, for the moment, she was unable to launch herself upon one of those enthusiastic, but inconsequent, tirades upon liberty, democracy, the rights of the people, and the iniquities of the Government, in which she delighted. Some memory from her own past or from the past of her sex rose to her mind and kept her abashed. She glanced furtively at Mary, who still sat by the window with her arm upon the sill. She noticed now young she was and full of the promise of womanhood. The sight made her so uneasy that she fidgeted the cups upon their saucers.

“Yes—enough work to last a lifetime,” said Mary, as if concluding some passage of thought.

Mrs. Seal brightened at once. She lamented her lack of scientific training, and her deficiency in the processes of logic, but she set her mind to work at once to make the prospects of the cause appear as alluring and important as she could. She delivered herself of an harangue in which she asked a great many rhetorical questions and answered them with a little bang of one fist upon another.

“To last a lifetime? My dear child, it will last all our lifetimes. As one falls another steps into the breach. My father, in his generation, a pioneer—I, coming after him, do my little best. What, alas! can one do more? And now it’s you young women—we look to you—the future looks to you. Ah, my dear, if I’d a thousand lives, I’d give them all to our cause. The cause of women, d’you say? I say the cause of humanity. And there are some”—she glanced fiercely at the window—“who don’t see it! There are some who are satisfied to go on, year after year, refusing to admit the truth. And we who have the vision—the kettle boiling over? No, no, let me see to it—we who know the truth,” she continued, gesticulating with the kettle and the teapot. Owing to these encumbrances, perhaps, she lost the thread of her discourse, and concluded, rather wistfully, “It’s all so simple.” She referred to a matter that was a perpetual source of bewilderment to her—the extraordinary incapacity of the human race, in a world where the good is so unmistakably divided from the bad, of distinguishing one from the other, and embodying what ought to be done in a few large, simple Acts of Parliament, which would, in a very short time, completely change the lot of humanity.

“One would have thought,” she said, “that men of University training, like Mr. Asquith—one would have thought that an appeal to reason would not be unheard by them. But reason,” she reflected, “what is reason without Reality?”

Doing homage to the phrase, she repeated it once more, and caught the ear of Mr. Clacton, as he issued from his room; and he repeated it a third time, giving it, as he was in the habit of doing with Mrs. Seal’s phrases, a dryly humorous intonation. He was well pleased with the world, however, and he remarked, in a flattering manner, that he would like to see that phrase in large letters at the head of a leaflet.

“But, Mrs. Seal, we have to aim at a judicious combination of the two,” he added in his magisterial way to check the unbalanced enthusiasm of the women. “Reality has to be voiced by reason before it can make itself felt. The weak point of all these movements, Miss Datchet,” he continued, taking his place at the table and turning to Mary as usual when about to deliver his more profound cogitations, “is that they are not based upon sufficiently intellectual grounds. A mistake, in my opinion. The British public likes a pellet of reason in its jam of eloquence—a pill of reason in its pudding of sentiment,” he said, sharpening the phrase to a satisfactory degree of literary precision.

His eyes rested, with something of the vanity of an author, upon the yellow leaflet which Mary held in her hand. She rose, took her seat at the head of the table, poured out tea for her colleagues, and gave her opinion upon the leaflet. So she had poured out tea, so she had criticized Mr. Clacton’s leaflets a hundred times already; but now it seemed to her that she was doing it in a different spirit; she had enlisted in the army, and was a volunteer no longer. She had renounced something and was now—how could she express it?—not quite “in the running” for life. She had always known that Mr. Clacton and Mrs. Seal were not in the running, and across the gulf that separated them she had seen them in the guise of shadow people, flitting in and out of the ranks of the living—eccentrics, undeveloped human beings, from whose substance some essential part had been cut away. All this had never struck her so clearly as it did this afternoon, when she felt that her lot was cast with them for ever. One view of the world plunged in darkness, so a more volatile temperament might have argued after a season of despair, let the world turn again and show another, more splendid, perhaps. No, Mary thought, with unflinching loyalty to what appeared to her to be the true view, having lost what is best, I do not mean to pretend that any other view does instead. Whatever happens, I mean to have no pretences in my life. Her very words had a sort of distinctness which is sometimes produced by sharp, bodily pain. To Mrs. Seal’s secret jubilation the rule which forbade discussion of shop at tea-time was overlooked. Mary and Mr. Clacton argued with a cogency and a ferocity which made the little woman feel that something very important—she hardly knew what—was taking place. She became much excited; one crucifix became entangled with another, and she dug a considerable hole in the table with the point of her pencil in order to emphasize the most striking heads of the discourse; and how any combination of Cabinet Ministers could resist such discourse she really did not know.

She could hardly bring herself to remember her own private instrument of justice—the typewriter. The telephone-bell rang, and as she hurried off to answer a voice which always seemed a proof of importance by itself, she felt that it was at this exact spot on the surface of the globe that all the subterranean wires of thought and progress came together. When she returned, with a message from the printer, she found that Mary was putting on her hat firmly; there was something imperious and dominating in her attitude altogether.

“Look, Sally,” she said, “these letters want copying. These I’ve not looked at. The question of the new census will have to be gone into carefully. But I’m going home now. Good night, Mr. Clacton; good night, Sally.”

“We are very fortunate in our secretary, Mr. Clacton,” said Mrs. Seal, pausing with her hand on the papers, as the door shut behind Mary. Mr. Clacton himself had been vaguely impressed by something in Mary’s behaviour towards him. He envisaged a time even when it would become necessary to tell her that there could not be two masters in one office—but she was certainly able, very able, and in touch with a group of very clever young men. No doubt they had suggested to her some of her new ideas.

He signified his assent to Mrs. Seal’s remark, but observed, with a glance at the clock, which showed only half an hour past five:

“If she takes the work seriously, Mrs. Seal—but that’s just what some of your clever young ladies don’t do.” So saying he returned to his room, and Mrs. Seal, after a moment’s hesitation, hurried back to her labours.

[]

Chapter XXI

Mary walked to the nearest station and reached home in an incredibly short space of time, just so much, indeed, as was needed for the intelligent understanding of the news of the world as the Westminster Gazette reported it. Within a few minutes of opening her door, she was in trim for a hard evening’s work. She unlocked a drawer and took out a manuscript, which consisted of a very few pages, entitled, in a forcible hand, “Some Aspects of the Democratic State.” The aspects dwindled out in a criss-cross of blotted lines in the very middle of a sentence, and suggested that the author had been interrupted, or convinced of the futility of proceeding, with her pen in the air…. Oh, yes, Ralph had come in at that point. She scored that sheet very effectively, and, choosing a fresh one, began at a great rate with a generalization upon the structure of human society, which was a good deal bolder than her custom. Ralph had told her once that she couldn’t write English, which accounted for those frequent blots and insertions; but she put all that behind her, and drove ahead with such words as came her way, until she had accomplished half a page of generalization and might legitimately draw breath. Directly her hand stopped her brain stopped too, and she began to listen. A paper-boy shouted down the street; an omnibus ceased and lurched on again with the heave of duty once more shouldered; the dullness of the sounds suggested that a fog had risen since her return, if, indeed, a fog has power to deaden sound, of which fact, she could not be sure at the present moment. It was the sort of fact Ralph Denham knew. At any rate, it was no concern of hers, and she was about to dip a pen when her ear was caught by the sound of a step upon the stone staircase. She followed it past Mr. Chippen’s chambers; past Mr. Gibson’s; past Mr. Turner’s; after which it became her sound. A postman, a washerwoman, a circular, a bill—she presented herself with each of these perfectly natural possibilities; but, to her surprise, her mind rejected each one of them impatiently, even apprehensively. The step became slow, as it was apt to do at the end of the steep climb, and Mary, listening for the regular sound, was filled with an intolerable nervousness. Leaning against the table, she felt the knock of her heart push her body perceptibly backwards and forwards—a state of nerves astonishing and reprehensible in a stable woman. Grotesque fancies took shape. Alone, at the top of the house, an unknown person approaching nearer and nearer—how could she escape? There was no way of escape. She did not even know whether that oblong mark on the ceiling was a trap-door to the roof or not. And if she got on to the roof—well, there was a drop of sixty feet or so on to the pavement. But she sat perfectly still, and when the knock sounded, she got up directly and opened the door without hesitation. She saw a tall figure outside, with something ominous to her eyes in the look of it.

“What do you want?” she said, not recognizing the face in the fitful light of the staircase.

“Mary? I’m Katharine Hilbery!”

Mary’s self-possession returned almost excessively, and her welcome was decidedly cold, as if she must recoup herself for this ridiculous waste of emotion. She moved her green-shaded lamp to another table, and covered “Some Aspects of the Democratic State” with a sheet of blotting-paper.

“Why can’t they leave me alone?” she thought bitterly, connecting Katharine and Ralph in a conspiracy to take from her even this hour of solitary study, even this poor little defence against the world. And, as she smoothed down the sheet of blotting-paper over the manuscript, she braced herself to resist Katharine, whose presence struck her, not merely by its force, as usual, but as something in the nature of a menace.

“You’re working?” said Katharine, with hesitation, perceiving that she was not welcome.

“Nothing that matters,” Mary replied, drawing forward the best of the chairs and poking the fire.

“I didn’t know you had to work after you had left the office,” said Katharine, in a tone which gave the impression that she was thinking of something else, as was, indeed, the case.

She had been paying calls with her mother, and in between the calls Mrs. Hilbery had rushed into shops and bought pillow-cases and blotting-books on no perceptible method for the furnishing of Katharine’s house. Katharine had a sense of impedimenta accumulating on all sides of her. She had left her at length, and had come on to keep an engagement to dine with Rodney at his rooms. But she did not mean to get to him before seven o’clock, and so had plenty of time to walk all the way from Bond Street to the Temple if she wished it. The flow of faces streaming on either side of her had hypnotized her into a mood of profound despondency, to which her expectation of an evening alone with Rodney contributed. They were very good friends again, better friends, they both said, than ever before. So far as she was concerned this was true. There were many more things in him than she had guessed until emotion brought them forth—strength, affection, sympathy. And she thought of them and looked at the faces passing, and thought how much alike they were, and how distant, nobody feeling anything as she felt nothing, and distance, she thought, lay inevitably between the closest, and their intimacy was the worst pretence of all. For, “Oh dear,” she thought, looking into a tobacconist’s window, “I don’t care for any of them, and I don’t care for William, and people say this is the thing that matters most, and I can’t see what they mean by it.”

She looked desperately at the smooth-bowled pipes, and wondered—should she walk on by the Strand or by the Embankment? It was not a simple question, for it concerned not different streets so much as different streams of thought. If she went by the Strand she would force herself to think out the problem of the future, or some mathematical problem; if she went by the river she would certainly begin to think about things that didn’t exist—the forest, the ocean beach, the leafy solitudes, the magnanimous hero. No, no, no! A thousand times no!—it wouldn’t do; there was something repulsive in such thoughts at present; she must take something else; she was out of that mood at present. And then she thought of Mary; the thought gave her confidence, even pleasure of a sad sort, as if the triumph of Ralph and Mary proved that the fault of her failure lay with herself and not with life. An indistinct idea that the sight of Mary might be of help, combined with her natural trust in her, suggested a visit; for, surely, her liking was of a kind that implied liking upon Mary’s side also. After a moment’s hesitation she decided, although she seldom acted upon impulse, to act upon this one, and turned down a side street and found Mary’s door. But her reception was not encouraging; clearly Mary didn’t want to see her, had no help to impart, and the half-formed desire to confide in her was quenched immediately. She was slightly amused at her own delusion, looked rather absent-minded, and swung her gloves to and fro, as if doling out the few minutes accurately before she could say good bye.

Those few minutes might very well be spent in asking for information as to the exact position of the Suffrage Bill, or in expounding her own very sensible view of the situation. But there was a tone in her voice, or a shade in her opinions, or a swing of her gloves which served to irritate Mary Datchet, whose manner became increasingly direct, abrupt, and even antagonistic. She became conscious of a wish to make Katharine realize the importance of this work, which she discussed so coolly, as though she, too, had sacrificed what Mary herself had sacrificed. The swinging of the gloves ceased, and Katharine, after ten minutes, began to make movements preliminary to departure. At the sight of this, Mary was aware—she was abnormally aware of things to-night—of another very strong desire; Katharine was not to be allowed to go, to disappear into the free, happy world of irresponsible individuals. She must be made to realize—to feel.

“I don’t quite see,” she said, as if Katharine had challenged her explicitly, “how, things being as they are, any one can help trying, at least, to do something.”

“No. But how are things?”

Mary pressed her lips, and smiled ironically; she had Katharine at her mercy; she could, if she liked, discharge upon her head wagon-loads of revolting proof of the state of things ignored by the casual, the amateur, the looker-on, the cynical observer of life at a distance. And yet she hesitated. As usual, when she found herself in talk with Katharine, she began to feel rapid alternations of opinion about her, arrows of sensation striking strangely through the envelope of personality, which shelters us so conveniently from our fellows. What an egoist, how aloof she was! And yet, not in her words, perhaps, but in her voice, in her face, in her attitude, there were signs of a soft brooding spirit, of a sensibility unblunted and profound, playing over her thoughts and deeds, and investing her manner with an habitual gentleness. The arguments and phrases of Mr. Clacton fell flat against such armour.

“You’ll be married, and you’ll have other things to think of,” she said inconsequently, and with an accent of condescension. She was not going to make Katharine understand in a second, as she would, all that she herself had learnt at the cost of such pain. No. Katharine was to be happy; Katharine was to be ignorant; Mary was to keep this knowledge of the impersonal life for herself. The thought of her morning’s renunciation stung her conscience, and she tried to expand once more into that impersonal condition which was so lofty and so painless. She must check this desire to be an individual again, whose wishes were in conflict with those of other people. She repented of her bitterness.

Katharine now renewed her signs of leave-taking; she had drawn on one of her gloves, and looked about her as if in search of some trivial saying to end with. Wasn’t there some picture, or clock, or chest of drawers which might be singled out for notice? something peaceable and friendly to end the uncomfortable interview? The green-shaded lamp burnt in the corner, and illumined books and pens and blotting-paper. The whole aspect of the place started another train of thought and struck her as enviably free; in such a room one could work—one could have a life of one’s own.

“I think you’re very lucky,” she observed. “I envy you, living alone and having your own things”—and engaged in this exalted way, which had no recognition or engagement-ring, she added in her own mind.

Mary’s lips parted slightly. She could not conceive in what respects Katharine, who spoke sincerely, could envy her.

“I don’t think you’ve got any reason to envy me,” she said.

“Perhaps one always envies other people,” Katharine observed vaguely.

“Well, but you’ve got everything that any one can want.”

Katharine remained silent. She gazed into the fire quietly, and without a trace of self-consciousness. The hostility which she had divined in Mary’s tone had completely disappeared, and she forgot that she had been upon the point of going.

“Well, I suppose I have,” she said at length. “And yet I sometimes think——” She paused; she did not know how to express what she meant.

“It came over me in the Tube the other day,” she resumed, with a smile; “what is it that makes these people go one way rather than the other? It’s not love; it’s not reason; I think it must be some idea. Perhaps, Mary, our affections are the shadow of an idea. Perhaps there isn’t any such thing as affection in itself….” She spoke half-mockingly, asking her question, which she scarcely troubled to frame, not of Mary, or of any one in particular.

But the words seemed to Mary Datchet shallow, supercilious, cold-blooded, and cynical all in one. All her natural instincts were roused in revolt against them.

“I’m the opposite way of thinking, you see,” she said.

“Yes; I know you are,” Katharine replied, looking at her as if now she were about, perhaps, to explain something very important.

Mary could not help feeling the simplicity and good faith that lay behind Katharine’s words.

“I think affection is the only reality,” she said.

“Yes,” said Katharine, almost sadly. She understood that Mary was thinking of Ralph, and she felt it impossible to press her to reveal more of this exalted condition; she could only respect the fact that, in some few cases, life arranged itself thus satisfactorily and pass on. She rose to her feet accordingly. But Mary exclaimed, with unmistakable earnestness, that she must not go; that they met so seldom; that she wanted to talk to her so much…. Katharine was surprised at the earnestness with which she spoke. It seemed to her that there could be no indiscretion in mentioning Ralph by name.

Seating herself “for ten minutes,” she said: “By the way, Mr. Denham told me he was going to give up the Bar and live in the country. Has he gone? He was beginning to tell me about it, when we were interrupted.”

“He thinks of it,” said Mary briefly. The colour at once came to her face.

“It would be a very good plan,” said Katharine in her decided way.

“You think so?”

“Yes, because he would do something worth while; he would write a book. My father always says that he’s the most remarkable of the young men who write for him.”

Mary bent low over the fire and stirred the coal between the bars with a poker. Katharine’s mention of Ralph had roused within her an almost irresistible desire to explain to her the true state of the case between herself and Ralph. She knew, from the tone of her voice, that in speaking of Ralph she had no desire to probe Mary’s secrets, or to insinuate any of her own. Moreover, she liked Katharine; she trusted her; she felt a respect for her. The first step of confidence was comparatively simple; but a further confidence had revealed itself, as Katharine spoke, which was not so simple, and yet it impressed itself upon her as a necessity; she must tell Katharine what it was clear that she had no conception of—she must tell Katharine that Ralph was in love with her.

“I don’t know what he means to do,” she said hurriedly, seeking time against the pressure of her own conviction. “I’ve not seen him since Christmas.”

Katharine reflected that this was odd; perhaps, after all, she had misunderstood the position. She was in the habit of assuming, however, that she was rather unobservant of the finer shades of feeling, and she noted her present failure as another proof that she was a practical, abstract-minded person, better fitted to deal with figures than with the feelings of men and women. Anyhow, William Rodney would say so.

“And now——” she said.

“Oh, please stay!” Mary exclaimed, putting out her hand to stop her. Directly Katharine moved she felt, inarticulately and violently, that she could not bear to let her go. If Katharine went, her only chance of speaking was lost; her only chance of saying something tremendously important was lost. Half a dozen words were sufficient to wake Katharine’s attention, and put flight and further silence beyond her power. But although the words came to her lips, her throat closed upon them and drove them back. After all, she considered, why should she speak? Because it is right, her instinct told her; right to expose oneself without reservations to other human beings. She flinched from the thought. It asked too much of one already stripped bare. Something she must keep of her own. But if she did keep something of her own? Immediately she figured an immured life, continuing for an immense period, the same feelings living for ever, neither dwindling nor changing within the ring of a thick stone wall. The imagination of this loneliness frightened her, and yet to speak—to lose her loneliness, for it had already become dear to her, was beyond her power.

Her hand went down to the hem of Katharine’s skirt, and, fingering a line of fur, she bent her head as if to examine it.

“I like this fur,” she said, “I like your clothes. And you mustn’t think that I’m going to marry Ralph,” she continued, in the same tone, “because he doesn’t care for me at all. He cares for some one else.” Her head remained bent, and her hand still rested upon the skirt.

“It’s a shabby old dress,” said Katharine, and the only sign that Mary’s words had reached her was that she spoke with a little jerk.

“You don’t mind my telling you that?” said Mary, raising herself.

“No, no,” said Katharine; “but you’re mistaken, aren’t you?” She was, in truth, horribly uncomfortable, dismayed, indeed disillusioned. She disliked the turn things had taken quite intensely. The indecency of it afflicted her. The suffering implied by the tone appalled her. She looked at Mary furtively, with eyes that were full of apprehension. But if she had hoped to find that these words had been spoken without understanding of their meaning, she was at once disappointed. Mary lay back in her chair, frowning slightly, and looking, Katharine thought, as if she had lived fifteen years or so in the space of a few minutes.

“There are some things, don’t you think, that one can’t be mistaken about?” Mary said, quietly and almost coldly. “That is what puzzles me about this question of being in love. I’ve always prided myself upon being reasonable,” she added. “I didn’t think I could have felt this—I mean if the other person didn’t. I was foolish. I let myself pretend.” Here she paused. “For, you see, Katharine,” she proceeded, rousing herself and speaking with greater energy, “I am in love. There’s no doubt about that…. I’m tremendously in love … with Ralph.” The little forward shake of her head, which shook a lock of hair, together with her brighter colour, gave her an appearance at once proud and defiant.

Katharine thought to herself, “That’s how it feels then.” She hesitated, with a feeling that it was not for her to speak; and then said, in a low tone, “You’ve got that.”

“Yes,” said Mary; “I’ve got that. One wouldn’t not be in love…. But I didn’t mean to talk about that; I only wanted you to know. There’s another thing I want to tell you…” She paused. “I haven’t any authority from Ralph to say it; but I’m sure of this—he’s in love with you.”

Katharine looked at her again, as if her first glance must have been deluded, for, surely, there must be some outward sign that Mary was talking in an excited, or bewildered, or fantastic manner. No; she still frowned, as if she sought her way through the clauses of a difficult argument, but she still looked more like one who reasons than one who feels.

“That proves that you’re mistaken—utterly mistaken,” said Katharine, speaking reasonably, too. She had no need to verify the mistake by a glance at her own recollections, when the fact was so clearly stamped upon her mind that if Ralph had any feeling towards her it was one of critical hostility. She did not give the matter another thought, and Mary, now that she had stated the fact, did not seek to prove it, but tried to explain to herself, rather than to Katharine, her motives in making the statement.

She had nerved herself to do what some large and imperious instinct demanded her doing; she had been swept on the breast of a wave beyond her reckoning.

“I’ve told you,” she said, “because I want you to help me. I don’t want to be jealous of you. And I am—I’m fearfully jealous. The only way, I thought, was to tell you.”

She hesitated, and groped in her endeavour to make her feelings clear to herself.

“If I tell you, then we can talk; and when I’m jealous, I can tell you. And if I’m tempted to do something frightfully mean, I can tell you; you could make me tell you. I find talking so difficult; but loneliness frightens me. I should shut it up in my mind. Yes, that’s what I’m afraid of. Going about with something in my mind all my life that never changes. I find it so difficult to change. When I think a thing’s wrong I never stop thinking it wrong, and Ralph was quite right, I see, when he said that there’s no such thing as right and wrong; no such thing, I mean, as judging people——”

“Ralph Denham said that?” said Katharine, with considerable indignation. In order to have produced such suffering in Mary, it seemed to her that he must have behaved with extreme callousness. It seemed to her that he had discarded the friendship, when it suited his convenience to do so, with some falsely philosophical theory which made his conduct all the worse. She was going on to express herself thus, had not Mary at once interrupted her.

“No, no,” she said; “you don’t understand. If there’s any fault it’s mine entirely; after all, if one chooses to run risks——”

Her voice faltered into silence. It was borne in upon her how completely in running her risk she had lost her prize, lost it so entirely that she had no longer the right, in talking of Ralph, to presume that her knowledge of him supplanted all other knowledge. She no longer completely possessed her love, since his share in it was doubtful; and now, to make things yet more bitter, her clear vision of the way to face life was rendered tremulous and uncertain, because another was witness of it. Feeling her desire for the old unshared intimacy too great to be born without tears, she rose, walked to the farther end of the room, held the curtains apart, and stood there mastered for a moment. The grief itself was not ignoble; the sting of it lay in the fact that she had been led to this act of treachery against herself. Trapped, cheated, robbed, first by Ralph and then by Katharine, she seemed all dissolved in humiliation, and bereft of anything she could call her own. Tears of weakness welled up and rolled down her cheeks. But tears, at least, she could control, and would this instant, and then, turning, she would face Katharine, and retrieve what could be retrieved of the collapse of her courage.

She turned. Katharine had not moved; she was leaning a little forward in her chair and looking into the fire. Something in the attitude reminded Mary of Ralph. So he would sit, leaning forward, looking rather fixedly in front of him, while his mind went far away, exploring, speculating, until he broke off with his, “Well, Mary?”—and the silence, that had been so full of romance to her, gave way to the most delightful talk that she had ever known.

Something unfamiliar in the pose of the silent figure, something still, solemn, significant about it, made her hold her breath. She paused. Her thoughts were without bitterness. She was surprised by her own quiet and confidence. She came back silently, and sat once more by Katharine’s side. Mary had no wish to speak. In the silence she seemed to have lost her isolation; she was at once the sufferer and the pitiful spectator of suffering; she was happier than she had ever been; she was more bereft; she was rejected, and she was immensely beloved. Attempt to express these sensations was vain, and, moreover, she could not help believing that, without any words on her side, they were shared. Thus for some time longer they sat silent, side by side, while Mary fingered the fur on the skirt of the old dress.

[]

Chapter XXII

The fact that she would be late in keeping her engagement with William was not the only reason which sent Katharine almost at racing speed along the Strand in the direction of his rooms. Punctuality might have been achieved by taking a cab, had she not wished the open air to fan into flame the glow kindled by Mary’s words. For among all the impressions of the evening’s talk one was of the nature of a revelation and subdued the rest to insignificance. Thus one looked; thus one spoke; such was love.

“She sat up straight and looked at me, and then she said, ‘I’m in love,’” Katharine mused, trying to set the whole scene in motion. It was a scene to dwell on with so much wonder that not a grain of pity occurred to her; it was a flame blazing suddenly in the dark; by its light Katharine perceived far too vividly for her comfort the mediocrity, indeed the entirely fictitious character of her own feelings so far as they pretended to correspond with Mary’s feelings. She made up her mind to act instantly upon the knowledge thus gained, and cast her mind in amazement back to the scene upon the heath, when she had yielded, heaven knows why, for reasons which seemed now imperceptible. So in broad daylight one might revisit the place where one has groped and turned and succumbed to utter bewilderment in a fog.

“It’s all so simple,” she said to herself. “There can’t be any doubt. I’ve only got to speak now. I’ve only got to speak,” she went on saying, in time to her own footsteps, and completely forgot Mary Datchet.

William Rodney, having come back earlier from the office than he expected, sat down to pick out the melodies in “The Magic Flute” upon the piano. Katharine was late, but that was nothing new, and, as she had no particular liking for music, and he felt in the mood for it, perhaps it was as well. This defect in Katharine was the more strange, William reflected, because, as a rule, the women of her family were unusually musical. Her cousin, Cassandra Otway, for example, had a very fine taste in music, and he had charming recollections of her in a light fantastic attitude, playing the flute in the morning-room at Stogdon House. He recalled with pleasure the amusing way in which her nose, long like all the Otway noses, seemed to extend itself into the flute, as if she were some inimitably graceful species of musical mole. The little picture suggested very happily her melodious and whimsical temperament. The enthusiasms of a young girl of distinguished upbringing appealed to William, and suggested a thousand ways in which, with his training and accomplishments, he could be of service to her. She ought to be given the chance of hearing good music, as it is played by those who have inherited the great tradition. Moreover, from one or two remarks let fall in the course of conversation, he thought it possible that she had what Katharine professed to lack, a passionate, if untaught, appreciation of literature. He had lent her his play. Meanwhile, as Katharine was certain to be late, and “The Magic Flute” is nothing without a voice, he felt inclined to spend the time of waiting in writing a letter to Cassandra, exhorting her to read Pope in preference to Dostoevsky, until her feeling for form was more highly developed. He set himself down to compose this piece of advice in a shape which was light and playful, and yet did no injury to a cause which he had near at heart, when he heard Katharine upon the stairs. A moment later it was plain that he had been mistaken; it was not Katharine; but he could not settle himself to his letter. His temper had changed from one of urbane contentment—indeed of delicious expansion—to one of uneasiness and expectation. The dinner was brought in, and had to be set by the fire to keep hot. It was now a quarter of an hour beyond the specified time. He bethought him of a piece of news which had depressed him in the earlier part of the day. Owing to the illness of one of his fellow-clerks, it was likely that he would get no holiday until later in the year, which would mean the postponement of their marriage. But this possibility, after all, was not so disagreeable as the probability which forced itself upon him with every tick of the clock that Katharine had completely forgotten her engagement. Such things had happened less frequently since Christmas, but what if they were going to begin to happen again? What if their marriage should turn out, as she had said, a farce? He acquitted her of any wish to hurt him wantonly, but there was something in her character which made it impossible for her to help hurting people. Was she cold? Was she self-absorbed? He tried to fit her with each of these descriptions, but he had to own that she puzzled him.

“There are so many things that she doesn’t understand,” he reflected, glancing at the letter to Cassandra which he had begun and laid aside. What prevented him from finishing the letter which he had so much enjoyed beginning? The reason was that Katharine might, at any moment, enter the room. The thought, implying his bondage to her, irritated him acutely. It occurred to him that he would leave the letter lying open for her to see, and he would take the opportunity of telling her that he had sent his play to Cassandra for her to criticize. Possibly, but not by any means certainly, this would annoy her—and as he reached the doubtful comfort of this conclusion, there was a knock on the door and Katharine came in. They kissed each other coldly and she made no apology for being late. Nevertheless, her mere presence moved him strangely; but he was determined that this should not weaken his resolution to make some kind of stand against her; to get at the truth about her. He let her make her own disposition of clothes and busied himself with the plates.

“I’ve got a piece of news for you, Katharine,” he said directly they sat down to table; “I shan’t get my holiday in April. We shall have to put off our marriage.”

He rapped the words out with a certain degree of brusqueness. Katharine started a little, as if the announcement disturbed her thoughts.

“That won’t make any difference, will it? I mean the lease isn’t signed,” she replied. “But why? What has happened?”

He told her, in an off-hand way, how one of his fellow-clerks had broken down, and might have to be away for months, six months even, in which case they would have to think over their position. He said it in a way which struck her, at last, as oddly casual. She looked at him. There was no outward sign that he was annoyed with her. Was she well dressed? She thought sufficiently so. Perhaps she was late? She looked for a clock.

“It’s a good thing we didn’t take the house then,” she repeated thoughtfully.

“It’ll mean, too, I’m afraid, that I shan’t be as free for a considerable time as I have been,” he continued. She had time to reflect that she gained something by all this, though it was too soon to determine what. But the light which had been burning with such intensity as she came along was suddenly overclouded, as much by his manner as by his news. She had been prepared to meet opposition, which is simple to encounter compared with—she did not know what it was that she had to encounter. The meal passed in quiet, well-controlled talk about indifferent things. Music was not a subject about which she knew anything, but she liked him to tell her things; and could, she mused, as he talked, fancy the evenings of married life spent thus, over the fire; spent thus, or with a book, perhaps, for then she would have time to read her books, and to grasp firmly with every muscle of her unused mind what she longed to know. The atmosphere was very free. Suddenly William broke off. She looked up apprehensively, brushing aside these thoughts with annoyance.

“Where should I address a letter to Cassandra?” he asked her. It was obvious again that William had some meaning or other to-night, or was in some mood. “We’ve struck up a friendship,” he added.

“She’s at home, I think,” Katharine replied.

“They keep her too much at home,” said William. “Why don’t you ask her to stay with you, and let her hear a little good music? I’ll just finish what I was saying, if you don’t mind, because I’m particularly anxious that she should hear to-morrow.”

Katharine sank back in her chair, and Rodney took the paper on his knees, and went on with his sentence. “Style, you know, is what we tend to neglect—”; but he was far more conscious of Katharine’s eye upon him than of what he was saying about style. He knew that she was looking at him, but whether with irritation or indifference he could not guess.

In truth, she had fallen sufficiently into his trap to feel uncomfortably roused and disturbed and unable to proceed on the lines laid down for herself. This indifferent, if not hostile, attitude on William’s part made it impossible to break off without animosity, largely and completely. Infinitely preferable was Mary’s state, she thought, where there was a simple thing to do and one did it. In fact, she could not help supposing that some littleness of nature had a part in all the refinements, reserves, and subtleties of feeling for which her friends and family were so distinguished. For example, although she liked Cassandra well enough, her fantastic method of life struck her as purely frivolous; now it was socialism, now it was silkworms, now it was music—which last she supposed was the cause of William’s sudden interest in her. Never before had William wasted the minutes of her presence in writing his letters. With a curious sense of light opening where all, hitherto, had been opaque, it dawned upon her that, after all, possibly, yes, probably, nay, certainly, the devotion which she had almost wearily taken for granted existed in a much slighter degree than she had suspected, or existed no longer. She looked at him attentively as if this discovery of hers must show traces in his face. Never had she seen so much to respect in his appearance, so much that attracted her by its sensitiveness and intelligence, although she saw these qualities as if they were those one responds to, dumbly, in the face of a stranger. The head bent over the paper, thoughtful as usual, had now a composure which seemed somehow to place it at a distance, like a face seen talking to some one else behind glass.

He wrote on, without raising his eyes. She would have spoken, but could not bring herself to ask him for signs of affection which she had no right to claim. The conviction that he was thus strange to her filled her with despondency, and illustrated quite beyond doubt the infinite loneliness of human beings. She had never felt the truth of this so strongly before. She looked away into the fire; it seemed to her that even physically they were now scarcely within speaking distance; and spiritually there was certainly no human being with whom she could claim comradeship; no dream that satisfied her as she was used to be satisfied; nothing remained in whose reality she could believe, save those abstract ideas—figures, laws, stars, facts, which she could hardly hold to for lack of knowledge and a kind of shame.

When Rodney owned to himself the folly of this prolonged silence, and the meanness of such devices, and looked up ready to seek some excuse for a good laugh, or opening for a confession, he was disconcerted by what he saw. Katharine seemed equally oblivious of what was bad or of what was good in him. Her expression suggested concentration upon something entirely remote from her surroundings. The carelessness of her attitude seemed to him rather masculine than feminine. His impulse to break up the constraint was chilled, and once more the exasperating sense of his own impotency returned to him. He could not help contrasting Katharine with his vision of the engaging, whimsical Cassandra; Katharine undemonstrative, inconsiderate, silent, and yet so notable that he could never do without her good opinion.

She veered round upon him a moment later, as if, when her train of thought was ended, she became aware of his presence.

“Have you finished your letter?” she asked. He thought he heard faint amusement in her tone, but not a trace of jealousy.

“No, I’m not going to write any more to-night,” he said. “I’m not in the mood for it for some reason. I can’t say what I want to say.”

“Cassandra won’t know if it’s well written or badly written,” Katharine remarked.

“I’m not so sure about that. I should say she has a good deal of literary feeling.”

“Perhaps,” said Katharine indifferently. “You’ve been neglecting my education lately, by the way. I wish you’d read something. Let me choose a book.” So speaking, she went across to his bookshelves and began looking in a desultory way among his books. Anything, she thought, was better than bickering or the strange silence which drove home to her the distance between them. As she pulled one book forward and then another she thought ironically of her own certainty not an hour ago; how it had vanished in a moment, how she was merely marking time as best she could, not knowing in the least where they stood, what they felt, or whether William loved her or not. More and more the condition of Mary’s mind seemed to her wonderful and enviable—if, indeed, it could be quite as she figured it—if, indeed, simplicity existed for any one of the daughters of women.

“Swift,” she said, at last, taking out a volume at haphazard to settle this question at least. “Let us have some Swift.”

Rodney took the book, held it in front of him, inserted one finger between the pages, but said nothing. His face wore a queer expression of deliberation, as if he were weighing one thing with another, and would not say anything until his mind were made up.

Katharine, taking her chair beside him, noted his silence and looked at him with sudden apprehension. What she hoped or feared, she could not have said; a most irrational and indefensible desire for some assurance of his affection was, perhaps, uppermost in her mind. Peevishness, complaints, exacting cross-examination she was used to, but this attitude of composed quiet, which seemed to come from the consciousness of power within, puzzled her. She did not know what was going to happen next.

At last William spoke.

“I think it’s a little odd, don’t you?” he said, in a voice of detached reflection. “Most people, I mean, would be seriously upset if their marriage was put off for six months or so. But we aren’t; now how do you account for that?”

She looked at him and observed his judicial attitude as of one holding far aloof from emotion.

“I attribute it,” he went on, without waiting for her to answer, “to the fact that neither of us is in the least romantic about the other. That may be partly, no doubt, because we’ve known each other so long; but I’m inclined to think there’s more in it than that. There’s something temperamental. I think you’re a trifle cold, and I suspect I’m a trifle self-absorbed. If that were so it goes a long way to explaining our odd lack of illusion about each other. I’m not saying that the most satisfactory marriages aren’t founded upon this sort of understanding. But certainly it struck me as odd this morning, when Wilson told me, how little upset I felt. By the way, you’re sure we haven’t committed ourselves to that house?”

“I’ve kept the letters, and I’ll go through them to-morrow; but I’m certain we’re on the safe side.”

“Thanks. As to the psychological problem,” he continued, as if the question interested him in a detached way, “there’s no doubt, I think, that either of us is capable of feeling what, for reasons of simplicity, I call romance for a third person—at least, I’ve little doubt in my own case.”

It was, perhaps, the first time in all her knowledge of him that Katharine had known William enter thus deliberately and without sign of emotion upon a statement of his own feelings. He was wont to discourage such intimate discussions by a little laugh or turn of the conversation, as much as to say that men, or men of the world, find such topics a little silly, or in doubtful taste. His obvious wish to explain something puzzled her, interested her, and neutralized the wound to her vanity. For some reason, too, she felt more at ease with him than usual; or her ease was more the ease of equality—she could not stop to think of that at the moment though. His remarks interested her too much for the light that they threw upon certain problems of her own.

“What is this romance?” she mused.

“Ah, that’s the question. I’ve never come across a definition that satisfied me, though there are some very good ones”—he glanced in the direction of his books.

“It’s not altogether knowing the other person, perhaps—it’s ignorance,” she hazarded.

“Some authorities say it’s a question of distance—romance in literature, that is——”

“Possibly, in the case of art. But in the case of people it may be——” she hesitated.

“Have you no personal experience of it?” he asked, letting his eyes rest upon her swiftly for a moment.

“I believe it’s influenced me enormously,” she said, in the tone of one absorbed by the possibilities of some view just presented to them; “but in my life there’s so little scope for it,” she added. She reviewed her daily task, the perpetual demands upon her for good sense, self-control, and accuracy in a house containing a romantic mother. Ah, but her romance wasn’t that romance. It was a desire, an echo, a sound; she could drape it in colour, see it in form, hear it in music, but not in words; no, never in words. She sighed, teased by desires so incoherent, so incommunicable.

“But isn’t it curious,” William resumed, “that you should neither feel it for me, not I for you?”

Katharine agreed that it was curious—very; but even more curious to her was the fact that she was discussing the question with William. It revealed possibilities which opened a prospect of a new relationship altogether. Somehow it seemed to her that he was helping her to understand what she had never understood; and in her gratitude she was conscious of a most sisterly desire to help him, too—sisterly, save for one pang, not quite to be subdued, that for him she was without romance.

“I think you might be very happy with some one you loved in that way,” she said.

“You assume that romance survives a closer knowledge of the person one loves?”

He asked the question formally, to protect himself from the sort of personality which he dreaded. The whole situation needed the most careful management lest it should degenerate into some degrading and disturbing exhibition such as the scene, which he could never think of without shame, upon the heath among the dead leaves. And yet each sentence brought him relief. He was coming to understand something or other about his own desires hitherto undefined by him, the source of his difficulty with Katharine. The wish to hurt her, which had urged him to begin, had completely left him, and he felt that it was only Katharine now who could help him to be sure. He must take his time. There were so many things that he could not say without the greatest difficulty—that name, for example, Cassandra. Nor could he move his eyes from a certain spot, a fiery glen surrounded by high mountains, in the heart of the coals. He waited in suspense for Katharine to continue. She had said that he might be very happy with some one he loved in that way.

“I don’t see why it shouldn’t last with you,” she resumed. “I can imagine a certain sort of person—” she paused; she was aware that he was listening with the greatest intentness, and that his formality was merely the cover for an extreme anxiety of some sort. There was some person then—some woman—who could it be? Cassandra? Ah, possibly——

“A person,” she added, speaking in the most matter-of-fact tone she could command, “like Cassandra Otway, for instance. Cassandra is the most interesting of the Otways—with the exception of Henry. Even so, I like Cassandra better. She has more than mere cleverness. She is a character—a person by herself.”

“Those dreadful insects!” burst from William, with a nervous laugh, and a little spasm went through him as Katharine noticed. It was Cassandra then. Automatically and dully she replied, “You could insist that she confined herself to—to—something else…. But she cares for music; I believes she writes poetry; and there can be no doubt that she has a peculiar charm——”

She ceased, as if defining to herself this peculiar charm. After a moment’s silence William jerked out,

“I thought her affectionate?”

“Extremely affectionate. She worships Henry. When you think what a house that is—Uncle Francis always in one mood or another——”

“Dear, dear, dear,” William muttered.

“And you have so much in common.”

“My dear Katharine!” William exclaimed, flinging himself back in his chair, and uprooting his eyes from the spot in the fire. “I really don’t know what we’re talking about … I assure you …”

He was covered with an extreme confusion.

He withdrew the finger that was still thrust between the pages of Gulliver, opened the book, and ran his eye down the list of chapters, as though he were about to select the one most suitable for reading aloud. As Katharine watched him, she was seized with preliminary symptoms of his own panic. At the same time she was convinced that, should he find the right page, take out his spectacles, clear his throat, and open his lips, a chance that would never come again in all their lives would be lost to them both.

“We’re talking about things that interest us both very much,” she said. “Shan’t we go on talking, and leave Swift for another time? I don’t feel in the mood for Swift, and it’s a pity to read any one when that’s the case—particularly Swift.”

The pretence of wise literary speculation, as she calculated, restored William’s confidence in his security, and he replaced the book in the bookcase, keeping his back turned to her as he did so, and taking advantage of this circumstance to summon his thoughts together.

But a second of introspection had the alarming result of showing him that his mind, when looked at from within, was no longer familiar ground. He felt, that is to say, what he had never consciously felt before; he was revealed to himself as other than he was wont to think him; he was afloat upon a sea of unknown and tumultuous possibilities. He paced once up and down the room, and then flung himself impetuously into the chair by Katharine’s side. He had never felt anything like this before; he put himself entirely into her hands; he cast off all responsibility. He very nearly exclaimed aloud:

“You’ve stirred up all these odious and violent emotions, and now you must do the best you can with them.”

Her near presence, however, had a calming and reassuring effect upon his agitation, and he was conscious only of an implicit trust that, somehow, he was safe with her, that she would see him through, find out what it was that he wanted, and procure it for him.

“I wish to do whatever you tell me to do,” he said. “I put myself entirely in your hands, Katharine.”

“You must try to tell me what you feel,” she said.

“My dear, I feel a thousand things every second. I don’t know, I’m sure, what I feel. That afternoon on the heath—it was then—then—” He broke off; he did not tell her what had happened then. “Your ghastly good sense, as usual, has convinced me—for the moment—but what the truth is, Heaven only knows!” he exclaimed.

“Isn’t it the truth that you are, or might be, in love with Cassandra?” she said gently.

William bowed his head. After a moment’s silence he murmured:

“I believe you’re right, Katharine.”

She sighed, involuntarily. She had been hoping all this time, with an intensity that increased second by second against the current of her words, that it would not in the end come to this. After a moment of surprising anguish, she summoned her courage to tell him how she wished only that she might help him, and had framed the first words of her speech when a knock, terrific and startling to people in their overwrought condition, sounded upon the door.

“Katharine, I worship you,” he urged, half in a whisper.

“Yes,” she replied, withdrawing with a little shiver, “but you must open the door.”

[]

Chapter XXIII

When Ralph Denham entered the room and saw Katharine seated with her back to him, he was conscious of a change in the grade of the atmosphere such as a traveller meets with sometimes upon the roads, particularly after sunset, when, without warning, he runs from clammy chill to a hoard of unspent warmth in which the sweetness of hay and beanfield is cherished, as if the sun still shone although the moon is up. He hesitated; he shuddered; he walked elaborately to the window and laid aside his coat. He balanced his stick most carefully against the folds of the curtain. Thus occupied with his own sensations and preparations, he had little time to observe what either of the other two was feeling. Such symptoms of agitation as he might perceive (and they had left their tokens in brightness of eye and pallor of cheeks) seemed to him well befitting the actors in so great a drama as that of Katharine Hilbery’s daily life. Beauty and passion were the breath of her being, he thought.

She scarcely noticed his presence, or only as it forced her to adopt a manner of composure, which she was certainly far from feeling. William, however, was even more agitated than she was, and her first instalment of promised help took the form of some commonplace upon the age of the building or the architect’s name, which gave him an excuse to fumble in a drawer for certain designs, which he laid upon the table between the three of them.

Which of the three followed the designs most carefully it would be difficult to tell, but it is certain that not one of the three found for the moment anything to say. Years of training in a drawing-room came at length to Katharine’s help, and she said something suitable, at the same moment withdrawing her hand from the table because she perceived that it trembled. William agreed effusively; Denham corroborated him, speaking in rather high-pitched tones; they thrust aside the plans, and drew nearer to the fireplace.

“I’d rather live here than anywhere in the whole of London,” said Denham.

(“And I’ve got nowhere to live”) Katharine thought, as she agreed aloud.

“You could get rooms here, no doubt, if you wanted to,” Rodney replied.

“But I’m just leaving London for good—I’ve taken that cottage I was telling you about.” The announcement seemed to convey very little to either of his hearers.

“Indeed?—that’s sad…. You must give me your address. But you won’t cut yourself off altogether, surely——”

“You’ll be moving too, I suppose,” Denham remarked.

William showed such visible signs of floundering that Katharine collected herself and asked:

“Where is the cottage you’ve taken?”

In answering her, Denham turned and looked at her. As their eyes met, she realized for the first time that she was talking to Ralph Denham, and she remembered, without recalling any details, that she had been speaking of him quite lately, and that she had reason to think ill of him. What Mary had said she could not remember, but she felt that there was a mass of knowledge in her mind which she had not had time to examine—knowledge now lying on the far side of a gulf. But her agitation flashed the queerest lights upon her past. She must get through the matter in hand, and then think it out in quiet. She bent her mind to follow what Ralph was saying. He was telling her that he had taken a cottage in Norfolk, and she was saying that she knew, or did not know, that particular neighbourhood. But after a moment’s attention her mind flew to Rodney, and she had an unusual, indeed unprecedented, sense that they were in touch and shared each others thoughts. If only Ralph were not there, she would at once give way to her desire to take William’s hand, then to bend his head upon her shoulder, for this was what she wanted to do more than anything at the moment, unless, indeed, she wished more than anything to be alone—yes, that was what she wanted. She was sick to death of these discussions; she shivered at the effort to reveal her feelings. She had forgotten to answer. William was speaking now.

“But what will you find to do in the country?” she asked at random, striking into a conversation which she had only half heard, in such a way as to make both Rodney and Denham look at her with a little surprise. But directly she took up the conversation, it was William’s turn to fall silent. He at once forgot to listen to what they were saying, although he interposed nervously at intervals, “Yes, yes, yes.” As the minutes passed, Ralph’s presence became more and more intolerable to him, since there was so much that he must say to Katharine; the moment he could not talk to her, terrible doubts, unanswerable questions accumulated, which he must lay before Katharine, for she alone could help him now. Unless he could see her alone, it would be impossible for him ever to sleep, or to know what he had said in a moment of madness, which was not altogether mad, or was it mad? He nodded his head, and said, nervously, “Yes, yes,” and looked at Katharine, and thought how beautiful she looked; there was no one in the world that he admired more. There was an emotion in her face which lent it an expression he had never seen there. Then, as he was turning over means by which he could speak to her alone, she rose, and he was taken by surprise, for he had counted on the fact that she would outstay Denham. His only chance, then, of saying something to her in private, was to take her downstairs and walk with her to the street. While he hesitated, however, overcome with the difficulty of putting one simple thought into words when all his thoughts were scattered about, and all were too strong for utterance, he was struck silent by something that was still more unexpected. Denham got up from his chair, looked at Katharine, and said:

“I’m going too. Shall we go together?”

And before William could see any way of detaining him—or would it be better to detain Katharine?—he had taken his hat, stick, and was holding the door open for Katharine to pass out. The most that William could do was to stand at the head of the stairs and say good night. He could not offer to go with them. He could not insist that she should stay. He watched her descend, rather slowly, owing to the dusk of the staircase, and he had a last sight of Denham’s head and of Katharine’s head near together, against the panels, when suddenly a pang of acute jealousy overcame him, and had he not remained conscious of the slippers upon his feet, he would have run after them or cried out. As it was he could not move from the spot. At the turn of the staircase Katharine turned to look back, trusting to this last glance to seal their compact of good friendship. Instead of returning her silent greeting, William grinned back at her a cold stare of sarcasm or of rage.

She stopped dead for a moment, and then descended slowly into the court. She looked to the right and to the left, and once up into the sky. She was only conscious of Denham as a block upon her thoughts. She measured the distance that must be traversed before she would be alone. But when they came to the Strand no cabs were to be seen, and Denham broke the silence by saying:

“There seem to be no cabs. Shall we walk on a little?”

“Very well,” she agreed, paying no attention to him.

Aware of her preoccupation, or absorbed in his own thoughts, Ralph said nothing further; and in silence they walked some distance along the Strand. Ralph was doing his best to put his thoughts into such order that one came before the rest, and the determination that when he spoke he should speak worthily, made him put off the moment of speaking till he had found the exact words and even the place that best suited him. The Strand was too busy. There was too much risk, also, of finding an empty cab. Without a word of explanation he turned to the left, down one of the side streets leading to the river. On no account must they part until something of the very greatest importance had happened. He knew perfectly well what he wished to say, and had arranged not only the substance, but the order in which he was to say it. Now, however, that he was alone with her, not only did he find the difficulty of speaking almost insurmountable, but he was aware that he was angry with her for thus disturbing him, and casting, as it was so easy for a person of her advantages to do, these phantoms and pitfalls across his path. He was determined that he would question her as severely as he would question himself; and make them both, once and for all, either justify her dominance or renounce it. But the longer they walked thus alone, the more he was disturbed by the sense of her actual presence. Her skirt blew; the feathers in her hat waved; sometimes he saw her a step or two ahead of him, or had to wait for her to catch him up.

The silence was prolonged, and at length drew her attention to him. First she was annoyed that there was no cab to free her from his company; then she recalled vaguely something that Mary had said to make her think ill of him; she could not remember what, but the recollection, combined with his masterful ways—why did he walk so fast down this side street?—made her more and more conscious of a person of marked, though disagreeable, force by her side. She stopped and, looking round her for a cab, sighted one in the distance. He was thus precipitated into speech.

“Should you mind if we walked a little farther?” he asked. “There’s something I want to say to you.”

“Very well,” she replied, guessing that his request had something to do with Mary Datchet.

“It’s quieter by the river,” he said, and instantly he crossed over. “I want to ask you merely this,” he began. But he paused so long that she could see his head against the sky; the slope of his thin cheek and his large, strong nose were clearly marked against it. While he paused, words that were quite different from those he intended to use presented themselves.

“I’ve made you my standard ever since I saw you. I’ve dreamt about you; I’ve thought of nothing but you; you represent to me the only reality in the world.”

His words, and the queer strained voice in which he spoke them, made it appear as if he addressed some person who was not the woman beside him, but some one far away.

“And now things have come to such a pass that, unless I can speak to you openly, I believe I shall go mad. I think of you as the most beautiful, the truest thing in the world,” he continued, filled with a sense of exaltation, and feeling that he had no need now to choose his words with pedantic accuracy, for what he wanted to say was suddenly become plain to him.

“I see you everywhere, in the stars, in the river, to me you’re everything that exists; the reality of everything. Life, I tell you, would be impossible without you. And now I want——”

She had heard him so far with a feeling that she had dropped some material word which made sense of the rest. She could hear no more of this unintelligible rambling without checking him. She felt that she was overhearing what was meant for another.

“I don’t understand,” she said. “You’re saying things that you don’t mean.”

“I mean every word I say,” he replied, emphatically. He turned his head towards her. She recovered the words she was searching for while he spoke. “Ralph Denham is in love with you.” They came back to her in Mary Datchet’s voice. Her anger blazed up in her.

“I saw Mary Datchet this afternoon,” she exclaimed.

He made a movement as if he were surprised or taken aback, but answered in a moment:

“She told you that I had asked her to marry me, I suppose?”

“No!” Katharine exclaimed, in surprise.

“I did though. It was the day I saw you at Lincoln,” he continued. “I had meant to ask her to marry me, and then I looked out of the window and saw you. After that I didn’t want to ask any one to marry me. But I did it; and she knew I was lying, and refused me. I thought then, and still think, that she cares for me. I behaved very badly. I don’t defend myself.”

“No,” said Katharine, “I should hope not. There’s no defence that I can think of. If any conduct is wrong, that is.” She spoke with an energy that was directed even more against herself than against him. “It seems to me,” she continued, with the same energy, “that people are bound to be honest. There’s no excuse for such behaviour.” She could now see plainly before her eyes the expression on Mary Datchet’s face.

After a short pause, he said:

“I am not telling you that I am in love with you. I am not in love with you.”

“I didn’t think that,” she replied, conscious of some bewilderment.

“I have not spoken a word to you that I do not mean,” he added.

“Tell me then what it is that you mean,” she said at length.

As if obeying a common instinct, they both stopped and, bending slightly over the balustrade of the river, looked into the flowing water.

“You say that we’ve got to be honest,” Ralph began. “Very well. I will try to tell you the facts; but I warn you, you’ll think me mad. It’s a fact, though, that since I first saw you four or five months ago I have made you, in an utterly absurd way, I expect, my ideal. I’m almost ashamed to tell you what lengths I’ve gone to. It’s become the thing that matters most in my life.” He checked himself. “Without knowing you, except that you’re beautiful, and all that, I’ve come to believe that we’re in some sort of agreement; that we’re after something together; that we see something…. I’ve got into the habit of imagining you; I’m always thinking what you’d say or do; I walk along the street talking to you; I dream of you. It’s merely a bad habit, a schoolboy habit, day-dreaming; it’s a common experience; half one’s friends do the same; well, those are the facts.”

Simultaneously, they both walked on very slowly.

“If you were to know me you would feel none of this,” she said. “We don’t know each other—we’ve always been—interrupted…. Were you going to tell me this that day my aunts came?” she asked, recollecting the whole scene.

He bowed his head.

“The day you told me of your engagement,” he said.

She thought, with a start, that she was no longer engaged.

“I deny that I should cease to feel this if I knew you,” he went on. “I should feel it more reasonably—that’s all. I shouldn’t talk the kind of nonsense I’ve talked to-night…. But it wasn’t nonsense. It was the truth,” he said doggedly. “It’s the important thing. You can force me to talk as if this feeling for you were an hallucination, but all our feelings are that. The best of them are half illusions. Still,” he added, as if arguing to himself, “if it weren’t as real a feeling as I’m capable of, I shouldn’t be changing my life on your account.”

“What do you mean?” she inquired.

“I told you. I’m taking a cottage. I’m giving up my profession.”

“On my account?” she asked, in amazement.

“Yes, on your account,” he replied. He explained his meaning no further.

“But I don’t know you or your circumstances,” she said at last, as he remained silent.

“You have no opinion about me one way or the other?”

“Yes, I suppose I have an opinion——” she hesitated.

He controlled his wish to ask her to explain herself, and much to his pleasure she went on, appearing to search her mind

“I thought that you criticized me—perhaps disliked me. I thought of you as a person who judges——”

“No; I’m a person who feels,” he said, in a low voice.

“Tell me, then, what has made you do this,” she asked, after a break.

He told her in an orderly way, betokening careful preparation, all that he had meant to say at first; how he stood with regard to his brothers and sisters; what his mother had said, and his sister Joan had refrained from saying; exactly how many pounds stood in his name at the bank; what prospect his brother had of earning a livelihood in America; how much of their income went on rent, and other details known to him by heart. She listened to all this, so that she could have passed an examination in it by the time Waterloo Bridge was in sight; and yet she was no more listening to it than she was counting the paving-stones at her feet. She was feeling happier than she had felt in her life. If Denham could have seen how visibly books of algebraic symbols, pages all speckled with dots and dashes and twisted bars, came before her eyes as they trod the Embankment, his secret joy in her attention might have been dispersed. She went on, saying, “Yes, I see…. but how would that help you? … Your brother has passed his examination?” so sensibly, that he had constantly to keep his brain in check; and all the time she was in fancy looking up through a telescope at white shadow-cleft disks which were other worlds, until she felt herself possessed of two bodies, one walking by the river with Denham, the other concentrated to a silver globe aloft in the fine blue space above the scum of vapours that was covering the visible world. She looked at the sky once, and saw that no star was keen enough to pierce the flight of watery clouds now coursing rapidly before the west wind. She looked down hurriedly again. There was no reason, she assured herself, for this feeling of happiness; she was not free; she was not alone; she was still bound to earth by a million fibres; every step took her nearer home. Nevertheless, she exulted as she had never exulted before. The air was fresher, the lights more distinct, the cold stone of the balustrade colder and harder, when by chance or purpose she struck her hand against it. No feeling of annoyance with Denham remained; he certainly did not hinder any flight she might choose to make, whether in the direction of the sky or of her home; but that her condition was due to him, or to anything that he had said, she had no consciousness at all.

They were now within sight of the stream of cabs and omnibuses crossing to and from the Surrey side of the river; the sound of the traffic, the hooting of motor-horns, and the light chime of tram-bells sounded more and more distinctly, and, with the increase of noise, they both became silent. With a common instinct they slackened their pace, as if to lengthen the time of semi-privacy allowed them. To Ralph, the pleasure of these last yards of the walk with Katharine was so great that he could not look beyond the present moment to the time when she should have left him. He had no wish to use the last moments of their companionship in adding fresh words to what he had already said. Since they had stopped talking, she had become to him not so much a real person, as the very woman he dreamt of; but his solitary dreams had never produced any such keenness of sensation as that which he felt in her presence. He himself was also strangely transfigured. He had complete mastery of all his faculties. For the first time he was in possession of his full powers. The vistas which opened before him seemed to have no perceptible end. But the mood had none of the restlessness or feverish desire to add one delight to another which had hitherto marked, and somewhat spoilt, the most rapturous of his imaginings. It was a mood that took such clear-eyed account of the conditions of human life that he was not disturbed in the least by the gliding presence of a taxi-cab, and without agitation he perceived that Katharine was conscious of it also, and turned her head in that direction. Their halting steps acknowledged the desirability of engaging the cab; and they stopped simultaneously, and signed to it.

“Then you will let me know your decision as soon as you can?” he asked, with his hand on the door.

She hesitated for a moment. She could not immediately recall what the question was that she had to decide.

“I will write,” she said vaguely. “No,” she added, in a second, bethinking her of the difficulties of writing anything decided upon a question to which she had paid no attention, “I don’t see how to manage it.”

She stood looking at Denham, considering and hesitating, with her foot upon the step. He guessed her difficulties; he knew in a second that she had heard nothing; he knew everything that she felt.

“There’s only one place to discuss things satisfactorily that I know of,” he said quickly; “that’s Kew.”

“Kew?”

“Kew,” he repeated, with immense decision. He shut the door and gave her address to the driver. She instantly was conveyed away from him, and her cab joined the knotted stream of vehicles, each marked by a light, and indistinguishable one from the other. He stood watching for a moment, and then, as if swept by some fierce impulse from the spot where they had stood, he turned, crossed the road at a rapid pace, and disappeared.

He walked on upon the impetus of this last mood of almost supernatural exaltation until he reached a narrow street, at this hour empty of traffic and passengers. Here, whether it was the shops with their shuttered windows, the smooth and silvered curve of the wood pavement, or a natural ebb of feeling, his exaltation slowly oozed and deserted him. He was now conscious of the loss that follows any revelation; he had lost something in speaking to Katharine, for, after all, was the Katharine whom he loved the same as the real Katharine? She had transcended her entirely at moments; her skirt had blown, her feather waved, her voice spoken; yes, but how terrible sometimes the pause between the voice of one’s dreams and the voice that comes from the object of one’s dreams! He felt a mixture of disgust and pity at the figure cut by human beings when they try to carry out, in practice, what they have the power to conceive. How small both he and Katharine had appeared when they issued from the cloud of thought that enveloped them! He recalled the small, inexpressive, commonplace words in which they had tried to communicate with each other; he repeated them over to himself. By repeating Katharine’s words, he came in a few moments to such a sense of her presence that he worshipped her more than ever. But she was engaged to be married, he remembered with a start. The strength of his feeling was revealed to him instantly, and he gave himself up to an irresistible rage and sense of frustration. The image of Rodney came before him with every circumstance of folly and indignity. That little pink-cheeked dancing-master to marry Katharine? that gibbering ass with the face of a monkey on an organ? that posing, vain, fantastical fop? with his tragedies and his comedies, his innumerable spites and prides and pettinesses? Lord! marry Rodney! She must be as great a fool as he was. His bitterness took possession of him, and as he sat in the corner of the underground carriage, he looked as stark an image of unapproachable severity as could be imagined. Directly he reached home he sat down at his table, and began to write Katharine a long, wild, mad letter, begging her for both their sakes to break with Rodney, imploring her not to do what would destroy for ever the one beauty, the one truth, the one hope; not to be a traitor, not to be a deserter, for if she were—and he wound up with a quiet and brief assertion that, whatever she did or left undone, he would believe to be the best, and accept from her with gratitude. He covered sheet after sheet, and heard the early carts starting for London before he went to bed.

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Chapter XXIV

The first signs of spring, even such as make themselves felt towards the middle of February, not only produce little white and violet flowers in the more sheltered corners of woods and gardens, but bring to birth thoughts and desires comparable to those faintly coloured and sweetly scented petals in the minds of men and women. Lives frozen by age, so far as the present is concerned, to a hard surface, which neither reflects nor yields, at this season become soft and fluid, reflecting the shapes and colours of the present, as well as the shapes and colours of the past. In the case of Mrs. Hilbery, these early spring days were chiefly upsetting inasmuch as they caused a general quickening of her emotional powers, which, as far as the past was concerned, had never suffered much diminution. But in the spring her desire for expression invariably increased. She was haunted by the ghosts of phrases. She gave herself up to a sensual delight in the combinations of words. She sought them in the pages of her favourite authors. She made them for herself on scraps of paper, and rolled them on her tongue when there seemed no occasion for such eloquence. She was upheld in these excursions by the certainty that no language could outdo the splendour of her father’s memory, and although her efforts did not notably further the end of his biography, she was under the impression of living more in his shade at such times than at others. No one can escape the power of language, let alone those of English birth brought up from childhood, as Mrs. Hilbery had been, to disport themselves now in the Saxon plainness, now in the Latin splendour of the tongue, and stored with memories, as she was, of old poets exuberating in an infinity of vocables. Even Katharine was slightly affected against her better judgment by her mother’s enthusiasm. Not that her judgment could altogether acquiesce in the necessity for a study of Shakespeare’s sonnets as a preliminary to the fifth chapter of her grandfather’s biography. Beginning with a perfectly frivolous jest, Mrs. Hilbery had evolved a theory that Anne Hathaway had a way, among other things, of writing Shakespeare’s sonnets; the idea, struck out to enliven a party of professors, who forwarded a number of privately printed manuals within the next few days for her instruction, had submerged her in a flood of Elizabethan literature; she had come half to believe in her joke, which was, she said, at least as good as other people’s facts, and all her fancy for the time being centred upon Stratford-on-Avon. She had a plan, she told Katharine, when, rather later than usual, Katharine came into the room the morning after her walk by the river, for visiting Shakespeare’s tomb. Any fact about the poet had become, for the moment, of far greater interest to her than the immediate present, and the certainty that there was existing in England a spot of ground where Shakespeare had undoubtedly stood, where his very bones lay directly beneath one’s feet, was so absorbing to her on this particular occasion that she greeted her daughter with the exclamation:

“D’you think he ever passed this house?”

The question, for the moment, seemed to Katharine to have reference to Ralph Denham.

“On his way to Blackfriars, I mean,” Mrs. Hilbery continued, “for you know the latest discovery is that he owned a house there.”

Katharine still looked about her in perplexity, and Mrs. Hilbery added:

“Which is a proof that he wasn’t as poor as they’ve sometimes said. I should like to think that he had enough, though I don’t in the least want him to be rich.”

Then, perceiving her daughter’s expression of perplexity, Mrs. Hilbery burst out laughing.

“My dear, I’m not talking about your William, though that’s another reason for liking him. I’m talking, I’m thinking, I’m dreaming of my William—William Shakespeare, of course. Isn’t it odd,” she mused, standing at the window and tapping gently upon the pane, “that for all one can see, that dear old thing in the blue bonnet, crossing the road with her basket on her arm, has never heard that there was such a person? Yet it all goes on: lawyers hurrying to their work, cabmen squabbling for their fares, little boys rolling their hoops, little girls throwing bread to the gulls, as if there weren’t a Shakespeare in the world. I should like to stand at that crossing all day long and say: ‘People, read Shakespeare!’”

Katharine sat down at her table and opened a long dusty envelope. As Shelley was mentioned in the course of the letter as if he were alive, it had, of course, considerable value. Her immediate task was to decide whether the whole letter should be printed, or only the paragraph which mentioned Shelley’s name, and she reached out for a pen and held it in readiness to do justice upon the sheet. Her pen, however, remained in the air. Almost surreptitiously she slipped a clean sheet in front of her, and her hand, descending, began drawing square boxes halved and quartered by straight lines, and then circles which underwent the same process of dissection.

“Katharine! I’ve hit upon a brilliant idea!” Mrs. Hilbery exclaimed—“to lay out, say, a hundred pounds or so on copies of Shakespeare, and give them to working men. Some of your clever friends who get up meetings might help us, Katharine. And that might lead to a playhouse, where we could all take parts. You’d be Rosalind—but you’ve a dash of the old nurse in you. Your father’s Hamlet, come to years of discretion; and I’m—well, I’m a bit of them all; I’m quite a large bit of the fool, but the fools in Shakespeare say all the clever things. Now who shall William be? A hero? Hotspur? Henry the Fifth? No, William’s got a touch of Hamlet in him too. I can fancy that William talks to himself when he’s alone. Ah, Katharine, you must say very beautiful things when you’re together!” she added wistfully, with a glance at her daughter, who had told her nothing about the dinner the night before.

“Oh, we talk a lot of nonsense,” said Katharine, hiding her slip of paper as her mother stood by her, and spreading the old letter about Shelley in front of her.

“It won’t seem to you nonsense in ten years’ time,” said Mrs. Hilbery. “Believe me, Katharine, you’ll look back on these days afterwards; you’ll remember all the silly things you’ve said; and you’ll find that your life has been built on them. The best of life is built on what we say when we’re in love. It isn’t nonsense, Katharine,” she urged, “it’s the truth, it’s the only truth.”

Katharine was on the point of interrupting her mother, and then she was on the point of confiding in her. They came strangely close together sometimes. But, while she hesitated and sought for words not too direct, her mother had recourse to Shakespeare, and turned page after page, set upon finding some quotation which said all this about love far, far better than she could. Accordingly, Katharine did nothing but scrub one of her circles an intense black with her pencil, in the midst of which process the telephone-bell rang, and she left the room to answer it.

When she returned, Mrs. Hilbery had found not the passage she wanted, but another of exquisite beauty as she justly observed, looking up for a second to ask Katharine who that was?

“Mary Datchet,” Katharine replied briefly.

“Ah—I half wish I’d called you Mary, but it wouldn’t have gone with Hilbery, and it wouldn’t have gone with Rodney. Now this isn’t the passage I wanted. (I never can find what I want.) But it’s spring; it’s the daffodils; it’s the green fields; it’s the birds.”

She was cut short in her quotation by another imperative telephone-bell. Once more Katharine left the room.

“My dear child, how odious the triumphs of science are!” Mrs. Hilbery exclaimed on her return. “They’ll be linking us with the moon next—but who was that?”

“William,” Katharine replied yet more briefly.

“I’ll forgive William anything, for I’m certain that there aren’t any Williams in the moon. I hope he’s coming to luncheon?”

“He’s coming to tea.”

“Well, that’s better than nothing, and I promise to leave you alone.”

“There’s no need for you to do that,” said Katharine.

She swept her hand over the faded sheet, and drew herself up squarely to the table as if she refused to waste time any longer. The gesture was not lost upon her mother. It hinted at the existence of something stern and unapproachable in her daughter’s character, which struck chill upon her, as the sight of poverty, or drunkenness, or the logic with which Mr. Hilbery sometimes thought good to demolish her certainty of an approaching millennium struck chill upon her. She went back to her own table, and putting on her spectacles with a curious expression of quiet humility, addressed herself for the first time that morning to the task before her. The shock with an unsympathetic world had a sobering effect on her. For once, her industry surpassed her daughter’s. Katharine could not reduce the world to that particular perspective in which Harriet Martineau, for instance, was a figure of solid importance, and possessed of a genuine relationship to this figure or to that date. Singularly enough, the sharp call of the telephone-bell still echoed in her ear, and her body and mind were in a state of tension, as if, at any moment, she might hear another summons of greater interest to her than the whole of the nineteenth century. She did not clearly realize what this call was to be; but when the ears have got into the habit of listening, they go on listening involuntarily, and thus Katharine spent the greater part of the morning in listening to a variety of sounds in the back streets of Chelsea. For the first time in her life, probably, she wished that Mrs. Hilbery would not keep so closely to her work. A quotation from Shakespeare would not have come amiss. Now and again she heard a sigh from her mother’s table, but that was the only proof she gave of her existence, and Katharine did not think of connecting it with the square aspect of her own position at the table, or, perhaps, she would have thrown her pen down and told her mother the reason of her restlessness. The only writing she managed to accomplish in the course of the morning was one letter, addressed to her cousin, Cassandra Otway—a rambling letter, long, affectionate, playful and commanding all at once. She bade Cassandra put her creatures in the charge of a groom, and come to them for a week or so. They would go and hear some music together. Cassandra’s dislike of rational society, she said, was an affectation fast hardening into a prejudice, which would, in the long run, isolate her from all interesting people and pursuits. She was finishing the sheet when the sound she was anticipating all the time actually struck upon her ears. She jumped up hastily, and slammed the door with a sharpness which made Mrs. Hilbery start. Where was Katharine off to? In her preoccupied state she had not heard the bell.

The alcove on the stairs, in which the telephone was placed, was screened for privacy by a curtain of purple velvet. It was a pocket for superfluous possessions, such as exist in most houses which harbour the wreckage of three generations. Prints of great-uncles, famed for their prowess in the East, hung above Chinese teapots, whose sides were riveted by little gold stitches, and the precious teapots, again, stood upon bookcases containing the complete works of William Cowper and Sir Walter Scott. The thread of sound, issuing from the telephone, was always coloured by the surroundings which received it, so it seemed to Katharine. Whose voice was now going to combine with them, or to strike a discord?

“Whose voice?” she asked herself, hearing a man inquire, with great determination, for her number. The unfamiliar voice now asked for Miss Hilbery. Out of all the welter of voices which crowd round the far end of the telephone, out of the enormous range of possibilities, whose voice, what possibility, was this? A pause gave her time to ask herself this question. It was solved next moment.

“I’ve looked out the train…. Early on Saturday afternoon would suit me best…. I’m Ralph Denham…. But I’ll write it down….”

With more than the usual sense of being impinged upon the point of a bayonet, Katharine replied:

“I think I could come. I’ll look at my engagements…. Hold on.”

She dropped the machine, and looked fixedly at the print of the great-uncle who had not ceased to gaze, with an air of amiable authority, into a world which, as yet, beheld no symptoms of the Indian Mutiny. And yet, gently swinging against the wall, within the black tube, was a voice which recked nothing of Uncle James, of China teapots, or of red velvet curtains. She watched the oscillation of the tube, and at the same moment became conscious of the individuality of the house in which she stood; she heard the soft domestic sounds of regular existence upon staircases and floors above her head, and movements through the wall in the house next door. She had no very clear vision of Denham himself, when she lifted the telephone to her lips and replied that she thought Saturday would suit her. She hoped that he would not say good-bye at once, although she felt no particular anxiety to attend to what he was saying, and began, even while he spoke, to think of her own upper room, with its books, its papers pressed between the leaves of dictionaries, and the table that could be cleared for work. She replaced the instrument, thoughtfully; her restlessness was assuaged; she finished her letter to Cassandra without difficulty, addressed the envelope, and fixed the stamp with her usual quick decision.

A bunch of anemones caught Mrs. Hilbery’s eye when they had finished luncheon. The blue and purple and white of the bowl, standing in a pool of variegated light on a polished Chippendale table in the drawing-room window, made her stop dead with an exclamation of pleasure.

“Who is lying ill in bed, Katharine?” she demanded. “Which of our friends wants cheering up? Who feels that they’ve been forgotten and passed over, and that nobody wants them? Whose water rates are overdue, and the cook leaving in a temper without waiting for her wages? There was somebody I know——” she concluded, but for the moment the name of this desirable acquaintance escaped her. The best representative of the forlorn company whose day would be brightened by a bunch of anemones was, in Katharine’s opinion, the widow of a general living in the Cromwell Road. In default of the actually destitute and starving, whom she would much have preferred, Mrs. Hilbery was forced to acknowledge her claims, for though in comfortable circumstances, she was extremely dull, unattractive, connected in some oblique fashion with literature, and had been touched to the verge of tears, on one occasion, by an afternoon call.

It happened that Mrs. Hilbery had an engagement elsewhere, so that the task of taking the flowers to the Cromwell Road fell upon Katharine. She took her letter to Cassandra with her, meaning to post it in the first pillar-box she came to. When, however, she was fairly out of doors, and constantly invited by pillar-boxes and post-offices to slip her envelope down their scarlet throats, she forbore. She made absurd excuses, as that she did not wish to cross the road, or that she was certain to pass another post-office in a more central position a little farther on. The longer she held the letter in her hand, however, the more persistently certain questions pressed upon her, as if from a collection of voices in the air. These invisible people wished to be informed whether she was engaged to William Rodney, or was the engagement broken off? Was it right, they asked, to invite Cassandra for a visit, and was William Rodney in love with her, or likely to fall in love? Then the questioners paused for a moment, and resumed as if another side of the problem had just come to their notice. What did Ralph Denham mean by what he said to you last night? Do you consider that he is in love with you? Is it right to consent to a solitary walk with him, and what advice are you going to give him about his future? Has William Rodney cause to be jealous of your conduct, and what do you propose to do about Mary Datchet? What are you going to do? What does honour require you to do? they repeated.

“Good Heaven’s!” Katharine exclaimed, after listening to all these remarks, “I suppose I ought to make up my mind.”

But the debate was a formal skirmishing, a pastime to gain breathing-space. Like all people brought up in a tradition, Katharine was able, within ten minutes or so, to reduce any moral difficulty to its traditional shape and solve it by the traditional answers. The book of wisdom lay open, if not upon her mother’s knee, upon the knees of many uncles and aunts. She had only to consult them, and they would at once turn to the right page and read out an answer exactly suited to one in her position. The rules which should govern the behaviour of an unmarried woman are written in red ink, graved upon marble, if, by some freak of nature, it should fall out that the unmarried woman has not the same writing scored upon her heart. She was ready to believe that some people are fortunate enough to reject, accept, resign, or lay down their lives at the bidding of traditional authority; she could envy them; but in her case the questions became phantoms directly she tried seriously to find an answer, which proved that the traditional answer would be of no use to her individually. Yet it had served so many people, she thought, glancing at the rows of houses on either side of her, where families, whose incomes must be between a thousand and fifteen-hundred a year lived, and kept, perhaps, three servants, and draped their windows with curtains which were always thick and generally dirty, and must, she thought, since you could only see a looking-glass gleaming above a sideboard on which a dish of apples was set, keep the room inside very dark. But she turned her head away, observing that this was not a method of thinking the matter out.

The only truth which she could discover was the truth of what she herself felt—a frail beam when compared with the broad illumination shed by the eyes of all the people who are in agreement to see together; but having rejected the visionary voices, she had no choice but to make this her guide through the dark masses which confronted her. She tried to follow her beam, with an expression upon her face which would have made any passer-by think her reprehensibly and almost ridiculously detached from the surrounding scene. One would have felt alarmed lest this young and striking woman were about to do something eccentric. But her beauty saved her from the worst fate that can befall a pedestrian; people looked at her, but they did not laugh. To seek a true feeling among the chaos of the unfeelings or half-feelings of life, to recognize it when found, and to accept the consequences of the discovery, draws lines upon the smoothest brow, while it quickens the light of the eyes; it is a pursuit which is alternately bewildering, debasing, and exalting, and, as Katharine speedily found, her discoveries gave her equal cause for surprise, shame, and intense anxiety. Much depended, as usual, upon the interpretation of the word love; which word came up again and again, whether she considered Rodney, Denham, Mary Datchet, or herself; and in each case it seemed to stand for something different, and yet for something unmistakable and something not to be passed by. For the more she looked into the confusion of lives which, instead of running parallel, had suddenly intersected each other, the more distinctly she seemed to convince herself that there was no other light on them than was shed by this strange illumination, and no other path save the one upon which it threw its beams. Her blindness in the case of Rodney, her attempt to match his true feeling with her false feeling, was a failure never to be sufficiently condemned; indeed, she could only pay it the tribute of leaving it a black and naked landmark unburied by attempt at oblivion or excuse.

With this to humiliate there was much to exalt. She thought of three different scenes; she thought of Mary sitting upright and saying, “I’m in love—I’m in love”; she thought of Rodney losing his self-consciousness among the dead leaves, and speaking with the abandonment of a child; she thought of Denham leaning upon the stone parapet and talking to the distant sky, so that she thought him mad. Her mind, passing from Mary to Denham, from William to Cassandra, and from Denham to herself—if, as she rather doubted, Denham’s state of mind was connected with herself—seemed to be tracing out the lines of some symmetrical pattern, some arrangement of life, which invested, if not herself, at least the others, not only with interest, but with a kind of tragic beauty. She had a fantastic picture of them upholding splendid palaces upon their bent backs. They were the lantern-bearers, whose lights, scattered among the crowd, wove a pattern, dissolving, joining, meeting again in combination. Half forming such conceptions as these in her rapid walk along the dreary streets of South Kensington, she determined that, whatever else might be obscure, she must further the objects of Mary, Denham, William, and Cassandra. The way was not apparent. No course of action seemed to her indubitably right. All she achieved by her thinking was the conviction that, in such a cause, no risk was too great; and that, far from making any rules for herself or others, she would let difficulties accumulate unsolved, situations widen their jaws unsatiated, while she maintained a position of absolute and fearless independence. So she could best serve the people who loved.

Read in the light of this exaltation, there was a new meaning in the words which her mother had pencilled upon the card attached to the bunch of anemones. The door of the house in the Cromwell Road opened; gloomy vistas of passage and staircase were revealed; such light as there was seemed to be concentrated upon a silver salver of visiting-cards, whose black borders suggested that the widow’s friends had all suffered the same bereavement. The parlourmaid could hardly be expected to fathom the meaning of the grave tone in which the young lady proffered the flowers, with Mrs. Hilbery’s love; and the door shut upon the offering.

The sight of a face, the slam of a door, are both rather destructive of exaltation in the abstract; and, as she walked back to Chelsea, Katharine had her doubts whether anything would come of her resolves. If you cannot make sure of people, however, you can hold fairly fast to figures, and in some way or other her thought about such problems as she was wont to consider worked in happily with her mood as to her friends lives. She reached home rather late for tea.

On the ancient Dutch chest in the hall she perceived one or two hats, coats, and walking-sticks, and the sound of voices reached her as she stood outside the drawing-room door. Her mother gave a little cry as she came in; a cry which conveyed to Katharine the fact that she was late, that the teacups and milk-jugs were in a conspiracy of disobedience, and that she must immediately take her place at the head of the table and pour out tea for the guests. Augustus Pelham, the diarist, liked a calm atmosphere in which to tell his stories; he liked attention; he liked to elicit little facts, little stories, about the past and the great dead, from such distinguished characters as Mrs. Hilbery for the nourishment of his diary, for whose sake he frequented tea-tables and ate yearly an enormous quantity of buttered toast. He, therefore, welcomed Katharine with relief, and she had merely to shake hands with Rodney and to greet the American lady who had come to be shown the relics, before the talk started again on the broad lines of reminiscence and discussion which were familiar to her.

Yet, even with this thick veil between them, she could not help looking at Rodney, as if she could detect what had happened to him since they met. It was in vain. His clothes, even the white slip, the pearl in his tie, seemed to intercept her quick glance, and to proclaim the futility of such inquiries of a discreet, urbane gentleman, who balanced his cup of tea and poised a slice of bread and butter on the edge of the saucer. He would not meet her eye, but that could be accounted for by his activity in serving and helping, and the polite alacrity with which he was answering the questions of the Americ visitor.

It was certainly a sight to daunt any one coming in with a head full of theories about love. The voices of the invisible questioners were reinforced by the scene round the table, and sounded with a tremendous self-confidence, as if they had behind them the common sense of twenty generations, together with the immediate approval of Mr. Augustus Pelham, Mrs. Vermont Bankes, William Rodney, and, possibly, Mrs. Hilbery herself. Katharine set her teeth, not entirely in the metaphorical sense, for her hand, obeying the impulse towards definite action, laid firmly upon the table beside her an envelope which she had been grasping all this time in complete forgetfulness. The address was uppermost, and a moment later she saw William’s eye rest upon it as he rose to fulfil some duty with a plate. His expression instantly changed. He did what he was on the point of doing, and then looked at Katharine with a look which revealed enough of his confusion to show her that he was not entirely represented by his appearance. In a minute or two he proved himself at a loss with Mrs. Vermont Bankes, and Mrs. Hilbery, aware of the silence with her usual quickness, suggested that, perhaps, it was now time that Mrs. Bankes should be shown “our things.”

Katharine accordingly rose, and led the way to the little inner room with the pictures and the books. Mrs. Bankes and Rodney followed her.

She turned on the lights, and began directly in her low, pleasant voice: “This table is my grandfather’s writing-table. Most of the later poems were written at it. And this is his pen—the last pen he ever used.” She took it in her hand and paused for the right number of seconds. “Here,” she continued, “is the original manuscript of the ‘Ode to Winter.’ The early manuscripts are far less corrected than the later ones, as you will see directly…. Oh, do take it yourself,” she added, as Mrs. Bankes asked, in an awestruck tone of voice, for that privilege, and began a preliminary unbuttoning of her white kid gloves.

“You are wonderfully like your grandfather, Miss Hilbery,” the American lady observed, gazing from Katharine to the portrait, “especially about the eyes. Come, now, I expect she writes poetry herself, doesn’t she?” she asked in a jocular tone, turning to William. “Quite one’s ideal of a poet, is it not, Mr. Rodney? I cannot tell you what a privilege I feel it to be standing just here with the poet’s granddaughter. You must know we think a great deal of your grandfather in America, Miss Hilbery. We have societies for reading him aloud. What! His very own slippers!” Laying aside the manuscript, she hastily grasped the old shoes, and remained for a moment dumb in contemplation of them.

While Katharine went on steadily with her duties as show-woman, Rodney examined intently a row of little drawings which he knew by heart already. His disordered state of mind made it necessary for him to take advantage of these little respites, as if he had been out in a high wind and must straighten his dress in the first shelter he reached. His calm was only superficial, as he knew too well; it did not exist much below the surface of tie, waistcoat, and white slip.

On getting out of bed that morning he had fully made up his mind to ignore what had been said the night before; he had been convinced, by the sight of Denham, that his love for Katharine was passionate, and when he addressed her early that morning on the telephone, he had meant his cheerful but authoritative tones to convey to her the fact that, after a night of madness, they were as indissolubly engaged as ever. But when he reached his office his torments began. He found a letter from Cassandra waiting for him. She had read his play, and had taken the very first opportunity to write and tell him what she thought of it. She knew, she wrote, that her praise meant absolutely nothing; but still, she had sat up all night; she thought this, that, and the other; she was full of enthusiasm most elaborately scratched out in places, but enough was written plain to gratify William’s vanity exceedingly. She was quite intelligent enough to say the right things, or, even more charmingly, to hint at them. In other ways, too, it was a very charming letter. She told him about her music, and about a Suffrage meeting to which Henry had taken her, and she asserted, half seriously, that she had learnt the Greek alphabet, and found it “fascinating.” The word was underlined. Had she laughed when she drew that line? Was she ever serious? Didn’t the letter show the most engaging compound of enthusiasm and spirit and whimsicality, all tapering into a flame of girlish freakishness, which flitted, for the rest of the morning, as a will-o’-the-wisp across Rodney’s landscape. He could not resist beginning an answer to her there and then. He found it particularly delightful to shape a style which should express the bowing and curtsying, advancing and retreating, which are characteristic of one of the many million partnerships of men and women. Katharine never trod that particular measure, he could not help reflecting; Katharine—Cassandra; Cassandra—Katharine—they alternated in his consciousness all day long. It was all very well to dress oneself carefully, compose one’s face, and start off punctually at half-past four to a tea-party in Cheyne Walk, but Heaven only knew what would come of it all, and when Katharine, after sitting silent with her usual immobility, wantonly drew from her pocket and slapped down on the table beneath his eyes a letter addressed to Cassandra herself, his composure deserted him. What did she mean by her behaviour?

He looked up sharply from his row of little pictures. Katharine was disposing of the American lady in far too arbitrary a fashion. Surely the victim herself must see how foolish her enthusiasms appeared in the eyes of the poet’s granddaughter. Katharine never made any attempt to spare people’s feelings, he reflected; and, being himself very sensitive to all shades of comfort and discomfort, he cut short the auctioneer’s catalogue, which Katharine was reeling off more and more absent-mindedly, and took Mrs. Vermont Bankes, with a queer sense of fellowship in suffering, under his own protection.

But within a few minutes the American lady had completed her inspection, and inclining her head in a little nod of reverential farewell to the poet and his shoes, she was escorted downstairs by Rodney. Katharine stayed by herself in the little room. The ceremony of ancestor-worship had been more than usually oppressive to her. Moreover, the room was becoming crowded beyond the bounds of order. Only that morning a heavily insured proof-sheet had reached them from a collector in Australia, which recorded a change of the poet’s mind about a very famous phrase, and, therefore, had claims to the honour of glazing and framing. But was there room for it? Must it be hung on the staircase, or should some other relic give place to do it honour? Feeling unable to decide the question, Katharine glanced at the portrait of her grandfather, as if to ask his opinion. The artist who had painted it was now out of fashion, and by dint of showing it to visitors, Katharine had almost ceased to see anything but a glow of faintly pleasing pink and brown tints, enclosed within a circular scroll of gilt laurel-leaves. The young man who was her grandfather looked vaguely over her head. The sensual lips were slightly parted, and gave the face an expression of beholding something lovely or miraculous vanishing or just rising upon the rim of the distance. The expression repeated itself curiously upon Katharine’s face as she gazed up into his. They were the same age, or very nearly so. She wondered what he was looking for; were there waves beating upon a shore for him, too, she wondered, and heroes riding through the leaf-hung forests? For perhaps the first time in her life she thought of him as a man, young, unhappy, tempestuous, full of desires and faults; for the first time she realized him for herself, and not from her mother’s memory. He might have been her brother, she thought. It seemed to her that they were akin, with the mysterious kinship of blood which makes it seem possible to interpret the sights which the eyes of the dead behold so intently, or even to believe that they look with us upon our present joys and sorrows. He would have understood, she thought, suddenly; and instead of laying her withered flowers upon his shrine, she brought him her own perplexities—perhaps a gift of greater value, should the dead be conscious of gifts, than flowers and incense and adoration. Doubts, questionings, and despondencies she felt, as she looked up, would be more welcome to him than homage, and he would hold them but a very small burden if she gave him, also, some share in what she suffered and achieved. The depth of her own pride and love were not more apparent to her than the sense that the dead asked neither flowers nor regrets, but a share in the life which they had given her, the life which they had lived.

Rodney found her a moment later sitting beneath her grandfather’s portrait. She laid her hand on the seat next her in a friendly way, and said:

“Come and sit down, William. How glad I was you were here! I felt myself getting ruder and ruder.”

“You are not good at hiding your feelings,” he returned dryly.

“Oh, don’t scold me—I’ve had a horrid afternoon.” She told him how she had taken the flowers to Mrs. McCormick, and how South Kensington impressed her as the preserve of officers’ widows. She described how the door had opened, and what gloomy avenues of busts and palm-trees and umbrellas had been revealed to her. She spoke lightly, and succeeded in putting him at his ease. Indeed, he rapidly became too much at his ease to persist in a condition of cheerful neutrality. He felt his composure slipping from him. Katharine made it seem so natural to ask her to help him, or advise him, to say straight out what he had in his mind. The letter from Cassandra was heavy in his pocket. There was also the letter to Cassandra lying on the table in the next room. The atmosphere seemed charged with Cassandra. But, unless Katharine began the subject of her own accord, he could not even hint—he must ignore the whole affair; it was the part of a gentleman to preserve a bearing that was, as far as he could make it, the bearing of an undoubting lover. At intervals he sighed deeply. He talked rather more quickly than usual about the possibility that some of the operas of Mozart would be played in the summer. He had received a notice, he said, and at once produced a pocket-book stuffed with papers, and began shuffling them in search. He held a thick envelope between his finger and thumb, as if the notice from the opera company had become in some way inseparably attached to it.

“A letter from Cassandra?” said Katharine, in the easiest voice in the world, looking over his shoulder. “I’ve just written to ask her to come here, only I forgot to post it.”

He handed her the envelope in silence. She took it, extracted the sheets, and read the letter through.

The reading seemed to Rodney to take an intolerably long time.

“Yes,” she observed at length, “a very charming letter.”

Rodney’s face was half turned away, as if in bashfulness. Her view of his profile almost moved her to laughter. She glanced through the pages once more.

“I see no harm,” William blurted out, “in helping her—with Greek, for example—if she really cares for that sort of thing.”

“There’s no reason why she shouldn’t care,” said Katharine, consulting the pages once more. “In fact—ah, here it is—‘The Greek alphabet is absolutely fascinating.’ Obviously she does care.”

“Well, Greek may be rather a large order. I was thinking chiefly of English. Her criticisms of my play, though they’re too generous, evidently immature—she can’t be more than twenty-two, I suppose?—they certainly show the sort of thing one wants: real feeling for poetry, understanding, not formed, of course, but it’s at the root of everything after all. There’d be no harm in lending her books?”

“No. Certainly not.”

“But if it—hum—led to a correspondence? I mean, Katharine, I take it, without going into matters which seem to me a little morbid, I mean,” he floundered, “you, from your point of view, feel that there’s nothing disagreeable to you in the notion? If so, you’ve only to speak, and I never think of it again.”

She was surprised by the violence of her desire that he never should think of it again. For an instant it seemed to her impossible to surrender an intimacy, which might not be the intimacy of love, but was certainly the intimacy of true friendship, to any woman in the world. Cassandra would never understand him—she was not good enough for him. The letter seemed to her a letter of flattery—a letter addressed to his weakness, which it made her angry to think was known to another. For he was not weak; he had the rare strength of doing what he promised—she had only to speak, and he would never think of Cassandra again.

She paused. Rodney guessed the reason. He was amazed.

“She loves me,” he thought. The woman he admired more than any one in the world, loved him, as he had given up hope that she would ever love him. And now that for the first time he was sure of her love, he resented it. He felt it as a fetter, an encumbrance, something which made them both, but him in particular, ridiculous. He was in her power completely, but his eyes were open and he was no longer her slave or her dupe. He would be her master in future. The instant prolonged itself as Katharine realized the strength of her desire to speak the words that should keep William for ever, and the baseness of the temptation which assailed her to make the movement, or speak the word, which he had often begged her for, which she was now near enough to feeling. She held the letter in her hand. She sat silent.

At this moment there was a stir in the other room; the voice of Mrs. Hilbery was heard talking of proof-sheets rescued by miraculous providence from butcher’s ledgers in Australia; the curtain separating one room from the other was drawn apart, and Mrs. Hilbery and Augustus Pelham stood in the doorway. Mrs. Hilbery stopped short. She looked at her daughter, and at the man her daughter was to marry, with her peculiar smile that always seemed to tremble on the brink of satire.

“The best of all my treasures, Mr. Pelham!” she exclaimed. “Don’t move, Katharine. Sit still, William. Mr. Pelham will come another day.”

Mr. Pelham looked, smiled, bowed, and, as his hostess had moved on, followed her without a word. The curtain was drawn again either by him or by Mrs. Hilbery.

But her mother had settled the question somehow. Katharine doubted no longer.

“As I told you last night,” she said, “I think it’s your duty, if there’s a chance that you care for Cassandra, to discover what your feeling is for her now. It’s your duty to her, as well as to me. But we must tell my mother. We can’t go on pretending.”

“That is entirely in your hands, of course,” said Rodney, with an immediate return to the manner of a formal man of honour.

“Very well,” said Katharine.

Directly he left her she would go to her mother, and explain that the engagement was at an end—or it might be better that they should go together?

“But, Katharine,” Rodney began, nervously attempting to stuff Cassandra’s sheets back into their envelope; “if Cassandra—should Cassandra—you’ve asked Cassandra to stay with you.”

“Yes; but I’ve not posted the letter.”

He crossed his knees in a discomfited silence. By all his codes it was impossible to ask a woman with whom he had just broken off his engagement to help him to become acquainted with another woman with a view to his falling in love with her. If it was announced that their engagement was over, a long and complete separation would inevitably follow; in those circumstances, letters and gifts were returned; after years of distance the severed couple met, perhaps at an evening party, and touched hands uncomfortably with an indifferent word or two. He would be cast off completely; he would have to trust to his own resources. He could never mention Cassandra to Katharine again; for months, and doubtless years, he would never see Katharine again; anything might happen to her in his absence.

Katharine was almost as well aware of his perplexities as he was. She knew in what direction complete generosity pointed the way; but pride—for to remain engaged to Rodney and to cover his experiments hurt what was nobler in her than mere vanity—fought for its life.

“I’m to give up my freedom for an indefinite time,” she thought, “in order that William may see Cassandra here at his ease. He’s not the courage to manage it without my help—he’s too much of a coward to tell me openly what he wants. He hates the notion of a public breach. He wants to keep us both.”

When she reached this point, Rodney pocketed the letter and elaborately looked at his watch. Although the action meant that he resigned Cassandra, for he knew his own incompetence and distrusted himself entirely, and lost Katharine, for whom his feeling was profound though unsatisfactory, still it appeared to him that there was nothing else left for him to do. He was forced to go, leaving Katharine free, as he had said, to tell her mother that the engagement was at an end. But to do what plain duty required of an honourable man, cost an effort which only a day or two ago would have been inconceivable to him. That a relationship such as he had glanced at with desire could be possible between him and Katharine, he would have been the first, two days ago, to deny with indignation. But now his life had changed; his attitude had changed; his feelings were different; new aims and possibilities had been shown him, and they had an almost irresistible fascination and force. The training of a life of thirty-five years had not left him defenceless; he was still master of his dignity; he rose, with a mind made up to an irrevocable farewell.

“I leave you, then,” he said, standing up and holding out his hand with an effort that left him pale, but lent him dignity, “to tell your mother that our engagement is ended by your desire.”

She took his hand and held it.

“You don’t trust me?” she said.

“I do, absolutely,” he replied.

“No. You don’t trust me to help you…. I could help you?”

“I’m hopeless without your help!” he exclaimed passionately, but withdrew his hand and turned his back. When he faced her, she thought that she saw him for the first time without disguise.

“It’s useless to pretend that I don’t understand what you’re offering, Katharine. I admit what you say. Speaking to you perfectly frankly, I believe at this moment that I do love your cousin; there is a chance that, with your help, I might—but no,” he broke off, “it’s impossible, it’s wrong—I’m infinitely to blame for having allowed this situation to arise.”

“Sit beside me. Let’s consider sensibly——”

“Your sense has been our undoing——” he groaned.

“I accept the responsibility.”

“Ah, but can I allow that?” he exclaimed. “It would mean—for we must face it, Katharine—that we let our engagement stand for the time nominally; in fact, of course, your freedom would be absolute.”

“And yours too.”

“Yes, we should both be free. Let us say that I saw Cassandra once, twice, perhaps, under these conditions; and then if, as I think certain, the whole thing proves a dream, we tell your mother instantly. Why not tell her now, indeed, under pledge of secrecy?”

“Why not? It would be over London in ten minutes, besides, she would never even remotely understand.”

“Your father, then? This secrecy is detestable—it’s dishonourable.”

“My father would understand even less than my mother.”

“Ah, who could be expected to understand?” Rodney groaned; “but it’s from your point of view that we must look at it. It’s not only asking too much, it’s putting you into a position—a position in which I could not endure to see my own sister.”

“We’re not brothers and sisters,” she said impatiently, “and if we can’t decide, who can? I’m not talking nonsense,” she proceeded. “I’ve done my best to think this out from every point of view, and I’ve come to the conclusion that there are risks which have to be taken, though I don’t deny that they hurt horribly.”

“Katharine, you mind? You’ll mind too much.”

“No I shan’t,” she said stoutly. “I shall mind a good deal, but I’m prepared for that; I shall get through it, because you will help me. You’ll both help me. In fact, we’ll help each other. That’s a Christian doctrine, isn’t it?”

“It sounds more like Paganism to me,” Rodney groaned, as he reviewed the situation into which her Christian doctrine was plunging them.

And yet he could not deny that a divine relief possessed him, and that the future, instead of wearing a lead-coloured mask, now blossomed with a thousand varied gaieties and excitements. He was actually to see Cassandra within a week or perhaps less, and he was more anxious to know the date of her arrival than he could own even to himself. It seemed base to be so anxious to pluck this fruit of Katharine’s unexampled generosity and of his own contemptible baseness. And yet, though he used these words automatically, they had now no meaning. He was not debased in his own eyes by what he had done, and as for praising Katharine, were they not partners, conspirators, people bent upon the same quest together, so that to praise the pursuit of a common end as an act of generosity was meaningless. He took her hand and pressed it, not in thanks so much as in an ecstasy of comradeship.

“We will help each other,” he said, repeating her words, seeking her eyes in an enthusiasm of friendship.

Her eyes were grave but dark with sadness as they rested on him. “He’s already gone,” she thought, “far away—he thinks of me no more.” And the fancy came to her that, as they sat side by side, hand in hand, she could hear the earth pouring from above to make a barrier between them, so that, as they sat, they were separated second by second by an impenetrable wall. The process, which affected her as that of being sealed away and for ever from all companionship with the person she cared for most, came to an end at last, and by common consent they unclasped their fingers, Rodney touching hers with his lips, as the curtain parted, and Mrs. Hilbery peered through the opening with her benevolent and sarcastic expression to ask whether Katharine could remember was it Tuesday or Wednesday, and did she dine in Westminster?

“Dearest William,” she said, pausing, as if she could not resist the pleasure of encroaching for a second upon this wonderful world of love and confidence and romance. “Dearest children,” she added, disappearing with an impulsive gesture, as if she forced herself to draw the curtain upon a scene which she refused all temptation to interrupt.

[]

Chapter XXV

At a quarter-past three in the afternoon of the following Saturday Ralph Denham sat on the bank of the lake in Kew Gardens, dividing the dial-plate of his watch into sections with his forefinger. The just and inexorable nature of time itself was reflected in his face. He might have been composing a hymn to the unhasting and unresting march of that divinity. He seemed to greet the lapse of minute after minute with stern acquiescence in the inevitable order. His expression was so severe, so serene, so immobile, that it seemed obvious that for him at least there was a grandeur in the departing hour which no petty irritation on his part was to mar, although the wasting time wasted also high private hopes of his own.

His face was no bad index to what went on within him. He was in a condition of mind rather too exalted for the trivialities of daily life. He could not accept the fact that a lady was fifteen minutes late in keeping her appointment without seeing in that accident the frustration of his entire life. Looking at his watch, he seemed to look deep into the springs of human existence, and by the light of what he saw there altered his course towards the north and the midnight…. Yes, one’s voyage must be made absolutely without companions through ice and black water—towards what goal? Here he laid his finger upon the half-hour, and decided that when the minute-hand reached that point he would go, at the same time answering the question put by another of the many voices of consciousness with the reply that there was undoubtedly a goal, but that it would need the most relentless energy to keep anywhere in its direction. Still, still, one goes on, the ticking seconds seemed to assure him, with dignity, with open eyes, with determination not to accept the second-rate, not to be tempted by the unworthy, not to yield, not to compromise. Twenty-five minutes past three were now marked upon the face of the watch. The world, he assured himself, since Katharine Hilbery was now half an hour behind her time, offers no happiness, no rest from struggle, no certainty. In a scheme of things utterly bad from the start the only unpardonable folly is that of hope. Raising his eyes for a moment from the face of his watch, he rested them upon the opposite bank, reflectively and not without a certain wistfulness, as if the sternness of their gaze were still capable of mitigation. Soon a look of the deepest satisfaction filled them, though, for a moment, he did not move. He watched a lady who came rapidly, and yet with a trace of hesitation, down the broad grass-walk towards him. She did not see him. Distance lent her figure an indescribable height, and romance seemed to surround her from the floating of a purple veil which the light air filled and curved from her shoulders.

“Here she comes, like a ship in full sail,” he said to himself, half remembering some line from a play or poem where the heroine bore down thus with feathers flying and airs saluting her. The greenery and the high presences of the trees surrounded her as if they stood forth at her coming. He rose, and she saw him; her little exclamation proved that she was glad to find him, and then that she blamed herself for being late.

“Why did you never tell me? I didn’t know there was this,” she remarked, alluding to the lake, the broad green space, the vista of trees, with the ruffled gold of the Thames in the distance and the Ducal castle standing in its meadows. She paid the rigid tail of the Ducal lion the tribute of incredulous laughter.

“You’ve never been to Kew?” Denham remarked.

But it appeared that she had come once as a small child, when the geography of the place was entirely different, and the fauna included certainly flamingoes and, possibly, camels. They strolled on, refashioning these legendary gardens. She was, as he felt, glad merely to stroll and loiter and let her fancy touch upon anything her eyes encountered—a bush, a park-keeper, a decorated goose—as if the relaxation soothed her. The warmth of the afternoon, the first of spring, tempted them to sit upon a seat in a glade of beech-trees, with forest drives striking green paths this way and that around them. She sighed deeply.

“It’s so peaceful,” she said, as if in explanation of her sigh. Not a single person was in sight, and the stir of the wind in the branches, that sound so seldom heard by Londoners, seemed to her as if wafted from fathomless oceans of sweet air in the distance.

While she breathed and looked, Denham was engaged in uncovering with the point of his stick a group of green spikes half smothered by the dead leaves. He did this with the peculiar touch of the botanist. In naming the little green plant to her he used the Latin name, thus disguising some flower familiar even to Chelsea, and making her exclaim, half in amusement, at his knowledge. Her own ignorance was vast, she confessed. What did one call that tree opposite, for instance, supposing one condescended to call it by its English name? Beech or elm or sycamore? It chanced, by the testimony of a dead leaf, to be oak; and a little attention to a diagram which Denham proceeded to draw upon an envelope soon put Katharine in possession of some of the fundamental distinctions between our British trees. She then asked him to inform her about flowers. To her they were variously shaped and coloured petals, poised, at different seasons of the year, upon very similar green stalks; but to him they were, in the first instance, bulbs or seeds, and later, living things endowed with sex, and pores, and susceptibilities which adapted themselves by all manner of ingenious devices to live and beget life, and could be fashioned squat or tapering, flame-coloured or pale, pure or spotted, by processes which might reveal the secrets of human existence. Denham spoke with increasing ardour of a hobby which had long been his in secret. No discourse could have worn a more welcome sound in Katharine’s ears. For weeks she had heard nothing that made such pleasant music in her mind. It wakened echoes in all those remote fastnesses of her being where loneliness had brooded so long undisturbed.

She wished he would go on for ever talking of plants, and showing her how science felt not quite blindly for the law that ruled their endless variations. A law that might be inscrutable but was certainly omnipotent appealed to her at the moment, because she could find nothing like it in possession of human lives. Circumstances had long forced her, as they force most women in the flower of youth, to consider, painfully and minutely, all that part of life which is conspicuously without order; she had had to consider moods and wishes, degrees of liking or disliking, and their effect upon the destiny of people dear to her; she had been forced to deny herself any contemplation of that other part of life where thought constructs a destiny which is independent of human beings. As Denham spoke, she followed his words and considered their bearing with an easy vigour which spoke of a capacity long hoarded and unspent. The very trees and the green merging into the blue distance became symbols of the vast external world which recks so little of the happiness, of the marriages or deaths of individuals. In order to give her examples of what he was saying, Denham led the way, first to the Rock Garden, and then to the Orchid House.

For him there was safety in the direction which the talk had taken. His emphasis might come from feelings more personal than those science roused in him, but it was disguised, and naturally he found it easy to expound and explain. Nevertheless, when he saw Katharine among the orchids, her beauty strangely emphasized by the fantastic plants, which seemed to peer and gape at her from striped hoods and fleshy throats, his ardour for botany waned, and a more complex feeling replaced it. She fell silent. The orchids seemed to suggest absorbing reflections. In defiance of the rules she stretched her ungloved hand and touched one. The sight of the rubies upon her finger affected him so disagreeably that he started and turned away. But next moment he controlled himself; he looked at her taking in one strange shape after another with the contemplative, considering gaze of a person who sees not exactly what is before him, but gropes in regions that lie beyond it. The far-away look entirely lacked self-consciousness. Denham doubted whether she remembered his presence. He could recall himself, of course, by a word or a movement—but why? She was happier thus. She needed nothing that he could give her. And for him too, perhaps, it was best to keep aloof, only to know that she existed, to preserve what he already had—perfect, remote, and unbroken. Further, her still look, standing among the orchids in that hot atmosphere, strangely illustrated some scene that he had imagined in his room at home. The sight, mingling with his recollection, kept him silent when the door was shut and they were walking on again.

But though she did not speak, Katharine had an uneasy sense that silence on her part was selfishness. It was selfish of her to continue, as she wished to do, a discussion of subjects not remotely connected with any human beings. She roused herself to consider their exact position upon the turbulent map of the emotions. Oh yes—it was a question whether Ralph Denham should live in the country and write a book; it was getting late; they must waste no more time; Cassandra arrived to-night for dinner; she flinched and roused herself, and discovered that she ought to be holding something in her hands. But they were empty. She held them out with an exclamation.

“I’ve left my bag somewhere—where?” The gardens had no points of the compass, so far as she was concerned. She had been walking for the most part on grass—that was all she knew. Even the road to the Orchid House had now split itself into three. But there was no bag in the Orchid House. It must, therefore, have been left upon the seat. They retraced their steps in the preoccupied manner of people who have to think about something that is lost. What did this bag look like? What did it contain?

“A purse—a ticket—some letters, papers,” Katharine counted, becoming more agitated as she recalled the list. Denham went on quickly in advance of her, and she heard him shout that he had found it before she reached the seat. In order to make sure that all was safe she spread the contents on her knee. It was a queer collection, Denham thought, gazing with the deepest interest. Loose gold coins were tangled in a narrow strip of lace; there were letters which somehow suggested the extreme of intimacy; there were two or three keys, and lists of commissions against which crosses were set at intervals. But she did not seem satisfied until she had made sure of a certain paper so folded that Denham could not judge what it contained. In her relief and gratitude she began at once to say that she had been thinking over what Denham had told her of his plans.

He cut her short. “Don’t let’s discuss that dreary business.”

“But I thought——”

“It’s a dreary business. I ought never to have bothered you——”

“Have you decided, then?”

He made an impatient sound. “It’s not a thing that matters.”

She could only say rather flatly, “Oh!”

“I mean it matters to me, but it matters to no one else. Anyhow,” he continued, more amiably, “I see no reason why you should be bothered with other people’s nuisances.”

She supposed that she had let him see too clearly her weariness of this side of life.

“I’m afraid I’ve been absent-minded,” she began, remembering how often William had brought this charge against her.

“You have a good deal to make you absent-minded,” he replied.

“Yes,” she replied, flushing. “No,” she contradicted herself. “Nothing particular, I mean. But I was thinking about plants. I was enjoying myself. In fact, I’ve seldom enjoyed an afternoon more. But I want to hear what you’ve settled, if you don’t mind telling me.”

“Oh, it’s all settled,” he replied. “I’m going to this infernal cottage to write a worthless book.”

“How I envy you,” she replied, with the utmost sincerity.

“Well, cottages are to be had for fifteen shillings a week.”

“Cottages are to be had—yes,” she replied. “The question is—” She checked herself. “Two rooms are all I should want,” she continued, with a curious sigh; “one for eating, one for sleeping. Oh, but I should like another, a large one at the top, and a little garden where one could grow flowers. A path—so—down to a river, or up to a wood, and the sea not very far off, so that one could hear the waves at night. Ships just vanishing on the horizon—” She broke off. “Shall you be near the sea?”

“My notion of perfect happiness,” he began, not replying to her question, “is to live as you’ve said.”

“Well, now you can. You will work, I suppose,” she continued; “you’ll work all the morning and again after tea and perhaps at night. You won’t have people always coming about you to interrupt.”

“How far can one live alone?” he asked. “Have you tried ever?”

“Once for three weeks,” she replied. “My father and mother were in Italy, and something happened so that I couldn’t join them. For three weeks I lived entirely by myself, and the only person I spoke to was a stranger in a shop where I lunched—a man with a beard. Then I went back to my room by myself and—well, I did what I liked. It doesn’t make me out an amiable character, I’m afraid,” she added, “but I can’t endure living with other people. An occasional man with a beard is interesting; he’s detached; he lets me go my way, and we know we shall never meet again. Therefore, we are perfectly sincere—a thing not possible with one’s friends.”

“Nonsense,” Denham replied abruptly.

“Why ‘nonsense’?” she inquired.

“Because you don’t mean what you say,” he expostulated.

“You’re very positive,” she said, laughing and looking at him. How arbitrary, hot-tempered, and imperious he was! He had asked her to come to Kew to advise him; he then told her that he had settled the question already; he then proceeded to find fault with her. He was the very opposite of William Rodney, she thought; he was shabby, his clothes were badly made, he was ill versed in the amenities of life; he was tongue-tied and awkward to the verge of obliterating his real character. He was awkwardly silent; he was awkwardly emphatic. And yet she liked him.

“I don’t mean what I say,” she repeated good-humouredly. “Well——?”

“I doubt whether you make absolute sincerity your standard in life,” he answered significantly.

She flushed. He had penetrated at once to the weak spot—her engagement, and had reason for what he said. He was not altogether justified now, at any rate, she was glad to remember; but she could not enlighten him and must bear his insinuations, though from the lips of a man who had behaved as he had behaved their force should not have been sharp. Nevertheless, what he said had its force, she mused; partly because he seemed unconscious of his own lapse in the case of Mary Datchet, and thus baffled her insight; partly because he always spoke with force, for what reason she did not yet feel certain.

“Absolute sincerity is rather difficult, don’t you think?” she inquired, with a touch of irony.

“There are people one credits even with that,” he replied a little vaguely. He was ashamed of his savage wish to hurt her, and yet it was not for the sake of hurting her, who was beyond his shafts, but in order to mortify his own incredibly reckless impulse of abandonment to the spirit which seemed, at moments, about to rush him to the uttermost ends of the earth. She affected him beyond the scope of his wildest dreams. He seemed to see that beneath the quiet surface of her manner, which was almost pathetically at hand and within reach for all the trivial demands of daily life, there was a spirit which she reserved or repressed for some season either of loneliness or—could it be possible?—of love. Was it given to Rodney to see her unmasked, unrestrained, unconscious of her duties? a creature of uncalculating passion and instinctive freedom? No; he refused to believe it. It was in her loneliness that Katharine was unreserved. “I went back to my room by myself and I did—what I liked.” She had said that to him, and in saying it had given him a glimpse of possibilities, even of confidences, as if he might be the one to share her loneliness, the mere hint of which made his heart beat faster and his brain spin. He checked himself as brutally as he could. He saw her redden, and in the irony of her reply he heard her resentment.

He began slipping his smooth, silver watch in his pocket, in the hope that somehow he might help himself back to that calm and fatalistic mood which had been his when he looked at its face upon the bank of the lake, for that mood must, at whatever cost, be the mood of his intercourse with Katharine. He had spoken of gratitude and acquiescence in the letter which he had never sent, and now all the force of his character must make good those vows in her presence.

She, thus challenged, tried meanwhile to define her points. She wished to make Denham understand.

“Don’t you see that if you have no relations with people it’s easier to be honest with them?” she inquired. “That is what I meant. One needn’t cajole them; one’s under no obligation to them. Surely you must have found with your own family that it’s impossible to discuss what matters to you most because you’re all herded together, because you’re in a conspiracy, because the position is false——” Her reasoning suspended itself a little inconclusively, for the subject was complex, and she found herself in ignorance whether Denham had a family or not. Denham was agreed with her as to the destructiveness of the family system, but he did not wish to discuss the problem at that moment.

He turned to a problem which was of greater interest to him.

“I’m convinced,” he said, “that there are cases in which perfect sincerity is possible—cases where there’s no relationship, though the people live together, if you like, where each is free, where there’s no obligation upon either side.”

“For a time—perhaps,” she agreed, a little despondently. “But obligations always grow up. There are feelings to be considered. People aren’t simple, and though they may mean to be reasonable, they end”—in the condition in which she found herself, she meant, but added lamely—“in a muddle.”

“Because,” Denham instantly intervened, “they don’t make themselves understood at the beginning. I could undertake, at this instant,” he continued, with a reasonable intonation which did much credit to his self-control, “to lay down terms for a friendship which should be perfectly sincere and perfectly straightforward.”

She was curious to hear them, but, besides feeling that the topic concealed dangers better known to her than to him, she was reminded by his tone of his curious abstract declaration upon the Embankment. Anything that hinted at love for the moment alarmed her; it was as much an infliction to her as the rubbing of a skinless wound.

But he went on, without waiting for her invitation.

“In the first place, such a friendship must be unemotional,” he laid it down emphatically. “At least, on both sides it must be understood that if either chooses to fall in love, he or she does so entirely at his own risk. Neither is under any obligation to the other. They must be at liberty to break or to alter at any moment. They must be able to say whatever they wish to say. All this must be understood.”

“And they gain something worth having?” she asked.

“It’s a risk—of course it’s a risk,” he replied. The word was one that she had been using frequently in her arguments with herself of late.

“But it’s the only way—if you think friendship worth having,” he concluded.

“Perhaps under those conditions it might be,” she said reflectively.

“Well,” he said, “those are the terms of the friendship I wish to offer you.” She had known that this was coming, but, none the less, felt a little shock, half of pleasure, half of reluctance, when she heard the formal statement.

“I should like it,” she began, “but——”

“Would Rodney mind?”

“Oh no,” she replied quickly.

“No, no, it isn’t that,” she went on, and again came to an end. She had been touched by the unreserved and yet ceremonious way in which he had made what he called his offer of terms, but if he was generous it was the more necessary for her to be cautious. They would find themselves in difficulties, she speculated; but, at this point, which was not very far, after all, upon the road of caution, her foresight deserted her. She sought for some definite catastrophe into which they must inevitably plunge. But she could think of none. It seemed to her that these catastrophes were fictitious; life went on and on—life was different altogether from what people said. And not only was she at an end of her stock of caution, but it seemed suddenly altogether superfluous. Surely if any one could take care of himself, Ralph Denham could; he had told her that he did not love her. And, further, she meditated, walking on beneath the beech-trees and swinging her umbrella, as in her thought she was accustomed to complete freedom, why should she perpetually apply so different a standard to her behaviour in practice? Why, she reflected, should there be this perpetual disparity between the thought and the action, between the life of solitude and the life of society, this astonishing precipice on one side of which the soul was active and in broad daylight, on the other side of which it was contemplative and dark as night? Was it not possible to step from one to the other, erect, and without essential change? Was this not the chance he offered her—the rare and wonderful chance of friendship? At any rate, she told Denham, with a sigh in which he heard both impatience and relief, that she agreed; she thought him right; she would accept his terms of friendship.

“Now,” she said, “let’s go and have tea.”

In fact, these principles having been laid down, a great lightness of spirit showed itself in both of them. They were both convinced that something of profound importance had been settled, and could now give their attention to their tea and the Gardens. They wandered in and out of glass-houses, saw lilies swimming in tanks, breathed in the scent of thousands of carnations, and compared their respective tastes in the matter of trees and lakes. While talking exclusively of what they saw, so that any one might have overheard them, they felt that the compact between them was made firmer and deeper by the number of people who passed them and suspected nothing of the kind. The question of Ralph’s cottage and future was not mentioned again.

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Chapter XXVI

Although the old coaches, with their gay panels and the guard’s horn, and the humours of the box and the vicissitudes of the road, have long mouldered into dust so far as they were matter, and are preserved in the printed pages of our novelists so far as they partook of the spirit, a journey to London by express train can still be a very pleasant and romantic adventure. Cassandra Otway, at the age of twenty-two, could imagine few things more pleasant. Satiated with months of green fields as she was, the first row of artisans’ villas on the outskirts of London seemed to have something serious about it, which positively increased the importance of every person in the railway carriage, and even, to her impressionable mind, quickened the speed of the train and gave a note of stern authority to the shriek of the engine-whistle. They were bound for London; they must have precedence of all traffic not similarly destined. A different demeanour was necessary directly one stepped out upon Liverpool Street platform, and became one of those preoccupied and hasty citizens for whose needs innumerable taxi-cabs, motor-omnibuses, and underground railways were in waiting. She did her best to look dignified and preoccupied too, but as the cab carried her away, with a determination which alarmed her a little, she became more and more forgetful of her station as a citizen of London, and turned her head from one window to another, picking up eagerly a building on this side or a street scene on that to feed her intense curiosity. And yet, while the drive lasted no one was real, nothing was ordinary; the crowds, the Government buildings, the tide of men and women washing the base of the great glass windows, were all generalized, and affected her as if she saw them on the stage.

All these feelings were sustained and partly inspired by the fact that her journey took her straight to the centre of her most romantic world. A thousand times in the midst of her pastoral landscape her thoughts took this precise road, were admitted to the house in Chelsea, and went directly upstairs to Katharine’s room, where, invisible themselves, they had the better chance of feasting upon the privacy of the room’s adorable and mysterious mistress. Cassandra adored her cousin; the adoration might have been foolish, but was saved from that excess and lent an engaging charm by the volatile nature of Cassandra’s temperament. She had adored a great many things and people in the course of twenty-two years; she had been alternately the pride and the desperation of her teachers. She had worshipped architecture and music, natural history and humanity, literature and art, but always at the height of her enthusiasm, which was accompanied by a brilliant degree of accomplishment, she changed her mind and bought, surreptitiously, another grammar. The terrible results which governesses had predicted from such mental dissipation were certainly apparent now that Cassandra was twenty-two, and had never passed an examination, and daily showed herself less and less capable of passing one. The more serious prediction that she could never possibly earn her living was also verified. But from all these short strands of different accomplishments Cassandra wove for herself an attitude, a cast of mind, which, if useless, was found by some people to have the not despicable virtues of vivacity and freshness. Katharine, for example, thought her a most charming companion. The cousins seemed to assemble between them a great range of qualities which are never found united in one person and seldom in half a dozen people. Where Katharine was simple, Cassandra was complex; where Katharine was solid and direct, Cassandra was vague and evasive. In short, they represented very well the manly and the womanly sides of the feminine nature, and, for foundation, there was the profound unity of common blood between them. If Cassandra adored Katharine she was incapable of adoring any one without refreshing her spirit with frequent draughts of raillery and criticism, and Katharine enjoyed her laughter at least as much as her respect.

Respect was certainly uppermost in Cassandra’s mind at the present moment. Katharine’s engagement had appealed to her imagination as the first engagement in a circle of contemporaries is apt to appeal to the imaginations of the others; it was solemn, beautiful, and mysterious; it gave both parties the important air of those who have been initiated into some rite which is still concealed from the rest of the group. For Katharine’s sake Cassandra thought William a most distinguished and interesting character, and welcomed first his conversation and then his manuscript as the marks of a friendship which it flattered and delighted her to inspire.

Katharine was still out when she arrived at Cheyne Walk. After greeting her uncle and aunt and receiving, as usual, a present of two sovereigns for “cab fares and dissipation” from Uncle Trevor, whose favourite niece she was, she changed her dress and wandered into Katharine’s room to await her. What a great looking-glass Katharine had, she thought, and how mature all the arrangements upon the dressing-table were compared to what she was used to at home. Glancing round, she thought that the bills stuck upon a skewer and stood for ornament upon the mantelpiece were astonishingly like Katharine. There wasn’t a photograph of William anywhere to be seen. The room, with its combination of luxury and bareness, its silk dressing-gowns and crimson slippers, its shabby carpet and bare walls, had a powerful air of Katharine herself; she stood in the middle of the room and enjoyed the sensation; and then, with a desire to finger what her cousin was in the habit of fingering, Cassandra began to take down the books which stood in a row upon the shelf above the bed. In most houses this shelf is the ledge upon which the last relics of religious belief lodge themselves as if, late at night, in the heart of privacy, people, sceptical by day, find solace in sipping one draught of the old charm for such sorrows or perplexities as may steal from their hiding-places in the dark. But there was no hymn-book here. By their battered covers and enigmatical contents, Cassandra judged them to be old school-books belonging to Uncle Trevor, and piously, though eccentrically, preserved by his daughter. There was no end, she thought, to the unexpectedness of Katharine. She had once had a passion for geometry herself, and, curled upon Katharine’s quilt, she became absorbed in trying to remember how far she had forgotten what she once knew. Katharine, coming in a little later, found her deep in this characteristic pursuit.

“My dear,” Cassandra exclaimed, shaking the book at her cousin, “my whole life’s changed from this moment! I must write the man’s name down at once, or I shall forget——”

Whose name, what book, which life was changed Katharine proceeded to ascertain. She began to lay aside her clothes hurriedly, for she was very late.

“May I sit and watch you?” Cassandra asked, shutting up her book. “I got ready on purpose.”

“Oh, you’re ready, are you?” said Katharine, half turning in the midst of her operations, and looking at Cassandra, who sat, clasping her knees, on the edge of the bed.

“There are people dining here,” she said, taking in the effect of Cassandra from a new point of view. After an interval, the distinction, the irregular charm, of the small face with its long tapering nose and its bright oval eyes were very notable. The hair rose up off the forehead rather stiffly, and, given a more careful treatment by hairdressers and dressmakers, the light angular figure might possess a likeness to a French lady of distinction in the eighteenth century.

“Who’s coming to dinner?” Cassandra asked, anticipating further possibilities of rapture.

“There’s William, and, I believe, Aunt Eleanor and Uncle Aubrey.”

“I’m so glad William is coming. Did he tell you that he sent me his manuscript? I think it’s wonderful—I think he’s almost good enough for you, Katharine.”

“You shall sit next to him and tell him what you think of him.”

“I shan’t dare do that,” Cassandra asserted.

“Why? You’re not afraid of him, are you?”

“A little—because he’s connected with you.”

Katharine smiled.

“But then, with your well-known fidelity, considering that you’re staying here at least a fortnight, you won’t have any illusions left about me by the time you go. I give you a week, Cassandra. I shall see my power fading day by day. Now it’s at the climax; but to-morrow it’ll have begun to fade. What am I to wear I wonder? Find me a blue dress, Cassandra, over there in the long wardrobe.”

She spoke disconnectedly, handling brush and comb, and pulling out the little drawers in her dressing-table and leaving them open. Cassandra, sitting on the bed behind her, saw the reflection of her cousin’s face in the looking-glass. The face in the looking-glass was serious and intent, apparently occupied with other things besides the straightness of the parting which, however, was being driven as straight as a Roman road through the dark hair. Cassandra was impressed again by Katharine’s maturity; and, as she enveloped herself in the blue dress which filled almost the whole of the long looking-glass with blue light and made it the frame of a picture, holding not only the slightly moving effigy of the beautiful woman, but shapes and colours of objects reflected from the background, Cassandra thought that no sight had ever been quite so romantic. It was all in keeping with the room and the house, and the city round them; for her ears had not yet ceased to notice the hum of distant wheels.

They went downstairs rather late, in spite of Katharine’s extreme speed in getting ready. To Cassandra’s ears the buzz of voices inside the drawing-room was like the tuning up of the instruments of the orchestra. It seemed to her that there were numbers of people in the room, and that they were strangers, and that they were beautiful and dressed with the greatest distinction, although they proved to be mostly her relations, and the distinction of their clothing was confined, in the eyes of an impartial observer, to the white waistcoat which Rodney wore. But they all rose simultaneously, which was by itself impressive, and they all exclaimed, and shook hands, and she was introduced to Mr. Peyton, and the door sprang open, and dinner was announced, and they filed off, William Rodney offering her his slightly bent black arm, as she had secretly hoped he would. In short, had the scene been looked at only through her eyes, it must have been described as one of magical brilliancy. The pattern of the soup-plates, the stiff folds of the napkins, which rose by the side of each plate in the shape of arum lilies, the long sticks of bread tied with pink ribbon, the silver dishes and the sea-coloured champagne glasses, with the flakes of gold congealed in their stems—all these details, together with a curiously pervasive smell of kid gloves, contributed to her exhilaration, which must be repressed however, because she was grown up, and the world held no more for her to marvel at.

The world held no more for her to marvel at, it is true; but it held other people, and each other person possessed in Cassandra’s mind some fragment of what privately she called “reality.” It was a gift that they would impart if you asked them for it, and thus no dinner-party could possibly be dull, and little Mr. Peyton on her right and William Rodney on her left were in equal measure endowed with the quality which seemed to her so unmistakable and so precious that the way people neglected to demand it was a constant source of surprise to her. She scarcely knew, indeed, whether she was talking to Mr. Peyton or to William Rodney. But to one who, by degrees, assumed the shape of an elderly man with a moustache, she described how she had arrived in London that very afternoon, and how she had taken a cab and driven through the streets. Mr. Peyton, an editor of fifty years, bowed his bald head repeatedly, with apparent understanding. At least, he understood that she was very young and pretty, and saw that she was excited, though he could not gather at once from her words or remember from his own experience what there was to be excited about. “Were there any buds on the trees?” he asked. “Which line did she travel by?”

He was cut short in these amiable inquiries by her desire to know whether he was one of those who read, or one of those who look out of the window? Mr. Peyton was by no means sure which he did. He rather thought he did both. He was told that he had made a most dangerous confession. She could deduce his entire history from that one fact. He challenged her to proceed; and she proclaimed him a Liberal Member of Parliament.

William, nominally engaged in a desultory conversation with Aunt Eleanor, heard every word, and taking advantage of the fact that elderly ladies have little continuity of conversation, at least with those whom they esteem for their youth and their sex, he asserted his presence by a very nervous laugh.

Cassandra turned to him directly. She was enchanted to find that, instantly and with such ease, another of these fascinating beings was offering untold wealth for her extraction.

“There’s no doubt what you do in a railway carriage, William,” she said, making use in her pleasure of his first name. “You never once look out of the window; you read all the time.”

“And what facts do you deduce from that?” Mr. Peyton asked.

“Oh, that he’s a poet, of course,” said Cassandra. “But I must confess that I knew that before, so it isn’t fair. I’ve got your manuscript with me,” she went on, disregarding Mr. Peyton in a shameless way. “I’ve got all sorts of things I want to ask you about it.”

William inclined his head and tried to conceal the pleasure that her remark gave him. But the pleasure was not unalloyed. However susceptible to flattery William might be, he would never tolerate it from people who showed a gross or emotional taste in literature, and if Cassandra erred even slightly from what he considered essential in this respect he would express his discomfort by flinging out his hands and wrinkling his forehead; he would find no pleasure in her flattery after that.

“First of all,” she proceeded, “I want to know why you chose to write a play?”

“Ah! You mean it’s not dramatic?”

“I mean that I don’t see what it would gain by being acted. But then does Shakespeare gain? Henry and I are always arguing about Shakespeare. I’m certain he’s wrong, but I can’t prove it because I’ve only seen Shakespeare acted once in Lincoln. But I’m quite positive,” she insisted, “that Shakespeare wrote for the stage.”

“You’re perfectly right,” Rodney exclaimed. “I was hoping you were on that side. Henry’s wrong—entirely wrong. Of course, I’ve failed, as all the moderns fail. Dear, dear, I wish I’d consulted you before.”

From this point they proceeded to go over, as far as memory served them, the different aspects of Rodney’s drama. She said nothing that jarred upon him, and untrained daring had the power to stimulate experience to such an extent that Rodney was frequently seen to hold his fork suspended before him, while he debated the first principles of the art. Mrs. Hilbery thought to herself that she had never seen him to such advantage; yes, he was somehow different; he reminded her of some one who was dead, some one who was distinguished—she had forgotten his name.

Cassandra’s voice rose high in its excitement.

“You’ve not read ‘The Idiot’!” she exclaimed.

“I’ve read ‘War and Peace,’” William replied, a little testily.

“‘War and Peace’!” she echoed, in a tone of derision.

“I confess I don’t understand the Russians.”

“Shake hands! Shake hands!” boomed Uncle Aubrey from across the table. “Neither do I. And I hazard the opinion that they don’t themselves.”

The old gentleman had ruled a large part of the Indian Empire, but he was in the habit of saying that he had rather have written the works of Dickens. The table now took possession of a subject much to its liking. Aunt Eleanor showed premonitory signs of pronouncing an opinion. Although she had blunted her taste upon some form of philanthropy for twenty-five years, she had a fine natural instinct for an upstart or a pretender, and knew to a hairbreadth what literature should be and what it should not be. She was born to the knowledge, and scarcely thought it a matter to be proud of.

“Insanity is not a fit subject for fiction,” she announced positively.

“There’s the well-known case of Hamlet,” Mr. Hilbery interposed, in his leisurely, half-humorous tones.

“Ah, but poetry’s different, Trevor,” said Aunt Eleanor, as if she had special authority from Shakespeare to say so. “Different altogether. And I’ve never thought, for my part, that Hamlet was as mad as they make out. What is your opinion, Mr. Peyton?” For, as there was a minister of literature present in the person of the editor of an esteemed review, she deferred to him.

Mr. Peyton leant a little back in his chair, and, putting his head rather on one side, observed that that was a question that he had never been able to answer entirely to his satisfaction. There was much to be said on both sides, but as he considered upon which side he should say it, Mrs. Hilbery broke in upon his judicious meditations.

“Lovely, lovely Ophelia!” she exclaimed. “What a wonderful power it is—poetry! I wake up in the morning all bedraggled; there’s a yellow fog outside; little Emily turns on the electric light when she brings me my tea, and says, ‘Oh, ma’am, the water’s frozen in the cistern, and cook’s cut her finger to the bone.’ And then I open a little green book, and the birds are singing, the stars shining, the flowers twinkling——” She looked about her as if these presences had suddenly manifested themselves round her dining-room table.

“Has the cook cut her finger badly?” Aunt Eleanor demanded, addressing herself naturally to Katharine.

“Oh, the cook’s finger is only my way of putting it,” said Mrs. Hilbery. “But if she had cut her arm off, Katharine would have sewn it on again,” she remarked, with an affectionate glance at her daughter, who looked, she thought, a little sad. “But what horrid, horrid thoughts,” she wound up, laying down her napkin and pushing her chair back. “Come, let us find something more cheerful to talk about upstairs.”

Upstairs in the drawing-room Cassandra found fresh sources of pleasure, first in the distinguished and expectant look of the room, and then in the chance of exercising her divining-rod upon a new assortment of human beings. But the low tones of the women, their meditative silences, the beauty which, to her at least, shone even from black satin and the knobs of amber which encircled elderly necks, changed her wish to chatter to a more subdued desire merely to watch and to whisper. She entered with delight into an atmosphere in which private matters were being interchanged freely, almost in monosyllables, by the older women who now accepted her as one of themselves. Her expression became very gentle and sympathetic, as if she, too, were full of solicitude for the world which was somehow being cared for, managed and deprecated by Aunt Maggie and Aunt Eleanor. After a time she perceived that Katharine was outside the community in some way, and, suddenly, she threw aside her wisdom and gentleness and concern and began to laugh.

“What are you laughing at?” Katharine asked.

A joke so foolish and unfilial wasn’t worth explaining.

“It was nothing—ridiculous—in the worst of taste, but still, if you half shut your eyes and looked——” Katharine half shut her eyes and looked, but she looked in the wrong direction, and Cassandra laughed more than ever, and was still laughing and doing her best to explain in a whisper that Aunt Eleanor, through half-shut eyes, was like the parrot in the cage at Stogdon House, when the gentlemen came in and Rodney walked straight up to them and wanted to know what they were laughing at.

“I utterly refuse to tell you!” Cassandra replied, standing up straight, clasping her hands in front of her, and facing him. Her mockery was delicious to him. He had not even for a second the fear that she had been laughing at him. She was laughing because life was so adorable, so enchanting.

“Ah, but you’re cruel to make me feel the barbarity of my sex,” he replied, drawing his feet together and pressing his finger-tips upon an imaginary opera-hat or malacca cane. “We’ve been discussing all sorts of dull things, and now I shall never know what I want to know more than anything in the world.”

“You don’t deceive us for a minute!” she cried. “Not for a second! We both know that you’ve been enjoying yourself immensely. Hasn’t he, Katharine?”

“No,” she replied, “I think he’s speaking the truth. He doesn’t care much for politics.”

Her words, though spoken simply, produced a curious change in the light, sparkling atmosphere. William at once lost his look of animation and said seriously:

“I detest politics.”

“I don’t think any man has the right to say that,” said Cassandra, almost severely.

“I agree. I mean that I detest politicians,” he corrected himself quickly.

“You see, I believe Cassandra is what they call a Feminist,” Katharine went on. “Or rather, she was a Feminist six months ago, but it’s no good supposing that she is now what she was then. That is one of her greatest charms in my eyes. One never can tell.” She smiled at her as an elder sister might smile.

“Katharine, you make one feel so horribly small!” Cassandra exclaimed.

“No, no, that’s not what she means,” Rodney interposed. “I quite agree that women have an immense advantage over us there. One misses a lot by attempting to know things thoroughly.”

“He knows Greek thoroughly,” said Katharine. “But then he also knows a good deal about painting, and a certain amount about music. He’s very cultivated—perhaps the most cultivated person I know.”

“And poetry,” Cassandra added.

“Yes, I was forgetting his play,” Katharine remarked, and turning her head as though she saw something that needed her attention in a far corner of the room, she left them.

For a moment they stood silent, after what seemed a deliberate introduction to each other, and Cassandra watched her crossing the room.

“Henry,” she said, next moment, “would say that a stage ought to be no bigger than this drawing-room. He wants there to be singing and dancing as well as acting—only all the opposite of Wagner—you understand?”

They sat down, and Katharine, turning when she reached the window, saw William with his hand raised in gesticulation and his mouth open, as if ready to speak the moment Cassandra ceased.

Katharine’s duty, whether it was to pull a curtain or move a chair, was either forgotten or discharged, but she continued to stand by the window without doing anything. The elderly people were all grouped together round the fire. They seemed an independent, middle-aged community busy with its own concerns. They were telling stories very well and listening to them very graciously. But for her there was no obvious employment.

“If anybody says anything, I shall say that I’m looking at the river,” she thought, for in her slavery to her family traditions, she was ready to pay for her transgression with some plausible falsehood. She pushed aside the blind and looked at the river. But it was a dark night and the water was barely visible. Cabs were passing, and couples were loitering slowly along the road, keeping as close to the railings as possible, though the trees had as yet no leaves to cast shadow upon their embraces. Katharine, thus withdrawn, felt her loneliness. The evening had been one of pain, offering her, minute after minute, plainer proof that things would fall out as she had foreseen. She had faced tones, gestures, glances; she knew, with her back to them, that William, even now, was plunging deeper and deeper into the delight of unexpected understanding with Casssandra. He had almost told her that he was finding it infinitely better than he could have believed. She looked out of the window, sternly determined to forget private misfortunes, to forget herself, to forget individual lives. With her eyes upon the dark sky, voices reached her from the room in which she was standing. She heard them as if they came from people in another world, a world antecedent to her world, a world that was the prelude, the antechamber to reality; it was as if, lately dead, she heard the living talking. The dream nature of our life had never been more apparent to her, never had life been more certainly an affair of four walls, whose objects existed only within the range of lights and fires, beyond which lay nothing, or nothing more than darkness. She seemed physically to have stepped beyond the region where the light of illusion still makes it desirable to possess, to love, to struggle. And yet her melancholy brought her no serenity. She still heard the voices within the room. She was still tormented by desires. She wished to be beyond their range. She wished inconsistently enough that she could find herself driving rapidly through the streets; she was even anxious to be with some one who, after a moment’s groping, took a definite shape and solidified into the person of Mary Datchet. She drew the curtains so that the draperies met in deep folds in the middle of the window.

“Ah, there she is,” said Mr. Hilbery, who was standing swaying affably from side to side, with his back to the fire. “Come here, Katharine. I couldn’t see where you’d got to—our children,” he observed parenthetically, “have their uses—I want you to go to my study, Katharine; go to the third shelf on the right-hand side of the door; take down ‘Trelawny’s Recollections of Shelley’; bring it to me. Then, Peyton, you will have to admit to the assembled company that you have been mistaken.”

“‘Trelawny’s Recollections of Shelley.’ The third shelf on the right of the door,” Katharine repeated. After all, one does not check children in their play, or rouse sleepers from their dreams. She passed William and Cassandra on her way to the door.

“Stop, Katharine,” said William, speaking almost as if he were conscious of her against his will. “Let me go.” He rose, after a second’s hesitation, and she understood that it cost him an effort. She knelt one knee upon the sofa where Cassandra sat, looking down at her cousin’s face, which still moved with the speed of what she had been saying.

“Are you—happy?” she asked.

“Oh, my dear!” Cassandra exclaimed, as if no further words were needed. “Of course, we disagree about every subject under the sun,” she exclaimed, “but I think he’s the cleverest man I’ve ever met—and you’re the most beautiful woman,” she added, looking at Katharine, and as she looked her face lost its animation and became almost melancholy in sympathy with Katharine’s melancholy, which seemed to Cassandra the last refinement of her distinction.

“Ah, but it’s only ten o’clock,” said Katharine darkly.

“As late as that! Well——?” She did not understand.

“At twelve my horses turn into rats and off I go. The illusion fades. But I accept my fate. I make hay while the sun shines.” Cassandra looked at her with a puzzled expression.

“Here’s Katharine talking about rats, and hay, and all sorts of odd things,” she said, as William returned to them. He had been quick. “Can you make her out?”

Katharine perceived from his little frown and hesitation that he did not find that particular problem to his taste at present. She stood upright at once and said in a different tone:

“I really am off, though. I wish you’d explain if they say anything, William. I shan’t be late, but I’ve got to see some one.”

“At this time of night?” Cassandra exclaimed.

“Whom have you got to see?” William demanded.

“A friend,” she remarked, half turning her head towards him. She knew that he wished her to stay, not, indeed, with them, but in their neighbourhood, in case of need.

“Katharine has a great many friends,” said William rather lamely, sitting down once more, as Katharine left the room.

She was soon driving quickly, as she had wished to drive, through the lamplit streets. She liked both light and speed, and the sense of being out of doors alone, and the knowledge that she would reach Mary in her high, lonely room at the end of the drive. She climbed the stone steps quickly, remarking the queer look of her blue silk skirt and blue shoes upon the stone, dusty with the boots of the day, under the light of an occasional jet of flickering gas.

The door was opened in a second by Mary herself, whose face showed not only surprise at the sight of her visitor, but some degree of embarrassment. She greeted her cordially, and, as there was no time for explanations, Katharine walked straight into the sitting-room, and found herself in the presence of a young man who was lying back in a chair and holding a sheet of paper in his hand, at which he was looking as if he expected to go on immediately with what he was in the middle of saying to Mary Datchet. The apparition of an unknown lady in full evening dress seemed to disturb him. He took his pipe from his mouth, rose stiffly, and sat down again with a jerk.

“Have you been dining out?” Mary asked.

“Are you working?” Katharine inquired simultaneously.

The young man shook his head, as if he disowned his share in the question with some irritation.

“Well, not exactly,” Mary replied. “Mr. Basnett had brought some papers to show me. We were going through them, but we’d almost done…. Tell us about your party.”

Mary had a ruffled appearance, as if she had been running her fingers through her hair in the course of her conversation; she was dressed more or less like a Russian peasant girl. She sat down again in a chair which looked as if it had been her seat for some hours; the saucer which stood upon the arm contained the ashes of many cigarettes. Mr. Basnett, a very young man with a fresh complexion and a high forehead from which the hair was combed straight back, was one of that group of “very able young men” suspected by Mr. Clacton, justly as it turned out, of an influence upon Mary Datchet. He had come down from one of the Universities not long ago, and was now charged with the reformation of society. In connexion with the rest of the group of very able young men he had drawn up a scheme for the education of labour, for the amalgamation of the middle class and the working class, and for a joint assault of the two bodies, combined in the Society for the Education of Democracy, upon Capital. The scheme had already reached the stage in which it was permissible to hire an office and engage a secretary, and he had been deputed to expound the scheme to Mary, and make her an offer of the Secretaryship, to which, as a matter of principle, a small salary was attached. Since seven o’clock that evening he had been reading out loud the document in which the faith of the new reformers was expounded, but the reading was so frequently interrupted by discussion, and it was so often necessary to inform Mary “in strictest confidence” of the private characters and evil designs of certain individuals and societies that they were still only half-way through the manuscript. Neither of them realized that the talk had already lasted three hours. In their absorption they had forgotten even to feed the fire, and yet both Mr. Basnett in his exposition, and Mary in her interrogation, carefully preserved a kind of formality calculated to check the desire of the human mind for irrelevant discussion. Her questions frequently began, “Am I to understand—” and his replies invariably represented the views of some one called “we.”

By this time Mary was almost persuaded that she, too, was included in the “we,” and agreed with Mr. Basnett in believing that “our” views, “our” society, “our” policy, stood for something quite definitely segregated from the main body of society in a circle of superior illumination.

The appearance of Katharine in this atmosphere was extremely incongruous, and had the effect of making Mary remember all sorts of things that she had been glad to forget.

“You’ve been dining out?” she asked again, looking, with a little smile, at the blue silk and the pearl-sewn shoes.

“No, at home. Are you starting something new?” Katharine hazarded, rather hesitatingly, looking at the papers.

“We are,” Mr. Basnett replied. He said no more.

“I’m thinking of leaving our friends in Russell Square,” Mary explained.

“I see. And then you will do something else.”

“Well, I’m afraid I like working,” said Mary.

“Afraid,” said Mr. Basnett, conveying the impression that, in his opinion, no sensible person could be afraid of liking to work.

“Yes,” said Katharine, as if he had stated this opinion aloud. “I should like to start something—something off one’s own bat—that’s what I should like.”

“Yes, that’s the fun,” said Mr. Basnett, looking at her for the first time rather keenly, and refilling his pipe.

“But you can’t limit work—that’s what I mean,” said Mary. “I mean there are other sorts of work. No one works harder than a woman with little children.”

“Quite so,” said Mr. Basnett. “It’s precisely the women with babies we want to get hold of.” He glanced at his document, rolled it into a cylinder between his fingers, and gazed into the fire. Katharine felt that in this company anything that one said would be judged upon its merits; one had only to say what one thought, rather barely and tersely, with a curious assumption that the number of things that could properly be thought about was strictly limited. And Mr. Basnett was only stiff upon the surface; there was an intelligence in his face which attracted her intelligence.

“When will the public know?” she asked.

“What d’you mean—about us?” Mr. Basnett asked, with a little smile.

“That depends upon many things,” said Mary. The conspirators looked pleased, as if Katharine’s question, with the belief in their existence which it implied, had a warming effect upon them.

“In starting a society such as we wish to start (we can’t say any more at present),” Mr. Basnett began, with a little jerk of his head, “there are two things to remember—the Press and the public. Other societies, which shall be nameless, have gone under because they’ve appealed only to cranks. If you don’t want a mutual admiration society, which dies as soon as you’ve all discovered each other’s faults, you must nobble the Press. You must appeal to the public.”

“That’s the difficulty,” said Mary thoughtfully.

“That’s where she comes in,” said Mr. Basnett, jerking his head in Mary’s direction. “She’s the only one of us who’s a capitalist. She can make a whole-time job of it. I’m tied to an office; I can only give my spare time. Are you, by any chance, on the look-out for a job?” he asked Katharine, with a queer mixture of distrust and deference.

“Marriage is her job at present,” Mary replied for her.

“Oh, I see,” said Mr. Basnett. He made allowances for that; he and his friends had faced the question of sex, along with all others, and assigned it an honourable place in their scheme of life. Katharine felt this beneath the roughness of his manner; and a world entrusted to the guardianship of Mary Datchet and Mr. Basnett seemed to her a good world, although not a romantic or beautiful place or, to put it figuratively, a place where any line of blue mist softly linked tree to tree upon the horizon. For a moment she thought she saw in his face, bent now over the fire, the features of that original man whom we still recall every now and then, although we know only the clerk, barrister, Government official, or workingman variety of him. Not that Mr. Basnett, giving his days to commerce and his spare time to social reform, would long carry about him any trace of his possibilities of completeness; but, for the moment, in his youth and ardour, still speculative, still uncramped, one might imagine him the citizen of a nobler state than ours. Katharine turned over her small stock of information, and wondered what their society might be going to attempt. Then she remembered that she was hindering their business, and rose, still thinking of this society, and thus thinking, she said to Mr. Basnett:

“Well, you’ll ask me to join when the time comes, I hope.”

He nodded, and took his pipe from his mouth, but, being unable to think of anything to say, he put it back again, although he would have been glad if she had stayed.

Against her wish, Mary insisted upon taking her downstairs, and then, as there was no cab to be seen, they stood in the street together, looking about them.

“Go back,” Katharine urged her, thinking of Mr. Basnett with his papers in his hand.

“You can’t wander about the streets alone in those clothes,” said Mary, but the desire to find a cab was not her true reason for standing beside Katharine for a minute or two. Unfortunately for her composure, Mr. Basnett and his papers seemed to her an incidental diversion of life’s serious purpose compared with some tremendous fact which manifested itself as she stood alone with Katharine. It may have been their common womanhood.

“Have you seen Ralph?” she asked suddenly, without preface.

“Yes,” said Katharine directly, but she did not remember when or where she had seen him. It took her a moment or two to remember why Mary should ask her if she had seen Ralph.

“I believe I’m jealous,” said Mary.

“Nonsense, Mary,” said Katharine, rather distractedly, taking her arm and beginning to walk up the street in the direction of the main road. “Let me see; we went to Kew, and we agreed to be friends. Yes, that’s what happened.”

Mary was silent, in the hope that Katharine would tell her more. But Katharine said nothing.

“It’s not a question of friendship,” Mary exclaimed, her anger rising, to her own surprise. “You know it’s not. How can it be? I’ve no right to interfere—” She stopped. “Only I’d rather Ralph wasn’t hurt,” she concluded.

“I think he seems able to take care of himself,” Katharine observed. Without either of them wishing it, a feeling of hostility had risen between them.

“Do you really think it’s worth it?” said Mary, after a pause.

“How can one tell?” Katharine asked.

“Have you ever cared for any one?” Mary demanded rashly and foolishly.

“I can’t wander about London discussing my feelings—Here’s a cab—no, there’s some one in it.”

“We don’t want to quarrel,” said Mary.

“Ought I to have told him that I wouldn’t be his friend?” Katharine asked. “Shall I tell him that? If so, what reason shall I give him?”

“Of course you can’t tell him that,” said Mary, controlling herself.

“I believe I shall though,” said Katharine suddenly.

“I lost my temper, Katharine; I shouldn’t have said what I did.”

“The whole thing’s foolish,” said Katharine, peremptorily. “That’s what I say. It’s not worth it.” She spoke with unnecessary vehemence, but it was not directed against Mary Datchet. Their animosity had completely disappeared, and upon both of them a cloud of difficulty and darkness rested, obscuring the future, in which they had both to find a way.

“No, no, it’s not worth it,” Katharine repeated. “Suppose, as you say, it’s out of the question—this friendship; he falls in love with me. I don’t want that. Still,” she added, “I believe you exaggerate; love’s not everything; marriage itself is only one of the things——” They had reached the main thoroughfare, and stood looking at the omnibuses and passers-by, who seemed, for the moment, to illustrate what Katharine had said of the diversity of human interests. For both of them it had become one of those moments of extreme detachment, when it seems unnecessary ever again to shoulder the burden of happiness and self-assertive existence. Their neighbours were welcome to their possessions.

“I don’t lay down any rules,” said Mary, recovering herself first, as they turned after a long pause of this description. “All I say is that you should know what you’re about—for certain; but,” she added, “I expect you do.”

At the same time she was profoundly perplexed, not only by what she knew of the arrangements for Katharine’s marriage, but by the impression which she had of her, there on her arm, dark and inscrutable.

They walked back again and reached the steps which led up to Mary’s flat. Here they stopped and paused for a moment, saying nothing.

“You must go in,” said Katharine, rousing herself. “He’s waiting all this time to go on with his reading.” She glanced up at the lighted window near the top of the house, and they both looked at it and waited for a moment. A flight of semicircular steps ran up to the hall, and Mary slowly mounted the first two or three, and paused, looking down upon Katharine.

“I think you underrate the value of that emotion,” she said slowly, and a little awkwardly. She climbed another step and looked down once more upon the figure that was only partly lit up, standing in the street with a colourless face turned upwards. As Mary hesitated, a cab came by and Katharine turned and stopped it, saying as she opened the door:

“Remember, I want to belong to your society—remember,” she added, having to raise her voice a little, and shutting the door upon the rest of her words.

Mary mounted the stairs step by step, as if she had to lift her body up an extremely steep ascent. She had had to wrench herself forcibly away from Katharine, and every step vanquished her desire. She held on grimly, encouraging herself as though she were actually making some great physical effort in climbing a height. She was conscious that Mr. Basnett, sitting at the top of the stairs with his documents, offered her solid footing if she were capable of reaching it. The knowledge gave her a faint sense of exaltation.

Mr. Basnett raised his eyes as she opened the door.

“I’ll go on where I left off,” he said. “Stop me if you want anything explained.”

He had been re-reading the document, and making pencil notes in the margin while he waited, and he went on again as if there had been no interruption. Mary sat down among the flat cushions, lit another cigarette, and listened with a frown upon her face.

Katharine leant back in the corner of the cab that carried her to Chelsea, conscious of fatigue, and conscious, too, of the sober and satisfactory nature of such industry as she had just witnessed. The thought of it composed and calmed her. When she reached home she let herself in as quietly as she could, in the hope that the household was already gone to bed. But her excursion had occupied less time than she thought, and she heard sounds of unmistakable liveliness upstairs. A door opened, and she drew herself into a ground-floor room in case the sound meant that Mr. Peyton were taking his leave. From where she stood she could see the stairs, though she was herself invisible. Some one was coming down the stairs, and now she saw that it was William Rodney. He looked a little strange, as if he were walking in his sleep; his lips moved as if he were acting some part to himself. He came down very slowly, step by step, with one hand upon the banisters to guide himself. She thought he looked as if he were in some mood of high exaltation, which it made her uncomfortable to witness any longer unseen. She stepped into the hall. He gave a great start upon seeing her and stopped.

“Katharine!” he exclaimed. “You’ve been out?” he asked.

“Yes…. Are they still up?”

He did not answer, and walked into the ground-floor room through the door which stood open.

“It’s been more wonderful than I can tell you,” he said, “I’m incredibly happy——”

He was scarcely addressing her, and she said nothing. For a moment they stood at opposite sides of a table saying nothing. Then he asked her quickly, “But tell me, how did it seem to you? What did you think, Katharine? Is there a chance that she likes me? Tell me, Katharine!”

Before she could answer a door opened on the landing above and disturbed them. It disturbed William excessively. He started back, walked rapidly into the hall, and said in a loud and ostentatiously ordinary tone:

“Good night, Katharine. Go to bed now. I shall see you soon. I hope I shall be able to come to-morrow.”

Next moment he was gone. She went upstairs and found Cassandra on the landing. She held two or three books in her hand, and she was stooping to look at others in a little bookcase. She said that she could never tell which book she wanted to read in bed, poetry, biography, or metaphysics.

“What do you read in bed, Katharine?” she asked, as they walked upstairs side by side.

“Sometimes one thing—sometimes another,” said Katharine vaguely. Cassandra looked at her.

“D’you know, you’re extraordinarily queer,” she said. “Every one seems to me a little queer. Perhaps it’s the effect of London.”

“Is William queer too?” Katharine asked.

“Well, I think he is a little,” Cassandra replied. “Queer, but very fascinating. I shall read Milton to-night. It’s been one of the happiest nights of my life, Katharine,” she added, looking with shy devotion at her cousin’s beautiful face.

[]

Chapter XXVII

London, in the first days of spring, has buds that open and flowers that suddenly shake their petals—white, purple, or crimson—in competition with the display in the garden beds, although these city flowers are merely so many doors flung wide in Bond Street and the neighbourhood, inviting you to look at a picture, or hear a symphony, or merely crowd and crush yourself among all sorts of vocal, excitable, brightly coloured human beings. But, all the same, it is no mean rival to the quieter process of vegetable florescence. Whether or not there is a generous motive at the root, a desire to share and impart, or whether the animation is purely that of insensate fervour and friction, the effect, while it lasts, certainly encourages those who are young, and those who are ignorant, to think the world one great bazaar, with banners fluttering and divans heaped with spoils from every quarter of the globe for their delight.

As Cassandra Otway went about London provided with shillings that opened turnstiles, or more often with large white cards that disregarded turnstiles, the city seemed to her the most lavish and hospitable of hosts. After visiting the National Gallery, or Hertford House, or hearing Brahms or Beethoven at the Bechstein Hall, she would come back to find a new person awaiting her, in whose soul were imbedded some grains of the invaluable substance which she still called reality, and still believed that she could find. The Hilberys, as the saying is, “knew every one,” and that arrogant claim was certainly upheld by the number of houses which, within a certain area, lit their lamps at night, opened their doors after 3 p.m., and admitted the Hilberys to their dining-rooms, say, once a month. An indefinable freedom and authority of manner, shared by most of the people who lived in these houses, seemed to indicate that whether it was a question of art, music, or government, they were well within the gates, and could smile indulgently at the vast mass of humanity which is forced to wait and struggle, and pay for entrance with common coin at the door. The gates opened instantly to admit Cassandra. She was naturally critical of what went on inside, and inclined to quote what Henry would have said; but she often succeeded in contradicting Henry, in his absence, and invariably paid her partner at dinner, or the kind old lady who remembered her grandmother, the compliment of believing that there was meaning in what they said. For the sake of the light in her eager eyes, much crudity of expression and some untidiness of person were forgiven her. It was generally felt that, given a year or two of experience, introduced to good dressmakers, and preserved from bad influences, she would be an acquisition. Those elderly ladies, who sit on the edge of ballrooms sampling the stuff of humanity between finger and thumb and breathing so evenly that the necklaces, which rise and fall upon their breasts, seem to represent some elemental force, such as the waves upon the ocean of humanity, concluded, a little smilingly, that she would do. They meant that she would in all probability marry some young man whose mother they respected.

William Rodney was fertile in suggestions. He knew of little galleries, and select concerts, and private performances, and somehow made time to meet Katharine and Cassandra, and to give them tea or dinner or supper in his rooms afterwards. Each one of her fourteen days thus promised to bear some bright illumination in its sober text. But Sunday approached. The day is usually dedicated to Nature. The weather was almost kindly enough for an expedition. But Cassandra rejected Hampton Court, Greenwich, Richmond, and Kew in favour of the Zoological Gardens. She had once trifled with the psychology of animals, and still knew something about inherited characteristics. On Sunday afternoon, therefore, Katharine, Cassandra, and William Rodney drove off to the Zoo. As their cab approached the entrance, Katharine bent forward and waved her hand to a young man who was walking rapidly in the same direction.

“There’s Ralph Denham!” she exclaimed. “I told him to meet us here,” she added. She had even come provided with a ticket for him. William’s objection that he would not be admitted was, therefore, silenced directly. But the way in which the two men greeted each other was significant of what was going to happen. As soon as they had admired the little birds in the large cage William and Cassandra lagged behind, and Ralph and Katharine pressed on rather in advance. It was an arrangement in which William took his part, and one that suited his convenience, but he was annoyed all the same. He thought that Katharine should have told him that she had invited Denham to meet them.

“One of Katharine’s friends,” he said rather sharply. It was clear that he was irritated, and Cassandra felt for his annoyance. They were standing by the pen of some Oriental hog, and she was prodding the brute gently with the point of her umbrella, when a thousand little observations seemed, in some way, to collect in one centre. The centre was one of intense and curious emotion. Were they happy? She dismissed the question as she asked it, scorning herself for applying such simple measures to the rare and splendid emotions of so unique a couple. Nevertheless, her manner became immediately different, as if, for the first time, she felt consciously womanly, and as if William might conceivably wish later on to confide in her. She forgot all about the psychology of animals, and the recurrence of blue eyes and brown, and became, instantly engrossed in her feelings as a woman, who could administer consolation, and she hoped that Katharine would keep ahead with Mr. Denham, as a child who plays at being grown-up hopes that her mother won’t come in just yet, and spoil the game. Or was it not rather that she had ceased to play at being grown-up, and was conscious, suddenly, that she was alarmingly mature and in earnest?

There was still unbroken silence between Katharine and Ralph Denham, but the occupants of the different cages served instead of speech.

“What have you been doing since we met?” Ralph asked at length.

“Doing?” she pondered. “Walking in and out of other people’s houses. I wonder if these animals are happy?” she speculated, stopping before a grey bear, who was philosophically playing with a tassel which once, perhaps, formed part of a lady’s parasol.

“I’m afraid Rodney didn’t like my coming,” Ralph remarked.

“No. But he’ll soon get over that,” she replied. The detachment expressed by her voice puzzled Ralph, and he would have been glad if she had explained her meaning further. But he was not going to press her for explanations. Each moment was to be, as far as he could make it, complete in itself, owing nothing of its happiness to explanations, borrowing neither bright nor dark tints from the future.

“The bears seem happy,” he remarked. “But we must buy them a bag of something. There’s the place to buy buns. Let’s go and get them.” They walked to the counter piled with little paper bags, and each simultaneously produced a shilling and pressed it upon the young lady, who did not know whether to oblige the lady or the gentleman, but decided, from conventional reasons, that it was the part of the gentleman to pay.

“I wish to pay,” said Ralph peremptorily, refusing the coin which Katharine tendered. “I have a reason for what I do,” he added, seeing her smile at his tone of decision.

“I believe you have a reason for everything,” she agreed, breaking the bun into parts and tossing them down the bears’ throats, “but I can’t believe it’s a good one this time. What is your reason?”

He refused to tell her. He could not explain to her that he was offering up consciously all his happiness to her, and wished, absurdly enough, to pour every possession he had upon the blazing pyre, even his silver and gold. He wished to keep this distance between them—the distance which separates the devotee from the image in the shrine.

Circumstances conspired to make this easier than it would have been, had they been seated in a drawing-room, for example, with a tea-tray between them. He saw her against a background of pale grottos and sleek hides; camels slanted their heavy-lidded eyes at her, giraffes fastidiously observed her from their melancholy eminence, and the pink-lined trunks of elephants cautiously abstracted buns from her outstretched hands. Then there were the hothouses. He saw her bending over pythons coiled upon the sand, or considering the brown rock breaking the stagnant water of the alligators’ pool, or searching some minute section of tropical forest for the golden eye of a lizard or the indrawn movement of the green frogs’ flanks. In particular, he saw her outlined against the deep green waters, in which squadrons of silvery fish wheeled incessantly, or ogled her for a moment, pressing their distorted mouths against the glass, quivering their tails straight out behind them. Again, there was the insect house, where she lifted the blinds of the little cages, and marvelled at the purple circles marked upon the rich tussore wings of some lately emerged and semi-conscious butterfly, or at caterpillars immobile like the knobbed twigs of a pale-skinned tree, or at slim green snakes stabbing the glass wall again and again with their flickering cleft tongues. The heat of the air, and the bloom of heavy flowers, which swam in water or rose stiffly from great red jars, together with the display of curious patterns and fantastic shapes, produced an atmosphere in which human beings tended to look pale and to fall silent.

Opening the door of a house which rang with the mocking and profoundly unhappy laughter of monkeys, they discovered William and Cassandra. William appeared to be tempting some small reluctant animal to descend from an upper perch to partake of half an apple. Cassandra was reading out, in her high-pitched tones, an account of this creature’s secluded disposition and nocturnal habits. She saw Katharine and exclaimed:

“Here you are! Do prevent William from torturing this unfortunate aye-aye.”

“We thought we’d lost you,” said William. He looked from one to the other, and seemed to take stock of Denham’s unfashionable appearance. He seemed to wish to find some outlet for malevolence, but, failing one, he remained silent. The glance, the slight quiver of the upper lip, were not lost upon Katharine.

“William isn’t kind to animals,” she remarked. “He doesn’t know what they like and what they don’t like.”

“I take it you’re well versed in these matters, Denham,” said Rodney, withdrawing his hand with the apple.

“It’s mainly a question of knowing how to stroke them,” Denham replied.

“Which is the way to the Reptile House?” Cassandra asked him, not from a genuine desire to visit the reptiles, but in obedience to her new-born feminine susceptibility, which urged her to charm and conciliate the other sex. Denham began to give her directions, and Katharine and William moved on together.

“I hope you’ve had a pleasant afternoon,” William remarked.

“I like Ralph Denham,” she replied.

“Ça se voit,” William returned, with superficial urbanity.

Many retorts were obvious, but wishing, on the whole, for peace, Katharine merely inquired:

“Are you coming back to tea?”

“Cassandra and I thought of having tea at a little shop in Portland Place,” he replied. “I don’t know whether you and Denham would care to join us.”

“I’ll ask him,” she replied, turning her head to look for him. But he and Cassandra were absorbed in the aye-aye once more.

William and Katharine watched them for a moment, and each looked curiously at the object of the other’s preference. But resting his eye upon Cassandra, to whose elegance the dressmakers had now done justice, William said sharply:

“If you come, I hope you won’t do your best to make me ridiculous.”

“If that’s what you’re afraid of I certainly shan’t come,” Katharine replied.

They were professedly looking into the enormous central cage of monkeys, and being thoroughly annoyed by William, she compared him to a wretched misanthropical ape, huddled in a scrap of old shawl at the end of a pole, darting peevish glances of suspicion and distrust at his companions. Her tolerance was deserting her. The events of the past week had worn it thin. She was in one of those moods, perhaps not uncommon with either sex, when the other becomes very clearly distinguished, and of contemptible baseness, so that the necessity of association is degrading, and the tie, which at such moments is always extremely close, drags like a halter round the neck. William’s exacting demands and his jealousy had pulled her down into some horrible swamp of her nature where the primeval struggle between man and woman still rages.

“You seem to delight in hurting me,” William persisted. “Why did you say that just now about my behaviour to animals?” As he spoke he rattled his stick against the bars of the cage, which gave his words an accompaniment peculiarly exasperating to Katharine’s nerves.

“Because it’s true. You never see what any one feels,” she said. “You think of no one but yourself.”

“That is not true,” said William. By his determined rattling he had now collected the animated attention of some half-dozen apes. Either to propitiate them, or to show his consideration for their feelings, he proceeded to offer them the apple which he held.

The sight, unfortunately, was so comically apt in its illustration of the picture in her mind, the ruse was so transparent, that Katharine was seized with laughter. She laughed uncontrollably. William flushed red. No display of anger could have hurt his feelings more profoundly. It was not only that she was laughing at him; the detachment of the sound was horrible.

“I don’t know what you’re laughing at,” he muttered, and, turning, found that the other couple had rejoined them. As if the matter had been privately agreed upon, the couples separated once more, Katharine and Denham passing out of the house without more than a perfunctory glance round them. Denham obeyed what seemed to be Katharine’s wish in thus making haste. Some change had come over her. He connected it with her laughter, and her few words in private with Rodney; he felt that she had become unfriendly to him. She talked, but her remarks were indifferent, and when he spoke her attention seemed to wander. This change of mood was at first extremely disagreeable to him; but soon he found it salutary. The pale drizzling atmosphere of the day affected him, also. The charm, the insidious magic in which he had luxuriated, were suddenly gone; his feeling had become one of friendly respect, and to his great pleasure he found himself thinking spontaneously of the relief of finding himself alone in his room that night. In his surprise at the suddenness of the change, and at the extent of his freedom, he bethought him of a daring plan, by which the ghost of Katharine could be more effectually exorcised than by mere abstinence. He would ask her to come home with him to tea. He would force her through the mill of family life; he would place her in a light unsparing and revealing. His family would find nothing to admire in her, and she, he felt certain, would despise them all, and this, too, would help him. He felt himself becoming more and more merciless towards her. By such courageous measures any one, he thought, could end the absurd passions which were the cause of so much pain and waste. He could foresee a time when his experiences, his discovery, and his triumph were made available for younger brothers who found themselves in the same predicament. He looked at his watch, and remarked that the gardens would soon be closed.

“Anyhow,” he added, “I think we’ve seen enough for one afternoon. Where have the others got to?” He looked over his shoulder, and, seeing no trace of them, remarked at once:

“We’d better be independent of them. The best plan will be for you to come back to tea with me.”

“Why shouldn’t you come with me?” she asked.

“Because we’re next door to Highgate here,” he replied promptly.

She assented, having very little notion whether Highgate was next door to Regent’s Park or not. She was only glad to put off her return to the family tea-table in Chelsea for an hour or two. They proceeded with dogged determination through the winding roads of Regent’s Park, and the Sunday-stricken streets of the neighbourhood, in the direction of the Tube station. Ignorant of the way, she resigned herself entirely to him, and found his silence a convenient cover beneath which to continue her anger with Rodney.

When they stepped out of the train into the still greyer gloom of Highgate, she wondered, for the first time, where he was taking her. Had he a family, or did he live alone in rooms? On the whole she was inclined to believe that he was the only son of an aged, and possibly invalid, mother. She sketched lightly, upon the blank vista down which they walked, the little white house and the tremulous old lady rising from behind her tea-table to greet her with faltering words about “my son’s friends,” and was on the point of asking Ralph to tell her what she might expect, when he jerked open one of the infinite number of identical wooden doors, and led her up a tiled path to a porch in the Alpine style of architecture. As they listened to the shaking of the bell in the basement, she could summon no vision to replace the one so rudely destroyed.

“I must warn you to expect a family party,” said Ralph. “They’re mostly in on Sundays. We can go to my room afterwards.”

“Have you many brothers and sisters?” she asked, without concealing her dismay.

“Six or seven,” he replied grimly, as the door opened.

While Ralph took off his coat, she had time to notice the ferns and photographs and draperies, and to hear a hum, or rather a babble, of voices talking each other down, from the sound of them. The rigidity of extreme shyness came over her. She kept as far behind Denham as she could, and walked stiffly after him into a room blazing with unshaded lights, which fell upon a number of people, of different ages, sitting round a large dining-room table untidily strewn with food, and unflinchingly lit up by incandescent gas. Ralph walked straight to the far end of the table.

“Mother, this is Miss Hilbery,” he said.

A large elderly lady, bent over an unsatisfactory spirit-lamp, looked up with a little frown, and observed:

“I beg your pardon. I thought you were one of my own girls. Dorothy,” she continued on the same breath, to catch the servant before she left the room, “we shall want some more methylated spirits—unless the lamp itself is out of order. If one of you could invent a good spirit-lamp——” she sighed, looking generally down the table, and then began seeking among the china before her for two clean cups for the new-comers.

The unsparing light revealed more ugliness than Katharine had seen in one room for a very long time. It was the ugliness of enormous folds of brown material, looped and festooned, of plush curtains, from which depended balls and fringes, partially concealing bookshelves swollen with black school-texts. Her eye was arrested by crossed scabbards of fretted wood upon the dull green wall, and wherever there was a high flat eminence, some fern waved from a pot of crinkled china, or a bronze horse reared so high that the stump of a tree had to sustain his forequarters. The waters of family life seemed to rise and close over her head, and she munched in silence.

At length Mrs. Denham looked up from her teacups and remarked:

“You see, Miss Hilbery, my children all come in at different hours and want different things. (The tray should go up if you’ve done, Johnnie.) My boy Charles is in bed with a cold. What else can you expect?—standing in the wet playing football. We did try drawing-room tea, but it didn’t do.”

A boy of sixteen, who appeared to be Johnnie, grumbled derisively both at the notion of drawing-room tea and at the necessity of carrying a tray up to his brother. But he took himself off, being enjoined by his mother to mind what he was doing, and shut the door after him.

“It’s much nicer like this,” said Katharine, applying herself with determination to the dissection of her cake; they had given her too large a slice. She knew that Mrs. Denham suspected her of critical comparisons. She knew that she was making poor progress with her cake. Mrs. Denham had looked at her sufficiently often to make it clear to Katharine that she was asking who this young woman was, and why Ralph had brought her to tea with them. There was an obvious reason, which Mrs. Denham had probably reached by this time. Outwardly, she was behaving with rather rusty and laborious civility. She was making conversation about the amenities of Highgate, its development and situation.

“When I first married,” she said, “Highgate was quite separate from London, Miss Hilbery, and this house, though you wouldn’t believe it, had a view of apple orchards. That was before the Middletons built their house in front of us.”

“It must be a great advantage to live at the top of a hill,” said Katharine. Mrs. Denham agreed effusively, as if her opinion of Katharine’s sense had risen.

“Yes, indeed, we find it very healthy,” she said, and she went on, as people who live in the suburbs so often do, to prove that it was healthier, more convenient, and less spoilt than any suburb round London. She spoke with such emphasis that it was quite obvious that she expressed unpopular views, and that her children disagreed with her.

“The ceiling’s fallen down in the pantry again,” said Hester, a girl of eighteen, abruptly.

“The whole house will be down one of these days,” James muttered.

“Nonsense,” said Mrs. Denham. “It’s only a little bit of plaster—I don’t see how any house could be expected to stand the wear and tear you give it.” Here some family joke exploded, which Katharine could not follow. Even Mrs. Denham laughed against her will.

“Miss Hilbery’s thinking us all so rude,” she added reprovingly. Miss Hilbery smiled and shook her head, and was conscious that a great many eyes rested upon her, for a moment, as if they would find pleasure in discussing her when she was gone. Owing, perhaps, to this critical glance, Katharine decided that Ralph Denham’s family was commonplace, unshapely, lacking in charm, and fitly expressed by the hideous nature of their furniture and decorations. She glanced along a mantelpiece ranged with bronze chariots, silver vases, and china ornaments that were either facetious or eccentric.

She did not apply her judgment consciously to Ralph, but when she looked at him ,a moment later, she rated him lower than at any other time of their acquaintanceship.

He had made no effort to tide over the discomforts of her introduction, and now, engaged in argument with his brother, apparently forgot her presence. She must have counted upon his support more than she realized, for this indifference, emphasized, as it was, by the insignificant commonplace of his surroundings, awoke her, not only to that ugliness, but to her own folly. She thought of one scene after another in a few seconds, with that shudder which is almost a blush. She had believed him when he spoke of friendship. She had believed in a spiritual light burning steadily and steadfastly behind the erratic disorder and incoherence of life. The light was now gone out, suddenly, as if a sponge had blotted it. The litter of the table and the tedious but exacting conversation of Mrs. Denham remained: they struck, indeed, upon a mind bereft of all defences, and, keenly conscious of the degradation which is the result of strife whether victorious or not, she thought gloomily of her loneliness, of life’s futility, of the barren prose of reality, of William Rodney, of her mother, and the unfinished book.

Her answers to Mrs. Denham were perfunctory to the verge of rudeness, and to Ralph, who watched her narrowly, she seemed further away than was compatible with her physical closeness. He glanced at her, and ground out further steps in his argument, determined that no folly should remain when this experience was over. Next moment, a silence, sudden and complete, descended upon them all. The silence of all these people round the untidy table was enormous and hideous; something horrible seemed about to burst from it, but they endured it obstinately. A second later the door opened and there was a stir of relief; cries of “Hullo, Joan! There’s nothing left for you to eat,” broke up the oppressive concentration of so many eyes upon the table-cloth, and set the waters of family life dashing in brisk little waves again. It was obvious that Joan had some mysterious and beneficent power upon her family. She went up to Katharine as if she had heard of her, and was very glad to see her at last. She explained that she had been visiting an uncle who was ill, and that had kept her. No, she hadn’t had any tea, but a slice of bread would do. Some one handed up a hot cake, which had been keeping warm in the fender; she sat down by her mother’s side, Mrs. Denham’s anxieties seemed to relax, and every one began eating and drinking, as if tea had begun over again. Hester voluntarily explained to Katharine that she was reading to pass some examination, because she wanted more than anything in the whole world to go to Newnham.

“Now, just let me hear you decline amo—I love,” Johnnie demanded.

“No, Johnnie, no Greek at meal-times,” said Joan, overhearing him instantly. “She’s up at all hours of the night over her books, Miss Hilbery, and I’m sure that’s not the way to pass examinations,” she went on, smiling at Katharine, with the worried humorous smile of the elder sister whose younger brothers and sisters have become almost like children of her own.

“Joan, you don’t really think that amo is Greek?” Ralph asked.

“Did I say Greek? Well, never mind. No dead languages at tea-time. My dear boy, don’t trouble to make me any toast——”

“Or if you do, surely there’s the toasting-fork somewhere?” said Mrs. Denham, still cherishing the belief that the bread-knife could be spoilt. “Do one of you ring and ask for one,” she said, without any conviction that she would be obeyed. “But is Ann coming to be with Uncle Joseph?” she continued. “If so, surely they had better send Amy to us——” and in the mysterious delight of learning further details of these arrangements, and suggesting more sensible plans of her own, which, from the aggrieved way in which she spoke, she did not seem to expect any one to adopt, Mrs. Denham completely forgot the presence of a well-dressed visitor, who had to be informed about the amenities of Highgate. As soon as Joan had taken her seat, an argument had sprung up on either side of Katharine, as to whether the Salvation Army has any right to play hymns at street corners on Sunday mornings, thereby making it impossible for James to have his sleep out, and tampering with the rights of individual liberty.

“You see, James likes to lie in bed and sleep like a hog,” said Johnnie, explaining himself to Katharine, whereupon James fired up and, making her his goal, also exclaimed:

“Because Sundays are my one chance in the week of having my sleep out. Johnie messes with stinking chemicals in the pantry——”

They appealed to her, and she forgot her cake and began to laugh and talk and argue with sudden animation. The large family seemed to her so warm and various that she forgot to censure them for their taste in pottery. But the personal question between James and Johnnie merged into some argument already, apparently, debated, so that the parts had been distributed among the family, in which Ralph took the lead; and Katharine found herself opposed to him and the champion of Johnnie’s cause, who, it appeared, always lost his head and got excited in argument with Ralph.

“Yes, yes, that’s what I mean. She’s got it right,” he exclaimed, after Katharine had restated his case, and made it more precise. The debate was left almost solely to Katharine and Ralph. They looked into each other’s eyes fixedly, like wrestlers trying to see what movement is coming next, and while Ralph spoke, Katharine bit her lower lip, and was always ready with her next point as soon as he had done. They were very well matched, and held the opposite views.

But at the most exciting stage of the argument, for no reason that Katharine could see, all chairs were pushed back, and one after another the Denham family got up and went out of the door, as if a bell had summoned them. She was not used to the clockwork regulations of a large family. She hesitated in what she was saying, and rose. Mrs. Denham and Joan had drawn together and stood by the fireplace, slightly raising their skirts above their ankles, and discussing something which had an air of being very serious and very private. They appeared to have forgotten her presence among them. Ralph stood holding the door open for her.

“Won’t you come up to my room?” he said. And Katharine, glancing back at Joan, who smiled at her in a preoccupied way, followed Ralph upstairs. She was thinking of their argument, and when, after the long climb, he opened his door, she began at once.

“The question is, then, at what point is it right for the individual to assert his will against the will of the State.”

For some time they continued the argument, and then the intervals between one statement and the next became longer and longer, and they spoke more speculatively and less pugnaciously, and at last fell silent. Katharine went over the argument in her mind, remembering how, now and then, it had been set conspicuously on the right course by some remark offered either by James or by Johnnie.

“Your brothers are very clever,” she said. “I suppose you’re in the habit of arguing?”

“James and Johnnie will go on like that for hours,” Ralph replied. “So will Hester, if you start her upon Elizabethan dramatists.”

“And the little girl with the pigtail?”

“Molly? She’s only ten. But they’re always arguing among themselves.”

He was immensely pleased by Katharine’s praise of his brothers and sisters. He would have liked to go on telling her about them, but he checked himself.

“I see that it must be difficult to leave them.” Katharine continued. His deep pride in his family was more evident to him, at that moment, than ever before, and the idea of living alone in a cottage was ridiculous. All that brotherhood and sisterhood, and a common childhood in a common past mean, all the stability, the unambitious comradeship, and tacit understanding of family life at its best, came to his mind, and he thought of them as a company, of which he was the leader, bound on a difficult, dreary, but glorious voyage. And it was Katharine who had opened his eyes to this, he thought.

A little dry chirp from the corner of the room now roused her attention.

“My tame rook,” he explained briefly. “A cat had bitten one of its legs.” She looked at the rook, and her eyes went from one object to another.

“You sit here and read?” she said, her eyes resting upon his books. He said that he was in the habit of working there at night.

“The great advantage of Highgate is the view over London. At night the view from my window is splendid.” He was extremely anxious that she should appreciate his view, and she rose to see what was to be seen. It was already dark enough for the turbulent haze to be yellow with the light of street lamps, and she tried to determine the quarters of the city beneath her. The sight of her gazing from his window gave him a peculiar satisfaction. When she turned, at length, he was still sitting motionless in his chair.

“It must be late,” she said. “I must be going.” She settled upon the arm of the chair irresolutely, thinking that she had no wish to go home. William would be there, and he would find some way of making things unpleasant for her, and the memory of their quarrel came back to her. She had noticed Ralph’s coldness, too. She looked at him, and from his fixed stare she thought that he must be working out some theory, some argument. He had thought, perhaps, of some fresh point in his position, as to the bounds of personal liberty. She waited, silently, thinking about liberty.

“You’ve won again,” he said at last, without moving.

“I’ve won?” she repeated, thinking of the argument.

“I wish to God I hadn’t asked you here,” he burst out.

“What do you mean?”

“When you’re here, it’s different—I’m happy. You’ve only to walk to the window—you’ve only to talk about liberty. When I saw you down there among them all——” He stopped short.

“You thought how ordinary I was.”

“I tried to think so. But I thought you more wonderful than ever.”

An immense relief, and a reluctance to enjoy that relief, conflicted in her heart.

She slid down into the chair.

“I thought you disliked me,” she said.

“God knows I tried,” he replied. “I’ve done my best to see you as you are, without any of this damned romantic nonsense. That was why I asked you here, and it’s increased my folly. When you’re gone I shall look out of that window and think of you. I shall waste the whole evening thinking of you. I shall waste my whole life, I believe.”

He spoke with such vehemence that her relief disappeared; she frowned; and her tone changed to one almost of severity.

“This is what I foretold. We shall gain nothing but unhappiness. Look at me, Ralph.” He looked at her. “I assure you that I’m far more ordinary than I appear. Beauty means nothing whatever. In fact, the most beautiful women are generally the most stupid. I’m not that, but I’m a matter-of-fact, prosaic, rather ordinary character: I order the dinner, I pay the bills, I do the accounts, I wind up the clock, and I never look at a book.”

“You forget——” he began, but she would not let him speak.

“You come and see me among flowers and pictures, and think me mysterious, romantic, and all the rest of it. Being yourself very inexperienced and very emotional, you go home and invent a story about me, and now you can’t separate me from the person you’ve imagined me to be. You call that, I suppose, being in love; as a matter of fact it’s being in delusion. All romantic people are the same,” she added. “My mother spends her life in making stories about the people she’s fond of. But I won’t have you do it about me, if I can help it.”

“You can’t help it,” he said.

“I warn you it’s the source of all evil.”

“And of all good,” he added.

“You’ll find out that I’m not what you think me.”

“Perhaps. But I shall gain more than I lose.”

“If such gain’s worth having.”

They were silent for a space.

“That may be what we have to face,” he said. “There may be nothing else. Nothing but what we imagine.”

“The reason of our loneliness,” she mused, and they were silent for a time.

“When are you to be married?” he asked abruptly, with a change of tone.

“Not till September, I think. It’s been put off.”

“You won’t be lonely then,” he said. “According to what people say, marriage is a very queer business. They say it’s different from anything else. It may be true. I’ve known one or two cases where it seems to be true.” He hoped that she would go on with the subject. But she made no reply. He had done his best to master himself, and his voice was sufficiently indifferent, but her silence tormented him. She would never speak to him of Rodney of her own accord, and her reserve left a whole continent of her soul in darkness.

“It may be put off even longer than that,” she said, as if by an afterthought. “Some one in the office is ill, and William has to take his place. We may put it off for some time in fact.”

“That’s rather hard on him, isn’t it?” Ralph asked.

“He has his work,” she replied. “He has lots of things that interest him…. I know I’ve been to that place,” she broke off, pointing to a photograph. “But I can’t remember where it is—oh, of course—it’s Oxford. Now, what about your cottage?”

“I’m not going to take it.”

“How you change your mind!” she smiled.

“It’s not that,” he said impatiently. “It’s that I want to be where I can see you.”

“Our compact is going to hold in spite of all I’ve said?” she asked.

“For ever, so far as I’m concerned,” he replied.

“You’re going to go on dreaming and imagining and making up stories about me as you walk along the street, and pretending that we’re riding in a forest, or landing on an island——”

“No. I shall think of you ordering dinner, paying bills, doing the accounts, showing old ladies the relics——”

“That’s better,” she said. “You can think of me to-morrow morning looking up dates in the ‘Dictionary of National Biography.’”

“And forgetting your purse,” Ralph added.

At this she smiled, but in another moment her smile faded, either because of his words or of the way in which he spoke them. She was capable of forgetting things. He saw that. But what more did he see? Was he not looking at something she had never shown to anybody? Was it not something so profound that the notion of his seeing it almost shocked her? Her smile faded, and for a moment she seemed upon the point of speaking, but looking at him in silence, with a look that seemed to ask what she could not put into words, she turned and bade him good night.

[]

Chapter XXVIII

Like a strain of music, the effect of Katharine’s presence slowly died from the room in which Ralph sat alone. The music had ceased in the rapture of its melody. He strained to catch the faintest lingering echoes; for a moment the memory lulled him into peace; but soon it failed, and he paced the room so hungry for the sound to come again that he was conscious of no other desire left in life. She had gone without speaking; abruptly a chasm had been cut in his course, down which the tide of his being plunged in disorder; fell upon rocks; flung itself to destruction. The distress had an effect of physical ruin and disaster. He trembled; he was white; he felt exhausted, as if by a great physical effort. He sank at last into a chair standing opposite her empty one, and marked, mechanically, with his eye upon the clock, how she went farther and farther from him, was home now, and now, doubtless, again with Rodney. But it was long before he could realize these facts; the immense desire for her presence churned his senses into foam, into froth, into a haze of emotion that removed all facts from his grasp, and gave him a strange sense of distance, even from the material shapes of wall and window by which he was surrounded. The prospect of the future, now that the strength of his passion was revealed to him, appalled him.

The marriage would take place in September she had said; that allowed him, then, six full months in which to undergo these terrible extremes of emotion. Six months of torture, and after that the silence of the grave, the isolation of the insane, the exile of the damned; at best, a life from which the chief good was knowingly and for ever excluded. An impartial judge might have assured him that his chief hope of recovery lay in this mystic temper, which identified a living woman with much that no human beings long possess in the eyes of each other; she would pass, and the desire for her vanish, but his belief in what she stood for, detached from her, would remain. This line of thought offered, perhaps, some respite, and possessed of a brain that had its station considerably above the tumult of the senses, he tried to reduce the vague and wandering incoherency of his emotions to order. The sense of self-preservation was strong in him, and Katharine herself had strangely revived it by convincing him that his family deserved and needed all his strength. She was right, and for their sake, if not for his own, this passion, which could bear no fruit, must be cut off, uprooted, shown to be as visionary and baseless as she had maintained. The best way of achieving this was not to run away from her, but to face her, and having steeped himself in her qualities, to convince his reason that they were, as she assured him, not those that he imagined. She was a practical woman, a domestic wife for an inferior poet, endowed with romantic beauty by some freak of unintelligent Nature. No doubt her beauty itself would not stand examination. He had the means of settling this point at least. He possessed a book of photographs from the Greek statues; the head of a goddess, if the lower part were concealed, had often given him the ecstasy of being in Katharine’s presence. He took it down from the shelf and found the picture. To this he added a note from her, bidding him meet her at the Zoo. He had a flower which he had picked at Kew to teach her botany. Such were his relics. He placed them before him, and set himself to visualize her so clearly that no deception or delusion was possible. In a second he could see her, with the sun slanting across her dress, coming towards him down the green walk at Kew. He made her sit upon the seat beside him. He heard her voice, so low and yet so decided in its tone; she spoke reasonably of indifferent matters. He could see her faults, and analyse her virtues. His pulse became quieter, and his brain increased in clarity. This time she could not escape him. The illusion of her presence became more and more complete. They seemed to pass in and out of each other’s minds, questioning and answering. The utmost fullness of communion seemed to be theirs. Thus united, he felt himself raised to an eminence, exalted, and filled with a power of achievement such as he had never known in singleness. Once more he told over conscientiously her faults, both of face and character; they were clearly known to him; but they merged themselves in the flawless union that was born of their association. They surveyed life to its uttermost limits. How deep it was when looked at from this height! How sublime! How the commonest things moved him almost to tears! Thus, he forgot the inevitable limitations; he forgot her absence, he thought it of no account whether she married him or another; nothing mattered, save that she should exist, and that he should love her. Some words of these reflections were uttered aloud, and it happened that among them were the words, “I love her.” It was the first time that he had used the word “love” to describe his feeling; madness, romance, hallucination—he had called it by these names before; but having, apparently by accident, stumbled upon the word “love,” he repeated it again and again with a sense of revelation.

“But I’m in love with you!” he exclaimed, with something like dismay. He leant against the window-sill, looking over the city as she had looked. Everything had become miraculously different and completely distinct. His feelings were justified and needed no further explanation. But he must impart them to some one, because his discovery was so important that it concerned other people too. Shutting the book of Greek photographs, and hiding his relics, he ran downstairs, snatched his coat, and passed out of doors.

The lamps were being lit, but the streets were dark enough and empty enough to let him walk his fastest, and to talk aloud as he walked. He had no doubt where he was going. He was going to find Mary Datchet. The desire to share what he felt, with some one who understood it, was so imperious that he did not question it. He was soon in her street. He ran up the stairs leading to her flat two steps at a time, and it never crossed his mind that she might not be at home. As he rang her bell, he seemed to himself to be announcing the presence of something wonderful that was separate from himself, and gave him power and authority over all other people. Mary came to the door after a moment’s pause. He was perfectly silent, and in the dusk his face looked completely white. He followed her into her room.

“Do you know each other?” she said, to his extreme surprise, for he had counted on finding her alone. A young man rose, and said that he knew Ralph by sight.

“We were just going through some papers,” said Mary. “Mr. Basnett has to help me, because I don’t know much about my work yet. It’s the new society,” she explained. “I’m the secretary. I’m no longer at Russell Square.”

The voice in which she gave this information was so constrained as to sound almost harsh.

“What are your aims?” said Ralph. He looked neither at Mary nor at Mr. Basnett. Mr. Basnett thought he had seldom seen a more disagreeable or formidable man than this friend of Mary’s, this sarcastic-looking, white-faced Mr. Denham, who seemed to demand, as if by right, an account of their proposals, and to criticize them before he had heard them. Nevertheless, he explained his projects as clearly as he could, and knew that he wished Mr. Denham to think well of them.

“I see,” said Ralph, when he had done. “D’you know, Mary,” he suddenly remarked, “I believe I’m in for a cold. Have you any quinine?” The look which he cast at her frightened her; it expressed mutely, perhaps without his own consciousness, something deep, wild, and passionate. She left the room at once. Her heart beat fast at the knowledge of Ralph’s presence; but it beat with pain, and with an extraordinary fear. She stood listening for a moment to the voices in the next room.

“Of course, I agree with you,” she heard Ralph say, in this strange voice, to Mr. Basnett. “But there’s more that might be done. Have you seen Judson, for instance? You should make a point of getting him.”

Mary returned with the quinine.

“Judson’s address?” Mr. Basnett inquired, pulling out his notebook and preparing to write. For twenty minutes, perhaps, he wrote down names, addresses, and other suggestions that Ralph dictated to him. Then, when Ralph fell silent, Mr. Basnett felt that his presence was not desired, and thanking Ralph for his help, with a sense that he was very young and ignorant compared with him, he said good-bye.

“Mary,” said Ralph, directly Mr. Basnett had shut the door and they were alone together. “Mary,” he repeated. But the old difficulty of speaking to Mary without reserve prevented him from continuing. His desire to proclaim his love for Katharine was still strong in him, but he had felt, directly he saw Mary, that he could not share it with her. The feeling increased as he sat talking to Mr. Basnett. And yet all the time he was thinking of Katharine, and marvelling at his love. The tone in which he spoke Mary’s name was harsh.

“What is it, Ralph?” she asked, startled by his tone. She looked at him anxiously, and her little frown showed that she was trying painfully to understand him, and was puzzled. He could feel her groping for his meaning, and he was annoyed with her, and thought how he had always found her slow, painstaking, and clumsy. He had behaved badly to her, too, which made his irritation the more acute. Without waiting for him to answer, she rose as if his answer were indifferent to her, and began to put in order some papers that Mr. Basnett had left on the table. She hummed a scrap of a tune under her breath, and moved about the room as if she were occupied in making things tidy, and had no other concern.

“You’ll stay and dine?” she said casually, returning to her seat.

“No,” Ralph replied. She did not press him further. They sat side by side without speaking, and Mary reached her hand for her work-basket, and took out her sewing and threaded a needle.

“That’s a clever young man,” Ralph observed, referring to Mr. Basnett.

“I’m glad you thought so. It’s tremendously interesting work, and considering everything, I think we’ve done very well. But I’m inclined to agree with you; we ought to try to be more conciliatory. We’re absurdly strict. It’s difficult to see that there may be sense in what one’s opponents say, though they are one’s opponents. Horace Basnett is certainly too uncompromising. I mustn’t forget to see that he writes that letter to Judson. You’re too busy, I suppose, to come on to our committee?” She spoke in the most impersonal manner.

“I may be out of town,” Ralph replied, with equal distance of manner.

“Our executive meets every week, of course,” she observed. “But some of our members don’t come more than once a month. Members of Parliament are the worst; it was a mistake, I think, to ask them.”

She went on sewing in silence.

“You’ve not taken your quinine,” she said, looking up and seeing the tabloids upon the mantelpiece.

“I don’t want it,” said Ralph shortly.

“Well, you know best,” she replied tranquilly.

“Mary, I’m a brute!” he exclaimed. “Here I come and waste your time, and do nothing but make myself disagreeable.”

“A cold coming on does make one feel wretched,” she replied.

“I’ve not got a cold. That was a lie. There’s nothing the matter with me. I’m mad, I suppose. I ought to have had the decency to keep away. But I wanted to see you—I wanted to tell you—I’m in love, Mary.” He spoke the word, but, as he spoke it, it seemed robbed of substance.

“In love, are you?” she said quietly. “I’m glad, Ralph.”

“I suppose I’m in love. Anyhow, I’m out of my mind. I can’t think, I can’t work, I don’t care a hang for anything in the world. Good Heavens, Mary! I’m in torment! One moment I’m happy; next I’m miserable. I hate her for half an hour; then I’d give my whole life to be with her for ten minutes; all the time I don’t know what I feel, or why I feel it; it’s insanity, and yet it’s perfectly reasonable. Can you make any sense of it? Can you see what’s happened? I’m raving, I know; don’t listen, Mary; go on with your work.”

He rose and began, as usual, to pace up and down the room. He knew that what he had just said bore very little resemblance to what he felt, for Mary’s presence acted upon him like a very strong magnet, drawing from him certain expressions which were not those he made use of when he spoke to himself, nor did they represent his deepest feelings. He felt a little contempt for himself at having spoken thus; but somehow he had been forced into speech.

“Do sit down,” said Mary suddenly. “You make me so——” She spoke with unusual irritability, and Ralph, noticing it with surprise, sat down at once.

“You haven’t told me her name—you’d rather not, I suppose?”

“Her name? Katharine Hilbery.”

“But she’s engaged——”

“To Rodney. They’re to be married in September.”

“I see,” said Mary. But in truth the calm of his manner, now that he was sitting down once more, wrapt her in the presence of something which she felt to be so strong, so mysterious, so incalculable, that she scarcely dared to attempt to intercept it by any word or question that she was able to frame. She looked at Ralph blankly, with a kind of awe in her face, her lips slightly parted, and her brows raised. He was apparently quite unconscious of her gaze. Then, as if she could look no longer, she leant back in her chair, and half closed her eyes. The distance between them hurt her terribly; one thing after another came into her mind, tempting her to assail Ralph with questions, to force him to confide in her, and to enjoy once more his intimacy. But she rejected every impulse, for she could not speak without doing violence to some reserve which had grown between them, putting them a little far from each other, so that he seemed to her dignified and remote, like a person she no longer knew well.

“Is there anything that I could do for you?” she asked gently, and even with courtesy, at length.

“You could see her—no, that’s not what I want; you mustn’t bother about me, Mary.” He, too, spoke very gently.

“I’m afraid no third person can do anything to help,” she added.

“No,” he shook his head. “Katharine was saying to-day how lonely we are.” She saw the effort with which he spoke Katharine’s name, and believed that he forced himself to make amends now for his concealment in the past. At any rate, she was conscious of no anger against him; but rather of a deep pity for one condemned to suffer as she had suffered. But in the case of Katharine it was different; she was indignant with Katharine.

“There’s always work,” she said, a little aggressively.

Ralph moved directly.

“Do you want to be working now?” he asked.

“No, no. It’s Sunday,” she replied. “I was thinking of Katharine. She doesn’t understand about work. She’s never had to. She doesn’t know what work is. I’ve only found out myself quite lately. But it’s the thing that saves one—I’m sure of that.”

“There are other things, aren’t there?” he hesitated.

“Nothing that one can count upon,” she returned. “After all, other people—” she stopped, but forced herself to go on. “Where should I be now if I hadn’t got to go to my office every day? Thousands of people would tell you the same thing—thousands of women. I tell you, work is the only thing that saved me, Ralph.” He set his mouth, as if her words rained blows on him; he looked as if he had made up his mind to bear anything she might say, in silence. He had deserved it, and there would be relief in having to bear it. But she broke off, and rose as if to fetch something from the next room. Before she reached the door she turned back, and stood facing him, self-possessed, and yet defiant and formidable in her composure.

“It’s all turned out splendidly for me,” she said. “It will for you, too. I’m sure of that. Because, after all, Katharine is worth it.”

“Mary—!” he exclaimed. But her head was turned away, and he could not say what he wished to say. “Mary, you’re splendid,” he concluded. She faced him as he spoke, and gave him her hand. She had suffered and relinquished, she had seen her future turned from one of infinite promise to one of barrenness, and yet, somehow, over what she scarcely knew, and with what results she could hardly foretell, she had conquered. With Ralph’s eyes upon her, smiling straight back at him serenely and proudly, she knew, for the first time, that she had conquered. She let him kiss her hand.

The streets were empty enough on Sunday night, and if the Sabbath, and the domestic amusements proper to the Sabbath, had not kept people indoors, a high strong wind might very probably have done so. Ralph Denham was aware of a tumult in the street much in accordance with his own sensations. The gusts, sweeping along the Strand, seemed at the same time to blow a clear space across the sky in which stars appeared, and for a short time the quick-speeding silver moon riding through clouds, as if they were waves of water surging round her and over her. They swamped her, but she emerged; they broke over her and covered her again; she issued forth indomitable. In the country fields all the wreckage of winter was being dispersed; the dead leaves, the withered bracken, the dry and discoloured grass, but no bud would be broken, nor would the new stalks that showed above the earth take any harm, and perhaps to-morrow a line of blue or yellow would show through a slit in their green. But the whirl of the atmosphere alone was in Denham’s mood, and what of star or blossom appeared was only as a light gleaming for a second upon heaped waves fast following each other. He had not been able to speak to Mary, though for a moment he had come near enough to be tantalized by a wonderful possibility of understanding. But the desire to communicate something of the very greatest importance possessed him completely; he still wished to bestow this gift upon some other human being; he sought their company. More by instinct than by conscious choice, he took the direction which led to Rodney’s rooms. He knocked loudly upon his door; but no one answered. He rang the bell. It took him some time to accept the fact that Rodney was out. When he could no longer pretend that the sound of the wind in the old building was the sound of some one rising from his chair, he ran downstairs again, as if his goal had been altered and only just revealed to him. He walked in the direction of Chelsea.

But physical fatigue, for he had not dined and had tramped both far and fast, made him sit for a moment upon a seat on the Embankment. One of the regular occupants of those seats, an elderly man who had drunk himself, probably, out of work and lodging, drifted up, begged a match, and sat down beside him. It was a windy night, he said; times were hard; some long story of bad luck and injustice followed, told so often that the man seemed to be talking to himself, or, perhaps, the neglect of his audience had long made any attempt to catch their attention seem scarcely worth while. When he began to speak Ralph had a wild desire to talk to him; to question him; to make him understand. He did, in fact, interrupt him at one point; but it was useless. The ancient story of failure, ill-luck, undeserved disaster, went down the wind, disconnected syllables flying past Ralph’s ears with a queer alternation of loudness and faintness as if, at certain moments, the man’s memory of his wrongs revived and then flagged, dying down at last into a grumble of resignation, which seemed to represent a final lapse into the accustomed despair. The unhappy voice afflicted Ralph, but it also angered him. And when the elderly man refused to listen and mumbled on, an odd image came to his mind of a lighthouse besieged by the flying bodies of lost birds, who were dashed senseless, by the gale, against the glass. He had a strange sensation that he was both lighthouse and bird; he was steadfast and brilliant; and at the same time he was whirled, with all other things, senseless against the glass. He got up, left his tribute of silver, and pressed on, with the wind against him. The image of the lighthouse and the storm full of birds persisted, taking the place of more definite thoughts, as he walked past the Houses of Parliament and down Grosvenor Road, by the side of the river. In his state of physical fatigue, details merged themselves in the vaster prospect, of which the flying gloom and the intermittent lights of lamp-posts and private houses were the outward token, but he never lost his sense of walking in the direction of Katharine’s house. He took it for granted that something would then happen, and, as he walked on, his mind became more and more full of pleasure and expectancy. Within a certain radius of her house the streets came under the influence of her presence. Each house had an individuality known to Ralph, because of the tremendous individuality of the house in which she lived. For some yards before reaching the Hilberys’ door he walked in a trance of pleasure, but when he reached it, and pushed the gate of the little garden open, he hesitated. He did not know what to do next. There was no hurry, however, for the outside of the house held pleasure enough to last him some time longer. He crossed the road, and leant against the balustrade of the Embankment, fixing his eyes upon the house.

Lights burnt in the three long windows of the drawing-room. The space of the room behind became, in Ralph’s vision, the centre of the dark, flying wilderness of the world; the justification for the welter of confusion surrounding it; the steady light which cast its beams, like those of a lighthouse, with searching composure over the trackless waste. In this little sanctuary were gathered together several different people, but their identity was dissolved in a general glory of something that might, perhaps, be called civilization; at any rate, all dryness, all safety, all that stood up above the surge and preserved a consciousness of its own, was centred in the drawing-room of the Hilberys. Its purpose was beneficent; and yet so far above his level as to have something austere about it, a light that cast itself out and yet kept itself aloof. Then he began, in his mind, to distinguish different individuals within, consciously refusing as yet to attack the figure of Katharine. His thoughts lingered over Mrs. Hilbery and Cassandra; and then he turned to Rodney and Mr. Hilbery. Physically, he saw them bathed in that steady flow of yellow light which filled the long oblongs of the windows; in their movements they were beautiful; and in their speech he figured a reserve of meaning, unspoken, but understood. At length, after all this half-conscious selection and arrangement, he allowed himself to approach the figure of Katharine herself; and instantly the scene was flooded with excitement. He did not see her in the body; he seemed curiously to see her as a shape of light, the light itself; he seemed, simplified and exhausted as he was, to be like one of those lost birds fascinated by the lighthouse and held to the glass by the splendour of the blaze.

These thoughts drove him to tramp a beat up and down the pavement before the Hilberys’ gate. He did not trouble himself to make any plans for the future. Something of an unknown kind would decide both the coming year and the coming hour. Now and again, in his vigil, he sought the light in the long windows, or glanced at the ray which gilded a few leaves and a few blades of grass in the little garden. For a long time the light burnt without changing. He had just reached the limit of his beat and was turning, when the front door opened, and the aspect of the house was entirely changed. A black figure came down the little pathway and paused at the gate. Denham understood instantly that it was Rodney. Without hesitation, and conscious only of a great friendliness for any one coming from that lighted room, he walked straight up to him and stopped him. In the flurry of the wind Rodney was taken aback, and for the moment tried to press on, muttering something, as if he suspected a demand upon his charity.

“Goodness, Denham, what are you doing here?” he exclaimed, recognizing him.

Ralph mumbled something about being on his way home. They walked on together, though Rodney walked quick enough to make it plain that he had no wish for company.

He was very unhappy. That afternoon Cassandra had repulsed him; he had tried to explain to her the difficulties of the situation, and to suggest the nature of his feelings for her without saying anything definite or anything offensive to her. But he had lost his head; under the goad of Katharine’s ridicule he had said too much, and Cassandra, superb in her dignity and severity, had refused to hear another word, and threatened an immediate return to her home. His agitation, after an evening spent between the two women, was extreme. Moreover, he could not help suspecting that Ralph was wandering near the Hilberys’ house, at this hour, for reasons connected with Katharine. There was probably some understanding between them—not that anything of the kind mattered to him now. He was convinced that he had never cared for any one save Cassandra, and Katharine’s future was no concern of his. Aloud, he said, shortly, that he was very tired and wished to find a cab. But on Sunday night, on the Embankment, cabs were hard to come by, and Rodney found himself constrained to walk some distance, at any rate, in Denham’s company. Denham maintained his silence. Rodney’s irritation lapsed. He found the silence oddly suggestive of the good masculine qualities which he much respected, and had at this moment great reason to need. After the mystery, difficulty, and uncertainty of dealing with the other sex, intercourse with one’s own is apt to have a composing and even ennobling influence, since plain speaking is possible and subterfuges of no avail. Rodney, too, was much in need of a confidant; Katharine, despite her promises of help, had failed him at the critical moment; she had gone off with Denham; she was, perhaps, tormenting Denham as she had tormented him. How grave and stable he seemed, speaking little, and walking firmly, compared with what Rodney knew of his own torments and indecisions! He began to cast about for some way of telling the story of his relations with Katharine and Cassandra that would not lower him in Denham’s eyes. It then occurred to him that, perhaps, Katharine herself had confided in Denham; they had something in common; it was likely that they had discussed him that very afternoon. The desire to discover what they had said of him now came uppermost in his mind. He recalled Katharine’s laugh; he remembered that she had gone, laughing, to walk with Denham.

“Did you stay long after we’d left?” he asked abruptly.

“No. We went back to my house.”

This seemed to confirm Rodney’s belief that he had been discussed. He turned over the unpalatable idea for a while, in silence.

“Women are incomprehensible creatures, Denham!” he then exclaimed.

“Um,” said Denham, who seemed to himself possessed of complete understanding, not merely of women, but of the entire universe. He could read Rodney, too, like a book. He knew that he was unhappy, and he pitied him, and wished to help him.

“You say something and they—fly into a passion. Or for no reason at all, they laugh. I take it that no amount of education will——” The remainder of the sentence was lost in the high wind, against which they had to struggle; but Denham understood that he referred to Katharine’s laughter, and that the memory of it was still hurting him. In comparison with Rodney, Denham felt himself very secure; he saw Rodney as one of the lost birds dashed senseless against the glass; one of the flying bodies of which the air was full. But he and Katharine were alone together, aloft, splendid, and luminous with a twofold radiance. He pitied the unstable creature beside him; he felt a desire to protect him, exposed without the knowledge which made his own way so direct. They were united as the adventurous are united, though one reaches the goal and the other perishes by the way.

“You couldn’t laugh at some one you cared for.”

This sentence, apparently addressed to no other human being, reached Denham’s ears. The wind seemed to muffle it and fly away with it directly. Had Rodney spoken those words?

“You love her.” Was that his own voice, which seemed to sound in the air several yards in front of him?

“I’ve suffered tortures, Denham, tortures!”

“Yes, yes, I know that.”

“She’s laughed at me.”

“Never—to me.”

The wind blew a space between the words—blew them so far away that they seemed unspoken.

“How I’ve loved her!”

This was certainly spoken by the man at Denham’s side. The voice had all the marks of Rodney’s character, and recalled, with strange vividness, his personal appearance. Denham could see him against the blank buildings and towers of the horizon. He saw him dignified, exalted, and tragic, as he might have appeared thinking of Katharine alone in his rooms at night.

“I am in love with Katharine myself. That is why I am here to-night.”

Ralph spoke distinctly and deliberately, as if Rodney’s confession had made this statement necessary.

Rodney exclaimed something inarticulate.

“Ah, I’ve always known it,” he cried, “I’ve known it from the first. You’ll marry her!”

The cry had a note of despair in it. Again the wind intercepted their words. They said no more. At length they drew up beneath a lamp-post, simultaneously.

“My God, Denham, what fools we both are!” Rodney exclaimed. They looked at each other, queerly, in the light of the lamp. Fools! They seemed to confess to each other the extreme depths of their folly. For the moment, under the lamp-post, they seemed to be aware of some common knowledge which did away with the possibility of rivalry, and made them feel more sympathy for each other than for any one else in the world. Giving simultaneously a little nod, as if in confirmation of this understanding, they parted without speaking again.

[]

Chapter XXIX

Between twelve and one that Sunday night Katharine lay in bed, not asleep, but in that twilight region where a detached and humorous view of our own lot is possible; or if we must be serious, our seriousness is tempered by the swift oncome of slumber and oblivion. She saw the forms of Ralph, William, Cassandra, and herself, as if they were all equally unsubstantial, and, in putting off reality, had gained a kind of dignity which rested upon each impartially. Thus rid of any uncomfortable warmth of partisanship or load of obligation, she was dropping off to sleep when a light tap sounded upon her door. A moment later Cassandra stood beside her, holding a candle and speaking in the low tones proper to the time of night.

“Are you awake, Katharine?”

“Yes, I’m awake. What is it?”

She roused herself, sat up, and asked what in Heaven’s name Cassandra was doing?

“I couldn’t sleep, and I thought I’d come and speak to you—only for a moment, though. I’m going home to-morrow.”

“Home? Why, what has happened?”

“Something happened to-day which makes it impossible for me to stay here.”

Cassandra spoke formally, almost solemnly; the announcement was clearly prepared and marked a crisis of the utmost gravity. She continued what seemed to be part of a set speech.

“I have decided to tell you the whole truth, Katharine. William allowed himself to behave in a way which made me extremely uncomfortable to-day.”

Katharine seemed to waken completely, and at once to be in control of herself.

“At the Zoo?” she asked.

“No, on the way home. When we had tea.”

As if foreseeing that the interview might be long, and the night chilly, Katharine advised Cassandra to wrap herself in a quilt. Cassandra did so with unbroken solemnity.

“There’s a train at eleven,” she said. “I shall tell Aunt Maggie that I have to go suddenly…. I shall make Violet’s visit an excuse. But, after thinking it over, I don’t see how I can go without telling you the truth.”

She was careful to abstain from looking in Katharine’s direction. There was a slight pause.

“But I don’t see the least reason why you should go,” said Katharine eventually. Her voice sounded so astonishingly equable that Cassandra glanced at her. It was impossible to suppose that she was either indignant or surprised; she seemed, on the contrary, sitting up in bed, with her arms clasped round her knees and a little frown on her brow, to be thinking closely upon a matter of indifference to her.

“Because I can’t allow any man to behave to me in that way,” Cassandra replied, and she added, “particularly when I know that he is engaged to some one else.”

“But you like him, don’t you?” Katharine inquired.

“That’s got nothing to do with it,” Cassandra exclaimed indignantly. “I consider his conduct, under the circumstances, most disgraceful.”

This was the last of the sentences of her premeditated speech; and having spoken it she was left unprovided with any more to say in that particular style. When Katharine remarked:

“I should say it had everything to do with it,” Cassandra’s self-possession deserted her.

“I don’t understand you in the least, Katharine. How can you behave as you behave? Ever since I came here I’ve been amazed by you!”

“You’ve enjoyed yourself, haven’t you?” Katharine asked.

“Yes, I have,” Cassandra admitted.

“Anyhow, my behaviour hasn’t spoilt your visit.”

“No,” Cassandra allowed once more. She was completely at a loss. In her forecast of the interview she had taken it for granted that Katharine, after an outburst of incredulity, would agree that Cassandra must return home as soon as possible. But Katharine, on the contrary, accepted her statement at once, seemed neither shocked nor surprised, and merely looked rather more thoughtful than usual. From being a mature woman charged with an important mission, Cassandra shrunk to the stature of an inexperienced child.

“Do you think I’ve been very foolish about it?” she asked.

Katharine made no answer, but still sat deliberating silently, and a certain feeling of alarm took possession of Cassandra. Perhaps her words had struck far deeper than she had thought, into depths beyond her reach, as so much of Katharine was beyond her reach. She thought suddenly that she had been playing with very dangerous tools.

Looking at her at length, Katharine asked slowly, as if she found the question very difficult to ask:

“But do you care for William?”

She marked the agitation and bewilderment of the girl’s expression, and how she looked away from her.

“Do you mean, am I in love with him?” Cassandra asked, breathing quickly, and nervously moving her hands.

“Yes, in love with him,” Katharine repeated.

“How can I love the man you’re engaged to marry?” Cassandra burst out.

“He may be in love with you.”

“I don’t think you’ve any right to say such things, Katharine,” Cassandra exclaimed. “Why do you say them? Don’t you mind in the least how William behaves to other women? If I were engaged, I couldn’t bear it!”

“We’re not engaged,” said Katharine, after a pause.

“Katharine!” Cassandra cried.

“No, we’re not engaged,” Katharine repeated. “But no one knows it but ourselves.”

“But why—I don’t understand—you’re not engaged!” Cassandra said again. “Oh, that explains it! You’re not in love with him! You don’t want to marry him!”

“We aren’t in love with each other any longer,” said Katharine, as if disposing of something for ever and ever.

“How queer, how strange, how unlike other people you are, Katharine,” Cassandra said, her whole body and voice seeming to fall and collapse together, and no trace of anger or excitement remaining, but only a dreamy quietude.

“You’re not in love with him?”

“But I love him,” said Katharine.

Cassandra remained bowed, as if by the weight of the revelation, for some little while longer. Nor did Katharine speak. Her attitude was that of some one who wishes to be concealed as much as possible from observation. She sighed profoundly; she was absolutely silent, and apparently overcome by her thoughts.

“D’you know what time it is?” she said at length, and shook her pillow, as if making ready for sleep.

Cassandra rose obediently, and once more took up her candle. Perhaps the white dressing-gown, and the loosened hair, and something unseeing in the expression of the eyes gave her a likeness to a woman walking in her sleep. Katharine, at least, thought so.

“There’s no reason why I should go home, then?” Cassandra said, pausing. “Unless you want me to go, Katharine? What do you want me to do?”

For the first time their eyes met.

“You wanted us to fall in love,” Cassandra exclaimed, as if she read the certainty there. But as she looked she saw a sight that surprised her. The tears rose slowly in Katharine’s eyes and stood there, brimming but contained—the tears of some profound emotion, happiness, grief, renunciation; an emotion so complex in its nature that to express it was impossible, and Cassandra, bending her head and receiving the tears upon her cheek, accepted them in silence as the consecration of her love.

“Please, miss,” said the maid, about eleven o’clock on the following morning, “Mrs. Milvain is in the kitchen.”

A long wicker basket of flowers and branches had arrived from the country, and Katharine, kneeling upon the floor of the drawing-room, was sorting them while Cassandra watched her from an arm-chair, and absent-mindedly made spasmodic offers of help which were not accepted. The maid’s message had a curious effect upon Katharine.

She rose, walked to the window, and, the maid being gone, said emphatically and even tragically:

“You know what that means.”

Cassandra had understood nothing.

“Aunt Celia is in the kitchen,” Katharine repeated.

“Why in the kitchen?” Cassandra asked, not unnaturally.

“Probably because she’s discovered something,” Katharine replied. Cassandra’s thoughts flew to the subject of her preoccupation.

“About us?” she inquired.

“Heaven knows,” Katharine replied. “I shan’t let her stay in the kitchen, though. I shall bring her up here.”

The sternness with which this was said suggested that to bring Aunt Celia upstairs was, for some reason, a disciplinary measure.

“For goodness’ sake, Katharine,” Cassandra exclaimed, jumping from her chair and showing signs of agitation, “don’t be rash. Don’t let her suspect. Remember, nothing’s certain——”

Katharine assured her by nodding her head several times, but the manner in which she left the room was not calculated to inspire complete confidence in her diplomacy.

Mrs. Milvain was sitting, or rather perching, upon the edge of a chair in the servants’ room. Whether there was any sound reason for her choice of a subterranean chamber, or whether it corresponded with the spirit of her quest, Mrs. Milvain invariably came in by the back door and sat in the servants’ room when she was engaged in confidential family transactions. The ostensible reason she gave was that neither Mr. nor Mrs. Hilbery should be disturbed. But, in truth, Mrs. Milvain depended even more than most elderly women of her generation upon the delicious emotions of intimacy, agony, and secrecy, and the additional thrill provided by the basement was one not to be lightly forfeited. She protested almost plaintively when Katharine proposed to go upstairs.

“I’ve something that I want to say to you in private,” she said, hesitating reluctantly upon the threshold of her ambush.

“The drawing-room is empty——”

“But we might meet your mother upon the stairs. We might disturb your father,” Mrs. Milvain objected, taking the precaution to speak in a whisper already.

But as Katharine’s presence was absolutely necessary to the success of the interview, and as Katharine obstinately receded up the kitchen stairs, Mrs. Milvain had no course but to follow her. She glanced furtively about her as she proceeded upstairs, drew her skirts together, and stepped with circumspection past all doors, whether they were open or shut.

“Nobody will overhear us?” she murmured, when the comparative sanctuary of the drawing-room had been reached. “I see that I have interrupted you,” she added, glancing at the flowers strewn upon the floor. A moment later she inquired, “Was some one sitting with you?” noticing a handkerchief that Cassandra had dropped in her flight.

“Cassandra was helping me to put the flowers in water,” said Katharine, and she spoke so firmly and clearly that Mrs. Milvain glanced nervously at the main door and then at the curtain which divided the little room with the relics from the drawing-room.

“Ah, Cassandra is still with you,” she remarked. “And did William send you those lovely flowers?”

Katharine sat down opposite her aunt and said neither yes nor no. She looked past her, and it might have been thought that she was considering very critically the pattern of the curtains. Another advantage of the basement, from Mrs. Milvain’s point of view, was that it made it necessary to sit very close together, and the light was dim compared with that which now poured through three windows upon Katharine and the basket of flowers, and gave even the slight angular figure of Mrs. Milvain herself a halo of gold.

“They’re from Stogdon House,” said Katharine abruptly, with a little jerk of her head.

Mrs. Milvain felt that it would be easier to tell her niece what she wished to say if they were actually in physical contact, for the spiritual distance between them was formidable. Katharine, however, made no overtures, and Mrs. Milvain, who was possessed of rash but heroic courage, plunged without preface:

“People are talking about you, Katharine. That is why I have come this morning. You forgive me for saying what I’d much rather not say? What I say is only for your own sake, my child.”

“There’s nothing to forgive yet, Aunt Celia,” said Katharine, with apparent good humour.

“People are saying that William goes everywhere with you and Cassandra, and that he is always paying her attentions. At the Markham’s dance he sat out five dances with her. At the Zoo they were seen alone together. They left together. They never came back here till seven in the evening. But that is not all. They say his manner is very marked—he is quite different when she is there.”

Mrs. Milvain, whose words had run themselves together, and whose voice had raised its tone almost to one of protest, here ceased, and looked intently at Katharine, as if to judge the effect of her communication. A slight rigidity had passed over Katharine’s face. Her lips were pressed together; her eyes were contracted, and they were still fixed upon the curtain. These superficial changes covered an extreme inner loathing such as might follow the display of some hideous or indecent spectacle. The indecent spectacle was her own action beheld for the first time from the outside; her aunt’s words made her realize how infinitely repulsive the body of life is without its soul.

“Well?” she said at length.

Mrs. Milvain made a gesture as if to bring her closer, but it was not returned.

“We all know how good you are—how unselfish—how you sacrifice yourself to others. But you’ve been too unselfish, Katharine. You have made Cassandra happy, and she has taken advantage of your goodness.”

“I don’t understand, Aunt Celia,” said Katharine. “What has Cassandra done?”

“Cassandra has behaved in a way that I could not have thought possible,” said Mrs. Milvain warmly. “She has been utterly selfish—utterly heartless. I must speak to her before I go.”

“I don’t understand,” Katharine persisted.

Mrs. Milvain looked at her. Was it possible that Katharine really doubted? that there was something that Mrs. Milvain herself did not understand? She braced herself, and pronounced the tremendous words:

“Cassandra has stolen William’s love.”

Still the words seemed to have curiously little effect.

“Do you mean,” said Katharine, “that he has fallen in love with her?”

“There are ways of making men fall in love with one, Katharine.”

Katharine remained silent. The silence alarmed Mrs. Milvain, and she began hurriedly:

“Nothing would have made me say these things but your own good. I have not wished to interfere; I have not wished to give you pain. I am a useless old woman. I have no children of my own. I only want to see you happy, Katharine.”

Again she stretched forth her arms, but they remained empty.

“You are not going to say these things to Cassandra,” said Katharine suddenly. “You’ve said them to me; that’s enough.”

Katharine spoke so low and with such restraint that Mrs. Milvain had to strain to catch her words, and when she heard them she was dazed by them.

“I’ve made you angry! I knew I should!” she exclaimed. She quivered, and a kind of sob shook her; but even to have made Katharine angry was some relief, and allowed her to feel some of the agreeable sensations of martyrdom.

“Yes,” said Katharine, standing up, “I’m so angry that I don’t want to say anything more. I think you’d better go, Aunt Celia. We don’t understand each other.”

At these words Mrs. Milvain looked for a moment terribly apprehensive; she glanced at her niece’s face, but read no pity there, whereupon she folded her hands upon a black velvet bag which she carried in an attitude that was almost one of prayer. Whatever divinity she prayed to, if pray she did, at any rate she recovered her dignity in a singular way and faced her niece.

“Married love,” she said slowly and with emphasis upon every word, “is the most sacred of all loves. The love of husband and wife is the most holy we know. That is the lesson Mamma’s children learnt from her; that is what they can never forget. I have tried to speak as she would have wished her daughter to speak. You are her grandchild.”

Katharine seemed to judge this defence upon its merits, and then to convict it of falsity.

“I don’t see that there is any excuse for your behaviour,” she said.

At these words Mrs. Milvain rose and stood for a moment beside her niece. She had never met with such treatment before, and she did not know with what weapons to break down the terrible wall of resistance offered her by one who, by virtue of youth and beauty and sex, should have been all tears and supplications. But Mrs. Milvain herself was obstinate; upon a matter of this kind she could not admit that she was either beaten or mistaken. She beheld herself the champion of married love in its purity and supremacy; what her niece stood for she was quite unable to say, but she was filled with the gravest suspicions. The old woman and the young woman stood side by side in unbroken silence. Mrs. Milvain could not make up her mind to withdraw while her principles trembled in the balance and her curiosity remained unappeased. She ransacked her mind for some question that should force Katharine to enlighten her, but the supply was limited, the choice difficult, and while she hesitated the door opened and William Rodney came in. He carried in his hand an enormous and splendid bunch of white and purple flowers, and, either not seeing Mrs. Milvain, or disregarding her, he advanced straight to Katharine, and presented the flowers with the words:

“These are for you, Katharine.”

Katharine took them with a glance that Mrs. Milvain did not fail to intercept. But with all her experience, she did not know what to make of it. She watched anxiously for further illumination. William greeted her without obvious sign of guilt, and, explaining that he had a holiday, both he and Katharine seemed to take it for granted that his holiday should be celebrated with flowers and spent in Cheyne Walk. A pause followed; that, too, was natural; and Mrs. Milvain began to feel that she laid herself open to a charge of selfishness if she stayed. The mere presence of a young man had altered her disposition curiously, and filled her with a desire for a scene which should end in an emotional forgiveness. She would have given much to clasp both nephew and niece in her arms. But she could not flatter herself that any hope of the customary exaltation remained.

“I must go,” she said, and she was conscious of an extreme flatness of spirit.

Neither of them said anything to stop her. William politely escorted her downstairs, and somehow, amongst her protests and embarrassments, Mrs. Milvain forgot to say good-bye to Katharine. She departed, murmuring words about masses of flowers and a drawing-room always beautiful even in the depths of winter.

William came back to Katharine; he found her standing where he had left her.

“I’ve come to be forgiven,” he said. “Our quarrel was perfectly hateful to me. I’ve not slept all night. You’re not angry with me, are you, Katharine?”

She could not bring herself to answer him until she had rid her mind of the impression that her aunt had made on her. It seemed to her that the very flowers were contaminated, and Cassandra’s pocket-handkerchief, for Mrs. Milvain had used them for evidence in her investigations.

“She’s been spying upon us,” she said, “following us about London, overhearing what people are saying——”

“Mrs. Milvain?” Rodney exclaimed. “What has she told you?”

His air of open confidence entirely vanished.

“Oh, people are saying that you’re in love with Cassandra, and that you don’t care for me.”

“They have seen us?” he asked.

“Everything we’ve done for a fortnight has been seen.”

“I told you that would happen!” he exclaimed.

He walked to the window in evident perturbation. Katharine was too indignant to attend to him. She was swept away by the force of her own anger. Clasping Rodney’s flowers, she stood upright and motionless.

Rodney turned away from the window.

“It’s all been a mistake,” he said. “I blame myself for it. I should have known better. I let you persuade me in a moment of madness. I beg you to forget my insanity, Katharine.”

“She wished even to persecute Cassandra!” Katharine burst out, not listening to him. “She threatened to speak to her. She’s capable of it—she’s capable of anything!”

“Mrs. Milvain is not tactful, I know, but you exaggerate, Katharine. People are talking about us. She was right to tell us. It only confirms my own feeling—the position is monstrous.”

At length Katharine realized some part of what he meant.

“You don’t mean that this influences you, William?” she asked in amazement.

“It does,” he said, flushing. “It’s intensely disagreeable to me. I can’t endure that people should gossip about us. And then there’s your cousin—Cassandra——” He paused in embarrassment.

“I came here this morning, Katharine,” he resumed, with a change of voice, “to ask you to forget my folly, my bad temper, my inconceivable behaviour. I came, Katharine, to ask whether we can’t return to the position we were in before this—this season of lunacy. Will you take me back, Katharine, once more and for ever?”

No doubt her beauty, intensified by emotion and enhanced by the flowers of bright colour and strange shape which she carried wrought upon Rodney, and had its share in bestowing upon her the old romance. But a less noble passion worked in him, too; he was inflamed by jealousy. His tentative offer of affection had been rudely and, as he thought, completely repulsed by Cassandra on the preceding day. Denham’s confession was in his mind. And ultimately, Katharine’s dominion over him was of the sort that the fevers of the night cannot exorcise.

“I was as much to blame as you were yesterday,” she said gently, disregarding his question. “I confess, William, the sight of you and Cassandra together made me jealous, and I couldn’t control myself. I laughed at you, I know.”

“You jealous!” William exclaimed. “I assure you, Katharine, you’ve not the slightest reason to be jealous. Cassandra dislikes me, so far as she feels about me at all. I was foolish enough to try to explain the nature of our relationship. I couldn’t resist telling her what I supposed myself to feel for her. She refused to listen, very rightly. But she left me in no doubt of her scorn.”

Katharine hesitated. She was confused, agitated, physically tired, and had already to reckon with the violent feeling of dislike aroused by her aunt which still vibrated through all the rest of her feelings. She sank into a chair and dropped her flowers upon her lap.

“She charmed me,” Rodney continued. “I thought I loved her. But that’s a thing of the past. It’s all over, Katharine. It was a dream—an hallucination. We were both equally to blame, but no harm’s done if you believe how truly I care for you. Say you believe me!”

He stood over her, as if in readiness to seize the first sign of her assent. Precisely at that moment, owing, perhaps, to her vicissitudes of feeling, all sense of love left her, as in a moment a mist lifts from the earth. And when the mist departed a skeleton world and blankness alone remained—a terrible prospect for the eyes of the living to behold. He saw the look of terror in her face, and without understanding its origin, took her hand in his. With the sense of companionship returned a desire, like that of a child for shelter, to accept what he had to offer her—and at that moment it seemed that he offered her the only thing that could make it tolerable to live. She let him press his lips to her cheek, and leant her head upon his arm. It was the moment of his triumph. It was the only moment in which she belonged to him and was dependent upon his protection.

“Yes, yes, yes,” he murmured, “you accept me, Katharine. You love me.”

For a moment she remained silent. He then heard her murmur:

“Cassandra loves you more than I do.”

“Cassandra?” he whispered.

“She loves you,” Katharine repeated. She raised herself and repeated the sentence yet a third time. “She loves you.”

William slowly raised himself. He believed instinctively what Katharine said, but what it meant to him he was unable to understand. Could Cassandra love him? Could she have told Katharine that she loved him? The desire to know the truth of this was urgent, unknown though the consequences might be. The thrill of excitement associated with the thought of Cassandra once more took possession of him. No longer was it the excitement of anticipation and ignorance; it was the excitement of something greater than a possibility, for now he knew her and had measure of the sympathy between them. But who could give him certainty? Could Katharine, Katharine who had lately lain in his arms, Katharine herself the most admired of women? He looked at her, with doubt, and with anxiety, but said nothing.

“Yes, yes,” she said, interpreting his wish for assurance, “it’s true. I know what she feels for you.”

“She loves me?”

Katharine nodded.

“Ah, but who knows what I feel? How can I be sure of my feeling myself? Ten minutes ago I asked you to marry me. I still wish it—I don’t know what I wish——”

He clenched his hands and turned away. He suddenly faced her and demanded: “Tell me what you feel for Denham.”

“For Ralph Denham?” she asked. “Yes!” she exclaimed, as if she had found the answer to some momentarily perplexing question. “You’re jealous of me, William; but you’re not in love with me. I’m jealous of you. Therefore, for both our sakes, I say, speak to Cassandra at once.”

He tried to compose himself. He walked up and down the room; he paused at the window and surveyed the flowers strewn upon the floor. Meanwhile his desire to have Katharine’s assurance confirmed became so insistent that he could no longer deny the overmastering strength of his feeling for Cassandra.

“You’re right,” he exclaimed, coming to a standstill and rapping his knuckles sharply upon a small table carrying one slender vase. “I love Cassandra.”

As he said this, the curtains hanging at the door of the little room parted, and Cassandra herself stepped forth.

“I have overheard every word!” she exclaimed.

A pause succeeded this announcement. Rodney made a step forward and said:

“Then you know what I wish to ask you. Give me your answer——”

She put her hands before her face; she turned away and seemed to shrink from both of them.

“What Katharine said,” she murmured. “But,” she added, raising her head with a look of fear from the kiss with which he greeted her admission, “how frightfully difficult it all is! Our feelings, I mean—yours and mine and Katharine’s. Katharine, tell me, are we doing right?”

“Right—of course we’re doing right,” William answered her, “if, after what you’ve heard, you can marry a man of such incomprehensible confusion, such deplorable——”

“Don’t, William,” Katharine interposed; “Cassandra has heard us; she can judge what we are; she knows better than we could tell her.”

But, still holding William’s hand, questions and desires welled up in Cassandra’s heart. Had she done wrong in listening? Why did Aunt Celia blame her? Did Katharine think her right? Above all, did William really love her, for ever and ever, better than any one?

“I must be first with him, Katharine!” she exclaimed. “I can’t share him even with you.”

“I shall never ask that,” said Katharine. She moved a little away from where they sat and began half-consciously sorting her flowers.

“But you’ve shared with me,” Cassandra said. “Why can’t I share with you? Why am I so mean? I know why it is,” she added. “We understand each other, William and I. You’ve never understood each other. You’re too different.”

“I’ve never admired anybody more,” William interposed.

“It’s not that”—Cassandra tried to enlighten him—“it’s understanding.”

“Have I never understood you, Katharine? Have I been very selfish?”

“Yes,” Cassandra interposed. “You’ve asked her for sympathy, and she’s not sympathetic; you’ve wanted her to be practical, and she’s not practical. You’ve been selfish; you’ve been exacting—and so has Katharine—but it wasn’t anybody’s fault.”

Katharine had listened to this attempt at analysis with keen attention. Cassandra’s words seemed to rub the old blurred image of life and freshen it so marvellously that it looked new again. She turned to William.

“It’s quite true,” she said. “It was nobody’s fault.”

“There are many things that he’ll always come to you for,” Cassandra continued, still reading from her invisible book. “I accept that, Katharine. I shall never dispute it. I want to be generous as you’ve been generous. But being in love makes it more difficult for me.”

They were silent. At length William broke the silence.

“One thing I beg of you both,” he said, and the old nervousness of manner returned as he glanced at Katharine. “We will never discuss these matters again. It’s not that I’m timid and conventional, as you think, Katharine. It’s that it spoils things to discuss them; it unsettles people’s minds; and now we’re all so happy——”

Cassandra ratified this conclusion so far as she was concerned, and William, after receiving the exquisite pleasure of her glance, with its absolute affection and trust, looked anxiously at Katharine.

“Yes, I’m happy,” she assured him. “And I agree. We will never talk about it again.”

“Oh, Katharine, Katharine!” Cassandra cried, holding out her arms while the tears ran down her cheeks.

[]

Chapter XXX

The day was so different from other days to three people in the house that the common routine of household life—the maid waiting at table, Mrs. Hilbery writing a letter, the clock striking, and the door opening, and all the other signs of long-established civilization appeared suddenly to have no meaning save as they lulled Mr. and Mrs. Hilbery into the belief that nothing unusual had taken place. It chanced that Mrs. Hilbery was depressed without visible cause, unless a certain crudeness verging upon coarseness in the temper of her favourite Elizabethans could be held responsible for the mood. At any rate, she had shut up “The Duchess of Malfi” with a sigh, and wished to know, so she told Rodney at dinner, whether there wasn’t some young writer with a touch of the great spirit—somebody who made you believe that life was beautiful? She got little help from Rodney, and after singing her plaintive requiem for the death of poetry by herself, she charmed herself into good spirits again by remembering the existence of Mozart. She begged Cassandra to play to her, and when they went upstairs Cassandra opened the piano directly, and did her best to create an atmosphere of unmixed beauty. At the sound of the first notes Katharine and Rodney both felt an enormous sense of relief at the licence which the music gave them to loosen their hold upon the mechanism of behaviour. They lapsed into the depths of thought. Mrs. Hilbery was soon spirited away into a perfectly congenial mood, that was half reverie and half slumber, half delicious melancholy and half pure bliss. Mr. Hilbery alone attended. He was extremely musical, and made Cassandra aware that he listened to every note. She played her best, and won his approval. Leaning slightly forward in his chair, and turning his little green stone, he weighed the intention of her phrases approvingly, but stopped her suddenly to complain of a noise behind him. The window was unhasped. He signed to Rodney, who crossed the room immediately to put the matter right. He stayed a moment longer by the window than was, perhaps, necessary, and having done what was needed, drew his chair a little closer than before to Katharine’s side. The music went on. Under cover of some exquisite run of melody, he leant towards her and whispered something. She glanced at her father and mother, and a moment later left the room, almost unobserved, with Rodney.

“What is it?” she asked, as soon as the door was shut.

Rodney made no answer, but led her downstairs into the dining-room on the ground floor. Even when he had shut the door he said nothing, but went straight to the window and parted the curtains. He beckoned to Katharine.

“There he is again,” he said. “Look, there—under the lamp-post.”

Katharine looked. She had no idea what Rodney was talking about. A vague feeling of alarm and mystery possessed her. She saw a man standing on the opposite side of the road facing the house beneath a lamp-post. As they looked the figure turned, walked a few steps, and came back again to his old position. It seemed to her that he was looking fixedly at her, and was conscious of her gaze on him. She knew, in a flash, who the man was who was watching them. She drew the curtain abruptly.

“Denham,” said Rodney. “He was there last night too.” He spoke sternly. His whole manner had become full of authority. Katharine felt almost as if he accused her of some crime. She was pale and uncomfortably agitated, as much by the strangeness of Rodney’s behaviour as by the sight of Ralph Denham.

“If he chooses to come——” she said defiantly.

“You can’t let him wait out there. I shall tell him to come in.” Rodney spoke with such decision that when he raised his arm Katharine expected him to draw the curtain instantly. She caught his hand with a little exclamation.

“Wait!” she cried. “I don’t allow you.”

“You can’t wait,” he replied. “You’ve gone too far.” His hand remained upon the curtain. “Why don’t you admit, Katharine,” he broke out, looking at her with an expression of contempt as well as of anger, “that you love him? Are you going to treat him as you treated me?”

She looked at him, wondering, in spite of all her perplexity, at the spirit that possessed him.

“I forbid you to draw the curtain,” she said.

He reflected, and then took his hand away.

“I’ve no right to interfere,” he concluded. “I’ll leave you. Or, if you like, we’ll go back to the drawing-room.”

“No. I can’t go back,” she said, shaking her head. She bent her head in thought.

“You love him, Katharine,” Rodney said suddenly. His tone had lost something of its sternness, and might have been used to urge a child to confess its fault. She raised her eyes and fixed them upon him.

“I love him?” she repeated. He nodded. She searched his face, as if for further confirmation of his words, and, as he remained silent and expectant, turned away once more and continued her thoughts. He observed her closely, but without stirring, as if he gave her time to make up her mind to fulfil her obvious duty. The strains of Mozart reached them from the room above.

“Now,” she said suddenly, with a sort of desperation, rising from her chair and seeming to command Rodney to fulfil his part. He drew the curtain instantly, and she made no attempt to stop him. Their eyes at once sought the same spot beneath the lamp-post.

“He’s not there!” she exclaimed.

No one was there. William threw the window up and looked out. The wind rushed into the room, together with the sound of distant wheels, footsteps hurrying along the pavement, and the cries of sirens hooting down the river.

“Denham!” William cried.

“Ralph!” said Katharine, but she spoke scarcely louder than she might have spoken to some one in the same room. With their eyes fixed upon the opposite side of the road, they did not notice a figure close to the railing which divided the garden from the street. But Denham had crossed the road and was standing there. They were startled by his voice close at hand.

“Rodney!”

“There you are! Come in, Denham.” Rodney went to the front door and opened it. “Here he is,” he said, bringing Ralph with him into the dining-room where Katharine stood, with her back to the open window. Their eyes met for a second. Denham looked half dazed by the strong light, and, buttoned in his overcoat, with his hair ruffled across his forehead by the wind, he seemed like somebody rescued from an open boat out at sea. William promptly shut the window and drew the curtains. He acted with a cheerful decision as if he were master of the situation, and knew exactly what he meant to do.

“You’re the first to hear the news, Denham,” he said. “Katharine isn’t going to marry me, after all.”

“Where shall I put——” Ralph began vaguely, holding out his hat and glancing about him; he balanced it carefully against a silver bowl that stood upon the sideboard. He then sat himself down rather heavily at the head of the oval dinner-table. Rodney stood on one side of him and Katharine on the other. He appeared to be presiding over some meeting from which most of the members were absent. Meanwhile, he waited, and his eyes rested upon the glow of the beautifully polished mahogany table.

“William is engaged to Cassandra,” said Katharine briefly.

At that Denham looked up quickly at Rodney. Rodney’s expression changed. He lost his self-possession. He smiled a little nervously, and then his attention seemed to be caught by a fragment of melody from the floor above. He seemed for a moment to forget the presence of the others. He glanced towards the door.

“I congratulate you,” said Denham.

“Yes, yes. We’re all mad—quite out of our minds, Denham,” he said. “It’s partly Katharine’s doing—partly mine.” He looked oddly round the room as if he wished to make sure that the scene in which he played a part had some real existence. “Quite mad,” he repeated. “Even Katharine—” His gaze rested upon her finally, as if she, too, had changed from his old view of her. He smiled at her as if to encourage her. “Katharine shall explain,” he said, and giving a little nod to Denham, he left the room.

Katharine sat down at once, and leant her chin upon her hands. So long as Rodney was in the room the proceedings of the evening had seemed to be in his charge, and had been marked by a certain unreality. Now that she was alone with Ralph she felt at once that a constraint had been taken from them both. She felt that they were alone at the bottom of the house, which rose, story upon story, upon the top of them.

“Why were you waiting out there?” she asked.

“For the chance of seeing you,” he replied.

“You would have waited all night if it hadn’t been for William. It’s windy too. You must have been cold. What could you see? Nothing but our windows.”

“It was worth it. I heard you call me.”

“I called you?” She had called unconsciously.

“They were engaged this morning,” she told him, after a pause.

“You’re glad?” he asked.

She bent her head. “Yes, yes,” she sighed. “But you don’t know how good he is—what he’s done for me—” Ralph made a sound of understanding. “You waited there last night too?” she asked.

“Yes. I can wait,” Denham replied.

The words seemed to fill the room with an emotion which Katharine connected with the sound of distant wheels, the footsteps hurrying along the pavement, the cries of sirens hooting down the river, the darkness and the wind. She saw the upright figure standing beneath the lamp-post.

“Waiting in the dark,” she said, glancing at the window, as if he saw what she was seeing. “Ah, but it’s different—” She broke off. “I’m not the person you think me. Until you realize that it’s impossible——”

Placing her elbows on the table, she slid her ruby ring up and down her finger abstractedly. She frowned at the rows of leather-bound books opposite her. Ralph looked keenly at her. Very pale, but sternly concentrated upon her meaning, beautiful but so little aware of herself as to seem remote from him also, there was something distant and abstract about her which exalted him and chilled him at the same time.

“No, you’re right,” he said. “I don’t know you. I’ve never known you.”

“Yet perhaps you know me better than any one else,” she mused.

Some detached instinct made her aware that she was gazing at a book which belonged by rights to some other part of the house. She walked over to the shelf, took it down, and returned to her seat, placing the book on the table between them. Ralph opened it and looked at the portrait of a man with a voluminous white shirt-collar, which formed the frontispiece.

“I say I do know you, Katharine,” he affirmed, shutting the book. “It’s only for moments that I go mad.”

“Do you call two whole nights a moment?”

“I swear to you that now, at this instant, I see you precisely as you are. No one has ever known you as I know you…. Could you have taken down that book just now if I hadn’t known you?”

“That’s true,” she replied, “but you can’t think how I’m divided—how I’m at my ease with you, and how I’m bewildered. The unreality—the dark—the waiting outside in the wind—yes, when you look at me, not seeing me, and I don’t see you either…. But I do see,” she went on quickly, changing her position and frowning again, “heaps of things, only not you.”

“Tell me what you see,” he urged.

But she could not reduce her vision to words, since it was no single shape coloured upon the dark, but rather a general excitement, an atmosphere, which, when she tried to visualize it, took form as a wind scouring the flanks of northern hills and flashing light upon cornfields and pools.

“Impossible,” she sighed, laughing at the ridiculous notion of putting any part of this into words.

“Try, Katharine,” Ralph urged her.

“But I can’t—I’m talking a sort of nonsense—the sort of nonsense one talks to oneself.” She was dismayed by the expression of longing and despair upon his face. “I was thinking about a mountain in the North of England,” she attempted. “It’s too silly—I won’t go on.”

“We were there together?” he pressed her.

“No. I was alone.” She seemed to be disappointing the desire of a child. His face fell.

“You’re always alone there?”

“I can’t explain.” She could not explain that she was essentially alone there. “It’s not a mountain in the North of England. It’s an imagination—a story one tells oneself. You have yours too?”

“You’re with me in mine. You’re the thing I make up, you see.”

“Oh, I see,” she sighed. “That’s why it’s so impossible.” She turned upon him almost fiercely. “You must try to stop it,” she said.

“I won’t,” he replied roughly, “because I—” He stopped. He realized that the moment had come to impart that news of the utmost importance which he had tried to impart to Mary Datchet, to Rodney upon the Embankment, to the drunken tramp upon the seat. How should he offer it to Katharine? He looked quickly at her. He saw that she was only half attentive to him; only a section of her was exposed to him. The sight roused in him such desperation that he had much ado to control his impulse to rise and leave the house. Her hand lay loosely curled upon the table. He seized it and grasped it firmly as if to make sure of her existence and of his own. “Because I love you, Katharine,” he said.

Some roundness or warmth essential to that statement was absent from his voice, and she had merely to shake her head very slightly for him to drop her hand and turn away in shame at his own impotence. He thought that she had detected his wish to leave her. She had discerned the break in his resolution, the blankness in the heart of his vision. It was true that he had been happier out in the street, thinking of her, than now that he was in the same room with her. He looked at her with a guilty expression on his face. But her look expressed neither disappointment nor reproach. Her pose was easy, and she seemed to give effect to a mood of quiet speculation by the spinning of her ruby ring upon the polished table. Denham forgot his despair in wondering what thoughts now occupied her.

“You don’t believe me?” he said. His tone was humble, and made her smile at him.

“As far as I understand you—but what should you advise me to do with this ring?” she asked, holding it out.

“I should advise you to let me keep it for you,” he replied, in the same tone of half-humorous gravity.

“After what you’ve said, I can hardly trust you—unless you’ll unsay what you’ve said?”

“Very well. I’m not in love with you.”

“But I think you are in love with me…. As I am with you,” she added casually enough. “At least,” she said, slipping her ring back to its old position, “what other word describes the state we’re in?”

She looked at him gravely and inquiringly, as if in search of help.

“It’s when I’m with you that I doubt it, not when I’m alone,” he stated.

“So I thought,” she replied.

In order to explain to her his state of mind, Ralph recounted his experience with the photograph, the letter, and the flower picked at Kew. She listened very seriously.

“And then you went raving about the streets,” she mused. “Well, it’s bad enough. But my state is worse than yours, because it hasn’t anything to do with facts. It’s an hallucination, pure and simple—an intoxication…. One can be in love with pure reason?” she hazarded. “Because if you’re in love with a vision, I believe that that’s what I’m in love with.”

This conclusion seemed fantastic and profoundly unsatisfactory to Ralph, but after the astonishing variations of his own sentiments during the past half-hour he could not accuse her of fanciful exaggeration.

“Rodney seems to know his own mind well enough,” he said almost bitterly. The music, which had ceased, had now begun again, and the melody of Mozart seemed to express the easy and exquisite love of the two upstairs.

“Cassandra never doubted for a moment. But we—” she glanced at him as if to ascertain his position, “we see each other only now and then——”

“Like lights in a storm——”

“In the midst of a hurricane,” she concluded, as the window shook beneath the pressure of the wind. They listened to the sound in silence.

Here the door opened with considerable hesitation, and Mrs. Hilbery’s head appeared, at first with an air of caution, but having made sure that she had admitted herself to the dining-room and not to some more unusual region, she came completely inside and seemed in no way taken aback by the sight she saw. She seemed, as usual, bound on some quest of her own which was interrupted pleasantly but strangely by running into one of those queer, unnecessary ceremonies that other people thought fit to indulge in.

“Please don’t let me interrupt you, Mr.——” she was at a loss, as usual, for the name, and Katharine thought that she did not recognize him. “I hope you’ve found something nice to read,” she added, pointing to the book upon the table. “Byron—ah, Byron. I’ve known people who knew Lord Byron,” she said.

Katharine, who had risen in some confusion, could not help smiling at the thought that her mother found it perfectly natural and desirable that her daughter should be reading Byron in the dining-room late at night alone with a strange young man. She blessed a disposition that was so convenient, and felt tenderly towards her mother and her mother’s eccentricities. But Ralph observed that although Mrs. Hilbery held the book so close to her eyes she was not reading a word.

“My dear mother, why aren’t you in bed?” Katharine exclaimed, changing astonishingly in the space of a minute to her usual condition of authoritative good sense. “Why are you wandering about?”

“I’m sure I should like your poetry better than I like Lord Byron’s,” said Mrs. Hilbery, addressing Ralph Denham.

“Mr. Denham doesn’t write poetry; he has written articles for father, for the Review,” Katharine said, as if prompting her memory.

“Oh dear! How dull!” Mrs. Hilbery exclaimed, with a sudden laugh that rather puzzled her daughter.

Ralph found that she had turned upon him a gaze that was at once very vague and very penetrating.

“But I’m sure you read poetry at night. I always judge by the expression of the eyes,” Mrs. Hilbery continued. (“The windows of the soul,” she added parenthetically.) “I don’t know much about the law,” she went on, “though many of my relations were lawyers. Some of them looked very handsome, too, in their wigs. But I think I do know a little about poetry,” she added. “And all the things that aren’t written down, but—but—” She waved her hand, as if to indicate the wealth of unwritten poetry all about them. “The night and the stars, the dawn coming up, the barges swimming past, the sun setting…. Ah dear,” she sighed, “well, the sunset is very lovely too. I sometimes think that poetry isn’t so much what we write as what we feel, Mr. Denham.”

During this speech of her mother’s Katharine had turned away, and Ralph felt that Mrs. Hilbery was talking to him apart, with a desire to ascertain something about him which she veiled purposely by the vagueness of her words. He felt curiously encouraged and heartened by the beam in her eye rather than by her actual words. From the distance of her age and sex she seemed to be waving to him, hailing him as a ship sinking beneath the horizon might wave its flag of greeting to another setting out upon the same voyage. He bent his head, saying nothing, but with a curious certainty that she had read an answer to her inquiry that satisfied her. At any rate, she rambled off into a description of the Law Courts which turned to a denunciation of English justice, which, according to her, imprisoned poor men who couldn’t pay their debts. “Tell me, shall we ever do without it all?” she asked, but at this point Katharine gently insisted that her mother should go to bed. Looking back from half-way up the staircase, Katharine seemed to see Denham’s eyes watching her steadily and intently with an expression that she had guessed in them when he stood looking at the windows across the road.

[]

Chapter XXXI

The tray which brought Katharine’s cup of tea the next morning brought, also, a note from her mother, announcing that it was her intention to catch an early train to Stratford-on-Avon that very day.

“Please find out the best way of getting there,” the note ran, “and wire to dear Sir John Burdett to expect me, with my love. I’ve been dreaming all night of you and Shakespeare, dearest Katharine.”

This was no momentary impulse. Mrs. Hilbery had been dreaming of Shakespeare any time these six months, toying with the idea of an excursion to what she considered the heart of the civilized world. To stand six feet above Shakespeare’s bones, to see the very stones worn by his feet, to reflect that the oldest man’s oldest mother had very likely seen Shakespeare’s daughter—such thoughts roused an emotion in her, which she expressed at unsuitable moments, and with a passion that would not have been unseemly in a pilgrim to a sacred shrine. The only strange thing was that she wished to go by herself. But, naturally enough, she was well provided with friends who lived in the neighbourhood of Shakespeare’s tomb, and were delighted to welcome her; and she left later to catch her train in the best of spirits. There was a man selling violets in the street. It was a fine day. She would remember to send Mr. Hilbery the first daffodil she saw. And, as she ran back into the hall to tell Katharine, she felt, she had always felt, that Shakespeare’s command to leave his bones undisturbed applied only to odious curiosity-mongers—not to dear Sir John and herself. Leaving her daughter to cogitate the theory of Anne Hathaway’s sonnets, and the buried manuscripts here referred to, with the implied menace to the safety of the heart of civilization itself, she briskly shut the door of her taxi-cab, and was whirled off upon the first stage of her pilgrimage.

The house was oddly different without her. Katharine found the maids already in possession of her room, which they meant to clean thoroughly during her absence. To Katharine it seemed as if they had brushed away sixty years or so with the first flick of their damp dusters. It seemed to her that the work she had tried to do in that room was being swept into a very insignificant heap of dust. The china shepherdesses were already shining from a bath of hot water. The writing-table might have belonged to a professional man of methodical habits.

Gathering together a few papers upon which she was at work, Katharine proceeded to her own room with the intention of looking through them, perhaps, in the course of the morning. But she was met on the stairs by Cassandra, who followed her up, but with such intervals between each step that Katharine began to feel her purpose dwindling before they had reached the door. Cassandra leant over the banisters, and looked down upon the Persian rug that lay on the floor of the hall.

“Doesn’t everything look odd this morning?” she inquired. “Are you really going to spend the morning with those dull old letters, because if so——”

The dull old letters, which would have turned the heads of the most sober of collectors, were laid upon a table, and, after a moment’s pause, Cassandra, looking grave all of a sudden, asked Katharine where she should find the “History of England” by Lord Macaulay. It was downstairs in Mr. Hilbery’s study. The cousins descended together in search of it. They diverged into the drawing-room for the good reason that the door was open. The portrait of Richard Alardyce attracted their attention.

“I wonder what he was like?” It was a question that Katharine had often asked herself lately.

“Oh, a fraud like the rest of them—at least Henry says so,” Cassandra replied. “Though I don’t believe everything Henry says,” she added a little defensively.

Down they went into Mr. Hilbery’s study, where they began to look among his books. So desultory was this examination that some fifteen minutes failed to discover the work they were in search of.

“Must you read Macaulay’s History, Cassandra?” Katharine asked, with a stretch of her arms.

“I must,” Cassandra replied briefly.

“Well, I’m going to leave you to look for it by yourself.”

“Oh no, Katharine. Please stay and help me. You see—you see—I told William I’d read a little every day. And I want to tell him that I’ve begun when he comes.”

“When does William come?” Katharine asked, turning to the shelves again.

“To tea, if that suits you?”

“If it suits me to be out, I suppose you mean.”

“Oh, you’re horrid…. Why shouldn’t you——?”

“Yes?”

“Why shouldn’t you be happy too?”

“I am quite happy,” Katharine replied.

“I mean as I am. Katharine,” she said impulsively, “do let’s be married on the same day.”

“To the same man?”

“Oh no. But why shouldn’t you marry—some one else?”

“Here’s your Macaulay,” said Katharine, turning round with the book in her hand. “I should say you’d better begin to read at once if you mean to be educated by tea-time.”

“Damn Lord Macaulay!” cried Cassandra, slapping the book upon the table. “Would you rather not talk?”

“We’ve talked enough already,” Katharine replied evasively.

“I know I shan’t be able to settle to Macaulay,” said Cassandra, looking ruefully at the dull red cover of the prescribed volume, which, however, possessed a talismanic property, since William admired it. He had advised a little serious reading for the morning hours.

“Have you read Macaulay?” she asked.

“No. William never tried to educate me.” As she spoke she saw the light fade from Cassandra’s face, as if she had implied some other, more mysterious, relationship. She was stung with compunction. She marvelled at her own rashness in having influenced the life of another, as she had influenced Cassandra’s life.

“We weren’t serious,” she said quickly.

“But I’m fearfully serious,” said Cassandra, with a little shudder, and her look showed that she spoke the truth. She turned and glanced at Katharine as she had never glanced at her before. There was fear in her glance, which darted on her and then dropped guiltily. Oh, Katharine had everything—beauty, mind, character. She could never compete with Katharine; she could never be safe so long as Katharine brooded over her, dominating her, disposing of her. She called her cold, unseeing, unscrupulous, but the only sign she gave outwardly was a curious one—she reached out her hand and grasped the volume of history. At that moment the bell of the telephone rang and Katharine went to answer it. Cassandra, released from observation, dropped her book and clenched her hands. She suffered more fiery torture in those few minutes than she had suffered in the whole of her life; she learnt more of her capacities for feeling. But when Katharine reappeared she was calm, and had gained a look of dignity that was new to her.

“Was that him?” she asked.

“It was Ralph Denham,” Katharine replied.

“I meant Ralph Denham.”

“Why did you mean Ralph Denham? What has William told you about Ralph Denham?” The accusation that Katharine was calm, callous, and indifferent was not possible in face of her present air of animation. She gave Cassandra no time to frame an answer. “Now, when are you and William going to be married?” she asked.

Cassandra made no reply for some moments. It was, indeed, a very difficult question to answer. In conversation the night before, William had indicated to Cassandra that, in his belief, Katharine was becoming engaged to Ralph Denham in the dining-room. Cassandra, in the rosy light of her own circumstances, had been disposed to think that the matter must be settled already. But a letter which she had received that morning from William, while ardent in its expression of affection, had conveyed to her obliquely that he would prefer the announcement of their engagement to coincide with that of Katharine’s. This document Cassandra now produced, and read aloud, with considerable excisions and much hesitation.

“… a thousand pities—ahem—I fear we shall cause a great deal of natural annoyance. If, on the other hand, what I have reason to think will happen, should happen—within reasonable time, and the present position is not in any way offensive to you, delay would, in my opinion, serve all our interests better than a premature explanation, which is bound to cause more surprise than is desirable——”

“Very like William,” Katharine exclaimed, having gathered the drift of these remarks with a speed that, by itself, disconcerted Cassandra.

“I quite understand his feelings,” Cassandra replied. “I quite agree with them. I think it would be much better, if you intend to marry Mr. Denham, that we should wait as William says.”

“But, then, if I don’t marry him for months—or, perhaps, not at all?”

Cassandra was silent. The prospect appalled her. Katharine had been telephoning to Ralph Denham; she looked queer, too; she must be, or about to become, engaged to him. But if Cassandra could have overheard the conversation upon the telephone, she would not have felt so certain that it tended in that direction. It was to this effect:

“I’m Ralph Denham speaking. I’m in my right senses now.”

“How long did you wait outside the house?”

“I went home and wrote you a letter. I tore it up.”

“I shall tear up everything too.”

“I shall come.”

“Yes. Come to-day.”

“I must explain to you——”

“Yes. We must explain——”

A long pause followed. Ralph began a sentence, which he cancelled with the word, “Nothing.” Suddenly, together, at the same moment, they said good-bye. And yet, if the telephone had been miraculously connected with some higher atmosphere pungent with the scent of thyme and the savour of salt, Katharine could hardly have breathed in a keener sense of exhilaration. She ran downstairs on the crest of it. She was amazed to find herself already committed by William and Cassandra to marry the owner of the halting voice she had just heard on the telephone. The tendency of her spirit seemed to be in an altogether different direction; and of a different nature. She had only to look at Cassandra to see what the love that results in engagement and marriage means. She considered for a moment, and then said: “If you don’t want to tell people yourselves, I’ll do it for you. I know William has feelings about these matters that make it very difficult for him to do anything.”

“Because he’s fearfully sensitive about other people’s feelings,” said Cassandra. “The idea that he could upset Aunt Maggie or Uncle Trevor would make him ill for weeks.”

This interpretation of what she was used to call William’s conventionality was new to Katharine. And yet she felt it now to be the true one.

“Yes, you’re right,” she said.

“And then he worships beauty. He wants life to be beautiful in every part of it. Have you ever noticed how exquisitely he finishes everything? Look at the address on that envelope. Every letter is perfect.”

Whether this applied also to the sentiments expressed in the letter, Katharine was not so sure; but when William’s solicitude was spent upon Cassandra it not only failed to irritate her, as it had done when she was the object of it, but appeared, as Cassandra said, the fruit of his love of beauty.

“Yes,” she said, “he loves beauty.”

“I hope we shall have a great many children,” said Cassandra. “He loves children.”

This remark made Katharine realize the depths of their intimacy better than any other words could have done; she was jealous for one moment, but the next she was humiliated. She had known William for years, and she had never once guessed that he loved children. She looked at the queer glow of exaltation in Cassandra’s eyes, through which she was beholding the true spirit of a human being, and wished that she would go on talking about William for ever. Cassandra was not unwilling to gratify her. She talked on. The morning slipped away. Katharine scarcely changed her position on the edge of her father’s writing-table, and Cassandra never opened the “History of England.”

And yet it must be confessed that there were vast lapses in the attention which Katharine bestowed upon her cousin. The atmosphere was wonderfully congenial for thoughts of her own. She lost herself sometimes in such deep reverie that Cassandra, pausing, could look at her for moments unperceived. What could Katharine be thinking about, unless it were Ralph Denham? She was satisfied, by certain random replies, that Katharine had wandered a little from the subject of William’s perfections. But Katharine made no sign. She always ended these pauses by saying something so natural that Cassandra was deluded into giving fresh examples of her absorbing theme. Then they lunched, and the only sign that Katharine gave of abstraction was to forget to help the pudding. She looked so like her mother, as she sat there oblivious of the tapioca, that Cassandra was startled into exclaiming:

“How like Aunt Maggie you look!”

“Nonsense,” said Katharine, with more irritation than the remark seemed to call for.

In truth, now that her mother was away, Katharine did feel less sensible than usual, but as she argued it to herself, there was much less need for sense. Secretly, she was a little shaken by the evidence which the morning had supplied of her immense capacity for—what could one call it?—rambling over an infinite variety of thoughts that were too foolish to be named. She was, for example, walking down a road in Northumberland in the August sunset; at the inn she left her companion, who was Ralph Denham, and was transported, not so much by her own feet as by some invisible means, to the top of a high hill. Here the scents, the sounds among the dry heather-roots, the grass-blades pressed upon the palm of her hand, were all so perceptible that she could experience each one separately. After this her mind made excursions into the dark of the air, or settled upon the surface of the sea, which could be discovered over there, or with equal unreason it returned to its couch of bracken beneath the stars of midnight, and visited the snow valleys of the moon. These fancies would have been in no way strange, since the walls of every mind are decorated with some such tracery, but she found herself suddenly pursuing such thoughts with an extreme ardour, which became a desire to change her actual condition for something matching the conditions of her dream. Then she started; then she awoke to the fact that Cassandra was looking at her in amazement.

Cassandra would have liked to feel certain that, when Katharine made no reply at all or one wide of the mark, she was making up her mind to get married at once, but it was difficult, if this were so, to account for some remarks that Katharine let fall about the future. She recurred several times to the summer, as if she meant to spend that season in solitary wandering. She seemed to have a plan in her mind which required Bradshaws and the names of inns.

Cassandra was driven finally, by her own unrest, to put on her clothes and wander out along the streets of Chelsea, on the pretence that she must buy something. But, in her ignorance of the way, she became panic-stricken at the thought of being late, and no sooner had she found the shop she wanted, than she fled back again in order to be at home when William came. He came, indeed, five minutes after she had sat down by the tea-table, and she had the happiness of receiving him alone. His greeting put her doubts of his affection at rest, but the first question he asked was:

“Has Katharine spoken to you?”

“Yes. But she says she’s not engaged. She doesn’t seem to think she’s ever going to be engaged.”

William frowned, and looked annoyed.

“They telephoned this morning, and she behaves very oddly. She forgets to help the pudding,” Cassandra added by way of cheering him.

“My dear child, after what I saw and heard last night, it’s not a question of guessing or suspecting. Either she’s engaged to him—or——”

He left his sentence unfinished, for at this point Katharine herself appeared. With his recollections of the scene the night before, he was too self-conscious even to look at her, and it was not until she told him of her mother’s visit to Stratford-on-Avon that he raised his eyes. It was clear that he was greatly relieved. He looked round him now, as if he felt at his ease, and Cassandra exclaimed:

“Don’t you think everything looks quite different?”

“You’ve moved the sofa?” he asked.

“No. Nothing’s been touched,” said Katharine. “Everything’s exactly the same.” But as she said this, with a decision which seemed to make it imply that more than the sofa was unchanged, she held out a cup into which she had forgotten to pour any tea. Being told of her forgetfulness, she frowned with annoyance, and said that Cassandra was demoralizing her. The glance she cast upon them, and the resolute way in which she plunged them into speech, made William and Cassandra feel like children who had been caught prying. They followed her obediently, making conversation. Any one coming in might have judged them acquaintances met, perhaps, for the third time. If that were so, one must have concluded that the hostess suddenly bethought her of an engagement pressing for fulfilment. First Katharine looked at her watch, and then she asked William to tell her the right time. When told that it was ten minutes to five she rose at once, and said:

“Then I’m afraid I must go.”

She left the room, holding her unfinished bread and butter in her hand. William glanced at Cassandra.

“Well, she is queer!” Cassandra exclaimed.

William looked perturbed. He knew more of Katharine than Cassandra did, but even he could not tell——. In a second Katharine was back again dressed in outdoor things, still holding her bread and butter in her bare hand.

“If I’m late, don’t wait for me,” she said. “I shall have dined,” and so saying, she left them.

“But she can’t—” William exclaimed, as the door shut, “not without any gloves and bread and butter in her hand!” They ran to the window, and saw her walking rapidly along the street towards the City. Then she vanished.

“She must have gone to meet Mr. Denham,” Cassandra exclaimed.

“Goodness knows!” William interjected.

The incident impressed them both as having something queer and ominous about it out of all proportion to its surface strangeness.

“It’s the sort of way Aunt Maggie behaves,” said Cassandra, as if in explanation.

William shook his head, and paced up and down the room looking extremely perturbed.

“This is what I’ve been foretelling,” he burst out. “Once set the ordinary conventions aside—Thank Heaven Mrs. Hilbery is away. But there’s Mr. Hilbery. How are we to explain it to him? I shall have to leave you.”

“But Uncle Trevor won’t be back for hours, William!” Cassandra implored.

“You never can tell. He may be on his way already. Or suppose Mrs. Milvain—your Aunt Celia—or Mrs. Cosham, or any other of your aunts or uncles should be shown in and find us alone together. You know what they’re saying about us already.”

Cassandra was equally stricken by the sight of William’s agitation, and appalled by the prospect of his desertion.

“We might hide,” she exclaimed wildly, glancing at the curtain which separated the room with the relics.

“I refuse entirely to get under the table,” said William sarcastically.

She saw that he was losing his temper with the difficulties of the situation. Her instinct told her that an appeal to his affection, at this moment, would be extremely ill-judged. She controlled herself, sat down, poured out a fresh cup of tea, and sipped it quietly. This natural action, arguing complete self-mastery, and showing her in one of those feminine attitudes which William found adorable, did more than any argument to compose his agitation. It appealed to his chivalry. He accepted a cup. Next she asked for a slice of cake. By the time the cake was eaten and the tea drunk the personal question had lapsed, and they were discussing poetry. Insensibly they turned from the question of dramatic poetry in general, to the particular example which reposed in William’s pocket, and when the maid came in to clear away the tea-things, William had asked permission to read a short passage aloud, “unless it bored her?”

Cassandra bent her head in silence, but she showed a little of what she felt in her eyes, and thus fortified, William felt confident that it would take more than Mrs. Milvain herself to rout him from his position. He read aloud.

Meanwhile Katharine walked rapidly along the street. If called upon to explain her impulsive action in leaving the tea-table, she could have traced it to no better cause than that William had glanced at Cassandra; Cassandra at William. Yet, because they had glanced, her position was impossible. If one forgot to pour out a cup of tea they rushed to the conclusion that she was engaged to Ralph Denham. She knew that in half an hour or so the door would open, and Ralph Denham would appear. She could not sit there and contemplate seeing him with William’s and Cassandra’s eyes upon them, judging their exact degree of intimacy, so that they might fix the wedding-day. She promptly decided that she would meet Ralph out of doors; she still had time to reach Lincoln’s Inn Fields before he left his office. She hailed a cab, and bade it take her to a shop for selling maps which she remembered in Great Queen Street, since she hardly liked to be set down at his door. Arrived at the shop, she bought a large scale map of Norfolk, and thus provided, hurried into Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and assured herself of the position of Messrs. Hoper and Grateley’s office. The great gas chandeliers were alight in the office windows. She conceived that he sat at an enormous table laden with papers beneath one of them in the front room with the three tall windows. Having settled his position there, she began walking to and fro upon the pavement. Nobody of his build appeared. She scrutinized each male figure as it approached and passed her. Each male figure had, nevertheless, a look of him, due, perhaps, to the professional dress, the quick step, the keen glance which they cast upon her as they hastened home after the day’s work. The square itself, with its immense houses all so fully occupied and stern of aspect, its atmosphere of industry and power, as if even the sparrows and the children were earning their daily bread, as if the sky itself, with its grey and scarlet clouds, reflected the serious intention of the city beneath it, spoke of him. Here was the fit place for their meeting, she thought; here was the fit place for her to walk thinking of him. She could not help comparing it with the domestic streets of Chelsea. With this comparison in her mind, she extended her range a little, and turned into the main road. The great torrent of vans and carts was sweeping down Kingsway; pedestrians were streaming in two currents along the pavements. She stood fascinated at the corner. The deep roar filled her ears; the changing tumult had the inexpressible fascination of varied life pouring ceaselessly with a purpose which, as she looked, seemed to her, somehow, the normal purpose for which life was framed; its complete indifference to the individuals, whom it swallowed up and rolled onwards, filled her with at least a temporary exaltation. The blend of daylight and of lamplight made her an invisible spectator, just as it gave the people who passed her a semi-transparent quality, and left the faces pale ivory ovals in which the eyes alone were dark. They tended the enormous rush of the current—the great flow, the deep stream, the unquenchable tide. She stood unobserved and absorbed, glorying openly in the rapture that had run subterraneously all day. Suddenly she was clutched, unwilling, from the outside, by the recollection of her purpose in coming there. She had come to find Ralph Denham. She hastily turned back into Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and looked for her landmark—the light in the three tall windows. She sought in vain. The faces of the houses had now merged in the general darkness, and she had difficulty in determining which she sought. Ralph’s three windows gave back on their ghostly glass panels only a reflection of the grey and greenish sky. She rang the bell, peremptorily, under the painted name of the firm. After some delay she was answered by a caretaker, whose pail and brush of themselves told her that the working day was over and the workers gone. Nobody, save perhaps Mr. Grateley himself, was left, she assured Katharine; every one else had been gone these ten minutes.

The news woke Katharine completely. Anxiety gained upon her. She hastened back into Kingsway, looking at people who had miraculously regained their solidity. She ran as far as the Tube station, overhauling clerk after clerk, solicitor after solicitor. Not one of them even faintly resembled Ralph Denham. More and more plainly did she see him; and more and more did he seem to her unlike any one else. At the door of the station she paused, and tried to collect her thoughts. He had gone to her house. By taking a cab she could be there probably in advance of him. But she pictured herself opening the drawing-room door, and William and Cassandra looking up, and Ralph’s entrance a moment later, and the glances—the insinuations. No; she could not face it. She would write him a letter and take it at once to his house. She bought paper and pencil at the bookstall, and entered an A.B.C. shop, where, by ordering a cup of coffee, she secured an empty table, and began at once to write:

“I came to meet you and I have missed you. I could not face William and Cassandra. They want us——” here she paused. “They insist that we are engaged,” she substituted, “and we couldn’t talk at all, or explain anything. I want——” Her wants were so vast, now that she was in communication with Ralph, that the pencil was utterly inadequate to conduct them on to the paper; it seemed as if the whole torrent of Kingsway had to run down her pencil. She gazed intently at a notice hanging on the gold-encrusted wall opposite. “… to say all kinds of things,” she added, writing each word with the painstaking of a child. But, when she raised her eyes again to meditate the next sentence, she was aware of a waitress, whose expression intimated that it was closing time, and, looking round, Katharine saw herself almost the last person left in the shop. She took up her letter, paid her bill, and found herself once more in the street. She would now take a cab to Highgate. But at that moment it flashed upon her that she could not remember the address. This check seemed to let fall a barrier across a very powerful current of desire. She ransacked her memory in desperation, hunting for the name, first by remembering the look of the house, and then by trying, in memory, to retrace the words she had written once, at least, upon an envelope. The more she pressed the farther the words receded. Was the house an Orchard Something, or the street a Hill? She gave it up. Never, since she was a child, had she felt anything like this blankness and desolation. There rushed in upon her, as if she were waking from some dream, all the consequences of her inexplicable indolence. She figured Ralph’s face as he turned from her door without a word of explanation, receiving his dismissal as a blow from herself, a callous intimation that she did not wish to see him. She followed his departure from her door; but it was far more easy to see him marching far and fast in any direction for any length of time than to conceive that he would turn back to Highgate. Perhaps he would try once more to see her in Cheyne Walk? It was proof of the clearness with which she saw him, that she started forward as this possibility occurred to her, and almost raised her hand to beckon to a cab. No; he was too proud to come again; he rejected the desire and walked on and on, on and on—If only she could read the names of those visionary streets down which he passed! But her imagination betrayed her at this point, or mocked her with a sense of their strangeness, darkness, and distance. Indeed, instead of helping herself to any decision, she only filled her mind with the vast extent of London and the impossibility of finding any single figure that wandered off this way and that way, turned to the right and to the left, chose that dingy little back street where the children were playing in the road, and so—— She roused herself impatiently. She walked rapidly along Holborn. Soon she turned and walked as rapidly in the other direction. This indecision was not merely odious, but had something that alarmed her about it, as she had been alarmed slightly once or twice already that day; she felt unable to cope with the strength of her own desires. To a person controlled by habit, there was humiliation as well as alarm in this sudden release of what appeared to be a very powerful as well as an unreasonable force. An aching in the muscles of her right hand now showed her that she was crushing her gloves and the map of Norfolk in a grip sufficient to crack a more solid object. She relaxed her grasp; she looked anxiously at the faces of the passers-by to see whether their eyes rested on her for a moment longer than was natural, or with any curiosity. But having smoothed out her gloves, and done what she could to look as usual, she forgot spectators, and was once more given up to her desperate desire to find Ralph Denham. It was a desire now—wild, irrational, unexplained, resembling something felt in childhood. Once more she blamed herself bitterly for her carelessness. But finding herself opposite the Tube station, she pulled herself up and took counsel swiftly, as of old. It flashed upon her that she would go at once to Mary Datchet, and ask her to give her Ralph’s address. The decision was a relief, not only in giving her a goal, but in providing her with a rational excuse for her own actions. It gave her a goal certainly, but the fact of having a goal led her to dwell exclusively upon her obsession; so that when she rang the bell of Mary’s flat, she did not for a moment consider how this demand would strike Mary. To her extreme annoyance Mary was not at home; a charwoman opened the door. All Katharine could do was to accept the invitation to wait. She waited for, perhaps, fifteen minutes, and spent them in pacing from one end of the room to the other without intermission. When she heard Mary’s key in the door she paused in front of the fireplace, and Mary found her standing upright, looking at once expectant and determined, like a person who has come on an errand of such importance that it must be broached without preface.

Mary exclaimed in surprise.

“Yes, yes,” Katharine said, brushing these remarks aside, as if they were in the way.

“Have you had tea?”

“Oh yes,” she said, thinking that she had had tea hundreds of years ago, somewhere or other.

Mary paused, took off her gloves, and, finding matches, proceeded to light the fire.

Katharine checked her with an impatient movement, and said:

“Don’t light the fire for me…. I want to know Ralph Denham’s address.”

She was holding a pencil and preparing to write on the envelope. She waited with an imperious expression.

“The Apple Orchard, Mount Ararat Road, Highgate,” Mary said, speaking slowly and rather strangely.

“Oh, I remember now!” Katharine exclaimed, with irritation at her own stupidity. “I suppose it wouldn’t take twenty minutes to drive there?” She gathered up her purse and gloves and seemed about to go.

“But you won’t find him,” said Mary, pausing with a match in her hand. Katharine, who had already turned towards the door, stopped and looked at her.

“Why? Where is he?” she asked.

“He won’t have left his office.”

“But he has left the office,” she replied. “The only question is will he have reached home yet? He went to see me at Chelsea; I tried to meet him and missed him. He will have found no message to explain. So I must find him—as soon as possible.”

Mary took in the situation at her leisure.

“But why not telephone?” she said.

Katharine immediately dropped all that she was holding; her strained expression relaxed, and exclaiming, “Of course! Why didn’t I think of that!” she seized the telephone receiver and gave her number. Mary looked at her steadily, and then left the room. At length Katharine heard, through all the superimposed weight of London, the mysterious sound of feet in her own house mounting to the little room, where she could almost see the pictures and the books; she listened with extreme intentness to the preparatory vibrations, and then established her identity.

“Has Mr. Denham called?”

“Yes, miss.”

“Did he ask for me?”

“Yes. We said you were out, miss.”

“Did he leave any message?”

“No. He went away. About twenty minutes ago, miss.”

Katharine hung up the receiver. She walked the length of the room in such acute disappointment that she did not at first perceive Mary’s absence. Then she called in a harsh and peremptory tone:

“Mary.”

Mary was taking off her outdoor things in the bedroom. She heard Katharine call her. “Yes,” she said, “I shan’t be a moment.” But the moment prolonged itself, as if for some reason Mary found satisfaction in making herself not only tidy, but seemly and ornamented. A stage in her life had been accomplished in the last months which had left its traces for ever upon her bearing. Youth, and the bloom of youth, had receded, leaving the purpose of her face to show itself in the hollower cheeks, the firmer lips, the eyes no longer spontaneously observing at random, but narrowed upon an end which was not near at hand. This woman was now a serviceable human being, mistress of her own destiny, and thus, by some combination of ideas, fit to be adorned with the dignity of silver chains and glowing brooches. She came in at her leisure and asked: “Well, did you get an answer?”

“He has left Chelsea already,” Katharine replied.

“Still, he won’t be home yet,” said Mary.

Katharine was once more irresistibly drawn to gaze upon an imaginary map of London, to follow the twists and turns of unnamed streets.

“I’ll ring up his home and ask whether he’s back.” Mary crossed to the telephone and, after a series of brief remarks, announced:

“No. His sister says he hasn’t come back yet.”

“Ah!” She applied her ear to the telephone once more. “They’ve had a message. He won’t be back to dinner.”

“Then what is he going to do?”

Very pale, and with her large eyes fixed not so much upon Mary as upon vistas of unresponding blankness, Katharine addressed herself also not so much to Mary as to the unrelenting spirit which now appeared to mock her from every quarter of her survey.

After waiting a little time Mary remarked indifferently:

“I really don’t know.” Slackly lying back in her armchair, she watched the little flames beginning to creep among the coals indifferently, as if they, too, were very distant and indifferent.

Katharine looked at her indignantly and rose.

“Possibly he may come here,” Mary continued, without altering the abstract tone of her voice. “It would be worth your while to wait if you want to see him to-night.” She bent forward and touched the wood, so that the flames slipped in between the interstices of the coal.

Katharine reflected. “I’ll wait half an hour,” she said.

Mary rose, went to the table, spread out her papers under the green-shaded lamp and, with an action that was becoming a habit, twisted a lock of hair round and round in her fingers. Once she looked unperceived at her visitor, who never moved, who sat so still, with eyes so intent, that you could almost fancy that she was watching something, some face that never looked up at her. Mary found herself unable to go on writing. She turned her eyes away, but only to be aware of the presence of what Katharine looked at. There were ghosts in the room, and one, strangely and sadly, was the ghost of herself. The minutes went by.

“What would be the time now?” said Katharine at last. The half-hour was not quite spent.

“I’m going to get dinner ready,” said Mary, rising from her table.

“Then I’ll go,” said Katharine.

“Why don’t you stay? Where are you going?”

Katharine looked round the room, conveying her uncertainty in her glance.

“Perhaps I might find him,” she mused.

“But why should it matter? You’ll see him another day.”

Mary spoke, and intended to speak, cruelly enough.

“I was wrong to come here,” Katharine replied.

Their eyes met with antagonism, and neither flinched.

“You had a perfect right to come here,” Mary answered.

A loud knocking at the door interrupted them. Mary went to open it, and returning with some note or parcel, Katharine looked away so that Mary might not read her disappointment.

“Of course you had a right to come,” Mary repeated, laying the note upon the table.

“No,” said Katharine. “Except that when one’s desperate one has a sort of right. I am desperate. How do I know what’s happening to him now? He may do anything. He may wander about the streets all night. Anything may happen to him.”

She spoke with a self-abandonment that Mary had never seen in her.

“You know you exaggerate; you’re talking nonsense,” she said roughly.

“Mary, I must talk—I must tell you——”

“You needn’t tell me anything,” Mary interrupted her. “Can’t I see for myself?”

“No, no,” Katharine exclaimed. “It’s not that——”

Her look, passing beyond Mary, beyond the verge of the room and out beyond any words that came her way, wildly and passionately, convinced Mary that she, at any rate, could not follow such a glance to its end. She was baffled; she tried to think herself back again into the height of her love for Ralph. Pressing her fingers upon her eyelids, she murmured:

“You forget that I loved him too. I thought I knew him. I did know him.”

And yet, what had she known? She could not remember it any more. She pressed her eyeballs until they struck stars and suns into her darkness. She convinced herself that she was stirring among ashes. She desisted. She was astonished at her discovery. She did not love Ralph any more. She looked back dazed into the room, and her eyes rested upon the table with its lamp-lit papers. The steady radiance seemed for a second to have its counterpart within her; she shut her eyes; she opened them and looked at the lamp again; another love burnt in the place of the old one, or so, in a momentary glance of amazement, she guessed before the revelation was over and the old surroundings asserted themselves. She leant in silence against the mantelpiece.

“There are different ways of loving,” she murmured, half to herself, at length.

Katharine made no reply and seemed unaware of her words. She seemed absorbed in her own thoughts.

“Perhaps he’s waiting in the street again to-night,” she exclaimed. “I’ll go now. I might find him.”

“It’s far more likely that he’ll come here,” said Mary, and Katharine, after considering for a moment, said:

“I’ll wait another half-hour.”

She sank down into her chair again, and took up the same position which Mary had compared to the position of one watching an unseeing face. She watched, indeed, not a face, but a procession, not of people, but of life itself: the good and bad; the meaning; the past, the present, and the future. All this seemed apparent to her, and she was not ashamed of her extravagance so much as exalted to one of the pinnacles of existence, where it behoved the world to do her homage. No one but she herself knew what it meant to miss Ralph Denham on that particular night; into this inadequate event crowded feelings that the great crises of life might have failed to call forth. She had missed him, and knew the bitterness of all failure; she desired him, and knew the torment of all passion. It did not matter what trivial accidents led to this culmination. Nor did she care how extravagant she appeared, nor how openly she showed her feelings.

When the dinner was ready Mary told her to come, and she came submissively, as if she let Mary direct her movements for her. They ate and drank together almost in silence, and when Mary told her to eat more, she ate more; when she was told to drink wine, she drank it. Nevertheless, beneath this superficial obedience, Mary knew that she was following her own thoughts unhindered. She was not inattentive so much as remote; she looked at once so unseeing and so intent upon some vision of her own that Mary gradually felt more than protective—she became actually alarmed at the prospect of some collision between Katharine and the forces of the outside world. Directly they had done, Katharine announced her intention of going.

“But where are you going to?” Mary asked, desiring vaguely to hinder her.

“Oh, I’m going home—no, to Highgate perhaps.”

Mary saw that it would be useless to try to stop her. All she could do was to insist upon coming too, but she met with no opposition; Katharine seemed indifferent to her presence. In a few minutes they were walking along the Strand. They walked so rapidly that Mary was deluded into the belief that Katharine knew where she was going. She herself was not attentive. She was glad of the movement along lamp-lit streets in the open air. She was fingering, painfully and with fear, yet with strange hope, too, the discovery which she had stumbled upon unexpectedly that night. She was free once more at the cost of a gift, the best, perhaps, that she could offer, but she was, thank Heaven, in love no longer. She was tempted to spend the first instalment of her freedom in some dissipation; in the pit of the Coliseum, for example, since they were now passing the door. Why not go in and celebrate her independence of the tyranny of love? Or, perhaps, the top of an omnibus bound for some remote place such as Camberwell, or Sidcup, or the Welsh Harp would suit her better. She noticed these names painted on little boards for the first time for weeks. Or should she return to her room, and spend the night working out the details of a very enlightened and ingenious scheme? Of all possibilities this appealed to her most, and brought to mind the fire, the lamplight, the steady glow which had seemed lit in the place where a more passionate flame had once burnt.

Now Katharine stopped, and Mary woke to the fact that instead of having a goal she had evidently none. She paused at the edge of the crossing, and looked this way and that, and finally made as if in the direction of Haverstock Hill.

“Look here—where are you going?” Mary cried, catching her by the hand. “We must take that cab and go home.” She hailed a cab and insisted that Katharine should get in, while she directed the driver to take them to Cheyne Walk.

Katharine submitted. “Very well,” she said. “We may as well go there as anywhere else.”

A gloom seemed to have fallen on her. She lay back in her corner, silent and apparently exhausted. Mary, in spite of her own preoccupation, was struck by her pallor and her attitude of dejection.

“I’m sure we shall find him,” she said more gently than she had yet spoken.

“It may be too late,” Katharine replied. Without understanding her, Mary began to pity her for what she was suffering.

“Nonsense,” she said, taking her hand and rubbing it. “If we don’t find him there we shall find him somewhere else.”

“But suppose he’s walking about the streets—for hours and hours?”

She leant forward and looked out of the window.

“He may refuse ever to speak to me again,” she said in a low voice, almost to herself.

The exaggeration was so immense that Mary did not attempt to cope with it, save by keeping hold of Katharine’s wrist. She half expected that Katharine might open the door suddenly and jump out. Perhaps Katharine perceived the purpose with which her hand was held.

“Don’t be frightened,” she said, with a little laugh. “I’m not going to jump out of the cab. It wouldn’t do much good after all.”

Upon this, Mary ostentatiously withdrew her hand.

“I ought to have apologized,” Katharine continued, with an effort, “for bringing you into all this business; I haven’t told you half, either. I’m no longer engaged to William Rodney. He is to marry Cassandra Otway. It’s all arranged—all perfectly right…. And after he’d waited in the streets for hours and hours, William made me bring him in. He was standing under the lamp-post watching our windows. He was perfectly white when he came into the room. William left us alone, and we sat and talked. It seems ages and ages ago, now. Was it last night? Have I been out long? What’s the time?” She sprang forward to catch sight of a clock, as if the exact time had some important bearing on her case.

“Only half-past eight!” she exclaimed. “Then he may be there still.” She leant out of the window and told the cabman to drive faster.

“But if he’s not there, what shall I do? Where could I find him? The streets are so crowded.”

“We shall find him,” Mary repeated.

Mary had no doubt but that somehow or other they would find him. But suppose they did find him? She began to think of Ralph with a sort of strangeness, in her effort to understand how he could be capable of satisfying this extraordinary desire. Once more she thought herself back to her old view of him and could, with an effort, recall the haze which surrounded his figure, and the sense of confused, heightened exhilaration which lay all about his neighbourhood, so that for months at a time she had never exactly heard his voice or seen his face—or so it now seemed to her. The pain of her loss shot through her. Nothing would ever make up—not success, or happiness, or oblivion. But this pang was immediately followed by the assurance that now, at any rate, she knew the truth; and Katharine, she thought, stealing a look at her, did not know the truth; yes, Katharine was immensely to be pitied.

The cab, which had been caught in the traffic, was now liberated and sped on down Sloane Street. Mary was conscious of the tension with which Katharine marked its progress, as if her mind were fixed upon a point in front of them, and marked, second by second, their approach to it. She said nothing, and in silence Mary began to fix her mind, in sympathy at first, and later in forgetfulness of her companion, upon a point in front of them. She imagined a point distant as a low star upon the horizon of the dark. There for her too, for them both, was the goal for which they were striving, and the end for the ardours of their spirits was the same: but where it was, or what it was, or why she felt convinced that they were united in search of it, as they drove swiftly down the streets of London side by side, she could not have said.

“At last,” Katharine breathed, as the cab drew up at the door. She jumped out and scanned the pavement on either side. Mary, meanwhile, rang the bell. The door opened as Katharine assured herself that no one of the people within view had any likeness to Ralph. On seeing her, the maid said at once:

“Mr. Denham called again, miss. He has been waiting for you for some time.”

Katharine vanished from Mary’s sight. The door shut between them, and Mary walked slowly and thoughtfully up the street alone.

Katharine turned at once to the dining-room. But with her fingers upon the handle, she held back. Perhaps she realized that this was a moment which would never come again. Perhaps, for a second, it seemed to her that no reality could equal the imagination she had formed. Perhaps she was restrained by some vague fear or anticipation, which made her dread any exchange or interruption. But if these doubts and fears or this supreme bliss restrained her, it was only for a moment. In another second she had turned the handle and, biting her lip to control herself, she opened the door upon Ralph Denham. An extraordinary clearness of sight seemed to possess her on beholding him. So little, so single, so separate from all else he appeared, who had been the cause of these extreme agitations and aspirations. She could have laughed in his face. But, gaining upon this clearness of sight against her will, and to her dislike, was a flood of confusion, of relief, of certainty, of humility, of desire no longer to strive and to discriminate, yielding to which, she let herself sink within his arms and confessed her love.

[]

Chapter XXXII

Nobody asked Katharine any questions next day. If cross-examined she might have said that nobody spoke to her. She worked a little, wrote a little, ordered the dinner, and sat, for longer than she knew, with her head on her hand piercing whatever lay before her, whether it was a letter or a dictionary, as if it were a film upon the deep prospects that revealed themselves to her kindling and brooding eyes. She rose once, and going to the bookcase, took out her father’s Greek dictionary and spread the sacred pages of symbols and figures before her. She smoothed the sheets with a mixture of affectionate amusement and hope. Would other eyes look on them with her one day? The thought, long intolerable, was now just bearable.

She was quite unaware of the anxiety with which her movements were watched and her expression scanned. Cassandra was careful not to be caught looking at her, and their conversation was so prosaic that were it not for certain jolts and jerks between the sentences, as if the mind were kept with difficulty to the rails, Mrs. Milvain herself could have detected nothing of a suspicious nature in what she overheard.

William, when he came in late that afternoon and found Cassandra alone, had a very serious piece of news to impart. He had just passed Katharine in the street and she had failed to recognize him.

“That doesn’t matter with me, of course, but suppose it happened with somebody else? What would they think? They would suspect something merely from her expression. She looked—she looked”—he hesitated—“like some one walking in her sleep.”

To Cassandra the significant thing was that Katharine had gone out without telling her, and she interpreted this to mean that she had gone out to meet Ralph Denham. But to her surprise William drew no comfort from this probability.

“Once throw conventions aside,” he began, “once do the things that people don’t do—” and the fact that you are going to meet a young man is no longer proof of anything, except, indeed, that people will talk.

Cassandra saw, not without a pang of jealousy, that he was extremely solicitous that people should not talk about Katharine, as if his interest in her were still proprietary rather than friendly. As they were both ignorant of Ralph’s visit the night before they had not that reason to comfort themselves with the thought that matters were hastening to a crisis. These absences of Katharine’s, moreover, left them exposed to interruptions which almost destroyed their pleasure in being alone together. The rainy evening made it impossible to go out; and, indeed, according to William’s code, it was considerably more damning to be seen out of doors than surprised within. They were so much at the mercy of bells and doors that they could hardly talk of Macaulay with any conviction, and William preferred to defer the second act of his tragedy until another day.

Under these circumstances Cassandra showed herself at her best. She sympathized with William’s anxieties and did her utmost to share them; but still, to be alone together, to be running risks together, to be partners in the wonderful conspiracy, was to her so enthralling that she was always forgetting discretion, breaking out into exclamations and admirations which finally made William believe that, although deplorable and upsetting, the situation was not without its sweetness.

When the door did open, he started, but braved the forthcoming revelation. It was not Mrs. Milvain, however, but Katharine herself who entered, closely followed by Ralph Denham. With a set expression which showed what an effort she was making, Katharine encountered their eyes, and saying, “We’re not going to interrupt you,” she led Denham behind the curtain which hung in front of the room with the relics. This refuge was none of her willing, but confronted with wet pavements and only some belated museum or Tube station for shelter, she was forced, for Ralph’s sake, to face the discomforts of her own house. Under the street lamps she had thought him looking both tired and strained.

Thus separated, the two couples remained occupied for some time with their own affairs. Only the lowest murmurs penetrated from one section of the room to the other. At length the maid came in to bring a message that Mr. Hilbery would not be home for dinner. It was true that there was no need that Katharine should be informed, but William began to inquire Cassandra’s opinion in such a way as to show that, with or without reason, he wished very much to speak to her.

From motives of her own Cassandra dissuaded him.

“But don’t you think it’s a little unsociable?” he hazarded. “Why not do something amusing?—go to the play, for instance? Why not ask Katharine and Ralph, eh?” The coupling of their names in this manner caused Cassandra’s heart to leap with pleasure.

“Don’t you think they must be——?” she began, but William hastily took her up.

“Oh, I know nothing about that. I only thought we might amuse ourselves, as your uncle’s out.”

He proceeded on his embassy with a mixture of excitement and embarrassment which caused him to turn aside with his hand on the curtain, and to examine intently for several moments the portrait of a lady, optimistically said by Mrs. Hilbery to be an early work of Sir Joshua Reynolds. Then, with some unnecessary fumbling, he drew aside the curtain, and with his eyes fixed upon the ground, repeated his message and suggested that they should all spend the evening at the play. Katharine accepted the suggestion with such cordiality that it was strange to find her of no clear mind as to the precise spectacle she wished to see. She left the choice entirely to Ralph and William, who, taking counsel fraternally over an evening paper, found themselves in agreement as to the merits of a music-hall. This being arranged, everything else followed easily and enthusiastically. Cassandra had never been to a music-hall. Katharine instructed her in the peculiar delights of an entertainment where Polar bears follow directly upon ladies in full evening dress, and the stage is alternately a garden of mystery, a milliner’s band-box, and a fried-fish shop in the Mile End Road. Whatever the exact nature of the programme that night, it fulfilled the highest purposes of dramatic art, so far, at least, as four of the audience were concerned.

No doubt the actors and the authors would have been surprised to learn in what shape their efforts reached those particular eyes and ears; but they could not have denied that the effect as a whole was tremendous. The hall resounded with brass and strings, alternately of of enormous pomp and majesty, and then of sweetest lamentation. The reds and creams of the background, the lyres and harps and urns and skulls, the protuberances of plaster, the fringes of scarlet plush the sinking and blazing of innumerable electric lights, could scarcely have been surpassed for decorative effect by any craftsman of the ancient or modern world.

Then there was the audience itself, bare-shouldered, tufted and garlanded in the stalls, decorous but festal in the balconies, and frankly fit for daylight and street life in the galleries. But, however they differed when looked at separately, they shared the same huge, lovable nature in the bulk, which murmured and swayed and quivered all the time the dancing and juggling and love-making went on in front of it, slowly laughed and reluctantly left off laughing, and applauded with a helter-skelter generosity which sometimes became unanimous and overwhelming. Once William saw Katharine leaning forward and clapping her hands with an abandonment that startled him. Her laugh rang out with the laughter of the audience.

For a second he was puzzled, as if this laughter disclosed something that he had never suspected in her. But then Cassandra’s face caught his eye, gazing with astonishment at the buffoon, not laughing, too deeply intent and surprised to laugh at what she saw, and for some moments he watched her as if she were a child.

The performance came to an end, the illusion dying out first here and then there, as some rose to put on their coats, others stood upright to salute “God Save the King,” the musicians folded their music and encased their instruments, and the lights sank one by one until the house was empty, silent, and full of great shadows. Looking back over her shoulder as she followed Ralph through the swing doors, Cassandra marvelled to see how the stage was already entirely without romance. But, she wondered, did they really cover all the seats in brown holland every night?

The success of this entertainment was such that before they separated another expedition had been planned for the next day. The next day was Saturday; therefore both William and Ralph were free to devote the whole afternoon to an expedition to Greenwich, which Cassandra had never seen, and Katharine confused with Dulwich. On this occasion Ralph was their guide. He brought them without accident to Greenwich.

What exigencies of state or fantasies of imagination first gave birth to the cluster of pleasant places by which London is surrounded is matter of indifference now that they have adapted themselves so admirably to the needs of people between the ages of twenty and thirty with Saturday afternoons to spend. Indeed, if ghosts have any interest in the affections of those who succeed them they must reap their richest harvests when the fine weather comes again and the lovers, the sightseers, and the holiday-makers pour themselves out of trains and omnibuses into their old pleasure-grounds. It is true that they go, for the most part, unthanked by name, although upon this occasion William was ready to give such discriminating praise as the dead architects and painters received seldom in the course of the year. They were walking by the river bank, and Katharine and Ralph, lagging a little behind, caught fragments of his lecture. Katharine smiled at the sound of his voice; she listened as if she found it a little unfamiliar, intimately though she knew it; she tested it. The note of assurance and happiness was new. William was very happy. She learnt every hour what sources of his happiness she had neglected. She had never asked him to teach her anything; she had never consented to read Macaulay; she had never expressed her belief that his play was second only to the works of Shakespeare. She followed dreamily in their wake, smiling and delighting in the sound which conveyed, she knew, the rapturous and yet not servile assent of Cassandra.

Then she murmured, “How can Cassandra—” but changed her sentence to the opposite of what she meant to say and ended, “how could she herself have been so blind?” But it was unnecessary to follow out such riddles when the presence of Ralph supplied her with more interesting problems, which somehow became involved with the little boat crossing the river, the majestic and careworn City, and the steamers homecoming with their treasury, or starting in search of it, so that infinite leisure would be necessary for the proper disentanglement of one from the other. He stopped, moreover, and began inquiring of an old boatman as to the tides and the ships. In thus talking he seemed different, and even looked different, she thought, against the river, with the steeples and towers for background. His strangeness, his romance, his power to leave her side and take part in the affairs of men, the possibility that they should together hire a boat and cross the river, the speed and wildness of this enterprise filled her mind and inspired her with such rapture, half of love and half of adventure, that William and Cassandra were startled from their talk, and Cassandra exclaimed, “She looks as if she were offering up a sacrifice! Very beautiful,” she added quickly, though she repressed, in deference to William, her own wonder that the sight of Ralph Denham talking to a boatman on the banks of the Thames could move any one to such an attitude of adoration.

That afternoon, what with tea and the curiosities of the Thames tunnel and the unfamiliarity of the streets, passed so quickly that the only method of prolonging it was to plan another expedition for the following day. Hampton Court was decided upon, in preference to Hampstead, for though Cassandra had dreamt as a child of the brigands of Hampstead, she had now transferred her affections completely and for ever to William III. Accordingly, they arrived at Hampton Court about lunch-time on a fine Sunday morning. Such unity marked their expressions of admiration for the red-brick building that they might have come there for no other purpose than to assure each other that this palace was the stateliest palace in the world. They walked up and down the Terrace, four abreast, and fancied themselves the owners of the place, and calculated the amount of good to the world produced indubitably by such a tenancy.

“The only hope for us,” said Katharine, “is that William shall die, and Cassandra shall be given rooms as the widow of a distinguished poet.”

“Or——” Cassandra began, but checked herself from the liberty of envisaging Katharine as the widow of a distinguished lawyer. Upon this, the third day of junketing, it was tiresome to have to restrain oneself even from such innocent excursions of fancy. She dared not question William; he was inscrutable; he never seemed even to follow the other couple with curiosity when they separated, as they frequently did, to name a plant, or examine a fresco. Cassandra was constantly studying their backs. She noticed how sometimes the impulse to move came from Katharine, and sometimes from Ralph; how, sometimes, they walked slow, as if in profound intercourse, and sometimes fast, as if in passionate. When they came together again nothing could be more unconcerned than their manner.

“We have been wondering whether they ever catch a fish …” or, “We must leave time to visit the Maze.” Then, to puzzle her further, William and Ralph filled in all interstices of meal-times or railway journeys with perfectly good-tempered arguments; or they discussed politics, or they told stories, or they did sums together upon the backs of old envelopes to prove something. She suspected that Katharine was absent-minded, but it was impossible to tell. There were moments when she felt so young and inexperienced that she almost wished herself back with the silkworms at Stogdon House, and not embarked upon this bewildering intrigue.

These moments, however, were only the necessary shadow or chill which proved the substance of her bliss, and did not damage the radiance which seemed to rest equally upon the whole party. The fresh air of spring, the sky washed of clouds and already shedding warmth from its blue, seemed the reply vouchsafed by nature to the mood of her chosen spirits. These chosen spirits were to be found also among the deer, dumbly basking, and among the fish, set still in mid-stream, for they were mute sharers in a benignant state not needing any exposition by the tongue. No words that Cassandra could come by expressed the stillness, the brightness, the air of expectancy which lay upon the orderly beauty of the grass walks and gravel paths down which they went walking four abreast that Sunday afternoon. Silently the shadows of the trees lay across the broad sunshine; silence wrapt her heart in its folds. The quivering stillness of the butterfly on the half-opened flower, the silent grazing of the deer in the sun, were the sights her eye rested upon and received as the images of her own nature laid open to happiness and trembling in its ecstasy.

But the afternoon wore on, and it became time to leave the gardens. As they drove from Waterloo to Chelsea, Katharine began to have some compunction about her father, which, together with the opening of offices and the need of working in them on Monday, made it difficult to plan another festival for the following day. Mr. Hilbery had taken their absence, so far, with paternal benevolence, but they could not trespass upon it indefinitely. Indeed, had they known it, he was already suffering from their absence, and longing for their return.

He had no dislike of solitude, and Sunday, in particular, was pleasantly adapted for letter-writing, paying calls, or a visit to his club. He was leaving the house on some such suitable expedition towards tea-time when he found himself stopped on his own doorstep by his sister, Mrs. Milvain. She should, on hearing that no one was at home, have withdrawn submissively, but instead she accepted his half-hearted invitation to come in, and he found himself in the melancholy position of being forced to order tea for her and sit in the drawing-room while she drank it. She speedily made it plain that she was only thus exacting because she had come on a matter of business. He was by no means exhilarated at the news.

“Katharine is out this afternoon,” he remaked. “Why not come round later and discuss it with her—with us both, eh?”

“My dear Trevor, I have particular reasons for wishing to talk to you alone…. Where is Katharine?”

“She’s out with her young man, naturally. Cassandra plays the part of chaperone very usefully. A charming young woman that—a great favourite of mine.” He turned his stone between his fingers, and conceived different methods of leading Celia away from her obsession, which, he supposed, must have reference to the domestic affairs of Cyril as usual.

“With Cassandra,” Mrs. Milvain repeated significantly. “With Cassandra.”

“Yes, with Cassandra,” Mr. Hilbery agreed urbanely, pleased at the diversion. “I think they said they were going to Hampton Court, and I rather believe they were taking a protégé of mine, Ralph Denham, a very clever fellow, too, to amuse Cassandra. I thought the arrangement very suitable.” He was prepared to dwell at some length upon this safe topic, and trusted that Katharine would come in before he had done with it.

“Hampton Court always seems to me an ideal spot for engaged couples. There’s the Maze, there’s a nice place for having tea—I forget what they call it—and then, if the young man knows his business he contrives to take his lady upon the river. Full of possibilities—full. Cake, Celia?” Mr. Hilbery continued. “I respect my dinner too much, but that can’t possibly apply to you. You’ve never observed that feast, so far as I can remember.”

Her brother’s affability did not deceive Mrs. Milvain; it slightly saddened her; she well knew the cause of it. Blind and infatuated as usual!

“Who is this Mr. Denham?” she asked.

“Ralph Denham?” said Mr. Hilbery, in relief that her mind had taken this turn. “A very interesting young man. I’ve a great belief in him. He’s an authority upon our mediaeval institutions, and if he weren’t forced to earn his living he would write a book that very much wants writing.”

“He is not well off, then?” Mrs. Milvain interposed.

“Hasn’t a penny, I’m afraid, and a family more or less dependent on him.”

“A mother and sisters?—his father is dead?”

“Yes, his father died some years ago,” said Mr. Hilbery, who was prepared to draw upon his imagination, if necessary, to keep Mrs. Milvain supplied with facts about the private history of Ralph Denham since, for some inscrutable reason, the subject took her fancy.

“His father has been dead some time, and this young man had to take his place——”

“A legal family?” Mrs. Milvain inquired. “I fancy I’ve seen the name somewhere.”

Mr. Hilbery shook his head. “I should be inclined to doubt whether they were altogether in that walk of life,” he observed. “I fancy that Denham once told me that his father was a corn merchant. Perhaps he said a stockbroker. He came to grief, anyhow, as stockbrokers have a way of doing. I’ve a great respect for Denham,” he added. The remark sounded to his ears unfortunately conclusive, and he was afraid that there was nothing more to be said about Denham. He examined the tips of his fingers carefully. “Cassandra’s grown into a very charming young woman,” he started afresh. “Charming to look at, and charming to talk to, though her historical knowledge is not altogether profound. Another cup of tea?”

Mrs. Milvain had given her cup a little push, which seemed to indicate some momentary displeasure. But she did not want any more tea.

“It is Cassandra that I have come about,” she began. “I am very sorry to say that Cassandra is not at all what you think her, Trevor. She has imposed upon your and Maggie’s goodness. She has behaved in a way that would have seemed incredible—in this house of all houses—were it not for other circumstances that are still more incredible.”

Mr. Hilbery looked taken aback, and was silent for a second.

“It all sounds very black,” he remarked urbanely, continuing his examination of his finger-nails. “But I own I am completely in the dark.”

Mrs. Milvain became rigid, and emitted her message in little short sentences of extreme intensity.

“Who has Cassandra gone out with? William Rodney. Who has Katharine gone out with? Ralph Denham. Why are they for ever meeting each other round street corners, and going to music-halls, and taking cabs late at night? Why will Katharine not tell me the truth when I question her? I understand the reason now. Katharine has entangled herself with this unknown lawyer; she has seen fit to condone Cassandra’s conduct.”

There was another slight pause.

“Ah, well, Katharine will no doubt have some explanation to give me,” Mr. Hilbery replied imperturbably. “It’s a little too complicated for me to take in all at once, I confess—and, if you won’t think me rude, Celia, I think I’ll be getting along towards Knightsbridge.”

Mrs. Milvain rose at once.

“She has condoned Cassandra’s conduct and entangled herself with Ralph Denham,” she repeated. She stood very erect with the dauntless air of one testifying to the truth regardless of consequences. She knew from past discussions that the only way to counter her brother’s indolence and indifference was to shoot her statements at him in a compressed form once finally upon leaving the room. Having spoken thus, she restrained herself from adding another word, and left the house with the dignity of one inspired by a great ideal.

She had certainly framed her remarks in such a way as to prevent her brother from paying his call in the region of Knightsbridge. He had no fears for Katharine, but there was a suspicion at the back of his mind that Cassandra might have been, innocently and ignorantly, led into some foolish situation in one of their unshepherded dissipations. His wife was an erratic judge of the conventions; he himself was lazy; and with Katharine absorbed, very naturally—Here he recalled, as well as he could, the exact nature of the charge. “She has condoned Cassandra’s conduct and entangled herself with Ralph Denham.” From which it appeared that Katharine was not absorbed, or which of them was it that had entangled herself with Ralph Denham? From this maze of absurdity Mr. Hilbery saw no way out until Katharine herself came to his help, so that he applied himself, very philosophically on the whole, to a book.

No sooner had he heard the young people come in and go upstairs than he sent a maid to tell Miss Katharine that he wished to speak to her in the study. She was slipping furs loosely on to the floor in the drawing-room in front of the fire. They were all gathered round, reluctant to part. The message from her father surprised Katharine, and the others caught from her look, as she turned to go, a vague sense of apprehension.

Mr. Hilbery was reassured by the sight of her. He congratulated himself, he prided himself, upon possessing a daughter who had a sense of responsibility and an understanding of life profound beyond her years. Moreover, she was looking to-day unusual; he had come to take her beauty for granted; now he remembered it and was surprised by it. He thought instinctively that he had interrupted some happy hour of hers with Rodney, and apologized.

“I’m sorry to bother you, my dear. I heard you come in, and thought I’d better make myself disagreeable at once—as it seems, unfortunately, that fathers are expected to make themselves disagreeable. Now, your Aunt Celia has been to see me; your Aunt Celia has taken it into her head apparently that you and Cassandra have been—let us say a little foolish. This going about together—these pleasant little parties—there’s been some kind of misunderstanding. I told her I saw no harm in it, but I should just like to hear from yourself. Has Cassandra been left a little too much in the company of Mr. Denham?”

Katharine did not reply at once, and Mr. Hilbery tapped the coal encouragingly with the poker. Then she said, without embarrassment or apology:

“I don’t see why I should answer Aunt Celia’s questions. I’ve told her already that I won’t.”

Mr. Hilbery was relieved and secretly amused at the thought of the interview, although he could not license such irreverence outwardly.

“Very good. Then you authorize me to tell her that she’s been mistaken, and there was nothing but a little fun in it? You’ve no doubt, Katharine, in your own mind? Cassandra is in our charge, and I don’t intend that people should gossip about her. I suggest that you should be a little more careful in future. Invite me to your next entertainment.”

She did not respond, as he had hoped, with any affectionate or humorous reply. She meditated, pondering something or other, and he reflected that even his Katharine did not differ from other women in the capacity to let things be. Or had she something to say?

“Have you a guilty conscience?” he inquired lightly. “Tell me, Katharine,” he said more seriously, struck by something in the expression of her eyes.

“I’ve been meaning to tell you for some time,” she said. “I’m not going to marry William.”

“You’re not going—!” he exclaimed, dropping the poker in his immense surprise. “Why? When? Explain yourself, Katharine.”

“Oh, some time ago—a week, perhaps more.” Katharine spoke hurriedly and indifferently, as if the matter could no longer concern any one.

“But may I ask—why have I not been told of this—what do you mean by it?”

“We don’t wish to be married—that’s all.”

“This is William’s wish as well as yours?”

“Oh yes. We agree perfectly.”

Mr. Hilbery had seldom felt more completely at a loss. He thought that Katharine was treating the matter with curious unconcern; she scarcely seemed aware of the gravity of what she was saying; he did not understand the position at all. But his desire to smooth everything over comfortably came to his relief. No doubt there was some quarrel, some whimsey on the part of William, who, though a good fellow, was a little exacting sometimes—something that a woman could put right. But though he inclined to take the easiest view of his responsibilities, he cared too much for his daughter to let things be.

“I confess I find great difficulty in following you. I should like to hear William’s side of the story,” he said irritably. “I think he ought to have spoken to me in the first instance.”

“I wouldn’t let him,” said Katharine. “I know it must seem to you very strange,” she added. “But I assure you, if you’d wait a little—until mother comes back.”

This appeal for delay was much to Mr. Hilbery’s liking. But his conscience would not suffer it. People were talking. He could not endure that his daughter’s conduct should be in any way considered irregular. He wondered whether, in the circumstances, it would be better to wire to his wife, to send for one of his sisters, to forbid William the house, to pack Cassandra off home—for he was vaguely conscious of responsibilities in her direction too. His forehead was becoming more and more wrinkled by the multiplicity of his anxieties, which he was sorely tempted to ask Katharine to solve for him, when the door opened and William Rodney appeared. This necessitated a complete change, not only of manner, but of position also.

“Here’s William,” Katharine exclaimed, in a tone of relief. “I’ve told father we’re not engaged,” she said to him. “I’ve explained that I prevented you from telling him.”

William’s manner was marked by the utmost formality. He bowed very slightly in the direction of Mr. Hilbery, and stood erect, holding one lapel of his coat, and gazing into the centre of the fire. He waited for Mr. Hilbery to speak.

Mr. Hilbery also assumed an appearance of formidable dignity. He had risen to his feet, and now bent the top part of his body slightly forward.

“I should like your account of this affair, Rodney—if Katharine no longer prevents you from speaking.”

William waited two seconds at least.

“Our engagement is at an end,” he said, with the utmost stiffness.

“Has this been arrived at by your joint desire?”

After a perceptible pause William bent his head, and Katharine said, as if by an afterthought:

“Oh yes.”

Mr. Hilbery swayed to and fro, and moved his lips as if to utter remarks which remained unspoken.

“I can only suggest that you should postpone any decision until the effect of this misunderstanding has had time to wear off. You have now known each other——” he began.

“There’s been no misunderstanding,” Katharine interposed. “Nothing at all.” She moved a few paces across the room, as if she intended to leave them. Her preoccupied naturalness was in strange contrast to her father’s pomposity and to William’s military rigidity. He had not once raised his eyes. Katharine’s glance, on the other hand, ranged past the two gentlemen, along the books, over the tables, towards the door. She was paying the least possible attention, it seemed, to what was happening. Her father looked at her with a sudden clouding and troubling of his expression. Somehow his faith in her stability and sense was queerly shaken. He no longer felt that he could ultimately entrust her with the whole conduct of her own affairs after a superficial show of directing them. He felt, for the first time in many years, responsible for her.

“Look here, we must get to the bottom of this,” he said, dropping his formal manner and addressing Rodney as if Katharine were not present. “You’ve had some difference of opinion, eh? Take my word for it, most people go through this sort of thing when they’re engaged. I’ve seen more trouble come from long engagements than from any other form of human folly. Take my advice and put the whole matter out of your minds—both of you. I prescribe a complete abstinence from emotion. Visit some cheerful seaside resort, Rodney.”

He was struck by William’s appearance, which seemed to him to indicate profound feeling resolutely held in check. No doubt, he reflected, Katharine had been very trying, unconsciously trying, and had driven him to take up a position which was none of his willing. Mr. Hilbery certainly did not overrate William’s sufferings. No minutes in his life had hitherto extorted from him such intensity of anguish. He was now facing the consequences of his insanity. He must confess himself entirely and fundamentally other than Mr. Hilbery thought him. Everything was against him. Even the Sunday evening and the fire and the tranquil library scene were against him. Mr. Hilbery’s appeal to him as a man of the world was terribly against him. He was no longer a man of any world that Mr. Hilbery cared to recognize. But some power compelled him, as it had compelled him to come downstairs, to make his stand here and now, alone and unhelped by any one, without prospect of reward. He fumbled with various phrases; and then jerked out:

“I love Cassandra.”

Mr. Hilbery’s face turned a curious dull purple. He looked at his daughter. He nodded his head, as if to convey his silent command to her to leave the room; but either she did not notice it or preferred not to obey.

“You have the impudence——” Mr. Hilbery began, in a dull, low voice that he himself had never heard before, when there was a scuffling and exclaiming in the hall, and Cassandra, who appeared to be insisting against some dissuasion on the part of another, burst into the room.

“Uncle Trevor,” she exclaimed, “I insist upon telling you the truth!” She flung herself between Rodney and her uncle, as if she sought to intercept their blows. As her uncle stood perfectly still, looking very large and imposing, and as nobody spoke, she shrank back a little, and looked first at Katharine and then at Rodney. “You must know the truth,” she said, a little lamely.

“You have the impudence to tell me this in Katharine’s presence?” Mr. Hilbery continued, speaking with complete disregard of Cassandra’s interruption.

“I am aware, quite aware—” Rodney’s words, which were broken in sense, spoken after a pause, and with his eyes upon the ground, nevertheless expressed an astonishing amount of resolution. “I am quite aware what you must think of me,” he brought out, looking Mr. Hilbery directly in the eyes for the first time.

“I could express my views on the subject more fully if we were alone,” Mr. Hilbery returned.

“But you forget me,” said Katharine. She moved a little towards Rodney, and her movement seemed to testify mutely to her respect for him, and her alliance with him. “I think William has behaved perfectly rightly, and, after all, it is I who am concerned—I and Cassandra.”

Cassandra, too, gave an indescribably slight movement which seemed to draw the three of them into alliance together. Katharine’s tone and glance made Mr. Hilbery once more feel completely at a loss, and in addition, painfully and angrily obsolete; but in spite of an awful inner hollowness he was outwardly composed.

“Cassandra and Rodney have a perfect right to settle their own affairs according to their own wishes; but I see no reason why they should do so either in my room or in my house…. I wish to be quite clear on this point, however; you are no longer engaged to Rodney.”

He paused, and his pause seemed to signify that he was extremely thankful for his daughter’s deliverance.

Cassandra turned to Katharine, who drew her breath as if to speak and checked herself; Rodney, too, seemed to await some movement on her part; her father glanced at her as if he half anticipated some further revelation. She remained perfectly silent. In the silence they heard distinctly steps descending the staircase, and Katharine went straight to the door.

“Wait,” Mr. Hilbery commanded. “I wish to speak to you—alone,” he added.

She paused, holding the door ajar.

“I’ll come back,” she said, and as she spoke she opened the door and went out. They could hear her immediately speak to some one outside, though the words were inaudible.

Mr. Hilbery was left confronting the guilty couple, who remained standing as if they did not accept their dismissal, and the disappearance of Katharine had brought some change into the situation. So, in his secret heart, Mr. Hilbery felt that it had, for he could not explain his daughter’s behaviour to his own satisfaction.

“Uncle Trevor,” Cassandra exclaimed impulsively, “don’t be angry, please. I couldn’t help it; I do beg you to forgive me.”

Her uncle still refused to acknowledge her identity, and still talked over her head as if she did not exist.

“I suppose you have communicated with the Otways,” he said to Rodney grimly.

“Uncle Trevor, we wanted to tell you,” Cassandra replied for him. “We waited——” she looked appealingly at Rodney, who shook his head ever so slightly.

“Yes? What were you waiting for?” her uncle asked sharply, looking at her at last.

The words died on her lips. It was apparent that she was straining her ears as if to catch some sound outside the room that would come to her help. He received no answer. He listened too.

“This is a most unpleasant business for all parties,” he concluded, sinking into his chair again, hunching his shoulders and regarding the flames. He seemed to speak to himself, and Rodney and Cassandra looked at him in silence.

“Why don’t you sit down?” he said suddenly. He spoke gruffly, but the force of his anger was evidently spent, or some preoccupation had turned his mood to other regions. While Cassandra accepted his invitation, Rodney remained standing.

“I think Cassandra can explain matters better in my absence,” he said, and left the room, Mr. Hilbery giving his assent by a slight nod of the head.

Meanwhile, in the dining-room next door, Denham and Katharine were once more seated at the mahogany table. They seemed to be continuing a conversation broken off in the middle, as if each remembered the precise point at which they had been interrupted, and was eager to go on as quickly as possible. Katharine, having interposed a short account of the interview with her father, Denham made no comment, but said:

“Anyhow, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t see each other.”

“Or stay together. It’s only marriage that’s out of the question,” Katharine replied.

“But if I find myself coming to want you more and more?”

“If our lapses come more and more often?”

He sighed impatiently, and said nothing for a moment.

“But at least,” he renewed, “we’ve established the fact that my lapses are still in some odd way connected with you; yours have nothing to do with me. Katharine,” he added, his assumption of reason broken up by his agitation, “I assure you that we are in love—what other people call love. Remember that night. We had no doubts whatever then. We were absolutely happy for half an hour. You had no lapse until the day after; I had no lapse until yesterday morning. We’ve been happy at intervals all day until I—went off my head, and you, quite naturally, were bored.”

“Ah,” she exclaimed, as if the subject chafed her, “I can’t make you understand. It’s not boredom—I’m never bored. Reality—reality,” she ejaculated, tapping her finger upon the table as if to emphasize and perhaps explain her isolated utterance of this word. “I cease to be real to you. It’s the faces in a storm again—the vision in a hurricane. We come together for a moment and we part. It’s my fault too. I’m as bad as you are—worse, perhaps.”

They were trying to explain, not for the first time, as their weary gestures and frequent interruptions showed, what in their common language they had christened their “lapses”; a constant source of distress to them, in the past few days, and the immediate reason why Ralph was on his way to leave the house when Katharine, listening anxiously, heard him and prevented him. What was the cause of these lapses? Either because Katharine looked more beautiful, or more strange, because she wore something different, or said something unexpected, Ralph’s sense of her romance welled up and overcame him either into silence or into inarticulate expressions, which Katharine, with unintentional but invariable perversity, interrupted or contradicted with some severity or assertion of prosaic fact. Then the vision disappeared, and Ralph expressed vehemently in his turn the conviction that he only loved her shadow and cared nothing for her reality. If the lapse was on her side it took the form of gradual detachment until she became completely absorbed in her own thoughts, which carried her away with such intensity that she sharply resented any recall to her companion’s side. It was useless to assert that these trances were always originated by Ralph himself, however little in their later stages they had to do with him. The fact remained that she had no need of him and was very loath to be reminded of him. How then, could they be in love? The fragmentary nature of their relationship was but too apparent.

Thus they sat depressed to silence at the dining-room table, oblivious of everything, while Rodney paced the drawing-room overhead in such agitation and exaltation of mind as he had never conceived possible, and Cassandra remained alone with her uncle. Ralph, at length, rose and walked gloomily to the window. He pressed close to the pane. Outside were truth and freedom and the immensity only to be apprehended by the mind in loneliness, and never communicated to another. What worse sacrilege was there than to attempt to violate what he perceived by seeking to impart it? Some movement behind him made him reflect that Katharine had the power, if she chose, to be in person what he dreamed of her spirit. He turned sharply to implore her help, when again he was struck cold by her look of distance, her expression of intentness upon some far object. As if conscious of his look upon her she rose and came to him, standing close by his side, and looking with him out into the dusky atmosphere. Their physical closeness was to him a bitter enough comment upon the distance between their minds. Yet distant as she was, her presence by his side transformed the world. He saw himself performing wonderful deeds of courage; saving the drowning, rescuing the forlorn. Impatient with this form of egotism, he could not shake off the conviction that somehow life was wonderful, romantic, a master worth serving so long as she stood there. He had no wish that she should speak; he did not look at her or touch her; she was apparently deep in her own thoughts and oblivious of his presence.

The door opened without their hearing the sound. Mr. Hilbery looked round the room, and for a moment failed to discover the two figures in the window. He started with displeasure when he saw them, and observed them keenly before he appeared able to make up his mind to say anything. He made a movement finally that warned them of his presence; they turned instantly. Without speaking, he beckoned to Katharine to come to him, and, keeping his eyes from the region of the room where Denham stood, he shepherded her in front of him back to the study. When Katharine was inside the room he shut the study door carefully behind him as if to secure himself from something that he disliked.

“Now, Katharine,” he said, taking up his stand in front of the fire, “you will, perhaps, have the kindness to explain—” She remained silent. “What inferences do you expect me to draw?” he said sharply…. “You tell me that you are not engaged to Rodney; I see you on what appear to be extremely intimate terms with another—with Ralph Denham. What am I to conclude? Are you,” he added, as she still said nothing, “engaged to Ralph Denham?”

“No,” she replied.

His sense of relief was great; he had been certain that her answer would have confirmed his suspicions, but that anxiety being set at rest, he was the more conscious of annoyance with her for her behaviour.

“Then all I can say is that you’ve very strange ideas of the proper way to behave…. People have drawn certain conclusions, nor am I surprised…. The more I think of it the more inexplicable I find it,” he went on, his anger rising as he spoke. “Why am I left in ignorance of what is going on in my own house? Why am I left to hear of these events for the first time from my sister? Most disagreeable—most upsetting. How I’m to explain to your Uncle Francis—but I wash my hands of it. Cassandra goes to-morrow. I forbid Rodney the house. As for the other young man, the sooner he makes himself scarce the better. After placing the most implicit trust in you, Katharine——” He broke off, disquieted by the ominous silence with which his words were received, and looked at his daughter with the curious doubt as to her state of mind which he had felt before, for the first time, this evening. He perceived once more that she was not attending to what he said, but was listening, and for a moment he, too, listened for sounds outside the room. His certainty that there was some understanding between Denham and Katharine returned, but with a most unpleasant suspicion that there was something illicit about it, as the whole position between the young people seemed to him gravely illicit.

“I’ll speak to Denham,” he said, on the impulse of his suspicion, moving as if to go.

“I shall come with you,” Katharine said instantly, starting forward.

“You will stay here,” said her father.

“What are you going to say to him?” she asked.

“I suppose I may say what I like in my own house?” he returned.

“Then I go too,” she replied.

At these words, which seemed to imply a determination to go—to go for ever, Mr. Hilbery returned to his position in front of the fire, and began swaying slightly from side to side without for the moment making any remark.

“I understood you to say that you were not engaged to him,” he said at length, fixing his eyes upon his daughter.

“We are not engaged,” she said.

“It should be a matter of indifference to you, then, whether he comes here or not—I will not have you listening to other things when I am speaking to you!” he broke off angrily, perceiving a slight movement on her part to one side. “Answer me frankly, what is your relationship with this young man?”

“Nothing that I can explain to a third person,” she said obstinately.

“I will have no more of these equivocations,” he replied.

“I refuse to explain,” she returned, and as she said it the front door banged to. “There!” she exclaimed. “He is gone!” She flashed such a look of fiery indignation at her father that he lost his self-control for a moment.

“For God’s sake, Katharine, control yourself!” he cried.

She looked for a moment like a wild animal caged in a civilized dwelling-place. She glanced over the walls covered with books, as if for a second she had forgotten the position of the door. Then she made as if to go, but her father laid his hand upon her shoulder. He compelled her to sit down.

“These emotions have been very upsetting, naturally,” he said. His manner had regained all its suavity, and he spoke with a soothing assumption of paternal authority. “You’ve been placed in a very difficult position, as I understand from Cassandra. Now let us come to terms; we will leave these agitating questions in peace for the present. Meanwhile, let us try to behave like civilized beings. Let us read Sir Walter Scott. What d’you say to ‘The Antiquary,’ eh? Or ‘The Bride of Lammermoor’?”

He made his own choice, and before his daughter could protest or make her escape, she found herself being turned by the agency of Sir Walter Scott into a civilized human being.

Yet Mr. Hilbery had grave doubts, as he read, whether the process was more than skin-deep. Civilization had been very profoundly and unpleasantly overthrown that evening; the extent of the ruin was still undetermined; he had lost his temper, a physical disaster not to be matched for the space of ten years or so; and his own condition urgently required soothing and renovating at the hands of the classics. His house was in a state of revolution; he had a vision of unpleasant encounters on the staircase; his meals would be poisoned for days to come; was literature itself a specific against such disagreeables? A note of hollowness was in his voice as he read.

[]

Chapter XXXIII

Considering that Mr. Hilbery lived in a house which was accurately numbered in order with its fellows, and that he filled up forms, paid rent, and had seven more years of tenancy to run, he had an excuse for laying down laws for the conduct of those who lived in his house, and this excuse, though profoundly inadequate, he found useful during the interregnum of civilization with which he now found himself faced. In obedience to those laws, Rodney disappeared; Cassandra was dispatched to catch the eleven-thirty on Monday morning; Denham was seen no more; so that only Katharine, the lawful occupant of the upper rooms, remained, and Mr. Hilbery thought himself competent to see that she did nothing further to compromise herself. As he bade her good morning next day he was aware that he knew nothing of what she was thinking, but, as he reflected with some bitterness, even this was an advance upon the ignorance of the previous mornings. He went to his study, wrote, tore up, and wrote again a letter to his wife, asking her to come back on account of domestic difficulties which he specified at first, but in a later draft more discreetly left unspecified. Even if she started the very moment that she got it, he reflected, she would not be home till Tuesday night, and he counted lugubriously the number of hours that he would have to spend in a position of detestable authority alone with his daughter.

What was she doing now, he wondered, as he addressed the envelope to his wife. He could not control the telephone. He could not play the spy. She might be making any arrangements she chose. Yet the thought did not disturb him so much as the strange, unpleasant, illicit atmosphere of the whole scene with the young people the night before. His sense of discomfort was almost physical.

Had he known it, Katharine was far enough withdrawn, both physically and spiritually, from the telephone. She sat in her room with the dictionaries spreading their wide leaves on the table before her, and all the pages which they had concealed for so many years arranged in a pile. She worked with the steady concentration that is produced by the successful effort to think down some unwelcome thought by means of another thought. Having absorbed the unwelcome thought, her mind went on with additional vigour, derived from the victory; on a sheet of paper lines of figures and symbols frequently and firmly written down marked the different stages of its progress. And yet it was broad daylight; there were sounds of knocking and sweeping, which proved that living people were at work on the other side of the door, and the door, which could be thrown open in a second, was her only protection against the world. But she had somehow risen to be mistress in her own kingdom; assuming her sovereignty unconsciously.

Steps approached her unheard. It is true that they were steps that lingered, divagated, and mounted with the deliberation natural to one past sixty whose arms, moreover, are full of leaves and blossoms; but they came on steadily, and soon a tap of laurel boughs against the door arrested Katharine’s pencil as it touched the page. She did not move, however, and sat blank-eyed as if waiting for the interruption to cease. Instead, the door opened. At first, she attached no meaning to the moving mass of green which seemed to enter the room independently of any human agency. Then she recognized parts of her mother’s face and person behind the yellow flowers and soft velvet of the palm-buds.

“From Shakespeare’s tomb!” exclaimed Mrs. Hilbery, dropping the entire mass upon the floor, with a gesture that seemed to indicate an act of dedication. Then she flung her arms wide and embraced her daughter.

“Thank God, Katharine!” she exclaimed. “Thank God!” she repeated.

“You’ve come back?” said Katharine, very vaguely, standing up to receive the embrace.

Although she recognized her mother’s presence, she was very far from taking part in the scene, and yet felt it to be amazingly appropriate that her mother should be there, thanking God emphatically for unknown blessings, and strewing the floor with flowers and leaves from Shakespeare’s tomb.

“Nothing else matters in the world!” Mrs. Hilbery continued. “Names aren’t everything; it’s what we feel that’s everything. I didn’t want silly, kind, interfering letters. I didn’t want your father to tell me. I knew it from the first. I prayed that it might be so.”

“You knew it?” Katharine repeated her mother’s words softly and vaguely, looking past her. “How did you know it?” She began, like a child, to finger a tassel hanging from her mother’s cloak.

“The first evening you told me, Katharine. Oh, and thousands of times—dinner-parties—talking about books—the way he came into the room—your voice when you spoke of him.”

Katharine seemed to consider each of these proofs separately. Then she said gravely:

“I’m not going to marry William. And then there’s Cassandra——”

“Yes, there’s Cassandra,” said Mrs. Hilbery. “I own I was a little grudging at first, but, after all, she plays the piano so beautifully. Do tell me, Katharine,” she asked impulsively, “where did you go that evening she played Mozart, and you thought I was asleep?”

Katharine recollected with difficulty.

“To Mary Datchet’s,” she remembered.

“Ah!” said Mrs. Hilbery, with a slight note of disappointment in her voice. “I had my little romance—my little speculation.” She looked at her daughter. Katharine faltered beneath that innocent and penetrating gaze; she flushed, turned away, and then looked up with very bright eyes.

“I’m not in love with Ralph Denham,” she said.

“Don’t marry unless you’re in love!” said Mrs. Hilbery very quickly. “But,” she added, glancing momentarily at her daughter, “aren’t there different ways, Katharine—different——?”

“We want to meet as often as we like, but to be free,” Katharine continued.

“To meet here, to meet in his house, to meet in the street.” Mrs. Hilbery ran over these phrases as if she were trying chords that did not quite satisfy her ear. It was plain that she had her sources of information, and, indeed, her bag was stuffed with what she called “kind letters” from the pen of her sister-in-law.

“Yes. Or to stay away in the country,” Katharine concluded.

Mrs. Hilbery paused, looked unhappy, and sought inspiration from the window.

“What a comfort he was in that shop—how he took me and found the ruins at once—how safe I felt with him——”

“Safe? Oh no, he’s fearfully rash—he’s always taking risks. He wants to throw up his profession and live in a little cottage and write books, though he hasn’t a penny of his own, and there are any number of sisters and brothers dependent on him.”

“Ah, he has a mother?” Mrs. Hilbery inquired.

“Yes. Rather a fine-looking old lady, with white hair.” Katharine began to describe her visit, and soon Mrs. Hilbery elicited the facts that not only was the house of excruciating ugliness, which Ralph bore without complaint, but that it was evident that every one depended on him, and he had a room at the top of the house, with a wonderful view over London, and a rook.

“A wretched old bird in a corner, with half its feathers out,” she said, with a tenderness in her voice that seemed to commiserate the sufferings of humanity while resting assured in the capacity of Ralph Denham to alleviate them, so that Mrs. Hilbery could not help exclaiming:

“But, Katharine, you are in love!” at which Katharine flushed, looked startled, as if she had said something that she ought not to have said, and shook her head.

Hastily Mrs. Hilbery asked for further details of this extraordinary house, and interposed a few speculations about the meeting between Keats and Coleridge in a lane, which tided over the discomfort of the moment, and drew Katharine on to further descriptions and indiscretions. In truth, she found an extraordinary pleasure in being thus free to talk to some one who was equally wise and equally benignant, the mother of her earliest childhood, whose silence seemed to answer questions that were never asked. Mrs. Hilbery listened without making any remark for a considerable time. She seemed to draw her conclusions rather by looking at her daughter than by listening to her, and, if cross-examined she would probably have given a highly inaccurate version of Ralph Denham’s life-history except that he was penniless, fatherless, and lived at Highgate—all of which was much in his favour. But by means of these furtive glances she had assured herself that Katharine was in a state which gave her, alternately, the most exquisite pleasure and the most profound alarm.

She could not help ejaculating at last:

“It’s all done in five minutes at a Registry Office nowadays, if you think the Church service a little florid—which it is, though there are noble things in it.”

“But we don’t want to be married,” Katharine replied emphatically, and added, “Why, after all, isn’t it perfectly possible to live together without being married?”

Again Mrs. Hilbery looked discomposed, and, in her trouble, took up the sheets which were lying upon the table, and began turning them over this way and that, and muttering to herself as she glanced:

“A plus B minus C equals x y z. It’s so dreadfully ugly, Katharine. That’s what I feel—so dreadfully ugly.”

Katharine took the sheets from her mother’s hand and began shuffling them absent-mindedly together, for her fixed gaze seemed to show that her thoughts were intent upon some other matter.

“Well, I don’t know about ugliness,” she said at length.

“But he doesn’t ask it of you?” Mrs. Hilbery exclaimed. “Not that grave young man with the steady brown eyes?”

“He doesn’t ask anything—we neither of us ask anything.”

“If I could help you, Katharine, by the memory of what I felt——”

“Yes, tell me what you felt.”

Mrs. Hilbery, her eyes growing blank, peered down the enormously long corridor of days at the far end of which the little figures of herself and her husband appeared fantastically attired, clasping hands upon a moonlit beach, with roses swinging in the dusk.

“We were in a little boat going out to a ship at night,” she began. “The sun had set and the moon was rising over our heads. There were lovely silver lights upon the waves and three green lights upon the steamer in the middle of the bay. Your father’s head looked so grand against the mast. It was life, it was death. The great sea was round us. It was the voyage for ever and ever.”

The ancient fairy-tale fell roundly and harmoniously upon Katharine’s ears. Yes, there was the enormous space of the sea; there were the three green lights upon the steamer; the cloaked figures climbed up on deck. And so, voyaging over the green and purple waters, past the cliffs and the sandy lagoons and through pools crowded with the masts of ships and the steeples of churches—here they were. The river seemed to have brought them and deposited them here at this precise point. She looked admiringly at her mother, that ancient voyager.

“Who knows,” exclaimed Mrs. Hilbery, continuing her reveries, “where we are bound for, or why, or who has sent us, or what we shall find—who knows anything, except that love is our faith—love——” she crooned, and the soft sound beating through the dim words was heard by her daughter as the breaking of waves solemnly in order upon the vast shore that she gazed upon. She would have been content for her mother to repeat that word almost indefinitely—a soothing word when uttered by another, a riveting together of the shattered fragments of the world. But Mrs. Hilbery, instead of repeating the word love, said pleadingly:

“And you won’t think those ugly thoughts again, will you, Katharine?” at which words the ship which Katharine had been considering seemed to put into harbour and have done with its seafaring. Yet she was in great need, if not exactly of sympathy, of some form of advice, or, at least, of the opportunity of setting forth her problems before a third person so as to renew them in her own eyes.

“But then,” she said, ignoring the difficult problem of ugliness, “you knew you were in love; but we’re different. It seems,” she continued, frowning a little as she tried to fix the difficult feeling, “as if something came to an end suddenly—gave out—faded—an illusion—as if when we think we’re in love we make it up—we imagine what doesn’t exist. That’s why it’s impossible that we should ever marry. Always to be finding the other an illusion, and going off and forgetting about them, never to be certain that you cared, or that he wasn’t caring for some one not you at all, the horror of changing from one state to the other, being happy one moment and miserable the next—that’s the reason why we can’t possibly marry. At the same time,” she continued, “we can’t live without each other, because——” Mrs. Hilbery waited patiently for the sentence to be completed, but Katharine fell silent and fingered her sheet of figures.

“We have to have faith in our vision,” Mrs. Hilbery resumed, glancing at the figures, which distressed her vaguely, and had some connexion in her mind with the household accounts, “otherwise, as you say——” She cast a lightning glance into the depths of disillusionment which were, perhaps, not altogether unknown to her.

“Believe me, Katharine, it’s the same for every one—for me, too—for your father,” she said earnestly, and sighed. They looked together into the abyss and, as the elder of the two, she recovered herself first and asked:

“But where is Ralph? Why isn’t he here to see me?”

Katharine’s expression changed instantly.

“Because he’s not allowed to come here,” she replied bitterly.

Mrs. Hilbery brushed this aside.

“Would there be time to send for him before luncheon?” she asked.

Katharine looked at her as if, indeed, she were some magician. Once more she felt that instead of being a grown woman, used to advise and command, she was only a foot or two raised above the long grass and the little flowers and entirely dependent upon the figure of indefinite size whose head went up into the sky, whose hand was in hers, for guidance.

“I’m not happy without him,” she said simply.

Mrs. Hilbery nodded her head in a manner which indicated complete understanding, and the immediate conception of certain plans for the future. She swept up her flowers, breathed in their sweetness, and, humming a little song about a miller’s daughter, left the room.

The case upon which Ralph Denham was engaged that afternoon was not apparently receiving his full attention, and yet the affairs of the late John Leake of Dublin were sufficiently confused to need all the care that a solicitor could bestow upon them, if the widow Leake and the five Leake children of tender age were to receive any pittance at all. But the appeal to Ralph’s humanity had little chance of being heard to-day; he was no longer a model of concentration. The partition so carefully erected between the different sections of his life had been broken down, with the result that though his eyes were fixed upon the last Will and Testament, he saw through the page a certain drawing-room in Cheyne Walk.

He tried every device that had proved effective in the past for keeping up the partitions of the mind, until he could decently go home; but a little to his alarm he found himself assailed so persistently, as if from outside, by Katharine, that he launched forth desperately into an imaginary interview with her. She obliterated a bookcase full of law reports, and the corners and lines of the room underwent a curious softening of outline like that which sometimes makes a room unfamiliar at the moment of waking from sleep. By degrees, a pulse or stress began to beat at regular intervals in his mind, heaping his thoughts into waves to which words fitted themselves, and without much consciousness of what he was doing, he began to write on a sheet of draft paper what had the appearance of a poem lacking several words in each line. Not many lines had been set down, however, before he threw away his pen as violently as if that were responsible for his misdeeds, and tore the paper into many separate pieces. This was a sign that Katharine had asserted herself and put to him a remark that could not be met poetically. Her remark was entirely destructive of poetry, since it was to the effect that poetry had nothing whatever to do with her; all her friends spent their lives in making up phrases she said; all his feeling was an illusion, and next moment, as if to taunt him with his impotence, she had sunk into one of those dreamy states which took no account whatever of his existence. Ralph was roused by his passionate attempts to attract her attention to the fact that he was standing in the middle of his little private room in Lincoln’s Inn Fields at a considerable distance from Chelsea. The physical distance increased his desperation. He began pacing in circles until the process sickened him, and then took a sheet of paper for the composition of a letter which, he vowed before he began it, should be sent that same evening.

It was a difficult matter to put into words; poetry would have done it better justice, but he must abstain from poetry. In an infinite number of half-obliterated scratches he tried to convey to her the possibility that although human beings are woefully ill-adapted for communication, still, such communion is the best we know; moreover, they make it possible for each to have access to another world independent of personal affairs, a world of law, of philosophy, or more strangely a world such as he had had a glimpse of the other evening when together they seemed to be sharing something, creating something, an ideal—a vision flung out in advance of our actual circumstances. If this golden rim were quenched, if life were no longer circled by an illusion (but was it an illusion after all?), then it would be too dismal an affair to carry to an end; so he wrote with a sudden spurt of conviction which made clear way for a space and left at least one sentence standing whole. Making every allowance for other desires, on the whole this conclusion appeared to him to justify their relationship. But the conclusion was mystical; it plunged him into thought. The difficulty with which even this amount was written, the inadequacy of the words, and the need of writing under them and over them others which, after all, did no better, led him to leave off before he was at all satisfied with his production, and unable to resist the conviction that such rambling would never be fit for Katharine’s eye. He felt himself more cut off from her than ever. In idleness, and because he could do nothing further with words, he began to draw little figures in the blank spaces, heads meant to resemble her head, blots fringed with flames meant to represent—perhaps the entire universe. From this occupation he was roused by the message that a lady wished to speak to him. He had scarcely time to run his hands through his hair in order to look as much like a solicitor as possible, and to cram his papers into his pocket, already overcome with shame that another eye should behold them, when he realized that his preparations were needless. The lady was Mrs. Hilbery.

“I hope you’re not disposing of somebody’s fortune in a hurry,” she remarked, gazing at the documents on his table, “or cutting off an entail at one blow, because I want to ask you to do me a favour. And Anderson won’t keep his horse waiting. (Anderson is a perfect tyrant, but he drove my dear father to the Abbey the day they buried him.) I made bold to come to you, Mr. Denham, not exactly in search of legal assistance (though I don’t know who I’d rather come to, if I were in trouble), but in order to ask your help in settling some tiresome little domestic affairs that have arisen in my absence. I’ve been to Stratford-on-Avon (I must tell you all about that one of these days), and there I got a letter from my sister-in-law, a dear kind goose who likes interfering with other people’s children because she’s got none of her own. (We’re dreadfully afraid that she’s going to lose the sight of one of her eyes, and I always feel that our physical ailments are so apt to turn into mental ailments. I think Matthew Arnold says something of the same kind about Lord Byron.) But that’s neither here nor there.”

The effect of these parentheses, whether they were introduced for that purpose or represented a natural instinct on Mrs. Hilbery’s part to embellish the bareness of her discourse, gave Ralph time to perceive that she possessed all the facts of their situation and was come, somehow, in the capacity of ambassador.

“I didn’t come here to talk about Lord Byron,” Mrs. Hilbery continued, with a little laugh, “though I know that both you and Katharine, unlike other young people of your generation, still find him worth reading.” She paused. “I’m so glad you’ve made Katharine read poetry, Mr. Denham!” she exclaimed, “and feel poetry, and look poetry! She can’t talk it yet, but she will—oh, she will!”

Ralph, whose hand was grasped and whose tongue almost refused to articulate, somehow contrived to say that there were moments when he felt hopeless, utterly hopeless, though he gave no reason for this statement on his part.

“But you care for her?” Mrs. Hilbery inquired.

“Good God!” he exclaimed, with a vehemence which admitted of no question.

“It’s the Church of England service you both object to?” Mrs. Hilbery inquired innocently.

“I don’t care a damn what service it is,” Ralph replied.

“You would marry her in Westminster Abbey if the worst came to the worst?” Mrs. Hilbery inquired.

“I would marry her in St. Paul’s Cathedral,” Ralph replied. His doubts upon this point, which were always roused by Katharine’s presence, had vanished completely, and his strongest wish in the world was to be with her immediately, since every second he was away from her he imagined her slipping farther and farther from him into one of those states of mind in which he was unrepresented. He wished to dominate her, to possess her.

“Thank God!” exclaimed Mrs. Hilbery. She thanked Him for a variety of blessings: for the conviction with which the young man spoke; and not least for the prospect that on her daughter’s wedding-day the noble cadences, the stately periods, the ancient eloquence of the marriage service would resound over the heads of a distinguished congregation gathered together near the very spot where her father lay quiescent with the other poets of England. The tears filled her eyes; but she remembered simultaneously that her carriage was waiting, and with dim eyes she walked to the door. Denham followed her downstairs.

It was a strange drive. For Denham it was without exception the most unpleasant he had ever taken. His only wish was to go as straightly and quickly as possible to Cheyne Walk; but it soon appeared that Mrs. Hilbery either ignored or thought fit to baffle this desire by interposing various errands of her own. She stopped the carriage at post-offices, and coffee-shops, and shops of inscrutable dignity where the aged attendants had to be greeted as old friends; and, catching sight of the dome of St. Paul’s above the irregular spires of Ludgate Hill, she pulled the cord impulsively, and gave directions that Anderson should drive them there. But Anderson had reasons of his own for discouraging afternoon worship, and kept his horse’s nose obstinately towards the west. After some minutes, Mrs. Hilbery realized the situation, and accepted it good-humouredly, apologizing to Ralph for his disappointment.

“Never mind,” she said, “we’ll go to St. Paul’s another day, and it may turn out, though I can’t promise that it will, that he’ll take us past Westminster Abbey, which would be even better.”

Ralph was scarcely aware of what she went on to say. Her mind and body both seemed to have floated into another region of quick-sailing clouds rapidly passing across each other and enveloping everything in a vaporous indistinctness. Meanwhile he remained conscious of his own concentrated desire, his impotence to bring about anything he wished, and his increasing agony of impatience.

Suddenly Mrs. Hilbery pulled the cord with such decision that even Anderson had to listen to the order which she leant out of the window to give him. The carriage pulled up abruptly in the middle of Whitehall before a large building dedicated to one of our Government offices. In a second Mrs. Hilbery was mounting the steps, and Ralph was left in too acute an irritation by this further delay even to speculate what errand took her now to the Board of Education. He was about to jump from the carriage and take a cab, when Mrs. Hilbery reappeared talking genially to a figure who remained hidden behind her.

“There’s plenty of room for us all,” she was saying. “Plenty of room. We could find space for four of you, William,” she added, opening the door, and Ralph found that Rodney had now joined their company. The two men glanced at each other. If distress, shame, discomfort in its most acute form were ever visible upon a human face, Ralph could read them all expressed beyond the eoquence of words upon the face of his unfortunate companion. But Mrs. Hilbery was either completely unseeing or determined to appear so. She went on talking; she talked, it seemed to both the young men, to some one outside, up in the air. She talked about Shakespeare, she apostrophized the human race, she proclaimed the virtues of divine poetry, she began to recite verses which broke down in the middle. The great advantage of her discourse was that it was self-supporting. It nourished itself until Cheyne Walk was reached upon half a dozen grunts and murmurs.

“Now,” she said, alighting briskly at her door, “here we are!”

There was something airy and ironical in her voice and expression as she turned upon the doorstep and looked at them, which filled both Rodney and Denham with the same misgivings at having trusted their fortunes to such an ambassador; and Rodney actually hesitated upon the threshold and murmured to Denham:

“You go in, Denham. I …” He was turning tail, but the door opening and the familiar look of the house asserting its charm, he bolted in on the wake of the others, and the door shut upon his escape. Mrs. Hilbery led the way upstairs. She took them to the drawing-room. The fire burnt as usual, the little tables were laid with china and silver. There was nobody there.

“Ah,” she said, “Katharine’s not here. She must be upstairs in her room. You have something to say to her, I know, Mr. Denham. You can find your way?” she vaguely indicated the ceiling with a gesture of her hand. She had become suddenly serious and composed, mistress in her own house. The gesture with which she dismissed him had a dignity that Ralph never forgot. She seemed to make him free with a wave of her hand to all that she possessed. He left the room.

The Hilberys’ house was tall, possessing many stories and passages with closed doors, all, once he had passed the drawing-room floor, unknown to Ralph. He mounted as high as he could and knocked at the first door he came to.

“May I come in?” he asked.

A voice from within answered “Yes.”

He was conscious of a large window, full of light, of a bare table, and of a long looking-glass. Katharine had risen, and was standing with some white papers in her hand, which slowly fluttered to the ground as she saw her visitor. The explanation was a short one. The sounds were inarticulate; no one could have understood the meaning save themselves. As if the forces of the world were all at work to tear them asunder they sat, clasping hands, near enough to be taken even by the malicious eye of Time himself for a united couple, an indivisible unit.

“Don’t move, don’t go,” she begged of him, when he stooped to gather the papers she had let fall. But he took them in his hands and, giving her by a sudden impulse his own unfinished dissertation, with its mystical conclusion, they read each other’s compositions in silence.

Katharine read his sheets to an end; Ralph followed her figures as far as his mathematics would let him. They came to the end of their tasks at about the same moment, and sat for a time in silence.

“Those were the papers you left on the seat at Kew,” said Ralph at length. “You folded them so quickly that I couldn’t see what they were.”

She blushed very deeply; but as she did not move or attempt to hide her face she had the appearance of someone disarmed of all defences, or Ralph likened her to a wild bird just settling with wings trembling to fold themselves within reach of his hand. The moment of exposure had been exquisitely painful—the light shed startlingly vivid. She had now to get used to the fact that some one shared her loneliness. The bewilderment was half shame and half the prelude to profound rejoicing. Nor was she unconscious that on the surface the whole thing must appear of the utmost absurdity. She looked to see whether Ralph smiled, but found his gaze fixed on her with such gravity that she turned to the belief that she had committed no sacrilege but enriched herself, perhaps immeasurably, perhaps eternally. She hardly dared steep herself in the infinite bliss. But his glance seemed to ask for some assurance upon another point of vital interest to him. It beseeched her mutely to tell him whether what she had read upon his confused sheet had any meaning or truth to her. She bent her head once more to the papers she held.

“I like your little dot with the flames round it,” she said meditatively.

Ralph nearly tore the page from her hand in shame and despair when he saw her actually contemplating the idiotic symbol of his most confused and emotional moments.

He was convinced that it could mean nothing to another, although somehow to him it conveyed not only Katharine herself but all those states of mind which had clustered round her since he first saw her pouring out tea on a Sunday afternoon. It represented by its circumference of smudges surrounding a central blot all that encircling glow which for him surrounded, inexplicably, so many of the objects of life, softening their sharp outline, so that he could see certain streets, books, and situations wearing a halo almost perceptible to the physical eye. Did she smile? Did she put the paper down wearily, condemning it not only for its inadequacy but for its falsity? Was she going to protest once more that he only loved the vision of her? But it did not occur to her that this diagram had anything to do with her. She said simply, and in the same tone of reflection:

“Yes, the world looks something like that to me too.”

He received her assurance with profound joy. Quietly and steadily there rose up behind the whole aspect of life that soft edge of fire which gave its red tint to the atmosphere and crowded the scene with shadows so deep and dark that one could fancy pushing farther into their density and still farther, exploring indefinitely. Whether there was any correspondence between the two prospects now opening before them they shared the same sense of the impending future, vast, mysterious, infinitely stored with undeveloped shapes which each would unwrap for the other to behold; but for the present the prospect of the future was enough to fill them with silent adoration. At any rate, their further attempts to communicate articulately were interrupted by a knock on the door, and the entrance of a maid who, with a due sense of mystery, announced that a lady wished to see Miss Hilbery, but refused to allow her name to be given.

When Katharine rose, with a profound sigh, to resume her duties, Ralph went with her, and neither of them formulated any guess, on their way downstairs, as to who this anonymous lady might prove to be. Perhaps the fantastic notion that she was a little black hunchback provided with a steel knife, which she would plunge into Katharine’s heart, appeared to Ralph more probable than another, and he pushed first into the dining-room to avert the blow. Then he exclaimed “Cassandra!” with such heartiness at the sight of Cassandra Otway standing by the dining-room table that she put her finger to her lips and begged him to be quiet.

“Nobody must know I’m here,” she explained in a sepulchral whisper. “I missed my train. I have been wandering about London all day. I can bear it no longer. Katharine, what am I to do?”

Katharine pushed forward a chair; Ralph hastily found wine and poured it out for her. If not actually fainting, she was very near it.

“William’s upstairs,” said Ralph, as soon as she appeared to be recovered. “I’ll go and ask him to come down to you.” His own happiness had given him a confidence that every one else was bound to be happy too. But Cassandra had her uncle’s commands and anger too vividly in mind to dare any such defiance. She became agitated and said that she must leave the house at once. She was not in a condition to go, had they known where to send her. Katharine’s common sense, which had been in abeyance for the past week or two, still failed her, and she could only ask, “But where’s your luggage?” in the vague belief that to take lodgings depended entirely upon a sufficiency of luggage. Cassandra’s reply, “I’ve lost my luggage,” in no way helped her to a conclusion.

“You’ve lost your luggage,” she repeated. Her eyes rested upon Ralph, with an expression which seemed better fitted to accompany a profound thanksgiving for his existence or some vow of eternal devotion than a question about luggage. Cassandra perceived the look, and saw that it was returned; her eyes filled with tears. She faltered in what she was saying. She began bravely again to discuss the question of a lodging when Katharine, who seemed to have communicated silently with Ralph, and obtained his permission, took her ruby ring from her finger and giving it to Cassandra, said: “I believe it will fit you without any alteration.”

These words would not have been enough to convince Cassandra of what she very much wished to believe had not Ralph taken the bare hand in his and demanded:

“Why don’t you tell us you’re glad?” Cassandra was so glad that the tears ran down her cheeks. The certainty of Katharine’s engagement not only relieved her of a thousand vague fears and self-reproaches, but entirely quenched that spirit of criticism which had lately impaired her belief in Katharine. Her old faith came back to her. She seemed to behold her with that curious intensity which she had lost; as a being who walks just beyond our sphere, so that life in their presence is a heightened process, illuminating not only us but a considerable stretch of the surrounding world. Next moment she contrasted her own lot with theirs and gave back the ring.

“I won’t take that unless William gives it me himself,” she said. “Keep it for me, Katharine.”

“I assure you everything’s perfectly all right,” said Ralph. “Let me tell William——”

He was about, in spite of Cassandra’s protest, to reach the door, when Mrs. Hilbery, either warned by the parlourmaid or conscious with her usual prescience of the need for her intervention, opened the door and smilingly surveyed them.

“My dear Cassandra!” she exclaimed. “How delightful to see you back again! What a coincidence!” she observed, in a general way. “William is upstairs. The kettle boils over. Where’s Katharine, I say? I go to look, and I find Cassandra!” She seemed to have proved something to her own satisfaction, although nobody felt certain precisely what thing it was.

“I find Cassandra,” she repeated.

“She missed her train,” Katharine interposed, seeing that Cassandra was unable to speak.

“Life,” began Mrs. Hilbery, drawing inspiration from the portraits on the wall apparently, “consists in missing trains and in finding——” But she pulled herself up and remarked that the kettle must have boiled completely over everything.

To Katharine’s agitated mind it appeared that this kettle was an enormous kettle, capable of deluging the house in its incessant showers of steam, the enraged representative of all those household duties which she had neglected. She ran hastily up to the drawing-room, and the rest followed her, for Mrs. Hilbery put her arm round Cassandra and drew her upstairs. They found Rodney observing the kettle with uneasiness but with such absence of mind that Katharine’s catastrophe was in a fair way to be fulfilled. In putting the matter straight no greetings were exchanged, but Rodney and Cassandra chose seats as far apart as possible, and sat down with an air of people making a very temporary lodgment. Either Mrs. Hilbery was impervious to their discomfort, or chose to ignore it, or thought it high time that the subject was changed, for she did nothing but talk about Shakespeare’s tomb.

“So much earth and so much water and that sublime spirit brooding over it all,” she mused, and went on to sing her strange, half-earthly song of dawns and sunsets, of great poets, and the unchanged spirit of noble loving which they had taught, so that nothing changes, and one age is linked with another, and no one dies, and we all meet in spirit, until she appeared oblivious of any one in the room. But suddenly her remarks seemed to contract the enormously wide circle in which they were soaring and to alight, airily and temporarily, upon matters of more immediate moment.

“Katharine and Ralph,” she said, as if to try the sound. “William and Cassandra.”

“I feel myself in an entirely false position,” said William desperately, thrusting himself into this breach in her reflections. “I’ve no right to be sitting here. Mr. Hilbery told me yesterday to leave the house. I’d no intention of coming back again. I shall now——”

“I feel the same too,” Cassandra interrupted. “After what Uncle Trevor said to me last night——”

“I have put you into a most odious position,” Rodney went on, rising from his seat, in which movement he was imitated simultaneously by Cassandra. “Until I have your father’s consent I have no right to speak to you—let alone in this house, where my conduct”—he looked at Katharine, stammered, and fell silent—“where my conduct has been reprehensible and inexcusable in the extreme,” he forced himself to continue. “I have explained everything to your mother. She is so generous as to try and make me believe that I have done no harm—you have convinced her that my behaviour, selfish and weak as it was—selfish and weak——” he repeated, like a speaker who has lost his notes.

Two emotions seemed to be struggling in Katharine; one the desire to laugh at the ridiculous spectacle of William making her a formal speech across the tea-table, the other a desire to weep at the sight of something childlike and honest in him which touched her inexpressibly. To every one’s surprise she rose, stretched out her hand, and said:

“You’ve nothing to reproach yourself with—you’ve been always——” but here her voice died away, and the tears forced themselves into her eyes, and ran down her cheeks, while William, equally moved, seized her hand and pressed it to his lips. No one perceived that the drawing-room door had opened itself sufficiently to admit at least half the person of Mr. Hilbery, or saw him gaze at the scene round the tea-table with an expression of the utmost disgust and expostulation. He withdrew unseen. He paused outside on the landing trying to recover his self-control and to decide what course he might with most dignity pursue. It was obvious to him that his wife had entirely confused the meaning of his instructions. She had plunged them all into the most odious confusion. He waited a moment, and then, with much preliminary rattling of the handle, opened the door a second time. They had all regained their places; some incident of an absurd nature had now set them laughing and looking under the table, so that his entrance passed momentarily unperceived. Katharine, with flushed cheeks, raised her head and said:

“Well, that’s my last attempt at the dramatic.”

“It’s astonishing what a distance they roll,” said Ralph, stooping to turn up the corner of the hearthrug.

“Don’t trouble—don’t bother. We shall find it—” Mrs. Hilbery began, and then saw her husband and exclaimed: “Oh, Trevor, we’re looking for Cassandra’s engagement-ring!”

Mr. Hilbery looked instinctively at the carpet. Remarkably enough, the ring had rolled to the very point where he stood. He saw the rubies touching the tip of his boot. Such is the force of habit that he could not refrain from stooping, with an absurd little thrill of pleasure at being the one to find what others were looking for, and, picking the ring up, he presented it, with a bow that was extremely courtly, to Cassandra. Whether the making of a bow released automatically feelings of complaisance and urbanity, Mr. Hilbery found his resentment completely washed away during the second in which he bent and straightened himself. Cassandra dared to offer her cheek and received his embrace. He nodded with some degree of stiffness to Rodney and Denham, who had both risen upon seeing him, and now all together sat down. Mrs. Hilbery seemed to have been waiting for the entrance of her husband, and for this precise moment in order to put to him a question which, from the ardour with which she announced it, had evidently been pressing for utterance for some time past.

“Oh, Trevor, please tell me, what was the date of the first performance of Hamlet?”

In order to answer her Mr. Hilbery had to have recourse to the exact scholarship of William Rodney, and before he had given his excellent authorities for believing as he believed, Rodney felt himself admitted once more to the society of the civilized and sanctioned by the authority of no less a person than Shakespeare himself. The power of literature, which had temporarily deserted Mr. Hilbery, now came back to him, pouring over the raw ugliness of human affairs its soothing balm, and providing a form into which such passions as he had felt so painfully the night before could be moulded so that they fell roundly from the tongue in shapely phrases, hurting nobody. He was sufficiently sure of his command of language at length to look at Katharine and again at Denham. All this talk about Shakespeare had acted as a soporific, or rather as an incantation upon Katharine. She leant back in her chair at the head of the tea-table, perfectly silent, looking vaguely past them all, receiving the most generalized ideas of human heads against pictures, against yellow-tinted walls, against curtains of deep crimson velvet. Denham, to whom he turned next, shared her immobility under his gaze. But beneath his restraint and calm it was possible to detect a resolution, a will, set now with unalterable tenacity, which made such turns of speech as Mr. Hilbery had at command appear oddly irrelevant. At any rate, he said nothing. He respected the young man; he was a very able young man; he was likely to get his own way. He could, he thought, looking at his still and very dignified head, understand Katharine’s preference, and, as he thought this, he was surprised by a pang of acute jealousy. She might have married Rodney without causing him a twinge. This man she loved. Or what was the state of affairs between them? An extraordinary confusion of emotion was beginning to get the better of him, when Mrs. Hilbery, who had been conscious of a sudden pause in the conversation, and had looked wistfully at her daughter once or twice, remarked:

“Don’t stay if you want to go, Katharine. There’s the little room over there. Perhaps you and Ralph——”

“We’re engaged,” said Katharine, waking with a start, and looking straight at her father. He was taken aback by the directness of the statement; he exclaimed as if an unexpected blow had struck him. Had he loved her to see her swept away by this torrent, to have her taken from him by this uncontrollable force, to stand by helpless, ignored? Oh, how he loved her! How he loved her! He nodded very curtly to Denham.

“I gathered something of the kind last night,” he said. “I hope you’ll deserve her.” But he never looked at his daughter, and strode out of the room, leaving in the minds of the women a sense, half of awe, half of amusement, at the extravagant, inconsiderate, uncivilized male, outraged somehow and gone bellowing to his lair with a roar which still sometimes reverberates in the most polished of drawing-rooms. Then Katharine, looking at the shut door, looked down again, to hide her tears.

[]

Chapter XXXIV

The lamps were lit; their lustre reflected itself in the polished wood; good wine was passed round the dinner-table; before the meal was far advanced civilization had triumphed, and Mr. Hilbery presided over a feast which came to wear more and more surely an aspect, cheerful, dignified, promising well for the future. To judge from the expression in Katharine’s eyes it promised something—but he checked the approach to sentimentality. He poured out wine; he bade Denham help himself.

They went upstairs and he saw Katharine and Denham abstract themselves directly Cassandra had asked whether she might not play him something—some Mozart? some Beethoven? She sat down to the piano; the door closed softly behind them. His eyes rested on the closed door for some seconds unwaveringly, but, by degrees, the look of expectation died out of them, and with a sigh he listened to the music.

Katharine and Ralph were agreed with scarcely a word of discussion as to what they wished to do, and in a moment she joined him in the hall dressed for walking. The night was still and moonlit, fit for walking, though any night would have seemed so to them, desiring more than anything movement, freedom from scrutiny, silence, and the open air.

“At last!” she breathed, as the front door shut. She told him how she had waited, fidgeted, thought he was never coming, listened for the sound of doors, half expected to see him again under the lamp-post, looking at the house. They turned and looked at the serene front with its gold-rimmed windows, to him the shrine of so much adoration. In spite of her laugh and the little pressure of mockery on his arm, he would not resign his belief, but with her hand resting there, her voice quickened and mysteriously moving in his ears, he had not time—he had not the same inclination—other objects drew his attention.

How they came to find themselves walking down a street with many lamps, corners radiant with light, and a steady succession of motor-omnibuses plying both ways along it, they could neither of them tell; nor account for the impulse which led them suddenly to select one of these wayfarers and mount to the very front seat. After curving through streets of comparative darkness, so narrow that shadows on the blinds were pressed within a few feet of their faces, they came to one of those great knots of activity where the lights, having drawn close together, thin out again and take their separate ways. They were borne on until they saw the spires of the city churches pale and flat against the sky.

“Are you cold?” he asked, as they stopped by Temple Bar.

“Yes, I am rather,” she replied, becoming conscious that the splendid race of lights drawn past her eyes by the superb curving and swerving of the monster on which she sat was at an end. They had followed some such course in their thoughts too; they had been borne on, victors in the forefront of some triumphal car, spectators of a pageant enacted for them, masters of life. But standing on the pavement alone, this exaltation left them; they were glad to be alone together. Ralph stood still for a moment to light his pipe beneath a lamp.

She looked at his face isolated in the little circle of light.

“Oh, that cottage,” she said. “We must take it and go there.”

“And leave all this?” he inquired.

“As you like,” she replied. She thought, looking at the sky above Chancery Lane, how the roof was the same everywhere; how she was now secure of all that this lofty blue and its steadfast lights meant to her; reality, was it, figures, love, truth?

“I’ve something on my mind,” said Ralph abruptly. “I mean I’ve been thinking of Mary Datchet. We’re very near her rooms now. Would you mind if we went there?”

She had turned before she answered him. She had no wish to see any one to-night; it seemed to her that the immense riddle was answered; the problem had been solved; she held in her hands for one brief moment the globe which we spend our lives in trying to shape, round, whole, and entire from the confusion of chaos. To see Mary was to risk the destruction of this globe.

“Did you treat her badly?” she asked rather mechanically, walking on.

“I could defend myself,” he said, almost defiantly. “But what’s the use, if one feels a thing? I won’t be with her a minute,” he said. “I’ll just tell her——”

“Of course, you must tell her,” said Katharine, and now felt anxious for him to do what appeared to be necessary if he, too, were to hold his globe for a moment round, whole, and entire.

“I wish—I wish——” she sighed, for melancholy came over her and obscured at least a section of her clear vision. The globe swam before her as if obscured by tears.

“I regret nothing,” said Ralph firmly. She leant towards him almost as if she could thus see what he saw. She thought how obscure he still was to her, save only that more and more constantly he appeared to her a fire burning through its smoke, a source of life.

“Go on,” she said. “You regret nothing——”

“Nothing—nothing,” he repeated.

“What a fire!” she thought to herself. She thought of him blazing splendidly in the night, yet so obscure that to hold his arm, as she held it, was only to touch the opaque substance surrounding the flame that roared upwards.

“Why nothing?” she asked hurriedly, in order that he might say more and so make more splendid, more red, more darkly intertwined with smoke this flame rushing upwards.

“What are you thinking of, Katharine?” he asked suspiciously, noticing her tone of dreaminess and the inapt words.

“I was thinking of you—yes, I swear it. Always of you, but you take such strange shapes in my mind. You’ve destroyed my loneliness. Am I to tell you how I see you? No, tell me—tell me from the beginning.”

Beginning with spasmodic words, he went on to speak more and more fluently, more and more passionately, feeling her leaning towards him, listening with wonder like a child, with gratitude, like a woman. She interrupted him gravely now and then.

“But it was foolish to stand outside and look at the windows. Suppose William hadn’t seen you. Would you have gone to bed?”

He capped her reproof with wonderment that a woman of her age could have stood in Kingsway looking at the traffic until she forgot.

“But it was then I first knew I loved you!” she exclaimed.

“Tell me from the beginning,” he begged her.

“No, I’m a person who can’t tell things,” she pleaded. “I shall say something ridiculous—something about flames—fires. No, I can’t tell you.”

But he persuaded her into a broken statement, beautiful to him, charged with extreme excitement as she spoke of the dark red fire, and the smoke twined round it, making him feel that he had stepped over the threshold into the faintly lit vastness of another mind, stirring with shapes, so large, so dim, unveiling themselves only in flashes, and moving away again into the darkness, engulfed by it. They had walked by this time to the street in which Mary lived, and being engrossed by what they said and partly saw, passed her staircase without looking up. At this time of night there was no traffic and scarcely any foot-passengers, so that they could pace slowly without interruption, arm-in-arm, raising their hands now and then to draw something upon the vast blue curtain of the sky.

They brought themselves by these means, acting on a mood of profound happiness, to a state of clear-sightedness where the lifting of a finger had effect, and one word spoke more than a sentence. They lapsed gently into silence, travelling the dark paths of thought side by side towards something discerned in the distance which gradually possessed them both. They were victors, masters of life, but at the same time absorbed in the flame, giving their life to increase its brightness, to testify to their faith. Thus they had walked, perhaps, twice or three times up and down Mary Datchet’s street before the recurrence of a light burning behind a thin, yellow blind caused them to stop without exactly knowing why they did so. It burnt itself into their minds.

“That is the light in Mary’s room,” said Ralph. “She must be at home.” He pointed across the street. Katharine’s eyes rested there too.

“Is she alone, working at this time of night? What is she working at?” she wondered. “Why should we interrupt her?” she asked passionately. “What have we got to give her? She’s happy too,” she added. “She has her work.” Her voice shook slightly, and the light swam like an ocean of gold behind her tears.

“You don’t want me to go to her?” Ralph asked.

“Go, if you like; tell her what you like,” she replied.

He crossed the road immediately, and went up the steps into Mary’s house. Katharine stood where he left her, looking at the window and expecting soon to see a shadow move across it; but she saw nothing; the blinds conveyed nothing; the light was not moved. It signalled to her across the dark street; it was a sign of triumph shining there for ever, not to be extinguished this side of the grave. She brandished her happiness as if in salute; she dipped it as if in reverence. “How they burn!” she thought, and all the darkness of London seemed set with fires, roaring upwards; but her eyes came back to Mary’s window and rested there satisfied. She had waited some time before a figure detached itself from the doorway and came across the road, slowly and reluctantly, to where she stood.

“I didn’t go in—I couldn’t bring myself,” he broke off. He had stood outside Mary’s door unable to bring himself to knock; if she had come out she would have found him there, the tears running down his cheeks, unable to speak.

They stood for some moments, looking at the illuminated blinds, an expression to them both of something impersonal and serene in the spirit of the woman within, working out her plans far into the night—her plans for the good of a world that none of them were ever to know. Then their minds jumped on and other little figures came by in procession, headed, in Ralph’s view, by the figure of Sally Seal.

“Do you remember Sally Seal?” he asked. Katharine bent her head.

“Your mother and Mary?” he went on. “Rodney and Cassandra? Old Joan up at Highgate?” He stopped in his enumeration, not finding it possible to link them together in any way that should explain the queer combination which he could perceive in them, as he thought of them. They appeared to him to be more than individuals; to be made up of many different things in cohesion; he had a vision of an orderly world.

“It’s all so easy—it’s all so simple,” Katharine quoted, remembering some words of Sally Seal’s, and wishing Ralph to understand that she followed the track of his thought. She felt him trying to piece together in a laborious and elementary fashion fragments of belief, unsoldered and separate, lacking the unity of phrases fashioned by the old believers. Together they groped in this difficult region, where the unfinished, the unfulfilled, the unwritten, the unreturned, came together in their ghostly way and wore the semblance of the complete and the satisfactory. The future emerged more splendid than ever from this construction of the present. Books were to be written, and since books must be written in rooms, and rooms must have hangings, and outside the windows there must be land, and an horizon to that land, and trees perhaps, and a hill, they sketched a habitation for themselves upon the outline of great offices in the Strand and continued to make an account of the future upon the omnibus which took them towards Chelsea; and still, for both of them, it swam miraculously in the golden light of a large steady lamp.

As the night was far advanced they had the whole of the seats on the top of the omnibus to choose from, and the roads, save for an occasional couple, wearing, even at midnight, an air of sheltering their words from the public, were deserted. No longer did the shadow of a man sing to the shadow of a piano. A few lights in bedroom windows burnt but were extinguished one by one as the omnibus passed them.

They dismounted and walked down to the river. She felt his arm stiffen beneath her hand, and knew by this token that they had entered the enchanted region. She might speak to him, but with that strange tremor in his voice, those eyes blindly adoring, whom did he answer? What woman did he see? And where was she walking, and who was her companion? Moments, fragments, a second of vision, and then the flying waters, the winds dissipating and dissolving; then, too, the recollection from chaos, the return of security, the earth firm, superb and brilliant in the sun. From the heart of his darkness he spoke his thanksgiving; from a region as far, as hidden, she answered him. On a June night the nightingales sing, they answer each other across the plain; they are heard under the window among the trees in the garden. Pausing, they looked down into the river which bore its dark tide of waters, endlessly moving, beneath them. They turned and found themselves opposite the house. Quietly they surveyed the friendly place, burning its lamps either in expectation of them or because Rodney was still there talking to Cassandra. Katharine pushed the door half open and stood upon the threshold. The light lay in soft golden grains upon the deep obscurity of the hushed and sleeping household. For a moment they waited, and then loosed their hands. “Good night,” he breathed. “Good night,” she murmured back to him.

[]

MONDAY
OR
TUESDAY

by
Virginia Woolf

published
1921
by
The Hogarth Press

monday or tuesday

1. A Haunted House.

2. A Society.

3. Monday or Tuesday.

4. An Unwritten Novel.

5. The String Quartet.

6. Blue & Green.

7. Kew Gardens.

8. The Mark on the Wall.

[]

[The text follows the 1921 Harcourt, Brace and Company edition.]

1. A Haunted House.

Whatever hour you woke there was a door shutting. From room to room they went, hand in hand, lifting here, opening there, making sure—a ghostly couple.

“Here we left it,” she said. And he added, “Oh, but here too!” “It’s upstairs,” she murmured. “And in the garden,” he whispered. “Quietly,” they said, “or we shall wake them.”

But it wasn’t that you woke us. Oh, no. “They’re looking for it; they’re drawing the curtain,” one might say, and so read on a page or two. “Now they’ve found it,” one would be certain, stopping the pencil on the margin. And then, tired of reading, one might rise and see for oneself, the house all empty, the doors standing open, only the wood pigeons bubbling with content and the hum of the threshing machine sounding from the farm. “What did I come in here for? What did I want to find?” My hands were empty. “Perhaps it’s upstairs then?” The apples were in the loft. And so down again, the garden still as ever, only the book had slipped into the grass.

But they had found it in the drawing room. Not that one could ever see them. The window panes reflected apples, reflected roses; all the leaves were green in the glass. If they moved in the drawing room, the apple only turned its yellow side. Yet, the moment after, if the door was opened, spread about the floor, hung upon the walls, pendant from the ceiling—what? My hands were empty. The shadow of a thrush crossed the carpet; from the deepest wells of silence the wood pigeon drew its bubble of sound. “Safe, safe, safe,” the pulse of the house beat softly. “The treasure buried; the room …” the pulse stopped short. Oh, was that the buried treasure?

A moment later the light had faded. Out in the garden then? But the trees spun darkness for a wandering beam of sun. So fine, so rare, coolly sunk beneath the surface the beam I sought always burnt behind the glass. Death was the glass; death was between us; coming to the woman first, hundreds of years ago, leaving the house, sealing all the windows; the rooms were darkened. He left it, left her, went North, went East, saw the stars turned in the Southern sky; sought the house, found it dropped beneath the Downs. “Safe, safe, safe,” the pulse of the house beat gladly. “The Treasure yours.”

The wind roars up the avenue. Trees stoop and bend this way and that. Moonbeams splash and spill wildly in the rain. But the beam of the lamp falls straight from the window. The candle burns stiff and still. Wandering through the house, opening the windows, whispering not to wake us, the ghostly couple seek their joy.

“Here we slept,” she says. And he adds, “Kisses without number.” “Waking in the morning—” “Silver between the trees—” “Upstairs—” “In the garden—” “When summer came—” “In winter snowtime—” The doors go shutting far in the distance, gently knocking like the pulse of a heart.

Nearer they come; cease at the doorway. The wind falls, the rain slides silver down the glass. Our eyes darken; we hear no steps beside us; we see no lady spread her ghostly cloak. His hands shield the lantern. “Look,” he breathes. “Sound asleep. Love upon their lips.”

Stooping, holding their silver lamp above us, long they look and deeply. Long they pause. The wind drives straightly; the flame stoops slightly. Wild beams of moonlight cross both floor and wall, and, meeting, stain the faces bent; the faces pondering; the faces that search the sleepers and seek their hidden joy.

“Safe, safe, safe,” the heart of the house beats proudly. “Long years—” he sighs. “Again you found me.” “Here,” she murmurs, “sleeping; in the garden reading; laughing, rolling apples in the loft. Here we left our treasure—” Stooping, their light lifts the lids upon my eyes. “Safe! safe! safe!” the pulse of the house beats wildly. Waking, I cry “Oh, is this your buried treasure? The light in the heart.”

[]

2. A Society.

This is how it all came about. Six or seven of us were sitting one day after tea. Some were gazing across the street into the windows of a milliner’s shop where the light still shone brightly upon scarlet feathers and golden slippers. Others were idly occupied in building little towers of sugar upon the edge of the tea tray. After a time, so far as I can remember, we drew round the fire and began as usual to praise men—how strong, how noble, how brilliant, how courageous, how beautiful they were—how we envied those who by hook or by crook managed to get attached to one for life—when Poll, who had said nothing, burst into tears. Poll, I must tell you, has always been queer. For one thing her father was a strange man. He left her a fortune in his will, but on condition that she read all the books in the London Library. We comforted her as best we could; but we knew in our hearts how vain it was. For though we like her, Poll is no beauty; leaves her shoe laces untied; and must have been thinking, while we praised men, that not one of them would ever wish to marry her. At last she dried her tears. For some time we could make nothing of what she said. Strange enough it was in all conscience. She told us that, as we knew, she spent most of her time in the London Library, reading. She had begun, she said, with English literature on the top floor; and was steadily working her way down to the Times on the bottom. And now half, or perhaps only a quarter, way through a terrible thing had happened. She could read no more. Books were not what we thought them. “Books,” she cried, rising to her feet and speaking with an intensity of desolation which I shall never forget, “are for the most part unutterably bad!”

Of course we cried out that Shakespeare wrote books, and Milton and Shelley.

“Oh, yes,” she interrupted us. “You’ve been well taught, I can see. But you are not members of the London Library.” Here her sobs broke forth anew. At length, recovering a little, she opened one of the pile of books which she always carried about with her—“From a Window” or “In a Garden,” or some such name as that it was called, and it was written by a man called Benton or Henson, or something of that kind. She read the first few pages. We listened in silence. “But that’s not a book,” someone said. So she chose another. This time it was a history, but I have forgotten the writer’s name. Our trepidation increased as she went on. Not a word of it seemed to be true, and the style in which it was written was execrable.

“Poetry! Poetry!” we cried, impatiently. “Read us poetry!” I cannot describe the desolation which fell upon us as she opened a little volume and mouthed out the verbose, sentimental foolery which it contained.

“It must have been written by a woman,” one of us urged. But no. She told us that it was written by a young man, one of the most famous poets of the day. I leave you to imagine what the shock of the discovery was. Though we all cried and begged her to read no more, she persisted and read us extracts from the Lives of the Lord Chancellors. When she had finished, Jane, the eldest and wisest of us, rose to her feet and said that she for one was not convinced.

“Why,” she asked, “if men write such rubbish as this, should our mothers have wasted their youth in bringing them into the world?”

We were all silent; and, in the silence, poor Poll could be heard sobbing out, “Why, why did my father teach me to read?”

Clorinda was the first to come to her senses. “It’s all our fault,” she said. “Every one of us knows how to read. But no one, save Poll, has ever taken the trouble to do it. I, for one, have taken it for granted that it was a woman’s duty to spend her youth in bearing children. I venerated my mother for bearing ten; still more my grandmother for bearing fifteen; it was, I confess, my own ambition to bear twenty. We have gone on all these ages supposing that men were equally industrious, and that their works were of equal merit. While we have borne the children, they, we supposed, have borne the books and the pictures. We have populated the world. They have civilized it. But now that we can read, what prevents us from judging the results? Before we bring another child into the world we must swear that we will find out what the world is like.”

So we made ourselves into a society for asking questions. One of us was to visit a man-of-war; another was to hide herself in a scholar’s study; another was to attend a meeting of business men; while all were to read books, look at pictures, go to concerts, keep our eyes open in the streets, and ask questions perpetually. We were very young. You can judge of our simplicity when I tell you that before parting that night we agreed that the objects of life were to produce good people and good books. Our questions were to be directed to finding out how far these objects were now attained by men. We vowed solemnly that we would not bear a single child until we were satisfied.

Off we went then, some to the British Museum; others to the King’s Navy; some to Oxford; others to Cambridge; we visited the Royal Academy and the Tate; heard modern music in concert rooms, went to the Law Courts, and saw new plays. No one dined out without asking her partner certain questions and carefully noting his replies. At intervals we met together and compared our observations. Oh, those were merry meetings! Never have I laughed so much as I did when Rose read her notes upon “Honour” and described how she had dressed herself as an Æthiopian Prince and gone aboard one of His Majesty’s ships. Discovering the hoax, the Captain visited her (now disguised as a private gentleman) and demanded that honour should be satisfied. “But how?” she asked. “How?” he bellowed. “With the cane of course!” Seeing that he was beside himself with rage and expecting that her last moment had come, she bent over and received, to her amazement, six light taps upon the behind. “The honour of the British Navy is avenged!” he cried, and, raising herself, she saw him with the sweat pouring down his face holding out a trembling right hand. “Away!” she exclaimed, striking an attitude and imitating the ferocity of his own expression, “My honour has still to be satisfied!” “Spoken like a gentleman!” he returned, and fell into profound thought. “If six strokes avenge the honour of the King’s Navy,” he mused, “how many avenge the honour of a private gentleman?” He said he would prefer to lay the case before his brother officers. She replied haughtily that she could not wait. He praised her sensibility. “Let me see,” he cried suddenly, “did your father keep a carriage?” “No,” she said. “Or a riding horse?” “We had a donkey,” she bethought her, “which drew the mowing machine.” At this his face lighted. “My mother’s name——” she added. “For God’s sake, man, don’t mention your mother’s name!” he shrieked, trembling like an aspen and flushing to the roots of his hair, and it was ten minutes at least before she could induce him to proceed. At length he decreed that if she gave him four strokes and a half in the small of the back at a spot indicated by himself (the half conceded, he said, in recognition of the fact that her great grandmother’s uncle was killed at Trafalgar) it was his opinion that her honour would be as good as new. This was done; they retired to a restaurant; drank two bottles of wine for which he insisted upon paying; and parted with protestations of eternal friendship.

Then we had Fanny’s account of her visit to the Law Courts. At her first visit she had come to the conclusion that the Judges were either made of wood or were impersonated by large animals resembling man who had been trained to move with extreme dignity, mumble and nod their heads. To test her theory she had liberated a handkerchief of bluebottles at the critical moment of a trial, but was unable to judge whether the creatures gave signs of humanity for the buzzing of the flies induced so sound a sleep that she only woke in time to see the prisoners led into the cells below. But from the evidence she brought we voted that it is unfair to suppose that the Judges are men.

Helen went to the Royal Academy, but when asked to deliver her report upon the pictures she began to recite from a pale blue volume, “O! for the touch of a vanished hand and the sound of a voice that is still. Home is the hunter, home from the hill. He gave his bridle reins a shake. Love is sweet, love is brief. Spring, the fair spring, is the year’s pleasant King. O! to be in England now that April’s there. Men must work and women must weep. The path of duty is the way to glory—” We could listen to no more of this gibberish.

“We want no more poetry!” we cried.

“Daughters of England!” she began, but here we pulled her down, a vase of water getting spilt over her in the scuffle.

“Thank God!” she exclaimed, shaking herself like a dog. “Now I’ll roll on the carpet and see if I can’t brush off what remains of the Union Jack. Then perhaps—” here she rolled energetically. Getting up she began to explain to us what modern pictures are like when Castalia stopped her.

“What is the average size of a picture?” she asked. “Perhaps two feet by two and a half,” she said. Castalia made notes while Helen spoke, and when she had done, and we were trying not to meet each other’s eyes, rose and said, “At your wish I spent last week at Oxbridge, disguised as a charwoman. I thus had access to the rooms of several Professors and will now attempt to give you some idea—only,” she broke off, “I can’t think how to do it. It’s all so queer. These Professors,” she went on, “live in large houses built round grass plots each in a kind of cell by himself. Yet they have every convenience and comfort. You have only to press a button or light a little lamp. Their papers are beautifully filed. Books abound. There are no children or animals, save half a dozen stray cats and one aged bullfinch—a cock. I remember,” she broke off, “an Aunt of mine who lived at Dulwich and kept cactuses. You reached the conservatory through the double drawing-room, and there, on the hot pipes, were dozens of them, ugly, squat, bristly little plants each in a separate pot. Once in a hundred years the Aloe flowered, so my Aunt said. But she died before that happened—” We told her to keep to the point. “Well,” she resumed, “when Professor Hobkin was out, I examined his life work, an edition of Sappho. It’s a queer looking book, six or seven inches thick, not all by Sappho. Oh, no. Most of it is a defence of Sappho’s chastity, which some German had denied, and I can assure you the passion with which these two gentlemen argued, the learning they displayed, the prodigious ingenuity with which they disputed the use of some implement which looked to me for all the world like a hairpin astounded me; especially when the door opened and Professor Hobkin himself appeared. A very nice, mild, old gentleman, but what could he know about chastity?” We misunderstood her.

“No, no,” she protested, “he’s the soul of honour I’m sure—not that he resembles Rose’s sea captain in the least. I was thinking rather of my Aunt’s cactuses. What could they know about chastity?”

Again we told her not to wander from the point,—did the Oxbridge professors help to produce good people and good books?—the objects of life.

“There!” she exclaimed. “It never struck me to ask. It never occurred to me that they could possibly produce anything.”

“I believe,” said Sue, “that you made some mistake. Probably Professor Hobkin was a gynæcologist. A scholar is a very different sort of man. A scholar is overflowing with humour and invention—perhaps addicted to wine, but what of that?—a delightful companion, generous, subtle, imaginative—as stands to reason. For he spends his life in company with the finest human beings that have ever existed.”

“Hum,” said Castalia. “Perhaps I’d better go back and try again.”

Some three months later it happened that I was sitting alone when Castalia entered. I don’t know what it was in the look of her that so moved me; but I could not restrain myself, and, dashing across the room, I clasped her in my arms. Not only was she very beautiful; she seemed also in the highest spirts. [spirits.] “How happy you look!” I exclaimed, as she sat down.

“I’ve been at Oxbridge,” she said.

“Asking questions?”

“Answering them,” she replied.

“You have not broken our vow?” I said anxiously, noticing something about her figure.

“Oh, the vow,” she said casually. “I’m going to have a baby, if that’s what you mean. You can’t imagine,” she burst out, “how exciting, how beautiful, how satisfying—”

“What is?” I asked.

“To—to—answer questions,” she replied in some confusion. Whereupon she told me the whole of her story. But in the middle of an account which interested and excited me more than anything I had ever heard, she gave the strangest cry, half whoop, half holloa—

“Chastity! Chastity! Where’s my chastity!” she cried. “Help Ho! The scent bottle!”

There was nothing in the room but a cruet containing mustard, which I was about to administer when she recovered her composure.

“You should have thought of that three months ago,” I said severely.

“True,” she replied. “There’s not much good in thinking of it now. It was unfortunate, by the way, that my mother had me called Castalia.”

“Oh, Castalia, your mother—” I was beginning when she reached for the mustard pot.

“No, no, no,” she said, shaking her head. “If you’d been a chaste woman yourself you would have screamed at the sight of me—instead of which you rushed across the room and took me in your arms. No, Cassandra. We are neither of us chaste.” So we went on talking.

Meanwhile the room was filling up, for it was the day appointed to discuss the results of our observations. Everyone, I thought, felt as I did about Castalia. They kissed her and said how glad they were to see her again. At length, when we were all assembled, Jane rose and said that it was time to begin. She began by saying that we had now asked questions for over five years, and that though the results were bound to be inconclusive—here Castalia nudged me and whispered that she was not so sure about that. Then she got up, and, interrupting Jane in the middle of a sentence, said:

“Before you say any more, I want to know—am I to stay in the room? Because,” she added, “I have to confess that I am an impure woman.”

Everyone looked at her in astonishment.

“You are going to have a baby?” asked Jane.

She nodded her head.

It was extraordinary to see the different expressions on their faces. A sort of hum went through the room, in which I could catch the words “impure,” “baby,” “Castalia,” and so on. Jane, who was herself considerably moved, put it to us:

“Shall she go? Is she impure?”

Such a roar filled the room as might have been heard in the street outside.

“No! No! No! Let her stay! Impure? Fiddlesticks!” Yet I fancied that some of the youngest, girls of nineteen or twenty, held back as if overcome with shyness. Then we all came about her and began asking questions, and at last I saw one of the youngest, who had kept in the background, approach shyly and say to her:

“What is chastity then? I mean is it good, or is it bad, or is it nothing at all?” She replied so low that I could not catch what she said.

“You know I was shocked,” said another, “for at least ten minutes.”

“In my opinion,” said Poll, who was growing crusty from always reading in the London Library, “chastity is nothing but ignorance—a most discreditable state of mind. We should admit only the unchaste to our society. I vote that Castalia shall be our President.”

This was violently disputed.

“It is as unfair to brand women with chastity as with unchastity,” said Poll. “Some of us haven’t the opportunity either. Moreover, I don’t believe Cassy herself maintains that she acted as she did from a pure love of knowledge.”

“He is only twenty-one and divinely beautiful,” said Cassy, with a ravishing gesture.

“I move,” said Helen, “that no one be allowed to talk of chastity or unchastity save those who are in love.”

“Oh, bother,” said Judith, who had been enquiring into scientific matters, “I’m not in love and I’m longing to explain my measures for dispensing with prostitutes and fertilizing virgins by Act of Parliament.”

She went on to tell us of an invention of hers to be erected at Tube stations and other public resorts, which, upon payment of a small fee, would safeguard the nation’s health, accommodate its sons, and relieve its daughters. Then she had contrived a method of preserving in sealed tubes the germs of future Lord Chancellors “or poets or painters or musicians,” she went on, “supposing, that is to say, that these breeds are not extinct, and that women still wish to bear children——”

“Of course we wish to bear children!” cried Castalia, impatiently. Jane rapped the table.

“That is the very point we are met to consider,” she said. “For five years we have been trying to find out whether we are justified in continuing the human race. Castalia has anticipated our decision. But it remains for the rest of us to make up our minds.”

Here one after another of our messengers rose and delivered their reports. The marvels of civilisation far exceeded our expectations, and, as we learnt for the first time how man flies in the air, talks across space, penetrates to the heart of an atom, and embraces the universe in his speculations, a murmur of admiration burst from our lips.

“We are proud,” we cried, “that our mothers sacrificed their youth in such a cause as this!” Castalia, who had been listening intently, looked prouder than all the rest. Then Jane reminded us that we had still much to learn, and Castalia begged us to make haste. On we went through a vast tangle of statistics. We learnt that England has a population of so many millions, and that such and such a proportion of them is constantly hungry and in prison; that the average size of a working man’s family is such, and that so great a percentage of women die from maladies incident to childbirth. Reports were read of visits to factories, shops, slums, and dockyards. Descriptions were given of the Stock Exchange, of a gigantic house of business in the City, and of a Government Office. The British Colonies were now discussed, and some account was given of our rule in India, Africa and Ireland. I was sitting by Castalia and I noticed her uneasiness.

“We shall never come to any conclusion at all at this rate,” she said. “As it appears that civilisation is so much more complex than we had any notion, would it not be better to confine ourselves to our original enquiry? We agreed that it was the object of life to produce good people and good books. All this time we have been talking of aeroplanes, factories, and money. Let us talk about men themselves and their arts, for that is the heart of the matter.”

So the diners out stepped forward with long slips of paper containing answers to their questions. These had been framed after much consideration. A good man, we had agreed, must at any rate be honest, passionate, and unworldly. But whether or not a particular man possessed those qualities could only be discovered by asking questions, often beginning at a remote distance from the centre. Is Kensington a nice place to live in? Where is your son being educated—and your daughter? Now please tell me, what do you pay for your cigars? By the way, is Sir Joseph a baronet or only a knight? Often it seemed that we learnt more from trivial questions of this kind than from more direct ones. “I accepted my peerage,” said Lord Bunkum, “because my wife wished it.” I forget how many titles were accepted for the same reason. “Working fifteen hours out of the twenty-four, as I do——” ten thousand professional men began.

“No, no, of course you can neither read nor write. But why do you work so hard?” “My dear lady, with a growing family——” “But why does your family grow?” Their wives wished that too, or perhaps it was the British Empire. But more significant than the answers were the refusals to answer. Very few would reply at all to questions about morality and religion, and such answers as were given were not serious. Questions as to the value of money and power were almost invariably brushed aside, or pressed at extreme risk to the asker. “I’m sure,” said Jill, “that if Sir Harley Tightboots hadn’t been carving the mutton when I asked him about the capitalist system he would have cut my throat. The only reason why we escaped with our lives over and over again is that men are at once so hungry and so chivalrous. They despise us too much to mind what we say.”

“Of course they despise us,” said Eleanor. “At the same time how do you account for this—I made enquiries among the artists. Now, no woman has ever been an artist, has she, Polls?”

“Jane - Austen - Charlotte - Brontë - George - Eliot,” cried Poll, like a man crying muffins in a back street.

“Damn the woman!” someone exclaimed. “What a bore she is!”

“Since Sappho there has been no female of first rate——” Eleanor began, quoting from a weekly newspaper.

“It’s now well known that Sappho was the somewhat lewd invention of Professor Hobkin,” Ruth interrupted.

“Anyhow, there is no reason to suppose that any woman ever has been able to write or ever will be able to write,” Eleanor continued. “And yet, whenever I go among authors they never cease to talk to me about their books. Masterly! I say, or Shakespeare himself! (for one must say something) and I assure you, they believe me.”

“That proves nothing,” said Jane. “They all do it. Only,” she sighed, “it doesn’t seem to help us much. Perhaps we had better examine modern literature next. Liz, it’s your turn.”

Elizabeth rose and said that in order to prosecute her enquiry she had dressed as a man and been taken for a reviewer.

“I have read new books pretty steadily for the past five years,” said she. “Mr. Wells is the most popular living writer; then comes Mr. Arnold Bennett; then Mr. Compton Makenzie; Mr. McKenna and Mr. Walpole may be bracketed together.” She sat down.

“But you’ve told us nothing!” we expostulated. “Or do you mean that these gentlemen have greatly surpassed Jane-Elliot and that English fiction is—where’s that review of yours? Oh, yes, ‘safe in their hands.’”

“Safe, quite safe,” she said, shifting uneasily from foot to foot. “And I’m sure that they give away even more than they receive.”

We were all sure of that. “But,” we pressed her, “do they write good books?”

“Good books?” she said, looking at the ceiling. “You must remember,” she began, speaking with extreme rapidity, “that fiction is the mirror of life. And you can’t deny that education is of the highest importance, and that it would be extremely annoying, if you found yourself alone at Brighton late at night, not to know which was the best boarding house to stay at, and suppose it was a dripping Sunday evening—wouldn’t it be nice to go to the Movies?”

“But what has that got to do with it?” we asked.

“Nothing—nothing—nothing whatever,” she replied.

“Well, tell us the truth,” we bade her.

“The truth? But isn’t it wonderful,” she broke off—“Mr. Chitter has written a weekly article for the past thirty years upon love or hot buttered toast and has sent all his sons to Eton——”

“The truth!” we demanded.

“Oh, the truth,” she stammered, “the truth has nothing to do with literature,” and sitting down she refused to say another word.

It all seemed to us very inconclusive.

“Ladies, we must try to sum up the results,” Jane was beginning, when a hum, which had been heard for some time through the open window, drowned her voice.

“War! War! War! Declaration of War!” men were shouting in the street below.

We looked at each other in horror.

“What war?” we cried. “What war?” We remembered, too late, that we had never thought of sending anyone to the House of Commons. We had forgotten all about it. We turned to Poll, who had reached the history shelves in the London Library, and asked her to enlighten us.

“Why,” we cried, “do men go to war?”

“Sometimes for one reason, sometimes for another,” she replied calmly. “In 1760, for example——” The shouts outside drowned her words. “Again in 1797—in 1804—It was the Austrians in 1866—1870 was the Franco-Prussian—In 1900 on the other hand——”

“But it’s now 1914!” we cut her short.

“Ah, I don’t know what they’re going to war for now,” she admitted.

* * * * *

The war was over and peace was in process of being signed, when I once more found myself with Castalia in the room where our meetings used to be held. We began idly turning over the pages of our old minute books. “Queer,” I mused, “to see what we were thinking five years ago.” “We are agreed,” Castalia quoted, reading over my shoulder, “that it is the object of life to produce good people and good books.” We made no comment upon that. “A good man is at any rate honest, passionate and unworldly.” “What a woman’s language!” I observed. “Oh, dear,” cried Castalia, pushing the book away from her, “what fools we were! It was all Poll’s father’s fault,” she went on. “I believe he did it on purpose—that ridiculous will, I mean, forcing Poll to read all the books in the London Library. If we hadn’t learnt to read,” she said bitterly, “we might still have been bearing children in ignorance and that I believe was the happiest life after all. I know what you’re going to say about war,” she checked me, “and the horror of bearing children to see them killed, but our mothers did it, and their mothers, and their mothers before them. And they didn’t complain. They couldn’t read. I’ve done my best,” she sighed, “to prevent my little girl from learning to read, but what’s the use? I caught Ann only yesterday with a newspaper in her hand and she was beginning to ask me if it was ‘true.’ Next she’ll ask me whether Mr. Lloyd George is a good man, then whether Mr. Arnold Bennett is a good novelist, and finally whether I believe in God. How can I bring my daughter up to believe in nothing?” she demanded.

“Surely you could teach her to believe that a man’s intellect is, and always will be, fundamentally superior to a woman’s?” I suggested. She brightened at this and began to turn over our old minutes again. “Yes,” she said, “think of their discoveries, their mathematics, their science, their philosophy, their scholarship——” and then she began to laugh, “I shall never forget old Hobkin and the hairpin,” she said, and went on reading and laughing and I thought she was quite happy, when suddenly she drew the book from her and burst out, “Oh, Cassandra, why do you torment me? Don’t you know that our belief in man’s intellect is the greatest fallacy of them all?” “What?” I exclaimed. “Ask any journalist, schoolmaster, politician or public house keeper in the land and they will all tell you that men are much cleverer than women.” “As if I doubted it,” she said scornfully. “How could they help it? Haven’t we bred them and fed and kept them in comfort since the beginning of time so that they may be clever even if they’re nothing else? It’s all our doing!” she cried. “We insisted upon having intellect and now we’ve got it. And it’s intellect,” she continued, “that’s at the bottom of it. What could be more charming than a boy before he has begun to cultivate his intellect? He is beautiful to look at; he gives himself no airs; he understands the meaning of art and literature instinctively; he goes about enjoying his life and making other people enjoy theirs. Then they teach him to cultivate his intellect. He becomes a barrister, a civil servant, a general, an author, a professor. Every day he goes to an office. Every year he produces a book. He maintains a whole family by the products of his brain—poor devil! Soon he cannot come into a room without making us all feel uncomfortable; he condescends to every woman he meets, and dares not tell the truth even to his own wife; instead of rejoicing our eyes we have to shut them if we are to take him in our arms. True, they console themselves with stars of all shapes, ribbons of all shades, and incomes of all sizes—but what is to console us? That we shall be able in ten years’ time to spend a week-end at Lahore? Or that the least insect in Japan has a name twice the length of its body? Oh, Cassandra, for Heaven’s sake let us devise a method by which men may bear children! It is our only chance. For unless we provide them with some innocent occupation we shall get neither good people nor good books; we shall perish beneath the fruits of their unbridled activity; and not a human being will survive to know that there once was Shakespeare!”

“It is too late,” I replied. “We cannot provide even for the children that we have.”

“And then you ask me to believe in intellect,” she said.

While we spoke, men were crying hoarsely and wearily in the street, and, listening, we heard that the Treaty of Peace had just been signed. The voices died away. The rain was falling and interfered no doubt with the proper explosion of the fireworks.

“My cook will have bought the Evening News,” said Castalia, “and Ann will be spelling it out over her tea. I must go home.”

“It’s no good—not a bit of good,” I said. “Once she knows how to read there’s only one thing you can teach her to believe in—and that is herself.”

“Well, that would be a change,” sighed Castalia.

So we swept up the papers of our Society, and, though Ann was playing with her doll very happily, we solemnly made her a present of the lot and told her we had chosen her to be President of the Society of the future—upon which she burst into tears, poor little girl.

[]

3. Monday or Tuesday.

Lazy and indifferent, shaking space easily from his wings, knowing his way, the heron passes over the church beneath the sky. White and distant, absorbed in itself, endlessly the sky covers and uncovers, moves and remains. A lake? Blot the shores of it out! A mountain? Oh, perfect—the sun gold on its slopes. Down that falls. Ferns then, or white feathers, for ever and ever——

Desiring truth, awaiting it, laboriously distilling a few words, for ever desiring—(a cry starts to the left, another to the right. Wheels strike divergently. Omnibuses conglomerate in conflict)—for ever desiring—(the clock asseverates with twelve distinct strokes that it is midday; light sheds gold scales; children swarm)—for ever desiring truth. Red is the dome; coins hang on the trees; smoke trails from the chimneys; bark, shout, cry “Iron for sale”—and truth?

Radiating to a point men’s feet and women’s feet, black or gold-encrusted—(This foggy weather—Sugar? No, thank you—The commonwealth of the future)—the firelight darting and making the room red, save for the black figures and their bright eyes, while outside a van discharges, Miss Thingummy drinks tea at her desk, and plate-glass preserves fur coats——

Flaunted, leaf-light, drifting at corners, blown across the wheels, silver-splashed, home or not home, gathered, scattered, squandered in separate scales, swept up, down, torn, sunk, assembled—and truth?

Now to recollect by the fireside on the white square of marble. From ivory depths words rising shed their blackness, blossom and penetrate. Fallen the book; in the flame, in the smoke, in the momentary sparks—or now voyaging, the marble square pendant, minarets beneath and the Indian seas, while space rushes blue and stars glint—truth? or now, content with closeness?

Lazy and indifferent the heron returns; the sky veils her stars; then bares them.

[October 1920]

[]

4. An Unwritten Novel.

Such an expression of unhappiness was enough by itself to make one’s eyes slide above the paper’s edge to the poor woman’s face—insignificant without that look, almost a symbol of human destiny with it. Life’s what you see in people’s eyes; life’s what they learn, and, having learnt it, never, though they seek to hide it, cease to be aware of—what? That life’s like that, it seems. Five faces opposite—five mature faces—and the knowledge in each face. Strange, though, how people want to conceal it! Marks of reticence are on all those faces: lips shut, eyes shaded, each one of the five doing something to hide or stultify his knowledge. One smokes; another reads; a third checks entries in a pocket book; a fourth stares at the map of the line framed opposite; and the fifth—the terrible thing about the fifth is that she does nothing at all. She looks at life. Ah, but my poor, unfortunate woman, do play the game—do, for all our sakes, conceal it!

As if she heard me, she looked up, shifted slightly in her seat and sighed. She seemed to apologise and at the same time to say to me, “If only you knew!” Then she looked at life again. “But I do know,” I answered silently, glancing at the Times for manners’ sake. “I know the whole business. ‘Peace between Germany and the Allied Powers was yesterday officially ushered in at Paris—Signor Nitti, the Italian Prime Minister—a passenger train at Doncaster was in collision with a goods train …’ We all know—the Times knows—but we pretend we don’t.” My eyes had once more crept over the paper’s rim. She shuddered, twitched her arm queerly to the middle of her back and shook her head. Again I dipped into my great reservoir of life. “Take what you like,” I continued, “births, deaths, marriages, Court Circular, the habits of birds, Leonardo da Vinci, the Sandhills murder, high wages and the cost of living—oh, take what you like,” I repeated, “it’s all in the Times!” Again with infinite weariness she moved her head from side to side until, like a top exhausted with spinning, it settled on her neck.

The Times was no protection against such sorrow as hers. But other human beings forbade intercourse. The best thing to do against life was to fold the paper so that it made a perfect square, crisp, thick, impervious even to life. This done, I glanced up quickly, armed with a shield of my own. She pierced through my shield; she gazed into my eyes as if searching any sediment of courage at the depths of them and damping it to clay. Her twitch alone denied all hope, discounted all illusion.

So we rattled through Surrey and across the border into Sussex. But with my eyes upon life I did not see that the other travellers had left, one by one, till, save for the man who read, we were alone together. Here was Three Bridges station. We drew slowly down the platform and stopped. Was he going to leave us? I prayed both ways—I prayed last that he might stay. At that instant he roused himself, crumpled his paper contemptuously, like a thing done with, burst open the door, and left us alone.

The unhappy woman, leaning a little forward, palely and colourlessly addressed me—talked of stations and holidays, of brothers at Eastbourne, and the time of year, which was, I forget now, early or late. But at last looking from the window and seeing, I knew, only life, she breathed, “Staying away—that’s the drawback of it——” Ah, now we approached the catastrophe, “My sister-in-law”—the bitterness of her tone was like lemon on cold steel, and speaking, not to me, but to herself, she muttered, “nonsense, she would say—that’s what they all say,” and while she spoke she fidgeted as though the skin on her back were as a plucked fowl’s in a poulterer’s shop-window.

“Oh, that cow!” she broke off nervously, as though the great wooden cow in the meadow had shocked her and saved her from some indiscretion. Then she shuddered, and then she made the awkward angular movement that I had seen before, as if, after the spasm, some spot between the shoulders burnt or itched. Then again she looked the most unhappy woman in the world, and I once more reproached her, though not with the same conviction, for if there were a reason, and if I knew the reason, the stigma was removed from life.

“Sisters-in-law,” I said—

Her lips pursed as if to spit venom at the word; pursed they remained. All she did was to take her glove and rub hard at a spot on the window-pane. She rubbed as if she would rub something out for ever—some stain, some indelible contamination. Indeed, the spot remained for all her rubbing, and back she sank with the shudder and the clutch of the arm I had come to expect. Something impelled me to take my glove and rub my window. There, too, was a little speck on the glass. For all my rubbing it remained. And then the spasm went through me; I crooked my arm and plucked at the middle of my back. My skin, too, felt like the damp chicken’s skin in the poulterer’s shop-window; one spot between the shoulders itched and irritated, felt clammy, felt raw. Could I reach it? Surreptitiously I tried. She saw me. A smile of infinite irony, infinite sorrow, flitted and faded from her face. But she had communicated, shared her secret, passed her poison; she would speak no more. Leaning back in my corner, shielding my eyes from her eyes, seeing only the slopes and hollows, greys and purples, of the winter’s landscape, I read her message, deciphered her secret, reading it beneath her gaze.

Hilda’s the sister-in-law. Hilda? Hilda? Hilda Marsh—Hilda the blooming, the full bosomed, the matronly. Hilda stands at the door as the cab draws up, holding a coin. “Poor Minnie, more of a grasshopper than ever—old cloak she had last year. Well, well, with two children these days one can’t do more. No, Minnie, I’ve got it; here you are, cabby—none of your ways with me. Come in, Minnie. Oh, I could carry you, let alone your basket!” So they go into the dining-room. “Aunt Minnie, children.”

Slowly the knives and forks sink from the upright. Down they get (Bob and Barbara), hold out hands stiffly; back again to their chairs, staring between the resumed mouthfuls. [But this we’ll skip; ornaments, curtains, trefoil china plate, yellow oblongs of cheese, white squares of biscuit—skip—oh, but wait! Half-way through luncheon one of those shivers; Bob stares at her, spoon in mouth. “Get on with your pudding, Bob;” but Hilda disapproves. “Why should she twitch?” Skip, skip, till we reach the landing on the upper floor; stairs brass-bound; linoleum worn; oh, yes! little bedroom looking out over the roofs of Eastbourne—zigzagging roofs like the spines of caterpillars, this way, that way, striped red and yellow, with blue-black slating]. Now, Minnie, the door’s shut; Hilda heavily descends to the basement; you unstrap the straps of your basket, lay on the bed a meagre nightgown, stand side by side furred felt slippers. The looking-glass—no, you avoid the looking-glass. Some methodical disposition of hat-pins. Perhaps the shell box has something in it? You shake it; it’s the pearl stud there was last year—that’s all. And then the sniff, the sigh, the sitting by the window. Three o’clock on a December afternoon; the rain drizzling; one light low in the skylight of a drapery emporium; another high in a servant’s bedroom—this one goes out. That gives her nothing to look at. A moment’s blankness—then, what are you thinking? (Let me peep across at her opposite; she’s asleep or pretending it; so what would she think about sitting at the window at three o’clock in the afternoon? Health, money, hills, her God?) Yes, sitting on the very edge of the chair looking over the roofs of Eastbourne, Minnie Marsh prays to God. That’s all very well; and she may rub the pane too, as though to see God better; but what God does she see? Who’s the God of Minnie Marsh, the God of the back streets of Eastbourne, the God of three o’clock in the afternoon? I, too, see roofs, I see sky; but, oh, dear—this seeing of Gods! More like President Kruger than Prince Albert—that’s the best I can do for him; and I see him on a chair, in a black frock-coat, not so very high up either; I can manage a cloud or two for him to sit on; and then his hand trailing in the cloud holds a rod, a truncheon is it?—black, thick, thorned—a brutal old bully—Minnie’s God! Did he send the itch and the patch and the twitch? Is that why she prays? What she rubs on the window is the stain of sin. Oh, she committed some crime!

I have my choice of crimes. The woods flit and fly—in summer there are bluebells; in the opening there, when Spring comes, primroses. A parting, was it, twenty years ago? Vows broken? Not Minnie’s! … She was faithful. How she nursed her mother! All her savings on the tombstone—wreaths under glass—daffodils in jars. But I’m off the track. A crime…. They would say she kept her sorrow, suppressed her secret—her sex, they’d say—the scientific people. But what flummery to saddle her with sex! No—more like this. Passing down the streets of Croydon twenty years ago, the violet loops of ribbon in the draper’s window spangled in the electric light catch her eye. She lingers—past six. Still by running she can reach home. She pushes through the glass swing door. It’s sale-time. Shallow trays brim with ribbons. She pauses, pulls this, fingers that with the raised roses on it—no need to choose, no need to buy, and each tray with its surprises. “We don’t shut till seven,” and then it is seven. She runs, she rushes, home she reaches, but too late. Neighbours—the doctor—baby brother—the kettle—scalded—hospital—dead—or only the shock of it, the blame? Ah, but the detail matters nothing! It’s what she carries with her; the spot, the crime, the thing to expiate, always there between her shoulders. “Yes,” she seems to nod to me, “it’s the thing I did.”

Whether you did, or what you did, I don’t mind; it’s not the thing I want. The draper’s window looped with violet—that’ll do; a little cheap perhaps, a little commonplace—since one has a choice of crimes, but then so many (let me peep across again—still sleeping, or pretending sleep! white, worn, the mouth closed—a touch of obstinacy, more than one would think—no hint of sex)—so many crimes aren’t your crime; your crime was cheap; only the retribution solemn; for now the church door opens, the hard wooden pew receives her; on the brown tiles she kneels; every day, winter, summer, dusk, dawn (here she’s at it) prays. All her sins fall, fall, for ever fall. The spot receives them. It’s raised, it’s red, it’s burning. Next she twitches. Small boys point. “Bob at lunch to-day”—But elderly women are the worst.

Indeed now you can’t sit praying any longer. Kruger’s sunk beneath the clouds—washed over as with a painter’s brush of liquid grey, to which he adds a tinge of black—even the tip of the truncheon gone now. That’s what always happens! Just as you’ve seen him, felt him, someone interrupts. It’s Hilda now.

How you hate her! She’ll even lock the bathroom door overnight, too, though it’s only cold water you want, and sometimes when the night’s been bad it seems as if washing helped. And John at breakfast—the children—meals are worst, and sometimes there are friends—ferns don’t altogether hide ’em—they guess, too; so out you go along the front, where the waves are grey, and the papers blow, and the glass shelters green and draughty, and the chairs cost tuppence—too much—for there must be preachers along the sands. Ah, that’s a nigger—that’s a funny man—that’s a man with parakeets—poor little creatures! Is there no one here who thinks of God?—just up there, over the pier, with his rod—but no—there’s nothing but grey in the sky or if it’s blue the white clouds hide him, and the music—it’s military music—and what they are fishing for? Do they catch them? How the children stare! Well, then home a back way—“Home a back way!” The words have meaning; might have been spoken by the old man with whiskers—no, no, he didn’t really speak; but everything has meaning—placards leaning against doorways—names above shop-windows—red fruit in baskets—women’s heads in the hairdresser’s—all say “Minnie Marsh!” But here’s a jerk. “Eggs are cheaper!” That’s what always happens! I was heading her over the waterfall, straight for madness, when, like a flock of dream sheep, she turns t’other way and runs between my fingers. Eggs are cheaper. Tethered to the shores of the world, none of the crimes, sorrows, rhapsodies, or insanities for poor Minnie Marsh; never late for luncheon; never caught in a storm without a mackintosh; never utterly unconscious of the cheapness of eggs. So she reaches home—scrapes her boots.

Have I read you right? But the human face—the human face at the top of the fullest sheet of print holds more, withholds more. Now, eyes open, she looks out; and in the human eye—how d’you define it?—there’s a break—a division—so that when you’ve grasped the stem the butterfly’s off—the moth that hangs in the evening over the yellow flower—move, raise your hand, off, high, away. I won’t raise my hand. Hang still, then, quiver, life, soul, spirit, whatever you are of Minnie Marsh—I, too, on my flower—the hawk over the down—alone, or what were the worth of life? To rise; hang still in the evening, in the midday; hang still over the down. The flicker of a hand—off, up! then poised again. Alone, unseen; seeing all so still down there, all so lovely. None seeing, none caring. The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages. Air above, air below. And the moon and immortality…. Oh, but I drop to the turf! Are you down too, you in the corner, what’s your name—woman—Minnie Marsh; some such name as that? There she is, tight to her blossom; opening her hand-bag, from which she takes a hollow shell—an egg—who was saying that eggs were cheaper? You or I? Oh, it was you who said it on the way home, you remember, when the old gentleman, suddenly opening his umbrella—or sneezing was it? Anyhow, Kruger went, and you came “home a back way,” and scraped your boots. Yes. And now you lay across your knees a pocket-handkerchief into which drop little angular fragments of eggshell—fragments of a map—a puzzle. I wish I could piece them together! If you would only sit still. She’s moved her knees—the map’s in bits again. Down the slopes of the Andes the white blocks of marble go bounding and hurtling, crushing to death a whole troop of Spanish muleteers, with their convoy—Drake’s booty, gold and silver. But to return——

To what, to where? She opened the door, and, putting her umbrella in the stand—that goes without saying; so, too, the whiff of beef from the basement; dot, dot, dot. But what I cannot thus eliminate, what I must, head down, eyes shut, with the courage of a battalion and the blindness of a bull, charge and disperse are, indubitably, the figures behind the ferns, commercial travellers. There I’ve hidden them all this time in the hope that somehow they’d disappear, or better still emerge, as indeed they must, if the story’s to go on gathering richness and rotundity, destiny and tragedy, as stories should, rolling along with it two, if not three, commercial travellers and a whole grove of aspidistra. “The fronds of the aspidistra only partly concealed the commercial traveller—” Rhododendrons would conceal him utterly, and into the bargain give me my fling of red and white, for which I starve and strive; but rhododendrons in Eastbourne—in December—on the Marshes’ table—no, no, I dare not; it’s all a matter of crusts and cruets, frills and ferns. Perhaps there’ll be a moment later by the sea. Moreover, I feel, pleasantly pricking through the green fretwork and over the glacis of cut glass, a desire to peer and peep at the man opposite—one’s as much as I can manage. James Moggridge is it, whom the Marshes call Jimmy? [Minnie, you must promise not to twitch till I’ve got this straight]. James Moggridge travels in—shall we say buttons?—but the time’s not come for bringing them in—the big and the little on the long cards, some peacock-eyed, others dull gold; cairngorms some, and others coral sprays—but I say the time’s not come. He travels, and on Thursdays, his Eastbourne day, takes his meals with the Marshes. His red face, his little steady eyes—by no means altogether commonplace—his enormous appetite (that’s safe; he won’t look at Minnie till the bread’s swamped the gravy dry), napkin tucked diamond-wise—but this is primitive, and, whatever it may do the reader, don’t take me in. Let’s dodge to the Moggridge household, set that in motion. Well, the family boots are mended on Sundays by James himself. He reads Truth. But his passion? Roses—and his wife a retired hospital nurse—interesting—for God’s sake let me have one woman with a name I like! But no; she’s of the unborn children of the mind, illicit, none the less loved, like my rhododendrons. How many die in every novel that’s written—the best, the dearest, while Moggridge lives. It’s life’s fault. Here’s Minnie eating her egg at the moment opposite and at t’other end of the line—are we past Lewes?—there must be Jimmy—or what’s her twitch for?

There must be Moggridge—life’s fault. Life imposes her laws; life blocks the way; life’s behind the fern; life’s the tyrant; oh, but not the bully! No, for I assure you I come willingly; I come wooed by Heaven knows what compulsion across ferns and cruets, table splashed and bottles smeared. I come irresistibly to lodge myself somewhere on the firm flesh, in the robust spine, wherever I can penetrate or find foothold on the person, in the soul, of Moggridge the man. The enormous stability of the fabric; the spine tough as whalebone, straight as oak-tree; the ribs radiating branches; the flesh taut tarpaulin; the red hollows; the suck and regurgitation of the heart; while from above meat falls in brown cubes and beer gushes to be churned to blood again—and so we reach the eyes. Behind the aspidistra they see something: black, white, dismal; now the plate again; behind the aspidistra they see elderly woman; “Marsh’s sister, Hilda’s more my sort;” the tablecloth now. “Marsh would know what’s wrong with Morrises …” talk that over; cheese has come; the plate again; turn it round—the enormous fingers; now the woman opposite. “Marsh’s sister—not a bit like Marsh; wretched, elderly female…. You should feed your hens…. God’s truth, what’s set her twitching? Not what I said? Dear, dear, dear! these elderly women. Dear, dear!”

[Yes, Minnie; I know you’ve twitched, but one moment—James Moggridge].

“Dear, dear, dear!” How beautiful the sound is! like the knock of a mallet on seasoned timber, like the throb of the heart of an ancient whaler when the seas press thick and the green is clouded. “Dear, dear!” what a passing bell for the souls of the fretful to soothe them and solace them, lap them in linen, saying, “So long. Good luck to you!” and then, “What’s your pleasure?” for though Moggridge would pluck his rose for her, that’s done, that’s over. Now what’s the next thing? “Madam, you’ll miss your train,” for they don’t linger.

That’s the man’s way; that’s the sound that reverberates; that’s St. Paul’s and the motor-omnibuses. But we’re brushing the crumbs off. Oh, Moggridge, you won’t stay? You must be off? Are you driving through Eastbourne this afternoon in one of those little carriages? Are you the man who’s walled up in green cardboard boxes, and sometimes has the blinds down, and sometimes sits so solemn staring like a sphinx, and always there’s a look of the sepulchral, something of the undertaker, the coffin, and the dusk about horse and driver? Do tell me—but the doors slammed. We shall never meet again. Moggridge, farewell!

Yes, yes, I’m coming. Right up to the top of the house. One moment I’ll linger. How the mud goes round in the mind—what a swirl these monsters leave, the waters rocking, the weeds waving and green here, black there, striking to the sand, till by degrees the atoms reassemble, the deposit sifts itself, and again through the eyes one sees clear and still, and there comes to the lips some prayer for the departed, some obsequy for the souls of those one nods to, the people one never meets again.

James Moggridge is dead now, gone for ever. Well, Minnie—“I can face it no longer.” If she said that—(Let me look at her. She is brushing the eggshell into deep declivities). She said it certainly, leaning against the wall of the bedroom, and plucking at the little balls which edge the claret-coloured curtain. But when the self speaks to the self, who is speaking?—the entombed soul, the spirit driven in, in, in to the central catacomb; the self that took the veil and left the world—a coward perhaps, yet somehow beautiful, as it flits with its lantern restlessly up and down the dark corridors. “I can bear it no longer,” her spirit says. “That man at lunch—Hilda—the children.” Oh, heavens, her sob! It’s the spirit wailing its destiny, the spirit driven hither, thither, lodging on the diminishing carpets—meagre footholds—shrunken shreds of all the vanishing universe—love, life, faith, husband, children, I know not what splendours and pageantries glimpsed in girlhood. “Not for me—not for me.”

But then—the muffins, the bald elderly dog? Bead mats I should fancy and the consolation of underlinen. If Minnie Marsh were run over and taken to hospital, nurses and doctors themselves would exclaim…. There’s the vista and the vision—there’s the distance—the blue blot at the end of the avenue, while, after all, the tea is rich, the muffin hot, and the dog—“Benny, to your basket, sir, and see what mother’s brought you!” So, taking the glove with the worn thumb, defying once more the encroaching demon of what’s called going in holes, you renew the fortifications, threading the grey wool, running it in and out.

Running it in and out, across and over, spinning a web through which God himself—hush, don’t think of God! How firm the stitches are! You must be proud of your darning. Let nothing disturb her. Let the light fall gently, and the clouds show an inner vest of the first green leaf. Let the sparrow perch on the twig and shake the raindrop hanging to the twig’s elbow…. Why look up? Was it a sound, a thought? Oh, heavens! Back again to the thing you did, the plate glass with the violet loops? But Hilda will come. Ignominies, humiliations, oh! Close the breach.

Having mended her glove, Minnie Marsh lays it in the drawer. She shuts the drawer with decision. I catch sight of her face in the glass. Lips are pursed. Chin held high. Next she laces her shoes. Then she touches her throat. What’s your brooch? Mistletoe or merry-thought? And what is happening? Unless I’m much mistaken, the pulse’s quickened, the moment’s coming, the threads are racing, Niagara’s ahead. Here’s the crisis! Heaven be with you! Down she goes. Courage, courage! Face it, be it! For God’s sake don’t wait on the mat now! There’s the door! I’m on your side. Speak! Confront her, confound her soul!

“Oh, I beg your pardon! Yes, this is Eastbourne. I’ll reach it down for you. Let me try the handle.” [But, Minnie, though we keep up pretences, I’ve read you right—I’m with you now].

“That’s all your luggage?”

“Much obliged, I’m sure.”

(But why do you look about you? Hilda won’t come to the station, nor John; and Moggridge is driving at the far side of Eastbourne).

“I’ll wait by my bag, ma’am, that’s safest. He said he’d meet me…. Oh, there he is! That’s my son.”

So they walk off together.

Well, but I’m confounded…. Surely, Minnie, you know better! A strange young man…. Stop! I’ll tell him—Minnie!—Miss Marsh!—I don’t know though. There’s something queer in her cloak as it blows. Oh, but it’s untrue, it’s indecent…. Look how he bends as they reach the gateway. She finds her ticket. What’s the joke? Off they go, down the road, side by side…. Well, my world’s done for! What do I stand on? What do I know? That’s not Minnie. There never was Moggridge. Who am I? Life’s bare as bone.

And yet the last look of them—he stepping from the kerb and she following him round the edge of the big building brims me with wonder—floods me anew. Mysterious figures! Mother and son. Who are you? Why do you walk down the street? Where to-night will you sleep, and then, to-morrow? Oh, how it whirls and surges—floats me afresh! I start after them. People drive this way and that. The white light splutters and pours. Plate-glass windows. Carnations; chrysanthemums. Ivy in dark gardens. Milk carts at the door. Wherever I go, mysterious figures, I see you, turning the corner, mothers and sons; you, you, you. I hasten, I follow. This, I fancy, must be the sea. Grey is the landscape; dim as ashes; the water murmurs and moves. If I fall on my knees, if I go through the ritual, the ancient antics, it’s you, unknown figures, you I adore; if I open my arms, it’s you I embrace, you I draw to me—adorable world!

[written early 1920, published in London Mercury, July 1920]

[]

5. The String Quartet.

Well, here we are, and if you cast your eye over the room you will see that Tubes and trams and omnibuses, private carriages not a few, even, I venture to believe, landaus with bays in them, have been busy at it, weaving threads from one end of London to the other. Yet I begin to have my doubts—

If indeed it’s true, as they’re saying, that Regent Street is up, and the Treaty signed, and the weather not cold for the time of year, and even at that rent not a flat to be had, and the worst of influenza its after effects; if I bethink me of having forgotten to write about the leak in the larder, and left my glove in the train; if the ties of blood require me, leaning forward, to accept cordially the hand which is perhaps offered hesitatingly—

“Seven years since we met!”

“The last time in Venice.”

“And where are you living now?”

“Well, the late afternoon suits me the best, though, if it weren’t asking too much——”

“But I knew you at once!”

“Still, the war made a break——”

If the mind’s shot through by such little arrows, and—for human society compels it—no sooner is one launched than another presses forward; if this engenders heat and in addition they’ve turned on the electric light; if saying one thing does, in so many cases, leave behind it a need to improve and revise, stirring besides regrets, pleasures, vanities, and desires—if it’s all the facts I mean, and the hats, the fur boas, the gentlemen’s swallow-tail coats, and pearl tie-pins that come to the surface—what chance is there?

Of what? It becomes every minute more difficult to say why, in spite of everything, I sit here believing I can’t now say what, or even remember the last time it happened.

“Did you see the procession?”

“The King looked cold.”

“No, no, no. But what was it?”

“She’s bought a house at Malmesbury.”

“How lucky to find one!”

On the contrary, it seems to me pretty sure that she, whoever she may be, is damned, since it’s all a matter of flats and hats and sea gulls, or so it seems to be for a hundred people sitting here well dressed, walled in, furred, replete. Not that I can boast, since I too sit passive on a gilt chair, only turning the earth above a buried memory, as we all do, for there are signs, if I’m not mistaken, that we’re all recalling something, furtively seeking something. Why fidget? Why so anxious about the sit of cloaks; and gloves—whether to button or unbutton? Then watch that elderly face against the dark canvas, a moment ago urbane and flushed; now taciturn and sad, as if in shadow. Was it the sound of the second violin tuning in the ante-room? Here they come; four black figures, carrying instruments, and seat themselves facing the white squares under the downpour of light; rest the tips of their bows on the music stand; with a simultaneous movement lift them; lightly poise them, and, looking across at the player opposite, the first violin counts one, two, three——

Flourish, spring, burgeon, burst! The pear tree on the top of the mountain. Fountains jet; drops descend. But the waters of the Rhone flow swift and deep, race under the arches, and sweep the trailing water leaves, washing shadows over the silver fish, the spotted fish rushed down by the swift waters, now swept into an eddy where—it’s difficult this—conglomeration of fish all in a pool; leaping, splashing, scraping sharp fins; and such a boil of current that the yellow pebbles are churned round and round, round and round—free now, rushing downwards, or even somehow ascending in exquisite spirals into the air; curled like thin shavings from under a plane; up and up…. How lovely goodness is in those who, stepping lightly, go smiling through the world! Also in jolly old fishwives, squatted under arches, obscene old women, how deeply they laugh and shake and rollick, when they walk, from side to side, hum, hah!

“That’s an early Mozart, of course——”

“But the tune, like all his tunes, makes one despair—I mean hope. What do I mean? That’s the worst of music! I want to dance, laugh, eat pink cakes, yellow cakes, drink thin, sharp wine. Or an indecent story, now—I could relish that. The older one grows the more one likes indecency. Hah, hah! I’m laughing. What at? You said nothing, nor did the old gentleman opposite…. But suppose—suppose—Hush!”

The melancholy river bears us on. When the moon comes through the trailing willow boughs, I see your face, I hear your voice and the bird singing as we pass the osier bed. What are you whispering? Sorrow, sorrow. Joy, joy. Woven together, like reeds in moonlight. Woven together, inextricably commingled, bound in pain and strewn in sorrow—crash!

The boat sinks. Rising, the figures ascend, but now leaf thin, tapering to a dusky wraith, which, fiery tipped, draws its twofold passion from my heart. For me it sings, unseals my sorrow, thaws compassion, floods with love the sunless world, nor, ceasing, abates its tenderness but deftly, subtly, weaves in and out until in this pattern, this consummation, the cleft ones unify; soar, sob, sink to rest, sorrow and joy.

Why then grieve? Ask what? Remain unsatisfied? I say all’s been settled; yes; laid to rest under a coverlet of rose leaves, falling. Falling. Ah, but they cease. One rose leaf, falling from an enormous height, like a little parachute dropped from an invisible balloon, turns, flutters waveringly. It won’t reach us.

“No, no. I noticed nothing. That’s the worst of music—these silly dreams. The second violin was late, you say?”

“There’s old Mrs. Munro, feeling her way out—blinder each year, poor woman—on this slippery floor.”

Eyeless old age, grey-headed Sphinx…. There she stands on the pavement, beckoning, so sternly, the red omnibus.

“How lovely! How well they play! How—how—how!”

The tongue is but a clapper. Simplicity itself. The feathers in the hat next me are bright and pleasing as a child’s rattle. The leaf on the plane-tree flashes green through the chink in the curtain. Very strange, very exciting.

“How—how—how!” Hush!

These are the lovers on the grass.

“If, madam, you will take my hand——”

“Sir, I would trust you with my heart. Moreover, we have left our bodies in the banqueting hall. Those on the turf are the shadows of our souls.”

“Then these are the embraces of our souls.” The lemons nod assent. The swan pushes from the bank and floats dreaming into mid stream.

“But to return. He followed me down the corridor, and, as we turned the corner, trod on the lace of my petticoat. What could I do but cry ‘Ah!’ and stop to finger it? At which he drew his sword, made passes as if he were stabbing something to death, and cried, ‘Mad! Mad! Mad!’ Whereupon I screamed, and the Prince, who was writing in the large vellum book in the oriel window, came out in his velvet skull-cap and furred slippers, snatched a rapier from the wall—the King of Spain’s gift, you know—on which I escaped, flinging on this cloak to hide the ravages to my skirt—to hide … But listen! the horns!”

The gentleman replies so fast to the lady, and she runs up the scale with such witty exchange of compliment now culminating in a sob of passion, that the words are indistinguishable though the meaning is plain enough—love, laughter, flight, pursuit, celestial bliss—all floated out on the gayest ripple of tender endearment—until the sound of the silver horns, at first far distant, gradually sounds more and more distinctly, as if seneschals were saluting the dawn or proclaiming ominously the escape of the lovers…. The green garden, moonlit pool, lemons, lovers, and fish are all dissolved in the opal sky, across which, as the horns are joined by trumpets and supported by clarions there rise white arches firmly planted on marble pillars…. Tramp and trumpeting. Clang and clangour. Firm establishment. Fast foundations. March of myriads. Confusion and chaos trod to earth. But this city to which we travel has neither stone nor marble; hangs enduring; stands unshakable; nor does a face, nor does a flag greet or welcome. Leave then to perish your hope; droop in the desert my joy; naked advance. Bare are the pillars; auspicious to none; casting no shade; resplendent; severe. Back then I fall, eager no more, desiring only to go, find the street, mark the buildings, greet the applewoman, say to the maid who opens the door: A starry night.

“Good night, good night. You go this way?”

“Alas. I go that.”

[ca. January 1921]

[]

6. Blue & Green.

GREEN

The pointed fingers of glass hang downwards. The light slides down the glass, and drops a pool of green. All day long the ten fingers of the lustre drop green upon the marble. The feathers of parakeets—their harsh cries—sharp blades of palm trees—green, too; green needles glittering in the sun. But the hard glass drips on to the marble; the pools hover above the dessert sand; the camels lurch through them; the pools settle on the marble; rushes edge them; weeds clog them; here and there a white blossom; the frog flops over; at night the stars are set there unbroken. Evening comes, and the shadow sweeps the green over the mantelpiece; the ruffled surface of ocean. No ships come; the aimless waves sway beneath the empty sky. It’s night; the needles drip blots of blue. The green’s out.

BLUE

The snub-nosed monster rises to the surface and spouts through his blunt nostrils two columns of water, which, fiery-white in the centre, spray off into a fringe of blue beads. Strokes of blue line the black tarpaulin of his hide. Slushing the water through mouth and nostrils he sings, heavy with water, and the blue closes over him dowsing the polished pebbles of his eyes. Thrown upon the beach he lies, blunt, obtuse, shedding dry blue scales. Their metallic blue stains the rusty iron on the beach. Blue are the ribs of the wrecked rowing boat. A wave rolls beneath the blue bells. But the cathedral’s different, cold, incense laden, faint blue with the veils of madonnas.

[]

7. Kew Gardens.

From the oval-shaped flower-bed there rose perhaps a hundred stalks spreading into heart-shaped or tongue-shaped leaves half way up and unfurling at the tip red or blue or yellow petals marked with spots of colour raised upon the surface; and from the red, blue or yellow gloom of the throat emerged a straight bar, rough with gold dust and slightly clubbed at the end. The petals were voluminous enough to be stirred by the summer breeze, and when they moved, the red, blue and yellow lights passed one over the other, staining an inch of the brown earth beneath with a spot of the most intricate colour. The light fell either upon the smooth, grey back of a pebble, or, the shell of a snail with its brown, circular veins, or falling into a raindrop, it expanded with such intensity of red, blue and yellow the thin walls of water that one expected them to burst and disappear. Instead, the drop was left in a second silver grey once more, and the light now settled upon the flesh of a leaf, revealing the branching thread of fibre beneath the surface, and again it moved on and spread its illumination in the vast green spaces beneath the dome of the heart-shaped and tongue-shaped leaves. Then the breeze stirred rather more briskly overhead and the colour was flashed into the air above, into the eyes of the men and women who walk in Kew Gardens in July.

The figures of these men and women straggled past the flower-bed with a curiously irregular movement not unlike that of the white and blue butterflies who crossed the turf in zig-zag flights from bed to bed. The man was about six inches in front of the woman, strolling carelessly, while she bore on with greater purpose, only turning her head now and then to see that the children were not too far behind. The man kept this distance in front of the woman purposely, though perhaps unconsciously, for he wished to go on with his thoughts.

“Fifteen years ago I came here with Lily,” he thought. “We sat somewhere over there by a lake and I begged her to marry me all through the hot afternoon. How the dragonfly kept circling round us: how clearly I see the dragonfly and her shoe with the square silver buckle at the toe. All the time I spoke I saw her shoe and when it moved impatiently I knew without looking up what she was going to say: the whole of her seemed to be in her shoe. And my love, my desire, were in the dragonfly; for some reason I thought that if it settled there, on that leaf, the broad one with the red flower in the middle of it, if the dragonfly settled on the leaf she would say “Yes” at once. But the dragonfly went round and round: it never settled anywhere—of course not, happily not, or I shouldn’t be walking here with Eleanor and the children—Tell me, Eleanor. D’you ever think of the past?”

“Why do you ask, Simon?”

“Because I’ve been thinking of the past. I’ve been thinking of Lily, the woman I might have married … Well, why are you silent? Do you mind my thinking of the past?”

“Why should I mind, Simon? Doesn’t one always think of the past, in a garden with men and women lying under the trees? Aren’t they one’s past, all that remains of it, those men and women, those ghosts lying under the trees,… one’s happiness, one’s reality?”

“For me, a square silver shoe buckle and a dragonfly—”

“For me, a kiss. Imagine six little girls sitting before their easels twenty years ago, down by the side of a lake, painting the water-lilies, the first red water-lilies I’d ever seen. And suddenly a kiss, there on the back of my neck. And my hand shook all the afternoon so that I couldn’t paint. I took out my watch and marked the hour when I would allow myself to think of the kiss for five minutes only—it was so precious—the kiss of an old grey-haired woman with a wart on her nose, the mother of all my kisses all my life. Come, Caroline, come, Hubert.”

They walked on the past the flower-bed, now walking four abreast, and soon diminished in size among the trees and looked half transparent as the sunlight and shade swam over their backs in large trembling irregular patches.

In the oval flower bed the snail, whose shell had been stained red, blue, and yellow for the space of two minutes or so, now appeared to be moving very slightly in its shell, and next began to labour over the crumbs of loose earth which broke away and rolled down as it passed over them. It appeared to have a definite goal in front of it, differing in this respect from the singular high stepping angular green insect who attempted to cross in front of it, and waited for a second with its antennæ trembling as if in deliberation, and then stepped off as rapidly and strangely in the opposite direction. Brown cliffs with deep green lakes in the hollows, flat, blade-like trees that waved from root to tip, round boulders of grey stone, vast crumpled surfaces of a thin crackling texture—all these objects lay across the snail’s progress between one stalk and another to his goal. Before he had decided whether to circumvent the arched tent of a dead leaf or to breast it there came past the bed the feet of other human beings.

This time they were both men. The younger of the two wore an expression of perhaps unnatural calm; he raised his eyes and fixed them very steadily in front of him while his companion spoke, and directly his companion had done speaking he looked on the ground again and sometimes opened his lips only after a long pause and sometimes did not open them at all. The elder man had a curiously uneven and shaky method of walking, jerking his hand forward and throwing up his head abruptly, rather in the manner of an impatient carriage horse tired of waiting outside a house; but in the man these gestures were irresolute and pointless. He talked almost incessantly; he smiled to himself and again began to talk, as if the smile had been an answer. He was talking about spirits—the spirits of the dead, who, according to him, were even now telling him all sorts of odd things about their experiences in Heaven.

“Heaven was known to the ancients as Thessaly, William, and now, with this war, the spirit matter is rolling between the hills like thunder.” He paused, seemed to listen, smiled, jerked his head and continued:—

“You have a small electric battery and a piece of rubber to insulate the wire—isolate?—insulate?—well, we’ll skip the details, no good going into details that wouldn’t be understood—and in short the little machine stands in any convenient position by the head of the bed, we will say, on a neat mahogany stand. All arrangements being properly fixed by workmen under my direction, the widow applies her ear and summons the spirit by sign as agreed. Women! Widows! Women in black——”

Here he seemed to have caught sight of a woman’s dress in the distance, which in the shade looked a purple black. He took off his hat, placed his hand upon his heart, and hurried towards her muttering and gesticulating feverishly. But William caught him by the sleeve and touched a flower with the tip of his walking-stick in order to divert the old man’s attention. After looking at it for a moment in some confusion the old man bent his ear to it and seemed to answer a voice speaking from it, for he began talking about the forests of Uruguay which he had visited hundreds of years ago in company with the most beautiful young woman in Europe. He could be heard murmuring about forests of Uruguay blanketed with the wax petals of tropical roses, nightingales, sea beaches, mermaids, and women drowned at sea, as he suffered himself to be moved on by William, upon whose face the look of stoical patience grew slowly deeper and deeper.

Following his steps so closely as to be slightly puzzled by his gestures came two elderly women of the lower middle class, one stout and ponderous, the other rosy cheeked and nimble. Like most people of their station they were frankly fascinated by any signs of eccentricity betokening a disordered brain, especially in the well-to-do; but they were too far off to be certain whether the gestures were merely eccentric or genuinely mad. After they had scrutinised the old man’s back in silence for a moment and given each other a queer, sly look, they went on energetically piecing together their very complicated dialogue:

“Nell, Bert, Lot, Cess, Phil, Pa, he says, I says, she says, I says, I says, I says——”

“My Bert, Sis, Bill, Grandad, the old man, sugar,

Sugar, flour, kippers, greens,

Sugar, sugar, sugar.”

The ponderous woman looked through the pattern of falling words at the flowers standing cool, firm, and upright in the earth, with a curious expression. She saw them as a sleeper waking from a heavy sleep sees a brass candlestick reflecting the light in an unfamiliar way, and closes his eyes and opens them, and seeing the brass candlestick again, finally starts broad awake and stares at the candlestick with all his powers. So the heavy woman came to a standstill opposite the oval-shaped flower bed, and ceased even to pretend to listen to what the other woman was saying. She stood there letting the words fall over her, swaying the top part of her body slowly backwards and forwards, looking at the flowers. Then she suggested that they should find a seat and have their tea.

The snail had now considered every possible method of reaching his goal without going round the dead leaf or climbing over it. Let alone the effort needed for climbing a leaf, he was doubtful whether the thin texture which vibrated with such an alarming crackle when touched even by the tip of his horns would bear his weight; and this determined him finally to creep beneath it, for there was a point where the leaf curved high enough from the ground to admit him. He had just inserted his head in the opening and was taking stock of the high brown roof and was getting used to the cool brown light when two other people came past outside on the turf. This time they were both young, a young man and a young woman. They were both in the prime of youth, or even in that season which precedes the prime of youth, the season before the smooth pink folds of the flower have burst their gummy case, when the wings of the butterfly, though fully grown, are motionless in the sun.

“Lucky it isn’t Friday,” he observed.

“Why? D’you believe in luck?”

“They make you pay sixpence on Friday.”

“What’s sixpence anyway? Isn’t it worth sixpence?”

“What’s ‘it’—what do you mean by ‘it’?”

“O, anything—I mean—you know what I mean.”

Long pauses came between each of these remarks; they were uttered in toneless and monotonous voices. The couple stood still on the edge of the flower bed, and together pressed the end of her parasol deep down into the soft earth. The action and the fact that his hand rested on the top of hers expressed their feelings in a strange way, as these short insignificant words also expressed something, words with short wings for their heavy body of meaning, inadequate to carry them far and thus alighting awkwardly upon the very common objects that surrounded them, and were to their inexperienced touch so massive; but who knows (so they thought as they pressed the parasol into the earth) what precipices aren’t concealed in them, or what slopes of ice don’t shine in the sun on the other side? Who knows? Who has ever seen this before? Even when she wondered what sort of tea they gave you at Kew, he felt that something loomed up behind her words, and stood vast and solid behind them; and the mist very slowly rose and uncovered—O, Heavens, what were those shapes?—little white tables, and waitresses who looked first at her and then at him; and there was a bill that he would pay with a real two shilling piece, and it was real, all real, he assured himself, fingering the coin in his pocket, real to everyone except to him and to her; even to him it began to seem real; and then—but it was too exciting to stand and think any longer, and he pulled the parasol out of the earth with a jerk and was impatient to find the place where one had tea with other people, like other people.

“Come along, Trissie; it’s time we had our tea.”

“Wherever does one have one’s tea?” she asked with the oddest thrill of excitement in her voice, looking vaguely round and letting herself be drawn on down the grass path, trailing her parasol, turning her head this way and that way, forgetting her tea, wishing to go down there and then down there, remembering orchids and cranes among wild flowers, a Chinese pagoda and a crimson crested bird; but he bore her on.

Thus one couple after another with much the same irregular and aimless movement passed the flower-bed and were enveloped in layer after layer of green blue vapour, in which at first their bodies had substance and a dash of colour, but later both substance and colour dissolved in the green-blue atmosphere. How hot it was! So hot that even the thrush chose to hop, like a mechanical bird, in the shadow of the flowers, with long pauses between one movement and the next; instead of rambling vaguely the white butterflies danced one above another, making with their white shifting flakes the outline of a shattered marble column above the tallest flowers; the glass roofs of the palm house shone as if a whole market full of shiny green umbrellas had opened in the sun; and in the drone of the aeroplane the voice of the summer sky murmured its fierce soul. Yellow and black, pink and snow white, shapes of all these colours, men, women, and children were spotted for a second upon the horizon, and then, seeing the breadth of yellow that lay upon the grass, they wavered and sought shade beneath the trees, dissolving like drops of water in the yellow and green atmosphere, staining it faintly with red and blue. It seemed as if all gross and heavy bodies had sunk down in the heat motionless and lay huddled upon the ground, but their voices went wavering from them as if they were flames lolling from the thick waxen bodies of candles. Voices. Yes, voices. Wordless voices, breaking the silence suddenly with such depth of contentment, such passion of desire, or, in the voices of children, such freshness of surprise; breaking the silence? But there was no silence; all the time the motor omnibuses were turning their wheels and changing their gear; like a vast nest of Chinese boxes all of wrought steel turning ceaselessly one within another the city murmured; on the top of which the voices cried aloud and the petals of myriads of flowers flashed their colours into the air.

[written ca. 1917, published by the Hogarth Press, May 12, 1919]

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8. The Mark on the Wall.

Perhaps it was the middle of January in the present year that I first looked up and saw the mark on the wall. In order to fix a date it is necessary to remember what one saw. So now I think of the fire; the steady film of yellow light upon the page of my book; the three chrysanthemums in the round glass bowl on the mantelpiece. Yes, it must have been the winter time, and we had just finished our tea, for I remember that I was smoking a cigarette when I looked up and saw the mark on the wall for the first time. I looked up through the smoke of my cigarette and my eye lodged for a moment upon the burning coals, and that old fancy of the crimson flag flapping from the castle tower came into my mind, and I thought of the cavalcade of red knights riding up the side of the black rock. Rather to my relief the sight of the mark interrupted the fancy, for it is an old fancy, an automatic fancy, made as a child perhaps. The mark was a small round mark, black upon the white wall, about six or seven inches above the mantelpiece.

How readily our thoughts swarm upon a new object, lifting it a little way, as ants carry a blade of straw so feverishly, and then leave it…. If that mark was made by a nail, it can’t have been for a picture, it must have been for a miniature—the miniature of a lady with white powdered curls, powder-dusted cheeks, and lips like red carnations. A fraud of course, for the people who had this house before us would have chosen pictures in that way—an old picture for an old room. That is the sort of people they were—very interesting people, and I think of them so often, in such queer places, because one will never see them again, never know what happened next. They wanted to leave this house because they wanted to change their style of furniture, so he said, and he was in process of saying that in his opinion art should have ideas behind it when we were torn asunder, as one is torn from the old lady about to pour out tea and the young man about to hit the tennis ball in the back garden of the suburban villa as one rushes past in the train.

But as for that mark, I’m not sure about it; I don’t believe it was made by a nail after all; it’s too big, too round, for that. I might get up, but if I got up and looked at it, ten to one I shouldn’t be able to say for certain; because once a thing’s done, no one ever knows how it happened. Oh! dear me, the mystery of life; The inaccuracy of thought! The ignorance of humanity! To show how very little control of our possessions we have—what an accidental affair this living is after all our civilization—let me just count over a few of the things lost in one lifetime, beginning, for that seems always the most mysterious of losses—what cat would gnaw, what rat would nibble—three pale blue canisters of book-binding tools? Then there were the bird cages, the iron hoops, the steel skates, the Queen Anne coal-scuttle, the bagatelle board, the hand organ—all gone, and jewels, too. Opals and emeralds, they lie about the roots of turnips. What a scraping paring affair it is to be sure! The wonder is that I’ve any clothes on my back, that I sit surrounded by solid furniture at this moment. Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour—landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one’s hair! Shot out at the feet of God entirely naked! Tumbling head over heels in the asphodel meadows like brown paper parcels pitched down a shoot in the post office! With one’s hair flying back like the tail of a race-horse. Yes, that seems to express the rapidity of life, the perpetual waste and repair; all so casual, all so haphazard….

But after life. The slow pulling down of thick green stalks so that the cup of the flower, as it turns over, deluges one with purple and red light. Why, after all, should one not be born there as one is born here, helpless, speechless, unable to focus one’s eyesight, groping at the roots of the grass, at the toes of the Giants? As for saying which are trees, and which are men and women, or whether there are such things, that one won’t be in a condition to do for fifty years or so. There will be nothing but spaces of light and dark, intersected by thick stalks, and rather higher up perhaps, rose-shaped blots of an indistinct colour—dim pinks and blues—which will, as time goes on, become more definite, become—I don’t know what….

And yet that mark on the wall is not a hole at all. It may even be caused by some round black substance, such as a small rose leaf, left over from the summer, and I, not being a very vigilant housekeeper—look at the dust on the mantelpiece, for example, the dust which, so they say, buried Troy three times over, only fragments of pots utterly refusing annihilation, as one can believe.

The tree outside the window taps very gently on the pane…. I want to think quietly, calmly, spaciously, never to be interrupted, never to have to rise from my chair, to slip easily from one thing to another, without any sense of hostility, or obstacle. I want to sink deeper and deeper, away from the surface, with its hard separate facts. To steady myself, let me catch hold of the first idea that passes…. Shakespeare…. Well, he will do as well as another. A man who sat himself solidly in an arm-chair, and looked into the fire, so— A shower of ideas fell perpetually from some very high Heaven down through his mind. He leant his forehead on his hand, and people, looking in through the open door,—for this scene is supposed to take place on a summer’s evening—But how dull this is, this historical fiction! It doesn’t interest me at all. I wish I could hit upon a pleasant track of thought, a track indirectly reflecting credit upon myself, for those are the pleasantest thoughts, and very frequent even in the minds of modest mouse-coloured people, who believe genuinely that they dislike to hear their own praises. They are not thoughts directly praising oneself; that is the beauty of them; they are thoughts like this:

“And then I came into the room. They were discussing botany. I said how I’d seen a flower growing on a dust heap on the site of an old house in Kingsway. The seed, I said, must have been sown in the reign of Charles the First. What flowers grew in the reign of Charles the First?” I asked—(but I don’t remember the answer). Tall flowers with purple tassels to them perhaps. And so it goes on. All the time I’m dressing up the figure of myself in my own mind, lovingly, stealthily, not openly adoring it, for if I did that, I should catch myself out, and stretch my hand at once for a book in self-protection. Indeed, it is curious how instinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry or any other handling that could make it ridiculous, or too unlike the original to be believed in any longer. Or is it not so very curious after all? It is a matter of great importance. Suppose the looking glass smashes, the image disappears, and the romantic figure with the green of forest depths all about it is there no longer, but only that shell of a person which is seen by other people—what an airless, shallow, bald, prominent world it becomes! A world not to be lived in. As we face each other in omnibuses and underground railways we are looking into the mirror; that accounts for the vagueness, the gleam of glassiness, in our eyes. And the novelists in future will realize more and more the importance of these reflections, for of course there is not one reflection but an almost infinite number; those are the depths they will explore, those the phantoms they will pursue, leaving the description of reality more and more out of their stories, taking a knowledge of it for granted, as the Greeks did and Shakespeare perhaps—but these generalizations are very worthless. The military sound of the word is enough. It recalls leading articles, cabinet ministers—a whole class of things indeed which as a child one thought the thing itself, the standard thing, the real thing, from which one could not depart save at the risk of nameless damnation. Generalizations bring back somehow Sunday in London, Sunday afternoon walks, Sunday luncheons, and also ways of speaking of the dead, clothes, and habits—like the habit of sitting all together in one room until a certain hour, although nobody liked it. There was a rule for everything. The rule for tablecloths at that particular period was that they should be made of tapestry with little yellow compartments marked upon them, such as you may see in photographs of the carpets in the corridors of the royal palaces. Tablecloths of a different kind were not real tablecloths. How shocking, and yet how wonderful it was to discover that these real things, Sunday luncheons, Sunday walks, country houses, and tablecloths were not entirely real, were indeed half phantoms, and the damnation which visited the disbeliever in them was only a sense of illegitimate freedom. What now takes the place of those things I wonder, those real standard things? Men perhaps, should you be a woman; the masculine point of view which governs our lives, which sets the standard, which establishes Whitaker’s Table of Precedency, which has become, I suppose, since the war half a phantom to many men and women, which soon, one may hope, will be laughed into the dustbin where the phantoms go, the mahogany sideboards and the Landseer prints, Gods and Devils, Hell and so forth, leaving us all with an intoxicating sense of illegitimate freedom—if freedom exists….

In certain lights that mark on the wall seems actually to project from the wall. Nor is it entirely circular. I cannot be sure, but it seems to cast a perceptible shadow, suggesting that if I ran my finger down that strip of the wall it would, at a certain point, mount and descend a small tumulus, a smooth tumulus like those barrows on the South Downs which are, they say, either tombs or camps. Of the two I should prefer them to be tombs, desiring melancholy like most English people, and finding it natural at the end of a walk to think of the bones stretched beneath the turf…. There must be some book about it. Some antiquary must have dug up those bones and given them a name…. What sort of a man is an antiquary, I wonder? Retired Colonels for the most part, I daresay, leading parties of aged labourers to the top here, examining clods of earth and stone, and getting into correspondence with the neighbouring clergy, which, being opened at breakfast time, gives them a feeling of importance, and the comparison of arrow-heads necessitates cross-country journeys to the county towns, an agreeable necessity both to them and to their elderly wives, who wish to make plum jam or to clean out the study, and have every reason for keeping that great question of the camp or the tomb in perpetual suspension, while the Colonel himself feels agreeably philosophic in accumulating evidence on both sides of the question. It is true that he does finally incline to believe in the camp; and, being opposed, indites a pamphlet which he is about to read at the quarterly meeting of the local society when a stroke lays him low, and his last conscious thoughts are not of wife or child, but of the camp and that arrowhead there, which is now in the case at the local museum, together with the foot of a Chinese murderess, a handful of Elizabethan nails, a great many Tudor clay pipes, a piece of Roman pottery, and the wine-glass that Nelson drank out of—proving I really don’t know what.

No, no, nothing is proved, nothing is known. And if I were to get up at this very moment and ascertain that the mark on the wall is really—what shall we say?—the head of a gigantic old nail, driven in two hundred years ago, which has now, owing to the patient attrition of many generations of housemaids, revealed its head above the coat of paint, and is taking its first view of modern life in the sight of a white-walled fire-lit room, what should I gain?—Knowledge? Matter for further speculation? I can think sitting still as well as standing up. And what is knowledge? What are our learned men save the descendants of witches and hermits who crouched in caves and in woods brewing herbs, interrogating shrew-mice and writing down the language of the stars? And the less we honour them as our superstitions dwindle and our respect for beauty and health of mind increases…. Yes, one could imagine a very pleasant world. A quiet, spacious world, with the flowers so red and blue in the open fields. A world without professors or specialists or house-keepers with the profiles of policemen, a world which one could slice with one’s thought as a fish slices the water with his fin, grazing the stems of the water-lilies, hanging suspended over nests of white sea eggs…. How peaceful it is down here, rooted in the centre of the world and gazing up through the grey waters, with their sudden gleams of light, and their reflections—if it were not for Whitaker’s Almanack—if it were not for the Table of Precedency!

I must jump up and see for myself what that mark on the wall really is—a nail, a rose-leaf, a crack in the wood?

Here is nature once more at her old game of self-preservation. This train of thought, she perceives, is threatening mere waste of energy, even some collision with reality, for who will ever be able to lift a finger against Whitaker’s Table of Precedency? The Archbishop of Canterbury is followed by the Lord High Chancellor; the Lord High Chancellor is followed by the Archbishop of York. Everybody follows somebody, such is the philosophy of Whitaker; and the great thing is to know who follows whom. Whitaker knows, and let that, so Nature counsels, comfort you, instead of enraging you; and if you can’t be comforted, if you must shatter this hour of peace, think of the mark on the wall.

I understand Nature’s game—her prompting to take action as a way of ending any thought that threatens to excite or to pain. Hence, I suppose, comes our slight contempt for men of action—men, we assume, who don’t think. Still, there’s no harm in putting a full stop to one’s disagreeable thoughts by looking at a mark on the wall.

Indeed, now that I have fixed my eyes upon it, I feel that I have grasped a plank in the sea; I feel a satisfying sense of reality which at once turns the two Archbishops and the Lord High Chancellor to the shadows of shades. Here is something definite, something real. Thus, waking from a midnight dream of horror, one hastily turns on the light and lies quiescent, worshipping the chest of drawers, worshipping solidity, worshipping reality, worshipping the impersonal world which is a proof of some existence other than ours. That is what one wants to be sure of…. Wood is a pleasant thing to think about. It comes from a tree; and trees grow, and we don’t know how they grow. For years and years they grow, without paying any attention to us, in meadows, in forests, and by the side of rivers—all things one likes to think about. The cows swish their tails beneath them on hot afternoons; they paint rivers so green that when a moorhen dives one expects to see its feathers all green when it comes up again. I like to think of the fish balanced against the stream like flags blown out; and of water-beetles slowly raising domes of mud upon the bed of the river. I like to think of the tree itself: first the close dry sensation of being wood; then the grinding of the storm; then the slow, delicious ooze of sap. I like to think of it, too, on winter’s nights standing in the empty field with all leaves close-furled, nothing tender exposed to the iron bullets of the moon, a naked mast upon an earth that goes tumbling, tumbling, all night long. The song of birds must sound very loud and strange in June; and how cold the feet of insects must feel upon it, as they make laborious progresses up the creases of the bark, or sun themselves upon the thin green awning of the leaves, and look straight in front of them with diamond-cut red eyes…. One by one the fibres snap beneath the immense cold pressure of the earth, then the last storm comes and, falling, the highest branches drive deep into the ground again. Even so, life isn’t done with; there are a million patient, watchful lives still for a tree, all over the world, in bedrooms, in ships, on the pavement, lining rooms, where men and women sit after tea, smoking cigarettes. It is full of peaceful thoughts, happy thoughts, this tree. I should like to take each one separately—but something is getting in the way…. Where was I? What has it all been about? A tree? A river? The Downs? Whitaker’s Almanack? The fields of asphodel? I can’t remember a thing. Everything’s moving, falling, slipping, vanishing…. There is a vast upheaval of matter. Someone is standing over me and saying—

“I’m going out to buy a newspaper.”

“Yes?”

“Though it’s no good buying newspapers … Nothing ever happens. Curse this war; God damn this war! … All the same, I don’t see why we should have a snail on our wall.”

Ah, the mark on the wall! It was a snail.

[published in Two Stories, The Hogarth Press, July 1917]

[]

JACOB’S
ROOM

by
Virginia Woolf

published
October 26, 1922
by
The Hogarth Press

jacob’s room

I    II

III    IV

V    VI

VII    VIII

IX    X

XI    XII

XIII    XIV

[]

[The text follows the 1929 Hogarth Press edition.]

I

“So of course,” wrote Betty Flanders, pressing her heels rather deeper in the sand, “there was nothing for it but to leave.”

Slowly welling from the point of her gold nib, pale blue ink dissolved the full stop; for there her pen stuck; her eyes fixed, and tears slowly filled them. The entire bay quivered; the lighthouse wobbled; and she had the illusion that the mast of Mr. Connor’s little yacht was bending like a wax candle in the sun. She winked quickly. Accidents were awful things. She winked again. The mast was straight; the waves were regular; the lighthouse was upright; but the blot had spread.

“… nothing for it but to leave,” she read.

“Well, if Jacob doesn’t want to play” (the shadow of Archer, her eldest son, fell across the notepaper and looked blue on the sand, and she felt chilly—it was the third of September already), “if Jacob doesn’t want to play”—what a horrid blot! It must be getting late.

“Where is that tiresome little boy?” she said. “I don’t see him. Run and find him. Tell him to come at once.” “… but mercifully,” she scribbled, ignoring the full stop, “everything seems satisfactorily arranged, packed though we are like herrings in a barrel, and forced to stand the perambulator which the landlady quite naturally won’t allow …”

Such were Betty Flanders’s letters to Captain Barfoot—many-paged, tear-stained. Scarborough is seven hundred miles from Cornwall: Captain Barfoot is in Scarborough: Seabrook is dead. Tears made all the dahlias in her garden undulate in red waves and flashed the glass house in her eyes, and spangled the kitchen with bright knives, and made Mrs. Jarvis, the rector’s wife, think at church, while the hymn-tune played and Mrs. Flanders bent low over her little boys’ heads, that marriage is a fortress and widows stray solitary in the open fields, picking up stones, gleaning a few golden straws, lonely, unprotected, poor creatures. Mrs. Flanders had been a widow these two years.

“Ja—cob! Ja—cob!” Archer shouted.

“Scarborough,” Mrs. Flanders wrote on the envelope, and dashed a bold line beneath; it was her native town; the hub of the universe. But a stamp? She ferreted in her bag; then held it up mouth downwards; then fumbled in her lap, all so vigorously that Charles Steele in the Panama hat suspended his paint-brush.

Like the antennae of some irritable insect it positively trembled. Here was that woman moving—actually going to get up—confound her! He struck the canvas a hasty violet-black dab. For the landscape needed it. It was too pale—greys flowing into lavenders, and one star or a white gull suspended just so—too pale as usual. The critics would say it was too pale, for he was an unknown man exhibiting obscurely, a favourite with his landladies’ children, wearing a cross on his watch chain, and much gratified if his landladies liked his pictures—which they often did.

“Ja—cob! Ja—cob!” Archer shouted.

Exasperated by the noise, yet loving children, Steele picked nervously at the dark little coils on his palette.

“I saw your brother—I saw your brother,” he said, nodding his head, as Archer lagged past him, trailing his spade, and scowling at the old gentleman in spectacles.

“Over there—by the rock,” Steele muttered, with his brush between his teeth, squeezing out raw sienna, and keeping his eyes fixed on Betty Flanders’s back.

“Ja—cob! Ja—cob!” shouted Archer, lagging on after a second.

The voice had an extraordinary sadness. Pure from all body, pure from all passion, going out into the world, solitary, unanswered, breaking against rocks—so it sounded.

Steele frowned; but was pleased by the effect of the black—it was just that note which brought the rest together. “Ah, one may learn to paint at fifty! There’s Titian …” and so, having found the right tint, up he looked and saw to his horror a cloud over the bay.

Mrs. Flanders rose, slapped her coat this side and that to get the sand off, and picked up her black parasol.

The rock was one of those tremendously solid brown, or rather black, rocks which emerge from the sand like something primitive. Rough with crinkled limpet shells and sparsely strewn with locks of dry seaweed, a small boy has to stretch his legs far apart, and indeed to feel rather heroic, before he gets to the top.

But there, on the very top, is a hollow full of water, with a sandy bottom; with a blob of jelly stuck to the side, and some mussels. A fish darts across. The fringe of yellow-brown seaweed flutters, and out pushes an opal-shelled crab——

“Oh, a huge crab,” Jacob murmured——and begins his journey on weakly legs on the sandy bottom. Now! Jacob plunged his hand. The crab was cool and very light. But the water was thick with sand, and so, scrambling down, Jacob was about to jump, holding his bucket in front of him, when he saw, stretched entirely rigid, side by side, their faces very red, an enormous man and woman.

An enormous man and woman (it was early-closing day) were stretched motionless, with their heads on pocket-handkerchiefs, side by side, within a few feet of the sea, while two or three gulls gracefully skirted the incoming waves, and settled near their boots.

The large red faces lying on the bandanna handkerchiefs stared up at Jacob. Jacob stared down at them. Holding his bucket very carefully, Jacob then jumped deliberately and trotted away very nonchalantly at first, but faster and faster as the waves came creaming up to him and he had to swerve to avoid them, and the gulls rose in front of him and floated out and settled again a little farther on. A large black woman was sitting on the sand. He ran towards her.

“Nanny! Nanny!” he cried, sobbing the words out on the crest of each gasping breath.

The waves came round her. She was a rock. She was covered with the seaweed which pops when it is pressed. He was lost.

There he stood. His face composed itself. He was about to roar when, lying among the black sticks and straw under the cliff, he saw a whole skull—perhaps a cow’s skull, a skull, perhaps, with the teeth in it. Sobbing, but absent-mindedly, he ran farther and farther away until he held the skull in his arms.

“There he is!” cried Mrs. Flanders, coming round the rock and covering the whole space of the beach in a few seconds. “What has he got hold of? Put it down, Jacob! Drop it this moment! Something horrid, I know. Why didn’t you stay with us? Naughty little boy! Now put it down. Now come along both of you,” and she swept round, holding Archer by one hand and fumbling for Jacob’s arm with the other. But he ducked down and picked up the sheep’s jaw, which was loose.

Swinging her bag, clutching her parasol, holding Archer’s hand, and telling the story of the gunpowder explosion in which poor Mr. Curnow had lost his eye, Mrs. Flanders hurried up the steep lane, aware all the time in the depths of her mind of some buried discomfort.

There on the sand not far from the lovers lay the old sheep’s skull without its jaw. Clean, white, wind-swept, sand-rubbed, a more unpolluted piece of bone existed nowhere on the coast of Cornwall. The sea holly would grow through the eye-sockets; it would turn to powder, or some golfer, hitting his ball one fine day, would disperse a little dust.—No, but not in lodgings, thought Mrs. Flanders. It’s a great experiment coming so far with young children. There’s no man to help with the perambulator. And Jacob is such a handful; so obstinate already.

“Throw it away, dear, do,” she said, as they got into the road; but Jacob squirmed away from her; and the wind rising, she took out her bonnet-pin, looked at the sea, and stuck it in afresh. The wind was rising. The waves showed that uneasiness, like something alive, restive, expecting the whip, of waves before a storm. The fishing-boats were leaning to the water’s brim. A pale yellow light shot across the purple sea; and shut. The lighthouse was lit. “Come along,” said Betty Flanders. The sun blazed in their faces and gilded the great blackberries trembling out from the hedge which Archer tried to strip as they passed.

“Don’t lag, boys. You’ve got nothing to change into,” said Betty, pulling them along, and looking with uneasy emotion at the earth displayed so luridly, with sudden sparks of light from greenhouses in gardens, with a sort of yellow and black mutability, against this blazing sunset, this astonishing agitation and vitality of colour, which stirred Betty Flanders and made her think of responsibility and danger. She gripped Archer’s hand. On she plodded up the hill.

“What did I ask you to remember?” she said.

“I don’t know,” said Archer.

“Well, I don’t know either,” said Betty, humorously and simply, and who shall deny that this blankness of mind, when combined with profusion, mother wit, old wives’ tales, haphazard ways, moments of astonishing daring, humour, and sentimentality—who shall deny that in these respects every woman is nicer than any man?

Well, Betty Flanders, to begin with.

She had her hand upon the garden gate.

“The meat!” she exclaimed, striking the latch down.

She had forgotten the meat.

There was Rebecca at the window.

The bareness of Mrs. Pearce’s front room was fully displayed at ten o’clock at night when a powerful oil lamp stood on the middle of the table. The harsh light fell on the garden; cut straight across the lawn; lit up a child’s bucket and a purple aster and reached the hedge. Mrs. Flanders had left her sewing on the table. There were her large reels of white cotton and her steel spectacles; her needle-case; her brown wool wound round an old postcard. There were the bulrushes and the Strand magazines; and the linoleum sandy from the boys’ boots. A daddy-long-legs shot from corner to corner and hit the lamp globe. The wind blew straight dashes of rain across the window, which flashed silver as they passed through the light. A single leaf tapped hurriedly, persistently, upon the glass. There was a hurricane out at sea.

Archer could not sleep.

Mrs. Flanders stooped over him. “Think of the fairies,” said Betty Flanders. “Think of the lovely, lovely birds settling down on their nests. Now shut your eyes and see the old mother bird with a worm in her beak. Now turn and shut your eyes,” she murmured, “and shut your eyes.”

The lodging-house seemed full of gurgling and rushing; the cistern overflowing; water bubbling and squeaking and running along the pipes and streaming down the windows.

“What’s all that water rushing in?” murmured Archer.

“It’s only the bath water running away,” said Mrs. Flanders.

Something snapped out of doors.

“I say, won’t that steamer sink?” said Archer, opening his eyes.

“Of course it won’t,” said Mrs. Flanders. “The Captain’s in bed long ago. Shut your eyes, and think of the fairies, fast asleep, under the flowers.”

“I thought he’d never get off—such a hurricane,” she whispered to Rebecca, who was bending over a spirit-lamp in the small room next door. The wind rushed outside, but the small flame of the spirit-lamp burnt quietly, shaded from the cot by a book stood on edge.

“Did he take his bottle well?” Mrs. Flanders whispered, and Rebecca nodded and went to the cot and turned down the quilt, and Mrs. Flanders bent over and looked anxiously at the baby, asleep, but frowning. The window shook, and Rebecca stole like a cat and wedged it. The two women murmured over the spirit-lamp, plotting the eternal conspiracy of hush and clean bottles while the wind raged and gave a sudden wrench at the cheap fastenings.

Both looked round at the cot. Their lips were pursed. Mrs. Flanders crossed over to the cot.

“Asleep?” whispered Rebecca, looking at the cot.

Mrs. Flanders nodded.

“Good-night, Rebecca,” Mrs. Flanders murmured, and Rebecca called her ma’m, though they were conspirators plotting the eternal conspiracy of hush and clean bottles.

Mrs. Flanders had left the lamp burning in the front room. There were her spectacles, her sewing; and a letter with the Scarborough postmark. She had not drawn the curtains either.

The light blazed out across the patch of grass; fell on the child’s green bucket with the gold line round it, and upon the aster which trembled violently beside it. For the wind was tearing across the coast, hurling itself at the hills, and leaping, in sudden gusts, on top of its own back. How it spread over the town in the hollow! How the lights seemed to wink and quiver in its fury, lights in the harbour, lights in bedroom windows high up! And rolling dark waves before it, it raced over the Atlantic, jerking the stars above the ships this way and that.

There was a click in the front sitting-room. Mr. Pearce had extinguished the lamp. The garden went out. It was but a dark patch. Every inch was rained upon. Every blade of grass was bent by rain. Eyelids would have been fastened down by the rain. Lying on one’s back one would have seen nothing but muddle and confusion—clouds turning and turning, and something yellow-tinted and sulphurous in the darkness.

The little boys in the front bedroom had thrown off their blankets and lay under the sheets. It was hot; rather sticky and steamy. Archer lay spread out, with one arm striking across the pillow. He was flushed; and when the heavy curtain blew out a little he turned and half-opened his eyes. The wind actually stirred the cloth on the chest of drawers, and let in a little light, so that the sharp edge of the chest of drawers was visible, running straight up, until a white shape bulged out; and a silver streak showed in the looking-glass.

In the other bed by the door Jacob lay asleep, fast asleep, profoundly unconscious. The sheep’s jaw with the big yellow teeth in it lay at his feet. He had kicked it against the iron bed-rail.

Outside the rain poured down more directly and powerfully as the wind fell in the early hours of the morning. The aster was beaten to the earth. The child’s bucket was half-full of rainwater; and the opal-shelled crab slowly circled round the bottom, trying with its weakly legs to climb the steep side; trying again and falling back, and trying again and again.

[]

II

“Mrs. Flanders”—“Poor Betty Flanders”—“Dear Betty”—“She’s very attractive still”—“Odd she don’t marry again!” “There’s Captain Barfoot to be sure—calls every Wednesday as regular as clockwork, and never brings his wife.”

“But that’s Ellen Barfoot’s fault,” the ladies of Scarborough said. “She don’t put herself out for no one.”

“A man likes to have a son—that we know.”

“Some tumours have to be cut; but the sort my mother had you bear with for years and years, and never even have a cup of tea brought up to you in bed.”

(Mrs. Barfoot was an invalid.)

Elizabeth Flanders, of whom this and much more than this had been said and would be said, was, of course, a widow in her prime. She was half-way between forty and fifty. Years and sorrow between them; the death of Seabrook, her husband; three boys; poverty; a house on the outskirts of Scarborough; her brother, poor Morty’s, downfall and possible demise—for where was he? what was he? Shading her eyes, she looked along the road for Captain Barfoot—yes, there he was, punctual as ever; the attentions of the Captain—all ripened Betty Flanders, enlarged her figure, tinged her face with jollity, and flooded her eyes for no reason that any one could see perhaps three times a day.

True, there’s no harm in crying for one’s husband, and the tombstone, though plain, was a solid piece of work, and on summer’s days when the widow brought her boys to stand there one felt kindly towards her. Hats were raised higher than usual; wives tugged their husbands’ arms. Seabrook lay six foot beneath, dead these many years; enclosed in three shells; the crevices sealed with lead, so that, had earth and wood been glass, doubtless his very face lay visible beneath, the face of a young man whiskered, shapely, who had gone out duck-shooting and refused to change his boots.

“Merchant of this city,” the tombstone said; though why Betty Flanders had chosen so to call him when, as many still remembered, he had only sat behind an office window for three months, and before that had broken horses, ridden to hounds, farmed a few fields, and run a little wild—well, she had to call him something. An example for the boys.

Had he, then, been nothing? An unanswerable question, since even if it weren’t the habit of the undertaker to close the eyes, the light so soon goes out of them. At first, part of herself; now one of a company, he had merged in the grass, the sloping hillside, the thousand white stones, some slanting, others upright, the decayed wreaths, the crosses of green tin, the narrow yellow paths, and the lilacs that drooped in April, with a scent like that of an invalid’s bedroom, over the churchyard wall. Seabrook was now all that; and when, with her skirt hitched up, feeding the chickens, she heard the bell for service or funeral, that was Seabrook’s voice—the voice of the dead.

The rooster had been known to fly on her shoulder and peck her neck, so that now she carried a stick or took one of the children with her when she went to feed the fowls.

“Wouldn’t you like my knife, mother?” said Archer.

Sounding at the same moment as the bell, her son’s voice mixed life and death inextricably, exhilaratingly.

“What a big knife for a small boy!” she said. She took it to please him. Then the rooster flew out of the hen-house, and, shouting to Archer to shut the door into the kitchen garden, Mrs. Flanders set her meal down, clucked for the hens, went bustling about the orchard, and was seen from over the way by Mrs. Cranch, who, beating her mat against the wall, held it for a moment suspended while she observed to Mrs. Page next door that Mrs. Flanders was in the orchard with the chickens.

Mrs. Page, Mrs. Cranch, and Mrs. Garfit could see Mrs. Flanders in the orchard because the orchard was a piece of Dods Hill enclosed; and Dods Hill dominated the village. No words can exaggerate the importance of Dods Hill. It was the earth; the world against the sky; the horizon of how many glances can best be computed by those who have lived all their lives in the same village, only leaving it once to fight in the Crimea, like old George Garfit, leaning over his garden gate smoking his pipe. The progress of the sun was measured by it; the tint of the day laid against it to be judged.

“Now she’s going up the hill with little John,” said Mrs. Cranch to Mrs. Garfit, shaking her mat for the last time, and bustling indoors.

Opening the orchard gate, Mrs. Flanders walked to the top of Dods Hill, holding John by the hand. Archer and Jacob ran in front or lagged behind; but they were in the Roman fortress when she came there, and shouting out what ships were to be seen in the bay. For there was a magnificent view—moors behind, sea in front, and the whole of Scarborough from one end to the other laid out flat like a puzzle. Mrs. Flanders, who was growing stout, sat down in the fortress and looked about her.

The entire gamut of the view’s changes should have been known to her; its winter aspect, spring, summer, and autumn; how storms came up from the sea; how the moors shuddered and brightened as the clouds went over; she should have noted the red spot where the villas were building; and the criss-cross of lines where the allotments were cut; and the diamond flash of little glass houses in the sun. Or, if details like these escaped her, she might have let her fancy play upon the gold tint of the sea at sunset, and thought how it lapped in coins of gold upon the shingle. Little pleasure boats shoved out into it; the black arm of the pier hoarded it up. The whole city was pink and gold; domed; mist-wreathed; resonant; strident. Banjoes strummed; the parade smelt of tar which stuck to the heels; goats suddenly cantered their carriages through crowds. It was observed how well the Corporation had laid out the flower-beds. Sometimes a straw hat was blown away. Tulips burnt in the sun. Numbers of sponge-bag trousers were stretched in rows. Purple bonnets fringed soft, pink, querulous faces on pillows in bath chairs. Triangular hoardings were wheeled along by men in white coats. Captain George Boase had caught a monster shark. One side of the triangular hoarding said so in red, blue, and yellow letters; and each line ended with three differently coloured notes of exclamation.

So that was a reason for going down into the Aquarium, where the sallow blinds, the stale smell of spirits of salt, the bamboo chairs, the tables with ash-trays, the revolving fish, the attendant knitting behind six or seven chocolate boxes (often she was quite alone with the fish for hours at a time) remained in the mind as part of the monster shark, he himself being only a flabby yellow receptacle, like an empty Gladstone bag in a tank. No one had ever been cheered by the Aquarium; but the faces of those emerging quickly lost their dim, chilled expression when they perceived that it was only by standing in a queue that one could be admitted to the pier. Once through the turnstiles, every one walked for a yard or two very briskly; some flagged at this stall; others at that. But it was the band that drew them all to it finally; even the fishermen on the lower pier taking up their pitch within its range.

The band played in the Moorish kiosk. Number nine went up on the board. It was a waltz tune. The pale girls, the old widow lady, the three Jews lodging in the same boarding-house, the dandy, the major, the horse-dealer, and the gentleman of independent means, all wore the same blurred, drugged expression, and through the chinks in the planks at their feet they could see the green summer waves, peacefully, amiably, swaying round the iron pillars of the pier.

But there was a time when none of this had any existence (thought the young man leaning against the railings). Fix your eyes upon the lady’s skirt; the grey one will do—above the pink silk stockings. It changes; drapes her ankles—the nineties; then it amplifies—the seventies; now it’s burnished red and stretched above a crinoline—the sixties; a tiny black foot wearing a white cotton stocking peeps out. Still sitting there? Yes—she’s still on the pier. The silk now is sprigged with roses, but somehow one no longer sees so clearly. There’s no pier beneath us. The heavy chariot may swing along the turnpike road, but there’s no pier for it to stop at, and how grey and turbulent the sea is in the seventeenth century! Let’s to the museum. Cannon-balls; arrow-heads; Roman glass and a forceps green with verdigris. The Rev. Jaspar Floyd dug them up at his own expense early in the forties in the Roman camp on Dods Hill—see the little ticket with the faded writing on it.

And now, what’s the next thing to see in Scarborough?

Mrs. Flanders sat on the raised circle of the Roman camp, patching Jacob’s breeches; only looking up as she sucked the end of her cotton, or when some insect dashed at her, boomed in her ear, and was gone.

John kept trotting up and slapping down in her lap grass or dead leaves which he called “tea,” and she arranged them methodically but absent-mindedly, laying the flowery heads of the grasses together, thinking how Archer had been awake again last night; the church clock was ten or thirteen minutes fast; she wished she could buy Garfit’s acre.

“That’s an orchid leaf, Johnny. Look at the little brown spots. Come, my dear. We must go home. Ar—cher! Ja—cob!”

“Ar—cher—Ja—cob!” Johnny piped after her, pivoting round on his heel, and strewing the grass and leaves in his hands as if he were sowing seed. Archer and Jacob jumped up from behind the mound where they had been crouching with the intention of springing upon their mother unexpectedly, and they all began to walk slowly home.

“Who is that?” said Mrs. Flanders, shading her eyes.

“That old man in the road?” said Archer, looking below.

“He’s not an old man,” said Mrs. Flanders. “He’s—no, he’s not—I thought it was the Captain, but it’s Mr. Floyd. Come along, boys.”

“Oh, bother Mr. Floyd!” said Jacob, switching off a thistle’s head, for he knew already that Mr. Floyd was going to teach them Latin, as indeed he did for three years in his spare time, out of kindness, for there was no other gentleman in the neighbourhood whom Mrs. Flanders could have asked to do such a thing, and the elder boys were getting beyond her, and must be got ready for school, and it was more than most clergymen would have done, coming round after tea, or having them in his own room—as he could fit it in—for the parish was a very large one, and Mr. Floyd, like his father before him, visited cottages miles away on the moors, and, like old Mr. Floyd, was a great scholar, which made it so unlikely—she had never dreamt of such a thing. Ought she to have guessed? But let alone being a scholar he was eight years younger than she was. She knew his mother—old Mrs. Floyd. She had tea there. And it was that very evening when she came back from having tea with old Mrs. Floyd that she found the note in the hall and took it into the kitchen with her when she went to give Rebecca the fish, thinking it must be something about the boys.

“Mr. Floyd brought it himself, did he?—I think the cheese must be in the parcel in the hall—oh, in the hall——” for she was reading. No, it was not about the boys.

“Yes, enough for fish-cakes to-morrow certainly—Perhaps Captain Barfoot——” she had come to the word “love.” She went into the garden and read, leaning against the walnut tree to steady herself. Up and down went her breast. Seabrook came so vividly before her. She shook her head and was looking through her tears at the little shifting leaves against the yellow sky when three geese, half-running, half-flying, scuttled across the lawn with Johnny behind them, brandishing a stick.

Mrs. Flanders flushed with anger.

“How many times have I told you?” she cried, and seized him and snatched his stick away from him.

“But they’d escaped!” he cried, struggling to get free.

“You’re a very naughty boy. If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times. I won’t have you chasing the geese!” she said, and crumpling Mr. Floyd’s letter in her hand, she held Johnny fast and herded the geese back into the orchard.

“How could I think of marriage!” she said to herself bitterly, as she fastened the gate with a piece of wire. She had always disliked red hair in men, she thought, thinking of Mr. Floyd’s appearance, that night when the boys had gone to bed. And pushing her work-box away, she drew the blotting-paper towards her, and read Mr. Floyd’s letter again, and her breast went up and down when she came to the word “love,” but not so fast this time, for she saw Johnny chasing the geese, and knew that it was impossible for her to marry any one—let alone Mr. Floyd, who was so much younger than she was, but what a nice man—and such a scholar too.

“Dear Mr. Floyd,” she wrote.—“Did I forget about the cheese?” she wondered, laying down her pen. No, she had told Rebecca that the cheese was in the hall. “I am much surprised …” she wrote.

But the letter which Mr. Floyd found on the table when he got up early next morning did not begin “I am much surprised,” and it was such a motherly, respectful, inconsequent, regretful letter that he kept it for many years; long after his marriage with Miss Wimbush, of Andover; long after he had left the village. For he asked for a parish in Sheffield, which was given him; and, sending for Archer, Jacob, and John to say good-bye, he told them to choose whatever they liked in his study to remember him by. Archer chose a paper-knife, because he did not like to choose anything too good; Jacob chose the works of Byron in one volume; John, who was still too young to make a proper choice, chose Mr. Floyd’s kitten, which his brothers thought an absurd choice, but Mr. Floyd upheld him when he said: “It has fur like you.” Then Mr. Floyd spoke about the King’s Navy (to which Archer was going); and about Rugby (to which Jacob was going); and next day he received a silver salver and went—first to Sheffield, where he met Miss Wimbush, who was on a visit to her uncle, then to Hackney—then to Maresfield House, of which he became the principal, and finally, becoming editor of a well-known series of Ecclesiastical Biographies, he retired to Hampstead with his wife and daughter, and is often to be seen feeding the ducks on Leg of Mutton Pond. As for Mrs. Flanders’s letter—when he looked for it the other day he could not find it, and did not like to ask his wife whether she had put it away. Meeting Jacob in Piccadilly lately, he recognized him after three seconds. But Jacob had grown such a fine young man that Mr. Floyd did not like to stop him in the street.

“Dear me,” said Mrs. Flanders, when she read in the Scarborough and Harrogate Courier that the Rev. Andrew Floyd, etc., etc., had been made Principal of Maresfield House, “that must be our Mr. Floyd.”

A slight gloom fell upon the table. Jacob was helping himself to jam; the postman was talking to Rebecca in the kitchen; there was a bee humming at the yellow flower which nodded at the open window. They were all alive, that is to say, while poor Mr. Floyd was becoming Principal of Maresfield House.

Mrs. Flanders got up and went over to the fender and stroked Topaz on the neck behind the ears.

“Poor Topaz,” she said (for Mr. Floyd’s kitten was now a very old cat, a little mangy behind the ears, and one of these days would have to be killed).

“Poor old Topaz,” said Mrs. Flanders, as he stretched himself out in the sun, and she smiled, thinking how she had had him gelded, and how she did not like red hair in men. Smiling, she went into the kitchen.

Jacob drew rather a dirty pocket-handkerchief across his face. He went upstairs to his room.

The stag-beetle dies slowly (it was John who collected the beetles). Even on the second day its legs were supple. But the butterflies were dead. A whiff of rotten eggs had vanquished the pale clouded yellows which came pelting across the orchard and up Dods Hill and away on to the moor, now lost behind a furze bush, then off again helter-skelter in a broiling sun. A fritillary basked on a white stone in the Roman camp. From the valley came the sound of church bells. They were all eating roast beef in Scarborough; for it was Sunday when Jacob caught the pale clouded yellows in the clover field, eight miles from home.

Rebecca had caught the death’s-head moth in the kitchen.

A strong smell of camphor came from the butterfly boxes.

Mixed with the smell of camphor was the unmistakable smell of seaweed. Tawny ribbons hung on the door. The sun beat straight upon them.

The upper wings of the moth which Jacob held were undoubtedly marked with kidney-shaped spots of a fulvous hue. But there was no crescent upon the underwing. The tree had fallen the night he caught it. There had been a volley of pistol-shots suddenly in the depths of the wood. And his mother had taken him for a burglar when he came home late. The only one of her sons who never obeyed her, she said.

Morris called it “an extremely local insect found in damp or marshy places.” But Morris is sometimes wrong. Sometimes Jacob, choosing a very fine pen, made a correction in the margin.

The tree had fallen, though it was a windless night, and the lantern, stood upon the ground, had lit up the still green leaves and the dead beech leaves. It was a dry place. A toad was there. And the red underwing had circled round the light and flashed and gone. The red underwing had never come back, though Jacob had waited. It was after twelve when he crossed the lawn and saw his mother in the bright room, playing patience, sitting up.

“How you frightened me!” she had cried. She thought something dreadful had happened. And he woke Rebecca, who had to be up so early.

There he stood pale, come out of the depths of darkness, in the hot room, blinking at the light.

No, it could not be a straw-bordered underwing.

The mowing-machine always wanted oiling. Barnet turned it under Jacob’s window, and it creaked—creaked, and rattled across the lawn and creaked again.

Now it was clouding over.

Back came the sun, dazzlingly.

It fell like an eye upon the stirrups, and then suddenly and yet very gently rested upon the bed, upon the alarum clock, and upon the butterfly box stood open. The pale clouded yellows had pelted over the moor; they had zigzagged across the purple clover. The fritillaries flaunted along the hedgerows. The blues settled on little bones lying on the turf with the sun beating on them, and the painted ladies and the peacocks feasted upon bloody entrails dropped by a hawk. Miles away from home, in a hollow among teasles beneath a ruin, he had found the commas. He had seen a white admiral circling higher and higher round an oak tree, but he had never caught it. An old cottage woman living alone, high up, had told him of a purple butterfly which came every summer to her garden. The fox cubs played in the gorse in the early morning, she told him. And if you looked out at dawn you could always see two badgers. Sometimes they knocked each other over like two boys fighting, she said.

“You won’t go far this afternoon, Jacob,” said his mother, popping her head in at the door, “for the Captain’s coming to say good-bye.” It was the last day of the Easter holidays.

Wednesday was Captain Barfoot’s day. He dressed himself very neatly in blue serge, took his rubber-shod stick—for he was lame and wanted two fingers on the left hand, having served his country—and set out from the house with the flagstaff precisely at four o’clock in the afternoon.

At three Mr. Dickens, the bath-chair man, had called for Mrs. Barfoot.

“Move me,” she would say to Mr. Dickens, after sitting on the esplanade for fifteen minutes. And again, “That’ll do, thank you, Mr. Dickens.” At the first command he would seek the sun; at the second he would stay the chair there in the bright strip.

An old inhabitant himself, he had much in common with Mrs. Barfoot—James Coppard’s daughter. The drinking-fountain, where West Street joins Broad Street, is the gift of James Coppard, who was mayor at the time of Queen Victoria’s jubilee, and Coppard is painted upon municipal watering-carts and over shop windows, and upon the zinc blinds of solicitors’ consulting-room windows. But Ellen Barfoot never visited the Aquarium (though she had known Captain Boase who had caught the shark quite well), and when the men came by with the posters she eyed them superciliously, for she knew that she would never see the Pierrots, or the brothers Zeno, or Daisy Budd and her troupe of performing seals. For Ellen Barfoot in her bath-chair on the esplanade was a prisoner—civilization’s prisoner—all the bars of her cage falling across the esplanade on sunny days when the town hall, the drapery stores, the swimming-bath, and the memorial hall striped the ground with shadow.

An old inhabitant himself, Mr. Dickens would stand a little behind her, smoking his pipe. She would ask him questions—who people were—who now kept Mr. Jones’s shop—then about the season—and had Mrs. Dickens tried, whatever it might be—the words issuing from her lips like crumbs of dry biscuit.

She closed her eyes. Mr. Dickens took a turn. The feelings of a man had not altogether deserted him, though as you saw him coming towards you, you noticed how one knobbed black boot swung tremulously in front of the other; how there was a shadow between his waistcoat and his trousers; how he leant forward unsteadily, like an old horse who finds himself suddenly out of the shafts drawing no cart. But as Mr. Dickens sucked in the smoke and puffed it out again, the feelings of a man were perceptible in his eyes. He was thinking how Captain Barfoot was now on his way to Mount Pleasant; Captain Barfoot, his master. For at home in the little sitting-room above the mews, with the canary in the window, and the girls at the sewing-machine, and Mrs. Dickens huddled up with the rheumatics—at home where he was made little of, the thought of being in the employ of Captain Barfoot supported him. He liked to think that while he chatted with Mrs. Barfoot on the front, he helped the Captain on his way to Mrs. Flanders. He, a man, was in charge of Mrs. Barfoot, a woman.

Turning, he saw that she was chatting with Mrs. Rogers. Turning again, he saw that Mrs. Rogers had moved on. So he came back to the bath-chair, and Mrs. Barfoot asked him the time, and he took out his great silver watch and told her the time very obligingly, as if he knew a great deal more about the time and everything than she did. But Mrs. Barfoot knew that Captain Barfoot was on his way to Mrs. Flanders.

Indeed he was well on his way there, having left the tram, and seeing Dods Hill to the south-east, green against a blue sky that was suffused with dust colour on the horizon. He was marching up the hill. In spite of his lameness there was something military in his approach. Mrs. Jarvis, as she came out of the Rectory gate, saw him coming, and her Newfoundland dog, Nero, slowly swept his tail from side to side.

“Oh, Captain Barfoot!” Mrs. Jarvis exclaimed.

“Good-day, Mrs. Jarvis,” said the Captain.

They walked on together, and when they reached Mrs. Flanders’s gate Captain Barfoot took off his tweed cap, and said, bowing very courteously:

“Good-day to you, Mrs. Jarvis.”

And Mrs. Jarvis walked on alone.

She was going to walk on the moor. Had she again been pacing her lawn late at night? Had she again tapped on the study window and cried: “Look at the moon, look at the moon, Herbert!”

And Herbert looked at the moon.

Mrs. Jarvis walked on the moor when she was unhappy, going as far as a certain saucer-shaped hollow, though she always meant to go to a more distant ridge; and there she sat down, and took out the little book hidden beneath her cloak and read a few lines of poetry, and looked about her. She was not very unhappy, and, seeing that she was forty-five, never perhaps would be very unhappy, desperately unhappy that is, and leave her husband, and ruin a good man’s career, as she sometimes threatened.

Still there is no need to say what risks a clergyman’s wife runs when she walks on the moor. Short, dark, with kindling eyes, a pheasant’s feather in her hat, Mrs. Jarvis was just the sort of woman to lose her faith upon the moors—to confound her God with the universal that is—but she did not lose her faith, did not leave her husband, never read her poem through, and went on walking the moors, looking at the moon behind the elm trees, and feeling as she sat on the grass high above Scarborough … Yes, yes, when the lark soars; when the sheep, moving a step or two onwards, crop the turf, and at the same time set their bells tinkling; when the breeze first blows, then dies down, leaving the cheek kissed; when the ships on the sea below seem to cross each other and pass on as if drawn by an invisible hand; when there are distant concussions in the air and phantom horsemen galloping, ceasing; when the horizon swims blue, green, emotional—then Mrs. Jarvis, heaving a sigh, thinks to herself, “If only some one could give me … if I could give some one….” But she does not know what she wants to give, nor who could give it her.

“Mrs. Flanders stepped out only five minutes ago, Captain,” said Rebecca. Captain Barfoot sat him down in the arm-chair to wait. Resting his elbows on the arms, putting one hand over the other, sticking his lame leg straight out, and placing the stick with the rubber ferrule beside it, he sat perfectly still. There was something rigid about him. Did he think? Probably the same thoughts again and again. But were they “nice” thoughts, interesting thoughts? He was a man with a temper; tenacious; faithful. Women would have felt, “Here is law. Here is order. Therefore we must cherish this man. He is on the Bridge at night,” and, handing him his cup, or whatever it might be, would run on to visions of shipwreck and disaster, in which all the passengers come tumbling from their cabins, and there is the captain, buttoned in his pea-jacket, matched with the storm, vanquished by it but by none other. “Yet I have a soul,” Mrs. Jarvis would bethink her, as Captain Barfoot suddenly blew his nose in a great red bandanna handkerchief, “and it’s the man’s stupidity that’s the cause of this, and the storm’s my storm as well as his”… so Mrs. Jarvis would bethink her when the Captain dropped in to see them and found Herbert out, and spent two or three hours, almost silent, sitting in the arm-chair. But Betty Flanders thought nothing of the kind.

“Oh, Captain,” said Mrs. Flanders, bursting into the drawing-room, “I had to run after Barker’s man … I hope Rebecca … I hope Jacob …”

She was very much out of breath, yet not at all upset, and as she put down the hearth-brush which she had bought of the oil-man, she said it was hot, flung the window further open, straightened a cover, picked up a book, as if she were very confident, very fond of the Captain, and a great many years younger than he was. Indeed, in her blue apron she did not look more than thirty-five. He was well over fifty.

She moved her hands about the table; the Captain moved his head from side to side, and made little sounds, as Betty went on chattering, completely at his ease—after twenty years.

“Well,” he said at length, “I’ve heard from Mr. Polegate.”

He had heard from Mr. Polegate that he could advise nothing better than to send a boy to one of the universities.

“Mr. Floyd was at Cambridge … no, at Oxford … well, at one or the other,” said Mrs. Flanders.

She looked out of the window. Little windows, and the lilac and green of the garden were reflected in her eyes.

“Archer is doing very well,” she said. “I have a very nice report from Captain Maxwell.”

“I will leave you the letter to show Jacob,” said the Captain, putting it clumsily back in its envelope.

“Jacob is after his butterflies as usual,” said Mrs. Flanders irritably, but was surprised by a sudden afterthought, “Cricket begins this week, of course.”

“Edward Jenkinson has handed in his resignation,” said Captain Barfoot.

“Then you will stand for the Council?” Mrs. Flanders exclaimed, looking the Captain full in the face.

“Well, about that,” Captain Barfoot began, settling himself rather deeper in his chair.

Jacob Flanders, therefore, went up to Cambridge in October, 1906.

[]

III

“This is not a smoking-carriage,” Mrs. Norman protested, nervously but very feebly, as the door swung open and a powerfully built young man jumped in. He seemed not to hear her. The train did not stop before it reached Cambridge, and here she was shut up alone, in a railway carriage, with a young man.

She touched the spring of her dressing-case, and ascertained that the scent-bottle and a novel from Mudie’s were both handy (the young man was standing up with his back to her, putting his bag in the rack). She would throw the scent-bottle with her right hand, she decided, and tug the communication cord with her left. She was fifty years of age, and had a son at college. Nevertheless, it is a fact that men are dangerous. She read half a column of her newspaper; then stealthily looked over the edge to decide the question of safety by the infallible test of appearance…. She would like to offer him her paper. But do young men read the Morning Post? She looked to see what he was reading—the Daily Telegraph.

Taking note of socks (loose), of tie (shabby), she once more reached his face. She dwelt upon his mouth. The lips were shut. The eyes bent down, since he was reading. All was firm, yet youthful, indifferent, unconscious—as for knocking one down! No, no, no! She looked out of the window, smiling slightly now, and then came back again, for he didn’t notice her. Grave, unconscious … now he looked up, past her … he seemed so out of place, somehow, alone with an elderly lady … then he fixed his eyes—which were blue—on the landscape. He had not realized her presence, she thought. Yet it was none of her fault that this was not a smoking-carriage—if that was what he meant.

Nobody sees any one as he is, let alone an elderly lady sitting opposite a strange young man in a railway carriage. They see a whole—they see all sorts of things—they see themselves…. Mrs. Norman now read three pages of one of Mr. Norris’s novels. Should she say to the young man (and after all he was just the same age as her own boy): “If you want to smoke, don’t mind me”? No: he seemed absolutely indifferent to her presence … she did not wish to interrupt.

But since, even at her age, she noted his indifference, presumably he was in some way or other—to her at least—nice, handsome, interesting, distinguished, well built, like her own boy? One must do the best one can with her report. Anyhow, this was Jacob Flanders, aged nineteen. It is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely what is done—for instance, when the train drew into the station, Mr. Flanders burst open the door, and put the lady’s dressing-case out for her, saying, or rather mumbling: “Let me” very shyly; indeed he was rather clumsy about it.

“Who …” said the lady, meeting her son; but as there was a great crowd on the platform and Jacob had already gone, she did not finish her sentence. As this was Cambridge, as she was staying there for the week-end, as she saw nothing but young men all day long, in streets and round tables, this sight of her fellow-traveller was completely lost in her mind, as the crooked pin dropped by a child into the wishing-well twirls in the water and disappears for ever.

They say the sky is the same everywhere. Travellers, the shipwrecked, exiles, and the dying draw comfort from the thought, and no doubt if you are of a mystical tendency, consolation, and even explanation, shower down from the unbroken surface. But above Cambridge—anyhow above the roof of King’s College Chapel—there is a difference. Out at sea a great city will cast a brightness into the night. Is it fanciful to suppose the sky, washed into the crevices of King’s College Chapel, lighter, thinner, more sparkling than the sky elsewhere? Does Cambridge burn not only into the night, but into the day?

Look, as they pass into service, how airily the gowns blow out, as though nothing dense and corporeal were within. What sculptured faces, what certainty, authority controlled by piety, although great boots march under the gowns. In what orderly procession they advance. Thick wax candles stand upright; young men rise in white gowns; while the subservient eagle bears up for inspection the great white book.

An inclined plane of light comes accurately through each window, purple and yellow even in its most diffused dust, while, where it breaks upon stone, that stone is softly chalked red, yellow, and purple. Neither snow nor greenery, winter nor summer, has power over the old stained glass. As the sides of a lantern protect the flame so that it burns steady even in the wildest night—burns steady and gravely illumines the tree-trunks—so inside the Chapel all was orderly. Gravely sounded the voices; wisely the organ replied, as if buttressing human faith with the assent of the elements. The white-robed figures crossed from side to side; now mounted steps, now descended, all very orderly.

… If you stand a lantern under a tree every insect in the forest creeps up to it—a curious assembly, since though they scramble and swing and knock their heads against the glass, they seem to have no purpose—something senseless inspires them. One gets tired of watching them, as they amble round the lantern and blindly tap as if for admittance, one large toad being the most besotted of any and shouldering his way through the rest. Ah, but what’s that? A terrifying volley of pistol-shots rings out—cracks sharply; ripples spread—silence laps smooth over sound. A tree—a tree has fallen, a sort of death in the forest. After that, the wind in the trees sounds melancholy.

But this service in King’s College Chapel—why allow women to take part in it? Surely, if the mind wanders (and Jacob looked extraordinarily vacant, his head thrown back, his hymn-book open at the wrong place), if the mind wanders it is because several hat shops and cupboards upon cupboards of coloured dresses are displayed upon rush-bottomed chairs. Though heads and bodies may be devout enough, one has a sense of individuals—some like blue, others brown; some feathers, others pansies and forget-me-nots. No one would think of bringing a dog into church. For though a dog is all very well on a gravel path, and shows no disrespect to flowers, the way he wanders down an aisle, looking, lifting a paw, and approaching a pillar with a purpose that makes the blood run cold with horror (should you be one of a congregation—alone, shyness is out of the question), a dog destroys the service completely. So do these women—though separately devout, distinguished, and vouched for by the theology, mathematics, Latin, and Greek of their husbands. Heaven knows why it is. For one thing, thought Jacob, they’re as ugly as sin.

Now there was a scraping and murmuring. He caught Timmy Durrant’s eye; looked very sternly at him; and then, very solemnly, winked.

“Waverley,” the villa on the road to Girton was called, not that Mr. Plumer admired Scott or would have chosen any name at all, but names are useful when you have to entertain undergraduates, and as they sat waiting for the fourth undergraduate, on Sunday at lunch-time, there was talk of names upon gates.

“How tiresome,” Mrs. Plumer interrupted impulsively. “Does anybody know Mr. Flanders?”

Mr. Durrant knew him; and therefore blushed slightly, and said, awkwardly, something about being sure—looking at Mr. Plumer and hitching the right leg of his trouser as he spoke. Mr. Plumer got up and stood in front of the fireplace. Mrs. Plumer laughed like a straightforward friendly fellow. In short, anything more horrible than the scene, the setting, the prospect, even the May garden being afflicted with chill sterility and a cloud choosing that moment to cross the sun, cannot be imagined. There was the garden, of course. Every one at the same moment looked at it. Owing to the cloud, the leaves ruffled grey, and the sparrows—there were two sparrows.

“I think,” said Mrs. Plumer, taking advantage of the momentary respite, while the young men stared at the garden, to look at her husband, and he, not accepting full responsibility for the act, nevertheless touched the bell.

There can be no excuse for this outrage upon one hour of human life, save the reflection which occurred to Mr. Plumer as he carved the mutton, that if no don ever gave a luncheon party, if Sunday after Sunday passed, if men went down, became lawyers, doctors, members of Parliament, business men—if no don ever gave a luncheon party——

“Now, does lamb make the mint sauce, or mint sauce make the lamb?” he asked the young man next him, to break a silence which had already lasted five minutes and a half.

“I don’t know, sir,” said the young man, blushing very vividly.

At this moment in came Mr. Flanders. He had mistaken the time.

Now, though they had finished their meat, Mrs. Plumer took a second helping of cabbage. Jacob determined, of course, that he would eat his meat in the time it took her to finish her cabbage, looking once or twice to measure his speed—only he was infernally hungry. Seeing this, Mrs. Plumer said that she was sure Mr. Flanders would not mind—and the tart was brought in. Nodding in a peculiar way, she directed the maid to give Mr. Flanders a second helping of mutton. She glanced at the mutton. Not much of the leg would be left for luncheon.

It was none of her fault—since how could she control her father begetting her forty years ago in the suburbs of Manchester? and once begotten, how could she do other than grow up cheese-paring, ambitious, with an instinctively accurate notion of the rungs of the ladder and an ant-like assiduity in pushing George Plumer ahead of her to the top of the ladder? What was at the top of the ladder? A sense that all the rungs were beneath one apparently; since by the time that George Plumer became Professor of Physics, or whatever it might be, Mrs. Plumer could only be in a condition to cling tight to her eminence, peer down at the ground, and goad her two plain daughters to climb the rungs of the ladder.

“I was down at the races yesterday,” she said, “with my two little girls.”

It was none of their fault either. In they came to the drawing-room, in white frocks and blue sashes. They handed the cigarettes. Rhoda had inherited her father’s cold grey eyes. Cold grey eyes George Plumer had, but in them was an abstract light. He could talk about Persia and the Trade winds, the Reform Bill and the cycle of the harvests. Books were on his shelves by Wells and Shaw; on the table serious sixpenny weeklies written by pale men in muddy boots—the weekly creak and screech of brains rinsed in cold water and wrung dry—melancholy papers.

“I don’t feel that I know the truth about anything till I’ve read them both!” said Mrs. Plumer brightly, tapping the table of contents with her bare red hand, upon which the ring looked so incongruous.

“Oh God, oh God, oh God!” exclaimed Jacob, as the four undergraduates left the house. “Oh, my God!”

“Bloody beastly!” he said, scanning the street for lilac or bicycle—anything to restore his sense of freedom.

“Bloody beastly,” he said to Timmy Durrant, summing up his discomfort at the world shown him at lunch-time, a world capable of existing—there was no doubt about that—but so unnecessary, such a thing to believe in—Shaw and Wells and the serious sixpenny weeklies! What were they after, scrubbing and demolishing, these elderly people? Had they never read Homer, Shakespeare, the Elizabethans? He saw it clearly outlined against the feelings he drew from youth and natural inclination. The poor devils had rigged up this meagre object. Yet something of pity was in him. Those wretched little girls——

The extent to which he was disturbed proves that he was already agog. Insolent he was and inexperienced, but sure enough the cities which the elderly of the race have built upon the skyline showed like brick suburbs, barracks, and places of discipline against a red and yellow flame. He was impressionable; but the word is contradicted by the composure with which he hollowed his hand to screen a match. He was a young man of substance.

Anyhow, whether undergraduate or shop boy, man or woman, it must come as a shock about the age of twenty—the world of the elderly—thrown up in such black outline upon what we are; upon the reality; the moors and Byron; the sea and the lighthouse; the sheep’s jaw with the yellow teeth in it; upon the obstinate irrepressible conviction which makes youth so intolerably disagreeable—“I am what I am, and intend to be it,” for which there will be no form in the world unless Jacob makes one for himself. The Plumers will try to prevent him from making it. Wells and Shaw and the serious sixpenny weeklies will sit on its head. Every time he lunches out on Sunday—at dinner parties and tea parties—there will be this same shock—horror—discomfort—then pleasure, for he draws into him at every step as he walks by the river such steady certainty, such reassurance from all sides, the trees bowing, the grey spires soft in the blue, voices blowing and seeming suspended in the air, the springy air of May, the elastic air with its particles—chestnut bloom, pollen, whatever it is that gives the May air its potency, blurring the trees, gumming the buds, daubing the green. And the river too runs past, not at flood, nor swiftly, but cloying the oar that dips in it and drops white drops from the blade, swimming green and deep over the bowed rushes, as if lavishly caressing them.

Where they moored their boat the trees showered down, so that their topmost leaves trailed in the ripples and the green wedge that lay in the water being made of leaves shifted in leaf-breadths as the real leaves shifted. Now there was a shiver of wind—instantly an edge of sky; and as Durrant ate cherries he dropped the stunted yellow cherries through the green wedge of leaves, their stalks twinkling as they wriggled in and out, and sometimes one half-bitten cherry would go down red into the green. The meadow was on a level with Jacob’s eyes as he lay back; gilt with buttercups, but the grass did not run like the thin green water of the graveyard grass about to overflow the tombstones, but stood juicy and thick. Looking up, backwards, he saw the legs of children deep in the grass, and the legs of cows. Munch, munch, he heard; then a short step through the grass; then again munch, munch, munch, as they tore the grass short at the roots. In front of him two white butterflies circled higher and higher round the elm tree.

“Jacob’s off,” thought Durrant, looking up from his novel. He kept reading a few pages and then looking up in a curiously methodical manner, and each time he looked up he took a few cherries out of the bag and ate them abstractedly. Other boats passed them, crossing the backwater from side to side to avoid each other, for many were now moored, and there were now white dresses and a flaw in the column of air between two trees, round which curled a thread of blue—Lady Miller’s picnic party. Still more boats kept coming, and Durrant, without getting up, shoved their boat closer to the bank.

“Oh-h-h-h,” groaned Jacob, as the boat rocked, and the trees rocked, and the white dresses and the white flannel trousers drew out long and wavering up the bank.

“Oh-h-h-h!” He sat up, and felt as if a piece of elastic had snapped in his face.

“They’re friends of my mother’s,” said Durrant. “So old Bow took no end of trouble about the boat.”

And this boat had gone from Falmouth to St. Ives Bay, all round the coast. A larger boat, a ten-ton yacht, about the twentieth of June, properly fitted out, Durrant said …

“There’s the cash difficulty,” said Jacob.

“My people’ll see to that,” said Durrant (the son of a banker, deceased).

“I intend to preserve my economic independence,” said Jacob stiffly. (He was getting excited.)

“My mother said something about going to Harrogate,” he said with a little annoyance, feeling the pocket where he kept his letters.

“Was that true about your uncle becoming a Mohammedan?” asked Timmy Durrant.

Jacob had told the story of his Uncle Morty in Durrant’s room the night before.

“I expect he’s feeding the sharks, if the truth were known,” said Jacob. “I say, Durrant, there’s none left!” he exclaimed, crumpling the bag which had held the cherries, and throwing it into the river. He saw Lady Miller’s picnic party on the island as he threw the bag into the river.

A sort of awkwardness, grumpiness, gloom came into his eyes.

“Shall we move on … this beastly crowd …” he said.

So up they went, past the island.

The feathery white moon never let the sky grow dark; all night the chestnut blossoms were white in the green; dim was the cow-parsley in the meadows.

The waiters at Trinity must have been shuffling china plates like cards, from the clatter that could be heard in the Great Court. Jacob’s rooms, however, were in Neville’s Court; at the top; so that reaching his door one went in a little out of breath; but he wasn’t there. Dining in Hall, presumably. It will be quite dark in Neville’s Court long before midnight, only the pillars opposite will always be white, and the fountains. A curious effect the gate has, like lace upon pale green. Even in the window you hear the plates; a hum of talk, too, from the diners; the Hall lit up, and the swing-doors opening and shutting with a soft thud. Some are late.

Jacob’s room had a round table and two low chairs. There were yellow flags in a jar on the mantelpiece; a photograph of his mother; cards from societies with little raised crescents, coats of arms, and initials; notes and pipes; on the table lay paper ruled with a red margin—an essay, no doubt—“Does History consist of the Biographies of Great Men?” There were books enough; very few French books; but then any one who’s worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, with extravagant enthusiasm. Lives of the Duke of Wellington, for example; Spinoza; the works of Dickens; the Faery Queen; a Greek dictionary with the petals of poppies pressed to silk between the pages; all the Elizabethans. His slippers were incredibly shabby, like boats burnt to the water’s rim. Then there were photographs from the Greeks, and a mezzotint from Sir Joshua—all very English. The works of Jane Austen, too, in deference, perhaps, to some one else’s standard. Carlyle was a prize. There were books upon the Italian painters of the Renaissance, a Manual of the Diseases of the Horse, and all the usual text-books. Listless is the air in an empty room, just swelling the curtain; the flowers in the jar shift. One fibre in the wicker arm-chair creaks, though no one sits there.

Coming down the steps a little sideways [Jacob sat on the window-seat talking to Durrant; he smoked, and Durrant looked at the map], the old man, with his hands locked behind him, his gown floating black, lurched, unsteadily, near the wall; then, upstairs he went into his room. Then another, who raised his hand and praised the columns, the gate, the sky; another, tripping and smug. Each went up a staircase; three lights were lit in the dark windows.

If any light burns above Cambridge, it must be from three such rooms; Greek burns here; science there; philosophy on the ground floor. Poor old Huxtable can’t walk straight;—Sopwith, too, has praised the sky any night these twenty years; and Cowan still chuckles at the same stories. It is not simple, or pure, or wholly splendid, the lamp of learning, since if you see them there under its light (whether Rossetti’s on the wall, or Van Goch [Gogh] reproduced, whether there are lilacs in the bowl or rusty pipes), how priestly they look! How like a suburb where you go to see a view and eat a special cake! “We are the sole purveyors of this cake.” Back you go to London; for the treat is over.

Old Professor Huxtable, performing with the method of a clock his change of dress, let himself down into his chair; filled his pipe; chose his paper; crossed his feet; and extracted his glasses. The whole flesh of his face then fell into folds as if props were removed. Yet strip a whole seat of an underground railway carriage of its heads and old Huxtable’s head will hold them all. Now, as his eye goes down the print, what a procession tramps through the corridors of his brain, orderly, quick-stepping, and reinforced, as the march goes on, by fresh runnels, till the whole hall, dome, whatever one calls it, is populous with ideas. Such a muster takes place in no other brain. Yet sometimes there he’ll sit for hours together, gripping the arm of the chair, like a man holding fast because stranded, and then, just because his corn twinges, or it may be the gout, what execrations, and, dear me, to hear him talk of money, taking out his leather purse and grudging even the smallest silver coin, secretive and suspicious as an old peasant woman with all her lies. Strange paralysis and constriction—marvellous illumination. Serene over it all rides the great full brow, and sometimes asleep or in the quiet spaces of the night you might fancy that on a pillow of stone he lay triumphant.

Sopwith, meanwhile, advancing with a curious trip from the fireplace, cut the chocolate cake into segments. Until midnight or later there would be undergraduates in his room, sometimes as many as twelve, sometimes three or four; but nobody got up when they went or when they came; Sopwith went on talking. Talking, talking, talking—as if everything could be talked—the soul itself slipped through the lips in thin silver disks which dissolve in young men’s minds like silver, like moonlight. Oh, far away they’d remember it, and deep in dulness gaze back on it, and come to refresh themselves again.

“Well, I never. That’s old Chucky. My dear boy, how’s the world treating you?” And in came poor little Chucky, the unsuccessful provincial, Stenhouse his real name, but of course Sopwith brought back by using the other everything, everything, “all I could never be”—yes, though next day, buying his newspaper and catching the early train, it all seemed to him childish, absurd; the chocolate cake, the young men; Sopwith summing things up; no, not all; he would send his son there. He would save every penny to send his son there. Sopwith went on talking; twining stiff fibres of awkward speech—things young men blurted out—plaiting them round his own smooth garland, making the bright side show, the vivid greens, the sharp thorns, manliness. He loved it. Indeed to Sopwith a man could say anything, until perhaps he’d grown old, or gone under, gone deep, when the silver disks would tinkle hollow, and the inscription read a little too simple, and the old stamp look too pure, and the impress always the same—a Greek boy’s head. But he would respect still. A woman, divining the priest, would, involuntarily, despise.

Cowan, Erasmus Cowan, sipped his port alone, or with one rosy little man, whose memory held precisely the same span of time; sipped his port, and told his stories, and without book before him intoned Latin, Virgil, and Catullus, as if language were wine upon his lips. Only—sometimes it will come over one—what if the poet strode in? “This my image?” he might ask, pointing to the chubby man, whose brain is, after all, Virgil’s representative among us, though the body gluttonize, and as for arms, bees, or even the plough, Cowan takes his trips abroad with a French novel in his pocket, a rug about his knees, and is thankful to be home again in his place, in his line, holding up in his snug little mirror the image of Virgil, all rayed round with good stories of the dons of Trinity and red beams of port. But language is wine upon his lips. Nowhere else would Virgil hear the like. And though, as she goes sauntering along the Backs, old Miss Umphelby sings him melodiously enough, accurately too, she is always brought up by this question as she reaches Clare Bridge: “But if I met him, what should I wear?”—and then, taking her way up the avenue towards Newnham, she lets her fancy play upon other details of men’s meeting with women which have never got into print. Her lectures, therefore, are not half so well attended as those of Cowan, and the thing she might have said in elucidation of the text for ever left out. In short, face a teacher with the image of the taught and the mirror breaks. But Cowan sipped his port, his exaltation over, no longer the representative of Virgil. No, the builder, assessor, surveyor, rather; ruling lines between names, hanging lists above doors. Such is the fabric through which the light must shine, if shine it can—the light of all these languages, Chinese and Russian, Persian and Arabic, of symbols and figures, of history, of things that are known and things that are about to be known. So that if at night, far out at sea over the tumbling waves, one saw a haze on the waters, a city illuminated, a whiteness even in the sky, such as that now over the Hall of Trinity where they’re still dining, or washing up plates, that would be the light burning there—the light of Cambridge.

“Let’s go round to Simeon’s room,” said Jacob, and they rolled up the map, having got the whole thing settled.

All the lights were coming out round the court, and falling on the cobbles, picking out dark patches of grass and single daisies. The young men were now back in their rooms. Heaven knows what they were doing. What was it that could drop like that? And leaning down over a foaming window-box, one stopped another hurrying past, and upstairs they went and down they went, until a sort of fulness settled on the court, the hive full of bees, the bees home thick with gold, drowsy, humming, suddenly vocal; the Moonlight Sonata answered by a waltz.

The Moonlight Sonata tinkled away; the waltz crashed. Although young men still went in and out, they walked as if keeping engagements. Now and then there was a thud, as if some heavy piece of furniture had fallen, unexpectedly, of its own accord, not in the general stir of life after dinner. One supposed that young men raised their eyes from their books as the furniture fell. Were they reading? Certainly there was a sense of concentration in the air. Behind the grey walls sat so many young men, some undoubtedly reading, magazines, shilling shockers, no doubt; legs, perhaps, over the arms of chairs; smoking; sprawling over tables, and writing while their heads went round in a circle as the pen moved—simple young men, these, who would—but there is no need to think of them grown old; others eating sweets; here they boxed; and, well, Mr. Hawkins must have been mad suddenly to throw up his window and bawl: “Jo—seph! Jo—seph!” and then he ran as hard as ever he could across the court, while an elderly man, in a green apron, carrying an immense pile of tin covers, hesitated, balanced, and then went on. But this was a diversion. There were young men who read, lying in shallow arm-chairs, holding their books as if they had hold in their hands of something that would see them through; they being all in a torment, coming from midland towns, clergymen’s sons. Others read Keats. And those long histories in many volumes—surely some one was now beginning at the beginning in order to understand the Holy Roman Empire, as one must. That was part of the concentration, though it would be dangerous on a hot spring night—dangerous, perhaps, to concentrate too much upon single books, actual chapters, when at any moment the door opened and Jacob appeared; or Richard Bonamy, reading Keats no longer, began making long pink spills from an old newspaper, bending forward, and looking eager and contented no more, but almost fierce. Why? Only perhaps that Keats died young—one wants to write poetry too and to love—oh, the brutes! It’s damnably difficult. But, after all, not so difficult if on the next staircase, in the large room, there are two, three, five young men all convinced of this—of brutality, that is, and the clear division between right and wrong. There was a sofa, chairs, a square table, and the window being open, one could see how they sat—legs issuing here, one there crumpled in a corner of the sofa; and, presumably, for you could not see him, somebody stood by the fender, talking. Anyhow, Jacob, who sat astride a chair and ate dates from a long box, burst out laughing. The answer came from the sofa corner; for his pipe was held in the air, then replaced. Jacob wheeled round. He had something to say to that, though the sturdy red-haired boy at the table seemed to deny it, wagging his head slowly from side to side; and then, taking out his penknife, he dug the point of it again and again into a knot in the table, as if affirming that the voice from the fender spoke the truth—which Jacob could not deny. Possibly, when he had done arranging the date-stones, he might find something to say to it—indeed his lips opened—only then there broke out a roar of laughter.

The laughter died in the air. The sound of it could scarcely have reached any one standing by the Chapel, which stretched along the opposite side of the court. The laughter died out, and only gestures of arms, movements of bodies, could be seen shaping something in the room. Was it an argument? A bet on the boat races? Was it nothing of the sort? What was shaped by the arms and bodies moving in the twilight room?

A step or two beyond the window there was nothing at all, except the enclosing buildings—chimneys upright, roofs horizontal; too much brick and building for a May night, perhaps. And then before one’s eyes would come the bare hills of Turkey—sharp lines, dry earth, coloured flowers, and colour on the shoulders of the women, standing naked-legged in the stream to beat linen on the stones. The stream made loops of water round their ankles. But none of that could show clearly through the swaddlings and blanketings of the Cambridge night. The stroke of the clock even was muffled; as if intoned by somebody reverent from a pulpit; as if generations of learned men heard the last hour go rolling through their ranks and issued it, already smooth and time-worn, with their blessing, for the use of the living.

Was it to receive this gift from the past that the young man came to the window and stood there, looking out across the court? It was Jacob. He stood smoking his pipe while the last stroke of the clock purred softly round him. Perhaps there had been an argument. He looked satisfied; indeed masterly; which expression changed slightly as he stood there, the sound of the clock conveying to him (it may be) a sense of old buildings and time; and himself the inheritor; and then to-morrow; and friends; at the thought of whom, in sheer confidence and pleasure, it seemed, he yawned and stretched himself.

Meanwhile behind him the shape they had made, whether by argument or not, the spiritual shape, hard yet ephemeral, as of glass compared with the dark stone of the Chapel, was dashed to splinters, young men rising from chairs and sofa corners, buzzing and barging about the room, one driving another against the bedroom door, which giving way, in they fell. Then Jacob was left there, in the shallow arm-chair, alone with Masham? Anderson? Simeon? Oh, it was Simeon. The others had all gone.

“… Julian the Apostate….” Which of them said that and the other words murmured round it? But about midnight there sometimes rises, like a veiled figure suddenly woken, a heavy wind; and this now flapping through Trinity lifted unseen leaves and blurred everything. “Julian the Apostate”—and then the wind. Up go the elm branches, out blow the sails, the old schooners rear and plunge, the grey waves in the hot Indian Ocean tumble sultrily, and then all falls flat again.

So, if the veiled lady stepped through the Courts of Trinity, she now drowsed once more, all her draperies about her, her head against a pillar.

“Somehow it seems to matter.”

The low voice was Simeon’s.

The voice was even lower that answered him. The sharp tap of a pipe on the mantelpiece cancelled the words. And perhaps Jacob only said “hum,” or said nothing at all. True, the words were inaudible. It was the intimacy, a sort of spiritual suppleness, when mind prints upon mind indelibly.

“Well, you seem to have studied the subject,” said Jacob, rising and standing over Simeon’s chair. He balanced himself; he swayed a little. He appeared extraordinarily happy, as if his pleasure would brim and spill down the sides if Simeon spoke.

Simeon said nothing. Jacob remained standing. But intimacy—the room was full of it, still, deep, like a pool. Without need of movement or speech it rose softly and washed over everything, mollifying, kindling, and coating the mind with the lustre of pearl, so that if you talk of a light, of Cambridge burning, it’s not languages only. It’s Julian the Apostate.

But Jacob moved. He murmured good-night. He went out into the court. He buttoned his jacket across his chest. He went back to his rooms, and being the only man who walked at that moment back to his rooms, his footsteps rang out, his figure loomed large. Back from the Chapel, back from the Hall, back from the Library, came the sound of his footsteps, as if the old stone echoed with magisterial authority: “The young man—the young man—the young man—back to his rooms.”

[]

IV

What’s the use of trying to read Shakespeare, especially in one of those little thin paper editions whose pages get ruffled, or stuck together with sea-water? Although the plays of Shakespeare had frequently been praised, even quoted, and placed higher than the Greek, never since they started had Jacob managed to read one through. Yet what an opportunity!

For the Scilly Isles had been sighted by Timmy Durrant lying like mountain-tops almost a-wash in precisely the right place. His calculations had worked perfectly, and really the sight of him sitting there, with his hand on the tiller, rosy gilled, with a sprout of beard, looking sternly at the stars, then at a compass, spelling out quite correctly his page of the eternal lesson-book, would have moved a woman. Jacob, of course, was not a woman. The sight of Timmy Durrant was no sight for him, nothing to set against the sky and worship; far from it. They had quarrelled. Why the right way to open a tin of beef, with Shakespeare on board, under conditions of such splendour, should have turned them to sulky schoolboys, none can tell. Tinned beef is cold eating, though; and salt water spoils biscuits; and the waves tumble and lollop much the same hour after hour—tumble and lollop all across the horizon. Now a spray of seaweed floats past—now a log of wood. Ships have been wrecked here. One or two go past, keeping their own side of the road. Timmy knew where they were bound, what their cargoes were, and, by looking through his glass, could tell the name of the line, and even guess what dividends it paid its shareholders. Yet that was no reason for Jacob to turn sulky.

The Scilly Isles had the look of mountain-tops almost a-wash…. Unfortunately, Jacob broke the pin of the Primus stove.

The Scilly Isles might well be obliterated by a roller sweeping straight across.

But one must give young men the credit of admitting that, though breakfast eaten under these circumstances is grim, it is sincere enough. No need to make conversation. They got out their pipes.

Timmy wrote up some scientific observations; and—what was the question that broke the silence—the exact time or the day of the month? anyhow, it was spoken without the least awkwardness; in the most matter-of-fact way in the world; and then Jacob began to unbutton his clothes and sat naked, save for his shirt, intending, apparently, to bathe.

The Scilly Isles were turning bluish; and suddenly blue, purple, and green flushed the sea; left it grey; struck a stripe which vanished; but when Jacob had got his shirt over his head the whole floor of the waves was blue and white, rippling and crisp, though now and again a broad purple mark appeared, like a bruise; or there floated an entire emerald tinged with yellow. He plunged. He gulped in water, spat it out, struck with his right arm, struck with his left, was towed by a rope, gasped, splashed, and was hauled on board.

The seat in the boat was positively hot, and the sun warmed his back as he sat naked with a towel in his hand, looking at the Scilly Isles which—confound it! the sail flapped. Shakespeare was knocked overboard. There you could see him floating merrily away, with all his pages ruffling innumerably; and then he went under.

Strangely enough, you could smell violets, or if violets were impossible in July, they must grow something very pungent on the mainland then. The mainland, not so very far off—you could see clefts in the cliffs, white cottages, smoke going up—wore an extraordinary look of calm, of sunny peace, as if wisdom and piety had descended upon the dwellers there. Now a cry sounded, as of a man calling pilchards in a main street. It wore an extraordinary look of piety and peace, as if old men smoked by the door, and girls stood, hands on hips, at the well, and horses stood; as if the end of the world had come, and cabbage fields and stone walls, and coast-guard stations, and, above all, the white sand bays with the waves breaking unseen by any one, rose to heaven in a kind of ecstasy.

But imperceptibly the cottage smoke droops, has the look of a mourning emblem, a flag floating its caress over a grave. The gulls, making their broad flight and then riding at peace, seem to mark the grave.

No doubt if this were Italy, Greece, or even the shores of Spain, sadness would be routed by strangeness and excitement and the nudge of a classical education. But the Cornish hills have stark chimneys standing on them; and, somehow or other, loveliness is infernally sad. Yes, the chimneys and the coast-guard stations and the little bays with the waves breaking unseen by any one make one remember the overpowering sorrow. And what can this sorrow be?

It is brewed by the earth itself. It comes from the houses on the coast. We start transparent, and then the cloud thickens. All history backs our pane of glass. To escape is vain.

But whether this is the right interpretation of Jacob’s gloom as he sat naked, in the sun, looking at the Land’s End, it is impossible to say; for he never spoke a word. Timmy sometimes wondered (only for a second) whether his people bothered him…. No matter. There are things that can’t be said. Let’s shake it off. Let’s dry ourselves, and take up the first thing that comes handy…. Timmy Durrant’s notebook of scientific observations.

“Now …” said Jacob.

It is a tremendous argument.

Some people can follow every step of the way, and even take a little one, six inches long, by themselves at the end; others remain observant of the external signs.

The eyes fix themselves upon the poker; the right hand takes the poker and lifts it; turns it slowly round, and then, very accurately, replaces it. The left hand, which lies on the knee, plays some stately but intermittent piece of march music. A deep breath is taken; but allowed to evaporate unused. The cat marches across the hearth-rug. No one observes her.

“That’s about as near as I can get to it,” Durrant wound up.

The next minute is quiet as the grave.

“It follows …” said Jacob.

Only half a sentence followed; but these half-sentences are like flags set on tops of buildings to the observer of external sights down below. What was the coast of Cornwall, with its violet scents, and mourning emblems, and tranquil piety, but a screen happening to hang straight behind as his mind marched up?

“It follows …” said Jacob.

“Yes,” said Timmy, after reflection. “That is so.”

Now Jacob began plunging about, half to stretch himself, half in a kind of jollity, no doubt, for the strangest sound issued from his lips as he furled the sail, rubbed the plates—gruff, tuneless—a sort of pæan, for having grasped the argument, for being master of the situation, sunburnt, unshaven, capable into the bargain of sailing round the world in a ten-ton yacht, which, very likely, he would do one of these days instead of settling down in a lawyer’s office, and wearing spats.

“Our friend Masham,” said Timmy Durrant, “would rather not be seen in our company as we are now.” His buttons had come off.

“D’you know Masham’s aunt?” said Jacob.

“Never knew he had one,” said Timmy.

“Masham has millions of aunts,” said Jacob.

“Masham is mentioned in Domesday Book,” said Timmy.

“So are his aunts,” said Jacob.

“His sister,” said Timmy, “is a very pretty girl.”

“That’s what’ll happen to you, Timmy,” said Jacob.

“It’ll happen to you first,” said Timmy.

“But this woman I was telling you about—Masham’s aunt——”

“Oh, do get on,” said Timmy, for Jacob was laughing so much that he could not speak.

“Masham’s aunt …”

Timmy laughed so much that he could not speak.

“Masham’s aunt …”

“What is there about Masham that makes one laugh?” said Timmy.

“Hang it all—a man who swallows his tie-pin,” said Jacob.

“Lord Chancellor before he’s fifty,” said Timmy.

“He’s a gentleman,” said Jacob.

“The Duke of Wellington was a gentleman,” said Timmy.

“Keats wasn’t.”

“Lord Salisbury was.”

“And what about God?” said Jacob.

The Scilly Isles now appeared as if directly pointed at by a golden finger issuing from a cloud; and everybody knows how portentous that sight is, and how these broad rays, whether they light upon the Scilly Isles or upon the tombs of crusaders in cathedrals, always shake the very foundations of scepticism and lead to jokes about God.

“Abide with me:

Fast falls the eventide;

The shadows deepen;

Lord, with me abide,”

sang Timmy Durrant.

“At my place we used to have a hymn which began

Great God, what do I see and hear?”

said Jacob.

Gulls rode gently swaying in little companies of two or three quite near the boat; the cormorant, as if following his long strained neck in eternal pursuit, skimmed an inch above the water to the next rock; and the drone of the tide in the caves came across the water, low, monotonous, like the voice of some one talking to himself.

“Rock of Ages, cleft for me,

Let me hide myself in thee,”

sang Jacob.

Like the blunt tooth of some monster, a rock broke the surface; brown; overflown with perpetual waterfalls.

“Rock of Ages,”

Jacob sang, lying on his back, looking up into the sky at mid-day, from which every shred of cloud had been withdrawn, so that it was like something permanently displayed with the cover off.

By six o’clock a breeze blew in off an icefield; and by seven the water was more purple than blue; and by half-past seven there was a patch of rough gold-beater’s skin round the Scilly Isles, and Durrant’s face, as he sat steering, was of the colour of a red lacquer box polished for generations. By nine all the fire and confusion had gone out of the sky, leaving wedges of apple-green and plates of pale yellow; and by ten the lanterns on the boat were making twisted colours upon the waves, elongated or squab, [squat,] as the waves stretched or humped themselves. The beam from the lighthouse strode rapidly across the water. Infinite millions of miles away powdered stars twinkled; but the waves slapped the boat, and crashed, with regular and appalling solemnity, against the rocks.

Although it would be possible to knock at the cottage door and ask for a glass of milk, it is only thirst that would compel the intrusion. Yet perhaps Mrs. Pascoe would welcome it. The summer’s day may be wearing heavy. Washing in her little scullery, she may hear the cheap clock on the mantelpiece tick, tick, tick … tick, tick, tick. She is alone in the house. Her husband is out helping Farmer Hosken; her daughter married and gone to America. Her elder son is married too, but she does not agree with his wife. The Wesleyan minister came along and took the younger boy. She is alone in the house. A steamer, probably bound for Cardiff, now crosses the horizon, while near at hand one bell of a foxglove swings to and fro with a bumble-bee for clapper.

These white Cornish cottages are built on the edge of the cliff; the garden grows gorse more readily than cabbages; and for hedge, some primeval man has piled granite boulders. In one of these, to hold, an historian conjectures, the victim’s blood, a basin has been hollowed, but in our time it serves more tamely to seat those tourists who wish for an uninterrupted view of the Gurnard’s Head. Not that any one objects to a blue print dress and a white apron in a cottage garden.

“Look—she has to draw her water from a well in the garden.”

“Very lonely it must be in winter, with the wind sweeping over those hills, and the waves dashing on the rocks.”

Even on a summer’s day you hear them murmuring.

Having drawn her water, Mrs. Pascoe went in. The tourists regretted that they had brought no glasses, so that they might have read the name of the tramp steamer. Indeed, it was such a fine day that there was no saying what a pair of field-glasses might not have fetched into view. Two fishing luggers, presumably from St. Ives Bay, were now sailing in an opposite direction from the steamer, and the floor of the sea became alternately clear and opaque. As for the bee, having sucked its fill of honey, it visited the teasle and thence made a straight line to Mrs. Pascoe’s patch, once more directing the tourists’ gaze to the old woman’s print dress and white apron, for she had come to the door of the cottage and was standing there.

There she stood, shading her eyes and looking out to sea.

For the millionth time, perhaps, she looked at the sea. A peacock butterfly now spread himself upon the teasle, fresh and newly emerged, as the blue and chocolate down on his wings testified. Mrs. Pascoe went indoors, fetched a cream pan, came out, and stood scouring it. Her face was assuredly not soft, sensual, or lecherous, but hard, wise, wholesome rather, signifying in a room full of sophisticated people the flesh and blood of life. She would tell a lie, though, as soon as the truth. Behind her on the wall hung a large dried skate. Shut up in the parlour she prized mats, china mugs, and photographs, though the mouldy little room was saved from the salt breeze only by the depth of a brick, and between lace curtains you saw the gannet drop like a stone, and on stormy days the gulls came shuddering through the air, and the steamers’ lights were now high, now deep. Melancholy were the sounds on a winter’s night.

The picture papers were delivered punctually on Sunday, and she pored long over Lady Cynthia’s wedding at the Abbey. She, too, would have liked to ride in a carriage with springs. The soft, swift syllables of educated speech often shamed her few rude ones. And then all night to hear the grinding of the Atlantic upon the rocks instead of hansom cabs and footmen whistling for motor cars…. So she may have dreamed, scouring her cream pan. But the talkative, nimble-witted people have taken themselves to towns. Like a miser, she has hoarded her feelings within her own breast. Not a penny piece has she changed all these years, and, watching her enviously, it seems as if all within must be pure gold.

The wise old woman, having fixed her eyes upon the sea, once more withdrew. The tourists decided that it was time to move on to the Gurnard’s Head.

Three seconds later Mrs. Durrant rapped upon the door.

“Mrs. Pascoe?” she said.

Rather haughtily, she watched the tourists cross the field path. She came of a Highland race, famous for its chieftains.

Mrs. Pascoe appeared.

“I envy you that bush, Mrs. Pascoe,” said Mrs. Durrant, pointing the parasol with which she had rapped on the door at the fine clump of St. John’s wort that grew beside it. Mrs. Pascoe looked at the bush deprecatingly.

“I expect my son in a day or two,” said Mrs. Durrant. “Sailing from Falmouth with a friend in a little boat…. Any news of Lizzie yet, Mrs. Pascoe?”

Her long-tailed ponies stood twitching their ears on the road twenty yards away. The boy, Curnow, flicked flies off them occasionally. He saw his mistress go into the cottage; come out again; and pass, talking energetically to judge by the movements of her hands, round the vegetable plot in front of the cottage. Mrs. Pascoe was his aunt. Both women surveyed a bush. Mrs. Durrant stooped and picked a sprig from it. Next she pointed (her movements were peremptory; she held herself very upright) at the potatoes. They had the blight. All potatoes that year had the blight. Mrs. Durrant showed Mrs. Pascoe how bad the blight was on her potatoes. Mrs. Durrant talked energetically; Mrs. Pascoe listened submissively. The boy Curnow knew that Mrs. Durrant was saying that it is perfectly simple; you mix the powder in a gallon of water; “I have done it with my own hands in my own garden,” Mrs. Durrant was saying.

“You won’t have a potato left—you won’t have a potato left,” Mrs. Durrant was saying in her emphatic voice as they reached the gate. The boy Curnow became as immobile as stone.

Mrs. Durrant took the reins in her hands and settled herself on the driver’s seat.

“Take care of that leg, or I shall send the doctor to you,” she called back over her shoulder; touched the ponies; and the carriage started forward. The boy Curnow had only just time to swing himself up by the toe of his boot. The boy Curnow, sitting in the middle of the back seat, looked at his aunt.

Mrs. Pascoe stood at the gate looking after them; stood at the gate till the trap was round the corner; stood at the gate, looking now to the right, now to the left; then went back to her cottage.

Soon the ponies attacked the swelling moor road with striving forelegs. Mrs. Durrant let the reins fall slackly, and leant backwards. Her vivacity had left her. Her hawk nose was thin as a bleached bone through which you almost see the light. Her hands, lying on the reins in her lap, were firm even in repose. The upper lip was cut so short that it raised itself almost in a sneer from the front teeth. Her mind skimmed leagues where Mrs. Pascoe’s mind adhered to its solitary patch. Her mind skimmed leagues as the ponies climbed the hill road. Forwards and backwards she cast her mind, as if the roofless cottages, mounds of slag, and cottage gardens overgrown with foxglove and bramble cast shade upon her mind. Arrived at the summit, she stopped the carriage. The pale hills were round her, each scattered with ancient stones; beneath was the sea, variable as a southern sea; she herself sat there looking from hill to sea, upright, aquiline, equally poised between gloom and laughter. Suddenly she flicked the ponies so that the boy Curnow had to swing himself up by the toe of his boot.

The rooks settled; the rooks rose. The trees which they touched so capriciously seemed insufficient to lodge their numbers. The tree-tops sang with the breeze in them; the branches creaked audibly and dropped now and then, though the season was midsummer, husks or twigs. Up went the rooks and down again, rising in lesser numbers each time as the sager birds made ready to settle, for the evening was already spent enough to make the air inside the wood almost dark. The moss was soft; the tree-trunks spectral. Beyond them lay a silvery meadow. The pampas grass raised its feathery spears from mounds of green at the end of the meadow. A breadth of water gleamed. Already the convolvulus moth was spinning over the flowers. Orange and purple, nasturtium and cherry pie, were washed into the twilight, but the tobacco plant and the passion flower, over which the great moth spun, were white as china. The rooks creaked their wings together on the tree-tops, and were settling down for sleep when, far off, a familiar sound shook and trembled—increased—fairly dinned in their ears—scared sleepy wings into the air again—the dinner bell at the house.

After six days of salt wind, rain, and sun, Jacob Flanders had put on a dinner jacket. The discreet black object had made its appearance now and then in the boat among tins, pickles, preserved meats, and as the voyage went on had become more and more irrelevant, hardly to be believed in. And now, the world being stable, lit by candle-light, the dinner jacket alone preserved him. He could not be sufficiently thankful. Even so his neck, wrists, and face were exposed without cover, and his whole person, whether exposed or not, tingled and glowed so as to make even black cloth an imperfect screen. He drew back the great red hand that lay on the table-cloth. Surreptitiously it closed upon slim glasses and curved silver forks. The bones of the cutlets were decorated with pink frills—and yesterday he had gnawn ham from the bone! Opposite him were hazy, semi-transparent shapes of yellow and blue. Behind them, again, was the grey-green garden, and among the pear-shaped leaves of the escallonia fishing-boats seemed caught and suspended. A sailing ship slowly drew past the women’s backs. Two or three figures crossed the terrace hastily in the dusk. The door opened and shut. Nothing settled or stayed unbroken. Like oars rowing now this side, now that, were the sentences that came now here, now there, from either side of the table.

“Oh, Clara, Clara!” exclaimed Mrs. Durrant, and Timothy Durrant adding, “Clara, Clara,” Jacob named the shape in yellow gauze Timothy’s sister, Clara. The girl sat smiling and flushed. With her brother’s dark eyes, she was vaguer and softer than he was. When the laugh died down she said: “But, mother, it was true. He said so, didn’t he? Miss Eliot agreed with us….”

But Miss Eliot, tall, grey-headed, was making room beside her for the old man who had come in from the terrace. The dinner would never end, Jacob thought, and he did not wish it to end, though the ship had sailed from one corner of the window-frame to the other, and a light marked the end of the pier. He saw Mrs. Durrant gaze at the light. She turned to him.

“Did you take command, or Timothy?” she said. “Forgive me if I call you Jacob. I’ve heard so much of you.” Then her eyes went back to the sea. Her eyes glazed as she looked at the view.

“A little village once,” she said, “and now grown….” She rose, taking her napkin with her, and stood by the window.

“Did you quarrel with Timothy?” Clara asked shyly. “I should have.”

Mrs. Durrant came back from the window.

“It gets later and later,” she said, sitting upright, and looking down the table. “You ought to be ashamed—all of you. Mr. Clutterbuck, you ought to be ashamed.” She raised her voice, for Mr. Clutterbuck was deaf.

“We are ashamed,” said a girl. But the old man with the beard went on eating plum tart. Mrs. Durrant laughed and leant back in her chair, as if indulging him.

“We put it to you, Mrs. Durrant,” said a young man with thick spectacles and a fiery moustache. “I say the conditions were fulfilled. She owes me a sovereign.”

“Not before the fish—with it, Mrs. Durrant,” said Charlotte Wilding.

“That was the bet; with the fish,” said Clara seriously. “Begonias, mother. To eat them with his fish.”

“Oh dear,” said Mrs. Durrant.

“Charlotte won’t pay you,” said Timothy.

“How dare you …” said Charlotte.

“That privilege will be mine,” said the courtly Mr. Wortley, producing a silver case primed with sovereigns and slipping one coin on to the table. Then Mrs. Durrant got up and passed down the room, holding herself very straight, and the girls in yellow and blue and silver gauze followed her, and elderly Miss Eliot in her velvet; and a little rosy woman, hesitating at the door, clean, scrupulous, probably a governess. All passed out at the open door.

“When you are as old as I am, Charlotte,” said Mrs. Durrant, drawing the girl’s arm within hers as they paced up and down the terrace.

“Why are you so sad?” Charlotte asked impulsively.

“Do I seem to you sad? I hope not,” said Mrs. Durrant.

“Well, just now. You’re not old.”

“Old enough to be Timothy’s mother.” They stopped.

Miss Eliot was looking through Mr. Clutterbuck’s telescope at the edge of the terrace. The deaf old man stood beside her, fondling his beard, and reciting the names of the constellations: “Andromeda, Bootes, Sidonia, Cassiopeia….”

“Andromeda,” murmured Miss Eliot, shifting the telescope slightly.

Mrs. Durrant and Charlotte looked along the barrel of the instrument pointed at the skies.

“There are millions of stars,” said Charlotte with conviction. Miss Eliot turned away from the telescope. The young men laughed suddenly in the dining-room.

“Let me look,” said Charlotte eagerly.

“The stars bore me,” said Mrs. Durrant, walking down the terrace with Julia Eliot. “I read a book once about the stars…. What are they saying?” She stopped in front of the dining-room window. “Timothy,” she noted.

“The silent young man,” said Miss Eliot.

“Yes, Jacob Flanders,” said Mrs. Durrant.

“Oh, mother! I didn’t recognize you!” exclaimed Clara Durrant, coming from the opposite direction with Elsbeth. “How delicious,” she breathed, crushing a verbena leaf.

Mrs. Durrant turned and walked away by herself.

“Clara!” she called. Clara went to her.

“How unlike they are!” said Miss Eliot.

Mr. Wortley passed them, smoking a cigar.

“Every day I live I find myself agreeing …” he said as he passed them.

“It’s so interesting to guess …” murmured Julia Eliot.

“When first we came out we could see the flowers in that bed,” said Elsbeth.

“We see very little now,” said Miss Eliot.

“She must have been so beautiful, and everybody loved her, of course,” said Charlotte. “I suppose Mr. Wortley …” she paused.

“Edward’s death was a tragedy,” said Miss Eliot decidedly.

Here Mr. Erskine joined them.

“There’s no such thing as silence,” he said positively. “I can hear twenty different sounds on a night like this without counting your voices.”

“Make a bet of it?” said Charlotte.

“Done,” said Mr. Erskine. “One, the sea; two, the wind; three, a dog; four …”

The others passed on.

“Poor Timothy,” said Elsbeth.

“A very fine night,” shouted Miss Eliot into Mr. Clutterbuck’s ear.

“Like to look at the stars?” said the old man, turning the telescope towards Elsbeth.

“Doesn’t it make you melancholy—looking at the stars?” shouted Miss Eliot.

“Dear me no, dear me no,” Mr. Clutterbuck chuckled when he understood her. “Why should it make me melancholy? Not for a moment—dear me no.”

“Thank you, Timothy, but I’m coming in,” said Miss Eliot. “Elsbeth, here’s a shawl.”

“I’m coming in,” Elsbeth murmured with her eye to the telescope. “Cassiopeia,” she murmured. “Where are you all?” she asked, taking her eye away from the telescope. “How dark it is!”

Mrs. Durrant sat in the drawing-room by a lamp winding a ball of wool. Mr. Clutterbuck read the Times. In the distance stood a second lamp, and round it sat the young ladies, flashing scissors over silver-spangled stuff for private theatricals. Mr. Wortley read a book.

“Yes; he is perfectly right,” said Mrs. Durrant, drawing herself up and ceasing to wind her wool. And while Mr. Clutterbuck read the rest of Lord Lansdowne’s speech she sat upright, without touching her ball.

“Ah, Mr. Flanders,” she said, speaking proudly, as if to Lord Lansdowne himself. Then she sighed and began to wind her wool again.

“Sit there,” she said.

Jacob came out from the dark place by the window where he had hovered. The light poured over him, illuminating every cranny of his skin; but not a muscle of his face moved as he sat looking out into the garden.

“I want to hear about your voyage,” said Mrs. Durrant.

“Yes,” he said.

“Twenty years ago we did the same thing.”

“Yes,” he said. She looked at him sharply.

“He is extraordinarily awkward,” she thought, noticing how he fingered his socks. “Yet so distinguished-looking.”

“In those days …” she resumed, and told him how they had sailed … “my husband, who knew a good deal about sailing, for he kept a yacht before we married” … and then how rashly they had defied the fishermen, “almost paid for it with our lives, but so proud of ourselves!” She flung the hand out that held the ball of wool.

“Shall I hold your wool?” Jacob asked stiffly.

“You do that for your mother,” said Mrs. Durrant, looking at him again keenly, as she transferred the skein. “Yes, it goes much better.”

He smiled; but said nothing.

Elsbeth Siddons hovered behind them with something silver on her arm.

“We want,” she said…. “I’ve come …” she paused.

“Poor Jacob,” said Mrs. Durrant, quietly as if she had known him all his life. “They’re going to make you act in their play.”

“How I love you!” said Elsbeth, kneeling beside Mrs. Durrant’s chair.

“Give me the wool,” said Mrs. Durrant.

“He’s come—he’s come!” cried Charlotte Wilding. “I’ve won my bet!”

“There’s another bunch higher up,” murmured Clara Durrant, mounting another step of the ladder. Jacob held the ladder as she stretched out to reach the grapes high up on the vine.

“There!” she said, cutting through the stalk. She looked semi-transparent, pale, wonderfully beautiful up there among the vine leaves and the yellow and purple bunches, the lights swimming over her in coloured islands. Geraniums and begonias stood in pots along planks; tomatoes climbed the walls.

“The leaves really want thinning,” she considered, and one green one, spread like the palm of a hand, circled down past Jacob’s head.

“I have more than I can eat already,” he said, looking up.

“It does seem absurd …” Clara began, “going back to London….”

“Ridiculous,” said Jacob, firmly.

“Then …” said Clara, “you must come next year, properly,” she said, snipping another vine leaf, rather at random.

“If … if …”

A child ran past the greenhouse shouting. Clara slowly descended the ladder with her basket of grapes.

“One bunch of white, and two of purple,” she said, and she placed two great leaves over them where they lay curled warm in the basket.

“I have enjoyed myself,” said Jacob, looking down the greenhouse.

“Yes, it’s been delightful,” she said vaguely.

“Oh, Miss Durrant,” he said, taking the basket of grapes; but she walked past him towards the door of the greenhouse.

“You’re too good—too good,” she thought, thinking of Jacob, thinking that he must not say that he loved her. No, no, no.

The children were whirling past the door, throwing things high into the air.

“Little demons!” she cried. “What have they got?” she asked Jacob.

“Onions, I think,” said Jacob. He looked at them without moving.

“Next August, remember, Jacob,” said Mrs. Durrant, shaking hands with him on the terrace where the fuchsia hung, like a scarlet ear-ring, behind her head. Mr. Wortley came out of the window in yellow slippers, trailing the Times and holding out his hand very cordially.

“Good-bye,” said Jacob. “Good-bye,” he repeated. “Good-bye,” he said once more. Charlotte Wilding flung up her bedroom window and cried out: “Good-bye, Mr. Jacob!”

“Mr. Flanders!” cried Mr. Clutterbuck, trying to extricate himself from his beehive chair. “Jacob Flanders!”

“Too late, Joseph,” said Mrs. Durrant.

“Not to sit for me,” said Miss Eliot, planting her tripod upon the lawn.

[]

V

“I rather think,” said Jacob, taking his pipe from his mouth, “it’s in Virgil,” and pushing back his chair, he went to the window.

The rashest drivers in the world are, certainly, the drivers of post-office vans. Swinging down Lamb’s Conduit Street, the scarlet van rounded the corner by the pillar box in such a way as to graze the kerb and make the little girl who was standing on tiptoe to post a letter look up, half frightened, half curious. She paused with her hand in the mouth of the box; then dropped her letter and ran away. It is seldom only that we see a child on tiptoe with pity—more often a dim discomfort, a grain of sand in the shoe which it’s scarcely worth while to remove—that’s our feeling, and so—Jacob turned to the bookcase.

Long ago great people lived here, and coming back from Court past midnight stood, huddling their satin skirts, under the carved door-posts while the footman roused himself from his mattress on the floor, hurriedly fastened the lower buttons of his waistcoat, and let them in. The bitter eighteenth-century rain rushed down the kennel. Southampton Row, however, is chiefly remarkable nowadays for the fact that you will always find a man there trying to sell a tortoise to a tailor. “Showing off the tweed, sir; what the gentry wants is something singular to catch the eye, sir—and clean in their habits, sir!” So they display their tortoises.

At Mudie’s corner in Oxford Street all the red and blue beads had run together on the string. The motor omnibuses were locked. Mr. Spalding going to the city looked at Mr. Charles Budgeon bound for Shepherd’s Bush. The proximity of the omnibuses gave the outside passengers an opportunity to stare into each other’s faces. Yet few took advantage of it. Each had his own business to think of. Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart; and his friends could only read the title, James Spalding, or Charles Budgeon, and the passengers going the opposite way could read nothing at all—save “a man with a red moustache,” “a young man in grey smoking a pipe.” The October sunlight rested upon all these men and women sitting immobile; and little Johnnie Sturgeon took the chance to swing down the staircase, carrying his large mysterious parcel, and so dodging a zigzag course between the wheels he reached the pavement, started to whistle a tune and was soon out of sight—for ever. The omnibuses jerked on, and every single person felt relief at being a little nearer to his journey’s end, though some cajoled themselves past the immediate engagement by promise of indulgence beyond—steak and kidney pudding, drink, or a game of dominoes in the smoky corner of a city restaurant. Oh yes, human life is very tolerable on the top of an omnibus in Holborn, when the policeman holds up his arm and the sun beats on your back, and if there is such a thing as a shell secreted by man to fit man himself here we find it, on the banks of the Thames, where the great streets join and St. Paul’s Cathedral, like the volute on the top of the snail shell, finishes it off. Jacob, getting off his omnibus, loitered up the steps, consulted his watch, and finally made up his mind to go in…. Does it need an effort? Yes. These changes of mood wear us out.

Dim it is, haunted by ghosts of white marble, to whom the organ for ever chaunts. If a boot creaks, it’s awful; then the order; the discipline. The verger with his rod has life ironed out beneath him. Sweet and holy are the angelic choristers. And for ever round the marble shoulders, in and out of the folded fingers, go the thin high sounds of voice and organ. For ever requiem—repose. Tired with scrubbing the steps of the Prudential Society’s office, which she did year in year out, Mrs. Lidgett took her seat beneath the great Duke’s tomb, folded her hands, and half closed her eyes. A magnificent place for an old woman to rest in, by the very side of the great Duke’s bones, whose victories mean nothing to her, whose name she knows not, though she never fails to greet the little angels opposite, as she passes out, wishing the like on her own tomb, for the leathern curtain of the heart has flapped wide, and out steal on tiptoe thoughts of rest, sweet melodies…. Old Spicer, jute merchant, thought nothing of the kind though. Strangely enough he’d never been in St. Paul’s these fifty years, though his office windows looked on the churchyard. “So that’s all? Well, a gloomy old place…. Where’s Nelson’s tomb? No time now—come again—a coin to leave in the box…. Rain or fine is it? Well, if it would only make up its mind!” Idly the children stray in—the verger dissuades them—and another and another … man, woman, man, woman, boy … casting their eyes up, pursing their lips, the same shadow brushing the same faces; the leathern curtain of the heart flaps wide.

Nothing could appear more certain from the steps of St. Paul’s than that each person is miraculously provided with coat, skirt, and boots; an income; an object. Only Jacob, carrying in his hand Finlay’s Byzantine Empire, which he had bought in Ludgate Hill, looked a little different; for in his hand he carried a book, which book he would at nine-thirty precisely, by his own fireside, open and study, as no one else of all these multitudes would do. They have no houses. The streets belong to them; the shops; the churches; theirs the innumerable desks; the stretched office lights; the vans are theirs, and the railway slung high above the street. If you look closer you will see that three elderly men at a little distance from each other run spiders along the pavement as if the street were their parlour, and here, against the wall, a woman stares at nothing, boot-laces extended, which she does not ask you to buy. The posters are theirs too; and the news on them. A town destroyed; a race won. A homeless people, circling beneath the sky whose blue or white is held off by a ceiling cloth of steel filings and horse dung shredded to dust.

There, under the green shade, with his head bent over white paper, Mr. Sibley transferred figures to folios, and upon each desk you observe, like provender, a bunch of papers, the day’s nutriment, slowly consumed by the industrious pen. Innumerable overcoats of the quality prescribed hung empty all day in the corridors, but as the clock struck six each was exactly filled, and the little figures, split apart into trousers or moulded into a single thickness, jerked rapidly with angular forward motion along the pavement; then dropped into darkness. Beneath the pavement, sunk in the earth, hollow drains lined with yellow light for ever conveyed them this way and that, and large letters upon enamel plates represented in the underworld the parks, squares, and circuses of the upper. “Marble Arch—Shepherd’s Bush”—to the majority the Arch and the Bush are eternally white letters upon a blue ground. Only at one point—it may be Acton, Holloway, Kensal Rise, Caledonian Road—does the name mean shops where you buy things, and houses, in one of which, down to the right, where the pollard trees grow out of the paving stones, there is a square curtained window, and a bedroom.

Long past sunset an old blind woman sat on a camp-stool with her back to the stone wall of the Union of London and Smith’s Bank, clasping a brown mongrel tight in her arms and singing out loud, not for coppers, no, from the depths of her gay wild heart—her sinful, tanned heart—for the child who fetches her is the fruit of sin, and should have been in bed, curtained, asleep, instead of hearing in the lamplight her mother’s wild song, where she sits against the Bank, singing not for coppers, with her dog against her breast.

Home they went. The grey church spires received them; the hoary city, old, sinful, and majestic. One behind another, round or pointed, piercing the sky or massing themselves, like sailing ships, like granite cliffs, spires and offices, wharves and factories crowd the bank; eternally the pilgrims trudge; barges rest in mid stream heavy laden; as some believe, the city loves her prostitutes.

But few, it seems, are admitted to that degree. Of all the carriages that leave the arch of the Opera House, not one turns eastward, and when the little thief is caught in the empty market-place no one in black-and-white or rose-coloured evening dress blocks the way by pausing with a hand upon the carriage door to help or condemn—though Lady Charles, to do her justice, sighs sadly as she ascends her staircase, takes down Thomas à Kempis, and does not sleep till her mind has lost itself tunnelling into the complexity of things. “Why? Why? Why?” she sighs. On the whole it’s best to walk back from the Opera House. Fatigue is the safest sleeping draught.

The autumn season was in full swing. Tristan was twitching his rug up under his armpits twice a week; Isolde waved her scarf in miraculous sympathy with the conductor’s baton. In all parts of the house were to be found pink faces and glittering breasts. When a Royal hand attached to an invisible body slipped out and withdrew the red and white bouquet reposing on the scarlet ledge, the Queen of England seemed a name worth dying for. Beauty, in its hothouse variety (which is none of the worst), flowered in box after box; and though nothing was said of profound importance, and though it is generally agreed that wit deserted beautiful lips about the time that Walpole died—at any rate when Victoria in her nightgown descended to meet her ministers, the lips (through an opera glass) remained red, adorable. Bald distinguished men with gold-headed canes strolled down the crimson avenues between the stalls, and only broke from intercourse with the boxes when the lights went down, and the conductor, first bowing to the Queen, next to the bald-headed men, swept round on his feet and raised his wand.

Then two thousand hearts in the semi-darkness remembered, anticipated, travelled dark labyrinths; and Clara Durrant said farewell to Jacob Flanders, and tasted the sweetness of death in effigy; and Mrs. Durrant, sitting behind her in the dark of the box, sighed her sharp sigh; and Mr. Wortley, shifting his position behind the Italian Ambassador’s wife, thought that Brangaena was a trifle hoarse; and suspended in the gallery many feet above their heads, Edward Whittaker surreptitiously held a torch to his miniature score; and … and …

In short, the observer is choked with observations. Only to prevent us from being submerged by chaos, nature and society between them have arranged a system of classification which is simplicity itself; stalls, boxes, amphitheatre, gallery. The moulds are filled nightly. There is no need to distinguish details. But the difficulty remains—one has to choose. For though I have no wish to be Queen of England—or only for a moment—I would willingly sit beside her; I would hear the Prime Minister’s gossip; the countess whisper, and share her memories of halls and gardens; the massive fronts of the respectable conceal after all their secret code; or why so impermeable? And then, doffing one’s own headpiece, how strange to assume for a moment some one’s—any one’s—to be a man of valour who has ruled the Empire; to refer while Brangaena sings to the fragments of Sophocles, or see in a flash, as the shepherd pipes his tune, bridges and aqueducts. But no—we must choose. Never was there a harsher necessity! or one which entails greater pain, more certain disaster; for wherever I seat myself, I die in exile: Whittaker in his lodging-house; Lady Charles at the Manor.

A young man with a Wellington nose, who had occupied a seven-and-sixpenny seat, made his way down the stone stairs when the opera ended, as if he were still set a little apart from his fellows by the influence of the music.

At midnight Jacob Flanders heard a rap on his door.

“By Jove!” he exclaimed. “You’re the very man I want!” and without more ado they discovered the lines which he had been seeking all day; only they come not in Virgil, but in Lucretius.

“Yes; that should make him sit up,” said Bonamy, as Jacob stopped reading. Jacob was excited. It was the first time he had read his essay aloud.

“Damned swine!” he said, rather too extravagantly; but the praise had gone to his head. Professor Bulteel, of Leeds, had issued an edition of Wycherley without stating that he had left out, disembowelled, or indicated only by asterisks, several indecent words and some indecent phrases. An outrage, Jacob said; a breach of faith; sheer prudery; token of a lewd mind and a disgusting nature. Aristophanes and Shakespeare were cited. Modern life was repudiated. Great play was made with the professorial title, and Leeds as a seat of learning was laughed to scorn. And the extraordinary thing was that these young men were perfectly right—extraordinary, because, even as Jacob copied his pages, he knew that no one would ever print them; and sure enough back they came from the Fortnightly, the Contemporary, the Nineteenth Century—when Jacob threw them into the black wooden box where he kept his mother’s letters, his old flannel trousers, and a note or two with the Cornish postmark. The lid shut upon the truth.

This black wooden box, upon which his name was still legible in white paint, stood between the long windows of the sitting-room. The street ran beneath. No doubt the bedroom was behind. The furniture—three wicker chairs and a gate-legged table—came from Cambridge. These houses (Mrs. Garfit’s daughter, Mrs. Whitehorn, was the landlady of this one) were built, say, a hundred and fifty years ago. The rooms are shapely, the ceilings high; over the doorway a rose, or a ram’s skull, is carved in the wood. The eighteenth century has its distinction. Even the panels, painted in raspberry-coloured paint, have their distinction….

“Distinction”—Mrs. Durrant said that Jacob Flanders was “distinguished-looking.” “Extremely awkward,” she said, “but so distinguished-looking.” Seeing him for the first time that no doubt is the word for him. Lying back in his chair, taking his pipe from his lips, and saying to Bonamy: “About this opera now” (for they had done with indecency). “This fellow Wagner” … distinction was one of the words to use naturally, though, from looking at him, one would have found it difficult to say which seat in the opera house was his, stalls, gallery, or dress circle. A writer? He lacked self-consciousness. A painter? There was something in the shape of his hands (he was descended on his mother’s side from a family of the greatest antiquity and deepest obscurity) which indicated taste. Then his mouth—but surely, of all futile occupations this of cataloguing features is the worst. One word is sufficient. But if one cannot find it?

“I like Jacob Flanders,” wrote Clara Durrant in her diary. “He is so unworldly. He gives himself no airs, and one can say what one likes to him, though he’s frightening because …” But Mr. Letts allows little space in his shilling diaries. Clara was not the one to encroach upon Wednesday. Humblest, most candid of women! “No, no, no,” she sighed, standing at the greenhouse door, “don’t break—don’t spoil”—what? Something infinitely wonderful.

But then, this is only a young woman’s language, one, too, who loves, or refrains from loving. She wished the moment to continue for ever precisely as it was that July morning. And moments don’t. Now, for instance, Jacob was telling a story about some walking tour he’d taken, and the inn was called “The Foaming Pot,” which, considering the landlady’s name … They shouted with laughter. The joke was indecent.

Then Julia Eliot said “the silent young man,” and as she dined with Prime Ministers, no doubt she meant: “If he is going to get on in the world, he will have to find his tongue.”

Timothy Durrant never made any comment at all.

The housemaid found herself very liberally rewarded.

Mr. Sopwith’s opinion was as sentimental as Clara’s, though far more skilfully expressed.

Betty Flanders was romantic about Archer and tender about John; she was unreasonably irritated by Jacob’s clumsiness in the house.

Captain Barfoot liked him best of the boys; but as for saying why….

It seems then that men and women are equally at fault. It seems that a profound, impartial, and absolutely just opinion of our fellow-creatures is utterly unknown. Either we are men, or we are women. Either we are cold, or we are sentimental. Either we are young, or growing old. In any case life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being shadows. And why, if this and much more than this is true, why are we yet surprised in the window corner by a sudden vision that the young man in the chair is of all things in the world the most real, the most solid, the best known to us—why indeed? For the moment after we know nothing about him.

Such is the manner of our seeing. Such the conditions of our love.

(“I’m twenty-two. It’s nearly the end of October. Life is thoroughly pleasant, although unfortunately there are a great number of fools about. One must apply oneself to something or other—God knows what. Everything is really very jolly—except getting up in the morning and wearing a tail coat.”)

“I say, Bonamy, what about Beethoven?”

(“Bonamy is an amazing fellow. He knows practically everything—not more about English literature than I do—but then he’s read all those Frenchmen.”)

“I rather suspect you’re talking rot, Bonamy. In spite of what you say, poor old Tennyson….”

(“The truth is one ought to have been taught French. Now, I suppose, old Barfoot is talking to my mother. That’s an odd affair to be sure. But I can’t see Bonamy down there. Damn London!”) for the market carts were lumbering down the street.

“What about a walk on Saturday?”

(“What’s happening on Saturday?”)

Then, taking out his pocket-book, he assured himself that the night of the Durrants’ party came next week.

But though all this may very well be true—so Jacob thought and spoke—so he crossed his legs—filled his pipe—sipped his whisky, and once looked at his pocket-book, rumpling his hair as he did so, there remains over something which can never be conveyed to a second person save by Jacob himself. Moreover, part of this is not Jacob but Richard Bonamy—the room; the market carts; the hour; the very moment of history. Then consider the effect of sex—how between man and woman it hangs wavy, tremulous, so that here’s a valley, there’s a peak, when in truth, perhaps, all’s as flat as my hand. Even the exact words get the wrong accent on them. But something is always impelling one to hum vibrating, like the hawk moth, at the mouth of the cavern of mystery, endowing Jacob Flanders with all sorts of qualities he had not at all—for though, certainly, he sat talking to Bonamy, half of what he said was too dull to repeat; much unintelligible (about unknown people and Parliament); what remains is mostly a matter of guess work. Yet over him we hang vibrating.

“Yes,” said Captain Barfoot, knocking out his pipe on Betty Flanders’s hob, and buttoning his coat. “It doubles the work, but I don’t mind that.”

He was now town councillor. They looked at the night, which was the same as the London night, only a good deal more transparent. Church bells down in the town were striking eleven o’clock. The wind was off the sea. And all the bedroom windows were dark—the Pages were asleep; the Garfits were asleep; the Cranches were asleep—whereas in London at this hour they were burning Guy Fawkes on Parliament Hill.

[]

VI

The flames had fairly caught.

“There’s St. Paul’s!” some one cried.

As the wood caught the city of London was lit up for a second; on other sides of the fire there were trees. Of the faces which came out fresh and vivid as though painted in yellow and red, the most prominent was a girl’s face. By a trick of the firelight she seemed to have no body. The oval of the face and hair hung beside the fire with a dark vacuum for background. As if dazed by the glare, her green-blue eyes stared at the flames. Every muscle of her face was taut. There was something tragic in her thus staring—her age between twenty and twenty-five.

A hand descending from the chequered darkness thrust on her head the conical white hat of a pierrot. Shaking her head, she still stared. A whiskered face appeared above her. They dropped two legs of a table upon the fire and a scattering of twigs and leaves. All this blazed up and showed faces far back, round, pale, smooth, bearded, some with billycock hats on; all intent; showed too St. Paul’s floating on the uneven white mist, and two or three narrow, paper-white, extinguisher-shaped spires.

The flames were struggling through the wood and roaring up when, goodness knows where from, pails flung water in beautiful hollow shapes, as of polished tortoiseshell; flung again and again; until the hiss was like a swarm of bees; and all the faces went out.

“Oh Jacob,” said the girl, as they pounded up the hill in the dark, “I’m so frightfully unhappy!”

Shouts of laughter came from the others—high, low; some before, others after.

The hotel dining-room was brightly lit. A stag’s head in plaster was at one end of the table; at the other some Roman bust blackened and reddened to represent Guy Fawkes, whose night it was. The diners were linked together by lengths of paper roses, so that when it came to singing “Auld Lang Syne” with their hands crossed a pink and yellow line rose and fell the entire length of the table. There was an enormous tapping of green wine-glasses. A young man stood up, and Florinda, taking one of the purplish globes that lay on the table, flung it straight at his head. It crushed to powder.

“I’m so frightfully unhappy!” she said, turning to Jacob, who sat beside her.

The table ran, as if on invisible legs, to the side of the room, and a barrel organ decorated with a red cloth and two pots of paper flowers reeled out waltz music.

Jacob could not dance. He stood against the wall smoking a pipe.

“We think,” said two of the dancers, breaking off from the rest, and bowing profoundly before him, “that you are the most beautiful man we have ever seen.”

So they wreathed his head with paper flowers. Then somebody brought out a white and gilt chair and made him sit on it. As they passed, people hung glass grapes on his shoulders, until he looked like the figure-head of a wrecked ship. Then Florinda got upon his knee and hid her face in his waistcoat. With one hand he held her; with the other, his pipe.

“Now let us talk,” said Jacob, as he walked down Haverstock Hill between four and five o’clock in the morning of November the sixth arm-in-arm with Timmy Durrant, “about something sensible.”

The Greeks—yes, that was what they talked about—how when all’s said and done, when one’s rinsed one’s mouth with every literature in the world, including Chinese and Russian (but these Slavs aren’t civilized), it’s the flavour of Greek that remains. Durrant quoted Aeschylus—Jacob Sophocles. It is true that no Greek could have understood or professor refrained from pointing out—Never mind; what is Greek for if not to be shouted on Haverstock Hill in the dawn? Moreover, Durrant never listened to Sophocles, nor Jacob to Aeschylus. They were boastful, triumphant; it seemed to both that they had read every book in the world; known every sin, passion, and joy. Civilizations stood round them like flowers ready for picking. Ages lapped at their feet like waves fit for sailing. And surveying all this, looming through the fog, the lamplight, the shades of London, the two young men decided in favour of Greece.

“Probably,” said Jacob, “we are the only people in the world who know what the Greeks meant.”

They drank coffee at a stall where the urns were burnished and little lamps burnt along the counter.

Taking Jacob for a military gentleman, the stall-keeper told him about his boy at Gibraltar, and Jacob cursed the British army and praised the Duke of Wellington. So on again they went down the hill talking about the Greeks.

A strange thing—when you come to think of it—this love of Greek, flourishing in such obscurity, distorted, discouraged, yet leaping out, all of a sudden, especially on leaving crowded rooms, or after a surfeit of print, or when the moon floats among the waves of the hills, or in hollow, sallow, fruitless London days, like a specific; a clean blade; always a miracle. Jacob knew no more Greek than served him to stumble through a play. Of ancient history he knew nothing. However, as he tramped into London it seemed to him that they were making the flagstones ring on the road to the Acropolis, and that if Socrates saw them coming he would bestir himself and say “my fine fellows,” for the whole sentiment of Athens was entirely after his heart; free, venturesome, high-spirited…. She had called him Jacob without asking his leave. She had sat upon his knee. Thus did all good women in the days of the Greeks.

At this moment there shook out into the air a wavering, quavering, doleful lamentation which seemed to lack strength to unfold itself, and yet flagged on; at the sound of which doors in back streets burst sullenly open; workmen stumped forth.

Florinda was sick.

Mrs. Durrant, sleepless as usual, scored a mark by the side of certain lines in the Inferno.

Clara slept buried in her pillows; on her dressing-table dishevelled roses and a pair of long white gloves.

Still wearing the conical white hat of a pierrot, Florinda was sick.

The bedroom seemed fit for these catastrophes—cheap, mustard-coloured, half attic, half studio, curiously ornamented with silver paper stars, Welshwomen’s hats, and rosaries pendent from the gas brackets. As for Florinda’s story, her name had been bestowed upon her by a painter who had wished it to signify that the flower of her maidenhood was still unplucked. Be that as it may, she was without a surname, and for parents had only the photograph of a tombstone beneath which, she said, her father lay buried. Sometimes she would dwell upon the size of it, and rumour had it that Florinda’s father had died from the growth of his bones which nothing could stop; just as her mother enjoyed the confidence of a Royal master, and now and again Florinda herself was a Princess, but chiefly when drunk. Thus deserted, pretty into the bargain, with tragic eyes and the lips of a child, she talked more about virginity than women mostly do; and had lost it only the night before, or cherished it beyond the heart in her breast, according to the man she talked to. But did she always talk to men? No, she had her confidante: Mother Stuart. Stuart, as the lady would point out, is the name of a Royal house; but what that signified, and what her business was, no one knew; only that Mrs. Stuart got postal orders every Monday morning, kept a parrot, believed in the transmigration of souls, and could read the future in tea leaves. Dirty lodging-house wallpaper she was behind the chastity of Florinda.

Now Florinda wept, and spent the day wandering the streets; stood at Chelsea watching the river swim past; trailed along the shopping streets; opened her bag and powdered her cheeks in omnibuses; read love letters, propping them against the milk pot in the A.B.C. shop; detected glass in the sugar bowl; accused the waitress of wishing to poison her; declared that young men stared at her; and found herself towards evening slowly sauntering down Jacob’s street, when it struck her that she liked that man Jacob better than dirty Jews, and sitting at his table (he was copying his essay upon the Ethics of Indecency), drew off her gloves and told him how Mother Stuart had banged her on the head with the tea-cosy.

Jacob took her word for it that she was chaste. She prattled, sitting by the fireside, of famous painters. The tomb of her father was mentioned. Wild and frail and beautiful she looked, and thus the women of the Greeks were, Jacob thought; and this was life; and himself a man and Florinda chaste.

She left with one of Shelley’s poems beneath her arm. Mrs. Stuart, she said, often talked of him.

Marvellous are the innocent. To believe that the girl herself transcends all lies (for Jacob was not such a fool as to believe implicitly), to wonder enviously at the unanchored life—his own seeming petted and even cloistered in comparison—to have at hand as sovereign specifics for all disorders of the soul Adonais and the plays of Shakespeare; to figure out a comradeship all spirited on her side, protective on his, yet equal on both, for women, thought Jacob, are just the same as men—innocence such as this is marvellous enough, and perhaps not so foolish after all.

For when Florinda got home that night she first washed her head; then ate chocolate creams; then opened Shelley. True, she was horribly bored. What on earth was it about? She had to wager with herself that she would turn the page before she ate another. In fact she slept. But then her day had been a long one, Mother Stuart had thrown the tea-cosy;—there are formidable sights in the streets, and though Florinda was ignorant as an owl, and would never learn to read even her love letters correctly, still she had her feelings, liked some men better than others, and was entirely at the beck and call of life. Whether or not she was a virgin seems a matter of no importance whatever. Unless, indeed, it is the only thing of any importance at all.

Jacob was restless when she left him.

All night men and women seethed up and down the well-known beats. Late home-comers could see shadows against the blinds even in the most respectable suburbs. Not a square in snow or fog lacked its amorous couple. All plays turned on the same subject. Bullets went through heads in hotel bedrooms almost nightly on that account. When the body escaped mutilation, seldom did the heart go to the grave unscarred. Little else was talked of in theatres and popular novels. Yet we say it is a matter of no importance at all.

What with Shakespeare and Adonais, Mozart and Bishop Berkeley—choose whom you like—the fact is concealed and the evenings for most of us pass reputably, or with only the sort of tremor that a snake makes sliding through the grass. But then concealment by itself distracts the mind from the print and the sound. If Florinda had had a mind, she might have read with clearer eyes than we can. She and her sort have solved the question by turning it to a trifle of washing the hands nightly before going to bed, the only difficulty being whether you prefer your water hot or cold, which being settled, the mind can go about its business unassailed.

But it did occur to Jacob, half-way through dinner, to wonder whether she had a mind.

They sat at a little table in the restaurant.

Florinda leant the points of her elbows on the table and held her chin in the cup of her hands. Her cloak had slipped behind her. Gold and white with bright beads on her she emerged, her face flowering from her body, innocent, scarcely tinted, the eyes gazing frankly about her, or slowly settling on Jacob and resting there. She talked:

“You know that big black box the Australian left in my room ever so long ago? … I do think furs make a woman look old…. That’s Bechstein come in now…. I was wondering what you looked like when you were a little boy, Jacob.” She nibbled her roll and looked at him.

“Jacob. You’re like one of those statues…. I think there are lovely things in the British Museum, don’t you? Lots of lovely things …” she spoke dreamily. The room was filling; the heat increasing. Talk in a restaurant is dazed sleep-walkers’ talk, so many things to look at—so much noise—other people talking. Can one overhear? Oh, but they mustn’t overhear us.

“That’s like Ellen Nagle—that girl …” and so on.

“I’m awfully happy since I’ve known you, Jacob. You’re such a good man.”

The room got fuller and fuller; talk louder; knives more clattering.

“Well, you see what makes her say things like that is …”

She stopped. So did every one.

“To-morrow … Sunday … a beastly … you tell me … go then!” Crash! And out she swept.

It was at the table next them that the voice spun higher and higher. Suddenly the woman dashed the plates to the floor. The man was left there. Everybody stared. Then—“Well, poor chap, we mustn’t sit staring. What a go! Did you hear what she said? By God, he looks a fool! Didn’t come up to the scratch, I suppose. All the mustard on the table-cloth. The waiters laughing.”

Jacob observed Florinda. In her face there seemed to him something horribly brainless—as she sat staring.

Out she swept, the black woman with the dancing feather in her hat.

Yet she had to go somewhere. The night is not a tumultuous black ocean in which you sink or sail as a star. As a matter of fact it was a wet November night. The lamps of Soho made large greasy spots of light upon the pavement. The by-streets were dark enough to shelter man or woman leaning against the doorways. One detached herself as Jacob and Florinda approached.

“She’s dropped her glove,” said Florinda.

Jacob, pressing forward, gave it her.

Effusively she thanked him; retraced her steps; dropped her glove again. But why? For whom?

Meanwhile, where had the other woman got to? And the man?

The street lamps do not carry far enough to tell us. The voices, angry, lustful, despairing, passionate, were scarcely more than the voices of caged beasts at night. Only they are not caged, nor beasts. Stop a man; ask him the way; he’ll tell it you; but one’s afraid to ask him the way. What does one fear?—the human eye. At once the pavement narrows, the chasm deepens. There! They’ve melted into it—both man and woman. Further on, blatantly advertising its meritorious solidity, a boarding-house exhibits behind uncurtained windows its testimony to the soundness of London. There they sit, plainly illuminated, dressed like ladies and gentlemen, in bamboo chairs. The widows of business men prove laboriously that they are related to judges. The wives of coal merchants instantly retort that their fathers kept coachmen. A servant brings coffee, and the crochet basket has to be moved. And so on again into the dark, passing a girl here for sale, or there an old woman with only matches to offer, passing the crowd from the Tube station, the women with veiled hair, passing at length no one but shut doors, carved door-posts, and a solitary policeman, Jacob, with Florinda on his arm, reached his room and, lighting the lamp, said nothing at all.

“I don’t like you when you look like that,” said Florinda.

The problem is insoluble. The body is harnessed to a brain. Beauty goes hand in hand with stupidity. There she sat staring at the fire as she had stared at the broken mustard-pot. In spite of defending indecency, Jacob doubted whether he liked it in the raw. He had a violent reversion towards male society, cloistered rooms, and the works of the classics; and was ready to turn with wrath upon whoever it was who had fashioned life thus.

Then Florinda laid her hand upon his knee.

After all, it was none of her fault. But the thought saddened him. It’s not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it’s the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.

Any excuse, though, serves a stupid woman. He told her his head ached.

But when she looked at him, dumbly, half-guessing, half-understanding, apologising perhaps, anyhow saying as he had said, “It’s none of my fault,” straight and beautiful in body, her face like a shell within its cap, then he knew that cloisters and classics are no use whatever. The problem is insoluble.

[]

VII

About this time a firm of merchants having dealings with the East put on the market little paper flowers which opened on touching water. As it was the custom also to use finger-bowls at the end of dinner, the new discovery was found of excellent service. In these sheltered lakes the little coloured flowers swam and slid; surmounted smooth slippery waves, and sometimes foundered and lay like pebbles on the glass floor. Their fortunes were watched by eyes intent and lovely. It is surely a great discovery that leads to the union of hearts and foundation of homes. The paper flowers did no less.

It must not be thought, though, that they ousted the flowers of nature. Roses, lilies, carnations in particular, looked over the rims of vases and surveyed the bright lives and swift dooms of their artificial relations. Mr. Stuart Ormond made this very observation; and charming it was thought; and Kitty Craster married him on the strength of it six months later. But real flowers can never be dispensed with. If they could, human life would be a different affair altogether. For flowers fade; chrysanthemums are the worst; perfect over night; yellow and jaded next morning—not fit to be seen. On the whole, though the price is sinful, carnations pay best;—it’s a question, however, whether it’s wise to have them wired. Some shops advise it. Certainly it’s the only way to keep them at a dance; but whether it is necessary at dinner parties, unless the rooms are very hot, remains in dispute. Old Mrs. Temple used to recommend an ivy leaf—just one—dropped into the bowl. She said it kept the water pure for days and days. But there is some reason to think that old Mrs. Temple was mistaken.

The little cards, however, with names engraved on them, are a more serious problem than the flowers. More horses’ legs have been worn out, more coachmen’s lives consumed, more hours of sound afternoon time vainly lavished than served to win us the battle of Waterloo, and pay for it into the bargain. The little demons are the source of as many reprieves, calamities, and anxieties as the battle itself. Sometimes Mrs. Bonham has just gone out; at others she is at home. But, even if the cards should be superseded, which seems unlikely, there are unruly powers blowing life into storms, disordering sedulous mornings, and uprooting the stability of the afternoon—dressmakers, that is to say, and confectioners’ shops. Six yards of silk will cover one body; but if you have to devise six hundred shapes for it, and twice as many colours?—in the middle of which there is the urgent question of the pudding with tufts of green cream and battlements of almond paste. It has not arrived.

The flamingo hours fluttered softly through the sky. But regularly they dipped their wings in pitch black; Notting Hill, for instance, or the purlieus of Clerkenwell. No wonder that Italian remained a hidden art, and the piano always played the same sonata. In order to buy one pair of elastic stockings for Mrs. Page, widow, aged sixty-three, in receipt of five shillings out-door relief, and help from her only son employed in Messrs. Mackie’s dye-works, suffering in winter with his chest, letters must be written, columns filled up in the same round, simple hand that wrote in Mr. Letts’s diary how the weather was fine, the children demons, and Jacob Flanders unworldly. Clara Durrant procured the stockings, played the sonata, filled the vases, fetched the pudding, left the cards, and when the great invention of paper flowers to swim in finger-bowls was discovered, was one of those who most marvelled at their brief lives.

Nor were there wanting poets to celebrate the theme. Edwin Mallett, for example, wrote his verses ending:

And read their doom in Chloe’s eyes,

which caused Clara to blush at the first reading, and to laugh at the second, saying that it was just like him to call her Chloe when her name was Clara. Ridiculous young man! But when, between ten and eleven on a rainy morning, Edwin Mallett laid his life at her feet she ran out of the room and hid herself in her bedroom, and Timothy below could not get on with his work all that morning on account of her sobs.

“Which is the result of enjoying yourself,” said Mrs. Durrant severely, surveying the dance programme all scored with the same initials, or rather they were different ones this time—R. B. instead of E. M.; Richard Bonamy it was now, the young man with the Wellington nose.

“But I could never marry a man with a nose like that,” said Clara.

“Nonsense,” said Mrs. Durrant.

“But I am too severe,” she thought to herself. For Clara, losing all vivacity, tore up her dance programme and threw it in the fender.

Such were the very serious consequences of the invention of paper flowers to swim in bowls.

“Please,” said Julia Eliot, taking up her position by the curtain almost opposite the door, “don’t introduce me. I like to look on. The amusing thing,” she went on, addressing Mr. Salvin, who, owing to his lameness, was accommodated with a chair, “the amusing thing about a party is to watch the people—coming and going, coming and going.”

“Last time we met,” said Mr. Salvin, “was at the Farquhars. Poor lady! She has much to put up with.”

“Doesn’t she look charming?” exclaimed Miss Eliot, as Clara Durrant passed them.

“And which of them …?” asked Mr. Salvin, dropping his voice and speaking in quizzical tones.

“There are so many …” Miss Eliot replied. Three young men stood at the doorway looking about for their hostess.

“You don’t remember Elizabeth as I do,” said Mr. Salvin, “dancing Highland reels at Banchorie. Clara lacks her mother’s spirit. Clara is a little pale.”

“What different people one sees here!” said Miss Eliot.

“Happily we are not governed by the evening papers,” said Mr. Salvin.

“I never read them,” said Miss Eliot. “I know nothing about politics,” she added.

“The piano is in tune,” said Clara, passing them, “but we may have to ask some one to move it for us.”

“Are they going to dance?” asked Mr. Salvin.

“Nobody shall disturb you,” said Mrs. Durrant peremptorily as she passed.

“Julia Eliot. It is Julia Eliot!” said old Lady Hibbert, holding out both her hands. “And Mr. Salvin. What is going to happen to us, Mr. Salvin? With all my experience of English politics—My dear, I was thinking of your father last night—one of my oldest friends, Mr. Salvin. Never tell me that girls of ten are incapable of love! I had all Shakespeare by heart before I was in my teens, Mr. Salvin!”

“You don’t say so,” said Mr. Salvin.

“But I do,” said Lady Hibbert.

“Oh, Mr. Salvin, I’m so sorry….”

“I will remove myself if you’ll kindly lend me a hand,” said Mr. Salvin.

“You shall sit by my mother,” said Clara. “Everybody seems to come in here…. Mr. Calthorp, let me introduce you to Miss Edwards.”

“Are you going away for Christmas?” said Mr. Calthorp.

“If my brother gets his leave,” said Miss Edwards.

“What regiment is he in?” said Mr. Calthorp.

“The Twentieth Hussars,” said Miss Edwards.

“Perhaps he knows my brother?” said Mr. Calthorp.

“I am afraid I did not catch your name,” said Miss Edwards.

“Calthorp,” said Mr. Calthorp.

“But what proof was there that the marriage service was actually performed?” said Mr. Crosby.

“There is no reason to doubt that Charles James Fox …” Mr. Burley began; but here Mrs. Stretton told him that she knew his sister well; had stayed with her not six weeks ago; and thought the house charming, but bleak in winter.

“Going about as girls do nowadays——” said Mrs. Forster.

Mr. Bowley looked round him, and catching sight of Rose Shaw moved towards her, threw out his hands, and exclaimed: “Well!”

“Nothing!” she replied. “Nothing at all—though I left them alone the entire afternoon on purpose.”

“Dear me, dear me,” said Mr. Bowley. “I will ask Jimmy to breakfast.”

“But who could resist her?” cried Rose Shaw. “Dearest Clara—I know we mustn’t try to stop you …”

“You and Mr. Bowley are talking dreadful gossip, I know,” said Clara.

“Life is wicked—life is detestable!” cried Rose Shaw.

“There’s not much to be said for this sort of thing, is there?” said Timothy Durrant to Jacob.

“Women like it.”

“Like what?” said Charlotte Wilding, coming up to them.

“Where have you come from?” said Timothy. “Dining somewhere, I suppose.”

“I don’t see why not,” said Charlotte.

“People must go downstairs,” said Clara, passing. “Take Charlotte, Timothy. How d’you do, Mr. Flanders.”

“How d’you do, Mr. Flanders,” said Julia Eliot, holding out her hand. “What’s been happening to you?”

“Who is Silvia? what is she?

That all our swains commend her?”

sang Elsbeth Siddons.

Every one stood where they were, or sat down if a chair was empty.

“Ah,” sighed Clara, who stood beside Jacob, half-way through.

“Then to Silvia let us sing,

That Silvia is excelling;

She excels each mortal thing

Upon the dull earth dwelling.

To her let us garlands bring,”

sang Elsbeth Siddons.

“Ah!” Clara exclaimed out loud, and clapped her gloved hands; and Jacob clapped his bare ones; and then she moved forward and directed people to come in from the doorway.

“You are living in London?” asked Miss Julia Eliot.

“Yes,” said Jacob.

“In rooms?”

‘Yes.”

“There is Mr. Clutterbuck. You always see Mr. Clutterbuck here. He is not very happy at home, I am afraid. They say that Mrs. Clutterbuck …” she dropped her voice. “That’s why he stays with the Durrants. Were you there when they acted Mr. Wortley’s play? Oh, no, of course not—at the last moment, did you hear—you had to go to join your mother, I remember, at Harrogate—At the last moment, as I was saying, just as everything was ready, the clothes finished and everything—Now Elsbeth is going to sing again. Clara is playing her accompaniment or turning over for Mr. Carter, I think. No, Mr. Carter is playing by himself—This is Bach,” she whispered, as Mr. Carter played the first bars.

“Are you fond of music?” said Mrs. Durrant.

“Yes. I like hearing it,” said Jacob. “I know nothing about it.”

“Very few people do that,” said Mrs. Durrant. “I daresay you were never taught. Why is that, Sir Jasper?—Sir Jasper Bigham—Mr. Flanders. Why is nobody taught anything that they ought to know, Sir Jasper?” She left them standing against the wall.

Neither of the gentlemen said anything for three minutes, though Jacob shifted perhaps five inches to the left, and then as many to the right. Then Jacob grunted, and suddenly crossed the room.

“Will you come and have something to eat?” he said to Clara Durrant.

“Yes, an ice. Quickly. Now,” she said.

Downstairs they went.

But half-way down they met Mr. and Mrs. Gresham, Herbert Turner, Sylvia Rashleigh, and a friend, whom they had dared to bring, from America, “knowing that Mrs. Durrant—wishing to show Mr. Pilcher.—Mr. Pilcher from New York—This is Miss Durrant.”

“Whom I have heard so much of,” said Mr. Pilcher, bowing low.

So Clara left him.

[]

VIII

About half-past nine Jacob left the house, his door slamming, other doors slamming, buying his paper, mounting his omnibus, or, weather permitting, walking his road as other people do. Head bent down, a desk, a telephone, books bound in green leather, electric light…. “Fresh coals, sir?” … “Your tea, sir.”… Talk about football, the Hotspurs, the Harlequins; six-thirty Star brought in by the office boy; the rooks of Gray’s Inn passing overhead; branches in the fog thin and brittle; and through the roar of traffic now and again a voice shouting: “Verdict—verdict—winner—winner,” while letters accumulate in a basket, Jacob signs them, and each evening finds him, as he takes his coat down, with some muscle of the brain new stretched.

Then, sometimes a game of chess; or pictures in Bond Street, or a long way home to take the air with Bonamy on his arm, meditatively marching, head thrown back, the world a spectacle, the early moon above the steeples coming in for praise, the sea-gulls flying high, Nelson on his column surveying the horizon, and the world our ship.

Meanwhile, poor Betty Flanders’s letter, having caught the second post, lay on the hall table—poor Betty Flanders writing her son’s name, Jacob Alan Flanders, Esq., as mothers do, and the ink pale, profuse, suggesting how mothers down at Scarborough scribble over the fire with their feet on the fender, when tea’s cleared away, and can never, never say, whatever it may be—probably this—Don’t go with bad women, do be a good boy; wear your thick shirts; and come back, come back, come back to me.

But she said nothing of the kind. “Do you remember old Miss Wargrave, who used to be so kind when you had the whooping-cough?” she wrote; “she’s dead at last, poor thing. They would like it if you wrote. Ellen came over and we spent a nice day shopping. Old Mouse gets very stiff, and we have to walk him up the smallest hill. Rebecca, at last, after I don’t know how long, went into Mr. Adamson’s. Three teeth, he says, must come out. Such mild weather for the time of year, the little buds actually on the pear trees. And Mrs. Jarvis tells me——” Mrs. Flanders liked Mrs. Jarvis, always said of her that she was too good for such a quiet place, and, though she never listened to her discontent and told her at the end of it (looking up, sucking her thread, or taking off her spectacles) that a little peat wrapped round the iris roots keeps them from the frost, and Parrot’s great white sale is Tuesday next, “do remember,”—Mrs. Flanders knew precisely how Mrs. Jarvis felt; and how interesting her letters were, about Mrs. Jarvis, could one read them year in, year out—the unpublished works of women, written by the fireside in pale profusion, dried by the flame, for the blotting-paper’s worn to holes and the nib cleft and clotted. Then Captain Barfoot. Him she called “the Captain,” spoke of frankly, yet never without reserve. The Captain was enquiring for her about Garfit’s acre; advised chickens; could promise profit; or had the sciatica; or Mrs. Barfoot had been indoors for weeks; or the Captain says things look bad, politics that is, for as Jacob knew, the Captain would sometimes talk, as the evening waned, about Ireland or India; and then Mrs. Flanders would fall musing about Morty, her brother, lost all these years—had the natives got him, was his ship sunk—would the Admiralty tell her?—the Captain knocking his pipe out, as Jacob knew, rising to go, stiffly stretching to pick up Mrs. Flanders’s wool which had rolled beneath the chair. Talk of the chicken farm came back and back, the woman, even at fifty, impulsive at heart, sketching on the cloudy future flocks of Leghorns, Cochin Chinas, Orpingtons; like Jacob in the blur of her outline; but powerful as he was; fresh and vigorous, running about the house, scolding Rebecca.

The letter lay upon the hall table; Florinda coming in that night took it up with her, put it on the table as she kissed Jacob, and Jacob seeing the hand, left it there under the lamp, between the biscuit-tin and the tobacco-box. They shut the bedroom door behind them.

The sitting-room neither knew nor cared. The door was shut; and to suppose that wood, when it creaks, transmits anything save that rats are busy and wood dry is childish. These old houses are only brick and wood, soaked in human sweat, grained with human dirt. But if the pale blue envelope lying by the biscuit-box had the feelings of a mother, the heart was torn by the little creak, the sudden stir. Behind the door was the obscene thing, the alarming presence, and terror would come over her as at death, or the birth of a child. Better, perhaps, burst in and face it than sit in the antechamber listening to the little creak, the sudden stir, for her heart was swollen, and pain threaded it. My son, my son—such would be her cry, uttered to hide her vision of him stretched with Florinda, inexcusable, irrational, in a woman with three children living at Scarborough. And the fault lay with Florinda. Indeed, when the door opened and the couple came out, Mrs. Flanders would have flounced upon her—only it was Jacob who came first, in his dressing-gown, amiable, authoritative, beautifully healthy, like a baby after an airing, with an eye clear as running water. Florinda followed, lazily stretching; yawning a little; arranging her hair at the looking-glass—while Jacob read his mother’s letter.

Let us consider letters—how they come at breakfast, and at night, with their yellow stamps and their green stamps, immortalized by the postmark—for to see one’s own envelope on another’s table is to realize how soon deeds sever and become alien. Then at last the power of the mind to quit the body is manifest, and perhaps we fear or hate or wish annihilated this phantom of ourselves, lying on the table. Still, there are letters that merely say how dinner’s at seven; others ordering coal; making appointments. The hand in them is scarcely perceptible, let alone the voice or the scowl. Ah, but when the post knocks and the letter comes always the miracle seems repeated—speech attempted. Venerable are letters, infinitely brave, forlorn, and lost.

Life would split asunder without them. “Come to tea, come to dinner, what’s the truth of the story? have you heard the news? life in the capital is gay; the Russian dancers….” These are our stays and props. These lace our days together and make of life a perfect globe. And yet, and yet … when we go to dinner, when pressing finger-tips we hope to meet somewhere soon, a doubt insinuates itself; is this the way to spend our days? the rare, the limited, so soon dealt out to us—drinking tea? dining out? And the notes accumulate. And the telephones ring. And everywhere we go wires and tubes surround us to carry the voices that try to penetrate before the last card is dealt and the days are over. “Try to penetrate,” for as we lift the cup, shake the hand, express the hope, something whispers, Is this all? Can I never know, share, be certain? Am I doomed all my days to write letters, send voices, which fall upon the tea-table, fade upon the passage, making appointments, while life dwindles, to come and dine? Yet letters are venerable; and the telephone valiant, for the journey is a lonely one, and if bound together by notes and telephones we went in company, perhaps—who knows?—we might talk by the way.

Well, people have tried. Byron wrote letters. So did Cowper. For centuries the writing-desk has contained sheets fit precisely for the communications of friends. Masters of language, poets of long ages, have turned from the sheet that endures to the sheet that perishes, pushing aside the tea-tray, drawing close to the fire (for letters are written when the dark presses round a bright red cave), and addressed themselves to the task of reaching, touching, penetrating the individual heart. Were it possible! But words have been used too often; touched and turned, and left exposed to the dust of the street. The words we seek hang close to the tree. We come at dawn and find them sweet beneath the leaf.

Mrs. Flanders wrote letters; Mrs. Jarvis wrote them; Mrs. Durrant too; Mother Stuart actually scented her pages, thereby adding a flavour which the English language fails to provide; Jacob had written in his day long letters about art, morality, and politics to young men at college. Clara Durrant’s letters were those of a child. Florinda—the impediment between Florinda and her pen was something impassable. Fancy a butterfly, gnat, or other winged insect, attached to a twig which, clogged with mud, it rolls across a page. Her spelling was abominable. Her sentiments infantile. And for some reason when she wrote she declared her belief in God. Then there were crosses—tear stains; and the hand itself rambling and redeemed only by the fact—which always did redeem Florinda—by the fact that she cared. Yes, whether it was for chocolate creams, hot baths, the shape of her face in the looking-glass, Florinda could no more pretend a feeling than swallow whisky. Incontinent was her rejection. Great men are truthful, and these little prostitutes, staring in the fire, taking out a powder-puff, decorating lips at an inch of looking-glass, have (so Jacob thought) an inviolable fidelity.

Then he saw her turning up Greek Street upon another man’s arm.

The light from the arc lamp drenched him from head to toe. He stood for a minute motionless beneath it. Shadows chequered the street. Other figures, single and together, poured out, wavered across, and obliterated Florinda and the man.

The light drenched Jacob from head to toe. You could see the pattern on his trousers; the old thorns on his stick; his shoe laces; bare hands; and face.

It was as if a stone were ground to dust; as if white sparks flew from a livid whetstone, which was his spine; as if the switchback railway, having swooped to the depths, fell, fell, fell. This was in his face.

Whether we know what was in his mind is another question. Granted ten years’ seniority and a difference of sex, fear of him comes first; this is swallowed up by a desire to help—overwhelming sense, reason, and the time of night; anger would follow close on that—with Florinda, with destiny; and then up would bubble an irresponsible optimism. “Surely there’s enough light in the street at this moment to drown all our cares in gold!” Ah, what’s the use of saying it? Even while you speak and look over your shoulder towards Shaftesbury Avenue, destiny is chipping a dent in him. He has turned to go. As for following him back to his rooms, no—that we won’t do.

Yet that, of course, is precisely what one does. He let himself in and shut the door, though it was only striking ten on one of the city clocks. No one can go to bed at ten. Nobody was thinking of going to bed. It was January and dismal, but Mrs. Wagg stood on her doorstep, as if expecting something to happen. A barrel-organ played like an obscene nightingale beneath wet leaves. Children ran across the road. Here and there one could see brown panelling inside the hall door…. The march that the mind keeps beneath the windows of others is queer enough. Now distracted by brown panelling; now by a fern in a pot; here improvising a few phrases to dance with the barrel-organ; again snatching a detached gaiety from a drunken man; then altogether absorbed by words the poor shout across the street at each other (so outright, so lusty)—yet all the while having for centre, for magnet, a young man alone in his room.

“Life is wicked—life is detestable,” cried Rose Shaw.

The strange thing about life is that though the nature of it must have been apparent to every one for hundreds of years, no one has left any adequate account of it. The streets of London have their map; but our passions are uncharted. What are you going to meet if you turn this corner?

“Holborn straight ahead of you,” says the policeman. Ah, but where are you going if instead of brushing past the old man with the white beard, the silver medal, and the cheap violin, you let him go on with his story, which ends in an invitation to step somewhere, to his room, presumably, off Queen’s Square, and there he shows you a collection of birds’ eggs and a letter from the Prince of Wales’s secretary, and this (skipping the intermediate stages) brings you one winter’s day to the Essex coast, where the little boat makes off to the ship, and the ship sails and you behold on the skyline the Azores; and the flamingoes rise; and there you sit on the verge of the marsh drinking rum-punch, an outcast from civilization, for you have committed a crime, are infected with yellow fever as likely as not, and—fill in the sketch as you like.

As frequent as street corners in Holborn are these chasms in the continuity of our ways. Yet we keep straight on.

Rose Shaw, talking in rather an emotional manner to Mr. Bowley at Mrs. Durrant’s evening party a few nights back, said that life was wicked because a man called Jimmy refused to marry a woman called (if memory serves) Helen Aitken.

Both were beautiful. Both were inanimate. The oval tea-table invariably separated them, and the plate of biscuits was all he ever gave her. He bowed; she inclined her head. They danced. He danced divinely. They sat in the alcove; never a word was said. Her pillow was wet with tears. Kind Mr. Bowley and dear Rose Shaw marvelled and deplored. Bowley had rooms in the Albany. Rose was re-born every evening precisely as the clock struck eight. All four were civilization’s triumphs, and if you persist that a command of the English language is part of our inheritance, one can only reply that beauty is almost always dumb. Male beauty in association with female beauty breeds in the onlooker a sense of fear. Often have I seen them—Helen and Jimmy—and likened them to ships adrift, and feared for my own little craft. Or again, have you ever watched fine collie dogs couchant at twenty yards’ distance? As she passed him his cup there was that quiver in her flanks. Bowley saw what was up—asked Jimmy to breakfast. Helen must have confided in Rose. For my own part, I find it exceedingly difficult to interpret songs without words. And now Jimmy feeds crows in Flanders and Helen visits hospitals. Oh, life is damnable, life is wicked, as Rose Shaw said.

The lamps of London uphold the dark as upon the points of burning bayonets. The yellow canopy sinks and swells over the great four-poster. Passengers in the mail-coaches running into London in the eighteenth century looked through leafless branches and saw it flaring beneath them. The light burns behind yellow blinds and pink blinds, and above fanlights, and down in basement windows. The street market in Soho is fierce with light. Raw meat, china mugs, and silk stockings blaze in it. Raw voices wrap themselves round the flaring gas-jets. Arms akimbo, they stand on the pavement bawling—Messrs. Kettle and Wilkinson; their wives sit in the shop, furs wrapped round their necks, arms folded, eyes contemptuous. Such faces as one sees. The little man fingering the meat must have squatted before the fire in innumerable lodging-houses, and heard and seen and known so much that it seems to utter itself even volubly from dark eyes, loose lips, as he fingers the meat silently, his face sad as a poet’s, and never a song sung. Shawled women carry babies with purple eyelids; boys stand at street corners; girls look across the road—rude illustrations, pictures in a book whose pages we turn over and over as if we should at last find what we look for. Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picture feverishly turned—in search of what? It is the same with books. What do we seek through millions of pages? Still hopefully turning the pages—oh, here is Jacob’s room.

He sat at the table reading the Globe. The pinkish sheet was spread flat before him. He propped his face in his hand, so that the skin of his cheek was wrinkled in deep folds. Terribly severe he looked, set, and defiant. (What people go through in half an hour! But nothing could save him. These events are features of our landscape. A foreigner coming to London could scarcely miss seeing St. Paul’s.) He judged life. These pinkish and greenish newspapers are thin sheets of gelatine pressed nightly over the brain and heart of the world. They take the impression of the whole. Jacob cast his eye over it. A strike, a murder, football, bodies found; vociferation from all parts of England simultaneously. How miserable it is that the Globe newspaper offers nothing better to Jacob Flanders! When a child begins to read history one marvels, sorrowfully, to hear him spell out in his new voice the ancient words.

The Prime Minister’s speech was reported in something over five columns. Feeling in his pocket, Jacob took out a pipe and proceeded to fill it. Five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes passed. Jacob took the paper over to the fire. The Prime Minister proposed a measure for giving Home Rule to Ireland. Jacob knocked out his pipe. He was certainly thinking about Home Rule in Ireland—a very difficult matter. A very cold night.

The snow, which had been falling all night, lay at three o’clock in the afternoon over the fields and the hill. Clumps of withered grass stood out upon the hill-top; the furze bushes were black, and now and then a black shiver crossed the snow as the wind drove flurries of frozen particles before it. The sound was that of a broom sweeping—sweeping.

The stream crept along by the road unseen by any one. Sticks and leaves caught in the frozen grass. The sky was sullen grey and the trees of black iron. Uncompromising was the severity of the country. At four o’clock the snow was again falling. The day had gone out.

A window tinged yellow about two feet across alone combated the white fields and the black trees…. At six o’clock a man’s figure carrying a lantern crossed the field…. A raft of twigs stayed upon a stone, suddenly detached itself, and floated towards the culvert…. A load of snow slipped and fell from a fir branch…. Later there was a mournful cry…. A motor car came along the road shoving the dark before it…. The dark shut down behind it….

Spaces of complete immobility separated each of these movements. The land seemed to lie dead…. Then the old shepherd returned stiffly across the field. Stiffly and painfully the frozen earth was trodden under and gave beneath pressure like a treadmill. The worn voices of clocks repeated the fact of the hour all night long.

Jacob, too, heard them, and raked out the fire. He rose. He stretched himself. He went to bed.

[]

IX

The Countess of Rocksbier sat at the head of the table alone with Jacob. Fed upon champagne and spices for at least two centuries (four, if you count the female line), the Countess Lucy looked well fed. A discriminating nose she had for scents, prolonged, as if in quest of them; her underlip protruded a narrow red shelf; her eyes were small, with sandy tufts for eyebrows, and her jowl was heavy. Behind her (the window looked on Grosvenor Square) stood Moll Pratt on the pavement, offering violets for sale; and Mrs. Hilda Thomas, lifting her skirts, preparing to cross the road. One was from Walworth; the other from Putney. Both wore black stockings, but Mrs. Thomas was coiled in furs. The comparison was much in Lady Rocksbier’s favour. Moll had more humour, but was violent; stupid too. Hilda Thomas was mealy-mouthed, all her silver frames aslant; egg-cups in the drawing-room; and the windows shrouded. Lady Rocksbier, whatever the deficiencies of her profile, had been a great rider to hounds. She used her knife with authority, tore her chicken bones, asking Jacob’s pardon, with her own hands.

“Who is that driving by?” she asked Boxall, the butler.

“Lady Fittlemere’s carriage, my lady,” which reminded her to send a card to ask after his lordship’s health. A rude old lady, Jacob thought. The wine was excellent. She called herself “an old woman”—“so kind to lunch with an old woman”—which flattered him. She talked of Joseph Chamberlain, whom she had known. She said that Jacob must come and meet—one of our celebrities. And the Lady Alice came in with three dogs on a leash, and Jackie, who ran to kiss his grandmother, while Boxall brought in a telegram, and Jacob was given a good cigar.

A few moments before a horse jumps it slows, sidles, gathers itself together, goes up like a monster wave, and pitches down on the further side. Hedges and sky swoop in a semicircle. Then as if your own body ran into the horse’s body and it was your own forelegs grown with his that sprang, rushing through the air you go, the ground resilient, bodies a mass of muscles, yet you have command too, upright stillness, eyes accurately judging. Then the curves cease, changing to downright hammer strokes, which jar; and you draw up with a jolt; sitting back a little, sparkling, tingling, glazed with ice over pounding arteries, gasping: “Ah! ho! Hah!” the steam going up from the horses as they jostle together at the cross-roads, where the signpost is, and the woman in the apron stands and stares at the doorway. The man raises himself from the cabbages to stare too.

So Jacob galloped over the fields of Essex, flopped in the mud, lost the hunt, and rode by himself eating sandwiches, looking over the hedges, noticing the colours as if new scraped, cursing his luck.

He had tea at the Inn; and there they all were, slapping, stamping, saying, “After you,” clipped, curt, jocose, red as the wattles of turkeys, using free speech until Mrs. Horsefield and her friend Miss Dudding appeared at the doorway with their skirts hitched up, and hair looping down. Then Tom Dudding rapped at the window with his whip. A motor car throbbed in the courtyard. Gentlemen, feeling for matches, moved out, and Jacob went into the bar with Brandy Jones to smoke with the rustics. There was old Jevons with one eye gone, and his clothes the colour of mud, his bag over his back, and his brains laid feet down in earth among the violet roots and the nettle roots; Mary Sanders with her box of wood; and Tom sent for beer, the half-witted son of the sexton—all this within thirty miles of London.

Mrs. Papworth, of Endell Street, Covent Garden, did for Mr. Bonamy in New Square, Lincoln’s Inn, and as she washed up the dinner things in the scullery she heard the young gentlemen talking in the room next door. Mr. Sanders was there again; Flanders she meant; and where an inquisitive old woman gets a name wrong, what chance is there that she will faithfully report an argument? As she held the plates under water and then dealt them on the pile beneath the hissing gas, she listened: heard Sanders speaking in a loud rather overbearing tone of voice: “good” he said, and “absolute” and “justice” and “punishment,” and “the will of the majority.” Then her gentleman piped up; she backed him for argument against Sanders. Yet Sanders was a fine young fellow (here all the scraps went swirling round the sink, scoured after by her purple, almost nailless hands). “Women”—she thought, and wondered what Sanders and her gentleman did in that line, one eyelid sinking perceptibly as she mused, for she was the mother of nine—three still-born and one deaf and dumb from birth. Putting the plates in the rack she heard once more Sanders at it again (“He don’t give Bonamy a chance,” she thought). “Objective something,” said Bonamy; and “common ground” and something else—all very long words, she noted. “Book learning does it,” she thought to herself, and, as she thrust her arms into her jacket, heard something—might be the little table by the fire—fall; and then stamp, stamp, stamp—as if they were having at each other—round the room, making the plates dance.

“To-morrow’s breakfast, sir,” she said, opening the door; and there were Sanders and Bonamy like two bulls of Bashan driving each other up and down, making such a racket, and all them chairs in the way. They never noticed her. She felt motherly towards them. “Your breakfast, sir,” she said, as they came near. And Bonamy, all his hair touzled and his tie flying, broke off, and pushed Sanders into the arm-chair, and said Mr. Sanders had smashed the coffee-pot and he was teaching Mr. Sanders—

Sure enough, the coffee-pot lay broken on the hearthrug.

“Any day this week except Thursday,” wrote Miss Perry, and this was not the first invitation by any means. Were all Miss Perry’s weeks blank with the exception of Thursday, and was her only desire to see her old friend’s son? Time is issued to spinster ladies of wealth in long white ribbons. These they wind round and round, round and round, assisted by five female servants, a butler, a fine Mexican parrot, regular meals, Mudie’s library, and friends dropping in. A little hurt she was already that Jacob had not called.

“Your mother,” she said, “is one of my oldest friends.”

Miss Rosseter, who was sitting by the fire, holding the Spectator between her cheek and the blaze, refused to have a fire screen, but finally accepted one. The weather was then discussed, for in deference to Parkes, who was opening little tables, graver matters were postponed. Miss Rosseter drew Jacob’s attention to the beauty of the cabinet.

“So wonderfully clever in picking things up,” she said. Miss Perry had found it in Yorkshire. The North of England was discussed. When Jacob spoke they both listened. Miss Perry was bethinking her of something suitable and manly to say when the door opened and Mr. Benson was announced. Now there were four people sitting in that room. Miss Perry aged 66; Miss Rosseter 42; Mr. Benson 38; and Jacob 25.

“My old friend looks as well as ever,” said Mr. Benson, tapping the bars of the parrot’s cage; Miss Rosseter simultaneously praised the tea; Jacob handed the wrong plates; and Miss Perry signified her desire to approach more closely. “Your brothers,” she began vaguely.

“Archer and John,” Jacob supplied her. Then to her pleasure she recovered Rebecca’s name; and how one day “when you were all little boys, playing in the drawing-room——”

“But Miss Perry has the kettle-holder,” said Miss Rosseter, and indeed Miss Perry was clasping it to her breast. (Had she, then, loved Jacob’s father?)

“So clever”—“not so good as usual”—“I thought it most unfair,” said Mr. Benson and Miss Rosseter, discussing the Saturday Westminster. Did they not compete regularly for prizes? Had not Mr. Benson three times won a guinea, and Miss Rosseter once ten and sixpence? Of course Everard Benson had a weak heart, but still, to win prizes, remember parrots, toady Miss Perry, despise Miss Rosseter, give tea-parties in his rooms (which were in the style of Whistler, with pretty books on tables), all this, so Jacob felt without knowing him, made him a contemptible ass. As for Miss Rosseter, she had nursed cancer, and now painted water-colours.

“Running away so soon?” said Miss Perry vaguely. “At home every afternoon, if you’ve nothing better to do—except Thursdays.”

“I’ve never known you desert your old ladies once,” Miss Rosseter was saying, and Mr. Benson was stooping over the parrot’s cage, and Miss Perry was moving towards the bell….

The fire burnt clear between two pillars of greenish marble, and on the mantelpiece there was a green clock guarded by Britannia leaning on her spear. As for pictures—a maiden in a large hat offered roses over the garden gate to a gentleman in eighteenth-century costume. A mastiff lay extended against a battered door. The lower panes of the windows were of ground glass, and the curtains, accurately looped, were of plush and green too.

Laurette and Jacob sat with their toes in the fender side by side, in two large chairs covered in green plush. Laurette’s skirts were short, her legs long, thin, and transparently covered. Her fingers stroked her ankles.

“It’s not exactly that I don’t understand them,” she was saying thoughtfully. “I must go and try again.”

“What time will you be there?” said Jacob.

She shrugged her shoulders.

“To-morrow?”

No, not to-morrow.

“This weather makes me long for the country,” she said, looking over her shoulder at the back view of tall houses through the window.

“I wish you’d been with me on Saturday,” said Jacob.

“I used to ride,” she said. She got up gracefully, calmly. Jacob got up. She smiled at him. As she shut the door he put so many shillings on the mantelpiece.

Altogether a most reasonable conversation; a most respectable room; an intelligent girl. Only Madame herself seeing Jacob out had about her that leer, that lewdness, that quake of the surface (visible in the eyes chiefly), which threatens to spill the whole bag of ordure, with difficulty held together, over the pavement. In short, something was wrong.

Not so very long ago the workmen had gilt the final “y” in Lord Macaulay’s name, and the names stretched in unbroken file round the dome of the British Museum. At a considerable depth beneath, many hundreds of the living sat at the spokes of a cart-wheel copying from printed books into manuscript books; now and then rising to consult the catalogue; regaining their places stealthily, while from time to time a silent man replenished their compartments.

There was a little catastrophe. Miss Marchmont’s pile overbalanced and fell into Jacob’s compartment. Such things happened to Miss Marchmont. What was she seeking through millions of pages, in her old plush dress, and her wig of claret-coloured hair, with her gems and her chilblains? Sometimes one thing, sometimes another, to confirm her philosophy that colour is sound—or, perhaps, it has something to do with music. She could never quite say, though it was not for lack of trying. And she could not ask you back to her room, for it was “not very clean, I’m afraid,” so she must catch you in the passage, or take a chair in Hyde Park to explain her philosophy. The rhythm of the soul depends on it—(“how rude the little boys are!” she would say) and Mr. Asquith’s Irish policy, and Shakespeare comes in, “and Queen Alexandra most graciously once acknowledged a copy of my pamphlet,” she would say, waving the little boys magnificently away. But she needs funds to publish her book, for “publishers are capitalists—publishers are cowards.” And so, digging her elbow into her pile of books it fell over.

Jacob remained quite unmoved.

But Fraser, the atheist, on the other side, detesting plush, more than once accosted with leaflets, shifted irritably. He abhorred vagueness—the Christian religion, for example, and old Dean Parker’s pronouncements. Dean Parker wrote books and Fraser utterly destroyed them by force of logic and left his children unbaptized—his wife did it secretly in the washing basin—but Fraser ignored her, and went on supporting blasphemers, distributing leaflets, getting up his facts in the British Museum, always in the same check suit and fiery tie, but pale, spotted, irritable. Indeed, what a work—to destroy religion!

Jacob transcribed a whole passage from Marlowe.

Miss Julia Hedge, the feminist, waited for her books. They did not come. She wetted her pen. She looked about her. Her eye was caught by the final letters in Lord Macaulay’s name. And she read them all round the dome—the names of great men which remind us—“Oh damn,” said Julia Hedge, “why didn’t they leave room for an Eliot or a Brontë?”

Unfortunate Julia! wetting her pen in bitterness, and leaving her shoe laces untied. When her books came she applied herself to her gigantic labours, but perceived through one of the nerves of her exasperated sensibility how composedly, unconcernedly, and with every consideration the male readers applied themselves to theirs. That young man for example. What had he got to do except copy out poetry? And she must study statistics. There are more women than men. Yes; but if you let women work as men work, they’ll die off much quicker. They’ll become extinct. That was her argument. Death and gall and bitter dust were on her pen-tip; and as the afternoon wore on, red had worked into her cheek-bones and a light was in her eyes.

But what brought Jacob Flanders to read Marlowe in the British Museum?

Youth, youth—something savage—something pedantic. For example there is Mr. Masefield, there is Mr. Bennett. Stuff them into the flame of Marlowe and burn them to cinders. Let not a shred remain. Don’t palter with the second rate. Detest your own age. Build a better one. And to set that on foot read incredibly dull essays upon Marlowe to your friends. For which purpose one must collate editions in the British Museum. One must do the thing oneself. Useless to trust to the Victorians, who disembowel, or to the living, who are mere publicists. The flesh and blood of the future depends entirely upon six young men. And as Jacob was one of them, no doubt he looked a little regal and pompous as he turned his page, and Julia Hedge disliked him naturally enough.

But then a pudding-faced man pushed a note towards Jacob, and Jacob, leaning back in his chair, began an uneasy murmured conversation, and they went off together (Julia Hedge watched them), and laughed aloud (she thought) directly they were in the hall.

Nobody laughed in the reading-room. There were shiftings, murmurings, apologetic sneezes, and sudden unashamed devastating coughs. The lesson hour was almost over. Ushers were collecting exercises. Lazy children wanted to stretch. Good ones scribbled assiduously—ah, another day over and so little done! And now and then was to be heard from the whole collection of human beings a heavy sigh, after which the humiliating old man would cough shamelessly, and Miss Marchmont hinnied like a horse.

Jacob came back only in time to return his books.

The books were now replaced. A few letters of the alphabet were sprinkled round the dome. Closely stood together in a ring round the dome were Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, and Shakespeare; the literatures of Rome, Greece, China, India, Persia. One leaf of poetry was pressed flat against another leaf, one burnished letter laid smooth against another in a density of meaning, a conglomeration of loveliness.

“One does want one’s tea,” said Miss Marchmont, reclaiming her shabby umbrella.

Miss Marchmont wanted her tea, but could never resist a last look at the Elgin Marbles. She looked at them sideways, waving her hand and muttering a word or two of salutation which made Jacob and the other man turn round. She smiled at them amiably. It all came into her philosophy—that colour is sound, or perhaps it has something to do with music. And having done her service, she hobbled off to tea. It was closing time. The public collected in the hall to receive their umbrellas.

For the most part the students wait their turn very patiently. To stand and wait while some one examines white discs is soothing. The umbrella will certainly be found. But the fact leads you on all day through Macaulay, Hobbes, Gibbon; through octavos, quartos, folios; sinks deeper and deeper through ivory pages and morocco bindings into this density of thought, this conglomeration of knowledge.

Jacob’s walking-stick was like all the others; they had muddled the pigeon-holes perhaps.

There is in the British Museum an enormous mind. Consider that Plato is there cheek by jowl with Aristotle; and Shakespeare with Marlowe. This great mind is hoarded beyond the power of any single mind to possess it. Nevertheless (as they take so long finding one’s walking-stick) one can’t help thinking how one might come with a notebook, sit at a desk, and read it all through. A learned man is the most venerable of all—a man like Huxtable of Trinity, who writes all his letters in Greek, they say, and could have kept his end up with Bentley. And then there is science, pictures, architecture,—an enormous mind.

They pushed the walking-stick across the counter. Jacob stood beneath the porch of the British Museum. It was raining. Great Russell Street was glazed and shining—here yellow, here, outside the chemist’s, red and pale blue. People scuttled quickly close to the wall; carriages rattled rather helter-skelter down the streets. Well, but a little rain hurts nobody. Jacob walked off much as if he had been in the country; and late that night there he was sitting at his table with his pipe and his book.

The rain poured down. The British Museum stood in one solid immense mound, very pale, very sleek in the rain, not a quarter of a mile from him. The vast mind was sheeted with stone; and each compartment in the depths of it was safe and dry. The night-watchmen, flashing their lanterns over the backs of Plato and Shakespeare, saw that on the twenty-second of February neither flame, rat, nor burglar was going to violate these treasures—poor, highly respectable men, with wives and families at Kentish Town, do their best for twenty years to protect Plato and Shakespeare, and then are buried at Highgate.

Stone lies solid over the British Museum, as bone lies cool over the visions and heat of the brain. Only here the brain is Plato’s brain and Shakespeare’s; the brain has made pots and statues, great bulls and little jewels, and crossed the river of death this way and that incessantly, seeking some landing, now wrapping the body well for its long sleep; now laying a penny piece on the eyes; now turning the toes scrupulously to the East. Meanwhile, Plato continues his dialogue; in spite of the rain; in spite of the cab whistles; in spite of the woman in the mews behind Great Ormond Street who has come home drunk and cries all night long, “Let me in! Let me in!”

In the street below Jacob’s room voices were raised.

But he read on. For after all Plato continues imperturbably. And Hamlet utters his soliloquy. And there the Elgin Marbles lie, all night long, old Jones’s lantern sometimes recalling Ulysses, or a horse’s head; or sometimes a flash of gold, or a mummy’s sunk yellow cheek. Plato and Shakespeare continue; and Jacob, who was reading the Phaedrus, heard people vociferating round the lamp-post, and the woman battering at the door and crying, “Let me in!” as if a coal had dropped from the fire, or a fly, falling from the ceiling, had lain on its back, too weak to turn over.

The Phaedrus is very difficult. And so, when at length one reads straight ahead, falling into step, marching on, becoming (so it seems) momentarily part of this rolling, imperturbable energy, which has driven darkness before it since Plato walked the Acropolis, it is impossible to see to the fire.

The dialogue draws to its close. Plato’s argument is done. Plato’s argument is stowed away in Jacob’s mind, and for five minutes Jacob’s mind continues alone, onwards, into the darkness. Then, getting up, he parted the curtains, and saw, with astonishing clearness, how the Springetts opposite had gone to bed; how it rained; how the Jews and the foreign woman, at the end of the street, stood by the pillar-box, arguing.

Every time the door opened and fresh people came in, those already in the room shifted slightly; those who were standing looked over their shoulders; those who were sitting stopped in the middle of sentences. What with the light, the wine, the strumming of a guitar, something exciting happened each time the door opened. Who was coming in?

“That’s Gibson.”

“The painter?”

“But go on with what you were saying.”

They were saying something that was far, far too intimate to be said outright. But the noise of the voices served like a clapper in little Mrs. Withers’s mind, scaring into the air flocks of small birds, and then they’d settle, and then she’d feel afraid, put one hand to her hair, bind both round her knees, and look up at Oliver Skelton nervously, and say:

“Promise, promise, you’ll tell no one.” … so considerate he was, so tender. It was her husband’s character that she discussed. He was cold, she said.

Down upon them came the splendid Magdalen, brown, warm, voluminous, scarcely brushing the grass with her sandalled feet. Her hair flew; pins seemed scarcely to attach the flying silks. An actress of course, a line of light perpetually beneath her. It was only “My dear” that she said, but her voice went jodelling between Alpine passes. And down she tumbled on the floor, and sang, since there was nothing to be said, round ah’s and oh’s. Mangin, the poet, coming up to her, stood looking down at her, drawing at his pipe. The dancing began.

Grey-haired Mrs. Keymer asked Dick Graves to tell her who Mangin was, and said that she had seen too much of this sort of thing in Paris (Magdalen had got upon his knees; now his pipe was in her mouth) to be shocked. “Who is that?” she said, staying her glasses when they came to Jacob, for indeed he looked quiet, not indifferent, but like some one on a beach, watching.

“Oh, my dear, let me lean on you,” gasped Helen Askew, hopping on one foot, for the silver cord round her ankle had worked loose. Mrs. Keymer turned and looked at the picture on the wall.

“Look at Jacob,” said Helen (they were binding his eyes for some game).

And Dick Graves, being a little drunk, very faithful, and very simple-minded, told her that he thought Jacob the greatest man he had ever known. And down they sat cross-legged upon cushions and talked about Jacob, and Helen’s voice trembled, for they both seemed heroes to her, and the friendship between them so much more beautiful than women’s friendships. Anthony Pollett now asked her to dance, and as she danced she looked at them, over her shoulder, standing at the table, drinking together.

The magnificent world—the live, sane, vigorous world…. These words refer to the stretch of wood pavement between Hammersmith and Holborn in January between two and three in the morning. That was the ground beneath Jacob’s feet. It was healthy and magnificent because one room, above a mews, somewhere near the river, contained fifty excited, talkative, friendly people. And then to stride over the pavement (there was scarcely a cab or policeman in sight) is of itself exhilarating. The long loop of Piccadilly, diamond-stitched, shows to best advantage when it is empty. A young man has nothing to fear. On the contrary, though he may not have said anything brilliant, he feels pretty confident he can hold his own. He was pleased to have met Mangin; he admired the young woman on the floor; he liked them all; he liked that sort of thing. In short, all the drums and trumpets were sounding. The street scavengers were the only people about at the moment. It is scarcely necessary to say how well-disposed Jacob felt towards them; how it pleased him to let himself in with his latch-key at his own door; how he seemed to bring back with him into the empty room ten or eleven people whom he had not known when he set out; how he looked about for something to read, and found it, and never read it, and fell asleep.

Indeed, drums and trumpets is no phrase. Indeed, Piccadilly and Holborn, and the empty sitting-room and the sitting-room with fifty people in it are liable at any moment to blow music into the air. Women perhaps are more excitable than men. It is seldom that any one says anything about it, and to see the hordes crossing Waterloo Bridge to catch the non-stop to Surbiton one might think that reason impelled them. No, no. It is the drums and trumpets. Only, should you turn aside into one of those little bays on Waterloo Bridge to think the matter over, it will probably seem to you all a muddle—all a mystery.

They cross the Bridge incessantly. Sometimes in the midst of carts and omnibuses a lorry will appear with great forest trees chained to it. Then, perhaps, a mason’s van with newly lettered tombstones recording how some one loved some one who is buried at Putney. Then the motor car in front jerks forward, and the tombstones pass too quick for you to read more. All the time the stream of people never ceases passing from the Surrey side to the Strand; from the Strand to the Surrey side. It seems as if the poor had gone raiding the town, and now trapesed back to their own quarters, like beetles scurrying to their holes, for that old woman fairly hobbles towards Waterloo, grasping a shiny bag, as if she had been out into the light and now made off with some scraped chicken bones to her hovel underground. On the other hand, though the wind is rough and blowing in their faces, those girls there, striding hand in hand, shouting out a song, seem to feel neither cold nor shame. They are hatless. They triumph.

The wind has blown up the waves. The river races beneath us, and the men standing on the barges have to lean all their weight on the tiller. A black tarpaulin is tied down over a swelling load of gold. Avalanches of coal glitter blackly. As usual, painters are slung on planks across the great riverside hotels, and the hotel windows have already points of light in them. On the other side the city is white as if with age; St. Paul’s swells white above the fretted, pointed, or oblong buildings beside it. The cross alone shines rosy-gilt. But what century have we reached? Has this procession from the Surrey side to the Strand gone on for ever? That old man has been crossing the Bridge these six hundred years, with the rabble of little boys at his heels, for he is drunk, or blind with misery, and tied round with old clouts of clothing such as pilgrims might have worn. He shuffles on. No one stands still. It seems as if we marched to the sound of music; perhaps the wind and the river; perhaps these same drums and trumpets—the ecstasy and hubbub of the soul. Why, even the unhappy laugh, and the policeman, far from judging the drunk man, surveys him humorously, and the little boys scamper back again, and the clerk from Somerset House has nothing but tolerance for him, and the man who is reading half a page of Lothair at the bookstall muses charitably, with his eyes off the print, and the girl hesitates at the crossing and turns on him the bright yet vague glance of the young.

Bright yet vague. She is perhaps twenty-two. She is shabby. She crosses the road and looks at the daffodils and the red tulips in the florist’s window. She hesitates, and makes off in the direction of Temple Bar. She walks fast, and yet anything distracts her. Now she seems to see, and now to notice nothing.

[]

X

Through the disused graveyard in the parish of St. Pancras, Fanny Elmer strayed between the white tombs which lean against the wall, crossing the grass to read a name, hurrying on when the grave-keeper approached, hurrying into the street, pausing now by a window with blue china, now quickly making up for lost time, abruptly entering a baker’s shop, buying rolls, adding cakes, going on again so that any one wishing to follow must fairly trot. She was not drably shabby, though. She wore silk stockings, and silver-buckled shoes, only the red feather in her hat drooped, and the clasp of her bag was weak, for out fell a copy of Madame Tussaud’s programme as she walked. She had the ankles of a stag. Her face was hidden. Of course, in this dusk, rapid movements, quick glances, and soaring hopes come naturally enough. She passed right beneath Jacob’s window.

The house was flat, dark, and silent. Jacob was at home engaged upon a chess problem, the board being on a stool between his knees. One hand was fingering the hair at the back of his head. He slowly brought it forward and raised the white queen from her square; then put her down again on the same spot. He filled his pipe; ruminated; moved two pawns; advanced the white knight; then ruminated with one finger upon the bishop. Now Fanny Elmer passed beneath the window.

She was on her way to sit to Nick Bramham the painter.

She sat in a flowered Spanish shawl, holding in her hand a yellow novel.

“A little lower, a little looser, so—better, that’s right,” Bramham mumbled, who was drawing her, and smoking at the same time, and was naturally speechless. His head might have been the work of a sculptor, who had squared the forehead, stretched the mouth, and left marks of his thumbs and streaks from his fingers in the clay. But the eyes had never been shut. They were rather prominent, and rather bloodshot, as if from staring and staring, and when he spoke they looked for a second disturbed, but went on staring. An unshaded electric light hung above her head.

As for the beauty of women, it is like the light on the sea, never constant to a single wave. They all have it; they all lose it. Now she is dull and thick as bacon; now transparent as a hanging glass. The fixed faces are the dull ones. Here comes Lady Venice displayed like a monument for admiration, but carved in alabaster, to be set on the mantelpiece and never dusted. A dapper brunette complete from head to foot serves only as an illustration to lie upon the drawing-room table. The women in the streets have the faces of playing cards; the outlines accurately filled in with pink or yellow, and the line drawn tightly round them. Then, at a top-floor window, leaning out, looking down, you see beauty itself; or in the corner of an omnibus; or squatted in a ditch—beauty glowing, suddenly expressive, withdrawn the moment after. No one can count on it or seize it or have it wrapped in paper. Nothing is to be won from the shops, and Heaven knows it would be better to sit at home than haunt the plate-glass windows in the hope of lifting the shining green, the glowing ruby, out of them alive. Sea glass in a saucer loses its lustre no sooner than silks do. Thus if you talk of a beautiful woman you mean only something flying fast which for a second uses the eyes, lips, or cheeks of Fanny Elmer, for example, to glow through.

She was not beautiful, as she sat stiffly; her underlip too prominent; her nose too large; her eyes too near together. She was a thin girl, with brilliant cheeks and dark hair, sulky just now, or stiff with sitting. When Bramham snapped his stick of charcoal she started. Bramham was out of temper. He squatted before the gas fire warming his hands. Meanwhile she looked at his drawing. He grunted. Fanny threw on a dressing-gown and boiled a kettle.

“By God, it’s bad,” said Bramham.

Fanny dropped on to the floor, clasped her hands round her knees, and looked at him, her beautiful eyes—yes, beauty, flying through the room, shone there for a second. Fanny’s eyes seemed to question, to commiserate, to be, for a second, love itself. But she exaggerated. Bramham noticed nothing. And when the kettle boiled, up she scrambled, more like a colt or a puppy than a loving woman.

Now Jacob walked over to the window and stood with his hands in his pockets. Mr. Springett opposite came out, looked at his shop window, and went in again. The children drifted past, eyeing the pink sticks of sweetstuff. Pickford’s van swung down the street. A small boy twirled from a rope. Jacob turned away. Two minutes later he opened the front door, and walked off in the direction of Holborn.

Fanny Elmer took down her cloak from the hook. Nick Bramham unpinned his drawing and rolled it under his arm. They turned out the lights and set off down the street, holding on their way through all the people, motor cars, omnibuses, carts, until they reached Leicester Square, five minutes before Jacob reached it, for his way was slightly longer, and he had been stopped by a block in Holborn waiting to see the King drive by, so that Nick and Fanny were already leaning over the barrier in the promenade at the Empire when Jacob pushed through the swing doors and took his place beside them.

“Hullo, never noticed you,” said Dick five minutes later.

“Bloody rot,” said Jacob.

“Miss Elmer,” said Nick.

Jacob took his pipe out of his mouth very awkwardly.

Very awkward he was. And when they sat upon a plush sofa and let the smoke go up between them and the stage, and heard far off the high-pitched voices and the jolly orchestra breaking in opportunely he was still awkward, only Fanny thought: “What a beautiful voice!” She thought how little he said yet how firm it was. She thought how young men are dignified and aloof, and how unconscious they are, and how quietly one might sit beside Jacob and look at him. And how childlike he would be, come in tired of an evening, she thought, and how majestic; a little overbearing perhaps; “But I wouldn’t give way,” she thought. He got up and leant over the barrier. The smoke hung about him.

And for ever the beauty of young men seems to be set in smoke, however lustily they chase footballs, or drive cricket balls, dance, run, or stride along roads. Possibly they are soon to lose it. Possibly they look into the eyes of faraway heroes, and take their station among us half contemptuously, she thought (vibrating like a fiddle-string, to be played on and snapped). Anyhow, they love silence, and speak beautifully, each word falling like a disc new cut, not a hubble-bubble of small smooth coins such as girls use; and they move decidedly, as if they knew how long to stay and when to go—oh, but Mr. Flanders was only gone to get a programme.

“The dancers come right at the end,” he said, coming back to them.

And isn’t it pleasant, Fanny went on thinking, how young men bring out lots of silver coins from their trouser pockets, and look at them, instead of having just so many in a purse?

Then there she was herself, whirling across the stage in white flounces, and the music was the dance and fling of her own soul, and the whole machinery, rock and gear of the world was spun smoothly into those swift eddies and falls, she felt, as she stood rigid leaning over the barrier two feet from Jacob Flanders.

Her screwed-up black glove dropped to the floor. When Jacob gave it her, she started angrily. For never was there a more irrational passion. And Jacob was afraid of her for a moment—so violent, so dangerous is it when young women stand rigid; grasp the barrier; fall in love.

It was the middle of February. The roofs of Hampstead Garden Suburb lay in a tremulous haze. It was too hot to walk. A dog barked, barked, barked down in the hollow. The liquid shadows went over the plain.

The body after long illness is languid, passive, receptive of sweetness, but too weak to contain it. The tears well and fall as the dog barks in the hollow, the children skim after hoops, the country darkens and brightens. Beyond a veil it seems. Ah, but draw the veil thicker lest I faint with sweetness, Fanny Elmer sighed, as she sat on a bench in Judges Walk looking at Hampstead Garden Suburb. But the dog went on barking. The motor cars hooted on the road. She heard a far-away rush and humming. Agitation was at her heart. Up she got and walked. The grass was freshly green; the sun hot. All round the pond children were stooping to launch little boats; or were drawn back screaming by their nurses.

At mid-day young women walk out into the air. All the men are busy in the town. They stand by the edge of the blue pond. The fresh wind scatters the children’s voices all about. My children, thought Fanny Elmer. The women stand round the pond, beating off great prancing shaggy dogs. Gently the baby is rocked in the perambulator. The eyes of all the nurses, mothers, and wandering women are a little glazed, absorbed. They gently nod instead of answering when the little boys tug at their skirts, begging them to move on.

And Fanny moved, hearing some cry—a workman’s whistle perhaps—high in mid air. Now, among the trees, it was the thrush trilling out into the warm air a flutter of jubilation, but fear seemed to spur him, Fanny thought; as if he too were anxious with such joy at his heart—as if he were watched as he sang, and pressed by tumult to sing. There! Restless, he flew to the next tree. She heard his song more faintly. Beyond it was the humming of the wheels and the wind rushing.

She spent tenpence on lunch.

“Dear, miss, she’s left her umberella,” [umbrella,”] grumbled the mottled woman in the glass box near the door at the Express Dairy Company’s shop.

“Perhaps I’ll catch her,” answered Milly Edwards, the waitress with the pale plaits of hair; and she dashed through the door.

“No good,” she said, coming back a moment later with Fanny’s cheap umbrella. She put her hand to her plaits.

“Oh, that door!” grumbled the cashier.

Her hands were cased in black mittens, and the finger-tips that drew in the paper slips were swollen as sausages.

“Pie and greens for one. Large coffee and crumpets. Eggs on toast. Two fruit cakes.”

Thus the sharp voices of the waitresses snapped. The lunchers heard their orders repeated with approval; saw the next table served with anticipation. Their own eggs on toast were at last delivered. Their eyes strayed no more.

Damp cubes of pastry fell into mouths opened like triangular bags.

Nelly Jenkinson, the typist, crumbled her cake indifferently enough. Every time the door opened she looked up. What did she expect to see?

The coal merchant read the Telegraph without stopping, missed the saucer, and, feeling abstractedly, put the cup down on the table-cloth.

“Did you ever hear the like of that for impertinence?” Mrs. Parsons wound up, brushing the crumbs from her furs.

“Hot milk and scone for one. Pot of tea. Roll and butter,” cried the waitresses.

The door opened and shut.

Such is the life of the elderly.

It is curious, lying in a boat, to watch the waves. Here are three coming regularly one after another, all much of a size. Then, hurrying after them comes a fourth, very large and menacing; it lifts the boat; on it goes; somehow merges without accomplishing anything; flattens itself out with the rest.

What can be more violent than the fling of boughs in a gale, the tree yielding itself all up the trunk, to the very tip of the branch, streaming and shuddering the way the wind blows, yet never flying in dishevelment away?

The corn squirms and abases itself as if preparing to tug itself free from the roots, and yet is tied down.

Why, from the very windows, even in the dusk, you see a swelling run through the street, an aspiration, as with arms outstretched, eyes desiring, mouths agape. And then we peaceably subside. For if the exaltation lasted we should be blown like foam into the air. The stars would shine through us. We should go down the gale in salt drops—as sometimes happens. For the impetuous spirits will have none of this cradling. Never any swaying or aimlessly lolling for them. Never any making believe, or lying cosily, or genially supposing that one is much like another, fire warm, wine pleasant, extravagance a sin.

“People are so nice, once you know them.”

“I couldn’t think ill of her. One must remember——” But Nick perhaps, or Fanny Elmer, believing implicitly in the truth of the moment, fling off, sting the cheek, are gone like sharp hail.

“Oh,” said Fanny, bursting into the studio three-quarters of an hour late because she had been hanging about the neighbourhood of the Foundling Hospital merely for the chance of seeing Jacob walk down the street, take out his latch-key, and open the door, “I’m afraid I’m late”; upon which Nick said nothing and Fanny grew defiant.

“I’ll never come again!” she cried at length.

“Don’t, then,” Nick replied, and off she ran without so much as good-night.

How exquisite it was—that dress in Evelina’s shop off Shaftesbury Avenue! It was four o’clock on a fine day early in April, and was Fanny the one to spend four o’clock on a fine day indoors? Other girls in that very street sat over ledgers, or drew long threads wearily between silk and gauze; or, festooned with ribbons in Swan and Edgars, rapidly added up pence and farthings on the back of the bill and twisted the yard and three-quarters in tissue paper and asked “Your pleasure?” of the next comer.

In Evelina’s shop off Shaftesbury Avenue the parts of a woman were shown separate. In the left hand was her skirt. Twining round a pole in the middle was a feather boa. Ranged like the heads of malefactors on Temple Bar were hats—emerald and white, lightly wreathed or drooping beneath deep-dyed feathers. And on the carpet were her feet—pointed gold, or patent leather slashed with scarlet.

Feasted upon by the eyes of women, the clothes by four o’clock were flyblown like sugar cakes in a baker’s window. Fanny eyed them too.

But coming along Gerrard Street was a tall man in a shabby coat. A shadow fell across Evelina’s window—Jacob’s shadow, though it was not Jacob. And Fanny turned and walked along Gerrard Street and wished that she had read books. Nick never read books, never talked of Ireland, or the House of Lords; and as for his finger-nails! She would learn Latin and read Virgil. She had been a great reader. She had read Scott; she had read Dumas. At the Slade no one read. But no one knew Fanny at the Slade, or guessed how empty it seemed to her; the passion for ear-rings, for dances, for Tonks and Steer—when it was only the French who could paint, Jacob said. For the moderns were futile; painting the least respectable of the arts; and why read anything but Marlowe and Shakespeare, Jacob said, and Fielding if you must read novels?

“Fielding,” said Fanny, when the man in Charing Cross Road asked her what book she wanted.

She bought Tom Jones.

At ten o’clock in the morning, in a room which she shared with a school teacher, Fanny Elmer read Tom Jones—that mystic book. For this dull stuff (Fanny thought) about people with odd names is what Jacob likes. Good people like it. Dowdy women who don’t mind how they cross their legs read Tom Jones—a mystic book; for there is something, Fanny thought, about books which if I had been educated I could have liked—much better than ear-rings and flowers, she sighed, thinking of the corridors at the Slade and the fancy-dress dance next week. She had nothing to wear.

They are real, thought Fanny Elmer, setting her feet on the mantelpiece. Some people are. Nick perhaps, only he was so stupid. And women never—except Miss Sargent, but she went off at lunch-time and gave herself airs. There they sat quietly of a night, reading, she thought. Not going to music-halls; not looking in at shop windows; not wearing each other’s clothes, like Robertson who had worn her shawl, and she had worn his waistcoat, which Jacob could only do very awkwardly; for he liked Tom Jones.

There it lay on her lap, in double columns, price three and sixpence; the mystic book in which Henry Fielding ever so many years ago rebuked Fanny Elmer for feasting on scarlet, in perfect prose, Jacob said. For he never read modern novels. He liked Tom Jones.

“I do like Tom Jones,” said Fanny at five-thirty that same day early in April when Jacob took out his pipe in the arm-chair opposite.

Alas, women lie! But not Clara Durrant. A flawless mind; a candid nature; a virgin chained to a rock (somewhere off Lowndes Square) eternally pouring out tea for old men in white waistcoats, blue-eyed, looking you straight in the face, playing Bach. Of all women, Jacob honoured her most. But to sit at a table with bread and butter, with dowagers in velvet, and never say more to Clara Durrant than Benson said to the parrot when old Miss Perry poured out tea, was an insufferable outrage upon the liberties and decencies of human nature—or words to that effect. For Jacob said nothing. Only he glared at the fire. Fanny laid down Tom Jones.

She stitched or knitted.

“What’s that?” asked Jacob.

“For the dance at the Slade.”

And she fetched her head-dress; her trousers; her shoes with red tassels. What should she wear?

“I shall be in Paris,” said Jacob.

And what is the point of fancy-dress dances? thought Fanny. You meet the same people; you wear the same clothes; Mangin gets drunk; Florinda sits on his knee. She flirts outrageously—with Nick Bramham just now.

“In Paris?” said Fanny.

“On my way to Greece,” he replied.

For, he said, there is nothing so detestable as London in May.

He would forget her.

A sparrow flew past the window trailing a straw—a straw from a stack stood by a barn in a farmyard. The old brown spaniel snuffs at the base for a rat. Already the upper branches of the elm trees are blotted with nests. The chestnuts have flirted their fans. And the butterflies are flaunting across the rides in the Forest. Perhaps the Purple Emperor is feasting, as Morris says, upon a mass of putrid carrion at the base of an oak tree.

Fanny thought it all came from Tom Jones. He could go alone with a book in his pocket and watch the badgers. He would take a train at eight-thirty and walk all night. He saw fire-flies, and brought back glow-worms in pill-boxes. He would hunt with the New Forest Staghounds. It all came from Tom Jones; and he would go to Greece with a book in his pocket and forget her.

She fetched her hand-glass. There was her face. And suppose one wreathed Jacob in a turban? There was his face. She lit the lamp. But as the daylight came through the window only half was lit up by the lamp. And though he looked terrible and magnificent and would chuck the Forest, he said, and come to the Slade, and be a Turkish knight or a Roman emperor (and he let her blacken his lips and clenched his teeth and scowled in the glass), still—there lay Tom Jones.

[]

XI

“Archer,” said Mrs. Flanders with that tenderness which mothers so often display towards their eldest sons, “will be at Gibraltar to-morrow.”

The post for which she was waiting (strolling up Dods Hill while the random church bells swung a hymn tune about her head, the clock striking four straight through the circling notes; the grass purpling under a storm-cloud; and the two dozen houses of the village cowering, infinitely humble, in company under a leaf of shadow), the post, with all its variety of messages, envelopes addressed in bold hands, in slanting hands, stamped now with English stamps, again with Colonial stamps, or sometimes hastily dabbed with a yellow bar, the post was about to scatter a myriad messages over the world. Whether we gain or not by this habit of profuse communication it is not for us to say. But that letter-writing is practised mendaciously nowadays, particularly by young men travelling in foreign parts, seems likely enough.

For example, take this scene.

Here was Jacob Flanders gone abroad and staying to break his journey in Paris. (Old Miss Birkbeck, his mother’s cousin, had died last June and left him a hundred pounds.)

“You needn’t repeat the whole damned thing over again, Cruttendon,” said Mallinson, the little bald painter who was sitting at a marble table, splashed with coffee and ringed with wine, talking very fast, and undoubtedly more than a little drunk.

“Well, Flanders, finished writing to your lady?” said Cruttendon, as Jacob came and took his seat beside them, holding in his hand an envelope addressed to Mrs. Flanders, near Scarborough, England.

“Do you uphold Velasquez?” said Cruttendon.

“By God, he does,” said Mallinson.

“He always gets like this,” said Cruttendon irritably.

Jacob looked at Mallinson with excessive composure.

“I’ll tell you the three greatest things that were ever written in the whole of literature,” Cruttendon burst out. “‘Hang there like fruit my soul.’” he began….

“Don’t listen to a man who don’t like Velasquez,” said Mallinson.

“Adolphe, don’t give Mr. Mallinson any more wine,” said Cruttendon.

“Fair play, fair play,” said Jacob judicially. “Let a man get drunk if he likes. That’s Shakespeare, Cruttendon. I’m with you there. Shakespeare had more guts than all these damned frogs put together. ‘Hang there like fruit my soul,’” he began quoting, in a musical rhetorical voice, flourishing his wine-glass. “The devil damn you black, you cream-faced loon!” he exclaimed as the wine washed over the rim.

“‘Hang there like fruit my soul,’” Cruttendon and Jacob both began again at the same moment, and both burst out laughing.

“Curse these flies,” said Mallinson, flicking at his bald head. “What do they take me for?”

“Something sweet-smelling,” said Cruttendon.

“Shut up, Cruttendon,” said Jacob. “The fellow has no manners,” he explained to Mallinson very politely. “Wants to cut people off their drink. Look here. I want grilled bone. What’s the French for grilled bone? Grilled bone, Adolphe. Now you juggins, don’t you understand?”

“And I’ll tell you, Flanders, the second most beautiful thing in the whole of literature,” said Cruttendon, bringing his feet down on to the floor, and leaning right across the table, so that his face almost touched Jacob’s face.

“‘Hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle,’” Mallinson interrupted, strumming his fingers on the table. “The most ex-qui-sitely beautiful thing in the whole of literature…. Cruttendon is a very good fellow,” he remarked confidentially. “But he’s a bit of a fool.” And he jerked his head forward.

Well, not a word of this was ever told to Mrs. Flanders; nor what happened when they paid the bill and left the restaurant, and walked along the Boulevard Raspaille.

Then here is another scrap of conversation; the time about eleven in the morning; the scene a studio; and the day Sunday.

“I tell you, Flanders,” said Cruttendon, “I’d as soon have one of Mallinson’s little pictures as a Chardin. And when I say that …” he squeezed the tail of an emaciated tube … “Chardin was a great swell…. He sells ’em to pay his dinner now. But wait till the dealers get hold of him. A great swell—oh, a very great swell.”

“It’s an awfully pleasant life,” said Jacob, “messing away up here. Still, it’s a stupid art, Cruttendon.” He wandered off across the room. “There’s this man, Pierre Louys now.” He took up a book.

“Now my good sir, are you going to settle down?” said Cruttendon.

“That’s a solid piece of work,” said Jacob, standing a canvas on a chair.

“Oh, that I did ages ago,” said Cruttendon, looking over his shoulder.

“You’re a pretty competent painter in my opinion,” said Jacob after a time.

“Now if you’d like to see what I’m after at the present moment,” said Cruttendon, putting a canvas before Jacob. “There. That’s it. That’s more like it. That’s …” he squirmed his thumb in a circle round a lamp globe painted white.

“A pretty solid piece of work,” said Jacob, straddling his legs in front of it. “But what I wish you’d explain …”

Miss Jinny Carslake, pale, freckled, morbid, came into the room.

“Oh Jinny, here’s a friend. Flanders. An Englishman. Wealthy. Highly connected. Go on, Flanders….”

Jacob said nothing.

“It’s that—that’s not right,” said Jinny Carslake.

“No,” said Cruttendon decidedly. “Can’t be done.”

He took the canvas off the chair and stood it on the floor with its back to them.

“Sit down, ladies and gentlemen. Miss Carslake comes from your part of the world, Flanders. From Devonshire. Oh, I thought you said Devonshire. Very well. She’s a daughter of the church too. The black sheep of the family. Her mother writes her such letters. I say—have you one about you? It’s generally Sundays they come. Sort of church-bell effect, you know.”

“Have you met all the painter men?” said Jinny. “Was Mallinson drunk? If you go to his studio he’ll give you one of his pictures. I say, Teddy …”

“Half a jiff,” said Cruttendon. “What’s the season of the year?” He looked out of the window.

“We take a day off on Sundays, Flanders.”

“Will he …” said Jinny, looking at Jacob. “You …”

“Yes, he’ll come with us,” said Cruttendon.

And then, here is Versailles.

Jinny stood on the stone rim and leant over the pond, clasped by Cruttendon’s arms or she would have fallen in. “There! There!” she cried. “Right up to the top!” Some sluggish, sloping-shouldered fish had floated up from the depths to nip her crumbs. “You look,” she said, jumping down. And then the dazzling white water, rough and throttled, shot up into the air. The fountain spread itself. Through it came the sound of military music far away. All the water was puckered with drops. A blue air-ball gently bumped the surface. How all the nurses and children and old men and young crowded to the edge, leant over and waved their sticks! The little girl ran stretching her arms towards her air-ball, but it sank beneath the fountain.

Edward Cruttendon, Jinny Carslake, and Jacob Flanders walked in a row along the yellow gravel path; got on to the grass; so passed under the trees; and came out at the summer-house where Marie Antoinette used to drink chocolate. In went Edward and Jinny, but Jacob waited outside, sitting on the handle of his walking-stick. Out they came again.

“Well?” said Cruttendon, smiling at Jacob.

Jinny waited; Edward waited; and both looked at Jacob.

“Well?” said Jacob, smiling and pressing both hands on his stick.

“Come along,” he decided; and started off. The others followed him, smiling.

And then they went to the little café in the by-street where people sit drinking coffee, watching the soldiers, meditatively knocking ashes into trays.

“But he’s quite different,” said Jinny, folding her hands over the top of her glass. “I don’t suppose you know what Ted means when he says a thing like that,” she said, looking at Jacob. “But I do. Sometimes I could kill myself. Sometimes he lies in bed all day long—just lies there…. I don’t want you right on the table”; she waved her hands. Swollen iridescent pigeons were waddling round their feet.

“Look at that woman’s hat,” said Cruttendon. “How do they come to think of it? … No, Flanders, I don’t think I could live like you. When one walks down that street opposite the British Museum—what’s it called?—that’s what I mean. It’s all like that. Those fat women—and the man standing in the middle of the road as if he were going to have a fit …”

“Everybody feeds them,” said Jinny, waving the pigeons away. “They’re stupid old things.”

“Well, I don’t know,” said Jacob, smoking his cigarette. “There’s St. Paul’s.”

“I mean going to an office,” said Cruttendon.

“Hang it all,” Jacob expostulated.

“But you don’t count,” said Jinny, looking at Cruttendon. “You’re mad. I mean, you just think of painting.”

“Yes, I know. I can’t help it. I say, will King George give way about the peers?”

“He’ll jolly well have to,” said Jacob.

“There!” said Jinny. “He really knows.”

“You see, I would if I could,” said Cruttendon, “but I simply can’t.”

“I think I could,” said Jinny. “Only, it’s all the people one dislikes who do it. At home, I mean. They talk of nothing else. Even people like my mother.”

“Now if I came and lived here——” said Jacob. “What’s my share, Cruttendon? Oh, very well. Have it your own way. Those silly birds, directly one wants them—they’ve flown away.”

And finally under the arc lamps in the Gare des Invalides, with one of those queer movements which are so slight yet so definite, which may wound or pass unnoticed but generally inflict a good deal of discomfort, Jinny and Cruttendon drew together; Jacob stood apart. They had to separate. Something must be said. Nothing was said. A man wheeled a trolley past Jacob’s legs so near that he almost grazed them. When Jacob recovered his balance the other two were turning away, though Jinny looked over her shoulder, and Cruttendon, waving his hand, disappeared like the very great genius that he was.

No—Mrs. Flanders was told none of this, though Jacob felt, it is safe to say, that nothing in the world was of greater importance; and as for Cruttendon and Jinny, he thought them the most remarkable people he had ever met—being of course unable to foresee how it fell out in the course of time that Cruttendon took to painting orchards; had therefore to live in Kent; and must, one would think, see through apple blossom by this time, since his wife, for whose sake he did it, eloped with a novelist; but no; Cruttendon still paints orchards, savagely, in solitude. Then Jinny Carslake, after her affair with Lefanu the American painter, frequented Indian philosophers, and now you find her in pensions in Italy cherishing a little jeweller’s box containing ordinary pebbles picked off the road. But if you look at them steadily, she says, multiplicity becomes unity, which is somehow the secret of life, though it does not prevent her from following the macaroni as it goes round the table, and sometimes, on spring nights, she makes the strangest confidences to shy young Englishmen.

Jacob had nothing to hide from his mother. It was only that he could make no sense himself of his extraordinary excitement, and as for writing it down——

“Jacob’s letters are so like him,” said Mrs. Jarvis, folding the sheet.

“Indeed he seems to be having …” said Mrs. Flanders, and paused, for she was cutting out a dress and had to straighten the pattern, “… a very gay time.”

Mrs. Jarvis thought of Paris. At her back the window was open, for it was a mild night; a calm night; when the moon seemed muffled and the apple trees stood perfectly still.

“I never pity the dead,” said Mrs. Jarvis, shifting the cushion at her back, and clasping her hands behind her head. Betty Flanders did not hear, for her scissors made so much noise on the table.

“They are at rest,” said Mrs. Jarvis. “And we spend our days doing foolish unnecessary things without knowing why.”

Mrs. Jarvis was not liked in the village.

“You never walk at this time of night?” she asked Mrs. Flanders.

“It is certainly wonderfully mild,” said Mrs. Flanders.

Yet it was years since she had opened the orchard gate and gone out on Dods Hill after dinner.

“It is perfectly dry,” said Mrs. Jarvis, as they shut the orchard door and stepped on to the turf.

“I shan’t go far,” said Betty Flanders. “Yes, Jacob will leave Paris on Wednesday.”

“Jacob was always my friend of the three,” said Mrs. Jarvis.

“Now, my dear, I am going no further,” said Mrs. Flanders. They had climbed the dark hill and reached the Roman camp.

The rampart rose at their feet—the smooth circle surrounding the camp or the grave. How many needles Betty Flanders had lost there! and her garnet brooch.

“It is much clearer than this sometimes,” said Mrs. Jarvis, standing upon the ridge. There were no clouds, and yet there was a haze over the sea, and over the moors. The lights of Scarborough flashed, as if a woman wearing a diamond necklace turned her head this way and that.

“How quiet it is!” said Mrs. Jarvis.

Mrs. Flanders rubbed the turf with her toe, thinking of her garnet brooch.

Mrs. Jarvis found it difficult to think of herself to-night. It was so calm. There was no wind; nothing racing, flying, escaping. Black shadows stood still over the silver moors. The furze bushes stood perfectly still. Neither did Mrs. Jarvis think of God. There was a church behind them, of course. The church clock struck ten. Did the strokes reach the furze bush, or did the thorn tree hear them?

Mrs. Flanders was stooping down to pick up a pebble. Sometimes people do find things, Mrs. Jarvis thought, and yet in this hazy moonlight it was impossible to see anything, except bones, and little pieces of chalk.

“Jacob bought it with his own money, and then I brought Mr. Parker up to see the view, and it must have dropped——” Mrs. Flanders murmured.

Did the bones stir, or the rusty swords? Was Mrs. Flanders’ twopenny-halfpenny brooch for ever part of the rich accumulation? and if all the ghosts flocked thick and rubbed shoulders with Mrs. Flanders in the circle, would she not have seemed perfectly in her place, a live English matron, growing stout?

The clock struck the quarter.

The frail waves of sound broke among the stiff gorse and the hawthorn twigs as the church clock divided time into quarters.

Motionless and broad-backed the moors received the statement “It is fifteen minutes past the hour,” but made no answer, unless a bramble stirred.

Yet even in this light the legends on the tombstones could be read, brief voices saying, “I am Bertha Ruck,” “I am Tom Gage.” And they say which day of the year they died, and the New Testament says something for them, very proud, very emphatic, or consoling.

The moors accept all that too.

The moonlight falls like a pale page upon the church wall, and illumines the kneeling family in the niche, and the tablet set up in 1780 to the Squire of the parish who relieved the poor, and believed in God—so the measured voice goes on down the marble scroll, as though it could impose itself upon time and the open air.

Now a fox steals out from behind the gorse bushes.

Often, even at night, the church seems full of people. The pews are worn and greasy, and the cassocks in place, and the hymn-books on the ledges. It is a ship with all its crew aboard. The timbers strain to hold the dead and the living, the ploughmen, the carpenters, the fox-hunting gentlemen and the farmers smelling of mud and brandy. Their tongues join together in syllabling the sharp-cut words, which for ever slice asunder time and the broad-backed moors. Plaint and belief and elegy, despair and triumph, but for the most part good sense and jolly indifference, go trampling out of the windows any time these five hundred years.

Still, as Mrs. Jarvis said, stepping out on to the moors, “How quiet it is!” Quiet at midday, except when the hunt scatters across it; quiet in the afternoon, save for the drifting sheep; at night the moor is perfectly quiet.

A garnet brooch has dropped into its grass. A fox pads stealthily. A leaf turns on its edge. Mrs. Jarvis, who is fifty years of age, reposes in the camp in the hazy moonlight.

“… and,” said Mrs. Flanders, straightening her back, “I never cared for Mr. Parker.”

“Neither did I,” said Mrs. Jarvis. They began to walk home.

But their voices floated for a little above the camp. The moonlight destroyed nothing. The moor accepted everything. Tom Gage cries aloud so long as his tombstone endures. The Roman skeletons are in safe keeping. Betty Flanders’s darning needles are safe too and her garnet brooch. And sometimes at mid-day, in the sunshine, the moor seems to hoard these little treasures, like a nurse. But at midnight when no one speaks or gallops, and the thorn tree is perfectly still, it would be foolish to vex the moor with questions—what? and why?

The church clock, however, strikes twelve.

[]

XII

The water fell off a ledge like lead—like a chain with thick white links. The train ran out into a steep green meadow, and Jacob saw striped tulips growing and heard a bird singing, in Italy.

A motor car full of Italian officers ran along the flat road and kept up with the train, raising dust behind it. There were trees laced together with vines—as Virgil said. Here was a station; and a tremendous leave-taking going on, with women in high yellow boots and odd pale boys in ringed socks. Virgil’s bees had gone about the plains of Lombardy. It was the custom of the ancients to train vines between elms. Then at Milan there were sharp-winged hawks, of a bright brown, cutting figures over the roofs.

These Italian carriages get damnably hot with the afternoon sun on them, and the chances are that before the engine has pulled to the top of the gorge the clanking chain will have broken. Up, up, up, it goes, like a train on a scenic railway. Every peak is covered with sharp trees, and amazing white villages are crowded on ledges. There is always a white tower on the very summit, flat red-frilled roofs, and a sheer drop beneath. It is not a country in which one walks after tea. For one thing there is no grass. A whole hillside will be ruled with olive trees. Already in April the earth is clotted into dry dust between them. And there are neither stiles nor footpaths, nor lanes chequered with the shadows of leaves nor eighteenth-century inns with bow-windows, where one eats ham and eggs. Oh no, Italy is all fierceness, bareness, exposure, and black priests shuffling along the roads. It is strange, too, how you never get away from villas.

Still, to be travelling on one’s own with a hundred pounds to spend is a fine affair. And if his money gave out, as it probably would, he would go on foot. He could live on bread and wine—the wine in straw bottles—for after doing Greece he was going to knock off Rome. The Roman civilization was a very inferior affair, no doubt. But Bonamy talked a lot of rot, all the same. “You ought to have been in Athens,” he would say to Bonamy when he got back. “Standing on the Parthenon,” he would say, or “The ruins of the Coliseum suggest some fairly sublime reflections,” which he would write out at length in letters. It might turn to an essay upon civilization. A comparison between the ancients and moderns, with some pretty sharp hits at Mr. Asquith—something in the style of Gibbon.

A stout gentleman laboriously hauled himself in, dusty, baggy, slung with gold chains, and Jacob, regretting that he did not come of the Latin race, looked out of the window.

It is a strange reflection that by travelling two days and nights you are in the heart of Italy. Accidental villas among olive trees appear; and men-servants watering the cactuses. Black victorias drive in between pompous pillars with plaster shields stuck to them. It is at once momentary and astonishingly intimate—to be displayed before the eyes of a foreigner. And there is a lonely hill-top where no one ever comes, and yet it is seen by me who was lately driving down Piccadilly on an omnibus. And what I should like would be to get out among the fields, sit down and hear the grasshoppers, and take up a handful of earth—Italian earth, as this is Italian dust upon my shoes.

Jacob heard them crying strange names at railway stations through the night. The train stopped and he heard frogs croaking close by, and he wrinkled back the blind cautiously and saw a vast strange marsh all white in the moonlight. The carriage was thick with cigar smoke, which floated round the globe with the green shade on it. The Italian gentleman lay snoring with his boots off and his waistcoat unbuttoned…. And all this business of going to Greece seemed to Jacob an intolerable weariness—sitting in hotels by oneself and looking at monuments—he’d have done better to go to Cornwall with Timmy Durrant…. “O—h,” Jacob protested, as the darkness began breaking in front of him and the light showed through, but the man was reaching across him to get something—the fat Italian man in his dicky, unshaven, crumpled, obese, was opening the door and going off to have a wash.

So Jacob sat up, and saw a lean Italian sportsman with a gun walking down the road in the early morning light, and the whole idea of the Parthenon came upon him in a clap.

“By Jove!” he thought, “we must be nearly there!” and he stuck his head out of the window and got the air full in his face.

It is highly exasperating that twenty-five people of your acquaintance should be able to say straight off something very much to the point about being in Greece, while for yourself there is a stopper upon all emotions whatsoever. For after washing at the hotel at Patras, Jacob had followed the tram lines a mile or so out; and followed them a mile or so back; he had met several droves of turkeys; several strings of donkeys; had got lost in back streets; had read advertisements of corsets and of Maggi’s consommé; children had trodden on his toes; the place smelt of bad cheese; and he was glad to find himself suddenly come out opposite his hotel. There was an old copy of the Daily Mail lying among coffee-cups; which he read. But what could he do after dinner?

No doubt we should be, on the whole, much worse off than we are without our astonishing gift for illusion. At the age of twelve or so, having given up dolls and broken our steam engines, France, but much more probably Italy, and India almost for a certainty, draws the superfluous imagination. One’s aunts have been to Rome; and every one has an uncle who was last heard of—poor man—in Rangoon. He will never come back any more. But it is the governesses who start the Greek myth. Look at that for a head (they say)—nose, you see, straight as a dart, curls, eyebrows—everything appropriate to manly beauty; while his legs and arms have lines on them which indicate a perfect degree of development—the Greeks caring for the body as much as for the face. And the Greeks could paint fruit so that birds pecked at it. First you read Xenophon; then Euripides. One day—that was an occasion, by God—what people have said appears to have sense in it; “the Greek spirit”; the Greek this, that, and the other; though it is absurd, by the way, to say that any Greek comes near Shakespeare. The point is, however, that we have been brought up in an illusion.

Jacob, no doubt, thought something in this fashion, the Daily Mail crumpled in his hand; his legs extended; the very picture of boredom.

“But it’s the way we’re brought up,” he went on.

And it all seemed to him very distasteful. Something ought to be done about it. And from being moderately depressed he became like a man about to be executed. Clara Durrant had left him at a party to talk to an American called Pilchard. And he had come all the way to Greece and left her. They wore evening-dresses, and talked nonsense—what damned nonsense—and he put out his hand for the Globe Trotter, an international magazine which is supplied free of charge to the proprietors of hotels.

In spite of its ramshackle condition modern Greece is highly advanced in the electric tramway system, so that while Jacob sat in the hotel sitting-room the trams clanked, chimed, rang, rang, rang imperiously to get the donkeys out of the way, and one old woman who refused to budge, beneath the windows. The whole of civilization was being condemned.

The waiter was quite indifferent to that too. Aristotle, a dirty man, carnivorously interested in the body of the only guest now occupying the only arm-chair, came into the room ostentatiously, put something down, put something straight, and saw that Jacob was still there.

“I shall want to be called early to-morrow,” said Jacob, over his shoulder. “I am going to Olympia.”

This gloom, this surrender to the dark waters which lap us about, is a modern invention. Perhaps, as Cruttendon said, we do not believe enough. Our fathers at any rate had something to demolish. So have we for the matter of that, thought Jacob, crumpling the Daily Mail in his hand. He would go into Parliament and make fine speeches—but what use are fine speeches and Parliament, once you surrender an inch to the black waters? Indeed there has never been any explanation of the ebb and flow in our veins—of happiness and unhappiness. That respectability and evening parties where one has to dress, and wretched slums at the back of Gray’s Inn—something solid, immovable, and grotesque—is at the back of it, Jacob thought probable. But then there was the British Empire which was beginning to puzzle him; nor was he altogether in favour of giving Home Rule to Ireland. What did the Daily Mail say about that?

For he had grown to be a man, and was about to be immersed in things—as indeed the chambermaid, emptying his basin upstairs, fingering keys, studs, pencils, and bottles of tabloids strewn on the dressing-table, was aware.

That he had grown to be a man was a fact that Florinda knew, as she knew everything, by instinct.

And Betty Flanders even now suspected it, as she read his letter, posted at Milan, “Telling me,” she complained to Mrs. Jarvis, “really nothing that I want to know”; but she brooded over it.

Fanny Elmer felt it to desperation. For he would take his stick and his hat and would walk to the window, and look perfectly absent-minded and very stern too, she thought.

“I am going,” he would say, “to cadge a meal off Bonamy.”

“Anyhow, I can drown myself in the Thames,” Fanny cried, as she hurried past the Foundling Hospital.

“But the Daily Mail isn’t to be trusted,” Jacob said to himself, looking about for something else to read. And he sighed again, being indeed so profoundly gloomy that gloom must have been lodged in him to cloud him at any moment, which was odd in a man who enjoyed things so, was not much given to analysis, but was horribly romantic, of course, Bonamy thought, in his rooms in Lincoln’s Inn.

“He will fall in love,” thought Bonamy. “Some Greek woman with a straight nose.”

It was to Bonamy that Jacob wrote from Patras—to Bonamy who couldn’t love a woman and never read a foolish book.

There are very few good books after all, for we can’t count profuse histories, travels in mule carts to discover the sources of the Nile, or the volubility of fiction.

I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page or two. I like sentences that don’t budge though armies cross them. I like words to be hard—such were Bonamy’s views, and they won him the hostility of those whose taste is all for the fresh growths of the morning, who throw up the window, and find the poppies spread in the sun, and can’t forbear a shout of jubilation at the astonishing fertility of English literature. That was not Bonamy’s way at all. That his taste in literature affected his friendships, and made him silent, secretive, fastidious, and only quite at his ease with one or two young men of his own way of thinking, was the charge against him.

But then Jacob Flanders was not at all of his own way of thinking—far from it, Bonamy sighed, laying the thin sheets of notepaper on the table and falling into thought about Jacob’s character, not for the first time.

The trouble was this romantic vein in him. “But mixed with the stupidity which leads him into these absurd predicaments,” thought Bonamy, “there is something—something”—he sighed, for he was fonder of Jacob than of any one in the world.

Jacob went to the window and stood with his hands in his pockets. There he saw three Greeks in kilts; the masts of ships; idle or busy people of the lower classes strolling or stepping out briskly, or falling into groups and gesticulating with their hands. Their lack of concern for him was not the cause of his gloom; but some more profound conviction—it was not that he himself happened to be lonely, but that all people are.

Yet next day, as the train slowly rounded a hill on the way to Olympia, the Greek peasant women were out among the vines; the old Greek men were sitting at the stations, sipping sweet wine. And though Jacob remained gloomy he had never suspected how tremendously pleasant it is to be alone; out of England; on one’s own; cut off from the whole thing. There are very sharp bare hills on the way to Olympia; and between them blue sea in triangular spaces. A little like the Cornish coast. Well now, to go walking by oneself all day—to get on to that track and follow it up between the bushes—or are they small trees?—to the top of that mountain from which one can see half the nations of antiquity——

“Yes,” said Jacob, for his carriage was empty, “let’s look at the map.”

Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us. To gallop intemperately; fall on the sand tired out; to feel the earth spin; to have—positively—a rush of friendship for stones and grasses, as if humanity were over, and as for men and women, let them go hang—there is no getting over the fact that this desire seizes us pretty often.

The evening air slightly moved the dirty curtains in the hotel window at Olympia.

“I am full of love for every one,” thought Mrs. Wentworth Williams, “—for the poor most of all—for the peasants coming back in the evening with their burdens. And everything is soft and vague and very sad. It is sad, it is sad. But everything has meaning,” thought Sandra Wentworth Williams, raising her head a little and looking very beautiful, tragic, and exalted. “One must love everything.”

She held in her hand a little book convenient for travelling—stories by Tchekov—as she stood, veiled, in white, in the window of the hotel at Olympia. How beautiful the evening was! and her beauty was its beauty. The tragedy of Greece was the tragedy of all high souls. The inevitable compromise. She seemed to have grasped something. She would write it down. And moving to the table where her husband sat reading she leant her chin in her hands and thought of the peasants, of suffering, of her own beauty, of the inevitable compromise, and of how she would write it down. Nor did Evan Williams say anything brutal, banal, or foolish when he shut his book and put it away to make room for the plates of soup which were now being placed before them. Only his drooping bloodhound eyes and his heavy sallow cheeks expressed his melancholy tolerance, his conviction that though forced to live with circumspection and deliberation he could never possibly achieve any of those objects which, as he knew, are the only ones worth pursuing. His consideration was flawless; his silence unbroken.

“Everything seems to mean so much,” said Sandra. But with the sound of her own voice the spell was broken. She forgot the peasants. Only there remained with her a sense of her own beauty, and in front, luckily, there was a looking-glass.

“I am very beautiful,” she thought.

She shifted her hat slightly. Her husband saw her looking in the glass; and agreed that beauty is important; it is an inheritance; one cannot ignore it. But it is a barrier; it is in fact rather a bore. So he drank his soup; and kept his eyes fixed upon the window.

“Quails,” said Mrs. Wentworth Williams languidly. “And then goat, I suppose; and then …”

“Caramel custard presumably,” said her husband in the same cadence, with his toothpick out already.

She laid her spoon upon her plate, and her soup was taken away half finished. Never did she do anything without dignity; for hers was the English type which is so Greek, save that villagers have touched their hats to it, the vicarage reveres it; and upper-gardeners and under-gardeners respectfully straighten their backs as she comes down the broad terrace on Sunday morning, dallying at the stone urns with the Prime Minister to pick a rose—which, perhaps, she was trying to forget, as her eye wandered round the dining-room of the inn at Olympia, seeking the window where her book lay, where a few minutes ago she had discovered something—something very profound it had been, about love and sadness and the peasants.

But it was Evan who sighed; not in despair nor indeed in rebellion. But, being the most ambitious of men and temperamentally the most sluggish, he had accomplished nothing; had the political history of England at his finger-ends, and living much in company with Chatham, Pitt, Burke, and Charles James Fox could not help contrasting himself and his age with them and theirs. “Yet there never was a time when great men are more needed,” he was in the habit of saying to himself, with a sigh. Here he was picking his teeth in an inn at Olympia. He had done. But Sandra’s eyes wandered.

“Those pink melons are sure to be dangerous,” he said gloomily. And as he spoke the door opened and in came a young man in a grey check suit.

“Beautiful but dangerous,” said Sandra, immediately talking to her husband in the presence of a third person. (“Ah, an English boy on tour,” she thought to herself.)

And Evan knew all that too.

Yes, he knew all that; and he admired her. Very pleasant, he thought, to have affairs. But for himself, what with his height (Napoleon was five feet four, he remembered), his bulk, his inability to impose his own personality (and yet great men are needed more than ever now, he sighed), it was useless. He threw away his cigar, went up to Jacob and asked him, with a simple sort of sincerity which Jacob liked, whether he had come straight out from England.

“How very English!” Sandra laughed when the waiter told them next morning that the young gentleman had left at five to climb the mountain. “I am sure he asked you for a bath?” at which the waiter shook his head, and said that he would ask the manager.

“You do not understand,” laughed Sandra. “Never mind.”

Stretched on the top of the mountain, quite alone, Jacob enjoyed himself immensely. Probably he had never been so happy in the whole of his life.

But at dinner that night Mr. Williams asked him whether he would like to see the paper; then Mrs. Williams asked him (as they strolled on the terrace smoking—and how could he refuse that man’s cigar?) whether he’d seen the theatre by moonlight; whether he knew Everard Sherborn; whether he read Greek and whether (Evan rose silently and went in) if he had to sacrifice one it would be the French literature or the Russian?

“And now,” wrote Jacob in his letter to Bonamy, “I shall have to read her cursed book”—her Tchekov, he meant, for she had lent it him.

Though the opinion is unpopular it seems likely enough that bare places, fields too thick with stones to be ploughed, tossing sea-meadows half-way between England and America, suit us better than cities.

There is something absolute in us which despises qualification. It is this which is teased and twisted in society. People come together in a room. “So delighted,” says somebody, “to meet you,” and that is a lie. And then: “I enjoy the spring more than the autumn now. One does, I think, as one gets older.” For women are always, always, always talking about what one feels, and if they say “as one gets older,” they mean you to reply with something quite off the point.

Jacob sat himself down in the quarry where the Greeks had cut marble for the theatre. It is hot work walking up Greek hills at midday. The wild red cyclamen was out; he had seen the little tortoises hobbling from clump to clump; the air smelt strong and suddenly sweet, and the sun, striking on jagged splinters of marble, was very dazzling to the eyes. Composed, commanding, contemptuous, a little melancholy, and bored with an august kind of boredom, there he sat smoking his pipe.

Bonamy would have said that this was the sort of thing that made him uneasy—when Jacob got into the doldrums, looked like a Margate fisherman out of a job, or a British Admiral. You couldn’t make him understand a thing when he was in a mood like that. One had better leave him alone. He was dull. He was apt to be grumpy.

He was up very early, looking at the statues with his Baedeker.

Sandra Wentworth Williams, ranging the world before breakfast in quest of adventure or a point of view, all in white, not so very tall perhaps, but uncommonly upright—Sandra Williams got Jacob’s head exactly on a level with the head of the Hermes of Praxiteles. The comparison was all in his favour. But before she could say a single word he had gone out of the Museum and left her.

Still, a lady of fashion travels with more than one dress, and if white suits the morning hour, perhaps sandy yellow with purple spots on it, a black hat, and a volume of Balzac, suit the evening. Thus she was arranged on the terrace when Jacob came in. Very beautiful she looked. With her hands folded she mused, seemed to listen to her husband, seemed to watch the peasants coming down with brushwood on their backs, seemed to notice how the hill changed from blue to black, seemed to discriminate between truth and falsehood, Jacob thought, and crossed his legs suddenly, observing the extreme shabbiness of his trousers.

“But he is very distinguished looking,” Sandra decided.

And Evan Williams, lying back in his chair with the paper on his knees, envied them. The best thing he could do would be to publish, with Macmillans, his monograph upon the foreign policy of Chatham. But confound this tumid, queasy feeling—this restlessness, swelling, and heat—it was jealousy! jealousy! jealousy! which he had sworn never to feel again.

“Come with us to Corinth, Flanders,” he said with more than his usual energy, stopping by Jacob’s chair. He was relieved by Jacob’s reply, or rather by the solid, direct, if shy manner in which he said that he would like very much to come with them to Corinth.

“Here is a fellow,” thought Evan Williams, “who might do very well in politics.”

“I intend to come to Greece every year so long as I live,” Jacob wrote to Bonamy. “It is the only chance I can see of protecting oneself from civilization.”

“Goodness knows what he means by that,” Bonamy sighed. For as he never said a clumsy thing himself, these dark sayings of Jacob’s made him feel apprehensive, yet somehow impressed, his own turn being all for the definite, the concrete, and the rational.

Nothing could be much simpler than what Sandra said as she descended the Acro-Corinth, keeping to the little path, while Jacob strode over rougher ground by her side. She had been left motherless at the age of four; and the Park was vast.

“One never seemed able to get out of it,” she laughed. Of course there was the library, and dear Mr. Jones, and notions about things. “I used to stray into the kitchen and sit upon the butlers’ knees,” she laughed, sadly though.

Jacob thought that if he had been there he would have saved her; for she had been exposed to great dangers, he felt, and, he thought to himself, “People wouldn’t understand a woman talking as she talks.”

She made little of the roughness of the hill; and wore breeches, he saw, under her short skirts.

“Women like Fanny Elmer don’t,” he thought. “What’s-her-name Carslake didn’t; yet they pretend …”

Mrs. Williams said things straight out. He was surprised by his own knowledge of the rules of behaviour; how much more can be said than one thought; how open one can be with a woman; and how little he had known himself before.

Evan joined them on the road; and as they drove along up hill and down hill (for Greece is in a state of effervescence, yet astonishingly clean-cut, a treeless land, where you see the ground between the blades, each hill cut and shaped and outlined as often as not against sparkling deep blue waters, islands white as sand floating on the horizon, occasional groves of palm trees standing in the valleys, which are scattered with black goats, spotted with little olive trees and sometimes have white hollows, rayed and criss-crossed, in their flanks), as they drove up hill and down he scowled in the corner of the carriage, with his paw so tightly closed that the skin was stretched between the knuckles and the little hairs stood upright. Sandra rode opposite, dominant, like a Victory prepared to fling into the air.

“Heartless!” thought Evan (which was untrue).

“Brainless!” he suspected (and that was not true, either). “Still…!” He envied her.

When bedtime came the difficulty was to write to Bonamy, Jacob found. Yet he had seen Salamis, and Marathon in the distance. Poor old Bonamy! No; there was something queer about it. He could not write to Bonamy.

“I shall go to Athens all the same,” he resolved, looking very set, with this hook dragging in his side.

The Williamses had already been to Athens.

Athens is still quite capable of striking a young man as the oddest combination, the most incongruous assortment. Now it is suburban; now immortal. Now cheap continental jewellery is laid upon plush trays. Now the stately woman stands naked, save for a wave of drapery above the knee. No form can he set on his sensations as he strolls, one blazing afternoon, along the Parisian boulevard and skips out of the way of the royal landau which, looking indescribably ramshackle, rattles along the pitted roadway, saluted by citizens of both sexes cheaply dressed in bowler hats and continental costumes; though a shepherd in kilt, cap, and gaiters very nearly drives his herd of goats between the royal wheels; and all the time the Acropolis surges into the air, raises itself above the town, like a large immobile wave with the yellow columns of the Parthenon firmly planted upon it.

The yellow columns of the Parthenon are to be seen at all hours of the day firmly planted upon the Acropolis; though at sunset, when the ships in the Piraeus fire their guns, a bell rings, a man in uniform (the waistcoat unbuttoned) appears; and the women roll up the black stockings which they are knitting in the shadow of the columns, call to the children, and troop off down the hill back to their houses.

There they are again, the pillars, the pediment, the Temple of Victory and the Erechtheum, set on a tawny rock cleft with shadows, directly you unlatch your shutters in the morning and, leaning out, hear the clatter, the clamour, the whip cracking in the street below. There they are.

The extreme definiteness with which they stand, now a brilliant white, again yellow, and in some lights red, imposes ideas of durability, of the emergence through the earth of some spiritual energy elsewhere dissipated in elegant trifles. But this durability exists quite independently of our admiration. Although the beauty is sufficiently humane to weaken us, to stir the deep deposit of mud—memories, abandonments, regrets, sentimental devotions—the Parthenon is separate from all that; and if you consider how it has stood out all night, for centuries, you begin to connect the blaze (at midday the glare is dazzling and the frieze almost invisible) with the idea that perhaps it is beauty alone that is immortal.

Added to this, compared with the blistered stucco, the new love songs rasped out to the strum of guitar and gramophone, and the mobile yet insignificant faces of the street, the Parthenon is really astonishing in its silent composure; which is so vigorous that, far from being decayed, the Parthenon appears, on the contrary, likely to outlast the entire world.

“And the Greeks, like sensible men, never bothered to finish the backs of their statues,” said Jacob, shading his eyes and observing that the side of the figure which is turned away from view is left in the rough.

He noted the slight irregularity in the line of the steps which “the artistic sense of the Greeks preferred to mathematical accuracy,” he read in his guide-book.

He stood on the exact spot where the great statue of Athena used to stand, and identified the more famous landmarks of the scene beneath.

In short he was accurate and diligent; but profoundly morose. Moreover he was pestered by guides. This was on Monday.

But on Wednesday he wrote a telegram to Bonamy, telling him to come at once. And then he crumpled it in his hand and threw it in the gutter.

“For one thing he wouldn’t come,” he thought. “And then I daresay this sort of thing wears off.” “This sort of thing” being that uneasy, painful feeling, something like selfishness—one wishes almost that the thing would stop—it is getting more and more beyond what is possible—“If it goes on much longer I shan’t be able to cope with it—but if some one else were seeing it at the same time—Bonamy is stuffed in his room in Lincoln’s Inn—oh, I say, damn it all, I say,”—the sight of Hymettus, Pentelicus, Lycabettus on one side, and the sea on the other, as one stands in the Parthenon at sunset, the sky pink feathered, the plain all colours, the marble tawny in one’s eyes, is thus oppressive. Luckily Jacob had little sense of personal association; he seldom thought of Plato or Socrates in the flesh; on the other hand his feeling for architecture was very strong; he preferred statues to pictures; and he was beginning to think a great deal about the problems of civilization, which were solved, of course, so very remarkably by the ancient Greeks, though their solution is no help to us. Then the hook gave a great tug in his side as he lay in bed on Wednesday night; and he turned over with a desperate sort of tumble, remembering Sandra Wentworth Williams with whom he was in love.

Next day he climbed Pentelicus.

The day after he went up to the Acropolis. The hour was early; the place almost deserted; and possibly there was thunder in the air. But the sun struck full upon the Acropolis.

Jacob’s intention was to sit down and read, and, finding a drum of marble conveniently placed, from which Marathon could be seen, and yet it was in the shade, while the Erechtheum blazed white in front of him, there he sat. And after reading a page he put his thumb in his book. Why not rule countries in the way they should be ruled? And he read again.

No doubt his position there overlooking Marathon somehow raised his spirits. Or it may have been that a slow capacious brain has these moments of flowering. Or he had, insensibly, while he was abroad, got into the way of thinking about politics.

And then looking up and seeing the sharp outline, his meditations were given an extraordinary edge; Greece was over; the Parthenon in ruins; yet there he was.

(Ladies with green and white umbrellas passed through the courtyard—French ladies on their way to join their husbands in Constantinople.)

Jacob read on again. And laying the book on the ground he began, as if inspired by what he had read, to write a note upon the importance of history—upon democracy—one of those scribbles upon which the work of a lifetime may be based; or again, it falls out of a book twenty years later, and one can’t remember a word of it. It is a little painful. It had better be burnt.

Jacob wrote; began to draw a straight nose; when all the French ladies opening and shutting their umbrellas just beneath him exclaimed, looking at the sky, that one did not know what to expect—rain or fine weather?

Jacob got up and strolled across to the Erechtheum. There are still several women standing there holding the roof on their heads. Jacob straightened himself slightly; for stability and balance affect the body first. These statues annulled things so! He stared at them, then turned, and there was Madame Lucien Gravé perched on a block of marble with her kodak pointed at his head. Of course she jumped down, in spite of her age, her figure, and her tight boots—having, now that her daughter was married, lapsed with a luxurious abandonment, grand enough in its way, into the fleshy grotesque; she jumped down, but not before Jacob had seen her.

“Damn these women—damn these women!” he thought. And he went to fetch his book which he had left lying on the ground in the Parthenon.

“How they spoil things,” he murmured, leaning against one of the pillars, pressing his book tight between his arm and his side. (As for the weather, no doubt the storm would break soon; Athens was under cloud.)

“It is those damned women,” said Jacob, without any trace of bitterness, but rather with sadness and disappointment that what might have been should never be.

(This violent disillusionment is generally to be expected in young men in the prime of life, sound of wind and limb, who will soon become fathers of families and directors of banks.)

Then, making sure that the Frenchwomen had gone, and looking cautiously round him, Jacob strolled over to the Erechtheum and looked rather furtively at the goddess on the left-hand side holding the roof on her head. She reminded him of Sandra Wentworth Williams. He looked at her, then looked away. He looked at her, then looked away. He was extraordinarily moved, and with the battered Greek nose in his head, with Sandra in his head, with all sorts of things in his head, off he started to walk right up to the top of Mount Hymettus, alone, in the heat.

That very afternoon Bonamy went expressly to talk about Jacob to tea with Clara Durrant in the square behind Sloane Street where, on hot spring days, there are striped blinds over the front windows, single horses pawing the macadam outside the doors, and elderly gentlemen in yellow waistcoats ringing bells and stepping in very politely when the maid demurely replies that Mrs. Durrant is at home.

Bonamy sat with Clara in the sunny front room with the barrel organ piping sweetly outside; the water-cart going slowly along spraying the pavement; the carriages jingling, and all the silver and chintz, brown and blue rugs and vases filled with green boughs, striped with trembling yellow bars.

The insipidity of what was said needs no illustration—Bonamy kept on gently returning quiet answers and accumulating amazement at an existence squeezed and emasculated within a white satin shoe (Mrs. Durrant meanwhile enunciating strident politics with Sir Somebody in the back room) until the virginity of Clara’s soul appeared to him candid; the depths unknown; and he would have brought out Jacob’s name had he not begun to feel positively certain that Clara loved him—and could do nothing whatever.

“Nothing whatever!” he exclaimed, as the door shut, and, for a man of his temperament, got a very queer feeling, as he walked through the park, of carriages irresistibly driven; of flower-beds uncompromisingly geometrical; of force rushing round geometrical patterns in the most senseless way in the world. “Was Clara,” he thought, pausing to watch the boys bathing in the Serpentine, “the silent woman?—would Jacob marry her?”

But in Athens in the sunshine, in Athens, where it is almost impossible to get afternoon tea, and elderly gentlemen who talk politics talk them all the other way round, in Athens sat Sandra Wentworth Williams, veiled, in white, her legs stretched in front of her, one elbow on the arm of the bamboo chair, blue clouds wavering and drifting from her cigarette.

The orange trees which flourish in the Square of the Constitution, the band, the dragging of feet, the sky, the houses, lemon and rose coloured—all this became so significant to Mrs. Wentworth Williams after her second cup of coffee that she began dramatizing the story of the noble and impulsive Englishwoman who had offered a seat in her carriage to the old American lady at Mycenae (Mrs. Duggan)—not altogether a false story, though it said nothing of Evan, standing first on one foot, then on the other, waiting for the women to stop chattering.

“I am putting the life of Father Damien into verse,” Mrs. Duggan had said, for she had lost everything—everything in the world, husband and child and everything, but faith remained.

Sandra, floating from the particular to the universal, lay back in a trance.

The flight of time which hurries us so tragically along; the eternal drudge and drone, now bursting into fiery flame like those brief balls of yellow among green leaves (she was looking at orange trees); kisses on lips that are to die; the world turning, turning in mazes of heat and sound—though to be sure there is the quiet evening with its lovely pallor, “For I am sensitive to every side of it,” Sandra thought, “and Mrs. Duggan will write to me for ever, and I shall answer her letters.” Now the royal band marching by with the national flag stirred wider rings of emotion, and life became something that the courageous mount and ride out to sea on—the hair blown back (so she envisaged it, and the breeze stirred slightly among the orange trees) and she herself was emerging from silver spray—when she saw Jacob. He was standing in the Square with a book under his arm looking vacantly about him. That he was heavily built and might become stout in time was a fact.

But she suspected him of being a mere bumpkin.

“There is that young man,” she said, peevishly, throwing away her cigarette, “that Mr. Flanders.”

“Where?” said Evan. “I don’t see him.”

“Oh, walking away—behind the trees now. No, you can’t see him. But we are sure to run into him,” which, of course, they did.

But how far was he a mere bumpkin? How far was Jacob Flanders at the age of twenty-six a stupid fellow? It is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely what is done. Some, it is true, take ineffaceable impressions of character at once. Others dally, loiter, and get blown this way and that. Kind old ladies assure us that cats are often the best judges of character. A cat will always go to a good man, they say; but then, Mrs. Whitehorn, Jacob’s landlady, loathed cats.

There is also the highly respectable opinion that character-mongering is much overdone nowadays. After all, what does it matter—that Fanny Elmer was all sentiment and sensation, and Mrs. Durrant hard as iron? that Clara, owing (so the character-mongers said) largely to her mother’s influence, never yet had the chance to do anything off her own bat, and only to very observant eyes displayed deeps of feeling which were positively alarming; and would certainly throw herself away upon some one unworthy of her one of these days unless, so the character-mongers said, she had a spark of her mother’s spirit in her—was somehow heroic. But what a term to apply to Clara Durrant! Simple to a degree, others thought her. And that is the very reason, so they said, why she attracts Dick Bonamy—the young man with the Wellington nose. Now he’s a dark horse if you like. And there these gossips would suddenly pause. Obviously they meant to hint at his peculiar disposition—long rumoured among them.

“But sometimes it is precisely a woman like Clara that men of that temperament need …” Miss Julia Eliot would hint.

“Well,” Mr. Bowley would reply, “it may be so.”

For however long these gossips sit, and however they stuff out their victims’ characters till they are swollen and tender as the livers of geese exposed to a hot fire, they never come to a decision.

“That young man, Jacob Flanders,” they would say, “so distinguished looking—and yet so awkward.” Then they would apply themselves to Jacob and vacillate eternally between the two extremes. He rode to hounds—after a fashion, for he hadn’t a penny.

“Did you ever hear who his father was?” asked Julia Eliot.

“His mother, they say, is somehow connected with the Rocksbiers,” replied Mr. Bowley.

“He doesn’t overwork himself anyhow.”

“His friends are very fond of him.”

“Dick Bonamy, you mean?”

“No, I didn’t mean that. It’s evidently the other way with Jacob. He is precisely the young man to fall headlong in love and repent it for the rest of his life.”

“Oh, Mr. Bowley,” said Mrs. Durrant, sweeping down upon them in her imperious manner, “you remember Mrs. Adams? Well, that is her niece.” And Mr. Bowley, getting up, bowed politely and fetched strawberries.

So we are driven back to see what the other side means—the men in clubs and Cabinets—when they say that character-drawing is a frivolous fireside art, a matter of pins and needles, exquisite outlines enclosing vacancy, flourishes, and mere scrawls.

The battleships ray out over the North Sea, keeping their stations accurately apart. At a given signal all the guns are trained on a target which (the master gunner counts the seconds, watch in hand—at the sixth he looks up) flames into splinters. With equal nonchalance a dozen young men in the prime of life descend with composed faces into the depths of the sea; and there impassively (though with perfect mastery of machinery) suffocate uncomplainingly together. Like blocks of tin soldiers the army covers the cornfield, moves up the hillside, stops, reels slightly this way and that, and falls flat, save that, through field-glasses, it can be seen that one or two pieces still agitate up and down like fragments of broken match-stick.

These actions, together with the incessant commerce of banks, laboratories, chancellories, and houses of business, are the strokes which oar the world forward, they say. And they are dealt by men as smoothly sculptured as the impassive policeman at Ludgate Circus. But you will observe that far from being padded to rotundity his face is stiff from force of will, and lean from the effort of keeping it so. When his right arm rises, all the force in his veins flows straight from shoulder to finger-tips; not an ounce is diverted into sudden impulses, sentimental regrets, wire-drawn distinctions. The buses punctually stop.

It is thus that we live, they say, driven by an unseizable force. They say that the novelists never catch it; that it goes hurtling through their nets and leaves them torn to ribbons. This, they say, is what we live by—this unseizable force.

“Where are the men?” said old General Gibbons, looking round the drawing-room, full as usual on Sunday afternoons of well-dressed people. “Where are the guns?”

Mrs. Durrant looked too.

Clara, thinking that her mother wanted her, came in; then went out again.

They were talking about Germany at the Durrants, and Jacob (driven by this unseizable force) walked rapidly down Hermes Street and ran straight into the Williamses.

“Oh!” cried Sandra, with a cordiality which she suddenly felt. And Evan added, “What luck!”

The dinner which they gave him in the hotel which looks on to the Square of the Constitution was excellent. Plated baskets contained fresh rolls. There was real butter. And the meat scarcely needed the disguise of innumerable little red and green vegetables glazed in sauce.

It was strange, though. There were the little tables set out at intervals on the scarlet floor with the Greek King’s monogram wrought in yellow. Sandra dined in her hat, veiled as usual. Evan looked this way and that over his shoulder; imperturbable yet supple; and sometimes sighed. It was strange. For they were English people come together in Athens on a May evening. Jacob, helping himself to this and that, answered intelligently, yet with a ring in his voice.

The Williamses were going to Constantinople early next morning, they said.

“Before you are up,” said Sandra.

They would leave Jacob alone, then. Turning very slightly, Evan ordered something—a bottle of wine—from which he helped Jacob, with a kind of solicitude, with a kind of paternal solicitude, if that were possible. To be left alone—that was good for a young fellow. Never was there a time when the country had more need of men. He sighed.

“And you have been to the Acropolis?” asked Sandra.

“Yes,” said Jacob. And they moved off to the window together, while Evan spoke to the head waiter about calling them early.

“It is astonishing,” said Jacob, in a gruff voice.

Sandra opened her eyes very slightly. Possibly her nostrils expanded a little too.

“At half-past six then,” said Evan, coming towards them, looking as if he faced something in facing his wife and Jacob standing with their backs to the window.

Sandra smiled at him.

And, as he went to the window and had nothing to say she added, in broken half-sentences:

“Well, but how lovely—wouldn’t it be? The Acropolis, Evan—or are you too tired?”

At that Evan looked at them, or, since Jacob was staring ahead of him, at his wife, surlily, sullenly, yet with a kind of distress—not that she would pity him. Nor would the implacable spirit of love, for anything he could do, cease its tortures.

They left him and he sat in the smoking-room, which looks out on to the Square of the Constitution.

“Evan is happier alone,” said Sandra. “We have been separated from the newspapers. Well, it is better that people should have what they want…. You have seen all these wonderful things since we met…. What impression … I think that you are changed.”

“You want to go to the Acropolis,” said Jacob. “Up here then.”

“One will remember it all one’s life,” said Sandra.

“Yes,” said Jacob. “I wish you could have come in the day-time.”

“This is more wonderful,” said Sandra, waving her hand.

Jacob looked vaguely.

“But you should see the Parthenon in the day-time,” he said. “You couldn’t come to-morrow—it would be too early?”

“You have sat there for hours and hours by yourself?”

“There were some awful women this morning,” said Jacob.

“Awful women?” Sandra echoed.

“Frenchwomen.”

“But something very wonderful has happened,” said Sandra. Ten minutes, fifteen minutes, half an hour—that was all the time before her.

“Yes,” he said.

“When one is your age—when one is young. What will you do? You will fall in love—oh yes! But don’t be in too great a hurry. I am so much older.”

She was brushed off the pavement by parading men.

“Shall we go on?” Jacob asked.

“Let us go on,” she insisted.

For she could not stop until she had told him—or heard him say—or was it some action on his part that she required? Far away on the horizon she discerned it and could not rest.

“You’d never get English people to sit out like this,” he said.

“Never—no. When you get back to England you won’t forget this—or come with us to Constantinople!” she cried suddenly.

“But then …”

Sandra sighed.

“You must go to Delphi, of course,” she said. “But,” she asked herself, “what do I want from him? Perhaps it is something that I have missed….”

“You will get there about six in the evening,” she said. “You will see the eagles.”

Jacob looked set and even desperate by the light at the street corner; and yet composed. He was suffering perhaps. He was credulous. Yet there was something caustic about him. He had in him the seeds of extreme disillusionment, which would come to him from women in middle life. Perhaps if one strove hard enough to reach the top of the hill it need not come to him—this disillusionment from women in middle life.

“The hotel is awful,” she said. “The last visitors had left their basins full of dirty water. There is always that,” she laughed.

“The people one meets are beastly,” Jacob said.

His excitement was clear enough.

“Write and tell me about it,” she said. “And tell me what you feel and what you think. Tell me everything.”

The night was dark. The Acropolis was a jagged mound.

“I should like to, awfully,” he said.

“When we get back to London, we shall meet …”

“Yes.”

“I suppose they leave the gates open?” he asked.

“We could climb them!” she answered wildly.

Obscuring the moon and altogether darkening the Acropolis the clouds passed from east to west. The clouds solidified; the vapours thickened; the trailing veils stayed and accumulated.

It was dark now over Athens, except for gauzy red streaks where the streets ran; and the front of the Palace was cadaverous from electric light. At sea the piers stood out, marked by separate dots; the waves being invisible, and promontories and islands were dark humps with a few lights.

“I’d love to bring my brother, if I may,” Jacob murmured.

“And then when your mother comes to London——,” said Sandra.

The mainland of Greece was dark; and somewhere off Euboea a cloud must have touched the waves and spattered them—the dolphins circling deeper and deeper into the sea. Violent was the wind now rushing down the Sea of Marmara between Greece and the plains of Troy.

In Greece and the uplands of Albania and Turkey, the wind scours the sand and the dust, and sows itself thick with dry particles. And then it pelts the smooth domes of the mosques, and makes the cypresses, standing stiff by the turbaned tombstones of Mohammedans, creak and bristle.

Sandra’s veils were swirled about her.

“I will give you my copy,” said Jacob. “Here. Will you keep it?”

(The book was the poems of Donne.)

Now the agitation of the air uncovered a racing star. Now it was dark. Now one after another lights were extinguished. Now great towns—Paris—Constantinople—London—were black as strewn rocks. Waterways might be distinguished. In England the trees were heavy in leaf. Here perhaps in some southern wood an old man lit dry ferns and the birds were startled. The sheep coughed; one flower bent slightly towards another. The English sky is softer, milkier than the Eastern. Something gentle has passed into it from the grass-rounded hills, something damp. The salt gale blew in at Betty Flanders’ bedroom window, and the widow lady, raising herself slightly on her elbow, sighed like one who realizes, but would fain ward off a little longer—oh, a little longer!—the oppression of eternity.

But to return to Jacob and Sandra.

They had vanished. There was the Acropolis; but had they reached it? The columns and the Temple remain; the emotion of the living breaks fresh on them year after year; and of that what remains?

As for reaching the Acropolis who shall say that we ever do it, or that when Jacob woke next morning he found anything hard and durable to keep for ever? Still, he went with them to Constantinople.

Sandra Wentworth Williams certainly woke to find a copy of Donne’s poems upon her dressing-table. And the book would be stood on the shelf in the English country house where Sally Duggan’s Life of Father Damien in verse would join it one of these days. There were ten or twelve little volumes already. Strolling in at dusk, Sandra would open the books and her eyes would brighten (but not at the print), and subsiding into the arm-chair she would suck back again the soul of the moment; or, for sometimes she was restless, would pull out book after book and swing across the whole space of her life like an acrobat from bar to bar. She had had her moments. Meanwhile, the great clock on the landing ticked and Sandra would hear time accumulating, and ask herself, “What for? What for?”

“What for? What for?” Sandra would say, putting the book back, and strolling to the looking-glass and pressing her hair. And Miss Edwards would be startled at dinner, as she opened her mouth to admit roast mutton, by Sandra’s sudden solicitude: “Are you happy, Miss Edwards?”—a thing Cissy Edwards hadn’t thought of for years.

“What for? What for?” Jacob never asked himself any such question, to judge by the way he laced his boots; shaved himself; to judge by the depth of his sleep that night, with the wind fidgeting at the shutters, and half-a-dozen mosquitoes singing in his ears. He was young—a man. And then Sandra was right when she judged him to be credulous as yet. At forty it might be a different matter. Already he had marked the things he liked in Donne, and they were savage enough. However, you might place beside them passages of the purest poetry in Shakespeare.

But the wind was rolling the darkness through the streets of Athens, rolling it, one might suppose, with a sort of trampling energy of mood which forbids too close an analysis of the feelings of any single person, or inspection of features. All faces—Greek, Levantine, Turkish, English—would have looked much the same in that darkness. At length the columns and the Temples whiten, yellow, turn rose; and the Pyramids and St. Peter’s arise, and at last sluggish St. Paul’s looms up.

The Christians have the right to rouse most cities with their interpretation of the day’s meaning. Then, less melodiously, dissenters of different sects issue a cantankerous emendation. The steamers, resounding like gigantic tuning-forks, state the old old fact—how there is a sea coldly, greenly, swaying outside. But nowadays it is the thin voice of duty, piping in a white thread from the top of a funnel, that collects the largest multitudes, and night is nothing but a long-drawn sigh between hammer-strokes, a deep breath—you can hear it from an open window even in the heart of London.

But who, save the nerve-worn and sleepless, or thinkers standing with hands to the eyes on some crag above the multitude, see things thus in skeleton outline, bare of flesh? In Surbiton the skeleton is wrapped in flesh.

“The kettle never boils so well on a sunny morning,” says Mrs. Grandage, glancing at the clock on the mantelpiece. Then the grey Persian cat stretches itself on the window-seat, and buffets a moth with soft round paws. And before breakfast is half over (they were late to-day) a baby is deposited in her lap, and she must guard the sugar basin while Tom Grandage reads the golfing article in the Times, sips his coffee, wipes his moustaches, and is off to the office, where he is the greatest authority upon the foreign exchanges and marked for promotion.

The skeleton is well wrapped in flesh. Even this dark night when the wind rolls the darkness through Lombard Street and Fetter Lane and Bedford Square it stirs (since it is summer-time and the height of the season) plane trees spangled with electric light, and curtains still preserving the room from the dawn. People still murmur over the last word said on the staircase, or strain, all through their dreams, for the voice of the alarum clock. So when the wind roams through a forest innumerable twigs stir; hives are brushed; insects sway on grass blades; the spider runs rapidly up a crease in the bark; and the whole air is tremulous with breathing; elastic with filaments.

Only here—in Lombard Street and Fetter Lane and Bedford Square—each insect carries a globe of the world in his head, and the webs of the forest are schemes evolved for the smooth conduct of business; and honey is treasure of one sort and another; and the stir in the air is the indescribable agitation of life.

But colour returns; runs up the stalks of the grass; blows out into tulips and crocuses; solidly stripes the tree trunks; and fills the gauze of the air and the grasses and pools.

The Bank of England emerges; and the Monument with its bristling head of golden hair; the dray horses crossing London Bridge show grey and strawberry and iron-coloured. There is a whir of wings as the suburban trains rush into the terminus. And the light mounts over the faces of all the tall blind houses, slides through a chink and paints the lustrous bellying crimson curtains; the green wine-glasses; the coffee-cups; and the chairs standing askew.

Sunlight strikes in upon shaving-glasses; and gleaming brass cans; upon all the jolly trappings of the day; the bright, inquisitive, armoured, resplendent, summer’s day, which has long since vanquished chaos; which has dried the melancholy mediaeval mists; drained the swamp and stood glass and stone upon it; and equipped our brains and bodies with such an armoury of weapons that merely to see the flash and thrust of limbs engaged in the conduct of daily life is better than the old pageant of armies drawn out in battle array upon the plain.

[]

XIII

“The height of the season,” said Bonamy.

The sun had already blistered the paint on the backs of the green chairs in Hyde Park; peeled the bark off the plane trees; and turned the earth to powder and to smooth yellow pebbles. Hyde Park was circled, incessantly, by turning wheels.

“The height of the season,” said Bonamy sarcastically.

He was sarcastic because of Clara Durrant; because Jacob had come back from Greece very brown and lean, with his pockets full of Greek notes, which he pulled out when the chair man came for pence; because Jacob was silent.

“He has not said a word to show that he is glad to see me,” thought Bonamy bitterly.

The motor-cars passed incessantly over the bridge of the Serpentine; the upper classes walked upright, or bent themselves gracefully over the palings; the lower classes lay with their knees cocked up, flat on their backs; the sheep grazed on pointed wooden legs; small children ran down the sloping grass, stretched their arms, and fell.

“Very urbane,” Jacob brought out.

“Urbane” on the lips of Jacob had mysteriously all the shapeliness of a character which Bonamy thought daily more sublime, devastating, terrific than ever, though he was still, and perhaps would be for ever, barbaric, obscure.

What superlatives! What adjectives! How acquit Bonamy of sentimentality of the grossest sort; of being tossed like a cork on the waves; of having no steady insight into character; of being unsupported by reason, and of drawing no comfort whatever from the works of the classics?

“The height of civilization,” said Jacob.

He was fond of using Latin words.

Magnanimity, virtue—such words when Jacob used them in talk with Bonamy meant that he took control of the situation; that Bonamy would play round him like an affectionate spaniel; and that (as likely as not) they would end by rolling on the floor.

“And Greece?” said Bonamy. “The Parthenon and all that?”

“There’s none of this European mysticism,” said Jacob.

“It’s the atmosphere, I suppose,” said Bonamy. “And you went to Constantinople?”

“Yes,” said Jacob.

Bonamy paused, moved a pebble; then darted in with the rapidity and certainty of a lizard’s tongue.

“You are in love!” he exclaimed.

Jacob blushed.

The sharpest of knives never cut so deep.

As for responding, or taking the least account of it, Jacob stared straight ahead of him, fixed, monolithic—oh, very beautiful!—like a British Admiral, exclaimed Bonamy in a rage, rising from his seat and walking off; waiting for some sound; none came; too proud to look back; walking quicker and quicker until he found himself gazing into motor cars and cursing women. Where was the pretty woman’s face? Clara’s—Fanny’s—Florinda’s? Who was the pretty little creature?

Not Clara Durrant.

The Aberdeen terrier must be exercised, and as Mr. Bowley was going that very moment—would like nothing better than a walk—they went together, Clara and kind little Bowley—Bowley who had rooms in the Albany, Bowley who wrote letters to the Times in a jocular vein about foreign hotels and the Aurora Borealis—Bowley who liked young people and walked down Piccadilly with his right arm resting on the boss of his back.

“Little demon!” cried Clara, and attached Troy to his chain.

Bowley anticipated—hoped for—a confidence. Devoted to her mother, Clara sometimes felt her a little, well, her mother was so sure of herself that she could not understand other people being—being—“as ludicrous as I am,” Clara jerked out (the dog tugging her forwards). And Bowley thought she looked like a huntress and turned over in his mind which it should be—some pale virgin with a slip of the moon in her hair, which was a flight for Bowley.

The colour was in her cheeks. To have spoken outright about her mother—still, it was only to Mr. Bowley, who loved her, as everybody must; but to speak was unnatural to her, yet it was awful to feel, as she had done all day, that she must tell some one.

“Wait till we cross the road,” she said to the dog, bending down.

Happily she had recovered by that time.

“She thinks so much about England,” she said. “She is so anxious——”

Bowley was defrauded as usual. Clara never confided in any one.

“Why don’t the young people settle it, eh?” he wanted to ask. “What’s all this about England?”—a question poor Clara could not have answered, since, as Mrs. Durrant discussed with Sir Edgar the policy of Sir Edward Grey, Clara only wondered why the cabinet looked dusty, and Jacob had never come. Oh, here was Mrs. Cowley Johnson …

And Clara would hand the pretty china teacups, and smile at the compliment—that no one in London made tea so well as she did.

“We get it at Brocklebank’s,” she said, “in Cursitor Street.”

Ought she not to be grateful? Ought she not to be happy? Especially since her mother looked so well and enjoyed so much talking to Sir Edgar about Morocco, Venezuela, or some such place.

“Jacob! Jacob!” thought Clara; and kind Mr. Bowley, who was ever so good with old ladies, looked; stopped; wondered whether Elizabeth wasn’t too harsh with her daughter; wondered about Bonamy, Jacob—which young fellow was it?—and jumped up directly Clara said she must exercise Troy.

They had reached the site of the old Exhibition. They looked at the tulips. Stiff and curled, the little rods of waxy smoothness rose from the earth, nourished yet contained, suffused with scarlet and coral pink. Each had its shadow; each grew trimly in the diamond-shaped wedge as the gardener had planned it.

“Barnes never gets them to grow like that,” Clara mused; she sighed.

“You are neglecting your friends,” said Bowley, as some one, going the other way, lifted his hat. She started; acknowledged Mr. Lionel Parry’s bow; wasted on him what had sprung for Jacob.

(“Jacob! Jacob!” she thought.)

“But you’ll get run over if I let you go,” she said to the dog.

“England seems all right,” said Mr. Bowley.

The loop of the railing beneath the statue of Achilles was full of parasols and waistcoats; chains and bangles; of ladies and gentlemen, lounging elegantly, lightly observant.

“‘This statue was erected by the women of England…’” Clara read out with a foolish little laugh. “Oh, Mr. Bowley! Oh!” Gallop—gallop—gallop—a horse galloped past without a rider. The stirrups swung; the pebbles spurted.

“Oh, stop! Stop it, Mr. Bowley!” she cried, white, trembling, gripping his arm, utterly unconscious, the tears coming.

“Tut-tut!” said Mr. Bowley in his dressing-room an hour later. “Tut-tut!”—a comment that was profound enough, though inarticulately expressed, since his valet was handing his shirt studs.

Julia Eliot, too, had seen the horse run away, and had risen from her seat to watch the end of the incident, which, since she came of a sporting family, seemed to her slightly ridiculous. Sure enough the little man came pounding behind with his breeches dusty; looked thoroughly annoyed; and was being helped to mount by a policeman when Julia Eliot, with a sardonic smile, turned towards the Marble Arch on her errand of mercy. It was only to visit a sick old lady who had known her mother and perhaps the Duke of Wellington; for Julia shared the love of her sex for the distressed; liked to visit death-beds; threw slippers at weddings; received confidences by the dozen; knew more pedigrees than a scholar knows dates, and was one of the kindliest, most generous, least continent of women.

Yet five minutes after she had passed the statue of Achilles she had the rapt look of one brushing through crowds on a summer’s afternoon, when the trees are rustling, the wheels churning yellow, and the tumult of the present seems like an elegy for past youth and past summers, and there rose in her mind a curious sadness, as if time and eternity showed through skirts and waistcoats, and she saw people passing tragically to destruction. Yet, Heaven knows, Julia was no fool. A sharper woman at a bargain did not exist. She was always punctual. The watch on her wrist gave her twelve minutes and a half in which to reach Bruton Street. Lady Congreve expected her at five.

The gilt clock at Verrey’s was striking five.

Florinda looked at it with a dull expression, like an animal. She looked at the clock; looked at the door; looked at the long glass opposite; disposed her cloak; drew closer to the table, for she was pregnant—no doubt about it, Mother Stuart said, recommending remedies, consulting friends; sunk, caught by the heel, as she tripped so lightly over the surface.

Her tumbler of pinkish sweet stuff was set down by the waiter; and she sucked, through a straw, her eyes on the looking-glass, on the door, now soothed by the sweet taste. When Nick Bramham came in it was plain, even to the young Swiss waiter, that there was a bargain between them. Nick hitched his clothes together clumsily; ran his fingers through his hair; sat down, to an ordeal, nervously. She looked at him; and set off laughing; laughed—laughed—laughed. The young Swiss waiter, standing with crossed legs by the pillar, laughed too.

The door opened; in came the roar of Regent Street, the roar of traffic, impersonal, unpitying; and sunshine grained with dirt. The Swiss waiter must see to the newcomers. Bramham lifted his glass.

“He’s like Jacob,” said Florinda, looking at the newcomer.

“The way he stares.” She stopped laughing.

Jacob, leaning forward, drew a plan of the Parthenon in the dust in Hyde Park, a network of strokes at least, which may have been the Parthenon, or again a mathematical diagram. And why was the pebble so emphatically ground in at the corner? It was not to count his notes that he took out a wad of papers and read a long flowing letter which Sandra had written two days ago at Milton Dower House with his book before her and in her mind the memory of something said or attempted, some moment in the dark on the road to the Acropolis which (such was her creed) mattered for ever.

“He is,” she mused, “like that man in Molière.”

She meant Alceste. She meant that he was severe. She meant that she could deceive him.

“Or could I not?” she thought, putting the poems of Donne back in the bookcase. “Jacob,” she went on, going to the window and looking over the spotted flower-beds across the grass where the piebald cows grazed under beech trees, “Jacob would be shocked.”

The perambulator was going through the little gate in the railing. She kissed her hand; directed by the nurse, Jimmy waved his.

“He’s a small boy,” she said, thinking of Jacob.

And yet—Alceste?

“What a nuisance you are!” Jacob grumbled, stretching out first one leg and then the other and feeling in each trouser-pocket for his chair ticket.

“I expect the sheep have eaten it,” he said. “Why do you keep sheep?”

“Sorry to disturb you, sir,” said the ticket-collector, his hand deep in the enormous pouch of pence.

“Well, I hope they pay you for it,” said Jacob. “There you are. No. You can stick to it. Go and get drunk.”

He had parted with half-a-crown, tolerantly, compassionately, with considerable contempt for his species.

Even now poor Fanny Elmer was dealing, as she walked along the Strand, in her incompetent way with this very careless, indifferent, sublime manner he had of talking to railway guards or porters; or Mrs. Whitehorn, when she consulted him about her little boy who was beaten by the schoolmaster.

Sustained entirely upon picture post cards for the past two months, Fanny’s idea of Jacob was more statuesque, noble, and eyeless than ever. To reinforce her vision she had taken to visiting the British Museum, where, keeping her eyes downcast until she was alongside of the battered Ulysses, she opened them and got a fresh shock of Jacob’s presence, enough to last her half a day. But this was wearing thin. And she wrote now—poems, letters that were never posted, saw his face in advertisements on hoardings, and would cross the road to let the barrel-organ turn her musings to rhapsody. But at breakfast (she shared rooms with a teacher), when the butter was smeared about the plate, and the prongs of the forks were clotted with old egg yolk, she revised these visions violently; was, in truth, very cross; was losing her complexion, as Margery Jackson told her, bringing the whole thing down (as she laced her stout boots) to a level of mother-wit, vulgarity, and sentiment, for she had loved too; and been a fool.

“One’s godmothers ought to have told one,” said Fanny, looking in at the window of Bacon, the mapseller, in the Strand—told one that it is no use making a fuss; this is life, they should have said, as Fanny said it now, looking at the large yellow globe marked with steamship lines.

“This is life. This is life,” said Fanny.

“A very hard face,” thought Miss Barrett, on the other side of the glass, buying maps of the Syrian desert and waiting impatiently to be served. “Girls look old so soon nowadays.”

The equator swam behind tears.

“Piccadilly?” Fanny asked the conductor of the omnibus, and climbed to the top. After all, he would, he must, come back to her.

But Jacob might have been thinking of Rome; of architecture; of jurisprudence; as he sat under the plane tree in Hyde Park.

The omnibus stopped outside Charing Cross; and behind it were clogged omnibuses, vans, motor-cars, for a procession with banners was passing down Whitehall, and elderly people were stiffly descending from between the paws of the slippery lions, where they had been testifying to their faith, singing lustily, raising their eyes from their music to look into the sky, and still their eyes were on the sky as they marched behind the gold letters of their creed.

The traffic stopped, and the sun, no longer sprayed out by the breeze, became almost too hot. But the procession passed; the banners glittered far away down Whitehall; the traffic was released; lurched on; spun to a smooth continuous uproar; swerving round the curve of Cockspur Street; and sweeping past Government offices and equestrian statues down Whitehall to the prickly spires, the tethered grey fleet of masonry, and the large white clock of Westminster.

Five strokes Big Ben intoned; Nelson received the salute. The wires of the Admiralty shivered with some far-away communication. A voice kept remarking that Prime Ministers and Viceroys spoke in the Reichstag; entered Lahore; said that the Emperor travelled; in Milan they rioted; said there were rumours in Vienna; said that the Ambassador at Constantinople had audience with the Sultan; the fleet was at Gibraltar. The voice continued, imprinting on the faces of the clerks in Whitehall (Timothy Durrant was one of them) something of its own inexorable gravity, as they listened, deciphered, wrote down. Papers accumulated, inscribed with the utterances of Kaisers, the statistics of rice-fields, the growling of hundreds of workpeople, plotting sedition in back streets, or gathering in the Calcutta bazaars, or mustering their forces in the uplands of Albania, where the hills are sand-coloured, and bones lie unburied.

The voice spoke plainly in the square quiet room with heavy tables, where one elderly man made notes on the margin of type-written sheets, his silver-topped umbrella leaning against the bookcase.

His head—bald, red-veined, hollow-looking—represented all the heads in the building. His head, with the amiable pale eyes, carried the burden of knowledge across the street; laid it before his colleagues, who came equally burdened; and then the sixteen gentlemen, lifting their pens or turning perhaps rather wearily in their chairs, decreed that the course of history should shape itself this way or that way, being manfully determined, as their faces showed, to impose some coherency upon Rajahs and Kaisers and the muttering in bazaars, the secret gatherings, plainly visible in Whitehall, of kilted peasants in Albanian uplands; to control the course of events.

Pitt and Chatham, Burke and Gladstone looked from side to side with fixed marble eyes and an air of immortal quiescence which perhaps the living may have envied, the air being full of whistling and concussions, as the procession with its banners passed down Whitehall. Moreover, some were troubled with dyspepsia; one had at that very moment cracked the glass of his spectacles; another spoke in Glasgow to-morrow; altogether they looked too red, fat, pale or lean, to be dealing, as the marble heads had dealt, with the course of history.

Timmy Durrant in his little room in the Admiralty, going to consult a Blue book, stopped for a moment by the window, and observed the placard tied round the lamp-post.

Miss Thomas, one of the typists, said to her friend that if the Cabinet was going to sit much longer she should miss her boy outside the Gaiety.

Timmy Durrant, returning with his Blue book under his arm, noticed a little knot of people at the street corner; conglomerated as though one of them knew something; and the others, pressing round him, looked up, looked down, looked along the street. What was it that he knew?

Timothy, placing the Blue book before him, studied a paper sent round by the Treasury for information. Mr. Crawley, his fellow-clerk, impaled a letter on a skewer.

Jacob rose from his chair in Hyde Park, tore his ticket to pieces, and walked away.

“Such a sunset,” wrote Mrs. Flanders in her letter to Archer at Singapore. “One couldn’t make up one’s mind to come indoors,” she wrote. “It seemed wicked to waste even a moment.”

The long windows of Kensington Palace flushed fiery rose as Jacob walked away; a flock of wild duck flew over the Serpentine; and the trees were stood against the sky, blackly, magnificently.

“Jacob,” wrote Mrs. Flanders, with the red light on her page, “is hard at work after his delightful journey …”

“The Kaiser,” the far-away voice remarked in Whitehall, “received me in audience.”

“Now I know that face—” said the Reverend Andrew Floyd, coming out of Carter’s shop in Piccadilly, “but who the dickens—?” and he watched Jacob, turned round to look at him, but could not be sure——

“Oh, Jacob Flanders!” he remembered in a flash.

But he was so tall; so unconscious; such a fine young fellow.

“I gave him Byron’s works,” Andrew Floyd mused, and started forward, as Jacob crossed the road; but hesitated, and let the moment pass, and lost the opportunity.

Another procession, without banners, was blocking Long Acre. Carriages, with dowagers in amethyst and gentlemen spotted with carnations, intercepted cabs and motor-cars turned in the opposite direction, in which jaded men in white waistcoats lolled, on their way home to shrubberies and billiard-rooms in Putney and Wimbledon.

Two barrel-organs played by the kerb, and horses coming out of Aldridge’s with white labels on their buttocks straddled across the road and were smartly jerked back.

Mrs. Durrant, sitting with Mr. Wortley in a motor-car, was impatient lest they should miss the overture.

But Mr. Wortley, always urbane, always in time for the overture, buttoned his gloves, and admired Miss Clara.

“A shame to spend such a night in the theatre!” said Mrs. Durrant, seeing all the windows of the coachmakers in Long Acre ablaze.

“Think of your moors!” said Mr. Wortley to Clara.

“Ah! but Clara likes this better,” Mrs. Durrant laughed.

“I don’t know—really,” said Clara, looking at the blazing windows. She started.

She saw Jacob.

“Who?” asked Mrs. Durrant sharply, leaning forward.

But she saw no one.

Under the arch of the Opera House large faces and lean ones, the powdered and the hairy, all alike were red in the sunset; and, quickened by the great hanging lamps with their repressed primrose lights, by the tramp, and the scarlet, and the pompous ceremony, some ladies looked for a moment into steaming bedrooms near by, where women with loose hair leaned out of windows, where girls—where children—(the long mirrors held the ladies suspended) but one must follow; one must not block the way.

Clara’s moors were fine enough. The Phoenicians slept under their piled grey rocks; the chimneys of the old mines pointed starkly; early moths blurred the heather-bells; cartwheels could be heard grinding on the road far beneath; and the suck and sighing of the waves sounded gently, persistently, for ever.

Shading her eyes with her hand Mrs. Pascoe stood in her cabbage-garden looking out to sea. Two steamers and a sailing-ship crossed each other; passed each other; and in the bay the gulls kept alighting on a log, rising high, returning again to the log, while some rode in upon the waves and stood on the rim of the water until the moon blanched all to whiteness.

Mrs. Pascoe had gone indoors long ago.

But the red light was on the columns of the Parthenon, and the Greek women who were knitting their stockings and sometimes crying to a child to come and have the insects picked from its head were as jolly as sand-martins in the heat, quarrelling, scolding, suckling their babies, until the ships in the Piraeus fired their guns.

The sound spread itself flat, and then went tunnelling its way with fitful explosions among the channels of the islands.

Darkness drops like a knife over Greece.

“The guns?” said Betty Flanders, half asleep, getting out of bed and going to the window, which was decorated with a fringe of dark leaves.

“Not at this distance,” she thought. “It is the sea.”

Again, far away, she heard the dull sound, as if nocturnal women were beating great carpets. There was Morty lost, and Seabrook dead; her sons fighting for their country. But were the chickens safe? Was that some one moving downstairs? Rebecca with the toothache? No. The nocturnal women were beating great carpets. Her hens shifted slightly on their perches.

[]

XIV

“He left everything just as it was,” Bonamy marvelled. “Nothing arranged. All his letters strewn about for any one to read. What did he expect? Did he think he would come back?” he mused, standing in the middle of Jacob’s room.

The eighteenth century has its distinction. These houses were built, say, a hundred and fifty years ago. The rooms are shapely, the ceilings high; over the doorways a rose or a ram’s skull is carved in the wood. Even the panels, painted in raspberry-coloured paint, have their distinction.

Bonamy took up a bill for a hunting-crop.

“That seems to be paid,” he said.

There were Sandra’s letters.

Mrs. Durrant was taking a party to Greenwich.

Lady Rocksbier hoped for the pleasure …

Listless is the air in an empty room, just swelling the curtain; the flowers in the jar shift. One fibre in the wicker arm-chair creaks, though no one sits there.

Bonamy crossed to the window. Pickford’s van swung down the street. The omnibuses were locked together at Mudie’s corner. Engines throbbed, and carters, jamming the brakes down, pulled their horses sharp up. A harsh and unhappy voice cried something unintelligible. And then suddenly all the leaves seemed to raise themselves.

“Jacob! Jacob!” cried Bonamy, standing by the window. The leaves sank down again.

“Such confusion everywhere!” exclaimed Betty Flanders, bursting open the bedroom door.

Bonamy turned away from the window.

“What am I to do with these, Mr. Bonamy?”

She held out a pair of Jacob’s old shoes.

[]

MRS.
DALLOWAY

by
Virginia Woolf

published
May 14, 1925
by
The Hogarth Press

mrs. dalloway

[section 1]    [section 2]

[section 3]    [section 4]

[section 5]    [section 6]

[section 7]    [section 8]

[section 9]    [section 10]

[section 11]

[]

[The text follows the 1947 Hogarth Press edition.]

Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.

For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer’s men were coming. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning—fresh as if issued to children on a beach.

What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, “Musing among the vegetables?”—was that it?—“I prefer men to cauliflowers”—was that it? He must have said it at breakfast one morning when she had gone out on to the terrace—Peter Walsh. He would be back from India one of these days, June or July, she forgot which, for his letters were awfully dull; it was his sayings one remembered; his eyes, his pocket-knife, his smile, his grumpiness and, when millions of things had utterly vanished—how strange it was!—a few sayings like this about cabbages.

She stiffened a little on the kerb, waiting for Durtnall’s van to pass. A charming woman, Scrope Purvis thought her (knowing her as one does know people who live next door to one in Westminster); a touch of the bird about her, of the jay, blue-green, light, vivacious, though she was over fifty, and grown very white since her illness. There she perched, never seeing him, waiting to cross, very upright.

For having lived in Westminster—how many years now? over twenty,—one feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza) before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can’t be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love life. In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.

For it was the middle of June. The War was over, except for some one like Mrs. Foxcroft at the Embassy last night eating her heart out because that nice boy was killed and now the old Manor House must go to a cousin; or Lady Bexborough who opened a bazaar, they said, with the telegram in her hand, John, her favourite, killed; but it was over; thank Heaven—over. It was June. The King and Queen were at the Palace. And everywhere, though it was still so early, there was a beating, a stirring of galloping ponies, tapping of cricket bats; Lords, Ascot, Ranelagh and all the rest of it; wrapped in the soft mesh of the grey-blue morning air, which, as the day wore on, would unwind them, and set down on their lawns and pitches the bouncing ponies, whose forefeet just struck the ground and up they sprung, the whirling young men, and laughing girls in their transparent muslins who, even now, after dancing all night, were taking their absurd woolly dogs for a run; and even now, at this hour, discreet old dowagers were shooting out in their motor cars on errands of mystery; and the shopkeepers were fidgeting in their windows with their paste and diamonds, their lovely old sea-green brooches in eighteenth-century settings to tempt Americans (but one must economise, not buy things rashly for Elizabeth), and she, too, loving it as she did with an absurd and faithful passion, being part of it, since her people were courtiers once in the time of the Georges, she, too, was going that very night to kindle and illuminate; to give her party. But how strange, on entering the Park, the silence; the mist; the hum; the slow-swimming happy ducks; the pouched birds waddling; and who should be coming along with his back against the Government buildings, most appropriately, carrying a despatch box stamped with the Royal Arms, who but Hugh Whitbread; her old friend Hugh—the admirable Hugh!

“Good-morning to you, Clarissa!” said Hugh, rather extravagantly, for they had known each other as children. “Where are you off to?”

“I love walking in London,” said Mrs. Dalloway. “Really, it’s better than walking in the country.”

They had just come up—unfortunately—to see doctors. Other people came to see pictures; go to the opera; take their daughters out; the Whitbreads came “to see doctors.” Times without number Clarissa had visited Evelyn Whitbread in a nursing home. Was Evelyn ill again? Evelyn was a good deal out of sorts, said Hugh, intimating by a kind of pout or swell of his very well-covered, manly, extremely handsome, perfectly upholstered body (he was almost too well dressed always, but presumably had to be, with his little job at Court) that his wife had some internal ailment, nothing serious, which, as an old friend, Clarissa Dalloway would quite understand without requiring him to specify. Ah yes, she did of course; what a nuisance; and felt very sisterly and oddly conscious at the same time of her hat. Not the right hat for the early morning, was that it? For Hugh always made her feel, as he bustled on, raising his hat rather extravagantly and assuring her that she might be a girl of eighteen, and of course he was coming to her party to-night, Evelyn absolutely insisted, only a little late he might be after the party at the Palace to which he had to take one of Jim’s boys,—she always felt a little skimpy beside Hugh; schoolgirlish; but attached to him, partly from having known him always, but she did think him a good sort in his own way, though Richard was nearly driven mad by him, and as for Peter Walsh, he had never to this day forgiven her for liking him.

She could remember scene after scene at Bourton—Peter furious; Hugh not, of course, his match in any way, but still not a positive imbecile as Peter made out; not a mere barber’s block. When his old mother wanted him to give up shooting or to take her to Bath he did it, without a word; he was really unselfish, and as for saying, as Peter did, that he had no heart, no brain, nothing but the manners and breeding of an English gentleman, that was only her dear Peter at his worst; and he could be intolerable; he could be impossible; but adorable to walk with on a morning like this.

(June had drawn out every leaf on the trees. The mothers of Pimlico gave suck to their young. Messages were passing from the Fleet to the Admiralty. Arlington Street and Piccadilly seemed to chafe the very air in the Park and lift its leaves hotly, brilliantly, on waves of that divine vitality which Clarissa loved. To dance, to ride, she had adored all that.)

For they might be parted for hundreds of years, she and Peter; she never wrote a letter and his were dry sticks; but suddenly it would come over her, if he were with me now what would he say?—some days, some sights bringing him back to her calmly, without the old bitterness; which perhaps was the reward of having cared for people; they came back in the middle of St. James’s Park on a fine morning—indeed they did. But Peter—however beautiful the day might be, and the trees and the grass, and the little girl in pink—Peter never saw a thing of all that. He would put on his spectacles, if she told him to; he would look. It was the state of the world that interested him; Wagner, Pope’s poetry, people’s characters eternally, and the defects of her own soul. How he scolded her! How they argued! She would marry a Prime Minister and stand at the top of a staircase; the perfect hostess he called her (she had cried over it in her bedroom), she had the makings of the perfect hostess, he said.

So she would still find herself arguing in St. James’s Park, still making out that she had been right—and she had too—not to marry him. For in marriage a little licence, a little independence there must be between people living together day in day out in the same house; which Richard gave her, and she him. (Where was he this morning, for instance? Some committee, she never asked what.) But with Peter everything had to be shared; everything gone into. And it was intolerable, and when it came to that scene in the little garden by the fountain, she had to break with him or they would have been destroyed, both of them ruined, she was convinced; though she had borne about her for years like an arrow sticking in her heart the grief, the anguish: and then the horror of the moment when some one told her at a concert that he had married a woman met on the boat going to India! Never should she forget all that. Cold, heartless, a prude, he called her. Never could she understand how he cared. But those Indian women did presumably—silly, pretty, flimsy nincompoops. And she wasted her pity. For he was quite happy, he assured her—perfectly happy, though he had never done a thing that they talked of; his whole life had been a failure. It made her angry still.

She had reached the Park gates. She stood for a moment, looking at the omnibuses in Piccadilly.

She would not say of any one in the world now that they were this or were that. She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxicabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day. Not that she thought herself clever, or much out of the ordinary. How she had got through life on the few twigs of knowledge Fräulein Daniels gave them she could not think. She knew nothing; no language, no history; she scarcely read a book now, except memoirs in bed; and yet to her it was absolutely absorbing; all this; the cabs passing; and she would not say of Peter, she would not say of herself, I am this, I am that.

Her only gift was knowing people almost by instinct, she thought, walking on. If you put her in a room with some one, up went her back like a cat’s; or she purred. Devonshire House, Bath House, the house with the china cockatoo, she had seen them all lit up once; and remembered Sylvia, Fred, Sally Seton—such hosts of people; and dancing all night; and the waggons plodding past to market; and driving home across the Park. She remembered once throwing a shilling into the Serpentine. But every one remembered; what she loved was this, here, now, in front of her; the fat lady in the cab. Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely? but that somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived, Peter survived, lived in each other, she being part, she was positive, of the trees at home; of the house there, ugly, rambling all to bits and pieces as it was; part of people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had seen the trees lift the mist, but it spread ever so far, her life, herself. But what was she dreaming as she looked into Hatchards’ shop window? What was she trying to recover? What image of white dawn in the country, as she read in the book spread open:

Fear no more the heat o’ the sun

Nor the furious winter’s rages.

This late age of world’s experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears. Tears and sorrows; courage and endurance; a perfectly upright and stoical bearing. Think, for example, of the woman she admired most, Lady Bexborough, opening the bazaar.

There were Jorrocks’ Jaunts and Jollities; there were Soapy Sponge and Mrs. Asquith’s Memoirs and Big Game Shooting in Nigeria, all spread open. Ever so many books there were; but none that seemed exactly right to take to Evelyn Whitbread in her nursing home. Nothing that would serve to amuse her and make that indescribably dried-up little woman look, as Clarissa came in, just for a moment cordial; before they settled down for the usual interminable talk of women’s ailments. How much she wanted it—that people should look pleased as she came in, Clarissa thought and turned and walked back towards Bond Street, annoyed, because it was silly to have other reasons for doing things. Much rather would she have been one of those people like Richard who did things for themselves, whereas, she thought, waiting to cross, half the time she did things not simply, not for themselves; but to make people think this or that; perfect idiocy she knew (and now the policeman held up his hand) for no one was ever for a second taken in. Oh if she could have had her life over again! she thought, stepping on to the pavement, could have looked even differently!

She would have been, in the first place, dark like Lady Bexborough, with a skin of crumpled leather and beautiful eyes. She would have been, like Lady Bexborough, slow and stately; rather large; interested in politics like a man; with a country house; very dignified, very sincere. Instead of which she had a narrow pea-stick figure; a ridiculous little face, beaked like a bird’s. That she held herself well was true; and had nice hands and feet; and dressed well, considering that she spent little. But often now this body she wore (she stopped to look at a Dutch picture), this body, with all its capacities, seemed nothing—nothing at all. She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having of children now, but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them, up Bond Street, this being Mrs. Dalloway; not even Clarissa any more; this being Mrs. Richard Dalloway.

Bond Street fascinated her; Bond Street early in the morning in the season; its flags flying; its shops; no splash; no glitter; one roll of tweed in the shop where her father had bought his suits for fifty years; a few pearls; salmon on an iceblock.

“That is all,” she said, looking at the fishmonger’s. “That is all,” she repeated, pausing for a moment at the window of a glove shop where, before the War, you could buy almost perfect gloves. And her old Uncle William used to say a lady is known by her shoes and her gloves. He had turned on his bed one morning in the middle of the War. He had said, “I have had enough.” Gloves and shoes; she had a passion for gloves; but her own daughter, her Elizabeth, cared not a straw for either of them.

Not a straw, she thought, going on up Bond Street to a shop where they kept flowers for her when she gave a party. Elizabeth really cared for her dog most of all. The whole house this morning smelt of tar. Still, better poor Grizzle than Miss Kilman; better distemper and tar and all the rest of it than sitting mewed in a stuffy bedroom with a prayer book! Better anything, she was inclined to say. But it might be only a phase, as Richard said, such as all girls go through. It might be falling in love. But why with Miss Kilman? who had been badly treated of course; one must make allowances for that, and Richard said she was very able, had a really historical mind. Anyhow they were inseparable, and Elizabeth, her own daughter, went to Communion; and how she dressed, how she treated people who came to lunch she did not care a bit, it being her experience that the religious ecstasy made people callous (so did causes); dulled their feelings, for Miss Kilman would do anything for the Russians, starved herself for the Austrians, but in private inflicted positive torture, so insensitive was she, dressed in a green mackintosh coat. Year in year out she wore that coat; she perspired; she was never in the room five minutes without making you feel her superiority, your inferiority; how poor she was; how rich you were; how she lived in a slum without a cushion or a bed or a rug or whatever it might be, all her soul rusted with that grievance sticking in it, her dismissal from school during the War—poor, embittered, unfortunate creature! For it was not her one hated but the idea of her, which undoubtedly had gathered in to itself a great deal that was not Miss Kilman; had become one of those spectres with which one battles in the night; one of those spectres who stand astride us and suck up half our life-blood, dominators and tyrants; for no doubt with another throw of the dice, had the black been uppermost and not the white, she would have loved Miss Kilman! But not in this world. No.

It rasped her, though, to have stirring about in her this brutal monster! to hear twigs cracking and feel hooves planted down in the depths of that leaf-encumbered forest, the soul; never to be content quite, or quite secure, for at any moment the brute would be stirring, this hatred, which, especially since her illness, had power to make her feel scraped, hurt in her spine; gave her physical pain, and made all pleasure in beauty, in friendship, in being well, in being loved and making her home delightful,rock, quiver, and bend as if indeed there were a monster grubbing at the roots, as if the whole panoply of content were nothing but self love! this hatred!

Nonsense, nonsense! she cried to herself, pushing through the swing doors of Mulberry’s the florists.

She advanced, light, tall, very upright, to be greeted at once by button-faced Miss Pym, whose hands were always bright red, as if they had been stood in cold water with the flowers.

There were flowers: delphiniums, sweet peas, bunches of lilac; and carnations, masses of carnations. There were roses; there were irises. Ah yes—so she breathed in the earthy-garden sweet smell as she stood talking to Miss Pym who owed her help, and thought her kind, for kind she had been years ago; very kind, but she looked older, this year, turning her head from side to side among the irises and roses and nodding tufts of lilac with her eyes half closed, snuffing in, after the street uproar, the delicious scent, the exquisite coolness. And then, opening her eyes, how fresh, like frilled linen clean from a laundry laid in wicker trays, the roses looked; and dark and prim the red carnations, holding their heads up; and all the sweet peas spreading in their bowls, tinged violet, snow white, pale—as if it were the evening and girls in muslin frocks came out to pick sweet peas and roses after the superb summer’s day, with its almost blue-black sky, its delphiniums, its carnations, its arum lilies, was over; and it was the moment between six and seven when every flower—roses, carnations, irises, lilac—glows; white, violet, red, deep orange; every flower seems to burn by itself, softly, purely in the misty beds; and how she loved the grey white moths spinning in and out, over the cherry pie, over the evening primroses!

And as she began to go with Miss Pym from jar to jar, choosing, nonsense, nonsense, she said to herself, more and more gently, as if this beauty, this scent, this colour, and Miss Pym liking her, trusting her, were a wave which she let flow over her and surmount that hatred, that monster, surmount it all; and it lifted her up and up when—oh! a pistol shot in the street outside!

“Dear, those motor cars,” said Miss Pym, going to the window to look, and coming back and smiling apologetically with her hands full of sweet peas, as if those motor cars, those tyres of motor cars, were all her fault.

The violent explosion which made Mrs. Dalloway jump and Miss Pym go to the window and apologise came from a motor car which had drawn to the side of the pavement precisely opposite Mulberry’s shop window. Passers-by, who, of course, stopped and stared, had just time to see a face of the very greatest importance against the dove-grey upholstery, before a male hand drew the blind and there was nothing to be seen except a square of dove grey.

Yet rumours were at once in circulation from the middle of Bond Street to Oxford Street on one side, to Atkinson’s scent shop on the other, passing invisibly, inaudibly, like a cloud, swift, veil-like upon hills, falling indeed with something of a cloud’s sudden sobriety and stillness upon faces which a second before had been utterly disorderly. But now mystery had brushed them with her wing; they had heard the voice of authority; the spirit of religion was abroad with her eyes bandaged tight and her lips gaping wide. But nobody knew whose face had been seen. Was it the Prince of Wales’s, the Queen’s, the Prime Minister’s? Whose face was it? Nobody knew.

Edgar J. Watkiss, with his roll of lead piping round his arm, said audibly, humorously of course: “The Proime Minister’s kyar.”

Septimus Warren Smith, who found himself unable to pass, heard him.

Septimus Warren Smith, aged about thirty, pale-faced, beak-nosed, wearing brown shoes and a shabby overcoat, with hazel eyes which had that look of apprehension in them which makes complete strangers apprehensive too. The world has raised its whip; where will it descend?

Everything had come to a standstill. The throb of the motor engines sounded like a pulse irregularly drumming through an entire body. The sun became extraordinarily hot because the motor car had stopped outside Mulberry’s shop window; old ladies on the tops of omnibuses spread their black parasols; here a green, here a red parasol opened with a little pop. Mrs. Dalloway, coming to the window with her arms full of sweet peas, looked out with her little pink face pursed in inquiry. Every one looked at the motor car. Septimus looked. Boys on bicycles sprang off. Traffic accumulated. And there the motor car stood, with drawn blinds, and upon them a curious pattern like a tree, Septimus thought, and this gradual drawing together of everything to one centre before his eyes, as if some horror had come almost to the surface and was about to burst into flames, terrified him. The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames. It is I who am blocking the way, he thought. Was he not being looked at and pointed at; was he not weighted there, rooted to the pavement, for a purpose? But for what purpose?

“Let us go on, Septimus,” said his wife, a little woman, with large eyes in a sallow pointed face; an Italian girl.

But Lucrezia herself could not help looking at the motor car and the tree pattern on the blinds. Was it the Queen in there—the Queen going shopping?

The chauffeur, who had been opening something, turning something, shutting something, got on to the box.

“Come on,” said Lucrezia.

But her husband, for they had been married four, five years now, jumped, started, and said, “All right!” angrily, as if she had interrupted him.

People must notice; people must see. People, she thought, looking at the crowd staring at the motor car; the English people, with their children and their horses and their clothes, which she admired in a way; but they were “people” now, because Septimus had said, “I will kill myself”; an awful thing to say. Suppose they had heard him? She looked at the crowd. Help, help! she wanted to cry out to butchers’ boys and women. Help! Only last autumn she and Septimus had stood on the Embankment wrapped in the same cloak and, Septimus reading a paper instead of talking, she had snatched it from him and laughed in the old man’s face who saw them! But failure one conceals. She must take him away into some park.

“Now we will cross,” she said.

She had a right to his arm, though it was without feeling. He would give her, who was so simple, so impulsive, only twenty-four, without friends in England, who had left Italy for his sake, a piece of bone.

The motor car with its blinds drawn and an air of inscrutable reserve proceeded towards Piccadilly, still gazed at, still ruffling the faces on both sides of the street with the same dark breath of veneration whether for Queen, Prince, or Prime Minister nobody knew. The face itself had been seen only once by three people for a few seconds. Even the sex was now in dispute. But there could be no doubt that greatness was seated within; greatness was passing, hidden, down Bond Street, removed only by a hand’s-breadth from ordinary people who might now, for the first time and last, be within speaking distance of the majesty of England, of the enduring symbol of the state which will be known to curious antiquaries, sifting the ruins of time, when London is a grass-grown path and all those hurrying along the pavement this Wednesday morning are but bones with a few wedding rings mixed up in their dust and the gold stoppings of innumerable decayed teeth. The face in the motor car will then be known.

It is probably the Queen, thought Mrs. Dalloway, coming out of Mulberry’s with her flowers: the Queen. And for a second she wore a look of extreme dignity standing by the flower shop in the sunlight while the car passed at a foot’s pace, with its blinds drawn. The Queen going to some hospital; the Queen opening some bazaar, thought Clarissa.

The crush was terrific for the time of day. Lords, Ascot, Hurlingham, what was it? she wondered, for the street was blocked. The British middle classes sitting sideways on the tops of omnibuses with parcels and umbrellas, yes, even furs on a day like this, were, she thought, more ridiculous, more unlike anything there has ever been than one could conceive; and the Queen herself held up; the Queen herself unable to pass. Clarissa was suspended on one side of Brook Street; Sir John Buckhurst, the old Judge, on the other, with the car between them (Sir John had laid down the law for years and liked a well-dressed woman) when the chauffeur, leaning ever so slightly, said or showed something to the policeman, who saluted and raised his arm and jerked his head and moved the omnibus to the side and the car passed through. Slowly and very silently it took its way.

Clarissa guessed; Clarissa knew of course; she had seen something white, magical, circular, in the footman’s hand, a disc inscribed with a name,—the Queen’s, the Prince of Wales’s, the Prime Minister’s?—which, by force of its own lustre, burnt its way through (Clarissa saw the car diminishing, disappearing), to blaze among candelabras, glittering stars, breasts stiff with oak leaves, Hugh Whitbread and all his colleagues, the gentlemen of England, that night in Buckingham Palace. And Clarissa, too, gave a party. She stiffened a little; so she would stand at the top of her stairs.

The car had gone, but it had left a slight ripple which flowed through glove shops and hat shops and tailors’ shops on both sides of Bond Street. For thirty seconds all heads were inclined the same way—to the window. Choosing a pair of gloves—should they be to the elbow or above it, lemon or pale grey?—ladies stopped; when the sentence was finished something had happened. Something so trifling in single instances that no mathematical instrument, though capable of transmitting shocks in China, could register the vibration; yet in its fullness rather formidable and in its common appeale motional; for in all the hat shops and tailors’ shops strangers looked at each other and thought of the dead; of the flag; of Empire. In a public-house in a back street a Colonial insulted the House of Windsor, which led to words, broken beer glasses, and a general shindy, which echoed strangely across the way in the ears of girls buying white underlinen threaded with pure white ribbon for their weddings. For the surface agitation of the passing car as it sunk grazed something very profound.

Gliding across Piccadilly, the car turned down St. James’s Street. Tall men, men of robust physique, well-dressed men with their tail-coats and their white slips and their hair raked back, who, for reasons difficult to discriminate, were standing in the bow window of White’s with their hands behind the tails of their coats, looking out, perceived instinctively that greatness was passing, and the pale light of the immortal presence fell upon them as it had fallen upon Clarissa Dalloway. At once they stood even straighter, and removed their hands, and seemed ready to attend their Sovereign, if need be, to the cannon’s mouth, as their ancestors had done before them. The white busts and the little tables in the background covered with copies of the Tatler and bottles of soda water seemed to approve; seemed to indicate the flowing corn and the manor houses of England; and to return the frail hum of the motor wheels as the walls of a whispering gallery return a single voice expanded and made sonorous by the might of a whole cathedral. Shawled Moll Pratt with her flowers on the pavement wished the dear boy well (it was the Prince of Wales for certain) and would have tossed the price of a pot of beer—a bunch of roses—into St. James’s Street out of sheer light-heartedness and contempt of poverty had she not seen the constable’s eye upon her, discouraging an old Irishwoman’s loyalty. The sentries at St. James’s saluted; Queen Alexandra’s policeman approved.

A small crowd, meanwhile, had gathered at the gates of Buckingham Palace. Listlessly, yet confidently, poor people all of them, they waited; looked at the Palace itself with the flag flying; at Victoria, billowing on her mound, admired her shelves of running water, her geraniums; singled out from the motor cars in the Mall first this one, then that; bestowed emotion, vainly, upon commoners out for a drive; recalled their tribute to keep it unspent while this car passed and that; and all the time let rumour accumulate in their veins and thrill the nerves in their thighs at the thought of Royalty looking at them; the Queen bowing; the Prince saluting; at the thought of the heavenly life divinely bestowed upon Kings; of the equerries and deep curtsies; of the Queen’s old doll’s house; of Princess Mary married to an Englishman, and the Prince—ah! the Prince! who took wonderfully, they said, after old King Edward, but was ever so much slimmer. The Prince lived at St. James’s; but he might come along in the morning to visit his mother.

So Sarah Bletchley said with her baby in her arms, tipping her foot up and down as though she were by her own fender in Pimlico, but keeping her eyes on the Mall, while Emily Coates ranged over the Palace windows and thought of the housemaids, the innumerable housemaids, the bedrooms, the innumerable bedrooms. Joined by an elderly gentleman with an Aberdeen terrier, by men without occupation, the crowd increased. Little Mr. Bowley, who had rooms in the Albany and was sealed with wax over the deeper sources of life, but could be unsealed suddenly, inappropriately, sentimentally, by this sort of thing—poor women waiting to see the Queen go past—poor women, nice little children, orphans, widows, the War—tut-tut—actually had tears in his eyes. A breeze flaunting ever so warmly down the Mall through the thin trees, past the bronze heroes, lifted some flag flying in the British breast of Mr. Bowley and he raised his hat as the car turned into the Mall and held it high as the car approached and let the poor mothers of Pimlico press close to him, and stood very upright. The car came on.

Suddenly Mrs. Coates looked up into the sky. The sound of an aeroplane bored ominously into the ears of the crowd. There it was coming over the trees, letting out white smoke from behind, which curled and twisted, actually writing something! making letters in the sky! Every one looked up.

Dropping dead down, the aeroplane soared straight up, curved in a loop, raced, sank, rose, and whatever it did, wherever it went, out fluttered behind it a thick ruffled bar of white smoke which curled and wreathed upon the sky in letters. But what letters? A C was it? an E, then an L? Only for a moment did they lie still; then they moved and melted and were rubbed out up in the sky, and the aeroplane shot further away and again, in a fresh space of sky, began writing a K, and E, a Y perhaps?

“Blaxo,” said Mrs. Coates in a strained, awe-stricken voice, gazing straight up, and her baby, lying stiff and white in her arms, gazed straight up.

“Kreemo,” murmured Mrs. Bletchley, like a sleep-walker. With his hat held out perfectly still in his hand, Mr. Bowley gazed straight up. All down the Mall people were standing and looking up into the sky. As they looked the whole world became perfectly silent, and a flight of gulls crossed the sky, first one gull leading, then another, and in this extraordinary silence and peace, in this pallor, in this purity, bells struck eleven times, the sound fading up there among the gulls.

The aeroplane turned and raced and swooped exactly where it liked, swiftly, freely, like a skater—

“That’s an E,” said Mrs. Bletchley—or a dancer—

“It’s toffee,” murmured Mr. Bowley—
(and the car went in at the gates and nobody looked at it), and shutting off the smoke, away and away it rushed, and the smoke faded and assembled itself round the broad white shapes of the clouds.

It had gone; it was behind the clouds. There was no sound. The clouds to which the letters E, G, or L had attached themselves moved freely, as if destined to cross from West to East on a mission of the greatest importance which would never be revealed, and yet certainly so it was—a mission of the greatest importance. Then suddenly, as a train comes out of a tunnel, the aeroplane rushed out of the clouds again, the sound boring into the ears of all people in the Mall, in the Green Park, in Piccadilly, in Regent Street, in Regent’s Park, and the bar of smoke curved behind and it dropped down, and it soared up and wrote one letter after another—but what word was it writing?

Lucrezia Warren Smith, sitting by her husband’s side on a seat in Regent’s Park in the Broad Walk, looked up.

“Look, look, Septimus!” she cried. For Dr. Holmes had told her to make her husband (who had nothing whatever seriously the matter with him but was a little out of sorts) take an interest in things outside himself.

So, thought Septimus, looking up, they are signalling to me. Not indeed in actual words; that is, he could not read the language yet; but it was plain enough, this beauty, this exquisite beauty, and tears filled his eyes as he looked at the smoke words languishing and melting in the sky and bestowing upon him, in their inexhaustible charity and laughing goodness, one shape after another of unimaginable beauty and signalling their intention to provide him, for nothing, for ever, for looking merely, with beauty, more beauty! Tears ran down his cheeks.

It was toffee; they were advertising toffee, a nursemaid told Rezia. Together they began to spell t … o … f …

“K … R …” said the nursemaid, and Septimus heard her say “Kay Arr” close to his ear, deeply, softly, like a mellow organ, but with a roughness in her voice like a grasshopper’s, which rasped his spine deliciously and sent running up into his brain waves of sound which, concussing, broke. A marvellous discovery indeed—that the human voice in certain atmospheric conditions (for one must be scientific, above all scientific) can quicken trees into life! Happily Rezia put her hand with a tremendous weight on his knee so that he was weighted down, transfixed, or the excitement of the elm trees rising and falling, rising and falling with all their leaves alight and the colour thinning and thickening from blue to the green of a hollow wave, like plumes on horses’ heads, feathers on ladies’, so proudly they rose and fell, so superbly, would have sent him mad. But he would not go mad. He would shut his eyes; he would see no more.

But they beckoned; leaves were alive; trees were alive. And the leaves being connected by millions of fibres with his own body, there on the seat, fanned it up and down; when the branch stretched he, too, made that statement. The sparrows fluttering, rising, and falling in jagged fountains were part of the pattern; the white and blue, barred with black branches. Sounds made harmonies with premeditation; the spaces between them were as significant as the sounds. A child cried. Rightly far away a horn sounded. All taken together meant the birth of a new religion——

“Septimus!” said Rezia. He started violently. People must notice.

“I am going to walk to the fountain and back,” she said.

For she could stand it no longer. Dr. Holmes might say there was nothing the matter. Far rather would she that he were dead! She could not sit beside him when he stared so and did not see her and made everything terrible; sky and tree, children playing, dragging carts, blowing whistles, falling down; all were terrible. And he would not kill himself; and she could tell no one. “Septimus has been working too hard”—that was all she could say to her own mother. To love makes one solitary, she thought. She could tell nobody, not even Septimus now, and looking back, she saw him sitting in his shabby overcoat alone, on the seat, hunched up, staring. And it was cowardly for a man to say he would kill himself, but Septimus had fought; he was brave; he was not Septimus now. She put on her lace collar. She put on her new hat and he never noticed; and he was happy without her. Nothing could make her happy without him! Nothing! He was selfish. So men are. For he was not ill. Dr. Holmes said there was nothing the matter with him. She spread her hand before her. Look! Her wedding ring slipped—she had grown so thin. It was she who suffered—but she had nobody to tell.

Far was Italy and the white houses and the room where her sisters sat making hats, and the streets crowded every evening with people walking, laughing out loud, not half alive like people here, huddled up in Bath chairs, looking at a few ugly flowers stuck in pots!

“For you should see the Milan gardens,” she said aloud. But to whom?

There was nobody. Her words faded. So a rocket fades. Its sparks, having grazed their way into the night, surrender to it, dark descends, pours over the outlines of houses and towers; bleak hill-sides soften and fall in. But though they are gone, the night is full of them; robbed of colour, blank of windows, they exist more ponderously, give out what the frank daylight fails to transmit—the trouble and suspense of things conglomerated there in the darkness; huddled together in the darkness; reft of the relief which dawn brings when, washing the walls white and grey, spotting each window-pane, lifting the mist from the fields, showing the red-brown cows peacefully grazing, all is once more decked out to the eye; exists again. I am alone; I am alone! she cried, by the fountain in Regent’s Park (staring at the Indian and his cross), as perhaps at midnight, when all boundaries are lost, the country reverts to its ancient shape, as the Romans saw it, lying cloudy, when they landed, and the hills had no names and rivers wound they knew not where—such was her darkness; when suddenly, as if a shelf were shot forth and she stood on it, she said how she was his wife, married years ago in Milan, his wife, and would never, never tell that he was mad! Turning, the shelf fell; down, down she dropped. For he was gone, she thought—gone, as he threatened, to kill himself—to throw himself under a cart! But no; there he was; still sitting alone on the seat, in his shabby overcoat, his legs crossed, staring, talking aloud.

Men must not cut down trees. There is a God. (He noted such revelations on the backs of envelopes.) Change the world. No one kills from hatred. Make it known (he wrote it down). He waited. He listened. A sparrow perched on the railing opposite chirped Septimus, Septimus, four or five times over and went on, drawing its notes out, to sing freshly and piercingly in Greek words how there is no crime and, joined by another sparrow, they sang in voices prolonged and piercing in Greek words, from trees in the meadow of life beyond a river where the dead walk, how there is no death.

There was his hand; there the dead. White things were assembling behind the railings opposite. But he dared not look. Evans was behind the railings!

“What are you saying?” said Rezia suddenly, sitting down by him.

Interrupted again! She was always interrupting.

Away from people—they must get away from people, he said (jumping up), right away over there, where there were chairs beneath a tree and the long slope of the park dipped like a length of green stuff with a ceiling cloth of blue and pink smoke high above, and there was a rampart of far, irregular houses, hazed in smoke, the traffic hummed in a circle, and on the right, dun-coloured animals stretched long necks over the Zoo palings, barking, howling. There they sat down under a tree.

“Look,” she implored him, pointing at a little troop of boys carrying cricket stumps, and one shuffled, spun round on his heel and shuffled, as if he were acting a clown at the music hall.

“Look,” she implored him, for Dr. Holmes had told her to make him notice real things, go to a music hall, play cricket—that was the very game, Dr. Holmes said, a nice out-of-door game, the very game for her husband.

“Look,” she repeated.

Look, the unseen bade him, the voice which now communicated with him who was the greatest of mankind, Septimus, lately taken from life to death, the Lord who had come to renew society, who lay like a coverlet, a snow blanket smitten only by the sun, for ever unwasted, suffering for ever, the scapegoat, the eternal sufferer, but he did not want it, he moaned, putting from him with a wave of his hand that eternal suffering, that eternal loneliness.

“Look,” she repeated, for he must not talk aloud to himself out of doors.

“Oh, look,” she implored him. But what was there to look at? A few sheep. That was all.

The way to Regent’s Park Tube station—could they tell her the way to Regent’s Park Tube station—Maisie Johnson wanted to know. She was only up from Edinburgh two days ago.

“Not this way—over there!” Rezia exclaimed, waving her aside, lest she should see Septimus.

Both seemed queer, Maisie Johnson thought. Everything seemed very queer. In London for the first time, come to take up a post at her uncle’s in Leadenhall Street, and now walking through Regent’s Park in the morning, this couple on the chairs gave her quite a turn: the young woman seeming foreign, the man looking queer; so that should she be very old she would still remember and make it jangle again among her memories how she had walked through Regent’s Park on a fine summer’s morning fifty years ago. For she was only nineteen and had got her way at last, to come to London; and now how queer it was, this couple she had asked the way of, and the girl started and jerked her hand, and the man—he seemed awfully odd; quarrelling, perhaps; parting for ever, perhaps; something was up, she knew; and now all these people (for she returned to the Broad Walk), the stone basins, the prim flowers, the old men and women, invalids most of them in Bath chairs—all seemed, after Edinburgh, so queer. And Maisie Johnson, as she joined that gently trudging, vaguely gazing, breeze-kissed company—squirrels perching and preening, sparrow fountains fluttering for crumbs, dogs busy with the railings, busy with each other, while the soft warm air washed over them and lent to the fixed unsurprised gaze with which they received life, something whimsical and mollified—Maisie Johnson positively felt she must cry Oh! (for that young man on the seat had given her quite a turn. Something was up, she knew).

Horror! horror! she wanted to cry. (She had left her people; they had warned her what would happen.)

Why hadn’t she stayed at home? she cried, twisting the knob of the iron railing.

That girl, thought Mrs. Dempster (who saved crusts for the squirrels and often ate her lunch in Regent’s Park), don’t know a thing yet; and really it seemed to her better to be a little stout, a little slack, a little moderate in one’s expectations. Percy drank. Well, better to have a son, thought Mrs. Dempster. She had had a hard time of it, and couldn’t help smiling at a girl like that. You’ll get married, for you’re pretty enough, thought Mrs. Dempster. Get married, she thought, and then you’ll know. Oh, the cooks, and so on. Every man has his ways. But whether I’d have chosen quite like that if I could have known, thought Mrs. Dempster, and could not help wishing to whisper a word to Maisie Johnson; to feel on the creased pouch of her worn old face the kiss of pity. For it’s been a hard life, thought Mrs. Dempster. What hadn’t she given to it? Roses; figure; her feet too. (She drew the knobbed lumps beneath her skirt.)

Roses, she thought sardonically. All trash, m’dear. For really, what with eating, drinking, and mating, the bad days and good, life had been no mere matter of roses, and what was more, let me tell you, Carrie Dempster had no wish to change her lot with any woman’s in Kentish Town! But, she implored, pity. Pity, for the loss of roses. Pity she asked of Maisie Johnson, standing by the hyacinth beds.

Ah, but that aeroplane! Hadn’t Mrs. Dempster always longed to see foreign parts? She had a nephew, a missionary. It soared and shot. She always went on the sea at Margate, not out o’ sight of land, but she had no patience with women who were afraid of water. It swept and fell. Her stomach was in her mouth. Up again. There’s a fine young feller aboard of it, Mrs. Dempster wagered, and away and away it went, fast and fading, away and away the aeroplane shot: soaring over Greenwich and all the masts; over the little island of grey churches, St. Paul’s and the rest, till, on either side of London, fields spread out and dark brown woods where adventurous thrushes, hopping boldly, glancing quickly, snatched the snail and tapped him on a stone, once, twice, thrice.

Away and away the aeroplane shot, till it was nothing but a bright spark; an aspiration; a concentration; a symbol (so it seemed to Mr. Bentley, vigorously rolling his strip of turf at Greenwich) of man’s soul; of his determination, thought Mr. Bentley, sweeping round the cedar tree, to get outside his body, beyond his house, by means of thought, Einstein, speculation, mathematics, the Mendelian theory—away the aeroplane shot.

Then, while a seedy-looking nondescript man carrying a leather bag stood on the steps of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and hesitated, for within was what balm, how great a welcome, how many tombs with banners waving over them, tokens of victories not over armies, but over, he thought, that plaguy spirit of truth seeking which leaves me at present without a situation, and more than that, the cathedral offers company, he thought, invites you to membership of a society; great men belong to it; martyrs have died for it; why not enter in, he thought, put this leather bag stuffed with pamphlets before an altar, a cross, the symbol of something which has soared beyond seeking and questing and knocking of words together and has become all spirit, disembodied, ghostly—why not enter in? he thought, and while he hesitated out flew the aeroplane over Ludgate Circus.

It was strange; it was still. Not a sound was to be heard above the traffic. Unguided it seemed; sped of its own free will. And now, curving up and up, straight up, like something mounting in ecstasy, in pure delight, out from behind poured white smoke looping, writing a T, and O, an F.

“What are they looking at?” said Clarissa Dalloway to the maid who opened her door.

The hall of the house was cool as a vault. Mrs. Dalloway raised her hand to her eyes, and, as the maid shut the door to, and she heard the swish of Lucy’s skirts, she felt like a nun who has left the world and feels fold round her the familiar veils and the response to old devotions. The cook whistled in the kitchen. She heard the click of the typewriter. It was her life, and, bending her head over the hall table, she bowed beneath the influence, felt blessed and purified, saying to herself, as she took the pad with the telephone message on it, how moments like this are buds on the tree of life, flowers of darkness they are, she thought (as if some lovely rose had blossomed for her eyes only); not for a moment did she believe in God; but all the more, she thought, taking up the pad, must one repay in daily life to servants, yes, to dogs and canaries, above all to Richard her husband, who was the foundation of it—of the gay sounds, of the green lights, of the cook even whistling, for Mrs. Walker was Irish and whistled all day long—one must pay back from this secret deposit of exquisite moments, she thought, lifting the pad, while Lucy stood by her, trying to explain how

“Mr. Dalloway, ma’am——”

Clarissa read on the telephone pad, “Lady Bruton wishes to know if Mr. Dalloway will lunch with her to-day.”

“Mr. Dalloway, ma’am, told me to tell you he would be lunching out.”

“Dear!” said Clarissa, and Lucy shared as she meant her to her disappointment (but not the pang); felt the concord between them; took the hint; thought how the gentry love; gilded her own future with calm; and taking Mrs. Dalloway’s parasol, handled it like a sacred weapon which a goddess, having acquitted herself honourably in the field of battle, sheds, and placed it in the umbrella stand.

“Fear no more,” said Clarissa. Fear no more the heat o’ the sun; for the shock of Lady Bruton asking Richard to lunch without her made the moment in which she had stood shiver, as a plant on the river-bed feels the shock of a passing oar and shivers: so she rocked: so she shivered.

Millicent Bruton, whose lunch parties were said to be extraordinarily amusing, had not asked her. No vulgar jealousy could separate her from Richard. But she feared time itself, and read on Lady Bruton’s face, as if it had been a dial cut in impassive stone, the dwindling of life; how year by year her share was sliced; how little the margin that remained was capable any longer of stretching, of absorbing, as in the youthful years, the colours, salts, tones of existence, so that she filled the room she entered, and felt often, as she stood hesitating one moment on the threshold of her drawing-room, an exquisite suspense, such as might stay a diver before plunging while the sea darkens and brightens beneath him, and the waves which threaten to break, but only gently split their surface, roll and conceal and encrust as they just turn over the weeds with pearl.

She put the pad on the hall table. She began to go slowly upstairs, with her hand on the banisters, as if she had left a party, where now this friend now that had flashed back her face, her voice; had shut the door and gone out and stood alone, a single figure against the appalling night, or rather, to be accurate, against the stare of this matter-of-fact June morning; soft with the glow of rose petals for some, she knew, and felt it, as she paused by the open staircase window which let in blinds flapping, dogs barking, let in, she thought, feeling herself suddenly shrivelled, aged, breastless, the grinding, blowing, flowering of the day, out of doors, out of the window, out of her body and brain which now failed, since Lady Bruton, whose lunch parties were said to be extraordinarily amusing, had not asked her.

Like a nun withdrawing, or a child exploring a tower, she went, upstairs, paused at the window, came to the bathroom. There was the green linoleum and a tap dripping. There was an emptiness about the heart of life; an attic room. Women must put off their rich apparel. At mid-day they must disrobe. She pierced the pincushion and laid her feathered yellow hat on the bed. The sheets were clean, tight stretched in a broad white band from side to side. Narrower and narrower would her bed be. The candle was half burnt down and she had read deep in Baron Marbot’s Memoirs. She had read late at night of the retreat from Moscow. For the House sat so long that Richard insisted, after her illness, that she must sleep undisturbed. And really she preferred to read of the retreat from Moscow. He knew it. So the room was an attic; the bed narrow; and lying there reading, for she slept badly, she could not dispel a virginity preserved through childbirth which clung to her like a sheet. Lovely in girlhood, suddenly there came a moment—for example on the river beneath the woods at Clieveden—when, through some contraction of this cold spirit, she had failed him. And then at Constantinople, and again and again. She could see what she lacked. It was not beauty; it was not mind. It was something central which permeated; something warm which broke up surfaces and rippled the cold contact of man and woman, or of women together. For that she could dimly perceive. She resented it, had a scruple picked up Heaven knows where, or, as she felt, sent by Nature (who is invariably wise); yet she could not resist sometimes yielding to the charm of a woman, not a girl, of a woman confessing, as to her they often did, some scrape, some folly. And whether it was pity, or their beauty, or that she was older, or some accident—like a faint scent, or a violin next door (so strange is the power of sounds at certain moments), she did undoubtedly then feel what men felt. Only for a moment; but it was enough. It was a sudden revelation, a tinge like a blush which one tried to check and then, as it spread, one yielded to its expansion, and rushed to the farthest verge and there quivered and felt the world come closer, swollen with some astonishing significance, some pressure of rapture, which split its thin skin and gushed and poured with an extraordinary alleviation over the cracks and sores. Then, for that moment, she had seen an illumination; a match burning in a crocus; an inner meaning almost expressed. But the close withdrew; the hard softened. It was over—the moment. Against such moments (with women too) there contrasted (as she laid her hat down) the bed and Baron Marbot and the candle half-burnt. Lying awake, the floor creaked; the lit house was suddenly darkened, and if she raised her head she could just hear the click of the handle released as gently as possible by Richard, who slipped upstairs in his socks and then, as often as not, dropped his hot-water bottle and swore! How she laughed!

But this question of love (she thought, putting her coat away), this falling in love with women. Take Sally Seton; her relation in the old days with Sally Seton. Had not that, after all, been love?

She sat on the floor—that was her first impression of Sally—she sat on the floor with her arms round her knees, smoking a cigarette. Where could it have been? The Mannings’? The Kinloch-Jones’s? At some party (where she could not be certain), for she had a distinct recollection of saying to the man she was with, “Who is that?” And he had told her, and said that Sally’s parents did not get on (how that shocked her—that one’s parents should quarrel!). But all that evening she could not take her eyes off Sally. It was an extraordinary beauty of the kind she most admired, dark, large-eyed, with that quality which, since she hadn’t got it herself, she always envied—a sort of abandonment, as if she could say anything, do anything; a quality much commoner in foreigners than in Englishwomen. Sally always said she had French blood in her veins, an ancestor had been with Marie Antoinette, had his head cut off, left a ruby ring. Perhaps that summer she came to stay at Bourton, walking in quite unexpectedly without a penny in her pocket, one night after dinner, and upsetting poor Aunt Helena to such an extent that she never forgave her. There had been some awful quarrel at home. She literally hadn’t a penny that night when she came to them—had pawned a brooch to come down. She had rushed off in a passion. They sat up till all hours of the night talking. Sally it was who made her feel, for the first time, how sheltered the life at Bourton was. She knew nothing about sex—nothing about social problems. She had once seen an old man who had dropped dead in a field—she had seen cows just after their calves were born. But Aunt Helena never liked discussion of anything (when Sally gave her William Morris, it had to be wrapped in brown paper). There they sat, hour after hour, talking in her bedroom at the top of the house, talking about life, how they were to reform the world. They meant to found a society to abolish private property, and actually had a letter written, though not sent out. The ideas were Sally’s, of course—but very soon she was just as excited—read Plato in bed before breakfast; read Morris; read Shelley by the hour.

Sally’s power was amazing, her gift, her personality. There was her way with flowers, for instance. At Bourton they always had stiff little vases all the way down the table. Sally went out, picked hollyhocks, dahlias—all sorts of flowers that had never been seen together—cut their heads off, and made them swim on the top of water in bowls. The effect was extraordinary—coming in to dinner in the sunset. (Of course Aunt Helena thought it wicked to treat flowers like that.) Then she forgot her sponge, and ran along the passage naked. That grim old housemaid, Ellen Atkins, went about grumbling—“Suppose any of the gentlemen had seen?” Indeed she did shock people. She was untidy, Papa said.

The strange thing, on looking back, was the purity, the integrity, of her feeling for Sally. It was not like one’s feeling for a man. It was completely disinterested, and besides, it had a quality which could only exist between women, between women just grown up. It was protective, on her side; sprang from a sense of being in league together, a presentiment of something that was bound to part them (they spoke of marriage always as a catastrophe), which led to this chivalry, this protective feeling which was much more on her side than Sally’s. For in those days she was completely reckless; did the most idiotic things out of bravado; bicycled round the parapet on the terrace: smoked cigars. Absurd, she was—very absurd. But the charm was overpowering, to her at least, so that she could remember standing in her bedroom at the top of the house holding the hot-water can in her hands and saying aloud, “She is beneath this roof…. She is beneath this roof!”

No, the words meant absolutely nothing to her now. She could not even get an echo of her old emotion. But she could remember going cold with excitement and doing her hair in a kind of ecstasy (now the old feeling began to come back to her, as she took out her hairpins, laid them on the dressing-table, began to do her hair), with the rooks flaunting up and down in the pink evening light, and dressing, and going downstairs, and feeling as she crossed the hall “if it were now to die ’twere now to be most happy.” That was her feeling—Othello’s feeling, and she felt it, she was convinced, as strongly as Shakespeare meant Othello to feel it, all because she was coming down to dinner in a white frock to meet Sally Seton!

She was wearing pink gauze—was that possible? She seemed, anyhow, all light, glowing, like some bird or air ball that has flown in, attached itself for a moment to a bramble. But nothing is so strange when one is in love (and what was this except being in love?) as the complete indifference of other people. Aunt Helena just wandered off after dinner; Papa read the paper. Peter Walsh might have been there, and old Miss Cummings; Joseph Breitkopf certainly was, for he came every summer, poor old man, for weeks and weeks, and pretended to read German with her, but really played the piano and sang Brahms without any voice.

All this was only a background for Sally. She stood by the fireplace talking, in that beautiful voice which made everything she said sound like a caress, to Papa, who had begun to be attracted rather against his will (he never got over lending her one of his books and finding it soaked on the terrace), when suddenly she said, “What a shame to sit indoors!” and they all went out on to the terrace and walked up and down. Peter Walsh and Joseph Breitkopf went on about Wagner. She and Sally fell a little behind. Then came the most exquisite moment of her whole life passing a stone urn with flowers in it. Sally stopped; picked a flower; kissed her on the lips. The whole world might have turned upside down! The others disappeared; there she was alone with Sally. And she felt that she had been given a present, wrapped up, and told just to keep it, not to look at it—a diamond, something infinitely precious, wrapped up, which, as they walked (up and down, up and down), she uncovered, or the radiance burnt through, the revelation, the religious feeling!—when old Joseph and Peter faced them:

“Star-gazing?” said Peter.

It was like running one’s face against a granite wall in the darkness! It was shocking; it was horrible!

Not for herself. She felt only how Sally was being mauled already, maltreated; she felt his hostility; his jealousy; his determination to break into their companionship. All this she saw as one sees a landscape in a flash of lightning—and Sally (never had she admired her so much!) gallantly taking her way unvanquished. She laughed. She made old Joseph tell her the names of the stars, which he liked doing very seriously. She stood there: she listened. She heard the names of the stars.

“Oh this horror!” she said to herself, as if she had known all along that something would interrupt, would embitter her moment of happiness.

Yet how much she owed Peter Walsh later. Always when she thought of him she thought of their quarrels for some reason—because she wanted his good opinion so much, perhaps. She owed him words: “sentimental,” “civilised”; they started up every day of her life as if he guarded her. A book was sentimental; an attitude to life sentimental. “Sentimental,” perhaps she was to be thinking of the past. What would he think, she wondered, when he came back?

That she had grown older? Would he say that, or would she see him thinking when he came back, that she had grown older? It was true. Since her illness she had turned almost white.

Laying her brooch on the table, she had a sudden spasm, as if, while she mused, the icy claws had had the chance to fix in her. She was not old yet. She had just broken into her fifty-second year. Months and months of it were still untouched. June, July, August! Each still remained almost whole, and, as if to catch the falling drop, Clarissa (crossing to the dressing-table) plunged into the very heart of the moment, transfixed it, there—the moment of this June morning on which was the pressure of all the other mornings, seeing the glass, the dressing-table, and all the bottles afresh, collecting the whole of her at one point (as she looked into the glass), seeing the delicate pink face of the woman who was that very night to give a party; of Clarissa Dalloway; of herself.

How many million times she had seen her face, and always with the same imperceptible contraction! She pursed her lips when she looked in the glass. It was to give her face point. That was her self—pointed; dartlike; definite. That was her self when some effort, some call on her to be her self, drew the parts together, she alone knew how different, how incompatible and composed so for the world only into one centre, one diamond, one woman who sat in her drawing-room and made a meeting-point, a radiancy no doubt in some dull lives, a refuge for the lonely to come to, perhaps; she had helped young people, who were grateful to her; had tried to be the same always, never showing a sign of all the other sides of her—faults, jealousies, vanities, suspicions, like this of Lady Bruton not asking her to lunch; which, she thought (combing her hair finally), is utterly base! Now, where was her dress?

Her evening dresses hung in the cupboard. Clarissa, plunging her hand into the softness, gently detached the green dress and carried it to the window. She had torn it. Some one had trod on the skirt. She had felt it give at the Embassy party at the top among the folds. By artificial light the green shone, but lost its colour now in the sun. She would mend it. Her maids had too much to do. She would wear it to-night. She would take her silks, her scissors, her—what was it?—her thimble, of course, down into the drawing-room, for she must also write, and see that things generally were more or less in order.

Strange, she thought, pausing on the landing, and assembling that diamond shape, that single person, strange how a mistress knows the very moment, the very temper of her house! Faint sounds rose in spirals up the well of the stairs; the swish of a mop; tapping; knocking; a loudness when the front door opened; a voice repeating a message in the basement; the chink of silver on a tray; clean silver for the party. All was for the party.

(And Lucy, coming into the drawing-room with her tray held out, put the giant candlesticks on the mantelpiece, the silver casket in the middle, turned the crystal dolphin towards the clock. They would come; they would stand; they would talk in the mincing tones which she could imitate, ladies and gentlemen. Of all, her mistress was loveliest—mistress of silver, of linen, of china, for the sun, the silver, doors off their hinges, Rumpelmayer’s men, gave her a sense, as she laid the paper-knife on the inlaid table, of something achieved. Behold! Behold! she said, speaking to her old friends in the baker’s shop, where she had first seen service at Caterham, prying into the glass. She was Lady Angela, attending Princess Mary, when in came Mrs. Dalloway.)

“Oh, Lucy,” she said, “the silver does look nice!

“And how,” she said, turning the crystal dolphin to stand straight, “how did you enjoy the play last night?” “Oh, they had to go before the end!” she said. “They had to be back at ten!” she said. “So they don’t know what happened,” she said. “That does seem hard luck,” she said (for her servants stayed later, if they asked her). “That does seem rather a shame,” she said, taking the old bald-looking cushion in the middle of the sofa and putting it in Lucy’s arms, and giving her a little push, and crying:

“Take it away! Give it to Mrs. Walker with my compliments! Take it away!” she cried.

And Lucy stopped at the drawing-room door, holding the cushion, and said, very shyly, turning a little pink, couldn’t she help to mend that dress?

But, said Mrs. Dalloway, she had enough on her hands already, quite enough of her own to do without that.

“But, thank you, Lucy, oh, thank you,” said Mrs. Dalloway, and thank you, thank you, she went on saying (sitting down on the sofa with her dress over her knees, her scissors, her silks), thank you, thank you, she went on saying in gratitude to her servants generally for helping her to be like this, to be what she wanted, gentle, generous-hearted. Her servants liked her. And then this dress of hers—where was the tear? and now her needle to be threaded. This was a favourite dress, one of Sally Parker’s, the last almost she ever made, alas, for Sally had now retired, lived at Ealing, and if ever I have a moment, thought Clarissa (but never would she have a moment any more), I shall go and see her at Ealing. For she was a character, thought Clarissa, a real artist. She thought of little out-of-the-way things; yet her dresses were never queer. You could wear them at Hatfield; at Buckingham Palace. She had worn them at Hatfield; at Buckingham Palace.

Quiet descended on her, calm, content, as her needle, drawing the silk smoothly to its gentle pause, collected the green folds together and attached them, very lightly, to the belt. So on a summer’s day waves collect, overbalance, and fall; collect and fall; and the whole world seems to be saying “that is all” more and more ponderously, until even the heart in the body which lies in the sun on the beach says too, that is all. Fear no more, says the heart. Fear no more, says the heart, committing its burden to some sea, which sighs collectively for all sorrows, and renews, begins, collects, lets fall. And the body alone listens to the passing bee; the wave breaking; the dog barking, far away barking and barking.

“Heavens, the front-door bell!” exclaimed Clarissa, staying her needle. Roused, she listened.

“Mrs. Dalloway will see me,” said the elderly man in the hall. “Oh yes, she will see me,” he repeated, putting Lucy aside very benevolently, and running upstairs ever so quickly. “Yes, yes, yes,” he muttered as he ran upstairs. “She will see me. After five years in India, Clarissa will see me.”

“Who can—what can—” asked Mrs. Dalloway (thinking it was outrageous to be interrupted at eleven o’clock on the morning of the day she was giving a party), hearing a step on the stairs. She heard a hand upon the door. She made to hide her dress, like a virgin protecting chastity, respecting privacy. Now the brass knob slipped. Now the door opened, and in came—for a single second she could not remember what he was called! so surprised she was to see him, so glad, so shy, so utterly taken aback to have Peter Walsh come to her unexpectedly in the morning! (She had not read his letter.)

“And how are you?” said Peter Walsh, positively trembling; taking both her hands; kissing both her hands. She’s grown older, he thought, sitting down. I shan’t tell her anything about it, he thought, for she’s grown older. She’s looking at me, he thought, a sudden embarrassment coming over him, though he had kissed her hands. Putting his hand into his pocket, he took out a large pocket-knife and half opened the blade.

Exactly the same, thought Clarissa; the same queer look; the same check suit; a little out of the straight his face is, a little thinner, dryer, perhaps, but he looks awfully well, and just the same.

“How heavenly it is to see you again!” she exclaimed. He had his knife out. That’s so like him, she thought.

He had only reached town last night, he said; would have to go down into the country at once; and how was everything, how was everybody—Richard? Elizabeth?

“And what’s all this?” he said, tilting his pen-knife towards her green dress.

He’s very well dressed, thought Clarissa; yet he always criticises me.

Here she is mending her dress; mending her dress as usual, he thought; here she’s been sitting all the time I’ve been in India; mending her dress; playing about; going to parties; running to the House and back and all that, he thought, growing more and more irritated, more and more agitated, for there’s nothing in the world so bad for some women as marriage, he thought; and politics; and having a Conservative husband, like the admirable Richard. So it is, so it is, he thought, shutting his knife with a snap.

“Richard’s very well. Richard’s at a Committee,” said Clarissa.

And she opened her scissors, and said, did he mind her just finishing what she was doing to her dress, for they had a party that night?

“Which I shan’t ask you to,” she said. “My dear Peter!” she said.

But it was delicious to hear her say that—my dear Peter! Indeed, it was all so delicious—the silver, the chairs; all so delicious!

Why wouldn’t she ask him to her party? he asked.

Now of course, thought Clarissa, he’s enchanting! perfectly enchanting! Now I remember how impossible it was ever to make up my mind—and why did I make up my mind—not to marry him, she wondered, that awful summer?

“But it’s so extraordinary that you should have come this morning!” she cried, putting her hands, one on top of another, down on her dress.

“Do you remember,” she said, “how the blinds used to flap at Bourton?”

“They did,” he said; and he remembered breakfasting alone, very awkwardly, with her father; who had died; and he had not written to Clarissa. But he had never got on well with old Parry, that querulous, weak-kneed old man, Clarissa’s father, Justin Parry.

“I often wish I’d got on better with your father,” he said.

“But he never liked any one who—our friends,” said Clarissa; and could have bitten her tongue for thus reminding Peter that he had wanted to marry her.

Of course I did, thought Peter; it almost broke my heart too, he thought; and was overcome with his own grief, which rose like a moon looked at from a terrace, ghastly beautiful with light from the sunken day. I was more unhappy than I’ve ever been since, he thought. And as if in truth he were sitting there on the terrace he edged a little towards Clarissa; put his hand out; raised it; let it fall. There above them it hung, that moon. She too seemed to be sitting with him on the terrace, in the moonlight.

“Herbert has it now,” she said. “I never go there now,” she said.

Then, just as happens on a terrace in the moonlight, when one person begins to feel ashamed that he is already bored, and yet as the other sits silent, very quiet, sadly looking at the moon, does not like to speak, moves his foot, clears his throat, notices some iron scroll on a table leg, stirs a leaf, but says nothing—so Peter Walsh did now. For why go back like this to the past? he thought. Why make him think of it again? Why make him suffer, when she had tortured him so infernally? Why?

“Do you remember the lake?” she said, in an abrupt voice, under the pressure of an emotion which caught her heart, made the muscles of her throat stiff, and contracted her lips in a spasm as she said “lake”. For she was a child throwing bread to the ducks, between her parents, and at the same time a grown woman coming to her parents who stood by the lake, holding her life in her arms which, as she neared them, grew larger and larger in her arms, until it became a whole life, a complete life, which she put down by them and said, “This is what I have made of it! This!” And what had she made of it? What, indeed? sitting there sewing this morning with Peter.

She looked at Peter Walsh; her look, passing through all that time and that emotion, reached him doubtfully; settled on him tearfully; and rose and fluttered away, as a bird touches a branch and rises and flutters away. Quite simply she wiped her eyes.

“Yes,” said Peter. “Yes, yes, yes,” he said, as if she drew up to the surface something which positively hurt him as it rose. Stop! Stop! he wanted to cry. For he was not old; his life was not over; not by any means. He was only just past fifty. Shall I tell her, he thought, or not? He would like to make a clean breast of it all. But she is too cold, he thought; sewing, with her scissors; Daisy would look ordinary beside Clarissa. And she would think me a failure, which I am in their sense, he thought; in the Dalloways’ sense. Oh yes, he had no doubt about that; he was a failure, compared with all this—the inlaid table, the mounted paper-knife, the dolphin and the candlesticks, the chair-covers and the old valuable English tinted prints—he was a failure! I detest the smugness of the whole affair, he thought; Richard’s doing, not Clarissa’s; save that she married him. (Here Lucy came into the room, carrying silver, more silver, but charming, slender, graceful she looked, he thought, as she stooped to put it down.) And this has been going on all the time! he thought; week after week; Clarissa’s life; while I—he thought; and at once everything seemed to radiate from him; journeys; rides; quarrels; adventures; bridge parties; love affairs; work; work, work! and he took out his knife quite openly—his old horn-handled knife which Clarissa could swear he had had these thirty years—and clenched his fist upon it.

What an extraordinary habit that was, Clarissa thought; always playing with a knife. Always making one feel, too, frivolous; empty-minded; a mere silly chatterbox, as he used. But I too, she thought, and, taking up her needle, summoned, like a Queen whose guards have fallen asleep and left her unprotected (she had been quite taken aback by this visit—it had upset her) so that any one can stroll in and have a look at her where she lies with the brambles curving over her, summoned to her help the things she did; the things she liked; her husband; Elizabeth; her self, in short, which Peter hardly knew now, all to come about her and beat off the enemy.

“Well, and what’s happened to you?” she said. So before a battle begins, the horses paw the ground; toss their heads; the light shines on their flanks; their necks curve. So Peter Walsh and Clarissa, sitting side by side on the blue sofa, challenged each other. His powers chafed and tossed in him. He assembled from different quarters all sorts of things; praise; his career at Oxford; his marriage, which she knew nothing whatever about; how he had loved; and altogether done his job.

“Millions of things!” he exclaimed, and, urged by the assembly of powers which were now charging this way and that and giving him the feeling at once frightening and extremely exhilarating of being rushed through the air on the shoulders of people he could no longer see, he raised his hands to his forehead.

Clarissa sat very upright; drew in her breath.

“I am in love,” he said, not to her however, but to some one raised up in the dark so that you could not touch her but must lay your garland down on the grass in the dark.

“In love,” he repeated, now speaking rather dryly to Clarissa Dalloway; “in love with a girl in India.” He had deposited his garland. Clarissa could make what she would of it.

“In love!” she said. That he at his age should be sucked under in his little bow-tie by that monster! And there’s no flesh on his neck; his hands are red; and he’s six months older than I am! her eye flashed back to her; but in her heart she felt, all the same; he is in love. He has that, she felt; he is in love.

But the indomitable egotism which for ever rides down the hosts opposed to it, the river which says on, on, on; even though, it admits, there may be no goal for us whatever, still on, on; this indomitable egotism charged her cheeks with colour; made her look very young; very pink; very bright-eyed as she sat with her dress upon her knee, and her needle held to the end of green silk, trembling a little. He was in love! Not with her. With some younger woman, of course.

“And who is she?” she asked.

Now this statue must be brought from its height and set down between them.

“A married woman, unfortunately,” he said; “the wife of a Major in the Indian Army.”

And with a curious ironical sweetness he smiled as he placed her in this ridiculous way before Clarissa.

(All the same, he is in love, thought Clarissa.)

“She has,” he continued, very reasonably, “two small children; a boy and a girl; and I have come over to see my lawyers about the divorce.”

There they are! he thought. Do what you like with them, Clarissa! There they are! And second by second it seemed to him that the wife of the Major in the Indian Army (his Daisy) and her two small children became more and more lovely as Clarissa looked at them; as if he had set light to a grey pellet on a plate and there had risen up a lovely tree in the brisk sea-salted air of their intimacy (for in some ways no one understood him, felt with him, as Clarissa did)—their exquisite intimacy.

She flattered him; she fooled him, thought Clarissa; shaping the woman, the wife of the Major in the Indian Army, with three strokes of a knife. What a waste! What a folly! All his life long Peter had been fooled like that; first getting sent down from Oxford; next marrying the girl on the boat going out to India; now the wife of a Major—thank Heaven she had refused to marry him! Still, he was in love; her old friend, her dear Peter, he was in love.

“But what are you going to do?” she asked him. Oh, the lawyers and solicitors, Messrs. Hooper and Grateley of Lincoln’s Inn, they were going to do it, he said. And he actually pared his nails with his pocket-knife.

For Heaven’s sake, leave your knife alone! she cried to herself in irrepressible irritation; it was his silly unconventionality, his weakness; his lack of the ghost of a notion what any one else was feeling that annoyed her, had always annoyed her; and now at his age, how silly!

I know all that, Peter thought; I know what I’m up against, he thought, running his finger along the blade of his knife, Clarissa and Dalloway and all the rest of them; but I’ll show Clarissa—and then to his utter surprise, suddenly thrown by those uncontrollable forces, thrown through the air, he burst into tears; wept; wept without the least shame, sitting on the sofa, the tears running down his cheeks.

And Clarissa had leant forward, taken his hand, drawn him to her, kissed him,—actually had felt his face on hers before she could down the brandishing of silver-flashing plumes like pampas grass in a tropic gale in her breast, which, subsiding, left her holding his hand, patting his knee, and feeling as she sat back extraordinarily at her ease with him and light-hearted, all in a clap it came over her, If I had married him, this gaiety would have been mine all day!

It was all over for her. The sheet was stretched and the bed narrow. She had gone up into the tower alone and left them blackberrying in the sun. The door had shut, and there among the dust of fallen plaster and the litter of birds’ nests how distant the view had looked, and the sounds came thin and chill (once on Leith Hill, she remembered), and Richard, Richard! she cried, as a sleeper in the night starts and stretches a hand in the dark for help. Lunching with Lady Bruton, it came back to her. He has left me; I am alone for ever, she thought, folding her hands upon her knee.

Peter Walsh had got up and crossed to the window and stood with his back to her, flicking a bandanna handkerchief from side to side. Masterly and dry and desolate he looked, his thin shoulder-blades lifting his coat slightly; blowing his nose violently. Take me with you, Clarissa thought impulsively, as if he were starting directly upon some great voyage; and then, next moment, it was as if the five acts of a play that had been very exciting and moving were now over and she had lived a lifetime in them and had run away, had lived with Peter, and it was now over.

Now it was time to move, and, as a woman gathers her things together, her cloak, her gloves, her opera-glasses, and gets up to go out of the theatre into the street, she rose from the sofa and went to Peter.

And it was awfully strange, he thought, how she still had the power, as she came tinkling, rustling, still had the power, as she came across the room, to make the moon, which he detested, rise at Bourton on the terrace in the summer sky.

“Tell me,” he said, seizing her by the shoulders. “Are you happy, Clarissa? Does Richard——”

The door opened.

“Here is my Elizabeth,” said Clarissa, emotionally, histrionically, perhaps.

“How d’y do?” said Elizabeth coming forward.

The sound of Big Ben striking the half-hour struck out between them with extraordinary vigour, as if a young man, strong, indifferent, inconsiderate, were swinging dumb-bells this way and that.

“Hullo, Elizabeth!” cried Peter, stuffing his handkerchief into his pocket, going quickly to her, saying “Good-bye, Clarissa” without looking at her, leaving the room quickly, and running downstairs and opening the hall door.

“Peter! Peter!” cried Clarissa, following him out on to the landing. “My party! Remember my party to-night!” she cried, having to raise her voice against the roar of the open air, and, overwhelmed by the traffic and the sound of all the clocks striking, her voice crying “Remember my party to-night!” sounded frail and thin and very far away as Peter Walsh shut the door.

Remember my party, remember my party, said Peter Walsh as he stepped down the street, speaking to himself rhythmically, in time with the flow of the sound, the direct downright sound of Big Ben striking the half-hour. (The leaden circles dissolved in the air.) Oh these parties? he thought; Clarissa’s parties. Why does she give these parties? he thought. Not that he blamed her or this effigy of a man in a tail-coat with a carnation in his button-hole coming towards him. Only one person in the world could be as he was, in love. And there he was, this fortunate man, himself, reflected in the plate-glass window of a motor-car manufacturer in Victoria Street. All India lay behind him; plains, mountains; epidemics of cholera; a district twice as big as Ireland; decisions he had come to alone—he, Peter Walsh; who was now really for the first time in his life in love. Clarissa had grown hard, he thought; and a trifle sentimental into the bargain, he suspected, looking at the great motor cars capable of doing—how many miles on how many gallons? For he had a turn for mechanics; had invented a plough in his district, had ordered wheel-barrows from England, but the coolies wouldn’t use them, all of which Clarissa knew nothing whatever about.

The way she said “Here is my Elizabeth!”—that annoyed him. Why not “Here’s Elizabeth” simply? It was insincere. And Elizabeth didn’t like it either. (Still the last tremors of the great booming voice shook the air round him; the half-hour; still early; only half-past eleven still.) For he understood young people; he liked them. There was always something cold in Clarissa, he thought. She had always, even as a girl, a sort of timidity, which in middle age becomes conventionality, and then it’s all up, it’s all up, he thought, looking rather drearily into the glassy depths, and wondering whether by calling at that hour he had annoyed her; overcome with shame suddenly at having been a fool; wept; been emotional; told her everything, as usual, as usual.

As a cloud crosses the sun, silence falls on London; and falls on the mind. Effort ceases. Time flaps on the mast. There we stop; there we stand. Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame. Where there is nothing, Peter Walsh said to himself; feeling hollowed out, utterly empty within. Clarissa refused me, he thought. He stood there thinking, Clarissa refused me.

Ah, said St. Margaret’s, like a hostess who comes into her drawing-room on the very stroke of the hour and finds her guests there already. I am not late. No, it is precisely half-past eleven, she says. Yet, though she is perfectly right, her voice, being the voice of the hostess, is reluctant to inflict its individuality. Some grief for the past holds it back; some concern for the present. It is half-past eleven, she says, and the sound of St. Margaret’s glides into the recesses of the heart and buries itself in ring after ring of sound, like something alive which wants to confide itself, to disperse itself, to be, with a tremor of delight, at rest—like Clarissa herself, thought Peter Walsh, coming downstairs on the stroke of the hour in white. It is Clarissa herself, he thought, with a deep emotion, and an extraordinarily clear, yet puzzling, recollection of her, as if this bell had come into the room years ago, where they sat at some moment of great intimacy, and had gone from one to the other and had left, like a bee with honey, laden with the moment. But what room? What moment? And why had he been so profoundly happy when the clock was striking? Then, as the sound of St. Margaret’s languished, he thought, she has been ill, and the sound expressed languor and suffering. It was her heart, he remembered; and the sudden loudness of the final stroke tolled for death that surprised in the midst of life, Clarissa falling where she stood, in her drawing-room. No! No! he cried. She is not dead! I am not old, he cried, and marched up Whitehall, as if there rolled down to him, vigorous, unending, his future.

He was not old, or set, or dried in the least. As for caring what they said of him—the Dalloways, the Whitbreads, and their set, he cared not a straw—not a straw (though it was true he would have, some time or other, to see whether Richard couldn’t help him to some job). Striding, staring, he glared at the statue of the Duke of Cambridge. He had been sent down from Oxford—true. He had been a Socialist, in some sense a failure—true. Still the future of civilisation lies, he thought, in the hands of young men like that; of young men such as he was, thirty years ago; with their love of abstract principles; getting books sent out to them all the way from London to a peak in the Himalayas; reading science; reading philosophy. The future lies in the hands of young men like that, he thought.

A patter like the patter of leaves in a wood came from behind, and with it a rustling, regular thudding sound, which as it overtook him drummed his thoughts, strict in step, up Whitehall, without his doing. Boys in uniform, carrying guns, marched with their eyes ahead of them, marched, their arms stiff, and on their faces an expression like the letters of a legend written round the base of a statue praising duty, gratitude, fidelity, love of England.

It is, thought Peter Walsh, beginning to keep step with them, a very fine training. But they did not look robust. They were weedy for the most part, boys of sixteen, who might, to-morrow, stand behind bowls of rice, cakes of soap on counters. Now they wore on them unmixed with sensual pleasure or daily preoccupations the solemnity of the wreath which they had fetched from Finsbury Pavement to the empty tomb. They had taken their vow. The traffic respected it; vans were stopped.

I can’t keep up with them, Peter Walsh thought, as they marched up Whitehall, and sure enough, on they marched, past him, past every one, in their steady way, as if one will worked legs and arms uniformly, and life, with its varieties, its irreticences, had been laid under a pavement of monuments and wreaths and drugged into a stiff yet staring corpse by discipline. One had to respect it; one might laugh; but one had to respect it, he thought. There they go, thought Peter Walsh, pausing at the edge of the pavement; and all the exalted statues, Nelson, Gordon, Havelock, the black, the spectacular images of great soldiers stood looking ahead of them, as if they too had made the same renunciation (Peter Walsh felt he, too, had made it the great renunciation), trampled under the same temptations, and achieved at length a marble stare. But the stare Peter Walsh did not want for himself in the least; though he could respect it in others. He could respect it in boys. They don’t know the troubles of the flesh yet, he thought, as the marching boys disappeared in the direction of the Strand—all that I’ve been through, he thought, crossing the road, and standing under Gordon’s statue, Gordon whom as a boy he had worshipped; Gordon standing lonely with one leg raised and his arms crossed,—poor Gordon, he thought.

And just because nobody yet knew he was in London, except Clarissa, and the earth, after the voyage, still seemed an island to him, the strangeness of standing alone, alive, unknown, at half-past eleven in Trafalgar Square overcame him. What is it? Where am I? And why, after all, does one do it? he thought, the divorce seeming all moonshine. And down his mind went flat as a marsh, and three great emotions bowled over him; understanding; a vast philanthropy; and finally, as if the result of the others, an irrepressible, exquisite delight; as if inside his brain, by another hand, strings were pulled, shutters moved, and he, having nothing to do with it, yet stood at the opening of endless avenues down which if he chose he might wander. He had not felt so young for years.

He had escaped! was utterly free—as happens in the downfall of habit when the mind, like an unguarded flame, bows and bends and seems about to blow from its holding. I haven’t felt so young for years! thought Peter, escaping (only of course for an hour or so) from being precisely what he was, and feeling like a child who runs out of doors, and sees, as he runs, his old nurse waving at the wrong window. But she’s extraordinarily attractive, he thought, as, walking across Trafalgar Square in the direction of the Haymarket, came a young woman who, as she passed Gordon’s statue, seemed, Peter Walsh thought (susceptible as he was), to shed veil after veil, until she became the very woman he had always had in mind; young, but stately; merry, but discreet; black, but enchanting.

Straightening himself and stealthily fingering his pocket-knife he started after her to follow this woman, this excitement, which seemed even with its back turned to shed on him a light which connected them, which singled him out, as if the random uproar of the traffic had whispered through hollowed hands his name, not Peter, but his private name which he called himself in his own thoughts. “You,” she said, only “you”, saying it with her white gloves and her shoulders. Then the thin long cloak which the wind stirred as she walked past Dent’s shop in Cockspur Street blew out with an enveloping kindness, a mournful tenderness, as of arms that would open and take the tired——

But she’s not married; she’s young; quite young, thought Peter, the red carnation he had seen her wear as she came across Trafalgar Square burning again in his eyes and making her lips red. But she waited at the kerbstone. There was a dignity about her. She was not worldly, like Clarissa; not rich, like Clarissa. Was she, he wondered as she moved, respectable? Witty, with a lizard’s flickering tongue, he thought (for one must invent, must allow oneself a little diversion), a cool waiting wit, a darting wit; not noisy.

She moved; she crossed; he followed her. To embarrass her was the last thing he wished. Still if she stopped he would say “Come and have an ice,” he would say, and she would answer, perfectly simply, “Oh yes.”

But other people got between them in the street, obstructing him, blotting her out. He pursued; she changed. There was colour in her cheeks; mockery in her eyes; he was an adventurer, reckless, he thought, swift, daring, indeed (landed as he was last night from India) a romantic buccaneer, careless of all these damned proprieties, yellow dressing-gowns, pipes, fishing-rods, in the shop windows; and respectability and evening parties and spruce old men wearing white slips beneath their waistcoats. He was a buccaneer. On and on she went, across Piccadilly, and up Regent Street, ahead of him, her cloak, her gloves, her shoulders combining with the fringes and the laces and the feather boas in the windows to make the spirit of finery and whimsy which dwindled out of the shops on to the pavement, as the light of a lamp goes wavering at night over hedges in the darkness.

Laughing and delightful, she had crossed Oxford Street and Great Portland Street and turned down one of the little streets, and now, and now, the great moment was approaching, for now she slackened, opened her bag, and with one look in his direction, but not at him, one look that bade farewell, summed up the whole situation and dismissed it triumphantly, for ever, had fitted her key, opened the door, and gone! Clarissa’s voice saying, Remember my party, Remember my party, sang in his ears. The house was one of those flat red houses with hanging flower-baskets of vague impropriety. It was over.

Well, I’ve had my fun; I’ve had it, he thought, looking up at the swinging baskets of pale geraniums. And it was smashed to atoms—his fun, for it was half made up, as he knew very well; invented, this escapade with the girl; made up, as one makes up the better part of life, he thought—making oneself up; making her up; creating an exquisite amusement, and something more. But odd it was, and quite true; all this one could never share—it smashed to atoms.

He turned; went up the street, thinking to find somewhere to sit, till it was time for Lincoln’s Inn—for Messrs. Hooper and Grateley. Where should he go? No matter. Up the street, then, towards Regent’s Park. His boots on the pavement struck out “no matter”; for it was early, still very early.

It was a splendid morning too. Like the pulse of a perfect heart, life struck straight through the streets. There was no fumbling—no hesitation. Sweeping and swerving, accurately, punctually, noiselessly, there, precisely at the right instant, the motor car stopped at the door. The girl, silk-stockinged, feathered, evanescent, but not to him particularly attractive (for he had had his fling), alighted. Admirable butlers, tawny chow dogs, halls laid in black and white lozenges with white blinds blowing, Peter saw through the opened door and approved of. A splendid achievement in its own way, after all, London; the season; civilisation. Coming as he did from a respectable Anglo-Indian family which for at least three generations had administered the affairs of a continent (it’s strange, he thought, what a sentiment I have about that, disliking India, and empire, and army as he did), there were moments when civilisation, even of this sort, seemed dear to him as a personal possession; moments of pride in England; in butlers; chow dogs; girls in their security. Ridiculous enough, still there it is, he thought. And the doctors and men of business and capable women all going about their business, punctual, alert, robust, seemed to him wholly admirable, good fellows, to whom one would entrust one’s life, companions in the art of living, who would see one through. What with one thing and another, the show was really very tolerable; and he would sit down in the shade and smoke.

There was Regent’s Park. Yes. As a child he had walked in Regent’s Park—odd, he thought, how the thought of childhood keeps coming back to me—the result of seeing Clarissa, perhaps; for women live much more in the past than we do, he thought. They attach themselves to places; and their fathers—a woman’s always proud of her father. Bourton was a nice place, a very nice place, but I could never get on with the old man, he thought. There was quite a scene one night—an argument about something or other, what, he could not remember. Politics presumably.

Yes, he remembered Regent’s Park; the long straight walk; the little house where one bought air-balls to the left; an absurd statue with an inscription somewhere or other. He looked for an empty seat. He did not want to be bothered (feeling a little drowsy as he did) by people asking him the time. An elderly grey nurse, with a baby asleep in its perambulator—that was the best he could do for himself; sit down at the far end of the seat by that nurse.

She’s a queer-looking girl, he thought, suddenly remembering Elizabeth as she came into the room and stood by her mother. Grown big; quite grown-up, not exactly pretty; handsome rather; and she can’t be more than eighteen. Probably she doesn’t get on with Clarissa. “There’s my Elizabeth”—that sort of thing—why not “Here’s Elizabeth” simply?—trying to make out, like most mothers, that things are what they’re not. She trusts to her charm too much, he thought. She overdoes it.

The rich benignant cigar smoke eddied coolly down his throat; he puffed it out again in rings which breasted the air bravely for a moment; blue, circular—I shall try and get a word alone with Elizabeth to-night, he thought—then began to wobble into hour-glass shapes and taper away; odd shapes they take, he thought. Suddenly he closed his eyes, raised his hand with an effort, and threw away the heavy end of his cigar. A great brush swept smooth across his mind, sweeping across it moving branches, children’s voices, the shuffle of feet, and people passing, and humming traffic, rising and falling traffic. Down, down he sank into the plumes and feathers of sleep, sank, and was muffled over.

The grey nurse resumed her knitting as Peter Walsh, on the hot seat beside her, began snoring. In her grey dress, moving her hands indefatigably yet quietly, she seemed like the champion of the rights of sleepers, like one of those spectral presences which rise in twilight in woods made of sky and branches. The solitary traveller, haunter of lanes, disturber of ferns, and devastator of great hemlock plants, looking up suddenly, sees the giant figure at the end of the ride.

By conviction an atheist perhaps, he is taken by surprise with moments of extraordinary exaltation. Nothing exists outside us except a state of mind, he thinks; a desire for solace, for relief, for something outside these miserable pigmies, these feeble, these ugly, these craven men and women. But if he can conceive of her, then in some sort she exists, he thinks, and advancing down the path with his eyes upon sky and branches he rapidly endows them with womanhood; sees with amazement how grave they become; how majestically, as the breeze stirs them, they dispense with a dark flutter of the leaves, charity, comprehension, absolution, and then, flinging themselves suddenly aloft, confound the piety of their aspect with a wild carouse.

Such are the visions which proffer great cornucopias full of fruit to the solitary traveller, or murmur in his ear like sirens lolloping away on the green sea waves, or are dashed in his face like bunches of roses, or rise to the surface like pale faces which fishermen flounder through floods to embrace.

Such are the visions which ceaselessly float up, pace beside, put their faces in front of, the actual thing; often overpowering the solitary traveller and taking away from him the sense of the earth, the wish to return, and giving him for substitute a general peace, as if (so he thinks as he advances down the forest ride) all this fever of living were simplicity itself; and myriads of things merged in one thing; and this figure, made of sky and branches as it is, had risen from the troubled sea (he is elderly, past fifty now) as a shape might be sucked up out of the waves to shower down from her magnificent hands, compassion, comprehension, absolution. So, he thinks, may I never go back to the lamplight; to the sitting-room; never finish my book; never knock out my pipe; never ring for Mrs. Turner to clear away; rather let me walk straight on to this great figure, who will, with a toss of her head, mount me on her streamers and let me blow to nothingness with the rest.

Such are the visions. The solitary traveller is soon beyond the wood; and there, coming to the door with shaded eyes, possibly to look for his return, with hands raised, with white apron blowing, is an elderly woman who seems (so powerful is this infirmity) to seek, over the desert, a lost son; to search for a rider destroyed; to be the figure of the mother whose sons have been killed in the battles of the world. So, as the solitary traveller advances down the village street where the women stand knitting and the men dig in the garden, the evening seems ominous; the figures still; as if some august fate, known to them, awaited without fear, were about to sweep them into complete annihilation.

Indoors among ordinary things, the cupboard, the table, the window-sill with its geraniums, suddenly the outline of the landlady, bending to remove the cloth, becomes soft with light, an adorable emblem which only the recollection of cold human contacts forbids us to embrace. She takes the marmalade; she shuts it in the cupboard.

“There is nothing more to-night, sir?”

But to whom does the solitary traveller make reply?

So the elderly nurse knitted over the sleeping baby in Regent’s Park. So Peter Walsh snored. He woke with extreme suddenness, saying to himself, “The death of the soul.”

“Lord, Lord!” he said to himself out loud, stretching and opening his eyes. “The death of the soul.” The words attached themselves to some scene, to some room, to some past he had been dreaming of. It became clearer; the scene, the room, the past he had been dreaming of.

It was at Bourton that summer, early in the ’nineties, when he was so passionately in love with Clarissa. There were a great many people there, laughing and talking, sitting round a table after tea, and the room was bathed in yellow light and full of cigarette smoke. They were talking about a man who had married his housemaid, one of the neighbouring squires, he had forgotten his name. He had married his housemaid, and she had been brought to Bourton to call—an awful visit it had been. She was absurdly overdressed, “like a cockatoo,” Clarissa had said, imitating her, and she never stopped talking. On and on she went, on and on. Clarissa imitated her. Then somebody said—Sally Seton it was—did it make any real difference to one’s feelings to know that before they’d married she had had a baby? (In those days, in mixed company, it was a bold thing to say.) He could see Clarissa now, turning bright pink; somehow contracting; and saying, “Oh, I shall never be able to speak to her again!” Whereupon the whole party sitting round the tea-table seemed to wobble. It was very uncomfortable.

He hadn’t blamed her for minding the fact, since in those days a girl brought up as she was knew nothing, but it was her manner that annoyed him; timid; hard; arrogant; prudish. “The death of the soul.” He had said that instinctively, ticketing the moment as he used to do—the death of her soul.

Every one wobbled; every one seemed to bow, as she spoke, and then to stand up different. He could see Sally Seton, like a child who has been in mischief, leaning forward, rather flushed, wanting to talk, but afraid, and Clarissa did frighten people. (She was Clarissa’s greatest friend, always about the place, an attractive creature, handsome, dark, with the reputation in those days of great daring, and he used to give her cigars, which she smoked in her bedroom, and she had either been engaged to somebody or quarrelled with her family, and old Parry disliked them both equally, which was a great bond.) Then Clarissa, still with an air of being offended with them all, got up, made some excuse, and went off, alone. As she opened the door, in came that great shaggy dog which ran after sheep. She flung herself upon him, went into raptures. It was as if she said to Peter—it was all aimed at him, he knew—“I know you thought me absurd about that woman just now; but see how extraordinarily sympathetic I am; see how I love my Rob!”

They had always this queer power of communicating without words. She knew directly he criticised her. Then she would do something quite obvious to defend herself, like this fuss with the dog—but it never took him in, he always saw through Clarissa. Not that he said anything, of course; just sat looking glum. It was the way their quarrels often began.

She shut the door. At once he became extremely depressed. It all seemed useless—going on being in love; going on quarrelling; going on making it up, and he wandered off alone, among outhouses, stables, looking at the horses. (The place was quite a humble one; the Parrys were never very well off; but there were always grooms and stable-boys about—Clarissa loved riding—and an old coachman—what was his name?—an old nurse, old Moody, old Goody, some such name they called her, whom one was taken to visit in a little room with lots of photographs, lots of bird-cages.)

It was an awful evening! He grew more and more gloomy, not about that only; about everything. And he couldn’t see her; couldn’t explain to her; couldn’t have it out. There were always people about—she’d go on as if nothing had happened. That was the devilish part of her—this coldness, this woodenness, something very profound in her, which he had felt again this morning talking to her; an impenetrability. Yet Heaven knows he loved her. She had some queer power of fiddling on one’s nerves, turning one’s nerves to fiddle-strings, yes.

He had gone into dinner rather late, from some idiotic idea of making himself felt, and had sat down by old Miss Parry—Aunt Helena—Mr. Parry’s sister, who was supposed to preside. There she sat in her white Cashmere shawl, with her head against the window—a formidable old lady, but kind to him, for he had found her some rare flower, and she was a great botanist, marching off in thick boots with a black tin collecting box slung between her shoulders. He sat down beside her, and couldn’t speak. Everything seemed to race past him; he just sat there, eating. And then half-way through dinner he made himself look across at Clarissa for the first time. She was talking to a young man on her right. He had a sudden revelation. “She will marry that man,” he said to himself. He didn’t even know his name.

For of course it was that afternoon, that very afternoon, that Dalloway had come over; and Clarissa called him “Wickham”; that was the beginning of it all. Somebody had brought him over; and Clarissa got his name wrong. She introduced him to everybody as Wickham. At last he said “My name is Dalloway!”—that was his first view of Richard—a fair young man, rather awkward, sitting on a deck-chair, and blurting out “My name is Dalloway!” Sally got hold of it; always after that she called him “My name is Dalloway!”

He was a prey to revelations at that time. This one—that she would marry Dalloway—was blinding—overwhelming at the moment. There was a sort of—how could he put it?—a sort of ease in her manner to him; something maternal; something gentle. They were talking about politics. All through dinner he tried to hear what they were saying.

Afterwards he could remember standing by old Miss Parry’s chair in the drawing-room. Clarissa came up, with her perfect manners, like a real hostess, and wanted to introduce him to some one—spoke as if they had never met before, which enraged him. Yet even then he admired her for it. He admired her courage; her social instinct; he admired her power of carrying things through. “The perfect hostess,” he said to her, whereupon she winced all over. But he meant her to feel it. He would have done anything to hurt her, after seeing her with Dalloway. So she left him. And he had a feeling that they were all gathered together in a conspiracy against him—laughing and talking—behind his back. There he stood by Miss Parry’s chair as though he had been cut out of wood, talking about wild flowers. Never, never had he suffered so infernally! He must have forgotten even to pretend to listen; at last he woke up; he saw Miss Parry looking rather disturbed, rather indignant, with her prominent eyes fixed. He almost cried out that he couldn’t attend because he was in Hell! People began going out of the room. He heard them talking about fetching cloaks; about its being cold on the water, and so on. They were going boating on the lake by moonlight—one of Sally’s mad ideas. He could hear her describing the moon. And they all went out. He was left quite alone.

“Don’t you want to go with them?” said Aunt Helena—poor old lady!—she had guessed. And he turned round and there was Clarissa again. She had come back to fetch him. He was overcome by her generosity—her goodness.

“Come along,” she said. “They’re waiting.” He had never felt so happy in the whole of his life! Without a word they made it up. They walked down to the lake. He had twenty minutes of perfect happiness. Her voice, her laugh, her dress (something floating, white, crimson), her spirit, her adventurousness; she made them all disembark and explore the island; she startled a hen; she laughed; she sang. And all the time, he knew perfectly well, Dalloway was falling in love with her; she was falling in love with Dalloway; but it didn’t seem to matter. Nothing mattered. They sat on the ground and talked—he and Clarissa. They went in and out of each other’s minds without any effort. And then in a second it was over. He said to himself as they were getting into the boat, “She will marry that man,” dully, without any resentment; but it was an obvious thing. Dalloway would marry Clarissa.

Dalloway rowed them in. He said nothing. But somehow as they watched him start, jumping on to his bicycle to ride twenty miles through the woods, wobbling off down the drive, waving his hand and disappearing, he obviously did feel, instinctively, tremendously, strongly, all that; the night; the romance; Clarissa. He deserved to have her.

For himself, he was absurd. His demands upon Clarissa (he could see it now) were absurd. He asked impossible things. He made terrible scenes. She would have accepted him still, perhaps, if he had been less absurd. Sally thought so. She wrote him all that summer long letters; how they had talked of him; how she had praised him, how Clarissa burst into tears! It was an extraordinary summer—all letters, scenes, telegrams—arriving at Bourton early in the morning, hanging about till the servants were up; appalling tête-à-têtes with old Mr. Parry at breakfast; Aunt Helena formidable but kind; Sally sweeping him off for talks in the vegetable garden; Clarissa in bed with headaches.

The final scene, the terrible scene which he believed had mattered more than anything in the whole of his life (it might be an exaggeration—but still, so it did seem now), happened at three o’clock in the afternoon of a very hot day. It was a trifle that led up to it—Sally at lunch saying something about Dalloway, and calling him “My name is Dalloway”; whereupon Clarissa suddenly stiffened, coloured, in a way she had, and rapped out sharply, “We’ve had enough of that feeble joke.” That was all; but for him it was as if she had said, “I’m only amusing myself with you; I’ve an understanding with Richard Dalloway.” So he took it. He had not slept for nights. “It’s got to be finished one way or the other,” he said to himself. He sent a note to her by Sally asking her to meet him by the fountain at three. “Something very important has happened,” he scribbled at the end of it.

The fountain was in the middle of a little shrubbery, far from the house, with shrubs and trees all round it. There she came, even before the time, and they stood with the fountain between them, the spout (it was broken) dribbling water incessantly. How sights fix themselves upon the mind! For example, the vivid green moss.

She did not move. “Tell me the truth, tell me the truth,” he kept on saying. He felt as if his forehead would burst. She seemed contracted, petrified. She did not move. “Tell me the truth,” he repeated, when suddenly that old man Breitkopf popped his head in carrying the Times; stared at them; gaped; and went away. They neither of them moved. “Tell me the truth,” he repeated. He felt that he was grinding against something physically hard; she was unyielding. She was like iron, like flint, rigid up the backbone. And when she said, “It’s no use. It’s no use. This is the end”—after he had spoken for hours, it seemed, with the tears running down his cheeks—it was as if she had hit him in the face. She turned, she left him, she went away.

“Clarissa!” he cried. “Clarissa!” But she never came back. It was over. He went away that night. He never saw her again.

It was awful, he cried, awful, awful!

Still, the sun was hot. Still, one got over things. Still, life had a way of adding day to day. Still, he thought, yawning and beginning to take notice—Regent’s Park had changed very little since he was a boy, except for the squirrels—still, presumably there were compensations—when little Elise Mitchell, who had been picking up pebbles to add to the pebble collection which she and her brother were making on the nursery mantelpiece, plumped her handful down on the nurse’s knee and scudded off again full tilt into a lady’s legs. Peter Walsh laughed out.

But Lucrezia Warren Smith was saying to herself, It’s wicked; why should I suffer? she was asking, as she walked down the broad path. No; I can’t stand it any longer, she was saying, having left Septimus, who wasn’t Septimus any longer, to say hard, cruel, wicked things, to talk to himself, to talk to a dead man, on the seat over there; when the child ran full tilt into her, fell flat, and burst out crying.

That was comforting rather. She stood her upright, dusted her frock, kissed her.

But for herself she had done nothing wrong; she had loved Septimus; she had been happy; she had had a beautiful home, and there her sisters lived still, making hats. Why should she suffer?

The child ran straight back to its nurse, and Rezia saw her scolded, comforted, taken up by the nurse who put down her knitting, and the kind-looking man gave her his watch to blow open to comfort her—but why should she be exposed? Why not left in Milan? Why tortured? Why?

Slightly waved by tears, the broad path, the nurse, the man in grey, the perambulator, rose and fell before her eyes. To be rocked by this malignant torturer was her lot. But why? She was like a bird sheltering under the thin hollow of a leaf, who blinks at the sun when the leaf moves; starts at the crack of a dry twig. She was exposed; she was surrounded by the enormous trees, vast clouds of an indifferent world, exposed; tortured; and why should she suffer? Why?

She frowned; she stamped her foot. She must go back again to Septimus since it was almost time for them to be going to Sir William Bradshaw. She must go back and tell him, go back to him sitting there on the green chair under the tree, talking to himself, or to that dead man Evans, whom she had only seen once for a moment in the shop. He had seemed a nice quiet man; a great friend of Septimus’s, and he had been killed in the War. But such things happen to every one. Every one has friends who were killed in the War. Every one gives up something when they marry. She had given up her home. She had come to live here, in this awful city. But Septimus let himself think about horrible things, as she could too, if she tried. He had grown stranger and stranger. He said people were talking behind the bedroom walls. Mrs. Filmer thought it odd. He saw things too—he had seen an old woman’s head in the middle of a fern. Yet he could be happy when he chose. They went to Hampton Court on top of a bus, and they were perfectly happy. All the little red and yellow flowers were out on the grass, like floating lamps he said, and talked and chattered and laughed, making up stories. Suddenly he said, “Now we will kill ourselves,” when they were standing by the river, and he looked at it with a look which she had seen in his eyes when a train went by, or an omnibus—a look as if something fascinated him; and she felt he was going from her and she caught him by the arm. But going home he was perfectly quiet—perfectly reasonable. He would argue with her about killing themselves; and explain how wicked people were; how he could see them making up lies as they passed in the street. He knew all their thoughts, he said; he knew everything. He knew the meaning of the world, he said.

Then when they got back he could hardly walk. He lay on the sofa and made her hold his hand to prevent him from falling down, down, he cried, into the flames! and saw faces laughing at him, calling him horrible disgusting names, from the walls and hands pointing round the screen. Yet they were quite alone. But he began to talk aloud, answering people, arguing, laughing, crying, getting very excited and making her write things down. Perfect nonsense it was; about death; about Miss Isabel Pole. She could stand it no longer. She would go back.

She was close to him now, could see him staring at the sky, muttering, clasping his hands. Yet Dr. Holmes said there was nothing the matter with him. What, then, had happened—why had he gone, then, why, when she sat by him, did he start, frown at her, move away, and point at her hand, take her hand, look at it terrified?

Was it that she had taken off her wedding ring? “My hand has grown so thin,” she said; “I have put it in my purse,” she told him.

He dropped her hand. Their marriage was over, he thought, with agony, with relief. The rope was cut; he mounted; he was free, as it was decreed that he, Septimus, the lord of men, should be free; alone (since his wife had thrown away her wedding ring; since she had left him), he, Septimus, was alone, called forth in advance of the mass of men to hear the truth, to learn the meaning, which now at last, after all the toils of civilisation—Greeks, Romans, Shakespeare, Darwin, and now himself—was to be given whole to … “To whom?” he asked aloud, “To the Prime Minister,” the voices which rustled above his head replied. The supreme secret must be told to the Cabinet; first, that trees are alive; next, there is no crime; next, love, universal love, he muttered, gasping, trembling, painfully drawing out these profound truths which needed, so deep were they, so difficult, an immense effort to speak out, but the world was entirely changed by them for ever.

No crime; love; he repeated, fumbling for his card and pencil, when a Skye terrier snuffed his trousers and he started in an agony of fear. It was turning into a man! He could not watch it happen! It was horrible, terrible to see a dog become a man! At once the dog trotted away.

Heaven was divinely merciful, infinitely benignant. It spared him, pardoned his weakness. But what was the scientific explanation (for one must be scientific above all things)? Why could he see through bodies, see into the future, when dogs will become men? It was the heat wave presumably, operating upon a brain made sensitive by eons of evolution. Scientifically speaking, the flesh was melted off the world. His body was macerated until only the nerve fibres were left. It was spread like a veil upon a rock.

He lay back in his chair, exhausted but upheld. He lay resting, waiting, before he again interpreted, with effort, with agony, to mankind. He lay very high, on the back of the world. The earth thrilled beneath him. Red flowers grew through his flesh; their stiff leaves rustled by his head. Music began clanging against the rocks up here. It is a motor horn down in the street, he muttered; but up here it cannoned from rock to rock, divided, met in shocks of sound which rose in smooth columns (that music should be visible was a discovery) and became an anthem, an anthem twined round now by a shepherd boy’s piping (That’s an old man playing a penny whistle by the public-house, he muttered) which, as the boy stood still, came bubbling from his pipe, and then, as he climbed higher, made its exquisite plaint while the traffic passed beneath. This boy’s elegy is played among the traffic, thought Septimus. Now he withdraws up into the snows, and roses hang about him—the thick red roses which grow on my bedroom wall, he reminded himself. The music stopped. He has his penny, he reasoned it out, and has gone on to the next public-house.

But he himself remained high on his rock, like a drowned sailor on a rock. I leant over the edge of the boat and fell down, he thought. I went under the sea. I have been dead, and yet am now alive, but let me rest still, he begged (he was talking to himself again—it was awful, awful!); and as, before waking, the voices of birds and the sound of wheels chime and chatter in a queer harmony, grow louder and louder, and the sleeper feels himself drawing to the shores of life, so he felt himself drawing towards life, the sun growing hotter, cries sounding louder, something tremendous about to happen.

He had only to open his eyes; but a weight was on them; a fear. He strained; he pushed; he looked; he saw Regent’s Park before him. Long streamers of sunlight fawned at his feet. The trees waved, brandished. We welcome, the world seemed to say; we accept; we create. Beauty, the world seemed to say. And as if to prove it (scientifically) wherever he looked, at the houses, at the railings, at the antelopes stretching over the palings, beauty sprang instantly. To watch a leaf quivering in the rush of air was an exquisite joy. Up in the sky swallows swooping, swerving, flinging themselves in and out, round and round, yet always with perfect control as if elastics held them; and the flies rising and falling; and the sun spotting now this leaf, now that, in mockery, dazzling it with soft gold in pure good temper; and now and again some chime (it might be a motor horn) tinkling divinely on the grass stalks—all of this, calm and reasonable as it was, made out of ordinary things as it was, was the truth now; beauty, that was the truth now. Beauty was everywhere.

“It is time,” said Rezia.

The word “time” split its husk; poured its riches over him; and from his lips fell like shells, like shavings from a plane, without his making them, hard, white, imperishable, words, and flew to attach themselves to their places in an ode to Time; an immortal ode to Time. He sang. Evans answered from behind the tree. The dead were in Thessaly, Evans sang, among the orchids. There they waited till the War was over, and now the dead, now Evans himself—

“For God’s sake don’t come!” Septimus cried out. For he could not look upon the dead.

But the branches parted. A man in grey was actually walking towards them. It was Evans! But no mud was on him; no wounds; he was not changed. I must tell the whole world, Septimus cried, raising his hand (as the dead man in the grey suit came nearer), raising his hand like some colossal figure who has lamented the fate of man for ages in the desert alone with his hands pressed to his forehead, furrows of despair on his cheeks, and now sees light on the desert’s edge which broadens and strikes the iron-black figure (and Septimus half rose from his chair), and with legions of men prostrate behind him he, the giant mourner, receives for one moment on his face the whole—

“But I am so unhappy, Septimus,” said Rezia, trying to make him sit down.

The millions lamented; for ages they had sorrowed. He would turn round, he would tell them in a few moments, only a few moments more, of this relief, of this joy, of this astonishing revelation—

“The time, Septimus,” Rezia repeated. “What is the time?”

He was talking, he was starting, this man must notice him. He was looking at them.

“I will tell you the time,” said Septimus, very slowly, very drowsily, smiling mysteriously at the dead man in the grey suit. As he sat smiling, the quarter struck—the quarter to twelve.

And that is being young, Peter Walsh thought as he passed them. To be having an awful scene—the poor girl looked absolutely desperate—in the middle of the morning. But what was it about? he wondered; what had the young man in the overcoat been saying to her to make her look like that; what awful fix had they got themselves into, both to look so desperate as that on a fine summer morning? The amusing thing about coming back to England, after five years, was the way it made, anyhow the first days, things stand out as if one had never seen them before; lovers squabbling under a tree; the domestic family life of the parks. Never had he seen London look so enchanting—the softness of the distances; the richness; the greenness; the civilisation, after India, he thought, strolling across the grass.

This susceptibility to impressions had been his undoing, no doubt. Still at his age he had, like a boy or a girl even, these alternations of mood; good days, bad days, for no reason whatever, happiness from a pretty face, downright misery at the sight of a frump. After India of course one fell in love with every woman one met. There was a freshness about them; even the poorest dressed better than five years ago surely; and to his eye the fashions had never been so becoming; the long black cloaks; the slimness; the elegance; and then the delicious and apparently universal habit of paint. Every woman, even the most respectable, had roses blooming under glass; lips cut with a knife; curls of Indian ink; there was design, art, everywhere; a change of some sort had undoubtedly taken place. What did the young people think about? Peter Walsh asked himself.

Those five years—1918 to 1923—had been, he suspected, somehow very important. People looked different. Newspapers seemed different. Now, for instance, there was a man writing quite openly in one of the respectable weeklies about water-closets. That you couldn’t have done ten years ago—written quite openly about water-closets in a respectable weekly. And then this taking out a stick of rouge, or a powder-puff, and making up in public. On board ship coming home there were lots of young men and girls—Betty and Bertie he remembered in particular—carrying on quite openly; the old mother sitting and watching them with her knitting, cool as a cucumber. The girl would stand still and powder her nose in front of every one. And they weren’t engaged; just having a good time; no feelings hurt on either side. As hard as nails she was—Betty Whatshername—but a thorough good sort. She would make a very good wife at thirty—she would marry when it suited her to marry; marry some rich man and live in a large house near Manchester.

Who was it now who had done that? Peter Walsh asked himself, turning into the Broad Walk—married a rich man and lived in a large house near Manchester? Somebody who had written him a long, gushing letter quite lately about “blue hydrangeas”. It was seeing blue hydrangeas that made her think of him and the old days—Sally Seton, of course! It was Sally Seton—the last person in the world one would have expected to marry a rich man and live in a large house near Manchester, the wild, the daring, the romantic Sally!

But of all that ancient lot, Clarissa’s friends—Whitbreads, Kindersleys, Cunninghams, Kinloch Jones’s—Sally was probably the best. She tried to get hold of things by the right end anyhow. She saw through Hugh Whitbread anyhow—the admirable Hugh—when Clarissa and the rest were at his feet.

“The Whitbreads?” he could hear her saying. “Who are the Whitbreads? Coal merchants. Respectable tradespeople.”

Hugh she detested for some reason. He thought of nothing but his own appearance, she said. He ought to have been a Duke. He would be certain to marry one of the Royal Princesses. And of course Hugh had the most extraordinary, the most natural, the most sublime respect for the British aristocracy of any human being he had ever come across. Even Clarissa had to own that. Oh, but he was such a dear, so unselfish, gave up shooting to please his old mother—remembered his aunts’ birthdays, and so on.

Sally, to do her justice, saw through all that. One of the things he remembered best was an argument one Sunday morning at Bourton about women’s rights (that antediluvian topic), when Sally suddenly lost her temper, flared up, and told Hugh that he represented all that was most detestable in British middle-class life. She told him that she considered him responsible for the state of “those poor girls in Piccadilly”—Hugh, the perfect gentleman, poor Hugh!—never did a man look more horrified! She did it on purpose, she said afterwards (for they used to get together in the vegetable garden and compare notes). “He’s read nothing, thought nothing, felt nothing,” he could hear her saying in that very emphatic voice which carried so much farther than she knew. The stable boys had more life in them than Hugh, she said. He was a perfect specimen of the public-school type, she said. No country but England could have produced him. She was really spiteful, for some reason; had some grudge against him. Something had happened—he forgot what—in the smoking-room. He had insulted her—kissed her? Incredible! Nobody believed a word against Hugh, of course. Who could? Kissing Sally in the smoking-room! If it had been some Honourable Edith or Lady Violet, perhaps; but not that ragamuffin Sally without a penny to her name, and a father or a mother gambling at Monte Carlo. For of all the people he had ever met Hugh was the greatest snob—the most obsequious—no, he didn’t cringe exactly. He was too much of a prig for that. A first-rate valet was the obvious comparison—somebody who walked behind carrying suitcases; could be trusted to send telegrams—indispensable to hostesses. And he’d found his job—married his Honourable Evelyn; got some little post at Court, looked after the King’s cellars, polished the Imperial shoe-buckles, went about in knee-breeches and lace ruffles. How remorseless life is! A little job at Court!

He had married this lady, the Honourable Evelyn, and they lived hereabouts, so he thought (looking at the pompous houses overlooking the Park), for he had lunched there once in a house which had, like all Hugh’s possessions, something that no other house could possibly have—linen cupboards it might have been. You had to go and look at them—you had to spend a great deal of time always admiring whatever it was—linen cupboards, pillow-cases, old oak furniture, pictures, which Hugh had picked up for an old song. But Mrs. Hugh sometimes gave the show away. She was one of those obscure mouse-like little women who admire big men. She was almost negligible. Then suddenly she would say something quite unexpected—something sharp. She had the relics of the grand manner, perhaps. The steam coal was a little too strong for her—it made the atmosphere thick. And so there they lived, with their linen cupboards and their old masters and their pillow-cases fringed with real lace, at the rate of five or ten thousand a year presumably, while he, who was two years older than Hugh, cadged for a job.

At fifty-three he had to come and ask them to put him into some secretary’s office, to find him some usher’s job teaching little boys Latin, at the beck and call of some mandarin in an office, something that brought in five hundred a year; for if he married Daisy, even with his pension, they could never do on less. Whitbread could do it presumably; or Dalloway. He didn’t mind what he asked Dalloway. He was a thorough good sort; a bit limited; a bit thick in the head; yes; but a thorough good sort. Whatever he took up he did in the same matter-of-fact sensible way; without a touch of imagination, without a spark of brilliancy, but with the inexplicable niceness of his type. He ought to have been a country gentleman—he was wasted on politics. He was at his best out of doors, with horses and dogs—how good he was, for instance, when that great shaggy dog of Clarissa’s got caught in a trap and had its paw half torn off, and Clarissa turned faint and Dalloway did the whole thing; bandaged, made splints; told Clarissa not to be a fool. That was what she liked him for, perhaps—that was what she needed. “Now, my dear, don’t be a fool. Hold this—fetch that,” all the time talking to the dog as if it were a human being.

But how could she swallow all that stuff about poetry? How could she let him hold forth about Shakespeare? Seriously and solemnly Richard Dalloway got on his hind legs and said that no decent man ought to read Shakespeare’s sonnets because it was like listening at keyholes (besides, the relationship was not one that he approved). No decent man ought to let his wife visit a deceased wife’s sister. Incredible! The only thing to do was to pelt him with sugared almonds—it was at dinner. But Clarissa sucked it all in; thought it so honest of him; so independent of him; Heaven knows if she didn’t think him the most original mind she’d ever met!

That was one of the bonds between Sally and himself. There was a garden where they used to walk, a walled-in place, with rose-bushes and giant cauliflowers—he could remember Sally tearing off a rose, stopping to exclaim at the beauty of the cabbage leaves in the moonlight (it was extraordinary how vividly it all came back to him, things he hadn’t thought of for years), while she implored him, half laughing of course, to carry off Clarissa, to save her from the Hughs and the Dalloways and all the other “perfect gentlemen” who would “stifle her soul” (she wrote reams of poetry in those days), make a mere hostess of her, encourage her worldliness. But one must do Clarissa justice. She wasn’t going to marry Hugh anyhow. She had a perfectly clear notion of what she wanted. Her emotions were all on the surface. Beneath, she was very shrewd—a far better judge of character than Sally, for instance, and with it all, purely feminine; with that extraordinary gift, that woman’s gift, of making a world of her own wherever she happened to be. She came into a room; she stood, as he had often seen her, in a doorway with lots of people round her. But it was Clarissa one remembered. Not that she was striking; not beautiful at all; there was nothing picturesque about her; she never said anything specially clever; there she was, however; there she was.

No, no, no! He was not in love with her any more! He only felt, after seeing her that morning, among her scissors and silks, making ready for the party, unable to get away from the thought of her; she kept coming back and back like a sleeper jolting against him in a railway carriage; which was not being in love, of course; it was thinking of her, criticising her, starting again, after thirty years, trying to explain her. The obvious thing to say of her was that she was worldly; cared too much for rank and society and getting on in the world—which was true in a sense; she had admitted it to him. (You could always get her to own up if you took the trouble; she was honest.) What she would say was that she hated frumps, fogies, failures, like himself presumably; thought people had no right to slouch about with their hands in their pockets; must do something, be something; and these great swells, these Duchesses, these hoary old Countesses one met in her drawing-room, unspeakably remote as he felt them to be from anything that mattered a straw, stood for something real to her. Lady Bexborough, she said once, held herself upright (so did Clarissa herself; she never lounged in any sense of the word; she was straight as a dart, a little rigid in fact). She said they had a kind of courage which the older she grew the more she respected. In all this there was a great deal of Dalloway, of course; a great deal of the public-spirited, British Empire, tariff-reform, governing-class spirit, which had grown on her, as it tends to do. With twice his wits, she had to see things through his eyes—one of the tragedies of married life. With a mind of her own, she must always be quoting Richard—as if one couldn’t know to a tittle what Richard thought by reading the Morning Post of a morning! These parties, for example, were all for him, or for her idea of him (to do Richard justice he would have been happier farming in Norfolk). She made her drawing-room a sort of meeting-place; she had a genius for it. Over and over again he had seen her take some raw youth, twist him, turn him, wake him up; set him going. Infinite numbers of dull people conglomerated round her, of course. But odd unexpected people turned up; an artist sometimes; sometimes a writer; queer fish in that atmosphere. And behind it all was that network of visiting, leaving cards, being kind to people; running about with bunches of flowers, little presents; So-and-so was going to France—must have an air-cushion; a real drain on her strength; all that interminable traffic that women of her sort keep up; but she did it genuinely, from a natural instinct.

Oddly enough, she was one of the most thoroughgoing sceptics he had ever met, and possibly (this was a theory he used to make up to account for her, so transparent in some ways, so inscrutable in others), possibly she said to herself, As we are a doomed race, chained to a sinking ship (her favourite reading as a girl was Huxley and Tyndall, and they were fond of these nautical metaphors), as the whole thing is a bad joke, let us, at any rate, do our part; mitigate the sufferings of our fellow-prisoners (Huxley again); decorate the dungeon with flowers and air-cushions; be as decent as we possibly can. Those ruffians, the Gods, shan’t have it all their own way—her notion being that the Gods, who never lost a chance of hurting, thwarting and spoiling human lives, were seriously put out if, all the same, you behaved like a lady. That phase came directly after Sylvia’s death—that horrible affair. To see your own sister killed by a falling tree (all Justin Parry’s fault—all his carelessness) before your very eyes, a girl too on the verge of life, the most gifted of them, Clarissa always said, was enough to turn one bitter. Later she wasn’t so positive, perhaps; she thought there were no Gods; no one was to blame; and so she evolved this atheist’s religion of doing good for the sake of goodness.

And of course she enjoyed life immensely. It was her nature to enjoy (though, goodness only knows, she had her reserves; it was a mere sketch, he often felt, that even he, after all these years, could make of Clarissa). Anyhow there was no bitterness in her; none of that sense of moral virtue which is so repulsive in good women. She enjoyed practically everything. If you walked with her in Hyde Park, now it was a bed of tulips, now a child in a perambulator, now some absurd little drama she made up on the spur of the moment. (Very likely she would have talked to those lovers, if she had thought them unhappy.) She had a sense of comedy that was really exquisite, but she needed people, always people, to bring it out, with the inevitable result that she frittered her time away, lunching, dining, giving these incessant parties of hers, talking nonsense, saying things she didn’t mean, blunting the edge of her mind, losing her discrimination. There she would sit at the head of the table taking infinite pains with some old buffer who might be useful to Dalloway—they knew the most appalling bores in Europe—or in came Elizabeth and everything must give way to her. She was at a High School, at the inarticulate stage last time he was over, a round-eyed, pale-faced girl, with nothing of her mother in her, a silent, stolid creature, who took it all as a matter of course, let her mother make a fuss of her, and then said “May I go now?” like a child of four; going off, Clarissa explained, with that mixture of amusement and pride which Dalloway himself seemed to rouse in her, to play hockey. And now Elizabeth was “out”, presumably; thought him an old fogy, laughed at her mother’s friends. Ah well, so be it. The compensation of growing old, Peter Walsh thought, coming out of Regent’s Park, and holding his hat in his hand, was simply this; that the passions remain as strong as ever, but one has gained—at last!—the power which adds the supreme flavour to existence—the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it round, slowly, in the light.

A terrible confession it was (he put his hat on again), but now, at the age of fifty-three, one scarcely needed people any more. Life itself, every moment of it, every drop of it, here, this instant, now, in the sun, in Regent’s Park, was enough. Too much, indeed. A whole lifetime was too short to bring out, now that one had acquired the power, the full flavour; to extract every ounce of pleasure, every shade of meaning; which both were so much more solid than they used to be, so much less personal. It was impossible that he should ever suffer again as Clarissa had made him suffer. For hours at a time (pray God that one might say these things without being overheard!), for hours and days he never thought of Daisy.

Could it be that he was in love with her, then, remembering the misery, the torture, the extraordinary passion of those days? It was a different thing altogether—a much pleasanter thing—the truth being, of course, that now she was in love with him. And that perhaps was the reason why, when the ship actually sailed, he felt an extraordinary relief, wanted nothing so much as to be alone; was annoyed to find all her little attentions—cigars, notes, a rug for the voyage—in his cabin. Every one if they were honest would say the same; one doesn’t want people after fifty; one doesn’t want to go on telling women they are pretty; that’s what most men of fifty would say, Peter Walsh thought, if they were honest.

But then these astonishing accesses of emotion—bursting into tears this morning, what was all that about? What could Clarissa have thought of him? thought him a fool presumably, not for the first time. It was jealousy that was at the bottom of it—jealousy which survives every other passion of mankind, Peter Walsh thought, holding his pocket-knife at arm’s length. She had been meeting Major Orde, Daisy said in her last letter; said it on purpose, he knew; said it to make him jealous; he could see her wrinkling her forehead as she wrote, wondering what she could say to hurt him; and yet it made no difference; he was furious! All this pother of coming to England and seeing lawyers wasn’t to marry her, but to prevent her from marrying anybody else. That was what tortured him, that was what came over him when he saw Clarissa so calm, so cold, so intent on her dress or whatever it was; realising what she might have spared him, what she had reduced him to—a whimpering, snivelling old ass. But women, he thought, shutting his pocket-knife, don’t know what passion is. They don’t know the meaning of it to men. Clarissa was as cold as an icicle. There she would sit on the sofa by his side, let him take her hand, give him one kiss on the cheek——Here he was at the crossing.

A sound interrupted him; a frail quivering sound, a voice bubbling up without direction, vigour, beginning or end, running weakly and shrilly and with an absence of all human meaning into

ee um fah um so

foo swee too eem oo—

the voice of no age or sex, the voice of an ancient spring spouting from the earth; which issued, just opposite Regent’s Park Tube Station from a tall quivering shape, like a funnel, like a rusty pump, like a wind-beaten tree for ever barren of leaves which lets the wind run up and down its branches singing

ee um fah um so

foo swee too eem oo,

and rocks and creaks and moans in the eternal breeze.

Through all ages—when the pavement was grass, when it was swamp, through the age of tusk and mammoth, through the age of silent sunrise—the battered woman—for she wore a skirt—with her right hand exposed, her left clutching at her side, stood singing of love—love which has lasted a million years, she sang, love which prevails, and millions of years ago her lover, who had been dead these centuries, had walked, she crooned, with her in May; but in the course of ages, long as summer days, and flaming, she remembered, with nothing but red asters, he had gone; death’s enormous sickle had swept those tremendous hills, and when at last she laid her hoary and immensely aged head on the earth, now become a mere cinder of ice, she implored the Gods to lay by her side a bunch of purple heather, there on her high burial place which the last rays of the last sun caressed; for then the pageant of the universe would be over.

As the ancient song bubbled up opposite Regent’s Park Tube Station still the earth seemed green and flowery; still, though it issued from so rude a mouth, a mere hole in the earth, muddy too, matted with root fibres and tangled grasses, still the old bubbling burbling song, soaking through the knotted roots of infinite ages, and skeletons and treasure, streamed away in rivulets over the pavement and all along the Marylebone Road, and down towards Euston, fertilising, leaving a damp stain.

Still remembering how once in some primeval May she had walked with her lover, this rusty pump, this battered old woman with one hand exposed for coppers, the other clutching her side, would still be there in ten million years, remembering how once she had walked in May, where the sea flows now, with whom it did not matter—he was a man, oh yes, a man who had loved her. But the passage of ages had blurred the clarity of that ancient May day; the bright-petalled flowers were hoar and silver frosted; and she no longer saw, when she implored him (as she did now quite clearly) “look in my eyes with thy sweet eyes intently,” she no longer saw brown eyes, black whiskers or sunburnt face, but only a looming shape, a shadow shape, to which, with the bird-like freshness of the very aged, she still twittered “give me your hand and let me press it gently” (Peter Walsh couldn’t help giving the poor creature a coin as he stepped into his taxi), “and if some one should see, what matter they?” she demanded; and her fist clutched at her side, and she smiled, pocketing her shilling, and all peering inquisitive eyes seemed blotted out, and the passing generations—the pavement was crowded with bustling middle-class people—vanished, like leaves, to be trodden under, to be soaked and steeped and made mould of by that eternal spring—

ee um fah um so

foo swee too eem oo.

“Poor old woman,” said Rezia Warren Smith.

Oh, poor old wretch! she said, waiting to cross.

Suppose it was a wet night? Suppose one’s father, or somebody who had known one in better days had happened to pass, and saw one standing there in the gutter? And where did she sleep at night?

Cheerfully, almost gaily, the invincible thread of sound wound up into the air like the smoke from a cottage chimney, winding up clean beech trees and issuing in a tuft of blue smoke among the topmost leaves. “And if some one should see, what matter they?”

Since she was so unhappy, for weeks and weeks now, Rezia had given meanings to things that happened, almost felt sometimes that she must stop people in the street, if they looked good, kind people, just to say to them “I am unhappy”; and this old woman singing in the street “if some one should see, what matter they?” made her suddenly quite sure that everything was going to be right. They were going to Sir William Bradshaw; she thought his name sounded nice; he would cure Septimus at once. And then there was a brewer’s cart, and the grey horses had upright bristles of straw in their tails; there were newspaper placards. It was a silly, silly dream, being unhappy.

So they crossed, Mr. and Mrs. Septimus Warren Smith, and was there, after all, anything to draw attention to them, anything to make a passer-by suspect here is a young man who carries in him the greatest message in the world, and is, moreover, the happiest man in the world, and the most miserable? Perhaps they walked more slowly than other people, and there was something hesitating, trailing, in the man’s walk, but what more natural for a clerk, who has not been in the West End on a week-day at this hour for years, than to keep looking at the sky, looking at this, that and the other, as if Portland Place were a room he had come into when the family are away, the chandeliers being hung in holland bags, and the caretaker, as she lets in long shafts of dusty light upon deserted, queer-looking arm-chairs, lifting one corner of the long blinds, explains to the visitors what a wonderful place it is; how wonderful, but at the same time, he thinks, how strange.

To look at, he might have been a clerk, but of the better sort; for he wore brown boots; his hands were educated; so, too, his profile—his angular, big-nosed, intelligent, sensitive profile; but not his lips altogether, for they were loose; and his eyes (as eyes tend to be), eyes merely; hazel, large; so that he was, on the whole, a border case, neither one thing nor the other; might end with a house at Purley and a motor car, or continue renting apartments in back streets all his life; one of those half-educated, self-educated men whose education is all learnt from books borrowed from public libraries, read in the evening after the day’s work, on the advice of well-known authors consulted by letter.

As for the other experiences, the solitary ones, which people go through alone, in their bedrooms, in their offices, walking the fields and the streets of London, he had them; had left home, a mere boy, because of his mother; she lied; because he came down to tea for the fiftieth time with his hands unwashed; because he could see no future for a poet in Stroud; and so, making a confidant of his little sister, had gone to London leaving an absurd note behind him, such as great men have written, and the world has read later when the story of their struggles has become famous.

London has swallowed up many millions of young men called Smith; thought nothing of fantastic Christian names like Septimus with which their parents have thought to distinguish them. Lodging off the Euston Road, there were experiences, again experiences, such as change a face in two years from a pink innocent oval to a face lean, contracted, hostile. But of all this what could the most observant of friends have said except what a gardener says when he opens the conservatory door in the morning and finds a new blossom on his plant: It has flowered; flowered from vanity, ambition, idealism, passion, loneliness, courage, laziness, the usual seeds, which all muddled up (in a room off the Euston Road), made him shy, and stammering, made him anxious to improve himself, made him fall in love with Miss Isabel Pole, lecturing in the Waterloo Road upon Shakespeare.

Was he not like Keats? she asked; and reflected how she might give him a taste of Antony and Cleopatra and the rest; lent him books; wrote him scraps of letters; and lit in him such a fire as burns only once in a lifetime, without heat, flickering a red-gold flame infinitely ethereal and insubstantial over Miss Pole; Antony and Cleopatra; and the Waterloo Road. He thought her beautiful, believed her impeccably wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in red ink; he saw her, one summer evening, walking in a green dress in a square. “It has flowered,” the gardener might have said, had he opened the door; had he come in, that is to say, any night about this time, and found him writing; found him tearing up his writing; found him finishing a masterpiece at three o’clock in the morning and running out to pace the streets, and visiting churches, and fasting one day, drinking another, devouring Shakespeare, Darwin, The History of Civilisation, and Bernard Shaw.

Something was up, Mr. Brewer knew; Mr. Brewer, managing clerk at Sibleys and Arrowsmiths, auctioneers, valuers, land and estate agents; something was up, he thought, and, being paternal with his young men, and thinking very highly of Smith’s abilities, and prophesying that he would, in ten or fifteen years, succeed to the leather arm-chair in the inner room under the skylight with the deed-boxes round him, “if he keeps his health,” said Mr. Brewer, and that was the danger—he looked weakly; advised football, invited him to supper and was seeing his way to consider recommending a rise of salary, when something happened which threw out many of Mr. Brewer’s calculations, took away his ablest young fellows, and eventually, so prying and insidious were the fingers of the European War, smashed a plaster cast of Ceres, ploughed a hole in the geranium beds, and utterly ruined the cook’s nerves at Mr. Brewer’s establishment at Muswell Hill.

Septimus was one of the first to volunteer. He went to France to save an England which consisted almost entirely of Shakespeare’s plays and Miss Isabel Pole in a green dress walking in a square. There in the trenches the change which Mr. Brewer desired when he advised football was produced instantly; he developed manliness; he was promoted; he drew the attention, indeed the affection of his officer, Evans by name. It was a case of two dogs playing on a hearth-rug; one worrying a paper screw, snarling, snapping, giving a pinch, now and then, at the old dog’s ear; the other lying somnolent, blinking at the fire, raising a paw, turning and growling good-temperedly. They had to be together, share with each other, fight with each other, quarrel with each other. But when Evans (Rezia, who had only seen him once, called him “a quiet man”, a sturdy red-haired man, undemonstrative in the company of women), when Evans was killed, just before the Armistice, in Italy, Septimus, far from showing any emotion or recognising that here was the end of a friendship, congratulated himself upon feeling very little and very reasonably. The War had taught him. It was sublime. He had gone through the whole show, friendship, European War, death, had won promotion, was still under thirty and was bound to survive. He was right there. The last shells missed him. He watched them explode with indifference. When peace came he was in Milan, billeted in the house of an innkeeper with a courtyard, flowers in tubs, little tables in the open, daughters making hats, and to Lucrezia, the younger daughter, he became engaged one evening when the panic was on him—that he could not feel.

For now that it was all over, truce signed, and the dead buried, he had, especially in the evening, these sudden thunder-claps of fear. He could not feel. As he opened the door of the room where the Italian girls sat making hats, he could see them; could hear them; they were rubbing wires among coloured beads in saucers; they were turning buckram shapes this way and that; the table was all strewn with feathers, spangles, silks, ribbons; scissors were rapping on the table; but something failed him; he could not feel. Still, scissors rapping, girls laughing, hats being made protected him; he was assured of safety; he had a refuge. But he could not sit there all night. There were moments of waking in the early morning. The bed was falling; he was falling. Oh for the scissors and the lamplight and the buckram shapes! He asked Lucrezia to marry him, the younger of the two, the gay, the frivolous, with those little artist’s fingers that she would hold up and say “It is all in them.” Silk, feathers, what not, were alive to them.

“It is the hat that matters most,” she would say, when they walked out together. Every hat that passed she would examine; and the cloak and the dress and the way the woman held herself. Ill-dressing, over-dressing she stigmatised, not savagely, rather with impatient movements of the hands, like those of a painter who puts from him some obvious well-meant glaring imposture; and then, generously, but always critically, she would welcome a shop-girl who had turned her little bit of stuff gallantly, or praise, wholly, with enthusiastic and professional understanding, a French lady descending from her carriage, in chinchilla, robes, pearls.

“Beautiful!” she would murmur, nudging Septimus, that he might see. But beauty was behind a pane of glass. Even taste (Rezia liked ices, chocolates, sweet things) had no relish to him. He put down his cup on the little marble table. He looked at people outside; happy they seemed, collecting in the middle of the street, shouting, laughing, squabbling over nothing. But he could not taste, he could not feel. In the tea-shop among the tables and the chattering waiters the appalling fear came over him—he could not feel. He could reason; he could read, Dante for example, quite easily (“Septimus, do put down your book,” said Rezia, gently shutting the Inferno), he could add up his bill; his brain was perfect; it must be the fault of the world then—that he could not feel.

“The English are so silent,” Rezia said. She liked it, she said. She respected these Englishmen, and wanted to see London, and the English horses, and the tailor-made suits, and could remember hearing how wonderful the shops were, from an aunt who had married and lived in Soho.

It might be possible, Septimus thought, looking at England from the train window, as they left Newhaven; it might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.

At the office they advanced him to a post of considerable responsibility. They were proud of him; he had won crosses. “You have done your duty; it is up to us——” began Mr. Brewer; and could not finish, so pleasurable was his emotion. They took admirable lodgings off the Tottenham Court Road.

Here he opened Shakespeare once more. That boy’s business of the intoxication of language—Antony and Cleopatra—had shrivelled utterly. How Shakespeare loathed humanity—the putting on of clothes, the getting of children, the sordidity of the mouth and the belly! This was now revealed to Septimus; the message hidden in the beauty of words. The secret signal which one generation passes, under disguise, to the next is loathing, hatred, despair. Dante the same. Aeschylus (translated) the same. There Rezia sat at the table trimming hats. She trimmed hats for Mrs. Filmer’s friends; she trimmed hats by the hour. She looked pale, mysterious, like a lily, drowned, under water, he thought.

“The English are so serious,” she would say, putting her arms round Septimus, her cheek against his.

Love between man and woman was repulsive to Shakespeare. The business of copulation was filth to him before the end. But, Rezia said, she must have children. They had been married five years.

They went to the Tower together; to the Victoria and Albert Museum; stood in the crowd to see the King open Parliament. And there were the shops—hat shops, dress shops, shops with leather bags in the window, where she would stand staring. But she must have a boy.

She must have a son like Septimus, she said. But nobody could be like Septimus; so gentle; so serious; so clever. Could she not read Shakespeare too? Was Shakespeare a difficult author? she asked.

One cannot bring children into a world like this. One cannot perpetuate suffering, or increase the breed of these lustful animals, who have no lasting emotions, but only whims and vanities, eddying them now this way, now that.

He watched her snip, shape, as one watches a bird hop, flit in the grass, without daring to move a finger. For the truth is (let her ignore it) that human beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor charity beyond what serves to increase the pleasure of the moment. They hunt in packs. Their packs scour the desert and vanish screaming into the wilderness. They desert the fallen. They are plastered over with grimaces. There was Brewer at the office, with his waxed moustache, coral tie-pin, white slip, and pleasurable emotions—all coldness and clamminess within,—his geraniums ruined in the War—his cook’s nerves destroyed; or Amelia Whatshername, handing round cups of tea punctually at five—a leering, sneering, obscene little harpy; and the Toms and Berties in their starched shirt fronts oozing thick drops of vice. They never saw him drawing pictures of them naked at their antics in his notebook. In the street, vans roared past him; brutality blared out on placards; men were trapped in mines; women burnt alive; and once a maimed file of lunatics being exercised or displayed for the diversion of the populace (who laughed aloud) ambled and nodded and grinned past him, in the Tottenham Court Road, each half apologetically, yet triumphantly, inflicting his hopeless woe. And would he go mad?

At tea Rezia told him that Mrs. Filmer’s daughter was expecting a baby. She could not grow old and have no children! She was very lonely, she was very unhappy! She cried for the first time since they were married. Far away he heard her sobbing; he heard it accurately, he noticed it distinctly; he compared it to a piston thumping. But he felt nothing.

His wife was crying, and he felt nothing; only each time she sobbed in this profound, this silent, this hopeless way, he descended another step into the pit.

At last, with a melodramatic gesture which he assumed mechanically and with complete consciousness of its insincerity, he dropped his head on his hands. Now he had surrendered; now other people must help him. People must be sent for. He gave in.

Nothing could rouse him. Rezia put him to bed. She sent for a doctor—Mrs. Filmer’s Dr. Holmes. Dr. Holmes examined him. There was nothing whatever the matter, said Dr. Holmes. Oh, what a relief! What a kind man, what a good man! thought Rezia. When he felt like that he went to the Music Hall, said Dr. Holmes. He took a day off with his wife and played golf. Why not try two tabloids of bromide dissolved in a glass of water at bedtime? These old Bloomsbury houses, said Dr. Holmes, tapping the wall, are often full of very fine panelling, which the landlords have the folly to paper over. Only the other day, visiting a patient, Sir Somebody Something, in Bedford Square—

So there was no excuse; nothing whatever the matter, except the sin for which human nature had condemned him to death; that he did not feel. He had not cared when Evans was killed; that was worst; but all the other crimes raised their heads and shook their fingers and jeered and sneered over the rail of the bed in the early hours of the morning at the prostrate body which lay realising its degradation; how he had married his wife without loving her; had lied to her; seduced her; outraged Miss Isabel Pole, and was so pocked and marked with vice that women shuddered when they saw him in the street. The verdict of human nature on such a wretch was death.

Dr. Holmes came again. Large, fresh-coloured, handsome, flicking his boots, looking in the glass, he brushed it all aside—headaches, sleeplessness, fears, dreams—nerve symptoms and nothing more, he said. If Dr. Holmes found himself even half a pound below eleven stone six, he asked his wife for another plate of porridge at breakfast. (Rezia would learn to cook porridge.) But, he continued, health is largely a matter in our own control. Throw yourself into outside interests; take up some hobby. He opened Shakespeare—Antony and Cleopatra; pushed Shakespeare aside. Some hobby, said Dr. Holmes, for did he not owe his own excellent health (and he worked as hard as any man in London) to the fact that he could always switch off from his patients on to old furniture? And what a very pretty comb, if he might say so, Mrs. Warren Smith was wearing!

When the damned fool came again, Septimus refused to see him. Did he indeed? said Dr. Holmes, smiling agreeably. Really he had to give that charming little lady, Mrs. Smith, a friendly push before he could get past her into her husband’s bedroom.

“So you’re in a funk,” he said agreeably, sitting down by his patient’s side. He had actually talked of killing himself to his wife, quite a girl, a foreigner, wasn’t she? Didn’t that give her a very odd idea of English husbands? Didn’t one owe perhaps a duty to one’s wife? Wouldn’t it be better to do something instead of lying in bed? For he had had forty years’ experience behind him; and Septimus could take Dr. Holmes’s word for it—there was nothing whatever the matter with him. And next time Dr. Holmes came he hoped to find Smith out of bed and not making that charming little lady his wife anxious about him.

Human nature, in short, was on him—the repulsive brute, with the blood-red nostrils. Holmes was on him. Dr. Holmes came quite regularly every day. Once you stumble, Septimus wrote on the back of a postcard, human nature is on you. Holmes is on you. Their only chance was to escape, without letting Holmes know; to Italy—anywhere, anywhere, away from Dr. Holmes.

But Rezia could not understand him. Dr. Holmes was such a kind man. He was so interested in Septimus. He only wanted to help them, he said. He had four little children and he had asked her to tea, she told Septimus.

So he was deserted. The whole world was clamouring: Kill yourself, kill yourself, for our sakes. But why should he kill himself for their sakes? Food was pleasant; the sun hot; and this killing oneself, how does one set about it, with a table knife, uglily, with floods of blood,—by sucking a gaspipe? He was too weak; he could scarcely raise his hand. Besides, now that he was quite alone, condemned, deserted, as those who are about to die are alone, there was a luxury in it, an isolation full of sublimity; a freedom which the attached can never know. Holmes had won of course; the brute with the red nostrils had won. But even Holmes himself could not touch this last relic straying on the edge of the world, this outcast, who gazed back at the inhabited regions, who lay, like a drowned sailor, on the shore of the world.

It was at that moment (Rezia had gone shopping) that the great revelation took place. A voice spoke from behind the screen. Evans was speaking. The dead were with him.

“Evans, Evans!” he cried.

Mr. Smith was talking aloud to himself, Agnes the servant girl cried to Mrs. Filmer in the kitchen. “Evans, Evans!” he had said as she brought in the tray. She jumped, she did. She scuttled downstairs.

And Rezia came in, with her flowers, and walked across the room, and put the roses in a vase, upon which the sun struck directly, and went laughing, leaping round the room.

She had had to buy the roses, Rezia said, from a poor man in the street. But they were almost dead already, she said, arranging the roses.

So there was a man outside; Evans presumably; and the roses, which Rezia said were half dead, had been picked by him in the fields of Greece. Communication is health; communication is happiness. Communication, he muttered.

“What are you saying, Septimus?” Rezia asked, wild with terror, for he was talking to himself.

She sent Agnes running for Dr. Holmes. Her husband, she said, was mad. He scarcely knew her.

“You brute! You brute!” cried Septimus, seeing human nature, that is Dr. Holmes, enter the room.

“Now what’s all this about,” said Dr. Holmes in the most amiable way in the world. “Talking nonsense to frighten your wife?” But he would give him something to make him sleep. And if they were rich people, said Dr. Holmes, looking ironically round the room, by all means let them go to Harley Street; if they had no confidence in him, said Dr. Holmes, looking not quite so kind.

[]

It was precisely twelve o’clock; twelve by Big Ben; whose stroke was wafted over the northern part of London; blent with that of other clocks, mixed in a thin ethereal way with the clouds and wisps of smoke and died up there among the seagulls—twelve o’clock struck as Clarissa Dalloway laid her green dress on her bed, and the Warren Smiths walked down Harley Street. Twelve was the hour of their appointment. Probably, Rezia thought, that was Sir William Bradshaw’s house with the grey motor car in front of it. (The leaden circles dissolved in the air.)

Indeed it was—Sir William Bradshaw’s motor car; low, powerful, grey with plain initials interlocked on the panel, as if the pomps of heraldry were incongruous, this man being the ghostly helper, the priest of science; and, as the motor car was grey, so, to match its sober suavity, grey furs, silver grey rugs were heaped in it, to keep her ladyship warm while she waited. For often Sir William would travel sixty miles or more down into the country to visit the rich, the afflicted, who could afford the very large fee which Sir William very properly charged for his advice. Her ladyship waited with the rugs about her knees an hour or more, leaning back, thinking sometimes of the patient, sometimes, excusably, of the wall of gold, mounting minute by minute while she waited; the wall of gold that was mounting between them and all shifts and anxieties (she had borne them bravely; they had had their struggles), until she felt wedged on a calm ocean, where only spice winds blow; respected, admired, envied, with scarcely anything left to wish for, though she regretted her stoutness; large dinner-parties every Thursday night to the profession; an occasional bazaar to be opened; Royalty greeted; too little time, alas, with her husband, whose work grew and grew; a boy doing well at Eton; she would have liked a daughter too; interests she had, however, in plenty; child welfare; the after-care of the epileptic, and photography, so that if there was a church building, or a church decaying, she bribed the sexton, got the key and took photographs, which were scarcely to be distinguished from the work of professionals, while she waited.

Sir William himself was no longer young. He had worked very hard; he had won his position by sheer ability (being the son of a shop-keeper); loved his profession; made a fine figurehead at ceremonies and spoke well—all of which had by the time he was knighted given him a heavy look, a weary look (the stream of patients being so incessant, the responsibilities and privileges of his profession so onerous), which weariness, together with his grey hairs, increased the extraordinary distinction of his presence and gave him the reputation (of the utmost importance in dealing with nerve cases) not merely of lightning skill and almost infallible accuracy in diagnosis, but of sympathy; tact; understanding of the human soul. He could see the first moment they came into the room (the Warren Smiths they were called); he was certain directly he saw the man; it was a case of extreme gravity. It was a case of complete breakdown—complete physical and nervous breakdown, with every symptom in an advanced stage, he ascertained in two or three minutes (writing answers to questions, murmured discreetly, on a pink card).

How long had Dr. Holmes been attending him?

Six weeks.

Prescribed a little bromide? Said there was nothing the matter? Ah yes (those general practitioners! thought Sir William. It took half his time to undo their blunders. Some were irreparable).

“You served with great distinction in the War?”

The patient repeated the word “war” interrogatively.

He was attaching meanings to words of a symbolical kind. A serious symptom to be noted on the card.

“The War?” the patient asked. The European War—that little shindy of schoolboys with gunpowder? Had he served with distinction? He really forgot. In the War itself he had failed.

“Yes, he served with the greatest distinction,” Rezia assured the doctor; “he was promoted.”

“And they have the very highest opinion of you at your office?” Sir William murmured, glancing at Mr. Brewer’s very generously worded letter. “So that you have nothing to worry you, no financial anxiety, nothing?”

He had committed an appalling crime and been condemned to death by human nature.

“I have—I have,” he began, “committed a crime——”

“He has done nothing wrong whatever,” Rezia assured the doctor. If Mr. Smith would wait, said Sir William, he would speak to Mrs. Smith in the next room. Her husband was very seriously ill, Sir William said. Did he threaten to kill himself?

Oh, he did, she cried. But he did not mean it, she said. Of course not. It was merely a question of rest, said Sir William; of rest, rest, rest; a long rest in bed. There was a delightful home down in the country where her husband would be perfectly looked after. Away from her? she asked. Unfortunately, yes; the people we care for most are not good for us when we are ill. But he was not mad, was he? Sir William said he never spoke of “madness”; he called it not having a sense of proportion. But her husband did not like doctors. He would refuse to go there. Shortly and kindly Sir William explained to her the state of the case. He had threatened to kill himself. There was no alternative. It was a question of law. He would lie in bed in a beautiful house in the country. The nurses were admirable. Sir William would visit him once a week. If Mrs. Warren Smith was quite sure she had no more questions to ask—he never hurried his patients—they would return to her husband. She had nothing more to ask—not of Sir William.

So they returned to the most exalted of mankind; the criminal who faced his judges; the victim exposed on the heights; the fugitive; the drowned sailor; the poet of the immortal ode; the Lord who had gone from life to death; to Septimus Warren Smith, who sat in the arm-chair under the skylight staring at a photograph of Lady Bradshaw in Court dress, muttering messages about beauty.

“We have had our little talk,” said Sir William.

“He says you are very, very ill,” Rezia cried.

“We have been arranging that you should go into a home,” said Sir William.

“One of Holmes’s homes?” sneered Septimus.

The fellow made a distasteful impression. For there was in Sir William, whose father had been a tradesman, a natural respect for breeding and clothing, which shabbiness nettled; again, more profoundly, there was in Sir William, who had never had time for reading, a grudge, deeply buried, against cultivated people who came into his room and intimated that doctors, whose profession is a constant strain upon all the highest faculties, are not educated men.

“One of my homes, Mr. Warren Smith,” he said, “where we will teach you to rest.”

And there was just one thing more.

He was quite certain that when Mr. Warren Smith was well he was the last man in the world to frighten his wife. But he had talked of killing himself.

“We all have our moments of depression,” said Sir William.

Once you fall, Septimus repeated to himself, human nature is on you. Holmes and Bradshaw are on you. They scour the desert. They fly screaming into the wilderness. The rack and the thumbscrew are applied. Human nature is remorseless.

“Impulses came upon him sometimes?” Sir William asked, with his pencil on a pink card.

That was his own affair, said Septimus.

“Nobody lives for himself alone,” said Sir William, glancing at the photograph of his wife in Court dress.

“And you have a brilliant career before you,” said Sir William. There was Mr. Brewer’s letter on the table. “An exceptionally brilliant career.”

But if he confessed? If he communicated? Would they let him off then, Holmes, Bradshaw?

“I—I——” he stammered.

But what was his crime? He could not remember it.

“Yes?” Sir William encouraged him. (But it was growing late.)

Love, trees, there is no crime—what was his message?

He could not remember it.

“I—I——” Septimus stammered.

“Try to think as little about yourself as possible,” said Sir William kindly. Really, he was not fit to be about.

Was there anything else they wished to ask him? Sir William would make all arrangements (he murmured to Rezia) and he would let her know between five and six that evening.

“Trust everything to me,” he said, and dismissed them.

Never, never had Rezia felt such agony in her life! She had asked for help and been deserted! He had failed them! Sir William Bradshaw was not a nice man.

The upkeep of that motor car alone must cost him quite a lot, said Septimus, when they got out into the street.

She clung to his arm. They had been deserted.

But what more did she want?

To his patients he gave three-quarters of an hour; and if in this exacting science which has to do with what, after all, we know nothing about—the nervous system, the human brain—a doctor loses his sense of proportion, as a doctor he fails. Health we must have; and health is proportion; so that when a man comes into your room and says he is Christ (a common delusion), and has a message, as they mostly have, and threatens, as they often do, to kill himself, you invoke proportion; order rest in bed; rest in solitude; silence and rest; rest without friends, without books, without messages; six months’ rest; until a man who went in weighing seven stone six comes out weighing twelve.

Proportion, divine proportion, Sir William’s goddess, was acquired by Sir William walking hospitals, catching salmon, begetting one son in Harley Street by Lady Bradshaw, who caught salmon herself and took photographs scarcely to be distinguished from the work of professionals. Worshipping proportion, Sir William not only prospered himself but made England prosper, secluded her lunatics, forbade childbirth, penalised despair, made it impossible for the unfit to propagate their views until they, too, shared his sense of proportion—his, if they were men, Lady Bradshaw’s if they were women (she embroidered, knitted, spent four nights out of seven at home with her son), so that not only did his colleagues respect him, his subordinates fear him, but the friends and relations of his patients felt for him the keenest gratitude for insisting that these prophetic Christs and Christesses, who prophesied the end of the world, or the advent of God, should drink milk in bed, as Sir William ordered; Sir William with his thirty years’ experience of these kinds of cases, and his infallible instinct, this is madness, this sense; his sense of proportion.

But Proportion has a sister, less smiling, more formidable, a Goddess even now engaged—in the heat and sands of India, the mud and swamp of Africa, the purlieus of London, wherever, in short, the climate or the devil tempts men to fall from the true belief which is her own—is even now engaged in dashing down shrines, smashing idols, and setting up in their place her own stern countenance. Conversion is her name and she feasts on the wills of the weakly, loving to impress, to impose, adoring her own features stamped on the face of the populace. At Hyde Park Corner on a tub she stands preaching; shrouds herself in white and walks penitentially disguised as brotherly love through factories and parliaments; offers help, but desires power; smites out of her way roughly the dissentient, or dissatisfied; bestows her blessing on those who, looking upward, catch submissively from her eyes the light of their own. This lady too (Rezia Warren Smith divined it) had her dwelling in Sir William’s heart, though concealed, as she mostly is, under some plausible disguise; some venerable name; love, duty, self-sacrifice. How he would work—how toil to raise funds, propagate reforms, initiate institutions! But conversion, fastidious Goddess, loves blood better than brick, and feasts most subtly on the human will. For example, Lady Bradshaw. Fifteen years ago she had gone under. It was nothing you could put your finger on; there had been no scene, no snap; only the slow sinking, water-logged, of her will into his. Sweet was her smile, swift her submission; dinner in Harley Street, numbering eight or nine courses, feeding ten or fifteen guests of the professional classes, was smooth and urbane. Only as the evening wore on a very slight dullness, or uneasiness perhaps, a nervous twitch, fumble, stumble and confusion indicated, what it was really painful to believe——that the poor lady lied. Once, long ago, she had caught salmon freely: now, quick to minister to the craving which lit her husband’s eye so oilily for dominion, for power, she cramped, squeezed, pared, pruned, drew back, peeped through: so that without knowing precisely what made the evening disagreeable, and caused this pressure on the top of the head (which might well be imputed to the professional conversation, or the fatigue of a great doctor whose life, Lady Bradshaw said, “is not his own but his patient’s”), disagreeable it was: so that guests, when the clock struck ten, breathed in the air of Harley Street even with rapture; which relief, however, was denied to his patients.

There in the grey room, with the pictures on the wall, and the valuable furniture, under the ground-glass skylight, they learnt the extent of their transgressions: huddled up in arm-chairs, they watched him go through, for their benefit, a curious exercise with the arms, which he shot out, brought sharply back to his hip, to prove (if the patient was obstinate) that Sir William was master of his own actions, which the patient was not. There some weakly broke down; sobbed, submitted; others, inspired by Heaven knows what intemperate madness, called Sir William to his face a damnable humbug; questioned, even more impiously, life itself. Why live? they demanded. Sir William replied that life was good. Certainly Lady Bradshaw in ostrich feathers hung over the mantelpiece, and as for his income it was quite twelve thousand a year. But to us, they protested, life has given no such bounty. He acquiesced. They lacked a sense of proportion. And perhaps, after all, there is no God? He shrugged his shoulders. In short, this living or not living is an affair of our own? But there they were mistaken. Sir William had a friend in Surrey where they taught, what Sir William frankly admitted was a difficult art—a sense of proportion. There were, moreover, family affection; honour; courage; and a brilliant career. All of these had in Sir William a resolute champion. If they failed, he had to support him police and the good of society, which, he remarked very quietly, would take care, down in Surrey, that these unsocial impulses, bred more than anything by the lack of good blood, were held in control. And then stole out from her hiding-place and mounted her throne that Goddess whose lust is to override opposition, to stamp indelibly in the sanctuaries of others the image of herself. Naked, defenceless, the exhausted, the friendless received the impress of Sir William’s will. He swooped; he devoured. He shut people up. It was this combination of decision and humanity that endeared Sir William so greatly to the relations of his victims.

But Rezia Warren Smith cried, walking down Harley Street, that she did not like that man.

Shredding and slicing, dividing and subdividing, the clocks of Harley Street nibbled at the June day, counselled submission, upheld authority, and pointed out in chorus the supreme advantages of a sense of proportion, until the mound of time was so far diminished that a commercial clock, suspended above a shop in Oxford Street, announced, genially and fraternally, as if it were a pleasure to Messrs. Rigby and Lowndes to give the information gratis, that it was half-past one.

Looking up, it appeared that each letter of their names stood for one of the hours; subconsciously one was grateful to Rigby and Lowndes for giving one time ratified by Greenwich; and this gratitude (so Hugh Whitbread ruminated, dallying there in front of the shop window) naturally took the form later of buying off Rigby and Lowndes socks or shoes. So he ruminated. It was his habit. He did not go deeply. He brushed surfaces; the dead languages, the living, life in Constantinople, Paris, Rome; riding, shooting, tennis, it had been once. The malicious asserted that he now kept guard at Buckingham Palace, dressed in silk stockings and knee-breeches, over what nobody knew. But he did it extremely efficiently. He had been afloat on the cream of English society for fifty-five years. He had known Prime Ministers. His affections were understood to be deep. And if it were true that he had not taken part in any of the great movements of the time or held important office, one or two humble reforms stood to his credit; an improvement in public shelters was one; the protection of owls in Norfolk another; servant girls had reason to be grateful to him; and his name at the end of letters to the Times, asking for funds, appealing to the public to protect, to preserve, to clear up litter, to abate smoke, and stamp out immorality in parks, commanded respect.

A magnificent figure he cut too, pausing for a moment (as the sound of the half-hour died away) to look critically, magisterially, at socks and shoes; impeccable, substantial, as if he beheld the world from a certain eminence, and dressed to match; but realised the obligations which size, wealth, health entail, and observed punctiliously, even when not absolutely necessary, little courtesies, old-fashioned ceremonies, which gave a quality to his manner, something to imitate, something to remember him by, for he would never lunch, for example, with Lady Bruton, whom he had known these twenty years, without bringing her in his outstretched hand a bunch of carnations, and asking Miss Brush, Lady Bruton’s secretary, after her brother in South Africa, which, for some reason, Miss Brush, deficient though she was in every attribute of female charm, so much resented that she said “Thank you, he’s doing very well in South Africa,” when, for half-a-dozen years, he had been doing badly in Portsmouth.

Lady Bruton herself preferred Richard Dalloway, who arrived at the same moment. Indeed they met on the doorstep.

Lady Bruton preferred Richard Dalloway of course. He was made of much finer material. But she wouldn’t let them run down her poor dear Hugh. She could never forget his kindness—he had been really remarkably kind—she forgot precisely upon what occasion. But he had been—remarkably kind. Anyhow, the difference between one man and another does not amount to much. She had never seen the sense of cutting people up, as Clarissa Dalloway did—cutting them up and sticking them together again; not at any rate when one was sixty-two. She took Hugh’s carnations with her angular grim smile. There was nobody else coming, she said. She had got them there on false pretences, to help her out of a difficulty—

“But let us eat first,” she said.

And so there began a soundless and exquisite passing to and fro through swing doors of aproned, white-capped maids, handmaidens not of necessity, but adepts in a mystery or grand deception practised by hostesses in Mayfair from one-thirty to two, when, with a wave of the hand, the traffic ceases, and there rises instead this profound illusion in the first place about the food—how it is not paid for; and then that the table spreads itself voluntarily with glass and silver, little mats, saucers of red fruit; films of brown cream mask turbot; in casseroles severed chickens swim; coloured, undomestic, the fire burns; and with the wine and the coffee (not paid for) rise jocund visions before musing eyes; gently speculative eyes; eyes to whom life appears musical, mysterious; eyes now kindled to observe genially the beauty of the red carnations which Lady Bruton (whose movements were always angular) had laid beside her plate, so that Hugh Whitbread, feeling at peace with the entire universe and at the same time completely sure of his standing, said, resting his fork:

“Wouldn’t they look charming against your lace?”

Miss Brush resented this familiarity intensely. She thought him an underbred fellow. She made Lady Bruton laugh.

Lady Bruton raised the carnations, holding them rather stiffly with much the same attitude with which the General held the scroll in the picture behind her; she remained fixed, tranced. Which was she now, the General’s great-granddaughter? great-great-granddaughter? Richard Dalloway asked himself. Sir Roderick, Sir Miles, Sir Talbot—that was it. It was remarkable how in that family the likeness persisted in the women. She should have been a general of dragoons herself. And Richard would have served under her, cheerfully; he had the greatest respect for her; he cherished these romantic views about well-set-up old women of pedigree, and would have liked, in his good-humoured way, to bring some young hot-heads of his acquaintance to lunch with her; as if a type like hers could be bred of amiable tea-drinking enthusiasts! He knew her country. He knew her people. There was a vine, still bearing, which either Lovelace or Herrick—she never read a word of poetry herself, but so the story ran—had sat under. Better wait to put before them the question that bothered her (about making an appeal to the public; if so, in what terms and so on), better wait until they have had their coffee, Lady Bruton thought; and so laid the carnations down beside her plate.

“How’s Clarissa?” she asked abruptly.

Clarissa always said that Lady Bruton did not like her. Indeed, Lady Bruton had the reputation of being more interested in politics than people; of talking like a man; of having had a finger in some notorious intrigue of the eighties, which was now beginning to be mentioned in memoirs. Certainly there was an alcove in her drawing-room, and a table in that alcove, and a photograph upon that table of General Sir Talbot Moore, now deceased, who had written there (one evening in the eighties) in Lady Bruton’s presence, with her cognisance, perhaps advice, a telegram ordering the British troops to advance upon an historical occasion. (She kept the pen and told the story.) Thus, when she said in her offhand way “How’s Clarissa?” husbands had difficulty in persuading their wives, and indeed, however devoted, were secretly doubtful themselves, of her interest in women who often got in their husbands’ way, prevented them from accepting posts abroad, and had to be taken to the seaside in the middle of the session to recover from influenza. Nevertheless her inquiry, “How’s Clarissa?” was known by women infallibly to be a signal from a well-wisher, from an almost silent companion, whose utterances (half a dozen perhaps in the course of a lifetime) signified recognition of some feminine comradeship which went beneath masculine lunch parties and united Lady Bruton and Mrs. Dalloway, who seldom met, and appeared when they did meet indifferent and even hostile, in a singular bond.

“I met Clarissa in the Park this morning,” said Hugh Whitbread, diving into the casserole, anxious to pay himself this little tribute, for he had only to come to London and he met everybody at once; but greedy, one of the greediest men she had ever known, Milly Brush thought, who observed men with unflinching rectitude, and was capable of everlasting devotion, to her own sex in particular, being knobbed, scraped, angular, and entirely without feminine charm.

“D’you know who’s in town?” said Lady Bruton, suddenly bethinking her. “Our old friend, Peter Walsh.”

They all smiled. Peter Walsh! And Mr. Dalloway was genuinely glad, Milly Brush thought; and Mr. Whitbread thought only of his chicken.

Peter Walsh! All three, Lady Bruton, Hugh Whitbread, and Richard Dalloway, remembered the same thing—how passionately Peter had been in love; been rejected; gone to India; come a cropper; made a mess of things; and Richard Dalloway had a very great liking for the dear old fellow too. Milly Brush saw that; saw a depth in the brown of his eyes; saw him hesitate; consider; which interested her, as Mr. Dalloway always interested her, for what was he thinking, she wondered, about Peter Walsh?

That Peter Walsh had been in love with Clarissa; that he would go back directly after lunch and find Clarissa; that he would tell her, in so many words, that he loved her. Yes, he would say that.

Milly Brush once might almost have fallen in love with these silences; and Mr. Dalloway was always so dependable; such a gentleman too. Now, being forty, Lady Bruton had only to nod, or turn her head a little abruptly, and Milly Brush took the signal, however deeply she might be sunk in these reflections of a detached spirit, of an uncorrupted soul whom life could not bamboozle, because life had not offered her a trinket of the slightest value; not a curl, smile, lip, cheek, nose; nothing whatever; Lady Bruton had only to nod, and Perkins was instructed to quicken the coffee.

“Yes; Peter Walsh has come back,” said Lady Bruton. It was vaguely flattering to them all. He had come back, battered, unsuccessful, to their secure shores. But to help him, they reflected, was impossible; there was some flaw in his character. Hugh Whitbread said one might of course mention his name to So-and-so. He wrinkled lugubriously, consequentially, at the thought of the letters he would write to the heads of Government offices about “my old friend, Peter Walsh,” and so on. But it wouldn’t lead to anything—not to anything permanent, because of his character.

“In trouble with some woman,” said Lady Bruton. They had all guessed that that was at the bottom of it.

“However,” said Lady Bruton, anxious to leave the subject, “we shall hear the whole story from Peter himself.”

(The coffee was very slow in coming.)

“The address?” murmured Hugh Whitbread; and there was at once a ripple in the grey tide of service which washed round Lady Bruton day in, day out, collecting, intercepting, enveloping her in a fine tissue which broke concussions, mitigated interruptions, and spread round the house in Brook Street a fine net where things lodged and were picked out accurately, instantly by grey-haired Perkins, who had been with Lady Bruton these thirty years and now wrote down the address; handed it to Mr. Whitbread, who took out his pocket-book, raised his eyebrows, and, slipping it in among documents of the highest importance, said that he would get Evelyn to ask him to lunch.

(They were waiting to bring the coffee until Mr. Whitbread had finished.)

Hugh was very slow, Lady Bruton thought. He was getting fat, she noticed. Richard always kept himself in the pink of condition. She was getting impatient; the whole of her being was setting positively, undeniably, domineeringly brushing aside all this unnecessary trifling (Peter Walsh and his affairs) upon that subject which engaged her attention, and not merely her attention, but that fibre which was the ramrod of her soul, that essential part of her without which Millicent Bruton would not have been Millicent Bruton; that project for emigrating young people of both sexes born of respectable parents and setting them up with a fair prospect of doing well in Canada. She exaggerated. She had perhaps lost her sense of proportion. Emigration was not to others the obvious remedy, the sublime conception. It was not to them (not to Hugh, or Richard, or even to devoted Miss Brush) the liberator of the pent egotism, which a strong martial woman, well nourished, well descended, of direct impulses, downright feelings, and little introspective power (broad and simple—why could not every one be broad and simple? she asked), feels rise within her, once youth is past, and must eject upon some object—it may be Emigration, it may be Emancipation; but whatever it be, this object round which the essence of her soul is daily secreted becomes inevitably prismatic, lustrous, half looking-glass, half precious stone; now carefully hidden in case people should sneer at it; now proudly displayed. Emigration had become, in short, largely Lady Bruton.

But she had to write. And one letter to the Times, she used to say to Miss Brush, cost her more than to organise an expedition to South Africa (which she had done in the war). After a morning’s battle, beginning, tearing up, beginning again, she used to feel the futility of her own womanhood as she felt it on no other occasion, and would turn gratefully to the thought of Hugh Whitbread who possessed—no one could doubt it—the art of writing letters to the Times.

A being so differently constituted from herself, with such a command of language; able to put things as editors liked them put; had passions which one could not call simply greed. Lady Bruton often suspended judgment upon men in deference to the mysterious accord in which they, but no woman, stood to the laws of the universe; knew how to put things; knew what was said; so that if Richard advised her, and Hugh wrote for her, she was sure of being somehow right. So she let Hugh eat his soufflé; asked after poor Evelyn; waited until they were smoking, and then said.

“Milly, would you fetch the papers?”

And Miss Brush went out, came back; laid papers on the table; and Hugh produced his fountain pen; his silver fountain pen, which had done twenty years’ service, he said, unscrewing the cap. It was still in perfect order; he had shown it to the makers; there was no reason, they said, why it should ever wear out; which was somehow to Hugh’s credit, and to the credit of the sentiments which his pen expressed (so Richard Dalloway felt) as Hugh began carefully writing capital letters with rings round them in the margin, and thus marvellously reduced Lady Bruton’s tangles to sense, to grammar such as the editor of the Times, Lady Bruton felt, watching the marvellous transformation, must respect. Hugh was slow. Hugh was pertinacious. Richard said one must take risks. Hugh proposed modifications in deference to people’s feelings, which, he said rather tartly when Richard laughed, “had to be considered,” and read out “how, therefore, we are of opinion that the times are ripe … the superfluous youth of our ever-increasing population … what we owe to the dead …” which Richard thought all stuffing and bunkum, but no harm in it, of course, and Hugh went on drafting sentiments in alphabetical order of the highest nobility, brushing the cigar ash from his waistcoat, and summing up now and then the progress they had made until, finally, he read out the draft of a letter which Lady Bruton felt certain was a masterpiece. Could her own meaning sound like that?

Hugh could not guarantee that the editor would put it in; but he would be meeting somebody at luncheon.

Whereupon Lady Bruton, who seldom did a graceful thing, stuffed all Hugh’s carnations into the front of her dress, and flinging her hands out called him “My Prime Minister!” What she would have done without them both she did not know. They rose .And [rose. And] Richard Dalloway strolled off as usual to have a look at the General’s portrait, because he meant, whenever he had a moment of leisure, to write a history of Lady Bruton’s family.

And Millicent Bruton was very proud of her family. But they could wait, they could wait, she said, looking at the picture; meaning that her family, of military men, administrators, admirals, had been men of action, who had done their duty; and Richard’s first duty was to his country, but it was a fine face, she said; and all the papers were ready for Richard down at Aldmixton whenever the time came; the Labour Government, she meant. “Ah, the news from India!” she cried.

And then, as they stood in the hall taking yellow gloves from the bowl on the malachite table and Hugh was offering Miss Brush with quite unnecessary courtesy some discarded ticket or other compliment, which she loathed from the depths of her heart and blushed brick red, Richard turned to Lady Bruton, with his hat in his hand, and said,

“We shall see you at our party to-night?” whereupon Lady Bruton resumed the magnificence which letter-writing had shattered. She might come; or she might not come. Clarissa had wonderful energy. Parties terrified Lady Bruton. But then, she was getting old. So she intimated, standing at her doorway; handsome; very erect; while her chow stretched behind her, and Miss Brush disappeared into the background with her hands full of papers.

And Lady Bruton went ponderously, majestically, up to her room, lay, one arm extended, on the sofa. She sighed, she snored, not that she was asleep, only drowsy and heavy, drowsy and heavy, like a field of clover in the sunshine this hot June day, with the bees going round and about and the yellow butterflies. Always she went back to those fields down in Devonshire, where she had jumped the brooks on Patty, her pony, with Mortimer and Tom, her brothers. And there were the dogs; there were the rats; there were her father and mother on the lawn under the trees, with the tea-things out, and the beds of dahlias, the hollyhocks, the pampas grass; and they, little wretches, always up to some mischief! stealing back through the shrubbery, so as not to be seen, all bedraggled from some roguery. What old nurse used to say about her frocks!

Ah dear, she remembered—it was Wednesday in Brook Street. Those kind good fellows, Richard Dalloway, Hugh Whitbread, had gone this hot day through the streets whose growl came up to her lying on the sofa. Power was hers, position, income. She had lived in the forefront of her time. She had had good friends; known the ablest men of her day. Murmuring London flowed up to her, and her hand, lying on the sofa back, curled upon some imaginary baton such as her grandfathers might have held, holding which she seemed, drowsy and heavy, to be commanding battalions marching to Canada, and those good fellows walking across London, that territory of theirs, that little bit of carpet, Mayfair.

And they went further and further from her, being attached to her by a thin thread (since they had lunched with her) which would stretch and stretch, get thinner and thinner as they walked across London; as if one’s friends were attached to one’s body, after lunching with them, by a thin thread, which (as she dozed there) became hazy with the sound of bells, striking the hour or ringing to service, as a single spider’s thread is blotted with rain-drops, and, burdened, sags down. So she slept.

And Richard Dalloway and Hugh Whitbread hesitated at the corner of Conduit Street at the very moment that Millicent Bruton, lying on the sofa, let the thread snap; snored. Contrary winds buffeted at the street corner. They looked in at a shop window; they did not wish to buy or to talk but to part, only with contrary winds buffeting the street corner, with some sort of lapse in the tides of the body, two forces meeting in a swirl, morning and afternoon, they paused. Some newspaper placard went up in the air, gallantly, like a kite at first, then paused, swooped, fluttered; and a lady’s veil hung. Yellow awnings trembled. The speed of the morning traffic slackened, and single carts rattled carelessly down half-empty streets. In Norfolk, of which Richard Dalloway was half thinking, a soft warm wind blew back the petals; confused the waters; ruffled the flowering grasses. Haymakers, who had pitched beneath hedges to sleep away the morning toil, parted curtains of green blades; moved trembling globes of cow parsley to see the sky; the blue, the steadfast, the blazing summer sky.

Aware that he was looking at a silver two-handled Jacobean mug, and that Hugh Whitbread admired condescendingly, with airs of connoisseurship, a Spanish necklace which he thought of asking the price of in case Evelyn might like it—still Richard was torpid; could not think or move. Life had thrown up this wreckage; shop windows full of coloured paste, and one stood stark with the lethargy of the old, stiff with the rigidity of the old, looking in. Evelyn Whitbread might like to buy this Spanish necklace—so she might. Yawn he must. Hugh was going into the shop.

“Right you are!” said Richard, following.

Goodness knows he didn’t want to go buying necklaces with Hugh. But there are tides in the body. Morning meets afternoon. Borne like a frail shallop on deep, deep floods, Lady Bruton’s great-grandfather and his memoir and his campaigns in North America were whelmed and sunk. And Millicent Bruton too. She went under. Richard didn’t care a straw what became of Emigration; about that letter, whether the editor put it in or not. The necklace hung stretched between Hugh’s admirable fingers. Let him give it to a girl, if he must buy jewels—any girl, any girl in the street. For the worthlessness of this life did strike Richard pretty forcibly—buying necklaces for Evelyn. If he’d had a boy he’d have said, Work, work. But he had his Elizabeth; he adored his Elizabeth.

“I should like to see Mr. Dubonnet,” said Hugh in his curt worldly way. It appeared that this Dubonnet had the measurements of Mrs. Whitbread’s neck, or, more strangely still, knew her views upon Spanish jewellery and the extent of her possessions in that line (which Hugh could not remember). All of which seemed to Richard Dalloway awfully odd. For he never gave Clarissa presents, except a bracelet two or three years ago, which had not been a success. She never wore it. It pained him to remember that she never wore it. And as a single spider’s thread after wavering here and there attaches itself to the point of a leaf, so Richard’s mind, recovering from its lethargy, set now on his wife, Clarissa, whom Peter Walsh had loved so passionately; and Richard had had a sudden vision of her there at luncheon; of himself and Clarissa; of their life together; and he drew the tray of old jewels towards him, and taking up first this brooch, then that ring, “How much is that?” he asked, but doubted his own taste. He wanted to open the drawing-room door and come in holding out something; a present for Clarissa. Only what? But Hugh was on his legs again. He was unspeakably pompous. Really, after dealing here for thirty-five years he was not going to be put off by a mere boy who did not know his business. For Dubonnet, it seemed, was out, and Hugh would not buy anything until Mr. Dubonnet chose to be in; at which the youth flushed and bowed his correct little bow. It was all perfectly correct. And yet Richard couldn’t have said that to save his life! Why these people stood that damned insolence he could not conceive. Hugh was becoming an intolerable ass. Richard Dalloway could not stand more than an hour of his society. And, flicking his bowler hat by way of farewell, Richard turned at the corner of Conduit Street eager, yes, very eager, to travel that spider’s thread of attachment between himself and Clarissa; he would go straight to her, in Westminster.

But he wanted to come in holding something. Flowers? Yes, flowers, since he did not trust his taste in gold; any number of flowers, roses, orchids, to celebrate what was, reckoning things as you will, an event; this feeling about her when they spoke of Peter Walsh at luncheon; and they never spoke of it; not for years had they spoken of it; which, he thought, grasping his red and white roses together (a vast bunch in tissue paper), is the greatest mistake in the world. The time comes when it can’t be said; one’s too shy to say it, he thought, pocketing his sixpence or two of change, setting off with his great bunch held against his body to Westminster, to say straight out in so many words (whatever she might think of him), holding out his flowers, “I love you.” Why not? Really it was a miracle thinking of the war, and thousands of poor chaps, with all their lives before them, shovelled together, already half forgotten; it was a miracle. Here he was walking across London to say to Clarissa in so many words that he loved her. Which one never does say, he thought. Partly one’s lazy; partly one’s shy. And Clarissa—it was difficult to think of her; except in starts, as at luncheon, when he saw her quite distinctly; their whole life. He stopped at the crossing; and repeated—being simple by nature, and undebauched, because he had tramped, and shot; being pertinacious and dogged, having championed the down-trodden and followed his instincts in the House of Commons; being preserved in his simplicity yet at the same time grown rather speechless, rather stiff—he repeated that it was a miracle that he should have married Clarissa; a miracle—his life had been a miracle, he thought; hesitating to cross. But it did make his blood boil to see little creatures of five or six crossing Piccadilly alone. The police ought to have stopped the traffic at once. He had no illusions about the London police. Indeed, he was collecting evidence of their malpractices; and those costermongers, not allowed to stand their barrows in the streets; and prostitutes, good Lord, the fault wasn’t in them, nor in young men either, but in our detestable social system and so forth; all of which he considered, could be seen considering, grey, dogged, dapper, clean, as he walked across the Park to tell his wife that he loved her.

For he would say it in so many words, when he came into the room. Because it is a thousand pities never to say what one feels, he thought, crossing the Green Park and observing with pleasure how in the shade of the trees whole families, poor families, were sprawling; children kicking up their legs; sucking milk; paper bags thrown about, which could easily be picked up (if people objected) by one of those fat gentlemen in livery; for he was of opinion that every park, and every square, during the summer months should be open to children (the grass of the park flushed and faded, lighting up the poor mothers of Westminster and their crawling babies, as if a yellow lamp were moved beneath). But what could be done for female vagrants like that poor creature, stretched on her elbow (as if she had flung herself on the earth, rid of all ties, to observe curiously, to speculate boldly, to consider the whys and the wherefores, impudent, loose-lipped, humorous), he did not know. Bearing his flowers like a weapon, Richard Dalloway approached her; intent he passed her; still there was time for a spark between them—she laughed at the sight of him, he smiled good-humouredly, considering the problem of the female vagrant; not that they would ever speak. But he would tell Clarissa that he loved her, in so many words. He had, once upon a time, been jealous of Peter Walsh; jealous of him and Clarissa. But she had often said to him that she had been right not to marry Peter Walsh; which, knowing Clarissa, was obviously true; she wanted support. Not that she was weak; but she wanted support.

As for Buckingham Palace (like an old prima donna facing the audience all in white) you can’t deny it a certain dignity, he considered, nor despise what does, after all, stand to millions of people (a little crowd was waiting at the gate to see the King drive out) for a symbol, absurd though it is; a child with a box of bricks could have done better, he thought; looking at the memorial to Queen Victoria (whom he could remember in her horn spectacles driving through Kensington), its white mound, its billowing motherliness; but he liked being ruled by the descendant of Horsa; he liked continuity; and the sense of handing on the traditions of the past. It was a great age in which to have lived. Indeed, his own life was a miracle; let him make no mistake about it; here he was, in the prime of life, walking to his house in Westminster to tell Clarissa that he loved her. Happiness is this, he thought.

It is this, he said, as he entered Dean’s Yard. Big Ben was beginning to strike, first the warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. Lunch parties waste the entire afternoon, he thought, approaching his door.

The sound of Big Ben flooded Clarissa’s drawing-room, where she sat, ever so annoyed, at her writing-table; worried; annoyed. It was perfectly true that she had not asked Ellie Henderson to her party; but she had done it on purpose. Now Mrs. Marsham wrote: “She had told Ellie Henderson she would ask Clarissa—Ellie so much wanted to come.”

But why should she invite all the dull women in London to her parties? Why should Mrs. Marsham interfere? And there was Elizabeth closeted all this time with Doris Kilman. Anything more nauseating she could not conceive. Prayer at this hour with that woman. And the sound of the bell flooded the room with its melancholy wave; which receded, and gathered itself together to fall once more, when she heard, distractingly, something fumbling, something scratching at the door. Who at this hour? Three, good Heavens! Three already! For with overpowering directness and dignity the clock struck three; and she heard nothing else; but the door handle slipped round and in came Richard! What a surprise! In came Richard, holding out flowers. She had failed him, once at Constantinople; and Lady Bruton, whose lunch parties were said to be extraordinarily amusing, had not asked her. He was holding out flowers—roses, red and white roses. (But he could not bring himself to say he loved her; not in so many words.)

But how lovely, she said, taking his flowers. She understood; she understood without his speaking; his Clarissa. She put them in vases on the mantelpiece. How lovely they looked, she said. And was it amusing, she asked? Had Lady Bruton asked after her? Peter Walsh was back. Mrs. Marsham had written. Must she ask Ellie Henderson? That woman Kilman was upstairs.

“But let us sit down for five minutes,” said Richard.

It all looked so empty. All the chairs were against the wall. What had they been doing? Oh, it was for the party; no, he had not forgotten the party. Peter Walsh was back. Oh yes; she had had him. And he was going to get a divorce; and he was in love with some woman out there. And he hadn’t changed in the slightest. There she was, mending her dress….

“Thinking of Bourton,” she said.

“Hugh was at lunch,” said Richard. She had met him too! Well, he was getting absolutely intolerable. Buying Evelyn necklaces; fatter than ever; an intolerable ass.

“And it came over me ‘I might have married you’,” she said, thinking of Peter sitting there in his little bow-tie; with that knife, opening it, shutting it. “Just as he always was, you know.”

They were talking about him at lunch, said Richard. (But he could not tell her he loved her. He held her hand. Happiness is this, he thought.) They had been writing a letter to the Times for Millicent Bruton. That was about all Hugh was fit for.

“And our dear Miss Kilman?” he asked. Clarissa thought the roses absolutely lovely; first bunched together; now of their own accord starting apart.

“Kilman arrives just as we’ve done lunch,” she said. “Elizabeth turns pink. They shut themselves up. I suppose they’re praying.”

Lord! He didn’t like it; but these things pass over if you let them.

“In a mackintosh with an umbrella,” said Clarissa.

He had not said “I love you”; but he held her hand. Happiness is this, is this, he thought.

“But why should I ask all the dull women in London to my parties?” said Clarissa. And if Mrs. Marsham gave a party, did she invite her guests?”

“Poor Ellie Henderson,” said Richard—it was a very odd thing how much Clarissa minded about her parties, he thought.

But Richard had no notion of the look of a room. However—what was he going to say?

If she worried about these parties he would not let her give them. Did she wish she had married Peter? But he must go.

He must be off, he said, getting up. But he stood for a moment as if he were about to say something; and she wondered what? Why? There were the roses.

“Some Committee?” she asked, as he opened the door.

“Armenians,” he said; or perhaps it was “Albanians.”

And there is a dignity in people; a solitude; even between husband and wife a gulf; and that one must respect, thought Clarissa, watching him open the door; for one would not part with it oneself, or take it, against his will, from one’s husband, without losing one’s independence, one’s self-respect—something, after all, priceless.

He returned with a pillow and a quilt.

“An hour’s complete rest after luncheon,” he said. And he went.

How like him! He would go on saying “An hour’s complete rest after luncheon” to the end of time, because a doctor had ordered it once. It was like him to take what doctors said literally; part of his adorable divine simplicity, which no one had to the same extent; which made him go and do the thing while she and Peter frittered their time away bickering. He was already half-way to the House of Commons, to his Armenians, his Albanians, having settled her on the sofa, looking at his roses. And people would say, “Clarissa Dalloway is spoilt.” She cared much more for her roses than for the Armenians. Hunted out of existence, maimed, frozen, the victims of cruelty and injustice (she had heard Richard say so over and over again)—no, she could feel nothing for the Albanians, or was it the Armenians? but she loved her roses (didn’t that help the Armenians?)—the only flowers she could bear to see cut. But Richard was already at the House of Commons; at his Committee, having settled all her difficulties. But no; alas, that was not true. He did not see the reasons against asking Ellie Henderson. She would do it, of course, as he wished it. Since he had brought the pillow, she would lie down…. But—but—why did she suddenly feel, for no reason that she could discover, desperately unhappy? As a person who has dropped some grain of pearl or diamond into the grass and parts the tall blades very carefully, this way and that, and searches here and there vainly, and at last spies it there at the roots, so she went through one thing and another; no, it was not Sally Seton saying that Richard would never be in the Cabinet because he had a second-class brain (it came back to her); no, she did not mind that; nor was it to do with Elizabeth either and Doris Kilman; those were facts. It was a feeling, some unpleasant feeling, earlier in the day perhaps; something that Peter had said, combined with some depression of her own, in her bedroom, taking off her hat; and what Richard had said had added to it, but what had he said? There were his roses. Her parties! That was it! Her parties! Both of them criticised her very unfairly, laughed at her very unjustly, for her parties. That was it! That was it!

Well, how was she going to defend herself? Now that she knew what it was, she felt perfectly happy. They thought, or Peter at any rate thought, that she enjoyed imposing herself; liked to have famous people about her; great names; was simply a snob, in short. Well, Peter might think so. Richard merely thought it foolish of her to like excitement when she knew it was bad for her heart. It was childish, he thought. And both were quite wrong. What she liked was simply life.

“That’s what I do it for,” she said, speaking aloud, to life.

Since she was lying on the sofa, cloistered, exempt, the presence of this thing which she felt to be so obvious became physically existent; with robes of sound from the street, sunny, with hot breath, whispering, blowing out the blinds. But suppose Peter said to her, “Yes, yes, but your parties—what’s the sense of your parties?” all she could say was (and nobody could be expected to understand): They’re an offering; which sounded horribly vague. But who was Peter to make out that life was all plain sailing?—Peter always in love, always in love with the wrong woman? What’s your love? she might say to him. And she knew his answer; how it is the most important thing in the world and no woman possibly understood it. Very well. But could any man understand what she meant either? about life? She could not imagine Peter or Richard taking the trouble to give a party for no reason whatever.

But to go deeper, beneath what people said (and these judgements, how superficial, how fragmentary they are!) in her own mind now, what did it mean to her, this thing she called life? Oh, it was very queer. Here was So-and-so in South Kensington; some one up in Bayswater; and somebody else, say, in Mayfair. And she felt quite continuously a sense of their existence; and she felt what a waste; and she felt what a pity; and she felt if only they could be brought together; so she did it. And it was an offering; to combine, to create; but to whom?

An offering for the sake of offering, perhaps. Anyhow, it was her gift. Nothing else had she of the slightest importance; could not think, write, even play the piano. She muddled Armenians and Turks; loved success; hated discomfort; must be liked; talked oceans of nonsense: and to this day, ask her what the Equator was, and she did not know.

All the same, that one day should follow another; Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday; that one should wake up in the morning; see the sky; walk in the park; meet Hugh Whitbread; then suddenly in came Peter; then these roses; it was enough. After that, how unbelievable death was!—that it must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all; how, every instant …

The door opened. Elizabeth knew that her mother was resting. She came in very quietly. She stood perfectly still. Was it that some Mongol had been wrecked on the coast of Norfolk (as Mrs. Hilbery said), had mixed with the Dalloway ladies, perhaps a hundred years ago? For the Dalloways, in general, were fair-haired; blue-eyed; Elizabeth, on the contrary, was dark; had Chinese eyes in a pale face; an Oriental mystery; was gentle, considerate, still. As a child, she had had a perfect sense of humour; but now at seventeen, why, Clarissa could not in the least understand, she had become very serious; like a hyacinth sheathed in glossy green, with buds just tinted, a hyacinth which has had no sun.

She stood quite still and looked at her mother; but the door was ajar, and outside the door was Miss Kilman, as Clarissa knew; Miss Kilman in her mackintosh listening to whatever they said.

Yes, Miss Kilman stood on the landing, and wore a mackintosh; but had her reasons. First, it was cheap; second, she was over forty; and did not, after all, dress to please. She was poor, moreover; degradingly poor. Otherwise she would not be taking jobs from people like the Dalloways; from rich people, who liked to be kind. Mr. Dalloway, to do him justice, had been kind. But Mrs. Dalloway had not. She had been merely condescending. She came from the most worthless of all classes—the rich, with a smattering of culture. They had expensive things everywhere; pictures, carpets, lots of servants. She considered that she had a perfect right to anything that the Dalloways did for her.

She had been cheated. Yes, the word was no exaggeration, for surely a girl has a right to some kind of happiness? And she had never been happy, what with being so clumsy and so poor. And then, just as she might have had a chance at Miss Dolby’s school, the war came; and she had never been able to tell lies. Miss Dolby thought she would be happier with people who shared her views about the Germans. She had had to go. It was true that the family was of German origin; spelt the name Kiehlman in the eighteenth century; but her brother had been killed. They turned her out because she would not pretend that the Germans were all villains—when she had German friends, when the only happy days of her life had been spent in Germany! And after all, she could read history. She had had to take whatever she could get. Mr. Dalloway had come across her working for the Friends. He had allowed her (and that was really generous of him) to teach his daughter history. Also she did a little Extension lecturing and so on. Then Our Lord had come to her (and here she always bowed her head). She had seen the light two years and three months ago. Now she did not envy women like Clarissa Dalloway; she pitied them.

She pitied and despised them from the bottom of her heart, as she stood on the soft carpet, looking at the old engraving of a little girl with a muff. With all this luxury going on, what hope was there for a better state of things? Instead of lying on a sofa—“My mother is resting,” Elizabeth had said—she should have been in a factory; behind a counter; Mrs. Dalloway and all the other fine ladies!

Bitter and burning, Miss Kilman had turned into a church two years three months ago. She had heard the Rev. Edward Whittaker preach; the boys sing; had seen the solemn lights descend, and whether it was the music, or the voices (she herself when alone in the evening found comfort in a violin; but the sound was excruciating; she had no ear), the hot and turbulent feelings which boiled and surged in her had been assuaged as she sat there, and she had wept copiously, and gone to call on Mr. Whittaker at his private house in Kensington. It was the hand of God, he said. The Lord had shown her the way. So now, whenever the hot and painful feelings boiled within her, this hatred of Mrs. Dalloway, this grudge against the world, she thought of God. She thought of Mr. Whittaker. Rage was succeeded by calm. A sweet savour filled her veins, her lips parted, and, standing formidable upon the landing in her mackintosh, she looked with steady and sinister serenity at Mrs. Dalloway, who came out with her daughter.

Elizabeth said she had forgotten her gloves. That was because Miss Kilman and her mother hated each other. She could not bear to see them together. She ran upstairs to find her gloves.

But Miss Kilman did not hate Mrs. Dalloway. Turning her large gooseberry-coloured eyes upon Clarissa, observing her small pink face, her delicate body, her air of freshness and fashion, Miss Kilman felt, Fool! Simpleton! You who have known neither sorrow nor pleasure; who have trifled your life away! And there rose in her an overmastering desire to overcome her; to unmask her. If she could have felled her it would have eased her. But it was not the body; it was the soul and its mockery that she wished to subdue; make feel her mastery. If only she could make her weep; could ruin her; humiliate her; bring her to her knees crying, You are right! But this was God’s will, not Miss Kilman’s. It was to be a religious victory. So she glared; so she glowered.

Clarissa was really shocked. This a Christian—this woman! This woman had taken her daughter from her! She in touch with invisible presences! Heavy, ugly, commonplace, without kindness or grace, she know the meaning of life!

“You are taking Elizabeth to the Stores?” Mrs. Dalloway said.

Miss Kilman said she was. They stood there. Miss Kilman was not going to make herself agreeable. She had always earned her living. Her knowledge of modern history was thorough in the extreme. She did, out of her meagre income, set aside so much for causes she believed in; whereas this woman did nothing, believed nothing; brought up her daughter—but here was Elizabeth, rather out of breath, the beautiful girl.

So they were going to the Stores. Odd it was, as Miss Kilman stood there (and stand she did, with the power and taciturnity of some prehistoric monster armoured for primeval warfare), how, second by second, the idea of her diminished, how hatred (which was for ideas, not people) crumbled, how she lost her malignity, her size, became second by second merely Miss Kilman, in a mackintosh, whom Heaven knows Clarissa would have liked to help.

At this dwindling of the monster, Clarissa laughed. Saying good-bye, she laughed.

Off they went together, Miss Kilman and Elizabeth, downstairs.

With a sudden impulse, with a violent anguish, for this woman was taking her daughter from her, Clarissa leant over the banisters and cried out, “Remember the party! Remember our party to-night!”

But Elizabeth had already opened the front door; there was a van passing; she did not answer.

Love and religion! thought Clarissa, going back into the drawing-room, tingling all over. How detestable, how detestable they are! For now that the body of Miss Kilman was not before her, it overwhelmed her—the idea. The cruellest things in the world, she thought, seeing them clumsy, hot, domineering, hypocritical, eavesdropping, jealous, infinitely cruel and unscrupulous, dressed in a mackintosh coat, on the landing; love and religion. Had she ever tried to convert any one herself? Did she not wish everybody merely to be themselves? And she watched out of the window the old lady opposite climbing upstairs. Let her climb upstairs if she wanted to; let her stop; then let her, as Clarissa had often seen her, gain her bedroom, part her curtains, and disappear again into the background. Somehow one respected that—that old woman looking out of the window, quite unconscious that she was being watched. There was something solemn in it—but love and religion would destroy that, whatever it was, the privacy of the soul. The odious Kilman would destroy it. Yet it was a sight that made her want to cry.

Love destroyed too. Everything that was fine, everything that was true went. Take Peter Walsh now. There was a man, charming, clever, with ideas about everything. If you wanted to know about Pope, say, or Addison, or just to talk nonsense, what people were like, what things meant, Peter knew better than any one. It was Peter who had helped her; Peter who had lent her books. But look at the women he loved—vulgar, trivial, commonplace. Think of Peter in love—he came to see her after all these years, and what did he talk about? Himself. Horrible passion! she thought. Degrading passion! she thought, thinking of Kilman and her Elizabeth walking to the Army and Navy Stores.

Big Ben struck the half-hour.

How extraordinary it was, strange, yes, touching to see the old lady (they had been neighbours ever so many years) move away from the window, as if she were attached to that sound, that string. Gigantic as it was, it had something to do with her. Down, down, into the midst of ordinary things the finger fell, making the moment solemn. She was forced, so Clarissa imagined, by that sound, to move, to go—but where? Clarissa tried to follow her as she turned and disappeared, and could still just see her white cap moving at the back of the bedroom. She was still there, moving about at the other end of the room. Why creeds and prayers and mackintoshes? when, thought Clarissa, that’s the miracle, that’s the mystery; that old lady, she meant, whom she could see going from chest of drawers to dressing-table. She could still see her. And the supreme mystery which Kilman might say she had solved, or Peter might say he had solved, but Clarissa didn’t believe either of them had the ghost of an idea of solving, was simply this: here was one room; there another. Did religion solve that, or love?

Love—but here the other clock, the clock which always struck two minutes after Big Ben, came shuffling in with its lap full of odds and ends, which it dumped down as if Big Ben were all very well with his majesty laying down the law, so solemn, so just, but she must remember all sorts of little things besides—Mrs. Marsham, Ellie Henderson, glasses for ices—all sorts of little things came flooding and lapping and dancing in on the wake of that solemn stroke which lay flat like a bar of gold on the sea. Mrs. Marsham, Ellie Henderson, glasses for ices. She must telephone now at once.

Volubly, troublously, the late clock sounded, coming in on the wake of Big Ben, with its lap full of trifles. Beaten up, broken up by the assault of carriages, the brutality of vans, the eager advance of myriads of angular men, of flaunting women, the domes and spires of offices and hospitals, the last relics of this lap full of odds and ends seemed to break, like the spray of an exhausted wave, upon the body of Miss Kilman standing still in the street for a moment to mutter “It is the flesh.”

It was the flesh that she must control. Clarissa Dalloway had insulted her. That she expected. But she had not triumphed; she had not mastered the flesh. Ugly, clumsy, Clarissa Dalloway had laughed at her for being that; and had revived the fleshly desires, for she minded looking as she did beside Clarissa. Nor could she talk as she did. But why wish to resemble her? Why? She despised Mrs. Dalloway from the bottom of her heart. She was not serious. She was not good. Her life was a tissue of vanity and deceit. Yet Doris Kilman had been overcome. She had, as a matter of fact, very nearly burst into tears when Clarissa Dalloway laughed at her. “It is the flesh, it is the flesh,” she muttered (it being her habit to talk aloud), trying to subdue this turbulent and painful feeling as she walked down Victoria Street. She prayed to God. She could not help being ugly; she could not afford to buy pretty clothes. Clarissa Dalloway had laughed—but she would concentrate her mind upon something else until she had reached the pillar-box. At any rate she had got Elizabeth. But she would think of something else; she would think of Russia; until she reached the pillar-box.

How nice it must be, she said, in the country, struggling, as Mr. Whittaker had told her, with that violent grudge against the world which had scorned her, sneered at her, cast her off, beginning with this indignity—the infliction of her unlovable body which people could not bear to see. Do her hair as she might, her forehead remained like an egg, bald, white. No clothes suited her. She might buy anything. And for a woman, of course, that meant never meeting the opposite sex. Never would she come first with any one. Sometimes lately it had seemed to her that, except for Elizabeth, her food was all that she lived for; her comforts; her dinner, her tea; her hot-water bottle at night. But one must fight; vanquish; have faith in God. Mr. Whittaker had said she was there for a purpose. But no one knew the agony! He said, pointing to the crucifix, that God knew. But why should she have to suffer when other women, like Clarissa Dalloway, escaped? Knowledge comes through suffering, said Mr. Whittaker.

She had passed the pillar-box, and Elizabeth had turned into the cool brown tobacco department of the Army and Navy Stores while she was still muttering to herself what Mr. Whittaker had said about knowledge coming through suffering and the flesh. “The flesh,” she muttered.

What department did she want? Elizabeth interrupted her.

“Petticoats,” she said abruptly, and stalked straight on to the lift.

Up they went. Elizabeth guided her this way and that; guided her in her abstraction as if she had been a great child, an unwieldy battleship. There were the petticoats, brown, decorous, striped, frivolous, solid, flimsy; and she chose, in her abstraction, portentously, and the girl serving thought her mad.

Elizabeth rather wondered, as they did up the parcel, what Miss Kilman was thinking. They must have their tea, said Miss Kilman, rousing, collecting herself. They had their tea.

Elizabeth rather wondered whether Miss Kilman could be hungry. It was her way of eating, eating with intensity, then looking, again and again, at a plate of sugared cakes on the table next them; then, when a lady and a child sat down and the child took the cake, could Miss Kilman really mind it? Yes, Miss Kilman did mind it. She had wanted that cake—the pink one. The pleasure of eating was almost the only pure pleasure left her, and then to be baffled even in that!

When people are happy they have a reserve, she had told Elizabeth, upon which to draw, whereas she was like a wheel without a tyre (she was fond of such metaphors), jolted by every pebble—so she would say staying on after the lesson, standing by the fire-place with her bag of books, her “satchel”, she called it, on a Tuesday morning, after the lesson was over. And she talked too about the war. After all, there were people who did not think the English invariably right. There were books. There were meetings. There were other points of view. Would Elizabeth like to come with her to listen to So-and-so? (a most extraordinary-looking old man). Then Miss Kilman took her to some church in Kensington and they had tea with a clergyman. She had lent her books. Law, medicine, politics, all professions are open to women of your generation, said Miss Kilman. But for herself, her career was absolutely ruined, and was it her fault? Good gracious, said Elizabeth, no.

And her mother would come calling to say that a hamper had come from Bourton and would Miss Kilman like some flowers? To Miss Kilman she was always very, very nice, but Miss Kilman squashed the flowers all in a bunch, and hadn’t any small talk, and what interested Miss Kilman bored her mother, and Miss Kilman and she were terrible together; and Miss Kilman swelled and looked very plain, but Miss Kilman was frightfully clever. Elizabeth had never thought about the poor. They lived with everything they wanted,—her mother had breakfast in bed every day; Lucy carried it up; and she liked old women because they were Duchesses, and being descended from some Lord. But Miss Kilman said (one of those Tuesday mornings when the lesson was over), “My grandfather kept an oil and colour shop in Kensington.” Miss Kilman was quite different from any one she knew; she made one feel so small.

Miss Kilman took another cup of tea. Elizabeth, with her oriental bearing, her inscrutable mystery, sat perfectly upright; no, she did not want anything more. She looked for her gloves—her white gloves. They were under the table. Ah, but she must not go! Miss Kilman could not let her go! this youth, that was so beautiful this girl, whom she genuinely loved! Her large hand opened and shut on the table.

But perhaps it was a little fiat [flat] somehow, Elizabeth felt. And really she would like to go.

But said Miss Kilman, “I’ve not quite finished yet.”

Of course, then, Elizabeth would wait. But it was rather stuffy in here.

“Are you going to the party to-night?” Miss Kilman said. Elizabeth supposed she was going; her mother wanted her to go. She must not let parties absorb her, Miss Kilman said, fingering the last two inches of a chocolate éclair.

She did not much like parties, Elizabeth said. Miss Kilman opened her mouth, slightly projected her chin, and swallowed down the last inches of the chocolate éclair, then wiped her fingers, and washed the tea round in her cup.

She was about to split asunder, she felt. The agony was so terrific. If she could grasp her, if she could clasp her, if she could make her hers absolutely and for ever and then die; that was all she wanted. But to sit here, unable to think of anything to say; to see Elizabeth turning against her; to be felt repulsive even by her—it was too much; she could not stand it. The thick fingers curled inwards.

“I never go to parties,” said Miss Kilman, just to keep Elizabeth from going. “People don’t ask me to parties”—and she knew as she said it that it was this egotism that was her undoing; Mr. Whittaker had warned her; but she could not help it. She had suffered so horribly. “Why should they ask me?” she said. “I’m plain, I’m unhappy.” She knew it was idiotic. But it was all those people passing—people with parcels who despised her—who made her say it. However, she was Doris Kilman. She had her degree. She was a woman who had made her way in the world. Her knowledge of modern history was more than respectable.

“I don’t pity myself,” she said. “I pity”—she meant to say “your mother,” but no, she could not, not to Elizabeth. “I pity other people much more.”

Like some dumb creature who has been brought up to a gate for an unknown purpose, and stands there longing to gallop away, Elizabeth Dalloway sat silent. Was Miss Kilman going to say anything more?

“Don’t quite forget me,” said Doris Kilman; her voice quivered. Right away to the end of the field the dumb creature galloped in terror.

The great hand opened and shut.

Elizabeth turned her head. The waitress came. One had to pay at the desk, Elizabeth said, and went off, drawing out, so Miss Kilman felt, the very entrails in her body, stretching them as she crossed the room, and then, with a final twist, bowing her head very politely, she went.

She had gone. Miss Kilman sat at the marble table among the éclairs, stricken once, twice, thrice by shocks of suffering. She had gone. Mrs. Dalloway had triumphed. Elizabeth had gone. Beauty had gone; youth had gone.

So she sat. She got up, blundered off among the little tables, rocking slightly from side to side, and somebody came after her with her petticoat, and she lost her way, and was hemmed in by trunks specially prepared for taking to India; next got among the accouchement sets and baby linen; through all the commodities of the world, perishable and permanent, hams, drugs, flowers, stationery, variously smelling, now sweet, now sour, she lurched; saw herself thus lurching with her hat askew, very red in the face, full length in a looking-glass; and at last came out into the street.

The tower of Westminster Cathedral rose in front of her, the habitation of God. In the midst of the traffic, there was the habitation of God. Doggedly she set off with her parcel to that other sanctuary, the Abbey, where, raising her hands in a tent before her face, she sat beside those driven into shelter too; the variously assorted worshippers, now divested of social rank, almost of sex, as they raised their hands before their faces; but once they removed them, instantly reverent, middle-class, English men and women, some of them desirous of seeing the waxworks.

But Miss Kilman held her tent before her face. Now she was deserted; now rejoined. New worshippers came in from the street to replace the strollers, and still, as people gazed round and shuffled past the tomb of the Unknown Warrior, still she barred her eyes with her fingers and tried in this double darkness, for the light in the Abbey was bodiless, to aspire above the vanities, the desires, the commodities, to rid herself both of hatred and of love. Her hands twitched. She seemed to struggle. Yet to others God was accessible and the path to Him smooth. Mr. Fletcher, retired, of the Treasury, Mrs. Gorham, widow of the famous K.C., approached Him simply, and having done their praying, leant back, enjoyed the music (the organ pealed sweetly), and saw Miss Kilman at the end of the row, praying, praying, and, being still on the threshold of their underworld, thought of her sympathetically as a soul haunting the same territory; a soul cut out of immaterial substance; not a woman, a soul.

But Mr. Fletcher had to go. He had to pass her, and being himself neat as a new pin, could not help being a little distressed by the poor lady’s disorder; her hair down; her parcel on the floor. She did not at once let him pass. But, as he stood gazing about him, at the white marbles, grey window panes, and accumulated treasures (for he was extremely proud of the Abbey), her largeness, robustness, and power as she sat there shifting her knees from time to time (it was so rough the approach to her God—so tough her desires) impressed him, as they had impressed Mrs. Dalloway (she could not get the thought of her out of her mind that afternoon), the Rev. Edward Whittaker, and Elizabeth too.

And Elizabeth waited in Victoria Street for an omnibus. It was so nice to be out of doors. She thought perhaps she need not go home just yet. It was so nice to be out in the air. So she would get on to an omnibus. And already, even as she stood there, in her very well-cut clothes, it was beginning…. People were beginning to compare her to poplar trees, early dawn, hyacinths, fawns, running water, and garden lilies; and it made her life a burden to her, for she so much preferred being left alone to do what she liked in the country, but they would compare her to lilies, and she had to go to parties, and London was so dreary compared with being alone in the country with her father and the dogs.

Buses swooped, settled, were off—garish caravans, glistening with red and yellow varnish. But which should she get on to? She had no preferences. Of course, she would not push her way. She inclined to be passive. It was expression she needed, but her eyes were fine, Chinese, oriental, and, as her mother said, with such nice shoulders and holding herself so straight, she was always charming to look at; and lately, in the evening especially, when she was interested, for she never seemed excited, she looked almost beautiful, very stately, very serene. What could she be thinking? Every man fell in love with her, and she was really awfully bored. For it was beginning. Her mother could see that—the compliments were beginning. That she did not care more about it—for instance for her clothes—sometimes worried Clarissa, but perhaps it was as well with all those puppies and guinea pigs about having distemper, and it gave her a charm. And now there was this odd friendship with Miss Kilman. Well, thought Clarissa about three o’clock in the morning, reading Baron Marbot for she could not sleep, it proves she has a heart.

Suddenly Elizabeth stepped forward and most competently boarded the omnibus, in front of everybody. She took a seat on top. The impetuous creature—a pirate—started forward, sprang away; she had to hold the rail to steady herself, for a pirate it was, reckless, unscrupulous, bearing down ruthlessly, circumventing dangerously, boldly snatching a passenger, or ignoring a passenger, squeezing eel-like and arrogant in between, and then rushing insolently all sails spread up Whitehall. And did Elizabeth give one thought to poor Miss Kilman who loved her without jealousy, to whom she had been a fawn in the open, a moon in a glade? She was delighted to be free. The fresh air was so delicious. It had been so stuffy in the Army and Navy Stores. And now it was like riding, to be rushing up Whitehall; and to each movement of the omnibus the beautiful body in the fawn-coloured coat responded freely like a rider, like the figure-head of a ship, for the breeze slightly disarrayed her; the heat gave her cheeks the pallor of white painted wood; and her fine eyes, having no eyes to meet, gazed ahead, blank, bright, with the staring, incredible innocence of sculpture.

It was always talking about her own sufferings that made Miss Kilman so difficult. And was she right? If it was being on committees and giving up hours and hours every day (she hardly ever saw him in London) that helped the poor, her father did that, goodness knows—if that was what Miss Kilman meant about being a Christian; but it was so difficult to say. Oh, she would like to go a little farther. Another penny, was it, to the Strand? Here was another penny, then. She would go up the Strand.

She liked people who were ill. And every profession is open to the women of your generation, said Miss Kilman. So she might be a doctor. She might be a farmer. Animals are often ill. She might own a thousand acres and have people under her. She would go and see them in their cottages. This was Somerset House. One might be a very good farmer—and that, strangely enough, though Miss Kilman had her share in it, was almost entirely due to Somerset House. It looked so splendid, so serious, that great grey building. And she liked the feeling of people working. She liked those churches, like shapes of grey paper, breasting the stream of the Strand. It was quite different here from Westminster, she thought, getting off at Chancery Lane. It was so serious; it was so busy. In short, she would like to have a profession. She would become a doctor, a farmer, possibly go into Parliament if she found it necessary, all because of the Strand.

The feet of those people busy about their activities, hands putting stone to stone, minds eternally occupied not with trivial chatterings (comparing women to poplars—which was rather exciting, of course, but very silly), but with thoughts of ships, of business, of law, of administration, and with it all so stately (she was in the Temple), gay (there was the river), pious (there was the Church), made her quite determined, whatever her mother might say, to become either a farmer or a doctor. But she was, of course, rather lazy.

And it was much better to say nothing about it. It seemed so silly. It was the sort of thing that did sometimes happen, when one was alone—buildings without architects’ names, crowds of people coming back from the city having more power than single clergymen in Kensington, than any of the books Miss Kilman had lent her, to stimulate what lay slumbrous, clumsy, and shy on the mind’s sandy floor, to break surface, as a child suddenly stretches its arms; it was just that, perhaps, a sigh, a stretch of the arms, an impulse, a revelation, which has its effects for ever, and then down again it went to the sandy floor. She must go home. She must dress for dinner. But what was the time?—where was a clock?

She looked up Fleet Street. She walked just a little way towards St. Paul’s, shyly, like some one penetrating on tiptoe, exploring a strange house by night with a candle, on edge lest the owner should suddenly fling wide his bedroom door and ask her business, nor did she dare wander off into queer alleys, tempting by-streets, any more than in a strange house open doors which might be bedroom doors, or sitting-room doors, or lead straight to the larder. For no Dalloways came down the Strand daily; she was a pioneer, a stray, venturing, trusting.

In many ways, her mother felt, she was extremely immature, like a child still, attached to dolls, to old slippers; a perfect baby; and that was charming. But then, of course, there was in the Dalloway family the tradition of public service. Abbesses, principals, head mistresses, dignitaries, in the republic of women—without being brilliant, any of them, they were that. She penetrated a little farther in the direction of St. Paul’s. She liked the geniality, sisterhood, motherhood, brotherhood of this uproar. It seemed to her good. The noise was tremendous; and suddenly there were trumpets (the unemployed) blaring, rattling about in the uproar; military music; as if people were marching; yet had they been dying—had some woman breathed her last, and whoever was watching, opening the window of the room where she had just brought off that act of supreme dignity, looked down on Fleet Street, that uproar, that military music would have come triumphing up to him, consolatory, indifferent.

It was not conscious. There was no recognition in it of one’s fortune, or fate, and for that very reason even to those dazed with watching for the last shivers of consciousness on the faces of the dying, consoling.

Forgetfulness in people might wound, their ingratitude corrode, but this voice, pouring endlessly, year in, year out, would take whatever it might be; this vow; this van; this life; this procession; would wrap them all about and carry them on, as in the rough stream of a glacier the ice holds a splinter of bone, a blue petal, some oak trees, and rolls them on.

But it was later than she thought. Her mother would not like her to be wandering off alone like this. She turned back down the Strand.

A puff of wind (in spite of the heat, there was quite a wind) blew a thin black veil over the sun and over the Strand. The faces faded; the omnibuses suddenly lost their glow. For although the clouds were of mountainous white so that one could fancy hacking hard chips off with a hatchet, with broad golden slopes, lawns of celestial pleasure gardens, on their flanks, and had all the appearance of settled habitations assembled for the conference of gods above the world, there was a perpetual movement among them. Signs were interchanged, when, as if to fulfil some scheme arranged already, now a summit dwindled, now a whole block of pyramidal size which had kept its station inalterably advanced into the midst or gravely led the procession to fresh anchorage. Fixed though they seemed at their posts, at rest in perfect unanimity, nothing could be fresher, freer, more sensitive superficially than the snow-white or gold-kindled surface; to change, to go, to dismantle the solemn assemblage was immediately possible; and in spite of the grave fixity, the accumulated robustness and solidity, now they struck light to the earth, now darkness.

Calmly and competently, Elizabeth Dalloway mounted the Westminster omnibus.

Going and coming, beckoning, signalling, so the light and shadow, which now made the wall grey, now the bananas bright yellow, now made the Strand grey, now made the omnibuses bright yellow, seemed to Septimus Warren Smith lying on the sofa in the sitting-room; watching the watery gold glow and fade with the astonishing sensibility of some live creature on the roses, on the wall-paper. Outside the trees dragged their leaves like nets through the depths of the air; the sound of water was in the room, and through the waves came the voices of birds singing. Every power poured its treasures on his head, and his hand lay there on the back of the sofa, as he had seen his hand lie when he was bathing, floating, on the top of the waves, while far away on shore he heard dogs barking and barking far away. Fear no more, says the heart in the body; fear no more.

He was not afraid. At every moment Nature signified by some laughing hint like that gold spot which went round the wall—there, there, there—her determination to show, by brandishing her plumes, shaking her tresses, flinging her mantle this way and that, beautifully, always beautifully, and standing close up to breathe through her hollowed hands Shakespeare’s words, her meaning.

Rezia, sitting at the table twisting a hat in her hands, watched him; saw him smiling. He was happy, then. But she could not bear to see him smiling. It was not marriage; it was not being one’s husband to look strange like that, always to be starting, laughing, sitting hour after hour silent, or clutching her and telling her to write. The table drawer was full of those writings; about war; about Shakespeare; about great discoveries; how there is no death. Lately he had become excited suddenly for no reason (and both Dr. Holmes and Sir William Bradshaw said excitement was the worst thing for him), and waved his hands and cried out that he knew the truth! He knew everything! That man, his friend who was killed, Evans, had come, he said. He was singing behind the screen. She wrote it down just as he spoke it. Some things were very beautiful; others sheer nonsense. And he was always stopping in the middle, changing his mind; wanting to add something; hearing something new; listening with his hand up. But she heard nothing.

And once they found the girl who did the room reading one of these papers in fits of laughter. It was a dreadful pity. For that made Septimus cry out about human cruelty—how they tear each other to pieces. The fallen, he said, they tear to pieces. “Holmes is on us,” he would say, and he would invent stories about Holmes; Holmes eating porridge; Holmes reading Shakespeare—making himself roar with laughter or rage, for Dr. Holmes seemed to stand for something horrible to him. “Human nature”, he called him. Then there were the visions. He was drowned, he used to say, and lying on a cliff with the gulls screaming over him. He would look over the edge of the sofa down into the sea. Or he was hearing music. Really it was only a barrel organ or some man crying in the street. But “Lovely!” he used to cry, and the tears would run down his cheeks, which was to her the most dreadful thing of all, to see a man like Septimus, who had fought, who was brave, crying. And he would lie listening until suddenly he would cry that he was falling down, down into the flames! Actually she would look for flames, it was so vivid. But there was nothing. They were alone in the room. It was a dream, she would tell him, and so quiet him at last, but sometimes she was frightened too. She sighed as she sat sewing.

Her sigh was tender and enchanting, like the wind outside a wood in the evening. Now she put down her scissors; now she turned to take something from the table. A little stir, a little crinkling, a little tapping built up something on the table there, where she sat sewing. Through his eyelashes he could see her blurred outline; her little black body; her face and hands; her turning movements at the table, as she took up a reel, or looked (she was apt to lose things) for her silk. She was making a hat for Mrs. Filmer’s married daughter, whose name was—he had forgotten her name.

“What is the name of Mrs. Filmer’s married daughter?” he asked.

“Mrs. Peters,” said Rezia. She was afraid it was too small, she said, holding it before her. Mrs. Peters was a big woman; but she did not like her. It was only because Mrs. Filmer had been so good to them—“She gave me grapes this morning,” she said—that Rezia wanted to do something to show that they were grateful. She had come into the room the other evening and found Mrs. Peters, who thought they were out, playing the gramophone.

“Was it true?” he asked. She was playing the gramophone? Yes; she had told him about it at the time; she had found Mrs. Peters playing the gramophone.

He began, very cautiously, to open his eyes, to see whether a gramophone was really there. But real things—real things were too exciting. He must be cautious. He would not go mad. First he looked at the fashion papers on the lower shelf, then gradually at the gramophone with the green trumpet. Nothing could be more exact. And so, gathering courage, he looked at the sideboard; the plate of bananas; the engraving of Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort; at the mantelpiece, with the jar of roses. None of these things moved. All were still; all were real.

“She is a woman with a spiteful tongue,” said Rezia.

“What does Mr. Peters do?” Septimus asked.

“Ah,” said Rezia, trying to remember. She thought Mrs. Filmer had said that he travelled for some company. “Just now he is in Hull,” she said.

“Just now!” She said that with her Italian accent. She said that herself. He shaded his eyes so that he might see only a little of her face at a time, first the chin, then the nose, then the forehead, in case it were deformed, or had some terrible mark on it. But no, there she was, perfectly natural, sewing, with the pursed lips that women have, the set, the melancholy expression, when sewing. But there was nothing terrible about it, he assured himself, looking a second time, a third time at her face, her hands, for what was frightening or disgusting in her as she sat there in broad daylight, sewing? Mrs. Peters had a spiteful tongue. Mr. Peters was in Hull. Why, then, rage and prophesy? Why fly scourged and outcast? Why be made to tremble and sob by the clouds? Why seek truths and deliver messages when Rezia sat sticking pins into the front of her dress, and Mr. Peters was in Hull? Miracles, revelations, agonies, loneliness, falling through the sea, down, down into the flames, all were burnt out, for he had a sense, as he watched Rezia trimming the straw hat for Mrs. Peters, of a coverlet of flowers.

“It’s too small for Mrs. Peters,” said Septimus.

For the first time for days he was speaking as he used to do! Of course it was—absurdly small, she said. But Mrs. Peters had chosen it.

He took it out of her hands. He said it was an organ grinder’s monkey’s hat.

How it rejoiced her, that! Not for weeks had they laughed like this together, poking fun privately like married people. What she meant was that if Mrs. Filmer had come in, or Mrs. Peters or anybody, they would not have understood what she and Septimus were laughing at.

“There,” she said, pinning a rose to one side of the hat. Never had she felt so happy! Never in her life!

But that was still more ridiculous, Septimus said. Now the poor woman looked like a pig at a fair. (Nobody ever made her laugh as Septimus did.)

What had she got in her work-box? She had ribbons and beads, tassels, artificial flowers. She tumbled them out on the table. He began putting odd colours together—for though he had no fingers, could not even do up a parcel, he had a wonderful eye, and often he was right, sometimes absurd, of course, but sometimes wonderfully right.

“She shall have a beautiful hat!” he murmured, taking up this and that, Rezia kneeling by his side, looking over his shoulder. Now it was finished—that is to say the design; she must stitch it together. But she must be very, very careful, he said, to keep it just as he had made it.

So she sewed. When she sewed, he thought, she made a sound like a kettle on the hob; bubbling, murmuring, always busy, her strong little pointed fingers pinching and poking; her needle flashing straight. The sun might go in and out, on the tassels, on the wall-paper, but he would wait, he thought, stretching out his feet, looking at his ringed sock at the end of the sofa; he would wait in this warm place, this pocket of still air, which one comes on at the edge of a wood sometimes in the evening, when, because of a fall in the ground, or some arrangement of the trees (one must be scientific above all, scientific), warmth lingers, and the air buffets the cheek like the wing of a bird.

“There it is,” said Rezia, twirling Mrs. Peters’ hat on the tips of her fingers. “That’ll do for the moment. Later …” her sentence bubbled away drip, drip, drip, like a contented tap left running.

It was wonderful. Never had he done anything which made him feel so proud. It was so real, it was so substantial, Mrs. Peters’ hat.

“Just look at it,” he said.

Yes, it would always make her happy to see that hat. He had become himself then, he had laughed then. They had been alone together. Always she would like that hat.

He told her to try it on.

“But I must look so queer!” she cried, running over to the glass and looking first this side, then that. Then she snatched it off again, for there was a tap at the door. Could it be Sir William Bradshaw? Had he sent already?

No! it was only the small girl with the evening paper.

What always happened, then happened—what happened every night of their lives. The small girl sucked her thumb at the door; Rezia went down on her knees; Rezia cooed and kissed; Rezia got a bag of sweets out of the table drawer. For so it always happened. First one thing, then another. So she built it up, first one thing and then another. Dancing, skipping, round and round the room they went. He took the paper. Surrey was all out, he read. There was a heat wave. Rezia repeated: Surrey was all out. There was a heat wave, making it part of the game she was playing with Mrs. Filmer’s grandchild, both of them laughing, chattering at the same time, at their game. He was very tired. He was very happy. He would sleep. He shut his eyes. But directly he saw nothing the sounds of the game became fainter and stranger and sounded like the cries of people seeking and not finding, and passing farther and farther away. They had lost him!

He started up in terror. What did he see? The plate of bananas on the sideboard. Nobody was there (Rezia had taken the child to its mother; it was bedtime). That was it: to be alone for ever. That was the doom pronounced in Milan when he came into the room and saw them cutting out buckram shapes with their scissors; to be alone for ever.

He was alone with the sideboard and the bananas. He was alone, exposed on this bleak eminence, stretched out—but not on a hill-top; not on a crag; on Mrs. Filmer’s sitting-room sofa. As for the visions, the faces, the voices of the dead, where were they? There was a screen in front of him, with black bulrushes and blue swallows. Where he had once seen mountains, where he had seen faces, where he had seen beauty, there was a screen.

“Evans!” he cried. There was no answer. A mouse had squeaked, or a curtain rustled. Those were the voices of the dead. The screen, the coal-scuttle, the sideboard remained to him. Let him, then, face the screen, the coal-scuttle and the side-board … but Rezia burst into the room chattering.

Some letter had come. Everybody’s plans were changed. Mrs. Filmer would not be able to go to Brighton after all. There was no time to let Mrs. Williams know, and really Rezia thought it very, very annoying, when she caught sight of the hat and thought … perhaps … she … might just make a little … Her voice died out in contented melody.

“Ah, damn!” she cried (it was a joke of theirs, her swearing); the needle had broken. Hat, child, Brighton, needle. She built it up; first one thing, then another, she built it up, sewing.

She wanted him to say whether by moving the rose she had improved the hat. She sat on the end of the sofa.

They were perfectly happy now, she said suddenly, putting the hat down. For she could say anything to him now. She could say whatever came into her head. That was almost the first thing she had felt about him, that night in the café when he had come in with his English friends. He had come in, rather shyly, looking round him, and his hat had fallen when he hung it up. That she could remember. She knew he was English, though not one of the large Englishmen her sister admired, for he was always thin; but he had a beautiful fresh colour; and with his big nose, his bright eyes, his way of sitting a little hunched, made her think, she had often told him, of a young hawk, that first evening she saw him, when they were playing dominoes, and he had come in—of a young hawk; but with her he was always very gentle. She had never seen him wild or drunk, only suffering sometimes through this terrible war, but even so, when she came in, he would put it all away. Anything, anything in the whole world, any little bother with her work, anything that struck her to say she would tell him, and he understood at once. Her own family even were not the same. Being older than she was and being so clever—how serious he was, wanting her to read Shakespeare before she could even read a child’s story in English!—being so much more experienced, he could help her. And she, too, could help him.

But this hat now. And then (it was getting late) Sir William Bradshaw.

She held her hands to her head, waiting for him to say did he like the hat or not, and as she sat there, waiting, looking down, he could feel her mind, like a bird, falling from branch to branch, and always alighting, quite rightly; he could follow her mind, as she sat there in one of those loose lax poses that came to her naturally, and, if he should say anything, at once she smiled, like a bird alighting with all its claws firm upon the bough.

But he remembered. Bradshaw said, “The people we are most fond of are not good for us when we are ill.” Bradshaw said he must be taught to rest. Bradshaw said they must be separated.

“Must”, “must”, why “must”? What power had Bradshaw over him? “What right has Bradshaw to say ‘must’ to me?” he demanded.

“It is because you talked of killing yourself,” said Rezia. (Mercifully, she could now say anything to Septimus.)

So he was in their power! Holmes and Bradshaw were on him! The brute with the red nostrils was snuffing into every secret place! “Must” it could say! Where were his papers? the things he had written?

She brought him his papers, the things he had written, things she had written for him. She tumbled them out on to the sofa. They looked at them together. Diagrams, designs, little men and women brandishing sticks for arms, with wings—were they?—on their backs; circles traced round shillings and sixpences—the suns and stars; zigzagging precipices with mountaineers ascending roped together, exactly like knives and forks; sea pieces with little faces laughing out of what might perhaps be waves: the map of the world. Burn them! he cried. Now for his writings; how the dead sing behind rhododendron bushes; odes to Time; conversations with Shakespeare; Evans, Evans, Evans—his messages from the dead; do not cut down trees; tell the Prime Minister. Universal love: the meaning of the world. Burn them! he cried.

But Rezia laid her hands on them. Some were very beautiful, she thought. She would tie them up (for she had no envelope) with a piece of silk.

Even if they took him, she said, she would go with him. They could not separate them against their wills, she said.

Shuffling the edges straight, she did up the papers, and tied the parcel almost without looking, sitting close, sitting beside him, he thought, as if all her petals were about her. She was a flowering tree; and through her branches looked out the face of a lawgiver, who had reached a sanctuary where she feared no one; not Holmes; not Bradshaw; a miracle, a triumph, the last and greatest. Staggering he saw her mount the appalling staircase, laden with Holmes and Bradshaw, men who never weighed less than eleven stone six, who sent their wives to court, men who made ten thousand a year and talked of proportion; who differed in their verdicts (for Holmes said one thing, Bradshaw another), yet judges they were; who mixed the vision and the sideboard; saw nothing clear, yet ruled, yet inflicted. Over them she triumphed.

“There!” she said. The papers were tied up. No one should get at them. She would put them away.

And, she said, nothing should separate them. She sat down beside him and called him by the name of that hawk or crow which, being malicious and a great destroyer of crops, was precisely like him. No one could separate them, she said.

Then she got up to go into the bedroom to pack their things, but hearing voices downstairs and thinking that Dr. Holmes had perhaps called, ran down to prevent him coming up.

Septimus could hear her talking to Holmes on the staircase.

“My dear lady, I have come as a friend,” Holmes was saying.

“No. I will not allow you to see my husband,” she said.

He could see her, like a little hen, with her wings spread barring his passage. But Holmes persevered.

“My dear lady, allow me …” Holmes said, putting her aside (Holmes was a powerfully built man).

Holmes was coming upstairs. Holmes would burst open the door. Holmes would say, “In a funk, eh?” Holmes would get him. But no; not Holmes; not Bradshaw. Getting up rather unsteadily, hopping indeed from foot to foot, he considered Mrs. Filmer’s nice clean bread-knife with “Bread” carved on the handle. Ah, but one mustn’t spoil that. The gas fire? But it was too late now. Holmes was coming. Razors he might have got, but Rezia, who always did that sort of thing, had packed them. There remained only the window, the large Bloomsbury lodging-house window; the tiresome, the troublesome, and rather melodramatic business of opening the window and throwing himself out. It was their idea of tragedy, not his or Rezia’s (for she was with him). Holmes and Bradshaw liked that sort of thing. (He sat on the sill.) But he would wait till the very last moment. He did not want to die. Life was good. The sun hot. Only human beings? Coming down the staircase opposite an old man stopped and stared at him. Holmes was at the door. “I’ll give it you!” he cried, and flung himself vigorously, violently down on to Mrs. Filmer’s area railings.

“The coward!” cried Dr. Holmes, bursting the door open. Rezia ran to the window, she saw; she understood. Dr. Holmes and Mrs. Filmer collided with each other. Mrs. Filmer flapped her apron and made her hide her eyes in the bedroom. There was a great deal of running up and down stairs. Dr. Holmes came in—white as a sheet, shaking all over, with a glass in his hand. She must be brave and drink something, he said (What was it? Something sweet), for her husband was horribly mangled, would not recover consciousness, she must not see him, must be spared as much as possible, would have the inquest to go through, poor young woman. Who could have foretold it? A sudden impulse, no one was in the least to blame (he told Mrs. Filmer). And why the devil he did it, Dr. Holmes could not conceive.

It seemed to her as she drank the sweet stuff that she was opening long windows, stepping out into some garden. But where? The clock was striking—one, two, three: how sensible the sound was; compared with all this thumping and whispering; like Septimus himself. She was falling asleep. But the clock went on striking, four, five, six, and Mrs. Filmer waving her apron (they wouldn’t bring the body in here, would they?) seemed part of that garden; or a flag. She had once seen a flag slowly rippling out from a mast when she stayed with her aunt at Venice. Men killed in battle were thus saluted, and Septimus had been through the War. Of her memories, most were happy.

She put on her hat, and ran through cornfields—where could it have been?—on to some hill, somewhere near the sea, for there were ships, gulls, butterflies; they sat on a cliff. In London, too, there they sat, and, half dreaming, came to her through the bedroom door, rain falling, whisperings, stirrings among dry corn, the caress of the sea, as it seemed to her, hollowing them in its arched shell and murmuring to her laid on shore, strewn she felt, like flying flowers over some tomb.

“He is dead,” she said, smiling at the poor old woman who guarded her with her honest light-blue eyes fixed on the door. (They wouldn’t bring him in here, would they?) But Mrs. Filmer pooh-poohed. Oh no, oh no! They were carrying him away now. Ought she not to be told? Married people ought to be together, Mrs. Filmer thought. But they must do as the doctor said.

“Let her sleep,” said Dr. Holmes, feeling her pulse. She saw the large outline of his body dark against the window. So that was Dr. Holmes.

One of the triumphs of civilisation, Peter Walsh thought. It is one of the triumphs of civilisation, as the light high bell of the ambulance sounded. Swiftly, cleanly, the ambulance sped to the hospital, having picked up instantly, humanely, some poor devil; some one hit on the head, struck down by disease, knocked over perhaps a minute or so ago at one of these crossings, as might happen to oneself. That was civilisation. It struck him coming back from the East—the efficiency, the organisation, the communal spirit of London. Every cart or carriage of its own accord drew aside to let the ambulance pass. Perhaps it was morbid; or was it not touching rather, the respect which they showed this ambulance with its victim inside—busy men hurrying home, yet instantly bethinking them as it passed of some wife; or presumably how easily it might have been them there, stretched on a shelf with a doctor and a nurse…. Ah, but thinking became morbid, sentimental, directly one began conjuring up doctors, dead bodies; a little glow of pleasure, a sort of lust, too, over the visual impression warned one not to go on with that sort of thing any more—fatal to art, fatal to friendship. True. And yet, thought Peter Walsh, as the ambulance turned the corner, though the light high bell could be heard down the next street and still farther as it crossed the Tottenham Court Road, chiming constantly, it is the privilege of loneliness; in privacy one may do as one chooses. One might weep if no one saw. It had been his undoing—this susceptibility—in Anglo-Indian society; not weeping at the right time, or laughing either. I have that in me, he thought, standing by the pillar-box, which could now dissolve in tears. Why, heaven knows. Beauty of some sort probably, and the weight of the day, which, beginning with that visit to Clarissa, had exhausted him with its heat, its intensity, and the drip, drip of one impression after another down into that cellar where they stood, deep, dark, and no one would ever know. Partly for that reason, its secrecy, complete and inviolable, he had found life like an unknown garden, full of turns and corners, surprising, yes; really it took one’s breath away, these moments; there coming to him by the pillar-box opposite the British Museum one of them, a moment, in which things came together; this ambulance; and life and death. It was as if he were sucked up to some very high roof by that rush of emotion, and the rest of him, like a white shell-sprinkled beach, left bare. It had been his undoing in Anglo-Indian society—this susceptibility.

Clarissa once, going on top of an omnibus with him somewhere, Clarissa superficially at least, so easily moved, now in despair, now in the best of spirits, all aquiver in those days and such good company, spotting queer little scenes, names, people from the top of a bus, for they used to explore London and bring back bags full of treasures from the Caledonian market—Clarissa had a theory in those days—they had heaps of theories, always theories, as young people have. It was to explain the feeling they had of dissatisfaction; not knowing people; not being known. For how could they know each other? You met every day; then not for six months, or years. It was unsatisfactory, they agreed, how little one knew people. But she said, sitting on the bus going up Shaftesbury Avenue, she felt herself everywhere; not “here, here, here”; and she tapped the back of the seat; but everywhere. She waved her hand, going up Shaftesbury Avenue. She was all that. So that to know her, or any one, one must seek out the people who completed them; even the places. Odd affinities she had with people she had never spoken to, some woman in the street, some man behind a counter—even trees, or barns. It ended in a transcendental theory which, with her horror of death, allowed her to believe, or say that she believed (for all her scepticism), that since our apparitions, the part of us which appears, are so momentary compared with the other, the unseen part of us, which spreads wide, the unseen might survive, be recovered somehow attached to this person or that, or even haunting certain places, after death. Perhaps—perhaps.

Looking back over that long friendship of almost thirty years her theory worked to this extent. Brief, broken, often painful as their actual meetings had been, what with his absences and interruptions (this morning, for instance, in came Elizabeth, like a long-legged colt, handsome, dumb, just as he was beginning to talk to Clarissa), the effect of them on his life was immeasurable. There was a mystery about it. You were given a sharp, acute, uncomfortable grain—the actual meeting; horribly painful as often as not; yet in absence, in the most unlikely places, it would flower out, open, shed its scent, let you touch, taste, look about you, get the whole feel of it and understanding, after years of lying lost. Thus she had come to him; on board ship; in the Himalayas; suggested by the oddest things (so Sally Seton, generous, enthusiastic goose! thought of him when she saw blue hydrangeas). She had influenced him more than any person he had ever known. And always in this way coming before him without his wishing it, cool, lady-like, critical; or ravishing, romantic, recalling some field or English harvest. He saw her most often in the country, not in London. One scene after another at Bourton….

He had reached his hotel. He crossed the hall, with its mounds of reddish chairs and sofas, its spike-leaved, withered-looking plants. He got his key off the hook. The young lady handed him some letters. He went upstairs—he saw her most often at Bourton, in the late summer, when he stayed there for a week, or fortnight even, as people did in those days. First on top of some hill there she would stand, hands clapped to her hair, her cloak blowing out, pointing, crying to them—She saw the Severn beneath. Or in a wood, making the kettle boil—very ineffective with her fingers; the smoke curtseying, blowing in their faces; her little pink face showing through; begging water from an old woman in a cottage, who came to the door to watch them go. They walked always; the others drove. She was bored driving, disliked all animals, except that dog. They tramped miles along roads. She would break off to get her bearings, pilot him back across country; and all the time they argued, discussed poetry, discussed people, discussed politics (she was a Radical then); never noticing a thing except when she stopped, cried out at a view or a tree, and made him look with her; and so on again, through stubble fields, she walking ahead, with a flower for her aunt, never tired of walking for all her delicacy; to drop down on Bourton in the dusk. Then, after dinner, old Breitkopf would open the piano and sing without any voice, and they would lie sunk in arm-chairs, trying not to laugh, but always breaking down and laughing, laughing—laughing at nothing. Breitkopf was supposed not to see. And then in the morning, flirting up and down like a wagtail in front of the house….

Oh it was a letter from her! This blue envelope; that was her hand. And he would have to read it. Here was another of those meetings, bound to be painful! To read her letter needed the devil of an effort. “How heavenly it was to see him. She must tell him that.” That was all.

But it upset him. It annoyed him. He wished she hadn’t written it. Coming on top of his thoughts, it was like a nudge in the ribs. Why couldn’t she let him be? After all, she had married Dalloway, and lived with him in perfect happiness all these years.

These hotels are not consoling places. Far from it. Any number of people had hung up their hats on those pegs. Even the flies, if you thought of it, had settled on other people’s noses. As for the cleanliness which hit him in the face, it wasn’t cleanliness, so much as bareness, frigidity; a thing that had to be. Some arid matron made her rounds at dawn sniffing, peering, causing blue-nosed maids to scour, for all the world as if the next visitor were a joint of meat to be served on a perfectly clean platter. For sleep, one bed; for sitting in, one arm-chair; for cleaning one’s teeth and shaving one’s chin, one tumbler, one looking-glass. Books, letters, dressing-gown, slipped about on the impersonality of the horse-hair like incongruous impertinences. And it was Clarissa’s letter that made him see all this. “Heavenly to see you. She must say so!” He folded the paper; pushed it away; nothing would induce him to read it again!

To get that letter to him by six o’clock she must have sat down and written it directly he left her; stamped it; sent somebody to the post. It was, as people say, very like her. She was upset by his visit. She had felt a great deal; had for a moment, when she kissed his hand, regretted, envied him even, remembered possibly (for he saw her look it) something he had said—how they would change the world if she married him perhaps; whereas, it was this; it was middle age; it was mediocrity; then forced herself with her indomitable vitality to put all that aside, there being in her a thread of life which for toughness, endurance, power to overcome obstacles and carry her triumphantly through he had never known the like of. Yes; but there would come a reaction directly he left the room. She would be frightfully sorry for him; she would think what in the world she could do to give him pleasure (short always of the one thing), and he could see her with the tears running down her cheeks going to her writing-table and dashing off that one line which he was to find greeting him…. “Heavenly to see you!” And she meant it.

Peter Walsh had now unlaced his boots.

But it would not have been a success, their marriage. The other thing, after all, came so much more naturally.

It was odd; it was true; lots of people felt it. Peter Walsh, who had done just respectably, filled the usual posts adequately, was liked, but thought a little cranky, gave himself airs—it was odd that he should have had, especially now that his hair was grey, a contented look; a look of having reserves. It was this that made him attractive to women, who liked the sense that he was not altogether manly. There was something unusual about him, or something behind him. It might be that he was bookish—never came to see you without taking up the book on the table (he was now reading, with his bootlaces trailing on the floor); or that he was a gentleman, which showed itself in the way he knocked the ashes out of his pipe, and in his manners of course to women. For it was very charming and quite ridiculous how easily some girl without a grain of sense could twist him round her finger. But at her own risk. That is to say, though he might be ever so easy, and indeed with his gaiety and good-breeding fascinating to be with, it was only up to a point. She said something—no, no; he saw through that. He wouldn’t stand that—no, no. Then he could shout and rock and hold his sides together over some joke with men. He was the best judge of cooking in India. He was a man. But not the sort of man one had to respect—which was a mercy; not like Major Simmons, for instance; not in the least, Daisy thought, when, in spite of her two small children, she used to compare them.

He pulled off his boots. He emptied his pockets. Out came with his pocket-knife a snapshot of Daisy on the verandah; Daisy all in white, with a fox-terrier on her knee; very charming, very dark; the best he had ever seen of her. It did come, after all, so naturally; so much more naturally than Clarissa. No fuss. No bother. No finicking and fidgeting. All plain sailing. And the dark, adorably pretty girl on the verandah exclaimed (he could hear her)[.] Of course, of course she would give him everything! she cried (she had no sense of discretion), everything he wanted! she cried, running to meet him, whoever might be looking. And she was only twenty-four. And she had two children. Well, well!

Well indeed he had got himself into a mess at his age. And it came over him when he woke in the night pretty forcibly. Suppose they did marry? For him it would be all very well, but what about her? Mrs. Burgess, a good sort and no chatterbox, in whom he had confided, thought this absence of his in England, ostensibly to see lawyers, might serve to make Daisy reconsider, think what it meant. It was a question of her position, Mrs. Burgess said; the social barrier; giving up her children. She’d be a widow with a past one of these days, draggling about in the suburbs, or more likely, indiscriminate (you know, she said, what such women get like, with too much paint). But Peter Walsh pooh-poohed all that. He didn’t mean to die yet. Anyhow, she must settle for herself; judge for herself, he thought, padding about the room in his socks, smoothing out his dress-shirt, for he might go to Clarissa’s party, or he might go to one of the Halls, or he might settle in and read an absorbing book written by a man he used to know at Oxford. And if he did retire, that’s what he’d do—write books. He would go to Oxford and poke about in the Bodleian. Vainly the dark, adorably pretty girl ran to the end of the terrace; vainly waved her hand; vainly cried she didn’t care a straw what people said. There he was, the man she thought the world of, the perfect gentleman, the fascinating, the distinguished (and his age made not the least difference to her), padding about a room in an hotel in Bloomsbury, shaving, washing, continuing, as he took up cans, put down razors, to poke about in the Bodleian, and get at the truth about one or two little matters that interested him. And he would have a chat with whoever it might be, and so come to disregard more and more precise hours for lunch, and miss engagements; and when Daisy asked him, as she would, for a kiss, a scene, fail to come up to the scratch (though he was genuinely devoted to her)—in short, it might be happier, as Mrs. Burgess said, that she should forget him, or merely remember him as he was in August 1922, like a figure standing at the cross roads at dusk, which grows more and more remote as the dog-cart spins away, carrying her securely fastened to the back seat, though her arms are outstretched; and as she sees the figure dwindle and disappear, still she cries out how she would do anything in the world, anything, anything, anything….

He never knew what people thought. It became more and more difficult for him to concentrate. He became absorbed; he became busied with his own concerns; now surly, now gay; dependent on women, absent-minded, moody, less and less able (so he thought as he shaved) to understand why Clarissa couldn’t simply find them a lodging and be nice to Daisy; introduce her. And then he could just—just do what? just haunt and hover (he was at the moment actually engaged in sorting out various keys, papers), swoop and taste, be alone, in short, sufficient to himself; and yet nobody of course was more dependent upon others (he buttoned his waistcoat); it had been his undoing. He could not keep out of smoking-rooms, liked colonels, liked golf, liked bridge, and above all women’s society, and the fineness of their companionship, and their faithfulness and audacity and greatness in loving which, though it had its drawbacks, seemed to him (and the dark, adorably pretty face was on top of the envelopes) so wholly admirable, so splendid a flower to grow on the crest of human life, and yet he could not come up to the scratch, being always apt to see round things (Clarissa had sapped something in him permanently), and to tire very easily of mute devotion and to want variety in love, though it would make him furious if Daisy loved anybody else, furious! for he was jealous, uncontrollably jealous by temperament. He suffered tortures! But where was his knife; his watch; his seals, his note-case, and Clarissa’s letter which he would not read again but liked to think of, and Daisy’s photograph? And now for dinner.

They were eating.

Sitting at little tables round vases, dressed or not dressed, with their shawls and bags laid beside them, with their air of false composure, for they were not used to so many courses at dinner; and confidence, for they were able to pay for it; and strain, for they had been running about London all day shopping, sightseeing; and their natural curiosity, for they looked round and up as the nice-looking gentleman in horn-rimmed spectacles came in; and their good nature, for they would have been glad to do any little service, such as lend a time-table or impart useful information; and their desire, pulsing in them, tugging at them subterraneously, somehow to establish connections if it were only a birthplace (Liverpool, for example), in common or friends of the same name; with their furtive glances, odd silences, and sudden withdrawals into family jocularity and isolation; there they sat eating dinner when Mr. Walsh came in and took his seat at a little table by the curtain.

It was not that he said anything, for being solitary he could only address himself to the waiter; it was his way of looking at the menu, of pointing his forefinger to a particular wine, of hitching himself up to the table, of addressing himself seriously, not gluttonously, to dinner, that won him their respect; which, having to remain unexpressed for the greater part of the meal, flared up at the table where the Morrises sat when Mr. Walsh was heard to say at the end of the meal, “Bartlett pears.” Why he should have spoken so moderately yet firmly, with the air of a disciplinarian well within his rights which are founded upon justice, neither young Charles Morris, nor old Charles, neither Miss Elaine nor Mrs. Morris knew. But when he said, “Bartlett pears,” sitting alone at his table, they felt that he counted on their support in some lawful demand; was champion of a cause which immediately became their own, so that their eyes met his eyes sympathetically, and when they all reached the smoking-room simultaneously, a little talk between them became inevitable.

It was not very profound—only to the effect that London was crowded; had changed in thirty years; that Mr. Morris preferred Liverpool; that Mrs. Morris had been to the Westminster flower-show, and that they had all seen the Prince of Wales. Yet, thought Peter Walsh, no family in the world can campare [compare] with the Morrises; none whatever; and their relations to each other are perfect, and they don’t care a hang for the upper classes, and they like what they like, and Elaine is training for the family business, and the boy has won a scholarship at Leeds, and the old lady (who is about his own age) has three more children at home; and they have two motor cars, but Mr. Morris still mends the boots on Sunday: it is superb, it is absolutely superb, thought Peter Walsh, swaying a little backwards and forwards with his liqueur glass in his hand among the hairy red chairs and ash-trays, feeling very well pleased with himself, for the Morrises liked him. Yes, they liked a man who said “Bartlett pears.” They liked him, he felt.

He would go to Clarissa’s party. (The Morrises moved off; but they would meet again.) He would go to Clarissa’s party, because he wanted to ask Richard what they were doing in India—the conservative duffers. And what’s being acted? And music…. Oh yes, and mere gossip.

For this is the truth about our soul, he thought, our self, who fish-like inhabits deep seas and plies among obscurities threading her way between the boles of giant weeds, over sun-flickered spaces and on and on into gloom, cold, deep, inscrutable; suddenly she shoots to the surface and sports on the wind-wrinkled waves; that is, has a positive need to brush, scrape, kindle herself, gossiping. What did the Government mean—Richard Dalloway would know—to do about India?

Since it was a very hot night and the paper boys went by with placards proclaiming in huge red letters that there was a heat-wave, wicker chairs were placed on the hotel steps and there, sipping, smoking, detached gentlemen sat. Peter Walsh sat there. One might fancy that day, the London day, was just beginning. Like a woman who had slipped off her print dress and white apron to array herself in blue and pearls, the day changed, put off stuff, took gauze, changed to evening, and with the same sigh of exhilaration that a woman breathes, tumbling petticoats on the floor, it too shed dust, heat, colour; the traffic thinned; motor cars, tinkling, darting, succeeded the lumber of vans; and here and there among the thick foliage of the squares an intense light hung. I resign, the evening seemed to say, as it paled and faded above the battlements and prominences, moulded, pointed, of hotel, flat, and block of shops, I fade, she was beginning, I disappear, but London would have none of it, and rushed her bayonets into the sky, pinioned her, constrained her to partnership in her revelry.

For the great revolution of Mr. Willett’s summer time had taken place since Peter Walsh’s last visit to England. The prolonged evening was new to him. It was inspiriting, rather. For as the young people went by with their despatch-boxes, awfully glad to be free, proud too, dumbly, of stepping this famous pavement, joy of a kind, cheap, tinselly, if you like, but all the same rapture, flushed their faces. They dressed well too; pink stockings; pretty shoes. They would now have two hours at the pictures. It sharpened, it refined them, the yellow-blue evening light; and on the leaves in the square shone lurid, livid—they looked as if dipped in sea water—the foliage of a submerged city. He was astonished by the beauty; it was encouraging too, for where the returned Anglo-Indian sat by rights (he knew crowds of them) in the Oriental Club biliously summing up the ruin of the world, here was he, as young as ever; envying young people their summer time and the rest of it, and more than suspecting from the words of a girl, from a housemaid’s laughter—intangible things you couldn’t lay your hands on—that shift in the whole pyramidal accumulation which in his youth had seemed immovable. On top of them it had pressed; weighed them down, the women especially, like those flowers Clarissa’s Aunt Helena used to press between sheets of grey blotting-paper with Littré’s dictionary on top, sitting under the lamp after dinner. She was dead now. He had heard of her, from Clarissa, losing the sight of one eye. It seemed so fitting—one of nature’s masterpieces—that old Miss Parry should turn to glass. She would die like some bird in a frost gripping her perch. She belonged to a different age, but being so entire, so complete, would always stand up on the horizon, stone-white, eminent, like a lighthouse marking some past stage on this adventurous, long, long voyage, this interminable—(he felt for a copper to buy a paper and read about Surrey and Yorkshire; he had held out that copper millions of times—Surrey was all out once more)—this interminable life. But cricket was no mere game. Cricket was important. He could never help reading about cricket. He read the scores in the stop press first, then how it was a hot day; then about a murder case. Having done things millions of times enriched them, though it might be said to take the surface off. The past enriched, and experience, and having cared for one or two people, and so having acquired the power which the young lack, of cutting short, doing what one likes, not caring a rap what people say and coming and going without any very great expectations (he left his paper on the table and moved off), which however (and he looked for his hat and coat) was not altogether true of him, not to-night, for here he was starting to go to a party, at his age, with the belief upon him that he was about to have an experience. But what?

Beauty anyhow. Not the crude beauty of the eye. It was not beauty pure and simple—Bedford Place leading into Russell Square. It was straightness and emptiness of course; the symmetry of a corridor; but it was also windows lit up, a piano, a gramophone sounding; a sense of pleasure-making hidden, but now and again emerging when, through the uncurtained window, the window left open, one saw parties sitting over tables, young people slowly circling, conversations between men and women, maids idly looking out (a strange comment theirs, when work was done), stockings drying on top ledges, a parrot, a few plants. Absorbing, mysterious, of infinite richness, this life. And in the large square where the cabs shot and swerved so quick, there were loitering couples, dallying, embracing, shrunk up under the shower of a tree; that was moving; so silent, so absorbed, that one passed, discreetly, timidly, as if in the presence of some sacred ceremony to interrupt which would have been impious. That was interesting. And so on into the flare and glare.

His light overcoat blew open, he stepped with indescribable idiosyncrasy, leant a little forward, tripped, with his hands behind his back and his eyes still a little hawk-like; he tripped through London, towards Westminster, observing.

Was everybody dining out, then? Doors were being opened here by a footman to let issue a high-stepping old dame, in buckled shoes, with three purple ostrich feathers in her hair. Doors were being opened for ladies wrapped like mummies in shawls with bright flowers on them, ladies with bare heads. And in respectable quarters with stucco pillars through small front gardens, lightly swathed, with combs in their hair (having run up to see the children), women came; men waited for them, with their coats blowing open, and the motor started. Everybody was going out. What with these doors being opened, and the descent and the start, it seemed as if the whole of London were embarking in little boats moored to the bank, tossing on the waters, as if the whole place were floating off in carnival. And Whitehall was skated over, silver beaten as it was, skated over by spiders, and there was a sense of midges round the arc lamps; it was so hot that people stood about talking. And here in Westminster was a retired Judge, presumably, sitting four square at his house door dressed all in white. An Anglo-Indian presumably.

And here a shindy of brawling women, drunken women; here only a policeman and looming houses, high houses, domed houses, churches, parliaments, and the hoot of a steamer on the river, a hollow misty cry. But it was her street, this, Clarissa’s; cabs were rushing round the corner, like water round the piers of a bridge, drawn together, it seemed to him, because they bore people going to her party, Clarissa’s party.

The cold stream of visual impressions failed him now as if the eye were a cup that overflowed and let the rest run down its china walls unrecorded. The brain must wake now. The body must contract now, entering the house, the lighted house, where the door stood open, where the motor cars were standing, and bright women descending: the soul must brave itself to endure. He opened the big blade of his pocket-knife.

Lucy came running full tilt downstairs, having just nipped into the drawing-room to smooth a cover, to straighten a chair, to pause a moment and feel whoever came in must think how clean, how bright, how beautifully cared for, when they saw the beautiful silver, the brass fire-irons, the new chair-covers, and the curtains of yellow chintz: she appraised each; heard a roar of voices; people already coming up from dinner; she must fly!

The Prime Minister was coming, Agnes said: so she had heard them say in the dining-room, she said, coming in with a tray of glasses. Did it matter, did it matter in the least, one Prime Minister more or less? It made no difference at this hour of the night to Mrs. Walker among the plates, saucepans, cullenders, frying-pans, chicken in aspic, ice-cream freezers, pared crusts of bread, lemons, soup tureens, and pudding basins which, however hard they washed up in the scullery, seemed to be all on top of her, on the kitchen table, on chairs, while the fire blared and roared, the electric lights glared, and still supper had to be laid. All she felt was, one Prime Minister more or less made not a scrap of difference to Mrs. Walker.

The ladies were going upstairs already, said Lucy; the ladies were going up, one by one, Mrs. Dalloway walking last and almost always sending back some message to the kitchen, “My love to Mrs. Walker,” that was it one night. Next morning they would go over the dishes—the soup, the salmon; the salmon, Mrs. Walker knew, as usual underdone, for she always got nervous about the pudding and left it to Jenny; so it happened, the salmon was always underdone. But some lady with fair hair and silver ornaments had said, Lucy said, about the entrée, was it really made at home? But it was the salmon that bothered Mrs. Walker, as she spun the plates round and round, and pushed in dampers and pulled out dampers; and there came a burst of laughter from the dining-room; a voice speaking; then another burst of laughter—the gentlemen enjoying themselves when the ladies had gone. The tokay, said Lucy, running in. Mr. Dalloway had sent for the tokay, from the Emperor’s cellars, the Imperial Tokay.

It was borne through the kitchen. Over her shoulder Lucy reported how Miss Elizabeth looked quite lovely; she couldn’t take her eyes off her; in her pink dress, wearing the necklace Mr. Dalloway had given her. Jenny must remember the dog, Miss Elizabeth’s fox-terrier, which, since it bit, had to be shut up and might, Elizabeth thought, want something. Jenny must remember the dog. But Jenny was not going upstairs with all those people about. There was a motor at the door already! There was a ring at the bell—and the gentlemen still in the dining-room, drinking tokay!

There, they were going upstairs; that was the first to come, and now they would come faster and faster, so that Mrs. Parkinson (hired for parties) would leave the hall door ajar, and the hall would be full of gentlemen waiting (they stood waiting, sleeking down their hair) while the ladies took their cloaks off in the room along the passage; where Mrs. Barnet helped them, old Ellen Barnet, who had been with the family for forty years, and came every summer to help the ladies, and remembered mothers when they were girls, and though very unassuming did shake hands; said “milady” very respectfully, yet had a humorous way with her, looking at the young ladies, and ever so tactfully helping Lady Lovejoy, who had some trouble with her underbodice. And they could not help feeling, Lady Lovejoy and Miss Alice, that some little privilege in the matter of brush and comb was awarded them having known Mrs. Barnet—“thirty years, milady,” Mrs. Barnet supplied her. Young ladies did not use to rouge, said Lady Lovejoy, when they stayed at Bourton in the old days. And Miss Alice didn’t need rouge, said Mrs. Barnet, looking at her fondly. There Mrs. Barnet would sit, in the cloakroom, patting down the furs, smoothing out the Spanish shawls, tidying the dressing-table, and knowing perfectly well, in spite of the furs and the embroideries, which were nice ladies, which were not. The dear old body, said Lady Lovejoy, mounting the stairs, Clarissa’s old nurse.

And then Lady Lovejoy stiffened. “Lady and Miss Lovejoy,” she said to Mr. Wilkins (hired for parties). He had an admirable manner, as he bent and straightened himself, bent and straightened himself and announced with perfect impartiality “Lady and Miss Lovejoy … Sir John and Lady Needham … Miss Weld … Mr. Walsh.” His manner was admirable; his family life must be irreproachable, except that it seemed impossible that a being with greenish lips and shaven cheeks could ever have blundered into the nuisance of children.

“How delightful to see you!” said Clarissa. She said it to every one. How delightful to see you! She was at her worst—effusive, insincere. It was a great mistake to have come. He should have stayed at home and read his book, thought Peter Walsh; should have gone to a music hall; he should have stayed at home, for he knew no one.

Oh dear, it was going to be a failure; a complete failure, Clarissa felt it in her bones as dear old Lord Lexham stood there apologising for his wife who had caught cold at the Buckingham Palace garden party. She could see Peter out of the tail of her eye, criticising her, there, in that corner. Why, after all, did she do these things? Why seek pinnacles and stand drenched in fire? Might it consume her anyhow! Burn her to cinders! Better anything, better brandish one’s torch and hurl it to earth than taper and dwindle away like some Ellie Henderson! It was extraordinary how Peter put her into these states just by coming and standing in a corner. He made her see herself; exaggerate. It was idiotic. But why did he come, then, merely to criticise? Why always take, never give? Why not risk one’s one little point of view? There he was wandering off, and she must speak to him. But she would not get the chance. Life was that—humiliation, renunciation. What Lord Lexham was saying was that his wife would not wear her furs at the garden party because “my dear, you ladies are all alike”—Lady Lexham being seventy-five at least! It was delicious, how they petted each other, that old couple. She did like old Lord Lexham. She did think it mattered, her party, and it made her feel quite sick to know that it was all going wrong, all falling flat. Anything, any explosion, any horror was better than people wandering aimlessly, standing in a bunch at a corner like Ellie Henderson, not even caring to hold themselves upright.

Gently the yellow curtain with all the birds of Paradise blew out and it seemed as if there were a flight of wings into the room, right out, then sucked back. (For the windows were open.) Was it draughty, Ellie Henderson wondered? She was subject to chills. But it did not matter that she should come down sneezing to-morrow; it was the girls with their naked shoulders she thought of, being trained to think of others by an old father, an invalid, late vicar of Bourton, but he was dead now; and her chills never went to her chest, never. It was the girls she thought of, the young girls with their bare shoulders, she herself having always been a wisp of a creature, with her thin hair and meagre profile; though now, past fifty, there was beginning to shine through some mild beam, something purified into distinction by years of self-abnegation but obscured again, perpetually, by her distressing gentility, her panic fear, which arose from three hundred pounds income, and her weaponless state (she could not earn a penny) and it made her timid, and more and more disqualified year by year to meet well-dressed people who did this sort of thing every night of the season, merely telling their maids “I’ll wear so and so,” whereas Ellie Henderson ran out nervously and bought cheap pink flowers, half-a-dozen, and then threw a shawl over her old black dress. For her invitation to Clarissa’s party had come at the last moment. She was not quite happy about it. She had a sort of feeling that Clarissa had not meant to ask her this year.

Why should she? There was no reason really, except that they had always known each other. Indeed, they were cousins. But naturally they had rather drifted apart, Clarissa being so sought after. It was an event to her, going to a party. It was quite a treat just to see the lovely clothes. Wasn’t that Elizabeth, grown up, with her hair done in the fashionable way, in the pink dress? Yet she could not be more than seventeen. She was very, very handsome. But girls when they first came out didn’t seem to wear white as they used. (She must remember everything to tell Edith.) Girls wore straight frocks, perfectly tight, with skirts well above the ankles. It was not becoming, she thought.

So, with her weak eyesight, Ellie Henderson craned rather forward, and it wasn’t so much she who minded not having any one to talk to (she hardly knew anybody there), for she felt that they were all such interesting people to watch; politicians presumably; Richard Dalloway’s friends; but it was Richard himself who felt that he could not let the poor creature go on standing there all the evening by herself.

“Well, Ellie, and how’s the world treating you?” he said in his genial way, and Ellie Henderson, getting nervous and flushing and feeling that it was extraordinarily nice of him to come and talk to her, said that many people really felt the heat more than the cold.

“Yes, they do,” said Richard Dalloway. “Yes.”

But what more did one say?

“Hullo, Richard,” said somebody, taking him by the elbow, and, good Lord, there was old Peter, old Peter Walsh. He was delighted to see him—ever so pleased to see him! He hadn’t changed a bit. And off they went together walking right across the room, giving each other little pats, as if they hadn’t met for a long time, Ellie Henderson thought, watching them go, certain she knew that man’s face. A tall man, middle aged, rather fine eyes, dark, wearing spectacles, with a look of John Burrows. Edith would be sure to know.

The curtain with its flight of birds of Paradise blew out again. And Clarissa saw—she saw Ralph Lyon beat it back, and go on talking. So it wasn’t a failure after all! it was going to be all right now—her party. It had begun. It had started. But it was still touch and go. She must stand there for the present. People seemed to come in a rush.

Colonel and Mrs. Garrod … Mr. Hugh Whitbread … Mr. Bowley … Mrs. Hilbery … Lady Mary Maddox … Mr. Quin … intoned Wilkins. She had six or seven words with each, and they went on, they went into the rooms; into something now, not nothing, since Ralph Lyon had beat back the curtain.

And yet for her own part, it was too much of an effort. She was not enjoying it. It was too much like being—just anybody, standing there; anybody could do it; yet this anybody she did a little admire, couldn’t help feeling that she had, anyhow, made this happen, that it marked a stage, this post that she felt herself to have become, for oddly enough she had quite forgotten what she looked like, but felt herself a stake driven in at the top of her stairs. Every time she gave a party she had this feeling of being something not herself, and that every one was unreal in one way; much more real in another. It was, she thought, partly their clothes, partly being taken out of their ordinary ways, partly the background; it was possible to say things you couldn’t say anyhow else, things that needed an effort; possible to go much deeper. But not for her; not yet anyhow.

“How delightful to see you!” she said. Dear old Sir Harry! He would know every one.

And what was so odd about it was the sense one had as they came up the stairs one after another, Mrs. Mount and Celia, Herbert Ainsty, Mrs. Dakers—oh. and Lady Bruton!

“How awfully good of you to come!” she said, and she meant it—it was odd how standing there one felt them going on, going on, some quite old, some …

What name? Lady Rosseter? But who on earth was Lady Rosseter?

“Clarissa!” That voice! It was Sally Seton! Sally Seton! after all these years! She loomed through a mist. For she hadn’t looked like that, Sally Seton, when Clarissa grasped the hot-water can. To think of her under this roof, under this roof! Not like that!

All on top of each other, embarrassed, laughing, words tumbled out—passing through London; heard from Clara Haydon; what a chance of seeing you! So I thrust myself in—without an invitation….

One might put down the hot-water can quite composedly. The lustre had left her. Yet it was extraordinary to see her again, older, happier, less lovely. They kissed each other, first this cheek, then that, by the drawing-room door, and Clarissa turned, with Sally’s hand in hers, and saw her rooms full, heard the roar of voices, saw the candlesticks, the blowing curtains, and the roses which Richard had given her.

“I have five enormous boys,” said Sally.

She had the simplest egotism, the most open desire to be thought first always, and Clarissa loved her for being still like that. “I can’t believe it!” she cried, kindling all over with pleasure at the thought of the past.

But alas, Wilkins; Wilkins wanted her; Wilkins was emitting in a voice of commanding authority, as if the whole company must be admonished and the hostess reclaimed from frivolity, one name:

“The Prime Minister,” said Peter Walsh.

The Prime Minister? Was it really? Ellie Henderson marvelled. What a thing to tell Edith!

One couldn’t laugh at him. He looked so ordinary. You might have stood him behind a counter and bought biscuits—poor chap, all rigged up in gold lace. And to be fair, as he went his rounds, first with Clarissa, then with Richard escorting him, he did it very well. He tried to look somebody. It was amusing to watch. Nobody looked at him. They just went on talking, yet it was perfectly plain that they all knew, felt to the marrow of their bones, this majesty passing; this symbol of what they all stood for, English society. Old Lady Bruton, and she looked very fine too, very stalwart in her lace, swam up, and they withdrew into a little room which at once became spied upon, guarded, and a sort of stir and rustle rippled through every one openly: the Prime Minister!

Lord, lord, the snobbery of the English! thought Peter Walsh, standing in the corner. How they loved dressing up in gold lace and doing homage! There! That must be—by Jove it was—Hugh Whitbread, snuffing round the precincts of the great, grown rather fatter, rather whiter, the admirable Hugh!

He looked always as if he were on duty, thought Peter, a privileged but secretive being, hoarding secrets which he would die to defend, though it was only some little piece of tittle-tattle dropped by a court footman which would be in all the papers to-morrow. Such were his rattles, his baubles, in playing with which he had grown white, come to the verge of old age, enjoying the respect and affection of all who had the privilege of knowing this type of the English public-school man. Inevitably one made up things like that about Hugh; that was his style; the style of those admirable letters which Peter had read thousands of miles across the sea in the Times, and had thanked God he was out of that pernicious hubble-bubble if it were only to hear baboons chatter and coolies beat their wives. An olive-skinned youth from one of the Universities stood obsequiously by. Him he would patronise, initiate, teach how to get on. For he liked nothing better than doing kindnesses, making the hearts of old ladies palpitate with the joy of being thought of in their age, their affliction, thinking themselves quite forgotten, yet here was dear Hugh driving up and spending an hour talking of the past, remembering trifles, praising the home-made cake, though Hugh might eat cake with a Duchess any day of his life, and, to look at him, probably did spend a good deal of time in that agreeable occupation. The All-judging, the All-merciful, might excuse. Peter Walsh had no mercy. Villains there must be, and, God knows, the rascals who get hanged for battering the brains of a girl out in a train do less harm on the whole than Hugh Whitbread and his kindness! Look at him now, on tiptoe, dancing forward, bowing and scraping, as the Prime Minister and Lady Bruton emerged, intimating for all the world to see that he was privileged to say something, something private, to Lady Bruton as she passed. She stopped. She wagged her fine old head. She was thanking him presumably for some piece of servility. She had her toadies, minor officials in Government offices who ran about putting through little jobs on her behalf, in return for which she gave them luncheon. But she derived from the eighteenth century. She was all right.

And now Clarissa escorted her Prime Minister down the room, prancing, sparkling, with the stateliness of her grey hair. She wore ear-rings, and a silver-green mermaid’s dress. Lolloping on the waves and braiding her tresses she seemed, having that gift still; to be; to exist; to sum it all up in the moment as she passed; turned, caught her scarf in some other woman’s dress, unhitched it, laughed, all with the most perfect ease and air of a creature floating in its element. But age had brushed her; even as a mermaid might behold in her glass the setting sun on some very clear evening over the waves. There was a breath of tenderness; her severity, her prudery, her woodenness were all warmed through now, and she had about her as she said good-bye to the thick gold-laced man who was doing his best, and good luck to him, to look important, an inexpressible dignity; an exquisite cordiality; as if she wished the whole world well, and must now, being on the very verge and rim of things, take her leave. So she made him think. (But he was not in love.)

Indeed, Clarissa felt, the Prime Minister had been good to come. And, walking down the room with him, with Sally there and Peter there and Richard very pleased, with all those people rather inclined, perhaps, to envy, she had felt that intoxication of the moment, that dilatation of the nerves of the heart itself till it seemed to quiver, steeped, upright;—yes, but after all it was what other people felt, that; for, though she loved it and felt it tingle and sting, still these semblances, these triumphs (dear old Peter, for example, thinking her so brilliant), had a hollowness; at arm’s length they were, not in the heart; and it might be that she was growing old, but they satisfied her no longer as they used; and suddenly, as she saw the Prime Minister go down the stairs, the gilt rim of the Sir Joshua picture of the little girl with a muff brought back Kilman with a rush; Kilman her enemy. That was satisfying; that was real. Ah, how she hated her—hot, hypocritical, corrupt; with all that power; Elizabeth’s seducer; the woman who had crept in to steal and defile (Richard would say, What nonsense!). She hated her: she loved her. It was enemies one wanted, not friends—not Mrs. Durrant and Clara, Sir William and Lady Bradshaw, Miss Truelock and Eleanor Gibson (whom she saw coming upstairs). They must find her if they wanted her. She was for the party!

There was her old friend Sir Harry.

“Dear Sir Harry!” she said, going up to the fine old fellow who had produced more bad pictures than any other two Academicians in the whole of St. John’s Wood (they were always of cattle, standing in sunset pools absorbing moisture, or signifying, for he had a certain range of gesture, by the raising of one foreleg and the toss of the antlers, “the Approach of the Stranger”—all his activities, dining out, racing, were founded on cattle standing absorbing moisture in sunset pools).

“What are you laughing at?” she asked him. For Willie Titcomb and Sir Harry and Herbert Ainsty were all laughing. But no. Sir Harry could not tell Clarissa Dalloway (much though he liked her; of her type he thought her perfect, and threatened to paint her) his stories of the music-hall stage. He chaffed her about her party. He missed his brandy. These circles, he said, were above him. But he liked her; respected her, in spite of her damnable, difficult, upper-class refinement, which made it impossible to ask Clarissa Dalloway to sit on his knee. And up came that wandering will-o’-the-wisp, that vagous phosphorescence, old Mrs. Hilbery, stretching her hands to the blaze of his laughter (about the Duke and the Lady), which, as she heard it across the room, seemed to reassure her on a point which sometimes bothered her if she woke early in the morning and did not like to call her maid for a cup of tea: how it is certain we must die.

“They won’t tell us their stories,” said Clarissa.

“Dear Clarissa!” exclaimed Mrs. Hilbery. She looked to-night, she said, so like her mother as she first saw her walking in a garden in a grey hat.

And really Clarissa’s eyes filled with tears. Her mother, walking in a garden! But alas, she must go.

For there was Professor Brierly, who lectured on Milton, talking to little Jim Hutton (who was unable even for a party like this to compass both tie and waistcoat or make his hair lie flat), and even at this distance they were quarrelling, she could see. For Professor Brierly was a very queer fish. With all those degrees, honours, lectureships between him and the scribblers, he suspected instantly an atmosphere not favourable to his queer compound; his prodigious learning and timidity; his wintry charm without cordiality; his innocence blent with snobbery; he quivered if made conscious, by a lady’s unkempt hair, a youth’s boots, of an underworld, very creditable doubtless, of rebels, of ardent young people; of would-be geniuses, and intimated with a little toss of the head, with a sniff—Humph!—the value of moderation; of some slight training in the classics in order to appreciate Milton. Professor Brierly (Clarissa could see) wasn’t hitting it off with little Jim Hutton (who wore red socks, his black being at the laundry) about Milton. She interrupted.

She said she loved Bach. So did Hutton. That was the bond between them, and Hutton (a very bad poet) always felt that Mrs. Dalloway was far the best of the great ladies who took an interest in art. It was odd how strict she was. About music she was purely impersonal. She was rather a prig. But how charming to look at! She made her house so nice, if it weren’t for her Professors. Clarissa had half a mind to snatch him off and set him down at the piano in the back room. For he played divinely.

“But the noise!” she said. “The noise!”

“The sign of a successful party.” Nodding urbanely, the Professor stepped delicately off.

“He knows everything in the whole world about Milton,” said Clarissa.

“Does he indeed?” said Hutton, who would imitate the Professor throughout Hampstead: the Professor on Milton; the Professor on moderation; the Professor stepping delicately off.

But she must speak to that couple, said Clarissa, Lord Gayton and Nancy Blow.

Not that they added perceptibly to the noise of the party. They were not talking (perceptibly) as they stood side by side by the yellow curtains. They would soon be off elsewhere, together; and never had very much to say in any circumstances. They looked; that was all. That was enough. They looked so clean, so sound, she with an apricot bloom of powder and paint, but he scrubbed, rinsed, with the eyes of a bird, so that no ball could pass him or stroke surprise him. He struck, he leapt, accurately, on the spot. Ponies’ mouths quivered at the end of his reins. He had his honours, ancestral monuments, banners hanging in the church at home. He had his duties; his tenants; a mother and sisters; had been all day at Lord’s, and that was what they were talking about—cricket, cousins, the movies—when Mrs. Dalloway came up. Lord Gayton liked her most awfully. So did Miss Blow. She had such charming manners.

“It is angelic—it is delicious of you to have come!” she said. She loved Lords; she loved youth, and Nancy, dressed at enormous expense by the greatest artists in Paris, stood there looking as if her body had merely put forth, of its own accord, a green frill.

“I had meant to have dancing,” said Clarissa.

For the young people could not talk. And why should they? Shout, embrace, swing, be up at dawn; carry sugar to ponies; kiss and caress the snouts of adorable chows; and then, all tingling and streaming, plunge and swim. But the enormous resources of the English language, the power it bestows, after all, of communicating feelings (at their age, she and Peter would have been arguing all the evening), was not for them. They would solidify young. They would be good beyond measure to the people on the estate, but alone, perhaps, rather dull.

“What a pity!” she said. “I had hoped to have dancing.”

It was so extraordinarily nice of them to have come! But talk of dancing! The rooms were packed.

There was old Aunt Helena in her shawl. Alas, she must leave them—Lord Gayton and Nancy Blow. There was old Miss Parry, her aunt.

For Miss Helena Parry was not dead: Miss Parry was alive. She was past eighty. She ascended staircases slowly with a stick. She was placed in a chair (Richard had seen to it). People who had known Burma in the ’seventies were always led up to her. Where had Peter got to? They used to be such friends. For at the mention of India, or even Ceylon, her eyes (only one was glass) slowly deepened, became blue, beheld, not human beings—she had no tender memories, no proud illusions about Viceroys, Generals, Mutinies—it was orchids she saw, and mountain passes, and herself carried on the backs of coolies in the ’sixties over solitary peaks; or descending to uproot orchids (startling blossoms, never beheld before) which she painted in water-colour; an indomitable Englishwoman, fretful if disturbed by the war, say, which dropped a bomb at her very door, from her deep meditation over orchids and her own figure journeying in the ’sixties in India—but here was Peter.

“Come and talk to Aunt Helena about Burma,” said Clarissa.

And yet he had not had a word with her all the evening!

“We will talk later,” said Clarissa, leading him up to Aunt Helena, in her white shawl, with her stick.

“Peter Walsh,” said Clarissa.

That meant nothing.

Clarissa had asked her. It was tiring; it was noisy; but Clarissa had asked her. So she had come. It was a pity that they lived in London—Richard and Clarissa. If only for Clarissa’s health it would have been better to live in the country. But Clarissa had always been fond of society.

“He has been in Burma,” said Clarissa.

Ah! She could not resist recalling what Charles Darwin had said about her little book on the orchids of Burma.

(Clarissa must speak to Lady Bruton.)

No doubt it was forgotten now, her book on the orchids of Burma, but it went into three editions before 1870, she told Peter. She remembered him now. He had been at Bourton (and he had left her, Peter Walsh remembered, without a word in the drawing-room that night when Clarissa had asked him to come boating).

“Richard so much enjoyed his lunch party,” said Clarissa to Lady Bruton.

“Richard was the greatest possible help,” Lady Bruton replied. “He helped me to write a letter. And how are you?”

“Oh, perfectly well!” said Clarissa. (Lady Bruton detested illness in the wives of politicians.)

“And there’s Peter Walsh!” said Lady Bruton (for she could never think of anything to say to Clarissa; though she liked her. She had lots of fine qualities; but they had nothing in common—she and Clarissa. It might have been better if Richard had married a woman with less charm, who would have helped him more in his work. He had lost his chance of the Cabinet). “There’s Peter Walsh!” she said, shaking hands with that agreeable sinner, that very able fellow who should have made a name for himself but hadn’t (always in difficulties with women), and, of course, old Miss Parry. Wonderful old lady!

Lady Bruton stood by Miss Parry’s chair, a spectral grenadier, draped in black, inviting Peter Walsh to lunch; cordial; but without small talk, remembering nothing whatever about the flora or fauna of India. She had been there, of course; had stayed with three Viceroys; thought some of the Indian civilians uncommonly fine fellows; but what a tragedy it was—the state of India! The Prime Minister had just been telling her (old Miss Parry, huddled up in her shawl, did not care what the Prime Minister had just been telling her), and Lady Bruton would like to have Peter Walsh’s opinion, he being fresh from the centre, and she would get Sir Sampson to meet him, for really it prevented her from sleeping at night, the folly of it, the wickedness she might say, being a soldier’s daughter. She was an old woman now, not good for much. But her house, her servants, her good friend Milly Brush—did he remember her?—were all there only asking to be used if—if they could be of help, in short. For she never spoke of England, but this isle of men, this dear, dear land, was in her blood (without reading Shakespeare), and if ever a woman could have worn the helmet and shot the arrow, could have led troops to attack, ruled with indomitable justice barbarian hordes and lain under a shield noseless in a church, or made a green grass mound on some primeval hillside, that woman was Millicent Bruton. Debarred by her sex, and some truancy, too, of the logical faculty (she found it impossible to write a letter to the Times), she had the thought of Empire always at hand, and had acquired from her association with that armoured goddess her ramrod bearing, her robustness of demeanour, so that one could not figure her even in death parted from the earth or roaming territories over which, in some spiritual shape, the Union Jack had ceased to fly. To be not English even among the dead—no, no! Impossible!

But was it Lady Bruton? (whom she used to know). Was it Peter Walsh grown grey? Lady Rosseter asked herself (who had been Sally Seton). It was old Miss Parry certainly—the old aunt who used to be so cross when she stayed at Bourton. Never should she forget running along the passage naked, and being sent for by Miss Parry! And Clarissa! oh Clarissa! Sally caught her by the arm.

Clarissa stopped beside them.

“But I can’t stay,” she said. “I shall come later. Wait,” she said, looking at Peter and Sally. They must wait, she meant, until all these people had gone.

“I shall come back,” she said, looking at her old friends, Sally and Peter, who were shaking hands, and Sally, remembering the past no doubt, was laughing.

But her voice was wrung of its old ravishing richness; her eyes not aglow as they used to be, when she smoked cigars, when she ran down the passage to fetch her sponge bag without a stitch of clothing on her, and Ellen Atkins asked, What if the gentlemen had met her? But everybody forgave her. She stole a chicken from the larder because she was hungry in the night; she smoked cigars in her bedroom; she left a priceless book in the punt. But everybody adored her (except perhaps Papa). It was her warmth; her vitality—she would paint, she would write. Old women in the village never to this day forgot to ask after “your friend in the red cloak who seemed so bright”. She accused Hugh Whitbread, of all people (and there he was, her old friend Hugh, talking to the Portuguese Ambassador), of kissing her in the smoking-room to punish her for saying that women should have votes. Vulgar men did, she said. And Clarissa remembered having to persuade her not to denounce him at family prayers—which she was capable of doing with her daring, her recklessness, her melodramatic love of being the centre of everything and creating scenes, and it was bound, Clarissa used to think, to end in some awful tragedy; her death; her martyrdom; instead of which she had married, quite unexpectedly, a bald man with a large buttonhole who owned, it was said, cotton mills at Manchester. And she had five boys!

She and Peter had settled down together. They were talking: it seemed so familiar—that they should be talking. They would discuss the past. With the two of them (more even than with Richard) she shared her past; the garden; the trees; old Joseph Breitkopf singing Brahms without any voice; the drawing-room wallpaper; the smell of the mats. A part of this Sally must always be; Peter must always be. But she must leave them. There were the Bradshaws, whom she disliked.

She must go up to Lady Bradshaw (in grey and silver, balancing like a sea-lion at the edge of its tank, barking for invitations, Duchesses, the typical successful man’s wife), she must go up to Lady Bradshaw and say …

But Lady Bradshaw anticipated her.

“We are shockingly late, dear Mrs. Dalloway; we hardly dared to come in,” she said.

And Sir William, who looked very distinguished, with his grey hair and blue eyes, said yes; they had not been able to resist the temptation. He was talking to Richard about that Bill probably, which they wanted to get through the Commons. Why did the sight of him, talking to Richard, curl her up? He looked what he was, a great doctor. A man absolutely at the head of his profession, very powerful, rather worn. For think what cases came before him—people in the uttermost depths of misery; people on the verge of insanity; husbands and wives. He had to decide questions of appalling difficulty. Yet—what she felt was, one wouldn’t like Sir William to see one unhappy. No; not that man.

“How is your son at Eton?” she asked Lady Bradshaw.

He had just missed his eleven, said Lady Bradshaw, because of the mumps. His father minded even more than he did, she thought, “being,” she said, “nothing but a great boy himself.”

Clarissa looked at Sir William, talking to Richard. He did not look like a boy—not in the least like a boy.

She had once gone with some one to ask his advice. He had been perfectly right; extremely sensible. But Heavens—what a relief to get out to the street again! There was some poor wretch sobbing, she remembered, in the waiting-room. But she did not know what it was about Sir William; what exactly she disliked. Only Richard agreed with her, “didn’t like his taste, didn’t like his smell.” But he was extraordinarily able. They were talking about this Bill. Some case Sir William was mentioning, lowering his voice. It had its bearing upon what he was saying about the deferred effects of shell shock. There must be some provision in the Bill.

Sinking her voice, drawing Mrs. Dalloway into the shelter of a common femininity, a common pride in the illustrious qualities of husbands and their sad tendency to overwork, Lady Bradshaw (poor goose—one didn’t dislike her) murmured how, “just as we were starting, my husband was called up on the telephone, a very sad case. A young man (that is what Sir William is telling Mr. Dalloway) had killed himself. He had been in the army.” Oh! thought Clarissa, in the middle of my party, here’s death, she thought.

She went on, into the little room where the Prime Minister had gone with Lady Bruton. Perhaps there was somebody there. But there was nobody. The chairs still kept the impress of the Prime Minister and Lady Bruton, she turned deferentially, he sitting four-square, authoritatively. They had been talking about India. There was nobody. The party’s splendour fell to the floor, so strange it was to come in alone in her finery.

What business had the Bradshaws to talk of death at her party? A young man had killed himself. And they talked of it at her party—the Bradshaws talked of death. He had killed himself—but how? Always her body went through it, when she was told, first, suddenly, of an accident; her dress flamed, her body burnt. He had thrown himself from a window. Up had flashed the ground; through him, blundering, bruising, went the rusty spikes. There he lay with a thud, thud, thud in his brain, and then a suffocation of blackness. So she saw it. But why had he done it? And the Bradshaws talked of it at her party!

She had once thrown a shilling into the Serpentine, never anything more. But he had flung it away. They went on living (she would have to go back; the rooms were still crowded; people kept on coming). They (all day she had been thinking of Bourton, of Peter, of Sally), they would grow old. A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter. This he had preserved. Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate, people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded; one was alone. There was an embrace in death.

But this young man who had killed himself—had he plunged holding his treasure? “If it were now to die, ’twere now to be most happy,” she had said to herself once, coming down, in white.

Or there were the poets and thinkers. Suppose he had had that passion, and had gone to Sir William Bradshaw, a great doctor, yet to her obscurely evil, without sex or lust, extremely polite to women, but capable of some indescribable outrage—forcing your soul, that was it—if this young man had gone to him, and Sir William had impressed him, like that, with his power, might he not then have said (indeed she felt it now), Life is made intolerable; they make life intolerable, men like that?

Then (she had felt it only this morning) there was the terror; the overwhelming incapacity, one’s parents giving it into one’s hands, this life, to be lived to the end, to be walked with serenely; there was in the depths of her heart an awful fear. Even now, quite often if Richard had not been there reading the Times, so that she could crouch like a bird and gradually revive, send roaring up that immeasurable delight, rubbing stick to stick, one thing with another, she must have perished. She had escaped. But that young man had killed himself.

Somehow it was her disaster—her disgrace. It was her punishment to see sink and disappear here a man, there a woman, in this profound darkness, and she forced to stand here in her evening dress. She had schemed; she had pilfered. She was never wholly admirable. She had wanted success, Lady Bexborough and the rest of it. And once she had walked on the terrace at Bourton.

Odd, incredible; she had never been so happy. Nothing could be slow enough; nothing last too long. No pleasure could equal, she thought, straightening the chairs, pushing in one book on the shelf, this having done with the triumphs of youth, lost herself in the process of living, to find it, with a shock of delight, as the sun rose, as the day sank. Many a time had she gone, at Bourton when they were all talking, to look at the sky; or seen it between people’s shoulders at dinner; seen it in London when she could not sleep. She walked to the window.

It held, foolish as the idea was, something of her own in it, this country sky, this sky above Westminster. She parted the curtains; she looked. Oh, but how surprising!—in the room opposite the old lady stared straight at her! She was going to bed. And the sky. It will be a solemn sky, she had thought, it will be a dusky sky, turning away its cheek in beauty. But there it was—ashen pale, raced over quickly by tapering vast clouds. It was new to her. The wind must have risen. She was going to bed, in the room opposite. It was fascinating to watch her, moving about, that old lady, crossing the room, coming to the window. Could she see her? It was fascinating, with people still laughing and shouting in the drawing-room, to watch that old woman, quite quietly, going to bed alone. She pulled the blind now. The clock began striking. The young man had killed himself; but she did not pity him; with the clock striking the hour, one, two, three, she did not pity him, with all this going on. There! the old lady had put out her light! the whole house was dark now with this going on, she repeated, and the words came to her, Fear no more the heat of the sun. She must go back to them. But what an extraordinary night! She felt somehow very like him—the young man who had killed himself. She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away while they went on living. The clock was striking. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. But she must go back. She must assemble. She must find Sally and Peter. And she came in from the little room.

“But where is Clarissa?” said Peter. He was sitting on the sofa with Sally. (After all these years he really could not call her “Lady Rosseter”.) “Where’s the woman gone to?” he asked. “Where’s Clarissa?”

Sally supposed, and so did Peter for the matter of that, that there were people of importance, politicians, whom neither of them knew unless by sight in the picture papers, whom Clarissa had to be nice to, had to talk to. She was with them. Yet there was Richard Dalloway not in the Cabinet. He hadn’t been a success, Sally supposed? For herself, she scarcely ever read the papers. She sometimes saw his name mentioned. But then—well, she lived a very solitary life, in the wilds, Clarissa would say, among great merchants, great manufacturers, men, after all, who did things. She had done things too!

“I have five sons!” she told him.

Lord, lord, what a change had come over her! the softness of motherhood; its egotism too. Last time they met, Peter remembered, had been among the cauliflowers in the moonlight, the leaves “like rough bronze” she had said, with her literary turn; and she had picked a rose. She had marched him up and down that awful night, after the scene by the fountain; he was to catch the midnight train. Heavens, he had wept!

That was his old trick, opening a pocket-knife, thought Sally, always opening and shutting a knife when he got excited. They had been very, very intimate, she and Peter Walsh, when he was in love with Clarissa, and there was that dreadful, ridiculous scene over Richard Dalloway at lunch. She had called Richard “Wickham”. Why not call Richard “Wickham”? Clarissa had flared up! and indeed they had never seen each other since, she and Clarissa, not more than half-a-dozen times perhaps in the last ten years. And Peter Walsh had gone off to India, and she had heard vaguely that he had made an unhappy marriage, and she didn’t know whether he had any children, and she couldn’t ask him, for he had changed. He was rather shrivelled-looking, but kinder, she felt, and she had a real affection for him, for he was connected with her youth, and she still had a little Emily Brontë he had given her, and he was to write, surely? In those days he was to write.

“Have you written?” she asked him, spreading her hand, her firm and shapely hand, on her knee in a way he recalled.

“Not a word!” said Peter Walsh, and she laughed.

She was still attractive, still a personage, Sally Seton. But who was this Rosseter? He wore two camellias on his wedding day—that was all Peter knew of him. “They have myriads of servants, miles of conservatories,” Clarissa wrote; something like that. Sally owned it with a shout of laughter.

“Yes, I have ten thousand a year”—whether before the tax was paid or after, she couldn’t remember, for her husband, “whom you must meet,” she said, “whom you would like,” she said, did all that for her.

And Sally used to be in rags and tatters. She had pawned her great-grandfather’s ring which Marie Antoinette had given him—had he got it right?—to come to Bourton.

Oh yes, Sally remembered; she had it still, a ruby ring which Marie Antoinette had given her great-grandfather. She never had a penny to her name in those days, and going to Bourton always meant some frightful pinch. But going to Bourton had meant so much to her—had kept her sane, she believed, so unhappy had she been at home. But that was all a thing of the past—all over now, she said. And Mr. Parry was dead; and Miss Parry was still alive. Never had he had such a shock in his life! said Peter. He had been quite certain she was dead. And the marriage had been, Sally supposed, a success? And that very handsome, very self-possessed young woman was Elizabeth, over there, by the curtains, in pink.

(She was like a poplar, she was like a river, she was like a hyacinth, Willie Titcomb was thinking. Oh how much nicer to be in the country and do what she liked! She could hear her poor dog howling, Elizabeth was certain.) She was not a bit like Clarissa, Peter Walsh said.

“Oh, Clarissa!” said Sally.

What Sally felt was simply this. She had owed Clarissa an enormous amount. They had been friends, not acquaintances, friends, and she still saw Clarissa all in white going about the house with her hands full of flowers—to this day tobacco plants made her think of Bourton. But—did Peter understand?—she lacked something. Lacked what was it? She had charm; she had extraordinary charm. But to be frank (and she felt that Peter was an old friend, a real friend—did absence matter? did distance matter? She had often wanted to write to him, but torn it up, yet felt he understood, for people understand without things being said, as one realises growing old, and old she was, had been that afternoon to see her sons at Eton, where they had the mumps), to be quite frank, then, how could Clarissa have done it?—married Richard Dalloway? a sportsman, a man who cared only for dogs. Literally, when he came into the room he smelt of the stables. And then all this? She waved her hand.

Hugh Whitbread it was, strolling past in his white waistcoat, dim, fat, blind, past everything he looked, except self-esteem and comfort.

“He’s not going to recognise us,” said Sally, and really she hadn’t the courage—so that was Hugh! the admirable Hugh!

“And what does he do?” she asked Peter.

He blacked the King’s boots or counted bottles at Windsor, Peter told her. Peter kept his sharp tongue still! But Sally must be frank, Peter said. That kiss now, Hugh’s.

On the lips, she assured him, in the smoking-room one evening. She went straight to Clarissa in a rage. Hugh didn’t do such things! Clarissa said, the admirable Hugh! Hugh’s socks were without exception the most beautiful she had ever seen—and now his evening dress. Perfect! And had he children?

“Everybody in the room has six sons at Eton,” Peter told her, except himself. He, thank God, had none. No sons, no daughters, no wife. Well, he didn’t seem to mind, said Sally. He looked younger, she thought, than any of them.

But it had been a silly thing to do, in many ways, Peter said, to marry like that; “a perfect goose she was,” he said, but, he said, “we had a splendid time of it,” but how could that be? Sally wondered; what did he mean? and how odd it was to know him and yet not know a single thing that had happened to him. And did he say it out of pride? Very likely, for after all it must be galling for him (though he was an oddity, a sort of sprite, not at all an ordinary man), it must be lonely at his age to have no home, nowhere to go to. But he must stay with them for weeks and weeks. Of course he would; he would love to stay with them, and that was how it came out. All these years the Dalloways had never been once. Time after time they had asked them. Clarissa (for it was Clarissa of course) would not come. For, said Sally, Clarissa was at heart a snob—one had to admit it, a snob. And it was that that was between them, she was convinced. Clarissa thought she had married beneath her, her husband being—she was proud of it—a miner’s son. Every penny they had he had earned. As a little boy (her voice trembled) he had carried great sacks.

(And so she would go on, Peter felt, hour after hour; the miner’s son; people thought she had married beneath her; her five sons; and what was the other thing—plants, hydrangeas, syringas, very very rare hibiscus lilies that never grow north of the Suez Canal, but she, with one gardener in a suburb near Manchester, had beds of them, positively beds! Now all that Clarissa had escaped, unmaternal as she was.)

A snob was she? Yes, in many ways. Where was she, all this time? It was getting late.

“Yes,” said Sally, “when I heard Clarissa was giving a party, I felt I couldn’t not come—must see her again (and I’m staying in Victoria Street, practically next door). So I just came without an invitation. But,” she whispered, “tell me, do. Who is this?”

It was Mrs. Hilbery, looking for the door. For how late it was getting! And, she murmured, as the night grew later, as people went, one found old friends; quiet nooks and corners; and the loveliest views. Did they know, she asked, that they were surrounded by an enchanted garden? Lights and trees and wonderful gleaming lakes and the sky. Just a few fairy lamps, Clarissa Dalloway had said, in the back garden! But she was a magician! It was a park…. And she didn’t know their names, but friends she knew they were, friends without names, songs without words, always the best. But there were so many doors, such unexpected places, she could not find her way.

“Old Mrs. Hilbery,” said Peter; but who was that? that lady standing by the curtain all the evening, without speaking? He knew her face; connected her with Bourton. Surely she used to cut up underclothes at the large table in the window? Davidson, was that her name?

“Oh, that is Ellie Henderson,” said Sally. Clarissa was really very hard on her. She was a cousin, very poor. Clarissa was hard on people.

She was rather, said Peter. Yet, said Sally, in her emotional way, with a rush of that enthusiasm which Peter used to love her for, yet dreaded a little now, so effusive she might become—how generous to her friends Clarissa was! and what a rare quality one found it, and how sometimes at night or on Christmas Day, when she counted up her blessings, she put that friendship first. They were young; that was it. Clarissa was pure-hearted; that was it. Peter would think her sentimental. So she was. For she had come to feel that it was the only thing worth saying—what one felt. Cleverness was silly. One must say simply what one felt.

“But I do not know,” said Peter Walsh, “what I feel.”

Poor Peter, thought Sally. Why did not Clarissa come and talk to them? That was what he was longing for. She knew it. All the time he was thinking only of Clarissa, and was fidgetting with his knife.

He had not found life simple, Peter said. His relations with Clarissa had not been simple. It had spoilt his life, he said. (They had been so intimate—he and Sally Seton, it was absurd not to say it.) One could not be in love twice, he said. And what could she say? Still, it is better to have loved (but he would think her sentimental—he used to be so sharp). He must come and stay with them in Manchester. That is all very true, he said. All very true. He would love to come and stay with them, directly he had done what he had to do in London.

And Clarissa had cared for him more than she had ever cared for Richard, Sally was positive of that.

“No, no, no!” said Peter (Sally should not have said that—she went too far). That good fellow—there he was at the end of the room, holding forth, the same as ever, dear old Richard. Who was he talking to? Sally asked, that very distinguished-looking man? Living in the wilds as she did, she had an insatiable curiosity to know who people were. But Peter did not know. He did not like his looks, he said, probably a Cabinet Minister. Of them all, Richard seemed to him the best, he said—the most disinterested.

“But what has he done?” Sally asked. Public work, she supposed. And were they happy together? Sally asked (she herself was extremely happy); for, she admitted, she knew nothing about them, only jumped to conclusions, as one does, for what can one know even of the people one lives with every day? she asked. Are we not all prisoners? She had read a wonderful play about a man who scratched on the wall of his cell, and she had felt that was true of life—one scratched on the wall. Despairing of human relationships (people were so difficult), she often went into her garden and got from her flowers a peace which men and women never gave her. But no; he did not like cabbages; he preferred human beings, Peter said. Indeed, the young are beautiful, Sally said, watching Elizabeth cross the room. How unlike Clarissa at her age! Could he make anything of her? She would not open her lips. Not much, not yet, Peter admitted. She was like a lily, Sally said, a lily by the side of a pool. But Peter did not agree that we know nothing. We know everything, he said; at least he did.

But these two, Sally whispered, these two coming now (and really she must go, if Clarissa did not come soon), this distinguished-looking man and his rather common-looking wife who had been talking to Richard—what could one know about people like that?

“That they’re damnable humbugs,” said Peter, looking at them casually. He made Sally laugh.

But Sir William Bradshaw stopped at the door to look at a picture. He looked in the corner for the engraver’s name. His wife looked too. Sir William Bradshaw was so interested in art.

When one was young, said Peter, one was too much excited to know people. Now that one was old, fifty-two to be precise (Sally was fifty-five, in body, she said, but her heart was like a girl’s of twenty); now that one was mature then, said Peter, one could watch, one could understand, and one did not lose the power of feeling, he said. No, that is true, said Sally. She felt more deeply, more passionately, every year. It increased, he said, alas, perhaps, but one should be glad of it—it went on increasing in his experience. There was some one in India. He would like to tell Sally about her. He would like Sally to know her. She was married, he said. She had two small children. They must all come to Manchester, said Sally—he must promise before they left.

“There’s Elizabeth,” he said, “she feels not half what we feel, not yet.” “But,” said Sally, watching Elizabeth go to her father, “one can see they are devoted to each other.” She could feel it by the way Elizabeth went to her father.

For her father had been looking at her, as he stood talking to the Bradshaws, and he had thought to himself who is that lovely girl? And suddenly he realised that it was his Elizabeth, and he had not recognised her, she looked so lovely in her pink frock! Elizabeth had felt him looking at her as she talked to Willie Titcomb. So she went to him and they stood together, now that the party was almost over, looking at the people going, and the rooms getting emptier and emptier, with things scattered on the floor. Even Ellie Henderson was going, nearly last of all, though no one had spoken to her, but she had wanted to see everything, to tell Edith. And Richard and Elizabeth were rather glad it was over, but Richard was proud of his daughter. And he had not meant to tell her, but he could not help telling her. He had looked at her, he said, and he had wondered, who is that lovely girl? and it was his daughter! That did make her happy. But her poor dog was howling.

“Richard has improved. You are right,” said Sally. “I shall go and talk to him. I shall say good-night. What does the brain matter,” said Lady Rosseter, getting up, “compared with the heart?”

“I will come,” said Peter, but he sat on for a moment. What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement?

It is Clarissa, he said.

For there she was.

the end

[]

THE
COMMON
READER

FIRST SERIES

by
Virginia Woolf

To Lytton Strachey

published
1925
by The Hogarth Press

the common reader i

Preface.

The Common Reader.

The Pastons and Chaucer.

On Not Knowing Greek.

The Elizabethan Lumber Room.

Notes on an Elizabethan Play.

Montaigne.

The Duchess of Newcastle.

Rambling Round Evelyn.

Defoe.

Addison.

The Lives of the Obscure.

Jane Austen.

Modern Fiction.

“Jane Eyre” And “Wuthering Heights”.

George Eliot.

The Russian Point of View.

Outlines.

The Patron and the Crocus.

The Modern Essay.

Joseph Conrad.

How it Strikes a Contemporary.

[]

[The text follows the 1951 Hogarth Press edition.]

Preface.

Some of these papers appeared originally in the Times Literary Supplement, the Athenaeum, the Nation and Athanæum, the New Statesman, the London Mercury, the Dial (New York), the New Republic (New York), and I have to thank the editors for allowing me to reprint them here. Some are based upon articles written for various newspapers, while others appear now for the first time.

[]

The Common Reader.

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

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

[]

The Pastons and Chaucer.

[The Paston Letters, edited by Dr. James Gairdner (1904), 4 vols.]

The tower of Caister Castle still rises ninety feet into the air, and the arch still stands from which Sir John Fastolf’s barges sailed out to fetch stone for the building of the great castle. But now jackdaws nest on the tower, and of the castle, which once covered six acres of ground, only ruined walls remain, pierced by loop-holes and surmounted by battlements, though there are neither archers within nor cannon without. As for the “seven religious men” and the “seven poor folk” who should, at this very moment, be praying for the souls of Sir John and his parents, there is no sign of them nor sound of their prayers. The place is a ruin. Antiquaries speculate and differ.

Not so very far off lie more ruins—the ruins of Bromholm Priory, where John Paston was buried, naturally enough, since his house was only a mile or so away, lying on low ground by the sea, twenty miles north of Norwich. The coast is dangerous, and the land, even in our time, inaccessible. Nevertheless, the little bit of wood at Bromholm, the fragment of the true Cross, brought pilgrims incessantly to the Priory, and sent them away with eyes opened and limbs straightened. But some of them with their newly-opened eyes saw a sight which shocked them—the grave of John Paston in Bromholm Priory without a tombstone. The news spread over the country-side. The Pastons had fallen; they that had been so powerful could no longer afford a stone to put above John Paston’s head. Margaret, his widow, could not pay her debts; the eldest son, Sir John, wasted his property upon women and tournaments, while the younger, John also, though a man of greater parts, thought more of his hawks than of his harvests.

The pilgrims of course were liars, as people whose eyes have just been opened by a piece of the true Cross have every right to be; but their news, none the less, was welcome. The Pastons had risen in the world. People said even that they had been bondmen not so very long ago. At any rate, men still living could remember John’s grandfather Clement tilling his own land, a hard-working peasant; and William, Clement’s son, becoming a judge and buying land; and John, William’s son, marrying well and buying more land and quite lately inheriting the vast new castle at Caister, and all Sir John’s lands in Norfolk and Suffolk. People said that he had forged the old knight’s will. What wonder, then, that he lacked a tombstone? But, if we consider the character of Sir John Paston, John’s eldest son, and his upbringing and his surroundings, and the relations between himself and his father as the family letters reveal them, we shall see how difficult it was, and how likely to be neglected—this business of making his father’s tombstone.

For let us imagine, in the most desolate part of England known to us at the present moment, a raw, new-built house, without telephone, bathroom or drains, arm-chairs or newspapers, and one shelf perhaps of books, unwieldy to hold, expensive to come by. The windows look out upon a few cultivated fields and a dozen hovels, and beyond them there is the sea on one side, on the other a vast fen. A single road crosses the fen, but there is a hole in it, which, one of the farm hands reports, is big enough to swallow a carriage. And, the man adds, Tom Topcroft, the mad bricklayer, has broken loose again and ranges the country half-naked, threatening to kill any one who approaches him. That is what they talk about at dinner in the desolate house, while the chimney smokes horribly, and the draught lifts the carpets on the floor. Orders are given to lock all gates at sunset, and, when the long dismal evening has worn itself away, simply and solemnly, girt about with dangers as they are, these isolated men and women fall upon their knees in prayer.

In the fifteenth century, however, the wild landscape was broken suddenly and very strangely by vast piles of brand-new masonry. There rose out of the sandhills and heaths of the Norfolk coast a huge bulk of stone, like a modern hotel in a watering-place; but there was no parade, no lodging-houses, and no pier at Yarmouth then, and this gigantic building on the outskirts of the town was built to house one solitary old gentleman without any children—Sir John Fastolf, who had fought at Agincourt and acquired great wealth. He had fought at Agincourt and got but little reward. No one took his advice. Men spoke ill of him behind his back. He was well aware of it; his temper was none the sweeter for that. He was a hot-tempered old man, powerful, embittered by a sense of grievance. But whether on the battlefield or at court he thought perpetually of Caister, and how, when his duties allowed, he would settle down on his father’s land and live in a great house of his own building.

The gigantic structure of Caister Castle was in progress not so many miles away when the little Pastons were children. John Paston, the father, had charge of some part of the business, and the children listened, as soon as they could listen at all, to talk of stone and building, of barges gone to London and not yet returned, of the twenty-six private chambers, of the hall and chapel; of foundations, measurements, and rascally work-people. Later, in 1454, when the work was finished and Sir John had come to spend his last years at Caister, they may have seen for themselves the mass of treasure that was stored there; the tables laden with gold and silver plate; the wardrobes stuffed with gowns of velvet and satin and cloth of gold, with hoods and tippets and beaver hats and leather jackets and velvet doublets; and how the very pillow-cases on the beds were of green and purple silk. There were tapestries everywhere. The beds were laid and the bedrooms hung with tapestries representing sieges, hunting and hawking, men fishing, archers shooting, ladies playing on their harps, dallying with ducks, or a giant “bearing the leg of a bear in his hand”. Such were the fruits of a well-spent life. To buy land, to build great houses, to stuff these houses full of gold and silver plate (though the privy might well be in the bedroom), was the proper aim of mankind. Mr. and Mrs. Paston spent the greater part of their energies in the same exhausting occupation. For since the passion to acquire was universal, one could never rest secure in one’s possessions for long. The outlying parts of one’s property were in perpetual jeopardy. The Duke of Norfolk might covet this manor, the Duke of Suffolk that. Some trumped-up excuse, as for instance that the Pastons were bondmen, gave them the right to seize the house and batter down the lodges in the owner’s absence. And how could the owner of Paston and Mauteby and Drayton and Gresham be in five or six places at once, especially now that Caister Castle was his, and he must be in London trying to get his rights recognised by the King? The King was mad too, they said; did not know his own child, they said; or the King was in flight; or there was civil war in the land. Norfolk was always the most distressed of counties and its country gentlemen the most quarrelsome of mankind. Indeed, had Mrs. Paston chosen, she could have told her children how when she was a young woman a thousand men with bows and arrows and pans of burning fire had marched upon Gresham and broken the gates and mined the walls of the room where she sat alone. But much worse things than that had happened to women. She neither bewailed her lot nor thought herself a heroine. The long, long letters which she wrote so laboriously in her clear cramped hand to her husband, who was (as usual) away, make no mention of herself. The sheep had wasted the hay. Heyden’s and Tuddenham’s men were out. A dyke had been broken and a bullock stolen. They needed treacle badly, and really she must have stuff for a dress.

But Mrs. Paston did not talk about herself.

Thus the little Pastons would see their mother writing or dictating page after page, hour after hour, long long letters, but to interrupt a parent who writes so laboriously of such important matters would have been a sin. The prattle of children, the lore of the nursery or schoolroom, did not find its way into these elaborate communications. For the most part her letters are the letters of an honest bailiff to his master, explaining, asking advice, giving news, rendering accounts. There was robbery and manslaughter; it was difficult to get in the rents; Richard Calle had gathered but little money; and what with one thing and another Margaret had not had time to make out, as she should have done, the inventory of the goods which her husband desired. Well might old Agnes, surveying her son’s affairs rather grimly from a distance, counsel him to contrive it so that “ye may have less to do in the world; your father said, In little business lieth much rest. This world is but a thoroughfare, and full of woe; and when we depart therefrom, right nought bear with us but our good deeds and ill.”

The thought of death would thus come upon them in a clap. Old Fastolf, cumbered with wealth and property, had his vision at the end of Hell fire, and shrieked aloud to his executors to distribute alms, and see that prayers were said “in perpetuum”, so that his soul might escape the agonies of purgatory. William Paston, the judge, was urgent too that the monks of Norwich should be retained to pray for his soul “for ever”. The soul was no wisp of air, but a solid body capable of eternal suffering, and the fire that destroyed it was as fierce as any that burnt on mortal grates. For ever there would be monks and the town of Norwich, and for ever the Chapel of Our Lady in the town of Norwich. There was something matter-of-fact, positive, and enduring in their conception both of life and of death.

With the plan of existence so vigorously marked out, children of course were well beaten, and boys and girls taught to know their places. They must acquire land; but they must obey their parents. A mother would clout her daughter’s head three times a week and break the skin if she did not conform to the laws of behaviour. Agnes Paston, a lady of birth and breeding, beat her daughter Elizabeth. Margaret Paston, a softer-hearted woman, turned her daughter out of the house for loving the honest bailiff Richard Calle. Brothers would not suffer their sisters to marry beneath them, and “sell candle and mustard in Framlingham”. The fathers quarrelled with the sons, and the mothers, fonder of their boys than of their girls, yet bound by all law and custom to obey their husbands, were torn asunder in their efforts to keep the peace. With all her pains, Margaret failed to prevent rash acts on the part of her eldest son John, or the bitter words with which his father denounced him. He was a “drone among bees”, the father burst out, “which labour for gathering honey in the fields, and the drone doth naught but taketh his part of it”. He treated his parents with insolence, and yet was fit for no charge of responsibility abroad.

But the quarrel was ended, very shortly, by the death (22nd May 1466) of John Paston, the father, in London. The body was brought down to Bromholm to be buried. Twelve poor men trudged all the way bearing torches beside it. Alms were distributed; masses and dirges were said. Bells were rung. Great quantities of fowls, sheep, pigs, eggs, bread, and cream were devoured, ale and wine drunk, and candles burnt. Two panes were taken from the church windows to let out the reek of the torches. Black cloth was distributed, and a light set burning on the grave. But John Paston, the heir, delayed to make his father’s tombstone.

He was a young man, something over twenty-four years of age. The discipline and the drudgery of a country life bored him. When he ran away from home, it was, apparently, to attempt to enter the King’s household. Whatever doubts, indeed, might be cast by their enemies on the blood of the Pastons, Sir John was unmistakably a gentleman. He had inherited his lands; the honey was his that the bees had gathered with so much labour. He had the instincts of enjoyment rather than of acquisition, and with his mother’s parsimony was strangely mixed something of his father’s ambition. Yet his own indolent and luxurious temperament took the edge from both. He was attractive to women, liked society and tournaments, and court life and making bets, and sometimes, even, reading books. And so life now that John Paston was buried started afresh upon rather a different foundation. There could be little outward change indeed. Margaret still ruled the house. She still ordered the lives of the younger children as she had ordered the lives of the elder. The boys still needed to be beaten into book-learning by their tutors, the girls still loved the wrong men and must be married to the right. Rents had to be collected; the interminable lawsuit for the Fastolf property dragged on. Battles were fought; the roses of York and Lancaster alternately faded and flourished. Norfolk was full of poor people seeking redress for their grievances, and Margaret worked for her son as she had worked for her husband, with this significant change only, that now, instead of confiding in her husband, she took the advice of her priest.

But inwardly there was a change. It seems at last as if the hard outer shell had served its purpose and something sensitive, appreciative, and pleasure-loving had formed within. At any rate Sir John, writing to his brother John at home, strayed sometimes from the business on hand to crack a joke, to send a piece of gossip, or to instruct him, knowingly and even subtly, upon the conduct of a love affair. Be “as lowly to the mother as ye list, but to the maid not too lowly, nor that ye be too glad to speed, nor too sorry to fail. And I shall always be your herald both here, if she come hither, and at home, when I come home, which I hope hastily within XI. days at the furthest.” And then a hawk was to be bought, a hat, or new silk laces sent down to John in Norfolk, prosecuting his suit, flying his hawks, and attending with considerable energy and not too nice a sense of honesty to the affairs of the Paston estates.

The lights had long since burnt out on John Paston’s grave. But still Sir John delayed; no tomb replaced them. He had his excuses; what with the business of the lawsuit, and his duties at Court, and the disturbance of the civil wars, his time was occupied and his money spent. But perhaps something strange had happened to Sir John himself, and not only to Sir John dallying in London, but to his sister Margery falling in love with the bailiff, and to Walter making Latin verses at Eton, and to John flying his hawks at Paston. Life was a little more various in its pleasures. They were not quite so sure as the elder generation had been of the rights of man and of the dues of God, of the horrors of death, and of the importance of tombstones. Poor Margaret Paston scented the change and sought uneasily, with the pen which had marched so stiffly through so many pages, to lay bare the root of her troubles. It was not that the lawsuit saddened her; she was ready to defend Caister with her own hands if need be, “though I cannot well guide nor rule soldiers”, but there was something wrong with the family since the death of her husband and master. Perhaps her son had failed in his service to God; he had been too proud or too lavish in his expenditure; or perhaps he had shown too little mercy to the poor. Whatever the fault might be, she only knew that Sir John spent twice as much money as his father for less result; that they could scarcely pay their debts without selling land, wood, or household stuff (“It is a death to me to think if it”); while every day people spoke ill of them in the country because they left John Paston to lie without a tombstone. The money that might have bought it, or more land, and more goblets and more tapestry, was spent by Sir John on clocks and trinkets, and upon paying a clerk to copy out Treatises upon Knighthood and other such stuff. There they stood at Paston—eleven volumes, with the poems of Lydgate and Chaucer among them, diffusing a strange air into the gaunt, comfortless house, inviting men to indolence and vanity, distracting their thoughts from business, and leading them not only to neglect their own profit but to think lightly of the sacred dues of the dead.

For sometimes, instead of riding off on his horse to inspect his crops or bargain with his tenants, Sir John would sit, in broad daylight, reading. There, on the hard chair in the comfortless room with the wind lifting the carpet and the smoke stinging his eyes, he would sit reading Chaucer, wasting his time, dreaming—or what strange intoxication was it that he drew from books? Life was rough, cheerless, and disappointing. A whole year of days would pass fruitlessly in dreary business, like dashes of rain on the window-pane. There was no reason in it as there had been for his father; no imperative need to establish a family and acquire an important position for children who were not born, or if born, had no right to bear their father’s name. But Lydgate’s poems or Chaucer’s, like a mirror in which figures move brightly, silently, and compactly, showed him the very skies, fields, and people whom he knew, but rounded and complete. Instead of waiting listlessly for news from London or piecing out from his mother’s gossip some country tragedy of love and jealousy, here, in a few pages, the whole story was laid before him. And then as he rode or sat at table he would remember some description or saying which bore upon the present moment and fixed it, or some string of words would charm him, and putting aside the pressure of the moment, he would hasten home to sit in his chair and learn the end of the story.

To learn the end of the story—Chaucer can still make us wish to do that. He has pre-eminently that story-teller’s gift, which is almost the rarest gift among writers at the present day. Nothing happens to us as it did to our ancestors; events are seldom important; if we recount them, we do not really believe in them; we have perhaps things of greater interest to say, and for these reasons natural story-tellers like Mr. Garnett, whom we must distinguish from self-conscious storytellers like Mr. Masefield, have become rare. For the story-teller, besides his indescribable zest for facts, must tell his story craftily, without undue stress or excitement, or we shall swallow it whole and jumble the parts together; he must let us stop, give us time to think and look about us, yet always be persuading us to move on. Chaucer was helped to this to some extent by the time of his birth; and in addition he had another advantage over the moderns which will never come the way of English poets again. England was an unspoilt country. His eyes rested on a virgin land, all unbroken grass and wood except for the small towns and an occasional castle in the building. No villa roofs peered through Kentish tree-tops; no factory chimney smoked on the hill-side. The state of the country, considering how poets go to Nature, how they use her for their images and their contrasts even when they do not describe her directly, is a matter of some importance. Her cultivation or her savagery influences the poet far more profoundly than the prose writer. To the modern poet, with Birmingham, Manchester, and London the size they are, the country is the sanctuary of moral excellence in contrast with the town which is the sink of vice. It is a retreat, the haunt of modesty and virtue, where men go to hide and moralise. There is something morbid, as if shrinking from human contact, in the nature worship of Wordsworth, still more in the microscopic devotion which Tennyson lavished upon the petals of roses and the buds of lime trees. But these were great poets. In their hands, the country was no mere jeweller’s shop, or museum of curious objects to be described, even more curiously, in words. Poets of smaller gift, since the view is so much spoilt, and the garden or the meadow must replace the barren heath and the precipitous mountain-side, are now confined to little landscapes, to birds’ nests, to acorns with every wrinkle drawn to the life. The wider landscape is lost.

But to Chaucer the country was too large and too wild to be altogether agreeable. He turned instinctively, as if he had painful experience of their nature, from tempests and rocks to the bright May day and the jocund landscape, from the harsh and mysterious to the gay and definite. Without possessing a tithe of the virtuosity in word-painting which is the modern inheritance, he could give, in a few words, or even, when we come to look, without a single word of direct description, the sense of the open air.

And se the fresshe floures how they sprynge

—that is enough.

Nature, uncompromising, untamed, was no looking-glass for happy faces, or confessor of unhappy souls. She was herself; sometimes, therefore, disagreeable enough and plain, but always in Chaucer’s pages with the hardness and the freshness of an actual presence. Soon, however, we notice something of greater importance than the gay and picturesque appearance of the mediaeval world—the solidity which plumps it out, the conviction which animates the characters. There is immense variety in the Canterbury Tales, and yet, persisting underneath, one consistent type. Chaucer has his world; he has his young men; he has his young women. If one met them straying in Shakespeare’s world one would know them to be Chaucer’s, not Shakespeare’s. He wants to describe a girl, and this is what she looks like:

Ful semely hir wimpel pinched was,

Hir nose tretys; hir eyen greye as glas;

Hir mouth ful smal, and ther-to soft and reed;

But sikerly she hadde a fair foreheed;

It was almost a spanne brood, I trowe;

For, hardily, she was nat undergrowe.

Then he goes on to develop her; she was a girl, a virgin, cold in her virginity:

I am, thou woost, yet of thy companye,

A mayde, and love hunting and venerye,

And for to walken in the wodes wilde,

And noght to been a wyf and be with childe.

Next he bethinks him how

Discreet she was in answering alway;

And though she had been as wise as Pallas

No countrefeted termes hadde she

To seme wys; but after hir degree

She spak, and alle hir wordes more and lesse

Souninge in vertu and in gentillesse.

Each of these quotations, in fact, comes from a different Tale, but they are parts, one feels, of the same personage, whom he had in mind, perhaps unconsciously, when he thought of a young girl, and for this reason, as she goes in and out of the Canterbury Tales bearing different names, she has a stability which is only to be found where the poet has made up his mind about young women, of course, but also about the world they live in, its end, its nature, and his own craft and technique, so that his mind is free to apply its force fully to its object. It does not occur to him that his Griselda might be improved or altered. There is no blur about her, no hesitation; she proves nothing; she is content to be herself. Upon her, therefore, the mind can rest with that unconscious ease which allows it, from hints and suggestions, to endow her with many more qualities than are actually referred to. Such is the power of conviction, a rare gift, a gift shared in our day by Joseph Conrad in his earlier novels, and a gift of supreme importance, for upon it the whole weight of the building depends. Once believe in Chaucer’s young men and women and we have no need of preaching or protest. We know what he finds good, what evil; the less said the better. Let him get on with his story, paint knights and squires, good women and bad, cooks, shipmen, priests, and we will supply the landscape, give his society its belief, its standing towards life and death, and make of the journey to Canterbury a spiritual pilgrimage.

This simple faithfulness to his own conceptions was easier then than now in one respect at least, for Chaucer could write frankly where we must either say nothing or say it slyly. He could sound every note in the language instead of finding a great many of the best gone dumb from disuse, and thus, when struck by daring fingers, giving off a loud discordant jangle out of keeping with the rest. Much of Chaucer—a few lines perhaps in each of the Tales—is improper and gives us as we read it the strange sensation of being naked to the air after being muffled in old clothing. And, as a certain kind of humour depends upon being able to speak without self-consciousness of the parts and functions of the body, so with the advent of decency literature lost the use of one of its limbs. It lost its power to create the Wife of Bath, Juliet’s nurse, and their recognisable though already colourless relation, Moll Flanders. Sterne, from fear of coarseness, is forced into indecency. He must be witty, not humorous; he must hint instead of speaking outright. Nor can we believe, with Mr. Joyce’s Ulysses before us, that laughter of the old kind will ever be heard again.

But, lord Christ! When that it remembreth me

Up-on my yowthe, and on my Iolitee,

It tikleth me aboute myn herte rote.

Unto this day it doth myn herte bote

That I have had my world as in my tyme.

The sound of that old woman’s voice is still.

But there is another and more important reason for the surprising brightness, the still effective merriment of the Canterbury Tales. Chaucer was a poet; but he never flinched from the life that was being lived at the moment before his eyes. A farmyard, with its straw, its dung, its cocks and its hens, is not (we have come to think) a poetic subject; poets seem either to rule out the farmyard entirely or to require that it shall be a farmyard in Thessaly and its pigs of mythological origin. But Chaucer says outright:

Three large sowes hadde she, and namo,

Three kyn, and eek a sheep that highte Malle;

or again,

A yard she hadde, enclosed al aboute

With stikkes, and a drye ditch with-oute.

He is unabashed and unafraid. He will always get close up to his object—an old man’s chin—

With thikke bristles of his berde unsofte,

Lyk to the skin of houndfish, sharp as brere;

or an old man’s neck—

The slakke skin aboute his nekke shaketh

Whyl that he sang;

and he will tell you what his characters wore, how they looked, what they ate and drank, as if poetry could handle the common facts of this very moment of Tuesday, the sixteenth day of April, 1387, without dirtying her hands. If he withdraws to the time of the Greeks or the Romans, it is only that his story leads him there. He has no desire to wrap himself round in antiquity, to take refuge in age, or to shirk the associations of common grocer’s English.

Therefore when we say that we know the end of the journey, it is hard to quote the particular lines from which we take our knowledge. Chaucer fixed his eyes upon the road before him, not upon the world to come. He was little given to abstract contemplation. He deprecated, with peculiar archness, any competition with the scholars and divines:

The answere of this I lete to divynis,

But wel I woot, that in this world grey pyne is.

What is this world? What asketh men to have?

Now with his love, now in the colde grave

Allone, withouten any companye,

O cruel goddes, that governe

This world with binding of your worde eterne,

And wryten in the table of athamaunt

Your parlement, and your eterne graunt,

What is mankinde more un-to yow holde

Than is the sheepe, that rouketh in the folde?

Questions press upon him; he asks them, but he is too true a poet to answer them; he leaves them unsolved, uncramped by the solution of the moment, and thus fresh for the generations that come after him. In his life, too, it would be impossible to write him down a man of this party or of that, a democrat or an aristocrat. He was a staunch churchman, but he laughed at priests. He was an able public servant and a courtier, but his views upon sexual morality were extremely lax. He sympathised with poverty, but did nothing to improve the lot of the poor. It is safe to say that not a single law has been framed or one stone set upon another because of anything that Chaucer said or wrote; and yet, as we read him, we are absorbing morality at every pore. For among writers there are two kinds: there are the priests who take you by the hand and lead you straight up to the mystery; there are the laymen who imbed their doctrines in flesh and blood and make a complete model of the world without excluding the bad or laying stress upon the good. Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley are among the priests; they give us text after text to be hung upon the wall, saying after saying to be laid upon the heart like an amulet against disaster—

Farewell, farewell, the heart that lives alone

He prayeth best that loveth best

All things both great and small

—such lines of exhortation and command spring to memory instantly. But Chaucer lets us go our ways doing the ordinary things with the ordinary people. His morality lies in the way men and women behave to each other. We see them eating, drinking, laughing, and making love, and come to feel without a word being said what their standards are and so are steeped through and through with their morality. There can be no more forcible preaching than this where all actions and passions are represented, and instead of being solemnly exhorted we are left to stray and stare and make out a meaning for ourselves. It is the morality of ordinary intercourse, the morality of the novel, which parents and librarians rightly judge to be far more persuasive than the morality of poetry.

And so, when we shut Chaucer, we feel that without a word being said the criticism is complete; what we are saying, thinking, reading, doing, has been commented upon. Nor are we left merely with the sense, powerful though that is, of having been in good company and got used to the ways of good society. For as we have jogged through the real, the unadorned country-side, with first one good fellow cracking his joke or singing his song and then another, we know that though this world resembles, it is not in fact our daily world. It is the world of poetry. Everything happens here more quickly and mere intensely, and with better order than in life or in prose; there is a formal elevated dullness which is part of the incantation of poetry; there are lines speaking half a second in advance what we were about to say, as if we read our thoughts before words cumbered them; and lines which we go back to read again with that heightened quality, that enchantment which keeps them glittering in the mind long afterwards. And the whole is held in its place, and its variety and divagations ordered by the power which is among the most impressive of all—the shaping power, the architect’s power. It is the peculiarity of Chaucer, however, that though we feel at once this quickening, this enchantment, we cannot prove it by quotation. From most poets quotation is easy and obvious; some metaphor suddenly flowers; some passage breaks off from the rest. But Chaucer is very equal, very even-paced, very unmetaphorical. If we take six or seven lines in the hope that the quality will be contained in them it has escaped.

My lord, ye woot that in my fadres place,

Ye dede me strepe out of my povre wede,

And richely me cladden, o your grace

To yow broghte I noght elles, out of drede,

But feyth and nakedness and maydenhede.

In its place that seemed not only memorable and moving but fit to set beside striking beauties. Cut out and taken separately it appears ordinary and quiet. Chaucer, it seems, has some art by which the most ordinary words and the simplest feelings when laid side by side make each other shine; when separated, lose their lustre. Thus the pleasure he gives us is different from the pleasure that other poets give us, because it is more closely connected with what we have ourselves felt or observed. Eating, drinking, and fine weather, the May, cocks and hens, millers, old peasant women, flowers—there is a special stimulus in seeing all these common things so arranged that they affect us as poetry affects us, and are yet bright, sober, precise as we see them out of doors. There is a pungency in this unfigurative language; a stately and memorable beauty in the undraped sentences which follow each other like women so slightly veiled that you see the lines of their bodies as they go—

And she set down hir water pot anon

Biside the threshold in an oxe’s stall.

And then, as the procession takes its way, out from behind peeps the face of Chaucer, in league with all foxes, donkeys, and hens, to mock the pomps and ceremonies of life—witty, intellectual, French, at the same time based upon a broad bottom of English humour.

So Sir John read his Chaucer in the comfortless room with the wind blowing and the smoke stinging, and left his father’s tombstone unmade. But no book, no tomb, had power to hold him long. He was one of those ambiguous characters who haunt the boundary line where one age merges in another and are not able to inhabit either. At one moment he was all for buying books cheap; next he was off to France and told his mother, “My mind is now not most upon books.” In his own house, where his mother Margaret was perpetually making out inventories or confiding in Gloys the priest, he had no peace or comfort. There was always reason on her side; she was a brave woman, for whose sake one must put up with the priest’s insolence and choke down one’s rage when the grumbling broke into open abuse, and “Thou proud priest” and “Thou proud Squire” were bandied angrily about the room. All this, with the discomforts of life and the weakness of his own character, drove him to loiter in pleasanter places, to put off coming, to put off writing, to put off, year after year, the making of his father’s tombstone.

Yet John Paston had now lain for twelve years under the bare ground. The Prior of Bromholm sent word that the grave-cloth was in tatters, and he had tried to patch it himself. Worse still, for a proud woman like Margaret Paston, the country people murmured at the Pastons’ lack of piety, and other families she heard, of no greater standing than theirs, spent money in pious restoration in the very church where her husband lay unremembered. At last, turning from tournaments and Chaucer and Mistress Anne Hault, Sir John bethought him of a piece of cloth of gold which had been used to cover his father’s hearse and might now be sold to defray the expenses of his tomb. Margaret had it in safe keeping; she had hoarded it and cared for it, and spent twenty marks on its repair. She grudged it; but there was no help for it. She sent it him, still distrusting his intentions or his power to put them into effect. “If you sell it to any other use,” she wrote, “by my troth I shall never trust you while I live.”

But this final act, like so many that Sir John had undertaken in the course of his life, was left undone. A dispute with the Duke of Suffolk in the year 1479 made it necessary for him to visit London in spite of the epidemic of sickness that was abroad; and there, in dirty lodgings, alone, busy to the end with quarrels, clamorous to the end for money, Sir John died and was buried at Whitefriars in London. He left a natural daughter; he left a considerable number of books; but his father’s tomb was still unmade.

The four thick volumes of the Paston letters, however, swallow up this frustrated man as the sea absorbs a raindrop. For, like all collections of letters, they seem to hint that we need not care overmuch for the fortunes of individuals. The family will go on, whether Sir John lives or dies. It is their method to heap up in mounds of insignificant and often dismal dust the innumerable trivialities of daily life, as it grinds itself out, year after year. And then suddenly they blaze up; the day shines out, complete, alive, before our eyes. It is early morning, and strange men have been whispering among the women as they milk. It is evening, and there in the churchyard Warne’s wife bursts out against old Agnes Paston: “All the devils of Hell draw her soul to Hell.” Now it is the autumn in Norfolk, and Cecily Dawne comes whining to Sir John for clothing. “Moreover, Sir, liketh it your mastership to understand that winter and cold weather draweth nigh and I have few clothes but of your gift.” There is the ancient day, spread out before us, hour by hour.

But in all this there is no writing for writing’s sake; no use of the pen to convey pleasure or amusement or any of the million shades of endearment and intimacy which have filled so many English letters since. Only occasionally, under stress of anger for the most part, does Margaret Paston quicken into some shrewd saw or solemn curse. “Men cut large thongs here out of other men’s leather…. We beat the bushes and other men have the birds…. Haste reweth … which is to my heart a very spear.” That is her eloquence and that her anguish. Her sons, it is true, bend their pens more easily to their will. They jest rather stiffly; they hint rather clumsily; they make a little scene like a rough puppet show of the old priest’s anger and give a phrase or two directly as they were spoken in person. But when Chaucer lived he must have heard this very language, matter of fact, unmetaphorical, far better fitted for narrative than for analysis, capable of religious solemnity or of broad humour, but very stiff material to put on the lips of men and women accosting each other face to face. In short, it is easy to see, from the Paston letters, why Chaucer wrote not Lear or Romeo and Juliet, but the Canterbury Tales.

Sir John was buried; and John the younger brother succeeded in his turn. The Paston letters go on; life at Paston continues much the same as before. Over it all broods a sense of discomfort and nakedness; of unwashed limbs thrust into splendid clothing; of tapestry blowing on the draughty walls; of the bedroom with its privy; of winds sweeping straight over land unmitigated by hedge or town; of Caister Castle covering with solid stone six acres of ground, and of the plain-faced Pastons indefatigably accumulating wealth, treading out the roads of Norfolk, and persisting with an obstinate courage which does them infinite credit in furnishing the bareness of England.

[]

On Not Knowing Greek.

For it is vain and foolish to talk of knowing Greek, since in our ignorance we should be at the bottom of any class of schoolboys, since we do not know how the words sounded, or where precisely we ought to laugh, or how the actors acted, and between this foreign people and ourselves there is not only difference of race and tongue but a tremendous breach of tradition. All the more strange, then, is it that we should wish to know Greek, try to know Greek, feel for ever drawn back to Greek, and be for ever making up some notion of the meaning of Greek, though from what incongruous odds and ends, with what slight resemblance to the real meaning of Greek, who shall say?

It is obvious in the first place that Greek literature is the impersonal literature. Those few hundred years that separate John Paston from Plato, Norwich from Athens, make a chasm which the vast tide of European chatter can never succeed in crossing. When we read Chaucer, we are floated up to him insensibly on the current of our ancestors’ lives, and later, as records increase and memories lengthen, there is scarcely a figure which has not its nimbus of association, its life and letters, its wife and family, its house, its character, its happy or dismal catastrophe. But the Greeks remain in a fastness of their own. Fate has been kind there too. She has preserved them from vulgarity. Euripides was eaten by dogs; Aeschylus killed by a stone; Sappho leapt from a cliff. We know no more of them than that. We have their poetry, and that is all.

But that is not, and perhaps never can be, wholly true. Pick up any play by Sophocles, read—

Son of him who led our hosts at Troy of old, son of Agamemnon,

and at once the mind begins to fashion itself surroundings. It makes some background, even of the most provisional sort, for Sophocles; it imagines some village, in a remote part of the country, near the sea. Even nowadays such villages are to be found in the wilder parts of England, and as we enter them we can scarcely help feeling that here, in this cluster of cottages, cut off from rail or city, are all the elements of a perfect existence. Here is the Rectory; here the Manor house, the farm and the cottages; the church for worship, the club for meeting, the cricket field for play. Here life is simply sorted out into its main elements. Each man and woman has his work; each works for the health or happiness of others. And here, in this little community, characters become part of the common stock; the eccentricities of the clergyman are known; the great ladies’ defects of temper; the blacksmith’s feud with the milkman, and the loves and matings of the boys and girls. Here life has cut the same grooves for centuries; customs have arisen; legends have attached themselves to hilltops and solitary trees, and the village has its history, its festivals, and its rivalries.

It is the climate that is impossible. If we try to think of Sophocles here, we must annihilate the smoke and the damp and the thick wet mists. We must sharpen the lines of the hills. We must imagine a beauty of stone and earth rather than of woods and greenery. With warmth and sunshine and months of brilliant, fine weather, life of course is instantly changed; it is transacted out of doors, with the result, known to all who visit Italy, that small incidents are debated in the street, not in the sitting-room, and become dramatic; make people voluble; inspire in them that sneering, laughing, nimbleness of wit and tongue peculiar to the Southern races, which has nothing in common with the slow reserve, the low half-tones, the brooding introspective melancholy of people accustomed to live more than half the year indoors.

That is the quality that first strikes us in Greek literature, the lightning-quick, sneering, out-of-doors manner. It is apparent in the most august as well as in the most trivial places. Queens and Princesses in this very tragedy by Sophocles stand at the door bandying words like village women, with a tendency, as one might expect, to rejoice in language, to split phrases into slices, to be intent on verbal victory. The humour of the people was not good-natured like that of our postmen and cab-drivers. The taunts of men lounging at the street corners had something cruel in them as well as witty. There is a cruelty in Greek tragedy which is quite unlike our English brutality. Is not Pentheus, for example, that highly respectable man, made ridiculous in the Bacchae before he is destroyed? In fact, of course, these Queens and Princesses were out of doors, with the bees buzzing past them, shadows crossing them, and the wind taking their draperies. They were speaking to an enormous audience rayed round them on one of those brilliant southern days when the sun is so hot and yet the air so exciting. The poet, therefore, had to bethink him, not of some theme which could be read for hours by people in privacy, but of something emphatic, familiar, brief, that would carry, instantly and directly, to an audience of seventeen thousand people perhaps, with ears and eyes eager and attentive, with bodies whose muscles would grow stiff if they sat too long without diversion. Music and dancing he would need, and naturally would choose one of those legends, like our Tristram and Iseult, which are known to every one in outline, so that a great fund of emotion is ready prepared, but can be stressed in a new place by each new poet.

Sophocles would take the old story of Electra, for instance, but would at once impose his stamp upon it. Of that, in spite of our weakness and distortion, what remains visible to us? That his genius was of the extreme kind in the first place; that he chose a design which, if it failed, would show its failure in gashes and ruin, not in the gentle blurring of some insignificant detail; which, if it succeeded, would cut each stroke to the bone, would stamp each fingerprint in marble. His Electra stands before us like a figure so tightly bound that she can only move an inch this way, an inch that. But each movement must tell to the utmost, or, bound as she is, denied the relief of all hints, repetitions, suggestions, she will be nothing but a dummy, tightly bound. Her words in crisis are, as a matter of fact, bare; mere cries of despair, joy, hate

οἲ ’γώ τάλαιν’, ὄλωλα τῇδ’ ἐν ἠμέρᾀ.

παῖσον, εἰ σθένειϚ, διπλῆν.

But these cries give angle and outline to the play. It is thus, with a thousand differences of degree, that in English literature Jane Austen shapes a novel. There comes a moment—“I will dance with you,” says Emma—which rises higher than the rest, which, though not eloquent in itself, or violent, or made striking by beauty of language, has the whole weight of the book behind it. In Jane Austen, too, we have the same sense, though the ligatures are much less tight, that her figures are bound, and restricted to a few definite movements. She, too, in her modest, everyday prose, chose the dangerous art where one slip means death.

But it is not so easy to decide what it is that gives these cries of Electra in her anguish their power to cut and wound and excite. It is partly that we know her, that we have picked up from little turns and twists of the dialogue hints of her character, of her appearance, which, characteristically, she neglected; of something suffering in her, outraged and stimulated to its utmost stretch of capacity, yet, as she herself knows (“my behaviour is unseemly and becomes me ill”), blunted and debased by the horror of her position, an unwed girl made to witness her mother’s vileness and denounce it in loud, almost vulgar, clamour to the world at large. It is partly, too, that we know in the same way that Clytemnestra is no unmitigated villainess. “δεινὸν τὸ τἰκτειν ἐστίν,” she says—“there is a strange power in motherhood”. It is no murderess, violent and unredeemed, whom Orestes kills within the house, and Electra bids him utterly destroy—“Strike again.” No; the men and women standing out in the sunlight before the audience on the hill-side were alive enough, subtle enough, not mere figures, or plaster casts of human beings.

Yet it is not because we can analyse them into feelings that they impress us. In six pages of Proust we can find more complicated and varied emotions than in the whole of the Electra. But in the Electra or in the Antigone we are impressed by something different, by something perhaps more impressive—by heroism itself, by fidelity itself. In spite of the labour and the difficulty it is this that draws us back and back to the Greeks; the stable, the permanent, the original human being is to be found there. Violent emotions are needed to rouse him into action, but when thus stirred by death, by betrayal, by some other primitive calamity, Antigone and Ajax and Electra behave in the way in which we should behave thus struck down; the way in which everybody has always behaved; and thus we understand them more easily and more directly than we understand the characters in the Canterbury Tales. These are the originals, Chaucer’s the varieties of the human species.

It is true, of course, that these types of the original man or woman, these heroic Kings, these faithful daughters, these tragic Queens who stalk through the ages always planting their feet in the same places, twitching their robes with the same gestures, from habit not from impulse, are among the greatest bores and the most demoralising companions in the world. The plays of Addison, Voltaire, and a host of others are there to prove it. But encounter them in Greek. Even in Sophocles, whose reputation for restraint and mastery has filtered down to us from the scholars, they are decided, ruthless, direct. A fragment of their speech broken off would, we feel, colour oceans and oceans of the respectable drama. Here we meet them before their emotions have been worn into uniformity. Here we listen to the nightingale whose song echoes through English literature singing in her own Greek tongue. For the first time Orpheus with his lute makes men and beasts follow him. Their voices ring out clear and sharp; we see the hairy, tawny bodies at play in the sunlight among the olive trees, not posed gracefully on granite plinths in the pale corridors of the British Museum. And then suddenly, in the midst of all this sharpness and compression, Electra, as if she swept her veil over her face and forbade us to think of her any more, speaks of that very nightingale: “that bird distraught with grief, the messenger of Zeus. Ah, queen of sorrow, Niobe, thee I deem divine—thee; who evermore weepest in thy rocky tomb.”

And as she silences her own complaint, she perplexes us again with the insoluble question of poetry and its nature, and why, as she speaks thus, her words put on the assurance of immortality. For they are Greek; we cannot tell how they sounded; they ignore the obvious sources of excitement; they owe nothing of their effect to any extravagance of expression, and certainly they throw no light upon the speaker’s character or the writer’s. But they remain, something that has been stated and must eternally endure.

Yet in a play how dangerous this poetry, this lapse from the particular to the general must of necessity be, with the actors standing there in person, with their bodies and their faces passively waiting to be made use of! For this reason the later plays of Shakespeare, where there is more of poetry than of action, are better read than seen, better understood by leaving out the actual body than by having the body, with all its associations and movements, visible to the eye. The intolerable restrictions of the drama could be loosened, however, if a means could be found by which what was general and poetic, comment, not action, could be freed without interrupting the movement of the whole. It is this that the choruses supply; the old men or women who take no active part in the drama, the undifferentiated voices who sing like birds in the pauses of the wind; who can comment, or sum up, or allow the poet to speak himself or supply, by contrast, another side to his conception. Always in imaginative literature, where characters speak for themselves and the author has no part, the need of that voice is making itself felt. For though Shakespeare (unless we consider that his fools and madmen supply the part) dispensed with the chorus, novelists are always devising some substitute—Thackeray speaking in his own person, Fielding coming out and addressing the world before his curtain rises. So to grasp the meaning of the play the chorus is of the utmost importance. One must be able to pass easily into those ecstasies, those wild and apparently irrelevant utterances, those sometimes obvious and commonplace statements, to decide their relevance or irrelevance, and give them their relation to the play as a whole.

We must “be able to pass easily”; but that of course is exactly what we cannot do. For the most part the choruses, with all their obscurities, must be spelt out and their symmetry mauled. But we can guess that Sophocles used them not to express something outside the action of the play, but to sing the praises of some virtue, or the beauties of some place mentioned in it. He selects what he wishes to emphasise and sings of white Colonus and its nightingale, or of love unconquered in fight. Lovely, lofty, and serene, his choruses grow naturally out of his situations, and change, not the point of view, but the mood. In Euripides, however, the situations are not contained within themselves; they give off an atmosphere of doubt, of suggestion, of questioning; but if we look to the choruses to make this plain we are often baffled rather than instructed. At once in the Bacchae we are in the world of psychology and doubt; the world where the mind twists facts and changes them and makes the familiar aspects of life appear new and questionable. What is Bacchus, and who are the Gods, and what is man’s duty to them, and what the rights of his subtle brain? To these questions the chorus makes no reply, or replies mockingly, or speaks darkly as if the straitness of the dramatic form had tempted Euripides to violate it, in order to relieve his mind of its weight. Time is so short and I have so much to say, that unless you will allow me to place together two apparently unrelated statements and trust to you to pull them together, you must be content with a mere skeleton of the play I might have given you. Such is the argument. Euripides therefore suffers less than Sophocles and less than Aeschylus from being read privately in a room, and not seen on a hill-side in the sunshine. He can be acted in the mind; he can comment upon the questions of the moment; more than the others he will vary in popularity from age to age.

If then in Sophocles the play is concentrated in the figures themselves, and in Euripides is to be retrieved from flashes of poetry and questions far flung and unanswered, Aeschylus makes these little dramas (the Agamemnon has 1663 lines; Lear about 2600) tremendous by stretching every phrase to the utmost, by sending them floating forth in metaphors, by bidding them rise up and stalk eyeless and majestic through the scene. To understand him it is not so necessary to understand Greek as to understand poetry. It is necessary to take that dangerous leap through the air without the support of words which Shakespeare also asks of us. For words, when opposed to such a blast of meaning, must give out, must be blown astray, and only by collecting in companies convey the meaning which each one separately is too weak to express. Connecting them in a rapid flight of the mind we know instantly and instinctively what they mean, but could not decant that meaning afresh into any other words. There is an ambiguity which is the mark of the highest poetry; we cannot know exactly what it means. Take this from the Agamemnon for instance—

ὀμμάτων δ’ ἐν ἀχηνίαιϚ ἔρρει πᾶσ’ ’Аϕροδίτα.

The meaning is just on the far side of language. It is the meaning which in moments of astonishing excitement and stress we perceive in our minds without words; it is the meaning that Dostoevsky (hampered as he was by prose and as we are by translation) leads us to by some astonishing run up the scale of emotions and points at but cannot indicate; the meaning that Shakespeare succeeds in snaring.

Aeschylus thus will not give, as Sophocles gives, the very words that people might have spoken, only so arranged that they have in some mysterious way a general force, a symbolic power, nor like Euripides will he combine incongruities and thus enlarge his little space, as a small room is enlarged by mirrors in odd corners. By the bold and running use of metaphor he will amplify and give us, not the thing itself, but the reverberation and reflection which, taken into his mind, the thing has made; close enough to the original to illustrate it, remote enough to heighten, enlarge, and make splendid.

For none of these dramatists had the licence which belongs to the novelist, and, in some degree, to all writers of printed books, of modelling their meaning with an infinity of slight touches which can only be properly applied by reading quietly, carefully, and sometimes two or three times over. Every sentence had to explode on striking the ear, however slowly and beautifully the words might then descend, and however enigmatic might their final purport be. No splendour or richness of metaphor could have saved the Agamemnon if either images or allusions of the subtlest or most decorative had got between us and the naked cry

ὀτοτοτοῖ πόποι δᾶ. ὢ ’πολλον, ὢ ’πολλον.

Dramatic they had to be at whatever cost.

But winter fell on these villages, darkness and extreme cold descended on the hill-side. There must have been some place indoors where men could retire, both in the depths of winter and in the summer heats, where they could sit and drink, where they could lie stretched at their ease, where they could talk. It is Plato, of course, who reveals the life indoors, and describes how, when a party of friends met and had eaten not at all luxuriously and drunk a little wine, some handsome boy ventured a question, or quoted an opinion, and Socrates took it up, fingered it, turned it round, looked at it this way and that, swiftly stripped it of its inconsistencies and falsities and brought the whole company by degrees to gaze with him at the truth. It is an exhausting process; to concentrate painfully upon the exact meaning of words; to judge what each admission involves; to follow intently, yet critically, the dwindling and changing of opinion as it hardens and intensifies into truth. Are pleasure and good the same? Can virtue be taught? Is virtue knowledge? The tired or feeble mind may easily lapse as the remorseless questioning proceeds; but no one, however weak, can fail, even if he does not learn more from Plato, to love knowledge better. For as the argument mounts from step to step, Protagoras yielding, Socrates pushing on, what matters is not so much the end we reach as our manner of reaching it. That all can feel—the indomitable honesty, the courage, the love of truth which draw Socrates and us in his wake to the summit where, if we too may stand for a moment, it is to enjoy the greatest felicity of which we are capable.

Yet such an expression seems ill fitted to describe the state of mind of a student to whom, after painful argument, the truth has been revealed. But truth is various; truth comes to us in different disguises; it is not with the intellect alone that we perceive it. It is a winter’s night; the tables are spread at Agathon’s house; the girl is playing the flute; Socrates has washed himself and put on sandals; he has stopped in the hall; he refuses to move when they send for him. Now Socrates has done; he is bantering Alcibiades; Alcibiades takes a fillet and binds it round “this wonderful fellow’s head”. He praises Socrates. “For he cares not for mere beauty, but despises more than any one can imagine all external possessions, whether it be beauty or wealth or glory, or any other thing for which the multitude felicitates the possessor. He esteems these things and us who honour them, as nothing, and lives among men, making all the objects of their admiration the playthings of his irony. But I know not if any one of you has ever seen the divine images which are within, when he has been opened and is serious. I have seen them, and they are so supremely beautiful, so golden, divine, and wonderful, that everything which Socrates commands surely ought to be obeyed even like the voice of a God.” All this flows over the arguments of Plato—laughter and movement; people getting up and going out; the hour changing; tempers being lost; jokes cracked; the dawn rising. Truth, it seems, is various; Truth is to be pursued with all our faculties. Are we to rule out the amusements, the tendernesses, the frivolities of friendship because we love truth? Will truth be quicker found because we stop our ears to music and drink no wine, and sleep instead of talking through the long winter’s night? It is not to the cloistered disciplinarian mortifying himself in solitude that we are to turn, but to the well-sunned nature, the man who practises the art of living to the best advantage, so that nothing is stunted but some things are permanently more valuable than others.

So in these dialogues we are made to seek truth with every part of us. For Plato, of course, had the dramatic genius. It is by means of that, by an art which conveys in a sentence or two the setting and the atmosphere, and then with perfect adroitness insinuates itself into the coils of the argument without losing its liveliness and grace, and then contracts to bare statement, and then, mounting, expands and soars in that higher air which is generally reached only by the more extreme measures of poetry—it is this art which plays upon us in so many ways at once and brings us to an exultation of mind which can only be reached when all the powers are called upon to contribute their energy to the whole.

But we must beware. Socrates did not care for “mere beauty”, by which he meant, perhaps, beauty as ornament. A people who judged as much as the Athenians did by ear, sitting out-of-doors at the play or listening to argument in the market-place, were far less apt than we are to break off sentences and appreciate them apart from the context. For them there were no Beauties of Hardy, Beauties of Meredith, Sayings from George Eliot. The writer had to think more of the whole and less of the detail. Naturally, living in the open, it was not the lip or the eye that struck them, but the carriage of the body and the proportions of its parts. Thus when we quote and extract we do the Greeks more damage than we do the English. There is a bareness and abruptness in their literature which grates upon a taste accustomed to the intricacy and finish of printed books. We have to stretch our minds to grasp a whole devoid of the prettiness of detail or the emphasis of eloquence. Accustomed to look directly and largely rather than minutely and aslant, it was safe for them to step into the thick of emotions which blind and bewilder an age like our own. In the vast catastrophe of the European war our emotions had to be broken up for us, and put at an angle from us, before we could allow ourselves to feel them in poetry or fiction. The only poets who spoke to the purpose spoke in the sidelong, satiric manner of Wilfrid Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. It was not possible for them to be direct without being clumsy; or to speak simply of emotion without being sentimental. But the Greeks could say, as if for the first time, “Yet being dead they have not died”. They could say, “If to die nobly is the chief part of excellence, to us out of all men Fortune gave this lot; for hastening to set a crown of freedom on Greece we lie possessed of praise that grows not old”. They could march straight up, with their eyes open; and thus fearlessly approached, emotions stand still and suffer themselves to be looked at.

But again (the question comes back and back), Are we reading Greek as it was written when we say this? When we read these few words cut on a tombstone, a stanza in a chorus, the end or the opening of a dialogue of Plato’s, a fragment of Sappho, when we bruise our minds upon some tremendous metaphor in the Agamemnon instead of stripping the branch of its flowers instantly as we do in reading Lear—are we not reading wrongly? losing our sharp sight in the haze of associations? reading into Greek poetry not what they have but what we lack? Does not the whole of Greece heap itself behind every line of its literature? They admit us to a vision of the earth unravaged, the sea unpolluted, the maturity, tried but unbroken, of mankind. Every word is reinforced by a vigour which pours out of olive-tree and temple and the bodies of the young. The nightingale has only to be named by Sophocles and she sings; the grove has only to be called ἄβατον, “untrodden”, and we imagine the twisted branches and the purple violets. Back and back we are drawn to steep ourselves in what, perhaps, is only an image of the reality, not the reality itself, a summer’s day imagined in the heart of a northern winter. Chief among these sources of glamour and perhaps misunderstanding is the language. We can never hope to get the whole fling of a sentence in Greek as we do in English. We cannot hear it, now dissonant, now harmonious, tossing sound from line to line across a page. We cannot pick up infallibly one by one all those minute signals by which a phrase is made to hint, to turn, to live. Nevertheless, it is the language that has us most in bondage; the desire for that which perpetually lures us back. First there is the compactness of the expression. Shelley takes twenty-one words in English to translate thirteen words of Greek—πᾶϚ γοῦν ποιητὴϚ γίγνεται, κἂν ἄμονσοϚ ᾖ τὸ πρίν, οὂ ἂν ἜρωϚ ἅψηται (“… for everyone, even if before he were ever so undisciplined, becomes a poet as soon as he is touched by love”).

Every ounce of fat has been pared off, leaving the flesh firm. Then, spare and bare as it is, no language can move more quickly, dancing, shaking, all alive, but controlled. Then there are the words themselves which, in so many instances, we have made expressive to us of our own emotions, θάλασσα, θάνατοϚ, ἄνθοϚ, ἀστήρ, σελήνη—to take the first that come to hand; so clear, so hard, so intense, that to speak plainly yet fittingly without blurring the outline or clouding the depths, Greek is the only expression. It is useless, then, to read Greek in translations. Translators can but offer us a vague equivalent; their language is necessarily full of echoes and associations. Professor Mackail says “wan”, and the age of Burne-Jones and Morris is at once evoked. Nor can the subtler stress, the flight and the fall of the words, be kept even by the most skilful of scholars—

… thee, who evermore weepest in thy rocky tomb

is not

ἄτ’ ἐν τάϕῳ πετραίῳ.

αἰεὶ δακρύειϚ.

Further, in reckoning the doubts and difficulties there is this important problem—Where are we to laugh in reading Greek? There is a passage in the Odyssey where laughter begins to steal upon us, but if Homer were looking we should probably think it better to control our merriment. To laugh instantly it is almost necessary (though Aristophanes may supply us with an exception) to laugh in English. Humour, after all, is closely bound up with a sense of the body. When we laugh at the humour of Wycherley, we are laughing with the body of that burly rustic who was our common ancestor on the village green. The French, the Italians, the Americans, who derive physically from so different a stock, pause, as we pause in reading Homer, to make sure that they are laughing in the right place, and the pause is fatal. Thus humour is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue, and when we turn from Greek to English literature it seems, after a long silence, as if our great age were ushered in by a burst of laughter.

These are all difficulties, sources of misunderstanding, of distorted and romantic, of servile and snobbish passion. Yet even for the unlearned some certainties remain. Greek is the impersonal literature; it is also the literature of masterpieces. There are no schools; no forerunners; no heirs. We cannot trace a gradual process working in many men imperfectly until it expresses itself adequately at last in one. Again, there is always about Greek literature that air of vigour which permeates an “age”, whether it is the age of Aeschylus, or Racine, or Shakespeare. One generation at least in that fortunate time is blown on to be writers to the extreme; to attain that unconsciousness which means that the consciousness is stimulated to the highest extent; to surpass the limits of small triumphs and tentative experiments. Thus we have Sappho with her constellations of adjectives; Plato daring extravagant flights of poetry in the midst of prose; Thucydides, constricted and contracted; Sophocles gliding like a shoal of trout smoothly and quietly, apparently motionless, and then, with a flicker of fins, off and away; while in the Odyssey we have what remains the triumph of narrative, the clearest and at the same time the most romantic story of the fortunes of men and women.

The Odyssey is merely a story of adventure, the instinctive story-telling of a sea-faring race. So we may begin it, reading quickly in the spirit of children wanting amusement to find out what happens next. But here is nothing immature; here are full-grown people, crafty, subtle, and passionate. Nor is the world itself a small one, since the sea which separates island from island has to be crossed by little hand-made boats and is measured by the flight of the sea-gulls. It is true that the islands are not thickly populated, and the people, though everything is made by hands, are not closely kept at work. They have had time to develop a very dignified, a very stately society, with an ancient tradition of manners behind it, which makes every relation at once orderly, natural, and full of reserve. Penelope crosses the room; Telemachus goes to bed; Nausicaa washes her linen; and their actions seem laden with beauty because they do not know that they are beautiful, have been born to their possessions, are no more self-conscious than children, and yet, all those thousands of years ago, in their little islands, know all that is to be known. With the sound of the sea in their ears, vines, meadows, rivulets about them, they are even more aware than we are of a ruthless fate. There is a sadness at the back of life which they do not attempt to mitigate. Entirely aware of their own standing in the shadow, and yet alive to every tremor and gleam of existence, there they endure, and it is to the Greeks that we turn when we are sick of the vagueness, of the confusion, of the Christianity and its consolations, of our own age.

[]

The Elizabethan Lumber Room.

[Hakluyt’s Collection of the Early Voyages, Travels, and Discoveries of the English Nation, five volumes, 4to, 1810.]

These magnificent volumes are not often, perhaps, read through. Part of their charm consists in the fact that Hakluyt is not so much a book as a great bundle of commodities loosely tied together, an emporium, a lumber room strewn with ancient sacks, obsolete nautical instruments, huge bales of wool, and little bags of rubies and emeralds. One is for ever untying this packet here, sampling that heap over there, wiping the dust off some vast map of the world, and sitting down in semi-darkness to snuff the strange smells of silks and leathers and ambergris, while outside tumble the huge waves of the uncharted Elizabethan sea.

For this jumble of seeds, silks, unicorns’ horns, elephants’ teeth, wool, common stones, turbans, and bars of gold, these odds and ends of priceless value and complete worthlessness, were the fruit of innumerable voyages, traffics, and discoveries to unknown lands in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. The expeditions were manned by “apt young men” from the West country, and financed in part by the great Queen herself. The ships, says Froude, were no bigger than modern yachts. There in the river by Greenwich the fleet lay gathered, close to the Palace. “The Privy council looked out of the windows of the court … the ships thereupon discharge their ordnance … and the mariners they shouted in such sort that the sky rang again with the noise thereof.” Then, as the ships swung down the tide, one sailor after another walked the hatches, climbed the shrouds, stood upon the mainyards to wave his friends a last farewell. Many would come back no more. For directly England and the coast of France were beneath the horizon, the ships sailed into the unfamiliar; the air had its voices, the sea its lions and serpents, its evaporations of fire and tumultuous whirlpools. But God too was very close; the clouds but sparely hid the divinity Himself; the limbs of Satan were almost visible. Familiarly the English sailors pitted their God against the God of the Turks, who “can speake never a word for dulnes, much lesse can he helpe them in such an extremitie…. But howsoever their God behaved himself, our God showed himself a God indeed….” God was as near by sea as by land, said Sir Humfrey Gilbert, riding through the storm. Suddenly one light disappeared; Sir Humfrey Gilbert had gone beneath the waves; when morning came, they sought his ship in vain. Sir Hugh Willoughby sailed to discover the North-West Passage and made no return. The Earl of Cumberland’s men, hung up by adverse winds off the coast of Cornwall for a fortnight, licked the muddy water off the deck in agony. And sometimes a ragged and worn-out man came knocking at the door of an English country house and claimed to be the boy who had left it years ago to sail the seas. “Sir William his father, and my lady his mother knew him not to be their son, until they found a secret mark, which was a wart upon one of his knees.” But he had with him a black stone, veined with gold, or an ivory tusk, or a silver ingot, and urged on the village youth with talk of gold strewn over the land as stones are strewn in the fields of England. One expedition might fail, but what if the passage to the fabled land of uncounted riches lay only a little farther up the coast? What if the known world was only the prelude to some more splendid panorama? When, after the long voyage, the ships dropped anchor in the great river of the Plate and the men went exploring through the undulating lands, startling grazing herds of deer, seeing the limbs of savages between the trees, they filled their pockets with pebbles that might be emeralds or sand that might be gold; or sometimes, rounding a headland, they saw, far off, a string of savages slowly descending to the beach bearing on their heads and linking their shoulders together with heavy burdens for the Spanish King.

These are the fine stories used effectively all through the West country to decoy “the apt young men” lounging by the harbour-side to leave their nets and fish for gold. But the voyagers were sober merchants into the bargain, citizens with the good of English trade and the welfare of English work-people at heart. The captains are reminded how necessary it is to find a market abroad for English wool; to discover the herb from which blue dyes are made; above all to make inquiry as to the methods of producing oil, since all attempts to make it from radish seed have failed. They are reminded of the misery of the English poor, whose crimes, brought about by poverty, make them “daily consumed by the gallows”. They are reminded how the soil of England had been enriched by the discoveries of travellers in the past; how Dr. Linaker brought seeds of the damask rose and tulipas, and how beasts and plants and herbs, “without which our life were to be said barbarous”, have all come to England gradually from abroad. In search of markets and of goods, of the immortal fame success would bring them, the apt young men set sail for the North, and were left, a little company of isolated Englishmen surrounded by snow and the huts of savages, to make what bargains they could and pick up what knowledge they might before the ships returned in the summer to fetch them home again. There they endured, an isolated company, burning on the rim of the dark. One of them, carrying a charter from his company in London, went inland as far as Moscow, and there saw the Emperor “sitting in his chair of estate with his crown on his head, and a staff of goldsmiths’ work in his left hand”. All the ceremony that he saw is carefully written out, and the sight upon which the English merchant first set eyes has the brilliancy of a Roman vase dug up and stood for a moment in the sun, until, exposed to the air, seen by millions of eyes, it dulls and crumbles away. There, all these centuries, on the outskirts of the world, the glories of Moscow, the glories of Constantinople have flowered unseen. The Englishman was bravely dressed for the occasion, led “three fair mastiffs in coats of red cloth”, and carried a letter from Elizabeth “the paper whereof did smell most fragrantly of camphor and ambergris, and the ink of perfect musk”. And sometimes, since trophies from the amazing new world were eagerly awaited at home, together with unicorns’ horns and lumps of ambergris and the fine stories of the engendering of whales and “debates” of elephants and dragons whose blood, mixed, congealed into vermilion, a living sample would be sent, a live savage caught somewhere off the coast of Labrador, taken to England, and shown about like a wild beast. Next year they brought him back, and took a woman savage on board to keep him company. When they saw each other they blushed; they blushed profoundly, but the sailors, though they noted it, knew not why. Later the two savages set up house together on board ship, she attending to his wants, he nursing her in sickness. But, as the sailors noted again, the savages lived together in perfect chastity.

All this, the new words, the new ideas, the waves, the savages, the adventures, found their way naturally into the plays which were being acted on the banks of the Thames. There was an audience quick to seize upon the coloured and the high-sounding; to associate those

frigates bottom’d with rich Sethin planks,

Topt with the lofty firs of Lebanon,

with the adventures of their own sons and brothers abroad. The Verneys, for example, had a wild boy who had gone as pirate, turned Turk, and died out there, sending back to Claydon to be kept as relics of him some silk, a turban, and a pilgrim’s staff. A gulf lay between the spartan domestic housecraft of the Paston women and the refined tastes of the Elizabethan Court ladies, who, grown old, says Harrison, spent their time reading histories, or “writing volumes of their own, or translating of other men’s into our English and Latin tongue”, while the younger ladies played the lute and the citharne and spent their leisure in the enjoyment of music. Thus, with singing and with music, springs into existence the characteristic Elizabethan extravagance; the dolphins and lavoltas of Greene; the hyperbole, more surprising in a writer so terse and muscular, of Ben Jonson. Thus we find the whole of Elizabethan literature strewn with gold and silver; with talk of Guiana’s rarities, and references to that America—“O my America! my new-found-land”—which was not merely a land on the map, but symbolised the unknown territories of the soul. So, over the water, the imagination of Montaigne brooded in fascination upon savages, cannibals, society, and government.

But the mention of Montaigne suggests that though the influence of the sea and the voyages, of the lumber room crammed with sea beasts and horns and ivory and old maps and nautical instruments, helped to inspire the greatest age of English poetry, its effects were by no means so beneficial upon English prose. Rhyme and metre helped the poets to keep the tumult of their perceptions in order. But the prose writer, without these restrictions, accumulated clauses, petered out in interminable catalogues, tripped and stumbled over the convolutions of his own rich draperies. How little Elizabethan prose was fit for its office, how exquisitely French prose was already adapted, can be seen by comparing a passage from Sidney’s Defense of Poesie with one from Montaigne’s Essays.

He beginneth not with obscure definitions, which must blur the margent with interpretations, and load the memory with doubtfulness: but he cometh to you with words set in delightful proportion, either accompanied with, or prepared for the well enchanting Skill of Music, and with a tale (forsooth) he cometh unto you, with a tale which holdeth children from play, and old men from the Chimney corner; and pretending no more, doth intend the winning of the mind from wickedness to virtue; even as the child is often brought to take most wholesome things by hiding them in such other as have a pleasant taste: which if one should begin to tell them the nature of the Aloës or Rhubarbarum they should receive, would sooner take their physic at their ears than at their mouth, so is it in men (most of which are childish in the best things, till they be cradled in their graves) glad they will be to hear the tales of Hercules….

And so it runs on for seventy-six words more. Sidney’s prose is an uninterrupted monologue, with sudden flashes of felicity and splendid phrases, which lends itself to lamentations and moralities, to long accumulations and catalogues, but is never quick, never colloquial, unable to grasp a thought closely and firmly, or to adapt itself flexibly and exactly to the chops and changes of the mind. Compared with this, Montaigne is master of an instrument which knows its own powers and limitations, and is capable of insinuating itself into crannies and crevices which poetry can never reach; capable of cadences different but no less beautiful; of subtleties and intensities which Elizabethan prose entirely ignores. He is considering the way in which certain of the ancients met death:

… ils l’ont faicte couler et glisser parmy la lascheté de leurs occupations accoustumées entre des garses et bons compaignons; nul propos de consolation, nulle mention de testament, nulle affectation ambitieuse de constance, nul discours de leur condition future; mais entre les jeux, les festins, facecies, entretiens communs et populaires, et la musique, et des vers amoureux.

An age seems to separate Sidney from Montaigne. The English compared with the French are as boys compared with men.

But the Elizabethan prose writers, if they have the formlessness of youth, have, too, its freshness and audacity. In the same essay Sidney shapes language, masterfully and easily, to his liking; freely and naturally reaches his hand for a metaphor. To bring this prose to perfection (and Dryden’s prose is very near perfection) only the discipline of the stage was necessary and the growth of self-consciousness. It is in the plays, and especially in the comic passages of the plays, that the finest Elizabethan prose is to be found. The stage was the nursery where prose learnt to find its feet. For on the stage people had to meet, to quip and crank, to suffer interruptions, to talk of ordinary things.

Cler. A pox of her autumnal face, her pieced beauty! there’s no man can be admitted till she be ready now-a-days, till she has painted, and perfumed, and washed, and scoured, but the boy here; and him she wipes her oiled lips upon, like a sponge. I have made a song (I pray thee hear it) on the subject.

[Page sings.

Still to be neat, still to be drest, &c.

True. And I am clearly on the other side: I love a good dressing before any beauty o’ the world. O, a woman is then like a delicate garden; nor is there one kind of it; she may vary every hour; take often counsel of her glass, and choose the best. If she have good ears, show them; good hair, lay it out; good legs, wear short clothes; a good hand, discover it often: practise any art to mend breath, cleanse teeth, repair eyebrows; paint and profess it.

So the talk runs in Ben Jonson’s Silent Woman, knocked into shape by interruptions, sharpened by collisions, and never allowed to settle into stagnancy or swell into turbidity. But the publicity of the stage and the perpetual presence of a second person were hostile to that growing consciousness of one’s self, that brooding in solitude over the mysteries of the soul, which, as the years went by, sought expression and found a champion in the sublime genius of Sir Thomas Browne. His immense egotism has paved the way for all psychological novelists, auto-biographers, confession-mongers, and dealers in the curious shades of our private life. He it was who first turned from the contacts of men with men to their lonely life within. “The world that I regard is myself; it is the microcosm of my own frame that I cast mine eye on; for the other I use it but like my globe, and turn it round sometimes for my recreation.” All was mystery and darkness as the first explorer walked the catacombs swinging his lanthorn. “I feel sometimes a hell within myself; Lucifer keeps his court in my breast; Legion is revived in me.” In these solitudes there were no guides and no companions. “I am in the dark to all the world, and my nearest friends behold me but in a cloud.” The strangest thoughts and imaginings have play with him as he goes about his work, outwardly the most sober of mankind and esteemed the greatest physician in Norwich. He has wished for death. He has doubted all things. What if we are asleep in this world and the conceits of life are as mere dreams? The tavern music, the Ave Mary bell, the broken pot that the workman has dug out of the field—at the sight and sound of them he stops dead, as if transfixed by the astonishing vista that opens before his imagination. “We carry with us the wonders we seek without us; there is all Africa and her prodigies in us.” A halo of wonder encircles everything that he sees; he turns his light gradually upon the flowers and insects and grasses at his feet so as to disturb nothing in the mysterious processes of their existence. With the same awe, mixed with a sublime complacency, he records the discovery of his own qualities and attainments. He was charitable and brave and averse from nothing. He was full of feeling for others and merciless upon himself. “For my conversation, it is like the sun’s, with all men, and with a friendly aspect to good and bad.” He knows six languages, the laws, the customs and policies of several states, the names of all the constellations and most of the plants of his country, and yet, so sweeping is his imagination, so large the horizon in which he sees this little figure walking that “methinks I do not know so many as when I did but know a hundred, and had scarcely ever simpled further than Cheapside”.

He is the first of the autobiographers. Swooping and soaring at the highest altitudes, he stoops suddenly with loving particularity upon the details of his own body. His height was moderate, he tells us, his eyes large and luminous; his skin dark but constantly suffused with blushes. He dressed very plainly. He seldom laughed. He collected coins, kept maggots in boxes, dissected the lungs of frogs, braved the stench of the spermaceti whale, tolerated Jews, had a good word for the deformity of the toad, and combined a scientific and sceptical attitude towards most things with an unfortunate belief in witches. In short, as we say when we cannot help laughing at the oddities of people we admire most, he was a character, and the first to make us feel that the most sublime speculations of the human imagination are issued from a particular man, whom we can love. In the midst of the solemnities of the Urn Burial we smile when he remarks that afflictions induce callosities. The smile broadens to laughter as we mouth out the splendid pomposities, the astonishing conjectures of the Religio Medici. Whatever he writes is stamped with his own idiosyncrasy, and we first become conscious of impurities which hereafter stain literature with so many freakish colours that, however hard we try, it is difficult to be certain whether we are looking at a man or his writing. Now we are in the presence of sublime imagination; now rambling through one of the finest lumber rooms in the world—a chamber stuffed from floor to ceiling with ivory, old iron, broken pots, urns, unicorns’ horns, and magic glasses full of emerald lights and blue mystery.

[]

Notes on an Elizabethan Play.

There are, it must be admitted, some highly formidable tracts in English literature, and chief among them that jungle, forest, and wilderness which is the Elizabethan drama. For many reasons, not here to be examined, Shakespeare stands out, Shakespeare who has had the light on him from his day to ours, Shakespeare who towers highest when looked at from the level of his own contemporaries. But the plays of the lesser Elizabethans—Greene, Dekker, Peele, Chapman, Beaumont and Fletcher,—to adventure into that wilderness is for the ordinary reader an ordeal, an upsetting experience which plys him with questions, harries him with doubts, alternately delights and vexes him with pleasures and pains. For we are apt to forget, reading, as we tend to do, only the masterpieces of a bygone age, how great a power the body of a literature possesses to impose itself: how it will not suffer itself to be read passively, but takes us and reads us; flouts our preconceptions; questions principles which we had got into the habit of taking for granted, and, in fact, splits us into two parts as we read, making us, even as we enjoy, yield our ground or stick to our guns.

At the outset in reading an Elizabethan play we are overcome by the extraordinary discrepancy between the Elizabethan view of reality and our own. The reality to which we have grown accustomed is, speaking roughly, based upon the life and death of some knight called Smith, who succeeded his father in the family business of pitwood importers, timber merchants and coal exporters, was well known in political, temperance, and church circles, did much for the poor of Liverpool, and died last Wednesday of pneumonia while on a visit to his son at Muswell Hill. That is the world we know. That is the reality which our poets and novelists have to expound and illuminate. Then we open the first Elizabethan play that comes to hand and read how

I once did see

In my young travels through Armenia

An angry unicorn in his full career

Charge with too swift a foot a jeweller

That watch’d him for the treasure of his brow,

And ere he could get shelter of a tree

Nail him with his rich antlers to the earth.

Where is Smith, we ask, where is Liverpool? And the groves of Elizabethan drama echo “Where?” Exquisite is the delight, sublime the relief of being set free to wander in the land of the unicorn and the jeweller among dukes and grandees, Gonzaloes and Bellimperias, who spend their lives in murder and intrigue, dress up as men if they are women, as women if they are men, see ghosts, run mad, and die in the greatest profusion on the slightest provocation, uttering as they fall imprecations of superb vigour or elegies of the wildest despair. But soon the low, the relentless voice, which if we wish to identify it we must suppose typical of a reader fed on modern English literature, and French and Russian, asks why, then, with all this to stimulate and enchant, these old plays are for long stretches of time so intolerably dull? Is it not that literature, if it is to keep us on the alert through five acts or thirty-two chapters, must somehow be based on Smith, have one toe touching Liverpool, take off into whatever heights it pleases from reality? We are not so purblind as to suppose that a man because his name is Smith and he lives at Liverpool is therefore “real”. We know indeed that this reality is a chameleon quality, the fantastic becoming as we grow used to it often the closest to the truth, the sober the furthest from it, and nothing proving a writer’s greatness more than his capacity to consolidate his scene by the use of what, until he touched them, seemed wisps of cloud and threads of gossamer. Our contention merely is that there is a station, somewhere in mid-air, whence Smith and Liverpool can be seen to the best advantage; that the great artist is the man who knows where to place himself above the shifting scenery; that while he never loses sight of Liverpool he never sees it in the wrong perspective. The Elizabethans bore us, then, because their Smiths are all changed to dukes, their Liverpools to fabulous islands and palaces in Genoa. Instead of keeping a proper poise above life they soar miles into the empyrean, where nothing is visible for long hours at a time but clouds at their revelry, and a cloud landscape is not ultimately satisfactory to human eyes. The Elizabethans bore us because they suffocate our imaginations rather than set them to work.

Still, though potent enough, the boredom of an Elizabethan play is of a different quality altogether from the boredom which a nineteenth-century play, a Tennyson or a Henry Taylor play, inflicts. The riot of images, the violent volubility of language, all that cloys and satiates in the Elizabethans yet appears to be drawn up with a roar as a feeble fire is sucked up by a newspaper. There is, even in the worst, an intermittent bawling vigour which gives us the sense in our quiet arm-chairs of ostlers and orange-girls catching up the lines, flinging them back, hissing or stamping applause. But the deliberate drama of the Victorian age is evidently written in a study. It has for audience ticking clocks and rows of classics bound in half morocco. There is no stamping, no applause. It does not, as, with all its faults, the Elizabethan audience did, leaven the mass with fire. Rhetorical and bombastic, the lines are flung and hurried into existence and reach the same impromptu felicities, have the same lip-moulded profusion and unexpectedness, which speech sometimes achieves, but seldom in our day the deliberate, solitary pen. Indeed, half the work of the dramatists, one feels, was done in the Elizabethan age by the public.

Against that, however, is to be set the fact that the influence of the public was in many respects detestable. To its door we must lay the greatest infliction that Elizabethan drama puts upon us—the plot; the incessant, improbable, almost unintelligible convolutions which presumably gratified the spirit of an excitable and unlettered public actually in the playhouse, but only confuse and fatigue a reader with the book before him. Undoubtedly something must happen; undoubtedly a play where nothing happens is an impossibility. But we have a right to demand (since the Greeks have proved that it is perfectly possible) that what happens shall have an end in view. It shall agitate great emotions; bring into existence memorable scenes; stir the actors to say what could not be said without this stimulus. Nobody can fail to remember the plot of the Antigone, because what happens is so closely bound up with the emotions of the actors that we remember the people and the plot at one and the same time. But who can tell us what happens in the White Devil, or the Maid’s Tragedy, except by remembering the story apart from the emotions which it has aroused? As for the lesser Elizabethans, like Greene and Kyd, the complexities of their plots are so great, and the violence which those plots demand so terrific, that the actors themselves are obliterated and emotions which, according to our convention at least, deserve the most careful investigation, the most delicate analysis, are clean sponged off the slate. And the result is inevitable. Outside Shakespeare and perhaps Ben Jonson, there are no characters in Elizabethan drama, only violences whom we know so little that we can scarcely care what becomes of them. Take any hero or heroine in those early plays—Bellimperia in the Spanish Tragedy will serve as well as another—and can we honestly say that we care a jot for the unfortunate lady who runs the whole gamut of human misery to kill herself in the end? No more than for an animated broomstick, we must reply, and in a work dealing with men and women the prevalence of broomsticks is a drawback. But the Spanish Tragedy is admittedly a crude forerunner, chiefly valuable because such primitive efforts lay bare the formidable framework which greater dramatists could modify, but had to use. Ford, it is claimed, is of the school of Stendhal and of Flaubert; Ford is a psychologist. Ford is an analyst. “This man”, says Mr. Havelock Ellis, “writes of women not as a dramatist nor as a lover, but as one who has searched intimately and felt with instinctive sympathy the fibres of their hearts.”

The play—’Tis pity she’s a Whore—upon which this judgement is chiefly based shows us the whole nature of Annabella spun from pole to pole in a series of tremendous vicissitudes. First, her brother tells her that he loves her; next she confesses her love for him; next finds herself with child by him; next forces herself to marry Soranzo; next is discovered; next repents; finally is killed, and it is her lover and brother who kills her. To trace the trail of feelings which such crises and calamities might be expected to breed in a woman of ordinary sensibility might have filled volumes. A dramatist, of course, has no volumes to fill. He is forced to contract. Even so, he can illumine; he can reveal enough for us to guess the rest. But what is it that we know without using microscopes and splitting hairs about the character of Annabella? Gropingly we make out that she is a spirited girl, with her defiance of her husband when he abuses her, her snatches of Italian song, her ready wit, her simple glad love-making. But of character as we understand the word there is no trace. We do not know how she reaches her conclusions, only that she has reached them. Nobody describes her. She is always at the height of her passion, never at its approach. Compare her with Anna Karenina. The Russian woman is flesh and blood, nerves and temperament, has heart, brain, body and mind where the English girl is flat and crude as a face painted on a playing card; she is without depth, without range, without intricacy. But as we say this we know that we have missed something. We have let the meaning of the play slip through our hands. We have ignored the emotion which has been accumulating because it has accumulated in places where we have not expected to find it. We have been comparing the play with prose, and the play, after all, is poetry.

The play is poetry, we say, and the novel prose. Let us attempt to obliterate detail, and place the two before us side by side, feeling, so far as we can, the angles and edges of each, recalling each, so far as we are able, as a whole. Then, at once, the prime differences emerge; the long leisurely accumulated novel; the little contracted play; the emotion all split up, dissipated and then woven together, slowly and gradually massed into a whole, in the novel; the emotion concentrated, generalised, heightened in the play. What moments of intensity, what phrases of astonishing beauty the play shot at us!

O, my lords,

I but deceived your eyes with antic gesture,

When one news straight came huddling on another

Of death! and death! and death! still I danced forward.

or

You have oft for these two lips

Neglected cassia or the natural sweets

Of the spring-violet: they are not yet much wither’d.

With all her reality, Anna Karenina could never say

“You have oft for these two lips

Neglected cassia”.

Some of the most profound of human emotions are therefore beyond her reach. The extremes of passion are not for the novelist; the perfect marriages of sense and sound are not for him; he must tame his swiftness to sluggardry; keep his eyes on the ground, not on the sky: suggest by description, not reveal by illumination. Instead of singing

Lay a garland on my hearse

Of the dismal yew;

Maidens, willow branches bear;

Say I died true,

he must enumerate the chrysanthemums fading on the grave and the undertakers’ men snuffling past in their four-wheelers. How then can we compare this lumbering and lagging art with poetry? Granted all the little dexterities by which the novelist makes us know the individual and recognise the real, the dramatist goes beyond the single and the separate, shows us not Annabella in love, but love itself; not Anna Karenina throwing herself under the train, but ruin and death and the

… soul, like a ship in a black storm,

… driven, I know not whither.

So with pardonable impatience we might exclaim as we shut our Elizabethan play. But what then is the exclamation with which we close War and Peace? Not one of disappointment; we are not left lamenting the superficiality, upbraiding the triviality of the novelist’s art. Rather we are made more than ever aware of the inexhaustible richness of human sensibility. Here, in the play, we recognise the general; here, in the novel, the particular. Here we gather all our energies into a bunch and spring. Here we extend and expand and let come slowly in from all quarters deliberate impressions, accumulated messages. The mind is so saturated with sensibility, language so inadequate to its experience, that, far from ruling off one form of literature or decreeing its inferiority to others, we complain that they are still unable to keep pace with the wealth of material, and wait impatiently the creation of what may yet be devised to liberate us of the enormous burden of the unexpressed.

Thus, in spite of dullness, bombast, rhetoric, and confusion, we still read the lesser Elizabethans, still find ourselves adventuring in the land of the jeweller and the unicorn. The familiar factories of Liverpool fade into thin air and we scarcely recognise any likeness between the knight who imported timber and died of pneumonia at Muswell Hill and the Armenian Duke who fell like a Roman on his sword while the owl shrieked in the ivy and the Duchess gave birth to a still-born babe ’mongst women howling. To join those territories and recognise the same man in different disguises we have to adjust and revise. But make the necessary alterations in perspective, draw in those filaments of sensibility which the moderns have so marvellously developed, use instead the ear and the eye which the moderns have so basely starved, hear words as they are laughed and shouted, not as they are printed in black letters on the page, see before your eyes the changing faces and living bodies of men and women—put yourself, in short, into a different but not more elementary stage of your reading development and then the true merits of Elizabethan drama will assert themselves. The power of the whole is undeniable. Theirs, too, is the word-coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping. Theirs is that broad humour based upon the nakedness of the body, which, however arduously the public-spirited may try, is impossible since the body is draped. Then at the back of this, imposing not unity but some sort of stability, is what we may briefly call a sense of the presence of the Gods. He would be a bold critic who should attempt to impose any creed upon the swarm and variety of the Elizabethan dramatists, and yet it implies some timidity if we take it for granted that a whole literature with common characteristics is a mere evaporation of high spirits, a money-making enterprise, a fluke of the mind which, owing to favourable circumstances, came off successfully. Even in the jungle and the wilderness the compass still points.

“Lord, Lord, that I were dead!”

they are for ever crying.

O thou soft natural death that art joint-twin

To sweetest slumber—

The pageant of the world is marvellous, but the pageant of the world is vanity.

glories

Of human greatness are but pleasing dreams

And shadows soon decaying: on the stage

Of my mortality my youth hath acted

Some scenes of vanity——

To die and be quit of it all is their desire; the bell that tolls throughout the drama is death and disenchantment.

All life is but a wandering to find home,

When we’re gone, we’re there.

Ruin, weariness, death, perpetually death, stand grimly to confront the other presence of Elizabethan drama which is life: life compact of frigates, fir trees and ivory, of dolphins and the juice of July flowers, of the milk of unicorns and panthers’ breath, of ropes of pearl, brains of peacocks and Cretan wine. To this, life at its most reckless and abundant, they reply

Man is a tree that hath no top in cares,

No root in comforts; all his power to live

Is given to no end but t’ have power to grieve.

It is this echo flung back and back from the other side of the play which, if it has not the name, still has the effect of the presence of the Gods. So we ramble through the jungle, forest, and wilderness of Elizabethan drama. So we consort with Emperors and clowns, jewellers and unicorns, and laugh and exult and marvel at the splendour and humour and fantasy of it all. A noble rage consumes us when the curtain falls; we are bored too, and nauseated by the wearisome old tricks and florid bombast. A dozen deaths of full-grown men and women move us less than the suffering of one of Tolstoi’s flies. Wandering in the maze of the impossible and tedious story suddenly some passionate intensity seizes us; some sublimity exalts, or some melodious snatch of song enchants. It is a world full of tedium and delight, pleasure and curiosity, of extravagant laughter, poetry, and splendour. But gradually it comes over us, what then are we being denied? What is it that we are coming to want so persistently, that unless we get it instantly we must seek elsewhere? It is solitude. There is no privacy here. Always the door opens and some one comes in. All is shared, made visible, audible, dramatic. Meanwhile, as if tired with company, the mind steals off to muse in solitude; to think, not to act; to comment, not to share; to explore its own darkness, not the bright-lit-up surfaces of others. It turns to Donne, to Montaigne, to Sir Thomas Browne, to the keepers of the keys of solitude.

[Times Literary Supplement, Mar 5, 1925]

[]

Montaigne.

[Essays of Montaigne, translated by Charles Cotton, 5 vols. The Navarre Society, £6: 6s. net]

Once at Bar-le-Duc Montaigne saw a portrait which René, King of Sicily, had painted of himself, and asked, “Why is it not, in like manner, lawful for every one to draw himself with a pen, as he did with a crayon?” Off-hand one might reply, Not only is it lawful, but nothing could be easier. Other people may evade us, but our own features are almost too familiar. Let us begin. And then, when we attempt the task, the pen falls from our fingers; it is a matter of profound, mysterious, and overwhelming difficulty.

After all, in the whole of literature, how many people have succeeded in drawing themselves with a pen? Only Montaigne and Pepys and Rousseau perhaps. The Religio Medici is a coloured glass through which darkly one sees racing stars and a strange and turbulent soul. A bright polished mirror reflects the face of Boswell peeping between other people’s shoulders in the famous biography. But this talking of oneself, following one’s own vagaries, giving the whole map, weight, colour, and circumference of the soul in its confusion, its variety, its imperfection—this art belonged to one man only: to Montaigne. As the centuries go by, there is always a crowd before that picture, gazing into its depths, seeing their own faces reflected in it, seeing more the longer they look, never being able to say quite what it is that they see. New editions testify to the perennial fascination. Here is the Navarre Society in England reprinting in five fine volumes Cotton’s translation; while in France the firm of Louis Conard is issuing the complete works of Montaigne with the various readings in an edition to which Dr. Armaingaud has devoted a long lifetime of research

To tell the truth about oneself, to discover oneself near at hand, is not easy.

We hear of but two or three of the ancients who have beaten this road [said Montaigne]. No one since has followed the track; ’tis a rugged road, more so than it seems, to follow a pace so rambling and uncertain, as that of the soul; to penetrate the dark profundities of its intricate internal windings; to choose and lay hold of so many little nimble motions; ’tis a new and extraordinary undertaking, and that withdraws us from the common and most recommended employments of the world.

There is, in the first place, the difficulty of expression. We all indulge in the strange, pleasant process called thinking, but when it comes to saying, even to some one opposite, what we think, then how little we are able to convey! The phantom is through the mind and out of the window before we can lay salt on its tail, or slowly sinking and returning to the profound darkness which it has lit up momentarily with a wandering light. Face, voice, and accent eke out our words and impress their feebleness with character in speech. But the pen is a rigid instrument; it can say very little; it has all kinds of habits and ceremonies of its own. It is dictatorial too: it is always making ordinary men into prophets, and changing the natural stumbling trip of human speech into the solemn and stately march of pens. It is for this reason that Montaigne stands out from the legions of the dead with such irrepressible vivacity. We can never doubt for an instant that his book was himself. He refused to teach; he refused to preach; he kept on saying that he was just like other people. All his effort was to write himself down, to communicate, to tell the truth, and that is a “rugged road, more than it seems”.

For beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself. This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to what other people say. Other people, for instance, long ago made up their minds that old invalidish gentlemen ought to stay at home and edify the rest of us by the spectacle of their connubial fidelity. The soul of Montaigne said, on the contrary, that it is in old age that one ought to travel, and marriage, which, rightly, is very seldom founded on love, is apt to become, towards the end of life, a formal tie better broken up. Again with politics, statesmen are always praising the greatness of Empire, and preaching the moral duty of civilising the savage. But look at the Spanish in Mexico, cried Montaigne in a burst of rage. “So many cities levelled with the ground, so many nations exterminated … and the richest and most beautiful part of the world turned upside down for the traffic of pearl and pepper! Mechanic victories!” And then when the peasants came and told him that they had found a man dying of wounds and deserted him for fear lest justice might incriminate them, Montaigne asked:

What could I have said to these people? ’Tis certain that this office of humanity would have brought them into trouble…. There is nothing so much, nor so grossly, nor so ordinarily faulty as the laws.

Here the soul, getting restive, is lashing out at the more palpable forms of Montaigne’s great bugbears, convention and ceremony. But watch her as she broods over the fire in the inner room of that tower which, though detached from the main building, has so wide a view over the estate. Really she is the strangest creature in the world, far from heroic, variable as a weathercock, “bashful, insolent; chaste, lustful; prating, silent; laborious, delicate; ingenious, heavy; melancholic, pleasant; lying, true; knowing, ignorant; liberal, covetous, and prodigal”—in short, so complex, so indefinite, corresponding so little to the version which does duty for her in public, that a man might spend his life merely in trying to run her to earth. The pleasure of the pursuit more than rewards one for any damage that it may inflict upon one’s worldly prospects. The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness. He alone lives, while other people, slaves of ceremony, let life slip past them in a kind of dream. Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent.

Surely then, if we ask this great master of the art of life to tell us his secret, he will advise us to withdraw to the inner room of our tower and there turn the pages of books, pursue fancy after fancy as they chase each other up the chimney, and leave the government of the world to others. Retirement and contemplation—these must be the main elements of his prescription. But no; Montaigne is by no means explicit. It is impossible to extract a plain answer from that subtle, half smiling, half melancholy man, with the heavy-lidded eyes and the dreamy, quizzical expression. The truth is that life in the country, with one’s books and vegetables and flowers, is often extremely dull. He could never see that his own green peas were so much better than other people’s. Paris was the place he loved best in the whole world—“jusques à ses verrues et à ses taches”. As for reading, he could seldom read any book for more than an hour at a time, and his memory was so bad that he forgot what was in his mind as he walked from one room to another. Book learning is nothing to be proud of, and as for the achievements of science, what do they amount to? He had always mixed with clever men, and his father had a positive veneration for them, but he had observed that, though they have their fine moments, their rhapsodies, their visions, the cleverest tremble on the verge of folly. Observe yourself: one moment you are exalted; the next a broken glass puts your nerves on edge. All extremes are dangerous. It is best to keep in the middle of the road, in the common ruts, however muddy. In writing choose the common words; avoid rhapsody and eloquence—yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.

It appears, then, that we are to aim at a democratic simplicity. We may enjoy our room in the tower, with the painted walls and the commodious bookcases, but down in the garden there is a man digging who buried his father this morning, and it is he and his like who live the real life and speak the real language. There is certainly an element of truth in that. Things are said very finely at the lower end of the table. There are perhaps more of the qualities that matter among the ignorant than among the learned. But again, what a vile thing the rabble is! “the mother of ignorance, injustice, and inconstancy. Is it reasonable that the life of a wise man should depend upon the judgment of fools?” Their minds are weak, soft and without power of resistance. They must be told what it is expedient for them to know. It is not for them to face facts as they are. The truth can only be known by the well-born soul—“l’âme bien née”. Who, then, are these well-born souls, whom we would imitate if only Montaigne would enlighten us more precisely?

But no. “Je n’enseigne poinct; je raconte.” After all, how could he explain other people’s souls when he could say nothing “entirely simply and solidly, without confusion or mixture, in one word”, about his own, when indeed it became daily more and more in the dark to him? One quality or principle there is perhaps—that one must not lay down rules. The souls whom one would wish to resemble, like Étienne de La Boétie, for example, are always the supplest. “C’est estre, mais ce n’est pas vivre, que de se tenir attaché et obligé par necessité a un seul train.” The laws are mere conventions, utterly unable to keep touch with the vast variety and turmoil of human impulses; habits and customs are a convenience devised for the support of timid natures who dare not allow their souls free play. But we, who have a private life and hold it infinitely the dearest of our possessions, suspect nothing so much as an attitude. Directly we begin to protest, to attitudinise, to lay down laws, we perish. We are living for others, not for ourselves. We must respect those who sacrifice themselves in the public service, load them with honours, and pity them for allowing, as they must, the inevitable compromise; but for ourselves let us fly fame, honour, and all offices that put us under an obligation to others. Let us simmer over our incalculable cauldron, our enthralling confusion, our hotch-potch of impulses, our perpetual miracle—for the soul throws up wonders every second. Movement and change are the essence of our being; rigidity is death; conformity is death: let us say what comes into our heads, repeat ourselves, contradict ourselves, fling out the wildest nonsense, and follow the most fantastic fancies without caring what the world does or thinks or says. For nothing matters except life; and, of course, order.

This freedom, then, which is the essence of our being, has to be controlled. But it is difficult to see what power we are to invoke to help us, since every restraint of private opinion or public law has been derided, and Montaigne never ceases to pour scorn upon the misery, the weakness, the vanity of human nature. Perhaps, then, it will be well to turn to religion to guide us? “Perhaps” is one of his favourite expressions; “perhaps” and “I think” and all those words which qualify the rash assumptions of human ignorance. Such words help one to muffle up opinions which it would be highly impolitic to speak outright. For one does not say everything; there are some things which at present it is advisable only to hint. One writes for a very few people, who understand. Certainly, seek the Divine guidance by all means, but meanwhile there is, for those who live a private life, another monitor, an invisible censor within, “un patron au dedans”, whose blame is much more to be dreaded than any other because he knows the truth; nor is there anything sweeter than the chime of his approval. This is the judge to whom we must submit; this is the censor who will help us to achieve that order which is the grace of a well-born soul. For “C’est une vie exquise, celle qui se maintient en ordre jusques en son privé”. But he will act by his own light; by some internal balance will achieve that precarious and everchanging poise which, while it controls, in no way impedes the soul’s freedom to explore and experiment. Without other guide, and without precedent, undoubtedly it is far more difficult to live well the private life than the public. It is an art which each must learn separately, though there are, perhaps, two or three men, like Homer, Alexander the Great, and Epaminondas among the ancients, and Etienne de La Boétie among the moderns, whose example may help us. But it is an art; and the very material in which it works is variable and complex and infinitely mysterious—human nature. To human nature we must keep close. “… il faut vivre entre les vivants”. We must dread any eccentricity or refinement which cuts us off from our fellow-beings. Blessed are those who chat easily with their neighbours about their sport or their buildings or their quarrels, and honestly enjoy the talk of carpenters and gardeners. To communicate is our chief business; society and friendship our chief delights; and reading, not to acquire knowledge, not to earn a living, but to extend our intercourse beyond our own time and province. Such wonders there are in the world; halcyons and undiscovered lands, men with dogs’ heads and eyes in their chests, and laws and customs, it may well be, far superior to our own. Possibly we are asleep in this world; possibly there is some other which is apparent to beings with a sense which we now lack.

Here then, in spite of all contradictions and all qualifications, is something definite. These essays are an attempt to communicate a soul. On this point at least he is explicit. It is not fame that he wants; it is not that men shall quote him in years to come; he is setting up no statue in the market-place; he wishes only to communicate his soul. Communication is health; communication is truth; communication is happiness. To share is our duty; to go down boldly and bring to light those hidden thoughts which are the most diseased; to conceal nothing; to pretend nothing; if we are ignorant to say so; if we love our friends to let them know it.

“… car, comme je scay par une trop certaine expérience, il n’est aucune si douce consolation en la perte de nos amis que celle que nous aporte la science de n’avoir rien oublié a leur dire et d’avoir eu avec eux une parfaite et entière communication.

There are people who, when they travel, wrap themselves up, “se défendans de la contagion d’un air incogneu” in silence and suspicion. When they dine they must have the same food they get at home. Every sight and custom is bad unless it resembles those of their own village. They travel only to return. That is entirely the wrong way to set about it. We should start without any fixed idea where we are going to spend the night, or when we propose to come back; the journey is everything. Most necessary of all, but rarest good fortune, we should try to find before we start some man of our own sort who will go with us and to whom we can say the first thing that comes into our heads. For pleasure has no relish unless we share it. As for the risks—that we may catch cold or get a headache—it is always worth while to risk a little illness for the sake of pleasure. “Le plaisir est des principales espèces du profit.” Besides if we do what we like, we always do what is good for us. Doctors and wise men may object, but let us leave doctors and wise men to their own dismal philosophy. For ourselves, who are ordinary men and women, let us return thanks to Nature for her bounty by using every one of the senses she has given us; vary our state as much as possible; turn now this side, now that, to the warmth, and relish to the full before the sun goes down the kisses of youth and the echoes of a beautiful voice singing Catullus. Every season is likeable, and wet days and fine, red wine and white, company and solitude. Even sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life, can be full of dreams; and the most common actions—a walk, a talk, solitude in one’s own orchard—can be enhanced and lit up by the association of the mind. Beauty is everywhere, and beauty is only two finger’s-breadth from goodness. So, in the name of health and sanity, let us not dwell on the end of the journey. Let death come upon us planting our cabbages, or on horseback, or let us steal away to some cottage and there let strangers close our eyes, for a servant sobbing or the touch of a hand would break us down. Best of all, let death find us at our usual occupations, among girls and good fellows who make no protests, no lamentations; let him find us “parmy les jeux, les festins, faceties, entretiens communs et populaires, et la musique, et des vers amoureux”. But enough of death; it is life that matters.

It is life that emerges more and more clearly as these essays reach not their end, but their suspension in full career. It is life that becomes more and more absorbing as death draws near, one’s self, one’s soul, every fact of existence: that one wears silk stockings summer and winter; puts water in one’s wine; has one’s hair cut after dinner; must have glass to drink from; has never worn spectacles; has a loud voice; carries a switch in one’s hand; bites one’s tongue; fidgets with one’s feet; is apt to scratch one’s ears; likes meat to be high; rubs one’s teeth with a napkin (thank God, they are good!); must have curtains to one’s bed; and, what is rather curious, began by liking radishes, then disliked them, and now likes them again. No fact is too little to let it slip through one’s fingers, and besides the interest of facts themselves there is the strange power we have of changing facts by the force of the imagination. Observe how the soul is always casting her own lights and shadows; makes the substantial hollow and the frail substantial; fills broad daylight with dreams; is as much excited by phantoms as by reality; and in the moment of death sports with a trifle. Observe, too, her duplicity, her complexity. She hears of a friend’s loss and sympathises, and yet has a bitter-sweet malicious pleasure in the sorrows of others. She believes; at the same time she does not believe. Observe her extraordinary susceptibility to impressions, especially in youth. A rich man steals because his father kept him short of money as a boy. This wall one builds not for oneself, but because one’s father loved building. In short, the soul is all laced about with nerves and sympathies which affect her every action, and yet, even now in 1580, no one has any clear knowledge—such cowards we are, such lovers of the smooth conventional ways—how she works or what she is except that of all things she is the most mysterious, and one’s self the greatest monster and miracle in the world. “… plus je me hante et connois, plus ma difformité m’estonne, moins je m’entens en moy.” Observe, observe perpetually, and, so long as ink and paper exist, “sans cesse et sans travail” Montaigne will write.

But there remains one final question which, if we could make him look up from his enthralling occupation, we should like to put to this great master of the art of life. In these extraordinary volumes of short and broken, long and learned, logical and contradictory statements, we have heard the very pulse and rhythm of the soul, beating day after day, year after year, through a veil which, as time goes on, fines itself almost to transparency. Here is some one who succeeded in the hazardous enterprise of living; who served his country and lived retired; was landlord, husband, father; entertained kings, loved women, and mused for hours alone over old books. By means of perpetual experiment and observation of the subtlest he achieved at last a miraculous adjustment of all these wayward parts that constitute the human soul. He laid hold of the beauty of the world with all his fingers. He achieved happiness. If he had had to live again, he said, he would have lived the same life over. But, as we watch with absorbed interest the enthralling spectacle of a soul living openly beneath our eyes, the question frames itself, Is pleasure the end of all? Whence this overwhelming interest in the nature of the soul? Why this overmastering desire to communicate with others? Is the beauty of this world enough, or is there, elsewhere, some explanation of the mystery? To this what answer can there be? There is none. There is only one more question: “Que scais-je?”

[Times Literary Supplement, Jan 31, 1924]

[]

The Duchess of Newcastle.

[The Life of William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, Etc., edited by C.H. Firth; Poems and Fancies, by the Duchess of Newcastle; The World’s Olio, Orations of divers Sorts Accommodated to Divers Places; Female Orations; Plays; Philosophical Letters, etc., etc.]

“… All I desire is fame”, wrote Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle. And while she lived her wish was granted. Garish in her dress, eccentric in her habits, chaste in her conduct, coarse in her speech, she succeeded during her lifetime in drawing upon herself the ridicule of the great and the applause of the learned. But the last echoes of that clamour have now all died away; she lives only in the few splendid phrases that Lamb scattered upon her tomb; her poems, her plays, her philosophies, her orations, her discourses—all those folios and quartos in which, she protested, her real life was shrined—moulder in the gloom of public libraries, or are decanted into tiny thimbles which hold six drops of their profusion. Even the curious student, inspired by the words of Lamb, quails before the mass of her mausoleum, peers in, looks about him, and hurries out again, shutting the door.

But that hasty glance has shown him the outlines of a memorable figure. Born (it is conjectured) in 1624, Margaret was the youngest child of a Thomas Lucas, who died when she was an infant, and her upbringing was due to her mother, a lady of remarkable character, of majestic grandeur and beauty “beyond the ruin of time”. “She was very skilful in leases, and setting of lands and court keeping, ordering of stewards, and the like affairs.” The wealth which thus accrued she spent, not on marriage portions, but on generous and delightful pleasures, “out of an opinion that if she bred us with needy necessity it might chance to create in us sharking qualities”. Her eight sons and daughters were never beaten, but reasoned with, finely and gaily dressed, and allowed no conversation with servants, not because they are servants but because servants “are for the most part ill-bred as well as meanly born”. The daughters were taught the usual accomplishments “rather for formality than for benefit”, it being their mother’s opinion that character, happiness, and honesty were of greater value to a woman than fiddling and singing, or “the prating of several languages”.

Already Margaret was eager to take advantage of such indulgence to gratify certain tastes. Already she liked reading better than needlework, dressing and “inventing fashions” better than reading, and writing best of all. Sixteen paper books of no title, written in straggling letters, for the impetuosity of her thought always outdid the pace of her fingers, testify to the use she made of her mother’s liberality. The happiness of their home life had other results as well. They were a devoted family. Long after they were married, Margaret noted, these handsome brothers and sisters, with their well-proportioned bodies, their clear complexions, brown hair, sound teeth, “tunable voices”, and plain way of speaking, kept themselves “in a flock together”. The presence of strangers silenced them. But when they were alone, whether they walked in Spring Gardens or Hyde Park, or had music, or supped in barges upon the water, their tongues were loosed and they made “very merry amongst themselves, … judging, condemning, approving, commending, as they thought good”.

The happy family life had its effect upon Margaret’s character. As a child, she would walk for hours alone, musing and contemplating and reasoning with herself of “everything her senses did present”. She took no pleasure in activity of any kind. Toys did not amuse her, and she could neither learn foreign languages nor dress as other people did. Her great pleasure was to invent dresses for herself, which nobody else was to copy, “for”, she remarks, “I always took delight in a singularity, even in accoutrements of habits”.

Such a training, at once so cloistered and so free, should have bred a lettered old maid, glad of her seclusion, and the writer perhaps of some volume of letters or translations from the classics, which we should still quote as proof of the cultivation of our ancestresses. But there was a wild streak in Margaret, a love of finery and extravagance and fame, which was for ever upsetting the orderly arrangements of nature. When she heard that the Queen, since the outbreak of the Civil War, had fewer maids-of-honour than usual, she had “a great desire” to become one of them. Her mother let her go against the judgement of the rest of the family, who, knowing that she had never left home and had scarcely been beyond their sight, justly thought that she might behave at Court to her disadvantage. “Which indeed I did,” Margaret confessed; “for I was so bashful when I was out of my mother’s, brothers’, and sisters’ sight that … I durst neither look up with my eyes, nor speak, nor be any way sociable, insomuch as I was thought a natural fool.” The courtiers laughed at her; and she retaliated in the obvious way. People were censorious; men were jealous of brains in a woman; women suspected intellect in their own sex; and what other lady, she might justly ask, pondered as she walked on the nature of matter and whether snails have teeth? But the laughter galled her, and she begged her mother to let her come home. This being refused, wisely as the event turned out, she stayed on for two years (1643-45), finally going with the Queen to Paris, and there, among the exiles who came to pay their respects to the Court, was the Marquis of Newcastle. To the general amazement, the princely nobleman, who had led the King’s forces to disaster with indomitable courage but little skill, fell in love with the shy, silent, strangely dressed maid-of-honour. It was not “amorous love, but honest, honourable love”, according to Margaret. She was no brilliant match; she had gained a reputation for prudery and eccentricity. What, then, could have made so great a nobleman fall at her feet? The onlookers were full of derision, disparagement, and slander. “I fear”, Margaret wrote to the Marquis, “others foresee we shall be unfortunate, though we see it not ourselves, or else there would not be such pains to untie the knot of our affections.” Again, “Saint Germains is a place of much slander, and thinks I send too often to you”. “Pray consider”, she warned him, “that I have enemies.” But the match was evidently perfect. The Duke, with his love of poetry and music and play-writing, his interest in philosophy, his belief “that nobody knew or could know the cause of anything”, his romantic and generous temperament, was naturally drawn to a woman who wrote poetry herself, was also a philosopher of the same way of thinking, and lavished upon him not only the admiration of a fellow-artist, but the gratitude of a sensitive creature who had been shielded and succoured by his extraordinary magnanimity. “He did approve”, she wrote, “of those bashful fears which many condemned, … and though I did dread marriage and shunned men’s company as much as I could, yet I … had not the power to refuse him.” She kept him company during the long years of exile; she entered with sympathy, if not with understanding, into the conduct and acquirements of those horses which he trained to such perfection that the Spaniards crossed themselves and cried “Miraculo!” as they witnessed their corvets, voltoes, and pirouettes; she believed that the horses even made a “trampling action” for joy when he came into the stables; she pleaded his cause in England during the Protectorate; and, when the Restoration made it possible for them to return to England, they lived together in the depths of the country in the greatest seclusion and perfect contentment, scribbling plays, poems, philosophies, greeting each other’s works with raptures of delight, and confabulating, doubtless, upon such marvels of the natural world as chance threw their way. They were laughed at by their contemporaries; Horace Walpole sneered at them. But there can be no doubt that they were perfectly happy.

For now Margaret could apply herself uninterruptedly to her writing. She could devise fashions for herself and her servants. She could scribble more and more furiously with fingers that became less and less able to form legible letters. She could even achieve the miracle of getting her plays acted in London and her philosophies humbly perused by men of learning. There they stand, in the British Museum, volume after volume, swarming with a diffused, uneasy, contorted vitality. Order, continuity, the logical development of her argument are all unknown to her. No fears impede her. She has the irresponsibility of a child and the arrogance of a Duchess. The wildest fancies come to her, and she canters away on their backs. We seem to hear her, as the thoughts boil and bubble, calling to John, who sat with a pen in his hand next door, to come quick, “John, John, I conceive!” And down it goes—whatever it may be; sense or nonsense; some thought on women’s education—“Women live like Bats or Owls, labour like Beasts, and die like Worms, … the best bred women are those whose minds are civilest”; some speculation that had struck her, perhaps, walking that afternoon alone—why “hogs have the measles”, why “dogs that rejoice swing their tails”, or what the stars are made of, or what this chrysalis is that her maid has brought her, and she keeps warm in a corner of her room. On and on, from subject to subject she flies, never stopping to correct, “for there is more pleasure in making than in mending”, talking aloud to herself of all those matters that filled her brain to her perpetual diversion—of wars, and boarding-schools, and cutting down trees, of grammar and morals, of monsters and the British, whether opium in small quantities is good for lunatics, why it is that musicians are mad. Looking upwards, she speculates still more ambitiously upon the nature of the moon, and if the stars are blazing jellies; looking downwards she wonders if the fishes know that the sea is salt; opines that our heads are full of fairies, “dear to God as we are”; muses whether there are not other worlds than ours, and reflects that the next ship may bring us word of a new one. In short, “we are in utter darkness”. Meanwhile, what a rapture is thought!

As the vast books appeared from the stately retreat at Welbeck the usual censors made the usual objections, and had to be answered, despised, or argued with, as her mood varied, in the preface to every work. They said, among other things, that her books were not her own, because she used learned terms, and “wrote of many matters outside her ken”. She flew to her husband for help, and he answered, characteristically, that the Duchess “had never conversed with any professed scholar in learning except her brother and myself”. The Duke’s scholarship, moreover, was of a peculiar nature. “I have lived in the great world a great while, and have thought of what has been brought to me by the senses, more than was put into me by learned discourse; for I do not love to be led by the nose, by authority, and old authors; ipse dixit will not serve my turn.” And then she takes up the pen and proceeds, with the importunity and indiscretion of a child, to assure the world that her ignorance is of the finest quality imaginable. She has only seen Des Cartes and Hobbes, not questioned them; she did indeed ask Mr. Hobbes to dinner, but he could not come; she often does not listen to a word that is said to her; she does not know any French, though she lived abroad for five years; she has only read the old philosophers in Mr. Stanley’s account of them; of Des Cartes she has read but half of his work on Passion; and of Hobbes only “the little book called De Cive”, all of which is infinitely to the credit of her native wit, so abundant that outside succour pained it, so honest that it would not accept help from others. It was from the plain of complete ignorance, the untilled field of her own consciousness, that she proposed to erect a philosophic system that was to oust all others. The results were not altogether happy. Under the pressure of such vast structures, her natural gift, the fresh and delicate fancy which had led her in her first volume to write charmingly of Queen Mab and fairyland, was crushed out of existence.

The palace of the Queen wherein she dwells,

Its fabric’s built all of hodmandod shells;

The hangings of a Rainbow made that’s thin,

Shew wondrous fine, when one first enters in;

The chambers made of Amber that is clear,

Do give a fine sweet smell, if fire be near;

Her bed a cherry stone, is carved throughout,

And with a butterfly’s wing hung about;

Her sheets are of the skin of Dove’s eyes made

Where on a violet bud her pillow’s laid.

So she could write when she was young. But her fairies, if they survived at all, grew up into hippopotami. Too generously her prayer was granted:

Give me the free and noble style,

Which seems uncurb’d, though it be wild.

She became capable of involutions, and contortions and conceits of which the following is among the shortest, but not the most terrific:

The human head may be likened to a town:

The mouth when full, begun

Is market day, when empty, market’s done;

The city conduct, where the water flows,

Is with two spouts, the nostrils and the nose.

She similised, energetically, incongruously, eternally; the sea became a meadow, the sailors shepherds, the mast a maypole. The fly was the bird of summer, trees were senators, houses ships, and even the fairies, whom she loved better than any earthly thing, except the Duke, are changed into blunt atoms and sharp atoms, and take part in some of those horrible manœuvres in which she delighted to marshal the universe. Truly, “my Lady Sanspareille hath a strange spreading wit”. Worse still, without an atom of dramatic power, she turned to play-writing. It was a simple process. The unwieldly thoughts which turned and tumbled within her were christened Sir Golden Riches, Moll Meanbred, Sir Puppy Dogman, and the rest, and sent revolving in tedious debate upon the parts of the soul, or whether virtue is better than riches, round a wise and learned lady who answered their questions and corrected their fallacies at considerable length in tones which we seem to have heard before.

Sometimes, however, the Duchess walked abroad. She would issue out in her own proper person, dressed in a thousand gems and furbelows, to visit the houses of the neighbouring gentry. Her pen made instant report of these excursions. She recorded how Lady C. R. “did beat her husband in a public assembly”; Sir F. O. “I am sorry to hear hath undervalued himself so much below his birth and wealth as to marry his kitchen-maid”; “Miss P. I. has become a sanctified soul, a spiritual sister, she has left curling her hair, black patches are become abominable to her, laced shoes and Galoshoes are steps to pride—she asked me what posture I thought was the best to be used in prayer”. Her answer was probably unacceptable. “I shall not rashly go there again”, she says of one such “gossip-making”. She was not, we may hazard, a welcome guest or an altogether hospitable hostess. She had a way of “bragging of myself” which frightened visitors so that they left, nor was she sorry to see them go. Indeed, Welbeck was the best place for her, and her own company the most congenial, with the amiable Duke wandering in and out, with his plays and his speculations, always ready to answer a question or refute a slander. Perhaps it was this solitude that led her, chaste as she was in conduct, to use language which in time to come much perturbed Sir Egerton Brydges. She used, he complained, “expressions and images of extraordinary coarseness as flowing from a female of high rank brought up in courts”. He forgot that this particular female had long ceased to frequent the Court; she consorted chiefly with fairies; and her friends were among the dead. Naturally, then, her language was coarse. Nevertheless, though her philosophies are futile, and her plays intolerable, and her verses mainly dull, the vast bulk of the Duchess is leavened by a vein of authentic fire. One cannot help following the lure of her erratic and lovable personality as it meanders and twinkles through page after page. There is something noble and Quixotic and high-spirited, as well as crack-brained and bird-witted, about her. Her simplicity is so open; her intelligence so active; her sympathy with fairies and animals so true and tender. She has the freakishness of an elf, the irresponsibility of some non-human creature, its heartlessness, and its charm. And although “they”, those terrible critics who had sneered and jeered at her ever since, as a shy girl, she had not dared look her tormentors in the face at Court, continued to mock, few of her critics, after all, had the wit to trouble about the nature of the universe, or cared a straw for the sufferings of the hunted hare, or longed, as she did, to talk to some one “of Shakespeare’s fools”. Now, at any rate, the laugh is not all on their side.

But laugh they did. When the rumour spread that the crazy Duchess was coming up from Welbeck to pay her respects at Court, people crowded the streets to look at her, and the curiosity of Mr. Pepys twice brought him to wait in the Park to see her pass. But the pressure of the crowd about her coach was too great. He could only catch a glimpse of her in her silver coach with her footmen all in velvet, a velvet cap on her head, and her hair about her ears. He could only see for a moment between the white curtains the face of “a very comely woman”, and on she drove through the crowd of staring Cockneys, all pressing to catch a glimpse of that romantic lady, who stands, in the picture at Welbeck, with large melancholy eyes, and something fastidious and fantastic in her bearing, touching a table with the tips of long pointed fingers, in the calm assurance of immortal fame.

[]

Rambling Round Evelyn.

Should you wish to make sure that your birthday will be celebrated three hundred years hence, your best course is undoubtedly to keep a diary. Only first be certain that you have the courage to lock your genius in a private book and the humour to gloat over a fame that will be yours only in the grave. For the good diarist writes either for himself alone or for a posterity so distant that it can safely hear every secret and justly weigh every motive. For such an audience there is need neither of affectation nor of restraint. Sincerity is what they ask, detail, and volume; skill with the pen comes in conveniently, but brilliance is not necessary; genius is a hindrance even; and should you know your business and do it manfully, posterity will let you off mixing with great men, reporting famous affairs, or having lain with the first ladies in the land.

The diary, for whose sake we are remembering the three hundredth anniversary of the birth of John Evelyn, is a case in point. It is sometimes composed like a memoir, sometimes jotted down like a calendar; but he never used its pages to reveal the secrets of his heart, and all that he wrote might have been read aloud in the evening with a calm conscience to his children. If we wonder, then, why we still trouble to read what we must consider the uninspired work of a good man we have to confess, first that diaries are always diaries, books, that is, that we read in convalescence, on horseback, in the grip of death; second, that this reading, about which so many fine things have been said, is for the most part mere dreaming and idling; lying in a chair with a book; watching the butterflies on the dahlias; a profitless occupation which no critic has taken the trouble to investigate, and on whose behalf only the moralist can find a good word to say. For he will allow it to be an innocent employment; and happiness, he will add, though derived from trivial sources, has probably done more to prevent human beings from changing their religions and killing their kings than either philosophy or the pulpit.

It may be well, indeed, before reading much further in Evelyn’s book, to decide where it is that our modern view of happiness differs from his. Ignorance, surely, ignorance is at the bottom of it; his ignorance and our comparative erudition. No one can read the story of Evelyn’s foreign travels without envying in the first place his simplicity of mind, in the second his activity. To take a simple example of the difference between us—that butterfly will sit motionless on the dahlia while the gardener trundles his barrow past it, but let him flick the wings with the shadow of a rake, and off it flies, up it goes, instantly on the alert. So, we may reflect, a butterfly sees but does not hear; and here no doubt we are much on a par with Evelyn. But as for going into the house to fetch a knife and with that knife dissecting a Red Admiral’s head, as Evelyn would have done, no sane person in the twentieth century would entertain such a project for a second. Individually we may know as little as Evelyn, but collectively we know so much that there is little incentive to venture on private discoveries. We seek the encyclopædia, not the scissors; and know in two minutes not only more than was known to Evelyn in his lifetime, but that the mass of knowledge is so vast that it is scarcely worth while to possess a single crumb. Ignorant, yet justly confident that with his own hands he might advance not merely his private knowledge but the knowledge of mankind, Evelyn dabbled in all the arts and sciences, ran about the Continent for ten years, gazed with unflagging gusto upon hairy women and rational dogs, and drew inferences and framed speculations which are now only to be matched by listening to the talk of old women round the village pump. The moon, they say, is so much larger than usual this autumn that no mushrooms will grow, and the carpenter’s wife will be brought to bed of twins. So Evelyn, Fellow of the Royal Society, a gentleman of the highest culture and intelligence, carefully noted all comets and portents, and thought it a sinister omen when a whale came up the Thames. In 1658, too, a whale had been seen. “That year died Cromwell.” Nature, it seems, was determined to stimulate the devotion of her seventeenth-century admirers by displays of violence and eccentricity from which she now refrains. There were storms, floods, and droughts; the Thames frozen hard; comets flaring in the sky. If a cat so much as kittened in Evelyn’s bed the kitten was inevitably gifted with eight legs, six ears, two bodies, and two tails.

But to return to happiness. It sometimes appears that if there is an insoluble difference between our ancestors and ourselves it is that we draw our happiness from different sources. We rate the same things at different values. Something of this we may ascribe to their ignorance and our knowledge. But are we to suppose that ignorance alters the nerves and the affections? Are we to believe that it would have been an intolerable penance for us to live familiarly with the Elizabethans? Should we have found it necessary to leave the room because of Shakespeare’s habits, and to have refused Queen Elizabeth’s invitation to dinner? Perhaps so. For Evelyn was a sober man of unusual refinement, and yet he pressed into a torture chamber as we crowd to see the lions fed.

… they first bound his wrists with a strong rope or small cable, and one end of it to an iron ring made fast to the wall about four feet from the floor, and then his feet with another cable, fastened about five feet farther than his utmost length to another ring on the floor of the room. Thus suspended, and yet lying but aslant, they slid a horse of wood under the rope which bound his feet, which so exceedingly stiffened it, as severed the fellow’s joints in miserable sort, drawing him out at length in an extraordinary manner, he having only a pair of linen drawers upon his naked body …

And so on. Evelyn watched this to the end, and then remarked that “the spectacle was so uncomfortable that I was not able to stay the sight of another”, as we might say that the lions growl so loud and the sight of raw meat is so unpleasant that we will now visit the penguins. Allowing for his discomfort, there is enough discrepancy between his view of pain and ours to make us wonder whether we see any fact with the same eyes, marry any woman from the same motives, or judge any conduct by the same standards. To sit passive when muscles tore and bones cracked, not to flinch when the wooden horse was raised higher and the executioner fetched a horn and poured two buckets of water down the man’s throat, to suffer this iniquity on a suspicion of robbery which the man denied—all this seems to put Evelyn in one of those cages where we still mentally seclude the riff-raff of Whitechapel. Only it is obvious that we have somehow got it wrong. If we could maintain that our susceptibility to suffering and love of justice were proof that all our humane instincts were as highly developed as these, then we could say that the world improves, and we with it. But let us get on with the diary.

In 1652, when it seemed that things had settled down unhappily enough, “all being entirely in the rebels’ hands”, Evelyn returned to England with his wife, his Tables of Veins and Arteries, his Venetian glass and the rest of his curiosities, to lead the life of a country gentleman of strong Royalist sympathies at Deptford. What with going to church and going to town, settling his accounts and planting his garden—“I planted the orchard at Sayes Court; new moon, wind west”—his time was spent much as ours is. But there was one difference which it is difficult to illustrate by a single quotation, because the evidence is scattered all about in little insignificant phrases. The general effect of them is that he used his eyes. The visible world was always close to him. The visible world has receded so far from us that to hear all this talk of buildings and gardens, statues and carving, as if the look of things assailed one out of doors as well as in, and were not confined to a few small canvases hung upon the wall, seems strange. No doubt there are a thousand excuses for us; but hitherto we have been finding excuses for him. Wherever there was a picture to be seen by Julio Romano, Polydore, Guido, Raphael, or Tintoretto, a finely built house, a prospect, or a garden nobly designed, Evelyn stopped his coach to look at it, and opened his diary to record his opinion. On August 27, Evelyn, with Dr. Wren and others, was in St. Paul’s surveying “the general decay of that ancient and venerable church”; held with Dr. Wren another judgement from the rest; and had a mind to build it with “a noble cupola, a form of church building not as yet known in England but of wonderful grace”, in which Dr. Wren concurred. Six days later the Fire of London altered their plans. It was Evelyn again who, walking by himself, chanced to look in at the window of “a poor solitary thatched house in a field in our parish”, there saw a young man carving at a crucifix, was overcome with an enthusiasm which does him the utmost credit, and carried Grinling Gibbons and his carving to Court.

Indeed, it is all very well to be scrupulous about the sufferings of worms and sensitive to the dues of servant girls, but how pleasant also if, with shut eyes, one could call up street after street of beautiful houses. A flower is red; the apples rosy-gilt in the afternoon sun; a picture has charm, especially as it displays the character of a grandfather and dignifies a family descended from such a scowl; but these are scattered fragments—little relics of beauty in a world that has grown indescribably drab. To our charge of cruelty Evelyn might well reply by pointing to Bayswater and the purlieus of Clapham; and if he should assert that nothing now has character or conviction, that no farmer in England sleeps with an open coffin at his bedside to remind him of death, we could not retort effectually offhand. True, we like the country. Evelyn never looked at the sky.

But to return. After the Restoration Evelyn emerged in full possession of a variety of accomplishments which in our time of specialists seems remarkable enough. He was employed on public business; he was Secretary to the Royal Society; he wrote plays and poems; he was the first authority upon trees and gardens in England; he submitted a design for the rebuilding of London; he went into the question of smoke and its abatement—the lime trees in St. James’s Park being, it is said, the result of his cogitations; he was commissioned to write a history of the Dutch war—in short, he completely outdid the Squire of “The Princess”, whom in many respects he anticipated—

A lord of fat prize-oxen and of sheep,

A raiser of huge melons and of pine,

A patron of some thirty charities,

A pamphleteer on guano and on grain,

A quarter-sessions chairman abler none.

All that he was, and shared with Sir Walter another characteristic which Tennyson does not mention. He was, we cannot help suspecting, something of a bore, a little censorious, a little patronising, a little too sure of his own merits, and a little obtuse to those of other people. Or what is the quality, or absence of quality, that checks our sympathies? Partly, perhaps, it is due to some inconsistency which it would be harsh to call by so strong a name as hypocrisy. Though he deplored the vices of his age he could never keep away from the centre of them. “The luxurious dallying and profaneness” of the Court, the sight of “Mrs. Nelly” looking over her garden wall and holding “very familiar discourse” with King Charles on the green walk below, caused him acute disgust; yet he could never decide to break with the Court and retire to “my poor but quiet villa”, which was of course the apple of his eye and one of the show-places in England. Then, though he loved his daughter Mary, his grief at her death did not prevent him from counting the number of empty coaches drawn by six horses apiece that attended her funeral. His women friends combined virtue with beauty to such an extent that we can hardly credit them with wit into the bargain. Poor Mrs. Godolphin at least, whom he celebrated in a sincere and touching biography, “loved to be at funerals” and chose habitually “the dryest and leanest morsels of meat”, which may be the habits of an angel but do not present her friendship with Evelyn in an alluring light. But it is Pepys who sums up our case against Evelyn; Pepys who said of him after a long morning’s entertainment: “In fine a most excellent person he is and must be allowed a little for a little conceitedness; but he may well be so, being a man so much above others”. The words exactly hit the mark, “A most excellent person he was”; but a little conceited.

Pepys it is who prompts us to another reflection, inevitable, unnecessary, perhaps unkind. Evelyn was no genius. His writing is opaque rather than transparent; we see no depths through it, nor any very secret movements of mind or heart. He can neither make us hate a regicide nor love Mrs. Godolphin beyond reason. But he writes a diary; and he writes it supremely well. Even as we drowse, somehow or other the bygone gentleman sets up, through three centuries, a perceptible tingle of communication, so that without laying stress on anything in particular, stopping to dream, stopping to laugh, stopping merely to look, we are yet taking notice all the time. His garden, for example—how delightful is his disparagement of it, and how acid his criticism of the gardens of others. Then, we may be sure, the hens at Sayes Court laid the very best eggs in England; and when the Tsar drove a wheelbarrow through his hedge, what a catastrophe it was; and we can guess how Mrs. Evelyn dusted and polished; and how Evelyn himself grumbled; and how punctilious and efficient and trustworthy he was; how ready to give advice; how ready to read his own works aloud; and how affectionate, withal, lamenting bitterly, but not effusively—for the man with the long-drawn sensitive face was never that—the death of the little prodigy Richard, and recording how “after evening prayers was my child buried near the rest of his brothers—my very dear children”. He was not an artist; no phrases linger in the mind; no paragraphs build themselves up in memory; but as an artistic method this of going on with the day’s story circumstantially, bringing in people who will never be mentioned again, leading up to crises which never take place, introducing Sir Thomas Browne but never letting him speak, has its fascination. All through his pages good men, bad men, celebrities, nonentities are coming into the room and going out again. The greater number we scarcely notice; the door shuts upon them and they disappear. But now and again the sight of a vanishing coat-tail suggests more than a whole figure sitting still in a full light. Perhaps it is that we catch them unawares. Little they think that for three hundred years and more they will be looked at in the act of jumping a gate, or observing, like the old Marquis of Argyle, that the turtle doves in the aviary are owls. Our eyes wander from one to the other; our affections settle here or there—on hot-tempered Captain Wray, for instance, who was choleric, had a dog that killed a goat, was for shooting the goat’s owner, was for shooting his horse when it fell down a precipice; on M. Saladine; on M. Saladine’s daughter; on Captain Wray lingering at Geneva to make love to M. Saladine’s daughter; on Evelyn himself most of all, grown old, walking in his garden at Wotton, his sorrows smoothed out, his grandson doing him credit, the Latin quotations falling pat from his lips, his trees flourishing, and the butterflies flying and flaunting on his dahlias too.

[Written in 1920]

[]

Defoe.

The fear which attacks the recorder of centenaries lest he should find himself measuring a diminishing spectre and forced to foretell its approaching dissolution is not only absent in the case of Robinson Crusoe but the mere thought of it is ridiculous. It may be true that Robinson Crusoe is two hundred years of age upon the twenty-fifth of April 1919, but far from raising the familiar speculations as to whether people now read it and will continue to read it, the effect of the bi-centenary is to make us marvel that Robinson Crusoe, the perennial and immortal, should have been in existence so short a time as that. The book resembles one of the anonymous productions of the race rather than the effort of a single mind; and as for celebrating its centenary we should as soon think of celebrating the centenaries of Stonehenge itself. Something of this we may attribute to the fact that we have all had Robinson Crusoe read aloud to us as children, and were thus much in the same state of mind towards Defoe and his story that the Greeks were in towards Homer. It never occurred to us that there was such a person as Defoe, and to have been told that Robinson Crusoe was the work of a man with a pen in his hand would either have disturbed us unpleasantly or meant nothing at all. The impressions of childhood are those that last longest and cut deepest. It still seems that the name of Daniel Defoe has no right to appear upon the title-page of Robinson Crusoe, and if we celebrate the bi-centenary of the book we are making a slightly unnecessary allusion to the fact that, like Stonehenge, it is still in existence.

The great fame of the book has done its author some injustice; for while it has given him a kind of anonymous glory it has obscured the fact that he was a writer of other works which, it is safe to assert, were not read aloud to us as children. Thus when the Editor of the Christian World in the year 1870 appealed to “the boys and girls of England” to erect a monument upon the grave of Defoe, which a stroke of lightning had mutilated, the marble was inscribed to the memory of the author of Robinson Crusoe. No mention was made of Moll Flanders. Considering the topics which are dealt with in that book, and in Roxana, Captain Singleton, Colonel Jack and the rest, we need not be surprised, though we may be indignant, at the omission. We may agree with Mr. Wright, the biographer of Defoe, that these “are not works for the drawing-room table”. But unless we consent to make that useful piece of furniture the final arbiter of taste, we must deplore the fact that their superficial coarseness, or the universal celebrity of Robinson Crusoe, has led them to be far less widely famed than they deserve. On any monument worthy of the name of monument the names of Moll Flanders and Roxana, at least, should be carved as deeply as the name of Defoe. They stand among the few English novels which we can call indisputably great. The occasion of the bicentenary of their more famous companion may well lead us to consider in what their greatness, which has so much in common with his, may be found to consist.

Defoe was an elderly man when he turned novelist, many years the predecessor of Richardson and Fielding, and one of the first indeed to shape the novel and launch it on its way. But it is unnecessary to labour the fact of his precedence, except that he came to his novel-writing with certain conceptions about the art which he derived partly from being himself one of the first to practise it. The novel had to justify its existence by telling a true story and preaching a sound moral. “This supplying a story by invention is certainly a most scandalous crime”, he wrote. “It is a sort of lying that makes a great hole in the heart, in which by degrees a habit of lying enters in.” Either in the preface or in the text of each of his works, therefore, he takes pains to insist that he has not used his invention at all but has depended upon facts, and that his purpose has been the highly moral desire to convert the vicious or to warn the innocent. Happily these were principles that tallied very well with his natural disposition and endowments. Facts had been drilled into him by sixty years of varying fortunes before he turned his experience to account in fiction. “I have some time ago summed up the Scenes of my life in this distich,” he wrote:

No man has tasted differing fortunes more,

And thirteen times I have been rich and poor.

He had spent eighteen months in Newgate and talked with thieves, pirates, highwaymen, and coiners before he wrote the history of Moll Flanders. But to have facts thrust upon you by dint of living and accident is one thing; to swallow them voraciously and retain the imprint of them indelibly, is another. It is not merely that Defoe knew the stress of poverty and had talked with the victims of it, but that the unsheltered life, exposed to circumstances and forced to shift for itself, appealed to him imaginatively as the right matter for his art. In the first pages of each of his great novels he reduces his hero or heroine to such a state of unfriended misery that their existence must be a continued struggle, and their survival at all the result of luck and their own exertions. Moll Flanders was born in Newgate of a criminal mother; Captain Singleton was stolen as a child and sold to the gipsies; Colonel Jack, though “born a gentleman, was put ’prentice to a pickpocket”; Roxana starts under better auspices, but, having married at fifteen, she sees her husband go bankrupt and is left with five children in “a condition the most deplorable that words can express”.

Thus each of these boys and girls has the world to begin and the battle to fight for himself. The situation thus created was entirely to Defoe’s liking. From her very birth or with half a year’s respite at most, Moll Flanders, the most notable of them, is goaded by “that worst of devils, poverty”, forced to earn her living as soon as she can sew, driven from place to place, making no demands upon her creator for the subtle domestic atmosphere which he was unable to supply, but drawing upon him for all he knew of strange people and customs. From the outset the burden of proving her right to exist is laid upon her. She has to depend entirely upon her own wits and judgement, and to deal with each emergency as it arises by a rule-of-thumb morality which she has forged in her own head. The briskness of the story is due partly to the fact that having transgressed the accepted laws at a very early age she has henceforth the freedom of the outcast. The one impossible event is that she should settle down in comfort and security. But from the first the peculiar genius of the author asserts itself, and avoids the obvious danger of the novel of adventure. He makes us understand that Moll Flanders was a woman on her own account and not only material for a succession of adventures. In proof of this she begins, as Roxana also begins, by falling passionately, if unfortunately, in love. That she must rouse herself and marry some one else and look very closely to her settlements and prospects is no slight upon her passion, but to be laid to the charge of her birth; and, like all Defoe’s women, she is a person of robust understanding. Since she makes no scruple of telling lies when they serve her purpose, there is something undeniable about her truth when she speaks it. She has no time to waste upon the refinements of personal affection; one tear is dropped, one moment of despair allowed, and then “on with the story”. She has a spirit that loves to breast the storm. She delights in the exercise of her own powers. When she discovers that the man she has married in Virginia is her own brother she is violently disgusted; she insists upon leaving him; but as soon as she sets foot in Bristol, “I took the diversion of going to Bath, for as I was still far from being old so my humour, which was always gay, continued so to an extreme”. Heartless she is not, nor can any one charge her with levity; but life delights her, and a heroine who lives has us all in tow. Moreover, her ambition has that slight strain of imagination in it which puts it in the category of the noble passions. Shrewd and practical of necessity, she is yet haunted by a desire for romance and for the quality which to her perception makes a man a gentleman. “It was really a true gallant spirit he was of, and it was the more grievous to me. ’Tis something of relief even to be undone by a man of honour rather than by a scoundrel”, she writes when she had misled a highwayman as to the extent of her fortune. It is in keeping with this temper that she should be proud of her final partner because he refuses to work when they reach the plantations but prefers hunting, and that she should take pleasure in buying him wigs and silver-hilted swords “to make him appear, as he really was, a very fine gentleman”. Her very love of hot weather is in keeping, and the passion with which she kissed the ground that her son had trod on, and her noble tolerance of every kind of fault so long as it is not “complete baseness of spirit, imperious, cruel, and relentless when uppermost, abject and low-spirited when down”. For the rest of the world she has nothing but good-will.

Since the list of the qualities and graces of this seasoned old sinner is by no means exhausted we can well understand how it was that Borrow’s apple-woman on London Bridge called her “blessed Mary” and valued her book above all the apples on her stall; and that Borrow, taking the book deep into the booth, read till his eyes ached. But we dwell upon such signs of character only by way of proof that the creator of Moll Flanders was not, as he has been accused of being, a mere journalist and literal recorder of facts with no conception of the nature of psychology. It is true that his characters take shape and substance of their own accord, as if in despite of the author and not altogether to his liking. He never lingers or stresses any point of subtlety or pathos, but presses on imperturbably as if they came there without his knowledge. A touch of imagination, such as that when the Prince sits by his son’s cradle and Roxana observes how “he loved to look at it when it was asleep”, seems to mean much more to us than to him. After the curiously modern dissertation upon the need of communicating matters of importance to a second person lest, like the thief in Newgate, we should talk of it in our sleep, he apologises for his digression. He seems to have taken his characters so deeply into his mind that he lived them without exactly knowing how; and, like all unconscious artists, he leaves more gold in his work than his own generation was able to bring to the surface.

The interpretation that we put on his characters might therefore well have puzzled him. We find for ourselves meanings which he was careful to disguise even from his own eye. Thus it comes about that we admire Moll Flanders far more than we blame her. Nor can we believe that Defoe had made up his mind as to the precise degree of her guilt, or was unaware that in considering the lives of the abandoned he raised many deep questions and hinted, if he did not state, answers quite at variance with his professions of belief. From the evidence supplied by his essay upon the “Education of Women” we know that he had thought deeply and much in advance of his age upon the capacities of women, which he rated very high, and the injustice done to them, which he rated very harsh.

I have often thought of it as one of the most barbarous customs in the world, considering us as a civilised and a Christian country, that we deny the advantages of learning to women. We reproach the sex every day with folly and impertinence; which I am confident, had they the advantages of education equal to us, they would be guilty of less than ourselves.

The advocates of women’s rights would hardly care, perhaps, to claim Moll Flanders and Roxana among their patron saints; and yet it is clear that Defoe not only intended them to speak some very modern doctrines upon the subject, but placed them in circumstances where their peculiar hardships are displayed in such a way as to elicit our sympathy. Courage, said Moll Flanders, was what women needed, and the power to “stand their ground”; and at once gave practical demonstration of the benefits that would result. Roxana, a lady of the same profession, argues more subtly against the slavery of marriage. She “had started a new thing in the world” the merchant told her; “it was a way of arguing contrary to the general practise”. But Defoe is the last writer to be guilty of bald preaching. Roxana keeps our attention because she is blessedly unconscious that she is in any good sense an example to her sex and is thus at liberty to own that part of her argument is “of an elevated strain which was really not in my thoughts at first, at all”. The knowledge of her own frailties and the honest questioning of her own motives, which that knowledge begets, have the happy result of keeping her fresh and human when the martyrs and pioneers of so many problem novels have shrunken and shrivelled to the pegs and props of their respective creeds.

But the claim of Defoe upon our admiration does not rest upon the fact that he can be shown to have anticipated some of the views of Meredith, or to have written scenes which (the odd suggestion occurs) might have been turned into plays by Ibsen. Whatever his ideas upon the position of women, they are an incidental result of his chief virtue, which is that he deals with the important and lasting side of things and not with the passing and trivial. He is often dull. He can imitate the matter-of-fact precision of a scientific traveller until we wonder that his pen could trace or his brain conceive what has not even the excuse of truth to soften its dryness. He leaves out the whole of vegetable nature, and a large part of human nature. All this we may admit, though we have to admit defects as grave in many writers whom we call great. But that does not impair the peculiar merit of what remains. Having at the outset limited his scope and confined his ambitions he achieves a truth of insight which is far rarer and more enduring than the truth of fact which he professed to make his aim. Moll Flanders and her friends recommended themselves to him not because they were, as we should say, “picturesque”; nor, as he affirmed, because they were examples of evil living by which the public might profit. It was their natural veracity, bred in them by a life of hardship, that excited his interest. For them there were no excuses; no kindly shelter obscured their motives. Poverty was their taskmaster. Defoe did not pronounce more than a judgement of the lips upon their failings. But their courage and resource and tenacity delighted him. He found their society full of good talk, and pleasant stories, and faith in each other, and morality of a home-made kind. Their fortunes had that infinite variety which he praised and relished and beheld with wonder in his own life. These men and women, above all, were free to talk openly of the passions and desires which have moved men and women since the beginning of time, and thus even now they keep their vitality undiminished. There is a dignity in everything that is looked at openly. Even the sordid subject of money, which plays so large a part in their histories, becomes not sordid but tragic when it stands not for ease and consequence but for honour, honesty, and life itself. You may object that Defoe is humdrum, but never that he is engrossed with petty things.

He belongs, indeed, to the school of the great plain writers, whose work is founded upon a knowledge of what is most persistent, though not most seductive, in human nature. The view of London from Hungerford Bridge, grey, serious, massive, and full of the subdued stir of traffic and business, prosaic if it were not for the masts of the ships and the towers and domes of the city, brings him to mind. The tattered girls with violets in their hands at the street corners, and the old weather-beaten women patiently displaying their matches and bootlaces beneath the shelter of arches, seem like characters from his books. He is of the school of Crabbe and of Gissing, and not merely a fellow-pupil in the same stern place of learning, but its founder and master.

[Written in 1919]

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Addison.

In July, 1843, Lord Macaulay pronounced the opinion that Joseph Addison had enriched our literature with compositions “that will live as long as the English language”. But when Lord Macaulay pronounced an opinion it was not merely an opinion. Even now, at a distance of seventy-six years, the words seem to issue from the mouth of the chosen representative of the people. There is an authority about them, a sonority, a sense of responsibility, which put us in mind of a Prime Minister making a proclamation on behalf of a great empire rather than of a journalist writing about a deceased man of letters for a magazine. The article upon Addison is, indeed, one of the most vigorous of the famous essays. Florid, and at the same time extremely solid, the phrases seem to build up a monument, at once square and lavishly festooned with ornament, which should serve Addison for shelter so long as one stone of Westminster Abbey stands upon another. Yet, though we may have read and admired this particular essay times out of number (as we say when we have read anything three times over), it has never occurred to us, strangely enough, to believe that it is true. That is apt to happen to the admiring reader of Macaulay’s essays. While delighting in their richness, force, and variety, and finding every judgement, however emphatic, proper in its place, it seldom occurs to us to connect these sweeping assertions and undeniable convictions with anything so minute as a human being. So it is with Addison. “If we wish”, Macaulay writes, “to find anything more vivid than Addison’s best portraits, we must go either to Shakespeare or to Cervantes”. “We have not the least doubt that if Addison had written a novel on an extensive plan it would have been superior to any that we possess.” His essays, again, “fully entitle him to the rank of a great poet”; and, to complete the edifice, we have Voltaire proclaimed “the prince of buffoons”, and together with Swift forced to stoop so low that Addison takes rank above them both as a humorist.

Examined separately, such flourishes of ornament look grotesque enough, but in their place—such is the persuasive power of design—they are part of the decoration; they complete the monument. Whether Addison or another is interred within, it is a very fine tomb. But now that two centuries have passed since the real body of Addison was laid by night under the Abbey floor, we are, through no merit of our own, partially qualified to test the first of the flourishes on that fictitious tombstone to which, though it may be empty, we have done homage, in a formal kind of way, these sixty-seven years. The compositions of Addison will live as long as the English language. Since every moment brings proof that our mother tongue is more lusty and lively than sorts with complete sedateness or chastity, we need only concern ourselves with the vitality of Addison. Neither lusty nor lively is the adjective we should apply to the present condition of the Tatler and the Spectator. To take a rough test, it is possible to discover how many people in the course of a year borrow Addison’s works from the public library, and a particular instance affords us the not very encouraging information that during nine years two people yearly take out the first volume of the Spectator. The second volume is less in request than the first. The inquiry is not a cheerful one. From certain marginal comments and pencil marks it seems that these rare devotees seek out only the famous passages and, as their habit is, score what we are bold enough to consider the least admirable phrases. No; if Addison lives at all, it is not in the public libraries. It is in libraries that are markedly private, secluded, shaded by lilac trees and brown with folios, that he still draws his faint, regular breath. If any man or woman is going to solace himself with a page of Addison before the June sun is out of the sky to-day, it is in some such pleasant retreat as this.

Yet all over England at intervals, perhaps wide ones, we may be sure that there are people engaged in reading Addison, whatever the year or season. For Addison is very well worth reading. The temptation to read Pope on Addison, Macaulay on Addison, Thackeray on Addison, Johnson on Addison rather than Addison himself is to be resisted, for you will find, if you study the Tatler and the Spectator, glance at Cato, and run through the remainder of the six moderate-sized volumes, that Addison is neither Pope’s Addison nor anybody else’s Addison, but a separate, independent individual still capable of casting a clear-cut shape of himself upon the consciousness, turbulent and distracted as it is, of nineteen hundred and nineteen. It is true that the fate of the lesser shades is always a little precarious. They are so easily obscured or distorted. It seems so often scarcely worth while to go through the cherishing and humanising process which is necessary to get into touch with a writer of the second class who may, after all, have little to give us. The earth is crusted over them; their features are obliterated, and perhaps it is not a head of the best period that we rub clean in the end, but only the chip of an old pot. The chief difficulty with the lesser writers, however, is not only the effort. It is that our standards have changed. The things that they like are not the things that we like; and as the charm of their writing depends much more upon taste than upon conviction, a change of manners is often quite enough to put us out of touch altogether. That is one of the most troublesome barriers between ourselves and Addison. He attached great importance to certain qualities. He had a very precise notion of what we are used to call “niceness” in man or woman. He was extremely fond of saying that men ought not to be atheists, and that women ought not to wear large petticoats. This directly inspires in us not so much a sense of distaste as a sense of difference. Dutifully, if at all, we strain our imaginations to conceive the kind of audience to whom these precepts were addressed. The Tatler was published in 1709; the Spectator a year or two later. What was the state of England at that particular moment? Why was Addison so anxious to insist upon the necessity of a decent and cheerful religious belief? Why did he so constantly, and in the main kindly, lay stress upon the foibles of women and their reform? Why was he so deeply impressed with the evils of party government? Any historian will explain; but it is always a misfortune to have to call in the services of any historian. A writer should give us direct certainty; explanations are so much water poured into the wine. As it is, we can only feel that these counsels are addressed to ladies in hoops and gentlemen in wigs—a vanished audience which has learnt its lesson and gone its way and the preacher with it. We can only smile and marvel and perhaps admire the clothes.

And that is not the way to read. To be thinking that dead people deserved these censures and admired this morality, judged the eloquence, which we find so frigid, sublime, the philosophy to us so superficial, profound, to take a collector’s joy in such signs of antiquity, is to treat literature as if it were a broken jar of undeniable age but doubtful beauty, to be stood in a cabinet behind glass doors. The charm which still makes Cato very readable is much of this nature. When Syphax exclaims,

So, where our wide Numidian wastes extend,

Sudden, th’impetuous hurricanes descend,

Wheel through the air, in circling eddies play,

Tear up the sands, and sweep whole plains away.

The helpless traveller, with wild surprise,

Sees the dry desert all around him rise,

And smother’d in the dusty whirlwind dies,

we cannot help imagining the thrill in the crowded theatre, the feathers nodding emphatically on the ladies’ heads, the gentlemen leaning forward to tap their canes, and every one exclaiming to his neighbour how vastly fine it is and crying “Bravo!” But how can we be excited? And so with Bishop Hurd and his notes—his “finely observed”, his “wonderfully exact, both in the sentiment and expression”, his serene confidence that when “the present humour of idolising Shakespeare is over”, the time will come when Cato is “supremely admired by all candid and judicious critics”. This is all very amusing and productive of pleasant fancies, both as to the faded frippery of our ancestors’ minds and the bold opulence of our own. But it is not the intercourse of equals, let alone that other kind of intercourse, which as it makes us contemporary with the author, persuades us that his object is our own. Occasionally in Cato one may pick up a few lines that are not obsolete; but for the most part the tragedy which Dr. Johnson thought “unquestionably the noblest production of Addison’s genius” has become collector’s literature.

Perhaps most readers approach the essays also with some suspicion as to the need of condescension in their minds. The question to be asked is whether Addison, attached as he was to certain standards of gentility, morality, and taste, has not become one of those people of exemplary character and charming urbanity who must never be talked to about anything more exciting than the weather. We have some slight suspicion that the Spectator and the Tatler are nothing but talk, couched in perfect English, about the number of fine days this year compared with the number of wet the year before. The difficulty of getting on to equal terms with him is shown by the little fable which he introduces into one of the early numbers of the Tatler, of “a young gentleman, of moderate understanding, but great vivacity, who … had got a little smattering of knowledge, just enough to make an atheist or a freethinker, but not a philosopher, or a man of sense”. This young gentleman visits his father in the country, and proceeds “to enlarge the narrowness of the country notions; in which he succeeded so well, that he had seduced the butler by his table-talk, and staggered his eldest sister…. ’Till one day, talking of his setting dog … said ‘he did not question but Tray was as immortal as any one of the family’; and in the heat of the argument told his father, that for his own part, ‘he expected to die like a dog’. Upon which, the old man, starting up in a very great passion, cried out, ‘Then, sirrah, you shall live like one’; and taking his cane in his hand, cudgelled him out of his system. This had so good an effect upon him, that he took up from that day, fell to reading good books, and is now a bencher in the Middle-Temple”. There is a good deal of Addison in that story: his dislike of “dark and uncomfortable prospects”; his respect for “principles which are the support, happiness, and glory of all public societies, as well as private persons”; his solicitude for the butler; and his conviction that to read good books and become a bencher in the Middle-Temple is the proper end for a very vivacious young gentleman. This Mr. Addison married a countess, “gave his little senate laws”, and, sending for young Lord Warwick, made that famous remark about seeing how a Christian can die which has fallen upon such evil days that our sympathies are with the foolish, and perhaps fuddled, young peer rather than with the frigid gentleman, not too far gone for a last spasm of self-complacency, upon the bed.

Let us rub off such incrustations, so far as they are due to the corrosion of Pope’s wit or the deposit of mid-Victorian lachrymosity, and see what, for us in our time, remains. In the first place, there remains the not despicable virtue, after two centuries of existence, of being readable. Addison can fairly lay claim to that; and then, slipped in on the tide of the smooth, well-turned prose, are little eddies, diminutive waterfalls, agreeably diversifying the polished surface. We begin to take note of whims, fancies, peculiarities on the part of the essayist which light up the prim, impeccable countenance of the moralist and convince us that, however tightly he may have pursed his lips, his eyes are very bright and not so shallow after all. He is alert to his finger-tips. Little muffs, silver garters, fringed gloves draw his attention; he observes with a keen, quick glance, not unkindly, and full rather of amusement than of censure. To be sure, the age was rich in follies. Here were coffee-houses packed with politicians talking of Kings and Emperors and letting their own small affairs go to ruin. Crowds applauded the Italian opera every night without understanding a word of it. Critics discoursed of the unities. Men gave a thousand pounds for a handful of tulip roots. As for women—or “the fair sex”, as Addison liked to call them—their follies were past counting. He did his best to count them, with a loving particularity which roused the ill-humour of Swift. But he did it very charmingly, with a natural relish for the task, as the following passage shows:

I consider woman as a beautiful romantic animal, that may be adorned with furs and feathers, pearls and diamonds, ores and silks. The lynx shall cast its skin at her feet to make her a tippet; the peacock, parrot, and swan, shall pay contributions to her muff; the sea shall be searched for shells, and the rocks for gems; and every part of nature furnish out its share towards the embellishment of a creature that is the most consummate work of it. All this I shall indulge them in; but as for the petticoat I have been speaking of, I neither can nor will allow it.

In all these matters Addison was on the side of sense and taste and civilisation. Of that little fraternity, often so obscure and yet so indispensable, who in every age keep themselves alive to the importance of art and letters and music, watching, discriminating, denouncing and delighting, Addison was one—distinguished and strangely contemporary with ourselves. It would have been, so one imagines, a great pleasure to take him a manuscript; a great enlightenment, as well as a great honour, to have his opinion. In spite of Pope, one fancies that his would have been criticism of the best order, open-minded and generous to novelty, and yet, in the final resort, unfaltering in its standards. The boldness which is a proof of vigour is shown by his defence of “Chevy Chase”. He had so clear a notion of what he meant by the “very spirit and soul of fine writing” as to track it down in an old barbarous ballad or rediscover it in “that divine work” “Paradise Lost”. Moreover, far from being a connoisseur only of the still, settled beauties of the dead, he was aware of the present; a severe critic of its “Gothic taste”, vigilant in protecting the rights and honours of the language, and all in favour of simplicity and quiet. Here we have the Addison of Will’s and Button’s, who, sitting late into the night and drinking more than was good for him, gradually overcame his taciturnity and began to talk. Then he “chained the attention of every one to him”. “Addison’s conversation”, said Pope, “had something in it more charming than I have found in any other man.” One can well believe it, for his essays at their best preserve the very cadence of easy yet exquisitely modulated conversation—the smile checked before it has broadened into laughter, the thought lightly turned from frivolity or abstraction, the ideas springing, bright, new, various, with the utmost spontaneity. He seems to speak what comes into his head, and is never at the trouble of raising his voice. But he has described himself in the character of the lute better than any one can do it for him.

The lute is a character directly opposite to the drum, that sounds very finely by itself, or in a very small concert. Its notes are exquisitely sweet, and very low, easily drowned in a multitude of instruments, and even lost among a few, unless you give a particular attention to it. A lute is seldom heard in a company of more than five, whereas a drum will show itself to advantage in an assembly of 500. The lutanists, therefore, are men of a fine genius, uncommon reflection, great affability, and esteemed chiefly by persons of a good taste, who are the only proper judges of so delightful and soft a melody.

Addison was a lutanist. No praise, indeed, could be less appropriate than Lord Macaulay’s. To call Addison on the strength of his essays a great poet, or to prophesy that if he had written a novel on an extensive plan it would have been “superior to any that we possess”, is to confuse him with the drums and trumpets; it is not merely to overpraise his merits, but to overlook them. Dr. Johnson superbly, and, as his manner is, once and for all has summed up the quality of Addison’s poetic genius:

His poetry is first to be considered; of which it must be confessed that it has not often those felicities of diction which give lustre to sentiments, or that vigour of sentiment that animates diction; there is little of ardour, vehemence, or transport; there is very rarely the awfulness of grandeur, and not very often the splendour of elegance. He thinks justly; but he thinks faintly.

The Sir Roger de Coverley papers are those which have the most resemblance, on the surface, to a novel. But their merit consists in the fact that they do not adumbrate, or initiate, or anticipate anything; they exist, perfect, complete, entire in themselves. To read them as if they were a first hesitating experiment containing the seed of greatness to come is to miss the peculiar point of them. They are studies done from the outside by a quiet spectator. When read together they compose a portrait of the Squire and his circle all in characteristic positions—one with his rod, another with his hounds—but each can be detached from the rest without damage to the design or harm to himself. In a novel, where each chapter gains from the one before it or adds to the one that follows it, such separations would be intolerable. The speed, the intricacy, the design, would be mutilated. These particular qualities are perhaps lacking, but nevertheless Addison’s method has great advantages. Each of these essays is very highly finished. The characters are defined by a succession of extremely neat, clean strokes. Inevitably, where the sphere is so narrow—an essay is only three or four pages in length—there is not room for great depth or intricate subtlety. Here, from the Spectator, is a good example of the witty and decisive manner in which Addison strikes out a portrait to fill the little frame:

Sombrius is one of these sons of sorrow. He thinks himself obliged in duty to be sad and disconsolate. He looks on a sudden fit of laughter as a breach of his baptismal vow. An innocent jest startles him like blasphemy. Tell him of one who is advanced to a title of honour, he lifts up his hands and eyes; describe a public ceremony, he shakes his head; shew him a gay equipage, he blesses himself. All the little ornaments of life are pomps and vanities. Mirth is wanton, and wit profane. He is scandalized at youth for being lively, and at childhood for being playful. He sits at a christening, or at a marriage-feast, as at a funeral; sighs at the conclusion of a merry story, and grows devout when the rest of the company grow pleasant. After all Sombrius is a religious man, and would have behaved himself very properly, had he lived when Christianity was under a general persecution.

The novel is not a development from that model, for the good reason that no development along these lines is possible. Of its kind such a portrait is perfect; and when we find, scattered up and down the Spectator and the Tatler, numbers of such little masterpieces with fancies and anecdotes in the same style, some doubt as to the narrowness of such a sphere becomes inevitable. The form of the essay admits of its own particular perfection; and if anything is perfect the exact dimensions of its perfection become immaterial. One can scarcely settle whether, on the whole, one prefers a raindrop to the River Thames. When we have said all that we can say against them—that many are dull, others superficial, the allegories faded, the piety conventional, the morality trite—there still remains the fact that the essays of Addison are perfect essays. Always at the highest point of any art there comes a moment when everything seems in a conspiracy to help the artist, and his achievement becomes a natural felicity on his part of which he seems, to a later age, half-unconscious. So Addison, writing day after day, essay after essay, knew instinctively and exactly how to do it. Whether it was a high thing, or whether it was a low thing, whether an epic is more profound or a lyric more passionate, undoubtedly it is due to Addison that prose is now prosaic—the medium which makes it possible for people of ordinary intelligence to communicate their ideas to the world. Addison is the respectable ancestor of an innumerable progeny. Pick up the first weekly journal and the article upon the “Delights of Summer” or the “Approach of Age” will show his influence. But it will also show, unless the name of Mr. Max Beerbohm, our solitary essayist, is attached to it, that we have lost the art of writing essays. What with our views and our virtues, our passions and profundities, the shapely silver drop, that held the sky in it and so many bright little visions of human life, is now nothing but a hold-all knobbed with luggage packed in a hurry. Even so, the essayist will make an effort, perhaps without knowing it, to write like Addison.

In his temperate and reasonable way Addison more than once amused himself with speculations as to the fate of his writings. He had a just idea of their nature and value. “I have new-pointed all the batteries of ridicule”, he wrote. Yet, because so many of his darts had been directed against ephemeral follies, “absurd fashions, ridiculous customs, and affected forms of speech”, the time would come, in a hundred years, perhaps, when his essays, he thought, would be “like so many pieces of old plate, where the weight will be regarded, but the fashion lost”. Two hundred years have passed; the plate is worn smooth; the pattern almost rubbed out; but the metal is pure silver.

[Written in 1919]

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The Lives of the Obscure.

Five shillings, perhaps, will secure a life subscription to this faded, out-of-date, obsolete library, which, with a little help from the rates, is chiefly subsidised from the shelves of clergymen’s widows, and country gentlemen inheriting more books than their wives like to dust. In the middle of the wide airy room, with windows that look to the sea and let in the shouts of men crying pilchards for sale on the cobbled street below, a row of vases stands, in which specimens of the local flowers droop, each with its name inscribed beneath. The elderly, the marooned, the bored, drift from newspaper to newspaper, or sit holding their heads over back numbers of The Illustrated London News and the Wesleyan Chronicle. No one has spoken aloud here since the room was opened in 1854. The obscure sleep on the walls, slouching against each other as if they were too drowsy to stand upright. Their backs are flaking off; their titles often vanished. Why disturb their sleep? Why reopen those peaceful graves, the librarian seems to ask, peering over his spectacles, and resenting the duty, which indeed has become laborious, of retrieving from among those nameless tombstones Nos. 1763, 1080, and 606.

I

For one likes romantically to feel oneself a deliverer advancing with lights across the waste of years to the rescue of some stranded ghost—a Mrs. Pilkington, a Rev. Henry Elman, a Mrs. Ann Gilbert—waiting, appealing, forgotten, in the growing gloom. Possibly they hear one coming. They shuffle, they preen, they bridle. Old secrets well up to their lips. The divine relief of communication will soon again be theirs. The dust shifts and Mrs. Gilbert—but the contact with life is instantly salutary. Whatever Mrs. Gilbert may be doing, she is not thinking about us. Far from it. Colchester, about the year 1800, was for the young Taylors, as Kensington had been for their mother, “a very Elysium”. There were the Strutts, the Hills, the Stapletons; there was poetry, philosophy, engraving. For the young Taylors were brought up to work hard, and if, after a long day’s toil upon their father’s pictures, they slipped round to dine with the Strutts, they had a right to their pleasure. Already they had won prizes in Darton and Harvey’s pocket-book. One of the Strutts knew James Montgomery, and there was talk, at those gay parties, with the Moorish decorations and all the cats—for old Ben Strutt was a bit of a character: did not communicate; would not let his daughters eat meat, so no wonder they died of consumption—there was talk of printing a joint volume to be called The Associate Minstrels, to which James, if not Robert himself, might contribute. The Stapletons were poetical, too. Moira and Bithia would wander over the old town wall at Balkerne Hill reading poetry by moonlight. Perhaps there was a little too much poetry in Colchester in 1800. Looking back in the middle of a prosperous and vigorous life, Ann had to lament many broken careers, much unfulfilled promise. The Stapletons died young, perverted, miserable; Jacob, with his “dark, scorn-speaking countenance”, who had vowed that he would spend the night looking for Ann’s lost bracelet in the street, disappeared, “and I last heard of him vegetating among the ruins of Rome—himself too much a ruin”; as for the Hills, their fate was worst of all. To submit to public baptism was flighty, but to marry Captain M.! Anybody could have warned pretty Fanny Hill against Captain M. Yet off she drove with him in his fine phaeton. For years nothing more was heard of her. Then one night, when the Taylors had moved to Ongar and old Mr. and Mrs. Taylor were sitting over the fire, thinking how, as it was nine o’clock, and the moon was full, they ought, according to their promise, to look at it and think of their absent children, there came a knock at the door. Mrs. Taylor went down to open it. But who was this sad, shabby-looking woman outside? “Oh, don’t you remember the Strutts and the Stapletons, and how you warned me against Captain M.?” cried Fanny Hill, for it was Fanny Hill—poor Fanny Hill, all worn and sunk; poor Fanny Hill, that used to be so sprightly. She was living in a lone house not far from the Taylors, forced to drudge for her husband’s mistress, for Captain M. had wasted all her fortune, ruined all her life.

Ann married Mr. G., of course—of course. The words toll persistently through these obscure volumes. For in the vast world to which the memoir writers admit us there is a solemn sense of something unescapable, of a wave gathering beneath the frail flotilla and carrying it on. One thinks of Colchester in 1800. Scribbling verses, reading Montgomery—so they begin; the Hills, the Stapletons, the Strutts disperse and disappear as one knew they would; but here, after long years, is Ann still scribbling, and at last here is the poet Montgomery himself in her very house, and she begging him to consecrate her child to poetry by just holding him in his arms, and he refusing (for he is a bachelor), but taking her for a walk, and they hear the thunder, and she thinks it the artillery, and he says in a voice which she will never, never forget: “Yes! The artillery of Heaven!” It is one of the attractions of the unknown, their multitude, their vastness; for, instead of keeping their identity separate, as remarkable people do, they seem to merge into one another, their very boards and title-pages and frontispieces dissolving, and their innumerable pages melting into continuous years so that we can lie back and look up into the fine mist-like substance of countless lives, and pass unhindered from century to century, from life to life. Scenes detach themselves. We watch groups. Here is young Mr. Elman talking to Miss Biffen at Brighton. She has neither arms nor legs; a footman carries her in and out. She teaches miniature painting to his sister. Then he is in the stage coach on the road to Oxford with Newman. Newman says nothing. Elman nevertheless reflects that he has known all the great men of his time. And so back and so forwards, he paces eternally the fields of Sussex until, grown to an extreme old age, there he sits in his Rectory thinking of Newman, thinking of Miss Biffen, and making—it is his great consolation—string bags for missionaries. And then? Go on looking. Nothing much happens. But the dim light is exquisitely refreshing to the eyes. Let us watch little Miss Frend trotting along the Strand with her father. They meet a man with very bright eyes. “Mr. Blake”, says Mr. Frend. It is Mrs. Dyer who pours out tea for them in Clifford’s Inn. Mr. Charles Lamb has just left the room. Mrs. Dyer says she married George because his washerwoman cheated him so. What do you think George paid for his shirts, she asks? Gently, beautifully, like the clouds of a balmy evening, obscurity once more traverses the sky, an obscurity which is not empty but thick with the star dust of innumerable lives. And suddenly there is a rift in it, and we see a wretched little packet-boat pitching off the Irish coast in the middle of the nineteenth century. There is an unmistakable air of 1840 about the tarpaulins and the hairy monsters in sou’westers lurching and spitting over the sloping decks, yet treating the solitary young woman who stands in shawl and poke bonnet gazing, gazing, not without kindness. No, no, no! She will not leave the deck. She will stand there till it is quite dark, thank you! “Her great love of the sea … drew this exemplary wife and mother every now and then irresistibly away from home. No one but her husband knew where she had gone, and her children learnt only later in life that on these occasions, when suddenly she disappeared for a few days, she was taking short sea voyages …” a crime which she expiated by months of work among the Midland poor. Then the craving would come upon her, would be confessed in private to her husband, and off she stole again—the mother of Sir George Newnes.

One would conclude that human beings were happy, endowed with such blindness to fate, so indefatigable an interest in their own activities, were it not for those sudden and astonishing apparitions staring in at us, all taut and pale in their determination never to be forgotten, men who have just missed fame, men who have passionately desired redress—men like Haydon, and Mark Pattison, and the Rev. Blanco White. And in the whole world there is probably but one person who looks up for a moment and tries to interpret the menacing face, the furious beckoning fist, before, in the multitude of human affairs, fragments of faces, echoes of voices, flying coat-tails, and bonnet strings disappearing down the shrubbery walks, one’s attention is distracted for ever. What is that enormous wheel, for example, careering downhill in Berkshire in the eighteenth century? It runs faster and faster; suddenly a youth jumps out from within; next moment it leaps over the edge of a chalk pit and is dashed to smithereens. This is Edgeworth’s doing—Richard Lovell Edgeworth, we mean, the portentous bore.

For that is the way he has come down to us in his two volumes of memoirs—Byron’s bore, Day’s friend, Maria’s father, the man who almost invented the telegraph, and did, in fact, invent machines for cutting turnips, climbing walls, contracting on narrow bridges and lifting their wheels over obstacles—a man meritorious, industrious, advanced, but still, as we investigate his memoirs, mainly a bore. Nature endowed him with irrepressible energy. The blood coursed through his veins at least twenty times faster than the normal rate. His face was red, round, vivacious. His brain raced. His tongue never stopped talking. He had married four wives and had nineteen children, including the novelist Maria. Moreover, he had known every one and done everything. His energy burst open the most secret doors and penetrated to the most private apartments. His wife’s grandmother, for instance, disappeared mysteriously every day. Edgeworth blundered in upon her and found her, with her white locks flowing and her eyes streaming, in prayer before a crucifix. She was a Roman Catholic then, but why a penitent? He found out somehow that her husband had been killed in a duel, and she had married the man who killed him. “The consolations of religion are fully equal to its terrors”, Dick Edgeworth reflected as he stumbled out again. Then there was the beautiful young woman in the castle among the forests of Dauphiny. Half paralysed, unable to speak above a whisper, there she lay when Edgeworth broke in and found her reading. Tapestries flapped on the castle walls; fifty thousand bats—“odious animals whose stench is uncommonly noisome”—hung in clusters in the caves beneath. None of the inhabitants understood a word she said. But to the Englishman she talked for hour after hour about books and politics and religion. He listened; no doubt he talked. He sat dumbfounded. But what could one do for her? Alas, one must leave her lying among the tusks, and the old men, and the cross-bows, reading, reading, reading. For Edgeworth was employed in turning the Rhone from its course. He must get back to his job. One reflection he would make. “I determined on steadily persevering in the cultivation of my understanding.”

He was impervious to the romance of the situations in which he found himself. Every experience served only to fortify his character. He reflected, he observed, he improved himself daily. You can improve, Mr. Edgeworth used to tell his children, every day of your life. “He used to say that with this power of improving they might in time be anything, and without it in time they would be nothing.” Imperturbable, indefatigable, daily increasing in sturdy self-assurance, he has the gift of the egoist. He brings out, as he bustles and bangs on his way, the diffident, shrinking figures who would otherwise be drowned in darkness. The aged lady, whose private penance he disturbed, is only one of a series of figures who start up on either side of his progress, mute, astonished, showing us in a way that is even now unmistakable, their amazement at this well-meaning man who bursts in upon them at their studies and interrupts their prayers. We see him through their eyes; we see him as he does not dream of being seen. What a tyrant he was to his first wife! How intolerably she suffered! But she never utters a word. It is Dick Edgeworth who tells her story in complete ignorance that he is doing anything of the kind. “It was a singular trait of character in my wife,” he observes, “who had never shown any uneasiness at my intimacy with Sir Francis Delaval, that she should take a strong dislike to Mr. Day. A more dangerous and seductive companion than the one, or a more moral and improving companion than the other, could not be found in England.” It was, indeed, very singular.

For the first Mrs. Edgeworth was a penniless girl, the daughter of a ruined country gentleman, who sat over his fire picking cinders from the hearth and throwing them into the grate, while from time to time he ejaculated “Hein! Heing!” as yet another scheme for making his fortune came into his head. She had had no education. An itinerant writing-master had taught her to form a few words. When Dick Edgeworth was an undergraduate and rode over from Oxford she fell in love with him and married him in order to escape the poverty and the mystery and the dirt, and to have a husband and children like other women. But with what result? Gigantic wheels ran downhill with the bricklayer’s son inside them. Sailing carriages took flight and almost wrecked four stage coaches. Machines did cut turnips, but not very efficiently. Her little boy was allowed to roam the country like a poor man’s son, bare-legged, untaught. And Mr. Day, coming to breakfast and staying to dinner, argued incessantly about scientific principles and the laws of nature.

But here we encounter one of the pitfalls of this nocturnal rambling among forgotten worthies. It is so difficult to keep, as we must with highly authenticated people, strictly to the facts. It is so difficult to refrain from making scenes which, if the past could be recalled, might perhaps be found lacking in accuracy. With a character like Thomas Day, in particular, whose history surpasses the bounds of the credible, we find ourselves oozing amazement, like a sponge which has absorbed so much that it can retain no more but fairly drips. Certain scenes have the fascination which belongs rather to the abundance of fiction than to the sobriety of fact. For instance, we conjure up all the drama of poor Mrs. Edgeworth’s daily life; her bewilderment, her loneliness, her despair, how she must have wondered whether any one really wanted machines to climb walls, and assured the gentlemen that turnips were better cut simply with a knife, and so blundered and floundered and been snubbed that she dreaded the almost daily arrival of the tall young man with his pompous, melancholy face, marked by the smallpox, his profusion of uncombed black hair, and his finical cleanliness of hands and person. He talked fast, fluently, incessantly, for hours at a time about philosophy and nature, and M. Rousseau. Yet it was her house; she had to see to his meals, and, though he ate as though he were half asleep, his appetite was enormous. But it was no use complaining to her husband. Edgeworth said, “She lamented about trifles”. He went on to say: “The lamenting of a female with whom we live does not render home delightful”. And then, with his obtuse open-mindedness, he asked her what she had to complain of. Did he ever leave her alone? In the five or six years of their married life he had slept from home not more than five or six times. Mr. Day could corroborate that. Mr. Day corroborated everything that Mr. Edgeworth said. He egged him on with his experiments. He told him to leave his son without education. He did not care a rap what the people of Henley said. In short, he was at the bottom of all the absurdities and extravagances which made Mrs. Edgeworth’s life a burden to her.

Yet let us choose another scene—one of the last that poor Mrs. Edgeworth was to behold. She was returning from Lyons, and Mr. Day was her escort. A more singular figure, as he stood on the deck of the packet which took them to Dover, very tall, very upright, one finger in the breast of his coat, letting the wind blow his hair out, dressed absurdly, though in the height of fashion, wild, romantic, yet at the same time authoritative and pompous, could scarcely be imagined; and this strange creature, who loathed women, was in charge of a lady who was about to become a mother, had adopted two orphan girls, and had set himself to win the hand of Miss Elizabeth Sneyd by standing between boards for six hours daily in order to learn to dance. Now and again he pointed his toe with rigid precision; then, waking from the congenial dream into which the dark clouds, the flying waters, and the shadow of England upon the horizon had thrown him, he rapped out an order in the smart, affected tones of a man of the world. The sailors stared, but they obeyed. There was something sincere about him, something proudly indifferent to what you thought; yes, something comforting and humane, too, so that Mrs. Edgeworth for her part was determined never to laugh at him again. But men were strange; life was difficult, and with a sigh of bewilderment, perhaps of relief, poor Mrs. Edgeworth landed at Dover, was brought to bed of a daughter, and died.

Day meanwhile proceeded to Lichfield. Elizabeth Sneyd, of course, refused him—gave a great cry, people said; exclaimed that she had loved Day the blackguard, but hated Day the gentleman, and rushed from the room. And then, they said, a terrible thing happened. Mr. Day, in his rage, bethought him of the orphan, Sabrina Sydney, whom he had bred to be his wife; visited her at Sutton Coldfield; flew into a passion at the sight of her; fired a pistol at her skirts, poured melted sealing-wax over her arms, and boxed her ears. “No; I could never have done that”, Mr. Edgeworth used to say, when people described the scene. And whenever, to the end of his life, he thought of Thomas Day, he fell silent. So great, so passionate, so inconsistent—his life had been a tragedy, and in thinking of his friend, the best friend he had ever had, Richard Edgeworth fell silent.

It is almost the only occasion upon which silence is recorded of him. To muse, to repent, to contemplate were foreign to his nature. His wife and friends and children are silhouetted with extreme vividness upon a broad disc of interminable chatter. Upon no other background could we realise so clearly the sharp fragment of his first wife, or the shades and depths which make up the character, at once humane and brutal, advanced and hidebound, of the inconsistent philosopher, Thomas Day. But his power is not limited to people; landscapes, groups, societies seem, even as he describes them, to split off from him, to be projected away, so that we are able to run just ahead of him and anticipate his coming. They are brought out all the more vividly by the extreme incongruity which so often marks his comment and stamps his presence; they live with a peculiar beauty, fantastic, solemn, mysterious, in contrast with Edgeworth, who is none of these things. In particular, he brings before us a garden in Cheshire, the garden of a parsonage, an ancient but commodious parsonage.

One pushed through a white gate and found oneself in a grass court, small but well kept, with roses growing in the hedges and grapes hanging from the walls. But what, in the name of wonder, were those objects in the middle of the grass plot? Through the dusk of an autumn evening there shone out an enormous white globe. Round it at various distances were others of different sizes—the planets and their satellites, it seemed. But who could have placed them there, and why? The house was silent; the windows shut; nobody was stirring. Then, furtively peeping from behind a curtain, appeared for a second the face of an elderly man, handsome, dishevelled, distraught. It vanished.

In some mysterious way, human beings inflict their own vagaries upon nature. Moths and birds must have flitted more silently through the little garden; over everything must have brooded the same fantastic peace. Then, red-faced, garrulous, inquisitive, in burst Richard Lovell Edgeworth. He looked at the globes; he satisfied himself that they were of “accurate design and workmanlike construction”. He knocked at the door. He knocked and knocked. No one came. At length, as his impatience was overcoming him, slowly the latch was undone, gradually the door was opened; a clergyman, neglected, unkempt, but still a gentleman, stood before him. Edgeworth named himself, and they retired to a parlour littered with books and papers and valuable furniture now fallen to decay. At last, unable to control his curiosity any longer, Edgeworth asked what were the globes in the garden? Instantly the clergyman displayed extreme agitation. It was his son who had made them, he exclaimed; a boy of genius, a boy of the greatest industry, and of virtue and acquirements far beyond his age. But he had died. His wife had died. Edgeworth tried to turn the conversation, but in vain. The poor man rushed on passionately, incoherently about his son, his genius, his death. “It struck me that his grief had injured his understanding”, said Edgeworth, and he was becoming more and more uncomfortable, when the door opened and a girl of fourteen or fifteen entering with a tea-tray in her hand, suddenly changed the course of his host’s conversation. Indeed, she was beautiful; dressed in white; her nose a shade too prominent, perhaps—but no, her proportions were exquisitely right. “She is a scholar and an artist!” the clergyman exclaimed as she left the room. But why did she leave the room? If she was his daughter why did she not preside at the tea-table? Was she his mistress? Who was she? And why was the house in this state of litter and decay? Why was the front door locked? Why was the clergyman apparently a prisoner, and what was his secret story? Questions began to crowd into Edgeworth’s head as he sat drinking his tea; but he could only shake his head and make one last reflection, “I feared that something was not right”, as he shut the white wicket gate behind him, and left alone for ever in the untidy house among the planets and their satellites, the mad clergyman and the lovely girl.

II
Laetitia Pilkington

Let us bother the librarian once again. Let us ask him to reach down, dust, and hand over to us that little brown book over there, the Memoirs of Mrs. Pilkington, three volumes bound in one, printed by Peter Hoey in Dublin, MDCCLXXVI. The deepest obscurity shades her retreat; the dust lies heavy on her tomb—one board is loose, that is to say, and nobody has read her since early in the last century when a reader, presumably a lady, whether disgusted by her obscenity or stricken by the hand of death, left off in the middle and marked her place with a faded list of goods and groceries. If ever a woman wanted a champion, it is obviously Laetitia Pilkington. Who then was she?

Can you imagine a very extraordinary cross between Moll Flanders and Lady Ritchie, between a rolling and rollicking woman of the town and a lady of breeding and refinement? Laetitia Pilkington (1712-1759) was something of the sort—shady, shifty, adventurous, and yet, like Thackeray’s daughter, like Miss Mitford, like Madame de Sévigné and Jane Austen and Maria Edgeworth, so imbued with the old traditions of her sex that she wrote, as ladies talk, to give pleasure. Throughout her Memoirs, we can never forget that it is her wish to entertain, her unhappy fate to sob. Dabbing her eyes and controlling her anguish, she begs us to forgive an odious breach of manners which only the suffering of a lifetime, the intolerable persecutions of Mr. P——n, the malignant, she must say the h——h, spite of Lady C——t can excuse. For who should know better than the Earl of Killmallock’s great-granddaughter that it is the part of a lady to hide her sufferings? Thus Laetitia is in the great tradition of English women of letters. It is her duty to entertain; it is her instinct to conceal. Still, though her room near the Royal Exchange is threadbare, and the table is spread with old play-bills instead of a cloth, and the butter is served in a shoe, and Mr. Worsdale has used the teapot to fetch small beer that very morning, still she presides, still she entertains. Her language is a trifle coarse, perhaps. But who taught her English? The great Doctor Swift.

In all her wanderings, which were many, and in her failings, which were great, she looked back to those early Irish days when Swift had pinched her into propriety of speech. He had beaten her for fumbling at a drawer: he had daubed her cheeks with burnt cork to try her temper; he had bade her pull off her shoes and stockings and stand against the wainscot and let him measure her. At first she had refused; then she had yielded. “Why,” said the Dean, “I suspected you had either broken Stockings or foul toes, and in either case should have delighted to expose you.” Three feet two inches was all she measured, he declared, though, as Laetitia complained, the weight of Swift’s hand on her head had made her shrink to half her size. But she was foolish to complain. Probably she owed her intimacy to that very fact—she was only three feet two. Swift had lived a lifetime among the giants; now there was a charm in dwarfs. He took the little creature into his library. “‘Well,’ said he, ‘I have brought you here to show you all the Money I got when I was in the Ministry, but don’t steal any of it.’ ‘I won’t, indeed, Sir,’ said I; so he opened a Cabinet, and showed me a whole parcel of empty drawers. ‘Bless me,’ says he, ‘the Money is flown.’” There was a charm in her surprise; there was a charm in her humility. He could beat her and bully her, make her shout when he was deaf, force her husband to drink the lees of the wine, pay their cab fares, stuff guineas into a piece of gingerbread, and relent surprisingly, as if there were something grimly pleasing to him in the thought of so foolish a midget setting up to have a life and a mind of her own. For with Swift she was herself; it was the effect of his genius. She had to pull off her stockings if he told her to. So, though his satire terrified her, and she found it highly unpleasant to dine at the Deanery and see him watching, in the great glass which hung before him for that purpose, the butler stealing beer at the sideboard, she knew that it was a privilege to walk with him in his garden; to hear him talk of Mr. Pope and quote Hudibras; and then be hustled back in the rain to save coach hire, and then to sit chatting in the parlour with Mrs. Brent, the housekeeper, about the Dean’s oddity and charity, and how the sixpence he saved on the coach he gave to the lame old man who sold gingerbread at the corner, while the Dean dashed up the front stairs and down the back so violently that she was afraid he would fall and hurt himself.

But memories of great men are no infallible specific. They fall upon the race of life like beams from a lighthouse. They flash, they shock, they reveal, they vanish. To remember Swift was of little avail to Laetitia when the troubles of life came thick about her. Mr. Pilkington left her for Widow W—rr—n. Her father—her dear father—died. The sheriff’s officers insulted her. She was deserted in an empty house with two children to provide for. The tea chest was secured, the garden gate locked, and the bills left unpaid. And still she was young and attractive and gay, with an inordinate passion for scribbling verses and an incredible hunger for reading books. It was this that was her undoing. The book was fascinating and the hour late. The gentleman would not lend it, but would stay till she had finished. They sat in her bedroom. It was highly indiscreet, she owned. Suddenly twelve watchmen broke through the kitchen window, and Mr. Pilkington appeared with a cambric handkerchief tied about his neck. Swords were drawn and heads broken. As for her excuse, how could one expect Mr. Pilkington and the twelve watchmen to believe that? Only reading! Only sitting up late to finish a new book! Mr. Pilkington and the watchmen interpreted the situation as such men would. But lovers of learning, she is persuaded, will understand her passion and deplore its consequences.

And now what was she to do? Reading had played her false, but still she could write. Ever since she could form her letters, indeed, she had written, with incredible speed and considerable grace, odes, addresses, apostrophes to Miss Hoadley, to the Recorder of Dublin, to Dr. Delville’s place in the country. “Hail, happy Delville, blissful seat!” “Is there a man whose fixed and steady gaze——”—the verses flowed without the slightest difficulty on the slightest occasion. Now, therefore, crossing to England, she set up, as her advertisement had it, to write letters upon any subject, except the law, for twelve pence ready money, and no trust given. She lodged opposite White’s Chocolate House, and there, in the evening, as she watered her flowers on the leads, the noble gentlemen in the window across the road drank her health, sent her over a bottle of burgundy; and later she heard old Colonel —— —crying, “Poke after me, my lord, poke after me,” as he shepherded the D—— of M—lb—gh up her dark stairs. That lovely gentleman, who honoured his title by wearing it, kissed her, complimented her, opened his pocket-book, and left her with a bank-note for fifty pounds upon Sir Francis Child. Such tributes stimulated her pen to astonishing outbursts of impromptu gratitude. If, on the other hand, a gentleman refused to buy or a lady hinted impropriety, this same flowery pen writhed and twisted in agonies of hate and vituperation. “Had I said that your F——r died Blaspheming the Almighty”, one of her accusations begins, but the end is unprintable. Great ladies were accused of every depravity, and the clergy, unless their taste in poetry was above reproach, suffered an incessant castigation. Mr. Pilkington, she never forgot, was a clergyman.

Slowly but surely the Earl of Killmallock’s great-granddaughter descended in the social scale. From St. James’s Street and its noble benefactors she migrated to Green Street to lodge with Lord Stair’s valet de chambre and his wife, who washed for persons of distinction. She, who had dallied with dukes, was glad for company’s sake to take a hand at quadrille with footmen and laundresses and Grub Street writers, who, as they drank porter, sipped green tea, and smoked tobacco, told stories of the utmost scurrility about their masters and mistresses. The spiciness of their conversation made amends for the vulgarity of their manners. From them Laetitia picked up those anecdotes of the great which sprinkled her pages with dashes and served her purpose when subscribers failed and landladies grew insolent. Indeed, it was a hard life—to trudge to Chelsea in the snow wearing nothing but a chintz gown and be put off with a beggarly half-crown by Sir Hans Sloane; next to tramp to Ormond Street and extract two guineas from the odious Dr. Meade, which, in her glee, she tossed in the air and lost in a crack of the floor; to be insulted by footmen; to sit down to a dish of boiling water because her landlady must not guess that a pinch of tea was beyond her means. Twice on moonlight nights, with the lime trees in flower, she wandered in St. James’s Park and contemplated suicide in Rosamond’s Pond. Once, musing among the tombs in Westminster Abbey, the door was locked on her, and she had to spend the night in the pulpit wrapped in a carpet from the Communion Table to protect herself from the assaults of rats. “I long to listen to the young-ey’d cherubims!” she exclaimed. But a very different fate was in store for her. In spite of Mr. Colley Cibber, and Mr. Richardson, who supplied her first with gilt-edged notepaper and then with baby linen, those harpies, her landladies, after drinking her ale, devouring her lobsters, and failing often for years at a time to comb their hair, succeeded in driving Swift’s friend, and the Earl’s great-granddaughter, to be imprisoned with common debtors in the Marshalsea.

Bitterly she cursed her husband, who had made her a lady of adventure instead of what nature intended, “a harmless household dove”. More and more wildly she ransacked her brains for anecdotes, memories, scandals, views about the bottomless nature of the sea, the inflammable character of the earth—anything that would fill a page and earn her a guinea. She remembered that she had eaten plovers’ eggs with Swift. “Here, Hussey,” said he, “is a Plover’s egg. King William used to give crowns apiece for them….” Swift never laughed, she remembered. He used to suck in his cheeks instead of laughing. And what else could she remember? A great many gentlemen, a great many landladies; how the window was thrown up when her father died, and her sister came downstairs, with the sugar-basin, laughing. All had been bitterness and struggle, except that she had loved Shakespeare, known Swift, and kept through all the shifts and shades of an adventurous career a gay spirit, something of a lady’s breeding, and the gallantry which, at the end of her short life, led her to crack her joke and enjoy her duck with death at her heart and duns at her pillow.

III
Miss Ormerod

The trees stood massively in all their summer foliage spotted and grouped upon a meadow which sloped gently down from the big white house. There were unmistakable signs of the year 1835 both in the trees and in the sky, for modern trees are not nearly so voluminous as these ones, and the sky of those days had a kind of pale diffusion in its texture which was different from the more concentrated tone of the skies we know.

Mr George Ormerod stepped from the drawing-room window of Sedbury House, Gloucestershire, wearing a tall furry hat and white trousers strapped under his instep; he was closely, though deferentially, followed by a lady wearing a yellow-spotted dress over a crinoline, and behind her, singly and arm in arm, came nine children in nankeen jackets and long white drawers. They were going to see the water let out of a pond.

The youngest child, Eleanor, a little girl with a pale face, rather elongated features, and black hair, was left by herself in the drawing-room, a large sallow apartment with pillars, two chandeliers for some reason enclosed in holland bags, and several octagonal tables, some of inlaid wood and others of greenish malachite. At one of these little Eleanor Ormerod was seated in a high chair.

‘Now Eleanor,’ said her mother, as the party assembled for the expedition to the pond, ‘here are some pretty beetles. Don’t touch the glass. Don’t get down from your chair, and when we come back little George will tell you all about it.’

So saying, Mrs Ormerod placed a tumbler of water containing about half a dozen great water grubs in the middle of the malachite table, at a safe distance from the child, and followed her husband down the slope of old-fashioned turf towards a cluster of extremely old-fashioned sheep; opening, directly she stepped on to the terrace, a tiny parasol of bottle green silk with a bottle green fringe, though the sky was like nothing so much as a flock bed covered with a counterpane of white dimity.

The plump pale grubs gyrated slowly round and round in the tumbler. So simple an entertainment must surely soon have ceased to satisfy. Surely Eleanor would shake the tumbler, upset the grubs, and scramble down from her chair. Why, even a grown person can hardly watch those grubs crawling down the glass wall, then floating to the surface, without a sense of boredom not untinged with disgust. But the child sat perfectly still. Was it her custom, then, to be entertained by the gyrations of grubs? Her eyes were reflective, even critical. But they shone with increasing excitement. She beat one hand upon the edge of the table. What was the reason? One of the grubs had ceased to float: he lay at the bottom; the rest, descending, proceeded to tear him to pieces.

‘And how has little Eleanor enjoyed herself?’ asked Mr Ormerod, in rather a deep voice, stepping into the room and with a slight air of heat and of fatigue upon his face.

‘Papa,’ said Eleanor almost interrupting her father in her eagerness to impart her observations, ‘I saw one of the grubs fall down and the rest came and ate him!’

‘Nonsense, Eleanor,’ said Mr Ormerod. ‘You are not telling the truth.’ He looked severely at the tumbler in which the beetles were still gyrating as before.

‘Papa, it was true!’

‘Eleanor, little girls are not allowed to contradict their fathers,’ said Mrs Ormerod, coming in through the window, and closing her green parasol with a snap.

‘Let this be a lesson,’ Mr Ormerod began, signing to the other children to approach, when the door opened, and the servant announced,

‘Captain Fenton.’

Captain Fenton ‘was at times thought to be tedious in his recurrence to the charge of the Scots Greys in which he had served at the battle of Waterloo.’

But what is this crowd gathered round the door of the George Hotel in Chepstow? A faint cheer rises from the bottom of the hill. Up comes the mail coach, horses steaming, panels mud-splashed. ‘Make way! Make way!’ cries the ostler and the vehicle dashed into the courtyard, pulls up sharp before the door. Down jumps the coachman, the horses are led off, and a fine team of spanking greys is harnessed with incredible speed in their stead. Upon all this—coachman, horses, coach, and passengers—the crowd looked with gaping admiration every Wednesday evening all through the year. But to-day, the twelfth of March, 1852, as the coachman settled his rug, and stretched his hands for the reins, he observed that instead of being fixed upon him, the eyes of the people of Chepstow darted this way and that. Heads were jerked. Arms flung out. Here a hat swooped in a semi-circle. Off drove the coach almost unnoticed. As it turned the corner all the outside passengers craned their necks, and one gentleman rose to his feet and shouted, ‘There! there! there!’ before he was bowled into eternity. It was an insect—a red-winged insect. Out the people of Chepstow poured into the high road; down the hill they ran; always the insect flew in front of them; at length by Chepstow Bridge a young man, throwing his bandanna over the blade of an oar, captured it alive and presented it to a highly respectable elderly gentleman who now came puffing upon the scene—Samuel Budge, doctor, of Chepstow. By Samuel Budge it was presented to Miss Ormerod; by her sent to a professor at Oxford. And he, declaring it ‘a fine specimen of the rose underwinged locust’ added the gratifying information that it ‘was the first of the kind to be captured so far west.’

And so, at the age of twenty-four Miss Eleanor Ormerod was thought the proper person to receive the gift of a locust.

When Eleanor Ormerod appeared at archery meetings and croquet tournaments young men pulled their whiskers and young ladies looked grave. It was so difficult to make friends with a girl who could talk of nothing but black beetles and earwigs—‘Yes, that’s what she likes, isn’t it queer?—Why, the other day Ellen, Mama’s maid, heard from Jane, who’s under-kitchenmaid at Sedbury House, that Eleanor tried to boil a beetle in the kitchen saucepan and he wouldn’t die, and swam round and round, and she got into a terrible state and sent the groom all the way to Gloucester to fetch chloroform—all for an insect my dear!—and she gives the cottagers shillings to collect beetles for her—and she spends hours in her bedroom cutting them up—and she climbs trees like a boy to find wasps’ nests—oh, you can’t think what they don’t say about her in the village— for she does look so odd, dressed anyhow, with that great big nose and those bright little eyes, so like a caterpillar herself, I always think—but of course she’s wonderfully clever and very good, too, both of them. Georgiana has a lending library for the cottagers, and Eleanor never misses a service—but there she is—that short pale girl in the large bonnet. Do go and talk to her, for I’m sure I’m too stupid, but you’d find plenty to say But neither Fred nor Arthur, Henry nor William found anything to say—

‘… probably the lecturer would have been equally well pleased had none of her own sex put in an appearance.’

This comment upon a lecture delivered in the year 1889 throws some light, perhaps, upon archery meetings in the ’fifties.

It being nine o’clock on a February night some time about 1862 all the Ormerods were in the library; Mr Ormerod making architectural designs at a table; Mrs Ormerod lying on a sofa making pencil drawings upon grey paper; Eleanor making a model of a snake to serve as a paper weight; Georgiana making a copy of the font in Tidenham Church; some of the others examining books with beautiful illustrations; while at intervals someone rose, unlocked the wire book case, took down a volume for instruction or entertainment, and perused it beneath the chandelier.

Mr Ormerod required complete silence for his studies. His word was law, even to the dogs, who, in the absence of their master, instinctively obeyed the eldest male person in the room. Some whispered colloquy there might be between Mrs Ormerod and her daughters—

‘The draught under the pew was really worse than ever this morning, Mama

‘And we could only unfasten the latch in the chancel because Eleanor happened to have her ruler with her—’

‘—hm—m—m. Dr Armstrong—Hm—m—m—’

‘—Anyhow things aren’t as bad with us as they are at Kinghampton. They say Mrs Briscoe’s Newfoundland dog follows her right up to the chancel rails when she takes the sacrament

‘And the turkey is still sitting on its eggs in the pulpit.’

— ‘The period of incubation for a turkey is between three and four weeks’—said Eleanor thoughtfully looking up from her cast of the snake and forgetting, in the interest of her subject, to speak in a whisper.

‘Am I to be allowed no peace in my own house?’ Mr Ormerod exclaimed angrily, rapping with his ruler on the table, upon which Mrs Ormerod half shut one eye and squeezed a little blob of Chinese white on to her high light, and they remained silent until the servants came in, when everyone, with the exception of Mrs Ormerod, fell on their knees. For she, poor lady, suffered from a chronic complaint and left the family party for ever a year or two later, when the green sofa was moved into the corner, and the drawings given to her nieces in memory of her. But Mr Ormerod went on making architectural drawings at nine p.m. every night (save on Sundays when he read a sermon) until he too lay upon the green sofa, which had not been used since Mrs Ormerod lay there, but still looked much the same. ‘We deeply felt the happiness of ministering to his welfare,’ Miss Ormerod wrote, ‘for he would not hear of our leaving him for even twenty-four hours and he objected to visits from my brothers excepting occasionally for a short time. They, not being used to the gentle ways necessary for an aged invalid, worried him .. the Thursday following, the 9th October, 1873, he passed gently away at the mature age of eighty-seven years.’ Oh, graves in country churchyards—respectable burials—mature old gentlemen—D.C.L., L.L.D., F.R.S., F.S.A.—lots of letters come after your names, but lots of women are buried with you!

There remained the Hessian Fly and the Bot—mysterious insects! Not, one would have thought, among God’s most triumphant creations, and yet—if you see them under a microscope!—the Bot, obese, globular, obscene; the Hessian, booted, spurred, whiskered, cadaverous. Next slip under the glass an innocent grain; behold it pock-marked and livid; or take this strip of hide, and note those odious pullulating lumps—well, what does the landscape look like then?

The only palatable object for the eye to rest on in acres of England is a lump of Paris Green. But English people won’t use microscopes; you can’t make them use Paris Green either—or if they do, they let it drip. Dr Ritzema Bos is a great stand-by. For they won’t take a woman’s word. And indeed, though for the sake of the Ox Warble one must stretch a point, there are matters, questions of stock infestation, things one has to go into—things a lady doesn’t even like to see, much less discuss in print—‘these, I say, I intend to leave entirely to the Veterinary surgeons. My brother—oh, he’s dead now—a very good man—for whom I collected wasps’ nests—lived at Brighton and wrote about wasps—he, I say, wouldn’t let me learn anatomy, never liked me to do more than take sections of teeth.’

Ah, but Eleanor, the Bot and the Hessian have more power over you than Mr Edward Ormerod himself. Under the microscope you clearly perceive that these insects have organs, orifices, excrement; they do, most emphatically, copulate. Escorted on the one side by the Bot or Warble, on the other by the Hessian Fly, Miss Ormerod advanced statelily, if slowly, into the open. Never did her features show more sublime than when lit up by the candour of her avowal. ‘This is excrement; these, though Ritzema Bos is positive to the contrary, are the generative organs of the male. I’ve proved it.’ Upon her head the hood of Edinburgh most fitly descended; pioneer of purity even more than of Paris Green.

‘If you’re sure I’m not in your way,’ said Miss Lipscomb unstrapping her paint box and planting her tripod firmly in the path, ‘—I’ll try to get a picture of those lovely hydrangeas against the sky—What flowers you have in Penzance!’

The market gardener crossed his hands on his hoe, slowly twined a piece of bass round his finger, looked at the sky, said something about the sun, also about the prevalence of lady artists, and then, with a nod of his head, observed sententiously that it was to a lady that he owed everything he had.

‘Ah?’ said Miss Lipscomb, flattered, but already much occupied with her composition.

‘A lady with a queer sounding name,’ said Mr Pascoe, ‘but that’s the lady I’ve called my little girl after—I don’t think there’s such another in Christendom.’

Of course it was Miss Ormerod, equally of course Miss Lipscomb was the sister of Miss Ormerod’s family doctor; and so she did no sketching that morning, but left with a handsome bunch of grapes instead—for every flower had drooped, ruin had stared him in the face—he had written, not believing one bit what they told him—to the lady with the queer name, back there came a book ‘In-ju-ri-ous In-sects,’ with the page turned down, perhaps by her very hand, also a letter which he kept at home under the clock, but he knew every word by heart, since it was due to what she said there that he wasn’t a ruined man—and the tears ran down his face and Miss Lipscomb, clearing a space on the lodging-house table, wrote the whole story to her brother.

‘The prejudice against Paris Green certainly seems to be dying down,’ said Miss Ormerod when she read it.—‘But now,’ she sighed rather heavily being no longer young and much afflicted with the gout, ‘now it’s the sparrows.’

One might have thought that they would have left her alone—innocent dirt-grey birds, taking more than their share of the breakfast crumbs, otherwise inoffensive. But once you look through a microscope—once you see the Hessian and the Bot as they really are—there’s no peace for an elderly lady pacing her terrace on a fine May morning. For example, why, when there are crumbs enough for all, do only the sparrows get them? Why not swallows or martins? Why—oh, here come the servants for prayers—

‘Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us … For thine is the Kingdom and the power and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen—’

‘The Times ma’am-’

‘Thank you, Dixon … The Queen’s birthday! We must drink her Majesty’s health in the old white port, Dixon. Home Rule—tut—tut—tut. All that madman Gladstone. My father would have thought the world was coming to an end, and I’m not at all sure that it isn’t. I must talk to Dr Lipscomb—’

Yet all the time in the tail of her eye she saw myriads of sparrows, and retiring to the study proclaimed in a pamphlet of which 36,000 copies were gratuitously distributed that the sparrow is a pest.

‘When he eats an insect,’ she said to her sister Georgiana, ‘which isn’t often, it’s one of the few insects that one wants to keep—one of the very few,’ she added with a touch of acidity natural to one whose investigations have all tended to the discredit of the insect race.

‘But there’ll be some very unpleasant consequences to face,’ she concluded—‘Very unpleasant indeed.’

Happily the port was now brought in, the servants assembled; and Miss Ormerod, rising to her feet, gave the toast ‘Her Blessed Majesty.’ She was extremely loyal, and moreover she liked nothing better than a glass of her father’s old white port. She kept his pigtail, too, in a box.

Such being her disposition it went hard with her to analyse the sparrow’s crop, for the sparrow she felt, symbolizes something of the homely virtue of English domestic life, and to proclaim it stuffed with deceit was disloyal to much that she, and her fathers before her, held dear. Sure enough the clergy—the Rev. J. E. Walker—denounced her for her brutality; ‘God Save the Sparrow!’ exclaimed the Animal’s Friend; and Miss Carrington, of the Humanitarian League, replied in a leaflet described by Miss Ormerod as ‘spirity, discourteous, and inaccurate.’

‘Well,’ said Miss Ormerod to her sister, ‘it did me no harm before to be threatened to be shot at, also hanged in effigy, and other little attentions.’

‘Still it was very disagreeable, Eleanor—more disagreeable, I believe, to me than to you,’ said Georgiana. Soon Georgiana died. She had however finished the beautiful series of insect diagrams at which she worked every morning in the diningroom and they were presented to Edinburgh University. But Eleanor was never the same woman after that.

Dear forest fly—flour moths—weevils—grouse and cheese flies—beetles—foreign correspondents—eel worms—ladybirds—wheat midges—resignation from the Royal Agricultural Society—gall mites—boot beetles—Announcement of honorary degree to be conferred—feelings of appreciation and anxiety—paper on wasps—last annual report—warnings of serious illness—proposed pension—gradual loss of strength—Finally Death.

That is life, so they say.

‘It does no good to keep people waiting for an answer,’ sighed Miss Ormerod, ‘though I don’t feel as able as I did since that unlucky accident at Waterloo. And no one realizes what the strain of the work is—often I’m the only lady in the room, and the gentlemen so learned, though I’ve always found them most helpful, most generous in every way. But I’m growing old, Miss Hartwell, that’s what it is. That’s what led me to be thinking of this difficult matter of flour infestation in the middle of the road so that I didn’t see the horse until he had poked his nose into my ear…. Then there’s this nonsense about a pension. What could possess Mr Barron to think of such a thing? I should feel inexpressibly lowered if I accepted a pension. Why, I don’t altogether like writing LL.D. after my name, though Georgie would have liked it. All I ask is to be let go on in my own quiet way. Now where is Messrs Langridge’s sample? We must take that first. “Gentlemen, I have examined your sample and find…’”

‘If any one deserves a thorough good rest it’s you, Miss Ormerod,’ said Dr Lipscomb, who had grown a little white over the ears. ‘I should say the farmers of England ought to set up a statue to you, bring offerings of corn and wine—make you a kind of Goddess, eh—what was her name?’

‘Not a very shapely figure for a Goddess,’ said Miss Ormerod with a little laugh. ‘I should enjoy the wine though. You’re not going to cut me off my one glass of port surely?’

‘You must remember,’ said Dr Lipscomb, shaking his head, ‘how much your life means to others.’

‘Well, I don’t know about that,’ said Miss Ormerod, pondering a little. ‘To be sure, I’ve chosen my epitaph. “She introduced Paris Green into England,” and there might be a word or two about the Hessian fly—that, I do believe, was a good piece of work.’

‘No need to think about epitaphs yet,’ said Dr Lipscomb.

‘Our lives are in the hands of the Lord,’ said Miss Ormerod simply.

Dr Lipscomb bent his head and looked out of the window. Miss Ormerod remained silent.

‘English entomologists care little or nothing for objects of practical importance,’ she exclaimed suddenly. ‘Take this question of flour infestation—I can’t say how many grey hairs that hasn’t grown me.’

‘Figuratively speaking, Miss Ormerod,’ said Dr Lipscomb, for her hair was still raven black.

‘Well, I do believe all good work is done in concert,’ Miss Ormerod continued. ‘It is often a great comfort to me to think that.’

‘It’s beginning to rain,’ said Dr Lipscomb. ‘How will your enemies like that, Miss Ormerod?’

‘Hot or cold, wet or dry, insects always flourish!’ cried Miss Ormerod energetically sitting up in bed.

‘Old Miss Ormerod is dead,’ said Mr Drummond, opening The Times on Saturday, July 20th, 1901.

‘Old Miss Ormerod?’ asked Mrs Drummond.

[I: London Mercury, January 1924;
II: Nation & Athenaeum, June 30, 1923;
III: Dial, December 1924, only published in the American edition of CRI]

[]

Jane Austen.

It is probable that if Miss Cassandra Austen had had her way we should have had nothing of Jane Austen’s except her novels. To her elder sister alone did she write freely; to her alone she confided her hopes and, if rumour is true, the one great disappointment of her life; but when Miss Cassandra Austen grew old, and the growth of her sister’s fame made her suspect that a time might come when strangers would pry and scholars speculate, she burnt, at great cost to herself, every letter that could gratify their curiosity, and spared only what she judged too trivial to be of interest.

Hence our knowledge of Jane Austen is derived from a little gossip, a few letters, and her books. As for the gossip, gossip which has survived its day is never despicable; with a little rearrangement it suits our purpose admirably. For example, Jane “is not at all pretty and very prim, unlike a girl of twelve … Jane is whimsical and affected,” says little Philadelphia Austen of her cousin. Then we have Mrs. Mitford, who knew the Austens as girls and thought Jane “the prettiest, silliest, most affected husband-hunting butterfly she ever remembers”. Next, there is Miss Mitford’s anonymous friend “who visits her now [and] says that she has stiffened into the most perpendicular, precise, taciturn piece of ‘single blessedness’ that ever existed, and that, until Pride and Prejudice showed what a precious gem was hidden in that unbending case, she was no more regarded in society than a poker or firescreen…. The case is very different now”, the good lady goes on; “she is still a poker—but a poker of whom everybody is afraid…. A wit, a delineator of character, who does not talk is terrific indeed!” On the other side, of course, there are the Austens, a race little given to panegyric of themselves, but nevertheless, they say, her brothers “were very fond and very proud of her. They were attached to her by her talents, her virtues, and her engaging manners, and each loved afterwards to fancy a resemblance in some niece or daughter of his own to the dear sister Jane, whose perfect equal they yet never expected to see.” Charming but perpendicular, loved at home but feared by strangers, biting of tongue but tender of heart—these contrasts are by no means incompatible, and when we turn to the novels we shall find ourselves stumbling there too over the same complexities in the writer.

To begin with, that prim little girl whom Philadelphia found so unlike a child of twelve, whimsical and affected, was soon to be the authoress of an astonishing and unchildish story, Love and Freindship [◉1], which, incredible though it appears, was written at the age of fifteen. It was written, apparently, to amuse the schoolroom; one of the stories in the same book is dedicated with mock solemnity to her brother; another is neatly illustrated with water-colour heads by her sister. These are jokes which, one feels, were family property; thrusts of satire, which went home because all little Austens made mock in common of fine ladies who “sighed and fainted on the sofa”.

Brothers and sisters must have laughed when Jane read out loud her last hit at the vices which they all abhorred. “I die a martyr to my grief for the loss of Augustus. One fatal swoon has cost me my life. Beware of Swoons, Dear Laura…. Run mad as often as you chuse, but do not faint….” And on she rushed, as fast as she could write and quicker than she could spell, to tell the incredible adventures of Laura and Sophia, of Philander and Gustavus, of the gentleman who drove a coach between Edinburgh and Stirling every other day, of the theft of the fortune that was kept in the table drawer, of the starving mothers and the sons who acted Macbeth. Undoubtedly, the story must have roused the schoolroom to uproarious laughter. And yet, nothing is more obvious than that this girl of fifteen, sitting in her private corner of the common parlour, was writing not to draw a laugh from brother and sisters, and not for home consumption. She was writing for everybody, for nobody, for our age, for her own; in other words, even at that early age Jane Austen was writing. One hears it in the rhythm and shapeliness and severity of the sentences. “She was nothing more than a mere good-tempered, civil, and obliging young woman; as such we could scarcely dislike her—she was only an object of contempt.” Such a sentence is meant to outlast the Christmas holidays. Spirited, easy, full of fun, verging with freedom upon sheer nonsense,—Love and Freindship is all that; but what is this note which never merges in the rest, which sounds distinctly and penetratingly all through the volume? It is the sound of laughter. The girl of fifteen is laughing, in her corner, at the world.

Girls of fifteen are always laughing. They laugh when Mr. Binney helps himself to salt instead of sugar. They almost die of laughing when old Mrs. Tomkins sits down upon the cat. But they are crying the moment after. They have no fixed abode from which they see that there is something eternally laughable in human nature, some quality in men and women that for ever excites our satire. They do not know that Lady Greville who snubs, and poor Maria who is snubbed, are permanent features of every ballroom. But Jane Austen knew it from her birth upwards. One of those fairies who perch upon cradles must have taken her a flight through the world directly she was born. When she was laid in the cradle again she knew not only what the world looked like, but had already chosen her kingdom. She had agreed that if she might rule over that territory, she would covet no other. Thus at fifteen she had few illusions about other people and none about herself. Whatever she writes is finished and turned and set in its relation, not to the parsonage, but to the universe. She is impersonal; she is inscrutable. When the writer, Jane Austen, wrote down in the most remarkable sketch in the book a little of Lady Greville’s conversation, there is no trace of anger at the snub which the clergyman’s daughter, Jane Austen, once received. Her gaze passes straight to the mark, and we know precisely where, upon the map of human nature, that mark is. We know because Jane Austen kept to her compact; she never trespassed beyond her boundaries. Never, even at the emotional age of fifteen, did she round upon herself in shame, obliterate a sarcasm in a spasm of compassion, or blur an outline in a mist of rhapsody. Spasms and rhapsodies, she seems to have said, pointing with her stick, end there; and the boundary line is perfectly distinct. But she does not deny that moons and mountains and castles exist—on the other side. She has even one romance of her own. It is for the Queen of Scots. She really admired her very much. “One of the first characters in the world”, she called her, “a bewitching Princess whose only friend was then the Duke of Norfolk, and whose only ones now Mr. Whitaker, Mrs. Lefroy, Mrs. Knight and myself.” With these words her passion is neatly circumscribed, and rounded with a laugh. It is amusing to remember in what terms the young Brontës wrote, not very much later, in their northern parsonage, about the Duke of Wellington.

The prim little girl grew up. She became “the prettiest, silliest, most affected husband-hunting butterfly” Mrs. Mitford ever remembered, and, incidentally, the authoress of a novel called Pride and Prejudice, which, written stealthily under cover of a creaking door, lay for many years unpublished. A little later, it is thought, she began another story, The Watsons, and being for some reason dissatisfied with it, left it unfinished. The second-rate works of a great writer are worth reading because they offer the best criticism of his masterpieces. Here her difficulties are more apparent, and the method she took to overcome them less artfully concealed. To begin with, the stiffness and the bareness of the first chapters prove that she was one of those writers who lay their facts out rather baldly in the first version and then go back and back and back and cover them with flesh and atmosphere. How it would have been done we cannot say—by what suppressions and insertions and artful devices. But the miracle would have been accomplished; the dull history of fourteen years of family life would have been converted into another of those exquisite and apparently effortless introductions; and we should never have guessed what pages of preliminary drudgery Jane Austen forced her pen to go through. Here we perceive that she was no conjuror after all. Like other writers, she had to create the atmosphere in which her own peculiar genius could bear fruit. Here she fumbles; here she keeps us waiting. Suddenly she has done it; now things can happen as she likes things to happen. The Edwardses are going to the ball. The Tomlinsons’ carriage is passing; she can tell us that Charles is “being provided with his gloves and told to keep them on”; Tom Musgrave retreats to a remote corner with a barrel of oysters and is famously snug. Her genius is freed and active. At once our senses quicken; we are possessed with the peculiar intensity which she alone can impart. But of what is it all composed? Of a ball in a country town; a few couples meeting and taking hands in an assembly room; a little eating and drinking; and for catastrophe, a boy being snubbed by one young lady and kindly treated by another. There is no tragedy and no heroism. Yet for some reason the little scene is moving out of all proportion to its surface solemnity. We have been made to see that if Emma acted so in the ball-room, how considerate, how tender, inspired by what sincerity of feeling she would have shown herself in those graver crises of life which, as we watch her, come inevitably before our eyes. Jane Austen is thus a mistress of much deeper emotion than appears upon the surface. She stimulates us to supply what is not there. What she offers is, apparently, a trifle, yet is composed of something that expands in the reader’s mind and endows with the most enduring form of life scenes which are outwardly trivial. Always the stress is laid upon character. How, we are made to wonder, will Emma behave when Lord Osborne and Tom Musgrave make their call at five minutes before three, just as Mary is bringing in the tray and the knife-case? It is an extremely awkward situation. The young men are accustomed to much greater refinement. Emma may prove herself ill-bred, vulgar, a nonentity. The turns and twists of the dialogue keep us on the tenterhooks of suspense. Our attention is half upon the present moment, half upon the future. And when, in the end, Emma behaves in such a way as to vindicate our highest hopes of her, we are moved as if we had been made witnesses of a matter of the highest importance. Here, indeed, in this unfinished and in the main inferior story, are all the elements of Jane Austen’s greatness. It has the permanent quality of literature. Think away the surface animation, the likeness to life, and there remains, to provide a deeper pleasure, an exquisite discrimination of human values. Dismiss this too from the mind and one can dwell with extreme satisfaction upon the more abstract art which, in the ball-room scene, so varies the emotions and proportions the parts that it is possible to enjoy it, as one enjoys poetry, for itself, and not as a link which carries the story this way and that.

But the gossip says of Jane Austen that she was perpendicular, precise, and taciturn—“a poker of whom everybody is afraid”. Of this too there are traces; she could be merciless enough; she is one of the most consistent satirists in the whole of literature. Those first angular chapters of The Watsons prove that hers was not a prolific genius; she had not, like Emily Brontë, merely to open the door to make herself felt. Humbly and gaily she collected the twigs and straws out of which the nest was to be made and placed them neatly together. The twigs and straws were a little dry and a little dusty in themselves. There was the big house and the little house; a tea party, a dinner party, and an occasional picnic; life was hedged in by valuable connections and adequate incomes; by muddy roads, wet feet, and a tendency on the part of the ladies to get tired; a little principle supported it, a little consequence, and the education commonly enjoyed by upper middle-class families living in the country. Vice, adventure, passion were left outside. But of all this prosiness, of all this littleness, she evades nothing, and nothing is slurred over. Patiently and precisely she tells us how they “made no stop anywhere till they reached Newbury, where a comfortable meal, uniting dinner and supper, wound up the enjoyments and fatigues of the day”. Nor does she pay to conventions merely the tribute of lip homage; she believes in them besides accepting them. When she is describing a clergyman, like Edmund Bertram, or a sailor, in particular, she appears debarred by the sanctity of his office from the free use of her chief tool, the comic genius, and is apt therefore to lapse into decorous panegyric or matter-of-fact description. But these are exceptions; for the most part her attitude recalls the anonymous lady’s ejaculation—“A wit, a delineator of character, who does not talk is terrific indeed!” She wishes neither to reform nor to annihilate; she is silent; and that is terrific indeed. One after another she creates her fools, her prigs, her worldlings, her Mr. Collinses, her Sir Walter Elliotts, her Mrs. Bennets. She encircles them with the lash of a whip-like phrase which, as it runs round them, cuts out their silhouettes for ever. But there they remain; no excuse is found for them and no mercy shown them. Nothing remains of Julia and Maria Bertram when she has done with them; Lady Bertram is left “sitting and calling to Pug and trying to keep him from the flower-beds” eternally. A divine justice is meted out; Dr. Grant, who begins by liking his goose tender, ends by bringing on “apoplexy and death, by three great institutionary dinners in one week”. Sometimes it seems as if her creatures were born merely to give Jane Austen the supreme delight of slicing their heads off. She is satisfied; she is content; she would not alter a hair on anybody’s head, or move one brick or one blade of grass in a world which provides her with such exquisite delight.

Nor, indeed, would we. For even if the pangs of outraged vanity, or the heat of moral wrath, urged us to improve away a world so full of spite, pettiness, and folly, the task is beyond our powers. People are like that—the girl of fifteen knew it; the mature woman proves it. At this very moment some Lady Bertram is trying to keep Pug from the flower beds; she sends Chapman to help Miss Fanny a little late. The discrimination is so perfect, the satire so just, that, consistent though it is, it almost escapes our notice. No touch of pettiness, no hint of spite, rouse us from our contemplation. Delight strangely mingles with our amusement. Beauty illumines these fools.

That elusive quality is, indeed, often made up of very different parts, which it needs a peculiar genius to bring together. The wit of Jane Austen has for partner the perfection of her taste. Her fool is a fool, her snob is a snob, because he departs from the model of sanity and sense which she has in mind, and conveys to us unmistakably even while she makes us laugh. Never did any novelist make more use of an impeccable sense of human values. It is against the disc of an unerring heart, an unfailing good taste, an almost stern morality, that she shows up those deviations from kindness, truth, and sincerity which are among the most delightful things in English literature. She depicts a Mary Crawford in her mixture of good and bad entirely by this means. She lets her rattle on against the clergy, or in favour of a baronetage and ten thousand a year, with all the ease and spirit possible; but now and again she strikes one note of her own, very quietly, but in perfect tune, and at once all Mary Crawford’s chatter, though it continues to amuse, rings flat. Hence the depth, the beauty, the complexity of her scenes. From such contrasts there comes a beauty, a solemnity even, which are not only as remarkable as her wit, but an inseparable part of it. In The Watsons she gives us a foretaste of this power; she makes us wonder why an ordinary act of kindness, as she describes it, becomes so full of meaning. In her masterpieces, the same gift is brought to perfection. Here is nothing out of the way; it is midday in Northamptonshire; a dull young man is talking to rather a weakly young woman on the stairs as they go up to dress for dinner, with housemaids passing. But, from triviality, from commonplace, their words become suddenly full of meaning, and the moment for both one of the most memorable in their lives. It fills itself; it shines; it glows; it hangs before us, deep, trembling, serene for a second; next, the housemaid passes, and this drop, in which all the happiness of life has collected, gently subsides again to become part of the ebb and flow of ordinary existence.

What more natural, then, with this insight into their profundity, than that Jane Austen should have chosen to write of the trivialities of day-to-day existence, of parties, picnics, and country dances? No “suggestions to alter her style of writing” from the Prince Regent or Mr. Clarke could tempt her; no romance, no adventure, no politics or intrigue could hold a candle to life on a country-house staircase as she saw it. Indeed, the Prince Regent and his librarian had run their heads against a very formidable obstacle; they were trying to tamper with an incorruptible conscience, to disturb an infallible discretion. The child who formed her sentences so finely when she was fifteen never ceased to form them, and never wrote for the Prince Regent or his Librarian, but for the world at large. She knew exactly what her powers were, and what material they were fitted to deal with as material should be dealt with by a writer whose standard of finality was high. There were impressions that lay outside her province; emotions that by no stretch or artifice could be properly coated and covered by her own resources. For example, she could not make a girl talk enthusiastically of banners and chapels. She could not throw herself whole-heartedly into a romantic moment. She had all sorts of devices for evading scenes of passion. Nature and its beauties she approached in a sidelong way of her own. She describes a beautiful night without once mentioning the moon. Nevertheless, as we read the few formal phrases about “the brilliancy of an unclouded night and the contrast of the deep shade of the woods”, the night is at once as “solemn, and soothing, and lovely” as she tells us, quite simply, that it was.

The balance of her gifts was singularly perfect. Among her finished novels there are no failures, and among her many chapters few that sink markedly below the level of the others. But, after all, she died at the age of forty-two. She died at the height of her powers. She was still subject to those changes which often make the final period of a writer’s career the most interesting of all. Vivacious, irrepressible, gifted with an invention of great vitality, there can be no doubt that she would have written more, had she lived, and it is tempting to consider whether she would not have written differently. The boundaries were marked; moons, mountains, and castles lay on the other side. But was she not sometimes tempted to trespass for a minute? Was she not beginning, in her own gay and brilliant manner, to contemplate a little voyage of discovery?

Let us take Persuasion, the last completed novel, and look by its light at the books she might have written had she lived. There is a peculiar beauty and a peculiar dullness in Persuasion. The dullness is that which so often marks the transition stage between two different periods. The writer is a little bored. She has grown too familiar with the ways of her world; she no longer notes them freshly. There is an asperity in her comedy which suggests that she has almost ceased to be amused by the vanities of a Sir Walter or the snobbery of a Miss Elliott. The satire is harsh, and the comedy crude. She is no longer so freshly aware of the amusements of daily life. Her mind is not altogether on her object. But, while we feel that Jane Austen has done this before, and done it better, we also feel that she is trying to do something which she has never yet attempted. There is a new element in Persuasion, the quality, perhaps, that made Dr. Whewell fire up and insist that it was “the most beautiful of her works”. She is beginning to discover that the world is larger, more mysterious, and more romantic than she had supposed. We feel it to be true of herself when she says of Anne: “She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older—the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning”. She dwells frequently upon the beauty and the melancholy of nature, upon the autumn where she had been wont to dwell upon the spring. She talks of the “influence so sweet and so sad of autumnal months in the country”. She marks “the tawny leaves and withered hedges”. “One does not love a place the less because one has suffered in it”, she observes. But it is not only in a new sensibility to nature that we detect the change. Her attitude to life itself is altered. She is seeing it, for the greater part of the book, through the eyes of a woman who, unhappy herself, has a special sympathy for the happiness and unhappiness of others, which, until the very end, she is forced to comment upon in silence. Therefore the observation is less of facts and more of feelings than is usual. There is an expressed emotion in the scene at the concert and in the famous talk about woman’s constancy which proves not merely the biographical fact that Jane Austen had loved, but the aesthetic fact that she was no longer afraid to say so. Experience, when it was of a serious kind, had to sink very deep, and to be thoroughly disinfected by the passage of time, before she allowed herself to deal with it in fiction. But now, in 1817, she was ready. Outwardly, too, in her circumstances, a change was imminent. Her fame had grown very slowly. “I doubt”, wrote Mr. Austen Leigh, “whether it would be possible to mention any other author of note whose personal obscurity was so complete.” Had she lived a few more years only, all that would have been altered. She would have stayed in London, dined out, lunched out, met famous people, made new friends, read, travelled, and carried back to the quiet country cottage a hoard of observations to feast upon at leisure.

And what effect would all this have had upon the six novels that Jane Austen did not write? She would not have written of crime, of passion, or of adventure. She would not have been rushed by the importunity of publishers or the flattery of friends into slovenliness or insincerity. But she would have known more. Her sense of security would have been shaken. Her comedy would have suffered. She would have trusted less (this is already perceptible in Persuasion) to dialogue and more to reflection to give us a knowledge of her characters. Those marvellous little speeches which sum up, in a few minutes’ chatter, all that we need in order to know an Admiral Croft or a Mrs. Musgrove for ever, that shorthand, hit-or-miss method which contains chapters of analysis and psychology, would have become too crude to hold all that she now perceived of the complexity of human nature. She would have devised a method, clear and composed as ever, but deeper and more suggestive, for conveying not only what people say, but what they leave unsaid; not only what they are, but what life is. She would have stood farther away from her characters, and seen them more as a group, less as individuals. Her satire, while it played less incessantly, would have been more stringent and severe. She would have been the forerunner of Henry James and of Proust—but enough. Vain are these speculations: the most perfect artist among women, the writer whose books are immortal, died “just as she was beginning to feel confidence in her own success”.

[Times Literary Supplement, May 13, 1913]

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Modern Fiction.

In making any survey, even the freest and loosest, of modern fiction, it is difficult not to take it for granted that the modern practice of the art is somehow an improvement upon the old. With their simple tools and primitive materials, it might be said, Fielding did well and Jane Austen even better, but compare their opportunities with ours! Their masterpieces certainly have a strange air of simplicity. And yet the analogy between literature and the process, to choose an example, of making motor cars scarcely holds good beyond the first glance. It is doubtful whether in the course of the centuries, though we have learnt much about making machines, we have learnt anything about making literature. We do not come to write better; all that we can be said to do is to keep moving, now a little in this direction, now in that, but with a circular tendency should the whole course of the track be viewed from a sufficiently lofty pinnacle. It need scarcely be said that we make no claim to stand, even momentarily, upon that vantage ground. On the flat, in the crowd, half blind with dust, we look back with envy to those happier warriors, whose battle is won and whose achievements wear so serene an air of accomplishment that we can scarcely refrain from whispering that the fight was not so fierce for them as for us. It is for the historian of literature to decide; for him to say if we are now beginning or ending or standing in the middle of a great period of prose fiction, for down in the plain little is visible. We only know that certain gratitudes and hostilities inspire us; that certain paths seem to lead to fertile land, others to the dust and the desert; and of this perhaps it may be worth while to attempt some account.

Our quarrel, then, is not with the classics, and if we speak of quarrelling with Mr. Wells, Mr. Bennett, and Mr. Galsworthy, it is partly that by the mere fact of their existence in the flesh their work has a living, breathing, everyday imperfection which bids us take what liberties with it we choose. But it is also true that, while we thank them for a thousand gifts, we reserve our unconditional gratitude for Mr. Hardy, for Mr. Conrad, and in a much lesser degree for the Mr. Hudson of The Purple Land, Green Mansions, and Far Away and Long Ago. Mr. Wells, Mr. Bennett, and Mr. Galsworthy have excited so many hopes and disappointed them so persistently that our gratitude largely takes the form of thanking them for having shown us what they might have done but have not done; what we certainly could not do, but as certainly, perhaps, do not wish to do. No single phrase will sum up the charge or grievance which we have to bring against a mass of work so large in its volume and embodying so many qualities, both admirable and the reverse. If we tried to formulate our meaning in one word we should say that these three writers are materialists. It is because they are concerned not with the spirit but with the body that they have disappointed us, and left us with the feeling that the sooner English fiction turns its back upon them, as politely as may be, and marches, if only into the desert, the better for its soul. Naturally, no single word reaches the centre of three separate targets. In the case of Mr. Wells it falls notably wide of the mark. And yet even with him it indicates to our thinking the fatal alloy in his genius, the great clod of clay that has got itself mixed up with the purity of his inspiration. But Mr. Bennett is perhaps the worst culprit of the three, inasmuch as he is by far the best workman. He can make a book so well constructed and solid in its craftsmanship that it is difficult for the most exacting of critics to see through what chink or crevice decay can creep in. There is not so much as a draught between the frames of the windows, or a crack in the boards. And yet—if life should refuse to live there? That is a risk which the creator of The Old Wives’ Tale, George Cannon, Edwin Clayhanger, and hosts of other figures, may well claim to have surmounted. His characters live abundantly, even unexpectedly, but it remains to ask how do they live, and what do they live for? More and more they seem to us, deserting even the well-built villa in the Five Towns, to spend their time in some softly padded first-class railway carriage, pressing bells and buttons innumerable; and the destiny to which they travel so luxuriously becomes more and more unquestionably an eternity of bliss spent in the very best hotel in Brighton. It can scarcely be said of Mr. Wells that he is a materialist in the sense that he takes too much delight in the solidity of his fabric. His mind is too generous in its sympathies to allow him to spend much time in making things shipshape and substantial. He is a materialist from sheer goodness of heart, taking upon his shoulders the work that ought to have been discharged by Government officials, and in the plethora of his ideas and facts scarcely having leisure to realise, or forgetting to think important, the crudity and coarseness of his human beings. Yet what more damaging criticism can there be both of his earth and of his Heaven than that they are to be inhabited here and hereafter by his Joans and his Peters? Does not the inferiority of their natures tarnish whatever institutions and ideals may be provided for them by the generosity of their creator? Nor, profoundly though we respect the integrity and humanity of Mr. Galsworthy, shall we find what we seek in his pages.

If we fasten, then, one label on all these books, on which is one word materialists, we mean by it that they write of unimportant things; that they spend immense skill and immense industry making the trivial and the transitory appear the true and the enduring.

We have to admit that we are exacting, and, further, that we find it difficult to justify our discontent by explaining what it is that we exact. We frame our question differently at different times. But it reappears most persistently as we drop the finished novel on the crest of a sigh—Is it worth while? What is the point of it all? Can it be that, owing to one of those little deviations which the human spirit seems to make from time to time, Mr. Bennett has come down with his magnificent apparatus for catching life just an inch or two on the wrong side? Life escapes; and perhaps without life nothing else is worth while. It is a confession of vagueness to have to make use of such a figure as this, but we scarcely better the matter by speaking, as critics are prone to do, of reality. Admitting the vagueness which afflicts all criticism of novels, let us hazard the opinion that for us at this moment the form of fiction most in vogue more often misses than secures the thing we seek. Whether we call it life or spirit, truth or reality, this, the essential thing, has moved off, or on, and refuses to be contained any longer in such ill-fitting vestments as we provide. Nevertheless, we go on perseveringly, conscientiously, constructing our two and thirty chapters after a design which more and more ceases to resemble the vision in our minds. So much of the enormous labour of proving the solidity, the likeness to life, of the story is not merely labour thrown away but labour misplaced to the extent of obscuring and blotting out the light of the conception. The writer seems constrained, not by his own free will but by some powerful and unscrupulous tyrant who has him in thrall, to provide a plot, to provide comedy, tragedy, love interest, and an air of probability embalming the whole so impeccable that if all his figures were to come to life they would find themselves dressed down to the last button of their coats in the fashion of the hour. The tyrant is obeyed; the novel is done to a turn. But sometimes, more and more often as time goes by, we suspect a momentary doubt, a spasm of rebellion, as the pages fill themselves in the customary way. Is life like this? Must novels be like this?

Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being “like this”. Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it. Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible? We are not pleading merely for courage and sincerity; we are suggesting that the proper stuff of fiction is a little other than custom would have us believe it.

It is, at any rate, in some such fashion as this that we seek to define the quality which distinguishes the work of several young writers, among whom Mr. James Joyce is the most notable, from that of their predecessors. They attempt to come closer to life, and to preserve more sincerely and exactly what interests and moves them, even if to do so they must discard most of the conventions which are commonly observed by the novelist. Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small. Any one who has read The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or, what promises to be a far more interesting work, Ulysses, now appearing in the Little Review, will have hazarded some theory of this nature as to Mr. Joyce’s intention. On our part, with such a fragment before us, it is hazarded rather than affirmed; but whatever the intention of the whole, there can be no question but that it is of the utmost sincerity and that the result, difficult or unpleasant as we may judge it, is undeniably important. In contrast with those whom we have called materialists, Mr. Joyce is spiritual; he is concerned at all costs to reveal the flickerings of that innermost flame which flashes its messages through the brain, and in order to preserve it he disregards with complete courage whatever seems to him adventitious, whether it be probability, or coherence, or any other of these signposts which for generations have served to support the imagination of a reader when called upon to imagine what he can neither touch nor see. The scene in the cemetery, for instance, with its brilliancy, its sordidity, its incoherence, its sudden lightning flashes of significance, does undoubtedly come so close to the quick of the mind that, on a first reading at any rate, it is difficult not to acclaim a masterpiece. If we want life itself, here surely we have it. Indeed, we find ourselves fumbling rather awkwardly if we try to say what else we wish, and for what reason a work of such originality yet fails to compare, for we must take high examples, with Youth or The Mayor of Casterbridge. It fails because of the comparative poverty of the writer’s mind, we might say simply and have done with it. But it is possible to press a little further and wonder whether we may not refer our sense of being in a bright yet narrow room, confined and shut in, rather than enlarged and set free, to some limitation imposed by the method as well as by the mind. Is it the method that inhibits the creative power? Is it due to the method that we feel neither jovial nor magnanimous, but centred in a self which, in spite of its tremor of susceptibility, never embraces or creates what is outside itself and beyond? Does the emphasis laid, perhaps didactically, upon indecency, contribute to the effect of something angular and isolated? Or is it merely that in any effort of such originality it is much easier, for contemporaries especially, to feel what it lacks than to name what it gives? In any case it is a mistake to stand outside examining “methods”. Any method is right, every method is right, that expresses what we wish to express, if we are writers; that brings us closer to the novelist’s intention if we are readers. This method has the merit of bringing us closer to what we were prepared to call life itself; did not the reading of Ulysses suggest how much of life is excluded or ignored, and did it not come with a shock to open Tristram Shandy or even Pendennis and be by them convinced that there are not only other aspects of life, but more important ones into the bargain.

However this may be, the problem before the novelist at present, as we suppose it to have been in the past, is to contrive means of being free to set down what he chooses. He has to have the courage to say that what interests him is no longer “this” but “that”: out of “that” alone must he construct his work. For the moderns “that”, the point of interest, lies very likely in the dark places of psychology. At once, therefore, the accent falls a little differently; the emphasis is upon something hitherto ignored; at once a different outline of form becomes necessary, difficult for us to grasp, incomprehensible to our predecessors. No one but a modern, no one perhaps but a Russian, would have felt the interest of the situation which Tchekov has made into the short story which he calls “Gusev”. Some Russian soldiers lie ill on board a ship which is taking them back to Russia. We are given a few scraps of their talk and some of their thoughts; then one of them dies and is carried away; the talk goes on among the others for a time, until Gusev himself dies, and looking “like a carrot or a radish” is thrown overboard. The emphasis is laid upon such unexpected places that at first it seems as if there were no emphasis at all; and then, as the eyes accustom themselves to twilight and discern the shapes of things in a room we see how complete the story is, how profound, and how truly in obedience to his vision Tchekov has chosen this, that, and the other, and placed them together to compose something new. But it is impossible to say “this is comic”, or “that is tragic”, nor are we certain, since short stories, we have been taught, should be brief and conclusive, whether this, which is vague and inconclusive, should be called a short story at all.

The most elementary remarks upon modern English fiction can hardly avoid some mention of the Russian influence, and if the Russians are mentioned one runs the risk of feeling that to write of any fiction save theirs is waste of time. If we want understanding of the soul and heart where else shall we find it of comparable profundity? If we are sick of our own materialism the least considerable of their novelists has by right of birth a natural reverence for the human spirit. “Learn to make yourself akin to people…. But let this sympathy be not with the mind—for it is easy with the mind—but with the heart, with love towards them.” In every great Russian writer we seem to discern the features of a saint, if sympathy for the sufferings of others, love towards them, endeavour to reach some goal worthy of the most exacting demands of the spirit constitute saintliness. It is the saint in them which confounds us with a feeling of our own irreligious triviality, and turns so many of our famous novels to tinsel and trickery. The conclusions of the Russian mind, thus comprehensive and compassionate, are inevitably, perhaps, of the utmost sadness. More accurately indeed we might speak of the inconclusiveness of the Russian mind. It is the sense that there is no answer, that if honestly examined life presents question after question which must be left to sound on and on after the story is over in hopeless interrogation that fills us with a deep, and finally it may be with a resentful, despair. They are right perhaps; unquestionably they see further than we do and without our gross impediments of vision. But perhaps we see something that escapes them, or why should this voice of protest mix itself with our gloom? The voice of protest is the voice of another and an ancient civilisation which seems to have bred in us the instinct to enjoy and fight rather than to suffer and understand. English fiction from Sterne to Meredith bears witness to our natural delight in humour and comedy, in the beauty of earth, in the activities of the intellect, and in the splendour of the body. But any deductions that we may draw from the comparison of two fictions so immeasurably far apart are futile save indeed as they flood us with a view of the infinite possibilities of the art and remind us that there is no limit to the horizon, and that nothing—no “method”, no experiment, even of the wildest—is forbidden, but only falsity and pretence. “The proper stuff of fiction” does not exist; everything is the proper stuff of fiction, every feeling, every thought; every quality of brain and spirit is drawn upon; no perception comes amiss. And if we can imagine the art of fiction come alive and standing in our midst, she would undoubtedly bid us break her and bully her, as well as honour and love her, for so her youth is renewed and her sovereignty assured.

[Written in April 1919.]

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“Jane Eyre” And “Wuthering Heights”.

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

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

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

There is nothing there more perishable than the moor itself, or more subject to the sway of fashion than the “long and lamentable blast”. Nor is this exhilaration short-lived. It rushes us through the entire volume, without giving us time to think, without letting us lift our eyes from the page. So intense is our absorption that if some one moves in the room the movement seems to take place not there but up in Yorkshire. The writer has us by the hand, forces us along her road, makes us see what she sees, never leaves us for a moment or allows us to forget her. At the end we are steeped through and through with the genius, the vehemence, the indignation of Charlotte Brontë. Remarkable faces, figures of strong outline and gnarled feature have flashed upon us in passing; but it is through her eyes that we have seen them. Once she is gone, we seek for them in vain. Think of Rochester and we have to think of Jane Eyre. Think of the moor, and again there is Jane Eyre. Think of the drawing-room,[◉2] even, those “white carpets on which seemed laid brilliant garlands of flowers”, that “pale Parian mantelpiece” with its Bohemia glass of “ruby red” and the “general blending of snow and fire”—what is all that except Jane Eyre?

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

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

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

[Written in 1916]

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George Eliot.

To read George Eliot attentively is to become aware how little one knows about her. It is also to become aware of the credulity, not very creditable to one’s insight, with which, half consciously and partly maliciously, one had accepted the late Victorian version of a deluded woman who held phantom sway over subjects even more deluded than herself. At what moment and by what means her spell was broken it is difficult to ascertain. Some people attribute it to the publication of her Life. Perhaps George Meredith, with his phrase about the “mercurial little showman” and the “errant woman” on the daïs, gave point and poison to the arrows of thousands incapable of aiming them so accurately, but delighted to let fly. She became one of the butts for youth to laugh at, the convenient symbol of a group of serious people who were all guilty of the same idolatry and could be dismissed with the same scorn. Lord Acton had said that she was greater than Dante; Herbert Spencer exempted her novels, as if they were not novels, when he banned all fiction from the London Library. She was the pride and paragon of her sex. Moreover, her private record was not more alluring than her public. Asked to describe an afternoon at the Priory, the story-teller always intimated that the memory of those serious Sunday afternoons had come to tickle his sense of humour. He had been so much alarmed by the grave lady in her low chair; he had been so anxious to say the intelligent thing. Certainly, the talk had been very serious, as a note in the fine clear hand of the great novelist bore witness. It was dated on the Monday morning, and she accused herself of having spoken without due forethought of Marivaux when she meant another; but no doubt, she said, her listener had already supplied the correction. Still, the memory of talking about Marivaux to George Eliot on a Sunday afternoon was not a romantic memory. It had faded with the passage of the years. It had not become picturesque.

Indeed, one cannot escape the conviction that the long, heavy face with its expression of serious and sullen and almost equine power has stamped itself depressingly upon the minds of people who remember George Eliot, so that it looks out upon them from her pages. Mr. Gosse has lately described her as he saw her driving through London in a victoria:

a large, thick-set sybil, dreamy and immobile, whose massive features, somewhat grim when seen in profile, were incongruously bordered by a hat, always in the height of Paris fashion, which in those days commonly included an immense ostrich feather.

Lady Ritchie, with equal skill, has left a more intimate indoor portrait:

She sat by the fire in a beautiful black satin gown, with a green shaded lamp on the table beside her, where I saw German books lying and pamphlets and ivory paper-cutters. She was very quiet and noble, with two steady little eyes and a sweet voice. As I looked I felt her to be a friend, not exactly a personal friend, but a good and benevolent impulse.

A scrap of her talk is preserved. “We ought to respect our influence,” she said. “We know by our own experience how very much others affect our lives, and we must remember that we in turn must have the same effect upon others.” Jealously treasured, committed to memory, one can imagine recalling the scene, repeating the words, thirty years later and suddenly, for the first time, bursting into laughter.

In all these records one feels that the recorder, even when he was in the actual presence, kept his distance and kept his head, and never read the novels in later years with the light of a vivid, or puzzling, or beautiful personality dazzling in his eyes. In fiction, where so much of personality is revealed, the absence of charm is a great lack; and her critics, who have been, of course, mostly of the opposite sex, have resented, half consciously perhaps, her deficiency in a quality which is held to be supremely desirable in women. George Eliot was not charming; she was not strongly feminine; she had none of those eccentricities and inequalities of temper which give to so many artists the endearing simplicity of children. One feels that to most people, as to Lady Ritchie, she was “not exactly a personal friend, but a good and benevolent impulse”. But if we consider these portraits more closely we shall find that they are all the portraits of an elderly celebrated woman, dressed in black satin, driving in her victoria, a woman who has been through her struggle and issued from it with a profound desire to be of use to others, but with no wish for intimacy, save with the little circle who had known her in the days of her youth. We know very little about the days of her youth; but we do know that the culture, the philosophy, the fame, and the influence were all built upon a very humble foundation—she was the grand-daughter of a carpenter.

The first volume of her life is a singularly depressing record. In it we see her raising herself with groans and struggles from the intolerable boredom of petty provincial society (her father had risen in the world and become more middle class, but less picturesque) to be the assistant editor of a highly intellectual London review, and the esteemed companion of Herbert Spencer. The stages are painful as she reveals them in the sad soliloquy in which Mr. Cross condemned her to tell the story of her life. Marked in early youth as one “sure to get something up very soon in the way of a clothing club”, she proceeded to raise funds for restoring a church by making a chart of ecclesiastical history; and that was followed by a loss of faith which so disturbed her father that he refused to live with her. Next came the struggle with the translation of Strauss, which, dismal and “soul-stupefying” in itself, can scarcely have been made less so by the usual feminine tasks of ordering a household and nursing a dying father, and the distressing conviction, to one so dependent upon affection, that by becoming a blue-stocking she was forfeiting her brother’s respect. “I used to go about like an owl,” she said, “to the great disgust of my brother.” “Poor thing,” wrote a friend who saw her toiling through Strauss with a statue of the risen Christ in front of her, “I do pity her sometimes, with her pale sickly face and dreadful headaches, and anxiety, too, about her father.” Yet, though we cannot read the story without a strong desire that the stages of her pilgrimage might have been made, if not more easy, at least more beautiful, there is a dogged determination in her advance upon the citadel of culture which raises it above our pity. Her development was very slow and very awkward, but it had the irresistible impetus behind it of a deep-seated and noble ambition. Every obstacle at length was thrust from her path. She knew every one. She read everything. Her astonishing intellectual vitality had triumphed. Youth was over, but youth had been full of suffering. Then, at the age of thirty-five, at the height of her powers, and in the fulness of her freedom, she made the decision which was of such profound moment to her and still matters even to us, and went to Weimar, alone with George Henry Lewes.

The books which followed so soon after her union testify in the fullest manner to the great liberation which had come to her with personal happiness. In themselves they provide us with a plentiful feast. Yet at the threshold of her literary career one may find in some of the circumstances of her life influences that turned her mind to the past, to the country village, to the quiet and beauty and simplicity of childish memories and away from herself and the present. We understand how it was that her first book was Scenes of Clerical Life, and not Middlemarch. Her union with Lewes had surrounded her with affection, but in view of the circumstances and of the conventions it had also isolated her. “I wish it to be understood”, she wrote in 1857, “that I should never invite any one to come and see me who did not ask for the invitation.” She had been “cut off from what is called the world”, she said later, but she did not regret it. By becoming thus marked, first by circumstances and later, inevitably, by her fame, she lost the power to move on equal terms unnoted among her kind; and the loss for a novelist was serious. Still, basking in the light and sunshine of Scenes of Clerical Life, feeling the large mature mind spreading itself with a luxurious sense of freedom in the world of her “remotest past”, to speak of loss seems inappropriate. Everything to such a mind was gain. All experience filtered down through layer after layer of perception and reflection, enriching and nourishing. The utmost we can say, in qualifying her attitude towards fiction by what little we know of her life, is that she had taken to heart certain lessons not usually learnt early, if learnt at all, among which, perhaps, the most branded upon her was the melancholy virtue of tolerance; her sympathies are with the everyday lot, and play most happily in dwelling upon the homespun of ordinary joys and sorrows. She has none of that romantic intensity which is connected with a sense of one’s own individuality, unsated and unsubdued, cutting its shape sharply upon the background of the world. What were the loves and sorrows of a snuffy old clergyman, dreaming over his whisky, to the fiery egotism of Jane Eyre? The beauty of those first books, Scenes of Clerical Life, Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, is very great. It is impossible to estimate the merit of the Poysers, the Dodsons, the Gilfils, the Bartons, and the rest with all their surroundings and dependencies, because they have put on flesh and blood and we move among them, now bored, now sympathetic, but always with that unquestioning acceptance of all that they say and do, which we accord to the great originals only. The flood of memory and humour which she pours so spontaneously into one figure, one scene after another, until the whole fabric of ancient rural England is revived, has so much in common with a natural process that it leaves us with little consciousness that there is anything to criticise. We accept; we feel the delicious warmth and release of spirit which the great creative writers alone procure for us. As one comes back to the books after years of absence they pour out, even against our expectation, the same store of energy and heat, so that we want more than anything to idle in the warmth as in the sun beating down from the red orchard wall. If there is an element of unthinking abandonment in thus submitting to the humours of Midland farmers and their wives, that, too, is right in the circumstances. We scarcely wish to analyse what we feel to be so large and deeply human. And when we consider how distant in time the world of Shepperton and Hayslope is, and how remote the minds of farmer and agricultural labourers from those of most of George Eliot’s readers, we can only attribute the ease and pleasure with which we ramble from house to smithy, from cottage parlour to rectory garden, to the fact that George Eliot makes us share their lives, not in a spirit of condescension or of curiosity, but in a spirit of sympathy. She is no satirist. The movement of her mind was too slow and cumbersome to lend itself to comedy. But she gathers in her large grasp a great bunch of the main elements of human nature and groups them loosely together with a tolerant and wholesome understanding which, as one finds upon re-reading, has not only kept her figures fresh and free, but has given them an unexpected hold upon our laughter and tears. There is the famous Mrs. Poyser. It would have been easy to work her idiosyncrasies to death, and, as it is, perhaps, George Eliot gets her laugh in the same place a little too often. But memory, after the book is shut, brings out, as sometimes in real life, the details and subtleties which some more salient characteristic has prevented us from noticing at the time. We recollect that her health was not good. There were occasions upon which she said nothing at all. She was patience itself with a sick child. She doted upon Totty. Thus one can muse and speculate about the greater number of George Eliot’s characters and find, even in the least important, a roominess and margin where those qualities lurk which she has no call to bring from their obscurity.

But in the midst of all this tolerance and sympathy there are, even in the early books, moments of greater stress. Her humour has shown itself broad enough to cover a wide range of fools and failures, mothers and children, dogs and flourishing midland fields, farmers, sagacious or fuddled over their ale, horse-dealers, inn-keepers, curates, and carpenters. Over them all broods a certain romance, the only romance that George Eliot allowed herself—the romance of the past. The books are astonishingly readable and have no trace of pomposity or pretence. But to the reader who holds a large stretch of her early work in view it will become obvious that the mist of recollection gradually withdraws. It is not that her power diminishes, for, to our thinking, it is at its highest in the mature Middlemarch, the magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the few English novels written for grown-up people. But the world of fields and farms no longer contents her. In real life she had sought her fortunes elsewhere; and though to look back into the past was calming and consoling, there are, even in the early works, traces of that troubled spirit, that exacting and questioning and baffled presence who was George Eliot herself. In Adam Bede there is a hint of her in Dinah. She shows herself far more openly and completely in Maggie in The Mill on the Floss. She is Janet in Janet’s Repentance, and Romola, and Dorothea seeking wisdom and finding one scarcely knows what in marriage with Ladislaw. Those who fall foul of George Eliot do so, we incline to think, on account of her heroines; and with good reason; for there is no doubt that they bring out the worst of her, lead her into difficult places, make her self-conscious, didactic, and occasionally vulgar. Yet if you could delete the whole sisterhood you would leave a much smaller and a much inferior world, albeit a world of greater artistic perfection and far superior jollity and comfort. In accounting for her failure, in so far as it was a failure, one recollects that she never wrote a story until she was thirty-seven, and that by the time she was thirty-seven she had come to think of herself with a mixture of pain and something like resentment. For long she preferred not to think of herself at all. Then, when the first flush of creative energy was exhausted and self-confidence had come to her, she wrote more and more from the personal standpoint, but she did so without the unhesitating abandonment of the young. Her self-consciousness is always marked when her heroines say what she herself would have said. She disguised them in every possible way. She granted them beauty and wealth into the bargain; she invented, more improbably, a taste for brandy. But the disconcerting and stimulating fact remained that she was compelled by the very power of her genius to step forth in person upon the quiet bucolic scene.

The noble and beautiful girl who insisted upon being born into the Mill on the Floss is the most obvious example of the ruin which a heroine can strew about her. Humour controls her and keeps her lovable so long as she is small and can be satisfied by eloping with the gipsies or hammering nails into her doll; but she develops; and before George Eliot knows what has happened she has a full-grown woman on her hands demanding what neither gipsies, nor dolls, nor St. Ogg’s itself is capable of giving her. First Philip Wakem is produced, and later Stephen Guest. The weakness of the one and the coarseness of the other have often been pointed out; but both, in their weakness and coarseness, illustrate not so much George Eliot’s inability to draw the portrait of a man, as the uncertainty, the infirmity, and the fumbling which shook her hand when she had to conceive a fit mate for a heroine. She is in the first place driven beyond the home world she knew and loved, and forced to set foot in middle-class drawing-rooms where young men sing all the summer morning and young women sit embroidering smoking-caps for bazaars. She feels herself out of her element, as her clumsy satire of what she calls “good society” proves.

Good society has its claret and its velvet carpets, its dinner engagements six weeks deep, its opera, and its faëry ball rooms … gets its science done by Faraday and its religion by the superior clergy who are to be met in the best houses; how should it have need of belief and emphasis?

There is no trace of humour or insight there, but only the vindictiveness of a grudge which we feel to be personal in its origin. But terrible as the complexity of our social system is in its demands upon the sympathy and discernment of a novelist straying across the boundaries, Maggie Tulliver did worse than drag George Eliot from her natural surroundings. She insisted upon the introduction of the great emotional scene. She must love; she must despair; she must be drowned clasping her brother in her arms. The more one examines the great emotional scenes the more nervously one anticipates the brewing and gathering and thickening of the cloud which will burst upon our heads at the moment of crisis in a shower of disillusionment and verbosity. It is partly that her hold upon dialogue, when it is not dialect, is slack; and partly that she seems to shrink with an elderly dread of fatigue from the effort of emotional concentration. She allows her heroines to talk too much. She has little verbal felicity. She lacks the unerring taste which chooses one sentence and compresses the heart of the scene within that. “Whom are you going to dance with?” asked Mr. Knightley, at the Westons’ ball. “With you, if you will ask me,” said Emma; and she has said enough. Mrs. Casaubon would have talked for an hour and we should have looked out of the window.

Yet, dismiss the heroines without sympathy, confine George Eliot to the agricultural world of her “remotest past”, and you not only diminish her greatness but lose her true flavour. That greatness is here we can have no doubt. The width of the prospect, the large strong outlines of the principal features, the ruddy light of the early books, the searching power and reflective richness of the later tempt us to linger and expatiate beyond our limits. But it is upon the heroines that we would cast a final glance. “I have always been finding out my religion since I was a little girl,” says Dorothea Casaubon. “I used to pray so much—now I hardly ever pray. I try not to have desires merely for myself….” She is speaking for them all. That is their problem. They cannot live without religion, and they start out on the search for one when they are little girls. Each has the deep feminine passion for goodness, which makes the place where she stands in aspiration and agony the heart of the book—still and cloistered like a place of worship, but that she no longer knows to whom to pray. In learning they seek their goal; in the ordinary tasks of womanhood; in the wider service of their kind. They do not find what they seek, and we cannot wonder. The ancient consciousness of woman, charged with suffering and sensibility, and for so many ages dumb, seems in them to have brimmed and overflowed and uttered a demand for something—they scarcely know what—for something that is perhaps incompatible with the facts of human existence. George Eliot had far too strong an intelligence to tamper with those facts, and too broad a humour to mitigate the truth because it was a stern one. Save for the supreme courage of their endeavour, the struggle ends, for her heroines, in tragedy, or in a compromise that is even more melancholy. But their story is the incomplete version of the story of George Eliot herself. For her, too, the burden and the complexity of womanhood were not enough; she must reach beyond the sanctuary and pluck for herself the strange bright fruits of art and knowledge. Clasping them as few women have ever clasped them, she would not renounce her own inheritance—the difference of view, the difference of standard—nor accept an inappropriate reward. Thus we behold her, a memorable figure, inordinately praised and shrinking from her fame, despondent, reserved, shuddering back into the arms of love as if there alone were satisfaction and, it might be, justification, at the same time reaching out with “a fastidious yet hungry ambition” for all that life could offer the free and inquiring mind and confronting her feminine aspirations with the real world of men. Triumphant was the issue for her, whatever it may have been for her creations, and as we recollect all that she dared and achieved, how with every obstacle against her—sex and health and convention—she sought more knowledge and more freedom till the body, weighted with its double burden, sank worn out, we must lay upon her grave whatever we have it in our power to bestow of laurel and rose.

[Times Literary Supplement, Nov 20, 1919]

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The Russian Point of View.

Doubtful as we frequently are whether either the French or the Americans, who have so much in common with us, can yet understand English literature, we must admit graver doubts whether, for all their enthusiasm, the English can understand Russian literature. Debate might protract itself indefinitely as to what we mean by “understand”. Instances will occur to everybody of American writers in particular who have written with the highest discrimination of our literature and of ourselves; who have lived a lifetime among us, and finally have taken legal steps to become subjects of King George. For all that, have they understood us, have they not remained to the end of their days foreigners? Could any one believe that the novels of Henry James were written by a man who had grown up in the society which he describes, or that his criticism of English writers was written by a man who had read Shakespeare without any sense of the Atlantic Ocean and two or three hundred years on the far side of it separating his civilisation from ours? A special acuteness and detachment, a sharp angle of vision the foreigner will often achieve; but not that absence of self-consciousness, that ease and fellowship and sense of common values which make for intimacy, and sanity, and the quick give and take of familiar intercourse.

Not only have we all this to separate us from Russian literature, but a much more serious barrier—the difference of language. Of all those who feasted upon Tolstoi, Dostoevsky, and Tchekov during the past twenty years, not more than one or two perhaps have been able to read them in Russian. Our estimate of their qualities has been formed by critics who have never read a word of Russian, or seen Russia, or even heard the language spoken by natives; who have had to depend, blindly and implicitly, upon the work of translators.

What we are saying amounts to this, then, that we have judged a whole literature stripped of its style. When you have changed every word in a sentence from Russian to English, have thereby altered the sense a little, the sound, weight, and accent of the words in relation to each other completely, nothing remains except a crude and coarsened version of the sense. Thus treated, the great Russian writers are like men deprived by an earthquake or a railway accident not only of all their clothes, but also of something subtler and more important—their manners, the idiosyncrasies of their characters. What remains is, as the English have proved by the fanaticism of their admiration, something very powerful and very impressive, but it is difficult to feel sure, in view of these mutilations, how far we can trust ourselves not to impute, to distort, to read into them an emphasis which is false.

They have lost their clothes, we say, in some terrible catastrophe, for some such figure as that describes the simplicity, the humanity, startled out of all effort to hide and disguise its instincts, which Russian literature, whether it is due to translation or to some more profound cause, makes upon us. We find these qualities steeping it through, as obvious in the lesser writers as in the greater. “Learn to make yourselves akin to people. I would even like to add: make yourself indispensable to them. But let this sympathy be not with the mind—for it is easy with the mind—but with the heart, with love towards them.” “From the Russian”, one would say instantly, where-ever one chanced on that quotation. The simplicity, the absence of effort, the assumption that in a world bursting with misery the chief call upon us is to understand our fellow-sufferers, “and not with the mind—for it is easy with the mind—but with the heart”—this is the cloud which broods above the whole of Russian literature, which lures us from our own parched brilliancy and scorched thoroughfares to expand in its shade—and of course with disastrous results. We become awkward and self-conscious; denying our own qualities, we write with an affectation of goodness and simplicity which is nauseating in the extreme. We cannot say “Brother” with simple conviction. There is a story by Mr. Galsworthy in which one of the characters so addresses another (they are both in the depths of misfortune). Immediately everything becomes strained and affected. The English equivalent for “Brother” is “Mate”—a very different word, with something sardonic in it, an indefinable suggestion of humour. Met though they are in the depths of misfortune the two Englishmen who thus accost each other will, we are sure, find a job, make their fortunes, spend the last years of their lives in luxury, and leave a sum of money to prevent poor devils from calling each other “Brother” on the Embankment. But it is common suffering, rather than common happiness, effort, or desire that produces the sense of brotherhood. It is the “deep sadness” which Dr. Hagberg Wright finds typical of the Russian people that creates their literature.

A generalisation of this kind will, of course, even if it has some degree of truth when applied to the body of literature, be changed profoundly when a writer of genius sets to work on it. At once other questions arise. It is seen that an “attitude” is not simple; it is highly complex. Men reft of their coats and their manners, stunned by a railway accident, say hard things, harsh things, unpleasant things, difficult things, even if they say them with the abandonment and simplicity which catastrophe has bred in them. Our first impressions of Tchekov are not of simplicity but of bewilderment. What is the point of it, and why does he make a story out of this? we ask as we read story after story. A man falls in love with a married woman, and they part and meet, and in the end are left talking about their position and by what means they can be free from “this intolerable bondage”.

“‘How? How?’ he asked, clutching his head…. And it seemed as though in a little while the solution would be found and then a new and splendid life would begin.” That is the end. A postman drives a student to the station and all the way the student tries to make the postman talk, but he remains silent. Suddenly the postman says unexpectedly, “It’s against the regulations to take any one with the post”. And he walks up and down the platform with a look of anger on his face. “With whom was he angry? Was it with people, with poverty, with the autumn nights?” Again, that story ends.

But is it the end, we ask? We have rather the feeling that we have overrun our signals; or it is as if a tune had stopped short without the expected chords to close it. These stories are inconclusive, we say, and proceed to frame a criticism based upon the assumption that stories ought to conclude in a way that we recognise. In so doing, we raise the question of our own fitness as readers. Where the tune is familiar and the end emphatic—lovers united, villains discomfited, intrigues exposed—as it is in most Victorian fiction, we can scarcely go wrong, but where the tune is unfamiliar and the end a note of interrogation or merely the information that they went on talking, as it is in Tchekov, we need a very daring and alert sense of literature to make us hear the tune, and in particular those last notes which complete the harmony. Probably we have to read a great many stories before we feel, and the feeling is essential to our satisfaction, that we hold the parts together, and that Tchekov was not merely rambling disconnectedly, but struck now this note, now that with intention, in order to complete his meaning.

We have to cast about in order to discover where the emphasis in these strange stories rightly comes. Tchekov’s own words give us a lead in the right direction. “… such a conversation as this between us”, he says, “would have been unthinkable for our parents. At night they did not talk, but slept sound; we, our generation, sleep badly, are restless, but talk a great deal, and are always trying to settle whether we are right or not.” Our literature of social satire and psychological finesse both sprang from that restless sleep, that incessant talking; but after all, there is an enormous difference between Tchekov and Henry James, between Tchekov and Bernard Shaw. Obviously—but where does it arise? Tchekov, too, is aware of the evils and injustices of the social state; the condition of the peasants appals him, but the reformer’s zeal is not his—that is not the signal for us to stop. The mind interests him enormously; he is a most subtle and delicate analyst of human relations. But again, no; the end is not there. Is it that he is primarily interested not in the soul’s relation with other souls, but with the soul’s relation to health—with the soul’s relation to goodness? These stories are always showing us some affectation, pose, insincerity. Some woman has got into a false relation; some man has been perverted by the inhumanity of his circumstances. The soul is ill; the soul is cured; the soul is not cured. Those are the emphatic points in his stories.

Once the eye is used to these shades, half the “conclusions” of fiction fade into thin air; they show like transparences with a light behind them—gaudy, glaring, superficial. The general tidying up of the last chapter, the marriage, the death, the statement of values so sonorously trumpeted forth, so heavily underlined, become of the most rudimentary kind. Nothing is solved, we feel; nothing is rightly held together. On the other hand, the method which at first seemed so casual, inconclusive, and occupied with trifles, now appears the result of an exquisitely original and fastidious taste, choosing boldly, arranging infallibly, and controlled by an honesty for which we can find no match save among the Russians themselves. There may be no answer to these questions, but at the same time let us never manipulate the evidence so as to produce something fitting, decorous, agreeable to our vanity. This may not be the way to catch the ear of the public; after all, they are used to louder music, fiercer measures; but as the tune sounded so he has written it. In consequence, as we read these little stories about nothing at all, the horizon widens; the soul gains an astonishing sense of freedom.

In reading Tchekov we find ourselves repeating the word “soul” again and again. It sprinkles his pages. Old drunkards use it freely; “… you are high up in the service, beyond all reach, but haven’t real soul, my dear boy … there’s no strength in it”. Indeed, it is the soul that is the chief character in Russian fiction. Delicate and subtle in Tchekov, subject to an infinite number of humours and distempers, it is of greater depth and volume in Dostoevsky; it is liable to violent diseases and raging fevers, but still the predominant concern. Perhaps that is why it needs so great an effort on the part of an English reader to read The Brothers Karamazov or The Possessed a second time. The “soul” is alien to him. It is even antipathetic. It has little sense of humour and no sense of comedy. It is formless. It has slight connection with the intellect. It is confused, diffuse, tumultuous, incapable, it seems, of submitting to the control of logic or the discipline of poetry. The novels of Dostoevsky are seething whirlpools, gyrating sandstorms, waterspouts which hiss and boil and suck us in. They are composed purely and wholly of the stuff of the soul. Against our wills we are drawn in, whirled round, blinded, suffocated, and at the same time filled with a giddy rapture. Out of Shakespeare there is no more exciting reading. We open the door and find ourselves in a room full of Russian generals, the tutors of Russian generals, their step-daughters and cousins, and crowds of miscellaneous people who are all talking at the tops of their voices about their most private affairs. But where are we? Surely it is the part of a novelist to inform us whether we are in an hotel, a flat, or hired lodging. Nobody thinks of explaining. We are souls, tortured, unhappy souls, whose only business it is to talk, to reveal, to confess, to draw up at whatever rending of flesh and nerve those crabbed sins which crawl on the sand at the bottom of us. But, as we listen, our confusion slowly settles. A rope is flung to us; we catch hold of a soliloquy; holding on by the skin of our teeth, we are rushed through the water; feverishly, wildly, we rush on and on, now submerged, now in a moment of vision understanding more than we have ever understood before, and receiving such revelations as we are wont to get only from the press of life at its fullest. As we fly we pick it all up—the names of the people, their relationships, that they are staying in an hotel at Roulettenburg, that Polina is involved in an intrigue with the Marquis de Grieux—but what unimportant matters these are compared with the soul! It is the soul that matters, its passion, its tumult, its astonishing medley of beauty and vileness. And if our voices suddenly rise into shrieks of laughter, or if we are shaken by the most violent sobbing, what more natural?—it hardly calls for remark. The pace at which we are living is so tremendous that sparks must rush off our wheels as we fly. Moreover, when the speed is thus increased and the elements of the soul are seen, not separately in scenes of humour or scenes of passion as our slower English minds conceive them, but streaked, involved, inextricably confused, a new panorama of the human mind is revealed. The old divisions melt into each other. Men are at the same time villains and saints; their acts are at once beautiful and despicable. We love and we hate at the same time. There is none of that precise division between good and bad to which we are used. Often those for whom we feel most affection are the greatest criminals, and the most abject sinners move us to the strongest admiration as well as love.

Dashed to the crest of the waves, bumped and battered on the stones at the bottom, it is difficult for an English reader to feel at ease. The process to which he is accustomed in his own literature is reversed. If we wished to tell the story of a General’s love affair (and we should find it very difficult in the first place not to laugh at a General), we should begin with his house; we should solidify his surroundings. Only when all was ready should we attempt to deal with the General himself. Moreover, it is not the samovar but the teapot that rules in England; time is limited; space crowded; the influence of other points of view, of other books, even of other ages, makes itself felt. Society is sorted out into lower, middle, and upper classes, each with its own traditions, its own manners, and, to some extent, its own language. Whether he wishes it or not, there is a constant pressure upon an English novelist to recognise these barriers, and, in consequence, order is imposed on him and some kind of form; he is inclined to satire rather than to compassion, to scrutiny of society rather than understanding of individuals themselves.

No such restraints were laid on Dostoevsky. It is all the same to him whether you are noble or simple, a tramp or a great lady. Whoever you are, you are the vessel of this perplexed liquid, this cloudy, yeasty, precious stuff, the soul. The soul is not restrained by barriers. It overflows, it floods, it mingles with the souls of others. The simple story of a bank clerk who could not pay for a bottle of wine spreads, before we know what is happening, into the lives of his father-in-law and the five mistresses whom his father-in-law treated abominably, and the postman’s life, and the charwoman’s, and the Princesses’ who lodged in the same block of flats; for nothing is outside Dostoevsky’s province; and when he is tired, he does not stop, he goes on. He cannot restrain himself. Out it tumbles upon us, hot, scalding, mixed, marvellous, terrible, oppressive—the human soul.

There remains the greatest of all novelists—for what else can we call the author of War and Peace? Shall we find Tolstoi, too, alien, difficult, a foreigner? Is there some oddity in his angle of vision which, at any rate until we have become disciples and so lost our bearings, keeps us at arm’s length in suspicion and bewilderment? From his first words we can be sure of one thing at any rate—here is a man who sees what we see, who proceeds, too, as we are accustomed to proceed, not from the inside outwards, but from the outside inwards. Here is a world in which the postman’s knock is heard at eight o’clock, and people go to bed between ten and eleven. Here is a man, too, who is no savage, no child of nature; he is educated; he has had every sort of experience. He is one of those born aristocrats who have used their privileges to the full. He is metropolitan, not suburban. His senses, his intellect, are acute, powerful, and well nourished. There is something proud and superb in the attack of such a mind and such a body upon life. Nothing seems to escape him. Nothing glances off him unrecorded. Nobody, therefore, can so convey the excitement of sport, the beauty of horses, and all the fierce desirability of the world to the senses of a strong young man. Every twig, every feather sticks to his magnet. He notices the blue or red of a child’s frock; the way a horse shifts its tail; the sound of a cough; the action of a man trying to put his hands into pockets that have been sewn up. And what his infallible eye reports of a cough or a trick of the hands his infallible brain refers to something hidden in the character, so that we know his people, not only by the way they love and their views on politics and the immortality of the soul, but also by the way they sneeze and choke. Even in a translation we feel that we have been set on a mountain-top and had a telescope put into our hands. Everything is astonishingly clear and absolutely sharp. Then, suddenly, just as we are exulting, breathing deep, feeling at once braced and purified, some detail—perhaps the head of a man—comes at us out of the picture in an alarming way, as if extruded by the very intensity of its life. “Suddenly a strange thing happened to me: first I ceased to see what was around me; then his face seemed to vanish till only the eyes were left, shining over against mine; next the eyes seemed to be in my own head, and then all became confused—I could see nothing and was forced to shut my eyes, in order to break loose from the feeling of pleasure and fear which his gaze was producing in me….” Again and again we share Masha’s feelings in Family Happiness. One shuts one’s eyes to escape the feeling of pleasure and fear. Often it is pleasure that is uppermost. In this very story there are two descriptions, one of a girl walking in a garden at night with her lover, one of a newly married couple prancing down their drawing-room, which so convey the feeling of intense happiness that we shut the book to feel it better. But always there is an element of fear which makes us, like Masha, wish to escape from the gaze which Tolstoi fixes on us. Is it the sense, which in real life might harass us, that such happiness as he describes is too intense to last, that we are on the edge of disaster? Or is it not that the very intensity of our pleasure is somehow questionable and forces us to ask, with Pozdnyshev in the Kreutzer Sonata, “But why live?” Life dominates Tolstoi as the soul dominates Dostoevsky. There is always at the centre of all the brilliant and flashing petals of the flower this scorpion, “Why live?” There is always at the centre of the book some Olenin, or Pierre, or Levin who gathers into himself all experience, turns the world round between his fingers, and never ceases to ask, even as he enjoys it, what is the meaning of it, and what should be our aims. It is not the priest who shatters our desires most effectively; it is the man who has known them, and loved them himself. When he derides them, the world indeed turns to dust and ashes beneath our feet. Thus fear mingles with our pleasure, and of the three great Russian writers, it is Tolstoi who most enthralls us and most repels.

But the mind takes its bias from the place of its birth, and no doubt, when it strikes upon a literature so alien as the Russian, flies off at a tangent far from the truth.

[Times Literary Supplement, Dec 19, 1918]

[]

Outlines.

I
Miss Mitford

Speaking truthfully, Mary Russell Mitford and her Surroundings is not a good book. It neither enlarges the mind nor purifies the heart. There is nothing in it about Prime Ministers and not very much about Miss Mitford. Yet, as one is setting out to speak the truth, one must own that there are certain books which can be read without the mind and without the heart, but still with considerable enjoyment. To come to the point, the great merit of these scrapbooks, for they can scarcely be called biographies, is that they license mendacity. One cannot believe what Miss Hill says about Miss Mitford, and thus one is free to invent Miss Mitford for oneself. Not for a second do we accuse Miss Hill of telling lies. That infirmity is entirely ours. For example: “Alresford was the birthplace of one who loved nature as few have loved her, and whose writings ‘breathe the air of the hayfields and the scent of the hawthorn boughs’, and seem to waft to us ‘the sweet breezes that blow over ripened cornfields and daisied meadows’.” It is perfectly true that Miss Mitford was born at Alresford, and yet, when it is put like that, we doubt whether she was ever born at all. Indeed she was, says Miss Hill; she was born “on the 16th December, 1787. ‘A pleasant house in truth it was,’ Miss Mitford writes. ‘The breakfast-room … was a lofty and spacious apartment.’” So Miss Mitford was born in the breakfast-room about eight-thirty on a snowy morning between the Doctor’s second and third cups of tea. “Pardon me,” said Mrs. Mitford, turning a little pale, but not omitting to add the right quantity of cream to her husband’s tea, “I feel …” That is the way in which Mendacity begins. There is something plausible and even ingenious in her approaches. The touch about the cream, for instance, might be called historical, for it is well known that when Mary won £20,000 in the Irish lottery, the Doctor spent it all upon Wedgwood china, the winning number being stamped upon the soup plates in the middle of an Irish harp, the whole being surmounted by the Mitford arms, and encircled by the motto of Sir John Bertram, one of William the Conqueror’s knights, from whom the Mitfords claimed descent. “Observe”, says Mendacity, “with what an air the Doctor drinks his tea, and how she, poor lady, contrives to curtsey as she leaves the room.” Tea? I inquire, for the Doctor, though a fine figure of a man, is already purple and profuse, and foams like a crimson cock over the frill of his fine laced shirt. “Since the ladies have left the room”, Mendacity begins, and goes on to make up a pack of lies with the sole object of proving that Dr. Mitford kept a mistress in the purlieus of Reading and paid her money on the pretence that he was investing it in a new method of lighting and heating houses invented by the Marquis de Chavannes. It came to the same thing in the end—to the King’s Bench Prison, that is to say; but instead of allowing us to recall the literary and historical associations of the place, Mendacity wanders off to the window and distracts us again by the platitudinous remark that it is still snowing. There is something very charming in an ancient snowstorm. The weather has varied almost as much in the course of generations as mankind. The snow of those days was more formally shaped and a good deal softer than the snow of ours, just as an eighteenth-century cow was no more like our cows than she was like the florid and fiery cows of Elizabethan pastures. Sufficient attention has scarcely been paid to this aspect of literature, which, it cannot be denied, has its importance.

Our brilliant young men might do worse, when in search of a subject, than devote a year or two to cows in literature, snow in literature, the daisy in Chaucer and in Coventry Patmore. At any rate, the snow falls heavily. The Portsmouth mail-coach has already lost its way; several ships have foundered, and Margate pier has been totally destroyed. At Hatfield Peveral twenty sheep have been buried, and though one supports itself by gnawing wurzels which it has found near it, there is grave reason to fear that the French king’s coach has been blocked on the road to Colchester. It is now the 16th of February 1808.

Poor Mrs. Mitford! Twenty-one years ago she left the breakfast-room, and no news has yet been received of her child. Even Mendacity is a little ashamed of itself, and, picking up Mary Russell Mitford and her Surroundings, assures us that everything will come right if we possess ourselves in patience. The French king’s coach was on its way to Bocking; at Bocking lived Lord and Lady Charles Murray-Aynsley; and Lord Charles was shy. Lord Charles had always been shy. Once when Mary Mitford was five years old—sixteen years, that is, before the sheep were lost and the French king went to Bocking—Mary “threw him into an agony of blushing by running up to his chair in mistake for that of my papa”. He had indeed to leave the room. Miss Hill, who, somewhat strangely, finds the society of Lord and Lady Charles pleasant, does not wish to quit it without “introducing an incident in connection with them which took place in the month of February, 1808”. But is Miss Mitford concerned in it? we ask, for there must be an end of trifling. To some extent, that is to say, Lady Charles was a cousin of the Mitfords, and Lord Charles was shy. Mendacity is quite ready to deal with “the incident” even on these terms; but, we repeat, we have had enough of trifling. Miss Mitford may not be a great woman; for all we know she was not even a good one; but we have certain responsibilities as a reviewer which we are not going to evade.

There is, to begin with, English literature. A sense of the beauty of nature has never been altogether absent, however much the cow may change from age to age, from English poetry. Nevertheless, the difference between Pope and Wordsworth in this respect is very considerable. Lyrical Ballads was published in 1798; Our Village in 1824. One being in verse and the other in prose, it is not necessary to labour a comparison which contains, however, not only the elements of justice, but the seeds of many volumes. Like her great predecessor, Miss Mitford much preferred the country to the town; and thus, perhaps, it may not be inopportune to dwell for a moment upon the King of Saxony, Mary Anning, and the ichthyosaurus. Let alone the fact that Mary Anning and Mary Mitford had a Christian name in common, they are further connected by what can scarcely be called a fact, but may, without hazard, be called a probability. Miss Mitford was looking for fossils at Lyme Regis only fifteen years before Mary Anning found one. The King of Saxony visited Lyme in 1844, and seeing the head of an ichthyosaurus in Mary Anning’s window, asked her to drive to Pinny and explore the rocks. While they were looking for fossils, an old woman seated herself in the King’s coach—was she Mary Mitford? Truth compels us to say that she was not; but there is no doubt, and we are not trifling when we say it, that Mary Mitford often expressed a wish that she had known Mary Anning, and it is singularly unfortunate to have to state that she never did. For we have reached the year 1844; Mary Mitford is fifty-seven years of age, and so far, thanks to Mendacity and its trifling ways, all we know of her is that she did not know Mary Anning, had not found an ichthyosaurus, had not been out in a snowstorm, and had not seen the King of France.

It is time to wring the creature’s neck, and begin again at the very beginning.

What considerations, then, had weight with Miss Hill when she decided to write Mary Russell Mitford and her Surroundings? Three emerge from the rest, and may be held of paramount importance. In the first place, Miss Mitford was a lady; in the second, she was born in the year 1787; and in the third, the stock of female characters who lend themselves to biographic treatment by their own sex is, for one reason or another, running short. For instance, little is known of Sappho, and that little is not wholly to her credit. Lady Jane Grey has merit, but is undeniably obscure. Of George Sand, the more we know the less we approve. George Eliot was led into evil ways which not all her philosophy can excuse. The Brontës, however highly we rate their genius, lacked that indefinable something which marks the lady; Harriet Martineau was an atheist; Mrs. Browning was a married woman; Jane Austen, Fanny Burney, and Maria Edgeworth have been done already; so that, what with one thing and another, Mary Russell Mitford is the only woman left.

There is no need to labour the extreme importance of the date when we see the word “surroundings” on the back of a book. Surroundings, as they are called, are invariably eighteenth-century surroundings. When we come, as of course we do, to that phrase which relates how “as we looked upon the steps leading down from the upper room, we fancied we saw the tiny figure jumping from step to step”, it would be the grossest outrage upon our sensibilities to be told that those steps were Athenian, Elizabethan, or Parisian. They were, of course, eighteenth-century steps, leading down from the old panelled room into the shady garden, where, tradition has it, William Pitt played marbles, or, if we like to be bold, where on still summer days we can almost fancy that we hear the drums of Bonaparte on the coast of France. Bonaparte is the limit of the imagination on one side, as Monmouth is on the other; it would be fatal if the imagination took to toying with Prince Albert or sporting with King John. But fancy knows her place, and there is no need to labour the point that her place is the eighteenth century. The other point is more obscure. One must be a lady. Yet what that means, and whether we like what it means, may both be doubtful. If we say that Jane Austen was a lady and that Charlotte Brontë was not one, we do as much as need be done in the way of definition, and commit ourselves to neither side.

It is undoubtedly because of their reticence that Miss Hill is on the side of the ladies. They sigh things off and they smile things off, but they never seize the silver table by the legs or dash the teacups on the floor. It is in many ways a great convenience to have a subject who can be trusted to live a long life without once raising her voice. Sixteen years is a considerable stretch of time, but of a lady it is enough to say, “Here Mary Mitford passed sixteen years of her life and here she got to know and love not only their own beautiful grounds but also every turn of the surrounding shady lanes”. Her loves were vegetable, and her lanes were shady. Then, of course, she was educated at the school where Jane Austen and Mrs. Sherwood had been educated. She visited Lyme Regis, and there is mention of the Cobb. She saw London from the top of St. Paul’s, and London was much smaller then than it is now. She changed from one charming house to another, and several distinguished literary gentlemen paid her compliments and came to tea. When the dining-room ceiling fell down it did not fall on her head, and when she took a ticket in a lottery she did win the prize. If in the foregoing sentences there are any words of more than two syllables, it is our fault and not Miss Hill’s; and to do that writer justice, there are not many whole sentences in the book which are neither quoted from Miss Mitford nor supported by the authority of Mr. Crissy.

But how dangerous a thing is life! Can one be sure that anything not wholly made of mahogany will to the very end stand empty in the sun? Even cupboards have their secret springs, and when, inadvertently we are sure, Miss Hill touches this one, out, terrible to relate, topples a stout old gentleman. In plain English, Miss Mitford had a father. There is nothing actually improper in that. Many women have had fathers. But Miss Mitford’s father was kept in a cupboard; that is to say, he was not a nice father. Miss Hill even goes so far as to conjecture that when “an imposing procession of neighbours and friends” followed him to the grave, “we cannot help thinking that this was more to show sympathy and respect for Miss Mitford than from special respect for him”. Severe as the judgement is, the gluttonous, bibulous, amorous old man did something to deserve it. The less said about him the better. Only, if from your earliest childhood your father has gambled and speculated, first with your mother’s fortune, then with your own, spent your earnings, driven you to earn more, and spent that too; if in old age he has lain upon a sofa and insisted that fresh air is bad for daughters; if, dying at length, he has left debts that can only be paid by selling everything you have or sponging upon the charity of friends—then even a lady sometimes raises her voice. Miss Mitford herself spoke out once. “It was grief to go; there I had toiled and striven and tasted as deeply of bitter anxiety, of fear, and of hope as often falls to the lot of woman.” What language for a lady to use! for a lady, too, who owns a teapot. There is a drawing of the teapot at the bottom of the page. But it is now of no avail; Miss Mitford has smashed it to smithereens. That is the worst of writing about ladies; they have fathers as well as teapots. On the other hand, some pieces of Dr. Mitford’s Wedgwood dinner service are still in existence, and a copy of Adam’s Geography, which Mary won as a prize at school, is “in our temporary possession”. If there is nothing improper in the suggestion, might not the next book be devoted entirely to them?

II
Dr. Bentley

As we saunter through those famous courts where Dr. Bentley once reigned supreme we sometimes catch sight of a figure hurrying on its way to Chapel or Hall which, as it disappears, draws our thoughts enthusiastically after it. For that man, we are told, has the whole of Sophocles at his finger-ends; knows Homer by heart; reads Pindar as we read the Times; and spends his life, save for these short excursions to eat and pray, wholly in the company of the Greeks. It is true that the infirmities of our education prevent us from appreciating his emendations as they deserve; his life’s work is a sealed book to us; none the less, we treasure up the last flicker of his black gown, and feel as if a bird of Paradise had flashed by us, so bright is his spirit’s raiment, and in the murk of a November evening we had been privileged to see it winging its way to roost in fields of amaranth and beds of moly. Of all men, great scholars are the most mysterious, the most august. Since it is unlikely that we shall ever be admitted to their intimacy, or see much more of them than a black gown crossing a court at dusk, the best we can do is to read their lives—for example, the Life of Dr. Bentley by Bishop Monk.

There we shall find much that is odd and little that is reassuring. The greatest of our scholars, the man who read Greek as the most expert of us read English not merely with an accurate sense of meaning and grammar but with a sensibility so subtle and widespread that he perceived relations and suggestions of language which enabled him to fetch up from oblivion lost lines and inspire new life into the little fragments that remained, the man who should have been steeped in beauty (if what they say of the Classics is true) as a honey-pot is ingrained with sweetness was, on the contrary, the most quarrelsome of mankind.

“I presume that there are not many examples of an individual who has been a party in six distinct suits before the Court of King’s Bench within the space of three years”, his biographer remarks; and adds that Bentley won them all. It is difficult to deny his conclusion that though Dr. Bentley might have been a first-rate lawyer or a great soldier “such a display suited any character rather than that of a learned and dignified clergyman”. Not all these disputes, however, sprung from his love of literature. The charges against which he had to defend himself were directed against him as Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. He was habitually absent from chapel; his expenditure upon building and upon his household was excessive; he used the college seal at meetings which did not consist of the statutable number of sixteen, and so on. In short, the career of the Master of Trinity was one continuous series of acts of aggression and defiance, in which Dr. Bentley treated the Society of Trinity College as a grown man might treat an importunate rabble of street boys. Did they dare to hint that the staircase at the Lodge which admitted four persons abreast was quite wide enough?—did they refuse to sanction his expenditure upon a new one? Meeting them in the Great Court one evening after chapel he proceeded urbanely to question them. They refused to budge. Whereupon, with a sudden alteration of colour and voice, Bentley demanded whether “they had forgotten his rusty sword?” Mr. Michael Hutchinson and some others, upon whose backs the weight of that weapon would have first descended, brought pressure upon their seniors. The bill for £350 was paid and their preferment secured. But Bentley did not wait for this act of submission to finish his staircase.

So it went on, year after year. Nor was the arrogance of his behaviour always justified by the splendour or utility of the objects he had in view—the creation of the Backs, the erection of an observatory, the foundation of a laboratory. More trivial desires were gratified with the same tyranny. Sometimes he wanted coal; sometimes bread and ale; and then Madame Bentley, sending her servant with a snuffbox in token of authority, got from the butteries at the expense of the college a great deal more of these commodities than the college thought that Dr. Bentley ought to require. Again, when he had four pupils to lodge with him who paid him handsomely for their board, it was drawn from the College, at the command of the snuff-box, for nothing. The principles of “delicacy and good feeling” which the Master might have been expected to observe (great scholar as he was, steeped in the wine of the classics) went for nothing. His argument that the “few College loaves” upon which the four young patricians were nourished were amply repaid by the three sash windows which he had put into their rooms at his own expense failed to convince the Fellows. And when, on Trinity Sunday 1719, the Fellows found the famous College ale not to their liking, they were scarcely satisfied when the butler told them that it had been brewed by the Master’s orders, from the Master’s malt, which was stored in the Master’s granary, and though damaged by “an insect called the weevil” had been paid for at the very high rates which the Master demanded.

Still these battles over bread and beer are trifles and domestic trifles at that. His conduct in his profession will throw more light upon our inquiry. For, released from brick and building, bread and beer, patricians and their windows, it may be found that he expanded in the atmosphere of Homer, Horace, and Manilius, and proved in his study the benign nature of those influences which have been wafted down to us through the ages. But there the evidence is even less to the credit of the dead languages. He acquitted himself magnificently, all agree, in the great controversy about the letters of Phalaris. His temper was excellent and his learning prodigious. But that triumph was succeeded by a series of disputes which force upon us the extraordinary spectacle of men of learning and genius, of authority and divinity, brawling about Greek and Latin texts, and calling each other names for all the world like bookies on a racecourse or washerwomen in a back street. For this vehemence of temper and virulence of language were not confined to Bentley alone; they appear unhappily characteristic of the profession as a whole. Early in life, in the year 1691, a quarrel was fastened upon him by his brother chaplain Hody for writing Malelas, not as Hody preferred, Malela. A controversy in which Bentley displayed learning and wit, and Hody accumulated endless pages of bitter argument against the letter s ensued. Hody was worsted, and “there is too much reason to believe, that the offence given by this trivial cause was never afterwards healed”. Indeed, to mend a line was to break a friendship. James Gronovius of Leyden—“homunculus eruditione mediocri, ingenio nullo”, as Bentley called him—attacked Bentley for ten years because Bentley had succeeded in correcting a fragment of Callimachus where he had failed.

But Gronovius was by no means the only scholar who resented the success of a rival with a rancour that grey hairs and forty years spent in editing the classics failed to subdue. In all the chief towns of Europe lived men like the notorious de Pauw of Utrecht, “a person who has justly been considered the pest and disgrace of letters”, who, when a new theory or new edition appeared, banded themselves together to deride and humiliate the scholar. “… all his writings”, Bishop Monk remarks of de Pauw, “prove him to be devoid of candour, good faith, good manners, and every gentlemanly feeling: and while he unites all the defects and bad qualities that were ever found in a critic or commentator, he adds one peculiar to himself, an incessant propensity to indecent allusions.” With such tempers and such habits it is not strange that the scholars of those days sometimes ended lives made intolerable by bitterness, poverty, and neglect by their own hands, like Johnson, who after a lifetime spent in the detection of minute errors of construction, went mad and drowned himself in the meadows near Nottingham. On May 20, 1712, Trinity College was shocked to find that the professor of Hebrew, Dr. Sike, had hanged himself “some time this evening, before candlelight, in his sash”. When Kuster died, it was reported that he, too, had killed himself. And so, in a sense, he had. For when his body was opened “there was found a cake of sand along the lower region of his belly. This, I take it, was occasioned by his sitting nearly double, and writing on a very low table, surrounded with three or four circles of books placed on the ground, which was the situation we usually found him in.” The minds of poor schoolmasters, like John Ker of the dissenting Academy, who had had the high gratification of dining with Dr. Bentley at the Lodge, when the talk fell upon the use of the word equidem, were so distorted by a lifetime of neglect and study that they went home, collected all uses of the word equidem which contradicted the Doctor’s opinion, returned to the Lodge, anticipating in their simplicity a warm welcome, met the Doctor issuing to dine with the Archbishop of Canterbury, followed him down the street in spite of his indifference and annoyance and, being refused even a word of farewell, went home to brood over their injuries and wait the day of revenge.

But the bickerings and animosities of the smaller fry were magnified, not obliterated, by the Doctor himself in the conduct of his own affairs. The courtesy and good temper which he had shown in his early controversies had worn away. “… a course of violent animosities and the indulgence of unrestrained indignation for many years had impaired both his taste and judgement in controversy”, and he condescended, though the subject in dispute was the Greek Testament, to call his antagonist “maggot”, “vermin”, “gnawing rat”, and “cabbage head”, to refer to the darkness of his complexion, and to insinuate that his wits were crazed, which charge he supported by dwelling on the fact that his brother, a clergyman, wore a beard to his girdle.

Violent, pugnacious, and unscrupulous, Dr. Bentley survived these storms and agitations, and remained, though suspended from his degrees and deprived of his mastership, seated at the Lodge imperturbably. Wearing a broad-brimmed hat indoors to protect his eyes, smoking his pipe, enjoying his port, and expounding to his friends his doctrine of the digamma, Bentley lived those eighty years which, he said, were long enough “to read everything which was worth reading”, “Et tunc”, he added, in his peculiar manner,

Et tunc magna mei sub terris ibit imago.

A small square stone marked his grave in Trinity College, but the Fellows refused to record upon it the fact that he had been their Master.

But the strangest sentence in this strange story has yet to be written, and Bishop Monk writes it as if it were a commonplace requiring no comment. “For a person who was neither a poet, nor possessed of poetical taste to venture upon such a task was no common presumption.” The task was to detect every slip of language in Paradise Lost, and all instances of bad taste and incorrect imagery. The result was notoriously lamentable. Yet in what, we may ask, did it differ from those in which Bentley was held to have acquitted himself magnificently? And if Bentley was incapable of appreciating the poetry of Milton, how can we accept his verdict upon Horace and Homer? And if we cannot trust implicitly to scholars, and if the study of Greek is supposed to refine the manners and purify the soul—but enough. Our scholar has returned from Hall; his lamp is lit; his studies are resumed; and it is time that our profane speculations should have an end. Besides, all this happened many, many years ago.

III
Lady Dorothy Nevill

She had stayed, in a humble capacity, for a week in the ducal household. She had seen the troops of highly decorated human beings descending in couples to eat, and ascending in couples to bed. She had, surreptitiously, from a gallery, observed the Duke himself dusting the miniatures in the glass cases, while the Duchess let her crochet fall from her hands as if in utter disbelief that the world had need of crochet. From an upper window she had seen, as far as eye could reach, gravel paths swerving round isles of greenery and losing themselves in little woods designed to shed the shade without the severity of forests; she had watched the ducal carriage bowling in and out of the prospect, and returning a different way from the way it went. And what was her verdict? “A lunatic asylum.”

It is true that she was a lady’s-maid, and that Lady Dorothy Nevill, had she encountered her on the stairs, would have made an opportunity to point out that that is a very different thing from being a lady.

My mother never failed to point out the folly of workwomen, shop-girls, and the like calling each other “Ladies”. All this sort of thing seemed to her to be mere vulgar humbug, and she did not fail to say so.

What can we point out to Lady Dorothy Nevill? that with all her advantages she had never learned to spell? that she could not write a grammatical sentence? that she lived for eighty-seven years and did nothing but put food into her mouth and slip gold through her fingers? But delightful though it is to indulge in righteous indignation, it is misplaced if we agree with the lady’s-maid that high birth is a form of congenital insanity, that the sufferer merely inherits the diseases of his ancestors, and endures them, for the most part very stoically, in one of those comfortably padded lunatic asylums which are known, euphemistically, as the stately homes of England.

Moreover, the Walpoles are not ducal. Horace Walpole’s mother was a Miss Shorter; there is no mention of Lady Dorothy’s mother in the present volume, but her great-grandmother was Mrs. Oldfield the actress, and, to her credit, Lady Dorothy was “exceedingly proud” of the fact. Thus she was not an extreme case of aristocracy; she was confined rather to a bird-cage than to an asylum; through the bars she saw people walking at large, and once or twice she made a surprising little flight into the open air. A gayer, brighter, more vivacious specimen of the caged tribe can seldom have existed; so that one is forced at times to ask whether what we call living in a cage is not the fate that wise people, condemned to a single sojourn upon earth, would choose. To be at large is, after all, to be shut out; to waste most of life in accumulating the money to buy and the time to enjoy what the Lady Dorothys find clustering and glowing about their cradles when their eyes first open—as hers opened in the year 1826 at number eleven Berkeley Square. Horace Walpole had lived there. Her father, Lord Orford, gambled it away in one night’s play the year after she was born. But Wolterton Hall, in Norfolk, was full of carving and mantelpieces, and there were rare trees in the garden, and a large and famous lawn. No novelist could wish a more charming and even romantic environment in which to set the story of two little girls, growing up, wild yet secluded, reading Bossuet with their governess, and riding out on their ponies at the head of the tenantry on polling day. Nor can one deny that to have had the author of the following letter among one’s ancestors would have been a source of inordinate pride. It is addressed to the Norwich Bible Society, which had invited Lord Orford to become its president:

I have long been addicted to the Gaming Table. I have lately taken to the Turf. I fear I frequently blaspheme. But I have never distributed religious tracts. All this was known to you and your Society. Notwithstanding which you think me a fit person to be your president. God forgive your hypocrisy.

It was not Lord Orford who was in the cage on that occasion. But, alas! Lord Orford owned another country house, Ilsington Hall, in Dorsetshire, and there Lady Dorothy came in contact first with the mulberry tree, and later with Mr. Thomas Hardy; and we get our first glimpse of the bars. We do not pretend to the ghost of an enthusiasm for Sailors’ Homes in general; no doubt mulberry trees are much nicer to look at; but when it comes to calling people “vandals” who cut them down to build houses, and to having footstools made from the wood, and to carving upon those footstools inscriptions which testify that “often and often has King George III taken his tea” under this very footstool, then we want to protest—“Surely you must mean Shakespeare?” But as her subsequent remarks upon Mr. Hardy tend to prove, Lady Dorothy does not mean Shakespeare. She “warmly appreciated” the works of Mr. Hardy, and used to complain “that the county families were too stupid to appreciate his genius at its proper worth”. George the Third drinking his tea; the county families failing to appreciate Mr. Hardy: Lady Dorothy is undoubtedly behind the bars.

Yet no story more aptly illustrates the barrier which we perceive hereafter between Lady Dorothy and the outer world than the story of Charles Darwin and the blankets. Among her recreations Lady Dorothy made a hobby of growing orchids, and thus got into touch with “the great naturalist”. Mrs. Darwin, inviting her to stay with them, remarked with apparent simplicity that she had heard that people who moved much in London society were fond of being tossed in blankets. “I am afraid”, her letter ended, “we should hardly be able to offer you anything of that sort.” Whether in fact the necessity of tossing Lady Dorothy in a blanket had been seriously debated at Down, or whether Mrs. Darwin obscurely hinted her sense of some incongruity between her husband and the lady of the orchids, we do not know. But we have a sense of two worlds in collision; and it is not the Darwin world that emerges in fragments. More and more do we see Lady Dorothy hopping from perch to perch, picking at groundsel here, and at hempseed there, indulging in exquisite trills and roulades, and sharpening her beak against a lump of sugar in a large, airy, magnificently equipped bird-cage. The cage was full of charming diversions. Now she illuminated leaves which had been macerated to skeletons; now she interested herself in improving the breed of donkeys; next she took up the cause of silkworms, almost threatened Australia with a plague of them, and “actually succeeded in obtaining enough silk to make a dress”; again she was the first to discover that wood, gone green with decay, can be made, at some expense, into little boxes; she went into the question of funguses and established the virtues of the neglected English truffle; she imported rare fish; spent a great deal of energy in vainly trying to induce storks and Cornish choughs to breed in Sussex; painted on china; emblazoned heraldic arms, and, attaching whistles to the tails of pigeons, produced wonderful effects “as of an aerial orchestra” when they flew through the air. To the Duchess of Somerset belongs the credit of investigating the proper way of cooking guinea-pigs; but Lady Dorothy was one of the first to serve up a dish of these little creatures at luncheon in Charles Street.

But all the time the door of the cage was ajar. Raids were made into what Mr. Nevill calls “Upper Bohemia”; from which Lady Dorothy returned with “authors, journalists, actors, actresses, or other agreeable and amusing people”. Lady Dorothy’s judgement is proved by the fact that they seldom misbehaved, and some indeed became quite domesticated, and wrote her “very gracefully turned letters”. But once or twice she made a flight beyond the cage herself. “These horrors”, she said, alluding to the middle class, “are so clever and we are so stupid; but then look how well they are educated, while our children learn nothing but how to spend their parents’ money!” She brooded over the fact. Something was going wrong. She was too shrewd and too honest not to lay the blame partly at least upon her own class. “I suppose she can just about read?” she said of one lady calling herself cultured; and of another, “She is indeed curious and well adapted to open bazaars”. But to our thinking her most remarkable flight took place a year or two before her death, in the Victoria and Albert Museum:

I do so agree with you, she wrote—though I ought not to say so—that the upper class are very—I don’t know what to say—but they seem to take no interest in anything—but golfing, etc. One day I was at the Victoria and Albert Museum, just a few sprinkles of legs, for I am sure they looked too frivolous to have bodies and souls attached to them—but what softened the sight to my eyes were 2 little Japs poring over each article with a handbook … our bodies, of course, giggling and looking at nothing. Still worse, not one soul of the higher class visible: in fact I never heard of any one of them knowing of the place, and for this we are spending millions—it is all too painful.

It was all too painful, and the guillotine, she felt, loomed ahead. That catastrophe she was spared, for who could wish to cut off the head of a pigeon with a whistle attached to its tail? But if the whole bird-cage had been overturned and the aerial orchestra sent screaming and fluttering through the air, we can be sure, as Mr. Joseph Chamberlain told her, that her conduct would have been “a credit to the British aristocracy”.

IV
Archbishop Thomson

The origin of Archbishop Thomson was obscure. His great-uncle “may reasonably be supposed” to have been “an ornament to the middle classes”. His aunt married a gentleman who was present at the murder of Gustavus III. of Sweden; and his father met his death at the age of eighty-seven by treading on a cat in the early hours of the morning. The physical vigour which this anecdote implies was combined in the Archbishop with powers of intellect which promised success in whatever profession he adopted. At Oxford it seemed likely that he would devote himself to philosophy or science. While reading for his degree he found time to write the Outlines of the Laws of Thought, which “immediately became a recognised text-book for Oxford classes”. But though poetry, philosophy, medicine, and the law held out their temptations he put such thoughts aside, or never entertained them, having made up his mind from the first to dedicate himself to Divine service. The measure of his success in the more exalted sphere is attested by the following facts: Ordained deacon in 1842 at the age of twenty-three, he became Dean and Bursar of Queen’s College, Oxford, in 1845; Provost in 1855, Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol in 1861, and Archbishop of York in 1862. Thus at the early age of forty-three he stood next in rank to the Archbishop of Canterbury himself; and it was commonly though erroneously expected that he would in the end attain to that dignity also.

It is a matter of temperament and belief whether you read this list with respect or with boredom; whether you look upon an archbishop’s hat as a crown or as an extinguisher. If, like the present reviewer, you are ready to hold the simple faith that the outer order corresponds to the inner—that a vicar is a good man, a canon a better man, and an archbishop the best man of all—you will find the study of the Archbishop’s life one of extreme fascination. He has turned aside from poetry and philosophy and law, and specialised in virtue. He has dedicated himself to the service of the Divine. His spiritual proficiency has been such that he has developed from deacon to dean, from dean to bishop, and from bishop to archbishop in the short space of twenty years. As there are only two archbishops in the whole of England the inference seems to be that he is the second best man in England; his hat is the proof of it. Even in a material sense his hat was one of the largest; it was larger than Mr. Gladstone’s; larger than Thackeray’s; larger than Dickens’s; it was in fact, so his hatter told him and we are inclined to agree, an “eight full.” Yet he began much as other men begin. He struck an undergraduate in a fit of temper and was rusticated; he wrote a text-book of logic and rowed a very good oar. But after he was ordained his diary shows that the specialising process had begun. He thought a great deal about the state of his soul; about “the monstrous tumour of Simony”; about Church reform; and about the meaning of Christianity. “Self-renunciation”, he came to the conclusion, “is the foundation of Christian Religion and Christian Morals…. The highest wisdom is that which can enforce and cultivate this self-renunciation. Hence (against Cousin) I hold that religion is higher far than philosophy.” There is one mention of chemists and capillarity, but science and philosophy were, even at this early stage, in danger of being crowded out. Soon the diary takes a different tone. “He seems”, says his biographer, “to have had no time for committing his thoughts to paper”; he records his engagements only, and he dines out almost every night. Sir Henry Taylor, whom he met at one of these parties, described him as “simple, solid, good, capable, and pleasing”. Perhaps it was his solidity combined with his “eminently scientific” turn of mind, his blandness as well as his bulk, that impressed some of these great people with the confidence that in him the Church had found a very necessary champion. His “brawny logic” and massive frame seemed to fit him to grapple with a task that taxed the strongest—how, that is, to reconcile the scientific discoveries of the age with religion, and even prove them “some of its strongest witnesses for the truth”. If any one could do this Thomson could; his practical ability, unhampered by any mystical or dreaming tendency, had already proved itself in the conduct of the business affairs of his College. From Bishop he became almost instantly Archbishop; and in becoming Archbishop he became Primate of England, Governor of the Charterhouse and King’s College, London, patron of one hundred and twenty livings, with the Archdeaconries of York, Cleveland, and the East Riding in his gift, and the Canonries and Prebends in York Minster. Bishopthorpe itself was an enormous palace; he was immediately faced by the “knotty question” of whether to buy all the furniture—“much of it only poor stuff”—or to furnish the house anew, which would cost a fortune. Moreover there were seven cows in the park; but these, perhaps, were counterbalanced by nine children in the nursery. Then the Prince and Princess of Wales came to stay, and the Archbishop took upon himself the task of furnishing the Princess’s apartments. He went up to London and bought eight Moderator lamps, two Spanish figures holding candles, and reminded himself of the necessity of buying “soap for Princess”. But meanwhile far more serious matters claimed every ounce of his strength. Already he had been exhorted to “wield the sure lance of your brawny logic against the sophistries” of the authors of Essays and Reviews, and had responded in a work called Aids to Faith. Near at hand the town of Sheffield, with its large population of imperfectly educated working men, was a breeding ground of scepticism and discontent. The Archbishop made it his special charge. He was fond of watching the rolling of armour plate, and constantly addressed meetings of working men. “Now what are these Nihilisms, and Socialisms, and Communisms, and Fenianisms, and Secret Societies—what do they all mean?” he asked. “Selfishness,” he replied, and “assertion of one class against the rest is at the bottom of them all”. There was a law of nature, he said, by which wages went up and wages went down. “You must accept the declivity as well as the ascent…. If we could only get people to learn that, then things would go on a great deal better and smoother.” And the working men of Sheffield responded by giving him five hundred pieces of cutlery mounted in sterling silver. But presumably there were a certain number of knives among the spoons and the forks.

Bishop Colenso, however, was far more troublesome than the working men of Sheffield; and the Ritualists vexed him so persistently that even his vast strength felt the strain. The questions which were referred to him for decision were peculiarly fitted to tease and annoy even a man of his bulk and his blandness. Shall a drunkard found dead in a ditch, or a burglar who has fallen through a skylight, be given the benefit of the Burial Service? he was asked. The question of lighted candles was “most difficult”; the wearing of coloured stoles and the administration of the mixed chalice taxed him considerably; and finally there was the Rev. John Purchas, who, dressed in cope, alb, biretta and stole “cross-wise”, lit candles and extinguished them “for no special reason”; filled a vessel with black powder and rubbed it into the foreheads of his congregation; and hung over the Holy Table “a figure, image, or stuffed skin of a dove, in a flying attitude”. The Archbishop’s temper, usually so positive and imperturbable, was gravely ruffled, “Will there ever come a time when it will be thought a crime to have striven to keep the Church of England as representing the common sense of the Nation?” he asked. “I suppose it may, but I shall not see it. I have gone through a good deal, but I do not repent of having done my best.” If, for a moment, the Archbishop himself could ask such a question, we must confess to a state of complete bewilderment. What has become of our superlatively good man? He is harassed and cumbered; spends his time settling questions about stuffed pigeons and coloured petticoats; writes over eighty letters before breakfast sometimes; scarcely has time to run over to Paris and buy his daughter a bonnet; and in the end has to ask himself whether one of these days his conduct will not be considered a crime.

Was it a crime? And if so, was it his fault? Did he not start out in the belief that Christianity had something to do with renunciation and was not entirely a matter of common sense? If honours and obligations, pomps and possessions, accumulated and encrusted him, how, being an Archbishop, could he refuse to accept them? Princesses must have their soap; palaces must have their furniture; children must have their cows. And, pathetic though it seems, he never completely lost his interest in science. He wore a pedometer; he was one of the first to use a camera; he believed in the future of the typewriter; and in his last years he tried to mend a broken clock. He was a delightful father too; he wrote witty, terse, sensible letters; his good stories were much to the point; and he died in harness. Certainly he was a very able man, but if we insist upon goodness—is it easy, is it possible, for a good man to be an Archbishop?

[]

The Patron and the Crocus.

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

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

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

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

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

[Nation & Athenaeum, Apr 12, 1924]

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The Modern Essay.

[Modern English Essays, edited by Ernest Rhys, 5 vols. (Dent)]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[]

Joseph Conrad.

Suddenly, without giving us time to arrange our thoughts or prepare our phrases, our guest has left us; and his withdrawal without farewell or ceremony is in keeping with his mysterious arrival, long years ago, to take up his lodging in this country. For there was always an air of mystery about him. It was partly his Polish birth, partly his memorable appearance, partly his preference for living in the depths of the country, out of ear-shot of gossips, beyond reach of hostesses, so that for news of him one had to depend upon the evidence of simple visitors with a habit of ringing door-bells who reported of their unknown host that he had the most perfect manners, the brightest eyes, and spoke English with a strong foreign accent.

Still, though it is the habit of death to quicken and focus our memories, there clings to the genius of Conrad something essentially, and not accidentally, difficult of approach. His reputation of later years was, with one obvious exception, undoubtedly the highest in England; yet he was not popular. He was read with passionate delight by some; others he left cold and lustreless. Among his readers were people of the most opposite ages and sympathies. Schoolboys of fourteen, driving their way through Marryat, Scott, Henty, and Dickens, swallowed him down with the rest; while the seasoned and the fastidious, who in process of time have eaten their way to the heart of literature and there turn over and over a few precious crumbs, set Conrad scrupulously upon their banqueting table. One source of difficulty and disagreement is, of course, to be found where men have at all times found it, in his beauty. One opens his pages and feels as Helen must have felt when she looked in her glass and realised that, do what she would, she could never in any circumstances pass for a plain woman. So Conrad had been gifted, so he had schooled himself, and such was his obligation to a strange language wooed characteristically for its Latin qualities rather than its Saxon that it seemed impossible for him to make an ugly or insignificant movement of the pen. His mistress, his style, is a little somnolent sometimes in repose. But let somebody speak to her, and then how magnificently she bears down upon us, with what colour, triumph, and majesty! Yet it is arguable that Conrad would have gained both in credit and in popularity if he had written what he had to write without this incessant care for appearances. They block and impede and distract, his critics say, pointing to those famous passages which it is becoming the habit to lift from their context and exhibit among other cut flowers of English prose. He was self-conscious and stiff and ornate, they complain, and the sound of his own voice was dearer to him than the voice of humanity in its anguish. The criticism is familiar, and as difficult to refute as the remarks of deaf people when Figaro is played. They see the orchestra; far off they hear a dismal scrape of sound; their own remarks are interrupted, and, very naturally, they conclude that the ends of life would be better served if instead of scraping Mozart those fifty fiddlers broke stones upon the road. That beauty teaches, that beauty is a disciplinarian, how are we to convince them, since her teaching is inseparable from the sound of her voice and to that they are deaf? But read Conrad, not in birthday books but in the bulk, and he must be lost indeed to the meaning of words who does not hear in that rather stiff and sombre music, with its reserve, its pride, its vast and implacable integrity, how it is better to be good than bad, how loyalty is good and honesty and courage, though ostensibly Conrad is concerned merely to show us the beauty of a night at sea. But it is ill work dragging such intimations from their element. Dried in our little saucers, without the magic and mystery of language, they lose their power to excite and goad; they lose the drastic power which is a constant quality of Conrad’s prose.

For it was by virtue of something drastic in him, the qualities of a leader and captain, that Conrad kept his hold over boys and young people. Until Nostromo was written his characters, as the young were quick to perceive, were fundamentally simple and heroic, however subtle the mind and indirect the method of their creator. They were seafarers, used to solitude and silence. They were in conflict with Nature, but at peace with man. Nature was their antagonist; she it was who drew forth honour, magnanimity, loyalty, the qualities proper to man; she who in sheltered bays reared to womanhood beautiful girls unfathomable and austere. Above all, it was Nature who turned out such gnarled and tested characters as Captain Whalley and old Singleton, obscure but glorious in their obscurity, who were to Conrad the pick of our race, the men whose praises he was never tired of celebrating:

They had been strong as those are strong who know neither doubts nor hopes. They had been impatient and enduring, turbulent and devoted, unruly and faithful. Well-meaning people had tried to represent these men as whining over every mouthful of their food, as going about their work in fear of their lives. But in truth they had been men who knew toil, privation, violence, debauchery—but knew not fear, and had no desire of spite in their hearts. Men hard to manage, but easy to inspire; voiceless men—but men enough to scorn in their hearts the sentimental voices that bewailed the hardness of their fate. It was a fate unique and their own; the capacity to bear it appeared to them the privilege of the chosen! Their generation lived inarticulate and indispensable, without knowing the sweetness of affections or the refuge of a home—and died free from the dark menace of a narrow grave. They were the everlasting children of the mysterious sea.

Such were the characters of the early books—Lord Jim, Typhoon, The Nigger of the “Narcissus”, Youth; and these books, in spite of the changes and fashions, are surely secure of their place among our classics. But they reach this height by means of qualities which the simple story of adventure, as Marryat told it, or Fenimore Cooper, has no claim to possess. For it is clear that to admire and celebrate such men and such deeds, romantically, whole-heartedly and with the fervour of a lover, one must be possessed of the double vision; one must be at once inside and out. To praise their silence one must possess a voice. To appreciate their endurance one must be sensitive to fatigue. One must be able to live on equal terms with the Whalleys and the Singletons and yet hide from their suspicious eyes the very qualities which enable one to understand them. Conrad alone was able to live that double life, for Conrad was compound of two men; together with the sea captain dwelt that subtle, refined, and fastidious analyst whom he called Marlow. “A most discreet, understanding man”, he said of Marlow.

Marlow was one of those born observers who are happiest in retirement. Marlow liked nothing better than to sit on deck, in some obscure creek of the Thames, smoking and recollecting; smoking and speculating; sending after his smoke beautiful rings of words until all the summer’s night became a little clouded with tobacco smoke. Marlow, too, had a profound respect for the men with whom he had sailed; but he saw the humour of them. He nosed out and described in masterly fashion those livid creatures who prey successfully upon the clumsy veterans. He had a flair for human deformity; his humour was sardonic. Nor did Marlow live entirely wreathed in the smoke of his own cigars. He had a habit of opening his eyes suddenly and looking—at a rubbish heap, at a port, at a shop counter—and then complete in its burning ring of light that thing is flashed bright upon the mysterious background. Introspective and analytical, Marlow was aware of this peculiarity. He said the power came to him suddenly. He might, for instance, overhear a French officer murmur “Mon Dieu, how the time passes!”

Nothing [he comments] could have been more commonplace than this remark; but its utterance coincided for me with a moment of vision. It’s extraordinary how we go through life with eyes half shut, with dull ears, with dormant thoughts…. Nevertheless, there can be but few of us who had never known one of these rare moments of awakening, when we see, hear, understand, ever so much—everything—in a flash, before we fall back again into our agreeable somnolence. I raised my eyes when he spoke, and I saw him as though I had never seen him before.

Picture after picture he painted thus upon that dark background; ships first and foremost, ships at anchor, ships flying before the storm, ships in harbour; he painted sunsets and dawns; he painted the night; he painted the sea in every aspect; he painted the gaudy brilliancy of Eastern ports, and men and women, their houses and their attitudes. He was an accurate and unflinching observer, schooled to that “absolute loyalty towards his feelings and sensations”, which, Conrad wrote, “an author should keep hold of in his most exalted moments of creation”. And very quietly and compassionately Marlow sometimes lets fall a few words of epitaph which remind us, with all that beauty and brilliancy before our eyes, of the darkness of the background.

Thus a rough-and-ready distinction would make us say that it is Marlow who comments, Conrad who creates. It would lead us, aware that we are on dangerous ground, to account for that change which, Conrad tells us, took place when he had finished the last story in the Typhoon volume—“a subtle change in the nature of the inspiration”—by some alteration in the relationship of the two old friends. “… it seemed somehow that there was nothing more in the world to write about.” It was Conrad, let us suppose, Conrad the creator, who said that, looking back with sorrowful satisfaction upon the stories he had told; feeling as he well might that he could never better the storm in The Nigger of the “Narcissus”, or render more faithful tribute to the qualities of British seamen than he had done already in Youth and Lord Jim. It was then that Marlow, the commentator, reminded him how, in the course of nature, one must grow old, sit smoking on deck, and give up seafaring. But, he reminded him, those strenuous years had deposited their memories; and he even went so far perhaps as to hint that, though the last word might have been said about Captain Whalley and his relation to the universe, there remained on shore a number of men and women whose relationships, though of a more personal kind, might be worth looking into. If we further suppose that there was a volume of Henry James on board and that Marlow gave his friend the book to take to bed with him, we may seek support in the fact that it was in 1905 that Conrad wrote a very fine essay upon that master.

For some years, then, it was Marlow who was the dominant partner. Nostromo, Chance, The Arrow of Gold represent that stage of the alliance which some will continue to find the richest of all. The human heart is more intricate than the forest, they will say; it has its storms; it has its creatures of the night; and if as novelist you wish to test man in all his relationships, the proper antagonist is man; his ordeal is in society, not solitude. For them there will always be a peculiar fascination in the books where the light of those brilliant eyes falls not only upon the waste of waters but upon the heart in its perplexity. But it must be admitted that, if Marlow thus advised Conrad to shift his angle of vision, the advice was bold. For the vision of a novelist is both complex and specialised; complex, because behind his characters and apart from them must stand something stable to which he relates them; specialised because since he is a single person with one sensibility the aspects of life in which he can believe with conviction are strictly limited. So delicate a balance is easily disturbed. After the middle period Conrad never again was able to bring his figures into perfect relation with their background. He never believed in his later, and more highly sophisticated characters as he had believed in his early seamen. When he had to indicate their relation to that other unseen world of novelists, the world of values and convictions, he was far less sure what those values were. Then, over and over again, a single phrase, “He steered with care”, coming at the end of a storm, carried in it a whole morality. But in this more crowded and complicated world such terse phrases became less and less appropriate. Complex men and women of many interests and relations would not submit to so summary a judgement; or, if they did, much that was important in them escaped the verdict. And yet it was very necessary to Conrad’s genius, with its luxuriant and romantic power, to have some law by which its creations could be tried. Essentially—such remained his creed—this world of civilised and self-conscious people is based upon “a few very simple ideas”; but where, in the world of thoughts and personal relations, are we to find them? There are no masts in drawing-rooms; the typhoon does not test the worth of politicians and business men. Seeking and not finding such supports, the world of Conrad’s later period has about it an involuntary obscurity, an inconclusiveness, almost a disillusionment which baffles and fatigues. We lay hold in the dusk only of the old nobilities and sonorities: fidelity, compassion, honour, service—beautiful always, but now a little wearily reiterated, as if times had changed. Perhaps it was Marlow who was at fault. His habit of mind was a trifle sedentary. He had sat upon deck too long; splendid in soliloquy, he was less apt in the give and take of conversation; and those “moments of vision” flashing and fading, do not serve as well as steady lamplight to illumine the ripple of life and its long, gradual years. Above all, perhaps, he did not take into account how, if Conrad was to create, it was essential first that he should believe.

Therefore, though we shall make expeditions into the later books and bring back wonderful trophies, large tracts of them will remain by most of us untrodden. It is the earlier books—Youth, Lord Jim, Typhoon, The Nigger of the “Narcissus”—that we shall read in their entirety. For when the question is asked, what of Conrad will survive and where in the ranks of novelists we are to place him, these books, with their air of telling us something very old and perfectly true, which had lain hidden but is now revealed, will come to mind and make such questions and comparisons seem a little futile. Complete and still, very chaste and very beautiful, they rise in the memory as, on these hot summer nights, in their slow and stately way first one star comes out and then another.

[Times Literary Supplement, Aug 14, 1924]

[]

How it Strikes a Contemporary.

In the first place a contemporary can scarcely fail to be struck by the fact that two critics at the same table at the same moment will pronounce completely different opinions about the same book. Here, on the right, it is declared a masterpiece of English prose; on the left, simultaneously, a mere mass of waste-paper which, if the fire could survive it, should be thrown upon the flames. Yet both critics are in agreement about Milton and about Keats. They display an exquisite sensibility and have undoubtedly a genuine enthusiasm. It is only when they discuss the work of contemporary writers that they inevitably come to blows. The book in question, which is at once a lasting contribution to English literature and a mere farrago of pretentious mediocrity, was published about two months ago. That is the explanation; that is why they differ.

The explanation is a strange one. It is equally disconcerting to the reader who wishes to take his bearings in the chaos of contemporary literature and to the writer who has a natural desire to know whether his own work, produced with infinite pains and in almost utter darkness, is likely to burn for ever among the fixed luminaries of English letters or, on the contrary, to put out the fire. But if we identify ourselves with the reader and explore his dilemma first, our bewilderment is short-lived enough. The same thing has happened so often before. We have heard the doctors disagreeing about the new and agreeing about the old twice a year on the average, in spring and autumn, ever since Robert Elsmere, or was it Stephen Phillips, somehow pervaded the atmosphere, and there was the same disagreement among grown-up people about these books too. It would be much more marvellous, and indeed much more upsetting, if, for a wonder, both gentlemen agreed, pronounced Blank’s book an undoubted masterpiece, and thus faced us with the necessity of deciding whether we should back their judgement to the extent of ten and sixpence. Both are critics of reputation; the opinions tumbled out so spontaneously here will be starched and stiffened into columns of sober prose which will uphold the dignity of letters in England and America.

It must be some innate cynicism, then, some ungenerous distrust of contemporary genius, which determines us automatically as the talk goes on that, were they to agree—which they show no signs of doing—half a guinea is altogether too large a sum to squander upon contemporary enthusiasms, and the case will be met quite adequately by a card to the library. Still the question remains, and let us put it boldly to the critics themselves. Is there no guidance nowadays for a reader who yields to none in reverence for the dead, but is tormented by the suspicion that reverence for the dead is vitally connected with understanding of the living? After a rapid survey both critics are agreed that there is unfortunately no such person. For what is their own judgement worth where new books are concerned? Certainly not ten and sixpence. And from the stores of their experience they proceed to bring forth terrible examples of past blunders; crimes of criticism which, if they had been committed against the dead and not against the living, would have lost them their jobs and imperilled their reputations. The only advice they can offer is to respect one’s own instincts, to follow them fearlessly and, rather than submit them to the control of any critic or reviewer alive, to check them by reading and reading again the masterpieces of the past.

Thanking them humbly, we cannot help reflecting that it was not always so. Once upon a time, we must believe, there was a rule, a discipline, which controlled the great republic of readers in a way which is now unknown. That is not to say that the great critic—the Dryden, the Johnson, the Coleridge, the Arnold—was an impeccable judge of contemporary work, whose verdicts stamped the book indelibly and saved the reader the trouble of reckoning the value for himself. The mistakes of these great men about their own contemporaries are too notorious to be worth recording. But the mere fact of their existence had a centralising influence. That alone, it is not fantastic to suppose, would have controlled the disagreements of the dinner-table and given to random chatter about some book just out an authority now entirely to seek. The diverse schools would have debated as hotly as ever, but at the back of every reader’s mind would have been the consciousness that there was at least one man who kept the main principles of literature closely in view: who, if you had taken to him some eccentricity of the moment, would have brought it into touch with permanence and tethered it by his own authority in the contrary blasts of praise and blame.[◉3] But when it comes to the making of a critic, nature must be generous and society ripe. The scattered dinner-tables of the modern world, the chase and eddy of the various currents which compose the society of our time, could only be dominated by a giant of fabulous dimensions. And where is even the very tall man whom we have the right to expect? Reviewers we have but no critic; a million competent and incorruptible policemen but no judge. Men of taste and learning and ability are for ever lecturing the young and celebrating the dead. But the too frequent result of their able and industrious pens is a desiccation of the living tissues of literature into a network of little bones. Nowhere shall we find the downright vigour of a Dryden, or Keats with his fine and natural bearing, his profound insight and sanity, or Flaubert and the tremendous power of his fanaticism, or Coleridge, above all, brewing in his head the whole of poetry and letting issue now and then one of those profound general statements which are caught up by the mind when hot with the friction of reading as if they were of the soul of the book itself.

And to all this, too, the critics generously agree. A great critic, they say, is the rarest of beings. But should one miraculously appear, how should we maintain him, on what should we feed him? Great critics, if they are not themselves great poets, are bred from the profusion of the age. There is some great man to be vindicated, some school to be founded or destroyed. But our age is meagre to the verge of destitution. There is no name which dominates the rest. There is no master in whose workshop the young are proud to serve apprenticeship. Mr. Hardy has long since withdrawn from the arena, and there is something exotic about the genius of Mr. Conrad which makes him not so much an influence as an idol, honoured and admired, but aloof and apart. As for the rest, though they are many and vigorous and in the full flood of creative activity, there is none whose influence can seriously affect his contemporaries, or penetrate beyond our day to that not very distant future which it pleases us to call immortality. If we make a century our test, and ask how much of the work produced in these days in England will be in existence then, we shall have to answer not merely that we cannot agree upon the same book, but that we are more than doubtful whether such a book there is. It is an age of fragments. A few stanzas, a few pages, a chapter here and there, the beginning of this novel, the end of that, are equal to the best of any age or author. But can we go to posterity with a sheaf of loose pages, or ask the readers of those days, with the whole of literature before them, to sift our enormous rubbish heaps for our tiny pearls? Such are the questions which the critics might lawfully put to their companions at table, the novelists and poets.

At first the weight of pessimism seems sufficient to bear down all opposition. Yes, it is a lean age, we repeat, with much to justify its poverty; but, frankly, if we pit one century against another the comparison seems overwhelmingly against us. Waverley, The Excursion, Kubla Khan, Don Juan, Hazlitt’s Essays, Pride and Prejudice, Hyperion, and Prometheus Unbound were all published between 1800 and 1821. Our century has not lacked industry; but if we ask for masterpieces it appears on the face of it that the pessimists are right. It seems as if an age of genius must be succeeded by an age of endeavour; riot and extravagance by cleanliness and hard work. All honour, of course, to those who have sacrificed their immortality to set the house in order. But if we ask for masterpieces, where are we to look? A little poetry, we may feel sure, will survive; a few poems by Mr. Yeats, by Mr. Davies, by Mr. De la Mare. Mr. Lawrence, of course, has moments of greatness, but hours of something very different. Mr. Beerbohm, in his way, is perfect, but it is not a big way. Passages in Far Away and Long Ago will undoubtedly go to posterity entire. Ulysses was a memorable catastrophe—immense in daring, terrific in disaster. And so, picking and choosing, we select now this, now that, hold it up for display, hear it defended or derided, and finally have to meet the objection that even so we are only agreeing with the critics that it is an age incapable of sustained effort, littered with fragments, and not seriously to be compared with the age that went before.

But it is just when opinions universally prevail and we have added lip service to their authority that we become sometimes most keenly conscious that we do not believe a word that we are saying. It is a barren and exhausted age, we repeat; we must look back with envy to the past. Meanwhile it is one of the first fine days of spring. Life is not altogether lacking in colour. The telephone, which interrupts the most serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty observations, has a romance of its own. And the random talk of people who have no chance of immortality and thus can speak their minds out has a setting, often, of lights, streets, houses, human beings, beautiful or grotesque, which will weave itself into the moment for ever. But this is life; the talk is about literature. We must try to disentangle the two, and justify the rash revolt of optimism against the superior plausibility, the finer distinction, of pessimism.

Our optimism, then, is largely instinctive. It springs from the fine day and the wine and the talk; it springs from the fact that when life throws up such treasures daily, daily suggests more than the most voluble can express, much though we admire the dead, we prefer life as it is. There is something about the present which we would not exchange, though we were offered a choice of all past ages to live in. And modern literature, with all its imperfections, has the same hold on us and the same fascination. It is like a relation whom we snub and scarify daily, but, after all, cannot do without. It has the same endearing quality of being that which we are, that which we have made, that in which we live, instead of being something, however august, alien to ourselves and beheld from the outside. Nor has any generation more need than ours to cherish its contemporaries. We are sharply cut off from our predecessors. A shift in the scale—the sudden slip of masses held in position for ages—has shaken the fabric from top to bottom, alienated us from the past and made us perhaps too vividly conscious of the present. Every day we find ourselves doing, saying, or thinking things that would have been impossible to our fathers. And we feel the differences which have not been noted far more keenly than the resemblances which have been very perfectly expressed. New books lure us to read them partly in the hope that they will reflect this re-arrangement of our attitude—these scenes, thoughts, and apparently fortuitous groupings of incongruous things which impinge upon us with so keen a sense of novelty—and, as literature does, give it back into our keeping, whole and comprehended. Here indeed there is every reason for optimism. No age can have been more rich than ours in writers determined to give expression to the differences which separate them from the past and not to the resemblances which connect them with it. It would be invidious to mention names, but the most casual reader dipping into poetry, into fiction, into biography can hardly fail to be impressed by the courage, the sincerity, in a word, by the widespread originality of our time. But our exhilaration is strangely curtailed. Book after book leaves us with the same sense of promise unachieved, of intellectual poverty, of brilliance which has been snatched from life but not transmuted into literature. Much of what is best in contemporary work has the appearance of being noted under pressure, taken down in a bleak shorthand which preserves with astonishing brilliance the movements and expressions of the figures as they pass across the screen. But the flash is soon over, and there remains with us a profound dissatisfaction. The irritation is as acute as the pleasure was intense.

After all, then, we are back at the beginning, vacillating from extreme to extreme, at one moment enthusiastic, at the next pessimistic, unable to come to any conclusion about our contemporaries. We have asked the critics to help us, but they have deprecated the task. Now, then, is the time to accept their advice and correct these extremes by consulting the masterpieces of the past. We feel ourselves indeed driven to them, impelled not by calm judgement but by some imperious need to anchor our instability upon their security. But, honestly, the shock of the comparison between past and present is at first disconcerting. Undoubtedly there is a dullness in great books. There is an unabashed tranquillity in page after page of Wordsworth and Scott and Miss Austen which is sedative to the verge of somnolence. Opportunities occur and they neglect them. Shades and subtleties accumulate and they ignore them. They seem deliberately to refuse to gratify those senses which are stimulated so briskly by the moderns; the senses of sight, of sound, of touch—above all, the sense of the human being, his depth and the variety of his perceptions, his complexity, his confusion, his self, in short. There is little of all this in the works of Wordsworth and Scott and Jane Austen. From what, then, arises that sense of security which gradually, delightfully, and completely overcomes us? It is the power of their belief—their conviction, that imposes itself upon us. In Wordsworth, the philosophic poet, this is obvious enough. But it is equally true of the careless Scott, who scribbled masterpieces to build castles before breakfast, and of the modest maiden lady who wrote furtively and quietly simply to give pleasure. In both there is the same natural conviction that life is of a certain quality. They have their judgement of conduct. They know the relations of human beings towards each other and towards the universe. Neither of them probably has a word to say about the matter outright, but everything depends on it. Only believe, we find ourselves saying, and all the rest will come of itself. Only believe, to take a very simple instance which the recent publication of The Watsons brings to mind, that a nice girl will instinctively try to soothe the feelings of a boy who has been snubbed at a dance, and then, if you believe it implicitly and unquestioningly, you will not only make people a hundred years later feel the same thing, but you will make them feel it as literature. For certainty of that kind is the condition which makes it possible to write. To believe that your impressions hold good for others is to be released from the cramp and confinement of personality. It is to be free, as Scott was free, to explore with a vigour which still holds us spell-bound the whole world of adventure and romance. It is also the first step in that mysterious process in which Jane Austen was so great an adept. The little grain of experience once selected, believed in, and set outside herself, could be put precisely in its place, and she was then free to make it, by a process which never yields its secrets to the analyst, into that complete statement which is literature.

So then our contemporaries afflict us because they have ceased to believe. The most sincere of them will only tell us what it is that happens to himself. They cannot make a world, because they are not free of other human beings. They cannot tell stories because they do not believe that stories are true. They cannot generalise. They depend on their senses and emotions, whose testimony is trustworthy, rather than on their intellects whose message is obscure. And they have perforce to deny themselves the use of some of the most powerful and some of the most exquisite of the weapons of their craft. With the whole wealth of the English language at the back of them, they timidly pass about from hand to hand and book to book only the meanest copper coins. Set down at a fresh angle of the eternal prospect they can only whip out their notebooks and record with agonised intensity the flying gleams, which light on what? and the transitory splendours, which may, perhaps, compose nothing whatever. But here the critics interpose, and with some show of justice.

If this description holds good, they say, and is not, as it may well be, entirely dependent upon our position at the table and certain purely personal relationships to mustard pots and flower vases, then the risks of judging contemporary work are greater than ever before. There is every excuse for them if they are wide of the mark; and no doubt it would be better to retreat, as Matthew Arnold advised, from the burning ground of the present to the safe tranquillity of the past. “We enter on burning ground,” wrote Matthew Arnold, “as we approach the poetry of times so near to us, poetry like that of Byron, Shelley, and Wordsworth, of which the estimates are so often not only personal, but personal with passion,” and this, they remind us, was written in the year 1880. Beware, they say, of putting under the microscope one inch of a ribbon which runs many miles; things sort themselves out if you wait; moderation, and a study of the classics are to be recommended. Moreover, life is short; the Byron centenary is at hand; and the burning question of the moment is, did he, or did he not, marry his sister? To sum up, then—if indeed any conclusion is possible when everybody is talking at once and it is time to be going—it seems that it would be wise for the writers of the present to renounce the hope of creating masterpieces. Their poems, plays, biographies, novels are not books but notebooks, and Time, like a good schoolmaster, will take them in his hands, point to their blots and scrawls and erasions, and tear them across; but he will not throw them into the waste-paper basket. He will keep them because other students will find them very useful. It is from the notebooks of the present that the masterpieces of the future are made. Literature, as the critics were saying just now, has lasted long, has undergone many changes, and it is only a short sight and a parochial mind that will exaggerate the importance of these squalls, however they may agitate the little boats now tossing out at sea. The storm and the drenching are on the surface; continuity and calm are in the depths.

As for the critics whose task it is to pass judgement upon the books of the moment, whose work, let us admit, is difficult, dangerous, and often distasteful, let us ask them to be generous of encouragement, but sparing of those wreaths and coronets which are so apt to get awry, and fade, and make the wearers, in six months time, look a little ridiculous. Let them take a wider, a less personal view of modern literature, and look indeed upon the writers as if they were engaged upon some vast building, which being built by common effort, the separate workmen may well remain anonymous. Let them slam the door upon the cosy company where sugar is cheap and butter plentiful, give over, for a time at least, the discussion of that fascinating topic—whether Byron married his sister—and, withdrawing, perhaps, a handsbreadth from the table where we sit chattering, say something interesting about literature itself. Let us buttonhole them as they leave, and recall to their memory that gaunt aristocrat, Lady Hester Stanhope, who kept a milk-white horse in her stable in readiness for the Messiah and was for ever scanning the mountain tops, impatiently but with confidence, for signs of his approach, and ask them to follow her example; scan the horizon; see the past in relation to the future; and so prepare the way for masterpieces to come.

[Times Literary Supplement, Apr 5, 1923]

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TO
THE
LIGHTHOUSE

by
Virginia Woolf

published
May 5, 1927
by
The Hogarth Press

to the lighthouse

I. The Window

1    2    3    4    5    6    7    8    9    10

11    12    13    14    15    16    17    18    19

II. Time Passes

1    2    3    4    5    6    7    8    9    10

III. The Lighthouse

1    2    3    4    5    6    7    8    9    10

11    12    13

[]

[The text follows the 1930 Hogarth Press edition.]

I
The Window.

1

“Yes, of course, if it’s fine to-morrow,” said Mrs. Ramsay. “But you’ll have to be up with the lark,” she added.

To her son these words conveyed an extraordinary joy, as if it were settled the expedition were bound to take place, and the wonder to which he had looked forward, for years and years it seemed, was, after a night’s darkness and a day’s sail, within touch. Since he belonged, even at the age of six, to that great clan which cannot keep this feeling separate from that, but must let future prospects, with their joys and sorrows, cloud what is actually at hand, since to such people even in earliest childhood any turn in the wheel of sensation has the power to crystallise and transfix the moment upon which its gloom or radiance rests, James Ramsay, sitting on the floor cutting out pictures from the illustrated catalogue of the Army and Navy Stores, endowed the picture of a refrigerator as his mother spoke with heavenly bliss. It was fringed with joy. The wheelbarrow, the lawn-mower, the sound of poplar trees, leaves whitening before rain, rooks cawing, brooms knocking, dresses rustling—all these were so coloured and distinguished in his mind that he had already his private code, his secret language, though he appeared the image of stark and uncompromising severity, with his high forehead and his fierce blue eyes, impeccably candid and pure, frowning slightly at the sight of human frailty, so that his mother, watching him guide his scissors neatly round the refrigerator, imagined him all red and ermine on the Bench or directing a stern and momentous enterprise in some crisis of public affairs.

“But,” said his father, stopping in front of the drawing-room window, “it won’t be fine.”

Had there been an axe handy, a poker, or any weapon that would have gashed a hole in his father’s breast and killed him, there and then, James would have seized it. Such were the extremes of emotion that Mr. Ramsay excited in his children’s breasts by his mere presence; standing, as now, lean as a knife, narrow as the blade of one, grinning sarcastically, not only with the pleasure of disillusioning his son and casting ridicule upon his wife, who was ten thousand times better in every way than he was (James thought), but also with some secret conceit at his own accuracy of judgement. What he said was true. It was always true. He was incapable of untruth; never tampered with a fact; never altered a disagreeable word to suit the pleasure or convenience of any mortal being, least of all of his own children, who, sprung from his loins, should be aware from childhood that life is difficult; facts uncompromising; and the passage to that fabled land where our brightest hopes are extinguished, our frail barks founder in darkness (here Mr. Ramsay would straighten his back and narrow his little blue eyes upon the horizon), one that needs, above all, courage, truth, and the power to endure.

“But it may be fine—I expect it will be fine,” said Mrs. Ramsay, making some little twist of the reddish-brown stocking she was knitting, impatiently. If she finished it to-night, if they did go to the Lighthouse after all, it was to be given to the Lighthouse keeper for his little boy, who was threatened with a tuberculous hip; together with a pile of old magazines, and some tobacco, indeed whatever she could find lying about, not really wanted, but only littering the room, to give those poor fellows who must be bored to death sitting all day with nothing to do but polish the lamp and trim the wick and rake about on their scrap of garden, something to amuse them. For how would you like to be shut up for a whole month at a time, and possibly more in stormy weather, upon a rock the size of a tennis lawn? she would ask; and to have no letters or newspapers, and to see nobody; if you were married, not to see your wife, not to know how your children were,—if they were ill, if they had fallen down and broken their legs or arms; to see the same dreary waves breaking week after week, and then a dreadful storm coming, and the windows covered with spray, and birds dashed against the lamp, and the whole place rocking, and not be able to put your nose out of doors for fear of being swept into the sea? How would you like that? she asked, addressing herself particularly to her daughters. So she added, rather differently, one must take them whatever comforts one can.

“It’s due west,” said the atheist Tansley, holding his bony fingers spread so that the wind blew through them, for he was sharing Mr. Ramsay’s evening walk up and down, up and down the terrace. That is to say, the wind blew from the worst possible direction for landing at the Lighthouse. Yes, he did say disagreeable things, Mrs. Ramsay admitted; it was odious of him to rub this in, and make James still more disappointed; but at the same time, she would not let them laugh at him. “The atheist”, they called him; “the little atheist”. Rose mocked him; Prue mocked him; Andrew, Jasper, Roger mocked him; even old Badger without a tooth in his head had bit him, for being (as Nancy put it) the hundred and tenth young man to chase them all the way up to the Hebrides when it was ever so much nicer to be alone.

“Nonsense,” said Mrs. Ramsay, with great severity. Apart from the habit of exaggeration which they had from her, and from the implication (which was true) that she asked too many people to stay, and had to lodge some in the town, she could not bear incivility to her guests, to young men in particular, who were poor as church mice, “exceptionally able”, her husband said, his great admirers, and come there for a holiday. Indeed, she had the whole of the other sex under her protection; for reasons she could not explain, for their chivalry and valour, for the fact that they negotiated treaties, ruled India, controlled finance; finally for an attitude towards herself which no woman could fail to feel or to find agreeable, something trustful, childlike, reverential; which an old woman could take from a young man without loss of dignity, and woe betide the girl—pray Heaven it was none of her daughters!—who did not feel the worth of it, and all that it implied, to the marrow of her bones.

She turned with severity upon Nancy. He had not chased them, she said. He had been asked.

They must find a way out of it all. There might be some simpler way, some less laborious way, she sighed. When she looked in the glass and saw her hair grey, her cheek sunk, at fifty, she thought, possibly she might have managed things better—her husband; money; his books. But for her own part she would never for a single second regret her decision, evade difficulties, or slur over duties. She was now formidable to behold, and it was only in silence, looking up from their plates, after she had spoken so severely about Charles Tansley, that her daughters—Prue, Nancy, Rose—could sport with infidel ideas which they had brewed for themselves of a life different from hers; in Paris, perhaps; a wilder life; not always taking care of some man or other; for there was in all their minds a mute questioning of deference and chivalry, of the Bank of England and the Indian Empire, of ringed fingers and lace, though to them all there was something in this of the essence of beauty, which called out the manliness in their girlish hearts, and made them, as they sat at table beneath their mother’s eyes, honour her strange severity, her extreme courtesy, like a Queen’s raising from the mud a beggar’s dirty foot and washing it, when she thus admonished them so very severely about that wretched atheist who had chased them to—or, speaking accurately, been invited to stay with them in—the Isle of Skye.

“There’ll be no landing at the Lighthouse to-morrow,” said Charles Tansley, clapping his hands together as he stood at the window with her husband. Surely, he had said enough. She wished they would both leave her and James alone and go on talking. She looked at him. He was such a miserable specimen, the children said, all humps and hollows. He couldn’t play cricket; he poked; he shuffled. He was a sarcastic brute, Andrew said. They knew what he liked best—to be for ever walking up and down, up and down, with Mr. Ramsay, and saying who had won this, who had won that, who was a “first-rate man” at Latin verses, who was “brilliant but I think fundamentally unsound”, who was undoubtedly the “ablest fellow in Balliol”, who had buried his light temporarily at Bristol or Bedford, but was bound to be heard of later when his Prolegomena, of which Mr. Tansley had the first pages in proof with him if Mr. Ramsay would like to see them, to some branch of mathematics or philosophy saw the light of day. That was what they talked about.

She could not help laughing herself sometimes. She said, the other day, something about “waves mountains high”. Yes, said Charles Tansley, it was a little rough. “Aren’t you drenched to the skin?” she had said. “Damp, not wet through,” said Mr. Tansley, pinching his sleeve, feeling his socks.

But it was not that they minded, the children said. It was not his face; it was not his manners. It was him—his point of view. When they talked about something interesting, people, music, history, anything, even said it was a fine evening so why not sit out of doors, then what they complained of about Charles Tansley was that until he had turned the whole thing round and made it somehow reflect himself and disparage them, put them all on edge somehow with his acid way of peeling the flesh and blood off everything, he was not satisfied. And he would go to picture galleries, they said, and he would ask one, did one like his tie? God knows, said Rose, one did not.

Disappearing as stealthily as stags from the dinner-table directly the meal was over, the eight sons and daughters of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay sought their bedrooms, their fastnesses in a house where there was no other privacy to debate anything, everything; Tansley’s tie; the passing of the Reform Bill; sea-birds and butterflies; people; while the sun poured into those attics, which a plank alone separated from each other so that every footstep could be plainly heard and the Swiss girl sobbing for her father who was dying of cancer in a valley of the Grisons, and lit up bats, flannels, straw hats, ink-pots, paint-pots, beetles, and the skulls of small birds, while it drew from the long frilled strips of seaweed pinned to the wall a smell of salt and weeds, which was in the towels too, gritty with sand from bathing.

Strife, divisions, difference of opinion, prejudices twisted into the very fibre of being, oh that they should begin so early, Mrs. Ramsay deplored. They were so critical, her children. They talked such nonsense. She went from the dining-room, holding James by the hand, since he would not go with the others. It seemed to her such nonsense—inventing differences, when people, heaven knows, were different enough without that. The real differences, she thought, standing by the drawing-room window, are enough, quite enough. She had in mind at the moment, rich and poor, high and low; the great in birth receiving from her, half grudging, some respect, for had she not in her veins the blood of that very noble, if slightly mythical, Italian house, whose daughters, scattered about English drawing-rooms in the nineteenth century, had lisped so charmingly, had stormed so wildly, and all her wit and her bearing and her temper came from them, and not from the sluggish English, or the cold Scotch; but more profoundly she ruminated the other problem, of rich and poor, and the things she saw with her own eyes, weekly, daily, here or in London, when she visited this widow, or that struggling wife in person with a bag on her arm, and a note-book and pencil with which she wrote down in columns carefully ruled for the purpose wages and spendings, employment and unemployment, in the hope that thus she would cease to be a private woman whose charity was half a sop to her own indignation, half a relief to her own curiosity, and become, what with her untrained mind she greatly admired, an investigator, elucidating the social problem.

Insoluble questions they were, it seemed to her, standing there, holding James by the hand. He had followed her into the drawing-room, that young man they laughed at; he was standing by the table, fidgeting with something, awkwardly, feeling himself out of things, as she knew without looking round. They had all gone—the children; Minta Doyle and Paul Rayley; Augustus Carmichael; her husband—they had all gone. So she turned with a sigh and said, “Would it bore you to come with me, Mr. Tansley?”

She had a dull errand in the town; she had a letter or two to write; she would be ten minutes perhaps; she would put on her hat. And, with her basket and her parasol, there she was again, ten minutes later, giving out a sense of being ready, of being equipped for a jaunt, which, however, she must interrupt for a moment, as they passed the tennis lawn, to ask Mr. Carmichael, who was basking with his yellow cat’s eyes ajar, so that like a cat’s they seemed to reflect the branches moving or the clouds passing, but to give no inkling of any inner thoughts or emotion whatsoever, if he wanted anything.

For they were making the great expedition, she said, laughing. They were going to the town. “Stamps, writing-paper, tobacco?” she suggested, stopping by his side. But no, he wanted nothing. His hands clasped themselves over his capacious paunch, his eyes blinked, as if he would have liked to reply kindly to these blandishments (she was seductive but a little nervous) but could not, sunk as he was in a grey-green somnolence which embraced them all, without need of words, in a vast and benevolent lethargy of well-wishing; all the house; all the world; all the people in it, for he had slipped into his glass at lunch a few drops of something, which accounted, the children thought, for the vivid streak of canary-yellow in moustache and beard that were otherwise milk-white. He wanted nothing, he murmured.

He should have been a great philosopher, said Mrs. Ramsay, as they went down the road to the fishing village, but he had made an unfortunate marriage. Holding her black parasol very erect, and moving with an indescribable air of expectation, as if she were going to meet someone round the corner, she told the story; an affair at Oxford with some girl; an early marriage; poverty; going to India; translating a little poetry “very beautifully, I believe”, being willing to teach the boys Persian or Hindustanee, but what really was the use of that?—and then lying, as they saw him, on the lawn.

It flattered him; snubbed as he had been, it soothed him that Mrs. Ramsay should tell him this. Charles Tansley revived. Insinuating, too, as she did the greatness of man’s intellect, even in its decay, the subjection of all wives—not that she blamed the girl, and the marriage had been happy enough, she believed—to their husband’s labours, she made him feel better pleased with himself than he had done yet, and he would have liked, had they taken a cab, for example, to have paid the fare. As for her little bag, might he not carry that? No, no, she said, she always carried that herself. She did too. Yes, he felt that in her. He felt many things, something in particular that excited him and disturbed him for reasons which he could not give. He would like her to see him, gowned and hooded, walking in a procession. A fellowship, a professorship,—he felt capable of anything and saw himself—but what was she looking at? At a man pasting a bill. The vast flapping sheet flattened itself out, and each shove of the brush revealed fresh legs, hoops, horses, glistening reds and blues, beautifully smooth, until half the wall was covered with the advertisement of a circus; a hundred horsemen, twenty performing seals, lions, tigers … Craning forwards, for she was short-sighted, she read out how it … “will visit this town.” It was terribly dangerous work for a one-armed man, she exclaimed, to stand on top of a ladder like that—his left arm had been cut off in a reaping machine two years ago.

“Let us all go!” she cried, moving on, as if all those riders and horses had filled her with childlike exultation and made her forget her pity.

“Let’s go,” he said, repeating her words, clicking them out, however, with a self-consciousness that made her wince. “Let us go to the Circus.” No. He could not say it right. He could not feel it right. But why not? she wondered. What was wrong with him then? She liked him warmly, at the moment. Had they not been taken, she asked, to circuses when they were children? Never, he answered, as if she asked the very thing he wanted to reply to; had been longing all these days to say, how they did not go to circuses. It was a large family, nine brothers and sisters, and his father was a working man; “My father is a chemist, Mrs. Ramsay. He keeps a shop.” He himself had paid his own way since he was thirteen. Often he went without a greatcoat in winter. He could never “return hospitality” (those were his parched stiff words) at college. He had to make things last twice the time other people did; he smoked the cheapest tobacco; shag; the same the old men smoked on the quays. He worked hard—seven hours a day; his subject was now the influence of something upon somebody—they were walking on and Mrs. Ramsay did not quite catch the meaning, only the words, here and there … dissertation … fellowship … readership … lectureship. She could not follow the ugly academic jargon, that rattled itself off so glibly, but said to herself that she saw now why going to the circus had knocked him off his perch, poor little man, and why he came out, instantly, with all that about his father and mother and brothers and sisters, and she would see to it that they didn’t laugh at him any more; she would tell Prue about it. What he would have liked, she supposed, would have been to say how he had been to Ibsen with the Ramsays. He was an awful prig—oh yes, an insufferable bore. For, though they had reached the town now and were in the main street, with carts grinding past on the cobbles, still he went on talking, about settlements, and teaching, and working men, and helping our own class, and lectures, till she gathered that he had got back entire self-confidence, had recovered from the circus, and was about (and now again she liked him warmly) to tell her—but here, the houses falling away on both sides, they came out on the quay, and the whole bay spread before them and Mrs. Ramsay could not help exclaiming, “Oh, how beautiful!” For the great plateful of blue water was before her; the hoary Lighthouse, distant, austere, in the midst; and on the right, as far as the eye could see, fading and falling, in soft low pleats, the green sand dunes with the wild flowing grasses on them, which always seemed to be running away into some moon country, uninhabited of men.

That was the view, she said, stopping, growing greyer-eyed, that her husband loved.

She paused a moment. But now, she said, artists had come here. There indeed, only a few paces off, stood one of them, in Panama hat and yellow boots, seriously, softly, absorbedly, for all that he was watched by ten little boys, with an air of profound contentment on his round red face, gazing, and then, when he had gazed, dipping; imbuing the tip of his brush in some soft mound of green or pink. Since Mr. Paunceforte had been there, three years before, all the pictures were like that she said, green and grey, with lemon-coloured sailing-boats, and pink women on the beach.

But her grandmother’s friends, she said, glancing discreetly as they passed, took the greatest pains; first they mixed their own colours, and then they ground them, and then they put damp cloths on them to keep them moist.

So Mr. Tansley supposed she meant him to see that that man’s picture was skimpy, was that what one said? The colours weren’t solid? Was that what one said? Under the influence of that extraordinary emotion which had been growing all the walk, had begun in the garden when he had wanted to take her bag, had increased in the town when he had wanted to tell her everything about himself, he was coming to see himself and everything he had ever known gone crooked a little. It was awfully strange.

There he stood in the parlour of the poky little house where she had taken him, waiting for her, while she went upstairs a moment to see a woman. He heard her quick step above; heard her voice cheerful, then low; looked at the mats, tea-caddies, glass shades; waited quite impatiently; looked forward eagerly to the walk home, determined to carry her bag; then heard her come out; shut a door; say they must keep the windows open and the doors shut, ask at the house for anything they wanted (she must be talking to a child), when, suddenly, in she came, stood for a moment silent (as if she had been pretending up there, and for a moment let herself be now), stood quite motionless for a moment against a picture of Queen Victoria wearing the blue ribbon of the Garter; and all at once he realised that it was this: it was this:—she was the most beautiful person he had ever seen.

With stars in her eyes and veils in her hair, with cyclamen and wild violets—what nonsense was he thinking? She was fifty at least; she had eight children. Stepping through fields of flowers and taking to her breast buds that had broken and lambs that had fallen; with the stars in her eyes and the wind in her hair—He took her bag.

“Good-bye, Elsie,” she said, and they walked up the street, she holding her parasol erect and walking as if she expected to meet someone round the corner, while for the first time in his life Charles Tansley felt an extraordinary pride; a man digging in a drain stopped digging and looked at her; let his arm fall down and looked at her; Charles Tansley felt an extraordinary pride; felt the wind and the cyclamen and the violets for he was walking with a beautiful woman for the first time in his life. He had hold of her bag.

[]

2

“No going to the Lighthouse, James,” he said, as he stood by the window, speaking awkwardly, but trying in deference to Mrs. Ramsay to soften his voice into some semblance of geniality at least.

Odious little man, thought Mrs. Ramsay, why go on saying that?

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3

“Perhaps you will wake up and find the sun shining and the birds singing,” she said compassionately, smoothing the little boy’s hair, for her husband, with his caustic saying that it would not be fine, had dashed his spirits she could see. This going to the Lighthouse was a passion of his, she saw, and then, as if her husband had not said enough, with his caustic saying that it would not be fine to-morrow, this odious little man went and rubbed it in all over again.

“Perhaps it will be fine to-morrow,” she said, smoothing his hair.

All she could do now was to admire the refrigerator, and turn the pages of the Stores list in the hope that she might come upon something like a rake, or a mowing-machine, which, with its prongs and its handles, would need the greatest skill and care in cutting out. All these young men parodied her husband, she reflected; he said it would rain; they said it would be a positive tornado.

But here, as she turned the page, suddenly her search for the picture of a rake or a mowing-machine was interrupted. The gruff murmur, irregularly broken by the taking out of pipes and the putting in of pipes which had kept on assuring her, though she could not hear what was said (as she sat in the window), that the men were happily talking; this sound, which had lasted now half an hour and had taken its place soothingly in the scale of sounds pressing on top of her, such as the tap of balls upon bats, the sharp, sudden bark now and then, “How’s that? How’s that?” of the children playing cricket, had ceased; so that the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts and seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again as she sat with the children the words of some old cradle song, murmured by nature, “I am guarding you—I am your support”, but at other times suddenly and unexpectedly, especially when her mind raised itself slightly from the task actually in hand, had no such kindly meaning, but like a ghostly roll of drums remorselessly beat the measure of life, made one think of the destruction of the island and its engulfment in the sea, and warned her whose day had slipped past in one quick doing after another that it was all ephemeral as a rainbow—this sound which had been obscured and concealed under the other sounds suddenly thundered hollow in her ears and made her look up with an impulse of terror.

They had ceased to talk; that was the explanation. Falling in one second from the tension which had gripped her to the other extreme which, as if to recoup her for her unnecessary expense of emotion, was cool, amused, and even faintly malicious, she concluded that poor Charles Tansley had been shed. That was of little account to her. If her husband required sacrifices (and indeed he did) she cheerfully offered up to him Charles Tansley, who had snubbed her little boy.

One moment more, with her head raised, she listened, as if she waited for some habitual sound, some regular mechanical sound; and then, hearing something rhythmical, half said, half chanted, beginning in the garden, as her husband beat up and down the terrace, something between a croak and a song, she was soothed once more, assured again that all was well, and looking down at the book on her knee found the picture of a pocket knife with six blades which could only be cut out if James was very careful.

Suddenly a loud cry, as of a sleep-walker, half roused, something about

Stormed at with shot and shell

sung out with the utmost intensity in her ear, made her turn apprehensively to see if any one heard him. Only Lily Briscoe, she was glad to find; and that did not matter. But the sight of the girl standing on the edge of the lawn painting reminded her; she was supposed to be keeping her head as much in the same position as possible for Lily’s picture. Lily’s picture! Mrs. Ramsay smiled. With her little Chinese eyes and her puckered-up face she would never marry; one could not take her painting very seriously; but she was an independent little creature, Mrs. Ramsay liked her for it, and so remembering her promise, she bent her head.

[]

4

Indeed, he almost knocked her easel over, coming down upon her with his hands waving, shouting out “Boldly we rode and well”, but, mercifully, he turned sharp, and rode off, to die gloriously she supposed upon the heights of Balaclava. Never was anybody at once so ridiculous and so alarming. But so long as he kept like that, waving, shouting, she was safe; he would not stand still and look at her picture. And that was what Lily Briscoe could not have endured. Even while she looked at the mass, at the line, at the colour, at Mrs. Ramsay sitting in the window with James, she kept a feeler on her surroundings lest someone should creep up, and suddenly she should find her picture looked at. But now, with all her senses quickened as they were, looking, straining, till the colour of the wall and the jacmanna beyond burnt into her eyes, she was aware of someone coming out of the house, coming towards her; but somehow divined, from the footfall, William Bankes, so that though her brush quivered, she did not, as she would have done had it been Mr. Tansley, Paul Rayley, Minta Doyle, or practically anybody else, turn her canvas upon the grass, but let it stand. William Bankes stood beside her.

They had rooms in the village, and so, walking in, walking out, parting late on door-mats, had said little things about the soup, about the children, about one thing and another which made them allies; so that when he stood beside her now in his judicial way (he was old enough to be her father too, a botanist, a widower, smelling of soap, very scrupulous and clean) she just stood there. He just stood there. Her shoes were excellent, he observed. They allowed the toes their natural expansion. Lodging in the same house with her, he had noticed too, how orderly she was, up before breakfast and off to paint, he believed, alone: poor, presumably, and without the complexion or the allurement of Miss Doyle certainly, but with a good sense which made her in his eyes superior to that young lady. Now, for instance, when Ramsay bore down on them, shouting, gesticulating, Miss Briscoe, he felt certain, understood.

Someone had blundered.

Mr. Ramsay glared at them. He glared at them without seeming to see them. That did make them both vaguely uncomfortable. Together they had seen a thing they had not been meant to see. They had encroached upon a privacy. So, Lily thought, it was probably an excuse of his for moving, for getting out of earshot, that made Mr. Bankes almost immediately say something about its being chilly and suggest taking a stroll. She would come, yes. But it was with difficulty that she took her eyes off her picture.

The jacmanna was bright violet; the wall staring white. She would not have considered it honest to tamper with the bright violet and the staring white, since she saw them like that, fashionable though it was, since Mr. Paunceforte’s visit, to see everything pale, elegant, semitransparent. Then beneath the colour there was the shape. She could see it all so clearly, so commandingly, when she looked: it was when she took her brush in hand that the whole thing changed. It was in that moment’s flight between the picture and her canvas that the demons set on her who often brought her to the verge of tears and made this passage from conception to work as dreadful as any down a dark passage for a child. Such she often felt herself—struggling against terrific odds to maintain her courage; to say: “But this is what I see; this is what I see”, and so to clasp some miserable remnant of her vision to her breast, which a thousand forces did their best to pluck from her. And it was then too, in that chill and windy way, as she began to paint, that there forced themselves upon her other things, her own inadequacy, her insignificance, keeping house for her father off the Brompton Road, and had much ado to control her impulse to fling herself (thank Heaven she had always resisted so far) at Mrs. Ramsay’s knee and say to her—but what could one say to her? “I’m in love with you?” No, that was not true. “I’m in love with this all”, waving her hand at the hedge, at the house, at the children? It was absurd, it was impossible. One could not say what one meant. So now she laid her brushes neatly in the box, side by side, and said to William Bankes:

“It suddenly gets cold. The sun seems to give less heat,” she said, looking about her, for it was bright enough, the grass still a soft deep green, the house starred in its greenery with purple passion flowers, and rooks dropping cool cries from the high blue. But something moved, flashed, turned a silver wing in the air. It was September after all, the middle of September, and past six in the evening. So off they strolled down the garden in the usual direction, past the tennis lawn, past the pampas grass, to that break in the thick hedge, guarded by red-hot pokers like brasiers of clear burning coal, between which the blue waters of the bay looked bluer than ever.

They came there regularly every evening drawn by some need. It was as if the water floated off and set sailing thoughts which had grown stagnant on dry land, and gave to their bodies even some sort of physical relief. First, the pulse of colour flooded the bay with blue, and the heart expanded with it and the body swam, only the next instant to be checked and chilled by the prickly blackness on the ruffled waves. Then, up behind the great black rock, almost every evening spurted irregularly, so that one had to watch for it and it was a delight when it came, a fountain of white water; and then, while one waited for that, one watched, on the pale semicircular beach, wave after wave shedding again and again smoothly a film of mother of pearl.

They both smiled, standing there. They both felt a common hilarity, excited by the moving waves; and then by the swift cutting race of a sailing boat, which, having sliced a curve in the bay, stopped; shivered; let its sail drop down; and then, with a natural instinct to complete the picture, after this swift movement, both of them looked at the dunes far away, and instead of merriment felt come over them some sadness—because the thing was completed partly, and partly because distant views seem to outlast by a million years (Lily thought) the gazer and to be communing already with a sky which beholds an earth entirely at rest.

Looking at the far sand hills, William Bankes thought of Ramsay: thought of a road in Westmorland, thought of Ramsay striding along a road by himself hung round with that solitude which seemed to be his natural air. But this was suddenly interrupted, William Bankes remembered (and this must refer to some actual incident), by a hen, straddling her wings out in protection of a covey of little chicks, upon which Ramsay, stopping, pointed his stick and said “Pretty—pretty,” an odd illumination into his heart, Bankes had thought it, which showed his simplicity, his sympathy with humble things; but it seemed to him as if their friendship had ceased, there, on that stretch of road. After that, Ramsay had married. After that, what with one thing and another, the pulp had gone out of their friendship. Whose fault it was he could not say, only, after a time, repetition had taken the place of newness. It was to repeat that they met. But in this dumb colloquy with the sand dunes he maintained that his affection for Ramsay had in no way diminished; but there, like the body of a young man laid up in peat for a century, with the red fresh on his lips, was his friendship, in its acuteness and reality laid up across the bay among the sandhills.

He was anxious for the sake of this friendship and perhaps too in order to clear himself in his own mind from the imputation of having dried and shrunk—for Ramsay lived in a welter of children, whereas Bankes was childless and a widower—he was anxious that Lily Briscoe should not disparage Ramsay (a great man in his own way) yet should understand how things stood between them. Begun long years ago, their friendship had petered out on a Westmorland road, where the hen spread her wings before her chicks; after which Ramsay had married, and their paths lying different ways, there had been, certainly for no one’s fault, some tendency, when they met, to repeat.

Yes. That was it. He finished. He turned from the view. And, turning to walk back the other way, up the drive, Mr. Bankes was alive to things which would not have struck him had not those sandhills revealed to him the body of his friendship lying with the red on its lips laid up in peat—for instance, Cam, the little girl, Ramsay’s youngest daughter. She was picking Sweet Alice on the bank. She was wild and fierce. She would not “give a flower to the gentleman” as the nursemaid told her. No! no! no! she would not! She clenched her fist. She stamped. And Mr. Bankes felt aged and saddened and somehow put into the wrong by her about his friendship. He must have dried and shrunk.

The Ramsays were not rich, and it was a wonder how they managed to contrive it all. Eight children! To feed eight children on philosophy! Here was another of them, Jasper this time, strolling past, to have a shot at a bird, he said, nonchalantly, swinging Lily’s hand like a pump-handle as he passed, which caused Mr. Bankes to say, bitterly, how she was a favourite. There was education now to be considered (true, Mrs. Ramsay had something of her own perhaps) let alone the daily wear and tear of shoes and stockings which those “great fellows”, all well grown, angular, ruthless youngsters, must require. As for being sure which was which, or in what order they came, that was beyond him. He called them privately after the Kings and Queens of England; Cam the Wicked, James the Ruthless, Andrew the Just, Prue the Fair—for Prue would have beauty, he thought, how could she help it?—and Andrew brains. While he walked up the drive and Lily Briscoe said yes and no and capped his comments (for she was in love with them all, in love with this world) he weighed Ramsay’s case, commiserated him, envied him, as if he had seen him divest himself of all those glories of isolation and austerity which crowned him in youth to cumber himself definitely with fluttering wings and clucking domesticities. They gave him something—William Bankes acknowledged that; it would have been pleasant if Cam had stuck a flower in his coat or clambered over his shoulder, as over her father’s, to look at a picture of Vesuvius in eruption; but they had also, his old friends could not but feel, destroyed something. What would a stranger think now? What did this Lily Briscoe think? Could one help noticing that habits grew on him? eccentricities, weaknesses perhaps? It was astonishing that a man of his intellect could stoop so low as he did—but that was too harsh a phrase—could depend so much as he did upon people’s praise.

“Oh but,” said Lily, “think of his work!”

Whenever she “thought of his work” she always saw clearly before her a large kitchen table. It was Andrew’s doing. She asked him what his father’s books were about. “Subject and object and the nature of reality”, Andrew had said. And when she said Heavens, she had no notion what that meant. “Think of a kitchen table then”, he told her, “when you’re not there”.

So she always saw, when she thought of Mr. Ramsay’s work, a scrubbed kitchen table. It lodged now in the fork of a pear tree, for they had reached the orchard. And with a painful effort of concentration, she focused her mind, not upon the silver-bossed bark of the tree, or upon its fish-shaped leaves, but upon a phantom kitchen table, one of those scrubbed board tables, grained and knotted, whose virtue seems to have been laid bare by years of muscular integrity, which stuck there, its four legs in air. Naturally, if one’s days were passed in this seeing of angular essences, this reducing of lovely evenings, with all their flamingo clouds and blue and silver to a white deal four-legged table (and it was a mark of the finest minds so to do), naturally one could not be judged like an ordinary person.

Mr. Bankes liked her for bidding him “think of his work”. He had thought of it, often and often. Times without number, he had said, “Ramsay is one of those men who do their best work before they are forty”. He had made a definite contribution to philosophy in one little book when he was only five and twenty; what came after was more or less amplification, repetition. But the number of men who make a definite contribution to anything whatsoever is very small, he said, pausing by the pear tree, well brushed, scrupulously exact, exquisitely judicial. Suddenly, as if the movement of his hand had released it, the load of her accumulated impressions of him tilted up, and down poured in a ponderous avalanche all she felt about him. That was one sensation. Then up rose in a fume the essence of his being. That was another. She felt herself transfixed by the intensity of her perception; it was his severity; his goodness. I respect you (she addressed him silently) in every atom; you are not vain; you are entirely impersonal; you are finer than Mr. Ramsay; you are the finest human being that I know; you have neither wife nor child (without any sexual feeling, she longed to cherish that loneliness), you live for science (involuntarily, sections of potatoes rose before her eyes); praise would be an insult to you; generous, pure-hearted, heroic man! But simultaneously, she remembered how he had brought a valet all the way up here; objected to dogs on chairs; would prose for hours (until Mr. Ramsay slammed out of the room) about salt in vegetables and the iniquity of English cooks.

How then did it work out, all this? How did one judge people, think of them? How did one add up this and that and conclude that it was liking one felt, or disliking? And to those words, what meaning attached, after all? Standing now, apparently transfixed, by the pear tree, impressions poured in upon her of those two men, and to follow her thought was like following a voice which speaks too quickly to be taken down by one’s pencil, and the voice was her own voice saying without prompting undeniable, everlasting, contradictory things, so that even the fissures and humps on the bark of the pear tree were irrevocably fixed there for eternity. You have greatness, she continued, but Mr. Ramsay has none of it. He is petty, selfish, vain, egotistical; he is spoilt; he is a tyrant; he wears Mrs. Ramsay to death; but he has what you (she addressed Mr. Bankes) have not; a fiery unworldliness; he knows nothing about trifles; he loves dogs and his children. He has eight. You have none. Did he not come down in two coats the other night and let Mrs. Ramsay trim his hair into a pudding basin? All of this danced up and down, like a company of gnats, each separate, but all marvellously controlled in an invisible elastic net—danced up and down in Lily’s mind, in and about the branches of the pear tree, where still hung in effigy the scrubbed kitchen table, symbol of her profound respect for Mr. Ramsay’s mind, until her thought which had spun quicker and quicker exploded of its own intensity; she felt released; a shot went off close at hand, and there came, flying from its fragments, frightened, effusive, tumultuous, a flock of starlings.

“Jasper!” said Mr. Bankes. They turned the way the starlings flew, over the terrace. Following the scatter of swift-flying birds in the sky they stepped through the gap in the high hedge straight into Mr. Ramsay, who boomed tragically at them, “Someone had blundered!”

His eyes, glazed with emotion, defiant with tragic intensity, met theirs for a second, and trembled on the verge of recognition; but then, raising his hand half-way to his face as if to avert, to brush off, in an agony of peevish shame, their normal gaze, as if he begged them to withhold for a moment what he knew to be inevitable, as if he impressed upon them his own child-like resentment of interruption, yet even in the moment of discovery was not to be routed utterly, but was determined to hold fast to something of this delicious emotion, this impure rhapsody of which he was ashamed, but in which he revelled—he turned abruptly, slammed his private door on them; and, Lily Briscoe and Mr. Bankes, looking uneasily up into the sky, observed that the flock of starlings which Jasper had routed with his gun had settled on the tops of the elm trees.

[]

5

“And even if it isn’t fine to-morrow,” said Mrs. Ramsay, raising her eyes to glance at William Bankes and Lily Briscoe as they passed, “it will be another day. And now,” she said, thinking that Lily’s charm was her Chinese eyes, aslant in her white, puckered little face, but it would take a clever man to see it, “and now stand up, and let me measure your leg,” for they might go to the Lighthouse after all, and she must see if the stocking did not need to be an inch or two longer in the leg.

Smiling, for an admirable idea had flashed upon her this very second—William and Lily should marry—she took the heather mixture stocking, with its criss-cross of steel needles at the mouth of it, and measured it against James’s leg.

“My dear, stand still,” she said, for in his jealousy, not liking to serve as measuring-block for the Lighthouse keeper’s little boy, James fidgeted purposely; and if he did that, how could she see, was it too long, was it too short? she asked.

She looked up—what demon possessed him, her youngest, her cherished?—and saw the room, saw the chairs, thought them fearfully shabby. Their entrails, as Andrew said the other day, were all over the floor; but then what was the point, she asked herself, of buying good chairs to let them spoil up here all through the winter when the house, with only one old woman to see to it, positively dripped with wet? Never mind: the rent was precisely twopence halfpenny; the children loved it; it did her husband good to be three thousand, or if she must be accurate, three hundred miles from his library and his lectures and his disciples; and there was room for visitors. Mats, camp beds, crazy ghosts of chairs and tables whose London life of service was done—they did well enough here; and a photograph or two, and books. Books, she thought, grew of themselves. She never had time to read them. Alas! even the books that had been given her, and inscribed by the hand of the poet himself: “For her whose wishes must be obeyed” … “The happier Helen of our days” … disgraceful to say, she had never read them. And Croom on the Mind and Bates on the Savage Customs of Polynesia (“My dear, stand still,” she said)—neither of those could one send to the Lighthouse. At a certain moment, she supposed, the house would become so shabby that something must be done. If they could be taught to wipe their feet and not bring the beach in with them—that would be something. Crabs, she had to allow, if Andrew really wished to dissect them, or if Jasper believed that one could make soup from seaweed, one could not prevent it; or Rose’s objects—shells, reeds, stones; for they were gifted, her children, but all in quite different ways. And the result of it was, she sighed, taking in the whole room from floor to ceiling, as she held the stocking against James’s leg, that things got shabbier and got shabbier summer after summer. The mat was fading; the wall-paper was flapping. You couldn’t tell any more that those were roses on it. Still, if every door in a house is left perpetually open, and no lockmaker in the whole of Scotland can mend a bolt, things must spoil. What was the use of flinging a green Cashmere shawl over the edge of a picture frame? In two weeks it would be the colour of pea soup. But it was the doors that annoyed her; every door was left open. She listened. The drawing-room door was open; the hall door was open; it sounded as if the bedroom doors were open; and certainly the window on the landing was open, for that she had opened herself. That windows should be open, and doors shut—simple as it was, could none of them remember it? She would go into the maids’ bedrooms at night and find them sealed like ovens, except for Marie’s, the Swiss girl, who would rather go without a bath than without fresh air, but then at home, she had said, “the mountains are so beautiful.” She had said that last night looking out of the window with tears in her eyes. “The mountains are so beautiful.” Her father was dying there, Mrs. Ramsay knew. He was leaving them fatherless. Scolding and demonstrating (how to make a bed, how to open a window, with hands that shut and spread like a Frenchwoman’s) all had folded itself quietly about her, when the girl spoke, as, after a flight through the sunshine the wings of a bird fold themselves quietly and the blue of its plumage changes from bright steel to soft purple. She had stood there silent for there was nothing to be said. He had cancer of the throat. At the recollection—how she had stood there, how the girl had said “At home the mountains are so beautiful”, and there was no hope, no hope whatever, she had a spasm of irritation, and speaking sharply, said to James:

“Stand still. Don’t be tiresome,” so that he knew instantly that her severity was real, and straightened his leg and she measured it.

The stocking was too short by half an inch at least, making allowance for the fact that Sorley’s little boy would be less well grown than James.

“It’s too short,” she said, “ever so much too short.”

Never did anybody look so sad. Bitter and black, half-way down, in the darkness, in the shaft which ran from the sunlight to the depths, perhaps a tear formed; a tear fell; the waters swayed this way and that, received it, and were at rest. Never did anybody look so sad.

But was it nothing but looks? people said. What was there behind it—her beauty, her splendour? Had he blown his brains out, they asked, had he died the week before they were married—some other, earlier lover, of whom rumours reached one? Or was there nothing? nothing but an incomparable beauty which she lived behind, and could do nothing to disturb? For easily though she might have said at some moment of intimacy when stories of great passion, of love foiled, of ambition thwarted came her way how she too had known or felt or been through it herself, she never spoke. She was silent always. She knew then—she knew without having learnt. Her simplicity fathomed what clever people falsified. Her singleness of mind made her drop plumb like a stone, alight exact as a bird, gave her, naturally, this swoop and fall of the spirit upon truth which delighted, eased, sustained—falsely perhaps.

(“Nature has but little clay”, said Mr. Bankes once, hearing her voice on the telephone, and much moved by it though she was only telling him a fact about a train, “like that of which she moulded you.” He saw her at the end of the line, Greek, blue-eyed, straight-nosed. How incongruous it seemed to be telephoning to a woman like that. The Graces assembling seemed to have joined hands in meadows of asphodel to compose that face. Yes, he would catch the 10.30 at Euston.

“But she’s no more aware of her beauty than a child,” said Mr. Bankes, replacing the receiver and crossing the room to see what progress the workmen were making with an hotel which they were building at the back of his house. And he thought of Mrs. Ramsay as he looked at that stir among the unfinished walls. For always, he thought, there was something incongruous to be worked into the harmony of her face. She clapped a deer-stalker’s hat on her head; she ran across the lawn in goloshes to snatch a child from mischief. So that if it was her beauty merely that one thought of, one must remember the quivering thing, the living thing (they were carrying bricks up a little plank as he watched them), and work it into the picture; or if one thought of her simply as a woman, one must endow her with some freak of idiosyncrasy; or suppose some latent desire to doff her royalty of form as if her beauty bored her and all that men say of beauty, and she wanted only to be like other people, insignificant. He did not know. He did not know. He must go to his work.)

Knitting her reddish-brown hairy stocking, with her head outlined absurdly by the gilt frame, the green shawl which she had tossed over the edge of the frame, and the authenticated masterpiece by Michael Angelo, Mrs. Ramsay smoothed out what had been harsh in her manner a moment before, raised his head, and kissed her little boy on the forehead. “Let’s find another picture to cut out,” she said.

[]

6

But what had happened?

Someone had blundered.

Starting from her musing she gave meaning to words which she had held meaningless in her mind for a long stretch of time. “Someone had blundered”—Fixing her short-sighted eyes upon her husband, who was now bearing down upon her, she gazed steadily until his closeness revealed to her (the jingle mated itself in her head) that something had happened, someone had blundered. But she could not for the life of her think what.

He shivered; he quivered. All his vanity, all his satisfaction in his own splendour, riding fell as a thunderbolt, fierce as a hawk at the head of his men through the valley of death, had been shattered, destroyed. Stormed at by shot and shell, boldly we rode and well, flashed through the valley of death, volleyed and thundered—straight into Lily Briscoe and William Bankes. He quivered; he shivered.

Not for the world would she have spoken to him, realising, from the familiar signs, his eyes averted, and some curious gathering together of his person, as if he wrapped himself about and needed privacy into which to regain his equilibrium, that he was outraged and anguished. She stroked James’s head; she transferred to him what she felt for her husband, and, as she watched him chalk yellow the white dress shirt of a gentleman in the Army and Navy Stores catalogue, thought what a delight it would be to her should he turn out a great artist; and why should he not? He had a splendid forehead. Then, looking up, as her husband passed her once more, she was relieved to find that the ruin was veiled; domesticity triumphed; custom crooned its soothing rhythm, so that when stopping deliberately, as his turn came round again, at the window he bent quizzically and whimsically to tickle James’s bare calf with a sprig of something, she twitted him for having dispatched “that poor young man”, Charles Tansley. Tansley had had to go in and write his dissertation, he said.

“James will have to write his dissertation one of these days,” he added ironically, flicking his sprig.

Hating his father, James brushed away the tickling spray with which in a manner peculiar to him, compound of severity and humour, he teased his youngest son’s bare leg.

She was trying to get these tiresome stockings finished to send to Sorley’s little boy to-morrow, said Mrs. Ramsay.

There wasn’t the slightest possible chance that they could go to the Lighthouse to-morrow, Mr. Ramsay snapped out irascibly.

How did he know? she asked. The wind often changed.

The extraordinary irrationality of her remark, the folly of women’s minds enraged him. He had ridden through the valley of death, been shattered and shivered; and now she flew in the face of facts, made his children hope what was utterly out of the question, in effect, told lies. He stamped his foot on the stone step. “Damn you,” he said. But what had she said? Simply that it might be fine to-morrow. So it might.

Not with the barometer falling and the wind due west.

To pursue truth with such astonishing lack of consideration for other people’s feelings, to rend the thin veils of civilisation so wantonly, so brutally, was to her so horrible an outrage of human decency that, without replying, dazed and blinded, she bent her head as if to let the pelt of jagged hail, the drench of dirty water, bespatter her unrebuked. There was nothing to be said.

He stood by her in silence. Very humbly, at length, he said that he would step over and ask the Coastguards if she liked.

There was nobody whom she reverenced as she reverenced him.

She was quite ready to take his word for it, she said. Only then they need not cut sandwiches—that was all. They came to her, naturally, since she was a woman, all day long with this and that; one wanting this, another that; the children were growing up; she often felt she was nothing but a sponge sopped full of human emotions. Then he said, Damn you. He said, It must rain. He said, It won’t rain; and instantly a Heaven of security opened before her. There was nobody she reverenced more. She was not good enough to tie his shoe strings, she felt.

Already ashamed of that petulance, of that gesticulation of the hands when charging at the head of his troops, Mr. Ramsay rather sheepishly prodded his son’s bare legs once more, and then, as if he had her leave for it, with a movement which oddly reminded his wife of the great sea lion at the Zoo tumbling backwards after swallowing his fish and walloping off so that the water in the tank washes from side to side, he dived into the evening air which, already thinner, was taking the substance from leaves and hedges but, as if in return, restoring to roses and pinks a lustre which they had not had by day.

“Someone had blundered,” he said again, striding off, up and down the terrace.

But how extraordinarily his note had changed! It was like the cuckoo; “in June he gets out of tune”; as if he were trying over, tentatively seeking, some phrase for a new mood, and having only this at hand, used it, cracked though it was. But it sounded ridiculous—“Someone had blundered”—said like that, almost as a question, without any conviction, melodiously. Mrs. Ramsay could not help smiling, and soon, sure enough, walking up and down, he hummed it, dropped it, fell silent.

He was safe, he was restored to his privacy. He stopped to light his pipe, looked once at his wife and son in the window, and as one raises one’s eyes from a page in an express train and sees a farm, a tree, a cluster of cottages as an illustration, a confirmation of something on the printed page to which one returns, fortified, and satisfied, so without his distinguishing either his son or his wife, the sight of them fortified him and satisfied him and consecrated his effort to arrive at a perfectly clear understanding of the problem which now engaged the energies of his splendid mind.

It was a splendid mind. For if thought is like the keyboard of a piano, divided into so many notes, or like the alphabet is ranged in twenty-six letters all in order, then his splendid mind had no sort of difficulty in running over those letters one by one, firmly and accurately, until it had reached, say, the letter Q. He reached Q. Very few people in the whole of England ever reach Q. Here, stopping for one moment by the stone urn which held the geraniums, he saw, but now far far away, like children picking up shells, divinely innocent and occupied with little trifles at their feet and somehow entirely defenceless against a doom which he perceived, his wife and son, together, in the window. They needed his protection; he gave it them. But after Q? What comes next? After Q there are a number of letters the last of which is scarcely visible to mortal eyes, but glimmers red in the distance. Z is only reached once by one man in a generation. Still, if he could reach R it would be something. Here at least was Q. He dug his heels in at Q. Q he was sure of. Q he could demonstrate. If Q then is Q—R— Here he knocked his pipe out, with two or three resonant taps on the ram’s horn which made the handle of the urn, and proceeded. “Then R …” He braced himself. He clenched himself.

Qualities that would have saved a ship’s company exposed on a broiling sea with six biscuits and a flask of water—endurance and justice, foresight, devotion, skill, came to his help. R is then—what is R?

A shutter, like the leathern eyelid of a lizard, flickered over the intensity of his gaze and obscured the letter R. In that flash of darkness he heard people saying—he was a failure—that R was beyond him. He would never reach R. On to R, once more. R—

Qualities that in a desolate expedition across the icy solitudes of the Polar region would have made him the leader, the guide, the counsellor, whose temper, neither sanguine nor despondent, surveys with equanimity what is to be and faces it, came to his help again. R—

The lizard’s eye flickered once more. The veins on his forehead bulged. The geranium in the urn became startlingly visible and, displayed among its leaves, he could see, without wishing it, that old, that obvious distinction between the two classes of men; on the one hand the steady goers of superhuman strength who, plodding and persevering, repeat the whole alphabet in order, twenty-six letters in all, from start to finish; on the other the gifted, the inspired who, miraculously, lump all the letters together in one flash—the way of genius. He had not genius; he laid no claim to that: but he had, or might have had, the power to repeat every letter of the alphabet from A to Z accurately in order. Meanwhile, he stuck at Q. On, then, on to R.

Feelings that would not have disgraced a leader who, now that the snow has begun to fall and the mountain-top is covered in mist, knows that he must lay himself down and die before morning comes, stole upon him, paling the colour of his eyes, giving him, even in the two minutes of his turn on the terrace, the bleached look of withered old age. Yet he would not die lying down; he would find some crag of rock, and there, his eyes fixed on the storm, trying to the end to pierce the darkness, he would die standing. He would never reach R.

He stood stock still, by the urn, with the geranium flowing over it. How many men in a thousand million, he asked himself, reach Z after all? Surely the leader of a forlorn hope may ask himself that, and answer, without treachery to the expedition behind him, “One perhaps”. One in a generation. Is he to be blamed then if he is not that one? provided he has toiled honestly, given to the best of his power, till he has no more left to give? And his fame lasts how long? It is permissible even for a dying hero to think before he dies how men will speak of him hereafter. His fame lasts perhaps two thousand years. And what are two thousand years? (asked Mr. Ramsay ironically, staring at the hedge). What, indeed, if you look from a mountain-top down the long wastes of the ages? The very stone one kicks with one’s boot will outlast Shakespeare. His own little light would shine, not very brightly, for a year or two, and would then be merged in some bigger light, and that in a bigger still. (He looked into the darkness, into the intricacy of the twigs.) Who then could blame the leader of that forlorn party which after all has climbed high enough to see the waste of the years and the perishing of stars, if before death stiffens his limbs beyond the power of movement he does a little consciously raise his numbed fingers to his brow, and square his shoulders, so that when the search party comes they will find him dead at his post, the fine figure of a soldier? Mr. Ramsay squared his shoulders and stood very upright by the urn.

Who shall blame him, if, so standing for a moment, he dwells upon fame, upon search parties, upon cairns raised by grateful followers over his bones? Finally, who shall blame the leader of the doomed expedition, if, having adventured to the uttermost, and used his strength wholly to the last ounce and fallen asleep not much caring if he wakes or not, he now perceives by some pricking in his toes that he lives, and does not on the whole object to live, but requires sympathy, and whisky, and someone to tell the story of his suffering to at once? Who shall blame him? Who will not secretly rejoice when the hero puts his armour off, and halts by the window and gazes at his wife and son, who very distant at first, gradually come closer and closer, till lips and book and head are clearly before him, though still lovely and unfamiliar from the intensity of his isolation and the waste of ages and the perishing of the stars, and finally putting his pipe in his pocket and bending his magnificent head before her—who will blame him if he does homage to the beauty of the world?

[]

7

But his son hated him. He hated him for coming up to them, for stopping and looking down on them; he hated him for interrupting them; he hated him for the exaltation and sublimity of his gestures; for the magnificence of his head; for his exactingness and egotism (for there he stood, commanding them to attend to him); but most of all he hated the twang and twitter of his father’s emotion which, vibrating round them, disturbed the perfect simplicity and good sense of his relations with his mother. By looking fixedly at the page, he hoped to make him move on; by pointing his finger at a word, he hoped to recall his mother’s attention, which, he knew angrily, wavered instantly his father stopped. But no. Nothing would make Mr. Ramsay move on. There he stood, demanding sympathy.

Mrs. Ramsay, who had been sitting loosely, folding her son in her arm, braced herself, and, half turning, seemed to raise herself with an effort, and at once to pour erect into the air a rain of energy, a column of spray, looking at the same time animated and alive as if all her energies were being fused into force, burning and illuminating (quietly though she sat, taking up her stocking again), and into this delicious fecundity, this fountain and spray of life, the fatal sterility of the male plunged itself, like a beak of brass, barren and bare. He wanted sympathy. He was a failure, he said. Mrs. Ramsay flashed her needles. Mr. Ramsay repeated, never taking his eyes from her face, that he was a failure. She blew the words back at him. “Charles Tansley …” she said. But he must have more than that. It was sympathy he wanted, to be assured of his genius, first of all, and then to be taken within the circle of life, warmed and soothed, to have his senses restored to him, his barrenness made fertile, and all the rooms of the house made full of life—the drawing-room; behind the drawing-room the kitchen; above the kitchen the bedrooms; and beyond them the nurseries; they must be furnished, they must be filled with life.

Charles Tansley thought him the greatest metaphysician of the time, she said. But he must have more than that. He must have sympathy. He must be assured that he too lived in the heart of life; was needed; not here only, but all over the world. Flashing her needles, confident, upright, she created drawing-room and kitchen, set them all aglow; bade him take his ease there, go in and out, enjoy himself. She laughed, she knitted. Standing between her knees, very stiff, James felt all her strength flaring up to be drunk and quenched by the beak of brass, the arid scimitar of the male, which smote mercilessly, again and again, demanding sympathy.

He was a failure, he repeated. Well, look then, feel then. Flashing her needles, glancing round about her, out of the window, into the room, at James himself, she assured him, beyond a shadow of a doubt, by her laugh, her poise, her competence (as a nurse carrying a light across a dark room assures a fractious child), that it was real; the house was full; the garden blowing. If he put implicit faith in her, nothing should hurt him; however deep he buried himself or climbed high, not for a second should he find himself without her. So boasting of her capacity to surround and protect, there was scarcely a shell of herself left for her to know herself by; all was so lavished and spent; and James, as he stood stiff between her knees, felt her rise in a rosy-flowered fruit tree laid with leaves and dancing boughs into which the beak of brass, the arid scimitar of his father, the egotistical man, plunged and smote, demanding sympathy.

Filled with her words, like a child who drops off satisfied, he said, at last, looking at her with humble gratitude, restored, renewed, that he would take a turn; he would watch the children playing cricket. He went.

Immediately, Mrs. Ramsay seemed to fold herself together, one petal closed in another, and the whole fabric fell in exhaustion upon itself, so that she had only strength enough to move her finger, in exquisite abandonment to exhaustion, across the page of Grimm’s fairy story, while there throbbed through her, like the pulse in a spring which has expanded to its full width and now gently ceases to beat, the rapture of successful creation.

Every throb of this pulse seemed, as he walked away, to enclose her and her husband, and to give to each that solace which two different notes, one high, one low, struck together, seem to give each other as they combine. Yet, as the resonance died, and she turned to the Fairy Tale again, Mrs. Ramsay felt not only exhausted in body (afterwards, not at the time, she always felt this) but also there tinged her physical fatigue some faintly disagreeable sensation with another origin. Not that, as she read aloud the story of the Fisherman’s Wife, she knew precisely what it came from; nor did she let herself put into words her dissatisfaction when she realised, at the turn of the page when she stopped and heard dully, ominously, a wave fall, how it came from this: she did not like, even for a second, to feel finer than her husband; and further, could not bear not being entirely sure, when she spoke to him, of the truth of what she said. Universities and people wanting him, lectures and books and their being of the highest importance—all that she did not doubt for a moment; but it was their relation, and his coming to her like that, openly, so that anyone could see, that discomposed her; for then people said he depended on her, when they must know that of the two he was infinitely the more important, and what she gave the world, in comparison with what he gave, negligible. But then again, it was the other thing too—not being able to tell him the truth, being afraid, for instance, about the greenhouse roof and the expense it would be, fifty pounds perhaps, to mend it; and then about his books, to be afraid that he might guess, what she a little suspected, that his last book was not quite his best book (she gathered that from William Bankes); and then to hide small daily things, and the children seeing it, and the burden it laid on them—all this diminished the entire joy, the pure joy, of the two notes sounding together, and let the sound die on her ear now with a dismal flatness.

A shadow was on the page; she looked up. It was Augustus Carmichael shuffling past, precisely now, at the very moment when it was painful to be reminded of the inadequacy of human relationships, that the most perfect was flawed, and could not bear the examination which, loving her husband, with her instinct for truth, she turned upon it; when it was painful to feel herself convicted of unworthiness, and impeded in her proper function by these lies, these exaggerations,—it was at this moment when she was fretted thus ignobly in the wake of her exaltation, that Mr. Carmichael shuffled past, in his yellow slippers, and some demon in her made it necessary for her to call out, as he passed,

“Going indoors Mr. Carmichael?”

[]

8

He said nothing. He took opium. The children said he had stained his beard yellow with it. Perhaps. What was obvious to her was that the poor man was unhappy, came to them every year as an escape; and yet every year, she felt the same thing; he did not trust her. She said, “I am going to the town. Shall I get you stamps, paper, tobacco?” and she felt him wince. He did not trust her. It was his wife’s doing. She remembered that iniquity of his wife’s towards him, which had made her turn to steel and adamant there, in the horrid little room in St. John’s Wood, when with her own eyes she had seen that odious woman turn him out of the house. He was unkempt; he dropped things on his coat; he had the tiresomeness of an old man with nothing in the world to do; and she turned him out of the room. She said, in her odious way, “Now, Mrs. Ramsay and I want to have a little talk together,” and Mrs. Ramsay could see, as if before her eyes, the innumerable miseries of his life. Had he money enough to buy tobacco? Did he have to ask her for it? half a crown? eighteenpence? Oh, she could not bear to think of the little indignities she made him suffer. And always now (why, she could not guess, except that it came probably from that woman somehow) he shrank from her. He never told her anything. But what more could she have done? There was a sunny room given up to him. The children were good to him. Never did she show a sign of not wanting him. She went out of her way indeed to be friendly. Do you want stamps, do you want tobacco? Here’s a book you might like and so on. And after all—after all (here insensibly she drew herself together, physically, the sense of her own beauty becoming, as it did so seldom, present to her)—after all, she had not generally any difficulty in making people like her; for instance, George Manning; Mr. Wallace; famous as they were, they would come to her of an evening, quietly, and talk alone over her fire. She bore about with her, she could not help knowing it, the torch of her beauty; she carried it erect into any room that she entered; and after all, veil it as she might, and shrink from the monotony of bearing that it imposed on her, her beauty was apparent. She had been admired. She had been loved. She had entered rooms where mourners sat. Tears had flown in her presence. Men, and women too, letting go the multiplicity of things, had allowed themselves with her the relief of simplicity. It injured her that he should shrink. It hurt her. And yet not cleanly, not rightly. That was what she minded, coming as it did on top of her discontent with her husband; the sense she had now when Mr. Carmichael shuffled past, just nodding to her question, with a book beneath his arm, in his yellow slippers, that she was suspected; and that all this desire of hers to give, to help, was vanity. For her own self-satisfaction was it that she wished so instinctively to help, to give, that people might say of her, “O Mrs. Ramsay! dear Mrs. Ramsay … Mrs. Ramsay, of course!” and need her and send for her and admire her? Was it not secretly this that she wanted, and therefore when Mr. Carmichael shrank away from her, as he did at this moment, making off to some corner where he did acrostics endlessly, she did not feel merely snubbed back in her instinct, but made aware of the pettiness of some part of her, and of human relations, how flawed they are, how despicable, how self-seeking, at their best. Shabby and worn out, and not presumably (her cheeks were hollow, her hair was white) any longer a sight that filled the eyes with joy, she had better devote her mind to the story of the Fisherman and his Wife and so pacify that bundle of sensitiveness (none of her children was as sensitive as he was) her son James.

“The man’s heart grew heavy,” she read aloud, “and he would not go. He said to himself, ‘It is not right,’ and yet he went. And when he came to the sea the water was quite purple and dark blue, and grey and thick, and no longer so green and yellow, but it was still quiet. And he stood there and said——”

Mrs. Ramsay could have wished that her husband had not chosen that moment to stop. Why had he not gone as he said to watch the children playing cricket? But he did not speak; he looked; he nodded; he approved; he went on. He slipped seeing before him that hedge which had over and over again rounded some pause, signified some conclusion, seeing his wife and child, seeing again the urns with the trailing red geraniums which had so often decorated processes of thought, and bore, written up among their leaves, as if they were scraps of paper on which one scribbles notes in the rush of reading—he slipped, seeing all this, smoothly into speculation suggested by an article in The Times about the number of Americans who visit Shakespeare’s house every year. If Shakespeare had never existed, he asked, would the world have differed much from what it is to-day? Does the progress of civilisation depend upon great men? Is the lot of the average human being better now than in the time of the Pharaohs? Is the lot of the average human being, however, he asked himself, the criterion by which we judge the measure of civilisation? Possibly not. Possibly the greatest good requires the existence of a slave class. The liftman in the Tube is an eternal necessity. The thought was distasteful to him. He tossed his head. To avoid it, he would find some way of snubbing the predominance of the arts. He would argue that the world exists for the average human being; that the arts are merely a decoration imposed on the top of human life; they do not express it. Nor is Shakespeare necessary to it. Not knowing precisely why it was that he wanted to disparage Shakespeare and come to the rescue of the man who stands eternally in the door of the lift, he picked a leaf sharply from the hedge. All this would have to be dished up for the young men at Cardiff next month, he thought; here, on his terrace, he was merely foraging and picnicking (he threw away the leaf that he had picked so peevishly) like a man who reaches from his horse to pick a bunch of roses, or stuffs his pockets with nuts as he ambles at his ease through the lanes and fields of a country known to him from boyhood. It was all familiar; this turning, that stile, that cut across the fields. Hours he would spend thus, with his pipe, of an evening, thinking up and down and in and out of the old familiar lanes and commons, which were all stuck about with the history of that campaign there, the life of this statesman here, with poems and with anecdotes, with figures too, this thinker, that soldier; all very brisk and clear; but at length the lane, the field, the common, the fruitful nut-tree and the flowering hedge led him on to that further turn of the road where he dismounted always, tied his horse to a tree, and proceeded on foot alone. He reached the edge of the lawn and looked out on the bay beneath.

It was his fate, his peculiarity, whether he wished it or not, to come out thus on a spit of land which the sea is slowly eating away, and there to stand, like a desolate sea-bird, alone. It was his power, his gift, suddenly to shed all superfluities, to shrink and diminish so that he looked barer and felt sparer, even physically, yet lost none of his intensity of mind, and so to stand on his little ledge facing the dark of human ignorance, how we know nothing and the sea eats away the ground we stand on—that was his fate, his gift. But having thrown away, when he dismounted, all gestures and fripperies, all trophies of nuts and roses, and shrunk so that not only fame but even his own name was forgotten by him, he kept even in that desolation a vigilance which spared no phantom and luxuriated in no vision, and it was in this guise that he inspired in William Bankes (intermittently) and in Charles Tansley (obsequiously) and in his wife now, when she looked up and saw him standing at the edge of the lawn, profound reverence, and pity, and gratitude too, as a stake driven into the bed of a channel upon which the gulls perch and the waves beat inspires in merry boat-loads a feeling of gratitude for the duty it has taken upon itself of marking the channel out there in the floods alone.

“But the father of eight children has no choice….” Muttering half aloud, so he broke off, turned, sighed, raised his eyes, sought the figure of his wife reading stories to the little boy; filled his pipe. He turned from the sight of human ignorance and human fate and the sea eating the ground we stand on, which, had he been able to contemplate it fixedly might have led to something; and found consolation in trifles so slight compared with the august theme just now before him that he was disposed to slur that comfort over, to deprecate it, as if to be caught happy in a world of misery was for an honest man the most despicable of crimes. It was true; he was for the most part happy; he had his wife; he had his children; he had promised in six weeks’ time to talk “some nonsense” to the young men of Cardiff about Locke, Hume, Berkeley, and the causes of the French Revolution. But this and his pleasure in it, in the phrases he made, in the ardour of youth, in his wife’s beauty, in the tributes that reached him from Swansea, Cardiff, Exeter, Southampton, Kidderminster, Oxford, Cambridge—all had to be deprecated and concealed under the phrase “talking nonsense,” because, in effect, he had not done the thing he might have done. It was a disguise; it was the refuge of a man afraid to own his own feelings, who could not say, This is what I like—this is what I am; and rather pitiable and distasteful to William Bankes and Lily Briscoe, who wondered why such concealments should be necessary; why he needed always praise; why so brave a man in thought should be so timid in life; how strangely he was venerable and laughable at one and the same time.

Teaching and preaching is beyond human power, Lily suspected. (She was putting away her things). If you are exalted you must somehow come a cropper. Mrs. Ramsay gave him what he asked too easily. Then the change must be so upsetting, Lily said. He comes in from his books and finds us all playing games and talking nonsense. Imagine what a change from the things he thinks about, she said.

He was bearing down upon them. Now he stopped dead and stood looking in silence at the sea. Now he had turned away again.

[]

9

Yes, Mr. Bankes said, watching him go. It was a thousand pities. (Lily had said something about his frightening her—he changed from one mood to another so suddenly.) Yes, said Mr. Bankes, it was a thousand pities that Ramsay could not behave a little more like other people. (For he liked Lily Briscoe; he could discuss Ramsay with her quite openly.) It was for that reason, he said, that the young don’t read Carlyle. A crusty old grumbler who lost his temper if the porridge was cold, why should he preach to us? was what Mr. Bankes understood that young people said nowadays. It was a thousand pities if you thought, as he did, that Carlyle was one of the great teachers of mankind. Lily was ashamed to say that she had not read Carlyle since she was at school. But in her opinion one liked Mr. Ramsay all the better for thinking that if his little finger ached the whole world must come to an end. It was not that she minded. For who could be deceived by him? He asked you quite openly to flatter him, to admire him, his little dodges deceived nobody. What she disliked was his narrowness, his blindness, she said, looking after him.

“A bit of a hypocrite?” Mr. Bankes suggested, looking, too, at Mr. Ramsay’s back, for was he not thinking of his friendship, and of Cam refusing to give him a flower, and of all those boys and girls, and his own house, full of comfort, but, since his wife’s death, quiet rather? Of course, he had his work…. All the same, he rather wished Lily to agree that Ramsay was, as he said, “a bit of a hypocrite”.

Lily Briscoe went on putting away her brushes, looking up, looking down. Looking up, there he was—Mr. Ramsay—advancing towards them, swinging, careless, oblivious, remote. A bit of a hypocrite? she repeated. Oh no—the most sincere of men, the truest (here he was), the best; but, looking down, she thought, he is absorbed in himself, he is tyrannical, he is unjust; and kept looking down, purposely, for only so could she keep steady, staying with the Ramsays. Directly one looked up and saw them, what she called “being in love” flooded them. They became part of that unreal but penetrating and exciting universe which is the world seen through the eyes of love. The sky stuck to them; the birds sang through them. And, what was even more exciting, she felt, too, as she saw Mr. Ramsay bearing down and retreating, and Mrs. Ramsay sitting with James in the window and the cloud moving and the tree bending, how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach.

Mr. Bankes expected her to answer. And she was about to say something criticising Mrs. Ramsay, how she was alarming, too, in her way, high-handed, or words to that effect, when Mr. Bankes made it entirely unnecessary for her to speak by his rapture. For such it was considering his age, turned sixty, and his cleanliness and his impersonality, and the white scientific coat which seemed to clothe him. For him to gaze as Lily saw him gazing at Mrs. Ramsay was a rapture, equivalent, Lily felt, to the loves of dozens of young men (and perhaps Mrs. Ramsay had never excited the loves of dozens of young men). It was love, she thought, pretending to move her canvas, distilled and filtered; love that never attempted to clutch its object; but, like the love which mathematicians bear their symbols, or poets their phrases, was meant to be spread over the world and become part of the human gain. So it was indeed. The world by all means should have shared it, could Mr. Bankes have said why that woman pleased him so; why the sight of her reading a fairy tale to her boy had upon him precisely the same effect as the solution of a scientific problem, so that he rested in contemplation of it, and felt, as he felt when he had proved something absolute about the digestive system of plants, that barbarity was tamed, the reign of chaos subdued.

Such a rapture—for by what other name could one call it?—made Lily Briscoe forget entirely what she had been about to say. It was nothing of importance; something about Mrs. Ramsay. It paled beside this “rapture”, this silent stare, for which she felt intense gratitude; for nothing so solaced her, eased her of the perplexity of life, and miraculously raised its burdens, as this sublime power, this heavenly gift, and one would no more disturb it, while it lasted, than break up the shaft of sunlight lying level across the floor.

That people should love like this, that Mr. Bankes should feel this for Mrs. Ramsay (she glanced at him musing) was helpful, was exalting. She wiped one brush after another upon a piece of old rag, menially, on purpose. She took shelter from the reverence which covered all women; she felt herself praised. Let him gaze; she would steal a look at her picture.

She could have wept. It was bad, it was bad, it was infinitely bad! She could have done it differently of course; the colour could have been thinned and faded; the shapes etherealised; that was how Paunceforte would have seen it. But then she did not see it like that. She saw the colour burning on a framework of steel; the light of a butterfly’s wing lying upon the arches of a cathedral. Of all that only a few random marks scrawled upon the canvas remained. And it would never be seen; never be hung even, and there was Mr. Tansley whispering in her ear, “Women can’t paint, women can’t write …”

She now remembered what she had been going to say about Mrs. Ramsay. She did not know how she would have put it; but it would have been something critical. She had been annoyed the other night by some highhandedness. Looking along the level of Mr. Bankes’ glance at her, she thought that no woman could worship another woman in the way he worshipped; they could only seek shelter under the shade which Mr. Bankes extended over them both. Looking along his beam she added to it her different ray, thinking that she was unquestionably the loveliest of people (bowed over her book); the best perhaps; but also, different too from the perfect shape which one saw there. But why different, and how different? she asked herself, scraping her palette of all those mounds of blue and green which seemed to her like clods with no life in them now, yet she vowed, she would inspire them, force them to move, flow, do her bidding to-morrow. How did she differ? What was the spirit in her, the essential thing, by which, had you found a glove in the corner of a sofa, you would have known it, from its twisted finger, hers indisputably? She was like a bird for speed, an arrow for directness. She was wilful; she was commanding (of course, Lily reminded herself, I am thinking of her relations with women, and I am much younger, an insignificant person, living off the Brompton Road). She opened bedroom windows. She shut doors. (So she tried to start the tune of Mrs. Ramsay in her head.) Arriving late at night, with a light tap on one’s bedroom door, wrapped in an old fur coat (for the setting of her beauty was always that—hasty, but apt), she would enact again whatever it might be—Charles Tansley losing his umbrella; Mr. Carmichael snuffling and sniffing; Mr. Bankes saying, “the vegetable salts are lost”. All this she would adroitly shape; even maliciously twist; and, moving over to the window, in pretence that she must go,—it was dawn, she could see the sun rising,—half turn back, more intimately, but still always laughing, insist that she must, Minta must, they all must marry, since in the whole world, whatever laurels might be tossed to her (but Mrs. Ramsay cared not a fig for her painting), or triumphs won by her (probably Mrs. Ramsay had had her share of those), and here she saddened, darkened, and came back to her chair, there could be no disputing this: an unmarried woman (she lightly took her hand for a moment), an unmarried woman has missed the best of life. The house seemed full of children sleeping and Mrs. Ramsay listening; of shaded lights and regular breathing.

Oh but, Lily would say, there was her father; her home; even, had she dared to say it, her painting. But all this seemed so little, so virginal, against the other. Yet, as the night wore on, and white lights parted the curtains, and even now and then some bird chirped in the garden, gathering a desperate courage she would urge her own exemption from the universal law; plead for it; she liked to be alone; she liked to be herself; she was not made for that; and so have to meet a serious stare from eyes of unparalleled depth, and confront Mrs. Ramsay’s simple certainty (and she was childlike now) that her dear Lily, her little Brisk, was a fool. Then, she remembered, she had laid her head on Mrs. Ramsay’s lap and laughed and laughed and laughed, laughed almost hysterically at the thought of Mrs. Ramsay presiding with immutable calm over destinies which she completely failed to understand. There she sat, simple, serious. She had recovered her sense of her now—this was the glove’s twisted finger. But into what sanctuary had one penetrated? Lily Briscoe had looked up at last, and there was Mrs. Ramsay, unwitting entirely what had caused her laughter, still presiding, but now with every trace of wilfulness abolished, and in its stead, something clear as the space which the clouds at last uncover—the little space of sky which sleeps beside the moon.

Was it wisdom? Was it knowledge? Was it, once more, the deceptiveness of beauty, so that all one’s perceptions, half-way to truth, were tangled in a golden mesh? or did she lock up within her some secret which certainly Lily Briscoe believed people must have for the world to go on at all? Every one could not be as helter skelter, hand to mouth as she was. But if they knew, could they tell one what they knew? Sitting on the floor with her arms round Mrs. Ramsay’s knees, close as she could get, smiling to think that Mrs. Ramsay would never know the reason of that pressure, she imagined how in the chambers of the mind and heart of the woman who was, physically, touching her, were stood, like the treasures in the tombs of kings, tablets bearing sacred inscriptions, which if one could spell them out would teach one everything, but they would never be offered openly, never made public. What art was there, known to love or cunning, by which one pressed through into those secret chambers? What device for becoming, like waters poured into one jar, inextricably the same, one with the object one adored? Could the body achieve it, or the mind, subtly mingling in the intricate passages of the brain? or the heart? Could loving, as people called it, make her and Mrs. Ramsay one? for it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge, she had thought, leaning her head on Mrs. Ramsay’s knee.

Nothing happened. Nothing! Nothing! as she leant her head against Mrs. Ramsay’s knee. And yet, she knew knowledge and wisdom were stored in Mrs. Ramsay’s heart. How then, she had asked herself, did one know one thing or another thing about people, sealed as they were? Only like a bee, drawn by some sweetness or sharpness in the air intangible to touch or taste, one haunted the dome-shaped hive, ranged the wastes of the air over the countries of the world alone, and then haunted the hives with their murmurs and their stirrings; the hives which were people. Mrs. Ramsay rose. Lily rose. Mrs. Ramsay went. For days there hung about her, as after a dream some subtle change is felt in the person one has dreamt of, more vividly than anything she said, the sound of murmuring and, as she sat in the wicker arm-chair in the drawing-room window she wore, to Lily’s eyes, an august shape; the shape of a dome.

This ray passed level with Mr. Bankes’s ray straight to Mrs. Ramsay sitting reading there with James at her knee. But now while she still looked, Mr. Bankes had done. He had put on his spectacles. He had stepped back. He had raised his hand. He had slightly narrowed his clear blue eyes, when Lily, rousing herself, saw what he was at, and winced like a dog who sees a hand raised to strike it. She would have snatched her picture off the easel, but she said to herself, One must. She braced herself to stand the awful trial of someone looking at her picture. One must, she said, one must. And if it must be seen, Mr. Bankes was less alarming than another. But that any other eyes should see the residue of her thirty-three years, the deposit of each day’s living, mixed with something more secret than she had ever spoken or shown in the course of all those days was an agony. At the same time it was immensely exciting.

Nothing could be cooler and quieter. Taking out a penknife, Mr. Bankes tapped the canvas with the bone handle. What did she wish to indicate by the triangular purple shape, “just there?” he asked.

It was Mrs. Ramsay reading to James, she said. She knew his objection—that no one could tell it for a human shape. But she had made no attempt at likeness, she said. For what reason had she introduced them then? he asked. Why indeed?—except that if there, in that corner, it was bright, here, in this, she felt the need of darkness. Simple, obvious, commonplace, as it was, Mr. Bankes was interested. Mother and child then—objects of universal veneration, and in this case the mother was famous for her beauty—might be reduced, he pondered, to a purple shadow without irreverence.

But the picture was not of them, she said. Or, not in his sense. There were other senses, too, in which one might reverence them. By a shadow here and a light there, for instance. Her tribute took that form, if, as she vaguely supposed, a picture must be a tribute. A mother and child might be reduced to a shadow without irreverence. A light here required a shadow there. He considered. He was interested. He took it scientifically in complete good faith. The truth was that all his prejudices were on the other side, he explained. The largest picture in his drawing-room, which painters had praised, and valued at a higher price than he had given for it, was of the cherry trees in blossom on the banks of the Kennet. He had spent his honeymoon on the banks of the Kennet, he said. Lily must come and see that picture, he said. But now—he turned, with his glasses raised to the scientific examination of her canvas. The question being one of the relations of masses, of lights and shadows, which, to be honest, he had never considered before, he would like to have it explained—what then did she wish to make of it? And he indicated the scene before them. She looked. She could not show him what she wished to make of it, could not see it even herself, without a brush in her hand. She took up once more her old painting position with the dim eyes and the absent-minded manner, subduing all her impressions as a woman to something much more general; becoming once more under the power of that vision which she had seen clearly once and must now grope for among hedges and houses and mothers and children—her picture. It was a question, she remembered, how to connect this mass on the right hand with that on the left. She might do it by bringing the line of the branch across so; or break the vacancy in the foreground by an object (James perhaps) so. But the danger was that by doing that the unity of the whole might be broken. She stopped; she did not want to bore him; she took the canvas lightly off the easel.

But it had been seen; it had been taken from her. This man had shared with her something profoundly intimate. And, thanking Mr. Ramsay for it and Mrs. Ramsay for it and the hour and the place, crediting the world with a power which she had not suspected, that one could walk away down that long gallery not alone any more but arm in arm with somebody—the strangest feeling in the world, and the most exhilarating—she nicked the catch of her paint-box to, more firmly than was necessary, and the nick seemed to surround in a circle for ever the paint-box, the lawn, Mr. Bankes, and that wild villain, Cam, dashing past.

[]

10

For Cam grazed the easel by an inch; she would not stop for Mr. Bankes and Lily Briscoe; though Mr. Bankes, who would have liked a daughter of his own, held out his hand; she would not stop for her father, whom she grazed also by an inch; nor for her mother, who called “Cam! I want you a moment!” as she dashed past. She was off like a bird, bullet, or arrow, impelled by what desire, shot by whom, at what directed, who could say? What, what? Mrs. Ramsay pondered, watching her. It might be a vision—of a shell, of a wheelbarrow, of a fairy kingdom on the far side of the hedge; or it might be the glory of speed; no one knew. But when Mrs. Ramsay called “Cam!” a second time, the projectile dropped in mid career, and Cam came lagging back, pulling a leaf by the way, to her mother.

What was she dreaming about, Mrs. Ramsay wondered, seeing her engrossed, as she stood there, with some thought of her own, so that she had to repeat the message twice—ask Mildred if Andrew, Miss Doyle, and Mr. Rayley have come back?—The words seemed to be dropped into a well, where, if the waters were clear, they were also so extraordinarily distorting that, even as they descended, one saw them twisting about to make Heaven knows what pattern on the floor of the child’s mind. What message would Cam give the cook? Mrs. Ramsay wondered. And indeed it was only by waiting patiently, and hearing that there was an old woman in the kitchen with very red cheeks, drinking soup out of a basin, that Mrs. Ramsay at last prompted that parrot-like instinct which had picked up Mildred’s words quite accurately and could now produce them, if one waited, in a colourless singsong. Shifting from foot to foot, Cam repeated the words, “No, they haven’t, and I’ve told Ellen to clear away tea.”

Minta Doyle and Paul Rayley had not come back then. That could only mean, Mrs. Ramsay thought, one thing. She must accept him, or she must refuse him. This going off after luncheon for a walk, even though Andrew was with them—what could it mean? except that she had decided, rightly, Mrs. Ramsay thought (and she was very, very fond of Minta), to accept that good fellow, who might not be brilliant, but then, thought Mrs. Ramsay, realising that James was tugging at her to make her go on reading aloud the Fisherman and his Wife, she did in her own heart infinitely prefer boobies to clever men who wrote dissertations; Charles Tansley for instance. Anyhow it must have happened, one way or the other, by now.

But she read, “Next morning the wife awoke first, and it was just daybreak, and from her bed she saw the beautiful country lying before her. Her husband was still stretching himself….”

But how could Minta say now that she would not have him? Not if she agreed to spend whole afternoons trapesing about the country alone—for Andrew would be off after his crabs—but possibly Nancy was with them. She tried to recall the sight of them standing at the hall door after lunch. There they stood, looking at the sky, wondering about the weather, and she had said, thinking partly to cover their shyness, partly to encourage them to be off (for her sympathies were with Paul),

“There isn’t a cloud anywhere within miles,” at which she could feel little Charles Tansley, who had followed them out, snigger. But she did it on purpose. Whether Nancy was there or not, she could not be certain, looking from one to the other in her mind’s eye.

She read on: “Ah, wife,” said the man, “why should we be king? I do not want to be King.” “Well,” said the wife, “if you won’t be King, I will; go to the Flounder, for I will be King.”

“Come in or go out, Cam,” she said, knowing that Cam was attracted only by the word “Flounder” and that in a moment she would fidget and fight with James as usual. Cam shot off. Mrs. Ramsay went on reading, relieved, for she and James shared the same tastes and were comfortable together.

“And when he came to the sea, it was quite dark grey, and the water heaved up from below, and smelt putrid. Then he went and stood by it and said,

‘Flounder, flounder, in the sea,

Come, I pray thee, here to me;

For my wife, good Ilsabil,

Wills not as I’d have her will.’

‘Well, what does she want then?’ said the Flounder.” And where were they now? Mrs. Ramsay wondered, reading and thinking, quite easily, both at the same time; for the story of the Fisherman and his Wife was like the bass gently accompanying a tune, which now and then ran up unexpectedly into the melody. And when should she be told? If nothing happened, she would have to speak seriously to Minta. For she could not go trapesing about all over the country, even if Nancy were with them (she tried again, unsuccessfully, to visualise their backs going down the path, and to count them). She was responsible to Minta’s parents—the Owl and the Poker. Her nicknames for them shot into her mind as she read. The Owl and the Poker—yes, they would be annoyed if they heard—and they were certain to hear—that Minta, staying with the Ramsays, had been seen etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. “He wore a wig in the House of Commons and she ably assisted him at the head of the stairs,” she repeated, fishing them up out of her mind by a phrase which, coming back from some party, she had made to amuse her husband. Dear, dear, Mrs. Ramsay said to herself, how did they produce this incongruous daughter? this tomboy Minta, with a hole in her stocking? How did she exist in that portentous atmosphere where the maid was always removing in a dust-pan the sand that the parrot had scattered, and conversation was almost entirely reduced to the exploits—interesting perhaps, but limited after all—of that bird? Naturally, one had asked her to lunch, tea, dinner, finally to stay with them up at Finlay, which had resulted in some friction with the Owl, her mother, and more calling, and more conversation, and more sand, and really at the end of it, she had told enough lies about parrots to last her a lifetime (so she had said to her husband that night, coming back from the party). However, Minta came…. Yes, she came, Mrs. Ramsay thought, suspecting some thorn in the tangle of this thought; and disengaging it found it to be this: a woman had once accused her of “robbing her of her daughter’s affections”; something Mrs. Doyle had said made her remember that charge again. Wishing to dominate, wishing to interfere, making people do what she wished—that was the charge against her, and she thought it most unjust. How could she help being “like that” to look at? No one could accuse her of taking pains to impress. She was often ashamed of her own shabbiness. Nor was she domineering, nor was she tyrannical. It was more true about hospitals and drains and the dairy. About things like that she did feel passionately, and would, if she had had the chance, have liked to take people by the scruff of their necks and make them see. No hospital on the whole island. It was a disgrace. Milk delivered at your door in London positively brown with dirt. It should be made illegal. A model dairy and a hospital up here—those two things she would have liked to do, herself. But how? With all these children? When they were older, then perhaps she would have time; when they were all at school.

Oh, but she never wanted James to grow a day older or Cam either. These two she would have liked to keep for ever just as they were, demons of wickedness, angels of delight, never to see them grow up into long-legged monsters. Nothing made up for the loss. When she read just now to James, “and there were numbers of soldiers with kettle-drums and trumpets”, and his eyes darkened, she thought, why should they grow up, and lose all that? He was the most gifted, the most sensitive of her children. But all, she thought, were full of promise. Prue, a perfect angel with the others, and sometimes now, at night especially, she took one’s breath away with her beauty. Andrew—even her husband admitted that his gift for mathematics was extraordinary. And Nancy and Roger, they were both wild creatures now, scampering about over the country all day long. As for Rose, her mouth was too big, but she had a wonderful gift with her hands. If they had charades, Rose made the dresses; made everything; liked best arranging tables, flowers, anything. She did not like it that Jasper should shoot birds; but it was only a stage; they all went through stages. Why, she asked, pressing her chin on James’s head, should they grow up so fast? Why should they go to school? She would have liked always to have had a baby. She was happiest carrying one in her arms. Then people might say she was tyrannical, domineering, masterful, if they chose; she did not mind. And, touching his hair with her lips, she thought, he will never be so happy again, but stopped herself, remembering how it angered her husband that she should say that. Still, it was true. They were happier now than they would ever be again. A tenpenny tea set made Cam happy for days. She heard them stamping and crowing on the floor above her head the moment they woke. They came bustling along the passage. Then the door sprang open and in they came, fresh as roses, staring, wide awake, as if this coming into the dining-room after breakfast, which they did every day of their lives was a positive event to them; and so on, with one thing after another, all day long, until she went up to say good-night to them, and found them netted in their cots like birds among cherries and raspberries still making up stories about some little bit of rubbish—something they had heard, something they had picked up in the garden. They had all their little treasures… And so she went down and said to her husband, Why must they grow up and lose it all? Never will they be so happy again. And he was angry. Why take such a gloomy view of life? he said. It is not sensible. For it was odd; and she believed it to be true; that with all his gloom and desperation he was happier, more hopeful on the whole, than she was. Less exposed to human worries—perhaps that was it. He had always his work to fall back on. Not that she herself was “pessimistic”, as he accused her of being. Only she thought life—and a little strip of time presented itself to her eyes, her fifty years. There it was before her—life. Life: she thought but she did not finish her thought. She took a look at life, for she had a clear sense of it there, something real, something private, which she shared neither with her children nor with her husband. A sort of transaction went on between them, in which she was on one side, and life was on another, and she was always trying to get the better of it, as it was of her; and sometimes they parleyed (when she sat alone); there were, she remembered, great reconciliation scenes; but for the most part, oddly enough, she must admit that she felt this thing that she called life terrible, hostile, and quick to pounce on you if you gave it a chance. There were the eternal problems: suffering; death; the poor. There was always a woman dying of cancer even here. And yet she had said to all these children, You shall go through with it. To eight people she had said relentlessly that (and the bill for the greenhouse would be fifty pounds). For that reason, knowing what was before them—love and ambition and being wretched alone in dreary places—she had often the feeling, Why must they grow up and lose it all? And then she said to herself, brandishing her sword at life, nonsense. They will be perfectly happy. And here she was, she reflected, feeling life rather sinister again, making Minta marry Paul Rayley; because whatever she might feel about her own transaction and she had had experiences which need not happen to everyone (she did not name them to herself); she was driven on, too quickly she knew, almost as if it were an escape for her too, to say that people must marry; people must have children.

Was she wrong in this, she asked herself, reviewing her conduct for the past week or two, and wondering if she had indeed put any pressure upon Minta, who was only twenty-four, to make up her mind. She was uneasy. Had she not laughed about it? Was she not forgetting again how strongly she influenced people? Marriage needed—oh all sorts of qualities (the bill for the greenhouse would be fifty pounds); one—she need not name it—that was essential; the thing she had with her husband. Had they that?

“Then he put on his trousers and ran away like a madman,” she read. “But outside a great storm was raging and blowing so hard that he could scarcely keep his feet; houses and trees toppled over, the mountains trembled, rocks rolled into the sea, the sky was pitch black, and it thundered and lightened, and the sea came in with black waves as high as church towers and mountains, and all with white foam at the top.”

She turned the page; there were only a few lines more, so that she would finish the story, though it was past bed-time. It was getting late. The light in the garden told her that; and the whitening of the flowers and something grey in the leaves conspired together to rouse in her a feeling of anxiety. What it was about she could not think at first. Then she remembered; Paul and Minta and Andrew had not come back. She summoned before her again the little group on the terrace in front of the hall door, standing looking up into the sky. Andrew had his net and basket. That meant he was going to catch crabs and things. That meant he would climb out on to a rock; he would be cut off. Or coming back single file on one of those little paths above the cliff one of them might slip. He would roll and then crash. It was growing quite dark.

But she did not let her voice change in the least as she finished the story, and added, shutting the book, and speaking the last words as if she had made them up herself, looking into James’s eyes: “And there they are living still at this very time.”

“And that’s the end,” she said, and she saw in his eyes, as the interest of the story died away in them, something else take its place; something wondering, pale, like the reflection of a light, which at once made him gaze and marvel. Turning, she looked across the bay, and there, sure enough, coming regularly across the waves first two quick strokes and then one long steady stroke, was the light of the Lighthouse. It had been lit.

In a moment he would ask her, “Are we going to the Lighthouse?” And she would have to say, “No: not to-morrow; your father says not.” Happily, Mildred came in to fetch them, and the bustle distracted them. But he kept looking back over his shoulder as Mildred carried him out, and she was certain that he was thinking, we are not going to the Lighthouse to-morrow; and she thought, he will remember that all his life.

[]

11

No, she thought, putting together some of the pictures he had cut out—a refrigerator, a mowing machine, a gentleman in evening dress—children never forget. For this reason, it was so important what one said, and what one did, and it was a relief when they went to bed. For now she need not think about anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of—to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others. Although she continued to knit, and sat upright, it was thus that she felt herself; and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures. When life sank down for a moment, the range of experience seemed limitless. And to everybody there was always this sense of unlimited resources, she supposed; one after another, she, Lily, Augustus Carmichael, must feel, our apparitions, the things you know us by, are simply childish. Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by. Her horizon seemed to her limitless. There were all the places she had not seen; the Indian plains; she felt herself pushing aside the thick leather curtain of a church in Rome. This core of darkness could go anywhere, for no one saw it. They could not stop it, she thought, exulting. There was freedom, there was peace, there was, most welcome of all, a summoning together, a resting on a platform of stability. Not as oneself did one find rest ever, in her experience (she accomplished here something dexterous with her needles), but as a wedge of darkness. Losing personality, one lost the fret, the hurry, the stir; and there rose to her lips always some exclamation of triumph over life when things came together in this peace, this rest, this eternity; and pausing there she looked out to meet that stroke of the Lighthouse, the long steady stroke, the last of the three, which was her stroke, for watching them in this mood always at this hour one could not help attaching oneself to one thing especially of the things one saw; and this thing, the long steady stroke, was her stroke. Often she found herself sitting and looking, sitting and looking, with her work in her hands until she became the thing she looked at—that light for example. And it would lift up on it some little phrase or other which had been lying in her mind like that—“Children don’t forget, children don’t forget”—which she would repeat and begin adding to it, It will end, It will end, she said. It will come, it will come, when suddenly she added, We are in the hands of the Lord.

But instantly she was annoyed with herself for saying that. Who had said it? not she; she had been trapped into saying something she did not mean. She looked up over her knitting and met the third stroke and it seemed to her like her own eyes meeting her own eyes, searching as she alone could search into her mind and her heart, purifying out of existence that lie, any lie. She praised herself in praising the light, without vanity, for she was stern, she was searching, she was beautiful like that light. It was odd, she thought, how if one was alone, one leant to things, inanimate things; trees, streams, flowers; felt they expressed one; felt they became one; felt they knew one, in a sense were one; felt an irrational tenderness thus (she looked at that long steady light) as for oneself. There rose, and she looked and looked with her needles suspended, there curled up off the floor of the mind, rose from the lake of one’s being, a mist, a bride to meet her lover.

What brought her to say that: “We are in the hands of the Lord?” she wondered. The insincerity slipping in among the truths roused her, annoyed her. She returned to her knitting again. How could any Lord have made this world? she asked. With her mind she had always seized the fact that there is no reason, order, justice: but suffering, death, the poor. There was no treachery too base for the world to commit; she knew that. No happiness lasted; she knew that. She knitted with firm composure, slightly pursing her lips and, without being aware of it, so stiffened and composed the lines of her face in a habit of sternness that when her husband passed, though he was chuckling at the thought that Hume, the philosopher, grown enormously fat, had stuck in a bog, he could not help noting, as he passed, the sternness at the heart of her beauty. It saddened him, and her remoteness pained him, and he felt, as he passed, that he could not protect her, and, when he reached the hedge, he was sad. He could do nothing to help her. He must stand by and watch her. Indeed, the infernal truth was, he made things worse for her. He was irritable—he was touchy. He had lost his temper over the Lighthouse. He looked into the hedge, into its intricacy, its darkness.

Always, Mrs. Ramsay felt, one helped oneself out of solitude reluctantly by laying hold of some little odd or end, some sound, some sight. She listened, but it was all very still; cricket was over; the children were in their baths; there was only the sound of the sea. She stopped knitting; she held the long reddish-brown stocking dangling in her hands a moment. She saw the light again. With some irony in her interrogation, for when one woke at all, one’s relations changed, she looked at the steady light, the pitiless, the remorseless, which was so much her, yet so little her, which had her at its beck and call (she woke in the night and saw it bent across their bed, stroking the floor), but for all that she thought, watching it with fascination, hypnotised, as if it were stroking with its silver fingers some sealed vessel in her brain whose bursting would flood her with delight, she had known happiness, exquisite happiness, intense happiness, and it silvered the rough waves a little more brightly, as daylight faded, and the blue went out of the sea and it rolled in waves of pure lemon which curved and swelled and broke upon the beach and the ecstasy burst in her eyes and waves of pure delight raced over the floor of her mind and she felt, It is enough! It is enough!

He turned and saw her. Ah! She was lovely, lovelier now than ever he thought. But he could not speak to her. He could not interrupt her. He wanted urgently to speak to her now that James was gone and she was alone at last. But he resolved, no; he would not interrupt her. She was aloof from him now in her beauty, in her sadness. He would let her be, and he passed her without a word, though it hurt him that she should look so distant, and he could not reach her, he could do nothing to help her. And again he would have passed her without a word had she not, at that very moment, given him of her own free will what she knew he would never ask, and called to him and taken the green shawl off the picture frame, and gone to him. For he wished, she knew, to protect her.

[]

12

She folded the green shawl about her shoulders. She took his arm. His beauty was so great, she said, beginning to speak of Kennedy the gardener at once; he was so awfully handsome, that she couldn’t dismiss him. There was a ladder against the greenhouse, and little lumps of putty stuck about, for they were beginning to mend the greenhouse roof. Yes, but as she strolled along with her husband, she felt that that particular source of worry had been placed. She had it on the tip of her tongue to say, as they strolled, “It’ll cost fifty pounds”, but instead, for her heart failed her about money, she talked about Jasper shooting birds, and he said, at once, soothing her instantly, that it was natural in a boy, and he trusted he would find better ways of amusing himself before long. Her husband was so sensible, so just. And so she said, “Yes; all children go through stages,” and began considering the dahlias in the big bed, and wondering what about next year’s flowers, and had he heard the children’s nickname for Charles Tansley, she asked. The atheist, they called him, the little atheist. “He’s not a polished specimen,” said Mr. Ramsay. “Far from it,” said Mrs. Ramsay.

She supposed it was all right leaving him to his own devices, Mrs. Ramsay said, wondering whether it was any use sending down bulbs; did they plant them? “Oh, he has his dissertation to write,” said Mr. Ramsay. She knew all about that, said Mrs. Ramsay. He talked of nothing else. It was about the influence of somebody upon something. “Well, it’s all he has to count on,” said Mr. Ramsay. “Pray Heaven he won’t fall in love with Prue,” said Mrs. Ramsay. He’d disinherit her if she married him, said Mr. Ramsay. He did not look at the flowers, which his wife was considering, but at a spot about a foot or so above them. There was no harm in him, he added, and was just about to say that anyhow he was the only young man in England who admired his—— when he choked it back. He would not bother her again about his books. These flowers seemed creditable, Mr. Ramsay said, lowering his gaze and noticing something red, something brown. Yes, but then these she had put in with her own hands, said Mrs. Ramsay. The question was, what happened if she sent bulbs down; did Kennedy plant them? It was his incurable laziness; she added, moving on. If she stood over him all day long with a spade in her hand, he did sometimes do a stroke of work. So they strolled along, towards the red-hot pokers. “You’re teaching your daughters to exaggerate,” said Mr. Ramsay, reproving her. Her Aunt Camilla was far worse than she was, Mrs. Ramsay remarked. “Nobody ever held up your Aunt Camilla as a model of virtue that I’m aware of,” said Mr. Ramsay. “She was the most beautiful woman I ever saw,” said Mrs. Ramsay. “Somebody else was that,” said Mr. Ramsay. Prue was going to be far more beautiful than she was, said Mrs. Ramsay. He saw no trace of it, said Mr. Ramsay. “Well, then, look to-night,” said Mrs. Ramsay. They paused. He wished Andrew could be induced to work harder. He would lose every chance of a scholarship if he didn’t. “Oh scholarships!” she said. Mr. Ramsay thought her foolish for saying that, about a serious thing, like a scholarship. He should be very proud of Andrew if he got a scholarship, he said. She would be just as proud of him if he didn’t, she answered. They disagreed always about this, but it did not matter. She liked him to believe in scholarships, and he liked her to be proud of Andrew whatever he did. Suddenly she remembered those little paths on the edge of the cliffs.

Wasn’t it late? she asked. They hadn’t come home yet. He flicked his watch carelessly open. But it was only just past seven. He held his watch open for a moment, deciding that he would tell her what he had felt on the terrace. To begin with, it was not reasonable to be so nervous. Andrew could look after himself. Then, he wanted to tell her that when he was walking on the terrace just now—here he became uncomfortable, as if he were breaking into that solitude, that aloofness, that remoteness of hers…. But she pressed him. What had he wanted to tell her, she asked, thinking it was about going to the Lighthouse; and that he was sorry he had said “Damn you”. But no. He did not like to see her look so sad, he said. Only wool gathering, she protested, flushing a little. They both felt uncomfortable, as if they did not know whether to go on or go back. She had been reading fairy tales to James, she said. No, they could not share that; they could not say that.

They had reached the gap between the two clumps of red-hot pokers, and there was the Lighthouse again, but she would not let herself look at it. Had she known that he was looking at her, she thought, she would not have let herself sit there, thinking. She disliked anything that reminded her that she had been seen sitting thinking. So she looked over her shoulder, at the town. The lights were rippling and running as if they were drops of silver water held firm in a wind. And all the poverty, all the suffering had turned to that, Mrs. Ramsay thought. The lights of the town and of the harbour and of the boats seemed like a phantom net floating there to mark something which had sunk. Well, if he could not share her thoughts, Mr. Ramsay said to himself, he would be off, then, on his own. He wanted to go on thinking, telling himself the story how Hume was stuck in a bog; he wanted to laugh. But first it was nonsense to be anxious about Andrew. When he was Andrew’s age he used to walk about the country all day long, with nothing but a biscuit in his pocket and nobody bothered about him, or thought that he had fallen over a cliff. He said aloud he thought he would be off for a day’s walk if the weather held. He had had about enough of Bankes and of Carmichael. He would like a little solitude. Yes, she said. It annoyed him that she did not protest. She knew that he would never do it. He was too old now to walk all day long with a biscuit in his pocket. She worried about the boys, but not about him. Years ago, before he had married, he thought, looking across the bay, as they stood between the clumps of red-hot pokers, he had walked all day. He had made a meal off bread and cheese in a public house. He had worked ten hours at a stretch; an old woman just popped her head in now and again and saw to the fire. That was the country he liked best, over there; those sandhills dwindling away into darkness. One could walk all day without meeting a soul. There was not a house scarcely, not a single village for miles on end. One could worry things out alone. There were little sandy beaches where no one had been since the beginning of time. The seals sat up and looked at you. It sometimes seemed to him that in a little house out there, alone—he broke off, sighing. He had no right. The father of eight children—he reminded himself. And he would have been a beast and a cur to wish a single thing altered. Andrew would be a better man than he had been. Prue would be a beauty, her mother said. They would stem the flood a bit. That was a good bit of work on the whole—his eight children. They showed he did not damn the poor little universe entirely, for on an evening like this, he thought, looking at the land dwindling away, the little island seemed pathetically small, half swallowed up in the sea.

“Poor little place,” he murmured with a sigh.

She heard him. He said the most melancholy things, but she noticed that directly he had said them he always seemed more cheerful than usual. All this phrase-making was a game, she thought, for if she had said half what he said, she would have blown her brains out by now.

It annoyed her, this phrase-making, and she said to him, in a matter-of-fact way, that it was a perfectly lovely evening. And what was he groaning about, she asked, half laughing, half complaining, for she guessed what he was thinking—he would have written better books if he had not married.

He was not complaining, he said. She knew that he did not complain. She knew that he had nothing whatever to complain of. And he seized her hand and raised it to his lips and kissed it with an intensity that brought the tears to her eyes, and quickly he dropped it.

They turned away from the view and began to walk up the path where the silver-green spear-like plants grew, arm in arm. His arm was almost like a young man’s arm, Mrs. Ramsay thought, thin and hard, and she thought with delight how strong he still was, though he was over sixty, and how untamed and optimistic, and how strange it was that being convinced, as he was, of all sorts of horrors, seemed not to depress him, but to cheer him. Was it not odd, she reflected? Indeed he seemed to her sometimes made differently from other people, born blind, deaf, and dumb, to the ordinary things, but to the extraordinary things, with an eye like an eagle’s. His understanding often astonished her. But did he notice the flowers? No. Did he notice the view? No. Did he even notice his own daughter’s beauty, or whether there was pudding on his plate or roast beef? He would sit at table with them like a person in a dream. And his habit of talking aloud, or saying poetry aloud, was growing on him, she was afraid; for sometimes it was awkward—

Best and brightest come away!

poor Miss Giddings, when he shouted that at her, almost jumped out of her skin. But then, Mrs. Ramsay, though instantly taking his side against all the silly Giddingses in the world, then, she thought, intimating by a little pressure on his arm that he walked up hill too fast for her, and she must stop for a moment to see whether those were fresh mole-hills on the bank, then, she thought, stooping down to look, a great mind like his must be different in every way from ours. All the great men she had ever known, she thought, deciding that a rabbit must have got in, were like that, and it was good for young men (though the atmosphere of lecture-rooms was stuffy and depressing to her beyond endurance almost) simply to hear him, simply to look at him. But without shooting rabbits, how was one to keep them down? she wondered. It might be a rabbit; it might be a mole. Some creature anyhow was ruining her Evening Primroses. And looking up, she saw above the thin trees the first pulse of the full-throbbing star, and wanted to make her husband look at it; for the sight gave her such keen pleasure. But she stopped herself. He never looked at things. If he did, all he would say would be, Poor little world, with one of his sighs.

At that moment, he said, “Very fine,” to please her, and pretended to admire the flowers. But she knew quite well that he did not admire them, or even realise that they were there. It was only to please her … Ah, but was that not Lily Briscoe strolling along with William Bankes? She focussed her short-sighted eyes upon the backs of a retreating couple. Yes, indeed it was. Did that not mean that they would marry? Yes, it must! What an admirable idea! They must marry!

[]

13

He had been to Amsterdam, Mr. Bankes was saying as he strolled across the lawn with Lily Briscoe. He had seen the Rembrandts. He had been to Madrid. Unfortunately, it was Good Friday and the Prado was shut. He had been to Rome. Had Miss Briscoe never been to Rome? Oh, she should—— It would be a wonderful experience for her—the Sistine Chapel; Michael Angelo; and Padua, with its Giottos. His wife had been in bad health for many years, so that their sight-seeing had been on a modest scale.

She had been to Brussels; she had been to Paris, but only for a flying visit to see an aunt who was ill. She had been to Dresden; there were masses of pictures she had not seen; however, Lily Briscoe reflected, perhaps it was better not to see pictures: they only made one hopelessly discontented with one’s own work. Mr. Bankes thought one could carry that point of view too far. We can’t all be Titians and we can’t all be Darwins, he said; at the same time he doubted whether you could have your Darwin and your Titian if it weren’t for humble people like ourselves. Lily would have liked to pay him a compliment; you’re not humble, Mr. Bankes, she would have liked to have said. But he did not want compliments (most men do, she thought), and she was a little ashamed of her impulse and said nothing while he remarked that perhaps what he was saying did not apply to pictures. Anyhow, said Lily, tossing off her little insincerity, she would always go on painting, because it interested her. Yes, said Mr. Bankes, he was sure she would, and as they reached the end of the lawn he was asking her whether she had difficulty in finding subjects in London when they turned and saw the Ramsays. So that is marriage, Lily thought, a man and a woman looking at a girl throwing a ball. That is what Mrs. Ramsay tried to tell me the other night, she thought. For she was wearing a green shawl, and they were standing close together watching Prue and Jasper throwing catches. And suddenly the meaning which, for no reason at all, as perhaps they are stepping out of the Tube or ringing a doorbell, descends on people, making them symbolical, making them representative, came upon them, and made them in the dusk standing, looking, the symbols of marriage, husband and wife. Then, after an instant, the symbolical outline which transcended the real figures sank down again, and they became, as they met them, Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay watching the children throwing catches. But still for a moment, though Mrs. Ramsay greeted them with her usual smile (oh, she’s thinking we’re going to get married, Lily thought) and said, “I have triumphed to-night,” meaning that for once Mr. Bankes had agreed to dine with them and not run off to his own lodging where his man cooked vegetables properly; still, for one moment, there was a sense of things having been blown apart, of space, of irresponsibility as the ball soared high, and they followed it and lost it and saw the one star and the draped branches. In the failing light they all looked sharp-edged and ethereal and divided by great distances. Then, darting backwards over the vast space (for it seemed as if solidity had vanished altogether), Prue ran full tilt into them and caught the ball brilliantly high up in her left hand, and her mother said, “Haven’t they come back yet?” whereupon the spell was broken. Mr. Ramsay felt free now to laugh out loud at Hume, who had stuck in a bog and an old woman rescued him on condition he said the Lord’s Prayer, and chuckling to himself he strolled off to his study. Mrs. Ramsay, bringing Prue back into the alliance of family life again, from which she had escaped, throwing catches, asked,

“Did Nancy go with them?”

[]

14

(Certainly, Nancy had gone with them, since Minta Doyle had asked it with her dumb look, holding out her hand, as Nancy made off, after lunch, to her attic, to escape the horror of family life. She supposed she must go then. She did not want to go. She did not want to be drawn into it all. For as they walked along the road to the cliff Minta kept on taking her hand. Then she would let it go. Then she would take it again. What was it she wanted? Nancy asked herself. There was something, of course, that people wanted; for when Minta took her hand and held it, Nancy, reluctantly, saw the whole world spread out beneath her, as if it were Constantinople seen through a mist, and then, however heavy-eyed one might be, one must needs ask, “Is that Santa Sofia?” “Is that the Golden Horn?” So Nancy asked, when Minta took her hand, “What is it that she wants? Is it that?” And what was that? Here and there emerged from the mist (as Nancy looked down upon life spread beneath her) a pinnacle, a dome; prominent things, without names. But when Minta dropped her hand, as she did when they ran down the hillside, all that, the dome, the pinnacle, whatever it was that had protruded through the mist, sank down into it and disappeared.

Minta, Andrew observed, was rather a good walker. She wore more sensible clothes than most women. She wore very short skirts and black knickerbockers. She would jump straight into a stream and flounder across. He liked her rashness, but he saw that it would not do—she would kill herself in some idiotic way one of these days. She seemed to be afraid of nothing—except bulls. At the mere sight of a bull in a field she would throw up her arms and fly screaming, which was the very thing to enrage a bull of course. But she did not mind owning up to it in the least; one must admit that. She knew she was an awful coward about bulls, she said. She thought she must have been tossed in her perambulator when she was a baby. She didn’t seem to mind what she said or did. Suddenly now she pitched down on the edge of the cliff and began to sing some song about

Damn your eyes, damn your eyes.

They all had to join in and sing the chorus, and shout out together:

Damn your eyes, damn your eyes,

but it would be fatal to let the tide come in and cover up all the good hunting-grounds before they got on to the beach.

“Fatal,” Paul agreed, springing up, and as they went slithering down, he kept quoting the guide-book about “these islands being justly celebrated for their park-like prospects and the extent and variety of their marine curiosities”. But it would not do altogether, this shouting and damning your eyes, Andrew felt, picking his way down the cliff, this clapping him on the back, and calling him “old fellow” and all that; it would not altogether do. It was the worst of taking women on walks. Once on the beach they separated, he going out on to the Pope’s Nose, taking his shoes off, and rolling his socks in them and letting that couple look after themselves; Nancy waded out to her own rocks and searched her own pools and let that couple look after themselves. She crouched low down and touched the smooth rubber-like sea anemones, who were stuck like lumps of jelly to the side of the rock. Brooding, she changed the pool into the sea, and made the minnows into sharks and whales, and cast vast clouds over this tiny world by holding her hand against the sun, and so brought darkness and desolation, like God himself, to millions of ignorant and innocent creatures, and then took her hand away suddenly and let the sun stream down. Out on the pale criss-crossed sand, high-stepping, fringed, gauntletted, stalked some fantastic leviathan (she was still enlarging the pool), and slipped into the vast fissures of the mountain side. And then, letting her eyes slide imperceptibly above the pool and rest on that wavering line of sea and sky, on the tree trunks which the smoke of steamers made waver upon the horizon, she became with all that dower [power] sweeping savagely in and inevitably withdrawing, hypnotised, and the two senses of that vastness and this tininess (the pool had diminished again) flowering within it made her feel that she was bound hand and foot and unable to move by the intensity of feelings which reduced her own body, her own life, and the lives of all the people in the world, for ever, to nothingness. So listening to the waves, crouched over the pool, she brooded.

And Andrew shouted that the sea was coming in, so she leapt splashing through the shallow waves on to the shore and ran up the beach and was carried by her own impetuosity and her desire for rapid movement right behind a rock and there oh heavens! in each others arms were Paul and Minta! kissing probably. She was outraged, indignant. She and Andrew put on their shoes and stockings in dead silence without saying a thing about it. Indeed they were rather sharp with each other. She might have called him when she saw the crayfish or whatever it was, Andrew grumbled. However, they both felt, it’s not our fault. They had not wanted this horrid nuisance to happen. All the same it irritated Andrew that Nancy should be a woman, and Nancy that Andrew should be a man and they tied their shoes very neatly and drew the bows rather tight.

It was not until they had climbed right up on to the top of the cliff again that Minta cried out that she had lost her grandmother’s brooch—her grandmother’s brooch, the sole ornament she possessed—a weeping willow, it was (they must remember it) set in pearls. They must have seen it, she said, with the tears running down her cheeks, the brooch which her grandmother had fastened her cap with till the last day of her life. Now she had lost it. She would rather have lost anything than that! She would go back and look for it. They all went back. They poked and peered and looked. They kept their heads very low, and said things shortly and gruffly. Paul Rayley searched like a madman all about the rock where they had been sitting. All this pother about a brooch really didn’t do at all, Andrew thought, as Paul told him to make a “thorough search between this point and that”. The tide was coming in fast. The sea would cover the place where they had sat in a minute. There was not a ghost of a chance of their finding it now. “We shall be cut off!” Minta shrieked, suddenly terrified. As if there were any danger of that! It was the same as the bulls all over again—she had no control over her emotions, Andrew thought. Women hadn’t. The wretched Paul had to pacify her. The men (Andrew and Paul at once became manly, and different from usual) took counsel briefly and decided that they would plant Rayley’s stick where they had sat and come back at low tide again. There was nothing more that could be done now. If the brooch was there, it would still be there in the morning, they assured her, but Minta still sobbed, all the way up to the top of the cliff. It was her grandmother’s brooch; she would rather have lost anything but that, and yet Nancy felt, though it might be true that she minded losing her brooch, she wasn’t crying only for that. She was crying for something else. We might all sit down and cry, she felt. But she did not know what for.

They drew ahead together, Paul and Minta, and he comforted her, and said how famous he was for finding things. Once when he was a little boy he had found a gold watch. He would get up at daybreak and he was positive he would find it. It seemed to him that it would be almost dark, and he would be alone on the beach, and somehow it would be rather dangerous. He began telling her, however, that he would certainly find it, and she said that she would not hear of his getting up at dawn: it was lost: she knew that: she had had a presentiment when she put it on that afternoon. And secretly he resolved that he would not tell her, but he would slip out of the house at dawn when they were all asleep and if he could not find it he would go to Edinburgh and buy her another, just like it but more beautiful. He would prove what he could do. And as they came out on the hill and saw the lights of the town beneath them, the lights coming out suddenly one by one seemed like things that were going to happen to him—his marriage, his children, his house; and again he thought, as they came out on to the high road, which was shaded with high bushes, how they would retreat into solitude together, and walk on and on, he always leading her, and she pressing close to his side (as she did now). As they turned by the cross roads he thought what an appalling experience he had been through, and he must tell some one—Mrs. Ramsay of course, for it took his breath away to think what he had been and done. It had been far and away the worst moment of his life when he asked Minta to marry him. He would go straight to Mrs. Ramsay, because he felt somehow that she was the person who had made him do it. She had made him think he could do any thing. Nobody else took him seriously. But she made him believe that he could do whatever he wanted. He had felt her eyes on him all day to-day, following him about (though she never said a word) as if she were saying, “Yes, you can do it. I believe in you. I expect it of you.” She had made him feel all that, and directly they got back (he looked for the lights of the house above the bay) he would go to her and say, “I’ve done it, Mrs. Ramsay; thanks to you”. And so turning into the lane that led to the house he could see lights moving about in the upper windows. They must be awfully late then. People were getting ready for dinner. The house was all lit up, and the lights after the darkness made his eyes feel full, and he said to himself, childishly, as he walked up the drive, Lights, lights, lights, and repeated in a dazed way, Lights, lights, lights, as they came into the house, staring about him with his face quite stiff. But, good heavens, he said to himself, putting his hand to his tie, I must not make a fool of myself.)

[]

15

“Yes,” said Prue, in her considering way, answering her mother’s question, “I think Nancy did go with them.”

[]

16

Well then, Nancy had gone with them, Mrs. Ramsay supposed, wondering, as she put down a brush, took up a comb, and said “Come in” to a tap at the door (Jasper and Rose came in), whether the fact that Nancy was with them made it less likely or more likely that anything would happen; it made it less likely, somehow, Mrs. Ramsay felt, very irrationally, except that after all holocaust on such a scale was not probable. They could not all be drowned. And again she felt alone in the presence of her old antagonist, life.

Jasper and Rose said that Mildred wanted to know whether she should wait dinner.

“Not for the Queen of England,” said Mrs. Ramsay emphatically.

“Not for the Empress of Mexico,” she added, laughing at Jasper; for he shared his mother’s vice: he, too, exaggerated.

And if Rose liked, she said, while Jasper took the message, she might choose which jewels she was to wear. When there are fifteen people sitting down to dinner, one cannot keep things waiting for ever. She was now beginning to feel annoyed with them for being so late; it was inconsiderate of them, and it annoyed her on top of her anxiety about them, that they should choose this very night to be out late, when, in fact, she wished the dinner to be particularly nice, since William Bankes had at last consented to dine with them; and they were having Mildred’s masterpiece—Bœuf en Daube. Everything depended upon things being served up the precise moment they were ready. The beef, the bayleaf, and the wine—all must be done to a turn. To keep it waiting was out of the question. Yet of course to-night, of all nights, out they went, and they came in late, and things had to be sent out, things had to be kept hot; the Bœuf en Daube would be entirely spoilt.

Jasper offered her an opal necklace; Rose a gold necklace. Which looked best against her black dress? Which did indeed? said Mrs. Ramsay absent-mindedly, looking at her neck and shoulders (but avoiding her face), in the glass. And then, while the children rummaged among her things, she looked out of the window at a sight which always amused her—the rooks trying to decide which tree to settle on. Every time, they seemed to change their minds and rose up into the air again, because, she thought, the old rook, the father rook, old Joseph was her name for him, was a bird of a very trying and difficult disposition. He was a disreputable old bird, with half his wing feathers missing. He was like some seedy old gentleman in a top hat she had seen playing the horn in front of a public house.

“Look!” she said, laughing. They were actually fighting. Joseph and Mary were fighting. Anyhow they all went up again, and the air was shoved aside by their black wings and cut into exquisite scimitar shapes. The movement of the wings beating out, out, out—she could never describe it accurately enough to please herself—was one of the loveliest of all to her. Look at that, she said to Rose, hoping that Rose would see it more clearly than she could. For one’s children so often gave one’s own perceptions a little thrust forwards.

But which was it to be? They had all the trays of her jewel-case open. The gold necklace, which was Italian, or the opal necklace, which Uncle James had brought her from India; or should she wear her amethysts?

“Choose, dearests, choose,” she said, hoping that they would make haste.

But she let them take their time to choose: she let Rose, particularly, take up this and then that, and hold her jewels against the black dress, for this little ceremony of choosing jewels, which was gone through every night, was what Rose liked best, she knew. She had some hidden reason of her own for attaching great importance to this choosing what her mother was to wear. What was the reason, Mrs. Ramsay wondered, standing still to let her clasp the necklace she had chosen, divining, through her own past, some deep, some buried, some quite speechless feeling that one had for one’s mother at Rose’s age. Like all feelings felt for oneself, Mrs. Ramsay thought, it made one sad. It was so inadequate, what one could give in return; and what Rose felt was quite out of proportion to anything she actually was. And Rose would grow up; and Rose would suffer, she supposed, with these deep feelings, and she said she was ready now, and they would go down, and Jasper, because he was the gentleman, should give her his arm, and Rose, as she was the lady, should carry her handkerchief (she gave her the handkerchief), and what else? oh, yes, it might be cold: a shawl. Choose me a shawl, she said, for that would please Rose, who was bound to suffer so. “There,” she said, stopping by the window on the landing, “there they are again.” Joseph had settled on another tree-top. “Don’t you think they mind,” she said to Jasper, “having their wings broken?” Why did he want to shoot poor old Joseph and Mary? He shuffled a little on the stairs, and felt rebuked, but not seriously, for she did not understand the fun of shooting birds; that they did not feel; and being his mother she lived away in another division of the world, but he rather liked her stories about Mary and Joseph. She made him laugh. But how did she know that those were Mary and Joseph? Did she think the same birds came to the same trees every night? he asked. But here, suddenly, like all grown-up people, she ceased to pay him the least attention. She was listening to a clatter in the hall.

“They’ve come back!” she exclaimed, and at once she felt much more annoyed with them than relieved. Then she wondered, had it happened? She would go down and they would tell her—but no. They could not tell her anything, with all these people about. So she must go down and begin dinner and wait. And, like some queen who, finding her people gathered in the hall, looks down upon them, and descends among them, and acknowledges their tributes silently, and accepts their devotion and their prostration before her (Paul did not move a muscle but looked straight before him as she passed), she went down, and crossed the hall and bowed her head very slightly, as if she accepted what they could not say: their tribute to her beauty.

But she stopped. There was a smell of burning. Could they have let the Bœuf en Daube overboil, she wondered? pray heaven not! when the great clangour of the gong announced solemnly, authoritatively, that all those scattered about, in attics, in bedrooms, on little perches of their own, reading, writing, putting the last smooth to their hair, or fastening dresses, must leave all that, and the little odds and ends on their washing-tables and dressing-tables, and the novels on the bed-tables, and the diaries which were so private, and assemble in the dining-room for dinner.

[]

17

But what have I done with my life? thought Mrs. Ramsay, taking her place at the head of the table, and looking at all the plates making white circles on it. “William, sit by me,” she said. “Lily,” she said, wearily, “over there.” They had that—Paul Rayley and Minta Doyle—she, only this—an infinitely long table and plates and knives. At the far end, was her husband, sitting down, all in a heap, frowning. What at? She did not know. She did not mind. She could not understand how she had ever felt any emotion or any affection for him. She had a sense of being past everything, through everything, out of everything, as she helped the soup, as if there was an eddy—there—and one could be in it, or one could be out of it, and she was out of it. It’s all come to an end, she thought, while they came in one after another, Charles Tansley—“Sit there, please,” she said—Augustus Carmichael—and sat down. And meanwhile she waited, passively, for someone to answer her, for something to happen. But this is not a thing, she thought, ladling out soup, that one says.

Raising her eyebrows at the discrepancy—that was what she was thinking, this was what she was doing—ladling out soup—she felt, more and more strongly, outside that eddy; or as if a shade had fallen, and, robbed of colour, she saw things truly. The room (she looked round it) was very shabby. There was no beauty anywhere. She forebore to look at Mr. Tansley. Nothing seemed to have merged. They all sat separate. And the whole of the effort of merging and flowing and creating rested on her. Again she felt, as a fact without hostility, the sterility of men, for if she did not do it nobody would do it, and so, giving herself a little shake that one gives a watch that has stopped, the old familiar pulse began beating, as the watch begins ticking—one, two, three, one, two, three. And so on and so on, she repeated, listening to it, sheltering and fostering the still feeble pulse as one might guard a weak flame with a newspaper. And so then, she concluded, addressing herself by bending silently in his direction to William Bankes—poor man! who had no wife and no children, and dined alone in lodgings except for to-night; and in pity for him, life being now strong enough to bear her on again, she began all this business, as a sailor not without weariness sees the wind fill his sail and yet hardly wants to be off again and thinks how, had the ship sunk, he would have whirled round and round and found rest on the floor of the sea.

“Did you find your letters? I told them to put them in the hall for you,” she said to William Bankes.

Lily Briscoe watched her drifting into that strange no-man’s land where to follow people is impossible and yet their going inflicts such a chill on those who watch them that they always try at least to follow them with their eyes as one follows a fading ship until the sails have sunk beneath the horizon.

How old she looks, how worn she looks, Lily thought, and how remote. Then when she turned to William Bankes, smiling, it was as if the ship had turned and the sun had struck its sails again, and Lily thought with some amusement because she was relieved, Why does she pity him? For that was the impression she gave, when she told him that his letters were in the hall. Poor William Bankes, she seemed to be saying, as if her own weariness had been partly pitying people, and the life in her, her resolve to live again, had been stirred by pity. And it was not true, Lily thought; it was one of those misjudgments of hers that seemed to be instinctive and to arise from some need of her own rather than of other people’s. He is not in the least pitiable. He has his work, Lily said to herself. She remembered, all of a sudden as if she had found a treasure, that she too had her work. In a flash she saw her picture, and thought, Yes, I shall put the tree further in the middle; then I shall avoid that awkward space. That’s what I shall do. That’s what has been puzzling me. She took up the salt cellar and put it down again on a flower in the pattern in the table-cloth, so as to remind herself to move the tree.

“It’s odd that one scarcely gets anything worth having by post, yet one always wants one’s letters,” said Mr. Bankes.

What damned rot they talk, thought Charles Tansley, laying down his spoon precisely in the middle of his plate, which he had swept clean, as if, Lily thought (he sat opposite to her with his back to the window precisely in the middle of view), he were determined to make sure of his meals. Everything about him had that meagre fixity, that bare unloveliness. But nevertheless, the fact remained, it was almost impossible to dislike anyone if one looked at them. She liked his eyes; they were blue, deep set, frightening.

“Do you write many letters, Mr. Tansley?” asked Mrs. Ramsay, pitying him too, Lily supposed; for that was true of Mrs. Ramsay—she pitied men always as if they lacked something—women never, as if they had something. He wrote to his mother; otherwise he did not suppose he wrote one letter a month, said Mr. Tansley, shortly.

For he was not going to talk the sort of rot these people wanted him to talk. He was not going to be condescended to by these silly women. He had been reading in his room, and now he came down and it all seemed to him silly, superficial, flimsy. Why did they dress? He had come down in his ordinary clothes. He had not got any dress clothes. “One never gets anything worth having by post”—that was the sort of thing they were always saying. They made men say that sort of thing. Yes, it was pretty well true, he thought. They never got anything worth having from one year’s end to another. They did nothing but talk, talk, talk, eat, eat, eat. It was the women’s fault. Women made civilisation impossible with all their “charm,” all their silliness.

“No going to the Lighthouse to-morrow, Mrs. Ramsay,” he said asserting himself. He liked her; he admired her; he still thought of the man in the drain-pipe looking up at her; but he felt it necessary to assert himself.

He was really, Lily Briscoe thought, in spite of his eyes, but then look at his nose, look at his hands, the most uncharming human being she had ever met. Then why did she mind what he said? Women can’t write, women can’t paint—what did that matter coming from him, since clearly it was not true to him but for some reason helpful to him, and that was why he said it? Why did her whole being bow, like corn under a wind, and erect itself again from this abasement only with a great and rather painful effort? She must make it once more. There’s the sprig on the table-cloth; there’s my painting; I must move the tree to the middle; that matters—nothing else. Could she not hold fast to that, she asked herself, and not lose her temper, and not argue; and if she wanted a little revenge take it by laughing at him?

“Oh, Mr. Tansley,” she said, “do take me to the Lighthouse with you. I should so love it.”

She was telling lies he could see. She was saying what she did not mean to annoy him, for some reason. She was laughing at him. He was in his old flannel trousers. He had no others. He felt very rough and isolated and lonely. He knew that she was trying to tease him for some reason; she didn’t want to go to the Lighthouse with him; she despised him: so did Prue Ramsay; so did they all. But he was not going to be made a fool of by women, so he turned deliberately in his chair and looked out of the window and said, all in a jerk, very rudely, it would be too rough for her to-morrow. She would be sick.

It annoyed him that she should have made him speak like that, with Mrs. Ramsay listening. If only he could be alone in his room working, he thought, among his books. That was where he felt at his ease. And he had never run a penny into debt; he had never cost his father a penny since he was fifteen; he had helped them at home out of his savings; he was educating his sister. Still, he wished he had known how to answer Miss Briscoe properly; he wished it had not come out all in a jerk like that. “You’d be sick.” He wished he could think of something to say to Mrs. Ramsay, something which would show her that he was not just a dry prig. That was what they all thought him. He turned to her. But Mrs. Ramsay was talking about people he had never heard of to William Bankes.

“Yes, take it away,” she said briefly, interrupting what she was saying to Mr. Bankes to speak to the maid. “It must have been fifteen—no, twenty years ago—that I last saw her,” she was saying, turning back to him again as if she could not lose a moment of their talk, for she was absorbed by what they were saying. So he had actually heard from her this evening! And was Carrie still living at Marlow, and was everything still the same? Oh she could remember it as if it were yesterday—going on the river, feeling very cold. But if the Mannings made a plan they stuck to it. Never should she forget Herbert killing a wasp with a teaspoon on the bank! And it was still going on, Mrs. Ramsay mused, gliding like a ghost among the chairs and tables of that drawing-room on the banks of the Thames where she had been so very, very cold twenty years ago; but now she went among them like a ghost; and it fascinated her, as if, while she had changed, that particular day, now become very still and beautiful, had remained there, all these years. Had Carrie written to him herself? she asked.

“Yes. She says they’re building a new billiard room,” he said. No! No! That was out of the question! Building a billiard room! It seemed to her impossible.

Mr. Bankes could not see that there was anything very odd about it. They were very well off now. Should he give her love to Carrie?

“Oh,” said Mrs. Ramsay with a little start, “No,” she added, reflecting that she did not know this Carrie who built a new billiard room. But how strange, she repeated, to Mr. Bankes’s amusement, that they should be going on there still. For it was extraordinary to think that they had been capable of going on living all these years when she had not thought of them more than once all that time. How eventful her own life had been, during those same years. Yet perhaps Carrie Manning had not thought about her either. The thought was strange and distasteful.

“People soon drift apart,” said Mr. Bankes, feeling, however, some satisfaction when he thought that after all he knew both the Mannings and the Ramsays. He had not drifted apart, he thought, laying down his spoon and wiping his clean shaven lips punctiliously. But perhaps he was rather unusual, he thought, in this; he never let himself get into a groove. He had friends in all circles…. Mrs. Ramsay had to break off here to tell the maid something about keeping food hot. That was why he preferred dining alone. All these interruptions annoyed him. Well, thought William Bankes, preserving a demeanour of exquisite courtesy and merely spreading the fingers of his left hand on the table-cloth as a mechanic examines a tool beautifully polished and ready for use in an interval of leisure, such are the sacrifices one’s friends ask of one. It would have hurt her if he had refused to come. But it was not worth it for him. Looking at his hand he thought that if he had been alone dinner would have been almost over now; he would have been free to work. Yes, he thought, it is a terrible waste of time. The children were dropping in still. “I wish one of you would run up to Roger’s room,” Mrs. Ramsay was saying. How trifling it all is, how boring it all is, he thought, compared with the other thing—work. Here he sat drumming his fingers on the table-cloth when he might have been—he took a flashing bird’s-eye view of his work. What a waste of time it all was to be sure! Yet, he thought, she is one of my oldest friends. I am by way of being devoted to her. Yet now, at this moment her presence meant absolutely nothing to him: her beauty meant nothing to him; her sitting with her little boy at the window—nothing, nothing. He wished only to be alone and to take up that book. He felt uncomfortable; he felt treacherous, that he could sit by her side and feel nothing for her. The truth was that he did not enjoy family life. It was in this sort of state that one asked oneself, What does one live for? Why, one asked oneself, does one take all these pains for the human race to go on? Is it so very desirable? Are we attractive as a species? Not so very, he thought, looking at those rather untidy boys. His favourite, Cam, was in bed, he supposed. Foolish questions, vain questions, questions one never asked if one was occupied. Is human life this? Is human life that? One never had time to think about it. But here he was asking himself that sort of question, because Mrs. Ramsay was giving orders to servants, and also because it had struck him, thinking how surprised Mrs. Ramsay was that Carrie Manning should still exist, that friendships, even the best of them, are frail things. One drifts apart. He reproached himself again. He was sitting beside Mrs. Ramsay and he had nothing in the world to say to her.

“I’m so sorry,” said Mrs. Ramsay, turning to him at last. He felt rigid and barren, like a pair of boots that has been soaked and gone dry so that you can hardly force your feet into them. Yet he must force his feet into them. He must make himself talk. Unless he were very careful, she would find out this treachery of his; that he did not care a straw for her, and that would not be at all pleasant, he thought. So he bent his head courteously in her direction.

“How you must detest dining in this bear garden,” she said, making use, as she did when she was distracted, of her social manner. So, when there is a strife of tongues at some meeting, the chairman, to obtain unity, suggests that every one shall speak in French. Perhaps it is bad French; French may not contain the words that express the speaker’s thoughts; nevertheless speaking French imposes some order, some uniformity. Replying to her in the same language, Mr. Bankes said, “No, not at all,” and Mr. Tansley, who had no knowledge of this language, even spoken thus in words of one syllable, at once suspected its insincerity. They did talk nonsense, he thought, the Ramsays; and he pounced on this fresh instance with joy, making a note which, one of these days, he would read aloud, to one or two friends. There, in a society where one could say what one liked he would sarcastically describe “staying with the Ramsays” and what nonsense they talked. It was worth while doing it once, he would say; but not again. The women bored one so, he would say. Of course Ramsay had dished himself by marrying a beautiful woman and having eight children. It would shape itself something like that, but now, at this moment, sitting stuck there with an empty seat beside him nothing had shaped itself at all. It was all in scraps and fragments. He felt extremely, even physically, uncomfortable. He wanted somebody to give him a chance of asserting himself. He wanted it so urgently that he fidgeted in his chair, looked at this person, then at that person, tried to break into their talk, opened his mouth and shut it again. They were talking about the fishing industry. Why did no one ask him his opinion? What did they know about the fishing industry?

Lily Briscoe knew all that. Sitting opposite him could she not see, as in an X-ray photograph, the ribs and thigh bones of the young man’s desire to impress himself lying dark in the mist of his flesh—that thin mist which convention had laid over his burning desire to break into the conversation? But, she thought, screwing up her Chinese eyes, and remembering how he sneered at women, “can’t paint, can’t write”, why should I help him to relieve himself?

There is a code of behaviour she knew, whose seventh article (it may be) says that on occasions of this sort it behoves the woman, whatever her own occupation may be, to go to the help of the young man opposite so that he may expose and relieve the thigh bones, the ribs, of his vanity, of his urgent desire to assert himself; as indeed it is their duty, she reflected, in her old maidenly fairness, to help us, suppose the Tube were to burst into flames. Then, she thought, I should certainly expect Mr. Tansley to get me out. But how would it be, she thought, if neither of us did either of these things? So she sat there smiling.

“You’re not planning to go to the Lighthouse, are you, Lily?” said Mrs. Ramsay. “Remember poor Mr. Langley; he had been round the world dozens of times, but he told me he never suffered as he did when my husband took him there. Are you a good sailor, Mr. Tansley?” she asked.

Mr. Tansley raised a hammer: swung it high in air; but realising, as it descended, that he could not smite that butterfly with such an instrument as this, said only that he had never been sick in his life. But in that one sentence lay compact, like gunpowder, that his grandfather was a fisherman; his father a chemist; that he had worked his way up entirely himself; that he was proud of it; that he was Charles Tansley—a fact that nobody there seemed to realise; but one of these days every single person would know it. He scowled ahead of him. He could almost pity these mild cultivated people, who would be blown sky high, like bales of wool and barrels of apples, one of these days by the gunpowder that was in him.

“Will you take me, Mr. Tansley?” said Lily, quickly, kindly, for, of course, if Mrs. Ramsay said to her, as in effect she did, “I am drowning, my dear, in seas of fire. Unless you apply some balm to the anguish of this hour and say something nice to that young man there, life will run upon the rocks—indeed I hear the grating and the growling at this minute. My nerves are taut as fiddle strings. Another touch and they will snap”—when Mrs. Ramsay said all this, as the glance in her eyes said it, of course for the hundred and fiftieth time Lily Briscoe had to renounce the experiment—what happens if one is not nice to that young man there—and be nice.

Judging the turn in her mood correctly—that she was friendly to him now—he was relieved of his egotism, and told her how he had been thrown out of a boat when he was a baby; how his father used to fish him out with a boat-hook; that was how he had learnt to swim. One of his uncles kept the light on some rock or other off the Scottish coast, he said. He had been there with him in a storm. This was said loudly in a pause. They had to listen to him when he said that he had been with his uncle in a lighthouse in a storm. Ah, thought Lily Briscoe, as the conversation took this auspicious turn, and she felt Mrs. Ramsay’s gratitude (for Mrs. Ramsay was free now to talk for a moment herself), ah, she thought, but what haven’t I paid to get it for you? She had not been sincere.

She had done the usual trick—been nice. She would never know him. He would never know her. Human relations were all like that, she thought, and the worst (if it had not been for Mr. Bankes) were between men and women. Inevitably these were extremely insincere. Then her eye caught the salt cellar, which she had placed there to remind her, and she remembered that next morning she would move the tree further towards the middle, and her spirits rose so high at the thought of painting to-morrow that she laughed out loud at what Mr. Tansley was saying. Let him talk all night if he liked it.

“But how long do they leave men on a Lighthouse?” she asked. He told her. He was amazingly well informed. And as he was grateful, and as he liked her, and as he was beginning to enjoy himself, so now, Mrs. Ramsay thought, she could return to that dream land, that unreal but fascinating place, the Mannings’ drawing-room at Marlow twenty years ago; where one moved about without haste or anxiety, for there was no future to worry about. She knew what had happened to them, what to her. It was like reading a good book again, for she knew the end of that story, since it had happened twenty years ago, and life, which shot down even from this dining-room table in cascades, heaven knows where, was sealed up there, and lay, like a lake, placidly between its banks. He said they had built a billiard room—was it possible? Would William go on talking about the Mannings? She wanted him to. But no—for some reason he was no longer in the mood. She tried. He did not respond. She could not force him. She was disappointed.

“The children are disgraceful,” she said, sighing. He said something about punctuality being one of the minor virtues which we do not acquire until later in life.

“If at all,” said Mrs. Ramsay merely to fill up space, thinking what an old maid William was becoming. Conscious of his treachery, conscious of her wish to talk about something more intimate, yet out of mood for it at present, he felt come over him the disagreeableness of life, sitting there, waiting. Perhaps the others were saying something interesting? What were they saying?

That the fishing season was bad; that the men were emigrating. They were talking about wages and unemployment. The young man was abusing the government. William Bankes, thinking what a relief it was to catch on to something of this sort when private life was disagreeable, heard him say something about “one of the most scandalous acts of the present government.” Lily was listening; Mrs. Ramsay was listening; they were all listening. But already bored, Lily felt that something was lacking; Mr. Bankes felt that something was lacking. Pulling her shawl round her, Mrs. Ramsay felt that something was lacking. All of them bending themselves to listen thought, “Pray heaven that the inside of my mind may not be exposed,” for each thought, “The others are feeling this. They are outraged and indignant with the government about the fishermen. Whereas, I feel nothing at all.” But perhaps, thought Mr. Bankes, as he looked at Mr. Tansley, here is the man. One was always waiting for the man. There was always a chance. At any moment the leader might arise; the man of genius, in politics as in anything else. Probably he will be extremely disagreeable to us old fogies, thought Mr. Bankes, doing his best to make allowances, for he knew by some curious physical sensation, as of nerves erect in his spine, that he was jealous, for himself partly, partly more probably for his work, for his point of view, for his science; and therefore he was not entirely open-minded or altogether fair, for Mr. Tansley seemed to be saying, You have wasted your lives. You are all of you wrong. Poor old fogies, you’re hopelessly behind the times. He seemed to be rather cocksure, this young man; and his manners were bad. But Mr. Bankes bade himself observe, he had courage; he had ability; he was extremely well up in the facts. Probably, Mr. Bankes thought, as Tansley abused the government, there is a good deal in what he says.

“Tell me now …” he said. So they argued about politics, and Lily looked at the leaf on the table-cloth; and Mrs. Ramsay, leaving the argument entirely in the hands of the two men, wondered why she was so bored by this talk, and wished, looking at her husband at the other end of the table, that he would say something. One word, she said to herself. For if he said a thing, it would make all the difference. He went to the heart of things. He cared about fishermen and their wages. He could not sleep for thinking of them. It was altogether different when he spoke; one did not feel then, pray heaven you don’t see how little I care, because one did care. Then, realising that it was because she admired him so much that she was waiting for him to speak, she felt as if somebody had been praising her husband to her and their marriage, and she glowed all over without realising that it was she herself who had praised him. She looked at him thinking to find this shown in his face; he would be looking magnificent…. But not in the least! He was screwing his face up, he was scowling and frowning, and flushing with anger. What on earth was it about? she wondered. What could be the matter? Only that poor old Augustus had asked for another plate of soup—that was all. It was unthinkable, it was detestable (so he signalled to her across the table) that Augustus should be beginning his soup over again. He loathed people eating when he had finished. She saw his anger fly like a pack of hounds into his eyes, his brow, and she knew that in a moment something violent would explode, and then—but thank goodness! she saw him clutch himself and clap a brake on the wheel, and the whole of his body seemed to emit sparks but not words. He sat there scowling. He had said nothing, he would have her observe. Let her give him the credit for that! But why after all should poor Augustus not ask for another plate of soup? He had merely touched Ellen’s arm and said:

“Ellen, please, another plate of soup,” and then Mr. Ramsay scowled like that.

And why not? Mrs. Ramsay demanded. Surely they could let Augustus have his soup if he wanted it. He hated people wallowing in food, Mr. Ramsay frowned at her. He hated everything dragging on for hours like this. But he had controlled himself, Mr. Ramsay would have her observe, disgusting though the sight was. But why show it so plainly, Mrs. Ramsay demanded (they looked at each other down the long table sending these questions and answers across, each knowing exactly what the other felt). Everybody could see, Mrs. Ramsay thought. There was Rose gazing at her father, there was Roger gazing at his father; both would be off in spasms of laughter in another second, she knew, and so she said promptly (indeed it was time):

“Light the candles,” and they jumped up instantly and went and fumbled at the sideboard.

Why could he never conceal his feelings? Mrs. Ramsay wondered, and she wondered if Augustus Carmichael had noticed. Perhaps he had; perhaps he had not. She could not help respecting the composure with which he sat there, drinking his soup. If he wanted soup, he asked for soup. Whether people laughed at him or were angry with him he was the same. He did not like her, she knew that; but partly for that very reason she respected him, and looking at him, drinking soup, very large and calm in the failing light, and monumental, and contemplative, she wondered what he did feel then, and why he was always content and dignified; and she thought how devoted he was to Andrew, and would call him into his room, and, Andrew said, “show him things”. And there he would lie all day long on the lawn brooding presumably over his poetry, till he reminded one of a cat watching birds, and then he clapped his paws together when he had found the word, and her husband said, “Poor old Augustus—he’s a true poet,” which was high praise from her husband.

Now eight candles were stood down the table, and after the first stoop the flames stood upright and drew with them into visibility the long table entire, and in the middle a yellow and purple dish of fruit. What had she done with it, Mrs. Ramsay wondered, for Rose’s arrangement of the grapes and pears, of the horny pink-lined shell, of the bananas, made her think of a trophy fetched from the bottom of the sea, of Neptune’s banquet, of the bunch that hangs with vine leaves over the shoulder of Bacchus (in some picture), among the leopard skins and the torches lolloping red and gold…. Thus brought up suddenly into the light it seemed possessed of great size and depth, was like a world in which one could take one’s staff and climb up hills, she thought, and go down into valleys, and to her pleasure (for it brought them into sympathy momentarily) she saw that Augustus too feasted his eyes on the same plate of fruit, plunged in, broke off a bloom there, a tassel here, and returned, after feasting, to his hive. That was his way of looking, different from hers. But looking together united them.

Now all the candles were lit, and the faces on both sides of the table were brought nearer by the candle light, and composed, as they had not been in the twilight, into a party round a table, for the night was now shut off by panes of glass, which, far from giving any accurate view of the outside world, rippled it so strangely that here, inside the room, seemed to be order and dry land; there, outside, a reflection in which things wavered and vanished, waterily.

Some change at once went through them all, as if this had really happened, and they were all conscious of making a party together in a hollow, on an island; had their common cause against that fluidity out there. Mrs. Ramsay, who had been uneasy, waiting for Paul and Minta to come in, and unable, she felt, to settle to things, now felt her uneasiness changed to expectation. For now they must come, and Lily Briscoe, trying to analyse the cause of the sudden exhilaration, compared it with that moment on the tennis lawn, when solidity suddenly vanished, and such vast spaces lay between them; and now the same effect was got by the many candles in the sparely furnished room, and the uncurtained windows, and the bright mask-like look of faces seen by candlelight. Some weight was taken off them; anything might happen, she felt. They must come now, Mrs. Ramsay thought, looking at the door, and at that instant, Minta Doyle, Paul Rayley, and a maid carrying a great dish in her hands came in together. They were awfully late; they were horribly late, Minta said, as they found their way to different ends of the table.

“I lost my brooch—my grandmother’s brooch,” said Minta with a sound of lamentation in her voice, and a suffusion in her large brown eyes, looking down, looking up, as she sat by Mr. Ramsay, which roused his chivalry so that he bantered her,

How could she be such a goose, he asked, as to scramble about the rocks in jewels?

She was by way of being terrified of him—he was so fearfully clever, and the first night when she had sat by him, and he talked about George Eliot, she had been really frightened, for she had left the third volume of Middlemarch in the train and she never knew what happened in the end; but afterwards she got on perfectly, and made herself out even more ignorant than she was, because he liked telling her she was a fool. And so to-night, directly he laughed at her, she was not frightened. Besides, she knew, directly she came into the room, that the miracle had happened; she wore her golden haze. Sometimes she had it; sometimes not. She never knew why it came or why it went, or if she had it until she came into the room and then she knew instantly by the way some man looked at her. Yes, to-night she had it, tremendously; she knew that by the way Mr. Ramsay told her not to be a fool. She sat beside him, smiling.

It must have happened then, thought Mrs. Ramsay; they are engaged. And for a moment she felt what she had never expected to feel again—jealousy. For he, her husband, felt it too—Minta’s glow; he liked these girls, these golden-reddish girls, with something flying, something a little wild and harum-scarum about them, who didn’t “scrape their hair off”, weren’t, as he said about poor Lily Briscoe, “skimpy”. There was some quality which she herself had not, some lustre, some richness, which attracted him, amused him, led him to make favourites of girls like Minta. They might cut his hair for him, plait him watch-chains, or interrupt him at his work, hailing him (she heard them), “Come along, Mr. Ramsay; it’s our turn to beat them now,” and out he came to play tennis.

But indeed she was not jealous, only, now and then, when she made herself look in her glass a little resentful that she had grown old, perhaps, by her own fault. (The bill for the greenhouse and all the rest of it.) She was grateful to them for laughing at him. (“How many pipes have you smoked to-day, Mr. Ramsay?” and so on), till he seemed a young man; a man very attractive to women, not burdened, not weighed down with the greatness of his labours and the sorrows of the world and his fame or his failure, but again as she had first known him, gaunt but gallant; helping her out of a boat, she remembered; with delightful ways, like that (she looked at him, and he looked astonishingly young, teasing Minta). For herself—“Put it down there,” she said, helping the Swiss girl to place gently before her the huge brown pot in which was the Bœuf en Daube—for her own part she liked her boobies. Paul must sit by her. She had kept a place for him. Really, she sometimes thought she liked the boobies best. They did not bother one with their dissertations. How much they missed, after all, these very clever men! How dried up they did become, to be sure. There was something, she thought as he sat down, very charming about Paul. His manners were delightful to her, and his sharp cut nose and his bright blue eyes. He was so considerate. Would he tell her—now that they were all talking again—what had happened?

“We went back to look for Minta’s brooch,” he said, sitting down by her. “We”—that was enough. She knew from the effort, the rise in his voice to surmount a difficult word that it was the first time he had said “we”. “We” did this, “we” did that. They’ll say that all their lives, she thought, and an exquisite scent of olives and oil and juice rose from the great brown dish as Marthe, with a little flourish, took the cover off. The cook had spent three days over that dish. And she must take great care, Mrs. Ramsay thought, diving into the soft mass, to choose a specially tender piece for William Bankes. And she peered into the dish, with its shiny walls and its confusion of savoury brown and yellow meats, and its bay leaves and its wine, and thought, This will celebrate the occasion—a curious sense rising in her, at once freakish and tender, of celebrating a festival, as if two emotions were called up in her, one profound—for what could be more serious than the love of man for woman, what more commanding, more impressive, bearing in its bosom the seeds of death; at the same time these lovers, these people entering into illusion glittering eyed, must be danced round with mockery, decorated with garlands.

“It is a triumph,” said Mr. Bankes, laying his knife down for a moment. He had eaten attentively. It was rich; it was tender. It was perfectly cooked. How did she manage these things in the depths of the country? he asked her. She was a wonderful woman. All his love, all his reverence had returned; and she knew it.

“It is a French recipe of my grandmother’s,” said Mrs. Ramsay, speaking with a ring of great pleasure in her voice. Of course it was French. What passes for cookery in England is an abomination (they agreed). It is putting cabbages in water. It is roasting meat till it is like leather. It is cutting off the delicious skins of vegetables. “In which,” said Mr. Bankes, “all the virtue of the vegetable is contained.” And the waste, said Mrs. Ramsay. A whole French family could live on what an English cook throws away. Spurred on by her sense that William’s affection had come back to her, and that everything was all right again, and that her suspense was over, and that now she was free both to triumph and to mock, she laughed, she gesticulated, till Lily thought, How childlike, how absurd she was, sitting up there with all her beauty opened again in her, talking about the skins of vegetables. There was something frightening about her. She was irresistible. Always she got her own way in the end, Lily thought. Now she had brought this off—Paul and Minta, one might suppose, were engaged. Mr. Bankes was dining here. She put a spell on them all, by wishing, so simply, so directly; and Lily contrasted that abundance with her own poverty of spirit, and supposed that it was partly that belief (for her face was all lit up—without looking young, she looked radiant) in this strange, this terrifying thing, which made Paul Rayley, the centre of it, all of a tremor, yet abstract, absorbed, silent. Mrs. Ramsay, Lily felt, as she talked about the skins of vegetables, exalted that, worshipped that; held her hands over it to warm them, to protect it, and yet, having brought it all about, somehow laughed, led her victims, Lily felt, to the altar. It came over her too now—the emotion, the vibration of love. How inconspicuous she felt herself by Paul’s side! He, glowing, burning; she, aloof, satirical; he, bound for adventure; she, moored to the shore; he, launched, incautious; she solitary, left out—and, ready to implore a share, if it were disaster, in his disaster, she said shyly:

“When did Minta lose her brooch?”

He smiled the most exquisite smile, veiled by memory, tinged by dreams. He shook his head. “On the beach,” he said.

“I’m going to find it,” he said, “I’m getting up early.” This being kept secret from Minta, he lowered his voice, and turned his eyes to where she sat, laughing, beside Mr. Ramsay.

Lily wanted to protest violently and outrageously her desire to help him, envisaging how in the dawn on the beach she would be the one to pounce on the brooch half-hidden by some stone, and thus herself be included among the sailors and adventurers. But what did he reply to her offer? She actually said with an emotion that she seldom let appear, “Let me come with you”; and he laughed. He meant yes or no—either perhaps. But it was not his meaning—it was the odd chuckle he gave, as if he had said, Throw yourself over the cliff if you like, I don’t care. He turned on her cheek the heat of love, its horror, its cruelty, its unscrupulosity. It scorched her, and Lily, looking at Minta being charming to Mr. Ramsay at the other end of the table, flinched for her exposed to those fangs, and was thankful. For at any rate, she said to herself, catching sight of the salt cellar on the pattern, she need not marry, thank Heaven: she need not undergo that degradation. She was saved from that dilution. She would move the tree rather more to the middle.

Such was the complexity of things. For what happened to her, especially staying with the Ramsays, was to be made to feel violently two opposite things at the same time; that’s what you feel, was one; that’s what I feel was the other, and then they fought together in her mind, as now. It is so beautiful, so exciting, this love, that I tremble on the verge of it, and offer, quite out of my own habit, to look for a brooch on a beach; also it is the stupidest, the most barbaric of human passions, and turns a nice young man with a profile like a gem (Paul’s was exquisite) into a bully with a crowbar (he was swaggering, he was insolent) in the Mile End Road. Yet she said to herself, from the dawn of time odes have been sung to love; wreaths heaped and roses; and if you asked nine people out of ten they would say they wanted nothing but this; while the women, judging from her own experience, would all the time be feeling, This is not what we want; there is nothing more tedious, puerile, and inhumane than love; yet it is also beautiful and necessary. Well then, well then? she asked, somehow expecting the others to go on with the argument, as if in an argument like this one threw one’s own little bolt which fell short obviously and left the others to carry it on. So she listened again to what they were saying in case they should throw any light upon the question of love.

“Then,” said Mr. Bankes, “there is that liquid the English call coffee.”

“Oh coffee!” said Mrs. Ramsay. But it was much rather a question (she was thoroughly roused, Lily could see, and talked very emphatically) of real butter and clean milk. Speaking with warmth and eloquence she described the iniquity of the English dairy system, and in what state milk was delivered at the door, and was about to prove her charges, for she had gone into the matter, when all round the table, beginning with Andrew in the middle, like a fire leaping from tuft to tuft of furze, her children laughed; her husband laughed; she was laughed at, fire-encircled, and forced to vail her crest, dismount her batteries, and only retaliate by displaying the raillery and ridicule of the table to Mr. Bankes as an example of what one suffered if one attacked the prejudices of the British Public.

Purposely, however, for she had it on her mind that Lily, who had helped her with Mr. Tansley, was out of things, she exempted her from the rest; said “Lily anyhow agrees with me,” and so drew her in, a little fluttered, a little startled. (For she was thinking about love.) They were both out of things, Mrs. Ramsay had been thinking, both Lily and Charles Tansley. Both suffered from the glow of the other two. He, it was clear, felt himself utterly in the cold; no woman would look at him with Paul Rayley in the room. Poor fellow! Still, he had his dissertation, the influence of somebody upon something: he could take care of himself. With Lily it was different. She faded, under Minta’s glow; became more inconspicuous than ever, in her little grey dress with her little puckered face and her little Chinese eyes. Everything about her was so small. Yet, thought Mrs. Ramsay, comparing her with Minta, as she claimed her help (for Lily should bear her out she talked no more about her dairies than her husband did about his boots—he would talk by the hour about his boots), of the two Lily at forty will be the better. There was in Lily a thread of something; a flare of something; something of her own which Mrs. Ramsay liked very much indeed, but no man would, she feared. Obviously, not, unless it were a much older man, like William Bankes. But then he cared, well, Mrs. Ramsay sometimes thought that he cared, since his wife’s death, perhaps for her. He was not “in love” of course; it was one of those unclassified affections of which there are so many. Oh but nonsense, she thought; William must marry Lily. They have so many things in common. Lily is so fond of flowers. They are both cold and aloof and rather self-sufficing. She must arrange for them to take a long walk together.

Foolishly, she had set them opposite each other. That could be remedied to-morrow. If it were fine, they should go for a picnic. Everything seemed possible. Everything seemed right. Just now (but this cannot last, she thought, dissociating herself from the moment while they were all talking about boots) just now she had reached security; she hovered like a hawk suspended; like a flag floated in an element of joy which filled every nerve of her body fully and sweetly, not noisily, solemnly rather, for it arose, she thought, looking at them all eating there, from husband and children and friends; all of which rising in this profound stillness (she was helping William Bankes to one very small piece more and peered into the depths of the earthenware pot) seemed now for no special reason to stay there like a smoke, like a fume rising upwards, holding them safe together. Nothing need be said; nothing could be said. There it was, all round them. It partook, she felt, carefully helping Mr. Bankes to a specially tender piece, of eternity; as she had already felt about something different once before that afternoon; there is a coherence in things, a stability; something, she meant, is immune from change, and shines out (she glanced at the window with its ripple of reflected lights) in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby; so that again to-night she had the feeling she had had once to-day, already, of peace, of rest. Of such moments, she thought, the thing is made that remains for ever after. This would remain.

“Yes,” she assured William Bankes, “there is plenty for everybody.”

“Andrew,” she said, “hold your plate lower, or I shall spill it.” (The Bœuf en Daube was a perfect triumph.) Here, she felt, putting the spoon down, was the still space that lies about the heart of things, where one could move or rest; could wait now (they were all helped) listening; could then, like a hawk which lapses suddenly from its high station, flaunt and sink on laughter easily, resting her whole weight upon what at the other end of the table her husband was saying about the square root of one thousand two hundred and fifty-three, which happened to be the number on his railway ticket.

What did it all mean? To this day she had no notion. A square root? What was that? Her sons knew. She leant on them; on cubes and square roots; that was what they were talking about now; on Voltaire and Madame de Staël; on the character of Napoleon; on the French system of land tenure; on Lord Rosebery; on Creevey’s Memoirs: she let it uphold her and sustain her, this admirable fabric of the masculine intelligence, which ran up and down, crossed this way and that, like iron girders spanning the swaying fabric, upholding the world, so that she could trust herself to it utterly, even shut her eyes, or flicker them for a moment, as a child staring up from its pillow winks at the myriad layers of the leaves of a tree. Then she woke up. It was still being fabricated. William Bankes was praising the Waverley novels.

He read one of them every six months, he said. And why should that make Charles Tansley angry? He rushed in (all, thought Mrs. Ramsay, because Prue will not be nice to him) and denounced the Waverly novels when he knew nothing about it, nothing about it whatsoever, Mrs. Ramsay thought, observing him rather than listening to what he said. She could see how it was from his manner—he wanted to assert himself, and so it would always be with him till he got his Professorship or married his wife, and so need not be always saying, “I—I—I.” For that was what his criticism of poor Sir Walter, or perhaps it was Jane Austen, amounted to. “I—I—I.” He was thinking of himself and the impression he was making, as she could tell by the sound of his voice, and his emphasis and his uneasiness. Success would be good for him. At anyrate they were off again. Now she need not listen. It could not last she knew, but at the moment her eyes were so clear that they seemed to go round the table unveiling each of these people, and their thoughts and their feelings, without effort like a light stealing under water so that its ripples and the reeds in it and the minnows balancing themselves, and the sudden silent trout are all lit up hanging, trembling. So she saw them; she heard them; but whatever they said had also this quality, as if what they said was like the movement of a trout when, at the same time, one can see the ripple and the gravel, something to the right, something to the left; and the whole is held together; for whereas in active life she would be netting and separating one thing from another; she would be saying she liked the Waverley Novels or had not read them; she would be urging herself forward; now she said nothing. For the moment she hung suspended.

“Ah, but how long do you think it’ll last?” said somebody. It was as if she had antennae trembling out from her, which, intercepting certain sentences, forced them upon her attention. This was one of them. She scented danger for her husband. A question like that would lead, almost certainly, to something being said which reminded him of his own failure. How long would he be read—he would think at once. William Bankes (who was entirely free from all such vanity) laughed, and said he attached no importance to changes in fashion. Who could tell what was going to last—in literature or indeed in anything else?

“Let us enjoy what we do enjoy,” he said. His integrity seemed to Mrs. Ramsay quite admirable. He never seemed for a moment to think, But how does this affect me? But then if you had the other temperament, which must have praise, which must have encouragement, naturally you began (and she knew that Mr. Ramsay was beginning) to be uneasy; to want somebody to say, Oh, but your work will last, Mr. Ramsay, or something like that. He showed his uneasiness quite clearly now by saying, with some irritation, that, anyhow, Scott (or was it Shakespeare?) would last him his lifetime. He said it irritably. Everybody, she thought, felt a little uncomfortable, without knowing why. Then Minta Doyle, whose instinct was fine, said bluffly, absurdly, that she did not believe that any one really enjoyed reading Shakespeare. Mr. Ramsay said grimly (but his mind was turned away again) that very few people liked it as much as they said they did. But, he added, there is considerable merit in some of the plays nevertheless, and Mrs. Ramsay saw that it would be all right for the moment anyhow; he would laugh at Minta, and she, Mrs. Ramsay saw, realising his extreme anxiety about himself, would, in her own way, see that he was taken care of, and praise him, somehow or other. But she wished it was not necessary: perhaps it was her fault that it was necessary. Anyhow, she was free now to listen to what Paul Rayley was trying to say about books one had read as a boy. They lasted, he said. He had read some of Tolstoi at school. There was one he always remembered, but he had forgotten the name. Russian names were impossible, said Mrs. Ramsay. “Vronsky,” said Paul. He remembered that because he always thought it such a good name for a villain. “Vronsky,” said Mrs. Ramsay; “Oh, Anna Karenina,” but that did not take them very far; books were not in their line. No, Charles Tansley would put them both right in a second about books, but it was all so mixed up with, Am I saying the right thing? Am I making a good impression? that, after all, one knew more about him than about Tolstoi, whereas what Paul said was about the thing simply, not himself. Like all stupid people, he had a kind of modesty too, a consideration for what you were feeling, which, once in a way at least, she found attractive. Now he was thinking, not about himself or about Tolstoi, but whether she was cold, whether she felt a draught, whether she would like a pear.

No, she said, she did not want a pear. Indeed she had been keeping guard over the dish of fruit (without realising it) jealously, hoping that nobody would touch it. Her eyes had been going in and out among the curves and shadows of the fruit, among the rich purples of the lowland grapes, then over the horny ridge of the shell, putting a yellow against a purple, a curved shape against a round shape, without knowing why she did it, or why, every time she did it, she felt more and more serene; until, oh, what a pity that they should do it—a hand reached out, took a pear, and spoilt the whole thing. In sympathy she looked at Rose. She looked at Rose sitting between Jasper and Prue. How odd that one’s child should do that!

How odd to see them sitting there, in a row, her children, Jasper, Rose, Prue, Andrew, almost silent, but with some joke of their own going on, she guessed, from the twitching at their lips. It was something quite apart from everything else, something they were hoarding up to laugh over in their own room. It was not about their father, she hoped. No, she thought not. What was it, she wondered, sadly rather, for it seemed to her that they would laugh when she was not there. There was all that hoarded behind those rather set, still, mask-like faces, for they did not join in easily; they were like watchers, surveyors, a little raised or set apart from the grown-up people. But when she looked at Prue to-night, she saw that this was not now quite true of her. She was just beginning, just moving, just descending. The faintest light was on her face, as if the glow of Minta opposite, some excitement, some anticipation of happiness was reflected in her, as if the sun of the love of men and women rose over the rim of the table-cloth, and without knowing what it was she bent towards it and greeted it. She kept looking at Minta, shyly, yet curiously, so that Mrs. Ramsay looked from one to the other and said, speaking to Prue in her own mind, You will be as happy as she is one of these days. You will be much happier, she added, because you are my daughter, she meant; her own daughter must be happier than other people’s daughters. But dinner was over. It was time to go. They were only playing with things on their plates. She would wait until they had done laughing at some story her husband was telling. He was having a joke with Minta about a bet. Then she would get up.

She liked Charles Tansley, she thought, suddenly; she liked his laugh. She liked him for being so angry with Paul and Minta. She liked his awkwardness. There was a lot in that young man after all. And Lily, she thought, putting her napkin beside her plate, she always has some joke of her own. One need never bother about Lily. She waited. She tucked her napkin under the edge of her plate. Well, were they done now? No. That story had led to another story. Her husband was in great spirits to-night, and wishing, she supposed, to make it all right with old Augustus after that scene about the soup, had drawn him in—they were telling stories about some one they had both known at college. She looked at the window in which the candle flames burnt brighter now that the panes were black, and looking at that outside the voices came to her very strangely, as if they were voices at a service in a cathedral, for she did not listen to the words. The sudden bursts of laughter and then one voice (Minta’s) speaking alone, reminded her of men and boys crying out the Latin words of a service in some Roman Catholic cathedral. She waited. Her husband spoke. He was repeating something, and she knew it was poetry from the rhythm and the ring of exaltation and melancholy in his voice:

Come out and climb the garden path,

Luriana Lurilee.

The China rose is all abloom and buzzing with the yellow bee.

The words (she was looking at the window) sounded as if they were floating like flowers on water out there, cut off from them all, as if no one had said them, but they had come into existence of themselves.

And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be

Are full of trees and changing leaves.

She did not know what they meant, but, like music, the words seemed to be spoken by her own voice, outside her self, saying quite easily and naturally what had been in her mind the whole evening while she said different things. She knew, without looking round, that every one at the table was listening to the voice saying:

I wonder if it seems to you,

Luriana, Lurilee

with the same sort of relief and pleasure that she had, as if this were, at last, the natural thing to say, this were their own voice speaking.

But the voice stopped. She looked round. She made herself get up. Augustus Carmichael had risen and, holding his table napkin so that it looked like a long white robe he stood chanting:

To see the Kings go riding by

Over lawn and daisy lea

With their palm leaves and cedar sheaves,

Luriana, Lurilee,

and as she passed him, he turned slightly towards her repeating the last words:

Luriana, Lurilee

and bowed to her as if he did her homage. Without knowing why, she felt that he liked her better than he had ever done before; and with a feeling of relief and gratitude she returned his bow and passed through the door which he held open for her.

It was necessary now to carry everything a step further. With her foot on the threshold she waited a moment longer in a scene which was vanishing even as she looked, and then, as she moved and took Minta’s arm and left the room, it changed, it shaped itself differently; it had become, she knew, giving one last look at it over her shoulder, already the past.

[]

18

As usual, Lily thought. There was always something that had to be done at that precise moment, something that Mrs. Ramsay had decided for reasons of her own to do instantly, it might be with every one standing about making jokes, as now, not being able to decide whether they were going into the smoking-room, into the drawing-room, up to the attics. Then one saw Mrs. Ramsay in the midst of this hubbub standing there with Minta’s arm in hers, bethink her “Yes, it is time for that now,” and so make off at once with an air of secrecy to do something alone. And directly she went a sort of disintegration set in; they wavered about, went different ways, Mr. Bankes took Charles Tansley by the arm and went off to finish on the terrace the discussion they had begun at dinner about politics, thus giving a turn to the whole poise of the evening, making the weight fall in a different direction, as if, Lily thought, seeing them go, and hearing a word or two about the policy of the Labour Party, they had gone up on to the bridge of the ship and were taking their bearings; the change from poetry to politics struck her like that; so Mr. Bankes and Charles Tansley went off, while the others stood looking at Mrs. Ramsay going upstairs in the lamplight alone. Where, Lily wondered, was she going so quickly?

Not that she did in fact run or hurry; she went indeed rather slowly. She felt rather inclined just for a moment to stand still after all that chatter, and pick out one particular thing; the thing that mattered; to detach it; separate it off; clean it of all the emotions and odds and ends of things, and so hold it before her, and bring it to the tribunal where, ranged about in conclave, sat the judges she had set up to decide these things. Is it good, is it bad, is it right or wrong? Where are we going to? and so on. So she righted herself after the shock of the event, and quite unconsciously and incongruously, used the branches of the elm trees outside to help her to stabilise her position. Her world was changing: they were still. The event had given her a sense of movement. All must be in order. She must get that right and that right, she thought, insensibly approving of the dignity of the trees’ stillness, and now again of the superb upward rise (like the beak of a ship up a wave) of the elm branches as the wind raised them. For it was windy (she stood a moment to look out). It was windy, so that the leaves now and then brushed open a star, and the stars themselves seemed to be shaking and darting light and trying to flash out between the edges of the leaves. Yes, that was done then, accomplished; and as with all things done, become solemn. Now one thought of it, cleared of chatter and emotion, it seemed always to have been, only was shown now, and so being shown struck everything into stability. They would, she thought, going on again, however long they lived, come back to this night; this moon; this wind; this house: and to her too. It flattered her, where she was most susceptible of flattery, to think how, wound about in their hearts, however long they lived she would be woven; and this, and this, and this, she thought, going upstairs, laughing, but affectionately, at the sofa on the landing (her mother’s) at the rocking-chair (her father’s); at the map of the Hebrides. All that would be revived again in the lives of Paul and Minta; “the Rayleys”—she tried the new name over; and she felt, with her hand on the nursery door, that community of feeling with other people which emotion gives as if the walls of partition had become so thin that practically (the feeling was one of relief and happiness) it was all one stream, and chairs, tables, maps, were hers, were theirs, it did not matter whose, and Paul and Minta would carry it on when she was dead.

She turned the handle, firmly, lest it should squeak, and went in, pursing her lips slightly, as if to remind herself that she must not speak aloud. But directly she came in she saw, with annoyance, that the precaution was not needed. The children were not asleep. It was most annoying. Mildred should be more careful. There was James wide awake and Cam sitting bolt upright, and Mildred out of bed in her bare feet, and it was almost eleven and they were all talking. What was the matter? It was that horrid skull again. She had told Mildred to move it, but Mildred, of course, had forgotten, and now there was Cam wide awake and James wide awake quarrelling when they ought to have been asleep hours ago. What had possessed Edward to send them this horrid skull? She had been so foolish as to let them nail it up there. It was nailed fast, Mildred said, and Cam couldn’t go to sleep with it in the room, and James screamed if she touched it.

Then Cam must go to sleep (it had great horns said Cam—) must go to sleep and dream of lovely palaces, said Mrs. Ramsay, sitting down on the bed by her side. She could see the horns, Cam said, all over the room. It was true. Wherever they put the light (and James could not sleep without a light) there was always a shadow somewhere.

“But think, Cam, it’s only an old pig,” said Mrs. Ramsay, “a nice black pig like the pigs at the farm.” But Cam thought it was a horrid thing, branching at her all over the room.

“Well then,” said Mrs. Ramsay, “we will cover it up,” and they all watched her go to the chest of drawers, and open the little drawers quickly one after another, and not seeing anything that would do, she quickly took her own shawl off and wound it round the skull, round and round and round, and then she came back to Cam and laid her head almost flat on the pillow beside Cam’s and said how lovely it looked now; how the fairies would love it; it was like a bird’s nest; it was like a beautiful mountain such as she had seen abroad, with valleys and flowers and bells ringing and birds singing and little goats and antelopes … She could see the words echoing as she spoke them rhythmically in Cam’s mind, and Cam was repeating after her how it was like a mountain, a bird’s nest, a garden, and there were little antelopes, and her eyes were opening and shutting, and Mrs. Ramsay went on saying still more monotonously, and more rhythmically and more nonsensically, how she must shut her eyes and go to sleep and dream of mountains and valleys and stars falling and parrots and antelopes and gardens, and everything lovely, she said, raising her head very slowly and speaking more and more mechanically, until she sat upright and saw that Cam was asleep.

Now, she whispered, crossing over to his bed, James must go to sleep too, for see, she said, the boar’s skull was still there; they had not touched it; they had done just what he wanted; it was there quite unhurt. He made sure that the skull was still there under the shawl. But he wanted to ask her something more. Would they go to the Lighthouse to-morrow?

No, not to-morrow, she said, but soon, she promised him; the next fine day. He was very good. He lay down. She covered him up. But he would never forget, she knew, and she felt angry with Charles Tansley, with her husband, and with herself, for she had raised his hopes. Then feeling for her shawl and remembering that she had wrapped it round the boar’s skull, she got up, and pulled the window down another inch or two, and heard the wind, and got a breath of the perfectly indifferent chill night air and murmured good-night to Mildred and left the room and let the tongue of the door slowly lengthen in the lock and went out.

She hoped he would not bang his books on the floor above their heads, she thought, still thinking how annoying Charles Tansley was. For neither of them slept well; they were excitable children, and since he said things like that about the Lighthouse, it seemed to her likely that he would knock a pile of books over, just as they were going to sleep, clumsily sweeping them off the table with his elbow. For she supposed that he had gone upstairs to work. Yet he looked so desolate; yet she would feel relieved when he went; yet she would see that he was better treated to-morrow; yet he was admirable with her husband; yet his manners certainly wanted improving; yet she liked his laugh—thinking this, as she came downstairs, she noticed that she could now see the moon itself through the staircase window—the yellow harvest moon—and turned, and they saw her, standing above them on the stairs.

“That’s my mother,” thought Prue. Yes; Minta should look at her; Paul Rayley should look at her. That is the thing itself, she felt, as if there were only one person like that in the world; her mother. And, from having been quite grown up, a moment before, talking with the others, she became a child again, and what they had been doing was a game, and would her mother sanction their game, or condemn it, she wondered. And thinking what a chance it was for Minta and Paul and Lily to see her, and feeling what an extraordinary stroke of fortune it was for her to have her, and how she would never grow up and never leave home, she said, like a child, “We thought of going down to the beach to watch the waves.”

Instantly, for no reason at all, Mrs. Ramsay became like a girl of twenty, full of gaiety. A mood of revelry suddenly took possession of her. Of course they must go; of course they must go, she cried, laughing; and running down the last three or four steps quickly, she began turning from one to the other and laughing and drawing Minta’s wrap round her and saying she only wished she could come too, and would they be very late, and had any of them got a watch?

“Yes, Paul has,” said Minta. Paul slipped a beautiful gold watch out of a little wash-leather case to show her. And as he held it in the palm of his hand before her, he felt “She knows all about it. I need not say anything.” He was saying to her as he showed her the watch, “I’ve done it, Mrs. Ramsay. I owe it all to you.” And seeing the gold watch lying in his hand, Mrs. Ramsay felt, How extraordinarily lucky Minta is! She is marrying a man who has a gold watch in a wash-leather bag!

“How I wish I could come with you!” she cried. But she was withheld by something so strong that she never even thought of asking herself what it was. Of course it was impossible for her to go with them. But she would have liked to go, had it not been for the other thing, and tickled by the absurdity of her thought (how lucky to marry a man with a wash-leather bag for his watch) she went with a smile on her lips into the other room, where her husband sat reading.

[]

19

Of course, she said to herself, coming into the room, she had to come here to get something she wanted. First she wanted to sit down in a particular chair under a particular lamp. But she wanted something more, though she did not know, could not think what it was that she wanted. She looked at her husband (taking up her stocking and beginning to knit), and saw that he did not want to be interrupted—that was clear. He was reading something that moved him very much. He was half smiling and then she knew he was controlling his emotion. He was tossing the pages over. He was acting it—perhaps he was thinking himself the person in the book. She wondered what book it was. Oh, it was one of old Sir Walter’s, she saw, adjusting the shade of her lamp so that the light fell on her knitting. For Charles Tansley had been saying (she looked up as if she expected to hear the crash of books on the floor above) had been saying that people don’t read Scott any more. Then her husband thought, “That’s what they’ll say of me”; so he went and got one of those books. And if he came to the conclusion “That’s true” what Charles Tansley said, he would accept it about Scott. (She could see that he was weighing, considering, putting this with that as he read.) But not about himself. He was always uneasy about himself. That troubled her. He would always be worrying about his own books—will they be read, are they good, why aren’t they better, what do people think of me? Not liking to think of him so, and wondering if they had guessed at dinner why he suddenly became irritable when they talked about fame and books lasting, wondering if the children were laughing at that, she twitched the stocking out, and all the fine gravings came drawn with steel instruments about her lips and forehead, and she grew still like a tree which has been tossing and quivering and now, when the breeze falls, settles, leaf by leaf, into quiet.

It didn’t matter, any of it, she thought. A great man, a great book, fame—who could tell? She knew nothing about it. But it was his way with him, his truthfulness—for instance at dinner she had been thinking quite instinctively, If only he would speak! She had complete trust in him. And dismissing all this, as one passes in diving now a weed, now a straw, now a bubble, she felt again, sinking deeper, as she had felt in the hall when the others were talking, There is something I want—something I have come to get, and she fell deeper and deeper without knowing quite what it was, with her eyes closed. And she waited a little, knitting, wondering, and slowly those words they had said at dinner, “the China rose is all abloom and buzzing with the honey bee,” began washing from side to side of her mind rhythmically, and as they washed, words, like little shaded lights, one red, one blue, one yellow, lit up in the dark of her mind, and seemed leaving their perches up there to fly across and across, or to cry out and to be echoed; so she turned and felt on the table beside her for a book.

And all the lives we ever lived

And all the lives to be,

Are full of trees and changing leaves,

she murmured, sticking her needles into the stocking. And she opened the book and began reading here and there at random, and as she did so she felt that she was climbing backwards, upwards, shoving her way up under petals that curved over her, so that she only knew this is white, or this is red. She did not know at first what the words meant at all.

Steer, hither steer your winged pines, all beaten Mariners

she read and turned the page, swinging herself, zigzagging this way and that, from one line to another as from one branch to another, from one red and white flower to another, until a little sound roused her—her husband slapping his thighs. Their eyes met for a second; but they did not want to speak to each other. They had nothing to say, but something seemed, nevertheless, to go from him to her. It was the life, it was the power of it, it was the tremendous humour, she knew, that made him slap his thighs. Don’t interrupt me, he seemed to be saying, don’t say anything; just sit there. And he went on reading. His lips twitched. It filled him. It fortified him. He clean forgot all the little rubs and digs of the evening, and how it bored him unutterably to sit still while people ate and drank interminably, and his being so irritable with his wife and so touchy and minding when they passed his books over as if they didn’t exist at all. But now, he felt, it didn’t matter a damn who reached Z (if thought ran like an alphabet from A to Z). Somebody would reach it—if not he, then another. This man’s strength and sanity, his feeling for straightforward simple things, these fishermen, the poor old crazed creature in Mucklebackit’s cottage made him feel so vigorous, so relieved of something that he felt roused and triumphant and could not choke back his tears. Raising the book a little to hide his face he let them fall and shook his head from side to side and forgot himself completely (but not one or two reflections about morality and French novels and English novels and Scott’s hands being tied but his view perhaps being as true as the other view) forgot his own bothers and failures completely in poor Steenie’s drowning and Mucklebackit’s sorrow (that was Scott at his best) and the astonishing delight and feeling of vigour that it gave him.

Well, let them improve upon that, he thought as he finished the chapter. He felt that he had been arguing with somebody, and had got the better of him. They could not improve upon that, whatever they might say; and his own position became more secure. The lovers were fiddlesticks, he thought, collecting it all in his mind again. That’s fiddlesticks, that’s first-rate, he thought, putting one thing beside another. But he must read it again. He could not remember the whole shape of the thing. He had to keep his judgement in suspense. So he returned to the other thought—if young men did not care for this, naturally they did not care for him either. One ought not to complain, thought Mr. Ramsay, trying to stifle his desire to complain to his wife that young men did not admire him. But he was determined; he would not bother her again. Here he looked at her reading. She looked very peaceful, reading. He liked to think that every one had taken themselves off and that he and she were alone. The whole of life did not consist in going to bed with a woman, he thought, returning to Scott and Balzac, to the English novel and the French novel.

Mrs. Ramsay raised her head and like a person in a light sleep seemed to say that if he wanted her to wake she would, she really would, but otherwise, might she go on sleeping, just a little longer, just a little longer? She was climbing up those branches, this way and that, laying hands on one flower and then another.

“Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose,”

she read, and so reading she was ascending, she felt, on to the top, on to the summit. How satisfying! How restful! All the odds and ends of the day stuck to this magnet; her mind felt swept, felt clean. And then there it was, suddenly entire shaped in her hands, beautiful and reasonable, clear and complete, the essence sucked out of life and held rounded here—the sonnet.

But she was becoming conscious of her husband looking at her. He was smiling at her, quizzically, as if he were ridiculing her gently for being asleep in broad daylight, but at the same time he was thinking, Go on reading. You don’t look sad now, he thought. And he wondered what she was reading, and exaggerated her ignorance, her simplicity, for he liked to think that she was not clever, not book-learned at all. He wondered if she understood what she was reading. Probably not, he thought. She was astonishingly beautiful. Her beauty seemed to him, if that were possible, to increase.

Yet seem’d it winter still, and, you away,

As with your shadow I with these did play,

she finished.

“Well?” she said, echoing his smile dreamily, looking up from her book.

As with your shadow I with these did play,

she murmured putting the book on the table.

What had happened she wondered, as she took up her knitting, since she had last seen him alone? She remembered dressing, and seeing the moon; Andrew holding his plate too high at dinner; being depressed by something William had said; the birds in the trees; the sofa on the landing; the children being awake; Charles Tansley waking them with his books falling—oh no, that she had invented; and Paul having a wash-leather case for his watch. Which should she tell him about?

“They’re engaged,” she said, beginning to knit, “Paul and Minta.”

“So I guessed,” he said. There was nothing very much to be said about it. Her mind was still going up and down, up and down with the poetry; he was still feeling very vigorous, very forthright, after reading about Steenie’s funeral. So they sat silent. Then she became aware that she wanted him to say something.

Anything, anything, she thought, going on with her knitting. Anything will do.

“How nice it would be to marry a man with a wash-leather bag for his watch,” she said, for that was the sort of joke they had together.

He snorted. He felt about this engagement as he always felt about any engagement; the girl is much too good for that young man. Slowly it came into her head, why is it then that one wants people to marry? What was the value, the meaning of things? (Every word they said now would be true.) Do say something, she thought, wishing only to hear his voice. For the shadow, the thing folding them in was beginning, she felt, to close round her again. Say anything, she begged, looking at him, as if for help.

He was silent, swinging the compass on his watch-chain to and fro, and thinking of Scott’s novels and Balzac’s novels. But through the crepuscular walls of their intimacy, for they were drawing together, involuntarily, coming side by side, quite close, she could feel his mind like a raised hand shadowing her mind; and he was beginning now that her thoughts took a turn he disliked—towards this “pessimism” as he called it—to fidget, though he said nothing, raising his hand to his forehead, twisting a lock of hair, letting it fall again.

“You won’t finish that stocking to-night,” he said, pointing to her stocking. That was what she wanted—the asperity in his voice reproving her. If he says it’s wrong to be pessimistic probably it is wrong, she thought; the marriage will turn out all right.

“No,” she said, flattening the stocking out upon her knee, “I shan’t finish it.”

And what then? For she felt that he was still looking at her, but that his look had changed. He wanted something—wanted the thing she always found it so difficult to give him; wanted her to tell him that she loved him. And that, no, she could not do. He found talking so much easier than she did. He could say things—she never could. So naturally it was always he that said the things, and then for some reason he would mind this suddenly, and would reproach her. A heartless woman he called her; she never told him that she loved him. But it was not so—it was not so. It was only that she never could say what she felt. Was there no crumb on his coat? Nothing she could do for him? Getting up she stood at the window with the reddish-brown stocking in her hands, partly to turn away from him, partly because she did not mind looking now, with him watching, at the Lighthouse. For she knew that he had turned his head as she turned; he was watching her. She knew that he was thinking, You are more beautiful than ever. And she felt herself very beautiful. Will you not tell me just for once that you love me? He was thinking that, for he was roused, what with Minta and his book, and its being the end of the day and their having quarrelled about going to the Lighthouse. But she could not do it; she could not say it. Then, knowing that he was watching her, instead of saying any thing she turned, holding her stocking, and looked at him. And as she looked at him she began to smile, for though she had not said a word, he knew, of course he knew, that she loved him. He could not deny it. And smiling she looked out of the window and said (thinking to herself, Nothing on earth can equal this happiness)—

“Yes, you were right. It’s going to be wet to-morrow.” She had not said it, but he knew it. And she looked at him smiling. For she had triumphed again.

[]

II
Time Passes.

1

“Well, we must wait for the future to show,” said Mr. Bankes, coming in from the terrace.

“It’s almost too dark to see,” said Andrew, coming up from the beach.

“One can hardly tell which is the sea and which is the land,” said Prue.

“Do we leave that light burning?” said Lily as they took their coats off indoors.

“No,” said Prue, “not if everyone’s in.”

“Andrew,” she called back, “just put out the light in the hall.”

One by one the lamps were all extinguished, except that Mr. Carmichael, who liked to lie awake a little reading Virgil, kept his candle burning rather longer than the rest.

[]

2

So with the lamps all put out, the moon sunk, and a thin rain drumming on the roof a downpouring of immense darkness began. Nothing, it seemed, could survive the flood, the profusion of darkness which, creeping in at keyholes and crevices, stole round window blinds, came into bedrooms, swallowed up here a jug and basin, there a bowl of red and yellow dahlias, there the sharp edges and firm bulk of a chest of drawers. Not only was furniture confounded; there was scarcely anything left of body or mind by which one could say “This is he” or “This is she.” Sometimes a hand was raised as if to clutch something or ward off something, or somebody groaned, or somebody laughed aloud as if sharing a joke with nothingness.

Nothing stirred in the drawing-room or in the dining-room or on the staircase. Only through the rusty hinges and swollen sea-moistened woodwork certain airs, detached from the body of the wind (the house was ramshackle after all) crept round corners and ventured indoors. Almost one might imagine them, as they entered the drawing-room questioning and wondering, toying with the flap of hanging wall-paper, asking, would it hang much longer, when would it fall? Then smoothly brushing the walls, they passed on musingly as if asking the red and yellow roses on the wall-paper whether they would fade, and questioning (gently, for there was time at their disposal) the torn letters in the wastepaper basket, the flowers, the books, all of which were now open to them and asking, Were they allies? Were they enemies? How long would they endure?

So some random light directing them from an uncovered star, or wandering ship, or the Lighthouse even, with its pale footfall upon stair and mat, the little airs mounted the staircase and nosed round bedroom doors. But here surely, they must cease. Whatever else may perish and disappear what lies here is steadfast. Here one might say to those sliding lights, those fumbling airs, that breathe and bend over the bed itself, here you can neither touch nor destroy. Upon which, wearily, ghostlily, as if they had feather-light fingers and the light persistency of feathers, they would look, once, on the shut eyes and the loosely clasping fingers, and fold their garments wearily and disappear. And so, nosing, rubbing, they went to the window on the staircase, to the servants’ bedrooms, to the boxes in the attics; descending, blanched the apples on the dining-room table, fumbled the petals of roses, tried the picture on the easel, brushed the mat and blew a little sand along the floor. At length, desisting, all ceased together, gathered together, all sighed together; all together gave off an aimless gust of lamentation to which some door in the kitchen replied; swung wide; admitted nothing; and slammed to.

[Here Mr. Carmichael, who was reading Virgil, blew out his candle. It was past midnight.]

[]

3

But what after all is one night? A short space, especially when the darkness dims so soon, and so soon a bird sings, a cock crows, or a faint green quickens, like a turning leaf, in the hollow of the wave. Night, however, succeeds to night. The winter holds a pack of them in store and deals them equally, evenly, with indefatigable fingers. They lengthen; they darken. Some of them hold aloft clear planets, plates of brightness. The autumn trees, ravaged as they are, take on the flash of tattered flags kindling in the gloom of cool cathedral caves where gold letters on marble pages describe death in battle and how bones bleach and burn far away in Indian sands. The autumn trees gleam in the yellow moonlight, in the light of harvest moons, the light which mellows the energy of labour, and smooths the stubble, and brings the wave lapping blue to the shore.

It seemed now as if, touched by human penitence and all its toil, divine goodness had parted the curtain and displayed behind it, single, distinct, the hare erect; the wave falling; the boat rocking, which, did we deserve them, should be ours always. But alas, divine goodness, twitching the cord, draws the curtain; it does not please him; he covers his treasures in a drench of hail, and so breaks them, so confuses them that it seems impossible that their calm should ever return or that we should ever compose from their fragments a perfect whole or read in the littered pieces the clear words of truth. For our penitence deserves a glimpse only; our toil respite only.

The nights now are full of wind and destruction; the trees plunge and bend and their leaves fly helter skelter until the lawn is plastered with them and they lie packed in gutters and choke rain pipes and scatter damp paths. Also the sea tosses itself and breaks itself, and should any sleeper fancying that he might find on the beach an answer to his doubts, a sharer of his solitude, throw off his bedclothes and go down by himself to walk on the sand, no image with semblance of serving and divine promptitude comes readily to hand bringing the night to order and making the world reflect the compass of the soul. The hand dwindles in his hand; the voice bellows in his ear. Almost it would appear that it is useless in such confusion to ask the night those questions as to what, and why, and wherefore, which tempt the sleeper from his bed to seek an answer.

[Mr. Ramsay stumbling along a passage stretched his arms out one dark morning, but, Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, he stretched his arms out. They remained empty.]

[]

4

So with the house empty and the doors locked and the mattresses rolled round, those stray airs, advance guards of great armies, blustered in, brushed bare boards, nibbled and fanned, met nothing in bedroom or drawing-room that wholly resisted them but only hangings that flapped, wood that creaked, the bare legs of tables, saucepans and china already furred, tarnished, cracked. What people had shed and left—a pair of shoes, a shooting cap, some faded skirts and coats in wardrobes—those alone kept the human shape and in the emptiness indicated how once they were filled and animated; how once hands were busy with hooks and buttons; how once the looking-glass had held a face; had held a world hollowed out in which a figure turned, a hand flashed, the door opened, in came children rushing and tumbling; and went out again. Now, day after day, light turned, like a flower reflected in water, its clear image on the wall opposite. Only the shadows of the trees, flourishing in the wind, made obeisance on the wall, and for a moment darkened the pool in which light reflected itself; or birds, flying, made a soft spot flutter slowly across the bedroom floor.

So loveliness reigned and stillness, and together made the shape of loveliness itself, a form from which life had parted; solitary like a pool at evening, far distant, seen from a train window, vanishing so quickly that the pool, pale in the evening, is scarcely robbed of its solitude, though once seen. Loveliness and stillness clasped hands in the bedroom, and among the shrouded jugs and sheeted chairs even the prying of the wind, and the soft nose of the clammy sea airs, rubbing, snuffling, iterating, and reiterating their questions—“Will you fade? Will you perish?”—scarcely disturbed the peace, the indifference, the air of pure integrity, as if the question they asked scarcely needed that they should answer: we remain.

Nothing it seemed could break that image, corrupt that innocence, or disturb the swaying mantle of silence which, week after week, in the empty room, wove into itself the falling cries of birds, ships hooting, the drone and hum of the fields, a dog’s bark, a man’s shout, and folded them round the house in silence. Once only a board sprang on the landing; once in the middle of the night with a roar, with a rupture, as after centuries of quiescence, a rock rends itself from the mountain and hurtles crashing into the valley, one fold of the shawl loosened and swung to and fro. Then again peace descended; and the shadow wavered; light bent to its own image in adoration on the bedroom wall; when Mrs. McNab, tearing the veil of silence with hands that had stood in the wash-tub, grinding it with boots that had crunched the shingle, came as directed to open all windows, and dust the bedrooms.

[]

5

As she lurched (for she rolled like a ship at sea) and leered (for her eyes fell on nothing directly, but with a sidelong glance that deprecated the scorn and anger of the world—she was witless, she knew it), as she clutched the banisters and hauled herself upstairs and rolled from room to room, she sang. Rubbing the glass of the long looking-glass and leering sideways at her swinging figure a sound issued from her lips—something that had been gay twenty years before on the stage perhaps, had been hummed and danced to, but now, coming from the toothless, bonneted, care-taking woman, was robbed of meaning, was like the voice of witlessness, humour, persistency itself, trodden down but springing up again, so that as she lurched, dusting, wiping, she seemed to say how it was one long sorrow and trouble, how it was getting up and going to bed again, and bringing things out and putting them away again. It was not easy or snug this world she had known for close on seventy years. Bowed down she was with weariness. How long, she asked, creaking and groaning on her knees under the bed, dusting the boards, how long shall it endure? but hobbled to her feet again, pulled herself up, and again with her sidelong leer which slipped and turned aside even from her own face, and her own sorrows, stood and gaped in the glass, aimlessly smiling, and began again the old amble and hobble, taking up mats, putting down china, looking sideways in the glass, as if, after all, she had her consolations, as if indeed there twined about her dirge some incorrigible hope. Visions of joy there must have been at the wash-tub, say with her children (yet two had been base-born and one had deserted her), at the public-house, drinking; turning over scraps in her drawers. Some cleavage of the dark there must have been, some channel in the depths of obscurity through which light enough issued to twist her face grinning in the glass and make her, turning to her job again, mumble out the old music hall song. Meanwhile the mystic, the visionary, walked the beach, stirred a puddle, looked at a stone, and asked themselves “What am I?” “What is this?” and suddenly an answer was vouchsafed them (what it was they could not say): so that they were warm in the frost and had comfort in the desert. But Mrs. McNab continued to drink and gossip as before.

[]

6

The spring without a leaf to toss, bare and bright like a virgin fierce in her chastity, scornful in her purity, was laid out on fields wide-eyed and watchful and entirely careless of what was done or thought by the beholders.

[Prue Ramsay, leaning on her father’s arm, was given in marriage that May. What, people said, could have been more fitting? And, they added, how beautiful she looked!]

As summer neared, as the evenings lengthened, there came to the wakeful, the hopeful, walking the beach, stirring the pool, imaginations of the strangest kind—of flesh turned to atoms which drove before the wind, of stars flashing in their hearts, of cliff, sea, cloud, and sky brought purposely together to assemble outwardly the scattered parts of the vision within. In those mirrors, the minds of men, in those pools of uneasy water, in which clouds for ever turn and shadows form, dreams persisted, and it was impossible to resist the strange intimation which every gull, flower, tree, man and woman, and the white earth itself seemed to declare (but if questioned at once to withdraw) that good triumphs, happiness prevails, order rules; or to resist the extraordinary stimulus to range hither and thither in search of some absolute good, some crystal of intensity, remote from the known pleasures and familiar virtues, something alien to the processes of domestic life, single, hard, bright, like a diamond in the sand, which would render the possessor secure. Moreover, softened and acquiescent, the spring with her bees humming and gnats dancing threw her cloak about her, veiled her eyes, averted her head, and among passing shadows and flights of small rain seemed to have taken upon her a knowledge of the sorrows of mankind.

[Prue Ramsay died that summer in some illness connected with childbirth, which was indeed a tragedy, people said. They said nobody deserved happiness more.]

And now in the heat of summer the wind sent its spies about the house again. Flies wove a web in the sunny rooms; weeds that had grown close to the glass in the night tapped methodically at the window pane. When darkness fell, the stroke of the Lighthouse, which had laid itself with such authority upon the carpet in the darkness, tracing its pattern, came now in the softer light of spring mixed with moonlight gliding gently as if it laid its caress and lingered stealthily and looked and came lovingly again. But in the very lull of this loving caress, as the long stroke leant upon the bed, the rock was rent asunder; another fold of the shawl loosened; there it hung, and swayed. Through the short summer nights and the long summer days, when the empty rooms seemed to murmur with the echoes of the fields and the hum of flies, the long streamer waved gently, swayed aimlessly; while the sun so striped and barred the rooms and filled them with yellow haze that Mrs. McNab, when she broke in and lurched about, dusting, sweeping, looked like a tropical fish oaring its way through sun-lanced waters.

But slumber and sleep though it might there came later in the summer ominous sounds like the measured blows of hammers dulled on felt, which, with their repeated shocks still further loosened the shawl and cracked the tea-cups. Now and again some glass tinkled in the cupboard as if a giant voice had shrieked so loud in its agony that tumblers stood inside a cupboard vibrated too. Then again silence fell; and then, night after night, and sometimes in plain mid-day when the roses were bright and light turned on the wall its shape clearly there seemed to drop into this silence this indifference, this integrity, the thud of something falling.

[A shell exploded. Twenty or thirty young men were blown up in France, among them Andrew Ramsay, whose death, mercifully, was instantaneous.]

At that season those who had gone down to pace the beach and ask of the sea and sky what message they reported or what vision they affirmed had to consider among the usual tokens of divine bounty—the sunset on the sea, the pallor of dawn, the moon rising, fishing-boats against the moon, and children pelting each other with handfuls of grass,—something out of harmony with this jocundity, this serenity. There was the silent apparition of an ashen-coloured ship for instance, come, gone; there was a purplish stain upon the bland surface of the sea as if something had boiled and bled, invisibly, beneath. This intrusion into a scene calculated to stir the most sublime reflections and lead to the most comfortable conclusions stayed their pacing. It was difficult blandly to overlook them, to abolish their significance in the landscape; to continue, as one walked by the sea, to marvel how beauty outside mirrored beauty within.

Did Nature supplement what man advanced? Did she complete what he began? With equal complacence she saw his misery, condoned his meanness, and acquiesced in his torture. That dream, then, of sharing, completing, finding in solitude on the beach an answer, was but a reflection in a mirror, and the mirror itself was but the surface glassiness which forms in quiescence when the nobler powers sleep beneath? Impatient, despairing yet loth to go (for beauty offers her lures, has her consolations), to pace the beach was impossible; contemplation was unendurable; the mirror was broken.

[Mr. Carmichael brought out a volume of poems that spring, which had an unexpected success. The war, people said, had revived their interest in poetry.]

[]

7

Night after night, summer and winter, the torment of storms, the arrow-like stillness of fine weather, held their court without interference. Listening (had there been any one to listen) from the upper rooms of the empty house only gigantic chaos streaked with lightning could have been heard tumbling and tossing, as the winds and waves disported themselves like the amorphous bulks of leviathans whose brows are pierced by no light of reason, and mounted one on top of another, and lunged and plunged in the darkness or the daylight (for night and day, month and year ran shapelessly together) in idiot games, until it seemed as if the universe were battling and tumbling, in brute confusion and wanton lust aimlessly by itself.

In spring the garden urns, casually filled with wind-blown plants, were gay as ever. Violets came and daffodils. But the stillness and the brightness of the day were as strange as the chaos and tumult of night, with the trees standing there, and the flowers standing there, looking before them, looking up, yet beholding nothing, eyeless, and thus terrible.

[]

8

Thinking no harm, for the family would not come, never again, some said, and the house would be sold at Michaelmas perhaps, Mrs. McNab stooped and picked a bunch of flowers to take home with her. She laid them on the table while she dusted. She was fond of flowers. It was a pity to let them waste. Suppose the house were sold (she stood arms akimbo in front of the looking-glass) it would want seeing to—it would. There it had stood all these years without a soul in it. The books and things were mouldy, for, what with the war and help being hard to get, the house had not been cleaned as she could have wished. It was beyond one person’s strength to get it straight now. She was too old. Her legs pained her. All those books needed to be laid out on the grass in the sun; there was plaster fallen in the hall; the rain-pipe had blocked over the study window and let the water in; the carpet was ruined quite. But people should come themselves; they should have sent somebody down to see. For there were clothes in the cupboards; they had left clothes in all the bedrooms. What was she to do with them? They had the moth in them—Mrs. Ramsay’s things. Poor lady! She would never want them again. She was dead, they said; years ago, in London. There was the old grey cloak she wore gardening (Mrs. McNab fingered it.) She could see her, as she came up the drive with the washing, stooping over her flowers (the garden was a pitiful sight now, all run to riot, and rabbits scuttling at you out of the beds)—she could see her with one of the children by her in that grey cloak. There were boots and shoes; and a brush and comb left on the dressing-table, for all the world as if she expected to come back to-morrow. (She had died very sudden at the end, they said.) And once they had been coming, but had put off coming, what with the war, and travel being so difficult these days; they had never come all these years; just sent her money; but never wrote, never came, and expected to find things as they had left them, ah dear! Why the dressing-table drawers were full of things (she pulled them open), handkerchiefs, bits of ribbon. Yes, she could see Mrs. Ramsay as she came up the drive with the washing.

“Good-evening, Mrs. McNab,” she would say.

She had a pleasant way with her. The girls all liked her. But dear, many things had changed since then (she shut the drawer); many families had lost their dearest. So she was dead; and Mr. Andrew killed; and Miss Prue dead too, they said, with her first baby; but every one had lost some one these years. Prices had gone up shamefully, and didn’t come down again neither. She could well remember her in her grey cloak.

“Good-evening, Mrs. McNab,” she said, and told cook to keep a plate of milk soup for her—quite thought she wanted it, carrying that heavy basket all the way up from town. She could see her now, stooping over her flowers; (and faint and flickering, like a yellow beam or the circle at the end of a telescope, a lady in a grey cloak, stooping over her flowers, went wandering over the bedroom wall, up the dressing-table, across the wash-stand, as Mrs. McNab hobbled and ambled, dusting, straightening).

And cook’s name now? Mildred? Marian?—some name like that. Ah, she had forgotten—she did forget things. Fiery, like all red-haired women. Many a laugh they had had. She was always welcome in the kitchen. She made them laugh, she did. Things were better then than now.

She sighed; there was too much work for one woman. She wagged her head this side and that. This had been the nursery. Why, it was all damp in here; the plaster was falling. Whatever did they want to hang a beast’s skull there? gone mouldy too. And rats in all the attics. The rain came in. But they never sent; never came. Some of the locks had gone, so the doors banged. She didn’t like to be up here at dusk alone neither. It was too much for one woman, too much, too much. She creaked, she moaned. She banged the door. She turned the key in the lock, and left the house shut up, locked, alone.

[]

9

The house was left; the house was deserted. It was left like a shell on a sandhill to fill with dry salt grains now that life had left it. The long night seemed to have set in; the trifling airs, nibbling, the clammy breaths, fumbling, seemed to have triumphed. The saucepan had rusted and the mat decayed. Toads had nosed their way in. Idly, aimlessly, the swaying shawl swung to and fro. A thistle thrust itself between the tiles in the larder. The swallows nested in the drawing-room; the floor was strewn with straw; the plaster fell in shovelfuls; rafters were laid bare; rats carried off this and that to gnaw behind the wainscots. Tortoise-shell butterflies burst from the chrysalis and pattered their life out on the window-pane. Poppies sowed themselves among the dahlias; the lawn waved with long grass; giant artichokes towered among roses; a fringed carnation flowered among the cabbages; while the gentle tapping of a weed at the window had become, on winters’ nights, a drumming from sturdy trees and thorned briars which made the whole room green in summer.

What power could now prevent the fertility, the insensibility of nature? Mrs. McNab’s dream of a lady, of a child, of a plate of milk soup? It had wavered over the walls like a spot of sunlight and vanished. She had locked the door; she had gone. It was beyond the strength of one woman, she said. They never sent. They never wrote. There were things up there rotting in the drawers—it was a shame to leave them so, she said. The place was gone to rack and ruin. Only the Lighthouse beam entered the rooms for a moment, sent its sudden stare over bed and wall in the darkness of winter, looked with equanimity at the thistle and the swallow, the rat and the straw. Nothing now withstood them; nothing said no to them. Let the wind blow; let the poppy seed itself and the carnation mate with the cabbage. Let the swallow build in the drawing-room, and the thistle thrust aside the tiles, and the butterfly sun itself on the faded chintz of the arm-chairs. Let the broken glass and the china lie out on the lawn and be tangled over with grass and wild berries.

For now had come that moment, that hesitation when dawn trembles and night pauses, when if a feather alight in the scale it will be weighed down. One feather, and the house, sinking, falling, would have turned and pitched downwards to the depths of darkness. In the ruined room, picnickers would have lit their kettles; lovers sought shelter there, lying on the bare boards; and the shepherd stored his dinner on the bricks, and the tramp slept with his coat round him to ward off the cold. Then the roof would have fallen; briars and hemlocks would have blotted out path, step, and window; would have grown, unequally but lustily over the mound, until some trespasser, losing his way, could have told only by a red-hot poker among the nettles, or a scrap of china in the hemlock, that here once some one had lived; there had been a house.

If the feather had fallen, if it had tipped the scale downwards, the whole house would have plunged to the depths to lie upon the sands of oblivion. But there was a force working; something not highly conscious; something that leered, something that lurched; something not inspired to go about its work with dignified ritual or solemn chanting. Mrs. McNab groaned; Mrs. Bast creaked. They were old; they were stiff; their legs ached. They came with their brooms and pails at last; they got to work. All of a sudden, would Mrs. McNab see that the house was ready, one of the young ladies wrote: would she get this done; would she get that done; all in a hurry. They might be coming for the summer; had left everything to the last; expected to find things as they had left them. Slowly and painfully, with broom and pail, mopping, scouring, Mrs. McNab, Mrs. Bast stayed the corruption and the rot; rescued from the pool of Time that was fast closing over them now a basin, now a cupboard; fetched up from oblivion all the Waverley novels and a tea-set one morning; in the afternoon restored to sun and air a brass fender and a set of steel fire-irons. George, Mrs. Bast’s son, caught the rats, and cut the grass. They had the builders. Attended with the creaking of hinges and the screeching of bolts, the slamming and banging of damp-swollen woodwork, some rusty laborious birth seemed to be taking place, as the women, stooping, rising, groaning, singing, slapped and slammed, upstairs now  now down in the cellars. Oh, they said, the work!

They drank their tea in the bedroom sometimes, or in the study; breaking off work at mid-day with the smudge on their faces, and their old hands clasped and cramped with the broom handles. Flopped on chairs they contemplated now the magnificent conquest over taps and bath; now the more arduous, more partial triumph over long rows of books, black as ravens once, now white-stained, breeding pale mushrooms and secreting furtive spiders. Once more, as she felt the tea warm in her, the telescope fitted itself to Mrs. McNab’s eyes, and in a ring of light she saw the old gentleman, lean as a rake, wagging his head, as she came up with the washing, talking to himself, she supposed, on the lawn. He never noticed her. Some said he was dead; some said she was dead. Which was it? Mrs. Bast didn’t know for certain either. The young gentleman was dead. That she was sure. She had read his name in the papers.

There was the cook now, Mildred, Marian, some such name as that—a red-headed woman, quick-tempered like all her sort, but kind, too, if you knew the way with her. Many a laugh they had had together. She saved a plate of soup for Maggie; a bite of ham, sometimes; whatever was over. They lived well in those days. They had everything they wanted (glibly, jovially, with the tea hot in her, she unwound her ball of memories, sitting in the wicker arm-chair by the nursery fender). There was always plenty doing, people in the house, twenty staying sometimes, and washing up till long past midnight.

Mrs. Bast (she had never known them; had lived in Glasgow at that time) wondered, putting her cup down, whatever they hung that beast’s skull there for? Shot in foreign parts no doubt.

It might well be, said Mrs. McNab, wantoning on with her memories; they had friends in eastern countries; gentlemen staying there, ladies in evening dress; she had seen them once through the dining-room door all sitting at dinner. Twenty she dared say in all their jewellery, and she asked to stay help wash up, might be till after midnight.

Ah, said Mrs. Bast, they’d find it changed. She leant out of the window. She watched her son George scything the grass. They might well ask, what had been done to it? seeing how old Kennedy was supposed to have charge of it, and then his leg got so bad after he fell from the cart; and perhaps then no one for a year, or the better part of one; and then Davie Macdonald, and seeds might be sent, but who should say if they were ever planted? They’d find it changed.

She watched her son scything. He was a great one for work—one of those quiet ones. Well they must be getting along with the cupboards, she supposed. They hauled themselves up.

At last, after days of labour within, of cutting and digging without, dusters were flicked from the windows, the windows were shut to, keys were turned all over the house; the front door was banged; it was finished.

And now as if the cleaning and the scrubbing and the scything and the mowing had drowned it there rose that half-heard melody, that intermittent music which the ear half catches but lets fall; a bark, a bleat; irregular, intermittent, yet somehow related; the hum of an insect, the tremor of cut grass, dissevered yet somehow belonging; the jar of a dor beetle, the squeak of a wheel, loud, low, but mysteriously related; which the ear strains to bring together and is always on the verge of harmonising but they are never quite heard, never fully harmonised, and at last, in the evening, one after another the sounds die out, and the harmony falters, and silence falls. With the sunset sharpness was lost, and like mist rising, quiet rose, quiet spread, the wind settled; loosely the world shook itself down to sleep, darkly here without a light to it, save what came green suffused through leaves, or pale on the white flowers by the window.

[Lily Briscoe had her bag carried up to the house late one evening in September. Mr. Carmichael came by the same train.]

[]

10

Then indeed peace had come. Messages of peace breathed from the sea to the shore. Never to break its sleep any more, to lull it rather more deeply to rest and whatever the dreamers dreamt holily, dreamt wisely, to confirm—what else was it murmuring—as Lily Briscoe laid her head on the pillow in the clean still room and heard the sea. Through the open window the voice of the beauty of the world came murmuring, too softly to hear exactly what it said—but what mattered if the meaning were plain?—entreating the sleepers (the house was full again; Mrs. Beckwith was staying there, also Mr. Carmichael), if they would not actually come down to the beach itself at least to lift the blind and look out. They would see then night flowing down in purple; his head crowned; his sceptre jewelled; and how in his eyes a child might look. And if they still faltered (Lily was tired out with travelling and slept almost at once; but Mr. Carmichael read a book by candlelight), if they still said no, that it was vapour this splendour of his, and the dew had more power than he, and they preferred sleeping; gently then without complaint, or argument, the voice would sing its song. Gently the waves would break (Lily heard them in her sleep); tenderly the light fell (it seemed to come through her eyelids). And it all looked, Mr. Carmichael thought, shutting his book, falling asleep, much as it used to look years ago.

Indeed the voice might resume, as the curtains of dark wrapped themselves over the house, over Mrs. Beckwith, Mr. Carmichael, and Lily Briscoe so that they lay with several folds of blackness on their eyes, why not accept this, be content with this, acquiesce and resign? The sigh of all the seas breaking in measure round the isles soothed them; the night wrapped them; nothing broke their sleep, until, the birds beginning and the dawn weaving their thin voices in to its whiteness, a cart grinding, a dog somewhere barking, the sun lifted the curtains, broke the veil on their eyes, and Lily Briscoe stirring in her sleep clutched at her blankets as a faller clutches at the turf on the edge of a cliff. Her eyes opened wide. Here she was again, she thought, sitting bolt upright in bed. Awake.

[]

III
The Lighthouse.

1

What does it mean then, what can it all mean? Lily Briscoe asked herself, wondering whether, since she had been left alone, it behoved her to go to the kitchen to fetch another cup of coffee or wait here. What does it mean?—a catchword that was, caught up from some book, fitting her thought loosely, for she could not, this first morning with the Ramsays, contract her feelings, could only make a phrase resound to cover the blankness of her mind until these vapours had shrunk. For really, what did she feel, come back after all these years and Mrs. Ramsay dead? Nothing, nothing—nothing that she could express at all.

She had come late last night when it was all mysterious, dark. Now she was awake, at her old place at the breakfast table, but alone. It was very early too, not yet eight. There was this expedition—they were going to the Lighthouse, Mr. Ramsay, Cam, and James. They should have gone already—they had to catch the tide or something. And Cam was not ready and James was not ready and Nancy had forgotten to order the sandwiches and Mr. Ramsay had lost his temper and banged out of the room.

“What’s the use of going now?” he had stormed.

Nancy had vanished. There he was, marching up and down the terrace in a rage. One seemed to hear doors slamming and voices calling all over the house. Now Nancy burst in, and asked, looking round the room, in a queer half dazed, half desperate way, “What does one send to the Lighthouse?” as if she were forcing herself to do what she despaired of ever being able to do.

What does one send to the Lighthouse indeed! At any other time Lily could have suggested reasonably tea, tobacco, newspapers. But this morning everything seemed so extraordinarily queer that a question like Nancy’s—What does one send to the Lighthouse?—opened doors in one’s mind that went banging and swinging to and fro and made one keep asking, in a stupefied gape, What does one send? What does one do? Why is one sitting here after all?

Sitting alone (for Nancy went out again) among the clean cups at the long table she felt cut off from other people, and able only to go on watching, asking, wondering. The house, the place, the morning, all seemed strangers to her. She had no attachment here, she felt, no relations with it, anything might happen, and whatever did happen, a step outside, a voice calling (“It’s not in the cupboard; it’s on the landing,” some one cried), was a question, as if the link that usually bound things together had been cut, and they floated up here, down there, off, anyhow. How aimless it was, how chaotic, how unreal it was, she thought, looking at her empty coffee cup. Mrs. Ramsay dead; Andrew killed; Prue dead too—repeat it as she might, it roused no feeling in her. And we all get together in a house like this on a morning like this, she said, looking out of the window—it was a beautiful still day.

Suddenly Mr. Ramsay raised his head as he passed and looked straight at her, with his distraught wild gaze which was yet so penetrating, as if he saw you, for one second, for the first time, for ever; and she pretended to drink out of her empty coffee cup so as to escape him—to escape his demand on her, to put aside a moment longer that imperious need. And he shook his head at her, and strode on (“Alone” she heard him say, “Perished” she heard him say) and like everything else this strange morning the words became symbols, wrote themselves all over the grey-green walls. If only she could put them together, she felt, write them out in some sentence, then she would have got at the truth of things. Old Mr. Carmichael came padding softly in, fetched his coffee, took his cup and made off to sit in the sun. The extraordinary unreality was frightening; but it was also exciting. Going to the Lighthouse. But what does one send to the Lighthouse? Perished. Alone. The grey-green light on the wall opposite. The empty places. Such were some of the parts, but how bring them together? she asked. As if any interruption would break the frail shape she was building on the table she turned her back to the window lest Mr. Ramsay should see her. She must escape somehow, be alone somewhere. Suddenly she remembered. When she had sat there last ten years ago there had been a little sprig or leaf pattern on the table-cloth, which she had looked at in a moment of revelation. There had been a problem about a foreground of a picture. Move the tree to the middle, she had said. She had never finished that picture. It had been knocking about in her mind all these years. She would paint that picture now. Where were her paints, she wondered? Her paints, yes. She had left them in the hall last night. She would start at once. She got up quickly, before Mr. Ramsay turned.

She fetched herself a chair. She pitched her easel with her precise old maidish movements on the edge of the lawn, not too close to Mr. Carmichael, but close enough for his protection. Yes, it must have been precisely here that she had stood ten years ago. There was the wall; the hedge; the tree. The question was of some relation between those masses. She had borne it in her mind all these years. It seemed as if the solution had come to her: she knew now what she wanted to do.

But with Mr. Ramsay bearing down on her, she could do nothing. Every time he approached—he was walking up and down the terrace—ruin approached, chaos approached. She could not paint. She stooped, she turned; she took up this rag; she squeezed that tube. But all she did was to ward him off a moment. He made it impossible for her to do anything. For if she gave him the least chance, if he saw her disengaged a moment, looking his way a moment, he would be on her, saying, as he had said last night, “You find us much changed.” Last night he had got up and stopped before her, and said that. Dumb and staring though they had all sat, the six children whom they used to call after the Kings and Queens of England—the Red, the Fair, the Wicked, the Ruthless,—she felt how they raged under it. Kind old Mrs. Beckwith said something sensible. But it was a house full of unrelated passions—she had felt that all the evening. And on top of this chaos Mr. Ramsay got up, pressed her hand, and said: “You will find us much changed” and none of them had moved or had spoken; but had sat there as if they were forced to let him say it. Only James (certainly the Sullen) scowled at the lamp; and Cam screwed her handkerchief round her finger. Then he reminded them that they were going to the Lighthouse to-morrow. They must be ready, in the hall, on the stroke of half-past seven. Then, with his hand on the door, he stopped; he turned upon them. Did they not want to go? he demanded. Had they dared say No (he had some reason for wanting it) he would have flung himself tragically backwards into the bitter waters of despair. Such a gift he had for gesture. He looked like a king in exile. Doggedly James said yes. Cam stumbled more wretchedly. Yes, oh yes, they’d both be ready, they said. And it struck her, this was tragedy—not palls, dust, and the shroud; but children coerced, their spirits subdued. James was sixteen, Cam, seventeen, perhaps. She had looked round for someone who was not there, for Mrs. Ramsay, presumably. But there was only kind Mrs. Beckwith turning over her sketches under the lamp. Then, being tired, her mind still rising and falling with the sea, the taste and smell that places have after long absence possessing her, the candles wavering in her eyes, she had lost herself and gone under. It was a wonderful night, starlit; the waves sounded as they went upstairs; the moon surprised them, enormous, pale, as they passed the staircase window. She had slept at once.

She set her clean canvas firmly upon the easel, as a barrier, frail, but she hoped sufficiently substantial to ward off Mr. Ramsay and his exactingness. She did her best to look, when his back was turned, at her picture; that line there, that mass there. But it was out of the question. Let him be fifty feet away, let him not even speak to you, let him not even see you, he permeated, he prevailed, he imposed himself. He changed everything. She could not see the colour; she could not see the lines; even with his back turned to her, she could only think, But he’ll be down on me in a moment, demanding—something she felt she could not give him. She rejected one brush; she chose another. When would those children come? When would they all be off? she fidgeted. That man, she thought, her anger rising in her, never gave; that man took. She, on the other hand, would be forced to give. Mrs. Ramsay had given. Giving, giving, giving, she had died—and had left all this. Really, she was angry with Mrs. Ramsay. With the brush slightly trembling in her fingers she looked at the hedge, the step, the wall. It was all Mrs. Ramsay’s doing. She was dead. Here was Lily, at forty-four, wasting her time, unable to do a thing, standing there, playing at painting, playing at the one thing one did not play at, and it was all Mrs. Ramsay’s fault. She was dead. The step where she used to sit was empty. She was dead.

But why repeat this over and over again? Why be always trying to bring up some feeling she had not got? There was a kind of blasphemy in it. It was all dry: all withered: all spent. They ought not to have asked her; she ought not to have come. One can’t waste one’s time at forty-four, she thought. She hated playing at painting. A brush, the one dependable thing in a world of strife, ruin, chaos—that one should not play with, knowingly even: she detested it. But he made her. You shan’t touch your canvas, he seemed to say, bearing down on her, till you’ve given me what I want of you. Here he was, close upon her again, greedy, distraught. Well, thought Lily in despair, letting her right hand fall at her side, it would be simpler then to have it over. Surely she could imitate from recollection the glow, the rhapsody, the self-surrender she had seen on so many women’s faces (on Mrs. Ramsay’s, for instance) when on some occasion like this they blazed up—she could remember the look on Mrs. Ramsay’s face—into a rapture of sympathy, of delight in the reward they had, which, though the reason of it escaped her, evidently conferred on them the most supreme bliss of which human nature was capable. Here he was, stopped by her side. She would give him what she could.

[]

2

She seemed to have shrivelled slightly, he thought. She looked a little skimpy, wispy; but not unattractive. He liked her. There had been some talk of her marrying William Bankes once, but nothing had come of it. His wife had been fond of her. He had been a little out of temper too at breakfast. And then, and then—this was one of those moments when an enormous need urged him, without being conscious what it was, to approach any woman, to force them, he did not care how, his need was so great, to give him what he wanted: sympathy.

Was anybody looking after her? he said. Had she everything she wanted?

“Oh, thanks, everything,” said Lily Briscoe nervously. No; she could not do it. She ought to have floated off instantly upon some wave of sympathetic expansion: the pressure on her was tremendous. But she remained stuck. There was an awful pause. They both looked at the sea. Why, thought Mr. Ramsay, should she look at the sea when I am here? She hoped it would be calm enough for them to land at the Lighthouse, she said. The Lighthouse! The Lighthouse! What’s that got to do with it? he thought impatiently. Instantly, with the force of some primeval gust (for really he could not restrain himself any longer), there issued from him such a groan that any other woman in the whole world would have done something, said something—all except myself, thought Lily, girding at herself bitterly, who am not a woman, but a peevish, ill-tempered, dried-up old maid, presumably.

Mr. Ramsay sighed to the full. He waited. Was she not going to say anything? Did she not see what he wanted from her? Then he said he had a particular reason for wanting to go to the Lighthouse. His wife used to send the men things. There was a poor boy with a tuberculous hip, the lightkeeper’s son. He sighed profoundly. He sighed significantly. All Lily wished was that this enormous flood of grief, this insatiable hunger for sympathy, this demand that she should surrender herself up to him entirely, and even so he had sorrows enough to keep her supplied for ever, should leave her, should be diverted (she kept looking at the house, hoping for an interruption) before it swept her down in its flow.

“Such expeditions,” said Mr. Ramsay, scraping the ground with his toe, “are very painful.” Still Lily said nothing. (She is a stock, she is a stone, he said to himself.) “They are very exhausting,” he said, looking, with a sickly look that nauseated her (he was acting, she felt, this great man was dramatising himself), at his beautiful hands. It was horrible, it was indecent. Would they never come, she asked, for she could not sustain this enormous weight of sorrow, support these heavy draperies of grief (he had assumed a pose of extreme decrepitude; he even tottered a little as he stood there) a moment longer.

Still she could say nothing; the whole horizon seemed swept bare of objects to talk about; could only feel, amazedly, as Mr. Ramsay stood there, how his gaze seemed to fall dolefully over the sunny grass and discolour it, and cast over the rubicund, drowsy, entirely contented figure of Mr. Carmichael, reading a French novel on a deck-chair, a veil of crape, as if such an existence, flaunting its prosperity in a world of woe, were enough to provoke the most dismal thoughts of all. Look at him, he seemed to be saying, look at me; and indeed, all the time he was feeling, Think of me, think of me. Ah, could that bulk only be wafted alongside of them, Lily wished; had she only pitched her easel a yard or two closer to him; a man, any man, would staunch this effusion, would stop these lamentations. A woman, she had provoked this horror; a woman, she should have known how to deal with it. It was immensely to her discredit, sexually, to stand there dumb. One said—what did one say?—Oh, Mr. Ramsay! Dear Mr. Ramsay! That was what that kind old lady who sketched, Mrs. Beckwith, would have said instantly, and rightly. But no. They stood there, isolated from the rest of the world. His immense self-pity, his demand for sympathy poured and spread itself in pools at her feet, and all she did, miserable sinner that she was, was to draw her skirts a little closer round her ankles, lest she should get wet. In complete silence she stood there, grasping her paint brush.

Heaven could never be sufficiently praised! She heard sounds in the house. James and Cam must be coming. But Mr. Ramsay, as if he knew that his time ran short, exerted upon her solitary figure the immense pressure of his concentrated woe; his age; his frailty; his desolation; when suddenly, tossing his head impatiently, in his annoyance—for, after all, what woman could resist him?—he noticed that his boot-laces were untied. Remarkable boots they were too, Lily thought, looking down at them: sculptured; colossal; like everything that Mr. Ramsay wore, from his frayed tie to his half-buttoned waistcoat, his own indisputably. She could see them walking to his room of their own accord, expressive in his absence of pathos, surliness, ill-temper, charm.

“What beautiful boots!” she exclaimed. She was ashamed of herself. To praise his boots when he asked her to solace his soul; when he had shown her his bleeding hands, his lacerated heart, and asked her to pity them, then to say, cheerfully, “Ah, but what beautiful boots you wear!” deserved, she knew, and she looked up expecting to get it, in one of his sudden roars of ill-temper, complete annihilation.

Instead, Mr. Ramsay smiled. His pall, his draperies, his infirmities fell from him. Ah yes, he said, holding his foot up for her to look at, they were first-rate boots. There was only one man in England who could make boots like that. Boots are among the chief curses of mankind, he said. “Bootmakers make it their business,” he exclaimed, “to cripple and torture the human foot.” They are also the most obstinate and perverse of mankind. It had taken him the best part of his youth to get boots made as they should be made. He would have her observe (he lifted his right foot and then his left) that she had never seen boots made quite that shape before. They were made of the finest leather in the world, also. Most leather was mere brown paper and cardboard. He looked complacently at his foot, still held in the air. They had reached, she felt, a sunny island where peace dwelt, sanity reigned and the sun for ever shone, the blessed island of good boots. Her heart warmed to him. “Now let me see if you can tie a knot,” he said. He poohpoohed her feeble system. He showed her his own invention. Once you tied it, it never came undone. Three times he knotted her shoe; three times he unknotted it.

Why, at this completely inappropriate moment, when he was stooping over her shoe, should she be so tormented with sympathy for him that, as she stooped too, the blood rushed to her face, and, thinking of her callousness (she had called him a play-actor) she felt her eyes swell and tingle with tears? Thus occupied he seemed to her a figure of infinite pathos. He tied knots. He bought boots. There was no helping Mr. Ramsay on the journey he was going. But now just as she wished to say something, could have said something, perhaps, here they were—Cam and James. They appeared on the terrace. They came, lagging, side by side, a serious, melancholy couple.

But why was it like that that they came? She could not help feeling annoyed with them; they might have come more cheerfully; they might have given him what, now that they were off, she would not have the chance of giving him. For she felt a sudden emptiness; a frustration. Her feeling had come too late; there it was ready; but he no longer needed it. He had become a very distinguished, elderly man, who had no need of her whatsoever. She felt snubbed. He slung a knapsack round his shoulders. He shared out the parcels—there were a number of them, ill tied, in brown paper. He sent Cam for a cloak. He had all the appearance of a leader making ready for an expedition. Then, wheeling about, he led the way with his firm military tread, in those wonderful boots, carrying brown paper parcels, down the path, his children following him. They looked, she thought, as if fate had devoted them to some stern enterprise, and they went to it, still young enough to be drawn acquiescent in their father’s wake, obediently, but with a pallor in their eyes which made her feel that they suffered something beyond their years in silence. So they passed the edge of the lawn, and it seemed to Lily that she watched a procession go, drawn on by some stress of common feeling which made it, faltering and flagging as it was, a little company bound together and strangely impressive to her. Politely, but very distantly, Mr. Ramsay raised his hand and saluted her as they passed.

But what a face, she thought, immediately finding the sympathy which she had not been asked to give troubling her for expression. What had made it like that? Thinking, night after night, she supposed—about the reality of kitchen tables, she added, remembering the symbol which in her vagueness as to what Mr. Ramsay did think about Andrew had given her. (He had been killed by the splinter of a shell instantly, she bethought her.) The kitchen table was something visionary, austere; something bare, hard, not ornamental. There was no colour to it; it was all edges and angles; it was uncompromisingly plain. But Mr. Ramsay kept always his eyes fixed upon it, never allowed himself to be distracted or deluded, until his face became worn too and ascetic and partook of this unornamented beauty which so deeply impressed her. Then, she recalled (standing where he had left her, holding her brush), worries had fretted it—not so nobly. He must have had his doubts about that table, she supposed; whether the table was a real table; whether it was worth the time he gave to it; whether he was able after all to find it. He had had doubts, she felt, or he would have asked less of people. That was what they talked about late at night sometimes, she suspected; and then next day Mrs. Ramsay looked tired, and Lily flew into a rage with him over some absurd little thing. But now he had nobody to talk to about that table, or his boots, or his knots; and he was like a lion seeking whom he could devour, and his face had that touch of desperation, of exaggeration in it which alarmed her, and made her pull her skirts about her. And then, she recalled, there was that sudden revivification, that sudden flare (when she praised his boots), that sudden recovery of vitality and interest in ordinary human things, which too passed and changed (for he was always changing, and hid nothing) into that other final phase which was new to her and had, she owned, made herself ashamed of her own irritability, when it seemed as if he had shed worries and ambitions, and the hope of sympathy and the desire for praise, had entered some other region, was drawn on, as if by curiosity, in dumb colloquy, whether with himself or another, at the head of that little procession out of one’s range. An extraordinary face! The gate banged.

[]

3

So they’re gone, she thought, sighing with relief and disappointment. Her sympathy seemed to fly back in her face, like a bramble sprung. She felt curiously divided, as if one part of her were drawn out there—it was a still day, hazy; the Lighthouse looked this morning at an immense distance; the other had fixed itself doggedly, solidly, here on the lawn. She saw her canvas as if it had floated up and placed itself white and uncompromising directly before her. It seemed to rebuke her with its cold stare for all this hurry and agitation; this folly and waste of emotion; it drastically recalled her and spread through her mind first a peace, as her disorderly sensations (he had gone and she had been so sorry for him and she had said nothing) trooped off the field; and then, emptiness. She looked blankly at the canvas, with its uncompromising white stare; from the canvas to the garden. There was something (she stood screwing up her little Chinese eyes in her small puckered face) something she remembered in the relations of those lines cutting across, slicing down, and in the mass of the hedge with its green cave of blues and browns, which had stayed in her mind; which had tied a knot in her mind so that at odds and ends of time, involuntarily, as she walked along the Brompton Road, as she brushed her hair, she found herself painting that picture, passing her eye over it, and untying the knot in imagination. But there was all the difference in the world between this planning airily away from the canvas, and actually taking her brush and making the first mark.

She had taken the wrong brush in her agitation at Mr. Ramsay’s presence, and her easel, rammed into the earth so nervously, was at the wrong angle. And now that she had put that right, and in so doing had subdued the impertinences and irrelevances that plucked her attention and made her remember how she was such and such a person, had such and such relations to people, she took her hand and raised her brush. For a moment it stayed trembling in a painful but exciting ecstasy in the air. Where to begin?—that was the question; at what point to make the first mark? One line placed on the canvas committed her to innumerable risks, to frequent and irrevocable decisions. All that in idea seemed simple became in practice immediately complex; as the waves shape themselves symmetrically from the cliff top, but to the swimmer among them are divided by steep gulfs, and foaming crests. Still the risk must be run; the mark made.

With a curious physical sensation, as if she were urged forward and at the same time must hold herself back, she made her first quick decisive stroke. The brush descended. It flickered brown over the white canvas; it left a running mark. A second time she did it—a third time. And so pausing and so flickering, she attained a dancing rhythmical movement, as if the pauses were one part of the rhythm and the strokes another, and all were related; and so, lightly and swiftly pausing, striking, she scored her canvas with brown running nervous lines which had no sooner settled there than they enclosed (she felt it looming out at her) a space. Down in the hollow of one wave she saw the next wave towering higher and higher above her. For what could be more formidable than that space? Here she was again, she thought, stepping back to look at it, drawn out of gossip, out of living, out of community with people into the presence of this formidable ancient enemy of hers—this other thing, this truth, this reality, which suddenly laid hands on her, emerged stark at the back of appearances and commanded her attention. She was half unwilling, half reluctant. Why always be drawn out and haled away? Why not left in peace, to talk to Mr. Carmichael on the lawn? It was an exacting form of intercourse anyhow. Other worshipful objects were content with worship; men, women, God, all let one kneel prostrate; but this form, were it only the shape of a white lamp-shade looming on a wicker table, roused one to perpetual combat, challenged one to a fight in which one was bound to be worsted. Always (it was in her nature, or in her sex, she did not know which) before she exchanged the fluidity of life for the concentration of painting she had a few moments of nakedness when she seemed like an unborn soul, a soul reft of body, hesitating on some windy pinnacle and exposed without protection to all the blasts of doubt. Why then did she do it? She looked at the canvas, lightly scored with running lines. It would be hung in the servants’ bedrooms. It would be rolled up and stuffed under a sofa. What was the good of doing it then, and she heard some voice saying she couldn’t paint, saying she couldn’t create, as if she were caught up in one of those habitual currents which after a certain time forms experience in the mind, so that one repeats words without being aware any longer who originally spoke them.

Can’t paint, can’t write, she murmured monotonously, anxiously considering what her plan of attack should be. For the mass loomed before her; it protruded; she felt it pressing on her eyeballs. Then, as if some juice necessary for the lubrication of her faculties were spontaneously squirted, she began precariously dipping among the blues and umbers, moving her brush hither and thither, but it was now heavier and went slower, as if it had fallen in with some rhythm which was dictated to her (she kept looking at the hedge, at the canvas) by what she saw, so that while her hand quivered with life, this rhythm was strong enough to bear her along with it on its current. Certainly she was losing consciousness of outer things. And as she lost consciousness of outer things, and her name and her personality and her appearance, and whether Mr. Carmichael was there or not, her mind kept throwing up from its depths, scenes, and names, and sayings, and memories and ideas, like a fountain spurting over that glaring, hideously difficult white space, while she modelled it with greens and blues.

Charles Tansley used to say that, she remembered, women can’t paint, can’t write. Coming up behind her he had stood close beside her, a thing she hated, as she painted here on this very spot. “Shag tobacco”, he said, “fivepence an ounce”, parading his poverty, his principles. (But the war had drawn the sting of her femininity. Poor devils, one thought, poor devils of both sexes, getting into such messes.) He was always carrying a book about under his arm—a purple book. He “worked”. He sat, she remembered, working in a blaze of sun. At dinner he would sit right in the middle of the view. And then, she reflected, there was that scene on the beach. One must remember that. It was a windy morning. They had all gone to the beach. Mrs. Ramsay sat and wrote letters by a rock. She wrote and wrote. “Oh,” she said, looking up at last at something floating in the sea, “is it a lobster pot? Is it an upturned boat?” She was so short-sighted that she could not see, and then Charles Tansley became as nice as he could possibly be. He began playing ducks and drakes. They chose little flat black stones and sent them skipping over the waves. Every now and then Mrs. Ramsay looked up over her spectacles and laughed at them. What they said she could not remember, but only she and Charles throwing stones and getting on very well all of a sudden and Mrs. Ramsay watching them. She was highly conscious of that. Mrs. Ramsay, she thought, stepping back and screwing up her eyes. (It must have altered the design a good deal when she was sitting on the step with James. There must have been a shadow.) Mrs. Ramsay. When she thought of herself and Charles throwing ducks and drakes and of the whole scene on the beach, it seemed to depend somehow upon Mrs. Ramsay sitting under the rock, with a pad on her knee, writing letters. (She wrote innumerable letters, and sometimes the wind took them and she and Charles just saved a page from the sea.) But what a power was in the human soul! she thought. That woman sitting there, writing under the rock resolved everything into simplicity; made these angers, irritations fall off like old rags; she brought together this and that and then this, and so made out of that miserable silliness and spite (she and Charles squabbling, sparring, had been silly and spiteful) something—this scene on the beach for example, this moment of friendship and liking—which survived, after all these years, complete, so that she dipped into it to re-fashion her memory of him, and it stayed in the mind almost like a work of art.

“Like a work of art,” she repeated, looking from her canvas to the drawing-room steps and back again. She must rest for a moment. And, resting, looking from one to the other vaguely, the old question which traversed the sky of the soul perpetually, the vast, the general question which was apt to particularise itself at such moments as these, when she released faculties that had been on the strain, stood over her, paused over her, darkened over her. What is the meaning of life? That was all—a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one. This, that, and the other; herself and Charles Tansley and the breaking wave; Mrs. Ramsay bringing them together; Mrs. Ramsay saying “Life stand still here”; Mrs. Ramsay making of the moment something permanent (as in another sphere Lily herself tried to make of the moment something permanent)—this was of the nature of a revelation. In the midst of chaos there was shape; this eternal passing and flowing (she looked at the clouds going and the leaves shaking) was struck into stability. Life stand still here, Mrs. Ramsay said. “Mrs. Ramsay! Mrs. Ramsay!” she repeated. She owed this revelation to her.

All was silence. Nobody seemed yet to be stirring in the house. She looked at it there sleeping in the early sunlight with its windows green and blue with the reflected leaves. The faint thought she was thinking of Mrs. Ramsay seemed in consonance with this quiet house; this smoke; this fine early morning air. Faint and unreal, it was amazingly pure and exciting. She hoped nobody would open the window or come out of the house, but that she might be left alone to go on thinking, to go on painting. She turned to her canvas. But impelled by some curiosity, driven by the discomfort of the sympathy which she held undischarged, she walked a pace or so to the end of the lawn to see whether, down there on the beach, she could see that little company setting sail. Down there among the little boats which floated, some with their sails furled, some slowly, for it was very calm, moving away, there was one rather apart from the others. The sail was even now being hoisted. She decided that there in that very distant and entirely silent little boat Mr. Ramsay was sitting with Cam and James. Now they had got the sail up; now after a little flagging and hesitation the sails filled and, shrouded in profound silence, she watched the boat take its way with deliberation past the other boats out to sea.

[]

4

The sails flapped over their heads. The water chuckled and slapped the sides of the boat, which drowsed motionless in the sun. Now and then the sails rippled with a little breeze in them, but the ripple ran over them and ceased. The boat made no motion at all. Mr. Ramsay sat in the middle of the boat. He would be impatient in a moment, James thought, and Cam thought, looking at her father, who sat in the middle of the boat between them (James steered; Cam sat alone in the bow) with his legs tightly curled. He hated hanging about. Sure enough, after fidgeting a second or two, he said something sharp to Macalister’s boy, who got out his oars and began to row. But their father, they knew, would never be content until they were flying along. He would keep looking for a breeze, fidgeting, saying things under his breath, which Macalister and Macalister’s boy would overhear, and they would both be made horribly uncomfortable. He had made them come. He had forced them to come. In their anger they hoped that the breeze would never rise, that he might be thwarted in every possible way, since he had forced them to come against their wills.

All the way down to the beach they had lagged behind together, though he bade them “Walk up, walk up”, without speaking. Their heads were bent down, their heads were pressed down by some remorseless gale. Speak to him they could not. They must come; they must follow. They must walk behind him carrying brown paper parcels. But they vowed, in silence, as they walked, to stand by each other and carry out the great compact—to resist tyranny to the death. So there they would sit, one at one end of the boat, one at the other, in silence. They would say nothing, only look at him now and then where he sat with his legs twisted, frowning and fidgeting, and pishing and pshawing and muttering things to himself, and waiting impatiently for a breeze. And they hoped it would be calm. They hoped he would be thwarted. They hoped the whole expedition would fail, and they would have to put back, with their parcels, to the beach.

But now, when Macalister’s boy had rowed a little way out, the sails slowly swung round, the boat quickened itself, flattened itself, and shot off. Instantly, as if some great strain had been relieved, Mr. Ramsay uncurled his legs, took out his tobacco pouch, handed it with a little grunt to Macalister, and felt, they knew, for all they suffered, perfectly content. Now they would sail on for hours like this, and Mr. Ramsay would ask old Macalister a question—about the great storm last winter probably—and old Macalister would answer it, and they would puff their pipes together, and Macalister would take a tarry rope in his fingers, tying or untying some knot, and the boy would fish, and never say a word to any one. James would be forced to keep his eye all the time on the sail. For if he forgot, then the sail puckered, and shivered, and the boat slackened, and Mr. Ramsay would say sharply, “Look out! Look out!” and old Macalister would turn slowly on his seat. So they heard Mr. Ramsay asking some question about the great storm at Christmas. “She comes driving round the point,” old Macalister said, describing the great storm last Christmas, when ten ships had been driven into the bay for shelter, and he had seen “one there, one there, one there” (he pointed slowly round the bay. Mr. Ramsay followed him, turning his head). He had seen three men clinging to the mast. Then she was gone. “And at last we shoved her off,” he went on (but in their anger and their silence they only caught a word here and there, sitting at opposite ends of the boat, united by their compact to fight tyranny to the death). At last they had shoved her off, they had launched the lifeboat, and they had got her out past the point—Macalister told the story; and though they only caught a word here and there, they were conscious all the time of their father—how he leant forward, how he brought his voice into tune with Macalister’s voice; how, puffing at his pipe, and looking there and there where Macalister pointed, he relished the thought of the storm and the dark night and the fishermen striving there. He liked that men should labour and sweat on the windy beach at night, pitting muscle and brain against the waves and the wind; he liked men to work like that, and women to keep house, and sit beside sleeping children indoors, while men were drowned, out there in a storm. So James could tell, so Cam could tell (they looked at him, they looked at each other), from his toss and his vigilance and the ring in his voice, and the little tinge of Scottish accent which came into his voice, making him seem like a peasant himself, as he questioned Macalister about the eleven ships that had been driven into the bay in a storm. Three had sunk.

He looked proudly where Macalister pointed; and Cam thought, feeling proud of him without knowing quite why, had he been there he would have launched the lifeboat, he would have reached the wreck, Cam thought. He was so brave, he was so adventurous, Cam thought. But she remembered. There was the compact; to resist tyranny to the death. Their grievance weighed them down. They had been forced; they had been bidden. He had borne them down once more with his gloom and his authority, making them do his bidding, on this fine morning, come, because he wished it, carrying these parcels, to the Lighthouse; take part in those rites he went through for his own pleasure in memory of dead people, which they hated, so that they lagged after him, and all the pleasure of the day was spoilt.

Yes, the breeze was freshening. The boat was leaning, the water was sliced sharply and fell away in green cascades, in bubbles, in cataracts. Cam looked down into the foam, into the sea with all its treasure in it, and its speed hypnotised her, and the tie between her and James sagged a little. It slackened a little. She began to think, How fast it goes. Where are we going? and the movement hypnotised her, while James, with his eye fixed on the sail and on the horizon, steered grimly. But he began to think as he steered that he might escape; he might be quit of it all. They might land somewhere; and be free then. Both of them, looking at each other for a moment, had a sense of escape and exaltation, what with the speed and the change. But the breeze bred in Mr. Ramsay too the same excitement, and, as old Macalister turned to fling his line overboard, he cried aloud, “We perished,” and then again, “each alone.” And then with his usual spasm of repentance or shyness, pulled himself up, and waved his hand towards the shore.

“See the little house,” he said pointing, wishing Cam to look. She raised herself reluctantly and looked. But which was it? She could no longer make out, there on the hillside, which was their house. All looked distant and peaceful and strange. The shore seemed refined, far away, unreal. Already the little distance they had sailed had put them far from it and given it the changed look, the composed look, of something receding in which one has no longer any part. Which was their house? She could not see it.

“But I beneath a rougher sea,” Mr. Ramsay murmured. He had found the house and so seeing it, he had also seen himself there; he had seen himself walking on the terrace, alone. He was walking up and down between the urns; and he seemed to himself very old, and bowed. Sitting in the boat he bowed, he crouched himself, acting instantly his part—the part of a desolate man, widowed, bereft; and so called up before him in hosts people sympathising with him; staged for himself as he sat in the boat, a little drama; which required of him decrepitude and exhaustion and sorrow (he raised his hands and looked at the thinness of them, to confirm his dream) and then there was given him in abundance women’s sympathy, and he imagined how they would soothe him and sympathise with him, and so getting in his dream some reflection of the exquisite pleasure women’s sympathy was to him, he sighed and said gently and mournfully,

But I beneath a rougher sea

Was whelmed in deeper gulfs than he,

so that the mournful words were heard quite clearly by them all. Cam half started on her seat. It shocked her—it outraged her. The movement roused her father; and he shuddered, and broke off, exclaiming: “Look! Look!” so urgently that James also turned his head to look over his shoulder at the island. They all looked. They looked at the island.

But Cam could see nothing. She was thinking how all those paths and the lawn, thick and knotted with the lives they had lived there, were gone: were rubbed out; were past; were unreal, and now this was real; the boat and the sail with its patch; Macalister with his earrings; the noise of the waves—all this was real. Thinking this, she was murmuring to herself “We perished, each alone”, for her father’s words broke and broke again in her mind, when her father, seeing her gazing so vaguely, began to tease her. Didn’t she know the points of the compass? he asked. Didn’t she know the North from the South? Did she really think they lived right out there? And he pointed again, and showed her where their house was, there, by those trees. He wished she would try to be more accurate, he said: “Tell me—which is East, which is West?” he said, half laughing at her, half scolding her, for he could not understand the state of mind of any one, not absolutely imbecile, who did not know the points of the compass. Yet she did not know. And seeing her gazing, with her vague, now rather frightened, eyes fixed where no house was Mr. Ramsay forgot his dream; how he walked up and down between the urns on the terrace; how the arms were stretched out to him. He thought, women are always like that; the vagueness of their minds is hopeless; it was a thing he had never been able to understand; but so it was. It had been so with her—his wife. They could not keep anything clearly fixed in their minds. But he had been wrong to be angry with her; moreover, did he not rather like this vagueness in women? It was part of their extraordinary charm. I will make her smile at me, he thought. She looks frightened. She was so silent. He clutched his fingers, and determined that his voice and his face and all the quick expressive gestures which had been at his command making people pity him and praise him all these years should subdue themselves. He would make her smile at him. He would find some simple easy thing to say to her. But what? For, wrapped up in his work as he was, he forgot the sort of thing one said. There was a puppy. They had a puppy. Who was looking after the puppy to-day? he asked. Yes, thought James pitilessly, seeing his sister’s head against the sail, now she will give way. I shall be left to fight the tyrant alone. The compact would be left to him to carry out. Cam would never resist tyranny to the death, he thought grimly, watching her face, sad, sulky, yielding. And as sometimes happens when a cloud falls on a green hillside and gravity descends and there among all the surrounding hills is gloom and sorrow, and it seems as if the hills themselves must ponder the fate of the clouded, the darkened, either in pity, or maliciously rejoicing in her dismay: so Cam now felt herself overcast, as she sat there among calm, resolute people and wondered how to answer her father about the puppy; how to resist his entreaty—forgive me, care for me; while James the lawgiver, with the tablets of eternal wisdom laid open on his knee (his hand on the tiller had become symbolical to her), said, Resist him. Fight him. He said so rightly; justly. For they must fight tyranny to the death, she thought. Of all human qualities she reverenced justice most. Her brother was most god-like, her father most suppliant. And to which did she yield, she thought, sitting between them, gazing at the shore whose points were all unknown to her, and thinking how the lawn and the terrace and the house were smoothed away now and peace dwelt there.

“Jasper,” she said sullenly. He’d look after the puppy.

And what was she going to call him? her father persisted. He had had a dog when he was a little boy, called Frisk. She’ll give way, James thought, as he watched a look come upon her face, a look he remembered. They look down, he thought, at their knitting or something. Then suddenly they look up. There was a flash of blue, he remembered, and then somebody sitting with him laughed, surrendered, and he was very angry. It must have been his mother, he thought, sitting on a low chair, with his father standing over her. He began to search among the infinite series of impressions which time had laid down, leaf upon leaf, fold upon fold softly, incessantly upon his brain; among scents, sounds; voices, harsh, hollow, sweet; and lights passing, and brooms tapping; and the wash and hush of the sea, how a man had marched up and down and stopped dead, upright, over them. Meanwhile, he noticed, Cam dabbled her fingers in the water, and stared at the shore and said nothing. No, she won’t give way, he thought; she’s different, he thought. Well, if Cam would not answer him, he would not bother her, Mr. Ramsay decided, feeling in his pocket for a book. But she would answer him; she wished, passionately, to move some obstacle that lay upon her tongue and to say, Oh yes, Frisk. I’ll call him Frisk. She wanted even to say, Was that the dog that found its way over the moor alone? But try as she might, she could think of nothing to say like that, fierce and loyal to the compact, yet passing on to her father, unsuspected by James, a private token of the love she felt for him. For she thought, dabbling her hand (and now Macalister’s boy had caught a mackerel, and it lay kicking on the floor, with blood on its gills) for she thought, looking at James who kept his eyes dispassionately on the sail, or glanced now and then for a second at the horizon, you’re not exposed to it, to this pressure and division of feeling, this extraordinary temptation. Her father was feeling in his pockets; in another second, he would have found his book. For no one attracted her more; his hands were beautiful to her and his feet, and his voice, and his words, and his haste, and his temper, and his oddity, and his passion, and his saying straight out before every one, we perish, each alone, and his remoteness. (He had opened his book.) But what remained intolerable, she thought, sitting upright, and watching Macalister’s boy tug the hook out of the gills of another fish, was that crass blindness and tyranny of his which had poisoned her childhood and raised bitter storms, so that even now she woke in the night trembling with rage and remembered some command of his; some insolence: “Do this”, “Do that”, his dominance: his “Submit to me”.

So she said nothing, but looked doggedly and sadly at the shore, wrapped in its mantle of peace; as if the people there had fallen asleep, she thought; were free like smoke, were free to come and go like ghosts. They have no suffering there, she thought.

[]

5

Yes, that is their boat, Lily Briscoe decided, standing on the edge of the lawn. It was the boat with greyish-brown sails, which she saw now flatten itself upon the water and shoot off across the bay. There he sits, she thought, and the children are quite silent still. And she could not reach him either. The sympathy she had not given him weighed her down. It made it difficult for her to paint.

She had always found him difficult. She had never been able to praise him to his face, she remembered. And that reduced their relationship to something neutral, without that element of sex in it which made his manner to Minta so gallant, almost gay. He would pick a flower for her, lend her his books. But could he believe that Minta read them? She dragged them about the garden, sticking in leaves to mark the place.

“D’you remember, Mr. Carmichael?” she was inclined to ask, looking at the old man. But he had pulled his hat half over his forehead; he was asleep, or he was dreaming, or he was lying there catching words, she supposed.

“D’you remember?” she felt inclined to ask him as she passed him, thinking again of Mrs. Ramsay on the beach; the cask bobbing up and down; and the pages flying. Why, after all these years had that survived, ringed round, lit up, visible to the last detail, with all before it blank and all after it blank, for miles and miles?

“Is it a boat? Is it a cork?” she would say, Lily repeated, turning back, reluctantly again, to her canvas. Heaven be praised for it, the problem of space remained, she thought, taking up her brush again. It glared at her. The whole mass of the picture was poised upon that weight. Beautiful and bright it should be on the surface, feathery and evanescent, one colour melting into another like the colours on a butterfly’s wing; but beneath the fabric must be clamped together with bolts of iron. It was to be a thing you could ruffle with your breath; and a thing you could not dislodge with a team of horses. And she began to lay on a red, a grey, and she began to model her way into the hollow there. At the same time, she seemed to be sitting beside Mrs. Ramsay on the beach.

“Is it a boat? Is it a cask?” Mrs. Ramsay said. And she began hunting round for her spectacles. And she sat, having found them, silent, looking out to sea. And Lily, painting steadily, felt as if a door had opened, and one went in and stood gazing silently about in a high cathedral-like place, very dark, very solemn. Shouts came from a world far away. Steamers vanished in stalks of smoke on the horizon. Charles threw stones and sent them skipping.

Mrs. Ramsay sat silent. She was glad, Lily thought, to rest in silence, uncommunicative; to rest in the extreme obscurity of human relationships. Who knows what we are, what we feel? Who knows even at the moment of intimacy, This is knowledge? Aren’t things spoilt then, Mrs. Ramsay may have asked (it seemed to have happened so often, this silence by her side) by saying them? Aren’t we more expressive thus? The moment at least seemed extraordinarily fertile. She rammed a little hole in the sand and covered it up, by way of burying in it the perfection of the moment. It was like a drop of silver in which one dipped and illumined the darkness of the past.

Lily stepped back to get her canvas—so—into perspective. It was an odd road to be walking, this of painting. Out and out one went, further and further, until at last one seemed to be on a narrow plank, perfectly alone, over the sea. And as she dipped into the blue paint, she dipped too into the past there. Now Mrs. Ramsay got up, she remembered. It was time to go back to the house—time for luncheon. And they all walked up from the beach together, she walking behind with William Bankes, and there was Minta in front of them with a hole in her stocking. How that little round hole of pink heel seemed to flaunt itself before them! How William Bankes deplored it, without, so far as she could remember, saying anything about it! It meant to him the annihilation of womanhood, and dirt and disorder, and servants leaving and beds not made at mid-day—all the things he most abhorred. He had a way of shuddering and spreading his fingers out as if to cover an unsightly object, which he did now—holding his hand in front of him. And Minta walked on ahead, and presumably Paul met her and she went off with Paul in the garden.

The Rayleys, thought Lily Briscoe, squeezing her tube of green paint. She collected her impressions of the Rayleys. Their lives appeared to her in a series of scenes; one, on the staircase at dawn. Paul had come in and gone to bed early; Minta was late. There was Minta, wreathed, tinted, garish on the stairs about three o’clock in the morning. Paul came out in his pyjamas carrying a poker in case of burglars. Minta was eating a sandwich, standing half-way up by a window, in the cadaverous early morning light, and the carpet had a hole in it. But what did they say? Lily asked herself, as if by looking she could hear them. Something violent. Minta went on eating her sandwich, annoyingly, while he spoke. He spoke indignant, jealous words, abusing her, in a mutter so as not to wake the children, the two little boys. He was withered, drawn; she flamboyant, careless. For things had worked loose after the first year or so; the marriage had turned out rather badly.

And this, Lily thought, taking the green paint on her brush, this making up scenes about them, is what we call “knowing” people, “thinking” of them, “being fond” of them! Not a word of it was true; she had made it up; but it was what she knew them by all the same. She went on tunnelling her way into her picture, into the past.

Another time, Paul said he “played chess in coffee-houses”. She had built up a whole structure of imagination on that saying too. She remembered how, as he said it, she thought how he rang up the servant, and she said “Mrs. Rayley’s out, sir”, and he decided that he would not come home either. She saw him sitting in the corner of some lugubrious place where the smoke attached itself to the red plush seats, and the waitresses got to know you, playing chess with a little man who was in the tea trade and lived at Surbiton, but that was all Paul knew about him. And then Minta was out when he came home and then there was that scene on the stairs, when he got the poker in case of burglars (no doubt to frighten her too) and spoke so bitterly, saying she had ruined his life. At any rate when she went down to see them at a cottage near Rickmansworth, things were horribly strained. Paul took her down the garden to look at the Belgian hares which he bred, and Minta followed them, singing, and put her bare arm on his shoulder, lest he should tell her anything.

Minta was bored by hares, Lily thought. But Minta never gave herself away. She never said things like that about playing chess in coffee-houses. She was far too conscious, far too wary. But to go on with their story—they had got through the dangerous stage by now. She had been staying with them last summer some time and the car broke down and Minta had to hand him his tools. He sat on the road mending the car, and it was the way she gave him the tools—business-like, straightforward, friendly—that proved it was all right now. They were “in love” no longer; no, he had taken up with another woman, a serious woman, with her hair in a plait and a case in her hand (Minta had described her gratefully, almost admiringly), who went to meetings and shared Paul’s views (they had got more and more pronounced) about the taxation of land values and a capital levy. Far from breaking up the marriage, that alliance had righted it. They were excellent friends, obviously, as he sat on the road and she handed him his tools.

So that was the story of the Rayleys, Lily smiled. She imagined herself telling it to Mrs. Ramsay, who would be full of curiosity to know what had become of the Rayleys. She would feel a little triumphant, telling Mrs. Ramsay that the marriage had not been a success.

But the dead, thought Lily, encountering some obstacle in her design which made her pause and ponder, stepping back a foot or so, Oh the dead! she murmured, one pitied them, one brushed them aside, one had even a little contempt for them. They are at our mercy. Mrs. Ramsay has faded and gone, she thought. We can over-ride her wishes, improve away her limited, old-fashioned ideas. She recedes further and further from us. Mockingly she seemed to see her there at the end of the corridor of years saying, of all incongruous things, “Marry, marry!” (sitting very upright early in the morning with the birds beginning to cheep in the garden outside). And one would have to say to her, It has all gone against your wishes. They’re happy like that; I’m happy like this. Life has changed completely. At that all her being, even her beauty, became for a moment, dusty and out of date. For a moment Lily, standing there, with the sun hot on her back, summing up the Rayleys, triumphed over Mrs. Ramsay, who would never know how Paul went to coffee-houses and had a mistress; how he sat on the ground and Minta handed him his tools; how she stood here painting, had never married, not even William Bankes.

Mrs. Ramsay had planned it. Perhaps, had she lived, she would have compelled it. Already that summer he was “the kindest of men”. He was “the first scientist of his age, my husband says”. He was also “poor William—it makes me so unhappy, when I go to see him, to find nothing nice in his house—no one to arrange the flowers”. So they were sent for walks together, and she was told, with that faint touch of irony that made Mrs. Ramsay slip through one’s fingers, that she had a scientific mind; she liked flowers; she was so exact. What was this mania of hers for marriage? Lily wondered, stepping to and fro from her easel.

(Suddenly, as suddenly as a star slides in the sky, a reddish light seemed to burn in her mind, covering Paul Rayley, issuing from him. It rose like a fire sent up in token of some celebration by savages on a distant beach. She heard the roar and the crackle. The whole sea for miles round ran red and gold. Some winy smell mixed with it and intoxicated her, for she felt again her own headlong desire to throw herself off the cliff and be drowned looking for a pearl brooch on a beach. And the roar and the crackle repelled her with fear and disgust, as if while she saw its splendour and power she saw too how it fed on the treasure of the house, greedily, disgustingly, and she loathed it. But for a sight, for a glory it surpassed everything in her experience, and burnt year after year like a signal fire on a desert island at the edge of the sea, and one had only to say “in love” and instantly, as happened now, up rose Paul’s fire again. And it sank and she said to herself, laughing, “The Rayleys”; how Paul went to coffee-houses and played chess.)

She had only escaped by the skin of her teeth though, she thought. She had been looking at the table-cloth, and it had flashed upon her that she would move the tree to the middle, and need never marry anybody, and she had felt an enormous exultation. She had felt, now she could stand up to Mrs. Ramsay—a tribute to the astonishing power that Mrs. Ramsay had over one. Do this, she said, and one did it. Even her shadow at the window with James was full of authority. She remembered how William Bankes had been shocked by her neglect of the significance of mother and son. Did she not admire their beauty? he said. But William, she remembered, had listened to her with his wise child’s eyes when she explained how it was not irreverence: how a light there needed a shadow there and so on. She did not intend to disparage a subject which, they agreed, Raphael had treated divinely. She was not cynical. Quite the contrary. Thanks to his scientific mind he understood—a proof of disinterested intelligence which had pleased her and comforted her enormously. One could talk of painting then seriously to a man. Indeed, his friendship had been one of the pleasures of her life. She loved William Bankes.

They went to Hampton Court and he always left her, like the perfect gentleman he was, plenty of time to wash her hands, while he strolled by the river. That was typical of their relationship. Many things were left unsaid. Then they strolled through the courtyards, and admired, summer after summer, the proportions and the flowers, and he would tell her things, about perspective, about architecture, as they walked, and he would stop to look at a tree, or the view over the lake, and admire a child—(it was his great grief—he had no daughter) in the vague aloof way that was natural to a man who spent so much time in laboratories that the world when he came out seemed to dazzle him, so that he walked slowly, lifted his hand to screen his eyes and paused, with his head thrown back, merely to breathe the air. Then he would tell her how his housekeeper was on her holiday; he must buy a new carpet for the staircase. Perhaps she would go with him to buy a new carpet for the staircase. And once something led him to talk about the Ramsays and he had said how when he first saw her she had been wearing a grey hat; she was not more than nineteen or twenty. She was astonishingly beautiful. There he stood looking down the avenue at Hampton Court, as if he could see her there among the fountains.

She looked now at the drawing-room step. She saw, through William’s eyes, the shape of a woman, peaceful and silent, with downcast eyes. She sat musing, pondering (she was in grey that day, Lily thought). Her eyes were bent. She would never lift them. Yes, thought Lily, looking intently, I must have seen her look like that, but not in grey; nor so still, nor so young, nor so peaceful. The figure came readily enough. She was astonishingly beautiful, William said. But beauty was not everything. Beauty had this penalty—it came too readily, came too completely. It stilled life—froze it. One forgot the little agitations; the flush, the pallor, some queer distortion, some light or shadow, which made the face unrecognisable for a moment and yet added a quality one saw for ever after. It was simpler to smooth that all out under the cover of beauty. But what was the look she had, Lily wondered, when she clapped her deer-stalker’s hat on her head, or ran across the grass, or scolded Kennedy, the gardener? Who could tell her? Who could help her?

Against her will she had come to the surface, and found herself half out of the picture, looking, a little dazedly, as if at unreal things, at Mr. Carmichael. He lay on his chair with his hands clasped above his paunch not reading, or sleeping, but basking like a creature gorged with existence. His book had fallen on to the grass.

She wanted to go straight up to him and say, “Mr. Carmichael!” Then he would look up benevolently as always, from his smoky vague green eyes. But one only woke people if one knew what one wanted to say to them. And she wanted to say not one thing, but everything. Little words that broke up the thought and dismembered it said nothing. “About life, about death; about Mrs. Ramsay”—no, she thought, one could say nothing to nobody. The urgency of the moment always missed its mark. Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too low. Then one gave it up; then the idea sunk back again; then one became like most middle-aged people, cautious, furtive, with wrinkles between the eyes and a look of perpetual apprehension. For how could one express in words these emotions of the body? express that emptiness there? (She was looking at the drawing-room steps; they looked extraordinarily empty). It was one’s body feeling, not one’s mind. The physical sensations that went with the bare look of the steps had become suddenly extremely unpleasant. To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have—to want and want—how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again! Oh Mrs. Ramsay! she called out silently, to that essence which sat by the boat, that abstract one made of her, that woman in grey, as if to abuse her for having gone, and then having gone, come back again. It had seemed so safe, thinking of her. Ghost, air, nothingness, a thing you could play with easily and safely at any time of day or night, she had been that, and then suddenly she put her hand out and wrung the heart thus. Suddenly, the empty drawing-room steps, the frill of the chair inside, the puppy tumbling on the terrace, the whole wave and whisper of the garden became like curves and arabesques flourishing round a centre of complete emptiness.

“What does it mean? How do you explain it all?” she wanted to say, turning to Mr. Carmichael again. For the whole world seemed to have dissolved in this early morning hour into a pool of thought, a deep basin of reality, and one could almost fancy that had Mr. Carmichael spoken, a little tear would have rent the surface of the pool. And then? Something would emerge. A hand would be shoved up, a blade would be flashed. It was nonsense of course.

A curious notion came to her that he did after all hear the things she could not say. He was an inscrutable old man, with the yellow stain on his beard, and his poetry, and his puzzles, sailing serenely through a world which satisfied all his wants, so that she thought he had only to put down his hand where he lay on the lawn to fish up anything he wanted. She looked at her picture. That would have been his answer, presumably—how “you” and “I” and “she” pass and vanish; nothing stays; all changes; but not words, not paint. Yet it would be hung in the attics, she thought; it would be rolled up and flung under a sofa; yet even so, even of a picture like that, it was true. One might say, even of this scrawl, not of that actual picture, perhaps, but of what it attempted, that it “remained for ever”, she was going to say, or, for the words spoken sounded even to herself, too boastful, to hint, wordlessly; when, looking at the picture, she was surprised to find that she could not see it. Her eyes were full of a hot liquid (she did not think of tears at first) which, without disturbing the firmness of her lips, made the air thick, rolled down her cheeks. She had perfect control of herself—Oh yes!—in every other way. Was she crying then for Mrs. Ramsay, without being aware of any unhappiness? She addressed old Mr. Carmichael again. What was it then? What did it mean? Could things thrust their hands up and grip one; could the blade cut; the fist grasp? Was there no safety? No learning by heart of the ways of the world? No guide, no shelter, but all was miracle, and leaping from the pinnacle of a tower into the air? Could it be, even for elderly people, that this was life?—startling, unexpected, unknown? For one moment she felt that if they both got up, here, now on the lawn, and demanded an explanation, why was it so short, why was it so inexplicable, said it with violence, as two fully equipped human beings from whom nothing should be hid might speak, then, beauty would roll itself up; the space would fill; those empty flourishes would form into shape; if they shouted loud enough Mrs. Ramsay would return. “Mrs. Ramsay!” she said aloud, “Mrs. Ramsay!” The tears ran down her face.

[]

6

[Macalister’s boy took one of the fish and cut a square out of its side to bait his hook with. The mutilated body (it was alive still) was thrown back into the sea.]

[]

7

“Mrs. Ramsay!” Lily cried, “Mrs. Ramsay!” But nothing happened. The pain increased. That anguish could reduce one to such a pitch of imbecility, she thought! Anyhow the old man had not heard her. He remained benignant, calm—if one chose to think it, sublime. Heaven be praised, no one had heard her cry that ignominious cry, stop pain, stop! She had not obviously taken leave of her senses. No one had seen her step off her strip of board into the waters of annihilation. She remained a skimpy old maid, holding a paint-brush on the lawn.

And now slowly the pain of the want, and the bitter anger (to be called back, just as she thought she would never feel sorrow for Mrs. Ramsay again. Had she missed her among the coffee cups at breakfast? not in the least) lessened; and of their anguish left, as antidote, a relief that was balm in itself, and also, but more mysteriously, a sense of some one there, of Mrs. Ramsay, relieved for a moment of the weight that the world had put on her, staying lightly by her side and then (for this was Mrs. Ramsay in all her beauty) raising to her forehead a wreath of white flowers with which she went. Lily squeezed her tubes again. She attacked that problem of the hedge. It was strange how clearly she saw her, stepping with her usual quickness across fields among whose folds, purplish and soft, among whose flowers, hyacinths or lilies, she vanished. It was some trick of the painter’s eye. For days after she had heard of her death she had seen her thus, putting her wreath to her forehead and going unquestioningly with her companion, a shadow, across the fields. The sight, the phrase, had its power to console. Wherever she happened to be, painting, here, in the country or in London, the vision would come to her, and her eyes, half closing, sought something to base her vision on. She looked down the railway carriage, the omnibus; took a line from shoulder or cheek; looked at the windows opposite; at Piccadilly, lamp-strung in the evening. All had been part of the fields of death. But always something—it might be a face, a voice, a paper boy crying Standard, News—thrust through, snubbed her, waked her, required and got in the end an effort of attention, so that the vision must be perpetually remade. Now again, moved as she was by some instinctive need of distance and blue, she looked at the bay beneath her, making hillocks of the blue bars of the waves, and stony fields of the purpler spaces. Again she was roused as usual by something incongruous. There was a brown spot in the middle of the bay. It was a boat. Yes, she realised that after a second. But whose boat? Mr. Ramsay’s boat, she replied. Mr. Ramsay; the man who had marched past her, with his hand raised, aloof, at the head of a procession, in his beautiful boots, asking her for sympathy, which she had refused. The boat was now half way across the bay.

So fine was the morning except for a streak of wind here and there that the sea and sky looked all one fabric, as if sails were stuck high up in the sky, or the clouds had dropped down into the sea. A steamer far out at sea had drawn in the air a great scroll of smoke which stayed there curving and circling decoratively, as if the air were a fine gauze which held things and kept them softly in its mesh, only gently swaying them this way and that. And as happens sometimes when the weather is very fine, the cliffs looked as if they were conscious of the ships, and the ships looked as if they were conscious of the cliffs, as if they signalled to each other some secret message of their own. For sometimes quite close to the shore, the Lighthouse looked this morning in the haze an enormous distance away.

“Where are they now?” Lily thought, looking out to sea. Where was he, that very old man who had gone past her silently, holding a brown paper parcel under his arm? The boat was in the middle of the bay.

[]

8

They don’t feel a thing there, Cam thought, looking at the shore, which, rising and falling, became steadily more distant and more peaceful. Her hand cut a trail in the sea, as her mind made the green swirls and streaks into patterns and, numbed and shrouded, wandered in imagination in that underworld of waters where the pearls stuck in clusters to white sprays, where in the green light a change came over one’s entire mind and one’s body shone half transparent enveloped in a green cloak.

Then the eddy slackened round her hand. The rush of the water ceased; the world became full of little creaking and squeaking sounds. One heard the waves breaking and flapping against the side of the boat as if they were anchored in harbour. Everything became very close to one. For the sail, upon which James had his eyes fixed until it had become to him like a person whom he knew, sagged entirely; there they came to a stop, flapping about waiting for a breeze, in the hot sun, miles from shore, miles from the Lighthouse. Everything in the whole world seemed to stand still. The Lighthouse became immovable, and the line of the distant shore became fixed. The sun grew hotter and everybody seemed to come very close together and to feel each other’s presence, which they had almost forgotten. Macalister’s fishing line went plumb down into the sea. But Mr. Ramsay went on reading with his legs curled under him.

He was reading a little shiny book with covers mottled like a plover’s egg. Now and again, as they hung about in that horrid calm, he turned a page. And James felt that each page was turned with a peculiar gesture aimed at him: now assertively, now commandingly; now with the intention of making people pity him; and all the time, as his father read and turned one after another of those little pages, James kept dreading the moment when he would look up and speak sharply to him about something or other. Why were they lagging about here? he would demand, or something quite unreasonable like that. And if he does, James thought, then I shall take a knife and strike him to the heart.

He had always kept this old symbol of taking a knife and striking his father to the heart. Only now, as he grew older, and sat staring at his father in an impotent rage, it was not him, that old man reading, whom he wanted to kill, but it was the thing that descended on him—without his knowing it perhaps: that fierce sudden black-winged harpy, with its talons and its beak all cold and hard, that struck and struck at you (he could feel the beak on his bare legs, where it had struck when he was a child) and then made off, and there he was again, an old man, very sad, reading his book. That he would kill, that he would strike to the heart. Whatever he did—(and he might do anything, he felt, looking at the Lighthouse and the distant shore) whether he was in a business, in a bank, a barrister, a man at the head of some enterprise, that he would fight, that he would track down and stamp out—tyranny, despotism, he called it—making people do what they did not want to do, cutting off their right to speak. How could any of them say, But I won’t, when he said, Come to the Lighthouse. Do this. Fetch me that. The black wings spread, and the hard beak tore. And then next moment, there he sat reading his book; and he might look up—one never knew—quite reasonably. He might talk to the Macalisters. He might be pressing a sovereign into some frozen old woman’s hand in the street, James thought; he might be shouting out at some fisherman’s sports; he might be waving his arms in the air with excitement. Or he might sit at the head of the table dead silent from one end of dinner to the other. Yes, thought James, while the boat slapped and dawdled there in the hot sun; there was a waste of snow and rock very lonely and austere; and there he had come to feel, quite often lately, when his father said something which surprised the others, were two pairs of footprints only; his own and his father’s. They alone knew each other. What then was this terror, this hatred? Turning back among the many leaves which the past had folded in him, peering into the heart of that forest where light and shade so chequer each other that all shape is distorted, and one blunders, now with the sun in one’s eyes, now with a dark shadow, he sought an image to cool and detach and round off his feeling in a concrete shape. Suppose then that as a child sitting helpless in a perambulator, or on someone’s knee, he had seen a waggon crush ignorantly and innocently, someone’s foot? Suppose he had seen the foot first, in the grass, smooth, and whole; then the wheel; and the same foot, purple, crushed. But the wheel was innocent. So now, when his father came striding down the passage knocking them up early in the morning to go to the Lighthouse down it came over his foot, over Cam’s foot, over anybody’s foot. One sat and watched it.

But whose foot was he thinking of, and in what garden did all this happen? For one had settings for these scenes; trees that grew there; flowers; a certain light; a few figures. Everything tended to set itself in a garden where there was none of this gloom and none of this throwing of hands about; people spoke in an ordinary tone of voice. They went in and out all day long. There was an old woman gossiping in the kitchen; and the blinds were sucked in and out by the breeze; all was blowing, all was growing; and over all those plates and bowls and tall brandishing red and yellow flowers a very thin yellow veil would be drawn, like a vine leaf, at night. Things became stiller and darker at night. But the leaf-like veil was so fine that lights lifted it, voices crinkled it; he could see through it a figure stooping, hear, coming close, going away, some dress rustling, some chain tinkling.

It was in this world that the wheel went over the person’s foot. Something, he remembered, stayed and darkened over him; would not move; something flourished up in the air, something arid and sharp descended even there, like a blade, a scimitar, smiting through the leaves and flowers even of that happy world and making them shrivel and fall.

“It will rain,” he remembered his father saying. “You won’t be able to go to the Lighthouse.”

The Lighthouse was then a silvery, misty-looking tower with a yellow eye that opened suddenly and softly in the evening. Now—

James looked at the Lighthouse. He could see the white-washed rocks; the tower, stark and straight; he could see that it was barred with black and white; he could see windows in it; he could even see washing spread on the rocks to dry. So that was the Lighthouse, was it?

No, the other was also the Lighthouse. For nothing was simply one thing. The other was the Lighthouse too. It was sometimes hardly to be seen across the bay. In the evening one looked up and saw the eye opening and shutting and the light seemed to reach them in that airy sunny garden where they sat.

But he pulled himself up. Whenever he said “they” or “a person”, and then began hearing the rustle of some one coming, the tinkle of some one going, he became extremely sensitive to the presence of whoever might be in the room. It was his father now. The strain became acute. For in one moment if there was no breeze, his father would slap the covers of his book together, and say: “What’s happening now? What are we dawdling about here for, eh?” as, once before he had brought his blade down among them on the terrace and she had gone stiff all over, and if there had been an axe handy, a knife, or anything with a sharp point he would have seized it and struck his father through the heart. His mother had gone stiff all over, and then, her arm slackening, so that he felt she listened to him no longer, she had risen somehow and gone away and left him there, impotent, ridiculous, sitting on the floor grasping a pair of scissors.

Not a breath of wind blew. The water chuckled and gurgled in the bottom of the boat where three or four mackerel beat their tails up and down in a pool of water not deep enough to cover them. At any moment Mr. Ramsay (James scarcely dared look at him) might rouse himself, shut his book, and say something sharp; but for the moment he was reading, so that James stealthily, as if he were stealing downstairs on bare feet, afraid of waking a watch-dog by a creaking board, went on thinking what was she like, where did she go that day? He began following her from room to room and at last they came to a room where in a blue light, as if the reflection came from many china dishes, she talked to somebody; he listened to her talking. She talked to a servant, saying simply whatever came into her head. “We shall need a big dish to-night. Where is it—the blue dish?” She alone spoke the truth; to her alone could he speak it. That was the source of her everlasting attraction for him, perhaps; she was a person to whom one could say what came into one’s head. But all the time he thought of her, he was conscious of his father following his thought, shadowing it, making it shiver and falter.

At last he ceased to think; there he sat with his hand on the tiller in the sun, staring at the Lighthouse, powerless to move, powerless to flick off these grains of misery which settled on his mind one after another. A rope seemed to bind him there, and his father had knotted it and he could only escape by taking a knife and plunging it…. But at that moment the sail swung slowly round, filled slowly out, the boat seemed to shake herself, and then to move off half conscious in her sleep, and then she woke and shot through the waves. The relief was extraordinary. They all seemed to fall away from each other again and to be at their ease and the fishing-lines slanted taut across the side of the boat. But his father did not rouse himself. He only raised his right hand mysteriously high in the air, and let it fall upon his knee again as if he were conducting some secret symphony.

[]

9

[The sea without a stain on it, thought Lily Briscoe, still standing and looking out over the bay. The sea is stretched like silk across the bay. Distance had an extraordinary power; they had been swallowed up in it, she felt, they were gone for ever, they had become part of the nature of things. It was so calm; it was so quiet. The steamer itself had vanished, but the great scroll of smoke still hung in the air and drooped like a flag mournfully in valediction.]

[]

10

It was like that then, the island, thought Cam, once more drawing her fingers through the waves. She had never seen it from out at sea before. It lay like that on the sea, did it, with a dent in the middle and two sharp crags, and the sea swept in there, and spread away for miles and miles on either side of the island. It was very small; shaped something like a leaf stood on end. So we took a little boat, she thought, beginning to tell herself a story of adventure about escaping from a sinking ship. But with the sea streaming through her fingers, a spray of seaweed vanishing behind them, she did not want to tell herself seriously a story; it was the sense of adventure and escape that she wanted, for she was thinking, as the boat sailed on, how her father’s anger about the points of the compass, James’s obstinacy about the compact, and her own anguish, all had slipped, all had passed, all had streamed away. What then came next? Where were they going? From her hand, ice cold, held deep in the sea, there spurted up a fountain of joy at the change, at the escape, at the adventure (that she should be alive, that she should be there). And the drops falling from this sudden and unthinking fountain of joy fell here and there on the dark, the slumbrous shapes in her mind; shapes of a world not realised but turning in their darkness, catching here and there, a spark of light; Greece, Rome, Constantinople. Small as it was, and shaped something like a leaf stood on end with the gold sprinkled waters flowing in and about it, it had, she supposed, a place in the universe—even that little island? The old gentlemen in the study she thought could have told her. Sometimes she strayed in from the garden purposely to catch them at it. There they were (it might be Mr. Carmichael or Mr. Bankes, very old, very stiff) sitting opposite each other in their low arm-chairs. They were crackling in front of them the pages of The Times, when she came in from the garden, all in a muddle, about something some one had said about Christ; a mammoth had been dug up in a London street; what was the great Napoleon like? Then they took all this with their clean hands (they wore grey coloured clothes; they smelt of heather) and they brushed the scraps together, turning the paper, crossing their knees, and said something now and then very brief. In a kind of trance she would take a book from the shelf and stand there, watching her father write, so equally, so neatly from one side of the page to another, with a little cough now and then, or something said briefly to the other old gentleman opposite. And she thought, standing there with her book open, here one could let whatever one thought expand like a leaf in water; and if it did well here, among the old gentlemen smoking and The Times crackling, then it was right. And watching her father as he wrote in his study, she thought (now sitting in the boat) he was most lovable, he was most wise; he was not vain nor a tyrant. Indeed, if he saw she was there, reading a book, he would ask her, as gently as any one could, Was there nothing he could give her?

Lest this should be wrong, she looked at him reading the little book with the shiny cover mottled like a plover’s egg. No; it was right. Look at him now, she wanted to say aloud to James. (But James had his eye on the sail.) He is a sarcastic brute, James would say. He brings the talk round to himself and his books, James would say. He is intolerably egotistical. Worst of all, he is a tyrant. But look! she said, looking at him. Look at him now. She looked at him reading the little book with his legs curled; the little book whose yellowish pages she knew, without knowing what was written on them. It was small; it was closely printed; on the fly-leaf, she knew, he had written that he had spent fifteen francs on dinner; the wine had been so much; he had given so much to the waiter; all was added up neatly at the bottom of the page. But what might be written in the book which had rounded its edges off in his pocket, she did not know. What he thought they none of them knew. But he was absorbed in it, so that when he looked up, as he did now for an instant, it was not to see anything; it was to pin down some thought more exactly. That done, his mind flew back again and he plunged into his reading. He read, she thought, as if he were guiding something, or wheedling a large flock of sheep, or pushing his way up and up a single narrow path; and sometimes he went fast and straight, and broke his way through the thicket, and sometimes it seemed a branch struck at him, a bramble blinded him, but he was not going to let himself be beaten by that; on he went, tossing over page after page. And she went on telling herself a story about escaping from a sinking ship, for she was safe, while he sat there; safe, as she felt herself when she crept in from the garden, and took a book down, and the old gentleman, lowering the paper suddenly, said something very brief over the top of it about the character of Napoleon.

She gazed back over the sea, at the island. But the leaf was losing its sharpness. It was very small; it was very distant. The sea was more important now than the shore. Waves were all round them, tossing and sinking, with a log wallowing down one wave; a gull riding on another. About here, she thought, dabbling her fingers in the water, a ship had sunk, and she murmured, dreamily, half asleep, how we perished, each alone.

[]

11

So much depends then, thought Lily Briscoe, looking at the sea which had scarcely a stain on it, which was so soft that the sails and the clouds seemed set in its blue, so much depends, she thought, upon distance: whether people are near us or far from us; for her feeling for Mr. Ramsay changed as he sailed further and further across the bay. It seemed to be elongated, stretched out; he seemed to become more and more remote. He and his children seemed to be swallowed up in that blue, that distance; but here, on the lawn, close at hand, Mr. Carmichael suddenly grunted. She laughed. He clawed his book up from the grass. He settled into his chair again puffing and blowing like some sea monster. That was different altogether, because he was so near. And now again all was quiet. They must be out of bed by this time, she supposed, looking at the house, but nothing appeared there. But then, she remembered, they had always made off directly a meal was over, on business of their own. It was all in keeping with this silence, this emptiness, and the unreality of the early morning hour. It was a way things had sometimes, she thought, lingering for a moment and looking at the long glittering windows and the plume of blue smoke: they became unreal. So coming back from a journey, or after an illness, before habits had spun themselves across the surface, one felt that same unreality, which was so startling; felt something emerge. Life was most vivid then. One could be at one’s ease. Mercifully one need not say, very briskly, crossing the lawn to greet old Mrs. Beckwith, who would be coming out to find a corner to sit in, “Oh good-morning, Mrs. Beckwith! What a lovely day! Are you going to be so bold as to sit in the sun? Jasper’s hidden the chairs. Do let me find you one!” and all the rest of the usual chatter. One need not speak at all. One glided, one shook one’s sails (there was a good deal of movement in the bay, boats were starting off) between things, beyond things. Empty it was not, but full to the brim. She seemed to be standing up to the lips in some substance, to move and float and sink in it, yes, for these waters were unfathomably deep. Into them had spilled so many lives. The Ramsays’; the children’s; and all sorts of waifs and strays of things besides. A washerwoman with her basket; a rook; a red-hot poker; the purples and grey-greens of flowers: some common feeling which held the whole together.

It was some such feeling of completeness perhaps which, ten years ago, standing almost where she stood now, had made her say that she must be in love with the place. Love had a thousand shapes. There might be lovers whose gift it was to choose out the elements of things and place them together and so, giving them a wholeness not theirs in life, make of some scene, or meeting of people (all now gone and separate), one of those globed compacted things over which thought lingers, and love plays.

Her eyes rested on the brown speck of Mr. Ramsay’s sailing boat. They would be at the Lighthouse by lunch time she supposed. But the wind had freshened, and, as the sky changed slightly and the sea changed slightly and the boats altered their positions, the view, which a moment before had seemed miraculously fixed, was now unsatisfactory. The wind had blown the trail of smoke about; there was something displeasing about the placing of the ships.

The disproportion there seemed to upset some harmony in her own mind. She felt an obscure distress. It was confirmed when she turned to her picture. She had been wasting her morning. For whatever reason she could not achieve that razor edge of balance between two opposite forces; Mr. Ramsay and the picture; which was necessary. There was something perhaps wrong with the design? Was it, she wondered, that the line of the wall wanted breaking, was it that the mass of the trees was too heavy? She smiled ironically; for had she not thought, when she began, that she had solved her problem?

What was the problem then? She must try to get hold of something that evaded her. It evaded her when she thought of Mrs. Ramsay; it evaded her now when she thought of her picture. Phrases came. Visions came. Beautiful pictures. Beautiful phrases. But what she wished to get hold of was that very jar on the nerves, the thing itself before it has been made anything. Get that and start afresh; get that and start afresh; she said desperately, pitching herself firmly again before her easel. It was a miserable machine, an inefficient machine, she thought, the human apparatus for painting or for feeling; it always broke down at the critical moment; heroically, one must force it on. She stared, frowning. There was the hedge, sure enough. But one got nothing by soliciting urgently. One got only a glare in the eye from looking at the line of the wall, or from thinking—she wore a grey hat. She was astonishingly beautiful. Let it come, she thought, if it will come. For there are moments when one can neither think nor feel. And if one can neither think nor feel, she thought, where is one?

Here on the grass, on the ground, she thought, sitting down, and examining with her brush a little colony of plantains. For the lawn was very rough. Here sitting on the world, she thought, for she could not shake herself free from the sense that everything this morning was happening for the first time, perhaps for the last time, as a traveller, even though he is half asleep, knows, looking out of the train window, that he must look now, for he will never see that town, or that mule-cart, or that woman at work in the fields, again. The lawn was the world; they were up here together, on this exalted station, she thought, looking at old Mr. Carmichael, who seemed (though they had not said a word all this time) to share her thoughts. And she would never see him again perhaps. He was growing old. Also, she remembered, smiling at the slipper that dangled from his foot, he was growing famous. People said that his poetry was “so beautiful.” They went and published things he had written forty years ago. There was a famous man now called Carmichael, she smiled, thinking how many shapes one person might wear, how he was that in the newspapers, but here the same as he had always been. He looked the same—greyer, rather. Yes, he looked the same, but somebody had said, she recalled, that when he had heard of Andrew Ramsay’s death (he was killed in a second by a shell; he should have been a great mathematician) Mr. Carmichael had “lost all interest in life.” What did it mean—that? she wondered. Had he marched through Trafalgar Square grasping a big stick? Had he turned pages over and over, without reading them, sitting in his room in St. John’s Wood alone? She did not know what he had done, when he heard that Andrew was killed, but she felt it in him all the same. They only mumbled at each other on staircases; they looked up at the sky and said it will be fine or it won’t be fine. But this was one way of knowing people, she thought: to know the outline, not the detail, to sit in one’s garden and look at the slopes of a hill running purple down into the distant heather. She knew him in that way. She knew that he had changed somehow. She had never read a line of his poetry. She thought that she knew how it went though, slowly and sonorously. It was seasoned and mellow. It was about the desert and the camel. It was about the palm tree and the sunset. It was extremely impersonal; it said something about death; it said very little about love. There was an aloofness about him. He wanted very little of other people. Had he not always lurched rather awkwardly past the drawing-room window with some newspaper under his arm, trying to avoid Mrs. Ramsay whom for some reason he did not much like? On that account, of course, she would always try to make him stop. He would bow to her. He would halt unwillingly and bow profoundly. Annoyed that he did not want anything of her, Mrs. Ramsay would ask him (Lily could hear her) wouldn’t he like a coat, a rug, a newspaper? No, he wanted nothing. (Here he bowed.) There was some quality in her which he did not much like. It was perhaps her masterfulness, her positiveness, something matter-of-fact in her. She was so direct.

(A noise drew her attention to the drawing-room window—the squeak of a hinge. The light breeze was toying with the window.)

There must have been people who disliked her very much, Lily thought (Yes; she realised that the drawing-room step was empty, but it had no effect on her whatever. She did not want Mrs. Ramsay now).—People who thought her too sure, too drastic. Also her beauty offended people probably. How monotonous, they would say, and the same always! They preferred another type—the dark, the vivacious. Then she was weak with her husband. She let him make those scenes. Then she was reserved. Nobody knew exactly what had happened to her. And (to go back to Mr. Carmichael and his dislike) one could not imagine Mrs. Ramsay standing painting, lying reading, a whole morning on the lawn. It was unthinkable. Without saying a word, the only token of her errand a basket on her arm, she went off to the town, to the poor, to sit in some stuffy little bedroom. Often and often Lily had seen her go silently in the midst of some game, some discussion, with her basket on her arm, very upright. She had noted her return. She had thought, half laughing (she was so methodical with the tea cups) half moved (her beauty took one’s breath away), eyes that are closing in pain have looked on you. You have been with them there.

And then Mrs. Ramsay would be annoyed because somebody was late, or the butter not fresh, or the teapot chipped. And all the time she was saying that the butter was not fresh one would be thinking of Greek temples, and how beauty had been with them there. She never talked of it—she went, punctually, directly. It was her instinct to go, an instinct like the swallows for the south, the artichokes for the sun, turning her infallibly to the human race, making her nest in its heart. And this, like all instincts, was a little distressing to people who did not share it; to Mr. Carmichael perhaps, to herself certainly. Some notion was in both of them about the ineffectiveness of action, the supremacy of thought. Her going was a reproach to them, gave a different twist to the world, so that they were led to protest, seeing their own prepossessions disappear, and clutch at them vanishing. Charles Tansley did that too: it was part of the reason why one disliked him. He upset the proportions of one’s world. And what had happened to him, she wondered, idly stirring the plantains with her brush. He had got his fellowship. He had married; he lived at Golder’s Green.

She had gone one day into a Hall and heard him speaking during the war. He was denouncing something: he was condemning somebody. He was preaching brotherly love. And all she felt was how could he love his kind who did not know one picture from another, who had stood behind her smoking shag (“fivepence an ounce, Miss Briscoe”) and making it his business to tell her women can’t write, women can’t paint, not so much that he believed it, as that for some odd reason he wished it? There he was, lean and red and raucous, preaching love from a platform (there were ants crawling about among the plantains which she disturbed with her brush—red, energetic ants, rather like Charles Tansley). She had looked at him ironically from her seat in the half-empty hall, pumping love into that chilly space, and suddenly, there was the old cask or whatever it was bobbing up and down among the waves and Mrs. Ramsay looking for her spectacle case among the pebbles. “Oh dear! What a nuisance! Lost again. Don’t bother, Mr. Tansley. I lose thousands every summer,” at which he pressed his chin back against his collar, as if afraid to sanction such exaggeration, but could stand it in her whom he liked, and smiled very charmingly. He must have confided in her on one of those long expeditions when people got separated and walked back alone. He was educating his little sister, Mrs. Ramsay had told her. It was immensely to his credit. Her own idea of him was grotesque, Lily knew well, stirring the plantains with her brush. Half one’s notions of other people were, after all, grotesque. They served private purposes of one’s own. He did for her instead of a whipping-boy. She found herself flagellating his lean flanks when she was out of temper. If she wanted to be serious about him she had to help herself to Mrs. Ramsay’s sayings, to look at him through her eyes.

She raised a little mountain for the ants to climb over. She reduced them to a frenzy of indecision by this interference in their cosmogony. Some ran this way, others that.

One wanted fifty pairs of eyes to see with, she reflected. Fifty pairs of eyes were not enough to get round that one woman with, she thought. Among them, must be one that was stone blind to her beauty. One wanted most some secret sense, fine as air, with which to steal through keyholes and surround her where she sat knitting, talking, sitting silent in the window alone; which took to itself and treasured up like the air which held the smoke of the steamer, her thoughts, her imaginations, her desires. What did the hedge mean to her, what did the garden mean to her, what did it mean to her when a wave broke? (Lily looked up, as she had seen Mrs. Ramsay look up; she too heard a wave falling on the beach.) And then what stirred and trembled in her mind when the children cried, “How’s that? How’s that?” cricketing? She would stop knitting for a second. She would look intent. Then she would lapse again, and suddenly Mr. Ramsay stopped dead in his pacing in front of her, and some curious shock passed through her and seemed to rock her in profound agitation on its breast when stopping there he stood over her, and looked down at her. Lily could see him.

He stretched out his hand and raised her from her chair. It seemed somehow as if he had done it before; as if he had once bent in the same way and raised her from a boat which, lying a few inches off some island, had required that the ladies should thus be helped on shore by the gentlemen. An old-fashioned scene that was, which required, very nearly, crinolines and peg-top trousers. Letting herself be helped by him, Mrs. Ramsay had thought (Lily supposed) the time has come now; Yes, she would say it now. Yes, she would marry him. And she stepped slowly, quietly on shore. Probably she said one word only, letting her hand rest still in his. I will marry you, she might have said, with her hand in his; but no more. Time after time the same thrill had passed between them—obviously it had, Lily thought, smoothing a way for her ants. She was not inventing; she was only trying to smooth out something she had been given years ago folded up; something she had seen. For in the rough and tumble of daily life, with all those children about, all those visitors, one had constantly a sense of repetition—of one thing falling where another had fallen, and so setting up an echo which chimed in the air and made it full of vibrations.

But it would be a mistake, she thought, thinking how they walked off together, she in her green shawl, he with his tie flying, arm in arm, past the greenhouse, to simplify their relationship. It was no monotony of bliss—she with her impulses and quicknesses; he with his shudders and glooms. Oh no. The bedroom door would slam violently early in the morning. He would start from the table in a temper. He would whizz his plate through the window. Then all through the house there would be a sense of doors slamming and blinds fluttering as if a gusty wind were blowing and people scudded about trying in a hasty way to fasten hatches and make things shipshape. She had met Paul Rayley like that one day on the stairs. They had laughed and laughed, like a couple of children, all because Mr. Ramsay, finding an earwig in his milk at breakfast had sent the whole thing flying through the air on to the terrace outside. “An earwig,” Prue murmured, awestruck, “in his milk.” Other people might find centipedes. But he had built round him such a fence of sanctity, and occupied the space with such a demeanour of majesty that an earwig in his milk was a monster.

But it tired Mrs. Ramsay, it cowed her a little—the plates whizzing and the doors slamming. And there would fall between them sometimes long rigid silences, when, in a state of mind which annoyed Lily in her, half plaintive, half resentful, she seemed unable to surmount the tempest calmly, or to laugh as they laughed, but in her weariness perhaps concealed something. She brooded and sat silent. After a time he would hang stealthily about the places where she was—roaming under the window where she sat writing letters or talking, for she would take care to be busy when he passed, and evade him, and pretend not to see him. Then he would turn smooth as silk, affable, urbane, and try to win her so. Still she would hold off, and now she would assert for a brief season some of those prides and airs the due of her beauty which she was generally utterly without; would turn her head; would look so, over her shoulder, always with some Minta, Paul, or William Bankes at her side. At length, standing outside the group the very figure of a famished wolfhound (Lily got up off the grass and stood looking at the steps, at the window, where she had seen him), he would say her name, once only, for all the world like a wolf barking in the snow, but still she held back; and he would say it once more, and this time something in the tone would rouse her, and she would go to him, leaving them all of a sudden, and they would walk off together among the pear trees, the cabbages, and the raspberry beds. They would have it out together. But with what attitudes and with what words? Such a dignity was theirs in this relationship that, turning away, she and Paul and Minta would hide their curiosity and their discomfort, and begin picking flowers, throwing balls, chattering, until it was time for dinner, and there they were, he at one end of the table, she at the other, as usual.

“Why don’t some of you take up botany? … With all those legs and arms why doesn’t one of you…?” So they would talk as usual, laughing, among the children. All would be as usual, save only for some quiver, as of a blade in the air, which came and went between them as if the usual sight of the children sitting round their soup plates had freshened itself in their eyes after that hour among the pears and the cabbages. Especially, Lily thought, Mrs. Ramsay would glance at Prue. She sat in the middle between brothers and sisters, always so occupied, it seemed, seeing that nothing went wrong that she scarcely spoke herself. How Prue must have blamed herself for that earwig in the milk! How white she had gone when Mr. Ramsay threw his plate through the window! How she drooped under those long silences between them! Anyhow, her mother now would seem to be making it up to her; assuring her that everything was well; promising her that one of these days that same happiness would be hers. She had enjoyed it for less than a year, however.

She had let the flowers fall from her basket, Lily thought, screwing up her eyes and standing back as if to look at her picture, which she was not touching, however, with all her faculties in a trance, frozen over superficially but moving underneath with extreme speed.

She let her flowers fall from her basket, scattered and tumbled them on to the grass and, reluctantly and hesitatingly, but without question or complaint—had she not the faculty of obedience to perfection?—went too. Down fields, across valleys, white, flower-strewn—that was how she would have painted it. The hills were austere. It was rocky; it was steep. The waves sounded hoarse on the stones beneath. They went, the three of them together, Mrs. Ramsay walking rather fast in front, as if she expected to meet some one round the corner.

Suddenly the window at which she was looking was whitened by some light stuff behind it. At last then somebody had come into the drawing-room; somebody was sitting in the chair. For Heaven’s sake, she prayed, let them sit still there and not come floundering out to talk to her. Mercifully, whoever it was stayed still inside; had settled by some stroke of luck so as to throw an odd-shaped triangular shadow over the step. It altered the composition of the picture a little. It was interesting. It might be useful. Her mood was coming back to her. One must keep on looking without for a second relaxing the intensity of emotion, the determination not to be put off, not to be bamboozled. One must hold the scene—so—in a vice and let nothing come in and spoil it. One wanted, she thought, dipping her brush deliberately, to be on a level with ordinary experience, to feel simply that’s a chair, that’s a table, and yet at the same time, It’s a miracle, it’s an ecstasy. The problem might be solved after all. Ah, but what had happened? Some wave of white went over the window pane. The air must have stirred some flounce in the room. Her heart leapt at her and seized her and tortured her.

“Mrs. Ramsay! Mrs. Ramsay!” she cried, feeling the old horror come back—to want and want and not to have. Could she inflict that still? And then, quietly, as if she refrained, that too became part of ordinary experience, was on a level with the chair, with the table. Mrs. Ramsay—it was part of her perfect goodness to Lily—sat there quite simply, in the chair, flicked her needles to and fro, knitted her reddish-brown stocking, cast her shadow on the step. There she sat.

And as if she had something she must share, yet could hardly leave her easel, so full her mind was of what she was thinking, of what she was seeing, Lily went past Mr. Carmichael holding her brush to the edge of the lawn. Where was that boat now? Mr. Ramsay? She wanted him.

[]

12

Mr. Ramsay had almost done reading. One hand hovered over the page as if to be in readiness to turn it the very instant he had finished it. He sat there bareheaded with the wind blowing his hair about, extraordinarily exposed to everything. He looked very old. He looked, James thought, getting his head now against the Lighthouse, now against the waste of waters running away into the open, like some old stone lying on the sand; he looked as if he had become physically what was always at the back of both of their minds—that loneliness which was for both of them the truth about things.

He was reading very quickly, as if he were eager to get to the end. Indeed they were very close to the Lighthouse now. There it loomed up, stark and straight, glaring white and black, and one could see the waves breaking in white splinters like smashed glass upon the rocks. One could see lines and creases in the rocks. One could see the windows clearly; a dab of white on one of them, and a little tuft of green on the rock. A man had come out and looked at them through a glass and gone in again. So it was like that, James thought, the Lighthouse one had seen across the bay all these years; it was a stark tower on a bare rock. It satisfied him. It confirmed some obscure feeling of his about his own character. The old ladies, he thought, thinking of the garden at home, went dragging their chairs about on the lawn. Old Mrs. Beckwith, for example, was always saying how nice it was and how sweet it was and how they ought to be so proud and they ought to be so happy, but as a matter of fact James thought, looking at the Lighthouse stood there on its rock, it’s like that. He looked at his father reading fiercely with his legs curled tight. They shared that knowledge. “We are driving before a gale—we must sink,” he began saying to himself, half aloud exactly as his father said it.

Nobody seemed to have spoken for an age. Cam was tired of looking at the sea. Little bits of black cork had floated past; the fish were dead in the bottom of the boat. Still her father read, and James looked at him and she looked at him, and they vowed that they would fight tyranny to the death, and he went on reading quite unconscious of what they thought. It was thus that he escaped, she thought. Yes, with his great forehead and his great nose, holding his little mottled book firmly in front of him, he escaped. You might try to lay hands on him, but then like a bird, he spread his wings, he floated off to settle out of your reach somewhere far away on some desolate stump. She gazed at the immense expanse of the sea. The island had grown so small that it scarcely looked like a leaf any longer. It looked like the top of a rock which some big wave would cover. Yet in its frailty were all those paths, those terraces, those bedrooms—all those innumerable things. But as, just before sleep, things simplify themselves so that only one of all the myriad details has power to assert itself, so, she felt, looking drowsily at the island, all those paths and terraces and bedrooms were fading and disappearing, and nothing was left but a pale blue censer swinging rhythmically this way and that across her mind. It was a hanging garden; it was a valley, full of birds, and flowers, and antelopes…. She was falling asleep.

“Come now,” said Mr. Ramsay, suddenly shutting his book.

Come where? To what extraordinary adventure? She woke with a start. To land somewhere, to climb somewhere? Where was he leading them? For after his immense silence the words startled them. But it was absurd. He was hungry, he said. It was time for lunch. Besides, look, he said. There’s the Lighthouse. “We’re almost there.”

“He’s doing very well,” said Macalister, praising James. “He’s keeping her very steady.”

But his father never praised him, James thought grimly.

Mr. Ramsay opened the parcel and shared out the sandwiches among them. Now he was happy, eating bread and cheese with these fishermen. He would have liked to live in a cottage and lounge about in the harbour spitting with the other old men, James thought, watching him slice his cheese into thin yellow sheets with his penknife.

This is right, this is it, Cam kept feeling, as she peeled her hard-boiled egg. Now she felt as she did in the study when the old men were reading The Times. Now I can go on thinking whatever I like, and I shan’t fall over a precipice or be drowned, for there he is, keeping his eye on me, she thought.

At the same time they were sailing so fast along by the rocks that it was very exciting—it seemed as if they were doing two things at once; they were eating their lunch here in the sun and they were also making for safety in a great storm after a shipwreck. Would the water last? Would the provisions last? she asked herself, telling herself a story but knowing at the same time what was the truth.

They would soon be out of it, Mr. Ramsay was saying to old Macalister; but their children would see some strange things. Macalister said he was seventy-five last March; Mr. Ramsay was seventy-one. Macalister said he had never seen a doctor; he had never lost a tooth. And that’s the way I’d like my children to live—Cam was sure that her father was thinking that, for he stopped her throwing a sandwich into the sea and told her, as if he were thinking of the fishermen and how they live, that if she did not want it she should put it back in the parcel. She should not waste it. He said it so wisely, as if he knew so well all the things that happened in the world, that she put it back at once, and then he gave her, from his own parcel, a gingerbread nut, as if he were a great Spanish gentleman, she thought, handing a flower to a lady at a window (so courteous his manner was). But he was shabby, and simple, eating bread and cheese; and yet he was leading them on a great expedition where, for all she knew, they would be drowned.

“That was where she sunk,” said Macalister’s boy suddenly.

“Three men were drowned where we are now,” said the old man. He had seen them clinging to the mast himself. And Mr. Ramsay taking a look at the spot was about, James and Cam were afraid, to burst out:

But I beneath a rougher sea,

and if he did, they could not bear it; they would shriek aloud; they could not endure another explosion of the passion that boiled in him; but to their surprise all he said was “Ah” as if he thought to himself, But why make a fuss about that? Naturally men are drowned in a storm, but it is a perfectly straightforward affair, and the depths of the sea (he sprinkled the crumbs from his sandwich paper over them) are only water after all. Then having lighted his pipe he took out his watch. He looked at it attentively; he made, perhaps, some mathematical calculation. At last he said, triumphantly:

“Well done!” James had steered them like a born sailor.

There! Cam thought, addressing herself silently to James. You’ve got it at last. For she knew that this was what James had been wanting, and she knew that now he had got it he was so pleased that he would not look at her or at his father or at any one. There he sat with his hand on the tiller sitting bolt upright, looking rather sulky and frowning slightly. He was so pleased that he was not going to let anybody take away a grain of his pleasure. His father had praised him. They must think that he was perfectly indifferent. But you’ve got it now, Cam thought.

They had tacked, and they were sailing swiftly, buoyantly on long rocking waves which handed them on from one to another with an extraordinary lilt and exhilaration beside the reef. On the left a row of rocks showed brown through the water which thinned and became greener and on one, a higher rock, a wave incessantly broke and spurted a little column of drops which fell down in a shower. One could hear the slap of the water and the patter of falling drops and a kind of hushing and hissing sound from the waves rolling and gambolling and slapping the rocks as if they were wild creatures who were perfectly free and tossed and tumbled and sported like this for ever.

Now they could see two men on the Lighthouse, watching them and making ready to meet them.

Mr. Ramsay buttoned his coat, and turned up his trousers. He took the large, badly packed, brown paper parcel which Nancy had got ready and sat with it on his knee. Thus in complete readiness to land he sat looking back at the island. With his long-sighted eyes perhaps he could see the dwindled leaf-like shape standing on end on a plate of gold quite clearly. What could he see? Cam wondered. It was all a blur to her. What was he thinking now? she wondered. What was it he sought, so fixedly, so intently, so silently? They watched him, both of them, sitting bareheaded with his parcel on his knee staring and staring at the frail blue shape which seemed like the vapour of something that had burnt itself away. What do you want? they both wanted to ask. They both wanted to say, Ask us anything and we will give it you. But he did not ask them anything. He sat and looked at the island and he might be thinking, We perished, each alone, or he might be thinking, I have reached it. I have found it, but he said nothing.

Then he put on his hat.

“Bring those parcels,” he said, nodding his head at the things Nancy had done up for them to take to the Lighthouse. “The parcels for the Lighthouse men,” he said. He rose and stood in the bow of the boat, very straight and tall, for all the world, James thought, as if he were saying, “There is no God,” and Cam thought, as if he were leaping into space, and they both rose to follow him as he sprang, lightly like a young man, holding his parcel, on to the rock.

[]

13

“He must have reached it,” said Lily Briscoe aloud, feeling suddenly completely tired out. For the Lighthouse had become almost invisible, had melted away into a blue haze, and the effort of looking at it and the effort of thinking of him landing there, which both seemed to be one and the same effort, had stretched her body and mind to the utmost. Ah, but she was relieved. Whatever she had wanted to give him, when he left her that morning, she had given him at last.

“He has landed,” she said aloud. “It is finished.” Then, surging up, puffing slightly, old Mr. Carmichael stood beside her, looking like an old pagan God, shaggy, with weeds in his hair and the trident (it was only a French novel) in his hand. He stood by her on the edge of the lawn, swaying a little in his bulk, and said, shading his eyes with his hand: “They will have landed,” and she felt that she had been right. They had not needed to speak. They had been thinking the same things and he had answered her without her asking him anything. He stood there spreading his hands over all the weakness and suffering of mankind; she thought he was surveying, tolerantly, compassionately, their final destiny. Now he has crowned the occasion, she thought, when his hand slowly fell, as if she had seen him let fall from his great height a wreath of violets and asphodels which, fluttering slowly, lay at length upon the earth.

Quickly, as if she were recalled by something over there, she turned to her canvas. There it was—her picture. Yes, with all its green and blues, its lines running up and across, its attempt at something. It would be hung in the attics, she thought; it would be destroyed. But what did that matter? she asked herself, taking up her brush again. She looked at the steps; they were empty; she looked at her canvas; it was blurred. With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.

[]

ORLANDO:
a biography

by
Virginia Woolf

To V. Sackville-West.

published
October 11, 1928
by
The Hogarth Press

orlando: a biography

Preface

Chapter 1.

Chapter 2.

Chapter 3.

Chapter 4.

Chapter 5.

Chapter 6.

Index.

[]

[The text follows the 1954 Hogarth Press edition.]

Orlando as a Boy

Preface.

Many friends have helped me in writing this book. Some are dead and so illustrious that I scarcely dare name them, yet no one can read or write without being perpetually in the debt of Defoe, Sir Thomas Browne, Sterne, Sir Walter Scott, Lord Macaulay, Emily Brontë, De Quincey, and Walter Pater,—to name the first that come to mind. Others are alive, and though perhaps as illustrious in their own way, are less formidable for that very reason. I am specially indebted to Mr. C. P. Sanger, without whose knowledge of the law of real property this book could never have been written. Mr. Sydney-Turner’s wide and peculiar erudition has saved me, I hope, some lamentable blunders. I have had the advantage—how great I alone can estimate—of Mr. Arthur Waley’s knowledge of Chinese. Madame Lopokova (Mrs. J. M. Keynes) has been at hand to correct my Russian. To the unrivalled sympathy and imagination of Mr. Roger Fry I owe whatever understanding of the art of painting I may possess. I have, I hope, profited in another department by the singularly penetrating, if severe, criticism of my nephew Mr. Julian Bell. Miss M. K. Snowdon’s indefatigable researches in the archives of Harrogate and Cheltenham were none the less arduous for being vain. Other friends have helped me in ways too various to specify. I must content myself with naming Mr. Angus Davidson; Mrs. Cartwright; Miss Janet Case; Lord Berners (whose knowledge of Elizabethan music has proved invaluable); Mr. Francis Birrell; my brother, Dr. Adrian Stephen; Mr. F. L. Lucas; Mr. and Mrs. Desmond Maccarthy; that most inspiriting of critics, my brother-in-law, Mr. Clive Bell; Mr. G. H. Rylands; Lady Colefax; Miss Nellie Boxall; Mr. J. M. Keynes; Mr. Hugh Walpole; Miss Violet Dickinson; the Hon. Edward Sackville West; Mr. and Mrs. St. John Hutchinson; Mr. Duncan Grant; Mr. and Mrs. Stephen Tomlin; Mr. and Lady Ottoline Morrell; my mother-in-law, Mrs. Sidney Woolf; Mr. Osbert Sitwell; Madame Jacques Raverat; Colonel Cory Bell; Miss Valerie Taylor; Mr. J. T. Sheppard; Mr. and Mrs. T. S. Eliot; Miss Ethel Sands; Miss Nan Hudson; my nephew Mr. Quentin Bell (an old and valued collaborator in fiction); Mr. Raymond Mortimer; Lady Gerald Wellesley; Mr. Lytton Strachey; the Viscountess Cecil; Miss Hope Mirrlees; Mr. E. M. Forster; the Hon. Harold Nicolson; and my sister, Vanessa Bell—but the list threatens to grow too long and is already far too distinguished. For while it rouses in me memories of the pleasantest kind it will inevitably wake expectations in the reader which the book itself can only disappoint. Therefore I will conclude by thanking the officials of the British Museum and Record Office for their wonted courtesy; my niece Miss Angelica Bell, for a service which none but she could have rendered; and my husband for the patience with which he has invariably helped my researches and for the profound historical knowledge to which these pages owe whatever degree of accuracy they may attain. Finally, I would thank, had I not lost his name and address, a gentleman in America, who has generously and gratuitously corrected the punctuation, the botany, the entomology, the geography, and the chronology of previous works of mine and will, I hope, not spare his services on the present occasion.

[]

Chapter 1.

He—for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it—was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters. It was the colour of an old football, and more or less the shape of one, save for the sunken cheeks and a strand or two of coarse, dry hair, like the hair on a cocoanut. Orlando’s father, or perhaps his grandfather, had struck it from the shoulders of a vast Pagan who had started up under the moon in the barbarian fields of Africa; and now it swung, gently, perpetually, in the breeze which never ceased blowing through the attic rooms of the gigantic house of the lord who had slain him.

Orlando’s fathers had ridden in fields of asphodel, and stony fields, and fields watered by strange rivers, and they had struck many heads of many colours off many shoulders, and brought them back to hang from the rafters. So too would Orlando, he vowed. But since he was sixteen only, and too young to ride with them in Africa or France, he would steal away from his mother and the peacocks in the garden and go to his attic room and there lunge and plunge and slice the air with his blade. Sometimes he cut the cord so that the skull bumped on the floor and he had to string it up again, fastening it with some chivalry almost out of reach so that his enemy grinned at him through shrunk, black lips triumphantly. The skull swung to and fro, for the house, at the top of which he lived, was so vast that there seemed trapped in it the wind itself, blowing this way, blowing that way, winter and summer. The green arras with the hunters on it moved perpetually. His fathers had been noble since they had been at all. They came out of the northern mists wearing coronets on their heads. Were not the bars of darkness in the room, and the yellow pools which chequered the floor, made by the sun falling through the stained glass of a vast coat of arms in the window? Orlando stood now in the midst of the yellow body of an heraldic leopard. When he put his hand on the window-sill to push the window open, it was instantly coloured red, blue, and yellow like a butterfly’s wing. Thus, those who like symbols, and have a turn for the deciphering of them, might observe that though the shapely legs, the handsome body, and the well-set shoulders were all of them decorated with various tints of heraldic light, Orlando’s face, as he threw the window open, was lit solely by the sun itself. A more candid, sullen face it would be impossible to find. Happy the mother who bears, happier still the biographer who records the life of such a one! Never need she vex herself, nor he invoke the help of novelist or poet. From deed to deed, from glory to glory, from office to office he must go, his scribe following after, till they reach whatever seat it may be that is the height of their desire. Orlando, to look at, was cut out precisely for some such career. The red of the cheeks was covered with peach down; the down on the lips was only a little thicker than the down on the cheeks. The lips themselves were short and slightly drawn back over teeth of an exquisite and almond whiteness. Nothing disturbed the arrowy nose in its short, tense flight; the hair was dark, the ears small, and fitted closely to the head. But, alas, that these catalogues of youthful beauty cannot end without mentioning forehead and eyes. Alas, that people are seldom born devoid of all three; for directly we glance at Orlando standing by the window, we must admit that he had eyes like drenched violets, so large that the water seemed to have brimmed in them and widened them; and a brow like the swelling of a marble dome pressed between the two blank medallions which were his temples. Directly we glance at eyes and forehead, thus do we rhapsodise. Directly we glance at eyes and forehead, we have to admit a thousand disagreeables which it is the aim of every good biographer to ignore. Sights disturbed him, like that of his mother, a very beautiful lady in green walking out to feed the peacocks with Twitchett, her maid, behind her; sights exalted him—the birds and the trees; and made him in love with death—the evening sky, the homing rooks; and so, mounting up the spiral stairway into his brain—which was a roomy one—all these sights, and the garden sounds too, the hammer beating, the wood chopping, began that riot and confusion of the passions and emotions which every good biographer detests. But to continue—Orlando slowly drew in his head, sat down at the table, and, with the half-conscious air of one doing what they do every day of their lives at this hour, took out a writing book labelled “Æthelbert: A Tragedy in Five Acts”, and dipped an old stained goose quill in the ink.

Soon he had covered ten pages and more with poetry. He was fluent, evidently, but he was abstract. Vice, Crime, Misery were the personages of his drama; there were Kings and Queens of impossible territories; horrid plots confounded them; noble sentiments suffused them; there was never a word said as he himself would have said it, but all was turned with a fluency and sweetness which, considering his age—he was not yet seventeen—and that the sixteenth century had still some years of its course to run, were remarkable enough. At last, however, he came to a halt. He was describing, as all young poets are for ever describing, nature, and in order to match the shade of green precisely he looked (and here he showed more audacity than most) at the thing itself, which happened to be a laurel bush growing beneath the window. After that, of course, he could write no more. Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces. The shade of green Orlando now saw spoilt his rhyme and split his metre. Moreover, nature has tricks of her own. Once look out of a window at bees among flowers, at a yawning dog, at the sun setting, once think “how many more suns shall I see set”, etc. etc. (the thought is too well known to be worth writing out) and one drops the pen, takes one’s cloak, strides out of the room, and catches one’s foot on a painted chest as one does so. For Orlando was a trifle clumsy.

He was careful to avoid meeting anyone. There was Stubbs, the gardener, coming along the path. He hid behind a tree till he had passed. He let himself out at a little gate in the garden wall. He skirted all stables, kennels, breweries, carpenters’ shops, washhouses, places where they make tallow candles, kill oxen, forge horse-shoes, stitch jerkins—for the house was a town ringing with men at work at their various crafts—and gained the ferny path leading uphill through the park unseen. There is perhaps a kinship among qualities; one draws another along with it; and the biographer should here call attention to the fact that this clumsiness is often mated with a love of solitude. Having stumbled over a chest, Orlando naturally loved solitary places, vast views, and to feel himself for ever and ever and ever alone.

So, after a long silence, “I am alone”, he breathed at last, opening his lips for the first time in this record. He had walked very quickly uphill through ferns and hawthorn bushes, startling deer and wild birds, to a place crowned by a single oak tree. It was very high, so high indeed that nineteen English counties could be seen beneath; and on clear days thirty or perhaps forty, if the weather was very fine. Sometimes one could see the English Channel, wave reiterating upon wave. Rivers could be seen and pleasure boats gliding on them; and galleons setting out to sea; and armadas with puffs of smoke from which came the dull thud of cannon firing; and forts on the coast; and castles among the meadows; and here a watch tower; and there a fortress; and again some vast mansion like that of Orlando’s father, massed like a town in the valley circled by walls. To the east there were the spires of London and the smoke of the city; and perhaps on the very sky line, when the wind was in the right quarter, the craggy top and serrated edges of Snowdon herself showed mountainous among the clouds. For a moment Orlando stood counting, gazing, recognising. That was his father’s house; that his uncle’s. His aunt owned those three great turrets among the trees there. The heath was theirs and the forest; the pheasant and the deer, the fox, the badger, and the butterfly.

He sighed profoundly, and flung himself—there was a passion in his movements which deserves the word—on the earth at the foot of the oak tree. He loved, beneath all this summer transiency, to feel the earth’s spine beneath him; for such he took the hard root of the oak tree to be; or, for image followed image, it was the back of a great horse that he was riding; or the deck of a tumbling ship—it was anything indeed, so long as it was hard, for he felt the need of something which he could attach his floating heart to; the heart that tugged at his side; the heart that seemed filled with spiced and amorous gales every evening about this time when he walked out. To the oak tree he tied it and as he lay there, gradually the flutter in and about him stilled itself; the little leaves hung, the deer stopped; the pale summer clouds stayed; his limbs grew heavy on the ground; and he lay so still that by degrees the deer stepped nearer and the rooks wheeled round him and the swallows dipped and circled and the dragonflies shot past, as if all the fertility and amorous activity of a summer’s evening were woven web-like about his body.

After an hour or so—the sun was rapidly sinking, the white clouds had turned red, the hills were violet, the woods purple, the valleys black—a trumpet sounded. Orlando leapt to his feet. The shrill sound came from the valley. It came from a dark spot down there; a spot compact and mapped out; a maze; a town, yet girt about with walls; it came from the heart of his own great house in the valley, which, dark before, even as he looked and the single trumpet duplicated and reduplicated itself with other shriller sounds, lost its darkness and became pierced with lights. Some were small hurrying lights, as if servants dashed along corridors to answer summonses; others were high and lustrous lights, as if they burnt in empty banqueting-halls made ready to receive guests who had not come; and others dipped and waved and sank and rose, as if held in the hands of troops of serving men, bending, kneeling, rising, receiving, guarding, and escorting with all dignity indoors a great Princess alighting from her chariot. Coaches turned and wheeled in the courtyard. Horses tossed their plumes. The Queen had come.

Orlando looked no more. He dashed downhill. He let himself in at a wicket gate. He tore up the winding staircase. He reached his room. He tossed his stockings to one side of the room, his jerkin to the other. He dipped his head. He scoured his hands. He pared his finger nails. With no more than six inches of looking-glass and a pair of old candles to help him, he had thrust on crimson breeches, lace collar, waistcoat of taffeta, and shoes with rosettes on them as big as double dahlias in less than ten minutes by the stable clock. He was ready. He was flushed. He was excited. But he was terribly late.

By short cuts known to him, he made his way now through the vast congeries of rooms and staircases to the banqueting-hall, five acres distant on the other side of the house. But half-way there, in the back quarters where the servants lived, he stopped. The door of Mrs. Stewkley’s sitting-room stood open—she was gone, doubtless, with all her keys to wait upon her mistress. But there, sitting at the servant’s dinner table with a tankard beside him and paper in front of him, sat a rather fat, rather shabby man, whose ruff was a thought dirty, and whose clothes were of hodden brown. He held a pen in his hand, but he was not writing. He seemed in the act of rolling some thought up and down, to and fro in his mind till it gathered shape or momentum to his liking. His eyes, globed and clouded like some green stone of curious texture, were fixed. He did not see Orlando. For all his hurry, Orlando stopped dead. Was this a poet? Was he writing poetry? “Tell me”, he wanted to say, “everything in the whole world”—for he had the wildest, most absurd, extravagant ideas about poets and poetry—but how speak to a man who does not see you? who sees ogres, satyrs, perhaps the depths of the sea instead? So Orlando stood gazing while the man turned his pen in his fingers, this way and that way; and gazed and mused; and then, very quickly, wrote half-a-dozen lines and looked up. Whereupon Orlando, overcome with shyness, darted off and reached the banqueting-hall only just in time to sink upon his knees and, hanging his head in confusion, to offer a bowl of rose water to the great Queen herself.

Such was his shyness that he saw no more of her than her ringed hand in water; but it was enough. It was a memorable hand; a thin hand with long fingers always curling as if round orb or sceptre; a nervous, crabbed, sickly hand; a commanding hand too; a hand that had only to raise itself for a head to fall; a hand, he guessed, attached to an old body that smelt like a cupboard in which furs are kept in camphor; which body was yet caparisoned in all sorts of brocades and gems; and held itself very upright though perhaps in pain from sciatica; and never flinched though strung together by a thousand fears; and the Queen’s eyes were light yellow. All this he felt as the great rings flashed in the water and then something pressed his hair—which, perhaps, accounts for his seeing nothing more likely to be of use to a historian. And in truth, his mind was such a welter of opposites—of the night and the blazing candles, of the shabby poet and the great Queen, of silent fields and the clatter of serving men—that he could see nothing; or only a hand.

By the same showing, the Queen herself can have seen only a head. But if it is possible from a hand to deduce a body, informed with all the attributes of a great Queen, her crabbedness, courage, frailty, and terror, surely a head can be as fertile, looked down upon from a chair of state by a lady whose eyes were always, if the waxworks at the Abbey are to be trusted, wide open. The long, curled hair, the dark head bent so reverently, so innocently before her, implied a pair of the finest legs that a young nobleman has ever stood upright upon; and violet eyes; and a heart of gold; and loyalty and manly charm—all qualities which the old woman loved the more the more they failed her. For she was growing old and worn and bent before her time. The sound of cannon was always in her ears. She saw always the glistening poison drop and the long stiletto. As she sat at table she listened; she heard the guns in the Channel; she dreaded—was that a curse, was that a whisper? Innocence, simplicity, were all the more dear to her for the dark background she set them against. And it was that same night, so tradition has it, when Orlando was sound asleep, that she made over formally, putting her hand and seal finally to the parchment, the gift of the great monastic house that had been the Archbishop’s and then the King’s to Orlando’s father.

Orlando slept all night in ignorance. He had been kissed by a queen without knowing it. And perhaps, for women’s hearts are intricate, it was his ignorance and the start he gave when her lips touched him that kept the memory of her young cousin (for they had blood in common) green in her mind. At any rate, two years of this quiet country life had not passed, and Orlando had written no more perhaps than twenty tragedies and a dozen histories and a score of sonnets when a message came that he was to attend the Queen at Whitehall.

“Here”, she said, watching him advance down the long gallery towards her, “comes my innocent!” (There was a serenity about him always which had the look of innocence when, technically, the word was no longer applicable.)

“Come!” she said. She was sitting bolt upright beside the fire. And she held him a foot’s pace from her and looked him up and down. Was she matching her speculations the other night with the truth now visible? Did she find her guesses justified? Eyes, mouth, nose, breast, hips, hands—she ran them over; her lips twitched visibly as she looked; but when she saw his legs she laughed out loud. He was the very image of a noble gentleman. But inwardly? She flashed her yellow hawk’s eyes upon him as if she would pierce his soul. The young man withstood her gaze blushing only a damask rose as became him. Strength, grace, romance, folly, poetry, youth—she read him like a page. Instantly she plucked a ring from her finger (the joint was swollen rather) and as she fitted it to his, named him her Treasurer and Steward; next hung about him chains of office; and bidding him bend his knee, tied round it at the slenderest part the jewelled order of the Garter. Nothing after that was denied him. When she drove in state he rode at her carriage door. She sent him to Scotland on a sad embassy to the unhappy Queen. He was about to sail for the Polish wars when she recalled him. For how could she bear to think of that tender flesh torn and that curly head rolled in the dust? She kept him with her. At the height of her triumph when the guns were booming at the Tower and the air was thick enough with gunpowder to make one sneeze and the huzzas of the people rang beneath the windows, she pulled him down among the cushions where her women had laid her (she was so worn and old) and made him bury his face in that astonishing composition—she had not changed her dress for a month—which smelt for all the world, he thought, recalling his boyish memory, like some old cabinet at home where his mother’s furs were stored. He rose, half suffocated from the embrace. “This”, she breathed, “is my victory!”—even as a rocket roared up and dyed her cheeks scarlet.

For the old woman loved him. And the Queen, who knew a man when she saw one, though not, it is said, in the usual way, plotted for him a splendid ambitious career. Lands were given him, houses assigned him. He was to be the son of her old age; the limb of her infirmity; the oak tree on which she leant her degradation. She croaked out these promises and strange domineering tendernesses (they were at Richmond now) sitting bolt upright in her stiff brocades by the fire which, however high they piled it, never kept her warm.

Meanwhile, the long winter months drew on. Every tree in the Park was lined with frost. The river ran sluggishly. One day when the snow was on the ground and the dark panelled rooms were full of shadows and the stags were barking in the Park, she saw in the mirror, which she kept for fear of spies always by her, through the door, which she kept for fear of murderers always open, a boy—could it be Orlando?—kissing a girl—who in the Devil’s name was the brazen hussy? Snatching at her golden-hilted sword she struck violently at the mirror. The glass crashed; people came running; she was lifted and set in her chair again; but she was stricken after that and groaned much, as her days wore to an end, of man’s treachery.

It was Orlando’s fault perhaps; yet, after all, are we to blame Orlando? The age was the Elizabethan; their morals were not ours; nor their poets; nor their climate; nor their vegetables even. Everything was different. The weather itself, the heat and cold of summer and winter, was, we may believe, of another temper altogether. The brilliant amorous day was divided as sheerly from the night as land from water. Sunsets were redder and more intense; dawns were whiter and more auroral. Of our crepuscular half-lights and lingering twilights they knew nothing. The rain fell vehemently, or not at all. The sun blazed or there was darkness. Translating this to the spiritual regions as their wont is, the poets sang beautifully how roses fade and petals fall. The moment is brief they sang; the moment is over; one long night is then to be slept by all. As for using the artifices of the greenhouse or conservatory to prolong or preserve these fresh pinks and roses, that was not their way. The withered intricacies and ambiguities of our more gradual and doubtful age were unknown to them. Violence was all. The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went. And what the poets said in rhyme, the young translated into practice. Girls were roses, and their seasons were short as the flowers’. Plucked they must be before nightfall; for the day was brief and the day was all. Thus, if Orlando followed the leading of the climate, of the poets, of the age itself, and plucked his flower in the window-seat even with the snow on the ground and the Queen vigilant in the corridor, we can scarcely bring ourselves to blame him. He was young; he was boyish; he did but as nature bade him do. As for the girl, we know no more than Queen Elizabeth herself did what her name was. It may have been Doris, Chloris, Delia, or Diana, for he made rhymes to them all in turn; equally, she may have been a court lady, or some serving maid. For Orlando’s taste was broad; he was no lover of garden flowers only; the wild and the weeds even had always a fascination for him.

Here, indeed, we lay bare rudely, as a biographer may, a curious trait in him, to be accounted for, perhaps, by the fact that a certain grandmother of his had worn a smock and carried milkpails. Some grains of the Kentish or Sussex earth were mixed with the thin, fine fluid which came to him from Normandy. He held that the mixture of brown earth and blue blood was a good one. Certain it is that he had always a liking for low company, especially for that of lettered people whose wits so often keep them under, as if there were the sympathy of blood between them. At this season of his life, when his head brimmed with rhymes and he never went to bed without striking off some conceit, the cheek of an innkeeper’s daughter seemed fresher and the wit of a gamekeeper’s niece seemed quicker than those of the ladies at Court. Hence, he began going frequently to Wapping Old Stairs and the beer gardens at night, wrapped in a grey cloak to hide the star at his neck and the garter at his knee. There, with a mug before him, among the sanded alleys and bowling greens and all the simple architecture of such places, he listened to sailors’ stories of hardship and horror and cruelty on the Spanish main; how some had lost their toes, others their noses—for the spoken story was never so rounded or so finely coloured as the written. Especially he loved to hear them volley forth their songs of the Azores, while the parrakeets, which they had brought from those parts, pecked at the rings in their ears, tapped with their hard acquisitive beaks at the rubies on their fingers, and swore as vilely as their masters. The women were scarcely less bold in their speech and less free in their manners than the birds. They perched on his knee, flung their arms round his neck and, guessing that something out of the common lay hid beneath his duffle cloak, were quite as eager to come at the truth of the matter as Orlando himself.

Nor was opportunity lacking. The river was astir early and late with barges, wherries, and craft of all description. Every day sailed to sea some fine ship bound for the Indies; now and again another blackened and ragged with hairy unknown men on board crept painfully to anchor. No one missed a boy or girl if they dallied a little on the water after sunset; or raised an eyebrow if gossip had seen them sleeping soundly among the treasure sacks safe in each other’s arms. Such indeed was the adventure that befel Orlando, Sukey, and the Earl of Cumberland. The day was hot; their loves had been active; they had fallen asleep among the rubies. Late that night the Earl, whose fortunes were much bound up in the Spanish ventures, came to check the booty alone with a lantern. He flashed the light on a barrel. He started back with an oath. Twined about the cask two spirits lay sleeping. Superstitious by nature, and his conscience laden with many a crime, the Earl took the couple—they were wrapped in a red cloak, and Sukey’s bosom was almost as white as the eternal snows of Orlando’s poetry—for a phantom sprung from the graves of drowned sailors to upbraid him. He crossed himself. He vowed repentance. The row of alms houses still standing in the Sheen Road is the visible fruit of that moment’s panic. Twelve poor old women of the parish to-day drink tea and to-night bless his Lordship for a roof above their heads; so that illicit love in a treasure ship—but we omit the moral.

Soon, however, Orlando grew tired, not only of the discomfort of this way of life, and of the crabbed streets of the neighbourhood, but of the primitive manners of the people. For it has to be remembered that crime and poverty had none of the attraction for the Elizabethans that they have for us. They had none of our modern shame of book learning; none of our belief that to be born the son of a butcher is a blessing and to be unable to read a virtue; no fancy that what we call “life” and “reality” are somehow connected with ignorance and brutality; nor, indeed, any equivalent for these two words at all. It was not to seek “life” that Orlando went among them; not in quest of “reality” that he left them. But when he had heard a score of times how Jakes had lost his nose and Sukey her honour—and they told the stories admirably, it must be admitted—he began to be a little weary of the repetition, for a nose can only be cut off in one way and maidenhood lost in another—or so it seemed to him—whereas the arts and the sciences had a diversity about them which stirred his curiosity profoundly. So, always keeping them in happy memory, he left off frequenting the beer gardens and the skittle alleys, hung his grey cloak in his wardrobe, let his star shine at his neck and his garter twinkle at his knee, and appeared once more at the Court of King James. He was young, he was rich, he was handsome. No one could have been received with greater acclamation than he was.

It is certain indeed that many ladies were ready to show him their favours. The names of three at least were freely coupled with his in marriage—Clorinda, Favilla, Euphrosyne—so he called them in his sonnets.

To take them in order; Clorinda was a sweet-mannered gentle lady enough;—indeed Orlando was greatly taken with her for six months and a half; but she had white eyelashes and could not bear the sight of blood. A hare brought up roasted at her father’s table turned her faint. She was much under the influence of the Priests too, and stinted her underlinen in order to give to the poor. She took it on her to reform Orlando of his sins, which sickened him, so that he drew back from the marriage, and did not much regret it when she died soon after of the small-pox.

Favilla, who comes next, was of a different sort altogether. She was the daughter of a poor Somersetshire gentleman; who, by sheer assiduity and the use of her eyes had worked her way up at court, where her address in horsemanship, her fine instep, and her grace in dancing won the admiration of all. Once, however, she was so ill-advised as to whip a spaniel that had torn one of her silk stockings (and it must be said in justice that Favilla had few stockings and those for the most part of drugget) within an inch of its life beneath Orlando’s window. Orlando, who was a passionate lover of animals, now noticed that her teeth were crooked, and the two front turned inward, which, he said, is a sure sign of a perverse and cruel disposition in woman, and so broke the engagement that very night for ever.

The third, Euphrosyne, was by far the most serious of his flames. She was by birth one of the Irish Desmonds and had therefore a family tree of her own as old and deeply rooted as Orlando’s itself. She was fair, florid, and a trifle phlegmatic. She spoke Italian well, had a perfect set of teeth in the upper jaw, though those on the lower were slightly discoloured. She was never without a whippet or spaniel at her knee; fed them with white bread from her own plate; sang sweetly to the virginals; and was never dressed before mid-day owing to the extreme care she took of her person. In short, she would have made a perfect wife for such a nobleman as Orlando, and matters had gone so far that the lawyers on both sides were busy with covenants, jointures, settlements, messuages, tenements, and whatever is needed before one great fortune can mate with another when, with the suddenness and severity that then marked the English climate, came the Great Frost.

The Great Frost was, historians tell us, the most severe that has ever visited these islands. Birds froze in mid-air and fell like stones to the ground. At Norwich a young countrywoman started to cross the road in her usual robust health and was seen by the onlookers to turn visibly to powder and be blown in a puff of dust over the roofs as the icy blast struck her at the street corner. The mortality among sheep and cattle was enormous. Corpses froze and could not be drawn from the sheets. It was no uncommon sight to come upon a whole herd of swine frozen immovable upon the road. The fields were full of shepherds, ploughmen, teams of horses, and little bird-scaring boys all struck stark in the act of the moment, one with his hand to his nose, another with the bottle to his lips, a third with a stone raised to throw at the raven who sat, as if stuffed, upon the hedge within a yard of him. The severity of the frost was so extraordinary that a kind of petrifaction sometimes ensued; and it was commonly supposed that the great increase of rocks in some parts of Derbyshire was due to no eruption, for there was none, but to the solidification of unfortunate wayfarers who had been turned literally to stone where they stood. The Church could give little help in the matter, and though some landowners had these relics blessed, the most part preferred to use them either as landmarks, scratching-posts for sheep, or, when the form of the stone allowed, drinking troughs for cattle, which purposes they serve, admirably for the most part, to this day.

But while the country people suffered the extremity of want, and the trade of the country was at a standstill, London enjoyed a carnival of the utmost brilliancy. The Court was at Greenwich, and the new King seized the opportunity that his coronation gave him to curry favour with the citizens. He directed that the river, which was frozen to a depth of twenty feet and more for six or seven miles on either side, should be swept, decorated and given all the semblance of a park or pleasure ground, with arbours, mazes, alleys, drinking booths, etc., at his expense. For himself and the courtiers, he reserved a certain space immediately opposite the Palace gates; which, railed off from the public only by a silken rope, became at once the centre of the most brilliant society in England. Great statesmen, in their beards and ruffs, despatched affairs of state under the crimson awning of the Royal Pagoda. Soldiers planned the conquest of the Moor and the downfall of the Turk in striped arbours surmounted by plumes of ostrich feathers. Admirals strode up and down the narrow pathways, glass in hand, sweeping the horizon and telling stories of the north-west passage and the Spanish Armada. Lovers dallied upon divans spread with sables. Frozen roses fell in showers when the Queen and her ladies walked abroad. Coloured balloons hovered motionless in the air. Here and there burnt vast bonfires of cedar and oak wood, lavishly salted, so that the flames were of green, orange, and purple fire. But however fiercely they burnt, the heat was not enough to melt the ice which, though of singular transparency, was yet of the hardness of steel. So clear indeed was it that there could be seen, congealed at a depth of several feet, here a porpoise, there a flounder. Shoals of eels lay motionless in a trance, but whether their state was one of death or merely of suspended animation which the warmth would revive puzzled the philosophers. Near London Bridge, where the river had frozen to a depth of some twenty fathoms, a wrecked wherry boat was plainly visible, lying on the bed of the river where it had sunk last autumn, overladen with apples. The old bumboat woman, who was carrying her fruit to market on the Surrey side, sat there in her plaids and farthingales with her lap full of apples, for all the world as if she were about to serve a customer, though a certain blueness about the lips hinted the truth. ’Twas a sight King James specially liked to look upon, and he would bring a troupe of courtiers to gaze with him. In short, nothing could exceed the brilliancy and gaiety of the scene by day. But it was at night that the carnival was at its merriest. For the frost continued unbroken; the nights were of perfect stillness; the moon and stars blazed with the hard fixity of diamonds, and to the fine music of flute and trumpet the courtiers danced.

Orlando, it is true, was none of those who tread lightly the corantoe and lavolta; he was clumsy and a little absent-minded. He much preferred the plain dances of his own country, which he had danced as a child to these fantastic foreign measures. He had indeed just brought his feet together about six in the evening of the seventh of January at the finish of some such quadrille or minuet when he beheld, coming from the pavilion of the Muscovite Embassy, a figure, which, whether boy’s or woman’s, for the loose tunic and trousers of the Russian fashion served to disguise the sex, filled him with the highest curiosity. The person, whatever the name or sex, was about middle height, very slenderly fashioned, and dressed entirely in oyster-coloured velvet, trimmed with some unfamiliar greenish-coloured fur. But these details were obscured by the extraordinary seductiveness which issued from the whole person. Images, metaphors of the most extreme and extravagant twined and twisted in his mind. He called her a melon, a pineapple, an olive tree, an emerald, and a fox in the snow all in the space of three seconds; he did not know whether he had heard her, tasted her, seen her, or all three together. (For though we must pause not a moment in the narrative we may here hastily note that all his images at this time were simple in the extreme to match his senses and were mostly taken from things he had liked the taste of as a boy. But if his senses were simple they were at the same time extremely strong. To pause therefore and seek the reasons of things is out of the question.) … A melon, an emerald, a fox in the snow—so he raved, so he stared. When the boy, for alas, a boy it must be—no woman could skate with such speed and vigour—swept almost on tiptoe past him, Orlando was ready to tear his hair with vexation that the person was of his own sex, and thus all embraces were out of the question. But the skater came closer. Legs, hands, carriage, were a boy’s, but no boy ever had a mouth like that; no boy had those breasts; no boy had eyes which looked as if they had been fished from the bottom of the sea. Finally, coming to a stop and sweeping a curtsey with the utmost grace to the King, who was shuffling past on the arm of some Lord-in-waiting, the unknown skater came to a standstill. She was not a handsbreadth off. She was a woman. Orlando stared; trembled; turned hot; turned cold; longed to hurl himself through the summer air; to crush acorns beneath his feet; to toss his arms with the beech trees and the oaks. As it was, he drew his lips up over his small white teeth; opened them perhaps half an inch as if to bite; shut them as if he had bitten. The Lady Euphrosyne hung upon his arm.

The stranger’s name, he found, was the Princess Marousha Stanilovska Dagmar Natasha Iliana Romanovitch, and she had come in the train of the Muscovite Ambassador, who was her uncle perhaps, or perhaps her father, to attend the coronation. Very little was known of the Muscovites. In their great beards and furred hats they sat almost silent; drinking some black liquid which they spat out now and then upon the ice. None spoke English, and French with which some at least were familiar was then little spoken at the English Court.

It was through this accident that Orlando and the Princess became acquainted. They were seated opposite each other at the great table spread under a huge awning for the entertainment of the notables. The Princess was placed between two young Lords, one Lord Francis Vere and the other the young Earl of Moray. It was laughable to see the predicament she soon had them in, for though both were fine lads in their way, the babe unborn had as much knowledge of the French tongue as they had. When at the beginning of dinner the Princess turned to the Earl and said, with a grace which ravished his heart, “Je crois avoir fait la connaissance d’un gentilhomme qui vous était apparenté en Pologne l’été dernier”, or “La beauté des dames de la cour d’Angleterre me met dans le ravissement. On ne peut voir une dame plus gracieuse que votre reine, ni une coiffure plus belle que la sienne,” both Lord Francis and the Earl showed the highest embarrassment. The one helped her largely to horse-radish sauce, the other whistled to his dog and made him beg for a marrow bone. At this the Princess could no longer contain her laughter, and Orlando, catching her eyes across the boars’ heads and stuffed peacocks, laughed too. He laughed, but the laugh on his lips froze in wonder. Whom had he loved, what had he loved, he asked himself in a tumult of emotion, until now? An old woman, he answered, all skin and bone. Red-cheeked trulls too many to mention. A puling nun. A hard-bitten cruel-mouthed adventuress. A nodding mass of lace and ceremony. Love had meant to him nothing but sawdust and cinders. The joys he had had of it tasted insipid in the extreme. He marvelled how he could have gone through with it without yawning. For as he looked the thickness of his blood melted; the ice turned to wine in his veins; he heard the waters flowing and the birds singing; spring broke over the hard wintry landscape; his manhood woke; he grasped a sword in his hand; he charged a more daring foe than Pole or Moor; he dived in deep water; he saw the flower of danger growing in a crevice; he stretched his hand—in fact he was rattling off one of his most impassioned sonnets when the Princess addressed him, “Would you have the goodness to pass the salt?”

He blushed deeply.

“With all the pleasure in the world, Madame,” he replied, speaking French with a perfect accent. For, heaven be praised, he spoke the tongue as his own; his mother’s maid had taught him. Yet perhaps it would have been better for him had he never learnt that tongue; never answered that voice; never followed the light of those eyes….

The Princess continued. Who were those bumpkins, she asked him, who sat beside her with the manners of stablemen? What was the nauseating mixture they had poured on her plate? Did the dogs eat at the same table with the men in England? Was that figure of fun at the end of the table with her hair rigged up like a Maypole (comme une grande perche mal fagotée) really the Queen? And did the King always slobber like that? And which of those popinjays was George Villiers? Though these questions rather discomposed Orlando at first, they were put with such archness and drollery that he could not help but laugh; and as he saw from the blank faces of the company that nobody understood a word, he answered her as freely as she asked him, speaking, as she did, in perfect French.

Thus began an intimacy between the two which soon became the scandal of the Court.

Soon it was observed Orlando paid the Muscovite far more attention than mere civility demanded. He was seldom far from her side, and their conversation, though unintelligible to the rest, was carried on with such animation, provoked such blushes and laughter, that the dullest could guess the subject. Moreover, the change in Orlando himself was extraordinary. Nobody had ever seen him so animated. In one night he had thrown off his boyish clumsiness; he was changed from a sulky stripling, who could not enter a ladies’ room without sweeping half the ornaments from the table, to a nobleman, full of grace and manly courtesy. To see him hand the Muscovite (as she was called) to her sledge, or offer her his hand for the dance, or catch the spotted kerchief which she had let drop, or discharge any other of those manifold duties which the supreme lady exacts and the lover hastens to anticipate was a sight to kindle the dull eyes of age, and to make the quick pulse of youth beat faster. Yet over it all hung a cloud. The old men shrugged their shoulders. The young tittered between their fingers. All knew that Orlando was betrothed to another. The Lady Margaret O’Brien O’Dare O’Reilly Tyrconnel (for that was the proper name of Euphrosyne of the Sonnets) wore Orlando’s splendid sapphire on the second finger of her left hand. It was she who had the supreme right to his attentions. Yet she might drop all the handkerchiefs in her wardrobe (of which she had many scores) upon the ice and Orlando never stooped to pick them up. She might wait twenty minutes for him to hand her to her sledge, and in the end have to be content with the services of her Blackamoor. When she skated, which she did rather clumsily, no one was at her elbow to encourage her, and, if she fell, which she did rather heavily, no one raised her to her feet and dusted the snow from her petticoats. Although she was naturally phlegmatic, slow to take offence, and more reluctant than most people to believe that a mere foreigner could oust her from Orlando’s affections, still even the Lady Margaret herself was brought at last to suspect that something was brewing against her peace of mind.

Indeed, as the days passed, Orlando took less and less care to hide his feelings. Making some excuse or other, he would leave the company as soon as they had dined, or steal away from the skaters, who were forming sets for a quadrille. Next moment it would be seen that the Muscovite was missing too. But what most outraged the Court, and stung it in its tenderest part, which is its vanity, was that the couple was often seen to slip under the silken rope, which railed off the Royal enclosure from the public part of the river and to disappear among the crowd of common people. For suddenly the Princess would stamp her foot and cry, “Take me away. I detest your English mob,” by which she meant the English Court itself. She could stand it no longer. It was full of prying old women, she said, who stared in one’s face, and of bumptious young men who trod on one’s toes. They smelt bad. Their dogs ran between her legs. It was like being in a cage. In Russia they had rivers ten miles broad on which one could gallop six horses abreast all day long without meeting a soul. Besides, she wanted to see the Tower, the Beefeaters, the Heads on Temple Bar, and the jewellers’ shops in the city. Thus, it came about that Orlando took her to the city, showed her the Beefeaters and the rebels’ heads, and bought her whatever took her fancy in the Royal Exchange. But this was not enough. Each increasingly desired the other’s company in privacy all day long where there were none to marvel or to stare. Instead of taking the road to London, therefore, they turned the other way about and were soon beyond the crowd among the frozen reaches of the Thames where, save for sea birds and some old country woman hacking at the ice in a vain attempt to draw a pailful of water or gathering what sticks or dead leaves she could find for firing, not a living soul ever came their way. The poor kept closely to their cottages, and the better sort, who could afford it, crowded for warmth and merriment to the city.

Hence, Orlando and Sasha, as he called her for short, and because it was the name of a white Russian fox he had had as a boy—a creature soft as snow, but with teeth of steel, which bit him so savagely that his father had it killed—hence, they had the river to themselves. Hot with skating and with love they would throw themselves down in some solitary reach, where the yellow osiers fringed the bank, and wrapped in a great fur cloak Orlando would take her in his arms, and know, for the first time, he murmured, the delights of love. Then, when the ecstasy was over and they lay lulled in a swoon on the ice, he would tell her of his other loves, and how, compared with her, they had been of wood, of sackcloth, and of cinders. And laughing at his vehemence, she would turn once more in his arms and give him, for love’s sake, one more embrace. And then they would marvel that the ice did not melt with their heat, and pity the poor old woman who had no such natural means of thawing it, but must hack at it with a chopper of cold steel. And then, wrapped in their sables, they would talk of everything under the sun; of sights and travels; of Moor and Pagan; of this man’s beard and that woman’s skin; of a rat that fed from her hand at table; of the arras that moved always in the hall at home; of a face; of a feather. Nothing was too small for such converse, nothing was too great.

Then, suddenly Orlando would fall into one of his moods of melancholy; the sight of the old woman hobbling over the ice might be the cause of it, or nothing; and would fling himself face downwards on the ice and look into the frozen waters and think of death. For the philosopher is right who says that nothing thicker than a knife’s blade separates happiness from melancholy; and he goes on to opine that one is twin fellow to the other; and draws from this the conclusion that all extremes of feeling are allied to madness; and so bids us take refuge in the true Church (in his view the Anabaptist), which is the only harbour, port, anchorage, etc., he said, for those tossed on this sea.

“All ends in death,” Orlando would say, sitting upright, his face clouded with gloom. (For that was the way his mind worked now, in violent see-saws from life to death, stopping at nothing in between, so that the biographer must not stop either, but must fly as fast as he can and so keep pace with the unthinking passionate foolish actions and sudden extravagant words in which, it is impossible to deny, Orlando at this time of his life indulged.)

“All ends in death,” Orlando would say, sitting upright on the ice. But Sasha who after all had no English blood in her but was from Russia where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden, and sentences often left unfinished from doubt as to how best to end them—Sasha stared at him, perhaps sneered at him, for he must have seemed a child to her, and said nothing. But at length the ice grew cold beneath them, which she disliked, so pulling him to his feet again, she talked so enchantingly, so wittily, so wisely (but unfortunately always in French, which notoriously loses its flavour in translation) that he forgot the frozen waters or night coming or the old woman or whatever it was, and would try to tell her—plunging and splashing among a thousand images which had gone as stale as the women who inspired them—what she was like. Snow, cream, marble, cherries, alabaster, golden wire? None of these. She was like a fox, or an olive tree; like the waves of the sea when you look down upon them from a height; like an emerald; like the sun on a green hill which is yet clouded—like nothing he had seen or known in England. Ransack the language as he might, words failed him. He wanted another landscape, and another tongue. English was too frank, too candid, too honeyed a speech for Sasha. For in all she said, however open she seemed and voluptuous, there was something hidden; in all she did, however daring, there was something concealed. So the green flame seems hidden in the emerald, or the sun prisoned in a hill. The clearness was only outward; within was a wandering flame. It came; it went; she never shone with the steady beam of an Englishwoman—here, however, remembering the Lady Margaret and her petticoats, Orlando ran wild in his transports and swept her over the ice, faster, faster, vowing that he would chase the flame, dive for the gem, and so on and so on, the words coming on the pants of his breath with the passion of a poet whose poetry is half pressed out of him by pain.

But Sasha was silent. When Orlando had done telling her that she was a fox, an olive tree, or a green hill-top, and had given her the whole history of his family; how their house was one of the most ancient in Britain; how they had come from Rome with the Caesars and had the right to walk down the Corso (which is the chief street in Rome) under a tasselled palanquin, which he said is a privilege reserved only for those of imperial blood (for there was an orgulous credulity about him which was pleasant enough), he would pause and ask her, Where was her own house? What was her father? Had she brothers? Why was she here alone with her uncle? Then, somehow, though she answered readily enough, an awkwardness would come between them. He suspected at first that her rank was not as high as she would like; or that she was ashamed of the savage ways of her people, for he had heard that the women in Muscovy wear beards and the men are covered with fur from the waist down; that both sexes are smeared with tallow to keep the cold out, tear meat with their fingers and live in huts where an English noble would scruple to keep his cattle; so that he forbore to press her. But on reflection, he concluded that her silence could not be for that reason; she herself was entirely free from hair on the chin; she dressed in velvet and pearls, and her manners were certainly not those of a woman bred in a cattle-shed.

What, then, did she hide from him? The doubt underlying the tremendous force of his feelings was like a quicksand beneath a monument which shifts suddenly and makes the whole pile shake. The agony would seize him suddenly. Then he would blaze out in such wrath that she did not know how to quiet him. Perhaps she did not want to quiet him; perhaps his rages pleased her and she provoked them purposely—such is the curious obliquity of the Muscovitish temperament.

To continue the story—skating farther than their wont that day they reached that part of the river where the ships had anchored and been frozen in midstream. Among them was the ship of the Muscovite Embassy flying its double-headed black eagle from the main mast, which was hung with many-coloured icicles several yards in length. Sasha had left some of her clothing on board, and supposing the ship to be empty they climbed on deck and went in search of it. Remembering certain passages in his own past, Orlando would not have marvelled had some good citizens sought this refuge before them; and so it turned out. They had not ventured far when a fine young man started up from some business of his own behind a coil of rope and saying, apparently, for he spoke Russian, that he was one of the crew and would help the Princess to find what she wanted, lit a lump of candle and disappeared with her into the lower parts of the ship.

The Russian Princess as a Child

Time went by, and Orlando, wrapped in his own dreams, thought only of the pleasures of life; of his jewel; of her rarity; of means for making her irrevocably and indissolubly his own. Obstacles there were and hardships to be overcome. She was determined to live in Russia, where there were frozen rivers and wild horses and men, she said, who gashed each other’s throats open. It is true that a landscape of pine and snow, habits of lust and slaughter, did not entice him. Nor was he anxious to cease his pleasant country ways of sport and tree-planting; relinquish his office; ruin his career; shoot the reindeer instead of the rabbit; drink vodka instead of canary, and slip a knife up his sleeve—for what purpose, he knew not. Still, all this and more than all this he would do for her sake. As for his marriage with the Lady Margaret, fixed though it was for this day sennight, the thing was so palpably absurd that he scarcely gave it a thought. Her kinsmen would abuse him for deserting a great lady; his friends would deride him for ruining the finest career in the world for a Cossack woman and a waste of snow—it weighed not a straw in the balance compared with Sasha herself. On the first dark night they would fly. They would take ship to Russia. So he pondered; so he plotted as he walked up and down the deck.

He was recalled, turning westward, by the sight of the sun, slung like an orange on the cross of St. Paul’s. It was blood-red and sinking rapidly. It must be almost evening. Sasha had been gone this hour and more. Seized instantly with those dark forebodings which shadowed even his most confident thoughts of her, he plunged the way he had seen them go into the hold of the ship; and, after stumbling among chests and barrels in the darkness, was made aware by a faint glimmer in a corner that they were seated there. For one second, he had a vision of them; saw Sasha seated on the sailor’s knee; saw her bend towards him; saw them embrace before the light was blotted out in a red cloud by his rage. He blazed into such a howl of anguish that the whole ship echoed. Sasha threw herself between them, or the sailor would have been stifled before he could draw his cutlass. Then a deadly sickness came over Orlando, and they had to lay him on the floor and give him brandy to drink before he revived. And then, when he had recovered and was sat upon a heap of sacking on deck, Sasha hung over him, passing before his dizzied eyes softly, sinuously, like the fox that had bit him, now cajoling, now denouncing, so that he came to doubt what he had seen. Had not the candle guttered; had not the shadows moved? The box was heavy, she said; the man was helping her to move it. Orlando believed her one moment—for who can be sure that his rage has not painted what he most dreads to find?—the next was the more violent with anger at her deceit. Then Sasha herself turned white; stamped her foot on deck; said she would go that night, and called upon her Gods to destroy her, if she, a Romanovitch, had lain in the arms of a common seaman. Indeed, looking at them together (which he could hardly bring himself to do) Orlando was outraged by the foulness of his imagination that could have painted so frail a creature in the paws of that hairy sea brute. The man was huge; stood six feet four in his stockings; wore common wire rings in his ears; and looked like a dray horse upon which some wren or robin has perched in its flight. So he yielded; believed her; and asked her pardon. Yet, when they were going down the ship’s side, lovingly again, Sasha paused with her hand on the ladder, and called back to this tawny wide-cheeked monster a volley of Russian greetings, jests, or endearments, not a word of which Orlando could understand. But there was something in her tone (it might be the fault of the Russian consonants) that reminded Orlando of a scene some nights since, when he had come upon her in secret gnawing a candle-end in a corner, which she had picked from the floor. True, it was pink; it was gilt; and it was from the King’s table; but it was tallow, and she gnawed it. Was there not, he thought, handing her on to the ice, something rank in her, something coarse flavoured, something peasant born? And he fancied her at forty grown unwieldy though she was now slim as a reed, and lethargic though she was now blithe as a lark. But again as they skated towards London such suspicions melted in his breast, and he felt as if he had been hooked by a great fish through the nose and rushed through the waters unwillingly, yet with his own consent.

It was an evening of astonishing beauty. As the sun sank, all the domes, spires, turrets, and pinnacles of London rose in inky blackness against the furious red sunset clouds. Here was the fretted cross at Charing; there the dome of St. Paul’s; there the massy square of the Tower buildings; there like a grove of trees stripped of all leaves save a knob at the end were the heads on the pikes at Temple Bar. Now the Abbey windows were lit up and burnt like a heavenly, many-coloured shield (in Orlando’s fancy); now all the west seemed a golden window with troops of angels (in Orlando’s fancy again) passing up and down the heavenly stairs perpetually. All the time they seemed to be skating on fathomless depths of air, so blue the ice had become; and so glassy smooth was it that they sped quicker and quicker to the city with the white gulls circling about them, and cutting in the air with their wings the very same sweeps that they cut on the ice with their skates.

Sasha, as if to reassure him, was tenderer than usual and even more delightful. Seldom would she talk about her past life, but now she told him how, in winter in Russia, she would listen to the wolves howling across the steppes, and thrice, to show him, she barked like a wolf. Upon which he told her of the stags in the snow at home, and how they would stray into the great hall for warmth and be fed by an old man with porridge from a bucket. And then she praised him; for his love of beasts; for his gallantry; for his legs. Ravished with her praises and shamed to think how he had maligned her by fancying her on the knees of a common sailor and grown fat and lethargic at forty, he told her that he could find no words to praise her; yet instantly bethought him how she was like the spring and green grass and rushing waters, and seizing her more tightly than ever, he swung her with him half across the river so that the gulls and the cormorants swung too. And halting at length, out of breath, she said, panting slightly, that he was like a million-candled Christmas tree (such as they have in Russia) hung with yellow globes; incandescent; enough to light a whole street by; (so one might translate it) for what with his glowing cheeks, his dark curls, his black and crimson cloak, he looked as if he were burning with his own radiance, from a lamp lit within.

All the colour, save the red of Orlando’s cheeks, soon faded. Night came on. As the orange light of sunset vanished it was succeeded by an astonishing white glare from the torches, bonfires, flaming cressets, and other devices by which the river was lit up and the strangest transformation took place. Various churches and noblemen’s palaces, whose fronts were of white stone showed in streaks and patches as if floating on the air. Of St. Paul’s, in particular, nothing was left but a gilt cross. The Abbey appeared like the grey skeleton of a leaf. Everything suffered emaciation and transformation. As they approached the carnival, they heard a deep note like that struck on a tuning-fork which boomed louder and louder until it became an uproar. Every now and then a great shout followed a rocket into the air. Gradually they could discern little figures breaking off from the vast crowd and spinning hither and thither like gnats on the surface of a river. Above and around this brilliant circle like a bowl of darkness pressed the deep black of a winter’s night. And then into this darkness there began to rise with pauses, which kept the expectation alert and the mouth open, flowering rockets; crescents; serpents; a crown. At one moment the woods and distant hills showed green as on a summer’s day; the next all was winter and blackness again.

By this time Orlando and the Princess were close to the Royal enclosure and found their way barred by a great crowd of the common people, who were pressing as near to the silken rope as they dared. Loth to end their privacy and encounter the sharp eyes that were on the watch for them, the couple lingered there, shouldered by apprentices; tailors; fishwives; horse dealers, cony catchers; starving scholars; maid - servants in their whimples; orange girls; ostlers; sober citizens; bawdy tapsters; and a crowd of little ragamuffins such as always haunt the outskirts of a crowd, screaming and scrambling among people’s feet—all the riff-raff of the London streets indeed was there, jesting and jostling, here casting dice, telling fortunes, shoving, tickling, pinching; here uproarious, there glum; some of them with mouths gaping a yard wide; others as little reverent as daws on a house-top; all as variously rigged out as their purse or stations allowed; here in fur and broadcloth; there in tatters with their feet kept from the ice only by a dishclout bound about them. The main press of people, it appeared, stood opposite a booth or stage something like our Punch and Judy show upon which some kind of theatrical performance was going forward. A black man was waving his arms and vociferating. There was a woman in white laid upon a bed. Rough though the staging was, the actors running up and down a pair of steps and sometimes tripping, and the crowd stamping their feet and whistling, or when they were bored, tossing a piece of orange peel on to the ice which a dog would scramble for, still the astonishing, sinuous melody of the words stirred Orlando like music. Spoken with extreme speed and a daring agility of tongue which reminded him of the sailors singing in the beer gardens at Wapping, the words even without meaning were as wine to him. But now and again a single phrase would come to him over the ice which was as if torn from the depths of his heart. The frenzy of the Moor seemed to him his own frenzy, and when the Moor suffocated the woman in her bed it was Sasha he killed with his own hands.

At last the play was ended. All had grown dark. The tears streamed down his face. Looking up into the sky there was nothing but blackness there too. Ruin and death, he thought, cover all. The life of man ends in the grave. Worms devour us.

Methinks it should be now a huge eclipse

Of sun and moon, and that the affrighted globe

Should yawn——

Even as he said this a star of some pallor rose in his memory. The night was dark; it was pitch dark; but it was such a night as this that they had waited for; it was on such a night as this that they had planned to fly. He remembered everything. The time had come. With a burst of passion he snatched Sasha to him, and hissed in her ear “Jour de ma vie!” It was their signal. At midnight they would meet at an inn near Blackfriars. Horses waited there. Everything was in readiness for their flight. So they parted, she to her tent, he to his. It still wanted an hour of the time.

Long before midnight Orlando was in waiting. The night was of so inky a blackness that a man was on you before he could be seen, which was all to the good, but it was also of the most solemn stillness so that a horse’s hoof, or a child’s cry, could be heard at a distance of half a mile. Many a time did Orlando, pacing the little courtyard, hold his heart at the sound of some nag’s steady footfall on the cobbles, or at the rustle of a woman’s dress. But the traveller was only some merchant, making home belated; or some woman of the quarter whose errand was nothing so innocent. They passed, and the street was quieter than before. Then those lights which burnt downstairs in the small, huddled quarters where the poor of the city lived moved up to the sleeping-rooms, and then, one by one, were extinguished. The street lanterns in these purlieus were few at most; and the negligence of the night watchman often suffered them to expire long before dawn. The darkness then became even deeper than before. Orlando looked to the wicks of his lantern, saw to the saddle girths; primed his pistols; examined his holsters; and did all these things a dozen times at least till he could find nothing more needing his attention. Though it still lacked some twenty minutes to midnight, he could not bring himself to go indoors to the inn parlour, where the hostess was still serving sack and the cheaper sort of canary wine to a few seafaring men, who would sit there trolling their ditties, and telling their stories of Drake, Hawkins, and Grenville, till they toppled off the benches and rolled asleep on the sanded floor. The darkness was more compassionate to his swollen and violent heart. He listened to every footfall; speculated on every sound. Each drunken shout and each wail from some poor wretch laid in the straw or in other distress cut his heart to the quick, as if it boded ill omen to his venture. Yet, he had no fear for Sasha. Her courage made nothing of the adventure. She would come alone, in her cloak and trousers, booted like a man. Light as her footfall was, it would hardly be heard, even in this silence.

So he waited in the darkness. Suddenly he was struck in the face by a blow, soft, yet heavy, on the side of his cheek. So strung with expectation was he, that he started and put his hand to his sword. The blow was repeated a dozen times on forehead and cheek. The dry frost had lasted so long that it took him a minute to realise that these were raindrops falling; the blows were the blows of the rain. At first, they fell slowly, deliberately, one by one. But soon the six drops became sixty; then six hundred; then ran themselves together in a steady spout of water. It was as if the hard and consolidated sky poured itself forth in one profuse fountain. In the space of five minutes Orlando was soaked to the skin.

Hastily putting the horses under cover, he sought shelter beneath the lintel of the door whence he could still observe the courtyard. The air was thicker now than ever, and such a steaming and droning rose from the downpour that no footfall of man or beast could be heard above it. The roads, pitted as they were with great holes, would be under water and perhaps impassable. But of what effect this would have upon their flight he scarcely thought. All his senses were bent upon gazing along the cobbled pathway—gleaming in the light of the lantern—for Sasha’s coming. Sometimes, in the darkness, he seemed to see her wrapped about with rain strokes. But the phantom vanished. Suddenly, with an awful and ominous voice, a voice full of horror and alarm which raised every hair of anguish in Orlando’s soul, St. Paul’s struck the first stroke of midnight. Four times more it struck remorselessly. With the superstition of a lover, Orlando had made out that it was on the sixth stroke that she would come. But the sixth stroke echoed away, and the seventh came and the eighth, and to his apprehensive mind they seemed notes first heralding and then proclaiming death and disaster. When the twelfth struck he knew that his doom was sealed. It was useless for the rational part of him to reason; she might be late; she might be prevented; she might have missed her way. The passionate and feeling heart of Orlando knew the truth. Other clocks struck, jangling one after another. The whole world seemed to ring with the news of her deceit and his derision. The old suspicions subterraneously at work in him rushed forth from concealment openly. He was bitten by a swarm of snakes, each more poisonous than the last. He stood in the doorway in the tremendous rain without moving. As the minutes passed, he sagged a little at the knees. The downpour rushed on. In the thick of it, great guns seemed to boom. Huge noises as of the tearing and rending of oak trees could be heard. There were also wild cries and terrible inhuman groanings. But Orlando stood there immovable till Paul’s clock struck two, and then, crying aloud with an awful irony, and all his teeth showing, “Jour de ma vie!” he dashed the lantern to the ground, mounted his horse and galloped he knew not where.

Some blind instinct, for he was past reasoning, must have driven him to take the river bank in the direction of the sea. For when the dawn broke, which it did with unusual suddenness, the sky turning a pale yellow and the rain almost ceasing, he found himself on the banks of the Thames off Wapping. Now a sight of the most extraordinary nature met his eyes. Where, for three months and more, there had been solid ice of such thickness that it seemed permanent as stone, and a whole gay city had been stood on its pavement, was now a race of turbulent yellow waters. The river had gained its freedom in the night. It was as if a sulphur spring (to which view many philosophers inclined) had risen from the volcanic regions beneath and burst the ice asunder with such vehemence that it swept the huge and massy fragments furiously apart. The mere look of the water was enough to turn one giddy. All was riot and confusion. The river was strewn with icebergs. Some of these were as broad as a bowling green and as high as a house; others no bigger than a man’s hat, but most fantastically twisted. Now would come down a whole convoy of ice blocks sinking everything that stood in their way. Now, eddying and swirling like a tortured serpent, the river would seem to be hurtling itself between the fragments and tossing them from bank to bank, so that they could be heard smashing against the piers and pillars. But what was the most awful and inspiring of terror was the sight of the human creatures who had been trapped in the night and now paced their twisting and precarious islands in the utmost agony of spirit. Whether they jumped into the flood or stayed on the ice their doom was certain. Sometimes quite a cluster of these poor creatures would come down together, some on their knees, others suckling their babies. One old man seemed to be reading aloud from a holy book. At other times, and his fate perhaps was the most dreadful, a solitary wretch would stride his narrow tenement alone. As they swept out to sea, some could be heard crying vainly for help, making wild promises to amend their ways, confessing their sins and vowing altars and wealth if God would hear their prayers. Others were so dazed with terror that they sat immovable and silent looking steadfastly before them. One crew of young watermen or post-boys, to judge by their liveries, roared and shouted the lewdest tavern songs, as if in bravado, and were dashed against a tree and sunk with blasphemies on their lips. An old nobleman—for such his furred gown and golden chain proclaimed him—went down not far from where Orlando stood, calling vengeance upon the Irish rebels, who, he cried with his last breath, had plotted this devilry. Many perished clasping some silver pot or other treasure to their breasts; and at least a score of poor wretches were drowned by their own cupidity, hurling themselves from the bank into the flood rather than let a gold goblet escape them, or see before their eyes the disappearance of some furred gown. For furniture, valuables, possessions of all sorts were carried away on the icebergs. Among other strange sights was to be seen a cat suckling its young; a table laid sumptuously for a supper of twenty; a couple in bed; together with an extraordinary number of cooking utensils.

Dazed and astounded, Orlando could do nothing for some time but watch the appalling race of waters as it hurled itself past him. At last, seeming to recollect himself, he clapped spurs to his horse and galloped hard along the river bank in the direction of the sea. Rounding a bend of the river, he came opposite that reach where, not two days ago, the ships of the Ambassadors had seemed immovably frozen. Hastily, he made count of them all; the French; the Spanish; the Austrian; the Turk. All still floated, though the French had broken loose from her moorings, and the Turkish vessel had taken a great rent in her side and was fast filling with water. But the Russian ship was nowhere to be seen. For one moment Orlando thought it must have foundered; but, raising himself in his stirrups and shading his eyes, which had the sight of a hawk’s, he could just make out the shape of a ship on the horizon. The black eagles were flying from the mast head. The ship of the Muscovite Embassy was standing out to sea.

Flinging himself from his horse, he made, in his rage, as if he would breast the flood. Standing knee-deep in water he hurled at the faithless woman all the insults that have ever been the lot of her sex. Faithless, mutable, fickle, he called her; devil, adulteress, deceiver; and the swirling waters took his words, and tossed at his feet a broken pot and a little straw.

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Chapter 2.

The biographer is now faced with a difficulty which it is better perhaps to confess than to gloss over. Up to this point in telling the story of Orlando’s life, documents, both private and historical, have made it possible to fulfil the first duty of a biographer, which is to plod, without looking to right or left, in the indelible footprints of truth; unenticed by flowers; regardless of shade; on and on methodically till we fall plump into the grave and write finis on the tombstone above our heads. But now we come to an episode which lies right across our path, so that there is no ignoring it. Yet it is dark, mysterious, and undocumented; so that there is no explaining it. Volumes might be written in interpretation of it; whole religious systems founded upon the signification of it. Our simple duty is to state the facts as far as they are known, and so let the reader make of them what he may.

In the summer of that disastrous winter which saw the frost, the flood, the deaths of many thousands, and the complete downfall of Orlando’s hopes—for he was exiled from Court; in deep disgrace with the most powerful nobles of his time; the Irish house of Desmond was justly enraged; the King had already trouble enough with the Irish not to relish this further addition—in that summer Orlando retired to his great house in the country and there lived in complete solitude. One June morning—it was Saturday the 18th—he failed to rise at his usual hour, and when his groom went to call him he was found fast asleep. Nor could he be awakened. He lay as if in a trance, without perceptible breathing; and though dogs were set to bark under his window; cymbals, drums, bones beaten perpetually in his room; a gorse bush put under his pillow; and mustard plasters applied to his feet, still he did not wake, take food, or show any sign of life for seven whole days. On the seventh day he woke at his usual time (a quarter before eight, precisely) and turned the whole posse of caterwauling wives and village soothsayers out of his room; which was natural enough; but what was strange was that he showed no consciousness of any such trance, but dressed himself and sent for his horse as if he had woken from a single night’s slumber. Yet some change, it was suspected, must have taken place in the chambers of his brain, for though he was perfectly rational and seemed graver and more sedate in his ways than before, he appeared to have an imperfect recollection of his past life. He would listen when people spoke of the great frost or the skating or the carnival, but he never gave any sign, except by passing his hand across his brow as if to wipe away some cloud, of having witnessed them himself. When the events of the past six months were discussed, he seemed not so much distressed as puzzled, as if he were troubled by confused memories of some time long gone or were trying to recall stories told him by another. It was observed that if Russia was mentioned or Princesses or ships, he would fall into a gloom of an uneasy kind and get up and look out of the window or call one of the dogs to him, or take a knife and carve a piece of cedar wood. But the doctors were hardly wiser then than they are now, and after prescribing rest and exercise, starvation and nourishment, society and solitude, that he should lie in bed all day and ride forty miles between lunch and dinner, together with the usual sedatives and irritants, diversified, as the fancy took them, with possets of newt’s slobber on rising, and draughts of peacock’s gall on going to bed, they left him to himself, and gave it as their opinion that he had been asleep for a week.

But if sleep it was, of what nature, we can scarcely refrain from asking, are such sleeps as these? Are they remedial measures—trances in which the most galling memories, events that seem likely to cripple life for ever, are brushed with a dark wing which rubs their harshness off and gilds them, even the ugliest and basest, with a lustre, an incandescence? Has the finger of death to be laid on the tumult of life from time to time lest it rend us asunder? Are we so made that we have to take death in small doses daily or we could not go on with the business of living? And then what strange powers are these that penetrate our most secret ways and change our most treasured possessions without our willing it? Had Orlando, worn out by the extremity of his suffering, died for a week, and then come to life again? And if so, of what nature is death and of what nature life? Having waited well over half an hour for an answer to these questions, and none coming, let us get on with the story.

Now Orlando gave himself up to a life of extreme solitude. His disgrace at Court and the violence of his grief were partly the reason of it, but as he made no effort to defend himself and seldom invited anyone to visit him (though he had many friends who would willingly have done so) it appeared as if to be alone in the great house of his fathers suited his temper. Solitude was his choice. How he spent his time, nobody quite knew. The servants, of whom he kept a full retinue, though much of their business was to dust empty rooms and to smooth the coverlets of beds that were never slept in, watched, in the dark of the evening, as they sat over their cakes and ale, a light passing along the galleries, through the banqueting-halls, up the staircases, into the bedrooms, and knew that their master was perambulating the house alone. None dared follow him, for the house was haunted by a great variety of ghosts, and the extent of it made it easy to lose one’s way and either fall down some hidden staircase or open a door which, should the wind blow it to, would shut upon one for ever—accidents of no uncommon occurrence, as the frequent discovery of the skeletons of men and animals in attitudes of great agony made evident. Then the light would be lost altogether, and Mrs. Grimsditch, the housekeeper, would say to Mr. Dupper, the chaplain, how she hoped his Lordship had not met with some bad accident. Mr. Dupper would opine that his Lordship was on his knees, no doubt, among the tombs of his ancestors in the Chapel, which was in the Billiard Table Court, half a mile away on the south side. For he had sins on his conscience, Mr. Dupper was afraid; upon which Mrs. Grimsditch would retort, rather sharply, that so had most of us; and Mrs. Stewkley and Mrs. Field and old Nurse Carpenter would all raise their voices in his Lordship’s praise; and the grooms and the stewards would swear that it was a thousand pities to see so fine a nobleman moping about the house when he might be hunting the fox or chasing the deer; and even the little laundry maids and scullery maids, the Judys and the Faiths, who were handing round the tankards and cakes, would pipe up their testimony to his Lordship’s gallantry; for never was there a kinder gentleman, or one more free with those little pieces of silver which serve to buy a knot of ribbon or put a posy in one’s hair; until even the Blackamoor whom they called Grace Robinson by way of making a Christian woman of her, understood what they were at, and agreed that his Lordship was a handsome, pleasant, darling gentleman in the only way she could, that is to say by showing all her teeth at once in a broad grin. In short, all his serving men and women held him in high respect, and cursed the foreign Princess (but they called her by a coarser name than that) who had brought him to this pass.

But though it was probably cowardice, or love of hot ale, that led Mr. Dupper to imagine his Lordship safe among the tombs so that he need not go in search of him, it may well have been that Mr. Dupper was right. Orlando now took a strange delight in thoughts of death and decay, and, after pacing the long galleries and ballrooms with a taper in his hand, looking at picture after picture as if he sought the likeness of somebody whom he could not find, would mount into the family pew and sit for hours watching the banners stir and the moonlight waver with a bat or death’s head moth to keep him company. Even this was not enough for him, but he must descend into the crypt where his ancestors lay, coffin piled upon coffin, for ten generations together. The place was so seldom visited that the rats had made free with the lead work, and now a thigh bone would catch at his cloak as he passed, or he would crack the skull of some old Sir Malise as it rolled beneath his foot. It was a ghastly sepulchre; dug deep beneath the foundations of the house as if the first Lord of the family, who had come from France with the Conqueror, had wished to testify how all pomp is built upon corruption; how the skeleton lies beneath the flesh; how we that dance and sing above must lie below; how the crimson velvet turns to dust; how the ring (here Orlando, stooping his lantern, would pick up a gold circle lacking a stone, that had rolled into a corner) loses its ruby and the eye which was so lustrous shines no more. “Nothing remains of all these Princes”, Orlando would say, indulging in some pardonable exaggeration of their rank, “except one digit,” and he would take a skeleton hand in his and bend the joints this way and that. “Whose hand was it?” he went on to ask. “The right or the left? The hand of man or woman, of age or youth? Had it urged the war horse, or plied the needle? Had it plucked the rose, or grasped cold steel? Had it——” but here either his invention failed him or, what is more likely, provided him with so many instances of what a hand can do that he shrank, as his wont was, from the cardinal labour of composition, which is excision, and he put it with the other bones, thinking how there was a writer called Thomas Browne, a Doctor of Norwich, whose writing upon such subjects took his fancy amazingly.

So, taking his lantern and seeing that the bones were in order, for though romantic, he was singularly methodical and detested nothing so much as a ball of string on the floor, let alone the skull of an ancestor, he returned to that curious, moody pacing down the galleries, looking for something among the pictures, which was interrupted at length by a veritable spasm of sobbing, at the sight of a Dutch snow scene by an unknown artist. Then it seemed to him that life was not worth living any more. Forgetting the bones of his ancestors and how life is founded on a grave, he stood there shaken with sobs, all for the desire of a woman in Russian trousers, with slanting eyes, a pouting mouth, and pearls about her neck. She had gone. She had left him. He was never to see her again. And so he sobbed. And so he found his way back to his own rooms; and Mrs. Grimsditch, seeing the light in the window, put the tankard from her lips and said Praise be to God, his Lordship was safe in his room again; for she had been thinking all this while that he was foully murdered.

Orlando now drew his chair up to the table; opened the works of Sir Thomas Browne and proceeded to investigate the delicate articulation of one of the doctor’s longest and most marvellously contorted cogitations.

For though these are not matters on which a biographer can profitably enlarge it is plain enough to those who have done a reader’s part in making up from bare hints dropped here and there the whole boundary and circumference of a living person; can hear in what we only whisper a living voice; can see, often when we say nothing about it, exactly what he looked like; know without a word to guide them precisely what he thought—and it is for readers such as these that we write—it is plain then to such a reader that Orlando was strangely compounded of many humours—of melancholy, of indolence, of passion, of love of solitude, to say nothing of all those contortions and subtleties of temper which were indicated on the first page, when he slashed at a dead nigger’s head; cut it down; hung it chivalrously out of his reach again and then betook himself to the window-seat with a book. The taste for books was an early one. As a child he was sometimes found at midnight by a page still reading. They took his taper away, and he bred glow-worms to serve his purpose. They took the glow-worms away, and he almost burnt the house down with a tinder. To put it in a nutshell, leaving the novelist to smooth out the crumpled silk and all its implications, he was a nobleman afflicted with a love of literature. Many people of his time, still more of his rank, escaped the infection and were thus free to run or ride or make love at their own sweet will. But some were early infected by a germ said to be bred of the pollen of the asphodel and to be blown out of Greece and Italy, which was of so deadly a nature that it would shake the hand as it was raised to strike, cloud the eye as it sought its prey, and make the tongue stammer as it declared its love. It was the fatal nature of this disease to substitute a phantom for reality, so that Orlando, to whom fortune had given every gift—plate, linen, houses, men-servants, carpets, beds in profusion—had only to open a book for the whole vast accumulation to turn to mist. The nine acres of stone which were his house vanished; one hundred and fifty indoor servants disappeared; his eighty riding horses became invisible; it would take too long to count the carpets, sofas, trappings, china, plate, cruets, chafing dishes and other movables often of beaten gold, which evaporated like so much sea mist under the miasma. So it was, and Orlando would sit by himself, reading, a naked man.

The disease gained rapidly upon him now in his solitude. He would read often six hours into the night; and when they came to him for orders about the slaughtering of cattle or the harvesting of wheat, he would push away his folio and look as if he did not understand what was said to him. This was bad enough and wrung the hearts of Hall, the falconer, of Giles, the groom, of Mrs. Grimsditch, the housekeeper, of Mr. Dupper, the chaplain. A fine gentleman like that, they said, had no need of books. Let him leave books, they said, to the palsied or the dying. But worse was to come. For once the disease of reading has laid hold upon the system it weakens it so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the inkpot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing. And while this is bad enough in a poor man, whose only property is a chair and a table set beneath a leaky roof—for he has not much to lose, after all—the plight of a rich man, who has houses and cattle, maid-servants, asses and linen, and yet writes books, is pitiable in the extreme. The flavour of it all goes out of him; he is riddled by hot irons; gnawed by vermin. He would give every penny he has (such is the malignity of the germ) to write one little book and become famous; yet all the gold in Peru will not buy him the treasure of a well-turned line. So he falls into consumption and sickness, blows his brains out, turns his face to the wall. It matters not in what attitude they find him. He has passed through the gates of Death and known the flames of Hell.

Happily, Orlando was of a strong constitution and the disease (for reasons presently to be given) never broke him down as it has broken many of his peers. But he was deeply smitten with it, as the sequel shows. For when he had read for an hour or so in Sir Thomas Browne, and the bark of the stag and the call of the night watchman showed that it was the dead of night and all safe asleep, he crossed the room, took a silver key from his pocket and unlocked the doors of a great inlaid cabinet which stood in the corner. Within were some fifty drawers of cedar wood and upon each was a paper neatly written in Orlando’s hand. He paused, as if hesitating which to open. One was inscribed “The Death of Ajax”, another “The Birth of Pyramus”, another “Iphigenia in Aulis”, another “The Death of Hippolytus”, another “Meleager”, another “The Return of Odysseus”,—in fact there was scarcely a single drawer that lacked the name of some mythological personage at a crisis of his career. In each drawer lay a document of considerable size all written over in Orlando’s hand. The truth was that Orlando had been afflicted thus for many years. Never had any boy begged apples as Orlando begged paper; nor sweetmeats as he begged ink. Stealing away from talk and games, he had hidden himself behind curtains, in priest’s holes, or in the cupboard behind his mother’s bedroom which had a great hole in the floor and smelt horribly of starling’s dung, with an inkhorn in one hand, a pen in another, and on his knee a roll of paper. Thus had been written, before he was turned twenty-five, some forty-seven plays, histories, romances, poems; some in prose, some in verse; some in French, some in Italian; all romantic, and all long. One he had had printed by John Ball of the Feathers and Coronet opposite St. Paul’s Cross, Cheapside; but though the sight of it gave him extreme delight, he had never dared show it even to his mother, since to write, much more to publish, was, he knew, for a nobleman an inexpiable disgrace.

Now, however, that it was the dead of night and he was alone, he chose from this repository one thick document called “Xenophila a Tragedy” or some such title, and one thin one, called simply “The Oak Tree” (this was the only monosyllabic title among the lot), and then he approached the inkhorn, fingered the quill, and made other such passes as those addicted to this vice begin their rites with. But he paused.

As this pause was of extreme significance in his history, more so, indeed, than many acts which bring men to their knees and make rivers run with blood, it behoves us to ask why he paused; and to reply, after due reflection, that it was for some such reason as this. Nature, who has played so many queer tricks upon us, making us so unequally of clay and diamonds, of rainbow and granite, and stuffed them into a case, often of the most incongruous, for the poet has a butcher’s face and the butcher a poet’s; nature, who delights in muddle and mystery, so that even now (the first of November 1927) we know not why we go upstairs, or why we come down again, our most daily movements are like the passage of a ship on an unknown sea, and the sailors at the mast-head ask, pointing their glasses to the horizon; Is there land or is there none? to which, if we are prophets, we make answer “Yes”; if we are truthful we say “No”; nature, who has so much to answer for besides the perhaps unwieldy length of this sentence, has further complicated her task and added to our confusion by providing not only a perfect rag-bag of odds and ends within us—a piece of a policeman’s trousers lying cheek by jowl with Queen Alexandra’s wedding veil—but has contrived that the whole assortment shall be lightly stitched together by a single thread. Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind. Instead of being a single, downright, bluff piece of work of which no man need feel ashamed, our commonest deeds are set about with a fluttering and flickering of wings, a rising and falling of lights. Thus it was that Orlando, dipping his pen in the ink, saw the mocking face of the lost Princess and asked himself a million questions instantly which were as arrows dipped in gall. Where was she; and why had she left him? Was the Ambassador her uncle or her lover? Had they plotted? Was she forced? Was she married? Was she dead?—all of which so drove their venom into him that, as if to vent his agony somewhere, he plunged his quill so deep into the inkhorn that the ink spirted over the table, which act, explain it how one may (and no explanation perhaps is possible—Memory is inexplicable), at once substituted for the face of the Princess a face of a very different sort. But whose was it, he asked himself? And he had to wait, perhaps half a minute, looking at the new picture which lay on top of the old, as one lantern slide is half seen through the next, before he could say to himself, “This is the face of that rather fat, shabby man who sat in Twitchett’s room ever so many years ago when old Queen Bess came here to dine; and I saw him,” Orlando continued, catching at another of those little coloured rags, “sitting at the table, as I peeped in on my way downstairs, and he had the most amazing eyes,” said Orlando, “that ever were, but who the devil was he?” Orlando asked, for here Memory added to the forehead and eyes, first, a coarse, grease-stained ruffle, then a brown doublet, and finally a pair of thick boots such as citizens wear in Cheapside. “Not a Nobleman; not one of us,” said Orlando (which he would not have said aloud, for he was the most courteous of gentlemen; but it shows what an effect noble birth has upon the mind and incidentally how difficult it is for a nobleman to be a writer), “a poet, I dare say.” By all the laws, Memory, having disturbed him sufficiently, should now have blotted the whole thing out completely, or have fetched up something so idiotic and out of keeping—like a dog chasing a cat or an old woman blowing her nose into a red cotton handkerchief—that, in despair of keeping pace with her vagaries, Orlando should have struck his pen in earnest against his paper. (For we can, if we have the resolution, turn the hussy, Memory, and all her ragtag and bobtail out of the house.) But Orlando paused. Memory still held before him the image of a shabby man with big, bright eyes. Still he looked, still he paused. It is these pauses that are our undoing. It is then that sedition enters the fortress and our troops rise in insurrection. Once before he had paused, and love with its horrid rout, its shawms, its cymbals, and its heads with gory locks torn from the shoulders had burst in. From love he had suffered the tortures of the damned. Now, again, he paused, and into the breach thus made, leapt Ambition, the harridan, and Poetry, the witch, and Desire of Fame, the strumpet; all joined hands and made of his heart their dancing ground. Standing upright in the solitude of his room, he vowed that he would be the first poet of his race and bring immortal lustre upon his name. He said (reciting the names and exploits of his ancestors) that Sir Boris had fought and killed the Paynim; Sir Gawain, the Turk; Sir Miles, the Pole; Sir Andrew, the Frank; Sir Richard, the Austrian; Sir Jordan, the Frenchman; and Sir Herbert, the Spaniard. But of all that killing and campaigning, that drinking and love-making, that spending and hunting and riding and eating, what remained? A skull; a finger. Whereas, he said, turning to the page of Sir Thomas Browne, which lay open upon the table—and again he paused. Like an incantation rising from all parts of the room, from the night wind and the moonlight, rolled the divine melody of those words which, lest they should outstare this page, we will leave where they lie entombed, not dead, embalmed rather, so fresh is their colour, so sound their breathing—and Orlando, comparing that achievement with those of his ancestors, cried out that they and their deeds were dust and ashes, but this man and his words were immortal.

He soon perceived, however, that the battles which Sir Miles and the rest had waged against armed knights to win a kingdom, were not half so arduous as this which he now undertook to win immortality against the English language. Anyone moderately familiar with the rigours of composition will not need to be told the story in detail; how he wrote and it seemed good; read and it seemed vile; corrected and tore up; cut out; put in; was in ecstasy; in despair; had his good nights and bad mornings; snatched at ideas and lost them; saw his book plain before him and it vanished; acted his people’s parts as he ate; mouthed them as he walked; now cried; now laughed; vacillated between this style and that; now preferred the heroic and pompous; next the plain and simple; now the vales of Tempe; then the fields of Kent or Cornwall; and could not decide whether he was the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world.

It was to settle this last question that he decided, after many months of such feverish labour, to break the solitude of years and communicate with the outer world. He had a friend in London, one Giles Isham of Norfolk, who, though of gentle birth, was acquainted with writers and could doubtless put him in touch with some member of that blessed, indeed sacred, fraternity. For, to Orlando in the state he was now in, there was a glory about a man who had written a book and had it printed, which outshone all the glories of blood and state. To his imagination it seemed as if even the bodies of those instinct with such divine thoughts must be transfigured. They must have aureoles for hair, incense for breath, and roses must grow between their lips—which was certainly not true either of himself or Mr. Dupper. He could think of no greater happiness than to be allowed to sit behind a curtain and hear them talk. Even the imagination of that bold and various discourse made the memory of what he and his courtier friends used to talk about—a dog, a horse, a woman, a game of cards—seem brutish in the extreme. He bethought him with pride that he had always been called a scholar, and sneered at for his love of solitude and books. He had never been apt at pretty phrases. He would stand stock still, blush, and stride like a grenadier in a ladies’ drawing-room. He had twice fallen, in sheer abstraction, from his horse. He had broken Lady Winchilsea’s fan once while making a rhyme. Eagerly recalling these and other instances of his unfitness for the life of society, an ineffable hope, that all the turbulence of his youth, his clumsiness, his blushes, his long walks, and his love of the country proved that he himself belonged to the sacred race rather than to the noble—was by birth a writer, rather than an aristocrat—possessed him. For the first time since the night of the great flood he was happy.

He now commissioned Mr. Isham of Norfolk to deliver to Mr. Nicholas Greene of Clifford’s Inn a document which set forth Orlando’s admiration for his works (for Nick Greene was a very famous writer at that time) and his desire to make his acquaintance; which he scarcely dared ask; for he had nothing to offer in return; but if Mr. Nicholas Greene would condescend to visit him, a coach and four would be at the corner of Fetter Lane at whatever hour Mr. Greene chose to appoint, and bring him safely to Orlando’s house. One may fill up the phrases which then followed; and figure Orlando’s delight when, in no long time, Mr. Greene signified his acceptance of the Noble Lord’s invitation; took his place in the coach and was set down in the hall to the south of the main building punctually at seven o’clock on Monday, April the twenty-first.

Many Kings, Queens, and Ambassadors had been received there; Judges had stood there in their ermine. The loveliest ladies of the land had come there; and the sternest warriors. Banners hung there which had been at Flodden and at Agincourt. There were displayed the painted coats of arms with their lions and their leopards and their coronets. There were the long tables where the gold and silver plate was stood; and there the vast fireplaces of wrought Italian marble where nightly a whole oak tree, with its million leaves and its nests of rook and wren, was burnt to ashes. Nicholas Greene, the poet stood there now, plainly dressed in his slouched hat and black doublet, carrying in one hand a small bag.

That Orlando as he hastened to greet him was slightly disappointed was inevitable. The poet was not above middle height; was of a mean figure; was lean and stooped somewhat, and, stumbling over the mastiff on entering, the dog bit him. Moreover, Orlando for all his knowledge of mankind was puzzled where to place him. There was something about him which belonged neither to servant, squire, or noble. The head with its rounded forehead and beaked nose was fine, but the chin receded. The eyes were brilliant, but the lips hung loose and slobbered. It was the expression of the face as a whole, however, that was disquieting. There was none of that stately composure which makes the faces of the nobility so pleasing to look at; nor had it anything of the dignified servility of a well-trained domestic’s face; it was a face seamed, puckered, and drawn together. Poet though he was, it seemed as if he were more used to scold than to flatter; to quarrel than to coo; to scramble than to ride; to struggle than to rest; to hate than to love. This, too, was shown by the quickness of his movements; and by something fiery and suspicious in his glance. Orlando was somewhat taken aback. But they went to dinner.

Here, Orlando, who usually took such things for granted, was, for the first time, unaccountably ashamed of the number of his servants and of the splendour of his table. Stranger still, he bethought him with pride—for the thought was generally distasteful—of that great grandmother Moll who had milked the cows. He was about somehow to allude to this humble woman and her milk-pails, when the poet forestalled him by saying that it was odd, seeing how common the name of Greene was, that the family had come over with the Conqueror and was of the highest nobility in France. Unfortunately, they had come down in the world and done little more than leave their name to the royal borough of Greenwich. Further talk of the same sort, about lost castles, coats of arms, cousins who were baronets in the north, intermarriage with noble families in the west, how some Greens spelt the name with an e at the end, and others without, lasted till the venison was on the table. Then Orlando contrived to say something of Grandmother Moll and her cows, and had eased his heart a little of its burden by the time the wild fowl were before them. But it was not until the Malmsey was passing freely that Orlando dared mention what he could not help thinking a more important matter than the Greens or the cows; that is to say the sacred subject of poetry. At the first mention of the word, the poet’s eyes flashed fire; he dropped the fine gentleman airs he had worn; thumped his glass on the table, and launched into one of the longest, most intricate, most passionate, and bitterest stories that Orlando had ever heard, save from the lips of a jilted woman, about a play of his; another poet; and a critic. Of the nature of poetry itself, Orlando only gathered that it was harder to sell than prose, and though the lines were shorter took longer in the writing. So the talk went on with ramifications interminable, until Orlando ventured to hint that he had himself been so rash as to write—but here the poet leapt from his chair. A mouse had squeaked in the wainscot, he said. The truth was, he explained, that his nerves were in a state where a mouse’s squeak upset them for a fortnight. Doubtless the house was full of vermin, but Orlando had not heard them. The poet then gave Orlando the full story of his health for the past ten years or so. It had been so bad that one could only marvel that he still lived. He had had the palsy, the gout, the ague, the dropsy, and the three sorts of fever in succession; added to which he had an enlarged heart, a great spleen, and a diseased liver. But, above all, he had, he told Orlando, sensations in his spine which defied description. There was one knob about the third from the top which burnt like fire; another about the second from the bottom which was cold as ice. Sometimes he woke with a brain like lead; at others it was as if a thousand wax tapers were alight and people were throwing fireworks inside him. He could feel a rose leaf through his mattress, he said; and knew his way almost about London by the feel of the cobbles. Altogether he was a piece of machinery so finely made and so curiously put together (here he raised his hand as if unconsciously, and indeed it was of the finest shape imaginable) that it confounded him to think that he had only sold five hundred copies of his poem, but that of course was largely due to the conspiracy against him. All he could say, he concluded, banging his fist upon the table, was that the art of poetry was dead in England.

How that could be with Shakespeare, Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Browne, Donne, all now writing or just having written, Orlando, reeling off the names of his favourite heroes, could not think.

Greene laughed sardonically. Shakespeare, he admitted, had written some scenes that were well enough; but he had taken them chiefly from Marlowe. Marlowe was a likely boy, but what could you say of a lad who died before he was thirty? As for Browne, he was for writing poetry in prose, and people soon got tired of such conceits as that. Donne was a mountebank who wrapped up his lack of meaning in hard words. The gulls were taken in; but the style would be out of fashion twelve months hence. As for Ben Jonson—Ben Jonson was a friend of his and he never spoke ill of his friends.

No, he concluded, the great age of literature is past; the great age of literature was the Greek; the Elizabethan age was inferior in every respect to the Greek. In such ages men cherished a divine ambition which he might call La Gloire (he pronounced it Glawr, so that Orlando did not at first catch his meaning). Now all young writers were in the pay of the booksellers and poured out any trash that would sell. Shakespeare was the chief offender in this way and Shakespeare was already paying the penalty. Their own age, he said, was marked by precious conceits and wild experiments—neither of which the Greeks would have tolerated for a moment. Much though it hurt him to say it—for he loved literature as he loved his life—he could see no good in the present and had no hope of the future. Here he poured himself out another glass of wine.

Orlando was shocked by these doctrines; yet could not help observing that the critic himself seemed by no means downcast. On the contrary, the more he denounced his own time, the more complacent he became. He could remember, he said, a night at the Cock Tavern in Fleet Street when Kit Marlowe was there and some others. Kit was in high feather, rather drunk, which he easily became, and in a mood to say silly things. He could see him now, brandishing his glass at the company and hiccoughing out, “Stap my vitals, Bill” (this was to Shakespeare), “there’s a great wave coming and you’re on the top of it,” by which he meant, Greene explained, that they were trembling on the verge of a great age in English literature, and that Shakespeare was to be a poet of some importance. Happily for himself, he was killed two nights later in a drunken brawl, and so did not live to see how this prediction turned out. “Poor foolish fellow,” said Greene, “to go and say a thing like that. A great age, forsooth—the Elizabethan a great age!”

“So, my dear Lord,” he continued, settling himself comfortably in his chair and rubbing the wine-glass between his fingers, “we must make the best of it, cherish the past and honour those writers—there are still a few left of ’em—who take antiquity for their model and write, not for pay but for Glawr.” (Orlando could have wished him a better accent.) “Glawr”, said Greene, “is the spur of noble minds. Had I a pension of three hundred pounds a year paid quarterly, I would live for Glawr alone. I would lie in bed every morning reading Cicero. I would imitate his style so that you couldn’t tell the difference between us. That’s what I call fine writing,” said Greene; “that’s what I call Glawr. But it’s necessary to have a pension to do it.”

By this time Orlando had abandoned all hope of discussing his own work with the poet; but this mattered the less as the talk now got upon the lives and characters of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and the rest, all of whom Greene had known intimately and about whom he had a thousand anecdotes of the most amusing kind to tell. Orlando had never laughed so much in his life. These, then, were his gods! Half were drunken and all were amorous. Most of them quarrelled with their wives; not one of them was above a lie or an intrigue of the most paltry kind. Their poetry was scribbled down on the backs of washing bills held to the heads of printer’s devils at the street door. Thus Hamlet went to press; thus Lear; thus Othello. No wonder, as Greene said, that these plays show the faults they do. The rest of the time was spent in carousings and junketings in taverns and in beer gardens, when things were said that passed belief for wit, and things were done that made the utmost frolic of the courtiers seem pale in comparison. All this Greene told with a spirit that roused Orlando to the highest pitch of delight. He had a power of mimicry that brought the dead to life, and could say the finest things of books provided they were written three hundred years ago.

So time passed, and Orlando felt for his guest a strange mixture of liking and contempt, of admiration and pity, as well as something too indefinite to be called by any one name, but had something of fear in it and something of fascination. He talked incessantly about himself, yet was such good company that one could listen to the story of his ague for ever. Then he was so witty; then he was so irreverent; then he made so free with the names of God and Woman; then he was so full of queer crafts and had such strange lore in his head; could make salad in three hundred different ways; knew all that could be known of the mixing of wines; played half-a-dozen musical instruments, and was the first person, and perhaps the last, to toast cheese in the great Italian fireplace. That he did not know a geranium from a carnation, an oak from a birch tree, a mastiff from a greyhound, a teg from a ewe, wheat from barley, plough land from fallow; was ignorant of the rotation of the crops; thought oranges grew under ground and turnips on trees; preferred any townscape to any landscape;—all this and much more amazed Orlando, who had never met anybody of his kind before. Even the maids, who despised him, tittered at his jokes, and the men-servants, who loathed him, hung about to hear his stories. Indeed, the house had never been so lively as now that he was there—all of which gave Orlando a great deal to think about, and caused him to compare this way of life with the old. He recalled the sort of talk he had been used to about the King of Spain’s apoplexy or the mating of a bitch; he bethought him how the day passed between the stables and the dressing closet; he remembered how the Lords snored over their wine and hated anybody who woke them up. He bethought him how active and valiant they were in body; how slothful and timid in mind. Worried by these thoughts, and unable to strike a proper balance, he came to the conclusion that he had admitted to his house a plaguey spirit of unrest that would never suffer him to sleep sound again.

At the same moment, Nick Greene came to precisely the opposite conclusion. Lying in bed of a morning on the softest pillows between the smoothest sheets and looking out of his oriel window upon turf which for three centuries had known neither dandelion nor dock weed, he thought that unless he could somehow make his escape, he should be smothered alive. Getting up and hearing the pigeons coo, dressing and hearing the fountains fall, he thought that unless he could hear the drays roar upon the cobbles of Fleet Street, he would never write another line. If this goes on much longer, he thought, hearing the footman mend the fire and spread the table with silver dishes next door, I shall fall asleep and (here he gave a prodigious yawn) sleeping die.

So he sought Orlando in his room, and explained that he had not been able to sleep a wink all night because of the silence. (Indeed, the house was surrounded by a park fifteen miles in circumference and a wall ten feet high.) Silence, he said, was of all things the most oppressive to his nerves. He would end his visit, by Orlando’s leave, that very morning. Orlando felt some relief at this, yet also a great reluctance to let him go. The house, he thought, would seem very dull without him. On parting (for he had never yet liked to mention the subject), he had the temerity to press his play upon the Death of Hercules upon the poet and ask his opinion of it. The poet took it; muttered something about Glawr and Cicero, which Orlando cut short by promising to pay the pension quarterly; whereupon Greene, with many protestations of affection, jumped into the coach and was gone.

The great hall had never seemed so large, so splendid, or so empty as the chariot rolled away. Orlando knew that he would never have the heart to make toasted cheese in the Italian fireplace again. He would never have the wit to crack jokes about Italian pictures; never have the skill to mix punch as it should be mixed; a thousand good quips and cranks would be lost to him. Yet what a relief to be out of the sound of that querulous voice, what a luxury to be alone once more, so he could not help reflecting, as he unloosed the mastiff which had been tied up these six weeks because it never saw the poet without biting him.

Nick Greene was set down at the corner of Fetter Lane that same afternoon, and found things going on much as he had left them. Mrs. Greene, that is to say, was giving birth to a baby in one room; Tom Fletcher was drinking gin in another. Books were tumbled all about the floor; dinner—such as it was—was set on a dressing-table where the children had been making mud pies. But this, Greene felt, was the atmosphere for writing; here he could write, and write he did. The subject was made for him. A noble Lord at home. A visit to a Nobleman in the country—his new poem was to have some such title as that. Seizing the pen with which his little boy was tickling the cat’s ears, and dipping it in the egg-cup which served for inkpot, Greene dashed off a very spirited satire there and then. It was so done to a turn that no one could doubt that the young Lord who was roasted was Orlando; his most private sayings and doings, his enthusiasms and follies, down to the very colour of his hair and the foreign way he had of rolling his r’s, were there to the life. And if there had been any doubt about it, Greene clinched the matter by introducing, with scarcely any disguise, passages from that aristocratic tragedy, the Death of Hercules, which he found as he expected, wordy and bombastic in the extreme.

The pamphlet, which ran at once into several editions, and paid the expenses of Mrs. Greene’s tenth lying-in, was soon sent by friends who take care of such matters to Orlando himself. When he had read it, which he did with deadly composure from start to finish, he rang for the footman; delivered the document to him at the end of a pair of tongs; bade him drop it in the filthiest heart of the foulest midden on the estate. Then, when the man was turning to go he stopped him, “Take the swiftest horse in the stable,” he said, “ride for dear life to Harwich. There embark upon a ship which you will find bound for Norway. Buy for me from the King’s own kennels the finest elk-hounds of the Royal strain, male and female. Bring them back without delay. For”, he murmured, scarcely above his breath as he turned to his books, “I have done with men.”

The footman, who was perfectly trained in his duties, bowed and disappeared. He fulfilled his task so efficiently that he was back that day three weeks, leading in his hand a leash of the finest elk-hounds, one of whom, a female, gave birth that very night under the dinner-table to a litter of eight fine puppies. Orlando had them brought to his bed-chamber.

“For”, he said, “I have done with men.”

Nevertheless, he paid the pension quarterly.

Thus, at the age of thirty, or thereabouts, this young Nobleman had not only had every experience that life has to offer, but had seen the worthlessness of them all. Love and ambition, women and poets were all equally vain. Literature was a farce. The night after reading Greene’s Visit to a Nobleman in the Country, he burnt in a great conflagration fifty-seven poetical works, only retaining “The Oak Tree”, which was his boyish dream and very short. Two things alone remained to him in which he now put any trust: dogs and nature; an elk-hound and a rose bush. The world, in all its variety, life in all its complexity, had shrunk to that. Dogs and a bush were the whole of it. So feeling quit of a vast mountain of illusion, and very naked in consequence, he called his hounds to him and strode through the Park.

So long had he been secluded, writing and reading, that he had half forgotten the amenities of nature, which in June can be great. When he reached that high mound whence on fine days half of England with a slice of Wales and Scotland thrown in can be seen, he flung himself under his favourite oak tree and felt that if he need never speak to another man or woman so long as he lived; if his dogs did not develop the faculty of speech; if he never met a poet or a Princess again, he might make out what years remained to him in tolerable content.

Here he came then, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year. He saw the beech trees turn golden and the young ferns unfurl; he saw the moon sickle and then circular; he saw—but probably the reader can imagine the passage which should follow and how every tree and plant in the neighbourhood is described first green, then golden; how moons rise and suns set; how spring follows winter and autumn summer; how night succeeds day and day night; how there is first a storm and then fine weather; how things remain much as they are for two or three hundred years or so, except for a little dust and a few cobwebs which one old woman can sweep up in half an hour; a conclusion which, one cannot help feeling, might have been reached more quickly by the simple statement that “Time passed” (here the exact amount could be indicated in brackets) and nothing whatever happened.

But Time, unfortunately, though it makes animals and vegetables bloom and fade with amazing punctuality, has no such simple effect upon the mind of man. The mind of man, moreover, works with equal strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of the mind by one second. This extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time in the mind is less known than it should be and deserves fuller investigation. But the biographer, whose interests are, as we have said, highly restricted, must confine himself to one simple statement: when a man has reached the age of thirty, as Orlando now had, time when he is thinking becomes inordinately long; time when he is doing becomes inordinately short. Thus Orlando gave his orders and did the business of his vast estates in a flash; but directly he was alone on the mound under the oak tree, the seconds began to round and fill until it seemed as if they would never fall. They filled themselves, moreover, with the strangest variety of objects. For not only did he find himself confronted by problems which have puzzled the wisest of men, such as What is love? What friendship? What truth? but directly he came to think about them, his whole past, which seemed to him of extreme length and variety, rushed into the falling second, swelled it a dozen times its natural size, coloured it a thousand tints, and filled it with all the odds and ends in the universe.

In such thinking (or by whatever name it should be called) he spent months and years of his life. It would be no exaggeration to say that he would go out after breakfast a man of thirty and come home to dinner a man of fifty-five at least. Some weeks added a century to his age, others no more than three seconds at most. Altogether, the task of estimating the length of human life (of the animals’ we presume not to speak) is beyond our capacity, for directly we say that it is ages long, we are reminded that it is briefer than the fall of a rose leaf to the ground. Of the two forces which alternately, and what is more confusing still, at the same moment, dominate our unfortunate numbskulls—brevity and diuturnity—Orlando was sometimes under the influence of the elephant-footed deity, then of the gnat-winged fly. Life seemed to him of prodigious length. Yet even so, it went like a flash. But even when it stretched longest and the moments swelled biggest and he seemed to wander alone in deserts of vast eternity, there was no time for the smoothing out and deciphering of those thickly scored parchments which thirty years among men and women had rolled tight in his heart and brain. Long before he had done thinking about Love (the oak tree had put forth its leaves and shaken them to the ground a dozen times in the process) Ambition would jostle it off the field, to be replaced by Friendship or Literature. And as the first question had not been settled—What is Love?—back it would come at the least provocation or none, and hustle Books or Metaphors or What one lives for into the margin, there to wait till they saw their chance to rush into the field again. What made the process still longer was that it was profusely illustrated, not only with pictures, as that of old Queen Elizabeth, laid on her tapestry couch in rose-coloured brocade with an ivory snuff-box in her hand and a gold-hilted sword by her side, but with scents—she was strongly perfumed—and with sounds; the stags were barking in Richmond Park that winter’s day. And so, the thought of love would be all ambered over with snow and winter; with log fires burning; with Russian women, gold swords, and the bark of stags; with old King James’ slobbering and fireworks and sacks of treasure in the holds of Elizabethan sailing ships. Every single thing, once he tried to dislodge it from its place in his mind, he found thus cumbered with other matter like the lump of glass which, after a year at the bottom of the sea, is grown about with bones and dragon-flies, and coins and the tresses of drowned women.

“Another metaphor by Jupiter!” he would exclaim as he said this (which will show the disorderly and circuitous way in which his mind worked and explain why the oak tree flowered and faded so often before he came to any conclusion about Love). “And what’s the point of it?” he would ask himself. “Why not say simply in so many words——” and then he would try to think for half an hour,—or was it two years and a half?—how to say simply in so many words what love is. “A figure like that is manifestly untruthful,” he argued, “for no dragon-fly, unless under very exceptional circumstances, could live at the bottom of the sea. And if literature is not the Bride and Bedfellow of Truth, what is she? Confound it all,” he cried, “why say Bedfellow when one’s already said Bride? Why not simply say what one means and leave it?”

So then he tried saying the grass is green and the sky is blue and so to propitiate the austere spirit of poetry whom still, though at a great distance, he could not help reverencing. “The sky is blue,” he said, “the grass is green.” Looking up, he saw that, on the contrary, the sky is like the veils which a thousand Madonnas have let fall from their hair; and the grass fleets and darkens like a flight of girls fleeing the embraces of hairy satyrs from enchanted woods. “Upon my word,” he said (for he had fallen into the bad habit of speaking aloud), “I don’t see that one’s more true than another. Both are utterly false.” And he despaired of being able to solve the problem of what poetry is and what truth is and fell into a deep dejection.

And here we may profit by a pause in his soliloquy to reflect how odd it was to see Orlando stretched there on his elbow on a June day and to reflect that this fine fellow with all his faculties about him and a healthy body, witness cheeks and limbs—a man who never thought twice about heading a charge or fighting a duel—should be so subject to the lethargy of thought, and rendered so susceptible by it, that when it came to a question of poetry, or his own competence in it, he was as shy as a little girl behind her mother’s cottage door. In our belief, Greene’s ridicule of his tragedy hurt him as much as the Princess’ ridicule of his love. But to return—

Orlando went on thinking. He kept looking at the grass and at the sky and trying to bethink him what a true poet, who has his verses published in London, would say about them. Memory meanwhile (whose habits have already been described) kept steady before his eyes the face of Nicholas Greene, as if that sardonic loose-lipped man, treacherous as he had proved himself, were the Muse in person, and it was to him that Orlando must do homage. So Orlando, that summer morning, offered him a variety of phrases, some plain, others figured, and Nick Greene kept shaking his head and sneering and muttering something about Glawr and Cicero and the death of poetry in our time. At length, starting to his feet (it was now winter and very cold) Orlando swore one of the most remarkable oaths of his lifetime, for it bound him to a servitude than which none is stricter. “I’ll be blasted”, he said, “if I ever write another word, or try to write another word, to please Nick Greene or the Muse. Bad, good, or indifferent, I’ll write, from this day forward, to please myself”; and here he made as if he were tearing a whole budget of papers across and tossing them in the face of that sneering loose-lipped man. Upon which, as a cur ducks if you stoop to shy a stone at him, Memory ducked her effigy of Nick Greene out of sight; and substituted for it—nothing whatever.

But Orlando, all the same, went on thinking. He had indeed much to think of. For when he tore the parchment across, he tore, in one rending, the scrolloping, emblazoned scroll which he had made out in his own favour in the solitude of his room appointing himself, as the King appoints Ambassadors, the first poet of his race, the first writer of his age, conferring eternal immortality upon his soul and granting his body a grave among laurels and the intangible banners of a people’s reverence perpetually. Eloquent as this all was, he now tore it up and threw it in the dust-bin. “Fame”, he said, “is like” (and since there was no Nick Greene to stop him, he went on to revel in images of which we will choose only one or two of the quietest) “a braided coat which hampers the limbs; a jacket of silver which curbs the heart; a painted shield which covers a scarecrow,” etc. etc. The pith of his phrases was that while fame impedes and constricts, obscurity wraps about a man like a mist; obscurity is dark, ample, and free; obscurity lets the mind take its way unimpeded. Over the obscure man is poured the merciful suffusion of darkness. None knows where he goes or comes. He may seek the truth and speak it; he alone is free; he alone is truthful; he alone is at peace. And so he sank into a quiet mood, under the oak tree, the hardness of whose roots, exposed above the ground, seemed to him rather comfortable than otherwise.

Sunk for a long time in profound thoughts as to the value of obscurity, and the delight of having no name, but being like a wave which returns to the deep body of the sea; thinking how obscurity rids the mind of the irk of envy and spite; how it sets running in the veins the free waters of generosity and magnanimity; and allows giving and taking without thanks offered or praise given; which must have been the way of all great poets, he supposed (though his knowledge of Greek was not enough to bear him out), for, he thought, Shakespeare must have written like that, and the church builders built like that, anonymously, needing no thanking or naming, but only their work in the daytime and a little ale perhaps at night—“What an admirable life this is,” he thought, stretching his limbs out under the oak tree. “And why not enjoy it this very moment?” The thought struck him like a bullet. Ambition dropped like a plummet. Rid of the heart-burn of rejected love, and of vanity rebuked, and all the other stings and pricks which the nettle-bed of life had burnt upon him when ambitious of fame, but could no longer inflict upon one careless of glory, he opened his eyes, which had been wide open all the time, but had seen only thoughts, and saw, lying in the hollow beneath him, his house.

There it lay in the early sunshine of spring. It looked a town rather than a house, but a town built, not hither and thither, as this man wished or that, but circumspectly, by a single architect with one idea in his head. Courts and buildings, grey, red, plum colour, lay orderly and symmetrical; the courts were some of them oblong and some square; in this was a fountain; in that a statue; the buildings were some of them low, some pointed; here was a chapel, there a belfry; spaces of the greenest grass lay in between and clumps of cedar trees and beds of bright flowers; all were clasped—yet so well set out was it that it seemed that every part had room to spread itself fittingly—by the roll of a massive wall; while smoke from innumerable chimneys curled perpetually into the air. This vast, yet ordered building, which could house a thousand men and perhaps two thousand horses, was built, Orlando thought, by workmen whose names are unknown. Here have lived, for more centuries than I can count, the obscure generations of my own obscure family. Not one of these Richards, Johns, Annes, Elizabeths has left a token of himself behind him, yet all, working together with their spades and their needles, their love-making and their child-bearing, have left this.

Never had the house looked more noble and humane.

Why, then, had he wished to raise himself above them? For it seemed vain and arrogant in the extreme to try to better that anonymous work of creation; the labours of those vanished hands. Better was it to go unknown and leave behind you an arch, a potting shed, a wall where peaches ripen, than to burn like a meteor and leave no dust. For after all, he said, kindling as he looked at the great house on the greensward below, the unknown lords and ladies who lived there never forgot to set aside something for those who come after; for the roof that will leak; for the tree that will fall. There was always a warm corner for the old shepherd in the kitchen; always food for the hungry; always their goblets were polished, though they lay sick; and their windows were lit though they lay dying. Lords though they were, they were content to go down into obscurity with the molecatcher and the stone-mason. Obscure noblemen, forgotten builders—thus he apostrophised them with a warmth that entirely gainsaid such critics as called him cold, indifferent, slothful (the truth being that a quality often lies just on the other side of the wall from where we seek it)—thus he apostrophised his house and race in terms of the most moving eloquence; but when it came to the peroration—and what is eloquence that lacks a peroration?—he fumbled. He would have liked to have ended with a flourish to the effect that he would follow in their footsteps and add another stone to their building. Since, however, the building already covered nine acres, to add even a single stone seemed superfluous. Could one mention furniture in a peroration? Could one speak of chairs and tables and mats to lie beside people’s beds? For whatever the peroration wanted, that was what the house stood in need of. Leaving his speech unfinished for the moment, he strode down hill again resolved henceforward to devote himself to the furnishing of the mansion. The news—that she was to attend him instantly—brought tears to the eyes of good old Mrs. Grimsditch, now grown somewhat old. Together they perambulated the house.

The towel horse in the King’s bedroom (“and that was King Jamie, my Lord,” she said, hinting that it was many a day since a King had slept under their roof; but the odious Parliament days were over and there was now a Crown in England again) lacked a leg; there were no stands to the ewers in the little closet leading into the waiting room of the Duchess’s page; Mr. Greene had made a stain on the carpet with his nasty pipe smoking, which she and Judy, for all their scrubbing, had never been able to wash out. Indeed, when Orlando came to reckon up the matter of furnishing with rosewood chairs and cedar-wood cabinets, with silver basins, china bowls, and Persian carpets, every one of the three hundred and sixty-five bedrooms which the house contained, he saw that it would be no light one; and if some thousands of pounds of his estate remained over, these would do little more than hang a few galleries with tapestry, set the dining hall with fine, carved chairs and provide mirrors of solid silver and chairs of the same metal (for which he had an inordinate passion) for the furnishing of the royal bedchambers.

He now set to work in earnest, as we can prove beyond a doubt if we look at his ledgers. Let us glance at an inventory of what he bought at this time, with the expenses totted up in the margin—but these we omit.

“To fifty pairs of Spanish blankets, ditto curtains of crimson and white taffeta; the valence to them of white satin embroidered with crimson and white silk….

“To seventy yellow satin chairs and sixty stools, suitable with their buckram covers to them all….

“To sixty seven walnut tree tables….

“To seventeen dozen boxes containing each dozen five dozen of Venice glasses….

“To one hundred and two mats, each thirty yards long….

“To ninety seven cushions of crimson damask laid with silver parchment lace and footstools of cloth of tissue and chairs suitable….

“To fifty branches for a dozen lights apiece….”

Already—it is an effect lists have upon us—we are beginning to yawn. But if we stop, it is only that the catalogue is tedious, not that it is finished. There are ninety-nine pages more of it and the total sum disbursed ran into many thousands—that is to say millions of our money. And if his day was spent like this, at night again, Lord Orlando might be found reckoning out what it would cost to level a million molehills, if the men were paid tenpence an hour; and again, how many hundredweight of nails at 5½d. a gill were needed to repair the fence round the park, which was fifteen miles in circumference. And so on and so on.

The tale, we say, is tedious, for one cupboard is much like another, and one molehill not much different from a million. Some pleasant journeys it cost him; and some fine adventures. As, for instance, when he set a whole city of blind women near Bruges to stitch hangings for a silver canopied bed; and the story of his adventure with a Moor in Venice of whom he bought (but only at the sword’s point) his lacquered cabinet, might, in other hands, prove worth the telling. Nor did the work lack variety; for here would come, drawn by teams from Sussex, great trees, to be sawn across and laid along the gallery for flooring; and then a chest from Persia, stuffed with wool and sawdust, from which, at last, he would take a single plate, or one topaz ring.

At length, however, there was no room in the galleries for another table; no room on the tables for another cabinet; no room in the cabinet for another rose-bowl; no room in the bowl for another handful of potpourri; there was no room for anything anywhere; in short the house was furnished. In the garden snowdrops, crocuses, hyacinths, magnolias, roses, lilies, asters, the dahlia in all its varieties, pear trees and apple trees and cherry trees and mulberry trees, with an enormous quantity of rare and flowering shrubs, of trees evergreen and perennial, grew so thick on each other’s roots that there was no plot of earth without its bloom, and no stretch of sward without its shade. In addition, he had imported wild fowl with gay plumage; and two Malay bears, the surliness of whose manners concealed, he was certain, trusty hearts.

All now was ready; and when it was evening and the innumerable silver sconces were lit and the light airs which for ever moved about the galleries stirred the blue and green arras, so that it looked as if the huntsmen were riding and Daphne flying; when the silver shone and lacquer glowed and wood kindled; when the carved chairs held their arms out and dolphins swam upon the walls with mermaids on their backs; when all this and much more than all this was complete and to his liking, Orlando walked through the house with his elk hounds following and felt content. He had matter now, he thought, to fill out his peroration. Perhaps it would be well to begin the speech all over again. Yet, as he paraded the galleries he felt that still something was lacking. Chairs and tables, however richly gilt and carved, sofas, resting on lions’ paws with swans’ necks curving under them, beds even of the softest swansdown are not by themselves enough. People sitting in them, people lying in them improve them amazingly. Accordingly Orlando now began a series of very splendid entertainments to the nobility and gentry of the neighbourhood. The three hundred and sixty-five bedrooms were full for a month at a time. Guests jostled each other on the fifty-two staircases. Three hundred servants bustled about the pantries. Banquets took place almost nightly. Thus, in a very few years, Orlando had worn the nap off his velvet, and spent the half of his fortune; but he had earned the good opinion of his neighbours, held a score of offices in the county, and was annually presented with perhaps a dozen volumes dedicated to his Lordship in rather fulsome terms by grateful poets. For though he was careful not to consort with writers at that time and kept himself always aloof from ladies of foreign blood, still, he was excessively generous both to women and to poets, and both adored him.

But when the feasting was at its height and his guests were at their revels, he was apt to take himself off to his private room alone. There when the door was shut, and he was certain of privacy, he would have out an old writing book, stitched together with silk stolen from his mother’s workbox, and labelled in a round schoolboy hand, “The Oak Tree, A Poem”. In this he would write till midnight chimed and long after. But as he scratched out as many lines as he wrote in, the sum of them was often, at the end of the year, rather less than at the beginning, and it looked as if in the process of writing the poem would be completely unwritten. For it is for the historian of letters to remark that he had changed his style amazingly. His floridity was chastened; his abundance curbed; the age of prose was congealing those warm fountains. The very landscape outside was less stuck about with garlands and the briars themselves were less thorned and intricate. Perhaps the senses were a little duller and honey and cream less seductive to the palate. Also that the streets were better drained and the houses better lit had its effect upon the style, it cannot be doubted.

One day he was adding a line or two with enormous labour to “The Oak Tree, A Poem”, when a shadow crossed the tail of his eye. It was no shadow, he soon saw, but the figure of a very tall lady in riding hood and mantle crossing the quadrangle on which his room looked out. As this was the most private of the courts, and the lady was a stranger to him, Orlando marvelled how she had got there. Three days later the same apparition appeared again; and on Wednesday noon appeared once more. This time, Orlando was determined to follow her, nor apparently was she afraid to be found, for she slackened her steps as he came up and looked him full in the face. Any other woman thus caught in a Lord’s private grounds would have been afraid; any other woman with that face, headdress, and aspect would have thrown her mantilla across her shoulders to hide it. For this lady resembled nothing so much as a hare; a hare startled, but obdurate; a hare whose timidity is overcome by an immense and foolish audacity; a hare that sits upright and glowers at its pursuer with great, bulging eyes; with ears erect but quivering, with nose pointed, but twitching. This hare, moreover, was six feet high and wore a headdress into the bargain of some antiquated kind which made her look still taller. Thus confronted, she stared at Orlando with a stare in which timidity and audacity were most strangely combined.

First, she asked him, with a proper, but somewhat clumsy curtsey, to forgive her her intrusion. Then, rising to her full height again, which must have been something over six feet two, she went on to say—but with such a cackle of nervous laughter, so much tee-heeing and haw-hawing that Orlando thought she must have escaped from a lunatic asylum—that she was the Archduchess Harriet Griselda of Finster-Aarhorn and Scand-op-Boom in the Roumanian territory. She desired above all things to make his acquaintance, she said. She had taken lodging over a baker’s shop at the Park Gates. She had seen his picture and it was the image of a sister of hers who was—here she guffawed—long since dead. She was visiting the English court. The Queen was her Cousin. The King was a very good fellow but seldom went to bed sober. Here she tee-heed and haw-hawed again. In short, there was nothing for it but to ask her in and give her a glass of wine.

The Archduchess Harriet

Indoors, her manners regained the hauteur natural to a Roumanian Archduchess; and had she not shown a knowledge of wines rare in a lady, and made some observations upon firearms and the customs of sportsmen in her country, which were sensible enough, the talk would have lacked spontaneity. Jumping to her feet at last, she announced that she would call the following day, swept another prodigious curtsey and departed. The following day, Orlando rode out. The next, he turned his back; on the third he drew his curtain. On the fourth it rained, and as he could not keep a lady in the wet, nor was altogether averse to company, he invited her in and asked her opinion whether a suit of armour, which belonged to an ancestor of his, was the work of Jacobi or of Topp. He inclined to Topp. She held another opinion—it matters very little which. But it is of some importance to the course of our story that, in illustrating her argument, which had to do with the working of the tie pieces, the Archduchess Harriet took the golden shin case and fitted it to Orlando’s leg.

That he had a pair of the shapeliest legs that any Nobleman has ever stood upright upon has already been said.

Perhaps something in the way she fastened the ankle buckle; or her stooping posture; or Orlando’s long seclusion; or the natural sympathy which is between the sexes; or the Burgundy; or the fire—any of these causes may have been to blame; for certainly blame there is on one side or another, when a Nobleman of Orlando’s breeding, entertaining a lady in his house, and she his elder by many years, with a face a yard long and staring eyes, dressed somewhat ridiculously too, in a mantle and riding cloak though the season was warm—blame there is when such a Nobleman is so suddenly and violently overcome by passion of some sort that he has to leave the room.

But what sort of passion, it may well be asked, could this be? And the answer is double faced as Love herself. For Love—but leaving Love out of the argument for a moment, the actual event was this:

When the Archduchess Harriet Griselda stooped to fasten the buckle, Orlando heard, suddenly and unaccountably, far off the beating of Love’s wings. The distant stir of that soft plumage roused in him a thousand memories of rushing waters, of loveliness in the snow and faithlessness in the flood; and the sound came nearer; and he blushed and trembled; and he was moved as he had thought never to be moved again; and he was ready to raise his hands and let the bird of beauty alight upon his shoulders, when—horror!—a creaking sound like that the crows make tumbling over the trees began to reverberate; the air seemed dark with coarse black wings; voices croaked; bits of straw, twigs, and feathers dropped; and there pitched down upon his shoulders the heaviest and foulest of the birds; which is the vulture. Thus he rushed from the room and sent the footman to see the Archduchess Harriet to her carriage.

For Love, to which we may now return, has two faces; one white, the other black; two bodies; one smooth, the other hairy. It has two hands, two feet, two tails, two, indeed, of every member and each one is the exact opposite of the other. Yet, so strictly are they joined together that you cannot separate them. In this case, Orlando’s love began her flight towards him with her white face turned, and her smooth and lovely body outwards. Nearer and nearer she came wafting before her airs of pure delight. All of a sudden (at the sight of the Archduchess presumably) she wheeled about, turned the other way round; showed herself black, hairy, brutish; and it was Lust the vulture, not Love, the Bird of Paradise, that flopped, foully and disgustingly, upon his shoulders. Hence he ran; hence he fetched the footman.

But the harpy is not so easily banished as all that. Not only did the Archduchess continue to lodge at the Baker’s, but Orlando was haunted every day and night by phantoms of the foulest kind. Vainly, it seemed, had he furnished his house with silver and hung the walls with arras, when at any moment a dung-bedraggled fowl could settle upon his writing table. There she was, flopping about among the chairs; he saw her waddling ungracefully across the galleries. Now, she perched, top heavy upon a fire screen. When he chased her out, back she came and pecked at the glass till she broke it.

Thus realising that his home was uninhabitable, and that steps must be taken to end the matter instantly, he did what any other young man would have done in his place, and asked King Charles to send him as Ambassador Extraordinary to Constantinople. The King was walking in Whitehall. Nell Gwyn was on his arm. She was pelting him with hazel nuts. ’Twas a thousand pities, that amorous lady sighed, that such a pair of legs should leave the country.

Howbeit, the Fates were hard; she could do no more than toss one kiss over her shoulder before Orlando sailed.

[]

Chapter 3.

It is, indeed, highly unfortunate, and much to be regretted that at this stage of Orlando’s career, when he played a most important part in the public life of his country, we have least information to go upon. We know that he discharged his duties to admiration—witness his Bath and his Dukedom. We know that he had a finger in some of the most delicate negotiations between King Charles and the Turks—to that, treaties in the vault of the Record Office bear testimony. But the revolution which broke out during his period of office, and the fire which followed, have so damaged or destroyed all those papers from which any trustworthy record could be drawn, that what we can give is lamentably incomplete. Often the paper was scorched a deep brown in the middle of the most important sentence. Just when we thought to elucidate a secret that has puzzled historians for a hundred years, there was a hole in the manuscript big enough to put your finger through. We have done our best to piece out a meagre summary from the charred fragments that remain; but often it has been necessary to speculate, to surmise, and even to use the imagination.

Orlando’s day was passed, it would seem, somewhat in this fashion. About seven, he would rise, wrap himself in a long Turkish cloak, light a cheroot, and lean his elbows on the parapet. Thus he would stand, gazing at the city beneath him, apparently entranced. At this hour the mist would lie so thick that the domes of Santa Sofia and the rest would seem to be afloat; gradually the mist would uncover them; the bubbles would be seen to be firmly fixed; there would be the river; there the Galata Bridge; there the green-turbaned pilgrims without eyes or noses, begging alms; there the pariah dogs picking up offal; there the shawled women; there the innumerable donkeys; there men on horses carrying long poles. Soon, the whole town would be astir with the cracking of whips, the beating of gongs, cryings to prayer, lashing of mules, and rattle of brass-bound wheels, while sour odours, made from bread fermenting and incense, and spice, rose even to the heights of Pera itself and seemed the very breath of the strident multi-coloured and barbaric population.

Nothing, he reflected, gazing at the view which was now sparkling in the sun, could well be less like the counties of Surrey and Kent or the towns of London and Tunbridge Wells. To the right and left rose in bald and stony prominence the inhospitable Asian mountains, to which the arid castle of a robber chief or two might hang; but parsonage there was none, nor manor house, nor cottage, nor oak, elm, violet, ivy, or wild eglantine. There were no hedges for ferns to grow on, and no fields for sheep to graze. The houses were white as egg-shells and as bald. That he, who was English root and fibre, should yet exult to the depths of his heart in this wild panorama, and gaze and gaze at those passes and far heights planning journeys there alone on foot where only the goat and shepherd had gone before; should feel a passion of affection for the bright, unseasonable flowers, love the unkempt, pariah dogs beyond even his elk hounds at home, and snuff the acrid, sharp smell of the streets eagerly into his nostrils, surprised him. He wondered if, in the season of the Crusades, one of his ancestors had taken up with a Circassian peasant woman; thought it possible; fancied a certain darkness in his complexion; and, going indoors again, withdrew to his bath.

An hour later, properly scented, curled, and anointed, he would receive visits from secretaries and other high officials carrying, one after another, red boxes which yielded only to his own golden key. Within were papers of the highest importance, of which only fragments, here a flourish, there a seal firmly attached to a piece of burnt silk, now remain. Of their contents then, we cannot speak, but can only testify that Orlando was kept busy, what with his wax and seals, his various coloured ribbons which had to be diversely attached, his engrossing of titles and making of flourishes round capital letters, till luncheon came—a splendid meal of perhaps thirty courses.

After luncheon, lackeys announced that his coach and six was at the door, and he went, preceded by purple Janissaries running on foot and waving great ostrich feather fans above their heads, to call upon the other ambassadors and dignitaries of state. The ceremony was always the same. On reaching the courtyard, the Janissaries struck with their fans upon the main portal, which immediately flew open revealing a large chamber, splendidly furnished. Here were seated two figures, generally of the opposite sexes. Profound bows and curtseys were exchanged. In the first room, it was permissible only to mention the weather. Having said that it was fine or wet, hot or cold, the Ambassador then passed on to the next chamber, where again, two figures rose to greet him. Here it was only permissible to compare Constantinople as a place of residence with London; and the Ambassador naturally said that he preferred Constantinople, and his hosts naturally said, though they had not seen it, that they preferred London. In the next chamber, King Charles’s and the Sultan’s healths had to be discussed at some length. In the next were discussed the Ambassador’s health and that of his host’s wife, but more briefly. In the next the Ambassador complimented his host upon his furniture, and the host complimented the Ambassador upon his dress. In the next, sweet meats were offered, the host deploring their badness, the Ambassador extolling their goodness. The ceremony ended at length with the smoking of a hookah and the drinking of a glass of coffee; but though the motions of smoking and drinking were gone through punctiliously there was neither tobacco in the pipe nor coffee in the glass, as, had either smoke or drink been real, the human frame would have sunk beneath the surfeit. For, no sooner had the Ambassador despatched one such visit, than another had to be undertaken. The same ceremonies were gone through in precisely the same order six or seven times over at the houses of the other great officials, so that it was often late at night before the Ambassador reached home. Though Orlando performed these tasks to admiration and never denied that they are, perhaps, the most important part of a diplomatist’s duties, he was undoubtedly fatigued by them, and often depressed to such a pitch of gloom that he preferred to take his dinner alone with his dogs. To them, indeed, he might be heard talking in his own tongue. And sometimes, it is said, he would pass out of his own gates late at night so disguised that the sentries did not know him. Then he would mingle with the crowd on the Galata Bridge; or stroll through the bazaars; or throw aside his shoes and join the worshippers in the Mosques. Once, when it was given out that he was ill of a fever, shepherds, bringing their goats to market, reported that they had met an English Lord on the mountain top and heard him praying to his God. This was thought to be Orlando himself, and his prayer was, no doubt, a poem said aloud, for it was known that he still carried about with him, in the bosom of his cloak, a much scored manuscript; and servants, listening at the door, heard the Ambassador chanting something in an odd, sing-song voice when he was alone.

Orlando as Ambassador

It is with fragments such as these that we must do our best to make up a picture of Orlando’s life and character at this time. There exist, even to this day, rumours, legends, anecdotes of a floating and unauthenticated kind about Orlando’s life in Constantinople—(we have quoted but a few of them) which go to prove that he possessed, now that he was in the prime of life, the power to stir the fancy and rivet the eye which will keep a memory green long after all that more durable qualities can do to preserve it is forgotten. The power is a mysterious one compounded of beauty, birth, and some rarer gift, which we may call glamour and have done with it. “A million candles”, as Sasha had said, burnt in him without his being at the trouble of lighting a single one. He moved like a stag, without any need to think about his legs. He spoke in his ordinary voice and echo beat a silver gong. Hence rumours gathered round him. He became the adored of many women and some men. It was not necessary that they should speak to him or even that they should see him; they conjured up before them especially when the scenery was romantic, or the sun was setting, the figure of a noble gentleman in silk stockings. Upon the poor and uneducated, he had the same power as upon the rich. Shepherds, gipsies, donkey drivers, still sing songs about the English Lord “who dropped his emeralds in the well”, which undoubtedly refer to Orlando, who once, it seems, tore his jewels from him in a moment of rage or intoxication and flung them in a fountain; whence they were fished by a page boy. But this romantic power, it is well known, is often associated with a nature of extreme reserve. Orlando seems to have made no friends. As far as is known, he formed no attachments. A certain great lady came all the way from England in order to be near him, and pestered him with her attentions, but he continued to discharge his duties so indefatigably that he had not been Ambassador at the Horn more than two years and a half before King Charles signified his intention of raising him to the highest rank in the peerage. The envious said that this was Nell Gwyn’s tribute to the memory of a leg. But, as she had seen him once only, and was then busily engaged in pelting her royal master with nutshells, it is likely that it was his merits that won him his Dukedom, not his calves.

Here we must pause, for we have reached a moment of great significance in his career. For the conferring of the Dukedom was the occasion of a very famous, and indeed, much disputed incident, which we must now describe, picking our way among burnt papers and little bits of tape as best we may. It was at the end of the great fast of Ramadan that the Order of the Bath and the patent of nobility arrived in a frigate commanded by Sir Adrian Scrope; and Orlando made this the occasion for an entertainment more splendid than any that has been known before or since in Constantinople. The night was fine; the crowd immense, and the windows of the Embassy brilliantly illuminated. Again, details are lacking, for the fire had its way with all such records, and has left only tantalising fragments which leave the most important points obscure. From the diary of John Fenner Brigge, however, an English naval officer, who was among the guests, we gather that people of all nationalities “were packed like herrings in a barrel” in the courtyard. The crowd pressed so unpleasantly close that Brigge soon climbed into a Judas tree, the better to observe the proceedings. The rumour had got about among the natives (and here is additional proof of Orlando’s mysterious power over the imagination) that some kind of miracle was to be performed. “Thus,” writes Brigge (but his manuscript is full of burns and holes, some sentences being quite illegible), “when the rockets began to soar into the air, there was considerable uneasiness among us lest the native population should be seized … fraught with unpleasant consequences to all … English ladies in the company, I own that my hand went to my cutlass. Happily,” he continues in his somewhat long-winded style, “these fears seemed, for the moment, groundless and, observing the demeanour of the natives … I came to the conclusion that this demonstration of our skill in the art of pyrotechny was valuable, if only because it impressed upon them … the superiority of the British…. Indeed, the sight was one of indescribable magnificence. I found myself alternately praising the Lord that he had permitted … and wishing that my poor, dear mother…. By the Ambassador’s orders, the long windows, which are so imposing a feature of Eastern architecture, for though ignorant in many ways … were thrown wide; and within, we could see a tableau vivant or theatrical display in which English ladies and gentlemen … represented a masque the work of one…. The words were inaudible, but the sight of so many of our countrymen and women, dressed with the highest elegance and distinction … moved me to emotions of which I am certainly not ashamed, though unable…. I was intent upon observing the astonishing conduct of Lady —— which was of a nature to fasten the eyes of all upon her, and to bring discredit upon her sex and country, when”—unfortunately a branch of the Judas tree broke, Lieutenant Brigge fell to the ground, and the rest of the entry records only his gratitude to Providence (who plays a very large part in the diary) and the exact nature of his injuries.

Happily, Miss Penelope Hartopp, daughter of the General of that name, saw the scene from inside and carries on the tale in a letter, much defaced too, which ultimately reached a female friend at Tunbridge Wells. Miss Penelope was no less lavish in her enthusiasm than the gallant officer. “Ravishing,” she exclaims ten times on one page, “wondrous … utterly beyond description … gold plate … candelabras … negroes in plush breeches … pyramids of ice … fountains of negus … jellies made to represent His Majesty’s ships … swans made to represent water lilies … birds in golden cages … gentlemen in slashed crimson velvet … Ladies’ headdresses at least six foot high … musical boxes…. Mr. Peregrine said I looked quite lovely which I only repeat to you, my dearest, because I know…. Oh! how I longed for you all! … surpassing anything we have seen at the Pantiles … oceans to drink … some gentlemen overcome … Lady Betty ravishing…. Poor Lady Bonham made the unfortunate mistake of sitting down without a chair beneath her…. Gentlemen all very gallant … wished a thousand times for you and dearest Betsy…. But the sight of all others, the cynosure of all eyes … as all admitted, for none could be so vile as to deny it, was the Ambassador himself. Such a leg! Such a countenance!! Such princely manners!!! To see him come into the room! To see him go out again! And something interesting in the expression, which makes one feel, one scarcely knows why, that he has suffered! They say a lady was the cause of it. The heartless monster!!! How can one of our reputed tender sex have had the effrontery!!! He is unmarried, and half the ladies in the place are wild for love of him…. A thousand, thousand kisses to Tom, Gerry, Peter, and dearest Mew” [presumably her cat].

From the Gazette of the time, we gather that “as the clock struck twelve, the Ambassador appeared on the centre Balcony which was hung with priceless rugs. Six Turks of the Imperial Body Guard, each over six foot in height, held torches to his right and left. Rockets rose into the air at his appearance, and a great shout went up from the people, which the Ambassador acknowledged, bowing deeply, and speaking a few words of thanks in the Turkish language, which it was one of his accomplishments to speak with fluency. Next, Sir Adrian Scrope, in the full dress of a British Admiral, advanced; the Ambassador knelt on one knee; the Admiral placed the Collar of the Most Noble Order of the Bath round his neck, then pinned the Star to his breast; after which another gentleman of the diplomatic corps advancing in a stately manner placed on his shoulders the ducal robes, and handed him on a crimson cushion, the ducal coronet.”

At length, with a gesture of extraordinary majesty and grace, first bowing profoundly, then raising himself proudly erect, Orlando took the golden circlet of strawberry leaves and placed it, with a gesture which none that saw it ever forgot, upon his brows. It was at this point that the first disturbance began. Either the people had expected a miracle—some say a shower of gold was prophesied to fall from the skies—which did not happen, or this was the signal chosen for the attack to begin; nobody seems to know; but as the coronet settled on Orlando’s brows a great uproar rose. Bells began ringing; the harsh cries of the prophets were heard above the shouts of the people; many Turks fell flat to the ground and touched the earth with their foreheads. A door burst open. The natives pressed into the banqueting rooms. Women shrieked. A certain lady, who was said to be dying for love of Orlando, seized a candelabra and dashed it to the ground. What might not have happened, had it not been for the presence of Sir Adrian Scrope and a squad of British bluejackets, nobody can say. But the Admiral ordered the bugles to be sounded; a hundred bluejackets stood instantly at attention; the disorder was quelled, and quiet, at least for the time being, fell upon the scene.

So far, we are on the firm, if rather narrow, ground of ascertained truth. But nobody has ever known exactly what took place later that night. The testimony of the sentries and others seems, however, to prove that the Embassy was empty of company, and shut up for the night in the usual way by two a.m. The Ambassador was seen to go to his room, still wearing the insignia of his rank, and shut the door. Some say he locked it, which was against his custom. Others maintain that they heard music of a rustic kind, such as shepherds play, later that night in the courtyard under the Ambassador’s window. A washer-woman, who was kept awake by a toothache, said that she saw a man’s figure, wrapped in a cloak or dressing gown, come out upon the balcony. Then, she said, a woman, much muffled, but apparently of the peasant class, was drawn up by means of a rope which the man let down to her on to the balcony. There, the washer-woman said, they embraced passionately ‘like lovers’, and went into the room together, drawing the curtains so that no more could be seen.

Next morning, the Duke, as we must now call him, was found by his secretaries sunk in profound slumber amid bed clothes that were much tumbled. The room was in some disorder, his coronet having rolled on the floor, and his cloak and garter being flung all of a heap on a chair. The table was littered with papers. No suspicion was felt at first, as the fatigues of the night had been great. But when afternoon came and he still slept, a doctor was summoned. He applied remedies which had been used on the previous occasion, plasters, nettles, emetics, etc., but without success. Orlando slept on. His secretaries then thought it their duty to examine the papers on the table. Many were scribbled over with poetry, in which frequent mention was made of an oak tree. There were also various state papers and others of a private nature concerning the management of his estates in England. But at length they came upon a document of far greater significance. It was nothing less, indeed, than a deed of marriage, drawn up, signed, and witnessed between his Lordship, Orlando, Knight of the Garter, etc., etc., etc., and Rosina Pepita, a dancer, father unknown, but reputed a gipsy, mother also unknown but reputed a seller of old iron in the market-place over against the Galata Bridge. The secretaries looked at each other in dismay. And still Orlando slept. Morning and evening they watched him, but, save that his breathing was regular and his cheeks still flushed their habitual deep rose, he gave no sign of life. Whatever science or ingenuity could do to waken him they did. But still he slept.

On the seventh day of his trance (Thursday, May the 10th) the first shot was fired of that terrible and bloody insurrection of which Lieutenant Brigge had detected the first symptoms. The Turks rose against the Sultan, set fire to the town, and put every foreigner they could find, either to the sword or to the bastinado. A few English managed to escape; but, as might have been expected, the gentlemen of the British Embassy preferred to die in defence of their red boxes, or, in extreme cases, to swallow bunches of keys rather than let them fall into the hands of the Infidel. The rioters broke into Orlando’s room, but seeing him stretched to all appearance dead they left him untouched, and only robbed him of his coronet and the robes of the Garter.

And now again obscurity descends, and would indeed that it were deeper! Would, we almost have it in our hearts to exclaim, that it were so deep that we could see nothing whatever through its opacity! Would that we might here take the pen and write Finis to our work! Would that we might spare the reader what is to come and say to him in so many words, Orlando died and was buried. But here, alas, Truth, Candour, and Honesty, the austere Gods who keep watch and ward by the inkpot of the biographer, cry No! Putting their silver trumpets to their lips they demand in one blast, Truth! And again they cry Truth! and sounding yet a third time in concert they peal forth, The Truth and nothing but the Truth!

At which—Heaven be praised! for it affords us a breathing space—the doors gently open, as if a breath of the gentlest and holiest zephyr had wafted them apart, and three figures enter. First, comes our Lady of Purity; whose brows are bound with fillets of the whitest lamb’s wool; whose hair is as an avalanche of the driven snow; and in whose hand reposes the white quill of a virgin goose. Following her, but with a statelier step, comes our Lady of Chastity; on whose brow is set like a turret of burning but unwasting fire a diadem of icicles; her eyes are pure stars, and her fingers, if they touch you, freeze you to the bone. Close behind her, sheltering indeed in the shadow of her more stately sisters, comes our Lady of Modesty, frailest and fairest of the three; whose face is only shown as the young moon shows when it is thin and sickle shaped and half hidden among clouds. Each advances towards the centre of the room where Orlando still lies sleeping; and with gestures at once appealing and commanding, Our Lady of Purity speaks first:

“I am the guardian of the sleeping fawn; the snow is dear to me; and the moon rising; and the silver sea. With my robes I cover the speckled hen’s eggs and the brindled sea shell; I cover vice and poverty. On all things frail or dark or doubtful, my veil descends. Wherefore, speak not, reveal not. Spare, O spare!”

Here the trumpets peal forth.

“Purity Avaunt! Begone Purity!”

Then Our Lady Chastity speaks:

“I am she whose touch freezes and whose glance turns to stone. I have stayed the star in its dancing, and the wave as it falls. The highest Alps are my dwelling place; and when I walk, the lightnings flash in my hair; where my eyes fall, they kill. Rather than let Orlando wake, I will freeze him to the bone. Spare, O spare!”

Here the trumpets peal forth.

“Chastity Avaunt! Begone Chastity!”

Then Our Lady of Modesty speaks, so low that one can hardly hear:

“I am she that men call Modesty. Virgin I am and ever shall be. Not for me the fruitful fields and the fertile vineyard. Increase is odious to me; and when the apples burgeon or the flocks breed, I run, I run; I let my mantle fall. My hair covers my eyes. I do not see. Spare, O spare!”

Again the trumpets peal forth:

“Modesty Avaunt! Begone Modesty!”

With gestures of grief and lamentation the three sisters now join hands and dance slowly, tossing their veils and singing as they go:

“Truth come not out from your horrid den. Hide deeper, fearful Truth. For you flaunt in the brutal gaze of the sun things that were better unknown and undone; you unveil the shameful; the dark you make clear, Hide! Hide! Hide!”

Here they make as if to cover Orlando with their draperies. The trumpets, meanwhile, still blare forth,

“The Truth and nothing but the Truth.”

At this the Sisters try to cast their veils over the mouths of the trumpets so as to muffle them, but in vain, for now all the trumpets blare forth together,

“Horrid Sisters, go!”

The sisters become distracted and wail in unison, still circling and flinging their veils up and down.

“It has not always been so! But men want us no longer; the women detest us. We go; we go. I (Purity says this) to the hen roost. I (Chastity says this) to the still unravished heights of Surrey. I (Modesty says this) to any cosy nook where there are ivy and curtains in plenty.”

“For there, not here (all speak together joining hands and making gestures of farewell and despair towards the bed where Orlando lies sleeping) dwell still in nest and boudoir, office and lawcourt those who love us; those who honour us, virgins and city men; lawyers and doctors; those who prohibit; those who deny; those who reverence without knowing why; those who praise without understanding; the still very numerous (Heaven be praised) tribe of the respectable; who prefer to see not; desire to know not; love the darkness; those still worship us, and with reason; for we have given them Wealth, Prosperity, Comfort, Ease. To them we go, you we leave. Come, Sisters, come! This is no place for us here.”

They retire in haste, waving their draperies over their heads, as if to shut out something that they dare not look upon and close the door behind them.

We are, therefore, now left entirely alone in the room with the sleeping Orlando and the trumpeters. The trumpeters, ranging themselves side by side in order, blow one terrific blast:—

“The truth!”

at which Orlando woke.

He stretched himself. He rose. He stood upright in complete nakedness before us, and while the trumpets pealed Truth! Truth! Truth! we have no choice left but confess—he was a woman.

* * * * *

The sound of the trumpets died away and Orlando stood stark naked. No human being, since the world began, has ever looked more ravishing. His form combined in one the strength of a man and a woman’s grace. As he stood there, the silver trumpets prolonged their note, as if reluctant to leave the lovely sight which their blast had called forth; and Chastity, Purity, and Modesty, inspired, no doubt, by Curiosity, peeped in at the door and threw a garment like a towel at the naked form which, unfortunately, fell short by several inches. Orlando looked himself up and down in a long looking-glass, without showing any signs of discomposure, and went, presumably, to his bath.

We may take advantage of this pause in the narrative to make certain statements. Orlando had become a woman—there is no denying it. But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been. The change of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity. Their faces remained, as their portraits prove, practically the same. His memory—but in future we must, for convention’s sake, say ‘her’ for ‘his’, and ‘she’ for ‘he’—her memory then, went back through all the events of her past life without encountering any obstacle. Some slight haziness there may have been, as if a few dark drops had fallen into the clear pool of memory; certain things had become a little dimmed; but that was all. The change seemed to have been accomplished painlessly and completely and in such a way that Orlando herself showed no surprise at it. Many people, taking this into account, and holding that such a change of sex is against nature, have been at great pains to prove (1) that Orlando had always been a woman, (2) that Orlando is at this moment a man. Let biologists and psychologists determine. It is enough for us to state the simple fact; Orlando was a man till the age of thirty; when he became a woman and has remained so ever since.

But let other pens treat of sex and sexuality; we quit such odious subjects as soon as we can. Orlando had now washed, and dressed herself in those Turkish coats and trousers which can be worn indifferently by either sex; and was forced to consider her position. That it was precarious and embarrassing in the extreme must be the first thought of every reader who has followed her story with sympathy. Young, noble, beautiful, she had woken to find herself in a position than which we can conceive none more delicate for a young lady of rank. We should not have blamed her had she rung the bell, screamed, or fainted. But Orlando showed no such signs of perturbation. All her actions were deliberate in the extreme, and might indeed have been thought to show tokens of premeditation. First, she carefully examined the papers on the table; took such as seemed to be written in poetry, and secreted them in her bosom; next she called her Seleuchi hound, which had never left her bed all these days, though half famished with hunger, fed and combed him; then stuck a pair of pistols in her belt; finally wound about her person several strings of emeralds and pearls of the finest orient which had formed part of her Ambassadorial wardrobe. This done, she leant out of the window, gave one low whistle, and descended the shattered and bloodstained staircase, now strewn with the litter of waste-paper baskets, treaties, despatches, seals, sealing wax, etc., and so entered the courtyard. There, in the shadow of a giant fig tree, waited an old gipsy on a donkey. He led another by the bridle. Orlando swung her leg over it; and thus, attended by a lean dog, riding a donkey, in company of a gipsy, the Ambassador of Great Britain at the Court of the Sultan left Constantinople.

They rode for several days and nights and met with a variety of adventures, some at the hands of men, some at the hands of nature, in all of which Orlando acquitted herself with courage. Within a week they reached the high ground outside Broussa, which was then the chief camping ground of the gipsy tribe to which Orlando had allied herself. Often she had looked at those mountains from her balcony at the Embassy; often had longed to be there; and to find oneself where one has longed to be always, to a reflective mind, gives food for thought. For some time, however, she was too well pleased with the change to spoil it by thinking. The pleasure of having no documents to seal or sign, no flourishes to make, no calls to pay, was enough. The gipsies followed the grass; when it was grazed down, on they moved again. She washed in streams if she washed at all; no boxes, red, blue, or green, were presented to her; there was not a key, let alone a golden key, in the whole camp; as for ‘visiting’, the word was unknown. She milked the goats; she collected brushwood; she stole a hen’s egg now and then, but always put a coin or a pearl in place of it; she herded cattle; she stripped vines; she trod the grape; she filled the goat-skin and drank from it; and when she remembered how, at about this time of day, she should have been making the motions of drinking and smoking over an empty coffee-cup and a pipe which lacked tobacco, she laughed aloud, cut herself another hunch of bread, and begged for a puff from old Rustum’s pipe, filled though it was with cow dung.

The gipsies, with whom it is obvious that she must have been in secret communication before the revolution, seem to have looked upon her as one of themselves (which is always the highest compliment a people can pay), and her dark hair and dark complexion bore out the belief that she was, by birth, one of them and had been snatched by an English Duke from a nut tree when she was a baby and taken to that barbarous land where people live in houses because they are too feeble and diseased to stand the open air. Thus, though in many ways inferior to them, they were willing to help her to become more like them; taught her their arts of cheese-making and basket-weaving, their science of stealing and bird-snaring, and were even prepared to consider letting her marry among them.

But Orlando had contracted in England some of the customs or diseases (whatever you choose to consider them) which cannot, it seems, be expelled. One evening, when they were all sitting round the camp fire and the sunset was blazing over the Thessalian hills, Orlando exclaimed:

“How good to eat!”

(The gipsies have no word for ‘beautiful’. This is the nearest.)

All the young men and women burst out laughing uproariously. The sky good to eat, indeed! The elders, however, who had seen more of foreigners than they had, became suspicious. They noticed that Orlando often sat for whole hours doing nothing whatever, except look here and then there; they would come upon her on some hill-top staring straight in front of her, no matter whether the goats were grazing or straying. They began to suspect that she had other beliefs than their own, and the older men and women thought it probable that she had fallen into the clutches of the vilest and cruellest among all the Gods, which is Nature. Nor were they far wrong. The English disease, a love of Nature, was inborn in her, and here, where Nature was so much larger and more powerful than in England, she fell into its hands as she had never done before. The malady is too well known, and has been, alas, too often described to need describing afresh, save very briefly. There were mountains; there were valleys; there were streams. She climbed the mountains; roamed the valleys; sat on the banks of the streams. She likened the hills to ramparts, to the breasts of doves, and the flanks of kine. She compared the flowers to enamel and the turf to Turkey rugs worn thin. Trees were withered hags, and sheep were grey boulders. Everything, in fact, was something else. She found the tarn on the mountain-top and almost threw herself in to seek the wisdom she thought lay hid there; and when, from the mountain-top, she beheld far off, across the Sea of Marmara, the plains of Greece, and made out (her eyes were admirable) the Acropolis with a white streak or two which must, she thought, be the Parthenon, her soul expanded with her eyeballs, and she prayed that she might share the majesty of the hills, know the serenity of the plains, etc. etc., as all such believers do. Then, looking down, the red hyacinth, the purple iris wrought her to cry out in ecstasy at the goodness, the beauty of nature; raising her eyes again, she beheld the eagle soaring, and imagined its raptures and made them her own. Returning home, she saluted each star, each peak, and each watch-fire as if they signalled to her alone; and at last, when she flung herself upon her mat in the gipsies’ tent, she could not help bursting out again, How good to eat! How good to eat! (For it is a curious fact that though human beings have such imperfect means of communication, that they can only say ‘good to eat’ when they mean ‘beautiful’ and the other way about, they will yet endure ridicule and misunderstanding rather than keep any experience to themselves.) All the young gipsies laughed. But Rustum el Sadi, the old man who had brought Orlando out of Constantinople on his donkey, sat silent. He had a nose like a scimitar; his cheeks were furrowed as if from the age-long descent of iron hail; he was brown and keen-eyed, and as he sat tugging at his hookah he observed Orlando narrowly. He had the deepest suspicion that her God was Nature. One day he found her in tears. Interpreting this to mean that her God had punished her, he told her that he was not surprised. He showed her the fingers of his left hand, withered by the frost; he showed her his right foot, crushed where a rock had fallen. This, he said, was what her God did to men. When she said, “But so beautiful”, using the English word, he shook his head; and when she repeated it he was angry. He saw that she did not believe what he believed, and that was enough, wise and ancient as he was, to enrage him.

This difference of opinion disturbed Orlando, who had been perfectly happy until now. She began to think, was Nature beautiful or cruel; and then she asked herself what this beauty was; whether it was in things themselves, or only in herself; so she went on to the nature of reality, which led her to truth, which in its turn led to Love, Friendship, Poetry (as in the days on the high mound at home); which meditations, since she could impart no word of them, made her long, as she had never longed before, for pen and ink.

“Oh! if only I could write!” she cried (for she had the odd conceit of those who write that words written are shared). She had no ink; and but little paper. But she made ink from berries and wine; and finding a few margins and blank spaces in the manuscript of “The Oak Tree”, managed, by writing a kind of shorthand, to describe the scenery in a long, blank version poem, and to carry on a dialogue with herself about this Beauty and Truth concisely enough. This kept her extremely happy for hours on end. But the gipsies became suspicious. First, they noticed that she was less adept than before at milking and cheese-making; next, she often hesitated before replying; and once a gipsy boy who had been asleep, woke in a terror feeling her eyes upon him. Sometimes this constraint would be felt by the whole tribe, numbering some dozens of grown men and women. It sprang from the sense they had (and their senses are very sharp and much in advance of their vocabulary) that whatever they were doing crumbled like ashes in their hands. An old woman making a basket, a boy skinning a sheep, would be singing or crooning contentedly at their work, when Orlando would come into the camp, fling herself down by the fire and gaze into the flames. She need not even look at them, and yet they felt, here is someone who doubts; (we make a rough-and-ready translation from the gipsy language) here is someone who does not do the thing for the sake of doing; nor looks for looking’s sake; here is someone who believes neither in sheep-skin nor basket; but sees (here they looked apprehensively about the tent) something else. Then a vague but most unpleasant feeling would begin to work in the boy and in the old woman. They broke their withys; they cut their fingers. A great rage filled them. They wished Orlando would leave the tent and never come near them again. Yet she was of a cheerful and willing disposition, they owned; and one of her pearls was enough to buy the finest herd of goats in Broussa.

Slowly, she began to feel that there was some difference between her and the gipsies which made her hesitate sometimes to marry and settle down among them for ever. At first she tried to account for it by saying that she came of an ancient and civilised race, whereas these gipsies were an ignorant people, not much better than savages. One night when they were questioning her about England she could not help with some pride describing the house where she was born, how it had 365 bedrooms and had been in the possession of her family for four or five hundred years. Her ancestors were earls, or even dukes, she added. At this she noticed again that the gipsies were uneasy; but not angry as before when she had praised the beauty of nature. Now they were courteous, but concerned as people of fine breeding are when a stranger has been made to reveal his low birth or poverty. Rustum followed her out of the tent alone and said that she need not mind if her father were a Duke, and possessed all the bedrooms and furniture that she described. They would none of them think the worse of her for that. Then she was seized with a shame that she had never felt before. It was clear that Rustum and the other gipsies thought a descent of four or five hundred years only the meanest possible. Their own families went back at least two or three thousand years. To the gipsy whose ancestors had built the Pyramids centuries before Christ was born, the genealogy of Howards and Plantagenets was no better and no worse than that of the Smiths and the Joneses: both were negligible. Moreover, where the shepherd boy had a lineage of such antiquity, there was nothing specially memorable or desirable in ancient birth; vagabonds and beggars all shared it. And then, though he was too courteous to speak openly, it was clear that the gipsy thought that there was no more vulgar ambition than to possess bedrooms by the hundred (they were on top of a hill as they spoke; it was night; the mountains rose around them) when the whole earth is ours. Looked at from the gipsy point of view, a Duke, Orlando understood, was nothing but a profiteer or robber who snatched land and money from people who rated these things of little worth, and could think of nothing better to do than to build three hundred and sixty-five bedrooms when one was enough, and none was even better than one. She could not deny that her ancestors had accumulated field after field; house after house; honour after honour; yet had none of them been saints or heroes, or great benefactors of the human race. Nor could she counter the argument (Rustum was too much of a gentleman to press it, but she understood) that any man who did now what her ancestors had done three or four hundred years ago would be denounced—and by her own family most loudly—for a vulgar upstart, an adventurer, a nouveau riche.

She sought to answer such arguments by the familiar if oblique method of finding the gipsy life itself rude and barbarous; and so, in a short time, much bad blood was bred between them. Indeed, such differences of opinion are enough to cause bloodshed and revolution. Towns have been sacked for less, and a million martyrs have suffered at the stake rather than yield an inch upon any of the points here debated. No passion is stronger in the breast of man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high. Whigs and Tories, Liberal party and Labour party—for what do they battle except their own prestige? It is not love of truth but desire to prevail that sets quarter against quarter and makes parish desire the downfall of parish. Each seeks peace of mind and subserviency rather than the triumph of truth and the exaltation of virtue—but these moralities belong, and should be left to the historian, since they are as dull as ditch water.

“Four hundred and seventy-six bedrooms mean nothing to them,” sighed Orlando.

“She prefers a sunset to a flock of goats,” said the gipsies.

What was to be done, Orlando could not think. To leave the gipsies and become once more an Ambassador seemed to her intolerable. But it was equally impossible to remain for ever where there was neither ink nor writing paper, neither reverence for the Talbots nor respect for a multiplicity of bedrooms. So she was thinking, one fine morning on the slopes of Mount Athos, when minding her goats. And then Nature, in whom she trusted, either played her a trick or worked a miracle—again, opinions differ too much for it to be possible to say which. Orlando was gazing rather disconsolately at the steep hill-side in front of her. It was now midsummer, and if we must compare the landscape to anything, it would have been to a dry bone; to a sheep’s skeleton; to a gigantic skull picked white by a thousand vultures. The heat was intense, and the little fig tree under which Orlando lay only served to print patterns of fig-leaves upon her light burnous.

Suddenly a shadow, though there was nothing to cast a shadow, appeared on the bald mountain-side opposite. It deepened quickly and soon a green hollow showed where there had been barren rock before. As she looked, the hollow deepened and widened, and a great park-like space opened in the flank of the hill. Within, she could see an undulating and grassy lawn; she could see oak trees dotted here and there; she could see the thrushes hopping among the branches. She could see the deer stepping delicately from shade to shade, and could even hear the hum of insects and the gentle sighs and shivers of a summer’s day in England. After she had gazed entranced for some time, snow began falling; soon the whole landscape was covered and marked with violet shades instead of yellow sunlight. Now she saw heavy carts coming along the roads, laden with tree trunks, which they were taking, she knew, to be sawn for firewood; and then there appeared the roofs and belfries and towers and courtyards of her own home. The snow was falling steadily, and she could now hear the slither and flop which it made as it slid down the roof and fell to the ground. The smoke went up from a thousand chimneys. All was so clear and minute that she could see a daw pecking for worms in the snow. Then, gradually, the violet shadows deepened and closed over the carts and the lawns and the great house itself. All was swallowed up. Now there was nothing left of the grassy hollow, and instead of the green lawns was only the blazing hill-side which a thousand vultures seemed to have picked bare. At this, she burst into a passion of tears, and striding back to the gipsies’ camp, told them that she must sail for England the very next day.

It was happy for her that she did so. Already the young men had plotted her death. Honour, they said, demanded it, for she did not think as they did. Yet they would have been sorry to cut her throat; and welcomed the news of her departure. An English merchant ship, as luck would have it, was already under sail in the harbour about to return to England; and Orlando, by breaking off another pearl from her necklace, not only paid her passage but had some banknotes left over in her wallet. These she would have liked to present to the gipsies. But they despised wealth she knew; and she had to content herself with embraces, which on her part were sincere.

[]

Chapter 4.

With some of the guineas left from the sale of the tenth pearl of her string, Orlando had bought herself a complete outfit of such clothes as women then wore, and it was in the dress of a young Englishwoman of rank that she now sat on the deck of the Enamoured Lady. It is a strange fact, but a true one, that up to this moment she had scarcely given her sex a thought. Perhaps the Turkish trousers which she had hitherto worn had done something to distract her thoughts; and the gipsy women, except in one or two important particulars, differ very little from the gipsy men. At any rate, it was not until she felt the coil of skirts about her legs and the Captain offered, with the greatest politeness, to have an awning spread for her on deck, that she realised with a start the penalties and the privileges of her position. But that start was not of the kind that might have been expected.

It was not caused, that is to say, simply and solely by the thought of her chastity and how she could preserve it. In normal circumstances a lovely young woman alone would have thought of nothing else; the whole edifice of female government is based on that foundation stone; chastity is their jewel, their centrepiece, which they run mad to protect, and die when ravished of. But if one has been a man for thirty years or so, and an Ambassador into the bargain, if one has held a Queen in one’s arms and one or two other ladies, if report be true, of less exalted rank, if one has married a Rosina Pepita, and so on, one does not perhaps give such a very great start about that. Orlando’s start was of a very complicated kind, and not to be summed up in a trice. Nobody, indeed, ever accused her of being one of those quick wits who run to the end of things in a minute. It took her the entire length of the voyage to moralise out the meaning of her start, and so, at her own pace, we will follow her.

“Lord,” she thought, when she had recovered from her start, stretching herself out at length under her awning, “this is a pleasant, lazy way of life, to be sure. But”, she thought, giving her legs a kick, “these skirts are plaguey things to have about one’s heels. Yet the stuff (flowered paduasoy) is the loveliest in the world. Never have I seen my own skin (here she laid her hand on her knee) look to such advantage as now. Could I, however, leap overboard and swim in clothes like these? No! Therefore, I should have to trust to the protection of a blue-jacket. Do I object to that? Now do I?” she wondered, here encountering the first knot in the smooth skein of her argument.

Dinner came before she had untied it, and then it was the Captain himself—Captain Nicholas Benedict Bartolus, a sea-captain of distinguished aspect, who did it for her as he helped her to a slice of corned beef.

“A little of the fat, Ma’m?” he asked. “Let me cut you just the tiniest little slice the size of your fingernail.” At those words a delicious tremor ran through her frame. Birds sang; the torrents rushed. It recalled the feeling of indescribable pleasure with which she had first seen Sasha, hundred of years ago. Then she had pursued, now she fled. Which is the greater ecstasy? The man’s or the woman’s? And are they not perhaps the same? No, she thought, this is the most delicious (thanking the Captain but refusing), to refuse, and see him frown. Well, she would, if he wished it, have the very thinnest, smallest shiver in the world. This was the most delicious of all, to yield and see him smile. “For nothing”, she thought, regaining her couch on deck, and continuing the argument, “is more heavenly than to resist and to yield; to yield and to resist. Surely it throws the spirit into such a rapture as nothing else can. So that I’m not sure”, she continued, “that I won’t throw myself overboard, for the mere pleasure of being rescued by a blue-jacket after all.”

(It must be remembered that she was like a child entering into possession of a pleasaunce or toy cupboard; her arguments would not commend themselves to mature women, who have had the run of it all their lives.)

“But what used we young fellows in the cockpit of the Marie Rose to say about a woman who threw herself overboard for the pleasure of being rescued by a blue-jacket?” she said. “We had a word for them. Ah! I have it….” (But we must omit that word; it was disrespectful in the extreme and passing strange on a lady’s lips.) “Lord! Lord!” she cried again at the conclusion of her thoughts, “must I then begin to respect the opinion of the other sex, however monstrous I think it? If I wear skirts, if I can’t swim, if I have to be rescued by a blue-jacket, by God!” she cried, “I must!” Upon which a gloom fell over her. Candid by nature, and averse to all kinds of equivocation, to tell lies bored her. It seemed to her a roundabout way of going to work. Yet, she reflected, the flowered paduasoy—the pleasure of being rescued by a blue-jacket—if these were only to be obtained by roundabout ways, roundabout one must go, she supposed. She remembered how, as a young man, she had insisted that women must be obedient, chaste, scented, and exquisitely apparelled. “Now I shall have to pay in my own person for those desires,” she reflected; “for women are not (judging by my own short experience of the sex) obedient, chaste, scented, and exquisitely apparelled by nature. They can only attain these graces, without which they may enjoy none of the delights of life, by the most tedious discipline. There’s the hairdressing,” she thought, “that alone will take an hour of my morning; there’s looking in the looking-glass, another hour; there’s staying and lacing; there’s washing and powdering; there’s changing from silk to lace and from lace to paduasoy; there’s being chaste year in year out….” Here she tossed her foot impatiently, and showed an inch or two of calf. A sailor on the mast, who happened to look down at the moment, started so violently that he missed his footing and only saved himself by the skin of his teeth. “If the sight of my ankles means death to an honest fellow who, no doubt, has a wife and family to support, I must, in all humanity, keep them covered,” Orlando thought. Yet her legs were among her chiefest beauties. And she fell to thinking what an odd pass we have come to when all a woman’s beauty has to be kept covered lest a sailor may fall from a mast-head. “A pox on them!” she said, realising for the first time what, in other circumstances, she would have been taught as a child, that is to say, the sacred responsibilities of womanhood.

“And that’s the last oath I shall ever be able to swear,” she thought; “once I set foot on English soil. And I shall never be able to crack a man over the head, or tell him he lies in his teeth, or draw my sword and run him through the body, or sit among my peers, or wear a coronet, or walk in procession, or sentence a man to death, or lead an army, or prance down Whitehall on a charger, or wear seventy-two different medals on my breast. All I can do, once I set foot on English soil, is to pour out tea and ask my lords how they like it. D’you take sugar? D’you take cream?” And mincing out the words, she was horrified to perceive how low an opinion she was forming of the other sex, the manly, to which it had once been her pride to belong. “To fall from a mast-head”, she thought, “because you see a woman’s ankles; to dress up like a Guy Fawkes and parade the streets, so that women may praise you; to deny a woman teaching lest she may laugh at you; to be the slave of the frailest chit in petticoats, and yet to go about as if you were the Lords of creation.—Heavens!” she thought, “what fools they make of us—what fools we are!” And here it would seem from some ambiguity in her terms that she was censuring both sexes equally, as if she belonged to neither; and indeed, for the time being, she seemed to vacillate; she was man; she was woman; she knew the secrets, shared the weaknesses of each. It was a most bewildering and whirligig state of mind to be in. The comforts of ignorance seemed utterly denied her. She was a feather blown on the gale. Thus it is no great wonder, as she pitted one sex against the other, and found each alternately full of the most deplorable infirmities, and was not sure to which she belonged—it was no great wonder that she was about to cry out that she would return to Turkey and become a gipsy again when the anchor fell with a great splash into the sea; the sails came tumbling on deck, and she perceived (so sunk had she been in thought that she had seen nothing for several days) that the ship was anchored off the coast of Italy. The Captain at once sent to ask the honour of her company ashore with him in the long-boat.

Orlando on her return to England

When she returned the next morning, she stretched herself on her couch under the awning and arranged her draperies with the greatest decorum about her ankles.

“Ignorant and poor as we are compared with the other sex,” she thought, continuing the sentence which she had left unfinished the other day, “armoured with every weapon as they are, while they debar us even from a knowledge of the alphabet” (and from these opening words it is plain that something had happened during the night to give her a push towards the female sex, for she was speaking more as a woman speaks than as a man, yet with a sort of content after all), “still—they fall from the mast-head.” Here she gave a great yawn and fell asleep. When she woke, the ship was sailing before a fair breeze so near the shore that towns on the cliffs’ edge seemed only kept from slipping into the water by the interposition of some great rock or the twisted roots of some ancient olive tree. The scent of oranges wafted from a million trees, heavy with the fruit, reached her on deck. A score of blue dolphins, twisting their tails, leapt high now and again into the air. Stretching her arms out (arms, she had learnt already, have no such fatal effects as legs), she thanked Heaven that she was not prancing down Whitehall on a war-horse, nor even sentencing a man to death. “Better is it”, she thought, “to be clothed with poverty and ignorance, which are the dark garments of the female sex; better to leave the rule and discipline of the world to others; better be quit of martial ambition, the love of power, and all the other manly desires if so one can more fully enjoy the most exalted raptures known to the human spirit, which are”, she said aloud, as her habit was when deeply moved, “contemplation, solitude, love.”

“Praise God that I’m a woman!” she cried, and was about to run into the extreme folly—than which none is more distressing in woman or man either—of being proud of her sex, when she paused over the singular word, which, for all we can do to put it in its place, has crept in at the end of the last sentence: Love. “Love,” said Orlando. Instantly—such is its impetuosity—love took a human shape—such is its pride. For where other thoughts are content to remain abstract, nothing will satisfy this one but to put on flesh and blood, mantilla and petticoats, hose and jerkin. And as all Orlando’s loves had been women, now, through the culpable laggardry of the human frame to adapt itself to convention, though she herself was a woman, it was still a woman she loved; and if the consciousness of being of the same sex had any effect at all, it was to quicken and deepen those feelings which she had had as a man. For now a thousand hints and mysteries became plain to her that were then dark. Now, the obscurity, which divides the sexes and lets linger innumerable impurities in its gloom, was removed, and if there is anything in what the poet says about truth and beauty, this affection gained in beauty what it lost in falsity. At last, she cried, she knew Sasha as she was, and in the ardour of this discovery, and in the pursuit of all those treasures which were now revealed, she was so rapt and enchanted that it was as if a cannon ball had exploded at her ear when a man’s voice said, “Permit me, Madam,” a man’s hand raised her to her feet; and the fingers of a man with a three-masted sailing ship tattooed on the middle finger pointed to the horizon.

“The cliffs of England, Ma’am,” said the Captain, and he raised the hand which had pointed at the sky to the salute. Orlando now gave a second start, even more violent than the first.

“Christ Jesus!” she cried.

Happily, the sight of her native land after long absence excused both start and exclamation, or she would have been hard put to it to explain to Captain Bartolus the raging and conflicting emotions which now boiled within her. How tell him that she, who now trembled on his arm, had been a Duke and an Ambassador? How explain to him that she, who had been lapped like a lily in folds of paduasoy, had hacked heads off, and lain with loose women among treasure sacks in the holds of pirate ships on summer nights when the tulips were abloom and the bees buzzing off Wapping Old Stairs? Not even to herself could she explain the giant start she gave, as the resolute right hand of the sea-captain indicated the cliffs of the British Islands.

“To refuse and to yield,” she murmured, “how delightful; to pursue and to conquer, how august; to perceive and to reason, how sublime.” Not one of these words so coupled together seemed to her wrong; nevertheless, as the chalky cliffs loomed nearer, she felt culpable; dishonoured; unchaste, which, for one who had never given the matter a thought, was strange. Closer and closer they drew, till the samphire gatherers, hanging half-way down the cliff, were plain to the naked eye. And watching them, she felt, scampering up and down within her, like some derisive ghost who in another instant will pick up her skirts and flaunt out of sight, Sasha the lost, Sasha the memory, whose reality she had proved just now so surprisingly—Sasha, she felt, mopping and mowing and making all sorts of disrespectful gestures towards the cliffs and the samphire gatherers; and when the sailors began chanting, “So good-bye and adieu to you, Ladies of Spain”, the words echoed in Orlando’s sad heart, and she felt that however much landing there meant comfort, meant opulence, meant consequence and state (for she would doubtless pick up some noble Prince and reign, his consort, over half Yorkshire), still, if it meant conventionality, meant slavery, meant deceit, meant denying her love, fettering her limbs, pursing her lips, and restraining her tongue, then she would turn about with the ship and set sail once more for the gipsies.

Among the hurry of these thoughts, however, there now rose, like a dome of smooth, white marble, something which, whether fact or fancy, was so impressive to her fevered imagination that she settled upon it as one has seen a swarm of vibrant dragonflies alight, with apparent satisfaction, upon the glass bell which shelters some tender vegetable. The form of it, by the hazard of fancy, recalled that earliest, most persistent memory—the man with the big forehead in Twitchett’s sitting-room, the man who sat writing, or rather looking, but certainly not at her, for he never seemed to see her poised there in all her finery, lovely boy though she must have been, she could not deny it—and whenever she thought of him, the thought spread round it, like the risen moon on turbulent waters, a sheet of silver calm. Now her hand went to her bosom (the other was still in the Captain’s keeping), where the pages of her poem were hidden safe. It might have been a talisman that she kept there. The distraction of sex, which hers was, and what it meant, subsided; she thought now only of the glory of poetry, and the great lines of Marlowe, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Milton began booming and reverberating, as if a golden clapper beat against a golden bell in the cathedral tower which was her mind. The truth was that the image of the marble dome which her eyes had first discovered so faintly that it suggested a poet’s forehead and thus started a flock of irrelevant ideas, was no figment, but a reality; and as the ship advanced down the Thames before a favouring gale, the image with all its associations gave place to the truth, and revealed itself as nothing more and nothing less than the dome of a vast cathedral rising among a fretwork of white spires.

“St. Paul’s,” said Captain Bartolus, who stood by her side. “The Tower of London,” he continued. “Greenwich Hospital, erected in memory of Queen Mary by her husband, his late majesty, William the Third. Westminster Abbey. The Houses of Parliament.” As he spoke, each of these famous buildings rose to view. It was a fine September morning. A myriad of little water-craft plied from bank to bank. Rarely has a gayer, or more interesting, spectacle presented itself to the gaze of a returned traveller. Orlando hung over the prow, absorbed in wonder. Her eyes had been used too long to savages and nature not to be entranced by these urban glories. That, then, was the dome of St. Paul’s which Mr. Wren had built during her absence. Near by, a shock of golden hair burst from a pillar—Captain Bartolus was at her side to inform her that that was the Monument; there had been a plague and a fire during her absence, he said. Do what she would to restrain them, the tears came to her eyes, until, remembering that it is becoming in a woman to weep, she let them flow. Here, she thought, had been the great carnival. Here, where the waves slapped briskly, had stood the Royal Pavilion. Here she had first met Sasha. About here (she looked down into the sparkling waters) one had been used to see the frozen bumboat woman with her apples on her lap. All that splendour and corruption was gone. Gone, too, was the dark night, the monstrous downpour, the violent surges of the flood. Here, where yellow icebergs had raced circling with a crew of terror-stricken wretches on top, a covey of swans floated, orgulous, undulant, superb. London itself had completely changed since she had last seen it. Then, she remembered, it had been a huddle of little black, beetle-browed houses. The heads of rebels had grinned on pikes at Temple Bar. The cobbled pavements had reeked of garbage and ordure. Now, as the ship sailed past Wapping, she caught glimpses of broad and orderly thoroughfares. Stately coaches drawn by teams of well-fed horses stood at the doors of houses whose bow windows, whose plate glass, whose polished knockers, testified to the wealth and modest dignity of the dwellers within. Ladies in flowered silk (she put the Captain’s glass to her eye) walked on raised footpaths. Citizens in broidered coats took snuff at street corners under lamp-posts. She caught sight of a variety of painted signs swinging in the breeze and could form a rapid notion from what was painted on them of the tobacco, of the stuff, of the silk, of the gold, of the silver ware, of the gloves, of the perfumes, and of a thousand other articles which were sold within. Nor could she do more as the ship sailed to its anchorage by London Bridge than glance at coffee-house windows where, on balconies, since the weather was fine, a great number of decent citizens sat at ease, with china dishes in front of them, clay pipes by their sides, while one among them read from a news sheet, and was frequently interrupted by the laughter or the comments of the others. Were these taverns, were these wits, were these poets? she asked of Captain Bartolus, who obligingly informed her that even now—if she turned her head a little to the left and looked along the line of his first finger—so—they were passing the Cocoa Tree, where,—yes, there he was—one might see Mr. Addison taking his coffee; the other two gentlemen—“there, Ma’am, a little to the right of the lamp-post, one of ’em humped, t’other much the same as you or me”—were Mr. Dryden and Mr. Pope. [◉1] “Sad dogs,” said the Captain, by which he meant that they were Papists, “but men of parts, none the less,” he added, hurrying aft to superintend the arrangements for landing.

“Addison, Dryden, Pope,” Orlando repeated as if the words were an incantation. For one moment she saw the high mountains above Broussa, the next, she had set her foot upon her native shore.

But now Orlando was to learn how little the most tempestuous flutter of excitement avails against the iron countenance of the law; how harder than the stones of London Bridge it is, and than the lips of a cannon more severe. No sooner had she returned to her home in Blackfriars than she was made aware by a succession of Bow Street runners and other grave emissaries from the Law Courts that she was a party to three major suits which had been preferred against her during her absence, as well as innumerable minor litigations, some arising out of, others depending on them. The chief charges against her were (1) that she was dead, and therefore could not hold any property whatsoever; (2) that she was a woman, which amounts to much the same thing; (3) that she was an English Duke who had married one Rosina Pepita, a dancer; and had had by her three sons, which sons now declaring that their father was deceased, claimed that all his property descended to them. Such grave charges as these would, of course, take time and money to dispose of. All her estates were put in Chancery and her titles pronounced in abeyance while the suits were under litigation. Thus it was in a highly ambiguous condition, uncertain whether she was alive or dead, man or woman, Duke or nonentity, that she posted down to her country seat, where, pending the legal judgment, she had the Law’s permission to reside in a state of incognito or incognita, as the case might turn out to be.

It was a fine evening in December when she arrived and the snow was falling and the violet shadows were slanting much as she had seen them from the hill-top at Broussa. The great house lay more like a town than a house, brown and blue, rose and purple in the snow, with all its chimneys smoking busily as if inspired with a life of their own. She could not restrain a cry as she saw it there tranquil and massive, couched upon the meadows. As the yellow coach entered the park and came bowling along the drive between the trees, the red deer raised their heads as if expectantly, and it was observed that instead of showing the timidity natural to their kind, they followed the coach and stood about the courtyard when it drew up. Some tossed their antlers, others pawed the ground as the step was let down and Orlando alighted. One, it is said, actually knelt in the snow before her. She had not time to reach her hand towards the knocker before both wings of the great door were flung open, and there, with lights and torches held above their heads, were Mrs. Grimsditch, Mr. Dupper, and a whole retinue of servants come to greet her. But the orderly procession was interrupted first by the impetuosity of Canute, the elk-hound, who threw himself with such ardour upon his mistress that he almost knocked her to the ground; next, by the agitation of Mrs. Grimsditch, who, making as if to curtsey, was overcome with emotion and could do no more than gasp Milord! Milady! Milady! Milord! until Orlando comforted her with a hearty kiss upon both her cheeks. After that, Mr. Dupper began to read from a parchment, but the dogs barking, the huntsmen winding their horns, and the stags, who had come into the courtyard in the confusion, baying the moon, not much progress was made, and the company dispersed within after crowding about their Mistress, and testifying in every way to their great joy at her return.

No one showed an instant’s suspicion that Orlando was not the Orlando they had known. If any doubt there was in the human mind the action of the deer and the dogs would have been enough to dispel it, for the dumb creatures, as is well known, are far better judges both of identity and character than we are. Moreover, said Mrs. Grimsditch, over her dish of china tea, to Mr. Dupper that night, if her Lord was a Lady now, she had never seen a lovelier one, nor was there a penny piece to choose between them; one was as well-favoured as the other; they were as like as two peaches on one branch; which, said Mrs. Grimsditch, becoming confidential, she had always had her suspicions (here she nodded her head very mysteriously), which it was no surprise to her (here she nodded her head very knowingly), and for her part, a very great comfort; for what with the towels wanting mending and the curtains in the chaplain’s parlour being moth-eaten round the fringes, it was time they had a Mistress among them.

“And some little masters and mistresses to come after her,” Mr. Dupper added, being privileged by virtue of his holy office to speak his mind on such delicate matters as these.

So, while the old servants gossiped in the servants’ hall, Orlando took a silver candle in her hand and roamed once more through the halls, the galleries, the courts, the bedrooms; saw loom down at her again the dark visage of this Lord Keeper, that Lord Chamberlain, among her ancestors; sat now in this chair of state, now reclined on that canopy of delight; observed the arras, how it swayed; watched the huntsmen riding and Daphne flying; bathed her hand, as she had loved to do as a child, in the yellow pool of light which the moonlight made falling through the heraldic Leopard in the window; slid along the polished planks of the gallery, the other side of which was rough timber; touched this silk, that satin; fancied the carved dolphins swam; brushed her hair with King James’ silver brush; buried her face in the pot-pourri, which was made as the Conqueror had taught them many hundred years ago and from the same roses; looked at the garden and imagined the sleeping crocuses, the dormant dahlias; saw the frail nymphs gleaming white in the snow and the great yew hedges, thick as a house, black behind them; saw the orangeries and the giant medlars;—all this she saw, and each sight and sound, rudely as we write it down, filled her heart with such a lust and balm of joy, that at length, tired out, she entered the Chapel and sank into the old red arm-chair in which her ancestors used to hear service. There she lit a cheroot (’twas a habit she had brought back from the East) and opened the Prayer Book.

It was a little book bound in velvet, stitched with gold, which had been held by Mary Queen of Scots on the scaffold, and the eye of faith could detect a brownish stain, said to be made of a drop of the Royal blood. But what pious thoughts it roused in Orlando, what evil passions it soothed asleep, who dare say, seeing that of all communions this with the deity is the most inscrutable? Novelist, poet, historian all falter with their hand on that door; nor does the believer himself enlighten us, for is he more ready to die than other people, or more eager to share his goods? Does he not keep as many maids and carriage horses as the rest? and yet with it all, holds a faith he says which should make goods a vanity and death desirable. In the Queen’s prayer-book, along with the blood-stain, was also a lock of hair and a crumb of pastry; Orlando now added to these keepsakes a flake of tobacco, and so, reading and smoking, was moved by the humane jumble of them all—the hair, the pastry, the blood-stain, the tobacco—to such a mood of contemplation as gave her a reverent air suitable in the circumstances, though she had, it is said, no traffic with the usual God. Nothing, however, can be more arrogant, though nothing is commoner than to assume that of Gods there is only one, and of religions none but the speaker’s. Orlando, it seemed, had a faith of her own. With all the religious ardour in the world, she now reflected upon her sins and the imperfections that had crept into her spiritual state. The letter S, she reflected, is the serpent in the poet’s Eden. Do what she would there were still too many of these sinful reptiles in the first stanzas of “The Oak Tree”. But ‘S’ was nothing, in her opinion, compared with the termination ‘ing’. The present participle is the Devil himself, she thought (now that we are in the place for believing in Devils). To evade such temptations is the first duty of the poet, she concluded, for as the ear is the antechamber to the soul, poetry can adulterate and destroy more surely than lust or gunpowder. The poet’s, then, is the highest office of all, she continued. His words reach where others fall short. A silly song of Shakespeare’s has done more for the poor and the wicked than all the preachers and philanthropists in the world. No time, no devotion, can be too great, therefore, which makes the vehicle of our message less distorting. We must shape our words till they are the thinnest integument for our thoughts. Thoughts are divine, etc. Thus it is obvious that she was back in the confines of her own religion which time had only strengthened in her absence, and was rapidly acquiring the intolerance of belief.

“I am growing up,” she thought, taking her taper at last. “I am losing some illusions,” she said, shutting Queen Mary’s book, “perhaps to acquire others,” and she descended among the tombs where the bones of her ancestors lay.

But even the bones of her ancestors, Sir Miles, Sir Gervase, and the rest, had lost something of their sanctity since Rustum el Sadi had waved his hand that night in the Asian mountains. Somehow the fact that only three or four hundred years ago these skeletons had been men with their way to make in the world like any modern upstart, and that they had made it by acquiring houses and offices, garters and ribbands, as any other upstart does, while poets, perhaps, and men of great mind and breeding had preferred the quietude of the country, for which choice they paid the penalty by extreme poverty, and now hawked broadsheets in the Strand, or herded sheep in the fields, filled her with remorse. She thought of the Egyptian pyramids and what bones lie beneath them as she stood in the crypt; and the vast, empty hills which lie above the Sea of Marmara seemed, for the moment, a finer dwelling-place than this many-roomed mansion in which no bed lacked its quilt and no silver dish its silver cover.

“I am growing up,” she thought, taking her taper. “I am losing my illusions, perhaps to acquire new ones,” and she paced down the long gallery to her bedroom. It was a disagreeable process, and a troublesome. But it was interesting, amazingly, she thought, stretching her legs out to her log fire (for no sailor was present), and she reviewed, as if it were an avenue of great edifices, the progress of her own self along her own past.

How she had loved sound when she was a boy, and thought the volley of tumultuous syllables from the lips the finest of all poetry. Then—it was the effect of Sasha and her disillusionment perhaps—into this high frenzy was let fall some black drop, which turned her rhapsody to sluggishness. Slowly there had opened within her something intricate and many-chambered, which one must take a torch to explore, in prose not verse; and she remembered how passionately she had studied that doctor at Norwich, Browne, whose book was at her hand there. She had formed here in solitude after her affair with Greene, or tried to form, for Heaven knows these growths are agelong in coming, a spirit capable of resistance. “I will write”, she had said, “what I enjoy writing”; and so had scratched out twenty-six volumes. Yet still, for all her travels and adventures and profound thinkings and turnings this way and that, she was only in process of fabrication. What the future might bring, Heaven only knew. Change was incessant, and change perhaps would never cease. High battlements of thought, habits that had seemed durable as stone, went down like shadows at the touch of another mind and left a naked sky and fresh stars twinkling in it. Here she went to the window, and in spite of the cold could not help unlatching it. She leant out into the damp night air. She heard a fox bark in the woods, and the clutter of a pheasant trailing through the branches. She heard the snow slither and flop from the roof to the ground. “By my life,” she exclaimed, “this is a thousand times better than Turkey. Rustum,” she cried, as if she were arguing with the gipsy (and in this new power of bearing an argument in mind and continuing it with someone who was not there to contradict she showed again the development of her soul), “you were wrong. This is better than Turkey. Hair, pastry, tobacco—of what odds and ends are we compounded,” she said (thinking of Queen Mary’s prayer-book). “What a phantasmagoria the mind is and meeting-place of dissemblables! At one moment we deplore our birth and state and aspire to an ascetic exaltation; the next we are overcome by the smell of some old garden path and weep to hear the thrushes sing.” And so bewildered as usual by the multitude of things which call for explanation and imprint their message without leaving any hint as to their meaning, she threw her cheroot out of the window and went to bed.

Next morning, in pursuance of these thoughts, she had out her pen and paper, and started afresh upon “The Oak Tree”, for to have ink and paper in plenty when one has made do with berries and margins is a delight not to be conceived. Thus she was now striking out a phrase in the depths of despair, now in the heights of ecstasy writing one in, when a shadow darkened the page. She hastily hid her manuscript.

As her window gave on to the most central of the courts, as she had given orders that she would see no one, as she knew no one and was herself legally unknown, she was first surprised at the shadow, then indignant at it, then (when she looked up and saw what caused it) overcome with merriment. For it was a familiar shadow, a grotesque shadow, the shadow of no less a personage than the Archduchess Harriet Griselda of Finster-Aarhorn and Scand-op-Boom in the Roumanian territory. She was loping across the court in her old black riding-habit and mantle as before. Not a hair of her head was changed. This then was the woman who had chased her from England! This was the eyrie of that obscene vulture—this the fatal fowl herself! At the thought that she had fled all the way to Turkey to avoid her seductions (now become excessively flat), Orlando laughed aloud. There was something inexpressibly comic in the sight. She resembled, as Orlando had thought before, nothing so much as a monstrous hare. She had the staring eyes, the lank cheeks, the high headdress of that animal. She stopped now, much as a hare sits erect in the corn when thinking itself unobserved, and stared at Orlando, who stared back at her from the window. After they had stared like this for a certain time, there was nothing for it but to ask her in, and soon the two ladies were exchanging compliments while the Archduchess struck the snow from her mantle.

“A plague on women,” said Orlando to herself, going to the cupboard to fetch a glass of wine, “they never leave one a moment’s peace. A more ferreting, inquisiting, busybodying set of people don’t exist. It was to escape this Maypole that I left England, and now”—here she turned to present the Archduchess with the salver, and behold—in her place stood a tall gentleman in black. A heap of clothes lay in the fender. She was alone with a man.

Recalled thus suddenly to a consciousness of her sex, which she had completely forgotten, and of his, which was now remote enough to be equally upsetting, Orlando felt seized with faintness.

“La!” she cried, putting her hand to her side, “how you frighten me!”

“Gentle creature,” cried the Archduchess, falling on one knee and at the same time pressing a cordial to Orlando’s lips, “forgive me for the deceit I have practised on you!”

Orlando sipped the wine and the Archduke knelt and kissed her hand.

In short, they acted the parts of man and woman for ten minutes with great vigour and then fell into natural discourse. The Archduchess (but she must in future be known as the Archduke) told his story—that he was a man and always had been one; that he had seen a portrait of Orlando and fallen hopelessly in love with him; that to compass his ends, he had dressed as a woman and lodged at the Baker’s shop; that he was desolated when he fled to Turkey; that he had heard of her change and hastened to offer his services (here he teed and heed intolerably). For to him, said the Archduke Harry, she was and would ever be the Pink, the Pearl, the Perfection of her sex. The three p’s would have been more persuasive if they had not been interspersed with tee-hees and haw-haws of the strangest kind. “If this is love,” said Orlando to herself, looking at the Archduke on the other side of the fender, and now from the woman’s point of view, “there is something highly ridiculous about it.”

Falling on his knees, the Archduke Harry made the most passionate declaration of his suit. He told her that he had something like twenty million ducats in a strong box at his castle. He had more acres than any nobleman in England. The shooting was excellent: he could promise her a mixed bag of ptarmigan and grouse such as no English moor, or Scotch either, could rival. True, the pheasants had suffered from the gape in his absence, and the does had slipped their young, but that could be put right, and would be with her help when they lived in Roumania together.

As he spoke, enormous tears formed in his rather prominent eyes and ran down the sandy tracts of his long and lanky cheeks.

That men cry as frequently and as unreasonably as women, Orlando knew from her own experience as a man; but she was beginning to be aware that women should be shocked when men display emotion in their presence, and so, shocked she was.

The Archduke apologised. He commanded himself sufficiently to say that he would leave her now, but would return on the following day for his answer.

That was a Tuesday. He came on Wednesday; he came on Thursday; he came on Friday; and he came on Saturday. It is true that each visit began, continued, or concluded with a declaration of love, but in between there was much room for silence. They sat on either side of the fireplace and sometimes the Archduke knocked over the fire-irons and Orlando picked them up again. Then the Archduke would bethink him how he had shot an elk in Sweden, and Orlando would ask, was it a very big elk, and the Archduke would say that it was not as big as the reindeer which he had shot in Norway; and Orlando would ask, had he ever shot a tiger, and the Archduke would say he had shot an albatross, and Orlando would say (half hiding her yawn) was an albatross as big as an elephant, and the Archduke would say—something very sensible, no doubt, but Orlando heard it not, for she was looking at her writing-table, out of the window, at the door. Upon which the Archduke would say, “I adore you”, at the very same moment that Orlando said “Look, it’s beginning to rain”, at which they were both much embarrassed, and blushed scarlet, and could neither of them think what to say next. Indeed, Orlando was at her wit’s end what to talk about and had she not bethought her of a game called Fly Loo, at which great sums of money can be lost with very little expense of spirit, she would have had to marry him, she supposed; for how else to get rid of him she knew not. By this device, however, and it was a simple one, needing only three lumps of sugar and a sufficiency of flies, the embarrassment of conversation was overcome and the necessity of marriage avoided. For now, the Archduke would bet her five hundred pounds to a tester that a fly would settle on this lump and not on that. Thus, they would have occupation for a whole morning watching the flies (who were naturally sluggish at this season and often spent an hour or so circling round the ceiling) until at length some fine blue-bottle made his choice and the match was won. Many hundreds of pounds changed hands between them at this game, which the Archduke, who was a born gambler, swore was every bit as good as horse racing, and vowed he could play at for ever. But Orlando soon began to weary.

“What’s the good of being a fine young woman in the prime of life”, she asked, “if I have to pass all my mornings watching blue-bottles with an Archduke?”

She began to detest the sight of sugar; flies made her dizzy. Some way out of the difficulty there must be, she supposed, but she was still awkward in the arts of her sex, and as she could no longer knock a man over the head or run him through the body with a rapier, she could think of no better method than this. She caught a blue-bottle, gently pressed the life out of it (it was half dead already, or her kindness for the dumb creatures would not have permitted it) and secured it by a drop of gum arabic to a lump of sugar. While the Archduke was gazing at the ceiling, she deftly substituted this lump for the one she had laid her money on, and crying “Loo Loo!” declared that she had won her bet. Her reckoning was that the Archduke, with all his knowledge of sport and horse-racing, would detect the fraud and, as to cheat at Loo is the most heinous of crimes, and men have been banished from the society of mankind to that of apes in the tropics for ever because of it, she calculated that he would be manly enough to refuse to have anything further to do with her. But she misjudged the simplicity of the amiable nobleman. He was no nice judge of flies. A dead fly looked to him much the same as a living one. She played the trick twenty times on him and he paid her over £17,250 (which is about £40,885 : 6 : 8 of our own money) before Orlando cheated so grossly that even he could be deceived no longer. When he realised the truth at last, a painful scene ensued. The Archduke rose to his full height. He coloured scarlet. Tears rolled down his cheeks one by one. That she had won a fortune from him was nothing—she was welcome to it; that she had deceived him was something—it hurt him to think her capable of it; but that she had cheated at Loo was everything. To love a woman who cheated at play was, he said, impossible. Here he broke down completely. Happily, he said, recovering slightly, there were no witnesses. She was, after all, only a woman, he said. In short, he was preparing in the chivalry of his heart to forgive her and had bent to ask her pardon for the violence of his language, when she cut the matter short, as he stooped his proud head, by dropping a small toad between his skin and his shirt.

In justice to her, it must be said that she would infinitely have preferred a rapier. Toads are clammy things to conceal about one’s person a whole morning. But if rapiers are forbidden, one must have recourse to toads. Moreover toads and laughter between them sometimes do what cold steel cannot. She laughed. The Archduke blushed. She laughed. The Archduke cursed. She laughed. The Archduke slammed the door.

“Heaven be praised!” cried Orlando still laughing. She heard the sound of chariot wheels driven at a furious pace down the courtyard. She heard them rattle along the road. Fainter and fainter the sound became. Now it faded away altogether.

“I am alone,” said Orlando, aloud since there was no one to hear.

That silence is more profound after noise still wants the confirmation of science. But that loneliness is more apparent directly after one has been made love to, many women would take their oath. As the sound of the Archduke’s chariot wheels died away, Orlando felt drawing further from her and further from her an Archduke (she did not mind that), a fortune (she did not mind that), a title (she did not mind that), the safety and circumstance of married life (she did not mind that), but life she heard going from her, and a lover. “Life and a lover,” she murmured; and going to her writing-table she dipped her pen in the ink and wrote:

“Life and a lover”—a line which did not scan and made no sense with what went before—something about the proper way of dipping sheep to avoid the scab. Reading it over she blushed and repeated,

“Life and a lover.” Then laying her pen aside she went into her bedroom, stood in front of her mirror, and arranged her pearls about her neck. Then since pearls do not show to advantage against a morning gown of sprigged cotton, she changed to a dove grey taffeta; thence to one of peach bloom; thence to a wine-coloured brocade. Perhaps a dash of powder was needed, and if her hair were disposed—so—about her brow, it might become her. Then she slipped her feet into pointed slippers, and drew an emerald ring upon her finger. “Now,” she said when all was ready and lit the silver sconces on either side of the mirror. What woman would not have kindled to see what Orlando saw then burning in the snow—for all about the looking - glass were snowy lawns, and she was like a fire, a burning bush, and the candle flames about her head were silver leaves; or again, the glass was green water, and she a mermaid, slung with pearls, a siren in a cave, singing so that oarsmen leant from their boats and fell down, down to embrace her; so dark, so bright, so hard, so soft, was she, so astonishingly seductive that it was a thousand pities that there was no one there to put it in plain English, and say outright, “Damn it, Madam, you are loveliness incarnate,” which was the truth. Even Orlando (who had no conceit of her person) knew it, for she smiled the involuntary smile which women smile when their own beauty, which seems not their own, forms like a drop falling or a fountain rising and confronts them all of a sudden in the glass—this smile she smiled and then she listened for a moment and heard only the leaves blowing and the sparrows twittering, and then she sighed, “Life, a lover,” and then she turned on her heel with extraordinary rapidity; whipped her pearls from her neck, stripped the satins from her back, stood erect in the neat black silk knickerbockers of an ordinary nobleman, and rang the bell. When the servant came, she told him to order a coach and six to be in readiness instantly. She was summoned by urgent affairs to London. Within an hour of the Archduke’s departure, off she drove.

And as she drove, we may seize the opportunity, since the landscape was of a simple English kind which needs no description, to draw the reader’s attention more particularly than we could at the moment to one or two remarks which have slipped in here and there in the course of the narrative. For example, it may have been observed that Orlando hid her manuscripts when interrupted. Next, that she looked long and intently in the glass; and now, as she drove to London, one might notice her starting and suppressing a cry when the horses galloped faster than she liked. Her modesty as to her writing, her vanity as to her person, her fears for her safety all seems to hint that what was said a short time ago about there being no change in Orlando the man and Orlando the woman, was ceasing to be altogether true. She was becoming a little more modest, as women are, of her brains, and a little more vain, as women are, of her person. Certain susceptibilities were asserting themselves, and others were diminishing. The change of clothes had, some philosophers will say, much to do with it. Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than merely to keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world’s view of us. For example, when Captain Bartolus saw Orlando’s skirt, he had an awning stretched for her immediately, pressed her to take another slice of beef, and invited her to go ashore with him in the long-boat. These compliments would certainly not have been paid her had her skirts, instead of flowing, been cut tight to her legs in the fashion of breeches. And when we are paid compliments, it behoves us to make some return. Orlando curtseyed; she complied; she flattered the good man’s humours as she would not have done had his neat breeches been a woman’s skirts, and his braided coat a woman’s satin bodice. Thus, there is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking. So, having now worn skirts for a considerable time, a certain change was visible in Orlando, which is to be found if the reader will look at page 144, even in her face. If we compare the picture of Orlando as a man with that of Orlando as a woman we shall see that though both are undoubtedly one and the same person, there are certain changes. The man has his hand free to seize his sword, the woman must use hers to keep the satins from slipping from her shoulders. The man looks the world full in the face, as if it were made for his uses and fashioned to his liking. The woman takes a sidelong glance at it, full of subtlety, even of suspicion. Had they both worn the same clothes, it is possible that their outlook might have been the same.

That is the view of some philosophers and wise ones, but on the whole, we incline to another. The difference between the sexes is, happily, one of great profundity. Clothes are but a symbol of something hid deep beneath. It was a change in Orlando herself that dictated her choice of a woman’s dress and of a woman’s sex. And perhaps in this she was only expressing rather more openly than usual—openness indeed was the soul of her nature—something that happens to most people without being thus plainly expressed. For here again, we come to a dilemma. Different though the sexes are, they intermix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above. Of the complications and confusions which thus result everyone has had experience; but here we leave the general question and note only the odd effect it had in the particular case of Orlando herself.

For it was this mixture in her of man and woman, one being uppermost and then the other, that often gave her conduct an unexpected turn. The curious of her own sex would argue, for example, if Orlando was a woman, how did she never take more than ten minutes to dress? And were not her clothes chosen rather at random, and sometimes worn rather shabby? And then they would say, still, she has none of the formality of a man, or a man’s love of power. She is excessively tender-hearted. She could not endure to see a donkey beaten or a kitten drowned. Yet again, they noted, she detested household matters, was up at dawn and out among the fields in summer before the sun had risen. No farmer knew more about the crops than she did. She could drink with the best and liked games of hazard. She rode well and drove six horses at a gallop over London Bridge. Yet again, though bold and active as a man, it was remarked that the sight of another in danger brought on the most womanly palpitations. She would burst into tears on slight provocation. She was unversed in geography, found mathematics intolerable, and held some caprices which are more common among women than men, as for instance that to travel south is to travel downhill. Whether, then, Orlando was most man or woman, it is difficult to say and cannot now be decided. For her coach was now rattling on the cobbles. She had reached her home in the city. The steps were being let down; the iron gates were being opened. She was entering her father’s house at Blackfriars, which, though fashion was fast deserting that end of the town, was still a pleasant, roomy mansion, with gardens running down to the river, and a pleasant grove of nut trees to walk in.

Here she took up her lodging and began instantly to look about her for what she had come in search of—that is to say, life and a lover. About the first there might be some doubt; the second she found without the least difficulty two days after her arrival. It was a Tuesday that she came to town. On Thursday she went for a walk in the Mall, as was then the habit of persons of quality. She had not made more than a turn or two of the avenue before she was observed by a little knot of vulgar people who go there to spy upon their betters. As she came past them, a common woman carrying a child at her breast stepped forward, peered familiarly into Orlando’s face, and cried out, “Lawk upon us, if it ain’t the Lady Orlando!” Her companions came crowding round, and Orlando found herself in a moment the centre of a mob of staring citizens and tradesmen’s wives, all eager to gaze upon the heroine of the celebrated lawsuit. Such was the interest that the case excited in the minds of the common people. She might, indeed, have found herself gravely discommoded by the pressure of the crowd—she had forgotten that ladies are not supposed to walk in public places alone—had not a tall gentleman at once stepped forward and offered her the protection of his arm. It was the Archduke. She was overcome with distress and yet with some amusement at the sight. Not only had this magnanimous nobleman forgiven her, but in order to show that he took her levity with the toad in good part, he had procured a jewel made in the shape of that reptile which he pressed upon her with a repetition of his suit as he handed her to her coach.

What with the crowd, what with the Duke, what with the jewel, she drove home in the vilest temper imaginable. Was it impossible then to go for a walk without being half-suffocated, presented with a toad set in emeralds, and asked in marriage by an Archduke? She took a kinder view of the case next day when she found on her breakfast table half a dozen billets from some of the greatest ladies in the land—Lady Suffolk, Lady Salisbury, Lady Chesterfield, Lady Tavistock, and others who reminded her in the politest manner of old alliances between their families and her own, and desired the honour of her acquaintance. Next day, which was a Saturday, many of these great ladies waited on her in person. On Tuesday, about noon, their footmen brought cards of invitation to various routs, dinners, and assemblies in the near future; so that Orlando was launched without delay, and with some splash and foam at that, upon the waters of London society.

To give a truthful account of London society at that or indeed at any other time, is beyond the powers of the biographer or the historian. Only those who have little need of the truth, and no respect for it—the poets and the novelists—can be trusted to do it, for this is one of the cases where the truth does not exist. Nothing exists. The whole thing is a miasma—a mirage. To make our meaning plain—Orlando would come home from one of these routs at three or four in the morning with cheeks like a Christmas tree and eyes like stars. She would untie a lace, pace the room a score of times, untie another lace, stop, and pace the room again. Often the sun would be blazing over Southwark chimneys before she could persuade herself to get into bed, and there she would lie, pitching and tossing, laughing and sighing for an hour or longer before she slept at last. And what was all this stir about? Society. And what had society said or done to throw a reasonable lady into such an excitement? In plain language, nothing. Rack her memory as she would, next day Orlando could never remember a single word to magnify into the name something. Lord O. had been gallant. Lord A. polite. The Marquis of C. charming. Mr. M. amusing. But when she tried to recollect in what their gallantry, politeness, charm, or wit had consisted, she was bound to suppose her memory at fault, for she could not name a thing. It was the same always. Nothing remained over the next day, yet the excitement of the moment was intense. Thus we are forced to conclude that society is one of those brews such as skilled housekeepers serve hot about Christmas time, whose flavour depends upon the proper mixing and stirring of a dozen different ingredients. Take one out, and it is in itself insipid. Take away Lord O., Lord A., Lord C., or Mr. M. and separately each is nothing. Stir them all together and they combine to give off the most intoxicating of flavours, the most seductive of scents. Yet this intoxication, this seductiveness, entirely evade our analysis. At one and the same time, therefore, society is everything and society is nothing. Society is the most powerful concoction in the world and society has no existence whatsoever. Such monsters the poets and the novelists alone can deal with; with such something-nothings their works are stuffed out to prodigious size; and to them with the best will in the world we are content to leave it.

Following the example of our predecessors, therefore, we will only say that society in the reign of Queen Anne was of unparalleled brilliance. To have the entry there was the aim of every well-bred person. The graces were supreme. Fathers instructed their sons, mothers their daughters. No education was complete for either sex which did not include the science of deportment, the art of bowing and curtseying, the management of the sword and the fan, the care of the teeth, the conduct of the leg, the flexibility of the knee, the proper methods of entering and leaving the room, with a thousand etceteras, such as will immediately suggest themselves to anybody who has himself been in society. Since Orlando had won the praise of Queen Elizabeth for the way she handed a bowl of rose water as a boy, it must be supposed that she was sufficiently expert to pass muster. Yet it is true that there was an absent-mindedness about her which sometimes made her clumsy; she was apt to think of poetry when she should have been thinking of taffeta; her walk was a little too much of a stride for a woman, perhaps, and her gestures, being abrupt, might endanger a cup of tea on occasion.

Whether this slight disability was enough to counterbalance the splendour of her bearing, or whether she inherited a drop too much of that black humour which ran in the veins of all her race, certain it is that she had not been in the world more than a score of times before she might have been heard to ask herself, had there been anybody but her spaniel Pippin to hear her, “What the devil is the matter with me?” The occasion was Tuesday, the 16th of June 1712; she had just returned from a great ball at Arlington House; the dawn was in the sky, and she was pulling off her stockings. “I don’t care if I never meet another soul as long as I live,” cried Orlando, bursting into tears. Lovers she had in plenty, but life, which is, after all, of some importance in its way, escaped her. “Is this”, she asked—but there was none to answer, “is this”, she finished her sentence all the same, “what people call life?” The spaniel raised her forepaw in token of sympathy. The spaniel licked Orlando with her tongue. Orlando stroked the spaniel with her hand. Orlando kissed the spaniel with her lips. In short, there was the truest sympathy between them that can be between a dog and its mistress, and yet it cannot be denied that the dumbness of animals is a great impediment to the refinements of intercourse. They wag their tails; they bow the front part of the body and elevate the hind; they roll, they jump, they paw, they whine, they bark, they slobber, they have all sorts of ceremonies and artifices of their own, but the whole thing is of no avail, since speak they cannot. Such was her quarrel, she thought, setting the dog gently on to the floor, with the great people at Arlington House. They, too, wag their tails, bow, roll, jump, paw, and slobber, but talk they cannot. “All these months that I’ve been out in the world”, said Orlando, pitching one stocking across the room, “I’ve heard nothing but what Pippin might have said. I’m cold. I’m happy. I’m hungry. I’ve caught a mouse. I’ve buried a bone. Please kiss my nose.” And it was not enough.

How, in so short a time, she had passed from intoxication to disgust we will only seek to explain by supposing that this mysterious composition which we call society, is nothing absolutely good or bad in itself, but has a spirit in it, volatile but potent, which either makes you drunk when you think it, as Orlando thought it, delightful, or gives you a headache when you think it, as Orlando thought it, repulsive. That the faculty of speech has much to do with it either way, we take leave to doubt. Often a dumb hour is the most ravishing of all; brilliant wit can be tedious beyond description. But to the poets we leave it, and so on with our story.

Orlando threw the second stocking after the first and went to bed dismally enough, determined that she would forswear society for ever. But again as it turned out, she was too hasty in coming to her conclusions. For the very next morning she woke to find, among the usual cards of invitation upon her table, one from a certain great Lady, the Countess of R. Having determined overnight that she would never go into society again, we can only explain Orlando’s behaviour—she sent a messenger hot-foot to R—— House to say that she would attend her Ladyship with all the pleasure in the world—by the fact that she was still suffering from the effect of three honeyed words dropped into her ear on the deck of the Enamoured Lady by Captain Nicholas Benedict Bartolus as they sailed down the Thames. Addison, Dryden, Pope, he had said, pointing to the Cocoa Tree, and Addison, Dryden, Pope had chimed in her head like an incantation ever since. Who can credit such folly? but so it was. All her experience with Nick Greene had taught her nothing. Such names still exercised over her the most powerful fascination. Something, perhaps, we must believe in, and as Orlando, we have said, had no belief in the usual divinities she bestowed her credulity upon great men—yet with a distinction. Admirals, soldiers, statesmen, moved her not at all. But the very thought of a great writer stirred her to such a pitch of belief that she almost believed him to be invisible. Her instinct was a sound one. One can only believe entirely, perhaps, in what one cannot see. The little glimpse she had of these great men from the deck of the ship was of the nature of a vision. That the cup was china, or the gazette paper, she doubted. When Lord O. said one day that he had dined with Dryden the night before, she flatly disbelieved him. Now, the Lady R.’s reception room had the reputation of being the antechamber to the presence room of genius; it was the place where men and women met to swing censers and chant hymns to the bust of genius in a niche in the wall. Sometimes the God himself vouchsafed his presence for a moment. Intellect alone admitted the suppliant, and nothing (so the report ran) was said inside that was not witty.

It was thus with great trepidation that Orlando entered the room. She found a company already assembled in a semicircle round the fire. Lady R., an oldish lady, of dark complexion, with a black lace mantilla on her head, was seated in a great arm-chair in the centre. Thus being somewhat deaf, she could control the conversation on both sides of her. On both sides of her sat men and women of the highest distinction. Every man, it was said, had been a Prime Minister and every woman, it was whispered, had been the mistress of a king. Certain it is that all were brilliant, and all were famous. Orlando took her seat with a deep reverence in silence…. After three hours, she curtseyed profoundly and left.

But what, the reader may ask with some exasperation, happened in between? In three hours, such a company must have said the wittiest, the profoundest, the most interesting things in the world. So it would seem indeed. But the fact appears to be that they said nothing. It is a curious characteristic which they share with all the most brilliant societies that the world has seen. Old Madame du Deffand and her friends talked for fifty years without stopping. And of it all, what remains? Perhaps three witty sayings. So that we are at liberty to suppose either that nothing was said, or that nothing witty was said, or that the fraction of three witty sayings lasted eighteen thousand two hundred and fifty nights, which does not leave a liberal allowance of wit for any one of them.

The truth would seem to be—if we dare use such a word in such a connection—that all these groups of people lie under an enchantment. The hostess is our modern Sibyl. She is a witch who lays her guests under a spell. In this house they think themselves happy; in that witty; in a third profound. It is all an illusion (which is nothing against it, for illusions are the most valuable and necessary of all things, and she who can create one is among the world’s greatest benefactors), but as it is notorious that illusions are shattered by conflict with reality, so no real happiness, no real wit, no real profundity are tolerated where the illusion prevails. This serves to explain why Madame du Deffand said no more than three witty things in the course of fifty years. Had she said more, her circle would have been destroyed. The witticism, as it left her lips, bowled over the current conversation as a cannon ball lays low the violets and the daisies. When she made her famous ‘mot de Saint Denis’ the very grass was singed. Disillusionment and desolation followed. Not a word was uttered. “Spare us another such, for Heaven’s sake, Madame!” her friends cried with one accord. And she obeyed. For almost seventeen years she said nothing memorable and all went well. The beautiful counterpane of illusion lay unbroken on her circle as it lay unbroken on the circle of Lady R. The guests thought that they were happy, thought that they were witty, thought that they were profound, and, as they thought this, other people thought it still more strongly; and so it got about that nothing was more delightful than one of Lady R.’s assemblies; everyone envied those who were admitted; those who were admitted envied themselves because other people envied them; and so there seemed no end to it—except that which we have now to relate.

For about the third time Orlando went there a certain incident occurred. She was still under the illusion that she was listening to the most brilliant epigrams in the world, though, as a matter of fact, old General C. was only saying, at some length, how the gout had left his left leg and gone to his right, while Mr. L. interrupted when any proper name was mentioned, “R.? Oh! I know Billy R. as well as I know myself. S.? My dearest friend. T.? Stayed with him a fortnight in Yorkshire”—which, such is the force of illusion, sounded like the wittiest repartee, the most searching comment upon human life, and kept the company in a roar; when the door opened and a little gentleman entered whose name Orlando did not catch. Soon a curiously disagreeable sensation came over her. To judge from their faces, the rest began to feel it as well. One gentleman said there was a draught. The Marchioness of C. feared a cat must be under the sofa. It was as if their eyes were being slowly opened after a pleasant dream and nothing met them but a cheap wash-stand and a dirty counterpane. It was as if the fumes of some delicious wine were slowly leaving them. Still the General talked and still Mr. L. remembered. But it became more and more apparent how red the General’s neck was, how bald Mr. L.’s head was. As for what they said—nothing more tedious and trivial could be imagined. Everybody fidgeted and those who had fans yawned behind them. At last Lady R. rapped with hers upon the arm of her great chair. Both gentlemen stopped talking.

Then the little gentleman said,

He said next,

He said finally, [◉2]

Here, it cannot be denied, was true wit, true wisdom, true profundity. The company was thrown into complete dismay. One such saying was bad enough; but three, one after another, on the same evening! No society could survive it.

“Mr. Pope,” said old Lady R. in a voice trembling with sarcastic fury, “you are pleased to be witty.” Mr. Pope flushed red. Nobody spoke a word. They sat in dead silence some twenty minutes. Then, one by one, they rose and slunk from the room. That they would ever come back after such an experience was doubtful. Link-boys could be heard calling their coaches all down South Audley Street. Doors were slammed and carriages drove off. Orlando found herself near Mr. Pope on the staircase. His lean and misshapen frame was shaken by a variety of emotions. Darts of malice, rage, triumph, wit, and terror (he was shaking like a leaf) shot from his eyes. He looked like some squat reptile set with a burning topaz in its forehead. At the same time, the strangest tempest of emotion seized now upon the luckless Orlando. A disillusionment so complete as that inflicted not an hour ago leaves the mind rocking from side to side. Everything appears ten times more bare and stark than before. It is a moment fraught with the highest danger for the human spirit. Women turn nuns and men priests in such moments. In such moments, rich men sign away their wealth; and happy men cut their throats with carving knives. Orlando would have done all willingly, but there was a rasher thing still for her to do, and this she did. She invited Mr. Pope to come home with her.

For if it is rash to walk into a lion’s den unarmed, rash to navigate the Atlantic in a rowing boat, rash to stand on one foot on the top of St. Paul’s, it is still more rash to go home alone with a poet. A poet is Atlantic and lion in one. While one drowns us the other gnaws us. If we survive the teeth, we succumb to the waves. A man who can destroy illusions is both beast and flood. Illusions are to the soul what atmosphere is to the earth. Roll up that tender air and the plant dies, the colour fades. The earth we walk on is a parched cinder. It is marl we tread and fiery cobbles scorch our feet. By the truth we are undone. Life is a dream. ’Tis waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life—(and so on for six pages if you will, but the style is tedious and may well be dropped).

On this showing, however, Orlando should have been a heap of cinders by the time the chariot drew up at her house in Blackfriars. That she was still flesh and blood, though certainly exhausted, is entirely due to a fact to which we drew attention earlier in the narrative. The less we see the more we believe. Now the streets that lie between Mayfair and Blackfriars were at that time very imperfectly lit. True, the lighting was a great improvement upon that of the Elizabethan age. Then the benighted traveller had to trust to the stars or the red flame of some night watchman to save him from the gravel pits at Park Lane or the oak woods where swine rootled in the Tottenham Court Road. But even so it wanted much of our modern efficiency. Lamp-posts lit with oil-lamps occurred every two hundred yards or so, but between lay a considerable stretch of pitch darkness. Thus for ten minutes Orlando and Mr. Pope would be in blackness; and then for about half a minute again in the light. A very strange state of mind was thus bred in Orlando. As the light faded, she began to feel steal over her the most delicious balm. “This is indeed a very great honour for a young woman, to be driving with Mr. Pope,” she began to think, looking at the outline of his nose. “I am the most blessed of my sex. Half an inch from me—indeed, I feel the knot of his knee ribbons pressing against my thigh—is the greatest wit in Her Majesty’s dominions. Future ages will think of us with curiosity and envy me with fury.” Here came the lamp-post again. “What a foolish wretch I am!” she thought. “There is no such thing as fame and glory. Ages to come will never cast a thought on me or on Mr. Pope either. What’s an ‘age’, indeed? What are ‘we’?” and their progress through Berkeley Square seemed the groping of two blind ants, momentarily thrown together without interest or concern in common, across a blackened desert. She shivered. But here again was darkness. Her illusion revived. “How noble his brow is,” she thought (mistaking a hump on a cushion for Mr. Pope’s forehead in the darkness). “What a weight of genius lives in it! What wit, wisdom, and truth—what a wealth of all those jewels, indeed, for which people are ready to barter their lives! Yours is the only light that burns for ever. But for you the human pilgrimage would be performed in utter darkness”; (here the coach gave a great lurch as it fell into a rut in Park Lane) “without genius we should be upset and undone. Most august, most lucid of beams,”—thus she was apostrophising the hump on the cushion when they drove beneath one of the street lamps in Berkeley Square and she realised her mistake. Mr. Pope had a forehead no bigger than another man’s. “Wretched man,” she thought, “how you have deceived me! I took that hump for your forehead. When one sees you plain, how ignoble, how despicable you are! Deformed and weakly, there is nothing to venerate in you, much to pity, most to despise.”

Again they were in darkness and her anger became modified directly she could see nothing but the poet’s knees.

“But it is I that am a wretch,” she reflected, once they were in complete obscurity again, “for base as you may be, am I not still baser? It is you who nourish and protect me, you who scare the wild beast, frighten the savage, make me clothes of the silkworm’s wool, and carpets of the sheep’s. If I want to worship, have you not provided me with an image of yourself and set it in the sky? Are not evidences of your care everywhere? How humble, how grateful, how docile, should I not be, therefore? Let it be all my joy to serve, honour, and obey you.”

Here they reached the big lamp-post at the corner of what is now Piccadilly Circus. The light blazed in her eyes, and she saw, besides some degraded creatures of her own sex, two wretched pigmies on a stark desert land. Both were naked, solitary, and defenceless. The one was powerless to help the other. Each had enough to do to look after itself. Looking Mr. Pope full in the face, “It is equally vain”, she thought, “for you to think you can protect me, or for me to think I can worship you. The light of truth beats upon us without shadow, and the light of truth is damnably unbecoming to us both.”

All this time, of course, they went on talking agreeably, as people of birth and education use, about the Queen’s temper and the Prime Minister’s gout, while the coach went from light to darkness down the Haymarket, along the Strand, up Fleet Street, and reached, at length, her house in Blackfriars. For some time the dark spaces between the lamps had been becoming brighter and the lamps themselves less bright—that is to say, the sun was rising, and it was in the equable but confused light of a summer’s morning in which everything is seen but nothing is seen distinctly that they alighted, Mr. Pope handing Orlando from her carriage and Orlando curtseying Mr. Pope to precede her into her mansion with the most scrupulous attention to the rites of the Graces.

From the foregoing passage, however, it must not be supposed that genius (but the disease is now stamped out in the British Isles, the late Lord Tennyson, it is said, being the last person to suffer from it) is constantly alight, for then we should see everything plain and perhaps should be scorched to death in the process. Rather it resembles the lighthouse in its working, which sends one ray and then no more for a time; save that genius is much more capricious in its manifestations and may flash six or seven beams in quick succession (as Mr. Pope did that night) and then lapse into darkness for a year or for ever. To steer by its beams is therefore impossible, and when the dark spell is on them men of genius are, it is said, much like other people.

It was happy for Orlando, though at first disappointing, that this should be so, for she now began to live much in the company of men of genius. Nor were they so different from the rest of us as one might have supposed. Addison, Pope, Swift, proved, she found, to be fond of tea. They liked arbours. They collected little bits of coloured glass. They adored grottos. Rank was not distasteful to them. Praise was delightful. They wore plum-coloured suits one day and grey another. Mr. Swift had a fine malacca cane. Mr. Addison scented his handkerchiefs. Mr. Pope suffered with his head. A piece of gossip did not come amiss. Nor were they without their jealousies. (We are jotting down a few reflections that came to Orlando higgledy-piggledy.) At first, she was annoyed with herself for noticing such trifles, and kept a book in which to write down their memorable sayings, but the page remained empty. All the same, her spirits revived, and she took to tearing up her cards of invitation to great parties; kept her evenings free; began to look forward to Mr. Pope’s visit, to Mr. Addison’s, to Mr. Swift’s—and so on and so on. If the reader will here refer to the Rape of the Lock, to the Spectator, to Gulliver’s Travels, he will understand precisely what these mysterious words may mean. Indeed, biographers and critics might save themselves all their labours if readers would only take this advice. For when we read:

Whether the Nymph shall break Diana’s Law,

Or some frail China Jar receive a Flaw,

Or stain her Honour, or her new Brocade,

Forget her Pray’rs or miss a Masquerade,

Or lose her Heart, or Necklace, at a Ball.

—we know as if we heard him how Mr. Pope’s tongue flickered like a lizard’s, how his eyes flashed, how his hand trembled, how he loved, how he lied, how he suffered. In short, every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works, yet we require critics to explain the one and biographers to expound the other. That time hangs heavy on people’s hands is the only explanation of the monstrous growth.

So, now that we have read a page or two of the Rape of the Lock, we know exactly why Orlando was so much amused and so much frightened and so very bright-cheeked and bright-eyed that afternoon.

Mrs. Nelly then knocked at the door to say that Mr. Addison waited on her Ladyship. At this, Mr. Pope got up with a wry smile, made his congee, and limped off. In came Mr. Addison. Let us, as he takes his seat, read the following passage from the Spectator:

“I consider woman as a beautiful, romantic animal, that may be adorned with furs and feathers, pearls and diamonds, ores and silks. The lynx shall cast its skin at her feet to make her a tippet, the peacock, parrot and swan shall pay contributions to her muff; the sea shall be searched for shells, and the rocks for gems, and every part of nature furnish out its share towards the embellishment of a creature that is the most consummate work of it. All this, I shall indulge them in, but as for the petticoat I have been speaking of, I neither can, nor will allow it.”

We hold that gentleman, cocked hat and all, in the hollow of our hands. Look once more into the crystal. Is he not clear to the very wrinkle in his stocking? Does not every ripple and curve of his wit lie exposed before us, and his benignity and his timidity and his urbanity and the fact that he would marry a Countess and die very respectably in the end? All is clear. And when Mr. Addison has said his say, there is a terrific rap at the door, and Mr. Swift, who had these arbitrary ways with him, walks in unannounced. One moment, where is Gulliver’s Travels? Here it is! Let us read a passage from the voyage to the Houyhnhnms:

“I enjoyed perfect Health of Body and Tranquillity of Mind; I did not find the Treachery or Inconstancy of a Friend, nor the Injuries of a secret or open Enemy. I had no occasion of bribing, flattering or pimping, to procure the Favour of any great Man or of his Minion. I wanted no Fence against Fraud or Oppression; Here was neither Physician to destroy my Body, nor Lawyer to ruin my Fortune; No Informer to watch my Words, and Actions, or forge Accusations against me for Hire: Here were no Gibers, Censurers, Backbiters, Pickpockets, Highwaymen, House-breakers, Attorneys, Bawds, Buffoons, Gamesters, Politicians, Wits, splenetick tedious Talkers….”

But stop, stop your iron pelt of words, lest you flay us all alive, and yourself too! Nothing can be plainer than that violent man. He is so coarse and yet so clean; so brutal, yet so kind; scorns the whole world, yet talks baby language to a girl, and will die, can we doubt it? in a madhouse.

So Orlando poured out tea for them all; and sometimes, when the weather was fine, she carried them down to the country with her, and feasted them royally in the Round Parlour, which she had hung with their pictures all in a circle, so that Mr. Pope could not say that Mr. Addison came before him, or the other way about. They were very witty, too (but their wit is all in their books), and taught her the most important part of style, which is the natural run of the voice in speaking—a quality which none that has not heard it can imitate, not Greene even, with all his skill; for it is born of the air, and breaks like a wave on the furniture, and rolls and fades away, and is never to be recaptured, least of all by those who prick up their ears, half a century later, and try. They taught her this, merely by the cadence of their voices in speech; so that her style changed somewhat, and she wrote some very pleasant, witty verses and characters in prose. And so she lavished her wine on them and put bank-notes, which they took very kindly, beneath their plates at dinner, and accepted their dedications, and thought herself highly honoured by the exchange.

Thus time ran on, and Orlando could often be heard saying to herself with an emphasis which might, perhaps, make the hearer a little suspicious, “Upon my soul, what a life this is!” (For she was still in search of that commodity.) But circumstances soon forced her to consider the matter more narrowly.

One day she was pouring out tea for Mr. Pope while, as anyone can tell from the verses quoted above, he sat very bright-eyed, observant, and all crumpled up in a chair by her side.

“Lord,” she thought, as she raised the sugar tongs, “how women in ages to come will envy me! And yet——” she paused; for Mr. Pope needed her attention. And yet—let us finish her thought for her—when anybody says “How future ages will envy me”, it is safe to say that they are extremely uneasy at the present moment. Was this life quite so exciting, quite so flattering, quite so glorious as it sounds when the memoir writer has done his work upon it? For one thing, Orlando had a positive hatred of tea; for another, the intellect, divine as it is, and all-worshipful, has a habit of lodging in the most seedy of carcases, and often, alas, acts the cannibal among the other faculties so that often, where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe. Then the high opinion poets have of themselves; then the low one they have of others; then the enmities, injuries, envies, and repartees in which they are constantly engaged; then the volubility with which they impart them; then the rapacity with which they demand sympathy for them; all this, one may whisper, lest the wits may overhear us, makes pouring out tea a more precarious and, indeed, arduous occupation than is generally allowed. Added to which (we whisper again lest the women may overhear us), there is a little secret which men share among them; Lord Chesterfield whispered it to his son with strict injunctions to secrecy, “Women are but children of a larger growth…. A man of sense only trifles with them, plays with them, humours and flatters them”, which, since children always hear what they are not meant to, and sometimes, even, grow up, may have somehow leaked out, so that the whole ceremony of pouring out tea is a curious one. A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea, this by no means signifies that he respects her opinions, admires her understanding, or will refuse, though the rapier is denied him, to run her through the body with his pen. All this, we say, whisper it as low as we can, may have leaked out by now; so that even with the cream jug suspended and the sugar tongs distended the ladies may fidget a little, look out of the window a little, yawn a little, and so let the sugar fall with a great plop—as Orlando did now—into Mr. Pope’s tea. Never was any mortal so ready to suspect an insult or so quick to avenge one as Mr. Pope. He turned to Orlando and presented her instantly with the rough draught of a certain famous line in the “Characters of Women”. Much polish was afterwards bestowed on it, but even in the original it was striking enough. Orlando received it with a curtsey. Mr. Pope left her with a bow. Orlando, to cool her cheeks, for really she felt as if the little man had struck her, strolled in the nut grove at the bottom of the garden. Soon the cool breezes did their work. To her amazement she found that she was hugely relieved to find herself alone. She watched the merry boatloads rowing up the river. No doubt the sight put her in mind of one or two incidents in her past life. She sat herself down in profound meditation beneath a fine willow tree. There she sat till the stars were in the sky. Then she rose, turned, and went into the house, where she sought her bedroom and locked the door. Now she opened a cupboard in which hung still many of the clothes she had worn as a young man of fashion, and from among them she chose a black velvet suit richly trimmed with Venetian lace. It was a little out of fashion, indeed, but it fitted her to perfection and dressed in it she looked the very figure of a noble Lord. She took a turn or two before the mirror to make sure that her petticoats had not lost her the freedom of her legs, and then let herself secretly out of doors.

It was a fine night early in April. A myriad stars mingling with the light of a sickle moon, which again was enforced by the street lamps, made a light infinitely becoming to the human countenance and to the architecture of Mr. Wren. Everything appeared in its tenderest form, yet, just as it seemed on the point of dissolution, some drop of silver sharpened it to animation. Thus it was that talk should be, thought Orlando (indulging in foolish reverie); that society should be, that friendship should be, that love should be. For, Heaven knows why, just as we have lost faith in human intercourse some random collocation of barns and trees or a haystack and a waggon presents us with so perfect a symbol of what is unattainable that we begin the search again.

She entered Leicester Square as she made these observations. The buildings had an airy yet formal symmetry not theirs by day. The canopy of the sky seemed most dexterously washed in to fill up the outline of roof and chimney. A young woman who sat dejectedly with one arm drooping by her side, the other reposing in her lap, on a seat beneath a plane tree in the middle of the square seemed the very figure of grace, simplicity, and desolation. Orlando swept her hat off to her in the manner of a gallant paying his addresses to a lady of fashion in a public place. The young woman raised her head. It was of the most exquisite shapeliness. The young woman raised her eyes. Orlando saw them to be of a lustre such as is sometimes seen on teapots but rarely in a human face. Through this silver glaze the young woman looked up at him (for a man he was to her) appealing, hoping, trembling, fearing. She rose; she accepted his arm. For—need we stress the point?—she was of the tribe which nightly burnishes their wares, and sets them in order on the common counter to wait the highest bidder. She led Orlando to the room in Gerrard Street which was her lodging. To feel her hanging lightly yet like a suppliant on her arm, roused in Orlando all the feelings which become a man. She looked, she felt, she talked like one. Yet, having been so lately a woman herself, she suspected that the girl’s timidity and her hesitating answers and the very fumbling with the key in the latch and the fold of her cloak and the droop of her wrist were all put on to gratify her masculinity. Upstairs they went, and the pains which the poor creature had been at to decorate her room and hide the fact that she had no other deceived Orlando not a moment. The deception roused her scorn; the truth roused her pity. One thing showing through the other bred the oddest assortment of feeling, so that she did not know whether to laugh or to cry. Meanwhile Nell, as the girl called herself, unbuttoned her gloves; carefully concealed the left-hand thumb, which wanted mending; then drew behind a screen, where, perhaps, she rouged her cheeks, arranged her clothes, fixed a new kerchief round her neck—all the time prattling as women do, to amuse her lover, though Orlando could have sworn, from the tone of her voice, that her thoughts were elsewhere. When all was ready, out she came, prepared—but here Orlando could stand it no longer. In the strangest torment of anger, merriment, and pity she flung off all disguise and admitted herself a woman.

At this, Nell burst into such a roar of laughter as might have been heard across the way.

“Well, my dear,” she said, when she had somewhat recovered, “I’m by no means sorry to hear it. For the plain Dunstable of the matter is” (and it was remarkable how soon, on discovering that they were of the same sex, her manner changed and she dropped her plaintive, appealing ways), “the plain Dunstable of the matter is, that I’m not in the mood for the society of the other sex to-night. Indeed, I’m in the devil of a fix.” Whereupon, drawing up the fire and stirring a bowl of punch, she told Orlando the whole story of her life. Since it is Orlando’s life that engages us at present, we need not relate the adventures of the other lady, but it is certain that Orlando had never known the hours speed faster or more merrily, though Mistress Nell had not a particle of wit about her, and when the name of Mr. Pope came up in talk asked innocently if he were connected with the perruque maker of that name in Jermyn Street. Yet, to Orlando, such is the charm of ease and the seduction of beauty, this poor girl’s talk, larded though it was with the commonest expressions of the street corners, tasted like wine after the fine phrases she had been used to, and she was forced to the conclusion that there was something in the sneer of Mr. Pope, in the condescension of Mr. Addison, and in the secret of Lord Chesterfield which took away her relish for the society of wits, deeply though she must continue to respect their works.

These poor creatures, she ascertained, for Nell brought Prue, and Prue Kitty, and Kitty Rose, had a society of their own of which they now elected her a member. Each would tell the story of the adventures which had landed her in her present way of life. Several were the natural daughters of earls and one was a good deal nearer than she should have been to the King’s person. None was too wretched or too poor but to have some ring or handkerchief in her pocket which stood her in lieu of pedigree. So they would draw round the punch-bowl which Orlando made it her business to furnish generously, and many were the fine tales they told and many the amusing observations they made, for it cannot be denied that when women get together—but hist—they are always careful to see that the doors are shut and that not a word of it gets into print. All they desire is—but hist again—is that not a man’s step on the stair? All they desire, we were about to say when the gentleman took the very words out of our mouths. Women have no desires, says this gentleman, coming into Nell’s parlour; only affectations. Without desires (she has served him and he is gone) their conversation cannot be of the slightest interest to anyone. “It is well known”, says Mr. S. W., “that when they lack the stimulus of the other sex, women can find nothing to say to each other. When they are alone, they do not talk, they scratch.” And since they cannot talk together and scratching cannot continue without interruption and it is well known (Mr. T. R. has proved it) “that women are incapable of any feeling of affection for their own sex and hold each other in the greatest aversion”, what can we suppose that women do when they seek out each other’s society?

As that is not a question that can engage the attention of a sensible man, let us, who enjoy the immunity of all biographers and historians from any sex whatever, pass it over, and merely state that Orlando professed great enjoyment in the society of her own sex, and leave it to the gentlemen to prove, as they are very fond of doing, that this is impossible.

But to give an exact and particular account of Orlando’s life at this time becomes more and more out of the question. As we peer and grope in the ill-lit, ill-paved, ill-ventilated courtyards that lay about Gerrard Street and Drury Lane at that time, we seem now to catch sight of her and then again to lose it. The task is made still more difficult by the fact that she found it convenient at this time to change frequently from one set of clothes to another. Thus she often occurs in contemporary memoirs as “Lord” So-and-so, who was in fact her cousin; her bounty is ascribed to him, and it is he who is said to have written the poems that were really hers. She had, it seems, no difficulty in sustaining the different parts, for her sex changed far more frequently than those who have worn only one set of clothing can conceive; nor can there be any doubt that she reaped a twofold harvest by this device; the pleasures of life were increased and its experiences multiplied. For the probity of breeches she exchanged the seductiveness of petticoats and enjoyed the love of both sexes equally.

So then one may sketch her spending her morning in a China robe of ambiguous gender among her books; then receiving a client or two (for she had many scores of suppliants) in the same garment; then she would take a turn in the garden and clip the nut trees—for which knee-breeches were convenient; then she would change into a flowered taffeta which best suited a drive to Richmond and a proposal of marriage from some great nobleman; and so back again to town, where she would don a snuff-coloured gown like a lawyer’s and visit the courts to hear how her cases were doing,—for her fortune was wasting hourly and the suits seemed no nearer consummation than they had been a hundred years ago; and so, finally, when night came, she would more often than not become a nobleman complete from head to toe and walk the streets in search of adventure.

Returning from some of these junketings—of which there were many stories told at the time, as, that she fought a duel, served on one of the King’s ships as a captain, was seen to dance naked on a balcony, and fled with a certain lady to the Low Countries where the lady’s husband followed them—but of the truth or otherwise of these stories, we express no opinion—returning from whatever her occupation may have been, she made a point sometimes of passing beneath the windows of a coffee house, where she could see the wits without being seen, and thus could fancy from their gestures what wise, witty, or spiteful things they were saying without hearing a word of them; which was perhaps an advantage; and once she stood half an hour watching three shadows on the blind drinking tea together in a house in Bolt Court.

Never was any play so absorbing. She wanted to cry out, Bravo! Bravo! For, to be sure, what a fine drama it was—what a page torn from the thickest volume of human life! There was the little shadow with the pouting lips, fidgeting this way and that on his chair, uneasy, petulant, officious; there was the bent female shadow, crooking a finger in the cup to feel how deep the tea was, for she was blind; and there was the Roman-looking rolling shadow in the big arm-chair—he who twisted his fingers so oddly and jerked his head from side to side and swallowed down the tea in such vast gulps. Dr. Johnson, Mr. Boswell, and Mrs. Williams,—those were the shadows’ names. So absorbed was she in the sight, that she forgot to think how other ages would have envied her, though it seems probable that on this occasion they would. She was content to gaze and gaze. At length Mr. Boswell rose. He saluted the old woman with tart asperity. But with what humility did he not abase himself before the great Roman shadow, who now rose to its full height and rocking somewhat as he stood there rolled out the most magnificent phrases that ever left human lips; so Orlando thought them, though she never heard a word that any of the three shadows said as they sat there drinking tea.

At length she came home one night after one of these saunterings and mounted to her bedroom. She took off her laced coat and stood there in shirt and breeches looking out of the window. There was something stirring in the air which forbade her to go to bed. A white haze lay over the town, for it was a frosty night in midwinter and a magnificent vista lay all round her. She could see St. Paul’s, the Tower, Westminster Abbey, with all the spires and domes of the city churches, the smooth bulk of its banks, the opulent and ample curves of its halls and meeting-places. On the north rose the smooth, shorn heights of Hampstead, and in the west the streets and squares of Mayfair shone out in one clear radiance. Upon this serene and orderly prospect the stars looked down, glittering, positive, hard, from a cloudless sky. In the extreme clearness of the atmosphere the line of every roof, the cowl of every chimney was perceptible; even the cobbles in the streets showed distinct one from another, and Orlando could not help comparing this orderly scene with the irregular and huddled purlieus which had been the city of London in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Then, she remembered, the city, if such one could call it, lay crowded, a mere huddle and conglomeration of houses, under her windows at Blackfriars. The stars reflected themselves in deep pits of stagnant water which lay in the middle of the streets. A black shadow at the corner where the wine shop used to stand was, as likely as not, the corpse of a murdered man. She could remember the cries of many a one wounded in such night brawlings, when she was a little boy, held to the diamond-paned window in her nurse’s arms. Troops of ruffians, men and women, unspeakably interlaced, lurched down the streets, trolling out wild songs with jewels flashing in their ears, and knives gleaming in their fists. On such a night as this the impermeable tangle of the forests on Highgate and Hampstead would be outlined, writhing in contorted intricacy against the sky. Here and there, on one of the hills which rose above London, was a stark gallows tree, with a corpse nailed to rot or parch on its cross; for danger and insecurity, lust and violence, poetry and filth swarmed over the tortuous Elizabethan highways and buzzed and stank—Orlando could remember even now the smell of them on a hot night—in the little rooms and narrow pathways of the city. Now—she leant out of her window—all was light, order, and serenity. There was the faint rattle of a coach on the cobbles. She heard the far-away cry of the night watchman—“Just twelve o’clock on a frosty morning”. No sooner had the words left his lips than the first stroke of midnight sounded. Orlando then for the first time noticed a small cloud gathered behind the dome of St. Paul’s. As the strokes sounded, the cloud increased, and she saw it darken and spread with extraordinary speed. At the same time a light breeze rose and by the time the sixth stroke of midnight had struck the whole of the eastern sky was covered with an irregular moving darkness, though the sky to the west and north stayed clear as ever. Then the cloud spread north. Height upon height above the city was engulfed by it. Only Mayfair, with all its lights shining, burnt more brilliantly than ever by contrast. With the eighth stroke, some hurrying tatters of cloud sprawled over Piccadilly. They seemed to mass themselves and to advance with extraordinary rapidity towards the west end. As the ninth, tenth, and eleventh strokes struck, a huge blackness sprawled over the whole of London. With the twelfth stroke of midnight, the darkness was complete. A turbulent welter of cloud covered the city. All was darkness; all was doubt; all was confusion. The Eighteenth century was over; the Nineteenth century had begun.

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Chapter 5.

The great cloud which hung, not only over London, but over the whole of the British Isles on the first day of the nineteenth century stayed, or rather, did not stay, for it was buffeted about constantly by blustering gales, long enough to have extraordinary consequences upon those who lived beneath its shadow. A change seemed to have come over the climate of England. Rain fell frequently, but only in fitful gusts, which were no sooner over than they began again. The sun shone, of course, but it was so girt about with clouds and the air was so saturated with water, that its beams were discoloured and purples, oranges, and reds of a dull sort took the place of the more positive landscapes of the eighteenth century. Under this bruised and sullen canopy the green of the cabbages was less intense, and the white of the snow was muddied. But what was worse, damp now began to make its way into every house—damp, which is the most insidious of all enemies, for while the sun can be shut out by blinds, and the frost roasted by a hot fire, damp steals in while we sleep; damp is silent, imperceptible, ubiquitous. Damp swells the wood, furs the kettle, rusts the iron, rots the stone. So gradual is the process, that it is not until we pick up some chest of drawers, or coal scuttle, and the whole thing drops to pieces in our hands, that we suspect even that the disease is at work.

Thus, stealthily and imperceptibly, none marking the exact day or hour of the change, the constitution of England was altered and nobody knew it. Everywhere the effects were felt. The hardy country gentleman, who had sat down gladly to a meal of ale and beef in a room designed, perhaps by the brothers Adam, with classic dignity, now felt chilly. Rugs appeared; beards were grown; trousers were fastened tight under the instep. The chill which he felt in his legs the country gentleman soon transferred to his house; furniture was muffled; walls and tables were covered; nothing was left bare. Then a change of diet became essential. The muffin was invented and the crumpet. Coffee supplanted the after-dinner port, and, as coffee led to a drawing-room in which to drink it, and a drawing-room to glass cases, and glass cases to artificial flowers, and artificial flowers to mantelpieces, and mantelpieces to pianofortes, and pianofortes to drawing-room ballads, and drawing-room ballads (skipping a stage or two) to innumerable little dogs, mats, and china ornaments, the home—which had become extremely important—was completely altered.

Outside the house—it was another effect of the damp—ivy grew in unparalleled profusion. Houses that had been of bare stone were smothered in greenery. No garden, however formal its original design, lacked a shrubbery, a wilderness, a maze. What light penetrated to the bedrooms where children were born was naturally of an obfusc green, and what light penetrated to the drawing-rooms where grown men and women lived came through curtains of brown and purple plush. But the change did not stop at outward things. The damp struck within. Men felt the chill in their hearts; the damp in their minds. In a desperate effort to snuggle their feelings into some sort of warmth one subterfuge was tried after another. Love, birth, and death were all swaddled in a variety of fine phrases. The sexes drew further and further apart. No open conversation was tolerated. Evasions and concealments were sedulously practised on both sides. And just as the ivy and the evergreen rioted in the damp earth outside, so did the same fertility show itself within. The life of the average woman was a succession of childbirths. She married at nineteen and had fifteen or eighteen children by the time she was thirty; for twins abounded. Thus the British Empire came into existence; and thus—for there is no stopping damp; it gets into the inkpot as it gets into the woodwork—sentences swelled, adjectives multiplied, lyrics became epics, and little trifles that had been essays a column long were now encyclopaedias in ten or twenty volumes. But Eusebius Chubb shall be our witness to the effect this all had upon the mind of a sensitive man who could do nothing to stop it. There is a passage towards the end of his memoirs where he describes how, after writing thirty-five folio pages one morning ‘all about nothing’ he screwed the lid on his inkpot and went for a turn in his garden. Soon he found himself involved in the shrubbery. Innumerable leaves creaked and glistened above his head. He seemed to himself “to crush the mould of a million more under his feet”. Thick smoke exuded from a damp bonfire at the end of the garden. He reflected that no fire on earth could ever hope to consume that vast vegetable encumbrance. Wherever he looked, vegetation was rampant. Cucumbers “came scrolloping across the grass to his feet”. Giant cauliflowers towered deck above deck till they rivalled, to his disordered imagination, the elm trees themselves. Hens laid incessantly eggs of no special tint. Then, remembering with a sigh his own fecundity and his poor wife Jane, now in the throes of her fifteenth confinement indoors, how, he asked himself, could he blame the fowls? He looked upwards into the sky. Did not heaven itself, or that great frontispiece of heaven, which is the sky, indicate the assent, indeed, the instigation of the heavenly hierarchy? For there, winter or summer, year in year out, the clouds turned and tumbled, like whales, he pondered, or elephants rather; but no, there was no escaping the simile which was pressed upon him from a thousand airy acres; the whole sky itself as it spread wide above the British Isles was nothing but a vast feather bed; and the undistinguished fecundity of the garden, the bedroom and the henroost was copied there. He went indoors, wrote the passage quoted above, laid his head in a gas oven, and when they found him later he was past revival.

While this went on in every part of England, it was all very well for Orlando to mew herself in her house at Blackfriars and pretend that the climate was the same; that one could still say what one liked and wear knee-breeches or skirts as the fancy took one. Even she, at length, was forced to acknowledge that times were changed. One afternoon in the early part of the century she was driving through St. James’s Park in her old panelled coach when one of those sunbeams, which occasionally, though not often, managed to come to earth, struggled through, marbling the clouds with strange prismatic colours as it passed. Such a sight was sufficiently strange after the clear and uniform skies of the eighteenth century to cause her to pull the window down and look at it. The puce and flamingo clouds made her think with a pleasurable anguish, which proves that she was insensibly afflicted with the damp already, of dolphins dying in Ionian seas. But what was her surprise when, as it struck the earth, the sunbeam seemed to call forth, or to light up, a pyramid, hecatomb, or trophy (for it had something of a banquet-table air)—a conglomeration at any rate of the most heterogeneous and ill-assorted objects, piled higgledy-piggledy in a vast mound where the statue of Queen Victoria now stands! Draped about a vast cross of fretted and floriated gold were widow’s weeds and bridal veils; hooked on to other excrescences were crystal palaces, bassinettes, military helmets, memorial wreaths, trousers, whiskers, wedding cakes, cannon, Christmas trees, telescopes, extinct monsters, globes, maps, elephants, and mathematical instruments—the whole supported like a gigantic coat of arms on the right side by a female figure clothed in flowing white; on the left, by a portly gentleman wearing a frock-coat and sponge-bag trousers. The incongruity of the objects, the association of the fully clothed and the partly draped, the garishness of the different colours and their plaid-like juxtapositions afflicted Orlando with the most profound dismay. She had never, in all her life, seen anything at once so indecent, so hideous, and so monumental. It might, and indeed it must be, the effect of the sun on the water-logged air; it would vanish with the first breeze that blew; but for all that, it looked, as she drove past, as if it were destined to endure for ever. Nothing, she felt, sinking back into the corner of her coach, no wind, rain, sun, or thunder, could ever demolish that garish erection. Only the noses would mottle and the trumpets would rust; but there they would remain, pointing east, west, south, and north, eternally. She looked back as her coach swept up Constitution Hill. Yes, there it was, still beaming placidly in a light which—she pulled her watch out of her fob—was, of course, the light of twelve o’clock mid-day. None other could be so prosaic, so matter-of-fact, so impervious to any hint of dawn or sunset, so seemingly calculated to last for ever. She was determined not to look again. Already she felt the tides of her blood run sluggishly. But what was more peculiar, a blush, vivid and singular, overspread her cheeks as she passed Buckingham Palace and her eyes seemed forced by a superior power down upon her knees. Suddenly she saw with a start that she was wearing black breeches. She never ceased blushing till she had reached her country house, which, considering the time it takes four horses to trot thirty miles, will be taken, we hope, as a signal proof of her chastity.

Once there, she followed what had now become the most imperious need of her nature and wrapped herself as well as she could in a damask quilt which she snatched from her bed. She explained to the Widow Bartholomew (who had succeeded good old Grimsditch as housekeeper) that she felt chilly.

“So do we all, m’lady,” said the Widow, heaving a profound sigh. “The walls is sweating,” she said, with a curious, lugubrious complacency, and sure enough, she had only to lay her hand on the oak panels for the finger-prints to be marked there. The ivy had grown so profusely that many windows were now sealed up. The kitchen was so dark that they could scarcely tell a kettle from a cullender. A poor black cat had been mistaken for coals and shovelled on the fire. Most of the maids were already wearing three or four red-flannel petticoats, though the month was August.

“But is it true, m’lady,” the good woman asked, hugging herself, while the golden crucifix heaved on her bosom, “that the Queen, bless her, is wearing a what d’you call it, a ——,” the good woman hesitated and blushed.

“A crinoline,” Orlando helped her out with it (for the word had reached Blackfriars). Mrs. Bartholomew nodded. The tears were already running down her cheeks, but as she wept she smiled. For it was pleasant to weep. Were they not all of them weak women? wearing crinolines the better to conceal the fact; the great fact; the only fact; but, nevertheless, the deplorable fact; which every modest woman did her best to deny until denial was impossible; the fact that she was about to bear a child? to bear fifteen or twenty children indeed, so that most of a modest woman’s life was spent, after all, in denying what, on one day at least of every year, was made obvious.

“The muffins is keepin’ ’ot”, said Mrs. Bartholomew, mopping up her tears, “in the liberry.”

And wrapped in a damask bed quilt, to a dish of muffins Orlando now sat down.

“The muffins is keepin’ ’ot in the liberry”—Orlando minced out the horrid cockney phrase in Mrs. Bartholomew’s refined cockney accents as she drank—but no, she detested the mild fluid—her tea. It was in this very room, she remembered, that Queen Elizabeth had stood astride the fireplace with a flagon of beer in her hand, which she suddenly dashed on the table when Lord Burghley tactlessly used the imperative instead of the subjunctive. “Little man, little man,”—Orlando could hear her say—“is ‘must’ a word to be addressed to princes?” And down came the flagon on the table: there was the mark of it still.

But when Orlando leapt to her feet, as the mere thought of that great Queen commanded, the bed quilt tripped her up, and she fell back in her arm-chair with a curse. To-morrow she would have to buy twenty yards or more of black bombazine, she supposed, to make a skirt. And then (here she blushed), she would have to buy a crinoline, and then (here she blushed) a bassinette, and then another crinoline, and so on…. The blushes came and went with the most exquisite iteration of modesty and shame imaginable. One might see the spirit of the age blowing, now hot, now cold, upon her cheeks. And if the spirit of the age blew a little unequally, the crinoline being blushed for before the husband, her ambiguous position must excuse her (even her sex was still in dispute) and the irregular life she had lived before.

At length the colour on her cheeks resumed its stability and it seemed as if the spirit of the age—if such indeed it were—lay dormant for a time. Then Orlando felt in the bosom of her shirt as if for some locket or relic of lost affection, and drew out no such thing, but a roll of paper, sea-stained, blood-stained, travel-stained—the manuscript of her poem, “The Oak Tree”. She had carried this about with her for so many years now, and in such hazardous circumstances, that many of the pages were stained, some were torn, while the straits she had been in for writing paper when with the gipsies, had forced her to overscore the margins and cross the lines till the manuscript looked like a piece of darning most conscientiously carried out. She turned back to the first page and read the date, 1586, written in her own boyish hand. She had been working at it for close on three hundred years now. It was time to make an end. Meanwhile she began turning and dipping and reading and skipping and thinking as she read, how very little she had changed all these years. She had been a gloomy boy, in love with death, as boys are; and then she had been amorous and florid; and then she had been sprightly and satirical; and sometimes she had tried prose and sometimes she had tried drama. Yet through all these changes she had remained, she reflected, fundamentally the same. She had the same brooding meditative temper, the same love of animals and nature, the same passion for the country and the seasons.

Orlando about the year 1840

“After all,” she thought, getting up and going to the window, “nothing has changed. The house, the garden are precisely as they were. Not a chair has been moved, not a trinket sold. There are the same walks, the same lawns, the same trees, and the same pool, which, I dare say, has the same carp in it. True, Queen Victoria is on the throne and not Queen Elizabeth, but what difference….”

No sooner had the thought taken shape, than, as if to rebuke it, the door was flung wide and in marched Basket, the butler, followed by Bartholomew, the housekeeper, to clear away tea. Orlando, who had just dipped her pen in the ink, and was about to indite some reflection upon the eternity of all things, was much annoyed to be impeded by a blot, which spread and meandered round her pen. It was some infirmity of the quill, she supposed; it was split or dirty. She dipped it again. The blot increased. She tried to go on with what she was saying; no words came. Next she began to decorate the blot with wings and whiskers, till it became a round-headed monster, something between a bat and a wombat. But as for writing poetry with Basket and Bartholomew in the room, it was impossible. No sooner had she said “Impossible” than, to her astonishment and alarm, the pen began to curve and caracole with the smoothest possible fluency. Her page was written in the neatest sloping Italian hand with the most insipid verse she had ever read in her life:

I am myself but a vile link

Amid life’s weary chain,

But I have spoken hallow’d words,

Oh, do not say in vain!

Will the young maiden, when her tears,

Alone in moonlight shine,

Tears for the absent and the loved,

Murmur——

she wrote without a stop as Bartholomew and Basket grunted and groaned about the room, mending the fire, picking up the muffins.

Again she dipped her pen and off it went—

She was so changed, the soft carnation cloud

Once mantling o’er her cheek like that which eve

Hangs o’er the sky, glowing with roseate hue,

Had faded into paleness, broken by

Bright burning blushes, torches of the tomb,

but here, by an abrupt movement she spilt the ink over the page and blotted it from human sight she hoped for ever. She was all of a quiver, all of a stew. Nothing more repulsive could be imagined than to feel the ink flowing thus in cascades of involuntary inspiration. What had happened to her? Was it the damp, was it Bartholomew, was it Basket, what was it? she demanded. But the room was empty. No one answered her, unless the dripping of the rain in the ivy could be taken for an answer.

Meanwhile, she became conscious, as she stood at the window, of an extraordinary tingling and vibration all over her, as if she were made of a thousand wires upon which some breeze or errant fingers were playing scales. Now her toes tingled; now her marrow. She had the queerest sensations about the thigh bones. Her hairs seemed to erect themselves. Her arms sang and twanged as the telegraph wires would be singing and twanging in twenty years or so. But all this agitation seemed at length to concentrate in her hands; and then in one hand, and then in one finger of that hand, and then finally to contract itself so that it made a ring of quivering sensibility about the second finger of the left hand. And when she raised it to see what caused this agitation, she saw nothing—nothing but the vast solitary emerald which Queen Elizabeth had given her. And was that not enough? she asked. It was of the finest water. It was worth ten thousand pounds at least. The vibration seemed, in the oddest way (but remember we are dealing with some of the darkest manifestations of the human soul) to say No, that is not enough; and, further, to assume a note of interrogation, as though it were asking, what did it mean, this hiatus, this strange oversight? till poor Orlando felt positively ashamed of the second finger of her left hand without in the least knowing why. At this moment, Bartholomew came in to ask which dress she should lay out for dinner, and Orlando, whose senses were much quickened, instantly glanced at Bartholomew’s left hand, and instantly perceived what she had never noticed before—a thick ring of rather jaundiced yellow circling the third finger where her own was bare.

“Let me look at your ring, Bartholomew,” she said, stretching her hand to take it.

At this, Bartholomew made as if she had been struck in the breast by a rogue. She started back a pace or two, clenched her hand and flung it away from her with a gesture that was noble in the extreme. “No,” she said, with resolute dignity, her Ladyship might look if she pleased, but as for taking off her wedding ring, not the Archbishop nor the Pope nor Queen Victoria on her throne could force her to do that. Her Thomas had put it on her finger twenty-five years, six months, three weeks ago; she had slept in it; worked in it; washed in it; prayed in it; and proposed to be buried in it. In fact, Orlando understood her to say, but her voice was much broken with emotion, that it was by the gleam on her wedding ring that she would be assigned her station among the angels and its lustre would be tarnished for ever if she let it out of her keeping for a second.

“Heaven help us,” said Orlando, standing at the window and watching the pigeons at their pranks, “what a world we live in! What a world to be sure!” Its complexities amazed her. It now seemed to her that the whole world was ringed with gold. She went in to dinner. Wedding rings abounded. She went to church. Wedding rings were everywhere. She drove out. Gold, or pinchbeck, thin, thick, plain, smooth, they glowed dully on every hand. Rings filled the jewellers’ shops, not the flashing pastes and diamonds of Orlando’s recollection, but simple bands without a stone in them. At the same time, she began to notice a new habit among the town people. In the old days, one would meet a boy trifling with a girl under a hawthorn hedge frequently enough. Orlando had flicked many a couple with the tip of her whip and laughed and passed on. Now, all that was changed. Couples trudged and plodded in the middle of the road indissolubly linked together. The woman’s right hand was invariably passed through the man’s left and her fingers were firmly gripped by his. Often it was not till the horses’ noses were on them that they budged, and then, though they moved it was all in one piece, heavily, to the side of the road. Orlando could only suppose that some new discovery had been made about the race; that they were somehow stuck together, couple after couple, but who had made it, and when, she could not guess. It did not seem to be Nature. She looked at the doves and the rabbits and the elk-hounds and she could not see that Nature had changed her ways or mended them, since the time of Elizabeth at least. There was no indissoluble alliance among the brutes that she could see. Could it be Queen Victoria then, or Lord Melbourne? Was it from them that the great discovery of marriage proceeded? Yet the Queen, she pondered, was said to be fond of dogs, and Lord Melbourne, she had heard, was said to be fond of women. It was strange—it was distasteful; indeed, there was something in this indissolubility of bodies which was repugnant to her sense of decency and sanitation. Her ruminations, however, were accompanied by such a tingling and twangling of the afflicted finger that she could scarcely keep her ideas in order. They were languishing and ogling like a housemaid’s fancies. They made her blush. There was nothing for it but to buy one of those ugly bands and wear it like the rest. This she did, slipping it, overcome with shame, upon her finger in the shadow of a curtain; but without avail. The tingling persisted more violently, more indignantly than ever. She did not sleep a wink that night. Next morning when she took up the pen to write, either she could think of nothing, and the pen make one large lachrymose blot after another, or it ambled off, more alarmingly still, into mellifluous fluencies about early death and corruption, which were worse than no thinking at all. For it would seem—her case proved it—that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver. Though the seat of her trouble seemed to be the left hand, she could feel herself poisoned through and through, and was forced at length to consider the most desperate of remedies, which was to yield completely and submissively to the spirit of the age, and take a husband.

That this was much against her natural temperament has been sufficiently made plain. When the sound of the Archduke’s chariot wheels died away, the cry that rose to her lips was “Life! A Lover!” not “Life! A Husband!” and it was in pursuit of this aim that she had gone to town and run about the world as has been shown in the previous chapter. Such is the indomitable nature of the spirit of the age, however, that it batters down anyone who tries to make stand against it far more effectually than those who bend its own way. Orlando had inclined herself naturally to the Elizabethan spirit, to the Restoration spirit, to the spirit of the eighteenth century, and had in consequence scarcely been aware of the change from one age to the other. But the spirit of the nineteenth century was antipathetic to her in the extreme, and thus it took her and broke her, and she was aware of her defeat at its hands as she had never been before. For it is probable that the human spirit has its place in time assigned to it; some are born of this age, some of that; and now that Orlando was grown a woman, a year or two past thirty indeed, the lines of her character were fixed, and to bend them the wrong way was intolerable.

So she stood mournfully at the drawing-room window (Bartholomew had so christened the library) dragged down by the weight of the crinoline which she had submissively adopted. It was heavier and more drab than any dress she had yet worn. None had ever so impeded her movements. No longer could she stride through the garden with her dogs, or run lightly to the high mound and fling herself beneath the oak tree. Her skirts collected damp leaves and straw. The plumed hat tossed on the breeze. The thin shoes were quickly soaked and mud-caked. Her muscles had lost their pliancy. She became nervous lest there should be robbers behind the wainscot and afraid, for the first time in her life, of ghosts in the corridors. All these things inclined her, step by step, to submit to the new discovery, whether Queen Victoria’s or another’s, that each man and each woman has another allotted to it for life, whom it supports, by whom it is supported, till death them do part. It would be a comfort, she felt, to lean; to sit down; yes, to lie down; never, never, never to get up again. Thus did the spirit work upon her, for all her past pride, and as she came sloping down the scale of emotion to this lowly and unaccustomed lodging-place, those twanglings and tinglings which had been so captious and so interrogative modulated into the sweetest melodies, till it seemed as if angels were plucking harp-strings with white fingers and her whole being was pervaded by a seraphic harmony.

But whom could she lean upon? She asked that question of the wild autumn winds. For it was now October, and wet as usual. Not the Archduke; he had married a very great lady and had hunted hares in Roumania these many years now; nor Mr. M.; he was become a Catholic; nor the Marquis of C.; he made sacks in Botany Bay; nor the Lord O.; he had long been food for fishes. One way or another, all her old cronies were gone now, and the Nells and the Kits of Drury Lane, much though she favoured them, scarcely did to lean upon.

“Whom”, she asked, casting her eyes upon the revolving clouds, clasping her hands as she knelt on the window-sill, and looking the very image of appealing womanhood as she did so, “can I lean upon?” Her words formed themselves, her hands clasped themselves, involuntarily, just as her pen had written of its own accord. It was not Orlando who spoke, but the spirit of the age. But whichever it was, nobody answered it. The rooks were tumbling pell-mell among the violet clouds of autumn. The rain had stopped at last and there was an iridescence in the sky which tempted her to put on her plumed hat and her little stringed shoes and stroll out before dinner.

“Everyone is mated except myself,” she mused, as she trailed disconsolately across the courtyard. There were the rooks; Canute and Pippin even—transitory as their alliances were, still each this evening seemed to have a partner. “Whereas, I, who am mistress of it all,” Orlando thought, glancing as she passed at the innumerable emblazoned windows of the hall, “am single, am mateless, am alone.”

Such thoughts had never entered her head before. Now they bore her down unescapably. Instead of thrusting the gate open, she tapped with a gloved hand for the porter to unfasten it for her. One must lean on someone, she thought, if it is only on a porter; and half wished to stay behind and help him to grill his chop on a bucket of fiery coals, but was too timid to ask it. So she strayed out into the park alone, faltering at first and apprehensive lest there might be poachers or gamekeepers or even errand-boys to marvel that a great lady should walk alone.

At every step she glanced nervously lest some male form should be hiding behind a furze bush or some savage cow be lowering its horns to toss her. But there were only the rooks flaunting in the sky. A steel-blue plume from one of them fell among the heather. She loved wild birds’ feathers. She had used to collect them as a boy. She picked it up and stuck it in her hat. The air blew upon her spirit somewhat and revived it. As the rooks went whirling and wheeling above her head and feather after feather fell gleaming through the purplish air, she followed them, her long cloak floating behind her, over the moor, up the hill. She had not walked so far for years. Six feathers had she picked from the grass and drawn between her finger tips and pressed to her lips to feel their smooth, glinting plumage, when she saw, gleaming on the hill-side, a silver pool, mysterious as the lake into which Sir Bedivere flung the sword of Arthur. A single feather quivered in the air and fell into the middle of it. Then, some strange ecstasy came over her. Some wild notion she had of following the birds to the rim of the world and flinging herself on the spongy turf and there drinking forgetfulness, while the rooks’ hoarse laughter sounded over her. She quickened her pace; she ran; she tripped; the tough heather roots flung her to the ground. Her ankle was broken. She could not rise. But there she lay content. The scent of the bog myrtle and the meadow-sweet was in her nostrils. The rooks’ hoarse laughter was in her ears. “I have found my mate,” she murmured. “It is the moor. I am nature’s bride,” she whispered, giving herself in rapture to the cold embraces of the grass as she lay folded in her cloak in the hollow by the pool. “Here will I lie. (A feather fell upon her brow.) I have found a greener laurel than the bay. My forehead will be cool always. These are wild birds’ feathers—the owl’s, the nightjar’s. I shall dream wild dreams. My hands shall wear no wedding ring,” she continued, slipping it from her finger. “The roots shall twine about them. Ah!” she sighed, pressing her head luxuriously on its spongy pillow, “I have sought happiness through many ages and not found it; fame and missed it; love and not known it; life—and behold, death is better. I have known many men and many women,” she continued; “none have I understood. It is better that I should lie at peace here with only the sky above me—as the gipsy told me years ago. That was in Turkey.” And she looked straight up into the marvellous golden foam into which the clouds had churned themselves, and saw next moment a track in it, and camels passing in single file through the rocky desert among clouds of red dust; and then, when the camels had passed, there were only mountains, very high and full of clefts and with pinnacles of rock, and she fancied she heard goat bells ringing in their passes, and in their folds were fields of irises and gentian. So the sky changed and her eyes slowly lowered themselves down and down till they came to the rain-darkened earth and saw the great hump of the South Downs, flowing in one wave along the coast; and where the land parted, there was the sea, the sea with ships passing; and she fancied she heard a gun far out at sea, and thought at first, “That’s the Armada”, and then thought “No, it’s Nelson”, and then remembered how those wars were over and the ships were busy merchant ships; and the sails on the winding river were those of pleasure boats. She saw, too, cattle sprinkled on the dark fields, sheep and cows, and she saw the lights coming here and there in farm-house windows, and lanterns moving among the cattle as the shepherd went his rounds and the cowman; and then the lights went out and the stars rose and tangled themselves about the sky. Indeed, she was falling asleep with the wet feathers on her face and her ear pressed to the ground when she heard, deep within, some hammer on an anvil, or was it a heart beating? Tick-tock, tick-tock, so it hammered, so it beat, the anvil, or the heart in the middle of the earth; until, as she listened, she thought it changed to the trot of a horse’s hoofs; one, two, three, four, she counted; then she heard a stumble; then, as it came nearer and nearer, she could hear the crack of a twig and the suck of the wet bog in its hoofs. The horse was almost on her. She sat upright. Towering dark against the yellow-slashed sky of dawn, with the plovers rising and falling about him, she saw a man on horseback. He started. The horse stopped.

“Madam,” the man cried, leaping to the ground, “you’re hurt!”

“I’m dead, sir!” she replied.

Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, Esquire

A few minutes later, they became engaged.

The morning after, as they sat at breakfast, he told her his name. It was Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, Esquire.

“I knew it!” she said, for there was something romantic and chivalrous, passionate, melancholy, yet determined about him which went with the wild, dark-plumed name—a name which had, in her mind, the steel-blue gleam of rooks’ wings, the hoarse laughter of their caws, the snake-like twisting descent of their feathers in a silver pool, and a thousand other things which will be described presently.

“Mine is Orlando,” she said. He had guessed it. For if you see a ship in full sail coming with the sun on it proudly sweeping across the Mediterranean from the South Seas, one says at once, “Orlando”, he explained.

In fact, though their acquaintance had been so short, they had guessed, as always happens between lovers, everything of any importance about each other in two seconds at the utmost, and it now remained only to fill in such unimportant details as what they were called; where they lived; and whether they were beggars or people of substance. He had a castle in the Hebrides, but it was ruined, he told her. Gannets feasted in the banqueting hall. He had been a soldier and a sailor, and had explored the East. He was on his way now to join his brig at Falmouth, but the wind had fallen and it was only when the gale blew from the South-west that he could put out to sea. Orlando looked hastily from the breakfast-room window at the gilt leopard on the weather vane. Mercifully its tail pointed due east and was steady as a rock. “Oh! Shel, don’t leave me!” she cried. “I’m passionately in love with you,” she said. No sooner had the words left her mouth than an awful suspicion rushed into both their minds simultaneously,

“You’re a woman, Shel!” she cried.

“You’re a man, Orlando!” he cried.

Never was there such a scene of protestation and demonstration as then took place since the world began. When it was over and they were seated again she asked him, what was this talk of a South-west gale? Where was he bound for?

“For the Horn,” he said briefly, and blushed. (For a man had to blush as a woman had, only at rather different things.) It was only by dint of great pressure on her side and the use of much intuition that she gathered that his life was spent in the most desperate and splendid of adventures—which is to voyage round Cape Horn in the teeth of a gale. Masts had been snapped off; sails torn to ribbons (she had to drag the admission from him). Sometimes the ship had sunk, and he had been left the only survivor on a raft with a biscuit.

“It’s about all a fellow can do nowadays,” he said sheepishly, and helped himself to great spoonfuls of strawberry jam. The vision which she had thereupon of this boy (for he was little more) sucking peppermints, for which he had a passion, while the masts snapped and the stars reeled and he roared brief orders to cut this adrift, to heave that overboard, brought the tears to her eyes, tears, she noted, of a finer flavour than any she had cried before. “I am a woman,” she thought, “a real woman, at last.” She thanked Bonthrop from the bottom of her heart for having given her this rare and unexpected delight. Had she not been lame in the left foot, she would have sat upon his knee.

“Shel, my darling,” she began again, “tell me …” and so they talked two hours or more, perhaps about Cape Horn, perhaps not, and really it would profit little to write down what they said, for they knew each other so well that they could say anything, which is tantamount to saying nothing, or saying such stupid, prosy things as how to cook an omelette, or where to buy the best boots in London, things which have no lustre taken from their setting, yet are positively of amazing beauty within it. For it has come about, by the wise economy of nature, that our modern spirit can almost dispense with language; the commonest expressions do, since no expressions do; hence the most ordinary conversation is often the most poetic, and the most poetic is precisely that which cannot be written down. For which reasons we leave a great blank here, which must be taken to indicate that the space is filled to repletion.

After some days more of this kind of talk,

“Orlando, my dearest,” Shel was beginning, when there was a scuffling outside, and Basket the butler entered with the information that there was a couple of Peelers downstairs with a warrant from the Queen.

“Show ’em up,” said Shelmerdine briefly, as if on his own quarter-deck, taking up, by instinct, a stand with his hands behind him in front of the fireplace. Two officers in bottle-green uniforms with truncheons at their hips then entered the room and stood at attention. Formalities being over, they gave into Orlando’s own hands, as their commission was, a legal document of some very impressive sort, judging by the blobs of sealing wax, the ribbons, the oaths, and the signatures, which were all of the highest importance.

Orlando ran her eyes through it and then, using the first finger of her right hand as pointer, read out the following facts as being most germane to the matter.

“The lawsuits are settled,” she read out … “some in my favour, as for example … others not. Turkish marriage annulled (I was ambassador in Constantinople, Shel,” she explained). “Children pronounced illegitimate (they said I had three sons by Pepita, a Spanish dancer). So they don’t inherit, which is all to the good…. Sex? Ah! what about sex? My sex”, she read out with some solemnity, “is pronounced indisputably, and beyond the shadow of a doubt (what I was telling you a moment ago, Shel?), female. The estates which are now desequestrated in perpetuity descend and are tailed and entailed upon the heirs male of my body, or in default of marriage”—but here she grew impatient with this legal verbiage, and said, “but there won’t be any default of marriage, nor of heirs either, so the rest can be taken as read.” Whereupon she appended her own signature beneath Lord Palmerston’s and entered from that moment into the undisturbed possession of her titles, her house, and her estate—which was now so much shrunk, for the cost of the lawsuits had been prodigious, that, though she was infinitely noble again, she was also excessively poor.

When the result of the lawsuit was made known (and rumour flew much quicker than the telegraph which has supplanted it), the whole town was filled with rejoicings.

[Horses were put into carriages for the sole purpose of being taken out. Empty barouches and landaus were trundled up and down the High Street incessantly. Addresses were read from the Bull. Replies were made from the Stag. The town was illuminated. Gold caskets were securely sealed in glass cases. Coins were well and duly laid under stones. Hospitals were founded. Rat and Sparrow clubs were inaugurated. Turkish women by the dozen were burnt in effigy in the market-place, together with scores of peasant boys with the label “I am a base Pretender”, lolling from their mouths. The Queen’s cream-coloured ponies were soon seen trotting up the avenue with a command to Orlando to dine and sleep at the Castle, that very same night. Her table, as on a previous occasion, was snowed under with invitations from the Countess of R., Lady Q., Lady Palmerston, the Marchioness of P., Mrs. W. E. Gladstone, and others, beseeching the pleasure of her company, reminding her of ancient alliances between their family and her own, etc.]—all of which is properly enclosed in square brackets, as above, for the good reason that a parenthesis it was without any importance in Orlando’s life. She skipped it, to get on with the text. For when the bonfires were blazing in the market-place, she was in the dark woods with Shelmerdine alone. So fine was the weather that the trees stretched their branches motionless above them, and if a leaf fell, it fell, spotted red and gold, so slowly that one could watch it for half an hour fluttering and falling till it came to rest at last, on Orlando’s foot.

“Tell me, Mar,” she would say (and here it must be explained, that when she called him by the first syllable of his first name, she was in a dreamy, amorous, acquiescent mood, domestic, languid a little, as if spiced logs were burning, and it was evening, yet not time to dress, and a thought wet perhaps outside, enough to make the leaves glisten, but a nightingale might be singing even so among the azaleas, two or three dogs barking at distant farms, a cock crowing—all of which the reader should imagine in her voice)—“Tell me, Mar,” she would say, “about Cape Horn.” Then Shelmerdine would make a little model on the ground of the Cape with twigs and dead leaves and an empty snail shell or two.

“Here’s the north,” he would say. “There’s the south. The wind’s coming from hereabouts. Now the brig is sailing due west; we’ve just lowered the top-boom mizzen; and so you see—here, where this bit of grass is, she enters the current which you’ll find marked—where’s my map and compasses, Bo’sun?—Ah! thanks, that’ll do, where the snail shell is. The current catches her on the starboard side, so we must rig the jib-boom or we shall be carried to the larboard, which is where that beech leaf is,—for you must understand my dear—” and so he would go on, and she would listen to every word; interpreting them rightly, so as to see, that is to say, without his having to tell her, the phosphorescence on the waves; the icicles clanking in the shrouds; how he went to the top of the mast in a gale; there reflected on the destiny of man; came down again; had a whisky and soda; went on shore; was trapped by a black woman; repented; reasoned it out; read Pascal; determined to write philosophy; bought a monkey; debated the true end of life; decided in favour of Cape Horn, and so on. All this and a thousand other things she understood him to say, and so when she replied, Yes, negresses are seductive, aren’t they? he having told her that the supply of biscuits now gave out, he was surprised and delighted to find how well she had taken his meaning.

“Are you positive you aren’t a man?” he would ask anxiously, and she would echo,

“Can it be possible you’re not a woman?” and then they must put it to the proof without more ado. For each was so surprised at the quickness of the other’s sympathy, and it was to each such a revelation that a woman could be as tolerant and free-spoken as a man, and a man as strange and subtle as a woman, that they had to put the matter to the proof at once.

And so they would go on talking or rather, understanding, which has become the main art of speech in an age when words are growing daily so scanty in comparison with ideas that “the biscuits ran out” has to stand for kissing a negress in the dark when one has just read Bishop Berkeley’s philosophy for the tenth time. (And from this it follows that only the most profound masters of style can tell the truth, and when one meets a simple one-syllabled writer, one may conclude, without any doubt at all, that the poor man is lying.)

So they would talk; and then, when her feet were fairly covered with spotted autumn leaves, Orlando would rise and stroll away into the heart of the woods in solitude, leaving Bonthrop sitting there among the snail shells, making models of Cape Horn. “Bonthrop,” she would say, “I’m off,” and when she called him by his second name, “Bonthrop”, it should signify to the reader that she was in a solitary mood, felt them both as specks on a desert, was desirous only of meeting death by herself, for people die daily, die at dinner tables, or like this, out of doors in the autumn woods; and with the bonfires blazing and Lady Palmerston or Lady Derby asking her out every night to dinner, the desire for death would overcome her, and so saying “Bonthrop”, she said in effect, “I’m dead”, and pushed her way as a spirit might through the spectre-pale beech trees, and so oared herself deep into solitude as if the little flicker of noise and movement were over and she were free now to take her way—all of which the reader should hear in her voice when she said “Bonthrop”; and should also add, the better to illumine the word, that for him too the same word signified, mystically, separation and isolation and the disembodied pacing the deck of his brig in unfathomable seas.

After some hours of death, suddenly a jay shrieked “Shelmerdine”, and stooping, she picked one of those autumn crocuses which to some people signify that very word, and put it with the jay’s feather that came tumbling blue through the beech woods, in her breast. Then she called “Shelmerdine” and the word went shooting this way and that way through the woods and struck him where he sat, making models out of snail shells in the grass. He saw her, and heard her coming to him with the crocus and the jay’s feather in her breast, and cried “Orlando”, which meant (and it must be remembered that when bright colours like blue and yellow mix themselves in our eyes, some of it rubs off on our thoughts) first the bowing and swaying of bracken as if something were breaking through; which proved to be a ship in full sail, heaving and tossing a little dreamily, rather as if she had a whole year of summer days to make her voyage in; and so the ship bears down, heaving this way, heaving that way, nobly, indolently, and rides over the crest of this wave and sinks into the hollow of that one, and so, suddenly stands over you (who are in a little cockle shell of a boat, looking up at her) with all her sails quivering, and then, behold, they drop all of a heap on deck—as Orlando dropped now into the grass beside him.

Eight or nine days had been spent thus, but on the tenth, which was the 26th of October, Orlando was lying in the bracken, while Shelmerdine recited Shelley (whose entire works he had by heart), when a leaf which had started to fall slowly enough from a treetop whipped briskly across Orlando’s foot. A second leaf followed and then a third. Orlando shivered and turned pale. It was the wind. Shelmerdine—but it would be more proper now to call him Bonthrop—leapt to his feet.

“The wind!” he cried.

Together they ran through the woods, the wind plastering them with leaves as they ran, to the great court and through it and the little courts, frightened servants leaving their brooms and their saucepans to follow after till they reached the Chapel, and there a scattering of lights was lit as fast as could be, one knocking over this bench, another snuffing out that taper. Bells were rung. People were summoned. At length there was Mr. Dupper catching at the ends of his white tie and asking where was the prayer book. And they thrust Queen Mary’s prayer book in his hands and he searched hastily fluttering the pages, and said, “Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, and Lady Orlando, kneel down”; and they knelt down, and now they were bright and now they were dark as the light and shadow came flying helter-skelter through the painted windows; and among the banging of innumerable doors and a sound like brass pots beating, the organ sounded, its growl coming loud and faint alternately, and Mr. Dupper, who was grown a very old man, tried now to raise his voice above the uproar and could not be heard and then all was quiet for a moment, and one word—it might be “the jaws of death”—rang out clear, while all the estate servants kept pressing in with rakes and whips still in their hands to listen, and some sang aloud and others prayed, and now a bird was dashed against the pane, and now there was a clap of thunder, so that no one heard the word Obey spoken or saw, except as a golden flash, the ring pass from hand to hand. All was movement and confusion. And up they rose with the organ booming and the lightning playing and the rain pouring, and the Lady Orlando, with her ring on her finger, went out into the court in her thin dress and held the swinging stirrup, for the horse was bitted and bridled and the foam was still on his flank, for her husband to mount, which he did with one bound, and the horse leapt forward and Orlando, standing there, cried out Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine! and he answered her Orlando! and the words went dashing and circling like wild hawks together among the belfries and higher and higher, further and further, faster and faster they circled, till they crashed and fell in a shower of fragments to the ground; and she went in.

[]

Chapter 6.

Orlando went indoors. It was completely still. It was very silent. There was the ink pot: there was the pen; there was the manuscript of her poem, broken off in the middle of a tribute to eternity. She had been about to say, when Basket and Bartholomew interrupted with the tea things, nothing changes. And then, in the space of three seconds and a half, everything had changed—she had broken her ankle, fallen in love, married Shelmerdine.

There was the wedding ring on her finger to prove it. It was true that she had put it there herself before she met Shelmerdine, but that had proved worse than useless. She now turned the ring round and round, with superstitious reverence, taking care lest it should slip past the joint of her finger.

“The wedding ring has to be put on the third finger of the left hand”, she said, like a child cautiously repeating its lesson, “for it to be of any use at all.”

She spoke thus, aloud and rather more pompously than was her wont, as if she wished someone whose good opinion she desired to overhear her. Indeed, she had in mind, now that she was at last able to collect her thoughts, the effect that her behaviour would have had upon the spirit of the age. She was extremely anxious to be informed whether the steps she had taken in the matter of getting engaged to Shelmerdine and marrying him met with its approval. She was certainly feeling more herself. Her finger had not tingled once, or nothing to count, since that night on the moor. Yet, she could not deny that she had her doubts. She was married, true; but if one’s husband was always sailing round Cape Horn, was it marriage? If one liked him, was it marriage? If one liked other people, was it marriage? And finally, if one still wished, more than anything in the whole world, to write poetry, was it marriage? She had her doubts.

But she would put it to the test. She looked at the ring. She looked at the ink pot. Did she dare? No, she did not. But she must. No, she could not. What should she do then? Faint, if possible. But she had never felt better in her life.

“Hang it all!” she cried, with a touch of her old spirit, “Here goes!”

And she plunged her pen neck deep in the ink. To her enormous surprise, there was no explosion. She drew the nib out. It was wet, but not dripping. She wrote. The words were a little long in coming, but come they did. Ah! but did they make sense? she wondered, a panic coming over her lest the pen might have been at some of its involuntary pranks again. She read,

And then I came to a field where the springing grass

Was dulled by the hanging cups of fritillaries,

Sullen and foreign-looking, the snaky flower,

Scarfed in dull purple, like Egyptian girls—

As she wrote she felt some power (remember we are dealing with the most obscure manifestations of the human spirit) reading over her shoulder, and when she had written “Egyptian girls”, the power told her to stop. Grass, the power seemed to say, going back with a ruler such as governesses use to the beginning, is all right; the hanging cups of fritillaries—admirable; the snaky flower—a thought, strong from a lady’s pen, perhaps, but Wordsworth, no doubt, sanctions it; but—girls? Are girls necessary? You have a husband at the Cape, you say? Ah, well, that’ll do.

And so the spirit passed on.

Orlando now performed in spirit (for all this took place in spirit) a deep obeisance to the spirit of her age, such as—to compare great things with small—a traveller, conscious that he has a bundle of cigars in the corner of his suit case, makes to the customs officer who has obligingly made a scribble of white chalk on the lid. For she was extremely doubtful whether, if the spirit had examined the contents of her mind carefully, it would not have found something highly contraband for which she would have had to pay the full fine. She had only escaped by the skin of her teeth. She had just managed, by some dexterous deference to the spirit of the age, by putting on a ring and finding a man on a moor, by loving nature and being no satirist, cynic, or psychologist—any one of which goods would have been discovered at once—to pass its examination successfully. And she heaved a deep sigh of relief, as, indeed, well she might, for the transaction between a writer and the spirit of the age is one of infinite delicacy, and upon a nice arrangement between the two the whole fortune of his works depends. Orlando had so ordered it that she was in an extremely happy position; she need neither fight her age, nor submit to it; she was of it, yet remained herself. Now, therefore, she could write, and write she did. She wrote. She wrote. She wrote.

It was now November. After November, comes December. Then January, February, March, and April. After April comes May. June, July, August follow. Next is September. Then October, and so, behold, here we are back at November again, with a whole year accomplished.

This method of writing biography, though it has its merits, is a little bare, perhaps, and the reader, if we go on with it, may complain that he could recite the calendar for himself and so save his pocket whatever sum the Hogarth Press may think proper to charge for this book. But what can the biographer do when his subject has put him in the predicament into which Orlando has now put us? Life, it has been agreed by everyone whose opinion is worth consulting, is the only fit subject for novelist or biographer; life, the same authorities have decided, has nothing whatever to do with sitting still in a chair and thinking. Thought and life are as the poles asunder. Therefore—since sitting in a chair and thinking is precisely what Orlando is doing now—there is nothing for it but to recite the calendar, tell one’s beads, blow one’s nose, stir the fire, look out of the window, until she has done. Orlando sat so still that you could have heard a pin drop. Would, indeed, that a pin had dropped! That would have been life of a kind. Or if a butterfly had fluttered through the window and settled on her chair, one could write about that. Or suppose she had got up and killed a wasp. Then, at once, we could out with our pens and write. For there would be blood shed, if only the blood of a wasp. Where there is blood there is life. And if killing a wasp is the merest trifle compared with killing a man, still it is a fitter subject for novelist or biographer than this mere wool-gathering; this thinking; this sitting in a chair day in, day out, with a cigarette and a sheet of paper and a pen and an ink pot. If only subjects, we might complain (for our patience is wearing thin), had more consideration for their biographers! What is more irritating than to see one’s subject, on whom one has lavished so much time and trouble, slipping out of one’s grasp altogether and indulging—witness her sighs and gasps, her flushing, her palings, her eyes now bright as lamps, now haggard as dawns—what is more humiliating than to see all this dumb show of emotion and excitement gone through before our eyes when we know that what causes it—thought and imagination—are of no importance whatsoever?

But Orlando was a woman—Lord Palmerston had just proved it. And when we are writing the life of a woman, we may, it is agreed, waive our demand for action, and substitute love instead. Love, the poet has said, is woman’s whole existence. And if we look for a moment at Orlando writing at her table, we must admit that never was there a woman more fitted for that calling. Surely, since she is a woman, and a beautiful woman, and a woman in the prime of life, she will soon give over this pretence of writing and thinking and begin at least to think of a gamekeeper (and as long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking). And then she will write him a little note (and as long as she writes little notes nobody objects to a woman writing either) and make an assignation for Sunday dusk and Sunday dusk will come; and the gamekeeper will whistle under the window—all of which is, of course, the very stuff of life and the only possible subject for fiction. Surely Orlando must have done one of these things? Alas,—a thousand times, alas, Orlando did none of them. Must it then be admitted that Orlando was one of those monsters of iniquity who do not love? She was kind to dogs, faithful to friends, generosity itself to a dozen starving poets, had a passion for poetry. But love—as the male novelists define it—and who, after all, speak with greater authority?—has nothing whatever to do with kindness, fidelity, generosity, or poetry. Love is slipping off one’s petticoat and—But we all know what love is. Did Orlando do that? Truth compels us to say no, she did not. If then, the subject of one’s biography will neither love nor kill, but will only think and imagine, we may conclude that he or she is no better than a corpse and so leave her.

The only resource now left us is to look out of the window. There were sparrows; there were starlings; there were a number of doves, and one or two rooks, all occupied after their fashion. One finds a worm, another a snail. One flutters to a branch, another takes a little run on the turf. Then a servant crosses the courtyard, wearing a green baize apron. Presumably he is engaged on some intrigue with one of the maids in the pantry, but as no visible proof is offered us, in the courtyard, we can but hope for the best and leave it. Clouds pass, thin or thick, with some disturbance of the colour of the grass beneath. The sun-dial registers the hour in its usual cryptic way. One’s mind begins tossing up a question or two, idly, vainly, about this same life. Life, it sings, or croons rather, like a kettle on a hob, Life, life, what art thou? Light or darkness, the baize apron of the under footman or the shadow of the starling on the grass?

Let us go, then, exploring, this summer morning, when all are adoring the plum blossom and the bee. And humming and hawing, let us ask of the starling (who is a more sociable bird than the lark) what he may think on the brink of the dust-bin, whence he picks among the sticks combings of scullion’s hair. What’s life, we ask, leaning on the farmyard gate; Life, Life, Life! cries the bird, as if he had heard, and knew precisely, what we meant by this bothering prying habit of ours of asking questions indoors and out and peeping and picking at daisies as the way is of writers when they don’t know what to say next. Then they come here, says the bird, and ask me what life is; Life, Life, Life!

We trudge on then by the moor path, to the high brow of the wine-blue purple-dark hill, and fling ourselves down there, and dream there and see there a grasshopper, carting back to his home in the hollow, a straw. And he says (if sawings like his can be given a name so sacred and tender) Life’s labour, or so we interpret the whirr of his dust-choked gullet. And the ant agrees and the bees, but if we lie here long enough to ask the moths, when they come at evening, stealing among the paler heather bells, they will breathe in our ears such wild nonsense as one hears from telegraph wires in snow storms; tee hee, haw haw. Laughter, Laughter! the moths say.

Having asked then of man and of bird and the insects, for fish, men tell us, who have lived in green caves, solitary for years to hear them speak, never, never say, and so perhaps know what life is—having asked them all and grown no wiser, but only older and colder (for did we not pray once in a way to wrap up in a book something so hard, so rare, one could swear it was life’s meaning?) back we must go and say straight out to the reader who waits a-tiptoe to hear what life is—alas, we don’t know.

At this moment, but only just in time to save the book from extinction, Orlando pushed away her chair, stretched her arms, dropped her pen, came to the window, and exclaimed, “Done!”

She was almost felled to the ground by the extraordinary sight which now met her eyes. There was the garden and some birds. The world was going on as usual. All the time she was writing the world had continued.

“And if I were dead, it would be just the same!” she exclaimed.

Such was the intensity of her feelings that she could even imagine that she had suffered dissolution, and perhaps some faintness actually attacked her. For a moment she stood looking at the fair, indifferent spectacle with staring eyes. At length she was revived in a singular way. The manuscript which reposed above her heart began shuffling and beating as if it were a living thing, and, what was still odder, and showed how fine a sympathy was between them, Orlando, by inclining her head, could make out what it was that it was saying. It wanted to be read. It must be read. It would die in her bosom if it were not read. For the first time in her life she turned with violence against nature. Elk-hounds and rose bushes were about her in profusion. But elk-hounds and rose bushes can none of them read. It is a lamentable oversight on the part of Providence which had never struck her before. Human beings alone are thus gifted. Human beings had become necessary. She rang the bell. She ordered the carriage to take her to London at once.

“There’s just time to catch the eleven forty-five, M’Lady,” said Basket. Orlando had not yet realised the invention of the steam engine, but such was her absorption in the sufferings of a being, who, though not herself, yet entirely depended on her, that she saw a railway train for the first time, took her seat in a railway carriage, and had the rug arranged about her knees without giving a thought to “that stupendous invention, which had (the historians say) completely changed the face of Europe in the past twenty years” (as, indeed, happens much more frequently than historians suppose). She noticed only that it was extremely smutty; rattled horribly; and the windows stuck. Lost in thought, she was whirled up to London in something less than an hour and stood on the platform at Charing Cross, not knowing where to go.

The old house at Blackfriars, where she had spent so many pleasant days in the eighteenth century, was now sold, part to the Salvation Army, part to an umbrella factory. She had bought another in Mayfair which was sanitary, convenient, and in the heart of the fashionable world, but was it in Mayfair that her poem would be relieved of its desire? Pray God, she thought, remembering the brightness of their ladyships’ eyes and the symmetry of their lordships’ legs, they haven’t taken to reading there. For that would be a thousand pities. Then there was Lady R.’s. The same sort of talk would be going on there still, she had no doubt. The gout might have shifted from the General’s left leg to his right, perhaps. Mr. L. might have stayed ten days with R. instead of T. Then Mr. Pope would come in. Oh! but Mr. Pope was dead. Who were the wits now, she wondered—but that was not a question one could put to a porter, and so she moved on. Her ears were now distracted by the jingling of innumerable bells on the heads of innumerable horses. Fleets of the strangest little boxes on wheels were drawn up by the pavement. She walked out into the Strand. There the uproar was even worse. Vehicles of all sizes, drawn by blood horses and by dray horses, conveying one solitary dowager or crowded to the top by whiskered men in silk hats, were inextricably mixed. Carriages, carts, and omnibuses seemed to her eyes, so long used to the look of a plain sheet of foolscap, alarmingly at loggerheads; and to her ears, attuned to a pen scratching, the uproar of the street sounded violently and hideously cacophonous. Every inch of the pavement was crowded. Streams of people, threading in and out between their own bodies and the lurching and lumbering traffic with incredible agility, poured incessantly east and west. Along the edge of the pavement stood men, holding out trays of toys, and bawled. At corners, women sat beside great baskets of spring flowers and bawled. Boys running in and out of the horses’ noses, holding printed sheets to their bodies, bawled too, Disaster! Disaster! At first Orlando supposed that she had arrived at some moment of national crisis; but whether it was happy or tragic, she could not tell. She looked anxiously at people’s faces. But that confused her still more. Here would come by a man sunk in despair, muttering to himself as if he knew some terrible sorrow. Past him would nudge a fat, jolly-faced fellow, shouldering his way along as if it were a festival for all the world. Indeed, she came to the conclusion that there was neither rhyme nor reason in any of it. Each man and each woman was bent on his own affairs. And where was she to go?

She walked on without thinking, up one street and down another, by vast windows piled with handbags, and mirrors, and dressing gowns, and flowers, and fishing rods, and luncheon baskets; while stuff of every hue and pattern, thickness or thinness, was looped and festooned and ballooned across and across. Sometimes she passed down avenues of sedate mansions, soberly numbered ‘one’, ‘two’, ‘three’, and so on right up to two or three hundred, each the copy of the other, with two pillars and six steps and a pair of curtains neatly drawn and family luncheons laid on tables, and a parrot looking out of one window and a man servant out of another, until her mind was dizzied with the monotony. Then she came to great open squares with black, shiny, tightly buttoned statues of fat men in the middle, and war horses prancing, and columns rising and fountains falling and pigeons fluttering. So she walked and walked along pavements between houses until she felt very hungry, and something fluttering above her heart rebuked her with having forgotten all about it. It was her manuscript, “The Oak Tree”.

She was confounded at her own neglect. She stopped dead where she stood. No coach was in sight. The street, which was wide and handsome, was singularly empty. Only one elderly gentleman was approaching. There was something vaguely familiar to her in his walk. As he came nearer, she felt certain that she had met him at some time or other. But where? Could it be that this gentleman, so neat, so portly, so prosperous, with a cane in his hand and a flower in his button-hole, with a pink, plump face, and combed white moustaches, could it be, Yes, by jove, it was!—her old, her very old friend, Nick Greene!

At the same time he looked at her; remembered her; recognised her. “The Lady Orlando!” he cried, sweeping his silk hat almost in the dust.

“Sir Nicholas!” she exclaimed. For she was made aware intuitively by something in his bearing that the scurrilous penny-a-liner, who had lampooned her and many another in the time of Queen Elizabeth, was now risen in the world and become certainly a Knight and doubtless a dozen other fine things into the bargain.

With another bow, he acknowledged that her conclusion was correct; he was a Knight; he was a Litt.D.; he was a Professor. He was the author of a score of volumes. He was, in short, the most influential critic of the Victorian age.

A violent tumult of emotion besieged her at meeting the man who had caused her, years ago, so much pain. Could this be the plaguy, restless fellow who had burnt holes in her carpets, and toasted cheese in the Italian fireplace and told such merry stories of Marlowe and the rest that they had seen the sun rise nine nights out of ten? He was now sprucely dressed in a grey morning suit, had a pink flower in his button-hole, and grey suede gloves to match. But even as she marvelled, he made another profound bow, and asked her whether she would honour him by lunching with him? The bow was a thought overdone perhaps, but the imitation of fine breeding was creditable. She followed him, wondering, into a superb restaurant, all red plush, white table-cloths, and silver cruets, as unlike as could be the old tavern or coffee house with its sanded floor, its wooden benches, its bowls of punch and chocolate, and its broadsheets and spittoons. He laid his gloves neatly on the table beside him. Still she could hardly believe that he was the same man. His nails were clean; where they used to be an inch long. His chin was shaved; where a black beard used to sprout. He wore gold sleeve-links; where his ragged linen used to dip in the broth. It was not, indeed, until he had ordered the wine, which he did with a care that reminded her of his taste in Malmsey long ago, that she was convinced he was the same man. “Ah!” he said, heaving a little sigh, which was yet comfortable enough, “ah! my dear lady, the great days of literature are over. Marlowe, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson—those were the giants. Dryden, Pope, Addison—those were the heroes. All, all are dead now. And whom have they left us? Tennyson, Browning, Carlyle!”—he threw an immense amount of scorn into his voice. “The truth of it is,” he said, pouring himself a glass of wine, “that all our young writers are in the pay of booksellers. They turn out any trash that serves to pay their tailor’s bills. It is an age”, he said, helping himself to hors-d’oeuvres, “marked by precious conceits and wild experiments—none of which the Elizabethans would have tolerated for an instant.”

“No, my dear lady,” he continued, passing with approval the turbot au gratin, which the waiter exhibited for his sanction, “the great days are over. We live in degenerate times. We must cherish the past; honour those writers—there are still a few left of ’em—who take antiquity for their model and write, not for pay but——” Here Orlando almost shouted “Glawr!” Indeed she could have sworn that she had heard him say the very same things three hundred years ago. The names were different, of course, but the spirit was the same. Nick Greene had not changed, for all his knighthood. And yet, some change there was. For while he ran on about taking Addison as one’s model (it had been Cicero once, she thought) and lying in bed of a morning (which she was proud to think her pension paid quarterly enabled him to do) rolling the best works of the best authors round and round on one’s tongue for an hour, at least, before setting pen to paper, so that the vulgarity of the present time and the deplorable condition of our native tongue (he had lived long in America, she believed) might be purified—while he ran on in much the same way that Greene had run on three hundred years ago, she had time to ask herself, how was it then that he had changed? He had grown plump; but he was a man verging on seventy. He had grown sleek: literature had been a prosperous pursuit evidently; but somehow the old restless, uneasy vivacity had gone. His stories, brilliant as they were, were no longer quite so free and easy. He mentioned, it is true, “my dear friend Pope” or “my illustrious friend Addison” every other second, but he had an air of respectability about him which was depressing, and he preferred, it seemed, to enlighten her about the doings and sayings of her own blood relations rather than tell her, as he used to do, scandal about the poets.

Orlando was unaccountably disappointed. She had thought of literature all these years (her seclusion, her rank, her sex must be her excuse) as something wild as the wind, hot as fire, swift as lightning; something errant, incalculable, abrupt, and behold, literature was an elderly gentleman in a grey suit talking about duchesses. The violence of her disillusionment was such that some hook or button fastening the upper part of her dress burst open, and out upon the table fell “The Oak Tree”, a poem.

“A manuscript!” said Sir Nicholas, putting on his gold pince-nez. “How interesting, how excessively interesting! Permit me to look at it.” And once more, after an interval of some three hundred years, Nicholas Greene took Orlando’s poem and, laying it down among the coffee cups and the liqueur glasses, began to read it. But now his verdict was very different from what it had been then. It reminded him, he said as he turned over the pages, of Addison’s Cato. It compared favourably with Thomson’s Seasons. There was no trace in it, he was thankful to say, of the modern spirit. It was composed with a regard to truth, to nature, to the dictates of the human heart, which was rare indeed, in these days of unscrupulous eccentricity. It must, of course, be published instantly.

Really Orlando did not know what he meant. She had always carried her manuscripts about with her in the bosom of her dress. The idea tickled Sir Nicholas considerably.

“But what about royalties?” he asked.

Orlando’s mind flew to Buckingham Palace and some dusky potentates who happened to be staying there.

Sir Nicholas was highly diverted. He explained that he was alluding to the fact that Messrs. —— (here he mentioned a well-known firm of publishers) would be delighted, if he wrote them a line, to put the book on their list. He could probably arrange for a royalty of ten per cent on all copies up to two thousand; after that it would be fifteen. As for the reviewers, he would himself write a line to Mr. ——, who was the most influential; then a compliment—say a little puff of her own poems—addressed to the wife of the editor of the —— never did any harm. He would call ——. So he ran on. Orlando understood nothing of all this, and from old experience did not altogether trust his good nature, but there was nothing for it but to submit to what was evidently his wish and the fervent desire of the poem itself. So Sir Nicholas made the blood-stained packet into a neat parcel; flattened it into his breast pocket, lest it should disturb the set of his coat; and with many compliments on both sides, they parted.

Orlando walked up the street. Now that the poem was gone,—and she felt a bare place in her breast where she had been used to carry it—she had nothing to do but reflect upon whatever she liked—the extraordinary chances it might be of the human lot. Here she was in St. James’s Street; a married woman; with a ring on her finger; where there had been a coffee house once there was now a restaurant; it was about half past three in the afternoon; the sun was shining; there were three pigeons; a mongrel terrier dog; two hansom cabs and a barouche landau. What then, was Life? The thought popped into her head violently, irrelevantly (unless old Greene were somehow the cause of it). And it may be taken as a comment, adverse or favourable, as the reader chooses to consider it upon her relations with her husband (who was at the Horn), that whenever anything popped violently into her head, she went straight to the nearest telegraph office and wired to him. There was one, as it happened, close at hand. “My God Shel”, she wired; “life literature Greene toady—” here she dropped into a cypher language which they had invented between them so that a whole spiritual state of the utmost complexity might be conveyed in a word or two without the telegraph clerk being any the wiser, and added the words “Rattigan Glumphoboo”, which summed it up precisely. For not only had the events of the morning made a deep impression on her, but it cannot have escaped the reader’s attention that Orlando was growing up—which is not necessarily growing better—and “Rattigan Glumphoboo” described a very complicated spiritual state—which if the reader puts all his intelligence at our service he may discover for himself.

There could be no answer to her telegram for some hours; indeed, it was probable, she thought, glancing at the sky, where the upper clouds raced swiftly past, that there was a gale at Cape Horn, so that her husband would be at the mast-head, as likely as not, or cutting away some tattered spar, or even alone in a boat with a biscuit. And so, leaving the post office, she turned to beguile herself into the next shop, which was a shop so common in our day that it needs no description, yet, to her eyes, strange in the extreme; a shop where they sold books. All her life long Orlando had known manuscripts; she had held in her hands the rough brown sheets on which Spenser had written in his little crabbed hand; she had seen Shakespeare’s script and Milton’s. She owned, indeed, a fair number of quartos and folios, often with a sonnet in her praise in them and sometimes a lock of hair. But these innumerable little volumes, bright, identical, ephemeral, for they seemed bound in cardboard and printed on tissue paper, surprised her infinitely. The whole works of Shakespeare cost half a crown and could be put in your pocket. One could hardly read them, indeed, the print was so small, but it was a marvel, none the less. ‘Works’—the works of every writer she had known or heard of and many more stretched from end to end of the long shelves. On tables and chairs, more ‘works’ were piled and tumbled, and these she saw, turning a page or two, were often works about other works by Sir Nicholas and a score of others whom, in her ignorance, she supposed, since they were bound and printed, to be very great writers too. So she gave an astounding order to the bookseller to send her everything of any importance in the shop and left.

She turned into Hyde Park, which she had known of old (beneath that cleft tree, she remembered, the Duke of Hamilton fell run through the body by Lord Mohun), and her lips, which are often to blame in the matter, began framing the words of her telegram into a senseless singsong; life literature Greene toady Rattigan Glumphoboo; so that several park keepers looked at her with suspicion and were only brought to a favourable opinion of her sanity by noticing the pearl necklace which she wore. She had carried off a sheaf of papers and critical journals from the book shop, and at length, flinging herself on her elbow beneath a tree, she spread these pages round her and did her best to fathom the noble art of prose composition as these masters practised it. For still the old credulity was alive in her; even the blurred type of a weekly newspaper had some sanctity in her eyes. So she read, lying on her elbow, an article by Sir Nicholas on the collected works of a man she had once known—John Donne. But she had pitched herself, without knowing it, not far from the Serpentine. The barking of a thousand dogs sounded in her ears. Carriage wheels rushed ceaselessly in a circle. Leaves sighed overhead. Now and again a braided skirt and a pair of tight scarlet trousers crossed the grass within a few steps of her. Once a gigantic rubber ball bounced on the newspaper. Violets, oranges, reds, and blues broke through the interstices of the leaves and sparkled in the emerald on her finger. She read a sentence and looked up at the sky; she looked up at the sky and looked down at the newspaper. Life? Literature? One to be made into the other? But how monstrously difficult! For—here came by a pair of tight scarlet trousers—how would Addison have put that? Here came two dogs dancing on their hind legs. How would Lamb have described that? For reading Sir Nicholas and his friends (as she did in the intervals of looking about her), she somehow got the impression—here she rose and walked—they made one feel—it was an extremely uncomfortable feeling—one must never, never say what one thought. (She stood on the banks of the Serpentine. It was a bronze colour; spider-thin boats were skimming from side to side.) They made one feel, she continued, that one must always, always write like somebody else. (The tears formed themselves in her eyes.) For really, she thought, pushing a little boat off with her toe, I don’t think I could (here the whole of Sir Nicholas’ article came before her as articles do, ten minutes after they are read, with the look of his room, his head, his cat, his writing-table, and the time of the day thrown in), I don’t think I could, she continued, considering the article from this point of view, sit in a study, no, it’s not a study, it’s a mouldy kind of drawing-room, all day long, and talk to pretty young men, and tell them little anecdotes, which they mustn’t repeat, about what Tupper said about Smiles; and then, she continued, weeping bitterly, they’re all so manly; and then, I do detest Duchesses; and I don’t like cake; and though I’m spiteful enough, I could never learn to be as spiteful as all that, so how can I be a critic and write the best English prose of my time? Damn it all! she exclaimed, launching a penny steamer so vigorously that the poor little boat almost sank in the bronze-coloured waves.

Now, the truth is that when one has been in a state of mind (as nurses call it)—and the tears still stood in Orlando’s eyes—the thing one is looking at becomes, not itself, but another thing, which is bigger and much more important and yet remains the same thing. If one looks at the Serpentine in this state of mind, the waves soon become just as big as the waves on the Atlantic; the toy boats become indistinguishable from ocean liners. So Orlando mistook the toy boat for her husband’s brig; and the wave she had made with her toe for a mountain of water off Cape Horn; and as she watched the toy boat climb the ripple, she thought she saw Bonthrop’s ship climb up and up a glassy wall; up and up it went, and a white crest with a thousand deaths in it arched over it; and through the thousand deaths it went and disappeared—‘It’s sunk!’ she cried out in an agony—and then, behold, there it was again sailing along safe and sound among the ducks on the other side of the Atlantic.

“Ecstasy!” she cried. “Ecstasy! Where’s the post office?” she wondered. “For I must wire at once to Shel and tell him….” And repeating “A toy boat on the Serpentine”, and “Ecstasy”, alternately, for the thoughts were interchangeable and meant exactly the same thing, she hurried towards Park Lane.

“A toy boat, a toy boat, a toy boat”, she repeated, thus enforcing upon herself the fact that it is not articles by Nick Greene on John Donne nor eight-hour bills nor covenants nor factory acts that matter; it’s something useless, sudden, violent; something that costs a life; red, blue, purple; a spirt; a splash; like those hyacinths (she was passing a fine bed of them); free from taint, dependence, soilure of humanity or care for one’s kind; something rash, ridiculous, like my hyacinth, husband I mean, Bonthrop: that’s what it is—a toy boat on the Serpentine, ecstasy—it’s ecstasy that matters. Thus she spoke aloud, waiting for the carriages to pass at Stanhope Gate, for the consequence of not living with one’s husband, except when the wind is sunk, is that one talks nonsense aloud in Park Lane. It would no doubt have been different had she lived all the year round with him as Queen Victoria recommended. As it was the thought of him would come upon her in a flash. She found it absolutely necessary to speak to him instantly. She did not care in the least what nonsense it might make, or what dislocation it might inflict on the narrative. Nick Greene’s article had plunged her in the depths of despair; the toy boat had raised her to the heights of joy. So she repeated: “Ecstasy, ecstasy”, as she stood waiting to cross.

But the traffic was heavy that spring afternoon, and kept her standing there, repeating, ecstasy, ecstasy, or a toy boat on the Serpentine, while the wealth and power of England sat, as if sculptured, in hat and cloak, in four-in-hand, victoria and barouche landau. It was as if a golden river had coagulated and massed itself in golden blocks across Park Lane. The ladies held card-cases between their fingers; the gentlemen balanced gold-mounted canes between their knees. She stood there gazing, admiring, awe-struck. One thought only disturbed her, a thought familiar to all who behold great elephants, or whales of an incredible magnitude, and that is how do these leviathans to whom obviously stress, change, and activity are repugnant, propagate their kind? Perhaps, Orlando thought, looking at the stately, still faces, their time of propagation is over; this is the fruit; this is the consummation. What she now beheld was the triumph of an age. Portly and splendid there they sat. But now, the policeman let fall his hand; the stream became liquid; the massive conglomeration of splendid objects moved, dispersed, and disappeared into Piccadilly.

So she crossed Park Lane and went to her house in Curzon Street where, when the meadow-sweet blew there, she could remember curlew calling and one very old man with a gun.

She could remember, she thought, stepping across the threshold of her house, how Lord Chesterfield had said—but her memory was checked. Her discreet eighteenth-century hall, where she could see Lord Chesterfield putting his hat down here and his coat down there with an elegance of deportment which it was a pleasure to watch, was now completely littered with parcels. While she had been sitting in Hyde Park the bookseller had delivered her order, and the house was crammed—there were parcels slipping down the staircase—with the whole of Victorian literature done up in grey paper and neatly tied with string. She carried as many of these packets as she could to her room, ordered footmen to bring the others, and, rapidly cutting innumerable strings, was soon surrounded by innumerable volumes.

Accustomed to the little literatures of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, Orlando was appalled by the consequences of her order. For, of course, to the Victorians themselves Victorian literature meant not merely four great names separate and distinct but four great names sunk and embedded in a mass of Alexander Smiths, Dixons, Blacks, Milmans, Buckles, Taines, Paynes, Tuppers, Jamesons—all vocal, clamorous, prominent, and requiring as much attention as anybody else. Orlando’s reverence for print had a tough job set before it, but drawing her chair to the window to get the benefit of what light might filter between the high houses of Mayfair, she tried to come to a conclusion.

And now it is clear that there are only two ways of coming to a conclusion upon Victorian literature—one is to write it out in sixty volumes octavo, the other is to squeeze it into six lines of the length of this one. Of the two courses, economy, since time runs short, leads us to choose the second; and so we proceed. Orlando then came to the conclusion (opening half-a-dozen books) that it was very odd that there was not a single dedication to a nobleman among them; next (turning over a vast pile of memoirs) that several of these writers had family trees half as high as her own; next, that it would be impolitic in the extreme to wrap a ten-pound note round the sugar tongs when Miss Christina Rossetti came to tea; next (here were half-a-dozen invitations to celebrate centenaries by dining) that literature since it ate all these dinners must be growing very corpulent; next (she was invited to a score of lectures on the Influence of this upon that; the Classical revival; the Romantic survival, and other titles of the same engaging kind) that literature since it listened to all these lectures must be growing very dry; next (here she attended a reception given by a peeress) that literature since it wore all those fur tippets must be growing very respectable; next (here she visited Carlyle’s sound-proof room at Chelsea) that genius since it needed all this coddling must be growing very delicate; and so at last she reached her final conclusion, which was of the highest importance but which, as we have already much overpassed our limit of six lines, we must omit.

Orlando, having come to this conclusion, stood looking out of the window for a considerable space of time. For, when anybody comes to a conclusion it is as if they had tossed the ball over the net and must wait for the unseen antagonist to return it to them. What would be sent her next from the colourless sky above Chesterfield House, she wondered? And with her hands clasped, she stood for a considerable space of time wondering. Suddenly she started—and here we could only wish that, as on a former occasion, Purity, Chastity, and Modesty would push the door ajar and provide, at least, a breathing space in which we could think how to wrap up what now has to be told delicately, as a biographer should. But no! Having thrown their white garment at the naked Orlando and seen it fall short by several inches, these ladies had given up all intercourse with her these many years; and were now otherwise engaged. Is nothing then, going to happen this pale March morning to mitigate, to veil, to cover, to conceal, to shroud this undeniable event whatever it may be? For after giving that sudden, violent start, Orlando—but Heaven be praised, at this very moment there struck up outside one of these frail, reedy, fluty, jerky, old-fashioned barrel-organs which are still sometimes played by Italian organ-grinders in back streets. Let us accept the intervention, humble though it is, as if it were the music of the spheres, and allow it, with all its gasps and groans, to fill this page with sound until the moment comes which it is impossible to deny is coming; which the footman has seen coming and the maid-servant; and the reader will have to see too; for Orlando herself is clearly unable to ignore it any longer—let the barrel-organ sound and transport us on thought, which is no more than a little boat, when music sounds, tossing on the waves; on thought, which is, of all carriers, the most clumsy, the most erratic, over the roof tops and the back gardens where washing is hanging to—what is this place? Do you recognise the Green and in the middle the steeple, and the gates with a lion couchant on either side? Oh yes, it is Kew! Well, Kew will do. So here then we are at Kew, and I will show you to-day (the second of March) under the plum tree, a grape hyacinth, and a crocus, and a bud, too, on the almond tree; so that to walk there is to be thinking of bulbs, hairy and red, thrust into the earth in October; flowering now; and to be dreaming of more than can rightly be said, and to be taking from its case a cigarette or cigar even, and to be flinging a cloak under (as the rhyme requires) an oak, and there to sit, waiting the kingfisher, which, it is said, was seen once to cross in the evening from bank to bank.

Wait! Wait! The kingfisher comes; the kingfisher comes not.

Behold, meanwhile, the factory chimneys, and their smoke; behold the city clerks flashing by in their outrigger. Behold the old lady taking her dog for a walk and the servant girl wearing her new hat for the first time not at the right angle. Behold them all. Though Heaven has mercifully decreed that the secrets of all hearts are hidden so that we are lured on for ever to suspect something, perhaps, that does not exist; still through our cigarette smoke, we see blaze up and salute the splendid fulfilment of natural desires for a hat, for a boat, for a rat in a ditch; as once one saw blazing—such silly hops and skips the mind takes when it slops like this all over the saucer and the barrel-organ plays—saw blazing a fire in a field against minarets near Constantinople.

Hail! natural desire! Hail! happiness! divine happiness! and pleasure of all sorts, flowers and wine, though one fades and the other intoxicates; and half-crown tickets out of London on Sundays, and singing in a dark chapel hymns about death, and anything, anything that interrupts and confounds the tapping of typewriters and filing of letters and forging of links and chains, binding the Empire together. Hail even the crude, red bows on shop girls’ lips (as if Cupid, very clumsily, dipped his thumb in red ink and scrawled a token in passing). Hail, happiness! kingfisher flashing from bank to bank, and all fulfilment of natural desire, whether it is what the male novelist says it is; or prayer; or denial; hail! in whatever form it comes, and may there be more forms, and stranger. For dark flows the stream—would it were true, as the rhyme hints “like a dream”—but duller and worser than that is our usual lot; without dreams, but alive, smug, fluent, habitual, under trees whose shade of an olive green drowns the blue of the wing of the vanishing bird when he darts of a sudden from bank to bank.

Hail, happiness, then, and after happiness, hail not those dreams which bloat the sharp image as spotted mirrors do the face in a country-inn parlour; dreams which splinter the whole and tear us asunder and wound us and split us apart in the night when we would sleep; but sleep, sleep, so deep that all shapes are ground to dust of infinite softness, water of dimness inscrutable, and there, folded, shrouded, like a mummy, like a moth, prone let us lie on the sand at the bottom of sleep.

But wait! but wait! we are not going, this time, visiting the blind land. Blue, like a match struck right in the ball of the innermost eye, he flys, burns, bursts the seal of sleep; the kingfisher; so that now floods back refluent like a tide, the red, thick stream of life again; bubbling, dripping; and we rise, and our eyes (for how handy a rhyme is to pass us safe over the awkward transition from death to life) fall on—(here the barrel-organ stops playing abruptly).

“It’s a very fine boy, M’Lady,” said Mrs. Banting, the midwife, putting her first-born child into Orlando’s arms. In other words Orlando was safely delivered of a son on Thursday, March the 20th, at three o’clock in the morning.

Once more Orlando stood at the window, but let the reader take courage; nothing of the same sort is going to happen to-day, which is not, by any means, the same day. No—for if we look out of the window, as Orlando was doing at the moment, we shall see that Park Lane itself has considerably changed. Indeed one might stand there ten minutes or more, as Orlando stood now, without seeing a single barouche landau. “Look at that!” she exclaimed, some days later when an absurd truncated carriage without any horses began to glide about of its own accord. A carriage without any horses indeed! She was called away just as she said that, but came back again after a time and had another look out of the window. It was odd sort of weather nowadays. The sky itself, she could not help thinking, had changed. It was no longer so thick, so watery, so prismatic now that King Edward—see, there he was, stepping out of his neat brougham to go and visit a certain lady opposite—had succeeded Queen Victoria. The clouds had shrunk to a thin gauze; the sky seemed made of metal, which in hot weather tarnished verdigris, copper colour or orange as metal does in a fog. It was a little alarming—this shrinkage. Everything seemed to have shrunk. Driving past Buckingham Palace last night, there was not a trace of that vast erection which she had thought everlasting; top hats, widows’ weeds, trumpets, telescopes, wreaths, all had vanished and left not a stain, not a puddle even, on the pavement. But it was now—after another interval she had come back again to her favourite station in the window—now, in the evening, that the change was most remarkable. Look at the lights in the houses! At a touch, a whole room was lit; hundreds of rooms were lit; and one was precisely the same as the other. One could see everything in the little square-shaped boxes; there was no privacy; none of those lingering shadows and odd corners that there used to be; none of those women in aprons carrying wobbly lamps which they put down carefully on this table and on that. At a touch, the whole room was bright. And the sky was bright all night long; and the pavements were bright; everything was bright. She came back again at mid-day. How narrow women had grown lately! They looked like stalks of corn, straight, shining, identical. And men’s faces were as bare as the palm of one’s hand. The dryness of the atmosphere brought out the colour in everything and seemed to stiffen the muscles of the cheeks. It was harder to cry now. Water was hot in two seconds. Ivy had perished or been scraped off houses. Vegetables were less fertile; families were much smaller. Curtains and covers had been frizzled up and the walls were bare so that new brilliantly coloured pictures of real things like streets, umbrellas, apples, were hung in frames, or painted upon the wood. There was something definite and distinct about the age, which reminded her of the eighteenth century, except that there was a distraction, a desperation—as she was thinking this, the immensely long tunnel in which she seemed to have been travelling for hundreds of years widened; the light poured in; her thoughts became mysteriously tightened and strung up as if a piano tuner had put his key in her back and stretched the nerves very taut; at the same time her hearing quickened; she could hear every whisper and crackle in the room so that the clock ticking on the mantelpiece beat like a hammer. And so for some seconds the light went on becoming brighter and brighter, and she saw everything more and more clearly and the clock ticked louder and louder until there was a terrific explosion right in her ear. Orlando leapt as if she had been violently struck on the head. Ten times she was struck. In fact it was ten o’clock in the morning. It was the eleventh of October. It was 1928. It was the present moment.

No one need wonder that Orlando started, pressed her hand to her heart, and turned pale. For what more terrifying revelation can there be than that it is the present moment? That we survive the shock at all is only possible because the past shelters us on one side and the future on another. But we have no time now for reflections; Orlando was terribly late already. She ran downstairs, she jumped into her motor-car, she pressed the self-starter and was off. Vast blue blocks of building rose into the air; the red cowls of chimneys were spotted irregularly across the sky; the road shone like silver-headed nails; omnibuses bore down upon her with sculptured white-faced drivers; she noticed sponges, bird-cages, boxes of green American cloth. But she did not allow these sights to sink into her mind even the fraction of an inch as she crossed the narrow plank of the present, lest she should fall into the raging torrent beneath. “Why don’t you look where you’re going to? … Put your hand out, can’t you?”—that was all she said sharply, as if the words were jerked out of her. For the streets were immensely crowded; people crossed without looking where they were going. People buzzed and hummed round the plate-glass windows within which one could see a glow of red, a blaze of yellow, as if they were bees, Orlando thought—but her thought that they were bees was violently snipped off and she saw, regaining perspective with one flick of her eye, that they were bodies. “Why don’t you look where you’re going?” she snapped out.

At last, however, she drew up at Marshall & Snelgrove’s and went into the shop. Shade and scent enveloped her. The present fell from her like drops of scalding water. Light swayed up and down like thin stuffs puffed out by a summer breeze. She took a list from her bag and began reading in a curious stiff voice at first as if she were holding the words—boy’s boots, bath salts, sardines—under a tap of many-coloured water. She watched them change as the light fell on them. Bath and boots became blunt, obtuse; sardines serrated itself like a saw. So she stood in the ground-floor department of Messrs. Marshall & Snelgrove; looked this way and that; snuffed this smell and that and thus wasted some seconds. Then she got into the lift, for the good reason that the door stood open; and was shot smoothly upwards. The very fabric of life now, she thought as she rose, is magic. In the eighteenth century, we knew how everything was done; but here I rise through the air; I listen to voices in America; I see men flying—but how it’s done, I can’t even begin to wonder. So my belief in magic returns. Now the lift gave a little jerk as it stopped at the first floor; and she had a vision of innumerable coloured stuffs flaunting in a breeze from which came distinct, strange smells; and each time the lift stopped and flung its doors open, there was another slice of the world displayed with all the smells of that world clinging to it. She was reminded of the river off Wapping in the time of Elizabeth, where the treasure ships and the merchant ships used to anchor. How richly and curiously they had smelt! How well she remembered the feel of rough rubies running through her fingers when she dabbled them in a treasure sack! And then lying with Sukey—or whatever her name was—and having Cumberland’s lantern flashed on them! The Cumberlands had a house in Portland Place now and she had lunched with them the other day and ventured a little joke with the old man about almshouses in the Sheen Road. He had winked. But here as the lift could go no higher, she must get out—Heaven knows into what ‘department’ as they called it. She stood still to consult her shopping list, but was blessed if she could see, as the list bade her, bath salts, or boy’s boots anywhere about. And indeed, she was about to descend again, without buying anything, but was saved from that outrage by saying aloud automatically the last item on her list; which happened to be “sheets for a double bed”.

“Sheets for a double bed,” she said to a man at a counter and, by a dispensation of Providence, it was sheets that the man at that particular counter happened to sell. For Grimsditch, no, Grimsditch was dead; Bartholomew, no, Bartholomew was dead; Louise then—Louise had come to her in a great taking the other day, for she had found a hole in the bottom of the sheet in the royal bed. Many kings and queens had slept there—Elizabeth; James; Charles; George; Victoria; Edward; no wonder the sheet had a hole in it. But Louise was positive she knew who had done it. It was the Prince Consort.

“Sale bosch!” she said (for there had been another war; this time against the Germans).

“Sheets for a double bed,” Orlando repeated dreamily, for a double bed with a silver counterpane in a room fitted in a taste which she now thought perhaps a little vulgar—all in silver; but she had furnished it when she had a passion for that metal. While the man went to get sheets for a double bed, she took out a little looking-glass and a powder puff. Women were not nearly as roundabout in their ways, she thought, powdering herself with the greatest unconcern, as they had been when she herself first turned woman and lay on the deck of the Enamoured Lady. She gave her nose the right tint deliberately. She never touched her cheeks. Honestly, though she was now thirty-six, she scarcely looked a day older. She looked just as pouting, as sulky, as handsome, as rosy (like a million-candled Christmas tree, Sasha had said) as she had done that day on the ice, when the Thames was frozen and they had gone skating——

“The best Irish linen, Ma’am,” said the shopman, spreading the sheets on the counter,—and they had met an old woman picking up sticks. Here, as she was fingering the linen abstractedly, one of the swing-doors between the departments opened and let through, perhaps from the fancy-goods department, a whiff of scent, waxen, tinted as if from pink candles, and the scent curved like a shell round a figure—was it a boy’s or was it a girl’s?—young, slender, seductive—a girl, by God! furred, pearled, in Russian trousers; but faithless, faithless!

“Faithless!” cried Orlando (the man had gone) and all the shop seemed to pitch and toss with yellow water and far off she saw the masts of the Russian ship standing out to sea, and then, miraculously (perhaps the door opened again) the conch which the scent had made became a platform, a dais, off which stepped a fat, furred woman, marvellously well preserved, seductive, diademed, a Grand Duke’s mistress; she who, leaning over the banks of the Volga, eating sandwiches, had watched men drown; and began walking down the shop towards her.

“Oh Sasha!” Orlando cried. Really, she was shocked that she should have come to this; she had grown so fat; so lethargic; and she bowed her head over the linen so that this apparition of a grey woman in fur, and a girl in Russian trousers, with all these smells of wax candles, white flowers, and old ships that it brought with it might pass behind her back unseen.

“Any napkins, towels, dusters to-day, Ma’am?” the shopman persisted. And it is enormously to the credit of the shopping list, which Orlando now consulted, that she was able to reply with every appearance of composure, that there was only one thing in the world she wanted and that was bath salts; which was in another department.

But descending in the lift again—so insidious is the repetition of any scene—she was again sunk far beneath the present moment; and thought when the lift bumped on the ground, that she heard a pot broken against a river bank. As for finding the right department, whatever it might be, she stood engrossed among the handbags, deaf to the suggestions of all the polite, black, combed, sprightly shop assistants, who descending as they did equally and some of them, perhaps, as proudly, even from such depths of the past as she did, chose to let down the impervious screen of the present so that to-day they appeared shop assistants in Marshall & Snelgrove’s merely. Orlando stood there hesitating. Through the great glass doors she could see the traffic in Oxford Street. Omnibus seemed to pile itself upon omnibus and then to jerk itself apart. So the ice blocks had pitched and tossed that day on the Thames. An old nobleman in furred slippers had sat astride one of them. There he went—she could see him now—calling down maledictions upon the Irish rebels. He had sunk there, where her car stood.

“Time has passed over me,” she thought, trying to collect herself; “this is the oncome of middle age. How strange it is! Nothing is any longer one thing. I take up a handbag and I think of an old bumboat woman frozen in the ice. Someone lights a pink candle and I see a girl in Russian trousers. When I step out of doors—as I do now,” here she stepped on to the pavement of Oxford Street, “what is it that I taste? Little herbs. I hear goat bells. I see mountains. Turkey? India? Persia?” Her eyes filled with tears.

That Orlando had gone a little too far from the present moment will, perhaps, strike the reader who sees her now preparing to get into her motor-car with her eyes full of tears and visions of Persian mountains. And indeed, it cannot be denied that the most successful practitioners of the art of life, often unknown people by the way, somehow contrive to synchronise the sixty or seventy different times which beat simultaneously in every normal human system so that when eleven strikes, all the rest chime in unison, and the present is neither a violent disruption nor completely forgotten in the past. Of them we can justly say that they live precisely the sixty-eight or seventy-two years allotted them on the tombstone. Of the rest some we know to be dead though they walk among us; some are not yet born though they go through the forms of life; others are hundreds of years old though they call themselves thirty-six. The true length of a person’s life, whatever the Dictionary of National Biography may say, is always a matter of dispute. For it is a difficult business—this time-keeping; nothing more quickly disorders it than contact with any of the arts; and it may have been her love of poetry that was to blame for making Orlando lose her shopping list and start home without the sardines, the bath salts, or the boots. Now as she stood with her hand on the door of her motor-car, the present again struck her on the head. Eleven times she was violently assaulted.

“Confound it all!” she cried, for it is a great shock to the nervous system, hearing a clock strike—so much so that for some time now there is nothing to be said of her save that she frowned slightly, changed her gears admirably, and cried out, as before, “Look where you’re going!” “Don’t you know your own mind?” “Why didn’t you say so then?” while the motor-car shot, swung, squeezed, and slid, for she was an expert driver, down Regent Street, down Haymarket, down Northumberland Avenue, over Westminster Bridge, to the left, straight on, to the right, straight on again….

The old Kent Road was very crowded on Thursday, the eleventh of October 1928. People spilt off the pavement. There were women with shopping bags. Children ran out. There were sales at drapers’ shops. Streets widened and narrowed. Long vistas steadily shrunk together. Here was a market. Here a funeral. Here a procession with banners upon which was written “Ra—Un”, but what else? Meat was very red. Butchers stood at the door. Women almost had their heels sliced off. Amor Vin—that was over a porch. A woman looked out of a bedroom window, profoundly contemplative, and very still. Applejohn and Applebed, Undert—. Nothing could be seen whole or read from start to finish. What was seen begun—like two friends starting to meet each other across the street—was never seen ended. After twenty minutes the body and mind were like scraps of torn paper tumbling from a sack and, indeed, the process of motoring fast out of London so much resembles the chopping up small of identity which precedes unconsciousness and perhaps death itself that it is an open question in what sense Orlando can be said to have existed at the present moment. Indeed we should have given her over for a person entirely disassembled were it not that here, at last, one green screen was held out on the right, against which the little bits of paper fell more slowly; and then another was held out on the left so that one could see the separate scraps now turning over by themselves in the air; and then green screens were held continuously on either side, so that her mind regained the illusion of holding things within itself and she saw a cottage, a farmyard and four cows, all precisely life-size.

When this happened, Orlando heaved a sigh of relief, lit a cigarette, and puffed for a minute or two in silence. Then she called hesitatingly, as if the person she wanted might not be there, “Orlando?” For if there are (at a venture) seventy-six different times all ticking in the mind at once, how many different people are there not—Heaven help us—all having lodgment at one time or another in the human spirit? Some say two thousand and fifty-two. So that it is the most usual thing in the world for a person to call, directly they are alone, Orlando? (if that is one’s name) meaning by that, Come, come! I’m sick to death of this particular self. I want another. Hence, the astonishing changes we see in our friends. But it is not altogether plain sailing, either, for though one may say, as Orlando said (being out in the country and needing another self presumably) Orlando? still the Orlando she needs may not come; these selves of which we are built up, one on top of another, as plates are piled on a waiter’s hand, have attachments elsewhere, sympathies, little constitutions and rights of their own, call them what you will (and for many of these things there is no name) so that one will only come if it is raining, another in a room with green curtains, another when Mrs. Jones is not there, another if you can promise it a glass of wine—and so on; for everybody can multiply from his own experience the different terms which his different selves have made with him—and some are too wildly ridiculous to be mentioned in print at all.

So Orlando, at the turn by the barn, called “Orlando?” with a note of interrogation in her voice and waited. Orlando did not come.

“All right then,” Orlando said, with the good humour people practise on these occasions; and tried another. For she had a great variety of selves to call upon, far more than we have been able to find room for, since a biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many thousand. Choosing then, only those selves we have found room for, Orlando may now have called on the boy who cut the nigger’s head down; the boy who strung it up again; the boy who sat on the hill; the boy who saw the poet; the boy who handed the Queen the bowl of rose water; or she may have called upon the young man who fell in love with Sasha; or upon the Courtier; or upon the Ambassador; or upon the Soldier; or upon the Traveller; or she may have wanted the woman to come to her; the Gipsy; the Fine Lady; the Hermit; the girl in love with life; the Patroness of Letters; the woman who called Mar (meaning hot baths and evening fires) or Shelmerdine (meaning crocuses in autumn woods) or Bonthrop (meaning the death we die daily) or all three together—which meant more things than we have space to write out—all were different and she may have called upon any one of them.

Perhaps; but what appeared certain (for we are now in the region of ‘perhaps’ and ‘appears’) was that the one she needed most kept aloof, for she was, to hear her talk, changing her selves as quickly as she drove—there was a new one at every corner—as happens when, for some unaccountable reason, the conscious self, which is the uppermost, and has the power to desire, wishes to be nothing but one self. This is what some people call the true self, and it is, they say, compact of all the selves we have it in us to be; commanded and locked up by the Captain self, the Key self, which amalgamates and controls them all. Orlando was certainly seeking this self as the reader can judge from overhearing her talk as she drove (and if it is rambling talk, disconnected, trivial, dull, and sometimes unintelligible, it is the reader’s fault for listening to a lady talking to herself; we only copy her words as she spoke them, adding in brackets which self in our opinion is speaking, but in this we may well be wrong).

“What then? Who then?” she said. “Thirty-six; in a motor car; a woman. Yes, but a million other things as well. A snob am I? The garter in the hall? The leopards? My ancestors? Proud of them? Yes! Greedy, luxurious, vicious? Am I? (here a new self came in). Don’t care a damn if I am. Truthful? I think so. Generous? Oh, but that don’t count (here a new self came in). Lying in bed of a morning listening to the pigeons on fine linen; silver dishes; wine; maids; footmen. Spoilt? Perhaps. Too many things for nothing. Hence my books (here she mentioned fifty classical titles; which represented, so we think, the early romantic works that she tore up). Facile, glib, romantic. But (here another self came in) a duffer, a fumbler. More clumsy I couldn’t be. And—and—(here she hesitated for a word and if we suggest ‘Love’ we may be wrong, but certainly she laughed and blushed and then cried out—) A toad set in emeralds! Harry the Archduke! Blue-bottles on the ceiling! (here another self came in). But Nell, Kit, Sasha? (she was sunk in gloom: tears actually shaped themselves and she had long given over crying). Trees, she said. (Here another self came in.) I love trees (she was passing a clump) growing there a thousand years. And barns (she passed a tumble-down barn at the edge of the road). And sheep dogs (here one came trotting across the road. She carefully avoided it). And the night. But people (here another self came in). People? (She repeated it as a question.) I don’t know. Chattering, spiteful, always telling lies. (Here she turned into the High Street of her native town, which was crowded, for it was market day, with farmers, and shepherds, and old women with hens in baskets.) I like peasants. I understand crops. But (here another self came skipping over the top of her mind like the beam from a lighthouse). Fame! (She laughed.) Fame! Seven editions. A prize. Photographs in the evening papers (here she alluded to the ‘Oak Tree’ and ‘The Burdett Coutts’ Memorial Prize which she had won; and we must snatch space to remark how discomposing it is for her biographer that this culmination to which the whole book moved, this peroration with which the book was to end, should be dashed from us on a laugh casually like this; but the truth is that when we write of a woman, everything is out of place—culminations and perorations; the accent never falls where it does with a man). Fame! she repeated. A poet—a charlatan; both every morning as regularly as the post comes in. To dine, to meet; to meet, to dine; fame—fame! (She had here to slow down to pass through the crowd of market people. But no one noticed her. A porpoise in a fishmonger’s shop attracted far more attention than a lady who had won a prize and might, had she chosen, have worn three coronets one on top of another on her brow.) Driving very slowly she now hummed as if it were part of an old song, “With my guineas I’ll buy flowering trees, flowering trees, flowering trees and walk among my flowering trees and tell my sons what fame is”. So she hummed, and now all her words began to sag here and there like a barbaric necklace of heavy beads. “And walk among my flowering trees”, she sang, accenting the words strongly, “and see the moon rise slow, the waggons go….” Here she stopped short, and looked ahead of her intently at the bonnet of the car in profound meditation.

“He sat at Twitchett’s table”, she mused, “with a dirty ruff on…. Was it old Mr. Baker come to measure the timber? Or was it Sh—p—re? (for when we speak names we deeply reverence to ourselves we never speak them whole). She gazed for ten minutes ahead of her, letting the car come almost to a standstill.

“Haunted!” she cried, suddenly pressing the accelerator. “Haunted! ever since I was a child. There flies the wild goose. It flies past the window out to sea. Up I jumped (she gripped the steering-wheel tighter) and stretched after it. But the goose flies too fast. I’ve seen it, here—there—there—England, Persia, Italy. Always it flies fast out to sea and always I fling after it words like nets (here she flung her hand out) which shrivel as I’ve seen nets shrivel drawn on deck with only sea-weed in them; and sometimes there’s an inch of silver—six words—in the bottom of the net. But never the great fish who lives in the coral groves.” Here she bent her head, pondering deeply.

And it was at this moment, when she had ceased to call “Orlando” and was deep in thoughts of something else, that the Orlando whom she had called came of its own accord; as was proved by the change that now came over her (she had passed through the lodge gates and was entering the park).

The whole of her darkened and settled, as when some foil whose addition makes the round and solidity of a surface is added to it, and the shallow becomes deep and the near distant; and all is contained as water is contained by the sides of a well. So she was now darkened, stilled, and become, with the addition of this Orlando, what is called, rightly or wrongly, a single self, a real self. And she fell silent. For it is probable that when people talk aloud, the selves (of which there may be more than two thousand) are conscious of disseverment, and are trying to communicate, but when communication is established they fall silent.

Masterfully, swiftly, she drove up the curving drive between the elms and oaks through the falling turf of the park whose fall was so gentle that had it been water it would have spread the beach with a smooth green tide. Planted here and in solemn groups were beech trees and oak trees. The deer stepped among them, one white as snow, another with its head on one side, for some wire netting had caught in its horns. All this, the trees, deer, and turf, she observed with the greatest satisfaction as if her mind had become a fluid that flowed round things and enclosed them completely. Next minute she drew up in the courtyard where, for so many hundred years she had come, on horseback or in coach and six, with men riding before or coming after; where plumes had tossed, torches flashed, and the same flowering trees that let their leaves drop now had shaken their blossoms. Now she was alone. The autumn leaves were falling. The porter opened the great gates. “Morning, James,” she said, “there’re some things in the car. Will you bring ’em in?” words of no beauty, interest, or significance themselves, it will be conceded, but now so plumped out with meaning that they fell like ripe nuts from a tree, and proved that when the shrivelled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning it satisfies the senses amazingly. This was true indeed of every movement and action now, usual though they were; so that to see Orlando change her skirt for a pair of whipcord breeches and leather jacket, which she did in less than three minutes, was to be ravished with the beauty of movement as if Madame Lopokova were using her highest art. Then she strode into the dining-room where her old friends Dryden, Pope, Swift, Addison regarded her demurely at first as who should say Here’s the prize winner! but when they reflected that two hundred guineas was in question, they nodded their heads approvingly. Two hundred guineas, they seemed to say; two hundred guineas are not to be sniffed at. She cut herself a slice of bread and ham, clapped the two together and began to eat, striding up and down the room, thus shedding her company habits in a second, without thinking. After five or six such turns, she tossed off a glass of red Spanish wine, and, filling another which she carried in her hand, strode down the long corridor and through a dozen drawing-rooms and so began a perambulation of the house, attended by such elk-hounds and spaniels as chose to follow her.

This, too, was all in the day’s routine. As soon would she come home and leave her own grandmother without a kiss as come back and leave the house unvisited. She fancied that the rooms brightened as she came in; stirred, opened their eyes as if they had been dozing in her absence. She fancied, too, that, hundreds and thousands of times as she had seen them, they never looked the same twice, as if so long a life as theirs had stored in them a myriad moods which changed with winter and summer, bright weather and dark, and her own fortunes and the people’s characters who visited them. Polite, they always were to strangers, but a little weary; with her, they were entirely open and at their ease. Why not indeed? They had known each other for close on four centuries now. They had nothing to conceal. She knew their sorrows and joys. She knew what age each part of them was and its little secrets—a hidden drawer, a concealed cupboard, or some deficiency perhaps, such as a part made up, or added later. They, too, knew her in all her moods and changes. She had hidden nothing from them; had come to them as boy and woman, crying and dancing, brooding and gay. In this window-seat, she had written her first verses; in that chapel, she had been married. And she would be buried here, she reflected, kneeling on the window-sill in the long gallery and sipping her Spanish wine. Though she could hardly fancy it, the body of the heraldic leopard would be making yellow pools on the floor the day they lowered her to lie among her ancestors. She, who believed in no immortality, could not help feeling that her soul would come and go forever with the reds on the panels and the greens on the sofa. For the room—she had strolled into the Ambassador’s bedroom—shone like a shell that has lain at the bottom of the sea for centuries and has been crusted over and painted a million tints by the water; it was rose and yellow, green and sand-coloured. It was frail as a shell, as iridescent and as empty. No Ambassador would ever sleep there again. Ah, but she knew where the heart of the house still beat. Gently opening a door, she stood on the threshold so that (as she fancied) the room could not see her and watched the tapestry rising and falling on the eternal faint breeze which never failed to move it. Still the hunter rode; still Daphne flew. The heart still beat, she thought, however faintly, however far withdrawn; the frail indomitable heart of the immense building.

Now, calling her troop of dogs to her she passed down the gallery whose floor was laid with whole oak trees sawn across. Rows of chairs with all their velvets faded stood ranged against the wall holding their arms out for Elizabeth, for James, for Shakespeare it might be, for Cecil, who never came. The sight made her gloomy. She unhooked the rope that fenced them off. She sat on the Queen’s chair; she opened a manuscript book lying on Lady Betty’s table; she stirred her fingers in the aged rose leaves; she brushed her short hair with King James’ silver brushes; she bounced up and down upon his bed (but no King would ever sleep there again, for all Louise’s new sheets) and pressed her cheek against the worn silver counterpane that lay upon it. But everywhere were little lavender bags to keep the moth out and printed notices, “Please do not touch”, which, though she had put them there herself, seemed to rebuke her. The house was no longer hers entirely, she sighed. It belonged to time now; to history; was past the touch and control of the living. Never would beer be spilt here any more, she thought (she was in the bedroom that had been old Nick Greene’s), or holes burnt in the carpet. Never two hundred servants come running and brawling down the corridors with warming pans and great branches for the great fireplaces. Never would ale be brewed and candles made and saddles fashioned and stone shaped in the workshops outside the house. Hammers and mallets were silent now. Chairs and beds were empty; tankards of silver and gold were locked in glass cases. The great wings of silence beat up and down the empty house.

So she sat at the end of the gallery with her dogs couched round her, in Queen Elizabeth’s hard armchair. The gallery stretched far away to a point where the light almost failed. It was as a tunnel bored deep into the past. As her eyes peered down it, she could see people laughing and talking; the great men she had known; Dryden, Swift, and Pope; and statesmen in colloquy; and lovers dallying in the window-seats; and people eating and drinking at the long tables; and the wood smoke curling round their heads and making them sneeze and cough. Still further down, she saw sets of splendid dancers formed for the quadrille. A fluty, frail, but nevertheless stately music began to play. An organ boomed. A coffin was borne into the chapel. A marriage procession came out of it. Armed men with helmets left for the wars. They brought banners back from Flodden and Poitiers and stuck them on the wall. The long gallery filled itself thus, and still peering further, she thought she could make out at the very end, beyond the Elizabethans and the Tudors, some one older, further, darker, a cowled figure, monastic, severe, a monk, who went with his hands clasped, and a book in them, murmuring——

Like thunder, the stable clock struck four. Never did any earthquake so demolish a whole town. The gallery and all its occupants fell to powder. Her own face, that had been dark and sombre as she gazed, was lit as by an explosion of gunpowder. In this same light everything near her showed with extreme distinctness. She saw two flies circling round and noticed the blue sheen on their bodies; she saw a knot in the wood where her foot was, and her dog’s ear twitching. At the same time, she heard a bough creaking in the garden, a sheep coughing in the park, a swift screaming past the window. Her own body quivered and tingled as if suddenly stood naked in a hard frost. Yet, she kept, as she had not done when the clock struck ten in London, complete composure (for she was now one and entire, and presented, it may be, a larger surface to the shock of time). She rose, but without precipitation, called her dogs, and went firmly but with great alertness of movement down the staircase and out into the garden. Here the shadows of the plants were miraculously distinct. She noticed the separate grains of earth in the flower beds as if she had a microscope stuck to her eye. She saw the intricacy of the twigs of every tree. Each blade of grass was distinct and the marking of veins and petals. She saw Stubbs, the gardener, coming along the path, and every button on his gaiters was visible; she saw Betty and Prince, the cart horses, and never had she marked so clearly the white star on Betty’s forehead, and the three long hairs that fell down below the rest on Prince’s tail. Out in the quadrangle the old grey walls of the house looked like a scraped new photograph; she heard the loud speaker condensing on the terrace a dance tune that people were listening to in the red velvet opera house at Vienna. Braced and strung up by the present moment she was also strangely afraid, as if whenever the gulf of time gaped and let a second through some unknown danger might come with it. The tension was too relentless and too rigorous to be endured long without discomfort. She walked more briskly than she liked, as if her legs were moved for her, through the garden and out into the park. Here she forced herself, by a great effort, to stop by the carpenter’s shop, and to stand stock-still watching Joe Stubbs fashion a cart wheel. She was standing with her eye fixed on his hand when the quarter struck. It hurtled through her like a meteor, so hot that no fingers can hold it. She saw with disgusting vividness that the thumb on Joe’s right hand was without a finger nail and there was a raised saucer of pink flesh where the nail should have been. The sight was so repulsive that she felt faint for a moment, but in that moment’s darkness, when her eyelids flickered, she was relieved of the pressure of the present. There was something strange in the shadow that the flicker of her eyes cast, something which (as anyone can test for himself by looking now at the sky) is always absent from the present—whence its terror, its nondescript character—something one trembles to pin through the body with a name and call beauty, for it has no body, is as a shadow without substance or quality of its own, yet has the power to change whatever it adds itself to. This shadow now, while she flickered her eye in her faintness in the carpenter’s shop, stole out, and attaching itself to the innumerable sights she had been receiving, composed them into something tolerable, comprehensible. Her mind began to toss like the sea. Yes, she thought, heaving a deep sigh of relief, as she turned from the carpenter’s shop to climb the hill, I can begin to live again. I am by the Serpentine, she thought, the little boat is climbing through the white arch of a thousand deaths. I am about to understand….

Orlando at the present time

Those were her words, spoken quite distinctly, but we cannot conceal the fact that she was now a very indifferent witness to the truth of what was before her and might easily have mistaken a sheep for a cow, or an old man called Smith for one who was called Jones and was no relation of his whatever. For the shadow of faintness which the thumb without a nail had cast had deepened now, at the back of her brain (which is the part furthest from sight), into a pool where things dwell in darkness so deep that what they are we scarcely know. She now looked down into this pool or sea in which everything is reflected—and, indeed, some say that all our most violent passions, and art and religion, are the reflections which we see in the dark hollow at the back of the head when the visible world is obscured for the time. She looked there now, long, deeply, profoundly, and immediately the ferny path up the hill along which she was walking became not entirely a path, but partly the Serpentine; the hawthorn bushes were partly ladies and gentlemen sitting with card-cases and gold-mounted canes; the sheep were partly tall Mayfair houses; everything was partly something else, as if her mind had become a forest with glades branching here and there; things came nearer, and further, and mingled and separated and made the strangest alliances and combinations in an incessant chequer of light and shade. Except when Canute, the elk-hound, chased a rabbit and so reminded her that it must be about half past four—it was indeed twenty-three minutes to six—she forgot the time.

The ferny path led, with many turns and windings, higher and higher to the oak tree, which stood on the top. The tree had grown bigger, sturdier, and more knotted since she had known it, somewhere about the year 1588, but it was still in the prime of life. The little sharply frilled leaves were still fluttering thickly on its branches. Flinging herself on the ground, she felt the bones of the tree running out like ribs from a spine this way and that beneath her. She liked to think that she was riding the back of the world. She liked to attach herself to something hard. As she flung herself down a little square book bound in red cloth fell from the breast of her leather jacket—her poem The Oak Tree. “I should have brought a trowel,” she reflected. The earth was so shallow over the roots that it seemed doubtful if she could do as she meant and bury the book here. Besides, the dogs would dig it up. No luck ever attends these symbolical celebrations, she thought. Perhaps it would be as well then to do without them. She had a little speech on the tip of her tongue which she meant to speak over the book as she buried it. (It was a copy of the first edition, signed by author and artist.) “I bury this as a tribute,” she was going to have said, “a return to the land of what the land has given me,” but Lord! once one began mouthing words aloud, how silly they sounded! She was reminded of old Greene getting upon a platform the other day comparing her with Milton (save for his blindness) and handing her a cheque for two hundred guineas. She had thought then, of the oak tree here on its hill, and what has that got to do with this, she had wondered? What has praise and fame to do with poetry? What has seven editions (the book had already gone into no less) got to do with the value of it? Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice? So that all this chatter and praise and blame and meeting people who admired one and meeting people who did not admire one was as ill suited as could be to the thing itself—a voice answering a voice. What could have been more secret, she thought, more slow, and like the intercourse of lovers, than the stammering answer she had made all these years to the old crooning song of the woods, and the farms and the brown horses standing at the gate, neck to neck, and the smithy and the kitchen and the fields, so laboriously bearing wheat, turnips, grass, and the garden blowing irises and fritillaries?

So she let her book lie unburied and dishevelled on the ground, and watched the vast view, varied like an ocean floor this evening with the sun lightening it and the shadows darkening it. There was a village with a church tower among elm trees; a grey domed manor house in a park; a spark of light burning on some glass-house; a farmyard with yellow corn stacks. The fields were marked with black tree clumps, and beyond the fields stretched long woodlands, and there was the gleam of a river, and then hills again. In the far distance Snowdon’s crags broke white among the clouds; she saw the far Scottish hills and the wild tides that swirl about the Hebrides. She listened for the sound of gun-firing out at sea. No—only the wind blew. There was no war to-day. Drake had gone; Nelson had gone. “And there”, she thought, letting her eyes, which had been looking at these far distances, drop once more to the land beneath her, “was my land once: that Castle between the downs was mine; and all that moor running almost to the sea was mine.” Here the landscape (it must have been some trick of the fading light) shook itself, heaped itself, let all this encumbrance of houses, castles, and woods slide off its tent-shaped sides. The bare mountains of Turkey were before her. It was blazing noon. She looked straight at the baked hill-side. Goats cropped the sandy tufts at her feet. An eagle soared above her. The raucous voice of old Rustum, the gipsy, croaked in her ears, “What is your antiquity and your race, and your possessions compared with this? What do you need with four hundred bedrooms and silver lids on all your dishes, and housemaids dusting?”

At this moment some church clock chimed in the valley. The tent-like landscape collapsed and fell. The present showered down upon her head once more, but now that the light was fading, gentlier than before, calling into view nothing detailed, nothing small, but only misty fields, cottages with lamps in them, the slumbering bulk of a wood, and a fan-shaped light pushing the darkness before it along some lane. Whether it had struck nine, ten, or eleven, she could not say. Night had come—night that she loved of all times, night in which the reflections in the dark pool of the mind shine more clearly than by day. It was not necessary to faint now in order to look deep into the darkness where things shape themselves and to see in the pool of the mind now Shakespeare, now a girl in Russian trousers, now a toy boat on the Serpentine, and then the Atlantic itself, where it storms in great waves past Cape Horn. She looked into the darkness. There was her husband’s brig, rising to the top of the wave! Up, it went, and up and up. The white arch of a thousand deaths rose before it. Oh rash, oh ridiculous man, always sailing, so uselessly, round Cape Horn in the teeth of a gale! But the brig was through the arch and out on the other side; it was safe at last!

“Ecstasy!” she cried, “ecstasy!” And then the wind sank, the waters grew calm; and she saw the waves rippling peacefully in the moonlight.

“Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine!” she cried, standing by the oak tree.

The beautiful, glittering name fell out of the sky like a steel-blue feather. She watched it fall, turning and twisting like a slow-falling arrow that cleaves the deep air beautifully. He was coming, as he always came, in moments of dead calm; when the wave rippled and the spotted leaves fell slowly over her foot in the autumn woods; when the leopard was still; the moon was on the waters, and nothing moved between sky and sea. Then he came.

All was still now. It was near midnight. The moon rose slowly over the weald. Its light raised a phantom castle upon earth. There stood the great house with all its windows robed in silver. Of wall or substance there was none. All was phantom. All was still. All was lit as for the coming of a dead Queen. Gazing below her, Orlando saw dark plumes tossing in the courtyard, and torches flickering and shadows kneeling. A Queen once more stepped from her chariot.

“The house is at your service, Ma’am,” she cried, curtseying deeply. “Nothing has been changed. The dead Lord, my father, shall lead you in.”

As she spoke, the first stroke of midnight sounded. The cold breeze of the present brushed her face with its little breath of fear. She looked anxiously into the sky. It was dark with clouds now. The wind roared in her ears. But in the roar of the wind she heard the roar of an aeroplane coming nearer and nearer.

“Here! Shel, here!” she cried, baring her breast to the moon (which now showed bright) so that her pearls glowed like the eggs of some vast moon-spider. The aeroplane rushed out of the clouds and stood over her head. It hovered above her. Her pearls burnt like a phosphorescent flare in the darkness.

And as Shelmerdine, now grown a fine sea captain, hale, fresh-coloured, and alert, leapt to the ground, there sprang up over his head a single wild bird.

“It is the goose!” Orlando cried. “The wild goose….”

And the twelfth stroke of midnight sounded; the twelfth stroke of midnight, Thursday, the eleventh of October, Nineteen hundred and Twenty Eight.

[]

Index.

A., Lord, 175

Abbey, Westminster, 52

Addison, Joseph, 152, 17g, 192

Alexandra, Queen, 73

Anne, Queen, 176

Archduchess Harriet of Finster-Aarhom (see Archduke Harry), 105, 161-164

Archduke, Harry, the, 221

Arlington House, 177

Bartholomew, Widow, 211, 212, 217

Bartolus, Captain Nicholas Benedict, 141, 147, 179

Basket, Butler, 214

Boswell, James, 201

Brigge, John Fenner, 116, 122

Browne, Sir Thomas, 68, 71,83

Browning, Robert, 250

C., Marquis of, 175, 221

Canute, the elk-hound, 222

Carlyle, Thomas, 250

Carpenter, Nurse, 66

Charles the Second, King, 109

Chesterfield, Lady, 174

Chesterfield, Lord, 193, 260

Chubb, Eusebius, 207

Cicero, 95

Clorinda, 32

Consort, the Prince, 271

Cumberland, Earl of, 30, 270

Deffand, Madame du, 181

Donne, John, 83, 256

Drake, 293

Dryden, John, 152, 179, 287

Dupper, Mr., 65, 70, 78, 154, 155, 235

Elizabeth, Queen, 21, 23, 24, 26, 27, 93

Euphrosyne, 32

Favilla, 32

Field, Mrs., 66

Frost, the Great, 33

Gladstone, Mrs., 230

Greene, Nicholas (afterwards Sir), 78-87, 95, 249, 291

Greenwich, 81

Grimsditch, Mrs., 65, 68, 70, 100, 154, 155, 271

Gulliver’s Travels, 191

Gwynn, Nell, 109

Hall, the falconer, 70

Hartopp, Miss Penelope, 118

Hercules, Death of, tragedy by Orlando, 87

Isham, Mr., 78

James the First, King, 34, 62, 93

Johnson, Samuel, 201

Jonson, Ben, 83

Kew Gardens, 263

Keynes, Mrs. J. M. (see Lopokova, Madame)

Leicester Square, 195

Lock, Rape of the, 189

Lopokova, Madame, 283

Louise, 271

M., Mr., 175, 221

Marlowe, 82, 83

Marshall & Snelgrove’s, 269

Mary, Queen of Scots, 156

Melbourne, Lord, 2I8

Moray, the Earl of, 38

Nell, 197

Nelson, 293

Oak Tree, The, 73, 244, 248, 252, 280, 291

Orlando, appearance as a boy, 17; writes his first play, 18; visits Queen at Whitehall, 25; made Treasurer and Steward, 25; his loves, 27; and Russian Princess, 36-61; his first trance, 63; retires into solitude, 65; love of reading, 69; his romantic dramas, literary ambitions, 72, 76, 77, 94, 96, 97; and Greene, 79, 85, 88; his greatgrandmother Moll, 80; buys elk-hounds, 89; and his poem The Oak Tree, 90, 104, 133, 157, 213; and his house, 98-103; and the Archduchess Harriet, 105-107; Ambassador at Constantinople, 109-129; created a Duke, 116; second trance, 121; marriage to Rosina Pepita, a gipsy, 122; becomes a woman, 126; with the gipsies, 130-139; returns to England, 139; lawsuits, 153; and Archduke Harry, 163; in London society, 175; entertains the wits, 188; and Mr. Pope, 192; and Nell, 197; confused with her cousin, 199; returns to her country house, 211; breaks her ankle, 223; declared a woman, 229; engagement, 225; marriage, 235; birth of her first son, 266

Othello, 54

Palmerston, Lord, 241

Pippin, the spaniel, 177

Pope, Alexander, 152, 179, 183, 184, 192, 194, 287

Princess, the Russian, 36-40, 46, 50, 74, 148, 159, 272

R., Countess of, 179, 180

R., Lady, 183, 246

Railway, the, 245

Robinson, Grace, 66

Rossetti, Miss Christina, 262

Rustum el Sadi, 132. 135, 158, 293

St. Paul’s, 50, 52

Salisbury, Lady, 174

Scrope, Sir Adrian, 116, 119, 120

Shakespeare, William, 22,75, 281

Shelmerdine, Marmaduke Bonthrop, 226, 294, 295

Smiles, 257

Spectator, the, 190

Spenser, 255

Stewkley, Mrs., 22, 66

Stubbs, Joe, 288

Suffolk, Lady, 174

Swift, Jonathan, 287

Tavistock, Lady, 174

Tennyson, the late Lord, 188, 250

Tupper, 257

Tyrconnel, The Lady Margaret, 41

Vere, Lord Francis, 38

Victoria, Queen, 214, 218, 230

Williams, Mrs., 201

Wren, Christopher, 195

the end

[]

A ROOM
OF
ONE’S OWN

by
Virginia Woolf

published
October 24, 1929
by
The Hogarth Press

a room of one’s own

Chapter I.

Chapter II.

Chapter III.

Chapter IV.

Chapter V.

Chapter VI.

[]

[The text follows the 1929 Hogarth Press edition.]

This essay is based upon two papers read to the Arts Society at Newnham and the Odtaa at Girton in October 1928. The papers were too long to be read in full, and have since been altered and expanded.

Chapter I.

But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction—what has that got to do with a room of one’s own? I will try to explain. When you asked me to speak about women and fiction I sat down on the banks of a river and began to wonder what the words meant. They might mean simply a few remarks about Fanny Burney; a few more about Jane Austen; a tribute to the Brontës and a sketch of Haworth Parsonage under snow; some witticisms if possible about Miss Mitford; a respectful allusion to George Eliot; a reference to Mrs. Gaskell and one would have done. But at second sight the words seemed not so simple. The title women and fiction might mean, and you may have meant it to mean, women and what they are like; or it might mean women and the fiction that they write; or it might mean women and the fiction that is written about them; or it might mean that somehow all three are inextricably mixed together and you want me to consider them in that light. But when I began to consider the subject in this last way, which seemed the most interesting, I soon saw that it had one fatal drawback. I should never be able to come to a conclusion. I should never be able to fulfil what is, I understand, the first duty of a lecturer—to hand you after an hour’s discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your notebooks and keep on the mantelpiece for ever. All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point—a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved. I have shirked the duty of coming to a conclusion upon these two questions—women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems. But in order to make some amends I am going to do what I can to show you how I arrived at this opinion about the room and the money. I am going to develop in your presence as fully and freely as I can the train of thought which led me to think this. Perhaps if I lay bare the ideas, the prejudices, that lie behind this statement you will find that they have some bearing upon women and some upon fiction. At any rate, when a subject is highly controversial—and any question about sex is that—one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold. One can only give one’s audience the chance of drawing their own conclusions as they observe the limitations, the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies of the speaker. Fiction here is likely to contain more truth than fact. Therefore I propose, making use of all the liberties and licences of a novelist, to tell you the story of the two days that preceded my coming here—how, bowed down by the weight of the subject which you have laid upon my shoulders, I pondered it, and made it work in and out of my daily life. I need not say that what I am about to describe has no existence; Oxbridge is an invention; so is Fernham; “I” is only a convenient term for somebody who has no real being. Lies will flow from my lips, but there may perhaps be some truth mixed up with them; it is for you to seek out this truth and to decide whether any part of it is worth keeping. If not, you will of course throw the whole of it into the waste-paper basket and forget all about it.

Here then was I (call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any name you please—it is not a matter of any importance) sitting on the banks of a river a week or two ago in fine October weather, lost in thought. That collar I have spoken of, women and fiction, the need of coming to some conclusion on a subject that raises all sorts of prejudices and passions, bowed my head to the ground. To the right and left bushes of some sort, golden and crimson, glowed with the colour, even it seemed burnt with the heat, of fire. On the further bank the willows wept in perpetual lamentation, their hair about their shoulders. The river reflected whatever it chose of sky and bridge and burning tree, and when the undergraduate had oared his boat through the reflections they closed again, completely, as if he had never been. There one might have sat the clock round lost in thought. Thought—to call it by a prouder name than it deserved—had let its line down into the stream. It swayed, minute after minute, hither and thither among the reflections and the weeds, letting the water lift it and sink it, until—you know the little tug—the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the end of one’s line: and then the cautious hauling of it in, and the careful laying of it out? Alas, laid on the grass how small, how insignificant this thought of mine looked; the sort of fish that a good fisherman puts back into the water so that it may grow fatter and be one day worth cooking and eating. I will not trouble you with that thought now, though if you look carefully you may find it for yourselves in the course of what I am going to say.

But however small it was, it had, nevertheless, the mysterious property of its kind—put back into the mind, it became at once very exciting, and important; and as it darted and sank, and flashed hither and thither, set up such a wash and tumult of ideas that it was impossible to sit still. It was thus that I found myself walking with extreme rapidity across a grass plot. Instantly a man’s figure rose to intercept me. Nor did I at first understand that the gesticulations of a curious-looking object, in a cut-away coat and evening shirt, were aimed at me. His face expressed horror and indignation. Instinct rather than reason came to my help; he was a Beadle; I was a woman. This was the turf; there was the path. Only the Fellows and Scholars are allowed here; the gravel is the place for me. Such thoughts were the work of a moment. As I regained the path the arms of the Beadle sank, his face assumed its usual repose, and though turf is better walking than gravel, no very great harm was done. The only charge I could bring against the Fellows and Scholars of whatever the college might happen to be was that in protection of their turf, which has been rolled for 300 years in succession, they had sent my little fish into hiding.

What idea it had been that had sent me so audaciously trespassing I could not now remember. The spirit of peace descended like a cloud from heaven, for if the spirit of peace dwells anywhere, it is in the courts and quadrangles of Oxbridge on a fine October morning. Strolling through those colleges past those ancient halls the roughness of the present seemed smoothed away; the body seemed contained in a miraculous glass cabinet through which no sound could penetrate, and the mind, freed from any contact with facts (unless one trespassed on the turf again), was at liberty to settle down upon whatever meditation was in harmony with the moment. As chance would have it, some stray memory of some old essay about revisiting Oxbridge in the long vacation brought Charles Lamb to mind—Saint Charles, said Thackeray, putting a letter of Lamb’s to his forehead. Indeed, among all the dead (I give you my thoughts as they came to me), Lamb is one of the most congenial; one to whom one would have liked to say, Tell me then how you wrote your essays? For his essays are superior even to Max Beerbohm’s, I thought, with all their perfection, because of that wild flash of imagination, that lightning crack of genius in the middle of them which leaves them flawed and imperfect, but starred with poetry. Lamb then came to Oxbridge perhaps a hundred years ago. Certainly he wrote an essay—the name escapes me—about the manuscript of one of Milton’s poems which he saw here. It was Lycidas perhaps, and Lamb wrote how it shocked him to think it possible that any word in Lycidas could have been different from what it is. To think of Milton changing the words in that poem seemed to him a sort of sacrilege. This led me to remember what I could of Lycidas and to amuse myself with guessing which word it could have been that Milton had altered, and why. It then occurred to me that the very manuscript itself which Lamb had looked at was only a few hundred yards away, so that one could follow Lamb’s footsteps across the quadrangle to that famous library where the treasure is kept. Moreover, I recollected, as I put this plan into execution, it is in this famous library that the manuscript of Thackeray’s Esmond is also preserved. The critics often say that Esmond is Thackeray’s most perfect novel. But the affectation of the style, with its imitation of the eighteenth century, hampers one, so far as I remember; unless indeed the eighteenth-century style was natural to Thackeray—a fact that one might prove by looking at the manuscript and seeing whether the alterations were for the benefit of the style or of the sense. But then one would have to decide what is style and what is meaning, a question which—but here I was actually at the door which leads into the library itself. I must have opened it, for instantly there issued, like a guardian angel barring the way with a flutter of black gown instead of white wings, a deprecating, silvery, kindly gentleman, who regretted in a low voice as he waved me back that ladies are only admitted to the library if accompanied by a Fellow of the College or furnished with a letter of introduction.

That a famous library has been cursed by a woman is a matter of complete indifference to a famous library. Venerable and calm, with all its treasures safe locked within its breast, it sleeps complacently and will, so far as I am concerned, so sleep for ever. Never will I wake those echoes, never will I ask for that hospitality again, I vowed as I descended the steps in anger. Still an hour remained before luncheon, and what was one to do? Stroll on the meadows? sit by the river? Certainly it was a lovely autumn morning; the leaves were fluttering red to the ground; there was no great hardship in doing either. But the sound of music reached my ear. Some service or celebration was going forward. The organ complained magnificently as I passed the chapel door. Even the sorrow of Christianity sounded in that serene air more like the recollection of sorrow than sorrow itself; even the groanings of the ancient organ seemed lapped in peace. I had no wish to enter had I the right, and this time the verger might have stopped me, demanding perhaps my baptismal certificate, or a letter of introduction from the Dean. But the outside of these magnificent buildings is often as beautiful as the inside. Moreover, it was amusing enough to watch the congregation assembling, coming in and going out again, busying themselves at the door of the Chapel like bees at the mouth of a hive. Many were in cap and gown; some had tufts of fur on their shoulders; others were wheeled in bath-chairs; others, though not past middle age, seemed creased and crushed into shapes so singular that one was reminded of those giant crabs and crayfish who heave with difficulty across the sand of an aquarium. As I leant against the wall the University indeed seemed a sanctuary in which are preserved rare types which would soon be obsolete if left to fight for existence on the pavement of the Strand. Old stories of old deans and old dons came back to mind, but before I had summoned up courage to whistle—it used to be said that at the sound of a whistle old Professor —— instantly broke into a gallop—the venerable congregation had gone inside. The outside of the chapel remained. As you know, its high domes and pinnacles can be seen, like a sailing-ship always voyaging never arriving, lit up at night and visible for miles, far away across the hills. Once, presumably, this quadrangle with its smooth lawns, its massive buildings and the chapel itself was marsh too, where the grasses waved and the swine rootled. Teams of horses and oxen, I thought, must have hauled the stone in wagons from far counties, and then with infinite labour the grey blocks in whose shade I was now standing were poised in order one on top of another, and then the painters brought their glass for the windows, and the masons were busy for centuries up on that roof with putty and cement, spade and trowel. Every Saturday somebody must have poured gold and silver out of a leathern purse into their ancient fists, for they had their beer and skittles presumably of an evening. An unending stream of gold and silver, I thought, must have flowed into this court perpetually to keep the stones coming and the masons working; to level, to ditch, to dig and to drain. But it was then the age of faith, and money was poured liberally to set these stones on a deep foundation, and when the stones were raised, still more money was poured in from the coffers of kings and queens and great nobles to ensure that hymns should be sung here and scholars taught. Lands were granted; tithes were paid. And when the age of faith was over and the age of reason had come, still the same flow of gold and silver went on; fellowships were founded; lectureships endowed; only the gold and silver flowed now, not from the coffers of the king, but from the chests of merchants and manufacturers, from the purses of men who had made, say, a fortune from industry, and returned, in their wills, a bounteous share of it to endow more chairs, more lectureships, more fellowships in the university where they had learnt their craft. Hence the libraries and laboratories; the observatories; the splendid equipment of costly and delicate instruments which now stands on glass shelves, where centuries ago the grasses waved and the swine rootled. Certainly, as I strolled round the court, the foundation of gold and silver seemed deep enough; the pavement laid solidly over the wild grasses. Men with trays on their heads went busily from staircase to staircase. Gaudy blossoms flowered in window-boxes. The strains of the gramophone blared out from the rooms within. It was impossible not to reflect—the reflection whatever it may have been was cut short. The clock struck. It was time to find one’s way to luncheon.

It is a curious fact that novelists have a way of making us believe that luncheon parties are invariably memorable for something very witty that was said, or for something very wise that was done. But they seldom spare a word for what was eaten. It is part of the novelist’s convention not to mention soup and salmon and ducklings, as if soup and salmon and ducklings were of no importance whatsoever, as if nobody ever smoked a cigar or drank a glass of wine. Here, however, I shall take the liberty to defy that convention and to tell you that the lunch on this occasion began with soles, sunk in a deep dish, over which the college cook had spread a counterpane of the whitest cream, save that it was branded here and there with brown spots like the spots on the flanks of a doe. After that came the partridges, but if this suggests a couple of bald, brown birds on a plate you are mistaken. The partridges, many and various, came with all their retinue of sauces and salads, the sharp and the sweet, each in its order; their potatoes, thin as coins but not so hard; their sprouts, foliated as rosebuds but more succulent. And no sooner had the roast and its retinue been done with than the silent serving-man, the Beadle himself perhaps in a milder manifestation, set before us, wreathed in napkins, a confection which rose all sugar from the waves. To call it pudding and so relate it to rice and tapioca would be an insult. Meanwhile the wineglasses had flushed yellow and flushed crimson; had been emptied; had been filled. And thus by degrees was lit, half-way down the spine, which is the seat of the soul, not that hard little electric light which we call brilliance, as it pops in and out upon our lips, but the more profound, subtle and subterranean glow which is the rich yellow flame of rational intercourse. No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself. We are all going to heaven and Vandyck is of the company—in other words, how good life seemed, how sweet its rewards, how trivial this grudge or that grievance, how admirable friendship and the society of one’s kind, as, lighting a good cigarette, one sunk among the cushions in the window-seat.

If by good luck there had been an ash-tray handy, if one had not knocked the ash out of the window in default, if things had been a little different from what they were, one would not have seen, presumably, a cat without a tail. The sight of that abrupt and truncated animal padding softly across the quadrangle changed by some fluke of the subconscious intelligence the emotional light for me. It was as if someone had let fall a shade. Perhaps the excellent hock was relinquishing its hold. Certainly, as I watched the Manx cat pause in the middle of the lawn as if it too questioned the universe, something seemed lacking, something seemed different. But what was lacking, what was different, I asked myself, listening to the talk? And to answer that question I had to think myself out of the room, back into the past, before the war indeed, and to set before my eyes the model of another luncheon party held in rooms not very far distant from these; but different. Everything was different. Meanwhile the talk went on among the guests, who were many and young, some of this sex, some of that; it went on swimmingly, it went on agreeably, freely, amusingly. And as it went on I set it against the background of that other talk, and as I matched the two together I had no doubt that one was the descendant, the legitimate heir of the other. Nothing was changed; nothing was different save only—here I listened with all my ears not entirely to what was being said, but to the murmur or current behind it. Yes, that was it—the change was there. Before the war at a luncheon party like this people would have said precisely the same things but they would have sounded different, because in those days they were accompanied by a sort of humming noise, not articulate, but musical, exciting, which changed the value of the words themselves. Could one set that humming noise to words? Perhaps with the help of the poets one could. A book lay beside me and, opening it, I turned casually enough to Tennyson. And here I found Tennyson was singing:

There has fallen a splendid tear

From the passion-flower at the gate.

She is coming, my dove, my dear;

She is coming, my life, my fate;

The red rose cries, “She is near, she is near”;

And the white rose weeps, “She is late”;

The larkspur listens, “I hear, I hear”;

And the lily whispers, “I wait.”

Was that what men hummed at luncheon parties before the war? And the women?

My heart is like a singing bird

Whose nest is in a water’d shoot;

My heart is like an apple tree

Whose houghs are bent with thick-set fruit;

My heart is like a rainbow shell

That paddles in a halcyon sea;

My heart is gladder than all these

Because my love is come to me.

Was that what women hummed at luncheon parties before the war?

There was something so ludicrous in thinking of people humming such things even under their breath at luncheon parties before the war that I burst out laughing, and had to explain my laughter by pointing at the Manx cat, who did look a little absurd, poor beast, without a tail, in the middle of the lawn. Was he really born so, or had he lost his tail in an accident? The tailless cat, though some are said to exist in the Isle of Man, is rarer than one thinks. It is a queer animal, quaint rather than beautiful. It is strange what a difference a tail makes—you know the sort of things one says as a lunch party breaks up and people are finding their coats and hats.

This one, thanks to the hospitality of the host, had lasted far into the afternoon. The beautiful October day was fading and the leaves were falling from the trees in the avenue as I walked through it. Gate after gate seemed to close with gentle finality behind me. Innumerable beadles were fitting innumerable keys into well-oiled locks; the treasure-house was being made secure for another night. After the avenue one comes out upon a road—I forget its name—which leads you, if you take the right turning, along to Fernham. But there was plenty of time. Dinner was not till half-past seven. One could almost do without dinner after such a luncheon. It is strange how a scrap of poetry works in the mind and makes the legs move in time to it along the road. Those words—

There has fallen a splendid tear

From the passion-flower at the gate.

She is coming, my dove, my dear—

sang in my blood as I stepped quickly along towards Headingley. And then, switching off into the other measure, I sang, where the waters are churned up by the weir:

My heart is like a singing bird

Whose nest is in a water’d shoot;

My heart is like an apple tree …

What poets, I cried aloud, as one does in the dusk, what poets they were!

In a sort of jealousy, I suppose, for our own age, silly and absurd though these comparisons are, I went on to wonder if honestly one could name two living poets now as great as Tennyson and Christina Rossetti were then. Obviously it is impossible, I thought, looking into those foaming waters, to compare them. The very reason why that poetry excites one to such abandonment, such rapture, is that it celebrates some feeling that one used to have (at luncheon parties before the war perhaps), so that one responds easily, familiarly, without troubling to check the feeling, or to compare it with any that one has now. But the living poets express a feeling that is actually being made and torn out of us at the moment. One does not recognise it in the first place; often for some reason one fears it; one watches it with keenness and compares it jealously and suspiciously with the old feeling that one knew. Hence the difficulty of modern poetry; and it is because of this difficulty that one cannot remember more than two consecutive lines of any good modern poet. For this reason—that my memory failed me—the argument flagged for want of material. But why, I continued, moving on towards Headingley, have we stopped humming under our breath at luncheon parties? Why has Alfred ceased to sing

She is coming, my dove, my dear.

Why has Christina ceased to respond

My heart is gladder than all these

Because my love is come to me?

Shall we lay the blame on the war? When the guns fired in August 1914, did the faces of men and women show so plain in each other’s eyes that romance was killed? Certainly it was a shock (to women in particular with their illusions about education, and so on) to see the faces of our rulers in the light of the shell-fire. So ugly they looked—German, English, French—so stupid. But lay the blame where one will, on whom one will, the illusion which inspired Tennyson and Christina Rossetti to sing so passionately about the coming of their loves is far rarer now than then. One has only to read, to look, to listen, to remember. But why say “blame”? Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, that destroyed illusion and put truth in its place? For truth … those dots mark the spot where, in search of truth, I missed the turning up to Fernham. Yes indeed, which was truth and which was illusion, I asked myself? What was the truth about these houses, for example, dim and festive now with their red windows in the dusk, but raw and red and squalid, with their sweets and their bootlaces, at nine o’clock in the morning? And the willows and the river and the gardens that run down to the river, vague now with the mist stealing over them, but gold and red in the sunlight—which was the truth, which was the illusion about them? I spare you the twists and turns of my cogitations, for no conclusion was found on the road to Headingley, and I ask you to suppose that I soon found out my mistake about the turning and retraced my steps to Fernham.

As I have said already that it was an October day, I dare not forfeit your respect and imperil the fair name of fiction by changing the season and describing lilacs hanging over garden walls, crocuses, tulips and other flowers of spring. Fiction must stick to facts, and the truer the facts the better the fiction—so we are told. Therefore it was still autumn and the leaves were still yellow and falling, if anything, a little faster than before, because it was now evening (seven twenty-three to be precise) and a breeze (from the south-west to be exact) had risen. But for all that there was something odd at work:

My heart is like a singing bird

Whose nest is in a water’d shoot;

My heart is like an apple tree

Whose boughs are bent with thick-set fruit—

perhaps the words of Christina Rossetti were partly responsible for the folly of the fancy—it was nothing of course but a fancy—that the lilac was shaking its flowers over the garden walls, and the brimstone butterflies were scudding hither and thither, and the dust of the pollen was in the air. A wind blew, from what quarter I know not, but it lifted the half-grown leaves so that there was a flash of silver grey in the air. It was the time between the lights when colours undergo their intensification and purples and golds burn in window-panes like the beat of an excitable heart; when for some reason the beauty of the world revealed and yet soon to perish (here I pushed into the garden, for, unwisely, the door was left open and no beadles seemed about), the beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder. The gardens of Fernham lay before me in the spring twilight, wild and open, and in the long grass, sprinkled and carelessly flung, were daffodils and bluebells, not orderly perhaps at the best of times, and now wind-blown and waving as they tugged at their roots. The windows of the building, curved like ships’ windows among generous waves of red brick, changed from lemon to silver under the flight of the quick spring clouds. Somebody was in a hammock, somebody, but in this light they were phantoms only, half guessed, half seen, raced across the grass—would no one stop her?—and then on the terrace, as if popping out to breathe the air, to glance at the garden, came a bent figure, formidable yet humble, with her great forehead and her shabby dress—could it be the famous scholar, could it be J—— H—— herself? All was dim, yet intense too, as if the scarf which the dusk had flung over the garden were torn asunder by star or sword—the flash of some terrible reality leaping, as its way is, out of the heart of the spring. For youth——

Here was my soup. Dinner was being served in the great dining-hall. Far from being spring it was in fact an evening in October. Everybody was assembled in the big dining-room. Dinner was ready. Here was the soup. It was a plain gravy soup. There was nothing to stir the fancy in that. One could have seen through the transparent liquid any pattern that there might have been on the plate itself. But there was no pattern. The plate was plain. Next came beef with its attendant greens and potatoes—a homely trinity, suggesting the rumps of cattle in a muddy market, and sprouts curled and yellowed at the edge, and bargaining and cheapening, and women with string bags on Monday morning. There was no reason to complain of human nature’s daily food, seeing that the supply was sufficient and coal-miners doubtless were sitting down to less. Prunes and custard followed. And if anyone complains that prunes, even when mitigated by custard, are an uncharitable vegetable (fruit they are not), stringy as a miser’s heart and exuding a fluid such as might run in misers’ veins who have denied themselves wine and warmth for eighty years and yet not given to the poor, he should reflect that there are people whose charity embraces even the prune. Biscuits and cheese came next, and here the water-jug was liberally passed round, for it is the nature of biscuits to be dry, and these were biscuits to the core. That was all. The meal was over. Everybody scraped their chairs back; the swing-doors swung violently to and fro; soon the hall was emptied of every sign of food and made ready no doubt for breakfast next morning. Down corridors and up staircases the youth of England went banging and singing. And was it for a guest, a stranger (for I had no more right here in Fernham than in Trinity or Somerville or Girton or Newnham or Christchurch), to say, “The dinner was not good,” or to say (we were now, Mary Seton and I, in her sitting-room), “Could we not have dined up here alone?” for if I had said anything of the kind I should have been prying and searching into the secret economies of a house which to the stranger wears so fine a front of gaiety and courage. No, one could say nothing of the sort. Indeed, conversation for a moment flagged. The human frame being what it is, heart, body and brain all mixed together, and not contained in separate compartments as they will be no doubt in another million years, a good dinner is of great importance to good talk. One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. The lamp in the spine does not light on beef and prunes. We are all probably going to heaven, and Vandyck is, we hope, to meet us round the next corner—that is the dubious and qualifying state of mind that beef and prunes at the end of the day’s work breed between them. Happily my friend, who taught science, had a cupboard where there was a squat bottle and little glasses—(but there should have been sole and partridge to begin with)—so that we were able to draw up to the fire and repair some of the damages of the day’s living. In a minute or so we were slipping freely in and out among all those objects of curiosity and interest which form in the mind in the absence of a particular person, and are naturally to be discussed on coming together again—how somebody has married, another has not; one thinks this, another that; one has improved out of all knowledge, the other most amazingly gone to the bad—with all those speculations upon human nature and the character of the amazing world we live in which spring naturally from such beginnings. While these things were being said, however, I became shamefacedly aware of a current setting in of its own accord and carrying everything forward to an end of its own. One might be talking of Spain or Portugal, of book or racehorse, but the real interest of whatever was said was none of those things, but a scene of masons on a high roof some five centuries ago. Kings and nobles brought treasure in huge sacks and poured it under the earth. This scene was for ever coming alive in my mind and placing itself by another of lean cows and a muddy market and withered greens and the stringy hearts of old men—these two pictures, disjointed and disconnected and nonsensical as they were, were for ever coming together and combating each other and had me entirely at their mercy. The best course, unless the whole talk was to be distorted, was to expose what was in my mind to the air, when with good luck it would fade and crumble like the head of the dead king when they opened the coffin at Windsor. Briefly, then, I told Miss Seton about the masons who had been all those years on the roof of the chapel, and about the kings and queens and nobles bearing sacks of gold and silver on their shoulders, which they shovelled into the earth; and then how the great financial magnates of our own time came and laid cheques and bonds, I suppose, where the others had laid ingots and rough lumps of gold. All that lies beneath the colleges down there, I said; but this college, where we are now sitting, what lies beneath its gallant red brick and the wild unkempt grasses of the garden? What force is behind that plain china off which we dined, and (here it popped out of my mouth before I could stop it) the beef, the custard and the prunes?

Well, said Mary Seton, about the year 1860—Oh, but you know the story, she said, bored, I suppose, by the recital. And she told me—rooms were hired. Committees met. Envelopes were addressed. Circulars were drawn up. Meetings were held; letters were read out; so-and-so has promised so much; on the contrary, Mr. —— won’t give a penny. The Saturday Review has been very rude. How can we raise a fund to pay for offices? Shall we hold a bazaar? Can’t we find a pretty girl to sit in the front row? Let us look up what John Stuart Mill said on the subject. Can anyone persuade the editor of the —— to print a letter? Can we get Lady —— to sign it? Lady —— is out of town. That was the way it was done, presumably, sixty years ago, and it was a prodigious effort, and a great deal of time was spent on it. And it was only after a long struggle and with the utmost difficulty that they got thirty thousand pounds together. [◉1] So obviously we cannot have wine and partridges and servants carrying tin dishes on their heads, she said. We cannot have sofas and separate rooms. “The amenities,” she said, quoting from some book or other, “will have to wait.” [◉2]

At the thought of all those women working year after year and finding it hard to get two thousand pounds together, and as much as they could do to get thirty thousand pounds, we burst out in scorn at the reprehensible poverty of our sex. What had our mothers been doing then that they had no wealth to leave us? Powdering their noses? Looking in at shop windows? Flaunting in the sun at Monte Carlo? There were some photographs on the mantelpiece. Mary’s mother—if that was her picture—may have been a wastrel in her spare time (she had thirteen children by a minister of the church), but if so her gay and dissipated life had left too few traces of its pleasures on her face. She was a homely body; an old lady in a plaid shawl which was fastened by a large cameo; and she sat in a basket-chair, encouraging a spaniel to look at the camera, with the amused, yet strained expression of one who is sure that the dog will move directly the bulb is pressed. Now if she had gone into business; had become a manufacturer of artificial silk or a magnate on the Stock Exchange; if she had left two or three hundred thousand pounds to Fernham, we could have been sitting at our ease to-night and the subject of our talk might have been archaeology, botany, anthropology, physics, the nature of the atom, mathematics, astronomy, relativity, geography. If only Mrs. Seton and her mother and her mother before her had learnt the great art of making money and had left their money, like their fathers and their grandfathers before them, to found fellowships and lectureships and prizes and scholarships appropriated to the use of their own sex, we might have dined very tolerably up here alone off a bird and a bottle of wine; we might have looked forward without undue confidence to a pleasant and honourable lifetime spent in the shelter of one of the liberally endowed professions. We might have been exploring or writing; mooning about the venerable places of the earth; sitting contemplative on the steps of the Parthenon, or going at ten to an office and coming home comfortably at half-past four to write a little poetry. Only, if Mrs. Seton and her like had gone into business at the age of fifteen, there would have been—that was the snag in the argument—no Mary. What, I asked, did Mary think of that? There between the curtains was the October night, calm and lovely, with a star or two caught in the yellowing trees. Was she ready to resign her share of it and her memories (for they had been a happy family, though a large one) of games and quarrels up in Scotland, which she is never tired of praising for the fineness of its air and the quality of its cakes, in order that Fernham might have been endowed with fifty thousand pounds or so by a stroke of the pen? For, to endow a college would necessitate the suppression of families altogether. Making a fortune and bearing thirteen children—no human being could stand it. Consider the facts, we said. First there are nine months before the baby is born. Then the baby is born. Then there are three or four months spent in feeding the baby. After the baby is fed there are certainly five years spent in playing with the baby. You cannot, it seems, let children run about the streets. People who have seen them running wild in Russia say that the sight is not a pleasant one. People say, too, that human nature takes its shape in the years between one and five. If Mrs. Seton, I said, had been making money, what sort of memories would you have had of games and quarrels? What would you have known of Scotland, and its fine air and cakes and all the rest of it? But it is useless to ask these questions, because you would never have come into existence at all. Moreover, it is equally useless to ask what might have happened if Mrs. Seton and her mother and her mother before her had amassed great wealth and laid it under the foundations of college and library, because, in the first place, to earn money was impossible for them, and in the second, had it been possible, the law denied them the right to possess what money they earned. It is only for the last forty-eight years that Mrs. Seton has had a penny of her own. For all the centuries before that it would have been her husband’s property—a thought which, perhaps, may have had its share in keeping Mrs. Seton and her mothers off the Stock Exchange. Every penny I earn, they may have said, will be taken from me and disposed of according to my husband’s wisdom—perhaps to found a scholarship or to endow a fellowship in Balliol or Kings, so that to earn money, even if I could earn money, is not a matter that interests me very greatly. I had better leave it to my husband.

At any rate, whether or not the blame rested on the old lady who was looking at the spaniel, there could be no doubt that for some reason or other our mothers had mismanaged their affairs very gravely. Not a penny could be spared for “amenities”; for partridges and wine, beadles and turf, books and cigars, libraries and leisure. To raise bare walls out of the bare earth was the utmost they could do.

So we talked standing at the window and looking, as so many thousands look every night, down on the domes and towers of the famous city beneath us. It was very beautiful, very mysterious in the autumn moonlight. The old stone looked very white and venerable. One thought of all the books that were assembled down there; of the pictures of old prelates and worthies hanging in the panelled rooms; of the painted windows that would be throwing strange globes and crescents on the pavement; of the tablets and memorials and inscriptions; of the fountains and the grass; of the quiet rooms looking across the quiet quadrangles. And (pardon me the thought) I thought, too, of the admirable smoke and drink and the deep arm-chairs and the pleasant carpets: of the urbanity, the geniality, the dignity which are the offspring of luxury and privacy and space. Certainly our mothers had not provided us with any thing comparable to all this—our mothers who found it difficult to scrape together thirty thousand pounds, our mothers who bore thirteen children to ministers of religion at St. Andrews.

So I went back to my inn, and as I walked through the dark streets I pondered this and that, as one does at the end of the day’s work. I pondered why it was that Mrs. Seton had no money to leave us; and what effect poverty has on the mind; and what effect wealth has on the mind; and I thought of the queer old gentlemen I had seen that morning with tufts of fur upon their shoulders; and I remembered how if one whistled one of them ran; and I thought of the organ booming in the chapel and of the shut doors of the library; and I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse perhaps to be locked in; and, thinking of the safety and prosperity of the one sex and of the poverty and insecurity of the other and of the effect of tradition and of the lack of tradition upon the mind of a writer, I thought at last that it was time to roll up the crumpled skin of the day, with its arguments and its impressions and its anger and its laughter, and cast it into the hedge. A thousand stars were flashing across the blue wastes of the sky. One seemed alone with an inscrutable society. All human beings were laid asleep—prone, horizontal, dumb. Nobody seemed stirring in the streets of Oxbridge. Even the door of the hotel sprang open at the touch of an invisible hand—not a boots was sitting up to light me to bed, it was so late.

[]

Chapter II.

The scene, if I may ask you to follow me, was now changed. The leaves were still falling, but in London now, not Oxbridge; and I must ask you to imagine a room, like many thousands, with a window looking across people’s hats and vans and motor-cars to other windows, and on the table inside the room a blank sheet of paper on which was written in large letters Women and Fiction, but no more. The inevitable sequel to lunching and dining at Oxbridge seemed, unfortunately, to be a visit to the British Museum. One must strain off what was personal and accidental in all these impressions and so reach the pure fluid, the essential oil of truth. For that visit to Oxbridge and the luncheon and the dinner had started a swarm of questions. Why did men drink wine and women water? Why was one sex so prosperous and the other so poor? What effect has poverty on fiction? What conditions are necessary for the creation of works of art?—a thousand questions at once suggested themselves. But one needed answers, not questions; and an answer was only to be had by consulting the learned and the unprejudiced, who have removed themselves above the strife of tongue and the confusion of body and issued the result of their reasoning and research in books which are to be found in the British Museum. If truth is not to be found on the shelves of the British Museum, where, I asked myself, picking up a notebook and a pencil, is truth?

Thus provided, thus confident and enquiring, I set out in the pursuit of truth. The day, though not actually wet, was dismal, and the streets in the neighbourhood of the Museum were full of open coal-holes, down which sacks were showering; four-wheeled cabs were drawing up and depositing on the pavement corded boxes containing, presumably, the entire wardrobe of some Swiss or Italian family seeking fortune or refuge or some other desirable commodity which is to be found in the boarding-houses of Bloomsbury in the winter. The usual hoarse-voiced men paraded the streets with plants on barrows. Some shouted; others sang. London was like a workshop. London was like a machine. We were all being shot backwards and forwards on this plain foundation to make some pattern. The British Museum was another department of the factory. The swing-doors swung open; and there one stood under the vast dome, as if one were a thought in the huge bald forehead which is so splendidly encircled by a band of famous names. One went to the counter; one took a slip of paper; one opened a volume of the catalogue, and ..... the five dots here indicate five separate minutes of stupefaction, wonder and bewilderment. Have you any notion how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe? Here had I come with a notebook and a pencil proposing to spend a morning reading, supposing that at the end of the morning I should have transferred the truth to my notebook. But I should need to be a herd of elephants, I thought, and a wilderness of spiders, desperately referring to the animals that are reputed longest lived and most multitudinously eyed, to cope with all this. I should need claws of steel and beak of brass even to penetrate the husk. How shall I ever find the grains of truth embedded in all this mass of paper? I asked myself, and in despair began running my eye up and down the long list of titles. Even the names of the books gave me food for thought. Sex and its nature might well attract doctors and biologists; but what was surprising and difficult of explanation was the fact that sex—woman, that is to say—also attracts agreeable essayists, light-fingered novelists, young men who have taken the M.A. degree; men who have taken no degree; men who have no apparent qualification save that they are not women. Some of these books were, on the face of it, frivolous and facetious; but many, on the other hand, were serious and prophetic, moral and hortatory. Merely to read the titles suggested innumerable schoolmasters, innumerable clergymen mounting their platforms and pulpits and holding forth with a loquacity which far exceeded the hour usually allotted to such discourse on this one subject. It was a most strange phenomenon; and apparently—here I consulted the letter M—one confined to the male sex. Women do not write books about men—a fact that I could not help welcoming with relief, for if I had first to read all that men have written about women, then all that women have written about men, the aloe that flowers once in a hundred years would flower twice before I could set pen to paper. So, making a perfectly arbitrary choice of a dozen volumes or so, I sent my slips of paper to lie in the wire tray, and waited in my stall, among the other seekers for the essential oil of truth.

What could be the reason, then, of this curious disparity, I wondered, drawing cart-wheels on the slips of paper provided by the British taxpayer for other purposes. Why are women, judging from this catalogue, so much more interesting to men than men are to women? A very curious fact it seemed, and my mind wandered to picture the lives of men who spend their time in writing books about women; whether they were old or young, married or unmarried, red-nosed or hump-backed—anyhow, it was flattering, vaguely, to feel oneself the object of such attention, provided that it was not entirely bestowed by the crippled and the infirm—so I pondered until all such frivolous thoughts were ended by an avalanche of books sliding down on to the desk in front of me. Now the trouble began. The student who has been trained in research at Oxbridge has no doubt some method of shepherding his question past all distractions till it runs into its answer as a sheep runs into its pen. The student by my side, for instance, who was copying assiduously from a scientific manual, was, I felt sure, extracting pure nuggets of the essential ore every ten minutes or so. His little grunts of satisfaction indicated so much. But if, unfortunately, one has had no training in a university, the question far from being shepherded to its pen flies like a frightened flock hither and thither, helter-skelter, pursued by a whole pack of hounds. Professors, schoolmasters, sociologists, clergymen, novelists, essayists, journalists, men who had no qualification save that they were not women, chased my simple and single question—Why are women poor?—until it became fifty questions; until the fifty questions leapt frantically into mid-stream and were carried away. Every page in my notebook was scribbled over with notes. To show the state of mind I was in, I will read you a few of them, explaining that the page was headed quite simply, Women and Poverty, in block letters; but what followed was something like this:

Condition in Middle Ages of,

Habits in the Fiji Islands of,

Worshipped as goddesses by,

Weaker in moral sense than, Idealism of,

Greater conscientiousness of,

South Sea Islanders, age of puberty among,

Attractiveness of,

Offered as sacrifice to,

Small size of brain of,

Profounder sub-consciousness of,

Less hair on the body of,

Mental, moral and physical inferiority of,

Love of children of,

Greater length of life of,

Weaker muscles of,

Strength of affections of,

Vanity of,

Higher education of,

Shakespeare’s opinion of,

Lord Birkenhead’s opinion of,

Dean Inge’s opinion of,

La Bruyère’s opinion of,

Dr. Johnson’s opinion of,

Mr. Oscar Browning’s opinion of, …

Here I drew breath and added, indeed, in the margin, Why does Samuel Butler say, “Wise men never say what they think of women?” Wise men never say anything else apparently. But, I continued, leaning back in my chair and looking at the vast dome in which I was a single but by now somewhat harassed thought, what is so unfortunate is that wise men never think the same thing about women. Here is Pope:

Most women have no character at all.

And here is La Bruyère:

Les femmes sont extrêmes; elles sont meilleures ou pires que les hommes—

a direct contradiction by keen observers who were contemporary. Are they capable of education or incapable? Napoleon thought them incapable. Dr. Johnson thought the opposite. [◉3] Have they souls or have they not souls? Some savages say they have none. Others, on the contrary, maintain that women are half divine and worship them on that account. [◉4] Some sages hold that they are shallower in the brain; others that they are deeper in the consciousness. Goethe honoured them; Mussolini despises them. Wherever one looked men thought about women and thought differently. It was impossible to make head or tail of it all, I decided, glancing with envy at the reader next door who was making the neatest abstracts, headed often with an A or a B or a C, while my own notebook rioted with the wildest scribble of contradictory jottings. It was distressing, it was bewildering, it was humiliating. Truth had run through my fingers. Every drop had escaped.

I could not possibly go home, I reflected, and add as a serious contribution to the study of women and fiction that women have less hair on their bodies than men, or that the age of puberty among the South Sea Islanders is nine—or is it ninety?—even the handwriting had become in its distraction indecipherable. It was disgraceful to have nothing more weighty or respectable to show after a whole morning’s work. And if I could not grasp the truth about W. (as for brevity’s sake I had come to call her) in the past, why bother about W. in the future? It seemed pure waste of time to consult all those gentlemen who specialise in woman and her effect on whatever it may be—politics, children, wages, morality—numerous and learned as they are. One might as well leave their books unopened.

But while I pondered I had unconsciously, in my listlessness, in my desperation, been drawing a picture where I should, like my neighbour, have been writing a conclusion. I had been drawing a face, a figure. It was the face and the figure of Professor von X. engaged in writing his monumental work entitled The Mental, Moral, and Physical Inferiority of the Female Sex. He was not in my picture a man attractive to women. He was heavily built; he had a great jowl; to balance that he had very small eyes; he was very red in the face. His expression suggested that he was labouring under some emotion that made him jab his pen on the paper as if he were killing some noxious insect as he wrote, but even when he had killed it that did not satisfy him; he must go on killing it; and even so, some cause for anger and irritation remained. Could it be his wife, I asked, looking at my picture? Was she in love with a cavalry officer? Was the cavalry officer slim and elegant and dressed in astrachan? Had he been laughed at, to adopt the Freudian theory, in his cradle by a pretty girl? For even in his cradle the professor, I thought, could not have been an attractive child. Whatever the reason, the professor was made to look very angry and very ugly in my sketch, as he wrote his great book upon the mental, moral and physical inferiority of women. Drawing pictures was an idle way of finishing an unprofitable morning’s work. Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top. A very elementary exercise in psychology, not to be dignified by the name of psycho-analysis, showed me, on looking at my notebook, that the sketch of the angry professor had been made in anger. Anger had snatched my pencil while I dreamt. But what was anger doing there? Interest, confusion, amusement, boredom—all these emotions I could trace and name as they succeeded each other throughout the morning. Had anger, the black snake, been lurking among them? Yes, said the sketch, anger had. It referred me unmistakably to the one book, to the one phrase, which had roused the demon; it was the professor’s statement about the mental, moral and physical inferiority of women. My heart had leapt. My cheeks had burnt. I had flushed with anger. There was nothing specially remarkable, however foolish, in that. One does not like to be told that one is naturally the inferior of a little man—I looked at the student next me—who breathes hard, wears a ready-made tie, and has not shaved this fortnight. One has certain foolish vanities. It is only human nature, I reflected, and began drawing cartwheels and circles over the angry professor’s face till he looked like a burning bush or a flaming comet—anyhow, an apparition without human semblance or significance. The professor was nothing now but a faggot burning on the top of Hampstead Heath. Soon my own anger was explained and done with; but curiosity remained. How explain the anger of the professors? Why were they angry? For when it came to analysing the impression left by these books there was always an element of heat. This heat took many forms; it showed itself in satire, in sentiment, in curiosity, in reprobation. But there was another element which was often present and could not immediately be identified. Anger, I called it. But it was anger that had gone underground and mixed itself with all kinds of other emotions. To judge from its odd effects, it was anger disguised and complex, not anger simple and open.

Whatever the reason, all these books, I thought, surveying the pile on the desk, are worthless for my purposes. They were worthless scientifically, that is to say, though humanly they were full of instruction, interest, boredom, and very queer facts about the habits of the Fiji Islanders. They had been written in the red light of emotion and not in the white light of truth. Therefore they must be returned to the central desk and restored each to his own cell in the enormous honeycomb. All that I had retrieved from that morning’s work had been the one fact of anger. The professors—I lumped them together thus—were angry. But why, I asked myself, having returned the books, why, I repeated, standing under the colonnade among the pigeons and the prehistoric canoes, why are they angry? And, asking myself this question, I strolled off to find a place for luncheon. What is the real nature of what I call for the moment their anger? I asked. Here was a puzzle that would last all the time that it takes to be served with food in a small restaurant somewhere near the British Museum. Some previous luncher had left the lunch edition of the evening paper on a chair, and, waiting to be served, I began idly reading the headlines. A ribbon of very large letters ran across the page. Somebody had made a big score in South Africa. Lesser ribbons announced that Sir Austen Chamberlain was at Geneva. A meat axe with human hair on it had been found in a cellar. Mr. Justice —— commented in the Divorce Courts upon the Shamelessness of Women. Sprinkled about the paper were other pieces of news. A film actress had been lowered from a peak in California and hung suspended in mid-air. The weather was going to be foggy. The most transient visitor to this planet, I thought, who picked up this paper could not fail to be aware, even from this scattered testimony, that England is under the rule of a patriarchy. Nobody in their senses could fail to detect the dominance of the professor. His was the power and the money and the influence. He was the proprietor of the paper and its editor and sub-editor. He was the Foreign Secretary and the Judge. He was the cricketer; he owned the racehorses and the yachts. He was the director of the company that pays two hundred per cent to its shareholders. He left millions to charities and colleges that were ruled by himself. He suspended the film actress in mid-air. He will decide if the hair on the meat axe is human; he it is who will acquit or convict the murderer, and hang him, or let him go free. With the exception of the fog he seemed to control everything. Yet he was angry. I knew that he was angry by this token. When I read what he wrote about women I thought, not of what he was saying, but of himself. When an arguer argues dispassionately he thinks only of the argument; and the reader cannot help thinking of the argument too. If he had written dispassionately about women, had used indisputable proofs to establish his argument and had shown no trace of wishing that the result should be one thing rather than another, one would not have been angry either. One would have accepted the fact, as one accepts the fact that a pea is green or a canary yellow. So be it, I should have said. But I had been angry because he was angry. Yet it seemed absurd, I thought, turning over the evening paper, that a man with all this power should be angry. Or is anger, I wondered, somehow, the familiar, the attendant sprite on power? Rich people, for example, are often angry because they suspect that the poor want to seize their wealth. The professors, or patriarchs, as it might be more accurate to call them, might be angry for that reason partly, but partly for one that lies a little less obviously on the surface. Possibly they were not “angry” at all; often, indeed, they were admiring, devoted, exemplary in the relations of private life. Possibly when the professor insisted a little too emphatically upon the inferiority of women, he was concerned not with their inferiority, but with his own superiority. That was what he was protecting rather hot-headedly and with too much emphasis, because it was a jewel to him of the rarest price. Life for both sexes—and I looked at them, shouldering their way along the pavement—is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic courage and strength. More than anything, perhaps, creatures of illusion as we are, it calls for confidence in oneself. Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradle. And how can we generate this imponderable quality, which is yet so invaluable, most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself. By feeling that one has some innate superiority—it may be wealth, or rank, a straight nose, or the portrait of a grandfather by Romney—for there is no end to the pathetic devices of the human imagination—over other people. Hence the enormous importance to a patriarch who has to conquer, who has to rule, of feeling that great numbers of people, half the human race indeed, are by nature inferior to himself. It must indeed be one of the chief sources of his power. But let me turn the light of this observation on to real life, I thought. Does it help to explain some of those psychological puzzles that one notes in the margin of daily life? Does it explain my astonishment the other day when Z, most humane, most modest of men, taking up some book by Rebecca West and reading a passage in it, exclaimed, “The arrant feminist! She says that men are snobs!” The exclamation, to me so surprising—for why was Miss West an arrant feminist for making a possibly true if uncomplimentary statement about the other sex?—was not merely the cry of wounded vanity; it was a protest against some infringement of his power to believe in himself. Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size. Without that power probably the earth would still be swamp and jungle. The glories of all our wars would be unknown. We should still be scratching the outlines of deer on the remains of mutton bones and bartering flints for sheep skins or whatever simple ornament took our unsophisticated taste. Supermen and Fingers of Destiny would never have existed. The Czar and the Kaiser would never have worn crowns or lost them. Whatever may be their use in civilised societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action. That is why Napoleon and Mussolini both insist so emphatically upon the inferiority of women, for if they were not inferior, they would cease to enlarge. That serves to explain in part the necessity that women so often are to men. And it serves to explain how restless they are under her criticism; how impossible it is for her to say to them this book is bad, this picture is feeble, or whatever it may be, without giving far more pain and rousing far more anger than a man would do who gave the same criticism. For if she begins to tell the truth, the figure in the looking-glass shrinks; his fitness for life is diminished. How is he to go on giving judgement, civilising natives, making laws, writing books, dressing up and speechifying at banquets, unless he can see himself at breakfast and at dinner at least twice the size he really is? So I reflected, crumbling my bread and stirring my coffee and now and again looking at the people in the street. The looking-glass vision is of supreme importance because it charges the vitality; it stimulates the nervous system. Take it away and man may die, like the drug fiend deprived of his cocaine. Under the spell of that illusion, I thought, looking out of the window, half the people on the pavement are striding to work. They put on their hats and coats in the morning under its agreeable rays. They start the day confident, braced, believing themselves desired at Miss Smith’s tea party; they say to themselves as they go into the room, I am the superior of half the people here, and it is thus that they speak with that self-confidence, that self-assurance, which have had such profound consequences in public life and lead to such curious notes in the margin of the private mind.

But these contributions to the dangerous and fascinating subject of the psychology of the other sex—it is one, I hope, that you will investigate when you have five hundred a year of your own—were interrupted by the necessity of paying the bill. It came to five shillings and ninepence. I gave the waiter a ten-shilling note and he went to bring me change. There was another ten-shilling note in my purse; I noticed it, because it is a fact that still takes my breath away—the power of my purse to breed ten-shilling notes automatically. I open it and there they are. Society gives me chicken and coffee, bed and lodging, in return for a certain number of pieces of paper which were left me by an aunt, for no other reason that that I share her name.

My aunt, Mary Beton, I must tell you, died by a fall from her horse when she was riding out to take the air in Bombay. The news of my legacy reached me one night about the same time that the act was passed that gave votes to women. A solicitor’s letter fell into the post-box and when I opened it I found that she had left me five hundred pounds a year for ever. Of the two—the vote and the money—the money, I own, seemed infinitely the more important. Before that I had made my living by cadging odd jobs from newspapers, by reporting a donkey show here or a wedding there; I had earned a few pounds by addressing envelopes, reading to old ladies, making artificial flowers, teaching the alphabet to small children in a kindergarten. Such were the chief occupations that were open to women before 1918. I need not, I am afraid, describe in any detail the hardness of the work, for you know perhaps women who have done it; nor the difficulty of living on the money when it was earned, for you may have tried. But what still remains with me as a worse infliction than either was the poison of fear and bitterness which those days bred in me. To begin with, always to be doing work that one did not wish to do, and to do it like a slave, flattering and fawning, not always necessarily perhaps, but it seemed necessary and the stakes were too great to run risks; and then the thought of that one gift which it was death to hide—a small one but dear to the possessor—perishing and with it my self, my soul,—all this became like a rust eating away the bloom of the spring, destroying the tree at its heart. However, as I say, my aunt died; and whenever I change a ten-shilling note a little of that rust and corrosion is rubbed off; fear and bitterness go. Indeed, I thought, slipping the silver into my purse, it is remarkable, remembering the bitterness of those days, what a change of temper a fixed income will bring about. No force in the world can take from me my five hundred pounds. Food, house and clothing are mine for ever. Therefore not merely do effort and labour cease, but also hatred and bitterness. I need not hate any man; he cannot hurt me. I need not flatter any man; he has nothing to give me. So imperceptibly I found myself adopting a new attitude towards the other half of the human race. It was absurd to blame any class or any sex, as a whole. Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do. They are driven by instincts which are not within their control. They too, the patriarchs, the professors, had endless difficulties, terrible drawbacks to contend with. Their education had been in some ways as faulty as my own. It had bred in them defects as great. True, they had money and power, but only at the cost of harbouring in their breasts an eagle, a vulture, for ever tearing the liver out and plucking at the lungs—the instinct for possession, the rage for acquisition which drives them to desire other people’s fields and goods perpetually; to make frontiers and flags; battleships and poison gas; to offer up their own lives and their children’s lives. Walk through the Admiralty Arch (I had reached that monument), or any other avenue given up to trophies and cannon, and reflect upon the kind of glory celebrated there. Or watch in the spring sunshine the stockbroker and the great barrister going indoors to make money and more money and more money when it is a fact that five hundred pounds a year will keep one alive in the sunshine. These are unpleasant instincts to harbour, I reflected. They are bred of the conditions of life; of the lack of civilisation, I thought, looking at the statue of the Duke of Cambridge, and in particular at the feathers in his cocked hat, with a fixity that they have scarcely ever received before. And, as I realised these drawbacks, by degrees fear and bitterness modified themselves into pity and toleration; and then in a year or two, pity and toleration went, and the greatest release of all came, which is freedom to think of things in themselves. That building, for example, do I like it or not? Is that picture beautiful or not? Is that in my opinion a good book or a bad? Indeed my aunt’s legacy unveiled the sky to me, and substituted for the large and imposing figure of a gentleman, which Milton recommended for my perpetual adoration, a view of the open sky.

So thinking, so speculating I found my way back to my house by the river. Lamps were being lit and an indescribable change had come over London since the morning hour. It was as if the great machine after labouring all day had made with our help a few yards of something very exciting and beautiful—a fiery fabric flashing with red eyes, a tawny monster roaring with hot breath. Even the wind seemed flung like a flag as it lashed the houses and rattled the hoardings.

In my little street, however, domesticity prevailed. The house painter was descending his ladder; the nursemaid was wheeling the perambulator carefully in and out back to nursery tea; the coal-heaver was folding his empty sacks on top of each other; the woman who keeps the greengrocer’s shop was adding up the day’s takings with her hands in red mittens. But so engrossed was I with the problem you have laid upon my shoulders that I could not see even these usual sights without referring them to one centre. I thought how much harder it is now than it must have been even a century ago to say which of these employments is the higher, the more necessary. Is it better to be a coal-heaver or a nursemaid; is the charwoman who has brought up eight children of less value to the world than the barrister who has made a hundred thousand pounds? It is useless to ask such questions; for nobody can answer them. Not only do the comparative values of charwomen and lawyers rise and fall from decade to decade, but we have no rods with which to measure them even as they are at the moment. I had been foolish to ask my professor to furnish me with “indisputable proofs” of this or that in his argument about women. Even if one could state the value of any one gift at the moment, those values will change; in a century’s time very possibly they will have changed completely. Moreover, in a hundred years, I thought, reaching my own doorstep, women will have ceased to be the protected sex. Logically they will take part in all the activities and exertions that were once denied them. The nursemaid will heave coal. The shopwoman will drive an engine. All assumptions founded on the facts observed when women were the protected sex will have disappeared—as, for example (here a squad of soldiers marched down the street), that women and clergymen and gardeners live longer than other people. Remove that protection, expose them to the same exertions and activities, make them soldiers and sailors and engine-drivers and dock labourers, and will not women die off so much younger, so much quicker, than men that one will say, “I saw a woman to-day”, as one used to say, “I saw an aeroplane”. Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation, I thought, opening the door. But what bearing has all this upon the subject of my paper, Women and Fiction? I asked, going indoors.

[]

Chapter III.

It was disappointing not to have brought back in the evening some important statement, some authentic fact. Women are poorer than men because—this or that. Perhaps now it would be better to give up seeking for the truth, and receiving on one’s head an avalanche of opinion hot as lava, discoloured as dish-water. It would be better to draw the curtains; to shut out distractions; to light the lamp; to narrow the enquiry and to ask the historian, who records not opinions but facts, to describe under what conditions women lived, not throughout the ages, but in England, say in the time of Elizabeth.

For it is a perennial puzzle why no woman wrote a word of that extraordinary literature when every other man, it seemed, was capable of song or sonnet. What were the conditions in which women lived, I asked myself; for fiction, imaginative work that is, is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground, as science may be; fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare’s plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in mid-air by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.

I went, therefore, to the shelf where the histories stand and took down one of the latest, Professor Trevelyan’s History of England. Once more I looked up Women, found “position of” and turned to the pages indicated. “Wife-beating”, I read, “was a recognised right of man, and was practised without shame by high as well as low…. Similarly,” the historian goes on, “the daughter who refused to marry the gentleman of her parents’ choice was liable to be locked up, beaten and flung about the room, without any shock being inflicted on public opinion. Marriage was not an affair of personal affection, but of family avarice, particularly in the ‘chivalrous’ upper classes…. Betrothal often took place while one or both of the parties was in the cradle, and marriage when they were scarcely out of the nurses’ charge.” That was about 1470, soon after Chaucer’s time. The next reference to the position of women is some two hundred years later, in the time of the Stuarts. “It was still the exception for women of the upper and middle class to choose their own husbands, and when the husband had been assigned, he was lord and master, so far at least as law and custom could make him. Yet even so,” Professor Trevelyan concludes, “neither Shakespeare’s women nor those of authentic seventeenth-century memoirs, like the Verneys and the Hutchinsons, seem wanting in personality and character.” Certainly, if we consider it, Cleopatra must have had a way with her; Lady Macbeth, one would suppose, had a will of her own; Rosalind, one might conclude, was an attractive girl. Professor Trevelyan is speaking no more than the truth when he remarks that Shakespeare’s women do not seem wanting in personality and character. Not being a historian, one might go even further and say that women have burnt like beacons in all the works of all the poets from the beginning of time—Clytemnestra, Antigone, Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth, Phèdre, Cressida, Rosalind, Desdemona, the Duchess of Malfi, among the dramatists; then among the prose writers: Millamant, Clarissa, Becky Sharp, Anna Karenine, Emma Bovary, Madame de Guermantes—the names flock to mind, nor do they recall women “lacking in personality and character.” Indeed, if woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man, some think even greater. [◉5] But this is woman in fiction. In fact, as Professor Trevelyan points out, she was locked up, beaten and flung about the room.

A very queer, composite being thus emerges. Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history. She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger. Some of the most inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband.

It was certainly an odd monster that one made up by reading the historians first and the poets afterwards—a worm winged like an eagle; the spirit of life and beauty in a kitchen chopping up suet. But these monsters, however amusing to the imagination, have no existence in fact. What one must do to bring her to life was to think poetically and prosaically at one and the same moment, thus keeping in touch with fact—that she is Mrs. Martin, aged thirty-six, dressed in blue, wearing a black hat and brown shoes; but not losing sight of fiction either—that she is a vessel in which all sorts of spirits and forces are coursing and flashing perpetually. The moment, however, that one tries this method with the Elizabethan woman, one branch of illumination fails; one is held up by the scarcity of facts. One knows nothing detailed, nothing perfectly true and substantial about her. History scarcely mentions her. And I turned to Professor Trevelyan again to see what history meant to him. I found by looking at his chapter headings that it meant—

“The Manor Court and the Methods of Open-field Agriculture … The Cistercians and Sheep-farming … The Crusades … The University … The House of Commons … The Hundred Years’ War … The Wars of the Roses … The Renaissance Scholars … The Dissolution of the Monasteries … Agrarian and Religious Strife … The Origin of English Sea-power … The Armada …” and so on. Occasionally an individual woman is mentioned, an Elizabeth, or a Mary; a queen or a great lady. But by no possible means could middle-class women with nothing but brains and character at their command have taken part in any one of the great movements which, brought together, constitute the historian’s view of the past. Nor shall we find her in any collection of anecdotes. Aubrey hardly mentions her. She never writes her own life and scarcely keeps a diary; there are only a handful of her letters in existence. She left no plays or poems by which we can judge her. What one wants, I thought—and why does not some brilliant student at Newnham or Girton supply it?—is a mass of information; at what age did she marry; how many children had she as a rule; what was her house like; had she a room to herself; did she do the cooking; would she be likely to have a servant? All these facts lie somewhere, presumably, in parish registers and account books; the life of the average Elizabethan woman must be scattered about somewhere, could one collect it and make a book of it. It would be ambitious beyond my daring, I thought, looking about the shelves for books that were not there, to suggest to the students of those famous colleges that they should rewrite history, though I own that it often seems a little queer as it is, unreal, lop-sided; but why should they not add a supplement to history? calling it, of course, by some inconspicuous name so that women might figure there without impropriety? For one often catches a glimpse of them in the lives of the great, whisking away into the background, concealing, I sometimes think, a wink, a laugh, perhaps a tear. And, after all, we have lives enough of Jane Austen; it scarcely seems necessary to consider again the influence of the tragedies of Joanna Baillie upon the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe; as for myself, I should not mind if the homes and haunts of Mary Russell Mitford were closed to the public for a century at least. But what I find deplorable, I continued, looking about the bookshelves again, is that nothing is known about women before the eighteenth century. I have no model in my mind to turn about this way and that. Here am I asking why women did not write poetry in the Elizabethan age, and I am not sure how they were educated; whether they were taught to write; whether they had sitting-rooms to themselves; how many women had children before they were twenty-one; what, in short, they did from eight in the morning till eight at night. They had no money evidently; according to Professor Trevelyan they were married whether they liked it or not before they were out of the nursery, at fifteen or sixteen very likely. It would have been extremely odd, even upon this showing, had one of them suddenly written the plays of Shakespeare, I concluded, and I thought of that old gentleman, who is dead now, but was a bishop, I think, who declared that it was impossible for any woman, past, present, or to come, to have the genius of Shakespeare. He wrote to the papers about it. He also told a lady who applied to him for information that cats do not as a matter of fact go to heaven, though they have, he added, souls of a sort. How much thinking those old gentlemen used to save one! How the borders of ignorance shrank back at their approach! Cats do not go to heaven. Women cannot write the plays of Shakespeare.

Be that as it may, I could not help thinking, as I looked at the works of Shakespeare on the shelf, that the bishop was right at least in this; it would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare. Let me imagine, since facts are so hard to come by, what would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith, let us say. Shakespeare himself went, very probably,—his mother was an heiress—to the grammar school, where he may have learnt Latin—Ovid, Virgil and Horace—and the elements of grammar and logic. He was, it is well known, a wild boy who poached rabbits, perhaps shot a deer, and had, rather sooner than he should have done, to marry a woman in the neighbourhood, who bore him a child rather quicker than was right. That escapade sent him to seek his fortune in London. He had, it seemed, a taste for the theatre; he began by holding horses at the stage door. Very soon he got work in the theatre, became a successful actor, and lived at the hub of the universe, meeting everybody, knowing everybody, practising his art on the boards, exercising his wits in the streets, and even getting access to the palace of the queen. Meanwhile his extraordinarily gifted sister, let us suppose, remained at home. She was as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was. But she was not sent to school. She had no chance of learning grammar and logic, let alone of reading Horace and Virgil. She picked up a book now and then, one of her brother’s perhaps, and read a few pages. But then her parents came in and told her to mend the stockings or mind the stew and not moon about with books and papers. They would have spoken sharply but kindly, for they were substantial people who knew the conditions of life for a woman and loved their daughter—indeed, more likely than not she was the apple of her father’s eye. Perhaps she scribbled some pages up in an apple loft on the sly, but was careful to hide them or set fire to them. Soon, however, before she was out of her teens, she was to be betrothed to the son of a neighbouring wool-stapler. She cried out that marriage was hateful to her, and for that she was severely beaten by her father. Then he ceased to scold her. He begged her instead not to hurt him, not to shame him in this matter of her marriage. He would give her a chain of beads or a fine petticoat, he said; and there were tears in his eyes. How could she disobey him? How could she break his heart? The force of her own gift alone drove her to it. She made up a small parcel of her belongings, let herself down by a rope one summer’s night and took the road to London. She was not seventeen. The birds that sang in the hedge were not more musical than she was. She had the quickest fancy, a gift like her brother’s, for the tune of words. Like him, she had a taste for the theatre. She stood at the stage door; she wanted to act, she said. Men laughed in her face. The manager—a fat, loose-lipped man—guffawed. He bellowed something about poodles dancing and women acting—no woman, he said, could possibly be an actress. He hinted—you can imagine what. She could get no training in her craft. Could she even seek her dinner in a tavern or roam the streets at midnight? Yet her genius was for fiction and lusted to feed abundantly upon the lives of men and women and the study of their ways. At last—for she was very young, oddly like Shakespeare the poet in her face, with the same grey eyes and rounded brows—at last Nick Greene the actor-manager took pity on her; she found herself with child by that gentleman and so—who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?—killed herself one winter’s night and lies buried at some cross-roads where the omnibuses now stop outside the Elephant and Castle.

That, more or less, is how the story would run, I think, if a woman in Shakespeare’s day had had Shakespeare’s genius. But for my part, I agree with the deceased bishop, if such he was—it is unthinkable that any woman in Shakespeare’s day should have had Shakespeare’s genius. For genius like Shakespeare’s is not born among labouring, uneducated, servile people. It was not born in England among the Saxons and the Britons. It is not born to-day among the working classes. How, then, could it have been born among women whose work began, according to Professor Trevelyan, almost before they were out of the nursery, who were forced to it by their parents and held to it by all the power of law and custom? Yet genius of a sort must have existed among women as it must have existed among the working classes. Now and again an Emily Brontë or a Robert Burns blazes out and proves its presence. But certainly it never got itself on to paper. When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Brontë who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman. It was a woman Edward Fitzgerald, I think, suggested who made the ballads and the folk-songs, crooning them to her children, beguiling her spinning with them, or the length of the winter’s night.

This may be true or it may be false—who can say?—but what is true in it, so it seemed to me, reviewing the story of Shakespeare’s sister as I had made it, is that any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at. For it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty. No girl could have walked to London and stood at a stage door and forced her way into the presence of actor-managers without doing herself a violence and suffering an anguish which may have been irrational—for chastity may be a fetish invented by certain societies for unknown reasons—but were none the less inevitable. Chastity had then, it has even now, a religious importance in a woman’s life, and has so wrapped itself round with nerves and instincts that to cut it free and bring it to the light of day demands courage of the rarest. To have lived a free life in London in the sixteenth century would have meant for a woman who was poet and playwright a nervous stress and dilemma which might well have killed her. Had she survived, whatever she had written would have been twisted and deformed, issuing from a strained and morbid imagination. And undoubtedly, I thought, looking at the shelf where there are no plays by women, her work would have gone unsigned. That refuge she would have sought certainly. It was the relic of the sense of chastity that dictated anonymity to women even so late as the nineteenth century. Currer Bell, George Eliot, George Sand, all the victims of inner strife as their writings prove, sought ineffectively to veil themselves by using the name of a man. Thus they did homage to the convention, which if not implanted by the other sex was liberally encouraged by them (the chief glory of a woman is not to be talked of, said Pericles, himself a much-talked-of man) that publicity in women is detestable. Anonymity runs in their blood. The desire to be veiled still possesses them. They are not even now as concerned about the health of their fame as men are, and, speaking generally, will pass a tombstone or a signpost without feeling an irresistible desire to cut their names on it, as Alf, Bert or Chas. must do in obedience to their instinct, which murmurs if it sees a fine woman go by, or even a dog, Ce chien est à moi. And, of course, it may not be a dog, I thought, remembering Parliament Square, the Sieges Allee and other avenues; it may be a piece of land or a man with curly black hair. It is one of the great advantages of being a woman that one can pass even a very fine negress without wishing to make an Englishwoman of her.

That woman, then, who was born with a gift of poetry in the sixteenth century, was an unhappy woman, a woman at strife against herself. All the conditions of her life, all her own instincts, were hostile to the state of mind which is needed to set free whatever is in the brain. But what is the state of mind that is most propitious to the act of creation, I asked? Can one come by any notion of the state that furthers and makes possible that strange activity? Here I opened the volume containing the Tragedies of Shakespeare. What was Shakespeare’s state of mind, for instance, when he wrote Lear and Antony and Cleopatra? It was certainly the state of mind most favourable to poetry that there has ever existed. But Shakespeare himself said nothing about it. We only know casually and by chance that he “never blotted a line”. Nothing indeed was ever said by the artist himself about his state of mind until the eighteenth century perhaps. Rousseau perhaps began it. At any rate, by the nineteenth century self-consciousness had developed so far that it was the habit for men of letters to describe their minds in confessions and autobiographies. Their lives also were written, and their letters were printed after their deaths. Thus, though we do not know what Shakespeare went through when he wrote Lear, we do know what Carlyle went through when he wrote the French Revolution; what Flaubert went through when he wrote Madame Bovary; what Keats was going through when he tried to write poetry against the coming of death and the indifference of the world.

And one gathers from this enormous modern literature of confession and self-analysis that to write a work of genius is almost always a feat of prodigious difficulty. Everything is against the likelihood that it will come from the writer’s mind whole and entire. Generally material circumstances are against it. Dogs will bark; people will interrupt; money must be made; health will break down. Further, accentuating all these difficulties and making them harder to bear is the world’s notorious indifference. It does not ask people to write poems and novels and histories; it does not need them. It does not care whether Flaubert finds the right word or whether Carlyle scrupulously verifies this or that fact. Naturally, it will not pay for what it does not want. And so the writer, Keats, Flaubert, Carlyle, suffers, especially in the creative years of youth, every form of distraction and discouragement. A curse, a cry of agony, rises from those books of analysis and confession. “Mighty poets in their misery dead”—that is the burden of their song. If anything comes through in spite of all this, it is a miracle, and probably no book is born entire and uncrippled as it was conceived.

But for women, I thought, looking at the empty shelves, these difficulties were infinitely more formidable. In the first place, to have a room of her own, let alone a quiet room or a sound-proof room, was out of the question, unless her parents were exceptionally rich or very noble, even up to the beginning of the nineteenth century. Since her pin money, which depended on the goodwill of her father, was only enough to keep her clothed, she was debarred from such alleviations as came even to Keats or Tennyson or Carlyle, all poor men, from a walking tour, a little journey to France, from the separate lodging which, even if it were miserable enough, sheltered them from the claims and tyrannies of their families. Such material difficulties were formidable; but much worse were the immaterial. The indifference of the world which Keats and Flaubert and other men of genius have found so hard to bear was in her case not indifference but hostility. The world did not say to her as it said to them, Write if you choose; it makes no difference to me. The world said with a guffaw, Write? What’s the good of your writing? Here the psychologists of Newnham and Girton might come to our help, I thought, looking again at the blank spaces on the shelves. For surely it is time that the effect of discouragement upon the mind of the artist should be measured, as I have seen a dairy company measure the effect of ordinary milk and Grade A milk upon the body of the rat. They set two rats in cages side by side, and of the two one was furtive, timid and small, and the other was glossy, bold and big. Now what food do we feed women as artists upon? I asked, remembering, I suppose, that dinner of prunes and custard. To answer that question I had only to open the evening paper and to read that Lord Birkenhead is of opinion—but really I am not going to trouble to copy out Lord Birkenhead’s opinion upon the writing of women. What Dean Inge says I will leave in peace. The Harley Street specialist may be allowed to rouse the echoes of Harley Street with his vociferations without raising a hair on my head. I will quote, however, Mr. Oscar Browning, because Mr. Oscar Browning was a great figure in Cambridge at one time, and used to examine the students at Girton and Newnham. Mr. Oscar Browning was wont to declare “that the impression left on his mind, after looking over any set of examination papers, was that, irrespective of the marks he might give, the best woman was intellectually the inferior of the worst man”. After saying that Mr. Browning went back to his rooms—and it is this sequel that endears him and makes him a human figure of some bulk and majesty—he went back to his rooms and found a stable-boy lying on the sofa—“a mere skeleton, his cheeks were cavernous and sallow, his teeth were black, and he did not appear to have the full use of his limbs…. ‘That’s Arthur’ [said Mr. Browning]. ‘He’s a dear boy really and most high-minded.’” The two pictures always seem to me to complete each other. And happily in this age of biography the two pictures often do complete each other, so that we are able to interpret the opinions of great men not only by what they say, but by what they do.

But though this is possible now, such opinions coming from the lips of important people must have been formidable enough even fifty years ago. Let us suppose that a father from the highest motives did not wish his daughter to leave home and become writer, painter or scholar. “See what Mr. Oscar Browning says,” he would say; and there was not only Mr. Oscar Browning; there was the Saturday Review; there was Mr. Greg—the “essentials of a woman’s being”, said Mr. Greg emphatically, “are that they are supported by, and they minister to, men”—there was an enormous body of masculine opinion to the effect that nothing could be expected of women intellectually. Even if her father did not read out loud these opinions, any girl could read them for herself; and the reading, even in the nineteenth century, must have lowered her vitality, and told profoundly upon her work. There would always have been that assertion—you cannot do this, you are incapable of doing that—to protest against, to overcome. Probably for a novelist this germ is no longer of much effect; for there have been women novelists of merit. But for painters it must still have some sting in it; and for musicians, I imagine, is even now active and poisonous in the extreme. The woman composer stands where the actress stood in the time of Shakespeare. Nick Greene, I thought, remembering the story I had made about Shakespeare’s sister, said that a woman acting put him in mind of a dog dancing. Johnson repeated the phrase two hundred years later of women preaching. And here, I said, opening a book about music, we have the very words used again in this year of grace, 1928, of women who try to write music. “Of Mlle. Germaine Tailleferre one can only repeat Dr. Johnson’s dictum concerning a woman preacher, transposed into terms of music. ‘Sir, a woman’s composing is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.’ [◉6] So accurately does history repeat itself.

Thus, I concluded, shutting Mr. Oscar Browning’s life and pushing away the rest, it is fairly evident that even in the nineteenth century a woman was not encouraged to be an artist. On the contrary, she was snubbed, slapped, lectured and exhorted. Her mind must have been strained and her vitality lowered by the need of opposing this, of disproving that. For here again we come within range of that very interesting and obscure masculine complex which has had so much influence upon the woman’s movement; that deep-seated desire, not so much that she shall be inferior as that he shall be superior, which plants him wherever one looks, not only in front of the arts, but barring the way to politics too, even when the risk to himself seems infinitesimal and the suppliant humble and devoted. Even Lady Bessborough, I remembered, with all her passion for politics, must humbly bow herself and write to Lord Granville Leveson-Gower: “… notwithstanding all my violence in politicks and talking so much on that subject, I perfectly agree with you that no woman has any business to meddle with that or any other serious business, farther than giving her opinion (if she is ask’d).” And so she goes on to spend her enthusiasm where it meets with no obstacle whatsoever, upon that immensely important subject, Lord Granville’s maiden speech in the House of Commons. The spectacle is certainly a strange one, I thought. The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself. An amusing book might be made of it if some young student at Girton or Newnham would collect examples and deduce a theory,—but she would need thick gloves on her hands, and bars to protect her of solid gold.

But what is amusing now, I recollected, shutting Lady Bessborough, had to be taken in desperate earnest once. Opinions that one now pastes in a book labelled cock-a-doodle-dum and keeps for reading to select audiences on summer nights once drew tears, I can assure you. Among your grandmothers and great-grandmothers there were many that wept their eyes out. Florence Nightingale shrieked aloud in her agony. [◉7] Moreover, it is all very well for you, who have got yourselves to college and enjoy sitting-rooms—or is it only bed-sitting-rooms?—of your own to say that genius should disregard such opinions; that genius should be above caring what is said of it. Unfortunately, it is precisely the men or women of genius who mind most what is said of them. Remember Keats. Remember the words he had cut on his tombstone. Think of Tennyson; think—but I need hardly multiply instances of the undeniable, if very unfortunate, fact that it is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

And this susceptibility of theirs is doubly unfortunate, I thought, returning again to my original enquiry into what state of mind is most propitious for creative work, because the mind of an artist, in order to achieve the prodigious effort of freeing whole and entire the work that is in him, must be incandescent, like Shakespeare’s mind, I conjectured, looking at the book which lay open at Antony and Cleopatra. There must be no obstacle in it, no foreign matter unconsumed.

For though we say that we know nothing about Shakespeare’s state of mind, even as we say that, we are saying something about Shakespeare’s state of mind. The reason perhaps why we know so little of Shakespeare—compared with Donne or Ben Jonson or Milton—is that his grudges and spites and antipathies are hidden from us. We are not held up by some “revelation” which reminds us of the writer. All desire to protest, to preach, to proclaim an injury, to pay off a score, to make the world the witness of some hardship or grievance was fired out of him and consumed. Therefore his poetry flows from him free and unimpeded. If ever a human being got his work expressed completely, it was Shakespeare. If ever a mind was incandescent, unimpeded, I thought, turning again to the bookcase, it was Shakespeare’s mind.

[]

Chapter IV.

That one would find any woman in that state of mind in the sixteenth century was obviously impossible. One has only to think of the Elizabethan tombstones with all those children kneeling with clasped hands; and their early deaths; and to see their houses with their dark, cramped rooms, to realise that no woman could have written poetry then. What one would expect to find would be that rather later perhaps some great lady would take advantage of her comparative freedom and comfort to publish something with her name to it and risk being thought a monster. Men, of course, are not snobs, I continued, carefully eschewing “the arrant feminism” of Miss Rebecca West; but they appreciate with sympathy for the most part the efforts of a countess to write verse. One would expect to find a lady of title meeting with far greater encouragement than an unknown Miss Austen or a Miss Brontë at that time would have met with. But one would also expect to find that her mind was disturbed by alien emotions like fear and hatred and that her poems showed traces of that disturbance. Here is Lady Winchilsea, for example, I thought, taking down her poems. She was born in the year 1661; she was noble both by birth and by marriage; she was childless; she wrote poetry, and one has only to open her poetry to find her bursting out in indignation against the position of women:

How are we fallen! fallen by mistaken rules,

And Education’s more than Nature’s fools;

Debarred from all improvements of the mind,

And to be dull, expected and designed;

And if someone would soar above the rest,

With warmer fancy, and ambition pressed,

So strong the opposing faction still appears,

The hopes to thrive can ne’er outweigh the fears.

Clearly her mind has by no means “consumed all impediments and become incandescent”. On the contrary, it is harassed and distracted with hates and grievances. The human race is split up for her into two parties. Men are the “opposing faction”; men are hated and feared, because they have the power to bar her way to what she wants to do—which is to write.

Alas! a woman that attempts the pen,

Such a presumptuous creature is esteemed,

The fault can by no virtue be redeemed.

They tell us we mistake our sex and way;

Good breeding, fashion, dancing, dressing, play,

Are the accomplishments we should desire;

To write, or read, or think, or to enquire,

Would cloud our beauty, and exhaust our time,

And interrupt the conquests of our prime,

Whilst the dull manage of a servile house

Is held by some our utmost art and use.

Indeed she has to encourage herself to write by supposing that what she writes will never be published; to soothe herself with the sad chant:

To some few friends, and to thy sorrows sing,

For groves of laurel thou wert never meant;

Be dark enough thy shades, and be thou there content.

Yet it is clear that could she have freed her mind from hate and fear and not heaped it with bitterness and resentment, the fire was hot within her. Now and again words issue of pure poetry:

Nor will in fading silks compose,

Faintly the inimitable rose.

—they are rightly praised by Mr. Murry, and Pope, it is thought, remembered and appropriated those others:

Now the jonquille o’ercomes the feeble brain;

We faint beneath the aromatic pain.

It was a thousand pities that the woman who could write like that, whose mind was tuned to nature and reflection, should have been forced to anger and bitterness. But how could she have helped herself? I asked, imagining the sneers and the laughter, the adulation of the toadies, the scepticism of the professional poet. She must have shut herself up in a room in the country to write, and been torn asunder by bitterness and scruples perhaps, though her husband was of the kindest, and their married life perfection. She “must have”, I say, because when one comes to seek out the facts about Lady Winchilsea, one finds, as usual, that almost nothing is known about her. She suffered terribly from melancholy, which we can explain at least to some extent when we find her telling us how in the grip of it she would imagine:

My lines decried, and my employment thought

An useless folly or presumptuous fault:

The employment, which was thus censured, was, as far as one can see, the harmless one of rambling about the fields and dreaming:

My hand delights to trace unusual things,

And deviates from the known and common way,

Nor will in fading silks compose,

Faintly the inimitable rose.

Naturally, if that was her habit and that was her delight, she could only expect to be laughed at; and, accordingly, Pope or Gay is said to have satirised her “as a blue-stocking with an itch for scribbling”. Also it is thought that she offended Gay by laughing at him. She said that his Trivia showed that “he was more proper to walk before a chair than to ride in one”. But this is all “dubious gossip” and, says Mr. Murry, “uninteresting”. But there I do not agree with him, for I should have liked to have had more even of dubious gossip so that I might have found out or made up some image of this melancholy lady, who loved wandering in the fields and thinking about unusual things and scorned, so rashly, so unwisely, “the dull manage of a servile house”. But she became diffuse, Mr. Murry says. Her gift is all grown about with weeds and bound with briars. It had no chance of showing itself for the fine distinguished gift it was. And so, putting her back on the shelf, I turned to the other great lady, the Duchess whom Lamb loved, hare-brained, fantastical Margaret of Newcastle, her elder, but her contemporary. They were very different, but alike in this that both were noble and both childless, and both were married to the best of husbands. In both burnt the same passion for poetry and both are disfigured and deformed by the same causes. Open the Duchess and one finds the same outburst of rage, “Women live like Bats or Owls, labour like Beasts, and die like Worms….” Margaret too might have been a poet; in our day all that activity would have turned a wheel of some sort. As it was, what could bind, tame or civilise for human use that wild, generous, untutored intelligence? It poured itself out, higgledy-piggledy, in torrents of rhyme and prose, poetry and philosophy which stand congealed in quartos and folios that nobody ever reads. She should have had a microscope put in her hand. She should have been taught to look at the stars and reason scientifically. Her wits were turned with solitude and freedom. No one checked her. No one taught her. The professors fawned on her. At Court they jeered at her. Sir Egerton Brydges complained of her coarseness—“as flowing from a female of high rank brought up in the Courts”. She shut herself up at Welbeck alone.

What a vision of loneliness and riot the thought of Margaret Cavendish brings to mind! as if some giant cucumber had spread itself over all the roses and carnations in the garden and choked them to death. What a waste that the woman who wrote “the best bred women are those whose minds are civilest” should have frittered her time away scribbling nonsense and plunging ever deeper into obscurity and folly till the people crowded round her coach when she issued out. Evidently the crazy Duchess became a bogey to frighten clever girls with. Here, I remembered, putting away the Duchess and opening Dorothy Osborne’s letters, is Dorothy writing to Temple about the Duchess’s new book. “Sure the poore woman is a little distracted, shee could never bee soe rediculous else as to venture at writeing book’s and in verse too, if I should not sleep this fortnight I should not come to that.”

And so, since no woman of sense and modesty could write books, Dorothy, who was sensitive and melancholy, the very opposite of the Duchess in temper, wrote nothing. Letters did not count. A woman might write letters while she was sitting by her father’s sick-bed. She could write them by the fire whilst the men talked without disturbing them. The strange thing is, I thought, turning over the pages of Dorothy’s letters, what a gift that untaught and solitary girl had for the framing of a sentence, for the fashioning of a scene. Listen to her running on:

“After dinner wee sitt and talk till Mr. B. com’s in question and then I am gon. the heat of the day is spent in reading or working and about sixe or seven a Clock, I walke out into a Common that lyes hard by the house where a great many young wenches keep Sheep and Cow’s and sitt in the shades singing of Ballads; I goe to them and compare their voyces and Beauty’s to some Ancient Shepherdesses that I have read of and finde a vaste difference there, but trust mee I think these are as innocent as those could bee. I talke to them, and finde they want nothing to make them the happiest People in the world, but the knoledge that they are soe. most commonly when we are in the middest of our discourse one looks aboute her and spyes her Cow’s goeing into the Corne and then away they all run, as if they had wing’s at theire heels. I that am not soe nimble stay behinde, and when I see them driveing home theire Cattle I think tis time for mee to retyre too. when I have supped I goe into the Garden and soe to the syde of a small River that runs by it where I sitt downe and wish you with mee….”

One could have sworn that she had the makings of a writer in her. But “if I should not sleep this fortnight I should not come to that”—one can measure the opposition that was in the air to a woman writing when one finds that even a woman with a great turn for writing has brought herself to believe that to write a book was to be ridiculous, even to show oneself distracted. And so we come, I continued, replacing the single short volume of Dorothy Osborne’s letters upon the shelf, to Mrs. Behn.

And with Mrs. Behn we turn a very important corner on the road. We leave behind, shut up in their parks among their folios, those solitary great ladies who wrote without audience or criticism, for their own delight alone. We come to town and rub shoulders with ordinary people in the streets. Mrs. Behn was a middle-class woman with all the plebeian virtues of humour, vitality and courage; a woman forced by the death of her husband and some unfortunate adventures of her own to make her living by her wits. She had to work on equal terms with men. She made, by working very hard, enough to live on. The importance of that fact outweighs anything that she actually wrote, even the splendid “A Thousand Martyrs I have made”, or “Love in Fantastic Triumph sat”, for here begins the freedom of the mind, or rather the possibility that in the course of time the mind will be free to write what it likes. For now that Aphra Behn had done it, girls could go to their parents and say, You need not give me an allowance; I can make money by my pen. Of course the answer for many years to come was, Yes, by living the life of Aphra Behn! Death would be better! and the door was slammed faster than ever. That profoundly interesting subject, the value that men set upon women’s chastity and its effect upon their education, here suggests itself for discussion, and might provide an interesting book if any student at Girton or Newnham cared to go into the matter. Lady Dudley, sitting in diamonds among the midges of a Scottish moor, might serve for frontispiece. Lord Dudley, The Times said when Lady Dudley died the other day, “a man of cultivated taste and many accomplishments, was benevolent and bountiful, but whimsically despotic. He insisted upon his wife’s wearing full dress, even at the remotest shooting-lodge in the Highlands; he loaded her with gorgeous jewels”, and so on, “he gave her everything—always excepting any measure of responsibility”. Then Lord Dudley had a stroke and she nursed him and ruled his estates with supreme competence for ever after. That whimsical despotism was in the nineteenth century too.

But to return. Aphra Behn proved that money could be made by writing at the sacrifice, perhaps, of certain agreeable qualities; and so by degrees writing became not merely a sign of folly and a distracted mind, but was of practical importance. A husband might die, or some disaster overtake the family. Hundreds of women began as the eighteenth century drew on to add to their pin money, or to come to the rescue of their families by making translations or writing the innumerable bad novels which have ceased to be recorded even in text-books, but are to be picked up in the fourpenny boxes in the Charing Cross Road. The extreme activity of mind which showed itself in the later eighteenth century among women—the talking, and the meeting, the writing of essays on Shakespeare, the translating of the classics—was founded on the solid fact that women could make money by writing. Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for. It might still be well to sneer at “blue stockings with an itch for scribbling”, but it could not be denied that they could put money in their purses. Thus, towards the end of the eighteenth century a change came about which, if I were rewriting history, I should describe more fully and think of greater importance than the Crusades or the Wars of the Roses. The middle-class woman began to write. For if Pride and Prejudice matters, and Middlemarch and Villette and Wuthering Heights matter, then it matters far more than I can prove in an hour’s discourse that women generally, and not merely the lonely aristocrat shut up in her country house among her folios and her flatterers, took to writing. Without those forerunners, Jane Austen and the Brontës and George Eliot could no more have written than Shakespeare could have written without Marlowe, or Marlowe without Chaucer, or Chaucer without those forgotten poets who paved the ways and tamed the natural savagery of the tongue. For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice. Jane Austen should have laid a wreath upon the grave of Fanny Burney, and George Eliot done homage to the robust shade of Eliza Carter—the valiant old woman who tied a bell to her bedstead in order that she might wake early and learn Greek. All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, which is, most scandalously but rather appropriately, in Westminster Abbey, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds. It is she—shady and amorous as she was—who makes it not quite fantastic for me to say to you to-night: Earn five hundred a year by your wits.

Here, then, one had reached the early nineteenth century. And here, for the first time, I found several shelves given up entirely to the works of women. But why, I could not help asking, as I ran my eyes over them, were they, with very few exceptions, all novels? The original impulse was to poetry. The “supreme head of song” was a poetess. Both in France and in England the women poets precede the women novelists. Moreover, I thought, looking at the four famous names, what had George Eliot in common with Emily Brontë? Did not Charlotte Brontë fail entirely to understand Jane Austen? Save for the possibly relevant fact that not one of them had a child, four more incongruous characters could not have met together in a room—so much so that it is tempting to invent a meeting and a dialogue between them. Yet by some strange force they were all compelled when they wrote, to write novels. Had it something to do with being born of the middle class, I asked; and with the fact, which Miss Emily Davies a little later was so strikingly to demonstrate, that the middle-class family in the early nineteenth century was possessed only of a single sitting-room between them? If a woman wrote, she would have to write in the common sitting-room. And, as Miss Nightingale was so vehemently to complain,—“women never have an half hour … that they can call their own”—she was always interrupted. Still it would be easier to write prose and fiction there than to write poetry or a play. Less concentration is required. Jane Austen wrote like that to the end of her days. “How she was able to effect all this”, her nephew writes in his Memoir, “is surprising, for she had no separate study to repair to, and most of the work must have been done in the general sitting-room, subject to all kinds of casual interruptions. She was careful that her occupation should not be suspected by servants or visitors or any persons beyond her own family party. [◉8] Jane Austen hid her manuscripts or covered them with a piece of blotting-paper. Then, again, all the literary training that a woman had in the early nineteenth century was training in the observation of character, in the analysis of emotion. Her sensibility had been educated for centuries by the influences of the common sitting-room. People’s feelings were impressed on her; personal relations were always before her eyes. Therefore, when the middle-class woman took to writing, she naturally wrote novels, even though, as seems evident enough, two of the four famous women here named were not by nature novelists. Emily Brontë should have written poetic plays; the overflow of George Eliot’s capacious mind should have spread itself when the creative impulse was spent upon history or biography. They wrote novels, however; one may even go further, I said, taking Pride and Prejudice from the shelf, and say that they wrote good novels. Without boasting or giving pain to the opposite sex, one may say that Pride and Prejudice is a good book. At any rate, one would not have been ashamed to have been caught in the act of writing Pride and Prejudice. Yet Jane Austen was glad that a hinge creaked, so that she might hide her manuscript before anyone came in. To Jane Austen there was something discreditable in writing Pride and Prejudice. And, I wondered, would Pride and Prejudice have been a better novel if Jane Austen had not thought it necessary to hide her manuscript from visitors? I read a page or two to see; but I could not find any signs that her circumstances had harmed her work in the slightest. That, perhaps, was the chief miracle about it. Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. That was how Shakespeare wrote, I thought, looking at Antony and Cleopatra; and when people compare Shakespeare and Jane Austen, they may mean that the minds of both had consumed all impediments; and for that reason we do not know Jane Austen and we do not know Shakespeare, and for that reason Jane Austen pervades every word that she wrote, and so does Shakespeare. If Jane Austen suffered in any way from her circumstances it was in the narrowness of life that was imposed upon her. It was impossible for a woman to go about alone. She never travelled; she never drove through London in an omnibus or had luncheon in a shop by herself. But perhaps it was the nature of Jane Austen not to want what she had not. Her gift and her circumstances matched each other completely. But I doubt whether that was true of Charlotte Brontë, I said, opening Jane Eyre and laying it beside Pride and Prejudice.

I opened it at chapter twelve and my eye was caught by the phrase “Anybody may blame me who likes”. What were they blaming Charlotte Brontë for? I wondered. And I read how Jane Eyre used to go up on to the roof when Mrs. Fairfax was making jellies and looked over the fields at the distant view. And then she longed—and it was for this that they blamed her—that “then I longed for a power of vision which might overpass that limit; which might reach the busy world, towns, regions full of life I had heard of but never seen: that then I desired more of practical experience than I possessed; more of intercourse with my kind, of acquaintance with variety of character than was here within my reach. I valued what was good in Mrs. Fairfax, and what was good in Adèle; but I believed in the existence of other and more vivid kinds of goodness, and what I believed in I wished to behold.

“Who blames me? Many, no doubt, and I shall be called discontented. I could not help it: the restlessness was in my nature; it agitated me to pain sometimes….

“It is vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it. Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth. Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.

“When thus alone I not unfrequently heard Grace Poole’s laugh….”

That is an awkward break, I thought. It is upsetting to come upon Grace Poole all of a sudden. The continuity is disturbed. One might say, I continued, laying the book down beside Pride and Prejudice, that the woman who wrote those pages had more genius in her than Jane Austen; but if one reads them over and marks that jerk in them, that indignation, one sees that she will never get her genius expressed whole and entire. Her books will be deformed and twisted. She will write in a rage where she should write calmly. She will write foolishly where she should write wisely. She will write of herself where she should write of her characters. She is at war with her lot. How could she help but die young, cramped and thwarted?

One could not but play for a moment with the thought of what might have happened if Charlotte Brontë had possessed say three hundred a year—but the foolish woman sold the copyright of her novels outright for fifteen hundred pounds; had somehow possessed more knowledge of the busy world, and towns and regions full of life; more practical experience, and intercourse with her kind and acquaintance with a variety of character. In those words she puts her finger exactly not only upon her own defects as a novelist but upon those of her sex at that time. She knew, no one better, how enormously her genius would have profited if it had not spent itself in solitary visions over distant fields; if experience and intercourse and travel had been granted her. But they were not granted; they were withheld; and we must accept the fact that all those good novels, Villette, Emma, Wuthering Heights, Middlemarch, were written by women without more experience of life than could enter the house of a respectable clergyman; written too in the common sitting-room of that respectable house and by women so poor that they could not afford to buy more than a few quires of paper at a time upon which to write Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre. One of them, it is true, George Eliot, escaped after much tribulation, but only to a secluded villa in St. John’s Wood. And there she settled down in the shadow of the world’s disapproval. “I wish it to be understood”, she wrote, “that I should never invite anyone to come and see me who did not ask for the invitation”; for was she not living in sin with a married man and might not the sight of her damage the chastity of Mrs. Smith or whoever it might be that chanced to call? One must submit to the social convention, and be “cut off from what is called the world”. At the same time, on the other side of Europe, there was a young man living freely with this gipsy or with that great lady; going to the wars; picking up unhindered and uncensored all that varied experience of human life which served him so splendidly later when he came to write his books. Had Tolstoi lived at the Priory in seclusion with a married lady “cut off from what is called the world”, however edifying the moral lesson, he could scarcely, I thought, have written War and Peace.

But one could perhaps go a little deeper into the question of novel-writing and the effect of sex upon the novelist. If one shuts one’s eyes and thinks of the novel as a whole, it would seem to be a creation owning a certain looking-glass likeness to life, though of course with simplifications and distortions innumerable. At any rate, it is a structure leaving a shape on the mind’s eye, built now in squares, now pagoda shaped, now throwing out wings and arcades, now solidly compact and domed like the Cathedral of Saint Sofia at Constantinople. This shape, I thought, thinking back over certain famous novels, starts in one the kind of emotion that is appropriate to it. But that emotion at once blends itself with others, for the “shape” is not made by the relation of stone to stone, but by the relation of human being to human being. Thus a novel starts in us all sorts of antagonistic and opposed emotions. Life conflicts with something that is not life. Hence the difficulty of coming to any agreement about novels, and the immense sway that our private prejudices have upon us. On the one hand, we feel You—John the hero—must live, or I shall be in the depths of despair. On the other, we feel, Alas, John, you must die, because the shape of the book requires it. Life conflicts with something that is not life. Then since life it is in part, we judge it as life. James is the sort of man I most detest, one says. Or, This is a farrago of absurdity. I could never feel anything of the sort myself. The whole structure, it is obvious, thinking back on any famous novel, is one of infinite complexity, because it is thus made up of so many different judgements, of so many different kinds of emotion. The wonder is that any book so composed holds together for more than a year or two, or can possibly mean to the English reader what it means for the Russian or the Chinese. But they do hold together occasionally very remarkably. And what holds them together in these rare instances of survival (I was thinking of War and Peace) is something that one calls integrity, though it has nothing to do with paying one’s bills or behaving honourably in an emergency. What one means by integrity, in the case of the novelist, is the conviction that he gives one that this is the truth. Yes, one feels, I should never have thought that this could be so; I have never known people behaving like that. But you have convinced me that so it is, so it happens. One holds every phrase, every scene to the light as one reads—for Nature seems, very oddly, to have provided us with an inner light by which to judge of the novelist’s integrity or disintegrity. Or perhaps it is rather that Nature, in her most irrational mood, has traced in invisible ink on the walls of the mind a premonition which these great artists confirm; a sketch which only needs to be held to the fire of genius to become visible. When one so exposes it and sees it come to life one exclaims in rapture, But this is what I have always felt and known and desired! And one boils over with excitement, and, shutting the book even with a kind of reverence as if it were something very precious, a stand-by to return to as long as one lives, one puts it back on the shelf, I said, taking War and Peace and putting it back in its place. If, on the other hand, these poor sentences that one takes and tests rouse first a quick and eager response with their bright colouring and their dashing gestures but there they stop: something seems to check them in their development: or if they bring to light only a faint scribble in that corner and a blot over there, and nothing appears whole and entire, then one heaves a sigh of disappointment and says, Another failure. This novel has come to grief somewhere.

And for the most part, of course, novels do come to grief somewhere. The imagination falters under the enormous strain. The insight is confused; it can no longer distinguish between the true and the false; it has no longer the strength to go on with the vast labour that calls at every moment for the use of so many different faculties. But how would all this be affected by the sex of the novelist, I wondered, looking at Jane Eyre and the others. Would the fact of her sex in any way interfere with the integrity of a woman novelist—that integrity which I take to be the backbone of the writer? Now, in the passages I have quoted from Jane Eyre, it is clear that anger was tampering with the integrity of Charlotte Brontë the novelist. She left her story, to which her entire devotion was due, to attend to some personal grievance. She remembered that she had been starved of her proper due of experience—she had been made to stagnate in a parsonage mending stockings when she wanted to wander free over the world. Her imagination swerved from indignation and we feel it swerve. But there were many more influences than anger tugging at her imagination and deflecting it from its path. Ignorance, for instance. The portrait of Rochester is drawn in the dark. We feel the influence of fear in it; just as we constantly feel an acidity which is the result of oppression, a buried suffering smouldering beneath her passion, a rancour which contracts those books, splendid as they are, with a spasm of pain.

And since a novel has this correspondence to real life, its values are to some extent those of real life. But it is obvious that the values of women differ very often from the values which have been made by the other sex; naturally, this is so. Yet it is the masculine values that prevail. Speaking crudely, football and sport are “important”; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes “trivial”. And these values are inevitably transferred from life to fiction. This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room. A scene in a battle-field is more important than a scene in a shop—everywhere and much more subtly the difference of value persists. The whole structure, therefore, of the early nineteenth-century novel was raised, if one was a woman, by a mind which was slightly pulled from the straight, and made to alter its clear vision in deference to external authority. One has only to skim those old forgotten novels and listen to the tone of voice in which they are written to divine that the writer was meeting criticism; she was saying this by way of aggression, or that by way of conciliation. She was admitting that she was “only a woman”, or protesting that she was “as good as a man”. She met that criticism as her temperament dictated, with docility and diffidence, or with anger and emphasis. It does not matter which it was; she was thinking of something other than the thing itself. Down comes her book upon our heads. There was a flaw in the centre of it. And I thought of all the women’s novels that lie scattered, like small pock-marked apples in an orchard, about the second-hand book shops of London. It was the flaw in the centre that had rotted them. She had altered her values in deference to the opinion of others.

But how impossible it must have been for them not to budge either to the right or to the left. What genius, what integrity it must have required in face of all that criticism, in the midst of that purely patriarchal society, to hold fast to the thing as they saw it without shrinking. Only Jane Austen did it and Emily Brontë. It is another feather, perhaps the finest, in their caps. They wrote as women write, not as men write. Of all the thousand women who wrote novels then, they alone entirely ignored the perpetual admonitions of the eternal pedagogue—write this, think that. They alone were deaf to that persistent voice, now grumbling, now patronising, now domineering, now grieved, now shocked, now angry, now avuncular, that voice which cannot let women alone, but must be at them, like some too conscientious governess, adjuring them, like Sir Egerton Brydges, to be refined; dragging even into the criticism of poetry criticism of sex; [◉9] admonishing them, if they would be good and win, as I suppose, some shiny prize, to keep within certain limits which the gentleman in question thinks suitable—“… female novelists should only aspire to excellence by courageously acknowledging the limitations of their sex”. [◉10] That puts the matter in a nutshell, and when I tell you, rather to your surprise, that this sentence was written not in August 1828 but in August 1928, you will agree, I think, that however delightful it is to us now, it represents a vast body of opinion—I am not going to stir those old pools; I take only what chance has floated to my feet—that was far more vigorous and far more vocal a century ago. It would have needed a very stalwart young woman in 1828 to disregard all those snubs and chidings and promises of prizes. One must have been something of a firebrand to say to oneself, Oh, but they can’t buy literature too. Literature is open to everybody. I refuse to allow you, Beadle though you are, to turn me off the grass. Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.

But whatever effect discouragement and criticism had upon their writing—and I believe that they had a very great effect—that was unimportant compared with the other difficulty which faced them (I was still considering those early nineteenth-century novelists) when they came to set their thoughts on paper—that is that they had no tradition behind them, or one so short and partial that it was of little help. For we think back through our mothers if we are women. It is useless to go to the great men writers for help, however much one may go to them for pleasure. Lamb, Browne, Thackeray, Newman, Sterne, Dickens, De Quincey—whoever it may be—never helped a woman yet, though she may have learnt a few tricks of them and adapted them to her use. The weight, the pace, the stride of a man’s mind are too unlike her own for her to lift anything substantial from him successfully. The ape is too distant to be sedulous. Perhaps the first thing she would find, setting pen to paper, was that there was no common sentence ready for her use. All the great novelists like Thackeray and Dickens and Balzac have written a natural prose, swift but not slovenly, expressive but not precious, taking their own tint without ceasing to be common property. They have based it on the sentence that was current at the time. The sentence that was current at the beginning of the nineteenth century ran something like this perhaps: “The grandeur of their works was an argument with them, not to stop short, but to proceed. They could have no higher excitement or satisfaction than in the exercise of their art and endless generations of truth and beauty. Success prompts to exertion; and habit facilitates success.” That is a man’s sentence; behind it one can see Johnson, Gibbon and the rest. It was a sentence that was unsuited for a woman’s use. Charlotte Brontë, with all her splendid gift for prose, stumbled and fell with that clumsy weapon in her hands. George Eliot committed atrocities with it that beggar description. Jane Austen looked at it and laughed at it and devised a perfectly natural, shapely sentence proper for her own use and never departed from it. Thus, with less genius for writing than Charlotte Brontë, she got infinitely more said. Indeed, since freedom and fullness of expression are of the essence of the art, such a lack of tradition, such a scarcity and inadequacy of tools, must have told enormously upon the writing of women. Moreover, a book is not made of sentences laid end to end, but of sentences built, if an image helps, into arcades or domes. And this shape too has been made by men out of their own needs for their own uses. There is no reason to think that the form of the epic or of the poetic play suit a woman any more than the sentence suits her. But all the older forms of literature were hardened and set by the time she became a writer. The novel alone was young enough to be soft in her hands—another reason, perhaps, why she wrote novels. Yet who shall say that even now “the novel” (I give it inverted commas to mark my sense of the words’ inadequacy), who shall say that even this most pliable of all forms is rightly shaped for her use? No doubt we shall find her knocking that into shape for herself when she has the free use of her limbs; and providing some new vehicle, not necessarily in verse, for the poetry in her. For it is the poetry that is still denied outlet. And I went on to ponder how a woman nowadays would write a poetic tragedy in five acts. Would she use verse?—would she not use prose rather?

But these are difficult questions which lie in the twilight of the future. I must leave them, if only because they stimulate me to wander from my subject into trackless forests where I shall be lost and, very likely, devoured by wild beasts. I do not want, and I am sure that you do not want me, to broach that very dismal subject, the future of fiction, so that I will only pause here one moment to draw your attention to the great part which must be played in that future so far as women are concerned by physical conditions. The book has somehow to be adapted to the body, and at a venture one would say that women’s books should be shorter, more concentrated, than those of men, and framed so that they do not need long hours of steady and uninterrupted work. For interruptions there will always be. Again, the nerves that feed the brain would seem to differ in men and women, and if you are going to make them work their best and hardest, you must find out what treatment suits them—whether these hours of lectures, for instance, which the monks devised, presumably, hundreds of years ago, suit them—what alternations of work and rest they need, interpreting rest not as doing nothing but as doing something but something that is different; and what should that difference be? All this should be discussed and discovered; all this is part of the question of women and fiction. And yet, I continued, approaching the bookcase again, where shall I find that elaborate study of the psychology of women by a woman? If through their incapacity to play football women are not going to be allowed to practise medicine——

Happily my thoughts were now given another turn.

[]

Chapter V.

I had come at last, in the course of this rambling, to the shelves which hold books by the living; by women and by men; for there are almost as many books written by women now as by men. Or if that is not yet quite true, if the male is still the voluble sex, it is certainly true that women no longer write novels solely. There are Jane Harrison’s books on Greek archaeology; Vernon Lee’s books on aesthetics; Gertrude Bell’s books on Persia. There are books on all sorts of subjects which a generation ago no woman could have touched. There are poems and plays and criticism; there are histories and biographies, books of travel and books of scholarship and research; there are even a few philosophies and books about science and economics. And though novels predominate, novels themselves may very well have changed from association with books of a different feather. The natural simplicity, the epic age of women’s writing, may have gone. Reading and criticism may have given her a wider range, a greater subtlety. The impulse towards autobiography may be spent. She may be beginning to use writing as an art, not as a method of self-expression. Among these new novels one might find an answer to several such questions.

I took down one of them at random. It stood at the very end of the shelf, was called Life’s Adventure, or some such title, by Mary Carmichael, and was published in this very month of October. It seems to be her first book, I said to myself, but one must read it as if it were the last volume in a fairly long series, continuing all those other books that I have been glancing at—Lady Winchilsea’s poems and Aphra Behn’s plays and the novels of the four great novelists. For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately. And I must also consider her—this unknown woman—as the descendant of all those other women whose circumstances I have been glancing at and see what she inherits of their characteristics and restrictions. So, with a sigh, because novels so often provide an anodyne and not an antidote, glide one into torpid slumbers instead of rousing one with a burning brand, I settled down with a notebook and a pencil to make what I could of Mary Carmichael’s first novel, Life’s Adventure.

To begin with, I ran my eye up and down the page. I am going to get the hang of her sentences first, I said, before I load my memory with blue eyes and brown and the relationship that there may be between Chloe and Roger. There will be time for that when I have decided whether she has a pen in her hand or a pickaxe. So I tried a sentence or two on my tongue. Soon it was obvious that something was not quite in order. The smooth gliding of sentence after sentence was interrupted. Something tore, something scratched; a single word here and there flashed its torch in my eyes. She was “unhanding” herself as they say in the old plays. She is like a person striking a match that will not light, I thought. But why, I asked her as if she were present, are Jane Austen’s sentences not of the right shape for you? Must they all be scrapped because Emma and Mr. Woodhouse are dead? Alas, I sighed, that it should be so. For while Jane Austen breaks from melody to melody as Mozart from song to song, to read this writing was like being out at sea in an open boat. Up one went, down one sank. This terseness, this short-windedness, might mean that she was afraid of something; afraid of being called “sentimental” perhaps; or she remembers that women’s writing has been called flowery and so provides a superfluity of thorns; but until I have read a scene with some care, I cannot be sure whether she is being herself or someone else. At any rate, she does not lower one’s vitality, I thought, reading more carefully. But she is heaping up too many facts. She will not be able to use half of them in a book of this size. (It was about half the length of Jane Eyre.) However, by some means or other she succeeded in getting us all—Roger, Chloe, Olivia, Tony and Mr. Bigham—in a canoe up the river. Wait a moment, I said, leaning back in my chair, I must consider the whole thing more carefully before I go any further.

I am almost sure, I said to myself, that Mary Carmichael is playing a trick on us. For I feel as one feels on a switchback railway when the car, instead of sinking, as one has been led to expect, swerves up again. Mary is tampering with the expected sequence. First she broke the sentence; now she has broken the sequence. Very well, she has every right to do both these things if she does them not for the sake of breaking, but for the sake of creating. Which of the two it is I cannot be sure until she has faced herself with a situation. I will give her every liberty, I said, to choose what that situation shall be; she shall make it of tin cans and old kettles if she likes; but she must convince me that she believes it to be a situation; and then when she has made it she must face it. She must jump. And, determined to do my duty by her as reader if she would do her duty by me as writer, I turned the page and read … I am sorry to break off so abruptly. Are there no men present? Do you promise me that behind that red curtain over there the figure of Sir Chartres Biron is not concealed? We are all women you assure me? Then I may tell you that the very next words I read were these—“Chloe liked Olivia …” Do not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women.

“Chloe liked Olivia,” I read. And then it struck me how immense a change was there. Chloe liked Olivia perhaps for the first time in literature. Cleopatra did not like Octavia. And how completely Antony and Cleopatra would have been altered had she done so! As it is, I thought, letting my mind, I am afraid, wander a little from Life’s Adventure, the whole thing is simplified, conventionalised, if one dared say it, absurdly. Cleopatra’s only feeling about Octavia is one of jealousy. Is she taller than I am? How does she do her hair? The play, perhaps, required no more. But how interesting it would have been if the relationship between the two women had been more complicated. All these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of fictitious women, are too simple. So much has been left out, unattempted. And I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends. There is an attempt at it in Diana of the Crossways. They are confidantes, of course, in Racine and the Greek tragedies. They are now and then mothers and daughters. But almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men. It was strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen’s day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of a woman’s life is that; and how little can a man know even of that when he observes it through the black or rosy spectacles which sex puts upon his nose. Hence, perhaps, the peculiar nature of women in fiction; the astonishing extremes of her beauty and horror; her alternations between heavenly goodness and hellish depravity—for so a lover would see her as his love rose or sank, was prosperous or unhappy. This is not so true of the nineteenth-century novelists, of course. Woman becomes much more various and complicated there. Indeed it was the desire to write about women perhaps that led men by degrees to abandon the poetic drama which, with its violence, could make so little use of them, and to devise the novel as a more fitting receptacle. Even so it remains obvious, even in the writing of Proust, that a man is terribly hampered and partial in his knowledge of women, as a woman in her knowledge of men.

Also, I continued, looking down at the page again, it is becoming evident that women, like men, have other interests besides the perennial interests of domesticity. “Chloe liked Olivia. They shared a laboratory together….” I read on and discovered that these two young women were engaged in mincing liver, which is, it seems, a cure for pernicious anæmia; although one of them was married and had—I think I am right in stating—two small children. Now all that, of course, has had to be left out, and thus the splendid portrait of the fictitious woman is much too simple and much too monotonous. Suppose, for instance, that men were only represented in literature as the lovers of women, and were never the friends of men, soldiers, thinkers, dreamers; how few parts in the plays of Shakespeare could be allotted to them; how literature would suffer! We might perhaps have most of Othello; and a good deal of Antony; but no Caesar, no Brutus, no Hamlet, no Lear, no Jaques—literature would be incredibly impoverished, as indeed literature is impoverished beyond our counting by the doors that have been shut upon women. Married against their will, kept in one room, and to one occupation, how could a dramatist give a full or interesting or truthful account of them? Love was the only possible interpreter. The poet was forced to be passionate or bitter, unless indeed he chose to “hate women”, which meant more often than not that he was unattractive to them.

Now if Chloe likes Olivia and they share a laboratory, which of itself will make their friendship more varied and lasting because it will be less personal; if Mary Carmichael knows how to write, and I was beginning to enjoy some quality in her style; if she has a room to herself, of which I am not quite sure; if she has five hundred a year of her own—but that remains to be proved—then I think that something of great importance has happened.

For if Chloe likes Olivia and Mary Carmichael knows how to express it she will light a torch in that vast chamber where nobody has yet been. It is all half lights and profound shadows like those serpentine caves where one goes with a candle peering up and down, not knowing where one is stepping. And I began to read the book again, and read how Chloe watched Olivia put a jar on a shelf and say how it was time to go home to her children. That is a sight that has never been seen since the world began, I exclaimed. And I watched too, very curiously. For I wanted to see how Mary Carmichael set to work to catch those unrecorded gestures, those unsaid or half-said words, which form themselves, no more palpably than the shadows of moths on the ceiling, when women are alone, unlit by the capricious and coloured light of the other sex. She will need to hold her breath, I said, reading on, if she is to do it; for women are so suspicious of any interest that has not some obvious motive behind it, so terribly accustomed to concealment and suppression, that they are off at the flicker of an eye turned observingly in their direction. The only way for you to do it, I thought, addressing Mary Carmichael as if she were there, would be to talk of something else, looking steadily out of the window, and thus note, not with a pencil in a notebook, but in the shortest of shorthand, in words that are hardly syllabled yet, what happens when Olivia—this organism that has been under the shadow of the rock these million years—feels the light fall on it, and sees coming her way a piece of strange food—knowledge, adventure, art. And she reaches out for it, I thought, again raising my eyes from the page, and has to devise some entirely new combination of her resources, so highly developed for other purposes, so as to absorb the new into the old without disturbing the infinitely intricate and elaborate balance of the whole.

But, alas, I had done what I had determined not to do; I had slipped unthinkingly into praise of my own sex. “Highly developed”—“infinitely intricate”—such are undeniably terms of praise, and to praise one’s own sex is always suspect, often silly; moreover, in this case, how could one justify it? One could not go to the map and say Columbus discovered America and Columbus was a woman; or take an apple and remark, Newton discovered the laws of gravitation and Newton was a woman; or look into the sky and say aeroplanes are flying overhead and aeroplanes were invented by women. There is no mark on the wall to measure the precise height of women. There are no yard measures, neatly divided into the fractions of an inch, that one can lay against the qualities of a good mother or the devotion of a daughter, or the fidelity of a sister, or the capacity of a housekeeper. Few women even now have been graded at the universities; the great trials of the professions, army and navy, trade, politics and diplomacy have hardly tested them. They remain even at this moment almost unclassified. But if I want to know all that a human being can tell me about Sir Hawley Butts, for instance, I have only to open Burke or Debrett and I shall find that he took such and such a degree; owns a hall; has an heir; was Secretary to a Board; represented Great Britain in Canada; and has received a certain number of degrees, offices, medals and other distinctions by which his merits are stamped upon him indelibly. Only Providence can know more about Sir Hawley Butts than that.

When, therefore, I say “highly developed”, “infinitely intricate” of women, I am unable to verify my words either in Whitaker, Debrett or the University Calendar. In this predicament what can I do? And I looked at the bookcase again. There were the biographies: Johnson and Goethe and Carlyle and Sterne and Cowper and Shelley and Voltaire and Browning and many others. And I began thinking of all those great men who have for one reason or another admired, sought out, lived with, confided in, made love to, written of, trusted in, and shown what can only be described as some need of and dependence upon certain persons of the opposite sex. That all these relationships were absolutely Platonic I would not affirm, and Sir William Joynson Hicks would probably deny. But we should wrong these illustrious men very greatly if we insisted that they got nothing from these alliances but comfort, flattery and the pleasures of the body. What they got, it is obvious, was something that their own sex was unable to supply; and it would not be rash, perhaps, to define it further, without quoting the doubtless rhapsodical words of the poets, as some stimulus, some renewal of creative power which is in the gift only of the opposite sex to bestow. He would open the door of drawing-room or nursery, I thought, and find her among her children perhaps, or with a piece of embroidery on her knee—at any rate, the centre of some different order and system of life, and the contrast between this world and his own, which might be the law courts or the House of Commons, would at once refresh and invigorate; and there would follow, even in the simplest talk, such a natural difference of opinion that the dried ideas in him would be fertilised anew; and the sight of her creating in a different medium from his own would so quicken his creative power that insensibly his sterile mind would begin to plot again, and he would find the phrase or the scene which was lacking when he put on his hat to visit her. Every Johnson has his Thrale, and holds fast to her for some such reasons as these, and when the Thrale marries her Italian music master Johnson goes half mad with rage and disgust, not merely that he will miss his pleasant evenings at Streatham, but that the light of his life will be “as if gone out”.

And without being Dr. Johnson or Goethe or Carlyle or Voltaire, one may feel, though very differently from these great men, the nature of this intricacy and the power of this highly developed creative faculty among women. One goes into the room—but the resources of the English language would be much put to the stretch, and whole flights of words would need to wing their way illegitimately into existence before a woman could say what happens when she goes into a room. The rooms differ so completely; they are calm or thunderous; open on to the sea, or, on the contrary, give on to a prison yard; are hung with washing; or alive with opals and silks; are hard as horsehair or soft as feathers—one has only to go into any room in any street for the whole of that extremely complex force of femininity to fly in one’s face. How should it be otherwise? For women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed, so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics. But this creative power differs greatly from the creative power of men. And one must conclude that it would be a thousand pities if it were hindered or wasted, for it was won by centuries of the most drastic discipline, and there is nothing to take its place. It would be a thousand pities if women wrote like men, or lived like men, or looked like men, for if two sexes are quite inadequate, considering the vastness and variety of the world, how should we manage with one only? Ought not education to bring out and fortify the differences rather than the similarities? For we have too much likeness as it is, and if an explorer should come back and bring word of other sexes looking through the branches of other trees at other skies, nothing would be of greater service to humanity; and we should have the immense pleasure into the bargain of watching Professor X rush for his measuring-rods to prove himself “superior”.

Mary Carmichael, I thought, still hovering at a little distance above the page, will have her work cut out for her merely as an observer. I am afraid indeed that she will be tempted to become, what I think the less interesting branch of the species—the naturalist-novelist, and not the contemplative. There are so many new facts for her to observe. She will not need to limit herself any longer to the respectable houses of the upper middle classes. She will go without kindness or condescension, but in the spirit of fellowship, into those small, scented rooms where sit the courtesan, the harlot and the lady with the pug dog. There they still sit in the rough and ready-made clothes that the male writer has had perforce to clap upon their shoulders. But Mary Carmichael will have out her scissors and fit them close to every hollow and angle. It will be a curious sight, when it comes, to see these women as they are, but we must wait a little, for Mary Carmichael will still be encumbered with that self-consciousness in the presence of “sin” which is the legacy of our sexual barbarity. She will still wear the shoddy old fetters of class on her feet.

However, the majority of women are neither harlots nor courtesans; nor do they sit clasping pug dogs to dusty velvet all through the summer afternoon. But what do they do then? and there came to my mind’s eye one of those long streets somewhere south of the river whose infinite rows are innumerably populated. With the eye of the imagination I saw a very ancient lady crossing the street on the arm of a middle-aged woman, her daughter, perhaps, both so respectably booted and furred that their dressing in the afternoon must be a ritual, and the clothes themselves put away in cupboards with camphor, year after year, throughout the summer months. They cross the road when the lamps are being lit (for the dusk is their favourite hour), as they must have done year after year. The elder is close on eighty; but if one asked her what her life has meant to her, she would say that she remembered the streets lit for the battle of Balaclava, or had heard the guns fire in Hyde Park for the birth of King Edward the Seventh. And if one asked her, longing to pin down the moment with date and season, but what were you doing on the fifth of April 1868, or the second of November 1875, she would look vague and say that she could remember nothing. For all the dinners are cooked; the plates and cups washed; the children sent to school and gone out into the world. Nothing remains of it all. All has vanished. No biography or history has a word to say about it. And the novels, without meaning to, inevitably lie.

All these infinitely obscure lives remain to be recorded, I said, addressing Mary Carmichael as if she were present; and went on in thought through the streets of London feeling in imagination the pressure of dumbness, the accumulation of unrecorded life, whether from the women at the street corners with their arms akimbo, and the rings embedded in their fat swollen fingers, talking with a gesticulation like the swing of Shakespeare’s words; or from the violet-sellers and match-sellers and old crones stationed under doorways; or from drifting girls whose faces, like waves in sun and cloud, signal the coming of men and women and the flickering lights of shop windows. All that you will have to explore, I said to Mary Carmichael, holding your torch firm in your hand. Above all, you must illumine your own soul with its profundities and its shallows, and its vanities and its generosities, and say what your beauty means to you or your plainness, and what is your relation to the ever-changing and turning world of gloves and shoes and stuffs swaying up and down among the faint scents that come through chemists’ bottles down arcades of dress material over a floor of pseudo-marble. For in imagination I had gone into a shop; it was laid with black and white paving; it was hung, astonishingly beautifully, with coloured ribbons. Mary Carmichael might well have a look at that in passing, I thought, for it is a sight that would lend itself to the pen as fittingly as any snowy peak or rocky gorge in the Andes. And there is the girl behind the counter too—I would as soon have her true history as the hundred and fiftieth life of Napoleon or seventieth study of Keats and his use of Miltonic inversion which old Professor Z and his like are now inditing. And then I went on very warily, on the very tips of my toes (so cowardly am I, so afraid of the lash that was once almost laid on my own shoulders), to murmur that she should also learn to laugh, without bitterness, at the vanities—say rather at the peculiarities, for it is a less offensive word—of the other sex. For there is a spot the size of a shilling at the back of the head which one can never see for oneself. It is one of the good offices that sex can discharge for sex—to describe that spot the size of a shilling at the back of the head. Think how much women have profited by the comments of Juvenal; by the criticism of Strindberg. Think with what humanity and brilliancy men, from the earliest ages, have pointed out to women that dark place at the back of the head! And if Mary were very brave and very honest, she would go behind the other sex and tell us what she found there. A true picture of man as a whole can never be painted until a woman has described that spot the size of a shilling. Mr. Woodhouse and Mr. Casuabon are spots of that size and nature. Not of course that anyone in their senses would counsel her to hold up to scorn and ridicule of set purpose—literature shows the futility of what is written in that spirit. Be truthful, one would say, and the result is bound to be amazingly interesting. Comedy is bound to be enriched. New facts are bound to be discovered.

However, it was high time to lower my eyes to the page again. It would be better, instead of speculating what Mary Carmichael might write and should write, to see what in fact Mary Carmichael did write. So I began to read again. I remembered that I had certain grievances against her. She had broken up Jane Austen’s sentence, and thus given me no chance of pluming myself upon my impeccable taste, my fastidious ear. For it was useless to say, “Yes, yes, this is very nice; but Jane Austen wrote much better than you do”, when I had to admit that there was no point of likeness between them. Then she had gone further and broken the sequence—the expected order. Perhaps she had done this unconsciously, merely giving things their natural order, as a woman would, if she wrote like a woman. But the effect was somehow baffling; one could not see a wave heaping itself, a crisis coming round the next corner. Therefore I could not plume myself either upon the depths of my feelings and my profound knowledge of the human heart. For whenever I was about to feel the usual things in the usual places, about love, about death, the annoying creature twitched me away, as if the important point were just a little further on. And thus she made it impossible for me to roll out my sonorous phrases about “elemental feelings”, the “common stuff of humanity”, “the depths of the human heart”, and all those other phrases which support us in our belief that, however clever we may be on top, we are very serious, very profound and very humane underneath. She made me feel, on the contrary, that instead of being serious and profound and humane, one might be—and the thought was far less seductive—merely lazy minded and conventional into the bargain.

But I read on, and noted certain other facts. She was no “genius”—that was evident. She had nothing like the love of Nature, the fiery imagination, the wild poetry, the brilliant wit, the brooding wisdom of her great predecessors, Lady Winchilsea, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Jane Austen and George Eliot; she could not write with the melody and the dignity of Dorothy Osborne—indeed she was no more than a clever girl whose books will no doubt be pulped by the publishers in ten years’ time. But, nevertheless, she had certain advantages which women of far greater gift lacked even half a century ago. Men were no longer to her “the opposing faction”; she need not waste her time railing against them; she need not climb on to the roof and ruin her peace of mind longing for travel, experience and a knowledge of the world and character that were denied her. Fear and hatred were almost gone, or traces of them showed only in a slight exaggeration of the joy of freedom, a tendency to the caustic and satirical, rather than to the romantic, in her treatment of the other sex. Then there could be no doubt that as a novelist she enjoyed some natural advantages of a high order. She had a sensibility that was very wide, eager and free. It responded to an almost imperceptible touch on it. It feasted like a plant newly stood in the air on every sight and sound that came its way. It ranged, too, very subtly and curiously, among almost unknown or unrecorded things; it lighted on small things and showed that perhaps they were not small after all. It brought buried things to light and made one wonder what need there had been to bury them. Awkward though she was and without the unconscious bearing of long descent which makes the least turn of the pen of a Thackeray or a Lamb delightful to the ear, she had—I began to think—mastered the first great lesson; she wrote as a woman, but as a woman who has forgotten that she is a woman, so that her pages were full of that curious sexual quality which comes only when sex is unconscious of itself.

All this was to the good. But no abundance of sensation or fineness of perception would avail unless she could build up out of the fleeting and the personal the lasting edifice which remains unthrown. I had said that I would wait until she faced herself with “a situation”. And I meant by that until she proved by summoning, beckoning and getting together that she was not a skimmer of surfaces merely, but had looked beneath into the depths. Now is the time, she would say to herself at a certain moment, when without doing anything violent I can show the meaning of all this. And she would begin—how unmistakable that quickening is!—beckoning and summoning, and there would rise up in memory, half forgotten, perhaps quite trivial things in other chapters dropped by the way. And she would make their presence felt while someone sewed or smoked a pipe as naturally as possible, and one would feel, as she went on writing, as if one had gone to the top of the world and seen it laid out, very majestically, beneath.

At any rate, she was making the attempt. And as I watched her lengthening out for the test, I saw, but hoped that she did not see, the bishops and the deans, the doctors and the professors, the patriarchs and the pedagogues all at her shouting warning and advice. You can’t do this and you shan’t do that! Fellows and scholars only allowed on the grass! Ladies not admitted without a letter of introduction! Aspiring and graceful female novelists this way! So they kept at her like the crowd at a fence on the race-course, and it was her trial to take her fence without looking to right or to left. If you stop to curse you are lost, I said to her; equally, if you stop to laugh. Hesitate or fumble and you are done for. Think only of the jump, I implored her, as if I had put the whole of my money on her back; and she went over it like a bird. But there was fence beyond that and a fence beyond that. Whether she had the staying power I was doubtful, for the clapping and the crying were fraying to the nerves. But she did her best. Considering that Mary Carmichael was no genius, but an unknown girl writing her first novel in a bed-sitting-room, without enough of those desirable things, time, money and idleness, she did not do so badly, I thought.

Give her another hundred years, I concluded, reading the last chapter—people’s noses and bare shoulders showed naked against a starry sky, for someone had twitched the curtain in the drawing-room—give her a room of her own and five hundred a year, let her speak her mind and leave out half that she now puts in, and she will write a better book one of these days. She will be a poet, I said, putting Life’s Adventure, by Mary Carmichael, at the end of the shelf, in another hundred years’ time.

[]

Chapter VI.

Next day the light of the October morning was falling in dusty shafts through the uncurtained windows, and the hum of traffic rose from the street. London then was winding itself up again; the factory was astir; the machines were beginning. It was tempting, after all this reading, to look out of the window and see what London was doing on the morning of the 26th of October 1928. And what was London doing? Nobody, it seemed, was reading Antony and Cleopatra. London was wholly indifferent, it appeared, to Shakespeare’s plays. Nobody cared a straw—and I do not blame them—for the future of fiction, the death of poetry or the development by the average woman of a prose style completely expressive of her mind. If opinions upon any of these matters had been chalked on the pavement, nobody would have stooped to read them. The nonchalance of the hurrying feet would have rubbed them out in half an hour. Here came an errand-boy; here a woman with a dog on a lead. The fascination of the London street is that no two people are ever alike; each seems bound on some private affair of his own. There were the business-like, with their little bags; there were the drifters rattling sticks upon area railings; there were affable characters to whom the streets serve for clubroom, hailing men in carts and giving information without being asked for it. Also there were funerals to which men, thus suddenly reminded of the passing of their own bodies, lifted their hats. And then a very distinguished gentleman came slowly down a doorstep and paused to avoid collision with a bustling lady who had, by some means or other, acquired a splendid fur coat and a bunch of Parma violets. They all seemed separate, self-absorbed, on business of their own.

At this moment, as so often happens in London, there was a complete lull and suspension of traffic. Nothing came down the street; nobody passed. A single leaf detached itself from the plane tree at the end of the street, and in that pause and suspension fell. Somehow it was like a signal falling, a signal pointing to a force in things which one had overlooked. It seemed to point to a river, which flowed past, invisibly, round the corner, down the street, and took people and eddied them along, as the stream at Oxbridge had taken the undergraduate in his boat and the dead leaves. Now it was bringing from one side of the street to the other diagonally a girl in patent leather boots, and then a young man in a maroon overcoat; it was also bringing a taxi-cab; and it brought all three together at a point directly beneath my window; where the taxi stopped; and the girl and the young man stopped; and they got into the taxi; and then the cab glided off as if it were swept on by the current elsewhere.

The sight was ordinary enough; what was strange was the rhythmical order with which my imagination had invested it; and the fact that the ordinary sight of two people getting into a cab had the power to communicate something of their own seeming satisfaction. The sight of two people coming down the street and meeting at the corner seems to ease the mind of some strain, I thought, watching the taxi turn and make off. Perhaps to think, as I had been thinking these two days, of one sex as distinct from the other is an effort. It interferes with the unity of the mind. Now that effort had ceased and that unity had been restored by seeing two people come together and get into a taxi-cab. The mind is certainly a very mysterious organ, I reflected, drawing my head in from the window, about which nothing whatever is known, though we depend upon it so completely. Why do I feel that there are severances and oppositions in the mind, as there are strains from obvious causes on the body? What does one mean by “the unity of the mind”? I pondered, for clearly the mind has so great a power of concentrating at any point at any moment that it seems to have no single state of being. It can separate itself from the people in the street, for example, and think of itself as apart from them, at an upper window looking down on them. Or it can think with other people spontaneously, as, for instance, in a crowd waiting to hear some piece of news read out. It can think back through its fathers or through its mothers, as I have said that a woman writing thinks back through her mothers. Again if one is a woman one is often surprised by a sudden splitting off of consciousness, say in walking down Whitehall, when from being the natural inheritor of that civilisation, she becomes, on the contrary, outside of it, alien and critical. Clearly the mind is always altering its focus, and bringing the world into different perspectives. But some of these states of mind seem, even if adopted spontaneously, to be less comfortable than others. In order to keep oneself continuing in them one is unconsciously holding something back, and gradually the repression becomes an effort. But there may be some state of mind in which one could continue without effort because nothing is required to be held back. And this perhaps, I thought, coming in from the window, is one of them. For certainly when I saw the couple get into the taxi-cab the mind felt as if, after being divided, it had come together again in a natural fusion. The obvious reason would be that it is natural for the sexes to co-operate. One has a profound, if irrational, instinct in favour of the theory that the union of man and woman makes for the greatest satisfaction, the most complete happiness. But the sight of the two people getting into the taxi and the satisfaction it gave me made me also ask whether there are two sexes in the mind corresponding to the two sexes in the body, and whether they also require to be united in order to get complete satisfaction and happiness? And I went on amateurishly to sketch a plan of the soul so that in each of us two powers preside, one male, one female; and in the man’s brain the man predominates over the woman, and in the woman’s brain the woman predominates over the man. The normal and comfortable state of being is that when the two live in harmony together, spiritually co-operating. If one is a man, still the woman part of the brain must have effect; and a woman also must have intercourse with the man in her. Coleridge perhaps meant this when he said that a great mind is androgynous. It is when this fusion takes place that the mind is fully fertilised and uses all its faculties. Perhaps a mind that is purely masculine cannot create, any more than a mind that is purely feminine, I thought. But it would be well to test what one meant by man-womanly, and conversely by woman-manly, by pausing and looking at a book or two.

Coleridge certainly did not mean, when he said that a great mind is androgynous, that it is a mind that has any special sympathy with women; a mind that takes up their cause or devotes itself to their interpretation. Perhaps the androgynous mind is less apt to make these distinctions than the single-sexed mind. He meant, perhaps, that the androgynous mind is resonant and porous; that it transmits emotion without impediment; that it is naturally creative, incandescent and undivided. In fact one goes back to Shakespeare’s mind as the type of the androgynous, of the man-womanly mind, though it would be impossible to say what Shakespeare thought of women. And if it be true that it is one of the tokens of the fully developed mind that it does not think specially or separately of sex, how much harder it is to attain that condition now than ever before. Here I came to the books by living writers, and there paused and wondered if this fact were not at the root of something that had long puzzled me. No age can ever have been as stridently sex-conscious as our own; those innumerable books by men about women in the British Museum are a proof of it. The Suffrage campaign was no doubt to blame. It must have roused in men an extraordinary desire for self-assertion; it must have made them lay an emphasis upon their own sex and its characteristics which they would not have troubled to think about had they not been challenged. And when one is challenged, even by a few women in black bonnets, one retaliates, if one has never been challenged before, rather excessively. That perhaps accounts for some of the characteristics that I remember to have found here, I thought, taking down a new novel by Mr. A, who is in the prime of life and very well thought of, apparently, by the reviewers. I opened it. Indeed, it was delightful to read a man’s writing again. It was so direct, so straightforward after the writing of women. It indicated such freedom of mind, such liberty of person, such confidence in himself. One had a sense of physical well-being in the presence of this well-nourished, well-educated, free mind, which had never been thwarted or opposed, but had had full liberty from birth to stretch itself in whatever way it liked. All this was admirable. But after reading a chapter or two a shadow seemed to lie across the page. It was a straight dark bar, a shadow shaped something like the letter “I”. One began dodging this way and that to catch a glimpse of the landscape behind it. Whether that was indeed a tree or a woman walking I was not quite sure. Back one was always hailed to the letter “I”. One began to be tired of “I”. Not but what this “I” was a most respectable “I”; honest and logical; as hard as a nut, and polished for centuries by good teaching and good feeding. I respect and admire that “I” from the bottom of my heart. But—here I turned a page or two, looking for something or other—the worst of it is that in the shadow of the letter “I” all is shapeless as mist. Is that a tree? No, it is a woman. But … she has not a bone in her body, I thought, watching Phoebe, for that was her name, coming across the beach. Then Alan got up and the shadow of Alan at once obliterated Phoebe. For Alan had views and Phoebe was quenched in the flood of his views. And then Alan, I thought, has passions; and here I turned page after page very fast, feeling that the crisis was approaching, and so it was. It took place on the beach under the sun. It was done very openly. It was done very vigorously. Nothing could have been more indecent. But … I had said “but” too often. One cannot go on saying “but”. One must finish the sentence somehow, I rebuked myself. Shall I finish it, “But—I am bored!” But why was I bored? Partly because of the dominance of the letter “I” and the aridity, which, like the giant beech tree, it casts within its shade. Nothing will grow there. And partly for some more obscure reason. There seemed to be some obstacle, some impediment in Mr. A’s mind which blocked the fountain of creative energy and shored it within narrow limits. And remembering the lunch party at Oxbridge, and the cigarette ash and the Manx cat and Tennyson and Christina Rossetti all in a bunch, it seemed possible that the impediment lay there. As he no longer hums under his breath, “There has fallen a splendid tear from the passion-flower at the gate”, when Phoebe crosses the beach, and she no longer replies, “My heart is like a singing bird whose nest is in a water’d shoot”, when Alan approaches what can he do? Being honest as the day and logical as the sun, there is only one thing he can do. And that he does, to do him justice, over and over (I said turning the pages) and over again. And that, I added, aware of the awful nature of the confession, seems somehow dull. Shakespeare’s indecency uproots a thousand other things in one’s mind, and is far from being dull. But Shakespeare does it for pleasure; Mr. A, as the nurses say, does it on purpose. He does it in protest. He is protesting against the equality of the other sex by asserting his own superiority. He is therefore impeded and inhibited and self-conscious as Shakespeare might have been if he too had known Miss Clough and Miss Davies. Doubtless Elizabethan literature would have been very different from what it is if the woman’s movement had begun in the sixteenth century and not in the nineteenth.

What, then, it amounts to, if this theory of the two sides of the mind holds good, is that virility has now become self-conscious—men, that is to say, are now writing only with the male side of their brains. It is a mistake for a woman to read them, for she will inevitably look for something that she will not find. It is the power of suggestion that one most misses, I thought, taking Mr. B the critic in my hand and reading, very carefully and very dutifully, his remarks upon the art of poetry. Very able they were, acute and full of learning; but the trouble was that his feelings no longer communicated; his mind seemed separated into different chambers; not a sound carried from one to the other. Thus, when one takes a sentence of Mr. B into the mind it falls plump to the ground—dead; but when one takes a sentence of Coleridge into the mind, it explodes and gives birth to all kinds of other ideas, and that is the only sort of writing of which one can say that it has the secret of perpetual life.

But whatever the reason may be, it is a fact that one must deplore. For it means—here I had come to rows of books by Mr. Galsworthy and Mr. Kipling—that some of the finest works of our greatest living writers fall upon deaf ears. Do what she will a woman cannot find in them that fountain of perpetual life which the critics assure her is there. It is not only that they celebrate male virtues, enforce male values and describe the world of men; it is that the emotion with which these books are permeated is to a woman incomprehensible. It is coming, it is gathering, it is about to burst on one’s head, one begins saying long before the end. That picture will fall on old Jolyon’s head; he will die of the shock; the old clerk will speak over him two or three obituary words; and all the swans on the Thames will simultaneously burst out singing. But one will rush away before that happens and hide in the gooseberry bushes, for the emotion which is so deep, so subtle, so symbolical to a man moves a woman to wonder. So with Mr. Kipling’s officers who turn their backs; and his Sowers who sow the Seed; and his Men who are alone with their Work; and the Flag—one blushes at all these capital letters as if one had been caught eavesdropping at some purely masculine orgy. The fact is that neither Mr. Galsworthy nor Mr. Kipling has a spark of the woman in him. Thus all their qualities seem to a woman, if one may generalise, crude and immature. They lack suggestive power. And when a book lacks suggestive power, however hard it hits the surface of the mind it cannot penetrate within.

And in that restless mood in which one takes books out and puts them back again without looking at them I began to envisage an age to come of pure, of self-assertive virility, such as the letters of professors (take Sir Walter Raleigh’s letters, for instance) seem to forebode, and the rulers of Italy have already brought into being. For one can hardly fail to be impressed in Rome by the sense of unmitigated masculinity; and whatever the value of unmitigated masculinity upon the state, one may question the effect of it upon the art of poetry. At any rate, according to the newspapers, there is a certain anxiety about fiction in Italy. There has been a meeting of academicians whose object it is “to develop the Italian novel”. “Men famous by birth, or in finance, industry or the Fascist corporations” came together the other day and discussed the matter, and a telegram was sent to the Duce expressing the hope “that the Fascist era would soon give birth to a poet worthy of it”. We may all join in that pious hope, but it is doubtful whether poetry can come out of an incubator. Poetry ought to have a mother as well as a father. The Fascist poem, one may fear, will be a horrid little abortion such as one sees in a glass jar in the museum of some county town. Such monsters never live long, it is said; one has never seen a prodigy of that sort cropping grass in a field. Two heads on one body do not make for length of life.

However, the blame for all this, if one is anxious to lay blame, rests no more upon one sex than upon the other. All seducers and reformers are responsible: Lady Bessborough when she lied to Lord Granville; Miss Davies when she told the truth to Mr. Greg. All who have brought about a state of sex-consciousness are to blame, and it is they who drive me, when I want to stretch my faculties on a book, to seek it in that happy age, before Miss Davies and Miss Clough were born, when the writer used both sides of his mind equally. One must turn back to Shakespeare then, for Shakespeare was androgynous; and so were Keats and Sterne and Cowper and Lamb and Coleridge. Shelley perhaps was sexless. Milton and Ben Jonson had a dash too much of the male in them. So had Wordsworth and Tolstoi. In our time Proust was wholly androgynous, if not perhaps a little too much of a woman. But that failing is too rare for one to complain of it, since without some mixture of the kind the intellect seems to predominate and the other faculties of the mind harden and become barren. However, I consoled myself with the reflection that this is perhaps a passing phase; much of what I have said in obedience to my promise to give you the course of my thoughts will seem out of date; much of what flames in my eyes will seem dubious to you who have not yet come of age.

Even so, the very first sentence that I would write here, I said, crossing over to the writing-table and taking up the page headed Women and Fiction, is that it is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex. It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly. It is fatal for a woman to lay the least stress on any grievance; to plead even with justice any cause; in any way to speak consciously as a woman. And fatal is no figure of speech; for anything written with that conscious bias is doomed to death. It ceases to be fertilised. Brilliant and effective, powerful and masterly, as it may appear for a day or two, it must wither at nightfall; it cannot grow in the minds of others. Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the art of creation can be accomplished. Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated. The whole of the mind must lie wide open if we are to get the sense that the writer is communicating his experience with perfect fullness. There must be freedom and there must be peace. Not a wheel must grate, not a light glimmer. The curtains must be close drawn. The writer, I thought, once his experience is over, must lie back and let his mind celebrate its nuptials in darkness. He must not look or question what is being done. Rather, he must pluck the petals from a rose or watch the swans float calmly down the river. And I saw again the current which took the boat and the undergraduate and the dead leaves; and the taxi took the man and the woman, I thought, seeing them come together across the street, and the current swept them away, I thought, hearing far off the roar of London’s traffic, into that tremendous stream.

Here, then, Mary Beton ceases to speak. She has told you how she reached the conclusion—the prosaic conclusion—that it is necessary to have five hundred a year and a room with a lock on the door if you are to write fiction or poetry. She has tried to lay bare the thoughts and impressions that led her to think this. She has asked you to follow her flying into the arms of a Beadle, lunching here, dining there, drawing pictures in the British Museum, taking books from the shelf, looking out of the window. While she has been doing all these things, you no doubt have been observing her failings and foibles and deciding what effect they have had on her opinions. You have been contradicting her and making whatever additions and deductions seem good to you. That is all as it should be, for in a question like this truth is only to be had by laying together many varieties of error. And I will end now in my own person by anticipating two criticisms, so obvious that you can hardly fail to make them.

No opinion has been expressed, you may say, upon the comparative merits of the sexes even as writers. That was done purposely, because, even if the time had come for such a valuation—and it is far more important at the moment to know how much money women had and how many rooms than to theorise about their capacities—even if the time had come I do not believe that gifts, whether of mind or character, can be weighed like sugar and butter, not even in Cambridge, where they are so adept at putting people into classes and fixing caps on their heads and letters after their names. I do not believe that even the Table of Precedency which you will find in Whitaker’s Almanac represents a final order of values, or that there is any sound reason to suppose that a Commander of the Bath will ultimately walk into dinner behind a Master in Lunacy. All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority, belong to the private-school stage of human existence where there are “sides”, and it is necessary for one side to beat another side, and of the utmost importance to walk up to a platform and receive from the hands of the Headmaster himself a highly ornamental pot. As people mature they cease to believe in sides or in Headmasters or in highly ornamental pots. At any rate, where books are concerned, it is notoriously difficult to fix labels of merit in such a way that they do not come off. Are not reviews of current literature a perpetual illustration of the difficulty of judgement? “This great book”, “this worthless book”, the same book is called by both names. Praise and blame alike mean nothing. No, delightful as the pastime of measuring may be, it is the most futile of all occupations, and to submit to the decrees of the measurers the most servile of attitudes. So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say. But to sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its colour, in deference to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand or to some professor with a measuring-rod up his sleeve, is the most abject treachery, and the sacrifice of wealth and chastity which used to be said to be the greatest of human disasters, a mere flea-bite in comparison.

Next I think that you may object that in all this I have made too much of the importance of material things. Even allowing a generous margin for symbolism, that five hundred a year stands for the power to contemplate, that a lock on the door means the power to think for oneself, still you may say that the mind should rise above such things; and that great poets have often been poor men. Let me then quote to you the words of your own Professor of Literature, who knows better than I do what goes to the making of a poet. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch writes: [◉11]

“What are the great poetical names of the last hundred years or so? Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Landor, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Morris, Rossetti, Swinburne—we may stop there. Of these, all but Keats, Browning, Rossetti were University men; and of these three, Keats, who died young, cut off in his prime, was the only one not fairly well to do. It may seem a brutal thing to say, and it is a sad thing to say: but, as a matter of hard fact, the theory that poetical genius bloweth where it listeth, and equally in poor and rich, holds little truth. As a matter of hard fact, nine out of those twelve were University men: which means that somehow or other they procured the means to get the best education England can give. As a matter of hard fact, of the remaining three you know that Browning was well to do, and I challenge you that, if he had not been well to do, he would no more have attained to write Saul or The Ring and the Book than Ruskin would have attained to writing Modern Painters if his father had not dealt prosperously in business. Rossetti had a small private income; and, moreover, he painted. There remains but Keats; whom Atropos slew young, as she slew John Clare in a mad-house, and James Thomson by the laudanum he took to drug disappointment. These are dreadful facts, but let us face them. It is—however dishonouring to us as a nation—certain that, by some fault in our commonwealth, the poor poet has not in these days, nor has had for two hundred years, a dog’s chance. Believe me—and I have spent a great part of ten years in watching some three hundred and twenty elementary schools,—we may prate of democracy, but actually, a poor child in England has little more hope than had the son of an Athenian slave to be emancipated into that intellectual freedom of which great writings are born.”

Nobody could put the point more plainly. “The poor poet has not in these days, nor has had for two hundred years, a dog’s chance … a poor child in England has little more hope than had the son of an Athenian slave to be emancipated into that intellectual freedom of which great writings are born.” That is it. Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time. Women have had less intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves. Women, then, have not had a dog’s chance of writing poetry. That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one’s own. However, thanks to the toils of those obscure women in the past, of whom I wish we knew more, thanks, curiously enough to two wars, the Crimean which let Florence Nightingale out of her drawing-room, and the European War which opened the doors to the average woman some sixty years later, these evils are in the way to be bettered. Otherwise you would not be here tonight, and your chance of earning five hundred pounds a year, precarious as I am afraid that it still is, would be minute in the extreme.

Still, you may object, why do you attach so much importance to this writing of books by women when, according to you, it requires so much effort, leads perhaps to the murder of one’s aunts, will make one almost certainly late for luncheon, and may bring one into very grave disputes with certain very good fellows? My motives, let me admit, are partly selfish. Like most uneducated Englishwomen, I like reading—I like reading books in the bulk. Lately my diet has become a trifle monotonous; history is too much about wars; biography too much about great men; poetry has shown, I think, a tendency to sterility, and fiction—but I have sufficiently exposed my disabilities as a critic of modern fiction and will say no more about it. Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast. By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream. For I am by no means confining you to fiction. If you would please me—and there are thousands like me—you would write books of travel and adventure, and research and scholarship, and history and biography, and criticism and philosophy and science. By so doing you will certainly profit the art of fiction. For books have a way of influencing each other. Fiction will be much the better for standing cheek by jowl with poetry and philosophy. Moreover, if you consider any great figure of the past, like Sappho, like the Lady Murasaki, like Emily Brontë, you will find that she is an inheritor as well as an originator, and has come into existence because women have come to have the habit of writing naturally; so that even as a prelude to poetry such activity on your part would be invaluable.

But when I look back through these notes and criticise my own train of thought as I made them, I find that my motives were not altogether selfish. There runs through these comments and discursions the conviction—or is it the instinct?—that good books are desirable and that good writers, even if they show every variety of human depravity, are still good human beings. Thus when I ask you to write more books I am urging you to do what will be for your good and for the good of the world at large. How to justify this instinct or belief I do not know, for philosophic words, if one has not been educated at a university, are apt to play one false. What is meant by “reality”? It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable—now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying. It overwhelms one walking home beneath the stars and makes the silent world more real than the world of speech—and then there it is again in an omnibus in the uproar of Piccadilly. Sometimes, too, it seems to dwell in shapes too far away for us to discern what their nature is. But whatever it touches, it fixes and makes permanent. That is what remains over when the skin of the day has been cast into the hedge; that is what is left of past time and of our loves and hates. Now the writer, as I think, has the chance to live more than other people in the presence of this reality. It is his business to find it and collect it and communicate it to the rest of us. So at least I infer from reading Lear or Emma or La Recherche du Temps Perdu. For the reading of these books seems to perform a curious couching operation on the senses; one sees more intensely afterwards; the world seems bared of its covering and given an intenser life. Those are the enviable people who live at enmity with unreality; and those are the pitiable who are knocked on the head by the thing done without knowing or caring. So that when I ask you to earn money and have a room of your own, I am asking you to live in the presence of reality, an invigorating life, it would appear, whether one can impart it or not.

Here I would stop, but the pressure of convention decrees that every speech must end with a peroration. And a peroration addressed to women should have something, you will agree, particularly exalting and ennobling about it. I should implore you to remember your responsibilities, to be higher, more spiritual; I should remind you how much depends upon you, and what an influence you can exert upon the future. But those exhortations can safely, I think, be left to the other sex, who will put them, and indeed have put them, with far greater eloquence than I can compass. When I rummage in my own mind I find no noble sentiments about being companions and equals and influencing the world to higher ends. I find myself saying briefly and prosaically that it is much more important to be oneself than anything else. Do not dream of influencing other people, I would say, if I knew how to make it sound exalted. Think of things in themselves.

And again I am reminded by dipping into newspapers and novels and biographies that when a woman speaks to women she should have something very unpleasant up her sleeve. Women are hard on women. Women dislike women. Women—but are you not sick to death of the word? I can assure you that I am. Let us agree, then, that a paper read by a woman to women should end with something particularly disagreeable.

But how does it go? What can I think of? The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their subtlety. I like their anonymity. I like—but I must not run on in this way. That cupboard there,—you say it holds clean table-napkins only; but what if Sir Archibald Bodkin were concealed among them? Let me then adopt a sterner tone. Have I, in the preceding words, conveyed to you sufficiently the warnings and reprobation of mankind? I have told you the very low opinion in which you were held by Mr. Oscar Browning. I have indicated what Napoleon once thought of you and what Mussolini thinks now. Then, in case any of you aspire to fiction, I have copied out for your benefit the advice of the critic about courageously acknowledging the limitations of your sex. I have referred to Professor X and given prominence to his statement that women are intellectually, morally and physically inferior to men. I have handed on all that has come my way without going in search of it, and here is a final warning—from Mr. John Langdon Davies. [◉12] Mr. John Langdon Davies warns women “that when children cease to be altogether desirable, women cease to be altogether necessary”. I hope you will make a note of it.

How can I further encourage you to go about the business of life? Young women, I would say, and please attend, for the peroration is beginning, you are, in my opinion, disgracefully ignorant. You have never made a discovery of any sort of importance. You have never shaken an empire or led an army into battle. The plays of Shakespeare are not by you, and you have never introduced a barbarous race to the blessings of civilisation. What is your excuse? It is all very well for you to say, pointing to the streets and squares and forests of the globe swarming with black and white and coffee-coloured inhabitants, all busily engaged in traffic and enterprise and love-making, we have had other work on our hands. Without our doing, those seas would be unsailed and those fertile lands a desert. We have borne and bred and washed and taught, perhaps to the age of six or seven years, the one thousand six hundred and twenty-three million human beings who are, according to statistics, at present in existence, and that, allowing that some had help, takes time.

There is truth in what you say—I will not deny it. But at the same time may I remind you that there have been at least two colleges for women in existence in England since the year 1866; that after the year 1880 a married woman was allowed by law to possess her own property; and that in 1919—which is a whole nine years ago—she was given a vote? May I also remind you that the most of the professions have been open to you for close on ten years now? When you reflect upon these immense privileges and the length of time during which they have been enjoyed, and the fact that there must be at this moment some two thousand women capable of earning over five hundred a year in one way or another, you will agree that the excuse of lack of opportunity, training, encouragement, leisure and money no longer holds good. Moreover, the economists are telling us that Mrs. Seton has had too many children. You must, of course, go on bearing children, but, so they say, in twos and threes, not in tens and twelves.

Thus, with some time on your hands and with some book learning in your brains—you have had enough of the other kind, and are sent to college partly, I suspect, to be un-educated—surely you should embark upon another stage of your very long, very laborious and highly obscure career. A thousand pens are ready to suggest what you should do and what effect you will have. My own suggestion is a little fantastic, I admit; I prefer, therefore, to put it in the form of fiction.

I told you in the course of this paper that Shakespeare had a sister; but do not look for her in Sir Sidney Lee’s life of the poet. She died young—alas, she never wrote a word. She lies buried where the omnibuses now stop, opposite the Elephant and Castle. Now my belief is that this poet who never wrote a word and was buried at the cross-roads still lives. She lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here to-night, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed. But she lives; for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh. This opportunity, as I think, it is now coming within your power to give her. For my belief is that if we live another century or so—I am talking of the common life which is the real life and not of the little separate lives which we live as individuals—and have five hundred a year each of us and rooms of our own; if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think; if we escape a little from the common sitting-room and see human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality; and the sky, too, and the trees or whatever it may be in themselves; if we look past Milton’s bogey, for no human being should shut out the view; if we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women, then the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare’s sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down. Drawing her life from the lives of the unknown who were her forerunners, as her brother did before her, she will be born. As for her coming without that preparation, without that effort on our part, without that determination that when she is born again she shall find it possible to live and write her poetry, that we cannot expect, for that would be impossible. But I maintain that she would come if we worked for her, and that so to work, even in poverty and obscurity, is worth while.

[Time and Tide, Nov 22/29, 1929 (excerpt)]

[]

ON
BEING
ILL

by
Virginia Woolf

[]

published
1930
by
The Hogarth Press

Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness, how we go down into the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads and wake thinking to find ourselves in the presence of the angels and the harpers when we have a tooth out and come to the surface in the dentist’s arm-chair and confuse his “Rinse the mouth—rinse the mouth” with the greeting of the Deity stooping from the floor of Heaven to welcome us—when we think of this, as we are so frequently forced to think of it, it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature. Novels, one would have thought, would have been devoted to influenza; epic poems to typhoid; odes to pneumonia; lyrics to toothache. But no; with a few exceptions—De Quincey attempted something of the sort in The Opium Eater; there must be a volume or two about disease scattered through the pages of Proust—literature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind; that the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear, and, save for one or two passions such as desire and greed, is null, and negligible and non-existent. On the contrary, the very opposite is true. All day, all night the body intervenes; blunts or sharpens, colours or discolours, turns to wax in the warmth of June, hardens to tallow in the murk of February. The creature within can only gaze through the pane—smudged or rosy; it cannot separate off from the body like the sheath of a knife or the pod of a pea for a single instant; it must go through the whole unending procession of changes, heat and cold, comfort and discomfort, hunger and satisfaction, health and illness, until there comes the inevitable catastrophe; the body smashes itself to smithereens, and the soul (it is said) escapes. But of all this daily drama of the body there is no record. People write always of the doings of the mind; the thoughts that come to it; its noble plans; how the mind has civilised the universe. They show it ignoring the body in the philosopher’s turret; or kicking the body, like an old leather football, across leagues of snow and desert in the pursuit of conquest or discovery. Those great wars which the body wages with the mind a slave to it, in the solitude of the bedroom against the assault of fever or the oncome of melancholia, are neglected. Nor is the reason far to seek. To look these things squarely in the face would need the courage of a lion tamer; a robust philosophy; a reason rooted in the bowels of the earth. Short of these, this monster, the body, this miracle, its pain, will soon make us taper into mysticism, or rise, with rapid beats of the wings, into the raptures of transcendentalism. The public would say that a novel devoted to influenza lacked plot; they would complain that there was no love in it—wrongly however, for illness often takes on the disguise of love, and plays the same odd tricks. It invests certain faces with divinity, sets us to wait, hour after hour, with pricked ears for the creaking of a stair, and wreathes the faces of the absent (plain enough in health, Heaven knows) with a new significance, while the mind concocts a thousand legends and romances about them for which it has neither time nor taste in health. Finally, to hinder the description of illness in literature, there is the poverty of the language. English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache. It has all grown one way. The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a  ufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry. There is nothing ready made for him. He is forced to coin words himself, and, taking his pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sound in the other (as perhaps the people of Babel did in the beginning), so to crush them together that a brand new word in the end drops out. Probably it will be something laughable. For who of English birth can take liberties with the language? To us it is a sacred thing and therefore doomed to die, unless the Americans, whose genius is so much happier in the making of new words than in the disposition of the old, will come to our help and set the springs aflow. Yet it is not only a new language that we need, more primitive, more sensual, more obscene, but a new hierarchy of the passions; love must be deposed in favour of a temperature of 104; jealousy give place to the pangs of sciatica; sleeplessness play the part of villain, and the hero become a white liquid with a sweet taste—that mighty Prince with the moths’ eyes and the feathered feet, one of whose names is Chloral.

But to return to the invalid. “I am in bed with influenza”—but what does that convey of the great experience; how the world has changed its shape; the tools of business grown remote; the sounds of festival become romantic like a merry-go-round heard across far fields; and friends have changed, some putting on a strange beauty, others deformed to the squatness of toads, while the whole landscape of life lies remote and fair, like the shore seen from a ship far out at sea, and he is now exalted on a peak and needs no help from man or God, and now grovels supine on the floor glad of a kick from a housemaid—the experience cannot be imparted and, as is always the way with these dumb things, his own suffering serves but to wake memories in his friends’ minds of their influenzas, their aches and pains which went unwept last February, and now cry aloud, desperately, clamorously, for the divine relief of sympathy.

But sympathy we cannot have. Wisest Fate says no. If her children, weighted as they already are with sorrow, were to take on them that burden too, adding in imagination other pains to their own, buildings would cease to rise; roads would peter out into grassy tracks; there would be an end of music and of painting; one great sigh alone would rise to Heaven, and the only attitudes for men and women would be those of horror and despair. As it is, there is always some little distraction—an organ grinder at the corner of the hospital, a shop with book or trinket to decoy one past the prison or the workhouse, some absurdity of cat or dog to prevent one from turning the old beggar’s hieroglyphic of misery into volumes of sordid suffering; and thus the vast effort of sympathy which those barracks of pain and discipline, those dried symbols of sorrow, ask us to exert on their behalf, is uneasily shuffled off for another time. Sympathy nowadays is dispensed chiefly by the laggards and failures, women for the most part (in whom the obsolete exists so strangely side by side with anarchy and newness), who, having dropped out of the race, have time to spend upon fantastic and unprofitable excursions; C. L. for example, who, sitting by the stale sickroom fire, builds up, with touches at once sober and imaginative, the nursery fender, the loaf, the lamp, barrel organs in the street, and all the simple old wives’ tales of pinafores and escapades; A. R., the rash, the magnanimous, who, if you fancied a giant tortoise to solace you or a theorbo to cheer you, would ransack the markets of London and procure them somehow, wrapped in paper, before the end of the day; the frivolous K. T., who, dressed in silks and feathers, powdered and painted (which takes time too) as if for a banquet of Kings and Queens, spends her whole brightness in the gloom of the sick room, and makes the medicine bottles ring and the flames shoot up with her gossip and her mimicry. But such follies have had their day; civilisation points to a different goal; and then what place will there be for the tortoise and the theorbo?

There is, let us confess it (and illness is the great confessional), a childish outspokenness in illness; things are said, truths blurted out, which the cautious respectability of health conceals. About sympathy for example—we can do without it. That illusion of a world so shaped that it echoes every groan, of human beings so tied together by common needs and fears that a twitch at one wrist jerks another, where however strange your experience other people have had it too, where however far you travel in your own mind someone has been there before you—is all an illusion. We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others. Human beings do not go hand in hand the whole stretch of the way. There is a virgin forest in each; a snowfield where even the print of birds’ feet is unknown. Here we go alone, and like it better so. Always to have sympathy, always to be accompanied, always to be understood would be intolerable. But in health the genial pretence must be kept up and the effort renewed—to communicate, to civilise, to share, to cultivate the desert, educate the native, to work together by day and by night to sport. In illness this make-believe ceases. Directly the bed is called for, or, sunk deep among pillows in one chair, we raise our feet even an inch above the ground on another, we cease to be soldiers in the army of the upright; we become deserters. They march to battle. We float with the sticks on the stream; helter-skelter with the dead leaves on the lawn, irresponsible and disinterested and able, perhaps for the first time for years, to look round, to look up—to look, for example, at the sky.

The first impression of that extraordinary spectacle is strangely overcoming. Ordinarily to look at the sky for any length of time is impossible. Pedestrians would be impeded and disconcerted by a public sky-gazer. What snatches we get of it are mutilated by chimneys and churches, serve as a background for man, signify wet weather or fine, daub windows gold, and, filling in the branches, complete the pathos of dishevelled autumnal plane trees in autumnal squares. Now, lying recumbent, staring straight up, the sky is discovered to be something so different from this that really it is a little shocking. This then has been going on all the time without our knowing it!—this incessant making up of shapes and casting them down, this buffeting of clouds together, and drawing vast trains of ships and waggons from North to South, this incessant ringing up and down of curtains of light and shade, this interminable experiment with gold shafts and blue shadows, with veiling the sun and unveiling it, with making rock ramparts and wafting them away—this endless activity, with the waste of Heaven knows how many million horse power of energy, has been left to work its will year in year out. The fact seems to call for comment and indeed for censure. Ought not some one to write to The Times? Use should be made of it. One should not let this gigantic cinema play perpetually to an empty house. But watch a little longer and another emotion drowns the stirrings of civic ardour. Divinely beautiful it is also divinely heartless. Immeasurable resources are used for some purpose which has nothing to do with human pleasure or human profit. If we were all laid prone, stiff, still the sky would be experimenting with its blues and its golds. Perhaps then, if we look down at something very small and close and familiar, we shall find sympathy. Let us examine the rose. We have seen it so often flowering in bowls, connected it so often with beauty in its prime, that we have forgotten how it stands, still and steady, throughout an entire afternoon in the earth. It preserves a demeanour of perfect dignity and self-possession. The suffusion of its petals is of inimitable rightness. Now perhaps one deliberately falls; now all the flowers, the voluptuous purple, the creamy, in whose waxen flesh the spoon has left a swirl of cherry juice; gladioli; dahlias; lilies, sacerdotal, ecclesiastical; flowers with prim cardboard collars tinged apricot and amber, all gently incline their heads to the breeze—all, with the exception of the heavy sunflower, who proudly acknowledges the sun at midday and perhaps at midnight rebuffs the moon. There they stand; and it is of these, the stillest, the most self-sufficient of all things that human beings have made companions; these that symbolise their passions, decorate their festivals, and lie (as if they knew sorrow) upon the pillows of the dead. Wonderful to relate, poets have found religion in nature; people live in the country to learn virtue from plants. It is in their indifference that they are comforting. That snowfield of the mind, where man has not trodden, is visited by the cloud, kissed by the falling petal, as, in another sphere, it is the great artists, the Miltons and the Popes, who console not by their thought of us but by their forgetfulness.

Meanwhile, with the heroism of the ant or the bee, however indifferent the sky or disdainful the flowers, the army of the upright marches to battle. Mrs. Jones catches her train. Mr. Smith mends his motor. The cows are driven home to be milked. Men thatch the roof. The dogs bark. The rooks, rising in a net, fall in a net upon the elm trees. The wave of life flings itself out indefatigably. It is only the recumbent who know what, after all, Nature is at no pains to conceal—that she in the end will conquer; heat will leave the world; stiff with frost we shall cease to drag ourselves about the fields; ice will lie thick upon factory and engine; the sun will go out. Even so, when the whole earth is sheeted and slippery, some undulation, some irregularity of surface will mark the boundary of an ancient garden, and there, thrusting its head up undaunted in the starlight, the rose will flower, the crocus will burn. But with the hook of life still in us still we must wriggle. We cannot stiffen peaceably into glassy mounds. Even the recumbent spring up at the mere imagination of frost about the toes and stretch out to avail themselves of the universal hope—Heaven, Immortality. Surely, since men have been wishing all these ages, they will have wished something into existence; there will be some green isle for the mind to rest on even if the foot cannot plant itself there. The co-operative imagination of mankind must have drawn some firm outline. But no. One opens the Morning Post and reads the Bishop of Lichfield on Heaven. One watches the church-goers file into those gallant temples where, on the bleakest day, in the wettest fields, lamps will be burning, bells will be ringing, and however the autumn leaves may shuffle and the winds sigh outside, hopes and desires will be changed to beliefs and certainties within. Do they look serene? Are their eyes filled with the light of their supreme conviction? Would one of them dare leap straight into Heaven off Beachy Head? None but a simpleton would ask such questions; the little company of believers lags and drags and strays. The mother is worn; the father tired. As for imagining Heaven, they have no time. Heaven-making must be left to the imagination of the poets. Without their help we can but trifle—imagine Pepys in Heaven, adumbrate little interviews with celebrated people on tufts of thyme, soon fall into gossip about such of our friends as have stayed in Hell, or, worse still, revert again to earth and choose, since there is no harm in choosing, to live over and over, now as man, now as woman, as sea-captain, or court lady, as Emperor or farmer’s wife, in splendid cities and on remote moors, at the time of Pericles or Arthur, Charlemagne or George the Fourth—to live and live till we have lived out those embryo lives which attend about us in early youth until “I” suppressed them. But “I” shall not, if wishing can alter it, usurp Heaven too, and condemn us, who have played our parts here as William or Alice, to remain William or Alice for ever. Left to ourselves we speculate thus carnally. We need the poets to imagine for us. The duty of Heaven-making should be attached to the office of the Poet Laureate.

Indeed it is to the poets that we turn. Illness makes us disinclined for the long campaigns that prose exacts. We cannot command all our faculties and keep our reason and our judgment and our memory at attention while chapter swings on top of chapter, and, as one settles into place, we must be on the watch for the coming of the next, until the whole structure—arches, towers, and battlements—stands firm on its foundations. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is not the book for influenza, nor The Golden Bowl nor Madame Bovary. On the other hand, with responsibility shelved and reason in the abeyance—for who is going to exact criticism from an invalid or sound sense from the bed-ridden?—other tastes assert themselves; sudden, fitful, intense. We rifle the poets of their flowers. We break off a line or two and let them open in the depths of the mind:

and oft at eve

Visits the herds along the twilight meadows

wandering in thick flocks along the mountains

Shepherded by the slow unwilling wind.

Or there is a whole three volume novel to be mused over in a verse of Hardy’s or a sentence of La Bruyère. We dip in Lamb’s Letters—some prose writers are to be read as poets—and find “I am a sanguinary murderer of time, and would kill him inchmeal just now. But the snake is vital” and who shall explain the delight? or open Rimbaud and read

O saisons o châteaux

Quelle âme est sans défauts?

and who shall rationalise the charm? In illness words seem to possess a mystic quality. We grasp what is beyond their surface meaning, gather instinctively this, that, and the other—a sound, a colour, here a stress, there a pause—which the poet, knowing words to be meagre in comparison with ideas, has strewn about his page to evoke, when collected, a state of mind which neither words can express nor the reason explain. Incomprehensibility has an enormous power over us in illness, more legitimately perhaps than the upright will allow. In health meaning has encroached upon sound. Our intelligence domineers over our senses. But in illness, with the police off duty, we creep beneath some obscure poem by Mallarmé or Donne, some phrase in Latin or Greek, and the words give out their scent and distil their flavour, and then, if at last we grasp the meaning, it is all the richer for having come to us sensually first, by way of the palate and the nostrils, like some queer odour. Foreigners, to whom the tongue is strange, have us at a disadvantage. The Chinese must know the sound of Antony and Cleopatra better than we do.

Rashness is one of the properties of illness—outlaws that we are—and it is rashness that we need in reading Shakespeare. It is not that we should doze in reading him, but that, fully conscious and aware, his fame intimidates and bores, and all the views of all the critics dull in us that thunder-clap of conviction which, if an illusion, is still so helpful an illusion, so prodigious a pleasure, so keen a stimulus in reading the great. Shakespeare is getting flyblown; a paternal government might well forbid writing about him, as they put his monument at Stratford beyond the reach of scribbling fingers. With all this buzz of criticism about, one may hazard one’s conjectures privately, make one’s notes in the margin; but, knowing that someone has said it before, or said it better, the zest is gone. Illness, in its kingly sublimity, sweeps all that aside and leaves nothing but Shakespeare and oneself. What with his overweening power and our overweening arrogance, the barriers go down, the knots run smooth, the brain rings and resounds with Lear or Macbeth, and even Coleridge himself squeaks like a distant mouse.

But enough of Shakespeare—let us turn to Augustus Hare. There are people who say that even illness does not warrant these transitions; that the author of The Story of Two Noble Lives is not the peer of Boswell; and if we assert that short of the best in literature we like the worst—it is mediocrity that is hateful—will have none of that either. So be it. The law is on the side of the normal. But for those who suffer a slight rise of temperature the names of Hare and Waterford and Canning ray out as beams of benignant lustre. Not, it is true, for the first hundred pages or so. There, as so often in these fat volumes, we flounder and threaten to sink in a plethora of aunts and uncles. We have to remind ourselves that there is such a thing as atmosphere; that the masters themselves often keep us waiting intolerably while they prepare our minds for whatever it may be—the surprise, or the lack of surprise. So Hare, too, takes his time; the charm steals upon us imperceptibly; by degrees we become almost one of the family, yet not quite, for our sense of the oddity of it all remains, and share the family dismay when Lord Stuart leaves the room—there was a ball going forward—and is next heard of in Iceland. Parties, he said, bored him—such were English aristocrats before marriage with intellect had adulterated the fine singularity of their minds. Parties bore them; they are off to Iceland. Then Beckford’s mania for castle building attacked him; he must lift a French château across the Channel, and erect pinnacles and towers to use as servants’ bedrooms at vast expense, upon the borders of a crumbling cliff, too, so that the housemaids saw their brooms swimming down the Solent, and Lady Stuart was much distressed, but made the best of it and began, like the high-born lady that she was, planting evergreens in the face of ruin. Meanwhile the daughters, Charlotte and Louisa, grew up in their incomparable loveliness, with pencils in their hands, for ever sketching, dancing, flirting, in a cloud of gauze. They are not very distinct it is true. For life then was not the life of Charlotte and Louisa. It was the life of families, of groups. It was a web, a net, spreading wide and enmeshing every sort of cousin, dependant, and old retainer. Aunts—Aunt Caledon, Aunt Mexborough—grandmothers—Granny Stuart, Granny Hardwicke—cluster in chorus, and rejoice and sorrow and eat Christmas dinner together, and grow very old and remain very upright, and sit in hooded chairs cutting flowers it seems out of coloured paper. Charlotte married Canning and went to India; Louisa married Lord Waterford and went to Ireland. Then letters begin to cross vast spaces in slow sailing ships and communication becomes still more protracted and verbose, and there seems no end to the space and the leisure of those early Victorian days, and faiths are lost and the life of Hedley Vicars revives them; aunts catch cold but recover; cousins marry; there are the Irish famine and the Indian Mutiny, and both sisters remain to their great, but silent, grief without children to come after them. Louisa, dumped down in Ireland with Lord Waterford at the hunt all day, was often very lonely; but she stuck to her post, visited the poor, spoke words of comfort (“I am sorry indeed to hear of Anthony Thompson’s loss of mind, or rather of memory; if, however, he can understand sufficiently to trust solely in our Saviour, he has enough”) and sketched and sketched. Thousands of notebooks were filled with pen and ink drawings of an evening, and then the carpenter stretched sheets for her and she designed frescoes for schoolrooms, had live sheep into her bedroom, draped gamekeepers in blankets, painted Holy Families in abundance, until the great Watts exclaimed that here was Titian’s peer and Raphael’s master! At that Lady Waterford laughed (she had a generous, benignant sense of humour); and said that she was nothing but a sketcher; had scarcely had a lesson in her life—witness her angel’s wings scandalously unfinished. Moreover, there was her father’s house forever falling into the sea; she must shore it up; must entertain her friends; must fill her days with all sorts of charities, till her Lord came home from hunting, and then, at midnight often, she would sketch him with his knightly face half hidden in a bowl of soup, sitting with her sketch-book under a lamp beside him. Off he would ride again, stately as a crusader, to hunt the fox, and she would wave to him and think each time, what if this should be the last? And so it was, that winter’s morning; his horse stumbled; he was killed. She knew it before they told her, and never could Sir John Leslie forget, when he ran downstairs on the day of the burial, the beauty of the great lady standing to see the hearse depart, nor, when he came back, how the curtain, heavy, mid-Victorian, plush perhaps, was all crushed together where she had grasped it in her agony.

[New Criterion, January 1926]

[]

THE
WAVES

by
Virginia Woolf

published
October 8, 1931
by
The Hogarth Press

the waves

[interlude]    [section 1]

[interlude]    [section 2]

[interlude]    [section 3]

[interlude]    [section 4]

[interlude]    [section 5]

[interlude]    [section 6]

[interlude]    [section 7]

[interlude]    [section 8]

[interlude]    [section 9]

[]

[The text follows the 1931 Hogarth Press edition.]

The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it. Gradually as the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky and the grey cloth became barred with thick strokes moving, one after another, beneath the surface, following each other, pursuing each other, perpetually.

As they neared the shore each bar rose, heaped itself, broke and swept a thin veil of white water across the sand. The wave paused, and then drew out again, sighing like a sleeper whose breath comes and goes unconsciously. Gradually the dark bar on the horizon became clear as if the sediment in an old wine-bottle had sunk and left the glass green. Behind it, too, the sky cleared as if the white sediment there had sunk, or as if the arm of a woman couched beneath the horizon had raised a lamp and flat bars of white, green and yellow spread across the sky like the blades of a fan. Then she raised her lamp higher and the air seemed to become fibrous and to tear away from the green surface flickering and flaming in red and yellow fibres like the smoky fire that roars from a bonfire. Gradually the fibres of the burning bonfire were fused into one haze, one incandescence which lifted the weight of the woollen grey sky on top of it and turned it to a million atoms of soft blue. The surface of the sea slowly became transparent and lay rippling and sparkling until the dark stripes were almost rubbed out. Slowly the arm that held the lamp raised it higher and then higher until a broad flame became visible; an arc of fire burnt on the rim of the horizon, and all round it the sea blazed gold.

The light struck upon the trees in the garden, making one leaf transparent and then another. One bird chirped high up; there was a pause; another chirped lower down. The sun sharpened the walls of the house, and rested like the tip of a fan upon a white blind and made a blue finger-print of shadow under the leaf by the bedroom window. The blind stirred slightly, but all within was dim and unsubstantial. The birds sang their blank melody outside.

“I see a ring,” said Bernard, “hanging above me. It quivers and hangs in a loop of light.”

“I see a slab of pale yellow,” said Susan, “spreading away until it meets a purple stripe.”

“I hear a sound,” said Rhoda, “cheep, chirp; cheep chirp; going up and down.”

“I see a globe,” said Neville, “hanging down in a drop against the enormous flanks of some hill.”

“I see a crimson tassel,” said Jinny, “twisted with gold threads.”

“I hear something stamping,” said Louis. “A great beast’s foot is chained. It stamps, and stamps, and stamps.”

“Look at the spider’s web on the corner of the balcony,” said Bernard. “It has beads of water on it, drops of white light.”

“The leaves are gathered round the window like pointed ears,” said Susan.

“A shadow falls on the path,” said Louis, “like an elbow bent.”

“Islands of light are swimming on the grass,” said Rhoda. “They have fallen through the trees.”

“The birds’ eyes are bright in the tunnels between the leaves,” said Neville.

“The stalks are covered with harsh, short hairs,” said Jinny, “and drops of water have stuck to them.”

“A caterpillar is curled in a green ring,” said Susan, “notched with blunt feet.”

“The grey-shelled snail draws across the path and flattens the blades behind him,” said Rhoda.

“And burning lights from the window-panes flash in and out on the grasses,” said Louis.

“Stones are cold to my feet,” said Neville. “I feel each one, round or pointed, separately.”

“The back of my hand burns,” said Jinny, “but the palm is clammy and damp with dew.”

“Now the cock crows like a spurt of hard, red water in the white tide,” said Bernard.

“Birds are singing up and down and in and out all round us,” said Susan.

“The beast stamps; the elephant with its foot chained; the great brute on the beach stamps,” said Louis.

“Look at the house,” said Jinny, “with all its windows white with blinds.”

“Cold water begins to run from the scullery tap,” said Rhoda, “over the mackerel in the bowl.”

“The walls are cracked with gold cracks,” said Bernard, “and there are blue, finger-shaped shadows of leaves beneath the windows.”

“Now Mrs. Constable pulls up her thick black stockings,” said Susan.

“When the smoke rises, sleep curls off the roof like a mist,” said Louis.

“The birds sang in chorus first,” said Rhoda. “Now the scullery door is unbarred. Off they fly. Off they fly like a fling of seed. But one sings by the bedroom window alone.”

“Bubbles form on the floor of the saucepan,” said Jinny. “Then they rise, quicker and quicker, in a silver chain to the top.”

“Now Biddy scrapes the fish-scales with a jagged knife on to a wooden board,” said Neville.

“The dining-room window is dark blue now,” said Bernard, “and the air ripples above the chimneys.”

“A swallow is perched on the lightning-conductor,” said Susan. “And Biddy has smacked down the bucket on the kitchen flags.”

“That is the first stroke of the church bell,” said Louis. “Then the others follow; one, two; one, two; one, two.”

“Look at the table-cloth, flying white along the table,” said Rhoda. “Now there are rounds of white china, and silver streaks beside each plate.”

“Suddenly a bee booms in my ear,” said Neville. “It is here; it is past.”

“I burn, I shiver,” said Jinny, “out of this sun, into this shadow.”

“Now they have all gone,” said Louis. “I am alone. They have gone into the house for breakfast, and I am left standing by the wall among the flowers. It is very early, before lessons. Flower after flower is specked on the depths of green. The petals are harlequins. Stalks rise from the black hollows beneath. The flowers swim like fish made of light upon the dark, green waters. I hold a stalk in my hand. I am the stalk. My roots go down to the depths of the world, through earth dry with brick, and damp earth, through veins of lead and silver. I am all fibre. All tremors shake me, and the weight of the earth is pressed to my ribs. Up here my eyes are green leaves, unseeing. I am a boy in grey flannels with a belt fastened by a brass snake up here. Down there my eyes are the lidless eyes of a stone figure in a desert by the Nile. I see women passing with red pitchers to the river; I see camels swaying and men in turbans. I hear tramplings, tremblings, stirrings round me.

“Up here Bernard, Neville, Jinny and Susan (but not Rhoda) skim the flower-beds with their nets. They skim the butterflies from the nodding tops of the flowers. They brush the surface of the world. Their nets are full of fluttering wings. ‘Louis! Louis! Louis!’ they shout. But they cannot see me. I am on the other side of the hedge. There are only little eye-holes among the leaves. Oh Lord, let them pass. Lord, let them lay their butterflies on a pocket-handkerchief on the gravel. Let them count out their tortoise-shells, their red admirals and cabbage whites. But let me be unseen. I am green as a yew tree in the shade of the hedge. My hair is made of leaves. I am rooted to the middle of the earth. My body is a stalk. I press the stalk. A drop oozes from the hole at the mouth and slowly, thickly, grows larger and larger. Now something pink passes the eyehole. Now an eye-beam is slid through the chink. Its beam strikes me. I am a boy in a grey flannel suit. She has found me. I am struck on the nape of the neck. She has kissed me. All is shattered.”

“I was running,” said Jinny, “after breakfast. I saw leaves moving in a hole in the hedge. I thought ‘That is a bird on its nest’. I parted them and looked; but there was no bird on a nest. The leaves went on moving. I was frightened. I ran past Susan, past Rhoda, and Neville and Bernard in the tool-house talking. I cried as I ran, faster and faster. What moved the leaves? What moves my heart, my legs? And I dashed in here, seeing you green as a bush, like a branch, very still, Louis, with your eyes fixed. ‘Is he dead?’ I thought, and kissed you, with my heart jumping under my pink frock like the leaves, which go on moving, though there is nothing to move them. Now I smell geraniums; I smell earth mould. I dance. I ripple. I am thrown over you like a net of light. I lie quivering flung over you.”

“Through the chink in the hedge,” said Susan “I saw her kiss him. I raised my head from my flower-pot and looked through a chink in the hedge. I saw her kiss him. I saw them, Jinny and Louis, kissing. Now I will wrap my agony inside my pocket-handkerchief. It shall be screwed tight into a ball. I will go to the beech wood alone, before lessons. I will not sit at a table, doing sums. I will not sit next Jinny and next Louis. I will take my anguish and lay it upon the roots under the beech trees. I will examine it and take it between my fingers. They will not find me. I shall eat nuts and peer for eggs through the brambles and my hair will be matted and I shall sleep under hedges and drink water from ditches and die there.”

“Susan has passed us,” said Bernard. “She has passed the tool-house door with her handkerchief screwed into a ball. She was not crying, but her eyes, which are so beautiful, were narrow as cats’ eyes before they spring. I shall follow her, Neville. I shall go gently behind her, to be at hand, with my curiosity, to comfort her when she bursts out in a rage and thinks, ‘I am alone’.

“Now she walks across the field with a swing, nonchalantly, to deceive us. Then she comes to the dip; she thinks she is unseen; she begins to run with her fists clenched in front of her. Her nails meet in the ball of her pocket-handkerchief. She is making for the beech woods out of the light. She spreads her arms as she comes to them and takes to the shade like a swimmer. But she is blind after the light and trips and flings herself down on the roots under the trees, where the light seems to pant in and out, in and out. The branches heave up and down. There is agitation and trouble here. There is gloom. The light is fitful. There is anguish here. The roots make a skeleton on the ground, with dead leaves heaped in the angles. Susan has spread her anguish out. Her pocket-handkerchief is laid on the roots of the beech trees and she sobs, sitting crumpled where she has fallen.”

“I saw her kiss him,” said Susan. “I looked between the leaves and saw her. She danced in flecked with diamonds light as dust. And I am squat, Bernard, I am short. I have eyes that look close to the ground and see insects in the grass. The yellow warmth in my side turned to stone when I saw Jinny kiss Louis. I shall eat grass and die in a ditch in the brown water where dead leaves have rotted.”

“I saw you go,” said Bernard. “As you passed the door of the tool-house I heard you cry ‘I am unhappy’. I put down my knife. I was making boats out of firewood with Neville. And my hair is untidy, because when Mrs. Constable told me to brush it there was a fly in a web, and I asked, ‘Shall I free the fly? Shall I let the fly be eaten?’ So I am late always. My hair is unbrushed and these chips of wood stick in it. When I heard you cry I followed you, and saw you put down your handkerchief, screwed up, with its rage, with its hate, knotted in it. But soon that will cease. Our bodies are close now. You hear me breathe. You see the beetle too carrying off a leaf on its back. It runs this way, then that way, so that even your desire while you watch the beetle, to possess one single thing (it is Louis now) must waver, like the light in and out of the beech leaves; and then words, moving darkly, in the depths of your mind will break up this knot of hardness, screwed in your pocket-handkerchief.”

“I love,” said Susan, “and I hate. I desire one thing only. My eyes are hard. Jinny’s eyes break into a thousand lights. Rhoda’s are like those pale flowers to which moths come in the evening. Yours grow full and brim and never break. But I am already set on my pursuit. I see insects in the grass. Though my mother still knits white socks for me and hems pinafores and I am a child, I love and I hate.”

“But when we sit together, close,” said Bernard, “we melt into each other with phrases. We are edged with mist. We make an unsubstantial territory.”

“I see the beetle,” said Susan. “It is black, I see; it is green, I see; I am tied down with single words. But you wander off; you slip away; you rise up higher, with words and words in phrases.”

“Now,” said Bernard, “let us explore. There is the white house lying among the trees. It lies down there ever so far beneath us. We shall sink like swimmers just touching the ground with the tips of their toes. We shall sink through the green air of the leaves, Susan. We sink as we run. The waves close over us, the beech leaves meet above our heads. There is the stable clock with its gilt hands shining. Those are the flats and heights of the roofs of the great house. There is the stable-boy clattering in the yard in rubber boots. That is Elvedon.

“Now we have fallen through the tree-tops to the earth. The air no longer rolls its long, unhappy, purple waves over us. We touch earth; we tread ground. That is the close-clipped hedge of the ladies’ garden. There they walk at noon, with scissors, clipping roses. Now we are in the ringed wood with the wall round it. This is Elvedon. I have seen signposts at the cross-roads with one arm pointing ‘To Elvedon’. No one has been there. The ferns smell very strong, and there are red funguses growing beneath them. Now we wake the sleeping daws who have never seen a human form; now we tread on rotten oak apples, red with age and slippery. There is a ring of wall round this wood; nobody comes here. Listen! That is the flop of a giant toad in the undergrowth; that is the patter of some primeval fir-cone falling to rot among the ferns.

“Put your foot on this brick. Look over the wall. That is Elvedon. The lady sits between the two long windows, writing. The gardeners sweep the lawn with giant brooms. We are the first to come here. We are the discoverers of an unknown land. Do not stir; if the gardeners saw us they would shoot us. We should be nailed like stoats to the stable door. Look! Do not move. Grasp the ferns tight on the top of the wall.”

“I see the lady writing. I see the gardeners sweeping,” said Susan. “If we died here, nobody would bury us.”

“Run!” said Bernard. “Run! The gardener with the black beard has seen us! We shall be shot! We shall be shot like jays and pinned to the wall! We are in a hostile country. We must escape to the beech wood. We must hide under the trees. I turned a twig as we came. There is a secret path. Bend as low as you can. Follow without looking back. They will think we are foxes. Run!

“Now we are safe. Now we can stand upright again. Now we can stretch our arms in this high canopy, in this vast wood. I hear nothing. That is only the murmur of the waves in the air. That is a wood-pigeon breaking cover in the tops of the beech trees. The pigeon beats the air; the pigeon beats the air with wooden wings.”

“Now you trail away,” said Susan, “making phrases. Now you mount like an air-ball’s string, higher and higher through the layers of the leaves, out of reach. Now you lag. Now you tug at my skirts, looking back, making phrases. You have escaped me. Here is the garden. Here is the hedge. Here is Rhoda on the path rocking petals to and fro in her brown basin.”

“All my ships are white,” said Rhoda. “I do not want red petals of hollyhocks or geranium. I want white petals that float when I tip the basin up. I have a fleet now swimming from shore to shore. I will drop a twig in as a raft for a drowning sailor. I will drop a stone in and see bubbles rise from the depths of the sea. Neville has gone and Susan has gone; Jinny is in the kitchen garden picking currants with Louis perhaps. I have a short time alone, while Miss Hudson spreads our copy-books on the schoolroom table. I have a short space of freedom. I have picked all the fallen petals and made them swim. I have put raindrops in some. I will plant a lighthouse here, a head of Sweet Alice. And I will now rock the brown basin from side to side so that my ships may ride the waves. Some will founder. Some will dash themselves against the cliffs. One sails alone. That is my ship. It sails into icy caverns where the sea-bear barks and stalactites swing green chains. The waves rise; their crests curl; look at the lights on the mastheads. They have scattered, they have foundered, all except my ship, which mounts the wave and sweeps before the gale and reaches the islands where the parrots chatter and the creepers …”

“Where is Bernard?” said Neville. “He has my knife. We were in the tool-shed making boats, and Susan came past the door. And Bernard dropped his boat and went after her taking my knife, the sharp one that cuts the keel. He is like a dangling wire, a broken bell-pull, always twangling. He is like the seaweed hung outside the window, damp now, now dry. He leaves me in the lurch; he follows Susan; and if Susan cries he will take my knife and tell her stories. The big blade is an emperor; the broken blade a Negro. I hate dangling things; I hate dampish things. I hate wandering and mixing things together. Now the bell rings and we shall be late. Now we must drop our toys. Now we must go in together. The copy-books are laid out side by side on the green baize table.”

“I will not conjugate the verb,” said Louis, “until Bernard has said it. My father is a banker in Brisbane and I speak with an Australian accent. I will wait and copy Bernard. He is English. They are all English. Susan’s father is a clergyman. Rhoda has no father. Bernard and Neville are the sons of gentlemen. Jinny lives with her grandmother in London. Now they suck their pens. Now they twist their copy-books, and, looking sideways at Miss Hudson, count the purple buttons on her bodice. Bernard has a chip in his hair. Susan has a red look in her eyes. Both are flushed. But I am pale; I am neat, and my knickerbockers are drawn together by a belt with a brass snake. I know the lesson by heart. I know more than they will ever know. I know my cases and my genders; I could know everything in the world if I wished. But I do not wish to come to the top and say my lesson. My roots are threaded, like fibres in a flower-pot, round and round about the world. I do not wish to come to the top and live in the light of this great clock, yellow-faced, which ticks and ticks. Jinny and Susan, Bernard and Neville bind themselves into a thong with which to lash me. They laugh at my neatness, at my Australian accent. I will now try to imitate Bernard softly lisping Latin.”

“Those are white words,” said Susan, “like stones one picks up by the seashore.”

“They flick their tails right and left as I speak them,” said Bernard. “They wag their tails; they flick their tails; they move through the air in flocks, now this way, now that way, moving all together, now dividing, now coming together.”

“Those are yellow words, those are fiery words,” said Jinny. “I should like a fiery dress, a yellow dress, a fulvous dress to wear in the evening.”

“Each tense,” said Neville, “means differently. There is an order in this world; there are distinctions, there are differences in this world, upon whose verge I step. For this is only a beginning.”

“Now Miss Hudson,” said Rhoda, “has shut the book. Now the terror is beginning. Now taking her lump of chalk she draws figures, six, seven, eight, and then a cross and then a line on the blackboard. What is the answer? The others look; they look with understanding. Louis writes; Susan writes; Neville writes; Jinny writes; even Bernard has now begun to write. But I cannot write. I see only figures. The others are handing in their answers, one by one. Now it is my turn. But I have no answer. The others are allowed to go. They slam the door. Miss Hudson goes. I am left alone to find an answer. The figures mean nothing now. Meaning has gone. The clock ticks. The two hands are convoys marching through a desert. The black bars on the clock face are green oases. The long hand has marched ahead to find water. The other, painfully stumbles among hot stones in the desert. It will die in the desert. The kitchen door slams. Wild dogs bark far away. Look, the loop of the figure is beginning to fill with time; it holds the world in it. I begin to draw a figure and the world is looped in it, and I myself am outside the loop; which I now join—so—and seal up, and make entire. The world is entire, and I am outside of it, crying, ‘Oh save me, from being blown for ever outside the loop of time!’”

“There Rhoda sits staring at the blackboard,” said Louis, “in the schoolroom, while we ramble off, picking here a bit of thyme, pinching here a leaf of southernwood while Bernard tells a story. Her shoulder-blades meet across her back like the wings of a small butterfly. And as she stares at the chalk figures, her mind lodges in those white circles; it steps through those white loops into emptiness, alone. They have no meaning for her. She has no answer for them. She has no body as the others have. And I, who speak with an Australian accent, whose father is a banker in Brisbane, do not fear her as I fear the others.”

“Let us now crawl,” said Bernard, “under the canopy of the currant leaves, and tell stories. Let us inhabit the underworld. Let us take possession of our secret territory, which is lit by pendant currants like candelabra, shining red on one side, black on the other. Here, Jinny, if we curl up close, we can sit under the canopy of the currant leaves and watch the censers swing. This is our universe. The others pass down the carriage-drive. The skirts of Miss Hudson and Miss Curry sweep by like candle extinguishers. Those are Susan’s white socks. Those are Louis’ neat sand-shoes firmly printing the gravel. Here come warm gusts of decomposing leaves, of rotting vegetation. We are in a swamp now; in a malarial jungle. There is an elephant white with maggots, killed by an arrow shot dead in its eye. The bright eyes of hopping birds—eagles, vultures—are apparent. They take us for fallen trees. They pick at a worm—that is a hooded cobra—and leave it with a festering brown scar to be mauled by lions. This is our world, lit with crescents and stars of light; and great petals half transparent block the openings like purple windows. Everything is strange. Things are huge and very small. The stalks of flowers are thick as oak trees. Leaves are high as the domes of vast cathedrals. We are giants, lying here, who can make forests quiver.”

“This is here,” said Jinny, “this is now. But soon we shall go. Soon Miss Curry will blow her whistle. We shall walk. We shall part. You will go to school. You will have masters wearing crosses with white ties. I shall have a mistress in a school on the East Coast who sits under a portrait of Queen Alexandra. That is where I am going, and Susan and Rhoda. This is only here; this is only now. Now we lie under the currant bushes and every time the breeze stirs we are mottled all over. My hand is like a snake’s skin. My knees are pink floating islands. Your face is like an apple tree netted under.”

“The heat is going,” said Bernard, “from the Jungle. The leaves flap black wings over us. Miss Curry has blown her whistle on the terrace. We must creep out from the awning of the currant leaves and stand upright. There are twigs in your hair, Jinny. There is a green caterpillar on your neck. We must form, two by two. Miss Curry is taking us for a brisk walk, while Miss Hudson sits at her desk settling her accounts.”

“It is dull,” said Jinny, “walking along the high road with no windows to look at, with no bleared eyes of blue glass let into the pavement.”

“We must form into pairs,” said Susan, “and walk in order, not shuffling our feet, not lagging, with Louis going first to lead us, because Louis is alert and not a wool-gatherer.”

“Since I am supposed,” said Neville, “to be too delicate to go with them, since I get so easily tired and then am sick, I will use this hour of solitude, this reprieve from conversation, to coast round the purlieus of the house and recover, if I can, by standing on the same stair half-way up the landing, what I felt when I heard about the dead man through the swing-door last night when cook was shoving in and out the dampers. He was found with his throat cut. The apple-tree leaves became fixed in the sky; the moon glared; I was unable to lift my foot up the stair. He was found in the gutter. His blood gurgled down the gutter. His jowl was white as a dead codfish. I shall call this stricture, this rigidity, ‘death among the apple trees’ for ever. There were the floating, pale-grey clouds; and the immitigable tree; the implacable tree with its greaved silver bark. The ripple of my life was unavailing. I was unable to pass by. There was an obstacle. ‘I cannot surmount this unintelligible obstacle’, I said. And the others passed on. But we are doomed, all of us, by the apple trees, by the immitigable tree which we cannot pass.

“Now the stricture and rigidity are over; and I will continue to make my survey of the purlieus of the house in the late afternoon, in the sunset, when the sun makes oleaginous spots on the linoleum, and a crack of light kneels on the wall, making the chair legs look broken.”

“I saw Florrie in the kitchen garden,” said Susan, “as we came back from our walk, with the washing blown out round her, the pyjamas, the drawers, the night-gowns blown tight. And Ernest kissed her. He was in his green baize apron, cleaning silver; and his mouth was sucked like a purse in wrinkles and he seized her with the pyjamas blown out hard between them. He was blind as a bull, and she swooned in anguish, only little veins streaking her white cheeks red. Now though they pass plates of bread and butter and cups of milk at tea-time I see a crack in the earth and hot steam hisses up; and the urn roars as Ernest roared, and I am blown out hard like the pyjamas, even while my teeth meet in the soft bread and butter, and I lap the sweet milk. I am not afraid of heat, nor of the frozen winter. Rhoda dreams, sucking a crust soaked in milk; Louis regards the wall opposite with snail-green eyes; Bernard moulds his bread into pellets and calls them ‘people’. Neville with his clean and decisive ways has finished. He has rolled his napkin and slipped it through the silver ring. Jinny spins her fingers on the table-cloth, as if they were dancing in the sunshine, pirouetting. But I am not afraid of the heat or of the frozen winter.”

“Now,” said Louis, “we all rise; we all stand up. Miss Curry spreads wide the black book on the harmonium. It is difficult not to weep as we sing, as we pray that God may keep us safe while we sleep, calling ourselves little children. When we are sad and trembling with apprehension it is sweet to sing together, leaning slightly, I towards Susan, Susan towards Bernard, clasping hands, afraid of much, I of my accent, Rhoda of figures; yet resolute to conquer.”

“We troop upstairs like ponies,” said Bernard, “stamping, clattering one behind another to take our turns in the bathroom. We buffet, we tussle, we spring up and down on the hard, white beds. My turn has come. I come now.

“Mrs. Constable, girt in a bath-towel, takes her lemon-coloured sponge and soaks it in water; it turns chocolate-brown; it drips; and, holding it high above me, shivering beneath her, she squeezes it. Water pours down the runnel of my spine. Bright arrows of sensation shoot on either side. I am covered with warm flesh. My dry crannies are wetted; my cold body is warmed; it is sluiced and gleaming. Water descends and sheets me like an eel. Now hot towels envelop me, and their roughness, as I rub my back, makes my blood purr. Rich and heavy sensations form on the roof of my mind; down showers the day—the woods; and Elvedon; Susan and the pigeon. Pouring down the walls of my mind, running together, the day falls copious, resplendent. Now I tie my pyjamas loosely round me, and lie under this thin sheet afloat in the shallow light which is like a film of water drawn over my eyes by a wave. I hear through it far off, far away, faint and far, the chorus beginning; wheels; dogs; men shouting; church bells; the chorus beginning.”

“As I fold up my frock and my chemise,” said Rhoda, “so I put off my hopeless desire to be Susan, to be Jinny. But I will stretch my toes so that they touch the rail at the end of the bed; I will assure myself, touching the rail, of something hard. Now I cannot sink; cannot altogether fall through the thin sheet now. Now I spread my body on this frail mattress and hang suspended. I am above the earth now. I am no longer upright, to be knocked against and damaged. All is soft, and bending. Walls and cupboards whiten and bend their yellow squares on top of which a pale glass gleams. Out of me now my mind can pour. I can think of my Armadas sailing on the high waves. I am relieved of hard contacts and collisions. I sail on alone under white cliffs. Oh, but I sink, I fall! That is the corner of the cupboard; that is the nursery looking-glass. But they stretch, they elongate. I sink down on the black plumes of sleep; its thick wings are pressed to my eyes. Travelling through darkness I see the stretched flower-beds, and Mrs. Constable runs from behind the corner of the pampas-grass to say my aunt has come to fetch me in a carriage. I mount; I escape; I rise on spring-heeled boots over the tree-tops. But I am now fallen into the carriage at the hall door, where she sits nodding yellow plumes with eyes hard like glazed marbles. Oh, to awake from dreaming! Look, there is the chest of drawers. Let me pull myself out of these waters. But they heap themselves on me; they sweep me between their great shoulders; I am turned; I am tumbled; I am stretched, among these long lights, these long waves, these endless paths, with people pursuing, pursuing.”

The sun rose higher. Blue waves, green waves swept a quick fan over the beach, circling the spike of sea-holly and leaving shallow pools of light here and there on the sand. A faint black rim was left behind them. The rocks which had been misty and soft hardened and were marked with red clefts.

Sharp stripes of shadow lay on the grass, and the dew dancing on the tips of the flowers and leaves made the garden like a mosaic of single sparks not yet formed into one whole. The birds, whose breasts were specked canary and rose, now sang a strain or two together, wildly, like skaters rollicking arm-in-arm, and were suddenly silent, breaking asunder.

The sun laid broader blades upon the house. The light touched something green in the window corner and made it a lump of emerald, a cave of pure green like stoneless fruit. It sharpened the edges of chairs and tables and stitched white table-cloths with fine gold wires. As the light increased a bud here and there split asunder and shook out flowers, green veined and quivering, as if the effort of opening had set them rocking, and pealing a faint carillon as they beat their frail clappers against their white walls. Everything became softly amorphous, as if the china of the plate flowed and the steel of the knife were liquid. Meanwhile the concussion of the waves breaking fell with muffled thuds, like logs falling, on the shore.

“Now,” said Bernard, “the time has come. The day has come. The cab is at the door. My huge box bends George’s bandy-legs even wider. The horrible ceremony is over, the tips, and the good-byes in the hall. Now there is this gulping ceremony with my mother, this hand-shaking ceremony with my father; now I must go on waving, I must go on waving, till we turn the corner. Now that ceremony is over. Heaven be praised, all ceremonies are over. I am alone; I am going to school for the first time.

“Everybody seems to be doing things for this moment only; and never again. Never again. The urgency of it all is fearful. Everybody knows I am going to school, going to school for the first time. ‘That boy is going to school for the first time’, says the housemaid, cleaning the steps. I must not cry. I must behold them indifferently. Now the awful portals of the station gape; ‘the moon-faced clock regards me’. I must make phrases and phrases and so interpose something hard between myself and the stare of housemaids, the stare of clocks, staring faces, indifferent faces, or I shall cry. There is Louis, there is Neville, in long coats, carrying handbags, by the booking-office. They are composed. But they look different.”

“Here is Bernard,” said Louis. “He is composed; he is easy. He swings his bag as he walks. I will follow Bernard, because he is not afraid. We are drawn through the booking-office on to the platform as a stream draws twigs and straws round the piers of a bridge. There is the very powerful, bottle-green engine without a neck, all back and thighs, breathing steam. The guard blows his whistle; the flag is dipped; without an effort, of its own momentum, like an avalanche started by a gentle push, we start forward. Bernard spreads a rug and plays knuckle-bones. Neville reads. London crumbles. London heaves and surges. There is a bristling of chimneys and towers. There a white church; there a mast among the spires. There a canal. Now there are open spaces with asphalt paths upon which it is strange that people should now be walking. There is a hill striped with red houses. A man crosses a bridge with a dog at his heels. Now the red boy begins firing at a pheasant. The blue boy shoves him aside. ‘My uncle is the best shot in England. My cousin is Master of Foxhounds.’ Boasting begins. And I cannot boast, for my father is a banker in Brisbane, and I speak with an Australian accent.”

“After all this hubbub,” said Neville, “all this scuffling and hubbub, we have arrived. This is indeed a moment—this is indeed a solemn moment. I come, like a lord to his halls appointed. That is our founder; our illustrious founder, standing in the courtyard with one foot raised. I salute our founder. A noble Roman air hangs over these austere quadrangles. Already the lights are lit in the form rooms. Those are laboratories perhaps; and that a library, where I shall explore the exactitude of the Latin language, and step firmly upon the well-laid sentences, and pronounce the explicit, the sonorous hexameters of Virgil, of Lucretius; and chant with a passion that is never obscure or formless the loves of Catullus, reading from a big book, a quarto with margins. I shall lie, too, in the fields among the tickling grasses. I shall lie with my friends under the towering elm trees.

“Behold, the Headmaster. Alas, that he should excite my ridicule. He is too sleek, he is altogether too shiny and black, like some statue in a public garden. And on the left side of his waistcoat, his taut, his drum-like waistcoat, hangs a crucifix.”

“Old Crane,” said Bernard, “now rises to address us. Old Crane, the Headmaster, has a nose like a mountain at sunset, and a blue cleft in his chin, like a wooded ravine, which some tripper has fired; like a wooded ravine seen from the train window. He sways slightly, mouthing out his tremendous and sonorous words. I love tremendous and sonorous words. But his words are too hearty to be true. Yet he is by this time convinced of their truth. And when he leaves the room, lurching rather heavily from side to side, and hurls his way through the swing-doors, all the masters, lurching rather heavily from side to side, hurl themselves also through the swing-doors. This is our first night at school, apart from our sisters.”

“This is my first night at school,” said Susan, “away from my father, away from my home. My eyes swell; my eyes prick with tears. I hate the smell of pine and linoleum. I hate the wind-bitten shrubs and the sanitary tiles. I hate the cheerful jokes and the glazed look of everyone. I left my squirrel and my doves for the boy to look after. The kitchen door slams, and shot patters among the leaves when Percy fires at the rooks. All here is false; all is meretricious. Rhoda and Jinny sit far off in brown serge, and look at Miss Lambert who sits under a picture of Queen Alexandra reading from a book before her. There is also a blue scroll of needlework embroidered by some old girl. If I do not purse my lips, if I do not screw my handkerchief, I shall cry.”

“The purple light,” said Rhoda, “in Miss Lambert’s ring passes to and fro across the black stain on the white page of the Prayer Book. It is a vinous, it is an amorous light. Now that our boxes are unpacked in the dormitories, we sit herded together under maps of the entire world. There are desks with wells for the ink. We shall write our exercises in ink here. But here I am nobody. I have no face. This great company, all dressed in brown serge, has robbed me of my identity. We are all callous, unfriended. I will seek out a face, a composed, a monumental face, and will endow it with omniscience, and wear it under my dress like a talisman and then (I promise this) I will find some dingle in a wood where I can display my assortment of curious treasures. I promise myself this. So I will not cry.”

“That dark woman,” said Jinny, “with high cheek-bones, has a shiny dress, like a shell, veined, for wearing in the evening. That is nice for summer, but for winter I should like a thin dress shot with red threads that would gleam in the firelight. Then when the lamps were lit, I should put on my red dress and it would be thin as a veil, and would wind about my body, and billow out as I came into the room, pirouetting. It would make a flower shape as I sank down, in the middle of the room, on a gilt chair. But Miss Lambert wears an opaque dress, that falls in a cascade from her snow-white ruffle as she sits under a picture of Queen Alexandra pressing one white finger firmly on the page. And we pray.”

“Now we march, two by two,” said Louis, “orderly, processional, into chapel. I like the dimness that falls as we enter the sacred building. I like the orderly progress. We file in; we seat ourselves. We put off our distinctions as we enter. I like it now, when, lurching slightly, but only from his momentum, Dr. Crane mounts the pulpit and reads the lesson from a Bible spread on the back of the brass eagle. I rejoice; my heart expands in his bulk, in his authority. He lays the whirling dust clouds in my tremulous, my ignominiously agitated mind—how we danced round the Christmas tree and handing parcels they forgot me, and the fat woman said, ‘This little boy has no present’, and gave me a shiny Union Jack from the top of the tree, and I cried with fury—to be remembered with pity. Now all is laid by his authority, his crucifix, and I feel come over me the sense of the earth under me, and my roots going down and down till they wrap themselves round some hardness at the centre. I recover my continuity, as he reads. I become a figure in the procession, a spoke in the huge wheel that turning, at last erects me, here and now. I have been in the dark; I have been hidden; but when the wheel turns (as he reads) I rise into this dim light where I just perceive, but scarcely, kneeling boys, pillars and memorial brasses. There is no crudity here, no sudden kisses.”

“The brute menaces my liberty,” said Neville, “when he prays. Unwarmed by imagination, his words fall cold on my head like paving-stones, while the gilt cross heaves on his waistcoat. The words of authority are corrupted by those who speak them. I gibe and mock at this sad religion, at these tremulous, grief-stricken figures advancing, cadaverous and wounded, down a white road shadowed by fig trees where boys sprawl in the dust—naked boys; and goatskins distended with wine hang at the tavern door. I was in Rome travelling with my father at Easter; and the trembling figure of Christ’s mother was borne niddle-noddling along the streets; there went by also the stricken figure of Christ in a glass case.

“Now I will lean sideways as if to scratch my thigh. So I shall see Percival. There he sits, upright among the smaller fry. He breathes through his straight nose rather heavily. His blue and oddly inexpressive eyes are fixed with pagan indifference upon the pillar opposite. He would make an admirable churchwarden. He should have a birch and beat little boys for misdemeanours. He is allied with the Latin phrases on the memorial brasses. He sees nothing; he hears nothing. He is remote from us all in a pagan universe. But look—he flicks his hand to the back of his neck. For such gestures one falls hopelessly in love for a lifetime. Dalton, Jones, Edgar and Bateman flick their hands to the backs of their necks likewise. But they do not succeed.”

“At last,” said Bernard, “the growl ceases. The sermon ends. He has minced the dance of the white butterflies at the door to powder. His rough and hairy voice is like an unshaven chin. Now he lurches back to his seat like a drunken sailor. It is an action that all the other masters will try to imitate; but, being flimsy, being floppy, wearing grey trousers, they will only succeed in making themselves ridiculous. I do not despise them. Their antics seem pitiable in my eyes. I note the fact for future reference with many others in my notebook. When I am grown up I shall carry a notebook—a fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases. Under B shall come ‘Butterfly powder’. If, in my novel, I describe the sun on the window-sill, I shall look under B and find butterfly powder. That will be useful. The tree ‘shades the window with green fingers’. That will be useful. But alas! I am so soon distracted—by a hair like twisted candy, by Celia’s Prayer Book, ivory covered. Louis can contemplate nature, unwinking, by the hour. Soon I fail, unless talked to. ‘The lake of my mind, unbroken by oars, heaves placidly and soon sinks into an oily somnolence.’ That will be useful.”

“Now we move out of this cool temple, into the yellow playing-fields,” said Louis. “And, as it is a half-holiday (the Duke’s birthday) we will settle among the long grasses, while they play cricket. Could I be ‘they’ I would choose it; I would buckle on my pads and stride across the playing-field at the head of the batsmen. Look now, how everybody follows Percival. He is heavy. He walks clumsily down the field, through the long grass, to where the great elm trees stand. His magnificence is that of some mediaeval commander. A wake of light seems to lie on the grass behind him. Look at us trooping after him, his faithful servants, to be shot like sheep, for he will certainly attempt some forlorn enterprise and die in battle. My heart turns rough; it abrades my side like a file with two edges: one, that I adore his magnificence; the other I despise his slovenly accents—I who am so much his superior—and am jealous.”

“And now,” said Neville, “let Bernard begin. Let him burble on, telling us stories, while we lie recumbent. Let him describe what we have all seen so that it becomes a sequence. Bernard says there is always a story. I am a story. Louis is a story. There is the story of the boot-boy, the story of the man with one eye, the story of the woman who sells winkles. Let him burble on with his story while I lie back and regard the stiff-legged figures of the padded batsmen through the trembling grasses. It seems as if the whole world were flowing and curving—on the earth the trees, in the sky the clouds. I look up, through the trees, into the sky. The match seems to be played up there. Faintly among the soft, white clouds I hear the cry ‘Run’, I hear the cry ‘How’s that?’ The clouds lose tufts of whiteness as the breeze dishevels them. If that blue could stay for ever; if that hole could remain for ever; if this moment could stay for ever——

“But Bernard goes on talking. Up they bubble—images. ‘Like a camel’, … ‘a vulture’. The camel is a vulture; the vulture a camel; for Bernard is a dangling wire, loose, but seductive. Yes, for when he talks, when he makes his foolish comparisons, a lightness comes over one. One floats, too, as if one were that bubble; one is freed; I have escaped, one feels. Even the chubby little boys (Dalton, Larpent and Baker) feel the same abandonment. They like this better than the cricket. They catch the phrases as they bubble. They let the feathery grasses tickle their noses. And then we all feel Percival lying heavy among us. His curious guffaw seems to sanction our laughter. But now he has rolled himself over in the long grass. He is, I think, chewing a stalk between his teeth. He feels bored; I too feel bored. Bernard at once perceives that we are bored. I detect a certain effort, an extravagance in his phrase, as if he said ‘Look!’ but Percival says ‘No’. For he is always the first to detect insincerity; and is brutal in the extreme. The sentence tails off feebly. Yes, the appalling moment has come when Bernard’s power fails him and there is no longer any sequence and he sags and twiddles a bit of string and falls silent, gaping as if about to burst into tears. Among the tortures and devastations of life is this then—our friends are not able to finish their stories.”

“Now let me try,” said Louis, “before we rise, before we go to tea, to fix the moment in one effort of supreme endeavour. This shall endure. We are parting; some to tea; some to the nets; I to show my essay to Mr. Barker. This will endure. From discord, from hatred (I despise dabblers in imagery—I resent the power of Percival intensely) my shattered mind is pieced together by some sudden perception. I take the trees, the clouds, to be witnesses of my complete integration. I, Louis, I, who shall walk the earth these seventy years, am born entire, out of hatred, out of discord. Here on this ring of grass we have sat together, bound by the tremendous power of some inner compulsion. The trees wave, the clouds pass. The time approaches when these soliloquies shall be shared. We shall not always give out a sound like a beaten gong as one sensation strikes and then another. Children, our lives have been gongs striking; clamour and boasting; cries of despair; blows on the nape of the neck in gardens.

“Now grass and trees, the travelling air blowing empty spaces in the blue which they then recover, shaking the leaves which then replace themselves, and our ring here, sitting, with our arms binding our knees, hint at some other order, and better, which makes a reason everlastingly. This I see for a second, and shall try to-night to fix in words, to forge in a ring of steel, though Percival destroys it, as he blunders off, crushing the grasses, with the small fry trotting subservient after him. Yet it is Percival I need; for it is Percival who inspires poetry.”

“For how many months,” said Susan, “for how many years, have I run up these stairs, in the dismal days of winter, in the chilly days of spring? Now it is midsummer. We go upstairs to change into white frocks to play tennis—Jinny and I with Rhoda following after. I count each step as I mount, counting each step something done with. So each night I tear off the old day from the calendar, and screw it tight into a ball. I do this vindictively, while Betty and Clara are on their knees. I do not pray. I revenge myself upon the day. I wreak my spite upon its image. You are dead now, I say, school day, hated day. They have made all the days of June—this is the twenty-fifth—shiny and orderly, with gongs, with lessons, with orders to wash, to change, to work, to eat. We listen to missionaries from China. We drive off in brakes along the asphalt pavement, to attend concerts in halls. We are shown galleries and pictures.

“At home the hay waves over the meadows. My father leans upon the stile, smoking. In the house one door bangs and then another, as the summer air puffs along the empty passages. Some old picture perhaps swings on the wall. A petal drops from the rose in the jar. The farm wagons strew the hedges with tufts of hay. All this I see, I always see, as I pass the looking-glass on the landing, with Jinny in front and Rhoda lagging behind. Jinny dances. Jinny always dances in the hall on the ugly, the encaustic tiles; she turns cartwheels in the playground; she picks some flower forbiddenly, and sticks it behind her ear so that Miss Perry’s dark eyes smoulder with admiration, for Jinny, not me. Miss Perry loves Jinny; and I could have loved her, but now love no one, except my father, my doves and the squirrel whom I left in the cage at home for the boy to look after.”

“I hate the small looking-glass on the stairs,” said Jinny. “It shows our heads only; it cuts off our heads. And my lips are too wide, and my eyes are too close together; I show my gums too much when I laugh. Susan’s head, with its fell look, with its grass-green eyes which poets will love, Bernard said, because they fall upon close white stitching, put mine out; even Rhoda’s face, mooning, vacant, is completed, like those white petals she used to swim in her bowl. So I skip up the stairs past them, to the next landing, where the long glass hangs and I see myself entire. I see my body and head in one now; for even in this serge frock they are one, my body and my head. Look, when I move my head I ripple all down my narrow body; even my thin legs ripple like a stalk in the wind. I flicker between the set face of Susan and Rhoda’s vagueness; I leap like one of those flames that run between the cracks of the earth; I move, I dance; I never cease to move and to dance. I move like the leaf that moved in the hedge as a child and frightened me. I dance over these streaked, these impersonal, distempered walls with their yellow skirting as firelight dances over teapots. I catch fire even from women’s cold eyes. When I read, a purple rim runs round the black edge of the textbook. Yet I cannot follow any word through its changes. I cannot follow any thought from present to past. I do not stand lost, like Susan, with tears in my eyes remembering home; or lie, like Rhoda, crumpled among the ferns, staining my pink cotton green, while I dream of plants that flower under the sea, and rocks through which the fish swim slowly. I do not dream.

“Now let us be quick. Now let me be the first to pull off these coarse clothes. Here are my clean white stockings. Here are my new shoes. I bind my hair with a white ribbon, so that when I leap across the court the ribbon will stream out in a flash, yet curl round my neck, perfectly in its place. Not a hair shall be untidy.”

“That is my face,” said Rhoda, “in the looking-glass behind Susan’s shoulder—that face is my face. But I will duck behind her to hide it, for I am not here. I have no face. Other people have faces; Susan and Jinny have faces; they are here. Their world is the real world. The things they lift are heavy. They say Yes, they say No; whereas I shift and change and am seen through in a second. If they meet a housemaid she looks at them without laughing. But she laughs at me. They know what to say if spoken to. They laugh really; they get angry really; while I have to look first and do what other people do when they have done it.

“See now with what extraordinary certainty Jinny pulls on her stockings, simply to play tennis. That I admire. But I like Susan’s way better, for she is more resolute, and less ambitious of distinction than Jinny. Both despise me for copying what they do; but Susan sometimes teaches me, for instance, how to tie a bow, while Jinny has her own knowledge but keeps it to herself. They have friends to sit by. They have things to say privately in corners. But I attach myself only to names and faces; and hoard them like amulets against disaster. I choose out across the hall some unknown face and can hardly drink my tea when she whose name I do not know sits opposite. I choke. I am rocked from side to side by the violence of my emotion. I imagine these nameless, these immaculate people, watching me from behind bushes. I leap high to excite their admiration. At night, in bed, I excite their complete wonder. I often die pierced with arrows to win their tears. If they should say, or I should see from a label on their boxes, that they were in Scarborough last holidays, the whole town runs gold, the whole pavement is illuminated. Therefore I hate looking-glasses which show me my real face. Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the edge of the world into nothingness. I have to bang my hand against some hard door to call myself back to the body.”

“We are late,” said Susan. “We must wait our turn to play. We will pitch here in the long grass and pretend to watch Jinny and Clara, Betty and Mavis. But we will not watch them. I hate watching other people play games. I will make images of all the things I hate most and bury them in the ground. This shiny pebble is Madame Carlo, and I will bury her deep because of her fawning and ingratiating manners, because of the sixpence she gave me for keeping my knuckles flat when I played my scales. I buried her sixpence. I would bury the whole school: the gymnasium; the classroom; the dining-room that always smells of meat; and the chapel. I would bury the red-brown tiles and the oily portraits of old men—benefactors, founders of schools. There are some trees I like; the cherry tree with lumps of clear gum on the bark; and one view from the attic towards some far hills. Save for these, I would bury it all as I bury these ugly stones that are always scattered about this briny coast, with its piers and its trippers. At home, the waves are mile long. On winter nights we hear them booming. Last Christmas a man was drowned sitting alone in his cart.”

“When Miss Lambert passes,” said Rhoda, “talking to the clergyman, the others laugh and imitate her hunch behind her back; yet everything changes and becomes luminous. Jinny leaps higher too when Miss Lambert passes. Suppose she saw that daisy, it would change. Where-ever she goes, things are changed under her eyes; and yet when she has gone is not the thing the same again? Miss Lambert is taking the clergyman through the wicket-gate to her private garden; and when she comes to the pond, she sees a frog on a leaf, and that will change. All is solemn, all is pale where she stands, like a statue in a grove. She lets her tasselled silken cloak slip down, and only her purple ring still glows, her vinous, her amethystine ring. There is this mystery about people when they leave us. When they leave us I can companion them to the pond and make them stately. When Miss Lambert passes, she makes the daisy change; and everything runs like streaks of fire when she carves the beef. Month by month things are losing their hardness; even my body now lets the light through; my spine is soft like wax near the flame of the candle. I dream; I dream.”

“I have won the game,” said Jinny. “Now it is your turn. I must throw myself on the ground and pant. I am out of breath with running, with triumph. Everything in my body seems thinned out with running and triumph. My blood must be bright red, whipped up, slapping against my ribs. My soles tingle, as if wire rings opened and shut in my feet. I see every blade of grass very clear. But the pulse drums so in my forehead, behind my eyes, that everything dances—the net, the grass; your faces leap like butterflies; the trees seem to jump up and down. There is nothing staid, nothing settled, in this universe. All is rippling, all is dancing; all is quickness and triumph. Only, when I have lain alone on the hard ground, watching you play your game, I begin to feel the wish to be singled out; to be summoned, to be called away by one person who comes to find me, who is attracted towards me, who cannot keep himself from me, but comes to where I sit on my gilt chair, with my frock billowing round me like a flower. And withdrawing into an alcove, sitting alone on a balcony we talk together.

“Now the tide sinks. Now the trees come to earth; the brisk waves that slap my ribs rock more gently, and my heart rides at anchor, like a sailing-boat whose sails slide slowly down on to the white deck. The game is over. We must go to tea now.”

“The boasting boys,” said Louis, “have gone now in a vast team to play cricket. They have driven off in their great brake, singing in chorus. All their heads turn simultaneously at the corner by the laurel bushes. Now they are boasting. Larpent’s brother played football for Oxford; Smith’s father made a century at Lords. Archie and Hugh; Parker and Dalton; Larpent and Smith; then again Archie and Hugh; Parker and Dalton; Larpent and Smith—the names repeat themselves; the names are the same always. They are the volunteers; they are the cricketers; they are the officers of the Natural History Society. They are always forming into fours and marching in troops with badges on their caps; they salute simultaneously passing the figure of their general. How majestic is their order, how beautiful is their obedience! If I could follow, if I could be with them, I would sacrifice all I know. But they also leave butterflies trembling with their wings pinched off; they throw dirty pocket-handkerchiefs clotted with blood screwed up into corners. They make little boys sob in dark passages. They have big red ears that stand out under their caps. Yet that is what we wish to be, Neville and I. I watch them go with envy. Peeping from behind a curtain, I note the simultaneity of their movements with delight. If my legs were reinforced by theirs, how they would run! If I had been with them and won matches and rowed in great races, and galloped all day, how I should thunder out songs at midnight! In what a torrent the words would rush from my throat!”

“Percival has gone now,” said Neville. “He is thinking of nothing but the match. He never waved his hand as the brake turned the corner by the laurel bush. He despises me for being too weak to play (yet he is always kind to my weakness). He despises me for not caring if they win or lose except that he cares. He takes my devotion; he accepts my tremulous, no doubt abject offering, mixed with contempt as it is for his mind. For he cannot read. Yet when I read Shakespeare or Catullus, lying in the long grass, he understands more than Louis. Not the words—but what are words? Do I not know already how to rhyme, how to imitate Pope, Dryden, even Shakespeare? But I cannot stand all day in the sun with my eyes on the ball; I cannot feel the flight of the ball through my body and think only of the ball. I shall be a clinger to the outsides of words all my life. Yet I could not live with him and suffer his stupidity. He will coarsen and snore. He will marry and there will be scenes of tenderness at breakfast. But now he is young. Not a thread, not a sheet of paper lies between him and the sun, between him and the rain, between him and the moon as he lies naked, tumbled, hot, on his bed. Now as they drive along the high road in their brake his face is mottled red and yellow. He will throw off his coat and stand with his legs apart, with his hands ready, watching the wicket. And he will pray, ‘Lord let us win’; he will think of one thing only, that they should win.

“How could I go with them in a brake to play cricket? Only Bernard could go with them, but Bernard is too late to go with them. He is always too late. He is prevented by his incorrigible moodiness from going with them. He stops, when he washes his hands, to say, ‘There is a fly in that web. Shall I rescue that fly; shall I let the spider eat it?’ He is shaded with innumerable perplexities, or he would go with them to play cricket, and would lie in the grass, watching the sky, and would start when the ball was hit. But they would forgive him; for he would tell them a story.”

“They have bowled off,” said Bernard, “and I am too late to go with them. The horrid little boys, who are also so beautiful, whom you and Louis, Neville, envy so deeply, have bowled off with their heads all turned the same way. But I am unaware of these profound distinctions. My fingers slip over the keyboard without knowing which is black and which white. Archie makes easily a hundred; I by a fluke make sometimes fifteen. But what is the difference between us? Wait though, Neville; let me talk. The bubbles are rising like the silver bubbles from the floor of a saucepan; image on top of image. I cannot sit down to my book, like Louis, with ferocious tenacity. I must open the little trap-door and let out these linked phrases in which I run together whatever happens, so that instead of incoherence there is perceived a wandering thread, lightly joining one thing to another. I will tell you the story of the doctor.

“When Dr. Crane lurches through the swing-doors after prayers he is convinced, it seems, of his immense superiority; and indeed Neville, we cannot deny that his departure leaves us not only with a sense of relief, but also with a sense of something removed, like a tooth. Now let us follow him as he heaves through the swing-door to his own apartments. Let us imagine him in his private room over the stables undressing. He unfastens his sock suspenders (let us be trivial, let us be intimate). Then with a characteristic gesture (it is difficult to avoid these ready-made phrases, and they are, in his case, somehow appropriate) he takes the silver, he takes the coppers from his trouser pockets and places them there, and there, on his dressing-table. With both arms stretched on the arms of his chair he reflects (this is his private moment; it is here we must try to catch him): shall he cross the pink bridge into his bedroom or shall he not cross it? The two rooms are united by a bridge of rosy light from the lamp at the bedside where Mrs. Crane lies with her hair on the pillow reading a French memoir. As she reads, she sweeps her hand with an abandoned and despairing gesture over her forehead, and sighs, ‘Is this all?’ comparing herself with some French duchess. Now, says the doctor, in two years I shall retire. I shall clip yew hedges in a west country garden. An admiral I might have been; or a judge; not a schoolmaster. What forces, he asks, staring at the gas-fire with his shoulders hunched up more hugely than we know them (he is in his shirt-sleeves remember), have brought me to this? What vast forces? he thinks, getting into the stride of his majestic phrases as he looks over his shoulder at the window. It is a stormy night; the branches of the chestnut trees are ploughing up and down. Stars flash between them. What vast forces of good and evil have brought me here? he asks, and sees with sorrow that his chair has worn a little hole in the pile of the purple carpet. So there he sits, swinging his braces. But stories that follow people into their private rooms are difficult. I cannot go on with this story. I twiddle a piece of string; I turn over four or five coins in my trouser pocket.”

“Bernard’s stories amuse me,” said Neville “at the start. But when they tail off absurdly and he gapes, twiddling a bit of string, I feel my own solitude. He sees everyone with blurred edges. Hence I cannot talk to him of Percival. I cannot expose my absurd and violent passion to his sympathetic understanding. It too would make a ‘story’. I need someone whose mind falls like a chopper on a block; to whom the pitch of absurdity is sublime, and a shoe-string adorable. To whom can I expose the urgency of my own passion? Louis is too cold, too universal. There is nobody—here among these grey arches, and moaning pigeons, and cheerful games and tradition and emulation, all so skilfully organised to prevent feeling alone. Yet I am struck still as I walk by sudden premonitions of what is to come. Yesterday, passing the open door leading into the private garden, I saw Fenwick with his mallet raised. The steam from the tea-urn rose in the middle of the lawn. There were banks of blue flowers. Then suddenly descended upon me the obscure, the mystic sense of adoration, of completeness that triumphed over chaos. Nobody saw my poised and intent figure as I stood at the open door. Nobody guessed the need I had to offer my being to one god; and perish, and disappear. His mallet descended; the vision broke.

“Should I seek out some tree? Should I desert these form rooms and libraries, and the broad yellow page in which I read Catullus, for woods and fields? Should I walk under beech trees, or saunter along the river bank, where the trees meet united like lovers in the water? But nature is too vegetable, too vapid. She has only sublimities and vastitudes and water and leaves. I begin to wish for firelight, privacy, and the limbs of one person.”

“I begin to wish,” said Louis, “for night to come. As I stand here with my hand on the grained oak panel of Mr. Wickham’s door I think myself the friend of Richelieu, or the Duke of St. Simon holding out a snuff-box to the King himself. It is my privilege. My witticisms ‘run like wildfire through the court’. Duchesses tear emeralds from their ear-rings out of admiration—but these rockets rise best in darkness, in my cubicle at night. I am now a boy only with a colonial accent holding my knuckles against Mr Wickham’s grained oak door. The day has been full of ignominies and triumphs concealed from fear of laughter. I am the best scholar in the school. But when darkness comes I put off this unenviable body—my large nose, my thin lips, my colonial accent—and inhabit space. I am then Virgil’s companion, and Plato’s. I am then the last scion of one of the great houses of France. But I am also one who will force himself to desert these windy and moonlit territories, these midnight wanderings, and confront grained oak doors. I will achieve in my life—Heaven grant that it be not long—some gigantic amalgamation between the two discrepancies so hideously apparent to me. Out of my suffering I will do it. I will knock. I will enter.”

“I have torn off the whole of May and June,” said Susan, “and twenty days of July. I have torn them off and screwed them up so that they no longer exist, save as a weight in my side. They have been crippled days, like moths with shrivelled wings unable to fly. There are only eight days left. In eight days’ time I shall get out of the train and stand on the platform at six twenty-five. Then my freedom will unfurl, and all these restrictions that wrinkle and shrivel—hours and order and discipline, and being here and there exactly at the right moment—will crack asunder. Out the day will spring, as I open the carriage-door and see my father in his old hat and gaiters. I shall tremble. I shall burst into tears. Then next morning I shall get up at dawn. I shall let myself out by the kitchen door. I shall walk on the moor. The great horses of the phantom riders will thunder behind me and stop suddenly. I shall see the swallow skim the grass. I shall throw myself on a bank by the river and watch the fish slip in and out among the reeds. The palms of my hands will be printed with pine-needles. I shall there unfold and take out whatever it is I have made here; something hard. For something has grown in me here, through the winters and summers, on staircases, in bedrooms. I do not want, as Jinny wants, to be admired. I do not want people, when I come in, to look up with admiration. I want to give, to be given, and solitude in which to unfold my possessions.

“Then I shall come back through the trembling lanes under the arches of the nut leaves. I shall pass an old woman wheeling a perambulator full of sticks; and the shepherd. But we shall not speak. I shall come back through the kitchen garden, and see the curved leaves of the cabbages pebbled with dew, and the house in the garden, blind with curtained windows. I shall go upstairs to my room, and turn over my own things, locked carefully in the wardrobe: my shells; my eggs; my curious grasses. I shall feed my doves and my squirrel. I shall go to the kennel and comb my spaniel. So gradually I shall turn over the hard thing that has grown here in my side. But here bells ring; feet shuffle perpetually.”

“I hate darkness and sleep and night,” said Jinny, “and lie longing for the day to come. I long that the week should be all one day without divisions. When I wake early—and the birds wake me—I lie and watch the brass handles on the cupboard grow clear; then the basin; then the towel-horse. As each thing in the bedroom grows clear, my heart beats quicker. I feel my body harden, and become pink, yellow, brown. My hands pass over my legs and body. I feel its slopes, its thinness. I love to hear the gong roar through the house and the stir begin—here a thud, there a patter. Doors slam; water rushes. Here is another day, here is another day, I cry, as my feet touch the floor. It may be a bruised day, an imperfect day. I am often scolded. I am often in disgrace for idleness, for laughing; but even as Miss Matthews grumbles at my feather-headed carelessness, I catch sight of something moving—a speck of sun perhaps on a picture, or the donkey drawing the mowing-machine across the lawn; or a sail that passes between the laurel leaves, so that I am never cast down. I cannot be prevented from pirouetting behind Miss Matthews into prayers.

“Now, too, the time is coming when we shall leave school and wear long skirts. I shall wear necklaces and a white dress without sleeves at night. There will be parties in brilliant rooms; and one man will single me out and will tell me what he has told no other person. He will like me better than Susan or Rhoda. He will find in me some quality, some peculiar thing. But I shall not let myself be attached to one person only. I do not want to be fixed, to be pinioned. I tremble, I quiver, like the leaf in the hedge, as I sit dangling my feet, on the edge of the bed, with a new day to break open. I have fifty years, I have sixty years to spend. I have not yet broken into my hoard. This is the beginning.”

“There are hours and hours,” said Rhoda, “before I can put out the light and lie suspended on my bed above the world, before I can let the day drop down, before I can let my tree grow, quivering in green pavilions above my head. Here I cannot let it grow. Somebody knocks through it. They ask questions, they interrupt, they throw it down.

“Now I will go to the bathroom and take off my shoes and wash; but as I wash, as I bend my head down over the basin, I will let the Russian Empress’s veil flow about my shoulders. The diamonds of the Imperial crown blaze on my forehead. I hear the roar of the hostile mob as I step out on to the balcony. Now I dry my hands, vigorously, so that Miss, whose name I forget, cannot suspect that I am waving my fist at an infuriated mob. ‘I am your Empress, people.’ My attitude is one of defiance. I am fearless. I conquer.

“But this is a thin dream. This is a papery tree. Miss Lambert blows it down. Even the sight of her vanishing down the corridor blows it to atoms. It is not solid; it gives me no satisfaction—this Empress dream. It leaves me, now that it has fallen, here in the passage rather shivering. Things seem paler. I will go now into the library and take out some book, and read and look; and read again and look. Here is a poem about a hedge. I will wander down it and pick flowers, green cowbind and the moonlight-coloured May, wild roses and ivy serpentine. I will clasp them in my hands and lay them on the desk’s shiny surface. I will sit by the river’s trembling edge and look at the water-lilies, broad and bright, which lit the oak that overhung the hedge with moonlight beams of their own watery light. I will pick flowers; I will bind flowers in one garland and clasp them and present them—Oh! to whom? There is some check in the flow of my being; a deep stream presses on some obstacle; it jerks; it tugs; some knot in the centre resists. Oh, this is pain, this is anguish! I faint, I fail. Now my body thaws; I am unsealed, I am incandescent. Now the stream pours in a deep tide fertilising, opening the shut, forcing the tight-folded, flooding free. To whom shall I give all that now flows through me, from my warm, my porous body? I will gather my flowers and present them—Oh! to whom?

“Sailors loiter on the parade, and amorous couples; the omnibuses rattle along the sea front to the town. I will give; I will enrich; I will return to the world this beauty. I will bind my flowers in one garland and advancing with my hand outstretched will present them—Oh! to whom?”

“Now we have received,” said Louis, “for this is the last day of the last term—Neville’s and Bernard’s and my last day—whatever our masters have had to give us. The introduction has been made; the world presented. They stay, we depart. The great Doctor, whom of all men I most revere, swaying a little from side to side among the tables, the bound volumes, has dealt out Horace, Tennyson, the complete works of Keats and Matthew Arnold, suitably inscribed. I respect the hand which gave them. He speaks with complete conviction. To him his words are true, though not to us. Speaking in the gruff voice of deep emotion, fiercely, tenderly, he has told us that we are about to go. He has bid us ‘quit ourselves like men’. (On his lips quotations from the Bible, from The Times, seem equally magnificent.) Some will do this; others that. Some will not meet again. Neville, Bernard and I shall not meet here again. Life will divide us. But we have formed certain ties. Our boyish, our irresponsible years are over. But we have forged certain links. Above all, we have inherited traditions. These stone flags have been worn for six hundred years. On these walls are inscribed the names of men of war, of statesmen, of some unhappy poets (mine shall be among them). Blessings be on all traditions, on all safeguards and circumscriptions! I am most grateful to you men in black gowns, and you, dead, for your leading, for your guardianship; yet after all, the problem remains. The differences are not yet solved. Flowers toss their heads outside the window. I see wild birds, and impulses wilder than the wildest birds strike from my wild heart. My eyes are wild; my lips tight pressed. The bird flies; the flower dances; but I hear always the sullen thud of the waves; and the chained beast stamps on the beach. It stamps and stamps.”

“This is the final ceremony,” said Bernard. “This is the last of all our ceremonies. We are overcome by strange feelings. The guard holding his flag is about to blow his whistle; the train breathing steam in another moment is about to start. One wants to say something, to feel something, absolutely appropriate to the occasion. One’s mind is primed; one’s lips are pursed. And then a bee drifts in and hums round the flowers in the bouquet which Lady Hampton, the wife of the General, keeps smelling to show her appreciation of the compliment. If the bee were to sting her nose? We are all deeply moved; yet irreverent; yet penitent; yet anxious to get it over; yet reluctant to part. The bee distracts us; its casual flight seems to deride our intensity. Humming vaguely, skimming widely, it is settled now on the carnation. Many of us will not meet again. We shall not enjoy certain pleasures again, when we are free to go to bed, or to sit up, when I need no longer smuggle in bits of candle-ends and immoral literature. The bee now hums round the head of the great Doctor. Larpent, John, Archie, Percival, Baker and Smith—I have liked them enormously. I have known one mad boy only. I have hated one mean boy only. I enjoy in retrospect my terribly awkward breakfasts at the Headmaster’s table with toast and marmalade. He alone does not notice the bee. If it were to settle on his nose he would flick it off with one magnificent gesture. Now he has made his joke; now his voice has almost broken but not quite. Now we are dismissed—Louis, Neville and I for ever. We take our highly polished books, scholastically inscribed in a little crabbed hand. We rise, we disperse; the pressure is removed. The bee has become an insignificant, a disregarded insect, flown through the open window into obscurity. To-morrow we go.”

“We are about to part,” said Neville. “Here are the boxes; here are the cabs. There is Percival in his billycock hat. He will forget me. He will leave my letters lying about among guns and dogs unanswered. I shall send him poems and he will perhaps reply with a picture post card. But it is for that that I love him. I shall propose meeting—under a clock, by some Cross; and shall wait, and he will not come. It is for that that I love him. Oblivious, almost entirely ignorant, he will pass from my life. And I shall pass, incredible as it seems, into other lives; this is only an escapade perhaps, a prelude only. I feel already, though I cannot endure the Doctor’s pompous mummery and faked emotions, that things we have only dimly perceived draw near. I shall be free to enter the garden where Fenwick raises his mallet. Those who have despised me shall acknowledge my sovereignty. But by some inscrutable law of my being sovereignty and the possession of power will not be enough; I shall always push through curtains to privacy, and want some whispered words alone. Therefore I go, dubious, but elate; apprehensive of intolerable pain; yet I think bound in my adventuring to conquer after huge suffering, bound, surely, to discover my desire in the end. There, for the last time, I see the statue of our pious founder with the doves about his head. They will wheel for ever about his head, whitening it, while the organ moans in the chapel. So I take my seat; and, when I have found my place in the corner of our reserved compartment, I will shade my eyes with a book to hide one tear; I will shade my eyes to observe; to peep at one face. It is the first day of the summer holidays.”

“It is the first day of the summer holidays,” said Susan. “But the day is still rolled up. I will not examine it until I step out on to the platform in the evening. I will not let myself even smell it until I smell the cold green air off the fields. But already these are not school fields; these are not school hedges; the men in these fields are doing real things; they fill carts with real hay; and those are real cows, not school cows. But the carbolic smell of corridors and the chalky smell of schoolrooms is still in my nostrils. The glazed, shiny look of matchboard is still in my eyes. I must wait for fields and hedges, and woods and fields, and steep railway cuttings, sprinkled with gorse bushes, and trucks in sidings, and tunnels and suburban gardens with women hanging out washing, and then fields again and children swinging on gates, to cover it over, to bury it deep, this school that I have hated.

“I will not send my children to school nor spend a night all my life in London. Here in this vast station everything echoes and booms hollowly. The light is like the yellow light under an awning. Jinny lives here. Jinny takes her dog for walks on these pavements. People here shoot through the streets silently. They look at nothing but shop-windows. Their heads bob up and down all at about the same height. The streets are laced together with telegraph wires. The houses are all glass, all festoons and glitter; now all front doors and lace curtains, all pillars and white steps. But now I pass on, out of London again; the fields begin again; and the houses, and women hanging washing, and trees and fields. London is now veiled, now vanished, now crumbled, now fallen. The carbolic and the pitch-pine begin to lose their savour. I smell corn and turnips. I undo a paper packet tied with a piece of white cotton. The egg shells slide in to the cleft between my knees. Now we stop at station after station, rolling out milk cans. Now women kiss each other and help with baskets. Now I will let myself lean out of the window. The air rushes down my nose and throat—the cold air, the salt air with the smell of turnip fields in it. And there is my father, with his back turned, talking to a farmer. I tremble. I cry. There is my father in gaiters. There is my father.”

“I sit snug in my own corner going North,” said Jinny, “in this roaring express which is yet so smooth that it flattens hedges, lengthens hills. We flash past signal-boxes; we make the earth rock slightly from side to side. The distance closes for ever in a point; and we for ever open the distance wide again. The telegraph poles bob up incessantly; one is felled, another rises. Now we roar and swing into a tunnel. The gentleman pulls up the window. I see reflections on the shining glass which lines the tunnel. I see him lower his paper. He smiles at my reflection in the tunnel. My body instantly of its own accord puts forth a frill under his gaze. My body lives a life of its own. Now the black window glass is green again. We are out of the tunnel. He reads his paper. But we have exchanged the approval of our bodies. There is then a great society of bodies, and mine is introduced; mine has come into the room where the gilt chairs are. Look—all the windows of the villas and their white-tented curtains dance; and the men sitting in the hedges in the cornfields with knotted blue handkerchiefs are aware too, as I am aware, of heat and rapture. One waves as we pass him. There are bowers and arbours in these villa gardens and young men in shirt-sleeves on ladders trimming roses. A man on a horse canters over the field. His horse plunges as we pass. And the rider turns to look at us. We roar again through blackness. And I lie back; I give myself up to rapture; I think that at the end of the tunnel I enter a lamp-lit room with chairs, into one of which I sink, much admired, my dress billowing round me. But behold, looking up, I meet the eyes of a sour woman, who suspects me of rapture. My body shuts in her face, impertinently, like a parasol. I open my body, I shut my body at my will. Life is beginning. I now break into my hoard of life.”

“It is the first day of the summer holidays,” said Rhoda. “And now, as the train passes by these red rocks, by this blue sea, the term, done with, forms itself into one shape behind me. I see its colour. June was white. I see the fields white with daisies, and white with dresses; and tennis courts marked with white. Then there was wind and violent thunder. There was a star riding through clouds one night, and I said to the star, ‘Consume me’. That was at midsummer, after the garden party and my humiliation at the garden party. Wind and storm coloured July. Also, in the middle, cadaverous, awful, lay the grey puddle in the courtyard, when, holding an envelope in my hand, I carried a message. I came to the puddle. I could not cross it. Identity failed me. We are nothing, I said, and fell. I was blown like a feather. I was wafted down tunnels. Then very gingerly, I pushed my foot across. I laid my hand against a brick wall. I returned very painfully, drawing myself back into my body over the grey, cadaverous space of the puddle. This is life then to which I am committed.

“So I detach the summer term. With intermittent shocks, sudden as the springs of a tiger, life emerges heaving its dark crest from the sea. It is to this we are attached; it is to this we are bound, as bodies to wild horses. And yet we have invented devices for filling up the crevices and disguising these fissures. Here is the ticket collector. Here are two men; three women; there is a cat in a basket; myself with my elbow on the window-sill—this is here and now. We draw on, we make off, through whispering fields of golden corn. Women in the fields are surprised to be left behind there, hoeing. The train now stamps heavily, breathes stertorously, as it climbs up and up. At last we are on the top of the moor. Only a few wild sheep live here; a few shaggy ponies; yet we are provided with every comfort; with tables to hold our newspapers, with rings to hold our tumblers. We come carrying these appliances with us over the top of the moor. Now we are on the summit. Silence will close behind us. If I look back over that bald head, I can see silence already closing and the shadows of clouds chasing each other over the empty moor; silence closes over our transient passage. This I say is the present moment; this is the first day of the summer holidays. This is part of the emerging monster to whom we are attached.”

“Now we are off,” said Louis. “Now I hang suspended without attachments. We are nowhere. We are passing through England in a train. England slips by the window, always changing from hill to wood, from rivers and willows to towns again. And I have no firm ground to which I go. Bernard and Neville, Percival, Archie, Larpent and Baker go to Oxford or Cambridge, to Edinburgh, Rome, Paris, Berlin, or to some American University. I go vaguely, to make money vaguely. Therefore a poignant shadow, a keen accent, falls on these golden bristles, on these poppy-red fields, this flowing corn that never overflows its boundaries; but runs rippling to the edge. This is the first day of a new life, another spoke of the rising wheel. But my body passes vagrant as a bird’s shadow. I should be transient as the shadow on the meadow, soon fading, soon darkening and dying there where it meets the wood, were it not that I coerce my brain to form in my forehead; I force myself to state, if only in one line of unwritten poetry, this moment; to mark this inch in the long, long history that began in Egypt, in the time of the Pharaohs, when woman carried red pitchers to the Nile. I seem already to have lived many thousand years. But if I now shut my eyes, if I fail to realise the meeting-place of past and present, that I sit in a third-class railway carriage full of boys going home for the holidays, human history is defrauded of a moment’s vision. Its eye, that would see through me, shuts—if I sleep now, through slovenliness, or cowardice, burying myself in the past, in the dark; or acquiesce, as Bernard acquiesces, telling stories; or boast, as Percival, Archie, John, Walter, Lathom, Larpent, Roper, Smith boast—the names are the same always, the names of the boasting boys. They are all boasting, all talking, except Neville, who slips a look occasionally over the edge of a French novel, and so will always slip into cushioned firelit rooms, with many books and one friend, while I tilt on an office chair behind a counter. Then I shall grow bitter and mock at them. I shall envy them their continuance down the safe traditional ways under the shade of old yew trees while I consort with cockneys and clerks, and tap the pavements of the city.

“But now disembodied, passing over fields without lodgment—(there is a river; a man fishes; there is a spire, there is the village street with its bow-windowed inn)—all is dreamlike and dim to me. These hard thoughts, this envy, this bitterness, make no lodgment in me. I am the ghost of Louis, an ephemeral passer-by, in whose mind dreams have power, and garden sounds when in the early morning petals float on fathomless depths and the birds sing. I dash and sprinkle myself with the bright waters of childhood. Its thin veil quivers. But the chained beast stamps and stamps on the shore.”

“Louis and Neville,” said Bernard, “both sit silent. Both are absorbed. Both feel the presence of other people as a separating wall. But if I find myself in company with other people, words at once make smoke rings—see how phrases at once begin to wreathe off my lips. It seems that a match is set to a fire; something burns. An elderly and apparently prosperous man, a traveller, now gets in. And I at once wish to approach him; I instinctively dislike the sense of his presence, cold, unassimilated, among us. I do not believe in separation. We are not single. Also I wish to add to my collection of valuable observations upon the true nature of human life. My book will certainly run to many volumes, embracing every known variety of man and woman. I fill my mind with whatever happens to be the contents of a room or a railway carriage as one fills a fountain-pen in an inkpot. I have a steady unquenchable thirst. Now I feel by imperceptible signs, which I cannot yet interpret but will later, that his defiance is about to thaw. His solitude shows signs of cracking. He has passed a remark about a country house. A smoke ring issues from my lips (about crops) and circles him, bringing him into contact. The human voice has a disarming quality—(we are not single, we are one). As we exchange these few but amiable remarks about country houses, I furbish him up and make him concrete. He is indulgent as a husband but not faithful; a small builder who employs a few men. In local society he is important; is already a councillor, and perhaps in time will be mayor. He wears a large ornament, like a double tooth torn up by the roots, made of coral, hanging at his watch-chain. Walter J. Trumble is the sort of name that would fit him. He has been in America, on a business trip with his wife, and a double room in a smallish hotel cost him a whole month’s wages. His front tooth is stopped with gold.

“The fact is that I have little aptitude for reflection. I require the concrete in everything. It is so only that I lay hands upon the world. A good phrase, however, seems to me to have an independent existence. Yet I think it is likely that the best are made in solitude. They require some final refrigeration which I cannot give them, dabbling always in warm soluble words. My method, nevertheless, has certain advantages over theirs. Neville is repelled by the grossness of Trumble. Louis, glancing, tripping with the high step of a disdainful crane, picks up words as if in sugar-tongs. It is true that his eyes—wild, laughing, yet desperate—express something that we have not gauged. There is about both Neville and Louis a precision, an exactitude, that I admire and shall never possess. Now I begin to be aware that action is demanded. We approach a junction; at a junction I have to change. I have to board a train for Edinburgh. I cannot precisely lay fingers on this fact—it lodges loosely among my thoughts like a button, like a small coin. Here is the jolly old boy who collects tickets. I had one—I had one certainly. But it does not matter. Either I shall find it, or I shall not find it. I examine my note-case. I look in all my pockets. These are the things that for ever interrupt the process upon which I am eternally engaged of finding some perfect phrase that fits this very moment exactly.”

“Bernard has gone,” said Neville, “without a ticket. He has escaped us, making a phrase, waving his hand. He talked as easily to the horse-breeder or to the plumber as to us. The plumber accepted him with devotion. ‘If he had a son like that,’ he was thinking, ‘he would manage to send him to Oxford.’ But what did Bernard feel for the plumber? Did he not only wish to continue the sequence of the story which he never stops telling himself? He began it when he rolled his bread into pellets as a child. One pellet was a man, one was a woman. We are all pellets. We are all phrases in Bernard’s story, things he writes down in his notebook under A or under B. He tells our story with extraordinary understanding, except of what we most feel. For he does not need us. He is never at our mercy. There he is, waving his arms on the platform. The train has gone without him. He has missed his connection. He has lost his ticket. But that does not matter. He will talk to the barmaid about the nature of human destiny. We are off; he has forgotten us already; we pass out of his view; we go on, filled with lingering sensations, half bitter, half sweet, for he is somehow to be pitied, breasting the world with half-finished phrases, having lost his ticket: he is also to be loved.

“Now I pretend again to read. I raise my book, till it almost covers my eyes. But I cannot read in the presence of horse-dealers and plumbers. I have no power of ingratiating myself. I do not admire that man; he does not admire me. Let me at least be honest. Let me denounce this piffling, trifling, self-satisfied world; these horse-hair seats; these coloured photographs of piers and parades. I could shriek aloud at the smug self-satisfaction, at the mediocrity of this world, which breeds horse-dealers with coral ornaments hanging from their watch-chains. There is that in me which will consume them entirely. My laughter shall make them twist in their seats; shall drive them howling before me. No; they are immortal. They triumph. They will make it impossible for me always to read Catullus in a third-class railway carriage. They will drive me in October to take refuge in one of the universities, where I shall become a don; and go with schoolmasters to Greece; and lecture on the ruins of the Parthenon. It would be better to breed horses and live in one of those red villas than to run in and out of the skulls of Sophocles and Euripides like a maggot, with a high-minded wife, one of those University women. That, however, will be my fate. I shall suffer. I am already at eighteen capable of such contempt that horse-breeders hate me. That is my triumph; I do not compromise. I am not timid; I have no accent. I do not finick about fearing what people think of ‘my father a banker at Brisbane’ like Louis.

“Now we draw near the centre of the civilised world. There are the familiar gasometers. There are the public gardens intersected by asphalt paths. There are the lovers lying shamelessly mouth to mouth on the burnt grass. Percival is now almost in Scotland; his train draws through the red moors; he sees the long line of the Border hills and the Roman wall. He reads a detective novel, yet understands everything.

“The train slows and lengthens, as we approach London, the centre, and my heart draws out too, in fear, in exultation. I am about to meet—what? What extraordinary adventure waits me, among these mail vans, these porters, these swarms of people calling taxis? I feel insignificant, lost, but exultant. With a soft shock we stop. I will let the others get out before me. I will sit still one moment before I emerge into that chaos, that tumult. I will not anticipate what is to come. The huge uproar is in my ears. It sounds and resounds under this glass roof like the surge of a sea. We are cast down on the platform with our handbags. We are whirled asunder. My sense of self almost perishes; my contempt. I become drawn in, tossed down, thrown sky-high. I step out on to the platform, grasping tightly all that I possess—one bag.”

The sun rose. Bars of yellow and green fell on the shore, gilding the ribs of the eaten-out boat and making the sea-holly and its mailed leaves gleam blue as steel. Light almost pierced the thin swift waves as they raced fan-shaped over the beach. The girl who had shaken her head and made all the jewels, the topaz, the aquamarine, the water-coloured jewels with sparks of fire in them, dance, now bared her brows and with wide-opened eyes drove a straight pathway over the waves. Their quivering mackerel sparkling was darkened; they massed themselves; their green hollows deepened and darkened and might be traversed by shoals of wandering fish. As they splashed and drew back they left a black rim of twigs and cork on the shore and straws and sticks of wood, as if some light shallop had foundered and burst its sides and the sailor had swum to land and bounded up the cliff and left his frail cargo to be washed ashore.

In the garden the birds that had sung erratically and spasmodically in the dawn on that tree, on that bush, now sang together in chorus, shrill and sharp; now together, as if conscious of companionship, now alone as if to the pale blue sky. They swerved, all in one flight, when the black cat moved among the bushes, when the cook threw cinders on the ash heap and startled them. Fear was in their song, and apprehension of pain, and joy to be snatched quickly now at this instant. Also they sang emulously in the clear morning air, swerving high over the elm tree, singing together as they chased each other, escaping, pursuing, pecking each other as they turned high in the air. And then tiring of pursuit and flight, lovelily they came descending, delicately declining, dropped down and sat silent on the tree, on the wall, with their bright eyes glancing, and their heads turned this way, that way; aware, awake; intensely conscious of one thing, one object in particular.

Perhaps it was a snail shell, rising in the grass like a grey cathedral, a swelling building burnt with dark rings and shadowed green by the grass. Or perhaps they saw the splendour of the flowers making a light of flowing purple over the beds, through which dark tunnels of purple shade were driven between the stalks. Or they fixed their gaze on the small bright apple leaves, dancing yet withheld, stiffly sparkling among the pink-tipped blossoms. Or they saw the rain drop on the hedge, pendent but not falling, with a whole house bent in it, and towering elms; or, gazing straight at the sun, their eyes became gold beads.

Now glancing this side, that side, they looked deeper, beneath the flowers, down the dark avenues into the unlit world where the leaf rots and the flower has fallen. Then one of them, beautifully darting, accurately alighting, spiked the soft, monstrous body of the defenceless worm, pecked again and yet again, and left it to fester. Down there among the roots where the flowers decayed, gusts of dead smells were wafted; drops formed on the bloated sides of swollen things. The skin of rotten fruit broke, and matter oozed too thick to run. Yellow excretions were exuded by slugs, and now and again an amorphous body with a head at either end swayed slowly from side to side. The gold-eyed birds darting in between the leaves observed that purulence, that wetness, quizzically. Now and then they plunged the tips of their beaks savagely into the sticky mixture.

Now, too, the rising sun came in at the window, touching the red-edged curtain, and began to bring out circles and lines. Now in the growing light its whiteness settled in the plate; the blade condensed its gleam. Chairs and cupboards loomed behind so that though each was separate they seemed inextricably involved. The looking-glass whitened its pool upon the wall. The real flower on the window-sill was attended by a phantom flower. Yet the phantom was part of the flower, for when a bud broke free the paler flower in the glass opened a bud too.

The wind rose. The waves drummed on the shore, like turbaned warriors, like turbaned men with poisoned assegais who, whirling their arms on high, advance upon the feeding flocks, the white sheep.

“The complexity of things becomes more close,” said Bernard, “here at college, where the stir and pressure of life are so extreme, where the excitement of mere living becomes daily more urgent. Every hour something new is unburied in the great bran pie. What am I? I ask. This? No, I am that. Especially now, when I have left a room, and people talking, and the stone flags ring out with my solitary footsteps, and I behold the moon rising, sublimely, indifferently, over the ancient chapel—then it becomes clear that I am not one and simple, but complex and many. Bernard in public, bubbles; in private, is secretive. That is what they do not understand, for they are now undoubtedly discussing me, saying I escape them, am evasive. They do not understand that I have to effect different transitions; have to cover the entrances and exits of several different men who alternately act their parts as Bernard. I am abnormally aware of circumstances. I can never read a book in a railway carriage without asking, Is he a builder? Is she unhappy? I was aware to-day acutely that poor Simes, with his pimple was feeling, how bitterly, that his chance of making a good impression upon Billy Jackson was remote. Feeling this painfully, I invited him to dinner with ardour. This he will attribute to an admiration which is not mine. That is true. But ‘joined to the sensibility of a woman’ (I am here quoting my own biographer) ‘Bernard possessed the logical sobriety of a man’. Now people who make a single impression, and that, in the main, a good one (for there seems to be a virtue in simplicity), are those who keep their equilibrium in mid-stream. (I instantly see fish with their noses one way, the stream rushing past another.) Canon, Lycett, Peters, Hawkins, Larpent, Neville—all fish in mid-stream. But you understand, you, my self, who always comes at a call (that would be a harrowing experience to call and for no one to come; that would make the midnight hollow, and explains the expression of old men in clubs—they have given up calling for a self who does not come), you understand that I am only superficially represented by what I was saying to-night. Underneath, and, at the moment when I am most disparate, I am also integrated. I sympathise effusively; I also sit like a toad in a hole, receiving with perfect coldness whatever comes. Very few of you who are now discussing me have the double capacity to feel, to reason. Lycett, you see, believes in running after hares; Hawkins has spent a most industrious afternoon in the library. Peters has his young lady at the circulating library. You are all engaged, involved, drawn in, and absolutely energised to the top of your bent—all save Neville, whose mind is far too complex to be roused by any single activity. I also am too complex. In my case something remains floating, unattached.

“Now, as a proof of my susceptibility to atmosphere, here, as I come into my room, and turn on the light, and see the sheet of paper, the table, my gown lying negligently over the back of the chair, I feel that I am that dashing yet reflective man, that bold and deleterious figure, who, lightly throwing off his cloak, seizes his pen and at once flings off the following letter to the girl with whom he is passionately in love.

“Yes, all is propitious. I am now in the mood. I can write the letter straight off which I have begun ever so many times. I have just come in; I have flung down my hat and my stick; I am writing the first thing that comes into my head without troubling to put the paper straight. It is going to be a brilliant sketch which, she must think, was written without a pause, without an erasure. Look how unformed the letters are—there is a careless blot. All must be sacrificed to speed and carelessness. I will write a quick, running, small hand, exaggerating the down stroke of the ‘y’ and crossing the ‘t’ thus—with a dash. The date shall be only Tuesday, the 17th, and then a question mark. But also I must give her the impression that though he—for this is not myself—is writing in such an off-hand, such a slap-dash way, there is some subtle suggestion of intimacy and respect. I must allude to talks we have had together—bring back some remembered scene. But I must seem to her (this is very important) to be passing from thing to thing with the greatest ease in the world. I shall pass from the service for the man who was drowned (I have a phrase for that) to Mrs. Moffat and her sayings (I have a note of them), and so to some reflections apparently casual but full of profundity (profound criticism is often written casually) about some book I have been reading, some out-of-the-way book. I want her to say as she brushes her hair or puts out the candle, ‘Where did I read that? Oh, in Bernard’s letter’. It is the speed, the hot, molten effect, the laval flow of sentence into sentence that I need. Who am I thinking of? Byron of course. I am, in some ways, like Byron. Perhaps a sip of Byron will help to put me in the vein. Let me read a page. No; this is dull; this is scrappy. This is rather too formal. Now I am getting the hang of it. Now I am getting his beat into my brain (the rhythm is the main thing in writing). Now, without pausing I will begin, on the very lilt of the stroke——

“Yet it falls flat. It peters out. I cannot get up steam enough to carry me over the transition. My true self breaks off from my assumed. And if I begin to re-write it, she will feel ‘Bernard is posing as a literary man; Bernard is thinking of his biographer’ (which is true). No, I will write the letter to-morrow directly after breakfast.

“Now let me fill my mind with imaginary pictures. Let me suppose that I am asked to stay at Restover, King’s Laughton, Station Langley three miles. I arrive in the dusk. In the courtyard of this shabby but distinguished house there are two or three dogs, slinking, long-legged. There are faded rugs in the hall; a military gentleman smokes a pipe as he paces the terrace. The note is of distinguished poverty and military connections. A hunter’s hoof on the writing-table—a favourite horse. ‘Do you ride?’ ‘Yes, sir, I love riding.’ ‘My daughter expects us in the drawing-room.’ My heart pounds against my ribs. She is standing at a low table; she has been hunting; she munches sandwiches like a tomboy. I make a fairly good impression on the Colonel. I am not too clever, he thinks; I am not too raw. Also I play billiards. Then the nice maid who has been with the family thirty years comes in. The pattern on the plates is of Oriental long-tailed birds. Her mother’s portrait in muslin hangs over the fireplace. I can sketch the surroundings up to a point with extraordinary ease. But can I make it work? Can I hear her voice—the precise tone with which, when we are alone, she says ‘Bernard’? And then what next?

“The truth is that I need the stimulus of other people. Alone, over my dead fire, I tend to see the thin places in my own stories. The real novelist, the perfectly simple human being, could go on, indefinitely, imagining. He would not integrate, as I do. He would not have this devastating sense of grey ashes in a burnt-out grate. Some blind flaps in my eyes. Everything becomes impervious. I cease to invent.

“Let me recollect. It has been on the whole a good day. The drop that forms on the roof of the soul in the evening is round, many-coloured. There was the morning, fine; there was the afternoon, walking. I like views of spires across grey fields. I like glimpses between people’s shoulders. Things kept popping into my head. I was imaginative, subtle. After dinner, I was dramatic. I put into concrete form many things that we had dimly observed about our common friends. I made my transitions easily. But now let me ask myself the final question, as I sit over this grey fire, with its naked promontories of black coal, which of these people am I? It depends so much upon the room. When I say to myself, ‘Bernard’, who comes? A faithful, sardonic man, disillusioned, but not embittered. A man of no particular age or calling. Myself, merely. It is he who now takes the poker and rattles the cinders so that they fall in showers through the grate. ‘Lord’, he says to himself, watching them fall, ‘what a pother!’ and then he adds, lugubriously, but with some sense of consolation, ‘Mrs. Moffat will come and sweep it all up——’ I fancy I shall often repeat to myself that phrase, as I rattle and bang through life, hitting first this side of the carriage, then the other, ‘Oh, yes, Mrs. Moffat will come and sweep it all up’. And so to bed.”

“In a world which contains the present moment,” said Neville, “why discriminate? Nothing should be named lest by so doing we change it. Let it exist, this bank, this beauty, and I, for one instant, steeped in pleasure. The sun is hot. I see the river. I see trees specked and burnt in the autumn sunlight. Boats float past, through the red, through the green. Far away a bell tolls, but not for death. There are bells that ring for life. A leaf falls, from joy. Oh, I am in love with life! Look how the willow shoots its fine sprays into the air! Look how through them a boat passes, filled with indolent, with unconscious, with powerful young men. They are listening to the gramophone; they are eating fruit out of paper bags. They are tossing the skins of bananas, which then sink eel-like, into the river. All they do is beautiful. There are cruets behind them and ornaments; their rooms are full of oars and oleographs but they have turned all to beauty. That boat passes under the bridge. Another comes. Then another. That is Percival, lounging on the cushions, monolithic, in giant repose. No, it is only one of his satellites, imitating his monolithic, his giant repose. He alone is unconscious of their tricks, and when he catches them at it he buffets them good-humouredly with a blow of his paw. They, too, have passed under the bridge through ‘the fountains of the pendant trees’, through its fine strokes of yellow and plum colour. The breeze stirs; the curtain quivers; I see behind the leaves the grave, yet eternally joyous buildings, which seem porous, not gravid; light, though set so immemorially on the ancient turf. Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and fall and rise again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet. Boats and youth passing and distant trees, ‘the falling fountains of the pendant trees’. I see it all. I feel it all. I am inspired. My eyes fill with tears. Yet even as I feel this. I lash my frenzy higher and higher. It foams. It becomes artificial, insincere. Words and words and words, how they gallop—how they lash their long manes and tails, but for some fault in me I cannot give myself to their backs; I cannot fly with them, scattering women and string bags. There is some flaw in me—some fatal hesitancy, which, if I pass it over, turns to foam and falsity. Yet it is incredible that I should not be a great poet. What did I write last night if it was not poetry? Am I too fast, too facile? I do not know. I do not know myself sometimes, or how to measure and name and count out the grains that make me what I am.

“Something now leaves me; something goes from me to meet that figure who is coming, and assures me that I know him before I see who it is. How curiously one is changed by the addition, even at a distance, of a friend. How useful an office one’s friends perform when they recall us. Yet how painful to be recalled, to be mitigated, to have one’s self adulterated, mixed up, become part of another. As he approaches I become not myself but Neville mixed with somebody—with whom?—with Bernard? Yes, it is Bernard, and it is to Bernard that I shall put the question, Who am I?”

“How strange,” said Bernard, “the willow looks seen together. I was Byron, and the tree was Byron’s tree, lachrymose, down-showering, lamenting. Now that we look at the tree together, it has a combed look, each branch distinct, and I will tell you what I feel, under the compulsion of your clarity.

“I feel your disapproval, I feel your force. I become, with you, an untidy, an impulsive human being whose bandanna handkerchief is for ever stained with the grease of crumpets. Yes, I hold Gray’s Elegy in one hand; with the other I scoop out the bottom crumpet, that has absorbed all the butter and sticks to the bottom of the plate. This offends you; I feel your distress acutely. Inspired by it and anxious to regain your good opinion, I proceed to tell you how I have just pulled Percival out of bed; I describe his slippers, his table, his guttered candle; his surly and complaining accents as I pull the blanket off his feet; he burrowing like some vast cocoon meanwhile. I describe all this in such a way that, centred as you are upon some private sorrow (for a hooded shape presides over our encounter), you give way, you laugh and delight in me. My charm and flow of language, unexpected and spontaneous as it is, delights me too. I am astonished, as I draw the veil off things with words, how much, how infinitely more than I can say, I have observed. More and more bubbles into my mind as I talk, images and images. This, I say to myself, is what I need; why, I ask, can I not finish the letter that I am writing? For my room is always scattered with unfinished letters. I begin to suspect, when I am with you, that I am among the most gifted of men. I am filled with the delight of youth, with potency, with the sense of what is to come. Blundering, but fervid, I see myself buzzing round flowers, humming down scarlet cups, making blue funnels resound with my prodigious booming. How richly I shall enjoy my youth (you make me feel). And London. And freedom. But stop. You are not listening. You are making some protest, as you slide, with an inexpressibly familiar gesture, your hand along your knee. By such signs we diagnose our friends’ diseases. ‘Do not, in your affluence and plenty,’ you seem to say, ‘pass me by.’ ‘Stop,’ you say. ‘Ask me what I suffer.’

“Let me then create you. (You have done as much for me.) You lie on this hot bank, in this lovely, this fading, this still bright October day, watching boat after boat float through the combed-out twigs of the willow tree. And you wish to be a poet; and you wish to be a lover. But the splendid clarity of your intelligence, and the remorseless honesty of your intellect (these Latin words I owe you; these qualities of yours make me shift a little uneasily and see the faded patches, the thin strands in my own equipment) bring you to a halt. You indulge in no mystifications. You do not fog yourself with rosy clouds, or yellow.

“Am I right? Have I read the little gesture of your left hand correctly? If so, give me your poems; hand over the sheets you wrote last night in such a fervour of inspiration that you now feel a little sheepish. For you distrust inspiration, yours or mine. Let us go back together, over the bridge, under the elm trees, to my room, where, with walls round us and red serge curtains drawn, we can shut out these distracting voices, scents and savours of lime trees, and other lives; these pert shop-girls, disdainfully tripping, these shuffling, heavy-laden old women; these furtive glimpses of some vague and vanishing figure—it might be Jinny, it might be Susan, or was that Rhoda disappearing down the avenue? Again, from some slight twitch I guess your feeling; I have escaped you; I have gone buzzing like a swarm of bees, endlessly vagrant, with none of your power of fixing remorselessly upon a single object. But I will return.”

“When there are buildings like these,” said Neville, “I cannot endure that there should be shop-girls. Their titter, their gossip, offends me; breaks into my stillness, and nudges me, in moments of purest exultation, to remember our degradation.

“But now we have regained our territory after that brief brush with the bicycles and the lime scent and the vanishing figures in the distracted street. Here we are masters of tranquillity and order; inheritors of proud tradition. The lights are beginning to make yellow slits across the square. Mists from the river are filling these ancient spaces. They cling, gently, to the hoary stone. The leaves now are thick in country lanes, sheep cough in the damp fields; but here in your room we are dry. We talk privately. The fire leaps and sinks, making some knob bright.

“You have been reading Byron. You have been marking the passages that seem to approve of your own character. I find marks against all those sentences which seem to express a sardonic yet passionate nature; a moth-like impetuosity dashing itself against hard glass. You thought, as you drew your pencil there, ‘I too throw off my cloak like that. I too snap my fingers in the face of destiny’. Yet Byron never made tea as you do, who fill the pot so that when you put the lid on the tea spills over. There is a brown pool on the table—it is running among your books and papers. Now you mop it up, clumsily, with your pocket-handkerchief. You then stuff your handkerchief back into your pocket—that is not Byron; that is you; that is so essentially you that if I think of you in twenty years’ time, when we are both famous, gouty and intolerable, it will be by that scene: and if you are dead, I shall weep. Once you were Tolstoi’s young man; now you are Byron’s young man; perhaps you will be Meredith’s young man; then you will visit Paris in the Easter vacation and come back wearing a black tie some detestable Frenchman whom nobody has ever heard of. Then I shall drop you.

“I am one person—myself. I do not impersonate Catullus, whom I adore. I am the most slavish of students, with here a dictionary, there a notebook in which I enter curious uses of the past participle. But one cannot go on for ever cutting these ancient inscriptions clearer with a knife. Shall I always draw the red serge curtain close and see my book, laid like a block of marble, pale under the lamp? That would be a glorious life, to addict oneself to perfection; to follow the curve of the sentence wherever it might lead, into deserts, under drifts of sand, regardless of lures, of seductions; to be poor always and unkempt; to be ridiculous in Piccadilly.

“But I am too nervous to end my sentence properly. I speak quickly, as I pace up and down, to conceal my agitation. I hate your greasy handkerchiefs—you will stain your copy of Don Juan. You are not listening to me. You are making phrases about Byron. And while you gesticulate, with your cloak, your cane, I am trying to expose a secret told to nobody yet; I am asking you (as I stand with my back to you) to take my life in your hands and tell me whether I am doomed always to cause repulsion in those I love?

“I stand with my back to you fidgeting. No, my hands are now perfectly still. Precisely, opening a space in the bookcase, I insert Don Juan; there. I would rather be loved, I would rather be famous than follow perfection through the sand. But am I doomed to cause disgust? Am I a poet? Take it. The desire which is loaded behind my lips, cold as lead, fell as a bullet, the thing I aim at shopgirls, women, the pretence, the vulgarity of life (because I love it) shoots at you as I throw—catch it—my poem.”

“He has shot like an arrow from the room,” said Bernard. “He has left me his poem. O friendship, I too will press flowers between the pages of Shakespeare’s sonnets! O friendship, how piercing are your darts—there, there, again there. He looked at me, turning to face me; he gave me his poem. All mists curl off the roof of my being. That confidence I shall keep to my dying day. Like a long wave, like a roll of heavy waters, he went over me, his devastating presence—dragging me open, laying bare the pebbles on the shore of my soul. It was humiliating; I was turned to small stones. All semblances were rolled up. ‘You are not Byron; you are your self.’ To be contracted by another person into a single being—how strange.

“How strange to feel the line that is spun from us lengthening its fine filament across the misty spaces of the intervening world. He is gone; I stand here, holding his poem. Between us is this line. But now, how comfortable, how reassuring to feel that alien presence removed, that scrutiny darkened and hooded over! How grateful to draw the blinds, and admit no other presence; to feel returning from the dark corners in which they took refuge, those shabby inmates, those familiars, whom, with his superior force, he drove into hiding. The mocking, the observant spirits who, even in the crisis and stab of the moment, watched on my behalf now come flocking home again. With their addition, I am Bernard; I am Byron; I am this, that and the other. They darken the air and enrich me, as of old, with their antics, their comments, and cloud the fine simplicity of my moment of emotion. For I am more selves than Neville thinks. We are not simple as our friends would have us to meet their needs. Yet love is simple.

“Now they have returned, my inmates, my familiars. Now the stab, the rent in my defences that Neville made with his astonishing fine rapier, is repaired. I am almost whole now; and see how jubilant I am, bringing into play all that Neville ignores in me. I feel, as I look from the window, parting the curtains, ‘That would give him no pleasure; but it rejoices me’. (We use our friends to measure our own stature.) My scope embraces what Neville never reaches. They are shouting hunting-songs over the way. They are celebrating some run with the beagles. The little boys in caps who always turned at the same moment when the brake went round the corner are clapping each other on the shoulder and boasting. But Neville, delicately avoiding interference, stealthily, like a conspirator, hastens back to his room. I see him sunk in his low chair gazing at the fire which has assumed for the moment an architectural solidity. If life, he thinks, could wear that permanence, if life could have that order—for above all he desires order, and detests my Byronic untidiness; and so draws his curtain; and bolts his door. His eyes (for he is in love; the sinister figure of love presided at our encounter) fill with longing; fill with tears. He snatches the poker and with one blow destroys that momentary appearance of solidity in the burning coals. All changes. And youth and love. The boat has floated through the arch of the willows and is now under the bridge. Percival, Tony, Archie, or another, will go to India. We shall not meet again. Then he stretches his hand for his copy-book—a neat volume bound in mottled paper—and writes feverishly long lines of poetry, in the manner of whomever he admires most at the moment.

“But I want to linger; to lean from the window; to listen. There again comes that rollicking chorus. They are now smashing china—that also is the convention. The chorus, like a torrent jumping rocks, brutally assaulting old trees, pours with splendid abandonment headlong over precipices. On they roll; on they gallop; after hounds, after footballs; they pump up and down attached to oars like sacks of flour. All divisions are merged—they act like one man. The gusty October wind blows the uproar in bursts of sound and silence across the court. Now again they are smashing the china—that is the convention. An old, unsteady woman carrying a bag trots home under the fire-red windows. She is half afraid that they will fall on her and tumble her into the gutter. Yet she pauses as if to warm her knobbed, her rheumaticky hands at the bonfire which flares away with streams of sparks and bits of blown paper. The old woman pauses against the lit window. A contrast. That I see and Neville does not see; that I feel and Neville does not feel. Hence he will reach perfection, and I shall fail and shall leave nothing behind me but imperfect phrases littered with sand.

“I think of Louis now. What malevolent yet searching light would Louis throw upon this dwindling autumn evening, upon this china-smashing and trolling of hunting-songs, upon Neville, Byron and our life here? His thin lips are somewhat pursed; his cheeks are pale; he pores in an office over some obscure commercial document. ‘My father, a banker at Brisbane’—being ashamed of him he always talks of him—failed. So he sits in an office, Louis the best scholar in the school. But I seeking contrasts often feel his eye on us, his laughing eye, his wild eye, adding us up like insignificant items in some grand total which he is for ever pursuing in his office. And one day, taking a fine pen and dipping it in red ink, the addition will be complete; our total will be known; but it will not be enough.

“Bang! They have thrown a chair now against the wall. We are damned then. My case is dubious too. Am I not indulging in unwarranted emotions? Yes, as I lean out of the window and drop my cigarette so that it twirls lightly to the ground, I feel Louis watching even my cigarette. And Louis says, ‘That means something. But what?’”

“People go on passing,” said Louis. “They pass the window of this eating-shop incessantly. Motor-cars, vans, motor-omnibuses; and again motor-omnibuses, vans, motor-cars—they pass the window. In the background I perceive shops and houses; also the grey spires of a city church. In the foreground are glass shelves set with plates of buns and ham sandwiches. All is somewhat obscured by steam from a tea-urn. A meaty, vapourish smell of beef and mutton, sausages and mash, hangs down like a damp net in the middle of the eating-house. I prop my book against a bottle of Worcester sauce and try to look like the rest.

“Yet I cannot. (They go on passing, they go on passing in disorderly procession.) I cannot read my book, or order my beef, with conviction. I repeat, ‘I am an average Englishman; I am an average clerk’, yet I look at the little men at the next table to be sure that I do what they do. Supple-faced, with rippling skins, that are always twitching with the multiplicity of their sensations, prehensile like monkeys, greased to this particular moment, they are discussing with all the right gestures the sale of a piano. It blocks up the hall; so he would take a tenner. People go on passing; they go on passing against the spires of the church and the plates of ham sandwiches. The streamers of my consciousness waver out and are perpetually torn and distressed by their disorder. I cannot therefore concentrate on my dinner. ‘I would take a tenner. The case is handsome; but it blocks up the hall.’ They dive and plunge like guillemots whose feathers are slippery with oil. All excesses beyond that norm are vanity. That is the mean; that is the average. Meanwhile the hats bob up and down; the door perpetually shuts and opens. I am conscious of flux, of disorder; of annihilation and despair. If this is all, this is worthless. Yet I feel, too, the rhythm of the eating-house. It is like a waltz tune, eddying in and out, round and round. The waitresses, balancing trays, swing in and out, round and round, dealing plates of greens, of apricot and custard, dealing them at the right time, to the right customers. The average men, including her rhythm in their rhythm (‘I would take a tenner; for it blocks up the hall’) take their greens, take their apricots and custard. Where then is the break in this continuity? What the fissure through which one sees disaster? The circle is unbroken; the harmony complete. Here is the central rhythm; here the common mainspring. I watch it expand, contract; and then expand again. Yet I am not included. If I speak, imitating their accent, they prick their ears, waiting for me to speak again, in order that they may place me—if I come from Canada or Australia, I, who desire above all things to be taken to the arms with love, am alien, external. I, who would wish to feel close over me the protective waves of the ordinary, catch with the tail of my eye some far horizon; am aware of hats bobbing up and down in perpetual disorder. To me is addressed the plaint of the wandering and distracted spirit (a woman with bad teeth falters at the counter), ‘Bring us back to the fold, we who pass so disjectedly, bobbing up and down, past windows with plates of ham sandwiches in the foreground.’ Yes; I will reduce you to order.

“I will read in the book that is propped against the bottle of Worcester sauce. It contains some forged rings, some perfect statements, a few words, but poetry. You, all of you, ignore it. What the dead poet said, you have forgotten. And I cannot translate it to you so that its binding power ropes you in, and makes it clear to you that you are aimless; and the rhythm is cheap and worthless; and so remove that degradation which, if you are unaware of your aimlessness, pervades you, making you senile, even while you are young. To translate that poem so that it is easily read is to be my endeavour. I, the companion of Plato, of Virgil, will knock at the grained oak door. I oppose to what is passing this ramrod of beaten steel. I will not submit to this aimless passing of billycock hats and Homburg hats and all the plumed and variegated head-dresses of women. (Susan, whom I respect, would wear a plain straw hat on a summer’s day.) And the grinding and the steam that runs in unequal drops down the window pane; and the stopping and the starting with a jerk of motor-omnibuses; and the hesitations at counters; and the words that trail drearily without human meaning; I will reduce you to order.

“My roots go down through veins of lead and silver, through damp, marshy places that exhale odours, to a knot made of oak roots bound together in the centre. Sealed and blind, with earth stopping my ears, I have yet heard rumours of wars; and the nightingale; have felt the hurrying of many troops of men flocking hither and thither in quest of civilisation like flocks of birds migrating seeking the summer; I have seen women carrying red pitchers to the banks of the Nile. I woke in a garden, with a blow on the nape of my neck, a hot kiss, Jinny’s; remembering all this as one remembers confused cries and toppling pillars and shafts of red and black in some nocturnal conflagration. I am for ever sleeping and waking. Now I sleep; now I wake. I see the gleaming tea-urn; the glass cases full of pale-yellow sandwiches; the men in round coats perched on stools at the counter; and also behind them, eternity. It is a stigma burnt on my quivering flesh by a cowled man with a red-hot iron. I see this eating-shop against the packed and fluttering birds’ wings, many feathered, folded, of the past. Hence my pursed lips, my sickly pallor; my distasteful and uninviting aspect as I turn my face with hatred and bitterness upon Bernard and Neville, who saunter under yew trees; who inherit arm-chairs; and draw their curtains close, so that lamplight falls on their books.

“Susan, I respect; because she sits stitching. She sews under a quiet lamp in a house where the corn sighs close to the window and gives me safety. For I am the weakest, the youngest of them all. I am a child looking at his feet and the little runnels that the stream has made in the gravel. That is a snail, I say; that is a leaf. I delight in the snails; I delight in the leaf. I am always the youngest, the most innocent, the most trustful. You are all protected. I am naked. When the waitress with the plaited wreaths of hair swings past, she deals you your apricots and custard unhesitatingly, like a sister. You are her brothers. But when I get up, brushing the crumbs from my waistcoat, I slip too large a tip, a shilling, under the edge of my plate, so that she may not find it till I am gone, and her scorn, as she picks it up with laughter, may not strike on me till I am past the swing-doors.”

“Now the wind lifts the blind,” said Susan, “Jars, bowls, matting and the shabby arm-chair with the hole in it are now become distinct. The usual faded ribbons sprinkle the wall-paper. The bird chorus is over, only one bird now sings close to the bedroom window. I will pull on my stockings and go quietly past the bedroom doors, and down through the kitchen, out through the garden past the greenhouse into the field. It is still early morning. The mist is on the marshes. The day is stark and stiff as a linen shroud. But it will soften; it will warm. At this hour, this still early hour, I think I am the field, I am the barn, I am the trees; mine are the flocks of birds, and this young hare who leaps, at the last moment when I step almost on him. Mine is the heron that stretches its vast wings lazily; and the cow that creaks as it pushes one foot before another munching; and the wild, swooping swallow; and the faint red in the sky, and the green when the red fades; the silence and the bell; the call of the man fetching cart-horses from the fields—all are mine.

“I cannot be divided, or kept apart. I was sent to school; I was sent to Switzerland to finish my education. I hate linoleum; I hate fir trees and mountains. Let me now fling myself on this flat ground under a pale sky where the clouds pace slowly. The cart grows gradually larger as it comes along the road. The sheep gather in the middle of the field. The birds gather in the middle of the road—they need not fly yet. The wood smoke rises. The starkness of the dawn is going out of it. Now the day stirs. Colour returns. The day waves yellow with all its crops. The earth hangs heavy beneath me.

“But who am I, who lean on this gate and watch my setter nose in a circle? I think sometimes (I am not twenty yet) I am not a woman, but the light that falls on this gate, on this ground. I am the seasons, I think sometimes, January, May, November; the mud, the mist, the dawn. I cannot be tossed about, or float gently, or mix with other people. Yet now, leaning here till the gate prints my arm, I feel the weight that has formed itself in my side. Something has formed, at school, in Switzerland, some hard thing. Not sighs and laughter; not circling and ingenious phrases; not Rhoda’s strange communications when she looks past us, over our shoulders; nor Jinny’s pirouetting, all of a piece, limbs and body. What I give is fell. I cannot float gently, mixing with other people. I like best the stare of shepherds met in the road; the stare of gipsy women beside a cart in a ditch suckling their children as I shall suckle my children. For soon in the hot midday when the bees hum round the hollyhocks my lover will come. He will stand under the cedar tree. To his one word I shall answer my one word. What has formed in me I shall give him. I shall have children; I shall have maids in aprons; men with pitchforks; a kitchen where they bring the ailing lambs to warm in baskets, where the hams hang and the onions glisten. I shall be like my mother, silent in a blue apron locking up the cupboards.

“Now I am hungry. I will call my setter. I think of crusts and bread and butter and white plates in a sunny room. I will go back across the fields. I will walk along this grass path with strong, even strides, now swerving to avoid the puddle, now leaping lightly to a clump. Beads of wet form on my rough skirt; my shoes become supple and dark. The stiffness has gone from the day; it is shaded with grey, green and umber. The birds no longer settle on the high road.

“I return, like a cat or fox returning, whose fur is grey with rime, whose pads are hardened by the coarse earth. I push through the cabbages, making their leaves squeak and their drops spill. I sit waiting for my father’s footsteps as he shuffles down the passage pinching some herb between his fingers. I pour out cup after cup while the unopened flowers hold themselves erect on the table among the pots of jam, the loaves and the butter. We are silent.

“I go then to the cupboard, and take the damp bags of rich sultanas; I lift the heavy flour on to the clean scrubbed kitchen table. I knead; I stretch; I pull, plunging my hands in the warm inwards of the dough. I let the cold water stream fanwise through my fingers. The fire roars; the flies buzz in a circle. All my currants and rices, the silver bags and the blue bags, are locked again in the cupboard. The meat is stood in the oven; the bread rises in a soft dome under the clean towel. I walk in the afternoon down to the river. All the world is breeding. The flies are going from grass to grass. The flowers are thick with pollen. The swans ride the stream in order. The clouds, warm now, sun-spotted, sweep over the hills, leaving gold in the water, and gold on the necks of the swans. Pushing one foot before the other, the cows munch their way across the field. I feel through the grass for the white-domed mushroom; and break its stalk and pick the purple orchid that grows beside it and lay the orchid by the mushroom with the earth at its root, and so home to make the kettle boil for my father among the just reddened roses on the tea-table.

“But evening comes and the lamps are lit. And when evening comes and the lamps are lit they make a yellow fire in the ivy. I sit with my sewing by the table. I think of Jinny; of Rhoda; and hear the rattle of wheels on the pavement as the farm horses plod home; I hear traffic roaring in the evening wind. I look at the quivering leaves in the dark garden and think ‘They dance in London. Jinny kisses Louis’.”

“How strange,” said Jinny, “that people should sleep, that people should put out the lights and go upstairs. They have taken off their dresses, they have put on white night-gowns. There are no lights in any of these houses. There is a line of chimney-pots against the sky; and a street lamp or two burning, as lamps burn when nobody needs them. The only people in the streets are poor people hurrying. There is no one coming or going in this street; the day is over. A few policemen stand at the corners. Yet night is beginning. I feel myself shining in the dark. Silk is on my knee. My silk legs rub smoothly together. The stones of a necklace lie cold on my throat. My feet feel the pinch of shoes. I sit bolt upright so that my hair may not touch the back of the seat. I am arrayed, I am prepared. This is the momentary pause; the dark moment. The fiddlers have lifted their bows.

“Now the car slides to a stop. A strip of pavement is lighted. The door is opening and shutting. People are arriving; they do not speak; they hasten in. There is the swishing sound of cloaks falling in the hall. This is the prelude, this is the beginning. I glance, I peep, I powder. All is exact, prepared. My hair is swept in one curve. My lips are precisely red. I am ready now to join men and women on the stairs, my peers. I pass them, exposed to their gaze, as they are to mine. Like lightning we look but do not soften or show signs of recognition. Our bodies communicate. This is my calling. This is my world. All is decided and ready; the servants, standing here, and again here, take my name, my fresh, my unknown name, and toss it before me. I enter.

“Here are gilt chairs in the empty, the expectant rooms, and flowers, stiller, statelier, than flowers that grow, spread green, spread white, against the walls. And on one small table is one bound book. This is what I have dreamt; this is what I have foretold. I am native here. I tread naturally on thick carpets. I slide easily on smooth-polished floors. I now begin to unfurl, in this scent, in this radiance, as a fern when its curled leaves unfurl. I stop. I take stock of this world. I look among the groups of unknown people. Among the lustrous green, pink, pearl-grey women stand upright the bodies of men. They are black and white; they are grooved beneath their clothes with deep rills. I feel again the reflection in the window of the tunnel; it moves. The black-and-white figures of unknown men look at me as I lean forward; as I turn aside to look at a picture, they turn too. Their hands go fluttering to their ties. They touch their waistcoats, their pocket-handkerchiefs. They are very young. They are anxious to make a good impression. I feel a thousand capacities spring up in me. I am arch, gay, languid, melancholy by turns. I am rooted, but I flow. All gold, flowing that way, I say to this one, ‘Come’. Rippling black, I say to that one, ‘No’. One breaks off from his station under the glass cabinet. He approaches. He makes towards me. This is the most exciting moment I have ever known. I flutter. I ripple. I stream like a plant in the river, flowing this way, flowing that way, but rooted, so that he may come to me. ‘Come,’ I say, ‘come.’ Pale, with dark hair, the one who is coming is melancholy, romantic. And I am arch and fluent and capricious; for he is melancholy, he is romantic. He is here; he stands at my side.

“Now with a little jerk, like a limpet broken from a rock, I am broken off: I fall with him; I am carried off. We yield to this slow flood. We go in and out of this hesitating music. Rocks break the current of the dance; it jars, it shivers. In and out, we are swept now into this large figure; it holds us together; we cannot step outside its sinuous, its hesitating, its abrupt, its perfectly encircling walls. Our bodies, his hard, mine flowing, are pressed together within its body; it holds us together; and then lengthening out, in smooth, in sinuous folds, rolls us between it, on and on. Suddenly the music breaks. My blood runs on but my body stands still. The room reels past my eyes. It stops.

“Come, then, let us wander whirling to the gilt chairs. The body is stronger than I thought. I am dizzier than I supposed. I do not care for anything in the world. I do not care for anybody save this man whose name I do not know. Are we not acceptable, moon? Are we not lovely sitting together here, I in my satin; he in black and white? My peers may look at me now. I look straight back at you, men and women. I am one of you. This is my world. Now I take this thin-stemmed glass and sip. Wine has a drastic, an astringent taste. I cannot help wincing as I drink. Scent and flowers, radiance and heat, are distilled here to a fiery, to a yellow liquid. Just behind my shoulder-blades some dry thing, wide-eyed, gently closes, gradually lulls itself to sleep. This is rapture; this is relief. The bar at the back of my throat lowers itself. Words crowd and cluster and push forth one on top of another. It does not matter which. They jostle and mount on each other’s shoulders. The single and the solitary mate, tumble and become many. It does not matter what I say. Crowding, like a fluttering bird, one sentence crosses the empty space between us. It settles on his lips. I fill my glass again. I drink. The veils drop between us. I am admitted to the warmth and privacy of another soul. We are together, high up, on some Alpine pass. He stands melancholy on the crest of the road. I stoop. I pick a blue flower and fix it, standing on tiptoe to reach him, in his coat. There! That is my moment of ecstasy. Now it is over.

“Now slackness and indifference invade us. Other people brush past. We have lost consciousness of our bodies uniting under the table. I also like fair-haired men with blue eyes. The door opens. The door goes on opening. Now I think, next time it opens the whole of my life will be changed. Who comes? But it is only a servant, bringing glasses. That is an old man—I should be a child with him. That is a great lady—with her I should dissemble. There are girls of my own age, for whom I feel the drawn swords of an honourable antagonism. For these are my peers. I am a native of this world. Here is my risk, here is my adventure. The door opens. O come, I say to this one, rippling gold from head to heels. ‘Come’, and he comes towards me.”

“I shall edge behind them,” said Rhoda, “as if I saw someone I know. But I know no one. I shall twitch the curtain and look at the moon. Draughts of oblivion shall quench my agitation. The door opens; the tiger leaps. The door opens; terror rushes in; terror upon terror, pursuing me. Let me visit furtively the treasures I have laid apart. Pools lie on the other side of the world reflecting marble columns. The swallow dips her wing in dark pools. But here the door opens and people come; they come towards me. Throwing faint smiles to mask their cruelty, their indifference, they seize me. The swallow dips her wings; the moon rides through blue seas alone. I must take his hand; I must answer. But what answer shall I give? I am thrust back to stand burning in this clumsy, this ill-fitting body, to receive the shafts of his indifference and his scorn, I who long for marble columns and pools on the other side of the world where the swallow dips her wings.

“Night has wheeled a little further over the chimney-pots. I see out of the window over his shoulder some unembarrassed cat, not drowned in light, not trapped in silk, free to pause, to stretch, and to move again. I hate all details of the individual life. But I am fixed here to listen. An immense pressure is on me. I cannot move without dislodging the weight of centuries. A million arrows pierce me. Scorn and ridicule pierce me. I, who could beat my breast against the storm and let the hail choke me joyfully, am pinned down here; am exposed. The tiger leaps. Tongues with their whips are upon me. Mobile, incessant, they flicker over me. I must prevaricate and fence them off with lies. What amulet is there against this disaster? What face can I summon to lay cool upon this heat? I think of names on boxes; of mothers from whose wide knees skirts descend; of glades where the many-backed steep hills come down. Hide me, I cry, protect me, for I am the youngest, the most naked of you all. Jinny rides like a gull on the wave, dealing her looks adroitly here and there, saying this, saying that, with truth. But I lie; I prevaricate.

“Alone, I rock my basins; I am mistress of my fleet of ships. But here, twisting the tassels of this brocaded curtain in my hostess’s window, I am broken into separate pieces; I am no longer one. What then is the knowledge that Jinny has as she dances; the assurance that Susan has as, stooping quietly beneath the lamplight, she draws the white cotton through the eye of her needle? They say, Yes; they say, No; they bring their fists down with a bang on the table. But I doubt; I tremble; I see the wild thorn tree shake its shadow in the desert.

“Now I will walk, as if I had an end in view, across the room, to the balcony under the awning. I see the sky, softly feathered with its sudden effulgence of moon. I also see the railings of the square, and two people without faces, leaning like statues against the sky. There is, then, a world immune from change. When I have passed through this drawing-room flickering with tongues that cut me like knives, making me stammer, making me lie, I find faces rid of features, robed in beauty. The lovers crouch under the plane tree. The policeman stands sentinel at the corner. A man passes. There is, then, a world immune from change. But I am not composed enough, standing on tiptoe on the verge of fire, still scorched by the hot breath, afraid of the door opening and the leap of the tiger, to make even one sentence. What I say is perpetually contradicted. Each time the door opens I am interrupted. I am not yet twenty-one. I am to be broken. I am to be derided all my life. I am to be cast up and down among these men and women, with their twitching faces, with their lying tongues, like a cork on a rough sea. Like a ribbon of weed I am flung far every time the door opens. I am the foam that sweeps and fills the uttermost rims of the rocks with whiteness; I am also a girl, here in this room.”

The sun, risen, no longer couched on a green mattress darting a fitful glance through watery jewels, bared its face and looked straight over the waves. They fell with a regular thud. They fell with the concussion of horses’ hooves on the turf. Their spray rose like the tossing of lances and assegais over the riders’ heads. They swept the beach with steel blue and diamond-tipped water. They drew in and out with the energy, the muscularity, of an engine which sweeps its force out and in again. The sun fell on cornfields and woods. Rivers became blue and many-plaited, lawns that sloped down to the water’s edge became green as birds’ feathers softly ruffling their plumes. The hills curved and controlled, seemed bound back by thongs, as a limb is laced by muscles; and the woods which bristled proudly on their flanks were like the curt, clipped mane on the neck of a horse.

In the garden where the trees stood thick over flowerbeds, ponds, and greenhouses the birds sang in the hot sunshine, each alone. One sang under the bedroom window; another on the topmost twig of the lilac bush; another on the edge of the wall. Each sang stridently, with passion, with vehemence, as if to let the song burst out of it, no matter if it shattered the song of another bird with harsh discord. Their round eyes bulged with brightness; their claws gripped the twig or rail. They sang, exposed without shelter, to the air and the sun, beautiful in their new plumage, shell-veined or brightly mailed, here barred with soft blues, here splashed with gold, or striped with one bright feather. They sang as if the song were urged out of them by the pressure of the morning. They sang as if the edge of being were sharpened and must cut, must split the softness of the blue-green light, the dampness of the wet earth; the fumes and steams of the greasy kitchen vapour; the hot breath of mutton and beef; the richness of pastry and fruit; the damp shreds and peelings thrown from the kitchen bucket, from which a slow steam oozed on the rubbish heap. On all the sodden, the damp-spotted, the curled with wetness, they descended, dry-beaked, ruthless, abrupt. They swooped suddenly from the lilac bough or the fence. They spied a snail and tapped the shell against a stone. They tapped furiously, methodically, until the shell broke and something slimy oozed from the crack. They swept and soared sharply in flights high into the air, twittering short, sharp notes, and perched in the upper branches of some tree, and looked down upon leaves and spires beneath, and the country white with blossom, flowing with grass, and the sea which beat like a drum that raises a regiment of plumed and turbaned soldiers. Now and again their songs ran together in swift scales like the interlacings of a mountain stream whose waters, meeting, foam and then mix, and hasten quicker and quicker down the same channel, brushing the same broad leaves. But there is a rock; they sever.

The sun fell in sharp wedges inside the room. Whatever the light touched became dowered with a fanatical existence. A plate was like a white lake. A knife looked like a dagger of ice. Suddenly tumblers revealed themselves upheld by streaks of light. Tables and chairs rose to the surface as if they had been sunk under water and rose, filmed with red, orange, purple like the bloom on the skin of ripe fruit. The veins on the glaze of the china, the grain of the wood, the fibres of the matting became more and more finely engraved. Everything was without shadow. A jar was so green that the eye seemed sucked up through a funnel by its intensity and stuck to it like a limpet. Then shapes took on mass and edge. Here was the boss of a chair; here the bulk of a cupboard. And as the light increased, flocks of shadow were driven before it and conglomerated and hung in many-pleated folds in the background.

“How fair, how strange,” said Bernard, “glittering, many-pointed and many-domed London lies before me under mist. Guarded by gasometers, by factory chimneys, she lies sleeping as we approach. She folds the ant-heap to her breast. All cries, all clamour, are softly enveloped in silence. Not Rome herself looks more majestic. But we are aimed at her. Already her maternal somnolence is uneasy. Ridges fledged with houses rise from the mist. Factories, cathedrals, glass domes, institutions and theatres erect themselves. The early train from the north is hurled at her like a missile. We draw a curtain as we pass. Blank expectant faces stare at us as we rattle and flash through stations. Men clutch their newspapers a little tighter, as our wind sweeps them, envisaging death. But we roar on. We are about to explode in the flanks of the city like a shell in the side of some ponderous, maternal, majestic animal. She hums and murmurs; she awaits us.

“Meanwhile as I stand looking from the train window, I feel strangely, persuasively, that because of my great happiness (being engaged to be married) I am become part of this speed, this missile hurled at the city. I am numbed to tolerance and acquiescence. My dear sir, I could say, why do you fidget, taking down your suitcase and pressing into it the cap that you have worn all night? Nothing we can do will avail. Over us all broods a splendid unanimity. We are enlarged and solemnised and brushed into uniformity as with the grey wing of some enormous goose (it is a fine but colourless morning) because we have only one desire—to arrive at the station. I do not want the train to stop with a thud. I do not want the connection which has bound us together sitting opposite each other all night long to be broken. I do not want to feel that hate and rivalry have resumed their sway; and different desires. Our community in the rushing train, sitting together with only one wish to arrive at Euston, was very welcome. But behold! It is over. We have attained our desire. We have drawn up at the platform. Hurry and confusion and the wish to be first through the gate into the lift assert themselves. But I do not wish to be first through the gate, to assume the burden of individual life. I, who have been since Monday, when she accepted me, charged in every nerve with a sense of identity, who could not see a tooth-brush in a glass without saying, ‘My tooth-brush’, now wish to unclasp my hands and let fall my possessions, and merely stand here in the street, taking no part, watching the omnibuses, without desire; without envy; with what would be boundless curiosity about human destiny if there were any longer an edge to my mind. But it has none. I have arrived; am accepted. I ask nothing.

“Having dropped off satisfied like a child from the breast, I am at liberty now to sink down, deep, into what passes, this omnipresent, general life. (How much, let me note, depends upon trousers; the intelligent head is entirely handicapped by shabby trousers.) One observes curious hesitations at the door of the lift. This way, that way, the other? Then individuality asserts itself. They are off. They are all impelled by some necessity. Some miserable affair of keeping an appointment, of buying a hat, severs these beautiful human beings once so united. For myself, I have no aim. I have no ambition. I will let myself be carried on by the general impulse. The surface of my mind slips along like a pale-grey stream reflecting what passes. I cannot remember my past, my nose, or the colour of my eyes, or what my general opinion of myself is. Only in moments of emergency, at a crossing, at a kerb, the wish to preserve my body springs out and seizes me and stops me, here, before this omnibus. We insist, it seems, on living. Then again, indifference descends. The roar of the traffic, the passage of undifferentiated faces, this way and that way, drugs me into dreams; rubs the features from faces. People might walk through me. And, what is this moment of time, this particular day in which I have found myself caught? The growl of traffic might be any uproar—forest trees or the roar of wild beasts. Time has whizzed back an inch or two on its reel; our short progress has been cancelled. I think also that our bodies are in truth naked. We are only lightly covered with buttoned cloth; and beneath these pavements are shells, bones and silence.

“It is, however, true that my dreaming, my tentative advance like one carried beneath the surface of a stream, is interrupted, torn, pricked and plucked at by sensations, spontaneous and irrelevant, of curiosity, greed, desire, irresponsible as in sleep. (I covet that bag—etc.) No, but I wish to go under; to visit the profound depths; once in a while to exercise my prerogative not always to act, but to explore; to hear vague, ancestral sounds of boughs creaking, of mammoths; to indulge impossible desires to embrace the whole world with the arms of understanding—impossible to those who act. Am I not, as I walk, trembling with strange oscillations and vibrations of sympathy, which, unmoored as I am from a private being, bid me embrace these engrossed flocks; these starers and trippers; these errand-boys and furtive and fugitive girls who, ignoring their doom, look in at shop-windows? But I am aware of our ephemeral passage.

“It is, however, true that I cannot deny a sense that life for me is now mysteriously prolonged. Is it that I may have children, may cast a fling of seed wider, beyond this generation, this doom-encircled population, shuffling each other in endless competition along the street? My daughters shall come here, in other summers; my sons shall turn new fields. Hence we are not raindrops, soon dried by the wind; we make gardens blow and forests roar; we come up differently, for ever and ever. This, then, serves to explain my confidence, my central stability, otherwise so monstrously absurd as I breast the stream of this crowded thoroughfare, making always a passage for myself between people’s bodies, taking advantage of safe moments to cross. It is not vanity; for I am emptied of ambition; I do not remember my special gifts, or idiosyncrasy, or the marks I bear on my person; eyes, nose or mouth. I am not, at this moment, myself.

“Yet behold, it returns. One cannot extinguish that persistent smell. It steals in through some crack in the structure—one’s identity. I am not part of the street—no, I observe the street. One splits off, therefore. For instance, up that back street a girl stands waiting; for whom? A romantic story. On the wall of that shop is fixed a small crane, and for what reason, I ask, was that crane fixed there? and invent a purple lady swelling, circumambient, hauled from a barouche landau by a perspiring husband sometime in the sixties. A grotesque story. That is, I am a natural coiner of words, a blower of bubbles through one thing and another. And, striking off these observations spontaneously I elaborate myself; differentiate myself and, listening to the voice that says as I stroll past, ‘Look! Take note of that!’ I conceive myself called upon to provide, some winter’s night, a meaning for all my observations—a line that runs from one to another, a summing up that completes. But soliloquies in back streets soon pall. I need an audience. That is my downfall. That always ruffles the edge of the final statement and prevents it from forming. I cannot seat myself in some sordid eating-house and order the same glass day after day and imbue myself entirely in one fluid—this life. I make my phrase and run off with it to some furnished room where it will be lit by dozens of candles. I need eyes on me to draw out these frills and furbelows. To be myself (I note) I need the illumination of other people’s eyes, and therefore cannot be entirely sure what is my self. The authentics, like Louis, like Rhoda, exist most completely in solitude. They resent illumination, reduplication. They toss their pictures once painted face downward on the field. On Louis’s words the ice is packed thick. His words issue pressed, condensed, enduring.

“I wish, then, after this somnolence to sparkle, many-faceted under the light of my friends’ faces. I have been traversing the sunless territory of non-identity. A strange land. I have heard in my moment of appeasement, in my moment of obliterating satisfaction, the sigh, as it goes in, comes out, of the tide that draws beyond this circle of bright light, this drumming of insensate fury. I have had one moment of enormous peace. This perhaps is happiness. Now I am drawn back by pricking sensations; by curiosity, greed (I am hungry) and the irresistible desire to be myself. I think of people to whom I could say things: Louis, Neville, Susan, Jinny and Rhoda. With them I am many-sided. They retrieve me from darkness. We shall meet to-night, thank Heaven. Thank Heaven, I need not be alone. We shall dine together. We shall say good-bye to Percival, who goes to India. The hour is still distant, but I feel already those harbingers, those outriders, figures of one’s friends in absence. I see Louis, stone-carved, sculpturesque; Neville, scissor-cutting, exact; Susan with eyes like lumps of crystal; Jinny dancing like a flame, febrile, hot, over dry earth; and Rhoda the nymph of the fountain always wet. These are fantastic pictures—these are figments, these visions of friends in absence, grotesque, dropsical, vanishing at the first touch of the toe of a real boot. Yet they drum me alive. They brush off these vapours. I begin to be impatient of solitude—to feel its draperies hang sweltering, unwholesome about me. Oh, to toss them off and be active! Anybody will do. I am not fastidious. The crossing-sweeper will do; the postman; the waiter in this French restaurant; better still the genial proprietor, whose geniality seems reserved for oneself. He mixes the salad with his own hands for some privileged guest. Which is the privileged guest, I ask, and why? And what is he saying to the lady in ear-rings; is she a friend or a customer? I feel at once, as I sit down at a table, the delicious jostle of confusion, of uncertainty, of possibility, of speculation. Images breed instantly. I am embarrassed by my own fertility. I could describe every chair, table, luncher here copiously, freely. My mind hums hither and thither with its veil of words for everything. To speak, about wine even to the waiter, is to bring about an explosion. Up goes the rocket. Its golden grain falls, fertilising, upon the rich soil of my imagination. The entirely unexpected nature of this explosion—that is the joy of intercourse. I, mixed with an unknown Italian waiter—what am I? There is no stability in this world. Who is to say what meaning there is in anything? Who is to foretell the flight of a word? It is a balloon that sails over tree-tops. To speak of knowledge is futile. All is experiment and adventure. We are for ever mixing ourselves with unknown quantities. What is to come? I know not. But as I put down my glass I remember: I am engaged to be married. I am to dine with my friends to-night. I am Bernard, myself.”

“It is now five minutes to eight,” said Neville. “I have come early. I have taken my place at the table ten minutes before the time in order to taste every moment of anticipation; to see the door open and to say, ‘Is it Percival? No; it is not Percival’. There is a morbid pleasure in saying: ‘No, it is not Percival’. I have seen the door open and shut twenty times already; each time the suspense sharpens. This is the place to which he is coming. This is the table at which he will sit. Here, incredible as it seems, will be his actual body. This table, these chairs, this metal vase with its three red flowers are about to undergo an extraordinary transformation. Already the room, with its swing-doors, its tables heaped with fruit, with cold joints, wears the wavering, unreal appearance of a place where one waits expecting something to happen. Things quiver as if not yet in being. The blankness of the white table-cloth glares. The hostility, the indifference of other people dining here is oppressive. We look at each other; see that we do not know each other, stare, and go off. Such looks are lashes. I feel the whole cruelty and indifference of the world in them. If he should not come I could not bear it. I should go. Yet somebody must be seeing him now. He must be in some cab; he must be passing some shop. And every moment he seems to pump into this room this prickly light, this intensity of being, so that things have lost their normal uses—this knife-blade is only a flash of light, not a thing to cut with. The normal is abolished.

“The door opens, but he does not come. That is Louis hesitating there. That is his strange mixture of assurance and timidity. He looks at himself in the looking-glass as he comes in; he touches his hair; he is dissatisfied with his appearance. He says, ‘I am a Duke—the last of an ancient race’. He is acrid, suspicious, domineering, difficult (I am comparing him with Percival). At the same time he is formidable, for there is laughter in his eyes. He has seen me. Here he is.”

“There is Susan,” said Louis. “She does not see us. She has not dressed, because she despises the futility of London. She stands for a moment at the swing-door, looking about her like a creature dazed by the light of a lamp. Now she moves. She has the stealthy yet assured movements (even among tables and chairs) of a wild beast. She seems to find her way by instinct in and out among these little tables, touching no one, disregarding waiters, yet comes straight to our table in the corner. When she sees us (Neville, and myself) her face assumes a certainty which is alarming, as if she had what she wanted. To be loved by Susan would be to be impaled by a bird’s sharp beak, to be nailed to a barnyard door. Yet there are moments when I could wish to be speared by a beak, to be nailed to a barnyard door, positively, once and for all.

“Rhoda comes now, from nowhere, having slipped in while we were not looking. She must have made a tortuous course, taking cover now behind a waiter, now behind some ornamental pillar, so as to put off as long as possible the shock of recognition, so as to be secure for one more moment to rock her petals in her basin. We wake her. We torture her. She dreads us, she despises us, yet comes cringing to our sides because for all our cruelty there is always some name, some face, which sheds a radiance, which lights up her pavements and makes it possible for her to replenish her dreams.”

“The door opens, the door goes on opening,” said Neville, “yet he does not come.”

“There is Jinny,” said Susan. “She stands in the door. Everything seems stayed. The waiter stops. The diners at the table by the door look. She seems to centre everything; round her tables, lines of doors, windows, ceilings, ray themselves, like rays round the star in the middle of a smashed window-pane. She brings things to a point, to order. Now she sees us, and moves, and all the rays ripple and flow and waver over us, bringing in new tides of sensation. We change. Louis puts his hand to his tie. Neville, who sits waiting with agonised intensity, nervously straightens the forks in front of him. Rhoda sees her with surprise, as if on some far horizon a fire blazed. And I, though I pile my mind with damp grass, with wet fields, with the sound of rain on the roof and the gusts of wind that batter at the house in winter and so protect my soul against her, feel her derision steal round me, feel her laughter curl its tongues of fire round me and light up unsparingly my shabby dress, my square-tipped finger-nails, which I at once hide under the table-cloth.”

“He has not come,” said Neville. “The door opens and he does not come. That is Bernard. As he pulls off his coat he shows, of course, the blue shirt under his arm-pits. And then, unlike the rest of us, he comes in without pushing open a door, without knowing that he comes into a room full of strangers. He does not look in the glass. His hair is untidy, but he does not know it. He has no perception that we differ, or that this table is his goal. He hesitates on his way here. Who is that? he asks himself, for he half knows a woman in an opera cloak. He half knows everybody; he knows nobody (I compare him with Percival). But now, perceiving us, he waves a benevolent salute; he bears down with such benignity, with such love of mankind (crossed with humour at the futility of ‘loving mankind’), that, if it were not for Percival, who turns all this to vapour, one would feel, as the others already feel: Now is our festival; now we are together. But without Percival there is no solidity. We are silhouettes, hollow phantoms moving mistily without a background.”

“The swing-door goes on opening,” said Rhoda. “Strangers keep on coming, people we shall never see again, people who brush us disagreeably with their familiarity, their indifference, and the sense of a world continuing without us. We cannot sink down, we cannot forget our faces. Even I who have no face, who make no difference when I come in (Susan and Jinny change bodies and faces), flutter unattached, without anchorage anywhere, unconsolidated, incapable of composing any blankness or continuity or wall against which these bodies move. It is because of Neville and his misery. The sharp breath of his misery scatters my being. Nothing can settle; nothing can subside. Every time the door opens he looks fixedly at the table—he dare not raise his eyes—then looks for one second and says, ‘He has not come’. But here he is.”

“Now,” said Neville, “my tree flowers. My heart rises. All oppression is relieved. All impediment is removed. The reign of chaos is over. He has imposed order. Knives cut again.”

“Here is Percival,” said Jinny. “He has not dressed.”

“Here is Percival,” said Bernard, “smoothing his hair, not from vanity (he does not look in the glass), but to propitiate the god of decency. He is conventional; he is a hero. The little boys trooped after him across the playing-fields. They blew their noses as he blew his nose, but unsuccessfully, for he is Percival. Now, when he is about to leave us, to go to India, all these trifles come together. He is a hero. Oh yes, that is not to be denied, and when he takes his seat by Susan, whom he loves, the occasion is crowned. We who yelped like jackals biting at each other’s heels now assume the sober and confident air of soldiers in the presence of their captain. We who have been separated by our youth (the oldest is not yet twenty-five), who have sung like eager birds each his own song and tapped with the remorseless and savage egotism of the young our own snail-shell till it cracked (I am engaged), or perched solitary outside some bedroom window and sang of love, of fame and other single experiences so dear to the callow bird with a yellow tuft on its beak, now come nearer; and shuffling closer on our perch in this restaurant where everybody’s interests are at variance, and the incessant passage of traffic chafes us with distractions, and the door opening perpetually its glass cage solicits us with myriad temptations and offers insults and wounds to our confidence—sitting together here we love each other and believe in our own endurance.”

“Now let us issue from the darkness of solitude,” said Louis.

“Now let us say, brutally and directly, what is in our minds,” said Neville. “Our isolation, our preparation, is over. The furtive days of secrecy and hiding, the revelations on staircases, moments of terror and ecstasy.”

“Old Mrs. Constable lifted her sponge and warmth poured over us,” said Bernard. “We became clothed in this changing, this feeling garment of flesh.”

“The boot-boy made love to the scullery-maid in the kitchen garden,” said Susan, “among the blown-out washing.”

“The breath of the wind was like a tiger panting,” said Rhoda.

“The man lay livid with his throat cut in the gutter,” said Neville. “And going upstairs I could not raise my foot against the immitigable apple tree with its silver leaves held stiff.”

“The leaf danced in the hedge without anyone to blow it,” said Jinny.

“In the sun-baked corner,” said Louis, “the petals swam on depths of green.”

“At Elvedon the gardeners swept and swept with their great brooms, and the woman sat at a table writing,” said Bernard.

“From these close-furled balls of string we draw now every filament,” said Louis, “remembering, when we meet.”

“And then,” said Bernard, “the cab came to the door, and, pressing our new bowler hats tightly over our eyes to hide our unmanly tears, we drove through streets in which even the housemaids looked at us, and our names painted in white letters on our boxes proclaimed to all the world that we were going to school with the regulation number of socks and drawers, on which our mothers for some nights previously had stitched our initials, in our boxes. A second severance from the body of our mother.”

“And Miss Lambert, Miss Cutting and Miss Bard,” said Jinny, “monumental ladies, white-ruffed, stone-coloured, enigmatic, with amethyst rings moving like virginal tapers, dim glow-worms over the pages of French, geography and arithmetic, presided; and there were maps, green-baize boards, and rows of shoes on a shelf.”

“Bells rang punctually,” said Susan, “maids scuffled and giggled. There was a drawing in of chairs and a drawing out of chairs on the linoleum. But from one attic there was a blue view, a distant view of a field unstained by the corruption of this regimented, unreal existence.”

“Down from our heads veils fell,” said Rhoda. “We clasped the flowers with their green leaves rustling in garlands.”

“We changed, we became unrecognisable,” said Louis. “Exposed to all these different lights, what we had in us (for we are all so different) came intermittently, in violent patches, spaced by blank voids, to the surface as if some acid had dropped unequally on the plate. I was this, Neville that, Rhoda different again, and Bernard too.”

“Then canoes slipped through palely tinted willow branches,” said Neville, “and Bernard, advancing in his casual way against breadths of green, against houses of very ancient foundation, tumbled in a heap on the ground beside me. In an access of emotion—winds are not more raving, nor lightning more sudden—I took my poem, I flung my poem, I slammed the door behind me.”

“I, however,” said Louis, “losing sight of you, sat in my office and tore the date from the calendar, and announced to the world of ship-brokers, corn-chandlers and actuaries that Friday the tenth, or Tuesday the eighteenth, had dawned on the city of London.”

“Then,” said Jinny, “Rhoda and I, exposed in bright dresses, with a few precious stones nestling on a cold ring round our throats, bowed, shook hands and took a sandwich from a plate with a smile.”

“The tiger leapt, and the swallow dipped her wings in dark pools on the other side of the world,” said Rhoda.

“But here and now we are together,” said Bernard. “We have come together, at a particular time, to this particular spot. We are drawn into this communion by some deep, some common emotion. Shall we call it, conveniently, ‘love’? Shall we say ‘love of Percival’ because Percival is going to India?

“No, that is too small, too particular a name. We cannot attach the width and spread of our feelings to so small a mark. We have come together (from the North, from the South, from Susan’s farm, from Louis’ house of business) to make one thing, not enduring—for what endures?—but seen by many eyes simultaneously. There is a red carnation in that vase. A single flower as we sat here waiting, but now a seven-sided flower, many-petalled, red, puce, purple-shaded, stiff with silver-tinted leaves—a whole flower to which every eye brings its own contribution.”

“After the capricious fires, the abysmal dullness of youth,” said Neville, “the light falls upon real objects now. Here are knives and forks. The world is displayed, and we too, so that we can talk.”

“We differ, it may be too profoundly,” said Louis, “for explanation. But let us attempt it. I smoothed my hair when I came in, hoping to look like the rest of you. But I cannot, for I am not single and entire as you are. I have lived a thousand lives already. Every day I unbury—I dig up. I find relics of myself in the sand that women made thousands of years ago, when I heard songs by the Nile and the chained beast stamping. What you see beside you, this man, this Louis, is only the cinders and refuse of something once splendid. I was an Arab prince; behold my free gestures. I was a great poet in the time of Elizabeth. I was a Duke at the court of Louis the Fourteenth. I am very vain, very confident; I have an immeasurable desire that women should sigh in sympathy. I have eaten no lunch to-day in order that Susan may think me cadaverous and that Jinny may extend to me the exquisite balm of her sympathy. But while I admire Susan and Percival, I hate the others, because it is for them that I do these antics, smoothing my hair, concealing my accent. I am the little ape who chatters over a nut, and you are the dowdy women with shiny bags of stale buns; I am also the caged tiger, and you are the keepers with red-hot bars. That is, I am fiercer and stronger than you are, yet the apparition that appears above ground after ages of non-entity will be spent in terror lest you should laugh at me, in veerings with the wind against the soot storms, in efforts to make a steel ring of clear poetry that shall connect the gulls and the women with bad teeth, the church spire and the bobbing billycock hats as I see them when I take my luncheon and prop my poet—is it Lucretius?—against a cruet and the gravy-splashed bill of fare.”

“But you will never hate me,” said Jinny. “You will never see me, even across a room full of gilt chairs and ambassadors, without coming to me across the room to seek my sympathy. When I came in just now everything stood still in a pattern. Waiters stopped, diners raised their forks and held them. I had the air of being prepared for what would happen. When I sat down you put your hands to your ties, you hid them under the table. But I hide nothing. I am prepared. Every time the door opens I cry ‘More!’ But my imagination is the bodies. I can imagine nothing beyond the circle cast by my body. My body goes before me, like a lantern down a dark lane, bringing one thing after another out of darkness into a ring of light. I dazzle you; I make you believe that this is all.”

“But when you stand in the door,” said Neville, “you inflict stillness, demanding admiration, and that is a great impediment to the freedom of intercourse. You stand in the door making us notice you. But none of you saw me approach. I came early; I came quickly and directly, here, to sit by the person whom I love. My life has a rapidity that yours lack. I am like a hound on the scent. I hunt from dawn to dusk. Nothing, not the pursuit of perfection through the sand, nor fame, nor money, has meaning for me. I shall have riches; I shall have fame. But I shall never have what I want, for I lack bodily grace and the courage that comes with it. The swiftness of my mind is too strong for my body. I fail before I reach the end and fall in a heap, damp, perhaps disgusting. I excite pity in the crises of life, not love. Therefore I suffer horribly. But I do not suffer, as Louis does, to make myself a spectacle. I have too fine a sense of fact to allow myself these juggleries, these pretences. I see everything—except one thing—with complete clarity. That is my saving. That is what gives my suffering an unceasing excitement. That is what makes me dictate, even when I am silent. And since I am, in one respect, deluded, since the person is always changing, though not the desire, and I do not know in the morning by whom I shall sit at night, I am never stagnant; I rise from my worst disasters, I turn, I change. Pebbles bounce off the mail of my muscular, my extended body. In this pursuit I shall grow old.”

“If I could believe,” said Rhoda, “that I should grow old in pursuit and change, I should be rid of my fear: nothing persists. One moment does not lead to another. The door opens and the tiger leaps. You did not see me come. I circled round the chairs to avoid the horror of the spring. I am afraid of you all. I am afraid of the shock of sensation that leaps upon me, because I cannot deal with it as you do—I cannot make one moment merge in the next. To me they are all violent, all separate; and if I fall under the shock of the leap of the moment you will be on me, tearing me to pieces. I have no end in view. I do not know how to run minute to minute and hour to hour, solving them by some natural force until they make the whole and indivisible mass that you call life. Because you have an end in view—one person, is it, to sit beside, an idea is it, your beauty is it? I do not know—your days and hours pass like the boughs of forest trees and the smooth green of forest rides to a hound running on the scent. But there is no single scent, no single body for me to follow. And I have no face. I am like the foam that races over the beach or the moonlight that falls arrowlike here on a tin can, here on a spike of the mailed sea holly, or a bone or a half-eaten boat. I am whirled down caverns, and flap like paper against endless corridors, and must press my hand against the wall to draw myself back.

“But since I wish above all things to have lodgment, I pretend, as I go upstairs lagging behind Jinny and Susan, to have an end in view. I pull on my stockings as I see them pull on theirs. I wait for you to speak and then speak like you. I am drawn here across London to a particular spot, to a particular place, not to see you or you or you, but to light my fire at the general blaze of you who live wholly, indivisibly and without caring.”

“When I came into the room to-night,” said Susan, “I stopped, I peered about like an animal with its eyes near to the ground. The smell of carpets and furniture and scent disgusts me. I like to walk through wet fields alone, or to stop at a gate and watch my setter nose in a circle, and to ask Where is the hare? I like to be with people who twist herbs, and spit into the fire, and shuffle down long passages in slippers like my father. The only sayings I understand are cries of love, hate, rage and pain. This talking is undressing an old woman whose dress had seemed to be part of her, but now, as we talk, she turns pinkish underneath, and has wrinkled thighs and sagging breasts. When you are silent you are again beautiful. I shall never have anything but natural happiness. It will almost content me. I shall go to bed tired. I shall lie like a field bearing crops in rotation; in the summer heat will dance over me; in the winter I shall be cracked with the cold. But heat and cold will follow each other naturally without my willing or unwilling. My children will carry me on; their teething, their crying, their going to school and coming back will be like the waves of the sea under me. No day will be without its movement. I shall be lifted higher than any of you on the backs of the seasons. I shall possess more than Jinny, more than Rhoda, by the time I die. But on the other hand, where you are various and dimple a million times to the ideas and laughter of others, I shall be sullen, storm-tinted and all one purple. I shall be debased and hide-bound by the bestial and beautiful passion of maternity. I shall push the fortunes of my children unscrupulously. I shall hate those who see their faults. I shall lie basely to help them. I shall let them wall me away from you, from you and from you. Also, I am torn with jealousy. I hate Jinny because she shows me that my hands are red, my nails bitten. I love with such ferocity that it kills me when the object of my love shows by a phrase that he can escape. He escapes, and I am left clutching at a string that slips in and out among the leaves on the tree-tops. I do not understand phrases.”

“Had I been born,” said Bernard, “not knowing that one word follows another I might have been, who knows, perhaps anything. As it is, finding sequences everywhere, I cannot bear the pressure of solitude. When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness—I am nothing. When I am alone I fall into lethargy, and say to myself dismally as I poke the cinders through the bars of the grate, Mrs. Moffat will come. She will come and sweep it all up. When Louis is alone he sees with astonishing intensity, and will write some words that may outlast us all. Rhoda loves to be alone. She fears us because we shatter the sense of being which is so extreme in solitude—see how she grasps her fork—her weapon against us. But I only come into existence when the plumber, or the horse-dealer, or whoever it may be, says something which sets me alight. Then how lovely the smoke of my phrase is, rising and falling, flaunting and falling, upon red lobsters and yellow fruit, wreathing them into one beauty. But observe how meretricious the phrase is—made up of what evasions and old lies. Thus my character is in part made of the stimulus which other people provide, and is not mine, as yours are. There is some fatal streak, some wandering and irregular vein of silver, weakening it. Hence the fact that used to enrage Neville at school, that I left him. I went with the boasting boys with little caps and badges, driving off in big brakes—there are some here to-night, dining together, correctly dressed, before they go off in perfect concord to the music hall; I loved them. For they bring me into existence as certainly as you do. Hence, too, when I am leaving you and the train is going, you feel that it is not the train that is going, but I, Bernard, who does not care, who does not feel, who has no ticket, and has lost perhaps his purse. Susan, staring at the string that slips in and out among the leaves of the beech trees, cries: ‘He is gone! He has escaped me!’ For there is nothing to lay hold of. I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.

“Thus there is not one person but fifty people whom I want to sit beside to-night. But I am the only one of you who is at home here without taking liberties. I am not gross; I am not a snob. If I lie open to the pressure of society I often succeed with the dexterity of my tongue in putting something difficult into the currency. See my little toys, twisted out of nothing in a second, how they entertain. I am no hoarder—I shall leave only a cupboard of old clothes when I die—and am almost indifferent to the minor vanities of life which cause Louis so much torture. But I have sacrificed much. Veined as I am with iron, with silver and streaks of common mud, I cannot contract into the firm fist which those clench who do not depend upon stimulus. I am incapable of the denials, the heroisms of Louis and Rhoda. I shall never succeed, even in talk, in making a perfect phrase. But I shall have contributed more to the passing moment than any of you; I shall go into more rooms, more different rooms, than any of you. But because there is something that comes from outside and not from within I shall be forgotten; when my voice is silent you will not remember me, save as the echo of a voice that once wreathed the fruit into phrases.”

“Look,” said Rhoda; “listen. Look how the light becomes richer, second by second, and bloom and ripeness lie everywhere; and our eyes, as they range round this room with all its tables, seem to push through curtains of colour, red, orange, umber and queer ambiguous tints, which yield like veils and close behind them, and one thing melts into another.”

“Yes,” said Jinny, “our senses have widened. Membranes, webs of nerve that lay white and limp, have filled and spread themselves and float round us like filaments, making the air tangible and catching in them far-away sounds unheard before.”

“The roar of London,” said Louis, “is round us. Motor-cars, vans, omnibuses pass and repass continuously. All are merged in one turning wheel of single sound. All separate sounds—wheels, bells, the cries of drunkards, of merrymakers—are churned into one sound, steel blue, circular. Then a siren hoots. At that shores slip away, chimneys flatten themselves, the ship makes for the open sea.”

“Percival is going,” said Neville. “We sit here, surrounded, lit up, many coloured; all things—hands, curtains, knives and forks, other people dining—run into each other. We are walled in here. But India lies outside.”

“I see India,” said Bernard. “I see the low, long shore; I see the tortuous lanes of stamped mud that lead in and out among ramshackle pagodas; I see the gilt and crenellated buildings which have an air of fragility and decay as if they were temporarily run up buildings in some Oriental exhibition. I see a pair of bullocks who drag a low cart along the sun-baked road. The cart sways incompetently from side to side. Now one wheel sticks in the rut, and at once innumerable natives in loin-cloths swarm round it, chattering excitedly. But they do nothing. Time seems endless, ambition vain. Over all broods a sense of the uselessness of human exertion. There are strange sour smells. An old man in a ditch continues to chew betel and to contemplate his navel. But now, behold, Percival advances; Percival rides a flea-bitten mare, and wears a sun-helmet. By applying the standards of the West, by using the violent language that is natural to him, the bullock-cart is righted in less than five minutes. The Oriental problem is solved. He rides on; the multitude cluster round him, regarding him as if he were—what indeed he is—a God.”

“Unknown, with or without a secret, it does not matter,” said Rhoda, “he is like a stone fallen into a pond round which minnows swarm. Like minnows, we who had been shooting this way, that way, all shot round him when he came. Like minnows, conscious of the presence of a great stone, we undulate and eddy contentedly. Comfort steals over us. Gold runs in our blood. One, two; one, two; the heart beats in serenity, in confidence, in some trance of well-being, in some rapture of benignity; and look—the outermost parts of the earth—pale shadows on the utmost horizon, India for instance, rise into our purview. The world that had been shrivelled, rounds itself; remote provinces are fetched up out of darkness; we see muddy roads, twisted jungle, swarms of men, and the vulture that feeds on some bloated carcass as within our scope, part of our proud and splendid province, since Percival, riding alone on a flea-bitten mare, advances down a solitary path, has his camp pitched among desolate trees, and sits alone, looking at the enormous mountains.”

“It is Percival,” said Louis, “sitting silent as he sat among the tickling grasses when the breeze parted the clouds and they formed again, who makes us aware that these attempts to say, ‘I am this, I am that’, which we make, coming together, like separated parts of one body and soul, are false. Something has been left out from fear. Something has been altered, from vanity. We have tried to accentuate differences. From the desire to be separate we have laid stress upon our faults, and what is particular to us. But there is a chain whirling round, round, in a steel-blue circle beneath.”

“It is hate, it is love,” said Susan. “That is the furious coal-black stream that makes us dizzy if we look down into it. We stand on a ledge here, but if we look down we turn giddy.”

“It is love,” said Jinny, “it is hate, such as Susan feels for me because I kissed Louis once in the garden; because equipped as I am, I make her think when I come in, ‘My hands are red’, and hide them. But our hatred is almost indistinguishable from our love.”

“Yet these roaring waters,” said Neville, “upon which we build our crazy platforms are more stable than the wild, the weak and inconsequent cries that we utter when, trying to speak, we rise; when we reason and jerk out these false sayings, ‘I am this; I am that!’ Speech is false.

“But I eat. I gradually lose all knowledge of particulars as I eat. I am becoming weighed down with food. These delicious mouthfuls of roast duck, fitly piled with vegetables, following each other in exquisite rotation of warmth, weight, sweet and bitter, past my palate, down my gullet, into my stomach, have stabilised my body. I feel quiet, gravity, control. All is solid now. Instinctively my palate now requires and anticipates sweetness and lightness, something sugared and evanescent; and cool wine, fitting glove-like over those finer nerves that seem to tremble from the roof of my mouth and make it spread (as I drink) into a domed cavern, green with vine leaves, musk-scented, purple with grapes. Now I can look steadily into the mill-race that foams beneath. By what particular name are we to call it? Let Rhoda speak, whose face I see reflected mistily in the looking-glass opposite; Rhoda whom I interrupted when she rocked her petals in a brown basin, asking for the pocket-knife that Bernard had stolen. Love is not a whirlpool to her. She is not giddy when she looks down. She looks far away over our heads, beyond India.”

“Yes, between your shoulders, over your heads, to a landscape,” said Rhoda, “to a hollow where the many-backed steep hills come down like birds’ wings folded. There, on the short, firm turf, are bushes, dark leaved, and against their darkness I see a shape, white, but not of stone, moving, perhaps alive. But it is not you, it is not you, it is not you; not Percival, Susan, Jinny, Neville or Louis. When the white arm rests upon the knee it is a triangle; now it is upright—a column; now a fountain, falling. It makes no sign, it does not beckon, it does not see us. Behind it roars the sea. It is beyond our reach. Yet there I venture. There I go to replenish my emptiness, to stretch my nights and fill them fuller and fuller with dreams. And for a second even now, even here, I reach my object and say, ‘Wander no more. All else is trial and make-believe. Here is the end.’ But these pilgrimages, these moments of departure, start always in your presence, from this table, these lights, from Percival and Susan, here and now. Always I see the grove over your heads, between your shoulders, or from a window when I have crossed the room at a party and stand looking down into the street.”

“But his slippers?” said Neville. “And his voice downstairs in the hall? And catching sight of him when he does not see one? One waits and he does not come. It gets later and later. He has forgotten. He is with someone else. He is faithless, his love meant nothing. Oh, then the agony—then the intolerable despair! And then the door opens. He is here.”

“Rippling gold, I say to him, ‘Come’,” said Jinny. “And he comes; he crosses the room to where I sit, with my dress like a veil billowing round me on the gilt chair. Our hands touch, our bodies burst into fire. The chair, the cup, the table—nothing remains unlit. All quivers, all kindles, all burns clear.”

(“Look, Rhoda,” said Louis, “they have become nocturnal, rapt. Their eyes are like moth’s wings moving so quickly that they do not seem to move at all.”

“Horns and trumpets,” said Rhoda, “ring out. Leaves unfold; the stags blare in the thicket. There is a dancing and a drumming, like the dancing and the drumming of naked men with assagais.”

“Like the dance of savages,” said Louis, “round the camp-fire. They are savage; they are ruthless. They dance in a circle, flapping bladders. The flames leap over their painted faces, over the leopard skins and the bleeding limbs which they have torn from the living body.”

“The flames of the festival rise high,” said Rhoda. “The great procession passes, flinging green boughs and flowering branches. Their horns spill blue smoke; their skins are dappled red and yellow in the torchlight. They throw violets. They deck the beloved with garlands and with laurel leaves, there on the ring of turf where the steep-backed hills come down. The procession passes. And while it passes, Louis, we are aware of downfalling, we forebode decay. The shadow slants. We who are conspirators, withdrawn together to lean over some cold urn, note how the purple flame flows downwards.”

“Death is woven in with the violets,” said Louis. “Death and again death.”)

“How proudly we sit here,” said Jinny, “we who are not yet twenty-five! Outside the trees flower; outside the women linger; outside the cabs swerve and sweep. Emerged from the tentative ways, the obscurities and dazzle of youth, we look straight in front of us, ready for what may come (the door opens, the door keeps on opening). All is real; all is firm without shadow or illusion. Beauty rides our brows. There is mine, there is Susan’s. Our flesh is firm and cool. Our differences are clear-cut as the shadows of rocks in full sunlight. Beside us lie crisp rolls, yellow-glazed and hard; the table-cloth is white; and our hands lie half curled, ready to contract. Days and days are to come; winter days, summer days; we have scarcely broken into our hoard. Now the fruit is swollen beneath the leaf. The room is golden, and I say to him, ‘Come.’”

“He has red ears,” said Louis, “and the smell of meat hangs down in a damp net while the city clerks take snacks at the lunch bar.”

“With infinite time before us,” said Neville, “we ask what shall we do? Shall we loiter down Bond Street, looking here and there, and buying perhaps a fountain-pen because it is green, or asking how much is the ring with the blue stone? Or shall we sit indoors and watch the coals turn crimson? Shall we stretch our hands for books and read here a passage and there a passage? Shall we shout with laughter for no reason? Shall we push through flowering meadows and make daisy chains? Shall we find out when the next train starts for the Hebrides and engage a reserved compartment? All is to come.”

“For you,” said Bernard, “but yesterday I walked bang into a pillar-box. Yesterday I became engaged.”

“How strange,” said Susan, “the little heaps of sugar look by the side of our plates. Also the mottled peelings of pears, and the plush rims to the looking-glasses. I had not seen them before. Everything is now set; everything is fixed. Bernard is engaged. Something irrevocable has happened. A circle has been cast on the waters; a chain is imposed. We shall never flow freely again.”

“For one moment only,” said Louis. “Before the chain breaks, before disorder returns, see us fixed, see us displayed, see us held in a vice.

“But now the circle breaks. Now the current flows. Now we rush faster than before. Now passions that lay in wait down there in the dark weeds which grow at the bottom rise and pound us with their waves. Pain and jealousy, envy and desire, and something deeper than they are, stronger than love and more subterranean. The voice of action speaks. Listen, Rhoda (for we are conspirators, with our hands on the cold urn), to the casual, quick, exciting voice of action, of hounds running on the scent. They speak now without troubling to finish their sentences. They talk a little language such as lovers use. An imperious brute possesses them. The nerves thrill in their thighs. Their hearts pound and churn in their sides. Susan screws her pocket-handkerchief. Jinny’s eyes dance with fire.”

“They are immune,” said Rhoda, “from picking fingers and searching eyes. How easily they turn and glance; what poses they take of energy and pride! What life shines in Jinny’s eyes; how fell, how entire Susan’s glance is, searching for insects at the roots! Their hair shines lustrous. Their eyes burn like the eyes of animals brushing through leaves on the scent of the prey. The circle is destroyed. We are thrown asunder.”

“But soon, too soon,” said Bernard, “this egotistic exultation fails. Too soon the moment of ravenous identity is over, and the appetite for happiness, and happiness, and still more happiness is glutted. The stone is sunk; the moment is over. Round me there spreads a wide margin of indifference. Now open in my eyes a thousand eyes of curiosity. Anyone now is at liberty to murder Bernard, who is engaged to be married, so long as they leave untouched this margin of unknown territory, this forest of the unknown world. Why, I ask (whispering discreetly), do women dine alone together there? Who are they? And what has brought them on this particular evening to this particular spot? The youth in the corner, judging from the nervous way in which he puts his hand from time to time to the back of his head, is from the country. He is suppliant, and so anxious to respond suitably to the kindness of his father’s friend, his host, that he can scarcely enjoy now what he will enjoy very much at about half-past eleven to-morrow morning. I have also seen that lady powder her nose three times in the midst of an absorbing conversation—about love perhaps, about the unhappiness of their dearest friend perhaps. ‘Ah, but the state of my nose!’ she thinks, and out comes her powder-puff, obliterating in its passage all the most fervent feelings of the human heart. There remains, however, the insoluble problem of the solitary man with the eyeglass; of the elderly lady drinking champagne alone. Who and what are these unknown people? I ask. I could make a dozen stories of what he said, of what she said—I can see a dozen pictures. But what are stories? Toys I twist, bubbles I blow, one ring passing through another. And sometimes I begin to doubt if there are stories. What is my story? What is Rhoda’s? What is Neville’s? There are facts, as, for example: ‘The handsome young man in the grey suit, whose reserve contrasted so strangely with the loquacity of the others, now brushed the crumbs from his waistcoat and, with a characteristic gesture at once commanding and benign, made a sign to the waiter, who came instantly and returned a moment later with the bill discreetly folded upon a plate’. That is the truth; that is the fact, but beyond it all is darkness and conjecture.”

“Now once more,” said Louis, “as we are about to part, having paid our bill, the circle in our blood, broken so often, so sharply, for we are so different, closes in a ring. Something is made. Yes, as we rise and fidget, a little nervously, we pray, holding in our hands this common feeling, ‘Do not move, do not let the swing door cut to pieces the thing that we have made, that globes itself here, among these lights, these peelings, this litter of bread crumbs and people passing. Do not move, do not go. Hold it for ever.’”

“Let us hold it for one moment,” said Jinny; “love, hatred, by whatever name we call it, this globe whose walls are made of Percival, of youth and beauty, and something so deep sunk within us that we shall perhaps never make this moment out of one man again.”

“Forests and far countries on the other side of the world,” said Rhoda, “are in it; seas and jungles; the howlings of jackals and moonlight falling upon some high peak where the eagle soars,”

“Happiness is in it,” said Neville, “and the quiet of ordinary things. A table, a chair, a book with a paper-knife stuck between the pages. And the petal falling from the rose, and the light flickering as we sit silent, or, perhaps, bethinking us of some trifle, suddenly speak.”

“Week-days are in it,” said Susan, “Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday; the horses going up to the fields, and the horses returning; the rooks rising and falling, and catching the elm-trees in their net, whether it is April, whether it is November.”

“What is to come is in it,” said Bernard. “That is the last drop and the brightest that we let fall like some supernal quicksilver into the swelling and splendid moment created by us from Percival. What is to come? I ask, brushing the crumbs from my waistcoat, what is outside? We have proved, sitting eating, sitting talking, that we can add to the treasury of moments. We are not slaves bound to suffer incessantly unrecorded petty blows on our bent backs. We are not sheep either, following a master. We are creators. We too have made something that will join the innumerable congregations of past time. We too, as we put on our hats and push open the door, stride not into chaos, but into a world that our own force can subjugate and make part of the illumined and everlasting road.

“Look, Percival, while they fetch the taxi, at the prospect which you are so soon to lose. The street is hard and burnished with the churning of innumerable wheels. The yellow canopy of our tremendous energy hangs like a burning cloth above our heads. Theatres, music halls and lamps in private houses make that light.”

“Peaked clouds,” said Rhoda, “voyage over a sky dark like polished whalebone.”

“Now the agony begins; now the horror has seized me with its fangs,” said Neville. “Now the cab comes; now Percival goes. What can we do to keep him? How bridge the distance between us? How fan the fire so that it blazes for ever? How signal to all time to come that we, who stand in the street, in the lamplight, loved Percival? Now Percival is gone.”

The sun had risen to its full height. It was no longer half seen and guessed at, from hints and gleams, as if a girl couched on her green-sea mattress tired her brows with water-globed jewels that sent lances of opal-tinted light falling and flashing in the uncertain air like the flanks of a dolphin leaping, or the flash of a falling blade. Now the sun burnt uncompromising, undeniable. It struck upon the hard sand, and the rocks became furnaces of red heat; it searched each pool and caught the minnow hiding in the cranny, and showed the rusty cartwheel, the white bone, or the boot without laces stuck, black as iron, in the sand. It gave to everything its exact measure of colour; to the sandhills their innumerable glitter, to the wild grasses their glancing green; or it fell upon the arid waste of the desert, here wind-scourged into furrows, here swept into desolate cairns, here sprinkled with stunted dark-green jungle trees. It lit up the smooth gilt mosque, the frail pink-and-white card houses of the southern village, and the long-breasted, white-haired women who knelt in the river bed beating wrinkled cloths upon stones. Steamers thudding slowly over the sea were caught in the level stare of the sun, and it beat through the yellow awnings upon passengers who dozed or paced the deck, shading their eyes to look for the land, while day after day, compressed in its oily throbbing sides, the ship bore them on monotonously over the waters.

The sun beat on the crowded pinnacles of southern hills and glared into deep, stony river beds where the water was shrunk beneath the high slung bridge so that washerwomen kneeling on hot stones could scarcely wet their linen; and lean mules went picking their way among the chattering grey stones with panniers slung across their narrow shoulders. At midday the heat of the sun made the hills grey as if shaved and singed in an explosion, while, further north, in cloudier and rainier countries, hills smoothed into slabs as with the back of a spade had a light in them as if a warder, deep within, went from chamber to chamber carrying a green lamp. Through atoms of grey-blue air the sun struck at English fields and lit up marshes and pools, a white gull on a stake, the slow sail of shadows over blunt-headed woods and young corn and flowing hayfields. It beat on the orchard wall, and every pit and grain of the brick was silver pointed, purple, fiery as if soft to touch, as if touched it must melt into hot-baked grains of dust. The currants hung against the wall in ripples and cascades of polished red; plums swelled out their leaves, and all the blades of the grass were run together in one fluent green blaze. The trees’ shadow was sunk to a dark pool at the root. Light descending in floods dissolved the separate foliation into one green mound.

The birds sang passionate songs addressed to one ear only and then stopped. Bubbling and chuckling they carried little bits of straw and twig to the dark knots in the higher branches of the trees. Gilt and purpled they perched in the garden where cones of laburnum and purple shook down gold and lilac, for now at midday the garden was all blossom and profusion and even the tunnels under the plants were green and purple and tawny as the sun beat through the red petal, or the broad yellow petal, or was barred by some thickly furred green stalk.

The sun struck straight upon the house, making the white walls glare between the dark windows. Their panes, woven thickly with green branches, held circles of impenetrable darkness. Sharp-edged wedges of light lay upon the window-sill and showed inside the room plates with blue rings, cups with curved handles, the bulge of a great bowl, the criss-cross pattern in the rug, and the formidable corners and lines of cabinets and bookcases. Behind their conglomeration hung a zone of shadow in which might be a further shape to be disencumbered of shadow or still denser depths of darkness.

The waves broke and spread their waters swiftly over the shore. One after another they massed themselves and fell; the spray tossed itself back with the energy of their fall. The waves were steeped deep-blue save for a pattern of diamond-pointed light on their backs which rippled as the backs of great horses ripple with muscles as they move. The waves fell; withdrew and fell again, like the thud of a great beast stamping.

“He is dead,” said Neville. “He fell. His horse tripped. He was thrown. The sails of the world have swung round and caught me on the head. All is over. The lights of the world have gone out. There stands the tree which I cannot pass.

“Oh, to crumple this telegram in my fingers—to let the light of the world flood back—to say this has not happened! But why turn one’s head hither and thither? This is the truth. This is the fact. His horse stumbled; he was thrown. The flashing trees and white rails went up in a shower. There was a surge; a drumming in his ears. Then the blow; the world crashed; he breathed heavily. He died where he fell.

“Barns and summer days in the country, rooms where we sat—all now lie in the unreal world which is gone. My past is cut from me. They came running. They carried him to some pavilion, men in riding-boots, men in sun helmets; among unknown men he died. Loneliness and silence often surrounded him. He often left me. And then, returning, ‘See where he comes!’ I said.

“Women shuffle past the window as if there were no gulf cut in the street; no tree with stiff leaves which we cannot pass. We deserve then to be tripped by molehills. We are infinitely abject, shuffling past with our eyes shut. But why should I submit? Why try to lift my foot and mount the stair? This is where I stand; here, holding the telegram. The past, summer days and rooms where we sat, stream away like burnt paper with red eyes in it. Why meet and resume? Why talk and eat and make up other combinations with other people? From this moment I am solitary. No one will know me now. I have three letters, ‘I am about to play quoits with a colonel, so no more’, thus he ends our friendship, shouldering his way through the crowd with a wave of his hand. This farce is worth no more formal celebration. Yet if someone had but said: ‘Wait’; had pulled the strap three holes tighter—he would have done justice for fifty years, and sat in Court and ridden alone at the head of troops and denounced some monstrous tyranny, and come back to us.

“Now I say there is a grinning, there is a subterfuge. There is something sneering behind our backs. That boy almost lost his footing as he leapt on the bus. Percival fell; was killed; is buried; and I watch people passing; holding tight to the rails of omnibuses; determined to save their lives.

“I will not lift my foot to climb the stair. I will stand for one moment beneath the immitigable tree, alone with the man whose throat is cut, while downstairs the cook shoves in and out the dampers. I will not climb the stair. We are doomed, all of us. Women shuffle past with shopping-bags. People keep on passing. Yet you shall not destroy me. For this moment, this one moment, we are together. I press you to me. Come, pain, feed on me. Bury your fangs in my flesh. Tear me asunder. I sob, I sob.”

“Such is the incomprehensible combination,” said Bernard, “such is the complexity of things, that as I descend the staircase I do not know which is sorrow, which joy. My son is born; Percival is dead. I am upheld by pillars, shored up on either side by stark emotions; but which is sorrow, which is joy? I ask, and do not know, only that I need silence, and to be alone and to go out, and to save one hour to consider what has happened to my world, what death has done to my world.

“This then is the world that Percival sees no longer. Let me look. The butcher delivers meat next door; two old men stumble along the pavement; sparrows alight. The machine then works; I note the rhythm, the throb, but as a thing in which I have no part, since he sees it no longer. (He lies pale and bandaged in some room.) Now then is my chance to find out what is of great importance, and I must be careful, and tell no lies. About him my feeling was: he sat there in the centre. Now I go to that spot no longer. The place is empty.

“Oh yes, I can assure you, men in felt hats and women carrying baskets—you have lost something that would have been very valuable to you. You have lost a leader whom you would have followed; and one of you has lost happiness and children. He is dead who would have given you that. He lies on a camp-bed, bandaged, in some hot Indian hospital while coolies squatted on the floor agitate those fans—I forget how they call them. But this is important; ‘You are well out of it’, I said, while the doves descended over the roofs and my son was born, as if it were a fact. I remember, as a boy, his curious air of detachment. And I go on to say (my eyes fill with tears and then are dry), ‘But this is better than one had dared to hope’. I say, addressing what is abstract, facing me eyeless at the end of the avenue, in the sky, ‘Is this the utmost you can do?’ Then we have triumphed. You have done your utmost, I say, addressing that blank and brutal face (for he was twenty-five and should have lived to be eighty) without avail. I am not going to lie down and weep away a life of care. (An entry to be made in my pocket-book; contempt for those who inflict meaningless death.) Further, this is important; that I should be able to place him in trifling and ridiculous situations, so that he may not feel himself absurd, perched on a great horse. I must be able to say, ‘Percival, a ridiculous name’. At the same time let me tell you, men and women, hurrying to the tube station, you would have had to respect him. You would have had to form up and follow behind him. How strange to oar one’s way through crowds seeing life through hollow eyes, burning eyes.

“Yet already signals begin, beckonings, attempts to lure me back. Curiosity is knocked out only for a short time. One cannot live outside the machine for more perhaps than half an hour. Bodies, I note, already begin to look ordinary; but what is behind them differs—the perspective. Behind that newspaper placard is the hospital; the long room with black men pulling ropes; and then they bury him. Yet since it says a famous actress has been divorced, I ask instantly Which? Yet I cannot take out my penny; I cannot buy a paper; I cannot suffer interruption yet.

“I ask, if I shall never see you again and fix my eyes on that solidity, what form will our communication take? You have gone across the court, further and further, drawing finer and finer the thread between us. But you exist somewhere. Something of you remains. A judge. That is, if I discover a new vein in myself I shall submit it to you privately. I shall ask, What is your verdict? You shall remain the arbiter. But for how long? Things will become too difficult to explain: there will be new things; already my son. I am now at the zenith of an experience. It will decline. Already I no longer cry with conviction, ‘What luck!’ Exaltation, the flight of doves descending, is over. Chaos, detail, return. I am no longer amazed by names written over shop-windows. I do not feel Why hurry? Why catch trains? The sequence returns; one thing leads to another—the usual order.

“Yes, but I still resent the usual order. I will not let myself be made yet to accept the sequence of things. I will walk; I will not change the rhythm of my mind by stopping, by looking; I will walk. I will go up these steps into the gallery and submit myself to the influence of minds like mine outside the sequence. There is little time left to answer the question; my powers flag; I become torpid. Here are pictures. Here are cold madonnas among their pillars. Let them lay to rest the incessant activity of the mind’s eye, the bandaged head, the men with ropes, so that I may find something unvisual beneath. Here are gardens; and Venus among her flowers; here are saints and blue madonnas. Mercifully these pictures make no reference; they do not nudge; they do not point. Thus they expand my consciousness of him and bring him back to me differently. I remember his beauty. ‘Look, where he comes’, I said.

“Lines and colours almost persuade me that I too can be heroic, I, who make phrases so easily, am so soon seduced, love what comes next, and cannot clench my fist, but vacillate weakly making phrases according to my circumstances. Now, through my own infirmity I recover what he was to me: my opposite. Being naturally truthful, he did not see the point of these exaggerations, and was borne on by a natural sense of the fitting, was indeed a great master of the art of living so that he seems to have lived long, and to have spread calm round him, indifference one might almost say, certainly to his own advancement, save that he had also great compassion. A child playing—a summer evening—doors will open and shut, will keep opening and shutting, through which I see sights that make me weep. For they cannot be imparted. Hence our loneliness; hence our desolation. I turn to that spot in my mind and find it empty. My own infirmities oppress me. There is no longer him to oppose them.

“Behold, then, the blue madonna streaked with tears. This is my funeral service. We have no ceremonies, only private dirges and no conclusions, only violent sensations, each separate. Nothing that has been said meets our case. We sit in the Italian room at the National Gallery picking up fragments. I doubt that Titian ever felt this rat gnaw. Painters live lives of methodical absorption, adding stroke to stroke. They are not like poets—scapegoats; they are not chained to the rock. Hence the silence, the sublimity. Yet that crimson must have burnt in Titian’s gizzard. No doubt he rose with the great arms holding the cornucopia, and fell, in that descent. But the silence weighs on me—the perpetual solicitation of the eye. The pressure is intermittent and muffled. I distinguish too little and too vaguely. The bell is pressed and I do not ring or give out irrelevant clamours all jangled. I am titillated inordinately by some splendour; the ruffled crimson against the green lining; the march of pillars; the orange light behind the black, pricked ears of the olive trees. Arrows of sensation strike from my spine, but without order.

“Yet something is added to my interpretation. Something lies deeply buried. For one moment I thought to grasp it. But bury it, bury it; let it breed, hidden in the depths of my mind some day to fructify. After a long lifetime, loosely, in a moment of revelation, I may lay hands on it, but now the idea breaks in my hand. Ideas break a thousand times for once that they globe themselves entire. They break; they fall over me. ‘Line and colours they survive, therefore…’

“I am yawning. I am glutted with sensations. I am exhausted with the strain and the long, long time—twenty-five minutes, half an hour—that I have held myself alone outside the machine. I grow numb; I grow stiff. How shall I break up this numbness which discredits my sympathetic heart? There are others suffering—multitudes of people suffering. Neville suffers. He loved Percival. But I can no longer endure extremities; I want someone with whom to laugh, with whom to yawn, with whom to remember how he scratched his head; someone he was at ease with and liked (not Susan, whom he loved, but Jinny rather). In her room also I could do penance. I could ask, Did he tell you how I refused him when he asked me to go to Hampton Court that day? Those are the thoughts that will wake me leaping in anguish in the middle of the night—the crimes for which one would do penance in all the markets of the world bareheaded; that one did not go to Hampton Court that day.

“But now I want life round me, and books and little ornaments, and the usual sounds of tradesmen calling on which to pillow my head after this exhaustion, and shut my eyes after this revelation. I will go straight, then, down the stairs, and hail the first taxi and drive to Jinny.”

“There is the puddle,” said Rhoda, “and I cannot cross it. I hear the rush of the great grindstone within an inch of my head. Its wind roars in my face. All palpable forms of life have failed me. Unless I can stretch and touch something hard, I shall be blown down the eternal corridors for ever. What, then, can I touch? What brick, what stone? and so draw myself across the enormous gulf into my body safely?

“Now the shadow has fallen and the purple light slants downwards. The figure that was robed in beauty is now clothed in ruin. The figure that stood in the grove where the steep-backed hills come down falls in ruin, as I told them when they said they loved his voice on the stair, and his old shoes and moments of being together.

“Now I will walk down Oxford Street envisaging a world rent by lightning; I will look at oaks cracked asunder and red where the flowering branch has fallen. I will go to Oxford Street and buy stockings for a party. I will do the usual things under the lightning flash. On the bare ground I will pick violets and bind them together and offer them to Percival, something given him by me. Look now at what Percival has given me. Look at the street now that Percival is dead. The houses are lightly founded to be puffed over by a breath of air. Reckless and random the cars race and roar and hunt us to death like bloodhounds. I am alone in a hostile world. The human face is hideous. This is to my liking. I want publicity and violence and to be dashed like a stone on the rocks. I like factory chimneys and cranes and lorries. I like the passing of face and face and face, deformed, indifferent. I am sick of prettiness; I am sick of privacy. I ride rough waters and shall sink with no one to save me.

“Percival, by his death, has made me this present, has revealed this terror, has left me to undergo this humiliation—faces and faces, served out like soup-plates by scullions; coarse, greedy, casual; looking in at shop-windows with pendant parcels; ogling, brushing, destroying everything, leaving even our love impure, touched now by their dirty fingers.

“Here is the shop where they sell stockings. And I could believe that beauty is once more set flowing. Its whisper comes down these aisles, through these laces, breathing among baskets of coloured ribbons. There are then warm hollows grooved in the heart of the uproar; alcoves of silence where we can shelter under the wing of beauty from truth which I desire. Pain is suspended as a girl silently slides open a drawer. And then, she speaks; her voice wakes me. I shoot to the bottom among the weeds and see envy, jealousy, hatred and spite scuttle like crabs over the sand as she speaks. These are our companions. I will pay my bill and take my parcel.

“This is Oxford Street. Here are hate, jealousy, hurry, and indifference frothed into the wild semblance of life. These are our companions. Consider the friends with whom we sit and eat. I think of Louis, reading the sporting column of an evening newspaper, afraid of ridicule; a snob. He says, looking at the people passing, he will shepherd us if we will follow. If we submit he will reduce us to order. Thus he will smooth out the death of Percival to his satisfaction, looking fixedly over the cruet, past the houses at the sky. Bernard, meanwhile, flops red-eyed into some arm-chair. He will have out his notebook; under D, he will enter ‘Phrases to be used on the deaths of friends’. Jinny, pirouetting across the room, will perch on the arm of his chair and ask, ‘Did he love me?’ ‘More than he loved Susan?’ Susan, engaged to her farmer in the country, will stand for a second with the telegram before her, holding a plate; and then, with a kick of her heel, slam to the oven door. Neville, after staring at the window through his tears, will see through his tears, and ask, ‘Who passes the window?’—‘What lovely boy?’ This is my tribute to Percival; withered violets, blackened violets.

“Where shall I go then? To some museum, where they keep rings under glass cases, where there are cabinets, and the dresses that queens have worn? Or shall I go to Hampton Court and look at the red walls and courtyards and the seemliness of herded yew trees making black pyramids symmetrically on the grass among flowers? There shall I recover beauty, and impose order upon my raked, my dishevelled soul? But what can one make in loneliness? Alone I should stand on the empty grass and say, Rooks fly; somebody passes with a bag; there is a gardener with a wheelbarrow. I should stand in a queue and smell sweat, and scent as horrible as sweat; and be hung with other people like a joint of meat among other joints of meat.

“Here is a hall where one pays money and goes in, where one hears music among somnolent people who have come here after lunch on a hot afternoon. We have eaten beef and pudding enough to live for a week without tasting food. Therefore we cluster like maggots on the back of something that will carry us on. Decorous, portly—we have white hair waved under our hats; slim shoes; little bags; clean-shaven cheeks; here and there a military moustache; not a speck of dust has been allowed to settle anywhere on our broadcloth. Swaying and opening programmes, with a few words of greeting to friends, we settle down, like walruses stranded on rocks, like heavy bodies incapable of waddling to the sea, hoping for a wave to lift us, but we are too heavy, and too much dry shingle lies between us and the sea. We lie gorged with food, torpid in the heat. Then, swollen but contained in slippery satin, the sea-green woman comes to our rescue. She sucks in her lips, assumes an air of intensity, inflates herself and hurls herself precisely at the right moment as if she saw an apple and her voice was the arrow into the note, ‘Ah!’

“An axe has split a tree to the core; the core is warm; sound quivers within the bark. ‘Ah!’ cried a woman to her lover, leaning from her window in Venice. ‘Ah, ah!’ she cried, and again she cries ‘Ah!’ She has provided us with a cry. But only a cry. And what is a cry? Then the beetle-shaped men come with their violins; wait; count; nod; down come their bows. And there is ripple and laughter like the dance of olive trees and their myriad-tongued grey leaves when a seafarer, biting a twig between his lips where the many-backed steep hills come down, leaps on shore.

“‘Like’ and ‘like’ and ‘like’—but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing? Now that lightning has gashed the tree and the flowering branch has fallen and Percival, by his death, has made me this gift, let me see the thing. There is a square; there is an oblong. The players take the square and place it upon the oblong. They place it very accurately; they make a perfect dwelling-place. Very little is left outside. The structure is now visible; what is inchoate is here stated; we are not so various or so mean; we have made oblongs and stood them upon squares. This is our triumph; this is our consolation.

“The sweetness of this content overflowing runs down the walls of my mind, and liberates understanding. Wander no more, I say; this is the end. The oblong has been set upon the square; the spiral is on top. We have been hauled over the shingle, down to the sea. The players come again. But they are mopping their faces. They are no longer so spruce or so debonair. I will go. I will set aside this afternoon. I will make a pilgrimage. I will go to Greenwich. I will fling myself fearlessly into trams, into omnibuses. As we lurch down Regent Street, and I am flung upon this woman, upon this man, I am not injured, I am not outraged by the collision. A square stands upon an oblong. Here are mean streets where chaffering goes on in street markets, and every sort of iron rod, bolt and screw is laid out, and people swarm off the pavement, pinching raw meat with thick fingers. The structure is visible. We have made a dwelling-place.

“These, then, are the flowers that grow among the rough grasses of the field which the cows trample, wind-bitten, almost deformed, without fruit or blossom. These are what I bring, torn up by the roots from the pavement of Oxford Street, my penny bunch, my penny bunch of violets. Now from the window of the tram I see masts among chimneys; there is the river; there are ships that sail to India. I will walk by the river. I will pace this embankment, where an old man reads a newspaper in a glass shelter. I will pace this terrace and watch the ships bowling down the tide. A woman walks on deck, with a dog barking round her. Her skirts are blown; her hair is blown; they are going out to sea; they are leaving us; they are vanishing this summer evening. Now I will relinquish; now I will let loose. Now I will at last free the checked, the jerked-back desire to be spent, to be consumed. We will gallop together over desert hills where the swallow dips her wings in dark pools and the pillars stand entire. Into the wave that dashes upon the shore, into the wave that flings its white foam to the uttermost corners of the earth, I throw my violets, my offering to Percival.”

The sun no longer stood in the middle of the sky. Its light slanted, falling obliquely. Here it caught on the edge of a cloud and burnt it into a slice of light, a blazing island on which no foot could rest. Then another cloud was caught in the light and another and another, so that the waves beneath were arrow-struck with fiery feathered darts that shot erratically across the quivering blue.

The topmost leaves of the tree were crisped in the sun. They rustled stiffly in the random breeze. The birds sat still save that they flicked their heads sharply from side to side. Now they paused in their song as if glutted with sound, as if the fullness of midday had gorged them. The dragon-fly poised motionless over a reed, then shot its blue stitch further through the air. The far hum in the distance seemed made of the broken tremor of fine wings dancing up and down on the horizon. The river water held the reeds now fixed as if glass had hardened round them; and then the glass wavered and the reeds swept low. Pondering, sunken headed, the cattle stood in the fields and cumbrously moved one foot and then another. In the bucket near the house the tap stopped dripping, as if the bucket were full, and then the tap dripped one, two, three separate drops in succession.

The windows showed erratically spots of burning fire, the elbow of one branch, and then some tranquil space of pure clarity. The blind hung red at the window’s edge and within the room daggers of light fell upon chairs and tables making cracks across their lacquer and polish. The green pot bulged enormously, with its white window elongated in its side. Light driving darkness before it spilt itself profusely upon the corners and bosses; and yet heaped up darkness in mounds of unmoulded shape.

The waves massed themselves, curved their backs and crashed. Up spurted stones and shingle. They swept round the rocks, and the spray, leaping high, spattered the walls of a cave that had been dry before, and left pools inland, where some fish stranded lashed its tail as the wave drew back.

“I have signed my name,” said Louis, “already twenty times. I, and again I, and again I. Clear, firm, unequivocal, there it stands, my name. Clear-cut and unequivocal am I too. Yet a vast inheritance of experience is packed in me. I have lived thousands of years. I am like a worm that has eaten its way through the wood of a very old oak beam. But now I am compact; now I am gathered together this fine morning.

“The sun shines from a clear sky. But twelve o’clock brings neither rain nor sunshine. It is the hour when Miss Johnson brings me my letters in a wire tray. Upon these white sheets I indent my name. The whisper of leaves, water running down gutters, green depths flecked with dahlias or zinnias; I, now a duke, now Plato, companion of Socrates; the tramp of dark men and yellow men migrating east, west, north and south; the eternal procession, women going with attaché cases down the Strand as they went once with pitchers to the Nile; all the furled and close-packed leaves of my many-folded life are now summed in my name; incised cleanly and barely on the sheet. Now a full-grown man; now upright standing in sun or rain, I must drop heavy as a hatchet and cut the oak with my sheer weight, for if I deviate, glancing this way, or that way, I shall fall like snow and be wasted.

“I am half in love with the typewriter and the telephone. With letters and cables and brief but courteous commands on the telephone to Paris, Berlin, New York, I have fused my many lives into one; I have helped by my assiduity and decision to score those lines on the map there by which the different parts of the world are laced together. I love punctually at ten to come into my room; I love the purple glow of the dark mahogany; I love the table and its sharp edge; and the smooth-running drawers. I love the telephone with its lip stretched to my whisper, and the date on the wall; and the engagement book. Mr. Prentice at four; Mr. Eyres sharp at four-thirty.

“I like to be asked to come to Mr. Burchard’s private room and report on our commitments to China. I hope to inherit an arm-chair and a Turkey carpet. My shoulder is to the wheel; I roll the dark before me, spreading commerce where there was chaos in the far parts of the world. If I press on, from chaos making order, I shall find myself where Chatham stood, and Pitt, Burke and Sir Robert Peel. Thus I expunge certain stains, and erase old defilements; the woman who gave me a flag from the top of the Christmas tree; my accent; beatings and other tortures; the boasting boys; my father, a banker at Brisbane.

“I have read my poet in an eating-house, and, stirring my coffee, listened to the clerks making bets at the little tables, watched the women hesitating at the counter. I said that nothing should be irrelevant, like a piece of brown paper dropped casually on the floor. I said their journeys should have an end in view; they should earn their two pound ten a week at the command of an august master; some hand, some robe, should fold us about in the evening. When I have healed these fractures and comprehended these monstrosities so that they need neither excuse nor apology, which both waste our strength, I shall give back to the street and the eating-shop what they lost when they fell on these hard times and broke on these stony beaches. I shall assemble a few words and forge round us a hammered ring of beaten steel.

“But now I have not a moment to spare. There is no respite here, no shadow made of quivering leaves, or alcove to which one can retreat from the sun, to sit, with a lover, in the cool of the evening. The weight of the world is on our shoulders; its vision is through our eyes; if we blink or look aside, or turn back to finger what Plato said or remember Napoleon and his conquests, we inflict on the world the injury of some obliquity. This is life; Mr. Prentice at four; Mr. Eyres at four-thirty. I like to hear the soft rush of the lift and the thud with which it stops on my landing and the heavy male tread of responsible feet down the corridors. So by dint of our united exertions we send ships to the remotest parts of the globe; replete with lavatories and gymnasiums. The weight of the world is on our shoulders. This is life. If I press on, I shall inherit a chair and a rug; a place in Surrey with glass houses, and some rare conifer, melon or flowering tree which other merchants will envy.

“Yet I still keep my attic room. There I open the usual little book; there I watch the rain glisten on the tiles till they shine like a policeman’s waterproof; there I see the broken windows in poor people’s houses; the lean cats; some slattern squinting in a cracked looking-glass as she arranges her face for the street corner; there Rhoda sometimes comes. For we are lovers.

“Percival has died (he died in Egypt; he died in Greece; all deaths are one death). Susan has children; Neville mounts rapidly to the conspicuous heights. Life passes. The clouds change perpetually over our houses. I do this, do that, and again do this and then that. Meeting and parting, we assemble different forms, make different patterns. But if I do not nail these impressions to the board and out of the many men in me make one; exist here and now and not in streaks and patches, like scattered snow wreaths on far mountains; and ask Miss Johnson as I pass through the office about the movies and take my cup of tea and accept also my favourite biscuit, then I shall fall like snow and be wasted.

“Yet when six o’clock comes and I touch my hat to the commissionaire, being always too effusive in ceremony since I desire so much to be accepted; and struggle, leaning against the wind, buttoned up, with my jaws blue and my eyes running water, I wish that a little typist would cuddle on my knees; I think that my favourite dish is liver and bacon; and so am apt to wander to the river, to the narrow streets where there are frequent public-houses, and the shadows of ships passing at the end of the street, and women fighting. But I say to myself, recovering my sanity, Mr. Prentice at four; Mr. Eyres at four-thirty. The hatchet must fall on the block; the oak must be cleft to the centre. The weight of the world is on my shoulders. Here is the pen and the paper; on the letters in the wire basket I sign my name, I, I, and again I.”

“Summer comes, and winter,” said Susan. “The seasons pass. The pear fills itself and drops from the tree. The dead leaf rests on its edge. But steam has obscured the window. I sit by the fire watching the kettle boil. I see the pear tree through the streaked steam on the window-pane.

“Sleep, sleep, I croon, whether it is summer or winter, May or November. Sleep I sing—I, who am unmelodious and hear no music save rustic music when a dog barks, a bell tinkles, or wheels crunch upon the gravel. I sing my song by the fire like an old shell murmuring on the beach. Sleep, sleep, I say, warning off with my voice all who rattle milk-cans, fire at rooks, shoot rabbits, or in any way bring the shock of destruction near this wicker cradle, laden with soft limbs, curled under a pink coverlet.

“I have lost my indifference, my blank eyes, my pear-shaped eyes that saw to the root. I am no longer January, May or any other season, but am all spun to a fine thread round the cradle, wrapping in a cocoon made of my own blood the delicate limbs of my baby. Sleep, I say, and feel within me uprush some wilder, darker violence, so that I would fell down with one blow any intruder, any snatcher, who should break into this room and wake the sleeper.

“I pad about the house all day long in apron and slippers, like my mother who died of cancer. Whether it is summer, whether it is winter, I no longer know by the moor grass, and the heath flower; only by the steam on the window-pane, or the frost on the window-pane. When the lark peels high his ring of sound and it falls through the air like an apple paring, I stoop; I feed my baby. I, who used to walk through beech woods noting the jay’s feather turning blue as it falls, past the shepherd and the tramp, who stared at the woman squatted beside a tilted cart in a ditch, go from room to room with a duster. Sleep, I say, desiring sleep to fall like a blanket of down and cover these weak limbs; demanding that life shall sheathe its claws and gird its lightning and pass by, making of my own body a hollow, a warm shelter for my child to sleep in. Sleep, I say, sleep. Or I go to the window, I look at the rook’s high nest; and the pear tree. ‘His eyes will see when mine are shut’, I think. ‘I shall go mixed with them beyond my body and shall see India. He will come home, bringing trophies to be laid at my feet. He will increase my possessions.’

“But I never rise at dawn and see the purple drops in the cabbage leaves; the red drops in the roses. I do not watch the setter nose in a circle, or lie at night watching the leaves hide the stars and the stars move and the leaves hang still. The butcher calls; the milk has to be stood under a shade lest it should sour.

“Sleep, I say, sleep, as the kettle boils and its breath comes thicker and thicker issuing in one jet from the spout. So life fills my veins. So life pours through my limbs. So I am driven forward, till I could cry, as I move from dawn to dusk opening and shutting, ‘No more. I am glutted with natural happiness.’ Yet more will come, more children; more cradles, more baskets in the kitchen and hams ripening; and onions glistening; and more beds of lettuce and potatoes. I am blown like a leaf by the gale; now brushing the wet grass, now whirled up. I am glutted with natural happiness; and wish sometimes that the fullness would pass from me and the weight of the sleeping house rise, when we sit reading, and I stay the thread at the eye of my needle. The lamp kindles a fire in the dark pane. A fire burns in the heart of the ivy. I see a lit-up street in the evergreens. I hear traffic in the brush of the wind down the lane, and broken voices, and laughter, and Jinny who cries as the door opens, ‘Come, Come!’

“But no sound breaks the silence of our house, where the fields sigh close to the door. The wind washes through the elm trees; a moth hits the lamp; a cow lows; a crack of sound starts in the rafter, and I push my thread through the needle and murmur, ‘Sleep’.”

“Now is the moment,” said Jinny. “Now we have met, and have come together. Now let us talk, let us tell stories. Who is he? Who is she? I am infinitely curious and do not know what is to come. If you, whom I meet for the first time, were to say to me, ‘The coach starts at four from Piccadilly’, I would not stay to fling a few necessaries in a bandbox, but would come at once.

“Let us sit here under the cut flowers, on the sofa by the picture. Let us decorate our Christmas tree with facts and again with facts. People are so soon gone; let us catch them. That man there, by the cabinet; he lives you say, surrounded by china pots. Break one and you shatter a thousand pounds. And he loved a girl in Rome and she left him. Hence the pots, old junk found in lodging-houses or dug from the desert sands. And since beauty must be broken daily to remain beautiful, and he is static, his life stagnates in a china sea. It is strange though; for once as a young man, he sat on damp ground and drank rum with soldiers.

“One must be quick and add facts deftly, like toys to a tree, fixing them with a twist of the fingers. He stoops, how he stoops, even over an azalea. He stoops over the old woman even, because she wears diamonds in her ears, and, bundling about her estate in a pony carriage, directs who is to be helped, what tree felled, and who turned out to-morrow. (I have lived my life, I must tell you, all these years, and I am now past thirty, perilously, like a mountain goat leaping from crag to crag; I do not settle long anywhere; I do not attach myself to one person in particular; but you will find that if I raise my arm, some figure at once breaks off and will come.) And that man is a judge; and that man is a millionaire, and that man, with the eyeglass, shot his governess through the heart with an arrow when he was ten years old. Afterwards he rode through deserts with despatches, took part in revolutions and now collects materials for a history of his mother’s family, long settled in Norfolk. That little man with a blue chin has a right hand that is withered. But why? We do not know. That woman, you whisper discreetly, with the pearl pagodas hanging from her ears, was the pure flame who lit the life of one of our statesmen; now since his death she sees ghosts, tells fortunes, and has adopted a coffee-coloured youth whom she calls the Messiah. That man with the drooping moustache, like a cavalry officer, lived a life of the utmost debauchery (it is all in some memoir) until one day he met a stranger in a train who converted him between Edinburgh and Carlisle by reading the Bible.

“Thus, in a few seconds, deftly, adroitly, we decipher the hieroglyphs written on other people’s faces. Here, in this room, are the abraded and battered shells cast on the shore. The door goes on opening. The room fills and fills with knowledge, anguish, many kinds of ambition, much indifference, some despair. Between us, you say, we could build cathedrals, dictate policies, condemn men to death, and administer the affairs of several public offices. The common fund of experience is very deep. We have between us scores of children of both sexes, whom we are educating, going to see at school with the measles, and bringing up to inherit our houses. In one way or another we make this day, this Friday, some by going to the Law Courts; others to the city; others to the nursery; others by marching and forming fours. A million hands stitch, raise hods with bricks. The activity is endless. And to-morrow it begins again; to-morrow we make Saturday. Some take train for France; others ship for India. Some will never come into this room again. One may die to-night. Another will beget a child. From us every sort of building, policy, venture, picture, poem, child, factory, will spring. Life comes; life goes; we make life. So you say.

“But we who live in the body see with the body’s imagination things in outline. I see rocks in bright sunshine. I cannot take these facts into some cave and, shading my eyes, grade their yellows, blues, umbers into one substance. I cannot remain seated for long. I must jump up and go. The coach may start from Piccadilly. I drop all these facts—diamonds, withered hands, china pots and the rest of it—as a monkey drops nuts from its naked paws. I cannot tell you if life is this or that. I am going to push out into the heterogeneous crowd. I am going to be buffeted; to be flung up, and flung down, among men, like a ship on the sea.

“For now my body, my companion, which is always sending its signals, the rough black ‘No’, the golden ‘Come’, in rapid running arrows of sensation, beckons. Someone moves. Did I raise my arm? Did I look? Did my yellow scarf with the strawberry spots float and signal? He has broken from the wall. He follows. I am pursued through the forest. All is rapt, all is nocturnal, and the parrots go screaming through the branches. All my senses stand erect. Now I feel the roughness of the fibre of the curtain through which I push; now I feel the cold iron railing and its blistered paint beneath my palm. Now the cool tide of darkness breaks its waters over me. We are out of doors. Night opens; night traversed by wandering moths; night hiding lovers roaming to adventure. I smell roses; I smell violets; I see red and blue just hidden. Now gravel is under my shoes; now grass. Up reel the tall backs of houses guilty with lights. All London is uneasy with flashing lights. Now let us sing our love song—Come, come, come. Now my gold signal is like a dragon-fly flying taut. Jug, jug, jug, I sing like the nightingale whose melody is crowded in the too narrow passage of her throat. Now I hear crash and rending of boughs and the crack of antlers as if the beasts of the forest were all hunting, all rearing high and plunging down among the thorns. One has pierced me. One is driven deep within me.

And velvet flowers and leaves whose coolness has been stood in water wash me round, and sheathe me, embalming me.”

“Why, look,” said Neville, “at the clock ticking on the mantelpiece? Time passes, yes. And we grow old. But to sit with you, alone with you, here in London, in this firelit room, you there, I here, is all. The world ransacked to its uttermost ends, and all its heights stripped and gathered of their flowers, holds no more. Look at the firelight running up and down the gold thread in the curtain. The fruit it circles droops heavy. It falls on the toe of your boot, it gives your face a red rim—I think it is the firelight and not your face; I think those are books against the wall, and that a curtain, and that perhaps an armchair. But when you come everything changes. The cups and saucers changed when you came in this morning. There can be no doubt, I thought, pushing aside the newspaper, that our mean lives, unsightly as they are, put on splendour and have meaning only under the eyes of love.

“I rose. I had done my breakfast. There was the whole day before us, and as it was fine, tender, non-committal, we walked through the Park to the Embankment, along the Strand to St. Paul’s, then to the shop where I bought an umbrella, always talking, and now and then stopping to look. But can this last? I said to myself, by a lion in Trafalgar Square, by the lion seen once and for ever;—so I revisit my past life, scene by scene; there is an elm tree, and there lies Percival. For ever and ever, I swore. Then darted in the usual doubt. I clutched your hand. You left me. The descent into the Tube was like death. We were cut up, we were dissevered by all those faces and the hollow wind that seemed to roar down there over desert boulders. I sat staring in my own room. By five I knew that you were faithless. I snatched the telephone and the buzz, buzz, buzz of its stupid voice in your empty room battered my heart down, when the door opened and there you stood. That was the most perfect of our meetings. But these meetings, these partings, finally destroy us.

“Now this room seems to me central, something scooped out of the eternal night. Outside lines twist and intersect, but round us, wrapping us about. Here we are centred. Here we can be silent, or speak without raising our voices. Did you notice that and then that? we say. He said that, meaning…. She hesitated, and I believe suspected. Anyhow, I heard voices, a sob on the stair late at night. It is the end of their relationship. Thus we spin round us infinitely fine filaments and construct a system. Plato and Shakespeare are included, also quite obscure people, people of no importance whatsoever. I hate men who wear crucifixes on the left side of their waistcoats. I hate ceremonies and lamentations and the sad figure of Christ trembling beside another trembling and sad figure. Also the pomp and the indifference and the emphasis, always on the wrong place, of people holding forth under chandeliers in full evening dress, wearing stars and decorations. Some spray in a hedge, though, or a sunset over a flat winter field, or again the way some old woman sits, arms akimbo, in an omnibus with a basket—those we point at for the other to look at. It is so vast an alleviation to be able to point for another to look at. And then not to talk. To follow the dark paths of the mind and enter the past, to visit books, to brush aside their branches and break off some fruit. And you take it and marvel, as I take the careless movements of your body and marvel at its ease, its power—how you fling open windows and are dexterous with your hands. For alas! my mind is a little impeded, it soon tires; I fall damp, perhaps disgusting, at the goal.

“Alas! I could not ride about India in a sun helmet and return to a bungalow. I cannot tumble, as you do, like half-naked boys on the deck of a ship, squirting each other with hose-pipes. I want this fire, I want this chair. I want someone to sit beside after the day’s pursuit and all its anguish, after its listenings, and its waitings, and its suspicions. After quarrelling and reconciliation I need privacy—to be alone with you, to set this hubbub in order. For I am as neat as a cat in my habits. We must oppose the waste and deformity of the world, its crowds eddying round and round disgorged and trampling. One must slip paper-knives, even, exactly through the pages of novels, and tie up packets of letters neatly with green silk, and brush up the cinders with a hearth broom. Everything must be done to rebuke the horror of deformity. Let us read writers of Roman severity and virtue; let us seek perfection through the sand. Yes, but I love to slip the virtue and severity of the noble Romans under the grey light of your eyes, and dancing grasses and summer breezes and the laughter and shouts of boys at play—of naked cabin-boys squirting each other with hose-pipes on the decks of ships. Hence I am not a disinterested seeker, like Louis, after perfection through the sand. Colours always stain the page; clouds pass over it. And the poem, I think, is only your voice speaking. Alcibiades, Ajax, Hector and Percival are also you. They loved riding, they risked their lives wantonly, they were not great readers either. But you are not Ajax or Percival. They did not wrinkle their noses and scratch their foreheads with your precise gesture. You are you. That is what consoles me for the lack of many things—I am ugly, I am weak—and the depravity of the world, and the flight of youth and Percival’s death, and bitterness and rancour and envies innumerable.

“But if one day you do not come after breakfast, if one day I see you in some looking-glass perhaps looking after another, if the telephone buzzes and buzzes in your empty room, I shall then, after unspeakable anguish, I shall then—for there is no end to the folly of the human heart—seek another, find another, you. Meanwhile, let us abolish the ticking of time’s clock with one blow. Come closer.”

The sun had now sunk lower in the sky. The islands of cloud had gained in density and drew themselves across the sun so that the rocks went suddenly black, and the trembling sea holly lost its blue and turned silver, and shadows were blown like grey cloths over the sea. The waves no longer visited the further pools or reached the dotted black line which lay irregularly marked upon the beach. The sand was pearl white, smoothed and shining.

Birds swooped and circled high up in the air. Some raced in the furrows of the wind and turned and sliced through them as if they were one body cut into a thousand shreds. Birds fell like a net descending on the tree-tops. Here one bird taking its way alone made wing for the marsh and sat solitary on a white stake, opening its wings and shutting them.

Some petals had fallen in the garden. They lay shell-shaped on the earth. The dead leaf no longer stood upon its edge, but had been blown, now running, now pausing, against some stalk. Through all the flowers the same wave of light passed in a sudden flaunt and flash as if a fin cut the green glass of a lake. Now and again some level and masterly blast blew the multitudinous leaves up and down and then, as the wind flagged, each blade regained its identity. The flowers, burning their bright discs in the sun, flung aside the sunlight as the wind tossed them, and then some heads too heavy to rise again drooped slightly.

The afternoon sun warmed the fields, poured blue into the shadows and reddened the corn. A deep varnish was laid like a lacquer over the fields. A cart, a horse, a flock of rooks—whatever moved in it was rolled round in gold. If a cow moved a leg it stirred ripples of red gold, and its horns seemed lined with light. Sprays of flaxen-haired corn lay on the hedges, brushed from the shaggy carts that came up from the meadows short legged and primeval looking. The round-headed clouds never dwindled as they bowled along, but kept every atom of their rotundity. Now, as they passed, they caught a whole village in the fling of their net and, passing, let it fly free again. Far away on the horizon, among the million grains of blue-grey dust, burnt one pane, or stood the single line of one steeple or one tree.

The red curtains and the white blinds blew in and out, flapping against the edge of the window, and the light which entered by flaps and breadths unequally had in it some brown tinge, and some abandonment as it blew through the blowing curtains in gusts. Here it browned a cabinet, there reddened a chair, here it made the window waver in the side of the green jar.

All for a moment wavered and bent in uncertainty and ambiguity, as if a great moth sailing through the room had shadowed the immense solidity of chairs and tables with floating wings.

“And time,” said Bernard, “lets fall its drop. The drop that has formed on the roof of the soul falls. On the roof of my mind time, forming, lets fall its drop. Last week, as I stood shaving, the drop fell. I, standing with my razor in my hand, became suddenly aware of the merely habitual nature of my action (this is the drop forming) and congratulated my hands, ironically, for keeping at it. Shave, shave, shave, I said. Go on shaving. The drop fell. All through the day’s work, at intervals, my mind went to an empty place, saying, ‘What is lost? What is over?’ And ‘Over and done with,’ I muttered, ‘over and done with’, solacing myself with words. People noticed the vacuity of my face and the aimlessness of my conversation. The last words of my sentence tailed away. And as I buttoned on my coat to go home I said more dramatically, ‘I have lost my youth’.

“It is curious how, at every crisis, some phrase which does not fit insists upon coming to the rescue—the penalty of living in an old civilisation with a notebook. This drop falling has nothing to do with losing my youth. This drop falling is time tapering to a point. Time, which is a sunny pasture covered with a dancing light, time, which is widespread as a field at midday, becomes pendant. Time tapers to a point. As a drop falls from a glass heavy with some sediment, time falls. These are the true cycles, these are the true events. Then as if all the luminosity of the atmosphere were withdrawn I see to the bare bottom. I see what habit covers. I lie sluggish in bed for days. I dine out and gape like a codfish. I do not trouble to finish my sentences, and my actions, usually so uncertain, acquire a mechanical precision. On this occasion, passing an office, I went in and bought, with all the composure of a mechanical figure, a ticket for Rome.

“Now I sit on a stone seat in these gardens surveying the eternal city, and the little man who was shaving in London five days ago looks already like a heap of old clothes. London has also crumbled. London consists of fallen factories and a few gasometers. At the same time I am not involved in this pageantry. I see the violet-sashed priests and the picturesque nursemaids; I notice externals only. I sit here like a convalescent, like a very simple man who knows only words of one syllable. ‘The sun is hot’, I say. ‘The wind is cold.’ I feel myself carried round like an insect on top of the earth and could swear that, sitting here, I feel its hardness, its turning movement. I have no desire to go the opposite way from the earth. Could I prolong this sense another six inches I have a foreboding that I should touch some queer territory. But I have a very limited proboscis. I never wish to prolong these states of detachment; I dislike them; I also despise them. I do not wish to be a man who sits for fifty years on the same spot thinking of his navel. I wish to be harnessed to a cart, a vegetable-cart that rattles over the cobbles.

“The truth is that I am not one of those who find their satisfaction in one person, or in infinity. The private room bores me, also the sky. My being only glitters when all its facets are exposed to many people. Let them fail and I am full of holes, dwindling like burnt paper. Oh, Mrs. Moffat, Mrs. Moffat, I say, come and sweep it all up. Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death—Percival—others through sheer inability to cross the street. I am not so gifted as at one time seemed likely. Certain things lie beyond my scope. I shall never understand the harder problems of philosophy. Rome is the limit of my travelling. As I drop asleep at night it strikes me sometimes with a pang that I shall never see savages in Tahiti spearing fish by the light of a blazing cresset, or a lion spring in the jungle, or a naked man eating raw flesh. Nor shall I learn Russian or read the Vedas. I shall never again walk bang into the pillar-box. (But still a few stars fall through my night, beautifully, from the violence of that concussion.) But as I think, truth has come nearer. For many years I crooned complacently, ‘My children … my wife … my house … my dog’. As I let myself in with my latch-key I would go through that familiar ritual and wrap myself in those warm coverings. Now that lovely veil has fallen. I do not want possessions now. (Note: an Italian washer-woman stands on the same rung of physical refinement as the daughter of an English duke.)

“But let me consider. The drop falls; another stage has been reached. Stage upon stage. And why should there be an end of stages? and where do they lead? To what conclusion? For they come wearing robes of solemnity. In these dilemmas the devout consult those violet-sashed and sensual-looking gentry who are trooping past me. But for ourselves, we resent teachers. Let a man get up and say, ‘Behold, this is the truth’, and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say. So Neville, at school, in the dim chapel, raged at the sight of the doctor’s crucifix. I, who am always distracted, whether by a cat or by a bee buzzing round the bouquet that Lady Hampden keeps so diligently pressed to her nose, at once make up a story and so obliterate the angles of the crucifix. I have made up thousands of stories; I have filled innumerable notebooks with phrases to be used when I have found the true story, the one story to which all these phrases refer. But I have never yet found that story. And I begin to ask, Are there stories?

“Look now from this terrace at the swarming population beneath. Look at the general activity and clamour. That man is in difficulties with his mule. Half a dozen good-natured loafers offer their services. Others pass by without looking. They have as many interests as there are threads in a skein. Look at the sweep of the sky, bowled over by round white clouds. Imagine the leagues of level land and the aqueducts and the broken Roman pavement and the tombstones in the Campagna, and beyond the Campagna, the sea, then again more land, then the sea. I could break off any detail in all that prospect—say the mule-cart—and describe it with the greatest ease. But why describe a man in trouble with his mule? Again, I could invent stories about that girl coming up the steps. ‘She met him under the dark archway…. “It is over”, he said, turning from the cage where the china parrot hangs.’ Or simply, ‘That was all’. But why impose my arbitrary design? Why stress this and shape that and twist up little figures like the toys men sell in trays in the street? Why select this, out of all that—one detail?

“Here am I shedding one of my life-skins, and all they will say is, ‘Bernard is spending ten days in Rome’. Here am I marching up and down this terrace alone, unoriented. But observe how dots and dashes are beginning, as I walk, to run themselves into continuous lines, how things are losing the bald, the separate identity that they had as I walked up those steps. The great red pot is now a reddish streak in a wave of yellowish green. The world is beginning to move past me like the banks of a hedge when the train starts, like the waves of the sea when a steamer moves. I am moving too, am becoming involved in the general sequence when one thing follows another and it seems inevitable that the tree should come, then the telegraph-pole, then the break in the hedge. And as I move, surrounded, included and taking part, the usual phrases begin to bubble up, and I wish to free these bubbles from the trap-door in my head, and direct my steps therefore towards that man, the back of whose head is half familiar to me. We were together at school. We shall undoubtedly meet. We shall certainly lunch together. We shall talk. But wait, one moment wait.

“These moments of escape are not to be despised. They come too seldom. Tahiti becomes possible. Leaning over this parapet I see far out a waste of water. A fin turns. This bare visual impression is unattached to any line of reason, it springs up as one might see the fin of a porpoise on the horizon. Visual impressions often communicate thus briefly statements that we shall in time to come uncover and coax into words. I note under F., therefore, ‘Fin in a waste of waters’. I, who am perpetually making notes in the margin of my mind for some final statement, make this mark, waiting for some winter’s evening.

“Now I shall go and lunch somewhere, I shall hold my glass up, I shall look through the wine, I shall observe with more than my usual detachment, and when a pretty woman enters the restaurant and comes down the room between the tables I shall say to myself, ‘Look where she comes against a waste of waters’. A meaningless observation, but to me, solemn, slate-coloured, with a fatal sound of ruining worlds and waters falling to destruction.

“So, Bernard (I recall you, you the usual partner in my enterprises), let us begin this new chapter, and observe the formation of this new, this unknown, strange, altogether unidentified and terrifying experience—the new drop—which is about to shape itself. Larpent is that man’s name.”

“In this hot afternoon,” said Susan, “here in this garden, here in this field where I walk with my son, I have reached the summit of my desires. The hinge of the gate is rusty; he heaves it open. The violent passions of childhood, my tears in the garden when Jinny kissed Louis, my rage in the schoolroom, which smelt of pine, my loneliness in foreign places, when the mules came clattering in on their pointed hoofs and the Italian women chattered at the fountain, shawled, with carnations twisted in their hair, are rewarded by security, possession, familiarity. I have had peaceful, productive years. I possess all I see. I have grown trees from the seed. I have made ponds in which goldfish hide under the broad-leaved lilies. I have netted over strawberry beds and lettuce beds, and stitched the pears and the plums into white bags to keep them safe from the wasps. I have seen my sons and daughters, once netted over like fruit in their cots, break the meshes and walk with me, taller than I am, casting shadows on the grass.

“I am fenced in, planted here like one of my own trees. I say, ‘My son’, I say, ‘My daughter’, and even the ironmonger looking up from his counter strewn with nails, paint and wire-fencing respects the shabby car at the door with its butterfly nets, pads and bee-hives. We hang mistletoe over the clock at Christmas, weigh our blackberries and mushrooms, count out jam-pots, and stand year by year to be measured against the shutter in the drawing-room window. I also make wreaths of white flowers, twisting silver-leaved plants among them for the dead, attaching my card with sorrow for the dead shepherd, with sympathy for the wife of the dead carter; and sit by the beds of dying women, who murmur their last terrors, who clutch my hand; frequenting rooms intolerable except to one born as I was and early acquainted with the farmyard and the dung-heap and the hens straying in and out, and the mother with two rooms and growing children. I have seen the windows run with heat, I have smelt the sink.

“I ask now, standing with my scissors among my flowers, Where can the shadow enter? What shock can loosen my laboriously gathered, relentlessly pressed down life? Yet sometimes I am sick of natural happiness, and fruit growing, and children scattering the house with oars, guns, skulls, books won for prizes and other trophies. I am sick of the body, I am sick of my own craft, industry and cunning, of the unscrupulous ways of the mother who protects, who collects under her jealous eyes at one long table her own children, always her own.

“It is when spring comes, cold, showery, with sudden yellow flowers—then as I look at the meat under the blue shade and press the heavy silver bags of tea, of sultanas, I remember how the sun rose, and the swallows skimmed the grass, and phrases that Bernard made when we were children, and the leaves shook over us, many-folded, very light, breaking the blue of the sky, scattering wandering lights upon the skeleton roots of the beech trees where I sat, sobbing. The pigeon rose. I jumped up and ran after the words that trailed like the dangling string from an air ball, up and up, from branch to branch escaping. Then like a cracked bowl the fixity of my morning broke, and putting down the bag of flour I thought, Life stands round me like glass round the imprisoned reed.

“I hold scissors and snip off hollyhocks, who went to Elvedon and trod on rotten oak-apples, and saw the lady writing and the gardeners with their great brooms. We ran back panting lest we should be shot and nailed like stoats to the wall. Now I measure, I preserve. At night I sit in the arm-chair and stretch my arm for my sewing; and hear my husband snore; and look up when the light from a passing car dazzles the windows and feel the waves of my life tossed, broken, round me who am rooted; and hear cries, and see other’s lives eddying like straws round the piers of a bridge while I push my needle in and out and draw my thread through the calico.

“I think sometimes of Percival who loved me. He rode and fell in India. I think sometimes of Rhoda. Uneasy cries wake me at dead of night. But for the most part I walk content with my sons. I cut the dead petals from hollyhocks. Rather squat, grey before my time, but with clear eyes, pear-shaped eyes, I pace my fields.”

“Here I stand,” said Jinny, “in the Tube station where everything that is desirable meets—Piccadilly South Side, Piccadilly North Side, Regent Street and the Haymarket. I stand for a moment under the pavement in the heart of London. Innumerable wheels rush and feet press just over my head. The great avenues of civilisation meet here and strike this way and that. I am in the heart of life. But look—there is my body in that looking glass. How solitary, how shrunk, how aged! I am no longer young. I am no longer part of the procession. Millions descend those stairs in a terrible descent. Great wheels churn inexorably urging them downwards. Millions have died. Percival died. I still move. I still live. But who will come if I signal?

“Little animal that I am, sucking my flanks in and out with fear, I stand here, palpitating, trembling. But I will not be afraid. I will bring the whip down on my flanks. I am not a whimpering little animal making for the shadow. It was only for a moment, catching sight of myself before I had time to prepare myself as I always prepare myself for the sight of myself, that I quailed. It is true; I am not young—I shall soon raise my arm in vain and my scarf will fall to my side without having signalled. I shall not hear the sudden sigh in the night and feel through the dark someone coming. There will be no reflections in window-panes in dark tunnels. I shall look into faces, and I shall see them seek some other face. I admit, for one moment the soundless flight of upright bodies down the moving stairs like the pinioned and terrible descent of some army of the dead downwards and the churning of the great engines remorselessly forwarding us, all of us, onwards, made me cower and run for shelter.

“But now I swear, making deliberately in front of the glass those slight preparations that equip me, I will not be afraid. Think of the superb omnibuses, red and yellow, stopping and starting, punctually in order. Think of the powerful and beautiful cars that now slow to a foot’s pace and now shoot forward; think of men, think of women, equipped, prepared, driving onward. This is the triumphant procession; this is the army of victory with banners and brass eagles and heads crowned with laurel-leaves won in battle. They are better than savages in loin-cloths, and women whose hair is dank, whose long breasts sag, with children tugging at their long breasts. These broad thoroughfares—Piccadilly South, Piccadilly North, Regent Street and the Haymarket—are sanded paths of victory driven through the jungle. I too, with my little patent-leather shoes, my handkerchief that is but a film of gauze, my reddened lips and my finely pencilled eyebrows, march to victory with the band.

“Look how they show off clothes here even under ground in a perpetual radiance. They will not let the earth even lie wormy and sodden. There are gauzes and silks illumined in glass cases and underclothes trimmed with a million close stitches of fine embroidery. Crimson, green, violet, they are dyed all colours. Think how they organise, roll out, smooth, dip in dyes, and drive tunnels blasting the rock. Lifts rise and fall; trains stop, trains start as regularly as the waves of the sea. This is what has my adhesion. I am a native of this world, I follow its banners. How could I run for shelter when they are so magnificently adventurous, daring, curious, too, and strong enough in the midst of effort to pause and scrawl with a free hand a joke upon the wall? Therefore I will powder my face and redden my lips. I will make the angle of my eyebrows sharper than usual. I will rise to the surface, standing erect with the others in Piccadilly Circus. I will sign with a sharp gesture to a cab whose driver will signify by some indescribable alacrity his understanding of my signals. For I still excite eagerness. I still feel the bowing of men in the street like the silent stoop of the corn when the light wind blows, ruffling it red.

“I will drive to my own house. I will fill the vases with lavish, with luxurious, with extravagant flowers nodding in great bunches. I will place one chair there, another here. I will put ready cigarettes, glasses and some gaily covered new unread book in case Bernard comes, or Neville or Louis. But perhaps it will not be Bernard, Neville or Louis, but somebody new, somebody unknown, somebody I passed on a staircase and, just turning as we passed, I murmured, ‘Come’. He will come this afternoon; somebody I do not know, somebody new. Let the silent army of the dead descend. I march forward.”

“I no longer need a room now,” said Neville, “or walls and firelight. I am no longer young. I pass Jinny’s house without envy, and smile at the young man who arranges his tie a little nervously on the door-step. Let the dapper young man ring the bell; let him find her. I shall find her if I want her; if not, I pass on. The old corrosion has lost its bite—envy, intrigue and bitterness have been washed out. We have lost our glory too. When we were young we sat anywhere, on bare benches in draughty halls with the doors always banging. We tumbled about half naked like boys on the deck of a ship squirting each other with hose-pipes. Now I could swear that I like people pouring profusely out of the Tube when the day’s work is done, unanimous, indiscriminate, uncounted. I have picked my own fruit. I look dispassionately.

“After all, we are not responsible. We are not judges. We are not called upon to torture our fellows with thumbscrews and irons; we are not called upon to mount pulpits and lecture them on pale Sunday afternoons. It is better to look at a rose, or to read Shakespeare as I read him here in Shaftesbury Avenue. Here’s the fool, here’s the villain, here in a car comes Cleopatra, burning on her barge. Here are figures of the damned too, noseless men by the police-court wall, standing with their feet in fire, howling. This is poetry if we do not write it. They act their parts infallibly, and almost before they open their lips I know what they are going to say, and wait the divine moment when they speak the word that must have been written. If it were only for the sake of the play, I could walk Shaftesbury Avenue for ever.

“Then coming from the street, entering some room, there are people talking, or hardly troubling to talk. He says, she says, somebody else says things have been said so often that one word is now enough to lift a whole weight. Argument, laughter, old grievances—they fall through the air, thickening it. I take a book and read half a page of anything. They have not mended the spout of the teapot yet. The child dances, dressed in her mother’s clothes.

“But then Rhoda, or it may be Louis, some fasting and anguished spirit, passes through and out again. They want a plot, do they? They want a reason? It is not enough for them, this ordinary scene. It is not enough to wait for the thing to be said as if it were written; to see the sentence lay its dab of clay precisely on the right place, making character; to perceive, suddenly, some group in outline against the sky. Yet if they want violence, I have seen death and murder and suicide all in one room. One comes in, one goes out. There are sobs on the staircase. I have heard threads broken and knots tied and the quiet stitching of white cambric going on and on on the knees of a woman. Why ask, like Louis, for a reason, or fly like Rhoda to some far grove and part the leaves of the laurels and look for statues? They say that one must beat one’s wings against the storm in the belief that beyond this welter the sun shines; the sun falls sheer into pools that are fledged with willows. (Here it is November; the poor hold out matchboxes in wind-bitten fingers.) They say truth is to be found there entire, and virtue, that shuffles along here, down blind alleys, is to be had there perfect. Rhoda flies with her neck outstretched and blind fanatic eyes, past us. Louis, now so opulent, goes to his attic window among the blistered roofs and gazes where she has vanished, but must sit down in his office among the typewriters and the telephone and work it all out for our instruction, for our regeneration, and the reform of an unborn world.

“But now in this room, which I enter without knocking, things are said as if they had been written. I go to the book-case. If I choose, I read half a page of anything. I need not speak. But I listen. I am marvellously on the alert. Certainly, one cannot read this poem without effort. The page is often corrupt and mud-stained, and torn and stuck together with faded leaves, with scraps of verbena or geranium. To read this poem one must have myriad eyes, like one of those lamps that turn on slabs of racing water at midnight in the Atlantic, when perhaps only a spray of seaweed pricks the surface, or suddenly the waves gape and up shoulders a monster. One must put aside antipathies and jealousies and not interrupt. One must have patience and infinite care and let the light sound, whether of spiders’ delicate feet on a leaf or the chuckle of water in some irrelevant drain-pipe, unfold too. Nothing is to be rejected in fear or horror. The poet who has written this page (what I read with people talking) has withdrawn. There are no commas or semicolons. The lines do not run in convenient lengths. Much is sheer nonsense. One must be sceptical, but throw caution to the winds and when the door opens accept absolutely. Also sometimes weep; also cut away ruthlessly with a slice of the blade soot, bark, hard accretions of all sorts. And so (while they talk) let down one’s net deeper and deeper and gently draw in and bring to the surface what he said and she said and make poetry.

“Now I have listened to them talking. They have gone now. I am alone. I could be content to watch the fire burn for ever, like a dome, like a furnace; now some spike of wood takes the look of a scaffold, or pit, or happy valley; now it is a serpent curled crimson with white scales. The fruit on the curtain swells beneath the parrot’s beak. Cheep, cheep, creaks the fire, like the cheep of insects in the middle of a forest. Cheep, cheep, it clicks while out there the branches thrash the air, and now, like a volley of shot, a tree falls. These are the sounds of a London night. Then I hear the one sound I wait for. Up and up it comes, approaches, hesitates, stops at my door. I cry, ‘Come in. Sit by me. Sit on the edge of the chair.’ Swept away by the old hallucination, I cry, ‘Come closer, closer’.”

“I come back from the office,” said Louis. “I hang my coat here, place my stick there—I like to fancy that Richelieu walked with such a cane. Thus I divest myself of my authority. I have been sitting at the right hand of a director at a varnished table. The maps of our successful undertakings confront us on the wall. We have laced the world together with our ships. The globe is strung with our lines. I am immensely respectable. All the young ladies in the office acknowledge my entrance. I can dine where I like now, and without vanity may suppose that I shall soon acquire a house in Surrey, two cars, a conservatory and some rare species of melon. But I still return, I still come back to my attic, hang up my hat and resume in solitude that curious attempt which I have made since I brought down my fist on my master’s grained oak door. I open a little book. I read one poem. One poem is enough.

O western wind …

O western wind, you are at enmity with my mahogany table and spats, and also, alas, with the vulgarity of my mistress, the little actress, who has never been able to speak English correctly—

O western wind, when wilt thou blow …

Rhoda, with her intense abstraction, with her unseeing eyes the colour of snail’s flesh, does not destroy you, western wind, whether she comes at midnight when the stars blaze or at the most prosaic hour of midday. She stands at the window and looks at the chimney-pots and the broken windows in the houses of poor people—

O western wind, when wilt thou blow …

“My task, my burden, has always been greater than other people’s. A pyramid has been set on my shoulders. I have tried to do a colossal labour. I have driven a violent, an unruly, a vicious team. With my Australian accent I have sat in eating-shops and tried to make the clerks accept me, yet never forgotten my solemn and severe convictions and the discrepancies and incoherences that must be resolved. As a boy I dreamt of the Nile, was reluctant to awake, yet brought down my fist on the grained oak door. It would have been happier to have been born without a destiny, like Susan, like Percival, whom I most admire.

O western wind, when wilt thou blow,

That the small rain down can rain?

“Life has been a terrible affair for me. I am like some vast sucker, some glutinous, some adhesive, some insatiable mouth. I have tried to draw from the living flesh the stone lodged at the centre. I have known little natural happiness, though I chose my mistress in order that, with her cockney accent, she might make me feel at my ease. But she only tumbled the floor with dirty under-linen, and the charwoman and the shop-boys called after me a dozen times a day, mocking my prim and supercilious gait.

O western wind, when wilt thou blow,

That the small rain down can rain?

“What has my destiny been, the sharp-pointed pyramid that has pressed on my ribs all these years? That I remember the Nile and the women carrying pitchers on their heads; that I feel myself woven in and out of the long summers and winters that have made the corn flow and have frozen the streams. I am not a single and passing being. My life is not a moment’s bright spark like that on the surface of a diamond. I go beneath ground tortuously, as if a warder carried a lamp from cell to cell. My destiny has been that I remember and must weave together, must plait into one cable the many threads, the thin, the thick, the broken, the enduring of our long history, of our tumultuous and varied day. There is always more to be understood; a discord to be listened for; a falsity to be reprimanded. Broken and soot-stained are these roofs with their chimney cowls, their loose slates, their slinking cats and attic windows. I pick my way over broken glass, among blistered tiles, and see only vile and famished faces.

“Let us suppose that I make reason of it all—one poem on a page, and then die. I can assure you it will not be unwillingly. Percival died. Rhoda left me. But I shall live to be gaunt and sere, to tap my way, much respected, with my gold-headed cane along the pavements of the city. Perhaps I shall never die, shall never attain even that continuity and permanence—

O western wind, when wilt thou blow,

That the small rain down can rain?

“Percival was flowering with green leaves and was laid in the earth with all his branches still sighing in the summer wind. Rhoda, with whom I shared silence when the others spoke, she who hung back and turned aside when the herd assembled and galloped with orderly, sleek backs over the rich pastures, has gone now like the desert heat. When the sun blisters the roofs of the city I think of her; when the dry leaves patter to the ground; when the old men come with pointed sticks and pierce little bits of paper as we pierced her—

O western wind, when wilt thou blow,

That the small rain down can rain?

Christ, that my love were in my arms,

And I in my bed again!

I return now to my book; I return now to my attempt.”

“Oh, life, how I have dreaded you,” said Rhoda, “oh, human beings, how I have hated you! How you have nudged, how you have interrupted, how hideous you have looked in Oxford Street, how squalid sitting opposite each other staring in the Tube! Now as I climb this mountain, from the top of which I shall see Africa, my mind is printed with brown-paper parcels and your faces. I have been stained by you and corrupted. You smelt so unpleasant too, lining up outside doors to buy tickets. All were dressed in indeterminate shades of grey and brown, never even a blue feather pinned to a hat. None had the courage to be one thing rather than another. What dissolution of the soul you demanded in order to get through one day, what lies, bowings, scrapings, fluency and servility! How you chained me to one spot, one hour, one chair, and sat yourselves down opposite! How you snatched from me the white spaces that lie between hour and hour and rolled them into dirty pellets and tossed them into the waste-paper basket with your greasy paws. Yet those were my life.

“But I yielded. Sneers and yawns were covered with my hand. I did not go out into the street and break a bottle in the gutter as a sign of rage. Trembling with ardour, I pretended that I was not surprised. What you did, I did. If Susan and Jinny pulled up their stockings like that, I pulled mine up like that also. So terrible was life that I held up shade after shade. Look at life through this, look at life through that; let there be rose leaves, let there be vine leaves—I covered the whole street, Oxford Street, Piccadilly Circus, with the blaze and ripple of my mind, with vine leaves and rose leaves. There were boxes too, standing in the passage when the school broke up. I stole secretly to read the labels and dream of names and faces. Harrogate, perhaps, Edinburgh, perhaps, was ruffled with golden glory where some girl whose name I forget stood on the pavement. But it was the name only. I left Louis; I feared embraces. With fleeces, with vestments, I have tried to cover the blue-black blade. I implored day to break into night. I have longed to see the cupboard dwindle, to feel the bed soften, to float suspended, to perceive lengthened trees, lengthened faces, a green bank on a moor and two figures in distress saying good-bye. I flung words in fans like those the sower throws over the ploughed fields when the earth is bare. I desired always to stretch the night and fill it fuller and fuller with dreams.

“Then in some Hall I parted the boughs of music and saw the house we have made; the square stood upon the oblong. ‘The house which contains all’, I said, lurching against people’s shoulders in an omnibus after Percival died; yet I went to Greenwich. Walking on the embankment, I prayed that I might thunder for ever on the verge of the world where there is no vegetation, but here and there a marble pillar. I threw my bunch into the spreading wave. I said, ‘Consume me, carry me to the furthest limit’. The wave has broken; the bunch is withered. I seldom think of Percival now.

“Now I climb this Spanish hill; and I will suppose that this mule-back is my bed and that I lie dying. There is only a thin sheet between me now and the infinite depths. The lumps in the mattress soften beneath me. We stumble up—we stumble on. My path has been up and up, towards some solitary tree with a pool beside it on the very top. I have sliced the waters of beauty in the evening when the hills close themselves like birds wings folded. I have picked sometimes a red carnation, and wisps of hay. I have sunk alone on the turf and fingered some old bone and thought: When the wind stoops to brush this height, may there be nothing found but a pinch of dust.

“The mule stumbles up and on. The ridge of the hill rises like mist, but from the top I shall see Africa. Now the bed gives under me. The sheets spotted with yellow holes let me fall through. The good woman with a face like a white horse at the end of the bed makes a valedictory movement and turns to go. Who then comes with me? Flowers only, the cowbind and the moonlight-coloured May. Gathering them loosely in a sheaf I made of them a garland and gave them—Oh, to whom? We launch out now over the precipice. Beneath us lie the lights of the herring fleet. The cliffs vanish. Rippling small, rippling grey, innumerable waves spread beneath us. I touch nothing. I see nothing. We may sink and settle on the waves. The sea will drum in my ears. The white petals will be darkened with sea water. They will float for a moment and then sink. Rolling me over the waves will shoulder me under. Everything falls in a tremendous shower, dissolving me.

“Yet that tree has bristling branches; that is the hard line of a cottage roof. Those bladder shapes painted red and yellow are faces. Putting my foot to the ground I step gingerly and press my hand against the hard door of a Spanish inn.”

The sun was sinking. The hard stone of the day was cracked and light poured through its splinters. Red and gold shot through the waves, in rapid running arrows, feathered with darkness. Erratically rays of light flashed and wandered, like signals from sunken islands, or darts shot through laurel groves by shameless, laughing boys. But the waves, as they neared the shore, were robbed of light, and fell in one long concussion, like a wall falling, a wall of grey stone, unpierced by any chink of light.

A breeze rose; a shiver ran through the leaves; and thus stirred they lost their brown density and became grey or white as the tree shifted its mass, winked and lost its domed uniformity. The hawk poised on the topmost branch flicked its eyelids and rose and sailed and soared far away, The wild plover cried in the marshes, evading, circling, and crying further off in loneliness. The smoke of trains and chimneys was stretched and torn and became part of the fleecy canopy that hung over the sea and the fields.

Now the corn was cut. Now only a brisk stubble was left of all its flowing and waving. Slowly a great owl launched itself from the elm tree and swung and rose, as if on a line that dipped, to the height of the cedar. On the hills the slow shadows now broadened, now shrank, as they passed over. The pool on the top of the moor lay blank. No furry face looked there, or hoof splashed, or hot muzzle seethed in the water. A bird, perched on an ash-coloured twig, sipped a beak full of cold water. There was no sound of cropping, and no sound of wheels, but only the sudden roar of the wind letting its sails fill and brushing the tops of the grasses. One bone lay rain-pocked and sun-bleached till it shone like a twig that the sea has polished. The tree, that had burnt foxy red in spring and in midsummer bent pliant leaves to the south wind, was now black as iron, and as bare.

The land was so distant that no shining roof or glittering window could be any longer seen. The tremendous weight of the shadowed earth had engulfed such frail fetters, such snail-shell encumbrances. Now there was only the liquid shadow of the cloud, the buffeting of the rain, a single darting spear of sunshine, or the sudden bruise of the rainstorm. Solitary trees marked distant hills like obelisks.

The evening sun, whose heat had gone out of it and whose burning spot of intensity had been diffused, made chairs and tables mellower and inlaid them with lozenges of brown and yellow. Lined with shadows their weight seemed more ponderous, as if colour, tilted, had run to one side. Here lay knife, fork and glass, but lengthened, swollen, and made portentous. Rimmed in a gold circle the looking-glass held the scene immobile as if everlasting in its eye.

Meanwhile the shadows lengthened on the beach; the blackness deepened. The iron black boot became a pool of deep blue. The rocks lost their hardness. The water that stood round the old boat was dark as if mussels had been steeped in it. The foam had turned livid and left here and there a white gleam of pearl on the misty sand.

“Hampton Court,” said Bernard. “Hampton Court. This is our meeting-place. Behold the red chimneys, the square battlements of Hampton Court. The tone of my voice as I say ‘Hampton Court’ proves that I am middle-aged. Ten years, fifteen years ago, I should have said ‘Hampton Court?’ with interrogation—what will it be like? Will there be lakes, mazes? Or with anticipation, What is going to happen to me here? Whom shall I meet? Now, Hampton Court—Hampton Court—the words beat a gong in the space which I have so laboriously cleared with half a dozen telephone messages and post cards, give off ring after ring of sound, booming, sonorous: and pictures rise—summer afternoons, boats, old ladies holding their skirts up, one urn in winter, some daffodils in March—these all float to the top of the waters that now lie deep on every scene.

There at the door by the Inn, our meeting-place, they are already standing—Susan, Louis, Rhoda, Jinny and Neville. They have come together already. In a moment, when I have joined them, another arrangement will form, another pattern. What now runs to waste, forming scenes profusely, will be checked, stated. I am reluctant to suffer that compulsion. Already at fifty yards distance I feel the order of my being changed. The tug of the magnet of their society tells upon me. I come nearer. They do not see me. Now Rhoda sees me, but she pretends, with her horror of the shock of meeting, that I am a stranger. Now Neville turns. Suddenly, raising my hand, saluting Neville I cry, ‘I too have pressed flowers between the pages of Shakespeare’s sonnets,’ and am churned up. My little boat bobs unsteadily upon the chopped and tossing waves. There is no panacea (let me note) against the shock of meeting.

“It is uncomfortable too, joining ragged edges, raw edges; only gradually, as we shuffle and trample into the Inn, taking coats and hats off, does meeting become agreeable. Now we assemble in the long, bare dining-room that overlooks some park, some green space still fantastically lit by the setting sun so that there is a gold bar between the trees, and sit ourselves down.”

“Now sitting side by side,” said Neville, “at this narrow table, now before the first emotion is worn smooth, what do we feel? Honestly now, openly and directly as befits old friends meeting with difficulty, what do we feel on meeting? Sorrow. The door will not open; he will not come. And we are laden. Being now all of us middle-aged, loads are on us. Let us put down our loads. What have you made of life, we ask, and I? You, Bernard; you, Susan; you, Jinny; and Rhoda and Louis? The lists have been posted on the doors. Before we break these rolls, and help ourselves to fish and salad, I feel in my private pocket and find my credentials—what I carry to prove my superiority. I have passed. I have papers in my private pocket that prove it. But your eyes, Susan, full of turnips and cornfields, disturb me. These papers in my private pocket—the clamour that proves that I have passed—make a faint sound like that of a man clapping in an empty field to scare away rooks. Now it has died down altogether, under Susan’s stare (the clapping, the reverberation that I have made), and I hear only the wind sweeping over the ploughed land and some bird singing—perhaps some intoxicated lark. Has the waiter heard of me, or those furtive everlasting couples, now loitering, now holding back and looking at the trees which are not yet dark enough to shelter their prostrate bodies? No; the sound of clapping has failed.

“What then remains, when I cannot pull out my papers and make you believe by reading aloud my credentials that I have passed? What remains is what Susan brings to light under the acid of her green eyes, her crystal, pear-shaped eyes. There is always somebody, when we come together, and the edges of meeting are still sharp, who refuses to be submerged; whose identity therefore one wishes to make crouch beneath one’s own. For me now, it is Susan. I talk to impress Susan. Listen to me, Susan.

“When someone comes in at breakfast, even the embroidered fruit on my curtain swells so that parrots can peck it; one can break it off between one’s thumb and finger. The thin, skimmed milk of early morning turns opal, blue, rose. At that hour your husband—the man who slapped his gaiters, pointing with his whip at the barren cow—grumbles. You say nothing. You see nothing. Custom blinds your eyes. At that hour your relationship is mute, null, dun-coloured. Mine at that hour is warm and various. There are no repetitions for me. Each day is dangerous. Smooth on the surface, we are all bone beneath like snakes coiling. Suppose we read The Times; suppose we argue. It is an experience. Suppose it is winter. The snow falling loads down the roof and seals us together in a red cave. The pipes have burst. We stand a yellow tin bath in the middle of the room. We rush helter-skelter for basins. Look there—it has burst again over the bookcase. We shout with laughter at the sight of ruin. Let solidity be destroyed. Let us have no possessions. Or is it summer? We may wander to a lake and watch Chinese geese waddling flat-footed to the water’s edge, or see a bone-like city church with young green trembling before it. (I choose at random; I choose the obvious.) Each sight is an arabesque scrawled suddenly to illustrate some hazard and marvel of intimacy. The snow, the burst pipe, the tin bath, the Chinese goose—these are signs swung high aloft upon which, looking back, I read the character of each love; how each was different.

“You meanwhile—for I want to diminish your hostility, your green eyes fixed on mine, and your shabby dress, your rough hands, and all the other emblems of your maternal splendour—have stuck like a limpet to the same rock. Yet it is true, I do not want to hurt you; only to refresh and furbish up my own belief in myself that failed at your entry. Change is no longer possible. We are committed. Before, when we met in a restaurant in London with Percival, all simmered and shook; we could have been anything. We have chosen now, or sometimes it seems the choice was made for us—a pair of tongs pinched us between the shoulders. I chose. I took the print of life not outwardly, but inwardly upon the raw, the white, the unprotected fibre. I am clouded and bruised with the print of minds and faces and things so subtle that they have smell, colour, texture, substance, but no name. I am merely ‘Neville’ to you, who see the narrow limits of my life and the line it cannot pass. But to myself I am immeasurable; a net whose fibres pass imperceptibly beneath the world. My net is almost indistinguishable from that which it surrounds. It lifts whales—huge leviathans and white jellies, what is amorphous and wandering; I detect, I perceive. Beneath my eyes opens—a book; I see to the bottom; the heart—I see to the depths. I know what loves are trembling into fire; how jealousy shoots its green flashes hither and thither; how intricately love crosses love; love makes knots; love brutally tears them apart. I have been knotted; I have been torn apart.

“But there was another glory once, when we watched for the door to open, and Percival came; when we flung ourselves unattached on the edge of a hard bench in a public room.”

“There was the beech wood,” said Susan, “Elvedon, and the gilt hands of the clock sparkling among the trees. The pigeons broke the leaves. The changing travelling lights wandered over me. They escaped me. Yet look, Neville, whom I discredit in order to be myself, at my hand on the table. Look at the gradations of healthy colour here on the knuckles, here on the palm. My body has been used daily, rightly, like a tool by a good workman, all over. The blade is clean, sharp, worn in the centre. (We battle together like beasts fighting in a field, like stags making their horns clash.) Seen through your pale and yielding flesh, even apples and bunches of fruit must have a filmed look as if they stood under glass. Lying deep in a chair with one person, one person only, but one person who changes, you see one inch of flesh only; its nerves, fibres, the sullen or quick flow of blood on it; but nothing entire. You do not see a house in a garden; a horse in a field; a town laid out, as you bend like an old woman straining her eyes over her darning. But I have seen life in blocks, substantial, huge; its battlements and towers, factories and gasometers; a dwelling-place made from time immemorial after an hereditary pattern. These things remain square, prominent, undissolved in my mind. I am not sinuous or suave; I sit among you abrading your softness with my hardness, quenching the silver-grey flickering moth-wing quiver of words with the green spurt of my clear eyes.

“Now we have clashed our antlers. This is the necessary prelude; the salute of old friends.”

“The gold has faded between the trees,” said Rhoda, “and a slice of green lies behind them, elongated like the blade of a knife seen in dreams, or some tapering island on which nobody sets foot. Now the cars begin to wink and flicker, coming down the avenue. Lovers can draw into the darkness now; the boles of the trees are swollen, are obscene with lovers.”

“It was different once,” said Bernard. “Once we could break the current as we chose. How many telephone calls, how many post cards, are now needed to cut this hole through which we come together, united, at Hampton Court? How swift life runs from January to December! We are all swept on by the torrent of things grown so familiar that they cast no shade; we make no comparisons; think scarcely ever of I or of you; and in this unconsciousness attain the utmost freedom from friction and part the weeds that grow over the mouths of sunken channels. We have to leap like fish, high in the air, in order to catch the train from Waterloo. And however high we leap we fall back again into the stream. I shall never now take ship for the South Sea Islands. A journey to Rome is the limit of my travelling. I have sons and daughters. I am wedged into my place in the puzzle.

“But it is only my body—this elderly man here whom you call Bernard—that is fixed irrevocably—so I desire to believe. I think more disinterestedly than I could when I was young and must dig furiously like a child rummaging in a bran-pie to discover my self. ‘Look, what is this? And this? Is this going to be a fine present? Is that all?’ and so on. Now I know what the parcels hold; and do not care much. I throw my mind out in the air as a man throws seeds in great fan-flights, falling through the purple sunset, falling on the pressed and shining ploughland which is bare.

“A phrase. An imperfect phrase. And what are phrases? They have left me very little to lay on the table, beside Susan’s hand; to take from my pocket, with Neville’s credentials. I am not an authority on law, or medicine, or finance. I am wrapped round with phrases, like damp straw; I glow, phosphorescent. And each of you feels when I speak, ‘I am lit up. I am glowing.’ The little boys used to feel ‘That’s a good one, that’s a good one,’ as the phrases bubbled up from my lips under the elm trees in the playing-fields. They too bubbled up; they also escaped with my phrases. But I pine in solitude. Solitude is my undoing.

“I pass from house to house like the friars in the Middle Ages who cozened the wives and girls with beads and ballads. I am a traveller, a pedlar, paying for my lodging with a ballad; I am an indiscriminate, an easily pleased guest; often putting up in the best room in a four-poster; then lying in a barn on a haystack. I don’t mind the fleas and find no fault with silk either. I am very tolerant. I am not a moralist. I have too great a sense of the shortness of life and its temptations to rule red lines. Yet I am not so indiscriminate as you think, judging me—as you judge me—from my fluency. I have a little dagger of contempt and severity hidden up my sleeve. But I am apt to be deflected. I make stories. I twist up toys out of anything. A girl sits at a cottage door; she is waiting; for whom? Seduced, or not seduced? The headmaster sees the hole in the carpet. He sighs. His wife, drawing her fingers through the waves of her still abundant hair, reflects—et cetera. Waves of hands, hesitations at street corners, someone dropping a cigarette into the gutter—all are stories. But which is the true story? That I do not know. Hence I keep my phrases hung like clothes in a cupboard, waiting for someone to wear them. Thus waiting, thus speculating, making this note and then another, I do not cling to life. I shall be brushed like a bee from a sunflower. My philosophy, always accumulating, welling up moment by moment, runs like quicksilver a dozen ways at once. But Louis, wild-eyed but severe, in his attic, in his office, has formed unalterable conclusions upon the true nature of what is to be known.”

“It breaks,” said Louis, “the thread I try to spin; your laughter breaks it, your indifference, also your beauty. Jinny broke the thread when she kissed me in the garden years ago. The boasting boys mocked me at school for my Australian accent and broke it. ‘This is the meaning’, I say; and then start with a pang—vanity. ‘Listen’, I say, ‘to the nightingale, who sings among the trampling feet; the conquests and migrations. Believe——’ and then am twitched asunder. Over broken tiles and splinters of glass I pick my way. Different lights fall, making the ordinary leopard-spotted and strange. This moment of reconciliation, when we meet together united, this evening moment, with its wine and shaking leaves, and youth coming up from the river in white flannels, carrying cushions, is to me black with the shadows of dungeons and the tortures and infamies practised by man upon man. So imperfect are my senses that they never blot out with one purple the serious charge that my reason adds and adds against us, even as we sit here. What is the solution, I ask myself, and the bridge? How can I reduce these dazzling, these dancing apparitions to one line capable of linking all in one? So I ponder; and you meanwhile observe maliciously my pursed lips, my sallow cheeks and my invariable frown.

“But I beg you also to notice my cane and my waistcoat. I have inherited a desk of solid mahogany in a room hung with maps. Our steamers have won an enviable reputation for their cabins replete with luxury. We supply swimming-baths and gymnasiums. I wear a white waistcoat now and consult a little book before I make an engagement.

“This is the arch and ironical manner in which I hope to distract you from my shivering, my tender, and infinitely young and unprotected soul. For I am always the youngest; the most naïvely surprised; the one who runs in advance in apprehension and sympathy with discomfort or ridicule—should there be a smut on a nose, or a button undone. I suffer for all humiliations. Yet I am also ruthless, marmoreal. I do not see how you can say that it is fortunate to have lived. Your little excitements, your childish transports, when a kettle boils, when the soft air lifts Jinny’s spotted scarf and it floats web-like, are to me like silk streamers thrown in the eyes of the charging bull. I condemn you. Yet my heart yearns towards you. I would go with you through the fires of death. Yet am happiest alone. I luxuriate in gold and purple vestments. Yet I prefer a view over chimney-pots; cats scraping their mangy sides upon blistered chimney-stacks; broken windows; and the hoarse clangour of bells from the steeple of some brick chapel.”

“I see what is before me,” said Jinny. “This scarf, these wine-coloured spots. This glass. This mustard pot. This flower. I like what one touches, what one tastes. I like rain when it has turned to snow and become palpable. And being rash, and much more courageous than you are, I do not temper my beauty with meanness lest it should scorch me. I gulp it down entire. It is made of flesh; it is made of stuff. My imagination is the body’s. Its visions are not fine-spun and white with purity like Louis’s. I do not like your lean cats and your blistered chimney-pots. The scrannel beauties of your roof-tops repel me. Men and women, in uniforms, wigs and gowns, bowler hats and tennis shirts beautifully open at the neck, the infinite variety of women’s dresses (I note all clothes always) delight me. I eddy with them, in and out, in and out, into rooms, into halls, here, there, everywhere, wherever they go. This man lifts the hoof of a horse. This man shoves in and out the drawers of his private collection. I am never alone. I am attended by a regiment of my fellows. My mother must have followed the drum, my father the sea. I am like a little dog that trots down the road after the regimental band, but stops to snuff a tree-trunk, to sniff some brown stain, and suddenly careers across the street after some mongrel cur and then holds one paw up while it sniffs an entrancing whiff of meat from the butcher’s shop. My traffics have led me into strange places. Men, how many, have broken from the wall and come to me. I have only to hold my hand up. Straight as a dart they have come to the place of assignation—perhaps a chair on a balcony, perhaps a shop at a street corner. The torments, the divisions of your lives have been solved for me night after night, sometimes only by the touch of a finger under the table-cloth as we sat dining—so fluid has my body become, forming even at the touch of a finger into one full drop, which fills itself, which quivers, which flashes, which falls in ecstasy.

“I have sat before a looking-glass as you sit writing, adding up figures at desks. So, before the looking-glass in the temple of my bedroom, I have judged my nose and my chin; my lips that open too wide and show too much gum. I have looked. I have noted. I have chosen what yellow or white, what shine or dullness, what loop or straightness suits. I am volatile for one, rigid for another, angular as an icicle in silver, or voluptuous as a candle flame in gold. I have run violently like a whip flung out to the extreme end of my tether. His shirt front, there in the corner, has been white; then purple; smoke and flame have wrapped us about; after a furious conflagration—yet we scarcely raised our voices, sitting on the hearth-rug, as we murmured all the secrets of our hearts as into shells so that nobody might hear in the sleeping-house, but I heard the cook stir once, and once we thought the ticking of the clock was a footfall—we have sunk to ashes, leaving no relics, no unburnt bones, no wisps of hair to be kept in lockets such as your intimacies leave behind them. Now I turn grey; now I turn gaunt; but I look at my face at midday sitting in front of the looking-glass in broad daylight, and note precisely my nose, my chin, my lips that open too wide and show too much gum. But I am not afraid.”

“There were lamp-posts,” said Rhoda, “and trees that had not yet shed their leaves on the way from the station. The leaves might have hidden me still. But I did not hide behind them. I walked straight up to you instead of circling round to avoid the shock of sensation as I used. But it is only that I have taught my body to do a certain trick. Inwardly I am not taught; I fear, I hate, I love, I envy and despise you, but I never join you happily. Coming up from the station, refusing to accept the shadow of the trees and the pillar-boxes, I perceived, from your coats and umbrellas, even at a distance, how you stand embedded in a substance made of repeated moments run together; are committed, have an attitude, with children, authority, fame, love, society; where I have nothing. I have no face.

“Here in this dining-room you see the antlers and the tumblers; the salt-cellars; the yellow stains on the table-cloth. ‘Waiter!’ says Bernard. ‘Bread!’ says Susan. And the waiter comes; he brings bread. But I see the side of a cup like a mountain and only parts of antlers, and the brightness on the side of that jug like a crack in darkness with wonder and terror. Your voices sound like trees creaking in a forest. So with your faces and their prominences and hollows. How beautiful, standing at a distance immobile at midnight against the railings of some square! Behind you is a white crescent of foam, and fishermen on the verge of the world are drawing in nets and casting them. A wind ruffles the topmost leaves of primeval trees. (Yet here we sit at Hampton Court.) Parrots shrieking break the intense stillness of the jungle. (Here the trams start.) The swallow dips her wings in midnight pools. (Here we talk.) That is the circumference that I try to grasp as we sit together. Thus I must undergo the penance of Hampton Court at seven thirty precisely.

“But since these rolls of bread and wine bottles are needed by me, and your faces with their hollows and prominences are beautiful, and the table-cloth and its yellow stains, far from being allowed to spread in wider and wider circles of understanding that may at last (so I dream, falling off the edge of the earth at night when my bed floats suspended) embrace the entire world, I must go through the antics of the individual. I must start when you pluck at me with your children, your poems, your chilblains or whatever it is that you do and suffer. But I am not deluded. After all these callings hither and thither, these pluckings and searchings, I shall fall alone through this thin sheet into gulfs of fire. And you will not help me. More cruel than the old torturers, you will let me fall, and will tear me to pieces when I am fallen. Yet there are moments when the walls of the mind grow thin; when nothing is unabsorbed, and I could fancy that we might blow so vast a bubble that the sun might set and rise in it and we might take the blue of midday and the black of midnight and be cast off and escape from here and now.”

“Drop upon drop,” said Bernard, “silence falls. It forms on the roof of the mind and falls into pools beneath. For ever alone, alone, alone,—hear silence fall and sweep its rings to the farthest edges. Gorged and replete, solid with middle-aged content, I, whom loneliness destroys, let silence fall, drop by drop.

“But now silence falling pits my face, wastes my nose like a snowman stood out in a yard in the rain. As silence falls I am dissolved utterly and become featureless and scarcely to be distinguished from another. It does not matter. What matters? We have dined well. The fish, the veal cutlets, the wine have blunted the sharp tooth of egotism. Anxiety is at rest. The vainest of us, Louis perhaps, does not care what people think. Neville’s tortures are at rest. Let others prosper—that is what he thinks. Susan hears the breathing of all her children safe asleep. Sleep, sleep, she murmurs. Rhoda has rocked her ships to shore. Whether they have foundered, whether they have anchored, she cares no longer. We are ready to consider any suggestion that the world may offer quite impartially. I reflect now that the earth is only a pebble flicked off accidentally from the face of the sun and that there is no life anywhere in the abysses of space.”

“In this silence,” said Susan, “it seems as if no leaf would ever fall, or bird fly.”

“As if the miracle had happened,” said Jinny, “and life were stayed here and now.”

“And,” said Rhoda, “we had no more to live.”

“But listen,” said Louis, “to the world moving through abysses of infinite space. It roars; the lighted strip of history is past and our Kings and Queens; we are gone; our civilisation; the Nile; and all life. Our separate drops are dissolved; we are extinct, lost in the abysses of time, in the darkness.”

“Silence falls; silence falls,” said Bernard. “But now listen; tick, tick; hoot, hoot; the world has hailed us back to it. I heard for one moment the howling winds of darkness as we passed beyond life. Then tick, tick (the clock); then hoot, hoot (the cars). We are landed; we are on shore; we are sitting, six of us, at a table. It is the memory of my nose that recalls me. I rise; ‘Fight,’ I cry, ‘fight!’ remembering the shape of my own nose, and strike with this spoon upon this table pugnaciously.”

“Oppose ourselves to this illimitable chaos,” said Neville, “this formless imbecility. Making love to a nursemaid behind a tree, that soldier is more admirable than all the stars. Yet sometimes one trembling star comes in the clear sky and makes me think the world beautiful and we maggots deforming even the trees with our lust.”

(“Yet, Louis,” said Rhoda, “how short a time silence lasts. Already they are beginning to smooth their napkins by the side of their plates. ‘Who comes?’ says Jinny; and Neville sighs, remembering that Percival comes no more. Jinny has taken out her looking-glass. Surveying her face like an artist, she draws a powder-puff down her nose, and after one moment of deliberation has given precisely that red to the lips that the lips need. Susan, who feels scorn and fear at the sight of these preparations, fastens the top button of her coat, and unfastens it. What is she making ready for? For something, but something different.”

“They are saying to themselves,” said Louis, “‘It is time. I am still vigorous’, they are saying, ‘My face shall be cut against the black of infinite space’. They do not finish their sentences. ‘It is time’, they keep saying. ‘The gardens will be shut.’ And going with them, Rhoda, swept into their current, we shall perhaps drop a little behind.”

“Like conspirators who have something to whisper,” said Rhoda.)

“It is true, and I know for a fact,” said Bernard, “as we walk down this avenue, that a King, riding, fell over a molehill here. But how strange it seems to set against the whirling abysses of infinite space a little figure with a golden teapot on his head. Soon one recovers belief in figures: but not at once in what they put on their heads. Our English past—one inch of light. Then people put teapots on their heads and say, ‘I am a King!’ No, I try to recover, as we walk, the sense of time, but with that streaming darkness in my eyes I have lost my grip. This Palace seems light as a cloud set for a moment on the sky. It is a trick of the mind—to put Kings on their thrones, one following another, with crowns on their heads. And we ourselves, walking six abreast, what do we oppose, with this random flicker of light in us that we call brain and feeling, how can we do battle against this flood; what has permanence? Our lives too stream away, down the unlighted avenues, past the strip of time, unidentified. Once Neville threw a poem at my head. Feeling a sudden conviction of immortality, I said, ‘I too know what Shakespeare knew’. But that has gone.”

“Unreasonably, ridiculously,” said Neville, “as we walk, time comes back. A dog does it, prancing. The machine works. Age makes hoary that gateway. Three hundred years now seem no more than a moment vanished against that dog. King William mounts his horse wearing a wig, and the court ladies sweep the turf with their embroidered panniers. I am beginning to be convinced, as we walk, that the fate of Europe is of immense importance, and, ridiculous as it still seems, that all depends upon the battle of Blenheim. Yes; I declare, as we pass through this gateway, it is the present moment; I am become a subject of King George.”

“While we advance down this avenue,” said Louis, “I leaning slightly upon Jinny, Bernard arm-in-arm with Neville, and Susan with her hand in mine, it is difficult not to weep, calling ourselves little children, praying that God may keep us safe while we sleep. It is sweet to sing together, clasping hands, afraid of the dark, while Miss Curry plays the harmonium.”

“The iron gates have rolled back,” said Jinny. “Time’s fangs have ceased their devouring. We have triumphed over the abysses of space, with rouge, with powder, with flimsy pocket-handkerchiefs.”

“I grasp, I hold fast,” said Susan. “I hold firmly to this hand, anyone’s, with love, with hatred; it does not matter which.”

“The still mood, the disembodied mood is on us,” said Rhoda, “and we enjoy this momentary alleviation (it is not often that one has no anxiety) when the walls of the mind become transparent. Wren’s palace, like the quartet played to the dry and stranded people in the stalls, makes an oblong. A square is stood upon the oblong and we say, ‘This is our dwelling-place. The structure is now visible. Very little is left outside.’”

“The flower,” said Bernard, “the red carnation that stood in the vase on the table of the restaurant when we dined together with Percival, is become a six-sided flower; made of six lives.”

“A mysterious illumination,” said Louis, “visible against those yew trees.”

“Built up with much pain, many strokes,” said Jinny.

“Marriage, death, travel, friendship,” said Bernard; “town and country; children and all that; a many-sided substance cut out of this dark; a many-faceted flower. Let us stop for a moment; let us behold what we have made. Let it blaze against the yew trees. One life. There. It is over. Gone out.”

“Now they vanish,” said Louis. “Susan with Bernard. Neville with Jinny. You and I, Rhoda, stop for a moment by this stone urn. What song shall we hear now that these couples have sought the groves, and Jinny, pointing with her gloved hand, pretends to notice the water-lilies, and Susan, who has always loved Bernard, says to him, ‘My ruined life, my wasted life’. And Neville, taking Jinny’s little hand, with the cherry-coloured finger-nails, by the lake, by the moonlit water, cries, ‘Love, love’, and she answers, imitating the bird, ‘Love, love?’ What song do we hear?”

“They vanish, towards the lake,” said Rhoda. “They slink away over the grass furtively, yet with assurance as if they asked of our pity their ancient privilege—not to be disturbed. The tide in the soul, tipped, flows that way; they cannot help deserting us. The dark has closed over their bodies. What song do we hear—the owl’s, the nightingale’s, the wren’s? The steamer hoots; the light on the electric rails flashes; the trees gravely bow and bend. The flare hangs over London. Here is an old woman, quietly returning, and a man, a late fisherman, comes down the terrace with his rod. Not a sound, not a movement must escape us.”

“A bird flies homeward,” said Louis. “Evening opens her eyes and gives one quick glance among the bushes before she sleeps. How shall we put it together, the confused and composite message that they send back to us, and not they only, but many dead, boys and girls, grown men and women, who have wandered here, under one king or another?”

“A weight has dropped into the night,” said Rhoda, “dragging it down. Every tree is big with a shadow that is not the shadow of the tree behind it. We hear a drumming on the roofs of a fasting city when the Turks are hungry and uncertain tempered. We hear them crying with sharp, stag-like barks, ‘Open, open’. Listen to the trams squealing and to the flashes from the electric rails. We hear the beech trees and the birch trees raise their branches as if the bride had let her silken nightdress fall and come to the doorway saying, ‘Open, open’.”

“All seems alive,” said Louis. “I cannot hear death anywhere to-night. Stupidity, on that man’s face, age, on that woman’s, would be strong enough, one would think, to resist the incantation, and bring in death. But where is death to-night? All the crudity, odds and ends, this and that, have been crushed like glass splinters into the blue, the red-fringed tide, which, drawing into the shore, fertile with innumerable fish, breaks at our feet.”

“If we could mount together, if we could perceive from a sufficient height,” said Rhoda, “if we could remain untouched without any support—but you, disturbed by faint clapping sounds of praise and laughter, and I, resenting compromise and right and wrong on human lips, trust only in solitude and the violence of death and thus are divided.”

“For ever,” said Louis, “divided. We have sacrificed the embrace among the ferns, and love, love, love by the lake, standing, like conspirators who have drawn apart to share some secret, by the urn. But now look, as we stand here, a ripple breaks on the horizon. The net is raised higher and higher. It comes to the top of the water. The water is broken by silver, by quivering little fish. Now leaping, now lashing, they are laid on shore. Life tumbles its catch upon the grass. There are figures coming towards us. Are they men or are they women? They still wear the ambiguous draperies of the flowing tide in which they have been immersed.”

“Now,” said Rhoda, “as they pass that tree, they regain their natural size. They are only men, only women. Wonder and awe change as they put off the draperies of the flowing tide. Pity returns, as they emerge into the moonlight, like the relics of an army, our representatives, going every night (here or in Greece) to battle, and coming back every night with their wounds, their ravaged faces. Now light falls on them again. They have faces. They become Susan and Bernard, Jinny and Neville, people we know. Now what a shrinkage takes place! Now what a shrivelling, what an humiliation! The old shivers run through me, hatred and terror, as I feel myself grappled to one spot by these hooks they cast on us; these greetings, recognitions, pluckings of the finger and searchings of the eyes. Yet they have only to speak, and their first words, with the remembered tone and the perpetual deviation from what one expects, and their hands moving and making a thousand past days rise again in the darkness, shake my purpose.”

“Something flickers and dances,” said Louis. “Illusion returns as they approach down the avenue. Rippling and questioning begin. What do I think of you—what do you think of me? Who are you? Who am I?—that quivers again its uneasy air over us, and the pulse quickens and the eye brightens and all the insanity of personal existence without which life would fall flat and die, begins again. They are on us. The southern sun flickers over this urn; we push off in to the tide of the violent and cruel sea. Lord help us to act our parts as we greet them returning—Susan and Bernard, Neville and Jinny.”

“We have destroyed something by our presence,” said Bernard, “a world perhaps.”

“Yet we scarcely breathe,” said Neville, “spent as we are. We are in that passive and exhausted frame of mind when we only wish to rejoin the body of our mother from whom we have been severed. All else is distasteful, forced and fatiguing. Jinny’s yellow scarf is moth-coloured in this light; Susan’s eyes are quenched. We are scarcely to be distinguished from the river. One cigarette end is the only point of emphasis among us. And sadness tinges our content, that we should have left you, torn the fabric; yielded to the desire to press out, alone, some bitterer, some blacker juice, which was sweet too. But now we are worn out.”

“After our fire,” said Jinny, “there is nothing left to put in lockets.”

“Still I gape,” said Susan, “like a young bird, unsatisfied, for something that has escaped me.”

“Let us stay for a moment,” said Bernard, “before we go. Let us pace the terrace by the river almost alone. It is nearly bed-time. People have gone home. Now how comforting it is to watch the lights coming out in the bedrooms of small shopkeepers on the other side of the river. There is one—there is another. What do you think their takings have been to-day? Only just enough to pay for the rent, for light and food and the children’s clothing. But just enough. What a sense of the tolerableness of life the lights in the bedrooms of small shopkeepers give us! Saturday comes, and there is just enough to pay perhaps for seats at the Pictures. Perhaps before they put out the light they go into the little garden and look at the giant rabbit couched in its wooden hut. That is the rabbit they will have for Sunday dinner. Then they put out the light. Then they sleep. And for thousands of people sleep is nothing but warmth and silence and one moment’s sport with some fantastic dream. ‘I have posted my letter,’ the greengrocer thinks, ‘to the Sunday newspaper. Suppose I win five hundred pounds in the football competition? And we shall kill the rabbit. Life is pleasant. Life is good. I have posted the letter. We shall kill the rabbit.’ And he sleeps.

“That goes on. Listen. There is a sound like the knocking of railway trucks in a siding. That is the happy concatenation of one event following another in our lives. Knock, knock, knock. Must, must, must. Must go, must sleep, must wake, must get up—sober, merciful word which we pretend to revile, which we press tight to our hearts, without which we should be undone. How we worship that sound like the knocking together of trucks in a siding!

“Now far off down the river I hear the chorus; the song of the boasting boys, who are coming back in large charabancs from a day’s outing on the decks of crowded steamers. Still they are singing as they used to sing, across the court, on winters’ nights, or with the windows open in summer, getting drunk, breaking the furniture, wearing little striped caps, all turning their heads the same way as the brake rounded the corner; and I wished to be with them.

“What with the chorus, and the spinning water and the just perceptible murmur of the breeze we are slipping away. Little bits of ourselves are crumbling. There! Something very important fell then. I cannot keep myself together. I shall sleep. But we must go; must catch our train; must walk back to the station—must, must, must. We are only bodies jogging along side by side. I exist only in the soles of my feet and in the tired muscles of my thighs. We have been walking for hours it seems. But where? I cannot remember. I am like a log slipping smoothly over some waterfall. I am not a judge. I am not called upon to give my opinion. Houses and trees are all the same in this grey light. Is that a post? Is that a woman walking? Here is the station, and if the train were to cut me in two, I should come together on the further side, being one, being indivisible. But what is odd is that I still clasp the return half of my ticket to Waterloo firmly between the fingers of my right hand, even now, even sleeping.”

Now the sun had sunk. Sky and sea were indistinguishable. The waves breaking spread their white fans far out over the shore, sent white shadows into the recesses of sonorous caves and then rolled back sighing over the shingle.

The tree shook its branches and a scattering of leaves fell to the ground. There they settled with perfect composure on the precise spot where they would await dissolution. Black and grey were shot into the garden from the broken vessel that had once held red light. Dark shadows blackened the tunnels between the stalks. The thrush was silent and the worm sucked itself back into its narrow hole. Now and again a whitened and hollow straw was blown from an old nest and fell into the dark grasses among the rotten apples. The light had faded from the tool-house wall and the adder’s skin hung from the nail empty. All the colours in the room had overflown their banks. The precise brush stroke was swollen and lop-sided; cupboards and chairs melted their brown masses into one huge obscurity. The height from floor to ceiling was hung with vast curtains of shaking darkness. The looking-glass was pale as the mouth of a cave shadowed by hanging creepers.

The substance had gone from the solidity of the hills. Travelling lights drove a plumy wedge among unseen and sunken roads, but no lights opened among the folded wings of the hills, and there was no sound save the cry of a bird seeking some lonelier tree. At the cliff’s edge there was an equal murmur of air that had been brushed through forests, of water that had been cooled in a thousand glassy hollows of mid-ocean.

As if there were waves of darkness in the air, darkness moved on, covering houses, hills, trees, as waves of water wash round the sides of some sunken ship. Darkness washed down streets, eddying round single figures, engulfing them; blotting out couples clasped under the showery darkness of elm trees in full summer foliage. Darkness rolled its waves along grassy rides and over the wrinkled skin of the turf, enveloping the solitary thorn tree and the empty snail shells at its foot. Mounting higher, darkness blew along the bare upland slopes, and met the fretted and abraded pinnacles of the mountain where the snow lodges for ever on the hard rock even when the valleys are full of running streams and yellow vine leaves, and girls, sitting on verandahs, look up at the snow, shading their faces with their fans. Them, too, darkness covered.

“Now to sum up,” said Bernard. “Now to explain to you the meaning of my life. Since we do not know each other (though I met you once, I think, on board a ship going to Africa), we can talk freely. The illusion is upon me that something adheres for a moment, has roundness, weight, depth, is completed. This, for the moment, seems to be my life. If it were possible, I would hand it you entire. I would break it off as one breaks off a bunch of grapes. I would say, ‘Take it. This is my life’.

“But unfortunately, what I see (this globe, full of figures) you do not see. You see me, sitting at a table opposite you, a rather heavy, elderly man, grey at the temples. You see me take my napkin and unfold it. You see me pour myself out a glass of wine. And you see behind me the door opening, and people passing. But in order to make you understand, to give you my life, I must tell you a story—and there are so many, and so many—stories of childhood, stories of school, love, marriage, death, and so on; and none of them are true. Yet like children we tell each other stories, and to decorate them we make up these ridiculous, flamboyant, beautiful phrases. How tired I am of stories, how tired I am of phrases that come down beautifully with all their feet on the ground! Also, how I distrust neat designs of life that are drawn upon half-sheets of note-paper. I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on the pavement. I begin to seek some design more in accordance with those moments of humiliation and triumph that come now and then undeniably. Lying in a ditch on a stormy day, when it has been raining, then enormous clouds come marching over the sky, tattered clouds, wisps of cloud. What delights me then is the confusion, the height, the indifference and the fury. Great clouds always changing, and movement; something sulphurous and sinister, bowled up, helter-skelter; towering, trailing, broken off, lost, and I forgotten, minute, in a ditch. Of story, of design, I do not see a trace then.

“But meanwhile, while we eat, let us turn over these scenes as children turn over the pages of a picture-book and the nurse says, pointing: ‘That’s a cow. That’s a boat.’ Let us turn over the pages, and I will add, for your amusement, a comment in the margin.

“In the beginning, there was the nursery, with windows opening on to a garden, and beyond that the sea. I saw something brighten—no doubt the brass handle of a cupboard. Then Mrs. Constable raised the sponge above her head, squeezed it, and out shot, right, left, all down the spine, arrows of sensation. And so, as long as we draw breath, for the rest of time, if we knock against a chair, a table, or a woman, we are pierced with arrows of sensation—if we walk in a garden, if we drink this wine. Sometimes indeed, when I pass a cottage with a light in the window where a child has been born, I could implore them not to squeeze the sponge over that new body. Then, there was the garden and the canopy of the currant leaves which seemed to enclose everything; flowers, burning like sparks upon the depths of green; a rat wreathing with maggots under a rhubarb leaf; the fly going buzz, buzz, buzz upon the nursery ceiling, and plates upon plates of innocent bread and butter. All these things happen in one second and last for ever. Faces loom. Dashing round the corner, ‘Hullo’, one says, ‘there’s Jinny. That’s Neville. That’s Louis in grey flannel with a snake belt. That’s Rhoda’. She had a basin in which she sailed petals of white flowers. It was Susan who cried, that day when I was in the tool-house with Neville; and I felt my indifference melt. Neville did not melt. ‘Therefore,’ I said, ‘I am myself, not Neville’, a wonderful discovery. Susan cried and I followed her. Her wet pocket-handkerchief, and the sight of her little back heaving up and down like a pump-handle, sobbing for what was denied her, screwed my nerves up. ‘This is not to be borne’, I said, as I sat beside her on the roots that were hard as skeletons. I then first became aware of the presence of those enemies who change, but are always there; the forces we fight against. To let oneself be carried on passively is unthinkable. ‘That’s your course, world,’ one says, ‘mine is this.’ So, ‘Let’s explore’, I cried, and jumped up, and ran downhill with Susan and saw the stable-boy clattering about the yard in great boots. Down below, through the depths of the leaves, the gardeners swept the lawns with great brooms. The lady sat writing. Transfixed, stopped dead, I thought, ‘I cannot interfere with a single stroke of those brooms. They sweep and they sweep. Nor with the fixity of that woman writing.’ It is strange that one cannot stop gardeners sweeping nor dislodge a woman. There they have remained all my life. It is as if one had woken in Stonehenge surrounded by a circle of great stones, these enemies, these presences. Then a wood-pigeon flew out of the trees. And being in love for the first time, I made a phrase—a poem about a wood-pigeon—a single phrase, for a hole had been knocked in my mind, one of those sudden transparences through which one sees everything. Then more bread and butter and more flies droning round the nursery ceiling on which quivered islands of light, ruffled, opalescent, while the pointed fingers of the lustre dripped blue pools on the corner of the mantelpiece. Day after day as we sat at tea we observed these sights.

“But we were all different. The wax—the virginal wax that coats the spine melted in different patches for each of us. The growl of the boot-boy making love to the tweeny among the gooseberry bushes; the clothes blown out hard on the line; the dead man in the gutter; the apple tree, stark in the moonlight; the rat swarming with maggots; the lustre dripping blue—our white wax was streaked and stained by each of these differently. Louis was disgusted by the nature of human flesh; Rhoda by our cruelty; Susan could not share; Neville wanted order; Jinny love; and so on. We suffered terribly as we became separate bodies.

“Yet I was preserved from these excesses and have survived many of my friends, am a little stout, grey, rubbed on the thorax as it were, because it is the panorama of life, seen not from the roof, but from the third-story window, that delights me, not what one woman says to one man, even if that man is myself. How could I be bullied at school therefore? How could they make things hot for me? There was the Doctor lurching into chapel, as if he trod a battleship in a gale of wind, shouting out his commands through a megaphone, since people in authority always become melodramatic—I did not hate him like Neville, or revere him like Louis. I took notes as we sat together in chapel. There were pillars, shadows, memorial brasses, boys scuffling and swopping stamps behind Prayer Books; the sound of a rusty pump; the Doctor booming, about immortality and quitting ourselves like men; and Percival scratching his thigh. I made notes for stories; drew portraits in the margin of my pocket-book and thus became still more separate. Here are one or two of the figures I saw.

“Percival sat staring straight ahead of him that day in chapel. He also had a way of flicking his hand to the back of his neck. His movements were always remarkable. We all flicked our hands to the backs of our heads—unsuccessfully. He had the kind of beauty which defends itself from any caress. As he was not in the least precocious, he read whatever was written up for our edification without any comment, and thought with that magnificent equanimity (Latin words come naturally) that was to preserve him from so many meannesses and humiliations, that Lucy’s flaxen pigtails and pink cheeks were the height of female beauty. Thus preserved, his taste later was of extreme fineness. But there should be music, some wild carol. Through the window should come a hunting-song from some rapid unapprehended life—a sound that shouts among the hills and dies away. What is startling, what is unexpected, what we cannot account for, what turns symmetry to nonsense—that comes suddenly to my mind, thinking of him. The little apparatus of observation is unhinged. Pillars go down; the Doctor floats off; some sudden exaltation possesses me. He was thrown, riding in a race, and when I came along Shaftesbury Avenue to-night, those insignificant and scarcely formulated faces that bubble up out of the doors of the Tube, and many obscure Indians, and people dying of famine and disease, and women who have been cheated, and whipped dogs and crying children—all these seemed to me bereft. He would have done justice. He would have protected. About the age of forty he would have shocked the authorities. No lullaby has ever occurred to me capable of singing him to rest.

“But let me dip again and bring up in my spoon another of these minute objects which we call optimistically, ‘characters of our friends’—Louis. He sat staring at the preacher. His being seemed conglobulated in his brow, his lips were pressed; his eyes were fixed, but suddenly they flashed with laughter. Also he suffered from chilblains, the penalty of an imperfect circulation. Unhappy, unfriended, in exile he would sometimes, in moments of confidence, describe how the surf swept over the beaches of his home. The remorseless eye of youth fixed itself upon his swollen joints. Yes, but we were also quick to perceive how cutting, how apt, how severe he was, how naturally, when we lay under the elm trees pretending to watch cricket, we waited his approval, seldom given. His ascendancy was resented, as Percival’s was adored. Prim, suspicious, lifting his feet like a crane, there was yet a legend that he had smashed a door with his naked fist. But his peak was too bare, too stony for that kind of mist to cling to it. He was without those simple attachments by which one is connected with another. He remained aloof; enigmatic; a scholar capable of that inspired accuracy which has something formidable about it. My phrases (how to describe the moon) did not meet with his approval. On the other hand, he envied me to the point of desperation for being at my ease with servants. Not that the sense of his own deserts failed him. That was commensurate with his respect for discipline. Hence his success, finally. His life, though, was not happy. But look—his eye turns white as he lies in the palm of my hand. Suddenly the sense of what people are leaves one. I return him to the pool where he will acquire lustre.

“Neville next—lying on his back staring up at the summer sky. He floated among us like a piece of thistledown, indolently haunting the sunny corner of the playing-field, not listening, yet not remote. It was through him that I have nosed round without ever precisely touching the Latin classics and have also derived some of those persistent habits of thought which make us irredeemably lop-sided—for instance about crucifixes, that they are the mark of the devil. Our half-loves and half-hates and ambiguities on these points were to him indefensible treacheries. The swaying and sonorous Doctor, whom I made to sit swinging his braces over a gas-fire, was to him nothing but an instrument of the inquisition. So he turned with a passion that made up for his indolence upon Catullus, Horace, Lucretius, lying lazily dormant, yes, but regardant, noticing, with rapture, cricketers, while with a mind like the tongue of an ant-eater, rapid, dexterous, glutinous, he searched out every curl and twist of those Roman sentences, and sought out one person, always one person to sit beside.

“And the long skirts of the master’s wives would come swishing by, mountainous, menacing; and our hands would fly to our caps. And immense dullness would descend unbroken, monotonous. Nothing, nothing, nothing broke with its fin that leaden waste of waters. Nothing would happen to lift that weight of intolerable boredom. The terms went on. We grew; we changed; for, of course, we are animals. We are not always aware by any means; we breathe, eat, sleep automatically. We exist not only separately but in undifferentiated blobs of matter. With one scoop a whole brakeful of boys is swept up and goes cricketing, footballing. An army marches across Europe. We assemble in parks and halls and sedulously oppose any renegade (Neville, Louis, Rhoda) who sets up a separate existence. And I am so made that, while I hear one or two distinct melodies, such as Louis sings, or Neville, I am also drawn irresistibly to the sound of the chorus chanting its old, chanting its almost wordless, almost senseless song that comes across courts at night; which we hear now booming round us as cars and omnibuses take people to theatres. (Listen; the cars rush past this restaurant; now and then, down the river, a siren hoots, as a steamer makes for the sea.) If a bagman offers me snuff in a train I accept. I like the copious, shapeless, warm, not so very clever, but extremely easy and rather coarse aspect of things; the talk of men in clubs and public-houses, of miners half naked in drawers—the forthright, perfectly unassuming, and without end in view except dinner, love, money and getting along tolerably; that which is without great hopes, ideals, or anything of that kind; what is unassuming except to make a tolerably good job of it. I like all that. So I joined them, when Neville sulked or Louis, as I quite agree sublimely, turned on his heel.

“Thus, not equally by any means or with order, but in great streaks my waxen waistcoat melted, here one drop, there another. Now through this transparency became visible those wondrous pastures, at first so moon-white, radiant, where no foot has been; meadows of the rose, the crocus, of the rock and the snake too; of the spotted and swart; the embarrassing, the binding and tripping up. One leaps out of bed, throws up the window; with what a whirr the birds rise! You know that sudden rush of wings, that exclamation, carol, and confusion; the riot and babble of voices; and all the drops are sparkling, trembling, as if the garden were a splintered mosaic, vanishing, twinkling; not yet formed into one whole; and a bird sings close to the window. I heard those songs. I followed those phantoms. I saw Joans, Dorothys, Miriams, I forget their names, passing down avenues, stopping on the crest of bridges to look down into the river. And from among them rise one or two distinct figures, birds who sang with the rapt egotism of youth by the window; broke their snails on stones, dipped their beaks in sticky, viscous matter; hard, avid, remorseless; Jinny, Susan, Rhoda. They had been educated on the east coast or on the south coast. They had grown long pigtails and acquired the look of startled foals, which is the mark of adolescence.

“Jinny was the first to come sidling up to the gate to eat sugar. She nipped it off the palms of one’s hands very cleverly, but her ears were laid back as if she might bite. Rhoda was wild—Rhoda one never could catch. She was both frightened and clumsy. It was Susan who first became wholly woman, purely feminine. It was she who dropped on my face those scalding tears which are terrible, beautiful; both, neither. She was born to be the adored of poets, since poets require safety; someone who sits sewing, who says, ‘I hate, I love’, who is neither comfortable nor prosperous, but has some quality in accordance with the high but unemphatic beauty of pure style which those who create poetry so particularly admire. Her father trailed from room to room and down flagged corridors in his flapping dressing-gown and worn slippers. On still nights a wall of water fell with a roar a mile off. The ancient dog could scarcely heave himself up on to his chair. And some witless servant could be heard laughing at the top of the house as she whirred the wheel of the sewing-machine round and round.

“That I observed even in the midst of my anguish when, twisting her pocket-handkerchief, Susan cried, ‘I love; I hate’. ‘A worthless servant’, I observed, ‘laughs upstairs in the attic’, and that little piece of dramatisation shows how incompletely we are merged in our own experiences. On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points; who whispers as he whispered to me that summer morning in the house where the corn comes up to the window, ‘The willow grows on the turf by the river. The gardeners sweep with great brooms and the lady sits writing.’ Thus he directed me to that which is beyond and outside our own predicament; to that which is symbolic, and thus perhaps permanent, if there is any permanence in our sleeping, eating, breathing, so animal, so spiritual and tumultuous lives.

“The willow tree grew by the river. I sat on the smooth turf with Neville, with Larpent, with Baker, Romsey, Hughes, Percival and Jinny. Through its fine plumes specked with little pricked ears of green in spring, of orange in autumn, I saw boats; buildings; I saw hurrying, decrepit women. I buried match after match in the turf decidedly to mark this or that stage in the process of understanding (it might be philosophy; science; it might be myself) while the fringe of my intelligence floating unattached caught those distant sensations which after a time the mind draws in and works upon; the chime of bells; general murmurs; vanishing figures; one girl on a bicycle who, as she rode, seemed to lift the corner of a curtain concealing the populous undifferentiated chaos of life which surged behind the outlines of my friends and the willow tree.

“The tree alone resisted our eternal flux. For I changed and changed; was Hamlet, was Shelley, was the hero, whose name I now forget, of a novel by Dostoevsky; was for a whole term, incredibly, Napoleon; but was Byron chiefly. For many weeks at a time it was my part to stride into rooms and fling gloves and coat on the back of chairs, scowling slightly. I was always going to the bookcase for another sip of the divine specific. Therefore, I let fly my tremendous battery of phrases upon somebody quite inappropriate—a girl now married, now buried; every book, every window-seat was littered with the sheets of my unfinished letters to the woman who made me Byron. For it is difficult to finish a letter in somebody else’s style. I arrived all in a lather at her house; exchanged tokens but did not marry her, being no doubt unripe for that intensity.

Here again there should be music. Not that wild hunting-song, Percival’s music; but a painful, guttural, visceral, also soaring, lark-like, pealing song to replace these flagging, foolish transcripts—how much too deliberate! how much too reasonable!—which attempt to describe the flying moment of first love. A purple slide is slipped over the day. Look at a room before she comes and after. Look at the innocents outside pursuing their way. They neither see nor hear; yet on they go. Moving oneself in this radiant yet gummy atmosphere, how conscious one is of every movement—something adheres, something sticks to one’s hands, taking up a newspaper even. Then there is the being eviscerated—drawn out, spun like a spider’s web and twisted in agony round a thorn. Then a thunder-clap of complete indifference; the light blown out; then the return of measureless irresponsible joy; certain fields seem to glow green for ever, and innocent landscapes appear as if in the light of the first dawn—one patch of green, for example, up at Hampstead; and all faces are lit up, all conspire in a hush of tender joy; and then the mystic sense of completion and then that rasping, dog-fish skin-like roughness—those black arrows of shivering sensation, when she misses the post, when she does not come. Out rush a bristle of horned suspicions, horror, horror, horror—but what is the use of painfully elaborating these consecutive sentences when what one needs is nothing consecutive but a bark, a groan? And years later to see a middle-aged woman in a restaurant taking off her cloak.

“But to return. Let us again pretend that life is a solid substance, shaped like a globe, which we turn about in our fingers. Let us pretend that we can make out a plain and logical story, so that when one matter is despatched—love for instance—we go on, in an orderly manner, to the next. I was saying there was a willow tree. Its shower of falling branches, its creased and crooked bark had the effect of what remains outside our illusions yet cannot stay them, is changed by them for the moment, yet shows through stable, still, and with a sternness that our lives lack. Hence the comment it makes; the standard it supplies, and the reason why, as we flow and change, it seems to measure. Neville, for example, sat with me on the turf. But can anything be as clear as all that, I would say, following his gaze, through the branches, to a punt on the river, and a young man eating bananas from a paper bag? The scene was cut out with such intensity and so permeated with the quality of his vision that for a moment I could see it too; the punt, the bananas, the young man, through the branches of the willow tree. Then it faded.

“Rhoda came wandering vaguely. She would take advantage of any scholar in a blowing gown, or donkey rolling the turf with slippered feet to hide behind. What fear wavered and hid itself and blew to a flame in the depths of her grey, her startled, her dreaming eyes? Cruel and vindictive as we are, we are not bad to that extent. We have our fundamental goodness surely or to talk as I talk freely to someone I hardly know would be impossible—we should cease. The willow as she saw it grew on the verge of a grey desert where no bird sang. The leaves shrivelled as she looked at them, tossed in agony as she passed them. The trams and omnibuses roared hoarse in the street, ran over rocks and sped foaming away. Perhaps one pillar, sunlit, stood in her desert by a pool where wild beasts come down stealthily to drink.

“Then Jinny came. She flashed her fire over the tree. She was like a crinkled poppy, febrile, thirsty with the desire to drink dry dust. Darting, angular, not in the least impulsive, she came prepared. So little flames zigzag over the cracks in the dry earth. She made the willows dance, but not with illusion; for she saw nothing that was not there. It was a tree; there was the river; it was afternoon; here we were; I in my serge suit; she in green. There was no past, no future; merely the moment in its ring of light, and our bodies; and the inevitable climax, the ecstasy.

“Louis, when he let himself down on the grass, cautiously spreading (I do not exaggerate) a mackintosh square, made one acknowledge his presence. It was formidable. I had the intelligence to salute his integrity; his research with bony fingers wrapped in rags because of chilblains for some diamond of indissoluble veracity. I buried boxes of burnt matches in holes in the turf at his feet. His grim and caustic tongue reproved my indolence. He fascinated me with his sordid imagination. His heroes wore bowler-hats and talked about selling pianos for tenners. Through his landscape the tram squealed; the factory poured its acrid fumes. He haunted mean streets and towns where women lay drunk, naked, on counterpanes on Christmas day. His words falling from a shot-tower hit the water and up it spurted. He found one word, one only for the moon. Then he got up and went; we all got up; we all went. But I, pausing, looked at the tree, and as I looked in autumn at the fiery and yellow branches, some sediment formed; I formed; a drop fell; I fell—that is, from some completed experience I had emerged.

“I rose and walked away—I, I, I; not Byron, Shelley, Dostoevsky, but I, Bernard. I even repeated my own name once or twice. I went, swinging my stick, into a shop, and bought—not that I love music—a picture of Beethoven in a silver frame. Not that I love music, but because the whole of life, its masters, its adventurers, then appeared in long ranks of magnificent human beings behind me; and I was the inheritor; I, the continuer; I, the person miraculously appointed to carry it on. So, swinging my stick, with my eyes filmed, not with pride, but with humility rather, I walked down the street. The first whirr of wings had gone up, the carol, the exclamation; and now one enters; one goes into the house, the dry, uncompromising, inhabited house, the place with all its traditions, its objects, its accumulations of rubbish, and treasures displayed upon tables. I visited the family tailor, who remembered my uncle. People turned up in great quantities, not cut out, like the first faces (Neville, Louis, Jinny, Susan, Rhoda), but confused, featureless, or changed their features so fast that they seemed to have none. And blushing yet scornful, in the oddest condition of raw rapture and scepticism, I took the blow; the mixed sensations; the complex and disturbing and utterly unprepared for impacts of life all over, in all places at the same time. How upsetting! How humiliating never to be sure what to say next, and those painful silences, glaring as dry deserts, with every pebble apparent; and then to say what one ought not to have said, and then to be conscious of a ramrod of incorruptible sincerity which one would willingly exchange for a shower of smooth pence, but could not, there at that party, where Jinny sat quite at her ease, rayed out on a gilt chair.

“Then says some lady with an impressive gesture, ‘Come with me’. She leads one into a private alcove and admits one to the honour of her intimacy. Surnames change to Christian names; Christian names to nicknames. What is to be done about India, Ireland or Morocco? Old gentlemen answer the question standing decorated under chandeliers. One finds oneself surprisingly supplied with information. Outside the undifferentiated forces roar; inside we are very private, very explicit, have a sense indeed, that it is here, in this little room, that we make whatever day of the week it may be. Friday or Saturday. A shell forms upon the soft soul, nacreous, shiny, upon which sensations tap their beaks in vain. On me it formed earlier than on most. Soon I could carve my pear when other people had done dessert. I could bring my sentence to a close in a hush of complete silence. It is at that season too that perfection has a lure. One can learn Spanish, one thinks, by tying a string to the right toe and waking early. One fills up the little compartments of one’s engagement book with dinner at eight; luncheon at one-thirty. One has shirts, socks, ties laid out on one’s bed.

“But it is a mistake, this extreme precision, this orderly and military progress; a convenience, a lie. There is always deep below it, even when we arrive punctually at the appointed time with our white waistcoats and polite formalities, a rushing stream of broken dreams, nursery rhymes, street cries, half-finished sentences and sights—elm trees, willow trees, gardeners sweeping, women writing—that rise and sink even as we hand a lady down to dinner. While one straightens the fork so precisely on the table-cloth, a thousand faces mop and mow. There is nothing one can fish up in a spoon; nothing one can call an event. Yet it is alive too and deep, this stream. Immersed in it I would stop between one mouthful and the next, and look intently at a vase, perhaps with one red flower, while a reason struck me, a sudden revelation. Or I would say, walking along the Strand, ‘That’s the phrase I want’, as some beautiful, fabulous phantom bird, fish or cloud with fiery edges swam up to enclose once and for all some notion haunting me, after which on I trotted taking stock with renewed delight of ties and things in shop-windows.

“The crystal, the globe of life as one calls it, far from being hard and cold to the touch, has walls of thinnest air. If I press them all will burst. Whatever sentence I extract whole and entire from this cauldron is only a string of six little fish that let themselves be caught while a million others leap and sizzle, making the cauldron bubble like boiling silver, and slip through my fingers. Faces recur, faces and faces—they press their beauty to the walls of my bubble—Neville, Susan, Louis, Jinny, Rhoda and a thousand others. How impossible to order them rightly; to detach one separately, or to give the effect of the whole—again like music. What a symphony with its concord and its discord, and its tunes on top and its complicated bass beneath, then grew up! Each played his own tune, fiddle, flute, trumpet, drum or whatever the instrument might be. With Neville, ‘Let’s discuss Hamlet’. With Louis, science. With Jinny, love. Then suddenly, in a moment of exasperation, off to Cumberland with a quiet man for a whole week in an inn, with the rain running down the window-panes and nothing but mutton and mutton and again mutton for dinner. Yet that week remains a solid stone in the welter of unrecorded sensation. It was then we played dominoes; then we quarrelled about tough mutton. Then we walked on the fell. And a little girl, peeping round the door, gave me that letter, written on blue paper, in which I learnt that the girl who had made me Byron was to marry a squire. A man in gaiters, a man with a whip, a man who made speeches about fat oxen at dinner—I exclaimed derisively and looked at the racing clouds, and felt my own failure; my desire to be free; to escape; to be bound; to make an end; to continue; to be Louis; to be myself; and walked out in my mackintosh alone, and felt grumpy under the eternal hills and not in the least sublime; and came home and blamed the meat and packed and so back again to the welter; to the torture.

“Nevertheless, life is pleasant, life is tolerable. Tuesday follows Monday; then comes Wednesday. The mind grows rings; the identity becomes robust; pain is absorbed in growth. Opening and shutting, shutting and opening, with increasing hum and sturdiness, the haste and fever of youth are drawn into service until the whole being seems to expand in and out like the mainspring of a clock. How fast the stream flows from January to December! We are swept on by the torrent of things grown so familiar that they cast no shadow. We float, we float….

“However, since one must leap (to tell you this story), I leap, here, at this point, and alight now upon some perfectly commonplace object—say the poker and tongs, as I saw them sometime later, after that lady who had made me Byron had married, under the light of one whom I will call the third Miss Jones. She is the girl who wears a certain dress expecting one at dinner, who picks a certain rose, who makes one feel ‘Steady, steady, this is a matter of some importance’, as one shaves. Then one asks, ‘How does she behave to children?’ One observes that she is a little clumsy with her umbrella; but minded when the mole was caught in the trap; and finally, would not make the loaf at breakfast (I was thinking of the interminable breakfasts of married life as I shaved) altogether prosaic—it would not surprise one sitting opposite this girl to see a dragon-fly perched on the loaf at breakfast. Also she inspired me with a desire to rise in the world; also she made me look with curiosity at the hitherto repulsive faces of new-born babies. And the little fierce beat—tick-tack, tick-tack—of the pulse of one’s mind took on a more majestic rhythm. I roamed down Oxford Street. We are the continuers, we are the inheritors, I said, thinking of my sons and daughters; and if the feeling is so grandiose as to be absurd and one conceals it by jumping on to a bus or buying the evening paper, it is still a curious element in the ardour with which one laces up one’s boots, with which one now addresses old friends committed to different careers. Louis, the attic dweller; Rhoda, the nymph of the fountain always wet; both contradicted what was then so positive to me; both gave the other side of what seemed to me so evident (that we marry, that we domesticate); for which I loved them, pitied them, and also deeply envied them their different lot.

“Once I had a biographer, dead long since, but if he still followed my footsteps with his old flattering intensity he would here say, ‘About this time Bernard married and bought a house…. His friends observed in him a growing tendency to domesticity…. The birth of children made it highly desirable that he should augment his income.’ That is the biographic style, and it does to tack together torn bits of stuff, stuff with raw edges. After all, one cannot find fault with the biographic style if one begins letters ‘Dear Sir’, ends them ‘yours faithfully’; one cannot despise these phrases laid like Roman roads across the tumult of our lives, since they compel us to walk in step like civilised people with the slow and measured tread of policemen though one may be humming any nonsense under one’s breath at the same time—‘Hark, hark, the dogs do bark’, ‘Come away, come away, death’, ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds’, and so on. ‘He attained some success in his profession…. He inherited a small sum of money from an uncle’—that is how the biographer continues, and if one wears trousers and hitches them up with braces, one has to say that, though it is tempting now and then to go blackberrying; tempting to play ducks and drakes with all these phrases. But one has to say that.

“I became, I mean, a certain kind of man, scoring my path across life as one treads a path across the fields. My boots became worn a little on the left side. When I came in, certain re-arrangements took place. ‘Here’s Bernard!’ How differently different people say that! There are many rooms—many Bernards. There was the charming, but weak; the strong, but supercilious; the brilliant, but remorseless; the very good fellow, but, I make no doubt, the awful bore; the sympathetic, but cold; the shabby, but—go into the next room—the foppish, worldly, and too well dressed. What I was to myself was different; was none of these. I am inclined to pin myself down most firmly there before the loaf at breakfast with my wife, who being now entirely my wife and not at all the girl who wore when she hoped to meet me a certain rose, gave me that feeling of existing in the midst of unconsciousness such as the tree-frog must have couched on the right shade of green leaf. ‘Pass’ … I would say. ‘Milk’ … she might answer, or ‘Mary’s coming’ …—simple words for those who have inherited the spoils of all the ages but not as said then, day after day, in the full tide of life, when one feels complete, entire, at breakfast. Muscles, nerves, intestines, blood-vessels, all that makes the coil and spring of our being, the unconscious hum of the engine, as well as the dart and flicker of the tongue, functioned superbly. Opening, shutting; shutting, opening; eating, drinking; sometimes speaking—the whole mechanism seemed to expand, to contract, like the mainspring of a clock. Toast and butter, coffee and bacon, The Times and letters—suddenly the telephone rang with urgency and I rose deliberately and went to the telephone. I took up the black mouth. I marked the ease with which my mind adjusted itself to assimilate the message—it might be (one has these fancies) to assume command of the British Empire; I observed my composure; I remarked with what magnificent vitality the atoms of my attention dispersed, swarmed round the interruption, assimilated the message, adapted themselves to a new state of affairs and had created, by the time I put back the receiver, a richer, a stronger, a more complicated world in which I was called upon to act my part and had no doubt whatever that I could do it. Clapping my hat on my head, I strode into a world inhabited by vast numbers of men who had also clapped their hats on their heads, and as we jostled and encountered in trains and tubes we exchanged the knowing wink of competitors and comrades braced with a thousand snares and dodges to achieve the same end—to earn our livings.

“Life is pleasant. Life is good. The mere process of life is satisfactory. Take the ordinary man in good health. He likes eating and sleeping. He likes the snuff of fresh air and walking at a brisk pace down the Strand. Or in the country there’s a cock crowing on a gate; there’s a foal galloping round a field. Something always has to be done next. Tuesday follows Monday; Wednesday Tuesday. Each spreads the same ripple of wellbeing, repeats the same curve of rhythm; covers fresh sand with a chill or ebbs a little slackly without. So the being grows rings; identity becomes robust. What was fiery and furtive like a fling of grain cast into the air and blown hither and thither by wild gusts of life from every quarter is now methodical and orderly and flung with a purpose—so it seems.

“Lord, how pleasant! Lord, how good! How tolerable is the life of little shopkeepers, I would say, as the train drew through the suburbs and one saw lights in bedroom windows. Active, energetic as a swarm of ants, I said, as I stood at the window and watched workers, bag in hand, stream into town. What hardness, what energy and violence of limb, I thought, seeing men in white drawers scouring after a football on a patch of snow in January. Now being grumpy about some small matter—it might be the meat—it seemed luxurious to disturb with a little ripple the enormous stability, whose quiver, for our child was about to be born, increased its joy, of our married life. I snapped at dinner. I spoke unreasonably as if, being a millionaire, I could throw away five shillings; or, being a perfect steeple-jack, stumbled over a footstool on purpose. Going up to bed we settled our quarrel on the stairs, and standing by the window looking at a sky clear like the inside of a blue stone, ‘Heaven be praised,’ I said, ‘we need not whip this prose into poetry. The little language is enough.’ For the space of the prospect and its clarity seemed to offer no impediment whatsoever, but to allow our lives to spread out and out beyond all bristling of roofs and chimneys to the flawless verge.

“Into this crashed death—Percival’s. ‘Which is happiness?’ I said (our child had been born), ‘which pain?’ referring to the two sides of my body, as I came downstairs, making a purely physical statement. Also I made note of the state of the house; the curtain blowing; the cook singing; the wardrobe showing through the half-opened door. I said, ‘Give him (myself) another moment’s respite’ as I went downstairs. ‘Now in this drawing-room he is going to suffer. There is no escape.’ But for pain words are lacking. There should be cries, cracks, fissures, whiteness passing over chintz covers, interference with the sense of time, of space; the sense also of extreme fixity in passing objects; and sounds very remote and then very close; flesh being gashed and blood spurting, a joint suddenly twisted—beneath all of which appears something very important, yet remote, to be just held in solitude. So I went out. I saw the first morning he would never see—the sparrows were like toys dangled from a string by a child. To see things without attachment, from the outside, and to realise their beauty in itself—how strange! And then the sense that a burden has been removed; pretence and make-believe and unreality are gone, and lightness has come with a kind of transparency, making oneself invisible and things seen through as one walks—how strange. ‘And now what other discovery will there be?’ I said, and in order to hold it tight ignored newspaper placards and went and looked at pictures. Madonnas and pillars, arches and orange trees, still as on the first day of creation, but acquainted with grief, there they hung, and I gazed at them. ‘Here,’ I said, ‘we are together without interruption.’ This freedom, this immunity, seemed then a conquest, and stirred in me such exaltation that I sometimes go there, even now, to bring back exaltation and Percival. But it did not last. What torments one is the horrible activity of the mind’s eye—how he fell, how he looked, where they carried him; men in loin-cloths, pulling ropes; the bandages and the mud. Then comes the terrible pounce of memory, not to be foretold, not to be warded off—that I did not go with him to Hampton Court. That claw scratched; that fang tore; I did not go. In spite of his impatiently protesting that it did not matter; why interrupt, why spoil our moment of uninterrupted community?—Still, I repeated sullenly, I did not go, and so, driven out of the sanctuary by these officious devils, went to Jinny because she had a room; a room with little tables, with little ornaments scattered on little tables. There I confessed, with tears—I had not gone to Hampton Court. And she, remembering other things, to me trifles but torturing to her, showed me how life withers when there are things we cannot share. Soon, too, a maid came in with a note, and as she turned to answer it and I felt my own curiosity to know what she was writing and to whom, I saw the first leaf fall on his grave. I saw us push beyond this moment, and leave it behind us for ever. And then sitting side by side on the sofa we remembered inevitably what had been said by others; ‘the lily of the day is fairer far in May’; we compared Percival to a lily—Percival whom I wanted to lose his hair, to shock the authorities, to grow old with me; he was already covered over with lilies.

“So the sincerity of the moment passed; so it became symbolical; and that I could not stand. Let us commit any blasphemy of laughter and criticism rather than exude this lily-sweet glue; and cover him with phrases, I cried. Therefore I broke off, and Jinny, who was without future, or speculation, but respected the moment with complete integrity, gave her body a flick with the whip, powdered her face (for which I loved her), and waved to me as she stood on the doorstep, pressing her hand to her hair so that the wind might not disorder it, a gesture for which I honoured her, as if it confirmed our determination—not to let lilies grow.

“I observed with disillusioned clarity the despicable nonentity of the street; its porches; its window curtains; the drab clothes, the cupidity and complacency of shopping women; and old men taking the air in comforters; the caution of people crossing; the universal determination to go on living, when really, fools and gulls that you are, I said, any slate may fly from a roof, any car may swerve, for there is neither rhyme nor reason when a drunk man staggers about with a club in his hand—that is all. I was like one admitted behind the scenes: like one shown how the effects are produced. I returned, however, to my own snug home and was warned by the parlourmaid to creep upstairs in my stockings. The child was asleep. I went to my room.

“Was there no sword, nothing with which to batter down these walls, this protection, this begetting of children and living behind curtains, and becoming daily more involved and committed, with books and pictures? Better burn one’s life out like Louis, desiring perfection; or like Rhoda leave us, flying past us to the desert; or choose one out of millions and one only like Neville; better be like Susan and love and hate the heat of the sun or the frost-bitten grass; or be like Jinny, honest, an animal. All had their rapture; their common feeling with death; something that stood them in stead. Thus I visited each of my friends in turn, trying, with fumbling fingers to prise open their locked caskets. I went from one to the other holding my sorrow—no, not my sorrow but the incomprehensible nature of this our life—for their inspection. Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends, I to my own heart, I to seek among phrases and fragments something unbroken—I to whom there is not beauty enough in moon or tree; to whom the touch of one person with another is all, yet who cannot grasp even that, who am so imperfect, so weak, so unspeakably lonely. There I sat.

“Should this be the end of the story? a kind of sigh? a last ripple of the wave? A trickle of water to some gutter where, burbling, it dies away? Let me touch the table—so—and thus recover my sense of the moment. A sideboard covered with cruets; a basket full of rolls; a plate of bananas—these are comfortable sights. But if there are no stories, what end can there be, or what beginning? Life is not susceptible perhaps to the treatment we give it when we try to tell it. Sitting up late at night it seems strange not to have more control. Pigeon-holes are not then very useful. It is strange how force ebbs away and away into some dry creek. Sitting alone, it seems we are spent; our waters can only just surround feebly that spike of sea-holly; we cannot reach that further pebble so as to wet it. It is over, we are ended. But wait—I sat all night waiting—an impulse again runs through us; we rise, we toss back a mane of white spray; we pound on the shore; we are not to be confined. That is, I shaved and washed; did not wake my wife, and had breakfast; put on my hat, and went out to earn my living. After Monday, Tuesday comes.

“Yet some doubt remained, some note of interrogation. I was surprised, opening a door, to find people thus occupied; I hesitated, taking a cup of tea, whether one said milk or sugar. And the light of the stars falling, as it falls now, on my hand after travelling for millions upon millions of years—I could get a cold shock from that for a moment—not more, my imagination is too feeble. But some doubt remained. A shadow flitted through my mind like moths’ wings among chairs and tables in a room in the evening. When, for example, I went to Lincolnshire that summer to see Susan and she advanced towards me across the garden with the lazy movement of a half-filled sail, with the swaying movement of a woman with child, I thought, ‘It goes on; but why?’ We sat in the garden; the farm carts came up dripping with hay; there was the usual country gabble of rooks and doves; fruit was netted and covered over; the gardener dug. Bees boomed down the purple tunnels of flowers; bees embedded themselves on the golden shields of sunflowers. Little twigs were blown across the grass. How rhythmical, and half conscious and like something wrapped in mist it was; but to me hateful, like a net folding one’s limbs in its meshes, cramping. She who had refused Percival lent herself to this, to this covering over.

“Sitting down on a bank to wait for my train, I thought then how we surrender, how we submit to the stupidity of nature. Woods covered in thick green leafage lay in front of me. And by some flick of a scent or a sound on a nerve, the old image—the gardeners sweeping, the lady writing—returned. I saw the figures beneath the beech trees at Elvedon. The gardeners swept; the lady at the table sat writing. But I now made the contribution of maturity to childhood’s intuitions—satiety and doom; the sense of what is unescapable in our lot; death; the knowledge of limitations; how life is more obdurate than one had thought it. Then, when I was a child, the presence of an enemy had asserted itself; the need for opposition had stung me. I had jumped up and cried, ‘Let’s explore’. The horror of the situation was ended.

“Now what situation was there to end? Dullness and doom. And what to explore? The leaves and the wood concealed nothing. If a bird rose I should no longer make a poem—I should repeat what I had said before. Thus if I had a stick with which to point to indentations in the curve of being, this is the lowest; here it coils useless on the mud where no tide comes—here, where I sat with my back to a hedge, and my hat over my eyes, while the sheep advanced remorselessly in that wooden way of theirs, step by step on stiff, pointed legs. But if you hold a blunt blade to a grindstone long enough, something spurts—a jagged edge of fire; so held to lack of reason, aimlessness, the usual, all massed together, out spurted in one flame hatred, contempt. I took my mind, my being, the old dejected, almost inanimate object, and lashed it about among these odds and ends, sticks and straws, detestable little bits of wreckage, flotsam and jetsam, floating on the oily surface. I jumped up. I said, ‘Fight! Fight!’ I repeated. It is the effort and the struggle, it is the perpetual warfare, it is the shattering and piecing together—this is the daily battle, defeat or victory, the absorbing pursuit. The trees, scattered, put on order; the thick green of the leaves thinned itself to a dancing light. I netted them under with a sudden phrase. I retrieved them from formlessness with words.

“The train came in. Lengthening down the platform, the train came to a stop. I caught my train. And so back to London in the evening. How satisfactory, the atmosphere of common sense and tobacco; old women clambering into the third-class carriage with their baskets; the sucking at pipes; the good-nights and see you to-morrows of friends parting at wayside stations, and then the lights of London—not the flaring ecstasy of youth, not that tattered violet banner, but still the lights of London all the same; hard, electric lights, high up in offices; street lamps laced along dry pavements; flares roaring above street markets. I like all this when I have despatched the enemy for a moment.

“Also I like to find the pageant of existence roaring, in a theatre for instance. The clay-coloured, earthy nondescript animal of the field here erects himself and with infinite ingenuity and effort puts up a fight against the green woods and green fields and sheep advancing with measured tread, munching. And, of course, windows in the long grey streets were lit up; strips of carpet cut the pavement; there were swept and garnished rooms, fire, food, wine, talk. Men with withered hands, women with pearl pagodas hanging from their ears, came in and went out. I saw old men’s faces carved into wrinkles and sneers by the work of the world; beauty cherished so that it seemed newly sprung even in age; and youth so apt for pleasure that pleasure, one thought, must exist; it seemed that grass-lands must roll for it; and the sea be chopped up into little waves; and the woods rustle with bright-coloured birds for youth, for youth expectant. There one met Jinny and Hal, Tom and Betty; there we had our jokes and shared our secrets; and never parted in the doorway without arranging to meet again in some other room as the occasion, as the time of the year, suggested. Life is pleasant; life is good. After Monday comes Tuesday, and Wednesday follows.

“Yes, but after a time with a difference. It may be that something in the look of the room one night, in the arrangement of the chairs, suggests it. It seems comfortable to sink down on a sofa in a corner, to look, to listen. Then it happens that two figures standing with their backs to the window appear against the branches of a spreading tree. With a shock of emotion one feels ‘There are figures without features robed in beauty’. In the pause that follows while the ripples spread, the girl to whom one should be talking says to herself, ‘He is old’. But she is wrong. It is not age; it is that a drop has fallen; another drop. Time has given the arrangement another shake. Out we creep from the arch of the currant leaves, out into a wider world. The true order of things—this is our perpetual illusion—is now apparent. Thus in a moment, in a drawing-room, our life adjusts itself to the majestic march of day across the sky.

“It was for this reason that instead of pulling on my patent-leather shoes and finding a tolerable tie, I sought Neville. I sought my oldest friend, who had known me when I was Byron; when I was Meredith’s young man, and also that hero in a book by Dostoevsky whose name I have forgotten. I found him alone, reading. A perfectly neat table; a curtain pulled methodically straight; a paper-knife dividing a French volume—nobody, I thought, ever changes the attitude in which we saw them first, or the clothes. Here he has sat in this chair, in these clothes, ever since we first met. Here was freedom; here was intimacy; the firelight broke off some round apple on the curtain. There we talked; sat talking; sauntered down that avenue, the avenue which runs under the trees, under the thick-leaved murmuring trees, the trees that are hung with fruit, which we have trodden so often together, so that now the turf is bare round some of those trees, round certain plays and poems, certain favourites of ours—the turf is trodden bare by our incessant unmethodical pacing. If I have to wait, I read; if I wake in the night, I feel along the shelf for a book. Swelling, perpetually augmented, there is a vast accumulation of unrecorded matter in my head. Now and then I break off a lump, Shakespeare it may be, it may be some old woman called Peck; and say to myself, smoking a cigarette in bed, ‘That’s Shakespeare. That’s Peck’—with a certainty of recognition and a shock of knowledge which is endlessly delightful, though not to be imparted. So we shared our Pecks, our Shakespeares; compared each other’s versions; allowed each other’s insight to set our own Peck or Shakespeare in a better light; and then sank into one of those silences which are now and again broken by a few words, as if a fin rose in the wastes of silence; and then the fin, the thought, sinks back into the depths, spreading round it a little ripple of satisfaction, content.

“Yes, but suddenly one hears a clock tick. We who had been immersed in this world became aware of another. It is painful. It was Neville who changed our time. He, who had been thinking with the unlimited time of the mind, which stretches in a flash from Shakespeare to ourselves, poked the fire and began to live by that other clock which marks the approach of a particular person. The wide and dignified sweep of his mind contracted. He became on the alert. I could feel him listening to sounds in the street. I noted how he touched a cushion. From the myriads of mankind and all time past he had chosen one person, one moment in particular. A sound was heard in the hall. What he was saying wavered in the air like an uneasy flame. I watched him disentangle one footstep from other footsteps; wait for some particular mark of identification and glance with the swiftness of a snake at the handle of the door. (Hence the astonishing acuteness of his perceptions; he has been trained always by one person.) So concentrated a passion shot out others like foreign matter from a still, sparkling fluid. I became aware of my own vague and cloudy nature full of sediment, full of doubt, full of phrases and notes to be made in pocket-books. The folds of the curtain became still, statuesque; the paper-weight on the table hardened; the threads on the curtain sparkled; everything became definite, external, a scene in which I had no part. I rose, therefore; I left him.

“Heavens! how they caught me as I left the room, the fangs of that old pain! the desire for someone not there. For whom? I did not know at first; then remembered Percival. I had not thought of him for months. Now to laugh with him, to laugh with him at Neville—that was what I wanted, to walk off arm-in-arm together laughing. But he was not there. The place was empty.

“It is strange how the dead leap out on us at street corners, or in dreams.

“This fitful gust blowing so sharp and cold upon me sent me that night across London to visit other friends, Rhoda and Louis, desiring company, certainty, contact. I wondered, as I mounted the stairs, what was their relationship? What did they say alone? I figured her awkward with the tea-kettle. She gazed over the slate roofs—the nymph of the fountain always wet, obsessed with visions, dreaming. She parted the curtain to look at the night. ‘Away!’ she said. ‘The moor is dark beneath the moon.’ I rang; I waited. Louis perhaps poured out milk in a saucer for the cat; Louis, whose bony hands shut like the sides of a dock closing themselves with a slow anguish of effort upon an enormous tumult of waters, who knew what has been said by the Egyptian, the Indian, by men with high cheek-bones and solitaries in hair shirts. I knocked: I waited; there was no answer. I tramped down the stone stairs again. Our friends—how distant, how mute, how seldom visited and little known. And I, too, am dim to my friends and unknown; a phantom, sometimes seen, often not. Life is a dream surely. Our flame, the will-o’-the-wisp that dances in a few eyes, is soon to be blown out and all will fade. I recalled my friends. I thought of Susan. She had bought fields. Cucumbers and tomatoes ripened in her hothouses. The vine that had been killed by last year’s frost was putting out a leaf or two. She walked heavily with her sons across her meadows. She went about the land attended by men in gaiters, pointing with her stick at a roof, at hedges, at walls fallen into disrepair. The pigeons followed her, waddling, for the grain that she let fall from her capable, earthy fingers. ‘But I no longer rise at dawn’, she said. Then Jinny—entertaining, no doubt, some new young man. They reached the crisis of the usual conversation. The room would be darkened; chairs arranged. For she still sought the moment. Without illusions, hard and clear as crystal, she rode at the day with her breast bared. She let its spikes pierce her. When the lock whitened on her forehead she twisted it fearlessly among the rest. So when they come to bury her nothing will be out of order. Bits of ribbons will be found curled up. But still the door opens. Who is coming in? she asks, and rises to meet him, prepared, as on those first spring nights when the tree under the big London houses where respectable citizens were going soberly to bed scarcely sheltered her love; and the squeak of trams mixed with her cry of delight and the rippling of leaves had to shade her languor, her delicious lassitude as she sank down cooled by all the sweetness of nature satisfied. Our friends, how seldom visited, how little known—it is true; and yet, when I meet an unknown person, and try to break off, here at this table, what I call ‘my life’, it is not one life that I look back upon; I am not one person; I am many people; I do not altogether know who I am—Jinny, Susan, Neville, Rhoda, or Louis: or how to distinguish my life from theirs.

“So I thought that night in early autumn when we came together and dined once more at Hampton Court. Our discomfort was at first considerable, for each by that time was committed to a statement, and the other person coming along the road to the meeting-place dressed like this or that, with a stick or without, seemed to contradict it. I saw Jinny look at Susan’s earthy fingers and then hide her own; I, considering Neville, so neat and exact, felt the nebulosity of my own life blurred with all these phrases. He then boasted, because he was ashamed of one room and one person and his own success. Louis and Rhoda, the conspirators, the spies at table, who take notes, felt, ‘After all, Bernard can make the waiter fetch us rolls—a contact denied us’. We saw for a moment laid out among us the body of the complete human being whom we have failed to be, but at the same time, cannot forget. All that we might have been we saw; all that we had missed, and we grudged for a moment the other’s claim, as children when the cake is cut, the one cake, the only cake, watch their slice diminishing.

“However, we had our bottle of wine, and under that seduction lost our enmity, and stopped comparing. And, half-way through dinner, we felt enlarge itself round us the huge blackness of what is outside us, of what we are not. The wind, the rush of wheels became the roar of time, and we rushed—where? And who were we? We were extinguished for a moment, went out like sparks in burnt paper and the blackness roared. Past time, past history we went. For me this lasts but one second. It is ended by my own pugnacity. I strike the table with a spoon. If I could measure things with compasses I would, but since my only measure is a phrase, I make phrases—I forget what, on this occasion. We became six people at a table in Hampton Court. We rose and walked together down the avenue. In the thin, the unreal twilight, fitfully like the echo of voices laughing down some alley, geniality returned to me and flesh. Against the gateway, against some cedar tree I saw blaze bright, Neville, Jinny, Rhoda, Louis, Susan and myself, our life, our identity. Still King William seemed an unreal monarch and his crown mere tinsel. But we—against the brick, against the branches, we six, out of how many million millions, for one moment out of what measureless abundance of past time and time to come, burnt there triumphant. The moment was all; the moment was enough. And then Neville, Jinny, Susan and I, as a wave breaks, burst asunder, surrendered—to the next leaf, to the precise bird, to a child with a hoop, to a prancing dog, to the warmth that is hoarded in woods after a hot day, to the lights twisted like white ribbon on rippled waters. We drew apart; we were consumed in the darkness of the trees, leaving Rhoda and Louis to stand on the terrace by the urn.

“When we returned from that immersion—how sweet, how deep!—and came to the surface and saw the conspirators still standing there it was with some compunction. We had lost what they had kept. We interrupted. But we were tired, and whether it had been good or bad, accomplished or left undone, the dusky veil was falling upon our endeavours; the lights were sinking as we paused for a moment upon the terrace that overlooks the river. The steamers were landing their trippers on the bank; there was a distant cheering, the sound of singing, as if people waved their hats and joined in some last song. The sound of the chorus came across the water and I felt leap up that old impulse, which has moved me all my life, to be thrown up and down on the roar of other people’s voices, singing the same song; to be tossed up and down on the roar of almost senseless merriment, sentiment, triumph, desire. But not now. No! I could not collect myself; I could not distinguish myself; I could not help letting fall the things that had made me a minute ago eager, amused, jealous, vigilant and hosts of other things, into the water. I could not recover myself from that endless throwing away, dissipation, flooding forth without our willing it and rushing soundlessly away out there under the arches of the bridge, round some clump of trees or an island, out where sea-birds sit on stakes, over the roughened water to become waves in the sea—I could not recover myself from that dissipation. So we parted.

“Was this, then, this streaming away mixed with Susan, Jinny, Neville, Rhoda, Louis, a sort of death? A new assembly of elements? Some hint of what was to come? The note was scribbled, the book shut, for I am an intermittent student. I do not say my lessons by any means at the stated hour. Later, walking down Fleet Street at the rush hour, I recalled that moment; I continued it. ‘Must I for ever,’ I said, ‘beat my spoon on the table-cloth? Shall I not, too, consent?’ The omnibuses were clogged; one came up behind another and stopped with a click, like a link added to a stone chain. People passed.

“Multitudinous, carrying attaché-cases, dodging with incredible celerity in and out, they went past like a river in spate. They went past roaring like a train in a tunnel. Seizing my chance I crossed; dived down a dark passage and entered the shop where they cut my hair. I leant my head back and was swathed in a sheet. Looking-glasses confronted me in which I could see my pinioned body and people passing; stopping, looking, and going on indifferent. The hairdresser began to move his scissors to and fro. I felt myself powerless to stop the oscillations of the cold steel. So we are cut and laid in swaths, I said; so we lie side by side on the damp meadows, withered branches and flowering. We have no more to expose ourselves on the bare hedges to the wind and snow; no more to carry ourselves erect when the gale sweeps, to bear our burden upheld; or stay, unmurmuring, on those pallid noondays when the bird creeps close to the bough and the damp whitens the leaf. We are cut, we are fallen. We are become part of that unfeeling universe that sleeps when we are at our quickest and burns red when we lie asleep. We have renounced our station and lie now flat, withered and how soon forgotten! Upon which I saw an expression in the tail of the eye of the hairdresser as if something interested him in the street.

“What interested the hairdresser? What did the hairdresser see in the street? It is thus that I am recalled. (For I am no mystic; something always plucks at me—curiosity, envy, admiration, interest in hairdressers and the like bring me to the surface.) While he brushed the fluff from my coat I took pains to assure myself of his identity, and then, swinging my stick, I went into the Strand, and evoked to serve as opposite to myself the figure of Rhoda, always so furtive, always with fear in her eyes, always seeking some pillar in the desert, to find which she had gone; she had killed herself. ‘Wait’, I said, putting my arm in imagination (thus we consort with our friends) through her arm. ‘Wait until these omnibuses have gone by. Do not cross so dangerously. These men are your brothers.’ In persuading her I was also persuading my own soul. For this is not one life; nor do I always know if I am man or woman, Bernard or Neville, Louis, Susan, Jinny or Rhoda—so strange is the contact of one with another.

“Swinging my stick, with my hair newly cut and the nape of my neck tingling, I went past all those trays of penny toys imported from Germany that men hold out in the street by St. Paul’s—St. Paul’s, the brooding hen with spread wings from whose shelter run omnibuses and streams of men and women at the rush hour. I thought how Louis would mount those steps in his neat suit with his cane in his hand and his angular, rather detached gait. With his Australian accent (‘My father, a banker at Brisbane’) he would come, I thought, with greater respect to these old ceremonies than I do, who have heard the same lullabies for a thousand years. I am always impressed, as I enter, by the rubbed noses; the polished brasses; the flapping and the chanting, while one boy’s voice wails round the dome like some lost and wandering dove. The recumbency and the peace of the dead impress me—warriors at rest under their old banners. Then I scoff at the floridity and absurdity of some scrolloping tomb; and the trumpets and the victories and the coats of arms and the certainty, so sonorously repeated, of resurrection, of eternal life. My wandering and inquisitive eye then shows me an awe-stricken child; a shuffling pensioner; or the obeisances of tired shop-girls burdened with heaven knows what strife in their poor thin breasts come to solace themselves in the rush hour. I stray and look and wonder, and sometimes, rather furtively, try to rise on the shaft of somebody else’s prayer into the dome, out, beyond, wherever they go. But then like the lost and wailing dove, I find myself failing, fluttering, descending and perching upon some curious gargoyle, some battered nose or absurd tombstone, with humour, with wonder, and so again watch the sightseers with their Baedekers shuffling past, while the boy’s voice soars in the dome and the organ now and then indulges in a moment of elephantine triumph. How then, I asked, would Louis roof us all in? How would he confine us, make us one, with his red ink, with his very fine nib? The voice petered out in the dome, wailing.

“So into the street again, swinging my stick, looking at wire trays in stationers’ shop-windows, at baskets of fruit grown in the colonies, murmuring Pillicock sat on Pillicock’s hill, or Hark, hark, the dogs do bark, or The World’s great age begins anew, or Come away, come away, death—mingling nonsense and poetry, floating in the stream. Something always has to be done next. Tuesday follows Monday; Wednesday, Tuesday. Each spreads the same ripple. The being grows rings, like a tree. Like a tree, leaves fall.

“For one day as I leant over a gate that led into a field, the rhythm stopped: the rhymes and the hummings, the nonsense and the poetry. A space was cleared in my mind. I saw through the thick leaves of habit. Leaning over the gate I regretted so much litter, so much unaccomplishment and separation, for one cannot cross London to see a friend, life being so full of engagements; nor take ship to India and see a naked man spearing fish in blue water. I said life had been imperfect, an unfinished phrase. It had been impossible for me, taking snuff as I do from any bagman met in a train, to keep coherency—that sense of the generations, of women carrying red pitchers to the Nile, of the nightingale who sings among conquests and migrations. It had been too vast an undertaking, I said, and how can I go on lifting my foot perpetually to climb the stair? I addressed my self as one would speak to a companion with whom one is voyaging to the North Pole.

“I spoke to that self who has been with me in many tremendous adventures; the faithful man who sits over the fire when everybody has gone to bed, stirring the cinders with a poker; the man who has been so mysteriously and with sudden accretions of being built up, in a beech wood, sitting by a willow tree on a bank, leaning over a parapet at Hampton Court; the man who has collected himself in moments of emergency and banged his spoon on the table, saying, ‘I will not consent’.

“This self now as I leant over the gate looking down over fields rolling in waves of colour beneath me made no answer. He threw up no opposition. He attempted no phrase. His fist did not form. I waited. I listened. Nothing came, nothing. I cried then with a sudden conviction of complete desertion, Now there is nothing. No fin breaks the waste of this immeasurable sea. Life has destroyed me. No echo comes when I speak, no varied words. This is more truly death than the death of friends, than the death of youth. I am the swathed figure in the hairdresser’s shop taking up only so much space.

“The scene beneath me withered. It was like the eclipse when the sun went out and left the earth, flourishing in full summer foliage, withered, brittle, false. Also I saw on a winding road in a dust dance the groups we had made, how they came together, how they ate together, how they met in this room or that. I saw my own indefatigable busyness—how I had rushed from one to the other, fetched and carried, travelled and returned, joined this group and that, here kissed, here withdrawn; always kept hard at it by some extraordinary purpose, with my nose to the ground like a dog on the scent; with an occasional toss of the head, an occasional cry of amazement, despair and then back again with my nose to the scent. What a litter—what a confusion; with here birth, here death; succulence and sweetness; effort and anguish; and myself always running hither and thither. Now it was done with. I had no more appetites to glut; no more stings in me with which to poison people; no more sharp teeth and clutching hands or desire to feel the pear and the grape and the sun beating down from the orchard wall.

“The woods had vanished; the earth was a waste of shadow. No sound broke the silence of the wintry landscape. No cock crowed; no smoke rose; no train moved. A man without a self, I said. A heavy body leaning on a gate. A dead man. With dispassionate despair, with entire disillusionment, I surveyed the dust dance; my life, my friends’ lives, and those fabulous presences, men with brooms, women writing, the willow tree by the river—clouds and phantoms made of dust too, of dust that changed, as clouds lose and gain and take gold or red and lose their summits and billow this way and that, mutable, vain. I, carrying a notebook, making phrases, had recorded merely changes; a shadow, I had been sedulous to take note of shadows. How can I proceed now, I said, without a self, weightless and visionless, through a world weightless, without illusion?

“The heaviness of my despondency thrust open the gate I leant on and pushed me, an elderly man, a heavy man with grey hair, through the colourless field, the empty field. No more to hear echoes, no more to see phantoms, to conjure up no opposition, but to walk always unshadowed, making no impress upon the dead earth. If even there had been sheep munching, pushing one foot after another, or a bird, or a man driving a spade into the earth, had there been a bramble to trip me, or a ditch, damp with soaked leaves, into which to fall—but no, the melancholy path led along the level, to more wintriness and pallor and the equal and uninteresting view of the same landscape.

“How then does light return to the world after the eclipse of the sun? Miraculously. Frailly. In thin stripes. It hangs like a glass cage. It is a hoop to be fractured by a tiny jar. There is a spark there. Next moment a flush of dun. Then a vapour as if earth were breathing in and out, once, twice, for the first time. Then under the dullness someone walks with a green light. Then off twists a white wraith. The woods throb blue and green, and gradually the fields drink in red, gold, brown. Suddenly a river snatches a blue light. The earth absorbs colour like a sponge slowly drinking water. It puts on weight; rounds itself; hangs pendent; settles and swings beneath our feet.

“So the landscape returned to me; so I saw fields rolling in waves of colour beneath me, but now with this difference; I saw but was not seen. I walked unshadowed; I came unheralded. From me had dropped the old cloak, the old response; the hollowed hand that beats back sounds. Thin as a ghost, leaving no trace where I trod, perceiving merely, I walked alone in a new world, never trodden; brushing new flowers, unable to speak save in a child’s words of one syllable; without shelter from phrases—I who have made so many; unattended, I who have always gone with my kind; solitary, I who have always had someone to share the empty grate, or the cupboard with its hanging loop of gold.

“But how describe the world seen without a self? There are no words. Blue, red—even they distract, even they hide with thickness instead of letting the light through. How describe or say anything in articulate words again?—save that it fades, save that it undergoes a gradual transformation, becomes, even in the course of one short walk, habitual—this scene also. Blindness returns as one moves and one leaf repeats another. Loveliness returns as one looks, with all its train of phantom phrases. One breathes in and out substantial breath; down in the valley the train draws across the fields lop-eared with smoke.

“But for a moment I had sat on the turf somewhere high above the flow of the sea and the sound of the woods, had seen the house, the garden, and the waves breaking. The old nurse who turns the pages of the picture-book had stopped and had said, ‘Look. This is the truth’.

“So I was thinking as I came along Shaftesbury Avenue to-night. I was thinking of that page in the picture-book. And when I met you in the place where one goes to hang up one’s coat I said to myself, ‘It does not matter whom I meet. All this little affair of “being” is over. Who this is I do not know; nor care; we will dine together’. So I hung up my coat, tapped you on the shoulder, and said, ‘Sit with me’.

“Now the meal is finished; we are surrounded by peelings and bread-crumbs. I have tried to break off this bunch and hand it you; but whether there is substance or truth in it I do not know. Nor do I know exactly where we are. What city does that stretch of sky look down upon? Is it Paris, is it London where we sit, or some southern city of pink-washed houses lying under cypresses, under high mountains, where eagles soar? I do not at this moment feel certain.

“I begin now to forget; I begin to doubt the fixity of tables, the reality of here and now, to tap my knuckles smartly upon the edges of apparently solid objects and say, ‘Are you hard?’ I have seen so many different things, have made so many different sentences. I have lost in the process of eating and drinking and rubbing my eyes along surfaces that thin, hard shell which cases the soul, which, in youth, shuts one in—hence the fierceness, and the tap, tap, tap of the remorseless beaks of the young. And now I ask, ‘Who am I?’ I have been talking of Bernard, Neville, Jinny, Susan, Rhoda and Louis. Am I all of them? Am I one and distinct? I do not know. We sat here together. But now Percival is dead, and Rhoda is dead; we are divided; we are not here. Yet I cannot find any obstacle separating us. There is no division between me and them. As I talked I felt ‘I am you’. This difference we make so much of, this identity we so feverishly cherish, was overcome. Yes, ever since old Mrs. Constable lifted her sponge and pouring warm water over me covered me with flesh I have been sensitive, percipient. Here on my brow is the blow I got when Percival fell. Here on the nape of my neck is the kiss Jinny gave Louis. My eyes fill with Susan’s tears. I see far away, quivering like a gold thread, the pillar Rhoda saw, and feel the rush of the wind of her flight when she leapt.

“Thus when I come to shape here at this table between my hands the story of my life and set it before you as a complete thing, I have to recall things gone far, gone deep, sunk into this life or that and become part of it; dreams, too, things surrounding me, and the inmates, those old half-articulate ghosts who keep up their hauntings by day and night; who turn over in their sleep, who utter their confused cries, who put out their phantom fingers and clutch at me as I try to escape—shadows of people one might have been; unborn selves. There is the old brute, too, the savage, the hairy man who dabbles his fingers in ropes of entrails; and gobbles and belches; whose speech is guttural, visceral—well, he is here. He squats in me. To-night he has been feasted on quails, salad, and sweetbread. He now holds a glass of fine old brandy in his paw. He brindles, purrs and shoots warm thrills all down my spine as I sip. It is true, he washes his hands before dinner, but they are still hairy. He buttons on trousers and waistcoats, but they contain the same organs. He jibs if I keep him waiting for dinner. He mops and mows perpetually, pointing with his half-idiot gestures of greed and covetousness at what he desires. I assure you, I have great difficulty sometimes in controlling him. That man, the hairy, the ape-like, has contributed his part to my life. He has given a greener glow to green things, has held his torch with its red flames, its thick and smarting smoke, behind every leaf. He has lit up the cool garden even. He has brandished his torch in murky by-streets where girls suddenly seem to shine with a red and intoxicating translucency. Oh, he has tossed his torch high! He has led me wild dances!

“But no more. Now to-night, my body rises tier upon tier like some cool temple whose floor is strewn with carpets and murmurs rise and the altars stand smoking; but up above, here in my serene head, come only fine gusts of melody, waves of incense, while the lost dove wails, and the banners tremble above tombs, and the dark airs of midnight shake trees outside the open windows. When I look down from this transcendency, how beautiful are even the crumbled relics of bread! What shapely spirals the peelings of pears make—how thin, and mottled like some sea-bird’s egg. Even the forks laid straight side by side appear lucid, logical, exact; and the horns of the rolls which we have left are glazed, yellow-plated, hard. I could worship my hand even, with its fan of bones laced by blue mysterious veins and its astonishing look of aptness, suppleness and ability to curl softly or suddenly crush—its infinite sensibility.

“Immeasurably receptive, holding everything, trembling with fullness, yet clear, contained—so my being seems, now that desire urges it no more out and away; now that curiosity no longer dyes it a thousand colours. It lies deep, tideless, immune, now that he is dead, the man I called ‘Bernard’, the man who kept a book in his pocket in which he made notes—phrases for the moon, notes of features; how people looked, turned, dropped their cigarette ends; under B, butterfly powder, under D, ways of naming death. But now let the door open, the glass door that is for ever turning on its hinges. Let a woman come, let a young man in evening-dress with a moustache sit down; is there anything that they can tell me? No! I know all that, too. And if she suddenly gets up and goes, ‘My dear’, I say, ‘you no longer make me look after you’. The shock of the falling wave which has sounded all my life, which woke me so that I saw the gold loop on the cupboard, no longer makes quiver what I hold.

“So now, taking upon me the mystery of things, I could go like a spy without leaving this place, without stirring from my chair. I can visit the remote verges of the desert lands where the savage sits by the camp-fire. Day rises; the girl lifts the watery fire-hearted jewels to her brow; the sun levels his beams straight at the sleeping house; the waves deepen their bars; they fling themselves on shore; back blows the spray; sweeping their waters they surround the boat and the sea-holly. The birds sing in chorus; deep tunnels run between the stalks of flowers; the house is whitened; the sleeper stretches; gradually all is astir. Light floods the room and drives shadow beyond shadow to where they hang in folds inscrutable. What does the central shadow hold? Something? Nothing? I do not know.

“Oh, but there is your face. I catch your eye. I, who had been thinking myself so vast, a temple, a church, a whole universe, unconfined and capable of being everywhere on the verge of things and here too, am now nothing but what you see—an elderly man, rather heavy, grey above the ears, who (I see myself in the glass) leans one elbow on the table, and holds in his left hand a glass of old brandy. That is the blow you have dealt me. I have walked bang into the pillar-box. I reel from side to side. I put my hands to my head. My hat is off—I have dropped my stick. I have made an awful ass of myself and am justly laughed at by any passer-by.

“Lord, how unutterably disgusting life is! What dirty tricks it plays us, one moment free; the next, this. Here we are among the breadcrumbs and the stained napkins again. That knife is already congealing with grease. Disorder, sordidity and corruption surround us. We have been taking into our mouths the bodies of dead birds. It is with these greasy crumbs, slobbered over napkins, and little corpses that we have to build. Always it begins again; always there is the enemy; eyes meeting ours; fingers twitching ours; the effort waiting. Call the waiter. Pay the bill. We must pull ourselves up out of our chairs. We must find our coats. We must go. Must, must, must—detestable word. Once more, I who had thought myself immune, who had said, ‘Now I am rid of all that’, find that the wave has tumbled me over, head over heels, scattering my possessions, leaving me to collect, to assemble, to heap together, summon my forces, rise and confront the enemy.

“It is strange that we, who are capable of so much suffering, should inflict so much suffering. Strange that the face of a person, whom I scarcely know save that I think we met once on the gangway of a ship bound for Africa—a mere adumbration of eyes, cheeks, nostrils—should have power to inflict this insult. You look, eat, smile, are bored, pleased, annoyed—that is all I know. Yet this shadow which has sat by me for an hour or two, this mask from which peep two eyes, has power to drive me back, to pinion me down among all those other faces, to shut me in a hot room; to send me dashing like a moth from candle to candle.

“But wait. While they add up the bill behind the screen, wait one moment. Now that I have reviled you for the blow that sent me staggering among peelings and crumblings and old scraps of meat, I will record in words of one syllable how also under your gaze with that compulsion on me I begin to perceive this, that and the other. The clock ticks; the woman sneezes; the waiter comes—there is a gradual coming together, running into one, acceleration and unification. Listen: a whistle sounds, wheels rush, the door creaks on its hinges. I regain the sense of the complexity and the reality and the struggle, for which I thank you. And with some pity, some envy and much good will, take your hand and bid you good night.

“Heaven be praised for solitude! I am alone now. That almost unknown person has gone, to catch some train, to take some cab, to go to some place or person whom I do not know. The face looking at me has gone. The pressure is removed. Here are empty coffee-cups. Here are chairs turned but nobody sits on them. Here are empty tables and nobody any more coming to dine at them to-night.

“Let me now raise my song of glory. Heaven be praised for solitude. Let me be alone. Let me cast and throw away this veil of being, this cloud that changes with the least breath, night and day, and all night and all day. While I sat here I have been changing. I have watched the sky change. I have seen clouds cover the stars, then free the stars, then cover the stars again. Now I look at their changing no more. Now no one sees me and I change no more. Heaven be praised for solitude that has removed the pressure of the eye, the solicitation of the body, and all need of lies and phrases.

“My book, stuffed with phrases, has dropped to the floor. It lies under the table, to be swept up by the charwoman when she comes wearily at dawn looking for scraps of paper, old tram tickets, and here and there a note screwed into a ball and left with the litter to be swept up. What is the phrase for the moon? And the phrase for love? By what name are we to call death? I do not know. I need a little language such as lovers use, words of one syllable such as children speak when they come into the room and find their mother sewing and pick up some scrap of bright wool, a feather, or a shred of chintz. I need a howl; a cry. When the storm crosses the marsh and sweeps over me where I lie in the ditch unregarded I need no words. Nothing neat. Nothing that comes down with all its feet on the floor. None of those resonances and lovely echoes that break and chime from nerve to nerve in our breasts, making wild music, false phrases. I have done with phrases.

“How much better is silence; the coffee-cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee-cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself. Do not come and worry me with your hints that it is time to shut the shop and be gone. I would willingly give all my money that you should not disturb me but let me sit on and on, silent, alone.

“But now the head waiter, who has finished his own meal, appears and frowns; he takes his muffler from his pocket and ostentatiously makes ready to go. They must go; must put up the shutters, must fold the table-cloths, and give one brush with a wet mop under the tables.

Curse you then. However beat and done with it all I am, I must haul myself up, and find the particular coat that belongs to me; must push my arms into the sleeves; must muffle myself up against the night air and be off. I, I, I, tired as I am, spent as I am, and almost worn out with all this rubbing of my nose along the surfaces of things, even I, an elderly man who is getting rather heavy and dislikes exertion, must take myself off and catch some last train.

“Again I see before me the usual street. The canopy of civilisation is burnt out. The sky is dark as polished whale-bone. But there is a kindling in the sky whether of lamplight or of dawn. There is a stir of some sort—sparrows on plane trees somewhere chirping. There is a sense of the break of day. I will not call it dawn. What is dawn in the city to an elderly man standing in the street looking up rather dizzily at the sky? Dawn is some sort of whitening of the sky; some sort of renewal. Another day; another Friday; another twentieth of March, January, or September. Another general awakening. The stars draw back and are extinguished. The bars deepen themselves between the waves. The film of mist thickens on the fields. A redness gathers on the roses, even on the pale rose that hangs by the bedroom window. A bird chirps. Cottagers light their early candles. Yes, this is the eternal renewal, the incessant rise and fall and fall and rise again.

“And in me too the wave rises. It swells; it arches its back. I am aware once more of a new desire, something rising beneath me like the proud horse whose rider first spurs and then pulls him back. What enemy do we now perceive advancing against us, you whom I ride now, as we stand pawing this stretch of pavement? It is death. Death is the enemy. It is death against whom I ride with my spear couched and my hair flying back like a young man’s, like Percival’s, when he galloped in India. I strike spurs into my horse. Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!”

The waves broke on the shore.

the end

[]

THE
COMMON
READER

SECOND SERIES

by
Virginia Woolf

published
1932
by
The Hogarth Press

the common reader ii

The Strange Elizabethans.

Donne After Three Centuries.

“The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia.”

“Robinson Crusoe.”

Dorothy Osborne’s “Letters.”

Swift’s “Journal to Stella.”

The “Sentimental Journey.”

Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to His Son.

Two Parsons.

Dr. Burney’s Evening Party.

Jack Mytton.

De Quincey’s Autobiography.

Four Figures.

William Hazlitt.

Geraldine and Jane.

“Aurora Leigh.”

The Niece of an Earl.

George Gissing.

The Novels of George Meredith.

“I Am Christina Rossetti.”

The Novels of Thomas Hardy.

How Should One Read a Book?

[]

“… I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers, uncorrupted by literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be generally decided all claim to poetical honours.”—Dr. Johnson, Life of Gray.

Most of the following papers have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, Life and Letters, The Nation, Vogue, The New York Herald, The Yale Review, and Figaro. For permission to reprint two of them I have to thank the Oxford University Press and Mr. Jonathan Cape. Some are now published for the first time.

The Strange Elizabethans.

There are few greater delights than to go back three or four hundred years and become in fancy at least an Elizabethan. That such fancies are only fancies, that this “becoming an Elizabethan”, this reading sixteenth-century writing as currently and certainly as we read our own is an illusion, is no doubt true. Very likely the Elizabethans would find our pronunciation of their language unintelligible; our fancy picture of what it pleases us to call Elizabethan life would rouse their ribald merriment. Still, the instinct that drives us to them is so strong and the freshness and vigour that blow through their pages are so sweet that we willingly run the risk of being laughed at, of being ridiculous.

And if we ask why we go further astray in this particular region of English literature than in any other, the answer is no doubt that Elizabethan prose, for all its beauty and bounty, was a very imperfect medium. It was almost incapable of fulfilling one of the offices of prose which is to make people talk, simply and naturally, about ordinary things. In an age of utilitarian prose like our own, we know exactly how people spend the hours between breakfast and bed, how they behave when they are neither one thing nor the other, neither angry nor loving, neither happy nor miserable. Poetry ignores these slighter shades; the social student can pick up hardly any facts about daily life from Shakespeare’s plays; and if prose refuses to enlighten us, then one avenue of approach to the men and women of another age is blocked. Elizabethan prose, still scarcely separated off from the body of its poetry, could speak magnificently, of course, about the great themes—how life is short, and death certain; how spring is lovely, and winter horrid—perhaps, indeed, the lavish and towering periods that it raises above these simple platitudes are due to the fact that it has not cheapened itself upon trifles. But the price it pays for this soaring splendour is to be found in its awkwardness when it comes to earth—when Lady Sidney, for example, finding herself cold at nights, has to solicit the Lord Chamberlain for a better bedroom at Court. Then any housemaid of her own age could put her case more simply and with greater force. Thus, if we go to the Elizabethan prose-writers to solidify the splendid world of Elizabethan poetry as we should go now to our biographers, novelists, and journalists to solidify the world of Pope, of Tennyson, of Conrad, we are perpetually baffled and driven from our quest. What, we ask, was the life of an ordinary man or woman in the time of Shakespeare? Even the familiar letters of the time give us little help. Sir Henry Wotton is pompous and ornate and keeps us stiffly at arm’s length. Their histories resound with drums and trumpets. Their broadsheets reverberate with meditations upon death and reflections upon the immortality of the soul. Our best chance of finding them off their guard and so becoming at ease with them is to seek one of those unambitious men who haunt the outskirts of famous gatherings, listening, observing, sometimes taking a note in a book. But they are difficult to find. Gabriel Harvey perhaps, the friend of Spenser and of Sidney, might have fulfilled that function. Unfortunately the values of the time persuaded him that to write about rhetoric, to write about Thomas Smith, to write about Queen Elizabeth in Latin, was better worth doing than to record the table talk of Spenser and Sir Philip Sidney. But he possessed to some extent the modern instinct for preserving trifles, for keeping copies of letters, and for making notes of ideas that struck him in the margins of books. If we rummage among these fragments we shall, at any rate, leave the highroad and perhaps hear some roar of laughter from a tavern door, where poets are drinking; or meet humble people going about their milking and their love-making without a thought that this is the great Elizabethan age, or that Shakespeare is at this moment strolling down the Strand and might tell one, if one plucked him by the sleeve, to whom he wrote the sonnets, and what he meant by Hamlet.

The first person whom we meet is indeed a milkmaid—Gabriel Harvey’s sister Mercy. In the winter of 1574 she was milking in the fields near Saffron Walden accompanied by an old woman, when a man approached her and offered her cakes and malmsey wine. When they had eaten and drunk in a wood and the old woman had wandered off to pick up sticks, the man proceeded to explain his business. He came from Lord Surrey, a youth of about Mercy’s own age—seventeen or eighteen that is—and a married man. He had been bowling one day and had seen the milkmaid; her hat had blown off and “she had somewhat changed her colour”. In short, Lord Surrey had fallen passionately in love with her; and sent her by the same man gloves, a silk girdle, and an enamel posy ring which he had torn from his own hat though his Aunt, Lady W——, had given it him for a very different purpose. Mercy at first stood her ground. She was a poor milkmaid, and he was a noble gentleman. But at last she agreed to meet him at her house in the village. Thus, one very misty, foggy night just before Christmas, Lord Surrey and his servant came to Saffron Walden. They peered in at the malthouse, but saw only her mother and sisters; they peeped in at the parlour, but only her brothers were there. Mercy herself was not to be seen; and “well mired and wearied for their labour”, there was nothing for it but to ride back home again. Finally, after further parleys, Mercy agreed to meet Lord Surrey in a neighbour’s house alone at midnight. She found him in the little parlour “in his doublet and hose, his points untrust, and his shirt lying round about him”. He tried to force her on to the bed; but she cried out, and the good wife, as had been agreed between them, rapped on the door and said she was sent for. Thwarted, enraged, Lord Surrey cursed and swore, “God confound me, God confound me”, and by way of lure emptied his pockets of all the money in them—thirteen shillings in shillings and testers it came to—and made her finger it. Still, however, Mercy made off, untouched, on condition that she would come again on Christmas eve. But when Christmas eve dawned she was up betimes and had put seven miles between her and Saffron Walden by six in the morning, though it snowed and rained so that the floods were out, and P., the servant, coming later to the place of assignation, had to pick his way through the water in pattens. So Christmas passed. And a week later, in the very nick of time to save her honour, the whole story very strangely was discovered and brought to an end. On New Year’s Eve her brother Gabriel, the young fellow of Pembroke Hall, was riding back to Cambridge when he came up with a simple countryman whom he had met at his father’s house. They rode on together, and after some country gossip, the man said that he had a letter for Gabriel in his pocket. Indeed, it was addressed “To my loving brother Mr. G.H.”, but when Gabriel opened it there on the road, he found that the address was a lie. It was not from his sister Mercy, but to his sister Mercy. “Mine Own Sweet Mercy”, it began; and it was signed “Thine more than ever his own Phil”. Gabriel could hardly control himself—“could scarcely dissemble my sudden fancies and comprimitt my inward passions”—as he read. For it was not merely a love-letter; it was more; it talked about possessing Mercy according to promise. There was also a fair English noble wrapped up in the paper. So Gabriel, doing his best to control himself before the countryman, gave him back the letter and the coin and told him to deliver them both to his sister at Saffron Walden with this message: “To look ere she leap. She may pick out the English of it herself.” He rode on to Cambridge; he wrote a long letter to the young lord, informing him with ambiguous courtesy that the game was up. The sister of Gabriel Harvey was not to be the mistress of a married nobleman. Rather she was to be a maid, “diligent, and trusty and tractable”, in the house of Lady Smith at Audley End. Thus Mercy’s romance breaks off; the clouds descend again; and we no longer see the milkmaid, the old woman, the treacherous serving man who came with malmsey and cakes and rings and ribbons to tempt a poor girl’s honour while she milked her cows.

This is probably no uncommon story; there must have been many milkmaids whose hats blew off as they milked their cows, and many lords whose hearts leapt at the sight so that they plucked the jewels from their hats and sent their servants to make treaty for them. But it is rare for the girl’s own letters to be preserved or to read her own account of the story as she was made to deliver it at her brother’s inquisition. Yet when we try to use her words to light up the Elizabethan field, the Elizabethan house and living-room, we are met by the usual perplexities. It is easy enough, in spite of the rain and the fog and the floods, to make a fancy piece out of the milkmaid and the meadows and the old woman wandering off to pick up sticks. Elizabethan songwriters have taught us too well the habit of that particular trick. But if we resist the impulse to make museum pieces out of our reading, Mercy herself gives us little help. She was a milkmaid, scribbling love-letters by the light of a farthing dip in an attic. Nevertheless, the sway of the Elizabethan convention was so strong, the accent of their speech was so masterful, that she bears herself with a grace and expresses herself with a resonance that would have done credit to a woman of birth and literary training. When Lord Surrey pressed her to yield she replied:

The thing you wot of, Milord, were a great trespass towards God, a great offence to the world, a great grief to my friends, a great shame to myself, and, as I think, a great dishonour to your lordship. I have heard my father say, Virginity is ye fairest flower in a maid’s garden, and chastity ye richest dowry a poor wench can have…. Chastity, they say, is like unto time, which, being once lost, can no more be recovered.

Words chime and ring in her ears, as if she positively enjoyed the act of writing. When she wishes him to know that she is only a poor country girl and no fine lady like his wife, she exclaims, “Good Lord, that you should seek after so bare and country stuff abroad, that have so costly and courtly wares at home!” She even breaks into a jog-trot of jingling rhyme, far less sonorous than her prose, but proof that to write was an art, not merely a means of conveying facts. And if she wants to be direct and forcible, the proverbs she has heard in her father’s house come to her pen, the biblical imagery runs in her ears: “And then were I, poor wench, cast up for hawk’s meat, to mine utter undoing, and my friends’ exceeding grief”. In short, Mercy the milkmaid writes a natural and noble style, which is incapable of vulgarity, and equally incapable of intimacy. Nothing, one feels, would have been easier for Mercy than to read her lover a fine discourse upon the vanity of grandeur, the loveliness of chastity, the vicissitudes of fortune. But of emotion as between one particular Mercy and one particular Philip, there is no trace. And when it comes to dealing exactly in a few words with some mean object—when, for example, the wife of Sir Henry Sidney, the daughter of the Duke of Northumberland, has to state her claim to a better room to sleep in, she writes for all the world like an illiterate servant girl who can neither form her letters nor spell her words nor make one sentence follow smoothly after another. She haggles, she niggles, she wears our patience down with her repetitions and her prolixities. Hence it comes about that we know very little about Mercy Harvey, the milkmaid, who wrote so well, or Mary Sidney, daughter to the Duke of Northumberland, who wrote so badly. The background of Elizabethan life eludes us.

But let us follow Gabriel Harvey to Cambridge, in case we can there pick up something humble and colloquial that will make these strange Elizabethans more familiar to us. Gabriel, having discharged his duty as a brother, seems to have given himself up to the life of an intellectual young man with his way to make in the world. He worked so hard and he played so little that he made himself unpopular with his fellows. For it was obviously difficult to combine an intense interest in the future of English poetry and the capacity of the English language with card-playing, bear-baiting, and such diversions. Nor could he apparently accept everything that Aristotle said as gospel truth. But with congenial spirits he argued, it is clear, hour by hour, night after night, about poetry, and metre, and the raising of the despised English speech and the meagre English literature to a station among the great tongues and literatures of the world. We are sometimes made to think, as we listen, of such arguments as might now be going forward in the new Universities of America. The young English poets speak with a bold yet uneasy arrogance—“England, since it was England, never bred more honourable minds, more adventurous hearts, more valorous hands, or more excellent wits, than of late”. Yet, to be English is accounted a kind of crime—“nothing is reputed so contemptible and so basely and vilely accounted of as whatsoever is taken for English”. And if, in their hopes for the future and their sensitiveness to the opinion of older civilisations, the Elizabethans show much the same susceptibility that sometimes puzzle us among the younger countries today, the sense that broods over them of what is about to happen, of an undiscovered land on which they are about to set foot, is much like the excitement that science stirs in the minds of imaginative English writers of our own time. Yet however stimulating it is to think that we hear the stir and strife of tongues in Cambridge rooms about the year 1570, it has to be admitted that to read Harvey’s pages methodically is almost beyond the limits of human patience. The words seem to run red-hot, molten, hither and thither, until we cry out in anguish for the boon of some meaning to set its stamp on them. He takes the same idea and repeats it over and over again:

In the sovereign workmanship of Nature herself, what garden of flowers without weeds? what orchard of trees without worms? what field of corn without cockle? what pond of fishes without frogs? what sky of light without darkness? what mirror of knowledge without ignorance? what man of earth without frailty? what commodity of the world without discommodity?

It is interminable. As we go round and round like a horse in a mill, we perceive that we are thus clogged with sound because we are reading what we should be hearing. The amplifications and the repetitions, the emphasis like that of a fist pounding the edge of a pulpit, are for the benefit of the slow and sensual ear which loves to dally over sense and luxuriate in sound—the ear which brings in, along with the spoken word, the look of the speaker and his gestures, which gives a dramatic value to what he says and adds to the crest of an extravagance some modulation which makes the word wing its way to the precise spot aimed at in the hearer’s heart. Hence, when we lay Harvey’s diatribes against Nash or his letters to Spenser upon poetry under the light of the eye alone, we can hardly make headway and lose our sense of any definite direction. We grasp any simple fact that floats to the surface as a drowning man grasps a plank—that the carrier was called Mrs. Kerke, that Perne kept a cub for his pleasure in his rooms at Peterhouse; that “Your last letter … was delivered me at mine hostesses by the fireside, being fast hedged in round about on every side with a company of honest, good fellows, and at that time reasonable, honest quaffers”; that Greene died begging Mistress Isam “for a penny pot of Malmsey”, had borrowed her husband’s shirt when his own was awashing, and was buried yesterday in the new churchyard near Bedlam at a cost of six shillings and fourpence. Light seems to dawn upon the darkness. But no; just as we think to lay hands on Shakespeare’s coat-tails, to hear the very words rapped out as Spenser spoke them, up rise the fumes of Harvey’s eloquence and we are floated off again into disputation and eloquence, windy, wordy, voluminous, and obsolete. How, we ask, as we slither over the pages, can we ever hope to come to grips with these Elizabethans? And then, turning, skipping and glancing, something fitfully and doubtfully emerges from the violent pages, the voluminous arguments—the figure of a man, the outlines of a face, somebody who is not “an Elizabethan” but an interesting, complex, and individual human being.

We know him, to begin with, from his dealings with his sister. We see him riding to Cambridge, a fellow of his college, when she was milking with poor old women in the fields. We observe with amusement his sense of the conduct that befits the sister of Gabriel Harvey, the Cambridge scholar. Education had put a great gulf between him and his family. He rode to Cambridge from a house in a village street where his father made ropes and his mother worked in the malthouse. Yet though his lowly birth and the consciousness that he had his way to make in the world made him severe with his sister, fawning to the great, uneasy and self-centred and ostentatious, it never made him ashamed of his family. The father who could send three sons to Cambridge and was so little ashamed of his craft that he had himself carved making ropes at his work and the carving let in above his fireplace, was no ordinary man. The brothers who followed Gabriel to Cambridge and were his best allies there, were brothers to be proud of. He could be proud of Mercy even, whose beauty could make a great nobleman pluck the jewel from his hat. He was undoubtedly proud of himself. It was the pride of a self-made man who must read when other people are playing cards, who owns no undue allegiance to authority and will contradict Aristotle himself, that made him unpopular at Cambridge and almost cost him his degree. But it was an unfortunate chance that led him thus early in life to defend his rights and insist upon his merits. Moreover, since it was true—since he was abler, quicker, and more learned than other people, handsome in person too, as even his enemies could not deny (“a smudge piece of a handsome fellow it hath been in his days” Nash admitted) he had reason to think that he deserved success and was denied it only by the jealousies and conspiracies of his colleagues. For a time, by dint of much caballing and much dwelling upon his own deserts, he triumphed over his enemies in the matter of the degree. He delivered lectures. He was asked to dispute before the court when Queen Elizabeth came to Audley End. He even drew her favourable attention. “He lookt something like an Italian”, she said when he was brought to her notice. But the seeds of his downfall were visible even in his moment of triumph. He had no self-respect, no self-control. He made himself ridiculous and his friends uneasy. When we read how he dressed himself up and “came ruffling it out huffty tuffty in his suit of velvet” how uneasy he was, at one moment cringing, at another “making no bones to take the wall of Sir Phillip Sidney”, now flirting with the ladies, now “putting bawdy riddles to them”, how when the Queen praised him he was beside himself with joy and talked the English of Saffron Walden with an Italian accent, we can imagine how his enemies jeered and his friends blushed. And so, for all his merits, his decline began. He was not taken into Lord Leicester’s service; he was not made Public Orator; he was not given the Mastership of Trinity Hall. But there was one society in which he succeeded. In the small, smoky rooms where Spenser and other young men discussed poetry and language and the future of English literature, Harvey was not laughed at. Harvey, on the contrary, was taken very seriously. To friends like these he seemed as capable of greatness as any of them. He too might be one of those destined to make English literature illustrious. His passion for poetry was disinterested. His leaning was profound. When he held forth upon quantity and metre, upon what the Greeks had written and the Italians, and what the English might write, no doubt he created for Spenser that atmosphere of hope and ardent curiosity spiced with sound learning that serves to spur the imagination of a young writer and to make each fresh poem as it is written seem the common property of a little band of adventurers set upon the same quest. It was thus that Spenser saw him:

Harvey, the happy above happiest men,

I read: that, sitting like a looker-on

Of this world’s stage, doest note, with critic pen,

The sharp dislikes of each condition.

Poets need such “lookers-on”; someone who discriminates from a watch-tower above the battle; who warns; who foresees. It must have been pleasant for Spenser to listen as Harvey talked; and then to cease to listen, to let the vehement, truculent voice run on, while he slipped from theory to practice and made up a few lines of his own poetry in his head. But the looker-on may sit too long and hold forth too curiously and domineeringly for his own health. He may make his theories fit too tight to accommodate the formlessness of life. Thus when Harvey ceased to theorise and tried to practise there issued nothing but a thin dribble of arid and unappetising verse or a copious flow of unctuous and servile eulogy. He failed to be a poet as he failed to be a statesman, as he failed to be a professor, as he failed to be a Master, as he failed, it might seem, in everything that he undertook, save that he had won the friendship of Spenser and Sir Philip Sidney.

But, happily, Harvey left behind him a commonplace book; he had the habit of making notes in the margins of books as he read. Looking from one to the other, from his public self to his private, we see his face lit from both sides, and the expression changes as it changes so seldom upon the face of the Elizabethans. We detect another Harvey lurking behind the superficial Harvey, shading him with doubt and effort and despondency. For, luckily, the commonplace book was small; the margins even of an Elizabethan folio narrow; Harvey was forced to be brief, and because he wrote only for his own eye at the command of some sharp memory or experience he seems to write as if he were talking to himself. That is true, he seems to say; or that reminds me, or again: If only I had done this—We thus become aware of a conflict between the Harvey who blundered among men and the Harvey who sat wisely at home among his books. The one who acts and suffers brings his case to the one who reads and thinks for advice and consolation.

Indeed, he had need of both. From the first his life was full of conflict and difficulty. Harvey the rope-maker’s son might put a brave face on it, but still in the society of gentlemen the lowness of his birth galled him. Think, then, the sedentary Harvey counselled him, of all those unknown people who have nevertheless triumphed. Think of “Alexander, an Unexpert Youth”; think of David, “a forward stripling, but vanquished a huge Giant”; think of Judith and of Pope Joan and their exploits; think, above all, of that “gallant virago … Joan of Arc, a most worthy, valiant young wench … what may not an industrious and politic man do … when a lusty adventurous wench might thus prevail?” And then it seems as if the smart young men at Cambridge twitted the rope-maker’s son for his lack of skill in the gentlemanly arts. “Leave writing”, Gabriel counselled him, “which consumeth unreasonable much time…. You have already plagued yourself this way”. Make yourself master of the arts of eloquence and persuasion. Go into the world. Learn swordsmanship, riding, and shooting. All three may be learnt in a week. And then the ambitious but uneasy youth began to find the other sex attractive and asked advice of his wise and sedentary brother in the conduct of his love affairs. Manners, the other Harvey was of opinion, are of the utmost importance in dealing with women; one must be discreet, self-controlled. A gentleman, this counsellor continued, is known by his “Good entertainment of Ladies and gentlewomen. No salutation, without much respect and ceremony”—a reflection inspired no doubt by the memory of some snub received at Audley End. Health and the care of the body are of the utmost importance. “We scholars make an Ass of our body and wit”. One must “leap out of bed lustily, every morning in ye whole year”. One must be sparing in one’s diet, and active, and take regular exercise, like brother H., “who never failed to breathe his hound once a day at least”. There must be no “buzzing or musing”. A learned man must also be a man of the world. Make it your “daily charge” “to exercise, to laugh; to proceed boldly”. And if your tormentors brawl and rail and scoff and mock at you, the best answer is “a witty and pleasant Ironie”. In any case, do not complain, “It is gross folly, and a vile Sign of a wayward and forward disposition, to be eftsoons complaining of this, or that, to small purpose”. And if as time goes on without preferment, one cannot pay one’s bills, one is thrust into prison, one has to bear the taunts and insults of landladies, still remember “Glad poverty is no poverty”; and if, as time passes and the struggle increases, it seems as if “Life is warfare”, if sometimes the beaten man has to own, “But for hope ye Hart would brust”, still his sage counsellor in the study will not let him throw up the sponge. “He beareth his misery best, that hideth it most” he told himself.

So runs the dialogue that we invent between the two Harveys—Harvey the active and Harvey the passive, Harvey the foolish and Harvey the wise. And it seems on the surface that the two halves, for all their counselling together, made but a sorry business of the whole. For the young man who had ridden off to Cambridge full of conceit and hope and good advice to his sister returned empty-handed to his native village in the end. He dwindled out his last long years in complete obscurity at Saffron Walden. He occupied himself superficially by practising his skill as a doctor among the poor of the neighbourhood. He lived in the utmost poverty off buttered roots and sheep’s trotters. But even so he had his consolations, he cherished his dreams. As he pottered about his garden in the old black velvet suit, purloined, Nash says, from a saddle for which he had not paid, his thoughts were all of power and glory; of Stukeley and Drake; of “the winners of gold and the wearers of gold”. Memories he had in abundance—“The remembrance of best things will soon pass out of memory; if it be not often renewed and revived”, he wrote. But there was some eager stir in him, some lust for action and glory and life and adventure that forbade him to dwell in the past. “The present tense only to be regarded” is one of his notes. Nor did he drug himself with the dust of scholarship. Books he loved as a true reader loves them, not as trophies to be hung up for display, but as living beings that “must be meditated, practised and incorporated into my body and soul”. A singularly humane view of learning survived in the breast of the old and disappointed scholar. “The only brave way to learn all things with no study and much pleasure”, he remarked. Dreams of the winners of gold and the wearers of gold, dreams of action and power, fantastic though they were in an old beggar who could not pay his reckoning, who pressed simples and lived off buttered roots in a cottage, kept life in him when his flesh had withered and his skin was “riddled and crumpled like a piece of burnt parchment”. He had his triumph in the end. He survived both his friends and his enemies—Spenser and Sidney, Nash and Perne. He lived to a very great age for an Elizabethan, to eighty-one or eighty-two; and when we say that Harvey lived we mean that he quarrelled and was tiresome and ridiculous and struggled and failed and had a face like ours—a changing, a variable, a human face.

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Donne After Three Centuries.

When we think how many millions of words have been written and printed in England in the past three hundred years, and how the vast majority have died out without leaving any trace, it is tempting to wonder what quality the words of Donne possess that we should still hear them distinctly today. Far be it from us to suggest even in this year of celebration and pardonable adulation (1931) that the poems of Donne are popular reading or that the typist, if we look over her shoulder in the Tube, is to be discovered reading Donne as she returns from her office. But he is read; he is audible—to that fact new editions and frequent articles testify, and it is worth perhaps trying to analyse the meaning that his voice has for us as it strikes upon the ear after this long flight across the stormy seas that separate us from the age of Elizabeth. But the first quality that attracts us is not his meaning, charged with meaning as his poetry is, but something much more unmixed and immediate; it is the explosion with which he bursts into speech. All preface, all parleying have been consumed; he leaps into poetry the shortest way. One phrase consumes all preparation:

I long to talke with some old lover’s ghost,

or

He is starke mad, whoever sayes,

That he hath beene in love an houre.

At once we are arrested. Stand still, he commands,

Stand still, and I will read to thee

A Lecture, Love, in love’s philosophy.

And stand still we must. With the first words a shock passes through us; perceptions, previously numb and torpid, quiver into being; the nerves of sight and hearing are quickened; the “bracelet of bright hair” burns in our eyes. But, more remarkably, we do not merely become aware of beautiful remembered lines; we feel ourselves compelled to a particular attitude of mind. Elements that were dispersed in the usual stream of life become, under the stroke of Donne’s passion, one and entire. The world, a moment before, cheerful, humdrum, bursting with character and variety, is consumed. We are in Donne’s world now. All other views are sharply cut off.

In this power of suddenly surprising and subjugating the reader, Donne excels most poets. It is his characteristic quality; it is thus that he lays hold upon us, summing up his essence in a word or two. But it is an essence that, as it works in us, separates into strange contraries at odds with one another. Soon we begin to ask ourselves of what this essence is composed, what elements have met together to cut so deep and complex an impression. Some obvious clues lie strewn on the surface of the poems. When we read the Satyres, for example, we need no external proof to tell us that these are the work of a boy. He has all the ruthlessness and definiteness of youth, its hatred of the follies of middle age and of convention. Bores, liars, courtiers—detestable humbugs and hypocrites as they are, why not sum them up and sweep them off the face of the earth with a few strokes of the pen? And so these foolish figures are drubbed with an ardour that proves how much hope and faith and delight in life inspire the savagery of youthful scorn. But, as we read on, we begin to suspect that the boy with the complex and curious face of the early portrait—bold yet subtle, sensual yet nerve drawn—possessed qualities that made him singular among the young. It is not simply that the huddle and pressure of youth which out-thinks its words had urged him on too fast for grace or clarity. It may be that there is in this clipping and curtailing, this abrupt heaping of thought on thought, some deeper dissatisfaction than that of youth with age, of honesty with corruption. He is in rebellion, not merely against his elders, but against something antipathetic to him in the temper of his time. His verse has the deliberate bareness of those who refuse to avail themselves of the current usage. It has the extravagance of those who do not feel the pressure of opinion, so that sometimes judgment fails them, and they heap up strangeness for strangeness’ sake. He is one of those nonconformists, like Browning and Meredith, who cannot resist glorifying their nonconformity by a dash of wilful and gratuitous eccentricity. But to discover what Donne disliked in his own age, let us imagine some of the more obvious influences that must have told upon him when he wrote his early poems—let us ask what books he read. And by Donne’s own testimony we find that his chosen books were the works of “grave Divines”; of philosophers; of “jolly Statesmen, which teach how to tie The sinewes of a cities mistique bodie”; and chroniclers. Clearly he liked facts and arguments. If there are also poets among his books, the epithets he applies to them, “Giddie fantastique”, seem to disparage the art, or at least to show that Donne knew perfectly well what qualities were antipathetic to him in poetry. And yet he was living in the very spring of English poetry. Some of Spenser might have been on his shelves; and Sidney’s Arcadia; and the Paradise of Dainty Devices, and Lyly’s Euphues. He had the chance, and apparently took it—“I tell him of new playes”—of going to the theatre; of seeing the plays of Marlowe and Shakespeare acted. When he went abroad in London, he must have met all the writers of that time—Spenser and Sidney and Shakespeare and Jonson; he must have heard at this tavern or at that talk of new plays, of new fashions in verse, heated and learned discussion of the possibilities of the English language and the future of English poetry. And yet, if we turn to his biography, we find that he neither consorted with his contemporaries nor read what they wrote. He was one of those original beings who cannot draw profit, but are rather disturbed and distracted by what is being done round them at the moment. If we turn again to Satyres, it is easy to see why this should be so. Here is a bold and active mind that loves to deal with actual things, which struggles to express each shock exactly as it impinges upon his tight-stretched senses. A bore stops him in the street. He sees him exactly, vividly.

His cloths were strange, though coarse; and black, though bare;

Sleevelesse his jerkin was, and it had beene

Velvet, but t’was now (so much ground was seene)

Become Tufftaffatie;

Then he likes to give the actual words that people say:

He, like to a high stretcht lute string squeakt, O Sir,

’Tis sweet to talke of Kings. At Westminster,

Said I, The man that keepes the Abbey tombes,

And for his price doth with who ever comes,

Of all our Harries, and our Edwards talke,

From King to King and all their kin can walke:

Your eares shall heare nought, but Kings; your eyes meet

Kings only; The way to it, is Kingstreet.

His strength and his weakness are both to be found here. He selects one detail and stares at it until he has reduced it to the few words that express its oddity:

And like a bunch of ragged carrets stand

The short swolne fingers of thy gouty hand,

but he cannot see in the round, as a whole. He cannot stand apart and survey the large outline so that the description is always of some momentary intensity, seldom of the broader aspect of things. Naturally, then, he found it difficult to use the drama with its conflict of other characters; he must always speak from his own centre in soliloquy, in satire, in self-analysis. Spenser, Sidney, and Marlowe provided no helpful models for a man who looked out from this angle of vision. The typical Elizabethan with his love of eloquence, with his longing for brave new words, tended to enlarge and generalize. He loved wide landscapes, heroic virtues, and figures seen sublimely in outline or in heroic conflict. Even the prose-writers have the same habit of aggrandisement. When Dekker sets out to tell us how Queen Elizabeth died in the spring, he cannot describe her death in particular or that spring in particular; he must dilate upon all deaths and all springs:

… the Cuckoo (like a single, sole Fiddler, that reels from Tavern to Tavern) plied it all the day long: Lambs frisked up and down in the vallies, kids and Goats leapt to and fro on the Mountains: Shepherds sat piping, country wenches singing: Lovers made Sonnets for their Lasses, whilst they made Garlands for their Lovers: And as the Country was frolic, so was the City merry … no Scritch-Owl frighted the silly Countryman at midnight, nor any Drum the Citizen at noon-day; but all was more calm than a still water, all husht, as if the Spheres had been playing in Consort: In conclusion, heaven lookt like a Pallace, and the great hall of the earth, like a Paradise. But O the short-liv’d Felicity of man! O world, of what slight and thin stuff is thy happiness!

—in short, Queen Elizabeth died, and it is no use asking Dekker what the old woman who swept his room for him said, or what Cheapside looked like that night if one happened to be caught in the thick of the throng. He must enlarge; he must generalize; he must beautify.

Donne’s genius was precisely the opposite of this. He diminished; he particularized. Not only did he see each spot and wrinkle which defaced the fair outline; but he noted with the utmost curiosity his own reaction to such contrasts and was eager to lay side by side the two conflicting views and to let them make their own dissonance. It is this desire for nakedness in an age that was florid, this determination to record not the likenesses which go to compose a rounded and seemly whole, but the inconsistencies that break up semblances, the power to make us feel the different emotions of love and hate and laughter at the same time, that separate Donne from his contemporaries. And if the usual traffic of the day—to be buttonholed by a bore, to be snared by a lawyer, to be snubbed by a courtier—made so sharp an impression on Donne, the effect of falling in love was bound to be incomparably greater. Falling in love meant, to Donne, a thousand things; it meant being tormented and disgusted, disillusioned and enraptured; but it also meant speaking the truth. The love poems, the elegies, and the letters thus reveal a figure of a very different calibre from the typical figure of Elizabethan love poetry. That great ideal, built up by a score of eloquent pens, still burns bright in our eyes. Her body was of alabaster, her legs of ivory; her hair was golden wire and her teeth pearls from the Orient. Music was in her voice and stateliness in her walk. She could love and sport and be faithless and yielding and cruel and true; but her emotions were simple, as befitted her person. Donne’s poems reveal a lady of a very different cast. She was brown but she was also fair; she was solitary but also sociable; she was rustic yet also fond of city life; she was sceptical yet devout, emotional but reserved—in short she was as various and complex as Donne himself. As for choosing one type of human perfection and restricting himself to love her and her only, how could Donne, or any man who allowed his senses full play and honestly recorded his own moods, so limit his nature and tell such lies to placate the conventional and the decorous? Was not “love’s sweetest part, Variety”? “Of music, joy, life and eternity Change is the nursery”, he sang. The timid fashion of the age might limit a lover to one woman. For his part he envied and admired the ancients, “who held plurality of loves no crime”:

But since this title honour hath been us’d,

Our weak credulity hath been abus’d.

We have fallen from our high estate; the golden laws of nature are repealed.

So through the glass of Donne’s poetry, now darkly clouded, now brilliantly clear, we see pass in procession the many women whom he loved and hated—the common Julia whom he despised; the simpleton, to whom he taught the art of love; she who was married to an invalid husband, “cag’d in a basket chair”; she who could only be loved dangerously by strategy; she who dreamt of him and saw him murdered as he crossed the Alps; she whom he had to dissuade from the risk of loving him; and lastly, the autumnal, the aristocratic lady for whom he felt more of reverence than of love—so they pass, common and rare, simple and sophisticated, young and old, noble and plebeian, and each casts a different spell and brings out a different lover, although the man is the same man, and the women, perhaps, are also phases of womanhood rather than separate and distinct women. In later years the Dean of St. Paul’s would willingly have edited some of these poems and suppressed one of these lovers—the poet presumably of “Going to Bed” and “Love’s Warr”. But the Dean would have been wrong. It is the union of so many different desires that gives Donne’s love poetry not only its vitality but also a quality that is seldom found with such strength in the conventional and orthodox lover—its spirituality. If we do not love with the body, can we love with the mind? If we do not love variously, freely, admitting the lure first of this quality and then of that, can we at length choose out the one quality that is essential and adhere to it and so make peace among the warring elements and pass into a state of being which transcends the “Hee and Shee”? Even while he was at his most fickle and gave fullest scope to his youthful lusts, Donne could predict the season of maturity when he would love differently, with pain and difficulty, one and one only. Even while he scorned and railed and abused, he divined another relationship which transcended change and parting and might, even in the bodies’ absence, lead to unity and communion:

Rend us in sunder, thou cans’t not divide,

Our bodies so, but that our souls are ty’d,

And we can love by letters still and gifts,

And thoughts and dreams;

Again,

They who one another keepe alive

N’er parted be.

And again,

So to one neutrall thing both sexes fit,

Wee dye and rise the same, and prove

Mysterious by this love.

Such hints and premonitions of a further and finer state urge him on and condemn him to perpetual unrest and dissatisfaction with the present. He is tantalized by the sense that there is a miracle beyond any of these transient delights and disgusts. Lovers can, if only for a short space, reach a state of unity beyond time, beyond sex, beyond the body. And at last, for one moment, they reach it. In the “Extasie” they lie together on a bank,

All day, the same our postures were,

And wee said nothing, all the day….

This Extasie doth unperplex

(We said) and tell us what we love,

Wee see by this, it was not sexe,

Wee see, we saw not what did move: …

Wee then, who are this new soule, know,

Of what we are compos’d, and made,

For, th’ Atomies of which we grow,

Are soules, whom no change can invade.

But O alas, so long, so farre

Our bodies why doe wee forbeare? …

But O alas, he breaks off, and the words remind us that however much we may wish to keep Donne in one posture—for it is in these Extasies that lines of pure poetry suddenly flow as if liquefied by a great heat—so to remain in one posture was against his nature. Perhaps it is against the nature of things also. Donne snatches the intensity because he is aware of the change that must alter, of the discord that must interrupt.

Circumstances, at any rate, put it beyond his power to maintain that ecstasy for long. He had married secretly; he was a father; he was, as we are soon reminded, a very poor yet a very ambitious man, living in a damp little house at Mitcham with a family of small children. The children were frequently ill. They cried, and their cries, cutting through the thin walls of the jerry-built house, disturbed him at his work. He sought sanctuary naturally enough elsewhere, and naturally had to pay rent for that relief. Great ladies—Lady Bedford, Lady Huntingdon, Mrs. Herbert—with well-spread tables and fair gardens, must be conciliated; rich men with the gift of rooms in their possession must be placated. Thus, after Donne the harsh satirist, and Donne the imperious lover, comes the servile and obsequious figure of Donne the devout servant of the great, the extravagant eulogist of little girls. And our relationship with him suddenly changes. In the satires and the love poems there was a quality—some psychological intensity and complexity—that brings him closer than his contemporaries, who often seem to be caught up in a different world from ours and to exist immune from our perplexities and swept by passions which we admire but cannot feel. Easy as it is to exaggerate affinities, still we may claim to be akin to Donne in our readiness to admit contrasts, in our desire for openness, in that psychological intricacy which the novelists have taught us with their slow, subtle, and analytic prose. But now, as we follow Donne in his progress, he leaves us in the lurch. He becomes more remote, inaccessible, and obsolete than any of the Elizabethans. It is as if the spirit of the age, which he had scorned and flouted, suddenly asserted itself and made this rebel its slave. And as we lose sight of the outspoken young man who hated society, and of the passionate lover, seeking some mysterious unity with his love and finding it miraculously, now here, now there, it is natural to abuse the system of patrons and patronage that thus seduced the most incorruptible of men. Yet it may be that we are too hasty. Every writer has an audience in view, and it may well be doubted if the Bedfords and the Drurys and the Herberts were worse influences than the libraries and the newspaper proprietors who fill the office of patron nowadays.

The comparison, it is true, presents great difficulties. The noble ladies who brought so strange an element into Donne’s poetry, live only in the reflection, or in the distortion, that we find in the poems themselves. The age of memoirs and letter-writing was still to come. If they wrote themselves, and it is said that both Lady Pembroke and Lady Bedford were poets of merit, they did not dare to put their names to what they wrote, and it has vanished. But a diary here and there survives from which we may see the patroness more closely and less romantically. Lady Ann Clifford, for example, the daughter of a Clifford and a Russell, though active and practical and little educated—she was not allowed “to learn any language because her father would not permit it”—felt, we can gather from the bald statements of her diary, a duty towards literature and to the makers of it as her mother, the patroness of the poet Daniel, had done before her. A great heiress, infected with all the passion of her age for lands and houses, busied with all the cares of wealth and property, she still read good English books as naturally as she ate good beef and mutton. She read The Faery Queen and Sidney’s Arcadia; she acted in Ben Jonson’s Masques at Court; and it is proof of the respect in which reading was held that a girl of fashion should be able to read an old corrupt poet like Chaucer without feeling that she was making herself a target for ridicule as a bluestocking. The habit was part of a normal and well-bred life. It persisted even when she was mistress of one estate and claimant to even vaster possession of her own. She had Montaigne read aloud to her as she sat stitching at Knole; she sat absorbed in Chaucer while her husband worked. Later, when years of strife and loneliness had saddened her, she returned to her Chaucer with a deep sigh of content: “… if I had not excellent Chaucer’s book here to comfort me”, she wrote, “I were in a pitiable case having as many troubles as I have here, but, when I read in that, I scorn and make light of them all, and a little part of his beauteous spirit infuses itself in me”. The woman who said that, though she never attempted to set up a salon or to found a library, felt it incumbent on her to respect the men of low birth and no fortune who could write The Canterbury Tales or The Faery Queen. Donne preached before her at Knole. It was she who paid for the first monument to Spenser in Westminster Abbey, and if, when she raised a tomb to her old tutor, she dwelt largely upon her own virtues and titles, she still acknowledged that even so great a lady as herself owed gratitude to the makers of books. Words from great writers nailed to the walls of the room in which she sat, eternally transacting business, surrounded her as she worked, as they surrounded Montaigne in his tower in Burgundy.

Thus we may infer that Donne’s relation to the Countess of Bedford was very different from any that could exist between a poet and a countess at the present time. There was something distant and ceremonious about it. To him she was “as a vertuous Prince farre off”. The greatness of her office inspired reverence apart from her personality, just as the rewards within her gift inspired humility. He was her Laureate, and his songs in her praise were rewarded by invitations to stay with her at Twickenham and by those friendly meetings with men in power which were so effective in furthering the career of an ambitious man—and Donne was highly ambitious, not indeed for the fame of a poet, but for the power of a statesman. Thus when we read that Lady Bedford was “God’s Masterpiece”, that she excelled all women in all ages, we realise that John Donne is not writing to Lucy Bedford; Poetry is saluting Rank. And this distance served to inspire reason rather than passion. Lady Bedford must have been a very clever woman, well versed in the finer shades of theology, to derive an instant or an intoxicating pleasure from the praises of her servant. Indeed, the extreme subtlety and erudition of Donne’s poems to his patrons seems to show that one effect of writing for such an audience is to exaggerate the poet’s ingenuity. What is not poetry but something tortured and difficult will prove to the patron that the poet is exerting his skill on her behalf. Then again, a learned poem can be handed round among statesmen and men of affairs to prove that the poet is no mere versifier, but capable of office and responsibility. But a change of inspiration that has killed many poets—witness Tennyson and the Idylls of the King—only stimulated another side of Donne’s many-sided nature and many-faceted brain. As we read the long poems written ostensibly in praise of Lady Bedford, or in celebration of Elizabeth Drury (An Anatomie of the World and the Progresse of the Soul), we are made to reflect how much remains for a poet to write about when the season of love is over. When May and June are passed, most poets cease to write or sing the songs of their youth out of tune. But Donne survived the perils of middle age by virtue of the acuteness and ardour of his intellect. When “the satyrique fires which urg’d me to have writt in skorne of all” were quenched, when “My muse (for I had one), because I’m cold, Divorced herself”, there still remained the power to turn upon the nature of things and dissect that. Even in the passionate days of youth Donne had been a thinking poet. He had dissected and analysed his own love. To turn from that to the anatomy of the world, from the personal to the impersonal, was the natural development of a complex nature. And the new angle to which his mind now pointed under the influence of middle age and traffic with the world, released powers that were held in check when they were directed against some particular courtier or some particular woman. Now his imagination, as if freed from impediment, goes rocketing up in flights of extravagant exaggeration. True, the rocket bursts; it scatters in a shower of minute, separate particles—curious speculations, wire-drawn comparisons, obsolete erudition; but, winged by the double pressure of mind and heart, of reason and imagination, it soars far and fast into a finer air. Working himself up by his own extravagant praise of the dead girl, he shoots on:

We spur, we reine the starres, and in their race

They’re diversly content t’ obey our pace.

But keepes the earth her round proportion still?

Doth not a Tenarif, or higher Hill

Rise so high like a Rocke, that one might thinke

The floating Moone would shipwracke there, and sinke?

Seas are so deepe, that Whales being strooke to day,

Perchance tomorrow, scarce at middle way

Of their wish’d journies end, the bottome, die.

And men, to sound depths, so much line untie,

As one might justly thinke, that there would rise

At end thereof, one of th’ Antipodies:

Or again, Elizabeth Drury is dead and her soul has escaped:

she stayes not in the ayre,

To looke what Meteors there themselves prepare;

She carries no desire to know, nor sense,

Whether th’ ayres middle region be intense;

For th’ Element of fire, she doth not know,

Whether she past by such a place or no;

She baits not at the Moone, nor cares to trie

Whether in that new world, men live, and die.

Venus retards her not, to’ enquire, how shee

Can, (being one starre) Hesper, and Vesper bee;

Hee that charm’d Argus eyes, sweet Mercury,

Workes not on her, who now is growne all eye;

So we penetrate into distant regions, and reach rare and remote speculations a million miles removed from the simple girl whose death fired the explosion. But to break off fragments from poems whose virtue lies in their close-knit sinews and their long-breathed strength is to diminish them. They need to be read currently rather to grasp the energy and power of the whole than to admire those separate lines which Donne suddenly strikes to illumine the stages of our long climb.

Thus, finally, we reach the last section of the book, the Holy Sonnets and Divine Poems. Again the poetry changes with the change of circumstances and of years. The patron has gone with the need of patronage. Lady Bedford has been replaced by a Prince still more virtuous and still more remote. To Him the prosperous, the important, the famous Dean of St. Paul’s now turns. But how different is the divine poetry of this great dignitary from the divine poetry of the Herberts and the Vaughans! The memory of his sins returns to him as he writes. He has been burnt with “lust and envy”; he has followed profane loves; he has been scornful and fickle and passionate and servile and ambitious. He has attained his end; but he is weaker and worse than the horse or the bull. Now too he is lonely. “Since she whom I lov’d” is dead “My good is dead.” Now at last his mind is “wholly sett on heavenly things”. And yet how could Donne—that “little world made cunningly of elements”—be wholly set on any one thing?

Oh, to vex me, contraryes meet in one:

Inconstancy unnaturally hath begott

A constant habit; that when I would not

I change in vowes, and in devotione.

It was impossible for the poet who had noted so curiously the flow and change of human life, and its contrasts, who was at once so inquisitive of knowledge and so sceptical—

Doubt wisely; in strange way,

To stand inquiring right, is not to stray;

To sleep, or run wrong, is

—who had owned allegiance to so many great Princes, the body, the King, the Church of England, to reach that state of wholeness and certainty which poets of purer life were able to maintain. His devotions themselves were feverish and fitful. “My devout fitts come and goe away like a fantastique Ague.” They are full of contraries and agonies. Just as his love poetry at its most sensual will suddenly reveal the desire for a transcendent unity “beyond the Hee and Shee”, and his most reverential letters to great ladies will suddenly become love poems addressed by an amorous man to a woman of flesh and blood, so these last divine poems are poems of climbing and falling, of incongruous clamours and solemnities, as if the church door opened on the uproar of the street. That perhaps is why they still excite interest and disgust, contempt and admiration. For the Dean still retained the incorrigible curiosity of his youth. The temptation to speak the truth in defiance of the world even when he had taken all that the world had to give, still worked in him. An obstinate interest in the nature of his own sensations still troubled his age and broke its repose as it had troubled his youth and made him the most vigorous of satirists and the most passionate of lovers. There was no rest, no end, no solution even at the height of fame and on the edge of the grave for a nature plaited together of such diverse strands. The famous preparations that he made, lying in his shroud, being carved for his tomb, when he felt death approach are poles asunder from the falling asleep of the tired and content. He must still cut a figure and still stand erect—a warning perhaps, a portent certainly, but always consciously and conspicuously himself. That, finally, is one of the reasons why we still seek out Donne; why after three hundred years and more we still hear the sound of his voice speaking across the ages so distinctly. It may be true that when from curiosity we come to cut up and “survey each part”, we are like the doctors and “know not why”—we cannot see how so many different qualities meet together in one man. But we have only to read him, to submit to the sound of that passionate and penetrating voice, and his figure rises again across the waste of the years more erect, more imperious, more inscrutable than any of his time. Even the elements seem to have respected that identity. When the fire of London destroyed almost every other monument in St. Paul’s, it left Donne’s figure untouched, as if the flames themselves found that knot too hard to undo, that riddle too difficult to read, and that figure too entirely itself to turn to common clay.

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“The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia”.

If it is true that there are books written to escape from the present moment, and its meanness and its sordidity, it is certainly true that readers are familiar with a corresponding mood. To draw the blinds and shut the door, to muffle the noises of the street and shade the glare and flicker of its lights—that is our desire. There is then a charm even in the look of the great volumes that have sunk, like the “Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia”, as if by their own weight down to the very bottom of the shelf. We like to feel that the present is not all; that other hands have been before us, smoothing the leather until the corners are rounded and blunt, turning the pages until they are yellow and dog’s-eared. We like to summon before us the ghosts of those old readers who have read their Arcadia from this very copy—Richard Porter, reading with the splendours of the Elizabethans in his eyes; Lucy Baxter, reading in the licentious days of the Restoration; Thos. Hake, still reading, though now the eighteenth century has dawned with a distinction that shows itself in the upright elegance of his signature. Each has read differently, with the insight and the blindness of his own generation. Our reading will be equally partial. In 1930 we shall miss a great deal that was obvious to 1655; we shall see some things that the eighteenth century ignored. But let us keep up the long succession of readers; let us in our turn bring the insight and the blindness of our own generation to bear upon the “Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia”, and so pass it on to our successors.

If we choose the Arcadia because we wish to escape, certainly the first impression of the book is that Sidney wrote it with very much the same intention: “… it is done only for you, only to you”, he tells his “dear lady and sister, the Countess of Pembroke”. He is not looking at what is before him here at Wilton; he is not thinking of his own troubles or of the tempestuous mood of the great Queen in London. He is absenting himself from the present and its strife. He is writing merely to amuse his sister, not for “severer eyes”. “Your dear self can best witness the manner, being done in loose sheets of Paper, most of it in your presence, the rest, by sheets sent unto you, as fast as they were done.” So, sitting at Wilton under the downs with Lady Pembroke, he gazes far away into a beautiful land which he calls Arcadia. It is a land of fair valleys and fertile pastures, where the houses are “lodges of yellow stone built in the form of a star”; where the inhabitants are either great princes or humble shepherds; where the only business is to love and to adventure; where bears and lions surprise nymphs bathing in fields red with roses; where princesses are immured in the huts of shepherds; where disguise is perpetually necessary; where the shepherd is really a prince and the woman a man; where, in short, anything may be and happen except what actually is and happens here in England in the year 1580. It is easy to see why, as Sidney handed these dream pages to his sister, he smiled, entreating her indulgence. “Read it then at your idle times, and the follies your good judgment will find in it, blame not, but laugh at.” Even for the Sidneys and the Pembrokes life was not quite like that. And yet the life that we invent, the stories we tell, as we sink back with half-shut eyes and pour forth our irresponsible dreams, have perhaps some wild beauty; some eager energy; we often reveal in them the distorted and decorated image of what we soberly and secretly desire. Thus the Arcadia, by wilfully flouting all contact with the fact, gains another reality. When Sidney hinted that his friends would like the book for its writer’s sake, he meant perhaps that they would find there something that he could say in no other form, as the shepherds singing by the river’s side will “deliver out, sometimes joys, sometimes lamentations, sometimes challengings one of the other, sometimes, under hidden forms, uttering such matters as otherwise they durst not deal with”. There may be under the disguise of the Arcadia a real man trying to speak privately about something that is close to his heart. But in the first freshness of the early pages the disguise itself is enough to enchant us. We find ourselves with shepherds in spring on those sands which “lie against the Island of Cithera”. Then, behold, something floats on the waters. It is the body of a man, and he grasps to his breast a small square coffer; and he is young and beautiful—“though he were naked, his nakedness was to him an apparel”; and his name is Musidorus; and he has lost his friend. So, warbling melodiously, the shepherds revive the youth, and row out in a bark from the haven in search of Pyrocles; and a stain appears on the sea, with sparks and smoke issuing from it. For the ship upon which the two princes Musidorus and Pyrocles were voyaging has caught fire; it floats blazing on the water with a great store of rich things round it, and many drowned bodies. “In sum, a defeat, where the conquered kept both field and spoil: a shipwrack without storm or ill footing: and a waste of fire in the midst of the water.”

There in a little space we have some of the elements that are woven together to compose this vast tapestry. We have beauty of scene; a pictorial stillness; and something floating towards us, not violently but slowly and gently in time to the sweet warbling of the shepherds’ voices. Now and again this crystallises into a phrase that lingers and haunts the ear—“and a waste of fire in the midst of the waters”; “having in their faces a certain waiting sorrow”. Now the murmur broadens and expands into some more elaborate passage of description: “each pasture stored with sheep, feeding with sober security, while the pretty lambs with bleating oratory crav’d the dam’s comfort: here a shepherd’s boy piping, as though he should never be old: there a young shepherdess knitting, and withal singing, and it seemed that her voice comforted her hands to work, and her hands kept time to her voice-music”—a passage that reminds us of a famous description in Dorothy Osborne’s Letters.

Beauty of scene; stateliness of movement; sweetness of sound—these are the graces that seem to reward the mind that seeks enjoyment purely for its own sake. We are drawn on down the winding paths of this impossible landscape because Sidney leads us without any end in view but sheer delight in wandering. The syllabling of the words even causes him the liveliest delight. Mere rhythm we feel as we sweep over the smooth backs of the undulating sentences intoxicates him. Words in themselves delight him. Look, he seems to cry, as he picks up the glittering handfuls, can it be true that there are such numbers of beautiful words lying about for the asking? Why not use them, lavishly and abundantly? And so he luxuriates. Lambs do not suck—“with bleating oratory [they] craved the dam’s comfort”; girls do not undress—they “take away the eclipsing of their apparel”; a tree is not reflected in a river—“it seemed she looked into it and dressed her green locks by that running river”. It is absurd; and yet there is a world of difference between writing like this with zest and wonder at the images that form upon one’s pen and the writing of later ages when the dew was off the language—witness the little tremor that stirs and agitates a sentence that a more formal age would have made coldly symmetrical:

And the boy fierce though beautiful; and beautiful, though dying, not able to keep his falling feet, fell down to the earth, which he bit for anger, repining at his fortune, and as long as he could, resisting death, which might seem unwilling too; so long he was in taking away his young struggling soul.

It is this inequality and elasticity that lend their freshness to Sidney’s vast pages. Often as we rush through them, half laughing, half in protest, the desire comes upon us to shut the ear of reason completely and lie back and listen to this unformed babble of sound; this chorus of intoxicated voices singing madly like birds round the house before anyone is up.

But it is easy to lay too much stress upon qualities that delight us because they are lost. Sidney doubtless wrote the Arcadia partly to while away the time, partly to exercise his pen and experiment with the new instrument of the English language. But even so he remained young and a man; even in Arcadia the roads had ruts, and coaches were upset and ladies dislocated their shoulders; even the Princes Musidorus and Pyrocles have passions; Pamela and Philoclea, for all their sea-coloured satins and nets strung with pearls, are women and can love. Thus we stumble upon scenes that cannot be reeled off with a flowing pen; there are moments where Sidney stopped and thought, like any other novelist, what a real man or woman in this particular situation would say; where his own emotions come suddenly to the surface and light up the vague pastoral landscape with an incongruous glare. For a moment we get a surprising combination; crude daylight overpowers the silver lights of the tapers; shepherds and princesses suddenly stop their warbling and speak a few rapid words in their eager human voices.

… many times have I, leaning to yonder Palm, admired the blessedness of it, that it could bear love without sense of pain; many times, when my Master’s cattle came hither to chew their cud in this fresh place, I might see the young Bull testify his love; but how? with proud looks and joyfulness. O wretched mankind (said I then to myself) in whom wit (which should be the governor of his welfare) become’s the traitor to his blessedness: these beasts like children to nature, inherit her blessings quietly; we like bastards are laid abroad, even as foundlings, to be trained up by grief and sorrow. Their minds grudge not at their bodies comfort, nor their senses are letted from enjoying their objects; we have the impediments of honour, and the torments of conscience.

The words ring strangely on the finicking, dandified lips of Musidorus. There is Sidney’s own anger in them and his pain. And then the novelist Sidney suddenly opens his eyes. He watches Pamela as she takes the jewel in the figure of a crab-fish to signify “because it looks one way and goes another” that though he pretended to love Mopsa his heart was Pamela’s. And she takes it, he notes,

with a calm carelessness letting each thing slide (just as we do by their speeches who neither in matter nor person do any way belong unto us) which kind of cold temper, mixt with that lightning of her natural majesty, is of all others most terrible unto me….

Had she despised him, had she hated him, it would have been better.

But this cruel quietness, neither retiring to mislike, nor proceeding to favour; gracious, but gracious still after one manner; all her courtesies having this engraven in them, that what is done, is for virtue’s sake, not for the parties…. This (I say) heavenliness of hers … is so impossible to reach unto that I almost begin to submit myself unto the tyranny of despair, not knowing any way of persuasion….

—surely an acute and subtle observation made by a man who had felt what he describes. For a moment the pale and legendary figures, Gynecia, Philoclea, and Zelmane, become alive; their featureless faces work with passion; Gynecia, realizing that she loves her daughter’s lover, foams into grandeur, “crying vehemently Zelmane help me, O Zelmane have pity on me”; and the old King, in whom the beautiful strange Amazon has awakened a senile amorosity, shows himself old and foolish, looking “very curiously upon himself, sometimes fetching a little skip, as if he had said his strength had not yet forsaken him”.

But that moment of illumination, as it dies down and the princes once more resume their postures and the shepherds apply themselves to their lutes, throws a curious light upon the book as a whole. We realize more clearly the boundaries within which Sidney was working. For a moment he could note and observe and record as keenly and exactly as any modern novelist. And then, after this one glimpse in our direction, he turns aside, as if he heard other voices calling him and must obey their commands. In prose, he bethinks himself, one must not use the common words of daily speech. In a romance one must not make princes and princesses feel like ordinary men and women. Humour is the attribute of peasants. They can behave ridiculously; they can talk naturally; like Dametas they can come “whistling, and counting upon his fingers, how many load of hay seventeen fat oxen eat up on a year”; but the language of great people must always be long-winded and abstract and full of metaphors. Further, they must either be heroes of stainless virtue, or villains untouched by humanity. Of human oddities and littleness they must show no trace. Prose also must be careful to turn away from what is actually before it. Sometimes for a moment in looking at Nature one may fit the word to the sight; note the heron “wagling” as it rises from the marsh, or observe the water-spaniel hunting the duck “with a snuffling grace”. But this realism is only to be applied to Nature and animals and peasants. Prose, it seems, is made for slow, noble, and generalized emotions; for the description of wide landscapes; for the conveyance of long, equable discourses uninterrupted for pages together by any other speaker. Verse, on the other hand, had quite a different office. It is curious to observe how, when Sidney wished to sum up, to strike hard, to register a single and definite impression, he turns to verse. Verse in the Arcadia performs something of the function of dialogue in the modern novel. It breaks up the monotony and strikes a high-light. In those snatches of song that are scattered about the interminable adventures of Pyrocles and Musidorus our interest is once more fanned into flame. Often the realism and vigour of the verse comes with a shock after the drowsy langour of the prose:

What needed so high spirits such mansions blind?

Or wrapt in flesh what do they here obtain,

But glorious name of wretched human kind?

Balls to the stars, and thralls to fortune’s reign;

Turn’d from themselves, infected with their cage,

Where death is fear’d, and life is held with pain.

Like players plac’t to fill a filthy stage….

—one wonders what the indolent princes and princesses will make of that vehement speaking? Or of this:

A shop of shame, a Book where blots be rife,

This body is …

This man, this talking beast, this walking tree.

—thus the poet turns upon his languid company as if he loathed their self-complacent foppery; and yet must indulge them. For though it is clear that the poet Sidney had shrewd eyes—he talks of “hives of wisely painful bees”, and knew like any other country-bred Englishman “how shepherds spend their days. At blow-point, hot-cockles or else at keels”,—still he must drone on about Plangus and Erona, and Queen Andromana and the intrigues of Amphialus and his mother Cecropia in deference to his audience. Incongruously enough, violent as they were in their lives, with their plots and their poisonings, nothing can be too sweet, too vague, too long-winded for those Elizabethan listeners. Only the fact that Zelmane had received a blow from a lion’s paw that morning can shorten the story and suggest to Basilius that it might be better to reserve the complaint of Klaius till another day.

Which she, perceiving the song had already worn out much time, and not knowing when Lamon would end, being even now stepping over to a new matter, though much delighted with what was spoken, willingly agreed unto. And so of all sides they went to recommend themselves to the elder brother of death.

And as the story winds on its way, or rather as the succession of stories fall on each other like soft snowflakes, one obliterating the other, we are much tempted to follow their example. Sleep weighs down our eyes. Half dreaming, half yawning, we prepare to seek the elder brother of death. What, then, has become of that first intoxicating sense of freedom? We who wished to escape have been caught and enmeshed. Yet how easy it seemed in the beginning to tell a story to amuse a sister—how inspiriting to escape from here and now and wander wildly in a world of lutes and roses! But alas, softness has weighed down our steps; brambles have caught at our clothing. We have come to long for some plain statement, and the decoration of the style, at first so enchanting, has dulled and decayed. It is not difficult to find the reason. High-spirited, flown with words, Sidney seized his pen too carelessly. He had no notion when he set out where he was going. Telling stories, he thought, was enough—one could follow another interminably. But where there is no end in view there is no sense of direction to draw us on. Nor, since it is part of his scheme to keep his characters simply bad and simply good without distinction, can he gain variety from the complexity of character. To supply change and movement he must have recourse to mystification. These changes of dress, these disguises of princes as peasants, of men as women, serve instead of psychological subtlety to relieve the stagnancy of people collected together with nothing to talk about. But when the charm of that childish device falls flat, there is no breath left to fill his sails. Who is talking, and to whom, and about what we no longer feel sure. So slack indeed becomes Sidney’s grasp upon these ambling phantoms that in the middle he has forgotten what his relation to them is—is it “I” the author who is speaking or is it “I” the character? No reader can be kept in bondage, whatever the grace and the charm, when the ties between him and the writer are so irresponsibly doffed and assumed. So by degrees the book floats away into the thin air of limbo. It becomes one of those half-forgotten and deserted places where the grasses grow over fallen statues and the rain drips and the marble steps are green with moss and vast weeds flourish in the flower-beds. And yet it is a beautiful garden to wander in now and then; one stumbles over lovely broken faces, and here and there a flower blooms and the nightingale sings in the lilac-tree.

Thus when we come to the last page that Sidney wrote before he gave up the hopeless attempt to finish the Arcadia, we pause for a moment before we return the folio to its place on the bottom shelf. In the Arcadia, as in some luminous globe, all the seeds of English fiction lie latent. We can trace infinite possibilities: it may take any one of many different directions. Will it fix its gaze upon Greece and princes and princesses, and seek as it might so nobly, the statuesque, the impersonal? Will it keep to simple lines and great masses and the vast landscapes of the epic? Or will it look closely and carefully at what is actually before it? Will it take for its heroes Darnetas and Mopsa, ordinary people of low birth and rough natural speech, and deal with the normal course of daily human life? Or will it brush through those barriers and penetrate within to the anguish and complexity of some unhappy woman loving where she may not love; to the senile absurdity of some old man tortured by an incongruous passion? Will it make its dwelling in their psychology and the adventures of the soul? All these possibilities are present in the Arcadia—romance and realism, poetry and psychology. But as if Sidney knew that he had broached a task too large for his youth to execute, had bequeathed a legacy for other ages to inherit, he put down his pen, midway, and left unfinished in all its beauty and absurdity this attempt to while away the long days at Wilton, telling a story to his sister.

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“Robinson Crusoe”.

There are many ways of approaching this classical volume; but which shall we choose? Shall we begin by saying that, since Sidney died at Zutphen leaving the Arcadia unfinished, great changes had come over English life, and the novel had chosen, or had been forced to choose, its direction? A middle class had come into existence, able to read and anxious to read not only about the loves of princes and princesses, but about themselves and the details of their humdrum lives. Stretched upon a thousand pens, prose had accommodated itself to the demand; it had fitted itself to express the facts of life rather than the poetry. That is certainly one way of approaching Robinson Crusoe—through the development of the novel; but another immediately suggests itself—through the life of the author. Here too, in the heavenly pastures of biography, we may spend many more hours than are needed to read the book itself from cover to cover. The date of Defoe’s birth, to begin with, is doubtful—was it 1660 or 1661? Then again, did he spell his name in one word or in two? And who were his ancestors? He is said to have been a hosier; but what, after all, was a hosier in the seventeenth century? He became a pamphleteer, and enjoyed the confidence of William the Third; one of his pamphlets caused him to be stood in the pillory and imprisoned at Newgate; he was employed by Harley and later by Godolphin; he was the first of the hireling journalists; he wrote innumerable pamphlets and articles; also Moll Flanders and Robinson Crusoe; he had a wife and six children; was spare in figure, with a hooked nose, a sharp chin, grey eyes, and a large mole near his mouth. Nobody who has any slight acquaintance with English literature needs to be told how many hours can be spent and how many lives have been spent in tracing the development of the novel and in examining the chins of the novelists. Only now and then, as we turn from theory to biography and from biography to theory, a doubt insinuates itself—if we knew the very moment of Defoe’s birth and whom he loved and why, if we had by heart the history of the origin, rise, growth, decline, and fall of the English novel from its conception (say) in Egypt to its decease in the wilds (perhaps) of Paraguay, should we suck an ounce of additional pleasure from Robinson Crusoe or read it one whit more intelligently?

For the book itself remains. However we may wind and wriggle, loiter and dally in our approach to books, a lonely battle waits us at the end. There is a piece of business to be transacted between writer and reader before any further dealings are possible, and to be reminded in the middle of this private interview that Defoe sold stockings, had brown hair, and was stood in the pillory is a distraction and a worry. Our first task, and it is often formidable enough, is to master his perspective. Until we know how the novelist orders his world, the ornaments of that world, which the critics press upon us, the adventures of the writer, to which biographers draw attention, are superfluous possessions of which we can make no use. All alone we must climb upon the novelist’s shoulders and gaze through his eyes until we, too, understand in what order he ranges the large common objects upon which novelists are fated to gaze: man and men; behind them Nature; and above them that power which for convenience and brevity we may call God. And at once confusion, misjudgement, and difficulty begin. Simple as they appear to us, these objects can be made monstrous and indeed unrecognizable by the manner in which the novelist relates them to each other. It would seem to be true that people who live cheek by jowl and breathe the same air vary enormously in their sense of proportion; to one the human being is vast, the tree minute; to the other, trees are huge and human beings insignificant little objects in the background. So, in spite of the text-books, writers may live at the same time and see nothing the same size. Here is Scott, for example, with his mountains looming huge and his men therefore drawn to scale; Jane Austen picking out the roses on her teacups to match the wit of her dialogues; while Peacock bends over heaven and earth one fantastic distorting mirror in which a tea-cup may be Vesuvius or Vesuvius a tea-cup. Nevertheless Scott, Jane Austen, and Peacock lived through the same years; they saw the same world; they are covered in the text-books by the same stretch of literary history. It is in their perspective that they are different. If, then, it were granted us to grasp this firmly, for ourselves, the battle would end in victory; and we could turn, secure in our intimacy, to enjoy the various delights with which the critics and biographers so generously supply us.

But here many difficulties arise. For we have our own vision of the world; we have made it from our own experience and prejudices, and it is therefore bound up with our own vanities and loves. It is impossible not to feel injured and insulted if tricks are played and our private harmony is upset. Thus when Jude the Obscure appears or a new volume of Proust, the newspapers are flooded with protests. Major Gibbs of Cheltenham would put a bullet through his head tomorrow if life were as Hardy paints it; Miss Wiggs of Hampstead must protest that though Proust’s art is wonderful, the real world, she thanks God, has nothing in common with the distortions of a perverted Frenchman. Both the gentleman and the lady are trying to control the novelist’s perspective so that it shall resemble and reinforce their own. But the great writer—the Hardy or the Proust—goes on his way regardless of the rights of private property; by the sweat of his brow he brings order from chaos; he plants his tree there, and his man here; he makes the figure of his deity remote or present as he wills. In masterpieces—books, that is, where the vision is clear and order has been achieved—he inflicts his own perspective upon us so severely that as often as not we suffer agonies—our vanity is injured because our own order is upset; we are afraid because the old supports are being wrenched from us; and we are bored—for what pleasure or amusement can be plucked from a brand new idea? Yet from anger, fear, and boredom a rare and lasting delight is sometimes born.

Robinson Crusoe, it may be, is a case in point. It is a masterpiece, and it is a masterpiece largely because Defoe has throughout kept consistently to his own sense of perspective. For this reason he thwarts us and flouts us at every turn. Let us look at the theme largely and loosely, comparing it with our preconceptions. It is, we know, the story of a man who is thrown, after many perils and adventures, alone upon a desert island. The mere suggestion—peril and solitude and a desert island—is enough to rouse in us the expectation of some far land on the limits of the world; of the sun rising and the sun setting; of man, isolated from his kind, brooding alone upon the nature of society and the strange ways of men. Before we open the book we have perhaps vaguely sketched out the kind of pleasure we expect it to give us. We read; and we are rudely contradicted on every page. There are no sunsets and no sunrises; there is no solitude and no soul. There is, on the contrary, staring us full in the face nothing but a large earthenware pot. We are told, that is to say, that it was the 1st of September 1651; that the hero’s name is Robinson Crusoe; and that his father has the gout. Obviously, then, we must alter our attitude. Reality, fact, substance is going to dominate all that follows. We must hastily alter our proportions throughout; Nature must furl her splendid purples; she is only the giver of drought and water; man must be reduced to a struggling, life-preserving animal; and God shrivel into a magistrate whose seat, substantial and somewhat hard, is only a little way above the horizon. Each sortie of ours in pursuit of information upon these cardinal points of perspective—God, man, Nature—is snubbed back with ruthless common sense. Robinson Crusoe thinks of God: “sometimes I would expostulate with myself, why providence should thus completely ruin its creatures…. But something always return’d swift upon me to check these thoughts.” God does not exist. He thinks of Nature, the fields “adorn’d with flowers and grass, and full of very fine woods”, but the important thing about a wood is that it harbours an abundance of parrots who may be tamed and taught to speak. Nature does not exist. He considers the dead, whom he has killed himself. It is of the utmost importance that they should be buried at once, for “they lay open to the sun and would presently be offensive”. Death does not exist. Nothing exists except an earthenware pot. Finally, that is to say, we are forced to drop our own preconceptions and to accept what Defoe himself wishes to give us.

Let us then go back to the beginning and repeat again, “I was born in the year 1632 in the city of York of a good family”. Nothing could be plainer, more matter of fact, than that beginning. We are drawn on soberly to consider all the blessings of orderly, industrious middle-class life. There is no greater good fortune we are assured than to be born of the British middle class. The great are to be pitied and so are the poor; both are exposed to distempers and uneasiness; the middle station between the mean and the great is the best; and its virtues—temperance, moderation, quietness, and health—are the most desirable. It was a sorry thing, then, when by some evil fate a middle-class youth was bitten with the foolish love of adventure. So he proses on, drawing, little by little, his own portrait, so that we never forget it—imprinting upon us indelibly, for he never forgets it either, his shrewdness, his caution, his love of order and comfort and respectability; until by whatever means, we find ourselves at sea, in a storm; and, peering out, everything is seen precisely as it appears to Robinson Crusoe. The waves, the seamen, the sky, the ship—all are seen through those shrewd, middle-class, unimaginative eyes. There is no escaping him. Everything appears as it would appear to that naturally cautious, apprehensive, conventional, and solidly matter-of-fact intelligence. He is incapable of enthusiasm. He has a natural slight distaste for the sublimities of Nature. He suspects even Providence of exaggeration. He is so busy and has such an eye to the main chance that he notices only a tenth part of what is going on round him. Everything is capable of a rational explanation, he is sure, if only he had time to attend to it. We are much more alarmed by the “vast great creatures” that swim out in the night and surround his boat than he is. He at once takes his gun and fires at them, and off they swim—whether they are lions or not he really cannot say. Thus before we know it we are opening our mouths wider and wider. We are swallowing monsters that we should have jibbed at if they had been offered us by an imaginative and flamboyant traveller. But anything that this sturdy middle-class man notices can be taken for a fact. He is for ever counting his barrels, and making sensible provisions for his water supply; nor do we ever find him tripping even in a matter of detail. Has he forgotten, we wonder, that he has a great lump of beeswax on board? Not at all. But as he had already made candles out of it, it is not nearly as great on page thirty-eight as it was on page twenty-three. When for a wonder he leaves some inconsistency hanging loose—why if the wild cats are so very tame are the goats so very shy?—we are not seriously perturbed, for we are sure that there was a reason, and a very good one, had he time to give it us. But the pressure of life when one is fending entirely for oneself alone on a desert island is really no laughing matter. It is no crying one either. A man must have an eye to everything; it is no time for raptures about Nature when the lightning may explode one’s gunpowder—it is imperative to seek a safer lodging for it. And so by means of telling the truth undeviatingly as it appears to him—by being a great artist and forgoing this and daring that in order to give effect to his prime quality, a sense of reality—he comes in the end to make common actions dignified and common objects beautiful. To dig, to bake, to plant, to build—how serious these simple occupations are; hatchets, scissors, logs, axes—how beautiful these simple objects become. Unimpeded by comment, the story marches on with magnificent downright simplicity. Yet how could comment have made it more impressive? It is true that he takes the opposite way from the psychologist’s—he describes the effect of emotion on the body, not on the mind. But when he says how, in a moment of anguish, he clinched his hands so that any soft thing would have been crushed; how “my teeth in my head would strike together, and set against one another so strong that for the time I could not part them again”, the effect is as deep as pages of analysis could have made it. His own instinct in the matter is right. “Let the naturalists”, he says, “explain these things, and the reason and manner of them; all I can say to them is, to describe the fact….” If you are Defoe, certainly to describe the fact is enough; for the fact is the right fact. By means of this genius for fact Defoe achieves effects that are beyond any but the great masters of descriptive prose. He has only to say a word or two about “the grey of the morning” to paint vividly a windy dawn. A sense of desolation and of the deaths of many men is conveyed by remarking in the most prosaic way in the world, “I never saw them afterwards, or any sign of them except three of their hats, one cap, and two shoes that were not fellows”. When at last he exclaims, “Then to see how like a king I din’d too all alone, attended by my servants”—his parrot and his dog and his two cats, we cannot help but feel that all humanity is on a desert island alone—though Defoe at once informs us, for he has a way of snubbing off our enthusiasms, that the cats were not the same cats that had come in the ship. Both of those were dead; these cats were new cats, and as a matter of fact cats became very troublesome before long from their fecundity, whereas dogs, oddly enough, did not breed at all.

Thus Defoe, by reiterating that nothing but a plain earthenware pot stands in the foreground, persuades us to see remote islands and the solitudes of the human soul. By believing fixedly in the solidity of the pot and its earthiness, he has subdued every other element to his design; he has roped the whole universe into harmony. And is there any reason, we ask as we shut the book, why the perspective that a plain earthenware pot exacts should not satisfy us as completely, once we grasp it, as man himself in all his sublimity standing against a background of broken mountains and tumbling oceans with stars flaming in the sky?

[Nation & Athenaeum, Feb 6, 1926]

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Dorothy Osborne’s “Letters”.

It must sometimes strike the casual reader of English literature that there is a bare season in it, sometimes like early spring in our country-side. The trees stand out; the hills are unmuffled in green; there is nothing to obscure the mass of the earth or the lines of the branches. But we miss the tremor and murmur of June, when the smallest wood seems full of movement, and one has only to stand still to hear the whispering and the pattering of nimble, inquisitive animals going about their affairs in the undergrowth. So in English literature we have to wait till the sixteenth century is over and the seventeenth well on its way before the bare landscape becomes full of stir and quiver and we can fill in the spaces between the great books with the voices of people talking.

Doubtless great changes in psychology were needed and great changes in material comfort—arm-chairs and carpets and good roads—before it was possible for human beings to watch each other curiously or to communicate their thoughts easily. And it may be that our early literature owes something of its magnificence to the fact that writing was an uncommon art, practised, rather for fame than for money, by those whose gifts compelled them. Perhaps the dissipation of our genius in biography, and journalism, and letter-and memoir-writing has weakened its strength in any one direction. However this may be, there is a bareness about an age that has neither letter-writers nor biographers. Lives and characters appear in stark outline. Donne, says Sir Edmund Gosse, is inscrutable; and that is largely because, though we know what Donne thought of Lady Bedford, we have not the slightest inkling what Lady Bedford thought of Donne. She had no friend to whom she described the effect of that strange visitor; nor, had she had a confidante, could she have explained for what reasons Donne seemed to her strange.

And the conditions that made it impossible for Boswell or Horace Walpole to be born in the sixteenth century were obviously likely to fall with far heavier force upon the other sex. Besides the material difficulty—Donne’s small house at Mitcham with its thin walls and crying children typifies the discomfort in which the Elizabethans lived—the woman was impeded also by her belief that writing was an act unbefitting her sex. A great lady here and there whose rank secured her the toleration and it may be the adulation of a servile circle, might write and print her writings. But the act was offensive to a woman of lower rank. “Sure the poore woman is a little distracted, she could never bee soe ridiculous else as to venture writeing book’s and in verse too”, Dorothy Osborne exclaimed when the Duchess of Newcastle published one of her books. For her own part, she added, “If I could not sleep this fortnight I should not come to that”. And the comment is the more illuminating in that it was made by a woman of great literary gift. Had she been born in 1827, Dorothy Osborne would have written novels; had she been born in 1527, she would never have written at all. But she was born in 1627, and at that date though writing books was ridiculous for a woman there was nothing unseemly in writing a letter. And so by degrees the silence is broken; we begin to hear rustlings in the undergrowth; for the first time in English literature we hear men and women talking together over the fire.

But the art of letter-writing in its infancy was not the art that has since filled so many delightful volumes. Men and women were ceremoniously Sir and Madam; the language was still too rich and stiff to turn and twist quickly and freely upon half a sheet of notepaper. The art of letter-writing is often the art of essay-writing in disguise. But such as it was, it was an art that a woman could practise without unsexing herself. It was an art that could be carried on at odd moments, by a father’s sick-bed, among a thousand interruptions, without exciting comment, anonymously as it were, and often with the pretence that it served some useful purpose. Yet into these innumerable letters, lost now for the most part, went powers of observation and of wit that were later to take rather a different shape in Evelina and in Pride and Prejudice. They were only letters, yet some pride went to their making. Dorothy, without admitting it, took pains with her own writing and had views as to the nature of it: “… great Schollers are not the best writer’s (of Letters I mean, of books perhaps they are) … all letters mee thinks should be free and easy as one’s discourse”. She was in agreement with an old uncle of hers who threw his standish at his secretary’s head for saying “put pen to paper” instead of simply “wrote”. Yet there were limits, she reflected, to free-and-easiness: “… many pritty things shuffled together” do better spoken than in a letter. And so we come by a form of literature, if Dorothy Osborne will let us call it so, which is distinct from any other, and much to be regretted now that it has gone from us, as it seems, for ever.

For Dorothy Osborne, as she filled her great sheets by her father’s bed or by the chimney-corner, gave a record of life, gravely yet playfully, formally yet with intimacy, to a public of one, but to a fastidious public, as the novelist can never give it, or the historian either. Since it is her business to keep her lover informed of what passes in her home, she must sketch the solemn Sir Justinian Isham—Sir Solomon Justinian, she calls him—the pompous widower with four daughters and a great gloomy house in Northamptonshire who wished to marry her. “Lord what would I give that I had a Lattin letter of his for you”, she exclaimed, in which he describes her to an Oxford friend and specially commended her that she was “capable of being company and conversation for him”; she must sketch her valetudinarian Cousin Molle waking one morning in fear of the dropsy and hurrying to the doctor at Cambridge; she must draw her own picture wandering in the garden at night and smelling the “Jessomin”, “and yet I was not pleased” because Temple was not with her. Any gossip that comes her way is sent on to amuse her lover. Lady Sunderland, for instance, has condescended to marry plain Mr. Smith, who treats her like a princess, which Sir Justinian thinks a bad precedent for wives. But Lady Sunderland tells everyone she married him out of pity, and that, Dorothy comments, “was the pittyfull’st sayeing that ever I heard”. Soon we have picked up enough about all her friends to snatch eagerly at any further addition to the picture which is forming in our mind’s eye.

Indeed, our glimpse of the society of Bedfordshire in the seventeenth century is the more intriguing for its intermittency. In they come and out they go—Sir Justinian and Lady Diana, Mr. Smith and his countess—and we never know when or whether we shall hear of them again. But with all this haphazardry, the Letters, like the letters of all born letter-writers, provide their own continuity. They make us feel that we have our seat in the depths of Dorothy’s mind, at the heart of the pageant which unfolds itself page by page as we read. For she possesses indisputably the gift which counts for more in letter-writing than wit or brilliance or traffic with great people. By being herself without effort or emphasis, she envelops all these odds and ends in the flow of her own personality. It was a character that was both attractive and a little obscure. Phrase by phrase we come closer into touch with it. Of the womanly virtues that befitted her age she shows little trace. She says nothing of sewing or baking. She was a little indolent by temperament. She browsed casually on vast French romances. She roams the commons, loitering to hear the milkmaids sing; she walks in the garden by the side of a small river, “where I sitt downe and wish you were with mee”. She was apt to fall silent in company and dream over the fire till some talk of flying, perhaps, roused her, and she made her brother laugh by asking what they were saying about flying, for the thought had struck her, if she could fly she could be with Temple. Gravity, melancholy were in her blood. She looked, her mother used to say, as if all her friends were dead. She is oppressed by a sense of fortune and its tyranny and the vanity of things and the uselessness of effort. Her mother and sister were grave women too, the sister famed for her letters, but fonder of books than of company, the mother “counted as wise a woman as most in England”, but sardonic. “I have lived to see that ’tis almost impossible to think People worse than they are and soe will you”—Dorothy could remember her mother saying that. To assuage her spleen, Dorothy herself had to visit the wells at Epsom and to drink water that steel had stood in.

With such a temperament her humour naturally took the form of irony rather than of wit. She loved to mock her lover and to pour a fine raillery over the pomps and ceremonies of existence. Pride of birth she laughed at. Pompous old men were fine subjects for her satire. A dull sermon moved her to laughter. She saw through parties; she saw through ceremonies; she saw through worldliness and display. But with all this clearsightedness there was something that she did not see through. She dreaded with a shrinking that was scarcely sane the ridicule of the world. The meddling of aunts and the tyranny of brothers exasperated her. “I would live in a hollow Tree”, she said, “to avoyde them.” A husband kissing his wife in public seemed to her as “ill a sight as one would wish to see”. Though she cared no more whether people praised her beauty or her wit than whether “they think my name Eliz: or Dor:”, a word of gossip about her own behaviour would set her in a quiver. Thus when it came to proving before the eyes of the world that she loved a poor man and was prepared to marry him, she could not do it. “I confess that I have an humor that will not suffer mee to Expose myself to People’s Scorne”, she wrote. She could be “sattisfyed within as narrow a compasse as that of any person liveing of my rank”, but ridicule was intolerable to her. She shrank from any extravagance that could draw the censure of the world upon her. It was a weakness for which Temple had sometimes to reprove her.

For Temple’s character emerges more and more clearly as the letters go on—it is a proof of Dorothy’s gift as a correspondent. A good letter-writer so takes the colour of the reader at the other end, that from reading the one we can imagine the other. As she argues, as she reasons, we hear Temple almost as clearly as we hear Dorothy herself. He was in many ways the opposite of her. He drew out her melancholy by rebutting it; he made her defend her dislike of marriage by opposing it. Of the two Temple was by far the more robust and positive. Yet there was perhaps something—a little hardness, a little conceit—that justified her brother’s dislike of him. He called Temple the “proudest imperious insulting ill-natured man that ever was”. But, in the eyes of Dorothy, Temple had qualities that none of her other suitors possessed. He was not a mere country gentleman, nor a pompous Justice of the Peace, nor a town gallant, making love to every woman he met, nor a travelled Monsieur; for had he been any one of these things, Dorothy, with her quick sense of the ridiculous, would have had none of him. To her he had some charm, some sympathy, that the others lacked; she could write to him whatever came into her head; she was at her best with him; she loved him; she respected him. Yet suddenly she declared that marry him she would not. She turned violently against marriage indeed, and cited failure after failure. If people knew each other before marriage, she thought, there would be an end of it. Passion was the most brutish and tyrannical of all our senses. Passion had made Lady Anne Blount the “talk of all the footmen and Boy’s in the street”. Passion had been the undoing of the lovely Lady Izabella—what use was her beauty now married to “that beast with all his estate”? Torn asunder by her brother’s anger, by Temple’s jealousy, and by her own dread of ridicule, she wished for nothing but to be left to find “an early and a quiet grave”. That Temple overcame her scruples and overrode her brother’s opposition is much to the credit of his character. Yet it is an act that we can hardly help deploring. Married to Temple, she wrote to him no longer. The letters almost immediately cease. The whole world that Dorothy had brought into existence is extinguished. It is then that we realise how round and populous and stirring that world has become. Under the warmth of her affection for Temple the stiffness had gone out of her pen. Writing half asleep by her father’s side, snatching the back of an old letter to write upon, she had come to write easily though always with the dignity proper to that age, of the Lady Dianas, and the Ishams, of the aunts and the uncles—how they come, how they go; what they say; whether she finds them dull, laughable, charming, or much as usual. More than that, she has suggested, writing her mind out to Temple, the deeper relationships, the more private moods, that gave her life its conflict and its consolation—her brother’s tyranny; her own moodiness and melancholy; the sweetness of walking in the garden at night; of sitting lost in thought by the river; of longing for a letter and finding one. All this is around us; we are deep in this world, seizing its hints and suggestions when, in the moment, the scene is blotted out. She married, and her husband was a rising diplomat. She had to follow his fortunes in Brussels, at The Hague, wherever they called him. Seven children were born and seven children died “almost all in their cradle”. Innumerable duties and responsibilities fell to the lot of the girl who had made fun of pomp and ceremony, who loved privacy and had wished to live secluded out of the world and “grow old together in our little cottage”. Now she was mistress of her husband’s house at The Hague with its splendid buffet of plate. She was his confidante in the many troubles of his difficult career. She stayed behind in London to negotiate if possible the payment of his arrears of salary. When her yacht was fired on, she behaved, the King said, with greater courage than the captain himself. She was everything that the wife of an ambassador should be: she was everything, too, that the wife of a man retired from the public service should be. And troubles came upon them—a daughter died; a son, inheriting perhaps his mother’s melancholy, filled his boots with stones and leapt into the Thames. So the years passed; very full, very active, very troubled. But Dorothy maintained her silence.

At last, however, a strange young man came to Moor Park as secretary to her husband. He was difficult, ill-mannered, and quick to take offence. But it is through Swift’s eyes that we see Dorothy once more in the last years of her life. “Mild Dorothea, peaceful, wise, and great”, Swift called her; but the light falls upon a ghost. We do not know that silent lady. We cannot connect her after all these years with the girl who poured her heart out to her lover. “Peaceful, wise, and great”—she was none of those things when we last met her, and much though we honour the admirable ambassadress who made her husband’s career her own, there are moments when we would exchange all the benefits of the Triple Alliance and all the glories of the Treaty of Nimuegen for the letters that Dorothy did not write.

[New Republic, Oct 24, 1928]

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Swift’s “Journal to Stella”.

In any highly civilised society disguise plays so large a part, politeness is so essential, that to throw off the ceremonies and conventions and talk a “little language” for one or two to understand, is as much a necessity as a breath of air in a hot room. The reserved, the powerful, the admired, have the most need of such a refuge. Swift himself found it so. The proudest of men coming home from the company of great men who praised him, of lovely women who flattered him, from intrigue and politics, put all that aside, settled himself comfortably in bed, pursed his severe lips into baby language and prattled to his “two monkies”, his “dear Sirrahs”, his “naughty rogues” on the other side of the Irish Channel.

Well, let me see you now again. My wax candle’s almost out, but however I’ll begin. Well then don’t be so tedious, Mr. Presto; what can you say to MD’s letter? Make haste, have done with your preambles—why, I say, I am glad you are so often abroad.

So long as Swift wrote to Stella in that strain, carelessly, illegibly, for “methinks when I write plain, I do not know how, but we are not alone, all the world can see us. A bad scrawl is so snug…”, Stella had no need to be jealous. It was true that she was wearing away the flower of her youth in Ireland with Rebecca Dingley, who wore hinged spectacles, consumed large quantities of Brazil tobacco, and stumbled over her petticoats as she walked. Further, the conditions in which the two ladies lived, for ever in Swift’s company when he was at home, occupying his house when he was absent, gave rise to gossip; so that though Stella never saw him except in Mrs. Dingley’s presence, she was one of those ambiguous women who live chiefly in the society of the other sex. But surely it was well worth while. The packets kept coming from England, each sheet written to the rim in Swift’s crabbed little hand, which she imitated to perfection, full of nonsense words, and capital letters, and hints which no one but Stella could understand, and secrets which Stella was to keep, and little commissions which Stella was to execute. Tobacco came for Dingley, and chocolate and silk aprons for Stella. Whatever people might say, surely it was well worth while.

Of this Presto, who was so different from that formidable character “t’other I”, the world knew nothing. The world knew only that Swift was over in England again, soliciting the new Tory government on behalf of the Irish Church for those First Fruits which he had begged the Whigs in vain to restore. The business was soon accomplished; nothing indeed could exceed the cordiality and affection with which Harley and St. John greeted him; and now the world saw what even in those days of small societies and individual pre-eminence must have been a sight to startle and amaze—the “mad parson”, who had marched up and down the coffee-houses in silence and unknown a few years ago, admitted to the inmost councils of State; the penniless boy who was not allowed to sit down at table with Sir William Temple dining with the highest Ministers of the Crown, making dukes do his bidding, and so run after for his good offices that his servant’s chief duty was to know how to keep people out. Addison himself forced his way up only by pretending that he was a gentleman come to pay a bill. For the time being Swift was omnipotent. Nobody could buy his services; everybody feared his pen. He went to Court, and “am so proud I make all the lords come up to me”. The Queen wished to hear him preach; Harley and St. John added their entreaties; but he refused. When Mr. Secretary one night dared show his temper, Swift called upon him and warned him

never to appear cold to me, for I would not be treated like a schoolboy…. He took all right; said I had reason … would have had me dine with him at Mrs. Masham’s brother, to make up matters; but I would not. I don’t know, but I would not.

He scribbled all this down to Stella without exultation or vanity. That he should command and dictate, prove himself the peer of great men and make rank abase itself before him, called for no comment on his part or on hers. Had she not known him years ago at Moor Park and seen him lose his temper with Sir William Temple, and guessed his greatness and heard from his own lips what he planned and hoped? Did she not know better than anyone how strangely good and bad were blent in him and all his foibles and eccentricities of temper? He scandalised the lords with whom he dined by his stinginess, picked the coals off his fire, saved halfpence on coaches; and yet by the help of these very economies he practised, she knew, the most considerate and secret of charities—he gave poor Patty Rolt “a pistole to help her a little forward against she goes to board in the country”; he took twenty guineas to young Harrison, the sick poet, in his garret. She alone knew how he could be coarse in his speech and yet delicate in his behaviour; how he could be cynical superficially and yet cherish a depth of feeling which she had never met with in any other human being. They knew each other in and out; the good and the bad, the deep and the trivial; so that without effort or concealment he could use those precious moments late at night or the first thing on waking to pour out upon her the whole story of his day, with its charities and meannesses, its affections and ambitions and despairs, as though he were thinking aloud.

With such proof of his affection, admitted to intimacy with this Presto whom no one else in the world knew, Stella had no cause to be jealous. It was perhaps the opposite that happened. As she read the crowded pages, she could see him and hear him and imagine so exactly the impression that he must be making on all these fine people that she fell more deeply in love with him than ever. Not only was he courted and flattered by the great; everybody seemed to call upon him when they were in trouble. There was “young Harrison”; he worried to find him ill and penniless; carried him off to Knightsbridge; took him a hundred pounds only to find that he was dead an hour before. “Think what grief this is to me! … I could not dine with Lord Treasurer, nor anywhere else; but got a bit of meat toward evening.” She could imagine the strange scene, that November morning, when the Duke of Hamilton was killed in Hyde Park, and Swift went at once to the Duchess and sat with her for two hours and heard her rage and storm and rail; and took her affairs, too, on his shoulders as if it were his natural office, and none could dispute his place in the house of mourning. “She has moved my very soul”, he said. When young Lady Ashburnham died he burst out, “I hate life when I think it exposed to such accidents; and to see so many thousand wretches burdening the earth, while such as her die, makes me think God did never intend life for a blessing”. And then, with that instinct to rend and tear his own emotions which made him angry in the midst of his pity, he would round upon the mourners, even the mother and sister of the dead woman, and part them as they cried together and complain how “people will pretend to grieve more than they really do, and that takes off from their true grief”.

All this was poured forth freely to Stella; the gloom and the anger, the kindness and the coarseness and the genial love of little ordinary human things. To her he showed himself fatherly and brotherly; he laughed at her spelling; he scolded her about her health; he directed her business affairs. He gossiped and chatted with her. They had a fund of memories in common. They had spent many happy hours together. “Do not you remember I used to come into your chamber and turn Stella out of her chair, and rake up the fire in a cold morning and cry uth, uth, uth!” She was often in his mind; he wondered if she was out walking when he was; when Prior abused one of his puns he remembered Stella’s puns and how vile they were; he compared his life in London with hers in Ireland and wondered when they would be together again. And if this was the influence of Stella upon Swift in town among all the wits, the influence of Swift upon Stella marooned in an Irish village alone with Dingley was far greater. He had taught her all the little learning she had when she was a child and he a young man years ago at Moor Park. His influence was everywhere—upon her mind, upon her affections, upon the books she read and the hand she wrote, upon the friends she made and the suitors she rejected. Indeed, he was half responsible for her being.

But the woman he had chosen was no insipid slave. She had a character of her own. She was capable of thinking for herself. She was aloof, a severe critic for all her grace and sympathy, a little formidable perhaps with her love of plain speaking and her fiery temper and her fearlessness in saying what she thought. But with all her gifts she was little known. Her slender means and feeble health and dubious social standing made her way of life very modest. The society which gathered round her came for the simple pleasure of talking to a woman who listened and understood and said very little herself, but in the most agreeable of voices and generally “the best thing that was said in the company”. For the rest she was not learned. Her health had prevented her from serious study, and though she had run over a great variety of subjects and had a fine severe taste in letters, what she did read did not stick in her mind. She had been extravagant as a girl, and flung her money about until her good sense took control of her, and now she lived with the utmost frugality. “Five nothings on five plates of delf” made her supper. Attractive, if not beautiful, with her fine dark eyes and her raven black hair, she dressed very plainly, and thus contrived to lay by enough to help the poor and to bestow upon her friends (it was an extravagance that she could not resist) “the most agreeable presents in the world”. Swift never knew her equal in that art, “although it be an affair of as delicate a nature as most in the course of life”. She had in addition that sincerity which Swift called “honour”, and in spite of the weakness of her body “the personal courage of a hero”. Once when a robber came to her window, she had shot him through the body with her own hand. Such, then, was the influence which worked on Swift as he wrote; such the presence that mingled with the thought of his fruit trees and the willows and the trout stream at Laracor when he saw the trees budding in St. James’s Park and heard the politicians wrangle at Westminster. Unknown to all of them, he had his retreat; and if the Ministers again played him false, and once more, after making his friend’s fortunes, he went empty-handed away, then after all he could retire to Ireland and to Stella and have “no shuddering at all” at the thought.

But Stella was the last woman in the world to press her claims. None knew better than she that Swift loved power and the company of men: that though he had his moods of tenderness and his fierce spasms of disgust at society, still for the most part he infinitely preferred the dust and bustle of London to all the trout streams and cherry trees in the world. Above all, he hated interference. If anyone laid a finger upon his liberty or hinted the least threat to his independence, were they men or women, queens or kitchen-maids, he turned upon them with a ferocity which made a savage of him on the spot. Harley once dared to offer him a bank-note; Miss Waring dared hint that the obstacles to their marriage were now removed. Both were chastised, the woman brutally. But Stella knew better than to invite such treatment. Stella had learnt patience; Stella had learnt discretion. Even in a matter like this of staying in London or coming back to Ireland she allowed him every latitude. She asked nothing for herself and therefore got more than she asked. Swift was half annoyed:

… your generosity makes me mad; I know you repine inwardly at Presto’s absence; you think he has broken his word, of coming in three months, and that this is always his trick: and now Stella says, she does not see possibly how I can come away in haste, and that MD is satisfied, etc. An’t you a rogue to overpower me thus?

But it was thus that she kept him. Again and again he burst into language of intense affection:

Farewell dear Sirrahs, dearest lives: there is peace and quiet with MD, and nowhere else…. Farewell again, dearest rogues: I am never happy, but when I write or think of MD…. You are as welcome as my blood to every farthing I have in the world: and all that grieves me is, I am not richer, for MD’s sake.

One thing alone dashed the pleasure that such words gave her. It was always in the plural that he spoke of her; it was always “dearest Sirrahs, dearest lives”; MD stood for Stella and Mrs. Dingley together. Swift and Stella were never alone. Grant that this was for form’s sake merely, grant that the presence of Mrs. Dingley, busy with her keys and her lap-dog and never listening to a word that was said to her, was a form too. But why should such forms be necessary? Why impose a strain that wasted her health and half spoilt her pleasure and kept “perfect friends” who were happy only in each other’s company apart? Why indeed? There was a reason; a secret that Stella knew; a secret that Stella did not impart. Divided they had to be. Since, then, no bond bound them, since she was afraid to lay the least claim upon her friend, all the more jealously must she have searched into his words and analysed his conduct to ascertain the temper of his mood and acquaint herself instantly with the least change in it. So long as he told her frankly of his “favourites” and showed himself the bluff tyrant who required every woman to make advances to him, who lectured fine ladies and let them tease him, all was well. There was nothing in that to rouse her suspicions. Lady Berkeley might steal his hat; the Duchess of Hamilton might lay bare her agony; and Stella, who was kind to her sex, laughed with the one and grieved with the other.

But were there traces in the Journal of a different sort of influence—something far more dangerous because more equal and more intimate? Suppose that there were some woman of Swift’s own station, a girl, like the girl that Stella herself had been when Swift first knew her, dissatisfied with the ordinary way of life, eager, as Stella put it, to know right from wrong, gifted, witty, and untaught—she indeed, if she existed, might be a rival to be feared. But was there such a rival? If so, it was plain that there would be no mention of her in the Journal. Instead, there would be hesitations, excuses, an occasional uneasiness and embarrassment when, in the midst of writing freely and fully, Swift was brought to a stop by something that he could not say. Indeed, he had only been a month or two in England when some such silence roused Stella’s suspicions. Who was it, she asked, that boarded near him, that he dined with now and then? “I know no such person,” Swift replied; “I do not dine with boarders. What the pox! You know whom I have dined with every day since I left you, better than I do. What do you mean, Sirrah?” But he knew what she meant: she meant Mrs. Vanhomrigh, the widow who lived near him; she meant her daughter Esther. “The Vans” kept coming again and again after that in the Journal. Swift was too proud to conceal the fact that he saw them, but he sought nine times out of ten to excuse it. When he was in Suffolk Street the Vanhomrighs were in St. James’s Street and thus saved him a walk. When he was in Chelsea they were in London, and it was convenient to keep his best gown and periwig there. Sometimes the heat kept him there and sometimes the rain; now they were playing cards, and young Lady Ashburnham reminded him so much of Stella that he stayed on to help her. Sometimes he stayed out of listlessness; again he stayed because he was very busy and they were simple people who did not stand on ceremony. At the same time Stella had only to hint that these Vanhomrighs were people of no consequence for him to retort, “Why, they keep as good female company as I do male…. I saw two lady Bettys there this afternoon.” In short, to tell the whole truth, to write whatever came into his head in the old free way, was no longer easy.

Indeed, the whole situation was full of difficulty. No man detested falsehood more than Swift or loved truth more whole-heartedly. Yet here he was compelled to hedge, to hide, and to prevaricate. Again, it had become essential to him to have some “sluttery” or private chamber where he could relax and unbend and be Presto and not “t’other I”. Stella satisfied this need as no one else could. But then Stella was in Ireland; Vanessa was on the spot. She was younger and fresher; she too had her charms. She too could be taught and improved and scolded into maturity as Stella had been. Obviously Swift’s influence upon her was all to the good. And so with Stella in Ireland and Vanessa in London, why should it not be possible to enjoy what each could give him, confer benefits on both and do no serious harm to either? It seemed possible; at any rate he allowed himself to make the experiment. Stella, after all, had contrived for many years to make shift with her portion; Stella had never complained of her lot.

But Vanessa was not Stella. She was younger, more vehement, less disciplined, less wise. She had no Mrs. Dingley to restrain her. She had no memories of the past to solace her. She had no journals coming day by day to comfort her. She loved Swift and she knew no reason why she should not say so. Had he not himself taught her “to act what was right, and not to mind what the world said”? Thus when some obstacle impeded her, when some mysterious secret came between them, she had the unwisdom to question him. “Pray what can be wrong in seeing and advising an unhappy young woman? I can’t imagine.” “You have taught me to distinguish,” she burst out, “and then you leave me miserable.” Finally in her anguish and her bewilderment she had the temerity to force herself upon Stella. She wrote and demanded to be told the truth—what was Stella’s connexion with Swift? But it was Swift himself who enlightened her. And when the full force of those bright blue eyes blazed upon her, when he flung her letter on the table and glared at her and said nothing and rode off, her life was ended. It was no figure of speech when she said that “his killing, killing words” were worse than the rack to her; when she cried out that there was “something in your look so awful that it strikes me dumb”. Within a few weeks of that interview she was dead; she had vanished, to become one of those uneasy ghosts who haunted the troubled background of Stella’s life, peopling its solitude with fears.

Stella was left to enjoy her intimacy alone. She lived on to practise those sad arts by which she kept her friend at her side until, worn out with the strain and the concealment, with Mrs. Dingley and her lap-dogs, with the perpetual fears and frustrations, she too died. As they buried her, Swift sat in a back room away from the lights in the churchyard and wrote an account of the character of “the truest, most virtuous, and valuable friend, that I, or perhaps any other person, was ever blessed with”. Years passed; insanity overcame him; he exploded in violent outbursts of mad rage. Then by degrees he fell silent. Once they caught him murmuring. “I am what I am”, they heard him say.

[Times Literary Supplement, Sep 24, 1925]

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The “Sentimental Journey”.

Tristram Shandy, though it is Sterne’s first novel, was written at a time when many have written their twentieth, that is, when he was forty-five years old. But it bears every sign of maturity. No young writer could have dared to take such liberties with grammar and syntax and sense and propriety and the longstanding tradition of how a novel should be written. It needed a strong dose of the assurance of middle age and its indifference to censure to run such risks of shocking the lettered by the unconventionality of one’s style, and the respectable by the irregularity of one’s morals. But the risk was run and the success was prodigious. All the great, all the fastidious, were enchanted. Sterne became the idol of the town. Only in the roar of laughter and applause which greeted the book, the voice of the simple-minded public at large was to be heard protesting that it was a scandal coming from a clergyman and that the Archbishop of York ought to administer, to say the least of it, a scolding. The Archbishop, it seems, did nothing. But Sterne, however little he let it show on the surface, laid the criticism to heart. That heart too had been afflicted since the publication of Tristram Shandy. Eliza Draper, the object of his passion, had sailed to join her husband in Bombay. In his next book Sterne was determined to give effect to the change that had come over him, and to prove, not only the brilliance of his wit, but the depths of his sensibility. In his own words, “my design in it was to teach us to love the world and our fellow creatures better than we do”. It was with such motives animating him that he sat down to write that narrative of a little tour in France which he called A Sentimental Journey.

But if it were possible for Sterne to correct his manners, it was impossible for him to correct his style. That had become as much a part of himself as his large nose or his brilliant eyes. With the first words—They order, said I, this matter better in France—we are in the world of Tristram Shandy. It is a world in which anything may happen. We hardly know what jest, what jibe, what flash of poetry is not going to glance suddenly through the gap which this astonishingly agile pen has cut in the thick-set hedge of English prose. Is Sterne himself responsible? Does he know what he is going to say next for all his resolve to be on his best behaviour this time? The jerky, disconnected sentences are as rapid and it would seem as little under control as the phrases that fall from the lips of a brilliant talker. The very punctuation is that of speech, not writing, and brings the sound and associations of the speaking voice in with it. The order of the ideas, their suddenness and irrelevancy, is more true to life than to literature. There is a privacy in this intercourse which allows things to slip out unreproved that would have been in doubtful taste had they been spoken in public. Under the influence of this extraordinary style the book becomes semi-transparent. The usual ceremonies and conventions which keep reader and writer at arm’s length disappear. We are as close to life as we can be.

That Sterne achieved this illusion only by the use of extreme art and extraordinary pains is obvious without going to his manuscript to prove it. For though the writer is always haunted by the belief that somehow it must be possible to brush aside the ceremonies and conventions of writing and to speak to the reader as directly as by word of mouth, anyone who has tried the experiment has either been struck dumb by the difficulty, or waylaid into disorder and diffusity unutterable. Sterne somehow brought off the astonishing combination. No writing seems to flow more exactly into the very folds and creases of the individual mind, to express its changing moods, to answer its lightest whim and impulse, and yet the result is perfectly precise and composed. The utmost fluidity exists with the utmost permanence. It is as if the tide raced over the beach hither and thither and left every ripple and eddy cut on the sand in marble.

Nobody, of course, stood more in need of the liberty to be himself than Sterne. For while there are writers whose gift is impersonal, so that a Tolstoy, for example, can create a character and leave us alone with it, Sterne must always be there in person to help us in our intercourse. Little or nothing of A Sentimental Journey would be left if all that we call Sterne himself were extracted from it. He has no valuable information to give, no reasoned philosophy to impart. He left London, he tells us, “with so much precipitation that it never enter’d my mind that we were at war with France”. He has nothing to say of pictures or churches or the misery or well-being of the countryside. He was travelling in France indeed, but the road was often through his own mind, and his chief adventures were not with brigands and precipices but with the emotions of his own heart.

This change in the angle of vision was in itself a daring innovation. Hitherto, the traveller had observed certain laws of proportion and perspective. The Cathedral had always been a vast building in any book of travels and the man a little figure, properly diminutive, by its side. But Sterne was quite capable of omitting the Cathedral altogether. A girl with a green satin purse might be much more important than Notre-Dame. For there is, he seems to hint, no universal scale of values. A girl may be more interesting than a cathedral; a dead monkey more instructive than a living philosopher. It is all a question of one’s point of view. Sterne’s eyes were so adjusted that small things often bulked larger in them than big. The talk of a barber about the buckle of his wig told him more about the character of the French than the grandiloquence of her statesmen.

I think I can see the precise and distinguishing marks of national characters more in these nonsensical minutiae, than in the most important matters of state; where great men of all nations talk and stalk so much alike, that I would not give nine-pence to chuse amongst them.

So too if one wishes to seize the essence of things as a sentimental traveller should, one should seek for it, not at broad noonday in large and open streets, but in an unobserved corner up a dark entry. One should cultivate a kind of shorthand which renders the several turns of looks and limbs into plain words. It was an art that Sterne had long trained himself to practise.

For my own part, by long habitude, I do it so mechanically that when I walk the streets of London, I go translating all the way; and have more than once stood behind in the circle, where not three words had been said, and have brought off twenty different dialogues with me, which I could have fairly wrote down and swore to.

It is thus that Sterne transfers our interest from the outer to the inner. It is no use going to the guide-book; we must consult our own minds; only they can tell us what is the comparative importance of a cathedral, of a donkey, and of a girl with a green satin purse. In this preference for the windings of his own mind to the guide-book and its hammered high road, Sterne is singularly of our own age. In this interest in silence rather than in speech Sterne is the forerunner of the moderns. And for these reasons he is on far more intimate terms with us today than his great contemporaries the Richardsons and the Fieldings.

Yet there is a difference. For all his interest in psychology Sterne was far more nimble and less profound than the masters of this somewhat sedentary school have since become. He is after all telling a story, pursuing a journey, however arbitrary and zigzag his methods. For all our divagations, we do make the distance between Calais and Modena within the space of a very few pages. Interested as he was in the way in which he saw things, the things themselves also interested him acutely. His choice is capricious and individual, but no realist could be more brilliantly successful in rendering the impression of the moment. A Sentimental Journey is a succession of portraits—the Monk, the lady, the Chevalier selling pâtés, the girl in the bookshop, La Fleur in his new breeches;—it is a succession of scenes. And though the flight of this erratic mind is as zigzag as a dragon-fly’s, one cannot deny that this dragon-fly has some method in its flight, and chooses the flowers not at random but for some exquisite harmony or for some brilliant discord. We laugh, cry, sneer, sympathize by turns. We change from one emotion to its opposite in the twinkling of an eye. This light attachment to the accepted reality, this neglect of the orderly sequence of narrative, allows Sterne almost the licence of a poet. He can express ideas which ordinary novelists would have to ignore in language which, even if the ordinary novelist could command it, would look intolerably outlandish upon his page.

I walked up gravely to the window in my dusty black coat, and looking through the glass saw all the world in yellow, blue, and green, running at the ring of pleasure.—The old with broken lances, and in helmets which had lost their vizards—the young in armour bright which shone like gold, beplumed with each gay feather of the east—all—all tilting at it like fascinated knights in tournaments of yore for fame and love.

There are many passages of such pure poetry in Sterne. One can cut them out and read them apart from the text, and yet—for Sterne was a master of the art of contrast—they lie harmoniously side by side on the printed page. His freshness, his buoyancy, his perpetual power to surprise and startle are the result of these contrasts. He leads us to the very brink of some deep precipice of the soul; we snatch one short glance into its depths; next moment, we are whisked round to look at the green pastures glowing on the other side.

If Sterne distresses us, it is for another reason. And here the blame rests partly at least upon the public—the public which had been shocked, which had cried out after the publication of Tristram Shandy that the writer was a cynic who deserved to be unfrocked. Sterne, unfortunately, thought it necessary to reply.

The world has imagined [he told Lord Shelburne] because I wrote Tristram Shandy, that I was myself more Shandean than I really ever was…. If it (A Sentimental Journey) is not thought a chaste book, mercy on them that read it, for they must have warm imaginations, indeed!

Thus in A Sentimental Journey we are never allowed to forget that Sterne is above all things sensitive, sympathetic, humane; that above all things he prizes the decencies, the simplicities of the human heart. And directly a writer sets out to prove himself this or that our suspicions are aroused. For the little extra stress he lays on the quality he desires us to see in him, coarsens it and over-paints it, so that instead of humour, we get farce, and instead of sentiment, sentimentality. Here, instead of being convinced of the tenderness of Sterne’s heart—which in Tristram Shandy was never in question—we begin to doubt it. For we feel that Sterne is thinking not of the thing itself but of its effect upon our opinion of him. The beggars gather round him and he gives the pauvre honteux more than he had meant to. But his mind is not solely and simply on the beggars; his mind is partly on us, to see that we appreciate his goodness. Thus his conclusion, “and I thought he thank’d me more than them all”, placed, for more emphasis, at the end of the chapter, sickens us with its sweetness like the drop of pure sugar at the bottom of a cup. Indeed, the chief fault of A Sentimental Journey comes from Sterne’s concern for our good opinion of his heart. It has a monotony about it, for all its brilliance, as if the author had reined in the natural variety and vivacity of his tastes, lest they should give offence. The mood is subdued to one that is too uniformly kind, tender, and compassionate to be quite natural. One misses the variety, the vigour, the ribaldry of Tristram Shandy. His concern for his sensibility has blunted his natural sharpness, and we are called upon to gaze rather too long at modesty, simplicity, and virtue standing rather too still to be looked at.

But it is significant of the change of taste that has come over us that it is Sterne’s sentimentality that offends us and not his immorality. In the eyes of the nineteenth century all that Sterne wrote was clouded by his conduct as husband and lover. Thackeray lashed him with his righteous indignation, and exclaimed that “There is not a page of Sterne’s writing but has something that were better away, a latent corruption—a hint as of an impure presence”. To us at the present time, the arrogance of the Victorian novelist seems at least as culpable as the infidelities of the eighteenth-century parson. Where the Victorians deplored his lies and his levities, the courage which turned all the rubs of life to laughter and the brilliance of the expression are far more apparent now.

Indeed A Sentimental Journey, for all its levity and wit, is based upon something fundamentally philosophic. It is true that it is a philosophy that was much out of fashion in the Victorian age—the philosophy of pleasure; the philosophy which holds that it is as necessary to behave well in small things as in big, which makes the enjoyment, even of other people, seem more desirable than their suffering. The shameless man had the hardihood to confess to “having been in love with one princess or another almost all my life”, and to add, “and I hope I shall go on so till I die, being firmly persuaded that if ever I do a mean action, it must be in some interval betwixt one passion and another”. The wretch had the audacity to cry through the mouth of one of his characters, “Mais vive la joie … Vive l’amour! et vive la bagatelle!” Clergyman though he was, he had the irreverence to reflect, when he watched the French peasants dancing, that he could distinguish an elevation of spirit, different from that which is the cause or the effect of simple jollity.—“In a word, I thought I beheld Religion mixing in the dance.”

It was a daring thing for a clergyman to perceive a relationship between religion and pleasure. Yet it may, perhaps, excuse him that in his own case the religion of happiness had a great deal of difficulty to overcome. If you are no longer young, if you are deeply in debt, if your wife is disagreeable, if, as you racket about France in a post-chaise, you are dying of consumption all the time, then the pursuit of happiness is not so easy after all. Still, pursue it one must. One must pirouette about the world, peeping and peering, enjoying a flirtation here, bestowing a few coppers there, and sitting in whatever little patch of sunshine one can find. One must crack a joke, even if the joke is not altogether a decent one. Even in daily life one must not forget to cry “Hail ye, small, sweet courtesies of life, for smooth do ye make the road of it!” One must—but enough of must; it is not a word that Sterne was fond of using. It is only when one lays the book aside and recalls its symmetry, its fun, its whole-hearted joy in all the different aspects of life, and the brilliant ease and beauty with which they are conveyed to us, that one credits the writer with a backbone of conviction to support him. Was not Thackeray’s coward—the man who trifled so immorally with so many women and wrote love-letters on gilt-edged paper when he should have been lying on a sick-bed or writing sermons—was he not a stoic in his own way and a moralist, and a teacher? Most great writers are, after all. And that Sterne was a very great writer we cannot doubt.

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Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to His Son.

When Lord Mahon edited the letters of Lord Chesterfield he thought it necessary to warn the intending reader that they are “by no means fitted for early or indiscriminate perusal”. Only “those people whose understandings are fixed and whose principles are matured” can, so his Lordship said, read them with impunity. But that was in 1845. And 1845 looks a little distant now. It seems to us now the age of enormous houses without any bathrooms. Men smoke in the kitchen after the cook has gone to bed. Albums lie upon drawing-room tables. The curtains are very thick and the women are very pure. But the eighteenth century also has undergone a change. To us in 1930 it looks less strange, less remote than those early Victorian years. Its civilisation seems more rational and more complete than the civilisation of Lord Mahon and his contemporaries. Then at any rate a small group of highly educated people lived up to their ideals. If the world was smaller it was also more compact; it knew its own mind; it had its own standards. Its poetry is affected by the same security. When we read the Rape of the Lock we seem to find ourselves in an age so settled and so circumscribed that masterpieces were possible. Then, we say to ourselves, a poet could address himself whole-heartedly to his task and keep his mind upon it, so that the little boxes on a lady’s dressing-table are fixed among the solid possessions of our imaginations. A game at cards or a summer’s boating party upon the Thames has power to suggest the same beauty and the same sense of things vanishing that we receive from poems aimed directly at our deepest emotions. And just as the poet could spend all his powers upon a pair of scissors and a lock of hair, so too, secure in his world and its values, the aristocrat could lay down precise laws for the education of his son. In that world also there was a certainty, a security that we are now without. What with one thing and another times have changed. We can now read Lord Chesterfield’s letters without blushing, or, if we do blush, we blush in the twentieth century at passages that caused Lord Mahon no discomfort whatever.

When the letters begin, Philip Stanhope, Lord Chesterfield’s natural son by a Dutch governess, was a little boy of seven. And if we are to make any complaint against the father’s moral teaching, it is that the standard is too high for such tender years. “Let us return to oratory, or the art of speaking well; which should never be entirely out of our thoughts”, he writes to the boy of seven. “A man can make no figure without it in Parliament, or the Church, or in the law”, he continues, as if the little boy were already considering his career. It seems, indeed, that the father’s fault, if fault it be, is one common to distinguished men who have not themselves succeeded as they should have done and are determined to give their children—and Philip was an only child—the chances that they have lacked. Indeed, as the letters go on one may suppose that Lord Chesterfield wrote as much to amuse himself by turning over the stores of his experience, his reading, his knowledge of the world, as to instruct his son. The letters show an eagerness, an animation, which prove that to write to Philip was not a task, but a delight. Tired, perhaps, with the duties of office and disillusioned with its disappointments, he takes up his pen and, in the relief of free communication at last, forgets that his correspondent is, after all, only a schoolboy who cannot understand half the things that his father says to him. But, even so, there is nothing to repel us in Lord Chesterfield’s preliminary sketch of the unknown world. He is all on the side of moderation, toleration, ratiocination. Never abuse whole bodies of people, he counsels; frequent all churches, laugh at none; inform yourself about all things. Devote your mornings to study, your evenings to good society. Dress as the best people dress, behave as they behave, never be eccentric, egotistical, or absent-minded. Observe the laws of proportion, and live every moment to the full.

So, step by step, he builds up the figure of the perfect man—the man that Philip may become, he is persuaded, if he will only—and here Lord Chesterfield lets fall the words which are to colour his teaching through and through—cultivate the Graces. These ladies are, at first, kept discreetly in the background. It is well that the boy should be indulged in fine sentiments about women and poets to begin with. Lord Chesterfield adjures him to respect them both. “For my own part, I used to think myself in company as much above me when I was with Mr. Addison and Mr. Pope, as if I had been with all the Princes in Europe”, he writes. But as time goes on the Virtues are more and more taken for granted. They can be left to take care of themselves. But the Graces assume tremendous proportions. The Graces dominate the life of man in this world. Their service cannot for an instant be neglected. And the service is certainly exacting. For consider what it implies, this art of pleasing. To begin with, one must know how to come into a room and then how to go out again. As human arms and legs are notoriously perverse, this by itself is a matter needing considerable dexterity. Then one must be dressed so that one’s clothes seem perfectly fashionable without being new or striking; one’s teeth must be perfect; one’s wig beyond reproach; one’s finger-nails cut in the segment of a circle; one must be able to carve, able to dance, and, what is almost as great an art, able to sit gracefully in a chair. These things are the alphabet of the art of pleasing. We now come to speech. It is necessary to speak at least three languages to perfection. But before we open our lips we must take a further precaution—we must be on our guard never to laugh. Lord Chesterfield himself never laughed. He always smiled. When at length the young man is pronounced capable of speech he must avoid all proverbs and vulgar expressions; he must enunciate clearly and use perfect grammar; he must not argue; he must not tell stories; he must not talk about himself. Then, at last, the young man may begin to practise the finest of the arts of pleasing—the art of flattery. For every man and every woman has some prevailing vanity. Watch, wait, pry, seek out their weakness, “and you will then know what to bait your hook with to catch them”. For that is the secret of success in the world.

It is at this point, such is the idiosyncrasy of our age, that we begin to feel uneasy. Lord Chesterfield’s views upon success are far more questionable than his views upon love. For what is to be the prize of this endless effort and self-abnegation? What do we gain when we have learnt to come into rooms and to go out again; to pry into people’s secrets; to hold our tongues and to flatter, to forsake the society of low-born people which corrupts and the society of clever people which perverts? What is the prize which is to reward us? It is simply that we shall rise in the world. Press for a further definition, and it amounts perhaps to this: one will be popular with the best people. But if we are so exacting as to demand who the best people are we become involved in a labyrinth from which there is no returning. Nothing exists in itself. What is good society? It is the society that the best people believe to be good. What is wit? It is what the best people think to be witty. All value depends upon somebody else’s opinion. For it is the essence of this philosophy that things have no independent existence, but live only in the eyes of other people. It is a looking-glass world, this, to which we climb so slowly; and its prizes are all reflections. That may account for our baffled feeling as we shuffle, and shuffle vainly, among these urbane pages for something hard to lay our hands upon. Hardness is the last thing we shall find. But, granted the deficiency, how much that is ignored by sterner moralists is here seized upon, and who shall deny, at least while Lord Chesterfield’s enchantment is upon him, that these imponderable qualities have their value and these shining Graces have their radiance? Consider for a moment what the Graces have done for their devoted servant, the Earl.

Here is a disillusioned politician, who is prematurely aged, who has lost his office, who is losing his teeth, who, worst fate of all, is growing deafer day by day. Yet he never allows a groan to escape him. He is never dull; he is never boring; he is never slovenly. His mind is as well groomed as his body. Never for a second does he “welter in an easy-chair”. Private though these letters are, and apparently spontaneous, they play with such ease in and about the single subject which absorbs them that it never becomes tedious or, what is still more remarkable, never becomes ridiculous. It may be that the art of pleasing has some connection with the art of writing. To be polite, considerate, controlled, to sink one’s egotism, to conceal rather than to obtrude one’s personality, may profit the writer even as they profit the man of fashion.

Certainly there is much to be said in favour of the training, however we define it, which helped Lord Chesterfield to write his Characters. The little papers have the precision and formality of some old-fashioned minuet. Yet the symmetry is so natural to the artist that he can break it where he likes; it never becomes pinched and formal, as it would in the hands of an imitator. He can be sly; he can be witty; he can be sententious, but never for an instant does he lose his sense of time, and when the tune is over he calls a halt. “Some succeeded, and others burst” he says of George the First’s mistresses: the King liked them fat. Again, “He was fixed in the house of lords, that hospital of incurables.” He smiles: he does not laugh. Here the eighteenth century, of course, came to his help. Lord Chesterfield, though he was polite to everything, even to the stars and Bishop Berkeley’s philosophy, firmly refused, as became a son of his age, to dally with infinity or to suppose that things are not quite as solid as they seem. The world was good enough and the world was big enough as it was. This prosaic temper, while it keeps him within the bounds of impeccable common sense, limits his outlook. No single phrase of his reverberates or penetrates as so many of La Bruyère’s do. But he would have been the first to deprecate any comparison with that great writer; besides, to write as La Bruyère wrote, one must perhaps believe in something, and then how difficult to observe the Graces! One might perhaps laugh; one might perhaps cry. Both are equally deplorable.

But while we amuse ourselves with this brilliant nobleman and his views on life we are aware, and the letters owe much of their fascination to this consciousness, of a dumb yet substantial figure on the farther side of the page. Philip Stanhope is always there. It is true that he says nothing, but we feel his presence in Dresden, in Berlin, in Paris, opening the letters and poring over them and looking dolefully at the thick packets which have been accumulating year after year since he was a child of seven. He had grown into a rather serious, rather stout, rather short young man. He had a taste for foreign politics. A little serious reading was rather to his liking. And by every post the letters came—urbane, polished, brilliant, imploring and commanding him to learn to dance, to learn to carve, to consider the management of his legs, and to seduce a lady of fashion. He did his best. He worked very hard in the school of the Graces, but their service was too exacting. He sat down half-way up the steep stairs which lead to the glittering hall with all the mirrors. He could not do it. He failed in the House of Commons; he subsided into some small post in Ratisbon; he died untimely. He left it to his widow to break the news which he had lacked the heart or the courage to tell his father—that he had been married all these years to a lady of low birth, who had borne him children.

The Earl took the blow like a gentleman. His letter to his daughter-inlaw is a model of urbanity. He began the education of his grandsons. But he seems to have become a little indifferent to what happened to himself after that. He did not care greatly if he lived or died. But still to the very end he cared for the Graces. His last words were a tribute of respect to those goddesses. Someone came into the room when he was dying; he roused himself: “Give Dayrolles a chair,” he said, and said no more.

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Two Parsons.

I
James Woodforde

One could wish that the psycho-analysts would go into the question of diary-keeping. For often it is the one mysterious fact in a life otherwise as clear as the sky and as candid as the dawn. Parson Woodforde is a case in point—his diary is the only mystery about him. For forty-three years he sat down almost daily to record what he did on Monday and what he had for dinner on Tuesday; but for whom he wrote or why he wrote it is impossible to say. He does not unburden his soul in his diary; yet it is no mere record of engagements and expenses. As for literary fame, there is no sign that he ever thought of it, and finally, though the man himself is peaceable above all things, there are little indiscretions and criticisms which would have got him into trouble and hurt the feelings of his friends had they read them. What purpose, then, did the sixty-eight little books fulfil? Perhaps it was the desire for intimacy. When James Woodforde opened one of his neat manuscript books he entered into conversation with a second James Woodforde, who was not quite the same as the reverend gentleman who visited the poor and preached in the church. These two friends said much that all the world might hear; but they had a few secrets which they shared with each other only. It was a great comfort, for example, that Christmas when Nancy, Betsy, and Mr. Walker seemed to be in conspiracy against him, to exclaim in the diary, “The treatment I meet with for my Civility this Christmas is to me abominable”. The second James Woodforde sympathised and agreed. Again, when a stranger abused his hospitality it was a relief to inform the other self who lived in the little book that he had put him to sleep in the attic story, “and I treated him as one that would be too free if treated kindly”. It is easy to understand why, in the quiet life of a country parish, these two bachelor friends became in time inseparable. An essential part of him would have died had he been forbidden to keep his diary. When indeed he thought himself in the grip of death he still wrote on and on. And as we read—if reading is the word for it—we seem to be listening to someone who is murmuring over the events of the day to himself in the quiet space which precedes sleep. It is not writing, and, to speak of the truth, it is not reading. It is slipping through half a dozen pages and strolling to the window and looking out. It is going on thinking about the Woodfordes while we watch the people in the street below. It is taking a walk and making up the life and character of James Woodforde as we go. It is not reading any more than it is writing—what to call it we scarcely know.

James Woodforde, then, was one of those smooth-cheeked, steady-eyed men, demure to look at, whom we can never imagine except in the prime of life. He was of an equable temper, with only such acerbities and touchinesses as are generally to be found in those who have had a love affair in their youth and remained, as they fancy, unwed because of it. The Parson’s love affair, however, was nothing very tremendous. Once when he was a young man in Somerset he liked to walk over to Shepton and to visit a certain “sweet tempered” Betsy White who lived there. He had a great mind “to make a bold stroke” and ask her to marry him. He went so far, indeed, as to propose marriage “when opportunity served”, and Betsy was willing. But he delayed; time passed; four years passed indeed, and Betsy went to Devonshire, met a Mr. Webster, who had five hundred pounds a year, and married him. When James Woodforde met them in the turnpike road he could say little, “being shy”, but to his diary he remarked—and this no doubt was his private version of the affair ever after—“she has proved herself to me a mere jilt”.

But he was a young man then, and as time went on we cannot help suspecting that he was glad to consider the question of marriage shelved once and for all so that he might settle down with his niece Nancy at Weston Longueville, and give himself simply and solely, every day and all day, to the great business of living. Again, what else to call it we do not know.

For James Woodforde was nothing in particular. Life had it all her own way with him. He had no special gift; he had no oddity or infirmity. It is idle to pretend that he was a zealous priest. God in Heaven was much the same to him as King George upon the throne—a kindly Monarch, that is to say, whose festivals one kept by preaching a sermon on Sunday much as one kept the Royal birthday by firing a blunderbuss and drinking a toast at dinner. Should anything untoward happen, like the death of a boy who was dragged and killed by a horse, he would instantly, but rather perfunctorily, exclaim, “I hope to God the Poor Boy is happy”, and add, “We all came home singing”; just as when Justice Creed’s peacock spread its tail—“and most noble it is”—he would exclaim, “How wonderful are Thy Works O God in every Being”. But there was no fanaticism, no enthusiasm, no lyric impulse about James Woodforde. In all these pages, indeed, each so neatly divided into compartments, and each of those again filled, as the days themselves were filled, quietly and fully in a hand steady as the pacing of a well-tempered nag, one can only call to mind a single poetic phrase about the transit of Venus. “It appeared as a black patch upon a fair Lady’s face”, he says. The words themselves are mild enough, but they hang over the undulating expanse of the Parson’s prose with the resplendence of the star itself. So in the Fen country a barn or a tree appears twice its natural size against the surrounding flats. But what led him to this palpable excess that summer’s night we cannot tell. It cannot have been that he was drunk. He spoke out too roundly against such failings in his brother Jack to be guilty himself. Temperamentally he was among the eaters of meat and not among the drinkers of wine. When we think of the Woodfordes, uncle and niece, we think of them as often as not waiting with some impatience for their dinner. Gravely they watch the joint as it is set upon the table; swiftly they get their knives to work upon the succulent leg or loin; without much comment, unless a word is passed about the gravy or the stuffing, they go on eating. So they munch, day after day, year in, year out, until between them they must have devoured herds of sheep and oxen, flocks of poultry, an odd dozen or so of swans and cygnets, bushels of apples and plums, while the pastries and the jellies crumble and squash beneath their spoons in mountains, in pyramids, in pagodas. Never was there a book so stuffed with food as this one is. To read the bill of fare respectfully and punctually set forth gives one a sense of repletion. Trout and chicken, mutton and peas, pork and apple sauce—so the joints succeed each other at dinner, and there is supper with more joints still to come, all, no doubt, home grown, and of the juiciest and sweetest; all cooked, often by the mistress herself, in the plainest English way, save when the dinner was at Weston Hall and Mrs. Custance surprised them with a London dainty—a pyramid of jelly, that is to say, with a “landscape appearing through it”. After dinner sometimes, Mrs. Custance, for whom James Woodforde had a chivalrous devotion, would play the “Sticcardo Pastorale”, and make “very soft music indeed”; or would get out her work-box and show them how neatly contrived it was, unless indeed she were giving birth to another child upstairs. These infants the Parson would baptize and very frequently he would bury them. They died almost as frequently as they were born. The Parson had a deep respect for the Custances. They were all that country gentry should be—a little given to the habit of keeping mistresses, perhaps, but that peccadillo could be forgiven them in view of their generosity to the poor, the kindness they showed to Nancy, and their condescension in asking the Parson to dinner when they had great people staying with them. Yet great people were not much to James’s liking. Deeply though he respected the nobility, “one must confess”, he said, “that being with our equals is much more agreeable”.

Not only did Parson Woodforde know what was agreeable; that rare gift was by the bounty of Nature supplemented by another equally rare—he could have what he wanted. The age was propitious. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday—they follow each other and each little compartment seems filled with content. The days were not crowded, but they were enviably varied. Fellow of New College though he was, he did things with his own hands, not merely with his own head. He lived in every room of the house—in the study he wrote sermons, in the dining-room he ate copiously; he cooked in the kitchen, he played cards in the parlour. And then he took his coat and stick and went coursing his greyhounds in the fields. Year in, year out, the provisioning of the house and its defence against the cold of winter and the drought of summer fell upon him. Like a general he surveyed the seasons and took steps to make his own little camp safe with coal and wood and beef and beer against the enemy. His day thus had to accommodate a jumble of incongruous occupations. There is religion to be served, and the pig to be killed; the sick to be visited and dinner to be eaten; the dead to be buried and beer to be brewed; Convocation to be attended and the cow to be bolused. Life and death, mortality and immortality, jostle in his pages and make a good mixed marriage of it: “… found the old gentleman almost at his last gasp. Totally senseless with rattlings in his Throat. Dinner today boiled beef and Rabbit rosted.” All is as it should be; life is like that.

Surely, surely, then, here is one of the breathing-spaces in human affairs—here in Norfolk at the end of the eighteenth century at the Parsonage. For once man is content with his lot; harmony is achieved; his house fits him; a tree is a tree; a chair is a chair; each knows its office and fulfils it. Looking through the eyes of Parson Woodforde, the different lives of men seem orderly and settled. Far away guns roar; a King falls; but the sound is not loud enough to scare the rooks here in Norfolk. The proportions of things are different. The Continent is so distant that it looks a mere blur; America scarcely exists; Australia is unknown. But a magnifying glass is laid upon the fields of Norfolk. Every blade of grass is visible there. We see every lane and every field; the ruts on the roads and the peasants’ faces. Each house stands in its own breadth of meadow isolated and independent. No wires link village to village. No voices thread the air. The body also is more present and more real. It suffers more acutely. No anaesthetic deadens physical pain. The surgeon’s knife hovers real and sharp above the limb. Cold strikes unmitigated upon the house. The milk freezes in the pans; the water is thick with ice in the basins. One can scarcely walk from one room to another in the parsonage in winter. Poor men and women are frozen to death upon the roads. Often no letters come and there are no visitors and no newspapers. The Parsonage stands alone in the midst of the frost-bound fields. At last, Heaven be praised, life circulates again; a man comes to the door with a Madagascar monkey; another brings a box containing a child with two distinct perfect heads; there is a rumour that a balloon is going to rise at Norwich. Every little incident stands out sharp and clear. The drive to Norwich even is something of an adventure. One must trundle every step of the way behind a horse. But look how distinct the trees stand in the hedges; how slowly the cattle move their heads as the carriage trots by; how gradually the spires of Norwich raise themselves above the hill. And then how clear-cut and familiar are the faces of the few people who are our friends—the Custances, Mr. du Quesne. Friendship has time to solidify, to become a lasting, a valuable possession.

True, Nancy of the younger generation is visited now and then by a flighty notion that she is missing something, that she wants something. One day she complained to her uncle that life was very dull: she complained “of the dismal situation of my house, nothing to be seen, and little or no visiting or being visited, &c.”, and made him very uneasy. We could read Nancy a little lecture upon the folly of wanting that ‘et cetera’. Look what your ‘et cetera’ has brought to pass, we might say; half the countries of Europe are bankrupt; there is a red line of villas on every green hill-side; your Norfolk roads are black as tar; there is no end to ‘visiting or being visited’. But Nancy has an answer to make us, to the effect that our past is her present. You, she says, think it a great privilege to be born in the eighteenth century, because one called cowslips pagles and rode in a curricle instead of driving in a car. But you are utterly wrong, you fanatical lovers of memoirs, she goes on. I can assure you, my life was often intolerably dull. I did not laugh at the things that make you laugh. It did not amuse me when my uncle dreamt of a hat or saw bubbles in the beer, and said that meant a death in the family; I thought so too. Betsy Davy mourned young Walker with all her heart in spite of dressing in sprigged paduasoy. There is a great deal of humbug talked of the eighteenth century. Your delight in old times and old diaries is half impure. You make up something that never had any existence. Our sober reality is only a dream to you—so Nancy grieves and complains, living through the eighteenth century day by day, hour by hour.

Still, if it is a dream, let us indulge it a moment longer. Let us believe that some things last, and some places and some people are not touched by change. On a fine May morning, with the rooks rising and the hares scampering and the plover calling among the long grass, there is much to encourage the illusion. It is we who change and perish. Parson Woodforde lives on. It is the kings and queens who lie in prison. It is the great towns that are ravaged with anarchy and confusion. But the river Wensum still flows; Mrs. Custance is brought to bed of yet another baby; there is the first swallow of the year. The spring comes, and summer with its hay and strawberries; then autumn, when the walnuts are exceptionally fine though the pears are poor; so we lapse into winter, which is indeed boisterous, but the house, thank God, withstands the storm; and then again there is the first swallow, and Parson Woodforde takes his greyhounds out a-coursing.

II
The Rev. John Skinner

A whole world separates Woodforde, who was born in 1740 and died in 1803, from Skinner, who was born in 1772 and died in 1839.

For the few years that separated the two parsons are those momentous years that separate the eighteenth century from the nineteenth. Camerton, it is true, lying in the heart of Somersetshire, was a village of the greatest antiquity; nevertheless, before five pages of the diary are turned we read of coal-works, and how there was a great shouting at the coal-works because a fresh vein of coal had been discovered, and the proprietors had given money to the workmen to celebrate an event which promised such prosperity to the village. Then, though the country gentlemen seemed set as firmly in their seats as ever, it happened that the manor house at Camerton, with all the rights and duties pertaining to it, was in the hands of the Jarretts, whose fortune was derived from the Jamaica trade. This novelty, this incursion of an element quite unknown to Woodforde in his day, had its disturbing influence no doubt upon the character of Skinner himself. Irritable, nervous, apprehensive, he seems to embody, even before the age itself had come into existence, all the strife and unrest of our distracted times. He stands, dressed in the prosaic and unbecoming stocks and pantaloons of the early nineteenth century, at the parting of the ways. Behind him lay order and discipline and all the virtues of the heroic past, but directly he left his study he was faced with drunkenness and immorality; with indiscipline and irreligion; with Methodism and Roman Catholicism; with the Reform Bill and the Catholic Emancipation Act, with a mob clamouring for freedom, with the overthrow of all that was decent and established and right. Tormented and querulous, at the same time conscientious and able, he stands at the parting of the ways, unwilling to yield an inch, unable to concede a point, harsh, peremptory, apprehensive, and without hope.

Private sorrow had increased the natural acerbity of his temper. His wife had died young, leaving him with four small children, and of these the best-loved, Laura, a child who shared his tastes and would have sweetened his life, for she already kept a diary and had arranged a cabinet of shells with the utmost neatness, died too. But these losses, though they served nominally to make him love God the better, in practice led him to hate men more. By the time the diary opens in 1822 he was fixed in his opinion that the mass of men are unjust and malicious, and that the people of Camerton are more corrupt even than the mass of men. But by that date he was also fixed in his profession. Fate had taken him from the lawyer’s office, where he would have been in his element, dealing out justice, filling up forms, keeping strictly to the letter of the law, and had planted him at Camerton among churchwardens and farmers, the Gullicks and the Padfields, the old woman who had dropsy, the idiot boy, and the dwarf. Nevertheless, however sordid his tasks and disgusting his parishioners, he had his duty to them; and with them he would remain. Whatever insults he suffered, he would live up to his principles, uphold the right, protect the poor, and punish the wrongdoer. By the time the diary opens, this strenuous and unhappy career is in full swing.

Perhaps the village of Camerton in the year 1822, with its coal-mines and the disturbance they brought, was no fair sample of English village life. Certainly it is difficult, as one follows the Rector on his daily rounds, to indulge in pleasant dreams about the quaintness and amenity of old English rural life. Here, for instance, he was called to see Mrs. Gooch—a woman of weak mind, who had been locked up alone in her cottage and fallen into the fire and was in agony. “Why do you not help me, I say? Why do you not help me?” she cried. And the Rector, as he heard her screams, knew that she had come to this through no fault of her own. Her efforts to keep a home together had led to drink, and so she had lost her reason, and what with the squabbles between the Poor Law officials and the family as to who should support her, what with her husband’s extravagance and drunkenness, she had been left alone, had fallen into the fire, and so died. Who was to blame? Mr. Purnell, the miserly magistrate, who was all for cutting down the allowance paid to the poor, or Hicks the Overseer, who was notoriously harsh, or the alehouses, or the Methodists, or what? At any rate the Rector had done his duty. However he might be hated for it, he always stood up for the rights of the down-trodden; he always told people of their faults, and convicted them of evil. Then there was Mrs. Somer, who kept a house of ill-fame and was bringing up her daughters to the same profession. Then there was Farmer Lippeatt, who, turned out of the Red Post at midnight, dead drunk, missed his way, fell into a quarry, and died of a broken breastbone. Wherever one turned there was suffering, wherever one looked one found cruelty behind that suffering. Mr. and Mrs. Hicks, for example, the Overseers, let an infirm pauper lie for ten days in the Poor House without care, “so that maggots had bred in his flesh and eaten great holes in his body”. His only attendant was an old woman, who was so failing that she was unable to lift him. Happily the pauper died. Happily poor Garratt, the miner, died too. For to add to the evils of drink and poverty and the cholera there was constant peril from the mine itself. Accidents were common and the means of treating them elementary. A fall of coal had broken Garratt’s back, but he lingered on, though exposed to the crude methods of country surgeons, from January to November, when at last death released him. Both the stern Rector and the flippant Lady of the Manor, to do them justice, were ready with their half-crowns, with their soups and their medicines, and visited sick-beds without fail. But even allowing for the natural asperity of Mr. Skinner’s temper, it would need a very rosy pen and a very kindly eye to make a smiling picture of life in the village of Camerton a century ago. Half-crowns and soup went a very little way to remedy matters; sermons and denunciations made them perhaps even worse.

The Rector found refuge from Camerton neither in dissipation like some of his neighbours, nor in sport like others. Occasionally he drove over to dine with a brother cleric, but he noted acrimoniously that the entertainment was “better suited to Grosvenor Square than a clergyman’s home—French dishes and French wines in profusion”, and records with a note of exclamation that it was eleven o’clock before he drove home. When his children were young he sometimes walked with them in the fields, or amused himself by making them a boat, or rubbed up his Latin in an epitaph for the tomb of some pet dog or tame pigeon. And sometimes he leant back peacefully and listened to Mrs. Fenwick as she sang the songs of Moore to her husband’s accompaniment on the flute. But even such harmless pleasures were poisoned with suspicion. A farmer stared insolently as he passed; someone threw a stone from a window; Mrs. Jarrett clearly concealed some evil purpose behind her cordiality. No, the only refuge from Camerton lay in Camalodunum. The more he thought of it the more certain he became that he had the singular good fortune to live on the identical spot where lived the father of Caractacus, where Ostorius established his colony, where Arthur had fought the traitor Modred, where Alfred very nearly came in his misfortunes. Camerton was undoubtedly the Camalodunum of Tacitus. Shut up in his study alone with his documents, copying, comparing, proving indefatigably, he was safe, at rest, even happy. He was also, he became convinced, on the track of an important etymological discovery, by which it could be proved that there was a secret significance “in every letter that entered into the composition of Celtic names”. No archbishop was as content in his palace as Skinner the antiquary was content in his cell. To these pursuits he owed, too, those rare and delightful visits to Stourhead, the seat of Sir Richard Hoare, when at last he mixed with men of his own calibre, and met the gentlemen who were engaged in examining the antiquities of Wiltshire. However hard it froze, however high the snow lay heaped on the roads, Skinner rode over to Stourhead; and sat in the library, with a violent cold, but in perfect content, making extracts from Seneca, and extracts from Diodorum Siculus, and extracts from Ptolemy’s Geography, or scornfully disposed of some rash and ill-informed fellow-antiquary who had the temerity to assert that Camalodunum was really situated at Colchester. On he went with his extracts, with his theories, with his proofs, in spite of the malicious present of a rusty nail wrapped in paper from his parishioners, in spite of the laughing warning of his host: “Oh, Skinner, you will bring everything at last to Camalodunum; be content with what you have already discovered; if you fancy too much you will weaken the authority of real facts”. Skinner replied with a sixth letter thirty-four pages long; for Sir Richard did not know how necessary Camalodunum had become to an embittered man who had daily to encounter Hicks the Overseer and Purnell the magistrate, the brothels, the ale-houses, the Methodists, the dropsies and bad legs of Camerton. Even the floods were mitigated if one could reflect that thus Camalodunum must have looked in the time of the Britons.

So he filled three iron chests with ninety-eight volumes of manuscript. But by degrees the manuscripts ceased to be entirely concerned with Camalodunum; they began to be largely concerned with John Skinner. It was true that it was important to establish the truth about Camalodunum, but it was also important to establish the truth about John Skinner. In fifty years after his death, when the diaries were published, people would know not only that John Skinner was a great antiquary, but that he was a much wronged, much suffering man. His diary became his confidante, as it was to become his champion. For example, was he not the most affectionate of fathers, he asked the diary? He had spent endless time and trouble on his sons; he had sent them to Winchester and Cambridge, and yet now when the farmers were so insolent about paying him his tithes, and gave him a broken-backed lamb for his share, or fobbed him off with less than his due of cocks, his son Joseph refused to help him. His son said that the people of Camerton laughed at him; that he treated his children like servants; that he suspected evil where none was meant. And then he opened a letter by chance and found a bill for a broken gig; and then his sons lounged about smoking cigars when they might have helped him to mount his drawings. In short, he could not stand their presence in his house. He dismissed them in a fury to Bath. When they had gone he could not help admitting that perhaps he had been at fault. It was his querulous temper again—but then he had so much to make him querulous. Mrs. Jarrett’s peacock screamed under his window all night. They jangled the church bells on purpose to annoy him. Still, he would try; he would let them come back. So Joseph and Owen came back. And then the old irritation overcame him again. He “could not help saying” something about being idle, or drinking too much cider, upon which there was a terrible scene and Joseph broke one of the parlour chairs. Owen took Joseph’s part. So did Anna. None of his children cared for him. Owen went further. Owen said “I was a madman and ought to have a commission of lunacy to investigate my conduct”. And, further, Owen cut him to the quick by pouring scorn on his verses, on his diaries and archaeological theories. He said “No one would read the nonsense I had written. When I mentioned having gained a prize at Trinity College … his reply was that none but the most stupid fellows ever thought of writing for the college prize”. Again there was a terrible scene; again they were dismissed to Bath, followed by their father’s curses. And then Joseph fell ill with the family consumption. At once his father was all tenderness and remorse. He sent for doctors, he offered to take him for a sea trip to Ireland, he took him indeed to Weston and went sailing with him on the sea. Once more the family came together. And once more the querulous, exacting father could not help, for all his concern, exasperating the children whom, in his own crabbed way, he yet genuinely loved. The question of religion cropped up. Owen said his father was no better than a Deist or a Socinian. And Joseph, lying ill upstairs, said he was too tired for argument; he did not want his father to bring drawings to show him; he did not want his father to read prayers to him, “he would rather have some other person to converse with than me”. So in the crisis of their lives, when a father should have been closest to them, even his children turned away from him. There was nothing left to live for. Yet what had he done to make everyone hate him? Why did the farmers call him mad? Why did Joseph say that no one would read what he wrote? Why did the villagers tie tin cans to the tail of his dog? Why did the peacocks shriek and the bells ring? Why was there no mercy shown to him and no respect and no love? With agonising repetition the diary asks these questions; but there was no answer. At last, one morning in December 1839, the Rector took his gun, walked into the beech wood near his home, and shot himself dead.

[]

Dr. Burney’s Evening Party.

I

The party was given either in 1777 or in 1778; on which day or month of the year is not known, but the night was cold. Fanny Burney, from whom we get much of our information, was accordingly either twenty-five or twenty-six, as we choose. But in order to enjoy the party to the full it is necessary to go back some years and to scrape acquaintance with the guests.

Fanny, from the earliest days, had always been fond of writing. There was a cabin at the end of her stepmother’s garden at King’s Lynn, where she used to sit and write of an afternoon till the oaths of the seamen sailing up and down the river drove her in. But it was only in the afternoon and in remote places that her half-suppressed, uneasy passion for writing had its way. Writing was held to be slightly ridiculous in a girl; rather unseemly in a woman. Besides, one never knew, if a girl kept a diary, whether she might not say something indiscreet—so Miss Dolly Young warned her; and Miss Dolly Young, though exceedingly plain, was esteemed a woman of the highest character in King’s Lynn. Fanny’s stepmother also disapproved of writing. Yet so keen was the joy—“I cannot express the pleasure I have in writing down my thoughts at the very moment, and my opinion of people when I first see them”—that scribble she must. Loose sheets of paper fell from her pocket and were picked up and read by her father to her agony and shame; once she was forced to make a bonfire of all her papers in the back garden. At last some kind of compromise seems to have been arrived at. The morning was sacred to serious tasks like sewing; it was only in the afternoon that she allowed herself to scribble—letters, diaries, stories, verses in the look-out place which overhung the river, till the oaths of the sailors drove her in.

There was something strange in that, perhaps, for the eighteenth century was the age of oaths. Fanny’s early diary is larded with them. “God help me”, “Split me”, “Stap my vitals”, together with damneds and devilishes, dropped daily and hourly from the lips of her adored father and her venerated Daddy Crisp. Perhaps Fanny’s attitude to language was altogether a little abnormal. She was immensely susceptible to the power of words, but not nervously or acutely as Jane Austen was. She adored fluency and the sound of language pouring warmly and copiously over the printed page. Directly she read Rasselas, enlarged and swollen sentences formed on the tip of her childish pen in the manner of Dr. Johnson. Quite early in life she would go out of her way to avoid the plain name of Tomkins. Thus, whatever she heard from her cabin at the end of the garden was sure to affect her more than most girls, and it is also clear that while her ears were sensitive to sound, her soul was sensitive to meaning. There was something a little prudish in her nature. Just as she avoided the name of Tomkins, so she avoided the roughnesses, the asperities, the plainnesses of daily life. The chief fault that mars the extreme vivacity and vividness of the early diary is that the profusion of words tends to soften the edges of the sentences, and the sweetness of the sentiment to smooth out the outlines of the thought. Thus, when she heard the sailors swearing, though Maria Allen, her half-sister, would, one believes, have liked to stay and toss a kiss over the water—her future history allows us to take the liberty of thinking so—Fanny went indoors.

Fanny went indoors, but not to solitary meditation. The house, whether it was in Lynn or in London—and by far the greater part of the year was spent in Poland Street—hummed with activity. There was the sound of the harpsichord; the sound of singing; there was the sound—for such concentration seems to pervade a whole house with its murmur—of Dr. Burney writing furiously, surrounded by notebooks, in his study; and there were great bursts of chatter and laughter when, returning from their various occupations, the Burney children met together. Nobody enjoyed family life more than Fanny did. For there her shyness only served to fasten the nickname of Old Lady upon her; there she had a familiar audience for her humour; there she need not bother about her clothes; there—perhaps the fact that their mother had died when they were all young was partly the cause of it—was that intimacy which expresses itself in jokes and legends and a private language (“The wig is wet”, they would say, winking at each other); there were endless confabulations, and confidences between sisters and brothers and brothers and sisters. Nor could there be any doubt that the Burneys—Susan and James and Charles and Fanny and Hetty and Charlotte—were a gifted race. Charles was a scholar; James was a humorist; Fanny was a writer; Susan was musical—each had some special gift or characteristic to add to the common stock. And besides their natural gifts they were happy in the fact that their father was a very popular man; a man, too, so admirably situated by his talents, which were social, and his birth, which was gentle, that they could mix without difficulty either with lords or with bookbinders, and had, in fact, as free a run of life as could be wished.

As for Dr. Burney himself, there are some points about which, at this distance of time, one may feel dubious. It is difficult to be sure what, had one met him now, one would have felt for him. One thing is certain—one would have met him everywhere. Hostesses would be competing to catch him. Notes would wait for him. Telephone bells would interrupt him. For he was the most sought-after, the most occupied of men. He was always dashing in and dashing out. Sometimes he dined off a box of sandwiches in his carriage. Sometimes he went out at seven in the morning, and was not back from his round of music lessons till eleven at night. The “habitual softness of his manners”, his great social charm, endeared him to everybody. His haphazard untidy ways—everything, notes, money, manuscripts, was tossed into a drawer, and he was robbed of all his savings once, but his friends were delighted to make it up for him; his odd adventures—did he not fall asleep after a bad crossing at Dover, and so return to France and so have to cross the Channel again?—gave him a claim upon people’s kindness and sympathy. It is, perhaps, his diffuseness that makes him a trifle nebulous. He seems to be for ever writing and then rewriting, and requiring his daughters to write for him, endless books and articles, while over him, unchecked, unfiled, unread perhaps, pour down notes, letters, invitations to dinner which he cannot destroy and means some day to annotate and collect, until he seems to melt away at last in a cloud of words. When he died at the age of eighty-eight, there was nothing to be done by the most devoted of daughters but to burn the whole accumulation entire. Even Fanny’s love of language was suffocated. But if we fumble a little as to our feeling for Dr. Burney, Fanny certainly did not. She adored her father. She never minded how many times she had to lay aside her own writing in order to copy out his. And he returned her affection. Though his ambition for her success at Court was foolish, perhaps, and almost cost her her life, she had only to cry when a distasteful suitor was pressed on her, “Oh, Sir, I wish for nothing! Only let me live with you!” for the emotional doctor to reply, “My Life! Thou shall live with me for ever if thou wilt. Thou canst not think I meant to get rid of thee?” And not only were his eyes full of tears, but, what was more remarkable, he never mentioned Mr. Barlow again. Indeed, the Burneys were a happy family; a mixed composite, oddly assorted family; for there were the Aliens, too, and little half-brothers and half-sisters were being born and growing up.

So time passed, and the passage of the years made it impossible for the family to continue in Poland Street any longer. First they moved to Queen Square, and then, in 1774, to the house where Newton had lived, in St. Martin’s Street, Leicester Fields; where his Observatory still stood, and his room with the painted panels was still to be seen. Here in a mean street, but in the centre of the town, the Burneys set up their establishment. Here Fanny went on scribbling, stealing to the Observatory as she had stolen to the cabin at Lynn, for she exclaimed, “I cannot any longer resist what I find to be irresistible, the pleasure of popping down my thoughts from time to time upon paper”. Here came so many famous people either to be closeted with the doctor, or, like Garrick, to sit with him while his fine head of natural hair was brushed, or to join the lively family dinner, or, more formally, to gather together in a musical party, where all the Burney children played and their father “dashed away” on the harpsichord, and perhaps some foreign musician of distinction performed a solo—so many people came for one reason or another to the house in St. Martin’s Street that it is only the eccentrics, the grotesques, that catch the eye. One remembers, for instance, the Ajujari, the astonishing soprano, because she had been “mauled as an infant by a pig, in consequence of which she is reported to have a silver side”. One remembers Bruce, the traveller, because he had a most extraordinary complaint. When he attempted to speak, his whole stomach suddenly seemed to heave like an organ bellows. He did not wish to make any secret about it, but spoke of it as having originated in Abyssinia. However, one evening, when he appeared rather agitated, it lasted much longer than usual, and was so violent that it alarmed the company.

One seems to remember, for she paints herself while she paints the others, Fanny herself slipping eagerly and lightly in and out of all this company, with her rather prominent gnat-like eyes, and her shy, awkward manners. But the gnat-like eyes, the awkward manners, concealed the quickest observation, the most retentive memory. As soon as the company had gone, she stole to the Observatory and wrote down every word, every scene, in letters twelve pages long, for her beloved Daddy Crisp at Chessington. That old hermit—he had retired to a house in a field in dudgeon with society—though professing to be better pleased with a bottle of wine in his cellar and a horse in his stable, and a game of backgammon at night, than with all the fine company in the world, was always agog for news. He scolded his Fannikin if she did not tell him all about her fine goings-on. And he scolded her again if she did not write at full tilt exactly as the words came into her head.

Mr. Crisp wanted to know in particular “about Mr. Greville and his notions”. For, indeed, Mr. Greville was a perpetual source of curiosity. It is a thousand pities that time with her poppy dust has covered Mr. Greville so that only his most prominent features, his birth, his person, and his nose emerge. Fulke Greville was the descendant—he must, one fancies, have emphasised the fact from the way in which it is repeated—of the friend of Sir Philip Sidney. A coronet, indeed, “hung almost suspended over his head”. In person he was tall and well proportioned. “His face, features, and complexion were striking for masculine beauty.” “His air and carriage were noble with conscious dignity”; his bearing was “lofty, yet graceful”. But all these gifts and qualities, to which one must add that he rode and fenced and danced and played tennis to admiration, were marred by prodigious faults. He was supercilious in the extreme; he was selfish; he was fickle. He was a man of violent temper. His introduction to Dr. Burney in the first place was due to his doubt whether a musician could be fit company for a gentleman. When he found that young Burney not only played the harpsichord to perfection, but curved his finger and rounded his hand as he played; that he answered plain “Yes, Sir,” or “No, Sir,” being more interested in the music than in his patron; that it was only indeed when Greville himself thrummed pertinaciously from memory that he could stand it no longer, and broke into vivacious conversation—it was only when he found that young Burney was both gifted and well bred that, being himself a very clever man, he no longer stood upon his dignity. Burney became his friend and his equal. Burney, indeed, almost became his victim. For if there was one thing that the descendant of the friend of Sir Philip Sidney detested it was what he called “fogrum”. By that expressive word he seems to have meant the middle-class virtues of discretion and respectability, as opposed to the aristocratic virtues of what he called “ton”. Life must be lived dashingly, daringly, with perpetual display, even if the display was extremely expensive, and, as seemed possible to those who trailed dismally round his grounds praising the improvements, as boring to the man who made it as to the unfortunate guests whose admiration he insisted upon extorting. But Greville could not endure fogrum in himself or in his friends. He threw the obscure young musician into the fast life of White’s and Newmarket, and watched with amusement to see if he sank or swam. Burney, most adroit of men, swam as if born to the water, and the descendant of the friend of Sir Philip Sidney was pleased. From being his protégé, Burney became his confidant. Indeed, the splendid gentleman, for all his high carriage, was in need of one. For Greville, could one wipe away the poppy dust that covers him, was one of those tortured and unhappy souls who find themselves torn asunder by opposite desires. On the one hand he was consumed with the wish to be in the first flight of fashion and to do “the thing”, however costly or dreary “the thing” might be. On the other, he was secretly persuaded that “the proper bent of his mind and understanding was for metaphysics”. Burney, perhaps, was a link between the world of ton and the world of fogrum. He was a man of breeding who could dice and bet with the bloods; he was also a musician who could talk of intellectual things and ask clever people to his house.

Thus Greville treated the Burneys as his equals, and came to their house, though his visits were often interrupted by the violent quarrels which he managed to pick even with the amiable Dr. Burney himself. Indeed, as time went on there was nobody with whom Greville did not quarrel. He had lost heavily at the gambling-tables. His prestige in society was sunk. His habits were driving his family from him. Even his wife, by nature gentle and conciliatory, though excessive thinness made her seem fitted to sit for a portrait “of a penetrating, puissant and sarcastic fairy queen”, was wearied by his infidelities. Inspired by them she had suddenly produced that famous Ode to Indifference, “which had passed into every collection of fugitive pieces in the English language” and (it is Madam D’Arblay who speaks) “twined around her brow a garland of wide-spreading and unfading fragrance”. Her fame, it may be, was another thorn in her husband’s side; for he, too, was an author. He himself had produced a volume of Maxims and Characters; and having “waited for fame with dignity rather than anxiety, because with expectation unclogged with doubt”, was beginning perhaps to become a little impatient when fame delayed. Meanwhile he was fond of the society of clever people, and it was largely at his desire that the famous party in St. Martin’s Street met together that very cold night.

II

In those days, when London was so small, it was easier than now for people to stand on an eminence which they scarcely struggled to keep, but enjoyed by unanimous consent. Everybody knew and remembered when they saw her that Mrs. Greville had written an Ode to Indifference; everybody knew that Mr. Bruce had travelled in Abyssinia; so, too, everybody knew that there was a house at Streatham presided over by a lady called Mrs. Thrale. Without troubling to write an Ode, without hazarding her life among savages, without possessing either high rank or vast wealth, Mrs. Thrale was a celebrity. By the exercise of powers difficult to define—for to feel them one must have sat at table and noticed a thousand audacities and deftnesses and skilful combinations which die with the moment—Mrs. Thrale had the reputation of a great hostess. Her fame spread far beyond her house. People who had never seen her discussed her. People wanted to know what she was like; whether she was really so witty and so well read; whether it was a pose; whether she had a heart; whether she loved her husband the brewer, who seemed a dull dog; why she had married him; whether Dr. Johnson was in love with her—what, in short, was the truth of her story, the secret of her power. For power she had—that was indisputable.

Even then, perhaps, it would have been difficult to say in what it consisted. For she possessed the one quality which can never be named; she enjoyed the one gift which never ceases to excite discussion. Somehow or other she was a personality. The young Burneys, for instance, had never seen Mrs. Thrale or been to Streatham, but the stir which she set going round her had reached them in St. Martin’s Street. When their father came back from giving his first music lesson to Miss Thrale at Streatham they flocked about him to hear his account of her mother. Was she as brilliant as people made out? Was she kind? Was she cruel? Had he liked her? Dr. Burney was in high good temper—in itself a proof of his hostess’s power—and he replied, not, we may be sure, as Fanny rendered it, that she was a “star of the first constellation of female wits: surpassing, rather than equalising the reputation which her extraordinary endowments, and the splendid fortune which made them conspicuous, had blazoned abroad”—that was written when Fanny’s style was old and tarnished, and its leaves were fluttering and falling profusely to the ground; the doctor, we may suppose, answered briskly that he had enjoyed himself hugely; that the lady was a very clever lady; that she had interrupted the lesson all the time; that she had a very sharp tongue—there was no doubt of that; but he would go to the stake for it that she was a good-hearted woman at bottom. Then they must have pressed to know what she looked like. She looked younger than her age—which was about forty. She was rather plump, very small, fair with very blue eyes, and had a scar or cut on her lip. She painted her cheeks, which was unnecessary, because her complexion was rosy by nature. The whole impression she made was one of bustle and gaiety and good temper. She was, he said, a woman “full of sport”, whom nobody could have taken for a creature that the doctor could not bear, a learned lady. Less obviously, she was very observant, as her anecdotes were to prove; capable of passion, though that was not yet visible at Streatham; and, while curiously careless and good-tempered about her dues as a wit or a blue-stocking, had an amusing pride in being descended from a long line of Welsh gentry (whereas the Thrales were obscure), and drew satisfaction now and then from the reflection that in her veins ran the blood, as the College of Heralds acknowledged, of Adam of Salzburg.

Many women might have possessed these qualities without being remembered for them. Mrs. Thrale possessed besides one that has given her immortality: the power of being the friend of Dr. Johnson. Without that addition, her life might have fizzled and flamed to extinction, leaving nothing behind it. But the combination of Dr. Johnson and Mrs. Thrale created something as solid, as lasting, as remarkable in its way as a work of art. And this was an achievement that called for much rarer powers on the part of Mrs. Thrale than the qualities of a good hostess. When the Thrales first met Johnson he was in a state of profound gloom, crying out such lost and terrible words that Mr. Thrale put his hand before his mouth to silence him. Physically, too, he was afflicted with asthma and dropsy; his manners were rough; his habits were gross; his clothes were dirty; his wig was singed; his linen was soiled; and he was the rudest of men. Yet Mrs. Thrale carried this monster off with her to Brighton and then domesticated him in her house at Streatham, where he was given a room to himself, and where he spent habitually some days in the middle of every week. This might have been, it is true, but the enthusiasm of a curiosity hunter, ready to put up with a host of disagreeables for the sake of having at her house the original Dr. Johnson, whom anybody in England would gladly pay to see. But it is clear that her connoisseurship was of a finer type. She understood—her anecdotes prove it—that Dr. Johnson was somehow a rare, an important, an impressive human being whose friendship might be a burden but was certainly an honour. And it was not by any means so easy to know this then as it is now. What one knew then was that Dr. Johnson was coming to dinner. And when Dr. Johnson came to dinner one had to ask one’s self who was coming too? For if it was a Cambridge man there might be an outburst. If it was a Whig there would certainly be a scene. If it was a Scotsman anything might happen. Such were his whims and prejudices. Next one would have to bethink one, what food had been ordered for dinner? For the food never went uncriticised; and even when one had provided him with young peas from the garden, one must not praise them. Were not the young peas charming, Mrs. Thrale asked once? and he turned upon her, after gobbling down masses of pork and veal pie with lumps of sugar in it, and snapped, “Perhaps they would be so—to a pig”. Then what would the talk be about—that was another cause for anxiety. If it got upon painting or music he was apt to dismiss it with scorn, for both arts were indifferent to him. Then if a traveller told a tale he was sure to pooh-pooh it, because he believed nothing that he had not seen himself. Then if anyone were to express sympathy in his presence it might well draw down upon one a rebuke for insincerity.

When, one day, I lamented the loss of a cousin killed in America: “Prithee, my dear,” said he, “have done with canting: how would the world be the worse for it, I may ask, if all your relations were at once spitted like larks, and roasted for Presto’s supper?”

In short, the meal would be strewn with difficulties; the whole affair might run upon the rocks at any moment.

Had Mrs. Thrale been a shallow curiosity hunter she would have shown him for a season or so and then let him drop. But Mrs. Thrale realised even at the moment that one must submit to be snubbed and bullied and irritated and offended by Dr. Johnson because—well, what was the force that sent an impudent and arrogant young man like Boswell slinking back to his chair like a beaten boy when Johnson bade him? Why did she herself sit up till four in the morning pouring out tea for him? There was a force in him that awed even a competent woman of the world, that subdued even a thick-skinned, conceited boy. He had a right to scold Mrs. Thrale for inhumanity, when she knew that he spent only seventy pounds a year on himself and with the rest of his income supported a houseful of decrepit and ungrateful lodgers. If he gobbled at table and tore the peaches from the wall, he went back punctually to London to see that his wretched inmates had their three good meals over the week-end. Moreover, he was a warehouse of knowledge. If the dancing-master talked about dancing, Johnson could out-talk him. He could keep one amused by the hour with his tales of the underworld, of the topers and scallywags who haunted his lodgings and claimed his bounty. He said things casually that one never forgot. But what was perhaps more engaging than all this learning and virtue, was his love of pleasure, his detestation of the mere bookworm, his passion for life and society. And then, as a woman would, Mrs. Thrale loved him for his courage—that he had separated two fierce dogs that were tearing each other to pieces in Mr. Beauclerc’s sitting-room; that he had thrown a man, chair and all, into the pit of a theatre; that, blind and twitching as he was, he rode to hounds on Brighthelmstone Downs, and followed the hunt as if he had been a gay dog instead of a huge and melancholy old man. Moreover, there was a natural affinity between them. She drew him out: she made him say what without her he would never have said; indeed, he had confessed to her some painful secret of his youth which she never revealed to anybody. Above all, they shared the same passion. Of talk they could neither of them ever have enough.

Thus Mrs. Thrale could always be counted on to produce Dr. Johnson; and it was, of course, Dr. Johnson whom Mr. Greville most particularly wished to meet. As it happened, Dr. Burney had renewed his acquaintance with Dr. Johnson after many years, when he went to Streatham to give his first music lesson, and Dr. Johnson had been there, “wearing his mildest aspect”. For he remembered Dr. Burney with kindness. He remembered a letter that Dr. Burney had written to him in praise of the dictionary; he remembered, too, that Dr. Burney having called upon him, years ago, and found him out, had dared to cut some bristles from the hearth broom to send to an admirer. When he met Dr. Burney again at Streatham, he had instantly taken a liking to him; soon he was brought by Mrs. Thrale to see Dr. Burney’s books; it was quite easy, therefore, for Dr. Burney to arrange that on a certain night in the early spring of 1777 or 1778, Mr. Greville’s great wish to meet Dr. Johnson and Mrs. Thrale should be gratified. A day was fixed and the engagement was made.

Whatever the day was it must have been marked in the host’s calendar with a note of interrogation. Anything might happen. Any extreme of splendour or disaster might spring from the meeting of so many marked and distinguished characters. Dr. Johnson was formidable. Mr. Greville was domineering. Mrs. Greville was a celebrity in one way; Mrs. Thrale was a celebrity in another. Then it was an occasion. Everybody felt it to be so. Wits would be on the strain; expectation on tiptoe. Dr. Burney foresaw these difficulties and took steps to avert them, but there was, one vaguely feels, something a little obtuse about Dr. Burney. The eager, kind, busy man, with his head full of music and his desk stuffed with notes, lacked discrimination. The precise outline of people’s characters was covered with a rambling pink haze. To his innocent mind music was the universal specific. Everybody must share his own enthusiasm for music. If there was going to be any difficulty, music could solve it. He therefore asked Signor Piozzi to be of the party.

The night arrived and the fire was lit. The chairs were placed and the company arrived. As Dr. Burney had foreseen, the awkwardness was great. Things indeed seemed to go wrong from the start. Dr. Johnson had come in his worsted wig, very clean and prepared evidently for enjoyment. But after one look at him, Mr. Greville seemed to decide that there was something formidable about the old man; it would be better not to compete; it would be better to play the fine gentleman, and leave it to literature to make the first advances. Murmuring, apparently, something about having the toothache, Mr. Greville “assumed his most supercilious air of distant superiority and planted himself, immovable as a noble statue, upon the hearth”. He said nothing. Then Mrs. Greville, though longing to distinguish herself, judged it proper for Dr. Johnson to begin, so that she said nothing. Mrs. Thrale, who might have been expected to break up the solemnity, felt, it seemed, that the party was not her party and, waiting for the principals to engage, resolved to say nothing either. Mrs. Crewe, the Grevilles’ daughter, lovely and vivacious as she was, had come to be entertained and instructed and therefore very naturally she, too, said nothing. Nobody said anything. Complete silence reigned. Here was the very moment for which Dr. Burney in his wisdom had prepared. He nodded to Signor Piozzi; and Signor Piozzi stepped to the instrument and began to sing. Accompanying himself on the pianoforte, he sang an aria parlante. He sang beautifully, he sang his best. But far from breaking the awkwardness and loosing the tongues, the music increased the constraint. Nobody spoke. Everybody waited for Dr. Johnson to begin. There, indeed, they showed their fatal ignorance, for if there was one thing that Dr. Johnson never did, it was to begin. Somebody had always to start a topic before he consented to pursue it or to demolish it. Now he waited in silence to be challenged. But he waited in vain. Nobody spoke. Nobody dared speak. The roulades of Signor Piozzi continued uninterrupted. As he saw his chance of a pleasant evening’s talk drowned in the rattle of a piano, Dr. Johnson sank into silent abstraction and sat with his back to the piano gazing at the fire. The aria parlante continued uninterrupted. At last the strain became unendurable. At last Mrs. Thrale could stand it no longer. It was the attitude of Mr. Greville, apparently, that roused her resentment. There he stood on the hearth in front of the fire “staring around him at the whole company in curious silence sardonically”. What right had he, even if he were the descendant of the friend of Sir Philip Sidney, to despise the company and absorb the fire? Her own pride of ancestry suddenly asserted itself. Did not the blood of Adam of Salzburg run in her veins? Was it not as blue as that of the Grevilles and far more sparkling? Giving rein to the spirit of recklessness which sometimes bubbled in her, she rose, and stole on tiptoe to the pianoforte. Signor Piozzi was still singing and accompanying himself dramatically as he sang. She began a ludicrous mimicry of his gestures: she shrugged her shoulders, she cast up her eyes, she reclined her head on one side just as he did. At this singular display the company began to titter—indeed, it was a scene that was to be described “from coterie to coterie throughout London, with comments and sarcasms of endless variety”. People who saw Mrs. Thrale at her mockery that night never forgot that this was the beginning of that criminal affair, the first scene of that “most extraordinary drama” which lost Mrs. Thrale the respect of friends and children, which drove her in ignominy from England, and scarcely allowed her to show herself in London again—this was the beginning of her most reprehensible, her most unnatural passion for one who was not only a musician but a foreigner. But all this still lay on the laps of the gods. Nobody yet knew of what iniquity the vivacious lady was capable. She was still the respected wife of a wealthy brewer. Happily, Dr. Johnson was staring at the fire, and knew nothing of the scene at the piano. But Dr. Burney put a stop to the laughter instantly. He was shocked that a guest, even if a foreigner and a musician, should be ridiculed behind his back, and stealing to Mrs. Thrale he whispered kindly but with authority in her ear that if she had no taste for music herself she should consider the feelings of those who had. Mrs. Thrale took the rebuke with admirable sweetness, nodded her acquiescence and returned to her chair. But she had done her part. After that nothing more could be expected from her. Let them now do what they chose—she washed her hands of it, and seated herself “like a pretty little Miss”, as she said afterwards, to endure what yet remained to be endured “of one of the most humdrum evenings that she had ever passed”.

If no one had dared to tackle Dr. Johnson in the beginning, it was scarcely likely that they would dare now. He had apparently decided that the evening was a failure so far as talk was concerned. If he had not come dressed in his best clothes he might have had a book in his pocket which he could have pulled out and read. As it was, nothing but the resources of his own mind were left him; but these were huge; and these he explored as he sat with his back to the piano looking the very image of gravity, dignity, and composure.

At last the aria parlante came to an end. Signor Piozzi indeed, finding nobody to talk to, fell asleep in his solitude. Even Dr. Burney by this time must have been aware that music is not an infallible specific; but there was nothing for it now. Since people would not talk, the music must continue. He called upon his daughters to sing a duet. And then, when that was over, there was nothing for it but that they must sing another. Signor Piozzi still slept, or still feigned sleep. Dr. Johnson explored still further the magnificent resources of his own mind. Mr. Greville still stood superciliously upon the hearth-rug. And the night was cold.

But it was a grave mistake to suppose that because Dr. Johnson was apparently lost in thought, and certainly almost blind, he was not aware of anything, particularly of anything reprehensible, that was taking place in the room. His “starts of vision” were always astonishing and almost always painful. So it was on the present occasion. He suddenly woke up. He suddenly roused himself. He suddenly uttered the words for which the company had been waiting all the evening.

“If it were not for depriving the ladies of the fire”, he said, looking fixedly at Mr. Greville, “I should like to stand upon the hearth myself!” The effect of the outburst was prodigious. The Burney children said afterwards that it was as good as a comedy. The descendant of the friend of Sir Philip Sidney quailed before the Doctor’s glance. All the blood of all the Brookes rallied itself to overcome the insult. The son of a bookseller should be taught his place. Greville did his best to smile—a faint, scoffing smile. He did his best to stand where he had stood the whole evening. He stood smiling, he stood trying to smile, for two or perhaps for three minutes more. But when he looked round the room and saw all eyes cast down, all faces twitching with amusement, all sympathies plainly on the side of the bookseller’s son, he could stand there no longer. Fulke Greville slunk away, sloping even his proud shoulders, to a chair. But as he went, he rang the bell “with force”. He demanded his carriage.

“The party then broke up; and no one from amongst it ever asked, or wished for its repetition.”

[New York Herald Tribune, Jul 21/28, 1929]

[]

Jack Mytton.

Are you curious to know what sort of person your neighbour is in a deck-chair on Brighton pier? Watch, then, which column of The Times—she has brought it, rolled like a French roll, and it lies on the top of her bag—she reads first. Politics, presumably, or an article upon a temple in Jerusalem? Not a bit of it—she reads the sporting news. Yet one could have sworn, to look at her—boots, stockings, and all—that she was a public servant of some sort; with an Act of Parliament, a blue-book or two, and a frugal lunch of biscuits and bananas in her bag. If for a moment she basks on Brighton pier while Madame Rosalba, poised high on a platform above the sea, dives for coins or soup-plates it is only to refresh herself before renewing her attack upon the iniquities of our social system. Yet she begins by reading the sporting news.

Perhaps there is nothing so strange in it after all. The great English sports are pursued almost as fiercely by sedentary men who cannot sit a donkey, and by quiet women who cannot drown a mouse, as by the booted and spurred. They hunt in imagination. They follow the fortunes of the Berkeley, the Cattistock, the Quorn, and the Belvoir upon phantom hunters. They roll upon their lips the odd-sounding, beautifully crabbed English place-names—Humblebee, Doddles Hill, Caroline Bog, Winniats Brake. They imagine as they read (hanging to a strap in the Underground or propping the paper against a suburban teapot) now a “slow, twisting hunt”, now a “brilliant gallop”. The rolling meadows are in their eyes; they hear the thunder and the whimper of horses and hounds; the shapely slopes of Leicestershire unfold before them, and in imagination they ride home again, when evening falls, soothed and satisfied, and watch the lights coming out in farmhouse windows. Indeed the English sporting writers, Beckford, St. John, Surtees, Nimrod, make no mean reading. In their slapdash, gentlemanly way they have ridden their pens as boldly as they have ridden their horses. They have had their effect upon the language. This riding and tumbling, this being blown upon and rained upon and splashed from head to heels with mud, have worked themselves into the very texture of English prose and given it that leap and dash, that stripping of images from flying hedge and tossing tree which distinguish it not indeed above the French but so emphatically from it. How much English poetry depends upon English hunting this is not the place to enquire. That Shakespeare was a bold if erratic horseman scarcely needs proving. Therefore that an Englishwoman should choose to read the sporting news rather than the political gossip need cause us no surprise; nor need we condemn her if, when she has folded up her paper, she takes from her bag not a blue-book but a red book and proceeds, while Madame Rosalba dives and the band blares and the green waters of the English Channel sparkle and sway between the chinks of the pier, to read the Life of Jack Mytton.

Jack Mytton was by no means an estimable character. Of an old Shropshire family (the name was Mutton once; so Brontë was Prunty), he had inherited a fine property and a large income. The little boy who was born in the year 1796 should have carried on the tradition of politics and sport which his ancestors had pursued respectably for five centuries before him. But families have their seasons, like the year. After months of damp and drizzle, growth and prosperity, there come the wild equinoctial gales, a roaring in the trees all day, fruit destroyed and blossom wasted. Lightning strikes the house and its roof-tree goes up in fire. Indeed, Nature and society between them had imposed upon the Mytton of 1796 a burden which might have crushed a finer spirit—a body hewn from the solid rock, a fortune of almost indestructible immensity. Nature and society dared him, almost, to defy them. He accepted the challenge. He went shooting in the thinnest silk stockings, he let the rain pelt on his bare skin, he swam rivers, charged gates, crouched naked on the snow, but still his body remained obdurate and upright. He had his breeches made without pockets; wads of bank-notes were picked up in the woods, but still his fortune survived. He begot children and tossed them in the air and pelted them with oranges; he married wives whom he tormented and imprisoned until one died and the other snatched her chance and ran away. While he shaved, a glass of port stood by his side, and as the day wore on he worked through five or six bottles of wine and sopped them up with pound upon pound of filberts. There was an extremity about his behaviour which raises it from the particular to the general. The shaggy body of primeval man, with all his appetites and aptitudes, seemed to have risen from his grave under the barrows, where the great stones were piled on top of him, where once he sacrificed rams and did homage to the rising sun, to carouse with tippling fox-hunters of the time of George the Fourth. His limbs themselves seemed carved from more primitive materials than modern men’s. He had neither beauty of countenance nor grace of manner, yet he bore himself, for all his violence of body and mind, with an air of natural breeding which one can imagine in a savage stepping on his native turf. When he talked, says Nimrod, which he did sparely, he said, in a very few words, things which made everybody laugh; but, unequally gifted as he was, acute in some senses, dull in others, he had a deafness which made him unwieldy in general society.

What, then, could a primeval man do, who was born in England in the reign of George the Fourth? He could take bets and make them. Was it a watery winter’s night? He would drive his gig across country under the moon. Was it freezing? He would make his stable-boys hunt rats upon skates. Did some moderately cautious guest admit that he had never been upset in a gig? Mytton at once ran the wheel up the bank and flung them both into the road. Put any obstacle in his way and he leapt it, swam it, smashed it, somehow surmounted it, at the cost of a broken bone or a broken carriage. To yield to danger or to own to pain were both unthinkable. And so the Shropshire peasantry were amazed (as we see them in Alken’s and Rawlins’s pictures) by the apparition of a gentleman setting his tandem at a gate, riding a bear round his drawing-room, beating a bulldog with naked fists, lying between the hoofs of a nervous horse, riding with broken ribs unmurmuring when every jar was agony. They were amazed; they were scandalised; his eccentricities and infidelities and generosities were the talk of every inn and farmhouse for miles; yet somehow no bailiff in the four counties would arrest him. They looked up at him as one looks at something removed from ordinary duties and joys—a monument, a menace—with contempt and pity and some awe.

But Jack Mytton himself—what was he feeling meanwhile? The thrill of perfect satisfaction, the delight of joys snatched unhesitatingly without compunction? The barbarian surely should have been satisfied. But the by no means introspective mind of Nimrod was puzzled. “Did the late Mr. Mytton really enjoy life amidst all this profusion of expenditure?” No; Nimrod was of opinion that he did not. He had everything that the human heart could desire, but he lacked “the art of enjoyment”. He was bored. He was unhappy. “There was that about him which resembled the restlessness of the hyena.” He hurried from thing to thing, determined to taste and enjoy, but somehow blunted and bruised his pleasures as he touched them. Two hours before his own exquisite dinner he devoured fat bacon and strong ale at a farmhouse, and then blamed his cook. Still, without an appetite, he would eat; still he would drink, only instead of port it must be brandy to lash his flagging palate into sensation. A “sort of destroying spirit egged him on”. He was magnificent, wasteful, extravagant in every detail. “… it was his largeness of heart that ruined Mr. Mytton”, said Nimrod, “added to the lofty pride which disdained the littleness of prudence.”

By the time he was thirty, at any rate, Jack Mytton had done two things that to most men would have been impossible: he had almost ruined his health; he had almost spent his money. He had to leave the ancestral home of the Myttons. But it was no primeval man, glowing with health, bristling with energy, but a “round-shouldered, tottering old-young man bloated by drink” who joined the company of shady adventurers whose necessities obliged them to live at Calais. Even in that society his burden was upon him; still he must shine; still he must excel. No one should call him Johnny Mytton with impunity. Four horses must draw Mr. Mytton the three hundred yards to his rooms or he preferred to walk. And then the hiccough attacked him. Seizing his bedroom candle, he set a light to his shirt and staggered, burning and blazing, to show his friends how Jack Mytton cured the hiccough. What more could human beings ask of him? To what further frenzies would the gods dare their victim? Now that he had burnt himself alive, it seemed as if he had discharged his obligation to society and could lay the primeval man to rest. He might perhaps allow that other spirit, the civilised gentleman who was so incongruously coupled with the barbarian, to come to the surface. He had once learnt Greek. Now as he lay burnt and bloated in bed he quoted Sophocles—“the beautiful passage … wherein Oedipus recommends his children to the care of Creon”. He remembered the Greek anthology. When they moved him to the seaside he began to pick up shells, and could hardly sit out dinner in his eagerness to be at the work of brushing them “with a nail brush dipped in vinegar”. “He to whom the whole world had appeared insufficient to afford pleasure … was now completely happy.” But alas, shells and Sophocles, peace and happiness, were whelmed in the general dissolution which could not be delayed. The King’s Bench prison seized him, and there, corrupt in body, ruined in fortune, worn out in mind, he died at the age of thirty-eight. And his wife cried that she could not “help loving him with all his faults”, and four hourses drew him to the grave, and three thousand poor people sobbed for the loss of one who had somehow acted out for the benefit of the crowd an odious, monstrous part, laid on him by the gods, for the edification of mankind and their pleasure too, but for his own unutterable misery.

For the truth is we like these exhibitions of human nature. We like to see exalted above us some fox-hunter, like Jack Mytton, burning himself alive to cure the hiccough, some diver like Madame Rosalba, who, mounting higher and higher, wraps herself about in sacking, and then, with a look of indifference and satiety as if she had renounced and suffered and dedicated herself to some insane act of defiance for no pleasure of her own, dives into the Channel and brings up a twopenny-halfpenny soup-plate between her teeth. The lady on the pier feels gratified. It is because of this, she says, that I love my kind.

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De Quincey’s Autobiography.

It must often strike the reader that very little criticism worthy of being called so has been written in English of prose—our great critics have given the best of their minds to poetry. And the reason perhaps why prose so seldom calls out the higher faculties of the critic, but invites him to argue a case or to discuss the personality of the writer—to take a theme from the book and make his criticism an air played in variation on it—is to be sought in the prose-writer’s attitude to his own work. Even if he writes as an artist, without a practical end in view, still he treats prose as a humble beast of burden which must accommodate all sorts of odds and ends; as an impure substance in which dust and twigs and flies find lodgment. But more often than not the prose-writer has a practical aim in view, a theory to argue, or a cause to plead, and with it adopts the moralist’s view that the remote, the difficult, and the complex are to be abjured. His duty is to the present and the living. He is proud to call himself a journalist. He must use the simplest words and express himself as clearly as possible in order to reach the greatest number in the plainest way. Therefore he cannot complain of the critics if his writing, like the irritation in the oyster, serves only to breed other art; nor be surprised if his pages, once they have delivered their message, are thrown on the rubbish heap like other objects that have served their turn.

But sometimes we meet even in prose with writing that seems inspired by other aims. It does not wish to argue or to convert or even to tell a story. We can draw all our pleasure from the words themselves; we have not to enhance it by reading between the lines or by making a voyage of discovery into the psychology of the writer. De Quincey, of course, is one of these rare beings. When we bring his work to mind we recall it by some passage of stillness and completeness, like the following:

“Life is Finished!” was the secret misgiving of my heart; for the heart of infancy is as apprehensive as that of maturest wisdom in relation to any capital wound inflicted on the happiness. “Life is Finished! Finished it is!” was the hidden meaning that, half-unconsciously to myself, lurked within my sighs; and, as bells heard from a distance on a summer evening seem charged at times with an articulate form of words, some monitory message, that rolls round unceasingly, even so for me some noiseless and subterraneous voice seemed to chant continually a secret word, made audible only to my own heart—that “now is the blossoming of life withered for ever”.

Such passages occur naturally, for they consist of visions and dreams, not of actions or of dramatic scenes, in his autobiographic sketches. And yet we are not made to think of him, De Quincey, as we read. If we try to analyse our sensations we shall find that we are worked upon as if by music—the senses are stirred rather than the brain. The rise and fall of the sentence immediately soothes us to a mood and removes us to a distance in which the near fades and detail is extinguished. Our minds, thus widened and lulled to a width of apprehension, stand open to receive one by one in slow and stately procession the ideas which De Quincey wishes us to receive; the golden fullness of life; the pomps of the heaven above; the glory of the flowers below, as he stands “between an open window and a dead body on a summer’s day”. The theme is supported and amplified and varied. The idea of hurry and trepidation, of reaching towards something that for ever flies, intensifies the impression of stillness and eternity. Bells heard on summer evenings, palm-trees waving, sad winds that blow for ever, keep us by successive waves of emotion in the same mood. The emotion is never stated; it is suggested and brought slowly by repeated images before us until it stays, in all its complexity, complete.

The effect is one that is very rarely attempted in prose and is rarely appropriate to it because of this very quality of finality. It does not lead anywhere. We do not add to our sense of high summer and death and immortality any consciousness of who is hearing, seeing, and feeling. De Quincey wished to shut out from us everything save the picture “of a solitary infant, and its solitary combat with grief—a mighty darkness, and a sorrow without a voice”, to make us fathom and explore the depths of that single emotion. It is a state which is general and not particular. Therefore De Quincey was at odds with the aims of the prose-writer and his morality. His reader was to be put in possession of a meaning of that complex kind which is largely a sensation. He had to become fully aware not merely of the fact that a child was standing by a bed, but of stillness, sunlight, flowers, the passage of time and the presence of death. None of this could be conveyed by simple words in their logical order; clarity and simplicity would merely travesty and deform such a meaning. De Quincey, of course, was fully aware of the gulf that lay between him as a writer who wished to convey such ideas and his contemporaries. He turned from the neat, precise speech of his time to Milton and Jeremy Taylor and Sir Thomas Browne; from them he learnt the roll of the long sentence that sweeps its coils in and out, that piles its summit higher and higher. Then followed a discipline exacted, most drastically, by the fineness of his own ear—the weighing of cadences, the consideration of pauses; the effect of repetitions and consonances and assonances—all this was part of the duty of a writer who wishes to put a complex meaning fully and completely before his reader.

When, therefore, we come to consider critically one of the passages that has made so deep an impression we find that it has been produced much as a poet like Tennyson would produce it. There is the same care in the use of sound; the same variety of measure; the length of the sentence is varied and its weight shifted. But all these measures are diluted to a lower degree of strength and their force is spread over a much greater space, so that the transition from the lowest compass to the highest is by a gradation of shallow steps and we reach the utmost heights without violence. Hence the difficulty of stressing the particular quality of any single line as in a poem and the futility of taking one passage apart from the context, since its effect is compound of suggestions that have been received sometimes several pages earlier. Moreover, De Quincey, unlike some of his masters, was not at his best in sudden majesty of phrase; his power lay in suggesting large and generalised visions; landscapes in which nothing is seen in detail; faces without features; the stillness of midnight or summer; the tumult and trepidation of flying multitudes; anguish that for ever falls and rises and casts its arms upwards in despair.

But De Quincey was not merely the master of separate passages of beautiful prose; if that had been so his achievement would have been far less than it is. He was also a writer of narrative, an autobiographer, and one, if we consider that he wrote in the year 1833, with very peculiar views of the art of autobiography. In the first place he was convinced of the enormous value of candour.

If he were really able to pierce the haze which so often envelops, even to himself, his own secret springs of action and reserve, there cannot be a life moving at all under intellectual impulses that would not, through that single force of absolute frankness, fall within the reach of a deep, solemn, and sometimes even of a thrilling interest.

He understood by autobiography the history not only of the external life but of the deeper and more hidden emotions. And he realised the difficulty of making such a confession: “… vast numbers of people, though liberated from all reasonable motives of self-restraint, cannot be confidential—have it not in their power to lay aside reserve”. Aerial chains, invisible spells, bind and freeze the free spirit of communication. “It is because a man cannot see and measure these mystical forces which palsy him that he cannot deal with them effectually.” With such perceptions and intentions it is strange that De Quincey failed to be among the great autobiographers of our literature. Certainly he was not tongue-tied or spellbound. Perhaps one of the reasons that led him to fail in his task of self-delineation was not the lack of expressive power, but the superfluity. He was profusely and indiscriminately loquacious. Discursiveness—the disease that attacked so many of the nineteenth-century English writers—had him in her coils. But while it is easy to see why the works of Ruskin or Carlyle are huge and formless—every kind of heterogeneous object had to be found room for somehow, somewhere—De Quincey had not their excuse. The burden of the prophet was not laid upon him. He was, moreover, the most careful of artists. Nobody tunes the sound and modulates the cadence of a sentence more carefully and more exquisitely. But strangely enough, the sensibility which was on the alert to warn him instantly if a sound clashed or a rhythm flagged failed him completely when it came to the architecture of the whole. Then he could tolerate a disproportion and profusion that make his book as dropsical and shapeless as each sentence is symmetrical and smooth. He is indeed, to use the expressive word coined by his brother to describe De Quincey’s tendency as a small boy “to plead some distinction or verbal demur”, the prince of Pettifogulisers. Not only did he find “in everybody’s words an unintentional opening left for double interpretations”; he could not tell the simplest story without qualifying and illustrating and introducing additional information until the point that was to be cleared up has long since become extinct in the dim mists of the distance.

Together with this fatal verbosity and weakness of architectural power, De Quincey suffered too as an autobiographer from a tendency to meditative abstraction. “It was my disease”, he said, “to meditate too much and to observe too little.” A curious formality diffuses his vision to a general vagueness, lapsing into a colourless monotony. He shed over everything the lustre and the amenity of his own dreaming, pondering absent-mindedness. He approached even the two disgusting idiots with their red eyes with the elaboration of a great gentleman who has by mistake wandered into a slum. So too he slipped mellifluously across all the fissures of the social scale—talking on equal terms with the young aristocrats at Eton or with the working-class family as they chose a joint of meat for their Sunday dinner. De Quincey indeed prided himself upon the ease with which he passed from one sphere to another: “… from my very earliest youth”, he observed, “it has been my pride to converse familiarly, more Socratico, with all human beings, man, woman, and child, that chance might fling in my way”. But as we read his descriptions of these men, women, and children we are led to think that he talked to them so easily because to him they differed so little. The same manner served equally for them all. His relations even with those with whom he was most intimate, whether it was Lord Altamont, his schoolboy friend, or Ann the prostitute, were equally ceremonial and gracious. His portraits have the flowing contours, the statuesque poses, the undifferentiated features of Scott’s heroes and heroines. Nor is his own face exempted from the general ambiguity. When it came to telling the truth about himself he shrank from the task with all the horror of a well-bred English gentleman. The candour which fascinates us in the confessions of Rousseau—the determination to reveal the ridiculous, the mean, the sordid in himself—was abhorrent to him. “Nothing indeed is more revolting to English feelings”, he wrote, “than the spectacle of a human being obtruding on our notice his moral ulcers and scars.”

Clearly, therefore, De Quincey as an autobiographer labours under great defects. He is diffuse and redundant; he is aloof and dreamy and in bondage to the old pruderies and conventions. At the same time he was capable of being transfixed by the mysterious solemnity of certain emotions; of realising how one moment may transcend in value fifty years. He was able to devote to their analysis a skill which the professed analysts of the human heart—the Scotts, the Jane Austens, the Byrons—did not then possess. We find him writing passages which, in their self-consciousness, are scarcely to be matched in the fiction of the nineteenth century:

And, recollecting it, I am struck with the truth, that far more of our deepest thoughts and feelings pass to us through perplexed combinations of concrete objects, pass to us as involutes (if I may coin that word) in compound experiences incapable of being disentangled, than ever reach us directly and in their own abstract shapes…. Man is doubtless one by some subtle nexus, some system of links, that we cannot perceive, extending from the new-born infant to the superannuated dotard: but, as regards many affections and passions incident to his nature at different stages, he is not one, but an intermitting creature, ending and beginning anew; the unity of man, in this respect, is co-extensive only with the particular stage to which the passion belongs. Some passions, as that of sexual love, are celestial by one-half of their origin, animal and earthly by the other half. These will not survive their own appropriate stage. But love which is altogether holy, like that between two children, is privileged to revisit by glimpses the silence and the darkness of declining years….

When we read such passages of analysis, when such states of mind seem in retrospect to be an important element in life and so to deserve scrutiny and record, the art of autobiography as the eighteenth century knew it is changing its character. The art of biography also is being transformed. Nobody after that could maintain that the whole truth of life can be told without “piercing the haze”; without revealing “his own secret springs of action and reserve”. Yet external events also have their importance. To tell the whole story of a life the autobiographer must devise some means by which the two levels of existence can be recorded—the rapid passage of events and actions; the slow opening up of single and solemn moments of concentrated emotion. It is the fascination of De Quincey’s pages that the two levels are beautifully, if unequally, combined. For page after page we are in company with a cultivated gentleman who describes with charm and eloquence what he has seen and known—the stage coaches, the Irish rebellion, the appearance and conversation of George the Third. Then suddenly the smooth narrative parts asunder, arch opens beyond arch, the vision of something for ever flying, for ever escaping, is revealed, and time stands still.

[]

Four Figures.

I
Cowper and Lady Austen

It happened, of course, many years ago, but there must have been something remarkable about the meeting, since people still like to bring it before their eyes. An elderly gentleman was looking out of his window in a village street in the summer of 1781 when he saw two ladies go into a draper’s shop opposite. The look of one of them interested him very much, and he seems to have said so, for soon a meeting was arranged.

A quiet and solitary life that must have been, in which a gentleman stood in the morning looking out of the window, in which the sight of an attractive face was an event. Yet perhaps it was an event partly because it revived some half-forgotten but still pungent memories. For Cowper had not always looked at the world from the windows of a house in a village street. Time was when the sight of ladies of fashion had been familiar enough. In his younger days he had been very foolish. He had flirted and giggled; he had gone smartly dressed to Vauxhall and Marylebone Gardens. He had taken his work at the Law Courts with a levity that alarmed his friends—for he had nothing whatever to live upon. He had fallen in love with his cousin Theodora Cowper. Indeed, he had been a thoughtless, wild young man. But suddenly in the heyday of his youth, in the midst of his gaiety, something terrible had happened. There lurked beneath that levity and perhaps inspired it a morbidity that sprang from some defect of person, a dread which made action, which made marriage, which made any public exhibition of himself insupportable. If goaded to it, and he was now committed to a public career in the House of Lords, he must fly, even into the jaws of death. Rather than take up his appointment he would drown himself. But a man sat on the quay when he came to the water’s edge; some invisible hand mysteriously forced the laudanum from his lips when he tried to drink it; the knife which he pressed to his heart broke; and the garter with which he tried to hang himself from the bed-post let him fall. Cowper was condemned to live.

When, therefore, that July morning he looked out of the window at the ladies shopping, he had come through gulfs of despair, but he had reached at last not only the haven of a quiet country town, but a settled state of mind, a settled way of life. He was domesticated with Mrs. Unwin, a widow six years his elder. By letting him talk, and listening to his terrors and understanding them, she had brought him very wisely, like a mother, to something like peace of mind. They had lived side by side for many years in methodical monotony. They began the day by reading the Scriptures together; they then went to church; they parted to read or walk; they met after dinner to converse on religious topics or to sing hymns together; then again they walked if it were fine, or read and talked if it were wet, and at last the day ended with more hymns and more prayers. Such for many years had been the routine of Cowper’s life with Mary Unwin. When his fingers found their way to a pen they traced the lines of a hymn, or if they wrote a letter it was to urge some misguided mortal, his brother John, for instance, at Cambridge, to seek salvation before it was too late. Yet this urgency was akin perhaps to the old levity; it, too, was an attempt to ward off some terror, to propitiate some deep unrest that lurked at the bottom of his soul. Suddenly the peace was broken. One night in February 1773 the enemy rose; it smote once and for ever. An awful voice called out to Cowper in a dream. It proclaimed that he was damned, that he was outcast, and he fell prostrate before it. After that he could not pray. When the others said grace at table, he took up his knife and fork as a sign that he had no right to join their prayers. Nobody, not even Mrs. Unwin, understood the terrific import of the dream. Nobody realised why he was unique; why he was singled out from all mankind and stood alone in his damnation. But that loneliness had a strange effect—since he was no longer capable of help or direction he was free. The Rev. John Newton could no longer guide his pen or inspire his muse. Since doom had been pronounced and damnation was inevitable, he might sport with hares, cultivate cucumbers, listen to village gossip, weave nets, make tables; all that could be hoped was to while away the dreadful years without the ability to enlighten others or to be helped himself. Never had Cowper written more enchantingly, more gaily, to his friends than now that he knew himself condemned. It was only at moments, when he wrote to Newton or to Unwin, that the terror raised its horrid head above the surface and that he cried aloud: “My days are spent in vanity…. Nature revives again; but a soul once slain lives no more.” For the most part, as he idled his time away in pleasant pastimes, as he looked with amusement at what passed in the street below, one might think him the happiest of men. There was Geary Ball going to the “Royal Oak” to drink his dram—that happened as regularly as Cowper brushed his teeth; but behold—two ladies were going into the draper’s shop opposite. That was an event.

One of the ladies he knew already—she was Mrs. Jones, the wife of a neighbouring clergyman. But the other was a stranger. She was arch and sprightly, with dark hair and round dark eyes. Though a widow—she had been the wife of a Sir Robert Austen—she was far from old and not at all solemn. When she talked, for she and Cowper were soon drinking tea together, “she laughs and makes laugh, and keeps up a conversation without seeming to labour at it”. She was a lively, well-bred woman who had lived much in France, and, having seen much of the world, “accounts it a great simpleton as it is”. Such were Cowper’s first impressions of Ann Austen. Ann’s first impressions of the queer couple who lived in the large house in the village street were even more enthusiastic. But that was natural—Ann was an enthusiast by nature. Moreover, though she had seen a great deal of the world and had a town house in Queen Anne Street, she had no friends or relations in that world much to her liking. Clifton Reynes, where her sister lived, was a rude, rough English village where the inhabitants broke into the house if a lady were left unprotected. Lady Austen was dissatisfied; she wanted society, but she also wanted to be settled and to be serious. Neither Clifton Reynes nor Queen Anne Street gave her altogether what she wanted. And then in the most opportune way—quite by chance—she met a refined, well-bred couple who were ready to appreciate what she had to give and ready to invite her to share the quiet pleasures of the countryside which were so dear to them. She could heighten those pleasures deliciously. She made the days seem full of movement and laughter. She organised picnics—they went to the Spinnie and ate their dinner in the root-house and drank their tea on the top of a wheelbarrow. And when autumn came and the evenings drew in, Ann Austen enlivened them too; she it was who stirred William to write a poem about a sofa, and told him, just as he was sinking into one of his fits of melancholy, the story of John Gilpin, so that he leapt out of bed, shaking with laughter. But beneath her sprightliness they were glad to find that she was seriously inclined. She longed for peace and quietude, “for with all that gaiety”, Cowper wrote, “she is a great thinker”.

And with all that melancholy, to paraphrase his words, Cowper was a man of the world. As he said himself, he was not by nature a recluse. He was no lean and solitary hermit. His limbs were sturdy; his cheeks were ruddy; he was growing plump. In his younger days he, too, had known the world, and provided, of course, that you have seen through it, there is something to be said for having known it. Cowper, at any rate, was a little proud of his gentle birth. Even at Olney he kept certain standards of gentility. He must have an elegant box for his snuff and silver buckles for his shoes; if he wanted a hat it must be “not a round slouch, which I abhor, but a smart, well-cocked, fashionable affair”. His letters preserve this serenity, this good sense, this sidelong, arch humour embalmed in page after page of beautiful clear prose. As the post went only three times a week he had plenty of time to smooth out every little crease in daily life to perfection. He had time to tell how a farmer was thrown from his cart and one of the pet hares had escaped; Mr. Grenville had called; they had been caught in a shower and Mrs. Throckmorton had asked them to come into the house—some little thing of the kind happened every week very aptly for his purpose. Or if nothing happened and it was true that the days went by at Olney “shod with felt”, then he was able to let his mind play with rumours that reached him from the outer world. There was talk of flying. He would write a few pages on the subject of flying and its impiety; he would express his opinion of the wickedness, for Englishwomen at any rate, of painting the cheeks. He would discourse upon Homer and Virgil and perhaps attempt a few translations himself. And when the days were dark and even he could no longer trudge through the mud, he would open one of his favourite travellers and dream that he was voyaging with Cook or with Anson, for he travelled widely in imagination, though in body he moved no further than from Buckingham to Sussex and from Sussex back to Buckingham again.

His letters preserve what must have made the charm of his company. It is easy to see that his wit, his stories, his sedate, considerate ways, must have made his morning visits—and he had got into the habit of visiting Lady Austen at eleven every morning—delightful. But there was more in his society than that—there was some charm some peculiar fascination, that made it indispensable. His cousin Theodora had loved him—she still loved him anonymously; Mrs. Unwin loved him; and now Ann Austen was beginning to feel something stronger than friendship rise within her. That strain of intense and perhaps inhuman passion which rested with tremulous ecstasy like that of a hawk-moth over a flower, upon some tree, some hill-side—did that not tensify the quiet of the country morning, and give to intercourse with him some keener interest than belonged to the society of other men? “The very stones in the garden walls are my intimate acquaintance”, he wrote. “Everything I see in the fields is to me an object, and I can look at the same rivulet, or at a handsome tree, every day of my life with new pleasure.” It is this intensity of vision that gives his poetry, with all its moralising and didacticism, its unforgettable qualities. It is this that makes passages in The Task like clear windows let into the prosaic fabric of the rest. It was this that gave the edge and zest to his talk. Some finer vision suddenly seized and possessed him. It must have given to the long winter evenings, to the early morning visits, an indescribable combination of pathos and charm. Only, as Theodora could have warned Ann Austen, his passion was not for men and women; it was an abstract ardour; he was a man singularly without thought of sex.

Already early in their friendship Ann Austen had been warned. She adored her friends, and she expressed her adoration with the enthusiasm that was natural to her. At once Cowper wrote to her kindly but firmly admonishing her of the folly of her ways. “When we embellish a creature with colours taken from our fancy,” he wrote, “we make it an idol … and shall derive nothing from it but a painful conviction of our error.” Ann read the letter, flew into a rage, and left the country in a huff. But the breach was soon healed; she worked him ruffles; he acknowledged them with a present of his book. Soon she had embraced Mary Unwin and was back again on more intimate terms than ever. In another month indeed, with such rapidity did her plans take effect, she had sold the lease of her town house, taken part of the vicarage next door to Cowper, and declared that she had now no home but Olney and no friends but Cowper and Mary Unwin. The door between the gardens was opened; the two families dined together on alternate nights; William called Ann sister; and Ann called William brother. What arrangement could have been more idyllic? “Lady Austen and we pass our days alternately at each other’s chateau. In the morning I walk with one or other of the ladies, and in the afternoon wind thread”, wrote Cowper, playfully comparing himself to Hercules and Samson. And then the evening came, the winter evening which he loved best, and he dreamt in the firelight and watched the shadows dance uncouthly and the sooty films play upon the bars until the lamp was brought, and in that level light he had out his netting, or wound silk, and then, perhaps, Ann sang to the harpsichord and Mary and William played battledore and shuttlecock together. Secure, innocent, peaceful, where then was that “thistly sorrow” that grows inevitably, so Cowper said, beside human happiness? Where would discord come, if come it must? The danger lay perhaps with the women. It might be that Mary would notice one evening that Ann wore a lock of William’s hair set in diamonds. She might find a poem to Ann in which he expressed more than a brotherly affection. She would grow jealous. For Mary Unwin was no country simpleton, she was a well-read woman with “the manners of a Duchess”; she had nursed and consoled William for years before Ann came to flutter the “still life” which they both loved best. Thus the two ladies would compete; discord would enter at that point. Cowper would be forced to choose between them.

But we are forgetting another presence at that innocent evening’s entertainment. Ann might sing; Mary might play; the fire might burn brightly and the frost and the wind outside make the fireside calm all the sweeter. But there was a shadow among them. In that tranquil room a gulf opened. Cowper trod on the verge of an abyss. Whispers mingled with the singing, voices hissed in his ear words of doom and damnation. He was haled by a terrible voice to perdition. And then Ann Austen expected him to make love to her! Then Ann Austen wanted him to marry her! The thought was odious; it was indecent; it was intolerable. He wrote her another letter, a letter to which there could be no reply. In her bitterness Ann burnt it. She left Olney and no word ever passed between them again. The friendship was over.

And Cowper did not mind very much. Everybody was extremely kind to him. The Throckmortons gave him the key of their garden. An anonymous friend—he never guessed her name—gave him fifty pounds a year. A cedar desk with silver handles was sent him by another friend who wished also to remain unknown. The kind people at Olney supplied him with almost too many tame hares. But if you are damned, if you are solitary, if you are cut off from God and man, what does human kindness avail? “It is all vanity…. Nature revives again; but a soul once slain lives no more.” He sank from gloom to gloom, and died in misery. As for Lady Austen, she married a Frenchman. She was happy—so people said.

II
Beau Brummell

When Cowper, in the seclusion of Olney, was roused to anger by the thought of the Duchess of Devonshire and predicted a time when “instead of a girdle there will be a rent, and instead of beauty, baldness”, he was acknowledging the power of the lady whom he thought so despicable. Why, otherwise, should she haunt the damp solitudes of Olney? Why should the rustle of her silken skirts disturb those gloomy meditations? Undoubtedly the Duchess was a good haunter. Long after those words were written, when she was dead and buried beneath a tinsel coronet, her ghost mounted the stairs of a very different dwelling-place. An old man was sitting in his arm-chair at Caen. The door opened, and the servant announced, “The Duchess of Devonshire”. Beau Brummell at once rose, went to the door and made a bow that would have graced the Court of St. James’s. Only, unfortunately, there was nobody there. The cold air blew up the staircase of an Inn. The Duchess was long dead, and Beau Brummell, in his old age and imbecility, was dreaming that he was back in London again giving a party. Cowper’s curse had come true for both of them. The Duchess lay in her shroud, and Brummell, whose clothes had been the envy of kings, had now only one pair of much-mended trousers, which he hid as best he could under a tattered cloak. As for his hair, that had been shaved by order of the doctor.

But though Cowper’s sour predictions had thus come to pass, both the Duchess and the dandy might claim that they had had their day. They had been great figures in their time. Of the two, perhaps Brummell might boast the more miraculous career. He had no advantage of birth, and but little of fortune. His grandfather had let rooms in St. James’s Street. He had only a moderate capital of thirty thousand pounds to begin with, and his beauty, of figure rather than of face, was marred by a broken nose. Yet without a single noble, important, or valuable action to his credit he cuts a figure; he stands for a symbol; his ghost walks among us still. The reason for this eminence is now a little difficult to determine. Skill of hand and nicety of judgment were his, of course, otherwise he would not have brought the art of tying neck-cloths to perfection. The story is, perhaps, too well known—how he drew his head far back and sunk his chin slowly down so that the cloth wrinkled in perfect symmetry, or if one wrinkle were too deep or too shallow, the cloth was thrown into a basket and the attempt renewed, while the Prince of Wales sat, hour after hour, watching. Yet skill of hand and nicety of judgment were not enough. Brummell owed his ascendency to some curious combination of wit, of taste, of insolence, of independence—for he was never a toady—which it were too heavy-handed to call a philosophy of life, but served the purpose. At any rate, ever since he was the most popular boy at Eton, coolly jesting when they were for throwing a bargee into the river, “My good fellows, don’t send him into the river; the man is evidently in a high state of perspiration, and it almost amounts to a certainty that he will catch cold”, he floated buoyantly and gaily and without apparent effort to the top of whatever society he found himself among. Even when he was a captain in the Tenth Hussars and so scandalously inattentive to duty that he only knew his troop by “the very large blue nose” of one of the men, he was liked and tolerated. When he resigned his commission, for the regiment was to be sent to Manchester—and “I really could not go—think, your Royal Highness, Manchester!”—he had only to set up house in Chesterfield Street to become the head of the most jealous and exclusive society of his time. For example, he was at Almack’s one night talking to Lord ——. The Duchess of —— was there, escorting her young daughter, Lady Louisa. The Duchess caught sight of Mr. Brummell, and at once warned her daughter that if that gentleman near the door came and spoke to them she was to be careful to impress him favourably, “for”, and she sank her voice to a whisper, “he is the celebrated Mr. Brummell”. Lady Louisa might well have wondered why a Mr. Brummell was celebrated, and why a Duke’s daughter need take care to impress a Mr. Brummell. And then, directly he began to move towards them, the reason of her mother’s warning became apparent. The grace of his carriage was so astonishing; his bows were so exquisite. Everybody looked overdressed or badly dressed—some, indeed, looked positively dirty—beside him. His clothes seemed to melt into each other with the perfection of their cut and the quiet harmony of their colour. Without a single point of emphasis everything was distinguished—from his bow to the way he opened his snuff-box, with his left hand invariably. He was the personification of freshness and cleanliness and order. One could well believe that he had his chair brought into his dressing-room and was deposited at Almack’s without letting a puff of wind disturb his curls or a spot of mud stain his shoes. When he actually spoke to her, Lady Louisa would be at first enchanted—no one was more agreeable, more amusing, had a manner that was more flattering and enticing—and then she would be puzzled. It was quite possible that before the evening was out he would ask her to marry him, and yet his manner of doing it was such that the most ingenuous debutante could not believe that he meant it seriously. His odd grey eyes seemed to contradict his lips; they had a look in them which made the sincerity of his compliments very doubtful. And then he said very cutting things about other people. They were not exactly witty; they were certainly not profound; but they were so skilful, so adroit—they had a twist in them which made them slip into the mind and stay there when more important phrases were forgotten. He had downed the Regent himself with his dexterous “Who’s your fat friend?” and his method was the same with humbler people who snubbed him or bored him. “Why, what could I do, my good fellow, but cut the connection? I discovered that Lady Mary actually ate cabbage!”—so he explained to a friend his failure to marry a lady. And, again, when some dull citizen pestered him about his tour to the North, “Which of the lakes do I admire?” he asked his valet. “Windermere, sir.” “Ah, yes—Windermere, so it is—Windermere.” That was his style, flickering, sneering, hovering on the verge of insolence, skimming the edge of nonsense, but always keeping within some curious mean, so that one knew the false Brummell story from the true by its exaggeration. Brummell could never have said, “Wales, ring the bell”, any more than he could have worn a brightly coloured waistcoat or a glaring necktie. That “certain exquisite propriety” which Lord Byron remarked in his dress stamped his whole being, and made him appear cool, refined, and debonair among the gentlemen who talked only of sport, which Brummell detested, and smelt of the stable, which Brummell never visited. Lady Louisa might well be on tenter-hooks to impress Mr. Brummell favourably. Mr. Brummell’s good opinion was of the utmost importance in the world of Lady Louisa.

And unless that world fell into ruins his rule seemed assured. Handsome, heartless, and cynical, the Beau seemed invulnerable. His taste was impeccable, his health admirable, and his figure as fine as ever. His rule had lasted many years and survived many vicissitudes. The French Revolution had passed over his head without disordering a single hair. Empires had risen and fallen while he experimented with the crease of a neck-cloth and criticised the cut of a coat. Now the battle of Waterloo had been fought and peace had come. The battle left him untouched; it was the peace that undid him. For some time past he had been winning and losing at the gaming-tables. Harriette Wilson had heard that he was ruined, and then, not without disappointment, that he was safe again. Now, with the armies disbanded, there was let loose upon London a horde of rough, ill-mannered men who had been fighting all those years and were determined to enjoy themselves. They flooded the gaming-houses. They played very high. Brummell was forced into competition. He lost and won and vowed never to play again, and then he did play again. At last his remaining ten thousand pounds was gone. He borrowed until he could borrow no more. And finally, to crown the loss of so many thousands, he lost the sixpenny-bit with a hole in it which had always brought him good luck. He gave it by mistake to a hackney coachman: that rascal Rothschild got hold of it, he said, and that was the end of his luck. Such was his own account of the affair—other people put a less innocent interpretation on the matter. At any rate there came a day, 16th May 1816, to be precise—it was a day upon which everything was precise—when he dined alone off a cold fowl and a bottle of claret at Watier’s, attended the opera, and then took coach for Dover. He drove rapidly all through the night and reached Calais the day after. He never set foot in England again.

And now a curious process of disintegration set in. The peculiar and highly artificial society of London had acted as a preservative; it had kept him in being; it had concentrated him into one single gem. Now that the pressure was removed, the odds and ends, so trifling separately, so brilliant in combination, which had made up the being of the Beau, fell asunder and revealed what lay beneath. At first his lustre seemed undiminished. His old friends crossed the water to see him and made a point of standing him a dinner and leaving a little present behind them at his bankers. He held his usual levee at his lodgings; he spent the usual hours washing and dressing; he rubbed his teeth with a red root, tweezed out hairs with a silver tweezer, tied his cravat to admiration, and issued at four precisely as perfectly equipped as if the Rue Royale had been St. James’s Street and the Prince himself had hung upon his arm. But the Rue Royale was not St. James’s Street; the old French Countess who spat on the floor was not the Duchess of Devonshire; the good bourgeois who pressed him to dine off goose at four was not Lord Alvanley; and though he soon won for himself the title of Roi de Calais, and was known to workmen as “George, ring the bell”, the praise was gross, the society coarse, and the amusements of Calais very slender. The Beau had to fall back upon the resources of his own mind. These might have been considerable. According to Lady Hester Stanhope, he might have been, had he chosen, a very clever man; and when she told him so, the Beau admitted that he had wasted his talents because a dandy’s way of life was the only one “which could place him in a prominent light, and enable him to separate himself from the ordinary herd of men, whom he held in considerable contempt”. That way of life allowed of verse-making—his verses, called “The Butterfly’s Funeral”, were much admired; and of singing, and of some dexterity with the pencil. But now, when the summer days were so long and so empty, he found that such accomplishments hardly served to while away the time. He tried to occupy himself with writing his memoirs; he bought a screen and spent hours pasting it with pictures of great men and beautiful ladies whose virtues and frailties were symbolised by hyenas, by wasps, by profusions of cupids, fitted together with extraordinary skill; he collected Buhl furniture; he wrote letters in a curiously elegant and elaborate style to ladies. But these occupations palled. The resources of his mind had been whittled away in the course of years; now they failed him. And then the crumbling process went a little farther, and another organ was laid bare—the heart. He who had played at love all these years and kept so adroitly beyond the range of passion, now made violent advances to girls who were young enough to be his daughters. He wrote such passionate letters to Mademoiselle Ellen of Caen that she did not know whether to laugh or to be angry. She was angry, and the Beau, who had tryannised over the daughters of Dukes, prostrated himself before her in despair. But it was too late—the heart after all these years was not a very engaging object even to a simple country girl, and he seems at last to have lavished his affections upon animals. He mourned his terrier Vick for three weeks; he had a friendship with a mouse; he became the champion of all the neglected cats and starving dogs in Caen. Indeed, he said to a lady that if a man and a dog were drowning in the same pond he would prefer to save the dog—if, that is, there were nobody looking. But he was still persuaded that everybody was looking; and his immense regard for appearances gave him a certain stoical endurance. Thus, when paralysis struck him at dinner he left the table without a sign; sunk deep in debt as he was, he still picked his way over the cobbles on the points of his toes to preserve his shoes, and when the terrible day came and he was thrown into prison he won the admiration of murderers and thieves by appearing among them as cool and courteous as if about to pay a morning call. But if he were to continue to act his part, it was essential that he should be supported—he must have a sufficiency of boot polish, gallons of eau-de-Cologne, and three changes of linen every day. His expenditure upon these items was enormous. Generous as his old friends were, and persistently as he supplicated them, there came a time when they could be squeezed no longer. It was decreed that he was to content himself with one change of linen daily, and his allowance was to admit of necessaries only. But how could a Brummell exist upon necessaries only? The demand was absurd. Soon afterwards he showed his sense of the gravity of the situation by mounting a black silk neck-cloth. Black silk neck-cloths had always been his aversion. It was a signal of despair, a sign that the end was in sight. After that everything that had supported him and kept him in being dissolved. His self-respect vanished. He would dine with anyone who would pay the bill. His memory weakened and he told the same story over and over again till even the burghers of Caen were bored. Then his manners degenerated. His extreme cleanliness lapsed into carelessness, and then into positive filth. People objected to his presence in the dining-room of the hotel. Then his mind went—he thought that the Duchess of Devonshire was coming up the stairs when it was only the wind. At last but one passion remained intact among the crumbled debris of so many—an immense greed. To buy Rheims biscuits he sacrificed the greatest treasure that remained to him—he sold his snuff-box. And then nothing was left but a heap of disagreeables, a mass of corruption, a senile and disgusting old man fit only for the charity of nuns and the protection of an asylum. There the clergyman begged him to pray. “‘I do try’, he said, but he added something which made me doubt whether he understood me.” Certainly, he would try; for the clergyman wished it and he had always been polite. He had been polite to thieves and to duchesses and to God Himself. But it was no use trying any longer. He could believe in nothing now except a hot fire, sweet biscuits, and another cup of coffee if he asked for it. And so there was nothing for it but that the Beau who had been compact of grace and sweetness should be shuffled into the grave like any other ill-dressed, ill-bred, unneeded old man. Still, one must remember that Byron, in his moments of dandyism, “always pronounced the name of Brummell with a mingled emotion of respect and jealousy”.

[Note.—Mr. Berry of St. James’s Street has courteously drawn my attention to the fact that Beau Brummell certainly visited England in 1822. He came to the famous wine-shop on 26th July 1822 and was weighed as usual. His weight was then 10 stones 13 pounds. On the previous occasion, 6th July 1815, his weight was 12 stones 10 pounds. Mr. Berry adds that there is no record of his coming after 1822.]

III
Mary Wollstonecraft

Great wars are strangely intermittent in their effects. The French Revolution took some people and tore them asunder; others it passed over without disturbing a hair of their heads. Jane Austen, it is said, never mentioned it; Charles Lamb ignored it; Beau Brummell never gave the matter a thought. But to Wordsworth and to Godwin it was the dawn; unmistakably they saw

France standing on the top of golden hours,

And human nature seeming born again.

Thus it would be easy for a picturesque historian to lay side by side the most glaring contrasts—here in Chesterfield Street was Beau Brummell letting his chin fall carefully upon his cravat and discussing in a tone studiously free from vulgar emphasis the proper cut of the lapel of a coat; and here in Somers Town was a party of ill-dressed, excited young men, one with a head too big for his body and a nose too long for his face, holding forth day by day over the tea-cups upon human perfectibility, ideal unity, and the rights of man. There was also a woman present with very bright eyes and a very eager tongue, and the young men, who had middle-class names, like Barlow and Holcroft and Godwin, called her simply “Wollstonecraft”, as if it did not matter whether she were married or unmarried, as if she were a young man like themselves.

Such glaring discords among intelligent people—for Charles Lamb and Godwin, Jane Austen and Mary Wollstonecraft were all highly intelligent—suggest how much influence circumstances have upon opinions. If Godwin had been brought up in the precincts of the Temple and had drunk deep of antiquity and old letters at Christ’s Hospital, he might never have cared a straw for the future of man and his rights in general. If Jane Austen had lain as a child on the landing to prevent her father from thrashing her mother, her soul might have burnt with such a passion against tyranny that all her novels might have been consumed in one cry for justice.

Such had been Mary Wollstonecraft’s first experience of the joys of married life. And then her sister Everina had been married miserably and had bitten her wedding ring to pieces in the coach. Her brother had been a burden on her; her father’s farm had failed, and in order to start that disreputable man with the red face and the violent temper and the dirty hair in life again she had gone into bondage among the aristocracy as a governess—in short, she had never known what happiness was, and, in its default, had fabricated a creed fitted to meet the sordid misery of real human life. The staple of her doctrine was that nothing mattered save independence. “Every obligation we receive from our fellow-creatures is a new shackle, takes from our native freedom, and debases the mind.” Independence was the first necessity for a woman; not grace or charm, but energy and courage and the power to put her will into effect, were her necessary qualities. It was her highest boast to be able to say, “I never yet resolved to do anything of consequence that I did not adhere readily to it”. Certainly Mary could say this with truth. When she was a little more than thirty she could look back upon a series of actions which she had carried out in the teeth of opposition. She had taken a house by prodigious efforts for her friend Fanny, only to find that Fanny’s mind was changed and she did not want a house after all. She had started a school. She had persuaded Fanny into marrying Mr. Skeys. She had thrown up her school and gone to Lisbon alone to nurse Fanny when she died. On the voyage back she had forced the captain of the ship to rescue a wrecked French vessel by threatening to expose him if he refused. And when, overcome by a passion for Fuseli, she declared her wish to live with him and been refused flatly by his wife, she had put her principle of decisive action instantly into effect, and had gone to Paris determined to make her living by her pen.

The Revolution thus was not merely an event that had happened outside her; it was an active agent in her own blood. She had been in revolt all her life—against tyranny, against law, against convention. The reformer’s love of humanity, which has so much of hatred in it as well as love, fermented within her. The outbreak of revolution in France expressed some of her deepest theories and convictions, and she dashed off in the heat of that extraordinary moment those two eloquent and daring books—the Reply to Burke and the Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which are so true that they seem now to contain nothing new in them—their originality has become our commonplace. But when she was in Paris lodging by herself in a great house, and saw with her own eyes the King whom she despised driving past surrounded by National Guards and holding himself with greater dignity than she expected, then, “I can scarcely tell you why”, the tears came to her eyes. “I am going to bed,” the letter ended, “and, for the first time in my life, I cannot put out the candle.” Things were not so simple after all. She could not understand even her own feelings. She saw the most cherished of her convictions put into practice—and her eyes filled with tears. She had won fame and independence and the right to live her own life—and she wanted something different. “I do not want to be loved like a goddess,” she wrote, “but I wish to be necessary to you.” For Imlay, the fascinating American to whom her letter was addressed, had been very good to her. Indeed, she had fallen passionately in love with him. But it was one of her theories that love should be free—“that mutual affection was marriage and that the marriage tie should not bind after the death of love, if love should die”. And yet at the same time that she wanted freedom she wanted certainty. “I like the word affection,” she wrote, “because it signifies something habitual.”

The conflict of all these contradictions shows itself in her face, at once so resolute and so dreamy, so sensual and so intelligent, and beautiful into the bargain with its great coils of hair and the large bright eyes that Southey thought the most expressive he had ever seen. The life of such a woman was bound to be tempestuous. Every day she made theories by which life should be lived; and every day she came smack against the rock of other people’s prejudices. Every day too—for she was no pedant, no cold-blooded theorist—something was born in her that thrust aside her theories and forced her to model them afresh. She acted upon her theory that she had no legal claim upon Imlay; she refused to marry him; but when he left her alone week after week with the child she had borne him her agony was unendurable.

Thus distracted, thus puzzling even to herself, the plausible and treacherous Imlay cannot be altogether blamed for failing to follow the rapidity of her changes and the alternate reason and unreason of her moods. Even friends whose liking was impartial were disturbed by her discrepancies. Mary had a passionate, an exuberant, love of Nature, and yet one night when the colours in the sky were so exquisite that Madeleine Schweizer could not help saying to her, “Come, Mary—come, nature-lover—and enjoy this wonderful spectacle—this constant transition from colour to colour”, Mary never took her eyes off the Baron de Wolzogen. “I must confess,” wrote Madame Schweizer, “that this erotic absorption made such a disagreeable impression on me, that all my pleasure vanished.” But if the sentimental Swiss was disconcerted by Mary’s sensuality, Imlay, the shrewd man of business, was exasperated by her intelligence. Whenever he saw her he yielded to her charm, but then her quickness, her penetration, her uncompromising idealism harassed him. She saw through his excuses; she met all his reasons; she was even capable of managing his business. There was no peace with her—he must be off again. And then her letters followed him, torturing him with their sincerity and their insight. They were so outspoken; they pleaded so passionately to be told the truth; they showed such a contempt for soap and alum and wealth and comfort; they repeated, as he suspected, so truthfully that he had only to say the word, “and you shall never hear of me more”, that he could not endure it. Tickling minnows he had hooked a dolphin, and the creature rushed him through the waters till he was dizzy and only wanted to escape. After all, though he had played at theory-making too, he was a business man, he depended upon soap and alum; “the secondary pleasures of life”, he had to admit, “are very necessary to my comfort”. And among them was one that for ever evaded Mary’s jealous scrutiny. Was it business, was it politics, was it a woman, that perpetually took him away from her? He shillied and shallied; he was very charming when they met; then he disappeared again. Exasperated at last, and half insane with suspicion, she forced the truth from the cook. A little actress in a strolling company was his mistress, she learnt. True to her own creed of decisive action, Mary at once soaked her skirts so that she might sink unfailingly, and threw herself from Putney Bridge. But she was rescued; after unspeakable agony she recovered, and then her “unconquerable greatness of mind”, her girlish creed of independence, asserted itself again, and she determined to make another bid for happiness and to earn her living without taking a penny from Imlay for herself or their child.

It was in this crisis that she again saw Godwin, the little man with the big head, whom she had met when the French Revolution was making the young men in Somers Town think that a new world was being born. She met him—but that is a euphemism, for in fact Mary Wollstonecraft actually visited him in his own house. Was it the effect of the French Revolution? Was it the blood she had seen spilt on the pavement and the cries of the furious crowd that had rung in her ears that made it seem a matter of no importance whether she put on her cloak and went to visit Godwin in Somers Town, or waited in Judd Street West for Godwin to come to her? And what strange upheaval of human life was it that inspired that curious man, who was so queer a mixture of meanness and magnanimity, of coldness and deep feeling—for the memoir of his wife could not have been written without unusual depth of heart—to hold the view that she did right—that he respected Mary for trampling upon the idiotic convention by which women’s lives were tied down? He held the most extraordinary views on many subjects, and upon the relations of the sexes in particular. He thought that reason should influence even the love between men and women. He thought that there was something spiritual in their relationship. He had written that “marriage is a law, and the worst of all laws … marriage is an affair of property, and the worst of all properties”. He held the belief that if two people of the opposite sex like each other, they should live together without any ceremony, or, for living together is apt to blunt love, twenty doors off, say, in the same street. And he went further; he said that if another man liked your wife “this will create no difficulty. We may all enjoy her conversation, and we shall all be wise enough to consider the sensual intercourse a very trivial object.” True, when he wrote those words he had never been in love; now for the first time he was to experience that sensation. It came very quietly and naturally, growing “with equal advances in the mind of each” from those talks in Somers Town, from those discussions upon everything under the sun which they held so improperly alone in his rooms. “It was friendship melting into love…”, he wrote. “When, in the course of things, the disclosure came, there was nothing in a manner for either party to disclose to the other.” Certainly they were in agreement upon the most essential points; they were both of opinion, for instance, that marriage was unnecessary. They would continue to live apart. Only when Nature again intervened, and Mary found herself with child, was it worth while to lose valued friends, she asked, for the sake of a theory? She thought not, and they were married. And then that other theory—that it is best for husband and wife to live apart—was not that also incompatible with other feelings that were coming to birth in her? “A husband is a convenient part of the furniture of the house”, she wrote. Indeed, she discovered that she was passionately domestic. Why not, then, revise that theory too, and share the same roof. Godwin should have a room some doors off to work in; and they should dine out separately if they liked—their work, their friends, should be separate. Thus they settled it, and the plan worked admirably. The arrangement combined “the novelty and lively sensation of a visit with the more delicious and heart-felt pleasures of domestic life”. Mary admitted that she was happy; Godwin confessed that, after all one’s philosophy, it was “extremely gratifying” to find that “there is someone who takes an interest in one’s happiness”. All sorts of powers and emotions were liberated in Mary by her new satisfaction. Trifles gave her an exquisite pleasure—the sight of Godwin and Imlay’s child playing together; the thought of their own child who was to be born; a day’s jaunt into the country. One day, meeting Imlay in the New Road, she greeted him without bitterness. But, as Godwin wrote, “Ours is not an idle happiness, a paradise of selfish and transitory pleasures”. No, it too was an experiment, as Mary’s life had been an experiment from the start, an attempt to make human conventions conform more closely to human needs. And their marriage was only a beginning; all sorts of things were to follow after. Mary was going to have a child. She was going to write a book to be called The Wrongs of Women. She was going to reform education. She was going to come down to dinner the day after her child was born. She was going to employ a midwife and not a doctor at her confinement—but that experiment was her last. She died in child-birth. She whose sense of her own existence was so intense, who had cried out even in her misery, “I cannot bear to think of being no more—of losing myself—nay, it appears to me impossible that I should cease to exist”, died at the age of thirty-six. But she has her revenge. Many millions have died and been forgotten in the hundred and thirty years that have passed since she was buried; and yet as we read her letters and listen to her arguments and consider her experiments, above all, that most fruitful experiment, her relation with Godwin, and realise the high-handed and hot-blooded manner in which she cut her way to the quick of life, one form of immortality is hers undoubtedly: she is alive and active, she argues and experiments, we hear her voice and trace her influence even now among the living.

IV
Dorothy Wordsworth

Two highly incongruous travellers, Mary Wollstonecraft and Dorothy Wordsworth, followed close upon each other’s footsteps. Mary was in Altona on the Elbe in 1795 with her baby; three years later Dorothy came there with her brother and Coleridge. Both kept a record of their travels; both saw the same places, but the eyes with which they saw them were very different. Whatever Mary saw served to start her mind upon some theory, upon the effect of government, upon the state of the people, upon the mystery of her own soul. The beat of the oars on the waves made her ask, “Life, what are you? Where goes this breath? This I so much alive? In what element will it mix, giving and receiving fresh energy?” And sometimes she forgot to look at the sunset and looked instead at the Baron Wolzogen. Dorothy, on the other hand, noted what was before her accurately, literally, and with prosaic precision. “The walk very pleasing between Hamburgh and Altona. A large piece of ground planted with trees, and intersected by gravel walks…. The ground on the opposite side of the Elbe appears marshy.” Dorothy never railed against “the cloven hoof of despotism”. Dorothy never asked “men’s questions” about exports and imports; Dorothy never confused her own soul with the sky. This “I so much alive” was ruthlessly subordinated to the trees and the grass. For if she let “I” and its rights and its wrongs and its passions and its suffering get between her and the object, she would be calling the moon “the Queen of the Night”; she would be talking of dawn’s “orient beams”; she would be soaring into reveries and rhapsodies and forgetting to find the exact phrase for the ripple of moonlight upon the lake. It was like “herrings in the water”—she could not have said that if she had been thinking about herself. So while Mary dashed her head against wall after wall, and cried out, “Surely something resides in this heart that is not perishable—and life is more than a dream”, Dorothy went on methodically at Alfoxden noting the approach of spring. “The sloe in blossom, the hawthorn green, the larches in the park changed from black to green, in two or three days.” And next day, 14th April 1798, “the evening very stormy, so we staid indoors. Mary Wollstonecraft’s life, &c., came.” And the day after they walked in the squire’s grounds and noticed that “Nature was very successfully striving to make beautiful what art had deformed—ruins, hermitages, &c., &c.”. There is no reference to Mary Wollstonecraft; it seems as if her life and all its storms had been swept away in one of those compendious et ceteras, and yet the next sentence reads like an unconscious comment. “Happily we cannot shape the huge hills, or carve out the valleys according to our fancy.” No, we cannot re-form, we must not rebel; we can only accept and try to understand the message of Nature. And so the notes go on.

Spring passed; summer came; summer turned to autumn; it was winter, and then again the sloes were in blossom and the hawthorns green and spring had come. But it was spring in the North now, and Dorothy was living alone with her brother in a small cottage at Grasmere in the midst of the hills. Now after the hardships and separations of youth they were together under their own roof; now they could address themselves undisturbed to the absorbing occupation of living in the heart of Nature and trying, day by day, to read her meaning. They had money enough at last to let them live together without the need of earning a penny. No family duties or professional tasks distracted them. Dorothy could ramble all day on the hills and sit up talking to Coleridge all night without being scolded by her aunt for unwomanly behaviour. The hours were theirs from sunrise to sunset, and could be altered to suit the season. If it was fine, there was no need to come in; if it was wet, there was no need to get up. One could go to bed at any hour. One could let the dinner cool if the cuckoo were shouting on the hill and William had not found the exact epithet he wanted. Sunday was a day like any other. Custom, convention, everything was subordinated to the absorbing, exacting, exhausting task of living in the heart of Nature and writing poetry. For exhausting it was. William would make his head ache in the effort to find the right word. He would go on hammering at a poem until Dorothy was afraid to suggest an alteration. A chance phrase of hers would run in his head and make it impossible for him to get back into the proper mood. He would come down to breakfast and sit “with his shirt neck unbuttoned, and his waistcoat open”, writing a poem on a Butterfly which some story of hers had suggested, and he would eat nothing, and then he would begin altering the poem and again would be exhausted.

It is strange how vividly all this is brought before us, considering that the diary is made up of brief notes such as any quiet woman might make of her garden’s changes and her brother’s moods and the progress of the seasons. It was warm and mild, she notes, after a day of rain. She met a cow in a field. “The cow looked at me, and I looked at the cow, and whenever I stirred the cow gave over eating.” She met an old man who walked with two sticks—for days on end she met nothing more out of the way than a cow eating and an old man walking. And her motives for writing are common enough—“because I will not quarrel with myself, and because I shall give William pleasure by it when he comes home again”. It is only gradually that the difference between this rough notebook and others discloses itself; only by degrees that the brief notes unfurl in the mind and open a whole landscape before us, that the plain statement proves to be aimed so directly at the object that if we look exactly along the line that it points we shall see precisely what she saw. “The moonlight lay upon the hills like snow.” “The air was become still, the lake of a bright slate colour, the hills darkening. The bays shot into the low fading shores. Sheep resting. All things quiet.” “There was no one waterfall above another—it was the sound of waters in the air—the voice of the air.” Even in such brief notes one feels the suggestive power which is the gift of the poet rather than of the naturalist, the power which, taking only the simplest facts, so orders them that the whole scene comes before us, heightened and composed, the lake in its quiet, the hills in their splendour. Yet she was no descriptive writer in the usual sense. Her first concern was to be truthful—grace and symmetry must be made subordinate to truth. But then truth is sought because to falsify the look of the stir of the breeze on the lake is to tamper with the spirit which inspires appearances. It is that spirit which goads her and urges her and keeps her faculties for ever on the stretch. A sight or a sound would not let her be till she had traced her perception along its course and fixed it in words, though they might be bald, or in an image, though it might be angular. Nature was a stern taskmistress. The exact prosaic detail must be rendered as well as the vast and visionary outline. Even when the distant hills trembled before her in the glory of a dream she must note with literal accuracy “the glittering silver line on the ridge of the backs of the sheep”, or remark how “the crows at a little distance from us became white as silver as they flew in the sunshine, and when they went still further, they looked like shapes of water passing over the green fields”. Always trained and in use, her powers of observation became in time so expert and so acute that a day’s walk stored her mind’s eye with a vast assembly of curious objects to be sorted at leisure. How strange the sheep looked mixed with the soldiers at Dumbarton Castle! For some reason the sheep looked their real size, but the soldiers looked like puppets. And then the movements of the sheep were so natural and fearless, and the motion of the dwarf soldiers was so restless and apparently without meaning. It was extremely queer. Or lying in bed she would look up at the ceiling and think how the varnished beams were “as glossy as black rocks on a sunny day cased in ice”. Yes, they

crossed each other in almost as intricate and fantastic a manner as I have seen the underboughs of a large beech-tree withered by the depth of the shade above…. It was like what I should suppose an underground cave or temple to be, with a dripping or moist roof, and the moonlight entering in upon it by some means or other, and yet the colours were more like melted gems. I lay looking up till the light of the fire faded away…. I did not sleep much.

Indeed, she scarcely seemed to shut her eyes. They looked and they looked, urged on not only by an indefatigable curiosity but also by reverence, as if some secret of the utmost importance lay hidden beneath the surface. Her pen sometimes stammers with the intensity of the emotion that she controlled, as De Quincey said that her tongue stammered with the conflict between her ardour and her shyness when she spoke. But controlled she was. Emotional and impulsive by nature, her eyes “wild and starting”, tormented by feelings which almost mastered her, still she must control, still she must repress, or she would fail in her task—she would cease to see. But if one subdued oneself, and resigned one’s private agitations, then, as if in reward, Nature would bestow an exquisite satisfaction. “Rydale was very beautiful, with spear-shaped streaks of polished steel…. It calls home the heart to quietness. I had been very melancholy”, she wrote. For did not Coleridge come walking over the hills and tap at the cottage door late at night—did she not carry a letter from Coleridge hidden safe in her bosom?

Thus giving to Nature, thus receiving from Nature, it seemed, as the arduous and ascetic days went by, that Nature and Dorothy had grown together in perfect sympathy—a sympathy not cold or vegetable or inhuman because at the core of it burnt that other love for “my beloved”, her brother, who was indeed its heart and inspiration. William and Nature and Dorothy herself, were they not one being? Did they not compose a trinity, self-contained and self-sufficient and independent whether indoors or out? They sit indoors. It was

about ten o’clock and a quiet night. The fire flickers and the watch ticks. I hear nothing but the breathing of my Beloved as he now and then pushes his book forward, and turns over a leaf.

And now it is an April day, and they take the old cloak and lie in John’s grove out of doors together.

William heard me breathing, and rustling now and then, but we both lay still and unseen by one another. He thought that it would be sweet thus to lie in the grave, to hear the peaceful sounds of the earth, and just to know that our dear friends were near. The lake was still; there was a boat out.

It was a strange love, profound, almost dumb, as if brother and sister had grown together and shared not the speech but the mood, so that they hardly knew which felt, which spoke, which saw the daffodils or the sleeping city; only Dorothy stored the mood in prose, and later William came and bathed in it and made it into poetry. But one could not act without the other. They must feel, they must think, they must be together. So now, when they had lain out on the hill-side they would rise and go home and make tea, and Dorothy would write to Coleridge, and they would sow the scarlet beans together, and William would work at his “Leech Gatherer”, and Dorothy would copy the lines for him. Rapt but controlled, free yet strictly ordered, the homely narrative moves naturally from ecstasy on the hills to baking bread and ironing linen and fetching William his supper in the cottage.

The cottage, though its garden ran up into the fells, was on the highroad. Through her parlour window Dorothy looked out and saw whoever might be passing—a tall beggar woman perhaps with her baby on her back; an old soldier; a coroneted landau with touring ladies peering inquisitively inside. The rich and the great she would let pass—they interested her no more than cathedrals or picture galleries or great cities; but she could never see a beggar at the door without asking him in and questioning him closely. Where had he been? What had he seen? How many children had he? She searched into the lives of the poor as if they held in them the same secret as the hills. A tramp eating cold bacon over the kitchen fire might have been a starry night, so closely she watched him; so clearly she noted how his old coat was patched “with three bell-shaped patches of darker blue behind, where the buttons had been”, how his beard of a fortnight’s growth was like “grey plush”. And then as they rambled on with their tales of seafaring and the press-gang and the Marquis of Granby, she never failed to capture the one phrase that sounds on in the mind after the story is forgotten, “What, you are stepping westward?” “To be sure there is great promise for virgins in Heaven.” “She could trip lightly by the graves of those who died when they were young.” The poor had their poetry as the hills had theirs. But it was out of doors, on the road or on the moor, not in the cottage parlour, that her imagination had freest play. Her happiest moments were passed tramping beside a jibbing horse on a wet Scottish road without certainty of bed or supper. All she knew was that there was some sight ahead, some grove of trees to be noted, some waterfall to be inquired into. On they tramped hour after hour in silence for the most part, though Coleridge, who was of the party, would suddenly begin to debate aloud the true meaning of the words majestic, sublime, and grand. They had to trudge on foot because the horse had thrown the cart over a bank and the harness was only mended with string and pocket-handkerchiefs. They were hungry, too, because Wordsworth had dropped the chicken and the bread into the lake, and they had nothing else for dinner. They were uncertain of the way, and did not know where they would find lodging: all they knew was that there was a waterfall ahead. At last Coleridge could stand it no longer. He had rheumatism in the joints; the Irish jaunting car provided no shelter from the weather; his companions were silent and absorbed. He left them. But William and Dorothy tramped on. They looked like tramps themselves. Dorothy’s cheeks were brown as a gipsy’s, her clothes were shabby, her gait was rapid and ungainly. But still she was indefatigable; her eye never failed her; she noticed everything. At last they reached the waterfall. And then all Dorothy’s powers fell upon it. She searched out its character, she noted its resemblances, she defined its differences, with all the ardour of a discoverer, with all the exactness of a naturalist, with all the rapture of a lover. She possessed it at last—she had laid it up in her mind for ever. It had become one of those “inner visions” which she could call to mind at any time in their distinctness and in their particularity. It would come back to her long years afterwards when she was old and her mind had failed her; it would come back stilled and heightened and mixed with all the happiest memories of her past—with the thought of Racedown and Alfoxden and Coleridge reading “Christabel”, and her beloved, her brother William. It would bring with it what no human being could give, what no human relation could offer—consolation and quiet. If, then, the passionate cry of Mary Wollstonecraft had reached her ears—“Surely something resides in this heart that is not perishable—and life is more than a dream”—she would have had no doubt whatever as to her answer. She would have said quite simply, “We looked about us, and felt that we were happy”.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Sep 21 – Oct 12, 1929]

[]

William Hazlitt.

Had one met Hazlitt no doubt one would have liked him on his own principle that “We can scarcely hate anyone we know”. But Hazlitt has been dead now a hundred years, and it is perhaps a question how far we can know him well enough to overcome those feelings of dislike, both personal and intellectual, which his writings still so sharply arouse. For Hazlitt—it is one of his prime merits—was not one of those noncommittal writers who shuffle off in a mist and die of their own insignificance. His essays are emphatically himself. He has no reticence and he has no shame. He tells us exactly what he thinks, and he tells us—the confidence is less seductive—exactly what he feels. As of all men he had the most intense consciousness of his own existence, since never a day passed without inflicting on him some pang of hate or of jealousy, some thrill of anger or of pleasure, we cannot read him for long without coming in contact with a very singular character—ill-conditioned yet high-minded; mean yet noble; intensely egotistical yet inspired by the most genuine passion for the rights and liberties of mankind.

Soon, so thin is the veil of the essay as Hazlitt wore it, his very look comes before us. We see him as Coleridge saw him, “brow-hanging, shoe-contemplative, strange”. He comes shuffling into the room, he looks nobody straight in the face, he shakes hands with the fin of a fish; occasionally he darts a malignant glance from his corner. “His manners are 99 in 100 singularly repulsive”, Coleridge said. Yet now and again his face lit up with intellectual beauty, and his manner became radiant with sympathy and understanding. Soon, too, as we read on, we become familiar with the whole gamut of his grudges and his grievances. He lived, one gathers, mostly at inns. No woman’s form graced his board. He had quarrelled with all his old friends, save perhaps with Lamb. Yet his only fault had been that he had stuck to his principles and “not become a government tool”. He was the object of malignant persecution—Blackwood’s reviewers called him “pimply Hazlitt”, though his cheek was pale as alabaster. These lies, however, got into print, and then he was afraid to visit his friends because the footman had read the newspaper and the housemaid tittered behind his back. He had—no one could deny it—one of the finest minds, and he wrote indisputably the best prose style of his time. But what did that avail with women? Fine ladies have no respect for scholars, nor chambermaids either—so the growl and plaint of his grievances keeps breaking through, disturbing us, irritating us; and yet there is something so independent, subtle, fine, and enthusiastic about him—when he can forget himself he is so rapt in ardent speculation about other things—that dislike crumbles and turns to something much warmer and more complex. Hazlitt was right:

It is the mask only that we dread and hate; the man may have something human about him! The notions in short which we entertain of people at a distance, or from partial representation, or from guess-work, are simple, uncompounded ideas, which answer to nothing in reality; those which we derive from experience are mixed modes, the only true and, in general, the most favourable ones.

Certainly no one could read Hazlitt and maintain a simple and uncompounded idea of him. From the first he was a twy-minded man—one of those divided natures which are inclined almost equally to two quite opposite careers. It is significant that his first impulse was not to essay-writing but to painting and philosophy. There was something in the remote and silent art of the painter that offered a refuge to his tormented spirit. He noted enviously how happy the old age of painters was—“their minds keep alive to the last”; he turned longingly to the calling that takes one out of doors, among fields and woods, that deals with bright pigments, and has solid brush and canvas for its tools and not merely black ink and white paper. Yet at the same time he was bitten by an abstract curiosity that would not let him rest in the contemplation of concrete beauty. When he was a boy of fourteen he heard his father, the good Unitarian minister, dispute with an old lady of the congregation as they were coming out of Meeting as to the limits of religious toleration, and, he said, “it was this circumstance that decided the fate of my future life”. It set him off “forming in my head … the following system of political rights and general jurisprudence”. He wished “to be satisfied of the reason of things”. The two ideals were ever after to clash. To be a thinker and to express in the plainest and most accurate of terms “the reason of things”, and to be a painter gloating over blues and crimsons, breathing fresh air and living sensually in the emotions—these were two different, perhaps incompatible ideals, yet like all Hazlitt’s emotions both were tough and each strove for mastery. He yielded now to one, now to the other. He spent months in Paris copying pictures at the Louvre. He came home and toiled laboriously at the portrait of an old woman in a bonnet day after day, seeking by industry and pains to discover the secret of Rembrandt’s genius; but he lacked some quality—perhaps it was invention—and in the end cut the canvas to ribbons in a rage or turned it against the wall in despair. At the same time he was writing the “Essay on the Principles of Human Action” which he preferred to all his other works. For there he wrote plainly and truthfully, without glitter or garishness, without any wish to please or to make money, but solely to gratify the urgency of his own desire for truth. Naturally, “the book dropped still-born from the press”. Then, too, his political hopes, his belief that the age of freedom had come and that the tyranny of kingship was over, proved vain. His friends deserted to the Government, and he was left to uphold the doctrines of liberty, fraternity, and revolution in that perpetual minority which requires so much self-approval to support it.

Thus he was a man of divided tastes and of thwarted ambition; a man whose happiness, even in early life, lay behind. His mind had set early and bore for ever the stamp of first impressions. In his happiest moods he looked not forwards but backwards—to the garden where he had played as a child, to the blue hills of Shropshire and to all those landscapes which he had seen when hope was still his, and peace brooded upon him and he looked up from his painting or his book and saw the fields and woods as if they were the outward expression of his own inner quietude. It is to the books that he read then that he returns—to Rousseau and to Burke and to the Letters of Junius. The impression that they made upon his youthful imagination was never effaced and scarcely overlaid; for after youth was over he ceased to read for pleasure, and youth and the pure and intense pleasures of youth were soon left behind.

Naturally, given his susceptibility to the charms of the other sex, he married; and naturally, given his consciousness of his own “misshapen form made to be mocked”, he married unhappily. Miss Sarah Stoddart pleased him when he met her at the Lambs by the common sense with which she found the kettle and boiled it when Mary absentmindedly delayed. But of domestic talents she had none. Her little income was insufficient to meet the burden of married life, and Hazlitt soon found that instead of spending eight years in writing eight pages he must turn journalist and write articles upon politics and plays and pictures and books of the right length, at the right moment. Soon the mantelpiece of the old house at York Street where Milton had lived was scribbled over with ideas for essays. As the habit proves, the house was not a tidy house, nor did geniality and comfort excuse the lack of order. The Hazlitts were to be found eating breakfast at two in the afternoon, without a fire in the grate or a curtain to the window. A valiant walker and a clear-sighted woman, Mrs. Hazlitt had no delusions about her husband. He was not faithful to her, and she faced the fact with admirable common sense. But “he said that I had always despised him and his abilities”, she noted in her diary, and that was carrying common sense too far. The prosaic marriage came lamely to an end. Free at last from the encumbrance of home and husband, Sarah Hazlitt pulled on her boots and set off on a walking tour through Scotland, while Hazlitt, incapable of attachment or comfort, wandered from inn to inn, suffered tortures of humiliation and disillusionment, but, as he drank cup after cup of very strong tea and made love to the innkeeper’s daughter, he wrote those essays that are of course among the very best that we have.

That they are not quite the best—that they do not haunt the mind and remain entire in the memory as the essays of Montaigne or Lamb haunt the mind—is also true. He seldom reaches the perfection of these great writers or their unity. Perhaps it is the nature of these short pieces that they need unity and a mind at harmony with itself. A little jar there makes the whole composition tremble. The essays of Montaigne, Lamb, even Addison, have the reticence which springs from composure, for with all their familiarity they never tell us what they wish to keep hidden. But with Hazlitt it is different. There is always something divided and discordant even in his finest essays, as if two minds were at work who never succeed save for a few moments in making a match of it. In the first place there is the mind of the inquiring boy who wishes to be satisfied of the reason of things—the mind of the thinker. It is the thinker for the most part who is allowed the choice of the subject. He chooses some abstract idea, like Envy, or Egotism, or Reason and Imagination. He treats it with energy and independence. He explores its ramifications and scales its narrow paths as if it were a mountain road and the ascent both difficult and inspiring. Compared with this athletic progress, Lamb’s seems the flight of a butterfly cruising capriciously among the flowers and perching for a second incongruously here upon a barn, there upon a wheelbarrow. But every sentence in Hazlitt carries us forward. He has his end in view and, unless some accident intervenes, he strides towards it in that “pure conversational prose style” which, as he points out, is so much more difficult to practise than fine writing.

There can be no question that Hazlitt the thinker is an admirable companion. He is strong and fearless; he knows his mind and he speaks his mind forcibly yet brilliantly too, for the readers of newspapers are a dull-eyed race who must be dazzled in order to make them see. But besides Hazlitt the thinker there is Hazlitt the artist. There is the sensuous and emotional man, with his feeling for colour and touch, with his passion for prizefighting and Sarah Walker, with his sensibility to all those emotions which disturb the reason and make it often seem futile enough to spend one’s time slicing things up finer and finer with the intellect when the body of the world is so firm and so warm and demands so imperatively to be pressed to the heart. To know the reason of things is a poor substitute for being able to feel them. And Hazlitt felt with the intensity of a poet. The most abstract of his essays will suddenly glow red-hot or white-hot if something reminds him of his past. He will drop his fine analytic pen and paint a phrase or two with a full brush brilliantly and beautifully if some landscape stirs his imagination or some book brings back the hour when he first read it. The famous passages about reading Love for Love and drinking coffee from a silver pot, and reading La Nouvelle Héloïse and eating a cold chicken, are known to all, and yet how oddly they often break into the context, how violently we are switched from reason to rhapsody—how embarrassingly our austere thinker falls upon our shoulders and demands our sympathy! It is this disparity and the sense of two forces in conflict that trouble the serenity and cause the inconclusiveness of some of Hazlitt’s finest essays. They set out to give us a proof and they end by giving us a picture. We are about to plant our feet upon the solid rock of Q.E.D., and behold the rock turns to quagmire and we are knee-deep in mud and water and flowers. “Faces pale as the primrose with hyacinthine locks” are in our eyes; the woods of Tuderly breathe their mystic voices in our ears. Then suddenly we are recalled, and the thinker, austere, muscular, and sardonic, leads us on to analyse, to dissect, and to condemn.

Thus if we compare Hazlitt with the other great masters in his line it is easy to see where his limitations lie. His range is narrow and his sympathies few if intense. He does not open the doors wide upon all experience like Montaigne, rejecting nothing, tolerating everything, and watching the play of the soul with irony and detachment. On the contrary, his mind shut hard with egotistic tenacity upon his first impressions and froze them to unalterable convictions. Nor was it for him to make play, like Lamb, with the figures of his friends, creating them afresh in fantastic flights of imagination and reverie. His characters are seen with the same quick sidelong glance full of shrewdness and suspicion which he darted upon people in the flesh. He does not use the essayist’s licence to circle and meander. He is tethered by his egotism and by his convictions to one time and one place and one being. We never forget that this is England in the early days of the nineteenth century; indeed, we feel ourselves in the Southampton Buildings or in the inn parlour that looks over the downs and on to the high road at Winterslow. He has an extraordinary power of making us contemporary with himself. But as we read on through the many volumes which he filled with so much energy and yet with so little love of his task, the comparison with the other essayists drops from us. These are not essays, it seems, independent and self-sufficient, but fragments broken off from some larger book—some searching enquiry into the reason for human actions or into the nature of human institutions. It is only accident that has cut them short, and only deference to the public taste that has decked them out with gaudy images and bright colours. The phrase which occurs in one form or another so frequently and indicates the structure which if he were free he would follow—“I will here try to go more at large into the subject and then give such instances and illustrations of it as occur to me”—could by no possibility occur in the Essays of Elia or Sir Roger de Coverley. He loves to grope among the curious depths of human psychology and to track down the reason of things. He excels in hunting out the obscure causes that lie behind some common saying or sensation, and the drawers of his mind are well stocked with illustrations and arguments. We can believe him when he says that for twenty years he had thought hard and suffered acutely. He is speaking of what he knows from experience when he exclaims, “How many ideas and trains of sentiment, long and deep and intense, often pass through the mind in only one day’s thinking or reading!” Convictions are his life-blood; ideas have formed in him like stalactites, drop by drop, year by year. He has sharpened them in a thousand solitary walks; he has tested them in argument after argument, sitting in his corner, sardonically observant, over a late supper at the Southampton Inn. But he has not changed them. His mind is his own and it is made up.

Thus however threadbare the abstraction—Hot and Cold, or Envy, or The Conduct of Life, or The Picturesque and the Ideal—he has something solid to write about. He never lets his brain slacken or trusts to his great gift of picturesque phrasing to float him over a stretch of shallow thought. Even when it is plain from the savagery and contempt with which he attacks his task that he is out of the mood and only keeps his mind to the grindstone by strong tea and sheer force of will, we still find him mordant and searching and acute. There is a stir and trouble, a vivacity and conflict in his essays as if the very contrariety of his gifts kept him on the stretch. He is always hating, loving, thinking, and suffering. He could never come to terms with authority or doff his own idiosyncrasy in deference to opinion. Thus chafed and goaded the level of his essays is extraordinarily high. Often dry, garish in their bright imagery, monotonous in the undeviating energy of their rhythm—for Hazlitt believed too implicitly in his own saying, “mediocrity, insipidity, want of character, is the great fault”, to be an easy writer to read for long at a stretch—there is scarcely an essay without its stress of thought, its thrust of insight, its moment of penetration. His pages are full of fine sayings and unexpected turns and independence and originality. “All that is worth remembering of life is the poetry of it.” “If the truth were known, the most disagreeable people are the most amiable.” “You will hear more good things on the outside of a stage-coach from London to Oxford, than if you were to pass a twelve-month with the undergraduates or heads of colleges of that famous University.” We are constantly plucked at by sayings that we would like to put by to examine later.

But besides the volumes of Hazlitt’s essays there are the volumes of Hazlitt’s criticism. In one way or another, either as lecturer or reviewer, Hazlitt strode through the greater part of English literature and delivered his opinion of the majority of famous books. His criticism has the rapidity and the daring, if it has also the looseness and the roughness, which arise from the circumstances in which it was written. He must cover a great deal of ground, make his points clear to an audience not of readers but of listeners, and has time only to point to the tallest towers and the brightest pinnacles in the landscape. But even in his most perfunctory criticism of books we feel that faculty for seizing on the important and indicating the main outline which learned critics often lose and timid critics never acquire. He is one of those rare critics who have thought so much that they can dispense with reading. It matters very little that Hazlitt had read only one poem by Donne; that he found Shakespeare’s sonnets unintelligible; that he never read a book through after he was thirty; that he came indeed to dislike reading altogether. What he had read he had read with fervour. And since in his view it was the duty of a critic to “reflect the colours, the light and shade, the soul and body of a work”, appetite, gusto, enjoyment were far more important than analytic subtlety or prolonged and extensive study. To communicate his own fervour was his aim. Thus he first cuts out with vigorous and direct strokes the figure of one author and contrasts it with another, and next builds up with the freest use of imagery and colour the brilliant ghost that the book has left glimmering in his mind. The poem is re-created in glowing phrases—“A rich distilled perfume emanates from it like the breath of genius; a golden cloud envelops it; a honeyed paste of poetic diction encrusts it, like the candied coat of the auricula”. But since the analyst in Hazlitt is never far from the surface, this painter’s imagery is kept in check by a nervous sense of the hard and lasting in literature, of what a book means and where it should be placed, which models his enthusiasm and gives it angle and outline. He singles out the peculiar quality of his author and stamps it vigorously. There is the “deep, internal, sustained sentiment” of Chaucer; “Crabbe is the only poet who has attempted and succeeded in the still life of tragedy”. There is nothing flabby, weak, or merely ornamental in his criticism of Scott—sense and enthusiasm run hand in hand. And if such criticism is the reverse of final, if it is initiatory and inspiring rather than conclusive and complete, there is something to be said for the critic who starts the reader on a journey and fires him with a phrase to shoot off on adventures of his own. If one needs an incentive to read Burke, what is better than “Burke’s style was forked and playful like the lightning, crested like the serpent”? Or again, should one be trembling on the brink of a dusty folio, the following passage is enough to plunge one in midstream:

It is delightful to repose on the wisdom of the ancients; to have some great name at hand, besides one’s own initials always staring one in the face; to travel out of one’s self into the Chaldee, Hebrew, and Egyptian characters; to have the palm-trees waving mystically in the margin of the page, and the camels moving slowly on in the distance of three thousand years. In that dry desert of learning, we gather strength and patience, and a strange and insatiable thirst of knowledge. The ruined monuments of antiquity are also there, and the fragments of buried cities (under which the adder lurks) and cool springs, and green sunny spots, and the whirlwind and the lion’s roar, and the shadow of angelic wings.

Needless to say that is not criticism. It is sitting in an armchair and gazing into the fire, and building up image after image of what one has seen in a book. It is loving and taking the liberties of a lover. It is being Hazlitt.

But it is likely that Hazlitt will survive not in his lectures, nor in his travels, nor in his Life of Napoleon, nor in his Conversations of Northcote, full as they are of energy and integrity, of broken and fitful splendour and shadowed with the shape of some vast unwritten book that looms on the horizon. He will live in a volume of essays in which is distilled all those powers that are dissipated and distracted elsewhere, where the parts of his complex and tortured spirit come together in a truce of amity and concord. Perhaps a fine day was needed, or a game of fives or a long walk in the country, to bring about this consummation. The body has a large share in everything that Hazlitt writes. Then a mood of intense and spontaneous reverie came over him; he soared into what Patmore called “a calm so pure and serene that one did not like to interrupt it”. His brain worked smoothly and swiftly and without consciousness of its own operations; the pages dropped without an erasure from his pen. Then his mind ranged in a rhapsody of well-being over books and love, over the past and its beauty, the present and its comfort, and the future that would bring a partridge hot from the oven or a dish of sausages sizzling in the pan.

I look out of my window and see that a shower has just fallen: the fields look green after it, and a rosy cloud hangs over the brow of the hill; a lily expands its petals in the moisture, dressed in its lovely green and white; a shepherd-boy has just brought some pieces of turf with daisies and grass for his young mistress to make a bed for her skylark, not doomed to dip his wings in the dappled dawn—my cloudy thoughts draw off, the storm of angry politics has blown over—Mr. Blackwood, I am yours—Mr. Croker, my service to you—Mr. T. Moore, I am alive and well.

There is then no division, no discord, no bitterness. The different faculties work in harmony and unity. Sentence follows sentence with the healthy ring and chime of a blacksmith’s hammer on the anvil; the words glow and the sparks fly; gently they fade and the essay is over. And as his writing had such passages of inspired description, so, too, his life had its seasons of intense enjoyment. When he lay dying a hundred years ago in a lodging in Soho his voice rang out with the old pugnacity and conviction: “Well, I have had a happy life.” One has only to read him to believe it.

[New York Herald Tribune, Sep 7, 1930, as “Wm. Hazlitt, the Man”]

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Geraldine and Jane.

Geraldine Jewsbury would certainly not have expected anybody at this time of day to bother themselves about her novels. If she had caught one pulling them down from the shelf in some library she would have expostulated. “They’re such nonsense, my dear”, she would have said. And then one likes to fancy that she would have burst out in that irresponsible, unconventional way of hers against libraries and literature and love and life and all the rest of it with a “Damn it all!” or a “Confound it!” for Geraldine was fond of swearing.

The odd thing about Geraldine Jewsbury, indeed, was the way in which she combined oaths and endearments, sense and effervescence, daring and gush: “… defenceless and tender on the one hand, and strong enough to cleave the very rocks on the other”—that is how Mrs. Ireland, her biographer, puts it; or again: “Intellectually she was a man, but the heart within her was as womanly as ever daughter of Eve could boast”. Even to look at there was, it would seem, something incongruous, queer, provocative about her. She was very small and yet boyish; very ugly yet attractive. She dressed very well, wore her reddish hair in a net, and ear-rings made in the form of miniature parrots swung in her ears as she talked. There, in the only portrait we have of her, she sits reading, with her face half-turned away, defenceless and tender at the moment rather than cleaving the very rocks.

But what had happened to her before she sat at the photographer’s table reading her book it is impossible to say. Until she was twenty-nine we know nothing of her except that she was born in the year 1812, was the daughter of a merchant, and lived in Manchester, or near it. In the first part of the nineteenth century a woman of twenty-nine was no longer young; she had lived her life or she had missed it. And though Geraldine, with her unconventional ways, was an exception, still it cannot be doubted that something very tremendous had happened in those dim years before we know her. Something had happened in Manchester. An obscure male figure looms in the background—a faithless but fascinating creature who had taught her that life is treacherous, life is hard, life is the very devil for a woman. A dark pool of experience had formed in the back of her mind into which she would dip for the consolation or for the instruction of others. “Oh! it is too frightful to talk about. For two years I lived only in short respites from this blackness of darkness”, she exclaimed from time to time. There had been seasons “like dreary, calm November days when there is but one cloud, but that one covers the whole heaven”. She had struggled, “but struggling is no use”. She had read Cudworth through. She had written an essay upon materialism before giving way. For, though the prey to so many emotions, she was also oddly detached and speculative. She liked to puzzle her head with questions about “matter and spirit and the nature of life” even while her heart was bleeding. Upstairs there was a box full of extracts, abstracts, and conclusions. Yet what conclusion could a woman come to? Did anything avail a woman when love had deserted her, when her lover had played her false? No. It was useless to struggle; one had better let the wave engulf one, the cloud close over one’s head. So she meditated, lying often on a sofa with a piece of knitting in her hands and a green shade over her eyes. For she suffered from a variety of ailments—sore eyes, colds, nameless exhaustion; and Greenheys, the suburb outside Manchester, where she kept house for her brother, was very damp. “Dirty, half-melted snow and fog, a swampy meadow, set off by a creeping cold damp”—that was the view from her window. Often she could hardly drag herself across the room. And then there were incessant interruptions: somebody had come unexpectedly for dinner; she had to jump up and run into the kitchen and cook a fowl with her own hands. That done, she would put on her green shade and peer at her book again, for she was a great reader. She read metaphysics, she read travels, she read old books and new books—and especially the wonderful books of Mr. Carlyle.

Early in the year 1841 she came to London and secured an introduction to the great man whose works she so much admired. She met Mrs. Carlyle. They must have become intimate with great rapidity. In a few weeks Mrs. Carlyle was “dearest Jane”. They must have discussed everything. They must have talked about life and the past and the present, and certain “individuals” who were sentimentally interested or were not sentimentally interested in Geraldine. Mrs. Carlyle, so metropolitan, so brilliant, so deeply versed in life and scornful of its humbugs, must have captivated the young woman from Manchester completely, for directly Geraldine returned to Manchester she began writing long letters to Jane which echo and continue the intimate conversations of Cheyne Row. “A man who has had le plus grand succès among women, and who was the most passionate and poetically refined lover in his manners and conversation you would wish to find, once said to me…” So she would begin. Or she would reflect:

It may be that we women are made as we are in order that they may in some sort fertilise the world. We shall go on loving, they [the men] will go on struggling and toiling, and we are all alike mercifully allowed to die—after a while. I don’t know whether you will agree to this, and I cannot see to argue, for my eyes are very bad and painful.

Probably Jane agreed to very little of all this. For Jane was eleven years the elder. Jane was not given to abstract reflections upon the nature of life. Jane was the most caustic, the most concrete, the most clear-sighted of women. But it is perhaps worth noting that when she first fell in with Geraldine she was beginning to feel those premonitions of jealousy, that uneasy sense that old relationships had shifted and that new ones were forming themselves, which had come to pass with the establishment of her husband’s fame. No doubt, in the course of those long talks in Cheyne Row, Geraldine had received certain confidences, heard certain complaints, and drawn certain conclusions. For besides being a mass of emotion and sensibility, Geraldine was a clever, witty woman who thought for herself and hated what she called “respectability” as much as Mrs. Carlyle hated what she called “humbug”. In addition, Geraldine had from the first the strangest feelings about Mrs. Carlyle. She felt “vague undefined yearnings to be yours in some way”. “You will let me be yours and think of me as such, will you not?” she urged again and again. “I think of you as Catholics think of their saints”, she said: “… you will laugh, but I feel towards you much more like a lover than a female friend!” No doubt Mrs. Carlyle did laugh, but also she could scarcely fail to be touched by the little creature’s adoration.

Thus when Carlyle himself early in 1843 suggested unexpectedly that they should ask Geraldine to stay with them, Mrs. Carlyle, after debating the question with her usual candour, agreed. She reflected that a little of Geraldine would be “very enlivening”, but, on the other hand, much of Geraldine would be very exhausting. Geraldine dropped hot tears on to one’s hands; she watched one; she fussed one; she was always in a state of emotion. Then “with all her good and great qualities” Geraldine had in her “a born spirit of intrigue” which might make mischief between husband and wife, though not in the usual way, for, Mrs. Carlyle reflected, her husband “had the habit” of preferring her to other women, “and habits are much stronger in him than passions”. On the other hand, she herself was getting lazy intellectually; Geraldine loved talk and clever talk; with all her aspirations and enthusiasms it would be a kindness to let the young woman marooned in Manchester come to Chelsea; and so she came.

She came on the 1st or 2nd of February, and she stayed till the Saturday, the 11th of March. Such were visits in the year 1843. And the house was very small, and the servant was inefficient. Geraldine was always there. All the morning she scribbled letters. All the afternoon she lay fast asleep on the sofa in the drawing-room. She dressed herself in a low-necked dress to receive visitors on Sunday. She talked too much. As for her reputed intellect, “she is sharp as a meat axe, but as narrow”. She flattered. She wheedled. She was insincere. She flirted. She swore. Nothing would make her go. The charges against her rose in a crescendo of irritation. Mrs. Carlyle almost had to turn her out of the house. At last they parted; and Geraldine, as she got into the cab, was in floods of tears, but Mrs. Carlyle’s eyes were dry. Indeed, she was immensely relieved to see the last of her visitor. Yet when Geraldine had driven off and she found herself alone she was not altogether easy in her mind. She knew that her behaviour to a guest whom she herself had invited had been far from perfect. She had been “cold, cross, ironical, disobliging”. Above all, she was angry with herself for having taken Geraldine for a confidante. “Heaven grant that the consequences may be only boring—not fatal”, she wrote. But it is clear that she was very much out of temper; and with herself as much as with Geraldine.

Geraldine, returned to Manchester, was well aware that something was wrong. Estrangement and silence fell between them. People repeated malicious stories which she half believed. But Geraldine was the least vindictive of women—“very noble in her quarrels”, as Mrs. Carlyle herself admitted—and, if foolish and sentimental, neither conceited nor proud. Above all, her love for Jane was sincere. Soon she was writing to Mrs. Carlyle again “with an assiduity and disinterestedness that verge on the superhuman”, as Jane commented with a little exasperation. She was worrying about Jane’s health and saying that she did not want witty letters, but only dull letters telling the truth about Jane’s state. For—it may have been one of those things that made her so trying as a visitor—Geraldine had not stayed for four weeks in Cheyne Row without coming to conclusions which it is not likely that she kept entirely to herself. “You have no one who has any sort of consideration for you”, she wrote. “You have had patience and endurance till I am sick of the virtues, and what have they done for you? Half-killed you.” “Carlyle”, she burst out, “is much too grand for everyday life. A sphinx does not fit in comfortably to our parlour life arrangements.” But she could do nothing. “The more one loves, the more helpless one feels”, she moralised. She could only watch from Manchester the bright kaleidoscope of her friend’s existence and compare it with her own prosaic life, all made up of little odds and ends; but somehow, obscure though her own life was, she no longer envied Jane the brilliance of her lot.

So they might have gone on corresponding in a desultory way at a distance—and “I am tired to death of writing letters into space”, Geraldine exclaimed; “one only writes after a long separation, to oneself, instead of one’s friend”—had it not been for the Mudies. The Mudies and Mudieism as Geraldine called it, played a vast, if almost unrecorded, part in the obscure lives of Victorian gentlewomen. In this case the Mudies were two girls, Elizabeth and Juliet: “flary, staring, and conceited, stolid-looking girls”, Carlyle called them, the daughters of a Dundee schoolmaster, a respectable man who had written books on natural history and died, leaving a foolish widow and little or no provision for his family. Somehow the Mudies arrived in Cheyne Row inconveniently, if one may hazard a guess, just as dinner was on the table. But the Victorian lady never minded that—she put herself to any inconvenience to help the Mudies. The question at once presented itself to Mrs. Carlyle, what could be done for them? Who knew of a place? who had influence with a rich man? Geraldine flashed into her mind. Geraldine was always wishing she could be of use. Geraldine might fairly be asked if there were situations to be had for the Mudies in Manchester. Geraldine acted with a promptitude that was much to her credit. She “placed” Juliet at once. Soon she had heard of another place for Elizabeth. Mrs. Carlyle, who was in the Isle of Wight, at once procured stays, gown, and petticoat for Elizabeth, came up to London, took Elizabeth all the way across London to Euston Square at half past seven in the evening, put her in charge of a benevolent-looking, fat old man, saw that a letter to Geraldine was pinned to her stays, and returned home, exhausted, triumphant, yet, as happens often with the devotees of Mudieism, a prey to secret misgivings. Would the Mudies be happy? Would they thank her for what she had done? A few days later the inevitable bugs appeared in Cheyne Row, and were ascribed, with or without reason, to Elizabeth’s shawl. What was far worse, Elizabeth herself appeared four months later, having proved herself “wholly inapplicable to any practical purpose”, having “sewed a black apron with white thread”, and, on being mildly scolded, having “thrown herself on the kitchen floor and kicked and screamed”. “Of course, her immediate dismissal is the result.” Elizabeth vanished—to sew more black aprons with white thread, to kick and scream and be dismissed—who knows what happened eventually to poor Elizabeth Mudie? She disappears from the world altogether, swallowed up in the dark shades of her sisterhood. Juliet, however, remained. Geraldine made Juliet her charge. She superintended and advised. The first place was unsatisfactory. Geraldine engaged herself to find another. She went off and sat in the hall of a “very stiff old lady” who wanted a maid. The very stiff old lady said she would want Juliet to clear-starch collars, to iron cuffs, and to wash and iron petticoats. Juliet’s heart failed her. All this clear-starching and ironing, she exclaimed, were beyond her. Off went Geraldine again, late in the evening, and saw the old lady’s daughter. It was arranged that the petticoats should be “put out” and only the collars and frills left for Juliet to iron. Off went Geraldine and arranged with her own milliner to give her lessons in quilling and trimming. And Mrs. Carlyle wrote kindly to Juliet and sent her a packet. So it went on with more places and more bothers, and more old ladies, and more interviews till Juliet wrote a novel, which a gentleman praised very highly, and Juliet told Miss Jewsbury that she was annoyed by another gentleman who followed her home from church; but still she was a very nice girl, and everybody spoke well of her until the year 1849, when suddenly, without any reason given, silence descends upon the last of the Mudies. It covers, one cannot doubt, another failure. The novel, the stiff old lady, the gentleman, the caps, the petticoats, the clear-starching—what was the cause of her downfall? Nothing is known. “The wretched stalking blockheads”, wrote Carlyle, “stalked fatefully, in spite of all that could be done and said, steadily downwards towards perdition and sank altogether out of view.” For all her endeavours Mrs. Carlyle had to admit that Mudieism was always a failure.

But Mudieism had unexpected results. Mudieism brought Jane and Geraldine together again. Jane could not deny that “the fluff of feathers” whom she had served up, as her way was, in so many a scornful phrase for Carlyle’s amusement, had “taken up the matter with an enthusiasm even surpassing my own”. She had grit in her as well as fluff. Thus when Geraldine sent her the manuscript of her first novel, Zoe, Mrs. Carlyle bestirred herself to find a publisher (“for”, she wrote, “what is to become of her when she is old without ties, without purposes?”) and with surprising success. Chapman & Hall at once agreed to publish the book, which, their reader reported, “had taken hold of him with a grasp of iron”. The book had been long on the way. Mrs. Carlyle herself had been consulted at various stages of its career. She had read the first sketch “with a feeling little short of terror! So much power of genius rushing so recklessly into unknown space.” But she had also been deeply impressed.

Geraldine in particular shows herself here a far more profound and daring speculator than ever I had fancied her. I do not believe there is a woman alive at the present day, not even Georges Sand herself, that could have written some of the best passages in this book … but they must not publish it—decency forbids!

There was, Mrs. Carlyle complained, an indecency or “want of reserve in the spiritual department”, which no respectable public would stand. Presumably Geraldine consented to make alterations, though she confessed that she “had no vocation for propriety as such”; the book was rewritten, and it appeared at last in February 1845. The usual buzz and conflict of opinion at once arose. Some were enthusiastic, others were shocked. The “old and young roués of the Reform Club almost go off into hysterics over—its indecency”. The publisher was a little alarmed; but the scandal helped the sale, and Geraldine became a lioness.

And now, of course, as one turns the pages of the three little yellowish volumes, one wonders what reason there was for approval or disapproval, what spasm of indignation or admiration scored that pencil mark, what mysterious emotion pressed violets, now black as ink, between the pages of the love scenes. Chapter after chapter glides amiably, fluently past. In a kind of haze we catch glimpses of an illegitimate girl called Zoe; of an enigmatic Roman Catholic priest called Everhard; of a castle in the country; of ladies lying on sky-blue sofas; of gentlemen reading aloud; of girls embroidering hearts in silk. There is a conflagration. There is an embrace in a wood. There is incessant conversation. There is a moment of terrific emotion when the priest exclaims, “Would that I had never been born!” and proceeds to sweep a letter from the Pope asking him to edit a translation of the principal works of the Fathers of the first four centuries and a parcel containing a gold chain from the University of Göttingen into a drawer because Zoe has shaken his faith. But what indecency there was pungent enough to shock the roués of the Reform Club, what genius there was brilliant enough to impress the shrewd intellect of Mrs. Carlyle, it is impossible to guess. Colours that were fresh as roses eighty years ago have faded to a feeble pink; nothing remains of all those scents and savours but a faint perfume of faded violets, of stale hair-oil, we know not which. What miracles, we exclaim, are within the power of a few years to accomplish! But even as we exclaim, we see, far away, a trace perhaps of what they meant. The passion, in so far as it issues from the lips of living people, is completely spent. The Zoes, the Clothildes, the Everhards moulder on their perches; but, nevertheless, there is somebody in the room with them; an irresponsible spirit, a daring and agile woman, if one considers that she is cumbered with crinoline and stays; an absurd sentimental creature, languishing, expatiating, but for all that still strangely alive. We catch a sentence now and then rapped out boldly, a thought subtly conceived. “How much better to do right without religion!” “Oh! if they really believed all they preach, how would any priest or preacher be able to sleep in his bed!” “Weakness is the only state for which there is no hope.” “To love rightly is the highest morality of which mankind is capable.” Then how she hated the “compacted, plausible theories of men”! And what is life? For what end was it given us? Such questions, such convictions, still hurtle past the heads of the stuffed figures mouldering on their perches. They are dead, but Geraldine Jewsbury herself still survives, independent, courageous, absurd, writing page after page without stopping to correct, and coming out with her views upon love, morality, religion, and the relations of the sexes, whoever may be within hearing, with a cigar between her lips.

Some time before the publication of Zoe, Mrs. Carlyle had forgotten, or overcome, her irritation with Geraldine, partly because she had worked so zealously in the cause of the Mudies, partly also because by Geraldine’s painstaking she was “almost over-persuaded back into my old illusion that she has some sort of strange, passionate … incomprehensible attraction towards me”. Not only was she drawn back into correspondence—after all her vows to the contrary she again stayed under the same roof with Geraldine, at Seaforth House near Liverpool, in July 1844. Not many days had passed before Mrs. Carlyle’s “illusion” about the strength of Geraldine’s affection for her proved to be no illusion but a monstrous fact. One morning there was some slight tiff between them: Geraldine sulked all day; at night Geraldine came to Mrs. Carlyle’s bedroom and made a scene which was “a revelation to me, not only of Geraldine, but of human nature! Such mad, lover-like jealousy on the part of one woman towards another it had never entered into my heart to conceive.” Mrs. Carlyle was angry and outraged and contemptuous. She saved up a full account of the scene to entertain her husband with. A few days later she turned upon Geraldine in public and sent the whole company into fits of laughter by saying, “I wondered she should expect me to behave decently to her after she had for a whole evening been making love before my very face to another man!” The trouncing must have been severe, the humiliation painful. But Geraldine was incorrigible. A year later she was again sulking and raging and declaring that she had a right to rage because “she loves me better than all the rest of the world”; and Mrs. Carlyle was getting up and saying, “Geraldine, until you can behave like a gentlewoman…” and leaving the room. And again there were tears and apologies and promises to reform.

Yet though Mrs. Carlyle scolded and jeered, though they were estranged, and though for a time they ceased to write to each other, still they always came together again. Geraldine, it is abundantly clear, felt that Jane was in every way wiser, better, stronger than she was. She depended on Jane. She needed Jane to keep her out of scrapes; for Jane never got into scrapes herself. But though Jane was so much wiser and cleverer than Geraldine, there were times when the foolish and irresponsible one of the two became the counsellor. Why, she asked, waste your time in mending old clothes? Why not work at something that will really employ your energies? Write, she advised her. For Jane, who was so profound, so far-seeing, could, Geraldine was convinced, write something that would help women in “their very complicated duties and difficulties”. She owed a duty to her sex. But, the bold woman proceeded, “do not go to Mr. Carlyle for sympathy, do not let him dash you with cold water. You must respect your own work, and your own motives”—a piece of advice that Jane, who was afraid to accept the dedication of Geraldine’s new novel The Half Sisters, lest Mr. Carlyle might object, would have done well to follow. The little creature was in some ways the bolder and the more independent of the two.

She had, moreover, a quality that Jane with all her brilliancy lacked—an element of poetry, a trace of the speculative imagination. She browsed upon old books and copied out romantic passages about the palm trees and cinnamon of Arabia and sent them to lie, incongruously enough, upon the breakfast table in Cheyne Row. Jane’s genius, of course, was the very opposite; it was positive, direct, and practical. Her imagination concentrated itself upon people. Her letters owe their incomparable brilliancy to the hawk-like swoop and descent of her mind upon facts. Nothing escapes her. She sees through clear water down to the rocks at the bottom. But the intangible eluded her; she dismissed the poetry of Keats with a sneer; something of the narrowness and something of the prudery of a Scottish country doctors daughter clung to her. Though infinitely the less masterly, Geraldine was sometimes the broader minded.

Such sympathies and antipathies bound the two women together with an elasticity that made for permanence. The tie between them could stretch and stretch indefinitely without breaking. Jane knew the extent of Geraldine’s folly; Geraldine had felt the full lash of Jane’s tongue. They had learnt to tolerate each other. Naturally, they quarrelled again; but their quarrels were different now; they were quarrels that were bound to be made up. And when after her brother’s marriage in 1854 Geraldine moved to London, it was to be near Mrs. Carlyle at Mrs. Carlyle’s own wish. The woman who in 1843 would never be a friend of hers again was now the most intimate friend she had in the world. She was to lodge two streets off; and perhaps two streets off was the right space to put between them. The emotional friendship was full of misunderstandings at a distance; it was intolerably exacting under the same roof. But when they lived round the corner their relationship broadened and simplified; it became a natural intercourse whose ruffles and whose calms were based upon the depths of intimacy. They went about together. They went to hear The Messiah; and, characteristically, Geraldine wept at the beauty of the music and Jane had much ado to prevent herself from shaking Geraldine for crying and from crying herself at the ugliness of the chorus women. They went to Norwood for a jaunt, and Geraldine left a silk handkerchief and an aluminium brooch (“a love token from Mr. Barlow”) in the hotel and a new silk parasol in the waiting-room. Also Jane noted with sardonic satisfaction that Geraldine, in an attempt at economy, bought two second-class tickets, while the cost of a return ticket first class was precisely the same.

Meanwhile Geraldine lay on the floor and generalised and speculated and tried to formulate some theory of life from her own tumultuous experience. “How loathsome” (her language was always apt to be strong—she knew that she “sinned against Jane’s notions of good taste” very often), how loathsome the position of women was in many ways! How she herself had been crippled and stunted! How her blood boiled in her at the power that men had over women! She would like to kick certain gentlemen—“the lying hypocritical beggars! Well, it’s no good swearing—only, I am angry and it eases my mind.”

And then her thoughts turned to Jane and herself and to the brilliant gifts—at any rate, Jane had brilliant gifts—which had borne so little visible result. Nevertheless, except when she was ill,

I do not think that either you or I are to be called failures. We are indications of a development of womanhood which as yet is not recognised. It has, so far, no ready-made channels to run in, but still we have looked and tried, and found that the present rules for women will not hold us—that something better and stronger is needed…. There are women to come after us, who will approach nearer the fullness of the measure of the stature of a woman’s nature. I regard myself as a mere faint indication, a rudiment of the idea, of certain higher qualities and possibilities that lie in women, and all the eccentricities and mistakes and miseries and absurdities I have made are only the consequences of an imperfect formation, an immature growth.

So she theorised, so she speculated; and Mrs. Carlyle listened, and laughed, and contradicted, no doubt, but with more of sympathy than of derision: she could have wished that Geraldine were more precise; she could have wished her to moderate her language. Carlyle might come in at any moment; and if there was one creature that Carlyle hated, it was a strong-minded woman of the George Sand species. Yet she could not deny that there was an element of truth in what Geraldine said; she had always thought that Geraldine “was born to spoil a horn or make a spoon”. Geraldine was no fool in spite of appearances.

But what Geraldine thought and said; how she spent her mornings; what she did in the long evenings of the London winter—all, in fact, that constituted her life at Markham Square—is but slightly and doubtfully known to us. For, fittingly enough, the bright light of Jane extinguished the paler and more flickering fire of Geraldine. She had no need to write to Jane any more. She was in and out of the house—now writing a letter for Jane because Jane’s fingers were swollen, now taking a letter to the post and forgetting, like the scatter-brained romantic creature she was, to post it. A crooning domestic sound like the purring of a kitten or the humming of a tea-kettle seems to rise, as we turn the pages of Mrs. Carlyle’s letters, from the intercourse of the two incompatible but deeply attached women. So the years passed. At length, on Saturday, 21st April 1866, Geraldine was to help Jane with a tea-party. Mr. Carlyle was in Scotland, and Mrs. Carlyle hoped to get through some necessary civilities to admirers in his absence. Geraldine was actually dressing for the occasion when Mr. Froude appeared suddenly at her house. He had just had a message from Cheyne Row to say that “something had happened to Mrs. Carlyle”. Geraldine flung on her cloak. They hastened together to St. George’s Hospital. There, writes Froude, they saw Mrs. Carlyle, beautifully dressed as usual,

as if she had sat upon the bed after leaving the brougham, and had fallen back upon it asleep…. The brilliant mockery, the sad softness with which the mockery alternated, both were alike gone. The features lay composed in a stern majestic calm…. [Geraldine] could not speak.

Nor indeed can we break that silence. It deepened. It became complete. Soon after Jane’s death she went to live at Sevenoaks. She lived there alone for twenty-two years. It is said that she lost her vivacity. She wrote no more books. Cancer attacked her and she suffered much. On her deathbed she began tearing up Jane’s letters, as Jane had wished, and she had destroyed all but one before she died. Thus, just as her life began in obscurity, so it ended in obscurity. We know her well only for a few years in the middle. But let us not be too sanguine about “knowing her well”. Intimacy is a difficult art, as Geraldine herself reminds us.

Oh, my dear [she wrote to Mrs. Carlyle], if you and I are drowned, or die, what would become of us if any superior person were to go and write our “life and errors”? What a precious mess a “truthful person” would go and make of us, and how very different to what we really are or were!

The echo of her mockery, ungrammatical, colloquial, but as usual with the ring of truth in it, reaches us from where she lies in Lady Morgan’s vault in the Brompton cemetery.

[Bookman, New York, February 1929]

[]

“Aurora Leigh”.

By one of those ironies of fashion that might have amused the Brownings themselves, it seems likely that they are now far better known in the flesh than they have ever been in the spirit. Passionate lovers, in curls and side-whiskers, oppressed, defiant, eloping—in this guise thousands of people must know and love the Brownings who have never read a line of their poetry. They have become two of the most conspicuous figures in that bright and animated company of authors who, thanks to our modern habit of writing memoirs and printing letters and sitting to be photographed, live in the flesh, not merely as of old in the word; are known by their hats, not merely by their poems. What damage the art of photography has inflicted upon the art of literature has yet to be reckoned. How far we are going to read a poet when we can read about a poet is a problem to lay before biographers. Meanwhile, nobody can deny the power of the Brownings to excite our sympathy and rouse our interest. “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship” is glanced at perhaps by two professors in American universities once a year; but we all know how Miss Barrett lay on her sofa; how she escaped from the dark house in Wimpole Street one September morning; how she met health and happiness, freedom, and Robert Browning in the church round the corner.

But fate has not been kind to Mrs. Browning as a writer. Nobody reads her, nobody discusses her, nobody troubles to put her in her place. One has only to compare her reputation with Christina Rossetti’s to trace her decline. Christina Rossetti mounts irresistibly to the first place among English women poets. Elizabeth, so much more loudly applauded during her lifetime, falls farther and farther behind. The primers dismiss her with contumely. Her importance, they say, “has now become merely historical. Neither education nor association with her husband ever succeeded in teaching her the value of words and a sense of form.” In short, the only place in the mansion of literature that is assigned her is downstairs in the servants’ quarters, where, in company with Mrs. Hemans, Eliza Cook, Jean Ingelow, Alexander Smith, Edwin Arnold, and Robert Montgomery, she bangs the crockery about and eats vast handfuls of peas on the point of her knife.

If, therefore, we take Aurora Leigh from the shelf it is not so much in order to read it as to muse with kindly condescension over this token of bygone fashion, as we toy with the fringes of our grandmothers’ mantles and muse over the alabaster models of the Taj Mahal which once adorned their drawing-room tables. But to the Victorians, undoubtedly, the book was very dear. Thirteen editions of Aurora Leigh had been demanded by the year 1873. And, to judge from the dedication, Mrs. Browning herself was not afraid to say that she set great store by it—“the most mature of my works”, she calls it, “and the one into which my highest convictions upon Life and Art have entered”. Her letters show that she had had the book in mind for many years. She was brooding over it when she first met Browning, and her intention with regard to it forms almost the first of those confidences about their work which the lovers delighted to share.

… my chief intention [she wrote] just now is the writing of a sort of novel-poem … running into the midst of our conventions, and rushing into drawing-rooms and the like, “where angels fear to tread”; and so, meeting face to face and without mask the Humanity of the age, and speaking the truth of it out plainly. That is my intention.

But for reasons which later become clear, she hoarded her intention throughout the ten astonishing years of escape and happiness; and when at last the book appeared in 1856 she might well feel that she had poured into it the best that she had to give. Perhaps the hoarding and the saturation which resulted have something to do with the surprise that awaits us. At any rate we cannot read the first twenty pages of Aurora Leigh without becoming aware that the Ancient Mariner who lingers, for unknown reasons, at the porch of one book and not of another has us by the hand, and makes us listen like a three years’ child while Mrs. Browning pours out in nine volumes of blank verse the story of Aurora Leigh. Speed and energy, forthrightness and complete self-confidence—these are the qualities that hold us enthralled. Floated off our feet by them, we learn how Aurora was the child of an Italian mother “whose rare blue eyes were shut from seeing her when she was scarcely four years old”. Her father was “an austere Englishman, Who, after a dry lifetime spent at home in college-learning, law and parish talk, Was flooded with a passion unaware”, but died too, and the child was sent back to England to be brought up by an aunt. The aunt, of the well-known family of the Leighs, stood upon the hall step of her country house dressed in black to welcome her. Her somewhat narrow forehead was braided tight with brown hair pricked with gray; she had a close, mild mouth; eyes of no colour; and cheeks like roses pressed in books, “Kept more for ruth than pleasure,—if past bloom, Past fading also”. The lady had lived a quiet life, exercising her Christian gifts upon knitting stockings and stitching petticoats “because we are of one flesh, after all, and need one flannel”. At her hand Aurora suffered the education that was thought proper for women. She learnt a little French, a little algebra; the internal laws of the Burmese empire; what navigable river joins itself to Lara; what census of the year five was taken at Klagenfurt; also how to draw nereids neatly draped, to spin glass, to stuff birds, and model flowers in wax. For the aunt liked a woman to be womanly. Of an evening she did cross-stitch and, owing to some mistake in her choice of silk, once embroidered a shepherdess with pink eyes. Under this torture of women’s education, the passionate Aurora exclaimed, certain women have died; others pine; a few who have, as Aurora had, “relations with the unseen”, survive and walk demurely, and are civil to their cousins and listen to the vicar and pour out tea. Aurora herself was blessed with a little room. It was green-papered, had a green carpet and there were green curtains to the bed, as if to match the insipid greenery of the English countryside. There she retired; there she read. “I had found the secret of a garret room Piled high with cases in my father’s name, Piled high, packed large, where, creeping in and out … like some small nimble mouse between the ribs of a mastodon” she read and read. The mouse indeed (it is the way with Mrs. Browning’s mice) took wings and soared, for “It is rather when We gloriously forget ourselves and plunge Soul-forward, headlong, into a book’s profound, Impassioned for its beauty and salt of truth—’Tis then we get the right good from a book”. And so she read and read, until her cousin Romney called to walk with her, or the painter Vincent Carrington, “whom men judge hardly as bee-bonneted Because he holds that paint a body well you paint a soul by implication”, tapped on the window.

This hasty abstract of the first volume of Aurora Leigh does it of course no sort of justice; but having gulped down the original much as Aurora herself advises, soul-forward, headlong, we find ourselves in a state where some attempt at the ordering of our multitudinous impressions becomes imperative. The first of these impressions and the most pervasive is the sense of the writer’s presence. Through the voice of Aurora the character, the circumstances, the idiosyncrasies of Elizabeth Barrett Browning ring in our ears. Mrs. Browning could no more conceal herself than she could control herself, a sign no doubt of imperfection in an artist, but a sign also that life has impinged upon art more than life should. Again and again in the pages we have read, Aurora the fictitious seems to be throwing light upon Elizabeth the actual. The idea of the poem, we must remember, came to her in the early forties when the connexion between a woman’s art and a woman’s life was unnaturally close, so that it is impossible for the most austere of critics not sometimes to touch the flesh when his eyes should be fixed upon the page. And as everybody knows, the life of Elizabeth Barrett was of a nature to affect the most authentic and individual of gifts. Her mother had died when she was a child; she had read profusely and privately; her favourite brother was drowned; her health broke down; she had been immured by the tyranny of her father in almost conventual seclusion in a bedroom in Wimpole Street. But instead of rehearsing the well-known facts, it is better to read in her own words her own account of the effect they had upon her.

I have lived only inwardly [she wrote] or with sorrow, for a strong emotion. Before this seclusion of my illness, I was secluded still, and there are few of the youngest women in the world who have not seen more, heard more, known more, of society, than I, who am scarcely to be called young now. I grew up in the country—I had no social opportunities, had my heart in books and poetry, and my experience in reveries. And so time passed and passed—and afterwards, when my illness came … and no prospect (as appeared at one time) of ever passing the threshold of one room again; why then, I turned to thinking with some bitterness … that I had stood blind in this temple I was about to leave—that I had seen no Human nature, that my brothers and sisters of the earth were names to me, that I had beheld no great mountain or river, nothing in fact…. And do you also know what a disadvantage this ignorance is to my art? Why, if I live on and yet do not escape from this seclusion, do you not perceive that I labour under signal disadvantages—that I am, in a manner as a blind poet? Certainly, there is compensation to a degree. I have had much of the inner life, and from the habit of self-consciousness and self-analysis, I make great guesses at Human nature in the main. But how willingly I would as a poet exchange some of this lumbering, ponderous, helpless knowledge of books, for some experience of life and man, for some …

She breaks off, with three little dots, and we may take advantage of her pause to turn once more to Aurora Leigh.

What damage had her life done her as a poet? A great one, we cannot deny. For it is clear, as we turn the pages of Aurora Leigh or of the Letters—one often echoes the other—that the mind which found its natural expression in this swift and chaotic poem about real men and women was not the mind to profit by solitude. A lyrical, a scholarly, a fastidious mind might have used seclusion and solitude to perfect its powers. Tennyson asked no better than to live with books in the heart of the country. But the mind of Elizabeth Barrett was lively and secular and satirical. She was no scholar. Books were to her not an end in themselves but a substitute for living. She raced through folios because she was forbidden to scamper on the grass. She wrestled with Aeschylus and Plato because it was out of the question that she should argue about politics with live men and women. Her favourite reading as an invalid was Balzac and George Sand and other “immortal improprieties” because “they kept the colour in my life to some degree”. Nothing is more striking when at last she broke the prison bars than the fervour with which she flung herself into the life of the moment. She loved to sit in a café and watch people passing; she loved the arguments, the politics, and the strife of the modern world. The past and its ruins, even the past of Italy and Italian ruins, interested her much less than the theories of Mr. Hume the medium, or the politics of Napoleon, Emperor of the French. Italian pictures, Greek poetry, roused in her a clumsy and conventional enthusiasm in strange contrast with the original independence of her mind when it applied itself to actual facts.

Such being her natural bent, it is not surprising that even in the depths of her sick-room her mind turned to modern life as a subject for poetry. She waited, wisely, until her escape had given her some measure of knowledge and proportion. But it cannot be doubted that the long years of seclusion had done her irreparable damage as an artist. She had lived shut off, guessing at what was outside, and inevitably magnifying what was within. The loss of Flush, the spaniel, affected her as the loss of a child might have affected another woman. The tap of ivy on the pane became the thrash of trees in a gale. Every sound was enlarged, every incident exaggerated, for the silence of the sick-room was profound and the monotony of Wimpole Street was intense. When at last she was able to “rush into drawing-rooms and the like and meet face to face without mask the Humanity of the age and speak the truth of it out plainly”, she was too weak to stand the shock. Ordinary daylight, current gossip, the usual traffic of human beings left her exhausted, ecstatic, and dazzled into a state where she saw so much and felt so much that she did not altogether know what she felt or what she saw.

Aurora Leigh, the novel-poem, is not, therefore, the masterpiece that it might have been. Rather it is a masterpiece in embryo; a work whose genius floats diffused and fluctuating in some pre-natal stage waiting the final stroke of creative power to bring it into being. Stimulating and boring, ungainly and eloquent, monstrous and exquisite, all by turns, it overwhelms and bewilders; but, nevertheless, it still commands our interest and inspires our respect. For it becomes clear as we read that, whatever Mrs. Browning’s faults, she was one of those rare writers who risk themselves adventurously and disinterestedly in an imaginative life which is independent of their private lives and demands to be considered apart from personalities. Her “intention” survives; the interest of her theory redeems much that is faulty in her practice. Abridged and simplified from Aurora’s argument in the fifth book, that theory runs something like this. The true work of poets, she said, is to present their own age, not Charlemagne’s. More passion takes place in drawing-rooms than at Roncesvalles with Roland and his knights. “To flinch from modern varnish, coat or flounce, Cry out for togas and the picturesque, Is fatal—foolish too.” For living art presents and records real life, and the only life we can truly know is our own. But what form, she asks, can a poem on modern life take? The drama is impossible, for only servile and docile plays have any chance of success. Moreover, what we (in 1846) have to say about life is not fit for “boards, actors, prompters, gaslight, and costume; our stage is now the soul itself”. What then can she do? The problem is difficult, performance is bound to fall short of endeavour; but she has at least wrung her life-blood on to every page of her book, and, for the rest “Let me think of forms less, and the external. Trust the spirit … Keep up the fire and leave the generous flames to shape themselves.” And so the fire blazed and the flames leapt high.

The desire to deal with modern life in poetry was not confined to Miss Barrett. Robert Browning said that he had had the same ambition all his life. Coventry Patmore’s “Angel in the House” and Clough’s “Bothie” were both attempts of the same kind and preceded Aurora Leigh by some years. It was natural enough. The novelists were dealing triumphantly with modern life in prose. Jane Eyre, Vanity Fair, David Copperfield, Richard Feverel all trod fast on each other’s heels between the years 1847 and 1860. The poets may well have felt, with Aurora Leigh, that modern life had an intensity and a meaning of its own. Why should these spoils fall solely into the laps of the prose writers? Why should the poet be forced back to the remoteness of Charlemagne and Roland, to the toga and the picturesque, when the humours and tragedies of village life, drawing-room life, club life, and street life all cried aloud for celebration? It was true that the old form in which poetry had dealt with life—the drama—was obsolete; but was there none other that could take its place? Mrs. Browning, convinced of the divinity of poetry, pondered, seized as much as she could of actual experience, and then at last threw down her challenge to the Brontës and the Thackerays in nine books of blank verse. It was in blank verse that she sang of Shoreditch and Kensington; of my aunt and the vicar; of Romney Leigh and Vincent Carrington; of Marian Erle and Lord Howe; of fashionable weddings and drab suburban streets, and bonnets and whiskers and four-wheeled cabs, and railway trains. The poets can treat of these things, she exclaimed, as well as of knights and dames, moats and drawbridges and castle courts. But can they? Let us see what happens to a poet when he poaches upon a novelist’s preserves and gives us not an epic or a lyric but the story of many lives that move and change and are inspired by the interests and passions that are ours in the middle of the reign of Queen Victoria.

In the first place there is the story; a tale has to be told; the poet must somehow convey to us the necessary information that his hero has been asked out to dinner. This is a statement that a novelist would convey as quietly and prosaically as possible; for example, “While I was kissing her glove, sadly enough, a note was brought saying that her father sent his regards and asked me to dine with them next day”. That is harmless. But the poet has to write:

While thus I grieved, and kissed her glove,

My man brought in her note to say,

Papa had bid her send his love,

And would I dine with them next day!

Which is absurd. The simple words have been made to strut and posture and take on an emphasis which makes them ridiculous. Then again, what will the poet do with dialogue? In modern life, as Mrs. Browning indicated when she said that our stage is now the soul, the tongue has superseded the sword. It is in talk that the high moments of life, the shock of character upon character, are defined. But poetry when it tries to follow the words on people’s lips is terribly impeded. Listen to Romney in a moment of high emotion talking to his old love Marian about the baby she has borne to another man:

May God so father me, as I do him,

And so forsake me, as I let him feel

He’s orphaned haply. Here I take the child

To share my cup, to slumber on my knee,

To play his loudest gambol at my foot,

To hold my finger in the public ways …

and so on. Romney, in short, rants and reels like any of those Elizabethan heroes whom Mrs. Browning had warned so imperiously out of her modern living-room. Blank verse has proved itself the most remorseless enemy of living speech. Talk tossed up on the surge and swing of the verse becomes high, rhetorical, impassioned; and as talk, since action is ruled out, must go on and on, the reader’s mind stiffens and glazes under the monotony of the rhythm. Following the lilt of her rhythm rather than the emotions of her characters, Mrs. Browning is swept on into generalization and declamation. Forced by the nature of her medium, she ignores the slighter, the subtler, the more hidden shades of emotion by which a novelist builds up touch by touch a character in prose. Change and development, the effect of one character upon another—all this is abandoned. The poem becomes one long soliloquy, and the only character that is known to us and the only story that is told us are the character and story of Aurora Leigh herself.

Thus, if Mrs. Browning meant by a novel-poem a book in which character is closely and subtly revealed, the relations of many hearts laid bare, and a story unfalteringly unfolded, she failed completely. But if she meant rather to give us a sense of life in general, of people who are unmistakably Victorian, wrestling with the problems of their own time, all brightened, intensified, and compacted by the fire of poetry, she succeeded. Aurora Leigh, with her passionate interest in social questions, her conflict as artist and woman, her longing for knowledge and freedom, is the true daughter of her age. Romney, too, is no less certainly a mid-Victorian gentleman of high ideals who has thought deeply about the social question, and has founded, unfortunately, a phalanstery in Shropshire. The aunt, the antimacassars, and the country house from which Aurora escapes are real enough to fetch high prices in the Tottenham Court Road at this moment. The broader aspects of what it felt like to be a Victorian are seized as surely and stamped as vividly upon us as in any novel by Trollope or Mrs. Gaskell.

And indeed if we compare the prose novel and the novel-poem the triumphs are by no means all to the credit of prose. As we rush through page after page of narrative in which a dozen scenes that the novelist would smooth out separately are pressed into one, in which pages of deliberate description are fused into a single line, we cannot help feeling that the poet has outpaced the prose writer. Her page is packed twice as full as his. Characters, too, if they are not shown in conflict but snipped off and summed up with something of the exaggeration of a caricaturist, have a heightened and symbolical significance which prose with its gradual approach cannot rival. The general aspect of things—market, sunset, church—have a brilliance and a continuity, owing to the compressions and elisions of poetry, which mock the prose writer and his slow accumulations of careful detail. For these reasons Aurora Leigh remains, with all its imperfections, a book that still lives and breathes and has its being. And when we think how still and cold the plays of Beddoes or of Sir Henry Taylor lie, in spite of all their beauty, and how seldom in our own day we disturb the repose of the classical dramas of Robert Bridges, we may suspect that Elizabeth Barrett was inspired by a flash of true genius when she rushed into the drawing-room and said that here, where we live and work, is the true place for the poet. At any rate, her courage was justified in her own case. Her bad taste, her tortured ingenuity, her floundering, scrambling, and confused impetuosity have space to spend themselves here without inflicting a deadly wound, while her ardour and abundance, her brilliant descriptive powers, her shrewd and caustic humour, infect us with her own enthusiasm. We laugh, we protest, we complain—it is absurd, it is impossible, we cannot tolerate this exaggeration a moment longer—but, nevertheless, we read to the end enthralled. What more can an author ask? But the best compliment that we can pay Aurora Leigh is that it makes us wonder why it has left no successors. Surely the street, the drawing-room, are promising subjects; modern life is worthy of the muse. But the rapid sketch that Elizabeth Barrett Browning threw off when she leapt from her couch and dashed into the drawing-room remains unfinished. The conservatism or the timidity of poets still leaves the chief spoils of modern life to the novelist. We have no novel-poem of the age of George the Fifth.

[Yale Review, June 1931]

[]

The Niece of an Earl.

There is an aspect of fiction of so delicate a nature that less has been said about it than its importance deserves. One is supposed to pass over class distinctions in silence; one person is supposed to be as well born as another; and yet English fiction is so steeped in the ups and downs of social rank that without them it would be unrecognizable. When Meredith, in The Case of General Ople and Lady Camper, remarks, “He sent word that he would wait on Lady Camper immediately, and betook himself forthwith to his toilette. She was the niece of an Earl”, all of British blood accept the statement unhesitatingly, and know that Meredith is right. A General in those circumstances would certainly have given his coat an extra brush. For though the General might have been, we are given to understand that he was not, Lady Camper’s social equal. He received the shock of her rank upon a naked surface. No earldom, baronetage, or knighthood protected him. He was an English gentleman merely, and a poor one at that. Therefore, to British readers even now it seems unquestionably fitting that he should “betake himself to his toilette” before appearing in the lady’s presence.

It is useless to suppose that social distinctions have vanished. Each may pretend that he knows no such restrictions, and that the compartment in which he lives allows him the run of the world. But it is an illusion. The idlest stroller down summer streets may see for himself the charwoman’s shawl shouldering its way among the silk wraps of the successful; he sees shop-girls pressing their noses against the plate glass of motor-cars; he sees radiant youth and august age waiting their summons within to be admitted to the presence of King George. There is no animosity, perhaps, but there is no communication. We are enclosed, and separate, and cut off. Directly we see ourselves in the looking-glass of fiction we know that this is so. The novelist, and the English novelist in particular, knows and delights, it seems, to know that Society is a nest of glass boxes one separate from another, each housing a group with special habits and qualities of its own. He knows that there are Earls and that Earls have nieces; he knows that there are Generals and that Generals brush their coats before they visit the nieces of Earls. But this is only the ABC of what he knows. For in a few short pages, Meredith makes us aware not only that Earls have nieces, but that Generals have cousins; that the cousins have friends; that the friends have cooks; that the cooks have husbands, and that the husbands of the cooks of the friends of the cousins of the Generals are carpenters. Each of these people lives in a glass box of his own, and has peculiarities of which the novelist must take account. What appears superficially to be the vast equality of the middle classes is, in truth, nothing of the sort. All through the social mass run curious veins and streakings separating man from man and woman from woman; mysterious prerogatives and disabilities too ethereal to be distinguished by anything so crude as a title impede and disorder the great business of human intercourse. And when we have threaded our way carefully through all these grades from the niece of the Earl to the friend of the cousin of the General, we are still faced with an abyss; a gulf yawns before us; on the other side are the working classes. The writer of perfect judgement and taste, like Jane Austen, does no more than glance across the gulf; she restricts herself to her own special class and finds infinite shades within it. But for the brisk, inquisitive, combative writer like Meredith, the temptation to explore is irresistible. He runs up and down the social scale; he chimes one note against another; he insists that the Earl and the cook, the General and the farmer shall speak up for themselves and play their part in the extremely complicated comedy of English civilized life.

It was natural that he should attempt it. A writer touched by the comic spirit relishes these distinctions keenly; they give him something to take hold of; something to make play with. English fiction without the nieces of Earls and the cousins of Generals would be an arid waste. It would resemble Russian fiction. It would have to fall back upon the immensity of the soul and upon the brotherhood of man. Like Russian fiction, it would lack comedy. But while we realize the immense debt that we owe the Earl’s niece and the General’s cousin, we doubt sometimes whether the pleasure we get from the play of satire on these broken edges is altogether worth the price we pay. For the price is a high one. The strain upon a novelist is tremendous. In two short stories Meredith gallantly attempts to bridge all gulfs, and to take half a dozen different levels in his stride. Now he speaks as an Earl’s niece; now as a carpenter’s wife. It cannot be said that his daring is altogether successful. One has a feeling (perhaps it is unfounded) that the blood of the niece of an Earl is not quite so tart and sharp as he would have it. Aristocracy is not, perhaps, so consistently high and brusque and eccentric as, from his angle, he would represent it. Yet his great people are more successful than his humble. His cooks are too ripe and rotund; his farmers too ruddy and earthy. He overdoes the pith and the sap; the fist-shaking and the thigh-slapping. He has got too far from them to write of them with ease.

It seems, therefore, that the novelist, and the English novelist in particular, suffers from a disability which affects no other artist to the same extent. His work is influenced by his birth. He is fated to know intimately, and so to describe with understanding, only those who are of his own social rank. He cannot escape from the box in which he has been bred. A bird’s-eye view of fiction shows us no gentlemen in Dickens; no working men in Thackeray. One hesitates to call Jane Eyre a lady. The Elizabeths and the Emmas of Miss Austen could not possibly be taken for anything else. It is vain to look for dukes or for dustmen—we doubt that such extremes are to be found anywhere in fiction. We are, therefore, brought to the melancholy and tantalizing conclusion not only that novels are poorer than they might be, but that we are very largely prevented—for after all, the novelists are the great interpreters—from knowing what is happening either in the heights of Society or in its depths. There is practically no evidence available by which we can guess at the feelings of the highest in the land. What does a King feel? What does a Duke think? We cannot say. For the highest in the land have seldom written at all, and have never written about themselves. We shall never know what the Court of Louis XIV looked like to Louis XIV himself. It seems likely indeed that the English aristocracy will pass out of existence, or be merged with the common people, without leaving any true picture of themselves behind.

But our ignorance of the aristocracy is nothing compared with our ignorance of the working classes. At all times the great families of England and France have delighted to have famous men at their tables, and thus the Thackerays and the Disraelis and the Prousts have been familiar enough with the cut and fashion of aristocratic life to write about it with authority. Unfortunately, however, life is so framed that literary success invariably means a rise, never a fall, and seldom, what is far more desirable, a spread in the social scale. The rising novelist is never pestered to come to gin and winkles with the plumber and his wife. His books never bring him into touch with the cat’s-meat man, or start a correspondence with the old lady who sells matches and bootlaces by the gate of the British Museum. He becomes rich; he becomes respectable; he buys an evening suit and dines with peers. Therefore, the later works of successful novelists show, if anything, a slight rise in the social scale. We tend to get more and more portraits of the successful and the distinguished. On the other hand, the old rat-catchers and ostlers of Shakespeare’s day are shuffled altogether off the scene, or become, what is far more offensive, objects of pity, examples of curiosity. They serve to show up the rich. They serve to point the evils of the social system. They are no longer, as they used to be when Chaucer wrote, simply themselves. For it is impossible, it would seem, for working men to write in their own language about their own lives. Such education as the act of writing implies at once makes them self-conscious, or class-conscious, or removes them from their own class. That anonymity, in the shadow of which writers write most happily, is the prerogative of the middle class alone. It is from the middle class that writers spring, because it is in the middle class only that the practice of writing is as natural and habitual as hoeing a field or building a house. Thus it must have been harder for Byron to be a poet than Keats; and it is as impossible to imagine that a Duke could be a great novelist as that Paradise Lost could be written by a man behind a counter.

But things change; class distinctions were not always so hard and fast as they have now become. The Elizabethan age was far more elastic in this respect than our own; we, on the other hand, are far less hide-bound than the Victorians. Thus it may well be that we are on the edge of a greater change than any the world has yet known. In another century or so, none of these distinctions may hold good. The Duke and the agricultural labourer as we know them now may have died out as completely as the bustard and the wild cat. Only natural differences such as those of brain and character will serve to distinguish us. General Ople (if there are still Generals) will visit the niece (if there are still nieces) of the Earl (if there are still Earls) without brushing his coat (if there are still coats). But what will happen to English fiction when it has come to pass that there are neither Generals, nieces, Earls, nor coats, we cannot imagine. It may change its character so that we no longer know it. It may become extinct. Novels may be written as seldom and as unsuccessfully by our descendants as the poetic drama by ourselves. The art of a truly democratic age will be—what?

[Life And Letters, October 1928]

[]

George Gissing.

“Do you know there are men in London who go the round of the streets selling paraffin oil?” wrote George Gissing in the year 1880, and the phrase because it is Gissing’s calls up a world of fog and four-wheelers, of slatternly landladies, of struggling men of letters, of gnawing domestic misery, of gloomy back streets, and ignoble yellow chapels; but also, above this misery, we see tree-crowned heights, the columns of the Parthenon, and the hills of Rome. For Gissing is one of those imperfect novelists through whose books one sees the life of the author faintly covered by the lives of fictitious people. With such writers we establish a personal rather than an artistic relationship. We approach them through their lives as much as through their work, and when we take up Gissing’s letters, which have character, but little wit and no brilliance to illumine them, we feel that we are filling in a design which we began to trace out when we read Demos and New Grub Street and The Nether World.

Yet here, too, there are gaps in plenty, and many dark places left unlit. Much information has been kept back, many facts necessarily omitted. The Gissings were poor, and their father died when they were children; there were many of them, and they had to scrape together what education they could get. George, his sister said, had a passion for learning. He would rush off to school with a sharp herring bone in his throat for fear of missing his lesson. He would copy out from a little book called That’s It the astonishing number of eggs that the tench lays and the sole lays and the carp lays, “because I think it is a fact worthy of attention”. She remembers his “overwhelming veneration” for intellect, and how patiently, sitting beside her, the tall boy with the high white forehead and the short-sighted eyes would help her with her Latin, “giving the same explanation time after time without the least sign of impatience”.

Partly because he reverenced facts and had no faculty it seems (his language is meagre and unmetaphorical) for impressions, it is doubtful whether his choice of a novelist’s career was a happy one. There was the whole world, with its history and its literature, inviting him to haul it into his mind; he was eager; he was intellectual; yet he must sit down in hired rooms and spin novels about “earnest young people striving for improvement in, as it were, the dawn of a new phase of our civilization”.

But the art of fiction is infinitely accommodating, and it was quite ready about the year 1880 to accept into its ranks a writer who wished to be the “mouthpiece of the advanced Radical Party”, who was determined to show in his novels the ghastly condition of the poor and the hideous injustice of society. The art of fiction was ready, that is, to agree that such books were novels; but it was doubtful if such novels would be read. Smith Elder’s reader summed up the situation tersely enough. Mr. Gissing’s novel, he wrote, “is too painful to please the ordinary novel reader, and treats of scenes that can never attract the subscribers to Mr. Mudie’s Library”. So, dining off lentils and hearing the men cry paraffin for sale in the streets of Islington, Gissing paid for the publication himself. It was then that he formed the habit of getting up at five in the morning in order to tramp half across London and coach Mr. M. before breakfast. Often enough Mr. M. sent down word that he was already engaged, and then another page was added to the dismal chronicle of life in modern Grub Street—we are faced by another of those problems with which literature is sown so thick. The writer has dined upon lentils; he gets up at five; he walks across London; he finds Mr. M. still in bed, whereupon he stands forth as the champion of life as it is, and proclaims that ugliness is truth, truth ugliness, and that is all we know and all we need to know. But there are signs that the novel resents such treatment. To use a burning consciousness of one’s own misery, of the shackles that cut one’s own limbs, to quicken one’s sense of life in general, as Dickens did, to shape out of the murk which has surrounded one’s childhood some resplendent figure such as Micawber or Mrs. Gamp, is admirable: but to use personal suffering to rivet the reader’s sympathy and curiosity upon your private case is disastrous. Imagination is at its freest when it is most generalized; it loses something of its sweep and power, it becomes petty and personal, when it is limited to the consideration of a particular case calling for sympathy.

At the same time the sympathy which identifies the author with his hero is a passion of great intensity; it makes the pages fly; it lends what has perhaps little merit artistically another and momentarily perhaps a keener edge. Biffen and Reardon had, we say to ourselves, bread and butter and sardines for supper; so had Gissing; Biffen’s overcoat had been pawned, and so had Gissing’s; Reardon could not write on Sunday; no more could Gissing. We forget whether it was Reardon who loved cats or Gissing who loved barrel organs. Certainly both Reardon and Gissing bought their copies of Gibbon at a second-hand bookstall, and lugged the volumes home one by one through the fog. So we go on capping these resemblances, and each time we succeed, a little glow of satisfaction comes over us, as if novel-reading were a game of skill in which the puzzle set us is to find the face of the writer.

We know Gissing thus as we do not know Hardy or George Eliot. Where the great novelist flows in and out of his characters and bathes them in an element which seems to be common to us all, Gissing remains solitary, self-centred, apart. His is one of those sharp lights beyond whose edges all is vapour and phantom. But mixed with this sharp light is one ray of singular penetration. With all his narrowness of outlook and meagreness of sensibility, Gissing is one of the extremely rare novelists who believes in the power of the mind, who makes his people think. They are thus differently poised from the majority of fictitious men and women. The awful hierarchy of the passions is slightly displaced. Social snobbery does not exist; money is desired almost entirely to buy bread and butter; love itself takes a second place. But the brain works, and that alone is enough to give us a sense of freedom. For to think is to become complex; it is to overflow boundaries, to cease to be a “character”, to merge one’s private life in the life of politics or art or ideas, to have relationships based partly on them, and not on sexual desire alone. The impersonal side of life is given its due place in the scheme. “Why don’t people write about the really important things of life?” Gissing makes one of his characters exclaim, and at the unexpected cry the horrid burden of fiction begins to slip from the shoulders. Is it possible that we are going to talk of other things besides falling in love, important though that is, and going to dinner with Duchesses, fascinating though that is? Here in Gissing is a gleam of recognition that Darwin had lived, that science was developing, that people read books and look at pictures, that once upon a time there was such a place as Greece. It is the consciousness of these things that makes his books such painful reading; it was this that made it impossible for them to “attract the subscribers to Mr. Mudie’s Library”. They owe their peculiar grimness to the fact that the people who suffer most are capable of making their suffering part of a reasoned view of life. The thought endures when the feeling has gone. Their unhappiness represents something more lasting than a personal reverse; it becomes part of a view of life. Hence when we have finished one of Gissing’s novels we have taken away not a character, nor an incident, but the comment of a thoughtful man upon life as life seemed to him.

But because Gissing was always thinking, he was always changing. In that lies much of his interest for us. As a young man he had thought that he would write books to show up the “hideous injustice of our whole system of society”. Later his views changed; either the task was impossible, or other tastes were tugging him in a different direction. He came to think, as he believed finally, that “the only thing known to us of absolute value is artistic perfection … the works of the artist … remain sources of health to the world”. So that if one wishes to better the world one must, paradoxically enough, withdraw and spend more and more time fashioning one’s sentences to perfection in solitude. Writing, Gissing thought, is a task of the utmost difficulty; perhaps at the end of his life he might be able “to manage a page that is decently grammatical and fairly harmonious”. There are moments when he succeeded splendidly. For example, he is describing a cemetery in the East End of London:

Here on the waste limits of that dread east, to wander among tombs is to go hand-inhand with the stark and eyeless emblems of mortality; the spirit fails beneath the cold burden of ignoble destiny. Here lie those who were born for toil; who, when toil has worn them to the uttermost, have but to yield their useless breath and pass into oblivion. For them is no day, only the brief twilight of a winter’s sky between the former and the latter night. For them no aspiration; for them no hope of memory in the dust; their very children are wearied into forgetfulness. Indistinguishable units in the vast throng that labours but to support life, the name of each, father, mother, child, is but a dumb cry for the warmth and love of which fate so stinted them. The wind wails above their narrow tenements; the sandy soil, soaking in the rain as soon as it has fallen, is a symbol of the great world which absorbs their toil and straight way blots their being.

Again and again such passages of description stand out like stone slabs, shaped and solid, among the untidy litter with which the pages of fiction are strewn.

Gissing, indeed, never ceased to educate himself. While the Baker Street trains hissed their steam under his window, and the lodger downstairs blew his room out, and the landlady was insolent, and the grocer refused to send the sugar so that he had to fetch it himself, and the fog burnt his throat and he caught cold and never spoke to anybody for three weeks, yet must drive his pen through page after page and vacillated miserably from one domestic disaster to another—while all this went on with a dreary monotony, for which he could only blame the weakness of his own character, the columns of the Parthenon, the hills of Rome still rose above the fogs and the fried-fish shops of the Euston Road. He was determined to visit Greece and Rome. He actually set foot in Athens; he saw Rome; he read his Thucydides in Sicily before he died. Life was changing round him; his comment upon life was changing too. Perhaps the old sordidity, the fog and the paraffin, and the drunken landlady, was not the only reality; ugliness is not the whole truth; there is an element of beauty in the world. The past, with its literature and its civilization, solidifies the present. At any rate his books in future were to be about Rome in the time of Totila, not about Islington in the time of Queen Victoria. He was reaching some point in his perpetual thinking where “one has to distinguish between two forms of intelligence”; one cannot venerate the intellect only. But before he could mark down the spot he had reached on the map of thought, he, who had shared so many of his characters’ experiences, shared, too, the death he had given to Edwin Reardon. “Patience, patience”, he said to the friend who stood by him as he died—an imperfect novelist, but a highly educated man.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Feb 26, 1927]

[]

The Novels of George Meredith.

Twenty years ago [Written in January, 1928] the reputation of George Meredith was at its height. His novels had won their way to celebrity through all sorts of difficulties, and their fame was all the brighter and the more singular for what it had subdued. Then, too, it was generally discovered that the maker of these splendid books was himself a splendid old man. Visitors who went down to Box Hill reported that they were thrilled as they walked up the drive of the little suburban house by the sound of a voice booming and reverberating within. The novelist, seated among the usual knick-knacks of the drawing-room, was like the bust of Euripides to look at. Age had worn and sharpened the fine features, but the nose was still acute, the blue eyes still keen and ironical. Though he had sunk immobile into an arm-chair, his aspect was still vigorous and alert. It was true that he was almost stone-deaf, but this was the least of afflictions to one who was scarcely able to keep pace with the rapidity of his own ideas. Since he could not hear what was said to him, he could give himself wholeheartedly to the delights of soliloquy. It did not much matter, perhaps, whether his audience was cultivated or simple. Compliments that would have flattered a duchess were presented with equal ceremony to a child. To neither could he speak the simple language of daily life. But all the time this highly wrought, artificial conversation, with its crystallized phrases and its high-piled metaphors, moved and tossed on a current of laughter. His laugh curled round his sentences as if he himself enjoyed their humorous exaggeration. The master of language was splashing and diving in his element of words. So the legend grew; and the fame of George Meredith, who sat with the head of a Greek poet on his shoulders in a suburban villa beneath Box Hill, pouring out poetry and sarcasm and wisdom in a voice that could be heard almost on the high road, made his fascinating and brilliant books seem more fascinating and brilliant still.

But that is twenty years ago. His fame as a talker is necessarily dimmed, and his fame as a writer seems also under a cloud. On none of his successors is his influence now marked. When one of them whose own work has given him the right to be heard with respect chances to speak his mind on the subject, it is not flattering.

Meredith [writes Mr. Forster in his Aspects of the Novel] is not the great name he was twenty years ago…. His philosophy has not worn well. His heavy attacks on sentimentality—they bore the present generation…. When he gets serious and noble-minded there is a strident overtone, a bullying that becomes distressing…. What with the faking, what with the preaching, which was never agreeable and is now said to be hollow, and what with the home counties posing as the universe, it is no wonder Meredith now lies in the trough.

The criticism is not, of course, intended to be a finished estimate; but in its conversational sincerity it condenses accurately enough what is in the air when Meredith is mentioned. No, the general conclusion would seem to be, Meredith has not worn well. But the value of centenaries lies in the occasion they offer us for solidifying such airy impressions. Talk, mixed with half-rubbed-out memories, forms a mist by degrees through which we scarcely see plain. To open the books again, to try to read them as if for the first time, to try to free them from the rubbish of reputation and accident—that, perhaps, is the most acceptable present we can offer to a writer on his hundredth birthday.

And since the first novel is always apt to be an unguarded one, where the author displays his gifts without knowing how to dispose of them to the best advantage, we may do well to open Richard Feverel first. It needs no great sagacity to see that the writer is a novice at his task. The style is extremely uneven. Now he twists himself into iron knots; now he lies flat as a pancake. He seems to be of two minds as to his intention. Ironic comment alternates with long-winded narrative. He vacillates from one attitude to another. Indeed, the whole fabric seems to rock a little insecurely. The baronet wrapped in a cloak; the county family; the ancestral home; the uncles mouthing epigrams in the dining-room; the great ladies flaunting and swimming; the jolly farmers slapping their thighs: all liberally if spasmodically sprinkled with dried aphorisms from a pepper-pot called the Pilgrim’s Scrip—what an odd conglomeration it is! But the oddity is not on the surface; it is not merely that whiskers and bonnets have gone out of fashion: it lies deeper, in Meredith’s intention, in what he wishes to bring to pass. He has been, it is plain, at great pains to destroy the conventional form of the novel. He makes no attempt to preserve the sober reality of Trollope and Jane Austen; he has destroyed all the usual staircases by which we have learnt to climb. And what is done so deliberately is done with a purpose. This defiance of the ordinary, these airs and graces, the formality of the dialogue with its Sirs and Madams are all there to create an atmosphere that is unlike that of daily life, to prepare the way for a new and an original sense of the human scene. Peacock, from whom Meredith learnt so much, is equally arbitrary, but the virtue of the assumptions he asks us to make is proved by the fact that we accept Mr. Skionar and the rest with natural delight. Meredith’s characters in Richard Feverel, on the other hand, are at odds with their surroundings. We at once exclaim how unreal they are, how artificial, how impossible. The baronet and the butler, the hero and the heroine, the good woman and the bad woman are mere types of baronets and butlers, good women and bad. For what reason, then, has he sacrificed the substantial advantages of realistic common sense—the staircase and the stucco? Because, it becomes clear as we read, he possessed a keen sense not of the complexity of character, but of the splendour of a scene. One after another in this first book he creates a scene to which we can attach abstract names—Youth, The Birth of Love, The Power of Nature. We are galloped to them over every obstacle on the pounding hoofs of rhapsodical prose.

Away with Systems! Away with a corrupt World! Let us breathe the air of the Enchanted Island! Golden lie the meadows; golden run the streams; red gold is on the pine stems.

We forget that Richard is Richard and that Lucy is Lucy; they are youth; the world runs molten gold. The writer is a rhapsodist, a poet then; but we have not yet exhausted all the elements in this first novel. We have to reckon with the author himself. He has a mind stuffed with ideas, hungry for argument. His boys and girls may spend their time picking daisies in the meadows, but they breathe, however unconsciously, an air bristling with intellectual question and comment. On a dozen occasions these incongruous elements strain and threaten to break apart. The book is cracked through and through with those fissures which come when the author seems to be of twenty minds at the same time. Yet it succeeds in holding miraculously together, not certainly by the depths and originality of its character drawing but by the vigour of its intellectual power and by its lyrical intensity.

We are left, then, with our curiosity aroused. Let him write another book or two; get into his stride; control his crudities: and we will open Harry Richmond and see what has happened now. Of all the things that might have happened this surely is the strangest. All trace of immaturity is gone; but with it every trace of the uneasy adventurous mind has gone too. The story bowls smoothly along the road which Dickens has already trodden of autobiographical narrative. It is a boy speaking, a boy thinking, a boy adventuring. For that reason, no doubt, the author has curbed his redundance and pruned his speech. The style is the most rapid possible. It runs smooth, without a kink in it. Stevenson, one feels, must have learnt much from this supple narrative, with its precise adroit phrases, its exact quick glance at visible things.

Plunged among dark green leaves, smelling wood-smoke, at night; at morning waking up, and the world alight, and you standing high, and marking the hills where you will see the next morning and the next, morning after morning, and one morning the dearest person in the world surprising you just before you wake: I thought this a heavenly pleasure.

It goes gallantly, but a little self-consciously. He hears himself talking. Doubts begin to rise and hover and settle at last (as in Richard Feverel) upon the human figures. These boys are no more real boys than the sample apple which is laid on top of the basket is a real apple. They are too simple, too gallant, too adventurous to be of the same unequal breed as David Copperfield, for example. They are sample boys, novelist’s specimens; and again we encounter the extreme conventionality of Meredith’s mind where we found it, to our surprise, before. With all his boldness (and there is no risk that he will not run with probability) there are a dozen occasions on which a reach-me-down character will satisfy him well enough. But just as we are thinking that the young gentlemen are altogether too pat, and the adventures which befall them altogether too slick, the shallow bath of illusion closes over our heads and we sink with Richmond Roy and the Princess Ottilia into the world of fantasy and romance, where all holds together and we are able to put our imagination at the writer’s service without reserve. That such surrender is above all things delightful: that it adds spring-heels to our boots: that it fires the cold scepticism out of us and makes the world glow in lucid transparency before our eyes, needs no showing, as it certainly submits to no analysis. That Meredith can induce such moments proves him possessed of an extraordinary power. Yet it is a capricious power and highly intermittent. For pages all is effort and agony; phrase after phrase is struck and no light comes. Then, just as we are about to drop the book, the rocket roars into the air; the whole scene flashes into light; and the book, years after, is recalled by that sudden splendour.

If, then, this intermittent brilliancy is Meredith’s characteristic excellence, it is worth while to look into it more closely. And perhaps the first thing that we shall discover is that the scenes which catch the eye and remain in memory are static; they are illuminations, not discoveries; they do not improve our knowledge of the characters. It is significant that Richard and Lucy, Harry and Ottilia, Clara and Vernon, Beauchamp and Renée are presented in carefully appropriate surroundings—on board a yacht, under a flowering cherry tree, upon some river-bank, so that the landscape always makes part of the emotion. The sea or the sky or the wood is brought forward to symbolize what the human beings are feeling or looking.

The sky was bronze, a vast furnace dome. The folds of light and shadow everywhere were satin rich. That afternoon the bee hummed of thunder and refreshed the ear.

That is a description of a state of mind.

These winter mornings are divine. They move on noiselessly. The earth is still as if waiting. A wren warbles, and flits through the lank, drenched branches; hillside opens green; everywhere is mist, everywhere expectancy.

That is a description of a woman’s face. But only some states of mind and some expressions of face can be described in imagery—only those which are so highly wrought as to be simple and, for that reason, will not submit to analysis. This is a limitation; for though we may be able to see these people, very brilliantly, in a moment of illumination, they do not change or grow; the light sinks and leaves us in darkness. We have no such intuitive knowledge of Meredith’s characters as we have of Stendhal’s, Tchekov’s, Jane Austen’s. Indeed, our knowledge of such characters is so intimate that we can almost dispense with “great scenes” altogether. Some of the most emotional scenes in fiction are the quietest. We have been wrought upon by nine hundred and ninety-nine little touches; the thousandth, when it comes, is as slight as the others, but the effect is prodigious. But with Meredith there are no touches; there are hammer-strokes only, so that our knowledge of his characters is partial, spasmodic, and intermittent.

Meredith, then, is not among the great psychologists who feel their way, anonymously and patiently, in and out of the fibres of the mind and make one character differ minutely and completely from another. He is among the poets who identify the character with the passion or with the idea; who symbolize and make abstract. And yet—here lay his difficulty perhaps—he was not a poet-novelist wholly and completely as Emily Brontë was a poet-novelist. He did not steep the world in one mood. His mind was too self-conscious, and too sophisticated to remain lyrical for long. He does not sing only; he dissects. Even in his most lyrical scenes a sneer curls its lash round the phrases and laughs at their extravagance. And as we read on, we shall find that the comic spirit, when it is allowed to dominate the scene, licked the world to a very different shape. The Egoist at once modifies our theory that Meredith is pre-eminently the master of great scenes. Here there is none of that precipitate hurry that has rushed us over obstacles to the summit of one emotional peak after another. The case is one that needs argument; argument needs logic; Sir Willoughby, “our original male in giant form”, is turned slowly round before a steady fire of scrutiny and criticism which allows no twitch on the victim’s part to escape it. That the victim is a wax model and not entirely living flesh and blood is perhaps true. At the same time Meredith pays us a supreme compliment to which as novel-readers we are little accustomed. We are civilized people, he seems to say, watching the comedy of human relations together. Human relations are of profound interest. Men and women are not cats and monkeys, but beings of a larger growth and of a greater range. He imagines us capable of disinterested curiosity in the behaviour of our kind. This is so rare a compliment from a novelist to his reader that we are at first bewildered and then delighted. Indeed his comic spirit is a far more penetrating goddess than his lyrical. It is she who cuts a clear path through the brambles of his manner; she who surprises us again and again by the depth of her observations; she who creates the dignity, the seriousness, and the vitality of Meredith’s world. Had Meredith, one is tempted to reflect, lived in an age or in a country where comedy was the rule, he might never have contracted those airs of intellectual superiority, that manner of oracular solemnity which it is, as he points out, the use of the comic spirit to correct.

But in many ways the age—if we can judge so amorphous a shape—was hostile to Meredith, or, to speak more accurately, was hostile to his success with the age we now live in-the year 1928. His teaching seems now too strident and too optimistic and too shallow. It obtrudes; and when philosophy is not consumed in a novel, when we can underline this phrase with a pencil, and cut out that exhortation with a pair of scissors and paste the whole into a system, it is safe to say that there is something wrong with the philosophy or with the novel or with both. Above all, his teaching is too insistent. He cannot, even to hear the profoundest secret, suppress his own opinion. And there is nothing that characters in fiction resent more. If, they seem to argue, we have been called into existence merely to express Mr. Meredith’s views upon the universe, we would rather not exist at all. Thereupon they die; and a novel that is full of dead characters, even though it is also full of profound wisdom and exalted teaching, is not achieving its aim as a novel. But here we reach another point upon which the present age may be inclined to have more sympathy with Meredith. When he wrote, in the seventies and eighties of the last century, the novel had reached a stage where it could only exist by moving onward. It is a possible contention that after those two perfect novels, Pride and Prejudice and The Small House at Allington, English fiction had to escape from the dominion of that perfection, as English poetry had to escape from the perfection of Tennyson. George Eliot, Meredith, and Hardy were all imperfect novelists largely because they insisted upon introducing qualities, of thought and of poetry, that are perhaps incompatible with fiction at its most perfect. On the other hand, if fiction had remained what it was to Jane Austen and Trollope, fiction would by this time be dead. Thus Meredith deserves our gratitude and excites our interest as a great innovator. Many of our doubts about him and much of our inability to frame any definite opinion of his work comes from the fact that it is experimental and thus contains elements that do not fuse harmoniously—the qualities are at odds: the one quality which binds and concentrates has been omitted. To read Meredith, then, to our greatest advantage we must make certain allowances and relax certain standards. We must not expect the perfect quietude of a traditional style nor the triumphs of a patient and pedestrian psychology. On the other hand, his claim, “My method has been to prepare my readers for a crucial exhibition of the personae, and then to give the scene in the fullest of their blood and brain under stress of a fierce situation”, is frequently justified. Scene after scene rises on the mind’s eye with a flare of fiery intensity. If we are irritated by the dancing-master dandyism which made him write “gave his lungs full play” instead of laughed, or “tasted the swift intricacies of the needle” instead of sewed, we must remember that such phrases prepare the way for the “fierce situations”. Meredith is creating the atmosphere from which we shall pass naturally into a highly pitched state of emotion. Where the realistic novelist, like Trollope, lapses into flatness and dullness, the lyrical novelist, like Meredith, becomes meretricious and false; and such falsity is, of course, not only much more glaring than flatness, but it is a greater crime against the phlegmatic nature of prose fiction. Perhaps Meredith had been well advised if he had abjured the novel altogether and kept himself wholly to poetry. Yet we have to remind ourselves that the fault may be ours. Our prolonged diet upon Russian fiction, rendered neutral and negative in translation, our absorption in the convolutions of psychological Frenchmen, may have led us to forget that the English language is naturally exuberant, and the English character full of humours and eccentricities. Meredith’s flamboyancy has a great ancestry behind it; we cannot avoid all memory of Shakespeare.

When such questions and qualifications crowd upon us as we read, the fact may be taken to prove that we are neither near enough to be under his spell nor far enough to see him in proportion. Thus the attempt to pronounce a finished estimate is even more illusive than usual. But we can testify even now that to read Meredith is to be conscious of a packed and muscular mind; of a voice booming and reverberating with its own unmistakable accent even though the partition between us is too thick for us to hear what he says distinctly. Still, as we read we feel that we are in the presence of a Greek god though he is surrounded by the innumerable ornaments of a suburban drawing-room; who talks brilliantly, even if he is deaf to the lower tones of the human voice; who, if he is rigid and immobile, is yet marvellously alive and on the alert. This brilliant and uneasy figure has his place with the great eccentrics rather than with the great masters. He will be read, one may guess, by fits and starts; he will be forgotten and discovered and again discovered and forgotten like Donne, and Peacock, and Gerard Hopkins. But if English fiction continues to be read, the novels of Meredith must inevitably rise from time to time into view; his work must inevitably be disputed and discussed.

[Times Literary Supplement, Feb 9, 1928]

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“I Am Christina Rossetti”.

On the fifth of this December [1930] Christina Rossetti will celebrate her centenary, or, more properly speaking, we shall celebrate it for her, and perhaps not a little to her distress, for she was one of the shyest of women, and to be spoken of, as we shall certainly speak of her, would have caused her acute discomfort. Nevertheless, it is inevitable; centenaries are inexorable; talk of her we must. We shall read her life; we shall read her letters; we shall study her portraits, speculate about her diseases—of which she had a great variety; and rattle the drawers of her writing-table, which are for the most part empty. Let us begin with the biography—for what could be more amusing? As everybody knows, the fascination of reading biographies is irresistible. No sooner have we opened the pages of Miss Sandars’s careful and competent book (Life of Christina Rossetti, by Mary F. Sandars. (Hutchinson)) than the old illusion comes over us. Here is the past and all its inhabitants miraculously sealed as in a magic tank; all we have to do is to look and to listen and to listen and to look and soon the little figures—for they are rather under life size—will begin to move and to speak, and as they move we shall arrange them in all sorts of patterns of which they were ignorant, for they thought when they were alive that they could go where they liked; and as they speak we shall read into their sayings all kinds of meanings which never struck them, for they believed when they were alive that they said straight off whatever came into their heads. But once you are in a biography all is different.

Here, then, is Hallam Street, Portland Place, about the year 1830; and here are the Rossettis, an Italian family consisting of father and mother and four small children. The street was unfashionable and the home rather poverty-stricken; but the poverty did not matter, for, being foreigners, the Rossettis did not care much about the customs and conventions of the usual middle-class British family. They kept themselves to themselves, dressed as they liked, entertained Italian exiles, among them organ-grinders and other distressed compatriots, and made ends meet by teaching and writing and other odd jobs. By degrees Christina detached herself from the family group. It is plain that she was a quiet and observant child, with her own way of life already fixed in her head—she was to write—but all the more did she admire the superior competence of her elders. Soon we begin to surround her with a few friends and to endow her with a few characteristics. She detested parties. She dressed anyhow. She liked her brother’s friends and little gatherings of young artists and poets who were to reform the world, rather to her amusement, for although so sedate, she was also whimsical and freakish, and liked making fun of people who took themselves with egotistic solemnity. And though she meant to be a poet she had very little of the vanity and stress of young poets; her verses seem to have formed themselves whole and entire in her head, and she did not worry very much what was said of them because in her own mind she knew that they were good. She had also immense powers of admiration—for her mother, for example, who was so quiet, and so sagacious, so simple and so sincere; and for her elder sister Maria, who had no taste for painting or for poetry, but was, for that very reason, perhaps more vigorous and effective in daily life. For example, Maria always refused to visit the Mummy Room at the British Museum because, she said, the Day of Resurrection might suddenly dawn and it would be very unseemly if the corpses had to put on immortality under the gaze of mere sight-seers—a reflection which had not struck Christina, but seemed to her admirable. Here, of course, we, who are outside the tank, enjoy a hearty laugh, but Christina, who is inside the tank and exposed to all its heats and currents, thought her sister’s conduct worthy of the highest respect. Indeed, if we look at her a little more closely we shall see that something dark and hard, like a kernel, had already formed in the centre of Christina Rossetti’s being.

It was religion, of course. Even when she was quite a girl her lifelong absorption in the relation of the soul with God had taken possession of her. Her sixty-four years might seem outwardly spent in Hallam Street and Endsleigh Gardens and Torrington Square, but in reality she dwelt in some curious region where the spirit strives towards an unseen God—in her case, a dark God, a harsh God—a God who decreed that all the pleasures of the world were hateful to Him. The theatre was hateful, the opera was hateful, nakedness was hateful—when her friend Miss Thompson painted naked figures in her pictures she had to tell Christina that they were fairies, but Christina saw through the imposture—everything in Christina’s life radiated from that knot of agony and intensity in the centre. Her belief regulated her life in the smallest particulars. It taught her that chess was wrong, but that whist and cribbage did not matter. But also it interfered in the most tremendous questions of her heart. There was a young painter called James Collinson, and she loved James Collinson and he loved her, but he was a Roman Catholic and so she refused him. Obligingly he became a member of the Church of England, and she accepted him. Vacillating, however, for he was a slippery man, he wobbled back to Rome, and Christina, though it broke her heart and for ever shadowed her life, cancelled the engagement. Years afterwards another, and it seems better founded, prospect of happiness presented itself. Charles Cayley proposed to her. But alas, this abstract and erudite man who shuffled about the world in a state of absent-minded dishabille, and translated the gospel into Iroquois, and asked smart ladies at a party “whether they were interested in the Gulf Stream”, and for a present gave Christina a sea mouse preserved in spirits, was, not unnaturally, a free thinker. Him, too, Christina put from her. Though “no woman ever loved a man more deeply”, she would not be the wife of a sceptic. She who loved the “obtuse and furry”—the wombats, toads, and mice of the earth—and called Charles Cayley “my blindest buzzard, my special mole”, admitted no moles, wombats, buzzards, or Cayleys to her heaven.

So one might go on looking and listening for ever. There is no limit to the strangeness, amusement, and oddity of the past sealed in a tank. But just as we are wondering which cranny of this extraordinary territory to explore next, the principal figure intervenes. It is as if a fish, whose unconscious gyrations we had been watching in and out of reeds, round and round rocks, suddenly dashed at the glass and broke it. A tea-party is the occasion. For some reason Christina went to a party given by Mrs. Virtue Tebbs. What happened there is unknown—perhaps something was said in a casual, frivolous, tea-party way about poetry. At any rate,

suddenly there uprose from a chair and paced forward into the centre of the room a little woman dressed in black, who announced solemnly, “I am Christina Rossetti!” and having so said, returned to her chair.

With those words the glass is broken. Yes [she seems to say], I am a poet. You who pretend to honour my centenary are no better than the idle people at Mrs. Tebb’s tea-party. Here you are rambling among unimportant trifles, rattling my writing-table drawers, making fun of the Mummies and Maria and my love affairs when all I care for you to know is here. Behold this green volume. It is a copy of my collected works. It costs four shillings and sixpence. Read that. And so she returns to her chair.

How absolute and unaccommodating these poets are! Poetry, they say, has nothing to do with life. Mummies and wombats, Hallam Street and omnibuses, James Collinson and Charles Cayley, sea mice and Mrs. Virtue Tebbs, Torrington Square and Endsleigh Gardens, even the vagaries of religious belief, are irrelevant, extraneous, superfluous, unreal. It is poetry that matters. The only question of any interest is whether that poetry is good or bad. But this question of poetry, one might point out if only to gain time, is one of the greatest difficulty. Very little of value has been said about poetry since the world began. The judgment of contemporaries is almost always wrong. For example, most of the poems which figure in Christina Rossetti’s complete works were rejected by editors. Her annual income from her poetry was for many years about ten pounds. On the other hand, the works of Jean Ingelow, as she noted sardonically, went into eight editions. There were, of course, among her contemporaries one or two poets and one or two critics whose judgment must be respectfully consulted. But what very different impressions they seem to gather from the same works—by what different standards they judge! For instance, when Swinburne read her poetry he exclaimed: “I have always thought that nothing more glorious in poetry has ever been written”, and went on to say of her New Year Hymn

that it was touched as with the fire and bathed as in the light of sunbeams, tuned as to chords and cadences of refluent sea-music beyond reach of harp and organ, large echoes of the serene and sonorous tides of heaven.

Then Professor Saintsbury comes with his vast learning, and examines Goblin Market, and reports that

The metre of the principal poem [“Goblin Market”] may be best described as a dedoggerelised Skeltonic, with the gathered music of the various metrical progress since Spenser, utilised in the place of the wooden rattling of the followers of Chaucer. There may be discerned in it the same inclination towards line irregularity which has broken out, at different times, in the Pindaric of the late seventeenth and earlier eighteenth centuries, and in the rhymelessness of Sayers earlier and of Mr. Arnold later.

And then there is Sir Walter Raleigh:

I think she is the best poet alive…. The worst of it is you cannot lecture on really pure poetry any more than you can talk about the ingredients of pure water—it is adulterated, methylated, sanded poetry that makes the best lectures. The only thing that Christina makes me want to do, is cry, not lecture.

It would appear, then, that there are at least three schools of criticism: the refluent sea-music school; the line-irregularity school, and the school that bids one not criticise but cry. This is confusing; if we follow them all we shall only come to grief. Better perhaps read for oneself, expose the mind bare to the poem, and transcribe in all its haste and imperfection whatever may be the result of the impact. In this case it might run something as follows: O Christina Rossetti, I have humbly to confess that though I know many of your poems by heart, I have not read your works from cover to cover. I have not followed your course and traced your development. I doubt indeed that you developed very much. You were an instinctive poet. You saw the world from the same angle always. Years and the traffic of the mind with men and books did not affect you in the least. You carefully ignored any book that could shake your faith or any human being who could trouble your instincts. You were wise perhaps. Your instinct was so sure, so direct, so intense that it produced poems that sing like music in one’s ears—like a melody by Mozart or an air by Gluck. Yet for all its symmetry, yours was a complex song. When you struck your harp many strings sounded together. Like all instinctives you had a keen sense of the visual beauty of the world. Your poems are full of gold dust and “sweet geraniums’ varied brightness”; your eye noted incessantly how rushes are “velvet-headed”, and lizards have a “strange metallic mail”—your eye, indeed, observed with a sensual pre-Raphaelite intensity that must have surprised Christina the Anglo-Catholic. But to her you owed perhaps the fixity and sadness of your muse. The pressure of a tremendous faith circles and clamps together these little songs. Perhaps they owe to it their solidity. Certainly they owe to it their sadness—your God was a harsh God, your heavenly crown was set with thorns. No sooner have you feasted on beauty with your eyes than your mind tells you that beauty is vain and beauty passes. Death, oblivion, and rest lap round your songs with their dark wave. And then, incongruously, a sound of scurrying and laughter is heard. There is the patter of animals’ feet and the odd guttural notes of rooks and the snufflings of obtuse furry animals grunting and nosing. For you were not a pure saint by any means. You pulled legs; you tweaked noses. You were at war with all humbug and pretence. Modest as you were, still you were drastic, sure of your gift, convinced of your vision. A firm hand pruned your lines; a sharp ear tested their music. Nothing soft, otiose, irrelevant cumbered your pages. In a word, you were an artist. And thus was kept open, even when you wrote idly, tinkling bells for your own diversion, a pathway for the descent of that fiery visitant who came now and then and fused your lines into that indissoluble connection which no hand can put asunder:

But bring me poppies brimmed with sleepy death

And ivy choking what it garlandeth

And primroses that open to the moon.

Indeed so strange is the constitution of things, and so great the miracle of poetry, that some of the poems you wrote in your little back room will be found adhering in perfect symmetry when the Albert Memorial is dust and tinsel. Our remote posterity will be singing:

When I am dead, my dearest,

or:

My heart is like a singing bird,

when Torrington Square is a reef of coral perhaps and the fishes shoot in and out where your bedroom window used to be; or perhaps the forest will have reclaimed those pavements and the wombat and the ratel will be shuffling on soft, uncertain feet among the green undergrowth that will then tangle the area railings. In view of all this, and to return to your biography, had I been present when Mrs. Virtue Tebbs gave her party, and had a short elderly woman in black risen to her feet and advanced to the middle of the room, I should certainly have committed some indiscretion—have broken a paper-knife or smashed a tea-cup in the awkward ardour of my admiration when she said, “I am Christina Rossetti”.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Dec 6, 1930]

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The Novels of Thomas Hardy.

When we say that the death of Thomas Hardy leaves English fiction without a leader, we mean that there is no other writer whose supremacy would be generally accepted, none to whom it seems so fitting and natural to pay homage. Nobody of course claimed it less. The unworldly and simple old man would have been painfully embarrassed by the rhetoric that flourishes on such occasions as this. Yet it is no less than the truth to say that while he lived there was one novelist at all events who made the art of fiction seem an honourable calling; while Hardy lived there was no excuse for thinking meanly of the art he practised. Nor was this solely the result of his peculiar genius. Something of it sprang from his character in its modesty and integrity, from his life, lived simply down in Dorsetshire without self-seeking or self-advertisement. For both reasons, because of his genius and because of the dignity with which his gift was used, it was impossible not to honour him as an artist and to feel respect and affection for the man. But it is of the work that we must speak, of the novels that were written so long ago that they seem as detached from the fiction of the moment as Hardy himself was remote from the stir of the present and its littleness.

We have to go back more than a generation if we are to trace the career of Hardy as a novelist. In the year 1871 he was a man of thirty-one; he had written a novel, Desperate Remedies, but he was by no means an assured craftsman. He “was feeling his way to a method”, he said himself; as if he were conscious that he possessed all sorts of gifts, yet did not know their nature, or how to use them to advantage. To read that first novel is to share in the perplexity of its author. The imagination of the writer is powerful and sardonic; he is book-learned in a home-made way; he can create characters but he cannot control them; he is obviously hampered by the difficulties of his technique and, what is more singular, he is driven by some sense that human beings are the sport of forces outside themselves, to make use of an extreme and even melodramatic use of coincidence. He is already possessed of the conviction that a novel is not a toy, nor an argument; it is a means of giving truthful if harsh and violent impressions of the lives of men and women. But perhaps the most remarkable quality in the book is the sound of a waterfall that echoes and booms through its pages. It is the first manifestation of the power that was to assume such vast proportions in the later books. He already proves himself a minute and skilled observer of Nature; the rain, he knows, falls differently as it falls upon roots or arable; he knows that the wind sounds differently as it passes through the branches of different trees. But he is aware in a larger sense of Nature as a force; he feels in it a spirit that can sympathize or mock or remain the indifferent spectator of human fortunes. Already that sense was his; and the crude story of Miss Aldclyffe and Cytherea is memorable because it is watched by the eyes of the gods, and worked out in the presence of Nature.

That he was a poet should have been obvious; that he was a novelist might still have been held uncertain. But the year after, when Under the Greenwood Tree appeared, it was clear that much of the effort of “feeling for a method” had been overcome. Something of the stubborn originality of the earlier book was lost. The second is accomplished, charming, idyllic compared with the first. The writer, it seems, may well develop into one of our English landscape painters, whose pictures are all of cottage gardens and old peasant women, who lingers to collect and preserve from oblivion the old-fashioned ways and words which are rapidly falling into disuse. And yet what kindly lover of antiquity, what naturalist with a microscope in his pocket, what scholar solicitous for the changing shapes of language, ever heard the cry of a small bird killed in the next wood by an owl with such intensity? The cry “passed into the silence without mingling with it”. Again we hear, very far away, like the sound of a gun out at sea on a calm summer’s morning, a strange and ominous echo. But as we read these early books there is a sense of waste. There is a feeling that Hardy’s genius was obstinate and perverse; first one gift would have its way with him and then another. They would not consent to run together easily in harness. Such indeed was likely to be the fate of a writer who was at once poet and realist, a faithful son of field and down, yet tormented by the doubts and despondencies bred of book-learning; a lover of old ways and plain countrymen, yet doomed to see the faith and flesh of his forefathers turn to thin and spectral transparencies before his eyes.

To this contradiction Nature had added another element likely to disorder a symmetrical development. Some writers are born conscious of everything; others are unconscious of many things. Some, like Henry James and Flaubert, are able not merely to make the best use of the spoil their gifts bring in, but control their genius in the act of creation; they are aware of all the possibilities of every situation, and are never taken by surprise. The unconscious writers, on the other hand, like Dickens and Scott, seem suddenly and without their own consent to be lifted up and swept onwards. The wave sinks and they cannot say what has happened or why. Among them—it is the source of his strength and of his weakness—we must place Hardy. His own word, “moments of vision”, exactly describes those passages of astonishing beauty and force which are to be found in every book that he wrote. With a sudden quickening of power which we cannot foretell, nor he, it seems, control, a single scene breaks off from the rest. We see, as if it existed alone and for all time, the wagon with Fanny’s dead body inside travelling along the road under the dripping trees; we see the bloated sheep struggling among the clover; we see Troy flashing his sword round Bathsheba where she stands motionless, cutting the lock off her head and spitting the caterpillar on her breast. Vivid to the eye, but not to the eye alone, for every sense participates, such scenes dawn upon us and their splendour remains. But the power goes as it comes. The moment of vision is succeeded by long stretches of plain daylight, nor can we believe that any craft or skill could have caught the wild power and turned it to a better use. The novels therefore are full of inequalities; they are lumpish and dull and inexpressive; but they are never arid; there is always about them a little blur of unconsciousness, that halo of freshness and margin of the unexpressed which often produce the most profound sense of satisfaction. It is as if Hardy himself were not quite aware of what he did, as if his consciousness held more than he could produce, and he left it for his readers to make out his full meaning and to supplement it from their own experience.

For these reasons Hardy’s genius was uncertain in development, uneven in accomplishment, but, when the moment came, magnificent in achievement. The moment came, completely and fully, in Far from the Madding Crowd. The subject was right; the method was right; the poet and the countryman, the sensual man, the sombre reflective man, the man of learning, all enlisted to produce a book which, however fashions may chop and change, must hold its place among the great English novels. There is, in the first place, that sense of the physical world which Hardy more than any novelist can bring before us; the sense that the little prospect of man’s existence is ringed by a landscape which, while it exists apart, yet confers a deep and solemn beauty upon his drama. The dark downland, marked by the barrows of the dead and the huts of shepherds, rises against the sky, smooth as a wave of the sea, but solid and eternal; rolling away to the infinite distance, but sheltering in its folds quiet villages whose smoke rises in frail columns by day, whose lamps burn in the immense darkness by night. Gabriel Oak tending his sheep up there on the back of the world is the eternal shepherd; the stars are ancient beacons; and for ages he has watched beside his sheep.

But down in the valley the earth is full of warmth and life; the farms are busy, the barns stored, the fields loud with the lowing of cattle and the bleating of sheep. Nature is prolific, splendid, and lustful; not yet malignant and still the Great Mother of labouring men. And now for the first time Hardy gives full play to his humour, where it is freest and most rich, upon the lips of country men. Jan Coggan and Henry Fray and Joseph Poorgrass gather in the malthouse when the day’s work is over and give vent to that half-shrewd, half-poetic humour which has been brewing in their brains and finding expression over their beer since the pilgrims tramped the Pilgrims’ Way; which Shakespeare and Scott and George Eliot all loved to overhear, but none loved better or heard with greater understanding than Hardy. But it is not the part of the peasants in the Wessex novels to stand out as individuals. They compose a pool of common wisdom, of common humour, a fund of perpetual life. They comment upon the actions of the hero and heroine, but while Troy or Oak or Fanny or Bathsheba come in and out and pass away, Jan Coggan and Henry Fray and Joseph Poorgrass remain. They drink by night and they plough the fields by day. They are eternal. We meet them over and over again in the novels, and they always have something typical about them, more of the character that marks a race than of the features which belong to an individual. The peasants are the great sanctuary of sanity, the country the last stronghold of happiness. When they disappear, there is no hope for the race.

With Oak and Troy and Bathsheba and Fanny Robin we come to the men and women of the novels at their full stature. In every book three or four figures predominate, and stand up like lightning conductors to attract the force of the elements. Oak and Troy and Bathsheba; Eustacia, Wildeve, and Venn; Henchard, Lucetta, and Farfrae; Jude, Sue Bridehead, and Phillotson. There is even a certain likeness between the different groups. They live as individuals and they differ as individuals; but they also live as types and have a likeness as types. Bathsheba is Bathsheba, but she is woman and sister to Eustacia and Lucetta and Sue; Gabriel is Gabriel Oak, but he is man and brother to Henchard, Venn, and Jude. However lovable and charming Bathsheba may be, still she is weak; however stubborn and ill-guided Henchard may be, still he is strong. This is a fundamental part of Hardy’s vision; the staple of many of his books. The woman is the weaker and the fleshlier, and she clings to the stronger and obscures his vision. How freely, nevertheless, in his greater books life is poured over the unalterable framework! When Bathsheba sits in the wagon among her plants, smiling at her own loveliness in the little looking-glass, we may know, and it is proof of Hardy’s power that we do know, how severely she will suffer and cause others to suffer before the end. But the moment has all the bloom and beauty of life. And so it is, time and time again. His characters, both men and women, were creatures to him of an infinite attraction. For the women he shows a more tender solicitude than for the men, and in them, perhaps, he takes a keener interest. Vain might their beauty be and terrible their fate, but while the glow of life is in them their step is free, their laughter sweet, and theirs is the power to sink into the breast of Nature and become part of her silence and solemnity, or to rise and put on them the movement of the clouds and the wildness of the flowering woodlands. The men who suffer, not like the women through dependence upon other human beings, but through conflict with fate, enlist our sterner sympathies. For such a man as Gabriel Oak we need have no passing fears. Honour him we must, though it is not granted us to love him quite so freely. He is firmly set upon his feet and can give as shrewd a blow, to men at least, as any he is likely to receive. He has a prevision of what is to be expected that springs from character rather than from education. He is stable in his temperament, steadfast in his affections, and capable of open-eyed endurance without flinching. But he, too, is no puppet. He is a homely, humdrum fellow on ordinary occasions. He can walk the street without making people turn to stare at him. In short, nobody can deny Hardy’s power—the true novelist’s power—to make us believe that his characters are fellow-beings driven by their own passions and idiosyncrasies, while they have—and this is the poet’s gift—something symbolical about them which is common to us all.

And it is when we are considering Hardy’s power of creating men and women that we become most conscious of the profound differences that distinguish him from his peers. We look back at a number of these characters and ask ourselves what it is that we remember them for. We recall their passions. We remember how deeply they have loved each other and often with what tragic results. We remember the faithful love of Oak for Bathsheba; the tumultuous but fleeting passions of men like Wildeve, Troy, and Fitzpiers; we remember the filial love of Clym for his mother, the jealous paternal passion of Henchard for Elizabeth Jane. But we do not remember how they have loved. We do not remember how they talked and changed and got to know each other, finely, gradually, from step to step and from stage to stage. Their relationship is not composed of those intellectual apprehensions and subtleties of perception which seem so slight yet are so profound. In all the books love is one of the great facts that mould human life. But it is a catastrophe; it happens suddenly and overwhelmingly, and there is little to be said about it. The talk between the lovers when it is not passionate is practical or philosophic, as though the discharge of their daily duties left them with more desire to question life and its purpose than to investigate each other’s sensibilities. Even if it were in their power to analyse their emotions, life is too stirring to give them time. They need all their strength to deal with the downright blows, the freakish ingenuity, the gradually increasing malignity of fate. They have none to spend upon the subtleties and delicacies of the human comedy.

Thus there comes a time when we can say with certainty that we shall not find in Hardy some of the qualities that have given us most delight in the works of other novelists. He has not the perfection of Jane Austen, or the wit of Meredith, or the range of Thackeray, or Tolstoy’s amazing intellectual power. There is in the work of the great classical writers a finality of effect which places certain of their scenes, apart from the story, beyond the reach of change. We do not ask what bearing they have upon the narrative, nor do we make use of them to interpret problems which lie on the outskirts of the scene. A laugh, a blush, half a dozen words of dialogue, and it is enough; the source of our delight is perennial. But Hardy has none of this concentration and completeness. His light does not fall directly upon the human heart. It passes over it and out on to the darkness of the heath and upon the trees swaying in the storm. When we look back into the room the group by the fireside is dispersed. Each man or woman is battling with the storm, alone, revealing himself most when he is least under the observation of other human beings. We do not know them as we know Pierre or Natasha or Becky Sharp. We do not know them in and out and all round as they are revealed to the casual caller, to the Government official, to the great lady, to the general on the battlefield. We do not know the complication and involvement and turmoil of their thoughts. Geographically, too, they remain fixed to the same stretch of the English countryside. It is seldom, and always with unhappy results, that Hardy leaves the yeoman or farmer to describe the class above theirs in the social scale. In the drawing-room and clubroom and ballroom, where people of leisure and education come together, where comedy is bred and shades of character revealed, he is awkward and ill at ease. But the opposite is equally true. If we do not know his men and women in their relations to each other, we know them in their relations to time, death, and fate. If we do not see them in quick agitation against the lights and crowds of cities, we see them against the earth, the storm, and the seasons. We know their attitude towards some of the most tremendous problems that can confront mankind. They take on a more than mortal size in memory. We see them, not in detail but enlarged and dignified. We see Tess reading the baptismal service in her nightgown “with an impress of dignity that was almost regal”. We see Marty South, “like a being who had rejected with indifference the attribute of sex for the loftier quality of abstract humanism”, laying the flowers on Winterbourne’s grave. Their speech has a Biblical dignity and poetry. They have a force in them which cannot be defined, a force of love or of hate, a force which in the men is the cause of rebellion against life, and in the women implies an illimitable capacity for suffering, and it is this which dominates the character and makes it unnecessary that we should see the finer features that lie hid. This is the tragic power; and, if we are to place Hardy among his fellows, we must call him the greatest tragic writer among English novelists.

But let us, as we approach the danger-zone of Hardy’s philosophy, be on our guard. Nothing is more necessary, in reading an imaginative writer, than to keep at the right distance above his page. Nothing is easier, especially with a writer of marked idiosyncrasy, than to fasten on opinions, convict him of a creed, tether him to a consistent point of view. Nor was Hardy any exception to the rule that the mind which is most capable of receiving impressions is very often the least capable of drawing conclusions. It is for the reader, steeped in the impression, to supply the comment. It is his part to know when to put aside the writer’s conscious intention in favour of some deeper intention of which perhaps he may be unconscious. Hardy himself was aware of this. A novel “is an impression, not an argument”, he has warned us, and, again

Unadjusted impressions have their value, and the road to a true philosophy of life seems to lie in humbly recording diverse readings of its phenomena as they are forced upon us by chance and change.

Certainly it is true to say of him that, at his greatest, he gives us impressions; at his weakest, arguments. In The Woodlanders, The Return of the Native, Far from the Madding Crowd, and above all, in The Mayor of Casterbridge, we have Hardy’s impression of life as it came to him without conscious ordering. Let him once begin to tamper with his direct intuitions and his power is gone. “Did you say the stars were worlds, Tess?” asks little Abraham as they drive to market with their beehives. Tess replies that they are like “the apples on our stubbard-tree, most of them splendid and sound—a few blighted”. “Which do we live on—a splendid or a blighted one?” “A blighted one,” she replies, or rather the mournful thinker who has assumed her mask speaks for her. The words protrude, cold and raw, like the springs of a machine where we had seen only flesh and blood. We are crudely jolted out of that mood of sympathy which is renewed a moment later when the little cart is run down and we have a concrete instance of the ironical methods which rule our planet.

That is the reason why Jude the Obscure is the most painful of all Hardy’s books, and the only one against which we can fairly bring the charge of pessimism. In Jude the Obscure argument is allowed to dominate impression, with the result that though the misery of the book is overwhelming it is not tragic. As calamity succeeds calamity we feel that the case against society is not being argued fairly or with profound understanding of the facts. Here is nothing of that width and force and knowledge of mankind which, when Tolstoy criticizes society, makes his indictment formidable. Here we have revealed to us the petty cruelty of men, not the large injustice of the gods. It is only necessary to compare Jude the Obscure with The Mayor of Casterbridge to see where Hardy’s true power lay. Jude carries on his miserable contest against the deans of colleges and the conventions of sophisticated society. Henchard is pitted, not against another man, but against something outside himself which is opposed to men of his ambition and power. No human being wishes him ill. Even Farfrae and Newson and Elizabeth Jane whom he has wronged all come to pity him, and even to admire his strength of character. He is standing up to fate, and in backing the old Mayor whose ruin has been largely his own fault, Hardy makes us feel that we are backing human nature in an unequal contest. There is no pessimism here. Throughout the book we are aware of the sublimity of the issue, and yet it is presented to us in the most concrete form. From the opening scene in which Henchard sells his wife to the sailor at the fair to his death on Egdon Heath the vigour of the story is superb, its humour rich and racy, its movement large-limbed and free. The skimmity ride, the fight between Farfrae and Henchard in the loft, Mrs. Cuxsom’s speech upon the death of Mrs. Henchard, the talk of the ruffians at Peter’s Finger with Nature present in the background or mysteriously dominating the foreground, are among the glories of English fiction. Brief and scanty, it may be, is the measure of happiness allowed to each, but so long as the struggle is, as Henchard’s was, with the decrees of fate and not with the laws of man, so long as it is in the open air and calls for activity of the body rather than of the brain, there is greatness in the contest, there is pride and pleasure in it, and the death of the broken corn merchant in his cottage on Egdon Heath is comparable to the death of Ajax, lord of Salamis. The true tragic emotion is ours.

Before such power as this we are made to feel that the ordinary tests which we apply to fiction are futile enough. Do we insist that a great novelist shall be a master of melodious prose? Hardy was no such thing. He feels his way by dint of sagacity and uncompromising sincerity to the phrase he wants, and it is often of unforgettable pungency. Failing it, he will make do with any homely or clumsy or old-fashioned turn of speech, now of the utmost angularity, now of a bookish elaboration. No style in literature, save Scott’s, is so difficult to analyse; it is on the face of it so bad, yet it achieves its aim so unmistakably. As well might one attempt to rationalize the charm of a muddy country road, or of a plain field of roots in winter. And then, like Dorsetshire itself, out of these very elements of stiffness and angularity his prose will put on greatness; will roll with a Latin sonority; will shape itself in a massive and monumental symmetry like that of his own bare downs. Then again, do we require that a novelist shall observe the probabilities, and keep close to reality? To find anything approaching the violence and convolution of Hardy’s plots one must go back to the Elizabethan drama. Yet we accept his story completely as we read it; more than that, it becomes obvious that his violence and his melodrama, when they are not due to a curious peasant-like love of the monstrous for its own sake, are part of that wild spirit of poetry which saw with intense irony and grimness that no reading of life can possibly outdo the strangeness of life itself, no symbol of caprice and unreason be too extreme to represent the astonishing circumstances of our existence.

But as we consider the great structure of the Wessex Novels it seems irrelevant to fasten on little points—this character, that scene, this phrase of deep and poetic beauty. It is something larger that Hardy has bequeathed to us. The Wessex Novels are not one book, but many. They cover an immense stretch; inevitably they are full of imperfections—some are failures, and others exhibit only the wrong side of their maker’s genius. But undoubtedly, when we have submitted ourselves fully to them, when we come to take stock of our impression of the whole, the effect is commanding and satisfactory. We have been freed from the cramp and pettiness imposed by life. Our imaginations have been stretched and heightened; our humour has been made to laugh out; we have drunk deep of the beauty of the earth. Also we have been made to enter the shade of a sorrowful and brooding spirit which, even in its saddest mood, bore itself with a grave uprightness and never, even when most moved to anger, lost its deep compassion for the sufferings of men and women. Thus it is no mere transcript of life at a certain time and place that Hardy has given us. It is a vision of the world and of man’s lot as they revealed themselves to a powerful imagination, a profound and poetic genius, a gentle and humane soul.

[Times Literary Supplement, Jan 19, 1928, as “Thomas Hardy’s Novels”]

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How Should One Read a Book?

In the first place, I want to emphasise the note of interrogation at the end of my title. Even if I could answer the question for myself, the answer would apply only to me and not to you. The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions. If this is agreed between us, then I feel at liberty to put forward a few ideas and suggestions because you will not allow them to fetter that independence which is the most important quality that a reader can possess. After all, what laws can be laid down about books? The battle of Waterloo was certainly fought on a certain day; but is Hamlet a better play than Lear? Nobody can say. Each must decide that question for himself. To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries. Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and conventions—there we have none.

But to enjoy freedom, if the platitude is pardonable, we have of course to control ourselves. We must not squander our powers, helplessly and ignorantly, squirting half the house in order to water a single rose-bush; we must train them, exactly and powerfully, here on the very spot. This, it may be, is one of the first difficulties that faces us in a library. What is “the very spot”? There may well seem to be nothing but a conglomeration and huddle of confusion. Poems and novels, histories and memoirs, dictionaries and blue-books; books written in all languages by men and women of all tempers, races, and ages jostle each other on the shelf. And outside the donkey brays, the women gossip at the pump, the colts gallop across the fields. Where are we to begin? How are we to bring order into this multitudinous chaos and so get the deepest and widest pleasure from what we read?

It is simple enough to say that since books have classes—fiction, biography, poetry—we should separate them and take from each what it is right that each should give us. Yet few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices. If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning. Do not dictate to your author; try to become him. Be his fellow-worker and accomplice. If you hang back, and reserve and criticise at first, you are preventing yourself from getting the fullest possible value from what you read. But if you open your mind as widely as possible, then signs and hints of almost imperceptible fineness, from the twist and turn of the first sentences, will bring you into the presence of a human being unlike any other. Steep yourself in this, acquaint yourself with this, and soon you will find that your author is giving you, or attempting to give you, something far more definite. The thirty-two chapters of a novel—if we consider how to read a novel first—are an attempt to make something as formed and controlled as a building: but words are more impalpable than bricks; reading is a longer and more complicated process than seeing. Perhaps the quickest way to understand the elements of what a novelist is doing is not to read, but to write; to make your own experiment with the dangers and difficulties of words. Recall, then, some event that has left a distinct impression on you—how at the corner of the street, perhaps, you passed two people talking. A tree shook; an electric light danced; the tone of the talk was comic, but also tragic; a whole vision, an entire conception, seemed contained in that moment.

But when you attempt to reconstruct it in words, you will find that it breaks into a thousand conflicting impressions. Some must be subdued; others emphasised; in the process you will lose, probably, all grasp upon the emotion itself. Then turn from your blurred and littered pages to the opening pages of some great novelist—Defoe, Jane Austen, Hardy. Now you will be better able to appreciate their mastery. It is not merely that we are in the presence of a different person—Defoe, Jane Austen, or Thomas Hardy—but that we are living in a different world. Here, in Robinson Crusoe, we are trudging a plain high road; one thing happens after another; the fact and the order of the fact is enough. But if the open air and adventure mean everything to Defoe they mean nothing to Jane Austen. Hers is the drawing-room, and people talking, and by the many mirrors of their talk revealing their characters. And if, when we have accustomed ourselves to the drawing-room and its reflections, we turn to Hardy, we are once more spun round. The moors are round us and the stars are above our heads. The other side of the mind is now exposed—the dark side that comes uppermost in solitude, not the light side that shows in company. Our relations are not towards people, but towards Nature and destiny. Yet different as these worlds are, each is consistent with itself. The maker of each is careful to observe the laws of his own perspective, and however great a strain they may put upon us they will never confuse us, as lesser writers so frequently do, by introducing two different kinds of reality into the same book. Thus to go from one great novelist to another—from Jane Austen to Hardy, from Peacock to Trollope, from Scott to Meredith—is to be wrenched and uprooted; to be thrown this way and then that. To read a novel is a difficult and complex art. You must be capable not only of great fineness of perception, but of great boldness of imagination if you are going to make use of all that the novelist—the great artist—gives you.

But a glance at the heterogeneous company on the shelf will show you that writers are very seldom “great artists”; far more often a book makes no claim to be a work of art at all. These biographies and autobiographies, for example, lives of great men, of men long dead and forgotten, that stand cheek by jowl with the novels and poems, are we to refuse to read them because they are not “art”? Or shall we read them, but read them in a different way, with a different aim? Shall we read them in the first place to satisfy that curiosity which possesses us sometimes when in the evening we linger in front of a house where the lights are lit and the blinds not yet drawn, and each floor of the house shows us a different section of human life in being? Then we are consumed with curiosity about the lives of these people—the servants gossiping, the gentlemen dining, the girl dressing for a party, the old woman at the window with her knitting. Who are they, what are they, what are their names, their occupations, their thoughts, and adventures?

Biographies and memoirs answer such questions, light up innumerable such houses; they show us people going about their daily affairs, toiling, failing, succeeding, eating, hating, loving, until they die. And sometimes as we watch, the house fades and the iron railings vanish and we are out at sea; we are hunting, sailing, fighting; we are among savages and soldiers; we are taking part in great campaigns. Or if we like to stay here in England, in London, still the scene changes; the street narrows; the house becomes small, cramped, diamond-paned, and malodorous. We see a poet, Donne, driven from such a house because the walls were so thin that when the children cried their voices cut through them. We can follow him, through the paths that lie in the pages of books, to Twickenham; to Lady Bedford’s Park, a famous meeting-ground for nobles and poets; and then turn our steps to Wilton, the great house under the downs, and hear Sidney read the Arcadia to his sister; and ramble among the very marshes and see the very herons that figure in that famous romance; and then again travel north with that other Lady Pembroke, Anne Clifford, to her wild moors, or plunge into the city and control our merriment at the sight of Gabriel Harvey in his black velvet suit arguing about poetry with Spenser. Nothing is more fascinating than to grope and stumble in the alternate darkness and splendour of Elizabethan London. But there is no staying there. The Temples and the Swifts, the Harleys and the St. Johns beckon us on; hour upon hour can be spent disentangling their quarrels and deciphering their characters; and when we tire of them we can stroll on, past a lady in black wearing diamonds, to Samuel Johnson and Goldsmith and Garrick; or cross the channel, if we like, and meet Voltaire and Diderot, Madame du Deffand; and so back to England and Twickenham—how certain places repeat themselves and certain names!—where Lady Bedford had her Park once and Pope lived later, to Walpole’s home at Strawberry Hill. But Walpole introduces us to such a swarm of new acquaintances, there are so many houses to visit and bells to ring that we may well hesitate for a moment, on the Miss Berrys’ doorstep, for example, when behold, up comes Thackeray; he is the friend of the woman whom Walpole loved; so that merely by going from friend to friend, from garden to garden, from house to house, we have passed from one end of English literature to another and wake to find ourselves here again in the present, if we can so differentiate this moment from all that have gone before. This, then, is one of the ways in which we can read these lives and letters; we can make them light up the many windows of the past; we can watch the famous dead in their familiar habits and fancy sometimes that we are very close and can surprise their secrets, and sometimes we may pull out a play or a poem that they have written and see whether it reads differently in the presence of the author. But this again rouses other questions. How far, we must ask ourselves, is a book influenced by its writer’s life—how far is it safe to let the man interpret the writer? How far shall we resist or give way to the sympathies and antipathies that the man himself rouses in us—so sensitive are words, so receptive of the character of the author? These are questions that press upon us when we read lives and letters, and we must answer them for ourselves, for nothing can be more fatal than to be guided by the preferences of others in a matter so personal.

But also we can read such books with another aim, not to throw light on literature, not to become familiar with famous people, but to refresh and exercise our own creative powers. Is there not an open window on the right hand of the bookcase? How delightful to stop reading and look out! How stimulating the scene is, in its unconsciousness, its irrelevance, its perpetual movement—the colts galloping round the field, the woman filling her pail at the well, the donkey throwing back his head and emitting his long, acrid moan. The greater part of any library is nothing but the record of such fleeting moments in the lives of men, women, and donkeys. Every literature, as it grows old, has its rubbish-heap, its record of vanished moments and forgotten lives told in faltering and feeble accents that have perished. But if you give yourself up to the delight of rubbish-reading you will be surprised, indeed you will be overcome, by the relics of human life that have been cast out to moulder. It may be one letter—but what a vision it gives! It may be a few sentences—but what vistas they suggest! Sometimes a whole story will come together with such beautiful humour and pathos and completeness that it seems as if a great novelist had been at work, yet it is only an old actor, Tate Wilkinson, remembering the strange story of Captain Jones; it is only a young subaltern serving under Arthur Wellesley and falling in love with a pretty girl at Lisbon; it is only Maria Allen letting fall her sewing in the empty drawing-room and sighing how she wishes she had taken Dr. Burney’s good advice and had never eloped with her Rishy. None of this has any value; it is negligible in the extreme; yet how absorbing it is now and again to go through the rubbish-heaps and find rings and scissors and broken noses buried in the huge past and try to piece them together while the colt gallops round the field, the woman fills her pail at the well, and the donkey brays.

But we tire of rubbish-reading in the long run. We tire of searching for what is needed to complete the half-truth which is all that the Wilkinsons, the Bunburys, and the Maria Allens are able to offer us. They had not the artist’s power of mastering and eliminating; they could not tell the whole truth even about their own lives; they have disfigured the story that might have been so shapely. Facts are all that they can offer us, and facts are a very inferior form of fiction. Thus the desire grows upon us to have done with half-statements and approximations; to cease from searching out the minute shades of human character, to enjoy the greater abstractness, the purer truth of fiction. Thus we create the mood, intense and generalised, unaware of detail, but stressed by some regular, recurrent beat, whose natural expression is poetry; and that is the time to read poetry … when we are almost able to write it.

Western wind, when wilt thou blow?

The small rain down can rain.

Christ, if my love were in my arms,

And I in my bed again!

The impact of poetry is so hard and direct that for the moment there is no other sensation except that of the poem itself. What profound depths we visit then—how sudden and complete is our immersion! There is nothing here to catch hold of; nothing to stay us in our flight. The illusion of fiction is gradual; its effects are prepared; but who when they read these four lines stops to ask who wrote them, or conjures up the thought of Donne’s house or Sidney’s secretary; or enmeshes them in the intricacy of the past and the succession of generations? The poet is always our contemporary. Our being for the moment is centred and constricted, as in any violent shock of personal emotion. Afterwards, it is true, the sensation begins to spread in wider rings through our minds; remoter senses are reached; these begin to sound and to comment and we are aware of echoes and reflections. The intensity of poetry covers an immense range of emotion. We have only to compare the force and directness of

I shall fall like a tree, and find my grave,

Only remembering that I grieve,

with the wavering modulation of

Minutes are numbered by the fall of sands,

As by an hour glass; the span of time

Doth waste us to our graves, and we look on it;

An age of pleasure, revelled out, comes home

At last, and ends in sorrow; but the life,

Weary of riot, numbers every sand,

Wailing in sighs, until the last drop down,

So to conclude calamity in rest,

or place the meditative calm of

whether we be young or old,

Our destiny, our being’s heart and home,

Is with infinitude, and only there;

With hope it is, hope that can never die,

Effort, and expectation, and desire,

And something evermore about to be,

beside the complete and inexhaustible loveliness of

The moving Moon went up the sky,

And nowhere did abide:

Softly she was going up,

And a star or two beside—

or the splendid fantasy of

And the woodland haunter

Shall not cease to saunter

When, far down some glade,

Of the great world’s burning,

One soft flame upturning

Seems, to his discerning,

Crocus in the shade,

to bethink us of the varied art of the poet; his power to make us at once actors and spectators; his power to run his hand into character as if it were a glove, and be Falstaff or Lear; his power to condense, to widen, to state, once and for ever.

“We have only to compare”—with those words the cat is out of the bag, and the true complexity of reading is admitted. The first process, to receive impressions with the utmost understanding, is only half the process of reading; it must be completed, if we are to get the whole pleasure from a book, by another. We must pass judgment upon these multitudinous impressions; we must make of these fleeting shapes one that is hard and lasting. But not directly. Wait for the dust of reading to settle; for the conflict and the questioning to die down; walk, talk, pull the dead petals from a rose, or fall asleep. Then suddenly without our willing it, for it is thus that Nature undertakes these transitions, the book will return, but differently. It will float to the top of the mind as a whole. And the book as a whole is different from the book received currently in separate phrases. Details now fit themselves into their places. We see the shape from start to finish; it is a barn, a pigsty, or a cathedral. Now then we can compare book with book as we compare building with building. But this act of comparison means that our attitude has changed; we are no longer the friends of the writer, but his judges; and just as we cannot be too sympathetic as friends, so as judges we cannot be too severe. Are they not criminals, books that have wasted our time and sympathy; are they not the most insidious enemies of society, corrupters, defilers, the writers of false books, faked books, books that fill the air with decay and disease? Let us then be severe in our judgments; let us compare each book with the greatest of its kind. There they hang in the mind the shapes of the books we have read solidified by the judgments we have passed on them—Robinson Crusoe, Emma, The Return of the Native. Compare the novels with these—even the latest and least of novels has a right to be judged with the best. And so with poetry—when the intoxication of rhythm has died down and the splendour of words has faded, a visionary shape will return to us and this must be compared with Lear, with Phèdre, with The Prelude; or if not with these, with whatever is the best or seems to us to be the best in its own kind. And we may be sure that the newness of new poetry and fiction is its most superficial quality and that we have only to alter slightly, not to recast, the standards by which we have judged the old.

It would be foolish, then, to pretend that the second part of reading, to judge, to compare, is as simple as the first—to open the mind wide to the fast flocking of innumerable impressions. To continue reading without the book before you, to hold one shadow-shape against another, to have read widely enough and with enough understanding to make such comparisons alive and illuminating—that is difficult; it is still more difficult to press further and to say, “Not only is the book of this sort, but it is of this value; here it fails; here it succeeds; this is bad; that is good”. To carry out this part of a reader’s duty needs such imagination, insight, and learning that it is hard to conceive any one mind sufficiently endowed; impossible for the most self-confident to find more than the seeds of such powers in himself. Would it not be wiser, then, to remit this part of reading and to allow the critics, the gowned and furred authorities of the library, to decide the question of the book’s absolute value for us? Yet how impossible! We may stress the value of sympathy; we may try to sink our identity as we read. But we know that we cannot sympathise wholly or immerse ourselves wholly; there is always a demon in us who whispers, “I hate, I love”, and we cannot silence him. Indeed, it is precisely because we hate and we love that our relation with the poets and novelists is so intimate that we find the presence of another person intolerable. And even if the results are abhorrent and our judgments are wrong, still our taste, the nerve of sensation that sends shocks through us, is our chief illuminant; we learn through feeling; we cannot suppress our own idiosyncrasy without impoverishing it. But as time goes on perhaps we can train our taste; perhaps we can make it submit to some control. When it has fed greedily and lavishly upon books of all sorts—poetry, fiction, history, biography—and has stopped reading and looked for long spaces upon the variety, the incongruity of the living world, we shall find that it is changing a little; it is not so greedy, it is more reflective. It will begin to bring us not merely judgments on particular books, but it will tell us that there is a quality common to certain books. Listen, it will say, what shall we call this? And it will read us perhaps Lear and then perhaps the Agamemnon in order to bring out that common quality. Thus, with our taste to guide us, we shall venture beyond the particular book in search of qualities that group books together; we shall give them names and thus frame a rule that brings order into our perceptions. We shall gain a further and a rarer pleasure from that discrimination. But as a rule only lives when it is perpetually broken by contact with the books themselves—nothing is easier and more stultifying than to make rules which exist out of touch with facts, in a vacuum—now at last, in order to steady ourselves in this difficult attempt, it may be well to turn to the very rare writers who are able to enlighten us upon literature as an art. Coleridge and Dryden and Johnson, in their considered criticism, the poets and novelists themselves in their considered sayings, are often surprisingly revelant; they light up and solidify the vague ideas that have been tumbling in the misty depths of our minds. But they are only able to help us if we come to them laden with questions and suggestions won honestly in the course of our own reading. They can do nothing for us if we herd ourselves under their authority and lie down like sheep in the shade of a hedge. We can only understand their ruling when it comes in conflict with our own and vanquishes it.

If this is so, if to read a book as it should be read calls for the rarest qualities of imagination, insight, and judgment, you may perhaps conclude that literature is a very complex art and that it is unlikely that we shall be able, even after a lifetime of reading, to make any valuable contribution to its criticism. We must remain readers; we shall not put on the further glory that belongs to those rare beings who are also critics. But still we have our responsibilities as readers and even our importance. The standards we raise and the judgments we pass steal into the air and become part of the atmosphere which writers breathe as they work. An influence is created which tells upon them even if it never finds its way into print. And that influence, if it were well instructed, vigorous and individual and sincere, might be of great value now when criticism is necessarily in abeyance; when books pass in review like the procession of animals in a shooting gallery, and the critic has only one second in which to load and aim and shoot and may well be pardoned if he mistakes rabbits for tigers, eagles for barndoor fowls, or misses altogether and wastes his shot upon some peaceful cow grazing in a further field. If behind the erratic gunfire of the press the author felt that there was another kind of criticism, the opinion of people reading for the love of reading, slowly and unprofessionally, and judging with great sympathy and yet with great severity, might this not improve the quality of his work? And if by our means books were to become stronger, richer, and more varied, that would be an end worth reaching.

Yet who reads to bring about an end, however desirable? Are there not some pursuits that we practise because they are good in themselves, and some pleasures that are final? And is not this among them? I have sometimes dreamt, at least, that when the Day of Judgment dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards—their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble—the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when he sees us coming with our books under our arms, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading.”

[A paper read at a school; Yale Review, October 1926]

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FLUSH:
a biography

by
Virginia Woolf

published
1933
by
The Hogarth Press

flush: a biography

Chapter One: Three Mile Cross

Chapter Two: The Back Bedroom

Chapter Three: The Hooded Man

Chapter Four: Whitechapel

Chapter Five: Italy

Chapter Six: The End

Authorities

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[The text follows the second 1933 Hogarth Press edition.]

Chapter One
Three Mile Cross.

It is universally admitted that the family from which the subject of this memoir claims descent is one of the greatest antiquity. Therefore it is not strange that the origin of the name itself is lost in obscurity. Many million years ago the country which is now called Spain seethed uneasily in the ferment of creation. Ages passed; vegetation appeared; where there is vegetation the law of Nature has decreed that there shall be rabbits; where there are rabbits, Providence has ordained there shall be dogs. There is nothing in this that calls for question or comment. But when we ask why the dog that caught the rabbit was called a Spaniel, then doubts and difficulties begin. Some historians say that when the Carthaginians landed in Spain the common soldiers shouted with one accord “Span! Span!”—for rabbits darted from every scrub, from every bush. The land was alive with rabbits. And Span in the Carthaginian tongue signifies Rabbit. Thus the land was called Hispania, or Rabbit-land, and the dogs, which were almost instantly perceived in full pursuit of the rabbits, were called Spaniels or rabbit dogs.

There many of us would be content to let the matter rest; but truth compels us to add that there is another school of thought which thinks differently. The word Hispania, these scholars say, has nothing whatever to do with the Carthaginian word span. Hispania derives from the Basque word españa, signifying an edge or boundary. If that is so, rabbits, bushes, dogs, soldiers—the whole of that romantic and pleasant picture, must be dismissed from the mind; and we must simply suppose that the Spaniel is called a spaniel because Spain is called España. As for the third school of antiquaries which maintains that just as a lover calls his mistress monster or monkey, so the Spaniards called their favourite dogs crooked or cragged (the word españa can be made to take these meanings) because a spaniel is notoriously the opposite—that is too fanciful a conjecture to be seriously entertained.

Passing over these theories, and many more which need not detain us here, we reach Wales in the middle of the tenth century. The spaniel is already there, brought, some say, by the Spanish clan of Ebhor or Ivor many centuries previously; and certainly by the middle of the tenth century a dog of high repute and value. “The Spaniel of the King is a pound in value,” Howel Dha laid it down in his Book of Laws. And when we remember what the pound could buy in the year a.d. 948—how many wives, slaves, horses, oxen, turkeys and geese—it is plain that the spaniel was already a dog of value and reputation. He had his place already by the King’s side. His family was held in honour before those of many famous monarchs. He was taking his ease in palaces when the Plantagenets and the Tudors and the Stuarts were following other people’s ploughs through other people’s mud. Long before the Howards, the Cavendishes or the Russells had risen above the common ruck of Smiths, Joneses and Tomkins, the spaniel family was a family distinguished and apart. And as the centuries took their way, minor branches broke off from the parent stem. By degrees, as English history pursues its course, there came into existence at least seven famous Spaniel families—the Clumber, the Sussex, the Norfolk, the Black Field, the Cocker, the Irish Water and the English Water, all deriving from the original spaniel of prehistoric days but showing distinct characteristics, and therefore no doubt claiming privileges as distinct. That there was an aristocracy of dogs by the time Queen Elizabeth was on the throne Sir Philip Sidney bears witness: “… greyhounds, Spaniels and Hounds”, he observes, “whereof the first might seem the Lords, the second the Gentlemen, and the last the Yeomen of dogs”, he writes in the Arcadia.

But if we are thus led to assume that the Spaniels followed human example, and looked up to Greyhounds as their superiors and considered Hounds beneath them, we have to admit that their aristocracy was founded on better reasons than ours. Such at least must be the conclusion of anyone who studies the laws of the Spaniel Club. By that august body it is plainly laid down what constitute the vices of a spaniel, and what constitute its virtues. Light eyes, for example, are undesirable; curled ears are still worse; to be born with a light nose or a topknot is nothing less than fatal. The merits of the spaniel are equally clearly defined. His head must be smooth, rising without a too-decided stoop from the muzzle; the skull must be comparatively rounded and well developed with plenty of room for brain power; the eyes must be full but not gozzled; the general expression must be one of intelligence and gentleness. The spaniel that exhibits these points is encouraged and bred from; the spaniel who persists in perpetuating topknots and light noses is cut off from the privileges and emoluments of his kind. Thus the judges lay down the law and, laying down the law, impose penalties and privileges which ensure that the law shall be obeyed.

But, if we now turn to human society, what chaos and confusion meet the eye! No Club has any such jurisdiction upon the breed of man. The Heralds’ College is the nearest approach we have to the Spaniel Club. It at least makes some attempt to preserve the purity of the human family. But when we ask what constitutes noble birth—should our eyes be light or dark, our ears curled or straight, are topknots fatal, our judges merely refer us to our coats of arms. You have none perhaps. Then you are nobody. But once make good your claim to sixteen quarterings, prove your right to a coronet, and then they say you are not only born, but nobly born into the bargain. Hence it is that not a muffineer in all Mayfair lacks its lion couchant or its mermaid rampant. Even our linendrapers mount the Royal Arms above their doors, as though that were proof that their sheets are safe to sleep in. Everywhere rank is claimed and its virtues are asserted. Yet when we come to survey the Royal Houses of Bourbon, Hapsburg and Hohenzollern, decorated with how many coronets and quarterings, couchant and rampant with how many lions and leopards, and find them now in exile, deposed from authority, judged unworthy of respect, we can but shake our heads and admit that the Judges of the Spaniel Club judged better. Such is the lesson that is enforced directly we turn from these high matters to consider the early life of Flush in the family of the Mitfords.

About the end of the eighteenth century a family of the famous spaniel breed was living near Reading in the house of a certain Dr. Midford or Mitford. That gentleman, in conformity with the canons of the Heralds’ College, chose to spell his name with a t, and thus claimed descent from the Northumberland family of the Mitfords of Bertram Castle. His wife was a Miss Russell, and sprang, if remotely, still decidedly from the ducal house of Bedford. But the mating of Dr. Mitford’s ancestors had been carried on with such wanton disregard for principles that no bench of judges could have admitted his claim to be well bred or have allowed him to perpetuate his kind. His eyes were light; his ears were curled; his head exhibited the fatal topknot. In other words, he was utterly selfish, recklessly extravagant, worldly, insincere and addicted to gambling. He wasted his own fortune, his wife’s fortune, and his daughter’s earnings. He deserted them in his prosperity and sponged upon them in his infirmity. Two points he had in his favour indeed, great personal beauty—he was like an Apollo until gluttony and intemperance changed Apollo into Bacchus—and he was genuinely devoted to dogs. But there can be no doubt that, had there been a Man Club corresponding to the Spaniel Club in existence, no spelling of Mitford with a t instead of with a d, no calling cousins with the Mitfords of Bertram Castle, would have availed to protect him from contumely and contempt, from all the penalties of outlawry and ostracism, from being branded as a mongrel man unfitted to carry on his kind. But he was a human being. Nothing therefore prevented him from marrying a lady of birth and breeding, from living for over eighty years, from having in his possession several generations of greyhounds and spaniels and from begetting a daughter.

All researches have failed to fix with any certainty the exact year of Flush’s birth, let alone the month or the day; but it is likely that he was born some time early in the year 1842. It is also probable that he was directly descended from Tray (c. 1816), whose points, preserved unfortunately only in the untrustworthy medium of poetry, prove him to have been a red cocker spaniel of merit. There is every reason to think that Flush was the son of that “real old cocking spaniel” for whom Dr. Mitford refused twenty guineas “on account of his excellence in the field”. It is to poetry, alas, that we have to trust for our most detailed description of Flush himself as a young dog. He was of that particular shade of dark brown which in sunshine flashes “all over into gold”. His eyes were “startled eyes of hazel bland”. His ears were “tasselled”; his “slender feet” were “canopied in fringes” and his tail was broad. Making allowance for the exigencies of rhyme and the inaccuracies of poetic diction, there is nothing here but what would meet with the approval of the Spaniel Club. We cannot doubt that Flush was a pure-bred Cocker of the red variety marked by all the characteristic excellences of his kind.

Flush’s birthplace

The first months of his life were passed at Three Mile Cross, a working man’s cottage near Reading. Since the Mitfords had fallen on evil days—Kerenhappock was the only servant—the chair-covers were made by Miss Mitford herself and of the cheapest material; the most important article of furniture seems to have been a large table; the most important room a large greenhouse—it is unlikely that Flush was surrounded by any of those luxuries, rain-proof kennels, cement walks, a maid or boy attached to his person, that would now be accorded a dog of his rank. But he throve; he enjoyed with all the vivacity of his temperament most of the pleasures and some of the licences natural to his youth and sex. Miss Mitford, it is true, was much confined to the cottage. She had to read aloud to her father hour after hour; then to play cribbage; then, when at last he slumbered, to write and write and write at the table in the greenhouse in the attempt to pay their bills and settle their debts. But at last the longed-for moment would come. She thrust her papers aside, clapped a hat on her head, took her umbrella and set off for a walk across the fields with her dogs. Spaniels are by nature sympathetic; Flush, as his story proves, had an even excessive appreciation of human emotions. The sight of his dear mistress snuffing the fresh air at last, letting it ruffle her white hair and redden the natural freshness of her face, while the lines on her huge brow smoothed themselves out, excited him to gambols whose wildness was half sympathy with her own delight. As she strode through the long grass, so he leapt hither and thither, parting its green curtain. The cool globes of dew or rain broke in showers of iridescent spray about his nose; the earth, here hard, here soft, here hot, here cold, stung, teased and tickled the soft pads of his feet. Then what a variety of smells interwoven in subtlest combination thrilled his nostrils; strong smells of earth, sweet smells of flowers; nameless smells of leaf and bramble; sour smells as they crossed the road; pungent smells as they entered bean-fields. But suddenly down the wind came tearing a smell sharper, stronger, more lacerating than any—a smell that ripped across his brain stirring a thousand instincts, releasing a million memories—the smell of hare, the smell of fox. Off he flashed like a fish drawn in a rush through water further and further. He forgot his mistress; he forgot all human kind. He heard dark men cry “Span! Span!” He heard whips crack. He raced; he rushed. At last he stopped bewildered; the incantation faded; very slowly, wagging his tail sheepishly, he trotted back across the fields to where Miss Mitford stood shouting “Flush! Flush! Flush!” and waving her umbrella. And once at least the call was even more imperious; the hunting horn roused deeper instincts, summoned wilder and stronger emotions that transcended memory and obliterated grass, trees, hare, rabbit, fox in one wild shout of ecstasy. Love blazed her torch in his eyes; he heard the hunting horn of Venus. Before he was well out of his puppyhood, Flush was a father.

Miss Mitford takes Flush for a walk

Such conduct in a man even, in the year 1842, would have called for some excuse from a biographer; in a woman no excuse could have availed; her name must have been blotted in ignominy from the page. But the moral code of dogs, whether better or worse, is certainly different from ours, and there was nothing in Flush’s conduct in this respect that requires a veil now, or unfitted him for the society of the purest and the chastest in the land then. There is evidence, that is to say, that the elder brother of Dr. Pusey was anxious to buy him. Deducing from the known character of Dr. Pusey the probable character of his brother, there must have been something serious, solid, promising well for future excellence whatever might be the levity of the present in Flush even as a puppy. But a much more significant testimony to the attractive nature of his gifts is that, even though Mr. Pusey wished to buy him, Miss Mitford refused to sell him. As she was at her wits’ end for money, scarcely knew indeed what tragedy to spin, what annual to edit, and was reduced to the repulsive expedient of asking her friends for help, it must have gone hard with her to refuse the sum offered by the elder brother of Dr. Pusey. Twenty pounds had been offered for Flush’s father. Miss Mitford might well have asked ten or fifteen for Flush. Ten or fifteen pounds was a princely sum, a magnificent sum to have at her disposal. With ten or fifteen pounds she might have re-covered her chairs, she might have re-stocked her greenhouse, she might have bought herself an entire wardrobe, and “I have not bought a bonnet, a cloak, a gown, hardly a pair of gloves,” she wrote in 1842, “for four years”.

But to sell Flush was unthinkable. He was of the rare order of objects that cannot be associated with money. Was he not of the still rarer kind that, because they typify what is spiritual, what is beyond price, become a fitting token of the disinterestedness of friendship; may be offered in that spirit to a friend, if one is lucky enough to have one, who is more like a daughter than a friend; to a friend who lies secluded all through the summer months in a back bedroom in Wimpole Street, to a friend who is no other than England’s foremost poetess, the brilliant, the doomed, the adored Elizabeth Barrett herself? Such were the thoughts that came more and more frequently to Miss Mitford as she watched Flush rolling and scampering in the sunshine; as she sat by the couch of Miss Barrett in her dark, ivy-shaded London bedroom. Yes; Flush was worthy of Miss Barrett; Miss Barrett was worthy of Flush. The sacrifice was a great one; but the sacrifice must be made. Thus, one day, probably in the early summer of the year 1842, a remarkable couple might have been seen taking their way down Wimpole Street—a very short, stout, shabby, elderly lady, with a bright red face and bright white hair, who led by the chain a very spirited, very inquisitive, very well-bred golden cocker spaniel puppy. They walked almost the whole length of the street until at last they paused at No. 50. Not without trepidation, Miss Mitford rang the bell.

Even now perhaps nobody rings the bell of a house in Wimpole Street without trepidation. It is the most august of London streets, the most impersonal. Indeed, when the world seems tumbling to ruin, and civilisation rocks on its foundations, one has only to go to Wimpole Street; to pace that avenue; to survey those houses; to consider their uniformity; to marvel at the window curtains and their consistency; to admire the brass knockers and their regularity; to observe butchers tendering joints and cooks receiving them; to reckon the incomes of the inhabitants and infer their consequent submission to the laws of God and man—one has only to go to Wimpole Street and drink deep of the peace breathed by authority in order to heave a sigh of thankfulness that, while Corinth has fallen and Messina has tumbled, while crowns have blown down the wind and old Empires have gone up in flames, Wimpole Street has remained unmoved, and, turning from Wimpole Street into Oxford Street, a prayer rises in the heart and bursts from the lips that not a brick of Wimpole Street may be re-pointed, not a curtain washed, not a butcher fail to tender or a cook to receive the sirloin, the haunch, the breast, the ribs of mutton and beef for ever and ever, for as long as Wimpole Street remains, civilisation is secure.

The butlers of Wimpole Street move ponderously even to-day; in the summer of 1842 they were more deliberate still. The laws of livery were then more stringent; the ritual of the green baize apron for cleaning silver; of the striped waistcoat and swallow-tail black coat for opening the hall door, was more closely observed. It is likely then that Miss Mitford and Flush were kept waiting at least three minutes and a half on the door-step. At last, however, the door of number fifty was flung wide; Miss Mitford and Flush were ushered in. Miss Mitford was a frequent visitor; there was nothing to surprise, though something to subdue her, in the sight of the Barrett family mansion. But the effect upon Flush must have been overwhelming in the extreme. Until this moment he had set foot in no house but the working man’s cottage at Three Mile Cross. The boards there were bare; the mats were frayed; the chairs were cheap. Here there was nothing bare, nothing frayed, nothing cheap—that Flush could see at a glance. Mr. Barrett, the owner, was a rich merchant; he had a large family of grown-up sons and daughters, and a retinue, proportionately large, of servants. His house was furnished in the fashion of the late ’thirties, with some tincture, no doubt, of that Eastern fantasy which had led him when he built a house in Shropshire to adorn it with the domes and crescents of Moorish architecture. Here in Wimpole Street such extravagance would not be allowed; but we may suppose that the high dark rooms were full of ottomans and carved mahogany; tables were twisted; filigree ornaments stood upon them; daggers and swords hung upon wine-dark walls; curious objects brought from his East Indian property stood in recesses, and thick rich carpets clothed the floors.

Miss Mitford

But as Flush trotted up behind Miss Mitford, who was behind the butler, he was more astonished by what he smelt than by what he saw. Up the funnel of the staircase came warm whiffs of joints roasting, of fowls basting, of soups simmering—ravishing almost as food itself to nostrils used to the meagre savour of Kerenhappock’s penurious fries and hashes. Mixing with the smell of food were further smells—smells of cedarwood and sandalwood and mahogany; scents of male bodies and female bodies; of men servants and maid servants; of coats and trousers; of crinolines and mantles; of curtains of tapestry, of curtains of plush; of coal dust and fog; of wine and cigars. Each room as he passed it—dining-room, drawing-room, library, bedroom—wafted out its own contribution to the general stew; while, as he set down first one paw and then another, each was caressed and retained by the sensuality of rich pile carpets closing amorously over it. At length they reached a closed door at the back of the house. A gentle tap was given; gently the door was opened.

Miss Barrett’s bedroom—for such it was—must by all accounts have been dark. The light, normally obscured by a curtain of green damask, was in summer further dimmed by the ivy, the scarlet runners, the convolvuluses and the nasturtiums which grew in the window-box. At first Flush could distinguish nothing in the pale greenish gloom but five white globes glimmering mysteriously in mid-air. But again it was the smell of the room that overpowered him. Only a scholar who has descended step by step into a mausoleum and there finds himself in a crypt, crusted with fungus, slimy with mould, exuding sour smells of decay and antiquity, while half-obliterated marble busts gleam in mid-air and all is dimly seen by the light of the small swinging lamp which he holds, and dips and turns, glancing now here, now there—only the sensations of such an explorer into the buried vaults of a ruined city can compare with the riot of emotions that flooded Flush’s nerves as he stood for the first time in an invalid’s bedroom, in Wimpole Street, and smelt eau-de-Cologne.

Very slowly, very dimly, with much sniffing and pawing, Flush by degrees distinguished the outlines of several articles of furniture. That huge object by the window was perhaps a wardrobe. Next to it stood, conceivably, a chest of drawers. In the middle of the room swam up to the surface what seemed to be a table with a ring round it; and then the vague amorphous shapes of armchair and table emerged. But everything was disguised. On top of the wardrobe stood three white busts; the chest of drawers was surmounted by a bookcase; the bookcase was pasted over with crimson merino; the washing-table had a coronal of shelves upon it; on top of the shelves that were on top of the washing-table stood two more busts. Nothing in the room was itself; everything was something else. Even the window-blind was not a simple muslin blind; it was a painted fabric [◉1] with a design of castles and gateways and groves of trees, and there were several peasants taking a walk. Looking-glasses further distorted these already distorted objects so that there seemed to be ten busts of ten poets instead of five; four tables instead of two. And suddenly there was a more terrifying confusion still. Suddenly Flush saw staring back at him from a hole in the wall another dog with bright eyes flashing, and tongue lolling! He paused amazed. He advanced in awe.

Thus advancing, thus withdrawing, Flush scarcely heard, save as the distant drone of wind among the tree-tops, the murmur and patter of voices talking. He pursued his investigations, cautiously, nervously, as an explorer in a forest softly advances his foot, uncertain whether that shadow is a lion, or that root a cobra. At last, however, he was aware of huge objects in commotion over him; and, unstrung as he was by the experiences of the past hour, he hid himself, trembling, behind a screen. The voices ceased. A door shut. For one instant he paused, bewildered, unstrung. Then with a pounce as of clawed tigers memory fell upon him. He felt himself alone—deserted. He rushed to the door. It was shut. He pawed, he listened. He heard footsteps descending. He knew them for the familiar footsteps of his mistress. They stopped. But no—on they went, down they went. Miss Mitford was slowly, was heavily, was reluctantly descending the stairs. And as she went, as he heard her footsteps fade, panic seized upon him. Door after door shut in his face as Miss Mitford went downstairs; they shut on freedom; on fields; on hares; on grass; on his adored, his venerated mistress—on the dear old woman who had washed him and beaten him and fed him from her own plate when she had none too much to eat herself—on all he had known of happiness and love and human goodness! There! The front door slammed. He was alone. She had deserted him.

Then such a wave of despair and anguish overwhelmed him, the irrevocableness and implacability of fate so smote him, that he lifted up his head and howled aloud. A voice said “Flush”. He did not hear it. “Flush”, it repeated a second time. He started. He had thought himself alone. He turned. Was there something alive in the room with him? Was there something on the sofa? In the wild hope that this being, whatever it was, might open the door, that he might still rush after Miss Mitford and find her—that this was some game of hide-and-seek such as they used to play in the greenhouse at home—Flush darted to the sofa.

“Oh, Flush!” said Miss Barrett. For the first time she looked him in the face. For the first time Flush looked at the lady lying on the sofa.

Each was surprised. Heavy curls hung down on either side of Miss Barrett’s face; large bright eyes shone out; a large mouth smiled. Heavy ears hung down on either side of Flush’s face; his eyes, too, were large and bright: his mouth was wide. There was a likeness between them. As they gazed at each other each felt: Here am I—and then each felt: But how different! Hers was the pale worn face of an invalid, cut off from air, light, freedom. His was the warm ruddy face of a young animal; instinct with health and energy. Broken asunder, yet made in the same mould, could it be that each completed what was dormant in the other? She might have been—all that; and he—But no. Between them lay the widest gulf that can separate one being from another. She spoke. He was dumb. She was woman; he was dog. Thus closely united, thus immensely divided, they gazed at each other. Then with one bound Flush sprang on to the sofa and laid himself where he was to lie for ever after—on the rug at Miss Barrett’s feet.

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Chapter Two
The Back Bedroom.

The summer of 1842 was, historians tell us, not much different from other summers, yet to Flush it was so different that he must have doubted if the world itself were the same. It was a summer spent in a bedroom; a summer spent with Miss Barrett. It was a summer spent in London, spent in the heart of civilisation. At first he saw nothing but the bedroom and its furniture, but that alone was surprising enough. To identify, distinguish and call by their right names all the different articles he saw there was confusing enough. And he had scarcely accustomed himself to the tables, to the busts, to the washing-stands—the smell of eau-de-Cologne still affected his nostrils disagreeably, when there came one of those rare days which are fine but not windy, warm but not baking, dry but not dusty, when an invalid can take the air. The day came when Miss Barrett could safely risk the huge adventure of going shopping with her sister.

The carriage was ordered; Miss Barrett rose from her sofa; veiled and muffled, she descended the stairs. Flush of course went with her. He leapt into the carriage by her side. Couched on her lap, the whole pomp of London at its most splendid burst on his astonished eyes. They drove along Oxford Street. He saw houses made almost entirely of glass. He saw windows laced across with glittering streamers; heaped with gleaming mounds of pink, purple, yellow, rose. The carriage stopped. He entered mysterious arcades filmed with clouds and webs of tinted gauze. A million airs from China, from Arabia, wafted their frail incense into the remotest fibres of his senses. Swiftly over the counters flashed yards of gleaming silk; more darkly, more slowly rolled the ponderous bombazine. Scissors snipped; coins sparkled. Paper was folded; string tied. What with nodding plumes, waving streamers, tossing horses, yellow liveries, passing faces, leaping, dancing up, down, Flush, satiated with the multiplicity of his sensations, slept, drowsed, dreamt and knew no more until he was lifted out of the carriage and the door of Wimpole Street shut on him again.

And next day, as the fine weather continued, Miss Barrett ventured upon an even more daring exploit—she had herself drawn up Wimpole Street in a bath-chair. Again Flush went with her. For the first time he heard his nails click upon the hard paving-stones of London. For the first time the whole battery of a London street on a hot summer’s day assaulted his nostrils. He smelt the swooning smells that lie in the gutters; the bitter smells that corrode iron railings; the fuming, heady smells that rise from basements—smells more complex, corrupt, violently contrasted and compounded than any he had smelt in the fields near Reading; smells that lay far beyond the range of the human nose; so that while the chair went on, he stopped, amazed; defining, savouring, until a jerk at his collar dragged him on. And also, as he trotted up Wimpole Street behind Miss Barrett’s chair he was dazed by the passage of human bodies. Petticoats swished at his head; trousers brushed his flanks; sometimes a wheel whizzed an inch from his nose; the wind of destruction roared in his ears and fanned the feathers of his paws as a van passed. Then he plunged in terror. Mercifully the chain tugged at his collar; Miss Barrett held him tight, or he would have rushed to destruction.

At last, with every nerve throbbing and every sense singing, he reached Regent’s Park. And then when he saw once more, after years of absence it seemed, grass, flowers and trees, the old hunting cry of the fields hallooed in his ears and he dashed forward to run as he had run in the fields at home. But now a heavy weight jerked at his throat; he was thrown back on his haunches. Were there not trees and grass? he asked. Were these not the signals of freedom? Had he not always leapt forward directly Miss Mitford started on her walk? Why was he a prisoner here? He paused. Here, he observed, the flowers were massed far more thickly than at home; they stood, plant by plant, rigidly in narrow plots. The plots were intersected by hard black paths. Men in shiny top-hats marched ominously up and down the paths. At the sight of them he shuddered closer to the chair. He gladly accepted the protection of the chain. Thus before many of these walks were over a new conception had entered his brain. Setting one thing beside another, he had arrived at a conclusion. Where there are flower-beds there are asphalt paths; where there are flower-beds and asphalt paths, there are men in shiny top-hats; where there are flower-beds and asphalt paths and men in shiny top-hats, dogs must be led on chains. Without being able to decipher a word of the placard at the Gate, he had learnt his lesson—in Regent’s Park dogs must be led on chains.

The back bedroom

And to this nucleus of knowledge, born from the strange experiences of the summer of 1842, soon adhered another; dogs are not equal, but different. At Three Mile Cross Flush had mixed impartially with tap-room dogs and the Squire’s greyhounds; he had known no difference between the tinker’s dog and himself. Indeed it is probable that the mother of his child, though by courtesy called Spaniel, was nothing but a mongrel, eared in one way, tailed in another. But the dogs of London, Flush soon discovered, are strictly divided into different classes. Some are chained dogs; some run wild. Some take their airings in carriages and drink from purple jars; others are unkempt and uncollared and pick up a living in the gutter. Dogs therefore, Flush began to suspect, differ; some are high, others low; and his suspicions were confirmed by snatches of talk held in passing with the dogs of Wimpole Street. “See that scallywag? A mere mongrel! … By gad, that’s a fine Spaniel. One of the best blood in Britain! … Pity his ears aren’t a shade more curly…. There’s a topknot for you!”

From such phrases, from the accent of praise or derision in which they were spoken, at the pillar-box or outside the public-house where the footmen were exchanging racing tips, Flush knew before the summer had passed that there is no equality among dogs: some dogs are high dogs; some are low. Which, then, was he? No sooner had Flush got home than he examined himself carefully in the looking-glass. Heaven be praised, he was a dog of birth and breeding! His head was smooth; his eyes were prominent but not gozzled; his feet were feathered; he was the equal of the best-bred cocker in Wimpole Street. He noted with approval the purple jar from which he drank—such are the privileges of rank; he bent his head quietly to have the chain fixed to his collar—such are its penalties. When about this time Miss Barrett observed him staring in the glass, she was mistaken. He was a philosopher, she thought, meditating the difference between appearance and reality. On the contrary, he was an aristocrat considering his points.

But the fine summer days were soon over; the autumn winds began to blow; and Miss Barrett settled down to a life of complete seclusion in her bedroom. Flush’s life was also changed. His outdoor education was supplemented by that of the bed-room, and this, to a dog of Flush’s temperament, was the most drastic that could have been invented. His only airings, and these were brief and perfunctory, were taken in the company of Wilson, Miss Barrett’s maid. For the rest of the day he kept his station on the sofa at Miss Barrett’s feet. All his natural instincts were thwarted and contradicted. When the autumn winds had blown last year in Berkshire he had run in wild scampering across the stubble; now at the sound of the ivy tapping on the pane Miss Barrett asked Wilson to see to the fastenings of the window. When the leaves of the scarlet runners and nasturtiums in the window-box yellowed and fell she drew her Indian shawl more closely round her. When the October rain lashed the window Wilson lit the fire and heaped up the coals. Autumn deepened into winter and the first fogs jaundiced the air. Wilson and Flush could scarcely grope their way to the pillar-box or to the chemist. When they came back, nothing could be seen in the room but the pale busts glimmering wanly on the tops of the wardrobes; the peasants and the castle had vanished on the blind; blank yellow filled the pane. Flush felt that he and Miss Barrett lived alone together in a cushioned and fire-lit cave. The traffic droned on perpetually outside with muffled reverberations; now and again a voice went calling hoarsely, “Old chairs and baskets to mend”, down the street: sometimes there was a jangle of organ music, coming nearer and louder; going further and fading away. But none of these sounds meant freedom, or action, or exercise. The wind and the rain, the wild days of autumn and the cold days of mid-winter, all alike meant nothing to Flush except warmth and stillness; the lighting of lamps, the drawing of curtains and the poking of the fire.

Mrs Browning

At first the strain was too great to be borne. He could not help dancing round the room on a windy autumn day when the partridges must be scattering over the stubble. He thought he heard guns on the breeze. He could not help running to the door with his hackles raised when a dog barked outside. And yet when Miss Barrett called him back, when she laid her hand on his collar, he could not deny that another feeling, urgent, contradictory, disagreeable—he did not know what to call it or why he obeyed it—restrained him. He lay still at her feet. To resign, to control, to suppress the most violent instincts of his nature—that was the prime lesson of the bedroom school, and it was one of such portentous difficulty that many scholars have learnt Greek with less—many battles have been won that cost their generals not half such pain. But then, Miss Barrett was the teacher. Between them, Flush felt more and more strongly, as the weeks wore on, was a bond, an uncomfortable yet thrilling tightness; so that if his pleasure was her pain, then his pleasure was pleasure no longer but three parts pain. The truth of this was proved every day. Somebody opened the door and whistled him to come. Why should he not go out? He longed for air and exercise; his limbs were cramped with lying on the sofa. He had never grown altogether used to the smell of eau-de-Cologne. But no—though the door stood open, he would not leave Miss Barrett. He hesitated half-way to the door and then went back to the sofa. “Flushie”, wrote Miss Barrett, “is my friend—my companion—and loves me better than he loves the sunshine without.” She could not go out. She was chained to the sofa. “A bird in a cage would have as good a story”, she wrote, as she had. And Flush, to whom the whole world was free, chose to forfeit all the smells of Wimpole Street in order to lie by her side.

And yet sometimes the tie would almost break; there were vast gaps in their understanding. Sometimes they would lie and stare at each other in blank bewilderment. Why, Miss Barrett wondered, did Flush tremble suddenly, and whimper and start and listen? She could hear nothing; she could see nothing; there was nobody in the room with them. She could not guess that Folly, her sister’s little King Charles, had passed the door; or that Catiline the Cuba bloodhound had been given a mutton-bone by a footman in the basement. But Flush knew; he heard; he was ravaged by the alternate rages of lust and greed. Then with all her poet’s imagination Miss Barrett could not divine what Wilson’s wet umbrella meant to Flush; what memories it recalled, of forests and parrots and wild trumpeting elephants; nor did she know, when Mr. Kenyon stumbled over the bell-pull, that Flush heard dark men cursing in the mountains; the cry, “Span! Span!” rang in his ears, and it was in some muffled, ancestral rage that he bit him.

Flush was equally at a loss to account for Miss Barrett’s emotions. There she would lie hour after hour passing her hand over a white page with a black stick; and her eyes would suddenly fill with tears; but why? “Ah, my dear Mr. Horne”, she was writing. “And then came the failure in my health … and then the enforced exile to Torquay … which gave a nightmare to my life for ever, and robbed it of more than I can speak of here; do not speak of that anywhere. Do not speak of that, dear Mr. Horne.” But there was no sound in the room, no smell to make Miss Barrett cry. Then again Miss Barrett, still agitating her stick, burst out laughing. She had drawn “a very neat and characteristic portrait of Flush, humorously made rather like myself”, and she had written under it that it “only fails of being an excellent substitute for mine through being more worthy than I can be counted”. What was there to laugh at in the black smudge that she held out for Flush to look at? He could smell nothing; he could hear nothing. There was nobody in the room with them. The fact was that they could not communicate with words, and it was a fact that led undoubtedly to much misunderstanding. Yet did it not lead also to a peculiar intimacy? “Writing”, Miss Barrett once exclaimed after a morning’s toil, “writing, writing …” After all, she may have thought, do words say everything? Can words say anything? Do not words destroy the symbol that lies beyond the reach of words? Once at least Miss Barrett seems to have found it so. She was lying, thinking; she had forgotten Flush altogether, and her thoughts were so sad that the tears fell upon the pillow. Then suddenly a hairy head was pressed against her; large bright eyes shone in hers; and she started. Was it Flush, or was it Pan? Was she no longer an invalid in Wimpole Street, but a Greek nymph in some dim grove in Arcady? And did the bearded god himself press his lips to hers? For a moment she was transformed; she was a nymph and Flush was Pan. The sun burnt and love blazed. But suppose Flush had been able to speak—would he not have said something sensible about the potato disease in Ireland?

So, too, Flush felt strange stirrings at work within him. When he saw Miss Barrett’s thin hands delicately lifting some silver box or pearl ornament from the ringed table, his own furry paws seemed to contract and he longed that they should fine themselves to ten separate fingers. When he heard her low voice syllabling innumerable sounds, he longed for the day when his own rough roar would issue like hers in the little simple sounds that had such mysterious meaning. And when he watched the same fingers for ever crossing a white page with a straight stick, he longed for the time when he too should blacken paper as she did.

And yet, had he been able to write as she did?—The question is superfluous happily, for truth compels us to say that in the year 1842-43 Miss Barrett was not a nymph but an invalid; Flush was not a poet but a red cocker spaniel; and Wimpole Street was not Arcady but Wimpole Street.

So the long hours went by in the back bedroom with nothing to mark them but the sound of steps passing on the stairs; and the distant sound of the front door shutting, and the sound of a broom tapping, and the sound of the postman knocking. In the room coals clicked; the lights and shadows shifted themselves over the brows of the five pale busts, over the bookcase and its red merino. But sometimes the step on the stair did not pass the door; it stopped outside. The handle was seen to spin round; the door actually opened; somebody came in. Then how strangely the furniture changed its look! What extraordinary eddies of sound and smell were at once set in circulation! How they washed round the legs of tables and impinged on the sharp edges of the wardrobe! Probably it was Wilson, with a tray of food or a glass of medicine; or it might be one of Miss Barrett’s two sisters—Arabel or Henrietta; or it might be one of Miss Barrett’s seven brothers—Charles, Samuel, George, Henry, Alfred, Septimus or Octavius. But once or twice a week Flush was aware that something more important was about to happen. The bed would be carefully disguised as a sofa. The armchair would be drawn up beside it; Miss Barrett herself would be wrapped becomingly in Indian shawls; the toilet things would be scrupulously hidden under the busts of Chaucer and Homer; Flush himself would be combed and brushed. At about two or three in the afternoon there was a peculiar, distinct and different tap at the door. Miss Barrett flushed, smiled and stretched out her hand. Then in would come—perhaps dear Miss Mitford, rosy and shiny and chattering, with a bunch of geraniums. Or it might be Mr. Kenyon, a stout, well-groomed elderly gentleman, radiating benevolence, provided with a book. Or it might be Mrs. Jameson, a lady who was the very opposite of Mr. Kenyon to look at—a lady with “a very light complexion—pale, lucid eyes; thin colourless lips … a nose and chin projective without breadth”. Each had his or her own manner, smell, tone and accent. Miss Mitford burbled and chattered, was fly-away yet substantial; Mr. Kenyon was urbane and cultured and mumbled slightly because he had lost two front teeth; [◉2] Mrs. Jameson had lost none of her teeth, and moved as sharply and precisely as she spoke.

Lying couched at Miss Barrett’s feet, Flush let the voices ripple over him, hour by hour. On and on they went. Miss Barrett laughed, expostulated, exclaimed, sighed too, and laughed again. At last, greatly to Flush’s relief, little silences came—even in the flow of Miss Mitford’s conversation. Could it be seven already? She had been there since midday! She must really run to catch her train. Mr. Kenyon shut his book—he had been reading aloud—and stood with his back to the fire; Mrs. Jameson with a sharp, angular movement pressed each finger of her glove sharp down. And Flush was patted by this one and had his ear pulled by another. The routine of leave-taking was intolerably prolonged; but at last Mrs. Jameson, Mr. Kenyon, and even Miss Mitford had risen, had said good-bye, had remembered something, had lost something, had found something, had reached the door, had opened it, and were—Heaven be praised—gone at last.

Miss Barrett sank back very white, very tired on her pillows. Flush crept closer to her. Mercifully they were alone again. But the visitor had stayed so long that it was almost dinner-time. Smells began to rise from the basement. Wilson was at the door with Miss Barrett’s dinner on a tray. It was set down on the table beside her and the covers lifted. But what with the dressing and the talking, what with the heat of the room and the agitation of the farewells, Miss Barrett was too tired to eat. She gave a little sigh when she saw the plump mutton chop, or the wing of partridge or chicken that had been sent up for her dinner. So long as Wilson was in the room she fiddled about with her knife and fork. But directly the door was shut and they were alone, she made a sign. She held up her fork. A whole chicken’s wing was impaled upon it. Flush advanced. Miss Barrett nodded. Very gently, very cleverly, without spilling a crumb, Flush removed the wing; swallowed it down and left no trace behind. Half a rice pudding clotted with thick cream went the same way. Nothing could have been neater, more effective than Flush’s co-operation. He was lying couched as usual at Miss Barrett’s feet, apparently asleep, Miss Barrett was lying rested and restored, apparently having made an excellent dinner, when once more a step that was heavier, more deliberate and firmer than any other, stopped on the stair; solemnly a knock sounded that was no tap of enquiry but a demand for admittance; the door opened and in came the blackest, the most formidable of elderly men—Mr. Barrett himself. His eye at once sought the tray. Had the meal been eaten? Had his commands been obeyed? Yes, the plates were empty. Signifying his approval of his daughter’s obedience, Mr. Barrett lowered himself heavily into the chair by her side. As that dark body approached him, shivers of terror and horror ran down Flush’s spine. So a savage couched in flowers shudders when the thunder growls and he hears the voice of God. Then Wilson whistled; and Flush, slinking guiltily, as if Mr. Barrett could read his thoughts and those thoughts were evil, crept out of the room and rushed downstairs. A force had entered the bedroom which he dreaded; a force that he was powerless to withstand. Once he burst in unexpectedly. Mr. Barrett was on his knees praying by his daughter’s side.

[]

Chapter Three
The Hooded Man.

Such an education as this, in the back bedroom at Wimpole Street, would have told upon an ordinary dog. And Flush was not an ordinary dog. He was high-spirited, yet reflective; canine, but highly sensitive to human emotions also. Upon such a dog the atmosphere of the bedroom told with peculiar force. We cannot blame him if his sensibility was cultivated rather to the detriment of his sterner qualities. Naturally, lying with his head pillowed on a Greek lexicon, he came to dislike barking and biting; he came to prefer the silence of the cat to the robustness of the dog; and human sympathy to either. Miss Barrett, too, did her best to refine and educate his powers still further. Once she took a harp from the window and asked him, as she laid it by his side, whether he thought that the harp, which made music, was itself alive? He looked and listened; pondered, it seemed, for a moment in doubt and then decided that it was not. Then she would make him stand with her in front of the looking-glass and ask him why he barked and trembled. Was not the little brown dog opposite himself? But what is “oneself”? Is it the thing people see? Or is it the thing one is? So Flush pondered that question too, and, unable to solve the problem of reality, pressed closer to Miss Barrett and kissed her “expressively”. That was real at any rate.

Fresh from such problems, with such emotional dilemmas agitating his nervous system, he went downstairs, and we cannot be surprised if there was something—a touch of the supercilious, of the superior—in his bearing that roused the rage of Catiline, the savage Cuba bloodhound, so that he set upon him and bit him and sent him howling upstairs to Miss Barrett for sympathy. Flush “is no hero”, she concluded; but why was he no hero? Was it not partly on her account? She was too just not to realise that it was for her that he had sacrificed his courage, as it was for her that he had sacrificed the sun and the air. This nervous sensibility had its drawbacks, no doubt—she was full of apologies when he flew at Mr. Kenyon and bit him for stumbling over the bell-pull; it was annoying when he moaned piteously all night because he was not allowed to sleep on her bed—when he refused to eat unless she fed him; but she took the blame and bore the inconvenience because, after all, Flush loved her. He had refused the air and the sun for her sake. “He is worth loving, is he not?” she asked of Mr. Horne. And whatever answer Mr. Horne might give, Miss Barrett was positive of her own. She loved Flush, and Flush was worthy of her love.

It seemed as if nothing were to break that tie—as if the years were merely to compact and cement it; and as if those years were to be all the years of their natural lives. Eighteen-forty-two turned into eighteen-forty-three; eighteen-forty-three into eighteen-forty-four; eighteen-forty-four into eighteen-forty-five. Flush was no longer a puppy; he was a dog of four or five; he was a dog in the full prime of life—and still Miss Barrett lay on her sofa in Wimpole Street and still Flush lay on the sofa at her feet. Miss Barrett’s life was the life of “a bird in its cage”. She sometimes kept the house for weeks at a time, and when she left it, it was only for an hour or two, to drive to a shop in a carriage, or to be wheeled to Regent’s Park in a bath-chair. The Barretts never left London. Mr. Barrett, the seven brothers, the two sisters, the butler, Wilson and the maids, Catiline, Folly, Miss Barrett and Flush all went on living at 50 Wimpole Street, eating in the dining-room, sleeping in the bedrooms, smoking in the study, cooking in the kitchen, carrying hot-water cans and emptying the slops from January to December. The chair-covers became slightly soiled; the carpets slightly worn; coal dust, mud, soot, fog, vapours of cigar smoke and wine and meat accumulated in crevices, in cracks, in fabrics, on the tops of picture-frames, in the scrolls of carvings. And the ivy that hung over Miss Barrett’s bedroom window flourished; its green curtain became thicker and thicker, and in summer the nasturtiums and the scarlet runners rioted together in the window-box.

But one night early in January 1845 the postman knocked. Letters fell into the box as usual. Wilson went downstairs to fetch the letters as usual. Everything was as usual—every night the postman knocked, every night Wilson fetched the letters, every night there was a letter for Miss Barrett. But to-night the letter was not the same letter; it was a different letter. Flush saw that, even before the envelope was broken. He knew it from the way that Miss Barrett took it; turned it; looked at the vigorous, jagged writing of her name. He knew it from the indescribable tremor in her fingers, from the impetuosity with which they tore the flap open, from the absorption with which she read. He watched her read. And as she read he heard, as when we are half asleep we hear through the clamour of the street some bell ringing and know that it is addressed to us, alarmingly yet faintly, as if someone far away were trying to rouse us with the warning of fire, or burglary, or some menace against our peace and we start in alarm before we wake—so Flush, as Miss Barrett read the little blotted sheet, heard a bell rousing him from his sleep; warning him of some danger; menacing his safety and bidding him sleep no more. Miss Barrett read the letter quickly; she read the letter slowly; she returned it carefully to its envelope. She too slept no more.

Again, a few nights later, there was the same letter on Wilson’s tray. Again it was read quickly, read slowly, read over and over again. Then it was put away carefully, not in the drawer with the voluminous sheets of Miss Mitford’s letters, but by itself. Now Flush paid the full price of long years of accumulated sensibility lying couched on cushions at Miss Barrett’s feet. He could read signs that nobody else could even see. He could tell by the touch of Miss Barrett’s fingers that she was waiting for one thing only—for the postman’s knock, for the letter on the tray. She would be stroking him perhaps with a light, regular movement; suddenly—there was the rap—her fingers constricted; he would be held in a vice while Wilson came upstairs. Then she took the letter and he was loosed and forgotten.

Yet, he argued, what was there to be afraid of, so long as there was no change in Miss Barrett’s life? And there was no change. No new visitors came. Mr. Kenyon came as usual; Miss Mitford came as usual. The brothers and sisters came; and in the evening Mr. Barrett came. They noticed nothing; they suspected nothing. So he would quieten himself and try to believe, when a few nights passed without the envelope, that the enemy had gone. A man in a cloak, he imagined, a cowled and hooded figure, had passed, like a burglar, rattling the door, and finding it guarded, had slunk away defeated. The danger, Flush tried to make himself believe, was over. The man had gone. And then the letter came again.

Robert Browning

As the envelopes came more and more regularly, night after night, Flush began to notice signs of change in Miss Barrett herself. For the first time in Flush’s experience she was irritable and restless. She could not read and she could not write. She stood at the window and looked out. She questioned Wilson anxiously about the weather—was the wind still in the east? Was there any sign of spring in the Park yet? Oh no, Wilson replied; the wind was a cruel east wind still. And Miss Barrett, Flush felt, was at once relieved and annoyed. She coughed. She complained of feeling ill—but not so ill as she usually felt when the wind was in the east. And then, when she was alone, she read over again last night’s letter. It was the longest she had yet had. There were many pages, closely covered, darkly blotted, scattered with strange little abrupt hieroglyphics. So much Flush could see, from his station at her feet. But he could make no sense of the words that Miss Barrett was murmuring to herself. Only he could trace her agitation when she came to the end of the page and read aloud (though unintelligibly), “Do you think I shall see you in two months, three months?”

Then she took up her pen and passed it rapidly and nervously over sheet after sheet. But what did they mean—the little words that Miss Barrett wrote? “April is coming. There will be both a May and a June if we live to see such things, and perhaps, after all, we may … I will indeed see you when the warm weather has revived me a little…. But I shall be afraid of you at first—though I am not, in writing thus. You are Paracelsus, and I am a recluse, with nerves that have been broken on the rack, and now hang loosely, quivering at a step and breath.”

Flush could not read what she was writing an inch or two above his head. But he knew just as well as if he could read every word, how strangely his mistress was agitated as she wrote; what contrary desires shook her—that April might come; that April might not come; that she might see this unknown man at once, that she might never see him at all. Flush, too, quivered as she did at a step, at a breath. And remorselessly the days went on. The wind blew out the blind. The sun whitened the busts. A bird sang in the mews. Men went crying fresh flowers to sell down Wimpole Street. All these sounds meant, he knew, that April was coming and May and June—nothing could stop the approach of that dreadful spring. For what was coming with the spring? Some terror—some horror—something that Miss Barrett dreaded, and that Flush dreaded too. He started now at the sound of a step. But it was only Henrietta. Then there was a knock. It was only Mr. Kenyon. So April passed; and the first twenty days of May. And then, on the 21st of May, Flush knew that the day itself had come. For on Tuesday, the 21st of May, Miss Barrett looked searchingly in the glass; arrayed herself exquisitely in her Indian shawls; bade Wilson draw the armchair close, but not too close; touched this, that and the other; and then sat upright among her pillows. Flush couched himself taut at her feet. They waited, alone together. At last, Marylebone Church clock struck two; they waited. Then Marylebone Church clock struck a single stroke—It was half-past two; and as the single stroke died away, a rap sounded boldly on the front door. Miss Barrett turned pale; she lay very still. Flush lay still too. Upstairs came the dreaded, the inexorable footfall; upstairs, Flush knew, came the cowled and sinister figure of midnight—the hooded man. Now his hand was on the door. The handle spun. There he stood.

“Mr. Browning”, said Wilson.

Flush, watching Miss Barrett, saw the colour rush into her face; saw her eyes brighten and her lips open.

“Mr. Browning!” she exclaimed.

Twisting his yellow gloves [◉3] in his hands, blinking his eyes, well groomed, masterly, abrupt, Mr. Browning strode across the room. He seized Miss Barrett’s hand, and sank into the chair by the sofa at her side. Instantly they began to talk.

What was horrible to Flush, as they talked, was his loneliness. Once he had felt that he and Miss Barrett were together, in a firelit cave. Now the cave was no longer firelit; it was dark and damp; Miss Barrett was outside. He looked round him. Everything had changed. The bookcase, the five busts—they were no longer friendly deities presiding approvingly—they were hostile, severe. He shifted his position at Miss Barrett’s feet. She took no notice. He whined. They did not hear him. At last he lay still in tense and silent agony. The talk went on; but it did not flow and ripple as talk usually flowed and rippled. It leapt and jerked. It stopped and leapt again. Flush had never heard that sound in Miss Barrett’s voice before—that vigour, that excitement. Her cheeks were bright as he had never seen them bright; her great eyes blazed as he had never seen them blaze. The clock struck four; and still they talked. Then it struck half-past four. At that Mr. Browning jumped up. A horrid decision, a dreadful boldness marked every movement. In another moment he had wrung Miss Barrett’s hand in his; he had taken his hat and gloves; he had said good-bye. They heard him running down the stairs. Smartly the door banged behind him. He was gone.

But Miss Barrett did not sink back in her pillows as she sank back when Mr. Kenyon or Miss Mitford left her. Now she still sat upright; her eyes still burnt; her cheeks still glowed; she seemed still to feel that Mr. Browning was with her. Flush touched her. She recalled him with a start. She patted him lightly, joyfully, on the head. And smiling, she gave him the oddest look—as if she wished that he could talk—as if she expected him too to feel what she felt. And then she laughed, pityingly; as if it were absurd—Flush, poor Flush could feel nothing of what she felt. He could know nothing of what she knew. Never had such wastes of dismal distance separated them. He lay there ignored; he might not have been there, he felt. Miss Barrett no longer remembered his existence.

And that night she ate her chicken to the bone. Not a scrap of potato or of skin was thrown to Flush. When Mr. Barrett came as usual, Flush marvelled at his obtuseness. He sat himself down in the very chair that the man had sat in. His head pressed the same cushions that the man’s had pressed, and yet he noticed nothing. “Don’t you know”, Flush marvelled, “who’s been sitting in that chair? Can’t you smell him?” For to Flush the whole room still reeked of Mr. Browning’s presence. The air dashed past the bookcase, and eddied and curled round the heads of the five pale busts. But the heavy man sat by his daughter in entire self-absorption. He noticed nothing. He suspected nothing. Aghast at his obtuseness, Flush slipped past him out of the room.

But in spite of their astonishing blindness, even Miss Barrett’s family began to notice, as the weeks passed, a change in Miss Barrett. She left her room and went down to sit in the drawing-room. Then she did what she had not done for many a long day—she actually walked on her own feet as far as the gate at Devonshire Place with her sister. Her friends, her family, were amazed at her improvement. But only Flush knew where her strength came from—it came from the dark man in the armchair. He came again and again and again. First it was once a week; then it was twice a week. He came always in the afternoon and left in the afternoon. Miss Barrett always saw him alone. And on the days when he did not come, his letters came. And when he himself was gone, his flowers were there. And in the mornings when she was alone, Miss Barrett wrote to him. That dark, taut, abrupt, vigorous man, with his black hair, his red cheeks and his yellow gloves, was everywhere. Naturally, Miss Barrett was better; of course she could walk. Flush himself felt that it was impossible to lie still. Old longings revived; a new restlessness possessed him. Even his sleep was full of dreams. He dreamt as he had not dreamt since the old days at Three Mile Cross—of hares starting from the long grass; of pheasants rocketing up with long tails streaming, of partridges rising with a whirr from the stubble. He dreamt that he was hunting, that he was chasing some spotted spaniel, who fled, who escaped him. He was in Spain; he was in Wales; he was in Berkshire; he was flying before park-keepers’ truncheons in Regent’s Park. Then he opened his eyes. There were no hares, and no partridges; no whips cracking and no black men crying “Span! Span!” There was only Mr. Browning in the armchair talking to Miss Barrett on the sofa.

Sleep became impossible while that man was there. Flush lay with his eyes wide open, listening. Though he could make no sense of the little words that hurtled over his head from two-thirty to four-thirty sometimes three times a week, he could detect with terrible accuracy that the tone of the words was changing. Miss Barrett’s voice had been forced and unnaturally lively at first. Now it had gained a warmth and an ease that he had never heard in it before. And every time the man came, some new sound came into their voices—now they made a grotesque chattering; now they skimmed over him like birds flying widely; now they cooed and clucked, as if they were two birds settled in a nest; and then Miss Barrett’s voice, rising again, went soaring and circling in the air; and then Mr. Browning’s voice barked out its sharp, harsh clapper of laughter; and then there was only a murmur, a quiet humming sound as the two voices joined together. But as the summer turned to autumn Flush noted, with horrid apprehension, another note. There was a new urgency, a new pressure and energy in the man’s voice, at which Miss Barrett, Flush felt, took fright. Her voice fluttered; hesitated; seemed to falter and fade and plead and gasp, as if she were begging for a rest, for a pause, as if she were afraid. Then the man was silent.

Of him they took but little notice. He might have been a log of wood lying there at Miss Barrett’s feet for all the attention Mr. Browning paid him. Sometimes he scrubbed his head in a brisk, spasmodic way, energetically, without sentiment, as he passed him. Whatever that scrub might mean, Flush felt nothing but an intense dislike for Mr. Browning. The very sight of him, so well tailored, so tight, so muscular, screwing his yellow gloves in his hand, set his teeth on edge. Oh! to let them meet sharply, completely in the stuff of his trousers! And yet he dared not. Taking it all in all, that winter—1845-6—was the most distressing that Flush had ever known.

The winter passed; and spring came round again. Flush could see no end to the affair; and yet just as a river, though it reflects still trees and grazing cows and rooks returning to the tree-tops, moves inevitably to a waterfall, so those days, Flush knew, were moving to catastrophe. Rumours of change hovered in the air. Sometimes he thought that some vast exodus impended. There was that indefinable stir in the house which precedes—could it be possible?—a journey. Boxes were actually dusted, were, incredible as it might seem, opened. Then they were shut again. No, it was not the family that was going to move. The brothers and sisters still went in and out as usual. Mr. Barrett paid his nightly visit, after the man had gone, at his accustomed hour. What was it, then, that was going to happen? for as the summer of 1846 wore on, Flush was positive that a change was coming. He could hear it again in the altered sound of the eternal voices. Miss Barrett’s voice, that had been pleading and afraid, lost its faltering note. It rang out with a determination and a boldness that Flush had never heard in it before. If only Mr. Barrett could hear the tone in which she welcomed this usurper, the laugh with which she greeted him, the exclamation with which he took her hand in his! But nobody was in the room with them except Flush. To him the change was of the most galling nature. It was not merely that Miss Barrett was changing towards Mr. Browning—she was changing in every relation—in her feeling towards Flush himself. She treated his advances more brusquely; she cut short his endearments laughingly; she made him feel that there was something petty, silly, affected, in his old affectionate ways. His vanity was exacerbated. His jealousy was inflamed. At last, when July came, he determined to make one violent attempt to regain her favour, and perhaps to oust the newcomer. How to accomplish this double purpose he did not know, and could not plan. But suddenly on the 8th of July his feelings overcame him. He flung himself on Mr. Browning and bit him savagely. At last his teeth met in the immaculate cloth of Mr. Browning’s trousers! But the limb inside was hard as iron—Mr. Kenyon’s leg had been butter in comparison. Mr. Browning brushed him off with a flick of his hand and went on talking. Neither he nor Miss Barrett seemed to think the attack worthy of attention. Completely foiled, worsted, without a shaft left in his sheath, Flush sank back on his cushions panting with rage and disappointment. But he had misjudged Miss Barrett’s insight. When Mr. Browning was gone, she called him to her and inflicted upon him the worst punishment he had ever known. First she slapped his ears—that was nothing; oddly enough the slap was rather to his liking; he would have welcomed another. But then she said in her sober, certain tones that she would never love him again. That shaft went to his heart. All these years they had lived together, shared everything together, and now, for one moment’s failure, she would never love him again. Then, as if to make her dismissal complete, she took the flowers that Mr. Browning had brought her and began to put them in water in a vase. It was an act, Flush thought, of calculated and deliberate malice; an act designed to make him feel his own insignificance completely. “This rose is from him”, she seemed to say, “and this carnation. Let the red shine by the yellow; and the yellow by the red. And let the green leaf lie there—” And, setting one flower with another, she stood back to gaze at them as if he were before her—the man in the yellow gloves—a mass of brilliant flowers. But even so, even as she pressed the leaves and flowers together, she could not altogether ignore the fixity with which Flush gazed at her. She could not deny that “expression of quite despair on his face”. She could not but relent. “At last I said, ‘If you are good, Flush, you may come and say that you are sorry’, on which he dashed across the room and, trembling all over, kissed first one of my hands and then another, and put up his paws to be shaken, and looked into my face with such beseeching eyes that you would certainly have forgiven him just as I did.” That was her account of the matter to Mr. Browning; and he of course replied: “Oh, poor Flush, do you think I do not love and respect him for his jealous supervision—his slowness to know another, having once known you?” It was easy enough for Mr. Browning to be magnanimous, but that easy magnanimity was perhaps the sharpest thorn that pressed into Flush’s side.

Another incident a few days later showed how widely they were separated, who had been so close, how little Flush could now count on Miss Barrett for sympathy. After Mr. Browning had gone one afternoon Miss Barrett decided to drive to Regent’s Park with her sister. As they got out at the Park gate the door of the four-wheeler shut on Flush’s paw. He “cried piteously” and held it up to Miss Barrett for sympathy. In other days sympathy in abundance would have been lavished upon him for less. But now a detached, a mocking, a critical expression came into her eyes. She laughed at him. She thought he was shamming: “… no sooner had he touched the grass than he began to run without a thought of it”, she wrote. And she commented sarcastically, “Flush always makes the most of his misfortunes—he is of the Byronic school—il se pose en victime”. But here Miss Barrett, absorbed in her own emotions, misjudged him completely. If his paw had been broken, still he would have bounded. That dash was his answer to her mockery; I have done with you—that was the meaning he flashed at her as he ran. The flowers smelt bitter to him; the grass burnt his paws; the dust filled his nostrils with disillusion. But he raced—he scampered. “Dogs must be led on chains”—there was the usual placard; there were the park-keepers with their top-hats and their truncheons to enforce it. But “must” no longer had any meaning for him. The chain of love was broken. He would run where he liked; chase partridges; chase spaniels; splash into the middle of dahlia beds; break brilliant, blowing red and yellow roses. Let the park-keepers throw their truncheons if they chose. Let them dash his brains out. Let him fall dead, disembowelled, at Miss Barrett’s feet. He cared nothing. But naturally nothing of the kind happened. Nobody pursued him; nobody noticed him. The solitary park-keeper was talking to a nursemaid. At last he returned to Miss Barrett and she absent-mindedly slipped the chain over his neck, and led him home.

After two such humiliations the spirit of an ordinary dog, the spirit even of an ordinary human being, might well have been broken. But Flush, for all his softness and silkiness, had eyes that blazed; had passions that leapt not merely in bright flame but sunk and smouldered. He resolved to meet his enemy face to face and alone. No third person should interrupt this final conflict. It should be fought out by the principals themselves. On the afternoon of Tuesday, the 21st of July, therefore, he slipped downstairs and waited in the hall. He had not long to wait. Soon he heard the tramp of the familiar footstep in the street; he heard the familiar rap on the door. Mr. Browning was admitted. Vaguely aware of the impending attack and determined to meet it in the most conciliatory of spirits, Mr. Browning had come provided with a parcel of cakes. There was Flush waiting in the hall. Mr. Browning made, evidently, some well-meant attempt to caress him; perhaps he even went so far as to offer him a cake. The gesture was enough. Flush sprang upon his enemy with unparalleled violence. His teeth once more met in Mr. Browning’s trousers. But unfortunately in the excitement of the moment he forgot what was most essential—silence. He barked; he flung himself on Mr. Browning, barking loudly. The sound was sufficient to alarm the household. Wilson rushed downstairs. Wilson beat him soundly. Wilson overpowered him completely. Wilson led him in ignominy away. Ignominy it was—to have attacked Mr. Browning, to have been beaten by Wilson. Mr. Browning had not lifted a finger. Taking his cakes with him, Mr. Browning proceeded unhurt, unmoved, in perfect composure, upstairs, alone to the bedroom. Flush was led away.

After two and a half hours of miserable confinement with parrots and beetles, ferns and saucepans, in the kitchen, Flush was summoned to Miss Barrett’s presence. She was lying on the sofa with her sister Arabella beside her. Conscious of the rightness of his cause, Flush went straight to her. But she refused to look at him. He turned to Arabella. She merely said, “Naughty Flush, go away”. Wilson was there—the formidable, the implacable Wilson. It was to her that Miss Barrett turned for information. She had beaten him, Wilson said, “because it was right”. And, she added, she had only beaten him with her hand. It was upon her evidence that Flush was convicted. The attack, Miss Barrett assumed, had been unprovoked; she credited Mr. Browning with all virtue, with all generosity; Flush had been beaten off by a servant, without a whip, because “it was right”. There was no more to be said. Miss Barrett decided against him. “So he lay down on the floor at my feet,” she wrote, “looking from under his eyebrows at me.” But though Flush might look, Miss Barrett refused even to meet his eyes. There she lay on the sofa; there Flush lay on the floor.

And as he lay there, exiled, on the carpet, he went through one of those whirlpools of tumultuous emotion in which the soul is either dashed upon the rocks and splintered or, finding some tuft of foothold, slowly and painfully pulls itself up, regains dry land, and at last emerges on top of a ruined universe to survey a world created afresh on a different plan. Which was it to be—destruction or reconstruction? That was the question. The outlines only of his dilemma can be traced here; for his debate was silent. Twice Flush had done his utmost to kill his enemy; twice he had failed. And why had he failed, he asked himself? Because he loved Miss Barrett. Looking up at her from under his eyebrows as she lay, severe and silent on the sofa, he knew that he must love her for ever. Things are not simple but complex. If he bit Mr. Browning he bit her too. Hatred is not hatred; hatred is also love. Here Flush shook his ears in an agony of perplexity. He turned uneasily on the floor. Mr. Browning was Miss Barrett—Miss Barrett was Mr. Browning; love is hatred and hatred is love. He stretched himself, whined and raised his head from the floor. The clock struck eight. For three hours and more he had been lying there, tossed from the horn of one dilemma to another.

Even Miss Barrett, severe, cold, implacable as she was, laid down her pen. “Wicked Flush!” she had been writing to Mr. Browning, “… if people like Flush, choose to behave like dogs savagely, they must take the consequences indeed, as dogs usually do! And you, so good and gentle to him! Anyone but you would have said ‘hasty words’ at least.” Really it would be a good plan, she thought, to buy a muzzle. And then she looked up and saw Flush. Something unusual in his look must have struck her. She paused. She laid down her pen. Once he had roused her with a kiss, and she had thought that he was Pan. He had eaten chicken and rice pudding soaked in cream. He had given up the sunshine for her sake. She called him to her and said she forgave him.

But to be forgiven, as if for a passing whim, to be taken back again on to the sofa as if he had learnt nothing in his anguish on the floor, as if he were the same dog when in fact he differed totally, was impossible. For the moment, exhausted as he was, Flush submitted. A few days later, however, a remarkable scene took place between him and Miss Barrett which showed the depths of his emotions. Mr. Browning had been and gone; Flush was alone with Miss Barrett. Normally he would have leapt on to the sofa at her feet. But now, instead of jumping up as usual and claiming her caress, Flush went to what was now called “Mr. Browning’s armchair”. Usually the chair was abhorrent to him; it still held the shape of his enemy. But now, such was the battle he had won, such was the charity that suffused him, that he not only looked at the chair but, as he looked, “suddenly fell into a rapture”. Miss Barrett, watching him intently, observed this extraordinary portent. Next she saw him turn his eyes towards a table. On that table still lay the packet of Mr. Browning’s cakes. He “reminded me that the cakes you left were on the table”. They were now old cakes, stale cakes, cakes bereft of any carnal seduction. Flush’s meaning was plain. He had refused to eat the cakes when they were fresh, because they were offered by an enemy. He would eat them now that they were stale, because they were offered by an enemy turned to friend, because they were symbols of hatred turned to love. Yes, he signified, he would eat them now. So Miss Barrett rose and took the cakes in her hand. And as she gave them to him she admonished him, “So I explained to him that you had brought them for him, and that he ought to be properly ashamed therefore for his past wickedness, and make up his mind to love you and not bite you for the future—and he was allowed to profit from your goodness to him”. As he swallowed down the faded flakes of that distasteful pastry—it was mouldy, it was fly-blown, it was sour—Flush solemnly repeated, in his own language, the words she had used—he swore to love Mr. Browning and not bite him for the future.

He was instantly rewarded—not by stale cakes, not by chicken’s wings, not by the caresses that were now his, nor by the permission to lie once more on the sofa at Miss Barrett’s feet. He was rewarded, spiritually; yet the effects were curiously physical. Like an iron bar corroding and festering and killing all natural life beneath it, hatred had lain all these months across his soul. Now, by the cutting of sharp knives and painful surgery, the iron had been excised. Now the blood ran once more; the nerves shot and tingled; flesh formed; Nature rejoiced, as in spring. Flush heard the birds sing again; he felt the leaves growing on the trees; as he lay on the sofa at Miss Barrett’s feet, glory and delight coursed through his veins. He was with them, not against them, now; their hopes, their wishes, their desires were his. Flush could have barked in sympathy with Mr. Browning now. The short, sharp words raised the hackles on his neck. “I need a week of Tuesdays,” Mr. Browning cried, “then a month—a year—a life!” I, Flush echoed him, need a month—a year—a life! I need all the things that you both need. We are all three conspirators in the most glorious of causes. We are joined in sympathy. We are joined in hatred. We are joined in defiance of black and beetling tyranny. We are joined in love.—In short, all Flush’s hopes now were set upon some dimly apprehended but none the less certainly emerging triumph, upon some glorious victory that was to be theirs in common, when suddenly, without a word of warning, in the midst of civilisation, security and friendship—he was in a shop in Vere Street with Miss Barrett and her sister: it was the morning of Tuesday the 12th of September—Flush was tumbled head over heels into darkness. The doors of a dungeon shut upon him. He was stolen. [◉4]

[]

Chapter Four
Whitechapel.

“This morning Arabel and I, and he with us,” Miss Barrett wrote, “went in a cab to Vere Street where we had a little business, and he followed us as usual into a shop and out of it again, and was at my heels when I stepped up into the carriage. Having turned, I said ‘Flush’, and Arabel looked round for Flush—there was no Flush! He had been caught up in that moment, from under the wheels, do you understand?” Mr. Browning understood perfectly well. Miss Barrett had forgotten the chain; therefore Flush was stolen. Such, in the year 1846, was the law of Wimpole Street and its neighbourhood.

Nothing, it is true, could exceed the apparent solidity and security of Wimpole Street itself. As far as an invalid could walk or a bath-chair could trundle nothing met the eye but an agreeable prospect of four-storeyed houses, plate-glass windows and mahogany doors. Even a carriage and pair, in the course of an afternoon’s airing, need not, if the coachman were discreet, leave the limits of decorum and respectability. But if you were not an invalid, if you did not possess a carriage and pair, if you were—and many people were—active and able-bodied and fond of walking, then you might see sights and hear language and smell smells, not a stone’s-throw from Wimpole Street, that threw doubts upon the solidity even of Wimpole Street itself. So Mr. Thomas Beames found when about this time he took it into his head to go walking about London. He was surprised; indeed he was shocked. Splendid buildings raised themselves in Westminster, yet just behind them were ruined sheds in which human beings lived herded together above herds of cows—“two in each seven feet of space”. He felt that he ought to tell people what he had seen. Yet how could one describe politely a bedroom in which two or three families lived above a cow-shed, when the cow-shed had no ventilation, when the cows were milked and killed and eaten under the bedroom? That was a task, as Mr. Beames found when he came to attempt it, that taxed all the resources of the English language. And yet he felt that he ought to describe what he had seen in the course of an afternoon’s walk through some of the most aristocratic parishes in London. The risk of typhus was so great. The rich could not know what dangers they were running. He could not altogether hold his tongue when he found what he did find in Westminster and Paddington and Marylebone. For instance, here was an old mansion formerly belonging to some great nobleman. Relics of marble mantelpieces remained. The rooms were panelled and the banisters were carved, and yet the floors were rotten, the walls dripped with filth; hordes of half-naked men and women had taken up their lodging in the old banqueting-halls. Then he walked on. Here an enterprising builder had pulled down the old family mansion. He had run up a jerry-built tenement house in its place. The rain dripped through the roof and the wind blew through the walls. He saw a child dipping a can into a bright-green stream and asked if they drank that water. Yes, and washed in it too, for the landlord only allowed water to be turned on twice a week. Such sights were the more surprising, because one might come upon them in the most sedate and civilised quarters of London—“the most aristocratic parishes have their share”. Behind Miss Barrett’s bedroom, for instance, was one of the worst slums in London. Mixed up with that respectability was this squalor. But there were certain quarters, of course, which had long been given over to the poor and were left undisturbed. In Whitechapel, or in a triangular space of ground at the bottom of the Tottenham Court Road, poverty and vice and misery had bred and seethed and propagated their kind for centuries without interference. A dense mass of aged buildings in St. Giles’s was “wellnigh a penal settlement, a pauper metropolis in itself”. Aptly enough, where the poor conglomerated thus, the settlement was called a Rookery. For there human beings swarmed on top of each other as rooks swarm and blacken tree-tops. Only the buildings here were not trees; they were hardly any longer buildings. They were cells of brick intersected by lanes which ran with filth. All day the lanes buzzed with half-dressed human beings; at night there poured back again into the stream the thieves, beggars and prostitutes who had been plying their trade all day in the West End. The police could do nothing. No single wayfarer could do anything except hurry through as fast as he could and perhaps drop a hint, as Mr. Beames did, with many quotations, evasions and euphemisms, that all was not quite as it should be. Cholera would come, and perhaps the hint that cholera would give would not be quite so evasive.

But in the summer of 1846 that hint had not yet been given; and the only safe course for those who lived in Wimpole Street and its neighbourhood was to keep strictly within the respectable area and to lead your dog on a chain. If one forgot, as Miss Barrett forgot, one paid the penalty, as Miss Barrett was now to pay it. The terms upon which Wimpole Street lived cheek by jowl with St. Giles’s were well known. St. Giles’s stole what St. Giles’s could; Wimpole Street paid what Wimpole Street must. Thus Arabel at once “began to comfort me by showing how certain it was that I should recover him for ten pounds at most”. Ten pounds, it was reckoned, was about the price that Mr. Taylor would ask for a cocker spaniel. Mr. Taylor was the head of the gang. As soon as a lady in Wimpole Street lost her dog she went to Mr. Taylor; he named his price, and it was paid; or if not, a brown paper parcel was delivered in Wimpole Street a few days later containing the head and paws of the dog. Such, at least, had been the experience of a lady in the neighbourhood who had tried to make terms with Mr. Taylor. But Miss Barrett of course intended to pay. Therefore when she got home she told her brother Henry, and Henry went to see Mr. Taylor that afternoon. He found him “smoking a cigar in a room with pictures”—Mr. Taylor was said to make an income of two or three thousand a year out of the dogs of Wimpole Street—and Mr. Taylor promised that he would confer with his “Society” and that the dog would be returned next day. Vexatious as it was, and especially annoying at a moment when Miss Barrett needed all her money, such were the inevitable consequences of forgetting in 1846 to keep one’s dog on a chain.

But for Flush things were very different. Flush, Miss Barrett reflected, “doesn’t know that we can recover him”; Flush had never mastered the principles of human society. “All this night he will howl and lament, I know perfectly”, Miss Barrett wrote to Mr. Browning on the afternoon of Tuesday, the 2nd September. But while Miss Barrett wrote to Mr. Browning, Flush was going through the most terrible experience of his life. He was bewildered in the extreme. One moment he was in Vere Street, among ribbons and laces; the next he was tumbled head over heels into a bag; jolted rapidly across streets, and at length was tumbled out—here. He found himself in complete darkness. He found himself in chillness and dampness. As his giddiness left him he made out a few shapes in a low dark room—broken chairs, a tumbled mattress. Then he was seized and tied tightly by the leg to some obstacle. Something sprawled on the floor—whether beast or human being, he could not tell. Great boots and draggled skirts kept stumbling in and out. Flies buzzed on scraps of old meat that were decaying on the floor. Children crawled out from dark corners and pinched his ears. He whined, and a heavy hand beat him over the head. He cowered down on the few inches of damp brick against the wall. Now he could see that the floor was crowded with animals of different kinds. Dogs tore and worried a festering bone that they had got between them. Their ribs stood out from their coats—they were half famished, dirty, diseased, uncombed, unbrushed; yet all of them, Flush could see, were dogs of the highest breeding, chained dogs, footmen’s dogs, like himself.

He lay, not daring even to whimper, hour after hour. Thirst was his worst suffering; but one sip of the thick greenish water that stood in a pail near him disgusted him; he would rather die than drink another. Yet a majestic greyhound was drinking greedily. Whenever the door was kicked open he looked up. Miss Barrett—was it Miss Barrett? Had she come at last? But it was only a hairy ruffian, who kicked them all aside and stumbled to a broken chair upon which he flung himself. Then gradually the darkness thickened. He could scarcely make out what shapes those were, on the floor, on the mattress, on the broken chairs. A stump of candle was stuck on the ledge over the fireplace. A flare burnt in the gutter outside. By its flickering, coarse light Flush could see terrible faces passing outside, leering at the window. Then in they came, until the small crowded room became so crowded that he had to shrink back and lie even closer against the wall. These horrible monsters—some were ragged, others were flaring with paint and feathers—squatted on the floor; hunched themselves over the table. They began to drink; they cursed and struck each other. Out tumbled, from the bags that were dropped on the floor, more dogs—lap-dogs, setters, pointers, with their collars still on them; and a giant cockatoo that flustered and fluttered its way from corner to corner, shrieking “Pretty Poll”, “Pretty Poll”, with an accent that would have terrified its mistress, a widow in Maida Vale. Then the women’s bags were opened, and out were tossed on to the table bracelets and rings and brooches such as Flush had seen Miss Barrett wear and Miss Henrietta. The demons pawed and clawed them; cursed and quarrelled over them. The dogs barked. The children shrieked, and the splendid cockatoo—such a bird as Flush had often seen pendant in a Wimpole Street window—shrieked “Pretty Poll! Pretty Poll!” faster and faster until a slipper was thrown at it and it flapped its great yellow-stained dove-grey wings in frenzy. Then the candle toppled over and fell. The room was dark. It grew steadily hotter and hotter; the smell, the heat, were unbearable, Flush’s nose burnt; his coat twitched. And still Miss Barrett did not come.

Miss Barrett lay on her sofa in Wimpole Street. She was vexed; she was worried, but she was not seriously alarmed. Of course Flush would suffer; he would whine and bark all night; but it was only a question of a few hours. Mr. Taylor would name his sum; she would pay it; Flush would be returned.

The morning of Wednesday the 3rd September dawned in the rookeries of Whitechapel. The broken windows gradually became smeared with grey. Light fell upon the hairy faces of ruffians lying sprawled upon the floor. Flush woke from a trance that had veiled his eyes and once more realised the truth. This was now the truth—this room, these ruffians, these whining, snapping, tightly tethered dogs, this murk, this dampness. Could it be true that he had been in a shop, with ladies, among ribbons, only yesterday? Was there such a place as Wimpole Street? Was there a room where fresh water sparkled in a purple jar; had he lain on cushions; had he been given a chicken’s wing nicely roasted; and had he been torn with rage and jealousy and bitten a man with yellow gloves? The whole of that life and its emotions floated away, dissolved, became unreal.

Mrs Browning

Here, as the dusty light filtered in, a woman heaved herself off a sack and staggered out to fetch beer. The drinking and the cursing began again. A fat woman held him up by his ears and pinched his ribs, and some odious joke was made about him—there was a roar of laughter as she threw him on the floor again. The door was kicked open and banged to. Whenever that happened he looked up. Was it Wilson? Could it possibly be Mr. Browning? Or Miss Barrett? But no—it was only another thief, another murderer; he cowered back at the mere sight of those draggled skirts, of those hard, horny boots. Once he tried to gnaw a bone that was hurled his way. But his teeth could not meet in stony flesh and the rank smell disgusted him. His thirst increased and he was forced to lap a little of the green water that had been spilt from the pail. But as Wednesday wore on and he became hotter and more parched and still more sore, lying on the broken boards, one thing merged in another. He scarcely noticed what was happening. It was only when the door opened that he raised his head and looked. No, it was not Miss Barrett.

Miss Barrett, lying on the sofa in Wimpole Street, was becoming anxious. There was some hitch in the proceedings. Taylor had promised that he would go down to Whitechapel on Wednesday afternoon and confer with “the Society”. Yet Wednesday afternoon, Wednesday evening passed and still Taylor did not come. This could only mean, she supposed, that the price was going to be raised—which was inconvenient enough at the moment. Still, of course, she would have to pay it. “I must have my Flush, you know”, she wrote to Mr. Browning. “I can’t run any risk and bargain and haggle.” So she lay on the sofa writing to Mr. Browning and listening for a knock at the door. But Wilson came up with the letters; Wilson came up with the hot water. It was time for bed and Flush had not come.

Thursday the 4th of September dawned in Whitechapel. The door opened and shut. The red setter who had been whining all night beside Flush on the floor was hauled off by a ruffian in a moleskin vest—to what fate? Was it better to be killed or to stay here? Which was worse—this life or that death? The racket, the hunger and the thirst, the reeking smells of the place—and once, Flush remembered, he had detested the scent of eau-de-Cologne—were fast obliterating any clear image, any single desire. Fragments of old memories began turning in his head. Was that the voice of old Dr. Mitford shouting in the field? Was that Kerenhappoch gossiping with the baker at the door? There was a rattling in the room and he thought he heard Miss Mitford tying up a bunch of geraniums. But it was only the wind—for it was stormy to-day—battering at the brown paper in the broken window pane. It was only some drunken voice raving in the gutter. It was only the old hag in the corner mumbling on and on and on as she fried a herring in a pan over a fire. He had been forgotten and deserted. No help was coming. No voice spoke to him—the parrots cried “Pretty Poll, Pretty Poll”, and the canaries kept up their senseless cheeping and chirping.

Then again evening darkened the room; the candle was stuck in its saucer; the coarse light flared outside; hordes of sinister men with bags on their backs, of garish women with painted faces, began to shuffle in at the door and to fling themselves down on the broken beds and tables. Another night had folded its blackness over Whitechapel. And the rain dripped steadily through a hole in the roof and drummed into a pail that had been stood to catch it. Miss Barrett had not come.

Thursday dawned in Wimpole Street. There was no sign of Flush—no message from Taylor. Miss Barrett was very much alarmed. She made enquiries. She summoned her brother Henry, and cross-examined him. She found out that he had tricked her. “The archfiend” Taylor had come according to his promise the night before. He had stated his terms—six guineas for the Society and half a guinea for himself. But Henry, instead of telling her, had told Mr. Barrett, with the result, of course, that Mr. Barrett had ordered him not to pay, and to conceal the visit from his sister. Miss Barrett was “very vexed and angry”. She bade her brother to go at once to Mr. Taylor and pay the money. Henry refused and “talked of Papa”. But it was no use talking of Papa, she protested. While they talked of Papa, Flush would be killed. She made up her mind. If Henry would not go, she would go herself: “… if people won’t do as I choose, I shall go down to-morrow morning, and bring Flush back with me”, she wrote to Mr. Browning.

But Miss Barrett now found that it was easier to say this than to do it. It was almost as difficult for her to go to Flush as for Flush to come to her. All Wimpole Street was against her. The news that Flush was stolen and that Taylor demanded a ransom was now public property. Wimpole Street was determined to make a stand against Whitechapel. Blind Mr. Boyd sent word that in his opinion it would be “an awful sin” to pay the ransom. Her father and her brother were in league against her and were capable of any treachery in the interests of their class. But worst of all—far worse—Mr. Browning himself threw all his weight, all his eloquence, all his learning, all his logic, on the side of Wimpole Street and against Flush. If Miss Barrett gave way to Taylor, he wrote, she was giving way to tyranny; she was giving way to blackmailers; she was increasing the power of evil over right, of wickedness over innocence. If she gave Taylor his demand, “… how will the poor owners fare who have not money enough for their dogs’ redemption”? His imagination took fire; he imagined what he would say if Taylor asked him even for five shillings; he would say, “You are responsible for the proceedings of your gang, and you I mark—don’t talk nonsense to me about cutting off heads or paws. Be as sure as that I stand here and tell you, I will spend my whole life in putting you down, the nuisance you declare yourself—and by every imaginable means I will be the death of you and as many of your accomplices as I can discover—but you I have discovered and will never lose sight of….” So Mr. Browning would have replied to Taylor if he had had the good fortune to meet that gentleman. For indeed, he went on, catching a later post with a second letter that same Thursday afternoon, “… it is horrible to fancy how all the oppressors in their several ranks may, if they choose, twitch back to them by the heartstrings after various modes the weak and silent whose secret they have found out”. He did not blame Miss Barrett—nothing she did could be anything but perfectly right, perfectly acceptable to him. Still, he continued on Friday morning, “I think it lamentable weakness …” If she encouraged Taylor who stole dogs, she encouraged Mr. Barnard Gregory who stole characters. Indirectly, she was responsible for all the wretches who cut their throats or fly the country because some blackmailer like Barnard Gregory took down a directory and blasted their characters. “But why write all this string of truisms about the plainest thing in the world?” So Mr. Browning stormed and vociferated from New Cross twice daily.

Lying on her sofa, Miss Barrett read the letters. How easy it would have been to yield—how easy it would have been to say, “Your good opinion is worth more to me than a hundred cocker spaniels”. How easy it would have been to sink back on her pillows and sigh, “I am a weak woman; I know nothing of law and justice; decide for me”. She had only to refuse to pay the ransom; she had only to defy Taylor and his Society. And if Flush were killed, if the dreadful parcel came and she opened it and out dropped his head and paws, there was Robert Browning by her side to assure her that she had done right and earned his respect. But Miss Barrett was not to be intimidated. Miss Barrett took up her pen and refuted Robert Browning. It was all very well, she said, to quote Donne; to cite the case of Gregory; to invent spirited replies to Mr. Taylor—she would have done the same had Taylor struck her; had Gregory defamed her;—would that they had! But what would Mr. Browning have done if the banditti had stolen her; had her in their power; threatened to cut off her ears and send them by post to New Cross? Whatever he would have done, her mind was made up. Flush was helpless. Her duty was to him. “But Flush, poor Flush, who has loved me so faithfully; have I a right to sacrifice him in his innocence, for the sake of any Mr. Taylor’s guilt in the world?” Whatever Mr. Browning might say, she was going to rescue Flush, even if she went down into the jaws of Whitechapel to fetch him, even if Robert Browning despised her for doing so.

On Saturday, therefore, with Mr. Browning’s letter lying open on the table before her, she began to dress. She read his “one word more—in all this, I labour against the execrable policy of the world’s husbands, fathers, brothers and domineerers in general”. So, if she went to Whitechapel she was siding against Robert Browning, and in favour of fathers, brothers and domineerers in general. Still, she went on dressing. A dog howled in the mews. It was tied up, helpless in the power of cruel men. It seemed to her to cry as it howled: “Think of Flush”. She put on her shoes, her cloak, her hat. She glanced at Mr. Browning’s letter once more. “I am about to marry you”, she read. Still the dog howled. She left her room and went downstairs.

Henry Barrett met her and told her that in his opinion she might well be robbed and murdered if she did what she threatened. She told Wilson to call a cab. All trembling but submissive, Wilson obeyed. The cab came. Miss Barrett told Wilson to get in. Wilson, though convinced that death awaited her, got in. Miss Barrett told the cabman to drive to Manning Street, Shoreditch. Miss Barrett got in herself and off they drove. Soon they were beyond plate-glass windows, the mahogany doors and the area railings. They were in a world that Miss Barrett had never seen, had never guessed at. They were in a world where cows are herded under bedroom floors, where whole families sleep in rooms with broken windows; in a world where water is turned on only twice a week, in a world where vice and poverty breed vice and poverty. They had come to a region unknown to respectable cab-drivers. The cab stopped; the driver asked his way at a public-house. “Out came two or three men. ‘Oh, you want to find Mr. Taylor, I daresay!’” In this mysterious world a cab with two ladies could only come upon one errand, and that errand was already known. It was sinister in the extreme. One of the men ran into a house, and came out saying that Mr. Taylor “‘wasn’t at home! but wouldn’t I get out?’ Wilson, in an aside of terror, entreated me not to think of such a thing.” A gang of men and boys pressed round the cab. “Then wouldn’t I see Mrs. Taylor?” the man asked. Miss Barrett had no wish whatever to see Mrs. Taylor; but now an immense fat woman came out of the house, “fat enough to have had an easy conscience all her life”, and informed Miss Barrett that her husband was out: “might be in in a few minutes, or in so many hours—wouldn’t I like to get out and wait?” Wilson tugged at her gown. Imagine waiting in the house of that woman! It was bad enough to sit in the cab with the gang of men and boys pressing round them. So Miss Barrett parleyed with the “immense feminine bandit” from the cab. Mr. Taylor had her dog, she said; Mr. Taylor had promised to restore her dog; would Mr. Taylor bring back her dog to Wimpole Street for certain that very day? “Oh yes, certainly,” said the fat woman with the most gracious of smiles. She did believe that Taylor had left home precisely on that business. And she “poised her head to right and left with the most easy grace”.

So the cab turned round and left Manning Street, Shoreditch. Wilson was of opinion that “we had escaped with our lives barely”. Miss Barrett herself had been alarmed. “Plain enough it was that the gang was strong there. The Society, the ‘Fancy’ … had their roots in the ground”, she wrote. Her mind teemed with thoughts, her eyes were full of pictures. This, then, was what lay on the other side of Wimpole Street—these faces, these houses. She had seen more while she sat in the cab at the public-house than she had seen during the five years that she had lain in the back bedroom at Wimpole Street. “The faces of those men!” she exclaimed. They were branded on her eyeballs. They stimulated her imagination as “the divine marble presences”, the busts on the bookcase, had never stimulated it. Here lived women like herself; while she lay on her sofa, reading, writing, they lived thus. But the cab was now trundling along between four-storeyed houses again. Here was the familiar avenue of doors and windows: the pointed brick, the brass knockers, the regular curtains. Here was Wimpole Street and No. 50. Wilson sprang out—with what relief to find herself in safety can be imagined. But Miss Barrett perhaps hesitated a moment. She still saw “the faces of those men”. They were to come before her again years later when she sat writing on a sunny balcony in Italy. [◉5] They were to inspire the most vivid passages in Aurora Leigh. But now the butler had opened the door, and she went upstairs to her room again.

Saturday was the fifth day of Flush’s imprisonment. Almost exhausted, almost hopeless, he lay panting in his dark corner of the teeming floor. Doors slammed and banged. Rough voices cried. Women screamed. Parrots chattered as they had never chattered to widows in Maida Vale, but now evil old women merely cursed at them. Insects crawled in his fur, but he was too weak, too indifferent to shake his coat. All Flush’s past life and its many scenes—Reading, the greenhouse, Miss Mitford, Mr. Kenyon, the bookcases, the busts, the peasants on the blind—had faded like snowflakes dissolved in a cauldron. If he still held to hope, it was to something nameless and formless; the featureless face of someone he still called “Miss Barrett”. She still existed; all the rest of the world was gone; but she still existed, though such gulfs lay between them that it was impossible, almost, that she should reach him still. Darkness began to fall again, such darkness as seemed almost able to crush out his last hope—Miss Barrett.

In truth, the forces of Wimpole Street were still, even at this last moment, battling to keep Flush and Miss Barrett apart. On Saturday afternoon she lay and waited for Taylor to come, as the immensely fat woman had promised. At last he came, but he had not brought the dog. He sent up a message—Let Miss Barrett pay him six guineas on the spot, and he would go straight to Whitechapel and fetch the dog “on his word of honour”. What “the archfiend” Taylor’s word of honour might be worth, Miss Barrett could not say; but “there seemed no other way for it”; Flush’s life was at stake; she counted out the guineas and sent them down to Taylor in the passage. But as ill luck would have it, as Taylor waited in the passage among the umbrellas, the engravings, the pile carpet and other valuable objects, Alfred Barrett came in. The sight of the archfiend actually in the house made him lose his temper. He burst into a rage. He called him “a swindler, and a liar and a thief”. Thereupon Mr. Taylor cursed him back. What was far worse, he swore that “as he hoped to be saved, we should never see our dog again”, and rushed out of the house. Next morning, then, the blood-stained parcel would arrive.

Miss Barrett flung on her clothes again and rushed downstairs. Where was Wilson? Let her call a cab. She was going back to Shoreditch instantly. Her family came running to prevent her. It was getting dark. She was exhausted already. The adventure was risky enough for a man in health. For her it was madness. So they told her. Her brothers, her sisters, all came round her threatening her, dissuading her, “crying out against me for being ‘quite mad’ and obstinate and wilful—I was called as many names as Mr. Taylor”. But she stood her ground. At last they realised the extent of her folly. Whatever the risk might be they must give way to her. Septimus promised if Ba would return to her room “and be in good humour” he would go to Taylor’s himself and pay the money and bring back the dog.

So the dusk of the 5th of September faded into the blackness of night in Whitechapel. The door of the room was once more kicked open. A hairy man hauled Flush by the scruff of his neck out of his corner. Looking up into the hideous face of his old enemy, Flush did not know whether he was being taken to be killed or to be freed. Save for one phantom memory, he did not care. The man stooped. What were those great fingers fumbling at his throat for? Was it a knife or a chain? Stumbling, half blinded, on legs that staggered, Flush was led out into the open air.

In Wimpole Street Miss Barrett could not eat her dinner. Was Flush dead, or was Flush alive? She did not know. At eight o’clock there was a rap on the door; it was the usual letter from Mr. Browning. But as the door opened to admit the letter, something rushed in also;—Flush. He made straight for his purple jar. It was filled three times over; and still he drank. Miss Barrett watched the dazed, bewildered dirty dog, drinking. “He was not so enthusiastic about seeing me as I expected”, she remarked. No, there was only one thing in the world he wanted—clean water.

After all, Miss Barrett had but glanced at the faces of those men and she remembered them all her life. Flush had been at their mercy in their midst for five whole days. Now as he lay on cushions once more, cold water was the only thing that seemed to have any substance, any reality. He drank continually. The old gods of the bedroom—the bookcase, the wardrobe, the busts—seemed to have lost their substance. This room was no longer the whole world; it was only a shelter. It was only a dell arched over by one trembling dock-leaf in a forest where wild beasts prowled and venomous snakes coiled; where behind every tree lurked a murderer ready to pounce. As he lay dazed and exhausted on the sofa at Miss Barrett’s feet the howls of tethered dogs, the screams of birds in terror still sounded in his ears. When the door opened he started, expecting a hairy man with a knife—it was only Mr. Kenyon with a book; it was only Mr. Browning with his yellow gloves. But he shrank away from Mr. Kenyon and Mr. Browning now. He trusted them no longer. Behind those smiling, friendly faces was treachery and cruelty and deceit. Their caresses were hollow. He dreaded even walking with Wilson to the pillar-box. He would not stir without his chain. When they said, “Poor Flush, did the naughty men take you away?” he put up his head and moaned and yelled. A whip cracking sent him bolting down the area-steps into safety. Indoors he crept closer to Miss Barrett on the sofa. She alone had not deserted him. He still kept some faith in her. Gradually some substance returned to her. Exhausted, trembling, dirty and very thin, he lay on the sofa at her feet.

As the days passed and the memory of Whitechapel grew fainter, Flush, lying close to Miss Barrett on the sofa, read her feelings more clearly than ever before. They had been parted; now they were together. Indeed they had never been so much akin. Every start she gave, every movement she made, passed through him too. And she seemed now to be perpetually starting and moving. The delivery of a parcel even made her jump. She opened the parcel; with trembling fingers she took out a pair of thick boots. She hid them instantly in the corner of the cupboard. Then she lay down as if nothing had happened; yet something had happened. When they were alone she rose and took a diamond necklace from a drawer. She took out the box that held Mr. Browning’s letters. She laid the boots, the necklace and the letters all in a carpet-box together and then—as if she heard a step on the stair—she pushed the box under the bed and lay down hastily, covering herself with her shawl again. Such signs of secrecy and stealth must herald, Flush felt, some approaching crisis. Were they about to fly together? Were they about to escape together from this awful world of dog-stealers and tyrants? Oh that it were possible! He trembled and whined with excitement; but in her low voice Miss Barrett bade him be quiet, and instantly he was quiet. She was very quiet too. She lay perfectly still on the sofa directly any of her brothers or sisters came in; she lay and talked to Mr. Barrett as she always lay and talked to Mr. Barrett.

But on Saturday, the 12th of September, Miss Barrett did what Flush had never known her do before. She dressed herself as if to go out directly after breakfast. Moreover, as he watched her dress, Flush knew perfectly well from the expression on her face that he was not to go with her. She was bound on secret business of her own. At ten Wilson came into the room. She also was dressed as if for a walk. They went out together; and Flush lay on the sofa and waited for their return. An hour or so later Miss Barrett came back alone. She did not look at him—she seemed to look at nothing. She drew off her gloves and for a moment he saw a gold band shine on one of the fingers of her left hand. Then he saw her slip the ring from her hand and hide it in the darkness of a drawer. Then she laid herself down as usual on the sofa. He lay by her side scarcely daring to breathe, for whatever had happened, it was something that must at all costs be concealed.

At all costs the life of the bedroom must go on as usual. Yet everything was different. The very movement of the blind as it drew in and out seemed to Flush like a signal. And as the lights and shadows passed over the busts they too seemed to be hinting and beckoning. Everything in the room seemed to be aware of change; to be prepared for some event. And yet all was silent; all was concealed. The brothers and sisters came in and out as usual; Mr. Barrett came as usual in the evening. He looked as usual to see that the chop was finished, the wine drunk. Miss Barrett talked and laughed and gave no sign when anyone was in the room that she was hiding anything. Yet when they were alone she pulled out the box from under the bed and filled it hastily, stealthily, listening as she did so. And the signs of strain were unmistakable. On Sunday the church bells were ringing. “What bells are those?” somebody asked. “Marylebone Church bells”, said Miss Henrietta. Miss Barrett, Flush saw, went deadly white. But nobody else seemed to notice anything.

So Monday passed, and Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday. Over them all lay a blanket of silence, of eating and talking and lying still on the sofa as usual. Flush, tossing in uneasy sleep, dreamt that they were couched together under ferns and leaves in the darkness, in a vast forest; then the leaves were parted and he woke. It was dark; but he saw Wilson come stealthily into the room, and take the box from beneath the bed and quietly carry it outside. This was on Friday night, the 19th of September. All Saturday morning he lay as one lies who knows that at any moment now a handkerchief may drop, a low whistle may sound and the signal will be given for death or for life. He watched Miss Barrett dress herself. At a quarter to four the door opened and Wilson came in. Then the signal was given—Miss Barrett lifted him in her arms. She rose and walked to the door. For a moment they stood looking round the room. There was the sofa and by it Mr. Browning’s armchair. There were the busts and the tables. The sun filtered through the ivy leaves and the blind with peasants walking blew gently out. All was as usual. All seemed to expect a million more such movements to come to them; but to Miss Barrett and Flush this was the last. Very quietly Miss Barrett shut the door.

Very quietly they slipped downstairs, past the drawing-room, the library, the dining-room. All looked as they usually looked; smelt as they usually smelt; all were quiet as if sleeping in the hot September afternoon. On the mat in the hall Catiline lay sleeping too. They gained the front door and very quietly turned the handle. A cab was waiting outside.

“To Hodgson’s”, said Miss Barrett. She spoke almost in a whisper. Flush sat on her knee very still. Not for anything in the whole world would he have broken that tremendous silence.

[]

Chapter Five
Italy.

Hours, days, weeks, it seemed of darkness and rattling; of sudden lights; and then long tunnels of gloom; of being flung this way and that; of being hastily lifted into the light and seeing Miss Barrett’s face close, and thin trees and lines and rails and high light-specked houses—for it was the barbarous custom of railways in those days to make dogs travel in boxes—followed. Yet Flush was not afraid; they were escaping; they were leaving tyrants and dog-stealers behind them. Rattle, grind; grind, rattle as much as you like, he murmured, as the train flung him this way and that; only let us leave Wimpole Street and Whitechapel behind us. At last the light broadened; the rattling stopped. He heard birds singing and the sigh of trees in the wind. Or was it the rush of water? Opening his eyes at last, shaking his coat at last, he saw—the most astonishing sight conceivable. There was Miss Barrett on a rock in the midst of rushing waters. Trees bent over her; the river raced round her. She must be in peril. With one bound Flush splashed through the stream and reached her. “… he is baptized in Petrarch’s name”, said Miss Barrett as he clambered up on to the rock by her side. For they were at Vaucluse; she had perched herself upon a stone in the middle of Petrarch’s fountain.

Then there was more rattling and more grinding; and then again he was stood down on a stable floor; the darkness opened; light poured over him; he found himself alive, awake, bewildered, standing on reddish tiles in a vast bare room flooded with sunshine. He ran hither and thither smelling and touching. There was no carpet and no fireplace. There were no sofas, no armchairs, no bookcases, no busts. Pungent and unfamiliar smells tickled his nostrils and made him sneeze. The light, infinitely sharp and clear, dazzled his eyes. He had never been in a room—if this were indeed a room—that was so hard, so bright, so big, so empty. Miss Barrett looked smaller than ever sitting on a chair by a table in the midst. Then Wilson took him out of doors. He found himself almost blinded, first by the sun, then by the shadow. One half of the street was burning hot; the other bitterly cold. Women went by wrapped in furs, yet they carried parasols to shade their heads. And the street was dry as bone. Though it was now the middle of November there was neither mud nor puddle to wet his paws or clot their feathers. There were no areas and no railings. There was none of that heady confusion of smells that made a walk down Wimpole Street or Oxford Street so distracting. On the other hand, the strange new smells that came from sharp stone corners, from dry yellow walls, were extraordinarily pungent and queer. Then from behind a black swinging curtain came an astonishing sweet smell, wafted in clouds; he stopped, his paws raised, to savour it; he made to follow it inside; he pushed in beneath the curtain. He had one glimpse of a booming light-sprinkled hall, very high and hollow; and then Wilson with a cry of horror, jerked him smartly back. They went on down the street again. The noise of the street was deafening. Everybody seemed to be shouting shrilly at the same moment. Instead of the solid and soporific hum of London there was a rattling and a crying, a jingling and a shouting, a cracking of whips and a jangling of bells. Flush leapt and jumped this way and that, and so did Wilson. They were forced on and off the pavement twenty times, to avoid a cart, a bullock, a troop of soldiers, a drove of goats. He felt younger, spryer than he had done these many years. Dazzled, yet exhilarated, he sank on the reddish tiles and slept more soundly than he had ever slept in the back bedroom at Wimpole Street upon pillows.

But soon Flush became aware of the more profound differences that distinguish Pisa—for it was in Pisa that they were now settled—from London. The dogs were different. In London he could scarcely trot round to the pillar-box without meeting some pug dog, retriever, bulldog, mastiff, collie, Newfoundland, St. Bernard, fox terrier or one of the seven famous families of the Spaniel tribe. To each he gave a different name, and to each a different rank. But here in Pisa, though dogs abounded, there were no ranks; all—could it be possible?—were mongrels. As far as he could see, they were dogs merely—grey dogs, yellow dogs, brindled dogs, spotted dogs; but it was impossible to detect a single spaniel, collie, retriever or mastiff among them. Had the Kennel Club, then, no jurisdiction in Italy? Was the Spaniel Club unknown? Was there no law which decreed death to the topknot, which cherished the curled ear, protected the feathered foot, and insisted absolutely that the brow must be domed but not pointed? Apparently not. Flush felt himself like a prince in exile. He was the sole aristocrat among a crowd of canaille. He was the only pure-bred cocker spaniel in the whole of Pisa.

For many years now Flush had been taught to consider himself an aristocrat. The law of the purple jar and of the chain had sunk deep into his soul. It is scarcely surprising that he was thrown off his balance. A Howard or a Cavendish set down among a swarm of natives in mud huts can hardly be blamed if now and again he remembers Chatsworth and muses regretfully over red carpets and galleries daubed with coronets as the sunset blazes down through painted windows. There was an element, it must be admitted, of the snob in Flush; Miss Mitford had detected it years ago; and the sentiment, subdued in London among equals and superiors, returned to him now that he felt himself unique. He became overbearing and impudent. “Flush has grown an absolute monarch and barks one distracted when he wants a door opened”, Mrs. Browning wrote. “Robert”, she continued, “declares that the said Flush considers him, my husband, to be created for the especial purpose of doing him service, and really it looks rather like it.”

“Robert”, “my husband”—if Flush had changed, so had Miss Barrett. It was not merely that she called herself Mrs. Browning now; that she flashed the gold ring on her hand in the sun; she was changed, as much as Flush was changed. Flush heard her say “Robert”, “my husband”, fifty times a day, and always with a ring of pride that made his hackles rise and his heart jump. But it was not her language only that had changed. She was a different person altogether. Now, for instance, instead of sipping a thimbleful of port and complaining of the headache, she tossed off a tumbler of Chianti and slept the sounder. There was a flowering branch of oranges on the dinner-table instead of one denuded, sour, yellow fruit. Then instead of driving in a barouche landau to Regent’s Park she pulled on her thick boots and scrambled over rocks. Instead of sitting in a carriage and rumbling along Oxford Street, they rattled off in a ramshackle fly to the borders of a lake and looked at mountains; and when she was tired she did not hail another cab; she sat on a stone and watched the lizards. She delighted in the sun; she delighted in the cold. She threw pine logs from the Duke’s forest on to the fire if it froze. They sat together in the crackling blaze and snuffed up the sharp, aromatic scent. She was never tired of praising Italy at the expense of England. “… our poor English”, she exclaimed, “want educating into gladness. They want refining not in the fire but in the sunshine.” Here in Italy was freedom and life and the joy that the sun breeds. One never saw men fighting, or heard them swearing; one never saw the Italians drunk;—“the faces of those men” in Shoreditch came again before her eyes. She was always comparing Pisa with London and saying how much she preferred Pisa. In the streets of Pisa pretty women could walk alone; great ladies first emptied their own slops and then went to Court “in a blaze of undeniable glory”. Pisa with all its bells, its mongrels, its camels, its pine woods, was infinitely preferable to Wimpole Street and its mahogany doors and its shoulders of mutton. So Mrs. Browning every day, as she tossed off her Chianti and broke another orange from the branch, praised Italy and lamented poor, dull, damp, sunless, joyless, expensive, conventional England.

Wilson, it is true, for a time maintained her British balance. The memory of butlers and basements, of front doors and curtains, was not obliterated from her mind without an effort. She still had the conscience to walk out of a picture gallery “struck back by the indecency of the Venus”. And later, when she was allowed, by the kindness of a friend, to peep through a door at the glories of the Grand Ducal Court, she still loyally upheld the superior glory of St. James’s. “It … was all very shabby”, she reported, “in comparison with our English Court.” But even as she gazed, the superb figure of one of the Grand Duke’s bodyguard caught her eye. Her fancy was fired; her judgement reeled; her standards toppled. Lily Wilson fell passionately in love with Signor Righi, the guardsman. [◉6]

And just as Mrs. Browning was exploring her new freedom and delighting in the discoveries she made, so Flush too was making his discoveries and exploring his freedom. Before they left Pisa—in the spring of 1847 they moved on to Florence—Flush had faced the curious and at first upsetting truth that the laws of the Kennel Club are not universal. He had brought himself to face the fact that light topknots are not necessarily fatal. He had revised his code accordingly. He had acted, at first with some hesitation, upon his new conception of canine society. He was becoming daily more and more democratic. Even in Pisa, Mrs. Browning noticed, “… he goes out every day and speaks Italian to the little dogs”. Now in Florence the last threads of his old fetters fell from him. The moment of liberation came one day in the Cascine. As he raced over the grass “like emeralds” with “the pheasants all alive and flying”, Flush suddenly bethought him of Regent’s Park and its proclamation: Dogs must be led on chains. Where was “must” now? Where were chains now? Where were park-keepers and truncheons? Gone, with the dog-stealers and Kennel Clubs and Spaniel Clubs of a corrupt aristocracy! Gone with four-wheelers and hansom cabs! with Whitechapel and Shoreditch! He ran, he raced; his coat flashed; his eyes blazed. He was the friend of all the world now. All dogs were his brothers. He had no need of a chain in this new world; he had no need of protection. If Mr. Browning was late in going for his walk—he and Flush were the best of friends now—Flush boldly summoned him. He “stands up before him and barks in the most imperious manner possible”, Mrs. Browning observed with some irritation—for her relations with Flush were far less emotional now than in the old days; she no longer needed his red fur and his bright eyes to give her what her own experience lacked; she had found Pan for herself among the vineyards and the olive trees; he was there too beside the pine fire of an evening. So if Mr. Browning loitered, Flush stood up and barked; but if Mr. Browning preferred to stay at home and write, it did not matter. Flush was independent now. The wistarias and the laburnum were flowering over walls; the judas trees were burning bright in the gardens; the wild tulips were sprinkled in the fields. Why should he wait? Off he ran by himself. He was his own master now. “… he goes out by himself, and stays hours together”, Mrs. Browning wrote; “… knows every street in Florence—will have his own way in everything. I am never frightened at his absence”, she added, remembering with a smile those hours of agony in Wimpole Street and the gang waiting to snatch him up under the horses’ feet if she forgot his chain in Vere Street. Fear was unknown in Florence; there were no dog-stealers here and, she may have sighed, there were no fathers.

But, to speak candidly, it was not to stare at pictures, to penetrate into dark churches and look up at dim frescoes, that Flush scampered off when the door of Casa Guidi was left open. It was to enjoy something, it was in search of something denied him all these years. Once the hunting horn of Venus had blown its wild music over the Berkshire fields; he had loved Mr. Partridge’s dog; she had borne him a child. Now he heard the same voice pealing down the narrow streets of Florence, but more imperiously, more impetuously, after all these years of silence. Now Flush knew what men can never know—love pure, love simple, love entire; love that brings no train of care in its wake; that has no shame; no remorse; that is here, that is gone, as the bee on the flower is here and is gone. To-day the flower is a rose, to-morrow a lily; now it is the wild thistle on the moor, now the pouched and portentous orchid of the conservatory. So variously, so carelessly Flush embraced the spotted spaniel down the alley, and the brindled dog and the yellow dog—it did not matter which. To Flush it was all the same. He followed the horn wherever the horn blew and the wind wafted it. Love was all; love was enough. No one blamed him for his escapades. Mr. Browning merely laughed—“Quite disgraceful for a respectable dog like him”—when Flush returned very late at night or early the next morning. And Mrs. Browning laughed too, as Flush flung himself down on the bedroom floor and slept soundly upon the arms of the Guidi family inlaid in scagliola.

For at Casa Guidi the rooms were bare. All those draped objects of his cloistered and secluded days had vanished. The bed was a bed; the wash-stand was a wash-stand. Everything was itself and not another thing. The drawing-room was large and sprinkled with a few old carved chairs of ebony. Over the fire hung a mirror with two cupids to hold the lights. Mrs. Browning herself had discarded her Indian shawls. She wore a cap made of some thin bright silk that her husband liked. Her hair was brushed in a new way. And when the sun had gone down and the shutters had been raised she paced the balcony dressed in thin white muslin. She loved to sit there looking, listening, watching the people in the street.

Casa Guidi

They had not been long in Florence before one night there was such a shouting and trampling in the street that they ran to the balcony to see what was happening. A vast crowd was surging underneath. They were carrying banners and shouting and singing. All the windows were full of faces; all the balconies were full of figures. The people in the windows were tossing flowers and laurel leaves on to the people in the street; and the people in the street—grave men, gay young women—were kissing each other and raising their babies to the people in the balconies. Mr. and Mrs. Browning leant over the balustrade and clapped and clapped. Banner after banner passed. The torches flashed their light on them. “Liberty” was written on one; “The Union of Italy” on another; and “The Memory of the Martyrs” and “Viva Pio Nono” and “Viva Leopoldo Secondo”—for three and a half hours the banners went by and the people cheered and Mr. and Mrs. Browning stood with six candles burning on the balcony, waving and waving. For some time Flush too, stretched between them with his paws over the sill, did his best to rejoice. But at last—he could not conceal it—he yawned. “He confessed at last that he thought they were rather long about it”, Mrs. Browning observed. A weariness, a doubt, a ribaldry possessed him. What was it all for? he asked himself. Who was this Grand Duke and what had he promised? Why were they all so absurdly excited?—for the ardour of Mrs. Browning, waving and waving, as the banners passed, somehow annoyed him. Such enthusiasm for a Grand Duke was somehow exaggerated, he felt. And then, as the Grand Duke passed, he became aware that a little dog had stopped at the door. Seizing his chance when Mrs. Browning was more than usually enthusiastic, he slipped down from the balcony and made off. Through the banners and the crowds he followed her. She fled further and further into the heart of Florence. Far away sounded the shouting; the cheers of the people died down into silence. The lights of the torches were extinguished. Only a star or two shone in the ripples of the Arno where Flush lay with the spotted spaniel by his side, couched in the shell of an old basket on the mud. There tranced in love they lay till the sun rose in the sky. Flush did not return until nine next morning, and Mrs. Browning greeted him rather ironically—he might at least, she thought, have remembered that it was the first anniversary of her wedding day. But she supposed “he had been very much amused”. It was true. While she had found an inexplicable satisfaction in the trampling of forty thousand people, in the promises of Grand Dukes and the windy aspirations of banners, Flush infinitely preferred the little dog at the door.

It cannot be doubted that Mrs. Browning and Flush were reaching different conclusions in their voyages of discovery—she a Grand Duke, he a spotted spaniel;—and yet the tie which bound them together was undeniably still binding. No sooner had Flush abolished “must” and raced free through the emerald grass of the Cascine gardens where the pheasants fluttered red and gold, than he felt a check. Once more he was thrown back on his haunches. At first it was nothing—a hint merely—only that Mrs. Browning in the spring of 1849 became busy with her needle. And yet there was something in the sight that gave Flush pause. She was not used to sew. He noted that Wilson moved a bed and that she opened a drawer to put white clothes inside it. Raising his head from the tiled floor, he looked, he listened attentively. Was something once more about to happen? He looked anxiously for signs of trunks and packing. Was there to be another flight, another escape? But an escape to what, from what? There is nothing to be afraid of here, he assured Mrs. Browning. They need neither of them worry themselves in Florence about Mr. Taylor and dogs’ heads wrapped up in brown paper parcels. Yet he was puzzled. The signs of change, as he read them, did not signify escape. They signified, much more mysteriously, expectance. Something, he felt, as he watched Mrs. Browning so composedly, yet silently and steadfastly, stitching in her low chair, was coming that was inevitable; yet to be dreaded. As the weeks went on, Mrs. Browning scarcely left the house. She seemed, as she sat there, to anticipate some tremendous event. Was she about to encounter somebody, like the ruffian Taylor, and let him rain blows on her alone and unaided? Flush quivered with apprehension at the thought. Certainly she had no intention of running away. No boxes were packed. There was no sign that anybody was about to leave the house—rather there were signs that somebody was coming. In his jealous anxiety Flush scrutinised each new-comer. There were many now—Miss Blagden, Mr. Landor, Hattie Hosmer, Mr. Lytton—ever so many ladies and gentlemen now came to Casa Guidi. Day after day Mrs. Browning sat there in her armchair quietly stitching.

Then one day early in March Mrs. Browning did not appear in the sitting-room at all. Other people came in and out; Mr. Browning and Wilson came in and out; and they came in and out so distractedly that Flush hid himself under the sofa. People were trampling up and down stairs, running and calling in low whispers and muted unfamiliar voices. They were moving upstairs in the bedroom. He crept further and further under the shadow of the sofa. He knew in every fibre of his body that some change was taking place—some awful event was happening. So he had waited, years ago, for the step of the hooded man on the staircase. And at last the door had opened and Miss Barrett had cried “Mr. Browning!” Who was coming now? What hooded man? As the day wore on, he was left completely alone; nobody came into the drawing-room. He lay in the drawing-room without food or drink; a thousand spotted spaniels might have sniffed at the door and he would have shrunk away from them. For as the hours passed he had an overwhelming sense that something was thrusting its way into the house from outside. He peeped out from beneath the flounces. The cupids holding the lights, the ebony chests, the French chairs, all looked thrust asunder; he himself felt as if he were being pushed up against the wall to make room for something that he could not see. Once he saw Mr. Browning, but he was not the same Mr. Browning; once Wilson, but she was changed too—as if they were both seeing the invisible presence that he felt. Their eyes were oddly glazed.

At last Wilson, looking very flushed and untidy but triumphant, took him in her arms and carried him upstairs. They entered the bedroom. There was a faint bleating in the shadowed room—something waved on the pillow. It was a live animal. Independently of them all, without the street door being opened, out of herself in the room, alone, Mrs. Browning had become two people. The horrid thing waved and mewed by her side. Torn with rage and jealousy and some deep disgust that he could not hide, Flush struggled himself free and rushed downstairs. Wilson and Mrs. Browning called him back; they tempted him with caresses; they offered him titbits; but it was useless. He cowered away from the disgusting sight, the repulsive presence, wherever there was a shadowy sofa or a dark corner. “… for a whole fortnight he fell into deep melancholy and was proof against all attentions lavished on him”—so Mrs. Browning, in the midst of all her other distractions, was forced to notice. And when we take, as we must, human minutes and hours and drop them into a dog’s mind and see how the minutes swell into hours and the hours into days, we shall not exaggerate if we conclude that Flush’s “deep melancholy” lasted six full months by the human clock. Many men and women have forgotten their hates and their loves in less.

But Flush was no longer the unschooled, untrained dog of Wimpole Street days. He had learnt his lesson. Wilson had struck him. He had been forced to swallow cakes that were stale when he might have eaten them fresh; he had sworn to love and not to bite. All this churned in his mind as he lay under the sofa; and at last he issued out. Again he was rewarded. At first, it must be admitted, the reward was insubstantial if not positively disagreeable. The baby was set on his back and Flush had to trot about with the baby pulling his ears. But he submitted with such grace, only turning round, when his ears were pulled, “to kiss the little bare, dimpled feet”, that, before three months had passed, this helpless, weak, puling, muling lump had somehow come to prefer him, “on the whole”—so Mrs. Browning said—to other people. And then, strangely enough, Flush found that he returned the baby’s affection. Did they not share something in common—did not the baby somehow resemble Flush in many ways? Did they not hold the same views, the same tastes? For instance, in the matter of scenery. To Flush all scenery was insipid. He had never, all these years, learnt to focus his eyes upon mountains. When they took him to Vallombrosa all the splendours of its woods had merely bored him. Now again, when the baby was a few months old, they went on another of those long expeditions in a travelling carriage. The baby lay on his nurse’s lap; Flush sat on Mrs. Browning’s knee. The carriage went on and on and on, painfully climbing the heights of the Apennines. Mrs. Browning was almost beside herself with delight. She could scarcely tear herself from the window. She could not find words enough in the whole of the English language to express what she felt. “… the exquisite, almost visionary scenery of the Apennines, the wonderful variety of shape and colour, the sudden transitions and vital individuality of those mountains, the chestnut forests dropping by their own weight into the deep ravines, the rocks cloven and clawed by the living torrents, and the hills, hill above hill, piling up their grand existences as if they did it themselves, changing colour in the effort”—the beauty of the Apennines brought words to birth in such numbers that they positively crushed each other out of existence. But the baby and Flush felt none of this stimulus, none of this inadequacy. Both were silent. Flush drew “in his head from the window and didn’t consider it worth looking at…. He has a supreme contempt for trees and hills or anything of that kind”, Mrs. Browning concluded. The carriage rumbled on. Flush slept and the baby slept. Then at last there were lights and houses and men and women passing the windows. They had entered a village. Instantly Flush was all attention. “… his eyes were starting out of his head with eagerness; he looked east, he looked west, you would conclude that he was taking notes or preparing them.” It was the human scene that stirred him. Beauty, so it seems at least, had to be crystallised into a green or violet powder and puffed by some celestial syringe down the fringed channels that lay behind his nostrils before it touched Flush’s senses; and then it issued not in words, but in a silent rapture. Where Mrs. Browning saw, he smelt; where she wrote, he snuffed.

Here, then, the biographer must perforce come to a pause. Where two or three thousand words are insufficient for what we see—and Mrs. Browning had to admit herself beaten by the Apennines: “Of these things I cannot give you any idea”, she admitted—there are no more than two words and one-half for what we smell. The human nose is practically non-existent. The greatest poets in the world have smelt nothing but roses on the one hand, and dung on the other. The infinite gradations that lie between are unrecorded. Yet it was in the world of smell that Flush mostly lived. Love was chiefly smell; form and colour were smell; music and architecture, law, politics and science were smell. To him religion itself was smell. To describe his simplest experience with the daily chop or biscuit is beyond our power. Not even Mr. Swinburne could have said what the smell of Wimpole Street meant to Flush on a hot afternoon in June. As for describing the smell of a spaniel mixed with the smell of torches, laurels, incense, banners, wax candles and a garland of rose leaves crushed by a satin heel that has been laid up in camphor, perhaps Shakespeare, had he paused in the middle of writing Antony and Cleopatra—But Shakespeare did not pause. Confessing our inadequacy, then, we can but note that to Flush Italy, in these the fullest, the freest, the happiest years of his life, meant mainly a succession of smells. Love, it must be supposed, was gradually losing its appeal. Smell remained. Now that they were established in Casa Guidi again, all had their avocations. Mr. Browning wrote regularly in one room; Mrs. Browning wrote regularly in another. The baby played in the nursery. But Flush wandered off into the streets of Florence to enjoy the rapture of smell. He threaded his path through main streets and back streets, through squares and alleys, by smell. He nosed his way from smell to smell; the rough, the smooth, the dark, the golden. He went in and out, up and down, where they beat brass, where they bake bread, where the women sit combing their hair, where the bird-cages are piled high on the causeway, where the wine spills itself in dark red stains on the pavement, where leather smells and harness and garlic, where cloth is beaten, where vine leaves tremble, where men sit and drink and spit and dice—he ran in and out, always with his nose to the ground, drinking in the essence; or with his nose in the air vibrating with the aroma. He slept in this hot patch of sun—how sun made the stone reek! he sought that tunnel of shade—how acid shade made the stone smell! He devoured whole bunches of ripe grapes largely because of their purple smell; he chewed and spat out whatever tough relic of goat or macaroni the Italian housewife had thrown from the balcony—goat and macaroni were raucous smells, crimson smells. He followed the swooning sweetness of incense into the violet intricacies of dark cathedrals; and, sniffing, tried to lap the gold on the window-stained tomb. Nor was his sense of touch much less acute. He knew Florence in its marmoreal smoothness and in its gritty and cobbled roughness. Hoary folds of drapery, smooth fingers and feet of stone received the lick of his tongue, the quiver of his shivering snout. Upon the infinitely sensitive pads of his feet he took the clear stamp of proud Latin inscriptions. In short, he knew Florence as no human being has ever known it; as Ruskin never knew it or George Eliot either. He knew it as only the dumb know. Not a single one of his myriad sensations ever submitted itself to the deformity of words.

But though it would be pleasant for the biographer to infer that Flush’s life in late middle age was an orgy of pleasure transcending all description; to maintain that while the baby day by day picked up a new word and thus removed sensation a little further beyond reach, Flush was fated to remain for ever in a Paradise where essences exist in their utmost purity, and the naked soul of things presses on the naked nerve—it would not be true. Flush lived in no such Paradise. The spirit, ranging from star to star, the bird whose furthest flight over polar snows or tropical forests never brings it within sight of human houses and their curling wood-smoke, may, for anything we know, enjoy such immunity, such integrity of bliss. But Flush had lain upon human knees and heard men’s voices. His flesh was veined with human passions; he knew all grades of jealousy, anger and despair. Now in summer he was scourged by fleas. [◉7] With a cruel irony the sun that ripened the grapes brought also the fleas. “… Savonarola’s martyrdom here in Florence”, wrote Mrs. Browning, “is scarcely worse than Flush’s in the summer.” Fleas leapt to life in every corner of the Florentine houses; they skipped and hopped out of every cranny of the old stone; out of every fold of old tapestry; out of every cloak, hat and blanket. They nested in Flush’s fur. They bit their way into the thickest of his coat. He scratched and tore. His health suffered; he became morose, thin and feverish. Miss Mitford was appealed to. What remedy was there, Mrs. Browning wrote anxiously, for fleas? Miss Mitford, still sitting in her greenhouse at Three Mile Cross, still writing tragedies, put down her pen and looked up her old prescriptions—what Mayflower had taken, what Rosebud. But the fleas of Reading die at a pinch. The fleas of Florence are red and virile. To them Miss Mitford’s powders might well have been snuff. In despair Mr. and Mrs. Browning went down on their knees beside a pail of water and did their best to exorcise the pest with soap and scrubbing-brush. It was in vain. At last one day Mr. Browning, taking Flush for a walk, noticed that people pointed; he heard a man lay a finger to his nose and whisper “La rogna” (mange). As by this time “Robert is as fond of Flush as I am”, to take his walk of an afternoon with a friend and to hear him thus stigmatised was intolerable. Robert, his wife wrote, “wouldn’t bear it any longer”. Only one remedy remained, but it was a remedy that was almost as drastic as the disease itself. However democratic Flush had become and careless of the signs of rank, he still remained what Philip Sidney had called him, a gentleman by birth. He carried his pedigree on his back. His coat meant to him what a gold watch inscribed with the family arms means to an impoverished squire whose broad acres have shrunk to that single circle. It was the coat that Mr. Browning now proposed to sacrifice. He called Flush to him and, “taking a pair of scissors, clipped him all over into the likeness of a lion”.

As Robert Browning snipped, as the insignia of a cocker spaniel fell to the floor, as the travesty of quite a different animal rose round his neck, Flush felt himself emasculated, diminished, ashamed. What am I now? he thought, gazing into the glass. And the glass replied with the brutal sincerity of glasses, “You are nothing”. He was nobody. Certainly he was no longer a cocker spaniel. But as he gazed, his ears bald now, and uncurled, seemed to twitch. It was as if the potent spirits of truth and laughter were whispering in them. To be nothing—is that not, after all, the most satisfactory state in the whole world? He looked again. There was his ruff. To caricature the pomposity of those who claim that they are something—was that not in its way a career? Anyhow, settle the matter as he might, there could be no doubt that he was free from fleas. He shook his ruff. He danced on his nude, attenuated legs. His spirits rose. So might a great beauty, rising from a bed of sickness and finding her face eternally disfigured, make a bonfire of clothes and cosmetics, and laugh with joy to think that she need never look in the glass again or dread a lover’s coolness or a rival’s beauty. So might a clergyman, cased for twenty years in starch and broadcloth, cast his collar into the dustbin and snatch the works of Voltaire from the cupboard. So Flush scampered off clipped all over into the likeness of a lion, but free from fleas. “Flush”, Mrs. Browning wrote to her sister, “is wise.” She was thinking perhaps of the Greeks saying that happiness is only to be reached through suffering. The true philosopher is he who has lost his coat but is free from fleas.

But Flush had not long to wait before his newly won philosophy was put to the test. Again in the summer of 1852 there were signs at Casa Guidi of one of those crises which, gathering soundlessly as a drawer opens or as a piece of string is left dangling from a box, are to a dog as menacing as the clouds which foretell lightning to a shepherd or as the rumours which foretell war to a statesman. Another change was indicated, another journey. Well, what of that? Trunks were hauled down and corded. The baby was carried out in his nurse’s arms. Mr. and Mrs. Browning appeared, dressed for travelling. There was a cab at the door. Flush waited philosophically in the hall. When they were ready he was ready. Now that they were all seated in the carriage, with one bound Flush sprang lightly in after them. To Venice, to Rome, to Paris—where were they going? All countries were equal to him now; all men were his brothers. He had learnt that lesson for himself. But when finally he emerged from obscurity he had need of all his philosophy—he was in London.

Houses spread to right and left in sharp avenues of regular brick. The pavement was cold and hard beneath his feet. And there, issuing from a mahogany door with a brass knocker, was a lady bountifully apparelled in flowing robes of purple plush. A light wreath starred with flowers rested on her hair. Gathering her draperies about her, she glanced disdainfully up and down the street while a footman, stooping, let down the step of the barouche landau. All Welbeck Street—for Welbeck Street it was—was wrapped in a splendour of red light—a light not clear and fierce like the Italian light, but tawny and troubled with the dust of a million wheels, with the trampling of a million hooves. The London season was at its height. A pall of sound, a cloud of interwoven humming, fell over the city in one confluent growl. By came a majestic deerhound led on a chain by a page. A policeman, swinging past with rhythmical stride, cast his bull’s-eye from side to side. Odours of stew, odours of beef, odours of basting, odours of beef and cabbage rose from a thousand basements. A flunkey in livery dropped a letter into a box.

Overcome by the magnificence of the metropolis, Flush paused for a moment with his foot on the door-step. Wilson paused too. How paltry it seemed now, the civilisation of Italy, its Courts and its revolutions, its Grand Dukes and their bodyguards! She thanked God, as the policeman passed, that she had not married Signor Righi after all. And then a sinister figure issued from the public-house at the corner. A man leered. With one spring Flush bolted indoors.

For some weeks now he was closely confined to a lodging-house sitting-room in Welbeck Street. For confinement was still necessary. The cholera had come, and it is true that the cholera had done something to improve the condition of the Rookeries; but not enough, for still dogs were stolen and the dogs of Wimpole Street had still to be led on chains. Flush went into society, of course. He met dogs at the pillar-box and outside the public-house; they welcomed him back with the inherent good breeding of their kind. Just as an English peer who has lived a lifetime in the East and contracted some of the habits of the natives—rumour hints indeed that he has turned Moslem and had a son by a Chinese washerwoman—finds, when he takes his place at Court, that old friends are ready enough to overlook these aberrations and he is asked to Chatsworth, though no mention is made of his wife and it is taken for granted that he will join the family at prayers—so the pointers and setters of Wimpole Street welcomed Flush among them and overlooked the condition of his coat. But there was a certain morbidity, it seemed to Flush now, among the dogs of London. It was common knowledge that Mrs. Carlyle’s dog Nero had leapt from a top storey window with the intention of committing suicide. [◉8] He had found the strain of life in Cheyne Row intolerable, it was said. Indeed Flush could well believe it now that he was back again in Welbeck Street. The confinement, the crowd of little objects, the blackbeetles by night, the bluebottles by day, the lingering odours of mutton, the perpetual presence on the sideboard of bananas—all this, together with the proximity of several men and women, heavily dressed and not often or indeed completely washed, wrought on his temper and strained his nerves. He lay for hours under the lodging-house chiffonier. It was impossible to run out of doors. The front door was always locked. He had to wait for somebody to lead him on a chain.

Two incidents alone broke the monotony of the weeks he spent in London. One day late that summer the Brownings went to visit the Rev. Charles Kingsley at Farnham. In Italy the earth would have been bare and hard as brick. Fleas would have been rampant. Languidly one would have dragged oneself from shadow to shadow, grateful even for the bar of shade cast by the raised arm of one of Donatello’s statues. But here at Farnham there were fields of green grass; there were pools of blue water; there were woods that murmured, and turf so fine that the paws bounced as they touched it. The Brownings and the Kingsleys spent the day together. And once more, as Flush trotted behind them, the old trumpets blew; the old ecstasy returned—was it hare or was it fox? Flush tore over the heaths of Surrey as he had not run since the old days at Three Mile Cross. A pheasant went rocketing up in a spurt of purple and gold. He had almost shut his teeth on the tail feathers when a voice rang out. A whip cracked. Was it the Rev. Charles Kingsley who called him sharply to heel? At any rate he ran no more. The woods of Farnham were strictly preserved.

A few days later he was lying in the sitting-room at Welbeck Street, when Mrs. Browning came in dressed for walking and called him from under the chiffonier. She slipped the chain on to his collar and, for the first time since September 1846, they walked up Wimpole Street together. When they came to the door of No. 50 they stopped as of old. Just as of old they waited. The butler just as of old was very slow in coming. At length the door opened. Could that be Catiline lying couched on the mat? The old toothless dog yawned and stretched himself and took no notice. Upstairs they crept as stealthily, as silently as once before they had come down. Very quietly, opening the doors as if she were afraid of what she might see there, Mrs. Browning went from room to room. A gloom descended upon her as she looked. “… they seemed to me”, she wrote, “smaller and darker, somehow, and the furniture wanted fitness and convenience.” The ivy was still tapping on the back bedroom window-pane. The painted blind still obscured the houses. Nothing had been changed. Nothing had happened all these years. So she went from room to room, sadly remembering. But long before she had finished her inspection, Flush was in a fever of anxiety. Suppose Mr. Barrett were to come in and find them? Suppose that with one frown he turned the key and locked them in the back bedroom for ever? At last Mrs. Browning shut the doors and went downstairs again very quietly. Yes, she said, it seemed to her that the house wanted cleaning.

After that, Flush had only one wish left in him—to leave London, to leave England for ever. He was not happy until he found himself on the deck of the Channel steamer crossing to France. It was a rough passage. The crossing took eight hours. As the steamer tossed and wallowed, Flush turned over in his mind a tumult of mixed memories—of ladies in purple plush, of ragged men with bags; of Regent’s Park, and Queen Victoria sweeping past with outriders; of the greenness of English grass and the rankness of English pavements—all this passed through his mind as he lay on deck; and, looking up, he caught sight of a stern, tall man leaning over the rail.

“Mr. Carlyle!” he heard Mrs. Browning exclaim; whereupon—the crossing, it must be remembered, was a bad one—Flush was violently sick. Sailors came running with pails and mops. “… he was ordered off the deck on purpose, poor dog”, said Mrs. Browning. For the deck was still English; dogs must not be sick on decks. Such was his last salute to the shores of his native land.

[]

Chapter Six
The End.

Flush was growing an old dog now. The journey to England and all the memories it revived had undoubtedly tired him. It was noticed that he sought the shade rather than the sun on his return, though the shade of Florence was hotter than the sun of Wimpole Street. Stretched beneath a statue, couched under the lip of a fountain for the sake of the few drops that spurted now and again on to his coat, he would lie dozing by the hour. The young dogs would come about him. To them he would tell his stories of Whitechapel and Wimpole Street; he would describe the smell of clover and the smell of Oxford Street; he would rehearse his memories of one revolution and another—how Grand Dukes had come and Grand Dukes had gone; but the spotted spaniel down the alley on the left—she goes on for ever, he would say. Then violent Mr. Landor would hurry by and shake his fist at him in mock fury; kind Miss Isa Blagden would pause and take a sugared biscuit from her reticule. The peasant women in the market-place made him a bed of leaves in the shadow of their baskets and tossed him a bunch of grapes now and then. He was known, he was liked by all Florence—gentle and simple, dogs and men.

But he was growing an old dog now, and he tended more and more to lie not even under the fountain—for the cobbles were too hard for his old bones—but in Mrs. Browning’s bedroom where the arms of the Guidi family made a smooth patch of scagliola on the floor, or in the drawing-room under the shadow of the drawing-room table. One day shortly after his return from London he was stretched there fast asleep. The deep and dreamless sleep of old age was heavy on him. Indeed to-day his sleep was deeper even than usual, for as he slept the darkness seemed to thicken round him. If he dreamt at all, he dreamt that he was sleeping in the heart of a primeval forest, shut from the light of the sun, shut from the voices of mankind, though now and again as he slept he dreamt that he heard the sleepy chirp of a dreaming bird, or, as the wind tossed the branches, the mellow chuckle of a brooding monkey.

Then suddenly the branches parted; the light broke in—here, there, in dazzling shafts. Monkeys chattered; birds rose crying and calling in alarm. He started to his feet wide awake. An astonishing commotion was all round him. He had fallen asleep between the bare legs of an ordinary drawing-room table. Now he was hemmed in by the billowing of skirts and the heaving of trousers. The table itself, moreover, was swaying violently from side to side. He did not know which way to run. What on earth was happening? What in Heaven’s name possessed the drawing-room table? He lifted up his voice in a prolonged howl of interrogation.

To Flush’s question no satisfactory answer can here be given. A few facts, and those of the baldest, are all that can be supplied. Briefly, then, it would appear that early in the nineteenth century the Countess of Blessington had bought a crystal ball from a magician. Her Ladyship “never could understand the use of it”; indeed she had never been able to see anything in the ball except crystal. After her death, however, there was a sale of her effects and the ball came into the possession of others who “looked deeper, or with purer eyes”, and saw other things in the ball besides crystal. Whether Lord Stanhope was the purchaser, whether it was he who looked “with purer eyes”, is not stated. But certainly by the year 1852 Lord Stanhope was in possession of a crystal ball and Lord Stanhope had only to look into it to see among other things “the spirits of the sun”. Obviously this was not a sight that a hospitable nobleman could keep to himself, and Lord Stanhope was in the habit of displaying his ball at luncheon parties and of inviting his friends to see the spirits of the sun also. There was something strangely delightful—except indeed to Mr. Chorley—in the spectacle; balls became the rage; and luckily a London optician soon discovered that he could make them, without being either an Egyptian or a magician, though naturally the price of English crystal was high. Thus many people in the early ’fifties became possessed of balls, though “many persons”, Lord Stanhope said, “use the balls, without the moral courage to confess it”. The prevalence of spirits in London indeed became so marked that some alarm was felt; and Lord Stanley suggested to Sir Edward Lytton “that the Government should appoint a committee of investigation so as to get as far as possible at the facts”. Whether the rumour of an approaching Government committee alarmed the spirits, or whether spirits, like bodies, tend to multiply in close confinement, there can be no doubt that the spirits began to show signs of restlessness, and, escaping in vast numbers, took up their residence in the legs of tables. Whatever the motive, the policy was successful. Crystal balls were expensive; almost everybody owns a table. Thus when Mrs. Browning returned to Italy in the winter of 1852 she found that the spirits had preceded her; the tables of Florence were almost universally infected. “From the Legation to the English chemists”, she wrote, “people are ‘serving tables’ … everywhere. When people gather round a table it isn’t to play whist.” No, it was to decipher messages conveyed by the legs of tables. Thus if asked the age of a child, the table “expresses itself intelligently by knocking with its legs, responses according to the alphabet”. And if a table could tell you that your own child was four years old, what limit was there to its capacity? Spinning tables were advertised in shops. The walls were placarded with advertisements of wonders “scoperte a Livorno”. By the year 1854, so rapidly did the movement spread, “four hundred thousand families in America had given their names … as actually in enjoyment of spiritual intercourse”. And from England the news came that Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton had imported “several of the American rapping spirits” to Knebworth, with the happy result—so little Arthur Russell was informed when he beheld a “strange-looking old gentleman in a shabby dressing-gown” staring at him at breakfast—that Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton believed himself invisible. [◉9]

When Mrs. Browning first looked into Lord Stanhope’s crystal ball at a luncheon party she saw nothing—except indeed that it was a remarkable sign of the times. The spirit of the sun indeed told her that she was about to go to Rome; but as she was not about to go to Rome, she contradicted the spirits of the sun. “But”, she added, with truth, “I love the marvellous.” She was nothing if not adventurous. She had gone to Manning Street at the risk of her life. She had discovered a world that she had never dreamt of within half an hour’s drive from Wimpole Street. Why should there not be another world only half a moment’s flight from Florence—a better world, a more beautiful world, where the dead live, trying in vain to reach us? At any rate she would take the risk. And so she sat herself down at the table too. And Mr. Lytton, the brilliant son of an invisible father, came; and Mr. Frederick Tennyson, and Mr. Powers and M. Villari—they all sat at the table, and then when the table had done kicking, they sat on drinking tea and eating strawberries and cream, with “Florence dissolving in the purple of the hills and the stars looking on”, talking and talking: “… what stories we told, and what miracles we swore to! Oh, we are believers here, Isa, except Robert….” Then in burst deaf Mr. Kirkup with his bleak white beard. He had come round simply to exclaim, “There is a spiritual world—there is a future state. I confess it. I am convinced at last.” And when Mr. Kirkup, whose creed had always been “the next thing to atheism”, was converted merely because, in spite of his deafness, he had heard “three taps so loud that they made him leap”, how could Mrs. Browning keep her hands off the table? “You know I am rather a visionary and inclined to knock round at all the doors of the present world to try to get out”, she wrote. So she summoned the faithful to Casa Guidi; and there they sat with their hands on the drawing-room table, trying to get out.

Flush started up in the wildest apprehension. The skirts and the trousers were billowing round him; the table was standing on one leg. But whatever the ladies and gentlemen round the table could hear and see, Flush could hear and see nothing. True, the table was standing on one leg, but so tables will if you lean hard on one side. He had upset tables himself and been well scolded for it. But now there was Mrs. Browning with her great eyes wide open staring as if she saw something marvellous outside. Flush rushed to the balcony and looked over. Was there another Grand Duke riding by with banners and torches? Flush could see nothing but an old beggar woman crouched at the corner of the street over her basket of melons. Yet clearly Mrs. Browning saw something; clearly she saw something that was very wonderful. So in the old Wimpole Street days she had wept once without any reason that he could see; and again she had laughed, holding up a blotted scrawl. But this was different. There was something in her look now that frightened him. There was something in the room, or in the table, or in the petticoats and trousers, that he disliked exceedingly.

As the weeks passed, this preoccupation of Mrs. Browning’s with the invisible grew upon her. It might be a fine hot day, but instead of watching the lizards slide in and out of the stones, she would sit at the table; it might be a dark starry night, but instead of reading in her book, or passing her hand over paper, she would call, if Mr. Browning were out, for Wilson, and Wilson would come yawning. Then they would sit at the table together until that article of furniture, whose chief function it was to provide shade, kicked on the floor, and Mrs. Browning exclaimed that it was telling Wilson that she would soon be ill. Wilson replied that she was only sleepy. But soon Wilson herself, the implacable, the upright, the British, screamed and went into a faint, and Mrs. Browning was rushing hither and thither to find “the hygienic vinegar”. That, to Flush, was a highly unpleasant way of spending a quiet evening. Better far to sit and read one’s book.

Undoubtedly the suspense, the intangible but disagreeable odour, the kicks and the screams and the vinegar, told upon Flush’s nerves. It was all very well for the baby, Penini, to pray “that Flush’s hair may grow”; that was an aspiration that Flush could understand. But this form of prayer which required the presence of evil-smelling, seedy-looking men and the antics of a piece of apparently solid mahogany, angered him much as they angered that robust, sensible, well-dressed man, his master. But far worse than any smell to Flush, far worse than any antics, was the look on Mrs. Browning’s face when she gazed out of the window as if she were seeing something that was wonderful when there was nothing. Flush stood himself in front of her. She looked through him as if he were not there. That was the cruellest look she had ever given him. It was worse than her cold anger when he bit Mr. Browning in the leg; worse than her sardonic laughter when the door shut upon his paw in Regent’s Park. There were moments indeed when he regretted Wimpole Street and its tables. The tables at No. 50 had never tilted upon one leg. The little table with the ring round it that held her precious ornaments had always stood perfectly still. In those far-off days he had only to leap on her sofa and Miss Barrett started wide-awake and looked at him. Now, once more, he leapt on to her sofa. But she did not notice him. She was writing. She paid no attention to him. She went on writing—“also, at the request of the medium, the spiritual hands took from the table a garland which lay there, and placed it upon my head. The particular hand which did this was of the largest human size, as white as snow, and very beautiful. It was as near to me as this hand I write with, and I saw it as distinctly.” Flush pawed her sharply. She looked through him as if he were invisible. He leapt off the sofa and ran downstairs into the street.

“So she knitted and he dozed.”

It was a blazing hot afternoon. The old beggar woman at the corner had fallen asleep over her melons. The sun seemed droning in the sky. Keeping to the shady side of the street, Flush trotted along the well-known ways to the market-place. The whole square was brilliant with awnings and stalls and bright umbrellas. The market women were sitting beside baskets of fruit; pigeons were fluttering, bells were pealing, whips were cracking. The many-coloured mongrels of Florence were running in and out sniffing and pawing. All was as brisk as a bee-hive and as hot as an oven. Flush sought the shade. He flung himself down beside his friend Catterina, under the shadow of her great basket. A brown jar of red and yellow flowers cast a shadow beside it. Above them a statue, holding his right arm outstretched, deepened the shade to violet. Flush lay there in the cool, watching the young dogs busy with their own affairs. They were snarling and biting, stretching and tumbling, in all the abandonment of youthful joy. They were chasing each other in and out, round and round, as he had once chased the spotted spaniel in the alley. His thoughts turned to Reading for a moment—to Mr. Partridge’s spaniel, to his first love, to the ecstasies, the innocences of youth. Well, he had had his day. He did not grudge them theirs. He had found the world a pleasant place to live in. He had no quarrel with it now. The market woman scratched him behind the ear. She had often cuffed him for stealing a grape, or for some other misdemeanour; but he was old now; and she was old. He guarded her melons and she scratched his ear. So she knitted and he dozed. The flies buzzed on the great pink melon that had been sliced open to show its flesh.

The sun burnt deliciously through the lily leaves, and through the green and white umbrella. The marble statue tempered its heat to a champagne freshness. Flush lay and let it burn through his fur to the naked skin. And when he was roasted on one side he turned over and let the sun roast the other. All the time the market people were chattering and bargaining; market women were passing; they were stopping and fingering the vegetables and the fruit. There was a perpetual buzz and hum of human voices such as Flush loved to listen to. After a time he drowsed off under the shadow of the lilies. He slept as dogs sleep when they are dreaming. Now his legs twitched—was he dreaming that he hunted rabbits in Spain? Was he coursing up a hot hill-side with dark men shouting “Span! Span!” as the rabbits darted from the brushwood? Then he lay still again. And now he yelped, quickly, softly, many times in succession. Perhaps he heard Dr. Mitford egging his greyhounds on to the hunt at Reading. Then his tail wagged sheepishly. Did he hear old Miss Mitford cry “Bad dog! Bad dog!” as he slunk back to her, where she stood among the turnips waving her umbrella? And then he lay for a time snoring, wrapt in the deep sleep of happy old age. Suddenly every muscle in his body twitched. He woke with a violent start. Where did he think he was? In Whitechapel among the ruffians? Was the knife at his throat again?

Whatever it was, he woke from his dream in a state of terror. He made off as if he were flying to safety, as if he were seeking refuge. The market women laughed and pelted him with rotten grapes and called him back. He took no notice. Cart-wheels almost crushed him as he darted through the streets—the men standing up to drive cursed him and flicked him with their whips. Half-naked children threw pebbles at him and shouted “Matta! Matta!” as he fled past. Their mothers ran to the door and caught them back in alarm. Had he then gone mad? Had the sun turned his brain? Or had he once more heard the hunting horn of Venus? Or had one of the American rapping spirits, one of the spirits that live in table legs, got possession of him at last? Whatever it was, he went in a bee-line up one street and down another until he reached the door of Casa Guidi. He made his way straight upstairs and went straight into the drawing-room.

Mrs. Browning was lying, reading, on the sofa. She looked up, startled, as he came in. No, it was not a spirit—it was only Flush. She laughed. Then, as he leapt on to the sofa and thrust his face into hers, the words of her own poem came into her mind:

You see this dog. It was but yesterday

I mused forgetful of his presence here

Till thought on thought drew downward tear on tear,

When from the pillow, where wet-cheeked I lay,

A head as hairy as Faunus, thrust its way

Right sudden against my face,—two golden-clear

Great eyes astonished mine,—a drooping ear

Did flap me on either cheek to dry the spray!

I started first, as some Arcadian,

Amazed by goatly god in twilight grove;

But, as the bearded vision closelier ran

My tears off, I knew Flush, and rose above

Surprise and sadness,—thanking the true Pan,

Who, by low creatures, leads to heights of love.

She had written that poem one day years ago in Wimpole Street when she was very unhappy. Now she was happy. She was growing old now and so was Flush. She bent down over him for a moment. Her face with its wide mouth and its great eyes and its heavy curls was still oddly like his. Broken asunder, yet made in the same mould, each, perhaps, completed what was dormant in the other. But she was woman; he was dog. Mrs. Browning went on reading. Then she looked at Flush again. But he did not look at her. An extraordinary change had come over him. “Flush!” she cried. But he was silent. He had been alive; he was now dead. [◉10] That was all. The drawing-room table, strangely enough, stood perfectly still.

[]

Authorities.

It must be admitted that there are very few authorities for the foregoing biography. But the reader who would like to check the facts or to pursue the subject further is referred to:

To Flush, My Dog. and Flush, or Faunus. Poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett. 2 vols.

The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, edited by Frederick Kenyon. 2 vols.

The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning addressed to Richard Hengist Horne, edited by S. R. Townshend Mayer. 2 vols.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning: letters to her sister 1846-1859, edited by Leonard Huxley, LL. D.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning in her Letters, by Percy Lubbock.

References to Flush are to be found in the Letters of Mary Russell Mitford, edited by H. Chorley. 2 vols.

For an account of London Rookeries, The Rookeries of London, by Thomas Beames, 1850, may be consulted.

[]

THE
YEARS

by
Virginia Woolf

published
1937
by
The Hogarth Press

the years

1880    1891

1907    1908

1910    1911

1913    1914

1917    1918

Present Day

[]

[The text follows the 1958 Hogarth Press edition.]

1880

It was an uncertain spring. The weather, perpetually changing, sent clouds of blue and of purple flying over the land. In the country farmers, looking at the fields, were apprehensive; in London umbrellas were opened and then shut by people looking up at the sky. But in April such weather was to be expected. Thousands of shop assistants made that remark, as they handed neat parcels to ladies in flounced dresses standing on the other side of the counter at Whiteley’s and the Army and Navy Stores. Interminable processions of shoppers in the West end, of business men in the East, paraded the pavements, like caravans perpetually marching,—so it seemed to those who had any reason to pause, say, to post a letter, or at a club window in Piccadilly. The stream of landaus, victorias and hansom cabs was incessant; for the season was beginning. In the quieter streets musicians doled out their frail and for the most part melancholy pipe of sound, which was echoed, or parodied, here in the trees of Hyde Park, here in St. James’s by the twitter of sparrows and the sudden outbursts of the amorous but intermittent thrush. The pigeons in the squares shuffled in the tree tops, letting fall a twig or two, and crooned over and over again the lullaby that was always interrupted. The gates at the Marble Arch and Apsley House were blocked in the afternoon by ladies in many-coloured dresses wearing bustles, and by gentlemen in frock coats carrying canes, wearing carnations. Here came the Princess, and as she passed hats were lifted. In the basements of the long avenues of the residential quarters servant girls in cap and apron prepared tea. Deviously ascending from the basement the silver teapot was placed on the table, and virgins and spinsters with hands that had staunched the sores of Bermondsey and Hoxton carefully measured out one, two, three, four spoonfuls of tea. When the sun went down a million little gaslights, shaped like the eyes in peacocks’ feathers, opened in their glass cages, but nevertheless broad stretches of darkness were left on the pavement. The mixed light of the lamps and the setting sun was reflected equally in the placid waters of the Round Pond and the Serpentine. Diners-out, trotting over the Bridge in hansom cabs, looked for a moment at the charming vista. At length the moon rose and its polished coin, though obscured now and then by wisps of cloud, shone out with serenity, with severity, or perhaps with complete indifference. Slowly wheeling, like the rays of a searchlight, the days, the weeks, the years passed one after another across the sky.

Colonel Abel Pargiter was sitting after luncheon in his club talking. Since his companions in the leather armchairs were men of his own type, men who had been soldiers, civil servants, men who had now retired, they were reviving with old jokes and stories now their past in India, Africa, Egypt, and then, by a natural transition, they turned to the present. It was a question of some appointment, of some possible appointment.

Suddenly the youngest and the sprucest of the three leant forward. Yesterday he had lunched with … Here the voice of the speaker fell. The others bent towards him; with a brief wave of his hand Colonel Abel dismissed the servant who was removing the coffee cups. The three baldish and greyish heads remained close together for a few minutes. Then Colonel Abel threw himself back in his chair. The curious gleam which had come into all their eyes when Major Elkin began his story had faded completely from Colonel Pargiter’s face. He sat staring ahead of him with bright blue eyes that seemed a little screwed up, as if the glare of the East were still in them; and puckered at the corners as if the dust were still in them. Some thought had struck him that made what the others were saying of no interest to him; indeed, it was disagreeable to him. He rose and looked out of the window down into Piccadilly. Holding his cigar suspended he looked down on the tops of omnibuses, hansom cabs, victorias, vans and landaus. He was out of it all, his attitude seemed to say; he had no longer any finger in that pie. Gloom settled on his red handsome face as he stood gazing. Suddenly a thought struck him. He had a question to ask; he turned to ask it; but his friends were gone. The little group had broken up. Elkins was already hurrying through the door; Brand had moved off to talk to another man. Colonel Pargiter shut his mouth on the thing he might have said, and turned back again to the window overlooking Piccadilly. Everybody in the crowded street, it seemed, had some end in view. Everybody was hurrying along to keep some appointment. Even the ladies in their victorias and broughams were trotting down Piccadilly on some errand or other. People were coming back to London; they were settling in for the season. But for him there would be no season; for him there was nothing to do. His wife was dying; but she did not die. She was better today; would be worse tomorrow; a new nurse was coming; and so it went on. He picked up a paper and turned over the pages. He looked at a picture of the west front of Cologne Cathedral. He tossed the paper back into its place among the other papers. One of these days—that was his euphemism for the time when his wife was dead—he would give up London, he thought, and live in the country. But then there was the house; then there were the children; and there was also … his face changed; it became less discontented; but also a little furtive and uneasy.

He had somewhere to go, after all. While they were gossiping he had kept that thought at the back of his mind. When he turned round and found them gone, that was the balm he clapped on his wound. He would go and see Mira; Mira at least would be glad to see him. Thus when he left the club he turned not East, where the busy men were going; nor West where his own house in Abercorn Terrace was; but took his way along the hard paths through the Green Park towards Westminster. The grass was very green; the leaves were beginning to shoot; little green claws, like birds’ claws, were pushing out from the branches; there was a sparkle, an animation everywhere; the air smelt clean and brisk. But Colonel Pargiter saw neither the grass nor the trees. He marched through the Park, in his closely buttoned coat, looking straight ahead of him. But when he came to Westminster he stopped. He did not like this part of the business at all. Every time he approached the little street that lay under the huge bulk of the Abbey, the street of dingy little houses, with yellow curtains and cards in the window, the street where the muffin man seemed always to be ringing his bell, where children screamed and hopped in and out of white chalk-marks on the pavement, he paused, looked to the right, looked to the left; and then walked very sharply to Number Thirty and rang the bell. He gazed straight at the door as he waited with his head rather sunk. He did not wish to be seen standing on that door-step. He did not like waiting to be let in. He did not like it when Mrs Sims let him in. There was always a smell in the house; there were always dirty clothes hanging on a line in the back garden. He went up the stairs, sulkily and heavily, and entered the sitting-room.

Nobody was there; he was too early. He looked round the room with distaste. There were too many little objects about. He felt out of place, and altogether too large as he stood upright before the draped fireplace in front of a screen upon which was painted a kingfisher in the act of alighting on some bulrushes. Footsteps scurried about hither and thither on the floor above. Was there somebody with her? he asked himself listening. Children screamed in the street outside. It was sordid; it was mean; it was furtive. One of these days, he said to himself … but the door opened and his mistress, Mira, came in.

“Oh Bogy, dear!” she exclaimed. Her hair was very untidy; she was a little fluffy-looking; but she was very much younger than he was and really glad to see him, he thought. The little dog bounced up at her.

“Lulu, Lulu,” she cried, catching the little dog in one hand while she put the other to her hair, “come and let Uncle Bogy look at you.”

The Colonel settled himself in the creaking basket-chair. She put the dog on his knee. There was a red patch—possibly eczema—behind one of its ears. The Colonel put on his glasses and bent down to look at the dog’s ear. Mira kissed him where his collar met his neck. Then his glasses fell off. She snatched them and put them on the dog. The old boy was out of spirits today, she felt. In that mysterious world of clubs and family life of which he never spoke to her something was wrong. He had come before she had done her hair, which was a nuisance. But her duty was to distract him. So she flitted—her figure, enlarging as it was, still allowed her to glide between table and chair—hither and thither; removed the fire-screen and set a light, before he could stop her, to the grudging lodging-house fire. Then she perched on the arm of his chair.

“Oh, Mira!” she said, glancing at herself in the looking-glass and shifting her hair-pins, “what a dreadfully untidy girl you are!” She loosed a long coil and let it fall over her shoulders. It was beautiful gold-glancing hair still, though she was nearing forty and had, if the truth were known, a daughter of eight boarded out with friends at Bedford. The hair began to fall of its own accord, of its own weight, and Bogy seeing it fall stooped and kissed her hair. A barrel-organ had begun to play down the street and the children all rushed in that direction, leaving a sudden silence. The Colonel began to stroke her neck. He began fumbling, with the hand that had lost two fingers, rather lower down, where the neck joins the shoulders. Mira slipped onto the floor and leant her back against his knee.

Then there was a creaking on the stairs; someone tapped as if to warn them of her presence. Mira at once pinned her hair together, got up and shut the door.

The Colonel began in his methodical way to examine the dog’s ears again. Was it eczema? or was it not eczema? He looked at the red patch, then set the dog on its legs in the basket and waited. He did not like the prolonged whispering on the landing outside. At length Mira came back; she looked worried; and when she looked worried she looked old. She began hunting about under cushions and covers. She wanted her bag, she said; where had she put her bag? In that litter of things, the Colonel thought, it might be anywhere. It was a lean, poverty-stricken-looking bag when she found it under the cushions in the corner of the sofa. She turned it upside down. Pocket handkerchiefs, screwed up bits of paper, silver and coppers fell out as she shook it. But there should have been a sovereign, she said. “I’m sure I had one yesterday,” she murmured.

“How much?” said the Colonel.

It came to one pound—no, it came to one pound eight and sixpence, she said, muttering something about the washing. The Colonel slipped two sovereigns out of his little gold case and gave them to her. She took them and there was more whispering on the landing.

“Washing …?” thought the Colonel, looking round the room. It was a dingy little hole; but being so much older than she was it did not do to ask questions about the washing. Here she was again. She flitted across the room and sat on the floor and put her head against his knee. The grudging fire which had been flickering feebly had died down now. “Let it be,” he said impatiently, as she took up the poker. “Let it go out.” She resigned the poker. The dog snored; the barrel organ played. His hand began its voyage up and down her neck, in and out of the long thick hair. In this small room, so close to the other houses, dusk came quickly; and the curtains were half drawn. He drew her to him; he kissed her on the nape of the neck; and then the hand that had lost two fingers began to fumble rather lower down where the neck joins the shoulders.

A sudden squall of rain struck the pavement, and the children, who had been skipping in and out of their chalk cages, scudded away home. The elderly street singer, who had been swaying along the kerb, with a fisherman’s cap stuck jauntily on the back of his head, lustily chanting “Count your blessings, Count your blessings——” turned up his coat collar and took refuge under the portico of a public house where he finished his injunction: “Count your blessings. Every One.” Then the sun shone again; and dried the pavement.

“It’s not boiling,” said Milly Pargiter, looking at the tea-kettle. She was sitting at the round table in the front drawing-room of the house in Abercorn Terrace. “Not nearly boiling,” she repeated. The kettle was an old-fashioned brass kettle, chased with a design of roses that was almost obliterated. A feeble little flame flickered up and down beneath the brass bowl. Her sister Delia, lying back in a chair beside her, watched it too. “Must a kettle boil?” she asked idly after a moment, as if she expected no answer, and Milly did not answer. They sat in silence watching the little flame on a tuft of yellow wick. There were many plates and cups as if other people were coming; but at the moment they were alone. The room was full of furniture. Opposite them stood a Dutch cabinet with blue china on the shelves; the sun of the April evening made a bright stain here and there on the glass. Over the fireplace the portrait of a red-haired young woman in white muslin holding a basket of flowers on her lap smiled down on them.

Milly took a hairpin from her head and began to fray the wick into separate strands so as to increase the size of the flame.

“But that doesn’t do any good,” Delia said irritably as she watched her. She fidgeted. Everything seemed to take such an intolerable time. Then Crosby came in and said, should she boil the kettle in the kitchen? and Milly said No. How can I put a stop to this fiddling and trifling, she said to herself, tapping a knife on the table and looking at the feeble flame that her sister was teasing with a hairpin. A gnat’s voice began to wail under the kettle; but here the door burst open again and a little girl in a stiff pink frock came in.

“I think Nurse might have put you on a clean pinafore,” said Milly severely, imitating the manner of a grown-up person. There was a green smudge on her pinafore as if she had been climbing trees.

“It hadn’t come back from the wash,” said Rose, the little girl, grumpily. She looked at the table, but there was no question of tea yet.

Milly applied her hairpin to the wick again. Delia leant back and glanced over her shoulder out of the window. From where she sat she could see the front door steps.

“Now, there’s Martin,” she said gloomily. The door slammed; books were slapped down on the hall table, and Martin, a boy of twelve, came in. He had the red hair of the woman in the picture, but it was rumpled.

“Go and make yourself tidy,” said Delia severely. “You’ve plenty of time,” she added. “The kettle isn’t boiling yet.”

They all looked at the kettle. It still kept up its faint melancholy singing as the little flame flickered under the swinging bowl of brass.

“Blast that kettle,” said Martin, turning sharply away.

“Mama wouldn’t like you to use language like that,” Milly reproved him as if in imitation of an older person; for their mother had been ill so long that both sisters had taken to imitating her manner with the children. The door opened again.

“The tray, Miss …” said Crosby, keeping the door open with her foot. She had an invalid’s tray in her hands.

“The tray,” said Milly. “Now who’s going to take up the tray?” Again she imitated the manner of an older person who wishes to be tactful with children.

“Not you, Rose. It’s too heavy. Let Martin carry it; and you can go with him. But don’t stay. Just tell Mama what you’ve been doing; and then the kettle … the kettle….”

Here she applied her hairpin to the wick again. A thin puff of steam issued from the serpent-shaped spout. At first intermittent, it gradually became more and more powerful, until, just as they heard steps on the stairs, one jet of powerful steam issued from the spout.

“It’s boiling!” Milly exclaimed. “It’s boiling!”

They ate in silence. The sun, judging from the changing lights on the glass of the Dutch cabinet, seemed to be going in and out. Sometimes a bowl shone deep blue; then became livid. Lights rested furtively upon the furniture in the other room. Here was a pattern; here was a bald patch. Somewhere there’s beauty, Delia thought, somewhere there’s freedom, and somewhere, she thought, he is—wearing his white flower…. But a stick grated in the hall.

“It’s Papa!” Milly exclaimed warningly.

Instantly Martin wriggled out of his father’s armchair; Delia sat upright. Milly at once moved forward a very large rose-sprinkled cup that did not match the rest. The Colonel stood at the door and surveyed the group rather fiercely. His small blue eyes looked round them as if to find fault; at the moment there was no particular fault to find; but he was out of temper; they knew at once before he spoke that he was out of temper.

“Grubby little ruffian,” he said, pinching Rose by the ear as he passed her. She put her hand at once over the stain on her pinafore.

“Mama all right?” he said, letting himself down in one solid mass into the big armchair. He detested tea; but he always sipped a little from the huge old cup that had been his father’s. He raised it and sipped perfunctorily.

“And what have you all been up to?” he asked.

He looked round him with the smoky but shrewd gaze that could be genial, but was surly now.

“Delia had her music lesson, and I went to Whiteley’s——” Milly began, rather as if she were a child reciting a lesson.

“Spending money, eh?” said her father sharply, but not unkindly.

“No, Papa; I told you. They sent the wrong sheets——”

“And you, Martin?” Colonel Pargiter asked, cutting short his daughter’s statement. “Bottom of the class as usual?”

“Top!” shouted Martin, bolting the word out as if he had restrained it with difficulty until this moment.

“Hm—you don’t say so,” said his father. His gloom relaxed a little. He put his hand into his trouser pocket and brought out a handful of silver. His children watched him as he tried to single out one sixpence from all the florins. He had lost two fingers of the right hand in the Mutiny, and the muscles had shrunk so that the right hand resembled the claw of some aged bird. He shuffled and fumbled; but as he always ignored the injury, his children dared not help him. The shiny knobs of the mutilated fingers fascinated Rose.

“Here you are, Martin,” he said at length, handing the sixpence to his son. Then he sipped his tea again and wiped his moustaches.

“Where’s Eleanor?” he said at last, as if to break the silence.

“It’s her Grove day,” Milly reminded him.

“Oh, her Grove day,” muttered the Colonel. He stirred the sugar round and round in the cup as if to demolish it.

“The dear old Levys,” said Delia tentatively. She was his favourite daughter; but she felt uncertain in his present mood how much she could venture.

He said nothing.

“Bertie Levy’s got six toes on one foot,” Rose piped up suddenly. The others laughed. But the Colonel cut them short.

“You hurry up and get off to your prep., my boy,” he said, glancing at Martin, who was still eating.

“Let him finish his tea, Papa,” said Milly, again imitating the manner of an older person.

“And the new nurse?” the Colonel asked, drumming on the edge of the table. “Has she come?”

“Yes …” Milly began. But there was a rustling in the hall and in came Eleanor. It was much to their relief; especially to Milly’s. Thank goodness, there’s Eleanor she thought, looking up—the soother, the maker-up of quarrels, the buffer between her and the intensities and strifes of family life. She adored her sister. She would have called her goddess and endowed her with a beauty that was not hers, with clothes that were not hers, had she not been carrying a pile of little mottled books and two black gloves. Protect me, she thought, handing her a teacup, who am such a mousy, downtrodden inefficient little chit, compared with Delia, who always gets her way, while I’m always snubbed by Papa, who was grumpy for some reason. The Colonel smiled at Eleanor. And the red dog on the hearthrug looked up too and wagged his tail, as if he recognised her for one of those satisfactory women who give you a bone, but wash their hands afterwards. She was the eldest of the daughters, about twenty-two, no beauty, but healthy, and though tired at the moment, naturally cheerful.

“I’m sorry I’m late,” she said. “I got kept. And I didn’t expect——” She looked at her father.

“I got off earlier than I thought,” he said hastily. “The meeting——” he stopped short. There had been another row with Mira.

“And how’s your Grove, eh?” he added.

“Oh, my Grove——” she repeated; but Milly handed her the covered dish.

“I got kept,” Eleanor said again, helping herself. She began to eat; the atmosphere lightened.

“Now tell us, Papa,” said Delia boldly—she was his favourite daughter—“what you’ve been doing with yourself. Had any adventures?”

The remark was unfortunate.

“There aren’t any adventures for an old fogy like me,” said the Colonel surlily. He ground the grains of sugar against the walls of his cup. Then he seemed to repent of his gruffness; he pondered for a moment.

“I met old Burke at the Club; asked me to bring one of you to dinner; Robin’s back, on leave,” he said.

He drank up his tea. Some drops fell on his little pointed beard. He took out his large silk handkerchief and wiped his chin impatiently. Eleanor, sitting on her low chair, saw a curious look first on Milly’s face, then on Delia’s. She had an impression of hostility between them. But they said nothing. They went on eating and drinking until the Colonel took up his cup, saw there was nothing in it, and put it down firmly with a little chink. The ceremony of tea-drinking was over.

“Now, my boy, take yourself off and get on with your prep.,” he said to Martin.

Martin withdrew the hand that was stretched towards a plate.

“Cut along,” said the Colonel imperiously. Martin got up and went, drawing his hand reluctantly along the chairs and tables as if to delay his passage. He slammed the door rather sharply behind him. The Colonel rose and stood upright among them in his tightly buttoned frock-coat.

“And I must be off too,” he said. But he paused a moment, as if there was nothing particular for him to be off to. He stood there very erect among them, as if he wished to give some order, but could not at the moment think of any order to give. Then he recollected.

“I wish one of you would remember,” he said, addressing his daughters impartially, “to write to Edward…. Tell him to write to Mama.”

“Yes,” said Eleanor.

He moved towards the door. But he stopped.

“And let me know when Mama wants to see me,” he remarked. Then he paused and pinched his youngest daughter by the ear.

“Grubby little ruffian,” he said, pointing to the green stain on her pinafore. She covered it with her hand. At the door he paused again.

“Don’t forget,” he said, fumbling with the handle, “don’t forget to write to Edward.” At last he had turned the handle and was gone.

They were silent. There was something strained in the atmosphere, Eleanor felt. She took one of the little books that she had dropped on the table and laid it open on her knee. But she did not look at it. Her glance fixed itself rather absent-mindedly upon the farther room. The trees were coming out in the back garden; there were little leaves—little ear-shaped leaves on the bushes. The sun was shining, fitfully; it was going in and it was going out, lighting up now this, now——

“Eleanor,” Rose interrupted. She held herself in a way that was oddly like her father’s.

“Eleanor,” she repeated in a low voice, for her sister was not attending.

“Well?” said Eleanor, looking at her.

“I want to go to Lamley’s,” said Rose.

She looked the image of her father, standing there with her hands behind her back.

“It’s too late for Lamley’s,” said Eleanor.

“They don’t shut till seven,” said Rose.

“Then ask Martin to go with you,” said Eleanor.

The little girl moved off slowly towards the door. Eleanor took up her account-books again.

“But you’re not to go alone, Rose; you’re not to go alone,” she said, looking up over them as Rose reached the door. Nodding her head in silence, Rose disappeared.

She went upstairs. She paused outside her mother’s bedroom and snuffed the sour-sweet smell that seemed to hang about the jugs, the tumblers, the covered bowls on the table outside the door. Up she went again, and stopped outside the schoolroom door. She did not want to go in, for she had quarrelled with Martin. They had quarrelled first about Erridge and the microscope and then about shooting Miss Pym’s cats next door. But Eleanor had told her to ask him. She opened the door.

“Hullo, Martin——” she began.

He was sitting at a table with a book propped in front of him, muttering to himself—perhaps it was Greek, perhaps it was Latin.

“Eleanor told me——” she began, noting how flushed he looked, and how his hand closed on a bit of paper as if he were going to screw it into a ball. “To ask you …” she began, and braced herself and stood with her back against the door.

Eleanor leant back in her chair. The sun now was on the trees in the back garden. The buds were beginning to swell. The spring light of course showed up the shabbiness of the chair-covers. The large armchair had a dark stain on it where her father had rested his head, she noticed. But what a number of chairs there were—how roomy, how airy it was after that bedroom where old Mrs Levy—— But Milly and Delia were both silent. It was the question of the dinner-party, she remembered. Which of them was to go? They both wanted to go. She wished people would not say, “Bring one of your daughters.” She wished they would say, “Bring Eleanor,” or “Bring Milly,” or “Bring Delia,” instead of lumping them all together. Then there could be no question.

“Well,” said Delia abruptly, “I shall …”

She got up as if she were going somewhere. But she stopped. Then she strolled over to the window that looked out onto the street. The houses opposite all had the same little front gardens; the same steps; the same pillars; the same bow windows. But now dusk was falling and they looked spectral and insubstantial in the dim light. Lamps were being lit; a light glowed in the drawing-room opposite; then the curtains were drawn, and the room was blotted out. Delia stood looking down at the street. A woman of the lower classes was wheeling a perambulator; an old man tottered along with his hands behind his back. Then the street was empty; there was a pause. Here came a hansom jingling down the road. Delia was momentarily interested. Was it going to stop at their door or not? She gazed more intently. But then, to her regret, the cabman jerked his reins, the horse stumbled on; the cab stopped two doors lower down.

“Someone’s calling on the Stapletons,” she called back, holding apart the muslin blind. Milly came and stood beside her sister, and together, through the slit, they watched a young man in a top-hat get out of the cab. He stretched his hand up to pay the driver.

“Don’t be caught looking,” said Eleanor warningly. The young man ran up the steps into the house; the door shut upon him and the cab drove away.

But for the moment the two girls stood at the window looking into the street. The crocuses were yellow and purple in the front gardens. The almond trees and privets were tipped with green. A sudden gust of wind tore down the street, blowing a piece of paper along the pavement; and a little swirl of dry dust followed after. Above the roofs was one of those red and fitful London sunsets that make window after window burn gold. There was a wildness in the spring evening; even here, in Abercorn Terrace the light was changing from gold to black, from black to gold. Dropping the blind, Delia turned, and coming back into the drawing-room, said suddenly:

“Oh my God!”

Eleanor, who had taken her books again, looked up disturbed.

“Eight times eight …” she said aloud. “What’s eight times eight?”

Putting her finger on the page to mark the place, she looked at her sister. As she stood there with her head thrown back and her hair red in the sunset glow, she looked for a moment defiant, even beautiful. Beside her Milly was mouse-coloured and nondescript.

“Look here, Delia,” said Eleanor, shutting her book, “you’ve only got to wait …” She meant but she could not say it, “until Mama dies.”

“No, no, no,” said Delia, stretching her arms out. “It’s hopeless….” she began. But she broke off, for Crosby had come in. She was carrying a tray. One by one with an exasperating little chink she put the cups, the plates, the knives, the jam-pots, the dishes of cake and the dishes of bread and butter, on the tray. Then, balancing it carefully in front of her, she went out. There was a pause. In she came again and folded the table-cloth and moved the tables. Again there was a pause. A moment or two later back she came carrying two silk-shaded lamps. She set one in the front room, one in the back room. Then she went, creaking in her cheap shoes, to the window and drew the curtains. They slid with a familiar click along the brass rod, and soon the windows were obscured by thick sculptured folds of claret-coloured plush. When she had drawn the curtains in both rooms, a profound silence seemed to fall upon the drawing-room. The world outside seemed thickly and entirely cut off. Far away down the next street they heard the voice of a street hawker droning; the heavy hooves of van horses clopped slowly down the road. For a moment wheels ground on the road; then they died out and the silence was complete.

Two yellow circles of light fell under the lamps. Eleanor drew her chair up under one of them, bent her head and went on with the part of her work that she always left to the last because she disliked it so much—adding up figures. Her lips moved and her pencil made little dots on the paper as she added eights to sixes, fives to fours.

“There!” she said at last. “That’s done. Now I’ll go and sit with Mama.”

She stooped to pick up her gloves.

“No,” said Milly, throwing aside a magazine she had opened, “I’ll go …”

Delia suddenly emerged from the back room in which she had been prowling.

“I’ve nothing whatever to do,” she said briefly. “I’ll go.”

She went upstairs, step by step, very slowly. When she came to the bedroom door with the jugs and glasses on the table outside, she paused. The sour-sweet smell of illness slightly sickened her. She could not force herself to go in. Through the little window at the end of the passage she could see flamingo-coloured curls of cloud lying on a pale-blue sky. After the dusk of the drawing-room, her eyes dazzled. She seemed fixed there for a moment by the light. Then on the floor above she heard children’s voices—Martin and Rose quarrelling.

“Don’t then!” she heard Rose say. A door slammed. She paused. Then she drew in a deep breath of air, looked once more at the fiery sky, and tapped on the bedroom door.

The nurse rose quietly; put her finger to her lips, and left the room. Mrs Pargiter was asleep. Lying in a cleft of the pillows with one hand under her cheek, Mrs Pargiter moaned slightly as if she wandered in a world where even in sleep little obstacles lay across her path. Her face was pouched and heavy; the skin was stained with brown patches; the hair which had been red was now white, save that there were queer yellow patches in it, as if some locks had been dipped in the yolk of an egg. Bare of all rings save her wedding ring, her fingers alone seemed to indicate that she had entered the private world of illness. But she did not look as if she were dying; she looked as if she might go on existing in this borderland between life and death for ever. Delia could see no change in her. As she sat down, everything seemed to be at full tide in her. A long narrow glass by the bedside reflected a section of the sky; it was dazzled at the moment with red light. The dressing-table was illuminated. The light struck on silver bottles and on glass bottles, all set out in the perfect order of things that are not used. At this hour of the evening the sick-room had an unreal cleanliness, quiet and order. There by the bedside was a little table set with spectacles, prayer-book and a vase of lilies of the valley. The flowers, too, looked unreal. There was nothing to do but to look.

She stared at the yellow drawing of her grandfather with the high light on his nose; at the photograph of her Uncle Horace in his uniform; at the lean and twisted figure on the crucifix to the right.

“But you don’t believe in it!” she said savagely, looking at her mother sunk in sleep. “You don’t want to die.”

She longed for her to die. There she was—soft, decayed but everlasting, lying in the cleft of the pillows, an obstacle, a prevention, an impediment to all life. She tried to whip up some feeling of affection, of pity. For instance, that summer, she told herself, at Sidmouth, when she called me up the garden steps…. But the scene melted as she tried to look at it. There was the other scene of course—the man in the frock-coat with the flower in his button-hole. But she had sworn not to think of that till bedtime. What then should she think of? Grandpapa with the white light on his nose? The prayer-book? The lilies of the valley? Or the looking-glass? The sun had gone in; the glass was dim and reflected now only a dun-coloured patch of sky. She could resist no longer.

“Wearing a white flower in his button-hole,” she began. It required a few minutes’ preparation. There must be a hall; banks of palms; a floor beneath them crowded with people’s heads. The charm was beginning to work. She became permeated with delicious starts of flattering and exciting emotion. She was on the platform; there was a huge audience; everybody was shouting, waving handkerchiefs, hissing and whistling. Then she stood up. She rose all in white in the middle of the platform; Mr Parnell was by her side.

“I am speaking in the cause of Liberty,” she began, throwing out her hands, “in the cause of Justice….” They were standing side by side. He was very pale but his dark eyes glowed. He turned to her and whispered….

There was a sudden interruption. Mrs Pargiter had raised herself on her pillows.

“Where am I?” she cried. She was frightened and bewildered, as she often was on waking. She raised her hand; she seemed to appeal for help. “Where am I?” she repeated. For a moment Delia was bewildered too. Where was she?

“Here, Mama! Here!” she said wildly. “Here, in your own room.”

She laid her hand on the counterpane. Mrs Pargiter clutched it nervously. She looked round the room as if she were seeking someone. She did not seem to recognise her daughter.

“What’s happening?” she said. “Where am I?” Then she looked at Delia and remembered.

“Oh, Delia—I was dreaming,” she murmured half apologetically. She lay for a moment looking out of the window. The lamps were being lit, and a sudden soft spurt of light came in the street outside.

“It’s been a fine day …” she hesitated, “for …” It seemed as if she could not remember what for.

“A lovely day, yes, Mama,” Delia repeated with mechanical cheerfulness.

“… for …” her mother tried again.

What day was it? Delia could not remember.

“… for your Uncle Digby’s birthday,” Mrs Pargiter at last brought out.

“Tell him from me—tell him how very glad I am.”

“I’ll tell him,” said Delia. She had forgotten her uncle’s birthday; but her mother was punctilious about such things.

“Aunt Eugénie——” she began.

But her mother was staring at the dressing-table. Some gleam from the lamp outside made the white cloth look extremely white.

“Another clean table-cloth!” Mrs Pargiter murmured peevishly. “The expense, Delia, the expense—that’s what worries me——”

“That’s all right, Mama,” said Delia dully. Her eyes were fixed upon her grandfather’s portrait; why, she wondered, had the artist put a dab of white chalk on the tip of his nose?

“Aunt Eugénie brought you some flowers,” she said.

For some reason Mrs Pargiter seemed pleased. Her eyes rested contemplatively on the clean table-cloth that had suggested the washing bill a moment before.

“Aunt Eugénie …” she said. “How well I remember”—her voice seemed to get fuller and rounder—“the day the engagement was announced. We were all of us in the garden; there came a letter.” She paused. “There came a letter,” she repeated. Then she said no more for a time. She seemed to be going over some memory.

“The dear little boy died, but save for that …” She stopped again. She seemed weaker tonight, Delia thought; and a start of joy ran through her. Her sentences were more broken than usual. What little boy had died? She began counting the twists on the counterpane as she waited for her mother to speak.

“You know all the cousins used to come together in the summer,” her mother suddenly resumed. “There was your Uncle Horace….”

“The one with the glass eye,” said Delia.

“Yes. He hurt his eye on the rocking-horse. The aunts thought so much of Horace. They would say …” Here there was a long pause. She seemed to be fumbling to find the exact words.

“When Horace comes … remember to ask him about the dining-room door.”

A curious amusement seemed to fill Mrs Pargiter. She actually laughed. She must be thinking of some long-past family joke, Delia supposed, as she watched the smile flicker and fade away. There was complete silence. Her mother lay with her eyes shut; the hand with the single ring, the white and wasted hand, lay on the counterpane. In the silence they could hear a coal click in the grate and a street hawker droning down the road. Mrs Pargiter said no more. She lay perfectly still. Then she sighed profoundly.

The door opened, and the nurse came in. Delia rose and went out. Where am I? she asked herself, staring at a white jug stained pink by the setting sun. For a moment she seemed to be in some borderland between life and death. Where am I? she repeated, looking at the pink jug, for it all looked strange. Then she heard water rushing and feet thudding on the floor above.

“Here you are, Rosie,” said Nurse, looking up from the wheel of the sewing-machine as Rose came in.

The nursery was brightly lit; there was an unshaded lamp on the table. Mrs C., who came every week with the washing, was sitting in the armchair with a cup in her hand. “Go and get your sewing, there’s a good girl,” said Nurse as Rose shook hands with Mrs C., “or you’ll never be done in time for Papa’s birthday,” she added, clearing a space on the nursery table.

Rose opened the table drawer and took out the boot-bag that she was embroidering with a design of blue and red flowers for her father’s birthday. There were still several clusters of little pencilled roses to be worked. She spread it on the table and examined it as Nurse resumed what she was saying to Mrs C. about Mrs Kirby’s daughter. But Rose did not listen.

Then I shall go by myself, she decided, straightening out the boot-bag. If Martin won’t come with me, then I shall go by myself.

“I left my work-box in the drawing-room,” she said aloud.

“Well, then, go and fetch it,” said Nurse, but she was not attending; she wanted to go on with what she was saying to Mrs C. about the grocer’s daughter.

Now the adventure has begun, Rose said to herself as she stole on tiptoe to the night nursery. Now she must provide herself with ammunition and provisions; she must steal Nurse’s latchkey; but where was it? Every night it was hidden in a new place for fear of burglars. It would be either under the handkerchief-case or in the little box where she kept her mother’s gold watch-chain. There it was. Now she had her pistol and her shot, she thought, taking her own purse from her own drawer, and enough provisions, she thought, as she hung her hat and coat over her arm, to last a fortnight.

She stole past the nursery, down the stairs. She listened intently as she passed the schoolroom door. She must be careful not to tread on a dry branch, or to let any twig crack under her, she told herself, as she went on tiptoe. Again she stopped and listened as she passed her mother’s bedroom door. All was silent. Then she stood for a moment on the landing, looking down into the hall. The dog was asleep on the mat; the coast was clear; the hall was empty. She heard voices murmuring in the drawing-room.

She turned the latch of the front door with extreme gentleness, and closed it with scarcely a click behind her. Until she was round the corner she crouched close to the wall so that nobody could see her. When she reached the corner under the laburnum tree she stood erect.

“I am Pargiter of Pargiter’s Horse,” she said, flourishing her hand, “riding to the rescue!”

She was riding by night on a desperate mission to a besieged garrison, she told herself. She had a secret message—she clenched her fist on her purse—to deliver to the General in person. All their lives depended upon it. The British flag was still flying on the central tower—Lamley’s shop was the central tower; the General was standing on the roof of Lamley’s shop with his telescope to his eye. All their lives depended upon her riding to them through the enemy’s country. Here she was galloping across the desert. She began to trot. It was growing dark. The street lamps were being lit. The lamplighter was poking his stick up into the little trap-door; the trees in the front gardens made a wavering network of shadow on the pavement; the pavement stretched before her broad and dark. Then there was the crossing; and then there was Lamley’s shop on the little island of shops opposite. She had only to cross the desert, to ford the river, and she was safe. Flourishing the arm that held the pistol, she clapped spurs to her horse and galloped down Melrose Avenue. As she ran past the pillar-box the figure of a man suddenly emerged under the gas lamp.

“The enemy!” Rose cried to herself. “The enemy! Bang!” she cried, pulling the trigger of her pistol and looking him full in the face as she passed him. It was a horrid face: white, peeled, pock-marked; he leered at her. He put out his arm as if to stop her. He almost caught her. She dashed past him. The game was over.

She was herself again, a little girl who had disobeyed her sister, in her house shoes, flying for safety to Lamley’s shop.

Fresh-faced Mrs Lamley was standing behind the counter folding up the newspapers. She was pondering among her twopenny watches, cards of tools, toy boats and boxes of cheap stationery something pleasant, it seemed, for she was smiling. Then Rose burst in. She looked up enquiringly.

“Hullo, Rosie!” she exclaimed. “What d’you want, my dear?”

She kept her hand on the pile of newspapers. Rose stood there panting. She had forgotten what she had come for.

“I want the box of ducks in the window,” Rose at last remembered.

Mrs Lamley waddled round to fetch it.

“Isn’t it rather late for a little girl like you to be out alone?” she asked, looking at her as if she knew she had come out in her house shoes, disobeying her sister.

“Good-night, my dear, and run along home,” she said, giving her the parcel. The child seemed to hesitate on the doorstep: she stood there staring at the toys under the hanging oil lamp; then out she went reluctantly.

I gave my message to the General in person, she said to herself as she stood outside on the pavement again. And this is the trophy, she said, grasping the box under her arm. I am returning in triumph with the head of the chief rebel, she told herself, as she surveyed the stretch of Melrose Avenue before her. I must set spurs to my horse and gallop. But the story no longer worked. Melrose Avenue remained Melrose Avenue. She looked down it. There was the long stretch of bare street in front of her. The trees were trembling their shadows over the pavement. The lamps stood at great distances apart, and there were pools of darkness between. She began to trot. Suddenly, as she passed the lamp-post, she saw the man again. He was leaning with his back against the lamp-post, and the light from the gas lamp flickered over his face. As she passed he sucked his lips in and out. He made a mewing noise. But he did not stretch his hands out at her; they were unbuttoning his clothes.

She fled past him. She thought that she heard him coming after her. She heard his feet padding on the pavement. Everything shook as she ran; pink and black spots danced before her eyes as she ran up the door-steps, fitted her key in the latch and opened the hall door. She did not care whether she made a noise or not. She hoped somebody would come out and speak to her. But nobody heard her. The hall was empty. The dog was asleep on the mat. Voices still murmured in the drawing-room.

“And when it does catch,” Eleanor was saying, “it’ll be much too hot.”

Crosby had piled the coals into a great black promontory. A plume of yellow smoke was sullenly twining round it; it was beginning to burn, and when it did burn it would be much too hot.

“She can see Nurse stealing the sugar, she says. She can see her shadow on the wall,” Milly was saying. They were talking about their mother.

“And then Edward,” she added, “forgetting to write.”

“That reminds me,” said Eleanor. She must remember to write to Edward. But there would be time after dinner. She did not want to write; she did not want to talk; always when she came back from the Grove she felt as if several things were going on at the same time. Words went on repeating themselves in her mind—words and sights. She was thinking of old Mrs Levy, sitting propped up in bed with her white hair in a thick flop like a wig and her face cracked like an old glazed pot.

“Them that’s been good to me, them I remember … them that’s ridden in their coaches when I was a poor widder woman scrubbing and mangling——” Here she stretched out her arm, which was wrung and white like the root of a tree. “Them that’s been good to me, them I remember …” Eleanor repeated as she looked at the fire. Then the daughter came in who was working for a tailor. She wore pearls as big as hen’s eggs; she had taken to painting her face; she was wonderfully handsome. But Milly made a little movement.

“I was thinking,” said Eleanor on the spur of the moment, “the poor enjoy themselves more than we do.”

“The Levys?” said Milly absent-mindedly. Then she brightened.

“Do tell me about the Levys,” she added. Eleanor’s relations with “the poor”—the Levys, the Grubbs, the Paravicinis, the Zwinglers and the Cobbs—always amused her. But Eleanor did not like talking about “the poor” as if they were people in a book. She had a great admiration for Mrs Levy, who was dying of cancer.

“Oh, they’re much as usual,” she said sharply. Milly looked at her. Eleanor’s “broody” she thought. The family joke was, “Look out. Eleanor’s broody. It’s her Grove day.” Eleanor was ashamed, but she always was irritable for some reason when she came back from the Grove—so many different things were going on in her head at the same time: Canning Place; Abercorn Terrace; this room; that room. There was the old Jewess sitting up in bed in her hot little room; then one came back here, and there was Mama ill; Papa grumpy; and Delia and Milly quarrelling about a party…. But she checked herself. She ought to try to say something to amuse her sister.

“Mrs Levy had her rent ready, for a wonder,” she said. “Lily helps her. Lily’s got a job at a tailor’s in Shoreditch. She came in all covered with pearls and things. They do love finery—Jews,” she added.

“Jews?” said Milly. She seemed to consider the taste of the Jews; and then to dimiss it.

“Yes,” she said. “Shiny.”

“She’s extraordinarily handsome,” said Eleanor, thinking of the red cheeks and the white pearls.

Milly smiled; Eleanor always would stick up for the poor. She thought Eleanor the best, the wisest, the most remarkable person she knew.

“I believe you like going there more than anything,” she said. “I believe you’d like to go and live there if you had your way,” she added, with a little sigh.

Eleanor shifted in her chair. She had her dreams, her plans, of course; but she did not want to discuss them.

“Perhaps you will, when you’re married?” said Milly. There was something peevish yet plaintive in her voice. The dinner-party; the Burkes’ dinner-party, Eleanor thought. She wished Milly did not always bring the conversation back to marriage. And what do they know about marriage? she asked herself. They stay at home too much, she thought; they never see anyone outside their own set. Here they are cooped up, day after day…. That was why she had said, “The poor enjoy themselves more than we do.” It had struck her coming back into that drawing-room, with all the furniture and the flowers and the hospital nurses…. Again she stopped herself. She must wait till she was alone—till she was brushing her teeth at night. When she was with the others she must stop herself from thinking of two things at the same time. She took the poker and struck the coal.

“Look! What a beauty!” she exclaimed. A flame danced on top of the coal, a nimble and irrelevant flame. It was the sort of flame they used to make when they were children, by throwing salt on the fire. She struck again, and a shower of gold-eyed sparks went volleying up the chimney. “D’you remember,” she said, “how we used to play at firemen, and Morris and I set the chimney on fire?”

“And Pippy went and fetched Papa,” said Milly. She paused. There was a sound in the hall. A stick grated; someone was hanging up a coat. Eleanor’s eyes brightened. That was Morris—yes; she knew the sound he made. Now he was coming in. She looked round with a smile as the door opened. Milly jumped up.

Morris tried to stop her.

“Don’t go——” he began.

“Yes!” she exclaimed. “I shall go. I shall go and have a bath,” she added on the spur of the moment. She left them.

Morris sat down in the chair she had left empty. He was glad to find Eleanor alone. Neither of them spoke for a moment. They watched the yellow plume of smoke, and the little flame dancing nimbly, irrelevantly, here and there on the black promontory of coals. Then he asked the usual question:

“How’s Mama?”

She told him; there was no change: “except that she sleeps more,” she said. He wrinkled his forehead. He was losing his boyish look, Eleanor thought. That was the worst of the Bar, everyone said; one had to wait. He was devilling for Sanders Curry; and it was dreary work, hanging about the Courts all day, waiting.

“How’s old Curry?” she asked—old Curry had a temper.

“A bit liverish,” said Morris grimly.

“And what have you been doing all day?” she asked.

“Nothing in particular,” he replied.

“Still Evans v. Carter?”

“Yes,” he said briefly.

“And who’s going to win?” she asked.

“Carter, of course,” he replied.

Why “of course” she wanted to ask? But she had said something silly the other day—something that showed that she had not been attending. She muddled things up; for example, what was the difference between Common Law and the other kind of law? She said nothing. They sat in silence, and watched the flame playing on the coals. It was a green flame, nimble, irrelevant.

“D’you think I’ve been an awful fool,” he asked suddenly. “With all this illness, and Edward and Martin to be paid for—Papa must find it a bit of a strain.” He wrinkled his brow up in the way that made her say to herself that he was losing his boyish look.

“Of course not,” she said emphatically. Of course it would have been absurd for him to go into business; his passion was for the Law.

“You’ll be Lord Chancellor one of these days,” she said. “I’m sure of it.” He shook his head, smiling.

“Quite sure,” she said, looking at him as she used to look at him when he came back from school and Edward had all the prizes and Morris sat silent—she could see him now—bolting his food with nobody making a fuss of him. But even while she looked, a doubt came over her. Lord Chancellor, she had said. Ought she not to have said Lord Chief Justice? She never could remember which was which: and that was why he would not discuss Evans v. Carter with her.

She never told him about the Levys either, except by way of a joke. That was the worst of growing up, she thought; they couldn’t share things as they used to share them. When they met they never had time to talk as they used to talk—about things in general—they always talked about facts—little facts. She poked the fire. Suddenly a blare of sound rang through the room. It was Crosby applying herself to the gong in the hall. She was like a savage wreaking vengeance upon some brazen victim. Ripples of rough sound rang through the room. “Lord, that’s the dressing-bell!” said Morris. He got up and stretched himself. He raised his arms and held them for a moment suspended above his head. That’s what he’ll look like when he’s the father of a family, Eleanor thought. He let his arms fall and left the room. She sat brooding for a moment; then she roused herself. What must I remember? she asked herself. To write to Edward, she mused, crossing over to her mother’s writing-table. It’ll be my table now, she thought, looking at the silver candlestick, the miniature of her grandfather, the tradesmen’s books—one had a gilt cow stamped on it—and the spotted walrus with a brush in its back that Martin had given his mother on her last birthday.

Crosby held open the door of the dining-room as she waited for them to come down. The silver paid for polishing, she thought. Knives and forks rayed out round the table. The whole room, with its carved chairs, oil paintings, the two daggers on the mantel-piece, and the handsome sideboard—all the solid objects that Crosby dusted and polished every day—looked at its best in the evening. Meat-smelling and serge-curtained by day, it looked lit up, semi-transparent in the evening. And they were a handsome family, she thought as they filed in—the young ladies in their pretty dresses of blue and white sprigged muslin; the gentlemen so spruce in their dinner jackets. She pulled the Colonel’s chair out for him. He was always at his best in the evening; he enjoyed his dinner; and for some reason his gloom had vanished. He was in his jovial mood. His children’s spirits rose as they noted it.

“That’s a pretty frock you’re wearing,” he said to Delia as he sat down.

“This old one?” she said, patting the blue muslin.

There was an opulence, an ease and a charm about him when he was in a good temper that she liked particularly. People always said she was like him; sometimes she was glad of it—tonight for instance. He looked so pink and clean and genial in his dinner-jacket. They became children again when he was in this mood, and were spurred on to make family jokes at which they all laughed for no particular reason.

“Eleanor’s broody,” said her father, winking at them. “It’s her Grove day.”

Everybody laughed; Eleanor had thought he was talking about Rover, the dog, when in fact he was talking about Mrs Egerton, the lady. Crosby, who was handing the soup, crinkled up her face because she wanted to laugh too. Sometimes the Colonel made Crosby laugh so much that she had to turn away and pretend to be doing something at the sideboard.

“Oh, Mrs Egerton——” said Eleanor, beginning her soup.

“Yes, Mrs Egerton,” said her father, and went on telling his story about Mrs Egerton, “whose golden hair was said by the voice of slander not to be entirely her own.”

Delia liked listening to her father’s stories about India. They were crisp, and at the same time romantic. They conveyed an atmosphere of officers dining together in mess jackets on a very hot night with a huge silver trophy in the middle of the table.

He used always to be like this when we were small, she thought. He used to jump over the bonfire on her birthday, she remembered. She watched him flicking cutlets dexterously on to plates with his left hand. She admired his decision, his common sense. Flicking the cutlets on to plates, he went on——

“Talking of the lovely Mrs Egerton reminds me—did I ever tell you the story of old Badger Parkes and——”

“Miss——” said Crosby in a whisper, opening the door behind Eleanor’s back. She whispered a few words to Eleanor privately.

“I’ll come,” said Eleanor, getting up.

“What’s that—what’s that?” said the Colonel, stopping in the middle of his sentence. Eleanor left the room.

“Some message from Nurse,” said Milly.

The Colonel, who had just helped himself to cutlets, held his knife and fork in his hand. They all held their knives suspended. Nobody liked to go on eating.

“Well, let’s get on with our dinner,” said the Colonel, abruptly attacking his cutlet. He had lost his geniality. Morris helped himself tentatively to potatoes. Then Crosby reappeared. She stood at the door, with her pale-blue eyes looking very prominent.

“What is it, Crosby? What is it?” said the Colonel.

“The Mistress, sir, taken worse, I think, sir,” she said with a curious whimper in her voice. Everybody got up.

“You wait. I’ll go and see,” said Morris. They all followed him out into the hall. The Colonel was still holding his dinner napkin. Morris ran upstairs; in a moment he came down again.

“Mama’s had a fainting-fit,” he said to the Colonel. “I’m going to fetch Prentice.” He snatched his hat and coat and ran down the front steps. They heard him whistling for a cab as they stood uncertainly in the hall.

“Finish your dinner, girls,” said the Colonel peremptorily. But he paced up and down the drawing-room, holding his dinner napkin in his hand.

“It has come,” Delia said to herself; “it has come!” An extraordinary feeling of relief and excitement possessed her. Her father was pacing from one drawing-room to the other; she followed him in; but she avoided him. They were too much alike; each knew what the other was feeling. She stood at the window looking up the street. There had been a shower of rain. The street was wet; the roofs were shining. Dark clouds were moving across the sky; the branches were tossing up and down in the light of the street lamps. Something in her was tossing up and down too. Something unknown seemed to be approaching. Then a gulping sound behind her made her turn. It was Milly. She was standing by the mantelpiece under the picture of the white-robed girl with the flower-basket, and the tears slid slowly down her cheeks. Delia moved towards her; she ought to go up to her and put her arms round her shoulders; but she could not do it. Real tears were sliding down Milly’s cheeks. But her own eyes were dry. She turned to the window again. The street was empty—only the branches were tossing up and down in the lamplight. The Colonel paced up and down; once he knocked against a table and said “Damn!” They heard steps moving about in the room upstairs. They heard voices murmuring. Delia turned to the window.

A hansom came trotting down the street. Morris jumped out directly the cab stopped. Dr. Prentice followed him. He went straight upstairs and Morris joined them in the drawing-room.

“Why not finish your dinner?” the Colonel said gruffly, coming to a halt and standing upright before them.

“Oh, after he’s gone,” said Morris irritably.

The Colonel resumed his pacing.

Then he stopped his pacing, and stood with his hands behind him in front of the fire. He had a braced look as if he were holding himself ready for an emergency.

We’re both acting, Delia thought to herself, stealing a glance at him, but he’s doing it better than I am.

She looked out of the window again. The rain was falling. When it crossed the lamplight it glanced in long strips of silver light.

“It’s raining,” she said in a low voice, but nobody answered her.

At last they heard footsteps on the stairs and Dr. Prentice came in. He shut the door quietly but said nothing.

“Well?” said the Colonel, facing up to him.

There was a prolonged pause.

“How d’you find her?” said the Colonel.

Dr. Prentice moved his shoulders slightly.

“She’s rallied,” he said. “For the moment,” he added.

Delia felt as if his words struck her violently a blow on the head. She sank down on the arm of a chair.

So you’re not going to die, she said, looking at the girl balanced on the trunk of a tree; she seemed to simper down at her daughter with smiling malice. You’re not going to die—never, never! she cried clenching her hands together beneath her mother’s picture.

“Now, shall we get on with our dinner?” said the Colonel, taking up the napkin which he had dropped on the drawing-room table.

It was a pity—the dinner was spoilt, Crosby thought, bringing up the cutlets from the kitchen again. The meat was dried up, and the potatoes had a brown crust on top of them. One of the candles was scorching its shade too, she observed as she put the dish down in front of the Colonel. Then she shut the door on them, and they began to eat their dinner.

All was quiet in the house. The dog slept on its mat at the foot of the stairs. All was quiet outside the sickroom door. A faint sound of snoring came from the bedroom where Martin lay asleep. In the day nursery Mrs C. and the nurse had resumed their supper, which they had interrupted when they heard sounds in the hall below. Rose lay asleep in the night nursery. For some time she slept profoundly, curled round with the blankets tight twisted over her head. Then she stirred and stretched her arms out. Something had swum up on top of the blackness. An oval white shape hung in front of her dangling, as if it hung from a string. She half opened her eyes and looked at it. It bubbled with grey spots that went in and out. She woke completely. A face was hanging close to her as if it dangled on a bit of string. She shut her eyes; but the face was still there, bubbling in and out, grey, white, purplish and pock-marked. She put out her hand to touch the big bed next hers. But it was empty. She listened. She heard the clatter of knives and the chatter of voices in the day nursery across the passage. But she could not sleep.

She made herself think of a flock of sheep penned up in a hurdle in a field. She made one of the sheep jump the hurdle; then another. She counted them as they jumped. One, two, three, four—they jumped over the hurdle. But the fifth sheep would not jump. It turned round and looked at her. Its long narrow face was grey; its lips moved; it was the face of the man at the pillar-box, and she was alone with it. If she shut her eyes there it was; if she opened them, there it was still.

She sat up in bed and cried out, “Nurse! Nurse!”

There was dead silence everywhere. The clatter of knives and forks in the next room had ceased. She was alone with something horrible. Then she heard a shuffling in the passage. It came closer and closer. It was the man himself. His hand was on the door. The door opened. An angle of light fell across the wash-stand. The jug and basin were lit up. The man was actually in the room with her…. [her …] but it was Eleanor.

“Why aren’t you asleep?” said Eleanor. She put down her candle and began to straighten the bedclothes. They were all crumpled up. She looked at Rose. Her eyes were very bright and her cheeks were flushed. What was the matter? Had they woken her, moving about downstairs in Mama’s room?

“What’s been keeping you awake?” she asked. Rose yawned again; but it was a sigh rather than a yawn. She could not tell Eleanor what she had seen. She had a profound feeling of guilt; for some reason she must lie about the face she had seen.

“I had a bad dream,” she said. “I was frightened.” A queer nervous jerk ran through her body as she sat up in bed. What was the matter? Eleanor wondered, again. Had she been fighting with Martin? Had she been chasing cats in Miss Pym’s garden again?

“Have you been chasing cats again?” she asked. “Poor cats,” she added; “they mind it just as much as you would,” she said. But she knew that Rose’s fright had nothing to do with the cats. She was grasping her finger tightly; she was staring ahead of her with a queer look in her eyes.

“What was your dream about?” she asked, sitting down on the edge of the bed. Rose stared at her; she could not tell her; but at all costs Eleanor must be made to stay with her.

“I thought I heard a man in the room,” she brought out at last. “A robber,” she added.

“A robber? Here?” said Eleanor. “But Rose, how could a robber get into your nursery? There’s Papa, there’s Morris—they would never let a robber come into your room.”

“No,” said Rose. “Papa would kill him,” she added. There was something queer about the way she twitched.

“But what are you all doing?” she said restlessly. “Haven’t you gone to bed yet? Isn’t it very late?”

“What are we all doing?” said Eleanor. “We’re sitting in the drawing-room. It’s not very late.” As she spoke a faint sound boomed through the room. When the wind was in the right direction they could hear St. Paul’s. The soft circles spread out in the air: one, two, three, four—Eleanor counted eight, nine, ten. She was surprised that the strokes stopped so soon.

“There, it’s only ten o’clock, you see,” she said. It had seemed to her much later. But the last stroke dissolved in the air. “So now you’ll go to sleep,” she said. Rose clutched her hand.

“Don’t go, Eleanor; not yet,” she implored her.

“But tell me, what’s frightened you?” Eleanor began. Something was being hidden from her, she was sure.

“I saw …” Rose began. She made a great effort to tell her the truth; to tell her about the man at the pillar-box. “I saw …” she repeated. But here the door opened and Nurse came in.

“I don’t know what’s come over Rosie tonight,” she said, bustling in. She felt a little guilty; she had stayed downstairs with the other servants gossiping about the mistress.

“She sleeps so sound generally,” she said, coming over to the bed.

“Now, here’s Nurse,” said Eleanor. “She’s coming to bed. So you won’t be frightened any more, will you?” She smoothed down the bed-clothes and kissed her. She got up and took her candle.

“Good-night, Nurse,” she said, turning to leave the room.

“Good-night, Miss Eleanor,” said Nurse, putting some sympathy into her voice; for they were saying downstairs that the mistress couldn’t last much longer.

“Turn over and go to sleep, dearie,” she said, kissing Rose on the forehead. For she was sorry for the little girl who would so soon be motherless. Then she slipped the silver links out of her cuffs and began to take the hairpins out of her hair, standing in her petticoats in front of the yellow chest of drawers.

“I saw,” Eleanor repeated, as she shut the nursery door. “I saw …” What had she seen? Something horrible, something hidden. But what? There it was, hidden behind her strained eyes. She held the candle slightly slanting in her hand. Three drops of grease fell on the polished skirting before she noticed them. She straightened the candle and walked down the stairs. She listened as she went. There was silence. Martin was asleep. Her mother was asleep. As she passed the doors and went downstairs a weight seemed to descend on her. She paused, looking down into the hall. A blankness came over her. Where am I? she asked herself, staring at a heavy frame. What is that? She seemed to be alone in the midst of nothingness; yet must descend, must carry her burden—she raised her arms slightly, as if she were carrying a pitcher, an earthenware pitcher on her head. Again she stopped. The rim of a bowl outlined itself upon her eyeballs; there was water in it; and something yellow. It was the dog’s bowl, she realised; that was the sulphur in the dog’s bowl; the dog was lying curled up at the bottom of the stairs. She stepped carefully over the body of the sleeping dog and went into the drawing-room.

They all looked up as she came in; Morris had a book in his hand but he was not reading; Milly had some stuff in her hand but she was not sewing; Delia was lying back in her chair, doing nothing whatever. She stood there hesitating for a moment. Then she turned to the writing-table. “I’ll write to Edward,” she murmured. She took up the pen, but she hesitated. She found it difficult to write to Edward, seeing him before her, when she took up the pen, when she smoothed the notepaper on the writing-table. His eyes were too close together; he brushed up his crest before the looking-glass in the lobby in a way that irritated her. ‘Nigs’ was her nickname for him. “My dear Edward,” she began to write, choosing ‘Edward’ not ‘Nigs’ on this occasion.

Morris looked up from the book he was trying to read. The scratching of Eleanor’s pen irritated him. She stopped; then she wrote; then she put her hand to her head. All the worries were put on her of course. Still she irritated him. She always asked questions; she never listened to the answers. He glanced at his book again. But what was the use of trying to read? The atmosphere of suppressed emotion was distasteful to him. There was nothing that anybody could do, but there they all sat in attitudes of suppressed emotion. Milly’s stitching irritated him, and Delia lying back in her chair doing nothing as usual. There he was cooped up with all these women in an atmosphere of unreal emotion. And Eleanor went on writing, writing, writing. There was nothing to write about—but here she licked the envelope and dabbed down the stamp.

“Shall I take it?” he said, dropping his book.

He got up as if he were glad to have something to do. Eleanor went to the front door with him and stood holding it open while he went to the pillar-box. It was raining gently, and as she stood at the door, breathing in the mild damp air, she watched the curious shadows that trembled on the pavement under the trees. Morris disappeared under the shadows round the corner. She remembered how she used to stand at the door when he was a small boy and went to a day school with a satchel in his hand. She used to wave to him; and when he got to the corner he always turned and waved back. It was a curious little ceremony, dropped now that they were both grown up. The shadows shook as she stood waiting; in a moment he emerged from the shadows. He came along the street and up the steps.

“He’ll get that tomorrow,” he said—“anyhow by the second post.”

He shut the door and stooped to fasten the chain. It seemed to her, as the chain rattled, that they both accepted the fact that nothing more was going to happen tonight. They avoided each other’s eyes; neither of them wanted any more emotion tonight. They went back into the drawing-room.

“Well,” said Eleanor, looking round her, “I think I shall go to bed. Nurse will ring,” she said, “if she wants anything.”

“We may as well all go,” said Morris. Milly began to roll up her embroidery. Morris began to rake out the fire.

“What an absurd fire——” he exclaimed irritably. The coals were all stuck together. They were blazing fiercely.

Suddenly a bell rang.

“Nurse!” Eleanor exclaimed. She looked at Morris. She left the room hurriedly. Morris followed her.

But what’s the good? Delia thought to herself. It’s only another false alarm. She got up. “It’s only Nurse,” she said to Milly, who was standing up with a look of alarm on her face. She can’t be going to cry again, she thought, and strolled off into the front room. Candles were burning on the mantelpiece; they lit up the picture of her mother. She glanced at the portrait of her mother. The girl in white seemed to be presiding over the protracted affair of her own deathbed with a smiling indifference that outraged her daughter.

“You’re not going to die—you’re not going to die!” said Delia bitterly, looking up at her. Her father, alarmed by the bell, had come into the room. He was wearing a red smoking-cap with an absurd tassel.

But it’s all for nothing, Delia said silently, looking at her father. She felt that they must both check their rising excitement. “Nothing’s going to happen—nothing whatever,” she said, looking at him. But at that moment Eleanor came into the room. She was very white.

“Where’s Papa?” she said, looking round. She saw him. “Come, Papa, come,” she said, stretching out her hand. “Mama’s dying…. And the children,” she said to Milly over her shoulder.

Two little white patches appeared above her father’s ears, Delia noticed. His eyes fixed themselves. He braced himself. He strode past them up the stairs. They all followed in a little procession behind. The dog, Delia noticed, tried to come upstairs with them; but Morris cuffed him back. The Colonel went first into the bedroom; then Eleanor; then Morris; then Martin came down, pulling on a dressing-gown; then Milly brought Rose wrapped in a shawl. But Delia hung back behind the others. There were so many of them in the room that she could get no further than the doorway. She could see two nurses standing with their backs to the wall opposite. One of them was crying—the one, she observed, who had only come that afternoon. She could not see the bed from where she stood. But she could see that Morris had fallen on his knees. Ought I to kneel too? she wondered. Not in the passage, she decided. She looked away; she saw the little window at the end of the passage. Rain was falling; there was a light somewhere that made the raindrops shine. One drop after another slid down the pane; they slid and they paused; one drop joined another drop and then they slid again. There was complete silence in the bedroom.

Is this death? Delia asked herself. For a moment there seemed to be something there. A wall of water seemed to gape apart; the two walls held themselves apart. She listened. There was complete silence. Then there was a stir, a shuffle of feet in the bedroom and out came her father, stumbling.

“Rose!” he cried. “Rose! Rose!” He held his arms with the fists clenched out in front of him.

You did that very well, Delia told him as he passed her. It was like a scene in a play. She observed quite dispassionately that the raindrops were still falling. One sliding met another and together in one drop they rolled to the bottom of the window-pane.

It was raining. A fine rain, a gentle shower, was peppering the pavements and making them greasy. Was it worth while opening an umbrella, was it necessary to hail a hansom, people coming out from the theatres asked themselves, looking up at the mild, milky sky in which the stars were blunted. Where it fell on earth, on fields and gardens, it drew up the smell of earth. Here a drop poised on a grass-blade; there filled the cup of a wild flower, till the breeze stirred and the rain was spilt. Was it worth while to shelter under the hawthorn, under the hedge, the sheep seemed to question; and the cows, already turned out in the grey fields, under the dim hedges, munched on, sleepily chewing with raindrops on their hides. Down on the roofs it fell—here in Westminster, there in the Ladbroke Grove; on the wide sea a million points pricked the blue monster like an innumerable shower bath. Over the vast domes, the soaring spires of slumbering University cities, over the leaded libraries, and the museums, now shrouded in brown holland, the gentle rain slid down, till, reaching the mouths of those fantastic laughers, the many-clawed gargoyles, it splayed out in a thousand odd indentations. A drunken man slipping in a narrow passage outside the public house, cursed it. Women in childbirth heard the doctor say to the midwife, “It’s raining.” And the walloping Oxford bells, turning over and over like slow porpoises in a sea of oil, contemplatively intoned their musical incantation. The fine rain, the gentle rain, poured equally over the mitred and the bareheaded with an impartiality which suggested that the god of rain, if there were a god, was thinking Let it not be restricted to the very wise, the very great, but let all breathing kind, the munchers and chewers, the ignorant, the unhappy, those who toil in the furnace making innumerable copies of the same pot, those who bore red hot minds through contorted letters, and also Mrs Jones in the alley, share my bounty.

It was raining in Oxford. The rain fell gently, persistently, making a little chuckling and burbling noise in the gutters. Edward, leaning out of the window, could still see the trees in the college garden, whitened by the falling rain. Save for the rustle of the trees and the rain falling, it was perfectly quiet. A damp, earthy smell came up from the wet ground. Lamps were being lit here and there in the dark mass of the college; and there was a pale-yellowish mound in one corner where lamplight fell upon a flowering tree. The grass was becoming invisible, fluid, grey, like water.

He drew in a long breath of satisfaction. Of all the moments in the day he liked this best, when he stood and looked out into the garden. He breathed in again the cool damp air, and then straightened himself and turned back into the room. He was working very hard. His day was parcelled out on the advice of his tutor into hours and half-hours; but he still had five minutes before he need begin. He turned up the reading-lamp. It was partly the green light that made him look a little pale and thin, but he was very handsome. With his clear-cut features and the fair hair that he brushed up with a flick of his fingers into a crest, he looked like a Greek boy on a frieze. He smiled. He was thinking as he watched the rain how, after the interview between his father and his tutor—when old Harbottle had said “Your son has a chance”—the old boy had insisted upon looking up the rooms that his own father had had when his father was at college. They had burst in and found a chap called Thompson on his knees blowing up the fire with a bellows.

“My father had these rooms, sir,” the Colonel had said, by way of apology. The young man had got very red and said, “Don’t mention it.” Edward smiled. “Don’t mention it,” he repeated. It was time to begin. He turned the lamp a little higher. When the lamp was turned higher he saw his work cut out in a sharp circle of bright light from the surrounding dimness. He looked at the textbooks, at the dictionaries lying before him. He always had some doubts before he began. His father would be frightfully cut-up if he failed. His heart was set on it. He had sent him a dozen of fine old port “by way of a stirrup-cup,” so he said. But after all Marsham was in for it; then there was the clever little Jew-boy from Birmingham—but it was time to begin. One after another the bells of Oxford began pushing their slow chimes through the air. They tolled ponderously, unequally, as if they had to roll the air out of their way and the air was heavy. He loved the sound of the bells. He listened till the last stroke had struck; then pulled his chair to the table; time was up; he must work now.

A little dint sharpened between his brows. He frowned as he read. He read; and made a note; then he read again. All sounds were blotted out. He saw nothing but the Greek in front of him. But as he read, his brain gradually warmed; he was conscious of something quickening and tightening in his forehead. He caught phrase after phrase exactly, firmly, more exactly, he noted, making a brief note in the margin, than the night before. Little negligible words now revealed shade of meaning which altered the meaning. He made another note; that was the meaning. His own dexterity in catching the phrase plumb in the middle gave him a thrill of excitement. There it was, clean and entire. But he must be precise; exact; even his little scribbled notes must be clear as print. He turned to this book; then that book. Then he leant back to see, with his eyes shut. He must let nothing dwindle off into vagueness. The clocks began striking. He listened. The clocks went on striking. The lines that had graved themselves on his face slackened; he leant back; his muscles relaxed; he looked up from his books into the dimness. He felt as if he had thrown himself down on the turf after running a race. But for a moment it seemed to him that he was still running; his mind went on without the book. It travelled by itself without impediments through a world of pure meaning; but gradually it lost its meaning. The books stood out on the wall: he saw the cream-coloured panels; a bunch of poppies in a blue vase. The last of the strokes had sounded. He gave a sigh and rose from the table.

He stood by the window again. It was raining, but the whiteness had gone. Save for a wet leaf shining here and there, the garden was all dark now—the yellow mound of the flowering tree had vanished. The college buildings lay round the garden in a low couched mass, here red-stained, here yellow-stained, where lights burnt behind curtains; and there lay the chapel, huddling its bulk against the sky which, because of the rain, seemed to tremble slightly. But it was no longer silent. He listened; there was no sound in particular; but, as he stood looking out, the building hummed with life. There was a sudden roar of laughter; then the tinkle of a piano; then a nondescript clatter and chatter—of china partly; then again the sound of rain falling, and the gutters chuckling and burbling as they sucked up the water. He turned back into the room.

It had grown chilly; the fire was almost out; only a little red glowed under the grey ash. Opportunely he remembered his father’s gift—the wine that had come that morning. He went to the side table and poured himself out a glass of port. As he raised it against the light he smiled. He saw again his father’s hand with two smooth knobs instead of fingers holding the glass, as he always held the glass, to the light before he drank.

“You can’t drive a bayonet through a chap’s body in cold blood,” he remembered him saying.

“And you can’t go in for an exam. [exam,] without drinking,” said Edward. He hesitated; he held the glass to the light in imitation of his father. Then he sipped. He set the glass on the table in front of him. He turned again to the Antigone. He read; then he sipped; then he read; then he sipped again. A soft glow spread over his spine at the nape of his neck. The wine seemed to press open little dividing doors in his brain. And whether it was the wine or the words or both, a luminous shell formed, a purple fume, from which out stepped a Greek girl; yet she was English. There she stood among the marble and the asphodel, yet there she was among the Morris wall-papers and the cabinets—his cousin Kitty, as he had seen her last time he dined at the lodge. She was both of them—Antigone and Kitty; here in the book; there in the room; lit up, risen, like a purple flower. No, he exclaimed, not in the least like a flower! For if ever a girl held herself upright, lived, laughed and breathed, it was Kitty, in the white and blue dress that she had worn last time he dined at the Lodge. He crossed to the window. Red squares showed through the trees. There was a party at the Lodge. Who was she talking to? What was she saying? He went back to the table.

“Oh, damn!” he exclaimed, prodding the paper with his pencil. The point broke. Then there was a tap at the door, a sliding tap, not a commanding tap, the tap of one who passes, not of one who comes in. He went and opened the door. There on the stair above loomed the figure of a huge young man who was leaning over the banisters. “Come in,” said Edward.

The huge young man came slowly down the stairs. He was very large. His eyes, which were prominent, became apprehensive at the sight of the books on the table. He looked at the books on the table. They were Greek. But there was wine after all.

Edward poured out wine. Beside Gibbs he looked what Eleanor called ‘finicky.’ He felt the contrast himself. The hand with which he lifted his glass was like a girl’s beside Gibbs’s great red paw. Gibbs’s hand was burnt bright scarlet; it was like a piece of raw meat.

Hunting was the subject they had in common. They talked about hunting. Edward leant back and let Gibbs do the talking. It was all very pleasant, listening to Gibbs, riding through these English lanes. He was talking about cubbing in September; and a raw but handy hack. He was saying, “You remember that farm on the right as you go up to Stapleys? and the pretty girl?”—he winked—“worse luck, she’s married to a keeper.” He was saying—Edward watched him gulping down his port—how he wished this damned summer were over. Then, again, he was telling the old story about the spaniel bitch. “You’ll come and stop with us in September,” he was saying when the door opened so silently that Gibbs did not hear it, and in glided another man—quite another man.

It was Ashley who came in. He was the very opposite of Gibbs. He was neither tall nor short, neither dark nor fair. But he was not negligible—far from it. It was partly the way he moved, as if chair and table rayed out some influence which he could feel by means of some invisible antennae, or whiskers, like a cat. Now he sank down, cautiously, gingerly, and looked at the table and half read a line in a book. Gibbs stopped in the middle of his sentence.

“Hullo, Ashley,” he said rather curtly. He stretched out and poured himself another glass of the Colonel’s port. Now the decanter was empty.

“Sorry,” he said, glancing at Ashley.

“Don’t open another bottle for me,” said Ashley quickly. His voice sounded a little squeaky, as if he were ill at ease.

“Oh, but we shall want some more too,” said Edward casually. He went into the dining-room to fetch it.

“Damned awkward,” he reflected as he stooped among the bottles. It meant, he reflected grimly as he chose his bottle, another row with Ashley, and he had had two rows with Ashley about Gibbs already this term.

He went back with the bottle and sat down on a low stool between them. He uncorked the wine and poured it out. They both looked at him, as he sat between them, admiringly. The vanity, which Eleanor always laughed at in her brother, was flattered. He liked to feel their eyes on him. And yet he was at his ease with both of them, he thought; the thought pleased him; he could talk hunting with Gibbs and books with Ashley. But Ashley could only talk about books, and Gibbs—he smiled—could only talk about girls. Girls and horses. He poured out three glasses of wine.

Ashley sipped gingerly, and Gibbs, with his great red hands on the glass, gulped rather. They talked about races; then they talked about examinations. Then Ashley, glancing at the books on the table, said:

“And what about you?”

“I’ve not the ghost of a chance,” said Edward. His indifference was affected. He pretended to despise examinations; but it was pretence. Gibbs was taken in by him; but Ashley saw through him. He often caught Edward out in small vanities like this; but they only served to endear him the more. How beautiful he looks, he was thinking: there he sat between them with the light falling on the top of his fair hair; like a Greek boy; strong; yet in some way, weak, needing his protection.

He ought to be rescued from brutes like Gibbs, he thought savagely. For how Edward could tolerate that clumsy brute, he thought looking at him, who always seemed to smell of beer and horses (he was listening to him) Ashley could not conceive. As he came in he had caught the tail of an infuriating sentence—of a sentence that seemed to show that they had made some plan together.

“Well, then, I’ll see Storey about that hack,” Gibbs was saying now, as if he were finishing some private talk that they had been having before he came in. A spasm of jealousy ran through Ashley. To hide it, he stretched out his hand and took up a book that lay open on the table. He pretended to read it.

He did it to insult him, Gibbs felt. Ashley, he knew, thought him a great hulking brute; the dirty little swine came in, spoilt the talk, and then began to give himself airs at Gibbs’s expense. Very well; he had been going to go; now he would stay; he would twist his tail for him—he knew how. He turned to Edward and went on talking.

“You won’t mind pigging it,” he said. “My people will be up in Scotland.”

Ashley turned a page viciously. They would be alone then. Edward began to relish the situation; he played up to it maliciously.

“All right,” he said. “But you’ll have to see I don’t make a fool of myself,” he added.

“Oh, it’ll only be cubbing,” said Gibbs. Ashley turned another page. Edward glanced at the book. It was being held upside down. But as he glanced at Ashley he caught his head against the panels and the poppies. How civilised he looked, he thought, compared with Gibbs; and how ironical. He respected him immensely. Gibbs had lost his glamour. There he was, telling the same old story of the spaniel bitch all over again. There would be a devil’s own row tomorrow, he thought, and glanced surreptitiously at his watch. It was past eleven; and he must do an hour’s work before breakfast. He swallowed down the last drops of his wine, stretched himself, yawned ostentatiously and rose.

“I’m off to bed,” he said. Ashley looked at him appealingly. Edward could torture him horribly. Edward began unbuttoning his waistcoat; he had a perfect figure, Ashley thought, looking at him, standing between them.

“But don’t you hurry” said Edward, yawning again. “Finish your drinks.” He smiled at the thought of Ashley and Gibbs finishing their drinks together.

“There’s plenty more in there if you want it.” He indicated the next room and left them.

“Let ’em fight it out together,” he thought as he shut the bedroom door. His own fight would come soon enough; he knew that from the look on Ashley’s face. He was infernally jealous. He began to undress. He put his money methodically in two heaps on either side of the looking-glass, for he was a little near about money; folded his waistcoat carefully on a chair; then glanced at himself in the looking-glass, and brushed his crest up with the half-conscious gesture that irritated his sister. Then he listened.

A door slammed outside. One of them had gone—either Gibbs or Ashley. But one, he rather thought, was still there. He listened intently. He heard someone moving about in the sitting-room. Very quickly, very firmly, he turned the key in the door. A moment later the handle moved.

“Edward!” said Ashley. His voice was low and controlled.

Edward made no answer.

“Edward!” said Ashley, rattling the handle.

The voice was sharp and appealing.

“Good-night,” said Edward sharply. He listened. There was a pause. Then he heard the door shut. Ashley was gone.

“Lord! What a row there’ll be tomorrow,” said Edward, going to the window and looking out at the rain that was still falling.

The party at the Lodge was over. The ladies stood in the doorway in their flowing gowns, and looked up at the sky from which a gentle rain was falling.

“Is that a nightingale?” said Mrs Larpent, hearing a bird twitter in the bushes. Then old Chuffy—the great Dr. Andrews—standing slightly behind her with his domed head exposed to the drizzle and his hirsute, powerful but not prepossessing countenance turned upward, gave a roar of laughter. It was a thrush, he said. The laughter was echoed back like a hyena laughing from the stone walls. Then, with a wave of the hand dictated by centuries of tradition, Mrs Larpent drew back her foot, as if she had encroached upon one of the chalk marks which decorate academic lintels and, signifying that Mrs Lathom, wife of the Divinity professor, should precede her, they passed out into the rain.

In the long drawing-room at the Lodge they were all standing up.

“I’m so glad Chuffy—Dr. Andrews—came up to your expectations,” Mrs Malone was saying in her courteous manner. As residents they called the great Doctor “Chuffy”; he was Dr. Andrews to American visitors.

The other guests had gone. But the Howard Fripps, the Americans, were staying in the house. Mrs Howard Fripp was saying that Dr. Andrews had been perfectly charming to her. And her husband, the Professor, was saying something equally polite to the Master. Kitty, the daughter, standing a little in the background, wished that they would get it over and come to bed. But she had to stand there until her mother gave the signal for them to move.

“Yes, I never knew Chuffy in better form,” her father continued, implying a compliment to the little American lady who had made such a conquest. She was small and vivacious, and Chuffy liked ladies to be small and vivacious.

“I adore his books,” she said in her queer nasal voice. “But I never expected to have the pleasure of sitting next him at dinner.”

Did you really like the way he spits when he talks? Kitty wondered, looking at her. She was extraordinarily pretty and gay. All the other women had looked dowdy and dumpy beside her, except her mother. For Mrs Malone, standing by the fireplace with her foot on the fender, with her crisp white hair curled stiffly, never looked in the fashion or out of it. Mrs Fripp, on the contrary, looked in the fashion.

And yet they laughed at her, Kitty thought. She had caught the Oxford ladies lifting their eyebrows at some of Mrs Fripp’s American phrases. But Kitty liked her American phrases; they were so different from what she was used to. She was American, a real American; but nobody would have taken her husband for an American, Kitty thought, looking at him. He might have been any professor, from any University, she thought, with his distinguished wrinkled face, his goatee beard and the black ribbon of his eyeglass crossing his shirt-front as if it were some foreign order. He spoke without any accent—at least without any American accent. Yet he too was different somehow. She had dropped her handkerchief. He stooped at once and gave it her with a bow that was almost too courteous—it made her shy. She bent her head and smiled at the Professor, rather shyly, as she took the handkerchief.

“Thank you so much,” she said. He made her feel awkward. Beside Mrs Fripp she felt even larger than usual. Her hair, of the true Rigby red, never lay smooth as it should have done; Mrs Fripp’s hair looked beautiful, glossy and tidy.

But now Mrs Malone, glancing at Mrs Fripp, said, “Well, ladies——?” and waved her hand.

There was something authoritative about her action—as if she had done it again and again; and been obeyed again and again. They moved towards the door. Tonight there was a little ceremony at the door; Professor Fripp bent very low over Mrs Malone’s hand, not quite so low over Kitty’s hand, and held the door wide open for them.

“He rather overdoes it,” Kitty thought to herself as they passed out.

The ladies took their candles and went in single file up the wide low stairs. Portraits of former masters of Katharine’s looked down on them as they mounted. The light of the candles flickered over the dark gold-framed faces as they went up stair after stair.

Now she’ll stop, thought Kitty, following behind, and ask who that is.

But Mrs Fripp did not stop. Kitty gave her good marks for that. She compared favourably with most of their visitors, Kitty thought. She had never done the Bodleian quite so quick as she had done it that morning. Indeed, she had felt rather guilty. There were a great many more sights to be seen, had they wished it. But in less than an hour of it Mrs Fripp had turned to Kitty and had said in her fascinating, if nasal, voice:

“Well, my dear, I guess you’re a bit fed-up with sights—what d’you say to an ice in that dear old bun-shop with the bow windows?”

And they had eaten ices when they ought to have been going round the Bodleian.

The procession had now reached the first landing, and Mrs Malone stopped at the door of the famous room where distinguished guests always slept when they stayed at the Lodge. She gave one look round as she held the door open.

“The bed where Queen Elizabeth did not sleep,” she said, making the usual little joke as they looked at the great four-poster. The fire was burning; the water-jug was swaddled up like an old woman with the toothache; and the candles were lit on the dressing-table. But there was something strange about the room tonight, Kitty thought, glancing over her mother’s shoulder; a dressing-gown flashed green and silver upon the bed. And on the dressing-table there were a number of little pots and jars and a large powder-puff stained pink. Could it be, was it possible, that the reason why Mrs Fripp looked so very bright and the Oxford ladies looked so very dingy was that Mrs Fripp—— But Mrs Malone was saying, “You have everything you want?” with such extreme politeness that Kitty guessed that Mrs Malone too had seen the dressing-table. Kitty held out her hand. To her surprise, instead of taking it, Mrs Fripp pulled her down and kissed her.

“Thanks a thousand times for showing me all those sights,” she said. “And remember, you’re coming to stay with us in America,” she added. For she had liked the big shy girl who had so obviously preferred eating ices to showing her the Bodleian; and she had felt sorry for her too for some reason.

“Good-night, Kitty,” said her mother as she shut the door; and they touched each other perfunctorily on the cheek.

Kitty went on upstairs to her own room. She still felt the spot where Mrs Fripp had kissed her; the kiss had left a little glow on her cheek.

She shut the door. The room was very stuffy. It was a warm night, but they always shut the windows and drew the curtains. She opened the windows and drew the curtains. It was raining as usual. Arrows of silver rain crossed the dark trees in the garden. Then she kicked off her shoes. That was the worst of being so large—shoes were always too tight; white satin shoes in particular. Then she began to unhook her dress. It was difficult; there were so many hooks and all at the back; but at last the white satin dress was off and laid neatly across the chair; and then she began to brush her hair. It had been Thursday at its very worst, she reflected; sights in the morning; people for lunch; undergraduates for tea; and a dinner-party in the evening.

However, she concluded, tugging the comb through her hair, it’s over … it’s over.

The candles flickered and then the muslin blind, blowing out in a white balloon, almost touched the flame. She opened her eyes with a start. She was standing at the open window with a light beside her in her petticoat.

“Anybody might see in,” her mother had said, scolding her only the other day.

Now, she said, moving the candles to a table at the right, nobody can see in.

She began to brush her hair again. But with the light at the side instead of in front she saw her face from a different angle.

Am I pretty? she asked herself, putting down her comb and looking in the glass. Her cheek-bones were too prominent; her eyes were set too far apart. She was not pretty; no, her size was against her. What did Mrs Fripp think of me, she wondered?

She kissed me, she suddenly remembered with a start of pleasure, feeling again the glow on her cheek. She asked me to go with them in America. What fun that would be! she thought. What fun to leave Oxford and go to America! She tugged the comb through her hair, which was like a fuzz bush.

But the bells were making their usual commotion. She hated the sound of the bells; it always seemed to her a dismal sound; and then, just as one stopped, here was another beginning. They went walloping one over another, one after another, as if they would never be finished. She counted eleven, twelve, and then they went on thirteen, fourteen … clock repeating clock through the damp, drizzling air. It was late. She began to brush her teeth. She glanced at the calendar above the washstand and tore off Thursday and screwed it into a ball, as if she were saying “That’s over! That’s over!” Friday in large red letters confronted her. Friday was a good day; on Friday she had her lesson with Lucy; she was going to tea with the Robsons. “Blessed is he who has found his work” she read on the calendar. Calendars always seemed to be talking at you. She had not done her work. She glanced at a row of blue volumes, “The Constitutional History of England, by Dr. Andrews.” There was a paper slip in volume three. She should have finished her chapter for Lucy; but not tonight. She was too tired tonight. She turned to the window. A roar of laughter floated out from the undergraduates’ quarters. What are they laughing at, she wondered as she stood by the window. It sounded as if they were enjoying themselves. They never laugh like that when they come to tea at the Lodge, she thought, as the laughter died away. The little man from Balliol sat twisting his fingers, twisting his fingers. He would not talk; but he would not go. Then she blew out the candle and got into bed. I rather like him, she thought, stretching out in the cool sheets, though he twists his fingers. As for Tony Ashton, she thought, turning on her pillow, I don’t like him. He always seemed to be cross-examining her about Edward, whom Eleanor, she thought, calls ‘Nigs’. His eyes were too close together. A bit of a barber’s block, she thought. He had followed her at the picnic the other day—the picnic when the ant got into Mrs Lathom’s skirts. There he was always beside her. But she didn’t want to marry him. She didn’t want to be a Don’s wife and live in Oxford for ever. No, no, no! She yawned, turned on her pillow, and listening to a belated bell that went walloping like a slow porpoise through the thick drizzling air, yawned once more and fell asleep.

The rain fell steadily all night long, making a faint mist over the fields, chuckling and burbling in the gutters. In gardens it fell over flowering bushes of lilac and laburnum. It slipped gently over the leaden domes of libraries, and splayed out of the laughing mouths of gargoyles. It smeared the window where the Jew boy from Birmingham sat mugging up Greek with a wet towel round his head; where Dr. Malone sat up late writing another chapter in his monumental history of the college. And in the garden of the Lodge outside Kitty’s window it sluiced the ancient tree under which Kings and poets had sat drinking three centuries ago, but now it was half fallen and had to be propped up by a stake in the middle.

“Umbrella, Miss?” said Hiscock, offering Kitty an umbrella as she left the house rather later than she should have left it the following afternoon. There was a chilliness in the air which made her glad, as she caught sight of a party with white and yellow frocks and cushions bound for the river, that she was not going to sit in a boat today. No parties today, she thought, no parties today. But she was late, the clock warned her.

She strode along until she came to the cheap red villas that her father disliked so much that he would always make a round to avoid them. But as it was in one of these cheap red villas that Miss Craddock lived, Kitty saw them haloed with romance. Her heart beat faster as she turned the corner by the new chapel and saw the steep steps of the house where Miss Craddock actually lived. Lucy went up those steps and down them every day; that was her window; this was her bell. The bell came out with a jerk when she pulled it; but it did not go back again, for everything was ramshackle in Lucy’s house; but everything was romantic. There was Lucy’s umbrella in the stand; and it too was not like other umbrellas; it had a parrot’s head for a handle. But as she went up the steep shiny stairs excitement became mixed with fear: once more she had scamped her work; she had not “given her mind to it” again this week.

“She’s coming!” thought Miss Craddock, holding her pen suspended. Her nose was red-tipped; there was something owl-like about the eyes, round which there was a sallow, hollow depression. There was the bell. The pen had been dipped in red ink; she had been correcting Kitty’s essay. Now she heard her step on the stairs. “She’s coming!” she thought with a little catch of her breath, laying down the pen.

“I’m awfully sorry, Miss Craddock,” Kitty said, taking off her things and sitting down at the table. “But we had people staying in the house.”

Miss Craddock brushed her hand over her mouth in a way she had when she was disappointed.

“I see,” she said. “So you haven’t done any work this week either.”

Miss Craddock took up her pen and dipped it in the red ink. Then she turned to the essay.

“It wasn’t worth correcting,” she remarked, pausing with her pen in the air.

“A child of ten would have been ashamed of it.” Kitty blushed bright red.

“And the odd thing is,” said Miss Craddock putting down her pen when the lesson was over, “that you’ve got quite an original mind.”

Kitty flushed bright red with pleasure.

“But you don’t use it,” said Miss Craddock. “Why don’t you use it?” she added, looking at her out of her fine grey eyes.

“You see, Miss Craddock,” Kitty began eagerly, “my mother——”

“Hm … hm … hm …” Miss Craddock stopped her. Confidences were not what Dr. Malone paid her for. She got up.

“Look at my flowers,” she said, feeling that she had snubbed her too severely. There was a bowl of flowers on the table; wild flowers, blue and white, stuck into a cushion of wet green moss.

“My sister sent them from the moors,” she said.

“The moors?” said Kitty. “Which moors?” She stooped and touched the little flowers tenderly. How lovely she is, Miss Craddock thought; for she was sentimental about Kitty. But I will not be sentimental, she told herself.

“The Scarborough moors,” she said aloud. “If you keep the moss damp but not too damp, they’ll last for weeks,” she added, looking at the flowers.

“Damp, but not too damp,” Kitty smiled. “That’s easy in Oxford, I should think. It’s always raining here.” She looked at the window. Mild rain was falling.

“If I lived up there, Miss Craddock——” she began, taking her umbrella. But she stopped. The lesson was over.

“You’d find it very dull,” said Miss Craddock, looking at her. She was putting on her cloak. Certainly she looked very lovely, putting on her cloak.

“When I was your age,” Miss Craddock continued, remembering her rôle as teacher, “I would have given my eyes to have the opportunities you have, to meet the people you meet; to know the people you know.”

“Old Chuffy?” said Kitty, remembering Miss Craddock’s profound admiration for that light of learning.

“You irreverent girl!” Miss Craddock expostulated. “The greatest historian of his age!”

“Well, he doesn’t talk history to me,” said Kitty, remembering the damp feel of a heavy hand on her knee.

She hesitated; but the lesson was over; another pupil was coming. She glanced round the room. There was a plate of oranges on the top of a pile of shiny exercise-books: a box that looked as if it contained biscuits. Was this her only room, she wondered? Did she sleep on the lumpy-looking sofa with the shawl thrown over it? There was no looking-glass, and she stuck her hat on rather to one side, thinking as she did so that Miss Craddock despised clothes.

But Miss Craddock was thinking how wonderful it was to be young and lovely and to meet brilliant men.

“I’m going to tea with the Robsons,” said Kitty, holding out her hand. The girl, Nelly Robson, was Miss Craddock’s favourite pupil; the only girl, she used to say, who knew what work meant.

“Are you walking?” said Miss Craddock, looking at her clothes. “It’s some way, you know. Down Ringmer Road, past the gasworks.”

“Yes, I’m walking,” said Kitty, shaking hands.

“And I will try to work hard this week,” she said, looking down on her with eyes full of love and admiration. Then she descended the steep stairs whose oilcloth shone bright with romance; and glanced at the umbrella that had a parrot for handle.

The son of the Professor, who had done it all off his own bat, “a most creditable performance”, to quote Dr. Malone, was mending the hen coops in the back garden at Prestwich Terrace—a scratched up little place. Hammer, hammer, hammer, he went, fixing a board to the rotten roof. His hands were white, unlike his father’s, and long fingered too. He had no love of doing these jobs himself. But his father mended the boots on Sunday. Down came the hammer. He went at it, hammering the long shiny nails that sometimes split the wood, or drove outside. For it was rotten. He hated hens too, imbecile fowls, a huddle of feathers, watching him out of their red beady eyes. They scratched up the path; left little curls of feather here and there on the beds, which were more to his fancy. But nothing grew there. How grow flowers like other people if one kept hens? A bell rang.

“Curse it! There’s some old woman come to tea,” he said, holding his hammer suspended; and then brought it down on the nail.

As she stood on the step, noting the cheap lace curtains and the blue and orange glass, Kitty tried to remember what it was that her father had said about Nelly’s father. But a little maid let her in. I’m much too large, Kitty thought, as she stood for a moment in the room to which the maid had admitted her. It was a small room, crowded with objects. And I’m too well dressed she thought, looking at herself in the glass over the fireplace. But here her friend Nelly came in. She was dumpy; over her large grey eyes she wore steel spectacles, and her brown holland overall seemed to increase her air of uncompromising veracity.

“We’re having tea in the back room,” she said, looking her up and down. What has she been doing? Why is she dressed in an overall? Kitty thought, following her into the room where tea had already begun.

“Pleased to see you,” said Mrs Robson formally, looking over her shoulder. But nobody seemed in the least pleased to see her. Two children were already eating. Slices of bread and butter were in their hands, but they stayed the bread and butter and stared at Kitty as she sat down.

She seemed to see the whole room at once. It was bare yet crowded. The table was too large; there were hard green-plush chairs; yet the table-cloth was coarse; darned in the middle; and the china was cheap with its florid red roses. The light was extraordinarily bright in her eyes. A sound of hammering came in from the garden outside. She looked at the garden; it was a scratched-up, earthy garden without flower-beds; and there was a shed at the end of the garden from which the sound of hammering came.

They’re all so short too, Kitty thought, glancing at Mrs Robson. Only her shoulders came above the tea things; but her shoulders were substantial. She was a little like Bigge, the cook at the Lodge, but more formidable. She gave one brief look at Mrs Robson and then began to pull off her gloves secretly, swiftly, under the cover of the table-cloth. But why does nobody talk? she thought nervously. The children kept their eyes fixed upon her with a look of solemn amazement. Their owl-like stare went up and down over her uncompromisingly. Happily before they could express their disapproval, Mrs Robson told them sharply to go on with their tea; and the bread and butter slowly rose to their mouths again.

Why don’t they say something? Kitty thought again, glancing at Nelly. She was about to speak when an umbrella grated in the hall; and Mrs Robson looked up and said to her daughter:

“There’s Dad!”

Next moment in trotted a little man, who was so short that he looked as if his jacket should have been an Eton jacket, and his collar a round collar. He wore, too, a very thick watch-chain, made of silver, like a schoolboy’s. But his eyes were keen and fierce, his moustache bristly, and he spoke with a curious accent.

“Pleased to see you,” he said, and gripped her hand hard in his. He sat down, tucked a napkin under his chin so that it obscured his heavy silver watch-chain under its stiff white shield. Hammer, hammer, hammer came from the shed in the garden.

“Tell Jo tea’s on the table,” said Mrs Robson to Nelly, who had brought in a dish with a cover on it. The cover was removed. Actually they were going to eat fried fish and potatoes at tea-time, Kitty remarked.

But Mr Robson had turned his rather alarming blue eyes upon her. She expected him to say, “How is your father, Miss Malone?”

But he said:

“You’re reading history with Lucy Craddock?”

“Yes,” she said. She liked the way he said Lucy Craddock, as if he respected her. So many of the Dons sneered at her. She liked feeling too, as he made her feel, that she was nobody’s daughter in particular.

“You’re interested in history?” he said, applying himself to his fish and potatoes.

“I love it,” she said. His bright blue eyes, gazing straight at her rather fiercely, seemed to make her say quite shortly what she meant.

“But I’m frightfully lazy,” she added. Here Mrs Robson looked at her rather sternly, and handed her a thick slice of bread on the point of a knife.

Anyhow their taste is awful, she said by way of revenge for the snub that she felt was intended. She focussed her eyes on a picture opposite—an oily landscape in a heavy gilt frame. There was a blue and red Japanese plate on either side of it. Everything was ugly, especially the pictures.

“The moor at the back of our house,” said Mr Robson, seeing her look at a picture.

It struck Kitty that the accent with which he spoke was a Yorkshire accent. In looking at the picture he had increased his accent.

“In Yorkshire?” she said. “We come from there too. My mother’s family I mean,” she added.

“Your mother’s family?” said Mr Robson.

“Rigby,” she said, and blushed slightly.

“Rigby?” said Mrs Robson, looking up.

“I wur-r-rked for a Miss Rigby before I married.”

What sort of wur-r-rk had Mrs Robson done? Kitty wondered. Sam explained.

“My wife was a cook, Miss Malone, before we married,” he said. Again he increased his accent as if he were proud of it. I had a great-uncle who rode in a circus, she felt inclined to say: and an Aunt who married … but here Mrs Robson interrupted her.

“The Hollies,” she said. “Two very old ladies; Miss Ann and Miss Matilda.” She spoke more gently.

“But they must be dead long ago,” she concluded. For the first time she leant back in her chair and stirred her tea, just as old Snap at the farm, Kitty thought, stirred her tea round and round and round.

“Tell Jo we’re not sparing the cake,” said Mr Robson, cutting himself a slice of that craggy-looking object; and Nell went out of the room once more. The hammering stopped in the garden. The door opened. Kitty, who had altered the focus of her eyes to suit the smallness of the Robson family, was taken by surprise. The young man seemed immense in that little room. He was a handsome young man. He brushed his hand through his hair as came in, for a wood shaving had stuck in it.

“Our Jo,” said Mrs Robson, introducing them. “Go and get the kittle, Jo,” she added; and he went at once as if he were used to it. When he came back with the kettle, Sam began chaffing him about a hencoop.

“It takes you a long time, my son, to mend a hencoop,” he said. There was some family joke which Kitty could not follow about mending boots and hencoops. She watched him eating steadily under his father’s banter. He was not Eton or Harrow, or Rugby or Winchester; or reading or rowing. He reminded her of Alf, the farm hand up at Carter’s, who had kissed her under the shadow of the haystack when she was fifteen, and old Carter loomed up leading a bull with a ring through its nose and said “Stop that!” She looked down again. She would rather like Jo to kiss her; better than Edward, she thought to herself suddenly. She remembered her own appearance, which she had forgotten. She liked him. Yes, she liked them all very much, she told herself; very much indeed. She felt as if she had given her nurse the slip and run off on her own.

Then the children began scrambling down off their chairs; the meal was over. She began to fish under the table for her gloves.

“These them?” said Jo, picking them up off the floor. She took them and crumpled them up in her hand.

He cast one quick sulky look at her as she stood in the doorway. She’s a stunner, he said to himself, but my word, she gives herself airs!

Mrs Robson ushered her into the little room where, before tea, she had looked in the glass. It was crowded with objects. There were bamboo tables; velvet books with brass hinges; marble gladiators askew on the mantelpiece and innumerable pictures…. But Mrs Robson, with a gesture that was exactly like Mrs Malone’s when she pointed to the Gainsborough that was not quite certainly a Gainsborough, was displaying a huge silver salver with an inscription.

“The salver my husband’s pupils gave him,” Mrs Robson began, pointing to the inscription. Kitty began to spell out the inscription.

“And this …” said Mrs Robson, when she had done, pointing to a document framed like a text on the wall.

But here Sam, who stood in the background fiddling with his watch-chain, stepped forward and indicated with his stubby forefinger the picture of an old woman looking rather over life size in the photographer’s chair.

“My mother,” he said and stopped. He gave a queer little chuckle.

“Your mother?” Kitty repeated, stooping to look. The unwieldy old lady, posed in all the stiffness of her best clothes, was plain in the extreme. And yet Kitty felt that admiration was expected.

“You’re very like her, Mr Robson,” was all she could find to say. Indeed they had something of the same sturdy look; the same piercing eyes; and they were both very plain. He gave an odd little chuckle.

“Glad you think so,” he said. “Brought us all up. Not one of them a patch on her though.” He gave his odd little chuckle again.

Then he turned to his daughter, who had come in and was standing there in her overall.

“Not a patch on her,” he repeated, pinching Nell on the shoulder. As she stood there with her father’s hand on her shoulder under the portrait of her grandmother, a sudden rush of self-pity came over Kitty. If she had been the daughter of people like the Robsons, she thought; if she had lived in the north—but it was clear they wanted her to go. Nobody ever sat down in this room. They were all standing up. Nobody pressed her to stay. When she said that she must go, they all came out into the little hall with her. They were all about to go on with what they were doing, she felt. Nell was about to go into the kitchen and wash up the tea things; Jo was about to return to his hencoops; the children were about to be put to bed by their mother; and Sam—what was he about to do? She looked at him standing there with his heavy watch-chain, like a schoolboy’s. You are the nicest man I have ever met, she thought, holding out her hand.

“Pleased to have made your acquaintance,” said Mrs Robson in her stately way.

“Hope you’ll come again soon,” said Mr Robson, grasping her hand very hard.

“Oh, I should love to!” she exclaimed, pressing their hands as hard as she could. Did they know how much she admired them? she wanted to say. Would they accept her in spite of her hat and her gloves? she wanted to ask. But they were all going off to their work. And I am going home to dress for dinner, she thought as she walked down the little front steps, pressing her pale kid gloves in her hands.

The sun was shining again; the damp pavements gleamed; a gust of wind tossed up the wet branches of the almond trees in the villa gardens; little twigs and tufts of blossom whirled onto the pavement and stuck there. As she stood still for a second at a crossing she too seemed to be tossed aloft out of her usual surroundings. She forgot where she was. The sky, blown into a blue open space, seemed to be looking down not here upon streets and houses, but upon open country, where the wind brushed the moors, and sheep, with grey fleeces ruffled, sheltered under stone walls. She could almost see the moors brighten and darken as the clouds passed over them.

But then in two strides the unfamiliar street became the street she had always known. Here she was again in the paved alley; there were the old curiosity shops with their blue china and their brass warming-pans; and next moment she was out in the famous crooked street with all the domes and steeples. The sun lay in broad stripes across it. There were the cabs and the awnings and the book-shops; the old men in black gowns billowing; the young women in pink and blue dresses flowing; and the young men in straw hats carrying cushions under their arms. But for a moment all seemed to her obsolete, frivolous, inane. The usual undergraduate in cap and gown with books under his arm looked silly. And the portentous old men with their exaggerated features, looked like gargoyles, carved, mediaeval, unreal. They were all like people dressed up and acting parts, she thought. Now she stood at her own door and waited for Hiscock, the butler, to take his feet off the fender and waddle upstairs. Why can’t you talk like a human being? she thought, as he took her umbrella and mumbled his usual remark about the weather.

Slowly, as if a weight had got into her feet too, she went upstairs, seeing through open windows and open doors the smooth lawn, the recumbent tree and the faded chintzes. Down she sank on the edge of her bed. It was very stuffy. A bluebottle buzzed round and round; a lawn mower squeaked in the garden below. Far away pigeons were cooing—Take two coos, Taffy. Take two coos. Tak…. Her eyes half shut. It seemed to her that she was sitting on the terrace of an Italian inn. There was her father pressing gentians on to a rough sheet of blotting paper. The lake below lapped and dazzled. She plucked up courage and said to her father: “Father …” He looked up very kindly over his spectacles. He held the little blue flower between his thumb and finger. “I want …” she began slipping off the balustrade upon which she was sitting. But here a bell struck. She rose and crossed to the washing-table. What would Nell think of this, she thought, tilting up the beautifully polished brass jug and dipping her hands in the hot water. Another bell tolled. She crossed to the dressing-table. The air from the garden outside was full of murmurings and cooings. Wood shavings, she said as she took up her brush and comb—he had wood shavings in his hair. A servant passed with a pile of tin dishes on his head. The pigeons were cooing Take two coos, Taffy. Take two coos…. But there was the dinner bell. In a moment she had pinned her hair up, hooked her dress on, and ran down the slippery stairs, sliding her palm along the banisters as she used to do when she was a child in a hurry. And there they all were.

Her parents were standing in the hall. A tall man was with them. His gown was thrown back and one last ray of sunshine lit up his genial, authoritative face. Who was he? Kitty could not remember.

“My word!” he exclaimed, looking up at her with admiration.

“It is Kitty, isn’t it?” he said. Then he took her hand and pressed it.

“How you’ve grown!” he exclaimed. He looked at her as if he were looking not at her but at his own past.

“You don’t remember me?” he added.

“Chingachgook!” she exclaimed, recalling some childish memory.

“But he is now Sir Richard Norton,” said her mother, giving him a proud little pat on the shoulder; and they turned away, for the gentlemen were dining in Hall.

It was dull fish, Kitty thought; the plates were half cold. It was stale bread she thought, cut in meagre little squares; the colour, the gaiety of Prestwich Terrace was still in her eyes, in her ears. She granted, as she looked round, the superiority of the Lodge china and silver; and the Japanese plates and the picture had been hideous; but this dining-room with its hanging creepers and its vast cracked canvases was so dark. At Prestwich Terrace the room was full of light; the sound of hammer, hammer, hammer still rang in her ears. She looked out at the fading greens in the garden. For the thousandth time she echoed her childish wish that the tree would either lie down or stand up instead of doing neither. It was not actually raining, but gusts of whiteness seemed to blow about the garden as the wind stirred the thick leaves on the laurels.

“Didn’t you notice it?” Mrs Malone suddenly appealed to her.

“What, Mama?” Kitty asked. She had not been attending.

“The odd taste in the fish,” said her mother.

“I don’t think I did,” she said; and Mrs Malone went on talking to the butler. The plates were changed; another dish was brought in. But Kitty was not hungry. She bit one of the green sweets that were provided for her, and then the modest dinner, retrieved for the ladies from the relics of last night’s party, was over and she followed her mother into the drawing-room.

It was too big when they were alone, but they always sat there. The pictures seemed to be looking down at the empty chairs, and the empty chairs seemed to be looking up at the pictures. The old gentleman who had ruled the college over a hundred years ago seemed to vanish in the daytime, but he came back when the lamps were lit. The face was placid, solid and smiling, and singularly like Dr. Malone, who, had a frame been set round him, might have hung over the fireplace too.

“It’s nice to have a quiet evening once in a way,” Mrs Malone was saying, “though the Fripps …” Her voice tailed off as she put on her spectacles and took up The Times. This was her moment of relaxation and recuperation after the day’s work. She suppressed a little yawn as she glanced up and down the columns of the newspaper.

“What a charming man he was,” she observed casually, as she looked at the births and deaths. “One would hardly have taken him for an American.”

Kitty recalled her thoughts. She was thinking of the Robsons. Her mother was talking about the Fripps.

“And I liked her too,” she said rashly. “Wasn’t she lovely?”

“Hum—m—m. A little overdressed for my taste,” said Mrs Malone dryly. “And that accent—” she went on, looking through the paper, “I sometimes hardly understood what she said.”

Kitty was silent. Here they differed; as they did about so many things.

Suddenly Mrs Malone looked up:

“Yes, just what I was saying to Bigge this morning,” she said, laying down the paper.

“What, Mama?” said Kitty.

“This man—in the leading article,” said Mrs Malone. She touched it with her finger.

“‘With the best flesh, fish and fowl in the world,’” she read, “‘we shall not be able to turn them to account because we have none to cook them’—what I was saying to Bigge this morning.” She gave her quick little sigh. Just when one wanted to impress people, like those Americans, something went wrong. It had been the fish this time. She foraged for her work things, and Kitty took up the paper.

“It’s the leading article,” said Mrs Malone. That man almost always said the very thing that she was thinking, which comforted her, and gave her a sense of security in a world which seemed to her to be changing for the worse.

“‘Before the rigid and now universal enforcement of school attendance …?’” Kitty read out.

“Yes. That’s it,” said Mrs Malone, opening her work-box and looking for her scissors.

“‘… the children saw a good deal of cooking which, poor as it was, yet gave them some taste and inkling of knowledge. They now see nothing and they do nothing but read, write, sum, sew or knit,’” Kitty read out.

“Yes, yes,” said Mrs Malone. She unrolled the long strip of embroidery upon which she was working a design of birds pecking at fruit copied from a tomb at Ravenna. It was for the spare bedroom.

The leading article bored Kitty with its pompous fluency. She searched the paper for some little piece of news that might interest her mother. Mrs Malone liked someone to talk to her or read aloud to her as she worked. Night after night her embroidery served to weave the after-dinner talk into a pleasant harmony. One said something and stitched; looked at the design, chose another coloured silk, and stitched again. Sometimes Dr Malone read poetry aloud—Pope: Tennyson. Tonight she would have liked Kitty to talk to her. But she was becoming increasingly conscious of difficulty with Kitty. Why? She glanced at her. What was wrong? she wondered. She gave her quick little sigh.

Kitty turned over the large pages. Sheep had the fluke; Turks wanted religious liberty; there was the General Election.

“Mr Gladstone——” she began.

Mrs Malone had lost her scissors. It annoyed her.

“Who can have taken them again?” she began. Kitty went down on the floor to look for them. Mrs Malone ferreted in the work-box; then she plunged her hand into the fissure between the cushion and the chair frame and brought up not only the scissors but also a little mother-of-pearl paper-knife that had been missing for ever so long. The discovery annoyed her. It proved Ellen never shook up the cushions properly.

“Here they are, Kitty,” she said. They were silent. There was always some constraint between them now.

“Did you enjoy your party at the Robsons’, Kitty?” she asked, resuming her embroidery. Kitty did not answer. She turned the paper.

“There’s been an experiment,” she said. “An experiment with electric light. ‘A brilliant light,’” she read, “‘was seen to shoot forth suddenly shooting out a profound ray across the water to the Rock. Everything was lit up as if by daylight.’” She paused. She saw the bright light from the ships on the drawing-room chair. But here the door opened and Hiscock came in with a note on a salver.

Mrs Malone took it and read it in silence.

“No answer,” she said. From the tone of her mother’s voice Kitty knew that something had happened. She sat holding the note in her hand. Hiscock shut the door.

“Rose is dead!” said Mrs Malone. “Cousin Rose.”

The note lay open on her knee.

“It’s from Edward,” she said.

“Cousin Rose is dead?” said Kitty. A moment before she had been thinking of a bright light on a red rock. Now everything looked dingy. There was a pause. There was silence. Tears stood in her mother’s eyes.

“Just when the children most wanted her,” she said, sticking the needle into her embroidery. She began to roll it up very slowly. Kitty folded The Times and laid it on a little table, slowly, so that it should not crackle. She had only seen Cousin Rose once or twice. She felt awkward.

“Fetch me my engagement book,” said her mother at last. Kitty brought it.

“We must put off our dinner on Monday,” said Mrs Malone, looking through her engagements.

“And the Lathoms’ party on Wednesday,” Kitty murmured, looking over her mother’s shoulder.

“We can’t put off everything,” said her mother sharply, and Kitty felt rebuked.

But there were notes to be written. She wrote them at her mother’s dictation.

Why is she so ready to put off all our engagements? thought Mrs Malone, watching her write. Why doesn’t she enjoy going out with me any more? She glanced through the notes that her daughter brought her.

“Why don’t you take more interest in things here, Kitty?” she said irritably, pushing the letters away.

“Mama, dear——” Kitty began, deprecating the usual argument.

“But what is it you want to do?” her mother persisted. She had put away her embroidery; she was sitting upright, she was looking rather formidable.

“Your father and I only want you to do what you want to do,” she continued.

“Mama, dear——” Kitty repeated.

“You could help your father if it bores you helping me,” said Mrs Malone. “Papa told me the other day that you never come to him now.” She referred, Kitty knew, to his history of the college. He had suggested that she should help him. Again she saw the ink flowing—she had made an awkward brush with her arm—over five generations of Oxford men, obliterating hours of her father’s exquisite penmanship; and could hear him say with his usual courteous irony, “Nature did not intend you to be a scholar, my dear,” as he applied the blotting-paper.

“I know,” she said guiltily. “I haven’t been to Papa lately. But then there’s always something——” She hesitated.

“Naturally,” said Mrs Malone, “with a man in your father’s position …” Kitty sat silent. They both sat silent. They both disliked this petty bickering; they both detested these recurring scenes; and yet they seemed inevitable. Kitty got up, took the letters she had written and put them in the hall.

What does she want? Mrs Malone asked herself, looking up at the picture without seeing it. When I was her age … she thought, and smiled. How well she remembered sitting at home on a spring evening like this up in Yorkshire, miles from anywhere. You could hear the beat of a horse’s hoof on the road miles away. She could remember flinging up her bedroom window and looking down on the dark shrubs in the garden and crying out, “Is this life?” And in the winter there was the snow. She could still hear the snow flopping off the trees in the garden. And here was Kitty, living in Oxford, in the midst of everything.

Kitty came back into the drawing-room and yawned very slightly. She raised her hand to her face with an unconscious gesture of fatigue that touched her mother.

“Tired, Kitty?” she said. “It’s been a long day; you look pale.”

“And you look tired too,” said Kitty.

The bells came pushing forth one after another, one on top of another, through the damp, heavy air.

“Go to bed, Kitty,” said Mrs Malone. “There! It’s striking ten.”

“But aren’t you coming too, Mama?” said Kitty, standing beside her chair.

“Your father won’t be back just yet,” said Mrs Malone, putting on her spectacles again.

Kitty knew it was useless to try to persuade her. It was part of the mysterious ritual of her parents’ lives. She bent down and gave her mother the little perfunctory peck that was the only sign they ever gave each other outwardly of their affection. Yet they were very fond of each other; yet they always quarrelled.

“Good-night, and sleep well,” said Mrs Malone.

“I don’t like to see your roses fade,” she added, putting her arm round her for once in a way.

She sat still after Kitty had gone. Rose is dead, she thought—Rose who was about her own age. She read the note again. It was from Edward. And Edward, she mused, is in love with Kitty, but I don’t know that I want her to marry him, she thought, taking up her needle. No, not Edward…. There was young Lord Lasswade…. That would be a nice marriage, she thought. Not that I want her to be rich, not that I care about rank, she thought, threading her needle. No, but he could give her what she wants…. What was it? … Scope, she decided, beginning to stitch. Then again her thoughts turned to Rose. Rose was dead. Rose who was about her own age. That must have been the first time he proposed to her, she thought, the day we had the picnic on the moors. It was a spring day. They were sitting on the grass. She could see Rose wearing a black hat with a cock’s feather in it over her bright red hair. She could still see her blush and look extremely pretty when Abel rode up, much to their surprise—he was stationed at Scarborough—the day they had the picnic on the moors.

The house at Abercorn Terrace was very dark. It smelt strongly of spring flowers. For some days now wreaths had been piled one on top of another on the hall table. In the dimness—all the blinds were drawn—the flowers gleamed; and the hall smelt with the amorous intensity of a hot-house. Wreath after wreath, they kept arriving. There were lilies with broad bars of gold in them; others with spotted throats sticky with honey; white tulips, white lilac—flowers of all kinds, some with petals as thick as velvet, others transparent, paper-thin; but all white, and clubbed together, head to head, in circles, in ovals, in crosses so that they scarcely looked like flowers. Black-edged cards were attached to them, “With deep sympathy from Major and Mrs Brand”; “With love and sympathy from General and Mrs Elkin”; “For dearest Rose from Susan.” Each card had a few words written on it.

Even now with the hearse at the door the bell rang; a messenger boy appeared bearing more lilies. He raised his cap, as he stood in the hall, for men were lurching down the stairs carrying the coffin. Rose, in deep black, prompted by her nurse, stepped forward and dropped her little bunch of violets on the coffin. But it slipped off as it swayed down the brilliant sunlit steps on the slanting shoulders of Whiteleys’ men. The family followed after.

It was an uncertain day, with passing shadows and darting rays of bright sunshine. The funeral started at a walking pace. Delia, getting into the second carriage with Milly and Edward, noticed that the houses opposite had their blinds drawn in sympathy, but a servant peeped. The others, she noticed, did not seem to see her; they were thinking of their mother. When they got into the main road the pace quickened, for the drive to the cemetery was a long one. Through the slit of the blind, Delia noticed dogs playing; a beggar singing; men raising their hats as the hearse passed them. But by the time their own carriage passed, the hats were on again. Men walked briskly and unconcernedly along the pavement. The shops were already gay with spring clothing; women paused and looked in at the windows. But they would have to wear nothing but black all the summer, Delia thought, looking at Edward’s coal-black trousers.

They scarcely spoke, or only in little formal sentences, as if they were already taking part in the ceremony. Somehow their relations had changed. They were more considerate, and a little important too, as if their mother’s death had laid new responsibilities on them. But the others knew how to behave; it was only she who had to make an effort. She remained outside, and so did her father, she thought. When Martin suddenly burst out laughing at tea, and then stopped and looked guilty, she felt—that is what Papa would do, that is what I should do if we were honest.

She glanced out of the window again. Another man raised his hat—a tall man, a man in a frock-coat, but she would not allow herself to think of Mr Parnell until the funeral was over.

At last they reached the cemetery. As she took her place in the little group behind the coffin and walked up the church, she was relieved to find that she was overcome by some generalised and solemn emotion. People stood up on both sides of the church and she felt their eyes on her. Then the service began. A clergyman, a cousin, read it. The first words struck out with a rush of extraordinary beauty. Delia, standing behind her father, noticed how he braced himself and squared his shoulders.

“I am the resurrection and the life.”

Pent up as she had been all these days in the half-lit house which smelt of flowers, the outspoken words filled her with glory. This she could feel genuinely; this was something that she said herself. But then, as Cousin James went on reading, something slipped. The sense was blurred. She could not follow with her reason. Then in the midst of the argument came another burst of familiar beauty. “And fade away suddenly like the grass, in the morning it is green, and groweth up; but in the evening it is cut down, dried up, and withered.” She could feel the beauty of that. Again it was like music; but then Cousin James seemed to hurry, as if he did not altogether believe what he was saying. He seemed to pass from the known to the unknown; from what he believed to what he did not believe; even his voice altered. He looked clean, he looked starched and ironed like his robes. But what did he mean by what he was saying? She gave it up. Either one understood or one did not understand, she thought. Her mind wandered.

But I will not think of him, she thought, seeing a tall man who stood beside her on a platform and raised his hat, until it’s over. She fixed her eyes upon her father. She watched him dab a great white pocket-handkerchief to his eyes and put it in his pocket; then he pulled it out and dabbed his eyes with it again. Then the voice stopped; he put his handkerchief finally in his pocket; and again they all formed up, the little group of the family, behind the coffin and again the dark people on either side rose, and watched them and let them go first and followed after.

It was a relief to feel the soft damp air blowing its leafy smell in her face again. But again now that she was out of doors, she began to notice things. She noticed how the black funeral horses were pawing the ground; they were scraping little pits with their hooves in the yellow gravel. She remembered hearing that funeral horses came from Belgium and were very vicious. They looked vicious she thought; their black necks were flecked with foam—but she recalled herself. They went straggling in ones and twos along a path until they reached a fresh mound of yellow earth heaped beside a pit; and there again she noticed how the grave-diggers stood at a little distance, rather behind, with their spades.

There was a pause; people kept on arriving and took up their positions, some a little higher, some a little lower. She observed a poor-looking shabby woman prowling on the outskirts, and tried to think whether she were some old servant, but she could not put a name to her. Her Uncle Digby, her father’s brother, stood directly opposite her, with his top-hat held like some sacred vessel between his hands, the image of grave decorum. Some of the women were crying; but not the men; the men had one pose; the women had another, she observed. Then it all began again. The splendid gust of music blew through them—“Man that is born of a woman”: the ceremony had renewed itself; once more they were grouped, united. The family pressed a little closer to the graveside and looked fixedly at the coffin which lay with its polish and its brass handles there in the earth to be buried for ever. It looked too new to be buried for ever. She stared down into the grave. There lay her mother; in that coffin—the woman she had loved and hated so. Her eyes dazzled. She was afraid that she might faint; but she must look; she must feel; it was the last chance that was left her. Earth dropped on the coffin; three pebbles fell on the hard shiny surface; and as they dropped she was possessed by a sense of something everlasting; of life mixing with death, of death becoming life. For as she looked she heard the sparrows chirp quicker and quicker; she heard wheels in the distance sound louder and louder; life came closer and closer….

“We give thee hearty thanks,” said the voice, “for that it has pleased thee to deliver this our sister out of the miseries of this sinful world——”

What a lie! she cried to herself. What a damnable lie! He had robbed her of the one feeling that was genuine; he had spoilt her one moment of understanding.

She looked up. She saw Morris and Eleanor side by side; their faces were blurred; their noses were red, the tears were running down them. As for her father he was so stiff and so rigid that she had a convulsive desire to laugh aloud. Nobody can feel like that, she thought. He’s overdoing it. None of us feel anything at all, she thought: we’re all pretending.

Then there was a general movement; the attempt at concentration was over. People strolled off this way and that; there was no attempt now to form into a procession; little groups came together; people shook hands rather furtively, among the graves, and even smiled.

“How good of you to come!” said Edward, shaking hands with old Sir James Graham, who gave him a little pat on the shoulder. Ought she to go and thank him too? The graves made it difficult. It was becoming a shrouded and subdued morning party among the graves. She hesitated—she did not know what she ought to do next. Her father had walked on. She looked back. The grave-diggers had come forward; they were piling the wreaths one on top of another neatly; and the prowling woman had joined them and was stooping down to read the names on the cards. The ceremony was over; rain was falling.

[]

1891

The autumn wind blew over England. It twitched the leaves off the trees, and down they fluttered, spotted red and yellow, or sent them floating, flaunting in wide curves before they settled. In towns coming in gusts round the corners, the wind blew here a hat off; there lifted a veil high above a woman’s head. Money was in brisk circulation. The streets were crowded. Upon the sloping desks of the offices near St. Paul’s, clerks paused with their pens on the ruled page. It was difficult to work after the holidays. Margate, Eastbourne and Brighton had bronzed them and tanned them. The sparrows and starlings, making their discordant chatter round the eaves of St. Martin’s, whitened the heads of the sleek statues holding rods or rolls of paper in Parliament Square. Blowing behind the boat train, the wind ruffled the channel, tossed the grapes in Provence, and made the lazy fisher boy, who was lying on his back in his boat in the Mediterranean, roll over and snatch a rope.

But in England, in the North, it was cold. Kitty, Lady Lasswade, sitting on the terrace beside her husband and his spaniel, drew the cloak round her shoulders. She was looking at the hill top, where the snuffer-shaped monument raised by the old Earl made a mark for ships at sea. There was mist on the woods. Near at hand the stone ladies on the terrace had scarlet flowers in their urns. Thin blue smoke drifted across the flaming dahlias in the long beds that went down to the river. “Burning weeds,” she said aloud. Then there was a tap on the window, and her little boy in a pink frock stumbled out, holding his spotted horse.

In Devonshire where the round red hills and the steep valleys hoarded the sea air leaves were still thick on the trees—too thick, Hugh Gibbs said at breakfast. Too thick for shooting, he said, and Milly, his wife, left him to go to his meeting. With her basket on her arm she walked down the well-kept crazy pavement with the swaying movement of a woman with child. There hung the yellow pears on the orchard wall, lifting the leaves over them, they were so swollen. But the wasps had got at them—the skin was broken. With her hand on the fruit she paused. Pop, pop, pop sounded in the distant woods. Someone was shooting.

The smoke hung in veils over the spires and domes of the University cities. Here it choked the mouth of a gargoyle; there it clung to the walls that were peeled yellow. Edward, who was taking his brisk constitutional, noted smell, sound and colour; which suggested how complex impressions are; few poets compress enough; but there must be some line in Greek or Latin, he was thinking, which sums up the contrast,—when Mrs Lathom passed him and he raised his cap.

In the Law Courts the leaves lay dry and angular on the flagstones. Morris, remembering his childhood, shuffled his feet through them on his way to his chambers, and they scattered edgeways along the gutters. Not yet trodden down they lay in Kensington Gardens, and children, crunching the shells as they ran, scooped up a handful and scudded on through the mist down the avenues, with their hoops.

Racing over the hills in the country the wind blew vast rings of shadow that dwindled again to green. But in London the streets narrowed the clouds; mist hung thick in the East End by the river; made the voices of men crying “Any old iron to sell, any old iron,” sound distant; and in the suburbs the organs were muted. The wind blew the smoke—for in every back garden in the angle of the ivy-grown wall that still sheltered a few last geraniums, leaves were heaped up; keen fanged flames were eating them—out into the street, into windows that stood open in the drawing-room in the morning. For it was October, the birth of the year.

Eleanor was sitting at her writing-table with her pen in her hand. It’s awfully queer, she thought, touching the ink-corroded patch of bristle on the back of Martin’s walrus with the point of her pen, that that should have gone on all these years. That solid object might survive them all. If she threw it away it would still exist somewhere or other. But she never had thrown it away because it was part of other things—her mother for example…. She drew on her blotting paper; a dot with strokes raying out round it. Then she looked up. They were burning weeds in the back garden; there was a drift of smoke; a sharp acrid smell; and leaves were falling. A barrel organ was playing up the street. “Sur le pont d’Avignon” she hummed in time to it. How did it go?—the song Pippy used to sing as she wiped your ears with a piece of slimy flannel?

“Ron, ron, ron, et plon, plon plon,” she hummed. Then the tune stopped. The organ had moved further away. She dipped her pen in the ink.

“Three times eight,” she murmured, “is twenty-four,” she said decidedly; wrote a figure at the bottom of the page, swept together the little red and blue books and took them to her father’s study.

“Here’s the housekeeper!” he said good-humouredly as she came in. He was sitting in his leather armchair reading a pinkish financial paper.

“Here’s the housekeeper,” he repeated, looking up over his glasses. He was getting slower and slower, she thought; and she was in a hurry. But they got on extremely well; they were almost like brother and sister. He put down his paper and went to the writing-table.

But I wish you would hurry, Papa, she thought as she watched the deliberate way in which he unlocked the drawer in which he kept his cheque-book, or I shall be late.

“Milk’s very high,” he said, tapping the book with the gilt cow. “Yes. It’s eggs in October,” she said.

As he made out the cheque with extreme deliberation she glanced round the room. It looked like an office, with its files of papers and its deed-boxes, except that horses’ bits hung by the fireplace, and there was the silver cup he had won at polo. Would he sit there all the morning reading the financial papers and considering his investments, she wondered? He stopped writing.

“And where are you off to now?” he asked with his shrewd little smile.

“A Committee,” she said.

“A Committee,” he repeated, signing his firm heavy signature. “Well, stand up for yourself; don’t be sat on, Nell.” He entered a figure in the ledger.

“Are you coming with me this afternoon, Papa?” she said as he finished writing the figure. “It’s Morris’s case you know; at the Law Courts.”

He shook his head.

“No; I’ve got to be in the City at three,” he said.

“Then I shall see you at lunch,” she said, making a movement to go. But he held up his hand. He had something to say, but he hesitated. He was getting rather heavier in the face, she noted; there were little veins in his nose; he was getting rather too red and heavy.

“I was thinking of looking in at the Digbys’,” he said, at length. He got up and walked to the window. He looked out at the back garden. She fidgeted.

“How the leaves are falling!” he remarked.

“Yes,” she said. “They’re burning weeds.”

He stood looking at the smoke for a moment.

“Burning weeds,” he repeated, and stopped.

“It’s Maggie’s birthday,” at last he came out with it. “I thought I’d take her some little present——” He paused. He meant that he wished her to buy it, she knew.

“What would you like to give her?” she asked.

“Well,” he said vaguely, “something pretty you know—something she could wear.”

Eleanor reflected—Maggie, her little cousin; was she seven or eight?

“A necklace? A brooch? Something like that?” she asked quickly.

“Yes, something like that,” said her father, settling down in his chair again. “Something pretty, something she could wear, you know.” He opened the paper and gave her a little nod. “Thank you, my dear,” he said as she left the room.

On the hall table, between a silver salver laden with visiting-cards—some with their corners turned down, some large, some small—and a piece of purple plush with which the Colonel polished his top hat—lay a thin foreign envelope with “England” marked in large letters in the corner. Eleanor, running down the stairs in a hurry, swept it into her bag as she passed. Then she ran at a peculiar ambling trot down the Terrace. At the corner she stopped and looked anxiously down the road. Among the other traffic she singled out one bulky form; mercifully, it was yellow; mercifully she had caught her bus. She hailed it and climbed on top. She sighed with relief as she pulled the leather apron over her knees. All responsibility now rested with the driver. She relaxed; she breathed in the soft London air; she heard the dull London roar with pleasure. She looked along the street and relished the sight of cabs, vans and carriages all trotting past with an end in view. She liked coming back in October to the full stir of life after the summer was over. She had been staying in Devonshire with the Gibbses. That’s turned out very well, she thought, thinking of her sister’s marriage to Hugh Gibbs, seeing Milly with her babies. And Hugh—she smiled. He rode about on a great white horse, breaking up litters. But there are too many trees and cows and too many little hills instead of one big one, she thought. She did not like Devonshire. She was glad to be back in London, on top of the yellow bus, with her bag stuffed with papers, and everything beginning again in October. They had left the residential quarter; the houses were changing; they were turning into shops. This was her world; here she was in her element. The streets were crowded; women were swarming in and out of shops with their shopping baskets. There was something customary, rhythmical about it, she thought, like rooks swooping in a field, rising and falling.

She, too, was going to her work—she turned her watch on her wrist without looking at it. After the Committee, Duffus; after Duffus, Dickson. Then lunch; and the Law Courts … then lunch and the Law Courts at two-thirty, she repeated. The bus trundled along the Bayswater Road. The streets were becoming poorer and poorer.

Perhaps I oughtn’t to have given the job to Duffus, she said to herself—she was thinking of Peter Street where she had built houses; the roof was leaking again; there was a bad smell in the sink. But here the omnibus stopped; people got in and out; the omnibus went on again—but it’s better to give the work to a small man, she thought, looking at the huge plate-glass windows of one of the large shops, instead of going to one of those big firms. There were always small shops side by side with big shops. It puzzled her. How did the small shops manage to make a living? she wondered. But if Duffus, she began—here the omnibus stopped; she looked up; she rose “—if Duffus thinks he can bully me,” she said as she went down the steps, “he’ll find he’s mistaken.”

She walked quickly up the cinder path to the galvanised iron shed in which the meeting took place. She was late; there they were already. It was her first meeting since the holidays, and they all smiled at her. Judd even took his toothpick out of his mouth—a sign of recognition that flattered her. Here we all are again, she thought, taking her place and laying her papers on the table.

But she meant “them”, not herself. She did not exist; she was not anybody at all. But there they all were—Brocket, Cufnell, Miss Sims, Ramsden, Major Porter and Mrs Lazenby. The Major preaching organisation; Miss Sims (ex-mill hand) scenting condescension; Mrs Lazenby, offering to write to her cousin Sir John, upon which Judd, the retired shopkeeper, snubbed her. She smiled as she took her seat. Miriam Parrish was reading letters. But why starve yourself, Eleanor asked as she listened. She was thinner than ever.

She looked round the room as the letters were read. There had been a dance. Festoons of red and yellow paper were slung across the ceiling. The coloured picture of the Princess of Wales had loops of yellow roses at the corners; a sea-green ribbon across her breast, a round yellow dog on her lap, and pearls slung and knotted over her shoulders. She wore an air of serenity, of indifference; a queer comment upon their divisions, Eleanor thought; something that the Lazenbys worshipped; that Miss Sims derided; that Judd looked at cocking his eyebrows, picking his teeth. If he had had a son, he had told her, he would have sent him to the Varsity. But she recalled herself. Major Porter had turned to her.

“Now, Miss Pargiter,” he said, drawing her in, because they were both of the same social standing, “you haven’t given us your opinion.”

She pulled herself together and gave him her opinion. She had an opinion—a very definite opinion. She cleared her throat and began.

The smoke blowing through Peter Street had condensed, between the narrowness of the houses, into a fine grey veil. But the houses on either side were clearly visible. Save for two in the middle of the street, they were all precisely the same—yellow-grey boxes with slate tents on top. Nothing whatever was happening; a few children were playing in the street, two cats turned something over in the gutter with their paws. Yet a woman leaning out of the windows searched this way, that way, up and down the street as if she were raking every cranny for something to feed on. Her eyes, rapacious, greedy, like the eyes of a bird of prey, were also sulky and sleepy, as if they had nothing to feed their hunger upon. Nothing happened—nothing whatever. Still she gazed up and down with her indolent dissatisfied stare. Then a trap turned the corner. She watched it. It stopped in front of the houses opposite which, since the sills were green, and there was a plaque with a sunflower stamped on it over the door, were different from the others. A little man in a tweed cap got out and rapped at the door. It was opened by a woman who was about to have a baby. She shook her head; looked up and down the street; then shut the door. The man waited. The horse stood patiently with the reins drooping and its head bent. Another woman appeared at the window, with a white many-chinned face, and an under lip that stood out like a ledge. Leaning out of the window side by side the two women watched the man. He was bandy-legged; he was smoking. They passed some remark about him together. He walked up and down as if he were waiting for somebody. Now he threw away his cigarette. They watched him. What would he do next? Was he going to give his horse a feed? But here a tall woman wearing a coat and skirt of grey tweed came round the corner hastily; and the little man turned and touched his cap.

“Sorry I’m late,” Eleanor called out, and Duffus touched his cap with the friendly smile that always pleased her.

“That’s all right, Miss Pargiter,” he said. She always hoped that he did not feel that she was the ordinary employer.

“Now we’ll go over it,” she said. She hated the job, but it had to be done.

The door was opened by Mrs Toms, the downstairs lodger.

Oh dear, thought Eleanor, observing the slant of her apron, another baby coming, after all I told her.

They went from room to room of the little house, Mrs Toms and Mrs Grove following after. There was a crack here; a stain there. Duffus had a foot-rule in his hand with which he tapped the plaster. The worst of it is, she thought, as she let Mrs Toms do the talking, that I can’t help liking him. It was his Welsh accent largely; he was a charming ruffian. He was as supple as an eel, she knew; but when he talked like that, in that sing-song, which reminded her of Welsh valleys…. But he had cheated her at every point. There was a hole you could poke your finger through in the plaster.

“Look at that, Mr Duffus, there——” she said, stooping and poking her finger. He was licking his pencil. She loved going to his yard with him and seeing him size up planks and bricks; she loved his technical words for things, his little hard words.

“Now we’ll go upstairs,” she said. He seemed to her like a fly struggling to haul itself up out of a saucer. It was touch and go with small employers like Duffus; they might haul themselves up and become the Judds of their day and send their sons to the Varsity; or on the other hand they might fall in and then—— He had a wife and five children; she had seen them in the room behind the shop, playing with reels of cotton on the floor. And she always hoped that they would ask her in…. But here was the top floor where old Mrs Potter lay bedridden. She knocked; she called out in a loud cheerful voice, “May we come in?”

There was no answer. The old woman was stone deaf; so in they went. There she was, as usual, doing nothing whatever, propped up in the corner of her bed.

“I’ve brought Mr Duffus to look at your ceiling,” Eleanor shouted.

The old woman looked up and began plucking with her hands like a large tousled ape. She looked at them wildly, suspiciously.

“The ceiling, Mr Duffus,” said Eleanor. She pointed to a yellow stain on the ceiling. The house had only been built five years; and yet everything wanted repairing. Duffus threw open the window and leant out. Mrs Potter clutched hold of Eleanor’s hand, as if she suspected that they were going to hurt her.

“We’ve come to look at your ceiling,” Eleanor repeated very loudly. But the words conveyed nothing. The old woman went off into a whining plaint; the words ran themselves together into a chant that was half plaint, half curse. If only the Lord would take her. Every night, she said, she implored Him to let her go. All her children were dead.

“When I wake in the morning …” she began.

“Yes, yes, Mrs Potter,” Eleanor tried to soothe her; but her hands were firmly grasped.

“I pray Him to let me go,” Mrs Potter continued.

“It’s the leaves in the gutter,” said Duffus, popping his head in again.

“And the pain——” Mrs Potter stretched out her hands; they were knotted and grooved like the gnarled roots of a tree.

“Yes, yes,” said Eleanor. “But there’s a leak; it’s not only the dead leaves,” she said to Duffus.

Duffus put his head out again.

“We’re going to make you more comfortable,” Eleanor shouted to the old woman. Now she was cringing and fawning; now she had pressed her hand to her lips.

Duffus drew his head in again.

“Have you found out what’s wrong?” Eleanor said to him sharply. He was entering something in his pocket-book. She longed to go. Mrs Potter was asking her to feel her shoulder. She felt her shoulder. Her hand was still grasped. There was medicine on the table; Miriam Parrish came every week. Why do we do it? she asked herself as Mrs Potter went on talking. Why do we force her to live? she asked, looking at the medicine on the table. She could stand it no longer. She withdrew her hand.

“Good-bye, Mrs Potter,” she shouted. She was insincere; she was hearty. “We’re going to mend your ceiling,” she shouted. She shut the door. Mrs Groves waddled in advance of her to show her the sink in the scullery. A wisp of yellow hair hung down behind her dirty ears. If I had to do this every day of my life, Eleanor thought, as she followed them down into the scullery, I should become a bag of bones like Miriam; with a string of beads…. And what’s the use of that? she thought, stooping to smell the sink in the scullery.

“Well, Duffus,” she said, facing him when the inspection was over, with the smell of drains still in her nose. “What d’you propose to do about it?”

Her anger was rising; it was his fault largely. He had swindled her. But as she stood facing him and observed his little underfed body, and how his bow tie had worked up over his collar, she felt uncomfortable.

He shuffled and squirmed; she felt that she was going to lose her temper.

“If you can’t make a good job of it,” she said curtly, “I shall employ somebody else.” She adopted the tone of the Colonel’s daughter; the upper middle-class tone that she detested. She saw him turn sullen before her eyes. But she rubbed it in.

“You ought to be ashamed of it,” she told him. He was impressed she could see. “Good morning,” she said briefly.

The ingratiating smile was not produced for her benefit again, she observed. But you have to bully them or else they despise you, she thought as Mrs Toms let her out, and once more she observed the slant in her apron. A crowd of children stood round staring at Duffus’s pony. But none of them, she noticed, dared stroke the pony’s nose.

She was late. She gave one look at the sunflower on the terra-cotta plaque. That symbol of her girlish sentiment amused her grimly. She had meant it to signify flowers, fields in the heart of London; but now it was cracked. She broke into her usual ambling trot. The movement seemed to break up the disagreeable crust; to jolt off the grasp of the old woman’s hand that was still on her shoulder. She ran; she dodged. Shopping women got in her way. She dashed into the road waving her hand among the carts and horses. The conductor saw her, curved his arm round her and hauled her up. She had caught her bus.

She trod on the toe of a man in the corner, and pitched down between two elderly women. She was panting slightly; her hair was coming down; she was red with running. She cast a glance at her fellow-passengers. They all looked settled, elderly, as if their minds were made up. For some reason she always felt that she was the youngest person in an omnibus, but today, since she had won her scrap with Judd, she felt that she was grown up. The grey line of houses jolted up and down before her eyes as the omnibus trundled along the Bayswater Road. The shops were turning into houses; there were big houses and little houses; public houses and private houses. And here a church raised its filigree spire. Underneath were pipes, wires, drains…. Her lips began moving. She was talking to herself. There’s always a public house, a library and a church, she was muttering.

The man on whose toe she had trodden sized her up; a well-known type; with a bag, philanthropic; well nourished; a spinster; a virgin; like all the women of her class, cold; her passions had never been touched; yet not unattractive. She was laughing…. Here she looked up and caught his eye. She had been talking aloud to herself in an omnibus. She must cure herself of the habit. She must wait till she brushed her teeth. But luckily the bus was stopping. She jumped out. She began to walk quickly up Melrose Place. She felt vigorous and young. She noticed everything freshly after Devonshire. She looked down the long many-pillared vista of Abercorn Terrace. The houses, with their pillars and their front gardens, all looked highly respectable; in every front room she seemed to see a parlourmaid’s arm sweep over the table, laying it for luncheon. In several rooms they were already sitting down to luncheon; she could see them between the tent-shaped opening made by the curtains. She would be late for her own luncheon, she thought as she ran up the front steps and fitted her latch-key in the door. Then, as if someone were speaking, words formed in her mind. “Something pretty, something to wear.” She stopped with her key in the lock. Maggie’s birthday; her father’s present; she had forgotten it. She paused. She turned, she ran down the steps again. She must go to Lamley’s.

Mrs Lamley, who had grown stout these last years, was masticating a mouthful of cold mutton in the back room when she saw Miss Eleanor through the glass door.

“Good morning, Miss Eleanor,” she began, coming out.

“Something pretty, something to wear,” Eleanor panted. She was looking very well—quite brown after her holiday, Mrs Lamley noticed.

“For my niece—I mean cousin. Sir Digby’s little girl,” Eleanor brought out.

Mrs Lamley deprecated the cheapness of her goods.

There were toy boats; dolls; twopenny gold watches—but nothing nice enough for Sir Digby’s little girl. But Miss Eleanor was in a hurry.

“There,” she said, pointing to a card of bead necklaces. “That’ll do.”

It looked a little cheap, Mrs Lamley thought; reaching down a blue necklace with gold spots, but Miss Eleanor was in such a hurry that she wouldn’t even have it wrapped in brown paper.

“I shall be late as it is, Mrs Lamley,” she said, with a genial wave of her hand; and off she ran.

Mrs Lamley liked her. She always seemed so friendly. It was such a pity she didn’t marry—such a mistake to let the younger sister marry before the elder. But then she had the Colonel to look after, and he was getting on now, Mrs Lamley concluded, going back to her mutton in the back shop.

“Miss Eleanor won’t be a minute,” said the Colonel as Crosby brought in the dishes. “Leave the covers on.” He stood with his back to the fireplace waiting for her. Yes, he thought, I don’t see why not. “I don’t see why not,” he repeated, looking at the dish-cover. Mira was on the scene again; the other fellow had turned out, as he knew he would, a bad egg. And what provision was he to make for Mira? What was he to do about it? It had struck him that he would like to put the whole thing before Eleanor. Why not after all? She’s not a child any longer, he thought; and he didn’t like this business of—of—shutting things up in drawers. But he felt some shyness at the thought of telling his own daughter.

“Here she is,” he said abruptly to Crosby, who stood waiting mutely behind him.

No, no, he said to himself with sudden conviction, as Eleanor came in. I can’t do it. For some reason when he saw her he realised that he could not tell her. And after all, he thought, seeing how bright-cheeked, how unconcerned she looked, she has her own life to live. A spasm of jealousy passed through him. She’s got her own affairs to think about, he thought as they sat down.

She pushed a necklace across the table towards him.

“Hullo, what’s that?” he said, looking at it blankly.

“Maggie’s present, Papa,” she said. “The best I could do…. I’m afraid it’s rather cheap.”

“Yes; that’ll do very nicely,” he said, glancing at it absentmindedly. “Just what she’ll like,” he added, shoving it to one side. He began to carve the chicken.

She was very hungry; she was still rather breathless. She felt a little “spun round,” as she put it to herself. What did you spin things round on? she wondered, helping herself to bread sauce—a pivot? The scene had changed so often that morning; and every scene required a different adjustment; bringing this to the front; sinking that to the depths. And now she felt nothing; hungry merely; merely a chicken-eater; blank. But as she ate, the sense of her father imposed itself. She liked his solidity, as he sat opposite her munching his chicken methodically. What had he been doing, she wondered. Taking shares out of one company and putting them in another? He roused himself.

“Well, how was the Committee?” he asked. She told him, exaggerating her triumph with Judd.

“That’s right. Stand up to ’em, Nell. Don’t let yourself be sat on,” he said. He was proud of her in his own way; and she liked him to be proud of her. At the same time she did not mention Duffus and Rigby Cottages. He had no sympathy with people who were foolish about money, and she never got a penny interest: it all went on repairs. She turned the conversation to Morris and his case at the Law Courts. She looked at her watch again. Her sister-in-law Celia had told her to meet her at the Law Courts at two-thirty sharp.

“I shall have to hurry,” she said.

“Ah, but these lawyer chaps always know how to spin things out,” said the Colonel. “Who’s the Judge?”

“Sanders Curry,” said Eleanor.

“Then it’ll last till Domesday,” said the Colonel.

“Which Court’s he sitting in?” he asked.

Eleanor did not know.

“Here, Crosby——” said the Colonel. He sent Crosby for The Times. He began opening and turning the great sheets with his clumsy fingers as Eleanor swallowed her tart. By the time she had poured out coffee he had found out in which court the case was being heard.

“And you’re going to the City, Papa?” she said as she put down her cup.

“Yes. To a meeting,” he said. He loved going to the City, whatever he did there.

“Odd it should be Curry who’s trying the case,” she said, rising. They had dined with him not long ago in a dreary great house somewhere off Queen’s Gate.

“D’you remember that party?” she said, getting up. “The old oak?” Curry collected oak chests.

“All shams I suspect,” said her father. “Don’t hurry,” he expostulated. “Take a cab, Nell—if you want any change——” he began, fumbling with his curtailed fingers for silver. As she watched him Eleanor felt the old childish feeling that his pockets were bottomless silver mines from which half-crowns could be dug eternally.

“Well, then,” she said, taking the coins, “we shall meet at tea.”

“No,” he reminded her, “I’m going round by the Digbys’.”

He took the necklace in his large hairy hand. It looked a little cheap, Eleanor was afraid.

“And what about a box for this, eh?” he asked.

“Crosby, find a box for the necklace,” said Eleanor. And Crosby, suddenly radiating importance, hurried off to the basement.

“It’ll be dinner then,” she said to her father. That’ll mean, she thought with relief, that I needn’t be back for tea.

“Yes, dinner,” he said. He held a spill of paper in his hand which he was applying to the end of his cigar. He sucked. A little puff of smoke rose from the cigar. She liked the smell of cigars. She stood for a moment and drew it in.

“And give my love to Aunt Eugénie,” she said. He nodded as he puffed at his cigar.

It was a treat to take a hansom—it saved fifteen minutes. She leant back in the corner, with a little sigh of content, as the flaps clicked above her knees. For a minute her mind was completely vacant. She enjoyed the peace, the silence, the rest from exertion as she sat there in the corner of the cab. She felt detached, a spectator, as it trotted along. The morning had been a rush; one thing on top of another. Now, until she reached the Law Courts, she could sit and do nothing. It was a long way; and the horse was a plodding horse, a red-coated hairy horse. It kept up its steady jog-trot all down the Bayswater Road. There was very little traffic; people were still at luncheon. A soft grey mist filled up the distance; the bells jingled; the houses passed. She ceased to notice what houses they were passing. She half shut her eyes, and then, involuntarily, she saw her own hand take a letter from the hall table. When? That very morning. What had she done with it? Put it in her bag? Yes. There it was, unopened; a letter from Martin in India. She would read it as they drove along. It was written on very thin paper in Martin’s little hand. It was longer than usual; it was about an adventure with somebody called Renton. Who was Renton? She could not remember. “We started at dawn,” she read.

She looked out of the window. They were being held up by traffic at the Marble Arch. Carriages were coming out of the Park. A horse pranced; but the coachman had him well in hand.

She read again: “I found myself alone in the middle of the jungle….”

But what were you doing? she asked.

She saw her brother; his red hair; his round face; and the rather pugnacious expression which always made her afraid that he would get himself into trouble one of these days. And so he had, apparently.

“I had lost my way; and the sun was sinking,” she read.

“The sun was sinking …” Eleanor repeated, glancing ahead of her down Oxford Street. The sun shone on dresses in a window. A jungle was a very thick wood, she supposed; made of stunted little trees; dark green in colour. Martin was in the jungle alone, and the sun was sinking. What happened next? “I thought it better to stay where I was.” So he stood in the midst of little trees alone, in the jungle; and the sun was sinking. The street before her lost its detail. It must have been cold, she thought, when the sun sank. She read again. He had to make a fire. “I looked in my pocket and found that I had only two matches … The first match went out.” She saw a heap of dry sticks and Martin alone watching the match go out. “Then I lit the other, and by sheer luck it did the trick.” The paper began to burn; the twigs caught; a fan of fire blazed up. She skipped on in her anxiety to reach the end …—“once I thought I heard voices shouting, but they died away.”

“They died away!” said Eleanor aloud.

They had stopped at Chancery Lane. An old woman was being helped across the road by a policeman; but the road was a jungle.

“They died away,” she said. “And then?”

“… I climbed a tree … I saw the track … the sun was rising…. They had given me up for dead.”

The cab stopped. For a moment Eleanor sat still. She saw nothing but stunted little trees, and her brother looking at the sun rising over the jungle. The sun was rising. Flames for a moment danced over the vast funereal mass of the Law Courts. It was the second match that did the trick, she said to herself as she paid the driver and went in.

“Oh, there you are!” cried a little woman in furs, who was standing by one of the doors.

“I had given you up. I was just going in.” She was a small cat-faced woman, worried, but very proud of her husband.

They pushed through the swing doors into the Court where the case was being tried. It seemed dark and crowded at first. Men in wigs and gowns were getting up and sitting down and coming in and going out like a flock of birds settling here and there on a field. They all looked unfamiliar; she could not see Morris. She looked about her, trying to find him.

“There he is,” Celia whispered.

One of the barristers in the front row turned his head. It was Morris; but how odd he looked in his yellow wig! His glance passed over them without any sign of recognition. Nor did she smile at him; the solemn sallow atmosphere forbade personalities; there was something ceremonial about it all. From where she sat she could see his face in profile; the wig squared his forehead, and gave him a framed look, like a picture. Never had she seen him to such advantage; with such a brow, with such a nose. She glanced round. They all looked like pictures; all the barristers looked emphatic, cut out, like eighteenth-century portraits hung upon a wall. They were still rising and settling, laughing, talking…. Suddenly a door was thrown open. The usher demanded silence for his lordship. There was silence; everybody stood up; and the Judge came in. He made one bow and took his seat under the Lion and the Unicorn. Eleanor felt a little thrill of awe run through her. That was old Curry. But how transformed! Last time she had seen him he was sitting at the head of a dinner-table; a long yellow strip of embroidery went rippling down the middle; and he had taken her, with a candle, round the drawing-room to look at his old oak. But now, there he was, awful, magisterial, in his robes.

A barrister had risen. She tried to follow what the man with a big nose was saying; but it was difficult to pick it up now. She listened, however. Then another barrister rose—a chicken-breasted little man, wearing gold pince-nez. He was reading some document; then he too began to argue. She could understand parts of what he was saying; though how it bore on the case she did not know. When was Morris going to speak, she wondered? Not yet apparently. As her father had said, these lawyer chaps knew how to spin things out. There had been no need to hurry over luncheon; an omnibus would have done just as well. She fixed her eyes on Morris. He was cracking some joke with the sandy man next to him. Those were his cronies, she thought; this was his life. She remembered his passion for the Bar as a boy. It was she who had talked Papa round; one morning she had taken her life in her hand and gone to his study … but now, to her excitement, Morris himself got up.

She felt her sister-in-law stiffen with nervousness and clasp her little bag tightly. Morris looked very tall, and very black and white as he began. One hand was on the edge of his gown. How well she knew that gesture of Morris’s, she thought—grasping something, so that you saw the white scar where he had cut himself bathing. But she did not recognise the other gesture—the way he flung his arm out. That belonged to his public life, his life in the Courts. And his voice was unfamiliar. But every now and then as he warmed to his speech, there was a tone in his voice that made her smile; it was his private voice. She could not help half turning to her sister-in-law as if to say, How like Morris! But Celia was looking with absolute fixity ahead of her at her husband. Eleanor, too, tried to fix her mind upon the argument. He spoke with extraordinary clearness; he spaced his words beautifully. Suddenly the Judge interrupted:

“Do I understand you to hold, Mr Pargiter …?” he said in urbane yet awful tones; and Eleanor was thrilled to see how instantly Morris stopped short; how respectfully he bent his head as the Judge spoke.

But will he know the answer? she thought, as if he were a child, shifting in her seat with nervousness lest he might break down. But he had the answer at his finger-ends. Without hurry or flutter he opened a book; found his place; read out a passage, upon which old Curry nodded, and made a note in the great volume that lay open in front of him. She was immensely relieved.

“How well he did that!” she whispered. Her sister-in-law nodded; but she still grasped her bag tightly. Eleanor felt that she could relax. She glanced round her. It was an odd mixture of solemnity and licence. Barristers kept coming in and out. They stood leaning against the wall of the Court. In the pale top light all their faces looked parchment-coloured; all their features seemed cut out. They had lit the gas. She gazed at the Judge himself. He was now lying back in his great carved chair under the Lion and the Unicorn, listening. He looked infinitely sad and wise, as if words had been beating upon him for centuries. Now he opened his heavy eyes, wrinkled his forehead, and the little hand that emerged frailly from the enormous cuff wrote a few words in the great volume. Then again he lapsed with half-shut eyes into his eternal vigil over the strife of unhappy human beings. Her mind wandered. She leant back against the hard wooden seat and let the tide of oblivion flow over her. Scenes from her morning began to form themselves; to obtrude themselves. Judd at the Committee; her father reading the paper; the old woman plucking at her hand; the parlourmaid sweeping the silver over the table; and Martin lighting his second match in the jungle….

She fidgeted. The air was fuggy; the light dim; and the Judge now that the first glamour had worn off, looked fretful; no longer immune from human weakness, and she remembered with a smile how very gullible he was, there in that hideous house in Queen’s Gate, about old oak. “This I picked up at Whitby,” he had said. And it was a sham. She wanted to laugh; she wanted to move. She rose and whispered:

“I’m going.”

Her sister-in-law made a little murmur, perhaps of protest. But Eleanor made her way as silently as she could through the swing doors, out into the street.

The uproar, the confusion, the space of the Strand came upon her with a shock of relief. She felt herself expand. It was still daylight here; a rush, a stir, a turmoil of variegated life came racing towards her. It was as if something had broken loose—in her, in the world. She seemed, after her concentration, to be dissipated, tossed about. She wandered along the Strand, looking with pleasure at the racing street; at the shops full of bright chains and leather cases; at the white-faced churches; at the irregular jagged roofs laced across and across with wires. Above was the dazzle of a watery but gleaming sky. The wind blew in her face. She breathed in a gulp of fresh wet air. And that man, she thought, thinking of the dark little Court and its cut-out faces, has to sit there all day, every day. She saw Sanders Curry again, lying back in his great chair, with his face falling in folds of iron. Every day, all day, she thought, arguing points of law. How could Morris stand it? But he had always wanted to go to the Bar.

Cabs, vans and omnibuses streamed past; they seemed to rush the air into her face; they splashed the mud onto the pavement. People jostled and hustled and she quickened her pace in time with theirs. She was stopped by a van turning down one of the little steep streets that led to the river. She looked up and saw the clouds moving between the roofs, dark clouds, rain-swollen; wandering, indifferent clouds. She walked on.

Again she was stopped at the entrance to Charing Cross station. The sky was wide at that point. She saw a file of birds flying high, flying together; crossing the sky. She watched them. Again she walked on. People on foot, people in cabs were being sucked in like straws round the piers of a bridge; she had to wait. Cabs piled with boxes went past her.

She envied them. She wished she were going abroad; to Italy, to India…. Then she felt vaguely that something was happening. The paper boys at the gates were dealing out papers with unusual rapidity. Men were snatching them and opening them and reading them as they walked on. She looked at a placard that was crumpled across a boy’s legs. “Death” was written in very large black letters.

Then the placard blew straight, and she read another word: “Parnell.”

“Dead” … she repeated. “Parnell.” She was dazed for a moment. How could he be dead—Parnell? She bought a paper. They said so….

“Parnell is dead!” she said aloud. She looked up and saw the sky again; clouds were passing; she looked down into the street. A man pointed at the news with his forefinger. Parnell is dead he was saying. He was gloating. But how could he be dead? It was like something fading in the sky.

She walked slowly along towards Trafalgar Square, holding the paper in her hand. Suddenly the whole scene froze into immobility. A man was joined to a pillar; a lion was joined to a man; they seemed stilled, connected, as if they would never move again.

She crossed into Trafalgar Square. Birds chattered shrilly somewhere. She stopped by the fountain and looked down into the large basin full of water. The water rippled black as the wind ruffled it. There were reflections in the water, branches and a pale strip of sky. What a dream, she murmured; what a dream … But someone jostled her. She turned. She must go to Delia. Delia had cared. Delia had cared passionately. What was it she used to say—flinging out of the house, leaving them all for the Cause, for this man? Justice, Liberty? She must go to her. This would be the end of all her dreams. She turned and hailed a cab.

She leant over the flaps of the cab looking out. The streets they were driving through were horribly poor; and not only poor, she thought, but vicious. Here was the vice, the obscenity, the reality of London. It was lurid in the mixed evening light. Lamps were being lit. Paper-boys were crying, Parnell … Parnell. He’s dead, she said to herself, still conscious of the two worlds; one flowing in wide sweeps overhead, the other tip-tapping circumscribed upon the pavement. But here she was … She held up her hand. She stopped the cab opposite a little row of posts in an alley. She got out and made her way into the Square.

The sound of the traffic was dulled. It was very silent here. In the October afternoon, with dead leaves falling, the old faded Square looked dingy and decrepit and full of mist. The houses were let out in offices, to societies, to people whose names were pinned up on the door-posts. The whole neighbourhood seemed to her foreign and sinister. She came to the old Queen Anne doorway with its heavy carved eyebrows and pressed the bell at the top of six or seven bells. Names were written over them, sometimes only on visiting-cards. Nobody came. She pushed the door open and went in; she mounted the wooden stairs with carved banisters, that seemed to have been degraded from their past dignity. Jugs of milk with bills under them stood in the deep window-seats. Some of the panes were broken. Outside Delia’s door, at the top, there was a milk-jug too, but it was empty. Her card was fixed by a drawing-pin to a panel. She knocked and waited. There was no sound. She turned the handle. The door was locked. She stood for a moment listening. A little window at the side gave on to the square. Pigeons crooned on the tree-tops. The traffic hummed far off; she could just hear paperboys crying death … death … death. The leaves were falling. She turned and went downstairs.

She strolled along the streets. Children had chalked the pavement into squares; women leant from the upper windows, raking the street with a rapacious, dissatisfied stare. Rooms were let out to single gentlemen only. There were cards in them which said “Furnished Apartments” or “Bed and Breakfast.” She guessed at the life that went on behind those thick yellow curtains. This was the purlieus in which her sister lived, she thought, turning; she must often come back this way at night alone. Then she went back to the Square and climbed the stairs and rattled at the door again. But there was no sound within. She stood for a moment watching the leaves fall; she heard the paper-boys crying and the pigeons crooning in the tree-tops. Take two coos, Taffy; take two coos, Taffy; tak…. Then a leaf fell.

The traffic at Charing Cross thickened as the afternoon wore on. People on foot, people in cabs were being sucked in at the gates of the station. Men swung along at a great pace as if there were some demon in the station who would be enraged if they kept him waiting. But even so they paused and snatched a paper as they passed. The clouds parting and massing let the light shine and then veiled it. The mud, now dark brown, now liquid gold, was splashed up by the wheels and hooves, and in the general churn and uproar the shrill chatter of the birds on the eaves was silenced. The hansoms jingled and passed; jingled and passed. At last among all the jingling cabs came one in which sat a stout red-faced man holding a flower wrapped in tissue-paper—the Colonel.

“Hi!” he cried as the cab passed the gates; and drove one hand through the trap-door in the roof. He leant out and a paper was thrust up at him.

“Parnell!” he exclaimed, as he fumbled for his glasses. “Dead, by Jove!”

The cab trotted on. He read the news two or three times over. He’s dead, he said, taking off his glasses. A shock of something like relief, of something that had a tinge of triumph in it, went through him as he leant back in the corner. Well, he said to himself, he’s dead—that unscrupulous adventurer—that agitator who had done all the mischief, that man … Some feeling connected with his own daughter here formed in him; he could not say exactly what, but it made him frown. Anyhow he’s dead now, he thought. How had he died? Had he killed himself? It wouldn’t be surprising…. Anyhow he was dead and that was an end of it. He sat holding the paper crumpled in one hand, the flower wrapped in tissue paper in the other, as the cab drove down Whitehall…. One could respect him, he thought, as the cab passed the House of Commons, which was more than could be said for some of the other fellows … and there’d been a lot of nonsense talked about the divorce case. He looked out. The cab was driving near a certain street where he used to stop and look about him years ago. He turned and glanced down a street to the right. But a man in public life can’t afford to do those things, he thought. He gave a little nod as the cab passed on. And now she’s written to ask me for money, he thought. The other chap had turned out, as he knew he would, a bad egg. She’d lost all her looks, he was thinking; she had grown very stout. Well, he could afford to be generous. He put on his glasses again and read the City news.

It would make no difference, Parnell’s death, coming now, he thought. Had he lived, had the scandal died down—he looked up. The cab was going the long way round as usual. “Left!” he shouted, “Left!” as the driver, as they always did, took the wrong turning.

In the rather dark basement at Browne Street, the Italian manservant was reading the paper in his shirt sleeves, when the housemaid waltzed in carrying a hat.

“Look what she’s given me!” she cried. To atone for the mess in the drawing-room, Lady Pargiter had given her a hat. “Ain’t I stylish?” she said, pausing in front of the glass with the great Italian hat that looked as if it were made of spun glass on one side of her head. And Antonio had to drop his paper and catch her round the waist from sheer gallantry, since she was no beauty, and her action was merely a parody of what he remembered in the hill towns of Tuscany. But a cab stopped in front of the railings; two legs stood still there, and he must detach himself, put on his jacket and go upstairs to answer the bell.

He takes his time, the Colonel thought, as he stood on the door-step waiting. The shock of the death had been absorbed almost; it still swept round in his system; but did not prevent him from thinking, as he stood there, that they had had the bricks re-pointed; but how had they money to spare, with the three boys to educate, and the two little girls? Eugénie was a clever woman of course; but he wished she would get a parlourmaid instead of these Italian dagoes who always seemed to be swallowing macaroni. Here the door opened, and as he went upstairs he thought he heard, from somewhere in the background, a shout of laughter.

He liked Eugénie’s drawing-room, he thought, as he stood there waiting. It was very untidy. There was a litter of shavings from something that was being unpacked on the floor. They had been to Italy, he remembered. A looking-glass stood on the table. It was probably one of the things she had picked up there: the sort of thing that people did pick up in Italy; an old glass, covered with spots. He straightened his tie in front of it.

But I prefer a glass in which one can see oneself, he thought, turning away. There was the piano open; and the tea—he smiled—with the cup half full as usual; and branches stuck about the room, branches of withering red and yellow leaves. She liked flowers. He was glad he had remembered to bring her his usual gift. He held the flower wrapped in tissue paper in front of him. But why was the room so full of smoke? A gust blew in. Both windows in the back room were open, and the smoke was blowing in from the garden. Were they burning weeds, he wondered? He walked to the window and looked out. Yes, there they were—Eugénie and the two little girls. There was a bonfire. As he looked, Magdalena, the little girl who was his favourite, tossed a whole armful of dead leaves. She jerked them as high as she could, and the fire blazed up. A great fan of red flame flung out.

“That’s dangerous!” he called out.

Eugénie pulled the children back. They were dancing with excitement. The other little girl, Sara, ducked under her mother’s arm, seized another armful of leaves and flung them again. A great fan of red flame flung out. Then the Italian servant came and mentioned his name. He tapped on the window. Eugénie turned and saw him. She held the children back with one hand and raised the other in welcome.

“Stay where you are!” she cried. “We’re coming!”

A cloud of smoke blew straight at him; it made his eyes water, and he turned and sat down in the chair by the sofa. In another second she came, hurrying towards him with both her hands stretched out. He rose and took them.

“We’re having a bonfire,” she said. Her eyes were glowing; her hair was looping down. “That’s why I’m all so blown-about,” she added, putting her hand to her head. She was untidy, but extremely handsome all the same, Abel thought. A fine large woman, growing ample, he noted as she shook hands; but it suited her. He admired that type more than the pink-and-white pretty Englishwoman. The flesh flowed over her like warm yellow wax; she had great dark eyes like a foreigner, and a nose with a ripple in it. He held out his camellia; his customary gift. She made a little exclamation as she took the flower from the tissue paper and sat down.

“How very good of you!” she said, and held it for a moment in front of her, and then did what he had often seen her do with a flower—put the stalk between her lips. Her movements charmed him as usual.

“Having a bonfire for the birthday?” he asked…. “No, no, no,” he protested, “I don’t want tea.”

She had taken her cup, and sipped the cold tea that was left in it. As he watched her, some memory of the East came back to him; so women sat in hot countries in their doorways in the sun. But it was very cold at the moment with the window open and the smoke blowing in. He still had his newspaper in his hand; he laid it on the table.

“Seen the news?” he asked.

She put down her cup and slightly opened her large dark eyes. Immense reserves of emotion seemed to dwell in them. As she waited for him to speak, she raised her hand as if in expectation.

“Parnell,” said Abel briefly. “He’s dead.”

“Dead?” Eugénie echoed him. She let her hand fall dramatically.

“Yes. At Brighton. Yesterday.”

“Parnell is dead!” she repeated.

“So they say,” said the Colonel. Her emotion always made him feel more matter-of-fact; but he liked it. She took up the paper.

“Poor thing!” she exclaimed, letting it fall.

“Poor thing?” he repeated. Her eyes were full of tears. He was puzzled. Did she mean Kitty O’Shea? He hadn’t thought of her.

“She ruined his career for him,” he said with a little snort.

“Ah, but how she must have loved him!” she murmured.

She drew her hand over her eyes. The Colonel was silent for a moment. Her emotion seemed to him out of all proportion to its object; but it was genuine. He liked it.

“Yes,” he said, rather stiffly. “Yes, I suppose so.” Eugénie picked up the flower again and held it, twirling it. She was oddly absentminded now and then, but he always felt at his ease with her. His body relaxed. He felt relieved of some obstruction in her presence.

“How people suffer!…” she murmured, looking at the flower. “How they suffer, Abel!” she said. She turned and looked straight at him.

A great gust of smoke blew in from the other room.

“You don’t mind the draught?” he asked, looking at the window. She did not answer at once; she was twirling her flower. Then she roused herself and smiled.

“Yes, yes. Shut it!” she said with a wave of her hand. He went and shut the window. When he turned round, she had got up and was standing at the looking-glass, arranging her hair.

“We’ve had a bonfire for Maggie’s birthday,” she murmured, looking at herself in the Venetian glass that was covered with spots. “That’s why, that’s why——” she smoothed her hair and fixed the camellia in her dress. “I’m so very——”

She put her head a little on one side as if to observe the effect of the flower in her dress. The Colonel sat down and waited. He glanced at his paper.

“They seem to be hushing things up,” he said.

“You don’t mean——” Eugénie was beginning; but here the door opened and the children came in. Maggie, the elder, came first; the other little girl, Sara, hung back behind her.

“Hullo!” the Colonel exclaimed. “Here they are!” He turned round. He was very fond of children. “Many happy returns of the day to you, Maggie!” He felt in his pocket for the necklace that Crosby had done up in a cardboard box. Maggie came up to him to take it. Her hair had been brushed, and she was dressed in a stiff clean frock. She took the parcel and undid it; she held the blue-and-gold necklace dangling from her finger. For a moment the Colonel doubted whether she liked it. It looked a little garish as she held it dangling in her hand. And she was silent. Her mother at once supplied the words she should have spoken.

“How lovely, Maggie! How perfectly lovely!”

Maggie held the beads in her hand and said nothing.

“Thank Uncle Abel for the lovely necklace,” her mother prompted her.

“Thank you for the necklace, Uncle Abel,” said Maggie. She spoke directly and accurately, but the Colonel felt another twinge of doubt. A pang of disappointment out of all proportion to its object came over him. Her mother, however, fastened it round her neck. Then she turned away to her sister, who was peeping from behind a chair.

“Come, Sara,” said her mother. “Come and say how-d’you-do.”

She held out her hand partly to coax the little girl, partly, Abel guessed, in order to conceal the very slight deformity that always made him uncomfortable. She had been dropped when she was a baby; one shoulder was slightly higher than the other; it made him feel squeamish; he could not bear the least deformity in a child. It did not affect her spirits, however. She skipped up to him, whirling round on her toe, and kissed him lightly on the cheek. Then she tugged at her sister’s frock, and they both rushed away into the back room laughing.

“They are going to admire your lovely present, Abel,” said Eugénie. “How you spoil them!—and me too,” she added, touching the camellia on her breast.

“I hope she liked it?” he asked. Eugénie did not answer him. She had taken up the cup of cold tea again and was sipping it in her indolent Southern manner.

“And now,” she said, leaning back comfortably, “tell me all your news.”

The Colonel, too, lay back in his chair. He pondered for a moment. What was his news? Nothing occurred to him on the spur of the moment. With Eugénie, too, he always wanted to make a little splash; she put a shine on things. While he hesitated, she began:

“We’ve been having a wonderful time in Venice! I took the children. That’s why we’re all so brown. We had rooms not on the Grand Canal—I hate the Grand Canal—but just off it. Two weeks of blazing sun; and the colours”—she hesitated—“marvellous!” she exclaimed, “marvellous!” She threw out her hand. She had gestures of extraordinary significance. That’s how she rigs things up, he thought. But he liked her for it.

He had not been to Venice for years.

“Any pleasant people there?” he asked.

“Not a soul,” she said. “Not a soul. No one except a dreadful Miss—. One of those women who make one ashamed of one’s country,” she said energetically.

“I know ’em,” he chuckled.

“But coming back from the Lido in the evening,” she resumed, “with the clouds above and the water below—we had a balcony; we used to sit there.” She paused.

“Was Digby with you?” the Colonel asked.

“No, poor Digby. He took his holiday earlier, in August. He was up in Scotland with the Lasswades shooting. It does him good, you know.” There she goes, rigging thing’s up again, he thought.

But she resumed.

“Now tell me about the family. Martin and Eleanor, Hugh and Milly, Morris and …” She hesitated; he suspected that she had forgotten the name of Morris’ wife.

“Celia,” he said. He stopped. He wanted to tell her about Mira. But he told her about the family: Hugh and Milly; Morris and Celia. And Edward.

“They seem to think a lot of him at Oxford,” he said gruffly. He was very proud of Edward.

“And Delia?” said Eugénie. She glanced at the paper. The Colonel at once lost his affability. He looked glum and formidable, like an old bull with his head down, she thought.

“Perhaps it will bring her to her senses,” he said sternly. They were silent for a moment. There were shouts of laughter from the garden.

“Oh those children!” she exclaimed. She rose and went to the window. The Colonel followed her. The children had stolen back into the garden. The bonfire was burning fiercely. A clear pillar of flame rose in the middle of the garden. The little girls were laughing and shouting as they danced round it. A shabby old man, something like a decayed groom to look at, stood there with a rake in his hand. Eugénie flung up the window and cried out. But they went on dancing. The Colonel leant out too; they looked like wild creatures with their hair flying. He would have liked to go down and jump over the bonfire, but he was too old. The flames leapt high—clear gold, bright red.

“Bravo!” he cried, clapping his hands. “Bravo!”

“Little demons!” said Eugénie. She was as much excited as they were, he observed. She leant out of the window and cried to the old man with the rake:

“Make it blaze! Make it blaze!”

But the old man was raking out the fire. The sticks were scattered. The flames had sunk.

The old man pushed the children away.

“Well, that’s over,” said Eugénie, heaving a sigh. She turned. Someone had come into the room.

“Oh, Digby, I never heard you!” she exclaimed. Digby stood there with a case in his hands.

“Hullo, Digby!” said Abel, shaking hands.

“What’s all this smoke?” said Digby, looking round him.

He’s aged a bit, Abel thought. There he stood in his frock coat with the top buttons undone. His coat was a little threadbare; his hair was white on top. But he was very handsome; beside him the Colonel felt large, weather-beaten and rough. He was a little ashamed that he had been caught leaning out of the window clapping his hands. He looks older, he thought, as they stood side by side; yet he’s five years younger than I am. He was a distinguished man in his way; the top of his tree; a knight and all the rest of it. But he’s not as rich as I am, he remembered with satisfaction; for he had always been the failure of the two.

“You look so tired, Digby!” Eugénie exclaimed, sitting down. “He ought to take a real holiday,” she said, turning to Abel. “I wish you’d tell him so.” Digby brushed away a white thread that had stuck to his trousers. He coughed slightly. The room was full of smoke.

“What’s all this smoke for?” he asked his wife.

“We’ve been having a bonfire for Maggie’s birthday,” she said as if excusing herself.

“Oh yes,” he said. Abel was irritated; Maggie was his favourite; her father ought to have remembered her birthday.

“Yes,” said Eugénie, turning to Abel again, “he lets everybody else take a holiday, but he never takes one himself. And then, when he’s done a full day’s work at the office, he comes back with his bag full of papers——” She pointed at the bag.

“You shouldn’t work after dinner,” said Abel. “That’s a bad habit.” Digby did look a bit off-colour, he thought. Digby brushed aside this feminine effusiveness.

“Seen the news?” he said to his brother, indicating the paper.

“Yes. By Jove!” said Abel. He liked talking politics with his brother, though he slightly resented his official airs as if he could say more but must not. And then it’s all in the papers the day after, he thought. Still they always talked politics. Eugénie lying back in her corner always let them talk; she never interrupted. But at length she got up and began tidying the litter that had fallen from the packing-case. Digby stopped what he was saying and watched her. He was looking at the glass.

“Like it?” said Eugénie, with her hand on the frame.

“Yes,” said Digby; but there was a hint of criticism in his voice. “Quite a pretty one.”

“It’s only for my bedroom,” she said quickly. Digby watched her stuffing the bits of paper into the box.

“Remember,” he said, “we’re dining with the Chathams tonight.”

“I know.” She touched her hair again. “I shall have to make myself tidy,” she said. Who were “the Chathams?” Abel wondered. Bigwigs, mandarins, he supposed half contemptuously. They moved a great deal in that world. He took it as a hint that he should go. They had come to the end of what they had to say to each other—he and Digby. He still hoped, however, that he might talk with Eugénie alone.

“About this African business——” he began, bethinking him of another question—when the children came in; they had come to say good-night. Maggie was wearing his necklace and it looked very pretty, he thought, or was it she who looked so pretty? But their frocks, their clean blue and pink frocks, were crumpled; they were smudged with the sooty London leaves that they had been holding in their arms.

“Grubby little ruffians!” he said, smiling at them. “Why d’you wear your best clothes to play in the garden?” said Sir Digby, as he kissed Maggie. He said it jokingly, but there was a hint of disapproval in his tones. Maggie made no answer. Her eyes were riveted on the camellia that her mother wore in the front of her dress. She went up and stood looking at her.

“And you—what a little sweep!” said Sir Digby, pointing to Sara.

“It’s Maggie’s birthday,” said Eugénie, holding out her arm again as if to protect the little girl.

“That is a reason, I should have thought,” said Sir Digby, surveying his daughters, “to—er—to—er—reform one’s habits.” He stumbled, trying to make his sentence sound playful; but it turned out as it generally did when he talked to the children, lame and rather pompous.

Sara looked at her father as if she were considering him.

“To—er—to—er—reform one’s habits,” she repeated. Emptied of all meaning, she had got the rhythm of his words exactly. The effect was somehow comic. The Colonel laughed; but Digby, he felt, was annoyed. He only patted Sara on the head when she came to say good-night; but he kissed Maggie as she passed him.

“Had a nice birthday?” he said, pulling her to him. Abel made it an excuse to go.

“But there is no need for you to go yet, Abel?” Eugénie protested as he held out his hand.

She kept hold of his hand as if to prevent him from going. What did she mean? Did she want him to stay, did she want him to go? Her eyes, her large dark eyes, were ambiguous.

“But you’re dining out?” he said.

“Yes,” she replied, letting his hand fall, and as she said no more there was nothing for it, he supposed—he must take himself off.

“Oh, I can find my way out alone,” he said as he left the room.

He went downstairs rather slowly. He felt depressed and disappointed. He had not seen her alone; he had not told her anything. Perhaps he never would tell anybody anything. After all, he thought as he went downstairs, slowly, heavily, it was his own affair; it didn’t matter to anybody else. One must burn one’s own smoke, he thought as he took his hat. He glanced round.

Yes … the house was full of pretty things. He looked vaguely at a great crimson chair with gilt claws that stood in the hall. He envied Digby his house, his wife, his children. He was getting old, he felt. All his children were grown-up; they had left him. He paused on the doorstep and looked out into the street. It was quite dark; lamps were lit; the autumn was drawing in; and as he marched up the dark windy street, now spotted with raindrops, a puff of smoke blew full in his face; and leaves were falling.

[]

1907

It was midsummer; and the nights were hot. The moon, falling on water, made it white, inscrutable, whether deep or shallow. But where the moonlight fell on solid objects it gave them a burnish and a silver plating, so that even the leaves in country roads seemed varnished. All along the silent country roads leading to London carts plodded; the iron reins fixed in the iron hands, for vegetables, fruit, flowers travelled slowly. Heaped high with round crates of cabbage, cherries, carnations, they looked like caravans piled with the goods of tribes migrating in search of water, driven by enemies to seek new pasturage. On they plodded, down this road, that road, keeping close to the kerb. Even the horses, had they been blind, could have heard the hum of London in the distance; and the drivers, dozing, yet saw through half shut eyes the fiery gauze of the eternally burning city. At dawn, at Covent Garden, they laid down their burdens; tables and trestles, even the cobbles were frilled as with some celestial laundry with cabbages, cherries and carnations.

All the windows were open. Music sounded. From behind crimson curtains, rendered semi-transparent and sometimes blowing wide came the sound of the eternal waltz—After the ball is over, after the dance is done—like a serpent that swallowed its own tail, since the ring was complete from Hammersmith to Shoreditch. Over and over again it was repeated by trombones outside public houses; errand boys whistled it; bands inside private rooms where people were dancing played it. There they sat at little tables at Wapping in the romantic Inn that overhung the river, between timber warehouses where barges were moored; and here again in Mayfair. Each table had its lamp; its canopy of tight red silk, and the flowers that had sucked damp from the earth that noon relaxed and spread their petals in vases. Each table had its pyramid of strawberries, its pale plump quail; and Martin, after India, after Africa, found it exciting to talk to a girl with bare shoulders, to a woman iridescent with green beetles wings in her hair in a manner that the waltz condoned and half concealed under its amorous blandishments. Did it matter what one said? For she looked over her shoulder, only half listening, as a man came in wearing decorations, and a lady, in black with diamonds, beckoned him to a private corner.

As the night wore on a tender blue light lay on the market carts still plodding close to the kerb, past Westminster, past the yellow round clocks, the coffee stalls and the statues that stood there in the dawn holding so stiffly their rods or rolls of paper. And the scavengers followed after, sluicing the pavements. Cigarette ends, little bits of silver paper, orange peel—all the litter of the day was swept off the pavement and still the carts plodded, and the cabs trotted, indefatigably, along the dowdy pavements of Kensington, under the sparkling lights of Mayfair, carrying ladies with high head dresses and gentlemen in white waistcoats along the hammered dry roads which looked in the moonlight as if they were plated with silver.

“Look!” said Eugénie as the cab trotted over the bridge in the summer twilight. “Isn’t that lovely?”

She waved her hand at the water. They were crossing the Serpentine; but her exclamation was only an aside; she was listening to what her husband was saying. Their daughter Magdalena was with them; and she looked where her mother pointed. There was the Serpentine, red in the setting sun; the trees grouped together, sculptured, losing their detail; and the ghostly architecture of the little bridge, white at the end, composed the scene. The lights—the sun-light and the artificial light—were strangely mixed.

“… of course it’s put the Government in a fix,” Sir Digby was saying. “But then that’s what he wants.”

“Yes … he’ll make a name for himself, that young man,” said Lady Pargiter.

The cab passed over the bridge. It entered the shadow of the trees. Now it left the Park and joined the long line of cabs, taking people in evening dress to plays, to dinner-parties, that was streaming towards the Marble Arch. The light grew more and more artificial; yellower and yellower. Eugénie leant across and touched something on her daughter’s dress. Maggie looked up. She had thought that they were still talking politics.

“So,” said her mother, arranging the flower in front of her dress. She put her head a little on one side and looked at her daughter approvingly. Then she gave a sudden laugh and threw her hand out. “D’you know what made me so late?” she said. “That imp, Sally …”

But her husband interrupted her. He had caught sight of an illuminated clock.

“We shall be late,” he said.

“But eight-fifteen means eight-thirty,” said Eugénie as they turned down a side street.

All was silent in the house at Browne Street. A ray from the street lamp fell through the fanlight and, rather capriciously, lit up a tray of glasses on the hall table; a top hat; and a chair with gilt paws. The chair, standing empty, as if waiting for someone, had a look of ceremony; as if it stood on the cracked floor of some Italian ante-room. But all was silent. Antonio, the man servant, was asleep; Mollie, the housemaid, was asleep; downstairs in the basement a door flapped to and fro—otherwise all was silent.

Sally in her bedroom at the top of the house turned on her side and listened intently. She thought she heard the front door click. A burst of dance music came in through the open window and made it impossible to hear.

She sat up in bed and looked out through the slit of the blind. Through the gap she could see a slice of the sky; then roofs; then the tree in the garden; then the backs of houses opposite standing in a long row. One of the houses was brilliantly lit and from the long open windows came dance music. They were waltzing. She saw shadows twirling across the blind. It was impossible to read; impossible to sleep. First there was the music; then a burst of talk; then people came out into the garden; voices chattered, then the music began again.

It was a hot summer’s night, and though it was late, the whole world seemed to be alive; the rush of traffic sounded distant but incessant.

A faded brown book lay on her bed; as if she had been reading. But it was impossible to read; impossible to sleep. She lay back on the pillow with her hands behind her head.

“And he says,” she murmured, “the world is nothing but …” She paused. What did he say? Nothing but thought, was it? she asked herself as if she had already forgotten. Well, since it was impossible to read and impossible to sleep, she would let herself be thought. It was easier to act things than to think them. Legs, body, hands, the whole of her must be laid out passively to take part in this universal process of thinking which the man said was the world living. She stretched herself out. Where did thought begin?

In the feet? she asked. There they were, jutting out under the single sheet. They seemed separated, very far away. She closed her eyes. Then against her will something in her hardened. It was impossible to act thought. She became something; a root; lying sunk in the earth; veins seemed to thread the cold mass; the tree put forth branches; the branches had leaves.

“—the sun shines through the leaves,” she said, waggling her finger. She opened her eyes in order to verify the sun on the leaves and saw the actual tree standing out there in the garden. Far from being dappled with sunlight, it had no leaves at all. She felt for a moment as if she had been contradicted. For the tree was black, dead black.

She leant her elbow on the sill and looked out at the tree. A confused clapping sound came from the room where they were having the dance. The music had stopped; people began to come down the iron staircase into the garden which was marked out with blue and yellow lamps dotted along the wall. The voices grew louder. More people came and more people came. The dotted square of green was full of the flowing pale figures of women in evening dress; of the upright black-and-white figures of men in evening dress. She watched them moving in and out. They were talking and laughing; but they were too far off for her to hear what they were saying. Sometimes a single word or a laugh rose above the rest, and then there was a confused babble of sound. In their own garden all was empty and silent. A cat slid stealthily along the top of a wall; stopped; and then went on again as if drawn on some secret errand. Another dance struck up.

“Over again, over and over again!” she exclaimed impatiently. The air, laden with the curious dry smell of London earth, puffed in her face, blowing the blind out. Stretched flat on her bed, she saw the moon; it seemed immensely high above her. Little vapours were moving across the surface. Now they parted and she saw engravings chased over the white disc. What were they, she wondered—mountains? valleys? And if valleys, she said to herself half closing her eyes, then white trees; then icy hollows, and nightingales, two nightingales calling to each other, calling and answering each other across the valleys. The waltz music took the words “calling and answering each other” and flung them out; but as it repeated the same rhythm again and again, it coarsened them, it destroyed them. The dance music interfered with everything. At first exciting, then it became boring and finally intolerable. Yet it was only twenty minutes to one.

Her lip raised itself, like that of a horse that is going to bite. The little brown book was dull. She reached her hand above her head and took down another book from the shelf of battered books without looking at it. She opened the book at random; but her eye was caught by one of the couples who were still sitting out in the garden though the others had gone in. What were they saying, she wondered? There was something gleaming in the grass, and, as far as she could see, the black-and-white figure stooped and picked it up.

“And as he picks it up,” she murmured, looking out, “he says to the lady beside him: Behold, Miss Smith, what I have found on the grass—a fragment of my heart; of my broken heart, he says. I have found it in the grass; and I wear it on my breast”—she hummed the words in time to the melancholy waltz music—“my broken heart, this broken glass, for love——” she paused and glanced at the book. On the fly-leaf was written:

“Sara Pargiter from her Cousin Edward Pargiter.”

“… for love,” she concluded, “is best.”

She turned to the title-page.

“The Antigone of Sophocles, done into English verse by Edward Pargiter,” she read.

Once more she looked out of the window. The couple had moved. They were going up the iron staircase. She watched them. They went into the ballroom. “And suppose in the middle of the dance,” she murmured, “she takes it out; and looks at it and says, ‘What is this?’ and it’s only a piece of broken glass—of broken glass….” She looked down at the book again.

“The Antigone of Sophocles,” she read. The book was brand-new; it cracked as she opened it; this was the first time she had opened it.

“The Antigone of Sophocles, done into English verse by Edward Pargiter,” she read again. He had given it her in Oxford; one hot afternoon when they had been trailing through chapels and libraries. “Trailing and wailing,” she hummed, turning over the pages, “and he said to me, getting up from the low armchair, and brushing his hand through his hair”—she glanced out of the window—“‘my wasted youth, my wasted youth.’” The waltz was now at its most intense, its most melancholy. “Taking in his hand,” she hummed in time to it, “this broken glass, this faded heart, he said to me …” Here the music stopped; there was a sound of clapping; the dancers once more came out into the garden.

She skipped through the pages. At first she read a line or two at random; then, from the litter of broken words, scenes rose, quickly, inaccurately, as she skipped. The unburied body of a murdered man lay like a fallen tree-trunk, like a statue, with one foot stark in the air. Vultures gathered. Down they flopped on the silver sand. With a lurch, with a reel, the top-heavy birds came waddling; with a flap of the grey throat swinging, they hopped—she beat her hand on the counterpane as she read—to that lump there. Quick, quick, quick with repeated jerks they struck the mouldy flesh. Yes. She glanced at the tree outside in the garden. The unburied body of the murdered man lay on the sand. Then in a yellow cloud came whirling—who? She turned the page quickly. Antigone? She came whirling out of the dust-cloud to where the vultures were reeling and flung white sand over the blackened foot. She stood there letting fall white dust over the blackened foot. Then behold! there were more clouds; dark clouds; the horsemen leapt down; she was seized; her wrists were bound with withies; and they bore her, thus bound—where?

There was a roar of laughter from the garden. She looked up. Where did they take her? she asked. The garden was full of people. She could not hear a word that they were saying. The figures were moving in and out.

“To the estimable court of the respected ruler?” she murmured, picking up a word or two at random, for she was still looking out into the garden. The man’s name was Creon. He buried her. It was a moonlight night. The blades of the cactuses were sharp silver. The man in the loincloth gave three sharp taps with his mallet on the brick. She was buried alive. The tomb was a brick mound. There was just room for her to lie straight out. Straight out in a brick tomb, she said. And that’s the end, she yawned, shutting the book.

She laid herself out, under the cold smooth sheets, and pulled the pillow over her ears. The one sheet and the one blanket fitted softly round her. At the bottom of the bed was a long stretch of cool fresh mattress. The sound of the dance music became dulled. Her body dropped suddenly; then reached ground. A dark wing brushed her mind, leaving a pause; a blank space. Everything—the music, the voices—became stretched and generalised. The book fell on the floor. She was asleep.

“It’s a lovely night,” said the girl who was going up the iron steps with her partner. She rested her hand on the balustrade. It felt very cold. She looked up; a slice of yellow light lay round the moon. It seemed to laugh round it. Her partner looked up too, and then mounted another step without saying anything for he was shy.

“Going to the match tomorrow?” he said stiffly, for they scarcely knew each other.

“If my brother gets off in time to take me,” she said, and went up another step too. Then, as they entered the ballroom, he gave her a little bow and left her; for his partner was waiting.

The moon which was now clear of clouds lay in a bare space as if the light had consumed the heaviness of the clouds and left a perfectly clear pavement, a dancing ground for revelry. For some time the dappled iridescence of the sky remained unbroken. Then there was a puff of wind; and a little cloud crossed the moon.

There was a sound in the bedroom. Sara turned over.

“Who’s that?” she murmured. She sat up and rubbed her eyes.

It was her sister. She stood at the door, hesitating. “Asleep?” she said in a low voice.

“No,” said Sara. She rubbed her eyes. “I’m awake,” she said, opening them.

Maggie came across the room and sat down on the edge of the bed. The blind was blowing out; the sheets were slipping off the bed. She felt dazed for a moment. After the ballroom, it looked so untidy. There was a tumbler with a toothbrush in it on the wash-stand; the towel was crumpled on the towel-horse; and a book had fallen on the floor. She stooped and picked up the book. As she did so, the music burst out down the street. She held back the blind. The women in pale dresses, the men in black and white, were crowding up the stairs into the ballroom. Snatches of talk and laughter were blown across the garden.

“Is there a dance?” she asked.

“Yes. Down the street,” said Sara.

Maggie looked out. At this distance the music sounded romantic, mysterious, and the colours flowed over each other, neither pink nor white nor blue.

Maggie stretched herself and unpinned the flower that she was wearing. It was drooping; the white petals were stained with black marks. She looked out of the window again. The mixture of lights was very odd; one leaf was a lurid green; another was a bright white. The branches crossed each other at different levels. Then Sally laughed.

“Did anybody give you a piece of glass,” she said, “saying to you, Miss Pargiter … my broken heart?”

“No,” said Maggie, “why should they?” The flower fell off her lap onto the floor.

“I was thinking,” said Sara. “The people in the garden …”

She waved her hand at the window. They were silent for a moment, listening to the dance music.

“And who did you sit next?” Sara asked after a time.

“A man in gold lace,” said Maggie.

“In gold lace?” Sara repeated.

Maggie was silent. She was getting used to the room; the discrepancy between this litter and the shiny ballroom was leaving her. She envied her sister lying in bed with the window open and the breeze blowing in.

“Because he was going to a party,” she said. She paused. Something had caught her eye. A branch swayed up and down in the little breeze. Maggie held the blind so that the window was uncurtained. Now she could see the whole sky, and the houses and the branches in the garden.

“It’s the moon,” she said. It was the moon that was making the leaves white. They both looked at the moon, which shone like a silver coin, perfectly polished, very sharp and hard.

“But if they don’t say O my broken heart,” said Sara, “what do they say, at parties?”

Maggie flicked off a white fleck that had stuck to her arm from her gloves.

“Some people say one thing,” she said, getting up, “and some people say another.”

She picked up the little brown book which lay on the counterpane and smoothed out the bedclothes. Sara took the book out of her hand.

“This man,” she said, tapping the ugly little brown volume, “says the world’s nothing but thought, Maggie.”

“Does he?” said Maggie, putting the book on the wash-stand. It was a device, she knew, to keep her standing there, talking.

“D’you think it’s true?” Sara asked.

“Possibly,” said Maggie, without thinking what she was saying. She put out her hand to draw the curtain.

“The world’s nothing but thought, does he say?” she repeated, holding the curtain apart.

She had been thinking something of the kind when the cab crossed the Serpentine; when her mother interrupted her. She had been thinking, Am I that, or am I this? Are we one, or are we separate—something of the kind.

“Then what about trees and colours?” she said, turning round.

“Trees and colours?” Sara repeated.

“Would there be trees if we didn’t see them?” said Maggie.

“What’s ‘I’? … ‘I’…” She stopped. She did not know what she meant. She was talking nonsense.

“Yes,” said Sara. “What’s ‘I’?” She held her sister tight by the skirt, whether she wanted to prevent her from going, or whether she wanted to argue the question.

“What’s ‘I’?” she repeated.

But there was a rustling outside the door and her mother came in.

“Oh my dear children!” she exclaimed, “still out of bed? Still talking?”

She came across the room, beaming, glowing, as if she were still under the influence of the party. Jewels flashed on her neck and her arms. She was extraordinarily handsome. She glanced round her.

“And the flower’s on the floor, and everything’s so untidy,” she said. She picked up the flower that Maggie had dropped and put it to her lips.

“Because I was reading, Mama, because I was waiting,” said Sara. She took her mother’s hand and stroked the bare arm. She imitated her mother’s manner so exactly that Maggie smiled. They were the very opposite of each other—Lady Pargiter so sumptuous; Sally so angular. But it’s worked, she thought to herself, as Lady Pargiter allowed herself to be pulled down onto the bed. The imitation had been perfect.

“But you must go to sleep, Sal,” she protested. “What did the doctor say? Lie straight, lie still, he said.” She pushed her back onto the pillows.

“I am lying straight and still,” said Sara. “Now”—she looked up at her—“tell me about the party.”

Maggie stood upright in the window. She watched the couples coming down the iron staircase. Soon the garden was full of pale whites and pinks, moving in and out. She half heard them behind her talking about the party.

“It was a very nice party,” her mother was saying.

Maggie looked out of the window. The square of the garden was filled with differently tinted colours. They seemed to ripple one over the other until they entered the angle where the light from the house fell, when they suddenly turned to ladies and gentlemen in full evening dress.

“No fish-knives?” she heard Sara saying.

She turned.

“Who was the man I sat next?” she asked.

“Sir Matthew Mayhew,” said Lady Pargiter.

“Who is Sir Matthew Mayhew?” said Maggie.

“A most distinguished man, Maggie!” said her mother, flinging her hand out.

“A most distinguished man,” Sara echoed her.

“But he is,” Lady Pargiter repeated, smiling at her daughter whom she loved, perhaps because of her shoulder.

“It was a great honour to sit next him, Maggie,” she continued. “A great honour,” she said reprovingly. She paused, as if she saw a little scene. She looked up.

“And then,” she resumed, “when Mary Palmer says to me, Which is your daughter? I see Maggie, miles away, at the other end of the room, talking to Martin, whom she might have met every day of her life in an omnibus!”

Her words were stressed so that they seemed to rise and fall. She emphasised the rhythm still further by tapping with her fingers on Sally’s bare arm.

“But I don’t see Martin every day,” Maggie protested.

“I haven’t seen him since he came back from Africa.” Her mother interrupted her.

“But you don’t go to parties, my dear Maggie, to talk to your own cousins. You go to parties to——”

Here the dance music crashed out. The first chords seemed possessed of frantic energy, as if they were summoning the dancers imperiously to return. Lady Pargiter stopped in the middle of her sentence. She sighed; her body seemed to become indolent and suave. The heavy lids lowered themselves slightly over her large dark eyes. She swayed her head slowly in time to the music.

“What’s that they’re playing?” she murmured. She hummed the tune, beating time with her hand. “Something I used to dance to.”

“Dance it now, Mama,” said Sara.

“Yes, Mama. Show us how you used to dance,” Maggie urged her.

“But without a partner——?” Lady Pargiter protested.

Maggie pushed a chair away.

“Imagine a partner,” Sara urged her.

“Well,” said Lady Pargiter. She rose. “It was something like this,” she said. She paused; she held her skirt out with one hand; she slightly crooked the other in which she held the flower; she twirled round and round in the space which Maggie had cleared. She moved with extraordinary stateliness. All her limbs seemed to bend and flow in the lilt and the curve of the music; which became louder and clearer as she danced to it. She circled in and out among the chairs and tables and then, as the music stopped, “There!” she exclaimed. Her body seemed to fold and close itself together as she sighed “There!” and sank all in one movement on the edge of the bed.

“Wonderful!” Maggie exclaimed. Her eyes rested on her mother with admiration.

“Nonsense,” Lady Pargiter laughed, panting slightly. “I’m much too old to dance now; but when I was young; when I was your age——” She sat there panting.

“You danced out of the house onto the terrace and found a little note folded in your bouquet——” said Sara, stroking her mother’s arm. “Tell us that story, Mama.”

“Not tonight,” said Lady Pargiter. “Listen—there’s the clock striking!”

Since the Abbey was so near, the sound of the hour filled the room; softly, tumultuously, as if it were a flurry of soft sighs hurrying one on top of another, yet concealing something hard. Lady Pargiter counted. It was very late.

“I’ll tell you the true story one of these days,” she said as she bent to kiss her daughter goodnight.

“Now! Now!” cried Sara, holding her fast.

“No, not now—not now!” Lady Pargiter laughed, snatching away her hand. “There’s Papa calling me!”

They heard footsteps in the passage outside, and then Sir Digby’s voice at the door.

“Eugénie! It’s very late, Eugénie!” they heard him say.

“Coming!” she cried. “Coming!”

Sara caught her by the train of her dress. “You haven’t told us the story of the bouquet, Mamma!” she cried.

“Eugénie!” Sir Digby repeated. His voice sounded peremptory. “Have you locked——”

“Yes, yes, yes,” said Eugénie. “I will tell you the true story another time,” she said, freeing herself from her daughter’s grasp. She kissed them both quickly and went out of the room.

“She won’t tell us,” said Maggie, picking up her gloves. She spoke with some bitterness.

They listened to the voices talking in the passage. They could hear their father’s voice. He was expostulating. His voice sounded querulous and cross.

“Pirouetting up and down with his sword between his legs; with his opera hat under his arm and his sword between his legs,” said Sara, pummelling her pillows viciously.

The voices went further away, downstairs.

“Who was the note from, d’you think?” said Maggie. She paused, looking at her sister burrowing into her pillows.

“The note? What note?” said Sara. “Oh, the note in the bouquet. I don’t remember,” she said. She yawned.

Maggie shut the window and pulled the curtain but she left a chink of light.

“Pull it tight, Maggie,” said Sara irritably. “Shut out that din.”

She curled herself up with her back to the window. She had raised a hump of pillow against her head as if to shut out the dance music that was still going on. She pressed her face into a cleft of the pillows. She looked like a chrysalis wrapped round in the sharp white folds of the sheet. Only the tip of her nose was visible. Her hip and her feet jutted out at the end of the bed covered by a single sheet. She gave a profound sigh that was half a snore; she was asleep already.

Maggie went along the passage. Then she saw that there were lights in the hall beneath. She stopped and looked down over the banister. The hall was lit up. She could see the great Italian chair with the gilt claws that stood in the hall. Her mother had thrown her evening cloak over it, so that it fell in soft golden folds over the crimson cover. She could see a tray with whisky and a soda-water syphon on the hall table. Then she heard the voices of her father and mother as they came up the kitchen stairs. They had been down in the basement; there had been a burglary up the street; her mother had promised to have a new lock put on the kitchen door but had forgotten. She could hear her father say:

“… they’d melt it down; we should never get it back again.”

Maggie went on a few steps upstairs.

“I’m so sorry, Digby,” Eugénie said as they came into the hall. “I will tie a knot in my handkerchief; I will go directly after breakfast tomorrow morning…. Yes,” she said, gathering her cloak in her arms, “I will go myself, and I will say ‘I’ve had enough of your excuses, Mr Toye. No, Mr Toye, you have deceived me once too often. And after all these years!’”

Then there was a pause. Maggie could hear soda-water squirted into a tumbler; the chink of a glass; and then the lights went out.

[]

1908

It was March and the wind was blowing. But it was not “blowing.” It was scraping, scourging. It was so cruel. So unbecoming. Not merely did it bleach faces and raise red spots on noses; it tweaked up skirts; showed stout legs; made trousers reveal skeleton shins. There was no roundness, no fruit in it. Rather it was like the curve of a scythe which cuts, not corn, usefully; but destroys, revelling in sheer sterility. With one blast it blew out colour—even a Rembrandt in the National Gallery, even a solid ruby in a Bond Street window: one blast and they were gone. Had it any breeding place it was in the Isle of Dogs among tin cans lying beside a workhouse drab on the banks of a polluted city. It tossed up rotten leaves, gave them another span of degraded existence; scorned, derided them, yet had nothing to put in the place of the scorned, the derided. Down they fell. Uncreative, unproductive, yelling its joy in destruction, its power to peel off the bark, the bloom, and show the bare bone, it paled every window; drove old gentlemen further and further into the leather smelling recesses of clubs; and old ladies to sit eyeless, leather cheeked, joyless among the tassels and antimacassars of their bedrooms and kitchens. Triumphing in its wantonness it emptied the streets; swept flesh before it; and coming smack against a dust cart standing outside the Army and Navy Stores, scattered along the pavement a litter of old envelopes; twists of hair; papers already blood smeared, yellow smeared, smudged with print and sent them scudding to plaster legs, lamp posts, pillar boxes, and fold themselves frantically against area railings.

Matty Stiles, the caretaker, huddled in the basement of the house in Browne Street, looked up. There was a rattle of dust along the pavement. It worked its way under the doors, through the window frames; on to chests and dressers. But she didn’t care. She was one of the unlucky ones. She had been thinking it was a safe job, sure to last the summer out anyhow. The lady was dead; the gentleman too. She had got the job through her son the policeman. The house with its basement would never let this side of Christmas—so they told her. She had only to show parties round who came with orders to view from the agent. And she always mentioned the basement—how damp it was. “Look at that stain on the ceiling.” There it was, sure enough. All the same, the party from China took a fancy to it. It suited him, he said. He had business in the city. She was one of the unlucky ones—after three months to turn out and lodge with her son in Pimlico.

A bell rang. Let him ring, ring, ring, she growled. She wasn’t going to open the door any more. There he was standing on the door-step. She could see a pair of legs against the railing. Let him ring as much as he liked. The house was sold. Couldn’t he see the notice on the board? Couldn’t he read it? Hadn’t he eyes? She huddled closer to the fire, which was covered with pale ash. She could see his legs there, standing on the door-step, between the canaries’ cage and the dirty linen which she had been going to wash, but this wind made her shoulder ache cruel. Let him ring the house down, for all she cared.

Martin was standing there.

“Sold” was written on a strip of bright red paper pasted across the house-agent’s board.

“Already!” said Martin. He had made a little circle to look at the house in Browne Street. And it was already sold. The red strip gave him a shock. It was sold already, and Digby had only been dead three months—Eugénie not much more than a year. He stood for a moment gazing at the black windows now grimed with dust. It was a house of character; built some time in the eighteenth century. Eugénie had been proud of it. And I used to like going there, he thought. But now an old newspaper was on the door-step; wisps of straw had caught in the railings; and he could see, for there were no blinds, into an empty room. A woman was peering up at him from behind the bars of a cage in the basement. It was no use ringing. He turned away. A feeling of something extinguished came over him as he went down the street.

It’s a grimy, it’s a sordid end, he thought; I used to enjoy going there. But he disliked brooding over unpleasant thoughts. What’s the good of it? he asked himself.

“The King of Spain’s daughter,” he hummed as he turned the corner, “came to visit me …”

“And how much longer,” he asked himself, pressing the bell, as he stood on the door-step of the house in Abercorn Terrace, “is old Crosby going to keep me waiting?” The wind was very cold.

He stood there, looking at the buff-coloured front of the large, architecturally insignificant, but no doubt convenient family mansion in which his father and sister still lived. “She takes her time nowadays,” he thought, shivering in the wind. But here the door opened, and Crosby appeared.

“Hullo, Crosby!” he said.

She beamed on him so that her gold tooth showed. He was always her favourite, they said, and the thought pleased him today.

“How’s the world treating you?” he asked, as he gave her his hat.

She was just the same—more shrivelled, more gnat-like, and her blue eyes were more prominent than ever.

“Feeling the rheumatics?” he asked, as she helped him off with his coat. She grinned, silently. He felt friendly; he was glad to find her much as usual. “And Miss Eleanor?” he asked, as he opened the drawing-room door. The room was empty. She was not there. But she had been there, for there was a book on the table. Nothing had been changed he was glad to see. He stood in front of the fire and looked at his mother’s picture. In the course of the past few years it had ceased to be his mother; it had become a work of art. But it was dirty.

There used to be a flower in the grass, he thought, peering into a dark corner: but now there was nothing but dirty brown paint. And what’s she been reading? he wondered. He took the book that was propped up against the teapot and looked at it. “Renan,” he read. “Why Renan?” he asked himself, beginning to read as he waited.

“Mr Martin, Miss,” said Crosby, opening the study door. Eleanor looked round. She was standing by her father’s chair with her hands full of long strips of newspaper cuttings, as if she had been reading them aloud. There was a chess-board in front of him; the chess-men were set out for a game; but he was lying back in his chair. He looked lethargic, and rather gloomy.

“Put ’em away…. Keep ’em safe somewhere,” he said, jerking his thumb at the cuttings. That was a sign that he had grown very old, Eleanor thought—wanting newspaper cuttings kept. He had grown inert and ponderous after his stroke; there were red veins in his nose and in his cheeks. She too felt old, heavy and dull.

“Mr Martin’s called,” Crosby repeated.

“Martin’s come,” Eleanor said. Her father seemed not to hear. He sat still with his head sunk on his breast. “Martin,” Eleanor repeated. “Martin …”

Did he want to see him or did he not want to see him? She waited as if for some sluggish thought to rise. At last he gave a little grunt; but what it meant she was not certain.

“I’ll send him in after tea,” she said. She paused for a moment. He roused himself and began fumbling with his chess-men. He still had courage, she observed with pride. He still insisted upon doing things for himself.

She went into the drawing-room and found Martin standing in front of the placid, smiling picture of their mother. He held a book in his hand.

“Why Renan?” he said as she came in. He shut the book and kissed her. “Why Renan?” he repeated. She flushed slightly. It made her shy, for some reason, that he had found the book there, open. She sat down and laid the press cuttings on the tea-table.

“How’s Papa?” he asked. She had lost something of her bright colour, he thought, glancing at her, and her hair had a tuft of grey in it.

“Rather gloomy,” she said, glancing at the press cuttings.

“I wonder,” she added, “who writes that sort of thing?”

“What sort of thing?” said Martin. He picked up one of the crinkled strips and began reading it: “‘… an exceptionally able public servant … a man of wide interests….’ Oh, Digby,” he said. “Obituaries. I passed the house this afternoon,” he added. “It’s sold.”

“Already?” said Eleanor.

“It looked very shut-up and desolate,” he added. “There was a dirty old woman in the basement.”

Eleanor took out a hair-pin and began fraying the wick of the kettle. Martin watched her for a moment in silence.

“I liked going there,” he said at length. “I liked Eugénie,” he added.

Eleanor paused.

“Yes …” she said doubtfully. She had never felt at her ease with her. “She exaggerated,” she added.

“Well of course,” Martin laughed. He smiled, recalling some memory. “She had less sense of truth than … that’s no sort of use, Nell,” he broke off, irritated by her fumbling with the wick.

“Yes, yes,” she protested. “It boils in time.”

She paused. Stretching out towards the tea-caddy, she measured the tea. “One, two, three, four,” she counted.

She still used the nice old silver tea-caddy, he noticed, with the sliding lid. He watched her measuring the tea methodically—one, two, three, four. He was silent.

“We can’t tell a lie to save our souls,” he said abruptly.

What makes him say that? Eleanor wondered.

“When I was with them in Italy—,” she said aloud. But here the door opened and Crosby came in carrying some sort of dish. She left the door ajar and a dog pushed in after her.

“I mean——” Eleanor added; but she could not say what she meant with Crosby in the room fidgeting about.

“It’s time Miss Eleanor got a new kettle,” said Martin, pointing to the old brass kettle, faintly engraved with a design of roses, which he had always hated.

“Crosby,” said Eleanor, still poking with her pin, “doesn’t hold with new inventions. Crosby won’t trust herself in the Tube, will you, Crosby?”

Crosby grinned. They always spoke to her in the third person, because she never answered but only grinned. The dog snuffed at the dish she had just put down. “Crosby’s letting that beast get much too fat,” said Martin, pointing at the dog.

“That’s what I’m always telling her,” said Eleanor.

“If I were you, Crosby,” said Martin, “I’d cut down his meals and take him for a brisk run round the park every morning.” Crosby opened her mouth wide.

“Oh, Mr Martin!” she protested, shocked by his brutality into speech.

The dog followed her out of the room.

“Crosby’s the same as ever,” said Martin.

Eleanor had lifted the lid of the kettle and was looking in. There were no bubbles on the water yet.

“Damn that kettle,” said Martin. He took up one of the newspaper cuttings and began to make it into a spill.

“No, no, Papa wants them kept,” said Eleanor. “But he wasn’t like that,” she said, laying her hand on the newspaper cuttings. “Not in the least.”

“What was he like?” Martin asked.

Eleanor paused. She could see her uncle clearly in her mind’s eye; he held his top-hat in his hand; he laid his hand on her shoulder as they stopped in front of some picture. But how could she describe him?

“He used to take me to the National Gallery,” she said.

“Very cultivated, of course,” said Martin. “But he was such a damned snob.”

“Only on the surface,” said Eleanor.

“And always finding fault with Eugénie about little things,” Martin added.

“But think of living with her,” said Eleanor.

“That manner——” She threw her hand out; but not as Eugénie threw her hand out, Martin thought.

“I liked her,” he said. “I liked going there.” He saw the untidy room; the piano open; the window open; a wind blowing the curtains, and his aunt coming forward with her arms open. “What a pleasure, Martin! what a pleasure!” she would say. What had her private life been, he wondered—her love affairs? She must have had them—obviously, obviously.

“Wasn’t there some story,” he began, “about a letter?” He wanted to say, Didn’t she have an affair with somebody? But it was more difficult to be open with his sister than with other women, because she treated him as if he were a small boy still. Had Eleanor ever been in love, he wondered, looking at her.

“Yes,” she said. “There was a story——”

But here the electric bell rang sharply. She stopped.

“Papa,” she said. She half rose.

“No,” said Martin. “I’ll go.” He got up. “I promised him a game of chess.”

“Thanks, Martin. He’ll enjoy that,” said Eleanor with relief as he left the room, and she found herself alone.

She leant back in her chair. How terrible old age was, she thought; shearing off all one’s faculties, one by one, but leaving something alive in the centre: leaving—she swept up the press cuttings—a game of chess, a drive in the park, and a visit from old General Arbuthnot in the evening.

It was better to die, like Eugénie and Digby, in the prime of life with all one’s faculties about one. But he wasn’t like that, she thought, glancing at the press cuttings. “A man of singularly handsome presence … shot, fished, and played golf.” No, not like that in the least. He had been a curious man; weak; sensitive; liking titles; liking pictures; and often depressed, she guessed, by his wife’s exuberance. She pushed the cuttings away and took up her book. It was odd how different the same person seemed to two different people, she thought. There was Martin, liking Eugénie; and she, liking Digby. She began to read.

She had always wanted to know about Christianity—how it began; what it meant, originally. God is love, The kingdom of Heaven is within us, sayings like that she thought, turning over the pages, what did they mean? The actual words were very beautiful. But who said them—when? Then the spout of the tea-kettle puffed steam at her and she moved it away. The wind was rattling the windows in the back room; it was bending the little bushes; they still had no leaves on them. It was what a man said under a fig tree, on a hill, she thought. And then another man wrote it down. But suppose that what that man says is just as false as what this man—she touched the press cuttings with her spoon—says about Digby? And here am I, she thought, looking at the china in the Dutch cabinet, in this drawing-room, getting a little spark from what someone said all those years ago—here it comes (the china was changing from blue to livid) skipping over all those mountains, all those seas. She found her place and began to read.

But a sound in the hall interrupted her. Was someone coming in? She listened. No, it was the wind. The wind was terrific. It pressed on the house; gripped it tight, then let it fall apart. Upstairs a door slammed; a window must be open in the bedroom above. A blind was tapping. It was difficult to fix her mind on Renan. She liked it, though. French she could read easily of course; and Italian; and a little German. But what vast gaps there were, what blank spaces, she thought leaning back in her chair, in her knowledge! How little she knew about anything. Take this cup for instance; she held it out in front of her. What was it made of? Atoms? And what were atoms, and how did they stick together? The smooth hard surface of the china with its red flowers seemed to her for a second a marvellous mystery. But there was another sound in the hall. It was the wind, but it was also a voice, talking. It must be Martin. But who could he be talking to, she wondered? She listened, but she could not hear what he was saying because of the wind. And why, she asked herself, did he say We can’t tell a lie to save our souls? He was thinking about himself; one always knew when people were thinking about themselves by their tone of voice. Perhaps he was justifying himself for having left the Army. That had been courageous, she thought; but isn’t it odd, she mused, listening to the voices, that he should be such a dandy too? He was wearing a new blue suit with white stripes on it. And he had shaved off his moustache. He ought never to have been a soldier, she thought; he was much too pugnacious…. They were still talking. She could not hear what he was saying, but from the sound of his voice it came over her that he must have a great many love affairs. Yes—it became perfectly obvious to her, listening to his voice through the door, that he had a great many love affairs. But who with? and why do men think love affairs so important? she asked as the door opened.

“Hullo, Rose!” she exclaimed, surprised to see her sister come in too. “I thought you were in Northumberland!”

“You thought I was in Northumberland!” Rose laughed, kissing her. “But why? I said the eighteenth.”

“But isn’t today the eleventh?” said Eleanor.

“You’re only a week behind the times, Nell,” said Martin.

“Then I must have dated all my letters wrong!” Eleanor exclaimed. She glanced apprehensively at her writing-table. The walrus, with a worn patch in its bristles, no longer stood there.

“Tea, Rose?” she asked.

“No. It’s a bath I want,” said Rose. She threw off her hat and ran her fingers through her hair.

“You’re looking very well,” said Eleanor, thinking how handsome she looked. But she had a scratch on her chin.

“A positive beauty, isn’t she?” Martin laughed at her.

Rose threw her head up rather like a horse. They always bickered, Eleanor thought—Martin and Rose. Rose was handsome, but she wished she dressed better. She was dressed in a green hairy coat and skirt with leather buttons, and she carried a shiny bag. She had been holding meetings in the North.

“I want a bath,” Rose repeated. “I’m dirty. And what’s all this?” she said, pointing to the press cuttings on the table. “Oh, Uncle Digby,” she added casually, pushing them away. He had been dead some months now; they were already yellowish and curled.

“Martin says the house has been sold,” said Eleanor.

“Has it?” she said indifferently. She broke off a piece of cake and began munching it. “Spoiling my dinner,” she said. “But I had no time for lunch.”

“What a woman of action she is!” Martin chaffed her.

“And the meetings?” Eleanor asked.

“Yes. What about the North?” said Martin.

They began to discuss politics. She had been speaking at a by-election. A stone had been thrown at her; she put her hand to her chin. But she had enjoyed it.

“I think we gave ’em something to think about,” she said, breaking off another piece of cake.

She ought to have been the soldier, Eleanor thought. She was exactly like the picture of old Uncle Pargiter of Pargiter’s Horse. Martin, now that he had shaved his moustache off and showed his lips, ought to have been—what? Perhaps an architect, she thought. He’s so—she looked up. Now it was hailing. White rods came across the window in the back room. There was a great gust of wind; the little bushes blanched and bent under it. And a window banged upstairs in her mother’s bedroom. Perhaps I ought to go and shut it, she thought. The rain must be coming in.

“Eleanor——” said Rose. “Eleanor”—she repeated.

Eleanor started.

“Eleanor’s broody,” said Martin.

“No, not at all—not at all,” she protested. “What are you talking about?”

“I was asking you,” said Rose. “Do you remember that row when the microscope was broken? Well, I met that boy—that horrid, ferret-faced boy—Erridge—up in the North.”

“He wasn’t horrid,” said Martin.

“He was,” Rose persisted. “A horrid little sneak. He pretended that it was I who broke the microscope and it was he who broke it…. D’you remember that row?” She turned to Eleanor.

“I don’t remember that row,” said Eleanor. “There were so many,” she added.

“That was one of the worst,” said Martin.

“It was,” said Rose. She pursed her lips together. Some memory seemed to have come back to her. “And after it was over,” she said, turning to Martin, “you came up into the nursery and asked me to go beetling with you in the Round Pond. D’you remember?”

She paused. There was something queer about the memory, Eleanor could see. She spoke with a curious intensity.

“And you said, ‘I’ll ask you three times; and if you don’t answer the third time, I’ll go alone.’ And I swore, ‘I’ll let him go alone.’” Her blue eyes blazed.

“I can see you,” said Martin. “Wearing a pink frock, with a knife in your hand.”

“And you went,” Rose said; she spoke with suppressed vehemence. “And I dashed into the bathroom and cut this gash”—she held out her wrist. Eleanor looked at it. There was a thin white scar just above the wrist joint.

When did she do that? Eleanor thought. She could not remember. Rose had locked herself into the bathroom with a knife and cut her wrist. She had known nothing about it. She looked at the white mark. It must have bled.

“Oh, Rose always was a firebrand!” said Martin. He got up. “She always had the devil’s own temper,” he added. He stood for a moment looking round the drawing-room, cluttered up with several hideous pieces of furniture that he would have got rid of had be been Eleanor, he thought, and forced to live there. But perhaps she did not mind things like that.

“Dining out?” she said. He dined out every night. She would like to have asked him where he was dining.

He nodded without saying anything. He met all sorts of people she did not know, she reflected; and he did not want to talk about them. He had turned to the fireplace.

“That picture wants cleaning,” he said, pointing to the picture of their mother.

“It’s a nice picture,” he added, looking at it critically. “But usen’t there to be a flower in the grass?”

Eleanor looked at it. She had not looked at it, so as to see it, for many years.

“Was there?” she said.

“Yes. A little blue flower,” said Martin. “I can remember it when I was a child….”

He turned. Some memory from his childhood came over him as he saw Rose sitting there at the tea table with her fist still clenched. He saw her standing with her back to the school-room door; very red in the face, with her lips tight shut as they were now. She had wanted him to do something. And he had crumpled a ball of paper in his hand and shied it at her.

“What awful lives children live!” he said, waving his hand at her as he crossed the room. “Don’t they, Rose?”

“Yes,” said Rose. “And they can’t tell anybody,” she added.

There was another gust and the sound of glass crashing.

“Miss Pym’s conservatory?” said Martin, pausing with his hand on the door.

“Miss Pym?” said Eleanor. “She’s been dead these twenty years!”

[]

1910

In the country it was an ordinary day enough; one of the long reel of days that turned as the years passed from green to orange; from grass to harvest. It was neither hot nor cold, an English spring day, bright enough, but a purple cloud behind the hill might mean rain. The grasses rippled with shadow, and then with sunlight.

In London, however, the stricture and pressure of the season were already felt, especially in the West End, where flags flew; canes tapped; dresses flowed; and houses freshly painted had awnings spread and swinging baskets of red geraniums. The Parks too—St. James’s, the Green Park, Hyde Park—were making ready. Already in the morning before there was a chance of a procession, the green chairs were ranged among the plump brown flower beds with their curled hyacinths, as if waiting for something to happen; for a curtain to rise; for Queen Alexandra to come, bowing through the gates. She had a face like a flower petal, and always wore her pink carnation.

Men lay flat on the grass reading newspapers with their shirts open; on the bald scrubbed space by the Marble Arch speakers congregated; nursemaids vacantly regarded them; and mothers, squatted on the grass, watched their children play. Down Park Lane and Piccadilly vans, cars, omnibuses ran along the streets as if the streets were slots; stopped and jerked; as if a puzzle were solved, and then broken, for it was the season, and the streets were crowded. Over Park Lane and Piccadilly the clouds kept their freedom, wandering fitfully, staining windows gold, daubing them black, passed and vanished, though marble in Italy looked no more solid, gleaming in the quarries, veined with yellow, than the clouds over Park Lane.

If the bus stopped here, Rose thought, looking down over the side, she would get up. The bus stopped, and she rose. It was a pity, she thought, as she stepped onto the pavement and caught a glimpse of her own figure in a tailor’s window, not to dress better, not to look nicer. Always reach-me-downs, coats and skirts from Whiteleys. But they saved time, and the years after all—she was over forty—made one care very little what people thought. They used to say, why don’t you marry? Why don’t you do this or that, interfering. But not any longer.

She paused in one of the little alcoves that were scooped out in the bridge, from habit. People always stopped to look at the river. It was running fast, a muddy gold this morning with smooth breadths and ripples, for the tide was high. And there was the usual tug and the usual barges with black tarpaulins and corn showing. The water swirled round the arches. As she stood there, looking down at the water, some buried feeling began to arrange the stream into a pattern. The pattern was painful. She remembered how she had stood there on the night of a certain engagement, crying; her tears had fallen, her happiness, it seemed to her, had fallen. Then she had turned—here she turned—and had seen the churches, the masts and roofs of the city. There’s that, she had said to herself. Indeed it was a splendid view…. She looked, and then again she turned. There were the Houses of Parliament. A queer expression, half frown, half smile, formed on her face and she threw herself slightly backwards, as if she were leading an army.

“Damned humbugs!” she said aloud, striking her fist on the balustrade. A clerk who was passing looked at her with surprise. She laughed. She often talked aloud. Why not? That too was one of the consolations, like her coat and skirt, and the hat she stuck on without giving a look in the glass. If people chose to laugh, let them. She strode on. She was lunching in Hyams Place with her cousins. She had asked herself on the spur of the moment, meeting Maggie in a shop. First she had heard a voice; then seen a hand. And it was odd, considering how little she knew them—they had lived abroad—how strongly, sitting there at the counter before Maggie saw her, simply from the sound of her voice, she had felt—she supposed it was affection?—some feeling bred of blood in common. She had got up and said May I come and see you? busy as she was, hating to break her day in the middle. She walked on. They lived in Hyams Place, over the river—Hyams Place, that little crescent of old houses with the name carved in the middle which she used to pass so often when she lived down here. She used to ask herself in those far-off days Who was Hyam? But she had never solved the question to her satisfaction. She walked on, across the river.

The shabby street on the south side of the river was very noisy. Now and again a voice detached itself from the general clamour. A woman shouted to her neighbour; a child cried. A man trundling a barrow opened his mouth and bawled up at the windows as he passed. There were bedsteads, grates, pokers and odd pieces of twisted iron on his barrow. But whether he was selling old iron or buying old iron it was impossible to say; the rhythm persisted; but the words were almost rubbed out.

The swarm of sound, the rush of traffic, the shouts of the hawkers, the single cries and the general cries, came into the upper room of the house in Hyams Place where Sara Pargiter sat at the piano. She was singing. Then she stopped; she watched her sister laying the table.

“Go search the valleys,” she murmured, as she watched her, “pluck up every rose.” She paused. “That’s very nice,” she added, dreamily. Maggie had taken a bunch of flowers; had cut the tight little string which bound them, and had laid them side by side on the table; and was arranging them in an earthenware pot. They were differently coloured, blue, white and purple. Sara watched her arranging them. She laughed suddenly.

“What are you laughing at?” said Maggie absent-mindedly. She added a purple flower to the bunch and looked at it.

“Dazed in a rapture of contemplation,” said Sara, “shading her eyes with peacocks’ feathers dipped in morning dew——” she pointed to the table. “Maggie said,” she jumped up and pirouetted about the room, “three’s the same as two, three’s the same as two.” She pointed to the table upon which three places had been laid.

“But we are three,” said Maggie. “Rose is coming.” Sara stopped. Her face fell.

“Rose is coming?” she repeated.

“I told you,” said Maggie. “I said to you, Rose is coming to luncheon on Friday. It is Friday. And Rose is coming to luncheon. Any minute now,” she said. She got up and began to fold some stuff that was lying on the floor.

“It is Friday, and Rose is coming to luncheon,” Sara repeated.

“I told you,” said Maggie. “I was in a shop. I was buying stuff. And somebody”—she paused to make her fold more accurately—“came out from behind a counter and said, ‘I’m your cousin. I’m Rose,’ she said. ‘Can I come and see you? Any day, any time,’ she said. So I said,” she put the stuff on a chair, “lunch.”

She looked round the room to see that everything was in readiness. Chairs were missing. Sara pulled up a chair.

“Rose is coming,” she said, “and this is where she’ll sit.” She placed the chair at the table facing the window. “And she’ll take off her gloves; and she’ll lay one on this side, one on that. And she’ll say, ‘I’ve never been in this part of London before.’”

“And then?” said Maggie, looking at the table.

“You’ll say ‘It’s so convenient for the theatres.’”

“And then?” said Maggie.

“And then she’ll say rather wistfully, smiling, putting her head on one side, ‘D’you often go to the theatre, Maggie?’”

“No,” said Maggie. “Rose has red hair.”

“Red hair?” Sara exclaimed. “I thought it was grey—a little wisp straggling from under a black bonnet,” she added.

“No,” said Maggie. “She has a great deal of hair; and it’s red.”

“Red hair; red Rose,” Sara exclaimed. She spun round on her toe.

“Rose of the flaming heart; Rose of the burning breast; Rose of the weary world—red, red Rose!”

A door slammed below; they heard footsteps mounting the stairs. “There she is,” said Maggie.

The steps stopped. They heard a voice saying, “Still further up? On the very top? Thank you.” Then the steps began mounting the stairs again.

“This is the worst torture …” Sara began, screwing her hands together and clinging to her sister, “that life….”

“Don’t be such an ass,” said Maggie, pushing her away, as the door opened.

Rose came in.

“It’s ages since we met,” she said, shaking hands.

She wondered what had made her come. Everything was different from what she expected. The room was rather poverty-stricken; the carpet did not cover the floor. There was a sewing-machine in the corner, and Maggie too looked different from what she had looked in the shop. But there was a crimson-and-gilt chair; she recognised it with relief.

“That used to stand in the hall, didn’t it?” she said, putting her bag down on the chair.

“Yes,” said Maggie.

“And that glass——” said Rose, looking at the old Italian glass blurred with spots that hung between the windows, “wasn’t that there too?”

“Yes,” said Maggie, “in my mother’s bedroom.”

There was a pause. There seemed to be nothing to say.

“What nice rooms you’ve found!” Rose continued, making conversation. It was a large room and the door-posts had little carvings on them. “But don’t you find it rather noisy?” she continued.

The man was crying under the window. She looked out of the window. Opposite there was a row of slate roofs, like half-opened umbrellas; and, rising high above them, a great building which, save for thin black strokes across it, seemed to be made entirely of glass. It was a factory. The man bawled in the street underneath.

“Yes, it’s noisy,” said Maggie. “But very convenient.”

“Very convenient for the theatres,” said Sara, as she put down the meat.

“So I remember finding,” said Rose, turning to look at her, “when I lived here myself.”

“Did you live here?” said Maggie, beginning to help the cutlets.

“Not here,” she said. “Round the corner. With a friend.”

“We thought you lived in Abercorn Terrace,” said Sara.

“Can’t one live in more places than one?” Rose asked, feeling vaguely annoyed, for she had lived in many places, felt many passions, and done many things.

“I remember Abercorn Terrace,” said Maggie. She paused. “There was a long room; and a tree at the end; and a picture over the fireplace, of a girl with red hair?”

Rose nodded. “Mama when she was young,” she said.

“And a round table in the middle?” Maggie continued.

Rose nodded.

“And you had a parlourmaid with very prominent blue eyes?”

“Crosby. She’s still with us.”

They ate in silence.

“And then?” said Sara, as if she were a child asking for a story.

“And then?” said Rose. “Well then”—she looked at Maggie, thinking of her as a little girl who had come to tea.

She saw them sitting round a table; and a detail that she had not thought of for years came back to her—how Milly used to take her hair-pin and fray the wick of the kettle. And she saw Eleanor sitting with her account books; and she saw herself go up to her and say: “Eleanor, I want to go to Lamley’s.”

Her past seemed to be rising above her present. And for some reason she wanted to talk about her past; to tell them something about herself that she had never told anybody—something hidden. She paused, gazing at the flowers in the middle of the table without seeing them. There was a blue knot in the yellow glaze she noticed.

“I remember Uncle Abel,” said Maggie. “He gave me a necklace; a blue necklace with gold spots.”

“He’s still alive,” said Rose.

They talked, she thought, as if Abercorn Terrace were a scene in a play. They talked as if they were speaking of people who were real, but not real in the way in which she felt herself to be real. It puzzled her; it made her feel that she was two different people at the same time; that she was living at two different times at the same moment. She was a little girl wearing a pink frock; and here she was in this room, now. But there was a great rattle under the windows. A dray went roaring past. The glasses jingled on the table. She started slightly, roused from her thoughts about her childhood, and separated the glasses.

“Don’t you find it very noisy here?” she said.

“Yes. But very convenient for the theatres,” said Sara.

Rose looked up. She had repeated herself. She thinks me an old fool, Rose thought, making the same remark twice over. She blushed slightly.

What is the use, she thought, of trying to tell people about one’s past? What is one’s past? She stared at the pot with the blue knot loosely tied in the yellow glaze. Why did I come, she thought, when they only laugh at me? Sally rose and cleared away the plates.

“And Delia—” Maggie began as they waited. She pulled the pot towards her, and began to arrange the flowers. She was not listening; she was thinking her own thoughts. She reminded Rose, as she watched her, of Digby—absorbed in the arrangement of a bunch of flowers, as if to arrange flowers, to put the white by the blue, were the most important thing in the world.

“She married an Irishman,” she said aloud.

Maggie took a blue flower and placed it beside a white flower.

“And Edward?” she asked.

“Edward …” Rose was beginning, when Sally came in with the pudding.

“Edward!” she exclaimed, catching the word.

“Oh blasted eyes of my deceased wife’s sister—withered prop of my defunct old age …” She put down the pudding. “That’s Edward,” she said. “A quotation from a book he gave me. ‘My wasted youth—my wasted youth’ …” The voice was Edward’s; Rose could hear him say it. For he had a way of belittling himself, when in fact he had a very good opinion of himself.

But it was not the whole of Edward. And she would not have him laughed at; for she was very fond of her brother and very proud of him.

“There’s not much of ‘my wasted youth’ about Edward now,” she said.

“I thought not,” said Sara, taking her place opposite.

They were silent. Rose looked at the flower again. Why did I come? she kept asking herself. Why had she broken up her morning, and interrupted her day’s work, when it was clear to her that they had not wished to see her?

“Go on, Rose,” said Maggie, helping the pudding. “Go on telling us about the Pargiters.”

“About the Pargiters?” said Rose. She saw herself running along the broad avenue in the lamplight.

“What could be more ordinary?” she said. “A large family, living in a large house …” And yet she felt that she had been herself very interesting. She paused. Sara looked at her.

“It’s not ordinary,” she said. “The Pargiters——” She was holding a fork in her hand, and she drew a line on the table-cloth. “The Pargiters,” she repeated, “going on and on and on”—here her fork touched a salt-cellar—“until they come to a rock,” she said; “and then Rose”—she looked at her again: Rose drew herself up slightly, “—Rose claps spurs to her horse, rides straight up to a man in a gold coat, and says ‘Damn your eyes!’ Isn’t that Rose, Maggie?” she said, looking at her sister as if she had been drawing her picture on the table-cloth.

That is true, Rose thought as she took her pudding. That is myself. Again she had the odd feeling of being two people at the same time.

“Well, that’s done,” said Maggie, pushing away her plate. “Come and sit in the armchair, Rose,” she said.

She went over to the fireplace and pulled out an armchair, which had springs like hoops, Rose noticed, in the seat.

They were poor, Rose thought, glancing round her. That was why they had chosen this house to live in—because it was cheap. They cooked their own food—Sally had gone into the kitchen to make the coffee. She drew her chair up beside Maggie’s.

“You make your own clothes?” she said, pointing to the sewing-machine in the corner. There was silk folded on it.

“Yes,” said Maggie, looking at the sewing-machine.

“For a party?” said Rose. The stuff was silk, green, with blue rays on it.

“Tomorrow night,” said Maggie. She raised her hand with a curious gesture to her face, as if she wanted to conceal something. She wants to hide herself from me, Rose thought, as I want to hide myself from her. She watched her; she had got up, had fetched the silk and the sewing-machine, and was threading the needle. Her hands were large and thin and strong, Rose noticed.

“I never could make my own clothes,” she said, watching her arrange the silk smoothly under the needle. She was beginning to feel at her ease. She took off her hat and threw it on the floor. Maggie looked at her with approval. She was handsome, in a ravaged way; more like a man than a woman.

“But then,” said Maggie, beginning to turn the handle rather cautiously, “you did other things.” She spoke in the absorbed tones of someone who is using their hands.

The machine made a comfortable whirring sound as the needle pricked through the silk.

“Yes, I did other things,” said Rose, stroking the cat that had stretched itself against her knee, “when I lived down here.”

“But that was years ago,” she added, “when I was young. I lived here with a friend,” she sighed, “and taught little thieves.”

Maggie said nothing; she was whirring the machine round and round.

“I always liked thieves better than other people,” Rose added after a time.

“Yes,” said Maggie.

“I never liked being at home,” said Rose. “I liked being on my own much better.”

“Yes,” said Maggie.

Rose went on talking.

It was quite easy to talk, she found; quite easy. And there was no need to say anything clever; or to talk about one’s self. She was talking about the Waterloo Road as she remembered it when Sara came in with the coffee.

“What was that about clinging to a fat man in the Campagna?” she asked, setting her tray down.

“The Campagna?” said Rose. “There was nothing about the Campagna.”

“Heard through a door,” said Sara, pouring out the coffee, “talk sounds very odd.” She gave Rose her cup.

“I thought you were talking about Italy; about the Campagna, about the moonlight.”

Rose shook her head. “We were talking about the Waterloo Road,” she said. But what had she been talking about? Not simply about the Waterloo Road. Perhaps she had been talking nonsense. She had been saying the first thing that came into her head.

“All talk would be nonsense, I suppose, if it were written down,” she said, stirring her coffee.

Maggie stopped the machine for a moment and smiled.

“And even if it isn’t,” she said.

“But it’s the only way we have of knowing each other,” Rose protested. She looked at her watch. It was later than she thought. She got up.

“I must go,” she said. “But why don’t you come with me?” she added on the spur of the moment.

Maggie looked up at her. “Where?” she said.

Rose was silent. “To a meeting,” she said at length. She wanted to conceal the thing that interested her most; she felt extraordinarily shy. And yet she wanted them to come. But why? she asked herself, as she stood there awkwardly waiting. There was a pause.

“You could wait upstairs,” she said suddenly. “And you’d see Eleanor; you’d see Martin—the Pargiters in the flesh,” she added. She remembered Sara’s phrase, “the caravan crossing the desert,” she said.

She looked at Sara. She was balancing herself on the arm of a chair, sipping her coffee and swinging her foot up and down.

“Shall I come?” she asked, vaguely, still swinging her foot up and down.

Rose shrugged her shoulders. “If you like,” she said.

“But should I like it?” Sara continued, still swinging her foot. “… this meeting? What do you think, Maggie?” she said, appealing to her sister. “Shall I go, or shan’t I? Shall I go, or shan’t I?” Maggie said nothing.

Then Sara got up, went to the window and stood there for a moment humming a tune. “Go search the valleys; pluck up every rose,” she hummed. The man was passing; he was crying “Any old iron? Any old iron?” She turned round with a sudden jerk.

“I’ll come,” she said, as if she had made up her mind. “I’ll fling on my clothes and come.”

She sprang up and went into the bedroom. She’s like one of those birds at the Zoo, Rose thought, that never flies but hops rapidly across the grass.

She turned to the window. It was a depressing little street, she thought. There was a public house at the corner. The houses opposite looked very dingy, and it was very noisy. “Any old iron to sell?” the man was crying under the window, “any old iron?” Children were screaming in the road; they were playing a game with chalk-marks on the pavement. She stood there looking down on them.

“Poor little wretches!” she said. She picked up her hat and ran two bonnet-pins sharply through it. “Don’t you find it rather unpleasant,” she said, giving her hat a little pat on one side as she looked in the looking-glass, “coming home late at night sometimes with that public house at the corner?”

“Drunken men, you mean?” said Maggie.

“Yes,” said Rose. She buttoned the row of leather buttons on her tailor-made suit and gave herself a little pat here and there, as if she were making ready.

“And now what are you talking about?” said Sara, coming in carrying her shoes. “Another visit to Italy?”

“No,” said Maggie. She spoke indistinctly because her mouth was full of pins. “Drunken men following one.”

“Drunken men following one,” said Sara. She sat down and began to put on her shoes.

“But they don’t follow me,” she said. Rose smiled. That was obvious. She was sallow, angular and plain. “I can walk over Waterloo Bridge at any hour of the day or night,” she continued, tugging at her shoelaces, “and nobody notices.” The shoe-lace was in a knot; she fumbled with it. “But I can remember,” she continued, “being told by a woman—a very beautiful woman—she was like——”

“Hurry up,” Maggie interrupted. “Rose is waiting.”

“… Rose is waiting—well, the woman told me, when she went into Regent’s Park to have an ice”—she stood up, trying to fit her shoe on to her foot, “—to have an ice, at one of those little tables under the trees, one of those little round tables laid with a cloth under the trees”—she hopped about with one shoe off and one shoe on—“the eyes, she said, came through every leaf like the darts of the sun; and her ice was melted…. Her ice was melted!” she repeated, tapping her sister on the shoulder as she twirled round on her toe.

Rose held out her hand. “You’re going to stay and finish your dress?” she said. “You won’t come with us?” It was Maggie she wanted to come.

“No, I won’t come,” said Maggie, shaking hands. “I should hate it,” she added, smiling at Rose with a candour that was baffling.

Did she mean me? thought Rose as she went down the stairs. Did she mean that she hated me? When I liked her so much?

In the alley that led into the old square off Holborn an elderly man, battered and red-nosed, as if he had weathered out many years at street corners, was selling violets. He had his pitch by a row of posts. The bunches, tightly laced, each with a green frill of leaves round the rather withered flowers, lay in a row on the tray; for he had not sold many.

“Nice vilets, fresh vilets,” he repeated automatically as the people passed. Most of them went by without looking. But he went on repeating his formula automatically. “Nice vilets, fresh vilets,” as if he scarcely expected any one to buy. Then two ladies came; and he held out his violets, and he said once more “Nice vilets, fresh vilets.” One of them slapped down two coppers on his tray; and he looked up. The other lady stopped, put her hand on the post, and said, “Here I leave you.” Upon which the one who was short and stout, struck her on the shoulder and said, “Don’t be such an ass!” And the tall lady gave a sudden cackle of laughter, took a bunch of violets from the tray as if she had paid for it; and off they walked. She’s an odd customer, he thought—she took the violets though she hadn’t paid for them. He watched them walking round the square; then he began muttering again, “Nice vilets, sweet vilets.”

“Is this the place where you meet?” said Sara as they walked along the square.

It was very quiet. The noise of the traffic had ceased. The trees were not in full leaf yet, and pigeons were shuffling and crooning on the tree tops. Little bits of twig fell on the pavement as the birds fidgeted among the branches. A soft air puffed in their faces. They walked on round the square.

“That’s the house over there,” said Rose, pointing. She stopped when she reached a house with a carved doorway, and many names on the door-post. The windows on the ground floor were open; the curtains blew in and out, and through them they could see a row of heads, as if people were sitting round a table, talking.

Rose paused on the door-step.

“Are you coming in,” she said, “or aren’t you?”

Sara hesitated. She peered in. Then she brandished her bunch of violets in Rose’s face and cried out, “All right!” she cried. “Ride on!”

Miriam Parrish was reading a letter. Eleanor was blackening the strokes on her blotting-paper. I’ve heard all this, I’ve done all this so often, she was thinking. She glanced round the table. People’s faces even seemed to repeat themselves. There’s the Judd type, there’s the Lazenby type, and there’s Miriam, she thought, drawing on her blotting-paper. I know what he’s going to say, I know what she’s going to say, she thought, digging a little hole in the blotting-paper. Here Rose came in. But who’s that with her, Eleanor asked? She did not recognise her. Whoever it was was waved by Rose to a seat in the corner, and the meeting went on. Why must we do it? Eleanor thought, drawing a spoke from the hole in the middle. She looked up. Someone was rattling a stick along the railings and whistling; the branches of a tree swung up and down in the garden outside. The leaves were already unfolding…. Miriam put down her papers; Mr Spicer rose.

There’s no other way, I suppose, she thought, taking up her pencil again. She made a note as Mr Spicer spoke. She found that her pencil could take notes quite accurately while she herself thought of something else. She seemed able to divide herself into two. One person followed the argument—and he’s putting it very well, she thought; while the other, for it was a fine afternoon, and she had wanted to go to Kew, walked down a green glade and stopped in front of a flowering tree. Is it a magnolia? she asked herself, or are they already over? Magnolias, she remembered, have no leaves, but masses of white blossom…. She drew a line on the blotting-paper.

Now Pickford … she said, looking up again. Mr Pickford spoke. She drew more spokes; blackened them. Then she looked up, for there was a change in the tone of voice.

“I know Westminster very well,” Miss Ashford was saying.

“So do I!” said Mr Pickford. “I’ve lived there for forty years.”

Eleanor was surprised. She had always thought he lived at Ealing. He lived at Westminster, did he? He was a clean-shaven, dapper little man, whom she had always seen in her mind’s eye running to catch a train with a newspaper under his arm. But he lived at Westminster, did he? That was odd, she thought.

Then they went on arguing again. The cooing of the pigeons became audible. Take two coos, take two coos, tak … they were crooning. Martin was speaking. And he speaks very well, she thought … but he shouldn’t be sarcastic; it puts people’s backs up. She drew another stroke.

Then she heard the rush of a car outside; it stopped outside the window. Martin stopped speaking. There was a momentary pause. Then the door opened and in came a tall woman in evening dress. Everybody looked up.

“Lady Lasswade!” said Mr Pickford, getting up and scraping back his chair.

“Kitty!” Eleanor exclaimed. She half rose, but she sat down again. There was a little stir. A chair was found for her. Lady Lasswade took her place opposite Eleanor.

“I’m so sorry,” she apologised, “to be so late. And for coming in these ridiculous clothes,” she added, touching her cloak. She did look strange, dressed in evening dress in the broad daylight. There was something shining in her hair.

“The Opera?” said Martin as she sat down beside him.

“Yes,” she said briefly. She laid her white gloves in a businesslike way on the table. Her cloak opened and showed the gleam of a silver dress beneath. She did look odd compared with the others; but it’s very good of her to come, Eleanor thought, looking at her, considering she’s going on to the Opera. The meeting began again.

How long has she been married? Eleanor wondered. How long is it since we broke the swing together at Oxford? She drew another stroke on the blotting-paper. The dot was now surrounded with strokes.

“… and we discussed the whole matter perfectly frankly,” Kitty was saying. Eleanor listened. That’s the manner I like, she thought. She had been meeting Sir Edward at dinner…. It’s the great ladies’ manner, Eleanor thought … authoritative, natural. She listened again. The great ladies’ manner charmed Mr Pickford; but it irritated Martin, she knew. He was pooh-poohing Sir Edward and his frankness. Then Mr Spicer was off again; and Kitty had joined in. Now there was Rose. They were all at loggerheads. Eleanor listened. She became more and more irritated. All it comes to is: I’m right and you’re wrong, she thought. This bickering merely wasted time. If we could only get at something, something deeper, deeper, she thought, prodding her pencil on the blotting-paper. Suddenly she saw the only point that was of any importance. She had the words on the tip of her tongue. She opened her mouth to speak. But just as she cleared her throat, Mr Pickford swept his papers together and rose. Would they pardon him? he said. He had to be at the Law Courts. He rose and went.

The meeting dragged on. The ash-tray in the middle of the table became full of cigarette-stumps; the air became thick with smoke; then Mr Spicer went; Miss Bodham went; Miss Ashford wound a scarf tightly round her neck, snapped her attaché-case to, and strode out of the room. Miriam Parrish took off her pince-nez and fixed them to a hook that was sewn onto the front of her dress. Everybody was going; the meeting was over. Eleanor got up. She wanted to speak to Kitty. But Miriam intercepted her.

“About coming to see you on Wednesday,” she began.

“Yes,” said Eleanor.

“I’ve just remembered I’ve promised to take a niece to the dentist,” said Miriam.

“Saturday would suit me just as well,” said Eleanor.

Miriam paused. She pondered.

“Would Monday do instead?” she said.

“I’ll write,” said Eleanor with an irritation that she could never conceal, saint though Miriam was, and Miriam fluttered away with a guilty air as if she were a little dog caught stealing.

Eleanor turned. The others were still arguing.

“You’ll agree with me one of these days,” Martin was saying.

“Never! Never!” said Kitty, slapping her gloves on the table. She looked very handsome; at the same time rather absurd in her evening dress.

“Why didn’t you speak, Nell?” she said, turning on her.

“Because—” Eleanor began, “I don’t know,” she added, rather feebly. She felt suddenly shabby and dowdy compared with Kitty, who stood there in full evening dress with something shining in her hair.

“Well,” said Kitty, turning away. “I must be off. But can’t I give anyone a lift?” she said, pointing to the window. There was her car.

“What a magnificent car!” said Martin, looking at it, with a sneer in his voice.

“It’s Charlie’s,” said Kitty rather sharply.

“What about you, Eleanor?” she said, turning to her.

“Thanks,” said Eleanor: “—one moment.”

She had muddled her things up. She had left her gloves somewhere. Had she brought an umbrella, or hadn’t she? She felt flustered and dowdy, as if she were a schoolgirl suddenly. There was the magnificent car waiting, and the chauffeur held the door open with a rug in his hand.

“Get in,” said Kitty. And she got in and the chauffeur put the rug over her knees.

“We’ll leave them,” said Kitty, with a wave of her hand, “caballing.” And the car drove off.

“What a pig-headed set they are!” said Kitty, turning to Eleanor.

“Force is always wrong—don’t you agree with me?—always wrong!” she repeated, drawing the rug over her knees. She was still under the influence of the meeting. Yet she wanted to talk to Eleanor. They met so seldom; she liked her so much. But she was shy, sitting there in her absurd clothes, and she could not jerk her mind out of the rut of the meeting in which it was running.

“What a pig-headed set they are!” she repeated. Then she began:

“Tell me….”

There were many things that she wanted to ask; but the engine was so powerful; the car swept in and out of the traffic so smoothly; before she had time to say any of the things she wanted to say Eleanor had put her hand out because they had reached the Tube station.

“Would he stop here?” she said, rising.

“But must you get out?” Kitty began. She had wanted to talk to her. “I must, I must,” said Eleanor. “Papa’s expecting me.” She felt like a child again beside this great lady and the chauffeur, who was holding the door open.

“Do come and see me—do let us meet again soon, Nell,” said Kitty, taking her hand.

The car started on again. Lady Lasswade sat back in her corner. She wished she saw more of Eleanor, she thought; but she never could get her to come and dine. It was always “Papa’s expecting me” or some other excuse, she thought rather bitterly. They had gone such different ways, they had lived such different lives, since Oxford…. The car slowed down. It had to take its place in the long line of cars that moved at a foot’s pace, now stopping dead, now jerking on, down the narrow street, blocked by market carts, that led to the Opera House. Men and women in full evening dress were walking along the pavement. They looked uncomfortable and self-conscious as they dodged between costers’ barrows, with their high piled hair and their evening cloaks; with their button-holes and their white waistcoats, in the glare of the afternoon sun. The ladies tripped uncomfortably on their high-heeled shoes; now and then they put their hands to their heads. The gentlemen kept close beside them as though protecting them. It’s absurd, Kitty thought; it’s ridiculous to come out in full evening dress at this time of day. She leant back in her corner. Covent Garden porters, dingy little clerks in their ordinary working clothes, coarse-looking women in aprons stared in at her. The air smelt strongly of oranges and bananas. But the car was coming to a standstill. It drew up under the archway; she pushed through the glass doors and went in.

She felt at once a sense of relief. Now that the daylight was extinguished and the air glowed yellow and crimson, she no longer felt absurd. On the contrary, she felt appropriate. The ladies and gentlemen who were mounting the stairs were dressed exactly as she was. The smell of oranges and bananas had been replaced by another smell—a subtle mixture of clothes and gloves and flowers that affected her pleasantly. The carpet was thick beneath her feet. She went along the corridor till she came to her own box with the card on it. She went in and the whole Opera House opened in front of her. She was not late after all. The orchestra was still tuning up; the players were laughing, talking and turning round in their seats as they fiddled busily with their instruments. She stood looking down at the stalls. The floor of the house was in a state of great agitation. People were passing to their seats; they were sitting down and getting up again; they were taking off their cloaks and signalling to friends. They were like birds settling on a field. In the boxes white figures were appearing here and there; white arms rested on the ledges of boxes; white shirt-fronts shone beside them. The whole house glowed—red, gold, cream-coloured, and smelt of clothes and flowers, and echoed with the squeaks and trills of the instruments and with the buzz and hum of voices. She glanced at the programme that was laid on the ledge of her box. It was Siegfried—her favourite opera. In a little space within the highly decorated border the names of the cast were given. She stooped to read them; then a thought struck her and she glanced at the royal box. It was empty. As she looked the door opened and two men came in; one was her cousin Edward; the other a boy, a cousin of her husband’s.

“They haven’t put it off?” he said as he shook hands. “I was afraid they might.” He was something in the Foreign Office; with a handsome Roman head.

They all looked instinctively at the royal box. Programmes lay along the edge; but there was no bouquet of pink carnations. The box was empty.

“The doctors have given him up,” said the young man, looking very important. They all think they know everything, Kitty thought, smiling at his air of private information.

“But if he dies?” she said, looking at the royal box, “d’you think they’ll stop it?”

The young man shrugged his shoulders. About that he could not be positive apparently. The house was filling up. Lights winked on ladies’ arms as they turned; ripples of light flashed, stopped, and then flashed the opposite way as they turned their heads.

But now the conductor pushed his way through the orchestra to his raised seat. There was an outburst of applause; he turned, bowed to the audience; turned again, all the lights sank down; the overture had begun.

Kitty leant back against the wall of the box; her face was shaded by the folds of the curtain. She was glad to be shaded. As they played the overture she looked at Edward. She could only see the outline of his face in the red glow; it was heavier than it used to be; but he looked intellectual, handsome and a little remote as he listened to the overture. It wouldn’t have done, she thought; I’m much too … she did not finish the sentence. He has never married, she thought; and she had. And I’ve three boys. I’ve been in Australia, I’ve been in India…. The music made her think of herself and her own life as she seldom did. It exalted her; it cast a flattering light over herself, her past. But why did Martin laugh at me for having a car? she thought. What’s the good of laughing? she asked.

Here the curtain went up. She leant forward and looked at the stage. The dwarf was hammering at the sword. Hammer, hammer, hammer, he went with little short, sharp strokes. She listened. The music had changed. He, she thought, looking at the handsome boy, knows exactly what the music means. He was already completely possessed by the music. She liked the look of complete absorption that had swum up on top of his immaculate respectability, making him seem almost stern…. But here was Siegfried. She leant forward. Dressed in leopard-skins, very fat, with nut-brown thighs, leading a bear—here he was. She liked the fat bouncing young man in his flaxen wig: his voice was magnificent. Hammer, hammer, hammer he went. She leant back again. What did that make her think of? A young man who came into a room with shavings in his hair … when she was very young. In Oxford? She had gone to tea with them; had sat on a hard chair; in a very light room; and there was a sound of hammering in the garden. And then a boy came in with shavings in his hair. And she had wanted him to kiss her. Or was it the farm hand up at Carter’s, when old Carter had loomed up suddenly leading a bull with a ring through its nose?

“That’s the sort of life I like,” she thought, taking up her opera-glasses. “That’s the sort of person I am….” she finished her sentence.

Then she put the opera-glasses to her eyes. The scenery suddenly became bright and close; the grass seemed to be made of thick green wool; she could see Siegfried’s fat brown arms glistening with paint. His face was shiny. She put down the glasses and leant back in her corner.

And old Lucy Craddock—she saw Lucy sitting at a table; with her red nose, and her patient, kind eyes. “So you’ve done no work this week again, Kitty!” she said reproachfully. How I loved her! Kitty thought. And then she had gone back to the Lodge; and there was the tree, with a prop in the middle; and her mother sitting bolt upright…. I wish I hadn’t quarrelled so much with my mother, she thought, overcome with a sudden sense of the passage of time and its tragedy. Then the music changed.

She looked at the stage again. The Wanderer had come in. He was sitting on a bank in a long grey dressing-gown; and a patch wobbled uncomfortably over one of his eyes. On and on he went; on and on. Her attention flagged. She glanced round the dim red house; she could only see white elbows pointed on the ledges of boxes; here and there a sharp pinpoint of light showed as some one followed the score with a torch. Edward’s fine profile again caught her eye. He was listening, critically, intently. It wouldn’t have done, she thought, it wouldn’t have done at all.

At last the Wanderer had gone. And now? she asked herself, leaning forward. Siegfried burst in. Dressed in his leopard-skins, laughing and singing, here he was again. The music excited her. It was magnificent. Siegfried took the broken pieces of the sword and blew on the fire and hammered, hammered, hammered. The singing, the hammering and the fire leaping all went on at the same time. Quicker and quicker, more and more rhythmically, more and more triumphantly he hammered, until at last up he swung the sword high above his head and brought it down—crack! The anvil burst asunder. And then he brandished the sword over his head and shouted and sang; and the music rushed higher and higher; and the curtain fell.

The lights opened in the middle of the house. All the colour came back. The whole Opera House leapt into life again with its faces and its diamonds and its men and women. They were clapping and waving their programmes. The whole house seemed to be fluttering with white squares of paper. The curtains fell apart and were held back by tall footmen in knee-breeches. Kitty stood up and clapped. Again the curtains closed; again they parted. The footmen were almost pulled off their feet by the heavy folds that they had to hold back. Again and again they held the curtain back; and even when they had let it fall and the singers had disappeared and the orchestra were leaving their seats, the audience still stood clapping and waving their programmes.

Kitty turned to the young man in her box. He was leaning over the ledge. He was still clapping. He was shouting “Bravo! Bravo!” He had forgotten her. He had forgotten himself.

“Wasn’t that marvellous?” he said at last, turning round.

There was an odd look on his face as if he were in two worlds at once and had to draw them together.

“Marvellous!” she agreed. She looked at him with a pang of envy.

“And now,” she said, gathering her things together, “let us have dinner.”

At Hyams Place they had finished dinner. The table was cleared; only a few crumbs remained, and the pot of flowers stood in the middle of the table like a sentry. The only sound in the room was the stitching of a needle, pricking through silk, for Maggie was sewing. Sara sat hunched on the music stool, but she was not playing.

“Sing something,” said Maggie suddenly. Sara turned and struck the notes.

“Brandishing, flourishing my sword in my hand …” she sang. The words were the words of some pompous eighteenth century march, but her voice was reedy and thin. Her voice broke. She stopped singing.

She sat silent with her hands on the notes. “What’s the good of singing if one hasn’t any voice?” she murmured. Maggie went on sewing.

“What did you do today?” she said at length, looking up abruptly.

“Went out with Rose,” said Sara.

“And what did you do with Rose?” said Maggie. She spoke absent-mindedly. Sara turned and glanced at her. Then she began to play again. “Stood on the bridge and looked into the water,” she murmured.

“Stood on the bridge and looked into the water,” she hummed, in time to the music. “Running water; flowing water. May my bones turn to coral; and fish light their lanthorns; fish light their green lanthorns in my eyes.” She half turned and looked round at Maggie. But she was not attending. Sara was silent. She looked at the notes again. But she did not see the notes, she saw a garden; flowers; and her sister; and a young man with a big nose who stooped to pick a flower that was gleaming in the dark. And he held the flower out in his hand in the moonlight … Maggie interrupted her.

“You went out with Rose,” she said. “Where to?”

Sara left the piano and stood in front of the fireplace.

“We got into a bus and went to Holborn,” she said. “And we walked along a street,” she went on; “and suddenly,” she jerked her hand out, “I felt a clap on my shoulder.” “Damned liar!” said Rose, “and took me and flung me against a public house wall!”

Maggie stitched on in silence.

“You got into a bus and went to Holborn,” she repeated mechanically after a time. “And then?”

“Then we went in to a room,” Sara continued, “and there were people—multitudes of people. And I said to myself …” she paused.

“A meeting?” Maggie murmured. “Where?”

“In a room,” Sara answered. “A pale greenish light. A woman hanging clothes on a line in the back garden; and someone went by rattling a stick on the railings.”

“I see,” said Maggie. She stitched on quickly.

“I said to myself,” Sara resumed, “whose heads are those …” she paused.

“A meeting,” Maggie interrupted her. “What for? What about?”

“There were pigeons cooing,” Sara went on. “Take two coos, Taffy. Take two coos … Tak … And then a wing darkened the air, and in came Kitty clothed in starlight; and sat on a chair.”

She paused. Maggie was silent. She went on stitching for a moment.

“Who came in?” she asked at length.

“Somebody very beautiful; clothed in starlight; with green in her hair,” said Sara. “Whereupon”—here she changed her voice and imitated the tones in which a middle-class man might be supposed to welcome a lady of fashion, “up jumps Mr Pickford, and says ‘Oh, Lady Lasswade, won’t you take this chair?’”

She pushed a chair in front of her.

“And then,” she went on, flourishing her hands, “Lady Lasswade sits down; puts her gloves on the table,”—she patted a cushion—“like that.”

Maggie looked up over her sewing. She had a general impression of a room full of people; sticks rattling on the railings; clothes hanging out to dry, and someone coming in with beetles’ wings in her hair.

“What happened then?” she asked.

“Then withered Rose, spiky Rose, tawny Rose, thorny Rose,” Sara burst out laughing, “shed a tear.”

“No, no,” said Maggie. There was something wrong with the story; something impossible. She looked up. The light of a passing car slid across the ceiling. It was growing too dark to see. The lamp from the public-house opposite made a yellow glare in the room; the ceiling trembled with a watery pattern of fluctuating light. There was a sound of brawling in the street outside; a scuffling and trampling as if the police were hauling someone along the street against his will. Voices jeered and shouted after him.

“Another row?” Maggie murmured, sticking her needle in the stuff.

Sara got up and went to the window. A crowd had gathered outside the public house. A man was being thrown out. There he came, staggering. He fell against a lamp-post to which he clung. The scene was lit up by the glare of the lamp over the public house door. Sara stood for a moment at the window watching them. Then she turned; her face in the mixed light looked cadaverous and worn, as if she were no longer a girl, but an old woman worn out by a life of childbirth, debauchery and crime. She stood there hunched up, with her hands clenched together.

“In time to come,” she said, looking at her sister, “people, looking into this room—this cave, this little antre, scooped out of mud and dung, will hold their fingers to their noses”—she held her fingers to her nose—“and say ‘Pah! They stink!’”

She fell down into a chair.

Maggie looked at her. Curled round, with her hair falling over her face and her hands screwed together she looked like some great ape, crouching there in a little cave of mud and dung. “Pah!” Maggie repeated to herself, “They stink” … She drove her needle through the stuff in a spasm of disgust. It was true, she thought; they were nasty little creatures, driven by uncontrollable lusts. The night was full of roaring and cursing; of violence and unrest, also of beauty and joy. She got up, holding the dress in her hands. The folds of silk fell down to the floor and she ran her hand over them.

“That’s done. That’s finished,” she said, laying the dress on the table. There was nothing more she could do with her hands. She folded the dress up and put it away. Then the cat, which had been asleep, rose very slowly, arched its back and stretched itself to its full length.

“You want your supper, do you?” said Maggie. She went into the kitchen and came back with a saucer of milk. “There, poor puss,” she said, putting the saucer down on the floor. She stood watching the cat lap up its milk, mouthful by mouthful; then it stretched itself out again with extraordinary grace.

Sara, standing at a little distance, watched her. Then she imitated her.

“There, poor puss, there, poor puss,” she repeated. “As you rock the cradle, Maggie,” she added.

Maggie raised her arms as if to ward off some implacable destiny; then let them fall. Sara smiled as she watched her; then tears brimmed, fell and ran slowly down her cheeks. But as she put up her hand to wipe them there was a sound of knocking; somebody was hammering on the door of the next house. The hammering stopped. Then it began again—hammer, hammer, hammer.

They listened.

“Upcher’s come home drunk and wants to be let in,” said Maggie. The knocking ceased. Then it began again.

Sara dried her eyes, roughly, energetically.

“Bring up your children on a desert island where the ships only come when the moon’s full!” she exclaimed.

“Or have none?” said Maggie. A window was thrown open. A woman’s voice was heard shrieking abuse at the man. He bawled back in a thick drunken voice from the doorstep. Then the door slammed.

They listened.

“Now he’ll stagger against the wall and be sick,” said Maggie. They could hear heavy footsteps lurching up the stairs in the next house. Then there was silence.

Maggie crossed the room to shut the window. The great windows of the factory opposite were all lit up; it looked like a palace of glass with thin black bars across it. A glaze of yellow light lit up the lower halves of the houses opposite; the slate roofs shone blue, for the sky hung down in a heavy canopy of yellow light. Footsteps tapped on the pavement, for people were still walking in the street. Far off a voice was crying hoarsely. Maggie leant out. The night was windy and warm.

“What’s he crying?” she said.

The voice came nearer and nearer.

“Death …?” she said.

“Death …?” said Sara. They leant out. But they could not hear the rest of the sentence. Then a man who was wheeling a barrow along the street shouted up to them:

“The King’s dead!”

[]

1911

The sun was rising. Very slowly it came up over the horizon shaking out light. But the sky was so vast, so cloudless, that to fill it with light took time. Very gradually the clouds turned blue; leaves on forest trees sparkled; down below a flower shone; eyes of beasts—tigers, monkeys, birds—sparkled. Slowly the world emerged from darkness. The sea became like the skin of an innumerable scaled fish, glittering gold. Here in the South of France the furrowed vineyards caught the light; the little vines turned purple and yellow; and the sun coming through the slats of the blinds striped the white walls. Maggie, standing at the window, looked down on the courtyard, and saw her husband’s book cracked across with shadow from the vine above; and the glass that stood beside him glowed yellow. Cries of peasants working came through the open window.

The sun, crossing the Channel, beat vainly on the blanket of thick sea mist. Light slowly permeated the haze over London; struck on the statues in Parliament Square, and on the Palace where the flag flew though the King, borne under a white and blue Union Jack, lay in the caverns at Frogmore. It was hotter than ever. Horses’ noses hissed as they drank from the troughs; their hoofs made ridges hard and brittle as plaster on the country roads. Fires tearing over the moors left charcoal twigs behind them. It was August, the holiday season. The glass roofs of the great railway stations were globes incandescent with light. Travellers watched the hands of the round yellow clocks as they followed porters, wheeling portmanteaus, with dogs on leashes. In all the stations trains were ready to bore their way through England; to the North, to the South, to the West. Now the guard standing with his hand raised dropped his flag and the tea-urn slid past. Off the trains swung through the public gardens with asphalt paths; past the factories; into open country. Men standing on bridges fishing looked up; horses cantered; women came to doors and shaded their eyes, the shadow of the smoke floated over the corn, looped down and caught a tree. And on they passed.

In the station yard at Wittering, Mrs Chinnery’s old victoria stood waiting. The train was late; it was very hot. William the gardener sat on the box in his buff-coloured coat with the plated buttons flicking the flies off. The flies were troublesome. They had gathered in little brown clusters on the horses’ ears. He flicked his whip; the old mare stamped her hoofs; and shook her ears, for the flies had settled again. It was very hot. The sun beat down on the station yard, on the carts and flies and traps waiting for the train. At last the signal dropped; a puff of smoke blew over the hedge; and in a minute people came streaming out into the yard, and here was Miss Pargiter carrying her bag in her hand and a white umbrella. William touched his hat.

“Sorry to be so late,” said Eleanor, smiling up at him, for she knew him; she came every year.

She put her bag on the seat and sat back under the shade of her white umbrella. The leather of the carriage was hot behind her back; it was very hot—hotter even than Toledo. They turned into the High Street; the heat seemed to make everything drowsy and silent. The broad street was full of traps and carts with the reins hanging loose and the horses’ heads drooping. But after the din of the foreign market-places how quiet it seemed! Men in gaiters were leaning against the walls; the shops had their awnings out; the pavement was barred with shadow. They had parcels to fetch. At the fishmonger’s they stopped; and a damp white parcel was handed out to them. At the ironmonger’s they stopped; and William came back with a scythe. Then they stopped at the chemist’s; but there they had to wait, because the lotion was not yet ready.

Eleanor sat back under the shade of her white umbrella. The air seemed to hum with the heat. The air seemed to smell of soap and chemicals. How thoroughly people wash in England, she thought, looking at the yellow soap, the green soap, and the pink soap in the chemist’s window. In Spain she had hardly washed at all; she had dried herself with a pocket handkerchief standing among the white dry stones of the Guadalquivir. In Spain it was all parched and shrivelled. But here—she looked down the High Street—every shop was full of vegetables; of shining silver fish; of yellow-clawed, soft-breasted chickens; of buckets, rakes and wheel-barrows. And how friendly people were!

She noticed how often hats were touched; hands were grasped; people stopped, talking, in the middle of the road. But now the chemist came out with a large bottle wrapped in tissue paper. It was stowed away under the scythe.

“Midges very bad this year, William?” she asked, recognising the lotion.

“Tarrible bad, miss, tarrible,” he said, touching his hat. There hadn’t been such a drought since the Jubilee she understood him to say; but his accent, his singsong and Dorsetshire rhythm, made it difficult to catch what he said. Then he flicked his whip and they drove on; past the market cross; past the red brick town hall, with the arches under it; along a street of bow-windowed eighteenth-century houses, the residences of doctors and solicitors; past the pond with chains linking white posts together and a horse drinking; and so out into the country. The road was laid with soft white dust; the hedges, hung with wreaths of travellers’ joy, seemed also thick with dust. The old horse settled down into his mechanical jog-trot, and Eleanor lay back under her white umbrella.

Every summer she came to visit Morris at his mother-in-law’s house. Seven times, eight times she had come she counted; but this year it was different. This year everything was different. Her father was dead; her house was shut up; she had no attachment at the moment anywhere. As she jolted through the hot lanes she thought drowsily, What shall I do now? Live there? she asked herself, as she passed a very respectable Georgian villa in the middle of a street. No, not in a village she said to herself; and they jogged through the village. What about that house then, she said to herself, looking at a house with a verandah among some trees. But then she thought, I should turn into a grey-haired lady cutting flowers with a pair of scissors and tapping at cottage doors. She did not want to tap at cottage doors. And the clergyman—a clergyman was wheeling his bicycle up the hill—would come to tea with her. But she did not want the clergyman to come to tea with her. How spick and span it all is she thought; for they were passing through the village. The little gardens were bright with red and yellow flowers. Then they began to meet village people; a procession. Some of the women carried parcels; there was a gleaming silver object on the quilt of a perambulator; and one old man clasped a hairy-headed coco-nut to his breast. There had been a Fête she supposed; here it was, returning. They drew to the side of the road as the carriage trotted past, and cast steady curious looks at the lady sitting under her green and white umbrella. Now they came to a white gate; trotted briskly down a short avenue; and drew up with a flourish of the whip in front of two slender columns; door-scrapers like bristling hedgehogs; and a wide open hall door.

She waited for a moment in the hall. Her eyes were dimmed after the glare of the road. Everything seemed pale and frail and friendly. The rugs were faded; the pictures were faded. Even the Admiral in his cocked hat over the fireplace wore a curious look of faded urbanity. In Greece one was always going back two thousand years. Here it was always the eighteenth century. Like everything English, she thought, laying down her umbrella on the refectory table beside the china bowl, with dried rose leaves in it, the past seemed near, domestic, friendly.

The door opened. “Oh Eleanor!” her sister-in-law exclaimed, running into the hall in her fly-away summer clothes, “How nice to see you! How brown you look! Come into the cool!”

She led her into the drawing-room. The drawing-room piano was strewn with white baby-linen; pink and green fruit glimmered in glass bottles.

“We’re in such a mess,” said Celia, sinking onto the sofa. “Lady St. Austell has only just this minute gone, and the Bishop.”

She fanned herself with a sheet of paper.

“But it’s been a great success. We had the bazaar in the garden. They acted.” It was a programme with which she was fanning herself.

“A play?” said Eleanor.

“Yes, a scene from Shakespeare,” said Celia. “Midsummer-Night? As You Like It? I forget which. Miss Green got it up. Happily it was so fine. Last year it poured. But how my feet are aching!” The long window opened onto the lawn. Eleanor could see people dragging tables.

“What an undertaking!” she said.

“It was!” Celia panted. “We had Lady St. Austell and the Bishop, coco-nut shies and a pig; but I think it all went off very well. They enjoyed it.”

“For the Church?” Eleanor asked.

“Yes. The new steeple,” said Celia.

“What a business!” said Eleanor again. She looked out onto the lawn. The grass was already scorched and yellow; the laurel bushes looked shrivelled. Tables were standing against the laurel bushes. Morris passed, dragging a table.

“Was it nice in Spain?” Celia was asking. “Did you see wonderful things?”

“Oh yes!” Eleanor exclaimed. “I saw …” She stopped. She had seen wonderful things—buildings, mountains, a red city in a plain. But how could she describe it?

“You must tell me all about it afterwards,” said Celia getting up. “It’s time we got ready. But I’m afraid,” she said, toiling rather painfully up the broad staircase, “I must ask you to be careful, because we’re very short of water. The well….” she stopped. The well, Eleanor remembered, always gave out in a hot summer. They walked together down the broad passage, past the old yellow globe which stood under the pleasant eighteenth-century picture of all the little Chinnerys in long drawers and nankeen trousers standing round their father and mother in the garden. Celia paused with her hand on the bedroom door. The sound of doves cooing came in through the open window.

“We’re putting you in the Blue room this time,” she said. Generally Eleanor had the Pink room. She glanced in. “I hope you’ve got everything——” she began.

“Yes, I’m sure I’ve got everything,” said Eleanor, and Celia left her.

The maid had already unpacked her things. There they were—laid on the bed. Eleanor took off her dress, and stood in her white petticoat washing herself, methodically but carefully, since they were short of water. The English sun still made her face prickle all over where the Spanish sun had burnt it. Her neck had been cut off from her chest as if it had been painted brown, she thought, as she slipped on her evening dress in front of the looking-glass. She twisted her thick hair, with the grey strand in it, rapidly into a coil; hung the jewel, a red blob like congealed raspberry jam with a gold seed in the centre, round her neck; and gave one glance at the woman who had been for fifty-five years so familiar that she no longer saw her—Eleanor Pargiter. That she was getting old was obvious; there were wrinkles across her forehead; hollows and creases where the flesh used to be firm.

And what was my good point? she asked herself, running the comb once more through her hair. My eyes? Her eyes laughed back at her as she looked at them. My eyes, yes, she thought. Somebody had once praised her eyes. She made herself open them instead of screwing them together. Round each eye were several little white strokes, where she had crinkled them up to avoid the glare on the Acropolis, at Naples, at Granada and Toledo. But that’s over, she thought, people praising my eyes, and finished her dressing.

She stood for a moment looking at the burnt, dry lawn. The grass was almost yellow; the elm trees were beginning to turn brown; red-and-white cows were munching on the far side of the sunk hedge. But England was disappointing, she thought; it was small; it was pretty; she felt no affection for her native land—none whatever. Then she went down, for she wanted if possible to see Morris alone.

But he was not alone. He got up as she came in and introduced her to a stoutish, white-haired old man in a dinner-jacket.

“You know each other, don’t you?” said Morris.

“Eleanor—Sir William Whatney.” He put a little stress humorously upon the “Sir” which for a moment confused Eleanor.

“We used to know each other,” said Sir William, coming forward and smiling as he took her hand.

She looked at him. Could it be William Whatney—old Dubbin—who used to come to Abercorn Terrace years ago? It was. She had not seen him since he went to India.

But are we all like that? she asked herself, looking from the grisled, crumpled red-and-yellow face of the boy she had known—he was almost hairless—at her own brother Morris. He looked bald and thin; but surely he was in the prime of life, as she was herself? Or had they all suddenly become old fogies like Sir William? Then her nephew North and her niece Peggy came in with their mother and they went in to dinner. Old Mrs Chinnery dined upstairs.

How has Dubbin become Sir William Whatney? she wondered, glancing at him as they ate the fish that had been brought up in the damp parcel. She had last seen him—in a boat on the river. They had gone for a picnic; they had supped on an island in the middle of the river. Maidenhead, was it?

They were talking about the Fête. Craster had won the pig; Mrs Grice had won the silver-plated salver.

“That’s what I saw on the perambulator,” said Eleanor. “I met the Fête coming back,” she explained. She described the procession. And they talked about the Fête.

“Don’t you envy my sister-in-law?” said Celia, turning to Sir William. “She’s just back from a tour in Greece.”

“Indeed!” said Sir William. “Which part of Greece?”

“We went to Athens, then to Olympia, then to Delphi,” Eleanor began, reciting the usual formula. They were on purely formal terms evidently—she and Dubbin.

“My brother-in-law, Edward,” Celia explained, “takes these delightful tours.”

“You remember Edward?” said Morris. “Weren’t you up with him?”

“No, he was junior to me,” said Sir William. “But I’ve heard of him, of course. He’s—let me think—what is he—a great swell, isn’t he?”

“Oh, he’s at the top of his tree,” said Morris.

He was not jealous of Edward, Eleanor thought; but there was a certain note in his voice which told her that he was comparing his career with Edward’s.

“They loved him,” she said. She smiled; she saw Edward lecturing troops of devout school mistresses on the Acropolis. Out came their notebooks and down they scribbled every word he said. But he had been very generous; very kind; he had looked after her all the time.

“Did you meet anyone at the Embassy?” Sir William asked her. Then he corrected himself. “Not an Embassy though, is it?”

“No. Athens is not an Embassy,” said Morris. Here there was a diversion; what was the difference between an Embassy and a Legation? Then they began to discuss the situation in the Balkans.

“There’s going to be trouble there in the near future,” Sir William was saying. He turned to Morris; they discussed the situation in the Balkans.

Eleanor’s attention wandered. What’s he done? she wondered. Certain words and gestures brought him back to her as he had been thirty years ago. There were relics of the old Dubbin if one half-shut one’s eyes. She half-shut her eyes. Suddenly she remembered—it was he who had praised her eyes. “Your sister has the brightest eyes I ever saw,” he had said. Morris had told her. And she had hidden her face behind a newspaper in the train going home to conceal her pleasure. She looked at him again. He was talking. She listened. He seemed too big for the quiet, English dining-room; his voice boomed out. He wanted an audience.

He was telling a story. He spoke in clipped, nervous sentences as if there were a ring round them—a style she admired, but she had missed the beginning. His glass was empty.

“Give Sir William some more wine,” Celia whispered to the nervous parlour-maid. There was some juggling with decanters on the sideboard. Celia frowned nervously. A girl from the village who doesn’t know her job, Eleanor reflected. The story was reaching its climax; but she had missed several links.

“… and I found myself in an old pair of riding-breeches standing under a peacock umbrella; and all the good people were crouching with their heads to the ground. ‘Good Lord,’ I said to myself, ‘if they only knew what a bally ass I feel!’” He held out his glass to be filled. “That’s how we were taught our job in those days,” he added.

He was boasting, of course; that was natural. He came back to England after ruling a district “about the size of Ireland,” as they always said; and nobody had ever heard of him. She had a feeling that she would hear a great many more stories that sailed serenely to his own advantage, during the week-end. But he talked very well. He had done a great many interesting things. She wished that Morris would tell stories too. She wished that he would assert himself instead of leaning back and passing his hand—the hand with the cut on it—over his forehead.

Ought I to have urged him to go to the Bar? she thought. Her father had been against it. But once it’s done there it is; he married; the children came; he had to go on, whether he wanted to or not. How irrevocable things are, she thought. We make our experiments, then they make theirs. She looked at her nephew North and at her niece Peggy. They sat opposite her with the sun on their faces. Their perfectly healthy egg-shell faces looked extraordinarily young. Peggy’s blue dress stuck out like a child’s muslin frock; North was still a brown-eyed cricketing boy. He was listening intently; Peggy was looking down at her plate. She had the non-committal look which well brought up children have when they listen to the talk of their elders. She might be amused; or bored? Eleanor could not be sure which it was.

“There he goes,” Peggy said, suddenly looking up. “The owl …,” she said, catching Eleanor’s eye. Eleanor turned to look out of the window behind her. She missed the owl; she saw the heavy trees, gold in the setting sun; and the cows slowly moving as they munched their way across the meadow.

“You can time him,” said Peggy, “he’s so regular.” Then Celia made a move.

“Shall we leave the gentlemen to their politics,” she said, “and have our coffee on the terrace?” and they shut the door upon the gentlemen and their politics.

“I’ll fetch my glasses,” said Eleanor, and she went upstairs.

She wanted to see the owl before it got too dark. She was becoming more and more interested in birds. It was a sign of old age, she supposed, as she went into her bedroom. An old maid who washes and watches birds, she said to herself as she looked in the glass. There were her eyes—they still seemed to her rather bright, in spite of the lines round them—the eyes she had shaded in the railway carriage because Dubbin praised them. But now I’m labelled, she thought—an old maid who washes and watches birds. That’s what they think I am. But I’m not—I’m not in the least like that, she said. She shook her head, and turned away from the glass. It was a nice room; shady, civilised, cool after the bedrooms in foreign inns, with marks on the wall where someone had squashed bugs and men brawling under the window. But where were her glasses? Put away in some drawer? She turned to look for them.

“Did father say Sir William was in love with her?” Peggy asked as they waited on the terrace.

“Oh I don’t know about that,” said Celia. “But I wish they could have married. I wish she had children of her own. And then they could have settled here,” she added. “He’s such a delightful man.”

Peggy was silent. There was a pause.

Celia resumed:

“I hope you were polite to the Robinsons this afternoon, dreadful as they are….”

“They give ripping parties anyhow,” said Peggy.

“‘Ripping, ripping,’” her mother complained half laughing. “I wish you wouldn’t pick up all North’s slang, my dear…. Oh, here’s Eleanor,” she broke off.

Eleanor came out onto the terrace with her glasses, and sat down beside Celia. It was still very warm; it was still light enough to see the hills in the distance.

“He’ll be back in a minute,” said Peggy, drawing up a chair. “He’ll come along that hedge.”

She pointed to the dark line of hedge that went across the meadow. Eleanor focussed her glasses and waited.

“Now,” said Celia, pouring out the coffee. “There are so many things I want to ask you.” She paused. She always had a hoard of questions to ask; she had not seen Eleanor since April. In four months questions accumulated. Out they came drop by drop.

“In the first place,” she began. “No….” She rejected that question in favour of another.

“What’s all this about Rose?” she asked.

“What?” said Eleanor absentmindedly, altering the focus of her glasses. “It’s getting too dark,” she said; the field was blurred.

“Morris says she’s been had up in a police-court,” said Celia. She dropped her voice slightly though they were alone.

“She threw a brick——” said Eleanor. She focussed her glasses on the hedge again. She held them poised in case the owl should come that way again.

“Will she be put in prison?” Peggy asked quickly.

“Not this time,” said Eleanor. “Next time—— Ah, here he comes!” she broke off. The blunt-headed bird came swinging along the hedge. He looked almost white in the dusk. Eleanor got him within the circle of her lens. He held a little black spot in front of him.

“He’s got a mouse in his claws!” she exclaimed. “He’s got a nest in the steeple,” said Peggy. The owl swooped out of the field of vision.

“Now I can’t see him any more,” said Eleanor. She lowered her glasses. They were silent for a moment, sipping their coffee. Celia was thinking of her next question; Eleanor anticipated her.

“Tell me about William Whatney,” she said. “When I last saw him he was a slim young man in a boat.” Peggy burst out laughing.

“That must have been ages ago!” she said.

“Not so very long,” said Eleanor. She felt rather nettled. “Well—” she reflected, “twenty years—twenty-five years perhaps.”

It seemed a very short time to her; but then, she thought, it was before Peggy was born. She could only be sixteen or seventeen.

“Isn’t he a delightful man?” Celia exclaimed. “He was in India, you know. Now he’s retired, and we do hope he’ll take a house here; but Morris thinks he’d find it too dull.”

They sat silent for a moment, looking out over the meadow. The cows coughed now and then as they munched and moved a step further through the grass. A sweet scent of cows and grass was wafted up to them.

“It’s going to be another hot day tomorrow,” said Peggy. The sky was perfectly smooth; it seemed made of innumerable grey-blue atoms the colour of an Italian officer’s cloak; until it reached the horizon where there was a long bar of pure green. Everything looked very settled; very still; very pure. There was not a single cloud, and the stars were not yet showing.

It was small; it was smug; it was petty after Spain, but still, now that the sun had sunk and the trees were massed together without separate leaves it had its beauty, Eleanor thought. The downs were becoming larger and simpler; they were becoming part of the sky.

“How lovely it is!” she exclaimed, as if she were making amends to England after Spain.

“If only Mr Robinson doesn’t build!” sighed Celia; and Eleanor remembered—they were the local scourge; rich people who threatened to build. “I did my best to be polite to them at the bazaar today,” Celia continued. “Some people won’t ask them; but I say one must be polite to neighbours in the country….”

Then she paused. “There are so many things I want to ask you,” she said. The bottle was tilted on its end again. Eleanor waited obediently.

“Have you had an offer for Abercorn Terrace yet?” Celia demanded. Drop, drop, drop, out her questions came.

“Not yet,” said Eleanor. “The agent wants me to cut it up into flats.”

Celia pondered. Then she hopped on again.

“And now about Maggie—when’s her baby going to be born?”

“In November, I think,” said Eleanor. “In Paris,” she added.

“I hope it’ll be all right,” said Celia. “But I do wish it could have been born in England.” She reflected again. “Her children will be French, I suppose?” she said.

“Yes; French, I suppose,” said Eleanor. She was looking at the green bar; it was fading; it was turning blue. It was becoming night.

“Everybody says he’s a very nice fellow,” said Celia. “But René—René,” her accent was bad, “—it doesn’t sound like a man’s name.”

“You can call him Renny,” said Peggy, pronouncing it in the English way.

“But that reminds me of Ronny; and I don’t like Ronny. We had a stable-boy called Ronny.”

“Who stole the hay,” said Peggy. They were silent again. “It’s such a pity——” Celia began. Then she stopped. The maid had come to clear away the coffee.

“It’s a wonderful night, isn’t it?” said Celia, adapting her voice to the presence of servants. “It looks as if it would never rain again. In which case I don’t know….” And she went on prattling about the drought; about the lack of water. The well always ran dry. Eleanor, looking at the hills, hardly listened. “Oh, but there’s quite enough for everybody at present,” she heard Celia saying. And for some reason she held the sentence suspended without a meaning in her mind’s ear, “… quite enough for everybody at present,” she repeated. After all the foreign languages she had been hearing, it sounded to her pure English. What a lovely language, she thought, saying over to herself again the commonplace words, spoken by Celia quite simply, but with some indescribable burr in the r’s, for the Chinnerys had lived in Dorsetshire since the beginning of time.

The maid had gone.

“What was I saying?” Celia resumed. “I was saying, It’s such a pity. Yes….” But there was a sound of voices; a scent of cigar smoke; the gentlemen were upon them. “Oh, here they are!” she broke off. And the chairs were pulled up and re-arranged.

They sat in a semicircle looking across the meadows at the fading hills. The broad bar of green that lay across the horizon had vanished. Only a tinge was left in the sky. It had become peaceful and cool; in them too something seemed to be smoothed out. There was no need to talk. The owl flew down the meadow again; they could just see the white of his wing against the dark of the hedge.

“There he goes,” said North, puffing at a cigar which was his first, Eleanor guessed, Sir William’s gift. The elm trees had become dead black against the sky. Their leaves hung in a fretted pattern like black lace with holes in it. Through a hole Eleanor saw the point of a star. She looked up. There was another.

“It’s going to be a fine day tomorrow,” said Morris, knocking out his pipe against his shoe. Far away on a distant road there was a rattle of cart-wheels; then a chorus of voices singing—country people going home. This is England, Eleanor thought to herself; she felt as if she were slowly sinking into some fine mesh made of branches shaking, hills growing dark, and leaves hanging like black lace with stars among them. But a bat swooped low over their heads.

“I hate bats!” Celia exclaimed, raising her hand to her head nervously.

“Do you?” said Sir William. “I rather like them.” His voice was quiet and almost melancholy. Now Celia will say, They get into one’s hair, Eleanor thought.

“They get into one’s hair,” Celia said.

“But I haven’t any hair,” said Sir William. His bald head, his large face gleamed out in the darkness.

The bat swooped again, skimming the ground at their feet. A little cool air stirred at their ankles. The trees had become part of the sky. There was no moon, but the stars were coming out. There’s another, Eleanor thought, gazing at a twinkling light ahead of her. But it was too low; too yellow; it was another house she realised, not a star. And then Celia began talking to Sir William, whom she wanted to settle near them; and Lady St. Austell had told her that the Grange was to let. Was that the Grange, Eleanor wondered, looking at a light, or a star? And they went on talking.

Tired of her own company, old Mrs Chinnery had come down early. There she sat in the drawing-room waiting. She had made a formal entry, but there was nobody there. Arrayed in her old lady’s dress of black satin, with a lace cap on her head, she sat waiting. Her hawk-like nose was curved in her shrivelled cheeks; a little red rim showed on one of her drooping eyelids.

“Why don’t they come in?” she said peevishly to Ellen, the discreet black maid who stood behind her. Ellen went to the window and tapped on the pane.

Celia stopped talking and turned round. “That’s Mama,” she said. “We must go in.” She got up and pushed back her chair.

After the dark, the drawing-room with its lamps lit had the effect of a stage. Old Mrs Chinnery sitting in her wheeled chair with her ear trumpet seemed to sit there awaiting homage. She looked exactly the same; not a day older; as vigorous as ever. As Eleanor bent to give her the customary kiss, life once more took on its familiar proportions. So she had bent, night after night, over her father. She was glad to stoop down; it made her feel younger herself. She knew the whole procedure by heart. They, the middle-aged, deferred to the very old; the very old were courteous to them; and then came the usual pause. They had nothing to say to her; she had nothing to say to them. What happened next? Eleanor saw the old lady’s eyes suddenly brighten. What made the eyes of an old woman of ninety turn blue? Cards? Yes. Celia had fetched the green baize table; Mrs Chinnery had a passion for whist. But she too had her ceremony; she too had her manners.

“Not tonight,” she said, making a little gesture as if to push away the table. “I am sure it will bore Sir William?” She gave a nod in the direction of the large man who stood there seeming a little outside the family party.

“Not at all. Not at all,” he said with alacrity. “Nothing would please me more,” he assured her.

You’re a good fellow, Dubbin, Eleanor thought. And they drew up the chairs; and dealt the cards; and Morris chaffed his mother-in-law down her ear-trumpet and they played rubber after rubber. North read a book; Peggy strummed on the piano; and Celia, dozing over her embroidery, now and then gave a sudden start and put her hand over her mouth. At last the door opened stealthily. Ellen, the discreet black maid stood behind Mrs Chinnery’s chair, waiting. Mrs Chinnery pretended to ignore her, but the others were glad to stop. Ellen stepped forward and Mrs Chinnery, submitting, was wheeled off to the mysterious upper chamber of extreme old age. Her pleasure was over.

Celia yawned openly.

“The bazaar,” she said, rolling up her embroidery. “I shall go to bed. Come, Peggy. Come, Eleanor.”

North jumped up with alacrity to open the door. Celia lit the brass candlesticks and began, rather heavily, to climb the stairs. Eleanor followed after. But Peggy lagged behind. Eleanor heard her whispering with her brother in the hall.

“Come along, Peggy,” Celia called back over the banister as she toiled upstairs. When she got to the landing at the top she stopped under the picture of the little Chinnerys and called back again rather sharply:

“Come, Peggy.” There was a pause. Then Peggy came, reluctantly. She kissed her mother obediently; but she did not look in the least sleepy. She looked extremely pretty and rather flushed. She did not mean to go to bed, Eleanor felt sure.

She went into her room and undressed. All the windows were open and she heard the trees rustling in the garden. It was so hot still that she lay in her nightgown on top of the bed with only the sheet over her. The candle burnt its little pear-shaped flame on the table by her side. She lay listening vaguely to the trees in the garden; and watched the shadow of a moth that dashed round and round the room. Either I must get up and shut the window or blow out the candle, she thought drowsily. She did not want to do either. She wanted to lie still. It was a relief to lie in the semi-darkness after the talk, after the cards. She could still see the cards falling; black, red and yellow; kings, queens and knaves; on a green baize table. She looked drowsily round her. A nice vase of flowers stood on the dressing-table; there was the polished wardrobe and a china box by her bedside. She lifted the lid. Yes; four biscuits and a pale piece of chocolate—in case she should be hungry in the night. Celia had provided books too, The Diary of a Nobody, Ruff’s Tour in Northumberland and an odd volume of Dante, in case she should wish to read in the night. She took one of the books and laid it on the counterpane beside her. Perhaps because she had been travelling, it seemed as if the ship were still padding softly through the sea; as if the train were still swinging from side to side as it rattled across France. She felt as if things were moving past her as she lay stretched on the bed under the single sheet. But it’s not the landscape any longer, she thought; it’s people’s lives, their changing lives.

The door of the pink bedroom shut. William Whatney coughed next door. She heard him cross the room. Now he was standing by the window, smoking a last cigar. What’s he thinking, she wondered—about India?—how he stood under a peacock umbrella? Then he began moving about the room, undressing. She could hear him take up a brush and put it down again on his dressing-table. And it’s to him, she thought, remembering the wide sweep of his chin and the floating stains of pink and yellow that lay underneath it, that I owe that moment, which had been more than pleasure, when she hid her face behind the newspaper in the corner of the third-class railway carriage.

Now there were three moths dashing round the ceiling. They made a little tapping noise as they dashed round and round from corner to corner. If she left the window open much longer the room would be full of moths. A board creaked in the passage outside. She listened. Peggy, was it, escaping, to join her brother? She felt sure there was some scheme on foot. But she could only hear the heavy-laden branches moving up and down in the garden; a cow lowing; a bird chirping, and then, to her delight, the liquid call of an owl going from tree to tree looping them with silver.

She lay looking at the ceiling. A faint water mark appeared there. It was like a hill. It reminded her of one of the great desolate mountains in Greece or in Spain, which looked as if nobody had ever set foot there since the beginning of time.

She opened the book that lay on the counterpane. She hoped it was Ruff’s Tour, or the Diary of a Nobody; but it was Dante, and she was too lazy to change it. She read a few lines, here and there. But her Italian was rusty; the meaning escaped her. There was a meaning however; a hook seemed to scratch the surface of her mind.

chè per quanti si dice più lì nostro

tanto possiede più di ben ciascuno.

What did that mean? She read the English translation.

For by so many more there are who say ‘ours’

So much the more of good doth each possess.

Brushed lightly by her mind that was watching the moths on the ceiling, and listening to the call of the owl as it looped from tree to tree with its liquid cry, the words did not give out their full meaning, but seemed to hold something furled up in the hard shell of the archaic Italian. I’ll read it one of these days, she thought, shutting the book. When I’ve pensioned Crosby off, when…. Should she take another house? Should she travel? Should she go to India, at last? Sir William was getting into bed next door, his life was over; hers was beginning. No, I don’t mean to take another house, not another house, she thought, looking at the stain on the ceiling. Again the sense came to her of a ship padding softly through the waves; of a train swinging from side to side down a railway-line. Things can’t go on for ever, she thought. Things pass, things change, she thought, looking up at the ceiling. And where are we going? Where? Where? … The moths were dashing round the ceiling; the book slipped on to the floor. Craster won the pig, but who was it won the silver salver? she mused; made an effort; turned round, and blew out the candle. Darkness reigned.

[]

1913

It was January. Snow was falling; snow had fallen all day. The sky spread like a grey goose’s wing from which feathers were falling all over England. The sky was nothing but a flurry of falling flakes. Lanes were levelled; hollows filled; the snow clogged the streams; obscured windows, and lay wedged against doors. There was a faint murmur in the air, a slight crepitation, as if the air itself were turning to snow; otherwise all was silent, save when a sheep coughed, snow flopped from a branch, or slipped in an avalanche down some roof in London. Now and again a shaft of light spread slowly across the sky as a car drove through the muffled roads. But as the night wore on, snow covered the wheel ruts; softened to nothingness the marks of the traffic, and coated monuments, palaces and statues with a thick vestment of snow.

It was still snowing when the young man came from the House Agents to see over Abercorn Terrace. The snow cast a hard white glare upon the walls of the bathroom, showed up the cracks on the enamel bath, and the stains on the wall. Eleanor stood looking out of the window. The trees in the back garden were heavily lined with snow; all the roofs were softly moulded with snow; it was still falling. She turned. The young man turned too. The light was unbecoming to them both, yet the snow—she saw it through the window at the end of the passage—was beautiful, falling.

Mr Grice turned to her as they went downstairs,

“The fact is, our clients expect more lavatory accommodation nowadays,” he said, stopping outside a bedroom door.

Why can’t he say “baths” and have done with it, she thought. Slowly she went downstairs. Now she could see the snow falling through the panels of the hall door. As he went downstairs, she noticed the red ears which stood out over his high collar; and the neck which he had washed imperfectly in some sink at Wandsworth. She was annoyed; as he went round the house, sniffing and peering, he had indicted their cleanliness, their humanity; and he used absurd long words. He was hauling himself up into the class above him, she supposed, by means of long words. Now he stepped cautiously over the body of the sleeping dog; took his hat from the hall table, and went down the front door-steps in his business man’s buttoned boots, leaving yellow footprints in the thick white cushion of snow. A four-wheeler was waiting.

Eleanor turned. There was Crosby, dodging about in her best bonnet and mantle. She had been following Eleanor about the house like a dog all the morning; the odious moment could no longer be put off. Her four-wheeler was at the door; they had to say good-bye.

“Well, Crosby, it all looks very empty, doesn’t it?” said Eleanor, looking in at the empty drawing-room. The white light of the snow glared in on the walls. It showed up the marks on the walls where the furniture had stood, where the pictures had hung.

“It does, Miss Eleanor,” said Crosby. She stood looking too. Eleanor knew that she was going to cry. She did not want her to cry. She did not want to cry herself.

“I can still see you all sitting round that table, Miss Eleanor,” said Crosby. But the table had gone. Morris had taken this; Delia had taken that; everything had been shared out and separated.

“And the kettle that wouldn’t boil,” said Eleanor. “D’you remember that?” She tried to laugh.

“Oh, Miss Eleanor,” said Crosby, shaking her head, “I remember everything!” The tears were forming; Eleanor looked away into the further room.

There too were marks on the wall, where the bookcase had stood, where the writing-table had stood. She thought of herself sitting there, drawing a pattern on the blotting-paper; digging a hole, adding up tradesmen’s books…. Then she turned. There was Crosby. Crosby was crying. The mixture of emotions was positively painful; she was so glad to be quit of it all, but for Crosby it was the end of everything.

She had known every cupboard, flagstone, chair and table in that large rambling house, not from five or six feet of distance as they had known it; but from her knees, as she scrubbed and polished; she had known every groove, stain, fork, knife, napkin and cupboard. They and their doings had made her entire world. And now she was going off, alone, to a single room at Richmond.

“I should think you’d be glad to be out of that basement anyhow, Crosby,” said Eleanor, turning into the hall again. She had never realised how dark, how low it was, until, looking at it with “our Mr Grice,” she had felt ashamed.

“It was my home for forty years, Miss,” said Crosby. The tears were running. For forty years! Eleanor thought with a start. She had been a little girl of thirteen or fourteen when Crosby came to them, looking so stiff and smart. Now her blue gnat’s eyes protruded and her cheeks were sunk.

Crosby was stooping to put Rover on the chain.

“You’re sure you want him?” said Eleanor, looking at the rather smelly, wheezy and unattractive old dog. “We could easily find a nice home for him in the country.”

“Oh, miss, don’t ask me to give him up!” said Crosby. Tears checked her speech. Tears were running freely down her cheeks. For all Eleanor could do to prevent it, tears formed in her eyes too.

“Dear Crosby, good-bye,” she said. She bent and kissed her. She had a curious dry quality of skin she noticed. But her own tears were falling. Then Crosby, holding Rover on the chain, began to edge sideways down the slippery steps. Eleanor, holding the door open, looked after her. It was a dreadful moment; unhappy; muddled; altogether wrong. Crosby was so miserable; she was so glad. Yet as she held the door open her tears formed and fell. They had all lived here; she had stood here to wave Morris to school; there was the little garden in which they used to plant crocuses. And now Crosby, with flakes of snow falling on her black bonnet, climbed into the four-wheeler, holding Rover in her arms. Eleanor shut the door and went in.

Snow was falling as the cab trotted along the streets. There were long yellow ruts on the pavement where people, shopping, had pressed it into slush. It was beginning to thaw slightly; loads of snow slipped off the roofs and fell onto the pavement. Little boys, too, were snowballing; one of them threw a ball which struck the cab as it passed. But when it turned into Richmond Green the whole of the vast space was completely white. Nobody seemed to have crossed the snow there; everything was white. The grass was white; the trees were white; the railings were white; the only marks in the whole vista were the rooks, sitting huddled black on the tree tops. The cab trotted on.

The carts had churned the snow to a yellowish clotted mixture by the time the cab stopped in front of the little house off the Green. Crosby, carrying Rover in her arms lest his feet should mark the stairs, went up the steps. There was Louisa Burt standing to welcome her; and Mr Bishop, the lodger from the top floor who had been a butler. He lent a hand with the luggage, and Crosby followed after, to her little room.

Her room was at the top, and at the back, overlooking the garden. It was small, but when she had unpacked her things it was comfortable enough. It had a look of Abercorn Terrace. Indeed for many years she had been hoarding odds and ends with a view to her retirement. Indian elephants, silver vases, the walrus that she had found in the waste-paper basket one morning, when the guns were firing for the old Queen’s funeral—there they all were. She ranged them askew on the mantelpiece, and when she had hung the portraits of the family—some in wedding-dress, some in wigs and gowns, and Mr Martin in his uniform in the middle because he was her favourite—it was quite like home.

But whether it was the change to Richmond, or whether he had caught cold in the snow, Rover sickened immediately. He refused his food. His nose was hot. His eczema broke out again. When she tried to take him shopping with her next morning he rolled over with his feet in the air as if he begged to be left alone. Mr Bishop had to tell Mrs Crosby—for she wore the courtesy title in Richmond—that in his opinion the poor old chap (here he patted his head) was better out of the way.

“Come along with me, my dear,” said Mrs Burt, putting her arm on Crosby’s shoulder, “and let Bishop do it.”

“He won’t suffer, I can assure you,” said Mr Bishop, rising from his knees. He had put her Ladyship’s dogs to sleep scores of time before this. “He’ll just take one sniff”—Mr Bishop had his pocket-handkerchief in his hand—“and he’ll be off in a jiffy.”

“It’ll be for his good, Annie,” Mrs Burt added, trying to draw her away.

Indeed, the poor old dog looked very miserable. But Crosby shook her head. He had wagged his tail; his eyes were open. He was alive. There was a gleam of what she had long considered a smile on his face. He depended on her, she felt. She was not going to hand him over to strangers. She sat by his side for three days and nights; she fed him with a teaspoon on Brand’s Essence; but at last he refused to open his lips; his body grew stiffer and stiffer; a fly walked across his nose without its twitching. This was in the early morning with the sparrows twittering on the trees outside.

“It’s a mercy she’s got something to distract her,” said Mrs Burt as Crosby passed the kitchen window the day after the funeral in her best mantle and bonnet; for it was Thursday, when she fetched Mr Pargiter’s socks from Ebury Street. “But he ought to have been put down long ago,” she added, turning back to the sink. His breath had smelt.

Crosby took the District Railway to Sloane Square and then she walked. She walked slowly, with her elbows jutting out from her sides as if to protect herself from the haphazardry of the streets. She still looked sad; but the change from Richmond to Ebury Street did her good. She felt more herself in Ebury Street than in Richmond. A common sort of people lived in Richmond she always felt. Here the ladies and gentlemen had the same kind of way with them. She glanced approvingly into the shops as she passed. And General Arbuthnot, who used to visit the Master, lived in Ebury Street she reflected as she turned into that gloomy thoroughfare. He was dead now; Louisa had shown her the notice in the papers. But when he was alive, he had lived here. She had reached Mr Martin’s lodgings. She paused on the steps and adjusted her bonnet. She always had a word with Martin when she came to fetch his socks; it was one of her pleasures; and she enjoyed a gossip with Mrs Briggs, his landlady. Today she would have the pleasure of telling her of the death of Rover. Sidling cautiously down the area steps which were slippery with sleet she stood at the back door and rang the bell.

Martin sat in his room reading his newspaper. The war in the Balkans was over; but there was more trouble brewing—that he was sure. Quite sure. He turned the page. The room was very dark with the sleet falling. And he could never read while he was waiting. Crosby was coming; he could hear voices in the hall. How they gossiped! How they chattered! he thought impatiently. He threw the paper down and waited. Now she was coming; her hand was on the door. But what was he to say to her? he wondered, as he saw the handle turning. He put down the paper. He made use of the usual formula: “Well, Crosby, how’s the world treating you?” as she came in.

She remembered Rover; and the tears started to her eyes.

Martin listened to the story; he wrinkled his brow sympathetically. Then he got up, went into his bedroom, and came back holding a pyjama jacket in his hand.

“What d’you call that, Crosby?” he said. He pointed to a hole under the collar, fringed with brown. Crosby adjusted her gold-rimmed spectacles.

“A burn, sir,” she said with conviction.

“Brand new pyjamas; only worn them twice,” said Martin, holding them extended. Crosby touched them. They were made of the finest silk, she could tell.

“Tut—tut—tut!” she said, shaking her head.

“Will you please take this pyjama to Mrs What’s-her-name,” he went on, holding it out in front of him. He wanted to use a metaphor; but one had to be very literal and use only the simplest language, he remembered, when one talked to Crosby.

“Tell her to get another laundress,” he concluded, “and send the old one to the devil.”

Crosby gathered the injured pyjama tenderly to her breast; Mr Martin never could abide wool next the skin, she remembered. Martin paused. One must pass the time of the day with Crosby, but the death of Rover had seriously limited their topics of conversation.

“How’s the rheumatics?” he asked, as she stood very upright at the door of the room with the pyjamas on her arm. She had grown distinctly smaller, he thought. She shook her head. Richmond was very low compared with Abercorn Terrace, she said. Her face dropped. She was thinking of Rover, he supposed. He must get her mind off that; he could not bear tears.

“Seen Miss Eleanor’s new flat?” he asked. Crosby had. But she did not like flats. In her opinion Miss Eleanor wore herself out.

“And the people’s not worth it, sir,” she said, referring to the Zwinglers, Paravicinis and Cobbs who used to come to the back door for cast-off clothing in the old days.

Martin shook his head. He could not think what to say next. He hated talking to servants; it always made him feel insincere. Either one simpers, or one’s hearty, he was thinking. In either case it’s a lie.

“And are you keeping pretty well yourself, Master Martin?” Crosby asked him, using the diminutive, which was a perquisite of her long service.

“Not married yet, Crosby,” said Martin.

Crosby cast her eye round the room. It was a bachelor’s apartment, with its leather chairs; its chessmen on top of a pile of books and its soda-water syphon on a tray. She ventured to say that she was sure that there were plenty of nice young ladies who would be very glad to take care of him.

“Ah, but I like lying in bed of a morning,” said Martin.

“You always did, sir,” she said, smiling. And then it was possible for Martin to take out his watch, step briskly to the window and exclaim as if he had suddenly remembered an appointment,

“By Jove, Crosby, I must be off!” and the door shut upon Crosby.

It was a lie. He had no engagement. One always lies to servants, he thought, looking out of the window. The mean outlines of the Ebury Street houses showed through the falling sleet. Everybody lies, he thought. His father had lied—after his death they had found letters from a woman called Mira tied up in his table-drawer. And he had seen Mira—a stout respectable lady who wanted help with her roof. Why had his father lied? What was the harm of keeping a mistress? And he had lied himself; about the room off the Fulham Road where he and Dodge and Erridge used to smoke cheap cigars and tell smutty stories. It was an abominable system, he thought; family life; Abercorn Terrace. No wonder the house would not let. It had one bathroom, and a basement; and there all those different people had lived, boxed up together, telling lies.

Then as he stood at the window looking at the little figures slinking along the wet pavement he saw Crosby come up the area steps with a parcel under her arm. She stood for a moment, like a frightened little animal, peering round her before she ventured to brave the dangers of the street. At last, off she trotted. He saw the snow falling on her black bonnet as she disappeared. He turned away.

[]

1914

It was a brilliant spring; the day was radiant. Even the air seemed to have a burr in it as it touched the tree tops; it vibrated, it rippled. The leaves were sharp and green. In the country old church clocks rasped out the hour; the rusty sound went over fields that were red with clover, and up went the rooks as if flung by the bells. Round they wheeled; then settled on the tree tops.

In London all was gallant and strident; the season was beginning; horns hooted; the traffic roared; flags flew taut as trout in a stream. And from all the spires of all the London churches—the fashionable saints of Mayfair, the dowdy saints of Kensington, the hoary saints of the city—the hour was proclaimed. The air over London seemed a rough sea of sound through which circles travelled. But the clocks were irregular, as if the saints themselves were divided. There were pauses, silences…. Then the clocks struck again.

Here in Ebury Street some distant frail-voiced clock was striking. It was eleven. Martin, standing at his window, looked down on the narrow street. The sun was bright; he was in the best of spirits; he was going to visit his stockbroker in the city. His affairs were turning out well. At one time, he was thinking, his father had made a lot of money; then he lost it; then he made it; but in the end he had done very well.

He stood at the window for a moment admiring a lady of fashion in a charming hat who was looking at a pot in the curiosity shop opposite. It was a blue pot on a Chinese stand with green brocade behind it. The sloping symmetrical body, the depth of blue, the little cracks in the glaze pleased him. And the lady looking at the pot was also charming.

He took his hat and stick and went out into the street. He would walk part of the way to the City. “The King of Spain’s daughter” he hummed as he turned up Sloane Street, “came to visit me. All for the sake of….” He looked into the shop windows as he passed. They were full of summer dresses; charming confections of green and gauze, and there were flights of hats stuck on little rods. “… all for the sake of” he hummed as he walked on, “my silver nutmeg tree.” But what was a silver nutmeg tree he wondered? An organ was fluting its merry little jig further down the street. The organ moved round and round, shifted this way and that, as if the old man who played it were half dancing to the tune. A pretty servant girl ran up the area steps and gave him a penny. His supple Italian face wrinkled all over as he whipped off his cap and bowed to her. The girl smiled and slipped back into the kitchen.

“… all for the sake of my silver nutmeg tree” Martin hummed, peering down through the area railings into the kitchen where they were sitting. They looked very snug, with teapots and bread and butter on the kitchen table. His stick swung from side to side like the tail of a cheerful dog. Everybody seemed light-hearted and irresponsible, sallying out of their houses, flaunting along the streets with pennies for the organ-grinders and pennies for the beggars. Everybody seemed to have money to spend. Women clustered round the plate-glass windows. He too stopped, looked at the model of a toy boat; at dressing-cases, shining yellow with rows of silver bottles. But who wrote that song, he wondered, as he strolled on, about the King of Spain’s daughter, the song that Pippy used to sing him, as she wiped his ears with a piece of slimy flannel? She used to take him on her knee and croak out in her wheezy rattle of a voice, “The King of Spain’s daughter came to visit me, all for the sake of….” And then suddenly her knee gave, and down he was tumbled onto the floor.

Here he was at Hyde Park Corner. The scene was extremely animated. Vans, motor-cars, motor omnibuses were streaming down the hill. The trees in the Park had little green leaves on them. Cars with gay ladies in pale dresses were already passing in at the gates. Everybody was going about their business. And somebody, he observed, had written the words “God is Love” in pink chalk on the gates of Apsley House. That must need some pluck, he thought, to write “God is love” on the gates of Apsley House when at any moment a policeman might nab you. But here came his bus; and he climbed on top.

“To St. Paul’s,” he said, handing the conductor his coppers.

The omnibuses swirled and circled in a perpetual current round the steps of St. Paul’s. The statue of Queen Anne seemed to preside over the chaos and to supply it with a centre, like the hub of a wheel. It seemed as if the white lady ruled the traffic with her sceptre; directed the activities of the little men in bowler hats and round coats; of the women carrying attaché cases; of the vans, the lorries and the motor omnibuses. Now and then single figures broke off from the rest and went up the steps into the church. The doors of the Cathedral kept opening and shutting. Now and again a blast of faint organ music was blown out into the air. The pigeons waddled; the sparrows fluttered. Soon after midday a little old man carrying a paper bag took up his station half-way up the steps and proceeded to feed the birds. He held out a slice of bread. His lips moved. He seemed to be wheedling and coaxing them. Soon he was haloed by a circle of fluttering wings. Sparrows perched on his head and his hands. Pigeons waddled close to his feet. A little crowd gathered to watch him feeding the sparrows. He tossed his bread round him in a circle. Then there was a ripple in the air. The great clock, all the clocks of the city, seemed to be gathering their forces together; they seemed to be whirring a preliminary warning. Then the stroke struck. “One” blared out. All the sparrows fluttered up into the air; even the pigeons were frightened; some of them made a little flight round the head of Queen Anne.

As the last ripple of the stroke died away, Martin came out in the open space in front of the Cathedral.

He crossed over and stood with his back against a shop window looking up at the great dome. All the weights in his body seemed to shift. He had a curious sense of something moving in his body in harmony with the building; it righted itself: it came to a full stop. It was exciting—this change of proportion. He wished he had been an architect. He stood with his back pressed against the shop trying to get the whole of the cathedral clear. But it was difficult with so many people passing. They knocked against him and brushed in front of him. It was the rush hour, of course, when City men were making for their luncheons. They were taking short cuts across the steps. The pigeons were swirling up and then settling down again. The doors were opening and shutting as he mounted the steps. The pigeons were a nuisance, he thought, making a mess on the steps. He climbed up slowly.

“And who’s that?” he thought, looking at someone who was standing against one of the pillars. “Don’t I know her?”

Her lips were moving. She was talking to herself.

“It’s Sally!” he thought. He hesitated; should he speak to her, or should he not? But she was company; and he was tired of his own.

“A penny for your thoughts, Sal!” he said, tapping her on the shoulder.

She turned; her expression changed instantly. “Just as I was thinking of you, Martin!” she exclaimed.

“What a lie!” he said, shaking hands.

“When I think of people, I always see them,” she said. She gave her queer little shuffle as if she were a bird, a somewhat dishevelled fowl, for her cloak was not in the fashion. They stood for a moment on the steps, looking down at the crowded street beneath. A gust of organ music came out from the Cathedral behind them as the doors opened and shut. The faint ecclesiastical murmur was vaguely impressive, and the dark space of the Cathedral seen through the door.

“What were you thinking …?” he began. But he broke off. “Come and lunch,” he said. “I’ll take you to a City chop house,” and he shepherded her down the steps, along a narrow alley, blocked by carts, into which packages were being shot from the warehouses. They pushed through the swing doors into the chop house.

“Very full today, Alfred,” said Martin affably, as the waiter took his coat and hat and hung them on the rack. He knew the waiter; he often lunched there; the waiter knew him too.

“Very full, Captain,” he said.

“Now,” he said, sitting down, “what shall we have?”

A vast brownish-yellow joint was being trundled from table to table on a lorry.

“That,” said Sara, waving her hand at it.

“And drink?” said Martin. He took the wine-list and consulted it.

“Drink—” said Sara, “drink, I leave to you.” She took off her gloves and laid them on a small reddish-brown book that was obviously a prayer-book.

“Drink you leave to me,” said Martin. Why, he wondered, do prayer-books always have their leaves gilt with red and gold? He chose the wine.

“And what were you doing,” he said, dismissing the waiter, “at St. Paul’s?”

“Listening to the service,” she said. She looked round her. The room was very hot and crowded. The walls were covered with gold leaves encrusted on a brown surface. People were passing them and coming in and out all the time. The waiter brought the wine. Martin poured her out a glass.

“I didn’t know you went to services,” he said, looking at her prayer-book.

She did not answer. She kept looking round her, watching the people come in and go out. She sipped her wine. The colour was coming into her cheeks. She took up her knife and fork and began to eat the admirable mutton. They ate in silence for a moment.

He wanted to make her talk.

“And what, Sal,” he said, touching the little book, “d’you make of it?”

She opened the prayer-book at random and began to read:

“The father incomprehensible; the son incomprehensible——” she spoke in her ordinary voice.

“Hush!” he stopped her. “Somebody’s listening.”

In deference to him she assumed the manner of a lady lunching with a gentleman in a City restaurant.

“And what were you doing,” she asked, “at St. Paul’s?”

“Wishing I’d been an architect,” he said. “But they sent me into the Army instead, which I loathed.” He spoke emphatically.

“Hush,” she whispered. “Somebody’s listening.”

He looked round quickly; then he laughed. The waiter was setting their tart in front of them. They ate in silence. He filled her glass again. Her cheeks were flushed; her eyes were bright. He envied her the generalised sensation of universal wellbeing that he used to get from a glass of wine. Wine was good—it broke down barriers. He wanted to make her talk.

“I didn’t know you went to services,” he said, looking at her prayer-book. “And what do you think of it?” She looked at it too. Then she tapped it with her fork.

“What do they think of it, Martin?” she asked. “The woman praying and the man with a long white beard?”

“Much what Crosby thinks when she comes to see me,” he said. He thought of the old woman standing at the door of his room with the pyjama jacket over her arm, and the devout look on her face.

“I’m Crosby’s God,” he said, helping her to brussels sprouts.

“Crosby’s God! Almighty, all-powerful Mr Martin!” She laughed.

She raised her glass to him. Was she laughing at him? he wondered. He hoped she did not think him very old. “You remember Crosby, don’t you?” he said. “She’s retired, and her dog’s dead.”

“Retired and her dog’s dead?” she repeated. She looked again over her shoulder. Conversation in a restaurant was impossible; it was broken into little fragments. City men in their neat striped suits and bowler hats were brushing past them all the time.

“It’s a fine church,” she said, turning round. She had hopped back to St. Paul’s, he supposed.

“Magnificent,” he replied. “Were you looking at the monuments?”

Somebody had come in whom he recognised: Erridge, the stockbroker. He raised a finger and beckoned. Martin rose and went to speak to him. When he came back she had filled her glass again. She was sitting there, looking at the people, as if she were a child that he had taken to a pantomime.

“And what are you doing this afternoon?” he asked.

“The Round Pond at four,” she said. She drummed on the table “The Round Pond at four.” Now she had passed, he guessed, into the drowsy benevolence which waits on a good dinner and a glass of wine.

“Meeting somebody?” he asked.

“Yes. Maggie,” she said.

They ate in silence. Fragments of other people’s talk reached them in broken sentences. Then the man to whom Martin had spoken touched him on the shoulder as he went out.

“Wednesday at eight,” he said.

“Right you are,” said Martin. He made a note in his pocket-book.

“And what are you doing this afternoon?” she asked.

“Ought to see my sister in prison,” he said, lighting a cigarette.

“In prison?” she asked.

“Rose. For throwing a brick,” he said.

“Red Rose, tawny Rose,” she began, reaching out her hand for the wine again, “wild Rose, thorny Rose——”

“No,” he said, putting his hand over the mouth of the bottle, “you’ve had enough.” A little excited her. He must damp her excitement. There were people listening.

“A damned unpleasant thing,” he said, “being in prison.”

She drew back her glass and sat gazing at it, as if the engine of the brain were suddenly cut off. She was very like her mother—except when she laughed.

He would have liked to talk to her about her mother. But it was impossible to talk. Too many people were listening, and they were smoking. Smoke mixed with the smell of meat made the air heavy. He was thinking of the past when she exclaimed:

“Sitting on a three-legged stool having meat crammed down her throat!”

He roused himself. She was thinking of Rose, was she?

“Crash came a brick!” she laughed, flourishing her fork.

“‘Roll up the map of Europe,’ said the man to the flunkey. ‘I don’t believe in force’!” She brought down her fork. A plum-stone jumped. Martin looked round. People were listening. He got up.

“Shall we go?” he said, “—if you’ve had enough?”

She got up and looked for her cloak.

“Well, I’ve enjoyed it,” she said, taking her cloak. “Thanks, Martin, for my good lunch.”

He beckoned to the waiter who came with alacrity and totted up the bill. Martin laid a sovereign on the plate. Sara began to thrust her arms into the sleeves of her cloak.

“Shall I come with you,” he said, helping her, “to the Round Pond at four?”

“Yes!” she said, spinning round on her heel. “To the Round Pond at four!”

She walked off, a little unsteadily he observed, past the City men who were still eating.

Here the waiter came up with the change and Martin began to slip it in his pocket. He kept back one coin for the tip. But as he was about to give it, he was struck by something shifty in Alfred’s expression. He flicked up the flap of the bill; a two-shilling piece lay beneath. It was the usual trick. He lost his temper.

“What’s this?” he said angrily.

“Didn’t know it was there, sir,” the waiter stammered.

Martin felt his blood rise to his ears. He felt exactly like his father in a rage; as if he had white spots above his temples. He pocketed the coin that he had been going to give the waiter; and marched past him, brushing aside his hand. The man slunk back with a murmur.

“Let’s be off,” he said, hustling Sara along the crowded room. “Let’s get out of this.”

He hurried her into the street. The fug, the warm meaty smell of the City chop-house, had suddenly become intolerable.

“How I hate being cheated!” he said as he put on his hat.

“Sorry, Sara,” he apologised. “I oughtn’t to have taken you there. It’s a beastly hole.”

He drew in a breath of fresh air. The street noises, the unconcerned, business-like look of things, were refreshing after the hot steamy room. There were the carts waiting, drawn up along the street; and the packages sliding down into them from the warehouses. Again they came out in front of St. Paul’s. He looked up. There was the same old man still feeding the sparrows. And there was the Cathedral. He wished he could feel again the sense of weights changing in his body and coming to a stop; but the queer thrill of some correspondence between his own body and the stone no longer came to him. He felt nothing except anger. Also, Sara distracted him. She was about to cross the crowded road. He put out his hand to stop her. “Take care,” he said. Then they crossed.

“Shall we walk?” he asked. She nodded. They began to walk along Fleet Street. Conversation was impossible. The pavement was so narrow that he had to step on and off in order to keep beside her. He still felt the discomfort of anger, but the anger itself was cooling. What ought I to have done? he thought, seeing himself brush past the waiter without giving him a tip. Not that; he thought, no, not that. People pressing against him made him step off the pavement. After all, the poor devil had to make a living. He liked being generous: he liked to leave people smiling; and two shillings meant nothing to him. But what’s the use, he thought, now it’s done? He began to hum his little song—and then stopped, remembering that he was with someone.

“Look at that, Sal,” he said, clutching at her arm. “Look at that!”

He pointed at the splayed-out figure at Temple Bar; it looked as ridiculous as usual—something between a serpent and a fowl.

“Look at that!” he repeated laughing. They paused for a moment to look at the little flattened figures lodged so uncomfortably against the pediment of Temple Bar: Queen Victoria: King Edward. Then they walked on. It was impossible to talk because of the crowd. Men in wigs and gowns hurried across the street: some carried red bags, others blue bags.

“The Law Courts,” he said, pointing at the cold mass of decorated stone. It looked very gloomy and funereal, “… where Morris spends his time,” he said aloud.

He still felt uncomfortable at having lost his temper. But the feeling was passing. Only a little ridge of roughness remained in his mind.

“D’you think I ought to have been …” he began, a barrister he meant; but also Ought I to have done that—lost his temper with the waiter.

“Ought to have been—ought to have done?” she asked, bending towards him. She had not caught his meaning in the roar of the traffic. It was impossible to talk; but at any rate the feeling that he had lost his temper was diminishing. That little sting was being successfully smoothed over. Then back it came because he saw a beggar selling violets. And that poor devil, he thought, had to go without his tip because he cheated me…. He fixed his eyes on a pillar-box. Then he looked at a car. It was odd how soon one got used to cars without horses, he thought. They used to look ridiculous. They passed the woman selling violets. She wore a hat over her face. He dropped a sixpence in her tray to make amends to the waiter. He shook his head. No violets, he meant; and indeed they were faded. But he caught sight of her face. She had no nose; her face was seamed with white patches; there were red rims for nostrils. She had no nose—she had pulled her hat down to hide that fact.

“Let’s cross,” he said, abruptly. He took Sara’s arm and made her cross between the omnibuses. She must have seen such sights often; he had, often; but not together—that made a difference. He hurried her on to the further pavement.

“We’ll get a bus,” he said, “Come along.”

He took her by the elbow to make her step out briskly. But it was impossible; a cart blocked the way; there were people passing. They were approaching Charing Cross. It was like the piers of a bridge; men and women were sucked in instead of water. They had to stop. Newspaper boys held placards against their legs. Men were buying papers: some loitered; others snatched them. Martin bought one and held it in his hand.

“We’ll wait here,” he said. “The bus’ll come.” An old straw hat with a purple ribbon round it, he thought opening his paper. The sight persisted. He looked up. The station clock’s always fast, he assured a man who was hurrying to catch a train. Always fast, he said to himself as he opened the paper. But there was no clock. He turned to read the news from Ireland. Omnibus after omnibus stopped, then swooped off again. It was difficult to concentrate on the news from Ireland; he looked up.

“This is ours,” he said, as the right bus came. They climbed on top and sat side by side overlooking the driver.

“Two to Hyde Park Corner,” he said, producing a handful of silver, and looked through the pages of the evening paper; but it was only an early edition.

“Nothing in it,” he said, stuffing the paper under the seat. “And now——” he began, filling his pipe. They were running smoothly down the incline of Piccadilly. “—where my old father used to sit,” he broke off, waving his pipe at Club windows. “… and now”—he lit a match, “—and now, Sally, you can say whatever you like. Nobody’s listening. Say something,” he added, throwing his match overboard, “very profound.”

He turned to her. He wanted her to speak. Down they dipped; up they swooped again. He wanted her to speak; or he must speak himself. And what could he say? He had buried his feeling. But some emotion remained. He wanted her to speak it: but she was silent. No, he thought, biting the stem of his pipe. I won’t say it. If I did she’d think me …

He looked at her. The sun was blazing on the windows of St. George’s Hospital. She was looking at it with rapture. But why with rapture? he wondered, as the bus stopped and he got down.

The scene since the morning had changed slightly. Clocks in the distance were just striking three. There were more cars; more women in pale summer dresses; more men in tail-coats and grey top-hats. The procession through the gates into the park was beginning. Everyone looked festive. Even the little dressmakers’ apprentices with band-boxes looked as if they were taking part in some ceremonial. Green chairs were drawn up at the edge of the Row. They were full of people looking about them as if they had taken seats at a play. Riders cantered to the end of the Row; pulled up their horses; turned and cantered the other way. The wind, coming from the west, moved white clouds grained with gold across the sky. The windows of Park Lane shone with blue and gold reflections.

Martin stepped out briskly.

“Come along,” he said; “come—come!” He walked on. I’m young, he thought; I’m in the prime of life. There was a tang of earth in the air; even in the Park there was some faint smell of spring, of the country.

“How I like——” he said aloud. He looked round. He had spoken to the empty air. Sara had lagged behind; there she was, tying her shoe-lace. But he felt as if he had missed a step going downstairs.

“What a fool one feels when one talks aloud to oneself,” he said as she came up. She pointed.

“But look,” she said, “they all do it.”

A middle-aged woman was coming towards them. She was talking to herself. Her lips moved; she was gesticulating with her hand.

“It’s the spring,” he said, as she passed them.

“No. Once in winter I came here,” she said, “and there was a negro, laughing aloud in the snow.”

“In the snow,” said Martin. “A negro.” The sun was bright on the grass; they were passing a bed in which the many-coloured hyacinths were curled and glossy.

“Don’t let’s think of the snow,” he said. “Let’s think——” A young woman was wheeling a perambulator; a sudden thought came into his head. “Maggie,” he said. “Tell me. I haven’t seen her since her baby was born. And I’ve never met the Frenchman—what d’you call him?—René?”

“Renny,” she said. She was still under the influence of the wine; of the wandering airs; of the people passing. He too felt the same distraction; but he wanted to end it.

“Yes. What’s he like, this man René; Renny?”

He pronounced the word first in the French way; then as she did, in the English. He wanted to wake her. He took her arm.

“Renny!” Sara repeated. She threw her head back and laughed. “Let me see,” she said. “He wears a red tie with white spots. And has dark eyes. And he takes an orange—suppose we’re at dinner, and says, looking straight at you, ‘This orange, Sara—’” She rolled her r’s. She paused.

“There’s another person talking to himself,” she broke off. A young man came past them in a closely buttoned-up coat as if he had no shirt. He was muttering as he walked. He scowled at them as he passed them.

“But Renny?” said Martin.

“We were talking about Renny,” he reminded her. “He takes an orange——”

“… and pours himself out a glass of wine,” she resumed. “‘Science is the religion of the future!’” she exclaimed, waving her hand as if she held a glass of wine.

“Of wine?” said Martin. Half listening, he had visualised an earnest French professor—a little picture to which now he must add inappropriately a glass of wine.

“Yes, wine,” she repeated. “His father was a merchant,” she continued. “A man with a black beard; a merchant at Bordeaux. And one day,” she continued, “when he was a little boy, playing in the garden, there was a tap on the window. ‘Don’t make so much noise. Play further away,’ said a woman in a white cap. His mother was dead…. And he was afraid to tell his father that the horse was too big to ride … and they sent him to England….”

She was skipping over railings.

“And then what happened?” said Martin, joining her. “They became engaged?”

She was silent. He waited for her to explain—why they had married—Maggie and Renny. He waited, but she said no more. Well, she married him and they’re happy he thought. He was jealous for a moment. The Park was full of couples walking together. Everything seemed fresh and full of sweetness. The air puffed soft in their faces. It was laden with murmurs; with the stir of branches; the rush of wheels; dogs barking, and now and again the intermittent song of a thrush.

Here a lady passed them, talking to herself. As they looked at her she turned and whistled, as if to her dog. But the dog she had whistled was another person’s dog. It bounded off in the opposite direction. The lady hurried on pursing her lips together.

“People don’t like being looked at,” said Sara, “when they’re talking to themselves.” Martin roused himself.

“Look here,” he said. “We’ve gone the wrong way.” Voices floated out to them.

They had been walking in the wrong direction. They were near the bald rubbed space where the speakers congregate. Meetings were in full swing. Groups had gathered round the different orators. Mounted on their platforms, or sometimes only on boxes, the speakers were holding forth. The voices became louder, louder and louder as they approached.

“Let’s listen,” said Martin. A thin man was leaning forward holding a slate in his hand. They could hear him say, “Ladies and gentlemen …” They stopped in front of him. “Fix your eyes on me,” he said. They fixed their eyes on him. “Don’t be afraid,” he said, crooking his finger. He had an ingratiating manner. He turned his slate over. “Do I look like a Jew?” he asked. Then he turned his slate and looked on the other side. And they heard him say that his mother was born in Bermondsey, as they strolled on, and his father in the Isle of—— The voice died away.

“What about this chap?” said Martin. Here was a large man, banging on the rail of his platform.

“Fellow citizens!” he was shouting. They stopped. The crowd of loafers, errand-boys and nursemaids gaped up at him with their mouths falling open and their eyes gazing blankly. His hand raked in the line of cars that was passing with a superb gesture of scorn. His shirt appeared under his waistcoat.

“Joostice and liberty,” said Martin, repeating his words, as the fist thumped on the railing. They waited. Then it all came over again.

“But he’s a jolly good speaker,” said Martin, turning. The voice died away. “And now, what’s the old lady saying?” They strolled on.

The old lady’s audience was extremely small. Her voice was hardly audible. She held a little book in her hand and she was saying something about sparrows. But her voice tapered off into a thin frail pipe. A chorus of little boys imitated her.

They listened for a moment. Then Martin turned again. “Come along, Sall,” he said, putting his hand on her shoulder.

The voices grew fainter, fainter and fainter. Soon they ceased altogether. They strolled on across the smooth slope that rose and fell like a breadth of green cloth striped with straight brown paths in front of them. Great white dogs were gambolling; through the trees shone the waters of the Serpentine, set here and there with little boats. The urbanity of the Park, the gleam of the water, the sweep and curve and composition of the scene, as if somebody had designed it, affected Martin agreeably.

“Joostice and liberty,” he said half to himself, as they came to the water’s edge and stood a moment, watching the gulls cut the air into sharp white patterns with their wings.

“Did you agree with him?” he asked, taking Sara’s arm to rouse her; for her lips were moving; she was talking to herself. “That fat man,” he explained, “who flung his arm out.” She started.

“Oi, oi, oi!” she exclaimed, imitating his cockney accent.

Yes, thought Martin, as they walked on. Oi, oi, oi, oi, oi, oi. It’s always that. There wouldn’t be much justice or liberty for the likes of him if the fat man had his way—or beauty either.

“And the poor old lady whom nobody listened to?” he said, “talking about the sparrows….”

He could still see in his mind’s eye the thin man persuasively crooking his finger; the fat man who flung his arms out so that his braces showed; and the little old lady who tried to make her voice heard above the cat-calls and whistles. There was a mixture of comedy and tragedy in the scene.

But they had reached the gate into Kensington Gardens. A long row of cars and carriages was drawn up by the kerb. Striped umbrellas were open over the little round tables where people were already sitting, waiting for their tea. Waitresses were hurrying in and out with trays; the season had begun. The scene was very gay.

A lady, fashionably dressed with a purple feather dipping down on one side of her hat, sat there sipping an ice. The sun dappled the table and gave her a curious look of transparency, as if she were caught in a net of light; as if she were composed of lozenges of floating colours. Martin half thought that he knew her; he half raised his hat. But she sat there looking in front of her; sipping her ice. No, he thought; he did not know her, and he stopped for a moment to light his pipe. What would the world be, he said to himself—he was still thinking of the fat man brandishing his arm—without “I” in it? He lit the match. He looked at the flame that had become almost invisible in the sun. He stood for a second drawing at his pipe. Sara had walked on. She too was netted with floating lights from between the leaves. A primal innocence seemed to brood over the scene. The birds made a fitful sweet chirping in the branches; the roar of London encircled the open space in a ring of distant but complete sound. The pink and white chestnut blossoms rode up and down as the branches moved in the breeze. The sun dappling the leaves gave everything a curious look of insubstantiality as if it were broken into separate points of light. He too, himself, seemed dispersed. His mind for a moment was a blank. Then he roused himself, threw away his match, and caught up Sally.

“Come along!” he said. “Come along…. The Round Pond at four!”

They walked on arm in arm in silence, down the long avenue with the Palace and the phantom church at the end of its vista. The size of the human figure seemed to have shrunk. Instead of full-grown people, children were now in the majority. Dogs of all sorts abounded. The air was full of barking and sudden shrill cries. Coveys of nursemaids pushed perambulators along the paths. Babies lay fast asleep in them like images of faintly tinted wax; their perfectly smooth eyelids fitted over their eyes as if they sealed them completely. He looked down; he liked children. Sally had looked like that the first time he saw her, asleep in her perambulator in the hall in Browne Street.

He stopped short. They had reached the Pond.

“Where’s Maggie?” he said. “There—is that her?” He pointed to a young woman who was lifting a baby out of its perambulator under a tree.

“Where?” said Sara. She looked in the wrong direction.

He pointed.

“There, under that tree.”

“Yes,” she said, “that’s Maggie.”

They walked in that direction.

“But is it?” said Martin. He was suddenly doubtful; for she had the unconsciousness of a person who is unaware that she is being looked at. It made her unfamiliar. With one hand she held the child; with the other she arranged the pillows of the perambulator. She too was dappled with lozenges of floating light.

“Yes,” he said, noticing something about her gesture, “that’s Maggie.”

She turned and saw them.

She held up her hand as if to warn them to approach quietly. She put a finger to her lips. They approached silently. As they reached her, the distant sound of a clock striking was wafted on the breeze. One, two, three, four it struck…. Then it ceased.

“We met at St. Paul’s,” said Martin in a whisper. He dragged up two chairs and sat down. They were silent for a moment. The child was not asleep. Then Maggie bent over and looked at the child.

“You needn’t talk in a whisper,” she said aloud. “He’s asleep.”

“We met at St. Paul’s,” Martin repeated in his ordinary voice. “I’d been seeing my stockbroker.” He took off his hat and laid it on the grass. “And when I came out,” he resumed, “there was Sally….” He looked at her. She had never told him, he remembered, what it was that she was thinking, as she stood there, with her lips moving, on the steps of St. Paul’s.

Now she was yawning. Instead of taking the little hard green chair which he had pulled up for her, she had thrown herself down on the grass. She had folded herself like a grasshopper with her back against the tree. The prayer-book, with its red and gold leaves, was lying on the ground tented over with trembling blades of grass. She yawned; she stretched. She was already half asleep.

He drew his chair beside Maggie’s; and looked at the scene in front of them.

It was admirably composed. There was the white figure of Queen Victoria against a green bank; beyond, was the red brick of the old palace; the phantom Church raised its spire, and the Round Pond made a pool of blue. A race of yachts was going forward. The boats leant on their sides so that the sails touched the water. There was a nice little breeze.

“And what did you talk about?” said Maggie.

Martin could not remember. “She was tipsy,” he said, pointing to Sara. “And now she’s going to sleep.” He felt sleepy himself. The sun for the first time was almost hot on his head.

Then he answered her question.

“The whole world,” he said, “Politics; religion; morality.” He yawned. Gulls were screaming as they rose and sank over a lady who was feeding them. Maggie was watching them. He looked at her.

“I haven’t seen you,” he said, “since your baby was born.” It’s changed her, having a child, he thought. It’s improved her, he thought. But she was watching the gulls; the lady had thrown a handful of fish. The gulls swooped round and round her head.

“D’you like having a child?” he said.

“Yes,” she said, rousing herself to answer him. “It’s a tie though.”

“But it’s nice having ties, isn’t it?” he enquired. He was fond of children. He looked at the sleeping baby with its eyes sealed and its thumb in its mouth.

“D’you want them?” she asked.

“Just what I was asking myself,” he said, “before——”

Here Sara made a click at the back of her throat; he dropped his voice to a whisper. “Before I met her at St. Paul’s,” he said. They were silent. The baby was asleep; Sara was asleep; the presence of the two sleepers seemed to enclose them in a circle of privacy. Two of the racing yachts were coming together as if they must collide; but one passed just ahead of the other. Martin watched them. Life had resumed its ordinary proportions. Everything once more was back in its place. The boats were sailing; the men walking; the little boys dabbled in the pond for minnows; the waters of the pond rippled bright blue. Everything was full of the stir, the potency, the fecundity of spring.

Suddenly he said aloud:

“Possessiveness is the devil.”

Maggie looked at him. Did he mean herself—herself and the baby? No. There was a tone in his voice that told her he was thinking not of her.

“What are you thinking?” she asked.

“About the woman I’m in love with,” he said. “Love ought to stop on both sides, don’t you think, simultaneously?” He spoke without any stress on the words, so as not to wake the sleepers. “But it won’t—that’s the devil,” he added in the same undertone.

“Bored, are you?” she murmured.

“Stiff,” he said. “Bored stiff.” He stooped and disinterred a pebble in the grass.

“And jealous?” she murmured. Her voice was very low and soft.

“Horribly,” he whispered. It was true, now that she referred to it. Here the baby half woke and stretched out its hand. Maggie rocked the perambulator. Sara stirred. Their privacy was imperilled. It would be destroyed at any moment, he felt; and he wanted to talk.

He glanced at the sleepers. The baby’s eyes were shut, and Sara’s too. Still they seemed encircled in a ring of solitude. Speaking in a low voice without accent, he told her his story; the story of the lady; how she wanted to keep him, and he wanted to be free. It was an ordinary story, but painful—mixed. As he told it, however, the sting was drawn. They sat silent, looking in front of them.

Another race was starting; men crouched at the edge of the pond, each with his stick resting on a toy boat. It was a charming scene, gay, innocent and a trifle ridiculous. The signal was given; off the boats went. And will he, Martin thought, looking at the sleeping baby, go through the same thing too? He was thinking of himself—of his jealousy.

“My father,” he said suddenly, but softly, “had a lady…. She called him ‘Bogy’.” And he told her the story of the lady who kept a boarding house at Putney—the very respectable lady, grown stout, who wanted help with her roof. Maggie laughed, but very gently, so as not to wake the sleepers. Both were still sleeping soundly.

“Was he in love,” Martin asked her, “with your mother?”

She was looking at the gulls, cutting patterns on the blue distance with their wings. His question seemed to sink through what she was seeing; then suddenly it reached her.

“Are we brother and sister?” she asked; and laughed out loud. The child opened its eyes, and uncurled its fingers.

“We’ve woken him,” said Martin. He began to cry. Maggie had to soothe him. Their privacy was over. The child cried; and the clocks began striking. The sound came wafted gently towards them on the breeze. One, two, three, four, five….

“It’s time to go,” said Maggie, as the last stroke died away. She laid the baby back on its pillow, and turned. Sara was still asleep. She lay crumpled up with her back to the tree. Martin stooped and threw a twig at her. She opened her eyes but shut them again.

“No, no,” she protested, stretching her arms over her head.

“It’s time,” said Maggie. She pulled herself up. “Time is it?” she sighed. “How strange …!” she murmured. She sat up and rubbed her eyes.

“Martin!” she exclaimed. She looked at him as he stood over her in his blue suit holding his stick in his hand. She looked at him as if she were bringing him back to the field of vision.

“Martin!” she said again.

“Yes, Martin!” he replied. “Did you hear what we’ve been saying?” he asked her.

“Voices,” she yawned, shaking her head. “Only voices.”

He paused for a moment, looking down at her. “Well, I’m off,” he said, taking up his hat, “to dine with a cousin in Grosvenor Square,” he added. He turned and left them.

He looked back at them after he had gone a little distance. They were still sitting by the perambulator under the trees. He walked on. Then he looked back again. The ground sloped, and the trees were hidden. A very stout lady was being tugged along the path by a small dog on a chain. He could see them no longer.

The sun was setting as he drove across the Park, an hour or two later. He was thinking that he had forgotten something; but what, he did not know. Scene passed over scene; one obliterated another. Now he was crossing the bridge over the Serpentine. The water glowed with sunset light; twisted poles of lamp light lay on the water, and there, at the end the white bridge composed the scene. The cab entered the shadow of the trees, and joined the long line of cabs that was streaming towards the Marble Arch. People in evening dress were going to plays and parties. The light became yellower and yellower. The road was beaten to a metallic silver. Everything looked festive.

But I’m going to be late, he thought, for the cab was held up in a block by the Marble Arch. He looked at his watch—it was just on eight-thirty. But eight-thirty means eight-forty-five he thought, as the cab moved on. Indeed as it turned into the square there was a car at the door, and a man getting out. So I’m just on time, he thought, and paid the driver.

The door opened almost before he touched the bell, as if he had trod on a spring. The door opened, and two footmen started forward to take his things directly he entered the black-and-white paved hall. He followed another man up the imposing staircase of white marble, sweeping in a curve. A succession of large, dark pictures hung on the wall, and at the top outside the door was a yellow-and-blue picture of Venetian palaces and pale green canals.

“Canaletto or the school of?” he thought, pausing to let the other man precede him. Then he gave his name to the footman.

“Captain Pargiter,” the man boomed out; and there was Kitty standing at the door. She was formal; fashionable; with a dash of red on her lips. She gave him her hand; but he moved on for other guests were arriving. “A saloon?” he said to himself, for the room with its chandeliers, yellow panels, and sofas and chairs dotted about had the air of a grandiose waiting-room. Seven or eight people were already there. It’s not going to work this time, he said to himself as he chatted with his host, who had been racing. His face shone as if it had only that moment been taken out of the sun. One almost expected, Martin thought, as he stood talking, to see a pair of glasses slung round his shoulders, just as there was a red mark across his forehead where his hat had been. No, it’s not going to work, Martin thought as they talked about horses. He heard a paper boy calling in the street below, and the hooting of horns. He preserved clearly his sense of the identity of different objects, and their differences. When a party worked all things, all sounds merged into one. He looked at an old lady with a wedge-shaped stone-coloured face sitting ensconced on a sofa. He glanced at Kitty’s portrait by a fashionable portrait painter as he chatted, standing first on this foot, then on that, to the grizzled man with the bloodhound eyes and the urbane manner whom Kitty had married instead of Edward. Then she came up and introduced him to a girl all in white who was standing alone with her hand on the back of a chair.

“Miss Ann Hillier,” she said. “My cousin, Captain Pargiter.”

She stood for a moment beside them as if to facilitate their introduction. But she was a little stiff always; she did nothing but flick her fan up and down.

“Been to the races, Kitty?” Martin said, because he knew that she hated racing, and he always felt a wish to tease her.

“I? No; I don’t go to races,” she replied rather shortly. She turned away because somebody else had come in—a man in gold lace, with a star.

I should have been better off, Martin thought, reading my book.

“Have you been to the races?” he said aloud to the girl whom he was to take down to dinner. She shook her head. She had white arms; a white dress; and a pearl necklace. Purely virginal, he said to himself; and only an hour ago I was lying stark naked in my bath in Ebury Street, he thought.

“I’ve been watching polo,” she said. He looked down at his shoes, and noticed that they had creases across them; they were old; he had meant to buy a new pair, but had forgotten. That was what he had forgotten, he thought, seeing himself again in the cab, crossing the bridge over the Serpentine.

But they were going down to dinner. He gave her his arm. As they went down the stairs, and he watched the ladies’ dresses in front of them trail from step to step, he thought, What on earth am I going to say to her? Then they crossed the black-and-white squares and went into the dining-room. It was harmoniously shrouded; pictures with hooded bars of light under them shone out; and the dinner table glowed; but no light shone directly on their faces. If this doesn’t work, he thought, looking at the portrait of a nobleman with a crimson cloak and a star that hung luminous in front of him, I’ll never do it again. Then he braced himself to talk to the virginal girl who sat beside him. But he had to reject almost everything that occurred to him—she was so young.

“I’ve thought of three subjects to talk about,” he began straight off, without thinking how the sentence was to end. “Racing; the Russian ballet; and”—he hesitated for a moment—“Ireland. Which interests you?” He unfolded his napkin.

“Please,” she said, bending slightly towards him, “say that again.”

He laughed. She had a charming way of putting her head on one side and bending towards him.

“Don’t let’s talk of any of them,” he said. “Let’s talk of something interesting. Do you enjoy parties?” he asked her. She was dipping her spoon in her soup. She looked up at him as she lifted it with eyes that seemed like bright stones under a film of water. They’re like drops of glass under water, he thought. She was extraordinarily pretty.

“But I’ve only been to three parties in my life!” she said. She gave a charming little laugh.

“You don’t say so!” he exclaimed. “This is the third, then; or is it the fourth?”

He listened to the sounds in the street. He could just hear the cars hooting; but they had gone far away; they made a continuous rushing noise. It was beginning to work. He held out his glass. He would like her to say, he thought, as his glass was filled, “What a charming man I sat next!” when she went to bed that night.

“This is my third real party,” she said, stressing the word “real” in a way that seemed to him slightly pathetic. She must have been in the nursery three months ago, he thought, eating bread and butter.

“And I was thinking as I shaved,” he said, “that I would never go to a party again.” It was true; he had seen a hole in the bookcase. Who’s taken my life of Wren? he had thought, holding his razor out; and had wanted to stay and read, alone. But now … what little piece of his vast experience could he break off and give to her, he wondered?

“Do you live in London?” she asked.

“Ebury Street,” he told her. And she knew Ebury Street, because it was on the way to Victoria; she often went to Victoria, because they had a house in Sussex.

“And now tell me,” he said, feeling that they had broken the ice—when she turned her head to answer some remark of the man on the other side. He was annoyed. The whole fabric that he had been building, like a game of spillikins in which one frail little bone is hooked on top of another, was dashed to the ground. Ann was talking as if she had known the other man all her life; he had hair that looked as if a rake had been drawn through it; he was very young. Martin sat silent. He looked at the great portrait opposite. A footman was standing beneath it; a row of decanters obscured the folds of the cloak on the floor. That’s the third Earl, or the fourth? he asked himself. He knew his eighteenth century; it was the fourth Earl who had made the great marriage. But after all, he thought, looking at Kitty at the head of the table, the Rigbys are a better family than they are. He smiled; he checked himself. I only think of “better families” when I dine in this sort of place, he thought. He looked at another picture; a lady in sea green; the famous Gainsborough. But here Lady Margaret, the woman on his left, turned to him.

“I’m sure you’ll agree with me,” she said, “Captain Pargiter”—he noticed that she swept her eyes over the name on his card before she spoke it, although they had met often before—“that it’s a devilish thing to have done?”

She spoke so pouncingly that the fork she held upright seemed like a weapon with which she was about to pinion him. He threw himself into their conversation. It was about politics of course, about Ireland. “Tell me—what’s your opinion?” she asked, with her fork poised. For a moment he had the illusion that he too was behind the scenes. The screen was down; the lights were up; and he too was behind the scenes. It was an illusion of course; they were only throwing him scraps from their larder; but it was an agreeable sensation while it lasted. He listened. Now she was holding forth to a distinguished old man at the end of the table. He watched him. He had let down a mask of infinitely wise tolerance over his face as she harangued them. He was arranging three crusts of bread by the side of his plate as if he were playing a mysterious little game of profound significance. “So,” he seemed to be saying, “So,” as if they were fragments of human destiny, not crusts, that he held in his fingers. The mask might conceal anything—or nothing? Anyhow it was a mask of great distinction. But here Lady Margaret pinioned him too with her fork; and he raised his eyebrows and moved one of the crusts a little to one side before he spoke. Martin leant forward to listen.

“When I was in Ireland,” he began, “in 1880…” He spoke very simply; he was offering them a memory; he told his story perfectly; it held its meaning without spilling a single drop. And he had played a great part. Martin listened attentively. Yes, it was absorbing. Here we are, he thought, going on and on and on…. He leant forward trying to catch every word. But he was conscious of some interruption; Ann had turned to him.

“Do tell me”—she was asking him—“who he is?” She bent her head to the right. She was under the impression that he knew everybody, apparently. He was flattered. He looked along the table. Who was it? Somebody he had met; somebody, he guessed, who was not quite at his ease.

“I know him,” he said. “I know him——” He had a rather white, fat face; he was talking away at a great rate. And the young married woman to whom he was talking was saying “I see; I see,” with little nods of her head. But there was a slight look of strain on her face. You needn’t put yourself to all that trouble, my good fellow, Martin felt inclined to say to him. She doesn’t understand a word you’re saying.

“I can’t put a name to him,” he said aloud. “But I’ve met him—let me see—where? In Oxford or Cambridge?”

A faint look of amusement came into Ann’s eyes. She had spotted the difference. She coupled them together. They were not her world—no.

“Have you seen the Russian dancers?” she was saying. She had been there with her young man, it seemed. And what’s your world, Martin thought, as she rapped our [out] her slender stock of adjectives—“heavenly,” “amazing,” “marvellous,” and so on. Is it “the” world? he mused. He looked down the table. Anyhow no other world had a chance against it, he thought. And it’s a good world too, he added; large; generous; hospitable. And very nice-looking. He glanced from face to face. Dinner was drawing to an end. They all looked as if they had been rubbed with wash leather, like precious stones; yet the bloom seemed ingrained; it went through the stone. And the stone was clear-cut, there was no blur, no indecision. Here a footman’s white-gloved hand removing dishes knocked over a glass of wine. A red splash trickled onto the lady’s dress. But she did not move a muscle; she went on talking. Then she straightened the clean napkin that had been brought her, nonchalantly, over the stain.

That’s what I like, Martin thought. He admired that. She would have blown her fingers on her nose like an applewoman if she wanted to, he thought. But Ann was talking.

“And when he gives that leap!” she exclaimed—she raised her hand with a lovely gesture in the air—“and then comes down!” She let her hand fall in her lap.

“Marvellous!” Martin agreed. He had got the very accent, he thought; he had got it from the young man whose hair looked as if a rake had gone through it.

“Yes: Nijinsky’s marvellous,” he agreed. “Marvellous,” he repeated.

“And my aunt has asked me to meet him at a party,” said Ann.

“Your aunt?” he said aloud.

She mentioned a well-known name.

“Oh, she’s your aunt, is she?” he said. He placed her. So that was her world. He wanted to ask her—for he found her charming in her youth, her simplicity—but it was too late. Ann was rising.

“I hope——” he began. She bent her head towards him as if she longed to stay, catch his last word, his least word; but could not, since Lady Lasswade had risen; and it was time for her to go.

Lady Lasswade had risen; everybody rose. All the pink, grey, sea-coloured dresses lengthened themselves, and for a moment the tall women standing by the table looked like the famous Gainsborough hanging on the wall. The table, strewn with napkins and wine-glasses, had a derelict air as they left it. For a moment the ladies clustered at the door; then the little old woman in black hobbled past them with remarkable dignity; and Kitty, coming last, put her arm round Ann’s shoulder and led her out. The door shut on the ladies.

Kitty paused for a moment.

“I hope you liked my old cousin?” she said to Ann as they walked upstairs together. She put her hand to her dress and straightened something as they passed a looking-glass.

“I thought him charming!” Ann exclaimed. “And what a lovely tree!” She spoke of Martin and the tree in exactly the same tone. They paused for a moment to look at a tree that was covered with pink blossoms in a china tub standing at the door. Some of the flowers were fully out; others were still unopened. As they looked a petal dropped.

“It’s cruel to keep it here,” said Kitty, “in this hot air.”

They went in. While they dined the servants had opened the folding doors and lit lights in a further room so that it seemed as if they came into another room freshly made ready for them. There was a great fire blazing between two stately fire-dogs; but it seemed cordial and decorative rather than hot. Two or three of the ladies stood before it, opening and shutting their fingers as they spread them to the blaze; but they turned to make room for their hostess.

“How I love that picture of you, Kitty!” said Mrs Aislabie, looking up at the portrait of Lady Lasswade as a young woman. Her hair had been very red in those days; she was toying with a basket of roses. Fiery but tender, she looked, emerging from a cloud of white muslin.

Kitty glanced at it and then turned away.

“One never likes one’s own picture,” she said.

“But it’s the image of you!” said another lady.

“Not now,” said Kitty, laughing off the compliment rather awkwardly. Always after dinner women paid each other compliments about their clothes or their looks, she thought. She did not like being alone with women after dinner; it made her shy. She stood there, upright among them, while footmen went round with trays of coffee.

“By the way, I hope the wine—” she paused and helped herself to coffee, “the wine didn’t stain your frock, Cynthia?” she said to the young married woman who had taken the disaster so coolly.

“And such a lovely frock,” said Lady Margaret, fondling the folds of golden satin between her finger and thumb.

“D’you like it?” said the young woman.

“It’s perfectly lovely! I’ve been looking at it the whole evening!” said Mrs Treyer, an Oriental-looking woman, with a feather floating back from her head in harmony with her nose, which was Jewish.

Kitty looked at them admiring the lovely frock. Eleanor would have found herself out of it, she thought. She had refused her invitation to dinner. That annoyed her.

“Do tell me,” Lady Cynthia interrupted, “who was the man I sat next? One always meets such interesting people at your house,” she added.

“The man you sat next?” said Kitty. She considered a moment. “Tony Ashton,” she said.

“Is that the man who’s been lecturing on French poetry at Mortimer House?” chimed in Mrs Aislabie. “I longed to go to those lectures. I heard they were wonderfully interesting.”

“Mildred went,” said Mrs Treyer.

“Why should we all stand?” said Kitty. She made a movement with her hands towards the seats. She did things like that so abruptly that they called her, behind her back, “The Grenadier.” They all moved this way and that, and she herself, after seeing how the couples sorted themselves, sat down by old Aunt Warburton, who was enthroned in the great chair.

“Tell me about my delightful godson,” the old lady began. She meant Kitty’s second son, who was with the fleet at Malta.

“He’s at Malta——” she began. She sat down on a low chair and began answering her questions. But the fire was too hot for Aunt Warburton. She raised her knobbed old hand.

“Priestley wants to roast us all alive,” said Kitty. She got up and went to the window. The ladies smiled as she strode across the room and jerked up the top of the long window. Just for a moment, as the curtains hung apart, she looked at the square outside. There was a spatter of leaf-shadow and lamplight on the pavement; the usual policeman was balancing himself as he patrolled; the usual little men and women, foreshortened from this height, hurried along by the railings. So she saw them hurrying, the other way, when she brushed her teeth in the morning. Then she came back and sat down on a low stool beside old Aunt Warburton. The worldly old woman was honest, in her way.

“And the little red-haired ruffian whom I love?” she asked. He was her favourite; the little boy at Eton.

“He’s been in trouble,” said Kitty. “He’s been swished.” She smiled. He was her favourite too.

The old lady grinned. She liked boys who got into trouble. She had a wedge-shaped yellow face with an occasional bristle on her chin; she was over eighty; but she sat as if she were riding a hunter, Kitty thought, glancing at her hands. They were coarse hands, with big finger-joints; red and white sparks flashed from her rings as she moved them.

“And you, my dear,” said the old lady, looking at her shrewdly under her bushy eyebrows, “busy as usual?”

“Yes. Much as usual,” said Kitty, evading the shrewd old eyes; for she did things on the sly that they—the ladies over there—did not approve.

They were chattering together. Yet animated as it sounded, to Kitty’s ear the talk lacked substance. It was a battledore and shuttlecock talk, to be kept going until the door opened and the gentlemen came in. Then it would stop. They were talking about a by-election. She could hear Lady Margaret telling some story that was rather coarse presumably, in the eighteenth-century way, since she dropped her voice.

“—turned her upside down and slapped her,” she could hear her say. There was a twitter of laughter.

“I’m so delighted he got in in spite of them,” said Mrs Treyer. They dropped their voices.

“I’m a tiresome old woman,” said Aunt Warburton, raising one of her knobbed hands to her shoulder. “But now I’m going to ask you to shut that window.” The draught was getting at her rheumatic joint.

Kitty strode to the window. “Damn these women!” she said to herself. She laid hold of the long stick with a beak at the end that stood in the window and poked; but the window stuck. She would have liked to fleece them of their clothes, of their jewels, of their intrigues, of their gossip. The window went up with a jerk. There was Ann standing about with nobody to talk to.

“Come and talk to us, Ann,” she said, beckoning to her. Ann drew up a footstool and sat down at Aunt Warburton’s feet. There was a pause. Old Aunt Warburton disliked young girls; but they had relations in common.

“Where’s Timmy, Ann?” she asked.

“Harrow,” said Ann.

“Ah, you’ve always been to Harrow,” said Aunt Warburton. And then the old lady, with the beautiful breeding that simulated at least human charity, flattered the girl, likening her to her grandmother, a famous beauty.

“How I should love to have known her!” Ann exclaimed. “Do tell me—what was she like?”

The old lady began making a selection from her memoirs; it was only a selection; an edition with asterisks; for it was a story that could hardly be told to a girl in white satin. Kitty’s mind wandered. If Charles stayed much longer downstairs, she thought, glancing at the clock, she would miss her train. Could Priestley be trusted to whisper a message in his ears? She would give them another ten minutes; she turned to Aunt Warburton again.

“She must have been wonderful!” Ann was saying. She sat with her hands clasped round her knees looking up into the face of the hairy old dowager. Kitty felt a moment’s pity. Her face will be like their faces, she thought, looking at the little group at the other side of the room. Their faces looked harassed, worried; their hands moved restlessly. Yet they’re brave, she thought; and generous. They gave as much as they took. Had Eleanor after all any right to despise them? Had she done more with her life than Margaret Marrable? And I? she thought. And I? … Who’s right? she thought. Who’s wrong? … Here mercifully the door opened.

The gentlemen came in. They came in reluctantly, rather slowly, as if they had just stopped talking, and had to get their bearings in the drawing-room. They were a little flushed and still laughing, as if they had stopped in the middle of what they were saying. They filed in; and the distinguished old man moved across the room with the air of a ship making port, and all the ladies stirred without rising. The game was over; the battledores and shuttlecocks put away. They were like gulls settling on fish, Kitty thought. There was a rising and a fluttering. The great man let himself slowly down into a chair beside his old friend Lady Warburton. He put the tips of his fingers together and began “Well …?” as if he were continuing a conversation left unfinished the night before. Yes, she thought, there was something—was it human? civilised? she could not find the word she wanted—about the old couple, talking, as they had talked for the past fifty years…. They were all talking. They had all settled in to add another sentence to the story that was just ending, or in the middle, or about to begin.

But there was Tony Ashton standing by himself without a sentence to add to the story. She went up to him therefore.

“Have you seen Edward lately?” he asked her as usual.

“Yes, today,” she said. “I lunched with him. We walked in the Park….” She stopped. They had walked in the Park. A thrush had been singing; they had stopped to listen. “That’s the wise thrush that sings each song twice over …” he had said. “Does he?” she had asked innocently. And it had been a quotation.

She had felt foolish; Oxford always made her feel foolish. She disliked Oxford; yet she respected Edward and Tony too, she thought looking at him. A snob on the surface; underneath a scholar…. They had a standard…. But she roused herself.

He would like to talk to some smart woman—Mrs Aislabie, or Margaret Marrable. But they were both engaged—both were adding sentences with considerable vivacity. There was a pause. She was not a good hostess, she reflected; this sort of hitch always happened at her parties. There was Ann; Ann about to be captured by a youth she knew. But Kitty beckoned. Ann came instantly and submissively.

“Come and be introduced,” she said, “to Mr Ashton. He’s been lecturing at Mortimer House,” she explained, “about——” She hesitated.

“Mallarmé,” he said with his odd little squeak, as if his voice had been pinched off.

Kitty turned away. Martin came up to her.

“A very brilliant party, Lady Lasswade,” he said with his usual tiresome irony.

“This? Oh, not at all,” she said brusquely. This wasn’t a party. Her parties were never brilliant. Martin was trying to tease her as usual. She looked down and saw his shabby shoes.

“Come and talk to me,” she said, feeling the old family affection return. She noticed with amusement that he was a little flushed, a little, as the nurses used to say, “above himself”. How many “parties” would it need, she wondered, to turn her satirical, uncompromising cousin into an obedient member of society?

“Let’s sit down and talk sense,” she said, sinking on to a little sofa. He sat down beside her.

“Tell me, what’s Nell doing?” she asked.

“She sent her love,” said Martin. “She told me to say how much she wanted to see you.”

“Then why wouldn’t she come tonight?” said Kitty. She felt hurt. She could not help it.

“She hasn’t the right kind of hairpin,” he said with a laugh, looking down at his shoes. Kitty looked down at them too.

“My shoes, you see, don’t matter,” he said. “But then I’m a man.”

“It’s such nonsense …” Kitty began. “What does it matter …”

But he was looking round him at the groups of beautifully dressed women; then at the picture.

“That’s a horrid daub of you over the mantelpiece,” he said, looking at the red-haired girl. “Who did it?”

“I forget … Don’t let’s look at it,” she said.

“Let’s talk …” Then she stopped.

He was looking round the room. It was crowded; there were little tables with photographs; ornate cabinets with vases of flowers; and panels of yellow brocade let into the walls. She felt that he was criticising the room and herself too.

“I always want to take a knife and scrape it all off,” she said. But what’s the use, she thought? If she moved a picture, “Where’s Uncle Bill on the old cob?” her husband would say, and back it had to go again.

“Like a hotel, isn’t it?” she continued.

“A saloon,” he remarked. He did not know why he always wanted to hurt her; but he did; it was a fact.

“I was asking myself,” he dropped his voice, “Why have a picture like that”—he nodded his head at the portrait—“when they’ve a Gainsborough …”

“And why,” she dropped her voice, imitating his tone that was half sneering, half humorous, “come and eat their food when you despise them?”

“I don’t! Not a bit!” he exclaimed. “I’m enjoying myself immensely. I like seeing you, Kitty,” he added. It was true—he always liked her. “You haven’t dropped your poor relations. That’s very nice of you.”

“It’s they who’ve dropped me,” she said.

“Oh, Eleanor,” he said. “She’s a queer old bird.”

“It’s all so …” Kitty began. But there was something wrong about the disposition of her party; she stopped in the middle of her sentence. “You’ve got to come and talk to Mrs Treyer,” she said getting up.

Why does one do it? he wondered as he followed her. He had wanted to talk to Kitty; he had nothing to say to that Oriental-looking harpy with a pheasant’s feather floating at the back of her head. Still, if you drink the good wine of the noble countess, he said bowing, you have to entertain her less desirable friends. He led her off.

Kitty went back to the fireplace. She dealt the coal a blow, and the sparks went volleying up the chimney. She was irritable; she was restless. Time was passing; if they stayed much longer she would miss her train. Surreptitiously she noted that the hands of the clock were close on eleven. The party was bound to break up soon; it was only the prelude to another party. Yet they were all talking, and talking, as if they would never go. She glanced at the groups that seemed immovable. Then the clock chimed a succession of petulant little strokes, on the last of which the door opened and Priestley advanced. With his inscrutable butler’s eyes and crooked forefinger he summoned Ann Hillier.

“That’s Mama fetching me,” said Ann, advancing down the room with a little flutter.

“She’s taking you on?” said Kitty. She held her hand for a moment. Why? she asked herself, looking at the lovely face, empty of meaning, or character, like a page on which nothing has been written but youth. She held her hand for a moment.

“Must you go?” she said.

“I’m afraid I must,” said Ann, withdrawing her hand.

There was a general rising and movement, like the flutter of white-winged gulls.

“Coming with us?” Martin heard Ann say to the youth through whose hair the rake seemed to have been passed. They turned to leave together. As she passed Martin, who stood with his hand out, Ann gave him the least bend of her head, as if his image had been already swept from her mind. He was dashed; his feeling was out of all proportion to its object. He felt a strong desire to go with them, wherever it was. But he had not been asked; Ashton had; he was following in their wake.

“What a toady!” he thought to himself with a bitterness that surprised him. It was odd how jealous he felt for a moment. They were all “going on,” it seemed. He hung about a little awkwardly. Only the old fogies were left—no, even the great man was going on, it seemed. Only the old lady was left. She was hobbling across the room on Lasswade’s arm. She wanted to confirm something that she had been saying about a miniature. Lasswade had taken it off the wall; he held it under a lamp so that she could pronounce her verdict. Was it Grandpapa on the cob, or was it Uncle William?

“Sit down, Martin, and let us talk,” said Kitty. He sat down: but he had a feeling that she wanted him to go. He had seen her glance at the clock. They chatted for a moment. Now the old lady came back; she was proving, beyond a doubt, from her unexampled store of anecdotes, that it must be Uncle William on the cob; not Grandpapa. She was going. But she took her time. Martin waited till she was fairly in the doorway, leaning on her nephew’s arm. He hesitated; they were alone now; should he stay, or should he go? But Kitty was standing up. She was holding out her hand.

“Come again soon and see me alone,” she said. She had dismissed him, he felt.

That’s what people always say, he said to himself as he made his way slowly downstairs behind Lady Warburton. Come again: but I don’t know that I shall…. Lady Warburton went downstairs like a crab, holding on to the banisters with one hand, to Lasswade’s arm with the other. He lingered behind her. He looked at the Canaletto once more. A nice picture: but a copy, he said to himself. He peered over the banisters and saw the black-and-white slabs on the hall beneath.

It did work, he said to himself, descending step by step into the hall. Off and on; by fits and starts. But was it worth it? he asked himself, letting the footman help him into his coat. The double doors stood wide open into the street. One or two people were passing; they peered in curiously, looking at the footmen, at the bright big hall; and at the old lady who paused for a moment on the black-and-white squares. She was robing herself. Now she was accepting her cloak with a violet slash in it; now her furs. A bag dangled from her wrist. She was hung about with chains; her fingers were knobbed with rings. Her sharp stone-coloured face, riddled with lines and wrinkled into creases, looked out from its soft nest of fur and laces. The eyes were still bright.

The nineteenth century going to bed, Martin said to himself as he watched her hobble down the steps on the arm of her footman. She was helped into her carriage. Then he shook hands with that good fellow his host, who had had quite as much wine as was good for him, and walked off through Grosvenor Square.

Upstairs in the bedroom at the top of the house Kitty’s maid Baxter was looking out of the window, watching the guests drive off. There—that was the old lady going. She wished they would hurry; if the party went on much longer her own little jaunt would be done for. She was going up the river tomorrow with her young man. She turned and looked round her. She had everything ready—her ladyship’s coat, skirt, and the bag with the ticket in it. It was long past eleven. She stood at the dressing-table waiting. The three-folded mirror reflected silver pots, powder puffs, combs and brushes. Baxter stooped down and smirked at herself in the glass—that was how she would look when she went up the river—then she drew herself up; she heard footsteps in the passage. Her ladyship was coming. Here she was.

Lady Lasswade came in, slipping the rings from her fingers. “Sorry to be so late, Baxter,” she said. “Now I must hurry.”

Baxter, without speaking, unhooked her dress; slipped it dexterously to her feet, and bore it away. Kitty sat down at her dressing-table and kicked off her shoes. Satin shoes were always too tight. She glanced at the clock on her dressing-table. She just had time.

Baxter was handing her coat. Now she was handing her bag.

“The ticket’s in there, m’lady,” she said, touching the bag.

“Now my hat,” said Kitty. She stooped to settle it in front of the mirror. The little tweed travelling-hat poised on the top of her hair made her look quite a different person; the person she liked being. She stood in her travelling-dress, wondering if she had forgotten anything. Her mind was a perfect blank for a moment. Where am I? she wondered. What am I doing? Where am I going? Her eyes fixed themselves on the dressing-table; vaguely she remembered some other room, and some other time when she was a girl. At Oxford was it?

“The ticket, Baxter?” she said perfunctorily.

“In your bag, m’lady,” Baxter reminded her. She was holding it in her hand.

“So that’s everything,” said Kitty, glancing round her.

She felt a moment’s compunction.

“Thanks, Baxter,” she said. “I hope you’ll enjoy your …”—she hesitated: she did not know what Baxter did on her day off—“… your play,” she said at a venture. Baxter gave a queer little bitten-off smile. Maids bothered Kitty with their demure politeness; with their inscrutable, pursed-up faces. But they were very useful.

“Good-night!” she said to Baxter at the door of the bedroom; for there Baxter turned back as if her responsibility for her mistress ended. Somebody else had charge of the stairs.

Kitty looked in at the drawing-room, in case her husband should be there. But the room was empty. The fire was still blazing; the chairs, drawn out in a circle, still seemed to hold the skeleton of the party in their empty arms. But the car was waiting for her at the door.

“Plenty of time?” she said to the chauffeur as he laid the rug across her knees. Off they started.

It was a clear still night and every tree in the square was visible; some were black, others were sprinkled with strange patches of green artificial light. Above the arc lamps rose shafts of darkness. Although it was close on midnight, it scarcely seemed to be night; but rather some ethereal disembodied day, for there were so many lamps in the streets; cars passing; men in white mufflers with their light overcoats open walking along the clean dry pavements, and many houses were still lit up, for everyone was giving parties. The town changed as they drew smoothly through Mayfair. The public houses were closing; here was a group clustered round a lamp-post at the corner. A drunken man was bawling out some loud song; a tipsy girl with a feather bobbing in her eyes was swaying as she clung to the lamp-post … but Kitty’s eyes alone registered what she saw. After the talk, the effort and the hurry, she could add nothing to what she saw. And they swept on quickly. Now they had turned, and the car was gliding at full speed up a long bright avenue of great shuttered shops. The streets were almost empty. The yellow station clock showed that they had five minutes to spare.

Just in time, she said to herself. The usual exhilaration mounted in her as she walked along the platform. Diffused light poured down from a great height. Men’s cries and the clangour of shunting carriages echoed in the immense vacancy. The train was waiting; travellers were making ready to start. Some were standing with one foot on the step of the carriage drinking out of thick cups as if they were afraid to go far from their seats. She looked down the length of the train and saw the engine sucking water from a hose. It seemed all body, all muscle; even the neck had been consumed into the smooth barrel of the body. This was “the” train; the others were toys in comparison. She snuffed up the sulphurous air, which left a slight tinge of acid at the back of the throat, as if it already had a tang of the north.

The guard had seen her and was coming towards her with his whistle in his hand.

“Good evening, m’lady,” he said.

“Good evening, Purvis. Run it rather fine,” she said as he unlocked the door of her carriage.

“Yes, m’lady. Only just in time,” he replied.

He locked the door. Kitty turned and looked round the small lighted room in which she was to spend the night. Everything was ready; the bed was made; the sheets were turned down; her bag was on the seat. The guard passed the window, holding his flag in his hand.

A man who had only just caught the train ran across the platform with his arms spread out. A door slammed.

“Just in time,” Kitty said to herself as she stood there. Then the train gave a gentle tug. She could hardly believe that so great a monster could start so gently on so long a journey. Then she saw the tea-urn sliding past.

“We’re off,” she said to herself, sinking back onto the seat. “We’re off!”

All the tension went out of her body. She was alone; and the train was moving. The last lamp on the platform slid away. The last figure on the platform vanished.

“What fun!” she said to herself, as if she were a little girl who had run away from her nurse and escaped. “We’re off!”

She sat still for a moment in her brightly lit compartment; then she tugged the blind and it sprang up with a jerk. Elongated lights slid past; lights in factories and warehouses; lights in obscure back streets. Then there were asphalt paths; more lights in public gardens; and then bushes and a hedge in a field. They were leaving London behind them; leaving that blaze of light which seemed, as the train rushed into the darkness, to contract itself into one fiery circle. The train rushed with a roar through a tunnel. It seemed to perform an act of amputation; now she was cut off from that circle of light.

She looked round the narrow little compartment in which she was isolated. Everything shook slightly. There was a perpetual faint vibration. She seemed to be passing from one world to another; this was the moment of transition. She sat still for a moment; then undressed and paused with her hand on the blind. The train had got into its stride now; it was rushing at full speed through the country. A few distant lights twinkled here and there. Black clumps of trees stood in the grey summer fields; the fields were full of summer grasses. The light from the engine lit up a quiet group of cows; and a hedge of hawthorn. They were in open country now.

She pulled down the blind and climbed into her bed. She laid herself out on the rather hard shelf with her back to the carriage wall, so that she felt a faint vibration against her head. She lay listening to the humming noise which the train made, now that it had got into its stride. Smoothly and powerfully she was being drawn through England to the north. I need do nothing, she thought, nothing, nothing, but let myself be drawn on. She turned and pulled the blue shade over the lamp. The sound of the train became louder in the darkness; its roar, its vibration, seemed to fall into a regular rhythm of sound, raking through her mind, rolling out her thoughts.

Ah, but not all of them, she thought, turning restlessly on her shelf. Some still jutted up. One’s not a child, she thought, staring at the light under the blue shade, any longer. The years changed things; destroyed things; heaped things up—worries and bothers; here they were again. Fragments of talk kept coming back to her; sights came before her. She saw herself raise the window with a jerk; and the bristles on Aunt Warburton’s chin. She saw the women rising, and the men filing in. She sighed as she turned on her ledge. All their clothes are the same, she thought; all their lives are the same. And which is right? she thought, turning restlessly on her shelf. Which is wrong? She turned again.

The train rushed her on. The sound had deepened; it had become a continuous roar. How could she sleep? How could she prevent herself from thinking? She turned away from the light. Now where are we? she said to herself. Where is the train at this moment? Now, she murmured, shutting her eyes, we are passing the white house on the hill; now we are going through the tunnel; now we are crossing the bridge over the river…. A blank intervened; her thoughts became spaced; they became muddled. Past and present became jumbled together. She saw Margaret Marrable pinching the dress in her fingers, but she was leading a bull with a ring through its nose…. This is sleep, she said to herself, half opening her eyes; thank goodness, she said to herself, shutting them again, this is sleep. And she resigned herself to the charge of the train, whose roar now became dulled and distant.

There was a tap at her door. She lay for a moment, wondering why the room shook so; then the scene settled itself; she was in the train; she was in the country; they were nearing the station. She got up.

She dressed rapidly and stood in the corridor. It was still early. She watched the fields galloping past. They were the bare fields, the angular fields of the north. The spring was late here; the trees were not fully out yet. The smoke looped down and caught a tree in its white cloud. When it lifted, she thought how fine the light was; clear and sharp, white and grey. The land had none of the softness, none of the greenness of the land in the south. But here was the junction; here was the gasometer; they were running into the station. The train slowed down, and all the lamp-posts on the platform gradually came to a standstill.

She got out and drew in a deep breath of the cold raw air. The car was waiting for her; and directly she saw it she remembered—it was the new car; a birthday present from her husband. She had never driven in it yet. Cole touched his hat.

“Let’s have it open, Cole,” she said, and he opened the stiff new hood, and she got in beside him. Very slowly, for the engine seemed to beat intermittently, starting and stopping and then starting again, they moved off. They drove through the town; all the shops were still shut; women were on their knees scrubbing doorsteps; blinds were still drawn in bedrooms and sitting-rooms; there was very little traffic about. Only milk-carts rattled past. Dogs roamed down the middle of the street on private errands of their own. Cole had to hoot again and again.

“They’ll learn in time, m’lady,” he said as a great brindled cur slunk out of their way. In the town he drove carefully; but once they were outside he speeded up. Kitty watched the needle jump forward on the speedometer.

“She does it easily?” she asked, listening to the soft purr of the engine.

Cole lifted his foot to show how lightly it touched the accelerator. Then he touched it again and the car sped on. They were driving too fast, Kitty thought; but the road—she kept her eye on it—was still empty. Only two or three lumbering farm waggons passed them; the men went to the horses’ heads and held them as they went by. The road stretched pearl-white in front of them; the hedges were decked with the little pointed leaves of early spring.

“Spring’s very late up here,” said Kitty; “cold winds I suppose?”

Cole nodded. He had none of the servile ways of the London flunkey; she was at her ease with him; she could be silent. The air seemed to have different grades of warmth and chill in it; now sweet; now—they were passing a farmyard—strong-smelling, acrid from the sour smell of manure. She leant back, holding her hat to her head as they rushed a hill. “You won’t get her up this on top, Cole,” she said. The pace slackened a little; they were climbing the familiar Crabbs hill, with the yellow streaks where carters had put on their brakes. In the old days, when she drove horses, they used to get out here and walk. Cole said nothing. He was going to show off his engine, she suspected. The car swept up finely. But the hill was long; there was a level stretch; then the road mounted again. The car faltered. Cole coaxed her on. Kitty saw him jerk his body slightly backwards and forwards as if he were encouraging horses. She felt the tension of his muscles. They slowed—they almost stopped. No, now they were on the crest of the hill. She had done it on top!

“Well done!” she exclaimed. He said nothing; but he was very proud, she knew.

“We couldn’t have done that on the old car,” she said.

“Ah, but it wasn’t her fault,” said Cole.

He was a very humane man; the kind of man she liked, she reflected—silent, reserved. On they swept again. Now they were passing the grey stone house where the mad lady lived alone with her peacocks and her bloodhounds. They had passed it. Now the woods were on their right hand and the air came singing through them. It was like the sea, Kitty thought, looking, as they passed, down a dark green drive patched with yellow sunlight. On they went again. Now heaps of ruddy brown leaves lay by the roadside staining the puddles red.

“It’s been raining?” she said. He nodded. They came out on the high ridge with woods beneath and there, in a clearing among the trees, was the grey tower of the Castle. She always looked for it and greeted it as if she were raising a hand to a friend. They were on their own land now. Gateposts were branded with their initials; their arms swung above the doorways of inns; their crest was mounted over cottage doors. Cole looked at the clock. The needle leapt again.

Too fast, too fast! Kitty said to herself. But she liked the rush of the wind in her face. Now they reached the Lodge gate; Mrs Preedy was holding it open with a white-haired child on her arm. They rushed through the Park. The deer looked up and hopped away lightly through the fern.

“Two minutes under the quarter, m’lady,” said Cole as they swept in a circle and drew up at the door. Kitty stood for a moment looking at the car. She laid her hand on the bonnet. It was hot. She gave it a little pat. “She did it beautifully, Cole,” she said. “I’ll tell his Lordship.” Cole smiled; he was happy.

She went in. Nobody was about; they had arrived earlier than was expected. She crossed the great stone-flagged hall, with the armour and the busts, and went into the morning-room where breakfast was laid.

The green light dazzled her as she went in. It was as if she stood in the hollow of an emerald. All was green outside. The statues of grey French ladies stood on the terrace, holding their baskets; but the baskets were empty. In summer flowers would burn there. Green turf fell down in broad swaths between clipped yews; dipped to the river; and then rose again to the hill that was crested with woods. There was a curl of mist on the woods now—the light mist of early morning. As she gazed a bee buzzed in her ear; she thought she heard the murmur of the river over the stones; pigeons crooned in the tree tops. It was the voice of early morning, the voice of summer. But the door opened. Here was breakfast.

She breakfasted; she felt warm, stored, and comfortable as she lay back in her chair. And she had nothing to do—nothing whatever. The whole day was hers. It was fine too. The sunlight suddenly quickened in the room, and laid a broad bar of light across the floor. The sun was on the flowers outside. A tortoiseshell butterfly flaunted across the window; she saw it settle on a leaf, and there it sat, opening its wings and shutting them, opening and shutting them, as if it feasted on the sunlight. She watched it. The down was soft rust-red on its wings. Off it flaunted again. Then, admitted by an invisible hand, the chow stalked in; came straight up to her; sniffed at her skirt, and flung himself down in a bright patch of sunlight.

Heartless brute! she thought, but his indifference pleased her. He asked nothing of her either. She stretched her hand for a cigarette. And what would Martin say, she wondered, as she took the enamel box that turned from green to blue, as she opened it. Hideous? Vulgar? Possibly—but what did it matter what people said? Criticism seemed light as smoke this morning. What did it matter what he said, what they said, what anybody said, since she had a whole day to herself?—since she was alone? And there they are, still asleep, in their houses, she thought, standing at the window, looking at the green-grey grass, after their dances, after their parties … The thought pleased her. She threw away her cigarette and went upstairs to change her clothes.

The sun was much stronger when she came down again. The garden had already lost its look of purity; the mist was off the woods. She could hear the squeak of the lawn mower as she stepped out of the window. The rubber-shoed pony was pacing up and down the lawns leaving a pale wake in the grass behind him. The birds were singing in their scattered way. The starlings in their bright mail were feeding on the grass. Dew shone, red, violet, gold on the trembling tips of the grass blades. It was a perfect May morning.

She sauntered slowly along the terrace. As she passed she glanced in at the long windows of the library. Everything was shrouded and shut up. But the long room looked more than usually stately, its proportions seemly; and the brown books in their long rows seemed to exist silently, with dignity, by themselves, for themselves. She left the terrace and strolled down the long grass path. The garden was still empty; only a man in his shirt sleeves was doing something to a tree; but she need speak to nobody. The chow stalked after her; he too was silent. She walked on past the flower-beds to the river. There she always stopped, on the bridge, with the cannon-balls at intervals. The water always fascinated her. The quick northern river came down from the moors; it was never smooth and green, never deep and placid like southern rivers. It raced; it hurried. It splayed itself, red, yellow and clear brown, over the pebbles on the bed. Resting her elbows on the balustrade, she watched it eddy round the arches; she watched it make diamonds and sharp arrow streaks over the stones. She listened. She knew the different sounds it made in summer and winter; now it hurried, it raced.

But the chow was bored; he marched on. She followed him. She went up the green ride towards the snuffer-shaped monument on the crest of the hill. Every path through the woods had its name. There was Keepers’ Path, Lovers’ Walk, Ladies’ Mile, and here was the Earl’s Ride. But before she went into the woods, she stopped and looked back at the house. Times out of number she had stopped here; the Castle looked grey and stately; asleep this morning, with the blinds drawn, and no flag on the flagstaff. Very noble it looked, and ancient, and enduring. Then she went on into the woods.

The wind seemed to rise as she walked under the trees. It sang in their tops, but it was silent beneath. The dead leaves crackled under foot; among them sprang up the pale spring flowers, the loveliest of the year—blue flowers and white flowers, trembling on cushions of green moss. Spring was sad always, she thought, it brought back memories. All passes, all changes, she thought, as she climbed up the little path between the trees. Nothing of this belonged to her; her son would inherit; his wife would walk here after her. She broke off a twig; she picked a flower and put it to her lips. But she was in the prime of life; she was vigorous. She strode on. The ground rose sharply; her muscles felt strong and flexible as she pressed her thick-soled shoes to the ground. She threw away her flower. The trees thinned as she strode higher and higher. Suddenly she saw the sky between two striped tree trunks extraordinarily blue. She came out on the top. The wind ceased; the country spread wide all round her. Her body seemed to shrink; her eyes to widen. She threw herself on the ground, and looked over the billowing land that went rising and falling, away and away, until somewhere far off it reached the sea. Uncultivated, uninhabited, existing by itself, for itself, without towns or houses it looked from this height. Dark wedges of shadow, bright breadths of light lay side by side. Then, as she watched, light moved and dark moved; light and shadow went travelling over the hills and over the valleys. A deep murmur sang in her ears—the land itself, singing to itself, a chorus, alone. She lay there listening. She was happy, completely. Time had ceased.

[]

1917

A very cold winter’s night, so silent that the air seemed frozen, and, since there was no moon, congealed to the stillness of glass spread over England. Ponds and ditches were frozen; the puddles made glazed eyes in the roads, and on the pavement the frost had raised slippery knobs. Darkness pressed on the windows; towns had merged themselves in open country. No light shone, save when a searchlight rayed round the sky, and stopped, here and there, as if to ponder some fleecy patch.

“If that is the river,” said Eleanor, pausing in the dark street outside the station, “Westminster must be there.” The omnibus in which she had come, with its silent passengers looking cadaverous in the blue light, had already vanished. She turned.

She was dining with Renny and Maggie, who lived in one of the obscure little streets under the shadow of the Abbey. She walked on. The further side of the street was almost invisible. The lamps were shrouded in blue. She flashed her torch onto a name on a street corner. Again she flashed her torch. Here it lit up a brick wall; there a dark green tuft of ivy. At last the number thirty, the number she was looking for, shone out. She knocked and rang at the same moment, for the darkness seemed to muffle sound as well as sight. Silence weighed on her as she stood there waiting. Then the door opened and a man’s voice said, “Come in!”

He shut the door behind him, quickly, as if to shut out the light. It looked strange after the streets—the perambulator in the hall; the umbrellas in the stand; the carpet, the pictures: they all seemed intensified.

“Come in!” said Renny again, and led her into the sitting-room ablaze with light. Another man was standing in the room, and she was surprised because she had expected to find them alone. But the man was somebody whom she did not know.

For a moment they stared at each other; then Renny said, “You know Nicholas …” but he did not speak the surname distinctly, and it was so long that she could not catch it. A foreign name, she thought. A foreigner. He was clearly not English. He shook hands with a bow like a foreigner, and he went on talking, as if he were in the middle of a sentence that he wished to finish … “we are talking about Napoleon …” he said, turning to her.

“I see,” she said. But she had no notion what he was saying. They were in the middle of an argument, she supposed. But it came to an end without her understanding a word of it, except that it had to do with Napoleon. She took off her coat and laid it down. They stopped talking.

“I will go and tell Maggie,” said Renny. He left them abruptly.

“You were talking about Napoleon?” Eleanor said. She looked at the man whose surname she had not heard. He was very dark; he had a rounded head and dark eyes. Did she like him or not? She did not know.

I’ve interrupted them, she felt, and I’ve nothing whatever to say. She felt dazed and cold. She spread her hands over the fire. It was a real fire; wood blocks were blazing; the flame ran along the streaks of shiny tar. A little trickle of feeble gas was all that was left her at home.

“Napoleon,” she said, warming her hands. She spoke without any meaning.

“We were considering the psychology of great men,” he said, “by the light of modern science,” he added with a little laugh. She wished the argument had been more within her reach.

“That’s very interesting,” she said shyly.

“Yes—if we knew anything about it,” he said.

“If we knew anything about it …” she repeated. There was a pause. She felt numb all over—not only her hands, but her brain.

“The psychology of great men——” she said, for she did not wish him to think her a fool, “… was that what you were discussing?”

“We were saying——” He paused. She guessed that he found it difficult to sum up their argument—they had evidently been talking for some time, judging by the newspapers lying about and the cigarette-ends on the table.

“I was saying,” he went on, “I was saying we do not know ourselves, ordinary people; and if we do not know ourselves, how then can we make religions, laws, that—” he used his hands as people do who find language obdurate, “that——”

“That fit—that fit,” she said, supplying him with a word that was shorter, she felt sure, than the dictionary word that foreigners always used.

“—that fit, that fit,” he said, taking the word and repeating it as if he were grateful for her help.

“… that fit,” she repeated. She had no idea what they were talking about. Then suddenly, as she bent to warm her hands over the fire words floated together in her mind and made one intelligible sentence. It seemed to her that what he had said was, “We cannot make laws and religions that fit because we do not know ourselves.”

“How odd that you should say that!” she said, smiling at him, “because I’ve so often thought it myself!”

“Why is that odd?” he said. “We all think the same things; only we do not say them.”

“Coming along in the omnibus tonight,” she began, “I was thinking about this war—I don’t feel this, but other people do …” She stopped. He looked puzzled; probably she had misunderstood what he had said; she had not made her own meaning plain.

“I mean,” she began again, “I was thinking as I came along in the bus——”

But here Renny came in.

He was carrying a tray with bottles and glasses.

“It is a great thing,” said Nicholas, “being the son of a wine merchant.”

It sounded like a quotation from the French grammar.

The son of the wine merchant, Eleanor repeated to herself, looking at his red cheeks, dark eyes and large nose. The other man must be Russian, she thought. Russian, Polish, Jewish?—she had no idea what he was, who he was.

She drank; the wine seemed to caress a knob in her spine. Here Maggie came in.

“Good evening,” she said, disregarding the foreigner’s bow as if she knew him too well to greet him.

“Papers,” she protested, looking at the litter on the floor, “papers, papers.” The floor was strewn with papers.

“We dine in the basement,” she continued, turning to Eleanor, “because we’ve no servants.” She led the way down the steep little stairs.

“But Magdalena,” said Nicholas, as they stood in the little low-ceilinged room in which dinner was laid, “Sara said, ‘We shall meet tomorrow night at Maggie’s …’ She is not here.”

He stood; the others had sat down.

“She will come in time,” said Maggie.

“I shall ring her up,” said Nicholas. He left the room.

“Isn’t it much nicer,” said Eleanor, taking her plate, “not having servants …”

“We have a woman to do the washing-up,” said Maggie.

“And we are extremely dirty,” said Renny.

He took up a fork and examined it between the prongs.

“No, this fork, as it happens, is clean,” he said, and put it down again.

Nicholas came back into the room. He looked perturbed. “She is not there,” he said to Maggie. “I rang her up, but I could get no answer.”

“Probably she’s coming,” said Maggie. “Or she may have forgotten….”

She handed him his soup. But he sat looking at his plate without moving. Wrinkles had come on his forehead; he made no attempt to hide his anxiety. He was without self-consciousness. “There!” he suddenly exclaimed, interrupting them as they talked. “She is coming!” he added. He put down his spoon and waited. Someone was coming slowly down the steep stairs.

The door opened and Sara came in. She looked pinched with the cold. Her cheeks were white here and red there, and she blinked as if she were still dazed from her walk through the blue-shrouded streets. She gave her hand to Nicholas and he kissed it. But she wore no engagement ring, Eleanor observed.

“Yes, we are dirty,” said Maggie, looking at her; she was in her day clothes. “In rags,” she added, for a loop of gold thread hung down from her own sleeve as she helped the soup.

“I was thinking how beautiful …” said Eleanor, for her eyes had been resting on the silver dress with gold threads in it. “Where did you get it?”

“In Constantinople, from a Turk,” said Maggie.

“A turbaned and fantastic Turk,” Sara murmured, stroking the sleeve as she took her plate. She still seemed dazed.

“And the plates,” said Eleanor, looking at the purple birds on her plate, “Don’t I remember them?” she asked.

“In the cabinet in the drawing-room at home,” said Maggie. “But it seemed silly—keeping them in a cabinet.”

“We break one every week,” said Renny.

“They’ll last the war,” said Maggie.

Eleanor observed a curious mask-like expression come down over Renny’s face as she said “the war.” Like all the French, she thought, he cares passionately for his country. But contradictorily, she felt, looking at him. He was silent. His silence oppressed her. There was something formidable about his silence.

“And why were you so late?” said Nicholas, turning to Sara. He spoke gently, reproachfully, rather as if she were a child. He poured her out a glass of wine.

Take care, Eleanor felt inclined to say to her; the wine goes to one’s head. She had not drunk wine for months. She was feeling already a little blurred; a little light-headed. It was the light after the dark; talk after silence; the war, perhaps, removing barriers.

But Sara drank. Then she burst out:

“Because of that damned fool.”

“Damned fool?” said Maggie. “Which?”

“Eleanor’s nephew,” said Sara. “North. Eleanor’s nephew, North.” She held her glass towards Eleanor, as if she were addressing her. “North …” Then she smiled. “There I was, sitting alone. The bell rang. ‘That’s the wash,’ I said. Footsteps came up the stairs. There was North—North,” she raised her hand to her head as if in salute, “cutting a figure like this…. ‘What the devil’s that for?’ I asked. ‘I leave for the Front tonight,’ he said, clicking his heels together. ‘I’m a lieutenant in——’ whatever it was—Royal Regiment of Rat-catchers or something…. And he hung his cap on the bust of our grandfather. And I poured out tea. ‘How many lumps of sugar does a lieutenant in the Royal Rat-catchers require?’ I asked. ‘One. Two. Three. Four….’”

She dropped pellets of bread on to the table. As each fell, it seemed to emphasise her bitterness. She looked older, more worn; though she laughed, she was bitter.

“Who is North?” Nicholas asked. He pronounced the word “North” as if it were a point on the compass.

“My nephew. My brother Morris’s son,” Eleanor explained.

“There he sat,” Sara resumed, “in his mud-coloured uniform, with his switch between his legs, and his ears sticking out on either side of his pink, foolish face, and whatever I said, ‘Good,’ he said, ‘Good,’ ‘Good,’ until I took up the poker and tongs”—she took up her knife and fork—“and played ‘God save the King, Happy and Glorious, Long to reign over us——’” She held her knife and fork as if they were weapons.

I’m sorry he’s gone, Eleanor thought. A picture came before her eyes—the picture of a nice cricketing boy smoking a cigar on a terrace. I’m sorry…. Then another picture formed. She was sitting on the same terrace; but now the sun was setting; a maid came out and said, “The soldiers are guarding the line with fixed bayonets!” That was how she had heard of the war—three years ago. And she had thought, putting down her coffee-cup on a little table, Not if I can help it! overcome by an absurd but vehement desire to protect those hills; she had looked at the hills across the meadow…. Now she looked at the foreigner opposite.

“How unfair you are,” Nicholas was saying to Sara. “Prejudiced; narrow; unfair,” he repeated, tapping her hand with his finger.

He was saying what Eleanor felt herself.

“Yes. Isn’t it natural …” she began. “Could you allow the Germans to invade England and do nothing?” she said, turning to Renny. She was sorry she had spoken; and the words were not the ones she had meant to use. There was an expression of suffering, or was it anger? on his face.

“I?” he said. “I help them to make shells.”

Maggie stood behind him. She had brought in the meat. “Carve,” she said. He was staring at the meat which she had put down in front of him. He took up the knife and began to carve mechanically.

“Now, Nurse,” she reminded him. He cut another helping.

“Yes,” said Eleanor awkwardly as Maggie took away the plate. She did not know what to say. She spoke without thinking. “Let’s end it as quickly as possible and then …” She looked at him. He was silent. He turned away. He had turned to listen to what the others were saying, as if to take refuge from speaking himself.

“Poppycock, poppycock … don’t talk such damned poppycock—that’s what you really said,” Nicholas was saying. His hands were large and clean and the finger-nails were trimmed very close, Eleanor noticed. He might be a doctor, she thought.

“What’s ‘poppy-cock’?” she asked, turning to Renny. For she did not know the word.

“American,” said Renny. “He’s an American,” he said, nodding at Nicholas.

“No,” said Nicholas, turning round, “I am a Pole.”

“His mother was a Princess,” said Maggie as if she were teasing him. That explains the seal on his chain, Eleanor thought. He wore a large old seal on his chain.

“She was,” he said quite seriously. “One of the noblest families in Poland. But my father was an ordinary man—a man of the people…. You should have had more self-control,” he added, turning again to Sara.

“So I should,” she sighed. “But then he gave his bridle reins a shake and said, ‘Adieu for evermore, adieu for evermore!’” She stretched out her hand and poured herself another glass of wine.

“You shall have no more to drink,” said Nicholas, moving away the bottle. “She saw herself,” he explained, turning to Eleanor, “on top of a tower, waving a white handkerchief to a knight in armour.”

“And the moon was rising over a dark moor,” Sara murmured, touching a pepper-pot.

The pepper-pot’s a dark moor, Eleanor thought, looking at it. A little blur had come round the edges of things. It was the wine; it was the war. Things seemed to have lost their skins; to be freed from some surface hardness; even the chair with gilt claws, at which she was looking, seemed porous; it seemed to radiate out some warmth, some glamour, as she looked at it.

“I remember that chair,” she said to Maggie. “And your mother …” she added. But she always saw Eugénie not sitting but in movement.

“… dancing,” she added.

“Dancing …” Sara repeated. She began drumming on the table with her fork.

“When I was young, I used to dance,” she hummed.

“All men loved me when I was young…. Roses and syringas hung, when I was young, when I was young. D’you remember, Maggie?” She looked at her sister as if they both remembered the same thing.

Maggie nodded. “In the bedroom. A waltz,” she said.

“A waltz …” said Eleanor. Sara was drumming a waltz rhythm on the table. Eleanor began to hum in time to it: “Hoity te, toity te, hoity te….”

A long-drawn hollow sound wailed out.

“No, no!” she protested, as if somebody had given her the wrong note. But the sound wailed again.

“A fog-horn?” she said. “On the river?”

But as she said it she knew what it was.

The siren wailed again.

“The Germans!” said Renny. “Those damned Germans!” He put down his knife and fork with an exaggerated gesture of boredom.

“Another raid,” said Maggie, getting up. She left the room; Renny followed her.

“The Germans …” said Eleanor as the door shut. She felt as if some dull bore had interrupted an interesting conversation. The colours began to fade. She had been looking at the red chair. It lost its radiance as she looked at it, as if a light had been extinguished underneath.

They heard the rush of wheels in the street. Everything seemed to be going past very quickly. There was the round of feet tapping on the pavement. Eleanor got up and drew the curtains slightly apart. The basement was sunk beneath the pavement, so that she only saw people’s legs and skirts as they went past the area railings. Two men came by walking very quickly; then an old woman, with her skirt swinging from side to side, walked past.

“Oughtn’t we to ask people in?” she said, turning round. But when she looked back the old woman had disappeared. So had the men. The street was now quite empty. The houses opposite were completely curtained. She drew their own curtain carefully. The table, with the gay china and the lamp, seemed ringed in a circle of bright light as she turned back.

She sat down again. “D’you mind air raids?” Nicholas asked, looking at her with his inquisitive expression. “People differ so much.”

“Not at all,” she said. She would have crumbled a piece of bread to show him that she was at her ease; but as she was not afraid, the action seemed to her unnecessary.

“The chances of being hit oneself are so small,” she said. “What were we saying?” she added.

It seemed to her that they had been saying something extremely interesting; but she could not remember what. They sat silent for a moment. Then they heard a shuffling on the stairs.

“The children …” said Sara. They heard the dull boom of a gun in the distance.

Here Renny came in.

“Bring your plates,” he said.

“In here.” He led them into the cellar. It was a large cellar. With its crypt-like ceiling and stone walls it had a damp ecclesiastical look. It was used partly for coal, partly for wine. The light in the centre shone on glittering heaps of coal; bottles of wine wrapped in straw lay on their sides on stone shelves. There was a mouldy smell of wine, straw and damp. It was chilly after the dining-room. Sara came in carrying quilts and dressing-gowns which she had fetched from upstairs. Eleanor was glad to wrap herself in a blue dressing-gown; she wrapped it round her and sat holding her plate on her knees. It was cold.

“And now?” said Sara, holding her spoon erect.

They all looked as if they were waiting for something to happen. Maggie came in carrying a plum pudding.

“We may as well finish our dinner,” she said. But she spoke too sensibly; she was anxious about the children, Eleanor guessed. They were in the kitchen. She had seen them as she passed.

“Are they asleep?” she asked.

“Yes. But if the guns …” she began, helping the pudding. Another gun boomed out. This time it was distinctly louder.

“They’ve got through the defences,” said Nicholas.

They began to eat their pudding.

A gun boomed again. This time there was a bark in its boom.

“Hampstead,” said Nicholas. He took out his watch. The silence was profound. Nothing happened. Eleanor looked at the blocks of stone arched over their heads. She noticed a spider’s web in one corner. Another gun boomed. A sigh of air rushed up with it. It was right on top of them this time.

“The Embankment,” said Nicholas. Maggie put down her plate and went into the kitchen.

There was profound silence. Nothing happened. Nicholas looked at his watch as if he were timing the guns. There was something queer about him, Eleanor thought; medical, priestly? He wore a seal that hung down from his watch-chain. The number on the box opposite was 1397. She noticed everything. The Germans must be overhead now. She felt a curious heaviness on top of her head. One, two, three, four, she counted, looking up at the greenish-grey stone. Then there was a violent crack of sound, like the split of lightning in the sky. The spider’s web oscillated.

“On top of us,” said Nicholas, looking up. They all looked up. At any moment a bomb might fall. There was dead silence. In the silence they heard Maggie’s voice in the kitchen.

“That was nothing. Turn round and go to sleep.” She spoke very calmly and soothingly.

One, two, three four, Eleanor counted. The spider’s web was swaying. That stone may fall, she thought, fixing a certain stone with her eyes. Then a gun boomed again. It was fainter—further away.

“That’s over,” said Nicholas. He shut his watch with a click. And they all turned and shifted on their hard chairs as if they had been cramped.

Maggie came in.

“Well, that’s over,” she said. (“He woke for a moment, but he went off to sleep again,” she said in an undertone to Renny, “but the baby slept right through.”) She sat down and took the plate that Renny was holding for her.

“Now let’s finish our pudding,” she said, speaking in her natural voice.

“Now we will have some wine,” said Renny. He examined one bottle; then another; finally he took a third and wiped it carefully with the tail of his dressing-gown. He placed the bottle on a wooden case and they sat round in a circle.

“It didn’t come to much, did it?” said Sara. She was tilting back her chair as she held out her glass.

“Ah, but we were frightened,” said Nicholas. “Look—how pale we all are.”

They looked at each other. Draped in their quilts and dressing-gowns, against the grey-green walls, they all looked whitish, greenish.

“It’s partly the light,” said Maggie. “Eleanor,” she said, looking at her, “looks like an abbess.”

The deep-blue dressing-gown which hid the foolish little ornaments, the tabs of velvet and lace on her dress, had improved her appearance. Her middle-aged face was crinkled like an old glove that has been creased into a multitude of fine lines by the gestures of a hand.

“Untidy, am I?” she said, putting her hand to her hair.

“No. Don’t touch it,” said Maggie.

“And what were we talking about before the raid?” Eleanor asked. Again she felt that they had been in the middle of saying something very interesting when they were interrupted. But there had been a complete break; none of them could remember what they had been saying.

“Well, it’s over now,” said Sara. “So let’s drink a health—Here’s to the New World!” she exclaimed. She raised her glass with a flourish. They all felt a sudden desire to talk and laugh.

“Here’s to the New World!” they all cried, raising their glasses, and clinking them together.

The five glasses filled with yellow liquid came together in a bunch.

“To the New World!” they cried and drank. The yellow liquid swayed up and down in their glasses.

“Now, Nicholas,” said Sara, setting her glass down with a tap on the box, “a speech! A speech!”

“Ladies and gentlemen!” he began, flinging his hand out like an orator. “Ladies and gentlemen …”

“We don’t want speeches,” Renny interrupted him.

Eleanor was disappointed. She would have liked a speech. But he seemed to take the interruption good-humouredly; he sat there nodding and smiling.

“Let’s go upstairs,” said Renny, pushing away the box.

“And leave this cellar,” said Sara, stretching her arms out, “this cave of mud and dung….”

“Listen!” Maggie interrupted. She held up her hand. “I thought I heard the guns again….”

They listened. The guns were still firing, but far away in the distance. There was a sound like the breaking of waves on a shore far away.

“They’re only killing other people,” said Renny savagely. He kicked the wooden box.

“But you must let us think of something else,” Eleanor protested. The mask had come down over his face.

“And what nonsense, what nonsense Renny talks,” said Nicholas, turning to her privately. “Only children letting off fireworks in the back garden,” he muttered as he helped her out of her dressing-gown. They went upstairs.

Eleanor came into the drawing-room. It looked larger than she remembered it, and very spacious and comfortable. Papers were strewn on the floor; the fire was burning brightly; it was warm; it was cheerful. She felt very tired. She sank down into an armchair. Sara and Nicholas had lagged behind. The others were helping the nurse to carry the children up to bed, she supposed. She lay back in the chair. Everything seemed to become quiet and natural again. A feeling of great calm possessed her. It was as if another space of time had been issued to her, but, robbed by the presence of death of something personal, she felt—she hesitated for a word; “immune?” Was that what she meant? Immune, she said, looking at a picture without seeing it. Immune, she repeated. It was a picture of a hill and a village perhaps in the South of France; perhaps in Italy. There were olive trees; and white roofs grouped against a hillside. Immune, she repeated, looking at the picture.

She could hear a gentle thudding on the floor above; Maggie and Renny were settling the children into their beds again, she supposed. There was a little squeak, like a sleepy bird chirping in its nest. It was very private and peaceful after the guns. But here the others came in.

“Did they mind it?” she said, sitting up, “—the children?”

“No,” said Maggie. “They slept through it.”

“But they may have dreamt,” said Sara, pulling up a chair. Nobody spoke. It was very quiet. The clocks that used to boom out the hour in Westminster were silent.

Maggie took the poker and struck the wood blocks. The sparks went volleying up the chimney in a shower of gold eyes.

“How that makes me …” Eleanor began.

She stopped.

“Yes?” said Nicholas.

“… think of my childhood,” she added.

She was thinking of Morris and herself, and old Pippy; but had she told them nobody would know what she meant. They were silent. Suddenly a clear flute-like note rang out in the street below.

“What’s that?” said Maggie. She started; she looked at the window; she half rose.

“The bugles,” said Renny, putting out his hand to stop her.

The bugles blew again beneath the window. Then they heard them further down the street; then further away still down the next street. Almost directly the hooting of cars began again, and the rushing of wheels as if the traffic had been released and the usual night life of London had begun again.

“It’s over,” said Maggie. She lay back in her chair; she looked very tired for a moment. Then she pulled a basket towards her and began to darn a sock.

“I’m glad I’m alive,” said Eleanor. “Is that wrong, Renny?” she asked. She wanted him to speak. It seemed to her that he hoarded immense supplies of emotion that he could not express. He did not answer. He was leaning on his elbow, smoking a cigar and looking into the fire.

“I have spent the evening sitting in a coal cellar while other people try to kill each other above my head,” he said suddenly. Then he stretched out and took up a paper.

“Renny, Renny, Renny,” said Nicholas, as if he were expostulating with a naughty child. He went on reading. The rush of wheels and the hooting of motor cars had run themselves into one continuous sound.

As Renny was reading and Maggie was darning there was silence in the room. Eleanor watched the fire run along veins of tar and blaze and sink.

“What are you thinking, Eleanor?” Nicholas interrupted her. He calls me Eleanor, she thought; that’s right.

“About the new world …” she said aloud. “D’you think we’re going to improve?” she asked.

“Yes, yes,” he said, nodding his head.

He spoke quietly as if he did not wish to rouse Renny who was reading, or Maggie who was darning, or Sara who was lying back in her chair half asleep. They seemed to be talking, privately, together.

“But how …” she began, “… how can we improve ourselves … live more …”—she dropped her voice as if she were afraid of waking sleepers—“… live more naturally … better … How can we?”

“It is only a question,” he said—he stopped. He drew himself close to her—“of learning. The soul …” Again he stopped.

“Yes—the soul?” she prompted him.

“The soul—the whole being,” he explained. He hollowed his hands as if to enclose a circle. “It wishes to expand; to adventure; to form—new combinations?”

“Yes, yes,” she said, as if to assure him that his words were right.

“Whereas now,”—he drew himself together; put his feet together; he looked like an old lady who is afraid of mice—“this is how we live, screwed up into one hard little, tight little—knot?”

“Knot, knot—yes, that’s right,” she nodded.

“Each is his own little cubicle; each with his own cross or holy book; each with his fire, his wife …”

“Darning socks,” Maggie interrupted.

Eleanor started. She had seemed to be looking into the future. But they had been overheard. Their privacy was ended.

Renny threw down his paper. “It’s all damned rot!” he said. Whether he referred to the paper, or to what they were saying, Eleanor did not know. But talk in private was impossible.

“Why d’you buy them then?” she said, pointing to the papers.

“To light fires with,” said Renny.

Maggie laughed and threw down the sock she was mending. “There!” she exclaimed. “Mended….”

Again they sat silent, looking at the fire. Eleanor wished that he would go on talking—the man she called Nicholas. When, she wanted to ask him, when will this new world come? When shall we be free? When shall we live adventurously, wholly, not like cripples in a cave? He seemed to have released something in her; she felt not only a new space of time, but new powers, something unknown within her. She watched his cigarette moving up and down. Then Maggie took the poker and struck the wood and again a shower of red-eyed sparks went volleying up the chimney. We shall be free, we shall be free, Eleanor thought.

“And what have you been thinking all this time?” said Nicholas, laying his hand on Sara’s knee. She started. “Or have you been asleep?” he added.

“I heard what you were saying,” she said.

“What were we saying?” he asked.

“The soul flying upwards like sparks up the chimney,” she said. The sparks were flying up the chimney.

“Not such a bad shot,” said Nicholas.

“Because people always say the same thing,” she laughed. She roused herself and sat up. “There’s Maggie—she says nothing. There’s Renny—he says ‘What damned rot!’ Eleanor says ‘That’s just what I was thinking.’ … And Nicholas, Nicholas,”—she patted him on the knee—“who ought to be in prison, says, ‘Oh, my dear friends, let us improve the soul!’”

“Ought to be in prison?” said Eleanor, looking at him.

“Because he loves,” Sara explained. She paused. “—the other sex, the other sex, you see,” she said lightly, waving her hand in the way that was so like her mother’s.

For a second a sharp shiver of repugnance passed over Eleanor’s skin as if a knife had sliced it. Then she realised that it touched nothing of importance. The sharp shiver passed. Underneath was—what? She looked at Nicholas. He was watching her.

“Does that,” he said, hesitating a little, “make you dislike me, Eleanor?”

“Not in the least! Not in the least!” she exclaimed spontaneously. All the evening, off and on, she had been feeling about him; this, that, and the other; but now all the feelings came together and made one feeling, one whole—liking. “Not in the least,” she said again. He gave her a little bow. She returned it with a little bow. But the clock on the mantelpiece was striking. Renny was yawning. It was late. She got up. She went to the window and parted the curtains and looked out. All the houses were still curtained. The cold winter’s night was almost black. It was like looking into the hollow of a dark-blue stone. Here and there a star pierced the blue. She had a sense of immensity and peace—as if something had been consumed….

“Shall I get you a cab?” Renny interrupted.

“No, I’ll walk,” she said, turning. “I like walking in London.”

“We will come with you,” said Nicholas. “Come, Sara,” he said. She was lying back in her chair swinging her foot up and down.

“But I don’t want to come,” she said, waving him away. “I want to stay; I want to talk; I want to sing—a hymn of praise—a song of thanksgiving….”

“Here is your hat; here is your bag,” said Nicholas, giving them to her.

“Come,” he said, taking her by the shoulder and pushing her out of the room. “Come.”

Eleanor went up to say good-night to Maggie.

“I should like to stay too,” she said. “There are so many things I should like to talk about——”

“But I want to go to bed—I want to go to bed,” Renny protested. He stood there with his hands stretched above his head, yawning.

Maggie rose. “So you shall,” she laughed at him.

“Don’t bother to come downstairs,” Eleanor protested as he opened the door for her. But he insisted. He is very rude and at the same time very polite, she thought, as she followed him down the stairs. A man who feels many different things, and all passionately, all at the same time, she thought…. But they had reached the hall. Nicholas and Sara were standing there.

“Cease to laugh at me for once, Sara,” Nicholas was saying as he put on his coat.

“And cease to lecture me,” she said, opening the front door.

Renny smiled at Eleanor as they stood for a moment by the perambulator.

“Educating themselves!” he said.

“Good-night,” she said, smiling as she shook hands. That is the man, she said to herself, with a sudden rush of conviction, as she came out into the frosty air, that I should like to have married. She recognised a feeling which she had never felt. But he’s twenty years younger than I am, she thought, and married to my cousin. For a moment she resented the passage of time and the accidents of life which had swept her away—from all that, she said to herself. And a scene came before her; Maggie and Renny sitting over the fire. A happy marriage, she thought, that’s what I was feeling all the time. A happy marriage. She looked up as she walked down the dark little street behind the others. A broad fan of light, like the sail of a windmill, was sweeping slowly across the sky. It seemed to take what she was feeling and to express it broadly and simply, as if another voice were speaking in another language. Then the light stopped and examined a fleecy patch of sky, a suspected spot.

The raid! she said to herself. I’d forgotten the raid!

The others had come to the crossing; there they stood.

“I’d forgotten the raid!” she said aloud as she came up with them. She was surprised; but it was true.

They were in Victoria Street. The street curved away, looking wider and darker than usual. Little figures were hurrying along the pavement; they emerged for a moment under a lamp, then vanished into darkness again. The street was very empty.

“Will the omnibuses be running as usual?” Eleanor asked as they stood there.

They looked round them. Nothing was coming along the street at the moment.

“I shall wait here,” said Eleanor.

“Then I shall go,” said Sara abruptly. “Goodnight!”

She waved her hand and walked away. Eleanor took it for granted that Nicholas would go with her.

“I shall wait here,” she repeated.

But he did not move. Sara had already vanished. Eleanor looked at him. Was he angry? Was he unhappy? She did not know. But here a great form loomed up through the darkness; its lights were shrouded with blue paint. Inside silent people sat huddled up; they looked cadaverous and unreal in the blue light. “Good-night,” she said, shaking hands with Nicholas. She looked back and saw him still standing on the pavement. He still held his hat in his hand. He looked tall, impressive and solitary standing there alone, while the searchlights wheeled across the sky.

The omnibus moved on. She found herself staring at an old man in the corner who was eating something out of a paper bag. He looked up and caught her staring at him.

“Like to see what I’ve got for supper, lady?” he said, cocking one eyebrow over his rheumy, twinkling old eyes. And he held out for her inspection a hunk of bread on which was laid a slice of cold meat or sausage.

[]

1918

A veil of mist covered the November sky; a many folded veil, so fine-meshed that it made one density. It was not raining, but here and there the mist condensed on the surface into dampness and made pavements greasy. Here and there on a grass blade or on a hedge leaf a drop hung motionless. It was windless and calm. Sounds coming through the veil—the bleat of sheep, the croak of rooks—were deadened. The uproar of the traffic merged into one growl. Now and then as if a door opened and shut, or the veil parted and closed, the roar boomed and faded.

“Dirty brute,” Crosby muttered as she hobbled along the asphalt path across Richmond Green. Her legs were paining her. It was not actually raining, but the great open space was full of mist; and there was nobody near, so that she could talk aloud.

“Dirty brute,” she muttered again. She had got into the habit of talking aloud. There was nobody in sight; the end of the path was lost in mist. It was very silent. Only the rooks gathered on the tree tops now and then let fall a queer little croak, and a leaf, spotted with black, fell to the ground. Her face twitched as she walked, as if her muscles had got into the habit of protesting, involuntarily, against the spites and obstacles that tormented her. She had aged greatly during the past four years. She looked so small and hunched that it seemed doubtful if she could make her way across the wide open space, shrouded in white mist. But she had to go to the High Street to do her shopping.

“The dirty brute,” she muttered again. She had had some words that morning with Mrs Burt about the Count’s bath. He spat in it, and Mrs Burt had told her to clean it.

“Count indeed—he’s no more Count than you are,” she continued. She was talking to Mrs Burt now. “I’m quite willing to oblige you,” she went on. Even out here, in the mist, where she was free to say what she liked, she adopted a conciliatory tone, because she knew that they wanted to be rid of her. She gesticulated with the hand that was not carrying the bag as she told Louisa that she was quite ready to oblige her. She hobbled on. “And I shouldn’t mind going either,” she added bitterly, but this was spoken to herself only. It was no pleasure to her to live in the house any more; but there was nowhere else for her to go; that the Burts knew very well.

“And I’m quite ready to oblige you,” she added aloud, as indeed she had said to Louisa herself. But the truth was that she was no longer able to work as she had done. Her legs pained her. It took all the strength out of her to do her own shopping, let alone to clean the bath. But it was all take-it-or-leave-it now. In the old days she would have sent the whole lot packing.

“Drabs … hussies,” she muttered. She was now addressing the red-haired servant girl who had flung out of the house yesterday without warning. She could easily get another job. It didn’t matter to her. So it was left to Crosby to clean the Count’s bath.

“Dirty brute, dirty brute,” she repeated; her pale-blue eyes glared impotently. She saw once more the blob of spittle that the Count had left on the side of his bath—the Belgian who called himself a Count. “I’ve been used to work for gentlefolk, not for dirty foreigners like you,” she told him as she hobbled.

The roar of traffic sounded louder as she approached the ghostly line of trees. She could see houses now beyond the trees. Her pale-blue eyes peered forward through the mist as she made her way towards the railings. Her eyes alone seemed to express an unconquerable determination; she was not going to give in; she was bent on surviving. The soft mist was slowly lifting. Leaves lay damp and purple on the asphalt path. The rooks croaked and shuffled on the tree tops. Now a dark line of railings emerged from the mist. The roar of traffic in the High Street sounded louder and louder. Crosby stopped and rested her bag on the railing before she went on to do battle with the crowd of shoppers in the High Street. She would have to shove and push, and be jostled this way and that, and her feet pained her. They didn’t mind if you bought or not, she thought; and often she was pushed out of her place by some bold-faced drab. She thought of the red-haired girl again, as she stood there, panting slightly, with her bag on the railing. Her legs pained her. Suddenly the long-drawn note of a siren floated out its melancholy wail of sound; then there was a dull explosion.

“Them guns again,” Crosby muttered, looking up at the pale-grey sky with peevish irritation. The rooks, scared by the gun-fire, rose and wheeled round the tree tops. Then there was another dull boom. A man on a ladder who was painting the windows of one of the houses paused with his brush in his hand and looked round. A woman who was walking along carrying a loaf of bread that stuck half out of its paper wrapping stopped too. They both waited as if for something to happen. A topple of smoke drifted over and flopped down from the chimneys. The guns boomed again. The man on the ladder said something to the woman on the pavement. She nodded her head. Then he dipped his brush in the pot and went on painting. The woman walked on. Crosby pulled herself together and tottered across the road into the High Street. The guns went on booming and the sirens wailed. The war was over—so somebody told her as she took her place in the queue at the grocer’s shop. The guns went on booming and the sirens wailed.

[]

Present Day

It was a summer evening; the sun was setting; the sky was blue still, but tinged with gold, as if a thin veil of gauze hung over it, and here and there in the gold-blue amplitude an island of cloud lay suspended. In the fields the trees stood majestically caparisoned, with their innumerable leaves gilt. Sheep and cows, pearl white and parti-coloured, lay recumbent or munched their way through the half transparent grass. An edge of light surrounded everything. A red-gold fume rose from the dust on the roads. Even the little red brick villas on the high roads had become porous, incandescent with light, and the flowers in cottage gardens, lilac and pink like cotton dresses, shone veined as if lit from within. Faces of people standing at cottage doors or padding along pavements showed the same red glow as they fronted the slowly sinking sun.

Eleanor came out of her flat and shut the door. Her face was lit up by the glow of the sun as it sank over London, and for a moment she was dazzled and looked out over the roofs and spires that lay beneath. There were people talking inside her room, and she wanted to have a word with her nephew alone. North, her brother Morris’s son, had just come back from Africa, and she had scarcely seen him alone. So many people had dropped in that evening—Miriam Parrish; Ralph Pickersgill; Antony Wedd; her niece Peggy, and on top of them all, that very talkative man, her friend Nicholas Pomjalovsky, whom they called Brown for short. She had scarcely had a word with North alone. For a moment they stood in the bright square of sunshine that fell on the stone floor of the passage. Voices were still talking within. She put her hand on his shoulder.

“It’s so nice to see you,” she said. “And you haven’t changed …” She looked at him. She still saw traces of the brown-eyed cricketing boy in the massive man, who was so burnt, and a little grey too over the ears. “We sha’n’t let you go back,” she continued, beginning to walk downstairs with him, “to that horrid farm.”

He smiled. “And you haven’t changed either,” he said.

She looked very vigorous. She had been in India. Her face was tanned with the sun. With her white hair and her brown cheeks she scarcely looked her age, but she must be well over seventy, he was thinking. They walked downstairs arm-in-arm. There were six flights of stone steps to descend, but she insisted upon coming all the way down with him, to see him off.

“And North,” she said, when they reached the hall, “you will be careful….” She stopped on the doorstep. “Driving in London,” she said, “isn’t the same as driving in Africa.”

There was his little sports car outside; a man was going past the door in the evening sunlight crying “Old chairs and baskets to mend.”

He shook his head; his voice was drowned by the voice of the man crying. He glanced at a board that hung in the hall with names on it. Who was in and who was out was signified with a care that amused him slightly, after Africa. The voice of the man crying “Old chairs and baskets to mend,” slowly died away.

“Well, good-bye, Eleanor,” he said turning. “We shall meet later.” He got into his car.

“Oh, but North——” she cried, suddenly remembering something she wanted to say to him. But he had turned on the engine; he did not hear her voice. He waved his hand to her—there she stood at the top of the steps with her hair blowing in the wind. The car started off with a jerk. She gave another wave of her hand to him as he turned the corner.

Eleanor is just the same, he thought: more erratic perhaps. With a room full of people—her little room had been crowded—she had insisted upon showing him her new shower-bath. “You press that knob,” she had said, “and look—” Innumerable needles of water shot down. He laughed aloud. They had sat on the edge of the bath together.

But the cars behind him hooted persistently; they hooted and hooted. What at? he asked. Suddenly he realised that they were hooting at him. The light had changed; it was green now, he had been blocking the way. He started off with a violent jerk. He had not mastered the art of driving in London.

The noise of London still seemed to him deafening, and the speed at which people drove was terrifying;[.] But it was exciting after Africa. The shops even, he thought, as he shot past rows of plate-glass windows, were marvellous. Along the kerb, too, there were barrows of fruit and flowers. Everywhere there was profusion; plenty …. Again the red light shone out; he pulled up.

He looked about him. He was somewhere in Oxford Street; the pavement was crowded with people; jostling each other; swarming round the plate-glass windows which were still lit up. The gaiety, the colour, the variety, were amazing after Africa. All these years, he thought to himself, looking at a floating banner of transparent silk, he had been used to raw goods; hides and fleeces; here was the finished article. A dressing-case, of yellow leather fitted with silver bottles, caught his eye. But the light was green again. On he jerked.

He had only been back ten days, and his mind was a jumble of odds and ends. It seemed to him that he had never stopped talking: shaking hands; saying How-d’you-do? People sprang up everywhere; his father; his sister; old men got up from armchairs and said, You don’t remember me? Children he had left in the nursery were grown-up men at college; girls with pigtails were now married women. He was still confused by it all; they talked so fast; they must think him very slow, he thought. He had to withdraw into the window and say, “What, what, what do they mean by it?”

For instance, this evening at Eleanor’s there was a man there with a foreign accent who squeezed lemon into his tea. Who might he be, he wondered? “One of Nell’s dentists,” said his sister Peggy, wrinkling her lip. For they all had lines cut; phrases ready-made. But that was the silent man on the sofa. It was the other one he meant—squeezing lemon in his tea. “We call him Brown,” she murmured. Why Brown if he’s a foreigner, he wondered. Anyhow they all romanticized solitude and savagery—“I wish I’d done what you did,” said a little man called Pickersgill—except this man Brown, who had said something that interested him. “If we do not know ourselves, how can we know other people?” he had said. They had been discussing dictators; Napoleon; the psychology of great men. But there was the green light—“GO”. He shot on again. And then the lady with the ear-rings gushed about the beauties of Nature. He glanced at the name of the street on the left. He was going to dine with Sara but he had not much notion how to get there. He had only heard her voice on the telephone saying, “Come and dine with me—Milton Street, fifty-two, my name’s on the door.” It was near the Prison Tower. But this man Brown—it was difficult to place him at once. He talked, spreading his fingers out with the volubility of a man who will in the end become a bore. And Eleanor wandered about, holding a cup, telling people about her shower-bath. He wished they would stick to the point. Talk interested him. Serious talk on abstract subjects. “Was solitude good; was society bad?” That was interesting; but they hopped from thing to thing. When the large man said, “Solitary confinement is the greatest torture we inflict,” the meagre old woman with the wispy hair at once piped up, laying her hand on her heart, “It ought to be abolished!” She visited prisons, it seemed.

“Where the dickens am I now?” he asked, peering at the name on the street corner. Somebody had chalked a circle on the wall with a jagged line in it. He looked down the long vista. Door after door, window after window, repeated the same pattern. There was a red-yellow glow over it all, for the sun was sinking through the London dust. Everything was tinged with a warm yellow haze. Barrows full of fruit and flowers were drawn up at the kerb. The sun gilded the fruit; the flowers had a blurred brilliance; there were roses, carnations and lilies too. He had half a mind to stop and buy a bunch to take to Sally. But the cars were hooting behind him. He went on. A bunch of flowers, he thought, held in the hand would soften the awkwardness of meeting and the usual things that had to be said. “How nice to see you—you’ve filled out,” and so on. He had only heard her voice on the telephone, and people changed after all these years. Whether this was the right street or not, he could not be sure; he filtered slowly round the corner. Then stopped; then went on again. This was Milton Street, a dusky street, with old houses, now let out as lodgings; but they had seen better days.

“The odds on that side; the evens on this,” he said. The street was blocked with vans. He hooted. He stopped. He hooted again. A man went to the horse’s head, for it was a coal-cart, and the horse slowly plodded on. Fifty-two was just along the row. He dribbled up to the door. He stopped.

A voice pealed out across the street, the voice of a woman singing scales.

“What a dirty,” he said, as he sat still in the car for a moment—here a woman crossed the street with a jug under her arm—“sordid,” he added, “low-down street to live in.” He cut off his engine; got out, and examined the names on the door. Names mounted one above another; here on a visiting-card, here engraved on brass—Foster; Abrahamson; Roberts; S. Pargiter was near the top, punched on a strip of aluminium. He rang one of the many bells. No one came. The woman went on singing scales, mounting slowly. The mood comes, the mood goes, he thought. He used to write poetry; now the mood had come again as he stood there waiting. He pressed the bell two or three times sharply. But no one answered. Then he gave the door a push; it was open. There was a curious smell in the hall; of vegetables cooking; and the oily brown paper made it dark. He went up the stairs of what had once been a gentleman’s residence. The banisters were carved; but they had been daubed over with some cheap yellow varnish. He mounted slowly and stood on the landing, uncertain which door to knock at. He was always finding himself now outside the doors of strange houses. He had a feeling that he was no one and nowhere in particular. From across the road came the voice of the singer deliberately ascending the scale, as if the notes were stairs; and here she stopped indolently, languidly, flinging out the voice that was nothing but pure sound. Then he heard somebody inside, laughing.

That’s her voice, he said. But there is somebody with her. He was annoyed. He had hoped to find her alone. The voice was speaking and did not answer when he knocked. Very cautiously he opened the door and went in.

“Yes, yes, yes,” Sara was saying. She was kneeling at the telephone talking; but there was nobody there. She raised her hand when she saw him and smiled at him; but she kept her hand raised as if the noise he had made caused her to lose what she was trying to hear.

“What?” she said, speaking into the telephone. “What?” He stood silent, looking at the silhouettes of his grandparents on the mantelpiece. There were no flowers, he observed. He wished he had brought her some. He listened to what she was saying; he tried to piece it together.

“Yes, now I can hear…. Yes, you’re right. Someone has come in…. Who? North. My cousin from Africa….”

That’s me, North thought. “My cousin from Africa.” That’s my label.

“You’ve met him?” she was saying. There was a pause. “D’you think so?” she said. She turned and looked at him. They must be discussing him, he thought. He felt uncomfortable.

“Good-bye,” she said, and put down the telephone.

“He says he met you tonight,” she said, going up to him and taking his hand. “And liked you,” she added, smiling.

“Who was that?” he asked, feeling awkward; but he had no flowers to give her.

“A man you met at Eleanor’s,” she said.

“A foreigner?” he asked.

“Yes. Called Brown,” she said, pushing up a chair for him.

He sat down on the chair she had pushed out for him, and she curled up opposite with her foot under her. He remembered the attitude; she came back in sections; first the voice; then the attitude; but something remained unknown.

“You’ve not changed,” he said—the face he meant. A plain face scarcely changed; whereas beautiful faces wither. She looked neither young nor old; but shabby; and the room, with the pampas grass in a pot in the corner, was untidy. A lodging-house room tidied in a hurry he guessed.

“And you—” she said, looking at him. It was as if she were trying to put two different versions of him together; the one on the telephone perhaps and the one on the chair. Or was there some other? This half knowing people, this half being known, this feeling of the eye on the flesh, like a fly crawling—how uncomfortable it was, he thought; but inevitable, after all these years. The tables were littered; he hesitated, holding his hat in his hand. She smiled at him, as he sat there, holding his hat uncertainly.

“Who’s the young Frenchman,” she said, “with the top hat in the picture?”

“What picture?” he asked.

“The one who sits looking puzzled with his hat in his hand,” she said. He put his hat on the table, but awkwardly. A book fell to the floor.

“Sorry,” he said. She meant, presumably, when she compared him to the puzzled man in the picture, that he was clumsy; he always had been.

“This isn’t the room where I came last time?” he asked.

He recognised a chair—a chair with gilt claws; there was the usual piano.

“No—that was on the other side of the river,” she said, “when you came to say good-bye.”

He remembered. He had come to her the evening before he left for the war; and he had hung his cap on the bust of their grandfather—that had vanished. And she had mocked him.

“How many lumps of sugar does a lieutenant in His Majesty’s Royal Regiment of Rat-catchers require?” she had sneered. He could see her now dropping lumps of sugar into his tea. And they had quarrelled. And he had left her. It was the night of the raid, he remembered. He remembered the dark night; the searchlights that slowly swept over the sky; here and there they stopped to ponder a fleecy patch; little pellets of shot fell; and people scudded along the empty blue shrouded streets. He had been going to Kensington to dine with his family; he had said good-bye to his mother; he had never seen her again.

The voice of the singer interrupted. “Ah—h-h, oh-h-h, ah—h-h, oh—h-h,” she sang, languidly climbing up and down the scale on the other side of the street.

“Does she go on like that every night?” he asked. Sara nodded. The notes coming through the humming evening air sounded slow and sensuous. The singer seemed to have endless leisure; she could rest on every stair.

And there was no sign of dinner, he observed; only a dish of fruit on the cheap lodging-house tablecloth, already yellowed with some gravy stain.

“Why d’you always choose slums——” he was beginning, for children were screaming in the street below, when the door opened and a girl came in carrying a bunch of knives and forks. The regular lodging-house skivvy, North thought; with red hands, and one of those jaunty white caps that girls in lodging-houses clap on top of their hair when the lodger has a party. In her presence they had to make conversation. “I’ve been seeing Eleanor,” he said. “That was where I met your friend Brown….”

The girl made a clatter laying the table with the knives and forks she held in a bunch.

“Oh, Eleanor,” said Sara. “Eleanor——” But she watched the girl going clumsily round the table; she breathed rather hard as she laid it.

“She’s just back from India,” he said. He too watched the girl laying the table. Now she stood a bottle of wine among the cheap lodging-house crockery.

“Gallivanting round the world,” Sara murmured.

“And entertaining the oddest set of old fogies,” he added. He thought of the little man with the fierce blue eyes who wished he had been in Africa; and the wispy woman with beads who visited prisons it seemed.

“… and that man, your friend——” he began. Here the girl went out of the room, but she left the door open, a sign that she was about to come back.

“Nicholas,” said Sara, finishing his sentence. “The man you call Brown.”

There was a pause. “And what did you talk about?” she asked.

He tried to remember.

“Napoleon; the psychology of great men; if we don’t know ourselves how can we know other people …” He stopped. It was difficult to remember accurately what had been said even one hour ago.

“And then,” she said, holding out one hand and touching a finger exactly as Brown had done, “… how can we make laws, religions, that fit, that fit, when we don’t know ourselves?”

“Yes! Yes!” he exclaimed. She had caught his manner exactly; the slight foreign accent; the repetition of the little word “fit”, as if he were not quite sure of the shorter words in English.

“And Eleanor,” Sara continued, “says … ‘Can we improve—can we improve ourselves?’ sitting on the edge of the sofa?”

“Of the bath,” he laughed, correcting her.

“You’ve had that talk before,” he said. That was precisely what he was feeling. They had talked before. “And then,” he continued, “we discussed….”

But here the girl burst in again. She had plates in her hand this time; blue-ringed plates, cheap lodging-house plates: “—society or solitude; which is best,” he finished his sentence.

Sara kept looking at the table. “And which,” she asked, in the distracted way of someone who with their surface senses watches what is being done, but at the same time thinks of something else “—which did you say? You who’ve been alone all these years,” she said. The girl left the room again. “—among your sheep, North.” She broke off; for now a trombone player had struck up in the street below, and as the voice of the woman practising her scales continued, they sounded like two people trying to express completely different views of the world in general at one and the same time. The voice ascended; the trombone wailed. They laughed.

“… Sitting on the verandah,” she resumed, “looking at the stars.”

He looked up: was she quoting something? He remembered he had written to her when he first went out. “Yes, looking at the stars,” he said.

“Sitting on the verandah in the silence,” she added. A van went past the window. All sounds were for the moment obliterated.

“And then …” she said as the van rattled away—she paused as if she were referring to something else that he had written.

“—then you saddled a horse,” she said, “and rode away!”

She jumped up, and for the first time he saw her face in the full light. There was a smudge on the side of her nose.

“D’you know,” he said, looking at her, “that you’ve a smudge on your face?”

She touched the wrong cheek.

“Not that side—the other,” he said.

She left the room without looking in the glass. From which we deduce the fact, he said to himself, as if he were writing a novel, that Miss Sara Pargiter has never attracted the love of men. Or had she? He did not know. These little snapshot pictures of people left much to be desired, these little surface pictures that one made, like a fly crawling over a face, and feeling, here’s the nose, here’s the brow.

He strolled to the window. The sun must be setting, for the brick of the house at the corner blushed a yellowish pink. One or two high windows were burnished gold. The girl was in the room, and she distracted him; also the noise of London still bothered him. Against the dull background of traffic noises, of wheels turning and brakes squeaking, there rose near at hand the cry of a woman suddenly alarmed for her child; the monotonous cry of a man selling vegetables; and far away a barrel organ was playing. It stopped; it began again. I used to write to her, he thought, late at night, when I felt lonely, when I was young. He looked at himself in the glass. He saw his sunburnt face with the broad cheek bones and the little brown eyes.

The girl had been sucked down into the lower portion of the house. The door stood open. Nothing seemed to be happening. He waited. He felt an outsider. After all these years, he thought, everyone was paired off; settled down; busy with their own affairs. You found them telephoning, remembering other conversations; they went out of the room; they left one alone. He took up a book and read a sentence.

“A shadow like an angel with bright hair …”

Next moment she came in. But there seemed to be some hitch in the proceedings. The door was open; the table laid; but nothing happened. They stood together, waiting, with their backs to the fireplace.

“How strange it must be,” she resumed, “coming back after all these years—as if you’d dropped from the clouds in an aeroplane,” she pointed to the table as if that were the field in which he had landed.

“On to an unknown land,” said North. He leant forward and touched a knife on the table.

“—and finding people talking,” she added.

“—talking, talking,” he said, “about money and politics,” he added, giving the fender behind him a vicious little kick with his heel.

Here the girl came in. She wore an air of importance derived apparently from the dish she carried, for it was covered with a great metal cover. She raised the cover with a certain flourish. There was a leg of mutton underneath. “Let’s dine,” said Sara.

“I’m hungry,” he added.

They sat down and she took the carving-knife and made a long incision. A thin trickle of red juice ran out; it was underdone. She looked at it.

“Mutton oughtn’t to be like that,” she said. “Beef—but not mutton.”

They watched the red juice running down into the well of the dish.

“Shall we send it back,” she said, “or eat it as it is?”

“Eat it,” he said. “I’ve eaten far worse joints than this,” he added.

“In Africa …” she said, lifting the lids of the vegetable dishes. There was a slabbed-down mass of cabbage in one oozing green water; in the other, yellow potatoes that looked hard.

“… in Africa, in the wilds of Africa,” she resumed, helping him to cabbage, “in that farm you were on, where no one came for months at a time, and you sat on the verandah listening——”

“To sheep,” he said. He was cutting his mutton into strips. It was tough.

“And there was nothing to break the silence,” she went on, helping herself to potatoes, “but a tree falling, or a rock breaking from the side of a distant mountain——” She looked at him as if to verify the sentences that she was quoting from his letters.

“Yes,” he said. “It was very silent.”

“And hot,” she added. “Blazing hot at midday: an old tramp tapped on your door …?”

He nodded. He saw himself again, a young man, and very lonely.

“And then——” she began again. But a great lorry came crashing down the street. Something rattled on the table. The walls and the floor seemed to tremble. She parted two glasses that were jingling together. The lorry passed; they heard it rumbling away in the distance.

“And the birds,” she went on. “The nightingales, singing in the moonlight?”

He felt uncomfortable at the vision she called up. “I must have written you a lot of nonsense!” he exclaimed. “I wish you’d torn them up—those letters!”

“No! They were beautiful letters! Wonderful letters!” she exclaimed, raising her glass. A thimbleful of wine always made her tipsy, he remembered. Her eyes shone; her cheeks glowed.

“And then you had a day off,” she went on, “and jolted along a rough white road in a springless cart to the next town——”

“Sixty miles away,” he said.

“And went to a bar; and met a man from the next—ranch?” She hesitated as if the word might be the wrong one.

“Ranch, yes, ranch,” he confirmed her. “I went to the town and had a drink at the bar——”

“And then?” she said. He laughed. There were some things he had not told her. He was silent.

“Then you stopped writing,” she said. She put her glass down.

“When I forgot what you were like,” he said, looking at her.

“You gave up writing too,” he said.

“Yes, I too,” she said.

The trombone had moved his station and was wailing lugubriously under the window. The doleful sound, as if a dog had thrown back its head and were baying the moon, floated up to them. She waved her fork in time to it.

“Our hearts full of tears, our lips full of laughter, we passed on the stairs”—she dragged her words out to fit the wail of the trombone—“we passed on the stair-r-r-r-s”—but here the trombone changed its measure to a jig. “He to sorrow, I to bliss,” she jigged with it, “he to bliss and I to sorrow, we passed on the stair-r-r-s.”

She set her glass down.

“Another cut off the joint?” she asked.

“No, thank you,” he said, looking at the rather stringy disagreeable object which was still bleeding into the well. The willow-pattern plate was daubed with gory streaks. She stretched her hand out and rang the bell. She rang; she rang a second time. No one came.

“Your bells don’t ring,” he said.

“No,” she smiled. “The bells don’t ring, and the taps don’t run.” She thumped on the floor. They waited. No one came. The trombone wailed outside.

“But there was one letter you wrote me,” he continued as they waited. “An angry letter; a cruel letter.”

He looked at her. She had lifted her lip like a horse that is going to bite. That, too, he remembered.

“Yes?” she said.

“The night you came in from the Strand,” he reminded her.

Here the girl came in with the pudding. It was an ornate pudding, semi-transparent, pink, ornamented with blobs of cream.

“I remember,” said Sara, sticking her spoon into the quivering jelly, “a still autumn night; the lights lit; and people padding along the pavement with wreaths in their hands?”

“Yes,” he nodded. “That was it.”

“And I said to myself,” she paused, “this is Hell. We are the damned?” He nodded.

She helped him to pudding.

“And I,” he said, as he took his plate, “was among the damned.” He stuck his spoon into the quivering mass that she had given him.

“Coward; hypocrite, with your switch in your hand; and your cap on your head——” He seemed to quote from a letter that she had written him. He paused. She smiled at him.

“But what was the word—the word I used?” she asked, as if she were trying to remember.

“Poppycock!” he reminded her. She nodded.

“And then I went over the bridge,” she resumed, raising her spoon half-way to her mouth, “and stopped in one of those little alcoves, bays, what d’you call ’em?—scooped out over the water, and looked down——” She looked down at her plate.

“When you lived on the other side of the river,” he prompted her.

“Stood and looked down,” she said, looking at her glass which she held in front of her, “and thought; Running water, flowing water, water that crinkles up the lights; moonlight; starlight——” She drank and was silent.

“Then the car came,” he prompted her.

“Yes; the Rolls-Royce. It stopped in the lamplight and there they sat——”

“Two people,” he reminded her.

“Two people. Yes,” she said. “He was smoking a cigar. An upper-class Englishman with a big nose, in a dress suit. And she, sitting beside him, in a fur-trimmed cloak, took advantage of the pause under the lamplight to raise her hand”—she raised her hand—“and polish that spade, her mouth.”

She swallowed her mouthful.

“And the peroration?” he prompted her.

She shook her head.

They were silent. North had finished his pudding. He took out his cigarette-case. Save for a dish of rather fly-blown fruit, apples and bananas, there was no more to eat apparently.

“We were very foolish when we were young, Sal,” he said, as he lit his cigarette, “writing purple passages …”

“At dawn with the sparrows chirping,” she said, pulling the plate of fruit towards her. She began peeling a banana, as if she were unsheathing some soft glove. He took an apple and peeled it. The curl of apple-skin lay on his plate, coiled up like a snake’s skin, he thought; and the banana-skin was like the finger of a glove that had been ripped open.

The street was now quiet. The woman had stopped singing. The trombone-player had moved off. The rush hour was over and nothing went down the street. He looked at her, biting little bits off her banana.

When she came to the fourth of June, he remembered, she wore her skirt the wrong way round. She was crooked in those days too; and they had laughed at her—he and Peggy. She had never married; he wondered why not. He swept up the broken coils of apple-peel on his plate.

“What does he do,” he said suddenly, “—that man who throws his hands out?”

“Like this?” she said. She threw her hands out.

“Yes,” he nodded. That was the man—one of those voluble foreigners with a theory about everything. Yet he had liked him—he gave off an aroma; a whirr; his flexible supple face worked amusingly; he had a round forehead; good eyes; and was bald.

“What does he do?” he repeated.

“Talks,” she replied, “about the soul.” She smiled. Again he felt an outsider; so many talks there must have been between them; such intimacy.

“About the soul,” she continued, taking a cigarette. “Lectures,” she added, lighting it. “Ten and six for a seat in the front row,” she puffed her smoke out. “There’s standing room at half a crown; but then,” she puffed, “you don’t hear so well. You only catch half the lesson of the Teacher, the Master,” she laughed.

She was sneering at him now; she conveyed the impression that he was a charlatan. Yet Peggy had said that they were very intimate—she and this foreigner. The vision of the man at Eleanor’s changed slightly like an air ball blown aside.

“I thought he was a friend of yours,” he said aloud.

“Nicholas?” she exclaimed. “I love him!”

Her eyes certainly glowed. They fixed themselves upon a salt cellar with a look of rapture that made North feel once more puzzled.

“You love him …” he began. But here the telephone rang.

“There he is!” she exclaimed. “That’s him! That’s Nicholas!”

She spoke with extreme irritation.

The telephone rang again. “I’m not here!” she said. The telephone rang again. “Not here! Not here! Not here!” she repeated in time to the bell. She made no attempt to answer it. He could stand the stab of her voice and the bell no longer. He went over to the telephone. There was a pause as he stood with the receiver in his hand.

“Tell him I’m not here!” she said.

“Hullo,” he said, answering the telephone. But there was a pause. He looked at her sitting on the edge of her chair, swinging her foot up and down. Then a voice spoke.

“I’m North,” he answered the telephone. “I’m dining with Sara…. Yes, I’ll tell her….” He looked at her again. “She is sitting on the edge of her chair,” he said, “with a smudge on her face, swinging her foot up and down.”

Eleanor stood holding the telephone. She smiled, and for a moment after she had put the receiver back stood there, still smiling, before she turned to her niece Peggy who had been dining with her.

“North is dining with Sara,” she said, smiling at the little telephone picture of two people at the other end of London, one of whom was sitting on the edge of her chair with a smudge on her face.

“He’s dining with Sara,” she said again. But her niece did not smile, for she had not seen the picture, and she was slightly irritated because, in the middle of what they were saying, Eleanor suddenly got up and said, “I’ll just remind Sara.”

“Oh, is he?” she said casually.

Eleanor came and sat down.

“We were saying——” she began.

“You’ve had it cleaned,” said Peggy simultaneously. While Eleanor telephoned, she had been looking at the picture of her grandmother over the writing-table.

“Yes,” Eleanor glanced back over her shoulder. “Yes. And do you see there’s a flower fallen on the grass?” she said. She turned and looked at the picture. The face, the dress, the basket of flowers all shone softly melting into each other, as if the paint were one smooth coat of enamel. There was a flower—a little sprig of blue—lying in the grass.

“It was hidden by the dirt,” said Eleanor. “But I can just remember it, when I was a child. That reminds me, if you want a good man to clean pictures——”

“But was it like her?” Peggy interrupted.

Somebody had told her that she was like her grandmother: and she did not want to be like her. She wanted to be dark and aquiline: but in fact she was blue-eyed and round-faced—like her grandmother.

“I’ve got the address somewhere,” Eleanor went on.

“Don’t bother—don’t bother,” said Peggy, irritated by her aunt’s habit of adding unnecessary details. It was age coming on, she supposed: age that loosened screws and made the whole apparatus of the mind rattle and jingle.

“Was it like her?” she asked again.

“Not as I remember her,” said Eleanor, glancing once more at the picture. “When I was a child perhaps—no, I don’t think even as a child. What’s so interesting,” she continued, “is that what they thought ugly—red hair for instance—we think pretty; so that I often ask myself,” she paused, puffing at her cheroot, “‘What is pretty?’”

“Yes,” said Peggy. “That’s what we were saying.”

For when Eleanor suddenly took it into her head that she must remind Sara of the party, they had been talking about Eleanor’s childhood—how things had changed; one thing seemed good to one generation, another to another. She liked getting Eleanor to talk about her past; it seemed to her so peaceful and so safe.

“Is there any standard, d’you think?” she said, wishing to bring her back to what they were saying.

“I wonder,” said Eleanor absentmindedly. She was thinking of something else.

“How annoying!” she exclaimed suddenly. “I had it on the tip of my tongue—something I want to ask you. Then I thought of Delia’s party: then North made me laugh—Sally sitting on the edge of her chair with a smudge on her nose; and that’s put it out of my head.” She shook her head.

“D’you know the feeling when one’s been on the point of saying something, and been interrupted; how it seems to stick here,” she tapped her forehead, “so that it stops everything else? Not that it was anything of importance,” she added. She wandered about the room for a moment. “No, I give it up; I give it up,” she said, shaking her head.

“I shall go and get ready now, if you’ll call a cab.”

She went into the bedroom. Soon there was the sound of running water.

Peggy lit another cigarette. If Eleanor were going to wash, as seemed likely from the sounds in the bedroom, there was no need to hurry about the cab. She glanced at the letters on the mantelpiece. An address stuck out on the top of one of them—“Mon Repos, Wimbledon.” One of Eleanor’s dentists, Peggy thought to herself. The man she went botanising with on Wimbledon Common perhaps. A charming man. Eleanor had described him. “He says every tooth is quite unlike every other tooth. And he knows all about plants….” It was difficult to get her to stick to her childhood.

She crossed to the telephone; she gave the number. There was a pause. As she waited she looked at her hands holding the telephone. Efficient, shell-like, polished but not painted, they’re a compromise, she thought, looking at her finger-nails, between science and … But here a voice said “Number, please,” and she gave it.

Again she waited. As she sat where Eleanor had sat she saw the telephone picture that Eleanor had seen—Sally sitting on the edge of her chair with a smudge on her face. What a fool, she thought bitterly, and a thrill ran down her thigh. Why was she bitter? For she prided herself upon being honest—she was a doctor—and that thrill she knew meant bitterness. Did she envy her because she was happy, or was it the croak of some ancestral prudery—did she disapprove of these friendships with men who did not love women? She looked at the picture of her grandmother as if to ask her opinion. But she had assumed the immunity of a work of art; she seemed as she sat there, smiling at her roses, to be indifferent to our right and wrong.

“Hullo,” said a gruff voice, which suggested sawdust and a shelter, and she gave the address and put down the telephone just as Eleanor came in—she was wearing a red-gold Arab cloak with a silver veil over her hair.

“One of these days d’you think you’ll be able to see things at the end of the telephone?” Peggy said, getting up. Eleanor’s hair was her beauty, she thought; and her silver-washed dark eyes—a fine old prophetess, a queer old bird, venerable and funny at one and the same time. She was burnt from her travels so that her hair looked whiter than ever.

“What’s that?” said Eleanor, for she had not caught her remark about the telephone. Peggy did not repeat it. They stood at the window waiting for the cab. They stood there side by side, silent, looking out, because there was a pause to fill up, and the view from the window, which was so high over the roofs, over the squares and angles of back gardens to the blue line of hills in the distance served, like another voice speaking, to fill up the pause. The sun was setting; one cloud lay curled like a red feather in the blue. She looked down. It was queer to see cabs turning corners, going round this street and down the other, and not to hear the sound they made. It was like a map of London; a section laid beneath them. The summer day was fading; lights were being lit, primrose lights, still separate, for the glow of the sunset was still in the air. Eleanor pointed at the sky.

“That’s where I saw my first aeroplane—there between those chimneys,” she said. There were high chimneys, factory chimneys, in the distance; and a great building—Westminster Cathedral was it?—over there riding above the roofs.

“I was standing here, looking out,” Eleanor went on. “It must have been just after I’d got into the flat, a summer’s day, and I saw a black spot in the sky, and I said to whoever it was—Miriam Parrish, I think, yes, for she came to help me to get into the flat—I hope Delia, by the way, remembered to ask her——” … that’s old age, Peggy noted, bringing in one thing after another.

“You said to Miriam—” she prompted her.

“I said to Miriam, ‘Is it a bird? No, I don’t think it can be a bird. It’s too big. Yet it moves.’ And suddenly it came over me, that’s an aeroplane! And it was! You know they’d flown the Channel not so very long before. I was staying with you in Dorset at the time: and I remember reading it out in the paper, and someone—your father, I think—said: ‘The world will never be the same again!”

“Oh, well——” Peggy laughed. She was about to say that aeroplanes hadn’t made all that difference, for it was her line to disabuse her elders of their belief in science, partly because their credulity amused her, partly because she was daily impressed by the ignorance of doctors—when Eleanor sighed.

“Oh dear,” she murmured.

She turned away from the window.

Old age again, Peggy thought. Some gust blew open a door: one of the many millions in Eleanor’s seventy-odd years; out came a painful thought; which she at once concealed—she had gone to her writing-table and was fidgeting with papers—with the humble generosity, the painful humility of the old.

“What, Nell——?” Peggy began.

“Nothing, nothing,” said Eleanor. She had seen the sky; and that sky was laid with pictures—she had seen it so often; any one of which might come uppermost when she looked at it. Now, because she had been talking to North, it brought back the war; how she had stood there one night, watching the searchlights. She had come home, after a raid; she had been dining in Westminster with Renny and Maggie. They had sat in a cellar; and Nicholas—it was the first time she had met him—had said that the war was of no importance. “We are children playing with fireworks in the back garden” … she remembered his phrase; and how, sitting round a wooden packing-case, they had drunk to a new world. “A new world—a new world!” Sally had cried, drumming with her spoon on top of the packing-case. She turned to her writing-table, tore up a letter and threw it away.

“Yes,” she said, fumbling among her papers, looking for something. “Yes—I don’t know about aeroplanes, I’ve never been up in one; but motor cars—I could do without motor cars. I was almost knocked down by one, did I tell you? In the Brompton Road. All my own fault—I wasn’t looking…. And wireless—that’s a nuisance—the people downstairs turn it on after breakfast; but on the other hand—hot water; electric light; and those new——” She paused. “Ah, there it is!” she exclaimed. She pounced upon some paper that she had been hunting for. “If Edward’s there tonight, do remind me—I’ll tie a knot in my handkerchief….”

She opened her bag, took out a silk handkerchief, and proceeded solemnly to tie it into a knot … “to ask him about Runcorn’s boy.”

The bell rang.

“The taxi,” she said.

She glanced about to make sure that she had forgotten nothing. She stopped suddenly. Her eye had been caught by the evening paper, which lay on the floor with its broad bar of print and its blurred photograph. She picked it up.

“What a face!” she exclaimed, flattening it out on the table.

As far as Peggy could see, but she was short-sighted, it was the usual evening paper’s blurred picture of a fat man gesticulating.

“Damned—” Eleanor shot out suddenly, “bully!” She tore the paper across with one sweep of her hand and flung it on the floor. Peggy was shocked. A little shiver ran over her skin as the paper tore. The word “damned” on her aunt’s lips had shocked her.

Next moment she was amused; but still she had been shocked. For when Eleanor, who used English so reticently, said “damned” and then “bully,” it meant much more than the words she and her friends used. And her gesture, tearing the paper … What a queer set they are, she thought, as she followed Eleanor down the stairs. Her red-gold cloak trailed from step to step. So she had seen her father crumple The Times and sit trembling with rage because somebody had said something in a newspaper. How odd!

And the way she tore it! she thought, half laughing, and she flung out her hand as Eleanor had flung hers. Eleanor’s figure still seemed erect with indignation. It would be simple, she thought, it would be satisfactory, she thought, following her down flight after flight of stone steps, to be like that. The little knob on her cloak tapped on the stairs. They descended rather slowly.

“Take my aunt,” she said to herself, beginning to arrange the scene into an argument she had been having with a man at the hospital, “take my aunt, living alone in a sort of workman’s flat at the top of six flights of stairs …” Eleanor stopped.

“Don’t tell me,” she said, “that I left the letter upstairs—Runcorn’s letter that I want to show Edward, about the boy?” She opened her bag. “No: here it is.” There it was in her bag. They went on downstairs.

Eleanor gave the address to the cabman and sat down with a jerk in her corner. Peggy glanced at her out of the corner of her eye.

It was the force that she had put into the words that impressed her, not the words. It was as if she still believed with passion—she, old Eleanor—in the things that man had destroyed. A wonderful generation, she thought, as they drove off. Believers …

“You see,” Eleanor interrupted, as if she wanted to explain her words, “it means the end of everything we cared for.”

“Freedom?” said Peggy perfunctorily.

“Yes,” said Eleanor. “Freedom and justice.”

The cab drove off down the mild respectable little streets where every house had its bow window, its strip of garden, its private name. As they drove on, into the big main street, the scene in the flat composed itself in Peggy’s mind as she would tell it to the man in the hospital. “Suddenly she lost her temper,” she said, “took the paper and tore it across—my aunt, who’s over seventy.” She glanced at Eleanor to verify the details. Her aunt interrupted her.

“That’s where we used to live,” she said. She waved her hand towards a long lamp-starred street on the left. Peggy, looking out, could just see the imposing unbroken avenue with its succession of pale pillars and steps. The repeated columns, the orderly architecture, had even a pale pompous beauty as one stucco column repeated another stucco column all down the street.

“Abercorn Terrace,” said Eleanor; “… the pillar-box,” she murmured as they drove past. Why the pillar-box? Peggy asked herself. Another door had been opened. Old age must have endless avenues, stretching away and away down its darkness, she supposed, and now one door opened and then another.

“Aren’t people——” Eleanor began. Then she stopped. As usual, she had begun in the wrong place.

“Yes?” said Peggy. She was irritated by this inconsequence.

“I was going to say—the pillar-box made me think,” Eleanor began; then she laughed. She gave up the attempt to account for the order in which her thoughts came to her. There was an order, doubtless; but it took so long to find it, and this rambling, she knew, annoyed Peggy, for young people’s minds worked so quickly.

“That’s where we used to dine,” she broke off, nodding at a big house at the corner of a square. “Your father and I. The man he used to read with. What was his name? He became a Judge…. We used to dine there, the three of us. Morris, my father and I…. They had very large parties in those days. Always legal people. And he collected old oak. Mostly shams,” she added with a little chuckle.

“You used to dine …” Peggy began. She wished to get her back to her past. It was so interesting; so safe; so unreal—that past of the ’eighties; and to her, so beautiful in its unreality.

“Tell me about your youth …” she began.

“But your lives are much more interesting than ours were,” said Eleanor. Peggy was silent.

They were driving along a bright crowded street; here stained ruby with the light from picture palaces; here yellow from shop windows gay with summer dresses, for the shops, though shut, were still lit up, and people were still looking at dresses, at flights of hats on little rods, at jewels.

When my Aunt Delia comes to town, Peggy continued the story of Eleanor that she was telling her friend at the hospital, she says, We must have a party. Then they all flock together. They love it. As for herself, she hated it. She would far rather have stayed at home or gone to the pictures. It’s the sense of the family, she added, glancing at Eleanor as if to collect another little fact about her to add to her portrait of a Victorian spinster. Eleanor was looking out of the window. Then she turned.

“And the experiment with the guinea-pig—how did that go off?” she asked. Peggy was puzzled.

Then she remembered and told her.

“I see. So it proved nothing. So you’ve got to begin all over again. That’s very interesting. Now I wish you’d explain to me …” There was another problem that puzzled her.

The things she wants explained, Peggy said to her friend at the Hospital, are either as simple as two and two make four, or so difficult that nobody in the world knows the answer. And if you say to her, “What’s eight times eight?”—she smiled at the profile of her aunt against the window—she taps her forehead and says … but again Eleanor interrupted her.

“It’s so good of you to come,” she said, giving her a little pat on the knee. (But did I show her, Peggy thought, that I hate coming?)

“It’s a way of seeing people,” Eleanor continued. “And now that we’re all getting on—not you, us—one doesn’t like to miss chances.”

They drove on. And how does one get that right? Peggy thought, trying to add another touch to the portrait. “Sentimental” was it? Or, on the contrary, was it good to feel like that … natural … right? She shook her head. I’m no use at describing people, she said to her friend at the Hospital. They’re too difficult…. She’s not like that—not like that at all, she said, making a little dash with her hand as if to rub out an outline that she had drawn wrongly. As she did so, her friend at the Hospital vanished.

She was alone with Eleanor in the cab. And they were passing houses. Where does she begin, and where do I end? she thought…. On they drove. They were two living people, driving across London; two sparks of life enclosed in two separate bodies; and those sparks of life enclosed in two separate bodies are at this moment, she thought, driving past a picture palace. But what is this moment; and what are we? The puzzle was too difficult for her to solve it. She sighed.

“You’re too young to feel that,” said Eleanor.

“What?” Peggy asked with a little start.

“About meeting people. About not missing chances of seeing them.”

“Young?” said Peggy. “I shall never be as young as you are!” She patted her Aunt’s knee in her turn. “Gallivanting off to India …” she laughed.

“Oh, India. India’s nothing nowadays,” said Eleanor. “Travel’s so easy. You just take a ticket; just get on board ship…. But what I want to see before I die,” she continued, “is something different….” She waved her hand out of the window. They were passing public buildings; offices of some sort. “… another kind of civilisation. Tibet, for instance. I was reading a book by a man called—now what was he called?”

She paused, distracted by the sights in the street. “Don’t people wear pretty clothes nowadays?” she said, pointing to a girl with fair hair and a young man in evening dress.

“Yes,” said Peggy perfunctorily, looking at the painted face and the bright shawl; at the white waistcoat and the smoothed back hair. Anything distracts Eleanor, everything interests her, she thought.

“Was it that you were suppressed when you were young?” she said aloud, recalling vaguely some childish memory; her grandfather with the shiny stumps instead of fingers; and a long dark drawing-room. Eleanor turned. She was surprised.

“Suppressed?” she repeated. She so seldom thought about herself now that she was surprised.

“Oh, I see what you mean,” she added after a moment. A picture—another picture—had swum to the surface. There was Delia standing in the middle of the room; Oh my God! Oh my God! she was saying; a hansom cab had stopped at the house next door; and she herself was watching Morris—was it Morris?—going down the street to post a letter…. She was silent. I do not want to go back into my past, she was thinking. I want the present.

“Where’s he taking us?” she said, looking out. They had reached the public part of London; the illuminated. The light fell on broad pavements; on white brilliantly lit-up public offices; on a pallid, hoary-looking church. Advertisements popped in and out. Here was a bottle of beer: it poured: then stopped: then poured again. They had reached the theatre quarter. There was the usual garish confusion. Men and women in evening dress were walking in the middle of the road. Cabs were wheeling and stopping. Their own taxi was held up. It stopped dead under a statue: the lights shone on its cadaverous pallor.

“Always reminds me of an advertisement of sanitary towels,” said Peggy, glancing at the figure of a woman in nurse’s uniform holding out her hand.

Eleanor was shocked for a moment. A knife seemed to slice her skin, leaving a ripple of unpleasant sensation; but what was solid in her body it did not touch, she realised after a moment. That she said because of Charles, she thought, feeling the bitterness in her tone—her brother, a nice dull boy who had been killed.

“The only fine thing that was said in the war,” she said aloud, reading the words cut on the pedestal.

“It didn’t come to much,” said Peggy sharply.

The cab remained fixed in the block.

The pause seemed to hold them in the light of some thought that they both wished to put away.

“Don’t people wear pretty clothes nowadays?” said Eleanor, pointing to another girl with fair hair in a long bright cloak and another young man in evening dress.

“Yes,” said Peggy briefly.

But why don’t you enjoy yourself more? Eleanor said to herself. Her brother’s death had been very sad, but she had always found North much the more interesting of the two. The cab threaded its way through the traffic and passed into a back street. He was stopped now by a red light. “It’s nice, having North back again,” Eleanor said.

“Yes,” said Peggy. “He says we talk of nothing but money and politics,” she added. She finds fault with him because he was not the one to be killed; but that’s wrong, Eleanor thought.

“Does he?” she said. “But then …” A newspaper placard, with large black letters, seemed to finish her sentence for her. They were approaching the square in which Delia lived. She began to fumble with her purse. She looked at the metre which had mounted rather high. The man was going the long way round.

“He’ll find his way in time,” she said. They were gliding slowly round the square. She waited patiently, holding her purse in her hand. She saw a breadth of dark sky over the roofs. The sun had sunk. For a moment the sky had the quiet look of the sky that lies above fields and woods in the country.

“He’ll have to turn, that’s all,” she said. “I’m not despondent,” she added, as the taxi turned. “Travelling, you see: when one has to mix up with all sorts of other people on board ship, or in one of those little places where one has to stay—off the beaten track——” The taxi was sliding tentatively past house after house—“You ought to go there, Peggy,” she broke off; “you ought to travel: the natives are so beautiful you know; half naked: going down to the river in the moonlight;—that’s the house over there——” She tapped on the window—the taxi slowed down. “What was I saying? I’m not despondent, no, because people are so kind, so good at heart…. So that if only ordinary people, ordinary people like ourselves …”

The cab drew up at a house whose windows were lit up. Peggy leant forward and opened the door. She jumped out and paid the driver. Eleanor bundled out after her. “No, no, no, Peggy,” she began.

“It’s my cab. It’s my cab,” Peggy protested.

“But I insist on paying my share,” said Eleanor, opening her purse.

“That’s Eleanor,” said North. He left the telephone and turned to Sara. She was still swinging her foot up and down.

“She told me to tell you to come to Delia’s party,” he said.

“To Delia’s party? Why to Delia’s party?” she asked.

“Because they’re old and want you to come,” he said, standing over her.

“Old Eleanor; wandering Eleanor; Eleanor with the wild eyes …” she mused. “Shall I, shan’t I, shall I, shan’t I?” she hummed, looking up at him. “No,” she said, putting her feet to the ground, “I shan’t.”

“You must,” he said. For her manner irritated him—Eleanor’s voice was still in his ears.

“I must, must I?” she said, making the coffee.

“Then,” she said, giving him his cup and picking up the book at the same time, “read until we must go.”

She curled herself up again, holding her cup in her hand.

It was still early, it was true. But why, he thought as he opened the book again and turned over the pages, won’t she come? Is she afraid? he wondered. He looked at her crumpled in her chair. Her dress was shabby. He looked at the book again, but he could hardly see to read. She had not lit the lamp.

“I can’t see to read without a light,” he said. It grew dark soon in this street; the houses were so close. Now a car passed and a light slid across the ceiling.

“Shall I turn on the light?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “I’ll try to remember something.” He began to say aloud the only poem he knew by heart. As he spoke the words out into the semi-darkness they sounded extremely beautiful, he thought, because they could not see each other, perhaps.

He paused at the end of the verse.

“Go on,” she said.

He began again. The words going out into the room seemed like actual presences, hard and independent; yet as she was listening they were changed by their contact with her. But as he reached the end of the second verse—

Society is all but rude—

To this delicious solitude …

he heard a sound. Was it in the poem or outside of it, he wondered? Inside, he thought, and was about to go on, when she raised her hand. He stopped. He heard heavy footsteps outside the door. Was someone coming in? Her eyes were on the door.

“The Jew,” she murmured.

“The Jew?” he said. They listened. He could hear quite distinctly now. Somebody was turning on taps; somebody was having a bath in the room opposite.

“The Jew having a bath,” she said.

“The Jew having a bath?” he repeated.

“And tomorrow there’ll be a line of grease round the bath,” she said.

“Damn the Jew!” he exclaimed. The thought of a line of grease from a strange man’s body on the bath next door disgusted him.

“Go on—” said Sara: “Society is all but rude,” she repeated the last lines, “to this delicious solitude.”

“No,” he said.

They listened to the water running. The man was coughing and clearing his throat as he sponged.

“Who is this Jew?” he asked.

“Abrahamson, in the tallow trade,” she said.

They listened.

“Engaged to a pretty girl in a tailor’s shop,” she added.

They could hear the sounds through the thin walls very distinctly.

He was snorting as he sponged himself.

“But he leaves hairs in the bath,” she concluded.

North felt a shiver run through him. Hairs in food, hairs on basins, other people’s hairs made him feel physically sick.

“D’you share a bath with him?” he asked.

She nodded.

He made a noise like “Pah!”

“‘Pah.’ That’s what I said,” she laughed. “‘Pah!’—when I went into the bathroom on a cold winter’s morning—‘Pah!’—she threw her hand out—“‘Pah!’” She paused.

“And then——?” he asked.

“And then,” she said, sipping her coffee, “I came back into the sitting-room. And breakfast was waiting. Fried eggs and a bit of toast. Lydia with her blouse torn and her hair down. The unemployed singing hymns under the window. And I said to myself—” she flung her hand out, “‘Polluted city, unbelieving city, city of dead fish and worn-out frying-pans’—thinking of a river’s bank, when the tide’s out,” she explained.

“Go on,” he nodded.

“So I put on my hat and coat and rushed out in a rage,” she continued, “and stood on the bridge, and said, ‘Am I a weed, carried this way, that way, on a tide that comes twice a day without a meaning?’”

“Yes?” he prompted her.

“And there were people passing; the strutting; the tiptoeing; the pasty; the ferret-eyed; the bowler-hatted, servile innumerable army of workers. And I said, ‘Must I join your conspiracy? Stain the hand, the unstained hand,’”—he could see her hand gleam as she waved it in the half-light of the sitting-room, “‘—and sign on, and serve a master; all because of a Jew in my bath, all because of a Jew?’”

She sat up and laughed, excited by the sound of her own voice which had run in to a jog-trot rhythm.

“Go on, go on,” he said.

“But I had a talisman, a glowing gem, a lucent emerald”—she picked up an envelope that lay on the floor—“a letter of introduction. And I said to the flunkey in peach-blossom trousers, ‘Admit me, sirrah,’ and he led me along corridors piled with purple till I came to a door, a mahogany door, and knocked; and a voice said, ‘Enter.’ And what did I find?” She paused. “A stout man with red cheeks. On his table three orchids in a vase. Pressed into your hand, I thought, as the car crunches the gravel by your wife at parting. And over the fireplace the usual picture——”

“Stop!” North interrupted her. “You have come to an office,” he tapped the table. “You are presenting a letter of introduction—but to whom?”

“Oh, to whom?” she laughed. “To a man in sponge-bag trousers. ‘I knew your father at Oxford,’ he said, toying with the blotting-paper, ornamented in one corner with a cartwheel. But what do you find insoluble, I asked him, looking at the mahogany man, the clean-shaven, rosy-gilled, mutton-fed man——”

“The man in a newspaper office,” North checked her, “who knew your father. And then?”

“There was a humming and a grinding. The great machines went round; and little boys popped in with elongated sheets; black sheets; smudged; damp with printer’s ink. ‘Pardon me a moment,’ he said, and made a note in the margin. But the Jew’s in my bath, I said—the Jew … the Jew….” She stopped suddenly and emptied her glass.

Yes, he thought, there’s the voice; there’s the attitude; and the reflection in other people’s faces; but then there’s something true—in the silence perhaps. But it was not silent. They could hear the Jew thudding in the bathroom; he seemed to stagger from foot to foot as he dried himself. Now he unlocked the door, and they heard him go upstairs. The pipes began to give forth hollow gurgling sounds.

“How much of that was true?” he asked her. But she had lapsed into silence. The actual words he supposed—the actual words floated together and formed a sentence in his mind—meant that she was poor; that she must earn her living, but the excitement with which she had spoken, due to wine perhaps, had created yet another person; another semblance, which one must solidify into one whole.

The house was quiet now, save for the sound of the bath water running away. A watery pattern fluctuated on the ceiling. The street lamps jiggering up and down outside made the houses opposite a curious pale red. The uproar of the day had died away; no carts were rattling down the street. The vegetable-sellers, the organ-grinders, the woman practising her scales, the man playing the trombone, had all trundled away their barrows, pulled down their shutters, and closed the lids of their pianos. It was so still that for a moment North thought he was in Africa, sitting on the verandah in the moonlight; but he roused himself. “What about this party?” he said. He got up and threw away his cigarette. He stretched himself and looked at his watch. “It’s time to go,” he said. “Go and get ready,” he urged her. For if one went to a party, he thought, it was absurd to go just as people were leaving. And the party must have begun.

“What were you saying—what were you saying, Nell?” said Peggy, in order to distract Eleanor from paying her share of the cab, as they stood on the doorstep. “Ordinary people—ordinary people ought to do what?” she asked.

Eleanor was still fumbling with her purse and did not answer.

“No, I can’t allow that,” she said. “Here, take this——”

But Peggy brushed aside the hand, and the coins rolled on the doorstep. They both stooped simultaneously and their heads collided.

“Don’t bother,” said Eleanor as a coin rolled away. “It was all my fault.” The maid was holding the door open.

“And where do we take our cloaks off?” she said. “In here?”

They went into a room on the ground floor which, though an office, had been arranged so that it could be used as a cloak-room. There was a looking-glass on the table: and in front of it trays of pins and combs and brushes. She went up to the glass and gave herself one brief glance.

“What a gipsy I look!” she said, and ran a comb through her hair. “Burnt as brown as a nigger!” Then she gave way to Peggy and waited.

“I wonder if this was the room …” she said.

“What room?” said Peggy abstractedly: she was attending to her face.

“… where we used to meet,” said Eleanor. She looked about her. It was still used as an office apparently; but now there were house-agents’ placards on the wall.

“I wonder if Kitty’ll come tonight,” she mused.

Peggy was gazing into the glass and did not answer.

“She doesn’t often come to town now. Only for weddings and christenings and so on,” Eleanor continued.

Peggy was drawing a line with a tube of some sort round her lips.

“Suddenly you meet a young man six-foot-two and you realise this is the baby,” Eleanor went on.

Peggy was still absorbed in her face.

“D’you have to do that fresh every time?” said Eleanor.

“I should look a fright if I didn’t,” said Peggy. The tightness round her lips and eyes seemed to her visible. She had never felt less in the mood for a party.

“Oh, how kind of you …” Eleanor broke off. The maid had brought in a sixpence.

“Now, Peggy,” said she, proffering the coin, “let me pay my share.”

“Don’t be an ass,” said Peggy, brushing away her hand.

“But it was my cab,” Eleanor insisted. Peggy walked on. “Because I hate going to parties,” Eleanor continued, following her, still holding out the coin, “on the cheap. You don’t remember your grandfather? He always said, ‘Don’t spoil a good ship for a ha’porth of tar.’ If you went shopping with him,” she went on as they began mounting the stairs, “‘Show me the very best thing you’ve got,’ he’d say.”

“I remember him,” said Peggy.

“Do you?” said Eleanor. She was pleased that anyone should remember her father. “They’ve lent these rooms, I suppose,” she added as they walked upstairs. Doors were open. “That’s a solicitor’s,” she said, looking at some deed-boxes with white names painted on them.

“Yes, I see what you mean about painting—making-up,” she continued, glancing at her niece. “You do look nice. You look lit-up. I like it on young people. Not for myself. I should feel bedizened—bedizzened?—how d’you pronounce it? And what am I to do with these coppers if you won’t take them? I ought to have left them in my bag downstairs.” They mounted higher and higher. “I suppose they’ve opened all these rooms,” she continued—they had now reached a strip of red carpet—“so that if Delia’s little room gets too full—but of course the party’s hardly begun yet. We’re early. Everybody’s upstairs. I hear them talking. Come along. Shall I go first?”

A babble of voices sounded behind a door. A maid intercepted them.

“Miss Pargiter,” said Eleanor.

“Miss Pargiter!” the maid called out, opening the door.

“Go and get ready,” said North. He crossed the room and fumbled with the switch.

He touched the switch, and the electric light in the middle of the room came on. The shade had been taken off, and a cone of greenish paper had been twisted round it.

“Go and get ready,” he repeated. Sara did not answer. She had pulled a book towards her and pretended to read it.

“He’s killed the king,” she said. “So what’ll he do next?” She held her finger between the pages of the book and looked up at him; a device, he knew, to put off the moment of action. He did not want to go either. Still, if Eleanor wanted them to go—he hesitated, looking at his watch.

“What’ll he do next?” she repeated.

“Comedy,” he said briefly, “Contrast,” he said, remembering something he had read. “The only form of continuity,” he added at a venture.

“Well, go on reading,” she said, handing him the book.

He opened it at random.

“The scene is a rocky island in the middle of the sea,” he said. He paused.

Always before reading he had to arrange the scene; to let this sink; that come forward. A rocky island in the middle of the sea, he said to himself—there were green pools, tufts of silver grass, sand, and far away the soft sigh of waves breaking. He opened his mouth to read. Then there was a sound behind him; a presence—in the play or in the room? He looked up.

“Maggie!” Sara exclaimed. There she was standing at the open door in evening dress.

“Were you asleep?” she said, coming into the room. “We’ve been ringing and ringing.”

She stood smiling at them, amused, as if she had wakened sleepers.

“Why d’you trouble to have a bell when it’s always broken?” said a man who stood behind her.

North rose. At first he scarcely remembered them. The surface sight was strange on top of his memory of them, as he had seen them years ago.

“The bells don’t ring, and the taps don’t run,” he said, awkwardly. “Or they don’t stop running,” he added, for the bath water was still gurgling in the pipes.

“Luckily the door was open,” said Maggie. She stood at the table looking at the broken apple peel and the dish of fly-blown fruit. Some beauty, North thought, withers; some, he looked at her, grows more beautiful with age. Her hair was grey; her children must be grown up now, he supposed. But why do women purse their lips up when they look in the glass? he wondered. She was looking in the glass. She was pursing her lips. Then she crossed the room, and sat down in the chair by the fireplace.

“And why has Renny been crying?” said Sara. North looked at him. There were wet marks on either side of his large nose.

“Because we’ve been to a very bad play,” he said, “and should like something to drink,” he added.

Sara went to the cupboard and began clinking glasses. “Were you reading?” said Renny, looking at the book which had fallen on the floor.

“We were on a rocky island in the middle of the sea,” said Sara, putting the glasses on the table. Renny began to pour out whisky.

Now I remember him, North thought. Last time they had met was before he went to the war. It was in a little house in Westminster. They had sat in front of the fire. And a child had played with a spotted horse. And he had envied them their happiness. And they had talked about science. And Renny had said, “I help them to make shells,” and a mask had come down over his face. A man who made shells; a man who loved peace; a man of science; a man who cried….

“Stop!” cried Renny. “Stop!” Sara had spurted the soda water over the table.

“When did you get back?” Renny asked him, taking his glass and looking at him with eyes still wet with tears.

“About a week ago,” he said.

“You’ve sold your farm?” said Renny. He sat down with his glass in his hand.

“Yes, sold it,” said North. “Whether I shall stay, or go back,” he said, taking his glass and raising it to his lips, “I don’t know.”

“Where was your farm?” said Renny, bending towards him. And they talked about Africa.

Maggie looked at them drinking and talking. The twisted cone of paper over the electric light was oddly stained. The mottled light made their faces look greenish. The two grooves on each side of Renny’s nose were still wet. His face was all peaks and hollows; North’s face was round and snub-nosed and rather blueish about the lips. She gave her chair a little push so that she got the two heads in relation side by side. They were very different. And as they talked about Africa their faces changed, as if some twitch had been given to the fine network under the skin and the weights fell into different sockets. A thrill ran through her as if the weights in her own body had changed too. But there was something about the light that puzzled her. She looked round. A lamp must be flaring in the street outside. Its light, flickering up and down, mixed with the electric light under the greenish cone of mottled paper. It was that which…. She started; a voice had reached her.

“To Africa?” she said, looking at North.

“To Delia’s party,” he said. “I asked if you were coming….” She had not been listening.

“One moment …” Renny interrupted. He held up his hand like a policeman stopping traffic. And again they went on, talking about Africa.

Maggie lay back in her chair. Behind their heads rose the curve of the mahogany chair back. And behind the curve of the chair back was a crinkled glass with a red lip; then there was the straight line of the mantelpiece with little black-and-white squares on it; and then three rods ending in soft yellow plumes. She ran her eye from thing to thing. In and out it went, collecting, gathering, summing up into one whole, when, just as she was about to complete the pattern, Renny exclaimed:

“We must—we must!”

He had got up. He had pushed away his glass of whisky. He stood there like somebody commanding a troop, North thought; so emphatic was his voice, so commanding his gesture. Yet it was only a question of going round to an old woman’s party. Or was there always, he thought, as he too rose and looked for his hat, something that came to the surface, inappropriately, unexpectedly, from the depths of people, and made ordinary actions, ordinary words, expressive of the whole being, so that he felt, as he turned to follow Renny to Delia’s party, as if he were riding to the relief of a besieged garrison across a desert?

He stopped with his hand on the door. Sara had come in from the bedroom. She had changed; she was in evening dress; there was something odd about her—perhaps it was the effect of the evening dress estranging her?

“I am ready,” she said, looking at them.

She stooped and picked up the book that North had let fall.

“We must go—” she said, turning to her sister.

She put the book on the table; she gave it a sad little pat as she shut it.

“We must go,” she repeated, and followed them down the stairs.

Maggie rose. She gave one more look at the cheap lodging-house room. There was the pampas grass in its terra-cotta pot; the green vase with the crinkled lip; and the mahogany chair. On the dinner table lay the dish of fruit; the heavy sensual apples lay side by side with the yellow spotted bananas. It was an odd combination—the round and the tapering, the rosy and the yellow. She switched off the light. The room now was almost dark, save for a watery pattern fluctuating on the ceiling. In this phantom evanescent light only the outlines showed; ghostly apples, ghostly bananas, and the spectre of a chair. Colour was slowly returning, as her eyes grew used to the darkness, and substance…. She stood there for a moment looking. Then a voice shouted:

“Maggie! Maggie!”

“I’m coming!” she cried, and followed them down the stairs.

“And your name, miss?” said the maid to Peggy as she hung back behind Eleanor.

“Miss Margaret Pargiter,” said Peggy.

“Miss Margaret Pargiter!” the maid called out into the room.

There was a babble of voices; lights opened brightly in front of her, and Delia came forward. “Oh, Peggy!” she exclaimed. “How nice of you to come!”

She went in; but she felt plated, coated over with some cold skin. They had come too early—the room was almost empty. Only a few people stood about, talking too loudly, as if to fill the room. Making believe, Peggy thought to herself as she shook hands with Delia and passed on, that something pleasant is about to happen. She saw with extreme clearness the Persian rug and the carved fireplace, but there was an empty space in the middle of the room.

What is the tip for this particular situation? she asked herself, as if she were prescribing for a patient. Take notes, she added. Do them up in a bottle with a glossy green cover, she thought. Take notes and the pain goes. Take notes and the pain goes, she repeated to herself as she stood there alone. Delia hurried past her. She was talking, but talking at random.

“It’s all very well for you people who live in London——” she was saying. But the nuisance of taking notes of what people say, Peggy went on as Delia passed her, is that they talk such nonsense … such complete nonsense, she thought, drawing herself back against the wall. Here her father came in. He paused at the door; put his head up as if he were looking for someone, and advanced with his hand out.

And what’s this? she asked, for the sight of her father in his rather worn shoes had given her a direct spontaneous feeling. This sudden warm spurt? she asked, examining it. She watched him cross the room. His shoes always affected her strangely. Part sex; part pity, she thought. Can one call it “love”? But she forced herself to move. Now that I have drugged myself into a state of comparative insensibility, she said to herself, I will walk across the room boldly; I will go to Uncle Patrick, who is standing by the sofa picking his teeth, and I will say to him—what shall I say?

A sentence suggested itself for no rhyme or reason as she crossed the room: “How’s the man who cut his toes off with the hatchet?”

“How’s the man who cut his toes off with the hatchet?” she said, speaking the words exactly as she thought them. The handsome old Irishman bent down, for he was very tall, and hollowed his hand, for he was hard of hearing.

“Hacket? Hacket?” he repeated. She smiled. The steps from brain to brain must be cut very shallow, if thought is to mount them, she noted.

“Cut his toes off with the hatchet when I was staying with you,” she said. She remembered how when she last stayed with them in Ireland the gardener had cut his foot with a hatchet.

“Hacket? Hacket?” he repeated. He looked puzzled. Then understanding dawned.

“Oh, the Hackets!” he said. “Dear old Peter Hacket—yes.” It seemed that there were Hackets in Galway, and the mistake, which she did not trouble to explain, was all to the good, for it set him off, and he told her stories about the Hackets as they sat side by side on the sofa.

A grown woman, she thought, crosses London to talk to a deaf old man about the Hackets, whom she’s never heard of, when she meant to ask after the gardener who cut his toe off with a hatchet. But does it matter? Hackets or hatchets? She laughed, happily in time with a joke, so that it seemed appropriate. But one wants somebody to laugh with, she thought. Pleasure is increased by sharing it. Does the same hold good of pain? she mused. Is that the reason why we all talk so much of ill-health—because sharing things lessens things? Give pain, give pleasure an outer body, and by increasing the surface diminish them…. But the thought slipped. He was off telling his old stories. Gently, methodically, like a man setting in motion some still serviceable but rather weary nag, he was off remembering old days, old dogs, old memories that slowly shaped themselves, as he warmed, into little figures of country house life. She fancied as she half listened that she was looking at a faded snapshot of cricketers; of shooting parties on the many steps of some country mansion.

How many people, she wondered, listen? This “sharing,” then, is a bit of a farce. She made herself attend.

“Ah yes, those were fine old days!” he was saying. The light came into his faded eyes.

She looked once more at the snapshot of the men in gaiters, and the women in flowing skirts on the broad white steps with the dogs curled up at their feet. But he was off again.

“Did you ever hear from your father of a man called Roddy Jenkins who lived in the little white house on the right-hand side as you go along the road?” he asked. “But you must know that story?” he added.

“No,” she said, screwing up her eyes as if she referred to the files of memory. “Tell me.”

And he told her the story.

I’m good, she thought, at fact-collecting. But what makes up a person——, (she hollowed her hand), the circumference,—no, I’m not good at that. There was her Aunt Delia. She watched her moving quickly about the room. What do I know about her? That she’s wearing a dress with gold spots; has wavy hair, that was red, is white; is handsome; ravaged; with a past. But what past? She married Patrick…. The long story that Patrick was telling her kept breaking up the surface of her mind like oars dipping into water. Nothing could settle. There was a lake in the story too, for it was a story about duck-shooting.

She married Patrick, she thought, looking at his battered weather-worn face with the single hairs on it. Why did Delia marry Patrick? she wondered. How do they manage it—love, childbirth? The people who touch each other and go up in a cloud of smoke: red smoke? His face reminded her of the red skin of a gooseberry with the little stray hairs. But none of the lines on his face was sharp enough, she thought, to explain how they came together and had three children. They were lines that came from shooting; lines that came from worry; for the old days were over, he was saying. They had to cut things down.

“Yes, we’re all finding that,” she said perfunctorily. She turned her wrist cautiously so that she could read her watch. Fifteen minutes only had passed. But the room was filling with people she did not know. There was an Indian in a pink turban.

“Ah, but I’m boring you with these old stories,” said her uncle, wagging his head. He was hurt, she felt.

“No, no, no!” she said, feeling uncomfortable. He was off again, but out of good manners this time, she felt. Pain must outbalance pleasure by two parts to one, she thought; in all social relations. Or am I the exception, the peculiar person? she continued, for the others seemed happy enough. Yes, she thought, looking straight ahead of her, and feeling again the stretched skin round her lips and eyes tight from the tiredness of sitting up late with a woman in childbirth, I’m the exception; hard; cold; in a groove already; merely a doctor.

Getting out of grooves is damned unpleasant, she thought, before the chill of death has set in, like bending frozen boots…. She bent her head to listen. To smile, to bend, to make believe you’re amused when you’re bored, how painful it is, she thought. All ways, every way’s painful, she thought; staring at the Indian in the pink turban.

“Who’s that fellow?” Patrick asked, nodding his head in his direction.

“One of Eleanor’s Indians I expect,” she said aloud, and thought, If only the merciful powers of darkness would obliterate the external exposure of the sensitive nerve and I could get up and…. There was a pause.

“But I mustn’t keep you here, listening to my old stories,” said Uncle Patrick. His weather-beaten nag with the broken knees had stopped.

“But tell me, does old Biddy still keep the little shop,” she asked, “where we used to buy sweets?”

“Poor old body——” he began. He was off again. All her patients said that, she thought. Rest—rest—let me rest. How to deaden; how to cease to feel; that was the cry of the woman bearing children; to rest, to cease to be. In the Middle Ages, she thought, it was the cell; the monastery; now it’s the laboratory; the professions; not to live; not to feel; to make money, always money, and in the end, when I’m old and worn like a horse, no, it’s a cow…—for part of old Patrick’s story had imposed itself upon her mind: “… for there’s no sale for the beasts at all,” he was saying, “no sale at all. Ah, there’s Julia Cromarty——” he exclaimed, and waved his hand, his large loose-jointed hand, at a charming compatriot.

She was left sitting alone on the sofa. For her uncle rose and went off with both hands outstretched to greet the bird-like old woman who had come in chattering.

She was left alone. She was glad to be alone. She had no wish to talk. But next moment somebody stood beside her. It was Martin. He sat down beside her. She changed her attitude completely.

“Hullo, Martin!” she greeted him cordially.

“Done your duty by the old mare, Peggy?” he said. He referred to the stories that old Patrick always told them.

“Did I look very glum?” she asked.

“Well,” he said, glancing at her, “not exactly enraptured.”

“One knows the end of his stories by now,” she excused herself, looking at Martin. He had taken to brushing his hair up like a waiter’s. He never looked her fully in the face. He never felt entirely at his ease with her. She was his doctor; she knew that he dreaded cancer. She must try to distract him from thinking, Does she see any symptoms?

“I was wondering how they came to marry,” she said. “Were they in love?” She spoke at random to distract him.

“Of course he was in love,” he said. He looked at Delia. She was standing by the fireplace talking to the Indian. She was still a very handsome woman, with her presence, with her gestures.

“We were all in love,” he said, glancing sideways at Peggy. The younger generation were so serious.

“Oh, of course,” she said, smiling. She liked his eternal pursuit of one love after another love—his gallant clutch upon the flying tail, the slippery tail of youth—even he, even now.

“But you,” he said, stretching his feet out, hitching up his trousers, “your generation I mean—you miss a great deal … you miss a great deal,” he repeated. She waited.

“Loving only your own sex,” he added.

He liked to assert his own youth in that way, she thought; to say things that he thought up to date.

“I’m not that generation,” she said.

“Well, well, well,” he chuckled, shrugging his shoulder and glancing at her sideways. He knew very little about her private life. But she looked serious; she looked tired. She works too hard, he thought.

“I’m getting on,” said Peggy. “Getting into a groove. So Eleanor told me tonight.”

Or was it she, on the other hand, who had told Eleanor she was “suppressed”? One or the other.

“Eleanor’s a gay old dog,” he said. “Look!” He pointed.

There she was, talking to the Indian in her red cloak.

“Just back from India,” he added. “A present from Bengal, eh?” he said, referring to the cloak.

“And next year she’s off to China,” said Peggy.

“But Delia—” she asked; Delia was passing them. “Was she in love?” (What you in your generation called “in love,” she added to herself.)

He wagged his head from side to side and pursed his lips. He always liked his little joke, she remembered.

“I don’t know—I don’t know about Delia,” he said. “There was the cause, you know—what she called in those days The Cause.” He screwed his face up. “Ireland, you know. Parnell. Ever heard of a man called Parnell?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Peggy.

“And Edward?” she added. He had come in; he looked very distinguished, too, in his elaborate, if conscious simplicity.

“Edward—yes,” said Martin. “Edward was in love. Surely you know that old story—Edward and Kitty?”

“The one who married—what was his name?—Lasswade?” Peggy murmured as Edward passed them.

“Yes, she married the other man—Lasswade. But he was in love—he was very much in love,” Martin murmured. “But you,” he gave her a quick little glance. There was something in her that chilled him. “Of course, you have your profession,” he added. He looked at the ground. He was thinking of his dread of cancer, she supposed. He was afraid that she had noted some symptom.

“Oh, doctors are great humbugs,” she threw out at random.

“Why? People live longer than they used, don’t they?” he said. “They don’t die so painfully anyhow,” he added.

“We’ve learnt a few little tricks,” she conceded. He stared ahead of him with a look that moved her pity.

“You’ll live to be eighty—if you want to live to be eighty,” she said. He looked at her.

“Of course I’m all in favour of living to be eighty!” he exclaimed. “I want to go to America. I want to see their buildings. I’m on that side, you see. I enjoy life.” He did, enormously.

He must be over sixty himself, she supposed. But he was wonderfully got up; as sprig and spruce as a man of forty, with his canary-coloured lady in Kensington.

“I don’t know,” she said aloud.

“Come, Peggy, come,” he said. “Don’t tell me you don’t enjoy—here’s Rose.”

Rose came up. She had grown very stout.

“Don’t you want to be eighty?” he said to her. He had to say it twice over. She was deaf.

“I do. Of course I do!” she said when she understood him. She faced them. She made an odd angle with her head thrown back, Peggy thought, as if she were a military man.

“Of course I do,” she said, sitting down abruptly on the sofa beside them.

“Ah, but then——” Peggy began. She paused. Rose was deaf, she remembered. She had to shout. “People hadn’t made such fools of themselves in your day,” she shouted. But she doubted if Rose heard.

“I want to see what’s going to happen,” said Rose. “We live in a very interesting world,” she added.

“Nonsense,” Martin teased her. “You want to live,” he bawled in her ear, “because you enjoy living.”

“And I’m not ashamed of it,” she said. “I like my kind—on the whole.”

“What you like is fighting them,” he bawled.

“D’you think you can get a rise out of me at this time o’ day?” she said, tapping him on the arm.

Now they’ll talk about being children; climbing trees in the back garden, thought Peggy, and how they shot somebody’s cats. Each person had a certain line laid down in their minds, she thought, and along it came the same old sayings. One’s mind must be crisscrossed like the palm of one’s hand, she thought, looking at the palm of her hand.

“She always was a spitfire,” said Martin, turning to Peggy.

“And they always put the blame on me,” Rose said. “He had the school-room. Where was I to sit? ‘Oh, run away and play in the nursery!’” she waved her hand.

“And so she went into the bathroom and cut her wrist with a knife,” Martin jeered.

“No, that was Erridge: that was about the microscope,” she corrected him.

It’s like a kitten catching its tail, Peggy thought; round and round they go in a circle. But it’s what they enjoy, she thought; it’s what they come to parties for. Martin went on teasing Rose.

“And where’s your red ribbon?” he was asking.

Some decoration had been given her, Peggy remembered, for her work in the war.

“Aren’t we worthy to see you in your war paint?” he teased her.

“This fellow’s jealous,” she said, turning to Peggy again. “He’s never done a stroke of work in his life.”

“I work—I work,” Martin insisted. “I sit in an office all day long——”

“Doing what?” said Rose.

Then they became suddenly silent. That turn was over—the old-brother-and-sister turn. Now they could only go back and repeat the same thing over again.

“Look here,” said Martin, “we must go and do our duty.” He rose. They parted.

“Doing what?” Peggy repeated, as she crossed the room. “Doing what?” she repeated. She was feeling reckless; nothing that she did mattered. She walked to the window and twitched the curtain apart. There were the stars pricked in little holes in the blue-black sky. There was a row of chimney-pots against the sky. Then the stars. Inscrutable, eternal, indifferent—those were the words; the right words. But I don’t feel it, she said, looking at the stars. So why pretend to? What they’re really like, she thought, screwing up her eyes to look at them, is little bits of frosty steel. And the moon—there it was—is a polished dish-cover. But she felt nothing, even when she had reduced moon and stars to that. Then she turned and found herself face to face with a young man she thought she knew but could not put a name to. He had a fine brow, but a receding chin and he was pale, pasty.

“How-d’you-do?” she said. Was his name Leacock or Laycock?

“Last time we met,” she said, “was at the races.” She connected him, incongruously, with a Cornish field, stone walls, farmers and rough ponies jumping.

“No, that’s Paul,” he said. “My brother Paul.” He was tart about it. What did he do, then, that made him superior in his own esteem to Paul?

“You live in London?” she said.

He nodded.

“You write?” she hazarded. But why, because he was a writer—she remembered now seeing his name in the papers—throw your head back when you say “Yes”? She preferred Paul; he looked healthy; this one had a queer face; knit up; nerve-drawn; fixed.

“Poetry?” she said.

“Yes.” But why bite off that word as if it were a cherry on the end of a stalk? she thought. There was nobody coming; they were bound to sit down side by side, on chairs by the wall.

“How do you manage, if you’re in an office?” she said. Apparently in his spare time.

“My uncle,” he began. “… You’ve met him?”

Yes, a nice commonplace man; he had been very kind to her about a passport once. This boy, of course, though she only half listened, sneered at him. Then why go into his office? she asked herself. My people, he was saying … hunted. Her attention wandered. She had heard it all before. I, I, I—he went on. It was like a vulture’s beak pecking, or a vacuum-cleaner sucking, or a telephone bell ringing. I, I, I. But he couldn’t help it, not with that nerve-drawn egotist’s face, she thought, glancing at him. He could not free himself, could not detach himself. He was bound on the wheel with tight iron hoops. He had to expose, had to exhibit. But why let him? she thought, as he went on talking. For what do I care about his “I, I, I”? Or his poetry? Let me shake him off then, she said to herself, feeling like a person whose blood has been sucked, leaving all the nerve-centres pale. She paused. He noted her lack of sympathy. He thought her stupid, she supposed.

“I’m tired,” she apologised. “I’ve been up all night,” she explained. “I’m a doctor——”

The fire went out of his face when she said “I.” That’s done it—now he’ll go, she thought. He can’t be “you”—he must be “I.” She smiled. For up he got and off he went.

She turned round and stood at the window. Poor little wretch, she thought; atrophied, withered; cold as steel; hard as steel; bald as steel. And I too, she thought, looking at the sky. The stars seemed pricked haphazard in the sky, except that there, to the right over the chimney-pots, hung that phantom wheel-barrow—what did they call it? The name escaped her. I will count them, she thought, returning to her notebook, and had begun one, two, three, four … when a voice exclaimed behind her: “Peggy! Aren’t your ears tingling?” She turned. It was Delia of course, with her genial ways, her imitation Irish flattery: “—because they ought to be,” said Delia, laying a hand on her shoulder, “considering what he’s been saying”—she pointed to a grey-haired man—“what praises he’s been singing of you.”

Peggy looked where she pointed. There was her teacher over there, her master. Yes, she knew he thought her clever. She was, she supposed. They all said so. Very clever.

“He’s been telling me——” Delia began. But she broke off.

“Just help me open this window,” she said. “It’s getting hot.”

“Let me,” said Peggy. She gave the window a jerk, but it stuck, for it was old and the frames did not fit.

“Here, Peggy,” said somebody, coming behind her. It was her father. His hand was on the window, his hand with the scar. He pushed; the window went up.

“Thanks, Morris, that’s better,” said Delia. “I was telling Peggy her ears ought to be tingling,” she began again: “‘My most brilliant pupil!’ That’s what he said,” Delia went on. “I assure you I felt quite proud. ‘But she’s my niece,’ I said. He hadn’t known it——”

There, said Peggy, that’s pleasure. The nerve down her spine seemed to tingle as the praise reached her father. Each emotion touched a different nerve. A sneer rasped the thigh; pleasure thrilled the spine; and also affected the sight. The stars had softened; they quivered. Her father brushed her shoulder as he dropped his hand; but neither of them spoke.

“D’you want it open at the bottom too?” he said.

“No, that’ll do,” said Delia. “The room’s getting hot,” she said. “People are beginning to come. They must use the rooms downstairs,” she said. “But who’s that out there?” she pointed. Opposite the house against the railings of the square was a group in evening dress.

“I think I recognise one of them,” said Morris, looking out. “That’s North, isn’t it?”

“Yes, that’s North,” said Peggy, looking out.

“Then why don’t they come in?” said Delia, tapping on the window.

“But you must come and see it for yourselves,” North was saying. They had asked him to describe Africa. He had said that there were mountains and plains; it was silent, he had said, and birds sang. He stopped; it was difficult to describe a place to people who had not seen it. Then curtains in the house opposite parted, and three heads appeared at the window. They looked at the heads outlined on the window opposite them. They were standing with their backs to the railings of the square. The trees hung dark showers of leaves over them. The trees had become part of the sky. Now and then they seemed to shift and shuffle slightly as a breeze went through them. A star shone among the leaves. It was silent too; the murmur of the traffic was run together into one far hum. A cat slunk past; for a second they saw the luminous green of the eyes; then it was extinguished. The cat crossed the lighted space and vanished. Someone tapped again on the window and cried, “Come in!”

“Come!” said Renny, and threw his cigar into the bushes behind him. “Come, we must.”

They went upstairs, past the doors of offices, past long windows that opened on to back gardens that lay behind houses. Trees in full leaf stretched their branches across at different levels; the leaves, here bright green in the artificial light, here dark in shadow, moved up and down in the little breeze. Then they came to the private part of the house, where the red carpet was laid; and a roar of voices sounded from behind a door as if a flock of sheep were penned there. Then music, a dance, swung out.

“Now,” said Maggie, pausing for a moment, outside the door. She gave their names to the servant.

“And you, sir?” said the maid to North, who hung behind.

“Captain Pargiter,” said North, touching his tie.

“And Captain Pargiter!” the maid called out.

Delia was upon them instantly. “And Captain Pargiter!” she exclaimed, as she came hurrying across the room. “How very nice of you to come!” she exclaimed. She took their hands at random, here a left hand, there a right hand, in her left hand, in her right hand.

“I thought it was you,” she exclaimed, “standing in the square. I thought I could recognise Renny—but I wasn’t sure about North. Captain Pargiter!” she wrung his hand, “you’re quite a stranger—but a very welcome one! Now who d’you know? Who don’t you know?”

She glanced round, twitching her shawl rather nervously.

“Let me see, there’s all your uncles and aunts; and your cousins; and your sons and daughters—yes, Maggie, I saw your lovely couple not long ago. They’re somewhere…. Only all the generations in our family are so mixed; cousins and aunts, uncles and brothers—but perhaps it’s a good thing.”

She stopped rather suddenly as if she had used up that vein. She twitched her shawl.

“They’re going to dance,” she said, pointing at the young man who was putting another record on the gramophone. “It’s all right for dancing,” she added, referring to the gramophone. “Not for music.” She became simple for a moment. “I can’t bear music on the gramophone. But dance music—that’s another thing. And young people—don’t you find that?—must dance. It’s right they should. Dance or not—just as you like.” She waved her hand.

“Yes, just as you like,” her husband echoed her. He stood beside her, dangling his hands in front of him like a bear on which coats are hung in a hotel.

“Just as you like,” he repeated, shaking his paws.

“Help me to move the tables, North,” said Delia. “If they’re going to dance, they’ll want everything out of the way—and the rugs rolled up.” She pushed a table out of the way. Then she ran across the room to whisk a chair against the wall.

Now one of the vases was upset, and a stream of water flowed across the carpet.

“Don’t mind it, don’t mind it—it doesn’t matter at all!” Delia exclaimed, assuming the manner of a harum-scarum Irish hostess. But North stooped and swabbed up the water.

“And what are you going to do with that pocket handkerchief?” Eleanor asked him; she had joined them in her flowing red cloak.

“Hang it on a chair to dry,” said North, walking off.

“And you, Sally?” said Eleanor, drawing back against the wall since they were going to dance. “Going to dance?” she asked, sitting down.

“I?” said Sara, yawning. “I want to sleep.” She sank down on a cushion beside Eleanor.

“But you don’t come to parties,” Eleanor laughed, looking down at her, “to sleep, do you?” Again she saw the little picture she had seen at the end of the telephone. But she could not see her face; only the top of her head.

“Dining with you, wasn’t he?” she said, as North passed them with his handkerchief.

“And what did you talk about?” she asked. She saw her, sitting on the edge of a chair, swinging her foot up and down, with a smudge on her nose.

“Talk about?” said Sara. “You, Eleanor.” People were passing them all the time; they were brushing against their knees; they were beginning to dance. It made one feel a little dizzy, Eleanor thought, sinking back in her chair.

“Me?” she said. “What about me?”

“Your life,” said Sara.

“My life?” Eleanor repeated. Couples began to twist and turn slowly past them. It was a fox-trot that they were dancing, she supposed.

My life, she said to herself. That was odd, it was the second time that evening that somebody had talked about her life. And I haven’t got one, she thought. Oughtn’t a life to be something you could handle and produce?—a life of seventy odd years. But I’ve only the present moment, she thought. Here she was alive, now, listening to the fox-trot. Then she looked round. There was Morris; Rose; Edward with his head thrown back talking to a man she did not know. I’m the only person here, she thought, who remembers how he sat on the edge of my bed that night, crying—the night Kitty’s engagement was announced. Yes, things came back to her. A long strip of life lay behind her. Edward crying, Mrs. Levy talking; snow falling; a sunflower with a crack in it; the yellow omnibus trotting along the Bayswater Road. And I thought to myself, I’m the youngest person in this omnibus; now I’m the oldest…. Millions of things came back to her. Atoms danced apart and massed themselves. But how did they compose what people called a life? She clenched her hands and felt the hard little coins she was holding. Perhaps there’s “I” at the middle of it, she thought; a knot; a centre; and again she saw herself sitting at her table drawing on the blotting-paper, digging little holes from which spokes radiated. Out and out they went; thing followed thing, scene obliterated scene. And then they say, she thought, “We’ve been talking about you!”

“My life …” she said aloud, but half to herself.

“Yes?” said Sara, looking up.

Eleanor stopped. She had forgotten her. But there was somebody listening. Then she must put her thoughts into order; then she must find words. But no, she thought, I can’t find words; I can’t tell anybody.

“Isn’t that Nicholas?” she said, looking at a rather large man who stood in the doorway.

“Where?” said Sara. But she looked in the wrong direction. He had disappeared. Perhaps she had been mistaken. My life’s been other people’s lives, Eleanor thought—my father’s; Morris’s; my friends’ lives; Nicholas’s…. Fragments of a conversation with him came back to her. Either I’d been lunching with him or dining with him, she thought. It was in a restaurant. There was a parrot with a pink feather in a cage on the counter. And they had sat there talking—it was after the war—about the future; about education. And he wouldn’t let me pay for the wine, she suddenly remembered, though it was I who ordered it….

Here somebody stopped in front of her. She looked up. “Just as I was thinking of you!” she exclaimed.

It was Nicholas.

“Good-evening, madame!” he said, bending over her in his foreign way.

“Just as I was thinking of you!” she repeated. Indeed it was like a part of her, a sunk part of her, coming to the surface. “Come and sit beside me,” she said, and pulled up a chair.

“D’you know who that chap is, sitting by my aunt?” said North to the girl he was dancing with. She looked round; but vaguely.

“I don’t know your aunt,” she said. “I don’t know anybody here.”

The dance was over and they began walking towards the door.

“I don’t even know my hostess,” she said. “I wish you’d point her out to me.”

“There—over there,” he said. He pointed to Delia in her black dress with the gold spangles.

“Oh, that,” she said, looking at her. “That’s my hostess, is it?” He had not caught the girl’s name, and she knew none of them either. He was glad of it. It made him seem different to himself—it stimulated him. He shepherded her towards the door. He wanted to avoid his relations. In particular he wanted to avoid his sister Peggy; but there she was, standing alone by the door. He looked the other way; he conveyed his partner out of the door. There must be a garden or a roof somewhere, he thought, where they could sit, alone. She was extraordinarily pretty and young.

“Come along,” he said, “downstairs.”

“And what were you thinking about me?” said Nicholas, sitting down beside Eleanor.

She smiled. There he was in his rather ill-assorted dress-clothes, with the seal engraved with the arms of his mother the princess, and his swarthy wrinkled face that always made her think of some loose-skinned, furry animal, savage to others but kind to herself. But what was she thinking about him? She was thinking of him in the lump; she could not break off little fragments. The restaurant had been smoky she remembered.

“How we dined together once in Soho,” she said. “… d’you remember?”

“All the evenings with you I remember, Eleanor,” he said. But his glance was a little vague. His attention was distracted. He was looking at a lady who had just come in; a well-dressed lady, who stood with her back to the bookcase equipped for every emergency. If I can’t describe my own life, Eleanor thought, how can I describe him? For what he was she did not know; only that it gave her pleasure when he came in; relieved her of the need of thinking; and gave her mind a little jog. He was looking at the lady. She seemed upheld by their gaze; vibrating under it. And suddenly it seemed to Eleanor that it had all happened before. So a girl had come in that night in the restaurant: had stood, vibrating, in the door. She knew exactly what he was going to say. He had said it before, in the restaurant. He is going to say, She is like a ball on the top of a fishmonger’s fountain. As she thought it, he said it. Does everything then come over again a little differently? she thought. If so, is there a pattern; a theme, recurring, like music; half remembered, half foreseen? … a gigantic pattern, momentarily perceptible? The thought gave her extreme pleasure: that there was a pattern. But who makes it? Who thinks it? Her mind slipped. She could not finish her thought.

“Nicholas …” she said. She wanted him to finish it; to take her thought and carry it out into the open unbroken; to make it whole, beautiful, entire.

“Tell me, Nicholas …” she began; but she had no notion how she was going to finish her sentence, or what it was that she wanted to ask him. He was talking to Sara. She listened. He was laughing at her. He was pointing at her feet.

“… coming to a party,” he was saying, “with one stocking that is white, and one stocking that is blue.”

“The Queen of England asked me to tea;” Sara hummed in time to the music; “and which shall it be; the gold or the rose; for all are in holes, my stockings, said she.” This is their love-making, Eleanor thought, half listening to their laughter, to their bickering. Another inch of the pattern, she thought, still using her half-formulated idea to stamp the immediate scene. And if this love-making differs from the old, still it has its charm; it was “love,” different from the old love, perhaps, but worse, was it? Anyhow, she thought, they are aware of each other; they live in each other; what else is love, she asked, listening to their laughter.

“… Can you never act for yourself?” he was saying. “Can you never even choose stockings for yourself?”

“Never! Never!” Sara was laughing.

“… Because you have no life of your own,” he said. “She lives in dreams,” he added, turning to Eleanor, “alone.”

“The professor preaching his little sermon,” Sara sneered, laying her hand on his knee.

“Sara singing her little song,” Nicholas laughed, pressing her hand.

But they are very happy, Eleanor thought: they laugh at each other.

“Tell me, Nicholas …” she began again. But another dance was beginning. Couples came flocking back into the room. Slowly, intently, with serious faces, as if they were taking part in some mystic rite which gave them immunity from other feelings, the dancers began circling past them, brushing against their knees, almost treading on their toes. And then someone stopped in front of them.

“Oh, here’s North,” said Eleanor, looking up.

“North!” Nicholas exclaimed. “North! We met this evening,” he stretched out his hand to North, “—at Eleanor’s.”

“We did,” said North warmly. Nicholas crushed his fingers; he felt them separate again when the hand was removed. It was effusive; but he liked it. He was feeling effusive himself. His eyes shone. He had lost his puzzled look completely. His adventure had turned out well. The girl had written her name in his pocket-book. “Come and see me tomorrow at six,” she had said.

“Good-evening again, Eleanor,” he said, bowing over her hand. “You’re looking very young. You’re looking extraordinarily handsome. I like you in those clothes,” he said, looking at her Indian cloak.

“The same to you, North,” she said. She looked up at him. She thought she had never seen him look so handsome, so vigorous.

“Aren’t you going to dance?” she asked. The music was in full swing.

“Not unless Sally will honour me,” he said, bowing to her with exaggerated courtesy. What has happened to him? Eleanor thought. He looks so handsome, so happy. Sally rose. She gave her hand to Nicholas.

“I will dance with you,” she said. They stood for a moment waiting; and then they circled away.

“What an odd-looking couple!” North exclaimed. He screwed his face up into a grin as he watched them. “They don’t know how to dance!” he added. He sat down by Eleanor in the chair that Nicholas had left empty.

“Why don’t they marry?” he asked.

“Why should they?” she said.

“Oh, everybody ought to marry,” he said. “And I like him, though he’s a bit of a—shall we say ‘bounder?’” he suggested, as he watched them circling rather awkwardly in and out.

“‘Bounder’?” Eleanor echoed him.

“Oh it’s his fob, you mean,” she added, looking at the gold seal which swung up and down as Nicholas danced.

“No, not a bounder,” she said aloud. “He’s——”

But North was not attending. He was looking at a couple at the further end of the room. They were standing by the fireplace. Both were young; both were silent; they seemed held still in that position by some powerful emotion. As he looked at them, some emotion about himself, about his own life, came over him, and he arranged another background for them or for himself—not the mantelpiece and the bookcase, but cataracts roaring, clouds racing, and they stood on a cliff above a torrent….

“Marriage isn’t for everyone,” Eleanor interrupted.

He started. “No. Of course not,” he agreed. He looked at her. She had never married. Why not? he wondered. Sacrificed to the family, he supposed—old Grandpapa without any fingers. Then some memory came back to him of a terrace, a cigar and William Whatney. Was not that her tragedy, that she had loved him? He looked at her with affection. He felt fond of everyone at the moment.

“What luck to find you alone, Nell!” he said, laying his hand on her knee.

She was touched; the feel of his hand on her knee pleased her.

“Dear North!” she exclaimed. She felt his excitement through her dress; he was like a dog on a leash; straining forward with all his nerves erect, she felt, as he laid his hand on her knee.

“But don’t marry the wrong woman!” she said.

“I?” he asked. “What makes you say that?” Had she seen him, he wondered, shepherding the girl downstairs?

“Tell me——” she began. She wanted to ask him, coolly and sensibly, what his plans were, now that they were alone; but as she spoke she saw his face change; an exaggerated expression of horror came over it.

“Milly!” he muttered. “Damn her!”

Eleanor glanced quickly over her shoulder. Her sister Milly, voluminous in draperies proper to her sex and class, was coming towards them. She had grown very stout. In order to disguise her figure, veils with beads on them hung down over her arms. They were so fat that they reminded North of asparagus; pale asparagus tapering to a point.

“Oh, Eleanor!” she exclaimed. For she still kept relics of a younger’s [younger] sister’s doglike devotion.

“Oh, Milly!” said Eleanor, but not so cordially.

“How nice to see you, Eleanor!” said Milly, with her little old-woman’s chuckle; yet there was something deferential in her manner. “And you too, North!”

She gave him her fat little hand. He noticed how the rings were sunk in her fingers, as if the flesh had grown over them. Flesh grown over diamonds disgusted him.

“How very nice that you’re back again!” she said, settling slowly down into her chair. Everything, he felt, became dulled. She cast a net over them; she made them all feel one family; he had to think of their relations in common; but it was an unreal feeling.

“Yes, we’re staying with Connie,” she said; they had come up for a cricket match.

He sunk his head. He looked at his shoes.

“And I’ve not heard a word about your travels, Nell,” she went on. They fall and fall, and cover all, he went on, as he listened to the damp falling patter of his aunt’s little questions. But he was in such a superfluity of high spirits that he could still make her words jingle. Did the tarantulas bite, she was asking him, and were the stars bright? And where shall I spend tomorrow night? he added, for the card in his waistcoat pocket rayed out of its own accord without regard for the context scenes which obliterated the present moment. They were staying with Connie, she went on, who was expecting Jimmy, who was home from Uganda … his mind slipped a few words, for he was seeing a garden, a room, and the next word he heard was “adenoids”—which is a good word, he said to himself, separating it from its context; wasp-waisted; pinched in the middle; with a hard, shining, metallic abdomen, useful to describe the appearance of an insect—but here a vast bulk approached; chiefly white waistcoat, lined with black; and Hugh Gibbs stood over them. North sprang up to offer him his chair.

“My dear boy, you don’t expect me to sit on that?” said Hugh, deriding the rather spindly seat that North offered him.

“You must find me something—” he looked about him, holding his hands to the sides of his white waistcoat, “more substantial.”

North pulled a stuffed seat towards him. He lowered himself cautiously.

“Chew, chew, chew,” he said as he sat down.

And Milly said, “Tut-tut-tut,” North observed.

That was what it came to—thirty years of being husband and wife—tut-tut-tut—and chew-chew-chew. It sounded like the half-inarticulate munchings of animals in a stall. Tut-tut-tut, and chew-chew-chew—as they trod out the soft steamy straw in the stable; as they wallowed in the primeval swamp, prolific, profuse, half-conscious, he thought; listening vaguely to the good-humoured patter, which suddenly fastened itself upon him.

“What d’you weigh, North?” his uncle was asking, sizing him up. He looked him up and down as if he were a horse.

“We must get you to fix a date,” Milly added, “when the boys are home.”

They were inviting him to stay with them at the Towers in September for cub-hunting. The men shot, and the women—he looked at his aunt as if she might be breaking into young even there, on that chair—the women broke off into innumerable babies. And those babies had other babies; and the other babies had—adenoids. The word recurred; but it now suggested nothing. He was sinking; he was falling under their weight; the name in his pocket even was fading. Could nothing be done about it? he asked himself. Nothing short of revolution, he thought. The idea of dynamite, exploding dumps of heavy earth, shooting earth up in a tree-shaped cloud, came to his mind, from the War. But that’s all poppy-cock, he thought; war’s poppy-cock, poppy-cock. Sara’s word “poppy-cock” returned. So what remains? Peggy caught his eye, where she stood talking to an unknown man. You doctors, he thought, you scientists, why don’t you drop a little crystal into a tumbler, something starred and sharp, and make them swallow it? Common sense; reason; starred and sharp. But would they swallow it? He looked at Hugh. He had a way of blowing his cheeks in and out, as he said tut-tut-tut and chew-chew-chew. Would you swallow it? he said silently to Hugh.

Hugh turned to him again.

“And I hope you’re going to stay in England now, North,” he said, “though I dare say it’s a fine life out there?”

And so they turned to Africa and the paucity of jobs. His exhilaration was oozing. The card no longer rayed out pictures. The damp leaves were falling. They fall and fall and cover all, he murmured to himself and looked at his aunt, colourless save for a brown stain on her forehead; and her hair colourless save for a stain like the yolk of egg on it. All over he suspected she must be soft and discoloured like a pear that has gone sleepy. And Hugh himself—his great hand was on his knee—was bound round with raw beef-steak. He caught Eleanor’s eye. There was a strained look in it.

“Yes, how they’ve spoilt it,” she was saying.

But the resonance had gone out of her voice.

“Brand-new villas everywhere,” she was saying. She had been down in Dorsetshire apparently.

“Little red villas all along the road,” she went on.

“Yes, that’s what strikes me,” he said, rousing himself to help her, “how you’ve spoilt England while I’ve been away.”

“But you won’t find many changes in our part of the world, North,” said Hugh. He spoke with pride.

“No. But then we’re lucky,” said Milly. “We have several large estates. We’re very lucky,” she repeated. “Except for Mr Phipps,” she added. She gave a tart little laugh.

North woke up. She meant that, he thought. She spoke with an acerbity that made her real. Not only did she become real, but the village, the great house, the little house, the church and the circle of old trees also appeared before him in complete reality. He would stay with them.

“That’s our parson,” Hugh explained. “Quite a good chap in his way; but high—very high. Candles—that sort of thing.”

“And his wife …” Milly began.

Here Eleanor sighed. North looked at her. She was dropping off to sleep. A glazed look, a fixed expression, had come over her face. She looked terribly like Milly for a moment; sleep brought out the family likeness. Then she opened her eyes wide; by an effort of will she kept them open. But obviously she saw nothing.

“You must come down and see what you make of us,” Hugh said. “What about the first week in September, eh?” He swayed from side to side as if his benevolence rolled about in him. He was like an old elephant who may be going to kneel. And if he does kneel, how will he ever get up again, North asked himself. And if Eleanor falls sound asleep and snores, what am I going to do, left sitting here between the knees of the elephant?

He looked round for an excuse to go.

There was Maggie coming along, not looking where she was going. They saw her. He felt a strong desire to cry out, “Take care! Take care!” for she was in the danger zone. The long white tentacles that amorphous bodies leave floating so that they can catch their food, would suck her in. Yes, they saw her: she was lost.

“Here’s Maggie!” Milly exclaimed, looking up.

“Haven’t seen you for an age!” said Hugh, trying to heave himself up.

She had to stop; to put her hand into that shapeless paw. Using the last ounce of energy that remained to him, from the address in his waistcoat pocket, North rose. He would carry her off. He would save her from the contamination of family life.

But she ignored him. She stood there, answering their greetings with perfect composure as if using an outfit provided for emergencies. Oh Lord, North said to himself, she’s as bad as they are. She was glazed; insincere. They were talking about her children now.

“Yes. That’s the baby,” she was saying, pointing to a boy who was dancing with a girl.

“And your daughter, Maggie?” Milly asked, looking round.

North fidgeted. This is the conspiracy, he said to himself; this is the steam roller that smooths, obliterates; rounds into identity; rolls into balls. He listened. Jimmy was in Uganda; Lily was in Leicestershire; my boy—my girl … they were saying. But they’re not interested in other people’s children, he observed. Only in their own; their own property; their own flesh and blood, which they would protect with the unsheathed claws of the primeval swamp, he thought, looking at Milly’s fat little paws, even Maggie, even she. For she too was talking about my boy, my girl. How then can we be civilised, he asked himself?

Eleanor snored. She was nodding off, shamelessly, helplessly. There was an obscenity in unconsciousness, he thought. Her mouth was open; her head was on one side.

But now it was his turn. Silence gaped. One has to egg it on, he thought; somebody has to say something, or human society would cease. Hugh would cease; Milly would cease; and he was about to apply himself to find something to say, something with which to feed the immense vacancy of that primeval maw, when Delia, either from the erratic desire of a hostess always to interrupt, or divinely inspired by human charity—which he could not say—came beckoning.

“The Ludbys!” she exclaimed. “The Ludbys!”

“Oh where? The dear Ludbys!” said Milly, and up they heaved and off they went, for the Ludbys, it appeared, seldom left Northumberland.

“Well, Maggie?” said North, turning to her—but here Eleanor made a little click at the back of her throat. Her head pitched forward. Sleep, now that she slept soundly, had given her dignity. She looked peaceful, far from them, rapt in the calm which sometimes gives the sleeper the look of the dead. They sat silent, for a moment, alone together, in private.

“Why—why—why—” he said at last, making a gesture as if he were plucking tufts of grass from the carpet.

“Why?” Maggie asked. “Why what?”

“The Gibbses,” he murmured. He jerked his head at them, where they stood talking by the fireplace. Gross, obese, shapeless, they looked to him like a parody, a travesty, an excrescence that had overgrown the form within, the fire within.

“What’s wrong?” he asked. She looked too. But she said nothing. Couples came dancing slowly past them. A girl stopped, and her gesture as she raised her hand, unconsciously, had the seriousness of the very young anticipating life in its goodness which touched him.

“Why—?” he jerked his thumb in the direction of the young, “when they’re so lovely—”

She too looked at the girl, who was fastening a flower that had come undone in the front of her frock. She smiled. She said nothing. Then half consciously she echoed his question without a meaning in her echo, “Why?”

He was dashed for a moment. It seemed to him that she refused to help him. And he wanted her to help him. Why should she not take the weight off his shoulders and give him what he longed for—assurance, certainty? Because she too was deformed like the rest of them? He looked down at her hands. They were strong hands; fine hands; but if it were a question, he thought, watching the fingers curl slightly, of “my” children, of “my” possessions, it would be one rip down the belly; or teeth in the soft fur of the throat. We cannot help each other, he thought, we are all deformed. Yet, disagreeable as it was to him to remove her from the eminence upon which he placed her, perhaps she was right, he thought, and we who make idols of other people, who endow this man, that woman, with power to lead us, only add to the deformity, and stoop ourselves.

“I’m going to stay with them,” he said aloud.

“At the Towers?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. “For cubbing in September.”

She was not listening. Her eyes were on him. She was getting him into relation with something else he felt. It made him uneasy. She was looking at him as if he were not himself but somebody else. He felt again the discomfort that he had felt when Sally described him on the telephone.

“I know,” he said, stiffening the muscles of his face, “I’m like the picture of a Frenchman holding his hat.”

“Holding his hat?” she asked.

“And getting fat,” he added.

“… Holding a hat … who’s holding a hat?” said Eleanor, opening her eyes.

She glanced about her in bewilderment. Since her last recollection, and it seemed only a second ago, was of Milly talking of candles in a church, something must have happened. Milly and Hugh had been there; but they were gone. There had been a gap—a gap filled with the golden light of lolling candles, and some sensation which she could not name.

She woke up completely.

“What nonsense are you talking?” she said. “North’s not holding a hat! And he’s not fat,” she added. “Not at all, not at all,” she repeated, patting him affectionately on the knee.

She felt extraordinarily happy. Most sleep left some dream in one’s mind—some scene or figure remained when one woke up. But this sleep, this momentary trance, in which the candles had lolled and lengthened themselves, had left her with nothing but a feeling; a feeling, not a dream.

“He’s not holding a hat,” she repeated.

They both laughed at her.

“You’ve been dreaming, Eleanor,” said Maggie.

“Have I?” she said. A deep gulf had been cut in the talk, it was true. She could not remember what they had been saying. There was Maggie; but Milly and Hugh had gone.

“Only a second’s nap,” she said. “But what are you going to do, North? What are your plans?” she said, speaking rather quickly.

“We musn’t let him go back, Maggie,” she said. “Not to that horrid farm.”

She wished to appear extremely practical, partly to prove that she had not slept, partly to protect the extraordinary feeling of happiness that still remained with her. Covered up from observation it might survive, she felt.

“You’ve saved enough, haven’t you?” she said aloud.

“Saved enough?” he said. Why, he wondered, did people who had been asleep always want to make out that they were extremely wide-awake? “Four or five thousand,” he added at random.

“Well, that’s enough,” she insisted. “Five per cent; six per cent——” She tried to do the sum in her head. She appealed to Maggie for help. “Four or five thousand—how much would that be, Maggie? Enough to live on, wouldn’t it?”

“Four or five thousand,” repeated Maggie.

“At five or six per cent …” Eleanor put in. She could never do sums in her head at the best of times; but for some reason it seemed to her very important to bring things back to facts. She opened her bag, found a letter, and produced a stubby little pencil.

“There—work it out on that,” she said. Maggie took the paper and drew a few lines with the pencil as if to test it. North glanced over her shoulder. Was she solving the problem before her—was she considering his life, his needs? No. She was drawing, apparently a caricature—he looked—of a big man opposite in a white waistcoat. It was a farce. It made him feel slightly ridiculous.

“Don’t be so silly,” he said.

“That’s my brother,” she said, nodding at the man in the white waistcoat. “He used to take us for rides on an elephant….” She added a flourish to the waistcoat.

“And we’re being very sensible,” Eleanor protested.

“If you want to live in England, North—if you want——”

He cut her short.

“I don’t know what I want,” he said.

“Oh, I see!” she said. She laughed. Her feeling of happiness returned to her, her unreasonable exaltation. It seemed to her that they were all young, with the future before them. Nothing was fixed; nothing was known; life was open and free before them.

“Isn’t that odd?” she exclaimed. “Isn’t that queer? Isn’t that why life’s a perpetual—what shall I call it?—miracle? … I mean,” she tried to explain, for he looked puzzled, “old age they say is like this; but it isn’t. It’s different; quite different. So when I was a child; so when I was a girl; it’s been a perpetual discovery, my life. A miracle.” She stopped. She was rambling on again. She felt rather light-headed, after her dream.

“There’s Peggy!” she exclaimed, glad to attach herself to something solid. “Look at her! Reading a book!”

Peggy, marooned when the dance started, over by the bookcase, stood as close to it as she could. In order to cover her loneliness she took down a book. It was bound in green leather; and had, she noted as she turned it in her hands, little gilt stars tooled upon it. Which is all to the good, she thought, turning it over, because then it’ll seem as if I were admiring the binding…. But I can’t stand here admiring the binding, she thought. She opened it. He’ll say what I’m thinking, she thought as she did so. Books opened at random always did.

“La médiocrité de l’univers m’étonne et me révolte” she read. That was it. Precisely. She read on. “… la petitesse de toutes choses m’emplit de dégoût …” She lifted her eyes. They were treading on her toes. “… la pauvreté des êtres humains m’anéantit.” She shut the book and put it back on the shelf.

Precisely, she said.

She turned her watch on her wrist and looked at it surreptitiously. Time was getting on. An hour is sixty minutes, she said to herself; two hours are one hundred and twenty minutes. How many have I still to stay here? Could she go yet? She saw Eleanor beckoning. She put the book back on the shelf. She went towards them.

“Come, Peggy, come and talk to us,” Eleanor called out, beckoning.

“D’you know what time it is, Eleanor?” said Peggy, coming up to them. She pointed to her watch. “Don’t you think it’s time to be going?” she said.

“I’d forgotten the time,” said Eleanor.

“But you’ll be so tired tomorrow,” Peggy protested, standing beside her.

“How like a doctor!” North twitted her. “Health, health, health!” he exclaimed. “But health’s not an end in itself,” he said, looking up at her.

She ignored him.

“D’you mean to stay to the end?” she said to Eleanor. “This’ll go on all night.” She looked at the twisting couples gyrating in time to the tune on the gramophone, as if some animal were dying in a slow but exquisite anguish.

“But we’re enjoying ourselves,” said Eleanor. “Come and enjoy yourself too.”

She pointed to the floor at her side. Peggy let herself down onto the floor at her side. Give up brooding, thinking, analysing, Eleanor meant she knew. Enjoy the moment—but could one? she asked, pulling her skirts round her feet as she sat down. Eleanor bent over and tapped her on the shoulder.

“I want you to tell me,” she said, drawing her into the conversation, since she looked so glum, “you’re a doctor—you know these things—what do dreams mean?”

Peggy laughed. Another of Eleanor’s questions. Does two and two make four—and what is the nature of the universe?

“I don’t mean dreams exactly,” Eleanor went on. “Feelings—feelings that come when one’s asleep?”

“My dear Nell,” said Peggy, glancing up at her, “how often have I told you? Doctors know very little about the body; absolutely nothing about the mind.” She looked down again.

“I always said they were humbugs!” North exclaimed.

“What a pity!” said Eleanor. “I was hoping you’d be able to explain to me——” She was bending down. There was a flush on her cheek, Peggy noted; she was excited; but what was there to be excited about?

“Explain—what?” she asked.

“Oh, nothing,” said Eleanor. Now I’ve snubbed her, Peggy thought.

She looked at her again. Her eyes were bright; her cheeks were flushed, or was it only the tan from her voyage to India? And a little vein stood out on her forehead. But what was there to be excited about? She leant back against the wall. From her seat on the floor she had a queer view of people’s feet; feet pointing this way, feet pointing that way; patent leather pumps; satin slippers; silk stockings and socks. They were dancing rhythmically, insistently, to the tune of the fox-trot. And what about the cocktail and the tea, said he to me, said he to me—the tune seemed to repeat over and over again. And voices went on over her head. Odd little gusts of inconsecutive conversations reached her … down in Norfolk where my brother-in-law has a boat … Oh, a complete washout, yes I agree…. People talked nonsense at parties. And beside her Maggie was talking; North was talking; Eleanor was talking. Suddenly Eleanor swept her hand out.

“There’s Renny!” she was saying. “Renny, whom I never see. Renny whom I love…. Come and talk to us, Renny.” And a pair of pumps crossed Peggy’s field of vision and stopped in front of her. He sat down beside Eleanor. She could just see the line of his profile; the big nose; the thin cheek. And what about the cocktails and the tea, said he to me, said he to me, the music ground out; the couples danced past. But the little group on the chairs above her were talking; they were laughing.

“I know you’ll agree with me …” Eleanor was saying. Through her half-shut eyes Peggy could see Renny turn towards her. She saw his thin cheek; his big nose; his nails, she noticed, were very close cut.

“Depends what you were saying …” he said.

“What were we saying?” Eleanor pondered. She’s forgotten already, Peggy suspected.

“… That things have changed for the better,” she heard Eleanor’s voice.

“Since you were a girl?” That she thought was Maggie’s voice.

Then a voice from a skirt with a pink bow on the hem interrupted. “… I don’t know how it is but the heat doesn’t affect me as much as it used to do….” She looked up. There were fifteen pink bows on the dress, accurately stitched, and wasn’t that Miriam Parrish’s little saint-like, sheep-like head on top?

“What I mean is, we’ve changed in ourselves,” Eleanor was saying. “We’re happier—we’re freer….”

What does she mean by “happiness,” by “freedom”? Peggy asked herself, lapsing against the wall again.

“Take Renny and Maggie,” she heard Eleanor saying. And then she stopped. And then she went on again:

“D’you remember, Renny, the night of the raid? When I met Nicholas for the first time … when we sat in the cellar? … Going downstairs I said to myself, That’s a happy marriage….” There was another pause. “I said to myself,” she continued, and Peggy saw her hand laid on Renny’s knee, “If I’d known Renny when I was young….” She stopped. Does she mean she would have fallen in love with him? Peggy wondered. Again the music interrupted … said he to me, said he to me….

“No, never …” she heard Eleanor say. “No, never….” Was she saying she had never been in love, never wanted to marry? Peggy wondered. They were laughing.

“Why, you look like a girl of eighteen!” she heard North say.

“And I feel like one!” Eleanor exclaimed. But you’ll be a wreck tomorrow morning Peggy thought, looking at her. She was flushed, the veins stood out on her forehead.

“I feel …” she stopped. She put her hand to her head: “as if I’d been in another world! So happy!” she exclaimed.

“Tosh, Eleanor, tosh,” said Renny.

I thought he’d say that, Peggy said to herself with some queer satisfaction. She could see his profile as he sat on the other side of her aunt’s knee. The French are logical; they are sensible, she thought. Still, she added, why not let Eleanor have her little flutter if she enjoys it?

“Tosh? What d’you mean by ‘tosh’?” Eleanor was asking. She was leaning forward; she held her hand up as if she wanted him to speak.

“Always talking of the other world,” he said. “Why not this one?”

“But I meant this world!” she said. “I meant, happy in this world—happy with living people.” She waved her hand as if to embrace the miscellaneous company, the young, the old, the dancers, the talkers; Miriam with her pink bows, and the Indian in his turban. Peggy sank back against the wall. Happy in this world, she thought, happy with living people!

The music stopped. The young man who had been putting records on the gramophone had walked off. The couples broke apart and began to push their way through the door. They were going to eat perhaps; they were going to stream out into the back garden and sit on hard sooty chairs. The music which had been cutting grooves in her mind had ceased. There was a lull—a silence. Far away she heard the sounds of the London night; a horn hooted; a siren wailed on the river. The far-away sounds, the suggestion they brought in of other worlds, indifferent to this world, of people toiling, grinding, in the heart of darkness, in the depths of night, made her say over Eleanor’s words, Happy in this world, happy with living people. But how can one be “happy”? she asked herself, in a world bursting with misery. On every placard at every street corner was Death; or worse—tyranny; brutality; torture; the fall of civilisation; the end of freedom. We here, she thought, are only sheltering under a leaf, which will be destroyed. And then Eleanor says the world is better, because two people out of all those millions are “happy.” Her eyes had fixed themselves on the floor; it was empty now save for a wisp of muslin torn from some skirt. But why do I notice everything?,she thought. She shifted her position. Why must I think? She did not want to think. She wished that there were blinds like those in railway carriages that came down over the light and hooded the mind. The blue blind that one pulls down on a night journey, she thought. Thinking was torment; why not give up thinking, and drift and dream? But the misery of the world, she thought, forces me to think. Or was that a pose? Was she not seeing herself in the becoming attitude of one who points to his bleeding heart? to whom the miseries of the world are misery, when in fact, she thought, I do not love my kind. Again she saw the ruby-splashed pavement, and faces mobbed at the door of a picture palace; apathetic, passive faces; the faces of people drugged with cheap pleasures; who had not even the courage to be themselves, but must dress up, imitate, pretend. And here, in this room, she thought, fixing her eyes on a couple…. But I will not think, she repeated; she would force her mind to become a blank and lie back, and accept quietly, tolerantly, whatever came.

She listened. Scraps reached her from above. “… flats in Highgate have bathrooms,” they were saying. “… Your mother … Digby…. Yes, Crosby’s still alive….” It was family gossip, and they were enjoying it. But how can I enjoy it? she said to herself. She was too tired; the skin round her eyes felt taut; a hoop was bound tight over her head, she tried to think herself away into the darkness of the country. But it was impossible; they were laughing. She opened her eyes, exacerbated by their laughter.

That was Renny laughing. He held a sheet of paper in his hand; his head was flung back; his mouth was wide open. From it came a sound like Ha! Ha! Ha! That is laughter, she said to herself. That is the sound people make when they are amused.

She watched him. Her muscles began to twitch involuntarily. She could not help laughing too. She stretched out her hand and Renny gave her the paper. It was folded; they had been playing a game. Each of them had drawn a different part of a picture. On top there was a woman’s head like Queen Alexandra, with a fuzz of little curls; then a bird’s neck; the body of a tiger; and stout elephant’s legs dressed in child’s drawers completed the picture.

“I drew that—I drew that!” said Renny pointing to the legs from which a long trail of ribbon depended. She laughed, laughed, laughed; she could not help laughing.

“The face that launched a thousand ships!” said North, pointing to another part of the monster’s person. They all laughed again. She stopped laughing; her lips smoothed themselves out. But her laughter had had some strange effect on her. It had relaxed her, enlarged her. She felt, or rather she saw, not a place, but a state of being, in which there was real laughter, real happiness, and this fractured world was whole; whole, and free. But how could she say it?

“Look here …” she began. She wanted to express something that she felt to be very important; about a world in which people were whole, in which people were free … But they were laughing; she was serious. “Look here …” she began again.

Eleanor stopped laughing.

“Peggy wants to say something,” she said. The others stopped talking, but they had stopped at the wrong moment. She had nothing to say when it came to the point, and yet she had to speak.

“Here,” she began again, “here you all are—talking about North—” He looked up at her in surprise. It was not what she had meant to say, but she must go on now that she had begun. Their faces gaped at her like birds with their mouths open. “… How he’s to live, where he’s to live,” she went on. “… But what’s the use, what’s the point of saying that?”

She looked at her brother. A feeling of animosity possessed her. He was still smiling, but his smile smoothed itself out as she looked at him.

“What’s the use?” she said, facing him. “You’ll marry. You’ll have children. What’ll you do then? Make money. Write little books to make money….”

She had got it wrong. She had meant to say something impersonal, but she was being personal. It was done now however; she must flounder on now.

“You’ll write one little book, and then another little book,” she said viciously, “instead of living … living differently, differently.”

She stopped. There was the vision still, but she had not grasped it. She had broken off only a little fragment of what she meant to say, and she had made her brother angry. Yet there it hung before her, the thing she had seen, the thing she had not said. But as she fell back with a jerk against the wall, she felt relieved of some oppression; her heart thumped; the veins on her forehead stood out. She had not said it, but she had tried to say it. Now she could rest; now she could think herself away under the shadow of their ridicule, which had no power to hurt her, into the country. Her eyes half shut; it seemed to her that she was on a terrace, in the evening; an owl went up and down, up and down; its white wing showed on the dark of the hedge; and she heard country people singing and the rattle of wheels on a road.

Then gradually the blur became distinct; she saw the line of the bookcase opposite; the wisp of muslin on the floor; and two large feet, in tight shoes, so that the bunions showed, stopped in front of her.

For a moment nobody moved; nobody spoke. Peggy sat still. She did not want to move, or to speak. She wanted to rest, to lean, to dream. She felt very tired. Then more feet stopped, and the hem of a black skirt.

“Aren’t you people coming down to supper?” said a chuckling little voice. She looked up. It was her aunt Milly, with her husband by her side.

“Supper’s downstairs,” said Hugh. “Supper’s downstairs.” And they passed on.

“How prosperous they’ve grown!” said North’s voice, laughing at them.

“Ah, but they’re so good to people …” Eleanor protested. The sense of the family again, Peggy noted.

Then the knee against which she was sheltering herself moved.

“We must go,” said Eleanor. Wait, wait, Peggy wanted to implore her. There was something she wanted to ask her; something she wanted to add to her outburst, since nobody had attacked her, and nobody had laughed at her. But it was useless; the knees straightened themselves; the red cloak elongated itself; Eleanor had risen. She was hunting for her bag or her handkerchief; she was ferreting in the cushions of her chair. As usual, she had lost something.

“I’m sorry to be such an old muddler,” she apologised. She shook a cushion; coins rolled out onto the floor. A sixpenny bit spun on its edge across the carpet, reached a pair of silver shoes on the floor and fell flat.

“There!” Eleanor exclaimed. “There! … But that’s Kitty! isn’t it?” she exclaimed.

Peggy looked up. A handsome elderly woman, with curled white hair and something shining in her hair was standing in the doorway looking round her, as if she had just come in and were looking for her hostess, who was not there. It was at her feet that the sixpence had fallen.

“Kitty!” Eleanor repeated. She went towards her with her hands stretched out. They all got up. Peggy got up. Yes, it was over; it was destroyed she felt. Directly something got together, it broke. She had a feeling of desolation. And then you have to pick up the pieces, and make something new, something different, she thought, and crossed the room, and joined the foreigner, the man she called Brown, whose real name was Nicholas Pomjalovsky.

“Who is that lady,” Nicholas asked her, “who appears to come into a room as if the whole world belonged to her?”

“That’s Kitty Lasswade,” said Peggy. As she stood in the door, they could not pass.

“I’m afraid I’m dreadfully late,” they heard her saying in her clear, authoritative tones. “But I’ve been to the ballet.”

That’s Kitty, is it? North said to himself, looking at her. She was one of those well-set-up rather masculine old ladies who repelled him slightly. He thought he remembered that she was the wife of one of our governors; or was it the Viceroy of India? He could see her, as she stood there, doing the honours of Government House. “Sit here. Sit there. And you, young man, I hope you take plenty of exercise?” He knew the type. She had a short straight nose and blue eyes very wide apart. She might have looked very dashing in the eighties, he thought; in a tight riding-habit; worn a small hat, with a cock’s feather in it; perhaps had an affair with an aide-de-camp; and then settled down, become dictatorial, and told stories about her past. He listened.

“Ah, but he’s not a patch on Nijinsky!” she was saying.

The sort of thing she would say, he thought. He examined the books in the bookcase. He took one out and held it upside down. One little book, and then another little book—Peggy’s taunt returned to him. The words had stung him out of all proportion to their surface meaning. She had turned on him with such violence, as if she despised him; she had looked as if she were going to burst into tears. He opened the little book. Latin, was it? He broke off a sentence and let it swim in his mind. There the words lay, beautiful, yet meaningless, yet composed in a pattern—nox est perpetua una dormienda. He remembered his master saying, Mark the long word at the end of the sentence. There the words floated; but just as they were about to give out their meaning, there was a movement at the door. Old Patrick had come ambling up, had given his arm gallantly to the widow of the Governor-General, and they were proceeding with a curious air of antiquated ceremony down the stairs. The others began to follow them. The younger generation following in the wake of the old, North said to himself as he put the book back on the shelf and followed. Only, he observed, they were not so very young; Peggy—there were white hairs on Peggy’s head—she must be thirty-seven, thirty-eight?

“Enjoying yourself, Peg?” he said as they hung back behind the others. He had a vague feeling of hostility towards her. She seemed to him bitter, disillusioned, and very critical of everyone, especially of himself.

“You go first, Patrick,” they heard Lady Lasswade boom out in her genial loud voice. “These staircases are not adapted …” she paused, as she advanced what was probably a rheumatic leg, “for old people who …” there was another pause as she descended another step, “’ve been kneeling on damp grass killing slugs.”

North looked at Peggy and laughed. He had not expected the sentence to end like that, but the widows of viceroys, he thought, always have gardens, always kill slugs. Peggy smiled too. But he felt uncomfortable with her. She had attacked him. There they stood, however, side by side.

“Did you see old William Whatney?” she said, turning to him.

“No!” he exclaimed. “He still alive? That old white walrus with the whiskers?”

“Yes—that’s him,” she said. There was an old man in a white waistcoat standing in the door.

“The old Mock Turtle,” he said. They had to fall back on childish slang, on childish memories, to cover their distance, their hostility.

“D’you remember …” he began.

“The night of the row?” she said. “The night I let myself out of the window by a rope.”

“And we picnicked in the Roman camp,” he said.

“We should never have been found out if that horrid little scamp hadn’t told on us,” she said, descending a step.

“A little beast with pink eyes,” said North.

They could think of nothing else to say, as they stood blocked, waiting for the others to move on, side by side. And he used to read her his poetry in the apple-loft, he remembered, and as they walked up and down by the rose bushes. And now they had nothing to say to each other.

“Perry,” he said, descending another step, suddenly remembering the name of the pink-eyed boy who had seen them coming home that morning and had told on them.

“Alfred,” she added.

She still knew certain things about him, he thought; they still had something very profound in common. That was why, he thought, she had hurt him by what she had said, before the others, about his “writing little books.” It was their past condemning his present. He glanced at her.

Damn women, he thought, they’re so hard; so unimaginative. Curse their little inquisitive minds. What did their “education” amount to? It only made her critical, censorious. Old Eleanor, with all her rambling and stumbling, was worth a dozen of Peggy any day. She was neither one thing nor the other, he thought, glancing at her; neither in the fashion nor out of it.

She felt him look at her and look away. He was finding fault with something about her, she knew. Her hands? Her dress? No, it was because she criticised him, she thought. Yes, she thought as she descended another step, now I’m going to be trounced; now I’m going to be paid back for telling him he’d write “little books.” It takes from ten to fifteen minutes, she thought, to get an answer; and then it’ll be something off the point but disagreeable—very, she thought. The vanity of men was immeasurable. She waited. He looked at her again. And now he’s comparing me with the girl I saw him talking to, she thought, and saw again the lovely, hard face. He’ll tie himself up with a red-lipped girl, and become a drudge. He must, and I can’t, she thought. No, I’ve a sense of guilt always. I shall pay for it, I shall pay for it, I kept saying to myself even in the Roman camp, she thought. She would have no children, and he would produce little Gibbses, more little Gibbses, she thought, looking in at the door of a solicitor’s office, unless she leaves him at the end of the year for some other man…. The solicitor’s name was Alridge, she noted. But I will take no more notes; I will enjoy myself, she thought suddenly. She put her hand on his arm.

“Met anybody amusing tonight?” she said.

He guessed that she had seen him with the girl.

“One girl,” he said briefly.

“So I saw,” she said.

She looked away.

“I thought her lovely,” she said, carefully observing a tinted picture of a bird with a long beak that hung on the stairs.

“Shall I bring her to see you?” he asked.

So he cared for her opinion, did he? Her hand was still on his arm; she felt something hard and taut beneath the sleeve, and the touch of his flesh, bringing back to her the nearness of human beings and their distance, so that if one meant to help one hurt, yet they depended on each other, produced in her such a tumult of sensation that she could scarcely keep herself from crying out, North! North! North! But I mustn’t make a fool of myself again, she said to herself.

“Any evening after six,” she said aloud, carefully descending another step, and they reached the bottom of the stairs.

A roar of voices sounded from behind the door of the supper room. She withdrew her hand from his arm. The door burst open.

“Spoons! spoons! spoons!” cried Delia, brandishing her arms in a rhetorical manner as if she were still declaiming to someone inside. She caught sight of her nephew and niece. “Be an angel, North, and fetch spoons!” she cried, throwing her hands out towards him.

“Spoons for the widow of the Governor-General!” North cried, catching her manner, imitating her dramatic gesture.

“In the kitchen, in the basement!” Delia cried, waving her arm at the kitchen stairs. “Come, Peggy, come,” she said, catching Peggy’s hand in hers, “we’re all sitting down to supper.” She burst into the room where they were having supper. It was crowded. People were sitting on the floor, on chairs, on office stools. Long office tables, little typewriting tables, had been pressed into use. They were strewn with flowers, frilled with flowers. Carnations, roses, daisies, were flung down higgledy-piggledy. “Sit on the floor, sit anywhere,” Delia commanded, waving her hand promiscuously.

“Spoons are coming,” she said to Lady Lasswade, who was drinking her soup out of a mug.

“But I don’t want a spoon,” said Kitty. She tilted the mug and drank.

“No, you wouldn’t,” said Delia, “but other people do.”

North brought in a bunch of spoons and she took them from him.

“Now who wants a spoon and who doesn’t?” she said, brandishing the bunch of spoons in front of her. Some people do and some don’t, she thought.

Her sort of people, she thought, did not want spoons; the others—the English—did. She had been making that distinction between people all her life.

“A spoon? A spoon?” she said, looking round her at the crowded room with some complacency. All sorts of people were there, she noted. That had always been her aim; to mix people; to do away with the absurd conventions of English life. And she had done it tonight, she thought. There were nobles and commoners; people dressed and people not dressed; people drinking out of mugs, and people waiting with their soup getting cold for a spoon to be brought to them.

“A spoon for me,” said her husband, looking up at her.

She wrinkled her nose. For the thousandth time he had dashed her dream. Thinking to marry a wild rebel, she had married the most King-respecting, Empire-admiring of country gentlemen, and for that very reason partly—because he was, even now, such a magnificent figure of a man. “A spoon for your Uncle,” she said dryly, and sent North off with the bunch. Then she sat down beside Kitty, who was gulping her soup like a child at a school treat. She set down her mug empty, among the flowers.

“Poor flowers,” she said, taking up a carnation that lay on the table-cloth and putting it to her lips. “They’ll die, Delia—they want water.”

“Roses are cheap today,” said Delia. “Twopence a bunch off a barrow in Oxford Street,” she said. She took up a red rose and held it under the light, so that it shone, veined, semi-transparent.

“What a rich country England is!” she said, laying it down again. She took up her mug.

“What I’m always telling you,” said Patrick, wiping his mouth. “The only civilised country in the whole world,” he added.

“I thought we were on the verge of a smash,” said Kitty. “Not that it looked much like it at Covent Garden tonight,” she added.

“Ah, but it’s true,” he sighed, going on with his own thoughts. “I’m sorry to say it—but we’re savages compared with you.”

“He won’t be happy till he’s got Dublin Castle back again,” Delia twitted him.

“You don’t enjoy your freedom?” said Kitty, looking at the queer old man whose face always made her think of a hairy gooseberry. But his body was magnificent.

“It seems to me that our new freedom is a good deal worse than our old slavery,” said Patrick, fumbling with his toothpick.

Politics as usual, money and politics, North thought, overhearing them, as he went round with the last of his spoons.

“You’re not going to tell me that all that struggle has been in vain, Patrick?” said Kitty.

“Come to Ireland and see for yourself, m’lady,” he said grimly.

“It’s too early—too early to tell,” said Delia.

Her husband looked past her with the sad innocent eyes of an old sporting dog whose hunting days are over. But they could not keep their fixity for long. “Who’s this chap with the spoons?” he said, resting his eyes on North, who stood just behind them, waiting.

“North,” said Delia. “Come and sit by us, North.”

“Good-evening to you, Sir,” said Patrick. They had met already, but he had already forgotten.

“What, Morris’s son?” said Kitty, turning round abruptly. She shook hands cordially. He sat down and took a gulp of soup.

“He’s just back from Africa. He’s been on a farm there,” said Delia.

“And how does the old country strike you?” said Patrick, leaning towards him genially.

“Very crowded,” he said, looking round the room. “And you all talk,” he added, “about money and politics.” That was his stock phrase. He had said it twenty times already.

“You were in Africa?” said Lady Lasswade. “And what made you give up your farm?” she demanded. She looked him in the eyes and spoke just as he expected she would speak; too imperiously for his liking. What business is that of yours, old lady? he asked himself.

“I’d had about enough of it,” he said aloud.

“And I’d have given anything to be a farmer!” she exclaimed. That was a little out of the picture, North thought. So were her eyes; she ought to have worn a pince-nez; but she did not.

“But in my youth,” she said, rather fiercely—her hands were rather stubby, and the skin was rough, but she gardened, he remembered—“that wasn’t allowed.”

“No,” said Patrick. “And it’s my belief,” he continued, drumming on the table with a fork, “that we should all be very glad, very glad, to go back to things as they were. What’s the War done for us, eh? Ruined me for one.” He wagged his head with melancholy tolerance from side to side.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Kitty. “But speaking for myself, the old days were bad days, wicked days, cruel days….” Her eyes turned blue with passion.

What about the aide-de-camp, and the hat with a cock’s feather in it? North asked himself.

“Don’t you agree with me, Delia?” said Kitty, turning to her.

But Delia was talking across her, using her rather exaggerated Irish sing-song to someone at the next table. Don’t I remember this room, Kitty thought; a meeting; an argument. But what was it about? Force …

“My dear Kitty,” Patrick interrupted, patting her hand with his great paw. “That’s another instance of what I’m telling you. Now these ladies have got the vote,” he said, turning to North, “are they any better off?”

Kitty looked fierce for a moment; then she smiled.

“We won’t argue, my old friend,” she said, giving him a little pat on the hand.

“And it’s just the same with the Irish,” he went on. North saw that he was bent on treading out the round of his familiar thoughts like an old broken-winded horse. “They’d be glad enough to join the Empire again, I assure you. I come of a family,” he said to North, “that has served its king and country for three hundred——”

“English settlers,” said Delia, rather shortly, returning to her soup. That’s what they quarrel about when they’re alone, North thought.

“We’ve been three hundred years in the country,” old Patrick continued, padding out his round—he laid a hand on North’s arm, “and what strikes an old fellow like me, an old fogy like me——”

“Nonsense, Patrick,” Delia struck in, “I’ve never seen you look younger. Might be fifty, mightn’t he, North?”

But Patrick shook his head.

“I shan’t see seventy again,” he said simply. “… But what strikes an old fellow like me,” he continued, patting North’s arm, “is with such a lot of good feeling about,” he nodded rather vaguely at a placard that was pinned to the wall—“and nice things too,”—he referred perhaps to the flowers, but his head jerked involuntarily as he talked—“what do these fellows want to be shooting each other for? I don’t join any societies; I don’t sign any of these”—he pointed to the placard—“what d’you call ’em? manifestoes—I just go to my friend Mike, or it may be Pat—they’re all good friends of mine, and we——”

He stooped and pinched his foot.

“Lord, these shoes!” he complained.

“Tight, are they?” said Kitty. “Kick ’em off.”

Why had the poor old boy been brought over here, North wondered, and stuck into those tight shoes? He was clearly talking to his dogs. There was a look in his eyes now when he raised them again and tried to recover the drift of what he had been saying that was like the look of a sportsman who saw the birds rising in a semicircle over the wide green bog. But they were out of shot. He could not remember where he had got to. “… We talk things over,” he said, “round a table.” His eyes became mild and vacant as if the engine were cut off, and his mind glided on silently.

“The English talk too,” said North perfunctorily. Patrick nodded, and looked vaguely at a group of young people. But he was not interested in what other people were saying. His mind could no longer stretch beyond its beat. His body was still beautifully proportioned; it was his mind that was old. He would say the same thing all over again, and when he had said it he would pick his teeth and sit gazing in front of him. There he sat now, holding a flower between his finger and thumb, loosely, without looking at it, as if his mind were gliding on…. But Delia interrupted.

“North must go and talk to his friends,” she said. Like so many wives, she saw when her husband was becoming a bore, North thought, as he got up.

“Don’t wait to be introduced,” said Delia, waving her hand. “Do just what you like—just what you like,” her husband echoed her, beating on the table with his flower.

North was glad to go; but where was he to go now? He was an outsider, he felt again, as he glanced round the room. All these people knew each other. They called each other—he stood on the outskirts of a little group of young men and women—by their Christian names, by their nicknames. Each was already part of a little group, he felt as he listened, keeping on the outskirts. He wanted to hear what they were saying; but not to be drawn in himself. He listened. They were arguing. Politics and money, he said to himself; money and politics. That phrase came in handy. But he could not understand the argument, which was already heated. Never have I felt so lonely, he thought. The old platitude about solitude in a crowd was true; for hills and trees accept one; human beings reject one. He turned his back and pretended to read the particulars of a desirable property at Bexhill which Patrick had called for some reason “a manifesto.” “Running water in all the bedrooms,” he read. He overheard scraps of talk. That’s Oxford, that’s Harrow, he continued, recognising the tricks of speech that were caught at school and college. It seemed to him that they were still cutting little private jokes about Jones minor winning the long jump; and old Foxy, or whatever the headmaster’s name was. It was like hearing small boys at a private school, hearing these young men talk politics. “I’m right … you’re wrong.” At their age, he thought, he had been in the trenches; he had seen men killed. But was that a good education? He shifted from one foot to another. At their age, he thought, he had been alone on a farm sixty miles from a white man, in control of a herd of sheep. But was that a good education? Anyhow it seemed to him, half hearing their argument, looking at their gestures, catching their slang, that they were all the same sort. Public school and university, he sized them up as he looked over his shoulder. But where are the Sweeps and the Sewer-men, the Seamstresses and the Stevedores? he thought, making a list of trades that began with the letter S. For all Delia’s pride in her promiscuity, he thought, glancing at the people, there were only Dons and Duchesses, and what other words begin with D? he asked himself, as he scrutinised the placard again—Drabs and Drones?

He turned. A nice fresh-faced boy with a freckled nose in ordinary day clothes was looking at him. If he didn’t take care he would be drawn in too. Nothing would be easier than to join a society, to sign what Patrick called “a manifesto.” But he did not believe in joining societies, in signing manifestoes. He turned back to the desirable residence with its three-quarters of an acre of garden and running water in all the bedrooms. People met, he thought, pretending to read, in hired halls. And one of them stood on a platform. There was the pump-handle gesture; the wringing-wet-clothes gesture; and then the voice, oddly detached from the little figure and tremendously magnified by the loudspeaker, went booming and bawling round the hall: Justice! Liberty! For a moment, of course, sitting among knees, wedged in tight, a ripple, a nice emotional quiver, went over the skin; but next morning, he said to himself as he glanced again at the house-agents’ placard, there’s not an idea, not a phrase that would feed a sparrow. What do they mean by Justice and Liberty? he asked, all these nice young men with two or three hundred a year. Something’s wrong, he thought; there’s a gap, a dislocation, between the word and the reality. If they want to reform the world, he thought, why not begin there, at the centre, with themselves? He turned on his heel and ran straight into an old man in a white waistcoat.

“Hullo!” he said, holding out his hand.

It was his Uncle Edward. He had the look of an insect whose body has been eaten out, leaving only the wings, the shell.

“Very glad to see you back, North,” said Edward, and shook him warmly by the hand.

“Very glad,” he repeated. He was shy. He was spare and thin. He looked as if his face had been carved and graved by a multitude of fine instruments; as if it had been left out on a frosty night and frozen over. He threw his head back like a horse champing a bit; but he was an old horse, a blue-eyed horse whose bit no longer irked him. His movements were from habit, not from feeling. What had he been doing all these years? North wondered, as they stood there surveying each other. Editing Sophocles? What would happen if Sophocles one of these days were edited? What would they do then, these eaten out hollow-shelled old men?

“You’ve filled out,” said Edward, looking him up and down. “You’ve filled out,” he repeated.

There was a subtle deference in his manner. Edward, the scholar, paid tribute to North, the soldier. Yes, but they found it difficult to talk. He had the air of being stamped, North thought; he had kept something, after all, out of the hubbub.

“Shan’t we sit down?” said Edward, as if he wished to talk to him seriously about interesting things. They looked about for a quiet place. He had not frittered his time away talking to old red setters and raising his gun, North thought, glancing about him, to see if by chance there was a quiet place in the room where they could sit down and talk. But there were only two office stools empty beside Eleanor over there in the corner.

She saw them and called out, “Oh, there’s Edward! I know there was something I wanted to ask …” she began.

It was a relief that the interview with the headmaster should be broken up by this impulsive, foolish old woman. She was holding out her pocket-handkerchief.

“I made a knot,” she was saying. Yes, there it was, a knot in her pocket-handkerchief.

“Now what did I make a knot for?” she said, looking up.

“It is an admirable habit to make a knot,” said Edward in his courteous, clipped way, lowering himself a little stiffly onto the chair beside her. “But at the same time it is advisable….” He stopped. That’s what I like about him, North thought, taking the other chair: he left half his sentence unfinished.

“It was to remind me——” said Eleanor putting her hand to her thick crop of white hair. Then she stopped. What is it that makes him look so calm, so carved, North thought, stealing a look at Edward, who waited with admirable serenity for his sister to remember why she had made a knot in her handkerchief. There was something final about him; he left half his sentences unfinished. He hadn’t worried himself about politics and money, he thought. There was something sealed up, stated, about him. Poetry and the past, was it? But as he fixed his eyes upon him, Edward smiled at his sister.

“Well, Nell?” he said.

It was a quiet smile, a tolerant smile.

North broke in, for Eleanor was still ruminating over her knot. “I met a man at the Cape who was a tremendous admirer of yours, Uncle Edward,” he said. The name came back to him—“Arbuthnot,” he said.

“R.K.?” said Edward. And he raised his hand to his head and smiled. It pleased him, that compliment. He was vain; he was touchy; he was—North stole a glance to add another impression—established. Glazed over with the smooth glossy varnish that those in authority wear. For he was now—what? North could not remember. A professor? A master? Somebody who had an attitude fixed on him, from which he could not relax any longer. Still, Arbuthnot, R.K., had said, with emotion, that he owed more to Edward than to any man.

“He said he owed more to you than to any man,” he said aloud.

Edward brushed aside the compliment; but it pleased him. He had a way of putting his hand to his head that North remembered. And Eleanor called him “Nigs.” She laughed at him; she preferred failures, like Morris. There she sat holding her pocket-handkerchief in her hand, smiling, ironically, covertly, at some memory.

“And what are your plans?” said Edward. “You deserve a holiday.”

There was something flattering in his manner, North thought, like a schoolmaster welcoming back to school an old boy who had won distinction. But he meant it; he doesn’t say what he doesn’t mean, North thought, and that was alarming too. They were silent.

“Delia’s got a wonderful lot of people here tonight, hasn’t she?” said Edward, turning to Eleanor. They sat looking at the different groups. His clear blue eyes surveyed the scene amiably but sardonically. But what’s he thinking, North asked himself. He’s got something behind that mask, he thought. Something that’s kept him clear of this muddle. The past? Poetry? he thought, looking at Edward’s distinct profile. It was finer than he remembered.

“I’d like to brush up my classics,” he said suddenly. “Not that I ever had much to brush,” he added, foolishly, afraid of the schoolmaster.

Edward did not seem to be listening. He was raising his eyeglass and letting it fall, as he looked at the queer jumble. There his head rested with the chin thrown up, on the back of his chair. The crowd, the noise, the clatter of knives and forks, made it unnecessary to talk. North stole another glance at him. The past and poetry, he said to himself, that’s what I want to talk about, he thought. He wanted to say it aloud. But Edward was too formed and idiosyncratic; too black and white and linear, with his head tilted up on the back of his chair, to ask him questions easily.

Now he was talking about Africa, and North wanted to talk about the past and poetry. There it was, he thought, locked up in that fine head, the head that was like a Greek boy’s head grown white; the past and poetry. Then why not prise it open? Why not share it? What’s wrong with him, he thought, as he answered the usual intelligent Englishman’s questions about Africa and the state of the country. Why can’t he flow? Why can’t he pull the string of the shower bath? Why’s it all locked up, refrigerated? Because he’s a priest, a mystery monger, he thought; feeling his coldness; this guardian of beautiful words.

But Edward was speaking to him.

“We must arrange a date,” he was saying, “next autumn.” He meant it too.

“Yes,” North said aloud, “I’d love to…. In the autumn….” And he saw before him a house with creeper-shaded rooms, butlers creeping, decanters, and some one handing a box of good cigars.

Unknown young men coming round with trays pressed different eatables upon them.

“How very kind of you!” said Eleanor, taking a glass. He himself took a glass of some yellow liquid. It was some kind of claret cup, he supposed. The little bubbles kept rising to the top and exploding. He watched them rise and explode.

“Who’s that pretty girl,” said Edward, inclining his head, “over there, standing in the corner, talking to the youth?”

He was benignant and urbane.

“Aren’t they lovely?” said Eleanor. “Just what I was thinking…. Everyone looks so young. That’s Maggie’s daughter…. But who’s that talking to Kitty?”

“That’s Middleton,” said Edward. “What, don’t you remember him? You must have met him in the old days.”

They chatted, basking there at their ease. Spinners and sitters in the sun, North thought, taking their ease when the day’s work is over; Eleanor and Edward each in his own niche, with his hands on the fruit, tolerant, assured.

He watched the bubbles rising in the yellow liquid. For them it’s all right, he thought; they’ve had their day: but not for him, not for his generation. For him a life modelled on the jet (he was watching the bubbles rise), on the spring, of the hard leaping fountain; another life; a different life. Not halls and reverberating megaphones, not marching in step after leaders, in herds, groups, societies, caparisoned. No; to begin inwardly, and let the devil take the outer form, he thought, looking up at a young man with a fine forehead and a weak chin. Not black shirts, green shirts, red shirts—always posing in the public eye; that’s all poppycock. Why not down barriers and simplify? But a world, he thought, that was all one jelly, one mass, would be a rice pudding world, a white counterpane world. To keep the emblems and tokens of North Pargiter—the man Maggie laughs at; the Frenchman holding his hat; but at the same time spread out, make a new ripple in human consciousness, be the bubble and the stream, the stream and the bubble—myself and the world together—he raised his glass. Anonymously, he said, looking at the clear yellow liquid. But what do I mean, he wondered—I, to whom ceremonies are suspect, and religion’s dead; who don’t fit, as the man said, don’t fit in anywhere? He paused. There was the glass in his hand; in his mind a sentence. And he wanted to make other sentences. But how can I, he thought—he looked at Eleanor, who sat with a silk handkerchief in her hands—unless I know what’s solid, what’s true; in my life, in other people’s lives?

“Runcorn’s boy,” Eleanor suddenly ejaculated. “The son of the porter at my flat,” she explained. She had untied the knot in her handkerchief.

“The son of the porter at your flat,” Edward repeated. His eyes were like a field on which the sun rests in winter, North thought, looking up—the winter’s sun, that has no heat left in it but some pale beauty.

“Commissionaire they call him, I think,” she said.

“How I hate that word!” said Edward with a little shudder. “Porter’s good English, isn’t it?”

“That’s what I say,” said Eleanor. “The son of the porter at my flat…. Well, he wants, they want him to go to college. So I said if I saw you, I’d ask you——”

“Of course, of course,” said Edward kindly.

And that’s all right, North said to himself. That’s the human voice at its natural speaking level. Of course, of course, he repeated.

“He wants to go to college, does he?” Edward went on. “What examinations has he passed, eh?”

What examinations has he passed, eh? North repeated. He repeated that too, but critically, as if he were actor and critic; he listened but he commented. He surveyed the thin yellow liquid in which the bubbles rose more slowly, one by one. Eleanor did not know what examinations he had passed. And what was I thinking? North asked himself. He felt that he had been in the middle of a jungle; in the heart of darkness; cutting his way towards the light; but provided only with broken sentences, single words, with which to break through the briar-bush of human bodies, human wills and voices, that bent over him, binding him, blinding him…. He listened.

“Well then, tell him to come and see me,” said Edward, briskly.

“But that’s asking too much of you, Edward?” Eleanor protested.

“That’s what I’m for,” said Edward.

That’s the right tone of voice too, North thought. Not carapaced—the words “caparison” and “carapace” collided in his mind, and made a new word that was no word. What I mean is, he added, taking a drink of his claret cup, underneath there’s the fountain; the sweet nut. The fruit, the fountain that’s in all of us; in Edward; in Eleanor; so why caparison ourselves on top? He looked up.

A big man had stopped in front of them. He bent over and very politely gave Eleanor his hand. He had to bend, for his white waistcoat enclosed so magnificent a sphere. “Alas,” he was saying in a voice that was oddly mellifluous for one of his bulk, “I’d love nothing more; but I have a meeting at ten tomorrow morning.” They were inviting him to sit down and talk. He was tittupping up and down on his little feet in front of them.

“Throw it over!” said Eleanor, smiling up at him, just as she used to smile when she was a girl with her brother’s friends, thought North. Then why hadn’t she married one of them, he wondered. Why do we hide all the things that matter? he asked himself.

“And leave my directors cooling their heels? As much as my place is worth!” the old friend was saying, and swung round on his heel with the agility of a trained elephant.

“Seems a long time since he acted in the Greek play, doesn’t it?” said Edward. “… in a toga,” he added with a grin, following the well-rounded person of the great railway magnate as he went with a certain celerity, for he was a perfect man of the world, through the crowd to the door.

“That’s Chipperfield, the great railway man,” he explained to North. “A very remarkable fellow,” he went on. “Son of a railway porter.” He made little pauses between each sentence. “Done it all off his own bat…. A delightful house … Perfectly restored…. Two or three hundred acres, I suppose…. Has his shooting…. Asks me to direct his reading…. And buys old masters.”

“And buys old masters,” North repeated. The deft little sentences seemed to build up a pagoda; sparely but accurately; and through it all ran some queer breath of mockery tinged with affection.

“Shams, I should think,” Eleanor laughed.

“Well, we needn’t go into that,” Edward chuckled. Then they were silent. The pagoda floated off. Chipperfield had vanished through the door.

“How nice this drink is,” Eleanor said above his head. North could see her glass held at the level of his head on her knee. A thin green leaf floated on top of it. “I hope it’s not intoxicating?” she said, raising it.

North took up his glass again. What was I thinking last time I looked at it? he asked himself. A block had formed in his forehead as if two thoughts had collided and had stopped the passage of the rest. His mind was a blank. He swayed the liquid from side to side. He was in the middle of a dark forest.

“So, North …” His own name roused him with a start. It was Edward speaking. He jerked forward. “… you want to brush up your classics, do you?” Edward went on. “I’m glad to hear you say that. There’s a lot in those old fellows. But the younger generation,” he paused, “… don’t seem to want ’em.”

“How foolish!” said Eleanor. “I was reading one of them the other day … the one you translated. Now which was it?” She paused. She never could remember names. “The one about the girl who …”

“The Antigone?” Edward suggested.

“Yes! The Antigone!” she exclaimed. “And I thought to myself, just what you say, Edward—how true—how beautiful….”

She broke off, as if afraid to continue.

Edward nodded. He paused. Then suddenly he jerked his head back and said some words in Greek: “οὔτοι συνέχθειν, ὰλλὰ συμφιλεῖν ἔφυν.”

North looked up.

“Translate it,” he said.

Edward shook his head. “It’s the language,” he said.

Then he shut up. It’s no go, North thought. He can’t say what he wants to say; he’s afraid. They’re all afraid; afraid of being laughed at; afraid of giving themselves away. He’s afraid too, he thought, looking at the young man with a fine forehead and a weak chin who was gesticulating too emphatically. We’re all afraid of each other, he thought; afraid of what? Of criticism; of laughter; of people who think differently…. He’s afraid of me because I’m a farmer (and he saw again his round face; high cheek-bones and small brown eyes). And I’m afraid of him because he’s clever. He looked at the big forehead, from which the hair was already receding. That’s what separates us; fear, he thought.

He shifted his position. He wanted to get up and talk to him. Delia had said, “Don’t wait to be introduced.” But it was difficult to speak to a man whom he did not know, and say: “What’s this knot in the middle of my forehead? Untie it.” For he had had enough of thinking alone. Thinking alone tied knots in the middle of the forehead; thinking alone bred pictures, foolish pictures. The man was moving off. He must make the effort. Yet he hesitated. He felt repelled and attracted, attracted and repelled. He began to rise; but before he had got on his feet somebody thumped on a table with a fork.

A large man sitting at a table in the corner was thumping on the table with his fork. He was leaning forward as if he wanted to attract attention, as if he were about to make a speech. It was the man Peggy called Brown; the others called Nicholas; whose real name he did not know. Perhaps he was a little drunk.

“Ladies and gentlemen!” he said. “Ladies and gentlemen!” he repeated rather more loudly.

“What, a speech?” said Edward quizzically. He half turned his chair; he raised his eyeglass, which hung on a black silk ribbon as if it were a foreign order.

People were buzzing about with plates and glasses. They were stumbling over cushions on the floor. A girl pitched head foremost.

“Hurt yourself?” said a young man, stretching out his hand.

No, she had not hurt herself. But the interruption had distracted attention from the speech. A buzz of talk had risen like the buzz of flies over sugar. Nicholas sat down again. He was lost apparently in contemplation of the red stone in his ring; or of the strewn flowers; the white, waxy flowers, the pale, semi-transparent flowers, the crimson flowers that were so full-blown that the gold heart showed, and the petals had fallen and lay among the hired knives and forks, the cheap tumblers on the table. Then he roused himself.

“Ladies and gentlemen!” he began. Again he thumped the table with his fork. There was a momentary lull. Rose marched across the room.

“Going to make a speech, are you?” she demanded. “Go on, I like hearing speeches.” She stood beside him, with her hand hollowed round her ear like a military man. Again the buzz of talk had broken out.

“Silence!” she exclaimed. She took a knife and rapped on the table.

“Silence! Silence!” She rapped again.

Martin crossed the room.

“What’s Rose making such a noise about?” he asked.

“I’m asking for silence!” she said, flourishing her knife in his face. “This gentleman wants to make a speech!”

But he had sat down and was regarding his ring with equanimity.

“Isn’t she the very spit and image,” said Martin, laying his hand on Rose’s shoulder and turning to Eleanor as if to confirm his words, “of old Uncle Pargiter of Pargiter’s Horse?”

“Well, I’m proud of it!” said Rose, brandishing her knife in his face. “I’m proud of my family; proud of my country; proud of …”

“Your sex?” he interrupted her.

“I am,” she asseverated. “And what about you?” she went on, tapping him on the shoulder. “Proud of yourself, are you?”

“Don’t quarrel, children, don’t quarrel!” cried Eleanor, giving her chair a little edge nearer. “They always would quarrel,” she said, “always … always….”

“She was a horrid little spitfire,” said Martin, squatting down on the floor, and looking up at Rose, “with her hair scraped off her forehead …”

“… wearing a pink frock,” Rose added. She sat down abruptly, holding her knife erect in her hand. “A pink frock; a pink frock,” she repeated, as if the words recalled something.

“But go on with your speech, Nicholas,” said Eleanor, turning to him. He shook his head.

“Let us talk about pink frocks,” he smiled.

“… in the drawing-room at Abercorn Terrace, when we were children,” said Rose. “D’you remember?” She looked at Martin. He nodded his head.

“In the drawing-room at Abercorn Terrace …” said Delia. She was going from table to table with a great jug of claret cup. She stopped in front of them. “Abercorn Terrace!” she exclaimed, filling a glass. She flung her head back and looked for a moment astonishingly young, handsome, and defiant.

“It was Hell!” she exclaimed. “It was Hell!” she repeated.

“Oh come, Delia …” Martin protested, holding out his glass to be filled.

“It was Hell,” she said, dropping her Irish manner, and speaking quite simply, as she poured out the drink.

“D’you know,” she said, looking at Eleanor, “when I go to Paddington, I always say to the man, ‘Drive the other way round!’”

“That’s enough …” Martin stopped her; his glass was full. “I hated it too …” he began.

But here Kitty Lasswade advanced upon them. She held her glass in front of her as though it were a bauble.

“What’s Martin hating now?” she said, facing him.

A polite gentleman pushed forward a little gilt chair upon which she sat down.

“He always was a hater,” she said, holding her glass out to be filled.

“What was it you hated that night, Martin, when you dined with us?” she asked him. “I remember how angry you made me….”

She smiled at him. He had grown cherubic; pink and plump; with his hair brushed back like a waiter’s.

“Hated? I never hated anybody,” he protested.

“My heart’s full of love; my heart’s full of kindness,” he laughed, waving his glass at her.

“Nonsense,” said Kitty. “When you were young you hated … everything!” she flung her hand out. “My house … my friends….” She broke off with a quick little sigh. She saw them again—the men filing in; the women pinching some dress between their thumbs and fingers. She lived alone now, in the north.

“… and I daresay I’m better off as I am,” she added, half to herself, “with just a boy to chop up wood.”

There was a pause.

“Now let him get on with his speech,” said Eleanor.

“Yes. Get on with your speech!” said Rose. Again she rapped her knife on the table; again he half rose.

“Going to make a speech, is he?” said Kitty, turning to Edward who had drawn his chair up beside her.

“The only place where oratory is now practised as an art …” Edward began. Then he paused, drew his chair a little closer, and adjusted his glasses, “… is the church,” he added.

That’s why I didn’t marry you, Kitty said to herself. How the voice, the supercilious voice, brought it back! the tree half fallen; rain falling; undergraduates calling; bells tolling; she and her mother….

But Nicholas had risen. He took a deep breath which expanded his shirt front. With one hand he fumbled with his fob; the other he flung out with an oratorical gesture.

“Ladies and gentlemen!” he began again. “In the name of all who have enjoyed themselves tonight….”

“Speak up! Speak up!” the young men cried who were standing in the window.

(“Is he a foreigner?” Kitty whispered to Eleanor.)

“… in the name of all who have enjoyed themselves tonight,” he repeated more loudly, “I wish to thank our host and hostess….”

“Oh, don’t thank me!” said Delia brushing past them with her empty jug.

Again the speech was brought to the ground. He must be a foreigner, Kitty thought to herself, because he has no self-consciousness. There he stood holding his wine-glass and smiling.

“Go on, go on,” she urged him. “Don’t mind them.” She was in the mood for a speech. A speech was a good thing at parties. It gave them a fillip. It gave them a finish. She rapped her glass on the table.

“It’s very nice of you,” said Delia, trying to push past him, but he had laid his hand on her arm, “but don’t thank me.”

“But Delia,” he expostulated, still holding her, “it’s not what you want; it’s what we want. And it is fitting,” he continued, waving his hand out, “when our hearts are full of gratitude …”

Now he’s getting into his stride, Kitty thought. I daresay he’s a bit of an orator. Most foreigners are.

“… when our hearts are full of gratitude,” he repeated, touching one finger.

“What for?” said a voice abruptly.

Nicholas stopped again.

(“Who is that dark man?” Kitty whispered to Eleanor. “I’ve been wondering all the evening.”

“Renny,” Eleanor whispered. “Renny,” she repeated.)

“What for?” said Nicholas. “That is what I am about to tell you….” He paused, and drew a deep breath which again expanded his waistcoat. His eyes beamed; he seemed full of spontaneous subterraneous benevolence. But here a head popped up over the edge of the table; a hand swept up a fistful of flower petals; and a voice cried:

“Red Rose, thorny Rose, brave Rose, tawny Rose!” The petals were thrown, fan-shape, over the stout old woman who was sitting on the edge of her chair. She looked up in surprise. Petals had fallen on her. She brushed them where they had lodged upon the prominences of her person. “Thank you! Thank you!” she exclaimed. Then she took up a flower and beat it energetically upon the edge of the table. “But I want my speech!” she said, looking at Nicholas.

“No, no,” he said. “This is not a time for making speeches,” and sat down again.

“Let’s drink then,” said Martin. He raised his glass. “Pargiter of Pargiter’s Horse!” he said. “I drink to her!” He put his glass down with a thump on the table.

“Oh, if you’re all drinking healths,” said Kitty, “I’ll drink too. Rose, your health. Rose is a fine fellow,” she said, raising her glass. “But Rose was wrong,” she added. “Force is always wrong,—don’t you agree with me, Edward?” She tapped him on the knee. I’d forgotten the War, she muttered half to herself. “Still,” she said aloud, “Rose had the courage of her convictions. Rose went to prison. And I drink to her!” She drank.

“The same to you, Kitty,” said Rose, bowing to her.

“She smashed his window,” Martin jeered at her, “and then she helped him to smash other people’s windows. Where’s your decoration, Rose?”

“In a cardboard box on the mantelpiece,” said Rose. “You can’t get a rise out of me at this time of day, my good fellow.”

“But I wish you had let Nicholas finish his speech,” said Eleanor.

Down through the ceiling, muted and far away, came the preliminary notes of another dance. The young people, hastily swallowing what remained in their glasses, rose and began to move off upstairs. Soon there was the sound of feet thudding, rhythmically, heavily on the floor above.

“Another dance?” said Eleanor. It was a waltz. “When we were young,” she said, looking at Kitty, “we used to dance….” The tune seemed to take her words and to repeat them—when I was young I used to dance—I used to dance….

“And how I hated it!” said Kitty, looking at her fingers, which were short and pricked. “How nice it is,” she said, “not to be young! How nice not to mind what people think! Now one can live as one likes,” she added, “… now that one’s seventy.”

She paused. She raised her eyebrows as if she remembered something. “Pity one can’t live again,” she said. But she broke off.

“Aren’t we going to have our speech after all, Mr ——?” she said, looking at Nicholas, whose name she did not know. He sat gazing benevolently in front of him, paddling his hands among the flower petals.

“What’s the good?” he said. “Nobody wants to listen.” They listened to the feet thudding upstairs, and to the music repeating, it seemed to Eleanor, when I was young I used to dance, all men loved me when I was young….

“But I want a speech!” said Kitty in her authoritative manner. It was true; she wanted something—something that gave a fillip, a finish—what she scarcely knew. But not the past—not memories. The present; the future; that was what she wanted.

“There’s Peggy!” said Eleanor, looking round. She was sitting on the edge of a table, eating a ham sandwich.

“Come, Peggy!” she called out. “Come and talk to us!”

“Speak for the younger generation, Peggy!” said Lady Lasswade, shaking hands.

“But I’m not the younger generation,” said Peggy. “And I’ve made my speech already,” she said. “I made a fool of myself upstairs,” she said, sinking down on the floor at Eleanor’s feet.

“Then, North …” said Eleanor, looking down on the parting of North’s hair as he sat on the floor beside her.

“Yes, North,” said Peggy, looking at him across her aunt’s knee. “North says we talk of nothing but money and politics,” she added. “Tell us what we ought to do.” He started. He had been dozing off, dazed by the music and voices. What we ought to do? he said to himself, waking up. What ought we to do?

He jerked up into a sitting posture. He saw Peggy’s face looking at him. Now she was smiling; her face was gay; it reminded him of his grandmother’s face in the picture. But he saw it as he had seen it upstairs—scarlet, puckered—as if she were about to burst into tears. It was her face that was true; not her words. But only her words returned to him—to live differently—differently. He paused. This is what needs courage, he said to himself; to speak the truth. She was listening. The old people were already gossiping about their own affairs.

“… It’s a nice little house,” Kitty was saying. “An old mad woman used to live there…. You’ll have to come and stay with me, Nell. In the spring….”

Peggy was watching him over the rim of her ham sandwich.

“What you said was true,” he blurted out, “… quite true.” It was what she meant that was true, he corrected himself; her feeling, not her words. He felt her feeling now; it was not about him; it was about other people; about another world, a new world….

The old aunts and uncles were gossiping above him.

“What was the name of the man I used to like so much at Oxford?” Lady Lasswade was saying. He could see her silver body bending towards Edward.

“The man you liked at Oxford?” Edward was repeating. “I thought you never liked anyone at Oxford….” And they laughed.

But Peggy was waiting, she was watching him. He saw again the glass with the bubbles rising; he felt again the constriction of a knot in his forehead. He wished there were someone, infinitely wise and good, to think for him, to answer for him. But the young man with the receding forehead had vanished.

“… To live differently … differently,” he repeated. Those were her words; they did not altogether fit his meaning; but he had to use them. Now I’ve made a fool of myself too, he thought, as a ripple of some disagreeable sensation went across his back as if a knife had sliced it, and he leant against the wall.

“Yes, it was Robson!” Lady Lasswade exclaimed. Her trumpet voice rang out over his head.

“How one forgets things!” she went on. “Of course—Robson. That was his name. And the girl I used to like—Nelly? The girl who was going to be a doctor?”

“Died, I think,” said Edward.

“Died, did she—died—” said Lady Lasswade. She paused for a moment. “Well, I wish you’d make your speech,” she said, turning and looking down at North.

He drew himself back. No more speech-making for me, he thought. He had his glass in his hand still. It was still half full of pale yellow liquid. The bubbles had ceased to rise. The wine was clear and still. Stillness and solitude, he thought to himself; silence and solitude … that’s the only element in which the mind is free now.

Silence and solitude, he repeated; silence and solitude. His eyes half closed themselves. He was tired; he was dazed; people talked; people talked. He would detach himself, generalise himself, imagine that he was lying in a great space on a blue plain with hills on the rim of the horizon. He stretched out his feet. There were the sheep cropping; slowly tearing the grass; advancing first one stiff leg and then another. And babbling—babbling. He made no sense of what they were saying. Through his half-open eyes he saw hands holding flowers—thin hands, fine hands; but hands that belonged to no one. And were they flowers the hands held? Or mountains? Blue mountains with violet shadows? Then petals fell. Pink, yellow, white with violet shadows, the petals fell. They fall and fall and cover all, he murmured. And there was the stem of a wine-glass; the rim of a plate; and a bowl of water. The hands went on picking up flower after flower; that was a white rose; that was a yellow rose; that was a rose with violet valleys in its petals. There they hung, many folded, many coloured, drooping over the rim of the bowl. And petals fell. There they lay, violet and yellow, little shallops, boats on a river. And he was floating, and drifting, in a shallop, in a petal, down a river into silence, into solitude … which is the worst torture, the words came back to him as if a voice had spoken them, that human beings can inflict….

“Wake up, North … we want your speech!” a voice interrupted him. Kitty’s red handsome face was hanging over him.

“Maggie!” he exclaimed, pulling himself up. It was she who was sitting there, putting flowers into water. “Yes, it’s Maggie’s turn to speak,” said Nicholas, putting his hand on her knee.

“Speak, speak!” Renny urged her.

But she shook her head. Laughter took her and shook her. She laughed, throwing her head back as if she were possessed by some genial spirit outside herself that made her bend and rise, as a tree, North thought, is tossed and bent by the wind. No idols, no idols, no idols, her laughter seemed to chime as if the tree were hung with innumerable bells, and he laughed too.

Their laughter ceased. Feet thudded, dancing on the floor above. A siren hooted on the river. A van crashed down the street in the distance. There was a rush and quiver of sound; something seemed to be released; it was as if the life of the day were about to begin, and this were the chorus, the cry, the chirp, the stir, which salutes the London dawn.

Kitty turned to Nicholas.

“And what was your speech going to have been about, Mr … I’m afraid I don’t know your name?” she said.

“… the one that was interrupted?”

“My speech?” he laughed. “It was to have been a miracle!” he said. “A masterpiece! But how can one speak when one is always interrupted? I begin: I say, Let us give thanks. Then Delia says, Don’t thank me. I begin again: I say, Let us give thanks to someone, to somebody … And Renny says, What for? I begin again, and look—Eleanor is sound asleep.” (He pointed at her.) “So what’s the good?”

“Oh, but there is some good——” Kitty began.

She still wanted something—some finish, some fillip—what she did not know. And it was getting late. She must go.

“Tell me, privately, what you were going to have said, Mr ——?” she asked him.

“What I was going to have said? I was going to have said——” he paused and stretched his hand out; he touched each finger separately.

“First I was going to have thanked our host and hostess. Then I was going to have thanked this house—” he waved his hand round the room hung with the placards of the house agent, “—which has sheltered the lovers, the creators, the men and women of goodwill. And finally—” he took his glass in his hand, “I was going to drink to the human race. The human race,” he continued, raising his glass to his lips, “which is now in its infancy, may it grow to maturity! Ladies and gentlemen!” he exclaimed, half rising and expanding his waistcoat, “I drink to that!”

He brought his glass down with a thump on the table. It broke.

“That’s the thirteenth glass broken tonight!” said Delia, coming up and stopping in front of them. “But don’t mind—don’t mind. They’re very cheap—glasses.”

“What’s very cheap?” Eleanor murmured. She half opened her eyes. But where was she? In what room? In which of the innumerable rooms? Always there were rooms; always there were people. Always from the beginning of time…. She shut her hands on the coins she was holding, and again she was suffused with a feeling of happiness. Was it because this had survived—this keen sensation (she was waking up) and the other thing, the solid object—she saw an ink-corroded walrus—had vanished? She opened her eyes wide. Here she was; alive; in this room, with living people. She saw all the heads in a circle. At first they were without identity. Then she recognised them. That was Rose; that was Martin; that was Morris. He had hardly any hair on the top of his head. There was a curious pallor on his face.

There was a curious pallor on all their faces as she looked round. The brightness had gone out of the electric lights; the table-cloths looked whiter. North’s head—he was sitting on the floor at her feet—was rimmed with whiteness. His shirt-front was a little crumpled.

He was sitting on the floor at Edward’s feet with his hands bound round his knees, and he gave little jerks and looked up at him as if he appealed to him about something.

“Uncle Edward,” she heard him say, “tell me this …”

He was like a child asking to be told a story.

“Tell me this,” he repeated, giving another little jerk. “You’re a scholar. About the classics now. Aeschylus. Sophocles. Pindar.”

Edward bent towards him.

“And the chorus,” North jerked on again. She leant towards them. “The chorus——” North repeated.

“My dear boy,” she heard Edward say as he smiled benignly down at him, “don’t ask me. I was never a great hand at that. No, if I’d had my way”—he paused and passed his hand over his forehead—“I should have been …” A burst of laughter drowned his words. She could not catch the end of the sentence. What had he said—what had he wished to be? She had lost his words.

There must be another life, she thought, sinking back into her chair, exasperated. Not in dreams; but here and now, in this room, with living people. She felt as if she were standing on the edge of a precipice with her hair blown back; she was about to grasp something that just evaded her. There must be another life, here and now, she repeated. This is too short, too broken. We know nothing, even about ourselves. We’re only just beginning, she thought, to understand, here and there. She hollowed her hands in her lap, just as Rose had hollowed hers round her ears. She held her hands hollowed; she felt that she wanted to enclose the present moment; to make it stay; to fill it fuller and fuller, with the past, the present and the future, until it shone, whole, bright, deep with understanding.

“Edward,” she began, trying to attract his attention. But he was not listening to her; he was telling North some old college story. It’s useless, she thought, opening her hands. It must drop. It must fall. And then? she thought. For her too there would be the endless night; the endless dark. She looked ahead of her as though she saw opening in front of her a very long dark tunnel. But, thinking of the dark, something baffled her; in fact it was growing light. The blinds were white.

There was a stir in the room.

Edward turned to her.

“Who are they?” he asked her, pointing to the door.

She looked. Two children stood in the door. Delia had her hands on their shoulders as if to encourage them. She was leading them over to the table in order to give them something to eat. They looked awkward and clumsy.

Eleanor glanced at their hands, at their clothes, at the shape of their ears. “The children of the caretaker, I should think,” she said. Yes, Delia was cutting slices of cake for them, and they were larger slices of cake than she would have cut had they been the children of her own friends. The children took the slices and stared at them with a curious fixed stare as if they were fierce. But perhaps they were frightened, because she had brought them up from the basement into the drawing-room.

“Eat it!” said Delia, giving them a little pat.

They began to munch slowly, gazing solemnly round them.

“Hullo, children!” cried Martin, beckoning to them. They stared at him solemnly.

“Haven’t you got a name?” he said. They went on eating in silence. He began to fumble in his pocket.

“Speak!” he said. “Speak!”

“The younger generation,” said Peggy, “don’t mean to speak.”

They turned their eyes on her now; but they went on munching. “No school tomorrow?” she said. They shook their heads from side to side.

“Hurrah!” said Martin. He held the coins in his hand; pressed between his thumb and finger. “Now—sing a song for sixpence!” he said.

“Yes. Weren’t you taught something at school?” Peggy asked.

They stared at her but remained silent. They had stopped eating. They were a centre of a little group. They swept their eyes over the grown-up people for a moment, then, each giving the other a little nudge, they burst into song:

Etho passo tanno hai,

Fai donk to tu do,

Mai to, kai to, lai to see

Toh dom to tuh do—

That was what it sounded like. Not a word was recognisable. The distorted sounds rose and sank as if they followed a tune. They stopped.

They stood with their hands behind their backs. Then with one impulse they attacked the next verse:

Fanno to par, etto to mar,

Timin tudo, tido,

Foll to gar in, mitno to par,

Eido, teido, meido—

They sang the second verse more fiercely than the first. The rhythm seemed to rock and the unintelligible words ran themselves together almost into a shriek. The grown-up people did not know whether to laugh or to cry. Their voices were so harsh; the accent was so hideous.

They burst out again:

Chree to gay ei,

Geeray didax….

Then they stopped. It seemed to be in the middle of a verse. They stood there grinning, silent, looking at the floor. Nobody knew what to say. There was something horrible in the noise they made. It was so shrill, so discordant, and so meaningless. Then old Patrick ambled up.

“Ah, that’s very nice, that’s very nice. Thank you, my dears,” he said in his genial way, fiddling with his toothpick. The children grinned at him. Then they began to make off. As they sidled past Martin, he slipped coins into their hands. Then they made a dash for the door.

“But what the devil were they singing?” said Hugh Gibbs. “I couldn’t understand a word of it, I must confess.” He held his hands to the sides of his large white waistcoat.

“Cockney accent, I suppose,” said Patrick. “What they teach ’em at school, you know.”

“But it was …” Eleanor began. She stopped. What was it? As they stood there they had looked so dignified; yet they had made this hideous noise. The contrast between their faces and their voices was astonishing; it was impossible to find one word for the whole. “Beautiful?” she said, with a note of interrogation, turning to Maggie.

“Extraordinarily,” said Maggie.

But Eleanor was not sure that they were thinking of the same thing.

She gathered together her gloves, her bag and two or three coppers, and got up. The room was full of a queer pale light. Objects seemed to be rising out of their sleep, out of their disguise, and to be assuming the sobriety of daily life. The room was making ready for its use as an estate agent’s office. The tables were becoming office tables; their legs were the legs of office tables, and yet they were still strewn with plates and glasses, with roses, lilies and carnations.

“It’s time to go,” she said, crossing the room. Delia had gone to the window. Now she jerked the curtains open.

“The dawn!” she exclaimed rather melodramatically.

The shapes of houses appeared across the square. Their blinds were all drawn; they seemed fast asleep still in the morning pallor.

“The dawn!” said Nicholas, getting up and stretching himself. He too walked across to the window. Renny followed him.

“Now for the peroration,” he said, standing with him in the window. “The dawn—the new day——”

He pointed at the trees, at the roofs, at the sky.

“No,” said Nicholas, holding back the curtain. “There you are mistaken. There is going to be no peroration—no peroration!” he exclaimed, throwing his arm out, “because there was no speech.”

“But the dawn has risen,” said Renny, pointing at the sky.

It was a fact. The sun had risen. The sky between the chimneys looked extraordinarily blue.

“And I am going to bed,” said Nicholas after a pause. He turned away.

“Where is Sara?” he said, looking round him. There she was curled up in a corner with her head against a table asleep apparently.

“Wake your sister, Magdalena,” he said, turning to Maggie. Maggie looked at her. Then she took a flower from the table and tossed it at her. She half-opened her eyes. “It’s time,” said Maggie, touching her on the shoulder. “Time, is it?” she sighed. She yawned and stretched herself. She fixed her eyes on Nicholas as if she were bringing him back to the field of vision. Then she laughed.

“Nicholas!” she exclaimed.

“Sara!” he replied. They smiled at each other. Then he helped her up and she balanced herself uncertainly against her sister, and rubbed her eyes.

“How strange,” she murmured, looking round her, “… how strange….”

There were the smeared plates, and the empty wine-glasses; the petals and the bread crumbs. In the mixture of lights they looked prosaic but unreal; cadaverous but brilliant. And there against the window, gathered in a group, were the old brothers and sisters.

“Look, Maggie,” she whispered, turning to her sister, “Look!” She pointed at the Pargiters, standing in the window.

The group in the window, the men in their black-and-white evening dress, the women in their crimsons, golds and silvers, wore a statuesque air for a moment, as if they were carved in stone. Their dresses fell in stiff sculptured folds. Then they moved; they changed their attitudes; they began to talk.

“Can’t I give you a lift back, Nell?” Kitty Lasswade was saying. “I’ve a car waiting.”

Eleanor did not answer. She was looking at the curtained houses across the square. The windows were spotted with gold. Everything looked clean swept, fresh and virginal. The pigeons were shuffling on the tree tops.

“I’ve a car …” Kitty repeated.

“Listen …” said Eleanor, raising her hand. Upstairs they were playing “God save the King” on the gramophone; but it was the pigeons she meant; they were crooning.

“That’s wood pigeons, isn’t it?” said Kitty. She put her head on one side to listen. Take two coos, Taffy, take two coos … tak … they were crooning.

“Wood pigeons?” said Edward, putting his hand to his ear.

“There on the tree tops,” said Kitty. The green-blue birds were shuffling about on the branches, pecking and crooning to themselves.

Morris brushed the crumbs off his waistcoat.

“What an hour for us old fogies to be out of bed!” he said. “I haven’t seen the sun rise since … since….”

“Ah, but when we were young,” said old Patrick, slapping him on the shoulder, “we thought nothing of making a night of it! I remember going to Covent Garden and buying roses for a certain lady …”

Delia smiled as if some romance, her own or another’s, had been recalled to her.

“And I…” Eleanor began. She stopped. She saw an empty milk jug and leaves falling. Then it had been autumn. Now it was summer. The sky was a faint blue; the roofs were tinged purple against the blue; the chimneys were a pure brick red. An air of ethereal calm and simplicity lay over everything.

“And all the tubes have stopped, and all the omnibuses,” she said turning round. “How are we going to get home?”

“We can walk,” said Rose. “Walking won’t do us any harm.”

“Not on a fine summer morning,” said Martin.

A breeze went through the square. In the stillness they could hear the branches rustle as they rose slightly, and fell, and shook a wave of green light through the air.

Then the door burst open. Couple after couple came flocking in, dishevelled, gay, to look for their cloaks and their hats, to say good-night.

“It’s been so good of you to come!” Delia exclaimed, turning towards them with her hands outstretched.

“Thank you—thank you for coming!” she cried.

“And look at Maggie’s bunch!” she said, taking a bunch of many coloured flowers that Maggie held out to her.

“How beautifully you’ve arranged them!” she said. “Look, Eleanor!” She turned to her sister.

But Eleanor was standing with her back to them. She was watching a taxi that was gliding slowly round the square. It stopped in front of a house two doors down.

“Aren’t they lovely?” said Delia, holding out the flowers.

Eleanor started.

“The roses? Yes …” she said. But she was watching the cab. A young man had got out; he paid the driver. Then a girl in a tweed travelling suit followed him. He fitted his latch-key to the door. “There,” Eleanor murmured, as he opened the door and they stood for a moment on the threshold. “There!” she repeated, as the door shut with a little thud behind them.

Then she turned round into the room. “And now?” she said, looking at Morris, who was drinking the last drops of a glass of wine. “And now?” she asked, holding out her hands to him.

The sun had risen, and the sky above the houses wore an air of extraordinary beauty, simplicity and peace.

[]

THREE
GUINEAS

by
Virginia Woolf

published
June 1938
by
The Hogarth Press

three guineas

One.

Two.

Three.

[]

[The text follows the 1943 Hogarth Press edition.]

One.

Three years is a long time to leave a letter unanswered, and your letter has been lying without an answer even longer than that. I had hoped that it would answer itself, or that other people would answer it for me. But there it is with its question—How in your opinion are we to prevent war?—still unanswered.

It is true that many answers have suggested themselves, but none that would not need explanation, and explanations take time. In this case, too, there are reasons why it is particularly difficult to avoid misunderstanding. A whole page could be filled with excuses and apologies; declarations of unfitness, incompetence, lack of knowledge, and experience: and they would be true. But even when they were said there would still remain some difficulties so fundamental that it may well prove impossible for you to understand or for us to explain. But one does not like to leave so remarkable a letter as yours—a letter perhaps unique in the history of human correspondence, since when before has an educated man asked a woman how in her opinion war can be prevented?—unanswered. Therefore let us make the attempt; even if it is doomed to failure.

In the first place let us draw what all letter-writers instinctively draw, a sketch of the person to whom the letter is addressed. Without someone warm and breathing on the other side of the page, letters are worthless. You, then, who ask the question, are a little grey on the temples; the hair is no longer thick on the top of your head. You have reached the middle years of life not without effort, at the Bar; but on the whole your journey has been prosperous. There is nothing parched, mean or dissatisfied in your expression. And without wishing to flatter you, your prosperity—wife, children, house—has been deserved. You have never sunk into the contented apathy of middle life, for, as your letter from an office in the heart of London shows, instead of turning on your pillow and prodding your pigs, pruning your pear trees—you have a few acres in Norfolk—you are writing letters, attending meetings, presiding over this and that, asking questions, with the sound of the guns in your ears. For the rest, you began your education at one of the great public schools and finished it at the university.

It is now that the first difficulty of communication between us appears. Let us rapidly indicate the reason. We both come of what, in this hybrid age when, though birth is mixed, classes still remain fixed, it is convenient to call the educated class. When we meet in the flesh we speak with the same accent; use knives and forks in the same way; expect maids to cook dinner and wash up after dinner; and can talk during dinner without much difficulty about politics and people; war and peace; barbarism and civilization—all the questions indeed suggested by your letter. Moreover, we both earn our livings. But … those three dots mark a precipice, a gulf so deeply cut between us that for three years and more I have been sitting on my side of it wondering whether it is any use to try to speak across it. Let us then ask someone else—it is Mary Kingsley—to speak for us. “I don’t know if I ever revealed to you the fact that being allowed to learn German was all the paid-for education I ever had. Two thousand pounds was spent on my brother’s, I still hope not in vain.”[◉1] Mary Kingsley is not speaking for herself alone; she is speaking, still, for many of the daughters of educated men. And she is not merely speaking for them; she is also pointing to a very important fact about them, a fact that must profoundly influence all that follows: the fact of Arthur’s Education Fund. You, who have read Pendennis, will remember how the mysterious letters A.E.F. figured in the household ledgers. Ever since the thirteenth century English families have been paying money into that account. From the Pastons to the Pendennises, all educated families from the thirteenth century to the present moment have paid money into that account. It is a voracious receptacle. Where there were many sons to educate it required a great effort on the part of the family to keep it full. For your education was not merely in book-learning; games educated your body; friends taught you more than books or games. Talk with them broadened your outlook and enriched your mind. In the holidays you travelled; acquired a taste for art; a knowledge of foreign politics; and then, before you could earn your own living, your father made you an allowance upon which it was possible for you to live while you learnt the profession which now entitles you to add the letters K.C. to your name. All this came out of Arthur’s Education Fund. And to this your sisters, as Mary Kingsley indicates, made their contribution. Not only did their own education, save for such small sums as paid the German teacher, go into it; but many of those luxuries and trimmings which are, after all, an essential part of education—travel, society, solitude, a lodging apart from the family house—they were paid into it too. It was a voracious receptacle, a solid fact—Arthur’s Education Fund—a fact so solid indeed that it cast a shadow over the entire landscape. And the result is that though we look at the same things, we see them differently. What is that congregation of buildings there, with a semi-monastic look, with chapels and halls and green playing-fields? To you it is your old school; Eton or Harrow; your old university, Oxford or Cambridge; the source of memories and of traditions innumerable. But to us, who see it through the shadow of Arthur’s Education Fund, it is a schoolroom table; an omnibus going to a class; a little woman with a red nose who is not well educated herself but has an invalid mother to support; an allowance of £50 a year with which to buy clothes, give presents and take journeys on coming to maturity. Such is the effect that Arthur’s Education Fund has had upon us. So magically does it change the landscape that the noble courts and quadrangles of Oxford and Cambridge often appear to educated men’s daughters[◉2] like petticoats with holes in them, cold legs of mutton, and the boat train starting for abroad while the guard slams the door in their faces.

The fact that Arthur’s Education Fund changes the landscape—the halls, the playing grounds, the sacred edifices—is an important one; but that aspect must be left for future discussion. Here we are only concerned with the obvious fact, when it comes to considering this important question—how we are to help you prevent war—that education makes a difference. Some knowledge of politics, of international relations, of economics, is obviously necessary in order to understand the causes which lead to war. Philosophy, theology even, might come in usefully. Now you the uneducated, you with an untrained mind, could not possibly deal with such questions satisfactorily. War, as the result of impersonal forces, is you will agree beyond the grasp of the untrained mind. But war as the result of human nature is another thing. Had you not believed that human nature, the reasons, the emotions of the ordinary man and woman, lead to war, you would not have written asking for our help. You must have argued, men and women, here and now, are able to exert their wills; they are not pawns and puppets dancing on a string held by invisible hands. They can act, and think for themselves. Perhaps even they can influence other people’s thoughts and actions. Some such reasoning must have led you to apply to us; and with justification. For happily there is one branch of education which comes under the heading “unpaid-for education”—that understanding of human beings and their motives which, if the word is rid of its scientific associations, might be called psychology. Marriage, the one great profession open to our class since the dawn of time until the year 1919; marriage, the art of choosing the human being with whom to live life successfully, should have taught us some skill in that. But here again another difficulty confronts us. For though many instincts are held more or less in common by both sexes, to fight has always been the man’s habit, not the woman’s. Law and practice have developed that difference, whether innate or accidental. Scarcely a human being in the course of history has fallen to a woman’s rifle; the vast majority of birds and beasts have been killed by you, not by us; and it is difficult to judge what we do not share.[◉3]

How then are we to understand your problem, and if we cannot, how can we answer your question, how to prevent war? The answer based upon our experience and our psychology—Why fight?—is not an answer of any value. Obviously there is for you some glory, some necessity, some satisfaction in fighting which we have never felt or enjoyed. Complete understanding could only be achieved by blood transfusion and memory transfusion—a miracle still beyond the reach of science. But we who live now have a substitute for blood transfusion and memory transfusion which must serve at a pinch. There is that marvellous, perpetually renewed, and as yet largely untapped aid to the understanding of human motives which is provided in our age by biography and autobiography. Also there is the daily paper, history in the raw. There is thus no longer any reason to be confined to the minute span of actual experience which is still, for us, so narrow, so circumscribed. We can supplement it by looking at the picture of the lives of others. It is of course only a picture at present, but as such it must serve. It is to biography then that we will turn first, quickly and briefly, in order to attempt to understand what war means to you. Let us extract a few sentences from a biography.

First, this from a soldier’s life:

I have had the happiest possible life, and have always been working for war, and have now got into the biggest in the prime of life for a soldier…. Thank God, we are off in an hour. Such a magnificent regiment! Such men, such horses! Within ten days I hope Francis and I will be riding side by side straight at the Germans.[◉4]

To which the biographer adds:

From the first hour he had been supremely happy, for he had found his true calling.

To that let us add this from an airman’s life:

We talked of the League of Nations and the prospects of peace and disarmament. On this subject he was not so much militarist as martial. The difficulty to which he could find no answer was that if permanent peace were ever achieved, and armies and navies ceased to exist, there would be no outlet for the manly qualities which fighting developed, and that human physique and human character would deteriorate.[◉5]

Here, immediately, are three reasons which lead your sex to fight; war is a profession; a source of happiness and excitement; and it is also an outlet for manly qualities, without which men would deteriorate. But that these feelings and opinions are by no means universally held by your sex is proved by the following extract from another biography, the life of a poet who was killed in the European war: Wilfred Owen.

Already I have comprehended a light which never will filter into the dogma of any national church: namely, that one of Christ’s essential commands was: Passivity at any price! Suffer dishonour and disgrace, but never resort to arms. Be bullied, be outraged, be killed; but do not kill…. Thus you see how pure Christianity will not fit in with pure patriotism.

And among some notes for poems that he did not live to write are these:

The unnaturalness of weapons…. Inhumanity of war…. The insupportability of war…. Horrible beastliness of war…. Foolishness of war.[◉6]

From these quotations it is obvious that the same sex holds very different opinions about the same thing. But also it is obvious, from to-day’s newspaper, that however many dissentients there are, the great majority of your sex are to-day in favour of war. The Scarborough Conference of educated men, the Bournemouth Conference of working men are both agreed that to spend £300,000,000 annually upon arms is a necessity. They are of opinion that Wilfred Owen was wrong; that it is better to kill than to be killed. Yet since biography shows that differences of opinion are many, it is plain that there must be some one reason which prevails in order to bring about this overpowering unanimity. Shall we call it, for the sake of brevity, “patriotism”? What then, we must ask next, is this “patriotism” which leads you to go to war? Let the Lord Chief Justice of England interpret it for us:

“Englishmen are proud of England. For those who have been trained in English schools and universities, and who have done the work of their lives in England, there are few loves stronger than the love we have for our country. When we consider other nations, when we judge the merits of the policy of this country or of that, it is the standard of our own country that we apply…. Liberty has made her abode in England. England is the home of democratic institutions…. It is true that in our midst there are many enemies of liberty—some of them, perhaps, in rather unexpected quarters. But we are standing firm. It has been said that an Englishman’s Home is his Castle. The home of Liberty is in England. And it is a castle indeed—a castle that will be defended to the last…. Yes, we are greatly blessed, we Englishmen.”[◉7]

That is a fair general statement of what patriotism means to an educated man and what duties it imposes upon him. But the educated man’s sister—what does “patriotism” mean to her? Has she the same reasons for being proud of England, for loving England, for defending England? Has she been “greatly blessed” in England? History and biography when questioned would seem to show that her position in the home of freedom has been different from her brother’s; and psychology would seem to hint that history is not without its effect upon mind and body. Therefore her interpretation of the word “patriotism” may well differ from his. And that difference may make it extremely difficult for her to understand his definition of patriotism and the duties it imposes. If then our answer to your question, “How in your opinion are we to prevent war?” depends upon understanding the reasons, the emotions, the loyalties which lead men to go to war, this letter had better be torn across and thrown into the waste-paper basket. For it seems plain that we cannot understand each other because of these differences. It seems plain that we think differently according as we are born differently; there is a Grenfell point of view; a Knebworth point of view; a Wilfred Owen point of view; a Lord Chief Justice’s point of view and the point of view of an educated man’s daughter. All differ. But is there no absolute point of view? Can we not find somewhere written up in letters of fire or gold, “This is right. This wrong”?—a moral judgment which we must all, whatever our differences, accept? Let us then refer the question of the rightness or wrongness of war to those who make morality their profession—the clergy. Surely if we ask the clergy the simple question: “Is war right or is war wrong?” they will give us a plain answer which we cannot deny. But no—the Church of England, which might be supposed able to abstract the question from its worldly confusions, is of two minds also. The bishops themselves are at loggerheads. The Bishop of London maintained that “the real danger to the peace of the world to-day were the pacifists. Bad as war was dishonour was far worse.”[◉8] On the other hand, the Bishop of Birmingham[◉9] described himself as an “extreme pacifist…. I cannot see myself that war can be regarded as consonant with the spirit of Christ.” So the Church itself gives us divided counsel—in some circumstances it is right to fight; in no circumstances is it right to fight. It is distressing, baffling, confusing, but the fact must be faced; there is no certainty in heaven above or on earth below. Indeed the more lives we read, the more speeches we listen to, the more opinions we consult, the greater the confusion becomes and the less possible it seems, since we cannot understand the impulses, the motives, or the morality which lead you to go to war, to make any suggestion that will help you to prevent war.

But besides these pictures of other people’s lives and minds—these biographies and histories—there are also other pictures—pictures of actual facts; photographs. Photographs, of course, are not arguments addressed to the reason; they are simply statements of fact addressed to the eye. But in that very simplicity there may be some help. Let us see then whether when we look at the same photographs we feel the same things. Here then on the table before us are photographs. The Spanish Government sends them with patient pertinacity about twice a week.[*] They are not pleasant photographs to look upon. They are photographs of dead bodies for the most part. This morning’s collection contains the photograph of what might be a man’s body, or a woman’s; it is so mutilated that it might, on the other hand, be the body of a pig. But those certainly are dead children, and that undoubtedly is the section of a house. A bomb has torn open the side; there is still a birdcage hanging in what was presumably the sitting-room, but the rest of the house looks like nothing so much as a bunch of spillikins suspended in mid air.

Those photographs are not an argument; they are simply a crude statement of fact addressed to the eye. But the eye is connected with the brain; the brain with the nervous system. That system sends its messages in a flash through every past memory and present feeling. When we look at those photographs some fusion takes place within us; however different the education, the traditions behind us, our sensations are the same; and they are violent. You, Sir, call them “horror and disgust”. We also call them horror and disgust. And the same words rise to our lips. War, you say, is an abomination; a barbarity; war must be stopped at whatever cost. And we echo your words. War is an abomination; a barbarity; war must be stopped. For now at last we are looking at the same picture; we are seeing with you the same dead bodies, the same ruined houses.

Let us then give up, for the moment, the effort to answer your question, how we can help you to prevent war, by discussing the political, the patriotic or the psychological reasons which lead you to go to war. The emotion is too positive to suffer patient analysis. Let us concentrate upon the practical suggestions which you bring forward for our consideration. There are three of them. The first is to sign a letter to the newspapers; the second is to join a certain society; the third is to subscribe to its funds. Nothing on the face of it could sound simpler. To scribble a name on a sheet of paper is easy; to attend a meeting where pacific opinions are more or less rhetorically reiterated to people who already believe in them is also easy; and to write a cheque in support of those vaguely acceptable opinions, though not so easy, is a cheap way of quieting what may conveniently be called one’s conscience. Yet there are reasons which make us hesitate; reasons into which we must enter, less superficially, later on. Here it is enough to say that though the three measures you suggest seem plausible, yet it also seems that, if we did what you ask, the emotion caused by the photographs would still remain unappeased. That emotion, that very positive emotion, demands something more positive than a name written on a sheet of paper; an hour spent listening to speeches; a cheque written for whatever sum we can afford—say one guinea. Some more energetic, some more active method of expressing our belief that war is barbarous, that war is inhuman, that war, as Wilfred Owen put it, is insupportable, horrible and beastly seems to be required. But, rhetoric apart, what active method is open to us? Let us consider and compare. You, of course, could once more take up arms—in Spain, as before in France—in defence of peace. But that presumably is a method that having tried you have rejected. At any rate that method is not open to us; both the Army and the Navy are closed to our sex. We are not allowed to fight. Nor again are we allowed to be members of the Stock Exchange. Thus we can use neither the pressure of force nor the pressure of money. The less direct but still effective weapons which our brothers, as educated men, possess in the diplomatic service, in the Church, are also denied to us. We cannot preach sermons or negotiate treaties. Then again although it is true that we can write articles or send letters to the Press, the control of the Press—the decision what to print, what not to print—is entirely in the hands of your sex. It is true that for the past twenty years we have been admitted to the Civil Service and to the Bar; but our position there is still very precarious and our authority of the slightest. Thus all the weapons with which an educated man can enforce his opinion are either beyond our grasp or so nearly beyond it that even if we used them we could scarcely inflict one scratch. If the men in your profession were to unite in any demand and were to say: “If it is not granted we will stop work”, the laws of England would cease to be administered. If the women in your profession said the same thing it would make no difference to the laws of England whatever. Not only are we incomparably weaker than the men of our own class; we are weaker than the women of the working class. If the working women of the country were to say: “If you go to war, we will refuse to make munitions or to help in the production of goods,” the difficulty of war-making would be seriously increased. But if all the daughters of educated men were to down tools to-morrow, nothing essential either to the life or to the war-making of the community would be embarrassed. Our class is the weakest of all the classes in the state. We have no weapon with which to enforce our will.[◉10]

The answer to that is so familiar that we can easily anticipate it. The daughters of educated men have no direct influence, it is true; but they possess the greatest power of all; that is, the influence that they can exert upon educated men. If this is true, if, that is, influence is still the strongest of our weapons and the only one that can be effective in helping you to prevent war, let us, before we sign your manifesto or join your society, consider what that influence amounts to. Clearly it is of such immense importance that it deserves profound and prolonged scrutiny. Ours cannot be profound; nor can it be prolonged; it must be rapid and imperfect—still, let us attempt it.

What influence then have we had in the past upon the profession that is most closely connected with war—upon politics? There again are the innumerable, the invaluable biographies, but it would puzzle an alchemist to extract from the massed lives of politicians that particular strain which is the influence upon them of women. Our analysis can only be slight and superficial; still if we narrow our enquiry to manageable limits, and run over the memoirs of a century and a half we can hardly deny that there have been women who have influenced politics. The famous Duchess of Devonshire, Lady Palmerston, Lady Melbourne, Madame de Lieven, Lady Holland, Lady Ashburton—to skip from one famous name to another—were all undoubtedly possessed of great political influence. Their famous houses and the parties that met in them play so large a part in the political memoirs of the time that we can hardly deny that English politics, even perhaps English wars, would have been different had those houses and those parties never existed. But there is one characteristic that all those memoirs possess in common; the names of the great political leaders—Pitt, Fox, Burke, Sheridan, Peel, Canning, Palmerston, Disraeli, Gladstone—are sprinkled on every page; but you will not find either at the head of the stairs receiving the guests, or in the more private apartments of the house, any daughter of an educated man. It may be that they were deficient in charm, in wit, in rank, or in clothing. Whatever the reason, you may turn page after page, volume after volume, and though you will find their brothers and husbands—Sheridan at Devonshire House, Macaulay at Holland House, Matthew Arnold at Lansdowne House, Carlyle even at Bath House, the names of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot do not occur; and though Mrs. Carlyle went, Mrs. Carlyle seems on her own showing to have found herself ill at ease.

But, as you will point out, the daughters of educated men may have possessed another kind of influence—one that was independent of wealth and rank, of wine, food, dress and all the other amenities that make the great houses of the great ladies so seductive. Here indeed we are on firmer ground, for there was of course one political cause which the daughters of educated men had much at heart during the past 150 years: the franchise. But when we consider how long it took them to win that cause, and what labour, we can only conclude that influence has to be combined with wealth in order to be effective as a political weapon, and that influence of the kind that can be exerted by the daughters of educated men is very low in power, very slow in action, and very painful in use.[◉11] Certainly the one great political achievement of the educated man’s daughter cost her over a century of the most exhausting and menial labour; kept her trudging in processions, working in offices, speaking at street corners; finally, because she used force, sent her to prison, and would very likely still keep her there, had it not been, paradoxically enough, that the help she gave her brothers when they used force at last gave her the right to call herself, if not a full daughter, still a stepdaughter of England.[◉12]

Influence then when put to the test would seem to be only fully effective when combined with rank, wealth and great houses. The influential are the daughters of noblemen, not the daughters of educated men. And that influence is of the kind described by a distinguished member of your own profession, the late Sir Ernest Wild.

“He claimed that the great influence which women exerted over men always had been, and always ought to be, an indirect influence. Man liked to think he was doing his job himself when, in fact, he was doing just what the woman wanted, but the wise woman always let him think he was running the show when he was not. Any woman who chose to take an interest in politics had an immensely greater power without the vote than with it, because she could influence many voters. His feeling was that it was not right to bring women down to the level of men. He looked up to women, and wanted to continue to do so. He desired that the age of chivalry should not pass, because every man who had a woman to care about him liked to shine in her eyes.”[◉13]

And so on.

If such is the real nature of our influence, and we all recognize the description and have noted the effects, it is either beyond our reach, for many of us are plain, poor and old; or beneath our contempt, for many of us would prefer to call ourselves prostitutes simply and to take our stand openly under the lamps of Piccadilly Circus rather than use it. If such is the real nature, the indirect nature, of this celebrated weapon, we must do without it; add our pigmy impetus to your more substantial forces, and have recourse, as you suggest, to letter signing, society joining and the drawing of an occasional exiguous cheque. Such would seem to be the inevitable, though depressing, conclusion of our enquiry into the nature of influence, were it not that for some reason, never satisfactorily explained, the right to vote,[◉14] in itself by no means negligible, was mysteriously connected with another right of such immense value to the daughters of educated men that almost every word in the dictionary has been changed by it, including the word “influence.” You will not think these words exaggerated if we explain that they refer to the right to earn one’s living.

That, Sir, was the right that was conferred upon us less than twenty years ago, in the year 1919, by an Act which unbarred the professions. The door of the private house was thrown open. In every purse there was, or might be, one bright new sixpence in whose light every thought, every sight, every action looked different. Twenty years is not, as time goes, a long time; nor is a sixpenny bit a very important coin; nor can we yet draw upon biography to supply us with a picture of the lives and minds of the new-sixpenny owners. But in imagination perhaps we can see the educated man’s daughter, as she issues from the shadow of the private house, and stands on the bridge which lies between the old world and the new, and asks, as she twirls the sacred coin in her hand, “What shall I do with it? What do I see with it?” Through that light we may guess everything she saw looked different—men and women, cars and churches. The moon even, scarred as it is in fact with forgotten craters, seemed to her a white sixpence, a chaste sixpence, an altar upon which she vowed never to side with the servile, the signers-on, since it was hers to do what she liked with—the sacred sixpence that she had earned with her own hands herself. And if checking imagination with prosaic good sense, you object that to depend upon a profession is only another form of slavery, you will admit from your own experience that to depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father. Recall the joy with which you received your first guinea for your first brief, and the deep breath of freedom that you drew when you realized that your days of dependence upon Arthur’s Education Fund were over. From that guinea, as from one of the magic pellets to which children set fire and a tree rises, all that you most value—wife, children, home—and above all that influence which now enables you to influence other men, have sprung. What would that influence be if you were still drawing £40 a year from the family purse, and for any addition to that income were dependent even upon the most benevolent of fathers? But it is needless to expatiate. Whatever the reason, whether pride, or love of freedom, or hatred of hypocrisy, you will understand the excitement with which in 1919 your sisters began to earn not a guinea but a sixpenny bit, and will not scorn that pride, or deny that it was justly based, since it meant that they need no longer use the influence described by Sir Ernest Wild.

The word “influence” then has changed. The educated man’s daughter has now at her disposal an influence which is different from any influence that she has possessed before. It is not the influence which the great lady, the Siren, possesses; nor is it the influence which the educated man’s daughter possessed when she had no vote; nor is it the influence which she possessed when she had a vote but was debarred from the right to earn her living. It differs, because it is an influence from which the charm element has been removed; it is an influence from which the money element has been removed. She need no longer use her charm to procure money from her father or brother. Since it is beyond the power of her family to punish her financially she can express her own opinions. In place of the admirations and antipathies which were often unconsciously dictated by the need of money she can declare her genuine likes and dislikes. In short, she need not acquiesce; she can criticize. At last she is in possession of an influence that is disinterested.

Such in rough and rapid outlines is the nature of our new weapon, the influence which the educated man’s daughter can exert now that she is able to earn her own living. The question that has next to be discussed, therefore, is how can she use this new weapon to help you to prevent war? And it is immediately plain that if there is no difference between men who earn their livings in the professions and women who earn their livings, then this letter can end; for if our point of view is the same as yours then we must add our sixpence to your guinea; follow your methods and repeat your words. But, whether fortunately or unfortunately, that is not true. The two classes still differ enormously. And to prove this, we need not have recourse to the dangerous and uncertain theories of psychologists and biologists; we can appeal to facts. Take the fact of education. Your class has been educated at public schools and universities for five or six hundred years, ours for sixty. Take the fact of property.[◉15] Your class possesses in its own right and not through marriage practically all the capital, all the land, all the valuables, and all the patronage in England. Our class possesses in its own right and not through marriage practically none of the capital, none of the land, none of the valuables, and none of the patronage in England. That such differences make for very considerable differences in mind and body, no psychologist or biologist would deny. It would seem to follow then as an indisputable fact that “we”—meaning by “we” a whole made up of body, brain and spirit, influenced by memory and tradition—must still differ in some essential respects from “you,” whose body, brain and spirit have been so differently trained and are so differently influenced by memory and tradition. Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes. Any help we can give you must be different from that you can give yourselves, and perhaps the value of that help may lie in the fact of that difference. Therefore before we agree to sign your manifesto or join your society, it might be well to discover where the difference lies, because then we may discover where the help lies also. Let us then by way of a very elementary beginning lay before you a photograph—a crudely coloured photograph—of your world as it appears to us who see it from the threshold of the private house; through the shadow of the veil that St. Paul still lays upon our eyes; from the bridge which connects the private house with the world of public life.

Your world, then, the world of professional, of public life, seen from this angle undoubtedly looks queer. At first sight it is enormously impressive. Within quite a small space are crowded together St. Paul’s, the Bank of England, the Mansion House, the massive if funereal battlements of the Law Courts; and on the other side, Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament. There, we say to ourselves, pausing, in this moment of transition on the bridge, our fathers and brothers have spent their lives. All these hundreds of years they have been mounting those steps, passing in and out of those doors, ascending those pulpits, preaching, money-making, administering justice. It is from this world that the private house (somewhere, roughly speaking, in the West End) has derived its creeds, its laws, its clothes and carpets, its beef and mutton. And then, as is now permissible, cautiously pushing aside the swing doors of one of these temples, we enter on tiptoe and survey the scene in greater detail. The first sensation of colossal size, of majestic masonry is broken up into a myriad points of amazement mixed with interrogation. Your clothes in the first place make us gape with astonishment.[◉16] How many, how splendid, how extremely ornate they are—the clothes worn by the educated man in his public capacity! Now you dress in violet; a jewelled crucifix swings on your breast; now your shoulders are covered with lace; now furred with ermine; now slung with many linked chains set with precious stones. Now you wear wigs on your heads; rows of graduated curls descend to your necks. Now your hats are boat-shaped, or cocked; now they mount in cones of black fur; now they are made of brass and scuttle shaped; now plumes of red, now of blue hair surmount them. Sometimes gowns cover your legs; sometimes gaiters. Tabards embroidered with lions and unicorns swing from your shoulders; metal objects cut in star shapes or in circles glitter and twinkle upon your breasts. Ribbons of all colours—blue, purple, crimson—cross from shoulder to shoulder. After the comparative simplicity of your dress at home, the splendour of your public attire is dazzling.

But far stranger are two other facts that gradually reveal themselves when our eyes have recovered from their first amazement. Not only are whole bodies of men dressed alike summer and winter—a strange characteristic to a sex which changes its clothes according to the season, and for reasons of private taste and comfort—but every button, rosette and stripe seems to have some symbolical meaning. Some have the right to wear plain buttons only; others rosettes; some may wear a single stripe; others three, four, five or six. And each curl or stripe is sewn on at precisely the right distance apart; it may be one inch for one man, one inch and a quarter for another. Rules again regulate the gold wire on the shoulders, the braid on the trousers, the cockades on the hats—but no single pair of eyes can observe all these distinctions, let alone account for them accurately.

Even stranger, however, than the symbolic splendour of your clothes are the ceremonies that take place when you wear them. Here you kneel; there you bow; here you advance in procession behind a man carrying a silver poker; here you mount a carved chair; here you appear to do homage to a piece of painted wood; here you abase yourselves before tables covered with richly worked tapestry. And whatever these ceremonies may mean you perform them always together, always in step, always in the uniform proper to the man and the occasion.

Apart from the ceremonies such decorative apparel appears to us at first sight strange in the extreme. For dress, as we use it, is comparatively simple. Besides the prime function of covering the body, it has two other offices—that it creates beauty for the eye, and that it attracts the admiration of your sex. Since marriage until the year 1919—less than twenty years ago—was the only profession open to us, the enormous importance of dress to a woman can hardly be exaggerated. It was to her what clients are to you—dress was her chief, perhaps her only, method of becoming Lord Chancellor. But your dress in its immense elaboration has obviously another function. It not only covers nakedness, gratifies vanity, and creates pleasure for the eye, but it serves to advertise the social, professional, or intellectual standing of the wearer. If you will excuse the humble illustration, your dress fulfils the same function as the tickets in a grocer’s shop. But, here, instead of saying “This is margarine; this pure butter; this is the finest butter in the market,” it says, “This man is a clever man—he is Master of Arts; this man is a very clever man—he is Doctor of Letters; this man is a most clever man—he is a Member of the Order of Merit.” It is this function—the advertisement function—of your dress that seems to us most singular. In the opinion of St. Paul, such advertisement, at any rate for our sex, was unbecoming and immodest; until a very few years ago we were denied the use of it. And still the tradition, or belief, lingers among us that to express worth of any kind, whether intellectual or moral, by wearing pieces of metal, or ribbon, coloured hoods or gowns, is a barbarity which deserves the ridicule which we bestow upon the rites of savages. A woman who advertised her motherhood by a tuft of horsehair on the left shoulder would scarcely, you will agree, be a venerable object.

But what light does our difference here throw upon the problem before us? What connection is there between the sartorial splendours of the educated man and the photograph of ruined houses and dead bodies? Obviously the connection between dress and war is not far to seek; your finest clothes are those that you wear as soldiers. Since the red and the gold, the brass and the feathers are discarded upon active service, it is plain that their expensive and not, one might suppose, hygienic splendour is invented partly in order to impress the beholder with the majesty of the military office, partly in order through their vanity to induce young men to become soldiers. Here, then, our influence and our difference might have some effect; we, who are forbidden to wear such clothes ourselves, can express the opinion that the wearer is not to us a pleasing or an impressive spectacle. He is on the contrary a ridiculous, a barbarous, a displeasing spectacle. But as the daughters of educated men we can use our influence more effectively in another direction, upon our own class—the class of educated men. For there, in courts and universities, we find the same love of dress. There, too, are velvet and silk, fur and ermine. We can say that for educated men to emphasize their superiority over other people, either in birth or intellect, by dressing differently, or by adding titles before, or letters after their names are acts that rouse competition and jealousy—emotions which, as we need scarcely draw upon biography to prove, nor ask psychology to show, have their share in encouraging a disposition towards war. If then we express the opinion that such distinctions make those who possess them ridiculous and learning contemptible we should do something, indirectly, to discourage the feelings that lead to war. Happily we can now do more than express an opinion; we can refuse all such distinctions and all such uniforms for ourselves. This would be a slight but definite contribution to the problem before us—how to prevent war; and one that a different training and a different tradition puts more easily within our reach than within yours.[◉17]

But our bird’s-eye view of the outside of things is not altogether encouraging. The coloured photograph that we have been looking at presents some remarkable features, it is true; but it serves to remind us that there are many inner and secret chambers that we cannot enter. What real influence can we bring to bear upon law or business, religion or politics—we to whom many doors are still locked, or at best ajar, we who have neither capital nor force behind us? It seems as if our influence must stop short at the surface. When we have expressed an opinion upon the surface we have done all that we can do. It is true that the surface may have some connection with the depths, but if we are to help you to prevent war we must try to penetrate deeper beneath the skin. Let us then look in another direction—in a direction natural to educated men’s daughters, in the direction of education itself.

Here, fortunately, the year, the sacred year 1919, comes to our help. Since that year put it into the power of educated men’s daughters to earn their livings they have at last some real influence upon education. They have money. They have money to subscribe to causes. Honorary treasurers invoke their help. To prove it, here, opportunely, cheek by jowl with your letter, is a letter from one such treasurer asking for money with which to rebuild a women’s college. And when honorary treasurers invoke help, it stands to reason that they can be bargained with. We have the right to say to her, “You shall only have our guinea with which to help you to rebuild your college if you will help this gentleman whose letter also lies before us to prevent war.” We can say to her, “You must educate the young to hate war. You must teach them to feel the inhumanity, the beastliness, the insupportability of war.” But what kind of education shall we bargain for? What sort of education will teach the young to hate war?

That is a question that is difficult enough in itself; and may well seem unanswerable by those who are of Mary Kingsley’s persuasion—those who have had no direct experience of university education themselves. Yet the part that education plays in human life is so important, and the part that it might play in answering your question is so considerable that to shirk any attempt to see how we can influence the young through education against war would be craven. Let us therefore turn from our station on the bridge across the Thames to another bridge over another river, this time in one of the great universities; for both have rivers, and both have bridges, too, for us to stand upon. Once more, how strange it looks, this world of domes and spires, of lecture rooms and laboratories, from our vantage point! How different it looks to us from what it must look to you! To those who behold it from Mary Kingsley’s angle—“being allowed to learn German was all the paid education I ever had”—it may well appear a world so remote, so formidable, so intricate in its ceremonies and traditions that any criticism or comment may well seem futile. Here, too, we marvel at the brilliance of your clothes; here, too, we watch maces erect themselves and processions form, and note with eyes too dazzled to record the differences, let alone to explain them, the subtle distinctions of hats and hoods, of purples and crimsons, of velvet and cloth, of cap and gown. It is a solemn spectacle. The words of Arthur’s song in Pendennis rise to our lips:

Although I enter not,

Yet round about the spot

Sometimes I hover,

And at the sacred gate,

With longing eyes I wait,

Expectant …

and again,

I will not enter there,

To sully your pure prayer

With thoughts unruly.

But suffer me to pace

Round the forbidden place,

Lingering a minute,

Like outcast spirits, who wait

And see through Heaven’s gate

Angels within it.

But, since both you, Sir, and the honorary treasurer of the college rebuilding fund are waiting for answers to your letters we must cease to hang over old bridges humming old songs; we must attempt to deal with the question of education, however imperfectly.

What, then, is this “university education” of which Mary Kingsley’s sisterhood have heard so much and to which they have contributed so painfully? What is this mysterious process that takes about three years to accomplish, costs a round sum in hard cash, and turns the crude and raw human being into the finished product—an educated man or woman? There can be no doubt in the first place of its supreme value. The witness of biography—that witness which any one who can read English can consult on the shelves of any public library—is unanimous upon this point; the value of education is among the greatest of all human values. Biography proves this in two ways. First, there is the fact that the great majority of the men who have ruled England for the past 500 years, who are now ruling England in Parliament and the Civil Service, have received a university education. Second, there is the fact which is even more impressive if you consider what toil, what privation it implies—and of this, too, there is ample proof in biography—the fact of the immense sum of money that has been spent upon education in the past 500 years. The income of Oxford University is £435,656 (1933-4), the income of Cambridge University is £212,000 (1930). In addition to the university income each college has its own separate income, which, judging only from the gifts and bequests announced from time to time in the newspapers, must in some cases be of fabulous proportions.[◉18] If we add further the incomes enjoyed by the great public schools—Eton, Harrow, Winchester, Rugby, to name the largest only—so huge a sum of money is reached that there can be no doubt of the enormous value that human beings place upon education. And the study of biography—the lives of the poor, of the obscure, of the uneducated—proves that they will make any effort, any sacrifice to procure an education at one of the great universities.[◉19]

But perhaps the greatest testimony to the value of education with which biography provides us is the fact that the sisters of educated men not only made the sacrifices of comfort and pleasure, which were needed in order to educate their brothers, but actually desired to be educated themselves. When we consider the ruling of the Church on this subject, a ruling which we learn from biography was in force only a few years ago—“… I was told that desire for learning in women was against the will of God, …”[◉20]—we must allow that their desire must have been strong. And if we reflect that all the professions for which a university education fitted her brothers were closed to her, her belief in the value of education must appear still stronger, since she must have believed in education for itself. And if we reflect further that the one profession that was open to her—marriage—was held to need no education, and indeed was of such a nature that education unfitted women to practise it, then it would have been no surprise to find that she had renounced any wish or attempt to be educated herself, but had contented herself with providing education for her brothers—the vast majority of women, the nameless, the poor, by cutting down household expenses; the minute minority, the titled, the rich, by founding or endowing colleges for men. This indeed they did. But so innate in human nature is the desire for education that you will find, if you consult biography, that the same desire, in spite of all the impediments that tradition, poverty and ridicule could put in its way, existed too among women. To prove this let us examine one life only—the life of Mary Astell.[◉21] Little is known about her, but enough to show that almost 250 years ago this obstinate and perhaps irreligious desire was alive in her; she actually proposed to found a college for women. What is almost as remarkable, the Princess Ann was ready to give her £10,000—a very considerable sum then, and, indeed, now, for any woman to have at her disposal—towards the expenses. And then—then we meet with a fact which is of extreme interest, both historically and psychologically: the Church intervened. Bishop Burnet was of opinion that to educate the sisters of educated men would be to encourage the wrong branch, that is to say, the Roman Catholic branch, of the Christian faith. The money went elsewhere; the college was never founded.

But these facts, as facts so often do, prove double-faced; for though they establish the value of education, they also prove that education is by no means a positive value; it is not good in all circumstances, and good for all people; it is only good for some people and for some purposes. It is good if it produces a belief in the Church of England; bad if it produces a belief in the Church of Rome; it is good for one sex and for some professions, but bad for another sex and for another profession.

Such at least would seem to be the answer of biography—the oracle is not dumb, but it is dubious. As, however, it is of great importance that we should use our influence through education to affect the young against war we must not be baffled by the evasions of biography or seduced by its charm. We must try to see what kind of education an educated man’s sister receives at present, in order that we may do our utmost to use our influence in the universities where it properly belongs, and where it will have most chance of penetrating beneath the skin. Now happily we need no longer depend upon biography, which inevitably, since it is concerned with the private life, bristles with innumerable conflicts of private opinion. We have now to help us that record of the public life which is history. Even outsiders can consult the annals of those public bodies which record not the day-to-day opinions of private people, but use a larger accent and convey through the mouths of Parliaments and Senates the considered opinions of bodies of educated men.

History at once informs us that there are now, and have been since about 1870, colleges for the sisters of educated men both at Oxford and at Cambridge. But history also informs us of facts of such a nature about those colleges that all attempt to influence the young against war through the education they receive there must be abandoned. In face of them it is mere waste of time and breath to talk of “influencing the young”; useless to lay down terms, before allowing the honorary treasurer to have her guinea; better to take the first train to London than to haunt the sacred gates. But, you will interpose, what are these facts? these historical but deplorable facts? Therefore let us place them before you, warning you that they are taken only from such records as are available to an outsider and from the annals of the university which is not your own—Cambridge. Your judgment, therefore, will be undistorted by loyalty to old ties, or gratitude for benefits received, but it will be impartial and disinterested.

To begin then where we left off: Queen Anne died and Bishop Burnet died and Mary Astell died; but the desire to found a college for her own sex did not die. Indeed, it became stronger and stronger. By the middle of the nineteenth century it became so strong that a house was taken at Cambridge to lodge the students. It was not a nice house; it was a house without a garden in the middle of a noisy street. Then a second house was taken, a better house this time, though it is true that the water rushed through the dining-room in stormy weather and there was no playground. But that house was not sufficient; the desire for education was so urgent that more rooms were needed, a garden to walk in, a playground to play in. Therefore another house was needed. Now history tells us that in order to build this house, money was needed. You will not question that fact but you may well question the next—that the money was borrowed. It will seem to you more probable that the money was given. The other colleges, you will say, were rich; all derived their incomes indirectly, some directly, from their sisters. There is Gray’s Ode to prove it. And you will quote the song with which he hails the benefactors: the Countess of Pembroke who founded Pembroke; the Countess of Clare who founded Clare; Margaret of Anjou who founded Queens’; the Countess of Richmond and Derby who founded St. John’s and Christ’s.

What is grandeur, what is power?

Heavier toil, superior pain.

What the bright reward we gain?

The grateful memory of the good.

Sweet is the breath of vernal shower,

The bee’s collected treasures sweet,

Sweet music’s melting fall, but sweeter yet

The still small voice of gratitude.[◉22]

Here, you will say in sober prose, was an opportunity to repay the debt. For what sum was needed? A beggarly £10,000—the very sum that the bishop intercepted about two centuries previously. That £10,000 surely was disgorged by the Church that had swallowed it? But churches do not easily disgorge what they have swallowed. Then the colleges, you will say, which had benefited, they must have given it gladly in memory of their noble benefactresses? What could £10,000 mean to St. John’s, or Clare, or Christ’s? And the land belonged to St. John’s. But the land, history says, was leased; and the £10,000 was not given; it was collected laboriously from private purses. Among them one lady must be for ever remembered because she gave £1,000; and Anon. must receive whatever thanks Anon. will consent to receive, because she gave sums ranging from £20 to £100. And another lady was able, owing to a legacy from her mother, to give her services as mistress without salary. And the students themselves subscribed—so far as students can—by making beds and washing dishes, by forgoing amenities and living on simple fare. Ten thousand pounds is not at all a beggarly sum when it has to be collected from the purses of the poor, from the bodies of the young. It takes time, energy, brains, to collect it; sacrifice to give it. Of course, several educated men were very kind; they lectured to their sisters; others were not so kind; they refused to lecture to their sisters. Some educated men were very kind and encouraged their sisters; others were not so kind, they discouraged their sisters.[◉23] Nevertheless, by hook or by crook, the day came at last, history tells us, when somebody passed an examination. And then the mistresses, principals or whatever they called themselves—for the title that should be worn by a woman who will not take a salary must be a matter of doubt—asked the Chancellors and the Masters about whose titles there need be no doubt, at any rate upon that score, whether the girls who had passed examinations might advertise the fact as those gentlemen themselves did by putting letters after their names. This was advisable, because, as the present Master of Trinity, Sir J. J. Thomson, O.M., F.R.S., after poking a little justifiable fun at the “pardonable vanity” of those who put letters after their names, informs us, “the general public who have not taken a degree themselves attach much more importance to B.A. after a person’s name than those who have. Head mistresses of schools therefore prefer a belettered staff, so that students of Newnham and Girton, since they could not put B.A. after their names, were at a disadvantage in obtaining appointments.” And in Heaven’s name, we may both ask, what conceivable reason could there be for preventing them from putting the letters B.A. after their names if it helped them to obtain appointments? To that question history supplies no answer; we must look for it in psychology, in biography; but history supplies us with the fact. “The proposal, however,” the Master of Trinity continues—the proposal, that is, that those who had passed examinations might call themselves B.A.—“met with the most determined opposition…. On the day of the voting there was a great influx of non-residents and the proposal was thrown out by the crushing majority of 1707 to 661. I believe the number of voters has never been equalled…. The behaviour of some of the undergraduates after the poll was declared in the Senate House was exceptionally deplorable and disgraceful. A large band of them left the Senate House, proceeded to Newnham and damaged the bronze gates which had been put up as a memorial to Miss Clough, the first Principal.”[◉24]

Is that not enough? Need we collect more facts from history and biography to prove our statement that all attempt to influence the young against war through the education they receive at the universities must be abandoned? For do they not prove that education, the finest education in the world, does not teach people to hate force, but to use it? Do they not prove that education, far from teaching the educated generosity and magnanimity, makes them on the contrary so anxious to keep their possessions, that “grandeur and power” of which the poet speaks, in their own hands, that they will use not force but much subtler methods than force when they are asked to share them? And are not force and possessiveness very closely connected with war? Of what use then is a university education in influencing people to prevent war? But history goes on of course; year succeeds to year. The years change things; slightly but imperceptibly they change them. And history tells us that at last, after spending time and strength whose value is immeasurable in repeatedly soliciting the authorities with the humility expected of our sex and proper to suppliants the right to impress head mistresses by putting the letters B.A. after the name was granted. But that right, history tells us, was only a titular right. At Cambridge, in the year 1937, the women’s colleges—you will scarcely believe it, Sir, but once more it is the voice of fact that is speaking, not of fiction—the women’s colleges are not allowed to be members of the university;[◉25] and the number of educated men’s daughters who are allowed to receive a university education is still strictly limited; though both sexes contribute to the university funds.[◉26] As for poverty, The Times newspaper supplies us with figures; any ironmonger will provide us with a foot-rule; if we measure the money available for scholarships at the men’s colleges with the money available for their sisters at the women’s colleges, we shall save ourselves the trouble of adding up; and come to the conclusion that the colleges for the sisters of educated men are, compared with their brothers’ colleges, unbelievably and shamefully poor.[◉27]

Proof of that last fact comes pat to hand in the honorary treasurer’s letter, asking for money with which to rebuild her college. She has been asking for some time; she is still asking, it seems. But there is nothing, after what has been said above, that need puzzle us, either in the fact that she is poor, or in the fact that her college needs rebuilding. What is puzzling, and has become still more puzzling, in view of the facts given above, is this: What answer ought we to make her when she asks us to help her to rebuild her college? History, biography, and the daily paper between them make it difficult either to answer her letter or to dictate terms. For between them they have raised many questions. In the first place, what reason is there to think that a university education makes the educated against war? Again, if we help an educated man’s daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not about education but about war?—not how she can learn, but how she can fight in order that she may win the same advantages as her brothers? Further, since the daughters of educated men are not members of Cambridge University they have no say in that education, therefore how can they alter that education, even if we ask them to? And then, of course, other questions arise—questions of a practical nature, which will easily be understood by a busy man, an honorary treasurer, like yourself, Sir. You will be the first to agree that to ask people who are so largely occupied in raising funds with which to rebuild a college to consider the nature of education and what effect it can have upon war is to heap another straw upon an already overburdened back. From an outsider, moreover, who has no right to speak, such a request may well deserve, and perhaps receive, a reply too forcible to be quoted. But we have sworn that we will do all we can to help you to prevent war by using our influence—our earned money influence. And education is the obvious way. Since she is poor, since she is asking for money, and since the giver of money is entitled to dictate terms, let us risk it and draft a letter to her, laying down the terms upon which she shall have our money to help to rebuild her college. Here, then, is an attempt:

A General

Heralds and A University Procession

“Your letter, Madam, has been waiting some time without an answer. But certain doubts and questions have arisen. May we put them to you, ignorantly as an outsider must, but frankly as an outsider should when asked to contribute money? You say, then, that you are asking for £100,000 with which to rebuild your college. But how can you be so foolish? Or are you so secluded among the nightingales and the willows, or so busy with profound questions of caps and gowns, and which is to walk first into the Provost’s drawing-room—the Master’s pug or the Mistress’s pom—that you have no time to read the daily papers? Or are you so harassed with the problem of drawing £100,000 gracefully from an indifferent public that you can only think of appeals and committees, bazaars and ices, strawberries and cream?

“Let us then inform you: we are spending three hundred millions annually upon the army and navy; for, according to a letter that lies cheek by jowl with your own, there is grave danger of war. How then can you seriously ask us to provide you with money with which to rebuild your college? If you reply that the college was built on the cheap, and that the college needs rebuilding, that may be true. But when you go on to say that the public is generous, and that the public is still capable of providing large sums for rebuilding colleges, let us draw your attention to a significant passage in the Master of Trinity’s memoirs. It is this: ‘Fortunately, however, soon after the beginning of this century the University began to receive a succession of very handsome bequests and donations, and these, aided by a liberal grant from the Government, have put the finances of the University in such a good position that it has been quite unnecessary to ask for any increase in the contribution from the Colleges. The income of the University from all sources has increased from about £60,000 in 1900 to £212,000 in 1930. It is not a very wild hypothesis to suppose that this has been to a large extent due to the important and very interesting discoveries which have been made in the University, and Cambridge may be quoted as an example of the practical results which come from Research for its own sake.’

“Consider only that last sentence. ‘… Cambridge may be quoted as an example of the practical results which come from Research for its own sake.’ What has your college done to stimulate great manufacturers to endow it? Have you taken a leading part in the invention of the implements of war? How far have your students succeeded in business as capitalists? How then can you expect “very handsome bequests and donations” to come your way? Again, are you a member of Cambridge University? You are not. How then can you fairly ask for any say in their distribution? You can not. Therefore, Madam, it is plain that you must stand at the door, cap in hand, giving parties, spending your strength and your time in soliciting subscriptions. That is plain. But it is also plain that outsiders who find you thus occupied must ask themselves, when they receive a request for a contribution towards rebuilding your college, Shall I send it or shan’t I? If I send it, what shall I ask them to do with it? Shall I ask them to rebuild the college on the old lines? Or shall I ask them to rebuild it, but differently? Or shall I ask them to buy rags and petrol and Bryant & May’s matches and burn the college to the ground?

“These are the questions, Madam, that have kept your letter so long unanswered. They are questions of great difficulty and perhaps they are useless questions. But can we leave them unasked in view of this gentleman’s questions? He is asking us how can we help him to prevent war? He is asking us how can we help him to defend liberty; to defend culture? Also consider these photographs: they are pictures of dead bodies and ruined houses. Surely in view of these questions and pictures you must consider very carefully before you begin to rebuild your college what is the aim of education, what kind of society, what kind of human being it should seek to produce. At any rate I will only send you a guinea with which to rebuild your college if you can satisfy me that you will use it to produce the kind of society, the kind of people that will help to prevent war.

“Let us then discuss as quickly as we can the sort of education that is needed. Now since history and biography—the only evidence available to an outsider—seem to prove that the old education of the old colleges breeds neither a particular respect for liberty nor a particular hatred of war it is clear that you must rebuild your college differently. It is young and poor; let it therefore take advantage of those qualities and be founded on poverty and youth. Obviously, then, it must be an experimental college, an adventurous college. Let it be built on lines of its own. It must be built not of carved stone and stained glass, but of some cheap, easily combustible material which does not hoard dust and perpetrate traditions. Do not have chapels.[◉28] Do not have museums and libraries with chained books and first editions under glass cases. Let the pictures and the books be new and always changing. Let it be decorated afresh by each generation with their own hands cheaply. The work of the living is cheap; often they will give it for the sake of being allowed to do it. Next, what should be taught in the new college, the poor college? Not the arts of dominating other people; not the arts of ruling, of killing, of acquiring land and capital. They require too many overhead expenses; salaries and uniforms and ceremonies. The poor college must teach only the arts that can be taught cheaply and practised by poor people; such as medicine, mathematics, music, painting and literature. It should teach the arts of human intercourse; the art of understanding other people’s lives and minds, and the little arts of talk, of dress, of cookery that are allied with them. The aim of the new college, the cheap college, should be not to segregate and specialize, but to combine. It should explore the ways in which mind and body can be made to cooperate; discover what new combinations make good wholes in human life. The teachers should be drawn from the good livers as well as from the good thinkers. There should be no difficulty in attracting them. For there would be none of the barriers of wealth and ceremony, of advertisement and competition which now make the old and rich universities such uneasy dwelling-places—cities of strife, cities where this is locked up and that is chained down; where nobody can walk freely or talk freely for fear of transgressing some chalk mark, of displeasing some dignitary. But if the college were poor it would have nothing to offer; competition would be abolished. Life would be open and easy. People who love learning for itself would gladly come there. Musicians, painters, writers, would teach there, because they would learn. What could be of greater help to a writer than to discuss the art of writing with people who were thinking not of examinations or degrees or of what honour or profit they could make literature give them but of the art itself?

“And so with the other arts and artists. They would come to the poor college and practise their arts there because it would be a place where society was free; not parcelled out into the miserable distinctions of rich and poor, of clever and stupid; but where all the different degrees and kinds of mind, body and soul merit co-operated. Let us then found this new college; this poor college; in which learning is sought for itself; where advertisement is abolished; and there are no degrees; and lectures are not given, and sermons are not preached, and the old poisoned vanities and parades which breed competition and jealousy …”

The letter broke off there. It was not from lack of things to say; the peroration indeed was only just beginning. It was because the face on the other side of the page—the face that a letter-writer always sees—appeared to be fixed with a certain melancholy, upon a passage in the book from which quotation has already been made. “Head mistresses of schools therefore prefer a belettered staff, so that students of Newnham and Girton, since they could not put B.A. after their name, were at a disadvantage in obtaining appointments.” The honorary treasurer of the Rebuilding Fund had her eyes fixed on that. “What is the use of thinking how a college can be different,” she seemed to say, “when it must be a place where students are taught to obtain appointments?” “Dream your dreams,” she seemed to add, turning, rather wearily, to the table which she was arranging for some festival, a bazaar presumably, “but we have to face realities.”

That then was the “reality” on which her eyes were fixed; students must be taught to earn their livings. And since that reality meant that she must rebuild her college on the same lines as the others, it followed that the college for the daughters of educated men must also make Research produce practical results which will induce bequests and donations from rich men; it must encourage competition; it must accept degrees and coloured hoods; it must accumulate great wealth; it must exclude other people from a share of its wealth; and, therefore, in 500 years or so, that college, too, must ask the same question that you, Sir, are asking now: “How in your opinion are we to prevent war?”

An undesirable result that seemed; why then subscribe a guinea to procure it? That question at any rate was answered. No guinea of earned money should go to rebuilding the college on the old plan; just as certainly none could be spent upon building a college upon a new plan; therefore the guinea should be earmarked “Rags. Petrol. Matches”. And this note should be attached to it. “Take this guinea and with it burn the college to the ground. Set fire to the old hypocrisies. Let the light of the burning building scare the nightingales and incarnadine the willows. And let the daughters of educated men dance round the fire and heap armful upon armful of dead leaves upon the flames. And let their mothers lean from the upper windows and cry ‘Let it blaze! Let it blaze! For we have done with this “education”’!”

That passage, Sir, is not empty rhetoric, for it is based upon the respectable opinion of the late head master of Eton, the present Dean of Durham.[◉29] Nevertheless, there is something hollow about it, as is shown by a moment’s conflict with fact. We have said that the only influence which the daughters of educated men can at present exert against war is the disinterested influence that they possess through earning their livings. If there were no means of training them to earn their livings, there would be an end of that influence. They could not obtain appointments. If they could not obtain appointments they would again be dependent upon their fathers and brothers; and if they were again dependent upon their fathers and brothers they would again be consciously and unconsciously in favour of war. History would seem to put that beyond doubt. Therefore we must send a guinea to the honorary treasurer of the college rebuilding fund, and let her do what she can with it. It is useless as things are to attach conditions as to the way in which that guinea is to be spent.

Such then is the rather lame and depressing answer to our question whether we can ask the authorities of the colleges for the daughters of educated men to use their influence through education to prevent war. It appears that we can ask them to do nothing; they must follow the old road to the old end; our own influence as outsiders can only be of the most indirect sort. If we are asked to teach, we can examine very carefully into the aim of such teaching, and refuse to teach any art or science that encourages war. Further, we can pour mild scorn upon chapels, upon degrees, and upon the value of examinations. We can intimate that a prize poem can still have merit in spite of the fact that it has won a prize; and maintain that a book may still be worth reading in spite of the fact that its author took a first class with honours in the English tripos. If we are asked to lecture we can refuse to bolster up the vain and vicious system of lecturing by refusing to lecture.[◉30] And, of course, if we are offered offices and honours for ourselves we can refuse them—how, indeed, in view of the facts, could we possibly do otherwise? But there is no blinking the fact that in the present state of things the most effective way in which we can help you through education to prevent war is to subscribe as generously as possible to the colleges for the daughters of educated men. For, to repeat, if those daughters are not going to be educated they are not going to earn their livings; if they are not going to earn their livings, they are going once more to be restricted to the education of the private house; and if they are going to be restricted to the education of the private house they are going, once more, to exert all their influence both consciously and unconsciously in favour of war. Of that there can be little doubt. Should you doubt it, should you ask proof, let us once more consult biography. Its testimony upon this point is so conclusive, but so voluminous, that we must try to condense many volumes into one story. Here, then, is the narrative of the life of an educated man’s daughter who was dependent upon father and brother in the private house of the nineteenth century.

The day was hot, but she could not go out. “How many a long dull summer’s day have I passed immured indoors because there was no room for me in the family carriage and no lady’s maid who had time to walk out with me.” The sun set; and out she went at last, dressed as well as could be managed upon an allowance of from £40 to £100 a year.[◉31] But “to any sort of entertainment she must be accompanied by father or mother or by some married woman.” Whom did she meet at those entertainments thus dressed, thus accompanied? Educated men—“cabinet ministers, ambassadors, famous soldiers and the like, all splendidly dressed, wearing decorations.” What did they talk about? Whatever refreshed the minds of busy men who wanted to forget their own work—“the gossip of the dancing world” did very well. The days passed. Saturday came. On Saturday “M.P.s and other busy men had leisure to enjoy society”; they came to tea and they came to dinner. Next day was Sunday. On Sundays “the great majority of us went as a matter of course to morning church.” The seasons changed. It was summer. In the summer they entertained visitors, “mostly relatives” in the country. Now it was winter. In the winter “they studied history and literature and music, and tried to draw and paint. If they did not produce anything remarkable they learnt much in the process.” And so with some visiting the sick and teaching the poor, the years passed. And what was the great end and aim of these years, of that education? Marriage, of course. “… it was not a question of whether we should marry, but simply of whom we should marry,” says one of them. It was with a view to marriage that her mind was taught. It was with a view to marriage that she tinkled on the piano, but was not allowed to join an orchestra; sketched innocent domestic scenes, but was not allowed to study from the nude; read this book, but was not allowed to read that, charmed, and talked. It was with a view to marriage that her body was educated; a maid was provided for her; that the streets were shut to her; that the fields were shut to her; that solitude was denied her—all this was enforced upon her in order that she might preserve her body intact for her husband. In short, the thought of marriage influenced what she said, what she thought, what she did. How could it be otherwise? Marriage was the only profession open to her.[◉32]

The sight is so curious for what it shows of the educated man as well as of his daughter that it is tempting to linger. The influence of the pheasant upon love alone deserves a chapter to itself.[◉33] But we are not asking now the interesting question, what was the effect of that education upon the race? We are asking why did such an education make the person so educated consciously and unconsciously in favour of war? Because consciously, it is obvious, she was forced to use whatever influence she possessed to bolster up the system which provided her with maids; with carriages; with fine clothes; with fine parties—it was by these means that she achieved marriage. Consciously she must use whatever charm or beauty she possessed to flatter and cajole the busy men, the soldiers, the lawyers, the ambassadors, the cabinet ministers who wanted recreation after their day’s work. Consciously she must accept their views, and fall in with their decrees because it was only so that she could wheedle them into giving her the means to marry or marriage itself.[◉34] In short, all her conscious effort must be in favour of what Lady Lovelace called “our splendid Empire” … “the price of which,” she added, “is mainly paid by women.” And who can doubt her, or that the price was heavy?

But her unconscious influence was even more strongly perhaps in favour of war. How else can we explain that amazing outburst in August 1914, when the daughters of educated men who had been educated thus rushed into hospitals, some still attended by their maids, drove lorries, worked in fields and munition factories, and used all their immense stores of charm, of sympathy, to persuade young men that to fight was heroic, and that the wounded in battle deserved all her care and all her praise? The reason lies in that same education. So profound was her unconscious loathing for the education of the private house with its cruelty, its poverty, its hypocrisy, its immorality, its inanity that she would undertake any task however menial, exercise any fascination however fatal that enabled her to escape. Thus consciously she desired “our splendid Empire”; unconsciously she desired our splendid war.

So, Sir, if you want us to help you to prevent war the conclusion seems to be inevitable; we must help to rebuild the college which, imperfect as it may be, is the only alternative to the education of the private house. We must hope that in time that education may be altered. That guinea must be given before we give you the guinea that you ask for your own society. But it is contributing to the same cause—the prevention of war. Guineas are rare; guineas are valuable, but let us send one without any condition attached to the honorary treasurer of the building fund, because by so doing we are making a positive contribution to the prevention of war.

[]

Two.

Now that we have given one guinea towards rebuilding a college we must consider whether there is not more that we can do to help you to prevent war. And it is at once obvious, if what we have said about influence is true, that we must turn to the professions, because if we could persuade those who can earn their livings, and thus actually hold in their hands this new weapon, our only weapon, the weapon of independent opinion based upon independent income, to use that weapon against war, we should do more to help you than by appealing to those who must teach the young to earn their livings; or by lingering, however long, round the forbidden places and sacred gates of the universities where they are thus taught. This, therefore, is a more important question than the other.

Let us then lay your letter asking for help to prevent war, before the independent, the mature, those who are earning their livings in the professions. There is no need of rhetoric; hardly, one would suppose, of argument. “Here is a man,” one has only to say, “whom we all have reason to respect; he tells us that war is possible; perhaps probable; he asks us, who can earn our livings, to help him in any way we can to prevent war.” That surely will be enough without pointing to the photographs that are all this time piling up on the table—photographs of more dead bodies, of more ruined houses, to call forth an answer, and an answer that will give you, Sir, the very help that you require. But … it seems that there is some hesitation, some doubt—not certainly that war is horrible, that war is beastly, that war is insupportable and that war is inhuman, as Wilfred Owen said, or that we wish to do all we can to help you to prevent war. Nevertheless, doubts and hesitations there are; and the quickest way to understand them is to place before you another letter, a letter as genuine as your own, a letter that happens to lie beside it on the table.[◉1]

It is a letter from another honorary treasurer, and it is again asking for money. “Will you,” she writes, “send a subscription to” [a society to help the daughters of educated men to obtain employment in the professions] “in order to help us to earn our livings? Failing money,” she goes on, “any gift will be acceptable—books, fruit or cast-off clothing that can be sold in a bazaar.” Now that letter has so much bearing upon the doubts and hesitations referred to above, and upon the help we can give you, that it seems impossible either to send her a guinea or to send you a guinea until we have considered the questions which it raises.

The first question is obviously, Why is she asking for money? Why is she so poor, this representative of professional women, that she must beg for cast-off clothing for a bazaar? That is the first point to clear up, because if she is as poor as this letter indicates, then the weapon of independent opinion upon which we have been counting to help you to prevent war is not, to put it mildly, a very powerful weapon. On the other hand, poverty has its advantages; for if she is poor, as poor as she pretends to be, then we can bargain with her, as we bargained with her sister at Cambridge, and exercise the right of potential givers to impose terms. Let us then question her about her financial position and certain other facts before we give her a guinea, or lay down the terms upon which she is to have it. Here is the draft of such a letter:

“Accept a thousand apologies, Madam, for keeping you waiting so long for an answer to your letter. The fact is, certain questions have arisen, to which we must ask you to reply before we send you a subscription. In the first place you are asking for money—money with which to pay your rent. But how can it be, how can it possibly be, my dear Madam, that you are so terribly poor? The professions have been open to the daughters of educated men for almost 20 years. Therefore, how can it be, that you, whom we take to be their representative, are standing, like your sister at Cambridge, hat in hand, pleading for money, or failing money, for fruit, books, or cast-off clothing to sell at a bazaar? How can it be, we repeat? Surely there must be some very grave defect, of common humanity, of common justice, or of common sense. Or can it simply be that you are pulling a long face and telling a tall story like the beggar at the street corner who has a stocking full of guineas safely hoarded under her bed at home? In any case, this perpetual asking for money and pleading of poverty is laying you open to very grave rebukes, not only from indolent outsiders who dislike thinking about practical affairs almost as much as they dislike signing cheques, but from educated men. You are drawing upon yourselves the censure and contempt of men of established reputation as philosophers and novelists—of men like Mr. Joad and Mr. Wells. Not only do they deny your poverty, but they accuse you of apathy and indifference. Let me draw your attention to the charges that they bring against you. Listen, in the first place, to what Mr. C. E. M. Joad has to say of you. He says: “I doubt whether at any time during the last fifty years young women have been more politically apathetic, more socially indifferent than at the present time.” That is how he begins. And he goes on to say, very rightly, that it is not his business to tell you what you ought to do; but he adds, very kindly, that he will give you an example of what you might do. You might imitate your sisters in America. You might found “a society for the advertisement of peace.” He gives an example. This society explained, “I know not with what truth, that the number of pounds spent by the world on armaments in the current year was exactly equal to the number of minutes (or was it seconds?) which had elapsed since the death of Christ, who taught that war is unchristian….” Now why should not you, too, follow their example and create such a society in England? It would need money, of course; but—and this is the point that I wish particularly to emphasize—there can be no doubt that you have the money. Mr. Joad provides the proof. “Before the war money poured into the coffers of the W.S.P.U. in order that women might win the vote which, it was hoped, would enable them to make war a thing of the past. The vote is won,” Mr. Joad continues, “but war is very far from being a thing of the past.” That I can corroborate myself—witness this letter from a gentleman asking for help to prevent war, and there are certain photographs of dead bodies and ruined houses—but let Mr. Joad continue. “Is it unreasonable,” he goes on, “to ask that contemporary women should be prepared to give as much energy and money, to suffer as much obloquy and insult in the cause of peace, as their mothers gave and suffered in the cause of equality?” And again, I cannot help but echo, is it unreasonable to ask women to go on, from generation to generation, suffering obloquy and insult first from their brothers and then for their brothers? Is it not both perfectly reasonable and on the whole for their physical, moral and spiritual welfare? But let us not interrupt Mr. Joad. “If is [it] is, then the sooner they give up the pretence of playing with public affairs and return to private life the better. If they cannot make a job of the House of Commons, let them at least make something of their own houses. If they cannot learn to save men from the destruction which incurable male mischievousness bids fair to bring upon them, let women at least learn to feed them, before they destroy themselves.”[◉2] Let us not pause to ask how even with a vote they can cure what Mr. Joad himself admits to be incurable, for the point is how, in the face of that statement, you have the effrontery to ask me for a guinea towards your rent? According to Mr. Joad you are not only extremely rich; you are also extremely idle; and so given over to the eating of peanuts and ice cream that you have not learnt how to cook him a dinner before he destroys himself, let alone how to prevent that fatal act. But more serious charges are to follow. Your lethargy is such that you will not fight even to protect the freedom which your mothers won for you. That charge is made against you by the most famous of living English novelists—Mr. H. G. Wells. Mr. H. G. Wells says, “There has been no perceptible woman’s movement to resist the practical obliteration of their freedom by Fascists or Nazis.”[◉3] Rich, idle, greedy and lethargic as you are, how have you the effrontery to ask me to subscribe to a society which helps the daughters of educated men to make their livings in the professions? For as these gentlemen prove in spite of the vote and the wealth which that vote must have brought with it, you have not ended war; in spite of the vote and the power which that vote must have brought with it, you have not resisted the practical obliteration of your freedom by Fascists or Nazis. What other conclusion then can one come to but that the whole of what was called “the woman’s movement” has proved itself a failure; and the guinea which I am sending you herewith is to be devoted not to paying your rent but to burning your building. And when that is burnt, retire once more to the kitchen, Madam, and learn, if you can, to cook the dinner which you may not share….”[◉4]

There, Sir, the letter stopped; for on the face at the other side of the letter—the face that a letter-writer always sees—was an expression, of boredom was it, or was it of fatigue? The honorary treasurer’s glance seemed to rest upon a little scrap of paper upon which were written two dull little facts which, since they have some bearing upon the question we are discussing, how the daughters of educated men who are earning their livings in the professions can help you to prevent war, may be copied here. The first fact was that the income of the W.S.P.U. upon which Mr. Joad has based his estimate of their wealth was (in the year 1912 at the height of their activity) £42,000.[◉5] The second fact was that: “To earn £250 a year is quite an achievement even for a highly qualified woman with years of experience.”[◉6] The date of that statement is 1934.

Both facts are interesting; and since both have a direct bearing upon the question before us, let us examine them. To take the first fact first—that is interesting because it shows that one of the greatest political changes of our times was accomplished upon the incredibly minute income of £42,000 a year. “Incredibly minute” is, of course, a comparative term; it is incredibly minute, that is to say, compared with the income which the Conservative party, or the Liberal party—the parties to which the educated woman’s brother belonged—had at their disposal for their political causes. It is considerably less than the income which the Labour party—the party to which the working woman’s brother belongs—has at their disposal.[◉7] It is incredibly minute compared with the sums that a society like the Society for the Abolition of Slavery for example had at its disposal for the abolition of that slavery. It is incredibly minute compared with the sums which the educated man spends annually, not upon political causes, but upon sports and pleasure. But our amazement, whether at the poverty of educated men’s daughters or at their economy, is a decidedly unpleasant emotion in this case, for it forces us to suspect that the honorary treasurer is telling the sober truth; she is poor; and it forces us to ask once more how, if £42,000 was all that the daughters of educated men could collect after many years of indefatigable labour for their own cause, they can help you to win yours? How much peace will £42,000 a year buy at the present moment when we are spending £300,000,000 annually upon arms?

But the second fact is the more startling and the more depressing of the two—the fact that now, almost 20 years, that is, after they have been admitted to the money-making professions “to earn £250 a year is quite an achievement even for a highly qualified woman with years of experience.” Indeed, that fact, if it is a fact, is so startling and has so much bearing upon the question before us that we must pause for a moment to examine it. It is so important that it must be examined, moreover, by the white light of facts, not by the coloured light of biography. Let us have recourse then to some impersonal and impartial authority who has no more axe to grind or dinner to cook than Cleopatra’s needle—Whitaker’s Almanack, for example.

Whitaker, needless to say, is not only one of the most dispassionate of authors, but one of the most methodical. There, in his Almanack he has collected all the facts about all, or almost all, of the professions that have been opened to the daughters of educated men. In a section called “Government and Public Offices” he provides us with a plain statement of whom the Government employs professionally, and of what the Government pays those whom it employs. Since Whitaker adopts the alphabetical system, let us follow his lead and examine the first six letters of the alphabet. Under A there are the Admiralty, the Air Ministry, and Ministry of Agriculture. Under B there is the British Broadcasting Corporation; under C the Colonial Office and the Charity Commissioners; under D the Dominions Office and Development Commission; under E there are the Ecclesiastical Commissioners and the Board of Education; and so we come to the sixth letter F under which we find the Ministry of Fisheries, the Foreign Office, the Friendly Societies and the Fine Arts. These then are some of the professions which are now, as we are frequently reminded, open to both men and women equally. And the salaries paid to those employed in them come out of public money which is supplied by both sexes equally. And the income tax which supplies those salaries (among other things) now stands at about five shillings in the pound. We have all, therefore, an interest in asking how that money is spent, and upon whom. Let us look at the salary list of the Board of Education, since that is the class to which we both, Sir, though in very different degrees, have the honour to belong. The President, Whitaker says, of the Board of Education, gets £2,000; his principal Private Secretary gets from £847 to £1,058; his Assistant Private Secretary gets from £277 to £634. Then there is the Permanent Secretary of the Board of Education. He gets £3,000; his Private Secretary gets from £277 to £634. The Parliamentary Secretary gets £1,200; his Private Secretary gets from £277 to £634. The Deputy Secretary gets £2,200. The Permanent Secretary of the Welsh Department gets £1,650. And then there are Principal Assistant Secretaries and Assistant Secretaries, there are Directors of Establishments, Accountants-General, principal Finance Officers, Finance Officers, Legal Advisers, Assistant Legal Advisers—all these ladies and gentlemen, the impeccable and impartial Whitaker informs us, get incomes which run into four figures or over. Now an income which is over or about a thousand a year is a nice round sum when it is paid yearly and paid punctually; but when we consider that the work is a whole-time job and a skilled job we shall not grudge these ladies and gentlemen their salaries, even though our income tax does stand at five shillings in the pound, and our incomes are by no means paid punctually or paid annually. Men and women who spend every day and all day in an office from the age of about 23 to the age of 60 or so deserve every penny they get. Only, the reflection will intrude itself, if these ladies are drawing £1,000, £2,000 and £3,000 a year, not only in the Board of Education, but in all the other boards and offices which are now open to them, from the Admiralty at the beginning of the alphabet to the Board of Works at the end, the statement that “£250 is quite an achievement, even for a highly qualified woman with years of experience” must be, to put it plainly, an unmitigated lie. Why, we have only to walk down Whitehall; consider how many boards and offices are housed there; reflect that each is staffed and officered by a flock of secretaries and under-secretaries so many and so nicely graded that their very names make our heads spin; and remember that each has his or her own sufficient salary, to exclaim that the statement is impossible, inexplicable. How can we explain it? Only by putting on a stronger pair of glasses. Let us read down the list, further and further and further down. At last we come to a name to which the prefix “Miss” is attached. Can it be that all the names on top of hers, all the names to which the big salaries are attached, are the names of gentlemen? It seems so. So then it is not the salaries that are lacking; it is the daughters of educated men.

Now three good reasons for this curious deficiency or disparity lie upon the surface. Dr. Robson supplies us with the first—“The Administrative Class, which occupies all the controlling positions in the Home Civil Service, consists to an overwhelming extent of the fortunate few who can manage to get to Oxford and Cambridge; and the entrance examination has always been expressly designed for that purpose.”[◉8] The fortunate few in our class, the daughters of educated men class, are very, very few. Oxford and Cambridge, as we have seen, strictly limit the number of educated men’s daughters who are allowed to receive a university education. Secondly, many more daughters stay at home to look after old mothers than sons stay at home to look after old fathers. The private house, we must remember, is still a going concern. Hence fewer daughters than sons enter for the Civil Service Examination. In the third place, we may fairly assume that 60 years of examination passing are not so effective as 500. The Civil Service Examination is a stiff one; we may reasonably expect more sons to pass it than daughters. We have nevertheless to explain the curious fact that though a certain number of daughters enter for the examination and pass the examination those to whose names the word “Miss” is attached do not seem to enter the four-figure zone. The sex distinction seems, according to Whitaker, possessed of a curious leaden quality, liable to keep any name to which it is fastened circling in the lower spheres. Plainly the reason for this may lie not upon the surface, but within. It may be, to speak bluntly, that the daughters are in themselves deficient; that they have proved themselves untrustworthy; unsatisfactory; so lacking in the necessary ability that it is to the public interest to keep them to the lower grades where, if they are paid less, they have less chance of impeding the transaction of public business. This solution would be easy but, unfortunately, it is denied to us. It is denied to us by the Prime Minister himself. Women in the Civil Services are not untrustworthy, Mr. Baldwin [*] informed us the other day. “Many of them,” he said, “are in positions in the course of their daily work to amass secret information. Secret information has a way of leaking very often, as we politicians know to our cost. I have never known a case of such a leakage being due to a woman, and I have known cases of leakage coming from men who should have known a great deal better.” So they are not so loose-lipped and fond of gossip as the tradition would have it? A useful contribution in its way to psychology and a hint to novelists; but still there may be other objections to women’s employment as Civil Servants.

Intellectually, they may not be so able as their brothers. But here again the Prime Minister will not help us out. “He was not prepared to say that any conclusion had been formed—or was even necessary—whether women were as good as, or better than, men, but he believed that women had worked in the Civil Service to their own content, and certainly to the complete satisfaction of everybody who had anything to do with them.” Finally, as if to cap what must necessarily be an inconclusive statement by expressing a personal opinion which might rightly be more positive he said, “I should like to pay my personal tribute to the industry, capacity, ability and loyalty of the women I have come across in Civil Service positions.” And he went on to express the hope that business men would make more use of those very valuable qualities.[◉9]

Now if anyone is in a position to know the facts it is the Prime Minister; and if anyone is able to speak the truth about them it is the same gentleman. Yet Mr. Baldwin says one thing; Mr. Whitaker says another. If Mr. Baldwin is well informed, so is Mr. Whitaker. Nevertheless, they contradict each other. The issue is joined; Mr. Baldwin says that women are first-class civil servants; Mr. Whitaker says that they are third-class civil servants. It is, in short, a case of Baldwin v. Whitaker, and since it is a very important case, for upon it depends the answer to many questions which puzzle us, not only about the poverty of educated men’s daughters but about the psychology of educated men’s sons, let us try the case of the Prime Minister v. the Almanack.

For such a trial you, Sir, have definite qualifications; as a barrister you have first-hand knowledge of one profession, and as an educated man second-hand knowledge of many more. And if it is true that the daughters of educated men who are of Mary Kingsley’s persuasion have no direct knowledge, still through fathers and uncles, cousins and brothers they may claim some indirect knowledge of professional life—it is a photograph that they have often looked upon—and this indirect knowledge they can improve, if they have a mind, by peeping through doors, taking notes, and asking questions discreetly. If, then, we pool our first-hand, second-hand, direct and indirect knowledge of the professions with a view to trying the important case of Baldwin v. Whitaker we shall agree at the outset that professions are very queer things. It by no means follows that a clever man gets to the top or that a stupid man stays at the bottom. This rising and falling is by no means a cut-and-dried clear-cut rational process, we shall both agree. After all, as we both have reason to know, Judges are fathers; and Permanent Secretaries have sons. Judges require marshals; Permanent Secretaries, private secretaries. What is more natural than that a nephew should be a marshal or the son of an old school friend a private secretary? To have such perquisites in their gift is as much the due of the public servant as a cigar now and then or a cast-off dress here and there are perquisites of the private servant. But the giving of such perquisites, the exercise of such influence, queers the professions. Success is easier for some, harder for others, however equal the brain power may be, so that some rise unexpectedly; some fall unexpectedly; some remain strangely stationary; with the result that the professions are queered. Often indeed it is the public advantage that they should be queered. Since nobody, from the Master of Trinity downwards (bating, presumably, a few Head Mistresses), believes in the infallibility of examiners, a certain degree of elasticity is to the public advantage; since the impersonal is fallible, it is well that it should be supplemented by the personal. Happily for us all, therefore, we may conclude, a board is not made literally of oak, nor a division of iron. Both boards and divisions transmit human sympathies, and reflect human antipathies with the result that the imperfections of the examination system are rectified; the public interest is served; and the ties of blood and friendship are recognized. Thus it is quite possible that the name “Miss” transmits through the board or division some vibration which is not registered in the examination room. “Miss” transmits sex; and sex may carry with it an aroma. “Miss” may carry with it the swish of petticoats, the savour of scent or other odour perceptible to the nose on the further side of the partition and obnoxious to it. What charms and consoles in the private house may distract and exacerbate in the public office. The Archbishops’ Commission assures us that this is so in the pulpit.[◉10] Whitehall may be equally susceptible. At any rate since Miss is a woman, Miss was not educated at Eton or Christ Church. Since Miss is a woman, Miss is not a son or a nephew. We are hazarding our way among imponderables. We can scarcely proceed too much on tiptoe. We are trying, remember, to discover what flavour attaches itself to sex in a public office; we are sniffing most delicately not facts but savours. And therefore it would be well not to depend on our own private noses, but to call in evidence from outside. Let us turn to the public press and see if we can discover from the opinions aired there any hint that will guide us in our attempt to decide the delicate and difficult question as to the aroma, the atmosphere that surrounds the word “Miss” in Whitehall. We will consult the newspapers.

First:

I think your correspondent … correctly sums up this discussion in the observation that woman has too much liberty. It is probable that this so-called liberty came with the war, when women assumed responsibilities so far unknown to them. They did splendid service during those days. Unfortunately, they were praised and petted out of all proportion to the value of their performances.[◉11]

That does very well for a beginning. But let us proceed:

I am of the opinion that a considerable amount of the distress which is prevalent in this section of the community [the clerical] could be relieved by the policy of employing men instead of women, wherever possible. There are to-day in Government offices, post offices, insurance companies, banks and other offices, thousands of women doing work which men could do. At the same time there are thousands of qualified men, young and middle-aged, who cannot get a job of any sort. There is a large demand for woman labour in the domestic arts, and in the process of re-grading a large number of women who have drifted into clerical service would become available for domestic service.[◉12]

The odour thickens, you will agree.

Then once more:

I am certain I voice the opinion of thousands of young men when I say that if men were doing the work that thousands of young women are now doing the men would be able to keep those same women in decent homes. Homes are the real places of the women who are now compelling men to be idle. It is time the Government insisted upon employers giving work to more men, thus enabling them to marry the women they cannot now approach.[◉13]

There! There can be no doubt of the odour now. The cat is out of the bag; and it is a Tom.

After considering the evidence contained in those three quotations, you will agree that there is good reason to think that the word “Miss,” however delicious its scent in the private house, has a certain odour attached to it in Whitehall which is disagreeable to the noses on the other side of the partition; and that it is likely that a name to which “Miss” is attached will, because of this odour, circle in the lower spheres where the salaries are small rather than mount to the higher spheres where the salaries are substantial. As for “Mrs.”, it is a contaminated word; an obscene word. The less said about that word the better. Such is the smell of it, so rank does it stink in the nostrils of Whitehall, that Whitehall excludes it entirely. In Whitehall as in heaven, there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage.[◉14]

Odour then—or shall we call it “atmosphere”?—is a very important element in professional life; in spite of the fact that like other important elements it is impalpable. It can escape the noses of examiners in examination rooms, yet penetrate boards and divisions and affect the senses of those within. Its bearing upon the case before us is undeniable. For it allows us to decide in the case of Baldwin v. Whitaker that both the Prime Minister and the Almanack are telling the truth. It is true that women civil servants deserve to be paid as much as men; but it is also true that they are not paid as much as men. The discrepancy is due to atmosphere.

Atmosphere plainly is a very mighty power. Atmosphere not only changes the sizes and shapes of things; it affects solid bodies, like salaries, which might have been thought impervious to atmosphere. An epic poem might be written about atmosphere, or a novel in ten or fifteen volumes. But since this is only a letter, and you are pressed for time, let us confine ourselves to the plain statement that atmosphere is one of the most powerful, partly because it is one of the most impalpable, of the enemies with which the daughters of educated men have to fight. If you think that statement exaggerated, look once more at the samples of atmosphere contained in those three quotations. We shall find there not only the reason why the pay of the professional woman is still so small, but something more dangerous, something which, if it spreads, may poison both sexes equally. There, in those quotations, is the egg of the very same worm that we know under other names in other countries. There we have in embryo the creature, Dictator as we call him when he is Italian or German, who believes that he has the right whether given by God, Nature, sex or race is immaterial, to dictate to other human beings how they shall live; what they shall do. Let us quote again: “Homes are the real places of the women who are now compelling men to be idle. It is time the Government insisted upon employers giving work to more men, thus enabling them to marry the women they cannot now approach.” Place beside it another quotation: “There are two worlds in the life of the nation, the world of men and the world of women. Nature has done well to entrust the man with the care of his family and the nation. The woman’s world is her family, her husband, her children, and her home.” One is written in English, the other in German. But where is the difference? Are they not both saying the same thing? Are they not both the voices of Dictators, whether they speak English or German, and are we not all agreed that the dictator when we meet him abroad is a very dangerous as well as a very ugly animal? And he is here among us, raising his ugly head, spitting his poison, small still, curled up like a caterpillar on a leaf, but in the heart of England. Is it not from this egg, to quote Mr. Wells again, that “the practical obliteration of [our] freedom by Fascists or Nazis” will spring? And is not the woman who has to breathe that poison and to fight that insect, secretly and without arms, in her office, fighting the Fascist or the Nazi as surely as those who fight him with arms in the limelight of publicity? And must not that fight wear down her strength and exhaust her spirit? Should we not help her to crush him in our own country before we ask her to help us to crush him abroad? And what right have we, Sir, to trumpet our ideals of freedom and justice to other countries when we can shake out from our most respectable newspapers any day of the week eggs like these?

Here, rightly, you will check what has all the symptoms of becoming a peroration by pointing out that though the opinions expressed in these letters are not altogether agreeable to our national self-esteem they are the natural expression of a fear and a jealousy which we must understand before we condemn them. It is true, you will say, that these gentlemen seem a little unduly concerned with their own salaries and their own security, but that is comprehensible, given the traditions of their sex, and even compatible with a genuine love of freedom and a genuine hatred of dictatorship. For these gentlemen are, or wish to become, husbands and fathers, and in that case the support of the family will depend upon them. In other words, sir, I take you to mean that the world as it is at present is divided into two services; one the public and the other the private. In one world the sons of educated men work as civil servants, judges, soldiers and are paid for that work; in the other world, the daughters of educated men work as wives, mothers, daughters—but are they not paid for that work? Is the work of a mother, of a wife, of a daughter, worth nothing to the nation in solid cash? That fact, if it be a fact, is so astonishing that we must confirm it by appealing once more to the impeccable Whitaker. Let us turn to his pages again. We may turn them, and turn them again. It seems incredible, yet it seems undeniable. Among all those offices there is no such office as a mother’s; among all those salaries there is no such salary as a mother’s. The work of an archbishop is worth £15,000 a year to the State; the work of a judge is worth £5,000 a year; the work of a permanent secretary is worth £3,000 a year; the work of an army captain, of a sea captain, of a sergeant of dragoons, of a policeman, of a postman—all these works are worth paying out of the taxes, but wives and mothers and daughters who work all day and every day, without whose work the State would collapse and fall to pieces, without whose work your sons, sir, would cease to exist, are paid nothing whatever. Can it be possible? Or have we convicted Whitaker, the impeccable, of errata?

Ah, you will interpose, here is another misunderstanding. Husband and wife are not only one flesh; they are also one purse. The wife’s salary is half the husband’s income. The man is paid more than the woman for that very reason—because he has a wife to support. The bachelor then is paid at the same rate as the unmarried woman? It appears not—another queer effect of atmosphere, no doubt; but let it pass. Your statement that the wife’s salary is half the husband’s income seems to be an equitable arrangement, and no doubt, since it is equitable, it is confirmed by law. Your reply that the law leaves these private matters to be decided privately is less satisfactory, for it means that the wife’s half-share of the common income is not paid legally into her hands, but into her husband’s. But still a spiritual right may be as binding as a legal right; and if the wife of an educated man has a spiritual right to half her husband’s income, then we may assume that the wife of an educated man has as much money to spend, once the common household bills are met, upon any cause that appeals to her as her husband. Now her husband, witness Whitaker, witness the wills in the daily paper, is often not merely well paid by his profession, but is master of a very considerable capital sum. Therefore this lady who asserts that £250 a year is all that a woman can earn to-day in the professions is evading the question; for the profession of marriage in the educated class is a highly paid one, since she has a right, a spiritual right, to half her husband’s salary. The puzzle deepens; the mystery thickens. For if the wives of rich men are themselves rich women, how does it come about that the income of the W.S.P.U. was only £42,000 a year; how does it come about that the honorary treasurer of the college rebuilding fund is still asking for £100,000; how does it come about that the treasurer of a society for helping professional women to obtain employment is asking not merely for money to pay her rent but will be grateful for books, fruit or cast-off clothing? It stands to reason that if the wife has a spiritual right to half her husband’s income because her own work as his wife is unpaid, then she must have as much money to spend upon such causes as appeal to her as he has. And since those causes are standing hat in hand a-begging we are forced to conclude that they are causes that do not take the fancy of the educated man’s wife. The charge against her is a very serious one. For consider—there is the money—that surplus fund that can be devoted to education, to pleasure, to philanthropy when the household dues are met; she can spend her share as freely as her husband can spend his. She can spend it upon whatever causes she likes; and yet she will not spend it upon the causes that are dear to her own sex. There they are, hat in hand a-begging. That is a terrible charge to bring against her.

But let us pause for a moment before we decide that charge against her. Let us ask what are the causes, the pleasures, the philanthropies upon which the educated man’s wife does in fact spend her share of the common surplus fund. And here we are confronted with facts which, whether we like them or not, we must face. The fact is that the tastes of the married woman in our class are markedly virile. She spends vast sums annually upon party funds; upon sport; upon grouse moors; upon cricket and football. She lavishes money upon clubs—Brooks’, White’s, the Travellers’, the Reform, the Athenaeum—to mention only the most prominent. Her expenditure upon these causes, pleasures and philanthropies must run into many millions every year. And yet by far the greater part of this sum is spent upon pleasures which she does not share. She lays out thousands and thousands of pounds upon clubs to which her own sex is not admitted;[◉15] upon racecourses where she may not ride; upon colleges from which her own sex is excluded. She pays a huge bill annually for wine which she does not drink and for cigars which she does not smoke. In short, there are only two conclusions to which we can come about the educated man’s wife—the first is that she is the most altruistic of beings who prefers to spend her share of the common fund upon his pleasures and causes; the second, and more probable, if less creditable, is not that she is the most altruistic of beings, but that her spiritual right to a share of half her husband’s income peters out in practice to an actual right to board, lodging and a small annual allowance for pocket money and dress. Either of these conclusions is possible; the evidence of public institutions and subscription lists puts any other out of the question. For consider how nobly the educated man supports his old school, his old college; how splendidly he subscribes to party funds; how munificently he contributes to all those institutions and sports by which he and his sons educate their minds and develop their bodies—the daily papers bear daily witness to those indisputable facts. But the absence of her name from subscription lists, and the poverty of the institutions which educate her mind and her body seem to prove that there is something in the atmosphere of the private house which deflects the wife’s spiritual share of the common income impalpably but irresistibly towards those causes which her husband approves and those pleasures which he enjoys. Whether creditable or discreditable, that is the fact. And that is the reason why those other causes stand a-begging.

With Whitaker’s facts and the facts of the subscription lists before us, we seem to have arrived at three facts which are indisputable and must have great influence upon our enquiry how we can help you to prevent war. The first is that the daughters of educated men are paid very little from the public funds for their public services; the second is that they are paid nothing at all from the public funds for their private services; and the third is that their share of the husband’s income is not a flesh-and-blood share but a spiritual or nominal share, which means that when both are clothed and fed the surplus fund that can be devoted to causes, pleasures or philanthropies gravitates mysteriously but indisputably towards those causes, pleasures and philanthropies which the husband enjoys, and of which the husband approves. It seems that the person to whom the salary is actually paid is the person who has the actual right to decide how that salary shall be spent.

These facts then bring us back in a chastened mood and with rather altered views to our starting point. For we were going, you may remember, to lay your appeal for help in the prevention of war before the women who earn their livings in the professions. It is to them, we said, to whom we must appeal, because it is they who have our new weapon, the influence of an independent opinion based upon an independent income, in their possession. But the facts once more are depressing. They make it clear in the first place that we must rule out, as possible helpers, that large group to whom marriage is a profession, because it is an unpaid profession, and because the spiritual share of half the husband’s salary is not, facts seem to show, an actual share. Therefore, her disinterested influence founded upon an independent income is nil. If he is in favour of force, she too will be in favour of force. In the second place, facts seem to prove that the statement “To earn £250 a year is quite an achievement even for a highly qualified woman with years of experience” is not an unmitigated lie but a highly probable truth. Therefore, the influence which the daughters of educated men have at present from their money-earning power cannot be rated very highly. Yet since it has become more than ever obvious that it is to them that we must look for help, for they alone can help us, it is to them that we must appeal. This conclusion then brings us back to the letter from which we quoted above—the honorary treasurer’s letter, the letter asking for a subscription to the society for helping the daughters of educated men to obtain employment in the professions. You will agree, sir, that we have strong selfish motives for helping her—there can be no doubt about that. For to help women to earn their livings in the professions is to help them to possess that weapon of independent opinion which is still their most powerful weapon. It is to help them to have a mind of their own and a will of their own with which to help you to prevent war. But …—here again, in those dots, doubts and hesitations assert themselves—can we, considering the facts given above, send her our guinea without laying down very stringent terms as to how that guinea shall be spent?

For the facts which we have discovered in checking her statement as to her financial position have raised questions which make us wonder whether we are wise to encourage people to enter the professions if we wish to prevent war. You will remember that we are using our psychological insight (for that is our only qualification) to decide what kind of qualities in human nature are likely to lead to war. And the facts disclosed above are of a kind to make us ask, before we write our cheque, whether if we encourage the daughters of educated men to enter the professions we shall not be encouraging the very qualities that we wish to prevent? Shall we not be doing our guinea’s worth to ensure that in two or three centuries not only the educated men in the professions but the educated women in the professions will be asking—oh, of whom? as the poet says—the very question that you are asking us now: How can we prevent war? If we encourage the daughters to enter the professions without making any conditions as to the way in which the professions are to be practised shall we not be doing our best to stereotype the old tune which human nature, like a gramophone whose needle has stuck, is now grinding out with such disastrous unanimity? “Here we go round the mulberry tree, the mulberry tree, the mulberry tree. Give it all to me, give it all to me, all to me. Three hundred millions spent upon war.” With that song, or something like it, ringing in our ears we cannot send our guinea to the honorary treasurer without warning her that she shall only have it on condition that she shall swear that the professions in future shall be practised so that they shall lead to a different song and a different conclusion. She shall only have it if she can satisfy us that our guinea shall be spent in the cause of peace. It is difficult to formulate such conditions; in our present psychological ignorance perhaps impossible. But the matter is so serious, war is so insupportable, so horrible, so inhuman, that an attempt must be made. Here then is another letter to the same lady.

A Judge

An Archbishop

“Your letter, Madam, has waited a long time for an answer, but we have been examining into certain charges made against you and making certain enquiries. We have acquitted you, Madam, you will be relieved to learn, of telling lies. It would seem to be true that you are poor. We have acquitted you further, of idleness, apathy and greed. The number of causes that you are championing, however secretly and ineffectively, is in your favour. If you prefer ice creams and peanuts to roast beef and beer the reason would seem to be economic rather than gustatory. It would seem probable that you have not much money to spend upon food or much leisure to spend upon eating it in view of the circulars and leaflets you issue, the meetings you arrange, the bazaars you organize. Indeed, you would appear to be working, without a salary too, rather longer hours than the Home Office would approve. But though we are willing to deplore your poverty and to commend your industry we are not going to send you a guinea to help you to help women to enter the professions unless you can assure us that they will practise those professions in such a way as to prevent war. That, you will say, is a vague statement, an impossible condition. Still, since guineas are rare and guineas are valuable you will listen to the terms we wish to impose if, you intimate, they can be stated briefly. Well then, Madam, since you are pressed for time, what with the Pensions Bill, what with shepherding the Peers into the House of Lords so that they may vote on it as instructed by you, what with reading Hansard and the newspapers—though that should not take much time; you will find no mention of your activities there;[◉16] a conspiracy of silence seems to be the rule; what with plotting still for equal pay for equal work in the Civil Service, while at the same time you are arranging hares and old coffee-pots so as to seduce people into paying more for them than they are strictly worth at a bazaar—since, in one word, it is obvious that you are busy, let us be quick; make a rapid survey; discuss a few passages in the books in your library; in the papers on your table, and then see if we can make the statement less vague, the conditions more clear.

“Let us then begin by looking at the outside of things, at the general aspect. Things have outsides let us remember as well as insides. Close at hand is a bridge over the Thames, an admirable vantage ground for such a survey. The river flows beneath; barges pass, laden with timber, bursting with corn; there on one side are the domes and spires of the city; on the other, Westminster and the Houses of Parliament. It is a place to stand on by the hour, dreaming. But not now. Now we are pressed for time. Now we are here to consider facts; now we must fix our eyes upon the procession—the procession of the sons of educated men.

“There they go, our brothers who have been educated at public schools and universities, mounting those steps, passing in and out of those doors, ascending those pulpits, preaching, teaching, administering justice, practising medicine, transacting business, making money. It is a solemn sight always—a procession, like a caravanserai crossing a desert. Great-grandfathers, grandfathers, fathers, uncles—they all went that way, wearing their gowns, wearing their wigs, some with ribbons across their breasts, others without. One was a bishop. Another a judge. One was an admiral. Another a general. One was a professor. Another a doctor. And some left the procession and were last heard of doing nothing in Tasmania; were seen, rather shabbily dressed, selling newspapers at Charing Cross. But most of them kept in step, walked according to rule, and by hook or by crook made enough to keep the family house, somewhere, roughly speaking, in the West End, supplied with beef and mutton for all, and with education for Arthur. It is a solemn sight, this procession, a sight that has often caused us, you may remember, looking at it sidelong from an upper window, to ask ourselves certain questions. But now, for the past twenty years or so, it is no longer a sight merely, a photograph, or fresco scrawled upon the walls of time, at which we can look with merely an aesthetic appreciation. For there, trapesing along at the tail end of the procession, we go ourselves. And that makes a difference. We who have looked so long at the pageant in books, or from a curtained window watched educated men leaving the house at about nine-thirty to go to an office, returning to the house at about six-thirty from an office, need look passively no longer. We too can leave the house, can mount those steps, pass in and out of those doors, wear wigs and gowns, make money, administer justice. Think—one of these days, you may wear a judge’s wig on your head, an ermine cape on your shoulders; sit under the lion and the unicorn; draw a salary of five thousand a year with a pension on retiring. We who now agitate these humble pens may in another century or two speak from a pulpit. Nobody will dare contradict us then; we shall be the mouthpieces of the divine spirit—a solemn thought, is it not? Who can say whether, as time goes on, we may not dress in military uniform, with gold lace on our breasts, swords at our sides, and something like the old family coal-scuttle on our heads, save that that venerable object was never decorated with plumes of white horsehair. You laugh—indeed the shadow of the private house still makes those dresses look a little queer. We have worn private clothes so long—the veil that St. Paul recommended. But we have not come here to laugh, or to talk of fashions—men’s and women’s. We are here, on the bridge, to ask ourselves certain questions. And they are very important questions; and we have very little time in which to answer them. The questions that we have to ask and to answer about that procession during this moment of transition are so important that they may well change the lives of all men and women for ever. For we have to ask ourselves, here and now, do we wish to join that procession, or don’t we? On what terms shall we join that procession? Above all, where is it leading us, the procession of educated men? The moment is short; it may last five years; ten years, or perhaps only a matter of a few months longer. But the questions must be answered; and they are so important that if all the daughters of educated men did nothing, from morning to night, but consider that procession, from every angle, if they did nothing but ponder it and analyse it, and think about it and read about it and pool their thinking and reading, and what they see and what they guess, their time would be better spent than in any other activity now open to them. But, you will object, you have no time to think; you have your battles to fight, your rent to pay, your bazaars to organize. That excuse shall not serve you, Madam. As you know from your own experience, and there are facts that prove it, the daughters of educated men have always done their thinking from hand to mouth; not under green lamps at study tables in the cloisters of secluded colleges. They have thought while they stirred the pot, while they rocked the cradle. It was thus that they won us the right to our brand-new sixpence. It falls to us now to go on thinking; how are we to spend that sixpence? Think we must. Let us think in offices; in omnibuses; while we are standing in the crowd watching Coronations and Lord Mayor’s Shows; let us think as we pass the Cenotaph; and in Whitehall; in the gallery of the House of Commons; in the Law Courts; let us think at baptisms and marriages and funerals. Let us never cease from thinking—what is this ‘civilization’ in which we find ourselves? What are these ceremonies and why should we take part in them? What are these professions and why should we make money out of them? Where in short is it leading us, the procession of the sons of educated men?

“But you are busy; let us return to facts. Come indoors then, and open the books on your library shelves. For you have a library, and a good one. A working library, a living library; a library where nothing is chained down and nothing is locked up; a library where the songs of the singers rise naturally from the lives of the livers. There are the poems, here the biographies. And what light do they throw upon the professions, these biographies? How far do they encourage us to think that if we help the daughters to become professional women we shall discourage war? The answer to that question is scattered all about these volumes; and is legible to anyone who can read plain English. And the answer, one must admit, is extremely queer. For almost every biography we read of professional men in the nineteenth century, to limit ourselves to that not distant and fully documented age, is largely concerned with war. They were great fighters, it seems, the professional men in the age of Queen Victoria. There was the battle of Westminster. There was the battle of the universities. There was the battle of Whitehall. There was the battle of Harley Street. There was the battle of the Royal Academy. Some of these battles, as you can testify, are still in progress. In fact the only profession which does not seem to have fought a fierce battle during the nineteenth century is the profession of literature. All the other professions, according to the testimony of biography, seem to be as bloodthirsty as the profession of arms itself. It is true that the combatants did not inflict flesh wounds;[◉17] chivalry forbade; but you will agree that a battle that wastes time is as deadly as a battle that wastes blood. You will agree that a battle that costs money is as deadly as a battle that costs a leg or an arm. You will agree that a battle that forces youth to spend its strength haggling in committee rooms, soliciting favours, assuming a mask of reverence to cloak its ridicule, inflicts wounds upon the human spirit which no surgery can heal. Even the battle of equal pay for equal work is not without its timeshed, its spiritshed, as you yourself, were you not unaccountably reticent on certain matters, might agree. Now the books in your library record so many of these battles that it is impossible to go into them all; but as they all seem to have been fought on much the same plan, and by the same combatants, that is by professional men v. their sisters and daughters, let us, since time presses, glance at one of these campaigns only and examine the battle of Harley Street, in order that we may understand what effect the professions have upon those who practise them.

“The campaign was opened in the year 1869 under the leadership of Sophia Jex-Blake. Her case is so typical an instance of the great Victorian fight between the victims of the patriarchal system and the patriarchs, of the daughters against the fathers, that it deserves a moment’s examination. Sophia’s father was an admirable specimen of the Victorian educated man, kindly, cultivated and well-to-do. He was a proctor of Doctors’ Commons. He could afford to keep six servants, horses and carriages, and could provide his daughter not only with food and lodging but with ‘handsome furniture’ and ‘a cosy fire’ in her bedroom. For salary, ‘for dress and private money,’ he gave her £40 a year. For some reason she found this sum insufficient. In 1859, in view of the fact that she had only nine shillings and ninepence left to last her till next quarter, she wished to earn money herself. And she was offered a tutorship with the pay of five shillings an hour. She told her father of the offer. He replied, ‘Dearest, I have only this moment heard that you contemplate being paid for the tutorship. It would be quite beneath you, darling, and I cannot consent to it.’ She argued: ‘Why should I not take it? You as a man did your work and received your payment, and no one thought it any degradation, but a fair exchange…. Tom is doing on a large scale what I am doing on a small one.’ He replied: ‘The cases you cite, darling, are not to the point…. T. W…. feels bound as a man … to support his wife and family, and his position is a high one, which can only be filled by a first-class man of character, and yielding him nearer two than one thousand a year…. How entirely different is my darling’s case! You want for nothing, and know that (humanly speaking) you will want for nothing. If you married to-morrow—to my liking—and I don’t believe you would ever marry otherwise—I should give you a good fortune.’ Upon which her comment, in a private diary, was: ‘Like a fool I have consented to give up the fees for this term only—though I am miserably poor. It was foolish. It only defers the struggle.’[◉18]

“There she was right. The struggle with her own father was over. But the struggle with fathers in general, with the patriarchy itself, was deferred to another place and another time. The second fight was at Edinburgh in 1869. She had applied for admission to the Royal College of Surgeons. Here is a newspaper account of the first skirmish. ‘A disturbance of a very unbecoming nature took place yesterday afternoon in front of the Royal College of Surgeons…. Shortly before four o’clock … nearly 200 students assembled in front of the gate leading to the building….’ the medical students howled and sang songs. ‘The gate was closed in their [the women’s] faces…. Dr. Handyside found it utterly impossible to begin his demonstration … a pet sheep was introduced into the room’ and so on. The methods were much the same as those that were employed at Cambridge during the battle of the Degree. And again, as on that occasion, the authorities deplored those downright methods and employed others, more astute and more effective, of their own. Nothing would induce the authorities encamped within the sacred gates to allow the women to enter. They said that God was on their side, Nature was on their side, Law was on their side, and Property was on their side. The college was founded for the benefit of men only; men only were entitled by law to benefit from its endowments. The usual committees were formed. The usual petitions were signed. The usual humble appeals were made. The usual bazaars were held. The usual questions of tactics were debated. As usual it was asked, ought we to attack now, or is it wiser to wait? Who are our friends and who are our enemies? There were the usual differences of opinion, the usual divisions among the counsellors. But why particularize? The whole proceeding is so familiar that the battle of Harley Street in the year 1869 might well be the battle of Cambridge University at the present moment. On both occasions there is the same waste of strength, waste of temper, waste of time, and waste of money. Almost the same daughters ask almost the same brothers for almost the same privileges. Almost the same gentlemen intone almost the same refusals for almost the same reasons. It seems as if there were no progress in the human race, but only repetition. We can almost hear them if we listen singing the same old song, ‘Here we go round the mulberry tree, the mulberry tree, the mulberry tree’ and if we add, ‘of property, of property, of property,’ we shall fill in the rhyme without doing violence to the facts.

“But we are not here to sing old songs or to fill in missing rhymes. We are here to consider facts. And the facts which we have just extracted from biography seem to prove that the professions have a certain undeniable effect upon the professors. They make the people who practise them possessive, jealous of any infringement of their rights, and highly combative if anyone dares dispute them. Are we not right then in thinking that if we enter the same professions we shall acquire the same qualities? And do not such qualities lead to war? In another century or so if we practise the professions in the same way, shall we not be just as possessive, just as jealous, just as pugnacious, just as positive as to the verdict of God, Nature, Law and Property as these gentlemen are now? Therefore this guinea, which is to help you to help women to enter the professions, has this condition as a first condition attached to it. You shall swear that you will do all in your power to insist that any woman who enters any profession shall in no way hinder any other human being, whether man or woman, white or black, provided that he or she is qualified to enter that profession, from entering it; but shall do all in her power to help them.

“You are ready to put your hand to that, here and now, you say, and at the same time stretch out that hand for the guinea. But wait. Other conditions are attached to it before it is yours. For consider once more the procession of the sons of educated men; ask yourself once more, where is it leading us? One answer suggests itself instantly. To incomes, it is obvious, that seem, to us at least, extremely handsome. Whitaker puts that beyond a doubt. And besides the evidence of Whitaker, there is the evidence of the daily paper—the evidence of the wills, of the subscription lists that we have considered already. In one issue of one paper, for example, it is stated that three educated men died; and one left £1,193,251; another £1,010,288; another £1,404,132. These are large sums for private people to amass, you will admit. And why should we not amass them too in course of time? Now that the Civil Service is open to us we may well earn from one thousand to three thousand a year; now that the Bar is open to us we may well earn £5,000 a year as judges, and any sum up to forty or fifty thousand a year as barristers. When the Church is open to us we may draw salaries of fifteen thousand, five thousand, three thousand yearly, with palaces and deaneries attached. When the Stock Exchange is open to us we may die worth as many millions as Pierpont Morgan, or as Rockefeller himself. As doctors we may make anything from two thousand to fifty thousand a year. As editors even we may earn salaries that are by no means despicable. One has a thousand a year; another two thousand; it is rumoured that the editor of a great daily paper has a salary of five thousand yearly. All this wealth may in the course of time come our way if we follow the professions. In short, we may change our position from being the victims of the patriarchal system, paid on the truck system, with £30 or £40 a year in cash and board and lodging thrown in, to being the champions of the capitalist system, with a yearly income in our own possession of many thousands which, by judicious investment, may leave us when we die possessed of a capital sum of more millions than we can count.

“It is a thought not without its glamour. Consider what it would mean if among us there were now a woman motor-car manufacturer who, with a stroke of her pen, could endow the women’s colleges with two or three hundred thousand pounds apiece. The honorary treasurer of the rebuilding fund, your sister at Cambridge, would have her labours considerably lightened then. There would be no need of appeals and committees, of strawberries and cream and bazaars. And suppose that there were not merely one rich woman, but that rich women were as common as rich men. What could you not do? You could shut up your office at once. You could finance a woman’s party in the House of Commons. You could run a daily newspaper committed to a conspiracy, not of silence, but of speech. You could get pensions for spinsters; those victims of the patriarchal system, whose allowance is insufficient and whose board and lodging are no longer thrown in. You could get equal pay for equal work. You could provide every mother with chloroform when her child is born;[◉19] bring down the maternal death-rate from four in every thousand to none at all, perhaps. In one session you could pass Bills that will now take you perhaps a hundred years of hard and continuous labour to get through the House of Commons. There seems at first sight nothing that you could not do, if you had the same capital at your disposal that your brothers have at theirs. Why not, then, you exclaim, help us to take the first step towards possessing it? The professions are the only way in which we can earn money. Money is the only means by which we can achieve objects that are immensely desirable. Yet here you are, you seem to protest, haggling and bargaining over conditions. But consider this letter from a professional man asking us to help him to prevent war. Look also at the photographs of dead bodies and ruined houses that the Spanish Government sends almost weekly. That is why it is necessary to haggle and to bargain over conditions.

“For the evidence of the letter and of the photographs when combined with the facts with which history and biography provide us about the professions seem together to throw a certain light, a red light, shall we say, upon those same professions. You make money in them; that is true; but how far is money in view of those facts in itself a desirable possession? A great authority upon human life, you will remember, held over two thousand years ago that great possessions were undesirable. To which you reply, and with some heat as if you suspected another excuse for keeping the purse-string tied, that Christ’s words about the rich and the Kingdom of Heaven are no longer helpful to those who have to face different facts in a different world. You argue that as things are now in England extreme poverty is less desirable than extreme wealth. The poverty of the Christian who should give away all his possessions produces, as we have daily and abundant proof, the crippled in body, the feeble in mind. The unemployed, to take the obvious example, are not a source of spiritual or intellectual wealth to their country. These are weighty arguments; but consider for a moment the life of Pierpont Morgan. Do you not agree with that evidence before us that extreme wealth is equally undesirable, and for the same reasons? If extreme wealth is undesirable and extreme poverty is undesirable, it is arguable that there is some mean between the two which is desirable. What then is that mean—how much money is needed to live upon in England to-day? How should that money be spent? What is the kind of life, the kind of human being, you propose to aim at if you succeed in extracting this guinea? Those, Madam, are the questions that I am asking you to consider and you cannot deny that those are questions of the utmost importance. But alas, they are questions that would lead us far beyond the solid world of actual fact to which we are here confined. So let us shut the New Testament; Shakespeare, Shelley, Tolstoy and the rest, and face the fact that stares us in the face at this moment of transition—the fact of the procession; the fact that we are trapesing along somewhere in the rear and must consider that fact before we can fix our eyes upon the vision on the horizon.

“There it is then, before our eyes, the procession of the sons of educated men, ascending those pulpits, mounting those steps, passing in and out of those doors, preaching, teaching, administering justice, practising medicine, making money. And it is obvious that if you are going to make the same incomes from the same professions that those men make you will have to accept the same conditions that they accept. Even from an upper window and from books we know or can guess what those conditions are. You will have to leave the house at nine and come back to it at six. That leaves very little time for fathers to know their children. You will have to do this daily from the age of twenty-one or so to the age of about sixty-five. That leaves very little time for friendship, travel or art. You will have to perform some duties that are very arduous, others that are very barbarous. You will have to wear certain uniforms and profess certain loyalties. If you succeed in your professions the words ‘For God and Empire’ will very likely be written, like the address on a dog-collar, round your neck.[◉20] And if words have meaning, as words perhaps should have meaning, you will have to accept that meaning and do what you can to enforce it. In short, you will have to lead the same lives and profess the same loyalties that professional men have professed for many centuries. There can be no doubt of that.

“If you retaliate, what harm is there in that? Why should we hesitate to do what our fathers and grandfathers have done before us? let us go into greater detail and consult the facts which are nowadays open to the inspection of all who can read their mother tongue in biography. There they are, those innumerable and invaluable works upon the shelves of your own library. Let us glance again rapidly at the lives of professional men who have succeeded in their professions. Here is an extract from the life of a great lawyer. ‘He went to his chambers about half-past nine…. He took briefs home with him … so that he was lucky if he got to bed about one or two o’clock in the morning.’[◉21] That explains why most successful barristers are hardly worth sitting next at dinner—they yawn so. Next, here is a quotation from a famous politician’s speech. ‘… since 1914 I have never seen the pageant of the blossom from the first damson to the last apple—never once have I seen that in Worcestershire since 1914, and if that is not a sacrifice I do not know what is.’[◉22] A sacrifice indeed, and one that explains the perennial indifference of the Government to art—why, these unfortunate gentlemen must be as blind as bats. Take the religious profession next. Here is a quotation from the life of a great bishop. ‘This is an awful mind-and-soul-destroying life. I really do not know how to live it. The arrears of important work accumulate and crush.’[◉23] That bears out what so many people are saying now about the Church and the nation. Our bishops and deans seem to have no soul with which to preach and no mind with which to write. Listen to any sermon in any church; read the journalism of Dean Alington or Dean Inge in any newspaper. Take the doctor’s profession next. ‘I have taken a good deal over £13,000 during the year, but this cannot possibly be maintained, and while it lasts it is slavery. What I feel most is being away from Eliza and the children so frequently on Sundays, and again at Christmas.’[◉24] That is the complaint of a great doctor; and his patient might well echo it, for what Harley Street specialist has time to understand the body, let alone the mind or both in combination, when he is a slave to thirteen thousand a year? But is the life of a professional writer any better? Here is a sample taken from the life of a highly successful journalist. ‘On another day at this time he wrote a 1,600 words article on Nietzsche, a leader of equal length on the railway strike for the Standard, 600 words for the Tribune and in the evening was at Shoe Lane.’[◉25] That explains among other things why the public reads its politics with cynicism, and authors read their reviews with foot-rules—it is the advertisement that counts; praise or blame have ceased to have any meaning. And with one more glance at the politician’s life, for his profession after all is the most important practically, let us have done. ‘Lord Hugh loitered in the lobby…. The Bill [the Deceased Wife’s Sister Bill] was in consequence dead, and the further chances of the cause were relegated to the chances and mischances of another year.’[◉26] That not only serves to explain a certain prevalent distrust of politicians, but also reminds us that since you have the Pensions Bill to steer through the lobbies of so just and humane an institution as the House of Commons, we must not loiter too long ourselves among these delightful biographies, but must try to sum up the information which we have gained from them.

“What then do these quotations from the lives of successful professional men prove, you ask? They prove, as Whitaker proves things, nothing whatever. If Whitaker, that is, says that a bishop is paid five thousand a year, that is a fact; it can be checked and verified. But if Bishop Gore says that the life of a bishop is ‘an awful mind- and soul-destroying life’ he is merely giving us his opinion; the next bishop on the bench may flatly contradict him. These quotations then prove nothing that can be checked and verified; they merely cause us to hold opinions. And those opinions cause us to doubt and criticize and question the value of professional life—not its cash value; that is great; but its spiritual, its moral, its intellectual value. They make us of the opinion that if people are highly successful in their professions they lose their senses. Sight goes. They have no time to look at pictures. Sound goes. They have no time to listen to music. Speech goes. They have no time for conversation. They lose their sense of proportion—the relations between one thing and another. Humanity goes. Money making becomes so important that they must work by night as well as by day. Health goes. And so competitive do they become that they will not share their work with others though they have more than they can do themselves. What then remains of a human being who has lost sight, and sound, and sense of proportion? Only a cripple in a cave.

That of course is a figure, and fanciful; but that it has some connection with figures that are statistical and not fanciful—with the three hundred millions spent upon arms—seems possible. Such at any rate would seem to be the opinion of disinterested observers whose position gives them every opportunity for judging widely, and for judging fairly. Let us examine two such opinions only. The Marquess of Londonderry said:

“We seem to hear a babel of voices among which direction and guidance are lacking, and the world appears to be marking time…. During the last century gigantic forces of scientific discovery had been unloosed, while at the same time we could discern no corresponding advance in literary or scientific achievement…. The question we are asking ourselves is whether man is capable of enjoying these new fruits of scientific knowledge and discovery, or whether by their misuse he will bring about the destruction of himself and the edifice of civilization.[◉27]

“Mr. Churchill said:

“Certain it is that while men are gathering knowledge and power with ever-increasing and measureless speed, their virtues and their wisdom have not shown any notable improvement as the centuries have rolled. The brain of a modern man does not differ in essentials from that of the human beings who fought and loved here millions of years ago. The nature of man has remained hitherto practically unchanged. Under sufficient stress—starvation, terror, warlike passion, or even cold intellectual frenzy, the modern man we know so well will do the most terrible deeds, and his modern woman will back him up.[◉28]

“Those are two quotations only from a great number to the same effect. And to them let us add another, from a less impressive source but worth your reading since it too bears upon our problem, from Mr. Cyril Chaventry of North Wembley.

“‘A woman’s sense of values,’ he writes, ‘is indisputably different from that of a man. Obviously therefore a woman is at a disadvantage and under suspicion when in competition in a man-created sphere of activity. More than ever to-day women have the opportunity to build a new and better world, but in this slavish imitation of men they are wasting their chance.”[◉29]

That opinion, too, is a representative opinion, one from a great number to the same effect provided by the daily papers. And the three quotations taken together are highly instructive. The two first seem to prove that the enormous professional competence of the educated man has not brought about an altogether desirable state of things in the civilized world; and the last, which calls upon professional women to use ‘their different sense of values’ to ‘build a new and better world’ not only implies that those who have built that world are dissatisfied with the results, but, by calling upon the other sex to remedy the evil imposes a great responsibility and implies a great compliment. For if Mr. Chaventry and the gentlemen who agree with him believe that ‘at a disadvantage and under suspicion’ as she is, with little or no political or professional training and upon a salary of about £250 a year, the professional woman can yet ‘build a new and better world’, they must credit her with powers that might almost be called divine. They must agree with Goethe:

The things that must pass

Are only symbols;

Here shall all failure

Grow to achievement,

Here, the Untellable

Work all fulfilment,

The woman in woman

Lead forward for ever[◉30]

—another very great compliment, and from a very great poet you will agree.

“But you do not want compliments; you are pondering quotations. And since your expression is decidedly downcast, it seems as if these quotations about the nature of professional life have brought you to some melancholy conclusion. What can it be? Simply, you reply, that we, daughters of educated men, are between the devil and the deep sea. Behind us lies the patriarchal system; the private house, with its nullity, its immorality, its hypocrisy, its servility. Before us lies the public world, the professional system, with its possessiveness, its jealousy, its pugnacity, its greed. The one shuts us up like slaves in a harem; the other forces us to circle, like caterpillars head to tail, round and round the mulberry tree, the sacred tree, of property. It is a choice of evils. Each is bad. Had we not better plunge off the bridge into the river; give up the game; declare that the whole of human life is a mistake and so end it?

“But before you take that step, Madam, a decisive one, unless you share the opinion of the professors of the Church of England that death is the gate of life—Mors Janua Vitæ is written upon an arch in St. Paul’s—in which case there is, of course, much to recommend it, let us see if another answer is not possible.

“Another answer may be staring us in the face on the shelves of your own library, once more in the biographies. Is it not possible that by considering the experiments that the dead have made with their lives in the past we may find some help in answering the very difficult question that is now forced upon us? At any rate, let us try. The question that we will now put to biography is this: For reasons given above we are agreed that we must earn money in the professions. For reasons given above those professions seem to us highly undesirable. The question we put to you, lives of the dead, is how can we enter the professions and yet remain civilized human beings; human beings, that is, who wish to prevent war?

“This time let us turn to the lives not of men but of women in the nineteenth century—to the lives of professional women. But there would seem to be a gap in your library, Madam. There are no lives of professional women in the nineteenth century. A Mrs. Tomlinson, the wife of a Mr. Tomlinson, F.R.S., F.C.S., explains the reason. This lady, who wrote a book ‘advocating the employment of young ladies as nurses for children’, says: ‘… it seemed as if there were no way in which an unmarried lady could earn a living but by taking a situation as governess, for which post she was often unfit by nature and education, or want of education.’[◉31] That was written in 1859—less than 100 years ago. That explains the gap on your shelves. There were no professional women, except governesses, to have lives written of them. And the lives of governesses, that is the written lives, can be counted on the fingers of one hand. What then can we learn about the lives of professional women from studying the lives of governesses? Happily old boxes are beginning to give up their old secrets. Out the other day crept one such document written about the year 1811. There was, it appears, an obscure Miss Weeton, who used to scribble down her thoughts upon professional life among other things when her pupils were in bed. Here is one such thought. ‘Oh! how I have burned to learn Latin, French, the Arts, the Sciences, anything rather than the dog trot way of sewing, teaching, writing copies, and washing dishes every day…. Why are not females permitted to study physics, divinity, astronomy, etc., etc., with their attendants, chemistry, botany, logic, mathematics, &c.?[◉32] That comment upon the lives of governesses, that question from the lips of governesses, reaches us from the darkness. It is illuminating, too. But let us go on groping; let us pick up a hint here and a hint there as to the professions as they were practised by women in the nineteenth century. Next we find Anne Clough, the sister of Arthur Clough, pupil of Dr. Arnold, Fellow of Oriel, who, though she served without a salary, was the first principal of Newnham, and thus may be called a professional woman in embryo—we find her training for her profession by ‘doing much of the housework’ … ‘earning money to pay off what had been lent by their friends’, ‘pressing for leave to keep a small school’, reading books her brother lent her, and exclaiming, ‘If I were a man, I would not work for riches, to make myself a name or to leave a wealthy family behind me. No, I think I would work for my country, and make its people my heirs.’[◉33] The nineteenth-century women were not without ambition it seems. Next we find Josephine Butler, who, though not strictly speaking a professional woman, led the campaign against the Contagious Diseases Act to victory, and then the campaign against the sale and purchase of children ‘for infamous purposes’—we find Josephine Butler refusing to have a life of herself written, and saying of the women who helped her in those campaigns: ‘The utter absence in them of any desire for recognition, of any vestige of egotism in any form, is worthy of remark. In the purity of their motives they shine out “clear as crystal”.’[◉34] That, then, was one of the qualities that the Victorian woman praised and practised—a negative one, it is true; not to be recognized; not to be egotistical; to do the work for the sake of doing the work.[◉35] An interesting contribution to psychology in its way. And then we come closer to our own time; we find Gertrude Bell, who, though the diplomatic service was and is shut to women, occupied a post in the East which almost entitled her to be called a pseudo-diplomat—we find rather to our surprise that ‘Gertrude could never go out in London without a female friend or, failing that, a maid.[◉36] … when it seemed unavoidable for Gertrude to drive in a hansom with a young man from one tea party to another, she feels obliged to write and confess it to my mother.’[◉37] So they were chaste, the women pseudo-diplomats of the Victorian Age?[◉38] And not merely in body; in mind also. “Gertrude was not allowed to read Bourget’s The Disciple” for fear of contracting whatever disease that book may disseminate. Dissatisfied but ambitious, ambitious but austere, chaste yet adventurous—such are some of the qualities that we have discovered. But let us go on looking—if not at the lines, then between the lines of biography. And we find, between the lines of their husbands’ biographies, so many women practising—but what are we to call the profession that consists in bringing nine or ten children into the world, the profession which consists in running a house, nursing an invalid, visiting the poor and the sick, tending here an old father, there an old mother?—there is no name and there is no pay for that profession; but we find so many mothers, sisters and daughters of educated men practising it in the nineteenth century that we must lump them and their lives together behind their husbands’ and brothers’, and leave them to deliver their message to those who have the time to extract it and the imagination with which to decipher it. Let us ourselves, who as you hint are pressed for time, sum up these random hints and reflections upon the professional life of women in the nineteenth century by quoting once more the highly significant words of a woman who was not a professional woman in the strict sense of the word, but had some nondescript reputation as a traveller nevertheless—Mary Kingsley:

“I don’t know if I ever revealed the fact to you that being allowed to learn German was all the paid-for education I ever had. £2,000 was spent on my brother’s. I still hope not in vain.

“That statement is so suggestive that it may save us the bother of groping and searching between the lines of professional men’s lives for the lives of their sisters. If we develop the suggestions we find in that statement, and connect it with the other hints and fragments that we have uncovered, we may arrive at some theory or point of view that may help us to answer the very difficult question, which now confronts us. For when Mary Kingsley says, ‘… being allowed to learn German was all the paid-for education I ever had’, she suggests that she had an unpaid-for education. The other lives that we have been examining corroborate that suggestion. What then was the nature of that ‘unpaid-for education’ which, whether for good or for evil, has been ours for so many centuries? If we mass the lives of the obscure behind four lives that were not obscure, but were so successful and distinguished that they were actually written, the lives of Florence Nightingale, Miss Clough, Mary Kingsley and Gertrude Bell, it seems undeniable that they were all educated by the same teachers. And those teachers, biography indicates, obliquely, and indirectly, but emphatically and indisputably none the less, were poverty, chastity, derision, and—but what word covers ‘lack of rights and privileges’? Shall we press the old word ‘freedom’ once more into service? ‘Freedom from unreal loyalties’, then, was the fourth of their teachers; that freedom from loyalty to old schools, old colleges, old churches, old ceremonies, old countries which all those women enjoyed, and which, to a great extent, we still enjoy by the law and custom of England. We have no time to coin new words, greatly though the language is in need of them. Let ‘freedom from unreal loyalties’ then stand as the fourth great teacher of the daughters of educated men.

“Biography thus provides us with the fact that the daughters of educated men received an unpaid-for education at the hands of poverty, chastity, derision and freedom from unreal loyalties. It was this unpaid-for education, biography informs us, that fitted them, aptly enough, for the unpaid-for professions. And biography also informs us that those unpaid-for professions had their laws, traditions, and labours no less certainly than the paid-for professions. Further, the student of biography cannot possibly doubt from the evidence of biography that this education and these professions were in many ways bad in the extreme, both for the unpaid themselves and for their descendants. The intensive childbirth of the unpaid wife, the intensive money-making of the paid husband in the Victorian age had terrible results, we cannot doubt, upon the mind and body of the present age. To prove it we need not quote once more the famous passage in which Florence Nightingale denounced that education and its results; nor stress the natural delight with which she greeted the Crimean war; nor illustrate from other sources—they are, alas, innumerable—the inanity, the pettiness, the spite, the tyranny, the hypocrisy, the immorality which it engendered as the lives of both sexes so abundantly testify. Final proof of its harshness upon one sex at any rate can be found in the annals of our ‘great war’, when hospitals, harvest fields and munition works were largely staffed by refugees flying from its horrors to their comparative amenity.

“But biography is many-sided; biography never returns a single and simple answer to any question that is asked of it. Thus the biographies of those who had biographies—say Florence Nightingale, Anne Clough, Emily Brontë, Christina Rossetti, Mary Kingsley—prove beyond a doubt that this same education, the unpaid for, must have had great virtues as well as great defects, for we cannot deny that these, if not educated, still were civilized women. We cannot, when we consider the lives of our uneducated mothers and grandmothers, judge education simply by its power to ‘obtain appointments,’ to win honour, to make money. We must if we are honest, admit that some who had no paid-for education, no salaries and no appointments were civilized human beings—whether or not they can rightly be called ‘English’ women is matter for dispute; and thus admit that we should be extremely foolish if we threw away the results of that education or gave up the knowledge that we have obtained from it for any bribe or decoration whatsoever. Thus biography, when asked the question we have put to it—how can we enter the professions and yet remain civilized human beings, human beings who discourage war, would seem to reply: If you refuse to be separated from the four great teachers of the daughters of educated men—poverty, chastity, derision and freedom from unreal loyalties—but combine them with some wealth, some knowledge, and some service to real loyalties then you can enter the professions and escape the risks that make them undesirable.

“Such being the answer of the oracle, such are the conditions attached to this guinea. You shall have it, to recapitulate, on condition that you help all properly qualified people, of whatever sex, class or colour, to enter your profession; and further on condition that in the practise of your profession you refuse to be separated from poverty, chastity, derision and freedom from unreal loyalties. Is the statement now more positive, have the conditions been made more clear and do you agree to the terms? You hesitate. Some of the conditions, you seem to suggest, need further discussion. Let us take them, then, in order. By poverty is meant enough money to live upon. That is, you must earn enough to be independent of any other human being and to buy that modicum of health, leisure, knowledge and so on that is needed for the full development of body and mind. But no more. Not a penny more.

“By chastity is meant that when you have made enough to live on by your profession you must refuse to sell your brain for the sake of money. That is you must cease to practise your profession, or practise it for the sake of research and experiment; or, if you are an artist, for the sake of the art; or give the knowledge acquired professionally to those who need it for nothing. But directly the mulberry tree begins to make you circle, break off. Pelt the tree with laughter.

“By derision—a bad word, but once again the English language is much in need of new words—is meant that you must refuse all methods of advertising merit, and hold that ridicule, obscurity and censure are preferable, for psychological reasons, to fame and praise. Directly badges, orders, or degrees are offered you, fling them back in the giver’s face.

“By freedom from unreal loyalties is meant that you must rid yourself of pride of nationality in the first place; also of religious pride, college pride, school pride, family pride, sex pride and those unreal loyalties that spring from them. Directly the seducers come with their seductions to bribe you into captivity, tear up the parchments; refuse to fill up the forms.

“And if you still object that these definitions are both too arbitrary and too general, and ask how anybody can tell how much money and how much knowledge are needed for the full development of body and mind, and which are the real loyalties which we must serve and which the unreal which we must despise, I can only refer you—time presses—to two authorities. One is familiar enough. It is the psychometer that you carry on your wrist, the little instrument upon which you depend in all personal relationships. If it were visible it would look something like a thermometer. It has a vein of quicksilver in it which is affected by any body or soul, house or society in whose presence it is exposed. If you want to find out how much wealth is desirable, expose it in a rich man’s presence; how much learning is desirable expose it in a learned man’s presence. So with patriotism, religion and the rest. The conversation need not be interrupted while you consult it; nor its amenity disturbed. But if you object that this is too personal and fallible a method to employ without risk of mistake, witness the fact that the private psychometer has led to many unfortunate marriages and broken friendships, then there is the other authority now easily within the reach even of the poorest of the daughters of educated men. Go to the public galleries and look at pictures; turn on the wireless and rake down music from the air; enter any of the public libraries which are now free to all. There you will be able to consult the findings of the public psychometer for yourself. To take one example, since we are pressed for time. The Antigone of Sophocles has been done into English prose or verse by a man whose name is immaterial.[◉39] Consider the character of Creon. There you have a most profound analysis by a poet, who is a psychologist in action, of the effect of power and wealth upon the soul. Consider Creon’s claim to absolute rule over his subjects. That is a far more instructive analysis of tyranny than any our politicians can offer us. You want to know which are the unreal loyalties which we must despise, which are the real loyalties which we must honour? Consider Antigone’s distinction between the laws and the Law. That is a far more profound statement of the duties of the individual to society than any our sociologists can offer us. Lame as the English rendering is, Antigone’s five words are worth all the sermons of all the archbishops.[◉40] But to enlarge would be impertinent. Private judgment is still free in private; and that freedom is the essence of freedom.

For the rest, though the conditions may seem many and the guinea, alas, is single, they are not for the most part as things are at present very difficult of fulfilment. With the exception of the first—that we must earn enough money to live upon—they are largely ensured us by the laws of England. The law of England sees to it that we do not inherit great possessions; the law of England denies us, and let us hope will long continue to deny us, the full stigma of nationality. Then we can scarcely doubt that our brothers will provide us for many centuries to come, as they have done for many centuries past, with what is so essential for sanity, and so invaluable in preventing the great modern sins of vanity, egotism, and megalomania—that is to say ridicule, censure and contempt.[◉41] And so long as the Church of England refuses our services—long may she exclude us!—and the ancient schools and colleges refuse to admit us to a share of their endowments and privileges we shall be immune without any trouble on our part from the particular loyalties and fealties which such endowments and privileges engender. Further, Madam, the traditions of the private house, that ancestral memory which lies behind the present moment, are there to help you. We have seen in the quotations given above how great a part chastity, bodily chastity, has played in the unpaid education of our sex. It should not be difficult to transmute the old ideal of bodily chastity into the new ideal of mental chastity—to hold that if it was wrong to sell the body for money it is much more wrong to sell the mind for money, since the mind, people say, is nobler than the body. Then again, are we not greatly fortified in resisting the seductions of the most powerful of all seducers—money—by those same traditions? For how many centuries have we not enjoyed the right of working all day and every day for £40 a year with board and lodging thrown in? And does not Whitaker prove that half the work of educated men’s daughters is still unpaid-for work? Finally, honour, fame, consequence—is it not easy for us to resist that seduction, we who have worked for centuries without other honour than that which is reflected from the coronets and badges on our father’s or husband’s brows and breasts?

“Thus, with law on our side, and property on our side, and ancestral memory to guide us, there is no need of further argument; you will agree that the conditions upon which this guinea is yours are, with the exception of the first, comparatively easy to fulfil. They merely require that you should develop, modify and direct by the findings of the two psychometers the traditions and the education of the private house which have been in existence these 2,000 years. And if you will agree to do that, there can be an end of bargaining between us. Then the guinea with which to pay the rent of your house is yours—would that it were a thousand! For if you agree to these terms then you can join the professions and yet remain uncontaminated by them; you can rid them of their possessiveness, their jealousy, their pugnacity, their greed. You can use them to have a mind of your own and a will of your own. And you can use that mind and will to abolish the inhumanity, the beastliness, the horror, the folly of war. Take this guinea then and use it, not to burn the house down, but to make its windows blaze. And let the daughters of uneducated women dance round the new house, the poor house, the house that stands in a narrow street where omnibuses pass and the street hawkers cry their wares, and let them sing, ‘We have done with war! We have done with tyranny!’ And their mothers will laugh from their graves, ‘It was for this that we suffered obloquy and contempt! Light up the windows of the new house, daughters! Let them blaze!’

“Those then are the terms upon which I give you this guinea with which to help the daughters of uneducated women to enter the professions. And by cutting short the peroration let us hope that you will be able to give the finishing touches to your bazaar, arrange the hare and the coffee-pot, and receive the Right Honourable Sir Sampson Legend, O.M., K.C.B., LL.D., D.C.L., P.C., etc., with that air of smiling deference which befits the daughter of an educated man in the presence of her brother.”

Such then, Sir, was the letter finally sent to the honorary treasurer of the society for helping the daughters of educated men to enter the professions. Those are the conditions upon which she is to have her guinea. They have been framed, so far as possible, to ensure that she shall do all that a guinea can make her do to help you to prevent war. Whether the conditions have been rightly laid down, who shall say? But as you will see, it was necessary to answer her letter and the letter from the honorary treasurer of the college rebuilding fund, and to send them both guineas before answering your letter, because unless they are helped, first to educate the daughters of educated men, and then to earn their livings in the professions, those daughters cannot possess an independent and disinterested influence with which to help you to prevent war. The causes it seems are connected. But having shown this to the best of our ability, let us return to your own letter and to your request for a subscription to your own society.

[]

Three.

Here then is your own letter. In that, as we have seen, after asking for an opinion as to how to prevent war, you go on to suggest certain practical measures by which we can help you to prevent it. These are it appears that we should sign a manifesto, pledging ourselves “to protect culture and intellectual liberty”;[◉1] that we should join a certain society, devoted to certain measures whose aim is to preserve peace; and, finally, that we should subscribe to that society which like the others is in need of funds.

First, then, let us consider how we can help you to prevent war by protecting culture and intellectual liberty, since you assure us that there is a connection between those rather abstract words and these very positive photographs—the photographs of dead bodies and ruined houses.

But if it was surprising to be asked for an opinion how to prevent war, it is still more surprising to be asked to help you in the rather abstract terms of your manifesto to protect culture and intellectual liberty. Consider, Sir, in the light of the facts given above, what this request of yours means. It means that in the year 1938 the sons of educated men are asking the daughters to help them to protect culture and intellectual liberty. And why, you may ask, is that so surprising? Suppose that the Duke of Devonshire, in his star and garter, stepped down into the kitchen and said to the maid who was peeling potatoes with a smudge on her cheek: “Stop your potato peeling, Mary, and help me to construe this rather difficult passage in Pindar,” would not Mary be surprised and run screaming to Louisa the cook, “Lawks, Louie, Master must be mad!” That, or something like it, is the cry that rises to our lips when the sons of educated men ask us, their sisters, to protect intellectual liberty and culture. But let us try to translate the kitchenmaid’s cry into the language of educated people.

Once more we must beg you, Sir, to look from our angle, from our point of view, at Arthur’s Education Fund. Try once more, difficult though it is to twist your head in that direction, to understand what it has meant to us to keep that receptacle filled all these centuries so that some 10,000 of our brothers may be educated every year at Oxford and Cambridge. It has meant that we have already contributed to the cause of culture and intellectual liberty more than any other class in the community. For have not the daughters of educated men paid into Arthur’s Education Fund from the year 1262 to the year 1870 all the money that was needed to educate themselves, bating such miserable sums as went to pay the governess, the German teacher, and the dancing master? Have they not paid with their own education for Eton and Harrow, Oxford and Cambridge, and all the great schools and universities on the continent—the Sorbonne and Heidelberg, Salamanca and Padua and Rome? Have they not paid so generously and lavishly if so indirectly, that when at last, in the nineteenth century, they won the right to some paid-for education for themselves, there was not a single woman who had received enough paid-for education to be able to teach them?[◉2] And now, out of the blue, just as they were hoping that they might filch not only a little of that same university education for themselves but some of the trimmings—travel, pleasure, liberty—for themselves, here is your letter informing them that the whole of that vast, that fabulous sum—for whether counted directly in cash, or indirectly in things done without, the sum that filled Arthur’s Education Fund is vast—has been wasted or wrongly applied. With what other purpose were the universities of Oxford and Cambridge founded, save to protect culture and intellectual liberty? For what other object did your sisters go without teaching or travel or luxuries themselves except that with the money so saved their brothers should go to schools and universities and there learn to protect culture and intellectual liberty? But now since you proclaim them in danger and ask us to add our voice to yours, and our sixpence to your guinea, we must assume that the money so spent was wasted and that those societies have failed. Yet, the reflection must intrude, if the public schools and universities with their elaborate machinery for mind-training and body-training have failed, what reason is there to think that your society, sponsored though it is by distinguished names, is going to succeed, or that your manifesto, signed though it is by still more distinguished names, is going to convert? Ought you not, before you lease an office, hire a secretary, elect a committee and appeal for funds, to consider why those schools and universities have failed?

That, however, is a question for you to answer. The question which concerns us is what possible help we can give you in protecting culture and intellectual liberty—we, who have been shut out from the universities so repeatedly, and are only now admitted so restrictedly; we who have received no paid-for education whatsoever, or so little that we can only read our own tongue and write our own language, we who are, in fact, members not of the intelligentsia but of the ignorantsia? To confirm us in our modest estimate of our own culture and to prove that you in fact share it there is Whitaker with his facts. Not a single educated man’s daughter, Whitaker says, is thought capable of teaching the literature of her own language at either university. Nor is her opinion worth asking, Whitaker informs us, when it comes to buying a picture for the National Gallery, a portrait for the Portrait Gallery, or a mummy for the British Museum. How then can it be worth your while to ask us to protect culture and intellectual liberty when, as Whitaker proves with his cold facts, you have no belief that our advice is worth having when it comes to spending the money, to which we have contributed, in buying culture and intellectual liberty for the State? Do you wonder that the unexpected compliment takes us by surprise? Still, there is your letter. There are facts in that letter, too. In it you say that war is imminent; and you go on to say, in more languages than one—here is the French version:[◉3] Seule la culture désintéressée peut garder le monde de sa ruine—you go on to say that by protecting intellectual liberty and our inheritance of culture we can help you to prevent war. And since the first statement at least is indisputable and any kitchenmaid even if her French is defective can read and understand the meaning of “Air Raid Precautions” when written in large letters upon a blank wall, we cannot ignore your request on the plea of ignorance or remain silent on the plea of modesty. Just as any kitchenmaid would attempt to construe a passage in Pindar if told that her life depended on it, so the daughters of educated men, however little their training qualifies them, must consider what they can do to protect culture and intellectual liberty if by so doing they can help you to prevent war. So let us by all means in our power examine this further method of helping you, and see, before we consider your request that we should join your society, whether we can sign this manifesto in favour of culture and intellectual liberty with some intention of keeping our word.

What, then, is the meaning of those rather abstract words? If we are to help you to protect them it would be well to define them in the first place. But like all honorary treasurers you are pressed for time, and to ramble through English literature in search of a definition, though a delightful pastime in its way, might well lead us far. Let us agree, then, for the present, that we know what they are, and concentrate upon the practical question how we can help you to protect them. Now the daily paper with its provision of facts lies on the table; and a single quotation from it may save time and limit our enquiry. “It was decided yesterday at a conference of head masters that women were not fit teachers for boys over the age of fourteen.” That fact is of instant help to us here, for it proves that certain kinds of help are beyond our reach. For us to attempt to reform the education of our brothers at public schools and universities would be to invite a shower of dead cats, rotten eggs and broken gates from which only street scavengers and locksmiths would benefit, while the gentlemen in authority, history assures us, would survey the tumult from their study windows without taking the cigars from their lips or ceasing to sip, slowly as its bouquet deserves, their admirable claret.[◉4] The teaching of history, then, reinforced by the teaching of the daily paper, drives us to a more restricted position. We can only help you to defend culture and intellectual liberty by defending our own culture and our own intellectual liberty. That is to say, we can hint, if the treasurer of one of the women’s colleges asks us for a subscription, that some change might be made in that satellite body when it ceases to be satellite; or again, if the treasurer of some society for obtaining professional employment for women asks us for a subscription, suggest that some change might be desirable, in the interests of culture and intellectual liberty, in the practice of the professions. But as paid-for education is still raw and young, and as the number of those allowed to enjoy it at Oxford and Cambridge is still strictly limited, culture for the great majority of educated men’s daughters must still be that which is acquired outside the sacred gates, in public libraries or in private libraries, whose doors by some unaccountable oversight have been left unlocked. It must still, in the year 1938, largely consist in reading and writing our own tongue. The question thus becomes more manageable. Shorn of its glory it is easier to deal with. What we have to do now, then, Sir, is to lay your request before the daughters of educated men and to ask them to help you to prevent war, not by advising their brothers how they shall protect culture and intellectual liberty, but simply by reading and writing their own tongue in such a way as to protect those rather abstract goddesses themselves.

This would seem, on the face of it, a simple matter, and one that needs neither argument nor rhetoric. But we are met at the outset by a new difficulty. We have already noted the fact that the profession of literature, to give it a simple name, is the only profession which did not fight a series of battles in the nineteenth century. There has been no battle of Grub Street. That profession has never been shut to the daughters of educated men. This was due of course to the extreme cheapness of its professional requirements. Books, pens and paper are so cheap, reading and writing have been, since the eighteenth century at least, so universally taught in our class, that it was impossible for any body of men to corner the necessary knowledge or to refuse admittance, except on their own terms, to those who wished to read books or to write them. But it follows, since the profession of literature is open to the daughters of educated men, that there is no honorary treasurer of the profession in such need of a guinea with which to prosecute her battle that she will listen to our terms, and promise to do what she can to observe them. This places us, you will agree, in an awkward predicament. For how then can we bring pressure upon them—what can we do to persuade them to help us? The profession of literature differs, it would seem, from all the other professions. There is no head of the profession; no Lord Chancellor as in your own case: no official body with the power to lay down rules and enforce them.[◉5] We cannot debar women from the use of libraries;[◉6] or forbid them to buy ink and paper; or rule that metaphors shall only be used by one sex, as the male only in art schools was allowed to study from the nude; or rule that rhyme shall be used by one sex only as the male only in Academies of music was allowed to play in orchestras. Such is the inconceivable licence of the profession of letters that any daughter of an educated man may use a man’s name—say George Eliot or George Sand—with the result that an editor or a publisher, unlike the authorities in Whitehall, can detect no difference in the scent or savour of a manuscript, or even know for certain whether the writer is married or not.

Thus, since we have very little power over those who earn their livings by reading and writing, we must go to them humbly without bribes or penalties. We must go to them cap in hand, like beggars, and ask them of their goodness to spare time to listen to our request that they shall practise the profession of reading and writing in the interests of culture and intellectual liberty.

And now, clearly, some further definition of “culture and intellectual liberty” would be useful. Fortunately, it need not be, for our purposes, exhaustive or elaborate. We need not consult Milton, Goethe, or Matthew Arnold; for their definition would apply to paid-for culture—the culture which, in Miss Weeton’s definition, includes physics, divinity, astronomy, chemistry, botany, logic and mathematics, as well as Latin, Greek and French. We are appealing in the main to those whose culture is the unpaid-for culture, that which consists in being able to read and write their own tongue. Happily your manifesto is at hand to help us to define the terms further; “disinterested” is the word you use. Therefore let us define culture for our purposes as the disinterested pursuit of reading and writing the English language. And intellectual liberty may be defined for our purposes as the right to say or write what you think in your own words, and in your own way. These are very crude definitions, but they must serve. Our appeal then might begin: “Oh, daughters of educated men, this gentleman, whom we all respect, says that war is imminent; by protecting culture and intellectual liberty he says that we can help him to prevent war. We entreat you, therefore, who earn your livings by reading and writing …” But here the words falter on our lips, and the prayer peters out into three separate dots because of facts again—because of facts in books, facts in biographies, facts which make it difficult, perhaps impossible, to go on.

What are those facts then? Once more we must interrupt our appeal in order to examine them. And there is no difficulty in finding them. Here, for example, is an illuminating document before us, a most genuine and indeed moving piece of work, the autobiography of Mrs. Oliphant, which is full of facts. She was an educated man’s daughter who earned her living by reading and writing. She wrote books of all kinds. Novels, biographies, histories, handbooks of Florence and Rome, reviews, newspaper articles innumerable came from her pen. With the proceeds she earned her living and educated her children. But how far did she protect culture and intellectual liberty? That you can judge for yourself by reading first a few of her novels; The Duke’s Daughter, Diana Trelawny, Harry Joscelyn, say; continue with the lives of Sheridan and Cervantes; go on to the Makers of Florence and Rome; conclude by sousing yourself in the innumerable faded articles, reviews, sketches of one kind and another which she contributed to literary papers. When you have done, examine the state of your own mind, and ask yourself whether that reading has led you to respect disinterested culture and intellectual liberty. Has it not on the contrary smeared your mind and dejected your imagination, and led you to deplore the fact that Mrs. Oliphant sold her brain, her very admirable brain, prostituted her culture and enslaved her intellectual liberty in order that she might earn her living and educate her children?[◉7] Inevitably, considering the damage that poverty inflicts upon mind and body, the necessity that is laid upon those who have children to see that they are fed and clothed, nursed and educated, we have to applaud her choice and to admire her courage. But if we applaud the choice and admire the courage of those who do what she did, we can spare ourselves the trouble of addressing our appeal to them, for they will no more be able to protect disinterested culture and intellectual liberty than she was. To ask them to sign your manifesto would be to ask a publican to sign a manifesto in favour of temperance. He may himself be a total abstainer; but since his wife and children depend upon the sale of beer, he must continue to sell beer, and his signature to the manifesto would be of no value to the cause of temperance because directly he had signed it he must be at the counter inducing his customers to drink more beer. So to ask the daughters of educated men who have to earn their livings by reading and writing to sign your manifesto would be of no value to the cause of disinterested culture and intellectual liberty, because directly they had signed it they must be at the desk writing those books, lectures and articles by which culture is prostituted and intellectual liberty is sold into slavery. As an expression of opinion it may have value; but if what you need is not merely an expression of opinion but positive help, you must frame your request rather differently. Then you will have to ask them to pledge themselves not to write anything that defiles culture, or to sign any contract that infringes intellectual liberty. And to that the answer given us by biography would be short but sufficient: Have I not to earn my living?

Thus, Sir, it becomes clear that we must make our appeal only to those daughters of educated men who have enough to live upon. To them we might address ourselves in this wise: “Daughters of educated men who have enough to live upon …” But again the voice falters: again the prayer peters out into separate dots. For how many of them are there? Dare we assume in the face of Whitaker, of the laws of property, of the wills in the newspapers, of facts in short, that 1,000, 500, or even 250 will answer when thus addressed? However that may be, let the plural stand and continue: “Daughters of educated men who have enough to live upon, and read and write your own language for your own pleasure, may we very humbly entreat you to sign this gentleman’s manifesto with some intention of putting your promise into practice?”

Here, if indeed they consent to listen, they might very reasonably ask us to be more explicit—not indeed to define culture and intellectual liberty, for they have books and leisure and can define the words for themselves. But what, they may well ask, is meant by this gentleman’s “disinterested” culture, and how are we to protect that and intellectual liberty in practice? Now as they are daughters, not sons, we may begin by reminding them of a compliment once paid them by a great historian. “Mary’s conduct,” says Macaulay, “was really a signal instance of that perfect disinterestedness and self-devotion of which man seems to be incapable, but which is sometimes found in women.”[◉8] Compliments, when you are asking a favour, never come amiss. Next let us refer them to the tradition which has long been honoured in the private house—the tradition of chastity. “Just as for many centuries, Madam,” we might plead, “it was thought vile for a woman to sell her body without love, but right to give it to the husband whom she loved, so it is wrong, you will agree, to sell your mind without love, but right to give it to the art which you love.” “But what,” she may ask, “is meant by ‘selling your mind without love’?” “Briefly,” we might reply, “to write at the command of another person what you do not want to write for the sake of money. But to sell a brain is worse than to sell a body, for when the body seller has sold her momentary pleasure she takes good care that the matter shall end there. But when a brain seller has sold her brain, its anaemic, vicious and diseased progeny are let loose upon the world to infect and corrupt and sow the seeds of disease in others. Thus we are asking you, Madam, to pledge yourself not to commit adultery of the brain because it is a much more serious offence than the other.” “Adultery of the brain,” she may reply, “means writing what I do not want to write for the sake of money. Therefore you ask me to refuse all publishers, editors, lecture agents and so on who bribe me to write or to speak what I do not want to write or to speak for the sake of money?” “That is so, Madam; and we further ask that if you should receive proposals for such sales you will resent them and expose them as you would resent and expose such proposals for selling your body, both for your own sake and for the sake of others. But we would have you observe that the verb “to adulterate” means, according to the dictionary, “to falsify by admixture of baser ingredients.” Money is not the only baser ingredient. Advertisement and publicity are also adulterers. Thus, culture mixed with personal charm, or culture mixed with advertisement and publicity, are also adulterated forms of culture. We must ask you to abjure them; not to appear on public platforms; not to lecture; not to allow your private face to be published, or details of your private life; not to avail yourself, in short, of any of the forms of brain prostitution which are so insidiously suggested by the pimps and panders of the brain-selling trade; or to accept any of those baubles and labels by which brain merit is advertised and certified—medals, honours, degrees—we must ask you to refuse them absolutely, since they are all tokens that culture has been prostituted and intellectual liberty sold into captivity.”

Upon hearing this definition, mild and imperfect as it is, of what it means, not merely to sign your manifesto in favour of culture and intellectual liberty, but to put that opinion into practice, even those daughters of educated men who have enough to live upon may object that the terms are too hard for them to keep. For they would mean loss of money, which is desirable, loss of fame which is universally held to be agreeable, and censure and ridicule which are by no means negligible. Each would be the butt of all who have an interest to serve or money to make from the sale of brains. And for what reward? Only, in the rather abstract terms of your manifesto, that they would thus “protect culture and intellectual liberty”, not by their opinion but by their practice.

Since the terms are so hard, and there is no body in existence whose ruling they need respect or obey, let us consider what other method of persuasion is left to us. Only, it would seem, to point to the photographs—the photographs of dead bodies and ruined houses. Can we bring out the connection between them and prostituted culture and intellectual slavery and make it so clear that the one implies the other, that the daughters of educated men will prefer to refuse money and fame, and to be the objects of scorn and ridicule rather than suffer themselves, or allow others to suffer, the penalties there made visible? It is difficult in the short time at our disposal, and with the weak weapons in our possession, to make that connection clear, but if what you, Sir, say is true, and there is a connection and a very real one between them, we must try to prove it.

Let us then begin by summoning, if only from the world of imagination, some daughter of an educated man who has enough to live upon and can read and write for her own pleasure and, taking her to be the representative of what may in fact be no class at all, let us ask her to examine the products of that reading and writing which lie upon her own table. “Look, Madam,” we might begin, “at the newspapers on your table. Why, may we ask, do you take in three dailies, and three weeklies?” “Because,” she replies, “I am interested in politics, and wish to know the facts.” “An admirable desire, Madam. But why three? Do they differ then about facts, and if so, why?” To which she replies, with some irony, “You call yourself an educated man’s daughter, and yet pretend not to know the facts—roughly that each paper is financed by a board; that each board has a policy; that each board employs writers to expound that policy, and if the writers do not agree with that policy, the writers, as you may remember after a moment’s reflection, find themselves unemployed in the street. Therefore if you want to know any fact about politics you must read at least three different papers, compare at least three different versions of the same fact, and come in the end to your own conclusion. Hence the three daily papers on my table.” Now that we have discussed, very briefly, what may be called the literature of fact, let us turn to what may be called the literature of fiction. “There are such things, Madam,” we may remind her, “as pictures, plays, music and books. Do you pursue the same rather extravagant policy there—glance at three daily papers and three weekly papers if you want to know the facts about pictures, plays, music and books, because those who write about art are in the pay of an editor, who is in the pay of a board, which has a policy to pursue, so that each paper takes a different view, so that it is only by comparing three different views that you can come to your own conclusion—what pictures to see, what play or concert to go to, which book to order from the library?” And to that she replies, “Since I am an educated man’s daughter, with a smattering of culture picked up from reading, I should no more dream, given the conditions of journalism at present, of taking my opinions of pictures, plays, music or books from the newspapers than I would take my opinion of politics from the newspapers. Compare the views, make allowance for the distortions, and then judge for yourself. That is the only way. Hence the many newspapers on my table.”[◉9]

So then the literature of fact and the literature of opinion, to make a crude distinction, are not pure fact, or pure opinion, but adulterated fact and adulterated opinion, that is fact and opinion “adulterated by the admixture of baser ingredients” as the dictionary has it. In other words you have to strip each statement of its money motive, of its power motive, of its advertisement motive, of its publicity motive, of its vanity motive, let alone of all the other motives which, as an educated man’s daughter, are familiar to you, before you make up your mind which fact about politics to believe, or even which opinion about art? “That is so,” she agrees. But if you were told by somebody who had none of those motives for wrapping up truth that the fact was in his or her opinion this or that, you would believe him or her, always allowing of course for the fallibility of human judgment which, in judging works of art, must be considerable? “Naturally,” she agrees. If such a person said that war was bad, you would believe him; or if such a person said that some picture, symphony, play or poem were good you would believe him? “Allowing for human fallibility, yes.” Now suppose, Madam, that there were 250, or 50, or 25 such people in existence, people pledged not to commit adultery of the brain, so that it was unnecessary to strip what they said of its money motive, power motive, advertisement motive, publicity motive, vanity motive and so on, before we unwrapped the grain of truth, might not two very remarkable consequences follow? Is it not possible that if we knew the truth about war, the glory of war would be scotched and crushed where it lies curled up in the rotten cabbage leaves of our prostituted fact-purveyors; and if we knew the truth about art instead of shuffling and shambling through the smeared and dejected pages of those who must live by prostituting culture, the enjoyment and practice of art would become so desirable that by comparison the pursuit of war would be a tedious game for elderly dilettantes in search of a mildly sanitary amusement—the tossing of bombs instead of balls over frontiers instead of nets? In short, if newspapers were written by people whose sole object in writing was to tell the truth about politics and the truth about art we should not believe in war, and we should believe in art.

Hence there is a very clear connection between culture and intellectual liberty and those photographs of dead bodies and ruined houses. And to ask the daughters of educated men who have enough to live upon not to commit adultery of the brain is to ask them to help in the most positive way now open to them—since the profession of literature is still that which stands widest open to them—to prevent war.

Thus, Sir, we might address this lady, crudely, briefly it is true; but time presses and we cannot define further. And to this appeal she might well reply, if indeed she exists: “What you say is obvious; so obvious that every educated man’s daughter already knows it for herself, or if she does not, has only to read the newspapers to be sure of it. But suppose she were well enough off not merely to sign this manifesto in favour of disinterested culture and intellectual liberty but to put her opinion into practice, how could she set about it? And do not,” she may reasonably add, “dream dreams about ideal worlds behind the stars; consider actual facts in the actual world.” Indeed, the actual world is much more difficult to deal with than the dream world. Still, Madam, the private printing press is an actual fact, and not beyond the reach of a moderate income. Typewriters and duplicators are actual facts and even cheaper. By using these cheap and so far unforbidden instruments you can at once rid yourself of the pressure of boards, policies and editors. They will speak your own mind, in your own words, at your own time, at your own length, at your own bidding. And that, we are agreed, is our definition of ‘intellectual liberty.’ “But,” she may say, “‘the public’? How can that be reached without putting my own mind through the mincing machine and turning it into sausage?” “‘The public,’ Madam,” we may assure her, “is very like ourselves; it lives in rooms; it walks in streets, and is said moreover to be tired of sausage. Fling leaflets down basements; expose them on stalls; trundle them along streets on barrows to be sold for a penny or given away. Find out new ways of approaching ‘the public’; single it into separate people instead of massing it into one monster, gross in body, feeble in mind. And then reflect—since you have enough to live on, you have a room, not necessarily ‘cosy’ or ‘handsome’ but still silent, private; a room where safe from publicity and its poison you could, even asking a reasonable fee for the service, speak the truth to artists, about pictures, music, books, without fear of affecting their sales, which are exiguous, or wounding their vanity, which is prodigious.[◉10] Such at least was the criticism that Ben Jonson gave Shakespeare at the Mermaid and there is no reason to suppose, with Hamlet as evidence, that literature suffered in consequence. Are not the best critics private people, and is not the only criticism worth having spoken criticism? Those then are some of the active ways in which you, as a writer of your own tongue, can put your opinion into practice. But if you are passive, a reader, not a writer, then you must adopt not active but passive methods of protecting culture and intellectual liberty.” “And what may they be?” she will ask. “To abstain, obviously. Not to subscribe to papers that encourage intellectual slavery; not to attend lectures that prostitute culture; for we are agreed that to write at the command of another what you do not want to write is to be enslaved, and to mix culture with personal charm or advertisement is to prostitute culture. By these active and passive measures you would do all in your power to break the ring, the vicious circle, the dance round and round the mulberry tree, the poison tree of intellectual harlotry. The ring once broken, the captives would be freed. For who can doubt that once writers had the chance of writing what they enjoy writing they would find it so much more pleasurable that they would refuse to write on any other terms; or that readers once they had the chance of reading what writers enjoy writing, would find it so much more nourishing than what is written for money that they would refuse to be palmed off with the stale substitute any longer? Thus the slaves who are now kept hard at work piling words into books, piling words into articles, as the old slaves piled stones into pyramids, would shake the manacles from their wrists and give up their loathsome labour. And ‘culture,’ that amorphous bundle, swaddled up as she now is in insincerity, emitting half truths from her timid lips, sweetening and diluting her message with whatever sugar or water serves to swell the writer’s fame or his master’s purse, would regain her shape and become, as Milton, Keats and other great writers assure us that she is in reality, muscular, adventurous, free. Whereas now, Madam, at the very mention of culture the head aches, the eyes close, the doors shut, the air thickens; we are in a lecture room, rank with the fumes of stale print, listening to a gentleman who is forced to lecture or to write every Wednesday, every Sunday, about Milton or about Keats, while the lilac shakes its branches in the garden free, and the gulls, swirling and swooping, suggest with wild laughter that such stale fish might with advantage be tossed to them. That is our plea to you, Madam; those are our reasons for urging it. Do not merely sign this manifesto in favour of culture and intellectual liberty; attempt at least to put your promise into practice.”

Whether the daughters of educated men who have enough to live upon and read and write their own tongue for their own pleasure will listen to this request or not, we cannot say, Sir. But if culture and intellectual liberty are to be protected, not by opinions merely but by practice, this would seem to be the way. It is not an easy way, it is true. Nevertheless, such as it is, there are reasons for thinking that the way is easier for them than for their brothers. They are immune, through no merit of their own, from certain compulsions. To protect culture and intellectual liberty in practice would mean, as we have said, ridicule and chastity, loss of publicity and poverty. But those, as we have seen, are their familiar teachers. Further, Whitaker with his facts is at hand to help them; for since he proves that all the fruits of professional culture—such as directorships of art galleries and museums, professorships and lectureships and editorships are still beyond their reach, they should be able to take a more purely disinterested view of culture than their brothers, without for a moment claiming, as Macaulay asserts, that they are by nature more disinterested. Thus helped by tradition and by facts as they are, we have not only some right to ask them to help us to break the circle, the vicious circle of prostituted culture, but some hope that if such people exist they will help us. To return then to your manifesto: we will sign it if we can keep these terms; if we cannot keep them, we will not sign it.

Now that we have tried to see how we can help you to prevent war by attempting to define what is meant by protecting culture and intellectual liberty let us consider your next and inevitable request: that we should subscribe to the funds of your society. For you, too, are an honorary treasurer, and like the other honorary treasurers in need of money. Since you, too, are asking for money it might be possible to ask you, also, to define your aims, and to bargain and to impose terms as with the other honorary treasurers. What then are the aims of your society? To prevent war, of course. And by what means? Broadly speaking, by protecting the rights of the individual; by opposing dictatorship; by ensuring the democratic ideals of equal opportunity for all. Those are the chief means by which as you say, “the lasting peace of the world can be assured.” Then, Sir, there is no need to bargain or to haggle. If those are your aims, and if, as it is impossible to doubt, you mean to do all in your power to achieve them, the guinea is yours—would that it were a million! The guinea is yours; and the guinea is a free gift, given freely.

But the word “free” is used so often, and has come, like used words, to mean so little, that it may be well to explain exactly, even pedantically, what the word “free” means in this context. It means here that no right or privilege is asked in return. The giver is not asking you to admit her to the priesthood of the Church of England; or to the Stock Exchange; or to the Diplomatic Service. The giver has no wish to be “English” on the same terms that you yourself are “English.” The giver does not claim in return for the gift admission to any profession; any honour, title, or medal; any professorship or lectureship; any seat upon any society, committee or board. The gift is free from all such conditions because the one right of paramount importance to all human beings is already won. You cannot take away her right to earn a living. Now then for the first time in English history an educated man’s daughter can give her brother one guinea of her own making at his request for the purpose specified above without asking for anything in return. It is a free gift, given without fear, without flattery, and without conditions. That, Sir, is so momentous an occasion in the history of civilization that some celebration seems called for. But let us have done with the old ceremonies—the Lord Mayor, with turtles and sheriffs in attendance, tapping nine times with his mace upon a stone while the Archbishop of Canterbury in full canonicals invokes a blessing. Let us invent a new ceremony for this new occasion. What more fitting than to destroy an old word, a vicious and corrupt word that has done much harm in its day and is now obsolete? The word “feminist” is the word indicated. That word, according to the dictionary, means “one who champions the rights of women.” Since the only right, the right to earn a living, has been won, the word no longer has a meaning. And a word without a meaning is a dead word, a corrupt word. Let us therefore celebrate this occasion by cremating the corpse. Let us write that word in large black letters on a sheet of foolscap; then solemnly apply a match to the paper. Look, how it burns! What a light dances over the world! Now let us bray the ashes in a mortar with a goose-feather pen, and declare in unison singing together that anyone who uses that word in future is a ring-the-bell-and-run-away man,[◉11] a mischief maker, a groper among old bones, the proof of whose defilement is written in a smudge of dirty water upon his face. The smoke has died down; the word is destroyed. Observe, Sir, what has happened as the result of our celebration. The word “feminist” is destroyed; the air is cleared; and in that clearer air what do we see? Men and women working together for the same cause. The cloud has lifted from the past too. What were they working for in the nineteenth century—those queer dead women in their poke bonnets and shawls? The very same cause for which we are working now. “Our claim was no claim of women’s rights only;”—it is Josephine Butler who speaks—“it was larger and deeper; it was a claim for the rights of all—all men and women—to the respect in their persons of the great principles of Justice and Equality and Liberty.” The words are the same as yours; the claim is the same as yours. The daughters of educated men who were called, to their resentment, “feminists” were in fact the advance guard of your own movement. They were fighting the same enemy that you are fighting and for the same reasons. They were fighting the tyranny of the patriarchal state as you are fighting the tyranny of the Fascist state. Thus we are merely carrying on the same fight that our mothers and grandmothers fought; their words prove it; your words prove it. But now with your letter before us we have your assurance that you are fighting with us, not against us. That fact is so inspiring that another celebration seems called for. What could be more fitting than to write more dead words, more corrupt words, upon more sheets of paper and burn them—the words, Tyrant, Dictator, for example? But, alas, those words are not yet obsolete. We can still shake out eggs from newspapers; still smell a peculiar and unmistakable odour in the region of Whitehall and Westminster. And abroad the monster has come more openly to the surface. There is no mistaking him there. He has widened his scope. He is interfering now with your liberty; he is dictating how you shall live; he is making distinctions not merely between the sexes, but between the races. You are feeling in your own persons what your mothers felt when they were shut out, when they were shut up, because they were women. Now you are being shut out, you are being shut up, because you are Jews, because you are democrats, because of race, because of religion. It is not a photograph that you look upon any longer; there you go, trapesing along in the procession yourselves. And that makes a difference. The whole iniquity of dictatorship, whether in Oxford or Cambridge, in Whitehall or Downing Street, against Jews or against women, in England, or in Germany, in Italy or in Spain is now apparent to you. But now we are fighting together. The daughters and sons of educated men are fighting side by side. That fact is so inspiring, even if no celebration is yet possible, that if this one guinea could be multiplied a million times all those guineas should be at your service without any other conditions than those that you have imposed upon yourself. Take this one guinea then and use it to assert “the rights of all—all men and women—to the respect in their persons of the great principles of Justice and Equality and Liberty.” Put this penny candle in the window of your new society, and may we live to see the day when in the blaze of our common freedom the words tyrant and dictator shall be burnt to ashes, because the words tyrant and dictator shall be obsolete.

That request then for a guinea answered, and the cheque signed, only one further request of yours remains to be considered—it is that we should fill up a form and become members of your society. On the face of it that seems a simple request, easily granted. For what can be simpler than to join the society to which this guinea has just been contributed? On the face of it, how easy, how simple; but in the depths, how difficult, how complicated…. What possible doubts, what possible hesitations can those dots stand for? What reason or what emotion can make us hesitate to become members of a society whose aims we approve, to whose funds we have contributed? It may be neither reason nor emotion, but something more profound and fundamental than either. It may be difference. Different we are, as facts have proved, both in sex and in education. And it is from that difference, as we have already said, that our help can come, if help we can, to protect liberty, to prevent war. But if we sign this form which implies a promise to become active members of your society, it would seem that we must lose that difference and therefore sacrifice that help. To explain why this is so is not easy, even though the gift of a guinea has made it possible (so we have boasted), to speak freely without fear or flattery. Let us then keep the form unsigned on the table before us while we discuss, so far as we are able, the reasons and the emotions which make us hesitate to sign it. For those reasons and emotions have their origin deep in the darkness of ancestral memory; they have grown together in some confusion; it is very difficult to untwist them in the light.

To begin with an elementary distinction: a society is a conglomeration of people joined together for certain aims; while you, who write in your own person with your own hand are single. You the individual are a man whom we have reason to respect; a man of the brotherhood, to which, as biography proves, many brothers have belonged. Thus Anne Clough, describing her brother, says: “Arthur is my best friend and adviser…. Arthur is the comfort and joy of my life; it is for him, and from him, that I am incited to seek after all that is lovely and of good report.” To which William Wordsworth, speaking of his sister but answering the other as if one nightingale called to another in the forests of the past, replies:

The Blessing of my later years

Was with me when a Boy:

She gave me eyes, she gave me ears;

And humble cares, and delicate fears;

A heart, the fountain of sweet tears;

And love, and thought, and joy.[◉12]

Such was, such perhaps still is, the relationship of many brothers and sisters in private, as individuals. They respect each other and help each other and have aims in common. Why then, if such can be their private relationship, as biography and poetry prove, should their public relationship, as law and history prove, be so very different? And here, since you are a lawyer, with a lawyer’s memory, it is not necessary to remind you of certain decrees of English law from its first records to the year 1919 by way of proving that the public, the society relationship of brother and sister has been very different from the private. The very word ‘society’ sets tolling in memory the dismal bells of a harsh music: shall not, shall not, shall not. You shall not learn; you shall not earn; you shall not own; you shall not—— such was the society relationship of brother to sister for many centuries. And though it is possible, and to the optimistic credible, that in time a new society may ring a carillon of splendid harmony, and your letter heralds it, that day is far distant. Inevitably we ask ourselves, is there not something in the conglomeration of people into societies that releases what is most selfish and violent, least rational and humane in the individuals themselves? Inevitably we look upon society, so kind to you, so harsh to us, as an ill-fitting form that distorts the truth; deforms the mind; fetters the will. Inevitably we look upon societies as conspiracies that sink the private brother, whom many of us have reason to respect, and inflate in his stead a monstrous male, loud of voice, hard of fist, childishly intent upon scoring the floor of the earth with chalk marks, within whose mystic boundaries human beings are penned, rigidly, separately, artificially; where, daubed red and gold, decorated like a savage with feathers he goes through mystic rites and enjoys the dubious pleasures of power and dominion while we, ‘his’ women, are locked in the private house without share in the many societies of which his society is composed. For such reasons compact as they are of many memories and emotions—for who shall analyse the complexity of a mind that holds so deep a reservoir of time past within it?—it seems both wrong for us rationally and impossible for us emotionally to fill up your form and join your society. For by so doing we should merge our identity in yours; follow and repeat and score still deeper the old worn ruts in which society, like a gramophone whose needle has stuck, is grinding out with intolerable unanimity “Three hundred millions spent upon arms.” We should not give effect to a view which our own experience of ‘society’ should have helped us to envisage. Thus, Sir, while we respect you as a private person and prove it by giving you a guinea to spend as you choose, we believe that we can help you most effectively by refusing to join your society; by working for our common ends—justice and equality and liberty for all men and women—outside your society, not within.

But this, you will say, if it means anything, can only mean that you, the daughters of educated men, who have promised us your positive help, refuse to join our society in order that you may make another of your own. And what sort of society do you propose to found outside ours, but in co-operation with it, so that we may both work together for our common ends? That is a question which you have every right to ask, and which we must try to answer in order to justify our refusal to sign the form you send. Let us then draw rapidly in outline the kind of society which the daughters of educated men might found and join outside your society but in co-operation with its ends. In the first place, this new society, you will be relieved to learn, would have no honorary treasurer, for it would need no funds. It would have no office, no committee, no secretary; it would call no meetings; it would hold no conferences. If name it must have, it could be called the Outsiders’ Society. That is not a resonant name, but it has the advantage that it squares with facts—the facts of history, of law, of biography; even, it may be, with the still hidden facts of our still unknown psychology. It would consist of educated men’s daughters working in their own class—how indeed can they work in any other?[◉13]—and by their own methods for liberty, equality and peace. Their first duty, to which they would bind themselves not by oath, for oaths and ceremonies have no part in a society which must be anonymous and elastic before everything would be not to fight with arms. This is easy for them to observe, for in fact, as the papers inform us, “the Army Council have no intention of opening recruiting for any women’s corps.”[◉14] The country ensures it. Next they would refuse in the event of war to make munitions or nurse the wounded. Since in the last war both these activities were mainly discharged by the daughters of working men, the pressure upon them here too would be slight, though probably disagreeable. On the other hand the next duty to which they would pledge themselves is one of considerable difficulty, and calls not only for courage and initiative, but for the special knowledge of the educated man’s daughter. It is, briefly, not to incite their brothers to fight, or to dissuade them, but to maintain an attitude of complete indifference. But the attitude expressed by the word “indifference” is so complex and of such importance that it needs even here further definition. Indifference in the first place must be given a firm footing upon fact. As it is a fact that she cannot understand what instinct compels him, what glory, what interest, what manly satisfaction fighting provides for him—“without war there would be no outlet for the manly qualities which fighting develops”—as fighting thus is a sex characteristic which she cannot share, the counterpart some claim of the maternal instinct which he cannot share, so is it an instinct which she cannot judge. The outsider therefore must leave him free to deal with this instinct by himself, because liberty of opinion must be respected, especially when it is based upon an instinct which is as foreign to her as centuries of tradition and education can make it.[◉15] This is a fundamental and instinctive distinction upon which indifference may be based. But the outsider will make it her duty not merely to base her indifference upon instinct, but upon reason. When he says, as history proves that he has said, and may say again, “I am fighting to protect our country” and thus seeks to rouse her patriotic emotion, she will ask herself, “What does ‘our country’ mean to me an outsider?” To decide this she will analyse the meaning of patriotism in her own case. She will inform herself of the position of her sex and her class in the past. She will inform herself of the amount of land, wealth and property in the possession of her own sex and class in the present—how much of “England” in fact belongs to her. From the same sources she will inform herself of the legal protection which the law has given her in the past and now gives her. And if he adds that he is fighting to protect her body, she will reflect upon the degree of physical protection that she now enjoys when the words “Air Raid Precaution” are written on blank walls. And if he says that he is fighting to protect England from foreign rule, she will reflect that for her there are no “foreigners”, since by law she becomes a foreigner if she marries a foreigner. And she will do her best to make this a fact, not by forced fraternity, but by human sympathy. All these facts will convince her reason (to put it in a nutshell) that her sex and class has very little to thank England for in the past; not much to thank England for in the present; while the security of her person in the future is highly dubious. But probably she will have imbibed, even from the governess, some romantic notion that Englishmen, those fathers and grandfathers whom she sees marching in the picture of history, are “superior” to the men of other countries. This she will consider it her duty to check by comparing French historians with English; German with French; the testimony of the ruled—the Indians or the Irish, say—with the claims made by their rulers. Still some “patriotic” emotion, some ingrained belief in the intellectual superiority of her own country over other countries may remain. Then she will compare English painting with French painting; English music with German music; English literature with Greek literature, for translations abound. When all these comparisons have been faithfully made by the use of reason, the outsider will find herself in possession of very good reasons for her indifference. She will find that she has no good reason to ask her brother to fight on her behalf to protect “our” country. “‘Our country,’” she will say, “throughout the greater part of its history has treated me as a slave; it has denied me education or any share in its possessions. ‘Our’ country still ceases to be mine if I marry a foreigner. ‘Our’ country denies me the means of protecting myself, forces me to pay others a very large sum annually to protect me, and is so little able, even so, to protect me that Air Raid precautions are written on the wall. Therefore if you insist upon fighting to protect me, or ‘our’ country, let it be understood, soberly and rationally between us, that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannot share; to procure benefits which I have not shared and probably will not share; but not to gratify my instincts, or to protect either myself or my country. For,” the outsider will say, “in fact, as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.” And if, when reason has said its say, still some obstinate emotion remains, some love of England dropped into a child’s ears by the cawing of rooks in an elm tree, by the splash of waves on a beach, or by English voices murmuring nursery rhymes, this drop of pure, if irrational, emotion she will make serve her to give to England first what she desires of peace and freedom for the whole world.

Such then will be the nature of her “indifference” and from this indifference certain actions must follow. She will bind herself to take no share in patriotic demonstrations; to assent to no form of national self-praise; to make no part of any claque or audience that encourages war; to absent herself from military displays, tournaments, tattoos, prize-givings and all such ceremonies as encourage the desire to impose “our” civilization or “our” dominion upon other people. The psychology of private life, moreover, warrants the belief that this use of indifference by the daughters of educated men would help materially to prevent war. For psychology would seem to show that it is far harder for human beings to take action when other people are indifferent and allow them complete freedom of action, than when their actions are made the centre of excited emotion. The small boy struts and trumpets outside the window: implore him to stop; he goes on; say nothing; he stops. That the daughters of educated men then should give their brothers neither the white feather of cowardice nor the red feather of courage, but no feather at all; that they should shut the bright eyes that rain influence, or let those eyes look elsewhere when war is discussed—that is the duty to which outsiders will train themselves in peace before the threat of death inevitably makes reason powerless.

Such then are some of the methods by which the society, the anonymous and secret Society of Outsiders would help you, Sir, to prevent war and to ensure freedom. Whatever value you may attach to them you will agree that they are duties which your own sex would find it more difficult to carry out than ours; and duties moreover which are specially appropriate to the daughters of educated men. For they would need some acquaintance with the psychology of educated men, and the minds of educated men are more highly trained and their words subtler than those of working men.[◉16] There are other duties, of course—many have already been outlined in the letters to the other honorary treasurers. But at the risk of some repetition let us roughly and rapidly repeat them, so that they may form a basis for a society of outsiders to take its stand upon. First, they would bind themselves to earn their own livings. The importance of this as a method of ending war is obvious; sufficient stress has already been laid upon the superior cogency of an opinion based upon economic independence over an opinion based upon no income at all or upon a spiritual right to an income to make further proof unnecessary. It follows that an outsider must make it her business to press for a living wage in all the professions now open to her sex; further that she must create new professions in which she can earn the right to an independent opinion. Therefore she must bind herself to press for a money wage for the unpaid worker in her own class—the daughters and sisters of educated men who, as biographies have shown us, are now paid on the truck system, with food, lodging and a pittance of £40 a year. But above all she must press for a wage to be paid by the State legally to the mothers of educated men. The importance of this to our common fight is immeasurable; for it is the most effective way in which we can ensure that the large and very honourable class of married women shall have a mind and a will of their own, with which, if his mind and will are good in her eyes, to support her husband, if bad to resist him, in any case to cease to be “his woman” and to be her self. You will agree, Sir, without any aspersion upon the lady who bears your name, that to depend upon her for your income would effect a most subtle and undesirable change in your psychology. Apart from that, this measure is of such importance directly to yourselves, in your own fight for liberty and equality and peace, that if any condition were to be attached to the guinea it would be this: that you should provide a wage to be paid by the State to those whose profession is marriage and motherhood. Consider, even at the risk of a digression, what effect this would have upon the birth-rate, in the very class where the birth-rate is falling, in the very class where births are desirable—the educated class. Just as the increase in the pay of soldiers has resulted, the papers say, in additional recruits to the force of arm-bearers, so the same inducement would serve to recruit the child-bearing force, which we can hardly deny to be as necessary and as honourable, but which, because of its poverty, and its hardships, is now failing to attract recruits. That method might succeed where the one in use at present—abuse and ridicule—has failed. But the point which, at the risk of further digression, the outsiders would press upon you is one that vitally concerns your own lives as educated men and the honour and vigour of your professions. For if your wife were paid for her work, the work of bearing and bringing up children, a real wage, a money wage, so that it became an attractive profession instead of being as it is now an unpaid profession, an unpensioned profession, and therefore a precarious and dishonoured profession, your own slavery would be lightened.[◉17] No longer need you go to the office at nine-thirty and stay there till six. Work could be equally distributed. Patients could be sent to the patientless. Briefs to the briefless. Articles could be left unwritten. Culture would thus be stimulated. You could see the fruit trees flower in spring. You could share the prime of life with your children. And after that prime was over no longer need you be thrown from the machine on to the scrap heap without any life left or interests surviving to parade the environs of Bath or Cheltenham in the care of some unfortunate slave. No longer would you be the Saturday caller, the albatross on the neck of society, the sympathy addict, the deflated work slave calling for replenishment; or, as Herr Hitler puts it, the hero requiring recreation, or, as Signor Mussolini puts it, the wounded warrior requiring female dependants to bandage his wounds.[◉18] If the State paid your wife a living wage for her work which, sacred though it is, can scarcely be called more sacred than that of the clergyman, yet as his work is paid without derogation so may hers be—if this step which is even more essential to your freedom than to hers were taken the old mill in which the professional man now grinds out his round, often so wearily, with so little pleasure to himself or profit to his profession, would be broken; the opportunity of freedom would be yours; the most degrading of all servitudes, the intellectual servitude, would be ended; the half-man might become whole. But since three hundred millions or so have to be spent upon the arm-bearers, such expenditure is obviously, to use a convenient word supplied by the politicians, “impracticable” and it is time to return to more feasible projects.

The outsiders then would bind themselves not only to earn their own livings, but to earn them so expertly that their refusal to earn them would be a matter of concern to the work master. They would bind themselves to obtain full knowledge of professional practices, and to reveal any instance of tyranny or abuse in their professions. And they would bind themselves not to continue to make money in any profession, but to cease all competition and to practise their profession experimentally, in the interests of research and for love of the work itself, when they had earned enough to live upon. Also they would bind themselves to remain outside any profession hostile to freedom, such as the making or the improvement of the weapons of war. And they would bind themselves to refuse to take office or honour from any society which, while professing to respect liberty, restricts it, like the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. And they would consider it their duty to investigate the claims of all public societies to which, like the Church and the universities, they are forced to contribute as taxpayers as carefully and fearlessly as they would investigate the claims of private societies to which they contribute voluntarily. They would make it their business to scrutinize the endowments of the schools and universities and the objects upon which that money is spent. As with the educational, so with the religious profession. By reading the New Testament in the first place and next those divines and historians whose works are all easily accessible to the daughters of educated men, they would make it their business to have some knowledge of the Christian religion and its history. Further they would inform themselves of the practice of that religion by attending Church services, by analysing the spiritual and intellectual value of sermons; by criticizing the opinions of men whose profession is religion as freely as they would criticize the opinions of any other body of men. Thus they would be creative in their activities, not merely critical. By criticizing education they would help to create a civilized society which protects culture and intellectual liberty. By criticizing religion they would attempt to free the religious spirit from its present servitude and would help, if need be, to create a new religion based it might well be upon the New Testament, but, it might well be, very different from the religion now erected upon that basis. And in all this, and in much more than we have time to particularize, they would be helped, you will agree, by their position as outsiders, that freedom from unreal loyalties, that freedom from interested motives which are at present assured them by the State.

It would be easy to define in greater number and more exactly the duties of those who belong to the Society of Outsiders, but not profitable. Elasticity is essential; and some degree of secrecy, as will be shown later, is at present even more essential. But the description thus loosely and imperfectly given is enough to show you, Sir, that the Society of Outsiders has the same ends as your society—freedom, equality, peace; but that it seeks to achieve them by the means that a different sex, a different tradition, a different education, and the different values which result from those differences have placed within our reach. Broadly speaking, the main distinction between us who are outside society and you who are inside society must be that whereas you will make use of the means provided by your position—leagues, conferences, campaigns, great names, and all such public measures as your wealth and political influence place within your reach—we, remaining outside, will experiment not with public means in public but with private means in private. Those experiments will not be merely critical but creative. To take two obvious instances:—the outsiders will dispense with pageantry not from any puritanical dislike of beauty. On the contrary, it will be one of their aims to increase private beauty; the beauty of spring, summer, autumn; the beauty of flowers, silks, clothes; the beauty which brims not only every field and wood but every barrow in Oxford Street; the scattered beauty which needs only to be combined by artists in order to become visible to all. But they will dispense with the dictated, regimented, official pageantry, in which only one sex takes an active part—those ceremonies, for example, which depend upon the deaths of kings, or their coronations to inspire them. Again, they will dispense with personal distinctions—medals, ribbons, badges, hoods, gowns—not from any dislike of personal adornment, but because of the obvious effect of such distinctions to constrict, to stereotype and to destroy. Here, as so often, the example of the Fascist States is at hand to instruct us—for if we have no example of what we wish to be, we have, what is perhaps equally valuable, a daily and illuminating example of what we do not wish to be. With the example then, that they give us of the power of medals, symbols, orders and even, it would seem, of decorated ink-pots[◉19] to hypnotize the human mind it must be our aim not to submit ourselves to such hypnotism. We must extinguish the coarse glare of advertisement and publicity, not merely because the limelight is apt to be held in incompetent hands, but because of the psychological effect of such illumination upon those who receive it. Consider next time you drive along a country road the attitude of a rabbit caught in the glare of a head-lamp—its glazed eyes, its rigid paws. Is there not good reason to think without going outside our own country, that the “attitudes,” the false and unreal positions taken by the human form in England as well as in Germany, are due to the limelight which paralyses the free action of the human faculties and inhibits the human power to change and create new wholes much as a strong head-lamp paralyses the little creatures who run out of the darkness into its beams? It is a guess; guessing is dangerous; yet we have some reason to guide us in the guess that ease and freedom, the power to change and the power to grow, can only be preserved by obscurity; and that if we wish to help the human mind to create, and to prevent it from scoring the same rut repeatedly, we must do what we can to shroud it in darkness.

But enough of guessing. To return to facts—what chance is there, you may ask, that such a Society of Outsiders without office, meetings, leaders or any hierarchy, without so much as a form to be filled up, or a secretary to be paid, can be brought into existence, let alone work to any purpose? Indeed it would have been waste of time to write even so rough a definition of the Outsiders’ Society were it merely a bubble of words, a covert form of sex or class glorification, serving, as so many such expressions do, to relieve the writer’s emotion, lay the blame elsewhere, and then burst. Happily there is a model in being, a model from which the above sketch has been taken, furtively it is true, for the model, far from sitting still to be painted, dodges and disappears. That model then, the evidence that such a body, whether named or unnamed, exists and works is provided not yet by history or biography, for the outsiders have only had a positive existence for twenty years—that is since the professions were opened to the daughters of educated men. But evidence of their existence is provided by history and biography in the raw—by the newspapers that is, sometimes openly in the lines, sometimes covertly between them. There, anyone who wishes to verify the existence of such a body, can find innumerable proofs. Many, it is obvious, are of dubious value. For example, the fact that an immense amount of work is done by the daughters of educated men without pay or for very little pay need not be taken as a proof that they are experimenting of their own free will in the psychological value of poverty. Nor need the fact that many daughters of educated men do not “eat properly”[◉20] serve as a proof that they are experimenting in the physical value of undernourishment. Nor need the fact that a very small proportion of women compared with men accept honours be held to prove that they are experimenting in the virtues of obscurity. Many such experiments are forced experiments and therefore of no positive value. But others of a much more positive kind are coming daily to the surface of the Press. Let us examine three only, in order that we may prove our statement that the Society of Outsiders is in being. The first is straightforward enough.

Speaking at a bazaar last week at the Plumstead Common Baptist Church the Mayoress (of Woolwich) said: “… I myself would not even do as much as darn a sock to help in a war.” These remarks are resented by the majority of the Woolwich public, who hold that the Mayoress was, to say the least, rather tactless. Some 12,000 Woolwich electors are employed in Woolwich Arsenal on armament making.[◉21]

There is no need to comment upon the tactlessness of such a statement made publicly, in such circumstances; but the courage can scarcely fail to command our admiration, and the value of the experiment, from a practical point of view, should other mayoresses in other towns and other countries where the electors are employed in armament making follow suit may well be immeasurable. At any rate, we shall agree that the Mayoress of Woolwich, Mrs. Kathleen Rance, has made a courageous and effective experiment in the prevention of war by not knitting socks. For a second proof that the outsiders are at work let us choose another example from the daily paper, one that is less obvious, but still you will agree an outsider’s experiment, a very original experiment, and one that may be of great value to the cause of peace.

Speaking of the work of the great voluntary associations for the playing of certain games, Miss Clarke [Miss E. R. Clarke of the Board of Education] referred to the women’s organizations for hockey, lacrosse, netball, and cricket, and pointed out that under the rules there could be no cup or award of any kind to a successful team. The “gates” for their matches might be a little smaller than for the men’s games, but their players played the game for the love of it, and they seemed to be proving that cups and awards are not necessary to stimulate interest for each year the numbers of players steadily continued to increase.[◉22]

That, you will agree, is an extraordinarily interesting experiment, one that may well bring about a psychological change of great value in human nature, and a change that may be of real help in preventing war. It is further of interest because it is an experiment that outsiders, owing to their comparative freedom from certain inhibitions and persuasions, can carry out much more easily than those who are necessarily exposed to such influences inside. That statement is corroborated in a very interesting way by the following quotation:

Official football circles here [Wellingborough, Northants] regard with anxiety the growing popularity of girls’ football. A secret meeting of the Northants Football Association’s consultative committee was held here last night to discuss the playing of a girls’ match on the Peterborough ground. Members of the Committee are reticent…. One member, however, said to-day: “The Northants Football Association is to forbid women’s football. This popularity of girls’ football comes when many men’s clubs in the country are in a parlous state through lack of support. Another serious aspect is the possibility of grave injury to women players.”[◉23]

There we have proof positive of those inhibitions and persuasions which make it harder for your sex to experiment freely in altering current values than for ours; and without spending time upon the delicacies of psychological analysis even a hasty glance at the reasons given by this Association for its decision will throw a valuable light upon the reasons which lead other and even more important associations to come to their decisions. But to return to the outsiders’ experiments. For our third example let us choose what we may call an experiment in passivity.

A remarkable change in the attitude of young women to the Church was discussed by Canon F. R. Barry, vicar of St. Mary the Virgin (the University Church), at Oxford last night…. The task before the Church, he said, was nothing less than to make civilization moral, and this was a great co-operative task which demanded all that Christians could bring to it. It simply could not be carried through by men alone. For a century, or a couple of centuries, women had predominated in the congregations in roughly the ratio of 75 per cent, to 25 per cent. The whole situation was now changing, and what the keen observer would notice in almost any church in England was the paucity of young women…. Among the student population the young women were, on the whole, farther away from the Church of England and the Christian faith than the young men.[◉24]

That again is an experiment of very great interest. It is, as we have said, a passive experiment. For while the first example was an outspoken refusal to knit socks in order to discourage war, and the second was an attempt to prove whether cups and awards are necessary to stimulate interest in games, the third is an attempt to discover what happens if the daughters of educated men absent themselves from church. Without being in itself more valuable than the others, it is of more practical interest because it is obviously the kind of experiment that great numbers of outsiders can practise with very little difficulty or danger. To absent yourself—that is easier than to speak aloud at a bazaar, or to draw up rules of an original kind for playing games. Therefore it is worth watching very carefully to see what effect the experiment of absenting oneself has had—if any. The results are positive and they are encouraging. There can be no doubt that the Church is becoming concerned about the attitude to the Church of educated men’s daughters at the universities. The report of the Archbishops’ Commission on the Ministry of Women is there to prove it. This document, which costs only one shilling and should be in the hands of all educated men’s daughters, points out that “one outstanding difference between men’s colleges and women’s colleges is the absence in the latter of a chaplain.” It reflects that “It is natural that in this period of their lives they [the students] exercise to the full their critical faculties.” It deplores the fact that “Very few women coming to the universities can now afford to offer continuous voluntary service either in social or in directly religious work.” And it concludes that “There are many special spheres in which such services are particularly needed, and the time has clearly come when the functions and position of women within the Church require further determination.”[◉25] Whether this concern is due to the empty churches at Oxford, or whether the voices of the “older schoolgirls” at Isleworth expressing “very grave dissatisfaction at the way in which organized religion was carried on”[◉26] have somehow penetrated to those august spheres where their sex is not supposed to speak, or whether our incorrigibly idealistic sex is at last beginning to take to heart Bishop Gore’s warning, “Men do not value ministrations which are gratuitous,”[◉27] and to express the opinion that a salary of £150 a year—the highest that the Church allows her daughters as deaconesses—is not enough—whatever the reason, considerable uneasiness at the attitude of educated men’s daughters is apparent; and this experiment in passivity, whatever our belief in the value of the Church of England as a spiritual agency, is highly encouraging to us as outsiders. For it seems to show that to be passive is to be active; those also serve who remain outside. By making their absence felt their presence becomes desirable. What light this throws upon the power of outsiders to abolish or modify other institutions of which they disapprove, whether public dinners, public speeches, Lord Mayors’ banquets and other obsolete ceremonies are pervious to indifference and will yield to its pressure, are questions, frivolous questions, that may well amuse our leisure and stimulate our curiosity. But that is not now the object before us. We have tried to prove to you, Sir, by giving three different examples of three different kinds of experiment that the Society of Outsiders is in being and at work. When you consider that these examples have all come to the surface of the newspaper you will agree that they represent a far greater number of private and submerged experiments of which there is no public proof. Also you will agree that they substantiate the model of the society given above, and prove that it was no visionary sketch drawn at random but based upon a real body working by different means for the same ends that you have set before us in your own society. Keen observers, like Canon Barry, could, if they liked, discover many more proofs that experiments are being made not only in the empty churches of Oxford. Mr. Wells even might be led to believe if he put his ear to the ground that a movement is going forward, not altogether imperceptibly, among educated men’s daughters against the Nazi and the Fascist. But it is essential that the movement should escape the notice even of keen observers and of famous novelists.

Secrecy is essential. We must still hide what we are doing and thinking even though what we are doing and thinking is for our common cause. The necessity for this, in certain circumstances, is not hard to discover. When salaries are low, as Whitaker proves that they are, and jobs are hard to get and keep, as everybody knows them to be, it is, “to say the least, rather tactless,” as the newspaper puts it, to criticize your master. Still, in country districts, as you yourself may be aware, farm labourers will not vote Labour. Economically, the educated man’s daughter is much on a level with the farm labourer. But it is scarcely necessary for us to waste time in searching out what reason it is that inspires both his and her secrecy. Fear is a powerful reason; those who are economically dependent have strong reasons for fear. We need explore no further. But here you may remind us of a certain guinea, and draw our attention to the proud boast that our gift, small though it was, had made it possible not merely to burn a certain corrupt word, but to speak freely without fear or flattery. The boast it seems had an element of brag in it. Some fear, some ancestral memory prophesying war, still remains, it seems. There are still subjects that educated people, when they are of different sexes, even though financially independent, veil, or hint at in guarded terms and then pass on. You may have observed it in real life; you may have detected it in biography. Even when they meet privately and talk, as we have boasted, about “politics and people, war and peace, barbarism and civilization,” yet they evade and conceal. But it is so important to accustom ourselves to the duties of free speech, for without private there can be no public freedom, that we must try to uncover this fear and to face it. What then can be the nature of the fear that still makes concealment necessary between educated people and reduces our boasted freedom to a farce? … Again there are three dots; again they represent a gulf—of silence this time, of silence inspired by fear. And since we lack both the courage to explain it and the skill, let us lower the veil of St. Paul between us, in other words take shelter behind an interpreter. Happily we have one at hand whose credentials are above suspicion. It is none other than the pamphlet from which quotation has already been made, the report of the Archbishops’ Commission on the Ministry of Women—a document of the highest interest for many reasons. For not only does it throw light of a searching and scientific nature upon this fear, but it gives us an opportunity to consider that profession which, since it is the highest of all may be taken as the type of all, the profession of religion, about which, purposely, very little has yet been said. And since it is the type of all it may throw light upon the other professions about which something has been said. You will pardon us therefore if we pause here to examine this report in some detail.

The Commission was appointed by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York “in order to examine any theological or other relevant principles which have governed or ought to govern the Church in the development of the Ministry of Women.”[◉28] Now the profession of religion, for our purposes the Church of England, though it seems on the surface to resemble the others in certain respects—it enjoys, Whitaker says, a large income, owns much property, and has a hierarchy of officials drawing salaries and taking precedence one of the other—yet ranks above all the other professions. The Archbishop of Canterbury precedes the Lord High Chancellor; the Archbishop of York precedes the Prime Minister. And it is the highest of all the professions because it is the profession of religion. But what, we may ask, is “religion”? What the Christian religion is has been laid down once and for all by the founder of that religion in words that can be read by all in a translation of singular beauty; and whether or not we accept the interpretation that has been put on them, we cannot deny them to be words of the most profound meaning. It can thus safely be said that whereas few people know what medicine is, or what law is, everyone who owns a copy of the New Testament knows what religion meant in the mind of its founder. Therefore, when in the year 1935 the daughters of educated men said that they wished to have the profession of religion opened to them, the priests of that profession, who correspond roughly to the doctors and barristers in the other professions, were forced not merely to consult some statute or charter which reserves the right to practise that profession professionally to the male sex; they were forced to consult the New Testament. They did so; and the result, as the Commissioners point out, was that they found that “the Gospels show us that our Lord regarded men and women alike as members of the same spiritual kingdom, as children of God’s family, and as possessors of the same spiritual capacities….” In proof of this they quote: “There is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. iii, 28). It would seem then that the founder of Christianity believed that neither training nor sex was needed for this profession. He chose his disciples from the working class from which he sprang himself. The prime qualification was some rare gift which in those early days was bestowed capriciously upon carpenters and fishermen, and upon women also. As the Commission points out there can be no doubt that in those early days there were prophetesses—women upon whom the divine gift had descended. Also they were allowed to preach. St. Paul, for example, lays it down that women, when praying in public, should be veiled. “The implication is that if veiled a woman might prophesy [i.e. preach] and lead in prayer.” How then can they be excluded from the priesthood since they were thought fit by the founder of the religion and by one of his apostles to preach? That was the question, and the Commission solved it by appealing not to the mind of the founder, but to the mind of the Church. That, of course, involved a distinction. For the mind of the Church had to be interpreted by another mind, and that mind was St. Paul’s mind; and St. Paul, in interpreting that mind, changed his mind. For after summoning from the depths of the past certain venerable if obscure figures—Lydia and Chloe, Euodia and Syntyche, Tryphœna and Tryphosa and Persis, debating their status, and deciding what was the difference between a prophetess and presbyteress, what the standing of a deaconess in the pre-Nicene Church and what in the post-Nicene Church, the Commissioners once more have recourse to St. Paul, and say: “In any case it is clear that the author of the Pastoral Epistles, be he St. Paul or another, regarded woman as being debarred on the ground of her sex from the position of an official “teacher” in the Church, or from any office involving the exercise of a governmental authority over a man (1 Tim. ii, 12).” That, it may frankly be said, is not so satisfactory as it might be; for we cannot altogether reconcile the ruling of St. Paul, or another, with the ruling of Christ himself who “regarded men and women alike as members of the same spiritual kingdom … and as possessors of the same spiritual capacities.” But it is futile to quibble over the meaning of words, when we are so soon in the presence of facts. Whatever Christ meant, or St. Paul meant, the fact was that in the fourth or fifth century the profession of religion had become so highly organized that “the deacon (unlike the deaconess) may, ‘after serving unto well-pleasing the ministry committed unto him,’ aspire to be appointed eventually to higher offices in the Church; whereas for the deaconess the Church prays simply that God ‘would grant unto her the Holy Spirit … that she may worthily accomplish the work committed to her.’” In three or four centuries, it appears, the prophet or prophetess whose message was voluntary and untaught became extinct; and their places were taken by the three orders of bishops, priests and deacons, who are invariably men, and invariably, as Whitaker points out, paid men, for when the Church became a profession its professors were paid. Thus the profession of religion seems to have been originally much what the profession of literature is now.[◉29] It was originally open to anyone who had received the gift of prophesy. No training was needed; the professional requirements were simple in the extreme—a voice and a market-place, a pen and paper. Emily Brontë, for instance, who wrote

No coward soul is mine,

No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere;

I see Heaven’s glories shine,

And faith shines equal, arming me from fear.

O God within my breast,

Almighty, ever-present Deity!

Life—that in me has rest,

As I—undying Life—have power in Thee!

though not worthy to be a priest in the Church of England, is the spiritual descendant of some ancient prophetess, who prophesied when prophecy was a voluntary and unpaid occupation. But when the Church became a profession, required special knowledge of its prophets and paid them for imparting it, one sex remained inside; the other was excluded. “The deacons rose in dignity—partly no doubt from their close association with the bishops—and become subordinate ministers of worship and of the sacraments; but the deaconess shared only in the preliminary stages of this evolution.” How elementary that evolution has been is proved by the fact that in England in 1938 the salary of an archbishop is £15,000; the salary of a bishop is £10,000 and the salary of a dean is £3,000. But the salary of a deaconess is £150; and as for the “parish worker,” who “is called upon to assist in almost every department of parish life,” whose “work is exacting and often solitary …” she is paid from £120 to £150 a year; nor is there anything to surprise us in the statement that “prayer needs to be the very centre of her activities.” Thus we might even go further than the Commissioners and say that the evolution of the deaconess is not merely “elementary,” it is positively stunted; for though she is ordained, and “ordination … conveys an indelible character, and involves the obligation of lifelong service,” she must remain outside the Church; and rank beneath the humblest curate. Such is the decision of the Church. For the Commission, having consulted the mind and tradition of the Church, reported finally; “While the Commission as a whole would not give their positive assent to the view that a woman is inherently incapable of receiving the grace of Order, and consequently to admission to any of the three Orders, we believe that the general mind of the Church is still in accord with the continuous tradition of a male priesthood.”

By thus showing that the highest of all the professions has many points of similarity with the other professions our interpreter, you will admit, has thrown further light upon the soul or essence of those professions. We must now ask him to help us, if he will, to analyse the nature of that fear which still, as we have admitted, makes it impossible for us to speak freely as free people should. Here again he is of service. Though identical in many respects, one very profound difference between the religious profession and the other professions has been noted above: the Church being a spiritual profession has to give spiritual and not merely historical reasons for its actions; it has to consult the mind, not the law. Therefore when the daughters of educated men wished to be admitted to the profession of the Church it seemed advisable to the Commissioners to give psychological and not merely historical reasons for their refusal to admit them. They therefore called in Professor Grensted, D.D., the Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion in the University of Oxford, and asked him “to summarize the relevant psychological and physiological material,” and to indicate “the grounds for the opinions and recommendations put forward by the Commission.” Now psychology is not theology; and the psychology of the sexes, as the Professor insisted, and “its bearing upon human conduct, is still a matter for specialists … and … its interpretation remains controversial in many respects obscure.” But he gave his evidence for what it was worth, and it is evidence that throws so much light upon the origin of the fear which we have admitted and deplored that we can do no better than follow his words exactly.

“It was represented,” he said, “in evidence before the Commission that man has a natural precedence of woman. This view, in the sense intended, cannot be supported psychologically. Psychologists fully recognize the fact of male dominance, but this must not be confused with male superiority, still less with any type of precedence which could have a bearing upon questions as to the admissibility of one sex rather than the other to Holy Orders.”

The psychologist, therefore, can only throw light upon certain facts. And this was the first fact that he investigated.

It is clearly a fact of the very greatest practical importance that strong feeling is aroused by any suggestion that women should be admitted to the status and functions of the threefold Order of the Ministry. The evidence before the Commission went to show that this feeling is predominantly hostile to such proposals…. This strength of feeling, conjoined with a wide variety of rational explanations, is clear evidence of the presence of powerful and widespread subconscious motive. In the absence of detailed analytical material, of which there seems to be no record in this particular connection, it nevertheless remains clear that infantile fixation plays a predominant part in determining the strong emotion with which this whole subject is commonly approached.

The exact nature of this fixation must necessarily differ with different individuals, and suggestions which can be made as to its origin can only be general in character. But whatever be the exact value and interpretation of the material upon which theories of the “œdipus complex” and the “castration complex” have been founded, it is clear that the general acceptance of male dominance, and still more of feminine inferiority, resting upon subconscious ideas of woman as “man manqué,” has its background in infantile conceptions of this type. These commonly, and even usually, survive in the adult, despite their irrationality, and betray their presence, below the level of conscious thought, by the strength of the emotions to which they give rise. It is strongly in support of this view that the admission of women to Holy Orders, and especially to the ministry of the sanctuary, is so commonly regarded as something shameful. This sense of shame cannot be regarded in any other light than as a non-rational sex-taboo.

Here we can take the Professor’s word for it that he has sought, and found, “ample evidence of these unconscious forces,” both in Pagan religions and in the Old Testament, and so follow him to his conclusion:

At the same time it must not be forgotten that the Christian conception of the priesthood rests not upon these subconscious emotional factors, but upon the institution of Christ. It thus not only fulfils but supersedes the priesthoods of paganism and the Old Testament. So far as psychology is concerned there is no theoretical reason why this Christian priesthood should not be exercised by women as well as by men and in exactly the same sense. The difficulties which the psychologist foresees are emotional and practical only.[◉30]

With that conclusion we may leave him.

The Commissioners, you will agree, have performed the delicate and difficult task that we asked them to undertake. They have acted as interpreters between us. They have given us an admirable example of a profession in its purest state; and shown us how a profession bases itself upon mind and tradition. They have further explained why it is that educated people when they are of different sexes do not speak openly upon certain subjects. They have shown why the outsiders, even when there is no question of financial dependence, may still be afraid to speak freely or to experiment openly. And, finally, in words of scientific precision, they have revealed to us the nature of that fear. For as Professor Grensted gave his evidence, we, the daughters of educated men, seemed to be watching a surgeon at work—an impartial and scientific operator, who, as he dissected the human mind by human means laid bare for all to see what cause, what root lies at the bottom of our fear. It is an egg. Its scientific name is “infantile fixation.” We, being unscientific, have named it wrongly. An egg we called it; a germ. We smelt it in the atmosphere; we detected its presence in Whitehall, in the universities, in the Church. Now undoubtedly the Professor has defined it and described it so accurately that no daughter of an educated man, however uneducated she may be, can miscall it or misinterpret it in future. Listen to the description. “Strong feeling is aroused by any suggestion that women be admitted”—it matters not to which priesthood; the priesthood of medicine or the priesthood of science or the priesthood of the Church. Strong feeling, she can corroborate the Professor, is undoubtedly shown should she ask to be admitted. “This strength of feeling is clear evidence of the presence of powerful and subconscious motive.” She will take the Professor’s word for that, and even supply him with some motives that have escaped him. Let us draw attention to two only. There is the money motive for excluding her, to put it plainly. Are not salaries motives now, whatever they may have been in the time of Christ? The archbishop has £15,000, the deaconess £150; and the Church, so the Commissioners say, is poor. To pay women more would be to pay men less. Secondly, is there not a motive, a psychological motive, for excluding her, hidden beneath what the Commissioners call a “practical consideration”? “At present a married priest,” they tell us, “is able to fulfil the requirements of the ordination service ‘to forsake and set aside all worldly cares and studies’ largely because his wife can undertake the care of the household and the family, …”[◉31] To be able to set aside all worldly cares and studies and lay them upon another person is a motive, to some of great attractive force; for some undoubtedly wish to withdraw and study, as theology with its refinements, and scholarship with its subtleties, prove; to others, it is true, the motive is a bad motive, a vicious motive, the cause of that separation between the Church and the people; between literature and the people; between the husband and the wife which has had its part in putting the whole of our Commonwealth out of gear. But whatever the powerful and subconscious motives may be that lie behind the exclusion of women from the priesthoods, and plainly we cannot count them, let alone dig to the roots of them here, the educated man’s daughter can testify from her own experience that they “commonly, and even usually, survive in the adult and betray their presence, below the level of conscious thought, by the strength of the emotions to which they give rise.” And you will agree that to oppose strong emotion needs courage; and that when courage fails, silence and evasion are likely to manifest themselves.

But now that the interpreters have performed their task, it is time for us to raise the veil of St. Paul and to attempt, face to face, a rough and clumsy analysis of that fear and of the anger which causes that fear; for they may have some bearing upon the question you put us, how we can help you to prevent war. Let us suppose, then, that in the course of that bi-sexual private conversation about politics and people, war and peace, barbarism and civilization, some question has cropped up, about admitting, shall we say, the daughters of educated men to the Church or the Stock Exchange or the diplomatic service. The question is adumbrated merely; but we on our side of the table become aware at once of some “strong emotion” on your side “arising from some motive below the level of conscious thought” by the ringing of an alarm bell within us; a confused but tumultuous clamour: You shall not, shall not, shall not…. The physical symptoms are unmistakable. Nerves erect themselves; fingers automatically tighten upon spoon or cigarette; a glance at the private psychometer shows that the emotional temperature has risen from ten to twenty degrees above normal. Intellectually, there is a strong desire either to be silent; or to change the conversation; to drag in, for example, some old family servant, called Crosby, perhaps, whose dog Rover has died … and so evade the issue and lower the temperature.

But what analysis can we attempt of the emotions on the other side of the table—your side? Often, to be candid, while we are talking about Crosby, we are asking questions—hence a certain flatness in the dialogue—about you. What are the powerful and subconscious motives that are raising the hackles on your side of the table? Is the old savage who has killed a bison asking the other old savage to admire his prowess? Is the tired professional man demanding sympathy and resenting competition? Is the patriach calling for the siren? Is dominance craving for submission? And, most persistent and difficult of all the questions that our silence covers, what possible satisfaction can dominance give to the dominator?[◉32] Now, since Professor Grensted has said that the psychology of the sexes is “still a matter for specialists,” while “its interpretation remains controversial and in many respects obscure,” it would be politic perhaps to leave these questions to be answered by specialists. But since, on the other hand, if common men and women are to be free they must learn to speak freely, we cannot leave the psychology of the sexes to the charge of specialists. There are two good reasons why we must try to analyse both our fear and your anger; first, because such fear and anger prevent real freedom in the private house; second, because such fear and anger may prevent real freedom in the public world: they may have a positive share in causing war. Let us then grope our way amateurishly enough among these very ancient and obscure emotions which we have known ever since the time of Antigone and Ismene and Creon at least; which St. Paul himself seems to have felt; but which the Professors have only lately brought to the surface and named “infantile fixation,” “Œdipus complex,” and the rest. We must try, however feebly, to analyse those emotions since you have asked us to help you in any way we can to protect liberty and to prevent war.

Let us then examine this “infantile fixation,” for such it seems is the proper name, in order that we may connect it with the question you have put to us. Once more, since we are generalists not specialists, we must rely upon such evidence as we can collect from history, biography, and from the daily paper—the only evidence that is available to the daughters of educated men. We will take our first example of infantile fixation from biography, and once more we will have recourse to Victorian biography because it is only in the Victorian age that biography becomes rich and representative. Now there are so many cases of infantile fixation as defined by Professor Grensted in Victorian biography that we scarcely know which to choose. The case of Mr. Barrett of Wimpole Street is, perhaps, the most famous and the best authenticated. Indeed, it is so famous that the facts scarcely bear repetition. We all know the story of the father who would allow neither sons nor daughters to marry; we all know in greatest detail how his daughter Elizabeth was forced to conceal her lover from her father; how she fled with her lover from the house in Wimpole Street; and how her father never forgave her for that act of disobedience. We shall agree that Mr. Barrett’s emotions were strong in the extreme; and their strength makes it obvious that they had their origin in some dark place below the level of conscious thought. That is a typical, a classical case of infantile fixation which we can all bear in mind. But there are others less famous which a little investigation will bring to the surface and show to be of the same nature. There is the case of the Rev. Patrick Brontë. The Rev. Arthur Nicholls was in love with his daughter, Charlotte; “What his words were,” she wrote, when Mr. Nicholls proposed to her, “you can imagine; his manner you can hardly realize nor can I forget it…. I asked if he had spoken to Papa. He said he dared not.” Why did he dare not? He was strong and young and passionately in love; the father was old. The reason is immediately apparent. “He [the Rev. Patrick Brontë] always disapproved of marriages, and constantly talked against them. But he more than disapproved this time; he could not bear the idea of this attachment of Mr. Nicholls to his daughter. Fearing the consequences … she made haste to give her father a promise that, on the morrow, Mr. Nicholls should have a distinct refusal.”[◉33] Mr. Nicholls left Haworth; Charlotte remained with her father. Her married life—it was to be a short one—was shortened still further by her father’s wish.

For a third example of infantile fixation let us choose one that is less simple, but for that reason more illuminating. There is the case of Mr. Jex-Blake. Here we have the case of a father who is not confronted with his daughter’s marriage but with his daughter’s wish to earn her living. That wish also would seem to have aroused in the father a very strong emotion and an emotion which also seems to have its origin in the levels below conscious thought. Again with your leave we will call it a case of infantile fixation. The daughter, Sophia, was offered a small sum for teaching mathematics; and she asked her father’s permission to take it. That permission was instantly and heatedly refused. “Dearest, I have only this moment heard that you contemplate being paid for the tutorship. It would be quite beneath you, darling, and I cannot consent to it.’ [The italics are the father’s.] ‘Take the post as one of honour and usefulness, and I shall be glad…. But to be paid for the work would be to alter the thing completely, and would lower you sadly in the eyes of almost everybody.” That is a very interesting statement. Sophia, indeed, was led to argue the matter. Why was it beneath her, she asked, why should it lower her? Taking money for work did not lower Tom in anybody’s eyes. That, Mr. Jex-Blake explained, was quite a different matter; Tom was a man; Tom “feels bound as a man … to support his wife and family”; Tom had therefore taken “the plain path of duty.” Still Sophia was not satisfied. She argued—not only was she poor and wanted the money; but also she felt strongly “the honest, and I believe perfectly justifiable pride of earning.” Thus pressed Mr. Jex-Blake at last gave, under a semi-transparent cover, the real reason why he objected to her taking money. He offered to give her the money himself if she would refuse to take it from the College. It was plain, therefore, that he did not object to her taking money; what he objected to was her taking money from another man. The curious nature of his proposal did not escape Sophia’s scrutiny. “In that case,” she said, “I must say to the Dean, not, ‘I am willing to work without payment,’ but ‘My Father prefers that I should receive payment from him, not from the College,’ and I think the Dean would think us both ridiculous, or at least foolish.” Whatever interpretation the Dean might have put upon Mr. Jex-Blake’s behaviour, we can have no doubt what emotion was at the root of it. He wished to keep his daughter in his own power. If she took money from him she remained in his power; if she took it from another man not only was she becoming independent of Mr. Jex-Blake, she was becoming dependent upon another man. That he wished her to depend upon him, and felt obscurely that this desirable dependence could only be secured by financial dependence is proved indirectly by another of his veiled statements. “If you married to-morrow to my liking—and I don’t believe you would ever marry otherwise—I should give you a good fortune.”[◉34] If she became a wage-earner, she could dispense with the fortune and marry whom she liked. The case of Mr. Jex-Blake is very easily diagnosed, but it is a very important case because it is a normal case, a typical case. Mr. Jex-Blake was no monster of Wimpole Street; he was an ordinary father; he was doing what thousands of other Victorian fathers whose cases remain unpublished were doing daily. It is a case, therefore, that explains much that lies at the root of Victorian psychology—that psychology of the sexes which is still, Professor Grensted tells us, so obscure. The case of Mr. Jex-Blake shows that the daughter must not on any account be allowed to make money because if she makes money she will be independent of her father and free to marry any man she chooses. Therefore the daughter’s desire to earn her living rouses two different forms of jealousy. Each is strong separately; together they are very strong. It is further significant that in order to justify this very strong emotion which has its origin below the levels of conscious thought Mr. Jex-Blake had recourse to one of the commonest of all evasions; the argument which is not an argument but an appeal to the emotions. He appealed to the very deep, ancient and complex emotion which we may, as amateurs, call the womanhood emotion. To take money was beneath her he said; if she took money she would lower herself in the eyes of almost everybody. Tom being a man would not be lowered; it was her sex that made the difference. He appealed to her womanhood.

Whenever a man makes that appeal to a woman he rouses in her, it is safe to say, a conflict of emotions of a very deep and primitive kind which it is extremely difficult for her to analyse or to reconcile. It may serve to transmit the feeling if we compare it with the confused conflict of manhood emotions that is roused in you, Sir, should a woman hand you a white feather.[◉35] It is interesting to see how Sophia, in the year 1859, tried to deal with this emotion. Her first instinct was to attack the most obvious form of womanhood, that which lay uppermost in her consciousness and seemed to be responsible for her father’s attitude—her ladyhood. Like other educated men’s daughters Sophia Jex-Blake was what is called “a lady.” It was the lady who could not earn money; therefore the lady must be killed. “Do you honestly, father, think,” she asked, “any lady lowered by the mere act of receiving money? Did you think the less of Mrs. Teed because you paid her?” Then, as if aware that Mrs. Teed, being a governess, was not on a par with herself who came of an upper middle-class family, “whose lineage will be found in Burke’s Landed Gentry”, she quickly called in to help her to kill the lady “Mary Jane Evans … one of the proudest families of our relations,” and then Miss Wodehouse, “whose family is better and older than mine”—they both thought her right in wishing to earn money. And not only did Miss Wodehouse think her right in wishing to earn money; Miss Wodehouse “showed she agreed with my opinions by her actions. She sees no meanness in earning, but in those that think it mean. When accepting Maurice’s school, she said to him, most nobly, I think, ‘If you think it better that I should work as a paid mistress, I will take any salary you please; if not, I am willing to do the work freely and for nothing’.” The lady, sometimes, was a noble lady; and that lady it was hard to kill; but killed she must be, as Sophia realized, if Sophia were to enter that Paradise where “lots of girls walk about London when and where they please,” that “Elysium upon earth,” which is (or was), Queen’s College, Harley Street, where the daughters of educated men enjoy the happiness not of ladies “but of Queens—Work and independence!”[◉36] Thus Sophia’s first instinct was to kill the lady;[◉37] but when the lady was killed the woman still remained. We can see her, concealing and excusing the disease of infantile fixation, more clearly in the other two cases. It was the woman, the human being whose sex made it her sacred duty to sacrifice herself to the father, whom Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Barrett had to kill. If it was difficult to kill the lady, it was even more difficult to kill the woman. Charlotte found it at first almost impossible. She refused her lover. “… thus thoughtfully for her father, and unselfishly for herself [she] put aside all consideration of how she should reply, excepting as he wished.” She loved Arthur Nicholls; but she refused him. “… she held herself simply passive, as far as words and actions went, while she suffered acute pain from the strong expressions which her father used in speaking of Mr. Nicholls.” She waited; she suffered; until “the great conqueror Time,” as Mrs. Gaskell puts it, “achieved his victory over strong prejudice and human resolve.” Her father consented. The great conqueror, however, had met his match in Mr. Barrett; Elizabeth Barrett waited; Elizabeth suffered; at last Elizabeth fled.

The extreme force of the emotions to which the infantile fixation gives rise is proved by these three cases. It is remarkable, we may agree. It was a force that could quell not only Charlotte Brontë but Arthur Nicholls; not only Elizabeth Barrett but Robert Browning. It was a force thus that could do battle with the strongest of human passions—the love of men and women; and could compel the most brilliant and the boldest of Victorian sons and daughters to quail before it; to cheat the father, to deceive the father, and then to fly from the father. But to what did it owe this amazing force? Partly, as these cases make clear, to the fact that the infantile fixation was protected by society. Nature, law and property were all ready to excuse and conceal it. It was easy for Mr. Barrett, Mr. Jex-Blake and the Rev. Patrick Brontë to hide the real nature of their emotions from themselves. If they wished that their daughter should stay at home, society agreed that they were right. If the daughter protested, then nature came to their help. A daughter who left her father was an unnatural daughter; her womanhood was suspect. Should she persist further, then law came to his help. A daughter who left her father had no means of supporting herself. The lawful professions were shut to her. Finally, if she earned money in the one profession that was open to her, the oldest profession of all, she unsexed herself. There can be no question—the infantile fixation is powerful, even when a mother is infected. But when the father is infected it has a threefold power; he has nature to protect him, law to protect him; and property to protect him. Thus protected it was perfectly possible for the Rev. Patrick Brontë to cause “acute pain” to his daughter Charlotte for several months, and to steal several months of her short married happiness without incurring any censure from the society in which he practised the profession of a priest of the Church of England; though had he tortured a dog, or stolen a watch, that same society would have unfrocked him and cast him forth. Society it seems was a father, and afflicted with the infantile fixation too.

Since society protected and indeed excused the victims of the infantile fixation in the nineteenth century, it is not surprising that the disease, though unnamed, was rampant. Whatever biography we open we find almost always the familiar symptoms—the father is opposed to his daughter’s marriage; the father is opposed to his daughter’s earning her living. Her wish either to marry, or to earn her living, rouses strong emotion in him; and he gives the same excuses for that strong emotion; the lady will debase her ladyhood; the daughter will outrage her womanhood. But now and again, very rarely, we find a father who was completely immune from the disease. The results are then extremely interesting. There is the case of Mr. Leigh Smith.[◉38] This gentleman was contemporary with Mr. Jex-Blake, and came of the same social caste. He, too, had property in Sussex; he, too, had horses and carriages; and he, too, had children. But there the resemblance ends. Mr. Leigh Smith was devoted to his children; he objected to schools; he kept his children at home. It would be interesting to discuss Mr. Leigh Smith’s educational methods; how he had masters to teach them; how, in a large carriage built like an omnibus, he took them with him on long journeys yearly all over England. But like so many experimentalists, Mr. Leigh Smith remains obscure; and we must content ourselves with the fact that he “held the unusual opinion that daughters should have an equal provision with sons.” So completely immune was he from the infantile fixation that “he did not adopt the ordinary plan of paying his daughter’s bills and giving them an occasional present, but when Barbara came of age in 1848 he gave her an allowance of £300 a year.” The results of that immunity from the infantile fixation were remarkable. For “treating her money as a power to do good, one of the first uses to which Barbara put it was educational.” She founded a school; a school that was open not only to different sexes and different classes, but to different creeds; Roman Catholics, Jews and “pupils from families of advanced free thought” were received in it. “It was a most unusual school,” an outsiders’ school. But that was not all that she attempted upon three hundred a year. One thing led to another. A friend, with her help, started a cooperative evening class for ladies “for drawing from an undraped model.” In 1858 only one life class in London was open to ladies. And then a petition was got up to the Royal Academy; its schools were actually, though as so often happens only nominally, opened to women in 1861;[◉39] next Barbara went into the question of the laws concerning women; so that actually in 1871 married women were allowed to own their property; and finally she helped Miss Davies to found Girton. When we reflect what one father who was immune from infantile fixation could do by allowing one daughter £300 a year we need not wonder that most fathers firmly refused to allow their daughters more than £40 a year with bed and board thrown in.

The infantile fixation in the fathers then was, it is clear, a strong force, and all the stronger because it was a concealed force. But the fathers were met, as the nineteenth century drew on, by a force which had become so strong in its turn that it is much to be hoped that the psychologists will find some name for it. The old names as we have seen are futile and false. “Feminism,” we have had to destroy. “The emancipation of women” is equally inexpressive and corrupt. To say that the daughters were inspired prematurely by the principles of anti-Fascism is merely to repeat the fashionable and hideous jargon of the moment. To call them champions of intellectual liberty and culture is to cloud the air with the dust of lecture halls and the damp dowdiness of public meetings. Moreover, none of these tags and labels express the real emotions that inspired the daughters’ opposition to the infantile fixation of the fathers, because, as biography shows, that force had behind it many different emotions, and many that were contradictory. Tears were behind it, of course—tears, bitter tears: the tears of those whose desire for knowledge was frustrated. One daughter longed to learn chemistry; the books at home only taught her alchemy. She “cried bitterly at not being taught things.” Also the desire for an open and rational love was behind it. Again there were tears—angry tears. “She flung herself on the bed in tears…. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘Harry is on the roof.’ ‘Who’s Harry?’ said I; ‘which roof? Why?’ ‘Oh, don’t be silly,’ she said; ‘he had to go.’”[◉40] But again the desire not to love, to lead a rational existence without love, was behind it. “I make the confession humbly…. I know nothing myself of love,”[◉41] wrote one of them. An odd confession from one of the class whose only profession for so many centuries had been marriage; but significant. Others wanted to travel; to explore Africa; to dig in Greece and Palestine. Some wanted to learn music, not to tinkle domestic airs, but to compose—operas, symphonies, quartets. Others wanted to paint, not ivy-clad cottages, but naked bodies. They all wanted—but what one word can sum up the variety of the things that they wanted, and had wanted, consciously or subconsciously, for so long? Josephine Butler’s label—Justice, Equality, Liberty—is a fine one; but it is only a label, and in our age of innumerable labels, of multi-coloured labels, we have become suspicious of labels; they kill and constrict. Nor does the old word “freedom” serve, for it was not freedom in the sense of license that they wanted; they wanted, like Antigone, not to break the laws, but to find the law.[◉42] Ignorant as we are of human motives and ill supplied with words, let us then admit that no one word expresses the force which in the nineteenth century opposed itself to the force of the fathers. All we can safely say about that force was that it was a force of tremendous power. It forced open the doors of the private house. It opened Bond Street and Piccadilly; it opened cricket grounds and football grounds; it shrivelled flounces and stays; it made the oldest profession in the world (but Whitaker supplies no figures) unprofitable. In fifty years, in short, that force made the life lived by Lady Lovelace and Gertrude Bell unlivable, and almost incredible. The fathers, who had triumphed over the strongest emotions of strong men, had to yield.

If that full stop were the end of the story, the final slam of the door, we could turn at once to your letter, Sir, and to the form which you have asked us to fill up. But it was not the end; it was the beginning. Indeed though we have used the past, we shall soon find ourselves using the present tense. The fathers in private, it is true, yielded; but the fathers in public, massed together in societies, in professions, were even more subject to the fatal disease than the fathers in private. The disease had acquired a motive, had connected itself with a right, a conception, which made it still more virulent outside the house than within. The desire to support wife and children—what motive could be more powerful, or deeply rooted? For it was connected with manhood itself—a man who could not support his family failed in his own conception of manliness. And was not that conception as deep in him as the conception of womanhood in his daughter? It was those motives, those rights and conceptions that were now challenged. To protect them, and from women, gave, and gives, rise it can scarcely be doubted to an emotion perhaps below the level of conscious thought but certainly of the utmost violence. The infantile fixation develops, directly the priest’s right to practise his profession is challenged, to an aggravated and exacerbated emotion to which the name sex taboo is scientifically applied. Take two instances; one private, the other public. A scholar has “to mark his disapproval of the admission of women to his university by refusing to enter his beloved college or city.”[◉43] A hospital has to decline an offer to endow a scholarship because it is made by a woman on behalf of women.[◉44] Can we doubt that both actions are inspired by that sense of shame which, as Professor Grensted says “cannot be regarded in any other light than as a non-rational sex taboo?” But since the emotion itself had increased in strength it became necessary to invoke the help of stronger allies to excuse and conceal it. Nature was called in; Nature it was claimed who is not only omniscient but unchanging, had made the brain of woman of the wrong shape or size. “Anyone,” writes Bertrand Russell, “who desires amusement may be advised to look up the tergiversations of eminent craniologists in their attempts to prove from brain measurements that women are stupider than men.”[◉45] Science, it would seem, is not sexless; she is a man, a father, and infected too. Science, thus infected, produced measurements to order: the brain was too small to be examined. Many years were spent waiting before the sacred gates of the universities and hospitals for permission to have the brains that the professors said that Nature had made incapable of passing examinations examined. When at last permission was granted the examinations were passed. A long and dreary list of those barren if necessary triumphs lies presumably along with other broken records[◉46] in college archives, and harassed head mistresses still consult them, it is said, when desiring official proof of impeccable mediocrity. Still Nature held out. The brain that could pass examinations was not the creative brain; the brain that can bear responsibility and earn the higher salaries. It was a practical brain, a pettifogging brain, a brain fitted for routine work under the command of a superior. And since the professions were shut, it was undeniable—the daughters had not ruled Empires, commanded fleets, or led armies to victory; only a few trivial books testified to their professional ability, for literature was the only profession that had been open to them. And, moreover, whatever the brain might do when the professions were opened to it, the body remained. Nature, the priests said, in her infinite wisdom, had laid down the unalterable law that man is the creator. He enjoys; she only passively endures. Pain was more beneficial than pleasure to the body that endures. “The views of medical men on pregnancy, childbirth, and lactation were until fairly recently,” Bertrand Russell writes, “impregnated with sadism. It required, for example, more evidence to persuade them that anaesthetics may be used in childbirth than it would have required to persuade them of the opposite.” So science argued, so the professors agreed. And when at last the daughters interposed, But are not brain and body affected by training? Does not the wild rabbit differ from the rabbit in the hutch? And must we not, and do we not change this unalterable nature? By setting a match to a fire frost is defied; Nature’s decree of death is postponed. And the breakfast egg, they persisted, is it all the work of the cock? Without yolk, without white, how far would your breakfasts, oh priests and professors, be fertile? Then the priests and professors in solemn unison intoned: But childbirth itself, that burden you cannot deny, is laid upon woman alone. Nor could they deny it, nor wish to renounce it. Still they declared, consulting the statistics in books, the time occupied by woman in childbirth is under modern conditions—remember we are in the twentieth century now—only a fraction.[◉47] Did that fraction incapacitate us from working in Whitehall, in fields and factories, when our country was in danger? To which the fathers replied: The war is over; we are in England now.

And if, Sir, pausing in England now, we turn on the wireless of the daily press we shall hear what answer the fathers who are infected with infantile fixation now are making to those questions now. “Homes are the real places of the women…. Let them go back to their homes…. The Government should give work to men…. A strong protest is to be made by the Ministry of Labour…. Women must not rule over men…. There are two worlds, one for women, the other for men…. Let them learn to cook our dinners…. Women have failed…. They have failed…. They have failed….”

Even now the clamour, the uproar that infantile fixation is making even here is such that we can hardly hear ourselves speak; it takes the words out of our mouths; it makes us say what we have not said. As we listen to the voices we seem to hear an infant crying in the night, the black night that now covers Europe, and with no language but a cry, Ay, ay, ay, ay…. But it is not a new cry, it is a very old cry. Let us shut off the wireless and listen to the past. We are in Greece now; Christ has not been born yet, nor St. Paul either. But listen:

“Whomsoever the city may appoint, that man must be obeyed, in little things and great, in just things and unjust … disobedience is the worst of evils…. We must support the cause of order, and in no wise suffer a woman to worst us…. They must be women, and not range at large. Servants, take them within.” That is the voice of Creon, the dictator. To whom Antigone, who was to have been his daughter, answered, “Not such are the laws set among men by the justice who dwells with the gods below.” But she had neither capital nor force behind her. And Creon said: “I will take her where the path is loneliest, and hide her, living, in a rocky vault.” And he shut her not in Holloway or in a concentration camp, but in a tomb. And Creon we read brought ruin on his house, and scattered the land with the bodies of the dead. It seems, Sir, as we listen to the voices of the past, as if we were looking at the photograph again, at the picture of dead bodies and ruined houses that the Spanish Government sends us almost weekly. Things repeat themselves it seems. Pictures and voices are the same to-day as they were 2,000 years ago.

Such then is the conclusion to which our enquiry into the nature of fear has brought us—the fear which forbids freedom in the private house. That fear, small, insignificant and private as it is, is connected with the other fear, the public fear, which is neither small nor insignificant, the fear which has led you to ask us to help you to prevent war. Otherwise we should not be looking at the picture again. But it is not the same picture that caused us at the beginning of this letter to feel the same emotions—you called them “horror and disgust”; we called them horror and disgust. For as this letter has gone on, adding fact to fact, another picture has imposed itself upon the foreground. It is the figure of a man; some say, others deny, that he is Man himself,[◉48] the quintessence of virility, the perfect type of which all the others are imperfect adumbrations. He is a man certainly. His eyes are glazed; his eyes glare. His body, which is braced in an unnatural position, is tightly cased in a uniform. Upon the breast of that uniform are sewn several medals and other mystic symbols. His hand is upon a sword. He is called in German and Italian Führer or Duce; in our own language Tyrant or Dictator. And behind him lie ruined houses and dead bodies—men, women and children. But we have not laid that picture before you in order to excite once more the sterile emotion of hate. On the contrary it is in order to release other emotions such as the human figure, even thus crudely in a coloured photograph, arouses in us who are human beings. For it suggests a connection and for us a very important connection. It suggests that the public and the private worlds are inseparably connected; that the tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other. But the human figure even in a photograph suggests other and more complex emotions. It suggests that we cannot dissociate ourselves from that figure but are ourselves that figure. It suggests that we are not passive spectators doomed to unresisting obedience but by our thoughts and actions can ourselves change that figure. A common interest unites us; it is one world, one life. How essential it is that we should realise that unity the dead bodies, the ruined houses prove. For such will be our ruin if you, in the immensity of your public abstractions forget the private figure, or if we in the intensity of our private emotions forget the public world. Both houses will be ruined, the public and the private, the material and the spiritual, for they are inseparably connected. But with your letter before us we have reason to hope. For by asking our help you recognize that connection; and by reading your words we are reminded of other connections that lie far deeper than the facts on the surface. Even here, even now your letter tempts us to shut our ears to these little facts, these trival [trivial] details, to listen not to the bark of the guns and the bray of the gramophones but to the voices of the poets, answering each other, assuring us of a unity that rubs out divisions as if they were chalk marks only; to discuss with you the capacity of the human spirit to overflow boundaries and make unity out of multiplicity. But that would be to dream—to dream the recurring dream that has haunted the human mind since the beginning of time; the dream of peace, the dream of freedom. But, with the sound of the guns in your ears you have not asked us to dream. You have not asked us what peace is; you have asked us how to prevent war. Let us then leave it to the poets to tell us what the dream is; and fix our eyes upon the photograph again: the fact.

Whatever the verdict of others may be upon the man in uniform—and opinions differ—there is your letter to prove that to you the picture is the picture of evil. And though we look upon that picture from different angles our conclusion is the same as yours—it is evil. We are both determined to do what we can to destroy the evil which that picture represents, you by your methods, we by ours. And since we are different, our help must be different. What ours can be we have tried to show—how imperfectly, how superficially there is no need to say.[◉49] But as a result the answer to your question must be that we can best help you to prevent war not by repeating your words and following your methods but by finding new words and creating new methods. We can best help you to prevent war not by joining your society but by remaining outside your society but in co-operation with its aim. That aim is the same for us both. It is to assert “the rights of all—all men and women—to the respect in their persons of the great principles of Justice and Equality and Liberty.” To elaborate further is unnecessary, for we have every confidence that you interpret those words as we do. And excuses are unnecessary, for we can trust you to make allowances for those deficiencies which we foretold and which this letter has abundantly displayed.

To return then to the form that you have sent and ask us to fill up: for the reasons given we will leave it unsigned. But in order to prove as substantially as possible that our aims are the same as yours, here is the guinea, a free gift, given freely, without any other conditions than you choose to impose upon yourself. It is the third of three guineas; but the three guineas, you will observe, though given to three different treasurers are all given to the same cause, for the causes are the same and inseparable.

Now, since you are pressed for time, let me make an end; apologising three times over to the three of you, first for the length of this letter, second for the smallness of the contribution, and thirdly for writing at all. The blame for that however rests upon you, for this letter would never have been written had you not asked for an answer to your own.

[]

ROGER FRY:
a biography

by
Virginia Woolf

published
1940
by
The Hogarth Press

roger fry: a biography

Foreword

Chapter I: Childhood: School

Chapter II: Cambridge

Chapter III: London: Italy: Paris

Chapter IV: Chelsea: Marriage

Chapter V: Work

Chapter VI: America

Chapter VII: The Post-Impressionists

Chapter VIII: The Omega

Chapter IX: The War Years

Chapter X: Vision and Design

Chapter XI: Transformations

Appendix

Index

[]

Roger Fry about 1928

Foreword.

London, April, 1940

Dear Virginia,

Years ago, after one of those discussions upon the methods of the arts which illuminated his long and happy friendship with you, Roger suggested, half seriously, that you should put into practice your theories of the biographer’s craft in a portrait of himself. When the time came for his life to be written some of us who were very close to him, thinking it would have been his wish as well as ours, asked you to undertake it.

I have now begged to have this page to tell you of our gratitude to you for having accepted, and for having brought to completion a piece of work neither light nor easy. As the book is to have no formal preface may I here join with yours our thanks to all those who have allowed the use of letters and pictures in their possession.

MARGERY FRY

[]

Chapter I

Childhood: School

I

“I lived the first six years of my life in the small eighteenth-century house at No. 6 The Grove, Highgate. This garden is still for me the imagined background for almost any garden scene that I read of in books”—thus Roger Fry began a fragment of autobiography. We may pause for a moment on the threshold of that small house at Highgate to ask what we can learn about him before he became conscious both of the serpent which bent down “from the fork of a peculiarly withered and soot begrimed old apple tree”, and of the ‘large red oriental poppies which by some blessed chance” grew in his “private and particular garden”.

He was born on 14th December 1866, the second son of Edward Fry and of Mariabella, the daughter of Thomas Hodgkin. Both were Quakers. Behind Roger on his father’s side were eight recorded generations of Frys, beginning with that Zephaniah, the first to become a Quaker, in whose house in Wiltshire George Fox held “a very blessed meeting, and quiet, though the officers had purposed to break it up, and were on their way in order thereunto. But before they got to it, word was brought them, that there was a house just broken up by thieves, and they were required to go back again with speed … That was in 1663, and from that time onwards the Frys held the Quaker faith and observed certain marked peculiarities both of opinion and of dress, for which, in the early days, they endured considerable persecution. The first of them, Zephaniah, was in prison for three months for refusing to take the oath of allegiance. As time went on the persecution weakened; they had nothing worse to suffer than the “sneers and coldness of their own class”; but whatever they suffered they abode by their convictions consistently. The injunction “Swear not at all” meant that no oaths could be taken, and therefore many professions were shut to them. Some of the Frys added additional scruples of their own. Even the profession of medicine was distasteful to Joseph, the grandson of Zephaniah, because “he could not feel easy to accept payment for the water contained in the medicines he dispensed”. Such scruples—“miserable questions of dress and address”, as Edward Fry came to call them—tormented the weaker spirits and laid them open to ridicule. They vacillated between the two worlds. A coat-of-arms was first engraved and then scratched out; fine linen was ordered and then cut up; one John Eliot fretted himself into the conviction that he ought to outrage eighteenth-century convention by growing a beard. The arts as well as the professions were outside the pale. Not only was the theatre forbidden, but music and dancing; and though “drawing and water-colour painting were tolerated or encouraged”, the encouragement was tepid, for, with some notable exceptions, even in the nineteenth century almost the only picture to be found in a Quaker household was an engraving of Perm’s Treaty with the Indians—that detestable picture, as Roger Fry called it later.

Undoubtedly the Quaker society, as one of its members writes, was “very narrow in outlook and bounded in interests; very bourgeois as to its members”. But the canalising of so much energy within such narrow limits bore remarkable fruit. The story of Joseph Fry is typical of the story of many of the Frys, Since, owing to his scruples, the medical profession was shut to him, “he took to business occupations, and established, or took part in establishing, five considerable businesses which probably proved far more remunerative than the profession which he had renounced for conscience sake”. Hence there came about a curious anomaly; the most unworldly of people were yet abundantly blessed with the world’s goods. The tradesman who lived over his shop in Bristol or in Bartholomew Close was at the same time a country gentleman owning many acres in Cornwall or in Wiltshire. But he was a country gentleman of a peculiar kind. He was a squire who refused to pay tithes; who refused to hunt or to shoot; who dressed differently from his neighbours, and, if he married, married a Quaker like himself. Thus the Frys and the Eliots, the Howards and the Hodgkins not only lived differently and spoke differently and dressed differently from other people, but these differences were enforced by innumerable inter-marriages. Any Quaker who married “outside the society” was disowned. For generation after generation therefore the sons of one Quaker family married the daughters of another. Mariabella Hodgkin, Roger Fry’s mother, came of precisely the same physical and spiritual stock as her husband Edward Fry. She was descended from the Eliots who, like the Frys, had been Quakers since the seventeenth century. They too had eschewed public life and had accumulated considerable wealth, first as merchants at Falmouth “exporting pilchards and tin to Venice”, and later in London, where they owned a large family mansion in Bartholomew Close. The Eliots married with the Howards, who were tinplate manufacturers and Quakers also. And it was through the marriage of Luke Howard, the son of Robert, the tinplate manufacturer of Old Street, with Mariabella Eliot that the only two names among all the names in the ample family chronicle in which their descendant Roger Fry showed any interest came into the family. His great-grandfather, Luke Howard (1772–1864), was a man of “brilliant but rather erratic genius” who, like so many of the Friends, being denied other outlet, turned his attention to science. He was the author of an essay “proposing a classification and nomenclature of the clouds” which attracted the attention of Goethe, who not only wrote a poem on the subject but entered into communication with the author. Mariabella Hodgkin could remember her grandfather. He seemed, she writes, “always to be thinking of something very far away…. He … would stand for a long time at the window gazing at the sky with his dreamy placid look”, and, like some of his descendants, he was “deft in the use of tools” and taught his grandchildren in his own workshop how to handle air pumps and electrical machines. Roger Fry left his copy of the family history uncut, but he admitted that he wished he knew more of this ingenious ancestor whose gift for setting other people’s minds to work by speculations which were not “entirely confirmed by subsequent observation” suggests some affinity of temperament as well as of blood. The other name that took Roger Fry’s fancy, though for different reasons, was his mother’s—Mariabella. It was first given in the seventeenth century to the daughter of a Blake who married a Farnborough, whose daughter married a Briggins, whose daughter married an Eliot. It was a name with a certain mystery attached to it, for it was “evidently Italian or Spanish in its origin”, and Roger Fry, who took no interest whatever in the Eliots and their possible connection with the Eliots of Port St Germans, or in the Westons and their possible but improbable descent from Lord Weston, Earl of Portland, liked to think that his ancestress, the first Mariabella, owed her name to some connection with the South. He hoped that the quiet and respectable blood of his innumerable Quaker forefathers was dashed with some more fiery strain. But it was only a hope. No scandal in the Eliot family had been recorded for more than two hundred years. His mother, Mariabella Hodgkin, the seventh to bear that name, was a pure-bred Quaker like the rest; and it was in the Friends’ Meeting House at Lewes on a cloudless spring day in April 1859 that Edward Fry married her and brought her back to the small house in Highgate.

That house[◉1], Edward Fry wrote, “looked over Miss Burdett-Coutts garden of Holly Lodge beyond to the roofs of London … a little garden, with a copper beech in one corner, sloped down from the house to the trees of our great neighbour, and was very dear to us in those early days. It was a little plot

Not wholly in the busy world nor quite

Beyond it.

And murmurs from the great city below us often stole up the hill and reminded us of how near we were to the great heart of things.” It was in that house that his nine children were born; and it was in that garden that his son Roger felt his first passion and suffered his first great disillusion.

This garden [Roger Fry wrote] is still for me the imagined background for almost any garden scene that I read of in books. The serpent still bends down to Eve from the fork of a peculiarly withered and soot begrimed old apple tree which stuck out of the lawn. And various other scenes of seduction seem to me to have taken place within its modest suburban precincts. But it was also the scene of two great emotional experiences, my first passion and my first great disillusion. My first passion was for a bushy plant of large red oriental poppies which by some blessed chance was actually within the limits of the square yard of bed which had been allotted to me as my private and particular garden. The plants I bought and glued into the ground with mud, made with a watering pot and garden mould—the seeds which I sowed never came up to my expectations, generally in fact refused to grow at all but the poppies were always better than my wildest dreams. Their red was always redder than any thing I could imagine when I looked away from them. I had a general passion for red which when I also developed a romantic attachment for locomotives led me to believe that I had once seen a “pure red engine”. Anyhow the poppy plant was the object of a much more sincere worship than I was at all able to give to “gentle Jesus” and I almost think of a greater affection than I felt for anyone except my father. I remember on one occasion the plant was full of fat green flower buds with little pieces of crumpled scarlet silk showing through the cracks between the sepals. A few were already in flower. I conceived that nothing in the world could be more exciting than to see the flower suddenly burst its green case and unfold its immense cup of red. I supposed this happened suddenly and that it only required patience to be able to watch the event. One morning I stood watching a promising bud for what seemed hours but nothing happened and I got tired, so I ran indoors very hurriedly for fear of getting back too late and got a stool on which I proceeded to keep watch for what seemed an eternity and was I daresay half an hour. I was discovered ultimately by an elder sister and duly laughed at by her and when the story was known by all the grown-ups, for all passions even for reel poppies leave one open to ridicule.

The other event was more tragic. It was in fact the horrible discovery that justice is not supreme, that innocence is no protection. It was again a summer morning and I was leaning against my mother’s knee as she sat on a low wicker chair and instructed me in the rudiments of botany. In order to illustrate some point she told me to fetch her one of the buds of my adored poppy plant or at least that was what I understood her to say. I had already been drilled to implicit obedience and though it seemed to me an almost sacrilegious act I accomplished it. Apparently …

There the fragment stops. But the sequel is known—he picked the poppy and was gravely reproved by his mother for doing so. The disillusionment was great. For if he was credulous and passionate, he was also “drilled to implicit obedience”; and the person who had first exacted his obedience and then punished him for it was his mother. The shock of that confused experience was still tingling fifty years later. It was akin to many of the same kind that were to follow; but the fact that his “first great disillusionment” was connected with his mother perhaps explains the sharpness and the permanence of the impression. Lady Fry exercised upon that very impressionable and sensitive, yet also very logical and independent, boy an influence that lasted long after she had ceased to teach him botany. As her photographs show, she was a woman of great personal impressiveness; handsome of feature, firm of lip, vigorous of body. Tradition has it that she was a high-spirited girl, fond of gaiety, and capable of attracting admiration in spite of the Quaker sobriety of life and of the Quaker dress which was still the common wear of the Hodgkins in her youth. Late in life—she lived to be ninety-seven—she made out a list of “Things that were not—: Things that were: when I was a little child”. It is an instructive list. Among the things that were not, she counted lucifer matches; hot-water bottles; night-lights; Christmas trees; hoardings with posters; Japanese anemones; spring mattresses; and gas for teeth extraction. Among the things that were, she counted flint and steel; rushlights; prunes and senna; clogs and pattens; beadles and chariots; tippets and sleeves (in one); snuff-boxes and Chartists. She drew no conclusion, and it is left for us to infer that there were more denials than delights, more austerities than luxuries in the life of the little Quaker girl. An anecdote that she tells of her childhood bears out this impression. “On this occasion [an illness at the age of four] a kind Uncle brought me a box of lovely tea-things (I have them still) and brought them up to me as I sat in my crib. Though no doubt longing to have them, I resolutely and firmly shut my eyes, and in spite of cajolements and commands, refused to open them. My Uncle departed, the tea-things were no doubt taken away and I was left under the ban of displeasure. This was one of those secret inhibitions which are part of childhood, and arise probably from vehement shyness.” And there were other inhibitions that were peculiar to a Quaker childhood. To the end of her life she remembered how her father had ordered the tight sleeves that were fashionable to be cut from her dress and large sleeves that were out of fashion to be inserted, and how, as she walked along the road, the street boys had jeered “Quack! Quack!” at her. Very shy and sensitive, the effect of such an upbringing was permanent. Always she seemed to live between two worlds, and to belong to neither. Thus it was no wonder that when her second son was a child, her eyes remained firmly yet uneasily shut to many of the sights that were to him objects “of a much more sincere worship than I was at all able to give to ‘gentle Jesus’ “—red poppies, red engines, and green flower-buds with little pieces of scarlet silk showing through the cracks between the sepals. And yet he respected her; and was “drilled to implicit obedience”.

The garden in which he received this first lesson in the rudiments of botany was surrounded by other gardens. Below it stretched Ken Wood, then belonging to Lord Mansfield; and Ken Wood merged in the heights of Hampstead. Highgate itself was a village; and though, as Sir Edward Fry said, the murmur of London stole up the hill, access to the great city was difficult. Only “an occasional omnibus” connected the two. The “villagers” were still isolated and exalted. They still considered themselves a race apart When Roger was a child, the old hair-dresser who had cut Coleridge’s hair was still cutting hair and recalling the poet’s loquacity—“He did talk!” he would say, but was unable to say what the poet had talked about. Local societies naturally formed themselves. There was a chess society and a society for literary and scientific discussion. A reading society met “once in three weeks to read aloud selections from standard works … Tea is handed round at 7, and sandwiches and fruit at 10 … and if any unfortunate lady, through ignorance or want of thought, put jellies or cream on her supper table she was sure to get a gentle rebuke for her lawlessness.” Sometimes the society met at the Frys”; and the leading spirit—Charles Tomlinson, F.R.S.—an indefatigable and erudite gentleman whose published works range from The Study of Common Salt to translations from Dante and Goethe with volumes upon Chess, Pneumatics and Acoustics, and Winter in the Arctic Regions thrown in—would drop in of a Sunday evening and listen to Sir Edward reading aloud Paradise Lost or George Fox’s Journals or one of Dean Stanley’s books to the children. The reading over, Mr Tomlinson would talk delightfully, if incomprehensibly, to the children. And then he would invite them to tea with him. He would show them all the marvels of his “den”. The small room, as befitted the multiplicity of its owner’s interests, was crowded with fascinating objects. There was an electrical machine; musical glasses; and Chladni’s clamp—an invention by which sand, when a violin was played, formed itself into beautiful patterns. Roger’s lifelong delight in scientific experiments must have been stimulated. But science was part of the home atmosphere; art was “kept in its place”; that is the Academy would be dutifully visited; and a landscape, if it faithfully recorded the scene of a summer holiday, would be dutifully bought. Thus it was through Charles Tomlinson perhaps that he first became aware of those aesthetic problems that were later to become so familiar. As the author of a Cyclopaedia of Useful Arts Mr Tomlinson had access to certain factories, and he would take the little Frys with him on visits to Price’s Candle Factory, Powell’s Glass-making Works, and a diamond-cutting factory in Clerkenwell. “And these factory visits”, wrote Roger’s sister Agnes, “raised questions of a fresh sort; what made good art and bad art, what ornament was justified, and whether diamonds were not better used for machinery than for necklaces. He was very strongly of opinion that they were—a brooch, he told us, might be useful, but lockets were an abomination to him.” Roger’s opinion, as to what made good and bad art, was unfortunately not recorded. It was again thanks to Mr Tomlinson, who was on good terms with the head gardener, that they went every spring for a walk in Lord Mansfield’s strictly private woods—that “earthly Paradise which we could see all the year from our own garden, which we passed almost daily in our walks, and which for one delightful morning in May-time seemed to belong to us”. So Agnes Fry described Ken Wood; and Ken Wood, as appears from another fragment of autobiography, had its place in Roger’s memory too. But his memory was not of walking in spring woods; it was of winter skating.

One day in January 1929, he says, he was dozing when

suddenly I had a vivid picture of my father skating. It must have been somewhere in the 70’s about ‘74 I should guess and the place was one of the ponds in Lord Mansfield’s Park at Kenwood which is now public property but was then very private. Only when the ponds bore, the privileged families of Highgate of which we were one were allowed in by ticket. It was a beautiful place with beechwoods standing a little back from the pond’s edge and that winter all beflowered with long needles of hoar frost which glittered rosy in the low winter sunshine. And there was my father with a pair of skates which was old-fashioned even for that date. Low wooden skates with a long blade which curled up in an elegant horn in front, skates exactly like those one sees in Dutch pictures. We half despised them because they were old-fashioned, half revered them as belonging to my father. He was passionately fond of skating—it was indeed the only thing approaching to a sport that he cared for. He was passionately fond of it though he skated rather badly at least it was an odd style or absence of style, the way he scuttered along with legs and arms and long black coat tails flying out at all angles and the inevitable top hat to crown it all. He loved skating indeed so much that though he was a Q,.C. in big practice he sometimes managed an afternoon off in the middle of the week so terrified was he of the frost giving before Saturday. It was the only interruption he ever allowed in the routine of his work. So there we were, my mien and I and Porty my elder brother six years my senior and a great swell to us, in various stages of scrambling along on skates in already gaining confidence. My father after two or three turn of the pond would return to us and help us very cheerfully giving a hand and a turn across the pond to those that were sufficiently advanced, for he was a I way» in high spirit when there was skating and even more kind than usual, anyhow more lively more talkative and less alarming. More and more alarming he was destined to become as we grew older and became separate individuals and more unwilling to fit in to the rigid scheme of Victorian domesticity. But on those days he was all laughter and high spirits and there seemed no danger of suddenly finding oneself guilty of moral obliquity which at other times seemed suddenly to be one’s situation without knowing exactly why or how it occurred, for the moral code was terribly complicated and one didn’t always foresee where it would catch you tripping over some apparently indifferent and innocent word or deed. And when it did my father’s voice was of such an awful gravity that one shrunk at once to helpless self-condemnation and overpowering shame.

There was one dark or doubtful spot in the picture—the skates. We were a large family and those who like myself came in the middle had generally to make what they could of discarded skates of the elders. These were made of blades of doubtful steel set in wood with a small screw which went into the heel of one’s boot. These screws had always lost most of their thread and used suddenly to come loose from one’s feet in the middle of an exciting race or when one was just beginning to cut an eight. The worst of these imperfect skates was that in the last resort they delivered you into the hands of the wretched men who hired chairs and fitted on skates. Our relations with these men were strained and painful.

First of all we were brought up to the absolute conviction that all men not in regular employment and receipt of a fairly high salary were morally reprehensible, that in fact the world was so arranged that wealth and virtue almost exactly corresponded, though every now and then we were allowed to despise some parvenu whose mushroom fortune had grown so quickly as to throw a dubious light on the theory itself. Such indeed was the owner of the upstart Kenwood Castle which thrust its gimcrack Gothic brickwork belvidere up into the midst of our own private view from our garden and who seemed actually to want to rival the splendours of Kenwood House which Lord Mansfield filled with his hereditary and long established dignity and actually allowed us to skate on his ponds.

This theory, then, of money being a coefficient of virtue made the pond loafers with their big red noses and big red neckerchiefs who stamped about blowing into their ugly hands altogether foreign beings infinitely remote from us like some other species, almost like the criminal species of man of which we heard now and again.

It is impossible to exaggerate the want of simple humanity in which we were brought up or to explain how that was closely associated with the duty of philanthropy. To pay these poor men who after all were trying to do a piece of work—to pay them a decent tip was truckling to immorality because a casual being immoral you were helping immorality. My elder brother was quite particularly stern about this and many a painful scene from which we retreated under a well-directed volley of abuse resulted from our heroic attempts to live up to his principles.

There again the fragment ends. Obviously the man, looking back at his past has added something to the impression received by a child of seven, and, since it was written for friends who took a humorous rather than a reverential view of eminent Victorians, no doubt it owed a little to the temper of the audience. Yet it is clear that the child had received an impression that was very vivid, and at the same time puzzling. He had felt the contrast between the father who “scuttered along” with his coat-tails flying “all laughter and high spirits” and the stem man who could in a moment, in a voice of awful gravity, reduce him to a sense of overpowering shame for some moral obliquity of which, without knowing exactly why or how, he had been guilty.

Sir Edward Fry, Roger Fry’s father

Lady Fry, Roger Fry’s mother

Indeed, judging from Sir Edward’s own account of himself in his own autobiography, these early impressions were well founded. There were good reasons why he should inspire his son with a mixture of devotion, fear and bewilderment. He was a man of deep feelings and of many conflicts … I often thought that in no human being had the two contending elements of our nature “—the baser and the better—ever existed in stronger antithesis, or ever fought more fiercely for the victory,” he wrote: … doubts and difficulties about God and the other world: aspirations often vague and purposeless, that were perforce unsatisfied: fears for the future—of things both spiritual and bodily: the mystery of the world: a sense that ordinary life was full of triviality: a repulsion from the character and habits of many people: regrets for things said and done amiss, and especially for the outbursts of a temper that was always somewhat masterful—all these and manifold other things often gave me sad and painful thoughts”—it was thus that he described his character as a young man. Among the desires that were “perforce unsatisfied” was the desire for the life of a scientist. His natural bent was strongly scientific. As a boy at Bristol he spent his pocket-money on the bodies of dead animals at the Zoological Gardens which he dissected at home. His first published work was on the Osteology of the Active Gibbon; his second, On the Relation of the Edentata to the Reptiles. Bones and rocks, plants and mosses were far more congenial to him than the work of a clerk in a sugar-broker’s office. The life of a professor of science at one of the great universities would have suited him to perfection. But as a Quaker both Oxford and Cambridge were “practically shut” to him; and he chose the law, for which he entertained “no predilection”, because it gave him “a justification for asking for College”. The college—University College, London—was not Oxford or Cambridge, but it was better than no college at all. It was natural thus, that, though born and bred a Quaker and remaining a Quaker all his life, he was yet highly critical of the sect. He was one of the first to protest against Quaker “peculiarities” and in his old age he wrote that “miserable questions about dress and address and the disputes about orthodoxy produced a chasm in my feelings between myself and systematic Quakerism which I have never got over”. By temperament he was shy and despondent, and “had very little interest in the common run of humanity”. But he had a vigorous and critical intellect; was contemptuous of “anything morbid, sentimental or effusive”; merciless to inaccuracy; and so retentive of facts that in extreme old age—he scarcely knew a day’s illness till his last years and lived to be over ninety—he could supply precise information “whether as to the exact limits of the English Channel, the geographical distribution of animals, or the spelling of a word”. Such gifts, though the law was not the profession of his choice, naturally brought him to eminence. After a dreary time of waiting, “seeing the current of briefs flow in the Square below me”, longing “for more society and love”, longing too for the country and sometimes catching a whiff of hay and seeing above Lincoln’s Inn the distant hills of Hampstead, briefs came his way, and his practice steadily increased. But the life of a successful lawyer never satisfied him. Directly he became a Judge he told his clerk that he would retire when he was entitled to a pension; and much to the surprise and regret of his colleagues he kept his word. In the prime of life, but too late to become a serious scientist, he retired to the country to enjoy that “union of simplicity of life with the benefits of cultivation” that had always been his ideal. But like his ancestors he was a country gentleman with a difference. He never smoked; bowls and halma were the only games he tolerated; and he had no skill with his hands. He read aloud to his children, cultivated his garden, and served his country at the Hague and on the Bench. His shelves were well stocked, and the busts of great men ornamented the library; but for works of art he had no feeling whatsoever. His only recorded judgment of a picture was unfavourable because “the beautiful lady [in the portrait] … had borne a character not without reproach”. Mosses, on the other hand—the Hypnum, and the Tortulas and the Bryums—gave him a satisfaction that human beings failed to give. And if, as he said of himself, he lacked confidence in his own powers and had “a certain rather despairing way of looking at the future”, there was no lack of decision in the rulings he laid down either upon, the Bench or in his own house. The “scheme of Victorian domesticity” devised by him was rigid. The moral code might be “terribly complicated” to a small boy, but it was extremely definite. Even though he inspired his children, and his daughters in particular, with profound devotion, they “always realised that there were bounds not to be overpassed”. Perhaps, could they have ignored those bounds, he would have welcomed it. Perhaps he regretted as much as his son did the “alarmingness” which, as they grew older and the son developed his own individuality, drove them further and further apart. Sir Edward at any rate was deeply conscious of his loneliness. He had had much happiness, he wrote in his old age, and many friends. “But in spite of all this, there is a sense of solitude—aloofness from my fellows, which has clung to me through life, and which in looking back has, I feel, coloured my intercourse with my fellow men as a whole. How few of those with whom I have associated have really understood me! One may think of me as a lawyer, another as a botanist, and another as this or that, and how few feel one’s real self…. I was born alone; I must die alone; and in spite of all the sweet ties of home and love (for the abundance of which I thank God) I must in some sense live alone.”

Naturally a child of seven could not enter into these solitudes; but he could, as Roger’s memory of the winter’s day on the pond at Ken Wood shows, feel the contrast between the father who, when he gave way for once to his passion for skating, was all laughter and high spirits; and the father whose large bright eyes suddenly clouded; and whose voice became one of awful severity as he accused him of sins which he could not understand. Moreover, there was another contrast which even as a child perturbed him. Whatever his father’s moral convictions might be, they lived a highly comfortable life in the small house at Highgate. There were perpetual compromises with the world of respectability and convention. A carriage and pair took his father to Lincoln’s Inn. The rights of property were respected; class distinctions were upheld; and the pond loafers, with their red neckerchiefs, blowing into their ugly hands, were not to be pitied but blamed. There was, he felt, “a want of simple humanity” in their upbringing. He revered his parents, his father especially; but they frightened him; and there was much in their way of life that puzzled him.

Such impressions, however, though sharp enough to last a lifetime, and deep enough to cause much conflict, were of course momentary and exceptional. For the most part, there was nothing to perplex or to frighten. “ The black hen is still sitting. Mr Carpenter’s little girl came this morning to take the white kitten away. On Saturday Forty examined Mab and Kizzy and myself in Tables, Geography and Latin and he set Mab and Kizzy some sums while he examined me in French”—that is an average sample of daily life at Highgate in the ‘seventies. The garden with its hot-houses and its gardener played a great part in Roger’s day. He had his own garden, and a lily grew there which he drew in pencil for his grandfather in Lewes. He had his sisters to play with; and he ruled over them despotically and refused to let them borrow his toys. There was a wide connection of uncles, aunts and cousins, remembering birthdays and sending presents, often, for they were a highly scientific family, of a mineral or of a vegetable nature. He went up to bed not with a toy, but with a crystal that his grandmother gave him. “In return for the Epipactis,” his cousin R.M. Fry writes, “would you like a specimen of the Oxalis corniculata?” And the boy of nine was always careful to use the proper scientific names in reply. His elder brother Portsmouth, already at school at Clifton, instructed him in other matters. “On the envelope is a picture of the hawkheaded God, I forget his name, and in his left hand he has the ‘crux ansana’ or symbol of generation, that is of life. He isn’t exactly what you might call a handsome God but perhaps he was very powerful and that is much more glorious…. I enclose another skeleton of a speech against the notion that the Greeks did the world more good than the Romans…. Grandpapa … again remarked on the thickness of my hand and said it was a good hand for work; his are so thin and shrivelled.”[◉2]

Nor did his father when he was on Circuit forget to write to him. It is true that he moralised: “I am glad to hear that you are good. You feel happy when you are good and unhappy when you are naughty”, but that did not prevent him from sending Roger the picture of a lion; and he picked a gentian and sent it him, and wished when he saw a squirrel in the Welsh woods that Roger at Highgate could have been with him and could have seen it too.

Roger Fry about 1872

Roger Fry about 1889

II

But a change in the garden at Highgate was at hand, and it was connected, as it happened, with a great family occasion—his father’s appointment to the Bench. Roger Fry has described it himself:

I must have been between 10 and 11 years old when our schoolroom lessons were suddenly interrupted by a message from my mother that we were all to go downstairs to her. We ran down to the dining room filled with rather apprehensive curiosity. For lessons to be interrupted it must be grave, it might—it probably would be, a criminal case—so peculiar were the intricacies of the moral code—one might quite well have committed an act of whose enormity one was still unconscious. My mother was seated gravely with an inscrutable air—no it was not criminal—it was solemn but we were not in disgrace—how quickly and surely we had learned to read the hieroglyphics on a face on which so much depended! Solemn it was but not evidently altogether unpleasing. Then we were told that our father had been made a Judge. It was a great honour, we must feel proud of him—but he would not be so well off as he had been—we must be prepared to sacrifice many comforts and luxuries that we had hitherto enjoyed willingly and gladly since the sacrifice would be due to his high station. Also he would be knighted—he would be Sir Edward Fry—that was a great honour but we must not be vain about it—though we gathered we might indulge some secret satisfaction in the far higher but more esoteric title of Mr Justice. We had nothing particularly to say to all this, but we knew how to murmur in a generally admiring and submissive way which was all that the occasion required. We went away encouraging one another to bear with Spartan fortitude those deprivations with which we were menaced. As my father must have been making something around £10,000 a year and as we lived in a smallish suburban house of I guess £50 a year rental—as moreover entertainment was confined to rare formal dinners each of which wiped out the hospitality scores of months and as my father had no vices and no expensive tastes I have no doubt that even the miserable salary of £5,000 a year to which he would be reduced more than covered our expenses—and thank goodness it did for I should scarcely be here if my father had not indulged in that grand Victorian vice of saving.

However we never noticed any serious change in our way of life. The Sunday sirloin continued to appear; Sunday tea still had its tea cakes and really it would have been difficult to point to any luxuries that could be suppressed in our week day menus. However when the summer came we found something which we were called on to sacrifice. My father as junior member of the Bench had to be Vacation Judge. So our yearly visit to the seaside was impossible as he could not get to and fro every day or at least it was thought impossible. My parents rented a house near Leith Hill belonging to two old Miss Wedgwoods. From here my father could drive to Abinger Station and get to his Chambers in time for the day’s work, coming back in the late afternoon. The house was furnished with a good deal more taste than our own and I suppose in a dim as yet unconscious way I was sensitive to such things for the memory of it remains as a peculiarly happy interlude in my life. And besides that the garden was large and led directly into a wooded valley which belonged to the house and of which we had the free run. So that our sacrifice to our father’s honour cost us nothing and I believe we enjoyed those holidays much more than the usual holidays in some distressing seaside lodging house. My father had begun to be interested in me. I was old enough for him to talk to without too much condescension and we often went for long walks over Leith Hill and the neighbourhood. It was in 1877 and the Russo-Turkish War was in full blast, and I remember my father telling me that not only did he hope the Russians would win but he believed firmly that they would because God would not allow a Christian country to be defeated by a Mahommedan one. It was many years before the full enormity of such a statement from a man of my father’s wide knowledge of history and science dawned on me. At the time it appeared perfectly natural and made me an ardent Russophil without having the slightest knowledge of the rights and wrongs of the quarrel. A month or two later when I found myself at Sunninghill preparatory school this conviction, which I was always ready to defend with rapidly improvised arguments, earned me a good deal of unpopularity for, for some reason, all right-minded people were on the other side. I fancy that the real issue for all even for my father was between Dizzy and Gladstone.

Fortunately during our delightful summer at Leith Hill I had no notion of the fate that was in store for me. So that when one day a clergyman Mr Sneyd-Kynnersley came to lunch I did not even wonder why this new acquaintance had turned up, although visitors were for the most part very scarce. After lunch he expressed a wish to see a particular view in the neighbourhood and I was told to show him the way. I suppose that he tried to draw me out during the walk, but I took very little notice of him or of anything he said believing in my incredible innocence of the world that he was just some stray acquaintance to whom my people wished to be polite. He left soon after and then I was called to a private interview with my parents and suddenly the bolt fell—would I like to go to a school with Mr Sneyd-Kynnersley? He was starting a new school at Ascot in a fine country house built by my uncle Alfred Waterhouse—this point was much dwelt upon as being likely to make me feel more at home than in a house built by an unrelated and unknown architect whereas I, who had so often staid at my uncle’s own country house, would be rejoiced to find the same sacred pitch pine boarding everywhere the same gothic windows with stained glass in the W.C. Mr Sneyd-Kynnersley was very fond of boys and there were no punishments. I had no desire whatever to go to school but I answered in the manner that was expected of me that it would be very nice to go to school with the strange clergyman.

And so sure enough in September I went, armed with a silver watch which my father gave me, and a black leather bible which my mother gave me, with many solemn warnings against sin and the assurance that the Bible would always guide me through the difficulties of life.

Now therefore Lady Fry began to receive the first of many schoolboy letters which she kept neatly tied up in little bundles. Many of them are stained with the juice of wild flowers, and still contain withered buds that Roger picked on his walks and sent home to his botanical parents. From the record of paper-chases and school concerts (at one Roger sang “The Tar’s Farewell”), of cricket and football matches, of sermons and visits from missionaries—“We are going to keep a nigger at Bishop Steer’s School. It will cost I believe £60 per ann…. He seems to be getting on well in most things but his character is only fair”—it would seem that he was tolerably happy at school, and was allowed not merely to have his own garden, but to keep pets—among them two active and adventurous snakes. As far as work went he was successful. He was almost at once at the top of the school. And yet there were certain sentences in the letters that might have made his parents uneasy. Bullying there was of course. A certain Harrison and a certain Ferguson “bully me as much as they can, sometimes by teasing, and sometimes by hitting me about … but their favourite dodge is to try and keep me under water and upset me when we bathe”. But he got on well with the boys for the most part, and liked the games and the work. The disquieting phrases concern the masters. Mr Sneyd-Kynnersley had assured the Frys that there were to be no punishments. Yet “there were two fellows flogged yesterday and there is going to be one flogged tomorrow. He was only playing with another boy at dinner.” Again, “the moon-faced boy” had been flogged because he threw some water on to the wall. Again, “Last night Ferguson went to Kynnersley’s room I don’t know what for, but he was found out and I had to dress and go to the Head’s room … Ferguson was so troublesome that Mr Holmes had to hold him down.” As head of the school Roger had to be present at the floggings. He disliked it very much. “I intend to get leave not to bring the boys up to be whipped, as I don’t like it” he told his mother; but the Head said that “it was the business of the captain of the school, but he hoped not to whip anyone”. In spite of these very plain hints that Mr Sneyd-Kynnersley was not keeping his promise, his parents made no effective protest, and the letters continue their chronicle of treats and paper-chases and measles and chilblains and long walks botanising over Cobham Common as if on the whole life at Sunninghill House was quite a tolerable experience. Years later, however, Roger filled out in greater detail the expurgated version of school life that he had given his parents. It begins with a portrait of Mr Sneyd-Kynnersley himself:

Mr Sneyd-Kynnersley had aristocratic connections, his double name was made even more impressive by an elaborate coat of arms with two crests, one the Sneyd the other the Kynnersley, which appeared in all sorts of places about the house and was stamped in gold on the bindings of the prizes. He was a tall thin loose-limbed man with an aquiline nose and angular features. He was something of a dandy. The white tie and the black cloth were all that marked him as a clergyman—he eschewed the clerical collar and coat. But his great pride and glory was a pair of floating red Dundreary whiskers which waved on each side of his flaccid cheeks like bat’s wings. How much satisfaction they afforded him was evident from the way in which during lessons he constantly fondled them distractedly. He was as high church as was consistent with being very much the gentleman, almost a man of the world. But he spoke of respect for his cloth with unction and felt deeply the superiority which his priesthood conferred on him. He was decidedly vain. His intellectual attainments consisted almost entirely in having as an undergraduate at Cambridge belonged to a Dickens society which cultivated an extreme admiration for the great man, and tested each other’s proficiency in the novels by examination papers, from which he would frequently quote to us. He read Dickens aloud to the whole school every evening before bed-time but I do not remember that we ever got beyond Pickwick and Oliver Twist Dickens and Keble’s Christian Year were I think the only books that he brought to my notice during the years I was under him. I doubt if he read anything else, certainly he read nothing which prevented him from being a bigoted and ignorant high church Tory.

He was however genuinely fond of boys and enjoyed their company. He was always organising expeditions—during a cold winter he took the upper form boys for long afternoons skating on the Basingstoke canal—in summer we went to Eton and always we were treated very lavishly with high teas and strawberries and cream. The school was I think a very expensive one but everything was done in good style and the food a good deal better than what I was accustomed to at home.

As the boys came mostly from rather aristocratic homes they were much easier to get on with than those which I met later at a Public school. They had not to the same extent the idea of good form were much more natural and ready to accept things. Altogether my time at Sunninghill House might have been more than tolerable if it had not been for one thing which poisoned my whole life there.

When my parents told me there were to be no punishments it was quite true that the masters never set lines or kept boys in, but as Mr Sneyd-Kynnersley explained to us with solemn gusto the first morning that we were all gathered together before him he reserved to himself the right to a good sound flogging with the birch rod. How my parents who were extremely scrupulous about verbal inaccuracy reconciled it to their consciences to omit this fact I never made out, but I cannot doubt that they knew or else they would have expressed more surprise than they did when later on I revealed the horrid fact to them.

Anyhow the birch rod was a serious matter to me, not that I dreaded it particularly for myself because I was of such a disgustingly law-abiding disposition that I was never likely to incur it. But as I was from the first and all through either first or second in the school I was bound ex officio to assist at the executions and hold down the culprit. The ritual was very precise and solemn—every Monday morning the whole school assembled in Hall and every boy’s report was read aloud.

After reading a bad report from a form master Mr Sneyd-Kynnersley would stop and after a moment’s awful silence say “Harrison minor you will come up to my study afterwards”. And so afterwards the culprits were led up by the two top boys. In the middle of the room was a large box draped in black cloth and in austere tones the culprit was told to take down his trousers and kneel before the block over which I and the other head boy held him down. The swishing was given with the master’s full strength and it took only two or three strokes for drops of blood to form everywhere and it continued for 15 or 20 strokes when the wretched boy’s bottom was a mass of blood. Generally of course the boys endured it with fortitude but sometimes there were scenes of screaming, howling and struggling which made me almost sick with disgust. Nor did the horrors even stop there. There was a wild red-haired Irish boy, himself rather a cruel brute, who whether deliberately or as a result of the pain or whether he had diarrhoea, let fly. The irate clergyman instead of stopping at once simply went on with increased fury until the whole ceiling and walls of his study were spattered with filth. I suppose he was afterwards somewhat ashamed of this for he did not call in the servants to clean up but spent hours doing it himself with the assistance of a boy who was his special favourite.

I think this fact alone shows that he had an intense sadistic pleasure in these floggings and that these feelings were even excited by the wretched victim’s performance or else he would certainly have put it off till a more suitable occasion.

Monday morning thus was always a dreadful time for us. It nearly always resulted in one or two executions but sometimes no sufficient excuse could be found in the reports. Sunday in spite of its leisure and amusements was spoilt for me by the anticipation of next morning’s session and I lay awake often praying feverishly, and nearly always futilely, that no one would get a swishing. But one was never sure not to be called on to assist. One night just as I was going to sleep the Head, as we called Mr Sneyd-Kynnersley, called me to come to his study. We slept in cubicles, sometimes three or four were arranged in a single large bedroom and the Head had overheard one boy say to another “What a bother, I forgot to pump-ship: I must get out of bed”. This indecent talk merited of course a ferocious flogging and my night’s rest was spoilt by the agitation it had put me into. I won’t deny that my reaction to all this was morbid. I do not know what complications and repressions lay behind it but their connection with sex was suddenly revealed to me one day when I went back to my room after assisting at an execution … all ideas of sex had been deeply repressed in me in my unremembered past. I have the proof of that from the fact that I read through the whole of the Bible in the years of my preparatory school without the faintest enlightenment on the subject being borne in upon me even by the smuttiest parts of the Old Testament. Why, you will wonder, did I accomplish this peculiar feat? My mother had so firmly impressed on me the supreme virtue of the act of reading the Bible and of its incomparable prophylactic power that in the inevitable troubles and anxieties of school life I inevitably relied on its help. I managed by waking early to put in one or two chapters every morning before the dressing bell rang. It was a piece of pure fetishism, the longer the amount read the better the chances for the day. Under these circumstances I did not exercise my intelligence or imagination much upon what I read and indeed I had known nearly all of its histories from our Sunday Bible lessons long ago, but still I was not a stupid boy nor wanting in curiosity about some things and I find it hard to explain my total immunity from any understanding of sex.

But whatever the cause, my horror of these executions was certainly morbid and it has given me all my life a morbid horror of all violence between men so that I can scarcely endure any simulation of it on the stage….

You will no doubt long ago have come to the conclusion that Mr Sneyd-Kynnersley was at least an unconscious Sodomite but on looking back I feel fairly convinced that he was not and that his undoubted fondness for boys was due to his own arrested development. He was certainly very vain and his very meagre intellectual culture left him I suspect always with a feeling of slight humiliation among grown-up people. I attribute to that the care with which he got rid of any master of intelligence and supplied his place with imbeciles. It was natural therefore that he felt happiest among boys where he could more than hold his own and whose sense of humour was of his own elementary brand.

Such is his own account of what went on behind the façade of the letters from school. The effect, he thought, lasted all his life. Yet he seems to have borne Mr Sneyd-Kynnersley no ill-will. “I am very sorry for it,” he wrote a few years later when his old schoolmaster died, “as although he never inspired me with much respect he was, I think, kindhearted on the whole.” And Mr Sneyd-Kynnersley must have felt a certain affection for his old pupil; for when he died he left Roger Fry “a nice little copy of some of Arnold’s sermons” in his will.

III

From Sunninghill and its shrivelled pine trees and dirty heather he went in 1881 to Clifton. The Head Master of Clifton, Canon Wilson, was a very different man from Mr Sneyd-Kynnersley. “One sees him standing there”, an old Cliftonian wrote, “at the plain deal desk where Percival had taught before him, a tall gaunt figure with sweeping beard and shaggy eyebrows, like some Old Testament prophet….” And the inner difference was no less marked than the outer. He was a man of the highest academic distinction, a Senior Wrangler and a Fellow of St John’s, Cambridge. Far from following Mr Sneyd-Kynnersley’s habit of “getting rid of any master of intelligence”, the men he had for colleagues at Clifton were “men of unusual ability and individuality”—men like Wollaston and Irwin, Norman Moor and W.W. Asquith. Clifton itself was “a new type of public School”. In seventeen years it had realised in no small degree John Percival’s vision of a public school which “should be a nursery or seed-plot for high-minded men, devoted to the highest service of the country, a new Christian chivalry of patriotic service”. And Percival’s ideal—an ideal “not only of simplicity, seriousness, modesty and industry but of a devotion to public service”, was also the ideal to which Canon Wilson was now devoting his immense ability and enthusiasm. Clifton, then, was a very different place from Sunninghill. There were no more floggings. The bullies, Harrison and Ferguson, with their red bulbous noses and small red-rimmed eyes, were replaced by quiet and conscientious boys, whose only fault, according to the evidence of the letters home, was that they were too anxious to uphold the public school convention of “good form”. No pet snakes were allowed in Roger’s new study. His messes—he tried unsuccessfully to make omelettes in a machine of his own invention—were objected to by the boy who shared this apartment. “One can hardly do anything for fear of making it less gorgeous ‘to anyone coming in’, as Wotherspon is always saying”, Roger complained. The community of six hundred boys was a highly organised society compared with the rather childish company at Sunninghill. Perhaps the newness of Clifton made it a little self-conscious in its virtues; it had to assert the new standards and to live up to them rather aggressively. The machine was efficient, and Roger Fry seems to have been completely ground down by the machinery. Dutifully and rather perfunctorily he recorded how “a fellow of the name of Reed had won the Short Penpole which came off on Thursday in one of those freezing east winds”; how “Clifton College has won the Ashburton Shield at Wimbledon…. The Eight came back last night … were accompanied by the Gloucestershire Engineer volunteers of which we form a company…. The Captain of the Eight presented the shield to Wilson who made a speech to which Colonel Plank, the Colonel of the Regiment, replied…. The Eight were then chaired to their houses.” There were the usual games and examinations: “Oh that there were no such things as exams. I am sure that they are ruinous to education of the highest kind!” he exclaims, and the usual epidemics of which he had more than his fair share. Missionaries appealed for funds; and “a Mr Johnson obtained £70 for a steamer on Lake Nyanza by an earnest though incoherent and rambling address”. Occasionally a lecturer caught his attention. “A Mr Upcott lectured on Greek Art and I noticed a curious thing in the photos of the frieze of the Parthenon, namely a rider riding apparently with his back to the horse’s head.” Miss Jane Harrison also lectured upon Greek art and he enjoyed her lecture very much. As for his school work, though his classics and his English were only fair, he did well enough to be among the first twenty fellows in the House in 1882, and found “being in the Fifth very much nicer than being a fag”.

But his main interest lay in science; and his main pleasure was in the Laboratory. That he “enjoyed immensely”. There he was allowed to carry out experiments of his own. His letters home were largely filled with accounts of these experiments in which his parents were deeply interested—“one was to find out how fast bodies fall by experiment; and another the specific gravity of candle grease…. I got a block of ice from the fishmongers with which I illustrated regelation by cutting it in half with a wire.” He also painted modestly, economically. With penny moist paints and twopenny Chinese white and penny brushes he decorated “two sweet little terra-cotta plates” with pictures of flowers. Flowers picked on half-holidays on the downs and scrupulously given their long Latin names fill a large part—a larger part than games—in the weekly chronicle. At Portishead, where his father in his boyhood had gone botanising, he found “Lithespermum purpureo caeruleum. I must tell you all about it, as it is almost the only important thing that has happened this week.” Often “there is no news since I last wrote” and the letter home has a blank page. Once, it is true, there was a sensation: a boy called Browne who had been “sent up for certain betting transactions” took “a large knife out of his sleeve and stabbed the H.M……..He appears to have aimed at his heart but hit him in the right shoulder only escaping an artery by an inch or two…”—a crime which was partly attributed to the works of Miss Braddon “in which he took a sort of horrid delight”.

But that sensation apart, the terms seem to have dragged along, heavily, respectably, monotonously. The weeks, the days, even the seconds separating him from the holidays are minutely counted and struck off. Whether the fault lay with Roger himself or with the public school system, it is strange how little the presence of men so remarkable as Wollaston and Irwin and Norman Moor and the Head Master himself penetrated his shell; how helplessly he endured a routine which was breeding in him nevertheless a “sullen revolt” against “the whole Public school system … and all those Imperialistic and patriotic emotions which it enshrined”. The hygienic hideousness of the new limestone buildings depressed him still further.

The shell was broken at last not by a master but by a boy. One day in 1882 his study mate, “an exceedingly prim and conventional schoolboy, the very personification of good form”, tried to express his amazement at a portentous apparition which had been seen in the Lower Fourth. “Words failed him to describe its strangeness—the shock head of hair, the long twisted lank frame, the untidy clothes, and above all a peculiarly crooked gait which made it appear that McTaggart was engaged in polishing the limestone walls of Clifton College as he sidled along their surface.” This description of the small boy who was afterwards to be the famous philosopher John Ellis McTaggart was received with “howls of laughter”. Roger listened, but he did not join in the laughter. “I was already conscious of so deep a revolt against all schoolboy standards that my heart warmed to the idea of any creatures who thus blatantly outraged them. Here, I thought, in one so marked out as a pariah, was a possible friend for me. I deliberately sought him out…. My intuition was more than justified; that ungainly body contained a spirit which became the one great consolation of my remaining years at school, and no Sunday evening walk for all that time was ever shared by anyone but him.”

This, the first of many such “intuitions”, was among the most fruitful. McTaggart’s friendship was by far the most important event of Roger’s life at Clifton. The influence lasted long after Clifton was over. But the nature of that influence was not plain then, and indeed it was of a peculiar kind. The discussions on those Sunday walks always centred, Roger said, “round Canon Wilson’s Sunday afternoon sermon”. But the centre itself was scrupulously respected. For “by the exercise of an extraordinary intellectual dexterity McTaggart never allowed me to suspect that he was already an atheist and a convinced materialist”. The astonishingly precocious boy, who had “absorbed and accepted the whole of Herbert Spencer’s philosophy” before he came to Clifton, must have perceived that his Quaker friend was by no means ripe for such revelations. The same disposition which made him argue that “being for a time an inmate of a Christian school he owed it a debt of loyalty which forbade any criticism of its tenets” led him also to respect his friend’s traditions and conventions. Whatever Roger’s latent revolt may have been, it was still deeply hidden.

He was outwardly pious and even priggish. He accepted the religious and political opinions of his family unthinkingly. He still asked his mother to pray for him, prayed devoutly himself, and “knows that God will help me”. He exclaimed: “Is it not a pity about Bradlaugh being returned again by those wretched Northampton shoemakers?” and thinks “the explosion at Westminster” inexcusable in England “where the people have so large a share in the country’s government”. He still went as a matter of course with his family to Meeting on Sunday. Such opinions and pieties were not directly combated on those Sunday walks. Nevertheless, the discussions were speculative; the talk ranged over “every conceivable subject, from Rossetti’s painting, the existence of which he revealed to me, to the superiority of a Republic over a Kingdom”. Clearly, though McTaggart carefully avoided certain subjects, and was “delicately scrupulous never to let me feel my own inferiority”, he was stimulating Roger Fry as none of the Clifton masters stimulated him. He was making him think for himself and suggesting the possibility of asking innumerable questions about things hitherto unquestionable.

Roger’s parents were soon aware of this. There was something in that ungainly boy that roused their suspicions. He looked, a sister remembers, “with his ill-fixed head and his inordinate length of body, like a greatly elongated tadpole”. His views were equally distasteful. “I am very sorry you were disappointed in McTaggart,” Roger wrote to his mother after the visit, “though I do not feel so sure that you would be if you could see him alone as I do. He is whatever his views and manners may be one of the most thoughtful and conscientious boys I know, and one who struggles to have a good influence.” Two or three years later, when they were both at Cambridge, Roger was still trying to lay his parents’ suspicions; and the words are worth taking out of their place, not for what they reveal of McTaggart but for what they reveal of Roger Fry. Lady Fry had again expressed anxiety about McTaggart’s influence. Roger answered: “I suppose you have forgotten that I once told you of McTaggart’s freethinking propensities as I thought I ought to, although I know he does not like them talked about nor is he anxious to talk on those subjects which relate to it. Indeed at Clifton I know he felt himself under a sort of obligation not to talk to fellows upon these subjects. I am very sorry if my friendship should be a cause of anxiety to you, as I feel he is a fellow of really fine character in many ways, and I know Wilson thought so too. I have often wished and prayed that he might be convinced of what we believe to be the truth, but I do not think that his want of Christianity ought to debar me from a friendship from which I believe that I have derived much good—though of course that friendship can never be of the very highest kind. I confess I do not feel that there is any danger to my own Christianity from this companionship, as I hope my Christianity is not so weak a structure as [not] to stand the proximity of doubt.”

That letter was written from rooms which he shared with McTaggart at Cambridge in 1885. It serves to show that in spite of Sunday walks in which they speculated about everything under the sun, Roger must have been, as he admits, “portentously solemn and serious” at Clifton with no notion “of any but the most literal directness of approach”—a weedy boy, with a retreating chin and spectacles hiding the bright large eyes, who behaved decently, hid his latent antagonism under a deep surface of conformity, and attracted no particular attention from the masters who taught him. Nobody seems to have guessed that he had any particular gifts or tastes of his own. Canon Wilson, it is true, had “no special gift or appreciation of poetry, nor indeed of any of the arts”. But Canon Wilson had at once recognised McTaggart’s genius. He knew that McTaggart and “a friend” discussed his sermons on their Sunday walks. But though he valued McTaggart’s opinion, and treated him as an equal rather than as a pupil, Roger Fry was only McTaggart’s friend. He seems to have made no impression upon the Head Master or upon any of the masters. His bent, if he had a bent, seemed to both purely scientific. It was taken for granted that he was to study science at the University; the only question was which University it was to be. Mr Jupp was in favour of Oxford. But for some reason the thought of Oxford roused Roger to express himself more outspokenly than was common with him then. “How long will it take for me to convince him [Mr Jupp] that I intend to go to Cambridge and that scholarships are not the only aims of one’s life, or at all events of mine, though my getting one may be part of his aims and I expect it is”, he wrote. Wilson himself was not only in favour of Cambridge but in favour of King’s. “He says I shall not be swamped as I might be at Trinity, and that the set is he believes extremely nice.”

So Cambridge it was to be, and in December 1884 he went up to try for a scholarship at King’s. He found himself lodged in a queer little garret looking across at King’s over the way. At once, in spite of the impending examination, his spirits rose and he began to enjoy himself enormously. The door opened and in came a gyp with an invitation from Mr Nixon to breakfast with him. “So I went rather in fear and trembling to his rooms.” But Mr Nixon was not in the least formidable. He was a “very jovial and queer little man” who had only one hand, squinted and wore very extraordinary spectacles. And he was very kind and amusing and explained that he was a friend of Smith’s. Then Roger went to his examination and feared that he had done very badly—“they set the life history of the Chara instead of the moss and unfortunately I could not do it”. However, Mr Nixon asked him to come and have tea after Chapel, and other friends turned up, “so you will perceive that I am doing pretty well considering how few people I know”. In spite of his foreboding he was successful. On 22nd December 1884 Lady Fry at Failand received a telegram which she put with the other letters from school.

It simply said in telegraphist’s English: “I have got the exhibition for two years they have only given this one for science”. But it was an immensely important document. For it meant an end—an end to Sunninghill and its shrivelled pines and dirty heather and Monday morning floggings, and an end to Clifton and its good form, its Christian patriotism, and its servility to established institutions. From his private school he had learnt a horror of all violence, and from his public school a lifelong antagonism to all public schools and their ideals. He seldom spoke of those years, but when he did he spoke of them as the dullest, and, save for one friendship, as the most completely wasted of his life.

[]

Chapter II

Cambridge

The years at Cambridge—years that were to be so important to him that in after-life, he said, he dated everything from them—began cheerfully but prosaically. Nixon asked him to dinner; but the lodging-house keeper was a stingy brute who provided no slop pails. Also when asked to provide antimacassars to hide his “hideous green chairs”, he refused, and demanded “twelve tallow candles apiece for his maid to use on dark mornings”. George Prothero, the tutor, was appealed to; and these domestic matters arranged, Roger Fry at once began, with an ardour that seems miraculous after the perfunctory records of Clifton routine, to talk, to walk, to dine out and to row. “Every afternoon I am tubbed, i.e. instructed in the art of rowing”, he told Sir Edward, and he showed such promise that Sir Edward took alarm, and hoped that he would not be called upon to cox the University boat. I have met both senior classic and senior wrangler several times at coffee”, Roger went on. “But I have met so many men lately that I cannot possibly describe them all.”

Thus he was writing when his first term was only a week or two old. There is no reason to doubt his statement that “my life at present is anything but dull, but rather on the contrary over-full”. He dined out, he said, almost every night, and found Cambridge dinner parties “where one plays games afterwards” very different from London parties and much more to his taste. He met the Cambridge characters. The great figure of O.B., “as Oscar Browning is commonly called”, loomed up instantly, and he had the usual stories of the great man to repeat—how he had “invited ‘the dear Prince’ to dine and provided wine at a guinea a bottle but ‘the dear Prince’ never came”. He met the Darwins, the Marshalls, the Creightons—“Mrs Creighton very formidable but Creighton delightful”—and Edmund Gosse. He was elected a member of the Apennines, a literary society which met to discuss “the poets of Kings and the origins of Tennyson’s Dora”, and he read them a paper on Jane Austen. In short he had slipped at once into the full swim of Cambridge life and confessed that he had never enjoyed himself “away from home so much”. “It is really so delightful to find so many nice friends and after school it is such a wonderful change. One is so free from the tyranny of one set who exacted homage from all others.”

The ugly rooms with the unpleasant landlord were shared with McTaggart, and to that original friend others rapidly attached themselves. The names recur—Schiller, Wedd, Dickinson, Headlam, Ashbee, Mallet, Dal Young. He walks with them, boats with them, dines with them, and presumably argues late into the night with them. But at first they are names without faces—an absence of comment that was no doubt partly due to the coldness with which McTaggart had been received at Failand. But it was also obvious that he himself was overwhelmed by the multiplicity of new friends, new ideas, new sights. If he could have stopped as he ran about Cambridge—“I have no black gloves and I do not wear a hat”, he told his mother—to single out which of the three came first, perhaps he would have chosen the third—the sights. It seemed as if his eyes always on the watch for beauty but hitherto often distracted by alien objects had opened fully at Cambridge to the astonishing loveliness of the visible world. After the shrivelled pine trees of Ascot and the limestone buildings of Clifton, the beauty of Cambridge was a perpetual surprise. The letters are full of exclamations and descriptions—“I have hardly seen anything more lovely than the view from King’s Bridge looking down the river when the sunset glow is still bright”. He rowed up the river in a whiff with Lowes Dickinson to watch the sunset effects “and Dickinson ran into a bank of reed and was upset”. He noticed the light on the flat fields and the willows changing colour and the river with the grey colleges behind it. He listened, too, sitting with Lowes Dickinson in Fellows Buildings, to the nightingales singing to one another all the evening. He borrowed a tricycle and began to explore the Fens. Blank pages of letters are often filled with drawings of arches and the windows of churches discovered in the little Cambridge villages. Gradually, his interest in the college boat faded away, and Sir Edward’s fear that Roger would have to cox the University boat proved unfounded.

Soon the faces and the voices of his friends become more distinct to him. He refers to papers that he read himself or heard others read. There was one on William Blake; another on George Eliot; another on Lowell’s Biglow Papers. After Dickinson’s paper on Browning’s Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day, “the discussion”, he says, “turned on whether an universal desire for immortality was any proof of its truth”. But he was reticent in what he reported of these arguments to his parents. They kept an anxious eye upon his morals, his health and his behaviour. “I shall of course observe your wishes entirely about smoking and such things”, he had to promise. Some of his new literary tastes were not to their liking. He had to apologise for having left a copy of Rossetti’s poems at home. His sisters had read it. “I am sorry,” he apologised, “also that it is bad in parts. I did not read it nearly all through and did not come across any that were bad.” It follows that Westcott’s beautiful sermon receives more attention than Dickinson’s speculations; and that when Edward Carpenter made his appearance in Cambridge he is described as “one of F.D. Maurice’s curates once and has a great admiration for him”.

Yet Edward Carpenter’s visit to Cambridge created a great impression. He discussed the universe with the undergraduates, made them read Walt Whitman, and turned Roger Fry’s thoughts to democracy and the future of England. Later, with Lowes Dickinson he went to stay with Carpenter at Millthorpe. “I had rather expected”, he wrote home, “that he might be a somewhat rampant and sensational Bohemian. But I am agreeably disappointed, for he seems a most delightful man and absolutely free from all affectation. The manner of life here is very curious and quite unlike anything I ever saw before, but I have not seen enough yet to form any opinion … he is quite one of the best men I have ever met, although he has given up so much for an ideal.” Under this influence the political opinions that he had brought from home became more and more unsettled. He became interested in Ashbee’s social guild, had a “Toynbeeast” to stay with him; and felt vaguely that a new era was dawning and that England was on the road to ruin. “Society seems to be sitting on the safety valve”, he told Lady Fry; and when she expressed concern for the German Crown Prince’s illness, said caustically: “I should be equally sorry for John Jones in similar circumstances, and doubtless far more sorry for most of the patients in the Cambridge hospital did I know the details”. The riots in London (November 1887) made him “hope that it won’t come to much because then one would have to make up one’s mind what position to take up, which of all things is the most objectionable to me”. And when Lady Fry expressed some uneasiness that his mind was not “made up”, he replied: “I am sorry you were troubled because I said that I had not made up my mind about social questions. But then one has to consider such an enormous number of facts and it is so hard to get at them truly, and even given the facts it is so difficult to get into a sufficiently unbiassed frame of mind that I really think I may be excused if I say that I should like to wait a great deal longer before I commit myself practically to any one theory of the State…. I hope”, he concluded, “that mere differences of opinion (which are after all only very indirect indications of moral character and that is what concerns us most) need not alter our feelings at all.”

It became, as the terms went on, increasingly difficult to describe his life at Cambridge to his parents. Letters from London told him how they had been dining, as Sir Edward wrote, with the Master of the Rolls to meet Sir Andrew Clark and Lord Bowen—“Bowen”, Sir Edward said, “asked Clark: ‘Is it true as I have heard that genius is a kind of fungus?’—a remark which is I believe a little in advance of any discovery yet”; and on the next night they were entertaining the Literary Society at Highgate to read and discuss More’s Utopia and Bacon’s Atlantis. In replying to his parents, stress had to be laid upon scientific work—“I am getting very swell at cutting sections with razors…. I enclose with this a specimen of the true oxlip (Primula elatior Jacq.) which may interest you”—upon the lectures of Vines and his work with Michael Foster. He was working hard; he was showing brilliant promise as a scientist.

But it was not the work in lecture-rooms or in laboratories that was most important to him. It was his talk with his friends. Lowes Dickinson, the young Fellow of King’s, had quickly become the most important of those friends. All one hot moonlit night they sat and talked “while a great dome of pale light travelled round from West to East and the cuckoo and the nightingale sang”, and for a few hours “we cared only for the now which is the same thing as being eternal”. His new friends were forcing him to take stock of the vague religious and political beliefs which he had brought with him from home and from Clifton. All questions were discussed, not only Canon Wilson’s Sunday sermon; nor was there any need to circle round the centre. His creed, he noted afterwards, had dropped from him without any shock or pain so far as he was concerned. His new friends were as respectful of the scientific spirit and as scornful of the sentimental or the effusive as Sir Edward himself. But they submitted not merely mosses and plants to their scrutiny but politics, religion, philosophy. This intense interest in abstract questions drew upon them a certain amount of banter from outsiders. So one may infer from a description given by Mr E.F. Benson of a certain evening party in Oscar Browning’s rooms. The host himself pedalled away at the obeophone; “Bobby and Dicky and Tommy” strummed out a Schumann quintet; the President of the Union played noughts-and-crosses with a cricket blue, and in the midst of the racket Mr Benson observed “a couple of members of the secret and thoughtful society known as ‘The Apostles’ with white careworn faces, nibbling biscuits and probably discussing the ethical limits of Determinism”.

The names are not given, but it is possible that one of those thoughtful young men was Roger Fry himself. For in May 1887 he confided to his mother: “I have just been elected to a secret society (not dynamitic though it sounds bad) commonly known as The Apostles—it is a society for the discussion of things in general. It was started by Tennyson and Hallam I think about 1820, and has always considered itself very select. It consists of about six members. McTaggart and Dickinson belong. It is rather a priding thing, though I do not know whether I shall like it much. It is an extremely secret society, so you must not mention it much.” Not long before he had been elected, without being asked, to the Pitt Club, “which is supposed to be a very swell thing, and for which there is keen competition”. But he refused, because he thought it “not worth the very big subscription”. He had no doubts about joining the other society, even if he doubted whether he would enjoy it. Soon the only doubt that remained was whether he was worthy of the honour.

Since I last wrote [he continued a few days later] I have been partially initiated into the society I mentioned before, i.e. I have seen the records which are very interesting containing as they do the names of all the members which includes nearly everyone of distinction who was at Cambridge during the last 50 years. Tennyson I think I told you is still a member and there are references to the society in “In Memoriam” which none but the duly initiated can understand. Thomson the late Master of Trinity, Baron Pollock, Lord Derby, Sir James Stephen, Clerk-Maxwell, Henry and Arthur Sidgwick and Hort are all (or have been) members, so that I feel much awed by thus becoming a member of so distinguished and secret a society—it has a wonderful secret ritual the full details of which I do not yet know but which is highly impressive. The most awful thing is that on June 22nd there is a grand dinner at Richmond at which Gerald Balfour is President and I (woe is me) as being the newest member am Vice-President and I have to make a speech. I suppose that theoretically it is very wrong of me to tell you all this but you must tell no one but father. I am afraid you will think all this rather absurd but I am rather delighted to have been elected though I know I am far below the average of members and was really chosen because they did not happen to know of anyone else so suitable. And now to turn to the awful Tripos….

It was undoubtedly “a priding thing” to be elected a member of that very select, very famous and very secret society. No election to any other society ever meant so much to him. And “the most awful thing”—the speech at Richmond—was a success. They laughed at his jokes; Gerald Balfour paid him a compliment on his speech; and after dinner with eight others he rowed down the river to Putney, which was reached about two in the morning. So, it would seem, the Apostles were not quite so white and careworn as they looked to outsiders. Certainly they ate something more succulent than biscuits; nor were their discussions confined to the “ethical limits of Determinism”. The meetings led to friendships and the friendships led to boating parties* Lowes Dickinson has described one of them:

We four [he wrote], that is McTaggart, Wedd, Fry and myself, used at this time to row down the Thames from Lechlade to Oxford at the close of the summer term and those few days were a wonderful blend of fun and sentiment. McTaggart bubbled over all the time. He could not row, of course, but we made him do so. “Time, Bow”, said the cox and McTaggart replied, “Space”. He read aloud or quoted Dickens, whom he knew almost by heart. The long stretches choked with rushes and reeds above Oxford; Abingdon, where we could pass the night and lie in the hay by the river; the wonderful wooded reach between Pangbourne and Maple Durham; the Hill at Streetley which we climbed at sunset; the locks with their roaring water; teas in riverside gardens; a moonlight night at Shipley; the splendid prospect of Windsor and ices in the famous tuck shop; it all lingers still in my mind after forty years, and the ghost of McTaggart rises up inspiring and enchanting it all, witty, absurd, sentimental, adorable.

It was a society of this kind then—the society of equals, enjoying each other’s foibles, criticising each other’s characters, and questioning everything with complete freedom, that became the centre of Roger Fry’s life at Cambridge. The centre of that centre was the weekly meeting when they read papers and, as Roger told his mother, “discussed things in general”. The records are private; yet it is permissible, judging from the names of the members and their future fame, to suppose that the subject of Roger Fry’s first paper, “Shall we Obey?” was typical of the general run; and to infer that “things in general” excluded some things in particular. It is difficult to suppose that Baron Pollock, Lord Derby, Sir James Stephen, Clerk-Maxwell and the Sidgwicks ever discussed the music of Bach and Beethoven or the painting of Titian and Velasquez. There is no evidence, apart from McTaggart’s early reference to Rossetti and from one visit in his company to the Royal Academy, that the young men who read so many books and discussed so many problems ever looked at pictures or debated the theory of aesthetics. Politics and philosophy were their chief interests. Art was for them the art of literature; and literature was half prophecy. Shelley and Walt Whitman were to be read for their message rather than for their music.

Perhaps then, when Mr Benson talks of the pallor of the Apostles, he hints at something eyeless, abstract and austere in their doctrines.

Often in later life Roger Fry was to deplore the extraordinary indifference of the English to the visual arts, and their determination to harness all art to moral problems. Among the undergraduates of his day, even the most thoughtful, the most speculative, this indifference seems to have been universal. His own interest in abstract argument was so keen that the deficiency scarcely made itself felt then. But as his letters show, even while they argued his eye was always active. He noticed the changing lights on the willows, the purple of the thunderstorm on the grey stone of the colleges, the sunset lights on the flat fields. Many half-sheets are filled with careful architectural drawings. He was sketching a great deal. At Cambridge indeed he began to paint in oils—his first picture was it seems a portrait of Lowes Dickinson. And pictures themselves were becoming more and more important. He bicycled over to Melbourne, where Miss Fordham showed him her “really very wonderful collection. She has five Turners, 2 Prouts, many old Cromes, Copley Fieldings, D. Cox’s &c.” When he stayed with Edward Carpenter he visited the Ruskin Museum at Walkley and noticed not only the minerals, though they are duly described, but also “copies of Carpaccio and Lippo and Botticelli, also a very fine Verrocchio”. He began to add lectures upon art to his lectures upon science; he went to meetings of the Fine Arts Society in Sidney Colvin’s rooms, and records how a scientific experiment that he was making was interrupted by “a huge discussion on the nature of art with an old King’s man who is up”.

Indeed, as the years at Cambridge went on, art was more and more frequently interrupting science. In November 1887 there was an important exhibition of pictures at Manchester. Roger Fry left Cambridge at 3.45 in the morning; reached the gallery at noon; looked at pictures till eight in the evening; got back to Cambridge at 4.15 the next morning; slept for an hour on a friend’s sofa and then went to a scientific lecture at nine.

It certainly was a somewhat fatiguing affair [he wrote], as of course one could not get much accommodation at the price, but the pictures were a sight worth all the trouble. I do not remember seeing so interesting a collection (bar the Nat. Gallery). I had got a catalogue beforehand and selected those pictures which I wanted to see so that I did not waste any time. I was as much delighted with some of Walker’s things as almost anybodys, and Madox Brown another artist one rarely sees anything of was well represented. There are some lovely Prouts but some of Sir David Roberts’ small architectural drawings delighted me as much as anything in the way of unfinished sketches. One or two of Uncle Alfred’s [Waterhouse] were noticeable, the Pœstum (I think it is) and the doorway of Chartres. As you despise Burne Jones and Rossetti and I have a somewhat similar feeling for Edwin Long I fear it will not be much use my “enthusing” about the pictures I liked best. I was surprised to find how good some of Millais’ earlier work is, making me still more deplore things like the “Dying Ornithologist” and the “North West Passage”. I was very much delighted with Sir Frederick Leighton’s “Daphnephoria”. I do not know whether you ever saw it, an enormous picture of a Theban chorus of victory. Holman Hunt was very poorly represented, but A.W. Hunt’s water colours were very magnificent and there were several that I had not seen before.

And there this first crude essay in art criticism stops, for, though it is only half-past eight, he is dropping asleep and must go to bed immediately.

The excursion to Manchester was made with friends, but they were not Apostles, a sign that when Roger Fry wished to gratify certain growing curiosities he had to seek company—and he had a great liking for company—outside the circle of that very select and famous society. But he had a gift for finding his way across country to the people he needed. At Clifton “an intuition” had made him discover in McTaggart the one friend who made school life tolerable. So at Cambridge where the conditions were reversed—there were almost too many friends, too many interests, too many things to be done and enjoyed—he discovered the one man who could give him what he still lacked. The letters begin to refer to “Middleton”. “I am getting to know more of Middleton which is very nice”, he wrote in October 1886. “I go to him once or twice a week for a sort of informal lecture on art—he shows me photographs &c. It is exceedingly good of him…. He tells me about the development of Italian painting, illustrating it by photos.”

John Henry Middleton had been elected to the Slade Professorship of Art at Cambridge in 1886. A romantic and rather mysterious career lay behind him. In youth the shock caused by the sudden death of a close friend at Oxford “had confined him to his room for five or six years”. Afterwards he travelled widely and adventurously in Greece, America and Africa. In order to study the philosophy of Plato as taught in Fez he had disguised himself as a pilgrim, had entered the Great Mosque “which no unbeliever had previously succeeded in doing”, and had been presented to the Sultan as one of the faithful. He had arrived in Cambridge with a tale of erudite works upon Greek and Roman archaeology to his credit; but he held very unconventional views as to the duties of a Slade professor. Dressed in “a thick dressing gown and skull cap looking like some Oriental magician”, he was willing to talk informally about art to any undergraduate who chose to visit him. Mr E.F. Benson, who thus describes him, was one of the undergraduates who went to his rooms: “ … he gave me no formal lectures,” Mr Benson writes, “but encouraged me to bring my books to his room, and spend the morning there … now he would pull an intaglio ring off his finger … or take half a dozen Greek coins out of his waistcoat pocket and bid me decipher the thick decorative letters and tell me where they came from”. As for the Tripos that his pupil was expected to take, he never mentioned it. Roger Fry too found his way to the Slade professor. He too found him enthralling and stimulating as he wandered about the room talking unconventionally in his skull cap and dressing-gown. That room was full of “the most wonderful things … some very lovely Persian tiles which he got at Ispahan and Damascus, some beautiful early Flemish and Italian paintings and several original Rembrandt etchings, some of them very fine—He is very delightful to talk to, though I fear”, he added, “you [Lady Fry] would think him dangerously socialistic.” Professor Middleton seems to have returned Roger Fry’s liking. He guessed that though he was working for a science degree his real bent was not for science but for art. He encouraged him in that bent. One vacation he asked him to go with him to Bologna. But Roger Fry’s parents were opposed to the visit. Their ostensible reason was that they doubted whether North Italy in the summer was “extremely healthy”, as Professor Middleton asserted. But they may well have doubted whether a jaunt to Bologna to look at pictures with a Slade professor of socialistic tendencies was the best preparation for “the awful Tripos” that was impending. They were afraid that Roger was scattering his energies. How far, they may well have asked, was he fulfilling the wish that Sir Edward had expressed when he first went to Cambridge, “I wish you as you know to have a thorough education and not to be ignorant either of letters or science. At the same time I want you so far to specialise as not to turn out a jack of all trades and master of none”?

There were signs that Roger Fry was finding it increasingly difficult to specialise. Every week he was discussing “things in general” with the Apostles. And when one of the brethren, Lowes Dickinson, came to Failand he made no better impression than McTaggart had done: “… he was unobtrusive and untidy and forgot to bring his white tie. ‘Have you any further luggage coming, Sir?’ enquired the footman.” His mind was being unmade rather than made up. All his friends were, as he called it, “unconventional”. He was staying with Edward Carpenter who, though once F.D. Maurice’s curate, was certainly “very unconventional” now. He also stayed with the Schillers at Gersau—“the most unconventional family in all its arrangements I ever saw”. He stayed at Kirkby Lonsdale with the Llewelyn Davies’s. They too were unconventional; and there he met Lady Carlisle, an unconventional countess who preached temperance and socialism. He attended meetings of the Psychical Research Society and visited haunted houses in a vain pursuit of ghosts. Also he was helping to start a new paper, The Cambridge Fortnightly, for which he designed the cover—“a tremendous sun of culture rising behind King’s College Chapel”. He was painting in oils, and twice a week he was discussing art with a Slade professor who wore a dressing-gown and cherished dangerously socialistic views. At a lunch party, too, there was another meeting with Mr Bernard Shaw. The effect of that meeting is described in a letter written to Mr Shaw forty years later:

I remember that you dazzled me not only with such wit as we had never heard but with your stupendous experience of the coulisses of the social scene at which we were beginning to peer timidly and with some anxiety. All my friends were already convinced that social service of some kind was the only end worth pursuing in life. I alone cherished as a guilty secret a profound scepticism about all political activity and even about progress itself and had begun to think of art as somehow my only possible job. I like to recall my feelings when that afternoon you explained incidentally that you had “gone into” the subject of art and there was nothing in it. It was all hocus pocus. I was far too deeply impressed by you to formulate any denial even in my own mind. I just shelved it for the time being.

In the midst of all these occupations, exposed to all these different views, it is scarcely surprising that Roger Fry himself admitted to some perplexity.

“It is perhaps no use retrospecting,” he wrote home in December 1888, “but I can’t help thinking that in 22 years one should be able to get through rather more than I have done. In fact I think one wants two lifetimes, one to find out what to do, and another to do it. As it is one acts always half in the dark and then for consistency’s sake sticks to what one has done and so ruins one’s power of impartial judgment.” The family creed which had been so forcibly impressed upon him since childhood was no longer sufficient. “Life”, he wrote, “does not any longer seem a simple problem to me…. I no longer feel that I must hedge myself from the evil of the world—that there are whole tracts of thought and action into which I must not go. I have said I will realise everything. Nothing shall seem to me so horrible but that I will try to understand why it exists.” Just as his father had shaken himself free from Quaker peculiarities, so Roger in his turn was ridding himself of other restrictions. But his was a far more buoyant and self-confident temperament than his father’s. Life at a great University, for which his father had longed in vain, had shown him a bewildering range of possibilities. Some of them were invisible to his friends. They, as he says, were convinced that social service of some kind was the only end worth pursuing. Of that he had come to be sceptical. Not only was he hiding from his friends as a guilty secret his doubts about political activity—he was hiding from his family another secret; that art, not science, was to be his job.

These doubts and secrets, the variety of his interests and occupations worried him. He wanted help and he wanted sympathy. In a letter to his mother he tried to break down the reserve which, as the years at Cambridge went on, had grown between them. “When those petty daily commonplaces of which our lives seem so much made up weigh upon me with the feeling of a dreary interminable life of getting up and dressing and eating and talking and going to bed and all without any object in the end, it is sometimes delightful to realise that such things are all shams and that at any moment the surface may dissolve and the reality appear, whatever that reality may be…. I do not know whether I am wise in writing a letter so full of my own convictions which I can hardly expect to be understood, but perhaps it is sometimes worth while to show one’s real self and not hide behind the make-belief ideas which for the most part are all we show, and your letter somehow encouraged me to make a confession.” Whatever else his new friends had taught him, they had taught him to distinguish between the sham and the reality, “whatever that reality may be”. He was becoming more and more conscious of the horror of hiding behind “make-belief ideas”. But it was very difficult to speak openly to his parents. He could only assure them that “the differences of opinion which I fear do and must arise between us owing to our different points of view in no wise affect our love for one another”. As the time at Cambridge drew to an end, he was concealing more, and they were becoming increasingly uneasy.

The immediate question was a practical one. A friend’s letter summed it up. “What”, he asked, “are you going to be?” The “awful Tripos” provided what, to his parents at least, seemed a decisive answer. Almost casually in the postscript to a letter he told his mother that “the examiners have honoured me by giving me a first; this is the more kind on their part as I neither expected nor deserved one. It was telegraphed to me at Norwich this morning by Dickinson.” The path was now open in all probability to a Fellowship, and thus to the career that his father had wished for himself and had planned for his son,—the career of a distinguished man of science. But Roger hesitated. Did he any longer want that career? Had he not come to feel that painting was his “only possible job”? that art was his only possible pursuit? When his father pressed him to decide, he answered, “Please do not think me weak because I find it hard to make up my mind about matters of great importance to me, but it really is because I realise what infinite possibilities there are [more] than because I am apathetic or indifferent”. He was going, he said, to consult Professor Middleton “on the subject of art as a profession”. The result of the interview is given in a letter to Sir Edward:

Roger Fry to Sir Edward Fry

Cambridge,
Feb 21, 1888

My dear Father,

Middleton has been very kindly advising me about my prospects in life, and I will try and give you as clear an account as I can of what he thinks. I explained to him (thinking it an extremely important factor) how unpleasing an idea it was to you that I should take up art—he says he quite understands the feeling that to fail in art is much more complete a failure and leaves one a more useless encumbrance on the world than to fail in almost anything else—e.g. to be a 4th rate doctor in the colonies…. He advised me if I thought I felt strongly enough to ask you to let me try for about two years and by the end of that time he says that he thinks I shall be able to tell what my own capacities are and whether it will be worth my while going on…. In case I do do that, he says the best course would be for me to do at least the first year’s drudgery at the cast and to do that up here at the Museum of Casts—spending some time on dissecting at the Laboratory. He kindly says that he would superintend my work and give me all the assistance he could and that I could get no better opportunities in London or Paris until I have had a year at casts.

He says that the idea of the possibility of landscape painting without figures is quite untenable—you must correct your drawing and colour on the figure as you see there more immediately where you go wrong. I then told him the objection you had to the nude—which he said was very natural tho’ so far as his experience went it did not lead to bad results and was not so harmful as an ordinary theatre—he says however that there is no reason at all why one should draw from the female figure—on the contrary men have much better figures as a rule in England and are more useful to practise drawing on….

I think I do feel strongly enough the desire for this, to ask you to let me try it. That is to say, if I do not do so I fear I may have an unpleasant feeling afterwards that I might have done something worth overcoming all obstacles to do if I had only had perseverance. I know what a great thing it is that I ask of you considering your views on the subject and what a disappointment it must be when you had hoped I should do something more congenial to your tastes. Still I do ask it because I think taking everything into consideration it is what I sincerely think I ought to do.

Your very loving son
Roger Fry

The result was a compromise and a strange one. For a few terms more he stayed on at Cambridge, dissecting in the Laboratory and painting the male nude under the direction of the Slade professor. Twice he sat for a Fellowship. But the first time his dissertation was purely scientific, and he took so little trouble with it that he failed. And the second time he tried to combine science and art—his dissertation was “On the Laws of Phenomenology and their Application to Greek Painting”. That too was a compromise. It seemed, Mr Farnell reported, “to have been put together in haste”, and again he failed.

The two failures mattered very little to him personally. “After all”, he wrote to his father, “I have got more from Cambridge than a scientific education.” For him that was true—he had got more from Cambridge than he could possibly explain. His mind had opened there; his eyes had opened there. It was at Cambridge that he had become aware of the “infinite possibilities” that life held. Now had become eternal as he sat talking to his friends in a Cambridge room while the moon rose and the nightingales sang. What Cambridge had given him could not be affected by any failure to win a fellowship. But to his father the failure was a bitter disappointment. It was not only that he had thrown away the career that seemed to Sir Edward the most desirable of all careers, a career too in which he had shown brilliant promise. But he had thrown it away in order to become a painter. To Sir Edward pictures were little better than coloured photographs. And that the son, upon whom all his hopes centred—for his elder son was an invalid and his daughters, it is recorded, “had no claim to a career”—should have rejected a science for a pursuit that is trifling in itself and exposes those who follow it to grave moral risks, was a source of profound and lasting grief to him. If Roger Fry had no regrets for himself he felt his father’s disappointment and his father’s disapproval not only then but for many years to come.

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Chapter III

London: Italy: Paris

I

The little Queen Anne houses at Highgate, in whose gardens Roger Fry had felt his first great passion and his first great disillusion, had been given up in 1887 for a house in Bayswater. Sir Edward liked the house, because it was near Kensington Gardens and had a fine view down the Broad Walk. To Roger Fry when he came to live there, for the combination of art and science at Cambridge soon broke down, it was “peculiarly flamboyant and pretentious”, and the years he spent there were, he said, “very uncomfortable”. That was inevitable, for they were years of compromise on both sides. His parents still believed, or hoped, that he might give up his wish to be an artist and return to science. He still hoped that they might come to share his views and sympathise with them. They agreed, after consulting Briton Rivière and Herbert Marshall, that he should study painting under Francis Bate at Hammersmith, but they expected him to live at home. A room with a gas fire was allotted him at Palace Houses; all day he worked at Applegarth Studios with Francis Bate, and he came back to family life in the evening.

The compromise proved very difficult. He expressed his feelings openly in letters to Lowes Dickinson. “Oh Goldie … Incomparable Crock … My dear…” the letters begin, and they go on in a rapid unformed hand to talk of the books he is reading, the expeditions he is making, how Francis Bate is teaching him “more how to analyse your impressions than how to move your pencil—and this seems to be the right end to begin”; how he is painting from the nude and how the lady students very sensibly “kick up a row” and insist upon painting from the nude in the same room at the same time; how he shows his pictures first to Briton Rivière and then to Herbert Marshall and how each gives different advice. But the letters are also full of complaints. He has to apologise for making them “a sort of drain for my superabundant spleen”. Again and again he complains that the snow is falling at Failand; and the fog is brooding over what he calls “the Bayswater bog”, and that both Failand and Bayswater reek with what he calls “a Nomian atmosphere”. “This Nomian atmosphere”, he wrote [March 1888], “is positively suffocating…. When every member of a family has a moral sense that makes them as rigid as iron and as tenacious as steel and when they have got through this same moral sense a feeling of the superlative necessity of doing everything in common because of the family tie, you may imagine that the friction is not slight.” He went on to give an example of this friction at work. “When a few minutes ago I made in pure innocence the statement that I believed Elsie Venner was founded on a psychological fact, I was immediately challenged for my evidence, which was only of a very imperfect kind. This I at once admitted. ‘Then you should not spread inaccurate and dangerous views’ For quietness’ sake I admitted the enormity of my crime. It is but a poor recompense to admit your folly, and I cannot but regret that you should speak in that light way of it.’ Silence on my part. Now do you see why I am an Antinomian?” Yet he could have been happy at home; he was highly domestic; he was very fond of his sisters. In the same letter he goes on, “All this is more or less made up for by my younger sisters who are blessedly corrupt—poor things they too will soon be ground down into presentable and eligible young ladies—all acquiescence and smirk and giggle. Damn—damn”—that forecast at least was not fulfilled.

Home life was difficult, and London life was dull and conventional after Cambridge. The family circle was legal and scientific, not artistic. When he dined out, he met a gentleman, a certain General, the type of many he was to meet in later years, who said, “What I demand in a picture is that it shall represent something to me which I can recognise at once, and if it doesn’t do that I maintain it is a bad picture”. Even with Lowes Dickinson he could not discuss painting. “But all this is technical rot to you”, he broke off, after trying to explain Bate’s methods as a teacher. When his Cambridge friends braved the rigours of family supper and went upstairs afterwards to sit in the room with a gas fire, they “plotted the destruction of society … unknown to the rest of the family”. Their interests remained the old interests—Shelley, Walt Whitman, and social reform. They were all convinced that “social service of some kind was the only end worth pursuing”. And in obedience to this creed Roger Fry tried also to make art the servant of society. He went to Toynbee Hall and gave lessons in drawing; but they were not successful. “I can’t possibly tell them to look for hidden meanings in things … at least my tongue would visibly fill my cheek if I did.” There was something in that compromise too that was disagreeable to him. He sampled the pleasures of London. He took train to Aldgate with a friend and tried to find adventures in the slums of Whitechapel and the Minories, “but we found nothing, much to my great relief for I didn’t much like the idea of a row”. The theatre was sampled too. One night he went to see Mrs Langtry act in Antony and Cleopatra. “Mrs Langtry really is very grand, quite worth going to see and acts really tolerably well, but anything more hopelessly absurd than the rest of the show it is hard to conceive. If you can imagine a number of respectable cheesemongers who have retired to Bedlam ranting and strutting about not invariably accompanied by the prescribed number of H’s, you will have some idea of the ridiculousness of the whole thing.” And one day on the top of an omnibus he again met Mr Bernard Shaw. More illusions fell from him. Bernard Shaw “took occasion to explain to me what a colossal farce British Justice was. Up to then my respect for my father had led me to take his word for it that anything so pure as British justice had never been known on earth. Again I shelved it….”

But he could not go on shelving it perpetually. The friction with his parents was increasing. They could not help “expressing disgust at my determination to go on drawing”; and he could not help asserting his determination to be an artist and nothing else. At last there was what he called “a general bust-up and explanation of my views with my people…. I think on the whole it is a very good thing. It removes the veil of reserve almost amounting to hypocrisy which I had long kept up so as not to hurt their feelings. You can understand knowing me as you do, how difficult I feel it to steer clear of priggish self-assertion on the one hand and dishonest compliance on the other, especially as I cannot quite make my usual motto of Don’t care a damn apply to the opinion that my people have of me.”

Obviously, he cared a great deal what his “people” thought of him. He was “fearfully sensitive to slight innuendoes”. He had a profound admiration for his father. He had moreover little confidence in his own gift as a painter, and no reason to think that he could make his living as an artist. For many years to come he would be dependent upon his father, and Sir Edward would have the right to look for results and to criticise failures. But he could not go on vacillating between self-assertion and dishonest compliance. That was the compromise that family life forced upon him; and he was determined to end it. “I may be a bloody fool”, he wrote, “but am at least as obstinate as a pig”. So the compromise between the bed sitting room and the studio which had been “frightfully uphill work for both parties” broke down; and in the spring of 1891 he left home and went for his first visit to Italy.

II

He had crossed the Channel before—there had been childish holidays in Switzerland and undergraduate visits to the Schillers at Gersau. But this was his first visit to Italy, and he went with a friend of his own age, Pip Hughes, the son of Thomas Hughes. The change from Bayswater and Hammersmith, the change even from Cambridge, was immense. It was a change from fog and damp to clear colours and sharp outlines. It was a change from plaster casts in museums and photographs in friend’s rooms to statues and buildings and the pictures themselves. It was a change from compromise and obedience to independence and certainty.

“Rome at last”—such are the first words of his first letter to Lowes Dickinson, dated 15th February 1891. A thick packet of letters, to Lowes Dickinson, to Basil Williams, to his family, is still in existence. They are traveller’s letters; full of details about lost luggage and quarrels with railway officials, with long and laboured descriptions of pictures, buildings and landscapes. He was always a casual and a careless letter-writer; a letter-writer who did not, like the born letter-writer, change his tone according to his correspondents. But for all that, the letters still convey the hum and pressure, the excitement and the rapture of those first weeks in Italy. Perhaps some notion of what they meant to him can best be given by making a skipping summary of their packed pages.

Oh I wish I could send you some of the sunlight of this divine city of splashing fountains and sunburnt domes…. Yes, Italy is much better than I ever thought but it smells much worse…. We have a divine sort of balcony or rather roof top where our host grows vines and oranges … but the wife proceeded to have a kid the morning we came in … he therefore kicked up the devil of a fuss … and demanded the whole rent to be paid in advance … * I’m getting frightfully learned in Italian dishes … we have found a wonderfully cheap Trattoria where we can dine splendidly for about 2 francs…. The Colosseum is a big ugly ruin very like a large building contractors yard…. Sometimes I dislike being so many hundreds of years old as one is in Rome and wish the whole bloody place might be burnt down…. But it is Eternal and I don’t think anything can touch it…. Whatever I have said against Rome … I won’t say anything against Italy … the country is perfectly lovely…. We took a two days’ walk. We went to Nemi [a pen-and-ink sketch of Nemi is inserted]. I doubt if you will understand this. If you don’t, half shut your eyes, and if you don’t then, shut them quite…. Every now and then we came on beds of purple crocus bursting up through last years dead leaves…. We sat and drank wine and watched the sun go down like a red hot ball into the blue sea of the Campagna.

In the evenings the two young men argued :

We continue to discuss socialism and individualism, and of course Pip has plenty of texts for his sermons in the treatment we experience at the hands of officials…. I’m furious about the officialism and bureaucracy of this damned government. It seriously interferes with what good I might get from Rome not to be able to make a note of a thing without rushing round after a permesso…. I want to get some idea of the development of early Christian art but can’t without getting a separate permesso…. I am often speechless with indignation.

But however he might abuse the Roman officials, the Roman people enchanted him:

I’ve just been walking on our loggia under a vine trellis through which the stars shine while in the street below … some men are playing intoxicating and voluptuous dance music which makes even me dance to it…. I think there is a great deal of spontaneous music in the Italians….

Then he began to go to the play:

Last night I went to hear Antony and Cleopatra…. Cleopatra is done by the great Duse…. She is called the Italian Sarah Bernhardt; she is really magnificent … she emphasised the witch or gipsy character rather than the grand queen and yet kept it full of dignity … it was incomparably finer than Mrs Langtry and the hair-dresser business.

But the greater part of every day was spent in seeing pictures. While Pip, who had no great liking for sightseeing, sat in the loggia smoking toothpicks, “having a dislike for Government tobacco”, Roger Fry, armed with a note-book, worked steadily, seriously and enthusiastically round the galleries.

My dear Goldie [he burst out], I’ve made a great discovery. Raphael is a great painter … one of the greatest. I never used to believe it, and I think I was right not to when I had only seen his English works—the fact is he is a fresco painter and not an oil painter…. I think the Venetians are the only Italians who knew what oil meant. Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love … is simply splendid … and so is Veronese’s Rape of Europa—But Raphael’s Galatea I Isn’t it divine? He seems to me in some way to have effected in some way the synthesis of Christianity and Paganism…. The Pantheon is the one really grand Roman building … I can’t in the least explain the effect it produces—it is like the awe and reverence one feels in a great Gothic “fane” and yet it hasn’t any mystery…. I’ve been to-day to see the Baths of Caracalla—they’re no better than a railway station…. I’ve been to the Vatican sculpture and had the divinest antidote to Rome in Greek sculpture. I’ve noticed that the Greeks always have a wonderful treatment of the surface of the marble which leaves it almost soft to the touch instead of the polish the Romans sometimes put on…. I’ve got very keen on Etruscan things…. I think they will throw some light on Greek paintings because what is so interesting is the extraordinary way in which they accepted Greek art. But there is also much that is original in their art and I think I can trace all that I formerly thought the Romans had added to Greek art (namely something grotesque and picturesque) to an Etruscan origin—so much so that I think what the Italians of the Renaissance selected for their model was rather what was Etruscan in Roman art than anything else. I daresay this is rather wild or else has been said before but at present I’m rather mad on them….

So he spent the days indefatigably looking at pictures. And then he began to dine out.

I’ve begun [the letters go on] to get into Roman society … last night we had a most delicious dinner through a friend of Pip’s people, Miss Cartwright. She asked Signor Costa, the great Italian Pre-Raphaelite, to take us all to a restaurant and give us a real Roman dinner…. We had frogs dressed in various ways and other strange and delightful Roman dishes. He brought his wife and daughter…. After dinner we walked about Rome. I fell quite in love with the daughter…. Also I have met Elihu Vedder a nice burly beefy sort of American with a stupendous opinion of himself…. I’ve also seen Mrs Stillman who is Rossetti and Burne-Jones personified…. I think a few years ago I would have thought her almost divine. Now I should like a little more blood.

And then he fell in with William Sharp, who excited him with stories of the Campagna—

one part South of Rome is absolutely wild—herds of wild buffaloes and wild horses without a soul living in it and yet once full of huge Etruscan cities….

Finally the two young men made friends with a Contessa who showered invitations and introductions upon them, and altogether Roman society became so exciting that he was glad, he said, that he had not discovered its charms sooner, or he would have done even less work than he had done.

Yet he had worked hard enough, and not only at seeing pictures. He had been painting pictures too. He went out sketching by himself.

I’m doing a lovely thing near the Villa Madonna … a row of bare trees bright red in the afternoon sun and behind the Apennines and the blue sky and in front a pool and sheep and a shepherd…. The frogs in the pool drive me wild with their incessant invitations to the female…. But there is a deaf little green lizard with whom I always have a talk as he sits by my paint box and lets me brush his back which he afterwards licks. The other inhabitant is a most wonderful shepherd boy who is half savage…. He is ugly and dressed entirely in raw sheep skins but what is interesting is that he always stands like the shepherds in Greek vases in the most beautiful attitudes.

What with seeing pictures, painting them, making new friends and dining with them, the weeks in Rome were packed to the brim. He had seen “all the important pictures and statues at least twice” as well as “a great many churches”. He had painted “six largish pictures, and many little drawings and copies”. And now, leaving Pip Hughes in Rome, for though they got on very well Pip was indolent—“he suffers from almost perpetual melancholy relieved by occasional flashes of moody exhilaration” was Roger’s way of describing what was probably a natural disinclination for several hours of picture-seeing daily—he was off to Sicily alone.

Sicily begins with a quotation, “And torrents of green rush down from the snows to be quenched in the purple seas”. It goes on with “Sicily is divine—to be there is to live in a perpetual idyll”. Syracuse, Palermo, Girgenti, each with a note of exclamation, for each is the loveliest place he had ever seen, follow. Temples and churches are visited, ruins and mosaics are described. Good Friday comes with its procession. Onlookers light their cigarettes at the holy candles. The dead body of Christ is carried past. And then a friend, Seaman, is met, who rushes him through the sights “a good deal faster than I liked, but perhaps it was as well to get a general view”. Anyhow, this is only a first taste of the wonderful land; next time Goldie must come too. And the next letter from Cambridge is to be addressed to the Villino Landau at Florence.

So, taking Amalfi and Sorrento and Paestum on the way, walking much of the road on foot, and falling in with two delightful American architects who played the flute and discussed art endlessly, he reached Florence, and that incredibly cheap pension where one could live not merely in comfort but in luxury for six francs a day and enjoy many of the humours of a Jane Austen novel into the bargain. “Florence”, he exclaimed, after a first walk by night to a hill-top from which the lights of the city showed bright among the olives and the cypress trees, “is splendid—in some ways the jolliest things I’ve had yet.” And then work began—the usual round of all the galleries. There are references to Andrea del Sarto; to Masaccio; to the Lorenzo Library, and to the chapel of the Medici which “make me quite certain that Michelangelo was much the greatest architect that has lived since Greek times. It is a perfectly new effect, produced by the most subtle arrangement in proportion and expresses an idea at least as complete and’ intelligible as a sonata of Beethoven’s which indeed it much resembles…. Botticelli’s Primavera is as splendid as I had expected and renews all the delight I had when I first saw your photograph and which I feared I should never again get out of Pre-raphaelite painting…” Then by great good luck he met Daniel (Sir A.M. Daniel) and they “grind all day at pictures…. Daniel with his terrific energy and intellectual beefishness is making me do it much more scientifically than I should otherwise…. The pictures are extraordinary…. Ashbee is out here and has joined us. He occasionally gives us parts of a Wagner opera on the Piazza Signoria…. If only Cambridge could be transplanted to Florence I believe you [G.L. Dickinson] would produce a great work. Wedd would become an epic poet, and McTaggart would go up to heaven in a fiery metaphysic.” So with music and argument and endless visits to the galleries, the days rushed by.

Then all of a sudden the gossip of the old maids in the pension became intolerable; the heat made him ill; he bought a great Panama straw hat and started off alone for a walking tour in Tuscany. The sun blazed; the country was parched and wild. Sometimes he walked eighteen miles a day through “the most absolute wilderness I ever saw … everywhere mile after mile hill behind hill one desperate wilderness of yellow sandy clay…. I assure you I nearly gave up and lay down and prayed sometimes.” But at last “I got through to a lovely little village called Sinalunga where I found a magnificent Sodoma.…” On he walked. He stayed with peasants in a farmhouse and had “a delightful feeling of being perfectly at home with them”. Adventures befell him. He was taken for a brigand in his great straw hat; for some mysterious reason a man picked a quarrel with him; a suspicious landlady refused to believe that there could be such a name as Fry—it was too short she asserted; he had to find an official and to produce his passport, and even so he had to pay his night’s lodging in advance. Still, in spite of all rubs and hardships, “I can’t give you any idea of the gracious gentleness of manner of these Tuscan peasants, nor of the Madonna-like beauty of the women”. And so, either on foot or by train, he visited Volterra and Prato and San Gimignano and Pistoia and Lucca; and made sketches and picked flowers and took notes and looked at so many pictures, frescoes, baptisteries and statues that at last he has to ask pardon both for describing so much and for leaving so much undescribed. At last, too, he exclaimed: “I am beginning to feel like a boa-constrictor after a very big bull or whatever it is that he constricts” and felt “half inclined to come home at once and begin the process of digestion”.

But still Venice remained. And Venice happily provided a respite, for he had been walking too far and seeing too much and was feeling mentally surfeited and physically knocked up. In Venice he came to a halt. In Venice there were cafés, or “little pubs” as he called them, where after the day’s sightseeing he could sit, and sample strange dishes, and drink good wine. Such was always his natural method of taking his ease when the sun had sunk and he could see no more pictures. And at Venice in May 1891 he was supremely fortunate. For there he fell in with John Addington Symonds, whose books, though he came to dislike the style, had, so Roger Fry always said, the root of the matter in them, and whose talk, he added, was infinitely better than his books. With Symonds was Horatio Brown, “the authority upon early Venetian painting”, “a solid unselfish pessimistic sort of man who says very surprising things when he does speak”. Both Symonds and Brown were “awfully good” to him. They asked him to dine with them almost every night “at a little tiny pub where they are habitués and know all the Venetians who frequent it”. The atmosphere was completely congenial. The pub was kept by a magnificent Venetian who looked as if he “might have stepped out of some great Vandyke portrait”. Roger christened him “il Senatore” and sketched his portrait while they talked and drank. And while they talked, Roger marvelled at the ease with which Symonds and Horatio Brown mixed with “the people”—perhaps he was thinking of the pond loafers at Highgate and their big red hands—and reflected, “Somehow I think it would be easier to be friends with ‘the people’ here than in England. Class distinctions are not really deeply implanted, and there is always a substructure of latent culture; civilisation has had so long to sink in and has penetrated the people so that they have all sorts of fine and delicate perceptions even when they can’t read or write.”

With Symonds and Brown he could talk to his heart’s content, and sometimes indeed rather to his mind’s bewilderment.

Last night we stayed up till the small hours discussing the preposterous paradox started by Symonds in real good faith, namely that Botticelli was either a fool with a knack of drawing who didn’t understand the least what he was about or else a puritan satirist who tried to bring the sensuosity of the Renaissance into contempt by his pot-bellied Venuses, &c. &c. I tried to convince him but in vain; he is wrong and ought to own it—the worst of it was that defending Botticelli is not at all what I am naturally keen on now but such a theory demanded criticism which alas, I was not very well able to give. Symonds ended by saying “Of course we are all very thankful to Botticelli for having inspired those pages of Walter Pater”, and then he added with what I think was hardly good taste in one who is so obviously a rival, “That is the worst thing I’ve yet said about Botticelli”.

Symonds perhaps saw in the young Cambridge art student someone who could still be very easily shocked and was worth shocking and so educating; for he continued the process at his own flat.

There one evening [Roger continued, to Basil Williams] we had the most extraordinary company I ever met. In the first place one Cope Whitehouse, an American who thinks he has discovered Lake Moeris and is going to fill it with water from the Nile. He was the most perfect type of schemer I ever met (Harry Richmond’s father would give you some idea of him)…. I never want to see a cleverer humbug and bogus company builder. With the next visitor the scene shifted from G. Meredith to Oscar Wilde for it [was] no one less than Lord Ronald Gower who one recognised at once as the original of Lord Henry in Dorian Gray. A middle-aged man with a splendidly finely featured aristocratic face not yet quite brutalised by debauchery, the most perfect manner, easy and affable, perhaps a little too indifferent. He talked very well about Greek sculpture and Giorgione and so on, but the conversation finally became weird and remarkable without ever being other than perfectly proper in its expression. The details of it I would rather tell you than write.

It was now Roger Fry’s turn to be shocked; there was still a great deal of the Quaker in him that was liable to shock from the “surprising” things that were openly discussed. There was no “cast iron morality”, nothing Nomian in the atmosphere that surrounded Symonds and Horatio Brown at Venice.

Symonds [he wrote admiringly] is the most pornographic person I ever saw but not in the least nasty … he has become most confidential to me over certain passages in his life. He is a curious creature—very dogmatic and overbearing in discussion, but with nice humane broad views of life.

But though he was still a little shocked—Quaker scruples still had an awkward way of asserting themselves—he felt nevertheless “absolutely at home here in Venice”. As he sauntered along the Zattere at night after these conversations, “it had just the feeling of King’s Backs to me without its associations” he remarked. Lowes Dickinson and Wedd and McTaggart unfortunately were missing; nevertheless, he found that he could talk perfectly openly with Symonds and Brown—“who is most Apostolic”—and not only about morals and philosophy, but about Veronese and Tintoretto and Tiepolo, whose pictures he had been seeing that morning. There was no fear that Symonds or Brown would complain, as his Cambridge friends complained, that he was “talking rot about technique”. Technique was not rot to them; pictures were the most important things to them in the world. And then there added itself to the group at the little pub another figure who was to recur in other pubs and other places so frequently that no record of Roger Fry’s life would be complete without mention of him—the traveller met by chance, the marvellous discovery. This time he was a nameless Swede—“a man of wonderful culture, who knows all English, French, and much Spanish and Italian literature and understands Italian art in a way I have hardly ever known anyone else do, but his special subject is Dutch literature in the 17th century … he gives one the notion of belonging to a bigger race than ours with a bigger future opening before it…. If he were a pedant, I wouldn’t mind, but he is a man of the world with all his learning … and he is younger than I am.” They made great friends; they roamed the streets at night talking endlessly. All his life Roger Fry was meeting such people; and sometimes he struck up lasting friendships with them, and sometimes, as on this occasion, they remain nameless, and vanish into the May night.

To make the spring complete only one thing was wanting and that too came to pass. An English girl and her mother were staying at Venice. The girl was “fascinating”; the mother “very remarkable”. Roger Fry fell deeply in love. To fall in love for the first time and in Venice in the spring must have been the most exciting of all those exciting new experiences. But his feelings must be guessed, for though he was on terms of perfect intimacy with Lowes Dickinson, falling in love was a topic that he did not find it easy to discuss with him. “Seriously I love you and understand you more than ever … and yet it’s no use to blink the fact that it isn’t the only kind of love I’m capable of although it may be better than any other; nor also that our love means something different to me to what it does to you—but I think you understand.”

Thus it was that the Italian tour with its immense variety of exciting experiences—artistic, intellectual, emotional—came to an end.

III

The process of digestion had now to begin. It was difficult; he had swallowed so much. He had seen enough in those few months to make him sure that compromise was impossible—his life’s work was to lie not in laboratories, but among pictures. He had only taken a rapid glance at Raphael, Michael Angelo and the rest, but he guessed that the mass behind them was prodigious, and that it would need a lifetime to take its measure. But there was also the other desire—the desire to paint himself. There was the shepherd boy standing against a background of bright red trees with blue mountains behind him. The critic, to whom it came so naturally to form “wild theories” and to analyse impressions, was always being urged by the artist to stop taking notes and to get out his canvas and paint. Yet although he had found that he could hold his own in argument with Symonds and Horatio Brown, he was very doubtful whether he could paint a picture that was fit to hang on a friend’s wall, let alone among the works of real painters in a gallery. It was a doubt that troubled him and that was to go on troubling him. Further the love affair, that had begun so happily at Venice, came to an unhappy end in the winter that followed.

Naturally the few months that he spent in London with his family on his return were gloomy. “I am very sick about things in general just now and cannot manage to work properly”, he wrote. After Italy, Bayswater was less tolerable than ever. The Quaker atmosphere, he said, made him “into a strange jelly-like mass with about as much consciousness as a chloroformed amoeba”. And after Italy the atmosphere of Applegarth Studios, Hammersmith, with Francis Bate to instruct and Briton Revière to advise was a little elementary. The solution seemed to be a second foreign tour, this time to France, to continue his education at the headquarters of art, the Académie Julian at Paris. He went there in 1892.

IV

According to Sir William Rothenstein, who had gone there a year or two before, Paris and Julian’s studio—“that congeries of studios that was called the Académie Julian”—was enough to send young art students “accustomed to the orderliness of the Slade, and the aloofness of the students, wild with excitement”. “Those first days in Paris”, he writes, “seemed like Paradise after a London purgatory.” Over the studio door was written the saying of Ingres, “Le dessein est la probité de I’art”; within, the rooms were crowded with students from all parts of the world. “Our easels were closely wedged together, the atmosphere was stifling, the noise at times deafening.” So Sir William begins his description of that exciting time, and he goes on to give a fascinating account of the friends he made; how they worked and discussed each other’s work; how they dined at the Rat Mort and the Moulin Rouge; how the band struck up and La Goulue danced, and Rayon d’Or and Nini Pattes en Fair and Grille d’Égout displayed their charms; how Gonder drew them; how one met and talked on equal terms with Lautrec and Anquetin and Edouard Dujardin.

All this and much more than all this, as a dozen memoirs testify, was going on when Roger Fry went to Paris. But he seems to have missed it. He was sharing rooms with Lowes Dickinson, and Lowes Dickinson, when he was taken to the Moulin Rouge, “or one of the dancing places”, records that he was bored; and when “a very ugly old prostitute came up to me once, in some eating-place, and began fondling me”, he “fairly ran away”—to continue writing his drama upon Mirabeau in the untidy attic which he shared with his friend. Roger Fry himself found Julian’s “very mild after all the tremendous accounts I heard”. Perhaps after Venice and Symonds and Horatio Brown, studio life with its song-singing and its merciless chaff and its frequent practical jokes, “some of them very cruel”, seemed to him rather primitive. Whether because of his upbringing, or because of some innate Puritanism of his own, he never liked what he called “rampant Bohemianism”. So, leaving Lowes Dickinson to write his play in their attic, he wandered about Paris by himself, gathering impressions of a mixed and miscellaneous kind. “What delights me in Paris”, he wrote to Basil Williams (February 1892), “more than anything else is the sort of way in which the national sentiment has got itself expressed in the magnificent public buildings…. It is an organised vertebrate city, not an amoeba or fungus like London…. Then the pictures. Well the Luxembourg is a great disappointment—I scarcely can think it typical—there is so little that is really big—little that is quite bad it is true, but a dull academic mediocrity pervades the place. Whistler’s mother is quite among the first three, if not first of all, as I rather incline to think. Bastien-Lepage is a disappointment to me, nice and genuine observation of peasant life, but I don’t like to have undigested facts thrown at my head in that way.”

He sampled the opera too. “I have never got at Wagner before—it seems quaint to get ones first real thrill of Wagner in Paris, but so it was”—and the theatre. He dined out with Madame Darmesteter, and went to a state ball, “chez Carnot”, at the Élysée. “Imagine me in the most gorgeous condition I could assume with a new opera hat wandering round the rooms at the Élysée—not knowing a soul and unknown…. It wasn’t anything very extraordinary in any way except for the number of decorations under which fat little Frenchmen who looked as though they’d made their money in candles or soap staggered about. The women were nearly all rather ugly but the dresses were good.” He was amused by the various samples of French life that came his way, but not excited, or much impressed. It is true that he made friends with “a young English artist, a friend of Oscar Wilde’s, and one of the most conceited little shits—there’s no other word for it—you can imagine but very clever and great fun”, and through him heard talk of the symboliste poets; but the symboliste poets “seem to be a set of egregious asses in some ways and only to keep alive through vast orgies of mutual admiration and reciprocal incense-swinging”. He went to the Chat Noir, “a café run by a sort of circle of artists where they give the most splendid shows”—but those shows seem only to have suggested aesthetic theories about an “ideal union of the three arts of drawing, music and poetry” upon which he meditated in solitude.

Altogether the months in Paris, though they had a wide circumference, seem to have lacked a centre. He was inquisitive and he was interested, but he found nothing in particular to fasten upon. He missed, to his lifelong regret, seeing any picture by Cézanne. And Paris and French painting, considering what both were to mean to him later, made very little impression upon him at first sight. It may have been that the first sight struck at him from an odd angle. Modern painting had to strike through a Quaker upbringing, through a scientific education; through Cambridge and Cambridge talk of morals and philosophy, and finally through an intensive study of the old Italian Masters before it reached him. And there was a further impediment; as a painter he was not in the least precocious. Had he shown at Julian’s a strong original bent as a painter, he would have been a member of that little artists’ republic which, whatever the age or the state of society, is always actively in being. His contemporaries would have praised or abused his work. His elders would have taken notice of him. He would have come to know both painters and writers at first hand, not only through the reports of others. As it was, he rambled about Paris for himself and nobody took any particular interest in him or in his work. Sir William Rothenstein sums up, no doubt, the impression that he made upon his fellow students at Julian’s when he says that Roger Fry “was not much of a figure draughtsman”, and though “clearly very intelligent”, he seemed “somewhat shy and uneasy” as if he had moved “chiefly in scientific and philosophical circles”. And to Roger Fry that famous studio seemed “very mild”.

Yet France was to mean more to Roger Fry than any other country. It was to mean something different. Italy, as the skipping summary of the letters is enough to show, was a lovely land of brilliant light and clear outlines; it was a place where one worked hard all day seeing Old Masters; where one settled down at night in some little pub to sample strange dishes and to argue with other English travellers about art. But it was not a place with a living art and a living civilization that one could share with the Italians themselves. France was to be that country. He was to spend his happiest days there, he was to find his greatest inspiration as a critic there. But he seems in 1892 to have had no premonition what France was to mean to him, and for perhaps the last time in his life he exclaimed on leaving Paris, “It’ll be ripping to see London and its inhabitants again”.

[]

Chapter IV

Chelsea: Marriage

I

London was Chelsea. He took a house in Beaufort Street which he shared with his friend R.C. Trevelyan. There was a studio in the back garden, and a great mulberry tree hung its branches over the garden wall. The house is still there, and Beaufort Street, whatever may have happened to the world since 1892, is practically unchanged. The years have given it neither dignity nor romance. The houses remain monotonously respectable and identical. But the river still runs at the end of the street, and Roger Fry, to whom London was a fungus, an amoeba, liked the river and the barges passing, and the silhouettes of factory chimneys and the yellow lights opening in the evening. But though Beaufort Street remains unchanged and the river still runs, it is difficult to recapture the; Chelsea in 1892. The peace was so profound. Politically, the most stirring question was the fate of the Home Rule Bill; in the world of poetry, it was the year of Tennyson’s death; Sir Frederick Leighton was President of the Royal Academy; Millais was exhibiting “The Little Speedwells Darling Blue” at the Academy; some of Oscar Wilde’s plays were being produced; and Roger Fry and his friends were immensely impressed by Ibsen. These are scattered landmarks that may recall as far as such things can the outlines of the world as it appeared to him. And it appeared to him of course from a certain angle, a sheltered angle, a favoured angle. Through his family, through his father, he had many connections with the active and eminent in the professional world; he had a tradition, a background, behind him.

An early picture by Roger Fry

For many reasons it seemed perfectly possible to settle down in Chelsea and to plan long years of work ahead. But another result of that profound peace was also obvious—it seemed necessary to revolt against it, to break it up. It was the stability of the world that impressed him; its security, its prosperity, its self-satisfaction. When he stayed at Failand, his father’s country house near Bristol, he fumed with irritation. He could see no chance of any change in family life in his time. In the world of art the Royal Academy was his bugbear. It stood for everything that was dull, established and respectable. The New Gallery, the Grosvenor Gallery, the New English Art Club were all in opposition; he joined the opposition as a matter of course. When he set up on his own as a painter, he sent his first pictures to the New English Art Club. It was the centre, as he wrote later, “of the serious artistic life of the day”. He had reasons of his own for criticising the New English Art Club and its aims; he thought, as he says in a letter at that time, that if he could ever paint a picture it would be “a better picture” than the pictures shown there—“My study of the Italian drawings has influenced my work in the direction of demanding more complete design in a picture”. But he had no doubt that the artists who showed at the New English Art Club were the only artists worth considering in England. He took Lowes Dickinson to task for doubting it. “I wish you wouldn’t say such things about the N.E.A.C.”, he protested. “No doubt some of them are extravagant. Steer I’m sure isn’t. He’s much too genuine….” So he sent his first pictures to the New English Art Club and was greatly disappointed when they were rejected.

But when he first set up house in Beaufort Street, perhaps Harris was more important to him than the New English Art Club. Harris certainly plays a far larger part in his letters than Mr Gladstone or the Home Rule Bill. Harris was the maid-of-all-work supplied by Lady Fry. Harris was a woman of sensibility. When left alone Harris took rather more drink than was good for her; when remonstrated with, Harris’s feelings were hurt, and when her feelings were hurt, Harris was incapable of cooking dinner. This was a serious matter, because Roger Fry was naturally hospitable. Now that he had a studio of his own, and not merely a room with a gas fire at the top of his parents’ house, friends came crowding to see him. The old Cambridge friends came of course; Lowes Dickinson read aloud the play there that he had written in the untidy attic in Paris. But the old Cambridge circle was being considerably enlarged. Mr Bernard Shaw came, and talked delightfully, but refused to eat a delicious risotto cooked by Roger himself because “he detected a flavour of animal gravy in it”. Family friends came—among them Mrs Crackanthorpe, who looked at his pictures and said: “I ought to write up large on my walls ‘Do not take pains’ “—a criticism with which he agreed; and then she carried off some of those too laboured canvases to show to Mr Ouless, R.A. And the argument, the everlasting argument, now that it was no longer necessary to plot the destruction of society in secret, raged fiercely in the studio at Beaufort Street. “When late one night Daniel [Sir A.M. Daniel] left”, Mr R.C. Trevelyan writes, “Roger accompanied him the whole way down King’s Road to Sloane Square Underground Station, and as the discussion was not yet finished, we all three walked the whole way back to Beaufort Street, and then back to Sloane Square again.” The subject of the argument has disappeared. It may have been, according to the evidence of the letters, “on the methods of the old masters and whether they can be combined with truth to nature to which modern people have become accustomed”; or it may have been about the Old Masters and the failure of the Impressionists to absorb their meaning—a subject, according to Alfred Thornton, upon which Roger Fry at this time used to carry on vigorous arguments with Henry Tonks. Or again it was likely with R.C. Trevelyan as a house-mate that the argument turned upon poetry. Through Robert Bridges, who had married a cousin, Roger had read some of Gerard Hopkins’s poems in manuscript, and was at once convinced and must convince Bob Trevelyan that here was a great poet, a far greater poet than Tennyson. “I’ve got some manuscript poems by Gerald Hopkins which would make you tear your hair. Look at this: T caught this morning, morning’s minion king’ “, etc. From Tennyson to Gerard Hopkins—that may serve as a landmark or as a mind mark, too.

Whatever the subject of those arguments, there is plenty of evidence that Roger Fry was, as R.C. Trevelyan writes, “a tireless and obstinate disputant”—on one side of the garden wall. But the garden wall had another side, and so too, it seems, had Roger Fry. On the other side of the garden wall lived Ricketts and Shannon, and the great mulberry tree, whose branches overhung the wall, brought about meetings. “Once every year,” Mr Trevelyan writes, “when the mulberries were ripe, Ricketts sent us a courteous invitation to come to tea and eat our share of the mulberry vintage. The ceremony, though outwardly friendly enough, was apt to be rather formal and constrained because Roger and Ricketts did not really like each other. Roger was still very much of a Quaker in temperament and tone of mind, though quite emancipated from Quaker puritanism, and he was inclined to be irritated by the somewhat irresponsible dogmatism of Ricketts’s talk.” But that irritation was concealed, it appears, and the “tireless and obstinate disputant” of the studio was silenced. He seemed to Sir William Rothenstein, who met him on the Ricketts and Shannon side of the wall, to be “very much what he was when he first came to Paris—shy, rather afraid of life, painting in the manner of the early English water colour painters”. And the discrepancy is interesting—it shows that there were two Roger Frys; one who had been trained at Cambridge to reason and was quite able to hold his own in argument with McTaggart and Lowes Dickinson, and another who was still inclined to be shocked by what he called “rampant and flamboyant Bohemianism” who was very diffident in the presence of painters, and who felt vaguely that if he could paint he would paint differently from the artists of his own generation.

There was a further characteristic that struck many people at that time and later. “He sat at Ricketts’s feet”, said Sir William Rothenstein. Mr Edgar Jepson, the novelist, uses the same words. “He sat at Selwyn Image’s feet”—“a pleasant gushing young fellow,” he called him, “and rather an ass. I never dreamt that he would grow up the Father of British Painting”—Sitting at other people’s feet was certainly a characteristic. Roger Fry had a great capacity all his life for laying himself open, trustfully, optimistically, completely to any new idea, new person, or new experience that came his way. But with it was combined another characteristic—when he had sat long enough at those feet to see where they led, he would get up and go off, sometimes in the opposite direction. This rare combination—the capacity to accept impressions implicitly and then submit them to the test of reason—made him the most stimulating of critics. But it was a gift that puzzled, and sometimes distressed his friends and colleagues. It led, as Alfred Thornton noticed, “to a certain restlessness and tendency to secede from societies to which he belonged and to found others, each to be abandoned in its turn”. Roger Fry did not regret it; he was often to maintain that it is only by changing one’s mind that one can avoid the prime danger of becoming either a fossil or a figurehead.

He seems, then, in those years at Beaufort Street to have sampled many groups but to have attached himself to none. He was always being driven by the range of his own interests and the activity of his mind to explore beyond the walls of the studio. The art of painting and its connection with the other arts was a subject that had already interested him when he was a student at Julian’s. He went to a great many concerts, and he read a great deal of poetry. There would burst into the studio, to take one instance, “a man who has lived in Italy for eight years translating Dante into Spenserian verse” which he proceeded to shout by the canto. “But the really extraordinary thing is that it is quite good … a few little tips which I had second hand from Bridges” threw him into a wild state of excitement “and made him perspire all over his bald head.” Then there was science. Science had been supplanted by painting; but it was dormant, not dead. Science was still the great bond between him and his father. He still discussed scientific problems with him, and would still gather some rare flower for Sir Edward to dissect on his cycling jaunts into the country. He continued to be interested in Psychical Research. Mrs Piper and her revelations were then exciting a good deal of discussion. He spent a week-end with Shadworth Hodgson and summed up the result of their arguments in a letter to his parents. “There does seem”, he wrote to his mother, “some reason to think that there are spirits and that they exist in luminiferous aether. They all find it a much pleasanter place than this, but apparently they are still rather confused as to their whereabouts…. It is much the most rational and collected account I have heard.” Then again medicine and its problems fascinated him. A new drug might always contain some magic property. His own colds and influenzas lent themselves to interesting theories and experiments. “Little tips” that he had discovered were always being handed on to his family. His charwoman had cured her husband of indigestion by putting isinglass in his tea—might it not be worth while for Lady Fry to try the same cure upon Sir Edward? … Undoubtedly, sitting at other people’s feet, whether they were the feet of art experts or of psychical researchers or of old charwomen with a hoard of nostrums under their black bonnets, was a characteristic, endearing to some, in its innocency; irritating to others, the sign of something fantastic, flighty, gushing, in his character. At any rate, it meant that his days were packed full of different things. In Beaufort Street, as at Cambridge, the old complaint recurs; life is too full of different possibilities and interests. “I sometimes think”, he wrote, “that I shall have to get a disguise and give out that I’ve gone abroad so as not to hurt people’s feelings by not spending all one’s time rushing about.”

All these different, sometimes conflicting, interests and activities may have interfered with that absorption in art, that isolation and concentration which, as he was often to remark, the great artists, like Cézanne, have found essential. To the critic, however, a richer, or a more varied diet, may be helpful. And circumstances were forcing him to become a critic. He was finding his allowance insufficient, and to write notes upon current art for the various weeklies was the obvious way of adding to it. There are frequent references to articles in the letters from Beaufort Street. Indeed, according to Sir William Rothenstein, he was already “an admirable writer”. His writing never satisfied him; there was nothing plastic about it; pen and ink, were meagre tools compared with brush and paint. But his mind was stored with ideas and arguments, and editors were ready to accept notes and half columns, reviews of books and reviews of picture shows, if not more serious contributions. Pages torn from the Athenaeum and the Pilot began to accumulate and to be thrown into table drawers. In October 1893 there is reference to a more ambitious article upon Impressionism intended for the Fortnightly. He tried to explain that “painting is not mere representation of natural objects”. But the Fortnightly refused it, and he turned to another method of making a living, and one that was more congenial to him.

“Berry wants to try me as an Extension lecturer upon art”, he wrote in 1894. He had already some experience as a lecturer—he had lectured to the boys in his study at Clifton with a block of ice in front of him; and he had lectured staying down at Yattendon with his cousins, the Bridges, when there was an explosion and the electric machine went wrong. But this was his first attempt at lecturing upon art, and though Berry said that his manner “was not assured enough”, it was a success. He went on to give a course at Cambridge on Leonardo da Vinci. Then Eastbourne applied for a course upon Italian art. Brighton followed suit. Very soon he was saying, “It is curious how my lecturing has caught on”. He was even complaining that though his lectures cost him very little trouble compared with his painting, they were much more successful. Lecturing was at any rate preferable to writing, and more congenial to him. The audience stimulated him, and the picture on the screen in front of him helped him to overcome the difficulty of finding words; he improvised. He had, too, natural gifts—a beautiful speaking voice, and the power, whatever its origin, to transmit emotion while transmitting facts. But he had to develop a technique, and the practical difficulties were at first very great. It was essential that his lectures should be illustrated, and it was difficult in those days to come by illustrations. He had to send to Italy for photographs and to have them made into slides. Then there were long journeys to remote places—often he went without dinner, was nearly frozen in his third-class railway carriage by the time he reached Dunfermline or Aberystwyth, and then found that no arrangements had been made and he had to set to work to rig up a screen, a light and a reading-desk himself. But he liked his audiences, and even if they wrote him papers too full of “gush about the fair city of Florence and the slopes of the Apennines”, he found them eager to learn. He was always discovering, to his great delight, someone in some out-of-the-way place who “is really keen about art”. He enjoyed, too, looking out of the train window, for a new landscape was almost as important to him as a new friend. Nor was he yet as positive as he later became that Suffolk is the only county in England worth looking at.

As a lecturer he was undoubtedly successful; but he was not successful as a painter, and his painting mattered far more to him than his lecturing. As a painter he complained that he did not seem “to fit in anywhere”. He was painting in the manner of the early English water-colour painters when his contemporaries were painting in the manner of the Impressionists. When he succeeded in getting a picture hung—a portrait of Mrs Widdrington—it seemed to him “old-fashioned…. I fear it is not very original or up to date—more like a reminiscence of Gainsborough than anything.” A fellow artist told him that he was “much too Old Masterish—it seems quaint for me to be an old fogey, but I see that it is a possible danger”. Critics to whom he showed his work took different views of it. “Steer has been round and I think likes my work more than before, but it is difficult to find out quite what he thinks. Powles has also been round….” And Powles of course said the very opposite of Steer. For reasons which he gave later in his “Retrospect” (Vision and Design), he found himself “out of touch with his generation as a painter”. And it followed that he found it very difficult to show his pictures, let alone to sell them. “I have had a great disappointment over the N.E.A.C.”, he wrote (November 1893), “which chucked all but Mrs Schiller and skied that. I am very sore about it, as I honestly think it is not a fair judgment and am backed up in that view by Bate and others….” Again, “I sent two things to the New Gallery with the usual result”. Success, he wrote to his mother, “seems to take a long time coming, but that chiefly troubles me in so far as it concerns you”. He did not like taking an allowance from his father, who had many claims upon him, and yet, though friends were very kind in commissioning portraits—the Pearsall Smiths, the Palgraves and the Bridges all gave him commissions, and he added to his income by taking a pupil, a Frenchman who improved his vocabulary—he was finding it very difficult to make both ends meet—

But he was right in saying that he felt his failure chiefly because it affected his parents. He had no doubt that he had found out “what to do”; he never regretted Cambridge or a scientific career. Particularly he was free to travel—indeed, his growing success as a lecturer made that great pleasure a necessity. He went to Antwerp and to Lille in order to see Rubens. There was another visit to Italy, partly in order to hunt up photographs for his lantern slides, partly in order to see pictures for a book on Bellini that was taking shape. “Daniel is talking so incessantly about the various ascriptions of pictures we have been to see that I am unable to concentrate”, he wrote (to Basil Williams, 20th October 1894).

We work here at the galleries all day long and read Morelli all the evening, and I am really getting a grip on Italian art such as I have never had before and I hope my lectures will be the better for it though I don’t see how in the least to convey what I have learnt in words. On the whole I am coming to the conclusion that the general level of painting in the 15th century was not very high. There was a batch of great men at the beginning, Masaccio, Piero della Francesca and Pisanello, and then no one first rate till Leonardo da Vinci. Also that on the whole the Florentines were a prosaic and rigidly scientific lot. I am trying very hard to see why Raphael is so great but he still leaves me cold and untouched.

And so to Prato and Pistoia and Parma and the works of Correggio. “… I am immensely excited by him. He seems to me almost the greatest painter of all the Italians. I know that I have felt that at random times of two or three others so you won’t think much of it”, he wrote home to his mother. Then it was necessary to go to Paris, to see the Salon and the work at the Louvre, “which seems to me finer every time I see it and to have more of importance especially in Italian art than our National Gallery”. He was beginning to know France itself, not merely Paris and the Louvre, but the villages, the rivers and the inns—France as it is known to the cyclist with a map in his pocket and an easel strapped to the back of his machine. There were expeditions at Easter and in the summer to little French villages—Sassetot-le-Mauconduit, Giverny, La Roche Guyon; visits to the English colony at Vetheuil, where he met Conder and admired the beautiful Miss Kinsellas; and there D.S. MacColl was staying too, and noted Roger Fry as “a modest youth worried because his painting would never look ‘artistic’ “ He missed seeing Monet, but he saw the poplars on the Ept with Alfred Thornton, who records “but despite the glamour of it all Fry was continually in doubt”—about the Impressionists, it seems; and once Jane Harrison was of the party, and they cycled together, and he delighted in her “ribald spirit” and her “really Apostolic mind” whilst her enthusiasm for “collecting idiotisms” helped him to a greater fluency in his own speech. Indeed, he fell in love not only with France but with the French language, and teased his friends by sprinkling both talks and letters unnecessarily with French words.

Back in Chelsea he filled up whatever crannies of time were left over after his articles were written, his lectures prepared and his pictures laboriously finished, with another activity. It came naturally to him to use his hands—they were broad, supple and sensitive. While he talked he was always doing something with his fingers. Now his friends gave him work. McTaggart asked him to design furniture for his rooms at Cambridge. Another friend, Bertie Crackanthorpe, the writer, asked him to decorate his house. Thus began his long connection with “little men in back streets”, house painters and carpenters, with whom he began to grapple with practical problems—cost; material; design and construction. And then when he had surmounted these problems and the house was finished, Bertie Crackanthorpe must go and ruin the design—white walls and a black dado—by hanging up photographs. How to reconcile the carpenter and the client was a problem that was to become familiar to him later. Meanwhile his father’s words about being a jack-of all-trades and master of none recurred to him, or, as he put it, “I sometimes feel tempted when I am in a cowardly mood to think that I’ve cut off a bigger chunk of life than I can chew.

Certainly there was no doubt that he had found out, and was daily finding out, what to do, but there is evidence that he was also finding out that he needed someone to do things with. His “fearful sensitiveness” to family friction is enough to show how much depended upon family sympathy. And now that the friction was lessened, the dependence showed itself. The general term “my people” is broken up significantly into the names of separate sisters. He was very anxious that they should share his freedom. With his sister Margery, in particular, he had a special sympathy. “I hear that Margery is coming to town at last…. If you really give up Rome, mightn’t she and Agnes come and live here for the summer and study with Bate and me? They should have a room to themselves so that they need not see my visitors and friends, and I think it would be a great thing for both of them”, he wrote to his father. The words hint at his conviction that his sisters must find family life and its “Nomian atmosphere” as suffocating as he did himself, but they also suggest, what was equally true, that he was, as he claimed, “highly domestic”. To have a centre, to share a home, was a deep instinct. Perhaps it was an instinct of self-preservation. He needed someone to concentrate upon, to share things with, to curb his restlessness.

There were, needless to say, young women who were not sisters. One—“the heroine of a Meredith novel” he described her, “aristocratic, high-spirited”—had refused him. Another had treated him “cat and mouseically”. He was very susceptible—“There are so many ways of love, aren’t there?” he wrote once. Indeed his words to his mother about Correggio, when he felt him to be the greatest of all the Italians—“I have felt that at random times of two or three others so you won’t think much of it”—were true in the emotional sphere also. Many young women found themselves invested, in Roger Fry’s eyes, not only with transcendent beauty, but, what surprised them perhaps more, with an infallible flair for the virtues of old Italian masters. And among these fleeting attachments to young and lovely faces there was a more serious relationship with a lady who was neither young nor beautiful, but old enough to be his mother. She it was who undertook to educate him in the art of love, much as Symonds had educated him in the art of painting. Endowed, he said, “with enough fire to stock all the devils in Hell”, she stormed at his stupidity, laughed at his timidity and ended by falling in love with him herself. He profited by the lesson and was profoundly grateful to his teacher. Had she not taught him what was far more important than the art of dissecting the livers of drunken men or of discriminating between a genuine Botticelli and a sham? So he thought at least, and to the end of life pupil and mistress remained the best of friends. Thus instructed he lost his Cambridge callowness and learnt to distinguish between “the many ways of love”. And there was one relationship in the years at Beaufort Street which from the first differed from any other. One day, to use his own words, “the fated inevitable thing” happened. “I fell completely in love in one afternoon’s talk”, he wrote. “And it was so inevitable that I thought she must see it too, but she didn’t for nearly a year.”

“She” was Helen Coombe. She was a year or two older than he, an art student, living by herself, and exhibiting too at the New English Art Club. “A delightful artist”, Sir Charles Holmes called her, and Roger Fry always maintained that she had a far more instinctive and original gift as a painter than he had. She, too, had broken away from her family and its traditions. The impression she made on him was strange, complex, unforgettable. She had “wit and a strange touch of genius … and there was beauty too, and a certain terror on my part at the mysterious ungetatableness of her … but the terror, though very definite … added a fearful delight”. She was the only person, he felt, with whom he could spend his life in complete sympathy. But when, after a year’s hesitation, she felt as he did, and agreed to marry him, there were obstacles. His parents, when asked their consent, objected, naturally enough. It was not the marriage that they wished for. She belonged neither to the Quaker world, nor to the conventional world. She was an artist, and for artists they felt a mixture of distrust and fear. Then there was her health—a rumour had reached them that there were reasons for anxiety. Roger Fry denied it. Then there was the old Victorian respect for family—that he dismissed with a laugh. “There is an Admiral somewhere in the offing”, he assured them. But there could be no answer to their final objection—that she was penniless. And this was a serious matter, which led to much discussion and roused much of the old bitterness, as one quotation is enough to show. “Don’t think”, he wrote, “I don’t feel sufficiently the humiliation of having to appeal to father’s generosity—I know that I am at his mercy and that if he chooses to cut off my allowance the whole thing must be broken off. We are neither of us very young or very rash. We both know enough of the world to see the dangers and disadvantages of marriage. We were both averse to the idea of it, I because of the possible interference with my work, she because of her dread of losing her independence; and yet we are both driven to it as the only solution.”

Marriage was “the only solution”. Neither of them, it is worth noting for the light it throws upon the conventions of the time, contemplated any other; and at last the objections were withdrawn. When the engagement was announced he wrote to Lowes Dickinson: “I know that it is momentous and irretrievable, and that it must make you and Mrs Widdrington apprehensive, as it would me if I hadn’t that sort of fundamental instinct about the thing which defies analysis. Of course I have to admit logically that I can’t prove anything….” But he added, “I am afraid I am ridiculously happy”. Proof of that, even if it was not logical proof, is given in many letters, too private, too outspoken, too sure that every word will be understood and their exaggeration discounted to be quoted. They are full of high spirits, full of laughter. There is an account of a visit to Cambridge—he was hanging a show of modern pictures; he laughs at himself “wheeling canvases in handcarts through the astonished slums”; he pokes fun at the Cambridge attitude to art—“everyone here thinks it a queer sort of joke, this art business, and that a sensible chap must excuse himself for caring about it at all by a sort of shy laugh like a schoolgirl over an indecent book”; and he describes with fantastic exaggeration the rigours of family life at Failand on a Sunday morning. At last he has someone to laugh with him and, what, is equally important, to laugh at him. And then the laughter dies away, and he tries to put into writing “what I said to you yesterday when we walked up from Bourton in the twilight when the whole world was an accomplice in our transfiguration and the trees claimed a new familiarity and even the stars nodded mysteriously between the driving clouds…. Oh, Fm trying to say the unsayable.” And what Roger Fry could not say that evening, in the twilight among the trees must be left unsaid by another.

They were married on 3rd December 1896. “The wedding was not so bad as it might have been”, he told Lowes Dickinson. “And there was no sentiment or humbug about it. Everything most matter-of-fact and jolly in spite of some horribly well-dressed and gossiping Bath ladies…. You needn’t be afraid that I don’t want you. Can’t you see the truth of your own quotation, that ‘to divide is not to take away’?”

II

The honeymoon was spent, needless to say, abroad, and it was a time for both of them of “perfect happiness”. Happiness is a difficult emotion to convey in letters written from a hotel bedroom with bags to be packed or unpacked, with clothes and paint-boxes littering the floor, and often “not a scrap of paper left to write upon”. Yet it was conveyed, and there it still is—a sense that everything had fallen into place and all the odds and ends of existence had come together to make a whole, a centre of peace and satisfaction. The honeymoon was prolonged. They loitered slowly through France, and then went on to Tunis and Bizerta, where they stayed with the Vice-Consul, Terence Bourke, “a jolly Irishman, a brother of Lord Mayo”, owing to whom Roger Fry, much to his delight, “heard and saw more of Eastern life than one could ordinarily through years of travel”. A very long letter to Lowes Dickinson gives a very full description of what they heard and saw. One incident is perhaps worth preserving. There was a service of the Isa Weir, a sect of the Mahommedans. Would they like to see it? They said yes, and were driven in a rickety mule carriage down to the village. It was a wonderful pale-green moonlight night. The village with its whitewashed domes and its mud walls looked very mysterious. Strange figures wrapped in white burnouses glided about. Then the service began. A holy man “something like Edward Carpenter to look at”, began beating a tambourine, lifting it above his head and bringing it down again in a kind of ecstasy. Others joined in; for over two hours there was scarcely any stop in the howlings and the jumpings; then the dancers were seized with a wild passion, crushed glass in their teeth, scraped their bare scalps with prickly pear leaves, and one man plunged a sword into his belly. There was scarcely any blood, Roger Fry noticed. “The only explanation I can find of it is that it is some form of auto-suggestion brought about by the music…. But I suppose the East has always explored the subconscious self as thoroughly as we have explored the ordinary consciousness.” That led him to ponder the difference between the Eastern conception of life and the Western—“What is so extraordinary about these people is that they have no idea of movement. All the functions of life are regulated and provided for—their religion prevents them from bothering about a future life and so they actually live and enjoy instead of preparing to enjoy as we do…. No one”, he reflected, “is disappointed by not getting what he hasn’t got because the idea of struggling and competition hardly exists—everything is accepted as it is. They constater the fact that they are poor or ill or wicked and there’s an end on’t.” Again, as at Venice with Symonds and Horatio Brown, the atmosphere was sympathetic. It was a great delight to find “a people who can’t be vulgar or really bad-mannered and who have complete social equality—in fact a sheik talks on terms of absolute equality with the man who serves his coffee at a few pence a day”. Half a page is given up to a sketch of the sheik, and that leads to a description of a picture he is painting—a great classical picture of the harbour at Carthage. And at Carthage while he was painting his picture “Helen found a corner of a capital sticking out of the earth and I grubbed it out with a bit of potsherd and my nails. It was high up on a bank of earth and took ages and nearly blinded both of us but we were as excited as children digging in the sand and finally got it out when it nearly crushed us under its weight. It was a very ordinary Roman Ionic capital and of course we could do nothing but leave it lying there, but we felt we had made a great discovery.”

The honeymoon was full of such discoveries. On they went to Florence, to Naples and to Sicily. There is no need to follow their progress in detail or to quote the rapid notes of all they saw in full. The letters written, as usual, post haste, on any sheet that came handy, on any surface that happened to be flat, are crowded with descriptions, with travellers’ stories, all run together in one unbroken flow of high spirits. Nothing went wrong—not even a meeting with Sir Edward and Lady Fry in Sicily, when there was a ridiculous scene with an eccentric English woman who kept great dogs at large in her villa; and the dogs set upon the party and Sir Edward “took up an attitude something between Horatius Coccles and the Vicar of Wakefield ready to die in defence of his family”; and “my mother carried on a sort of afternoon tea-party conversation in the intervals of the dogs’ remonstrances and Mrs C. said shortly that it was a pity the dogs were so nervous, poor things—she meant to get a really fierce one soon. My mother horrified: Then I suppose you’ll keep him chained up?’ Mrs G. indifferently: ‘Oh no. We shall keep him about the garden.’ “ Whatever happened, savage dogs, trains missed, a handbag left on a café table turned out to be a source of merriment and fun. They read Bouvard et Péchucet together and laughed prodigiously; also the Inferno; they drank a bottle of wine to celebrate the arrival of Goldie’s letter, and Helen vowed that she would dive into the sea next day and was made to keep her vow. There were innumerable pictures to be seen again with two pairs of eyes; there were pictures to be painted and museums to be visited. “My museum appetite”, Roger wrote without exaggeration, “is a robust one.” Work and pleasure went happily hand in hand. In blazing heat they visited Faenza and found it deserted; the courtyards “all grown over with vine and honeysuckle”; and noted the “beautiful simple-minded people … with unconscious gestures like animals” as well as the Donatellos. In blazing heat they reached Venice at last. Symonds was dead now, but Horatio Brown was still there and with him the old talks in the café were resumed. Apparently, they discussed Symonds and his books; but Roger Fry was no longer the ignorant art student sitting at his master’s feet. “I find Symonds”, he told Lowes Dickinson, “too much of an amateur in art. I like his history better, but then I’m only an amateur in history.” Venice continued the train of thought begun in Bizerta about life and the way to live it. “It makes me see more clearly than ever that somehow beauty of life as a whole (not the beauty of incidents and individuals but the beauty of harmonious relations between people and their surroundings) has somehow got reformed and ballotted and steam-intellected out of the world.” Why should they submit to the unnatural conditions forced upon them in England? Why not live in Venice, the perfect life in perfect surroundings? “Now that we are here of course we know that Venice is the one and only place in the world that a mortal man can possibly think of living in.” The weather grew hotter and hotter, but they delighted in the heat. They would get up at five in the morning, hire a sulky little boy, and row out across the lagoons in a sandolo. All day they loitered about, sketching, looking at. pictures, talking with Horatio Brown in the evening and bathing, until the heat at last grew too much even for them. The flesh melted off their bones and they fled across the Alps to the comparative coolness of France. There they lingered week after week, and at last, in the autumn of 1897, came home.

The letters to Lowes Dickinson and to R.C. Trevelyan, are by no means models of composition. Commas drop out, dashes insert themselves, sentences rush headlong without beginning or end. And sometimes—“you see what it is to be married—you can’t keep a sheet of note paper and its the last we’ve got to yourself”—Helen added a page in the middle. But even Lowes Dickinson, who had most reason to feel anxious about his friend’s marriage, could scarcely have doubted, as he read the many pages that reached him from abroad, that Roger Fry had found the wife who suited him, or that, whatever else life might bring, the months of the honeymoon were the happiest he had ever known.

III

The honeymoon over, the time had come to settle down. A house had to be found; furniture extracted from the warehouse, and the problem of making money enough to secure their independence to be solved. They were both of course to paint; Helen Fry had already some success as a decorator—Roger greatly admired a harpsichord that she was decorating for Arnold Dolmetsch; he was to paint, to lecture, to write articles, and if possible to come to grips with his book on Bellini. They were entering into negotiations with landlords, and proposing to R.C. Trevelyan that he should share rooms with them, when some slight illness, diagnosed by Roger Fry as rheumatism, made Helen Fry consult a doctor. He discovered symptoms of lung trouble and ordered them abroad at once.

Apart from the anxiety, the change was upsetting. The house had to be postponed, and engagements given up. Still, another visit to Italy was no great hardship, and Roger Fry was learning to carry on his work under all kinds of makeshift conditions. There were always pictures to see, and so long as he could improvise some sort of desk in his inn bedroom, he could fill yet another notebook with still more careful criticism. If it was fine, they could paint together, and in the evenings there was always a book to read—a learned German kunstforscher, a French novel, Dante, Baudelaire,—they read everything together; and their friends kept them supplied with plays and poems in manuscript. So the travels began again. Once more they went to Italy. There were one or two unpleasant incidents. Roger Fry was robbed of his pocket-book, containing what to them was the very important sum of ten pounds. On the anniversary of their wedding day they were almost suffocated by a faulty stove in the bedroom. But there were many pleasures. They made new friends from chance encounters, and old friends came out and stayed with them. Marriage, as Roger Fry had told Lowes Dickinson a day or two after his wedding, was not to mean an égoïsme à deux. And the theory was put into practice. Lowes Dickinson stayed with them in Rome. And once more they plunged into arguments about art, and Roger Fry was again afraid that he had talked “too much rot about technique”… Indeed I was sorry all the time”, he wrote when Lowes Dickinson had gone back to Cambridge, “that I was so immersed in pictures and so much in a technical way that I got no time to get into your atmosphere. I know you aren’t complaining and you know I’m not apologising for what was in the circs, inevitable, for a place like Rome so bowls me over with its complexity and the insistence of its purely sensuous presentations that I can’t get away from it. I can’t think in the metaphysical sense, not that you want me to talk metaphysics exactly. But I mean that I can’t get free enough from the immediate to generalise. It’s always been a little of an effort to me. You and Jack [McTaggart] have always lugged me panting though willing up your particular Parnassus and—well, perhaps I’ve got a little bit out of it.” But though they diverged, Lowes Dickinson to climb the heights of the metaphysical Parnassus, Roger Fry to explore the other, the more sensuous and immediate, that was the inevitable result of growing older. It was not the result of marriage. Helen Fry did not interfere with her husband’s friendships. She was, Lowes Dickinson said, the wittiest woman he had ever known, and, what was perhaps of more importance, it seemed to him that she understood her husband and gave him both the check and the stimulus that he needed. To that, too, R.C. Trevelyan, who stayed with them also, bears witness. And since his words throw light from an outside angle upon a relationship that was of intense importance to Roger Fry, they may be given.

She was certainly one of the most charming and intelligent women I have ever known—I will not say intellectual, because she was a little impatient of purely intellectual discussions and ways of thinking—even in Roger…. Helen had none of Roger’s love of finding reasons for liking and disliking things…. In a picture gallery, she knew at once what she liked and went straight for it; and then Roger would try to make her look at other pictures … to like works of art in the way in which he himself liked them, and he would become quite sad when he failed…. She seemed to me to be very much devoted to Roger, and when she laughed at and teased him, as she sometimes did, it was never in a way that could hurt him….

As for her appearance, she

may not have been really very beautiful; but she gave me the impression of being so. It is often so hard to distinguish charm and intelligence from beauty. Her movements were always graceful and unhurried and her way of talking too. She had a beautiful and expressive voice, and a quiet, humorous, often rather satirical smile. I think it was Roger who first put it into my mind that she was like the Spring in Botticelli’s Primavera.

The old friendships it may be guessed were improved not spoilt now that they were shared with Roger’s wife.

But happy as they were and hard as they worked, feeling sometimes, as Roger Fry said, overcome by the sight of so many masterpieces—“Italy makes one lose one’s nerve—a malarious infection of humility creeps over one’s soul”—a shadow little by little fell over them.

The illness which the doctor in London had diagnosed proved unimportant. But another anxiety, so vague at first that no reason could be found for it, took its place. Certain fears, whether reasonable or fantastic it was impossible to say, kept recurring. They moved from place to place in the attempt to escape from them. Roger Fry, it can only be said, did all that he could to help his wife; his patience and sympathy were indefatigable, his resourcefulness beyond belief. But her obsessions increased. And finally, when they came back to England in the spring, the blow fell. Madness declared itself. “I was a fool to be happy yesterday”, he wrote to R.C. Trevelyan who was with him. “Last night she was worse. Nothing was omitted to make it horrible. We take her to-day to an asylum.”

The agony that lay behind those words cannot be described but it cannot be exaggerated. To write of Roger Fry as he was before his wife’s illness is to write of someone who differed fundamentally from the man whom his friends knew later. He was never again to know perfect freedom from anxiety; the “beauty of life as a whole” was shattered, and the centre upon which he depended was shaken. The first shock was followed by the torture of prolonged illness. Death, which then seemed to him the most terrible possibility, was averted. But there were harassing alternations of hope and despair. Sometimes he was able to see her, again he was forbidden. Worst of all, the doctors could give him no certainty as to the future—the illness might be permanent, or again it might pass as suddenly as it had come. He spent those terrible days sometimes with friends—the Trevelyans, the Pearsall Smiths, the Sickerts all did what they could for him—sometimes alone. It was best, he found, to live as far as he could in the country, and he found, as he was often to find in the future, that the only way of facing the ruin of private happiness was to work.

[]

Chapter V

Work

I

Work was very necessary, if only to earn the money that was more than ever needed; and happily work was forthcoming. The Athenaeum made him at about this date their chief art critic; and the Athenaeum in those days devoted a generous space to art. They allowed their critic a column or two every week in which to express himself; and the public in those peaceful days, with time on its hands and a desire to cultivate itself, was willing apparently not only to be instructed about current pictures, but on technical matters—the use of tempera, for example, or the merits of Raphaelli’s new colour sticks. They would suffer long disquisitions in very small print about Old Masters—whether a certain picture was from the brush of Bellini, or by one of his pupils. It was an opportunity of great value to Roger Fry, not only financially, but because it gave him a chance to clear his mind and to deliver himself of views that had been forming during these years of travel and intensive picture-seeing. He took advantage of it with extraordinary energy and independence. The mass of old newspaper cuttings is evidence of that, and if in time to come anyone should wish to trace Roger Fry’s long and adventurous career as an art critic to its source, it is here in these columns of faded print. Even to the common seer, to coin a counterpart to Dr Johnson’s Common Reader, to whom the names of Pesellino and Matteo da Siena mean nothing whatever, to whom English painting round about 1900 is an obscure tract of country and its figures shadowy enough, these old articles seem curiously alive, alert and on the spot.

Further, they are very amusing. This is the more remarkable, because writing was often drudgery, and drudgery is apt to leave its trace on the printed page. Nor was Roger Fry a born writer. Compared with Symonds or Pater he was an amateur, doing his best with a medium for which he had no instinctive affection. For that very reason perhaps he was saved some of their temptations. He was not led away to write prose poems, or to make the picture a text for a dissertation upon life. He wrote of pictures as if they were pictures, and nothing else. But this itself led to a difficulty. “When the critic holds the results of his reaction to a work of art clearly in view he has next to translate it into words.” And there were no words. Often in those early articles he makes shift with terms that belong to the literary critic, or to the musical critic. He often calls in Shakespeare to help him out with a quotation, or Blake. Sometimes he gives up his attempt to express his reaction; what he feels can only be expressed by music. It was to take him many years and much drudgery before he forged for himself a language that wound itself into the heart of the sensation. And yet in spite of these difficulties, perhaps because of them, it is plain even to the common seer, even in these old articles, that here is someone writing with a pressure of meaning behind him. He has a definite idea of the critic’s function. That is soon apparent:

Mr Ricketts [he wrote in an early article] has tried to use the painful and laborious excavations of the Kunstforschern for the only purpose which in the end justified them, namely the more profound understanding of great imaginative creations. This has to be done over and over again for each generation. Pater did it to some extent for the last. Each successive performance of this work of appreciation and interpretation is based upon fuller knowledge and approaches nearer to completeness and finality.

That was the fundamental idea that lay behind these scattered notices, and it gives them their sequence, their seriousness. Though the notices may, and often must, deal with the fugitive—Mr Walker’s Twilight over Farringford Woods, or Mr Patterson’s Pink Roses,—each picture seems to fall into its place, so that we feel we are taking part in a planned and continued voyage of discovery. He makes his statement positively, as if he had a weight of knowledge behind him, nor is he afraid of speaking out—there is no trimming or evasion. The voyage, too, is made on broad lines—now we reach back to the early Italians, circle round the French and Dutch, and reach the particular picture laden with ideas gathered in other places. And the excitement is great. However rapid many of the judgments, however far they lead into unfamiliar regions, the theme we are made to feel is of surpassing interest, the art of painting is of the greatest importance. A few quotations may serve to justify these claims, and, what is more important, will give some idea of the lie of the land and of those bygone figures as they presented themselves to Roger Fry when he went the round of the galleries as critic to the Athenaeum about the year 1900.

In the first place, of course, the Royal Academy looms up—the Academy was an important feature of the landscape. Roger Fry was by no means opposed to Academies. They had a useful part to play. An Academy, he said, might be “an effective organ of scholarly and academic opinion”. It might preserve “a tradition of sound craftsmanship, a thing no more inherently impossible than a tradition of good plumbing and of carpentering”. And Academicians in the past had done this—the tradition still lingered among the older men. For the work of Etty and Sant he had a great respect. And for the work of one living Academician at least he expressed again and again the highest admiration. Watts’s portraits of Joachim, Garibaldi and the Countess Somers he said “take rank with the finest achievements of English art for all times”. They were enough to show that “… we are not altogether out of sight and out of touch with that great and genuinely academic tradition of British art.…” But the question recurs again and again—“What does the Academy stand for? What tradition does it uphold? What does it inculcate on its students?” And the reply also recurs—“The Academy becomes every year a more and more colossal joke played with inimitable gravity on a public which is too much the creature of habit to show that it is no longer taken in”. He criticised the works of Academicians in some detail and with considerable frankness. There was the President himself, Sir Edward Poynter. “The president’s career”, Roger Fry remarked, “shows how industry, and decided specific talent, and strict attention to business, combined with a certain fortunate commonness of feeling, may lead to success; how gradually sentimentality may take the place of imagination, and with what benefits the change is attended.” As for Mr Goodall, R.A., “one rejoices that his geniality has never been warped by the anxieties of thought or his complacency disturbed by the ambition for imaginative creation”. The Hon. John Collier “is really outstripping the camera in his relentless exposition of the obvious and the insignificant”. Yet these were the men who were officially at the head of British Art, and in control of the endowments given by the State for its encouragement. It was, he said, as if a theatre endowed by the State for the production of classical drama “pocketed its annual grant and proceeded to have thousand-night runs of Charley’s Aunt”. In short, when he contemplated the Royal Academy he was “often tempted to think that as a nation we are incapable of the imaginative life; and therefore fit for nothing but a harsh and ungenerous puritanism”. The present condition of art in England is chaotic.

Certain unacademic groups were, however, opposed to this “vast formless resistent mass of commercial Philistinism”. Among them the most prominent was the New English Art Club. The exhibitions held there were, as he remarks again and again, the only exhibitions of serious interest in London. There alone the critic had scope for serious criticism. Again and again he singled out the works of Steer, Gonder, Sickert, Shannon and Rothenstein for careful examination and praise. The praise was often warm; but it was also critical, for reasons which he gives at some length in an article upon the Exhibition held in 1902:

If we admit what is usually postulated of this society, that the more serious and strenuous of the younger artists send their work to its gallery, and that here, if anywhere, we should look for some encouraging signs of regeneration in English painting, the present exhibition can hardly induce, an optimistic mood. The very sincerity of these painters, the absence from their work of the more glaring displays of vulgarity and sentimentality which distinguish the larger shows, bring into more striking relief the poverty of their emotional and intellectual condition. In saying this we do not mean any depreciation of the individual artists. It is but their misfortune to have come at a “dead point” in the revolution of our culture. But such a point seems to have been reached. We are at a period which is fiercely opposed to such a one as that of the early Pre-Raphaelites, when fruitful and inspiring ideas were epidemic, when the imaginations of even mediocre minds were stimulated to attempt, and in some measure to achieve, things beyond the scope of their natural gifts. Now we have a good display of talent—in the case of one or two men, of remarkable gifts—and no sign of their finding a suitable investment for them. If one were to judge by this exhibition alone one would say that these artists seem paralysed by the fear of failure, that they lack the ambition to attempt those difficult and dangerous feats by which alone they could increase their resources and exercise their powers by straining them to the utmost. Such a landscape for instance as Mr Steer’s Valley of the Severn (No. 120) shows what really great things he might produce if only the conditions of contemporary thought favoured a more adventurous spirit—A lesser artist might be content with having accomplished so much, but with Mr Steer we feel a sense of disappointment that, having got so far, he does not push to their utmost limits the possibilities of his idea…. If only Mr Steer were to practise those powers of invention which in past times have been accounted among the most important parts of an artist’s training he would be able to express with far greater intensity his finely poetical feeling for landscape and atmospheric effects. Doubtless it is vain to protest, for it is one of the curious anomalies of the time that it is, as a rule, the more capable artists who despise most the study of invention, who are most influenced by a sophistical theory of aesthetics, which denies them the full use of the pictorial convention. The arbitrary rule that they have formulated is that they may leave out anything they like in a given scene, but that they must not introduce forms which do not happen to be there, however much these might increase the harmony or intensify the idea.

These were some of the theories that he carried at the back of his mind. But the theory had always to be applied to the particular instance and that was not so easy. The most famous of the artists who then exhibited at the New English Art Club was J.S. Sargent. He was being hailed both by the critics and by the public as the greatest painter of his time. Roger Fry disagreed. He condemned him instantly and unhesitatingly. “Mr Sargent”, he wrote in 1900, “is simply a précis writer of appearances.” Of his portrait of Lady Elcho, Mrs Adeane and Mrs Tennant he wrote, “Since Sir T. Lawrence’s time no one has been able thus to seize the exact cachet of fashionable life, or to render it in paint with a smartness and piquancy which so exactly corresponds to the social atmosphere itself…. He appears to harbour no imaginations that he could not easily avow at the afternoon tea-table he so brilliantly depicts.” The portrait of Sir Ian Hamilton made him exclaim, “I cannot see the man for his likeness”. And when he stood before Sargent’s portrait of the Duke of Portland he recorded his sensations in the following order: “First the collie dog which the Duke caresses has one lock of very white hair; secondly the Duke’s boots are so polished that they glitter; thirdly the Duke’s collar is very large and very stiffly starched; fourthly the Duke was when he stood for his portrait sunburnt. After that we might come to the Duke himself.” But by the time he came to the Duke himself is so “deadened by the fizz and crackle of Mr Sargent’s brush work that [he] can see nothing”. Whatever other judges might say, Sargent was to him nothing but a brilliant journalist whose work had no artistic value and would have no more permanent interest than the work of an expert photographer. Whether right or wrong, Roger Fry gave his opinion fearlessly, for what it was worth.

But, happily, contemporary art round about 1900 was not exclusively British art. In 1906 the International Society held an Exhibition at the New Gallery. And there, it seems for the first time, Roger Fry caught a glimpse of Cézanne. As usual, he felt his way along the walls conscientiously, noting first the sculpture. There was Rodin; there were two important works by M. Bartholomé; there was an excellent statuette by Mr Wells, and Mr Stirling Lee’s portrait head was admirable as a treatment of marble, “though a little wanting in the sense of style”. And then at last he came to the Bertheim collection in the North Room. There was a still life by Cézanne. In view of what he was to write later about that great master, this first glimpse may be given in full:

Here, indeed, certain aspects of the Impressionist School are seen as never before in London. There were, it is true, a few of M. Cézanne’s works at the Durand Ruel exhibition in the Grafton Gallery, but nothing which gave so definite an idea of his peculiar genius as the Nature Morte (199) and the Paysage (5205) in this gallery. From the Nature Morte one gathers that Cézanne goes back to Manet, developing one side of his art to the furthest limits. Manet himself had more than a little of the primitive about him, and in his early work, so far from diluting local colour by exaggerating its accidents, he tended to state it with a frankness and force that remind one of the elder Breughel. His Tête de Femme (188) in this gallery is an example of such a method, and Cézanne’s Nature Morte pushes it further. The white of the napkin and the delicious grey of the pewter have as much the quality of positive and intense local colour as the vivid green of the earthenware; and the whole is treated with insistence on the decorative value of these oppositions. Light and shade are subordinated entirely to this aim. Where the pattern requires it, the shadows of white are painted black, with total indifference to those laws of appearance which the scientific theory of the Impressionistic School has pronounced to be essential. In the “Paysage” we find the same decorative intention; but with this goes a quite extraordinary feeling for light. The sky and the reflections in the pool are rendered as never before in landscape art, with an absolute illusion of the planes of illumination. The sky recedes miraculously behind the hill-side, answered by the inverted concavity of lighted air in the pool. And this is effected without any chiaroscuro—merely by a perfect instinct for the expressive quality of tone values. We confess to having been hitherto sceptical about Cézanne’s genius, but these two pieces reveal a power which is entirely distinct and personal, and though the artist’s appeal is limited, and touches none of the finer issues of the imaginative life, it is none the less complete.

One is reminded of a passage in his letters in which he describes how on his honeymoon he had dug up the head of a column in the sand at Carthage, with a bit of potsherd and his nails. There for a moment Cézanne is seen still half covered in the sand. But half covered he still was and the critic had other matters to attend to. His duties were not simply confined to going round the galleries. The artist and the public had somehow to be brought together. It was one of the critic’s duties to see that the artist was fairly treated by his paymaster. And the artist, as Roger Fry was discovering, “is intensely individualistic, and in proportion as he is an artist, he finds it difficult to combine with his kind for any ulterior purpose”. It fell to the critic to mediate between the two parties, and Roger Fry took the practical side of his profession very seriously. He was in the first place a fearless and outspoken critic of institutions. He attacked the trustees of the Chantrey Bequest; he went at length into the question of the administration of the National Gallery. He pointed out that it is ruled by a body of trustees “gentlemen of very various and in some cases of quite empirical tastes…” so that the chances are that “any work in which the characteristics of its own period are strongly accentuated, any good work in short, will arouse their vehement opposition”. A body of trustees will be bound to compromise. “Compromise which is the deadly enemy of so absolute and definitely willed an activity as art will rule all the nation’s acquisitions.” He was of opinion that there should be one trustee with absolute powers. And he was fertile and perhaps optimistic in suggesting methods by which money could be raised for the endowment of art. He suggested that “A tax of one per cent, should be levied on all sales of works of art, the tax to be levied by means of stamps, without which the receipt will not be valid”, a scheme, he said, “so perfectly feasible, so simple and so likely to prove efficient that one can hardly doubt that it will be put into practice”—this was in January 1906.

Into these by-paths of the critic’s duty he poured a great deal of energy. But his main duty, so far as the Athenaeum was concerned, was to keep his eye upon current pictures, and to point out which tendencies were fruitful and which barren. One more quotation will show how keenly he scrutinised the present, and how eagerly he kept his eye upon the future.

“We doubt”, he wrote (19th November 1904), “if the New English Art Club has ever had an exhibition to be compared with this in importance … Mr Sargent, Mr Steer, Mr Rothenstein, Mr John, Mr Orpen, to mention only the best known artists, are all seen here at their best.” But he goes on to say that though they are at their best, they belong to a group “whose traditions and methods are already being succeeded by a new set of ideas. They are no longer le dernier cri—that is given by a group of whom Mr John is the most remarkable member.”

The contrast between the two groups has been gradually becoming apparent, and in the present show it is now clearly perceptible, for the younger men are coining into the inheritance of this power. The difference may be explained by their approach to the thing seen. The older men are all more or less impressionists, that is to say, they approach nature in order to analyse it into the component parts not of the thing seen but of the appearance…. But the younger men, really going back to an earlier tradition, carry the analysis further, penetrating through values to their causes in actual form and structure. This they record, and then adding the particular and accidental conditions of light and shade, and finally colour, regain at last the general appearance. The older group, the impressionists, are painters from first to last, and only draughtsmen and chiaroscurists by accident; the younger men base all their art upon draughtsmanship, and acquire the art of painting as an afterthought…. We have no doubt that the younger men in the group have got hold of the better method, a method which allows of inexhaustible possibilities of expression and of a deeper appeal to the emotions, and moreover that though it may take them far longer to learn how to paint, they will ultimately be able to paint much better, owing to their methodical and deliberate attack. This year for the first time Mr John gives promise of becoming a painter … at last he has seen where the logic of his views as a draughtsman should lead him—Following out these stages he has arrived already at a control of his medium which astonishes one by comparison with the work of a year or two back…. One must go back to Alfred Stevens or Etty or the youthful Watts to find its like…. People will no doubt complain of his love of low life; just as they complain of Rubens’s fat blondes; but in the one case as in the other they will have to bow to the mastery of power…. In modern life a thousand accidents may intervene to defraud an artist’s talents of fruition, but if only fate and his temperament are not adverse, we hardly dare confess how high are the hopes of Mr John’s future which his paintings have led us to form….

So the stream of comment and criticism runs on. It had to deal with much that was trivial and much that has proved ephemeral. A great many pictures of Farringford in the Twilight, a great many bowls of pink roses were painted forty years ago. Many of the theories here sketched were worked out more fully in later years. Many of the groups have changed their positions, and some of the figures have changed their proportions. But whether his judgment was right or wrong, it was an individual and independent judgment. It went beneath the surface and related the particular example to some general idea. Praise and blame are both outspoken, yet they are always directed towards the art, and not towards the artist. But the quality which draws the reader past the ephemeral and the accidental is one that is scarcely to be conveyed by quotation. It is his power of making pictures real and art important. Perorations about the function of art would have been out of place in the Athenaeum even if the critic himself had had a taste that way. But his belief conveys itself, as such deep-seated convictions do, without the help of set phrases, in his indignation, in his satire, in his underlying seriousness. Now and again it comes to the surface. When Watts died, for example, he seized the opportunity to do him honour because “he looked upon art as a necessary and culminating function of civilised life—as indeed the great refining and disinterested activity, without which modern civilisation would become a luxurious barbarity”. Watts at least had always stood out against the view that “art is only an amusement and luxury for the idle and preferably the uneducated rich, that the artist is after all, in Stevenson’s phrase, a fille de joie”. Whatever his own deficiencies as a painter, this entitled him to an eternal place of honour among the great, “mob of commercial philistines” who had reduced Victorian art in Roger Fry’s opinion to a level of incredible baseness.

There is plenty of evidence then in these old articles that Roger Fry was qualifying himself to do that work of differentiation and interpretation which, he said, has to be done over and over again for each generation in order to bring about “a more profound understanding of great imaginative creations”. They also show that he possessed the power of making the outsider, whose eyes are the least active of his senses, aware of something real and exciting on squares of coloured canvas. Further there is evidence that he was becoming capable of what he called “the painful and laborious excavations of the kunstforscher”. He could state that a Fra Bartolommeo was really from the hand of Brescianino; or that “Lady Wantage’s Adam and Eve is not we think by Bronzino, as stated, but by some Parmese artist, probably Mazzoloa Bedoli working under the influence of Parmegiano”. But such feats of expertise were always to be subordinated to the critic’s proper task and in themselves they were worthless. The critic, Roger Fry insists over and over again, must trust his sensibility, not his learning; he must lay himself open to all kinds of impressions and experiences; to science, to music, to poetry, and must never be afraid to revise a view which experience has altered. The muddle in which these old newspaper cuttings lie is perhaps symbolical—they are mixed up with passports, with hotel bills, with sketches and poems and innumerable notes taken in front of the picture itself. But there was another reason why it was impossible for Roger Fry to be content with the triumphs of a specialist. It is contained not in an article but in a letter. “I’m grinding away at my writing”, he told R.C. Trevelyan in 1898, “but it’s difficult to make the jump from Helen who seems all-important to the date of Bissoli’s death for which I don’t care just now a tuppenny damn.”

II

Gradually Helen Fry recovered. By the beginning of 1899 he was able to bring her back to a small house that he had taken near Dorking, The relief was enormous. Happiness returned with a bound. “It is really so wonderful to be with Helen again and at last in a home of our own that I can hardly believe it is real”, he wrote to his mother. Their plans for the future, the rooms in Beraers Street, the artist’s life where each was to work independently had to be abandoned. Great care was necessary; often he had to be doctor and nurse; and there was always anxiety in the background. Still, “The month down here”, he wrote to R.C. Trevelyan, the friend who had helped him through the worst, “has been as happy as any we have either of us spent”. And the letter goes on to say that Helen was laughing at him as he wrote it—“laughing at my pretensions as a lecturer”.

The cultivated classes were beginning to take him very seriously, perhaps too seriously, as a lecturer. He was lecturing not only in the provinces but at Leighton House and the Albert Hall; at Cambridge he delivered a course of lectures on Venetian painting a syllabus of which remains. But a home of his own meant as usual visits from friends—Logan Pearsall Smith, the Berensons, Desmond MacCarthy—those are some of the names that recur in the old letters. They came; they dined; they talked. Faint echoes can still be overheard; Stephen Phillips’s new play, Paolo and Francesca, was discussed—was it a masterpiece or a fake? Roger Fry had no doubt. “It was exactly”, he declared, “what the English like, there’s no harm in it, and no real poetry to shock and disturb them, and the consequence is that the critics are all tumbling over each other in their hurry to say that Sophocles and Dante aren’t in it.” He was reviewing books. A pile of books “as high as the tower of Babel and as intelligible I expect” stood on his table. Among them, however, was Letters to John Chinaman, by Lowes Dickinson. He was enthusiastic: “really”, he wrote to the author, “I am amazed at the beauty of it. It seems to me the only eloquent prose I’ve seen for ages or that so far as I know anyone but you can produce, and the added chapters are the best of all. In some ways I think it’s the biggest thing you’ve done yet—at all events you’ve let yourself go in bigger and freer flights. The last few years and all their disillusionment have made me think that eloquence and even rhetoric is not done with yet. The reasonable people can’t afford to let their view be shown merely on its reasonable merits but must speak in the emotional language that the unreasonable understand. But what a people the Americans are,” the letter goes on, for there was another book on his table, “I’m just reviewing a book on the great epochs of Art history by one Hopkins of Yale—the most amazing farrago of loose titbits of information all muddled up in his stupid colourless brain and tumbled out anyhow…. But for all this and for many other ills there is consolation in Max Beerbohm’s show of caricatures. They are perfectly amazing. There is a series of John Bull … but it’s no use describing them—they are really superb and a delightful revenge for much Pan-Anglo-Saxondom.”

The usual plans and projects sprang up. A colony was to be founded, either in Italy or in Surrey, where life could be lived as a whole without interference from Pan-Anglo-Saxondom. That great project broke down, but there were lesser enterprises to be carried out; a book to be written by R.G. Trevelyan and illustrated by Roger Fry; the craft of printing must be investigated, and printers instructed how to print wood blocks; new magazines—the Burlington, the Independent—were being founded and were, as usual, to be better than any that had appeared before. “Bertie’s article (A Free Man’s Worship) I think very fine indeed, but I don’t quite think resignation is a logical result of the attitude. I think indignation however fatuous would be more justified. Anyhow his attitude is too exalted for me. I cling to a cowardly ‘hope’.”

His friends the writers were doing brilliant work. With his own work, now that he was able to settle down to it, he was by no means satisfied. “I loathe art criticism more and more”, to take one phrase from many to the same effect, “and long to create.” But the doubt remained, could he create? Painting gave him the keenest pleasure; but when the pictures were shown the critics were depressing. From time to time he held exhibitions—with Neville Lytton at the Alpine Club; alone at the Carfax and at other galleries. All the critics, he complained, said the same thing; what the critic of the Westminster Gazette said may therefore be taken as an average sample. “Too strong a critical faculty and too wide an acquaintance with precedent are apt to act as a danger upon spontaneity. Sometimes we may suspect Mr Fry of thinking too much of his models and trusting too little to his instinct”—that was the usual verdict. His reputation as a critic stood in the way of his reputation as a painter. It gave him a label which the public read before it looked at his work. And perhaps there was a grain of truth in it. “Fry’s pictures looked too much pondered”, Alfred Thornton wrote, “and I suggested once that he let himself go and allow his sub-conscious mind some freedom. His reply was that if he did ‘the damned thing would only produce a pastiche’.” How far must the artist surrender to the damned thing? And did Roger Fry with his puritan upbringing and his Cambridge training repress the damned thing too severely? The psychologist may note that he had “given up day-dreaming when he was a boy of sixteen”. Again, when he found that a mood of “egotistic exaltation” forced itself upon him when he was listening to music, he gave up going to concerts. Perhaps the subconscious mind resented this incessant inspection and took its revenge. Or perhaps, as he claimed towards the end of his life, the art which is produced consciously and intellectually has its own quality, and it is a lasting one. At any rate, he painted indefatigably, pictures that were out of touch with his generation, with a queer mixture of obstinate belief in his own gift and of extreme diffidence. The critics were tepid; and he had no commercial success whatever. The usual fate of exhibitions held about 1900 is summed up in the account he gave of one of them: “My show has been a rather modified success. Rather poor notices in the press.” Sixteen pictures had been sold, and he had made one hundred and six pounds. Criticism and odd jobs of expertise were forced upon him against his will.

But criticism with all its drawbacks meant seeing pictures, and seeing pictures meant foreign travel. Directly his wife was well enough they were off abroad. “I assure you”, he wrote to his father, who had doubted the necessity of these journeys, “I don’t waste my time…. It’s solid hard work all the time.” There he certainly spoke the truth. When he was in his sixties, he would spend six hours a day every day for two months going round the Berlin galleries—“and I am a quick worker”. Picture-seeing when he was in his thirties, “filling up gaps” in his knowledge in the galleries of Berlin and Dresden, in Amsterdam and Madrid, must have been still more formidable. By way of proof, he was enraged when the Berlin galleries shut “at the absurd hour of three” in order that the officials might have “mittagsessen or something”. If the public galleries were shut there were always private collections to be seen. Note-book after note-book was filled. Seeing pictures was the foundation of his work. “You see”, he wrote to his father, “whatever success I have had has been the result of my Italian studies, not only in lecturing and writing, but in painting. It is there that I find the real source of all my ideas and there I must go often to get them. Even from a purely worldly point of view it would be very foolish to rest on my oars as it were and not keep constantly in touch with the latest ideas and constantly refreshed by new investigations of the Italian painters.” So they went, not only to Italy, but to Germany, to Spain and to Holland.

To the end of his life he would never write a book or deliver a lecture without seeing the pictures themselves, whether a fresh sight confirmed his opinions or upset them. And to his friends at home those journeys meant that each letter contained a shower of comments upon the pictures seen. He compared this year’s sight with last year’s sight; was amazed by this, disappointed by that; revised an old judgment, struck the track of a new one, improvised a theory and pressed it to the limits. To quote these comments in full would fill many volumes, and to select from them so as to show his snailhorn sensibility trembling this way and that would require the skill of a trained hand. But one extract may be made, not for its critical interest but because it shows Roger Fry sitting in a café and doing what he always did when he had seen a picture—discussing it with somebody else and comparing notes. “Helen”, he wrote, “won’t come round to Correggio and she don’t like the Sistine Madonna….” The words bring back to those who went picture-seeing with Roger Fry in later years the pause with which he would receive an opinion contrary to his own. And then, after the first shock, and the surprise, his eyes would light up—there might be something in it. The remark would be taken, and explored, given the benefit of every possible doubt, and returned to its author, perhaps exploded, but certainly illuminated. To have another pair of eyes to see with, another brain to argue with, was a very necessary process in making up his mind. And his wife’s instinct, he always maintained, rightly or wrongly, was much better than his own knowledge. “Women”, he wrote in an article at this time, “seldom learn…. But if they have good taste, they rarely sophisticate it … they have an instinct, a certainty and rapidity of judgment which not even the most gifted men can emulate.” This opinion, he goes on to say, is based “not on chivalrous grounds but from experience”. There can be no doubt that it was his wife who gave him that experience, or that whatever views she might hold upon Correggio and the Sistine Madonna would be carefully considered by her husband. But the letter continues: “In spite of all Helen’s attempts to undermine my beliefs I’m almost annoyed to find that I really do always like the great artists. It would be cheering to say with conviction that Raphael was not so good as Fiorenzo di Lorenzo, but I can’t.” That too was always behind his delight in the expression of direct sensation—something stable, and serious, a standard to which all speculations must be referred.

So they went on seeing pictures in Berlin, Dresden, Amsterdam, Madrid, and at last, with the usual regrets at returning to the land of the Philistines, came home. England among its many drawbacks of convention and climate always meant work—the work of writing and of lecturing, which had to take precedence of painting. He had to make money, and he had to take whatever work offered itself. It came from many quarters and it took him during these years (1900–1906) in many different directions. Now he was lecturing in Glasgow; now painting a Band of Hope banner in Guildford; now helping to build a friend’s house and overseeing workmen; now he was “just back from a wild journey to the Highlands, whither I went to report on two portraits in the house of a Highland laird…. Next week I must go to Paris, Brussels and Ghent.” The words show that his reputation as an expert was growing. He had no great respect for expertise; often enough he said sarcastic things of those who can only like a picture or trust themselves to buy it if assured by an expert that it is “genuine”. But it was fortunate for his purse that such people existed and some of the tasks they set him gave scope for his ingenuity and skill with his hands. “I’ve restored various old masters with a power of imitating various styles which is I suppose a proof that I haven’t one of my own—but it’s vastly intriguing work and brings in some of the increasingly necessary money.” It was exciting to clean a picture that its owner thought worthless and to find “a very good Florentine Madonna and Child underneath”. His visits to Paris and Italy were often on matters of business—flying visits that sometimes led to exciting incidents—one for example that reads something like a sketch for a story by Henry James. At Vienna there was an impoverished nobleman who, forced to part with his family collection, sent for Roger Fry to verify some of the ascriptions. Together they went round the gallery of reputed masterpieces. At each Roger Fry’s heart sank—it was a fake. Each time he had to declare that the Van Dyck or the Raphael or whatever it was called was worthless. And each time the Count remained unmoved. Finally Roger Fry saw unmistakable signs of a well-known forger’s hand and named him. The Count started with surprise. It was true—the man in question had been a friend of the family. The Count himself had always had his doubts. In fact he had always thought the collection a very poor one. And he was so delighted that his taste was confirmed and so impressed by the insight of the expert that, in spite of the fact that the verdict robbed him of a fortune, he was in the best of spirits and so won Roger Fry’s heart “by the perfect simplicity and candour of all his transactions with me … that I gave him a very good dinner and we parted excellent friends”.

Then again there was an experience of the very opposite kind—the discovery in a Venetian palace of two large pictures which the experts rated very low and Roger Fry was positive were in fact by Jacopo Bellini. They were for sale at a ridiculous price if he was right. But suppose he was wrong? He risked it, and wired home for the money. Very generously Sir Edward advanced it; the pictures were bought, packed and sent to London. There “Sidney Colvin fully endorsed all my views about them and considers them as the unique survivals of the great works that Jacopo Bellini did for the Venice Scuolo. But he thinks that the present authorities of the National Gallery will not seriously look at them and he says no one of the Trustees will understand their historical value.” Eventually a sale, though not to the National Gallery, justified his boldness, and his reputation was increased.

What with flying visits to the Continent, what with painting and writing at home his hands were full enough; but he could never resist embarking upon any enterprise that seemed promising. Perhaps the Quaker blood in him was responsible for the ardour with which he threw himself into such crusades. The cause was different but the zeal was the same. And perhaps from some old Eliot or Fry who in bygone days had made a fortune by chocolate-making or shipping he had inherited not only a strong interest in practical affairs but considerable though untrained business ability. Demands were frequently made upon it. There was the Burlington Magazine—in the autumn of 1903 it was in extremis. It had been run on insufficient capital “and with absolutely no business method”. It could not be left to perish; it must be revived and given wider scope. “I believe the only thing to save it is this…” he wrote to Charles Holmes. There followed not only an urgent appeal to Mr Holmes to take the editorship, but the most strenuous efforts on Roger Fry’s part to secure the capital. “On this errand we tramped about London together”, Mr (afterwards Sir Charles) Holmes wrote. “Fry … was simply magnificent. No rebuff could shake his determination to carry the matter through….” Friends were appealed to; millionaires approached. Somehow the money was found; somehow the magazine was started afresh.

The quiet painter’s life was always being interrupted by demands from the other world, the practical and active world where trains start punctually and business men are waiting to keep appointments. Nevertheless, he managed during those years to publish two books—the Bellini (1899) and his edition of The Discourses of Reynolds (1905). A first book is apt to lay a load upon a writer’s vivacity, and this first book seems, to the ordinary reader at least, less vigorous and less characteristic than the articles that were dashed off simultaneously. It is a little elaborate and literary, as if he were still in thrall to the literary associations of pictures, and had not found his own way to his own words. It was successful however—on the strength of it he was made art critic of the Pilot. But in the Reynolds he speaks with his own voice. His voice had only to provide an introduction and notes, but it is clear that he found in Sir Joshua not only a great critic—he gave, he said, “the truest account of the function of an art critic that has ever been framed”—but a critic after his own heart. Sir Joshua too was a painter as well as a critic. He too had to fight against “the demands made upon art by the untrained appetites of the public”. He too believed passionately in the importance of art; he too was disinterested and praised the work of contemporaries. In writing of him, Roger Fry praised the qualities he most admired and most wished himself to possess. Indeed, in the last year of his life he wrote, “Looking back on my own work, my highest ambition would be to be able to claim that I have striven to carry on his [Reynolds’s] work in his spirit by bringing it into line with the artistic situation of our own day”. Both books, like many of Roger Fry’s books, increased his reputation, but when the first edition was sold out, there was not enough demand to cause them to be reprinted.

Roger, Helen, and Julian Fry, about 1902

But he was a cool and dispassionate parent of books. He cared very little what was said of them compared with what was said of his painting. And another and more absorbing form of paternity came to him during those years. The doctors no longer forbade the natural wish that both Helen and Roger felt for children; and their first child, a son, Julian, was born in March 1901. It was a very anxious time, but everything went well. “He looks very jolly curled up asleep in Helen’s arms”, he wrote when the baby was born, and though momentarily crippled—he had been thrown riding “with that hippo-maniac Goldie”—he was sitting with his wife, sketch-book in hand, preparing to make “innumerable bambini drawings”. Another child, a daughter, Pamela, was born in 1902. For a time it seemed that the centre was safe again, that a happy life with wife and children was assured. “I can never tell you”, he wrote to his mother, “what enchantment and happiness Helen has brought me.” As for the children, “they are really a pure joy to us”, he wrote; and the letters become full of childish stories. Their games, their gifts, their doings—all this fills pages in the letters to Failand. He was an enthusiastic but perhaps a puzzling father. He was determined that his children should not suffer what he had suffered. There was to be no moral censure from their parents; no lack of simple humanity in their upbringing; no floggings when Julian went to school. He was not alarming as his own father had been; but his sympathies sometimes seemed perverse—he could not understand how any boy could like school; he was delighted by any sign of rebellion. And perhaps to reverse the ordinary standards is in its way as alarming as to accept them. Fortunately, however, the nursery came before school, and in the nursery there were toys—he made a water-wheel from a piece of tin and a hollow parsley stalk; he made a sailing boat—“the first that ever really sailed”; and these, his son writes, “have always been bright stars in my memory and have had associations of joy above all others”. And his daughter of course was given paints and brushes as soon as she could use them, and her childish scribbles were kept by her father, for they suggested “what an astonishing natural gift for art” children have before teaching has ruined them. Then, as they grew older, there were expeditions—“bicycling from Oxford through the Windrush valley to Fairford, walking from Guildford to Canterbury … rowing down the Thames from Oxford to Maidenhead, with anecdotes of Goldie and of Wedd thrown in…. The rare occasions when Roger was able to be with us, or better still to go out with us were very exciting”, his son wrote of those childish days. But inevitably those occasions were rare. There was very little time to spare, however carefully he contrived “to fit things in”. With two children in the nursery it was difficult to travel with his wife in the old way. A cycling tour in France had to take the place of the old rambling journeys through France to Italy and back again to France. The expenses of family life—“I am suffering from suppressed doctors’ bills which are coming out like the measles”, he complained—meant that he was hard pressed to make both ends meet. But for a time happiness returned, the domestic happiness that he had always wanted. There were, he told Lowes Dickinson, two kinds of happiness, one of “tantalising ecstasy”, the other of “comfortable reciprocity”. It was this last that he preferred: “… there’s something infinitely satisfying in the mere mass of affection two people accumulate between them in a number of years of quite close intimacy—but then boredom must never have to be suppressed—with us I feel that it has never begun to occur, but then I’m a lucky one in this at all events and I think I’d rather be fortunate so than have all the other sorts of success”.

That letter was written from London—they had moved to Hampstead (22 Willow Road) in 1903. But the happiness described there was not to last. “It seems”, he wrote to his mother, “as if one never could get free from constant anxiety, as though peace and security always eluded us.” During those years at Hampstead Helen Fry’s health was constantly threatened, and with the children to consider a new load of responsibility fell upon him. Whatever plan the doctors could suggest, he followed out with a devotion that amazed them. He carried on his own work under difficulties that need no description, always hoping that his wife’s health would be restored, always undaunted when once more that hope was shattered. At one time he was tempted to leave England for good, but he had his living to make, and for that London was essential. “The break is too difficult”, he wrote when a scheme for settling in Italy had to be abandoned. “And I must grind on in the old mill.”

III

It was becoming more than ever necessary to find some employment less precarious than journalism upon which he could depend for an income. “I hope that some post like a Slade professorship may fall to my share ultimately”, he wrote in 1902. And in 1904 the Slade Professorship at Cambridge was vacant. He collected the necessary testimonials, and was very sanguine, he told his father, about his chances of success. Many people in the art world, according to those old testimonials, thought that he was “peculiarly fitted for the post”. He appeared to George Prothero, for instance, “to possess an ensemble of qualifications for the duties of a professor of Fine Art which it would be difficult to surpass”. He was, the various witnesses testify, frank and independent; original yet learned; he had a mental and physical energy which were rare; he was an expert and experienced lecturer; and the tendency to over-severity which, in the opinion of Walter Armstrong, was a “debatable point” in his criticism, became a virtue in a professor. In short, there seemed to be considerable agreement among experts that “no critic and historian of Art in England is better fitted for the post than you are”. But he failed, and it was a bitter disappointment. “It is a very serious blow to my hopes”, he wrote to his father (June 1904), “and I find but little consolation in the indignation that the appointment has aroused in Cambridge. I gather that the King expressed a wish for Waldstein’s election, and that Poynter showed a very determined antagonism to me.” The articles in the Athenaeum, he might have reflected, had done nothing to ingratiate him with the President of the Royal Academy. And he minded the failure also because of its effects upon his parents. He had disappointed them again. “I feel”, he wrote to his mother, “that my want of worldly success has caused you more and more anxiety, and that you have felt that it must be my fault. So no doubt in a sense it is, that is that if I were a different kind of person with different ideals,I might have succeeded more conspicuously….” It seemed, he said, “an endless uphill fight” and he needed all the encouragement and sympathy that she could give him. Since he had failed at Cambridge, it was necessary to look elsewhere.

Among the collectors who had employed him to buy for them was the most famous and the wealthiest of them all—Pierpont Morgan. He had not only a great collection of his own, but he was one of the trustees of the Metropolitan Museum at New York. He had already sent Roger Fry to Liverpool to report upon a picture for the New York Gallery, and Roger Fry had already recorded his first impressions of the millionaire. They were mixed. He described him as “the most repulsively ugly man”, “with a great strawberry nose” who behaved “like a crowned head”; but there was no doubt that he was “a very remarkable and powerful man”. Suddenly, while he was still suffering from the disappointment about the Slade, and considering another possibility—that he should become the head of the British School at Rome—the Metropolitan Museum cabled to ask him to sail at once to New York. It was Christmas, and he had to take the next boat, but he decided to go. “I can’t tell you what it is precisely that the Americans want of me,” he wrote to Lady Fry, “but there is no doubt that certain very influential people there are getting disgusted at the way they are being cheated by the London dealers and I think they have pitched on me as a person who might give advice on pictures over here—The chief persons behind all this are the Trustees of the Metropolitan Museum of New York which has more funds at its disposal than any other gallery in the world, so that I hardly think I could hesitate about going, much though I dislike rushing off just now.”

This first visit to America was short and crowded with conflicting impressions. He found himself at once much more of a celebrity in New York than in London. Cultivated Americans, he found, had read his Athenaeum articles and had been impressed by them. He was fêted in the most imposing way. The scale of the eating and drinking and speech-making amazed him. He was present at a great banquet of which the toast list remains, illustrated in pencil with portrait heads of some of his fellow guests. He stayed with Pierpont Morgan and was astonished by the luxury of millionaires. He travelled in the great man’s private car tacked on to the end of a private express. It was snowing, and a log fire was lit in the car, which was “fitted up like a private house in the grandest style”. It appeared that they wanted him to become Director of the Metropolitan Museum under Sir Purdon Clarke. The decision was difficult. “There is no doubt”, he wrote to his mother, “that with the immense wealth here and the growing enthusiasm for pictures I should have a very big position, or at least the possibility of making one. I needn’t say that I am tempted to accept. It seems so much better to have a free field for one’s activities and real scope for one’s knowledge than to be for ever browbeaten and snubbed as I am at home. But it’s very difficult to think of making one’s home over here for some years and of course it would mean that.” It would also mean that he was much in contact with Pierpont Morgan, who was “all powerful” at the Museum. And Pierpont Morgan, seen at close quarters, was not altogether prepossessing. “I don’t think he wants anything but flattery”, he wrote home. “He is quite indifferent as to the real value of things. All he wants experts for is to give him a sense of his own wonderful sagacity. I shall never be able to dance to that tune, so that it is more than doubtful if after all America will come to anything. I must be quite independent in my judgements and behaviour and if Morgan is too great for that we had better part company…. The man is so swollen with pride and a sense of his own power that it never occurs to him that other people have any rights.” The difficulty of submitting to Morgan and the difficulty of transporting his family to America decided him finally to refuse. He told Morgan “quite politely” and Morgan was “very furious”. If proof is needed of the curious power that Roger Fry possessed of charming millionaires even while he enraged them, it is to be found in the fact that he persuaded Morgan in spite of his fury to subscribe a thousand pounds to die Burlington Magazine. He also arranged that though he would not accept the post in New York he would act as buyer to the Museum in Europe. It was a compromise that allowed him to live in England, and there was always the chance that some appointment in England would be given him.

In fact, no sooner had he come back to England than the possibility presented itself. The post of Director of the National Gallery was vacant, and Roger Fry heard on good authority that the choice “lies between Sir Charles Holroyd and myself”. It was the one post, since post he must have, that would have suited him. Again he was sanguine—he was even so bold as to think not only that he would be made Director but he would make a good Director. Sir Charles Holmes gives an amusing account of Roger Fry’s experiences when he offered himself as candidate for the office. “The Prime Minister, Mr Balfour,” he writes, “a professed lover of the arts, did absolutely nothing for them that I can remember, and through this critical year of 1905 left the National Gallery without a director. Claude Phillips was getting old and had made enemies, as active scholars in those days were bound to. Fry, in consequence, became the fancied candidate, and gave me an illuminating account of his interview in Whitehall. After explaining what he had done in the world of art to a high official, who appeared to understand and to care very little about the matter, he was finally asked, rather testily, ‘Yes, but isn’t there anyone whose name we know, who could tell us something about you?’ Fry was nonplussed. At last he timidly ventured, ‘Perhaps my father, Sir Edward Fry….’ ‘What!’ interrupted the other. ‘Are you a son of Sir Edward Fry? Why didn’t you say so at once? That will be all right.’ “ But in spite of Sir Edward Fry’s great distinction as a lawyer, the appointment was delayed. It was delayed until the trustees of the Metropolitan Museum had revised their original offer and had made one that allowed him to spend most of the year in England. His circumstances being what they were, he was forced to accept it. No sooner had he done so, and was on the point of sailing for America, than Campbell-Bannerman wired to say “that he was anxious I should be appointed to the National Gallery”. The compliment, Roger Fry said, was gratifying; but it had come too late. “So Holroyd’s appointment to the National Gallery followed in due course”, says Sir Charles Holmes, and Roger Fry left for America.

The incident created some little stir at the time. There were references to it in the newspapers. Roger Fry, it seems, was criticised for giving his services to America instead of waiting until his native land had decided whether or not it wanted him. In London the gossips ran about giving advice and proffering help. The post was still open; he had only to break with America and it would be given him. Helen Fry recorded some of these suggestions with caustic comments of her own in letters that reached her husband when he landed in New York. His friends in England were rueful even while they congratulated him. “I wish you were going to buy pictures for us here”, wrote Arthur Clutton-Brock. “We want someone to do it very badly indeed.” And McTaggart wrote: “I have been busily employed in addressing congratulations on your appointment—not to you, not to New York, but to myself—the one person, you will observe, in this universe who always scores. It is not well for people to differ from me. They always come to a bad end. I have always thought that the wicked will be damned by sending them to heaven and letting them be intensely bored there. Even so it is happening to you on this earth. Who. my ethereal Roger, is Pan-Britannic now:?

“But. sincerely, while I am awfully glad you have got a post which is worthy of you, I wish it was for England that you were collecting pictures. Still, it is America, and it’s not Germany.”

There is no doubt that Roger Fry too wished it was for England and not for America that he was to collect pictures. He would have liked to direct the National Gallery; he had no reason to feel sure that he would suit the Metropolitan Museum. And for a time the English post remained open and tentative offers were made to him. But he had given his word to the Americans and neither he nor his wife thought it possible to go back upon it.

[]

Chapter VI

America

I

By the terms of his agreement with the trustees, his visits to America were to be short; he was to spend two or three months yearly in New York. What he saw of America therefore was very limited, and his impressions naturally were full of sharp contrasts, now favourable, now unfavourable, laid side by side but never summed up. He begins: “wonderful as the first view of New York is it seems a fierce and cruel place, monstrous and inhuman, so that in spite of the voyage [which had been detestable] one scarcely wants to land”. When he landed he had no time to prowl about the streets with a sketch-book, as he liked to prowl about the streets of new towns, letting the character of the place sink in. He had at once to focus his attention upon the Museum, which was, he said, “in a state of chaos”. But as soon as he found his feet he began clearly to enjoy the stimulus and excitement of New York. He was asked out everywhere. For the moment at least he found that he was “quite the rage”. It was a new experience, and, in spite of the strain “of being on parade with fresh people constantly”, one that he enjoyed. He was sociable; he enjoyed talking—even after-dinner speaking amused him. And it was remarkable, after the apathy, the browbeating and the snubbing of the English, to find that New York “is wildly excited at what I’m doing and going to do….” His days filled themselves completely. “I get up at 8.0, down town to see pictures at 9.0, then to the Museum till 5.0, then calls, then dining out at a fresh house every night and then bed.” The dinner parties led to friendships: soon “the Americans” became separate individuals, with some of whom he formed lasting relationships. “Yes,” he wrote to Lowes Dickinson, “it’s mighty queer but I meet more and more nice people—Europeanised and sensitized and they are all very keen to help the new ideas at the Museum…. My two trials are the American artists who keep asking me to say that theirs is the greatest art the world has ever seen, and the Millionaires—the latter fortunately nearly all away just now. The in-between people are all right even when rich, and a few quite delightful. I’ve got as an assistant one of the most charming creatures I’ve ever met, a young and unsuccessful but quite good artist called Burroughes, a man who has never bothered about anything but just gone his own way—with no money and no reputation but with peace in his heart.” There was also a ruined French aristocrat, a Mons. de Beauvoir “who knows everything, has the most perfect taste and manners of the Ancien Régime. Instead of being my rival, and he was already installed as arbiter elegantiarum when I came, he has done all he can to befriend me and been in fact all that one doesn’t expect from a cher confrère.” This gentleman, unlike Roger Fry, was an anglophile, so much so “that he goes close to the subway exits parceque c’est la même odeur que celle du Tuppeny Tube”. “Like all other Europeanised people here we make signals of distress to one another in this weltering waste of the American people. It is strange what an invariable bond of sympathy this instinctive hatred of America as it exists to-day is—tho* many believe in the future. I suppose I do, as I’m investing so much in it….”

In spite of this instinctive hatred of the weltering waste, he felt that America offered him a great opportunity. He was sure that he could “do a lot for [Burroughes] and for the other young who here just as much as in England, perhaps more, are crushed by the regular commercial organisations—the Academies and societies. One of them, a young Jew, is really first-rate and quite unrecognised.”

To help the young and unrecognised in their fight against commercial organisations was as much his duty as his work at the Museum. And he hoped too that he could do much for the Museum. “I am allowed so far”, he continued to Lowes Dickinson, “to do what I want, and have bought heaps of pictures. I have got them at ridiculously low prices and quite fine things. Lotto, Goya, Guardi, Murrillo, Bugiardini and so on, and am getting ready a great gallery, a sort of Salon Carré, where all the real things will be seen in the hopes that it may throw a lurid light on the nameless horrors of modern art which fill the remainder.”

He worked very hard, and, so long as he could do what he wanted, he enjoyed his work very much. But as he foretold, it required “great tact to navigate one’s way”. And tact, a virtue that he never held in high esteem, if by tact was meant flattering the susceptibilities of officials, was not always at his command. Difficulties soon arose about his tenure of office. He had stipulated that his visits were to be for three months yearly; he soon found that the trustees expected him to return in the spring. “It’s too disgusting. I think there’ll be a big flare-up and perhaps I shall get notice”, he wrote home. The difficulty was arranged; Morgan for the moment was in high good-humour and upheld him against the other trustees; and an agreement was come to. “It gives me power with the Director and Assistant Director to withdraw pictures—to restore them—to repaint galleries and it establishes the idea of serious as opposed to frivolous art”, he told his wife. His hopes were high. He had plenty of scope for his abundant energy; he had been able to buy more pictures than he had expected—more, he was sure, than he could have bought for the National Gallery in the course of many years. He did not regret that he had closed with the American offer, in spite of the fact that overtures were still made him from home.

But the real difficulty he soon found was not with the Director nor with the trustees. It was with the President of the Metropolitan Museum, with Pierpont Morgan himself. Mr Morgan, according to his biographer,[◉3] wished to be as great a power in the world of art as in the world of finance. And he saw little difference between them. He was ‘a cheque-book collector…. He bought in batches…. He did not believe in giving the dealer a large profit. In the midst of a dicker he would turn his terrific eyes full upon his visitor and exclaim: I have heard enough. I’ll take this at the price you paid plus fifteen per cent. How much did you pay?’” By such methods he was “set upon making the Metropolitan Museum the finest institution of its sort in the world”. And he was also set upon owning the finest private collection in the world. He expected Roger Fry to help him to achieve both these aims. Naturally, this led to much conflict between them. The great man’s vanity was prodigious and his ignorance was colossal. Sometimes he was ready to take advice; sometimes it infuriated him. And besides advice he required flattery. He liked to look upon himself “as a modern counterpart of a gorgeous Renaissance Prince” and needed support in that romantic conception. Both as Curator of the Paintings at the Museum and as private adviser Roger Fry had much to do with him, and the more he saw of him the more difficult he found it “to dance to his tune”. Helen Fry had several times to warn him that tact was necessary, and to encourage him to persevere when difficulties seemed insurmountable. “Helen”, he wrote, “never doubts that one can do things.” And for a time all went well.

The work at the Gallery was absorbing in itself, and it enabled him when he came home to drop his journalism and to write articles on less ephemeral subjects for the Burlington, the Independent and other magazines. His reputation as a critic was growing—he was becoming, Sir William Rothenstein wrote, “the only English critic with a European reputation”. But there was now a difference—he was no longer merely a critic; he was a critic with money to spend. It was one of his duties to buy pictures in Europe for the Metropolitan Museum; and as master of an American purse he was a very important person in the world of picture-dealers. That world he discovered was a very strange one. Sir William happened to be in his company when he was considering the purchase of a Renoir for the Metropolitan Museum. It was strange, he writes, that “the once shy and retiring Fry should be swimming in such dangerous waters”. On this occasion “A fashionably dressed and attractive-looking lady showed us over the collection. While Fry was occupied the lady joined me. What taste and knowledge Monsieur showed … perhaps Monsieur was married…. No doubt Monsieur found life expensive and so forth. I wondered at her interest in a stranger, before I realised that since Fry consulted me about various pictures, she thought my influence was of importance, and was hinting at a bribe!” Such hints and blandishments were of course given much more frequently and persuasively to the Curator himself … I have had some tremendous revelations of the way things are done and of how difficult it is to stand out against the system of secret commissions which honeycomb the whole business, Roger Fry told his mother. His stories of the sharks who haunt those dangerous waters, and of the baits and blandishments which they dangled in front of him, were many and amusing. One letter may be quoted to show how he dealt with one of these gentry in particular:

22 Willow Road, Hampstead,
July 22 1905

Sir,—

You are entirely mistaken as to my position. I am the independent art critic of the Athenaeum and not a dealer nor am I in the habit of doing the kind of business which you suggest is best done after lunch. I could not under any circumstances have interested myself in the sale of your picture. The tone of your letter Is such that any further communications I may see fit to have with you will take place through my solicitors.

Yours faithfully,
R.E. Fry

But if his possession of an American purse had its dangers and brought about tremendous revelations, America was giving him the greatest opportunity that he had yet had. There was far more enthusiasm for art in America, he found, than in England, and the interest that was taken in his work at the Museum astonished him. Complaints indeed were made that he was too active; that he had cleaned a Rubens too thoroughly, and that he had paid too much for a Renoir. But his reputation was very high. He gave a series of lectures that were “quite a huge success”; and he found that “any number of people” were ready to pay him twenty guineas for an opinion. His popularity as a social figure waned of course; he found, rather to his relief, when he returned, that he had been “moved out of the lion’s cage into the smaller carnivora”. But he went out a good deal and American society continued to puzzle him. The contrasts were so violent. “I meet pretty often men of the finest culture and the frankest openness and genuineness”—men like Mark Twain for example, whom he sat next at dinner and found “a really fine generous and liberal minded gentleman, altogether one of the fine men”—“but”, he continued, “the contrasts are amazing…. I sometimes wonder whether this society isn’t drifting back to sheer barbarism…. The trouble is that no one really knows anything or has any true standard. They are as credulous as they are suspicious and are wanting in any intellectual ballast so that fashion and passing emotions drift them any whither” (to Sir E. Fry, March 1906). The Quaker in him, if his hatred of pretence and ostentation is to be attributed to that ancestral presence, was shocked. “The injustices I hear of are almost incredible, but that I have good authority. Everyone feels that this state of things can’t last and that the good people must come forward again.” And then again he met many of “the good people”—Europeanised Americans as he called them, William James, whom he admired greatly; “the wonderful and eccentric Mrs Gardner who has made the most remarkable collection of modern times and is altogether a woman of extraordinary force of character”; and Russell Loines, with whom he paddled in a canoe in New Jersey. These were people who would have been remarkable anywhere. On the other hand, America itself even in the Fall when “the trees are all one solid mass of colour, golden brown, deep claret, and most wonderful of all a pale rosy mauve like the colour of some chrysanthemums”, did not attract him greatly. It was too like England and not enough like itself. “One expects a new continent to be more original”, he complained. He vacillated from warm admiration to bewilderment and denunciation.

But general reflections upon America were always being interrupted by doubts as to his own position. That was becoming more and more precarious. It was partly his own fault—he could not conceal his opinions. “The one criticism of myself that comes back to me in roundabout ways is that I have not yet learned not to say what I think”, he wrote home. “But I’m not in a hurry to mend it.” He said what he thought, even when it was the opposite of what the President thought. And the President was omnipotent. To Roger Fry’s amazement, no one dared withstand him. Therefore, “one never knows what turn things at the Museum may take”. But the best account of this peculiar relationship is given in a description that Roger Fry wrote many years later of a journey that he made with Pierpont Morgan in 1907. There was an exhibition at Perugia, and Morgan summoned his adviser to consider possible purchases for the Museum.

I was asleep at the Grand Hotel at Perugia one morning in May 1907 when a knock at the door woke me and the Cameriera entered with a card. The Count Torelli urgently requested a short interview. I sent word I would he down soon, dressed and went into an empty room on the ground floor where the Count* young, dandified and weakly sympathetic, greeted me with anxious effusiveness. What did he want? I knew the answer beforehand,—family heirlooms to be offered to Pierpont Morgan still sleeping upstairs in the arms of the elderly and well preserved Mrs Douglas. What were they/ Chinese pictures rather recently imported and an immense eighteenth-century carpet spread all over the floor. The poor Count had rushed from Rome to Perugia to catch some of the golden shower and there they were displayed. Would I do what I could? The family fortunes depended on his success. He would be eternally even perhaps practically grateful if only I would intercede successfully with il Morgan. I could hold out very little hope but said I would see what could be done.

Before I could get away from him there jumped out from a dark corner of the room a little Levantine or Maltese gibbering in broken English and broken Italian. He had in his hands a large I7th-century crucifix which he handed me with feverish gestures. It was not a remarkable work of art and [I] was beginning the usual process of getting out when he whipped out a stiletto from the shaft of the cross. This was the clou of the piece and I knew my Morgan well enough to guess how likely he was to be taken by it. “Shows what the fellows did in those days! Stick a man while he was praying! Yes very interesting.” For a crude historical imagination was the only flaw in his otherwise perfect insensibility.

Once more I tried to get to my petit déjeuner but once more I was stopped, but this time by an elderly lady very refined with the timid dignity of an old Italian provincial aristocrat. She and her sister lived in a Castello some ten miles away in the hills and had a wonderful service of Majolica. Wouldn’t it be possible for il Morgan to visit them? Well, there was some possibility. I would do what I could and let her know. No need for that. She and her sister never left the ground. Any time would do. That made the chances all the more favourable and I could almost promise a visit. After petit déjeuner I went on to Morgan’s suite of rooms. He was up and ready to start while Mrs Douglas was putting the final touches to her stately and enamelled appearance. The courier entered. He was il Cavalière Luigi Poretta, a lank hungry Italian cadger, a servile and insinuating bully who had lived on his wits and somehow managed to get a title. He was ignorant, incapable and intriguing and the title was the only quality to recommend him for the post of courier to Pierpont Morgan. He announced in tones of greasy servility that the Fiat motor was waiting. The party descended and passed through the hall, eyed with awestruck admiration by the expectant Italian counts, the Levantine Jews and all the other human flotsam that was drawn into the whirlpool of Morgan’s wealth. They indeed but most of all the Italians looked at Morgan with something like worship. His wealth affected them not merely as something from which they might hope for doles but as something glorious and romantic in itself. Their passion was so great as to be almost disinterested. The mere thought that one man had so much wealth seemed to them ennobling and uplifting and incredibly more romantic than royalty itself. I forgot one other member of the party, little shrivelled white haired old Miss Burns, Mrs Douglas’ chaperone. She was entirely unnoticeable and the only evidence of her presence was that at proper intervals and whenever it seemed appropriate she uttered little shrill mouse-like squeaks of admiration at pictures, scenery, or Mr Morgan’s remarks.

It was a beautiful day and we were spinning along the road to Assisi. For a wonder Mr Morgan was in a good humour, he didn’t know how bored he was going to be with the frescoes at Assisi where moreover there was nothing one could buy. He was so pleased with himself that he joked about one of his gloves having a rent in it. “Can’t afford to buy another pair haw haw.” Faint screams of delight from Miss Burns and a slight relaxation of the grimly well preserved features of the maîtresse en titre. There was even something like conversation which Morgan pulled round to Raphael a sign of good humour because it allowed him to make the inevitable remark “What fools those National Gallery people were to let me lend ’em my Raphael—made their Ansidei thing look pretty queer”. (The said Raphael was a much repainted altarpiece which had been left for fifty years in the S.K. Museum because no one would buy it and no one wanted to look at it.)

The motor spun along driven by a horribly skilful but reckless Italian chauffeur who had his ideas of how an ultra-royal and Morganatic car should be driven, namely to cause as much terror to the inhabitants as possible. Oxen dragging loads of hay plunged wildly into ditches and up the opposite bank, fowls, dogs and children rushed screaming away and everyone realised that Morgan was a real millionaire. So we spun along until a particularly deep canniveau gave the car such a jerk that Morgan was projected violently up to the ceiling and his hat crushed down over his eyes. (He wore a kind of truncated top-hat.) Then there was an apoplectic splutter of rage, the Cavaliere was called from the front seat, the driver warned, and the car driven less impressively. Assisi was a failure. Mr Morgan was displeased with the condition of the frescoes, Miss Burns let off a few screams but stopped when she saw it wasn’t approved. Mrs Douglas would like to have improved her mind by pumping me on the history of the church and Giotto but we were hurried away since neither Morgan nor the Cavaliere were enjoying themselves.

On the way back I persuaded Morgan to go round by the old ladies’ Castello and see the Majolica service. It was a lovely place up in the hills and Morgan was always pleased by the idea of buying family heirlooms from the family itself, the object seemed to convey with it some of the distinction of impoverished nobility. He was none the less rude to the poor trembling old ladies but he agreed to buy the service. I think he imagined that he gave more when he bought from the family than when he bought from the dealer. But this was not so. It is true he bargained less but then no private person except Clive Bell ever had the gumption to stick on to the proper price a quarter as much as the Jew and Levantine dealer did. I forget what the ladies got but I fear whatever it was the Cavaliere got 6/7 of it. That was what he considered the proper perquisite for having arrived in the same motor car as Morgan.

Such was our triumphal progress through Italy. At Siena the whole of the wooden floor of the Cathedral was taken up that il Morgan might see the mosaics. The Queen of Italy had visited Siena a little before and had asked in vain for this. I must say the Cavaliere was ingenious. He got all the smaller galleries and libraries which are ordinarily open to the public shut up and then opened to Morgan as a special favour. At San Gimignano though we visited the town without warning we were instantly recognised and the royal book was brought out by the Mayor to be signed by the more than Royal millionaire. At Ancona we drove to the harbour through the square while everyone was listening to the military band. In a second the band was deserted and the whole population followed our carriage to the harbour where we embarked on Morgan’s yacht. As the launch put out a salute was fired and answered from the yacht. We lay off the town all night and till late in the evening the choral society of Ancona serenaded us in boats. They shocked Morgan very much by asking for money and they were rudely refused. It was not so much that he minded parting with money as that the request was a blow to the cherished illusion that everything was done out of pure admiration for his personality, just for his beaux yeux. I always wondered that his mistresses in New York got such substantial subsidies as they did. To man it is impossible but to Jews Armenians and women …

There the fragment ends. Morgan returned to New York “with a million dollars worth of the lovely spoils of his voyage”, writes his biographer. “Wood carvings, historic ceilings, treasures from the trappings of ancient palaces … lay in yet unopened cases at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.” And Roger Fry, having done his duty by the millionaire, returned home to his wife and children.

But he came back to anxiety, not to rest; he could no longer share these humours with his wife. During his absences Helen Fry was frequently ill, and the doctors were beginning to hint that her recovery was impossible. Once more he was faced with all the problems that her illness brought with it. He fought them with splendid courage; he won spaces of great happiness; but the menace was always there, increasing the strain of his work, taking away any pleasure that he might have had in his success. When about this time some show of his pictures was unexpectedly successful he wrote, “it comes at a time when I have lost my ambition in that direction and indeed in all directions”. With his sister’s help he made provisional arrangements for his wife and children, and went back to the problems that awaited him in America. They were familiar enough, and the words of one of the trustees, Mr Johnson of Philadelphia, may be taken as a sufficient description of them. “The trouble is”, he wrote, “that everybody is under the coercion of Mr M’s dominating will. No one does, or dares, resist it…. The one-man power in public institutions is a good one; but where it is exercised as in the case of the M⁠[useum], it is worse than Turkish rule…. I do think”, he continued, “it would be wiser for you, until some arrangement by way of complete substitution opens, to run upon the modified engagement although at a very considerable cost of just irritation.” Whatever “the modified engagement” may have been, Roger Fry did his best to comply with it. He was feeling “grumpy and dissatisfied”, he said, but “I must not throw up in mere disgust a position that does give us some much needed money”, to renounce a post which with all its drawbacks was still “the greatest opportunity I have ever had”, was a step to be deferred as long as possible. The break was only put off; given the President’s temper and his own inability to dance to that tune it was inevitable. On 14th February 1910 he wrote to his father: “The blow I expected has fallen. Morgan could not forgive me for trying to get that picture for the Museum,[◉4] and Choate has proved a broken reed…. It is useless to make any fuss about it. I could get no satisfaction from these people and they have behaved vilely.” “A vile deed,” he called his dismissal in a letter to Sir Charles Holmes, “villainously done with every kind of hypocritical slaver.” It is immaterial whether, as Sir Charles says, he “received his congé” or took it. The breach was final and for the moment he could not help regretting the National Gallery. Yet, as Sir Charles pointed out, the conditions in England were as unsatisfactory as in America. In America, he says—and his words throw some light upon Roger Fry’s difficulties at the Museum—“Fry … was … meeting with serious difficulties from Trustees as anxious to retain good pictures for themselves as ours apparently were to see them sold, of course for the highest obtainable price, to other countries.” The policy that then ruled the National Gallery—“the strangling of National Gallery initiative”—would have been as distasteful to Roger Fry in one way as the tyranny of Pierpont Morgan in another. Many years later, when he realised the difficulties under which Sir Charles Holmes laboured under the English trustees, he exclaimed: “How glad I am that the Americans prevented me from having that post which once seemed to me the height of my ambition!” But that was in 1927. In 1910 he was left without any post whatsoever.

The end of his work in America coincided with a far more terrible conclusion. When, three years before, Sir George Savage had told him that in his opinion Helen Fry’s illness was hopeless, he had refused to believe him. He had gone from doctor to doctor; he had tried every method that held out the least chance of success. It is a splendid record of courage, patience and devotion. In the hope that his wife could still live with him he had built a house from his own design near Guildford. In 1910 the house was ready, and he brought her there. But the illness increased, and in that year he was forced, for the children’s sake, to give up the battle. It had lasted, with intervals of rare happiness, since 1898. “You have certainly fought hard to help your wife, and shown a devotion I have never seen equalled”, Dr Head wrote to him in November 1910. “Unfortunately the disease has beaten us.”

What that defeat meant to one so sanguine, and so dependent upon private happiness, is only to be guessed at, and only from his own words. To his mother he wrote:

It is terrible to have to write happiness out of one’s life after I had had it so intensely and for such a short time…. I suppose we learn more from suffering than from happiness. But it’s a strange world where we are made to want it so much and have so little chance of getting it.

He also wrote:

… with all the terrible trouble that these years have brought … I do feel a kind of pious gratitude for it all.

And to Lowes Dickinson:

I think I could get used to the dullness and greyness of life without love if it weren’t for the constant sense of her suffering. This thing seems to be as diabolically contrived to give prolonged torture as anything could be. If she could only die! …

When Helen had first fallen ill, the thought of death had been intolerable. The years that followed had made death desirable. But he wrote:

I do believe almost mystically in tout comprendre est tout pardonner. The understanding is generally too impossibly difficult, but when one does understand it’s always a pitiful rather than a hateful sight one stumbles on.

His emotions were broken and contradictory. He did not attempt to take up any attitude. He had to find his way, to piece things together, as best he could. “I’ve given up even regretting the callus that had to form to ~ let me go through with things. Now and then it gives, and I could cry for the utter pity and wastefulness of things, but life is too urgent”, he told Lowes Dickinson. He had no creed. The old phrases meant nothing to him. He dreaded most, he said, “shutting myself up in the imprisonment of egotism.” The understanding of life, like the understanding of art, must be attempted by following its lead according to Ms own discovery of the pattern. He laid himself open to all experience with a certain recklessness, because so many of the things that men care for, as he said later, were now meaningless. The centre which would have given them meaning was gone. From this experience sprang both Ms profound tolerance and also his intolerance—his instant response to whatever he found genuine, Ms resentment of what seemed to him false. So much perhaps may be read into his fragmentary and broken words without risking the scorn with which he blew away stock phrases. At the back of all that he accepted and rejected after his wife left him lay the fact of that experience—he had suffered and was to go on suffering, something that was, he said, “far worse than death”.[◉5]

[]

Chapter VII

The Post-Impressionists

I

To a stranger meeting him then for the first time (1910) he looked much older than his age. He was only forty-four, but he gave the impression of a man with a great weight of experience behind him. He looked worn and seasoned, ascetic yet tough. And there was his reputation, of course, to confuse a first impression—his reputation as a lecturer and as an art critic. He did not live up to Ms reputation, if one expected a man who lectured upon the Old Masters at Leighton House to be pale, academic, aesthetic-looking. On the contrary, he was brown and animated. Nor was he altogether a man of the world, or a painter—there was nothing Bohemian about him. It was difficult at first sight to find his pigeon-hole. And another impression floated over the first glimpse of Roger Fry in the flesh—a glimpse caught a year or two before on a lawn at Cambridge. The trees were in leaf, and through the green light by the side of the summer river came two figures, both tall, both for some reason memorable and distinguished. Who were they? “Roger Fry and his wife.” And they disappeared.

He talked that spring day in a room looking out over the trees of a London square, in a deep voice like a harmonious growl,—“his and Forbes Robertson’s were the only voices one could listen, to for their own sakes” says Bernard Shaw—and he laughed spontaneously, thoroughly, with the whole of him. It was easy to make him laugh. Yet he was grave—“alarming”, to use his own word of his father. He too could be formidable. Behind his glasses, beneath bushy black eyebrows, he had very luminous eyes with a curious power of observation in them as if, while he talked, he looked, and considered what he saw. Half-consciously he would stretch out a hand and begin to alter the flowers in a vase, or pick up a bit of china, turn it round and put it down again. That look, that momentary detachment, was so instinctive that it made no break in what he was saying, yet it gave a sense of something held in reserve—things played over the surface and were referred to some hidden centre. There was something stable underneath his mobility. Mobile he was. He was just off—was it to Paris or to Poland? He had to catch a train. He seemed used to catching trains whether to Poland or to Paris. It was only for a week or so, and then he would be back. Out came a little engagement book. The pages were turned rapidly. He murmured in his deep voice through a long list of engagements, and at last chose a day and noted it. But the particular Sunday he chose for a first visit to Durbins was somehow muddled. There was no cab; there was no Roger Fry. The name Durbins conveyed nothing to any porter. And much to his contrition—but the blame must be laid on the “cussed nature of human affairs”—he inflicted upon his would-be guests the horrors, about which no one could be more eloquent than he, of Sunday lunch at an English inn.

It was to Poland, not to Paris, that he was starting that spring evening in 1910. A letter to his mother fixes the date—24th April 1910. “I am very busy”, he wrote, “just now. I have to go to Poland to buy for Mr Frick a very important picture. The whole business came upon me very suddenly, and I have, I hope, transacted the affair satisfactorily. The owner is a rather stupid country gentleman who insists on selling the picture in his château, that’s why I have to go and get it, as I must see it before buying. The picture costs £60,000 so it is an important affair…. It’s tiresome and rather hateful work but I couldn’t refuse to do it…. At all events I ought to get handsomely paid for it, and indeed it comes at a critical time for I am just at the end of my resources and have been feeling very anxious of late as to how I can possibly meet expenses.”

He had plenty of work on hand that spring—a ceiling to paint for Sir Andrew Noble, the Mantegnas to restore at Hampton Court; but it was spasmodic and miscellaneous, and he hoped again, though he was no longer sanguine, for some appointment that might canalise his energies and provide the income that was more than ever necessary. Once more the Slade professorship, this time at Oxford, was vacant. And again men of reputation in the art world asserted his fitness for the post. “I, for my part,” wrote Salomon Reinach, Conservateur des Musées Nationaux, “would consider Mr Roger Fry as capable of exerting the most beneficent influence on young students; they would learn from him to use their eyes not only for reading, but for seeing works of art; he would teach them to appreciate quality which makes the difference between handiwork and art”—but the electors thought differently; the post went elsewhere, and Roger Fry’s energies were made no use of, officially, to teach the young to use their eyes.

Perhaps it was as well in view of another journey that he made later that summer. It was only to Paris to see pictures—he had done that often enough. But on this occasion he went not to buy pictures for a millionaire or for a Museum but in order to choose pictures on his own responsibility for an exhibition that he had been asked to arrange at the Grafton Gallery in the autumn. “I’ve perhaps foolishly been the instigator of an Exhibition of modern French art at the Grafton Gallery this winter,” he told his mother, “and though I am not responsible and have no post in regard to it I’m bound to do a great deal of advising and supervising.” The words are casual enough; they give little notion of the interest that this particular exhibition was exciting in him or of the importance that it was to assume. Ever since 1906, as a letter to his wife explains, he had been becoming more and more absorbed in the work of Cézanne in particular and in modern French painting in general. Now at the invitation of the directors of the Grafton Gallery he had a chance to bring together a representative exhibition of those pictures in London. For reasons that he has given himself, and are too familiar to need repetition, the exhibition seemed to him of the highest importance. But what was remarkable was that he made it seem equally important to other people. His excitement transmitted itself. Everybody must see what he saw in those pictures—must share his sense of revelation.

There they stood upon chairs—the pictures that were to be shown at the Grafton Gallery—bold, bright, impudent almost, in contrast with the Watts portrait of a beautiful Victorian lady that hung on the wall behind them. And there was Roger Fry, gazing at them, plunging his eyes into them as if he were a humming-bird hawk-moth hanging over a flower, quivering yet still. And then drawing a deep breath of satisfaction, he would turn to whoever it might be, eager for sympathy. Were you puzzled? But why? And he would explain that it was quite easy to make the transition from Watts to Picasso; there was no break, only a continuation. They were only pushing things a little further. He demonstrated; he persuaded; he argued. The argument rose and soared. It vanished into the clouds. Then back it swooped to the picture. And not only to the picture—to the stuffs, to the pots, to the hats. He seemed never to come into a room that autumn without carrying some new trophy in his hands. There were cotton goods from Manchester, made to suit the taste of the negroes. The cotton goods made the chintz curtains look faded and old-fashioned like the Watts portrait. There were hats, enormous hats, boldly decorated and thickly plaited to withstand a tropical sun and delight the untutored taste of negresses. And what magnificent taste the untutored negress had! Under his influence, his pressure, his excitement, pictures, hats, cotton goods, we were connected. Everyone argued. Anyone’s sensation—his cook’s, his housemaid’s—was worth having. Learning did not matter; it was the reality that was all-important. So he talked in that gay crowded room, absorbed in what he was saying, quite unconscious of the impression he was making; fantastic yet reasonable, gentle yet fanatically obstinate, intolerant yet absolutely open-minded, and burning with the conviction that something very important was happening.

It was in November 1910 that the first exhibition of Post-Impressionist pictures—the name was struck out in talk with a journalist who wanted some convenient label, and the title, to be accurate, was “Manet and the Post-Impressionists”—was opened at the Grafton Galleries. Desmond MacCarthy, snatched from a sick-bed, revived with a bottle of champagne and assured that his real job in life was art criticism, had written an introduction. It reads to-day mildly enough. It has even an apologetic air: “… there is no denying”, he remarked, “that the work of the Post-Impressionists is sufficiently disconcerting. It may even appear ridiculous to those who do not recall the fact that a good rocking-horse has often more of the true horse about it than an instantaneous photograph of a Derby winner.” Several people of distinction, “though not responsible for the choice of the pictures”, allowed their names to appear on the Committee, and the opening was conventionally distinguished. Then the hubbub arose.

It is difficult in 1939, when a great hospital is benefiting from a centenary exhibition of Cezanne’s works, and the gallery is daily crowded with devout and submissive worshippers, to realise what violent emotions those pictures excited less than thirty years ago. The pictures are the same; it is the public that has changed. But there can be no doubt about the feet. The public in 1910 was thrown into paroxysms of rage and laughter. They went from Cézanne to Gauguin and from Gauguin to Van Gogh, they went from. Picasso to Signac, and from Derain to Friesz, and they were infuriated. The pictures were a joke, and a joke at their expense. One great lady asked to have her name removed from the Committee. One gentleman, according to Desmond MacCarthy, laughed so loud at Cézanne’s portrait of his wife that “he had to be taken out and walked up and down in the fresh air for five minutes. Fine ladies went into silvery trills of artificial laughter”. The secretary had to provide a book in which the public wrote down their complaints. Never less than four hundred people visited the gallery daily. And they expressed their opinions not only to the secretary but in letters to the director himself. The pictures were outrageous, anarchistic and childish. They were an insult to the British public and the man who was responsible for the insult was either a fool, an impostor or a knave. Caricatures of a gentleman whose mouth was very wide open and whose hair was very untidy appeared in the papers. Parents sent him childish scribbles which they asserted were far superior to the works of Cézanne. The storm of abuse, Mr MacCarthy says, positively alarmed him.

The critics themselves were naturally more measured and temperate in their strictures, but they were dubious. Only one of the London critics, Sir Charles Holmes, according to Mr MacCarthy, came out on the side of the Post-Impressionists. The most influential and authoritative of them, the critic of The Times, wrote as follows:

It is to be feared that when [Roger Fry] lends his authority to an exhibition of this kind, and gives it to be understood that he regards the work of Gauguin and Matisse as the last word in art, other writers of less sincerity will follow suit and try to persuade people that the Post-Impressionists are fine fellows, and that their art is the thing to be admired. They will even declare all who do not agree with them to be reactionaries of the worst type.

It is lawful to anticipate these critics, and to declare our belief that this art is in itself a flagrant example of reaction.

It professes to simplify, and to gain simplicity it throws away all that the long-developed skill of past artists had acquired and perpetuated. It begins all over again—and stops where a child would stop…. Really primitive art is attractive because it is unconscious; but this is deliberate—it is the rejection of all that civilisation has done, the good with the bad…. It is the old story of the days of Théophile Gautier—the aim of the artist should be “Épater le bourgeois” and by no means to please him! Such an aim is most completely realised by the painter Henri Matisse, from whose hand we have a landscape, a portrait, and a statue. We might have had more, but it is understood that nearly all his works belong to one rich family in Paris, who, we suppose, are so enamoured of them that they will not lend. Three are enough to enable us to judge the depth of the fall, in these strange productions, we will not say from the men of long ago, but from three idols of yesterday—from Claude Monet, from Manet, and from Rodin.

Finally The Times critic concluded by appealing to the verdict of Time—“le seul classificateur impeccable”, which he assumed, somewhat rashly, would be given in his favour.

Among the artists themselves there was a great division of opinion. The elder artists, to judge from a letter written by Eric Gill to Sir William Rothenstein, were uneasy. “You are missing an awful excitement just now being provided for us in London,” Eric Gill wrote to William Rothenstein in India, “to wit, the exhibition of Post-Impressionists now at the Grafton Galleries. All the critics are tearing one another’s eyes out over it, and the sheep and the goats are inextricably mixed up. The show”, he continued, “quite obviously represents a reaction and transition, and so if, like Fry, you are a factor in that reaction and transition, then you like the show. If, like MacColl and Robert Ross, you are too inseparably connected with the things reacted against and the generation from which it is a transition, then you don’t like it. If, on the other hand, you are like me and John, McEvoy and Epstein, then, feeling yourself beyond the reaction and beyond the transition, you have a right to feel superior to Mr Henri Matisse (who is typical of the show—though Gauguin makes the biggest splash and Van Gogh the maddest) and you can say you don’t like it. But have you seen Mr Matisse’s sculpture?…” To which Sir William Rothenstein adds, “Yes, I had seen Matisse’s sculpture in Ms studio in Paris. I could not pretend to like it.” Nor did Mr Ricketts make any bones about his contempt for the pictures. “Why talk of the sincerity of all this rubbish?” he asked. And he proposed, ironically, to start a national subscription “to get Plymouth and Curzon painted by Matisse and Picasso”; and detected definite signs of insanity in the painters. Here he was supported by eminent doctors. Dr Hyslop lectured on the exhibition in Roger Fry’s presence. He gave his opinion before an audience of artists and craftsmen that the pictures were the work of madmen. His conclusions were accepted with enthusiastic applause and Mr Selwyn Image expressed Ms agreement with Dr Hyslop in an appreciative little speech. Privately, Professor Tonks circulated caricatures in which Roger Fry, with Ms mouth very wide open and his hair flying wildly, proclaimed the religion of Cézannah, with Clive Bell in attendance as St Paul. And in his diary Wilfrid Blunt gave expression to the feelings of those who were not painters or critics but patrons and lovers of art:

15th Nov.—To the Grafton Gallery to look at what are called the Post-Impressionist pictures sent over from Paris. The exhibition is either an extremely bad joke or a swindle. I am inclined to think the latter, for there is no trace of humour in it. Still less is there a trace of sense or skill or taste, good or bad, or art or cleverness. Nothing but that gross puerility which scrawls indecencies on the walls of a privy. The drawing is on the level of that of an untaught child of seven or eight years old, the sense of colour that of a tea-tray painter, the method that of a schoolboy who wipes his fingers on a slate after spitting on them…. Apart from the frames, the whole collection should not be worth £5, and then only for the pleasure of making a bonfire of them. Yet two or three of our art critics have pronounced in their favour. Roger Fry, a critic of taste, has written an introduction to the catalogue, and Desmond MacCarthy acts as secretary to the show…. They are the works of idleness and impotent stupidity, a pornographic show.

The “awful excitement”, then, that the Post-Impressionist Exhibition aroused in 1910 seems to have been genuine. The works of Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, Van Gogh and Gauguin possessed what now seems an astonishing power to enrage the public, the critics and the artists of established reputation. Roger Fry was to analyse that excitement and his own reactions to it ten years later in the article called “Retrospect” (Vision and Design). At the time he was both amazed and amused. He was surprised at the interest that the pictures excited in a public normally indifferent to pictures. “There has been nothing like this outbreak of militant Philistinism since Whistler’s day”, he wrote to his mother. How had he contrived to spring this mine of emotion in that very phlegmatic body? He was amused to find that his own reputation—the dim portrait that the public had drawn of him as a man of taste and learning—was replaced by a crude caricature of a man who, as the critics implied, probably from base motives, either to advertise himself, to make money, or from mere freakishness, had thrown overboard his culture and deserted his standards. But his childish lesson that “all passions even for red poppies leave one open to ridicule” stood him in good stead. Desmond MacCarthy records that in the midst of the uproar Roger Fry “remained strangely calm and ‘did not give a single damn’”. The pictures themselves, and all that they meant, were of absorbing interest to him, and much of the annoyance that he was causing his respectable colleagues passed over him unnoticed. He never realised, it is safe to say, how from this time onward he obsessed the mind of Professor Tonks, so that that gentleman could scarcely bear to hear his name mentioned and felt at his death that it was for English art “as if a Mussolini, a Hitler, or a Stalin had passed away’3. Professor Tonks did not obsess Roger Fry. He and other of his colleagues tended to recede into the background, and were rather to be pitied than abused for remaining in their little eddy of suburban life instead of risking themselves in the main stream of European art.

But there was one element in all this hubbub that roused Roger Fry to anger. That was the attitude of the cultivated classes—the attitude expressed by Wilfrid Blunt in his diary. For so many years he had helped to educate the taste of that public. They had attended his lectures upon the Old Masters so devoutly, and had accepted so respectfully his views upon Raphael, Titian, Botticelli and the rest. Now, when he asked them to look also at the work of living artists whom he admired, they turned upon him and denounced him. It seemed to him that the cultivated classes were of the same kidney as Pierpont Morgan. They cared only for what could be labelled and classified “genuine”. Their interest in his lectures had been a pose; art was to them merely a social asset. “I found among the cultured,” to quote his own words, “who had hitherto been my most eager listeners, the most inveterate and exasperated enemies of the new movement…. These people felt instinctively that their special culture was one of their social assets. That to be able to speak glibly of Tang and Ming, of Amico di Sandro and Baldovinetti, gave them a social standing and a distinctive cachet.” They had not the excuse that their sales were hurt, or their pupils corrupted. They were not “inseparably connected”, like the professors, “with the things reacted against”. They should have been disinterested and dispassionate. And yet it was they who attacked the new movement most virulently, and from being their urbane and respected guide, Roger Fry had become “either incredibly flippant, or, for the more charitable explanation was usually adopted, slightly insane.

Time, twenty-nine years at least, of that judge whom the critic of The Times called, perhaps too confidently, “le seule classificateur impeccable”, has vindicated Roger Fry, if money is any test. Shares in Cezanne have risen immeasurably since 1910. That family, who. according to the same authority, accumulated works by Matisse must to-day be envied even by millionaires. And opinion too is on his side. It would need to-day as much moral courage to denounce Cezanne. Picasso, Seurat, Van Gogh and Gauguin as it needed then to defend them. But such figures and such opinions were not available in 1910, and Roger Fry was left to uphold his own beliefs under a shower of abuse and ridicule.

But the exhibition had other results that were far more important. Roger Fry may have sacrificed his reputation with the cultivated; but he had made it with the young. “Fry thenceforth”, as Sir William Rothenstein writes, “became the central figure round whom the more advanced of the young English painters grouped themselves.” That position was no sinecure, but, if it allowed room for the central figure to move on, it was the one of all others that Roger Fry would have chosen. So long as the young trusted him, he cared nothing for the enmity of officials. What mattered was that the young English artists were as enthusiastic about the works of Cézanne, Matisse and Picasso as he was. The first Post-Impressionist Exhibition, as many of them have testified, was to them a revelation; it was to affect their work profoundly. And to explain and to expound the meaning of the new movement, to help the young English painters to leave the little backwater of provincial art and to take their place in the main stream, became from this time one of Roger Fry’s main preoccupations. In his own words: “I began to discuss the problems of aesthetics that the contemplation of these works forced upon us”. He discussed them in all their aspects with the learned and with the ignorant, in lecture-halls, in drawing-rooms, in studios, in railway trains. And he wrote—often in an omnibus or in the corner of a third-class railway carriage. His writing gained a new vigour and depth. He became the most read and the most admired, if also the most abused, of all living art critics.

But anyone who had followed his criticism from the time when he laid about him so vigorously in the Athenaeum, or had wondered why it was that he was out of touch with his generation as a painter, knew that the importance of the Post-Impressionist movement lay in the fact that it was a continuation and not a break. He had always, as his criticism of the New English Art Club shows (he had resigned his place on the Jury of the New English Art Club in 1908), been dissatisfied with the Impressionist school. He had asserted in 190a that we are “at a dead point in the revolutions of our culture”. One would say, he went on, “that these artists seem paralysed by the fear of failure, and they lack the ambition to attempt those difficult and dangerous feats by which alone they could increase their resources and exercise their powers by straining them to the utmost”. He had lighted with eagerness upon the work of some of the younger artists, like Augustus John, who “by going back to an earlier tradition, carry the analysis further, penetrating through values to the causes in actual form and structure”. Here, in the work of the French artists, he found the very qualities that he had been looking for. To the British public the French painters were ignorant if not insane; even Professor Tonks could write, “If you want to know more of the follies of men, go to the Lefevre Galleries and see the Cézannes”. To Roger Fry, on the other hand, it was obvious that they were masters of their art; he could see “how closely they followed tradition, and how great a familiarity with the Italian primitives was displayed in their work”. The excitement, then, that these pictures gave him was the excitement of finding that what he had dimly hoped for and half foreseen as a possible development was actually in being. The statue that had lam half hidden in the sand was now revealed. He had feared that the art of painting was circling purposelessly among frivolities and was at a dead end. Now he was convinced that it was alive, and that a great age was at hand. He laid himself open with all his sensibility—that sensibility in which, as he said, one’s housemaid “by a mere haphazard gift of providence” might surpass one—to register the sensations that Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse and the rest produced in him. But he went on, as his maid could not, to analyse those sensations with an erudition that years of “seeing pictures” had made considerable, and with an honesty and acuteness that his training among the philosophers had made habitual. The results are to be read in the very rich and profound investigations which fill such books as Vision and Design, Transformations, and the masterly essays upon Cézanne and French Art.

But the Post-Impressionist Exhibition interested him not merely as a critic but as a creator. It freed him from some obstacle that had stood in his way as a painter. Now, after long years of groping and fumbling, he was able at last to begin to paint as he wished. It came to him as a painter at the right psychological moment. Such moments of vision, when a new force breaks in, and the gropings of the past suddenly seem to have meaning, are probably familiar to most artists. But most artists leave them unexplained. It would need a critic endowed with his own interpretative genius to single out and sum up all the elements in that long process which at last seemed to bear fruit. Unfortunately, though he traced many such spiritual journeys, he never traced his own. And even such a critic would have to admit that the origin of these moments of vision lies too deep for analysis. A red poppy, a mother’s reproof, a Quaker upbringing, sorrows, loves, humiliations—they too have their part in moments of vision. But the moment had come. “I feel”, he wrote, “that I have an altogether new sense of confidence and determination which I shall stick to as long as it will last” (to D.S. MacColl, February 1912).

And he felt that confidence, that determination not only as a painter. All his doubts and difficulties, he said, seemed to have left him. He had found himself at last—he could deal with life, he could deal with people. It is easy to find reasons, whether they are the right or the sufficient reasons, for the change. There was the relief from the long strain of his wife’s illness—the relief that comes naturally and healthily when a struggle has ended and defeat has been faced. There was the new friendship with Vanessa Bell, who, as a painter belonging to the younger generation, had all the ardour of the young for the new movements and the new pictures and urged him away from the past and on to the future. There was her painting and her studio and the younger generation arguing with him and laughing at him, but accepting him as one of themselves. All this brought about a change that showed itself even in his face, so that a friend meeting him in the street exclaimed, “What’s happened to you? You look ten years younger.” He repeated that saying, and added that, strange as it was, at last, at the age of forty-four he found himself where most people find themselves twenty years earlier—at the beginning of life, not in the middle, and nowhere within sight of the end.

Durbins

II

The exhibition shut, and the hubbub calmed down. But the excitement remained. It had left a trail behind it. He had made new friends as well as new enemies. He was being asked to dine, to lecture, to address this or that art society in the provinces or at the universities. Everybody was writing to him, either to express their views or to ask him to explain his own. His hall table—to recall some impressions of a visit to Durbins that did not fail—was littered with letters. They were still abusing him—“It is odd that people should think that because they don’t like a thing it was done specially to insult them, but such seems to be the usual reaction on such occasions”. But the letters could wait. Family life was in full swing. His sister Joan was not merely “keeping house” for him—she was creating a home, a safe and happy home, for the children who had long lacked one. A small boy was shooting arrows in the garden; a little girl was dabbling her brush in a jar of discoloured water. The house on the outskirts of Guildford, with its lofty rooms, was airy and spacious—“I hate Elizabethan rooms with their low ceilings in spite of their prettiness, and I love the interiors of the baroque palaces of Italy”. He had designed the house himself, and he was proud of its proportions and of its labour-saving devices. His work-room upstairs was crowded with tools of various kinds; it was littered, yet orderly. Sheaves of photographs lay flat on shelves. There were paintings and carvings, Italian cabinets and Chippendale chairs, blue Persian plates, delicately glazed, and rough yellow peasant pottery bought for farthings at fairs. Every sort of style and object seemed to be mixed, but harmoniously. It was a stored, but not a congested, house, a place to live in, not a museum. Certainly it was not luxurious—“It was characteristic of my purse that I could not afford to keep up a gentleman’s establishment, and of my taste that I could not endure to”. A pleasing freedom seemed to prevail. There was time—time to look at the garden, with the flowers nodding over the pool; time for a walk to see a view he liked, though the country was only Surrey. He half apologised for the country, spotted as it was with “gentlemanly residences”. “My own house is neighboured by houses of the most gentlemanly picturesqueness, houses from which tiny gables with window slits jut out at any unexpected angle.” The path he took over the downs avoided those gentlemanly residences, but his talk did not altogether avoid the inhabitants of those houses—their snobbery, their obtuseness, their complacency, and their complete indifference to any kind of art. That still amazed him. Yet his indignation dissolved in a kind of humorous pity. How much they missed—how little they allowed themselves to enjoy life. It was the English passion for morality, he supposed, and also the English climate. The light, he pointed out, was full of vapour. Nothing was clear. There was no structure in the hills, no meaning in the lines of the landscape; all was smug, pretty and small. Of course the English were incurably literary. They liked the associations of things, not things in themselves. They were wrapt in a cocoon of unreality. But again of course the young were all right—he had great hopes of the young. And the uneducated, whose taste had not been perverted by public schools and universities, had, he was convinced, an astonishing natural instinct—witness his housemaid, who had seen the point of Cézanne instantly. He was full of hope for the future, even for himself, late though it was, and much as he had groped and wandered and lost his way.

And so, deriding the village churchyard, its owls, its epitaphs and its ivy, and all those associations which appealed to the impure taste of the incurably literary, he led his way back to the house that the neighbours thought an eyesore, with its large rooms, its great windows, and the bands of red brick across the front. There were many things to be seen there: old Italian pictures, children’s drawings, carvings, pots and books—French books, in particular, tattered and coverless, which led to an attack upon English fiction. Why, he demanded, was there no English novelist who took his art seriously? Why were they all engrossed in childish problems of photographic representation? And then, before he went to busy himself in the kitchen, out came the picture that he had been painting that morning. He held it out with a strange mixture of anxiety and humility for inspection. Could he possibly mind what was thought of it? It was plain that he did mind. He gazed at his own work, intently, in silence, and then said how at last he was getting at something—something that he had never been able to get at before.

Room in Durbins

III

In The tasks that fell upon him now that he had become “the father of British painting”, the leader of the rebels, increased daily. Anyone with a scheme on foot, or an idea that only needed money in order to achieve wonders, came to him for advice and help. He was busy that spring helping to start “a vast institution for keeping photographs of all manner of products of human activity, from temples to towel horses”. A hundred thousand pounds had to be collected. He was full of optimism and energy. Then, rather to his surprise, he was offered the Directorship not of the National Gallery, but of the Tate. Financially, the offer was not tempting; the salary was £350 rising to £500; it meant too that he would have to give up all his other work. He refused it. “I really think”, he wrote, “I can do more outside, so I must give up the idea of official life and tides and honours which I very willingly do, so long as I can manage to get along as regards money. I once wanted these things, but now I feel quite indifferent to them.”

The Post-Impressionist Exhibition had made it clear not only that his work lay outside, but that there was a great deal to be done, and that the young English artists looked to him to do it. The Directors of the Grafton Galleries had made him an offer that seemed to him of much greater importance than the Directorship of the Tate. They offered him the control of their galleries for the autumn months. This gave him an opportunity—though the risk was great—that must be seized. He could use it to bring together, as he hoped, all the different schools of English painting, and to show them side by side with the French. If it succeeded, it might become an annual institution; it might unite groups; destroy coteries, and bring the English into touch with European art. Though “frantically busy” he put his views before the older artists and asked them to help him by lending their work. By this time he knew the difficulty of getting artists to combine. Had he not written years before, “the artist is intensely individualistic, and in proportion as he is an artist, he finds it difficult to combine with his kind for any ulterior purpose”? But perhaps he was not aware what a change had come over his reputation, since he proclaimed his faith in Cézanne, or how difficult it had become for the older artists to work with him, let alone under his direction. Some letters to Sir William Rothenstein show both what his aims were, and what difficulties he had to encounter.

The offer of the Grafton Gallery, he wrote to Sir William, means “a real acquisition of power for the younger and more vigorous artists. We can give them a chance they have never had before of being well seen, but if it is to succeed I must rely on the loyalty to the cause of those like yourself who have a more established name. I had hoped to make the scope very wide—to have a kind of general secession show and approached Steer and Tonks. They were unwilling to be seen with the younger men—said literally let them wait till they can get into the New English Art Club’. But I don’t want them to wait. Well, there remain John, Epstein and yourself. John has promised to send … I don’t like Exhibitions any more than you do, but until we have got back to a more perfect way of life altogether they remain the only possible medium of communication. I have to ask all these people who send to trust me to do their work justice—well from you I hoped that would not create a difficulty. I have no axe to grind except to make the show a success on the best lines but I am not, I think, narrow-minded where real art is concerned.” When he wrote that letter he was about to start on a holiday, the first he had had for many years, to Constantinople. From Constantinople he wrote again:

Hotel Bristol,
Constantinople,
April 13, 1911

My dear Rothenstein,

I have just got your letter. I am sorry there should have been misunderstandings but I don’t think anything Î have said or written ought to have given rise to them. I did explain to you as fully as I could in the time that I hoped for your cooperation in a show of contemporary English art at the Grafton. I thought that you knew me well enough to know that such a show would be in general character sympathetic to you and that in particular your work would receive a hearty welcome….

Now let me try to explain at greater length what I hoped to do. Originally I thought that the Grafton might be used for a general secession exhibition of all non-academy art of any importance including members of the NEAC. I approached Steer and Tonks with this idea and found them unwilling to join. I then thought it might still be possible to make up an Exhibition from the works of younger artists together with yourself, John, Epstein, W. Sickert. Only I saw that with this we could not fill the Grafton so I conceived the idea of having the Exhibition divided 2 rooms to this English group and 2 rooms to the works of the younger Russian artists which I thought ought to be better known in England; I thought that this would be of great interest to English artists….

It is still an unfortunate necessity that artists sh. exhibit and be seen and discussed in order to live and paint, and my ambition is to give the younger and more progressive men more opportunity than heretofore. On the other hand, in order to do this I must make the exhibitions pay their way on the average…. The conditions make it inevitable that I sh. appeal to the various artists to trust me with large powers since I have the actual control and responsibility on behalf of the Grafton Galleries. Now you know me well enough to know that I am not unlikely to listen to advice from you and that I should give every consideration to any suggestions which you or John or McEvoy might make and I sh. be delighted if you would cooperate; at the same time I could hardly go to other groups of younger artists who are quite willing to trust me personally and say to them that their work must come before such a committee as you suggest for judgment, nor can I possibly get rid of my responsibility to the Grafton Galleries….

Now you see I really want you to join in this and I believe it would be not only to the advantage of English art that you should join but ultimately to the good of yr. position. Unless those who care for what is vital in art agree to co-operate loyally commercialism will always trample us under foot. Just now there seems to me an occasion for a real effort at such co-operation and it wd. be a great and lasting regret to me if we did not have you with us.

Yours very sincerely,
—Roger Fry

Sir William Rothenstein in his Memoirs has given the reasons which made it impossible for him to co-operate: “… I still felt the New English Art Club to be the body with which I had most sympathy. Further, remembering Carr’s and Hallé’s ways at the New Gallery, I did not feel inclined to work under Fry’s dictatorship….” Mr Steer and Professor Tonks also were “disinclined to move”. Indeed, since to Professor Tonks Roger Fry was the counterpart of Hider and Mussolini, there was nothing to be surprised at in that; and even if that comparison was still to be made, “it was not pleasant”, as his biographer says, to the Professor “to know that New English Art, after having been hors concours for so long as ‘the advanced thing’, was now relegated to the academic category”. Also “one has a suspicion that Tonks felt that there was something in Fry’s ideas”. That, too, must have been irksome. But it is unnecessary to enquire further into the various motives which made it impossible for the older artists to co-operate with Roger Fry. He was greatly disappointed, and also he was surprised—it is a proof perhaps of the credulity that was so often observed in him—that what seemed to him “a perfectly simple and sincere offer” should not be met in the spirit in which it was made. But though after this he drifted apart from many of the artists mentioned, there was no bitterness on his side at least. His attitude was summed up in the words “‘poor dear or “dear old which attached themselves regretfully, humorously, to certain distinguished names, so that it was a surprise, many years later, to find that Henry Tonks was still alive, and natural enough to suppose that since he was alive, he must be. perhaps the President of the Royal Academy, and certainly a baronet. But for Henry Tonks personally Roger Fry had nothing but affection: and Henry Tonks seeing Roger Fry mount a chair at a dinner in order to explain to Lord Lascelles “something about a triptych”, was charmed. “Fry”, he wrote, “is really a very charming man; I have seen more of him lately, and now speak to, and lecture him freely.”

But in 1911 difficulties were made; difficulties, however, though they might surprise, always roused in him a spirit of indomitable energy. “No rebuff”, as Sir Charles Holmes had noted, “could shake his determination to carry the matter through.” He was determined, in spite of the rebuffs, in spite of the drudgery—the above letter is only one instance of the labours he undertook—to carry the exhibition through, even if the older artists held aloof. He was convinced that here was a chance both for what was vital in art and for the younger artists. And his mind was teeming with plans for the second Post-Impressionist Exhibition during his holiday in Constantinople.

IV

It was the first holiday that he had taken for many years—if that can be called a holiday which includes the writing of long letters filled with minute details. He was seeing a new country for the first time in company with friends—the Clive Bells—who were to mean much to him; he was “filling up gaps” in his knowledge of Byzantine art, and there were all the aesthetic problems roused by the Post-Impressionist pictures and the practical problems roused by the forthcoming show to be discussed. All this went to the making of a perfect holiday. Unfortunately, at Broussa one of the party—Vanessa Bell—fell ill, and the emergency brought out a side of Roger Fry, which though it could be guessed—did he not seem even at first sight a man with great experience behind him?—needed illness to bring it to the surface. He took control of the situation—it was difficult and complicated. There were few facilities for serious illness in a ramshackle Turkish inn; the proprietors were suspicious, the doctor unqualified and there were no nurses. But Roger Fry was in his element. He fetched and carried; ordered and conciliated; was absorbed but never flustered. All his curious medical lore came into use. He had a doctor’s interest in drugs and their properties. But unlike most doctors he was imaginative and adventurous. The human body and its oddities fascinated him. And his acute sympathy with suffering made him extraordinarily quick to anticipate and suggest. Bed, food and litter had all to be improvised from the most inappropriate materials—he had full scope for his ingenuity; he ventured into the kitchen, and returned triumphant with a new dish or two. Directly the immediate problem was solved he dismissed it; and turned instantly to the next thing on hand. It might be his painting—he had set up an easel in the courtyard where a tree or a fountain had suggested a subject. He was absorbed in that problem. But he was not absorbed to the extent of forgetting the presence of someone reading a book. What book was it? What sort of merit had it? A tentacle seemed to float out that attached itself to whatever was going on in his neighbourhood. He questioned; he pondered; at the same time he was washing in his sky with what seemed extraordinary dexterity. He was also noting the attitude of a peasant carrying a pot on her head, and taking stock, with a quick shrewd glance, of the English family who had arrived the night before and would have to be persuaded to renounce their rights to the shady corner of the garden where he had rigged up a tent for the invalid. They were the sort—he could tell that at a glance—who proved troublesome.

And then, his duties in the sick-room done, there was just time for a drive. He was enthusiastic about the landscape. There was a magnificence about the Turkish hills that gave him immense satisfaction. They were not romantic. The light was real light, not pea-soup dissolved in vapour. One could see the structure of the hills. Then he stopped the driver. Where could he buy pots like those the women used tor water? And handkerchiefs like those they wore on their heads? Talking partly French, partly Turkish which he had picked up from a conversation book, he persuaded the driver to take him to the native quarter. Soon he was standing with his hat on the back of his head gesticulating, laughing, the centre of a group of excited peasants. Pots were bought and coloured handkerchiefs, and he pointed out how the bold crude pattern was based on some half-forgotten tradition—Russian, or Greek, or Chinese? Whatever it was it proved that the tradition was alive and that the peasants of Broussa put the educated English to shame.

Soon therefore his room at the hotel was littered with stuffs and pots and silks, mixed with chessmen, medicine bottles and paint-boxes. Thanks largely to his skill, the invalid recovered. And though the Orient Express was crowded, and a truculent Colonel, whom Roger Fry sized up correctly at first sight, refused to give up his corner seat—had he not said that he would?—he contrived somehow to convey an invalid who could not stand and a freight of fragile china successfully across Europe. He himself was attacked by sciatica, but as the train rattled through the uplands of Serbia he stretched his leg upon an improvised leg-rest, took a book from his pocket and read it aloud.

The book that he was reading was by Frances Cornford. He liked it very much. “I think this shows”, he wrote to his mother, “that she is a genuine, though no doubt not a great poet. She has felt things for herself, and managed to say them. It is strange that this should be so rare, because when it’s done, it seems so simple, as though anyone could do it.” The Post-Impressionist movement, as the casual words show, was by no means confined to painting. He read books by the light of it too. It put him on the track of new ideas everywhere. Like a water-diviner, he seemed to have tapped some hidden spring sunk beneath the incrustations that had blocked it. The twig turned vigorously and unexpectedly in streets, in galleries, and also in front of the bookcase. There it was—this reality, the thing that the artist had managed to say, now in Frances Cornford, now in Wordsworth, now in Marie Clare, a novel by Marguerite Audoux in which, if memory serves, the writer has contrived to express the emotions of a peasant at the sight of a wolf without using a single adjective. But it was not where it was expected to be. He laid sacrilegious hands upon the classics. He found glaring examples in Shakespeare, in Shelley, of the writer’s vice of distorting reality, of importing impure associations, of contaminating the stream with adjectives and metaphors. Literature was suffering from a plethora of old clothes. Cézanne and Picasso had shown the way; writers should fling representation to the winds and follow suit. But he never found time to work out his theory of the influence of Post-Impressionism upon literature, and his attempts to found a broadsheet, profusely illustrated, to be sold for one penny at all the bookstalls, in which the two arts should work out the new theories side by side, failed—the money difficulty floored even him. And he went on to turn his attention to another undertaking that came more naturally within his scope.

This was to find work, not as painters but as decorators, for the young English artists who had been drawn together by the Post-Impressionist Exhibition. It was bad for young artists to be forced to depend upon private patrons who, as the exhibition had convinced him, looked upon art “chiefly as a symbol of social distinction”. He wanted to see the walls of railway stations and restaurants covered with pictures of ordinary life that ordinary people could enjoy. As soon as he was back in England therefore he persuaded the authorities of the Borough Polytechnic to let him decorate the walls of the students’ dining-room. He got the artists to design cartoons; he got the Committee to accept their designs; and in the autumn of 1911 the students of the Borough Polytechnic were given pictures, not of saints or of madonnas, but of the pleasures of London to look at as they ate their meals. Duncan Grant, Frederic Etchells, Bernard Adeney, Albert Rutherston, Max Gill and Roger Fry himself made designs representing Swimmers and Footballers, Punch and Judy, Paddlers in the Serpentine, Animals at the Zoo, and other familiar London scenes. The pictures have, it is said, now been destroyed; but Roger Fry threw a great deal of energy into the work of organisation that as usual fell chiefly upon him, and he was delighted with the results. “My work at the Borough Polytechnic”, he wrote that autumn, “has been a great success. They had a great debate upon it the other night which I was asked to open. It was a very amusing occasion, with much freedom of speech, but on the whole they seemed to be converted to my view.”

No record of the speech remains, but “the view” he expressed may be gathered from the essay called “Art and Socialism” which he wrote in 1912. In that essay, published later in Vision and Design, which begins with the words “I am not a socialist”, he investigated the position of the artist in the modern State, and tried to discover how the ideal State might make the best use of his powers. Only one phrase need be taken from that reasoned and subtle argument—“the greatest art has always been communal, the expression—in highly individualised ways no doubt—of common aspirations and ideals”. Attitudes had always to be revised, the fixed pose was always suspect, but though he would not call himself either a socialist or a democrat, he had views about the relation of art to society, and the pictures on the walls of the Polytechnic were an attempt to put those views into practice. One has to “accept modern conditions and to make the best of them”. He accepted those conditions down in Southward and if the public did not come forward, as he hoped, with commissions on a larger scale, it was an experiment that interested him greatly. If he was disillusioned about the love of art among the cultivated, he was sanguine about the love of art among the untaught. Indeed, it was more likely to be found, he had come to think, in Southwark than in Grafton Street.

Meanwhile, there were his own pictures. Underneath all these theories, fertilising them, there was his own “petite sensation”. That somehow had been freed from impediments. He was hard at work all that winter painting. Pictures accumulated. They “threaten to choke my room entirely”, he wrote. There they were, among the peasant pots and the Broussa handkerchiefs, those new pictures; upon one a cheque with five pounds still legible upon it was pasted; upon another the figure of Christ stood upon his head. The painters, without caring a rap for their reputations as men of learning and culture, were trying to penetrate beneath appearance to reality. And Roger Fry was carrying on any number of supplementary adventures. He was maintaining that a hat suitable for a negress under a tropical sun was fit headgear for Lady Ottoline Morrell in Bond Street; he had discovered a new cure for sciatica, and he was arguing some abstruse point about representation and the aesthetic emotion while all the time the picture grew rapidly beneath his brush.

He was going to hold a one-man show of his pictures in January. He wrote of it with the usual doubts: “I fear it may be rather a rash speculation. But I hope that it may cover expenses and distribute a few of my works which at present threaten to choke my room entirely. Perhaps it would be simpler to give them away without more ado…. But he attached great importance to that exhibition, for he was convinced that he was painting better than he had ever painted before. The pictures were shown at the Alpine Club in January 1912. They roused a good deal of attention. He was laughed at of course. The Post-Impressionist label had succeeded the Old English Water Colour label. It was astonishing, the old press cuttings said, to find that the cultivated and erudite Mr Fry had thrown overboard all his learning and all his science. But he was obviously sincere, and though the frames were of deal, and he had painted them himself, and though a pot of tulips if stood upon a table must have toppled over, the pictures were worth looking at. The press was kindly enough. But as the following letter shows, he was hurt when a critic for whom he had a great respect, Mr D.S. MacColl, expressed doubts about his “conversion”.

To D.S. MacColl

Dunbins,
Feb. 3rd, 1912

Of course I don’t like your article, partly no doubt because one doesn’t like to be called a pasticheur. There’s enough ground of truth for it to be very plausible and to be the most unpleasant thing I could have said of me, but as far as I can judge of my work impartially—and I try for my own sake to do so—I don’t think it’s true. I’ve always been searching for a style to express my petite sensation in. One of my earliest oil paintings was essentially Post-Impressionist but was so derided at the time—I never showed it publicly—that I gave in to what I thought were wiser counsels and my next rebellion against the dreary naturalism of our youth lay in the direction of archaism. I know that was no good, knew it at the time, but saw no other outlet for what I wanted which was a much more deliberate and closer unity of texture than any of my contemporaries tried for.

Now as to my sudden conversion. I don’t think it’s a point of any importance but you don’t state the facts correctly. So long ago as March 1908 1 wrote a long letter to the Burlington Mag. to protest against Holmes’s contemptuous tone with regard to Cézanne and Gauguin and what I said there seems to me, on re-reading it, to show that my first reaction to Cézanne and Gauguin was exactly what it still is.

The step from critical and intellectual assent to practise obviously takes some time but I think those—and there were one or two critics—who saw more of Matisse than of Guido Reni in my ceiling were right. In fact I thought the Guido Reni idea was a mere joke of Ross’s and could not be taken seriously at all. Still, that work had been commissioned and designed more than a year before I began to paint it and obviously I couldn’t with fairness change the whole thing to something quite other than I had covenanted to do.

All this may seem very trivial personality only I like to put it on record.

If indeed I have had a petite sensation which struggled now and then towards expression, why on earth didn’t you ever give it a helping hand by showing where and when it showed itself and pushing one in that direction? I should have been very grateful in old days.

Now, whether rightly or wrongly, I feel that I have got a way out of it and have an altogether new sense of confidence and determination which I shall stick to as long as it will last.

There is an asperity—a personal tone—in the letter that shows that what was said of his painting affected him differently from anything that was said of his writing. “You can create”, he once wrote to Lowes Dickinson, “and can influence others and impose your own creations on them and that is surely the greatest position to be got out of life.” After “long years of toil and uncertainty” he felt that he too was able to create and any doubt of that new capacity hurt him acutely. Under certain circumstances, as the letter shows, he might have become an artist with a grievance. But the circumstances were not favourable. For he had to leave his own problems as an artist, and to deal with the practical problems that faced him in Grafton Street.

V

The second Post-Impressionist Exhibition was opened on 5th October 1912. “The scope of the present Exhibition”, to quote the introduction to the catalogue, “differs somewhat from that of two years ago. Then the main object was to show the work of the ‘Old Masters’ of the new movement, to which the somewhat negative label of Post-Impressionism was attached for the sake of convenience. Now the idea has been to show it in its contemporary development not only in France, its native place, but in England where it is of very recent growth, and in Russia where it has liberated and revived the old native tradition.” This time, though English artists of established reputation had refused to co-operate, works by young English artists—Spencer, Grant, Gill, Etchells and Miss Etchells, Vanessa Bell, Adeney, Wyndham Lewis, and Gore—were included. And once more in his introduction to his own section—the French—Roger Fry did his best to anticipate objections and to explain the idea that lay behind the movement. “It was not surprising”, he wrote, “that a public which had come to admire above everything in a picture the skill with which an artist produced illusion should have resented an art in which such skill was completely subordinated to the direct expression of feeling. Accusations of clumsiness and incapacity were freely made, even against so singularly accomplished an artist as Cézanne. Such darts, however, fall wide of the mark, since it is not the object of these artists to exhibit their skill or proclaim their knowledge, but only to attempt to express by pictorial and plastic form certain spiritual experiences; and in conveying these ostentation of skill is likely to be even more fatal than downright incapacity…. Now these artists”, he went on, “do not seek to give what can, after all, be but a pale reflex of actual appearance, but to arouse the conviction of a new and definite reality. They do not seek to imitate form, but to create form, not to imitate life, but to find an equivalent for life. By that I mean that they wish to make images which by the clearness of their logical structure, and by their closely-knit unity of texture, shall appeal to our disinterested and contemplative imagination with something of the same vividness as the things of actual life appeal to our practical activities. In fact they aim not at illusion but at reality.”

Once more the public exposed themselves to the shock of reality, and once more they were considerably enraged. This time perhaps the shock was less considerable—the novelty had worn off; certainly Roger Fry himself had lost some of his illusions. But the business side of the enterprise was enough to engross his energies. The first exhibition had not done quite so well, financially, as had been expected. Therefore it was of the greatest importance, if as he hoped the exhibition was to be held annually, that the present show should succeed. Much depended upon his own aptitude for business. And he was not a trained business man. He sometimes thought, he said, that he had “a great business instinct somewhat smothered in great superficial incompetence”. “In fact”, writes Leonard Woolf, who took Desmond MacCarthy’s place as secretary, “he was a very curious mixture. In many ways he conducted business in an extremely unbusinesslike way, and this occasionally led to disastrous results. For instance, he would make agreements with people without recording them in writing. Although extraordinarily good and ingenious about the details of business, he was inclined to be carried away by his enthusiasm for a scheme and brush aside as unimportant all the details upon which success or failure depended.” Hence there were many scenes, in the basement beneath the gallery where business was transacted, that were both “hectic and comic”. Many of the Russian pictures failed to arrive upon the opening day. The rates of commission had been left unspecified and Roger Fry was naturally held responsible when they were found to be higher than the artists had anticipated. And when accused by artists and business men of mismanaging their different interests, he was not conciliatory. “He was completely disinterested”, Leonard Woolf writes, “in the large sense of the word, i.e. his ultimate motives were not his own interests, but some idea. But in planning and carrying out the actual steps and business necessary for attaining his disinterested object, he would be both dictatorial and ruthless.” Plain business men who were not used to skipping details in order to follow ideas were puzzled; and they protested. But the plain business men were not only puzzled; they were often coerced. In order to achieve his end, Roger Fry brought to play upon them three different qualities, not usually exercised in business dealings. “First”, his secretary writes, “there was the immense charm which everyone felt as soon as they began to talk to him. Then there was his incredible persuasiveness. In a personal business interview these two assets were usually sufficient. But if they were not, there then appeared a third line of defence which often, I think, surprised people. Roger had an extraordinarily strong will and immense persistence. If he had made up his mind on a practical business question, he nearly always got his way and in the pursuit of his object he would display what can only be called ruthlessness. Intellectually, he was the most open-minded person I have ever met, but he was not open-minded in practical affairs. That is why people who ‘got across’ him in business often genuinely misunderstood his motives.”

But difficulties with business men in the basement were not the only difficulties that he had to solve. All sorts of people were daily passing in front of the pictures in the galleries above. They were being exposed to the shock of reality and were registering many unexpected emotions. Directly Roger Fry showed his face in the gallery they would seize upon him; they would demand explanations; they would express their delight or their disgust. And then, his secretary observed, “His handling of people was masterly—it did not matter who they were”. Often they were very angry—then he would “skilfully and courteously manage to squash them”. Often, on the other hand, they would show unexpected intelligence. Then he would take them round the gallery and “deliver an extraordinarily interesting lecture”. And among the daily press of unknown people there would appear now and then an old friend—Arnold Bennett for instance, or Henry James. Them he would take down to the basement where, among the packing cases and the brown paper, tea would be provided. Seated on a little hard chair, Henry James would express “in convoluted sentences the disturbed hesitations which Matisse and Picasso aroused in him, and Roger Fry, exquisitely, with something of the old-world courtesy which James carried about with him”, would do his best to convey to the great novelist what he meant by saying that Cézanne and Flaubert were, in a manner of speaking, after the same thing.

But that was not the end of his day’s work. When the galleries were shut to the public he would open them again to bring people together—people from many different worlds, ladies of fashion, painters, poets, musicians, business men. The new movement was not to be restricted to the art of painting only. Some of the young French poets were invited to read aloud from their work. He lectured both upon poetry and upon painting himself. He arranged concerts. The fashionable and the aesthetic rubbed shoulders at those parties. Post-Impressionism had become, he noted, all the rage. Whether that meant that people really enjoyed Cézanne or merely thought that it was the right thing to say so, he was doubtful. His enthusiasm was always corrected by a douche of caustic common sense. His exquisite urbanity concealed a certain scepticism. Lady So-and-so was charming; she was’ ecstatic; but did she really cherish a disinterested delight in Cezanne himself”, or was he merely a new fashion to be worn this summer and thrown away the next? He often dwelt in the articles he wrote then upon snobbism and its symptoms—“the tendency to believe in the value of right opinion—to think that by knowing whom one ought to admire … one achieves aesthetic salvation’. But his own faith was more deeply grounded than ever, and whatever his share in the movement had been, there could be no doubt when the second Post-Impressionist exhibition shut on the last day of 1912. that the two exhibitions had made an immense impression both upon the artist and upon the public.

[]

Chapter VIII

The Omega

I

Many of the things that Roger Fry had thought impossible in 1892 seemed to him possible in 1913. The stability which he had found so oppressive as a young man was breaking up. The Post-Impressionist Exhibition was only one sign of the change that was coming over the world. What did that change amount to? He threw out a theory, characteristically, in a note to Goldie Dickinson (1913). What was happening in England, he said, was much what had happened in Rome in the sixth century. They were “in a hopeless muddle” then, he said: “the old stupid Roman attitude (dully materialistic and fatuous like that of modern popular art) still persisting, and yet this new ferment working…. And the new thing in the sixth century”, he went on, “wasn’t a religious thing … it was just a new excitement—about what? That’s where the difficulty is—to see what it was, which crystallised art into the spirituality of the Middle Ages and S. Francis. Anyhow its life and Roman art was dead. We’re so like that now somehow—all the people in this new movement are alive and whatever they do has life and that’s new. How long will it last—will it fizzle out like the pre-Raphaelites or have we got hold of something permanent?”

The change was in himself too. The shy and studio with his faculty youth, with his faculty for sitting at other people’s feet and absorbing other people’s ideas, had become “dictatorial and ruthless”, the leader of rebels, the father of modern British painting. Perhaps it was growth, not change, a natural development that sprang from his conviction that one must lay oneself open to new ideas, and to new passions even if they expose one to ridicule. Certainly the new ferment worked in him. He was gay. hopeful and immensely active. The new movement was suggesting fresh developments of the old aesthetic problems. As he explained in a letter to G.L. Dickinson (1913J:

I’m continuing my aesthetic theories and I have been attacking poetry to understand painting. I want to find out what the function of content is. and am developing a theory which you will hate very much, viz. that it is merely directive of form and that all the essential aesthetic quality has to do with pure form. It’s horribly difficult to analyse out of all the complex feelings just this one peculiar feeling, but I think that in proportion as poetry becomes more intense the content is entirely remade by the form and has no separate value at all. You see the sense of poetry is analogous to the things represented in painting. I admit that there is also a queer hybrid art of sense and illustration, but it can only arouse particular and definitely conditioned emotions, whereas the emotions of music and pure painting and poetry when it approaches purity are really free abstract and universal. Do you see at all and do you hate it? The odd thing is that apparently it is dangerous for the artist to know about this.

He worked out these theories at dinners, at debates, even at week-ends. “A.J. Balfour and Lord Morley are both here,” he wrote to his mother from Lord Curzon’s country house in December 1912, “so we have some delightful discussions. As I hoped, Balfour tumbled at once to my ideas about Post-Impressionism, tho’ he has not liked the pictures hitherto … but he sees how logical the theory is. Lord C. denounces it as pure humbug. So we have heated but very agreeable arguments. Balfour is charming as I always suspected he would be. Lord M. is getting old. He is old for his age, and I should think never had anything of Balfour’s intellectual agility.” Lord Morley, it is to be inferred, did not “tumble to” his ideas about Post-Impressionism. But a surprising number of people passed that test, as it was put to them by Roger Fry. He was ready to exempt a great many individuals from the common curse of Philistinism which brooded over the British Isles. He made many converts and friends. There was nothing he liked better than those heated but very agreeable arguments. At last, he felt, after the hypocrisy of the Victorian age, of which he had many anecdotes drawn from his own past, a time was at hand when a real society was possible. It was to be a society of people of moderate means, a society based upon the old Cambridge ideal of truth and free speaking, but alive, as Cambridge had never been, to the importance of the arts. It was possible in France; why not in England? No art could flourish without such a background. The young English artist tended to become illiterate, narrow-minded and self-centred with disastrous effects upon his work, failing any society where, among the amenities of civilisation, ideas were discussed in common and he was accepted as an equal. He was always hoping that he had discovered some such centre. Naturally, he was often disillusioned. The hostess whose passion for Cézanne had seemed to him absolutely disinterested was suddenly discovered to be a mere lion-hunter; the old Quaker in him would be roused, and henceforth she would be relegated to the lowest depths of the human hierarchy. But hope always revived—the very next night he sat next somebody who could talk, who could provide an atmosphere. And the centre of civilisation would be removed once more to her dwelling.

But if he was convinced in 1913 that there was a new excitement—something was happening—he was never blind to facts. There was always the Adversary. The Adversary, a compound of schoolboy bully, Pierpont Morgan, the pseudo-artist and the British public, had been too long and too solidly established in the centre of his mindscape to let him indulge in dreams of an easy Utopia. If you wanted a better world, you had to fight for it. And he fought—he waged endless newspaper battles for the Post-Impressionists; or indeed for any other cause that needed a champion. In 1912 to take one instance. Regent Street was being pulled down. The Times leader expressed a hope that the new buildings would “sacrifice to art”. Roger Fry at once protested.

The writer adjures us to make sacrifices for art, as though that were not the very root of all our aesthetic disasters. We all sacrifice to art, from the lodging-house keeper who fills her house with incredible ornaments to the millionaire who buys Old Masters that he does not like. It is the art that comes from such motives which is so deadening to all artistic impulse and effort. Nowhere is this dreary aesthetic “snobbism” more devastating than in architecture. We make buildings for our need, and then, sacrificing our pockets to art, cover them with a mass of purely nonsensical forms which we hope may turn them into fine architecture…. Let Messrs Swan and Edgar and the rest be as vigorous in their demands for plate glass as ever they like, and then let a really good engineer solve them their problem…. Thus we may get something really satisfactory instead of another piece of polite archaeological humbug. Fortunately there is already one building in London which reveals what may be done by honest methods—I mean the Kodak building in Kingsway…. This admirable shop puts all its neighbours to shame by sheer reasonableness and good sense, for it has what they lack—essential dignity of style.

Again, there was an exhibition at Burlington House of the works of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema. The Royal Academicians had been denouncing Cézanne. This then was the kind of art they admired. Roger Fry was indignant. He devoted an article in the Nation to the exhibition. He began by saying that “Sir Lawrence’s products are typical of the purely commercial ideals of the age in which he grew up”. He went on to say that “he had undoubtedly conveyed the information that the people of that interesting and remote period” (the Roman Empire) had “their furniture, clothes, even their splendid marble villas made of highly scented soap”, and added that while no one grudged “so honest and capable a commercialist his fortune”, artists must protest “against the remissness and indifference of the governing classes who instead of enforcing the Adulterated Foods Act … stamp it all over with the Government stamp, indicating that it is guaranteed to be the best dairy-made butter”. “How long”, he concluded, “will it take to disinfect the Order of Merit of Tadema’s scented soap?” This was the signal for an astonishing outburst. Perhaps, since times have changed and Alma-Tadema’s marble is no longer as solid as it seemed, a few phrases are worth resurrecting. Sir Philip Burne-Jones began the attack. “Fortunately at this date”, he wrote, “the work of Alma-Tadema needs no sort of defence. It rests in the security of a practically unanimous European reputation.” But since Mr Fry had attacked it, and expressed no contrition when called to order, lovers of art must protest. But what reason for surprise was there? Mr Walter James demanded. It was the “third consecutive year in which Mr Fry has performed a war dance over the recently interred remains of a Royal Academician”. (The other corpses were apparently those of Mr E.A. Abbey, R.A., and Mr John M. Swan, R.A.) But of course, they were all agreed, the man who could champion the works of the Post-Impressionists was capable of anything. Yet even he must realise that “his malignant sneers at a great artist only just dead did no good but great harm” to his advertisement of Post-Impressionism. That Post-Impressionism “as at present known will have any real effect upon true art I think nobody believes”, was the opinion of Mr Richard H. Herford. And Sir William Richmond summed up: “Mr Fry’s position as a student of art, of connoisseurship and criticism is not strong enough to stand up against many more such suicidal egoisms”; and he “must not be surprised if he is boycotted by decent society”. To all of which Roger Fry could only reply that there were two standards of art and that they differed, and suggest that “the State should either endow both, or, better still, allow complete free trade in art. and refuse all subventions and all honours to artists’—a conclusion that was naturally unpalatable to Royal Academicians. And then the “ Roger Fry rabble’ \ as Professor Tonks called them, among them Lytton Strachey and Give Bell, joined in. and the battle raged merrily.

The venom and the vigour of those old feuds proved that the Post-Impressionist movement had some sting in it. Roger Fry was delighted. He would quote Sir “William’s boycott with great appreciation. “The poor things lose their heads altogether”, was his private comment in a letter. But the vigour of the movement was being proved much more seriously and effectively by the young artists themselves. They were absorbing the new ideas; they were besieging Roger Fry for advice and criticism; they were asking him to organise exhibitions. He was convinced that the young English artists were extraordinarily gifted. If they were given the opportunity, they could use it. But that was the problem. How in England, with an Academy that was enraged by Cézanne and delighted by Alma-Tadema, could they hope to make a living? It was always possible, perhaps useful, to go on denouncing the indifference of the governing classes in the columns of the Nation, to prove over and over again that the State only rewarded “the honest and capable commercialist”. Every week almost he could find some fresh instance “of the complete indifference of contemporary officials to spiritual things”. But something practical had to be done, even if his experiment at the Borough Polytechnic had shown him the difficulty.

Many ideas occurred to him. Some are expressed in the article “Art and Socialism” from which quotation has already been made. He shows there how the artist has nothing to hope from the plutocrat; nothing to hope from the aristocrat; and nothing to hope “from the gentlemen who administer … the public funds”. Frankly, he says, “one scarcely knows if things would be worse if Bumble or the Royal Academy were to become the patrons of art”. So he conceives that in the great State, the State of the future, things might be so arranged that “all our pictures would be made by amateurs”. The painter would earn his living “by some craft in which his artistic powers would be constantly occupied, though at a lower tension and in a humbler way”. “There are”, he goes on, “innumerable crafts, even besides those that are definitely artistic, which, if pursued for short hours … would leave a man free to pursue other callings in his leisure.” And with his love of the concrete, in order to put some of these ideas to the test of fact, he wrote certain paragraphs of this article in a railway station restaurant. He described what he actually saw in front of him. It was, as he said, “a painful catalogue”. The window was half filled with stained glass; the stained glass was covered by a lace curtain; the lace curtain was covered with patterns; the walls were covered with lincrusta walton; the tables were covered with ornate cotton cloths—in short, every object that his eye rested upon was covered with an “eczematous eruption”. And “not one of these things has been made because the makers enjoyed the making; not one has been bought because its contemplation would give any one pleasure”. Display was the end and explanation of it all. And horrible toil was involved in that display. The article ends with a vision of what might be possible in the future: “Ultimately, of course, when art had been purified of its present unreality by a prolonged contact with the crafts, society would gain a new confidence in its collective artistic judgment, and might even boldly assume the responsibility which at present it knows that it is unable to face. It might choose its poets and painters and philosophers and deep investigators, and make of such men and women a new kind of kings.”

Ultimately that may be the case; but in 1910 it was a vision in the far future. In 1913, art depended upon “quite small and humble people … people with a few hundreds a year”, upon people like himself. It was they who must transform the vision into fact. It was their business to destroy the railway restaurant and all that it symbolised and put something else in its place. A plan was sketched in talk. A company was to be formed; a workshop was to be started. The young artists were to make chairs and tables, carpets and pots that people liked to look at; that they liked to make. Thus they were to earn a living; thus they would be free to paint pictures, as poets wrote poetry, for pleasure not for money. Thus they would assert the freedom of art “from all trammels and tyrannies”. And the great danger which had seduced so many fine talents—the danger of becoming a “pseudo-artist”, the prostitute “who professed to sell beauty as the prostitute professed to sell love”, would be removed. He knew by this time the drudgery and the difficulty of putting such schemes into execution. He had first-hand knowledge both of artists and of business men and of the abuse that is the reward of one who tries to bring them together. But—“all the people in this new movement are alive and whatever they do has life”. There were the young artists and they looked upon him as their leader. The moment had come, he believed; that was proved by a show of Post-Impressionist pictures at Leicester. People flocked to look at the pictures. “I can’t understand the enthusiasm”, he wrote. “I went and lectured there. The gallery packed, crowds standing all the time and an extraordinary interest. It’s really very odd and sometimes frightens me.” The artists and the public seemed to be coming together. All that was wanted to make the union fruitful was a connecting link. As it happened a legacy had been left him; for the first time he had a little capital of his own to play with. He decided to make the venture himself, to float a company, and to start a workshop. Once more he went about explaining, expounding, persuading. “I’ve got £1500 and am going ahead”, he wrote to G.L. Dickinson. “Already an architect has given me an order and to-day a big firm of cotton printers has written to ask if I can supply designs and so far I haven’t published a word so it looks as though I had hit on the psychological moment…. God knows”, he added, “why I work so hard. I don’t. It’s a stupid plan but I suppose I dimly think the thing’s worth doing tho’ I couldn’t prove it to my own satisfaction.” In July 1913 the Omega workshops in Fitzroy Square were opened.

II

The Square remains, one of the few Bloomsbury squares that are still untouched and dignified, with its classical pillars, its frieze and the great urn in the middle, though the roar of the Tottenham Court Road sounds not far away. The house in which Roger Fry set up his workshop is there to-day—a house with a past of its own, a Georgian past, a Victorian past. A lady remembered it in her childhood; the Pre-Raphaelites, she said, had congregated there, and either Rossetti’s legs had appeared through the ceiling or the floor had given way and the dinner-table had crashed through into the cesspool beneath—which, she could not remember. It had a past, anyhow. But now the Georgian and the Victorian ghosts were routed. Two Post-Impressionist Titans were mounted over the doorway; and inside everything was bustle and confusion. There were bright chintzes designed by the young artists; there were painted tables and painted chairs; and there was Roger Fry himself escorting now Lady So-and-so, now a business man from Birmingham, round the rooms and doing his best to persuade them to buy. But before that stage was reached a great deal of business had to be transacted. The work was very heavy and it fell mainly upon him. “I have to think out all between the design and the finished product and how to sell it—also how to pay the artists, and it’s almost more than I can manage”, he wrote to G.L. Dickinson. Another letter gives further details:

I’ve hardly known which way to turn since I’ve been back for the number of things to do and people to see. Most of all I’ve had to work at the Omega workshops which is now fully started. It needs a tremendous lot of work to organise it properly. The artists are delightful people but ever so unpractical. When I think of how practical the French artists are I almost wish these weren’t the delightful vague impossible Englishmen that they are. But I think I can manage them and it’s very exciting. Our stuffs are being printed and the French firm that’s doing them is full of enthusiasm and are altering all their processes to get rid of the mechanical and return to older simpler methods. Already a big American firm wants to buy some with the right to use them as wallpapers which I don’t mean to let them have. The main difficulty is the fact that everyone is going to copy and exploit our ideas and it’ll need great business skill to prevent it. Altogether the situation is exciting and rather alarming. I’ve got to make it pay or goodness knows what 11 become of me, let alone the group of artists who are already dependent on it. God knows how they lived before they got their 30/– a week from my workshop.

It was as he said “very exciting”. The public was eager to buy; and the artists were eager to work. He was surprised by the excellence of their work. “The artists have a tremendous lot of invention and a new feeling for colour and proportion that astonish me”, he told Lowes Dickinson. “My fearful problem is to harness the forces I’ve got and to get the best out of them practically and it’s the deuce to do.” The truth of that last statement was soon to be proved. The Omega had been opened in July; in October four artists, three of whom were employed by the Omega, issued a circular addressed to possible patrons which began:

1 Brecknock Studios,
Brecknock Road, N.

Dear Sir,

Understanding that you are interested in the Omega Workshops, we beg to lay before you the following discreditable facts.

They detailed them. The first charge was that “The Direction of the Omega Workshops secured the decoration of the Post-Impressionist room at the Ideal Home Exhibition by a shabby trick, and at the expense of one of their members—Mr Wyndham Lewis, and an outside artist—Mr Spencer Gore”. The second charge was that the Direction of the Omega had suppressed “information in order to prevent a member from exhibiting in a Show of Pictures not organised by the Direction of the Omega”. But the circular did not confine itself to these alleged facts; it went on to express opinions of a highly damaging nature about the Omega Workshops and their Director. One passage ran as follows:

As to its tendencies in Art, they alone would be sufficient to make it very difficult for any vigorous art-instinct to long remain under that roof. The Idol is still Prettiness, with its mid-Victorian languish of the neck, and its skin of “greenery-yallery”, despite the Post-What-Not fashionableness of its draperies. This family party of strayed and dissenting Aesthetes, however, were compelled to call in as much modern talent as they could find, to do the rough and masculine work without which they knew their efforts would not rise above the level of a pleasant tea-party, or command more attention.

The reiterated assurances of generosity of dealing and care for art, cleverly used to stimulate outside interest, have then, we think, been conspicuously absent from the interior working of the Omega Workshops. This enterprise seemed to promise, in the opportunities afforded it by support from the most intellectual quarters, emancipation from the middleman-shark. But a new form of fish in the troubled waters of Art has been revealed in the meantime, the Pecksniff-shark, a timid but voracious journalistic monster, unscrupulous, smooth-tongued and, owing chiefly to its weakness, mischievous.

No longer willing to form part of this unfortunate institution, we the undersigned have given up our work there:

Frederick Etchells  Wyndham Lewis
C.J. Hamilton  E. Wadsworth

This document was sent to Roger Fry, who was abroad. He was not, apparently, greatly surprised; once more he remained “strangely calm”, as the following letter shows:

Many thanks for your letter [he wrote to Duncan Grant] and all the bother that you have gone through in fighting my battles. I think you’ve got to the bottom of the question…. I quite agree with you about Etchells. I always thought he would act on rather romantic impulses. The only thing is that I personally find it a little hard to think that he could turn them so completely against me after having been so very friendly and without ever listening to me. But I really want to help him and I quite expect that when he’s seen the thing in a more reasonable way we shall be able to.

I’ve not heard a word about the Ideal Home. Has it been a success and has there been any decent press on it? This place is magnificent and we work quite hard. I don’t know whether to any purpose. I’m afraid all I’ve done so far is to “take views” of the various objects of interest. I try to turn my back on the mediaeval castle and the distant town of Avignon, but the beastly things will get into my composition somehow or another.

However I have come definitely to the conclusion that the painting of pictures is too difficult a job for human beings. It’s evident from the history of art that you sink such an amount of talent and taste and thought and feeling in producing something completely tiresome wherefore I rejoice in the Omega because it is not beyond the wit of man to make a decent plate or a decent stuff.

Doucet sends you his amitiés. He’s just gone to bed very tired after a game of billiards.

Yours ever,
Roger Fry

The circular, however, had been sent to the press; and some of his friends urged Roger Fry to bring an action for libel. The Omega might be damaged, they pointed out, if such charges were left unanswered. But Roger Fry refused to take any steps. No legal verdict, as he observed, would clear his character or vindicate the Omega. Publishing correspondence would only advertise the gentlemen, who, he sometimes suspected, rather enjoyed advertisement. He was quite content to abide by the verdict of time—le seule classificateur impeccable, as The Times critic had observed in another connection. But the young artists themselves anticipated the verdict of time. They gave him then and there the most practical and emphatic proofs of their confidence. They were quite ready to go on working for him; and, what was perhaps more remarkable, he was quite ready to go on working for them. The storm in a tea-cup blew over; though he noted bubbles from time to time—“The Lewis group have got hold of the New Age critic and he’s written an amusing thing wh. I send you—please send it back…. The Lewis group do nothing even now [March 1914] but abuse me. Brezska who sees them says he’s never seen such a display of vindictive jealousy among artists” (to Duncan Grant).

But he had much more important matters to attend to than storms in tea-cups. The “fearful problem” presented by the Omega was very real. It showed signs of immediately becoming a great success. Orders were coming in. The public was amused and interested. The papers devoted a great deal of space to the new venture. Interviewers were sent to Fitzroy Square, and one of them has recorded his impressions of the Omega in those early days. Mr Fry, he says, took him round and he asked Mr Fry to explain his intentions. “It is time”, said Mr Fry, “that the spirit of fun was introduced into furniture and into fabrics. We have suffered too long from the dull and the stupidly serious.” He took up a wool work cushion. “What do you think that represents?” said Mr Fry. “A landscape?” the interviewer hazarded. Mr Fry laughed. “It is a cat lying on a cabbage playing with a butterfly”, he said. “It was a mid-Victorian idea,” he explained, “but it was not treated in a mid-Victorian manner. The coloured designs are as full of colour and rhythm as the others were full of dullness and stiffness. The interviewer looked and at last saw the butterfly though he tailed to see the cat. Then Mr Fry showed him a chair. He said it was ca conversational chair”, a witty chair; he could imagine Mr Max Beerbohm sitting on it. Its legs were bright-blue and yellow. and brilliant bands of intense blue and green were worked round a black seat. Certainly it was much more amusing than an ordinary chair. Then there was a design for a wall decoration; a landscape with a purple sky. bright moon and blue mountains. “If people get tired of one landscape”, said Mr Fry, “they can easily have another. It can be done in a very short time.” Then he brought out a screen upon which there was a picture of a circus. The interviewer was puzzled by the long waists, bulging necks and short legs of the figures. “But how much wit there is in those figures”, said Mr Fry. “Art is significant deformity.” The interviewer was interested. Upstairs they went to the great white work-room, where one artist was at work upon a ceiling, another was painting what appeared to be “a very large raccoon with very flexible joints” for the walls of a nursery. Then down again to the showroom where the journalist was made to look at chintzes, cushions, lamp-shades, garden tables and also “a radiantly coloured dress of gossamery silk” designed by a French artist. Mr Fry was tackling the subject of women’s dress. Upon this one the artist had designed “a mass of large foliage and a pastoral scene, and maidens dancing under the moon, while a philosopher and a peasant stood by”. It was very beautiful, the interviewer agreed, but would English women ever have the courage to wear it? “Oh,” said Mr Fry, “people have to be educated….” So at last the interviewer took himself off, prophesying that posterity would hold the Omega in honour because “it had brought beauty and careful workmanship into the common things of life” and in high good temper for whatever else might be said, the Omega, or Mr Fry, had “certainly stimulated one’s intellect and one’s curiosity”.

Another visitor was Arnold Bennett. “I went up to the Omega workshops by appointment to see Roger Fry. Arrived as arranged at 2.30. I was told he was out. Then that he was at his studio, down Fitzroy Street. I went there and rang. He opened the door. ‘Come and have lunch’, he said. ‘I’ve had lunch; it’s 2.30’, I said. ‘How strange!’ he said. ‘I thought it was only 1.15.’ Then as he went upstairs he cried out to a girl above: ‘Blank (her Christian name), it’s 2.30’ as a great item of news. Fry expounded his theories. He said there was no original industrial art in England till he started, i.e. untraditional. He said lots of goodish things and was very persuasive and reasonable. Then he took me to the show-rooms in Fitzroy Square, and I bought a few little things…. I began to get more and more pleased with the stuff, and then I left with two parcels.”

Roger Fry had to say a great many goodish things and to be very persuasive and reasonable before people left with parcels under their arms. But the show-room side of the business was a very minor branch of his work at the Omega. He had also to deal with business men. As Arnold Bennett also records, he met with very serious opposition in that quarter. English firms, he said, “roared with laughter at his suggestion that they should do business together”. When he produced his designs they would not take them. “One firm quoted an impossible price when he asked them to make rugs to his design at his own risk.” But though they roared with laughter, the business men were, as he had foretold, quick to see how the designs could be copied and made agreeable to the public taste. Emasculated versions of the original Omega ideas appeared in the furniture shops and were more acceptable to the ordinary person than the original. Further, the original besides being original had to be practical. Chairs had to stand upon their legs; dyes must not fade, stuffs must not shrink. Sometimes there were failures. Cracks appeared. Legs came off. Varnish ran. He had to placate angry customers and to find new methods.

He had to hunt out carpenters and upholsterers—little men in back streets who could be trusted to carry out designs and to make serviceable objects. He had to keep an eye upon estimates and accounts. Altogether there were “almost endless small worries about details”. And then when the days work was over, “I have to be bagman”, he told G.L. Dickinson. “I go out into smart society and advertise my schemes…. You can guess if I’m busy.”

Lowes Dickinson, it may be presumed, had no need to guess. And sometimes the endless small worries that fell to Roger Fry’s lot made him doubt if he “could stick it out”. But again the excitement was great. Not only was the thing itself worth doing, but it opened a new world that appealed to his insatiable curiosity. He visited factories; he interviewed the makers of stuffs and carpets and wallpapers and furniture; he tried to understand the problems which confront manufacturers. And when he had found out how things are made there was the excitement of trying to make them himself. It seemed a natural division of labour—while his brain spun theories his hands busied themselves with solid objects. He went down to Poole and took lessons in potting. Soon a row of handmade pots stood on the studio floor. “It is fearfully exciting … when the stuff begins to come up between your fingers”, he wrote.

As his readers may remember, he had a habit, when he had found the word he wanted, of working that word, perhaps too hard. This spring the word was “exciting”. Everything was “exciting”. He went for a holiday to Italy. He revised his views upon Piero della Francesca. “Incomparably beyond all the men of the High Renaissance”, he commented. “He’s an almost pure artist with scarcely any dramatic content, or indeed anything that can be taken out of its own form.” He discovered new country to the north of Rome that was “very exciting”. Even England that summer—Bird’s Custard Island as he called it—though there were “gloomy inky black shadows round the trees and no clear-cut shapes or bright colours”—how could any artist possibly work there?—was “very exciting”. Above all the Omega was flourishing. Orders were pouring in. Brezska had sold several drawings. Lady (Ian) Hamilton had given a commission for stained-glass windows and a mosaic floor. The French and the German manufacturers were placing orders. He was able to pay his young artists their thirty shillings a week.

But the excitement was not confined to the Omega. Smart society yielded some very good friends to the bagman. There were parties; there were plays; there were operas and exhibitions. London was full of new enterprises. He went to see the Russian dancers, and they, of course suggested all kind of fresh possibilities, and new combinations of music, dancing and decoration. He went to the Opera with Arthur Balfour. It was Ariadne, by Strauss, and he was enthusiastic. “I do think seriously he’s incomparably better than Wagner, more of a pure musician…. It’s still not the music I want, but I think it clears the way for it.” The way seemed cleared in many directions at the moment. He had fallen very much in love—that was the most exciting thing of all. With complete openness, for the Quakers had taught him to be as honest about love as, indirectly, they had shown him the evils of suppressing it, he shared his excitement about that too. The most incongruous places—the Tottenham Court Road, for instance, on a rainy night—were lit up as he talked of this new hope in his life and of all that it meant to him.

So that exciting summer wore on. The garden at Guildford was ablaze with flowers as he sat writing to Lowes Dickinson—“It’s a mass of blue anchusas and red poppies and yellow and pink water lilies and Julian and Pamela are playing about with an old donkey they’ve hired”. He was reading Goldie’s articles in the Manchester Guardian. “My dear, they’re splendid. You know you do write better than anyone. It’s always alive and humorous and unexpected and so beautifully passive to reality. They’ve given me enormous pleasure.” All sorts of people were coming down—Princess Lichnowsky. Lady Ottoline Morrell G.L. Dickinson, a Chinese poet, a French poet, business men. young artists. He was working harder than he had ever worked before, and with more hope. Many of the things that he had worked for seemed to be coming within reach. Civilisation, a desire for the things of the spirit, seemed to be taking hold not merely of a small group, but to be breaking through among the poor, among the rich. As for himself though he knew that he often seemed “self-sufficient and headstrong . though he was conscious of a great indifference to most of the things men work for , though “success seems such a tiny thing compared with what I have lost”, he was happier than he had been since his wife’s illness. “We are at last”, he summed it up, “becoming a little civilised.” And then of course the war came.

[]

Chapter IX

The War Years

I

That a break must be made in every life when August 1914 is reached seems inevitable. But the fracture differs, according to what is broken, and Roger Fry was a man who lived many lives, the active, the contemplative, the public and the private. The war affected them all—it was, he said, “like living in a bad dream”. And the first shock was terrible. He had come to believe that a more civilised period in human life was beginning; now that hope seemed ended. “I hoped never to live to see this mad destruction of all that really counts in life. We were just beginning to be a little civilised and now it’s all to begin over again…. Oh if only France would keep out and leave Slavs and Teutons to their infernal race hatreds! But we are all entrapped in the net of a heartless bureaucracy”—such are two exclamations in August 1914.

But there were reasons why the shock affected him differently from some of his friends. He was not surprised, once the first shock was over, as G.L. Dickinson was surprised. “I suppose the difference is that I’ve known since Helen that the world was made for the worst conceivable horrors and Goldie somehow has thought it will stop somewhere”, he wrote to Vanessa Bell. “The war seems to knock the bottom out of his universe in a quite peculiar way. I was really glad when a knock came at the door at 10 o’clock and a thirsty and supperless Desmond [MacCarthy] appeared. So we were able to talk of all sorts of things … And there was another difference between him and some of his friends. He had not to change his work; he had only to work the harder. The problem of the Omega—how to pay his artists their thirty shillings a week—was more of a problem than ever. The same letter goes on to say therefore that he is “plugging away at his tables”. And again he had not to reconsider his beliefs or to reconstruct his life. He had been waging his own war against the adversary for many years now, and his life, as he said, had been full of bad dreams. The adversary was now more formidable; the bad dreams were not fitful but continuous. Thus the war was not so much a break as an intensification of many old struggles.

But the effect of the war upon the many lives that he lived simultaneously is best shown perhaps by piecing together his own day-to-day comments as he scribbled them down in letters to his friends. They were hurried letters—the pen was a very poor substitute for talk. And the pen in the studio in Fitzroy Street was often lost. It was an untidy room. He cooked there, slept there, painted there and wrote there. There was always a picture on the easel, and on the table an arrangement of flowers or of fruit, of eggs or of onions—some still life that the charwoman was admonished on a placard “Do not touch”. It was there that he was living in the first months of the war.

“The Omega still struggles on,” the letters begin in the autumn of 1914, “but it doesn’t anything like pay expenses.” He is interrupted by a visit from Mr—of the British Museum, an expert on pottery. Mr—says that “the Omega pottery is far better than any modern pottery he has seen. He praised the turquoise in particular … though the peculiar beauty of the colour is, I think, more due to some mistake in the firing than to calculation.” Then he is off to Poole, to practise throwing, glazing and painting on china. He is making a dinner set. The lodgings are squalid; the cast-iron mantelpiece has a design of classical ladies’ heads upon it; he must find some way of deleting them; clay perhaps will do it; but he is out working at the pottery from dawn till dark. At Durbins he has a family of refugees who have “nearly wrecked the household”. And he realises that “the war isn’t going to be over the winter. A kind of deadness through the prolongation of the horror” is coming over him. “Oh the boredom of war—the ways of killing men are so monotonous compared with the ways of living.” His old suspicions of British hypocrisy are revived. “I can’t say just now the whole truth [about the bombardment of Reims Cathedral], which is that no bombardment can do anything like the damage that the last restoration did.” But France, the centre of civilisation, must be supported. He is full of admiration too for the English soldiers. “I had a talk with Sir Ian Hamilton, who is commanding the forces in England. He is the really fine type of soldier who never allows such feelings as hatred of the enemy to get the better of them.” And so the letters pass to Ms private life: “Why I am happy, why I am unhappy” is the title of one pencilled page.

1915…. Interest in the Omega revives. People are discovering that they must have houses and furnish them. Customers begin to return. “Had there been no war we should have been doing a very good trade by now, judging from the greater appreciation and liking we get for our work.” But the war is coming closer. Doucet (one of the Omega artists) is at the front. A friend to whom he was much attached had lost her son, her daughter-in-law and their six children, in the Lusitania. He must see her—he must do what he can to comfort her. He is off in April to work with his sisters in organising the Quaker relief fund in France. He attempts to see Doucet. Without a pass, and with a letter from the German Ambassadress in his pocket, he ventures into the front line, is arrested as a spy, and only saved by the intervention of the head of the Friends’ Mission. But he saw Doucet, who was killed a week or two later. Then he went on to stay with the Simon Bussys at Roquebrune. There he painted. “I see that all my efforts in England will sooner or later be likely to fail through the war, and that I must aim at painting as my serious occupation.” Back in England he finds the Omega languishing. Can it be revived by “doing hats and dresses as being things which people must have quand même”? No sooner is that scheme set on foot than air raids begin. One day that autumn “I found everyone at the Omega in a state of panic”. The suffragist lady who rented the top flat “typed all through the raid without looking out of the window, and was much disappointed to find that she had missed seeing the Zeppelin over the Square”. But the concierge gave notice and he must find another—“raid proof if possible”. In November he held a show of some of his pictures. Much to his surprise it is successful. “30 or 40 people come daily. But of course I don’t sell.” And “most of the critics are very cross with me”, though Sir Claude Phillips is enthusiastic, “chiefly because he found a moral, unintended by me, in the Kaiser picture”. Meanwhile, the newspapers are becoming more and more disgusting. “The tyranny of the Northcliffe press is intolerable…. If only Asquith had hung him [Northcliffe] at the beginning of the war as an undesirable native how much better off we should be.” And the Germans evidently “are going, to stick at nothing. It only shows to what length of inhumanity devotion to one’s country leads one, for I don’t believe they are naturally inhuman.” Privately, unhappiness is much greater than happiness. He is suffering acutely. He has a feeling “that the whole centre and meaning of my life” has been destroyed.

1916…. The war is closing in. It is pressing upon non-combatants. The servant difficulty is acute. At Durbins he is camping out alone; the children are at school; the house is too big for him; he has an ineffective old Scotchwoman “who can talk but can’t cook”. He does the washing-up himself. On the other hand, the Omega surprisingly flourishes. “The Bank balance has risen from £27 to £130 after paying a quarter’s rent.” Norway and Sweden are beginning to buy. California is “clamouring for our pottery”.

And he has been commissioned to decorate a room in Berkeley Square, for which he is making a “large circular rug and tables in inlaid wood”. Public affairs, however, are going from bad to worse, “The persecution of the C.O.’s seems to be getting more and more horrible.” He is taking up the cudgels on their behalf. A sharp correspondence with Lord Curzon and Mrs Asquith leads to the comment: “It is terrible, isn’t it, that we have lost all the liberties that we set out to fight for. I think England will become unendurable.” One Conscientious Objector anyhow is employed by the Omega. And he is writing testimonials for friends. “I have known Mr R.C. Trevelyan for twenty-five years. I can state most emphatically that he is a man of serious and genuine convictions and of strong principles….” The children are a comfort. At Easter he bicycles about Oxfordshire with Pamela: “Pam is delightful to travel with. She loves loafing about towns and looking at shops as much as I do”, and Julian at Bedales “delighted me by going to bed when I lectured”. There was a rapid journey with Madame Vandervelde to Paris; visits to Ministers; visits to the “little artists’ rabbit warren behind the Gare Montparnasse”. The painters are all discussing Seurat. “You know … how we gradually come to think he was the great man we’d overlooked…. The new Matisses are magnificent, more solid and more concentrated than ever. Picasso a little dérouté for the moment but doing some splendid things all the same.” Then England again; and work at the pottery at Poole. More and more of the work was falling on him; the Omega artists were being called up. At Poole he had to work “13 hours one day” and “didn’t finish till it was dark on Saturday, working on alone in the empty factory…. At the last moment I found I’d forgotten to put handles on [Madame Vandervelde’s] dishes and there was no time to prepare them and let them get stiff as one ought. So I had to invent a handle which could be made instantly out of a ribbon of clay…. Miss Sand’s umbrella stand was a terrible job. It sagged and bulged and threatened utter collapse but I managed at last to punch and squeeze and cajole it into shape.” And then he has to give his mind to a bedstead: “I’m afraid the varnish has rather a bad effect on the tempera red lead. It seemed to run and clot in places in a way I’ve never seen. But it isn’t serious unless you look close.” He is always being sent for to the workshop to talk to possible clients. Among them was W.B. Yeats. They argued. “I had a huge discussion on aesthetics with him…. I impressed him so much that … he actually bought linen and carpets—rather a triumph for my dialectics.” But he was feeling “very seedy”. Something seemed wrong inside. A new doctor advised a new diet—potatoes and rice. The wear and tear of the war was beginning to rub sore places on the surface of some old friendships. McTaggart was becoming more and more reactionary. Lowes Dickinson, whose political views were sympathetic, “has no sympathy or understanding for art so that we never talk of it, and my work is just a subject for jokes with him”. His temper was short. A deputation from the Arts and Crafts Society provokes an outburst. “Three sour and melancholy elderly hypocrites full of sham modesty and noble sentiments” came to the Omega to choose exhibits for a show at Burlington House. “They represent to perfection the hideous muddle-headed sentimentality of the English—wanting to mix in elevated moral feeling with everything.” And in spite of their moral feelings they “wanted to put me in a sort of dark cupboard and I got really angry…” and the show as a whole “ is such incredibly lunatic humbug and genteel nonsense as you could hardly believe possible”. But he found relief in the picture he was painting—a copy of Buffalmacco. “The more I study it the more I am amazed at it. It seems to me to be just the next step that I’m aiming at. It goes one further than Seurat.” And he was reading Stendhal with enthusiasm. But he was “horribly lonely” that winter. The “old Scotch witch” had been replaced by a slavey “bred in genteel houses and with only one conception of housework—that there must be a tray under everything”. So he was developing bit by bit a habit of solitude and was struggling as best he might to find some means by which “out of the wreck of all that seemed safe and central” something might yet be preserved. But he was bitter; irritable, and at times “the struggle seems hopeless”.

In 1917 there were more air raids. That meant fresh difficulties with the staff at Fitzroy Square. Also the supply of coal was failing. “Some days you can get 6d. worth of briquettes, other days not even that.” The pipes froze; he mounted the roof at Durbins with a pail of boiling water but failed to thaw them. Water rushed over the walls; the bath remained cold. In spite of air raids and frost the Omega must be made to form a centre. A play by Lowes Dickinson was acted there. He used it too to show pictures. One show was of children’s drawings. He had met Marian Richardson, “a school mistress in the Black country”. “She’d been up in town”, he says, “to try and get a post in London and brought her class drawings. She’d been refused without a word, and I didn’t wonder when I saw what she’d been at…. She has invented methods of making the children put down their own visualisations—drawing with eyes shut &c. I assure you they’re simply marvellous. Many of them are a kind of cross between early miniatures and Seurat but all are absolutely individual and original. Everyone who’s seen them is amazed. John was in and said quite truly it makes one feel horribly jealous…. Anyhow here’s an inexhaustible supply of real primitive art and real vision which the government suppresses at a cost of hundreds of thousands of pounds. If the world weren’t the most crazily topsy-turvy place one would never believe it possible.” In the showroom he started a “sort of evening club…. It meets once a week and is a great success. We hope to get all the more interesting people in London to come. We hadn’t enough chairs and didn’t want to buy them so we made great pillows of sacking filled with straw and put them round the room against the wall. [A sketch.] … Yeats and Arnold Bennett came last night.” Arnold Bennett records that he came on “Friday March 2nd 1917”. “After dining alone at the Reform I went up to Roger Fry’s newly-constituted Omega Club in Fitzroy Square. Only about 2 chairs. The remainder of the seats are flattish canvas bags cast on floor near walls, and specially made for this. An exhibition of kids’ drawings round the walls. Crowd, including Madame Vandervelde, Lytton Strachey, the other Strachey, Yeats, Borenius &c. They all seemed very intelligent.” But there was no comfort to be found in the public world: “… it seems as though nothing would break the evil spell and as though we should drift on forever into an utter decline of civilisation. I dined with the Hamiltons a night or two ago and found what seemed intelligent military opinion entirely sceptical, as I had long been, about any chance of decision on the Western front…. Really the white man’s burden isn’t the poor blacks but his own incredible idealistic folly.” He was painting—a copy of S. Francis by Cimabue, revising his misconceptions of that artist, and making discoveries. “… When one begins to study the forms in detail one finds just the kind of purposeful distortion and pulling of planes that you get in El Greco and Cézanne and the same kind of sequence in the contours.” He was trying his hand at portraits too—“It’s odd how I get likeness without character”, he reflected; and Viola Tree failed to come—”… sitters are the devil and there’s nothing so unsettles one as waiting for one who doesn’t come”. As to his own drawing he reflected, “I’m beginning to find out about my drawing … the way that is to unhitch the mind. You’ve no idea what a difficult thing that is for a creature like me that’s always on the spot.” Was that why the unhinged, the insane always came to him? His “incorrigible sanity” seemed to attract them. An account follows of advice asked and given. The Omega, which refused to die or to live, was becoming a heavy burden. A whole day was frittered away doing “horrid little things” at the workshop; among others choosing a lining for a bedspread with a “disagreeable smart lady” who talked with the fashionable drawl. “If I could only see my way to get quit of it altogether I would”, he groaned.

Then spring came. He lunched with Madame Vandervelde, and met Elgar and Bernard Shaw. “Elgar”, Mr Shaw records, “talked music so voluminously that Roger had nothing to do but eat his lunch in silence. At last … Roger … began in his beautiful voice … ‘After all, there is only one art: all the arts are the same’. I heard no more; for my attention was taken by a growl from the other side of the table. It was Elgar, with his fangs bared and all his hackles bristling, in an appalling rage. ‘Music’, he spluttered, ‘is written on the skies for you to note down. And you compare that to a damned imitation.’ There was nothing for Roger to do but either seize the decanter and split Elgar’s head with it, or else take it like an angel with perfect dignity. Which latter he did.” And with Madame Vandervelde he went to Dulwich. “The Poussins [in Dulwich Gallery] are gorgeous. My word, what a composer. Also the finest Rubens in the world, and a Guido Reni which I found myself admiring seriously.” He half thought of taking an old house with a magnolia tree in the garden and of retiring to Dulwich for life. But there was Durbins—he had no servants; but friends still came down. “Gertler came for the week end and we had endless talks on art. Gerder is really passionately an artist—a most rare and refreshing thing…. The fact is, artists are a different race…. He went wild over my photos and reproductions.” Goldie Dickinson came; Clive Bell came: “We had a very good time together…. He’s amazing in the quantity and flow of his mind, and the quality gets better I think.” The gardener had been called up. The weeds were rampant. He took on the job of weeding himself. “I quite understand Maynard’s [Keynes’s] passion for weeding. When once it gets hold of you it’s irresistible…. I’ve learnt to scythe properly at last…. And now I must finish planting the cauliflowers.” In London there were more raids. One sent him to sit in the basement of Heal’s shop, where he was hanging pictures—“an absurd and boring proceeding”. Another raid he watched from his window in Fitzroy Street. “It was like a game being played high up with purest blue sky and dazzling light.” During the full moon he made Durbins into a refuge for some of his friend’s children. “It’s rather a business, and I’m so seedy I hardly know how to make all the arrangements.” Internal pains had not yielded to his diet of rice and potatoes, and he was trying yet another doctor. “I begin to feel I should like someone to look after me instead of always looking after the innumerable helpless ones,” he admits.

So autumn came, and he tried to finish his pictures for a show in the midst of other distractions. “It’s been a fearful rush, ending yesterday afternoon with me painting in my bedroom (for light) and … and … and … all trying to talk to me at once about their separate affairs.” The show of flower pictures was a success. But it was difficult to feel elated by success. The cold was horrible. Again the pipes froze; again hot water was poured from pails; and “Julian dragged me off to a pond three miles away through a bitter North wind to skate … and I enjoyed it very much when I had once started”. He visited his parents at Failand. He was amazed by his father’s vitality. “My father has just worked out with me a most admirable letter on the Pope’s peace proposals which I hope will come out and may do good. He’s splendid about the war. It’s very odd which side people come out on.”

So 1917 came to an end; and he noted how the struggle to keep going was almost intolerable; both publicly and privately. He spoke of the “sadness and numbness of my life”. Happiness had left him, he felt; and he was training himself to live “only on outside fringes”.

January 1918 begins with a penal draught of a poem.

“Accidia” it is called. “Accidia”, he explains, “is the sin of gloominess.” The gloomy, he says, are the sinners who do not enjoy life, whom Dante punishes by “eternal fog and blackness and I think mud”. Accidia was a great sin; it must be fought. But it was hard; for the cold was bitter; and food was getting scarce. The gift of a rabbit was very welcome. But again, to his surprise, the Omega improved. Sales increased “and I am the only person who can be called upon to do designs”. Odd jobs multiplied. He was helping to produce a play by Zangwill. “I’ve spent the whole day at the theatre seeing about the dress rehearsal of Zangwill’s play. My scene is really a great success.” He met Diaghileff and “have hopes that later on he may give us some decorations to do for a new ballet”. Also “I had an amusing time on Sunday with the Empire builder [Sir James Currie]…. I spent Sunday afternoon composing an inscription for his and Kitchener’s busts at Khartoum—an odd job for me, but it was amusing trying to turn the usual official humbug into something real.” He was also trying his hand at translating the Lysistrata for Madame Donnay. “I’ve never imagined such indecency possible on the stage. It would be fun if they could really do it, but of course no one could now. What civilised people the Greeks were!…”

But his health was worse. He was constantly suffering severe internal pain which the doctors failed to diagnose. He went to a new doctor. “He wanted me to have had jaundice very much but I couldn’t oblige him. He’s given me a new treatment with all manner of strange and potent drugs which makes me very giddy. In fact I’ve been rather bad of late.” He even contemplated taking a week’s rest, “sitting out if it’s fine enough and lying down after every meal”. But rest was impossible; the pains increased and so in despair “I’ve had recourse to a much advertised quack remedy…. I hardly like to say it but I can’t help thinking it’s doing me good.”

Public affairs seemed worse than ever. “Oh the un-fathomable beastliness of our newspapers!” Once there seemed a chance of peace: but ‘these beastly intriguing politicians will really bring the whole thing to a smash”. His father, whose views on the war he found unexpectedly sympathetic, began to tail. He ‘can hardly speak loud enough to be heard and can’t move a muscle”. But the Fry constitution is indomitable. There was no immediate danger. Friends were his great consolation. That summer he made a new one—André Gide. He brought him down to Guildford. “He’s a real event in my life at a time when events are very rare. I feel almost as tho’ I’d always known him. That I haven’t is evident from the fact that I never suspected him of being a musician, but when I showed him my virginals he sat down and played all the old Italian things I have as no one ever played them before and exactly as I have always dreamt that they should be played. He’s almost too ridiculously my counterpart in taste and feeling. It’s like finding a twin. I exaggerate of course. We should differ on a hundred things and he’s much more gifted than I am but still it’s a strange likeness in the point of view.—But we mostly talk poetry and I’ve got from him immense quantities of books to read which will keep me going for ages”. Heine, Tchekov, Lord Dunsany, Colette, Havelock Ellis, Romain Rolland, Schreiner (Sea Parasitism), Tristan Bernard; Durkheim; Schlumberger; Pierre Weber; Paul Fort; Levy Bruhl—those are some of the names jotted down in a note-book; in addition to the usual learned works by French and German Art Experts. He was reading too Harris’s Life of Oscar Wilde—“an amazing book and frightfully tragic. Also confirms all my beliefs of the impossibility of art in England. I don’t think any other civilisation is so recalcitrant to art. However you’ll say I’m back in my obsession. But I wish you would read it and see what happened then and would happen again if ever the British public could get its teeth into an artist.”

So the summer of 1918 wore on; peace seemed further away than ever; he took stock of his resources against the winter. He had saved one cwt. of coal from last year. He had replaced the slavey with her trays by a married couple—“The Shepherd and the Shepherdess” he called them. They were a delightful pair. But travel was becoming impossible. There were no porters and no taxis. A page is filled with a sketch of himself heavily burdened leading a procession of small boys carrying the family luggage from the station to Durbins. The Omega flourished, then flagged. It would not die, and it would not live. He could scarcely face another year of that struggle, he felt. “I really think the Omega will have to shut up. It’s too discouraging now. I’m having to pay all the time and I can’t keep it up.” Then in October, while he was paying a visit to Failand, his father died. “It was infinitely quicker and better than I had feared”, he wrote. It was the end of a long relationship. They had had much in common, and many differences. His father and mother had shared his failures but they had not shared his success. He had not realised perhaps how much his own unhappiness had saddened his father’s life. And now it was over. There were many reasons that autumn, both public and private, to make him write more despondently than ever before. He said how he had failed to achieve “the kind of intimate companionship that my domestic nature longs for”; how “I’ve missed marriage which was what I wanted, and there’s no means of getting a substitute”; how “after all these years of pain spent to try to save something from the wreck” all seemed wasted.

And then at last, as the autumn wore on, the cloud lifted. “Isn’t Prince Max’s speech splendid?” he exclaimed. It was almost impossible to believe that peace was at hand. At last the Armistice was signed. “Isn’t the relief immense?” he wrote. “But how much there is to do now…. I feel it’s the beginning not the end.”

II

The war years then, as these scattered and incongruous fragments show, broke into many of the lives that Roger Fry lived simultaneously. It was no longer possible to believe that the world generally was becoming more civilised. The war had killed, or was about to kill, his own private venture, the Omega. It had destroyed the hope of an annual exhibition in which English painters were to muster their forces at the Grafton Galleries. And private happiness, though this lay beyond the reach of any war, had once again eluded him. He had no centre of private security in which to shelter from the public catastrophe. But civilisation, art, personal relationships, though they might be damaged, were not to be destroyed by any war, unless indeed one gave up one’s belief in them. And that was impossible. He fought his old battles on their behalf, as the letters show, with many different weapons. They were humble and practical battles for the most part—with business firms, with public men, with private customers. He cooked; he washed up; he made pots; designed rugs and tables; showed visitors round the Omega; found work for Conscientious Objectors; fought on their behalf with politicians; did what he could to pay his artists their thirty shillings a week; and in one way or another he tried his best to make the Omega, though chairs were lacking, a centre in which some kind of civilised society might find a lodging.

But he fought the bad dream most effectively with his brain. “My intellectual life”, he wrote at the end of the war, “is perhaps keener than ever.” Throughout the war he went on writing articles, writing letters to the papers on behalf of this cause or that, and lecturing all over the country. Very little mention is made in his letters of his criticism. “I’ve been doing an article for the Burlington…. I had just time to scribble a few notes for my lecture in the train…—that activity is dismissed casually enough, as if it could be taken for granted. But there is one paper—Art and Life—read to the Fabians during the war, which helps to explain how it was that he survived the war, and not with his intellect merely. He there makes “a violently foreshortened survey of the history of art”, and concludes that “the usual assumption of a direct and decisive connection between art and life is by no means correct”. Art and life are two rhythms, he says—the word “rhythm” was henceforth to occur frequently in his writing—“and in the main the two rhythms are distinct, and as often as not play against each other…. What this survey suggests to me is that if we consider this special spiritual activity of art we find it no doubt open at times to influences from life, but in the main self-contained…. I admit of course that it is always conditioned more or less by economic changes, but these are rather conditions of its existence at all than directive influences. I also admit that under certain conditions the rhythms of life and of art may coincide with great effect on both; but in the main the two rhythms are distinct, and as often as not play against each other.”

This suggests, what the letters also confirm, that there were two rhythms in his own life. There was the hurried and distracted life; but there was also the still life. With callers coming, the telephone ringing, and fashionable ladies asking advice about their bedspreads, he went back to the studio at Fitzroy Street to contemplate Giotto, to look at a picture by Buffalmacco, and to remark “That’s the next step I’m aiming at”. If he survived the war, it was perhaps that he kept the two rhythms in being simultaneously. But, it is tempting to ask, were they distinct? It seems as if the aesthetic theory were brought to bear upon the problems of private life. Detachment, as he insisted over and over again, is the supreme necessity for the artist. Was it not equally necessary if the private life were to continue? That rhythm could only grow and expand if it were detached from the deformation which is possession.

To live fully, to live gaily, to live without falling into the great sin of Accidia which is punished by fog, darkness and mud, could only be done by asking nothing for oneself. It was difficult to put that teaching into practice. Yet in his private life he had during those difficult years forced himself to learn that lesson. “It was a kind of death to me”, he wrote of that long struggle, “and it is a pale and disembodied ghost that’s survived….” But it was no pale and disembodied ghost who opened the door if one knocked at it in December 1918 as Desmond MacCarthy had knocked at it in August 1914. He was huddled in an overcoat over the stove, writing. He was worn; he looked older; his cheeks were more cavernous; his face more lined than before. But he was as eager as ever to talk “about all sorts of things”, and the room was if possible still more untidy. Mrs Filmer had obeyed the command on the placard “Do not touch”. Mrs Filmer had not touched. Rows of dusty medicine bottles stood on the mantelpiece; frying pans were mixed with palettes; some plates held salad, others scrapings of congealed paint. The floor was strewn with papers. There were the pots he was making, there were samples of stuffs and designs for the Omega. But on the table, protected by its placard, was the still life—those symbols of detachment, those tokens of a spiritual reality immune from destruction, the immortal apples, the eternal eggs. He was delighted to stop work and to begin talking. But directly the friend was gone, the article would be finished, and directly the light dawned upon that very untidy room he would be at work upon his picture. Whatever the theory, whatever the connection between the rhythms of life and of art, there could be no doubt about the sensation—he had survived the war.

[]

Chapter X

Vision and Design

I

It was the beginning not the end, he wrote to his mother when the Armistice was signed. But in order that there might be a beginning, there had also to be an end. And it was difficult to make that end. The Omega too had survived the war, but in a badly crippled condition. A fresh spurt of business came, of course, with the peace; but then three of the staff went down with influenza; the auditors complained of unbusinesslike book-keeping, and Roger Fry had to pay certain debts out of his own pocket. At last, when it came to selling two chairs for four pounds “after being abject for a whole afternoon”, the struggle seemed no longer worth the effort. By March 1919 he determined to make an end of it; and in June of that year he presided over a sale of goods at the Omega workshops.

Rather bitterly Roger Fry watched the public buying linens and pots at half price which they had refused to buy at the full price. They might so easily have turned failure into success. Even now, could he have found the right manager, or carried on himself for a little longer, the business might have struck roots and flourished. It was on the brink of success when he dropped it. “Nobody knows”, one of the press gossips remarked, “why he is giving up the Omega place…. Everyone wants a Roger Fry house … perhaps he can’t live with his own wallpapers…. Lady Fry, his mother, dislikes his frantic colour schemes, and the family in general will be tempted to say T told you so’ when he puts up the shutters. But I admire him”, the gossip concluded, “for all that. He looks good—he looks like one of the early Italian saints he writes about.”

Unwittingly the gossip had put his finger upon one of the sore places that this failure had left behind it. Many people would be tempted to say “I told you so when he put up the shutters. It was not the first time that Roger Fry had failed, and this failure, unlike the others, left unpleasant consequences behind it. He had lost the money that his friends had invested, as well as his own. Also “drenched by Post-Impressionism and immersed in his Omega business”, Roger Fry, as Sir Charles Holmes records, “now seemed by general consent to be out of the running” for directorships and appointments. Once more he was without a settled source of income. And when he came to survey his work later he was by no means sure that he had done anything to make the railway restaurant less eczematous, though there was a notable change, superficially, in the shop windows. The English, it seemed to him, always attack an original idea; then debase it; and when they have rendered it harmless, proceed to swallow it whole. “Twenty years ago”, he wrote in The Listener, “I organised the Omega workshops with a view to creating just that kind of art applied to the needs of everyday life which Mr Barton so eloquently recommends. Twenty years ago the little group of artists which ran that workshop were experimenting with cubist designs and were endeavouring by the austere simplicity of their designs for furniture, and the geometrical quality of their patterns, to give expression to that new feeling for orderliness, clarity and adaptation to use which Mr Barton extols. Unfortunately we were too far ahead of our times, and people who now buy degraded and meaningless imitations of what we did twenty years ago feel that they are on the crest of the wave of a new movement.” Snobbism was ineradicable. The failure of the Omega and incidents connected with it no doubt did something to confirm him in his conviction that art “in this vile country” is hopeless.

He wrote bitterly and with reason. But perhaps he was too pessimistic. Perhaps Mr Thornton was right when he said that though “the value of the venture at the Omega workshops is not yet [1938] fully appreciated, yet much that is vital in present-day designs derives from this source”. Perhaps without the Omega to lead the way drawing-room suites and dining-room suites would have been still more degraded and meaningless than they now are; the riot of patterns in tea-shops and restaurants would have pullulated still more profusely. But whatever disillusionment the Omega brought him, it had not shaken his belief in the movement, or in the young English artists and their capacities. He could reflect that he had given them work when they were most in need of work; and he had carried out experiments that interested him greatly. If he had made enemies—“but you must admit”, he wrote, “that I’ve chosen my enemies well”—he had made new friends and given the old still more reason to say with the journalist “I admire him for all that”. Who but Roger Fry could have undertaken such a task single-handed, or have carried it within an inch of success, or have remained after all his difficulties and disillusionments not only undaunted but full of fresh projects for the future?

So the Omega workshops closed down. The shades of the Post-Impressionists have gone to join the other shades; no trace of them is now to be seen in Fitzroy Square. The giant ladies have been dismounted from the doorway and the rooms have other occupants. But some of the things he made still remain—a painted table; a witty chair; a dinner service; a bowl or two of that turquoise blue that the man from the British Museum so much admired. And if by chance one of those broad deep plates is broken, or an accident befalls a blue dish, all the shops in London may be searched in vain for its fellow.

II

The relief when the Omega was wound up. and he was quit of that incessant strain and struggle, was very great He was free, and the first use he made of his freedom was to take a holiday. First he went with his daughter to the English lakes, but the English lakes were not to his liking. “There’s very little temptation to paint here. It’s all so deucedly scenic’, he wrote. Nor was he moved by the poetic associations of the country. The cottages of the Lake poets left him cold, but at least he was vouchsafed a vision of William Wordsworth. I have very little doubt that I have seen William Wordsworth. I found him in the form of a very old sheep lying under a tree. I sat down close to him and did a drawing. He never moved but looked over my shoulder and coughed occasionally.”

With this tribute to his native land he crossed the Channel. He felt, he said, like an exile returning to his own country. At first he was disappointed; he found France “to all intents and purposes back in the middle ages”. The bureaucrats were all-powerful; soon they would be unable to keep the railways running; there was a tobacco famine; and he was reduced to a starvation diet of six cigarettes a day. But Paris was still the centre of civilisation. If there were strikes and bureaucrats and politicians there were also artists. He met Derain and Vildrac. Talk about pictures began again. “He [Derain] complains that every technique is so terribly easy. He seems to want to find some material that will resist his facility. He talked a great deal of getting rid of the quality of painting. I think I know what he means. He wants the vision to be communicated directly so that one is quite unconscious of the medium through which it is given.” He bought a picture by Derain. He visited Picasso; and was amazed by his work. “It’s astonishing stuff. Rather what I hoped might be coming. Vast pink nudes in boxes. Almost monochrome pinkish red flesh and pure grey fonds which enclose it.

They’re larger than life and vast in all directions and tremendously modelled on academic lines almost. They’re most impressive almost overwhelming things. I said ‘Mais vous commencez une nouvelle école, l’école des invendables’, for one can’t conceive who on earth could ever find a place for these monsters. He was very much pleased, and it is rather splendid of him … he goes and does things which disconcert everyone…. He’s always chucking Ms reputations. It’s curious how near all his late work is in its aims to things Fr. Bartolommeo and Raphael worked out.”

Then of course he spent long days in the Louvre. “I spend most of my time over the Poussins in the Louvre and am trying to hammer out some notions very vague at present about the different kinds of fullness and emptiness of picture space. Poussin fascinates me more than ever. His composition seems to me more full of new and unanalysable discoveries than anyone. I want to find what principle there is that governs the relations of a convex volume to the space it occupies or fills pictorially. Do you understand? I don’t yet, but I’ve got the glimmer of something which I can’t grasp….” (To Vanessa Bell.)

From Paris he went south to Avignon, and the further south he went, the happier he became. His eyes absorbed colours and forms as if they had been starved all these years in England. “… It’s too exciting to see this Southern colouring again”, he wrote to Vanessa Bell. “Every bit of old wall, every tiled roof seems as though it were exactly right, and only needed to be painted.” Although it was October, there were masses of wild flowers in the fields, “the most lovely daisies, our kind, only huge with bright pink flowers and heaps of candytuft”. He painted all day long. Up at seven, he was out by eight; and there in the open air he painted, until the mistral blew his canvas down and he had to seek refuge in an “incredibly dirty inn” kept by Spaniards. He found them surly at first; then as usual he made friends with them. Helped by the village carpenter he devised a special easel, warranted to resist the mistral; and when even this capsized, he took up his lodging in the kitchen. That kitchen may serve as the setting for innumerable scenes in Roger Fry’s pilgrimage. It was the common sitting-room of the place. He had only to sit there, sketch-book in hand, and someone turned up who fell into the very pose he wanted for a big composition he was working at. At night they turned on “an awfully loud mechanical piano called euphemistically the viola”, which ground out three tunes incessantly; the young men and women danced the farandole very beautifully, and he sat entranced, talking, drinking, sketching. Compare this with the Tottenham Court Road on a Saturday night! … but he was too busy and too happy to dwell upon his old obsessions, the Philistines, the British public and Bird’s Custard Island. He bicycled on to Les Baux.

There an adventure befell him. Les Baux itself was “too theatrical to be much good for painting”, and he was about to move on. But by chance he fell into talk at a restaurant with a very beautiful young man and woman. The man was an artist, who had run off with the beautiful lady and they were hiding at Les Baux until some formalities, “divorce of his wife or what not”, could be completed. They persuaded him to stay, and with them he went to an entertainment at which “a Breton cabotin” declaimed patriotic poetry. Roger Fry was outraged; and the village schoolmistress, whose name he discovered was Marie Mauron, observing his indignation, insisted that the peasants should sing some of their Provençal songs. The peasants sang; and Roger Fry was enthusiastic. In letter after letter to his friends in London he described those perfect autumn days at Les Baux. “I can’t give you any idea of how delightful these people are”, he wrote. “First of all there’s no idea of any class distinction—the peasants behave to one exactly as equals, and then they all seem to be artists in a way—i.e. they all know these poems which are quite modern and sing them beautifully.” He made friends with the singers, and through them he met the poets themselves. The greatest poet of all was “an old peasant who lived in one room of a tiny cottage. He was just preparing his supper which was stewed apples and we helped him to light the fire and cook the apples and all the time he talked about poetry and intoned his favourite poems. He is the great authority on the Provençal language. He has translated Homer into Provençal and is now doing Dante…. He was immensely distinguished and had the most charming manners and was quite conscious of being a great artist—” There follows a description of the wedding of the beautiful young man and the beautiful young woman, and how at the feast afterwards he made friends with another poet—“a most amusing character, no one knows his real name, but he is called ‘le sauvage’ because of his peculiar habits. He lives quite alone and has a passion for all kinds of wild animals and plants, but above all for spiders which he collects and keeps in his room which is entirely tapissé with spiders webs. He has written a charming poem in French to his spiders…. The odd thing is that he is also very well read in French literature and criticised things with perfect taste. He never wears a hat because one day the mistral blew his hat away and he swore it should never happen again. I’m afraid all this”, the letter ends, “sounds very dull, because I can’t give you the curious delight of finding that one can spend an evening with these peasants with much greater ease and happiness than let us say with … [a well-known literary man]. The fact is they really are our sort of people with our ideas of what’s worth while and our absence of all notions of arrivisme.”

Charles Mauron and Roger Fry, about 1927

He had the same sense of ease and well-being that had come to him years ago in Venice with Symonds and Horatio Brown and the gondoliers. He found again, even more completely with the Omega and the Tottenham Court Road to point the contrast, the atmosphere that suited him—the atmosphere in which people developed their own idiosyncrasies whether for spiders or for poetry, where differences of birth and education had ceased to exist, and the “great artist” living in one room and stewing his apples merged naturally in his surroundings—“for they all seem to be artists in their way”. And again, as if things repeat themselves, there was the unknown traveller met by chance This time she was Marie Mauron, and the chance meeting was to lead to two of the most valued friendships of his life. With the Maurons he was to share a mas at St Remy, and with Charles Mauron he was to carry on the most fruitful of his aesthetic arguments. The meeting at Les Baux ranked high among Roger Fry’s adventures.

From Les Baux he moved on to Martigues, cycling with his easel strapped to the carrier. He preferred travelling alone, he confessed, for then he could give his whole mind to the landscape. It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of the landscape in his life. He analysed it in all its vagaries and its moods, its asperities and its charms, as if it were a human being. The atmosphere of the country affected him almost as much as the human atmosphere, to which he was, as he said, “horribly sensitive”. “Aren’t atmospheres”, he wrote, “the reallest things there are?” Les Baux he found too theatrical; Martigues had certain merits but was too like Venice; and so he moved on to Aix, “the holy place” he called it, the home of Cézanne. To his critical eye it was too dramatic. “The illumination is so tremendously definite here that a small change of angle alters the tones a great deal. It hasn’t the sharp sculpture of the country round Avignon.” After Les Baux and the life there with the peasant poets the bourgeois atmosphere—he was lodging in a respectable hotel—was unendurable. He could no longer tolerate the conventions of his own class. He looked round and discovered a carriers’ inn, where though it was noisy, for the carts on the cobbles woke him at dawn, the company was entirely to his liking. He made friends with the local antiquity dealer, and persuaded him to put some of his pictures in the shop window. “At once there was a buzz of excitement. It reminded me of Vasari—one old connoisseur bringing another and then the artists coming and asking ‘Où sont les tableaux du peintre Anglais?’” Compare that with the dull supercilious indifference of the English! “There is more interest in art here than in the whole of London!” he exclaimed.

Cézanne even persuaded him to go sight-seeing. He made a pilgrimage in the holy place to the holy shrine. He went over the great man’s house, penetrated to the attics and persuaded the gardener to let him wander over the garden. But the gardener had never even heard of Cézanne, and when Roger Fry tried to get the shopkeepers of Aix to talk about him, they could only remember an old man who was rather cracked. Roger Fry was a little downcast. “It all seemed to me very queer and uncanny that Cézanne came and went and left no trace in the little bourgeois life of the place.” He gave up the pursuit of associations and turned to his own canvas. Colours and shapes after the frozen war years when he had no one to talk to about art, and everyone talked politics, became absorbing. He slipped back—he was writing to Vanessa Bell—into the fascination of painters’ shop. “I consume more terra verte than anything…. I use hardly even a touch of cadmium or rose madder.” The words murmur on as they murmured on hour after hour in the studio. And the problems of his own work came once more to the fore. “Why is it that I, who am a good critic, am so helpless in front of my own work?—is everyone? I alternate between fits of thinking—now this time I’ve done something, and sheer disgust.” Perhaps he was letting himself become “too terribly subordinated to the thing seen…. I don’t think I’m au dessus de mon sujet as Poussin said one should be—and I think he was right … but I think all the same that a period of subjection to the thing seen fills one with a lot of new possibilities of forms and colours which one may use later more freely. But perhaps I’m only persuading myself because I do get so excited by what I see everyday … Once more his favourite word was “excited”. Mont Sainte-Victoire inspired it again and again. It dominated him; it absorbed him. He sat in the valley with his legs wrapped in a copy of the local newspaper painting the mountain. He tried to describe it—“the most beautiful mountain I have ever seen—all white with blue shadows and pink rocks … and green tufts of dwarf oak and then the river-bed filled with all kinds of pale brown red orange and grey bushes”. Words as usual refused to do his bidding. A pen-and-ink sketch follows. But nothing he could say in a letter could give any idea of the beauty of the place, or of the harmony and satisfaction of the life there. Vanessa Bell must come there. She must transplant her family. He found a house. He counted the rooms; he planned alterations; he described the garden, the olive trees and the river. No doubt there was some school in the neighbourhood where children could be far better taught than in England. Was it not madness to live there?

But at last in the autumn he came back to Dalmeny Avenue.

III

The end of the Omega had brought about another change. The house at Guildford was too large now, and with his sister Margery’s help he discovered another in London. It was “in die wilds of Camden Town with a fine view of Holloway Jail”; and there in 1919 they set up house together. House-moving was an arduous occupation in the early days of peace; the price of linoleum, he groaned, was exorbitant; firm after firm refused to move his furniture; but at last two meat vans hired at Smithfield arrived at Durbins, and under his supervision porters who reeked of blood but were charming characters nevertheless removed the Chinese statues, the Italian cabinets, the negro masks and all the pots and plates that had made the big rooms at Durbins glow with so many different colours in so many different styles, in safety to Holloway.

The house in Camden Town (7 Dalmeny Avenue) was, he lamented, “in a horribly good condition”. The previous owner had decorated it with only too Victorian a thoroughness. Fortunately, he had learnt how to obliterate classical ladies heads in his lodgings at Poole; the Victorian wallpaper was dabbed out with a stencil; and there in the garden—for there was a “beautifully designed garden which stretches away for ever”—by the side of a fountain presided over by a Chinese deity under the austere gaze of the tower of Holloway Jail he sat writing an article for the Athenaeum. It was on Victorian furniture. “I think it’s the best I’ve ever done,” he wrote, “though written with great toil and labour.”

A mass of such articles had accumulated. They were torn out and tossed away without any respect for order or subject. For twenty years he had been lecturing and writing upon art, but save for the Bellini and the edition of Reynolds’s Discourses he had published no book. It was owing to his sister’s “gentle but persistent pressure” that he now began the work of collecting a volume from these old and repulsive deposits. “My notion”, he wrote, “of making a book is dumping old articles into a basket and shaking them up.” With his sister to supply pressure, and the “devoted and patient labour” of Mr R.R. Tadock to help in the task, the book that he called Vision and Design was finally collected. It was made up of old articles—a difficult and unattractive form. The articles treat of many subjects—of architecture, of society, of the Ottoman and the Whatnot. And inevitably the book suffers from the chops and changes and repetitions that are unavoidable when many short pieces are strung together. But why is it that the book attracts the common seer—the ordinary non-visual human being to whom pictures are far more inaccessible than books or music? Its appeal to the expert is plain enough. There is the masterly essay upon aesthetics to absorb him. And for the practising painter there are the essays upon Cézanne and the French Post-Impressionists and Claude. But why is it that Roger Fry’s criticism has for the common seer something of the enthralment of a novel, something of the excitement of a detective story while it is strictly about the art of painting and nothing else?

To this old problem it is only possible to hazard one such reader’s answer, as it forms in turning the pages once more. It is perhaps, in the first place, that Roger Fry makes painting different from the other arts. It is not literature; it is not biography; it is not music. It is the art of painting that he is writing about. And he does not make the approaches easy. It is an art of supreme difficulty. “Good painting”, he quotes Michael Angelo’s saying, “is a music and a melody which intellect only can appreciate and that with great difficulty.” So curiosity is stimulated. And then sensation is roused. For he assumes that we all have sensations; all that is necessary is to let ourselves trust to them. How, without any of Ruskin’s or Pater’s skill in words he rouses sensation; how he brings colour on to the page, and not only colour but forms and their relations; how without anecdote or prose poetry he wakes the eye to qualities that it has never seen before, are problems for the literary critic to solve at leisure. Undoubtedly he wakes the eye; and then begins what is in its way as exciting as the analysis by a master novelist of the human passions—the analysis of our sensations. It is as if a great magnifying-glass were laid over the picture. He elucidates, he defines. And as the colours emerge and the structure, learning begins easily and unconsciously to release its stores. He recalls other pictures—one in Rome, another in Pekin; he is reminded of a negro mask, or bethinks him of a Matisse or a Picasso seen the other day in Paris. So the tradition, the submerged but underlying connection, is revealed. And then from the collision of many converging ideas a theory forms. It may be helpful. For if we allow sensations to accumulate unchecked they lose their sharpness; to test them by reason strengthens and enriches. But fascinating as theories are—“I have an itch for explaining my own sensations”—they too must be controlled or they will form a crust which blocks the way for further experience. Theories must always be brought into touch with facts. The collision may prove fatal to these delicate and intricate constructions. It does not matter. The risk must be run. Running risks indeed is not the least part of the excitement of reading Roger Fry. At any moment he will have to confess, when faced with the discoveries of his eye, that he has been wrong, and so must change his mind. More sensations are examined, not ours—ours are long ago exhausted; but his. His well up, refreshed it may be by the theory which he has made but thrown aside. He seems to have an inexhaustible capacity for sensation; until at last, whether we see the picture itself, or only what he sees, there is nothing for it but to drop the book and take the next omnibus to the National Gallery, there to gratify the desire for seeing that has been so miraculously stimulated.

But besides the power to stimulate, he has also another gift which does not always accompany it,—the power to suggest. Even when the chase is at its hottest sayings like “There is great danger in a strong personal rhythm … unless [the artist] constantly strains it by the effort to make it take in new and refractory material it becomes stereotyped”, or a remark—“You cannot imitate the final results of mastery without going through the preliminaries”—break off heavy with meaning. They go behind the picture; they bring into being a rich background which we explore half-consciously while we read. That is why, when we read him, we never feel shut off alone in a studio; morality and conduct, even if they are called by other names, are present; eating and drinking and love-making hum and murmur on the other side of the page.

And pervading all is the character of the critic himself, with its strange mixture of scrupulous sincerity and fervent belief. He will reason to the last moment, and when that limit is reached he will admit honestly: “I feel unable at present to get beyond this vague adumbration”—But if reason must stop short, beyond reason lies reality—if nothing will make him doff his reason, nothing will make him lose his faith. The aesthetic emotion seems to him of supreme importance. But why?—he cannot say. “One can only say that those who experience it feel it to have a peculiar quality of ‘reality’, which makes it a matter of infinite importance in their lives. Any attempt I might make to explain this would probably land me in the depths of mysticism. On the edge of that gulf I stop.” But if he stops it is in the attitude of one who looks forward. We are always left with the sense of something to come.

This attempt to explain the fascination of Roger Fry’s criticism may serve to show that others besides the practising painter felt his spell. He started so many hares that all kinds of people joined in the chase. Among them one of the most distinguished was the Poet Laureate, Robert Bridges. Unfortunately, the Poet Laureate’s letter has been lost; but its drift can be gathered from Roger Fry’s reply:

Dalmeny Avenue, Jan. 23rd, 24

… I am delighted to have your criticisms of my book, though whether I fully grasp them or can meet them is more doubtful. First of all my attempts at aesthetic (and they are confessedly only attempts and suggestions) are much more empirical and less philosophical than your criticisms. I very early became convinced that our emotions before works of art were of many kinds and that we failed as a rule to distinguish the nature of the mixture and I set to work by introspection to discover what the different elements of these compound emotions might be and to try to get at the most constant unchanging and therefore I suppose fundamental emotion. I found that this “constant” had to do always with the contemplation of form (of course colour is in this sense part of artistic form). It also seemed to me that the emotions resulting from the contemplation of form were more universal (less particularised and coloured by the individual history), more profound and more significant spiritually than any of the emotions which had to do with life (the immense effect of music is noteworthy in this respect though of course music may be merely a physiological stimulus). I therefore assume that the contemplation of form is a peculiarly important spiritual exercise (your “spiritual mirth”). My analyses of form-lines, sequences, rhythms, &c. are merely aids for the uninitiated to attain to the contemplation of form—they do not explain.

But agreeing that aesthetic apprehension is a pre-eminently spiritual function does not imply for me any connection with morals. In the first place the contemplation of Truth is likewise a spiritual function but is I judge entirely a-moral. Indeed I should be inclined to deny to morals (proper) any spiritual quality—they are rather the mechanism of civil life—the rules by which life in groups can be rendered tolerable and are therefore only concerned directly with behaviours. I shall admit that the feelings we have to our kind are of a spiritual nature (love being a function of spiritual health and hate of spiritual disease) and that those feelings may issue in good or bad behaviour. But in so far as they do not issue but remain “states of mind” they are spiritually good or bad but not morally. But in any case it must, I think, be admitted that there are spiritual functions that are not moral.

As to sex. It like the endocrine glands may be a predisposing cause, a stimulus (like Mozart’s smell of rotten apples), but surely is no part of the aesthetic apprehension. I find that in proportion as a work of art is great it is forced to discard all appeal to sex. Only bad art can be successfully pornographic. It may have been the point de départ, it is no longer visible when the work of art has arrived. Of course those people who are insensitive to the artist’s real intention may go off on even the slightest hint of a more accessible appeal. As for instance a man reading a great poem which he did not understand might occupy his mind with the double entendre of words it contained. I can imagine that to some people Velasquez’s Venus might excite sexual feeling; to any one who understands the picture such an idea is utterly impossible, it is too remote from the artist’s meaning to be even suggested. As regards painting I think you are quite wrong in thinking that the preoccupation with the female nude is a result of sexual feeling. It is simply that the plasticity of the female figure is peculiarly adapted to pictorial design; much more so. on account of its greater simplicity, than the male—though of course the plasticity of the human figure in general is peculiarly stimulating to the pictorial sense—perhaps not more so than that of a tiger but it is the most stimulating of easily accessible natural phenomena.

There—if I’ve answered you at cross purposes it is because of the great brevity of your exposition. One day we must talk it over at length.

IV

The letter to the Poet Laureate is enough perhaps to show that the argument, always growing in vigour and variety, had survived the war. And no doubt the keenness of his intellectual life, which, he said, had increased during the war, helped him to bridge the difficult transition from war to peace. But that keenness made him also acutely aware of the difficulties that lay ahead. “My God”, he exclaimed, “what a world the reaction is going to bring—a return to the Middle Ages without the naïveté and the beauty of the Middle Ages.” He noted signs of that reaction in the early ‘twenties with apprehension and horror. “The question for Europe is no longer to struggle for power, but simply to safeguard what is left of civilisation by helping each other as much as possible. If Germany succumbs there will be no hope for Europe, and to continue to prevent it from re-establishing itself is so mad that one can’t understand it.” Again, “Of all the religions that have afflicted man (and they are the most terrible afflictions) Nationalism seems to me the most monstrous and the most cruel”. He was neither blind nor deaf to what was happening in the world of politics, even if he had to coin a name—“I’m an individualistic anarchist” was his attempt in 1925—to sum up his own political position. All his sympathies of course were with Lowes Dickinson in his fight to establish a League of Nations. Through Lowes Dickinson’s persuasion he attended one of the many conferences of intellectuals that were then being held in Paris. But conferences seemed to him to result in outbursts of moral indignation; and moral indignation was a mere “gaspillage de l’esprit”. His own fight lay elsewhere; and a long series of letters to Charles and Marie Mauron, written during the early ‘twenties, shows how clearly Roger Fry realised the necessity of fighting if, as he said, “it”—civilisation in one word—was to begin again.

“The herd” is the phrase that dominates the letters at this time—the herd with “its immense suggestibility more than ever at the mercy of unscrupulous politicians”. The herd has taken the place of the adversary; the herd is the adversary, swollen immensely in size and increased in brute power. The herd on the one side, the individual on the other—hatred of one, belief in the other—that is the rhythm, to use his favourite word, that vibrates beneath the surface. A vast mass of emotional unreason seemed to him to be threatening not only England—that was to be expected; but France also. France, he lamented, had lost that “objectivity which has been the glory of its great thinkers”. And this emotionalism, this irrationality could only be fought by science. We must try to understand our instincts, to analyse our emotions. That was a doctrine that he preached and practised. He extended his reading. He read Wilfred Trotter’s Instincts of the Herd with immense interest. He pressed it upon all his friends. He read the Behaviourists; he read the psychologists. “Il nous faut surtout de la psychologie vraie. Il nous faut comprendre cet animal entêté, violent, idéaliste qui se laisse mener par les mots creux.” He poured out the theories that all this reading suggested in argument and in letters. Two quotations from letters to the Maurons will be enough to show the drift of the ideas that swarmed in his brain.[◉6]

March 2nd 1920

Le bon Duhamel hurle dans La Nouvelle Revue contre la science—il prêche un soulèvement moral, la bonté, &c. Je trouve cela très dangereux et au fond réactionnaire. L’homme ne peut s’élever moralement par la bonne volonté pas plus qu’il ne s’élève dans l’art par sa propre force. Rien ne change en l’homme que les mœurs … et la science seulement peut changer les mœurs on nous montrant les moyens d’arriver à tel ou tel but …

And again in the same year:

—Je crains au dessus de tout l’impatience de l’homme—qui cherche des raccourcis qui l’amènent dans les culs-de-sac. La seule route qui ne l’a jamais égaré c’est la science et la science demande les plus grandes vertus pour l’homme … une humilité à toute épreuve et une complète désintérressement—c’est pour cela que c’est toujours mal vu par le commun des hommes qui ne l’acceptent que pour ses côtés utiles ou plutôt (voir la guerre) néfastes. Pour moi je crois que l’intelligence humaine n’a jamais rien construit de si beau, de si impressionant que la théorie de la matière depuis la découverte du radium. Je la comprends à peine mais juste assez pour en voir l’immensité et l’audace.

But though the scientific method seemed to him more and more the only method that could reduce the human tumult to order, there was always art. In painting, in music, in literature lay the enduring reality. And though in the ‘twenties he noted with dismay the return to mysticism in religion, and the return to nationalism in politics, by one of those paradoxes that were for ever upsetting the theorist he was forced by the evidence of his own eyes to believe that, far from perishing, art was more vigorous than ever.

Moi qui détestait l’art moderne dans ma jeunesse, qui m’absorbait entièrement dans les vieux maîtres Italiens—je vois maintenant une véritable Renaissance—nous vivons dans une époque extraordinaire pour l’art. Je suis sûr que je ne me trompe pas … à Paris j’ai trouvé un artiste jusqu’alors presqu’ inconnu pour moi, Rouault, qui est sûrement un des grands génies de tous les temps. Je ne peu comparer ses dessins qu’à l’art Tang des Chinois dont il nous reste seulement quelques spécimens. Non, je n’ai pas de patience avec les gens qui décrient notre époque—nous avons developpé aussi cette immense système de faux art—l’art officiel et pompier—l’art véritable devient toujours de plus en plus une chose esotérique et cachée comme un secte hérétique—ou plus encore comme la science au moyen âge.

So he wrote with all the old enthusiasm to Madame Mauron.

The question that he had asked Lowes Dickinson before the war, whether the new ferment, the new movement, was lasting or would it “fizzle out like the Pre-Raphaelites”, was answered. There were, it seemed to him, more “honest artists” in England than ever, in spite of the emotional turbulence that the reaction was stirring on the surface. On the other hand, the adversary was stronger than ever. In England, he wrote in 1920, “the artist is almost without resources”. So while theories multiplied, and with the help of science and with the help of psychology he tried to fortify the individual against the herd, he had also to help the individual in his private fight—to pay his rent, to sell his pictures. “I seem”, he said, “for some reason to be the only person available.” In his double capacity as artist and man of business he was indispensable. So the letter which has been dealing with the evils of mysticism, and the evils of nationalism, with behaviourism and psychology, breaks off in the middle of a quotation from Alain, from Bertrand Russell, from Flaubert, to exclaim, “I have a million calls upon me.…” He is due at a hanging committee. He is trying to organise a new group. A and B and C are all pestering him with letters. A is the Secretary of a provincial art gallery. “He wants me to go down and lecture. And as they seem really keen…” B is a young artist who wants to start a picture gallery with a lending library of pictures attached. It is an admirable idea; but money is needed. Every artist seems to think that Roger Fry can extract money from stones. Then there is C. He has real talent but “is in a frightful muddle about his private affairs”. He has, the letter laments, three children already, and another is on the way. “Oh dear, why are these delightful people so unpractical? he breaks off with a groan.

Each of these letters of the alphabet—and that alphabet had twenty-six letters at least—was an individual—a man or a woman who was trying to put up a fight for the spiritual life against the dominion of the herd. Therefore each had a claim upon him. For “What a rarity the individual is! … More and more I understand nothing of humanity in the mass and au fond I only believe in the value of some individuals…. I know that I have no right to detach myself so completely from the fate of my kind, but I have never been able to believe in political values/’ More and more he interested himself in the individual. The individual might be an old tramp who had stolen a watch and was found by Roger Fry sitting on a bench in the Temple Gardens. Roger Fry sat down beside him. “Oh la conversation exquise que j’ai eue l’autre jour avec un vieux mendiant criminel! Il faut que je raconte ça.” The old tramp told him how he had stolen the watch, and how he had gone to prison, and the account ends with the exclamation, “Mais comme ces gens sont sympathiques et moralement supérieurs aux bourgeois!” These were the people who must be helped if civilisation were to continue. And so, though “the jealousies and suspicions of artists make it almost impossible to help them”, he was off, as the abrupt ending of many letters testifies, to sit on committees, to hang pictures, to organise exhibitions, to beg money and to persuade the rich to buy.

He was also off to lecture. For by lecturing not only did he make a living and support his family, but he did something to encourage the individual to enjoy the rarest of his gifts, the disinterested life, the life of the spirit—“I use spiritual”, he wrote with his usual care to make his meaning plain, “to mean all those human faculties and activities which are over and above our mere existence as living organisms”. Instead therefore of nursing his bronchitis over the fire, he would pack his bag in the chill of January and February and be off to Dunfermline, to Birmingham, to Oxford, to lecture upon art. And that his audience was grateful is proved by some simple and anonymous lines in the local newspaper :

Beauty awoke: you heard her stripling call;

Enthroned her where some vulgar upstart sat.

Beauty is truth, truth beauty. That is all

We know on earth…. You helped us to know that.

Brantôme, a picture by Roger Fry (1923)

V

Then of course there was always his own painting. The studio at Dalmeny Avenue, a very pleasant room looking out over the garden and under Margery Fry’s supervision comparatively tidy, was full of his pictures—too full unfortunately. Nobody bought them, he complained. He held a show of his work in 1920, and it was a complete failure. Only five sketches were sold and he was bitterly disappointed. “I will never show again”, he wrote to Madame Mauron. “I will go on painting, and when the canvases are dry, I will roll them up.” This failure he explained partly by the crass indifference of the British public to art, and partly by the fact that the emotionalism left over from the war was rushing both public and painters “pall-mall into romanticism under the guidance of the surrealists”. Even in France, the country of civilisation, the pseudo-artist, the arriviste, was for the moment rampant. A letter to Helen Anrep (1925) gives an amusing account of a dinner-party in Paris where he met one of the apostles of the new mysticism and, rather maliciously, drew him out. “Mon dieu, the arrivism, the mercantilism, of the art world here! It has fallen very low and it seems to me all the young are given over to the determination to arrive and attract attention…. After dinner I got alone with—and pumped him about the ideas of les jeunes. 1 was shamelessly open-minded and sympathetic and out it all came. ‘We spent our youth at the war—that has made us more serious than the old—we can only accept hie at all on condition of finding God. To find God we must reduce all to a desert and then we may see him…. I accept life…. I can make money by dealing and I get drunk only because I know the emptiness of all except God. We seek to dislocate everything, to stir up trouble everywhere for trouble’s sake and because it leads to the desert where God is &c. &c….’—the new mysticism, you see it all.…”

The new mysticism which despised science and also Flaubert (“Flaubert,” said the young man, “je ne lui prête plus d’attention que je donne à ma concierge”) was highly antipathetic to Roger Fry. While surrealism and romanticism swept the surface, he felt more and more “left alone on the deserted island of orthodox classicism”. The meaning of that phrase so far as his own work as a painter was concerned is given in a letter to Vanessa Bell; and since it represents a considered opinion of his painting it may be quoted:

I am coming to have quite a good conceit of myself. At least I think I get more power every year and that’s all one need worry about. I don’t suppose you’ll ever like my things very much, but I think you’ll respect them more and more because there’s a lot of queer stuff hidden away in them as a result of all my long wanderings and peelings and gropings in the world of art and I think they’re things that will only come out gradually. I shall never make anything that will give you or anyone else the gasp of delighted surprise at a revelation but I think I shall tempt people to a quiet contemplative kind of pleasure—the pleasure of recognising that one has spotted just this or that quality which has a meaning tho’ mostly one passes it by.

That is not an extravagantly high estimate; whether it is a just one or not the art critic of the future must decide. But that it underestimates the place that painting played in his life is obvious. That is shown again and again by the eager, the pathetic, delight with which he recorded any praise of his work. If the English despised him, the French at least, who did not suffer to the same extent from the “snobbery of genius”, took him seriously. Even when nobody praised his work, and he was oppressed by the conviction that art after the war must be esoteric and hidden like science in the middle ages—“we can have no public art, only private ones, like writing and painting, and even painting is almost too public”, he wrote (to Virginia Woolf), he still went on painting. Even if he had to hire a room to house his canvases, and the canvases themselves must be rolled up, he painted. And that his writing profited by his painting can scarcely be doubted whatever the value of those canvases as works of art. It was with his brush that he broke through the crust that so often separates the critic from the creator. It was because the painter’s problems were his own that he understood them so profoundly, followed them so adventurously, and is first and foremost a painter’s critic not a connoisseur’s.

VI

The studio at Dalmeny Avenue, then, in the early ‘twenties was both an ivory tower where he contemplated reality, and an arsenal where he forged the only weapons that are effective in the fight against the enemy. More than ever it was necessary to oppose the emotionalism and chaos of the herd by reason and order. If the political man, as he told Lowes Dickinson, is a monster, then the artist must be more than ever independent, free, individual.

But the studio was not the only room in the house; there was the dining-room, looking out over the garden—where his favourite irises nodded over the fountain presided over by the Chinese statue. On the dinner table, decorated by Duncan Grant, were the plates he had made with his own hands, and round it were the chairs that he had designed himself. Almost any guest invited to dine with him about 1920 would find him, manuscript in hand; seeking the right words with which to fill in a gap in his translation of Mallarmé.[◉7]

“… One of his greatest pleasures”, Charles Mauron wrote in his introduction to their joint translation, “was in poetry, and especially the poetry of Mallarmé. He made no secret of the difficulties he met with: who does not meet them? But he of all men, he who was ever on the trail of some new splendour—felt himself attracted by the mysterious miroitement en dessous which, imprisoned in the poet’s most cryptic verses, at once exasperates and delights the mind…. Assured, then, of an authentic pleasure, Roger Fry’s first impulse was to share it….” Thus the guest before sitting down to dinner would be asked to share the dangerous delight of helping to translate Mallarmé into English:

Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui

Va-t-il nous déchirer avec un coup d’aile ivre

Ce lac dur oublié que hante sous le givre

Le transparent glacier des vols qui n’ont pas lui!

—how was that to be rendered? But if it was impossible to find the exact sense, let alone the exact sound, Mallarmé, intoned in Roger Fry’s deep and resonant voice, filled the dining-room with magnificent reverberations. Mallarmé stood with Cézanne among his patron saints. Mallarmé, of course, led to argument. The arts of painting and writing lay close together, and Roger Fry was always making raids across the boundaries. He was careful to explain that he knew nothing whatever about the writers’ problems, but that did not prevent him from discussing the other art. He enjoyed his irresponsibility. It left him free to indulge his speculative genius unfettered. Perhaps he was not altogether displeased to find flaws in the art of writing. In England, at least, literature had assumed such airs of superiority; it had done so much to turn the artist into a mere illustrator. So he would be perverse and he would be disparaging. How far, he would ask, could literature be considered an art? Writers lacked conscience; they lacked objectivity, they did not treat words as painters treat paint. “Gerald Brenan is almost the only writer who has the same sort of ideas about writing as we have about painting. I mean he believes that everything must come out of the matière of his prose and not out of the ideas and emotions he describes.” Most English novels—he read very few—were on a par with Frith’s “Derby Day”. Writers were moralists; they were propagandists and “propaganda … shuts off the contemplative penetration of life before it has found the finer shades of significance. It simplifies too much.” Defoe’s simplicity delighted him; Henry James’s complexity satisfied him. But in between, what a waste, what a confusion, what a jumble of mixed motives and impure desires!

As a critic of literature, then, he was not what is called a safe guide. He looked at the carpet from the wrong side; but he made it for that very reason display unexpected patterns. And many of his theories held good for both arts. Design, rhythm, texture—there they were again—in Flaubert as in Cézanne. And he would hold up a book to the light as if it were a picture and show where in his view—it was a painter’s of course—it fell short. He greatly admired E.M. Forster’s Passage to India. “I think it’s a marvellous texture—really beautiful writing. But Oh lord I wish he weren’t a mystic, or that he would keep his mysticism out of his books…. I’m certain that the only meanings that are worth anything in a work of art are those that the artist himself knows nothing about. The moment he tries to explain his ideas and his emotions he misses the great thing.” Then “poetisation”, making things out more interesting than they really are, that imposition of the writer’s personality for which there is no exact critical term, was another sin that he discovered in the work of another friend. So his light fell upon new books and upon old, upon the great and the small. It fell spasmodically; it fell erratically. “I’m sure I’m right about Gerard Hopkins”—he had been equally sure that he was right about Marguerite Audoux. Proust at first reading was a source of endless joy to him. Then he revised Ins views. “He comes out rather too pernickety and silly…. I get impatient with him…. Fancy a mind that could work for three years upon Ruskin!” So to Balzac … “what a queer creature after Proust. However, he does make a kind of texture, in fact a very solid one, out of the purely external conditions of life. He never gets inside anything or anybody but he does make the panorama move along. Also I’ve fallen back on a twopenny edition of the Fleurs du Mal—what a queer book to be distributed among ‘the people’. But what a genius—only how tiresome romanticism is even when you have great genius. It becomes a duty to have such violent experiences that they tend to be faked, faute de mieux. But when he talks about cats, owls and simple things he has such tremendous style.”

A theory impends, but it can be left pendant. To analyse, to explain, to theorise had for him an irresistible fascination. And yet he was almost envious of those who felt no such desire to investigate their sensations. It was so much better to create than to criticise, and perhaps, in order to create, unconsciousness was necessary. “Theories are dangerous for an artist. It is much better to know nothing about them.” It was thus that many arguments would end, and he would apologise for having ventured so many sweeping, perhaps ill-founded, criticisms of an art “about which I know nothing”. And the next letter would contain, not criticism, but an experiment of his own in prose poetry. It was not very successful; his interest in technique had perhaps allowed the sensation to grow cold. The nervous tremor which distinguishes the hand-made pot from the machine-made was lacking. Yet whatever the failure of his practice, and however distracting his theory, even in his rashest raids across the boundaries he conveyed his own sense of the immeasurable importance of art. Here one had pressed a little further—here one had been baffled. But in either case there was no conclusion, only the perpetual need for fresh effort. The thing itself went on whatever happened to the artist—in books, in pictures, in buildings and pots and chairs and tables. And the less the artist gave himself the airs of genius, the humbler he was; the more detached and disinterested, the more chance he had of becoming what Roger Fry sometimes called “a swell”—a member, though it might be a very humble member, of that confraternity to whom “Cézanne and Flaubert have become in a sort the patron saints”.

VII

The patron saints, in spite, perhaps because, of all the heresies of the ‘twenties—its mercantilism, its mysticism, its arrivisme—remained more firmly fixed than ever in their shrines. And the old enemies were still there, the snobbery of the British public, the stupidity of the Royal Academy, the timidity of officials. Nevertheless, a change in taste was gradually coming to pass: perhaps he had done something to bring it to pass himself. He noted in 1921 the amazing fact that the National Gallery had bought a Gauguin. “Ten years ago”, he wrote, “I was turned out of polite society for having a show of him…. Now they accept Gauguin but hate their contemporaries none the less.” It was his duty, and he practised it to buy his contemporaries. “It will be a long while before the modern pictures”—bought by selling one of his old masters to the National Gallery—“will be let into that exclusive society. Perhaps Pamela will live to see them there.” He was still sceptical about any genuine love of art among the English, and indignant at the travesties palmed off by the pseudo-artist whose “only faith is the faith in advertisement and getting on”. But though he could still be indignant, more often than in the past his indignation was tempered by other reflections. Officials became hidebound and reactionary as a matter of course. On the other hand, there were artists like Mark Gertler, like Matthew Smith, like McKnight Kauffer, like Duncan Grant, whose gifts differed but whose aims he respected immensely. There was a group of young English painters, he thought, who were more promising and more serious than English painters had ever been in the past. And everywhere he met private people—Sir Michael Sadler, Mr Hindley Smith, Marian Richardson, to choose some names at random—who were carrying on the fight of the individual against the herd. There was much in all this to encourage him. And for the rest, the scientists had shown him that human nature is very little responsible for its behaviour. “I am very indulgent to myself,” he wrote, “and therefore I must be indulgent to others.” Over and over again in his letters at this time he urged upon his friends the necessity of “sagesse” and tried to acquire that virtue himself. “To see things in their true perspective, to cease to have any parti pris for oneself, what freedom!” As for his own reputation, about which he used to care, he had ceased to consider it, except as an impediment to freedom that one must endeavour to destroy from time to time. “He’s always chucking reputations”, he wrote with admiration of Picasso. Freedom was the word that summed up what he most desired, and perhaps, after infinite gropings and wanderings, he was on the road to it.

The stock phrases thus never seem to have time to settle—he would not sit for his portrait as artist, or as critic; as politician or as prophet. But he did, to quote his own words about Balzac, “make a kind of texture … out of the purely external conditions of life”. In the spring he was off to Italy, or Spain, or France. In the winter, with the usual groans, he was dragged back to London. There he lectured and wrote; dined out and went to parties. At one of them Lady Astor took him for the devil “and I did my best to live up to it”. At another, given to Augustine Birrell on his eightieth birthday, he rejoiced in the sight of Francis Birrell “sublime in his unconsciousness of its being ‘an occasion’ … in an old brown suit, a well-crumpled shirt, and a string of red stuff for tie…” and delighted in the wit of “old Augustine who was superb … he kept us in roars of laughter by simply saying what he felt in opposition to what people are expected to feel and finally almost forgot about the company and his speech while he mused over the engravings in the Shakespeare which we gave him”. Crannies of time were filled up with Mallarmé; with chess; with the Burlington Magazine, and, since he was “very hard up”, with doing odd jobs of expertise.

But this external framework was never allowed to cramp the other life, the personal life, which, according to his belief, must go on changing if it is to live. Detachment seems as good a word as another to define the change which these later years were bringing to pass. It was felt casually, incidentally, as such things are felt in ways that cannot be put into words. It is expressed in a letter written in 1920 to Lowes Dickinson. The old project of sharing a house together, perhaps in Pisa, perhaps in Provence, had once more come under consideration.

Seriously it’s a splendid idea for one’s later years—years which I mean to be fuller and richer than any before. I suppose it’s a wild idea that, but I have a strange sense of liberation and ease as old age comes on. The envies and anxieties of appetite and ambition are gone or less—one’s egotism is there but it’s changed—it’s less sharp though perhaps it’s more petty…. It’s true I still like to be in touch with the younger artists … but I get more and more inclined for quiet and sunshine and just to see tranquil and generous sights like the walls of Italian buildings … and now I know what I want to work out I could manage a great deal of comparative isolation. And then we should I think keep one another going—even our disagreements would prevent us going to sleep intellectually.

But detachment did not mean withdrawal. His later years, as he told Lowes Dickinson, were to be richer and fuller, not emptier and paler than the others. And as he approached his sixtieth year his claim that the perpetual” revision of aesthetic experiences kept one alive aesthetically seemed to be justified in the emotional life also. New experiences succeeded the old, and brought new orientations. No crust must be allowed to form, even if the purely external conditions of life must have a certain solid texture. But while every sensation was to be savoured, and none rejected off-hand, a balance seemed to have been arrived at—a balance between the emotions and the intellect, between Vision and Design.

[]

Chapter XI

Transformations

I

Transformations was the title that Roger Fry chose for a book of essays, and it seems a fitting title for the last ten years of his life, the years that were to be richer and fuller than any that had gone before. Indeed, so full were they of change and experiment that only a rapid and fragmentary sketch of those transformations and their results can be attempted. “The great difference I find between myself and these people”, he wrote from Pontigny in 1925, “is that I have curiosity and they haven’t. I want to have new experiences. I want to go out into this tremendous unknown universe outside one.

The one drag upon this insatiable curiosity was, as might have been expected, the body. The long strain of the Omega, the hours spent potting in the cold factory at Poole, the odd meals he cooked for himself with the smell of paint hanging over the frying-pan, had told upon him.

pain. But this also excited his curiosity. It might be indigestion; on the other hand it might be cancer. All theories must be given a trial, none must be dismissed offhand. And so with indefatigable optimism, rather as a scientist on the track of a new discovery than as a patient seeking relief from pain, he went from doctor to doctor, tried cure after cure—“One has to see lots of doctors and draw one’s own conclusions”. When the orthodox failed he had recourse to the quacks. Drops of blood were submitted to a man with a black box and a pointer. Next a gentleman with an instrument that “worked as a kind of wireless receiver of telepathic vibrations” was consulted. Whatever the verdict—and it varied—he considered it with complete open-mindedness. “It’s altogether too queer”, he wrote when reporting one of these experiments, “and I want to find out more about it.”

This temper of mind, “this ridiculous and occasionally nefast gullibility” as Clive Bell put it, “was the exaggeration of an open-mindedness that made Roger not only one of the most delightful of companions, but one of the most remarkable men of his age. Had a serious student seriously advanced an opinion (say that Giotto or that Cézanne was no good) which called in question his (Roger’s) judgment and jeopardised his whole aesthetic, Roger would have listened attentively and sympathetically. And that, not out of urbanity, but because he was genuinely anxious to get at the truth….” Naturally, legends arose. What limits were there to what Roger Fry would believe if given the chance? It was tempting to give him the chance Might there not be, it was suggested, a scientific method for testing the value of works of art? The suggestion was acted upon. Next week he was found, according to gossip, “swinging a weight attached to a bit of string above a canvas by Cézanne or himself and attempting to measure by eye the extent of the oscillation”. Then his son, yachting in Southampton Water, reported some vagary in the tides, or perhaps in his own watch. To his father, however, a more sinister explanation seemed possible, indeed probable. He had been reading the astronomers. “He inferred that we were in the ambit of a “dark star’ which in all probability would shortly collide with the planet and annihilate it.” And so convincing was the picture that he drew of this catastrophe that doom seemed to hang over the omnibus that took his guests down the Holloway Road. As for the cures that he discovered and pressed on his friends, the patent medicines, the pills, the ointments, even the saffron-coloured vests—legend had it that he had pressed one such garment upon a lady threatened with tuberculosis with instructions that she must wear it “if possible on a promontory above the sea, looking east at sunrise”—they were legion. Perhaps one anecdote which is told and vouched for by Clive Bell may sum up this aspect of Roger Fry’s open-mindedness. A party was travelling in Italy: at Bologna one of them was struck down with illness. Roger Fry “arrived direct from Paris and found the little Italian doctor in the sick-room. Now in Paris, just outside the Gare de Lyon, Roger’s eye had been taken by a gay, multi-coloured tube containing a secret remedy. He had opened it in the train, administered a dose to himself—to precisely what end I am not sure—and studied the printed matter that surrounded it. This had satisfied him that he had in his waistcoat pocket nothing less than the veritable panacea. So, when the Italian doctor had finished his examination, written out a prescription, and arranged for a consultation with the professor of the faculty, Roger stepped forward, and a little uneasily I do think, said that he had brought with him something from Paris that might be worth trying.

“‘What does it cure?’

“‘Tutto’, said Roger without flinching.

“È troppo’, said the little doctor.”

II

It was not surprising, then, to find that in 1923 when other cures failed he prepared to submit himself to Dr Coué. But it was interesting. For he had a natural antipathy to that “damned thing” the unconscious; and the “huge Quaker obstinacy and independence of our race” revolted against submitting to it. On the other hand, a new experiment appealed to his curiosity, and there was also the human interest of the strange gathering that collected round the queer little man in the big shed at Nancy. Coué, he said, looked like a grocer’s assistant, and yet was so simple, so gay, so sincere that soon all the dismal invalids were laughing and believing in him as in “a kind of secular Jesus Christ. People of all nationalities and classes had come together. They told their stories in public. Miracles happened daily. A cripple walked; a deaf and dumb English lady suddenly recovered the use of faculties. At first it seemed impossible for Roger Fry to be anything but a detached and sympathetic spectator. “It’s terribly difficult for people with so external and analytical a mind as I have to submit”, he wrote. For six hours daily he sat on a camp-stool repeating “Ça passe” and tried to realise that his scepticism was “merely instinctive and irrational”. At last the charm began to work. His pain left him, and he went on to develop a theory of the unconscious, and that theory was, of course, brought to bear upon art. The séances at Nancy had their share in developing his growing interest in the art of uncivilised races. “The development of the unconscious in art”, he was to write in his last Slade lectures, “may bring about a purer and more expressive visual art and one that is complementary to the intellectual and spiritual art of the West.” And with Coué in his mind he went on to the Colonial Exhibition at Marseilles and exclaimed, on seeing the negroes, “What we’ve lost by forgetting how to be animals!”

But these experiments in unconsciousness were interrupted in December 1923 by a call upon faculties of a very different kind. From Nancy he went to Paris to give expert evidence in the case of a disputed Leonardo. For five hours he was examined and cross-examined. A certain Mr Hyacinthe Ringrose was facetious and searching. “You found that the public thought more of your writings than of your paintings?” “Yes.” “Did you ever get any prize in Paris?” “No, I never had that insult.” “Did you ever read John Ruskin?” “It is a very long time since I read him, but I should say he talked a great deal of nonsense.” “Have you changed your opinion sometimes?” “Yes.” “And you are still liable to change your opinion?”

“I hope so.” After a good deal more of such bickering, Mr Ringrose drew from him “a sort of personal confession”. “When I was a young man I thought the Italian masters had got hold of what I considered the right technique…. At that time I really believed that there was a right way of painting and a wrong way of painting. I honestly confess that I have changed my mind. Now I no longer think that there is a right way or a wrong way of painting, but every possible way. Every artist has to create his own method of expression in his medium, and there is no one way, right or wrong. But every way is right when it is expressive throughout of the idea in the artist’s mind.” And he went on to deliver a very lucid and technical disquisition upon mediums; upon washes and pastes; upon the use of the thumb; upon what is meant by rhythm and what is meant by movement; and gave Mr Ringrose and the experts who crowded to hear the case a learned and brilliant lecture upon art in general and the style of Leonardo in particular. After which he returned to more séances on the camp-stool at Nancy, and could be heard muttering “Ça passe, Ça passe” as he sat abstracted and unconscious in the corner of the railway carriage which took him later that year through Spain.

III

There is another aspect of the body which has to be referred to, and if possible in his own tone of voice. That, in talking of love and its “many ways”, was always perfectly simple, open and even matter-of-fact. Hence, a curious reversal of ordinary standards like that which had baffled his son in his school days. It was far more immoral to suppress the body than to give it its natural place. Its natural place had been distorted out of all proportion by the bourgeois conventions of the time. For the evasions and hypocrisies of his youth he had nothing but contempt. But if anyone imported the body into places where the body is out of place—if a painter, for example, used his art to rouse sexual feelings—he was disgusted and had only one word for that distortion—“pornography”. This honesty, like so many of his reversals of the accepted conventions, resulted in a new sense of reality. He made no attempt to hide passing affairs; they had their pleasure, perhaps their necessity, certainly their amusement; but the love that was not passing, that was transformed into a relation where mind and body mixed indistinguishably, gained in seriousness because of that honesty, and no one felt the importance of such relationships more than he did.

There was an experience about this time that affected him deeply, and of which he wrote an account. In order to introduce his own comments an outline can be given, such as remains in memory after reading a document meant only for himself and one or two friends. Among the patients at Nancy was a French woman who was neither young nor beautiful, but witty and sympathetic, and between them sprang up one of those friendships which are natural under the circumstances. The rest followed. He had reason to believe that for both of them the relationship in spite of its difficulties—she was ill, they were often separated—was of extraordinary value, when, for no reason that could be discovered, in a sudden access of insanity his friend put an end to her life. Far from having caused this tragedy, he had given her, as her family assured him, the greatest happiness she had ever known. But the shock was terrible, and in the days that followed he wrote an account of this “tragic story” in French, from which some passages may be taken:

Il se livre en moi un combat interminable entre deux principes contradictoires. Par l’amour et seulement par l’amour nous touchons ou croyons toucher à une réalité solide, à un monde peuplé de vraies substances, des âmes, des substances, indestructibles, éternelles, définitives. Dans tout le reste de notre vie règne une rélativité complète. Là il n’y a que des relations changeantes perpétuellement, et jamais répétées. Tout effort à concilier ces deux expériences semble vain. Les deux mondes n’ont pas une perspective commune. Dans la femme le principe de la vie éternelle de l’amour prime généralement sur l’autre. Souvent elle appartient complètement à l’amour. Je crois que … placée comme je suis maintenant et en pleine possession de son entendement se tuerait—moi non. L’autre principe, celui de la vie relative ne se laisse pas jamais abattre complètement chez nous. Sur celui-là j’ai petit à petit formé une philosophie capable de me supporter, capable de rendre viable la vie. Est-ce qu’on connaît le cas d’une seule femme qui fut vraiment sage? Tandis qu’il y a eu des hommes sages. Et la sagesse consiste dans la complète rénonciation de tout en nous qui réclame la justice. Il faut que l’on se résigne à ne pas croire même dans sa propre personnalité. L’ensemble de notre caractère est tout aussi bien le résultat pour ainsi dire fortuit de l’hérédité et du milieu que tout autre chose…. Il faut écarter toute idée de mérite et de blâme. Il faut traquer la vanité jusque dans ses recoins les plus intimes, l’écraser complètement et alors la vie peut se poursuivre tranquillement. Il me semble que Lao Tzü (si c’est bien lui) est le seul philosophe qui a su annoncer cette vérité profonde.[◉8] Toute vanité implique une déformation de la réalité extérieure. La vie n’est qu’une longue apprentissage dans l’art de se ficher complètement de son égo. Et la folie n’est autre chose que d’être complètement emprisonné. La sagesse n’est autre chose que la suppression de toute déformation, l’acceptation complète de ce qui n’est pas nous. C’est le triomphe de l’adaptation au milieu. Ce n’est pas le bonheur mais quel Démon nous a soufflé dès notre maissance l’idée funeste que nous avons droit au bonheur?

Finally—“Je vais me guérir je le sais … je ne vais pas donner à la nature en plus ce spectacle ridicule de l’homme en révolte. Il y a plus de fierté dans l’acceptance, dans l’humilité complète. Je vais goûter la saveur d’être vieux, de ne plus être aimé, de n’avoir plus d’espoir ni d’ambition…. Il faut que la sagesse nous enseigne encore comment nous soumettre à ses conseils. C’est la dernière et la plus dure passe de la philosophie.”

IV

He went later that summer to stay with the Maurons at St Rémy. It was the only life that he then found tolerable. He lodged in a little Mas, did his own housework, and found the peasants “the most civilised, sceptical, humorous good natured people imaginable—such people can only happen where Christianity hasn’t really taken hold—they descend direct from the Pagan world and have its wisdom”. The communism that had flowered from this ancient civilisation was congenial to him. If any one wanted a salad, he noted, he took it from the next garden, and the neighbours did the same in their turn. Soon he was out in the market at four in the morning, and won the respect of the market women by guessing correctly the price they would get for their haricots. It was very hot, and there was the landscape to look at—the infinitely complex chiselling of the limestone hills and the intricacy of the squares made by the almond and the olive groves. He forced himself to work. The light falling through the vine leaves of the half-darkened room where Charles Mauron, whose eyesight was threatened, was forced to sit interested him and he began to paint his portrait. They discussed aesthetics, played chess, and began together a translation of E.M. Forster’s Passage to India. “It’s only by piling new sensations on to one’s memories that one can learn to start life again”, he wrote to Mrs MacColl. He might have added, “It is only by helping other people to overcome their troubles that one can forget one’s own”, for such, as the letters abundantly prove, was one of his main preoccupations. But for the time, “the intensification of life” had gone; the bad dreams were to the fore.

If he could be happy, he could be very unhappy. Often the visitor to Dalmeny Avenue would find him harassed and in pain. He had given up repeating the magic formula “Ça passe, Ça passe”. Dr Coué’s magic had failed. And the old obsessions returned—art was impossible in England; nobody bought his pictures; perhaps he would be forced to give up painting. London society became more and more boring: yet people pestered him with invitations; and his restlessness increased. His energy without a centre to absorb it was formidable. There was his voice on the telephone. He was just back from one of his innumerable expeditions. He had met “a delightful creature” (Spanish, French, Portuguese or from the purlieus of Manchester) who had a real gift (for poetry, painting, or nothing in particular) but was, of course—with officials what they were and the British public what it was that might be taken for granted—starving, or what was worse, living in hopelessly uncongenial surroundings. Something must be done. A lecture must be given; a hall hired; circulars sent out; the rich forced to subscribe. Something must be done—the voice was imperious; and it was heard not without dread by those whose spirit was weak or whose time was occupied. The only consolation lay in art. There were the young English painters. “Matthew Smith has made tremendous strides this winter….” There were pictures, “I have bought a little Matisse for which I longed ever since I saw it years ago in the Elder Gallery”. And there was always the theory: “I’m getting an idea of what is the great thing in design, namely to have the greatest possible amount of interplay between the volumes and the spaces both at their three dimensionalist. Do you understand? It means that both volumes and spaces function to the utmost against one another as it were … if you look at a Raphael and then at, say, a Titian, perhaps you’ll see what I mean….”

At last, happily, he found what he had lacked for so many years—a centre, the intimacy between two people that grows with the years. That possibility presented itself in 1926. “Je suis incapable de me marier par suite de notre loi inique”, he wrote to his friends the Maurons. The law then must be disregarded. With a simplicity that makes it unnecessary either to emphasise the fact or to conceal it, he disregarded the law. He lived with Helen Anrep from 1926 to the end of his life—“il n’y a que la formule qui manque”. The reality—“jamais de ma vie ai’je recontré une sympathie aussi parfaite que nous avons”—was of such immeasurable importance that the formula could be brushed aside without hesitation. If from time to time he traced signs of outraged morality on the part of educational and other bodies, he was compelled to admit that things had improved even in England since Sir William Richmond had boycotted him from decent society, and it rejoiced him to find how successfully the young were routing the “fantastic puritanism” of the Victorians in their private lives. Certainly he was no less often asked to lecture; hostesses continued to pester him with invitations; and he was forced as time went on to admit, though it went strangely against the grain, that there were quite a number of people even in England who bought his pictures.

Room in Bernard Street

V

The main external change, then, of this marriage without a formula was another change of house. He took a house opposite the tube station with a side view of the terra-cotta prominence of the Russell Hotel, in Bernard Street. “Vous voyez”, he wrote to Madame Mauron, “que le bon dieu se charge de m’éviter toute monotonie dans la vie.” And once more the pictures, the pots, the negro carvings, the Omega chairs and tables were rearranged. “It’s great fun”, he wrote, “getting things to fit and seeing the new values they take.” Happiness, “this immense bien être, this extraordinary comfort and ease”, as he described it, gave everything a new value. Born, it seemed, to enjoy life instinctively, he had been forced to enjoy it courageously, philosophically, in the teeth of circumstances. Now that effort could be relaxed, and the things to be enjoyed seemed endless. “I seem”, he wrote in a letter at this time, “to get more and more pleasure out of all the small things.” He almost ceased to analyse them. That is why perhaps he enjoyed them so fully, and why in recording them he came closest to being the artist that he always longed to be. Here are some of them. “Just to walk about Paris and come to an old door or a Louis XV balcony”, to “flâner in the Tuileries gardens and watch the fat lady who keeps one of the kiosques … sitting out with her family round a great pot of stew … wishing the men who sweep up the leaves ‘Bon appétit’ with such an air of simple greedy good sense and humour”; to have one’s hair cut and “notice the relations between the manicures and the clients”; to buy toys for his grandchildren in the Printemps; to light a fire and watch “how the flames take hold of a great log and lick round it and eat their way into hollows and make lovely golden caverns”; to eat “two slices of ham shimmering in a pale reddish brown sauce of indecipherable subtlety and complexity”—these were among the small things that made every day richer and fuller. There were also the “odd contacts with people”. “Why should I provoke the confidence of the elderly clergy? … But he was rather an old dear with an odd capricious passion for pictures…. He said, ‘I’m getting very anxious about these Cubists and Futurists, and I mean to preach about it one day’. So I had to offer to show him my Cubists.” Then there was the great lady, the patroness of art, who, confronted with a blue Picasso, emitted “one of the great sayings of the century—‘Well, if you call them Chinese, I think they’re beautiful, but if you call them French, I think they’re quite stupid’ “. And the perennial and eternal earnest American lady, “who teaches art, God help us, to 300 American girls and is seeking desperately for the last word. She’s totally incapable of seeing anything, but she’s longing just to hear that blessed last word”, which word Roger Fry refused to supply. There was the pleasure of being taught to play billiards by a decorated French professor; and the pleasure of playing roulette on a system of his own by which he earned one franc after playing for twelve hours, and then, on the boat coming back to England, the amusement of hearing the French sailors squabbling: “ ‘Oh toi, à moins tu es plus moche que moi!’ He saw I was amused and turned to me and said, ‘N’est-ce-pas, Monsieur, il est plus moche que moi?’ I said, ‘Ce sont deux types de beauté. Dieu me garde de juger entre eux’, and all the quarrel ended in laughter.” And, of course, there were the perpetual inexhaustible pleasures of landscape, seascape and townscape, and the simple pleasure of feeling “the extraordinary sensation of pure sunlight”.

So he noted down rapidly and casually the small things that made up the common texture of daily life. Small they were; but the enjoyment of such pleasures played a great part in making his last years fuller and richer than any that had gone before; and had their share too in the increasing richness and humour of his writing.

VI

It was with many groans that he hitched his “very external and analytic” mind after these summer saunterings to the task of writing. “Yes, I know I ought to write, but you know it does need such a different focus of attention from painting—there is really a kind of opposition in the two attitudes.” He teemed with ideas, but to sit down and write them out meant “such intense labour and pain…. How little natural aptitude I have, and how rarely I like the turn my phrases are apt to take. How sick in fact I get with my own style…. I was rather shocked at the horrible repetition of words like ‘plastic’, but what is one to do if one has to make clear one’s exposition? One has to have the exact word as much as a man of science has to use the correct term for which no substitute is possible.”[◉9] Such were some of the groans with which he set to work under friendly pressure to prepare his next book, “Transformations” (1926), for the press. “By the word ‘Transformations’ I wish to suggest all those various transmutations which forms undergo in becoming parts of esthetic constructions”, he explained. The old articles and lectures had as usual been much “remoulded and manipulated”, and it may be that the reader will discover traces of the intense labour and pain that the writing caused him. Phrases repeat themselves; words, hideous words like “pastose”, “constatation” have to be coined and forced into service to express exactly that sensation for which there is no correct term. He never hesitated to spoil the shape of a sentence by tagging on a “namely” or a “that is to say” if he thought that by so doing he could lessen obscurity and press the argument a little further. Nor did he attempt to seduce the reader with perorations or fine writing. But again what other writer upon art, what other maker of aesthetic theories, has his power to make the chase exciting and the discovery real? And again, the ordinary reader asks, how is it done? Some Questions in Esthetics—it is not an attractive title. Questions about aesthetics are apt to fine themselves into thin air. The problem of what is meant by representation in art is remote and obscure. But as the process of pushing the theory further proceeds, the argument is not only so subtle and so serpentine that it is fascinating to follow its windings, but it grazes so many solid objects in its passage that it acquires solidity; the theory becomes something that we can see and touch. The picture is always miraculously at hand to illustrate by the attitude of a sportsman or the shadow on a wall, or the caricature of the old Duchess d’Uzès, the exact point that has been reached; and from that point it is possible to press still further. Then the views from this uphill path are so new. The pattern on the carpet is seen from the other side. Much is disputable; much doubtful. Fiction is given the capacity to deal with “psychological volumes”. Poetry is declared incapable of sensual appeal. New values are suggested and new vistas revealed. And at last, as if cleaned and burnished and set before us on the easel in a clearer and richer light than ever before, there is the picture itself: Rembrandt’s “Schoolboy at his Lessons” lies before us. But Roger Fry’s descriptions can never be detached from their context. His astonishing power of evoking, say the painting of the wood of the boy’s desk, is not a purely descriptive faculty. It depends upon the friction of argument and analysis that has gone before. But if for this reason he does not provide purple passages, the glow is deeper seated; it is ingrained in the very stuff of his prose. And then, of course, there is the humour—the refreshing and perpetual play of mind—turned now upon Sir Claude Phillips and then upon the old obsessions—the Philistine, the snob, and the treatment of the artist by the State—all of which leads us on, until upon the last page we have reached the present moment, and the living artist, and ask again what comes next?

Whatever the nature of the gift that can bring before us the green of an apple, the glow of a desk, or the complicated oppositions and harmonies of abstract lines, an increasing number of people came under his spell. His fame as a critic was growing. It is difficult to check that growth; it was not marked, as is usually the case, by honours and appointments. But proofs multiplied of the extraordinary position that he had come to hold among the younger generation of artists and critics. “In so far as taste can be changed by one man,” Sir Kenneth Clark wrote after his death, “it was changed by Roger Fry.” The only other writer with whom he could be compared was Ruskin. “At the time of his death”, Mr Howard Hannay writes, “Roger Fry’s position in the art world was unique, and the only parallel to it is that of Ruskin at the height of his reputation…. The scholars listened to his views on contemporary art because he knew more than they did about ancient art, and artists paid attention to his historical surveys because they illuminated contemporary painting.”

It was thus as a great critic, with something of a prophet’s power to excite and stimulate, that he appeared to those who were best fitted to judge among the younger generation. But Roger Fry had no reason to fear the fate he so often deplored—that he would be canonised during his lifetime. There was something about him, or his views, that still made it very difficult for those in authority to accept him. Of this he had curious proof when in 1927 the Slade Professorship, this time at Oxford, was again vacant, and the electors again rejected him. It gave him, he admitted, “a slight shock of surprise”. He regretted the opportunity it would have given him to formulate some of his theories, and, though the “grand Victorian vice of saving”, which he had not inherited, had given him an independence, a settled income would have been welcome. But he was more amused and interested than distressed. Could it be possible that he was still capable of inspiring fear in the minds of the elderly? “The Oxford electors”, he wrote, “are afraid, Bridges says, of my unreasonableness—as though the real crime weren’t that I’m so scandalously reasonable. But it’s rather pleasant to feel that one’s such a lurid figure … if they only knew what mildness, what caution, what prudent conservatism, what elderly wisdom there was behind this hob-goblin mask of mine how very shamefaced they’d be. But let’s keep the mask on just for the fun of frightening them.” Or was it that the authorities had a keen nose for formulas and had scented out the lack of one in his case? Whatever the reason, he was rejected, and the chief pang it caused him was that once more he had to confess his failure to his mother. The inferiority complex bred by his Victorian upbringing was not, he noted, quite dead yet; witness the fact that when he was past sixty he dreamt of a lion; and when he woke and analysed his dream he identified the lion with Sir Edward Fry and the British public. That showed how terribly he had been suppressed by both, and he was pleased when Dr Martin confirmed him by tracing his visceral neuralgia to the effects of a puritan upbringing—“I always think we ought to show some bad effects of that early training and sure enough here it is”. But though traces of Highgate and Sunninghill returned in dreams, Victorianism was evaporating. Time had changed his relation with his mother. “It’s not to be believed how much she’s changed”, he wrote. He could discuss anything with her, and he delighted in her wit. “It shows what a portentous pressure my father exercised over her”, he remarked. The old restraint had gone and it was “a real pleasure” to talk to her, even though he had to confess once more that the Oxford electors had again rejected him.

VII

But if Oxford rejected him, London accepted him. He found in these years to his amazement that he could fill the Queen’s Hall when he lectured upon art. The winter exhibitions at Burlington House gave him the opportunity. He lectured on Flemish art, on French art, on Italian art; and the hall was filled. The audience, as one of them records, “was enthusiastic and rapt”. It was an astonishing feat. There was the Queen’s Hall, full those winter evenings of greenish mist, echoing with the sneezings and coughings of the afflicted flock. And to entertain them there was nothing but a gentleman in evening dress with a long stick in his hand in front of a cadaverous sheet. How could contact be established? How could the world of spiritual reality emerge in those uncongenial surroundings? At first by “personality”—the attraction, as Mr Hannay says, “of the whole man”. “He had only to point to a passage in a picture … and to murmur the word ‘plasticity’ and a magical atmosphere was created.” The voice in which he murmured was conciliatory, urbane, humorous. It conveyed what was not so perceptible in his writing—the tolerance, the wide experience, that lay behind the hobgoblin mask of the man who had the reputation of being either a crack-brained theorist or the irresponsible champion of impossible beliefs. But as he went on it was clear that the beliefs were still there. Many listeners might have inferred that the lecturer, who looked like a “fasting friar with a rope round his waist” in spite of his evening dress, was inviting them to the practice of a new kind of religion. He was praising a new kind of saint—the artist who leads his laborious life “indifferent to the world’s praise or blame”; who must be poor in spirit, humble, and doggedly true to his own convictions. And the penalty for backsliding was pronounced—if he lies “he is cut off from the chief source of his inspiration”. No Fry among all the generations of Frys could have spoken with greater fervour of the claims of the spirit, or invoked doom with more severity. But then, “Slide, please”, he said. And there was the picture—Rembrandt, Chardin, Poussin, Cézanne—in black and white upon the screen. And the lecturer pointed. His long wand, trembling like the antenna of some miraculously sensitive insect, settled upon some “rhythmical phrase”, some sequence; some diagonal. And then he went on to make the audience see—“the gem-like notes; the aquamarines; and topazes that lie in the hollow of his satin gowns; bleaching the lights to evanescent pallors”. Somehow the black-and-white slide on the screen became radiant through the mist, and took on the grain and texture of the actual canvas.

All that he had done again and again in his books. But here there was a difference. As the next slide slid over the sheet there was a pause. He gazed afresh at the picture. And then in a flash he found the word he wanted; he added on the spur of the moment what he had just seen as if for the first time. That, perhaps, was the secret of his hold over his audience. They could see the sensation strike and form; he could lay bare the very moment of perception. So with pauses and spurts the world of spiritual reality emerged in slide after slide—in Poussin, in Chardin, in Rembrandt, in Cézanne—in its uplands and its lowlands, all connected, all somehow made whole and entire, upon the great screen in the Queen’s Hall. And finally the lecturer, after looking long through his spectacles, came to a pause. He was pointing to a late work by Cezanne, and he was baffled. He shook his head; his stick rested on the floor. It went, he said, far beyond any analysis of which he was capable. And so instead of saying, “Next slide”, he bowed, and the audience emptied itself into Langham Place.

For two hours they had been looking at pictures. But they had seen one of which the lecturer himself was unconscious—the outline of the man against the screen, an ascetic figure in evening dress who paused and pondered, and then raised his stick and pointed. That was a picture that would remain in memory together with the rest, a rough sketch that would serve many of the audience in years to come as the portrait of a great critic, a man of profound sensibility but of exacting honesty, who, when reason could penetrate no further, broke off; but was convinced, and convinced others, that what he saw was there.

VIII

The success of the lectures surprised him. Perhaps he had misjudged the British public. Perhaps in its queer way the public had more feeling for art than he allowed. At any rate there was the fact—“under certain conditions the English public becomes interested in ‘highbrow’ stuff…. Roger Fry had the power of making other people feel the importance of art…. In spite of a complete absence of purple passages or playing to the gallery he was able to keep his audience at a high pitch of interest and curiosity.” People, drawn from all classes and callings, would fill the Queen’s Hall when he lectured. And not only would they fill the Queen’s Hall—they threatened to fill Bernard Street into the bargain. “I am as usual”, he wrote after one of these lectures, “swamped by telephone calls and people at me all the time. Miss—wishes to know if she may come and look at my Matisse.

Mr—wants advice upon a lot of old masters…. A. wants to borrow my Vlaminck. B. came to consult me about his son’s education as an art student.” And there were the letters—the innumerable letters. One from a schoolgirl ran: “Dear Mr Fry … Our art mistress from school took a party to the Persian art Exhibition and we were attracted in many pictures, to people with their first fingers held to their lips. Also in some designs animals are seen biting each other. If these mean anything, or are symbolical in any way, I should be very grateful if you could tell me. Another thing is, does our common cat originate from Persia?”

He was delighted to answer schoolgirls’ questions. He was delighted to give advice. He would show “hordes of school marms from the U.S.A. armed with note-books seeking information”, round his rooms; and then “a very intelligent young man from Manchester” who was interested in Chinese pottery; and then go on to a committee meeting at Burlington House to arrange the Italian Exhibition; and from that to a committee meeting of the Burlington Magazine; and when he got home in the evening, there was somebody waiting to “ask my advice about getting up a show of Russian ikons”. That was an ordinary day’s work; and it was no wonder that at the end of a season of such days he would exclaim “London’s impossible!”

It was an exclamation that burst forth irrepressibly every year about February or March. It was necessary to escape from London and its attractions and distractions if he was to have any peace at all. And it was equally necessary if he was to continue lecturing. He must fill his cistern from the main source; he must see pictures again, And so he was off—to Berlin, to Tunis, to Sicily, to Rome, to Holland, to Spain and again and again to France. The old pictures must be seen once more; they must be seen afresh. “I spent the afternoon in the Louvre. I tried to forget all my ideas and theories and to look at everything as though I’d never seen it before…. It’s only so that one can make discoveries…. Each work must be a new and a nameless experience.”

His method was the same in his sixties as it had been in his thirties. He went to the gallery as soon as it was opened; for six hours he worked steadily round, looking at each picture in turn, and making rough notes in pencil. When lunch-time came he was always taken by surprise; and always, as in the old days, he compared his impressions with his companion’s, and scribbled his theories down in letters to friends at home. “I’m getting my aesthetic feelings absolutely exhausted with the amount I’ve looked at. I doubt if I’ve ever had such hard work in my life—one’s absolutely driven to it by the wealth of these museums”, he wrote to Vanessa Bell from Berlin in 1928. A long list of pictures seen and noted follows. There was Menzel; there was Liebermann; there was Trubner. There were ‘magnificent Cézannes’; there were Manets. There was Egyptian art; there was the art of Central Asia. Berlin had ten galleries filled with paintings and sculptures and miniatures, whereas the British Museum had only a few cases. Stimulated by all these sights, theories began to form themselves; perhaps too rapidly—perhaps they might have to be scrapped. “In fact I don’t know what I’m getting at at all. All sorts of vague hints at new aesthetics seem to be simmering in my brain….”

It was thus, in front of the pictures themselves, that the material for the lectures was collected. It was from these new and nameless experiences that vague hints at new aesthetics came into being. Then the vagueness had to be expelled; the simmer had to be spun into a tough thread of argument that held the whole together. And after the lecture had been given the drudgery of re-writing the spoken word would begin. The obstinate, the elusive, word had to be found, had to be coined, had to be “curled round” the sensation. And so at last the books came out one after another—the books on French art, and Flemish art and British art; the books on separate painters; the books on whole periods of art; the essays upon Persian art and Chinese art and Russian art; the pamphlets upon Architecture; upon Art and Psychology—all those books and essays and articles upon which his claim to be called the greatest critic of his time depends.

Pontigny, a picture by Roger Fry, about 1925

IX

But if, in order to write and lecture, it was necessary to see pictures “as if for the first time”, it was almost equally necessary to see friends. Ideas must be sketched on other people’s minds. Theories must be discussed, preferably with someone, like Charles Mauron, who could demolish them. But even if the friend was incapable of demolishing them, they must be shared. “He was so sociable that he could never enjoy anything without at once feeling the need to share it with those around him”, as M. Mauron says. It was the desire to share, to have two pairs of eyes to see with, and somebody at hand, or at least within reach of the pen, to argue with that made him scribble those letters which it is impossible to quote in full, for they have neither beginning, middle nor end, and are often illustrated with a sketch of a landscape, or with the profile of a sausage-maker’s wife at Royat, or with a few notes to indicate what he was “getting at” in his own picture. But if the letters cannot be quoted in full, here is a complete post-card: “In the train going to Edinburgh. I wonder whether you could send me to Edinburgh 1. my béret which is very nice for travelling. 2. Slides of Picasso’s sculptures, those queer birds. They’re in the Vitality series upstairs I think and still all together and on the bureau. 3. A negro head [sketch] the very blank one with no features. It’s in the negro lecture which I left on the old French chest of drawers in my sitting-room. The carriage is scarcely warmed. Damn the English.”

“Damn the English”—the words ceased to apply to the English—was not England the only country where free speech was allowed? But they may serve as a hint that he was not one of those characters who have, as we are told by their biographers, an instinctive love of their kind: His kind often amazed him and shocked him. His eyes, shining beneath the bushy black eyebrows, would fix themselves suddenly, and, looking as formidable as his father the Judge, he would pronounce judgment. “You are bolstering people up in their natural beastliness”, his words to Sir Charles Holmes who had given him, innocently, a book on fishing recall some awkward moments in his company. But if not gregarious he was sociable—“incurably sociable” he called himself. His friends meant so much to him that he would give up the delights of wandering from village to village, from gallery to gallery, in order to be with them. Spring after spring he would exclaim, “I feel very much inclined never to come back to England, just to wander on into Spain and Morocco…”, but the sentence would end, “if you wretches will live in London, then to London I must be dragged back”.

A list of those friends would be a long one. It would include many famous names—the names of painters, writers, men of science, art experts, politicians. But it would include many names that are quite unknown—people met in trains, people met in inns, mad poets and melancholy undergraduates. Often he had forgotten their names; names mattered less and less to him. He went out into society sometimes, but he came back disillusioned. “Your old friend”, he wrote (to Virginia Woolf), “went to that charming Princess … and came back with another illusion gone—he now knows that all aristocrats are virtuous but incredibly boring and refuses to suffer them any more … the said Princess having been his last desperate throw of the net on that barren shore.” After the war his old dream of a society in which people of all kinds met together in congenial surroundings, and talked about everything under the sun, had to be given up. People were too poor, their time was too occupied, and the English moreover had little gift for discussing general ideas in public. Perhaps the best substitute for this society was at Pontigny. He went several times to the sessions there and enjoyed them greatly. Of one he wrote:

To Helen Anrep, 7th September 1925

Pontigny broke up to-day…. Saturday was the day when at last Mauron and I had our innings and brought things down from the abstract. I elaborated a good deal on my empiricism, said with what envious admiration I’d watched all those marvellous evolutions “dans l’empyrée de la pensée” but that as an Englishman I couldn’t throw off my “empiricisme”, that however much I wanted to advance “je n’étais capable de quitter le sol que d’un pied a la fois”, and so on which amused them a good deal. Then Mauron read an essay on literary beauty which was by far the most creative and masterly contribution (except perhaps Groethuysen’s Augustine) of the whole “décade”. It was beautifully written, transparently clear, and perfectly developed and full of the most original ideas…. The enthusiasm was so great when he’d finished that everyone applauded wh. they never do in the entretiens. So the scientific spirit really had the last word and a great triumph over the abstractionists and metaphysicians. We two brought the thing out into daylight out of the mist of dialectic ingenuity. The brilliance of these men is simply amazing. Fernandez and Fayard do plays in extemporised Alexandrines or sing songs which they make up from bouts rhythmés given them. One night they had conférenciers who had to lecture for 2 minutes on subjects chosen out of a hat—the subjects are always preposterous. I gave them “the Ichthyosaurus as a precursor of Charlie du Bos”…. Then they did a Music Hall entertainment with acrobats who pretended to do incredible feats and of course did nothing, but the best was Martin Chauffier, a little solemn Breton with a face like a sucking nonconformist minister who had two specialities—Chateaubriand (on whom he read a very good paper) and Charlie Chaplin whom he did to perfection—the feet especially…. Also I liked Fabre-Luce, an exquisitely precise and formal young man—immensely rich, who has written the most brilliant and unpatriotic account of contemporary history…. He told me 1 looked like Erasmus. Je ne demande pas mieux.

Cassis, a picture by Roger Fry (1925)

But in London he was less ambitious. The attraction of London to him was that it was easy to get together little parties where old friends met new ones even if their names had slipped his memory. For if names mattered less and less, people mattered more and more. How much they mattered, how from one end of his life to the other he lived in his friendships, how in letter after letter he broke into praise of his friends—all that is not to be conveyed by lists of names. If certain friends—Lowes Dickinson, Desmond MacCarthy, Vanessa Bell, Philippa Strachey, the Maurons, his sister Margery stand out, they are surrounded by so many others from so many different worlds, talking so many different languages, that to choose from among them or to say what it was that he got from each of them is impossible. But to be with them was one of his chief pleasures. “Do you realise what delightful little parties we shall be able to have?” he wrote when he moved to Bernard Street; and one of those little parties may stand as the type of many.

His guests found him writing. He had forgotten the time; he was trying to finish a lecture. But he was delighted to stop writing and to begin to talk. The room was as untidy as ever. Ink-bottles and coffee-cups, proof sheets and paint-brushes were piled on the tables and strewn on the floor. And there were the pictures—some framed, others stood against the wall. There was the Derain picture of a spectral dog in the snow; the blue Matisse picture of ships in harbour. And there were the negro masks and the Chinese statues, and all the plates—the rare Persian china and the cheap peasant pottery that he had picked up for a farthing at a fair. Always there was something new to look at—a new picture, or a little panel of wood perhaps with a dim face upon it—very possibly it was the portrait of Dante, painted by Giotto and carried in Dante’s funeral procession. The room was crowded, and for all Roger Fry’s acute sensibility, he was curiously indifferent to physical comfort. The chairs had passed their prime; the lifts in the Tube station opposite clanged incessantly; a flare of light came in from the arc-lamp in the street outside; and what he called “the hymnology of Bernard Street” brayed from a loud-speaker next door. But it did not matter. “The dinner”, he wrote of one of those little parties, “was a great success. The wild ducks were a trifle tough, but our friends are not really critical. And after dinner”, the letter goes on, “we settled in to a good old Cambridge Apostolic discussion about existence, whether good was absolute or not. Charles [Mauron] and I representing modern science managed to make it clear that Oliver [Strachey] and Leonard [Woolf] were mystics. They could not accept the complete relativity of everything to human nature and the impossibility of talking at all about things in themselves. It’s curious how difficult it is to root out that mediaeval habit of thinking of ‘substances’ of things existing apart from all relations, and yet really they have no possible meanings…. Poor Oliver was horribly shocked to think he was in that galère…. It was a delightful talk. Philosophy was varied by some free criticisms of—to begin with. He was left a good deal damaged, but with some sympathy for him as a character—when Oliver said, ‘But the really wicked man is—’

And then the hunt was up and a fine run across country.”

That might serve for the skeleton of many such talks, and to give the skeleton flesh and blood—so far as flesh and blood can be given without voices, without laughter, without Roger Fry himself, looking now like Erasmus, now like a fasting friar—some extracts can be taken from the letters he wrote when, after the party was over, he sat on, “thinking’ aloud”, as he called it, over what had been said, and what there had been no time to say as the hunt galloped across philosophy, religion, science, and art, to its happy end in pure gossip. Mysticism may serve as a start.

Portrait of F. Hindley Smith by Roger Fry, about 1928

I wish I hadn’t got so hot about mysticism [he writes]. But I must go on because I’ve found a perfect description of mysticism—it’s the attempt to get rid of mystery. To the primitive mind there is no mystery—his mysticism is so complete and is capable of such indefinite extension that he can always explain every phenomenon. Science can only begin when you accept mystery and then seek to clear it up. But the effect of science is none the less always to increase mystery for with every new avenue that’s cleared up you get a fresh vista into the world beyond. To have science one has both to accept mystery and to dislike it enough to try to clear it up which is so complicated a balance that there is no wonder it’s rare, and that nearly everyone is even now at heart a primitive. We still have the method of science but we are losing for the time its faith.

So to religion:

As to religion—I can’t help thinking that you don’t see quite enough the difficulty. If religions made no claim but what art does—of being a possible interpretation without any notion of objective validity all would be well—that’s what the artist does—but religions all pretend to do what science tries to do—namely discover the one universally valid construction and hence comes all the trouble and hence it is that religions have always obstructed the effort towards more universal validity…. I think what I feel is that for the most part religions are so deeply dyed with wish-fulfilment that more than anything else they have stood in the way of the disinterested study (science) and vision (art) of the universe. I don’t doubt they’ve had to be, because men couldn’t straight away get the disinterested attitude, but I think they ought to go, and that one can’t by re-interpreting the word God or any other such methods make them friends of man’s real happiness…. I don’t think this is altogether the memory of my escape from a creed which really was a very gradual and painless process on the whole. I mean I had no sudden shock, no despair at losing my faith.

So to civilisation:

I’m gradually getting hold of a new idea about the real meaning of civilisation, or what it ought to mean. It’s apropos of the question of the existence of individuals. It seems to me that nearly the whole Anglo-Saxon race especially of course in America have lost the power to be individuals. They have become social insects like bees and ants. They just are lost to humanity, and the great question for the future is whether that will spread or will be repulsed by the people who still exist, mostly the people round the Mediterranean. We must hope for the complete collapse of Anglo-Saxondom. The Arabs and Turks are still pure. I want to write something round this when it gets clear. It’s the question of whether people are allowed a clear space round them or whether society impinges on that and squeezes them all into hexagons like a honeycomb.

Then to literature:

Why doesn’t one always re-read the classics? There they are offering the most authentic, the most accessible delights, and why bother about second-rate and third-rate stuff because it’s new? … Yes, you’re quite right about the Chartreuse de Parme. I thought all the tiresome part was the beginning, but it’s later on the repetition of the stabbing affrays &c. get boring. I think there’s a real reason why novelists should be very sparing in violent action—it increases the element of mere chance wh. one knows the author can turn either way he likes—whereas if you remain within the ordinary course of civilised life the situation whatever it is develops with some appearance at least of logical inevitability—of course chance is always at work but its effects are minimised and one’s sense of inevitable sequences is heightened…. I’m reading Flaubert’s letters right through. What an exquisite character and how intimately one loves him! I get furious when I think of the up-to-date young men of to-day who despise them and say he wasn’t a born writer. Why, some of his letters written when he was only 18 have the most gorgeous things and written with a gush and abandonment that only a born writer could have achieved.

Self-portrait, about 1926
(By permission of Mrs. F. Fry)

He had thought of a new classification for writers—into

Priests, Prophets and Purveyors. Of course Flaubert actually called himself a priest of literature—it means those who regard it as a sacred calling. I’m a Priest if I’m anything. Of course there are mixed specimens. Thus Shaw is mainly prophet but tinged with Purveying. Wells is mainly purveying but with a flavour of Prophecy. Shakespeare of the early poems and sonnets was a priest but became an almost pure Purveyor, so did Dickens. No, it’s a very good classification and the more you think of it the better you’ll like it….

He had been reading Rilke:

On the whole I don’t think much of Rilke. He exaggerates too much. He’s too anxious to create an effect. Things are really much more interesting than he makes them by forcing all the overtones of feeling. But I know that he’s the other side of a big dividing line between our ways of taking things. You like the overtones to sound more than the main note. I want a construction made out of solid blocks first and then let the overtones modify it…. It’s something like that isn’t it?

And so to Henry James—he had been reading Confidence :

It hasn’t the richness of texture of his late writing, but it has such a very elegant psychological pattern—you say you can almost touch Max’s wit, well, I feel I can almost draw James’s psychological pattern. I think I feel that aspect of things excessively—it gives me such special pleasure like the counterpoint of Poussin’s designs—I wonder if there’s any truth in the ordinary idea about me that I am purely “intellectual” in art—that it’s a sort of excited recognition of the aptness of formal relations like a mathematician’s recognition of the validity of an equation? There is something of that no doubt but then I also like some things that have very little of that quality…. But anyhow there’s a man [Henry James] who has a standard. He never wanders from the idea—it’s all dense and close-packed. I do like conscientious art—oh you’ll say that I’m a beastly moralist—but there it is—I can’t help it….

Also he had been reading The Road to Xanadu, by Livingstone Lowes, and had found it

amazingly ingenious…. It will be very useful if I ever do my Vision in Literature, because he’s really analysed the sources of almost all Coleridge’s imagery, and it’s clear that he’s the one really visual poet of that lot. I read some Shelley to compare and it’s deplorably lacking in any sharp or decisive sensation. Even Keats was far less visual than Coleridge. He was almost an impressionist, for I find in one note how he amused himself by looking out of the window at a view towards a twilight and seeing it together with the reflection of his fire in the glass—so he evidently played with his eyes. The Ancient Mariner is astonishing in the colour of the images.

And so naturally to painting:

He [Simon Bussy] began about volumes, so I showed him two portraits in my Flemish art. He said that I’d chosen them on purpose and that I might have shown an Italian flat and a Fleming in relief—and that it had no importance which way it was—that I was an illuminé who imagined such things and then got excited about them. I said it wasn’t a peculiarity of mine, that it was a commonplace of criticism. Then he snorted out Giotto—wasn’t he a great artist by my own showing, and wasn’t he perfectly flat? I brought out a photo of the Deposition…. Mon dieu, what a genius! I got wildly excited by just doing that…. At first he swore it was flat—then I showed him a Duccio which was all linear and involved one figure in another and at last he was staggered….

Those are some sentences that may serve to bring back the speaking voice. But the voice would often stop. For there was music—music that so often came to his help as a critic of painting. “Plastic phrase” was coined on the analogy of musical phrase—“the big men having long-sustained phrases and the lesser only managing to hold out say for a face or one fold of drapery at a time”. And Gainsborough, “never makes a statement in prose … it is transmuted as though music were going on somewhere”. He had replaced his virginals by a gramophone, chose his records carefully and as he listened, commented.

It is scandalous the musicians don’t do more for us. We ought to have perpetual concerts going regularly through all the old music so that at least we should know what it’s like…. I was terribly moved by Monteverdi’s Orfeo. I see that to be deeply moved I must be at a certain passing distance from the actual emotional situation—hence all the trouble with the Dostoievskis and the others…. I suppose Gluck isn’t a very great musician, but Lord what a gift of melody, and how right in feeling he is! It’s a fascinating idea—that eighteenth-century notion of the Greek. They just give it a sort of sweetness and tenderness which is all untrue, but which doesn’t spoil the bigness of the contours. How I like works of art which don’t break the line—that’s partly because I ain’t musical enough—because I see that in painting some of my greatest loves are people who do break the line—the Rembrandts, and after all Cézanne himself….

He had been to the opera, The Valkyrie:

… Well, first I thought I shall never sit this out because almost at once they rose to the last pitch of emotion without any apparent reason…. But gradually by not attending to the idiotic story more than just to see what he wanted to express—Lord, what an expressionist he is and what dreary Board School psychology—and then refusing to be the least interested in the emotion I managed to get a great deal of pleasure out of the interweaving of the motives and the extraordinary beauty of the orchestral colour…. Bizet’s Carmen…. I hadn’t seen [it] since I was an art student in Paris and had still left some vague Quaker scruples about the Opera…. It really is a most satisfactory work—so admirably planned to get everything within the operatic plane, so much drama that is rightly expressed in opera and will be no good on the stage. It exactly illustrates my theory of the mixture of the arts. For it’s almost perfect—the music never so important that you want to think of it as music and yet always adequate to the situation….

Finally, after discussing mysticism, religion, science and painting, and listening perhaps to “that remarkable artist Mrs Woodhouse” playing Bach on the gramophone—“Bach”, he said, “almost persuades me to be a Christian”—time must be found, before the party broke up and the Tube station shut, for “free criticism of…”—that is to say for gossip pure and simple. As a gossip he was imperfect. He said Smith when he meant Jones; and for all his indignation against Smiths in general, he was curiously tolerant of any Smith or Jones in particular. Nevertheless, the talk aloud continues. “We spent the evening laughing at stories, largely invented, about you. But you wouldn’t have minded.” That last remark was true, so far at least as he was concerned. He relished his friend’s foibles; he liked to hear them travestied and caricatured, to add some fantastic theory or inaccurate anecdote of his own. But though he laughed easily, and valued laughter more and more—“I’m sure the ‘Vale of Tears’ and ‘fiery ordeal’ view of life comes from people who have never learnt to enjoy and take an envious pleasure in preventing joy whenever they can”—still, the “only kind of fun I care about is fun made with flickering seriousness”. So, though he laughed at his friends, he never diminished them, and the most usual end to that fine run across country was praise—delight in Desmond MacCarthy’s wit—“I quite agree that he has the most imaginative view about life of almost any of us and he has the most humane humour”—praise of his old Cambridge friend Charles Sanger:

Charlie Sanger came…. He really is astonishing. He’s seeing through the press the greatest book on the law of wills that has ever been written, 2000 pages. That’s the sort of thing he does when we aren’t looking—then he casually remarked that he had nearly finished a book on mathematics for physicists which contains all the mathematical machinery for doing these things about atoms and all the rest of it which hardly anyone but a few specialists dream of understanding. Then he discoursed beautifully about Orlando, then about theories of infection, then about Gibbon, and on everything he has more interesting knowledge than anyone else. I know you think I have a well-furnished mind—compared with his it’s a workman’s cottage to be let unfurnished. I seriously think he’s the most remarkable intelligence (I don’t say the most original) that I’ve ever met, and to think that he’s utterly unknown to the public and probably always will be!

And so, standing at the door in his slippers with praise of an Apostle on his lips, the “good old Cambridge Apostolic discussion” came to an end.

Roger Fry about 1930

X

In the ’thirties some of the talkers began to drop out. Charlie Sanger died; MacTaggart died. It was he who on the downs above Clifton had first roused the portentously serious and solemn little boy to question everything—Canon Wilson’s Sunday sermon; kingdoms; republics; Rossetti’s pictures; “everything under the sun”. Ironically enough they had reached very different conclusions. Roger Fry after fifty years had come to distrust all institutions, “but institutions, as such, and in the end quite apart from what they stood for, moved [McTaggart] to almost religious veneration”. They evaded dangerous topics, and, when they met, talked chiefly of the past. But when McTaggart died (1935) Roger Fry went to his funeral and wrote to Helen Anrep: “… partly because in a way I had loved him very deeply—no, not that for we were au fond too different in temperament and his was the warmer, less critical affection—but because he had been one of the most constantly familiar beings in my life and one with whom I always found myself happily at ease, I was very much moved”. They played Beethoven’s Hymn of Creation, Bach’s Pastorale, and a Chorale of Bach, and then—“was read this from Spinoza, The free man thinks less of death than of anything else and all his wisdom is the contemplation of life’ or very nearly that. So for once the right thing was said. And while the Bach Chorale was being played the coffin moved by hidden mechanism through the doors into?—How odd that this up to date, hygienic, scientific machine-made and machine-worked disposal of the body is ten times more impressive, more really symbolic than that age-long consecrated business of earth-to-earth—with the ugliness of the big hole—so unsuggestive of the infinities which surround us—Whereas this with its slow silent movement through doors into the unknown is really dramatic and a perfect symbol of the inevitable mechanism of things and the futility of our protests against its irresistible force…. My faith in life is utterly unreasonable and groundless,” he concluded, “it rests on nothing I can see, it seeks for no sanction; it is the faith by which the animals live and move, perhaps the atoms themselves. So I must hurry on with this business of living which lasts as long as life lasts” (to Helen Anrep, 21st January 1935).

Fortunately the younger generation, his own children and the children of his friends, was growing up and proved of great help in carrying on the business of living. “They are entirely lacking in reverence”, he noted. They had greatly improved upon his own generation. When they were small he would teach them the rudiments of chemistry, making a beautiful blue-green solution of copper sulphate, or brewing coal gas in a clay pipe plugged with plasticine on the drawing-room fire. He would appear at a children’s party glittering in chains and frying-pans bought at Woolworth’s, a fancy dress which brought out, as fancy dress so often does, a spiritual likeness, in his case indisputably, to Don Quixote. Later he would arrive at their rooms in Cambridge and, remembering his own attitude to his elders, exclaim in delight, “They talk about their own interests and their pleasure in life without troubling to recognise our presence”. But there he was wrong. They were well aware of his presence—of his humours, of his eccentricities; of his “immense seriousness”, and of his equally immense powers of enjoyment. He would plunge at once into his own interests and his own problems. He would make them help to translate Mallarmé, he would argue for hours on end with “terrific Quaker scrupulosity and intellectual honesty”; and he would play chess, and through playing chess bring them to understand his views on aesthetics. “He was extraordinarily good at gaining one’s confidence,” one of those undergraduates, Julian Bell, wrote, “principally because he always took one’s ideas seriously enough to discuss them, and contradicted them if he disagreed…. He made one share his pleasure in thinking…. He had a power of analysing poetry, of showing what was happening, that was extraordinarily useful…. I’ve never known anyone so good at making one share his enjoyments…. He always seemed ready to enjoy whatever was going on, food, drink, people, love affairs. I was never once bored in his company. He never grew old and cursed.”

And Roger Fry returned the compliment. For Julian Bell himself he had a deep affection—“the most magnificent human being I have known since Jem Stephen”, he called him. Fresh from talk with him and his friends, he went on to reflect how much more at his ease he felt with the young than with his own generation. They made him realise “how curiously far I have travelled from the standpoint of my own generation…. Not that I didn’t enjoy seeing [an old friend] very much, but it just showed me how much I’d joined the younger generation.”

Roger Fry about 1932

XI

Beside Julian Bell’s description of Roger Fry arguing with undergraduates at Cambridge in 1932 may be set another of Roger Fry filling up gaps in his knowledge that same spring in Greece. A great book, great in range at least, perpetually pushed aside to make room for lectures, for reviews and broadcasts, lay at the back of his mind; and since Greece was one of the gaps in his knowledge he went there in 1932. The conclusions he came to are to be found in the last Slade lectures. Of the journey itself scattered memories, little pictures that seem to complete the old, remain: Venice, for instance, cold in the spring evening, and Roger Fry waving his hand at the palaces and saying, “That old fraud Ruskin has chapters about all that. He was too virtuous—that’s a great pity. Everything had to be squared—even those finicky palaces must be morally good, which they’re not—oh no, merely slices of coloured stone.” And then the voyage down the Dalmatian coast, sliding past pink grey mountains with blue shadows; and then the first sight of the Acropolis, purple that evening in a storm of rain, and his shock of surprise—his “Awfully swell—awfully swell”, and his delight at the French sailors, so “educated and avertis” compared with the Germans; and then the Museum. The Museum was a disappointment. “They don’t compose. That’s a starfish shape. Look at the thinness of the lines, and there’s no background.” And so, one sunny afternoon, to a Byzantine church where an old man was reading the newspaper at three o’clock in the afternoon and the peasant women were lazily picking great yellow flowers. He had out his little conversation book and began to talk to them, and then, gazing up at the white vindictive Christ in mosaic on the ceiling of the church, exclaimed: “Better than I’d any notion of”, and instantly set up his easel and began to paint. And so to Sunium, where, squatted on the turf, he dug up minute blue irises with his pocket-knife. Did he think Greek irises would grow in Suffolk? “Well, one can only try and see.” And so to Delphi and the argument with the chauffeur. “We must see that monastery.” The chauffeur protested; the monastery was twenty miles out of the way. “Never mind. We’ll get up at dawn.” “But the road’s impassable.” “Never mind. We’ll take the risks.” “But the last car fell over the precipice.” Reason convinced, at last he yielded. And so across the Peloponnese, the road winding along precipices, the road pitted with pot-holes, scarred with ruts, the passengers flung from side to side, bounced up and down. But always pitching or bouncing, back from the front seat where Roger Fry sat beside his sister came scraps of talk—about prison reform; about politics; about flowers; about Max Eastman’s book; about birds; about people. “The Frys”, according to a letter, “begin talking at dawn; and talk all day without stopping until…”—until the writer of that letter was forced to revise certain theories about Roger Fry himself.

One of the most persistent of those theories was “I’ve always hated families and patriarchalism of all kinds…. I have so little family feeling, so little feeling that it’s by the family that one goes on into the future.” That was the theory, and it was illustrated by so many anecdotes of the horrors of family life, and of his own attempts to escape that horror, that it was natural to suppose that he had never enjoyed a joke or shared a secret with any one of his own flesh and blood. That theory broke down with his sister. But then, he might have argued, she was not his sister; she was an individual. So the car pitched and bounced; fragments of talk and laughter were thrown back; until at a turn of the road where cypresses or poplars made a pattern and the accent was right for painting, two hands rose simultaneously, the car was halted, and brother and sister sat silent, painting. But Greece, bare of trees, angular and over-dramatic, lacked something necessary. He admired, he analysed, but he did not fall in love. That was a tribute that he reserved for France.

For years he had dreamt of a home in the South. It was to be “a rather grand place … where one could have big spaces and nice stones and jolly materials of all kinds”. This recurring dream had had to adapt itself to his purse—“we may have a motor car, but we shall never be rich enough to do all that” His dreams, however, had a way of coming true,—if indeed his motor car can be called a dream. It was a second-hand Citroën; it could go very fast; it stopped very suddenly. It landed him in the middle of a mustard field; it broke down on a hot Italian road and he lay on his back in the dust “tinkering the innards”. But with its help he discovered the beauty of Suffolk—“It’s no wonder that the only English painting or at least landscape comes from these parts. One finds everything arranging itself, the way the trees grow, the way they belong to the soil, the way they fill the spaces of the valley, and then the splendid cloud effects.” The car did something to increase his growing respect for his native land. It could be made to hold luggage, easels, paint-boxes, earthenware pots and furniture. Not without reason the bourgeoisie of Roy at were amazed when he drew up at the hotel in this battered veteran, covered with dust, having negotiated thirty hairpin bends in the Massif Central successfully, clasping in his arms a large Provençal kitchen implement—le diable—which he was taking home to acclimatise in Suffolk. Above all the Citroen took him again and again to St Rémy. There, in 1931, he had bought a little Mas, overlooking the famous ruins, which he shared with Charles and Marie Mauron. He loved that corner of Provence with a passion that seemed to spring from some ancestral memory. He did his best to believe that there was southern blood in his veins. There was the name Mariabella and his mother’s southern darkness to prove it. Even if the family annals were against him, and he was wholly English and purely Quaker, “both Margery and I always feel”, he wrote, “that we were born there”. It was not only the landscape that he loved; it was the pagan, classless society, where salads were held in common, where every peasant was an individual, and the old man who trimmed his olive trees was a more civilised human being than the citizens of Paris, Berlin or London. The Mas was always at the back of his mind, a centre of sanity and civilisation, when the telephone rang at Bernard Street, the loud-speaker brayed next door, and the Tube opened and shut its doors upon herds of undifferentiated cockneys. He was going to end his days there, he said, when all the young had turned Bolsheviks and talked nothing but politics. “Mais trêve à la sale politique—parlons Mas”—so one political argument ended.

The Mas, of course, had to be furnished. A great stone was hauled through the window to serve as hearth; chairs and tables were bought at the local market; stone pillars and jars were found in the neighbourhood; and he made himself a bed from four sections of plane trees “just sawn across”. As for the cooking, he announced triumphantly, “I’ve made a bœuf en daube which is a dream and will last us about five days so all I need do is to boil peas or something”, and he could read or write while he watched the pot. “We certainly have fallen on happy places”, he exclaimed. All night he slept on his raised couch with the door open,—“that door which opens straight out into nothing”, and listened to the nightingales singing and the frogs croaking, “but they always break the rhythm before it gets quite fixed”. Then he woke, and there was “the perfect view, the view that’s so full of infinitely chiselled detail and lucky conjunctions” to look at. All day he sat under the pine trees painting, his legs bound in copies of the Éclaireur de Nice and his head swathed in veils to protect him from the mosquitoes. The hoopoes, as he painted, described wonderful loops in the air with their white heraldic wings and said “Hou—hou—hou” very quickly, answering each other. The voices of his grandchildren reached him, chattering among the olives; now and then they interrupted him with fantastic stories of their dolls’ adventures. At last he went indoors, to gossip with the neighbours, to play chess, and to continue the argument about aesthetics with Charles Mauron.

XII

Here a sentence from a letter may be quoted, for the light it throws upon the method by which the final conclusion of some of those many transformations was reached. “Charles Mauron is so terribly good at analysis that it sometimes seems impossible to make any positive construction that will resist his acids…. I suppose you feel like that with me, that I will go on analysing when you want to take a certain whole and look without pulling it apart. Only as I never feel clear in my mind without having analysed as far as possible, I have to applaud his destruction even of my cherished ideas.” The book of all Roger Fry’s books which seems to the common reader at least, to prove the value of destroying theories by acids, because the positive construction left is so very solid, is the Cézanne (1927). A masterpiece, Sir Kenneth Clark “called it, and the word seems the only one to fit this profound, rich, and completely satisfying essay. It was written with great care, twice over, first in French and then in English. Here at least the theory is consumed, and the critic has become a creator. It suggests that if Roger Fry received the impulse to create from the work of art rather than from the thing itself, it was because a work of art posed an intellectual problem and thus gratified that intense intellectual curiosity, the desire “to pull apart and to analyse”, which, when he came directly into contact with the thing itself, was either too active, or too separate, to let him submit, as perhaps an artist must submit, completely and unconsciously to the experience itself. At any rate, the Cézanne, whether we call it criticism or creation, seems to justify the endless work of revision and analysis that lay behind it. Much more, of course, has gone to it than purely aesthetic curiosity. Sympathy and experience have enabled the critic to place the timid little man with only a sentence or two of biography in his setting of time and circumstance. We see him sheltering within his shell of bourgeois respectability at Aix, and then, step by step, he emerges and becomes “the great protagonist of individual prowess against the herd”. It is a “thrilling drama” with its counterpart in other dramas where the hero is assailed by temptations and confronted by apparently impassable obstacles. The story, the double story, is unfolded with masterly ease and the most scrupulous care. Never was the development of a character or of a picture from the bare canvas to the infinite complexity of the finished work more closely followed or more subtly described. Every element is distinguished and shown to have its necessary part in the final composition. But though the analysis is minute, it is not a dissection. Rather it is the bringing together from chaos and disorder of the parts that are necessary to the whole. When at last the apple, the kitchen table, and the bread-knife have come together, it is felt to be a victory for the human spirit over matter. The milk-jug and the ginger-jar are transformed. These common objects are invested with the majesty of mountains and the melody of music. But in all this protracted and difficult business of revelation and reconstruction the critic’s own identity has been consumed. Never does he draw attention by irrelevance or display to his own share in the work of reconstruction. The two gifts, the gift of analysis, the gift of sensibility, that so often conflict, here enhance each other—each contributes, neither dominates. “The concordance which we find in Cézanne between an intelligence rigorous, abstract and exacting to a degree, and a sensibility of extreme delicacy and quickness of response is here seen in masterly action.” The words are true of Roger Fry himself. The flower has kept its colour and the microscope its clarity. And yet, though it seems as if nothing could be added, as if the art of painting had been explored to its limit, the essay ends: “But it must always be kept in mind that such analysis halts before the ultimate concrete reality of a work of art and perhaps in proportion to the greatness of the work must leave untouched a greater part of its objective”.

XIII

Like most books that appear seamless and complete, the Cézanne cost its author much drudgery and despair. “O Lord, how bored I am with it”, he exclaimed; “… it seems to me poor formless stuff and I should like to begin it all over again.” There was even more than the usual struggle with words, and their vagueness. And at moments there were doubts—could Cézanne be as great as Roger Fry believed? Was he not deluded? He went and looked at the pictures again “as if for the first time”. His conviction became stronger than ever. “How much the greatest of all he is! He has that gravity and ponderation of the ‘greatest things … this is the colossal thing.” He had not changed his mind, in spite of the fact that all the authorities were now of his way of thinking. The authorities he noted, not without amusement, had purchased a picture by Cézanne for the National Gallery.

But if the Cézanne stands out among Roger Fry’s books like Mont Sainte-Victoire, solid in structure and bathed in light, from it, as from that mountain, other tracts of country became visible. He had it at the back of his mind that one day he must find time and energy to set about a great book—a book about the National Gallery; a book that was to cover the whole history of art from the earliest ages to the present time. He hesitated. One reason for hesitation was that “I feel so infinitely less confident about anything I have to say than I used to be. It’s dreadful how diffident getting a little deeper into things makes one—one sees too much to say anything.” So he painted, wrote articles, gave lectures, or went once more to Italy to look again at the old pictures.

It seemed as if some drop were needed to precipitate all that he had seen and thought into written words. At last, however, in 1933, the opportunity was given him: he was offered the Slade Professorship at Cambridge. It was a post that he had often wished for; it had often been denied him. But now at first he refused it. It had come when he did not need such recognition, and when those who would have valued it were dead. Cambridge too had lost its chief attraction for him. Lowes Dickinson had died in 1932; and there was nobody to take his place. “I knew you’d know that nothing else in my life is quite the same as that”, he wrote to Vanessa Bell. “He had been all through my youth my greatest and most intimate friend…. I owe such an immense amount to his influence and his extraordinary sympathy. I begin to see what a tremendously big place he had in shaping all that counts in our world, bigger I think than I’d ever quite realised…. He seemed to have got finer, wittier, more charming with age.” No one could take his place, and Cambridge without Lowes Dickinson did not altogether escape his criticism. The lack of any sense of beauty among the under graduates was painfully proved (as he pointed out in his first lecture) by the “barbarous ugliness” of their rooms; and “Mon dieu”, he exclaimed to Marie Mauron, “quelle vie que celle des universitaires, des hommes charmants et intelligents, mais si bornés et fixés dans les ornières de cette vie provinciale, et d’une conservatisme réflexe qui vraiment me choque”. But the offer of the Slade was made in very flattering terms, and after some hesitation he accepted. “I think it’s a good thing on the whole”, he wrote; “I shall be compelled to work out some of my ideas more fully.” Soon he was “head over ears in Chinese art, and hardly know how to get through in time—there’s so much for me to learn….” He was going to “apply his theories of esthetics to the visual art of die whole world, in roughly chronological sequence, from Egypt to the present day”. He was going at last to crystallise the mass of ideas that had been accumulating in his mind ever since, as a young man he had gone to Rome and filled note-book after notebook in front of the pictures themselves. It was “the sort of intellectual adventure which he loved”, as Sir Kenneth Clark wrote in his introduction to those last lectures; and vast as it was, he threw himself into it with ardour. But he was sixty-seven, and it was late in life to start upon such an enterprise. He was beginning, he sometimes complained, to feel old … “you begin to feel your whole body creaking, that’s what it is…. Don’t tell people this—I’d rather they didn’t know it.” It was difficult to know it; the more work he had on hand the greater his energy became. It was difficult even to know that he was working, for he carried on so many other activities simultaneously. A specimen day is described in a letter written at that time by Give Bell:

Up and on the motive before breakfast; after breakfast just slips over to Tilton to see Sam Courtauld, and arrange about lectures, and telephone to Hindley Smith; painting in Vanessa’s studio till lunch; at lunch moans and groans about not being allowed to eat anything; has Lottie put on to cook special invalid dishes but meanwhile makes a hearty meal off roast beef and plum-tart; hurries over to Seaford to inspect Hindley Smith’s collection; back in time for an early tea so that he can drag Vanessa and Duncan to Wilmington to paint landscape; after dinner just runs through a few of Mallarmé’s poems, which he is translating word for word into what he is pleased to consider blank verse; bedtime—“Oh just time for a game of chess, Julian”. I look out of window at half-past one and see the old object, lying like a tomb, in bed on the terrace, reading by the light of a candle. He had to start early this morning in order to lunch with Lady Colefax. But, while I am dressing, I hear him shouting to Julian through the ground-floor window—“I think before I go we’ve just time to run through L’Après-Midi d’un faune”.

It was in the midst of such distractions, playing chess with one hand, correcting Mallarmé with another, that the inaugural lecture was written. Whether it was a day’s work or a day’s pleasure—and it was difficult to say where work ended and pleasure began—it was a full day at any rate. If in his company, as Sir Kenneth Clark has said, “one felt sometimes that the proper answer to Tolstoy’s ‘What is art?’ was the counter question ‘What isn’t?’ “ so in his company the proper answer to the question “What is life?” seemed to be “What isn’t?” Everything was drawn in, assimilated, investigated. The body might creak, but the mind seemed to work with more sweep, with less friction than ever. It reached out and laid hold of every trifle—a new stitch, a zip-fastener, a shadow on the ceiling. Each must be investigated, each must be examined, as if by rescuing such trifles from mystery he could grasp life tighter and make it yield one more drop of rational and civilised enjoyment. And here fittingly, since he was no lover of vague statements, may follow his own definition “of what I mean by life … I mean the general and instinctive reaction to their surroundings of those men of any period whose lives rise to complete self-consciousness, their view of the universe as a whole and their conception of their relation to their kind”. Could he but live five years longer, he wrote in 1933, “life will have done all for me that I can expect”.

XIV

Only one subject seemed to escape his insatiable curiosity; and that was himself. Analysis seemed to stop short there. Perhaps human nature, until we have more knowledge of psychology, is inexplicable; we are only beginning, he would insist, to know anything about this very queer animal man. He was delighted, of course, to hazard theories—about the effect of a puritan upbringing, about the origin of the inferiority complex which he observed cropping up in him from time to time. And if pressed, though very little interested in the past compared with the present, he would try to set down what he could remember. “The first thing”, one such fragment of autobiography begins, “is the play of light on the leaves of the elm trees outside the nursery window at Highgate….” He could remember many sights, and here and there an amusing incident or character—his father skating, for example, or Pierpont Morgan, with his strawberry nose and his little red eyes, buying pictures in Italy. But the central figure remained vague. “… I don’t pretend to know much on the subject. It so rarely interests me”, he wrote when asked to explain himself. “You say I’m wild and want to know if I’m impulsive”, he went on (to Helen Anrep). “Why I should have thought, but of course I don’t know, that I was impulsive (which I don’t like and suspect you don’t) but not wild. No, surely not wild—infinitely sane, cautious, reasonable—what makes me look wild is that I don’t happen to accept any of the world’s idées reçues and values but have my own and stick to them…. But I should have said impulsive, i.e. moved rather jerkily and suddenly by what appeals to me, and I think it implies something wasteful and incoherent in me which I also lament and would like you to forgive—oh, and cure, perhaps.”

This lack of interest in the central figure—that central figure which was so increasingly interested in everything outside itself—had its charm. It made him unconscious, a perfect butt for the irreverent laughter, in which he delighted, of the young; unaware too of the astonishment that his appearance, clasping le diable in his arms, created among the respectable residents in middle-class hotels. But it had its drawbacks, for if he ignored himself, he sometimes ignored other people also. Thus it would be quite possible to collect from different sources a number of unflattering portraits of Roger Fry. They would be contradictory, of course. To some people he seemed insincere—he changed his opinions so quickly. His enthusiasm made the first sight so exciting; then his critical sense came into play and made the second sight so disappointing. The swan of yesterday would become the goose of to-day—a transformation naturally, and often volubly, resented by the bird itself. To others he seemed on the contrary only too ruthless, too dictatorial—a Hitler, a Mussolini, a Stalin. Absorbed in some idea, set upon some cause, he ignored feelings, he overrode objections. Everybody he assumed must share his views and have the same ardour in carrying them out. Fickle and impulsive, obstinate and overbearing—the unflattering portraits would be drawn on those lines.

And he was the first to realise that there was some truth in them. He was impulsive, he knew; he was obstinate; he was, he feared, egotistical. “I suddenly see”, he wrote, “the curious twisted egotism that there is somewhere in me that used to come out when I was little in my indignation against ‘the twinges3, as I used to call Isabel and Agnes, for wanting to play with my things.” Also he was “cross, fussy, stingy, pernickety and other things”. Perhaps psycho-analysis might help; or perhaps human nature in general and his own in particular was too irrational, too instinctive, either to be analysed or to be cured. And he would go on to deplore the natural imperviousness of the human mind to reason; to gird at the extraordinary morality with which human beings torture themselves, and to speculate whether in time to come they may not accept the simple gospel “that all decency and good come from peoples gradually determining to enjoy themselves a little, especially to enjoy their intellectual curiosity and their love of art”. In such speculations about the race in general, Roger Fry lost sight of himself in particular. Certainly he would have refused to sit for the portrait of a finished, complete or in any way perfect human being. He detested fixed attitudes; he suspected poses; he was quick to point out the fatal effect of reverence. And yet whether he liked it or not he would have had to sit for the portrait of a man who was greatly loved by his friends. Truth seems to compel the admission that he created the warmest feeling of affection and admiration in the minds of those who knew him. It was Roger Fry, to sum up many phrases from many letters, who set me on my feet again, and gave me a fresh start in life. It was he who was the most actively, the most imaginatively helpful of all my friends. And they go on to speak of his considerateness, of his humanity, and of his profound humility. So though he made some enemies and shed some acquaintances, he bound his friends to him all the more for the queer strains of impulsiveness and ruthlessness that lay on the surface of that very deep understanding.

But there was the other life—the artist’s. He felt no need to apologise for his conduct there. A work of art was a work of art, and nothing else: personal considerations counted for nothing there. He was a difficult man, it is easy to believe, on committees. He gave his opinion uncompromisingly; he gave it wittily and pungently, or sometimes he gave it sufficiently with one deep groan. He had no respect for authority. “If you said to him, ‘This must be right, all the experts say so, Hitler says so, Marx says so, Christ says so, The Times says so’, he would reply in effect, ‘Well, I wonder. Let’s see.’ … You would come away realising that an opinion may be influentially backed and yet be tripe.”[◉10] Naturally, artists and art critics being what they are, he was bitterly attacked. He was accused of caring only for the Old Masters or only for the latest fashions. He was always changing his mind and he was obstinately prejudiced in favour of his friends’ work. In spite of fadings that should have made his opinion worthless, it had weight—for some reason or other Roger Fry had influence, more influence, it was agreed, than any critic since Ruskin at the height of his fame.

How, without any post to back it he came to have such influence, is a question for the painters themselves to decide. The effect of it is shown in their works, and whether it is good or bad, no one, it is safe to say, will hold that it was negligible. To the outsider at any rate, the secret of his influence seemed based, in one word, upon his disinterestedness. He was among the priests, to use his own definition, not among the prophets, or the purveyors. By ignoring personalities and politics, success and failure, he seemed to penetrate beyond any other critic into the picture itself. To this the outsider could also add from direct observation another characteristic—he did not indulge in flattery. Friends he had—he cannot be acquitted of liking some people better than others. But a mutual admiration society, if such things exist—and according to some observers they do—would have expelled Roger Fry at the first meeting. He was as honest with his friends’ work as with his enemies’. He would look long and searchingly, and if he liked what he saw, he would praise generously, dispassionately. But if he did not like what he saw, he was silent; or his one word of condemnation was enough. But his detachment, his disinterestedness was shown most impressively by his own attitude to his own work. His painting was beyond comparison more important to him than his criticism. He never lost hope that he had “a little sensation”, as he called it, or that he had at last been able to express it. He would set his own canvas on the easel and await the verdict. It was often adverse; those whose praise he would have valued most highly were often unable to give it. How keenly he minded that silence is shown again and again in his letters. But it made no difference. His own picture would be set with its face to the wall, and he would turn to the work of those who had, been unable to praise his own. He would consider it with perfect single-mindedness, and if he liked it, he praised it, not because it was a friend’s work, but because he admired it. “One thing I can say for myself”, he wrote. “There are no pangs of jealousy or envy when I see someone else doing good work. It gives me pure delight.” There perhaps lay die secret of his influence as a critic.

But his influence as a human being—his own words, “We know too little of the rhythms of man’s spiritual life”, remind us of the perils of trying to guess the secret that lay behind that. He did not believe with all his knowledge that he could guess the secret of a work of art. And human beings are not works of art. They are not consciously creating a book that can be read, or a picture that can be hung upon the wall. The critic of Roger Fry as a man has a far harder task than any that was set him by the pictures of Cézanne. Yet his character was strongly marked; each transformation left something positive behind it. He stood for something rare in the general life of his time—“Roger Fry’s death is a definite loss to civilisation”, wrote E.M. Forster. “There is no one now living—no one, that is to say, of his calibre—who stands exactly where he stood.” He changed the taste of his time by his writing, altered the current of English painting by his championship of the Post-Impressionists, and increased immeasurably the love of art by his lectures. He left too upon the minds of those who knew him a very rich, complex and definite impression.

If for a moment we attempt his own task and assume that he was an artist who began his work in 1866 and continued it with immense energy and inventiveness for sixty-eight years, we can perhaps single out a few of the qualities that gave it shape. There are certain phrases that recur, that seem to stress the pattern of the whole. His own words “It gives me pure delight” might serve for a beginning. They bring to mind the little boy who sat in his own private and particular garden at Highgate, watching for the bud to burst into flower—“I conceived that nothing could be more exciting than to see the flower suddenly burst its green case and unfold its immense cup of red”. What was true of the child in the garden was true of the man all through his life. There was always some bud about to burst into flower; there was always some flower that gave him pure delight. But the critic who attempts to analyse the composition of his own work of art will have to note that his flower did not burst suddenly and completely into its immense cup of red. There were many obstacles. We recall the pond in winter; the “lack of simple humanity” in his upbringing that long cramped and fettered him.

Sunningdale and its floggings followed; from them he learnt a hatred of brutality that lasted all through his life. From Clifton and “its crass bourgeois respectability” sprang his intolerance of the Philistine, of the conventional.

Cambridge, of course, meant liberation. Only there again nature thwarted him. She gave him the capacity for pure delight, but a mind quick to doubt, to reason, to analyse, to dissect—perhaps to destroy pure delight. It was only after much waste of time and temper that he set to work with all his faculties upon the picture. The critic therefore has to record no steady and uninterrupted progress, but rather a series of sallies and excursions in different directions. Sensation beckons one way; training and reason another. The Quaker, the scientist, the artist, each in turn took a hand in the composition. And then happiness, a medium that would have solved many difficulties, was snatched from him. He had no centre. He had to make his picture in the harshest conditions, out of the sternest elements. The danger that threatened him was the danger of “imprisonment in egotism”. But “life was too urgent”. It was only “by piling new sensations on to one’s memories that one can learn to start life afresh”. He threw himself into other activities, and in their pursuit found once more that “all passions even for red poppies leave one open to ridicule”. He found, too, that to feel passion is to expose oneself not only to ridicule but to anguish. There was no lack of “that spiritual torment, that anxious effort which in the lives of the greatest artists forces them always to wrestle with new problems”. Here the phrase of the Chinese philosopher makes itself heard: “L’homme natural résiste à la nature des choses, celui qui connait le Lao coule par les interstices”. One must master detachment. But detachment did not mean withdrawal. “I want to have new experiences. I want to go out into this tremendous unknown universe outside one.” It was thus, the critic will note, by experiments, by revisions and perpetual reorientations that he avoided with astonishing success the fate that attends so many artists, both in paint and in life—repetition. Like the frogs at St Rémy, he broke the rhythm before it got quite fixed. As the artist grows older, therefore, the critic becomes aware of an increasing richness and boldness in the design. New rhythms and new themes appear. The artist becomes less conscious and so has access to a greater range of emotion. He draws into his theme common things, the milk-pot, the apple and the onion, and invests them with a peculiar quality of reality. So we can single out some of the processes that went to the making of that picture. But “It must always be kept in mind that such analysis halts before the ultimate concrete reality of a work of art, and perhaps in proportion to the greatest of the work it must leave untouched a greater part of its objective”.

With such words of warning the critic of Roger Fry may well drop the stick to the ground and give up pointing. But though the lecturer, when he came to a certain late work by Cezanne, made his bow and said, “It goes beyond any analysis of which I am capable”, he went next day to the gallery and tried to see the picture again as if for the first time—“it’s only so one makes discoveries”. Sometimes, though not by conscious effort, people also are seen as if for the first time. One such occasion—it was the last, as it happened—comes to memory. It was a summer evening, late in July 1934, and a friend had brought a picture upon which he wanted Roger Fry’s opinion—was it by Degas, or a copy only? The canvas was stood on a chair in front of him, in the same room, looking out on to the same trees where so many pictures had been stood in front of him—pictures by Watts, and pictures by Picasso, school children’s drawings and canvases with the paint still wet on them. Again his eyes fixed themselves with their very steady and penetrating gaze upon the canvas. Again they seemed to carry on a life of their own as they explored the world of reality. And again as if it helped him in his voyage of discovery he turned and laughed and talked and argued about other things. The two worlds were close together. He could pass from one to the other without impediment. He responded to the whole vibration—the still life and the laughter, the murmur of the traffic in the distance and the voices close at hand. His presence seemed to increase the sensation of everything in the room. But at the centre of that vibration was a gravity and a stillness, as in his face too there was that which made him look so often “like a saint in one of his Old Masters”. But he was a saint who laughed; a saint who enjoyed life to the uttermost. “Whereas piety or holiness make goodness stink in the nostrils”, he once wrote, “saintliness is the imaginative power to make goodness seem desirable.” He made goodness seem desirable, as he sat laughing with his friends and looking at the picture. But how describe the pure delight “of watching a flower unfold its immense cup of red”? Those who knew him best will attempt no summing up of that sensation. They can only say that Roger Fry had a peculiar quality of reality that made him a person of infinite importance in their lives, and add his own words, “Any attempt I might make to explain this would probably land me in the depths of mysticism. On the edge of that gulf I stop.”

But it was late; his mind was made up; and once more he was off.

XV

He went to St Rémy. He worked with Charles Mauron, translated Mallarmé and painted among the olive trees. “The sun shines perpetually”, he wrote home, “and if only the flies didn’t bite it would be an earthly paradise.” Once more there was Royat, once more there were the usual groans at the romantic landscape, at the bourgeois respectability—“like a perpetual Victorian sabbath”—of the hotel. Then with Helen Anrep he drove through France seeing “an incredible number of Romanesque churches some of astonishing beauty”. One last letter to Vanessa Bell thanked her for a last visit—“I don’t think I ever enjoyed it more”—and for a long friendship which had grown “more and more important with the years”. He was going to settle in for a winter of hard work, he told her; he was absorbed in his Slade lectures. He was full of plans for the future and of hope.

He reached home in the first week of September. On the evening of his return he was working in the room at Bernard Street, got up to fetch something, slipped and fell. Once before he had fallen and had written, “It’s odd that for some time before this I’d this feeling of impending menace and my first thought after the fall was—That’s it. I’m killed. But I almost instantly recovered and began to constater the facts.” This time the fall was very serious, the thigh was broken. For a few days he lay in great pain, but his vitality was great, and he seemed to be recovering. Then suddenly his heart failed and on the afternoon of 8th September he died in the Royal Free Hospital, to which he had been taken.

On 13th September, a day as it happened of extraordinary beauty, his body was cremated. When his friend McTaggart was cremated he wrote, “This slow silent movement through doors into the unknown is … a perfect symbol of the inevitable mechanism of things and of the futility of our protests against its irresistible force”. There was no service as Roger Fry’s body passed through the same door, but music was played, Bach’s Chorale, a Choral prelude, and Frescobaldi’s Fugue in G minor. And upon a paper that was given to his friends were printed some lines from Cornus, a passage from Transformations, and finally the words of Spinoza which, when his friend was cremated, he had said were the right words:

A free man thinks of death least of all things; and his wisdom is a meditation not of death but of life.

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Appendix.

The following technical appreciation of Roger Fry’s development as a painter has been contributed by an artist:

Roger Fry developed very late as an artist, partly because of the home influences described in this book, but also because of his own great sensibility to the work of others and perhaps some want of self-confidence. Hence he was even more influenced than are most young artists by those whom he admired. A certain natural austerity of taste and intellectual clear sightedness led him to reject the theories, and in consequence, the practice, of the more plain-sailing and purely painter-like among his contemporaries or immediate predecessors in England. Instead he accepted first, Whistler, with his deliberate and conscious attempt to design within a given space; and Gonder, who suggested something of eighteenth-century artificiality and could create a world at one remove as it were from reality and Impressionism’s disturbing problems. As he saw it, Impressionism, which at this time he seems to have judged mainly from Monet, led to a cul-de-sac, and this prevented him on his first visit to Paris from seeing very much of the work still being produced by Renoir, Cézanne and Monet, or from focusing attention on what he must have seen, such as the Caillebotte collection, then at the Luxembourg.

He was interested always in the old masters, between whom and the living there was never in his mind any dividing line, and his first visit to Italy must have made a very deep and permanent impression on him, not only as a critic but as a painter. This interest led him naturally to great consideration of technique and actual surface quality of paint. Probably at that time this seemed to him of much greater importance than it did later, though the discovery of a new “old masters’ medium” excited him greatly years afterwards. His paintings in gouache on silk and his oil paintings at that time all show this preoccupation. Poussin’s rich and complicated art fascinated him then as always, and the exhibition with Neville Lytton, when he was beginning to exist as a mature artist, showed this clearly.

The need to make money which led him to journalism and lecturing, to the editorship of the Burlington Magazine and the Metropolitan Museum at New York, inevitably put great difficulties in the way of painting, and by the year 1910, when he had finally returned from America, he was doing comparatively little serious work as a painter. Perhaps when he bought the La Famille Charpentier and Le Viol of Degas, both of which he admired enormously, for New York, he was beginning to see the significance and greatness of his French contemporaries. At any rate, about the year 1908 or 1909 he must have become aware of some other force stirring in contemporary art, something which made much greater appeal to his own instincts and satisfied his intellect as well as his sensibilities. This force, to which he later gave the name of Post-Impressionism, gave him—and many others—freedom to become himself. At first he was inclined to abandon subtleties, to use flat masses of colour and line, to reduce all as far as possible to fundamental and essential elements. Of all the exciting new possibilities that presented themselves the most obvious at first were probably those suggested by Gauguin and Van Gogh. His one-man show in 1910 or 1912 consisted almost entirely of new work, and in general tone, colour and quality could hardly have been more unlike the exhibition of five or six years earlier.

This liberation, which was almost a new birth as a painter, did not, however, prevent him from finding presently that he had jumped too rapidly to conclusions. The simplified statements, in spite of their new vigour, became too empty to satisfy his trained sensibility. But now, instead of the passionate interest in quality of paint and surface he became more and more intrigued by the problem of expressing something of the richness and complexity of nature transformed by vision and design. Cézanne, who more perhaps than any other artist since Rembrandt had conveyed something of this richness through his own sensibility, became the dominant influence. He realised too at last the greatness of the late Renoir and he possessed and studied the works of artists as different as Picasso, Derain, Segonzac and Vlaminck. After the dreary war years he was able more and more to explore his own sensations in the country he loved most, and gradually his own personal vision and attitude asserted themselves. His deep and wide sympathies with the art of so many ages and countries, his intense excitement about anything which seemed to him good, from the work of a living three-year-old child to that of some master dead centuries ago, seemed to leave him free at last to follow his own instincts as an artist. Some very profound and personal sympathy with the Dutch and with certain French artists—Chardin and Corot especially—helped him also to a more complete understanding of his own gifts and aims. In his latest work he was more sure of himself than he had ever been and saw more clearly the general direction he meant to follow.

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Index.

Abbey, E.A., R.A., 186

Aix, 223, 224

Anrep, Helen, 236, letter to; 255; 268, letter to; 290, letter to; 297

Apostles, Cambridge, 49, 50, 51

Armstrong, Walter, 128

Art and Life, 214

“Art and Socialism”, 173, 187

Arts and Crafts Society, 205

Ashbee, G.R., 45, 47, 71

Asquith, Mrs, 204

Athenaeum, the, 88, 105, 107, 113, 115, 128, 130, 226 Audoux, M., 172

Bach, 276

Balfour, A.J., 183

Balfour, Gerald, 50

Balzac, 241

Bartolommeo, Fra, 116

Bastien-Lepage, 79

Bate, Francis, 62, 77, 90

Baudelaire, 241

Baux, Les, 221, 222

Bayswater, house at, 63

Beaufort Street, house at, 82

Bedoli, M., 116

Beerbohrn, Max, 118, 195

Bell, Glive, 156,169,187,208; 247–8, letter from; 288, letter from

Bell, Julian, 279

Bell, Vanessa, 162, 169, 170; 200, letter to; 220, letters to; 237, letter to; 298, letter to

Bellini, 91, roi, 123

Bellini (book on), 124, 125

Bennett, Arnold, 180, 196, 207

Benson, E.F., 49, 52, 54

Berensons, Mr and Mrs, 117

Bernard Street, 255, 269

Birrell, Augustine, 244

Birrell, Francis, 244

Blunt, Wilfrid, 156

Borough Polytechnic, decorations at, 173

Botticelli, 71, 73, 74

Bourke, Terence, 97

Brenan, Gerald, 240

Brescianino, 116

Breszka, G., 194, 198

Bridges, Robert, 85, 89, 90, 229

Bronzino, 116

Broussa, visit to, 170, 171

Brown, Horatio, 73, 77, 78, 98, 99

Brown, Madox, 53

Browning, Oscar, 44

Buffalmacco, 205

Burlington Magazine, 118, 124, 131, 137, 213, 244, 264

Burne-Jones, Sir E. 5 53

Burne-Jones, Sir Philip, 186

Burroughes, 135

Bussy, M. and Mme., 202

Bussy, Simon, 274

Cambridge, 44–61

Campbell-Bannerman, Sir H., 132

Carlisle, Countess of, 56

Carpenter, E., 46, 47, 56

Cezanne, 80, in, 112, 152, 153, 154, 176, 177, 180, 207, 223, 224, 265, 275, 286

Cézanne (essay on), 284, 285, 286

Chantrey Bequest, 113

Cimabue, 207

Citroen, car, 282

Clark, Sir Kenneth, 259, 289

Clifton, 35–43

Clutton-Brock, A., 132, letter from

Collier, Hon. John, 108

Colvin, Sir Sidney, 53, 123

Gonder, G., 92, 109

Coombe, Helen, 94,95. See under Fry, Helen

Cornford, Frances, 171, 172

Correggio, 91, 121

Costa, Signor, 69

Coué, Dr, 248, 249

Crackanthorpe, Mrs, 84

Crackanthorpe, Bertie, 92

Gurrie, Sir James, 210

Curzon, Lord, 183, 204

Dalmeny Avenue, 225, 236, 238

Daniel, Sir A.W., 71, 84, 91

Dante, portrait of, 270

Darmesteter, Madame, 79

Davies, LL, 56

Derain, 154, 219, 269

Diaghileff, 210

Dickinson, G.L., 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50 (description of boating party), 55; 62, letter to; 66, letters to; 71, letter to; 76, letter to; 78, 84, 86, 95, 96, letter to; 99, letter to; 100, 101, 102; 118, letter to; 126, 135, letter to; 136, letter to; 147, letter to; 176, letter to; 182, letter to; 183, letter to; 189, letter to; 190, letter to; 191, letter to; 197, letter to; 198, letter to; 199, 200, 205, 208, 232, 244, letter to; 287

Donatello, 99

Donnay, Madame, 210

Dorking, house at, 117

Doucet, M., 202

Durbins, house at Guildford, 162 ff.

Duse, E., 67

Elgar, Sir Edward, 208

Epstein, J., 166, 167

Etchells, F., 192, 193

Etruscan art, 68

Etty, W., 107, 114

Exhibitions of Roger Fry’s pictures, 09, 120, 145, 175, 236

Fitzroy Square, Omega workshops in, 190, 218

Fitzroy Street, studio in, 201

Flaubert, 237, 272

Forster, E.M., 240, 253, 292

Fortnightly, The, 88

Francesca, Piero della, 197

Friesz, 154

Fry, Agnes, 20, 291

Fry, Helen, 98, 101, 102, 103, 104, 121, 122, 125, 127, 132, 137, 144, 146, 147, 148

Fry, Isabel, 291

Fry, Joan, 163

Fry, Julian, 125; 126, letter from; 204, 209, 247

Fry, K., 26

Fry, Lady, 11, 14, 16, 17, 18, 40; 41, letter to; 47, letter to; 49, letter to; 57, letter to; 95, letter to; 98, 99; 117, letter to; 129, letter to; 147, letter to; 150, letter to; 216, letter to; 261

Fry, M., 26

Fry, Margery, 93, 225, 226, 236, 269, 281, 282

Fry, Pamela, 126, 204

Fry, Portsmouth, 26, 27

Fry, R.M., 26

Fry, Roger: birth, n; childhood, 15; account of skating, 20–22; account of private school, 27, 31; Clifton, 35; Cambridge, 44; exhibition at Manchester, 52–53; Tripos, 58; choice of art as profession, 59; life at Bayswater, 62–65; visit to Italy, 66; Julian, Paris, 77; house in Chelsea, 82; first articles, 88; lectures, 88; engagement, 95; marriage, 96; writing for Athenaeum, 105; exhibition of pictures, 119; first visit to U.S.A., 130, 134; Curator of Paintings, M.M., New York, 134; the first Post-Impressionist exhibition, 153; second Post-Impressionist exhibition, 177; the Omega workshops, 182; war years, 200–215; Vision and Design, 226; Transformations, 258; Slade Professorships, 287; accident and death, 297

Fry, Sir Edward, n, 15, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27,44; 48, letter from; 55; 59, letter to; 60, 62, 87, 98, 99, 123; 128, letter to; 132; 139, letter to; 211, 212

Gardner, Mrs Jack, 140

Gauguin, 153, 242

Gertler, Mark, 208, 243

Gide, M. André, 211

Giotto, 274

Goodall, R.A., 108

Gore, Spencer, 192

Gower, Lord Ronald, 74

Graf ton Galleries, 151, 152, 153; offer by directors of, 165, 166, 167, 168, 213

Grant, Duncan, 193, letter to; 194, letter to; 243

Greco, El, 207

Greece, visit to, 280 ff.

Grosvenor Gallery, 83

Hamilton, C.J., 192

Hamilton, Lady (Ian), 198

Hamilton, Sir Ian and Lady, 207

Hampstead, house at, 127

Hannay, Howard, 259–261

Harris (maid), 83

Harrison, Jane, 37, 92

Head, Dr Henry, 146

Headlam, W., 45

Hodgson, Shadworth, 87

Holmes, Sir Charles, 124, 131, 132, 145, 146, 154, 217

Holroyd, Sir Charles, 131

Hopkins, Gerard, 85, 241

Hughes, "Pip", 66, 67, 68, 70

Hunt, A.W., 53

Hunt, Holman, 53

Image, Selwyn, 86

Independent, The, 118, 137

James, Henry, 180, 273, 274

James, William, 140

Jepson, Edgar, 86

John, Augustus, 113, 114, 115, 166, 167, 206

Johnson, of Philadelphia, 145

Julian, Academic, 77 ff.

Kauffer, McKnight, 243

Keynes, Maynard, 208

Langtry, Mrs, 64

Lao Tzii, 252

League of Nations, 232

Leighton, Sir F., 53, 82

Leonardo da Vinci, 89, 91 , 249, 250

Letters to John Chinaman, 118

Lewis, Wyndham, 192, 194

Lichnowsky, Princess, 19

Listener, The, 217

Loines, Russell, 140

Long, Edwin, 53

Lorenzo, Fiorenzo di, 122

Louvre, the, 91

MacCarthy, Desmond, 117, 153, 154, 157, 200, 215, 276

MacColl, D.S., 92; 162, letter to; 175, letter to

MacColl, Mrs, 253, letter to

McEvoy, 167

McTaggart, J.E., 39, 40–41, 45, 49, 54, 86, 92, 102; 132, letter from; 205, 277, 298

Mallarmé, translation of, 239, 288

Manet, in Mantegna, 151

Marshall, Herbert, 62, 63

Masaccio, 71, 91

Matisse, 155, 156, 204, 254, 270

Mauron, Charles, 223, 232, 233, 239; 253, 266, 268, 270, 283, 284, 297

Mauron, Marie, 221, 223, 232, 233; 234, letter to; 236, letter to; 255, letter to; 287, letter to

Metropolitan Museum, 129, 132, 133, 134, 138, 145, 146

Michael Angelo, 71

Middleton, Prof. J.H., 54, 55, 59, 60

Millais, Sir John, 53, 82

Monet, 92

Monteverdi, 275

Morelli, 91

Morgan, Pierpont, 129, 130, 131,

Morley, Lord, 183

Morrell, Lady Ottoline, 174, 199

Nation, the, 185, 187

National Gallery, directorship of, 131, 132, 242, 243, 286

New English Art Club, 83, 94, 108, 113, 166–167

New Gallery, 83, 90

Nixon, 42

Northcliffe, Lord, 203

Omega, 190–199, 201, 202,203, 207,

212, 213, 2l6, 217, 2l8

Omega Club, 207

Orpen, Sir W., 113

Ouless, Sir W., 84

Parmegiano, 116

Pater, W., 74, 106

Phillips, Sir Claude, 131, 203

Phillips, Stephen, 117

Picasso, 154, 204, 219, 220, 243

Pilot, the, 88, 125

Pisanello, 91

Pitt Club, Cambridge, 49

Pontigny, 268

Post-Impressionism, 182, 183, 186, 187, 189

Post-Impressionist Exhibition (First), 153 ff.; (Second), 177 ff.

Poussin, 208, 220, 224

Powles, L., 90

Poynter, Sir Edward, 108, 128

Prothero, G.W., 44, 128

Proust, 241

Prout, 53

Psychical Research Society, 56

Quakers, 11 ff.

Queen’s Hall, lectures at, 261

Raphael, 68, 91, 121, 122, 142

Rembrandt, 55

Rémy, St, 223, 253; Mas at, 282, 283, 297

Reni, Guido, 176, 208

Renoir, 138, 139

Reynolds, Discourses of, 124, 125

Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 125

Richardson, Marian, 206, 243

Richmond, Sir W., 186, 187, 255

Ricketts, C., 85, 86, 106, 156

Rilke, 273

Ringrose, Hyacinthe, 249, 250

Riviere, Briton, 62, 63, 77

Road to Xanadu, by Livingstone Lowes, 274

Roberts, Sir David, 53

Rossetti, 40, 53

Rothenstein, Sir W., 77, 78, 80, 85, 86, 88, 109, 113, 137, 138, 155, 159; 166, letter to; 167, letter to; 168

Rouault, 234

Royal Academy, 83, 107–108

Rubens, 91, 208

Russell, Bertrand, 118

Sadler, Sir Michael, 243

Sands, Ethel, 204

Sanger, C.P., 276, 277

Sant, 107

Sargent, J.S., no, in, 113

Savage, Sir George, 146

Schiller, F., 45

Schiller family, 56, 66

School children’s drawings, 206

Seurat, 205, 206

Shannon, C., 85, 109

Sharp, William, 69

Shaw, Bernard, meeting with, 56; 56, letter to; 65, 84; 208, letter from

Sickert, 109

Slade Lectures, 287, 288

Slade Professorships: at Cambridge, 128, 287; at Oxford, 151, 260

Smith, Hindley, 243

Smith, Logan Pearsall, 117

Smith, Matthew, 243, 254

Smiths, Pearsall, 90, 104

Sneyd-Kynnersley, 29, 31 ff.

Sodoma, 72

Steer, Wilson, 83, 90, 109, 113, 166

Stevens, Alfred, 114

Stillman, Mrs, 69

Strachey, Lytton, 187, 207

Strachey, Oliver, 270

Strachey, Philippa, 269

Sunninghill, school, 30–35

Swan, John M., R.A., 186

Swan and Edgar, 185

Symonds, J.A., 73, 74, 75, 77, 78, 94.99

Tadema, Sir L.A., 185, 186, 187

Tate Gallery, directorship of, 165

Tatlock, R.R., 226

Thornton, Alfred, 84, 86, 119, 218

Times, The, articles in, 154, 185

Titian, 68

Tomlinson, Charles, 18, 19

Tonks, Henry, 84, 156, 158, 160, 168, 169

Transformations, 258

Tree, Viola, 207

Trevelyan, R.C., 82; 84, letter from; 85, 100, 102, 103, 104; 116, letter to; 117, letter to; 118, 204

Twain, Mark, 139

Valkyrie, 275

Van Gogh, 153

Vandervelde, Madame, 204, 208

Velasquez, 230

Vildrac, 219

Vinci, L. da, 89, 91, 249, 250

Vision and Design, 226

Wadsworth, E., 192

Walker, F., 53

Waterhouse, Alfred, 53

Watts, G.F., R.A., 107, 114, 115, 152

Wedd, N., 45, 71

Westminster Gazette, 119

Whistler, J., 79.

Widdrington, Mrs, portrait of, 90,95

Wilde, Oscar, Harris’s Life of, 211

Williams, Basil, 66; 74, letter to; 78, letter to; 91, letter to

Wilson, Canon, 35, 36, 38, 41, 48

Woolf, Leonard, 178, 270

Woolf, Virginia, 238, letter to; 267, letter to

Yeats, W.B., 205

Young, D., 45

Zangwill, I., 210

THE END

[]

BETWEEN
THE
ACTS

by
Virginia Woolf

published
1941
by
The Hogarth Press

between the acts

[sec. 1]    [sec. 2]    [sec. 3]    [sec. 4]

[sec. 5]    [sec. 6]    [sec. 7]    [sec. 8]

[sec. 9]    [sec. 10]    [sec. 11]    [sec. 12]

[sec. 13]    [sec. 14]    [sec. 15]    [sec. 16]

[sec. 17]    [sec. 18]    [sec. 19]    [sec. 20]

[sec. 21]    [sec. 22]    [sec. 23]    [sec. 24]

[sec. 25]    [sec. 26]    [sec. 27]    [sec. 28]

[sec. 29]    [sec. 30]    [sec. 31]    [sec. 32]

[sec. 33]    [sec. 34]    [sec. 35]    [sec. 36]

[]

[The text follows the 1947 Hogarth Press edition.]

note

The MS. of this book had been completed, but had not been finally revised for the printer, at the time of Virginia Woolf’s death. She would not, I believe, have made any large or material alterations in it, though she would probably have made a good many small corrections or revisions before passing the final proofs.

Leonard Woolf

It was a summer’s night and they were talking, in the big room with the windows open to the garden, about the cesspool. The county council had promised to bring water to the village, but they hadn’t.

Mrs. Haines, the wife of the gentleman farmer, a goosefaced woman with eyes protruding as if they saw something to gobble in the gutter, said affectedly: “What a subject to talk about on a night like this!”

Then there was silence; and a cow coughed; and that led her to say how odd it was, as a child, she had never feared cows, only horses. But, then, as a small child in a perambulator, a great cart-horse had brushed within an inch of her face. Her family, she told the old man in the arm-chair, had lived near Liskeard for many centuries. There were the graves in the churchyard to prove it.

A bird chuckled outside. “A nightingale?” asked Mrs. Haines. No, nightingales didn’t come so far north. It was a daylight bird, chuckling over the substance and succulence of the day, over worms, snails, grit, even in sleep.

The old man in the arm-chair—Mr. Oliver, of the Indian Civil Service, retired—said that the site they had chosen for the cesspool was, if he had heard aright, on the Roman road. From an aeroplane, he said, you could still see, plainly marked, the scars made by the Britons; by the Romans; by the Elizabethan manor house; and by the plough, when they ploughed the hill to grow wheat in the Napoleonic wars.

“But you don’t remember …” Mrs. Haines began. No, not that. Still he did remember—— and he was about to tell them what, when there was a sound outside, and Isa, his son’s wife, came in with her hair in pigtails; she was wearing a dressing-gown with faded peacocks on it. She came in like a swan swimming its way; then was checked and stopped; was surprised to find people there; and lights burning. She had been sitting with her little boy who wasn’t well, she apologized. What had they been saying?

“Discussing the cesspool,” said Mr. Oliver.

“What a subject to talk about on a night like this!” Mrs. Haines exclaimed again.

What had he said about the cesspool; or indeed about anything? Isa wondered, inclining her head towards the gentleman farmer, Rupert Haines. She had met him at a Bazaar; and at a tennis party. He had handed her a cup and a racquet—that was all. But in his ravaged face she always felt mystery; and in his silence, passion. At the tennis party she had felt this, and at the Bazaar. Now a third time, if anything more strongly, she felt it again.

“I remember,” the old man interrupted, “my mother….” Of his mother he remembered that she was very stout; kept her tea-caddy locked; yet had given him in that very room a copy of Byron. It was over sixty years ago, he told them, that his mother had given him the works of Byron in that very room. He paused.

“She walks in beauty like the night,” he quoted.

Then again:

“So we’ll go no more a-roving by the light of the moon.”

Isa raised her head. The words made two rings, perfect rings, that floated them, herself and Haines, like two swans down stream. But his snow-white breast was circled with a tangle of dirty duckweed; and she too, in her webbed feet was entangled, by her husband, the stockbroker. Sitting on her three-cornered chair she swayed, with her dark pigtails hanging, and her body like a bolster in its faded dressing-gown.

Mrs. Haines was aware of the emotion circling them, excluding her. She waited, as one waits for the strain of an organ to die out before leaving church. In the car going home to the red villa in the cornfields, she would destroy it, as a thrush pecks the wings off a butterfly. Allowing ten seconds to intervene, she rose; paused; and then, as if she had heard the last strain die out, offered Mrs. Giles Oliver her hand.

But Isa, though she should have risen at the same moment that Mrs. Haines rose, sat on. Mrs. Haines glared at her out of goose-like eyes, gobbling, “Please, Mrs. Giles Oliver, do me the kindness to recognize my existence….” which she was forced to do, rising at last from her chair, in her faded dressing-gown, with the pigtails falling over each shoulder.

Pointz Hall was seen in the light of an early summer morning to be a middle-sized house. It did not rank among the houses that are mentioned in guide books. It was too homely. But this whitish house with the grey roof, and the wing thrown out at right angles, lying unfortunately low on the meadow with a fringe of trees on the bank above it so that smoke curled up to the nests of the rooks, was a desirable house to live in. Driving past, people said to each other: “I wonder if that’ll ever come into the market?” And to the chauffeur: “Who lives there?”

The chauffeur didn’t know. The Olivers, who had bought the place something over a century ago, had no connection with the Warings, the Elveys, the Mannerings or the Burnets; the old families who had all intermarried, and lay in their deaths intertwisted, like the ivy roots, beneath the churchyard wall.

Only something over a hundred and twenty years the Olivers had been there. Still, on going up the principal staircase—there was another, a mere ladder at the back for the servants—there was a portrait. A length of yellow brocade was visible half-way up; and, as one reached the top, a small powdered face, a great head-dress slung with pearls, came into view; an ancestress of sorts. Six or seven bedrooms opened out of the corridor. The butler had been a soldier; had married a lady’s maid; and, under a glass case there was a watch that had stopped a bullet on the field of Waterloo.

It was early morning. The dew was on the grass. The church clock struck eight times. Mrs. Swithin drew the curtain in her bedroom—the faded white chintz that so agreeably from the outside tinged the window with its green lining. There with her old hands on the hasp, jerking it open, she stood: old Oliver’s married sister; a widow. She always meant to set up a house of her own; perhaps in Kensington, perhaps at Kew, so that she could have the benefit of the gardens. But she stayed on all through the summer; and when winter wept its damp upon the panes, and choked the gutters with dead leaves, she said: “Why, Bart, did they build the house in the hollow, facing north?” Her brother said, “Obviously to escape from nature. Weren’t four horses needed to drag the family coach through the mud?” Then he told her the famous story of the great eighteenth-century winter; when for a whole month the house had been blocked by snow. And the trees had fallen. So every year, when winter came, Mrs. Swithin retired to Hastings.

But it was summer now. She had been waked by the birds. How they sang! attacking the dawn like so many choir boys attacking an iced cake. Forced to listen, she had stretched for her favourite reading—an Outline of History—and had spent the hours between three and five thinking of rhododendron forests in Piccadilly; when the entire continent, not then, she understood, divided by a channel, was all one; populated, she understood, by elephant-bodied, seal-necked, heaving, surging, slowly writhing, and, she supposed, barking monsters; the iguanodon, the mammoth, and the mastodon; from whom presumably, she thought, jerking the window open, we descend.

It took her five seconds in actual time, in mind time ever so much longer, to separate Grace herself, with blue china on a tray, from the leather-covered grunting monster who was about, as the door opened, to demolish a whole tree in the green steaming undergrowth of the primeval forest. Naturally, she jumped, as Grace put the tray down and said: “Good morning, Ma’am.” “Batty,” Grace called her, as she felt on her face the divided glance that was half meant for a beast in a swamp, half for a maid in a print frock and white apron.

“How those birds sing!” said Mrs. Swithin, at a venture. The window was open now; the birds certainly were singing. An obliging thrush hopped across the lawn; a coil of pinkish rubber twisted in its beak. Tempted by the sight to continue her imaginative reconstruction of the past, Mrs. Swithin paused; she was given to increasing the bounds of the moment by flights into past or future; or sidelong down corridors and alleys; but she remembered her mother—her mother in that very room rebuking her. “Don’t stand gaping, Lucy, or the wind’ll change …” How often her mother had rebuked her in that very room—“but in a very different world,” as her brother would remind her. So she sat down to morning tea, like any other old lady with a high nose, thin cheeks, a ring on her finger and the usual trappings of rather shabby but gallant old age, which included in her case a cross gleaming gold on her breast.

The nurses after breakfast were trundling the perambulator up and down the terrace; and as they trundled they were talking—not shaping pellets of information or handing ideas from one to another, but rolling words, like sweets on their tongues; which, as they thinned to transparency, gave off pink, green, and sweetness. This morning that sweetness was: “How cook had told ’im off about the asparagus; how when she rang I said: how it was a sweet costume with blouse to match;” and that was leading to something about a feller as they walked up and down the terrace rolling sweets, trundling the perambulator.

It was a pity that the man who had built Pointz Hall had pitched the house in a hollow, when beyond the flower garden and the vegetables there was this stretch of high ground. Nature had provided a site for a house; man had built his house in a hollow. Nature had provided a stretch of turf half a mile in length and level, till it suddenly dipped to the lily pool. The terrace was broad enough to take the entire shadow of one of the great trees laid flat. There you could walk up and down, up and down, under the shade of the trees. Two or three grew close together; then there were gaps. Their roots broke the turf, and among those bones were green waterfalls and cushions of grass in which violets grew in spring or in summer the wild purple orchis.

Amy was saying something about a feller when Mabel, with her hand on the pram, turned sharply, her sweet swallowed. “Leave off grubbing,” she said sharply. “Come along, George.”

The little boy had lagged and was grouting in the grass. Then the baby, Caro, thrust her fist out over the coverlet and the furry bear was jerked overboard. Amy had to stoop. George grubbed. The flower blazed between the angles of the roots. Membrane after membrane was torn. It blazed a soft yellow, a lambent light under a film of velvet; it filled the caverns behind the eyes with light. All that inner darkness became a hall, leaf smelling, earth smelling of yellow light. And the tree was beyond the flower; the grass, the flower and the tree were entire. Down on his knees grubbing he held the flower complete. Then there was a roar and a hot breath and a stream of coarse grey hair rushed between him and the flower. Up he leapt, toppling in his fright, and saw coming towards him a terrible peaked eyeless monster moving on legs, brandishing arms.

“Good morning, sir,” a hollow voice boomed at him from a beak of paper.

The old man had sprung upon him from his hiding-place behind a tree.

“Say good morning, George; say ‘Good morning, Grandpa,’” Mabel urged him, giving him a push towards the man. But George stood gaping. George stood gazing. Then Mr. Oliver crumpled the paper which he had cocked into a snout and appeared in person. A very tall old man, with gleaming eyes, wrinkled cheeks, and a head with no hair on it. He turned.

“Heel!” he bawled, “heel, you brute!” And George turned; and the nurses turned holding the furry bear; they all turned to look at Sohrab the Afghan hound bounding and bouncing among the flowers.

“Heel!” the old man bawled, as if he were commanding a regiment. It was impressive, to the nurses, the way an old boy of his age could still bawl and make a brute like that obey him. Back came the Afghan hound, sidling, apologetic. And as he cringed at the old man’s feet, a string was slipped over his collar; the noose that old Oliver always carried with him.

“You wild beast … you bad beast,” he grumbled, stooping. George looked at the dog only. The hairy flanks were sucked in and out; there was a blob of foam on its nostrils. He burst out crying.

Old Oliver raised himself, his veins swollen, his cheeks flushed; he was angry. His little game with the paper hadn’t worked. The boy was a cry-baby. He nodded and sauntered on, smoothing out the crumpled paper and muttering, as he tried to find his line in the column, “A cry-baby—a cry-baby.” But the breeze blew the great sheet out; and over the edge he surveyed the landscape—flowing fields, heath and woods. Framed, they became a picture. Had he been a painter, he would have fixed his easel here, where the country, barred by trees, looked like a picture. Then the breeze fell.

“M. Daladier,” he read finding his place in the column, “has been successful in pegging down the franc….”

Mrs. Giles Oliver drew the comb through the thick tangle of hair which, after giving the matter her best attention, she had never had shingled or bobbed; and lifted the heavily embossed silver brush that had been a wedding present and had its uses in impressing chambermaids in hotels. She lifted it and stood in front of the three-folded mirror, so that she could see three separate versions of her rather heavy, yet handsome, face; and also, outside the glass, a slip of terrace, lawn and tree tops.

Inside the glass, in her eyes, she saw what she had felt overnight for the ravaged, the silent, the romantic gentleman farmer. “In love,” was in her eyes. But outside, on the washstand, on the dressing-table, among the silver boxes and tooth-brushes, was the other love; love for her husband, the stockbroker—“The father of my children,” she added, slipping into the cliché conveniently provided by fiction. Inner love was in the eyes; outer love on the dressing-table. But what feeling was it that stirred in her now when above the looking-glass, out of doors, she saw coming across the lawn the perambulator; two nurses; and her little boy George, lagging behind?

She tapped on the window with her embossed hairbrush. They were too far off to hear. The drone of the trees was in their ears; the chirp of birds; other incidents of garden life, inaudible, invisible to her in the bedroom, absorbed them. Isolated on a green island, hedged about with snowdrops, laid with a counterpane of puckered silk, the innocent island floated under her window. Only George lagged behind.

She returned to her eyes in the looking-glass. “In love,” she must be; since the presence of his body in the room last night could so affect her; since the words he said, handing her a teacup, handing her a tennis racquet, could so attach themselves to a certain spot in her; and thus lie between them like a wire, tingling, tangling, vibrating—she groped, in the depths of the looking-glass, for a word to fit the infinitely quick vibrations of the aeroplane propeller that she had seen once at dawn at Croydon. Faster, faster, faster, it whizzed, whirred, buzzed, till all the flails became one flail and up soared the plane away and away….

“Where we know not, where we go not, neither know nor care,” she hummed. “Flying, rushing through the ambient, incandescent, summer silent …”

The rhyme was “air.” She put down her brush. She took up the telephone.

“Three, four, eight, Pyecombe,” she said.

“Mrs. Oliver speaking…. What fish have you this morning? Cod? Halibut? Sole? Plaice?”

“There to lose what binds us here,” she murmured. “Soles. Filleted. In time for lunch please,” she said aloud. “With a feather, a blue feather … flying mounting through the air … there to lose what binds us here …” The words weren’t worth writing in the book bound like an account book in case Giles suspected. “Abortive,” was the word that expressed her. She never came out of a shop, for example, with the clothes she admired; nor did her figure, seen against the dark roll of trousering in a shop window, please her. Thick of waist, large of limb, and, save for her hair, fashionable in the tight modern way, she never looked like Sappho, or one of the beautiful young men whose photographs adorned the weekly papers. She looked what she was: Sir Richard’s daughter; and niece of the two old ladies at Wimbledon who were so proud, being O’Neils, of their descent from the Kings of Ireland.

A foolish, flattering lady, pausing on the threshold of what she once called “the heart of the house,” the threshold of the library, had once said: “Next to the kitchen, the library’s always the nicest room in the house.” Then she added, stepping across the threshold: “Books are the mirrors of the soul.”

In this case a tarnished, a spotted soul. For as the train took over three hours to reach this remote village in the very heart of England, no one ventured so long a journey, without staving off possible mind-hunger, without buying a book on a bookstall. Thus the mirror that reflected the soul sublime, reflected also the soul bored. Nobody could pretend, as they looked at the shuffle of shilling shockers that week-enders had dropped, that the looking-glass always reflected the anguish of a Queen or the heroism of King Harry.

At this early hour of a June morning the library was empty. Mrs. Giles had to visit the kitchen. Mr. Oliver still tramped the terrace. And Mrs. Swithin was of course at church. The light but variable breeze, foretold by the weather expert, flapped the yellow curtain, tossing light, then shadow. The fire greyed, then glowed, and the tortoiseshell butterfly beat on the lower pane of the window; beat, beat, beat; repeating that if no human being ever came, never, never, never, the books would be mouldy, the fire out and the tortoiseshell butterfly dead on the pane.

Heralded by the impetuosity of the Afghan hound, the old man entered. He had read his paper; he was drowsy; and so sank down into the chintz-covered chair with the dog at his feet—the Afghan hound. His nose on his paws, his haunches drawn up, he looked a stone dog, a crusader’s dog, guarding even in the realms of death the sleep of his master. But the master was not dead; only dreaming; drowsily, seeing as in a glass, its lustre spotted, himself, a young man helmeted; and a cascade falling. But no water; and the hills, like grey stuff pleated; and in the sand a hoop of ribs; a bullock maggot-eaten in the sun; and in the shadow of the rock, savages; and in his hand a gun. The dream hand clenched; the real hand lay on the chair arm, the veins swollen but only with a brownish fluid now.

The door opened.

“Am I,” Isa apologized, “interrupting?”

Of course she was—destroying youth and India. It was his fault, since she had persisted in stretching his thread of life so fine, so far. Indeed he was grateful to her, watching her as she strolled about the room, for continuing.

Many old men had only their India—old men in clubs, old men in rooms off Jermyn Street. She in her striped dress continued him, murmuring, in front of the book cases: “The moor is dark beneath the moon, rapid clouds have drunk the last pale beams of even…. I have ordered the fish,” she said aloud, turning, “though whether it’ll be fresh or not I can’t promise. But veal is dear, and everybody in the house is sick of beef and mutton…. Sohrab,” she said, coming to a standstill in front of them, “What’s he been doing?”

His tail never wagged. He never admitted the ties of domesticity. Either he cringed or he bit. Now his wild yellow eyes gazed at her, gazed at him. He could outstare them both. Then Oliver remembered:

“Your little boy’s a cry-baby,” he said scornfully.

“Oh,” she sighed, pegged down on a chair arm, like a captive balloon, by a myriad of hair-thin ties into domesticity. “What’s been happening?”

“I took the newspaper,” he explained, “so …”

He took it and crumpled it into a beak over his nose. “So,” he had sprung out from behind a tree on to the children.

“And he howled. He’s a coward, your boy is.”

She frowned. He was not a coward, her boy wasn’t. And she loathed the domestic, the possessive; the maternal. And he knew it and did it on purpose to tease her, the old brute, her father-in-law.

She looked away.

“The library’s always the nicest room in the house,” she quoted, and ran her eyes along the books. “The mirror of the soul” books were. The Faerie Queene and Kinglake’s Crimea; Keats and the Kreutzer Sonata. There they were, reflecting. What? What remedy was there for her at her age—the age of the century, thirty-nine—in books? Book-shy she was, like the rest of her generation; and gun-shy too. Yet as a person with a raging tooth runs her eye in a chemist shop over green bottles with gilt scrolls on them lest one of them may contain a cure, she considered: Keats and Shelley; Yeats and Donne. Or perhaps not a poem; a life. The life of Garibaldi. The life of Lord Palmerston. Or perhaps not a person’s life; a county’s. The Antiquities of Durham; The Proceedings of the Archæological Society of Nottingham. Or not a life at all, but science—Eddington, Darwin, or Jeans.

None of them stopped her toothache. For her generation the newspaper was a book; and, as her father-in-law had dropped the Times, she took it and read: “A horse with a green tail …” which was fantastic. Next, “The guard at Whitehall …” which was romantic and then, building word upon word she read: “The troopers told her the horse had a green tail; but she found it was just an ordinary horse. And they dragged her up to the barrack room where she was thrown upon a bed. Then one of the troopers removed part of her clothing, and she screamed and hit him about the face….”

That was real; so real that on the mahogany door panels she saw the Arch in Whitehall; through the Arch the barrack room; in the barrack room the bed, and on the bed the girl was screaming and hitting him about the face, when the door (for in fact it was a door) opened and in came Mrs. Swithin carrying a hammer.

She advanced, sidling, as if the floor were fluid under her shabby garden shoes, and, advancing, pursed her lips and smiled, sidelong, at her brother. Not a word passed between them as she went to the cupboard in the corner and replaced the hammer, which she had taken without asking leave; together—she unclosed her fist—with a handful of nails.

“Cindy—Cindy,” he growled, as she shut the cupboard door.

Lucy, his sister, was three years younger than he was. The name Cindy, or Sindy, for it could be spelt either way, was short for Lucy. It was by this name that he had called her when they were children; when she had trotted after him as he fished, and had made the meadow flowers into tight little bunches, winding one long grass stalk round and round and round. Once, she remembered, he had made her take the fish off the hook herself. The blood had shocked her—“Oh!” she had cried—for the gills were full of blood. And he had growled: “Cindy!” The ghost of that morning in the meadow was in her mind as she replaced the hammer where it belonged on one shelf; and the nails where they belonged on another; and shut the cupboard about which, for he still kept his fishing tackle there, he was still so very particular.

“I’ve been nailing the placard on the Barn,” she said, giving him a little pat on the shoulder.

The words were like the first peal of a chime of bells. As the first peals, you hear the second; as the second peals, you hear the third. So when Isa heard Mrs. Swithin say: “I’ve been nailing the placard to the Barn,” she knew she would say next:

“For the pageant.”

And he would say:

“Today? By Jupiter! I’d forgotten!”

“If it’s fine,” Mrs. Swithin continued, “they’ll act on the terrace …”

“And if it’s wet,” Bartholomew continued, “in the Barn.”

“And which will it be?” Mrs. Swithin continued. “Wet or fine?”

Then, for the seventh time in succession, they both looked out of the window.

Every summer, for seven summers now, Isa had heard the same words; about the hammer and the nails; the pageant and the weather. Every year they said, would it be wet or fine; and every year it was—one or the other. The same chime followed the same chime, only this year beneath the chime she heard: “The girl screamed and hit him about the face with a hammer.”

“The forecast,” said Mr. Oliver, turning the pages till he found it, “says: Variable winds; fair average temperature; rain at times.”

He put down the paper, and they all looked at the sky to see whether the sky obeyed the meteorologist. Certainly the weather was variable. It was green in the garden; grey the next. Here came the sun—an illimitable rapture of joy, embracing every flower, every leaf. Then in compassion it withdrew, covering its face, as if it forebore to look on human suffering. There was a fecklessness, a lack of symmetry and order in the clouds, as they thinned and thickened. Was it their own law, or no law, they obeyed? Some were wisps of white hair merely. One, high up, very distant, had hardened to golden alabaster; was made of immortal marble. Beyond that was blue, pure blue, black blue; blue that had never filtered down; that had escaped registration. It never fell as sun, shadow, or rain upon the world, but disregarded the little coloured ball of earth entirely. No flower felt it; no field; no garden.

Mrs. Swithin’s eyes glazed as she looked at it. Isa thought her gaze was fixed because she saw God there, God on his throne. But as a shadow fell next moment on the garden Mrs. Swithin loosed and lowered her fixed look and said:

“It’s very unsettled. It’ll rain, I’m afraid. We can only pray,” she added, and fingered her crucifix.

“And provide umbrellas,” said her brother.

Lucy flushed. He had struck her faith. When she said “pray,” he added “umbrellas.” She half covered the cross with her fingers. She shrank; she cowered; but next moment she exclaimed:

“Oh there they are—the darlings!”

The perambulator was passing across the lawn.

Isa looked too. What an angel she was—the old woman! Thus to salute the children; to beat up against those immensities and the old man’s irreverences her skinny hands, her laughing eyes! How courageous to defy Bart and the weather!

“He looks blooming,” said Mrs. Swithin.

“It’s astonishing how they pick up,” said Isa.

“He ate his breakfast?” Mrs. Swithin asked.

“Every scrap,” said Isa.

“And baby? No sign of measles?”

Isa shook her head. “Touch wood,” she added, tapping the table.

“Tell me, Bart,” said Mrs. Swithin turning to her brother, “what’s the origin of that? Touch wood … Antaeus, didn’t he touch earth?”

She would have been, he thought, a very clever woman, had she fixed her gaze. But this led to that; that to the other. What went in at this ear, went out at that. And all were circled, as happens after seventy, by one recurring question. Hers was, should she live at Kensington or at Kew? But every year, when winter came, she did neither. She took lodgings at Hastings.

“Touch wood; touch earth; Antaeus,” he muttered, bringing the scattered bits together. Lempriere would settle it; or the Encyclopædia. But it was not in books the answer to his question—why, in Lucy’s skull, shaped so much like his own, there existed a prayable being? She didn’t, he supposed, invest it with hair, teeth or toe-nails. It was, he supposed more of a force or a radiance, controlling the thrush and the worm; the tulip and the hound; and himself, too, an old man with swollen veins. It got her out of bed on a cold morning and sent her down the muddy path to worship it, whose mouthpiece was Streatfield. A good fellow, who smoked cigars in the vestry. He needed some solace, doling out preachments to asthmatic elders, perpetually repairing the perpetually falling steeple, by means of placards nailed to Barns. The love, he was thinking, that they should give to flesh and blood they give to the church … when Lucy rapping her fingers on the table said:

“What’s the origin—the origin—of that?”

“Superstition,” he said.

She flushed, and the little breath too was audible that she drew in as once more he struck a blow at her faith. But, brother and sister, flesh and blood was not a barrier, but a mist. Nothing changed their affection; no argument; no fact; no truth. What she saw he didn’t; what he saw she didn’t—and so on, ad infinitum.

“Cindy,” he growled. And the quarrel was over.

The Barn to which Lucy had nailed her placard was a great building in the farmyard. It was as old as the church, and built of the same stone, but it had no steeple. It was raised on cones of grey stone at the corners to protect it from rats and damp. Those who had been to Greece always said it reminded them of a temple. Those who had never been to Greece—the majority—admired it all the same. The roof was weathered red-orange; and inside it was a hollow hall, sun-shafted, brown, smelling of corn, dark when the doors were shut, but splendidly illuminated when the doors at the end stood open, as they did to let the wagons in—the long low wagons, like ships of the sea, breasting the corn, not the sea, returning in the evening shagged with hay. The lanes caught tufts where the wagons had passed.

Now benches were drawn across the floor of the Barn. If it rained, the actors were to act in the Barn; planks had been laid together at one end to form a stage. Wet or fine, the audience would take tea there. Young men and women—Jim, Iris, David, Jessica—were even now busy with garlands of red and white paper roses left over from the Coronation. The seeds and the dust from the sacks made them sneeze. Iris had a handkerchief bound round her forehead; Jessica wore breeches. The young men worked in shirt sleeves. Pale husks had stuck in their hair, and it was easy to run a splinter of wood into the fingers.

“Old Flimsy” (Mrs. Swithin’s nickname) had been nailing another placard on the Barn. The first had been blown down, or the village idiot, who always tore down what had been nailed up, had done it, and was chuckling over the placard under the shade of some hedge. The workers were laughing too, as if old Swithin had left a wake of laughter behind her. The old girl with a wisp of white hair flying, knobbed shoes as if she had claws corned like a canary’s, and black stockings wrinkled over the ankles, naturally made David cock his eye and Jessica wink back, as she handed him a length of paper roses. Snobs they were; long enough stationed that is in that one corner of the world to have taken indelibly the print of some three hundred years of customary behaviour. So they laughed; but respected. If she wore pearls, pearls they were.

“Old Flimsy on the hop,” said David. She would be in and out twenty times, and finally bring them lemonade in a great jug and a plate of sandwiches. Jessie held the garland; he hammered. A hen strayed in; a file of cows passed the door; then a sheep dog; then the cowman, Bond, who stopped.

He contemplated the young people hanging roses from one rafter to another. He thought very little of anybody, simples or gentry. Leaning, silent, sardonic, against the door he was like a withered willow, bent over a stream, all its leaves shed, and in his eyes the whimsical flow of the waters.

“Hi—huh!” he cried suddenly. It was cow language presumably, for the parti-coloured cow, who had thrust her head in at the door lowered her horns, lashed her tail and ambled off. Bond followed after.

“That’s the problem,” said Mrs. Swithin. While Mr. Oliver consulted the Encyclopædia searching under Superstition for the origin of the expression “Touch Wood,” she and Isa discussed fish: whether, coming from a distance, it would be fresh.

They were so far from the sea. A hundred miles away, Mrs. Swithin said; no, perhaps a hundred and fifty. “But they do say,” she continued, “one can hear the waves on a still night. After a storm, they say, you can hear a wave break…. I like that story,” she reflected. “Hearing the waves in the middle of the night he saddled a horse and rode to the sea. Who was it, Bart, who rode to the sea?”

He was reading.

“You can’t expect it brought to your door in a pail of water,” said Mrs. Swithin, “as I remember when we were children, living in a house by the sea. Lobsters, fresh from the lobster pots. How they pinched the stick cook gave them! And salmon. You know if they’re fresh because they have lice in their scales.”

Bartholomew nodded. A fact that was. He remembered, the house by the sea. And the lobster.

They were bringing up nets full of fish from the sea; but Isa was seeing—the garden, variable as the forecast said, in the light breeze. Again, the children passed, and she tapped on the window and blew them a kiss. In the drone of the garden it went unheeded.

“Are we really,” she said, turning round, “a hundred miles from the sea?”

“Thirty-five only,” her father-in-law said, as if he had whipped a tape measure from his pocket and measured it exactly.

“It seems more,” said Isa. “It seems from the terrace as if the land went on for ever and ever.”

“Once there was no sea,” said Mrs. Swithin. “No sea at all between us and the continent. I was reading that in a book this morning. There were rhododendrons in the Strand; and mammoths in Piccadilly.”

“When we were savages,” said Isa.

Then she remembered; her dentist had told her that savages could perform very skilful operations on the brain. Savages had false teeth, he said. False teeth were invented, she thought he said, in the time of the Pharaohs.

“At least so my dentist told me,” she concluded.

“Which man d’you go to now?” Mrs. Swithin asked her.

“The same old couple; Batty and Bates in Sloane Street.”

“And Mr. Batty told you they had false teeth in the time of the Pharaohs?” Mrs. Swithin pondered.

“Batty? Oh not Batty. Bates,” Isa corrected her.

Batty, she recalled, only talked about Royalty. Batty, she told Mrs. Swithin, had a patient a Princess.

“So he kept me waiting well over an hour. And you know, when one’s a child, how long that seems.”

“Marriages with cousins,” said Mrs. Swithin, “can’t be good for the teeth.”

Bart put his finger inside his mouth and projected the upper row outside his lips. They were false. Yet, he said, the Olivers hadn’t married cousins. The Olivers couldn’t trace their descent for more than two or three hundred years. But the Swithins could. The Swithins were there before the Conquest.

“The Swithins,” Mrs. Swithin began. Then she stopped. Bart would crack another joke about Saints, if she gave him the chance. And she had had two jokes cracked at her already; one about an umbrella; another about superstition.

So she stopped and said, “How did we begin this talk?” She counted on her fingers. “The Pharaohs. Dentists. Fish … Oh yes, you were saying, Isa, you’d ordered fish; and you were afraid it wouldn’t be fresh. And I said ‘That’s the problem….’”

The fish had been delivered, Mitchell’s boy, holding them in a crook of his arm, jumped off his motor bike. There was no feeding the pony with lumps of sugar at the kitchen door, nor time for gossip, since his round had been increased. He had to deliver right over the hill at Bickley; also go round by Waythorn, Roddam, and Pyeminster, whose names, like his own, were in Domesday Book. But the cook—Mrs. Sands she was called, but by old friends Trixie—had never in all her fifty years been over the hill, nor wanted to.

He dabbed them down on the kitchen table, the filleted soles, the semi-transparent boneless fish. And before Mrs. Sands had time to peel the paper off, he was gone, giving a slap to the very fine yellow cat who rose majestically from the basket chair and advanced superbly to the table, winding the fish.

Were they a bit whiffy? Mrs. Sands held them to her nose. The cat rubbed itself this way, that way against the table legs, against her legs. She would save a slice for Sunny—his drawing-room name Sung-Yen had undergone a kitchen change into Sunny. She took them, the cat attendant, to the larder, and laid them on a plate in that semi-ecclesiastical apartment. For the house before the Reformation, like so many houses in that neighbourhood, had a chapel; and the chapel had become a larder, changing, like the cat’s name, as religion changed. The Master (his drawing-room name; in the kitchen they called him Bartie) would bring gentlemen sometimes to see the larder—often when cook wasn’t dressed. Not to see the hams that hung from hooks, or the butter on a blue slate, or the joint for tomorrow’s dinner, but to see the cellar that opened out of the larder and its carved arch. If you tapped—one gentleman had a hammer—there was a hollow sound; a reverberation; undoubtedly, he said, a concealed passage where once somebody had hid. So it might be. But Mrs. Sands wished they wouldn’t come into her kitchen telling stories with the girls about. It put ideas into their silly heads. They heard dead men rolling barrels. They saw a white lady walking under the trees. No one would cross the terrace after dark. If a cat sneezed, “There’s the ghost!”

Sunny had his little bit off the fillet. Then Mrs. Sands took an egg from the brown basket full of eggs; some with yellow fluff sticking to the shells; then a pinch of flour to coat those semi-transparent slips; and a crust from the great earthenware crock full of crusts. Then, returning to the kitchen, she made those quick movements at the oven, cinder raking, stoking, damping, which sent strange echoes through the house, so that in the library, the sitting-room, the dining-room, and the nursery, whatever they were doing, thinking, saying, they knew, they all knew, it was getting on for breakfast, lunch, or dinner.

“The sandwiches …” said Mrs. Swithin, coming into the kitchen. She refrained from adding “Sands” to “sandwiches,” for Sand and sandwiches clashed. “Never play,” her mother used to say, “on people’s names.” And Trixie was not a name that suited, as Sands did, the thin, acid woman, red-haired, sharp and clean, who never dashed off masterpieces, it was true; but then never dropped hairpins in the soup. “What in the name of Thunder?” Bart had said, raising a hairpin in his spoon, in the old days, fifteen years ago, before Sands came, in the time of Jessie Pook.

Mrs. Sands fetched bread; Mrs. Swithin fetched ham. One cut the bread; the other the ham. It was soothing, it was consolidating, this handwork together. The cook’s hands cut, cut, cut. Whereas Lucy, holding the loaf, held the knife up. Why’s stale bread, she mused, easier to cut than fresh? And so skipped, sidelong, from yeast to alcohol; so to fermentation; so to inebriation; so to Bacchus; and lay under purple lamps in a vineyard in Italy, as she had done, often; while Sands heard the clock tick; saw the cat; noted a fly buzz; and registered, as her lips showed, a grudge she mustn’t speak against people making work in the kitchen while they had a high old time hanging paper roses in the barn.

“Will it be fine?” asked Mrs. Swithin, her knife suspended. In the kitchen they humoured old Mother Swithin’s fancies.

“Seems like it,” said Mrs. Sands, giving her sharp look-out of the kitchen window.

“It wasn’t last year,” said Mrs. Swithin. “D’you remember what a rush we had—when the rain came—getting in the chairs?” She cut again. Then she asked about Billy, Mrs. Sands’s nephew, apprenticed to the butcher.

“He’s been doing,” Mrs. Sands said, “what boys shouldn’t; cheeking the master.”

“That’ll be all right,” said Mrs. Swithin, half meaning the boy, half meaning the sandwich, as it happened a very neat one, trimmed, triangular.

“Mr. Giles may be late,” she added, laying it, complacently, on top of the pile.

For Isa’s husband, the stockbroker, was coming from London. And the local train, which met the express train, arrived by no means punctually, even if he caught the early train which was by no means certain. In which case it meant—but what it meant to Mrs. Sands, when people missed their trains, and she, whatever she might want to do, must wait, by the oven, keeping meat hot, no one knew.

“There!” said Mrs. Swithin, surveying the sandwiches, some neat, some not, “I’ll take ’em to the barn.” As for the lemonade, she assumed, without a flicker of doubt, that Jane the kitchenmaid would follow after.

Candish paused in the dining-room to move a yellow rose. Yellow, white, carnation red—he placed them. He loved flowers, and arranging them, and placing the green sword or heart shaped leaf that came, fitly, between them. Queerly, he loved them, considering his gambling and drinking. The yellow rose went there. Now all was ready—silver and white, forks and napkins, and in the middle the splashed bowl of variegated roses. So, with one last look, he left the dining-room.

Two pictures hung opposite the window. In real life they had never met, the long lady and the man holding his horse by the rein. The lady was a picture, bought by Oliver because he liked the picture; the man was an ancestor. He had a name. He held the rein in his hand. He had said to the painter:

“If you want my likeness, dang it sir, take it when the leaves are on the trees.” There were leaves on the trees. He had said: “Ain’t there room for Colin as well as Buster?” Colin was his famous hound. But there was only room for Buster. It was, he seemed to say, addressing the company not the painter, a damned shame to leave out Colin whom he wished buried at his feet, in the same grave, about 1750; but that skunk the Reverend Whatshisname wouldn’t allow it.

He was a talk producer, that ancestor. But the lady was a picture. In her yellow robe, leaning, with a pillar to support her, a silver arrow in her hand, and a feather in her hair, she led the eye up, down, from the curve to the straight, through glades of greenery and shades of silver, dun and rose into silence. The room was empty.

Empty, empty, empty; silent, silent, silent. The room was a shell, singing of what was before time was; a vase stood in the heart of the house, alabaster, smooth, cold, holding the still, distilled essence of emptiness, silence.

Across the hall a door opened. One voice, another voice, a third voice came wimpling and warbling: gruff—Bart’s voice; quavering—Lucy’s voice; middle-toned—Isa’s voice. Their voices impetuously, impatiently, protestingly came across the hall saying: “The train’s late”; saying: “Keep it hot”; saying: “We won’t, no Candish, we won’t wait.”

Coming out from the library the voices stopped in the hall. They encountered an obstacle evidently; a rock. Utterly impossible was it, even in the heart of the country, to be alone? That was the shock. After that, the rock was raced round, embraced. If it was painful, it was essential. There must be society. Coming out of the library it was painful, but pleasant, to run slap into Mrs. Manresa and an unknown young man with tow-coloured hair and a twisted face. No escape was possible; meeting was inevitable. Uninvited, unexpected, droppers-in, lured off the high road by the very same instinct that caused the sheep and the cows to desire propinquity, they had come. But they had brought a lunch basket. Here it was.

“We couldn’t resist when we saw the name on the signpost,” Mrs. Manresa began in her rich fluty voice. “And this is a friend—William Dodge. We were going to sit all alone in a field. And I said: ‘Why not ask our dear friends,’ seeing the signpost, ‘to shelter us?’ A seat at the table—that’s all we want. We have our grub. We have our glasses. We ask nothing but——” society apparently, to be with her kind.

And she waved her hand upon which there was a glove, and under the glove it seemed rings, at old Mr. Oliver.

He bowed deep over her hand; a century ago, he would have kissed it. In all this sound of welcome, protestation, apology and again welcome, there was an element of silence, supplied by Isabella, observing the unknown young man. He was of course a gentleman; witness socks and trousers; brainy—tie spotted, waistcoat undone; urban, professional, that is putty coloured, unwholesome; very nervous, exhibiting a twitch at this sudden introduction, and fundamentally infernally conceited, for he deprecated Mrs. Manresa’s effusion, yet was her guest.

Isa felt antagonised, yet curious. But when Mrs. Manresa added, to make all shipshape: “He’s an artist,” and when William Dodge corrected her: “I’m a clerk in an office”—she thought he said Education or Somerset House—she had her finger on the knot which had tied itself so tightly, almost to the extent of squinting, certainly of twitching, in his face.

Then they went in to lunch, and Mrs. Manresa bubbled up, enjoying her own capacity to surmount, without turning a hair, this minor social crisis—this laying of two more places. For had she not complete faith in flesh and blood? and aren’t we all flesh and blood? and how silly to make bones of trifles when we’re all flesh and blood under the skin—men and women too! But she preferred men—obviously.

“Or what are your rings for, and your nails, and that really adorable little straw hat?” said Isabella addressing Mrs. Manresa silently and thereby making silence add its unmistakable contribution to talk. Her hat, her rings, her finger nails red as roses, smooth as shells, were there for all to see. But not her life history. That was only scraps and fragments to all of them, excluding perhaps William Dodge, whom she called “Bill” publicly—a sign perhaps that he knew more than they did. Some of the things that he knew—that she strolled the garden at midnight in silk pyjamas, had the loud speaker playing jazz, and a cocktail bar, of course they knew also. But nothing private; no strict biographical facts.

She had been born, but it was only gossip said so, in Tasmania: her grandfather had been exported for some hanky-panky mid-Victorian scandal; malversation of trusts was it? But the story got no further the only time Isabella heard it than “exported,” for the husband of the communicative lady—Mrs. Blencowe of the Grange—took exception, pedantically, to “exported,” said “expatriated” was more like it, but not the right word, which he had on the tip of his tongue, but couldn’t get at. And so the story dwindled away. Sometimes she referred to an uncle, a Bishop. But he was thought to have been a Colonial Bishop only. They forgot and forgave very easily in the Colonies. Also it was said her diamonds and rubies had been dug out of the earth with his own hands by a “husband” who was not Ralph Manresa. Ralph, a Jew, got up to look the very spit and image of the landed gentry, supplied from directing City companies—that was certain—tons of money; and they had no child. But surely with George the Sixth on the throne it was old fashioned, dowdy, savoured of moth-eaten furs, bugles, cameos and black-edged notepaper, to go ferreting into people’s pasts?

“All I need,” said Mrs. Manresa ogling Candish, as if he were a real man, not a stuffed man, “is a corkscrew.” She had a bottle of champagne, but no corkscrew.

“Look, Bill,” she continued, cocking her thumb—she was opening the bottle—“at the pictures. Didn’t I tell you you’d have a treat?”

Vulgar she was in her gestures, in her whole person, over-sexed, over-dressed for a picnic. But what a desirable, at least valuable, quality it was—for everybody felt, directly she spoke, “She’s said it, she’s done it, not I,” and could take advantage of the breach of decorum, of the fresh air that blew in, to follow like leaping dolphins in the wake of an ice-breaking vessel. Did she not restore to old Bartholomew his spice islands, his youth?

“I told him,” she went on, ogling Bart now, “that he wouldn’t look at our things” (of which they had heaps and mountains) “after yours. And I promised him you’d show him the—the——” here the champagne fizzed up and she insisted upon filling Bart’s glass first. “What is it all you learned gentlemen rave about? An arch? Norman? Saxon? Who’s the last from school? Mrs. Giles?”

She ogled Isabella now, conferring youth upon her; but always when she spoke to women, she veiled her eyes, for they, being conspirators, saw through it.

So with blow after blow, with champagne and ogling, she staked out her claim to be a wild child of nature, blowing into this—she did give one secret smile—sheltered harbour; which did make her smile, after London; yet it did, too, challenge London. For on she went to offer them a sample of her life; a few gobbets of gossip; mere trash; but she gave it for what it was worth; how last Tuesday she had been sitting next so and so; and she added, very casually a Christian name; then a nickname; and he’d said—for, as a mere nobody they didn’t mind what they said to her—and “in strict confidence, I needn’t tell you,” she told them. And they all pricked their ears. And then, with a gesture of her hands as if tossing overboard that odious crackling-under-the-pot London life—so—she exclaimed “There! … And what’s the first thing I do when I come down here?” They had only come last night, driving through June lanes, alone with Bill it was understood, leaving London, suddenly become dissolute and dirty, to sit down to dinner. “What do I do? Can I say it aloud? Is it permitted, Mrs. Swithin? Yes, everything can be said in this house. I take off my stays” (here she pressed her hands to her sides—she was stout) “and roll in the grass. Roll—you’ll believe that …” She laughed wholeheartedly. She had given up dealing with her figure and thus gained freedom.

“That’s genuine,” Isa thought. Quite genuine. And her love of the country too. Often when Ralph Manresa had to stay in town she came down alone; wore an old garden hat; taught the village women not how to pickle and preserve; but how to weave frivolous baskets out of coloured straw. Pleasure’s what they want she said. You often heard her, if you called, yodelling among the hollyhocks “Hoity te doity te ray do …”

A thorough good sort she was. She made old Bart feel young. Out of the corner of his eye, as he raised his glass, he saw a flash of white in the garden. Someone passing.

The scullery maid, before the plates came out, was cooling her cheeks by the lily pond.

There had always been lilies there, self-sown from wind-dropped seed, floating red and white on the green plates of their leaves. Water, for hundreds of years, had silted down into the hollow, and lay there four or five feet deep over a black cushion of mud. Under the thick plate of green water, glazed in their self-centred world, fish swam—gold, splashed with white, streaked with black or silver. Silently they manoeuvred in their water world, poised in the blue patch made by the sky, or shot silently to the edge where the grass, trembling, made a fringe of nodding shadow. On the water-pavement spiders printed their delicate feet. A grain fell and spiralled down; a petal fell, filled and sank. At that the fleet of boat-shaped bodies paused; poised; equipped; mailed; then with a waver of undulation off they flashed.

It was in that deep centre, in that black heart, that the lady had drowned herself. Ten years since the pool had been dredged and a thigh bone recovered. Alas, it was a sheep’s, not a lady’s. And sheep have no ghosts, for sheep have no souls. But, the servants insisted, they must have a ghost; the ghost must be a lady’s; who had drowned herself for love. So none of them would walk by the lily pool at night, only now when the sun shone and the gentry still sat at table.

The flower petal sank; the maid returned to the kitchen; Bartholomew sipped his wine. Happy he felt as a boy; yet reckless as an old man; an unusual, an agreeable sensation. Fumbling in his mind for something to say to the adorable lady, he chose the first thing that came handy; the story of the sheep’s thigh. “Servants,” he said, “must have their ghost.” Kitchenmaids must have their drowned lady.

“But so must I!” cried the wild child of nature, Mrs. Manresa. She became, of a sudden, solemn as an owl. She knew, she said, pinching a bit of bread to make this emphatic, that Ralph, when he was at the war, couldn’t have been killed without her seeing him—“wherever I was, whatever I was doing,” she added, waving her hands so that the diamonds flashed in the sun.

“I don’t feel that,” said Mrs. Swithin, shaking her head.

“No,” Mrs. Manresa laughed. “You wouldn’t. None of you would. You see I’m on a level with …” she waited till Candish had retired, “the servants. I’m nothing like so grown up as you are.”

She preened, approving her adolescence. Rightly or wrongly? A spring of feeling bubbled up through her mud. They had laid theirs with blocks of marble. Sheep’s bones were sheep’s bones to them, not the relics of the drowned Lady Ermyntrude.

“And which camp,” said Bartholomew turning to the unknown guest, “d’you belong to? The grown, or the ungrown?”

Isabella opened her mouth, hoping that Dodge would open his, and so enable her to place him. But he sat staring. “I beg your pardon, sir?” he said. They all looked at him. “I was looking at the pictures.”

The picture looked at nobody. The picture drew them down the paths of silence.

Lucy broke it.

“Mrs. Manresa, I’m going to ask you a favour—If it comes to a pinch this afternoon, will you sing?”

This afternoon? Mrs. Manresa was aghast. Was it the pageant? She had never dreamt it was this afternoon. They would never have thrust themselves in—had they known it was this afternoon. And, of course, once more the chime pealed. Isa heard the first chime; and the second; and the third—If it was wet, it would be in the Barn; if it was fine on the terrace. And which would it be, wet or fine? And they all looked out of the window. Then the door opened. Candish said Mr. Giles had come. Mr. Giles would be down in a moment.

Giles had come. He had seen the great silver-plated car at the door with the initials R. M. twisted so as to look at a distance like a coronet. Visitors, he had concluded, as he drew up behind; and had gone to his room to change. The ghost of convention rose to the surface, as a blush or a tear rises to the surface at the pressure of emotion; so the car touched his training. He must change. And he came into the dining-room looking like a cricketer, in flannels, wearing a blue coat with brass buttons; though he was enraged. Had he not read, in the morning paper, in the train, that sixteen men had been shot, others prisoned, just over there, across the gulf, in the flat land which divided them from the continent? Yet he changed. It was Aunt Lucy, waving her hand at him as he came in, who made him change. He hung his grievances on her, as one hangs a coat on a hook, instinctively. Aunt Lucy, foolish, free; always, since he had chosen, after leaving college, to take a job in the city, expressing her amazement, her amusement, at men who spent their lives, buying and selling—ploughs? glass beads was it? or stocks and shares?—to savages who wished most oddly—for were they not beautiful naked?—to dress and live like the English? A frivolous, a malignant statement hers was of a problem which, for he had no special gift, no capital, and had been furiously in love with his wife—he nodded to her across the table—had afflicted him for ten years. Given his choice, he would have chosen to farm. But he was not given his choice. So one thing led to another; and the conglomeration of things pressed you flat; held you fast, like a fish in water. So he came for the week-end, and changed.

“How d’you do?” he said all round; nodded to the unknown guest; took against him; and ate his fillet of sole.

He was the very type of all that Mrs. Manresa adored. His hair curled; far from running away, as many chins did, his was firm; the nose straight, if short; the eyes, of course, with that hair, blue; and finally to make the type complete, there was something fierce, untamed, in the expression which incited her, even at forty-five, to furbish up her ancient batteries.

“He is my husband,” Isabella thought, as they nodded across the bunch of many-coloured flowers. “The father of my children.” It worked, that old cliché; she felt pride; and affection; then pride again in herself, whom he had chosen. It was a shock to find, after the morning’s look in the glass, and the arrow of desire shot through her last night by the gentleman farmer, how much she felt when he came in, not a dapper city gent, but a cricketer, of love; and of hate.

They had met first in Scotland, fishing—she from one rock, he from another. Her line had got tangled; she had given over, and had watched him with the stream rushing between his legs, casting, casting—until, like a thick ingot of silver bent in the middle, the salmon had leapt, had been caught, and she had loved him.

Bartholomew too loved him; and noted his anger—about what? But he remembered his guest. The family was not a family in the presence of strangers. He must, rather laboriously, tell them the story of the pictures at which the unknown guest had been looking when Giles came in.

“That,” he indicated the man with a horse, “was my ancestor. He had a dog. The dog was famous. The dog has his place in history. He left it on record that he wished his dog to be buried with him.”

They looked at the picture.

“I always feel,” Lucy broke the silence, “he’s saying: ‘Paint my dog.’”

“But what about the horse?” said Mrs. Manresa.

“The horse,” said Bartholomew, putting on his glasses. He looked at the horse. The hindquarters were not satisfactory.

But William Dodge was still looking at the lady.

“Ah,” said Bartholomew who had bought that picture because he liked that picture, “you’re an artist.”

Dodge denied it, for the second time in half an hour, or so Isa noted.

What for did a good sort like the woman Manresa bring these half-breeds in her trail? Giles asked himself. And his silence made its contribution to talk—Dodge that is, shook his head. “I like that picture.” That was all he could bring himself to say.

“And you’re right,” said Bartholomew. “A man—I forget his name—a man connected with some Institute, a man who goes about giving advice, gratis, to descendants like ourselves, degenerate descendants, said … said …” He paused. They all looked at the lady. But she looked over their heads, looking at nothing. She led them down green glades into the heart of silence.

“Said it was by Sir Joshua?” Mrs. Manresa broke the silence abruptly.

“No, no,” William Dodge said hastily, but under his breath.

“Why’s he afraid?” Isabella asked herself. A poor specimen he was; afraid to stick up for his own beliefs—just as she was afraid, of her husband. Didn’t she write her poetry in a book bound like an account book lest Giles might suspect? She looked at Giles.

He had finished his fish; he had eaten quickly, not to keep them waiting. Now there was cherry tart. Mrs. Manresa was counting the stones.

“Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, apothecary, ploughboy … that’s me!” she cried, delighted to have it confirmed by the cherry stones that she was a wild child of nature.

“You believe,” said the old gentleman, courteously chaffing her, “in that too?”

“Of course, of course I do!” she cried. Now she was on the rails again. Now she was a thorough good sort again. And they too were delighted; now they could follow in her wake and leave the silver and dun shades that led to the heart of silence.

“I had a father,” said Dodge beneath his breath to Isa who sat next him, “who loved pictures.”

“Oh, I too!” she exclaimed. Flurriedly, disconnectedly, she explained. She used to stay when she was a child, when she had the whooping cough, with an uncle, a clergyman; who wore a skull cap; and never did anything; didn’t even preach; but made up poems, walking in his garden, saying them aloud.

“People thought him mad,” she said. “I didn’t….”

She stopped.

“Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, apothecary, ploughboy…. It appears,” said old Bartholomew, laying down his spoon, “that I am a thief. Shall we take our coffee in the garden?” He rose.

Isa dragged her chair across the gravel, muttering: “To what dark antre of the unvisited earth, or wind-brushed forest, shall we go now? Or spin from star to star and dance in the maze of the moon? Or….”

She held her deck chair at the wrong angle. The frame with the notches was upside down.

“Songs my uncle taught me?” said William Dodge, hearing her mutter. He unfolded the chair and fixed the bar into the right notch.

She flushed, as if she had spoken in an empty room and someone had stepped out from behind a curtain.

“Don’t you, if you’re doing something with your hands, talk nonsense?” she stumbled. But what did he do with his hands, the white, the fine, the shapely?

Giles went back to the house and brought more chairs and placed them in a semi-circle, so that the view might be shared, and the shelter of the old wall. For by some lucky chance a wall had been built continuing the house, it might be with the intention of adding another wing, on the raised ground in the sun. But funds were lacking; the plan was abandoned, and the wall remained, nothing but a wall. Later, another generation had planted fruit trees, which in time had spread their arms widely across the red orange weathered brick. Mrs. Sands called it a good year if she could make six pots of apricot jam from them—the fruit was never sweet enough for dessert. Perhaps three apricots were worth enclosing in muslin bags. But they were so beautiful, naked, with one flushed cheek, one green, that Mrs. Swithin left them naked, and the wasps burrowed holes.

The ground sloped up, so that to quote Figgis’s Guide Book (1833), “it commanded a fine view of the surrounding country…. The spire of Bolney Minster, Rough Norton woods, and on an eminence rather to the left, Hogben’s Folly, so called because….”

The Guide Book still told the truth. 1833 was true in 1939. No house had been built; no town had sprung up. Hogben’s Folly was still eminent; the very flat, field-parcelled land had changed only in this—the tractor had to some extent superseded the plough. The horse had gone; but the cow remained. If Figgis were here now, Figgis would have said the same. So they always said when in summer they sat there to drink coffee, if they had guests. When they were alone, they said nothing. They looked at the view; they looked at what they knew, to see if what they knew might perhaps be different today. Most days it was the same.

“That’s what makes a view so sad,” said Mrs. Swithin, lowering herself into the deck-chair which Giles had brought her. “And so beautiful. It’ll be there,” she nodded at the strip of gauze laid upon the distant fields, “when we’re not.”

Giles nicked his chair into position with a jerk. Thus only could he show his irritation, his rage with old fogies who sat and looked at views over coffee and cream when the whole of Europe—over there—was bristling like…. He had no command of metaphor. Only the ineffective word “hedgehog” illustrated his vision of Europe, bristling with guns, poised with planes. At any moment guns would rake that land into furrows; planes splinter Bolney Minster into smithereens and blast the Folly. He, too, loved the view. And blamed Aunt Lucy, looking at views, instead of—doing what? What she had done was to marry a squire now dead; she had borne two children, one in Canada, the other, married, in Birmingham. His father, whom he loved, he exempted from censure; as for himself, one thing followed another; and so he sat, with old fogies, looking at views.

“Beautiful,” said Mrs. Manresa, “beautiful …” she mumbled. She was lighting a cigarette. The breeze blew out her match. Giles hollowed his hand and lit another. She too was exempted—why, he could not say.

“Since you’re interested in pictures,” said Bartholomew, turning to the silent guest, “why, tell me, are we, as a race, so incurious, irresponsive and insensitive”—the champagne had given him a flow of unusual three-decker words—“to that noble art, whereas, Mrs. Manresa, if she’ll allow me my old man’s liberty, has her Shakespeare by heart?”

“Shakespeare by heart!” Mrs. Manresa protested. She struck an attitude. “To be, or not to be, that is the question. Whether ’tis nobler … Go on!” she nudged Giles, who sat next her.

“Fade far away and quite forget what thou amongst the leaves hast never known …” Isa supplied the first words that came into her head by way of helping her husband out of his difficulty.

“The weariness, the torture, and the fret …” William Dodge added, burying the end of his cigarette in a grave between two stones.

“There!” Bartholomew exclaimed, cocking his forefinger aloft. “That proves it! What springs touched, what secret drawer displays its treasures, if I say”—he raised more fingers—“Reynolds! Constable! Crome!”

“Why called ‘Old’?” Mrs. Manresa thrust in.

“We haven’t the words—we haven’t the words,” Mrs. Swithin protested. “Behind the eyes; not on the lips; that’s all.”

“Thoughts without words,” her brother mused. “Can that be?”

“Quite beyond me!” cried Mrs. Manresa, shaking her head. “Much too clever! May I help myself? I know it’s wrong. But I’ve reached the age—and the figure—when I do what I like.”

She took the little silver cream jug and let the smooth fluid curl luxuriously into her coffee, to which she added a shovel full of brown sugar candy. Sensuously, rhythmically, she stirred the mixture round and round.

“Take what you like! Help yourself!” Bartholomew exclaimed. He felt the champagne withdrawing and hastened, before the last trace of geniality was withdrawn, to make the most of it, as if he cast one last look into a lit-up chamber before going to bed.

The wild child, afloat once more on the tide of the old man’s benignity, looked over her coffee cup at Giles, with whom she felt in conspiracy. A thread united them—visible, invisible, like those threads, now seen, now not, that unite trembling grass blades in autumn before the sun rises. She had met him once only, at a cricket match. And then had been spun between them an early morning thread before the twigs and leaves of real friendship emerge. She looked before she drank. Looking was part of drinking. Why waste sensation, she seemed to ask, why waste a single drop that can be pressed out of this ripe, this melting, this adorable world? Then she drank. And the air round her became threaded with sensation. Bartholomew felt it; Giles felt it. Had he been a horse, the thin brown skin would have twitched, as if a fly had settled. Isabella twitched too. Jealousy, anger pierced her skin.

“And now,” said Mrs. Manresa, putting down her cup, “about this entertainment—this pageant, into which we’ve gone and butted”—she made it, too, seem ripe like the apricot into which the wasps were burrowing—“Tell me, what’s it to be?” She turned. “Don’t I hear?” She listened. She heard laughter, down among the bushes, where the terrace dipped to the bushes.

Beyond the lily pool the ground sank again, and in that dip of the ground, bushes and brambles had mobbed themselves together. It was always shady; sun-flecked in summer, dark and damp in winter. In the summer there were always butterflies; fritillaries darting through; Red Admirals feasting and floating; cabbage whites, unambitiously fluttering round a bush, like muslin milkmaids, content to spend a life there. Butterfly catching, for generation after generation, began there; for Bartholomew and Lucy; for Giles; for George it had began only the day before yesterday, when, in his little green net, he had caught a cabbage white.

It was the very place for a dressing-room, just as, obviously, the terrace was the very place for a play.

“The very place!” Miss La Trobe had exclaimed the first time she came to call and was shown the grounds. It was a winter’s day. The trees were leafless then.

“That’s the place for a pageant, Mr. Oliver!” she had exclaimed. “Winding in and out between the trees….” She waved her hand at the trees standing bare in the clear light of January.

“There the stage; here the audience; and down there among the bushes a perfect dressing-room for the actors.”

She was always all agog to get things up. But where did she spring from? With that name she wasn’t presumably pure English. From the Channel Islands perhaps? Only her eyes and something about her always made Mrs. Bingham suspect that she had Russian blood in her. “Those deep-set eyes; that very square jaw” reminded her—not that she had been to Russia—of the Tartars. Rumour said that she had kept a tea shop at Winchester; that had failed. She had been an actress. That had failed. She had bought a four-roomed cottage and shared it with an actress. They had quarrelled. Very little was actually known about her. Outwardly she was swarthy, sturdy and thick set; strode about the fields in a smock frock; sometimes with a cigarette in her mouth; often with a whip in her hand; and used rather strong language—perhaps, then, she wasn’t altogether a lady? At any rate, she had a passion for getting things up.

The laughter died away.

“Are they going to act?” Mrs. Manresa asked.

“Act; dance; sing; a little bit of everything,” said Giles.

“Miss La Trobe is a lady of wonderful energy,” said Mrs. Swithin.

“She makes everyone do something,” said Isabella.

“Our part,” said Bartholomew, “is to be the audience. And a very important part too.”

“Also, we provide the tea,” said Mrs. Swithin.

“Shan’t we go and help?” said Mrs. Manresa. “Cut up bread and butter?”

“No, no,” said Mr. Oliver. “We are the audience.”

“One year we had Gammer Gurton’s Needle,” said Mrs. Swithin. “One year we wrote the play ourselves. The son of our blacksmith—Tony? Tommy?—had the loveliest voice. And Elsie at the Crossways—how she mimicked! Took us all off. Bart; Giles; Old Flimsy—that’s me. People are gifted—very. The question is—how to bring it out? That’s where she’s so clever—Miss La Trobe. Of course, there’s the whole of English literature to choose from. But how can one choose? Often on a wet day I begin counting up; what I’ve read; what I haven’t read.”

“And leaving books on the floor,” said her brother. “Like the pig in the story; or was it a donkey?”

She laughed, tapping him lightly on the knee.

“The donkey who couldn’t choose between hay and turnips and so starved,” Isabella explained, interposing—anything—between her aunt and her husband, who hated this kind of talk this afternoon. Books open; no conclusion come to; and he sitting in the audience.

“We remain seated”—“We are the audience.” Words this afternoon ceased to lie flat in the sentence. They rose, became menacing and shook their fists at you. This afternoon he wasn’t Giles Oliver come to see the villagers act their annual pageant; manacled to a rock he was, and forced passively to behold indescribable horror. His face showed it; and Isa, not knowing what to say, abruptly, half purposely, knocked over a coffee cup.

William Dodge caught it as it fell. He held it for a moment. He turned it. From the faint blue mark, as of crossed daggers, in the glaze at the bottom he knew that it was English, made perhaps at Nottingham; date about 1760. His expression, considering the daggers, coming to this conclusion, gave Giles another peg on which to hang his rage as one hangs a coat on a peg, conveniently. A toady; a lickspittle; not a downright plain man of his senses; but a teaser and twitcher; a fingerer of sensations; picking and choosing; dillying and dallying; not a man to have straightforward love for a woman—his head was close to Isa’s head—but simply a —— At this word, which he could not speak in public, he pursed his lips; and the signet-ring on his little finger looked redder, for the flesh next it whitened as he gripped the arm of his chair.

“Oh what fun!” cried Mrs. Manresa in her fluty voice. “A little bit of everything. A song; a dance; then a play acted by the villagers themselves. Only,” here she turned with her head on one side to Isabella, “I’m sure she’s written it. Haven’t you, Mrs. Giles?”

Isa flushed and denied it.

“For myself,” Mrs. Manresa continued, “speaking plainly, I can’t put two words together. I don’t know how it is—such a chatterbox as I am with my tongue, once I hold a pen——” She made a face, screwed her fingers as if she held a pen in them. But the pen she held thus on the little table absolutely refused to move.

“And my handwriting—so huge—so clumsy—” She made another face and dropped the invisible pen.

Very delicately William Dodge set the cup in its saucer. “Now he,” said Mrs. Manresa, as if referring to the delicacy with which he did this, and imputing to him the same skill in writing, “writes beautifully. Every letter perfectly formed.”

Again they all looked at him. Instantly he put his hands in his pockets.

Isabella guessed the word that Giles had not spoken. Well, was it wrong if he was that word? Why judge each other? Do we know each other? Not here, not now. But somewhere, this cloud, this crust, this doubt, this dust—— She waited for a rhyme, it failed her; but somewhere surely one sun would shine and all, without a doubt, would be clear.

She started. Again, sounds of laughter reached her.

“I think I hear them,” she said. “They’re getting ready. They’re dressing up in the bushes.”

Miss La Trobe was pacing to and fro between the leaning birch trees. One hand was deep stuck in her jacket pocket; the other held a foolscap sheet. She was reading what was written there. She had the look of a commander pacing his deck. The leaning graceful trees with black bracelets circling the silver bark were distant about a ship’s length.

Wet would it be, or fine? Out came the sun; and, shading her eyes in the attitude proper to an Admiral on his quarter-deck, she decided to risk the engagement out of doors. Doubts were over. All stage properties, she commanded, must be moved from the Barn to the bushes. It was done. And the actors, while she paced, taking all responsibility and plumping for fine, not wet, dressed among the brambles. Hence the laughter.

The clothes were strewn on the grass. Cardboard crowns, swords made of silver paper, turbans that were sixpenny dish cloths, lay on the grass or were flung on the bushes. There were pools of red and purple in the shade; flashes of silver in the sun. The dresses attracted the butterflies. Red and silver, blue and yellow gave off warmth and sweetness. Red Admirals gluttonously absorbed richness from dish cloths, cabbage whites drank icy coolness from silver paper. Flitting, tasting, returning, they sampled the colours.

Miss La Trobe stopped her pacing and surveyed the scene. “It has the makings …” she murmured. For another play always lay behind the play she had just written. Shading her eyes, she looked. The butterflies circling; the light changing; the children leaping; the mothers laughing—— “No, I don’t get it,” she muttered and resumed her pacing.

“Bossy” they called her privately, just as they called Mrs. Swithin “Flimsy.” Her abrupt manner and stocky figure; her thick ankles and sturdy shoes; her rapid decisions barked out in guttural accents—all this “got their goat.” No one liked to be ordered about singly. But in little troops they appealed to her. Someone must lead. Then too they could put the blame on her. Suppose it poured?

“Miss La Trobe!” they hailed her now. “What’s the idea about this?”

She stopped. David and Iris each had a hand on the gramophone. It must be hidden; yet must be close enough to the audience to be heard. Well, hadn’t she given orders? Where were the hurdles covered in leaves? Fetch them. Mr. Streatfield had said he would see to it. Where was Mr. Streatfield? No clergyman was visible. Perhaps he’s in the Barn? “Tommy, cut along and fetch him.” “Tommy’s wanted in the first scene.” “Beryl then …” The mothers disputed. One child had been chosen; another not. Fair hair was unjustly preferred to dark. Mrs. Ebury had forbidden Fanny to act because of the nettle-rash. There was another name in the village for nettle-rash.

Mrs. Ball’s cottage was not what you might call clean. In the last war Mrs. Ball lived with another man while her husband was in the trenches. All this Miss La Trobe knew, but refused to be mixed up in it. She splashed into the fine mesh like a great stone into the lily pool. The criss-cross was shattered. Only the roots beneath water were of use to her. Vanity, for example, made them all malleable. The boys wanted the big parts; the girls wanted the fine clothes. Expenses had to be kept down. Ten pounds was the limit. Thus conventions were outraged. Swathed in conventions, they couldn’t see, as she could, that a dish cloth wound round a head in the open looked much richer than real silk. So they squabbled; but she kept out of it. Waiting for Mr. Streatfield, she paced between the birch trees.

The other trees were magnificently straight. They were not too regular; but regular enough to suggest columns in a church; in a church without a roof; in an open-air cathedral, a place where swallows darting seemed, by the regularity of the trees, to make a pattern, dancing, like the Russians, only not to music, but to the unheard rhythm of their own wild hearts.

The laughter died away.

“We must possess our souls in patience,” said Mrs. Manresa again. “Or could we help?” she suggested, glancing over her shoulder, “with those chairs?”

Candish, a gardener, and a maid were all bringing chairs—for the audience. There was nothing for the audience to do. Mrs. Manresa suppressed a yawn. They were silent. They stared at the view, as if something might happen in one of those fields to relieve them of the intolerable burden of sitting silent, doing nothing, in company. Their minds and bodies were too close, yet not close enough. We aren’t free, each one of them felt separately to feel or think separately, nor yet to fall asleep. We’re too close; but not close enough. So they fidgeted.

The heat had increased. The clouds had vanished. All was sun now. The view laid bare by the sun was flattened, silenced, stilled. The cows were motionless; the brick wall, no longer sheltering, beat back grains of heat. Old Mr. Oliver sighed profoundly. His head jerked; his hand fell. It fell within an inch of the dog’s head on the grass by his side. Then up he jerked it again on to his knee.

Giles glared. With his hands bound tight round his knees he stared at the flat fields. Staring, glaring, he sat silent.

Isabella felt prisoned. Through the bars of the prison, through the sleep haze that deflected them, blunt arrows bruised her; of love, then of hate. Through other people’s bodies she felt neither love nor hate distinctly. Most consciously she felt—she had drunk sweet wine at luncheon—a desire for water. “A beaker of cold water, a beaker of cold water,” she repeated, and saw water surrounded by walls of shining glass.

Mrs. Manresa longed to relax and curl in a corner with a cushion, a picture paper, and a bag of sweets.

Mrs. Swithin and William surveyed the view aloofly, and with detachment.

How tempting, how very tempting, to let the view triumph; to reflect its ripple; to let their own minds ripple; to let outlines elongate and pitch over—so—with a sudden jerk.

Mrs. Manresa yielded, pitched, plunged, then pulled herself up.

“What a view!” she exclaimed, pretending to dust the ashes of her cigarette, but in truth concealing her yawn. Then she sighed, pretending to express not her own drowsiness, but something connected with what she felt about views.

Nobody answered her. The flat fields glared green yellow, blue yellow, red yellow, then blue again. The repetition was senseless, hideous, stupefying.

“Then,” said Mrs. Swithin, in a low voice, as if the exact moment for speech had come, as if she had promised, and it was time to fulfil her promise, “come, come and I’ll show you the house.”

She addressed no one in particular. But William Dodge knew she meant him. He rose with a jerk, like a toy suddenly pulled straight by a string.

“What energy!” Mrs. Manresa half sighed, half yawned. “Have I the courage to go too?” Isabella asked herself. They were going; above all things, she desired cold water, a beaker of cold water; but desire petered out, suppressed by the leaden duty she owed to others. She watched them go—Mrs. Swithin tottering yet tripping; and Dodge unfurled and straightened, as he strode beside her along the blazing tiles under the hot wall, till they reached the shade of the house.

A match-box fell—Bartholomew’s. His fingers had loosed it; he had dropped it. He gave up the game; he couldn’t be bothered. With his head on one side, his hand dangling above the dog’s head he slept; he snored.

Mrs. Swithin paused for a moment in the hall among the gilt-clawed tables.

“This,” she said, “is the staircase. And now—up we go.”

She went up, two stairs ahead of her guest. Lengths of yellow satin unfurled themselves on a cracked canvas as they mounted.

“Not an ancestress,” said Mrs. Swithin, as they came level with the head in the picture. “But we claim her because we’ve known her—O, ever so many years. Who was she?” she gazed. “Who painted her?” She shook her head. She looked lit up, as if for a banquet, with the sun pouring over her.

“But I like her best in the moonlight,” Mrs. Swithin reflected, and mounted more stairs.

She panted slightly, going upstairs. Then she ran her hand over the sunk books in the wall on the landing, as if they were pan pipes.

“Here are the poets from whom we descend by way of the mind, Mr….” she murmured. She had forgotten his name. Yet she had singled him out.

“My brother says, they built the house north for shelter, not south for sun. So they’re damp in the winter.” She paused. “And now what comes next?”

She stopped. There was a door.

“The morning room.” She opened the door. “Where my mother received her guests.”

Two chairs faced each other on either side of a fine fluted mantelpiece. He looked over her shoulder.

She shut the door.

“Now up, now up again.” Again they mounted. “Up and up they went,” she panted, seeing, it seemed, an invisible procession, “up and up to bed.”

“A bishop; a traveller;—I’ve forgotten even their names. I ignore. I forget.”

She stopped at a window in the passage and held back the curtain. Beneath was the garden, bathed in sun. The grass was sleek and shining. Three white pigeons were flirting and tiptoeing as ornate as ladies in ball dresses. Their elegant bodies swayed as they minced with tiny steps on their little pink feet upon the grass. Suddenly, up they rose in a flutter, circled, and flew away.

“Now,” she said, “for the bedrooms.” She tapped twice very distinctly on a door. With her head on one side, she listened.

“One never knows,” she murmured, “if there’s somebody there.” Then she flung open the door.

He half expected to see somebody there, naked, or half dressed, or knelt in prayer. But the room was empty. The room was tidy as a pin, not slept in for months, a spare room. Candles stood on the dressing-table. The counterpane was straight. Mrs. Swithin stopped by the bed.

“Here,” she said, “yes, here,” she tapped the counterpane, “I was born. In this bed.”

Her voice died away. She sank down on the edge of the bed. She was tired, no doubt, by the stairs, by the heat.

“But we have other lives, I think, I hope,” she murmured. “We live in others, Mr…. We live in things.”

She spoke simply. She spoke with an effort. She spoke as if she must overcome her tiredness out of charity towards a stranger, a guest. She had forgotten his name. Twice she had said “Mr.” and stopped.

The furniture was mid-Victorian, bought at Maples, perhaps, in the forties. The carpet was covered with small purple dots. And a white circle marked the place where the slop pail had stood by the washstand.

Could he say “I’m William”? He wished to. Old and frail she had climbed the stairs. She had spoken her thoughts, ignoring, not caring if he thought her, as he had, inconsequent, sentimental, foolish. She had lent him a hand to help him up a steep place. She had guessed his trouble. Sitting on the bed he heard her sing, swinging her little legs, “Come and see my sea weeds, come and see my sea shells, come and see my dicky bird hop upon its perch”—an old child’s nursery rhyme to help a child. Standing by the cupboard in the corner he saw her reflected in the glass. Cut off from their bodies, their eyes smiled, their bodiless eyes, at their eyes in the glass.

Then she slipped off the bed.

“Now,” she said, “what comes next?” and pattered down the corridor. A door stood open. Everyone was out in the garden. The room was like a ship deserted by its crew. The children had been playing—there was a spotted horse in the middle of the carpet. The nurse had been sewing—there was a piece of linen on the table. The baby had been in the cot. The cot was empty.

“The nursery,” said Mrs. Swithin.

Words raised themselves and became symbolical. “The cradle of our race,” she seemed to say.

Dodge crossed to the fireplace and looked at the Newfoundland Dog in the Christmas Annual that was pinned to the wall. The room smelt warm and sweet; of clothes drying; of milk; of biscuits and warm water. “Good Friends” the picture was called. A rushing sound came in through the open door. He turned. The old woman had wandered out into the passage and leant against the window.

He left the door open for the crew to come back to and joined her.

Down in the courtyard beneath the window cars were assembling. Their narrow black roofs were laid together like the blocks of a floor. Chauffeurs were jumping down; here old ladies gingerly advanced black legs with silver-buckled shoes; old men striped trousers. Young men in shorts leapt out on one side; girls with skin-coloured legs on the other. There was a purring and a churning of the yellow gravel. The audience was assembling. But they, looking down from the window, were truants, detached. Together they leant half out of the window.

And then a breeze blew and all the muslin blinds fluttered out, as if some majestic goddess, rising from her throne among her peers, had tossed her amber-coloured raiment, and the other gods, seeing her rise and go, laughed, and their laughter floated her on.

Mrs. Swithin put her hands to her hair, for the breeze had ruffled it.

“Mr….” she began.

“I’m William,” he interrupted.

At that she smiled a ravishing girl’s smile, as if the wind had warmed the wintry blue in her eyes to amber.

“I took you,” she apologized, “away from your friends, William, because I felt wound tight here….” She touched her bony forehead upon which a blue vein wriggled like a blue worm. But her eyes in their caves of bone were still lambent. He saw her eyes only. And he wished to kneel before her, to kiss her hand, and to say: “At school they held me under a bucket of dirty water, Mrs. Swithin; when I looked up, the world was dirty, Mrs. Swithin; so I married; but my child’s not my child, Mrs. Swithin. I’m a half-man, Mrs. Swithin; a flickering, mind-divided little snake in the grass, Mrs. Swithin; as Giles saw; but you’ve healed me….” So he wished to say; but said nothing; and the breeze went lolloping along the corridors, blowing the blinds out.

Once more he looked and she looked down on to the yellow gravel that made a crescent round the door. Pendant from her chain her cross swung as she leant out and the sun struck it. How could she weight herself down by that sleek symbol? How stamp herself, so volatile, so vagrant, with that image? As he looked at it, they were truants no more. The purring of the wheels became vocal. “Hurry, hurry, hurry,” it seemed to say, “or you’ll be late. Hurry, hurry, hurry, or the best seats’ll be taken.”

“O,” cried Mrs. Swithin, “there’s Mr. Streatfield!” And they saw a clergyman, a strapping clergyman, carrying a hurdle, a leafy hurdle. He was striding through the cars with the air of a person of authority, who is awaited, expected, and now comes.

“Is it time,” said Mrs. Swithin, “to go and join——” She left the sentence unfinished, as if she were of two minds, and they fluttered to right and to left, like pigeons rising from the grass.

The audience was assembling. They came streaming along the paths and spreading across the lawn. Some were old; some were in the prime of life. There were children among them. Among them, as Mr. Figgis might have observed, were representatives of our most respected families—the Dyces of Denton; the Wickhams of Owlswick; and so on. Some had been there for centuries, never selling an acre. On the other hand there were new-comers, the Manresas, bringing the old houses up to date, adding bathrooms. And a scatter of odds and ends, like Cobbet of Cobbs Corner, retired, it was understood, on a pension from a tea plantation. Not an asset. He did his own housework and dug in his garden. The building of a car factory and of an aerodrome in the neighbourhood had attracted a number of unattached floating residents. Also there was Mr. Page, the reporter, representing the local paper. Roughly speaking, however, had Figgis been there in person and called a roll call, half the ladies and gentlemen present would have said: “Adsum; I’m here, in place of my grandfather or great-grandfather,” as the case might be. At this very moment, half-past three on a June day in 1939 they greeted each other, and as they took their seats, finding if possible a seat next one another, they said: “That hideous new house at Pyes Corner! What an eyesore! And those bungalows!—have you seen ’em?”

Again, had Figgis called the names of the villagers, they too would have answered. Mrs. Sands was born Iliffe; Candish’s mother was one of the Perrys. The green mounds in the churchyard had been cast up by their molings, which for centuries had made the earth friable. True, there were absentees when Mr. Streatfield called his roll call in the church. The motor bike, the motor bus, and the movies—when Mr. Streatfield called his roll call, he laid the blame on them.

Rows of chairs, deck chairs, gilt chairs, hired cane chairs, and indigenous garden seats had been drawn up on the terrace. There were plenty of seats for everybody. But some preferred to sit on the ground. Certainly Miss La Trobe had spoken the truth when she said: “The very place for a pageant!” The lawn was as flat as the floor of a theatre. The terrace, rising, made a natural stage. The trees barred the stage like pillars. And the human figure was seen to great advantage against a background of sky. As for the weather, it was turning out, against all expectation, a very fine day. A perfect summer afternoon.

“What luck!” Mrs. Carter was saying. “Last year …” Then the play began. Was it, or was it not, the play? Chuff, chuff, chuff sounded from the bushes. It was the noise a machine makes when something has gone wrong. Some sat down hastily; others stopped talking guiltily. All looked at the bushes. For the stage was empty. Chuff, chuff, chuff the machine buzzed in the bushes. While they looked apprehensively and some finished their sentences, a small girl, like a rosebud in pink, advanced; took her stand on a mat, behind a conch, hung with leaves and piped:

Gentles and simples, I address you all …

So it was the play then. Or was it the prologue?

Come hither for our festival (she continued)

This is a pageant, all may see

Drawn from our island history.
England am I….

“She’s England,” they whispered. “It’s begun.” “The prologue,” they added, looking down at the programme.

“England am I,” she piped again; and stopped.

She had forgotten her lines.

“Hear! Hear!” said an old man in a white waistcoat briskly. “Bravo! Bravo!”

“Blast ’em!” cursed Miss La Trobe, hidden behind the tree. She looked along the front row. They glared as if they were exposed to a frost that nipped them and fixed them all at the same level. Only Bond the cowman looked fluid and natural.

“Music!” she signalled. “Music!” But the machine continued: Chuff, chuff, chuff.

“A child new born …” she prompted.

“A child new born,” Phyllis Jones continued,

Sprung from the sea

Whose billows blown by mighty storm

Cut off from France and Germany
This isle.

She glanced back over her shoulder. Chuff, chuff, chuff, the machine buzzed. A long line of villagers in shirts made of sacking began passing in and out in single file behind her between the trees. They were singing, but not a word reached the audience.

“England am I,” Phyllis Jones continued, facing the audience,

Now weak and small

A child, as all may see …

Her words peppered the audience as with a shower of hard little stones. Mrs. Manresa in the very centre smiled; but she felt as if her skin cracked when she smiled. There was a vast vacancy between her, the singing villagers and the piping child.

Chuff, chuff, chuff, went the machine like a corn-cutter on a hot day.

The villagers were singing, but half their words were blown away.

Cutting the roads … up to the hill top … we climbed. Down in the valley … sow, wild boar, hog, rhinoceros, reindeer … Dug ourselves in to the hill top … Ground roots between stones … Ground corn … till we too … lay under g—r—o—u—n—d …

The words petered away. Chuff, chuff, chuff, the machine ticked. Then at last the machine ground out a tune!

Armed against fate

The valiant Rhoderick

Armed and valiant

Bold and blatant

Firm elatant

See the warriors—here they come …

The pompous popular tune brayed and blared. Miss La Trobe watched from behind the tree. Muscles loosened; ice cracked. The stout lady in the middle began to beat time with her hand on her chair. Mrs. Manresa was humming:

My home is at Windsor, close to the Inn.

Royal George is the name of the pub.

And boys you’ll believe me,

I don’t want no asking …

She was afloat on the stream of the melody. Radiating royalty, complacency, good humour, the wild child was Queen of the festival. The play had begun.

But there was an interruption. “O,” Miss La Trobe growled behind her tree, “the torture of these interruptions!”

“Sorry I’m so late,” said Mrs. Swithin. She pushed her way through the chairs to a seat beside her brother.

“What’s it all about? I’ve missed the prologue. England? That little girl? Now she’s gone …”

Phyllis had slipped off her mat.

“And who’s this?” asked Mrs. Swithin.

It was Hilda, the carpenter’s daughter. She now stood where England had stood.

“O, England’s grown …” Miss La Trobe prompted her.

“O, England’s grown a girl now,” Hilda sang out

(“What a lovely voice!” someone exclaimed)

With roses in her hair,

Wild roses, red roses,

She roams the lanes and chooses

A garland for her hair.

“A cushion? Thank you so much,” said Mrs. Swithin, stuffing the cushion behind her back. Then she leant forward.

“That’s England in the time of Chaucer, I take it. She’s been maying, nutting. She has flowers in her hair … But those passing behind her——” she pointed. “The Canterbury pilgrims? Look!”

All the time the villagers were passing in and out between the trees. They were singing; but only a word or two was audible “… wore ruts in the grass … built the house in the lane …” The wind blew away the connecting words of their chant, and then, as they reached the tree at the end they sang:

“To the shrine of the Saint … to the tomb … lovers … believers … we come …”

They grouped themselves together.

Then there was a rustle and an interruption. Chairs were drawn back. Isa looked behind her. Mr. and Mrs. Rupert Haines, detained by a breakdown on the road, had arrived. He was sitting to the right, several rows back, the man in grey.

Meanwhile the pilgrims, having done their homage to the tomb, were, it appeared, tossing hay on their rakes.

I kissed a girl and let her go,

Another did I tumble,

In the straw and in the hay …

—that was what they were singing, as they scooped and tossed the invisible hay, when she looked round again.

“Scenes from English history,” Mrs. Manresa explained to Mrs. Swithin. She spoke in a loud cheerful voice, as if the old lady were deaf. “Merry England.”

She clapped energetically.

The singers scampered away into the bushes. The tune stopped. Chuff, chuff, chuff, the machine ticked. Mrs. Manresa looked at her programme. It would take till midnight unless they skipped. Early Briton; Plantagenets; Tudors; Stuarts—she ticked them off, but probably she had forgotten a reign or two.

“Ambitious, ain’t it?” she said to Bartholomew, while they waited. Chuff, chuff, chuff went the machine. Could they talk? Could they move? No, for the play was going on. Yet the stage was empty; only the cows moved in the meadows; only the tick of the gramophone needle was heard. The tick, tick, tick seemed to hold them together, tranced. Nothing whatsoever appeared on the stage.

“I’d no notion we looked so nice,” Mrs. Swithin whispered to William. Hadn’t she? The children; the pilgrims; behind the pilgrims the trees, and behind them the fields—the beauty of the visible world took his breath away. Tick, tick, tick the machine continued.

“Marking time,” said old Oliver beneath his breath.

“Which don’t exist for us,” Lucy murmured. “We’ve only the present.”

“Isn’t that enough?” William asked himself. Beauty—isn’t that enough? But here Isa fidgetted. Her bare brown arms went nervously to her head. She half turned in her seat. “No, not for us, who’ve the future,” she seemed to say. The future disturbing our present. Who was she looking for? William, turning, following her eyes, saw only a man in grey.

The ticking stopped. A dance tune was put on the machine. In time to it, Isa hummed: “What do I ask? To fly away, from night and day, and issue where—no partings are—but eye meets eye—and … O,” she cried aloud: “Look at her!”

Everyone was clapping and laughing. From behind the bushes issued Queen Elizabeth—Eliza Clark, licensed to sell tobacco. Could she be Mrs. Clark of the village shop? She was splendidly made up. Her head, pearl-hung, rose from a vast ruff. Shiny satins draped her. Sixpenny brooches glared like cats’ eyes and tigers’ eyes; pearls looked down; her cape was made of cloth of silver—in fact swabs used to scour saucepans. She looked the age in person. And when she mounted the soap box in the centre, representing perhaps a rock in the ocean, her size made her appear gigantic. She could reach a flitch of bacon or haul a tub of oil with one sweep of her arm in the shop. For a moment she stood there, eminent, dominant, on the soap box with the blue and sailing clouds behind her. The breeze had risen.

The Queen of this great land …

—those were the first words that could be heard above the roar of laughter and applause.

Mistress of ships and bearded men (she bawled)

Hawkins, Frobisher, Drake,

Tumbling their oranges, ingots of silver,

Cargoes of diamonds, ducats of gold,

Down on the jetty, there in the west land,—

(she pointed her fist at the blazing blue sky)

Mistress of pinnacles, spires and palaces—

(her arm swept towards the house)

For me Shakespeare sang—

(a cow mooed. A bird twittered)

The throstle, the mavis (she continued)

In the green wood, the wild wood,

Carolled and sang, praising England, the Queen,

Then there was heard too

On granite and cobble

From Windsor to Oxford

Loud laughter, low laughter

Of warrior and lover,

The fighter, the singer.

The ashen haired babe

(she stretched out her swarthy, muscular arm)

Stretched his arm in contentment

As home from the Isles came

The sea faring men….

Here the wind gave a tug at her head dress. Loops of pearls made it top-heavy. She had to steady the ruffle which threatened to blow away.

“Laughter, loud laughter,” Giles muttered. The tune on the gramophone reeled from side to side as if drunk with merriment. Mrs. Manresa began beating her foot and humming in time to it.

“Bravo! Bravo!” she cried. “There’s life in the old dog yet!” And she trolloped out the words of the song with an abandonment which, if vulgar, was a great help to the Elizabethan age. For the ruff had become unpinned and great Eliza had forgotten her lines. But the audience laughed so loud that it did not matter.

“I fear I am not in my perfect mind,” Giles muttered to the same tune. Words came to the surface—he remembered “a stricken deer in whose lean flank the world’s harsh scorn has struck its thorn…. Exiled from its festival, the music turned ironical…. A churchyard haunter at whom the owl hoots and the ivy mocks tap-tap-tapping on the pane…. For they are dead, and I … I … I,” he repeated, forgetting the words, and glaring at his Aunt Lucy who sat craned forward, her mouth gaping, and her bony little hands clapping.

What were they laughing at?

At Albert, the village idiot, apparently. There was no need to dress him up. There he came, acting his part to perfection. He came ambling across the grass, mopping and mowing.

I know where the tit nests, he began

In the hedgerow. I know, I know—

What don’t I know?

All your secrets, ladies,

And yours too, gentlemen …

He skipped along the front row of the audience, leering at each in turn. Now he was picking and plucking at Great Eliza’s skirts. She cuffed him on the ear. He tweaked her back. He was enjoying himself immensely.

“Albert having the time of his life,” Bartholomew muttered.

“Hope he don’t have a fit,” Lucy murmured.

“I know … I know …” Albert tittered, skipping round the soap box.

“The village idiot,” whispered a stout black lady—Mrs. Elmhurst—who came from a village ten miles distant where they, too, had an idiot. It wasn’t nice. Suppose he suddenly did something dreadful? There he was pinching the Queen’s skirts. She half covered her eyes, in case he did do—something dreadful.

Hoppety, jiggety, Albert resumed,

In at the window, out at the door,

What does the little bird hear? (he whistled on his fingers.)

And see! There’s a mouse….

(he made as if chasing it through the grass)

Now the clock strikes!

(he stood erect, puffing out his cheeks as if he were blowing a dandelion clock)

One, two, three, four….

And off he skipped, as if his turn was over.

“Glad that’s over.” said Mrs. Elmhurst, uncovering her face. “Now what comes next? A tableau…?”

For helpers, issuing swiftly from the bushes, carrying hurdles, had enclosed the Queen’s throne with screens papered to represent walls. They had strewn the ground with rushes. And the pilgrims who had continued their march and their chant in the background, now gathered round the figure of Eliza on her soap box as if to form the audience at a play.

Were they about to act a play in the presence of Queen Elizabeth? Was this, perhaps, the Globe theatre?

“What does the programme say?” Mrs. Herbert Winthrop asked, raising her lorgnettes.

She mumbled through the blurred carbon sheet. Yes; it was a scene from a play.

“About a false Duke; and a Princess disguised as a boy; then the long lost heir turns out to be the beggar, because of a mole on his cheek; and Carinthia—that’s the Duke’s daughter, only she’s been lost in a cave—falls in love with Ferdinando who had been put into a basket as a baby by an aged crone. And they marry. That’s I think what happens,” she said, looking up from the programme.

“Play out the play,” great Eliza commanded. An aged crone tottered forward.

(“Mrs. Otter of the End House,” someone murmured.)

She sat herself on a packing case, and made motions, plucking her dishevelled locks and rocking herself from side to side as if she were an aged beldame in a chimney corner.

(“The crone, who saved the rightful heir,” Mrs. Winthrop explained.)

’Twas a winter’s night (she croaked out)

I mind me that, I to whom all’s one now, summer or winter.

You say the sun shines? I believe you, Sir.

‘Oh but it’s winter, and the fog’s abroad’

All’s one to Elsbeth, summer or winter,

By the fireside, in the chimney corner, telling her beads.

I’ve cause to tell ’em.

Each bead (she held a bead between thumb and finger)

A crime!

’Twas a winter’s night, before cockcrow,

Yet the cock did crow ere he left me—

The man with a hood on his face, and the bloody hands

And the babe in the basket.

‘Tee hee’ he mewed, as who should say ‘I want my toy’

Poor witling!

“Tee hee, tee hee!” I could not slay him!

For that, Mary in Heaven forgive me

The sins I’ve sinned before cockcrow!

Down to the creek i’ the dawn I slipped

Where the gull haunts and the heron stands

Like a stake on the edge of the marshes …

Who’s here?

(Three young men swaggered on to the stage and accosted her)

—“Are you come to torture me, Sirs?

There is little blood in this arm,

(she extended her skinny forearm from her ragged shift)

Saints in Heaven preserve me!

She bawled. They bawled. All together they bawled, and so loud that it was difficult to make out what they were saying: apparently it was: Did she remember concealing a child in a cradle among the rushes some twenty years previously? A babe in a basket, crone! A babe in a basket? they bawled. The wind howls and the bittern shrieks, she replied.

“There is little blood in my arm,” Isabella repeated.

That was all she heard. There was such a medley of things going on, what with the beldame’s deafness, the bawling of the youths, and the confusion of the plot that she could make nothing of it.

Did the plot matter? She shifted and looked over her right shoulder. The plot was only there to beget emotion. There were only two emotions: love; and hate. There was no need to puzzle out the plot. Perhaps Miss La Trobe meant that when she cut this knot in the centre?

Don’t bother about the plot: the plot’s nothing.

But what was happening? The Prince had come.

Plucking up his sleeve, the beldame recognized the mole; and, staggering back in her chair, shrieked:

My child! My child!

Recognition followed. The young Prince (Albert Perry) was almost smothered in the withered arms of the beldame. Then suddenly he started apart.

“Look where she comes!” he cried.

They all looked where she came—Sylvia Edwards in white satin.

Who came? Isa looked. The nightingale’s song? The pearl in night’s black ear? Love embodied.

All arms were raised; all faces stared.

“Hail, sweet Carinthia!” said the Prince, sweeping his hat off. And she to him, raising her eyes:

“My love! My lord!”

“It was enough. Enough. Enough,” Isa repeated.

All else was verbiage, repetition.

The beldame meanwhile, because that was enough, had sunk back on her chair, the beads dangling from her fingers.

“Look to the beldame there—old Elsbeth’s sick!”

(They crowded round her)

Dead, Sirs!

She fell back lifeless. The crowd drew away. Peace, let her pass. She to whom all’s one now, summer or winter.

Peace was the third emotion. Love. Hate. Peace. Three emotions made the ply of human life. Now the priest, whose cotton wool moustache confused his utterance, stepped forward and pronounced benediction.

From the distaff of life’s tangled skein, unloose her hands

(They unloosed her hands)

Of her frailty, let nothing now remembered be.

Call for the robin redbreast and the wren.

And roses fall your crimson pall.

(Petals were strewn from wicker baskets)

Cover the corpse. Sleep well.

(They covered the corpse)

On you, fair Sirs (he turned to the happy couple)

Let Heaven rain benediction!

Haste ere the envying sun

Night’s curtain hath undone. Let music sound

And the free air of Heaven waft you to your slumber!

Lead on the dance!

The gramophone blared. Dukes, priests, shepherds, pilgrims and serving men took hands and danced. The idiot scampered in and out. Hands joined, heads knocking, they danced round the majestic figure of the Elizabethan age personified by Mrs. Clark, licensed to sell tobacco, on her soap box.

It was a mellay; a medley; an entrancing spectacle (to William) of dappled light and shade on half clothed, fantastically coloured, leaping, jerking, swinging legs and arms. He clapped till his palms stung.

Mrs. Manresa applauded loudly. Somehow she was the Queen; and he (Giles) was the surly hero.

“Bravo! Bravo!” she cried, and her enthusiasm made the surly hero squirm on his seat. Then the great lady in the bath chair, the lady whose marriage with the local peer had obliterated in his trashy title a name that had been a name when there were brambles and briars where the Church now stood—so indigenous was she that even her body, crippled by arthritis, resembled an uncouth, nocturnal animal, now nearly extinct—clapped and laughed loud—the sudden laughter of a startled jay.

“Ha, ha, ha!” she laughed and clutched the arms of her chair with ungloved twisted hands.

“A-maying, a-maying,” they bawled. “In and out and round about, a-maying, a-maying….”

It didn’t matter what the words were; or who sang what. Round and round they whirled, intoxicated by the music. Then, at a sign from Miss La Trobe behind the tree, the dance stopped. A procession formed. Great Eliza descended from her soap box. Taking her skirts in her hand, striding with long strides, surrounded by Dukes and Princes, followed by the lovers arm in arm, with Albert the idiot playing in and out, and the corpse on its bier concluding the procession, the Elizabethan age passed from the scene.

“Curse! Blast! Damn ’em!” Miss La Trobe in her rage stubbed her toe against a root. Here was her downfall; here was the Interval. Writing this skimble-skamble stuff in her cottage, she had agreed to cut the play here; a slave to her audience,—to Mrs. Sands’ grumble—about tea; about dinner;—she had gashed the scene here. Just as she had brewed emotion, she spilt it. So she signalled: Phyllis! And, summoned, Phyllis popped up on the mat again in the middle.

Gentles and simples, I address you all (she piped.)

Our act is done, our scene is over.

Past is the day of crone and lover.

The bud has flowered; the flower has fallen.

But soon will rise another dawning,

For time whose children small we be

Hath in his keeping, you shall see,

You shall see….

Her voice petered out. No one was listening. Heads bent, they read “Interval” on the programme. And, cutting short her words, the megaphone announced in plain English: “An interval.” Half an hour’s interval, for tea. Then the gramophone blared out:

Armed against fate,
The valiant Rhoderick,

Bold and blatant,
Firm, elatant, etc., etc.

At that, the audience stirred. Some rose briskly; others stooped, retrieving walking-sticks, hats, bags. And then, as they raised themselves and turned about, the music modulated. The music chanted: Dispersed are we. It moaned: Dispersed are we. It lamented: Dispersed are we, as they streamed, spotting the grass with colour, across the lawns, and down the paths: Dispersed are we.

Mrs. Manresa took up the strain. Dispersed are we. “Freely, boldly, fearing no one” (she pushed a deck chair out of her way). “Youths and maidens” (she glanced behind her; but Giles had his back turned). “Follow, follow, follow me…. Oh Mr. Parker, what a pleasure to see you here! I’m for tea!”

“Dispersed are we,” Isabella followed her, humming. “All is over. The wave has broken. Left us stranded, high and dry. Single, separate on the shingle. Broken is the three-fold ply … Now I follow” (she pushed her chair back … The man in grey was lost in the crowd by the ilex) “that old strumpet” (she invoked Mrs. Manresa’s tight, flowered figure in front of her) “to have tea.”

Dodge remained behind. “Shall I,” he murmured, “go or stay? Slip out some other way? Or follow, follow, follow the dispersing company?”

Dispersed are we, the music wailed; dispersed are we. Giles remained like a stake in the tide of the flowing company.

“Follow?” He kicked his chair back. “Whom? Where?” He stubbed his light tennis shoes on the wood. “Nowhere. Anywhere.” Stark still he stood.

Here Cobbet of Cobbs Corner, alone under the monkey puzzle tree, rose and muttered: “What was in her mind, eh? What idea lay behind, eh? What made her indue the antique with this glamour—this sham lure, and set ’em climbing, climbing, climbing up the monkey puzzle tree?”

Dispersed are we, the music wailed. Dispersed are we. He turned and sauntered slowly after the retreating company.

Now Lucy, retrieving her bag from beneath the seat, chirruped to her brother:

“Bart, my dear, come with me…. D’you remember, when we were children, the play we acted in the nursery?”

He remembered. Red Indians the game was; a reed with a note wrapped up in a pebble.

“But for us, my old Cindy”—he picked up his hat—“the game’s over.” The glare and the stare and the beat of the tom-tom, he meant. He gave her his arm. Off they strolled. And Mr. Page, the reporter, noted, “Mrs. Swithin: Mr. B. Oliver,” then turning, added further “Lady Haslip, of Haslip Manor,” as he spied that old lady wheeled in her chair by her footman winding up the procession.

To the valediction of the gramophone hid in the bushes the audience departed. Dispersed, it wailed, Dispersed are we.

Now Miss La Trobe stepped from her hiding. Flowing, and streaming, on the grass, on the gravel, still for one moment she held them together—the dispersing company. Hadn’t she, for twenty-five minutes, made them see? A vision imparted was relief from agony … for one moment … one moment. Then the music petered out on the last word we. She heard the breeze rustle in the branches. She saw Giles Oliver with his back to the audience. Also Cobbet of Cobbs Corner. She hadn’t made them see. It was a failure, another damned failure! As usual. Her vision escaped her. And turning, she strode to the actors, undressing, down in the hollow, where butterflies feasted upon swords of silver paper; where the dish cloths in the shadow made pools of yellow.

Cobbet had out his watch. Three hours till seven, he noted; then water the plants. He turned.

Giles, nicking his chair into its notch, turned too, in the other direction. He took the short cut by the fields to the Barn. This dry summer the path was hard as brick across the fields. This dry summer the path was strewn with stones. He kicked—a flinty yellow stone, a sharp stone, edged as if cut by a savage for an arrow. A barbaric stone; a pre-historic. Stone-kicking was a child’s game. He remembered the rules. By the rules of the game, one stone, the same stone, must be kicked to the goal. Say a gate, or a tree. He played it alone. The gate was a goal; to be reached in ten. The first kick was Manresa (lust). The second, Dodge (perversion). The third himself (coward). And the fourth and the fifth and all the others were the same.

He reached it in ten. There, couched in the grass, curled in an olive green ring, was a snake. Dead? No, choked with a toad in its mouth. The snake was unable to swallow; the toad was unable to die. A spasm made the ribs contract; blood oozed. It was birth the wrong way round—a monstrous inversion. So, raising his foot, he stamped on them. The mass crushed and slithered. The white canvas on his tennis shoes was bloodstained and sticky. But it was action. Action relieved him. He strode to the Barn, with blood on his shoes.

The Barn, the Noble Barn, the barn that had been built over seven hundred years ago and reminded some people of a Greek temple, others of the middle ages, most people of an age before their own, scarcely anybody of the present moment, was empty.

The great doors stood open. A shaft of light like a yellow banner sloped from roof to floor. Festoons of paper roses, left over from the Coronation, drooped from the rafters. A long table, on which stood an urn, plates and cups, cakes and bread and butter, stretched across one end. The Barn was empty. Mice slid in and out of holes or stood upright, nibbling. Swallows were busy with straw in pockets of earth in the rafters. Countless beetles and insects of various sorts burrowed in the dry wood. A stray bitch had made the dark corner where the sacks stood a lying-in ground for her puppies. All these eyes, expanding and narrowing, some adapted to light, others to darkness, looked from different angles and edges. Minute nibblings and rustlings broke the silence. Whiffs of sweetness and richness veined the air. A blue-bottle had settled on the cake and stabbed its yellow rock with its short drill. A butterfly sunned itself sensuously on a sunlit yellow plate.

But Mrs. Sands was approaching. She was pushing her way through the crowd. She had turned the corner. She could see the great open door. But butterflies she never saw, mice were only black pellets in kitchen drawers; moths she bundled in her hands and put out of the window. Bitches suggested only servant girls misbehaving. Had there been a cat she would have seen it—any cat, a starved cat with a patch of mange on its rump opened the flood gates of her childless heart. But there was no cat. The Barn was empty. And so running, panting, set upon reaching the Barn and taking up her station behind the tea urn before the company came, she reached the Barn. And the butterfly rose and the bluebottle.

Following her in a scud came the servants and helpers—David, John, Irene, Lois. Water boiled. Steam issued. Cake was sliced. Swallows swooped from rafter to rafter. And the company entered.

“This fine old Barn …” said Mrs. Manresa, stopping in the doorway. It was not for her to press ahead of the villagers. It was for her, moved by the beauty of the Barn, to stand still; to draw aside; to gaze; to let other people come first.

“We have one, much like it, at Lathom,” said Mrs. Parker, stopping, for the same reasons. “Perhaps,” she added, “not quite so large.”

The villagers hung back. Then, hesitating, dribbled past.

“And the decorations …” said Mrs. Manresa, looking round for someone to congratulate. She stood smiling, waiting. Then old Mrs. Swithin came in. She was gazing up too, but not at the decorations. At the swallows apparently.

“They come every year,” she said, “the same birds.” Mrs. Manresa smiled benevolently, humouring the old lady’s whimsy. It was unlikely, she thought, that the birds were the same.

“The decorations, I suppose, are left over from the Coronation,” said Mrs. Parker. “We kept ours too. We built a village hall.”

Mrs. Manresa laughed. She remembered. An anecdote was on the tip of her tongue, about a public lavatory built to celebrate the same occasion, and how the Mayor … Could she tell it? No. The old lady, gazing at the swallows, looked too refined. “Refeened”—Mrs. Manresa qualified the word to her own advantage, thus confirming her approval of the wild child she was, whose nature was somehow “just human nature.” Somehow she could span the old lady’s “refeenment,” also the boy’s fun—Where was that nice fellow Giles? She couldn’t see him; nor Bill either. The villagers still hung back. They must have someone to start the ball rolling.

“Well, I’m dying for my tea!” she said in her public voice; and strode forward. She laid hold of a thick china mug. Mrs. Sands giving precedence, of course, to one of the gentry, filled it at once. David gave her cake. She was the first to drink, the first to bite. The villagers still hung back. “It’s all my eye about democracy,” she concluded. So did Mrs. Parker, taking her mug too. The people looked to them. They led; the rest followed.

“What delicious tea!” each exclaimed, disgusting though it was, like rust boiled in water, and the cake fly-blown. But they had a duty to society.

“They come every year,” said Mrs. Swithin, ignoring the fact that she spoke to the empty air. “From Africa.” As they had come, she supposed, when the Barn was a swamp.

The Barn filled. Fumes rose. China clattered; voices chattered. Isa pressed her way to the table.

“Dispersed are we,” she murmured. And held her cup out to be filled. She took it. “Let me turn away,” she murmured, turning, “from the array”—she looked desolately round her—“of china faces, glazed and hard. Down the ride, that leads under the nut tree and the may tree, away, till I come to the wishing well, where the washerwoman’s little boy—” she dropped sugar, two lumps, into her tea, “dropped a pin. He got his horse, so they say. But what wish should I drop into the well?” She looked round. She could not see the man in grey, the gentleman farmer; nor anyone known to her. “That the waters should cover me,” she added, “of the wishing well.”

The noise of china and chatter drowned her murmur. “Sugar for you?” they were saying. “Just a spot of milk? And you?” “Tea without milk or sugar. That’s the way I like it.” “A bit too strong? Let me add water.”

“That’s what I wished,” Isa added, “when I dropped my pin. Water. Water …”

“I must say,” the voice said behind her, “it’s brave of the King and Queen. They’re said to be going to India. She looks such a dear. Someone I know said his hair….”

“There,” Isa mused, “would the dead leaf fall, when the leaves fall, on the water. Should I mind not again to see may tree or nut tree? Not again to hear on the trembling spray the thrush sing, or to see, dipping and diving as if he skimmed waves in the air, the yellow woodpecker?”

She was looking at the canary yellow festoons left over from the Coronation.

“I thought they said Canada, not India,” the voice said behind her back. To which the other voice answered: “D’you believe what the papers say? For instance, about the Duke of Windsor. He landed on the south coast. Queen Mary met him. She’d been buying furniture—that’s a fact. And the papers say she met him …”

“Alone, under a tree, the withered tree that keeps all day murmuring of the sea, and hears the Rider gallop …”

Isa filled in the phrase. Then she started. William Dodge was by her side.

He smiled. She smiled. They were conspirators; each murmuring some song my uncle taught me.

“It’s the play,” she said. “The play keeps running in my head.”

“Hail, sweet Carinthia. My love. My life,” he quoted.

“My lord, my liege,” she bowed ironically.

She was handsome. He wanted to see her, not against the tea urn, but with her glass green eyes and thick body, the neck was broad as a pillar, against an arum lily or a vine. He wished she would say: “Come along. I’ll show you the greenhouse, the pig sty, or the stable.” But she said nothing, and they stood there holding their cups, remembering the play. Then he saw her face change, as if she had got out of one dress and put on another. A small boy battled his way through the crowd, striking against skirts and trousers as if he were swimming blindly.

“Here!” she cried raising her arm.

He made a bee-line for her. He was her little boy, apparently, her son, her George. She gave him cake; then a mug of milk. Then Nurse came up. Then again she changed her dress. This time, from the expression in her eyes it was apparently something in the nature of a strait waistcoat. Hirsute, handsome, virile, the young man in blue jacket and brass buttons, standing in a beam of dusty light, was her husband. And she his wife. Their relations, as he had noted at lunch, were as people say in novels “strained.” As he had noted at the play, her bare arm had raised itself nervously to her shoulder when she turned—looking for whom? But here he was; and the muscular, the hirsute, the virile plunged him into emotions in which the mind had no share. He forgot how she would have looked against vine leaf in a greenhouse. Only at Giles he looked; and looked and looked. Of whom was he thinking as he stood with his face turned? Not of Isa. Of Mrs. Manresa?

Mrs. Manresa half-way down the Barn had gulped her cup of tea. How can I rid myself, she asked, of Mrs. Parker? If they were of her own class, how they bored her—her own sex! Not the class below—cooks, shopkeepers, farmers’ wives; nor the class above—peeresses, countesses; it was the women of her own class that bored her. So she left Mrs. Parker, abruptly.

“Oh Mrs. Moore,” she hailed the keeper’s wife. “What did you think of it? And what did baby think of it?” Here she pinched baby. “I thought it every bit as good as anything I’d seen in London…. But we mustn’t be outdone. We’ll have a play of our own. In our Barn. We’ll show ’em” (here she winked obliquely at the table; so many bought cakes, so few made at home) “how we do it.”

Then cracking her jokes, she turned; saw Giles; caught his eye; and swept him in, beckoning. He came. And what—she looked down—had he done with his shoes? They were bloodstained. Vaguely some sense that he had proved his valour for her admiration flattered her. If vague it was sweet. Taking him in tow, she felt: I am the Queen, he my hero, my sulky hero.

“That’s Mrs. Neale!” she exclaimed. “A perfect marvel of a woman, aren’t you, Mrs. Neale! She runs our post office, Mrs. Neale. She can do sums in her head, can’t you, Mrs. Neale? Twenty-five halfpenny stamps, two packets of stamped envelopes and a packet of postcards—how much does that come to, Mrs. Neale?”

Mrs. Neale laughed; Mrs. Manresa laughed; Giles too smiled, and looked down at his shoes.

She drew him down the Barn, in and out, from one to another. She knew ’em all. Every one was a thorough good sort. No, she wouldn’t allow it, not for a moment—Pinsent’s bad leg. “No, no. We’re not going to take that for an excuse, Pinsent.” If he couldn’t bowl, he could bat. Giles agreed. A fish on a line meant the same to him and Pinsent; also jays and magpies. Pinsent stayed on the land; Giles went to an office. That was all. And she was a thorough good sort, making him feel less of an audience, more of an actor, going round the Barn in her wake.

Then, at the end by the door, they came upon the old couple, Lucy and Bartholomew, sitting on their Windsor chairs.

Chairs had been reserved for them. Mrs. Sands had sent them tea. It would have caused more bother than it was worth—asserting the democratic principle; standing in the crowd at the table.

“Swallows,” said Lucy, holding her cup, looking at the birds. Excited by the company they were flitting from rafter to rafter. Across Africa, across France they had come to nest here. Year after year they came. Before there was a channel, when the earth, upon which the Windsor chair was planted, was a riot of rhododendrons, and humming birds quivered at the mouths of scarlet trumpets, as she had read that morning in her Outline of History, they had come … Here Bart rose from his chair.

But Mrs. Manresa absolutely refused to take his seat. “Go on sitting, go on sitting,” she pressed him down again. “I’ll squat on the floor.” She squatted. The surly knight remained in attendance.

“And what did you think of the play?” she asked.

Bartholomew looked at his son. His son remained silent.

“And you Mrs. Swithin?” Mrs. Manresa pressed the old lady.

Lucy mumbled, looking at the swallows.

“I was hoping you’d tell me,” said Mrs. Manresa. “Was it an old play? Was it a new play?”

No one answered.

“Look!” Lucy exclaimed.

“The birds?” said Mrs. Manresa, looking up.

There was a bird with a straw in its beak; and the straw dropped.

Lucy clapped her hands. Giles turned away. She was mocking him as usual, laughing.

“Going?” said Bartholomew. “Time for the next act?”

And he heaved himself up from his chair. Regardless of Mrs. Manresa and of Lucy, off he strolled too.

“Swallow, my sister, O sister swallow,” he muttered, feeling for his cigar case, following his son.

Mrs. Manresa was nettled. What for had she squatted on the floor then? Were her charms fading? Both were gone. But, woman of action as she was, deserted by the male sex, she was not going to suffer tortures of boredom from the refeened old lady. Up she scrambled, putting her hands to hair as if it were high time that she went too, though it was nothing of the kind and her hair was perfectly tidy. Cobbet in his corner saw through her little game. He had known human nature in the East. It was the same in the West. Plants remained—the carnation, the zinnia, and the geranium. Automatically he consulted his watch; noted time to water at seven; and observed the little game of the woman following the man to the table in the West as in the East.

William at the table, now attached to Mrs. Parker and Isa, watched him approach. Armed and valiant, bold and blatant, firm elatant—the popular march tune rang in his head. And the fingers of William’s left hand closed firmly, surreptitiously, as the hero approached.

Mrs. Parker was deploring to Isa in a low voice the village idiot.

“Oh that idiot!” she was saying. But Isa was immobile, watching her husband. She could feel the Manresa in his wake. She could hear in the dusk in their bedroom the usual explanation. It made no difference; his infidelity—but hers did.

“The idiot?” William answered Mrs. Parker for her. “He’s in the tradition.”

“But surely,” said Mrs. Parker, and told Giles how creepy the idiot—“We have one in our village”—had made her feel. “Surely, Mr. Oliver, we’re more civilized?”

“We?” said Giles. “We?” He looked, once, at William. He knew not his name; but what his left hand was doing. It was a bit of luck—that he could despise him, not himself. Also Mrs. Parker. But not Isa—not his wife. She had not spoken to him, not one word. Nor looked at him either.

“Surely,” said Mrs. Parker, looking from one to the other. “Surely we are?”

Giles then did what to Isa was his little trick; shut his lips; frowned; and took up the pose of one who bears the burden of the world’s woe, making money for her to spend.

“No,” said Isa, as plainly as words could say it. “I don’t admire you,” and looked, not at his face, but at his feet. “Silly little boy, with blood on his boots.”

Giles shifted his feet. Whom then did she admire? Not Dodge. That he could take for certain. Who else? Some man he knew. Some man, he was sure, in the Barn. Which man? He looked round him.

Then Mr. Streatfield, the clergyman, interrupted. He was carrying cups.

“So I shake hands with my heart!” he exclaimed, nodding his handsome, grizzled head and depositing his burden safely.

Mrs. Parker took the tribute to herself.

“Mr. Streatfield!” she exclaimed. “Doing all the work! While we stand gossiping!”

“Like to see the greenhouse?” said Isa suddenly, turning to William Dodge.

O not now, he could have cried. But had to follow, leaving Giles to welcome the approaching Manresa, who had him in thrall.

The path was narrow. Isa went ahead. And she was broad; she fairly filled the path, swaying slightly as she walked, and plucking a leaf here and there from the hedge.

“Fly then, follow,” she hummed, “the dappled herds in the cedar grove, who, sporting, play, the red with the roe, the stag with the doe. Fly, away. I grieving stay. Alone I linger, I pluck the bitter herb by the ruined wall, the churchyard wall, and press its sour, its sweet, its sour, long grey leaf, so, twixt thumb and finger….”

She threw away the shred of Old Man’s Beard that she had picked in passing and kicked open the greenhouse door. Dodge had lagged behind. She waited. She picked up a knife from the plank. He saw her standing against the green glass, the fig tree, and the blue hydrangea, knife in hand.

“She spake,” Isa murmured. “And from her bosom’s snowy antre drew the gleaming blade. ‘Plunge blade!’ she said. And struck. ‘Faithless!’ she cried. Knife, too! It broke. So too my heart,” she said.

She was smiling ironically as he came up.

“I wish the play didn’t run in my head,” she said. Then she sat down on a plank under the vine. And he sat beside her. The little grapes above them were green buds; the leaves thin and yellow as the web between birds’ claws.

“Still the play?” he asked. She nodded. “That was your son,” he said, “in the Barn?”

She had a daughter too, she told him, in the cradle.

“And you—married?” she asked. From her tone he knew she guessed, as women always guessed, everything. They knew at once they had nothing to fear, nothing to hope. At first they resented—serving as statues in a greenhouse. Then they liked it. For then they could say—as she did—whatever came into their heads. And hand him, as she handed him, a flower.

“There’s something for your buttonhole, Mr….” she said, handing him a sprig of scented geranium.

“I’m William,” he said, taking the furry leaf and pressing it between thumb and finger.

“I’m Isa,” she answered. Then they talked as if they had known each other all their lives; which was odd, she said, as they always did, considering she’d known him perhaps one hour. Weren’t they, though, conspirators, seekers after hidden faces? That confessed, she paused and wondered, as they always did, why they could speak so plainly to each other. And added: “Perhaps because we’ve never met before, and never shall again.”

“The doom of sudden death hanging over us,” he said. “There’s no retreating and advancing”—he was thinking of the old lady showing him the house—“for us as for them.”

The future shadowed their present, like the sun coming through the many-veined transparent vine leaf; a criss-cross of lines making no pattern.

They had left the greenhouse door open, and now music came through it. A.B.C., A.B.C., A.B.C.—someone was practising scales. C.A.T. C.A.T. C.A.T…. Then the separate letters made one word “Cat.” Other words followed. It was a simple tune, like a nursery rhyme——

The King is in his counting house,

Counting out his money,

The Queen is in her parlour

Eating bread and honey.

They listened. Another voice, a third voice, was saying something simple. And they sat on in the greenhouse, on the plank with the vine over them, listening to Miss La Trobe or whoever it was, practising her scales.

He could not find his son. He had lost him in the crowd. So old Bartholomew left the Barn, and went to his own room, holding his cheroot and murmuring:

“O sister swallow, O sister swallow,

How can thy heart be full of the spring?”

“How can my heart be full of the spring?” he said aloud, standing in front of the book case. Books: the treasured life-blood of immortal spirits. Poets; the legislators of mankind. Doubtless, it was so. But Giles was unhappy. “How can my heart, how can my heart,” he repeated, puffing at his cheroot. “Condemned in life’s infernal mine, condemned in solitude to pine …” Arms akimbo, he stood in front of his country gentleman’s library. Garibaldi; Wellington; Irrigation Officers’ Reports; and Hibbert on the Diseases of the Horse. A great harvest the mind had reaped; but for all this, compared with his son, he did not care one damn.

“What’s the use, what’s the use,” he sank down into his chair muttering, “O sister swallow, O sister swallow, of singing your song?” The dog, who had followed him, flopped down on to the floor at his feet. Flanks sucked in and out, the long nose resting on his paws, a fleck of foam on the nostril, there he was, his familiar spirit, his Afghan hound.

The door trembled and stood half open. That was Lucy’s way of coming in—as if she did not know what she would find. Really! It was her brother! And his dog! She seemed to see them for the first time. Was it that she had no body? Up in the clouds, like an air ball, her mind touched ground now and then with a shock of surprise. There was nothing in her to weight a man like Giles to the earth.

She perched on the edge of a chair like a bird on a telegraph wire before starting for Africa.

“Swallow, my sister, O sister swallow …” he murmured.

From the garden—the window was open—came the sound of someone practising scales. A.B.C. A.B.C. A.B.C. Then the separate letters formed one word “Dog.” Then a phrase. It was a simple tune, another voice speaking.

“Hark hark, the dogs do bark

The beggars are coming to town …”

Then it languished and lengthened, and became a waltz. As they listened and looked—out into the garden—the trees tossing and the birds swirling seemed called out of their private lives, out of their separate avocations, and made to take part.

The lamp of love burns high, over the dark cedar groves,

The lamp of love shines clear, clear as a star in the sky….

Old Bartholomew tapped his fingers on his knee in time to the tune.

Leave your casement and come, lady, I love till I die,

He looked sardonically at Lucy, perched on her chair. How, he wondered, had she ever borne children?

For all are dancing, retreating and advancing,

The moth and the dragon fly….

She was thinking, he supposed, God is peace. God is love. For she belonged to the unifiers; he to the separatists.

Then the tune with its feet always on the same spot, became sugared, insipid; bored a hole with its perpetual invocation to perpetual adoration. Had it—he was ignorant of musical terms—gone into the minor key?

For this day and this dance and this merry, merry May

Will be over (he tapped his forefinger on his knee)

With the cutting of the clover this retreating and advancing—the swifts seemed to have shot beyond their orbits—

Will be over, over, over,

And the ice will dart its splinter, and the winter,

O the winter, will fill the grate with ashes,

And there’ll be no glow, no glow on the log.

He knocked the ash off his cheroot and rose.

“So we must,” said Lucy; as if he had said aloud, “It’s time to go.”

The audience was assembling. The music was summoning them. Down the paths, across the lawns they were streaming again. There was Mrs. Manresa, with Giles at her side, heading the procession. In taut plump curves her scarf blew round her shoulders. The breeze was rising. She looked, as she crossed the lawn to the strains of the gramophone, goddess-like, buoyant, abundant, her cornucopia running over. Bartholomew, following, blessed the power of the human body to make the earth fruitful. Giles would keep his orbit so long as she weighted him to the earth. She stirred the stagnant pool of his old heart even—where bones lay buried, but the dragon flies shot and the grass trembled as Mrs. Manresa advanced across the lawn to the strains of the gramophone.

Feet crunched the gravel. Voices chattered. The inner voice, the other voice was saying: How can we deny that this brave music, wafted from the bushes, is expressive of some inner harmony? “When we wake” (some were thinking) “the day breaks us with its hard mallet blows.” “The office” (some were thinking) “compels disparity. Scattered, shattered, hither thither summoned by the bell. ‘Ping-ping-ping’ that’s the phone. ‘Forward!’ ‘Serving!’—that’s the shop.” So we answer to the infernal, agelong and eternal order issued from on high. And obey. “Working, serving, pushing, striving, earning wages—to be spent—here? Oh dear no. Now? No, by and by. When ears are deaf and the heart is dry.”

Here Cobbet of Cobbs Corner who had stooped—there was a flower—was pressed on by people pushing from behind.

For I hear music, they were saying. Music wakes us. Music makes us see the hidden, join the broken. Look and listen. See the flowers, how they ray their redness, whiteness, silverness and blue. And the trees with their many-tongued much syllabling, their green and yellow leaves hustle us and shuffle us, and bid us, like the starlings, and the rooks, come together, crowd together, to chatter and make merry while the red cow moves forward and the black cow stands still.

The audience had reached their seats. Some sat down; others stood a moment, turned, and looked at the view. The stage was empty; the actors were still dressing up among the bushes. The audience turned to one another and began to talk. Scraps and fragments reached Miss La Trobe where she stood, script in hand, behind the tree.

“They’re not ready … I hear ’em laughing” (they were saying.) “… Dressing up. That’s the great thing, dressing up. And it’s pleasant now, the sun’s not so hot … That’s one good the war brought us—longer days … Where did we leave off? D’you remember? The Elizabethans … Perhaps she’ll reach the present, if she skips…. D’you think people change? Their clothes, of course…. But I meant ourselves … Clearing out a cupboard, I found my father’s old top hat…. But ourselves—do we change?”

“No, I don’t go by politicians. I’ve a friend who’s been to Russia. He says … And my daughter, just back from Rome, she says the common people, in the café’s, hate Dictators…. Well, different people say different things….”

“Did you see it in the papers—the case about the dog? D’you believe dogs can’t have puppies? … And Queen Mary and the Duke of Windsor on the south coast? … D’you believe what’s in the papers? I ask the butcher or the grocer … That’s Mr. Streatfield, carrying a hurdle…. The good clergyman, I say, does more work for less pay than all the lot … It’s the wives that make the trouble….”

“And what about the Jews? The refugees … the Jews … People like ourselves, beginning life again … But it’s always been the same…. My old mother, who’s over eighty, can remember … Yes, she still reads without glasses…. How amazing! Well, don’t they say, after eighty … Now they’re coming … No, that’s nothing…. I’d make it penal, leaving litter. But then, who’s, my husband says, to collect the fines? … Ah there she is, Miss La Trobe, over there, behind that tree …”

Over there behind the tree Miss La Trobe gnashed her teeth. She crushed her manuscript. The actors delayed. Every moment the audience slipped the noose; split up into scraps and fragments.

“Music!” she signalled. “Music!”

“What’s the origin,” said a voice, “of the expression ‘with a flea in his ear’?”

Down came her hand peremptorily. “Music, music,” she signalled.

And the gramophone began A.B.C., A.B.C.

The King is in his counting house

Counting out his money,

The Queen is in her parlour

Eating bread and honey….

Miss La Trobe watched them sink down peacefully into the nursery rhyme. She watched them fold their hands and compose their faces. Then she beckoned. And at last, with a final touch to her head dress, which had been giving trouble, Mabel Hopkins strode from the bushes, and took her place on the raised ground facing the audience.

Eyes fed on her as fish rise to a crumb of bread on the water. Who was she? What did she represent? She was beautiful—very. Her cheeks had been powdered; her colour glowed smooth and clear underneath. Her grey satin robe (a bedspread), pinned in stone-like folds, gave her the majesty of a statue. She carried a sceptre and a little round orb. England was she? Queen Anne was she? Who was she? She spoke too low at first; all they heard was

… reason holds sway.

Old Bartholomew applauded.

“Hear! Hear!” he cried. “Bravo! Bravo!”

Thus encouraged Reason spoke out.

Time, leaning on his sickle, stands amazed. While commerce from her Cornucopia pours the mingled tribute of her different ores. In distant mines the savage sweats; and from the reluctant earth the painted pot is shaped. At my behest, the armed warrior lays his shield aside; the heathen leaves the Altar steaming with unholy sacrifice. The violet and the eglantine over the riven earth their flowers entwine. No longer fears the unwary wanderer the poisoned snake. And in the helmet, yellow bees their honey make.

She paused. A long line of villagers in sacking were passing in and out of the trees behind her.

Digging and delving, ploughing and sowing they were singing, but the wind blew their words away.

Beneath the shelter of my flowing robe (she resumed, extending her arms) the arts arise. Music for me unfolds her heavenly harmony. At my behest the miser leaves his hoard untouched; at peace the mother sees her children play…. Her children play … she repeated, and, waving her sceptre, figures advanced from the bushes.

Let swains and nymphs lead on the play, while Zephyr sleeps, and the unruly tribes of Heaven confess my sway.

A merry little old tune was played on the gramophone. Old Bartholomew joined his finger tips; Mrs. Manresa smoothed her skirts about her knees.

Young Damon said to Cynthia

Come out now with the dawn

And don your azure tippet

And cast your cares adown

For peace has come to England,

And reason now holds sway.

What pleasure lies in dreaming

When blue and green’s the day?

Now cast your cares behind you.

Night passes: here is Day.

Digging and delving, the villagers sang passing in single file in and out between the trees, for the earth is always the same, summer and winter and spring; and spring and winter again; ploughing and sowing, eating and growing; time passes….

The wind blew the words away.

The dance stopped. The nymphs and swains withdrew. Reason held the centre of the stage alone. Her arms extended, her robes flowing, holding orb and sceptre, Mabel Hopkins stood sublimely looking over the heads of the audience. The audience gazed at her. She ignored the audience. Then while she gazed, helpers from the bushes arranged round her what appeared to be the three sides of a room. In the middle they stood a table. On the table they placed a china tea service. Reason surveyed this domestic scene from her lofty eminence unmoved. There was a pause.

“Another scene from another play, I suppose,” said Mrs. Elmhurst, referring to her programme. She read out for the benefit of her husband, who was deaf: “Where there’s a Will there’s a Way. That’s the name of the play. And the characters….” She read out: “Lady Harpy Harraden, in love with Sir Spaniel Lilyliver. Deb, her maid. Flavinda, her niece, in love with Valentine. Sir Spaniel Lilyliver, in love with Flavinda. Sir Smirking Peace-be-with-you-all, a clergyman. Lord and Lady Fribble. Valentine, in love with Flavinda. What names for real people! But look—here they come!”

Out they came from the bushes—men in flowered waistcoats, white waistcoats and buckled shoes; women wearing brocades tucked up, hooped and draped; glass stars, blue ribands and imitation pearls made them look the very image of Lords and Ladies.

“The first scene,” Mrs. Elmhurst whispered into her husband’s ear, “is Lady Harraden’s dressing-room…. That’s her….” She pointed. “Mrs. Otter, I think, from the End House; but she’s wonderfully made up. And that’s Deb her maid. Who she is, I don’t know.”

“Hush, hush, hush,” someone protested.

Mrs. Elmhurst dropped her programme. The play had begun.

Lady Harpy Harraden entered her dressing-room, followed by Deb her maid.

Lady H. H. … Give me the pounce-box. Then the patch. Hand me the mirror, girl. So. Now my wig…. A pox on the girl—she’s dreaming!

Deb … I was thinking, my lady, what the gentleman said when he saw you in the Park.

Lady H. H. (gazing in the glass) So, so—what was it? Some silly trash! Cupid’s dart—hah, hah! lighting his taper—tush—at my eyes…. pooh! That was in milord’s time, twenty years since…. But now—what’ll he say of me now? (She looks in the mirror) Sir Spaniel Lilyliver, I mean … (a rap at the door) Hark! That’s his chaise at the door. Run child. Don’t stand gaping.

Deb … (going to the door) Say? He’ll rattle his tongue as a gambler rattles dice in a box. He’ll find no words to fit you. He’ll stand like a pig in a poke…. Your servant, Sir Spaniel.

Enter Sir Spaniel.

Sir S. L. … Hail, my fair Saint! What, out o’ bed so early? Methought, as I came along the Mall the air was something brighter than usual. Here’s the reason…. Venus, Aphrodite, upon my word a very galaxy, a constellation! As I’m a sinner, a very Aurora Borealis!

(He sweeps his hat off.)

Lady H. H. Oh flatterer, flatterer! I know your ways. But come. Sit down…. A glass of Aqua Vitae. Take this seat, Sir Spaniel. I’ve something very private and particular to say to you…. You had my letter, Sir?

Sir S. L. … Pinned to my heart!

(He strikes his breast.)

Lady H. H. … I have a favour to ask of you, Sir.

Sir S. L.… (singing) What favour could fair Chloe ask that Damon would not get her? … A done with rhymes. Rhymes are still-a-bed. Let’s speak prose. What can Asphodilla ask of her plain servant Lilyliver? Speak out, Madam. An ape with a ring in his nose, or a strong young jackanapes to tell tales of us when we’re no longer here to tell truth about ourselves?

Lady H. H. (flirting her fan) Fie, fie, Sir Spaniel. You make me blush—you do indeed. But come closer. (She shifts her seat nearer to him) We don’t want the whole world to hear us.

Sir S. L. (aside) Come closer? A pox on my life! The old hag stinks like a red herring that’s been stood over head in a tar barrel! (Aloud) Your meaning, Madam? You were saying?

Lady H. H. I have a niece, Sir Spaniel, Flavinda by name.

Sir S. L. (aside) Why that’s the girl I love, to be sure! (Aloud) You have a niece, madam? I seem to remember hearing so. An only child, left by your brother, so I’ve heard, in your Ladyship’s charge—him that perished at sea.

Lady H. H. The very same Sir. She’s of age now and marriageable. I’ve kept her close as a weevil, Sir Spaniel, wrapped in the sere cloths of her virginity. Only maids about her, never a man to my knowledge, save Clout the serving man, who has a wart on his nose and a face like a nutgrater. Yet some fool has caught her fancy. Some gilded fly—some Harry, Dick; call him what you will.

Sir S. L. (aside) That’s young Valentine, I warrant. I caught ’em at the play together. (Aloud) Say you so, Madam?

Lady H. H. She’s not so ill favoured, Sir Spaniel—there’s beauty in our line—but that a gentleman of taste and breeding like yourself now might take pity on her.

Sir S. L. Saving your presence, Madam. Eyes that have seen the sun are not so easily dazzled by the lesser lights—the Cassiopeias, Aldebarans, Great Bears and so on—A fig for them when the sun’s up!

Lady H. H. (ogling him) You praise my hair-dresser, Sir, or my ear-rings (she shakes her head).

Sir S. L. (aside) She jingles like a she-ass at a fair! She’s rigged like a barber’s pole of a May Day. (Aloud) Your commands, Madam?

Lady H. H. Well Sir, t’was this way Sir. Brother Bob, for my father was a plain country gentleman and would have none of the fancy names the foreigners brought with ’em—Asphodilla I call myself, but my Christian name’s plain Sue—Brother Bob, as I was telling you, ran away to sea; and, so they say, became Emperor of the Indies; where the very stones are emeralds and the sheep-crop rubies. Which, for a tenderer-hearted man never lived, he would have brought back with him, Sir, to mend the family fortunes, Sir. But the brig, frigate or what they call it, for I’ve no head for sea terms, never crossed a ditch without saying the Lord’s Prayer backwards, struck a rock. The Whale had him. But the cradle was by the bounty of Heaven washed ashore. With the girl in it; Flavinda here. What’s more to the point, with the Will in it; safe and sound; wrapped in parchment. Brother Bob’s Will. Deb there! Deb I say! Deb!

(She hollas for Deb)

Sir S. L. (aside) Ah hah! I smell a rat! A will, quotha! Where there’s a Will there’s a Way.

Lady H. H. (bawling) The Will, Deb! The Will! In the ebony box by the right hand of the escritoire opposite the window…. A pox on the girl! She’s dreaming. It’s these romances, Sir Spaniel—these romances. Can’t see a candle gutter but its her heart that’s melting, or snuff a wick without reciting all the names in Cupid’s Calendar …

(Enter Deb carrying a parchment)

Lady H. H. So … Give it here. The Will. Brother Bob’s Will (she mumbles over the Will).

Lady H. H. To cut the matter short, Sir, for these lawyers even at the Antipodes are a long-winded race——

Sir S. L. To match their ears, Ma’am——

Lady H. H. Very true, very true. To cut the matter short, Sir, my brother Bob left all he died possessed of to his only child Flavinda; with this proviso, mark ye. That she marry to her Aunt’s liking. Her Aunt; that’s me. Otherwise, mark ye, all—to wit ten bushels of diamonds; item of rubies; item two hundred square miles of fertile territory bounding the River Amazon to the Nor-Nor-East; item his snuff box; item his flageolet—he was always one to love a tune, sir, Brother Bob; item six Macaws and as many Concubines as he had with him at the time of his decease—all this with other trifles needless to specify he left, mark ye, should she fail to marry to her Aunt’s liking—that’s me—to found a Chapel, Sir Spaniel, where six poor Virgins should sing hymns in perpetuity for the repose of his soul—which, to speak the truth, Sir Spaniel, poor Brother Bob stands in need of, perambulating the Gulf Stream as he is and consorting with Syrens. But take it; read the Will yourself, Sir.

Sir S. L. (reading) “Must marry to her Aunt’s liking.” That’s plain enough.

Lady H. H. Her Aunt, Sir. That’s me. That’s plain enough.

Sir S. L. (aside) She speaks the truth there! (Aloud) You would have me understand, Madam….?

Lady H. H. Hist! Come closer. Let me whisper in your ear … You and I have long entertained a high opinion of one another, Sir Spaniel. Played at ball together. Bound our wrists with daisy chains together. If I mind aright, you called me little bride—’tis fifty years since. We might have made a match of it, Sir Spaniel, had fortune favoured…. You take my meaning, Sir?

Sir S. L. Had it been written in letters of gold, fifty feet high, visible from Paul’s Churchyard to the Goat and Compasses at Peckham, it could have been no plainer…. Hist, I’ll whisper it. I, Sir Spaniel Lilyliver, do hereby bind myself to take thee—what’s the name of the green girl that was cast up in a lobster pot covered with seaweed? Flavinda, eh? Flavinda, so—to be my wedded wife … O for a lawyer to have it all in writing!

Lady H. H. On condition, Sir Spaniel.

Sir S. L. On condition, Asphodilla.

(Both speak together)

That the money is shared between us.

Lady H. H. We want no lawyer to certify that! Your hand on it, Sir Spaniel!

Sir S. L. Your lips Madam!

(They embrace)

Sir S. L. Pah! She stinks!

“Ha! Ha! Ha!” laughed the indigenous old lady in her bathchair.

“Reason, begad! Reason!” exclaimed old Bartholomew, and looked at his son as if exhorting him to give over these womanish vapours and be a man, Sir.

Giles sat straight as a dart, his feet tucked under him.

Mrs. Manresa had out her mirror and lipstick and attended to her lips and nose.

The gramophone, while the scene was removed, gently stated certain facts which everybody knows to be perfectly true. The tune said, more or less, how Eve, gathering her robes about her, stands reluctant still to let her dewy mantle fall. The herded flocks, the tune continued, in peace repose. The poor man to his cot returns, and, to the eager ears of wife and child, the simple story of his toil relates: what yield the furrow bears; and how the team the plover on the nest has spared; while Wat her courses ran; and speckled eggs in the warm hollow lay. Meanwhile the good wife on the table spreads her simple fare; and to the shepherd’s flute, from toil released, the nymphs and swains join hands and foot it on the green. Then Eve lets down her sombre tresses brown and spreads her lucent veil o’er hamlet, spire, and mead, etc., etc. And the tune repeated itself once more.

The view repeated in its own way what the tune was saying. The sun was sinking; the colours were merging; and the view was saying how after toil men rest from their labours; how coolness comes; reason prevails; and having unharnessed the team from the plough, neighbours dig in cottage gardens and lean over cottage gates.

The cows, making a step forward, then standing still, were saying the same thing to perfection.

Folded in this triple melody, the audience sat gazing; and beheld gently and approvingly without interrogation, for it seemed inevitable, a box tree in a green tub take the place of the ladies’ dressing-room; while on what seemed to be a wall, was hung a great clock face; the hands pointing to three minutes to the hour; which was seven.

Mrs. Elmhurst roused herself from her reverie; and looked at her programme.

“Scene Two. The Mall,” she read out. “Time; early morning. Enter Flavinda. Here she comes!”

Here came Millie Loder (shop assistant at Messrs. Hunt and Dicksons, drapery emporium), in sprigged satin, representing Flavinda.

Flav. Seven he said, and there’s the clock’s word for it. But Valentine—where’s Valentine? La! How my heart beats! Yet it’s not the time o’ day, for I’m often afoot before the sun’s up in the meadows … See—the fine folk passing! All a-tiptoeing like peacocks with spread tails! And I in my petticoat that looked so fine by my Aunt’s cracked mirror. Why, here it’s a dish clout … And they heap their hair up like a birthday cake stuck about with candles…. That’s a diamond—that’s a ruby … Where’s Valentine? The Orange Tree in the Mall, he said. The tree—there. Valentine—nowhere. That’s a courtier, I’ll warrant, that old fox with his tail between his legs. That’s a serving wench out without her master’s knowledge. That’s a man with a broom to sweep paths for the fine ladies’ flounces … La! the red in their cheeks! They never got that in the fields, I warrant! O faithless, cruel, hard-hearted Valentine. Valentine! Valentine!

(She wrings her hands, turning from side to side.)

Didn’t I leave my bed a-tiptoe and steal like a mouse in the wainscot for fear of waking Aunt? And lard my hair from her powder box? And scrub my cheeks to make ’em shine? And lie awake watching the stars climb the chimney pots? And give my gold guinea that Godfather hid behind the mistletoe last Twelfth Night to Deb so she shouldn’t tell on me? And grease the key in the lock so that Aunt shouldn’t wake and shriek Flavvy! Flavvy! Val, I say Val——That’s him coming…. No, I could tell him a mile off the way he strides the waves like what d’you call him in the picture book…. That’s not Val…. That’s a cit; that’s a fop; raising his glass, prithee, to have his fill of me … I’ll be home then … No, I won’t … That’s to play the green girl again and sew samplers … I’m of age, ain’t I, come Michaelmas? Only three turns of the moon and I inherit … Didn’t I read it in the Will the day the ball bounced on top of the old chest where Aunt keeps her furbelows, and the lid opened? …” All I die possessed of to my Daughter …” So far I’d read when the old lady came tapping down the passage like a blind man in an alley…. I’m no castaway, I’d have you know, Sir; no fishtailed mermaid with a robe of sea weed, at your mercy. I’m a match for any of ’em—the chits you dally with, and bid me meet you at the Orange Tree when you’re drowsing the night off spent in their arms…. Fie upon you, Sir, making sport with a poor girl so…. I’ll not cry, I swear I won’t. I’ll not brew a drop of the salt liquid for a man who’s served me so…. Yet to think on’t—how we hid in the dairy the day the cat jumped. And read romances under the holly tree. La! how I cried when the Duke left poor Polly…. And my Aunt found me with eyes like red jellies. “What stung, niece?” says she. And cried “Quick Deb, the blue bag.” I told ye … La, to think I read it all in a book and cried for another! … Hist, what’s there among the trees? It’s come—it’s gone. The breeze is it? In the shade now—in the sun now…. Valentine on my life! It’s he! Quick, I’ll hide. Let the tree conceal me!

(Flavinda hides behind the tree.)

He’s here … He turns … He casts about … He’s lost the scent … He gazes—this way, that way…. Let him feast his eyes on the fine faces—taste ’em, sample ’em, say: “That’s the fine lady I danced with … that I lay with … that I kissed under the mistletoe …” Ha! How he spews ’em out! Brave Valentine! How he casts his eyes upon the ground! How his frowns become him! “Where’s Flavinda?” he sighs. “She I love like the heart in my breast.” See him pull his watch out! “O faithless wretch!” he sighs. See how he stamps the earth! Now turns on his heel…. He sees me—no, the sun’s in his eyes. Tears fill ’em … Lord, how he fingers his sword! He’ll run it through his breast like the Duke in the story book! … Stop, Sir, stop!

(She reveals herself)

Valentine. … O Flavinda, O!

Flavinda. … O Valentine, O!

(They embrace)
The clock strikes nine.

“All that fuss about nothing!” a voice exclaimed. People laughed. The voice stopped. But the voice had seen; the voice had heard. For a moment Miss La Trobe behind her tree glowed with glory. The next, turning to the villagers who were passing in and out between the trees, she barked:

“Louder! Louder!”

For the stage was empty; the emotion must be continued; the only thing to continue the emotion was the song; and the words were inaudible.

“Louder! Louder!” She threatened them with her clenched fists.

Digging and delving (they sang), hedging and ditching, we pass…. Summer and winter, autumn and spring return … All passes but we, all changes … but we remain forever the same … (the breeze blew gaps between their words.)

“Louder, louder!” Miss La Trobe vociferated.

Palaces tumble down (they resumed), Babylon, Nineveh, Troy … And Caesar’s great house … all fallen they lie … Where the plover nests was the arch…. through which the Romans trod … Digging and delving we break with the share of the plough the clod … Where Clytemnestra watched for her Lord … saw the beacons blaze on the hills … we see only the clod … Digging and delving we pass…. and the Queen and the Watch Tower fall … for Agamemnon has ridden away…. Clytemnestra is nothing but….

The words died away. Only a few great names—Babylon, Nineveh, Clytemnestra, Agamemnon, Troy—floated across the open space. Then the wind rose, and in the rustle of the leaves even the great words became inaudible; and the audience sat staring at the villagers, whose mouths opened, but no sound came.

And the stage was empty. Miss La Trobe leant against the tree, paralyzed. Her power had left her. Beads of perspiration broke on her forehead. Illusion had failed. “This is death,” she murmured, “death.”

Then suddenly, as the illusion petered out, the cows took up the burden. One had lost her calf. In the very nick of time she lifted her great moon-eyed head and bellowed. All the great moon-eyed heads laid themselves back. From cow after cow came the same yearning bellow. The whole world was filled with dumb yearning. It was the primeval voice sounding loud in the ear of the present moment. Then the whole herd caught the infection. Lashing their tails, blobbed like pokers, they tossed their heads high, plunged and bellowed, as if Eros had planted his dart in their flanks and goaded them to fury. The cows annihilated the gap; bridged the distance; filled the emptiness and continued the emotion.

Miss La Trobe waved her hand ecstatically at the cows.

“Thank Heaven!” she exclaimed.

Suddenly the cows stopped; lowered their heads, and began browsing. Simultaneously the audience lowered their heads and read their programmes.

“The producer,” Mrs. Elmhurst read out for her husband’s benefit, “craves the indulgence of the audience. Owing to lack of time a scene has been omitted; and she begs the audience to imagine that in the interval Sir Spaniel Lilyliver has contracted an engagement with Flavinda; who had been about to plight her troth; when Valentine, hidden inside the grandfather’s clock, steps forward; claims Flavinda as his bride; reveals the plot to rob her of her inheritance; and, during the confusion that ensues, the lovers fly together, leaving Lady Harpy and Sir Spaniel alone together.”

“We’re asked to imagine all that,” she said, putting down her glasses.

“That’s very wise of her,” said Mrs. Manresa, addressing Mrs. Swithin. “If she’d put it all in, we should have been here till midnight. So we’ve got to imagine, Mrs. Swithin.” She patted the old lady on the knee.

“Imagine?” said Mrs. Swithin. “How right! Actors show us too much. The Chinese, you know, put a dagger on the table and that’s a battle. And so Racine …”

“Yes, they bore one stiff,” Mrs. Manresa interrupted, scenting culture, resenting the snub to the jolly human heart. “T’other day I took my nephew—such a jolly boy at Sandhurst—to Pop Goes the Weasel. Seen it?” She turned to Giles.

“Up and down the City Road,” he hummed by way of an answer.

“Did your Nanny sing that!” Mrs. Manresa exclaimed. “Mine did. And when she said ‘Pop’ she made a noise like a cork being drawn from a ginger-beer bottle. Pop!”

She made the noise.

“Hush, hush,” someone whispered.

“Now I’m being naughty and shocking your aunt,” she said. “We must be good and attend. This is Scene Three. Lady Harpy Harraden’s Closet. The sound of horses’ hooves is heard in the distance.”

The sound of horses’ hooves, energetically represented by Albert the idiot with a wooden spoon on a tray, died away.

Lady H. H. Half-way to Gretna Green already! O my deceitful niece! You that I rescued from the brine and stood on the hearthstone dripping! O that the whale had swallowed you whole! Perfidious porpoise, O! Didn’t the Horn book teach you Honour thy Great Aunt? How have you misread it and misspelt it, learnt thieving and cheating and reading of wills in old boxes and hiding of rascals in honest time-pieces that have never missed a second since King Charles’s day! O Flavinda! O porpoise, O!

Sir S. L. (trying to pull on his jack boots) Old—old—old. He called me “old”—“To your bed, old fool, and drink hot posset!”

Lady H. H. And she, stopping at the door and pointing the finger of scorn at me said “old” Sir—“woman” Sir—I that am in the prime of life and a lady!

Sir S. L. (tugging at his boots) But I’ll be even with him. I’ll have the law on’ em! I’ll run ’em to earth …

(He hobbles up and down, one boot on, one boot off)

Lady H. H. (laying her hand on his arm) Have mercy on your gout, Sir Spaniel. Bethink you, Sir—let’s not run mad, we that are on the sunny side of fifty. What’s this youth they prate on? Nothing but a goose feather blown on a north wind. Sit you down, Sir Spaniel. Rest your leg—so——

(She pushes a cushion under his leg)

Sir S. L. “Old” he called me … jumping from the clock like a jack-in-the-box … And she, making mock of me, points to my leg and cries “Cupid’s darts, Sir Spaniel, Cupid’s darts.” O that I could braise ’em in a mortar and serve ’em up smoking hot on the altar of—O my gout, O my gout!

Lady H. H. This talk, Sir, ill befits a man of sense. Bethink you, Sir, only t’other day you were invoking—ahem—the Constellations. Cassiopeia, Aldebaran; the Aurora Borealis … It’s not to be denied that one of ’em has left her sphere, has shot, has eloped, to put it plainly, with the entrails of a time-piece, the mere pendulum of a grandfather’s clock. But, Sir Spaniel, there are some stars that—ahem—stay fixed; that shine, to put it in a nutshell, never so bright as by a sea-coal fire on a brisk morning.

Sir S. L. O that I were five and twenty with a sharp sword at my side!

Lady H. H. (bridling) I take your meaning, Sir. Te hee—To be sure, I regret it as you do. But youth’s not all. To let you into a secret, I’ve passed the meridian myself. Am on t’other side of the Equator too. Sleep sound o’ nights without turning. The dog days are over…. But bethink you, Sir. Where there’s a will there’s a way.

Sir S. L. God’s truth Ma’am … ah my foot’s like a burning, burning horseshoe on the devil’s anvil ah!—what’s your meaning?

Lady H. H. My meaning, Sir? Must I disrupt my modesty and unquilt that which has been laid in lavender since, my lord, peace be to his name—’tis twenty years since—was lapped in lead? In plain words, Sir, Flavinda’s flown. The cage is empty. But we that have bound our wrists with cowslips might join ’em with a stouter chain. To have done with fallals and figures. Here am I, Asphodilla—but my plain name Sue. No matter what my name is—Asphodilla or Sue—here am I, hale and hearty, at your service. Now that the plot’s out, Brother Bob’s bounty must go to the virgins. That’s plain. Here’s Lawyer Quill’s word for it. “Virgins … in perpetuity … sing for his soul” And I warrant you, he has need of it … But no matter. Though we have thrown that to the fishes that might have wrapped us in lamb’s-wool, I’m no beggar. There’s messuages; tenements; napery; cattle; my dowry; an inventory. I’ll show you; engrossed on parchment; enough I’ll warrant you to keep us handsomely, for what’s to run of our time, as husband and wife.

Sir S. L. Husband and wife! So that’s the plain truth of it! Why, Madam, I’d rather lash myself to a tar barrel, be bound to a thorn tree in a winter’s gale. Faugh!

Lady H. H. … A tar barrel, quotha! A thorn tree—quotha! You that were harping on galaxies and milky ways! You that were swearing I outshone ’em all! A pox on you—you faithless! You shark, you! You serpent in jack boots, you! So you won’t have me? Reject my hand do you?

(She proffers her hand; he strikes it from him.)

Sir S. L. … Hide your chalk stones in a woollen mit! pah! I’ll none of ’em! Were they diamond, pure diamond, and half the habitable globe and all its concubines strung in string round your throat I’d none of it … none of it. Unhand me, scritch owl, witch, vampire! Let me go!

Lady H. H. … So all your fine words were tinsel wrapped round a Christmas cracker!

Sir S. L. … Bells hung on an ass’s neck! Paper roses on a barber’s pole … O my foot, my foot … Cupid’s darts, she mocked me … Old, old, he called me old …

(He hobbles away)

Lady H. H. (left alone) All gone. Following the wind. He’s gone; she’s gone; and the old clock that the rascal made himself into a pendulum for is the only one of ’em all to stop. A pox on ’em—turning an honest woman’s house into a brothel. I that was Aurora Borealis am shrunk to a tar barrel. I that was Cassiopeia am turned to a she-ass. My head turns. There’s no trusting man nor woman; nor fine speeches; nor fine looks. Off comes the sheep’s skin; out creeps the serpent. Get ye to Gretna Green; couch on the wet grass and breed vipers. My head spins … Tar barrels, quotha. Cassiopeia … Chalk stones … Andromeda … Thorn trees…. Deb, I say, Deb (She holloas) Unlace me. I’m fit to burst … Bring me my green baize table and set the cards…. And my fur lined slippers, Deb. And a dish of chocolate…. I’ll be even with ’em … I’ll outlive ’em all … Deb, I say! Deb! A pox on the girl! Can’t she hear me? Deb, I say, you gipsy’s spawn that I snatched from the hedge and taught to sew samplers! Deb! Deb!

(She throws open the door leading to the maid’s closet)

Empty! She’s gone too! … Hist, what’s that on the dresser?

(She picks up a scrap of paper and reads)

“What care I for your goose-feather bed? I’m off with the raggle-taggle gipsies, O! Signed: Deborah, one time your maid.” So! She that I fed on apple parings and crusts from my own table, she that I taught to play cribbage and sew chemises … she’s gone too. O ingratitude, thy name is Deborah! Who’s to wash the dishes now; who’s to bring me my posset now, suffer my temper and unlace my stays? … All gone. I’m alone then. Sans niece, sans lover; and sans maid.

And so to end the play, the moral is,

The God of love is full of tricks;

Into the foot his dart he sticks,

But the way of the will is plain to see;

Let holy virgins hymn perpetually:

“Where there’s a will there’s a way”

Good people all, farewell,

(dropping a curtsey, Lady H. H. withdrew)

The scene ended. Reason descended from her plinth. Gathering her robes about her, serenely acknowledging the applause of the audience, she passed across the stage; while Lords and Ladies in stars and garters followed after; Sir Spaniel limping escorted Lady Harraden smirking; and Valentine and Flavinda arm in arm bowed and curtsied.

“God’s truth!” cried Bartholomew catching the infection of the language. “There’s a moral for you!”

He threw himself back in his chair and laughed, like a horse whinnying.

A moral. What? Giles supposed it was: Where there’s a Will there’s a Way. The words rose and pointed a finger of scorn at him. Off to Gretna Green with his girl; the deed done. Damn the consequences.

“Like to see the greenhouse?” he said abruptly, turning to Mrs. Manresa.

“Love to!” she exclaimed, and rose.

Was there an interval? Yes, the programme said so. The machine in the bushes went chuff, chuff, chuff. And the next scene?

“The Victorian age,” Mrs. Elmhurst read out. Presumably there was time then for a stroll round the gardens, even for a look over the house. Yet somehow they felt—how could one put it—a little not quite here or there. As if the play had jerked the ball out of the cup; as if what I call myself was still floating unattached, and didn’t settle. Not quite themselves, they felt. Or was it simply that they felt clothes conscious? Skimpy out-of-date voile dresses; flannel trousers; panama hats; hats wreathed with raspberry-coloured net in the style of the Royal Duchess’s hat at Ascot seemed flimsy somehow.

“How lovely the clothes were,” said someone, casting a last look at Flavinda disappearing. “Most becoming. I wish …”

Chuff, chuff, chuff went the machine in the bushes, accurately, insistently.

Clouds were passing across the sky. The weather looked a little unsettled. Hogben’s Folly was for a moment ashen white. Then the sun struck the gilt vane of Bolney Minster.

“Looks a little unsettled,” said someone.

“Up you get … Let’s stretch our legs,” said another voice. Soon the lawns were floating with little moving islands of coloured dresses. Yet some of the audience remained seated.

“Major and Mrs. Mayhew,” Page the reporter noted, licking his pencil. As for the play, he would collar Miss Whatshername and ask for a synopsis. But Miss La Trobe had vanished.

Down among the bushes she worked like a nigger. Flavinda was in her petticoats. Reason had thrown her mantle on a holly hedge. Sir Spaniel was tugging at his jack boots. Miss La Trobe was scattering and foraging.

“The Victorian mantle with the bead fringe … Where is the damned thing? Chuck it here … Now the whiskers …”

Ducking up and down she cast her quick bird’s eye over the bushes at the audience. The audience was on the move. The audience was strolling up and down. They kept their distance from the dressing-room; they respected the conventions. But if they wandered too far, if they began exploring the grounds, going over the house, then…. Chuff, chuff, chuff went the machine. Time was passing. How long would time hold them together? It was a gamble; a risk…. And she laid about her energetically, flinging clothes on the grass.

Over the tops of the bushes came stray voices, voices without bodies, symbolical voices they seemed to her, half hearing, seeing nothing, but still, over the bushes, feeling invisible threads connecting the bodiless voices.

“It all looks very black.”

“No one wants it—save those damned Germans.”

There was a pause.

“I’d cut down those trees …”

“How they get their roses to grow!”

“They say there’s been a garden here for five hundred years …”

“Why even old Gladstone, to do him justice …”

Then there was silence. The voices passed the bushes. The trees rustled. Many eyes, Miss La Trobe knew, for every cell in her body was absorbent, looked at the view. Out of the corner of her eye she could see Hogben’s Folly; then the vane flashed.

“The glass is falling,” said a voice.

She could feel them slipping through her fingers, looking at the view.

“Where’s that damned woman, Mrs. Rogers? Who’s seen Mrs. Rogers?” she cried, snatching up a Victorian mantle.

Then, ignoring the conventions, a head popped up between the trembling sprays: Mrs. Swithin’s.

“Oh Miss La Trobe!” she exclaimed; and stopped. Then she began again; “Oh Miss La Trobe, I do congratulate you!”

She hesitated. “You’ve given me …” She skipped, then alighted—“Ever since I was a child I’ve felt …” A film fell over her eyes, shutting off the present. She tried to recall her childhood; then gave it up; and, with a little wave of her hand, as if asking Miss La Trobe to help her out, continued: “This daily round; this going up and down stairs; this saying ‘What am I going for? My specs? I have ’em on my nose.’ …”

She gazed at Miss La Trobe with a cloudless old-aged stare. Their eyes met in a common effort to bring a common meaning to birth. They failed; and Mrs. Swithin, laying hold desperately of a fraction of her meaning, said: “What a small part I’ve had to play! But you’ve made me feel I could have played … Cleopatra!”

She nodded between the trembling bushes and ambled off.

The villagers winked. “Batty” was the word for old Flimsy, breaking through the bushes.

“I might have been—Cleopatra,” Miss La Trobe repeated. “You’ve stirred in me my unacted part,” she meant.

“Now for the skirt, Mrs. Rogers,” she said.

Mrs. Rogers stood grotesque in her black stockings. Miss La Trobe pulled the voluminous flounces of the Victorian age over her head. She tied the tapes. “You’ve twitched the invisible strings,” was what the old lady meant; and revealed—of all people—Cleopatra! Glory possessed her. Ah, but she was not merely a twitcher of individual strings; she was one who seethes wandering bodies and floating voices in a cauldron, and makes rise up from its amorphous mass a recreated world. Her moment was on her—her glory.

“There!” she said, tying the black ribbons under Mrs. Rogers’ chin. “That’s done it! Now for the gentleman. Hammond!”

She beckoned Hammond. Sheepishly he came forward, and submitted to the application of black side whiskers. With his eyes half shut, his head leant back, he looked, Miss La Trobe thought, like King Arthur—noble, knightly, thin.

“Where’s the Major’s old frock coat?” she asked, trusting to the effect of that to transform him.

Tick, tick, tick, the machine continued. Time was passing. The audience was wandering, dispersing. Only the tick tick of the gramophone held them together. There, sauntering solitary far away by the flower beds was Mrs. Giles escaping.

“The tune!” Miss La Trobe commanded. “Hurry up! The tune! The next tune! Number Ten!”

“Now may I pluck,” Isa murmured, picking a rose, “my single flower. The white or the pink? And press it so, twixt thumb and finger….”

She looked among the passing faces for the face of the man in grey. There he was for one second; but surrounded, inaccessible. And now vanished.

She dropped her flower. What single, separate leaf could she press? None. Nor stray by the beds alone. She must go on; and she turned in the direction of the stable.

“Where do I wander?” she mused. “Down what draughty tunnels? Where the eyeless wind blows? And there grows nothing for the eye. No rose. To issue where? In some harvestless dim field where no evening lets fall her mantle; nor sun rises. All’s equal there. Unblowing, ungrowing are the roses there. Change is not; nor the mutable and lovable; nor greetings nor partings; nor furtive findings and feelings, where hand seeks hand and eye seeks shelter from the eye.”

She had come into the stable yard where the dogs were chained; where the buckets stood; where the great pear tree spread its ladder of branches against the wall. The tree whose roots went beneath the flags, was weighted with hard green pears. Fingering one of them she murmured: “How am I burdened with what they drew from the earth; memories; possessions. This is the burden that the past laid on me, last little donkey in the long caravanserai crossing the desert. ‘Kneel down,’ said the past. ‘Fill your pannier from our tree. Rise up, donkey. Go your way till your heels blister and your hoofs crack.’”

The pear was hard as stone. She looked down at the cracked flags beneath which the roots spread. “That was the burden,” she mused, “laid on me in the cradle; murmured by waves; breathed by restless elm trees; crooned by singing women; what we must remember; what we would forget.”

She looked up. The gilt hands of the stable clock pointed inflexibly at two minutes to the hour. The clock was about to strike.

“Now comes the lightning,” she muttered, “from the stone blue sky. The thongs are burst that the dead tied. Loosed are our possessions.”

Voices interrupted. People passed the stable yard, talking.

“It’s a good day, some say, the day we are stripped naked. Others, it’s the end of the day. They see the Inn and the Inn’s keeper. But none speaks with a single voice. None with a voice free from the old vibrations. Always I hear corrupt murmurs; the chink of gold and metal. Mad music….”

More voices sounded. The audience was streaming back to the terrace. She roused herself. She encouraged herself. “On little donkey, patiently stumble. Hear not the frantic cries of the leaders who in that they seek to lead desert us. Nor the chatter of china faces glazed and hard. Hear rather the shepherd, coughing by the farmyard wall; the withered tree that sighs when the Rider gallops; the brawl in the barrack room when they stripped her naked; or the cry which in London when I thrust the window open someone cries …” She had come out on to the path that led past the greenhouse. The door was kicked open. Out came Mrs. Manresa and Giles. Unseen, Isa followed them across the lawns to the front row of seats.

The chuff, chuff, chuff of the machine in the bushes had stopped. In obedience to Miss La Trobe’s command, another tune had been put on the gramophone. Number Ten. London street cries it was called. “A Pot Pourri.”

“Lavender, sweet lavender, who’ll buy my sweet lavender” the tune trilled and tinkled, ineffectively shepherding the audience. Some ignored it. Some still wandered. Others stopped, but stood upright. Some, like Colonel and Mrs. Mayhew, who had never left their seats, brooded over the blurred carbon sheet which had been issued for their information.

“The Nineteenth Century.” Colonel Mayhew did not dispute the producer’s right to skip two hundred years in less than fifteen minutes. But the choice of scenes baffled him.

“Why leave out the British Army? What’s history without the Army, eh?” he mused. Inclining her head, Mrs. Mayhew protested after all one mustn’t ask too much. Besides, very likely there would be a Grand Ensemble, round the Union Jack, to end with. Meanwhile, there was the view. They looked at the view.

“Sweet lavender … sweet lavender….” Humming the tune old Mrs. Lynn Jones (of the Mount) pushed a chair forward. “Here Etty,” she said, and plumped down, with Etty Springett, with whom, since both were widows now, she shared a house.

“I remember …” she nodded in time to the tune, “You remember too—how they used to cry it down the streets.” They remembered—the curtains blowing, and the men crying: “All a blowing, all a growing,” as they came with geraniums, sweet william, in pots, down the street.

“A harp, I remember, and a hansom and a growler. So quiet the street was then. Two for a hansom, was it? One for a growler? And Ellen, in cap and apron, whistling in the street? D’you remember? And the runners, my dear, who followed, all the way from the station, if one had a box.”

The tune changed. “Any old iron, any old iron to sell?” “D’you remember? That was what the men shouted in the fog. Seven Dials they came from. Men with red handkerchiefs. Garotters, did they call them? You couldn’t walk—O, dear me, no—home from the play. Regent Street. Piccadilly. Hyde Park Corner. The loose women … And everywhere loaves of bread in the gutter. The Irish you know round Covent Garden … Coming back from a Ball, past the clock at Hyde Park Corner, d’you remember the feel of white gloves? … My father remembered the old Duke in the Park. Two fingers like that—he’d touch his hat … I’ve got my mother’s album. A lake and two lovers. She’d copied out Byron, I suppose, in what was called then the Italian hand….”

“What’s that? ‘Knocked ’em in the Old Kent Road.’ I remember the bootboy whistled it. O, my dear, the servants … Old Ellen … Sixteen pound a year wages … And the cans of hot water! And the crinolines! And the stays! D’you remember the Crystal Palace, and the fireworks, and how Mira’s slipper got lost in the mud?”

“That’s young Mrs. Giles … I remember her mother. She died in India … We wore, I suppose, a great many petticoats then. Unhygienic? I dare say … Well, look at my daughter. To the right, just behind you. Forty, but slim as a wand. Each flat has its refrigerator … It took my mother half the morning to order dinner…. We were eleven. Counting servants, eighteen in family…. Now they simply ring up the Stores … That’s Giles coming, with Mrs. Manresa. She’s a type I don’t myself fancy. I may be wrong … And Colonel Mayhew, as spruce as ever … And Mr. Cobbet of Cobbs Corner, there, under the Monkey Puzzle Tree. One don’t see him often … That’s what’s so nice—it brings people together. These days, when we’re all so busy, that’s what one wants … The programme? Have you got it? Let’s see what comes next … The Nineteenth Century … Look, there’s the chorus, the villagers, coming on now, between the trees. First, there’s a prologue….”

A great box, draped in red baize festooned with heavy gold tassels had been moved into the middle of the stage. There was a swish of dresses, a stir of chairs. The audience seated themselves, hastily, guiltily. Miss La Trobe’s eye was on them. She gave them ten seconds to settle their faces. Then she flicked her hand. A pompous march tune brayed. “Firm, elatant, bold and blatant,” etc…. And once more a huge symbolical figure emerged from the bushes. It was Budge the publican; but so disguised that even cronies who drank with him nightly failed to recognize him; and a little titter of enquiry as to his identity ran about among the villagers. He wore a long black many-caped cloak; waterproof; shiny; of the substance of a statue in Parliament Square; a helmet which suggested a policeman; a row of medals crossed his breast; and in his right hand he held extended a special constable’s baton (loaned by Mr. Willert of the Hall). It was his voice, husky and rusty, issuing from a thick black cotton-wool beard that gave him away.

“Budge, Budge. That’s Mr. Budge,” the audience whispered.

Budge extended his truncheon and spoke:

It ain’t an easy job, directing the traffic at ’Yde Park Corner. Buses and ’ansom cabs. All a-clatter on the cobbles. Keep to the right, can’t you? Hi there, Stop!

(He waved his truncheon)

There she goes, the old party with the umbrella right under the ’orse’s nose.

(The truncheon pointed markedly at Mrs. Swithin)

She raised her skinny hand as if in truth she had fluttered off the pavement on the impulse of the moment to the just rage of authority. Got her, Giles thought, taking sides with authority against his aunt.

Fog or fine weather, I does my duty (Budge continued). At Piccadilly Circus; at ’Yde Park Corner, directing the traffic of ’Er Majesty’s Empire. The Shah of Persia; Sultan of Morocco; or it may be ’Er Majesty in person; or Cook’s tourists; black men; white men; sailors, soldiers; crossing the ocean; to proclaim her Empire; all of ’em Obey the Rule of my truncheon.

(He flourished it magnificently from right to left)

But my job don’t end there. I take under my protection and direction the purity and security of all Her Majesty’s minions; in all parts of her dominions; insist that they obey the laws of God and Man.

The laws of God and Man (he repeated and made as if to consult a Statute; engrossed on a sheet of parchment which with great deliberation he now produced from his trouser pocket)

Go to Church on Sunday; on Monday, nine sharp, catch the City Bus. On Tuesday it may be, attend a meeting at the Mansion House for the redemption of the sinner; at dinner on Wednesday attend another—turtle soup. Some bother it may be in Ireland; Famine. Fenians. What not. On Thursday it’s the natives of Peru require protection and correction; we give ’em what’s due. But mark you, our rule don’t end there. It’s a Christian country, our Empire; under the White Queen Victoria. Over thought and religion; drink; dress; manners; marriage too, I wield my truncheon. Prosperity and respectability always go, as we know, ’and in ’and. The ruler of an Empire must keep his eye on the cot; spy too in the kitchen; drawing-room; library; wherever one or two, me and you, come together. Purity our watchword; prosperity and respectability. If not, why, let ’em fester in …

(He paused—no, he had not forgotten his words)

Cripplegate; St. Giles’s; Whitechapel; the Minories. Let ’em sweat at the mines; cough at the looms; rightly endure their lot. That’s the price of Empire; that’s the white man’s burden. And, I can tell you, to direct the traffic orderly, at ’Yde Park Corner, Piccadilly Circus, is a whole-time, white man’s job.

He paused, eminent, dominant, glaring from his pedestal. A very fine figure of a man he was, everyone agreed, his truncheon extended; his waterproof pendant. It only wanted a shower of rain, a flight of pigeons round his head, and the pealing bells of St. Paul’s and the Abbey to transform him into the very spit and image of a Victorian constable; and to transport them to a foggy London afternoon, with the muffin bells ringing and the church bells pealing at the very height of Victorian prosperity.

There was a pause. The voices of the pilgrims singing, as they wound in and out between the trees, could be heard; but the words were inaudible. The audience sat waiting.

“Tut-tut-tut,” Mrs. Lynn-Jones expostulated. “There were grand men among them …” Why she did not know, yet somehow she felt that a sneer had been aimed at her father; therefore at herself.

Etty Springett tutted too. Yet, children did draw trucks in mines; there was the basement; yet Papa read Walter Scott aloud after dinner; and divorced ladies were not received at Court. How difficult to come to any conclusion! She wished they would hurry on with the next scene. She liked to leave a theatre knowing exactly what was meant. Of course this was only a village play…. They were setting another scene, round the red baize box. She read out from her programme:

“The Picnic Party. About 1860. Scene: A Lake. Characters—”

She stopped. A sheet had been spread on the Terrace. It was a lake apparently. Roughly painted ripples represented water. Those green stakes were bulrushes. Rather prettily, real swallows darted across the sheet.

“Look, Minnie!” she exclaimed. “Those are real swallows!”

“Hush, hush,” she was admonished. For the scene had begun. A young man in peg-top trousers and side whiskers carrying a spiked stick appeared by the lake.

Edgar T. … Let me help you, Miss Hardcastle! There!

(he helps Miss Eleanor Hardcastle, a young lady in crinoline and mushroom hat to the top. They stand for a moment panting slightly, looking at the view.)

Eleanor. How small the Church looks down among the trees!

Edgar. … So this is Wanderer’s Well, the trysting-place.

Eleanor. … Please Mr. Thorold, finish what you were saying before the others come. You were saying, “Our aim in life …”

Edgar. … Should be to help our fellow men.

Eleanor (sighing deeply) How true—how profoundly true!

Edgar. … Why sigh, Miss Hardcastle?—You have nothing to reproach yourself with—you whose whole life is spent in the service of others. It was of myself that I was thinking. I am no longer young. At twenty-four the best days of life are over. My life has passed (he throws a pebble on to the lake) like a ripple in water.

Eleanor. Oh Mr, Thorold, you do not know me. I am not what I seem. I too——

Edgar. … Do not tell me, Miss Hardcastle—no, I cannot believe it—You have doubted?

Eleanor. Thank Heaven not that, not that … But safe and sheltered as I am, always at home, protected as you see me, as you think me. O what am I saying? But yes, I will speak the truth, before Mama comes. I too have longed to convert the heathen!

Edgar. … Miss Hardcastle … Eleanor … You tempt me! Dare I ask you? No—so young, so fair, so innocent. Think, I implore you, before you answer.

Eleanor. … I have thought—on my knees!

Edgar (taking a ring from his pocket) Then…. My mother with her last breath charged me to give this ring only to one to whom a lifetime in the African desert among the heathens would be——

Eleanor (taking the ring) Perfect happiness! But hist! (She slips the ring into her pocket) Here’s Mama! (They start asunder)

(Enter Mrs. Hardcastle, a stout lady in black bombazine, upon a donkey, escorted by an elderly gentleman in a deer-stalker’s cap)

Mrs. H. … So you stole a march upon us, young people. There was a time, Sir John, when you and I were always first on top. Now …

(He helps her to alight. Children, young men, young women, some carrying hampers, others butterfly nets, others spy-glasses, others tin botanical cases arrive. A rug is thrown by the lake and Mrs. H. and Sir John seat themselves on camp stools.)

Mrs. H. … Now who’ll fill the kettles? Who’ll gather the sticks? Alfred (to a small boy), don’t run about chasing butterflies or you’ll make yourself sick … Sir John and I will unpack the hampers, here where the grass is burnt, where we had the picnic last year.

(The young people scatter off in different directions. Mrs. H. and Sir John begin to unpack the hamper)

Mrs. H. … Last year poor dear Mr. Beach was with us. It was a blessed release (She takes out a black-bordered handkerchief and wipes her eyes). Every year one of us is missing. That’s the ham … That’s the grouse … There in that packet are the game pasties … (She spreads the eatables on the grass) As I was saying poor dear Mr. Beach … I do hope the cream hasn’t curdled. Mr. Hardcastle is bringing the claret. I always leave that to him. Only when Mr. Hardcastle gets talking with Mr. Pigott about the Romans … last year they quite came to words…. But it’s nice for gentlemen to have a hobby, though they do gather the dust—those skulls and things…. But I was saying——poor dear Mr. Beach…. I wanted to ask you (she drops her voice) as a friend of the family, about the new clergyman—they can’t hear us, can they? No, they’re picking up sticks…. Last year, such a disappointment. Just got the things out … down came the rain. But I wanted to ask you, about the new clergyman, the one who’s come in place of dear Mr. Beach. I’m told the name’s Sibthorp. To be sure, I hope I’m right, for I had a cousin who married a girl of that name, and as a friend of the family, we don’t stand on ceremony … And when one has daughters—I’m sure I quite envy you, with only one daughter, Sir John, and I have four! So I was asking you to tell me in confidence, about this young—if that’s-his-name—Sibthorp, for I must tell you the day before yesterday our Mrs. Potts happened to say, as she passed the Rectory, bringing our laundry, they were unpacking the furniture; and what did she see on top of the wardrobe? A tea cosy! But of course she might be mistaken … But it occurred to me to ask you, as a friend of the family, in confidence, has Mr. Sibthorp a wife?

Here a chorus composed of villagers in Victorian mantles, side whiskers and top hats sang in concert:

O has Mr. Sibthorp a wife? O has Mr. Sibthorp a wife? That is the hornet, the bee in the bonnet, the screw in the cork and the drill; that whirling and twirling are for ever unfurling the folds of the motherly heart; for a mother must ask, if daughters she has, begot in the feathery billowy fourposter family bed, O did he unpack, with his prayer book and bands; his gown and his cane; his rod and his line; and the family album and gun; did he also display the connubial respectable tea-table token, a cosy with honeysuckle embossed. Has Mr. Sibthorp a wife? O has Mr. Sibthorp a wife?

While the chorus was sung, the picnickers assembled. Corks popped. Grouse, ham, chickens were sliced. Lips munched. Glasses were drained. Nothing was heard but the chump of jaws and the chink of glasses.

“They did eat,” Mrs. Lynn Jones whispered to Mrs. Springett. “That’s true. More than was good for them, I dare say.”

Mr. Hardcastle … (brushing flakes of meat from his whiskers) Now …

“Now what?” whispered Mrs. Springett, anticipating further travesty.

Now that we have gratified the inner man, let us gratify the desire of the spirit. I call upon one of the young ladies for a song.

Chorus of Young Ladies … O not me … not me … I really couldn’t … No, you cruel thing, you know I’ve lost my voice … I can’t sing without the instrument … etc., etc.

Chorus of Young Men. O bosh! Let’s have “The Last Rose of Summer.” Let’s have “I never loved a Dear Gazelle.”

Mrs. H. (authoritatively) Eleanor and Mildred will now sing “I’d be a Butterfly.”

(Eleanor and Mildred rise obediently and sing a duet: “I’d be a Butterfly.”)

Mrs. H. Thank you very much, my dears. And now gentlemen, Our Country!

(Arthur and Edgar sing “Rule Britannia.”)

Mrs. H. … Thank you very much. Mr. Hardcastle——

Mr. Hardcastle (rising to his feet, clasping his fossil) Let us pray.

(the whole company rise to their feet)

“This is too much, too much,” Mrs. Springett protested.

Mr. H. … Almighty God, giver of all good things, we thank Thee; for our food and drink; for the beauties of Nature; for the understanding with which Thou hast enlightened us (he fumbled with his fossil) And for thy great gift of Peace. Grant us to be thy servants on earth; grant us to spread the light of thy …

Here the hindquarters of the donkey, represented by Albert the idiot, became active. Intentional was it, or accidental? “Look at the donkey! Look at the donkey!” A titter drowned Mr. Hardcastle’s prayer; and then he was heard saying:

… a happy homecoming with bodies refreshed by thy bounty, and minds inspired by thy wisdom. Amen.

Holding his fossil in front of him, Mr. Hardcastle marched off. The donkey was captured; hampers were loaded; and forming into a procession, the picnickers began to disappear over the hill.

Edgar (winding up the procession with Eleanor) To convert the heathen!

Eleanor. To help our fellow men!

(The actors disappeared into the bushes.)

Budge. … It’s time, gentlemen, time ladies, time to pack up and be gone. From where I stand, truncheon in hand, guarding respectability, and prosperity, and the purity of Victoria’s land, I see before me—(he pointed: there was Pointz Hall; the rooks cawing; the smoke rising)

’Ome, Sweet ’Ome.

The gramophone took up the strain: Through pleasures and palaces, etc. There’s no place like Home.

Budge. … Home, gentlemen; home, ladies, it’s time to pack up and go home. Don’t I see the fire (he pointed: one window blazed red) blazing ever higher? In kitchen; and nursery; drawing-room and library? That’s the fire of ’Ome. And see! Our Jane has brought the tea. Now children where’s the toys? Mama, your knitting, quick. For here (he swept his truncheon at Cobbet of Cobbs Corner) comes the bread-winner, home from the city, home from the counter, home from the shop. “Mama, a cup o’ tea.” “Children, gather round my knee. I will read aloud. Which shall it be? Sindbad the sailor? Or some simple tale from the Scriptures? And show you the pictures? What none of ’em? Then out with the bricks. Let’s build: A conservatory. A laboratory? A mechanics’ institute? Or shall it be a tower; with our flag on top; where our widowed Queen, after tea, calls the Royal orphans round her knee? For it’s ’Ome, ladies, ’Ome, gentlemen. Be it never so humble, there’s no place like ’Ome.”

The gramophone warbled Home, Sweet Home, and Budge, swaying slightly, descended from his box and followed the procession off the stage.

There was an interval.

“Oh but it was beautiful,” Mrs. Lynn Jones protested. Home she meant; the lamplit room; the ruby curtains; and Papa reading aloud.

They were rolling up the lake and uprooting the bulrushes. Real swallows were skimming over real grass. But she still saw the home.

“It was …” she repeated, referring to the home.

“Cheap and nasty, I call it,” snapped Etty Springett, referring to the play, and shot a vicious glance at Dodge’s green trousers, yellow spotted tie, and unbuttoned waistcoat.

But Mrs. Lynn Jones still saw the home. Was there, she mused, as Budge’s red baize pediment was rolled off, something—not impure, that wasn’t the word—but perhaps “unhygienic” about the home? Like a bit of meat gone sour, with whiskers, as the servants called it? Or why had it perished? Time went on and on like the hands of the kitchen clock. (The machine chuffed in the bushes.) If they had met with no resistance, she mused, nothing wrong, they’d still be going round and round and round. The Home would have remained; and Papa’s beard, she thought, would have grown and grown; and Mama’s knitting—what did she do with all her knitting?—Change had to come, she said to herself, or there’d have been yards and yards of Papa’s beard, of Mama’s knitting. Nowadays her son-in-law was clean shaven. Her daughter had a refrigerator…. Dear, how my mind wanders, she checked herself. What she meant was, change had to come, unless things were perfect; in which case she supposed they resisted Time. Heaven was changeless.

“Were they like that?” Isa asked abruptly. She looked at Mrs. Swithin as if she had been a dinosaur or a very diminutive mammoth. Extinct she must be, since she had lived in the reign of Queen Victoria.

Tick, tick, tick, went the machine in the bushes.

“The Victorians,” Mrs. Swithin mused. “I don’t believe” she said with her odd little smile, “that there ever were such people. Only you and me and William dressed differently.”

“You don’t believe in history,” said William.

The stage remained empty. The cows moved in the field. The shadows were deeper under the trees.

Mrs. Swithin caressed her cross. She gazed vaguely at the view. She was off, they guessed, on a circular tour of the imagination—one-making. Sheep, cows, grass, trees, ourselves—all are one. If discordant, producing harmony—if not to us, to a gigantic ear attached to a gigantic head. And thus—she was smiling benignly—the agony of the particular sheep, cow, or human being is necessary; and so—she was beaming seraphically at the gilt vane in the distance—we reach the conclusion that all is harmony, could we hear it. And we shall. Her eyes now rested on the white summit of a cloud. Well, if the thought gave her comfort, William and Isa smiled across her, let her think it.

Tick tick tick the machine reiterated.

“D’you get her meaning?” said Mrs. Swithin alighting suddenly. “Miss La Trobe’s?”

Isa, whose eyes had been wandering, shook her head.

“But you might say the same of Shakespeare,” said Mrs. Swithin.

“Shakespeare and the musical glasses!” Mrs. Manresa intervened. “Dear, what a barbarian you all make me feel!”

She turned to Giles. She invoked his help against this attack upon the jolly human heart.

“Tosh,” Giles muttered.

Nothing whatever appeared on the stage.

Darts of red and green light flashed from the rings on Mrs. Manresa’s fingers. He looked from them at Aunt Lucy. From her to William Dodge. From him to Isa. She refused to meet his eyes. And he looked down at his blood-stained tennis shoes.

He said (without words) “I’m damnably unhappy.”

“So am I,” Dodge echoed.

“And I too,” Isa thought.

They were all caught and caged; prisoners; watching a spectacle. Nothing happened. The tick of the machine was maddening.

“On, little donkey” Isa murmured, “crossing the desert … bearing your burden …”

She felt Dodge’s eye upon her as her lips moved. Always some cold eye crawled over the surface like a winter blue-bottle! She flicked him off.

“What a time they take!” she exclaimed irritably.

“Another interval,” Dodge read out, looking at the programme.

“And after that, what?” asked Lucy.

“Present time. Ourselves,” he read.

“Let’s hope to God that’s the end,” said Giles gruffly.

“Now you’re being naughty,” Mrs. Manresa reproved her little boy, her surly hero.

No one moved. There they sat, facing the empty stage, the cows, the meadows and the view, while the machine ticked in the bushes.

“What’s the object,” said Bartholomew, suddenly rousing himself, “of this entertainment?”

“The profits,” Isa read out from her blurred carbon copy, “are to go to a fund for installing electric light in the Church.”

“All our village festivals,” Mr. Oliver snorted turning to Mrs. Manresa, “end with a demand for money.”

“Of course, of course,” she murmured, deprecating his severity, and the coins in her bead bag jingled.

“Nothing’s done for nothing in England,” the old man continued. Mrs. Manresa protested. It might be true, perhaps, of the Victorians; but surely not of ourselves? Did she really believe that we were disinterested? Mr. Oliver demanded.

“Oh you don’t know my husband!” the wild child exclaimed, striking an attitude.

Admirable woman! You could trust her to crow when the hour struck like an alarm clock; to stop like an old bus horse when the bell rang. Oliver said nothing. Mrs. Manresa had out her mirror and attended to her face.

All their nerves were on edge. They sat exposed. The machine ticked. There was no music. The horns of cars on the high road were heard. And the swish of trees. They were neither one thing nor the other; neither Victorians nor themselves. They were suspended, without being, in limbo. Tick, tick, tick went the machine.

Isa fidgeted; glancing to right and to left over her shoulder.

“Four and twenty blackbirds, strung upon a string,” she muttered.

“Down came an Ostrich, an eagle, an executioner,

‘Which of you is ripe,’ he said, ‘to bake in my pie?’

Which of you is ripe, which of you is ready,

Come my pretty gentleman,

Come my pretty lady.’ …”

How long was she going to keep them waiting? “The present time. Ourselves.” They read it on the programme. Then they read what came next: “The profits are to go to a fund for installing electric light in the Church.” Where was the Church? Over there. You could see the spire among the trees.

“Ourselves….” They returned to the programme. But what could she know about ourselves? The Elizabethans yes; the Victorians, perhaps; but ourselves; sitting here on a June day in 1939—it was ridiculous. “Myself”—it was impossible. Other people, perhaps … Cobbet of Cobbs Corner; the Major; old Bartholomew; Mrs. Swithin—them, perhaps. But she won’t get me—no, not me. The audience fidgeted. Sounds of laughter came from the bushes. But nothing whatsoever appeared on the stage.

“What’s she keeping us waiting for?” Colonel Mayhew asked irritably. “They don’t need to dress up if it’s present time.”

Mrs. Mayhew agreed. Unless of course she was going to end with a Grand Ensemble. Army; Navy; Union Jack; and behind them perhaps—Mrs. Mayhew sketched what she would have done had it been her pageant—the Church. In cardboard. One window, looking east, brilliantly illuminated to symbolize—she could work that out when the time came.

“There she is, behind the tree,” she whispered, pointing at Miss La Trobe.

Miss La Trobe stood there with her eye on her script. “After Vic.” she had written, “try ten mins. of present time. Swallows, cows etc.” She wanted to expose them, as it were, to douche them, with present-time reality. But something was going wrong with the experiment. “Reality too strong,” she muttered. “Curse ’em!” She felt everything they felt. Audiences were the devil. O to write a play without an audience—the play. But here she was fronting her audience. Every second they were slipping the noose. Her little game had gone wrong. If only she’d a back-cloth to hang between the trees—to shut out cows, swallows, present time! But she had nothing. She had forbidden music. Grating her fingers in the bark, she damned the audience. Panic seized her. Blood seemed to pour from her shoes. This is death, death, death, she noted in the margin of her mind; when illusion fails. Unable to lift her hand, she stood facing the audience.

And then the shower fell, sudden, profuse.

No one had seen the cloud coming. There it was, black, swollen, on top of them. Down it poured like all the people in the world weeping. Tears, Tears. Tears.

“O that our human pain could here have ending!” Isa murmured. Looking up she received two great blots of rain full in her face. They trickled down her cheeks as if they were her own tears. But they were all people’s tears, weeping for all people. Hands were raised. Here and there a parasol opened. The rain was sudden and universal. Then it stopped. From the grass rose a fresh earthy smell.

“That’s done it,” sighed Miss La Trobe, wiping away the drops on her cheeks. Nature once more had taken her part. The risk she had run acting in the open air was justified. She brandished her script. Music began—A.B.C.—A.B.C. The tune was as simple as could be. But now that the shower had fallen, it was the other voice speaking, the voice that was no one’s voice. And the voice that wept for human pain unending said:

The King is in his counting house,

Counting out his money,

The Queen is in her parlour …

“O that my life could here have ending,” Isa murmured (taking care not to move her lips). Readily would she endow this voice with all her treasure if so be tears could be ended. The little twist of sound could have the whole of her. On the altar of the rain-soaked earth she laid down her sacrifice….

“O look!” she cried aloud.

That was a ladder. And that (a cloth roughly painted) was a wall. And that a man with a hod on his back. Mr. Page the reporter, licking his pencil, noted: “With the very limited means at her disposal, Miss La Trobe conveyed to the audience Civilization (the wall) in ruins; rebuilt (witness man with hod) by human effort; witness also woman handing bricks. Any fool could grasp that. Now issued black man in fuzzy wig; coffee-coloured ditto in silver turban; they signify presumably the League of …”

A burst of applause greeted this flattering tribute to ourselves. Crude of course. But then she had to keep expenses down. A painted cloth must convey—what the Times and Telegraph both said in their leaders that very morning.

The tune hummed:

The King is in his counting house,

Counting out his money,

The Queen is in her parlour

Eating …

Suddenly the tune stopped. The tune changed. A waltz, was it? Something half known, half not. The swallows danced it. Round and round, in and out they skimmed. Real swallows. Retreating and advancing. And the trees, O the trees, how gravely and sedately like senators in council, or the spaced pillars of some cathedral church…. Yes, they barred the music, and massed and hoarded; and prevented what was fluid from overflowing. The swallows—or martins were they?—The temple-haunting martins who come, have always come … Yes, perched on the wall, they seemed to foretell what after all the Times was saying yesterday. Homes will be built. Each flat with its refrigerator, in the crannied wall. Each of us a free man; plates washed by machinery; not an aeroplane to vex us; all liberated; made whole….

The tune changed; snapped; broke; jagged. Fox-trot was it? Jazz? Anyhow the rhythm kicked, reared, snapped short. What a jangle and a jingle! Well, with the means at her disposal, you can’t ask too much. What a cackle, a cacophony! Nothing ended. So abrupt. And corrupt. Such an outrage; such an insult. And not plain. Very up to date, all the same. What is her game? To disrupt? Jog and trot? Jerk and smirk? Put the finger to the nose? Squint and pry? Peak and spy? O the irreverence of the generation which is only momentarily—thanks be—“the young.” The young, who can’t make, but only break; shiver into splinters the old vision; smash to atoms what was whole. What a cackle, what a rattle, what a yaffle—as they call the woodpecker, the laughing bird that flits from tree to tree.

Look! Out they come, from the bushes—the riff-raff. Children? Imps—elves—demons. Holding what? Tin cans? Bedroom candlesticks? Old jars? My dear, that’s the cheval glass from the Rectory! And the mirror—that I lent her. My mother’s. Cracked. What’s the notion? Anything that’s bright enough to reflect, presumably, ourselves?

Ourselves! Ourselves!

Out they leapt, jerked, skipped. Flashing, dazzling, dancing, jumping. Now old Bart … he was caught. Now Manresa. Here a nose … There a skirt … Then trousers only … Now perhaps a face…. Ourselves? But that’s cruel. To snap us as we are, before we’ve had time to assume … And only, too, in parts…. That’s what’s so distorting and upsetting and utterly unfair.

Mopping, mowing, whisking, frisking, the looking glasses darted, flashed, exposed. People in the back rows stood up to see the fun. Down they sat, caught themselves … What an awful show-up! Even for the old who, one might suppose, hadn’t any longer any care about their faces…. And Lord! the jangle and the din! The very cows joined in. Walloping, tail lashing, the reticence of nature was undone, and the barriers which should divide Man the Master from the Brute were dissolved. Then the dogs joined in. Excited by the uproar, scurrying and worrying, here they came! Look at them! And the hound, the Afghan hound … look at him!

Then once more, in the uproar which by this time has passed quite beyond control, behold Miss Whatshername behind the tree summoned from the bushes—or was it they who broke away—Queen Bess; Queen Anne; and the girl in the Mall; and the Age of Reason; and Budge the policeman. Here they came. And the Pilgrims. And the lovers. And the grandfather’s clock. And the old man with a beard. They all appeared. What’s more, each declaimed some phrase or fragment from their parts … I am not (said one) in my perfect mind … Another, Reason am I … And I? I’m the old top hat…. Home is the hunter, home from the hill … Home? Where the miner sweats, and the maiden faith is rudely strumpeted…. Sweet and low; sweet and low, wind of the western sea … Is that a dagger that I see before me? … The owl hoots and the ivy mocks tap-tap-tapping on the pane…. Lady I love till I die, leave thy chamber and come … Where the worm weaves its winding sheet … I’d be a butterfly. I’d be a butterfly…. In thy will is our peace…. Here, Papa, take your book and read aloud…. Hark, hark, the dogs do bark and the beggars …

It was the cheval glass that proved too heavy. Young Bonthorp for all his muscle couldn’t lug the damned thing about any longer. He stopped. So did they all—hand glasses, tin cans, scraps of scullery glass, harness room glass, and heavily embossed silver mirrors—all stopped. And the audience saw themselves, not whole by any means, but at any rate sitting still.

The hands of the clock had stopped at the present moment. It was now. Ourselves.

So that was her little game! To show us up, as we are, here and how. All shifted, preened, minced; hands were raised, legs shifted. Even Bart, even Lucy, turned away. All evaded or shaded themselves—save Mrs. Manresa who, facing herself in the glass, used it as a glass; had out her mirror; powdered her nose; and moved one curl, disturbed by the breeze, to its place.

“Magnificent!” cried old Bartholomew. Alone she preserved unashamed her identity, and faced without blinking herself. Calmly she reddened her lips.

The mirror bearers squatted; malicious; observant; expectant; expository.

“That’s them,” the back rows were tittering. “Must we submit passively to this malignant indignity?” the front row demanded. Each turned ostensibly to say—O whatever came handy—to his neighbour. Each tried to shift an inch or two beyond the inquisitive insulting eye. Some made as if to go.

“The play’s over, I take it,” muttered Colonel Mayhew, retrieving his hat. “It’s time …”

But before they had come to any common conclusion, a voice asserted itself. Whose voice it was no one knew. It came from the bushes—a megaphontic, anonymous, loud-speaking affirmation. The voice said:

Before we part, ladies and gentlemen, before we go … (Those who had risen sat down) … let’s talk in words of one syllable, without larding, stuffing or cant. Let’s break the rhythm and forget the rhyme. And calmly consider ourselves. Ourselves. Some bony. Some fat. (The glasses confirmed this.) Liars most of us. Thieves too. (The glasses made no comment on that.) The poor are as bad as the rich are. Perhaps worse. Don’t hide among rags. Or let our cloth protect us. Or for the matter of that book learning; or skilful practice on pianos; or laying on of paint. Or presume there’s innocency in childhood. Consider the sheep. Or faith in love. Consider the dogs. Or virtue in those that have grown white hairs. Consider the gun slayers, bomb droppers here or there. They do openly what we do slyly. Take for example (here the megaphone adopted a colloquial, conversational tone) Mr. M’s bungalow. A view spoilt for ever. That’s murder … Or Mrs. E’s lipstick and blood-red nails…. A tyrant, remember, is half a slave. Item the vanity of Mr. H. the writer, scraping in the dunghill for sixpenny fame … Then there’s the amiable condescension of the lady of the manor—the upper class manner. And buying shares in the market to sell ’em…. O we’re all the same. Take myself now. Do I escape my own reprobation, simulating indignation, in the bush, among the leaves? There’s a rhyme, to suggest, in spite of protestation and the desire for immolation, I too have had some, what’s called, education … Look at ourselves, ladies and gentlemen! Then at the wall; and ask how’s this wall, the great wall, which we call, perhaps miscall, civilization, to be built by (here the mirrors flicked and flashed) orts, scraps and fragments like ourselves?

All the same here I change (by way of the rhyme mark ye) to a loftier strain—there’s something to be said: for our kindness to the cat; note too in to-day’s paper “Dearly loved by his wife”; and the impulse which leads us—mark you, when no one’s looking—to the window at midnight to smell the bean. Or the resolute refusal of some pimpled dirty little scrub in sandals to sell his soul. There is such a thing—you can’t deny it. What? You can’t descry it? All you can see of yourselves is scraps, orts and fragments? Well then listen to the gramophone affirming….

A hitch occurred here. The records had been mixed. Fox trot, Sweet lavender, Home Sweet Home, Rule Britannia—sweating profusely, Jimmy, who had charge of the music, threw them aside and fitted the right one—was it Bach, Handel, Beethoven, Mozart or nobody famous, but merely a traditional tune? Anyhow, thank heaven, it was somebody speaking after the anonymous bray of the infernal megaphone.

Like quicksilver sliding, filings magnetized, the distracted united. The tune began; the first note meant a second; the second a third. Then down beneath a force was born in opposition; then another. On different levels they diverged. On different levels ourselves went forward; flower gathering some on the surface; others descending to wrestle with the meaning; but all comprehending; all enlisted. The whole population of the mind’s immeasurable profundity came flocking; from the unprotected, the unskinned; and dawn rose; and azure; from chaos and cacophony measure; but not the melody of surface sound alone controlled it; but also the warring battle-plumed warriors straining asunder: To part? No. Compelled from the ends of the horizon; recalled from the edge of appalling crevasses; they crashed; solved; united. And some relaxed their fingers; and others uncrossed their legs.

Was that voice ourselves? Scraps, orts and fragments, are we, also, that? The voice died away.

As waves withdrawing uncover; as mist uplifting reveals; so, raising their eyes (Mrs. Manresa’s were wet; for an instant tears ravaged her powder) they saw, as waters withdrawing leave visible a tramp’s old boot, a man in a clergyman’s collar surreptitiously mounting a soap-box.

“The Rev. G. W. Streatfield,” the reporter licked his pencil and noted “then spoke …”

All gazed. What an intolerable constriction, contraction, and reduction to simplified absurdity he was to be sure! Of all incongruous sights a clergyman in the livery of his servitude to the summing up was the most grotesque and entire. He opened his mouth. O Lord, protect and preserve us from words the defilers, from words the impure! What need have we of words to remind us? Must I be Thomas, you Jane?

As if a rook had hopped unseen to a prominent bald branch, he touched his collar and hemmed his preliminary croak. One fact mitigated the horror; his forefinger, raised in the customary manner, was stained with tobacco juice. He wasn’t such a bad fellow; the Rev. G. W. Streatfield; a piece of traditional church furniture; a corner cupboard; or the top beam of a gate, fashioned by generations of village carpenters after some lost-in-the-mists-of-antiquity model.

He looked at the audience; then up at the sky. The whole lot of them, gentles and simples, felt embarrassed, for him, for themselves. There he stood their representative spokesman; their symbol; themselves; a butt, a clod, laughed at by looking-glasses; ignored by the cows, condemned by the clouds which continued their majestic rearrangement of the celestial landscape; an irrelevant forked stake in the flow and majesty of the summer silent world.

His first words (the breeze had risen; the leaves were rustling) were lost. Then he was heard saying: “What.” To that word he added another “Message”; and at last a whole sentence emerged; not comprehensible; say rather audible. “What message,” it seemed he was asking, “was our pageant meant to convey?”

They folded their hands in the traditional manner as if they were seated in church.

“I have been asking myself”—the words were repeated—“what meaning, or message, this pageant was meant to convey?”

If he didn’t know, calling himself Reverend, also M. A., who after all could?

“As one of the audience,” he continued (words now put on meaning) “I will offer, very humbly, for I am not a critic”—and he touched the white gate that enclosed his neck with a yellow forefinger—“my interpretation. No, that is too bold a word. The gifted lady …” He looked round. La Trobe was invisible. He continued: “Speaking merely as one of the audience, I confess I was puzzled. For what reason, I asked, were we shown these scenes? Briefly, it is true. The means at our disposal this afternoon were limited. Still we were shown different groups. We were shown, unless I mistake, the effort renewed. A few were chosen; the many passed in the background. That surely we were shown. But again, were we not given to understand—am I too presumptuous? Am I treading, like angels, where as a fool I should absent myself? To me at least it was indicated that we are members one of another. Each is part of the whole. Yes, that occurred to me, sitting among you in the audience. Did I not perceive Mr. Hardcastle here” (he pointed) “at one time a Viking? And in Lady Harridan—excuse me, if I get the names wrong—a Canterbury pilgrim? We act different parts; but are the same. That I leave to you. Then again, as the play or pageant proceeded, my attention was distracted. Perhaps that too was part of the producer’s intention? I thought I perceived that nature takes her part. Dare we, I asked myself, limit life to ourselves? May we not hold that there is a spirit that inspires, pervades …” (the swallows were sweeping round him. They seemed cognizant of his meaning. Then they swept out of sight.) “I leave that to you. I am not here to explain. That role has not been assigned me. I speak only as one of the audience, one of ourselves. I caught myself too reflected, as it happened in my own mirror …” (Laughter) “Scraps, orts and fragments! Surely, we should unite?”

“But” (“but” marked a new paragraph) “I speak also in another capacity. As Treasurer of the Fund. In which capacity” (he consulted a sheet of paper) “I am glad to be able to tell you that a sum of thirty-six pounds ten shillings and eightpence has been raised by this afternoon’s entertainment towards our object: the illumination of our dear old church.”

“Applause,” the reporter reported.

Mr. Streatfield paused. He listened. Did he hear some distant music?

He continued: “But there is still a deficit” (he consulted his paper) “of one hundred and seventy-five pounds odd. So that each of us who has enjoyed this pageant has still an opp …” The word was cut in two. A zoom severed it. Twelve aeroplanes in perfect formation like a flight of wild duck came overhead. That was the music. The audience gaped; the audience gazed. Then zoom became drone. The planes had passed.

“… portunity,” Mr. Streatfield continued, “to make a contribution.” He signalled. Instantly collecting boxes were in operation. Hidden behind glasses they emerged. Coppers rattled. Silver jingled. But O what a pity—how creepy it made one feel! Here came Albert, the idiot, jingling his collecting box—an aluminium saucepan without a lid. You couldn’t very well deny him, poor fellow. Shillings were dropped. He rattled and sniggered; chattered and jibbered. As Mrs. Parker made her contribution—half a crown as it happened—she appealed to Mr. Streatfield to exorcize this evil, to extend the protection of his cloth.

The good man contemplated the idiot benignly. His faith had room, he indicated, for him too. He too, Mr. Streatfield appeared to be saying, is part of ourselves. But not a part we like to recognize, Mrs. Springett added silently, dropping her sixpence.

Contemplating the idiot, Mr. Streatfield had lost the thread of his discourse. His command over words seemed gone. He twiddled the cross on his watchchain. Then his hand sought his trouser pocket. Surreptitiously he extracted a small silver box. It was plain to all that the natural desire of the natural man was overcoming him. He had no further use for words.

“And now,” he resumed, cuddling the pipe lighter in the palm of his hand, “for the pleasantest part of my duty. To propose a vote of thanks to the gifted lady …” He looked round for an object corresponding to this description. None such was visible. “… who wishes it seems to remain anonymous.” He paused. “And so …” He paused again.

It was an awkward moment. How to make an end? Whom to thank? Every sound in nature was painfully audible; the swish of the trees; the gulp of a cow; even the skim of the swallows over the grass could be heard. But no one spoke. Whom could they make responsible? Whom could they thank for their entertainment? Was there no one?

Then there was a scuffle behind the bush; a preliminary premonitory scratching. A needle scraped a disc; chuff, chuff chuff; then having found the rut, there was a roll and a flutter which portended God … (they all rose to their feet) Save the King.

Standing the audience faced the actors; who also stood with their collecting boxes quiescent, their looking-glasses hidden, and the robes of their various parts hanging stiff.

Happy and glorious,

Long to reign over us

God save the King

The notes died away.

Was that the end? The actors were reluctant to go. They lingered; they mingled. There was Budge the policeman talking to old Queen Bess. And the Age of Reason hobnobbed with the foreparts of the donkey. And Mrs. Hardcastle patted out the folds of her crinoline. And little England, still a child, sucked a peppermint drop out of a bag. Each still acted the unacted part conferred on them by their clothes. Beauty was on them. Beauty revealed them. Was it the light that did it?—the tender, the fading, the uninquisitive but searching light of evening that reveals depths in water and makes even the red brick bungalow radiant?

“Look,” the audience whispered, “O look, look, look.—” And once more they applauded; and the actors joined hands and bowed.

Old Mrs. Lynn Jones, fumbling for her bag, sighed, “What a pity—must they change?”

But it was time to pack up and be off.

“Home, gentlemen; home ladies; it’s time to pack up and be off,” the reporter whistled, snapping the band round his notebook. And Mrs. Parker was stooping.

“I’m afraid I’ve dropped my glove. I’m so sorry to trouble you. Down there, between the seats….”

The gramophone was affirming in tones there was no denying, triumphant yet valedictory: Dispersed are we; who have come together. But, the gramophone asserted, let us retain whatever made that harmony.

O let us, the audience echoed (stooping, peering, fumbling), keep together. For there is joy, sweet joy, in company.

Dispersed are we, the gramophone repeated.

And the audience turning saw the flaming windows, each daubed with golden sun; and murmured: “Home, gentlemen; sweet …” yet delayed a moment, seeing through the golden glory perhaps a crack in the boiler; perhaps a hole in the carpet; and hearing, perhaps, the daily drop of the daily bill.

Dispersed are we, the gramophone informed them. And dismissed them. So, straightening themselves for the last time, each grasping, it might be a hat, or a stick or a pair of suede gloves, for the last time they applauded Budge and Queen Bess; the trees; the white road; Bolney Minster; and the Folly. One hailed another, and they dispersed, across lawns, down paths, past the house to the gravel-strewn crescent, where cars, push bikes and cycles were crowded together.

Friends hailed each other in passing.

“I do think,” someone was saying, “Miss Whatshername should have come forward and not left it to the rector … After all, she wrote it…. I thought it brilliantly clever … O my dear, I thought it utter bosh. Did you understand the meaning? Well, he said she meant we all act all parts…. He said, too, if I caught his meaning, Nature takes part…. Then there was the idiot…. Also, why leave out the Army, as my husband was saying, if it’s history? And if one spirit animates the whole, what about the aeroplanes? … Ah, but you’re being too exacting. After all, remember, it was only a village play…. For my part, I think they should have passed a vote of thanks to the owners. When we had our pageant, the grass didn’t recover till autumn … Then we had tents…. That’s the man, Cobbet of Cobbs Corner, who wins all the prizes at all the shows. I don’t myself admire prize flowers, nor yet prize dogs …”

Dispersed are we, the gramophone triumphed, yet lamented, Dispersed are we….

“But you must remember,” the old cronies chatted, “they had to do it on the cheap. You can’t get people, at this time o’ year, to rehearse. There’s the hay, let alone the movies…. What we need is a centre. Something to bring us all together … The Brookes have gone to Italy, in spite of everything. Rather rash? … If the worst should come—let’s hope it won’t—they’d hire an aeroplane, so they said…. What amused me was old Streatfield, feeling for his pouch. I like a man to be natural, not always on a perch … Then those voices from the bushes…. Oracles? You’re referring to the Greeks? Were the oracles, if I’m not being irreverent, a foretaste of our own religion? Which is what? … Crepe soles? That’s so sensible … They last much longer and protect the feet…. But I was saying: can the Christian faith adapt itself? In times like these … At Larting no one goes to church … There’s the dogs, there’s the pictures…. It’s odd that science, so they tell me, is making things (so to speak) more spiritual … The very latest notion, so I’m told is, nothing’s solid … There, you can get a glimpse of the church through the trees….

“Mr. Umphelby! How nice to see you! Do come and dine … No, alas, we’re going back to town. The House is sitting … I was telling them, the Brookes have gone to Italy. They’ve seen the volcano. Most impressive, so they say—they were lucky—in eruption. I agree—things look worse than ever on the continent. And what’s the channel, come to think of it, if they mean to invade us? The aeroplanes, I didn’t like to say it, made one think…. No, I thought it much too scrappy. Take the idiot. Did she mean, so to speak, something hidden, the unconscious as they call it? But why always drag in sex…. It’s true, there’s a sense in which we all, I admit, are savages still. Those women with red nails. And dressing up—what’s that? The old savage, I suppose…. That’s the bell. Ding dong. Ding … Rather a cracked old bell … And the mirrors! Reflecting us … I called that cruel. One feels such a fool, caught unprotected … There’s Mr. Streatfield, going, I suppose to take the evening service. He’ll have to hurry, or he won’t have time to change…. He said she meant we all act. Yes, but whose play? Ah, that’s the question! And if we’re left asking questions, isn’t it a failure, as a play? I must say I like to feel sure if I go to the theatre, that I’ve grasped the meaning … Or was that, perhaps, what she meant? … Ding dong. Ding … that if we don’t jump to conclusions, if you think, and I think, perhaps one day, thinking differently, we shall think the same?

“There’s dear old Mr. Carfax … Can’t we give you a lift, if you don’t mind playing bodkin? We were asking questions, Mr. Carfax, about the play. The looking-glasses now—did they mean the reflection is the dream; and the tune—was it Bach, Handel, or no one in particular—is the truth? Or was it t’other way about?

“Bless my soul, what a dither! Nobody seems to know one car from another. That’s why I have a mascot, a monkey … But I can’t see it … While we’re waiting, tell me, did you feel when the shower fell, someone wept for us all? There’s a poem, Tears tears tears, it begins. And goes on O then the unloosened ocean … but I can’t remember the rest.

“Then when Mr. Streatfield said: One spirit animates the whole—the aeroplanes interrupted. That’s the worst of playing out of doors…. Unless of course she meant that very thing … Dear me, the parking arrangements are not what you might call adequate … I shouldn’t have expected either so many Hispano-Suizas … That’s a Rolls … That’s a Bentley … That’s the new type of Ford…. To return to the meaning—Are machines the devil, or do they introduce a discord … Ding dong, ding … by means of which we reach the final … Ding dong…. Here’s the car with the monkey … Hop in … And good-bye, Mrs. Parker … Ring us up. Next time we’re down don’t forget … Next time … Next time …”

The wheels scrurred on the gravel. The cars drove off.

The gramophone gurgled Unity—Dispersity. It gurgled Un … dis … And ceased.

The little company who had come together at luncheon were left standing on the terrace. The pilgrims had bruised a lane on the grass. Also, the lawn would need a deal of clearing up. Tomorrow the telephone would ring: “Did I leave my handbag? … A pair of spectacles in a red leather case? … A little old brooch of no value to anyone but me?” Tomorrow the telephone would ring.

Now Mr. Oliver said: “Dear lady,” and, taking Mrs. Manresa’s gloved hand in his, pressed it, as if to say: “You have given me what you now take from me.” He would have liked to hold on for a moment longer to the emeralds and rubies dug up, so people said, by thin Ralph Manresa in his ragamuffin days. But alas, sunset light was unsympathetic to her make-up; plated it looked, not deeply interfused. And he dropped her hand; and she gave him an arch roguish twinkle, as if to say—but the end of that sentence was cut short. For she turned, and Giles stepped forward; and the light breeze which the meteorologist had foretold fluttered her skirts; and she went, like a goddess, buoyant, abundant, with flower-chained captives following in her wake.

All were retreating, withdrawing and dispersing; and he was left with the ash grown cold and no glow, no glow on the log. What word expressed the sag at his heart, the effusion in his veins, as the retreating Manresa, with Giles attendant, admirable woman, all sensation, ripped the rag doll and let the sawdust stream from his heart?

The old man made a guttural sound, and turned to the right. On with the hobble, on with the limp, since the dance was over. He strolled alone past the trees. It was here, early that very morning, that he had destroyed the little boy’s world. He had popped out with his newspaper; the child had cried.

Down in the dell, past the lily pool, the actors were undressing. He could see them among the brambles. In vests and trousers; unhooking; buttoning up: on all fours; stuffing clothes into cheap attaché cases; with silver swords, beards and emeralds on the grass. Miss La Trobe in coat and skirt—too short, for her legs were stout—battled with the billows of a crinoline. He must respect the conventions. So he stopped, by the pool. The water was opaque over the mud.

Then, coming up behind him, “Oughtn’t we to thank her?” Lucy asked him. She gave him a light pat on the arm.

How imperceptive her religion made her! The fumes of that incense obscured the human heart. Skimming the surface, she ignored the battle in the mud. After La Trobe had been excruciated by the Rector’s interpretation, by the maulings and the manglings of the actors … “She don’t want our thanks, Lucy,” he said gruffly. What she wanted, like that carp (something moved in the water) was darkness in the mud; a whisky and soda at the pub; and coarse words descending like maggots through the waters.

“Thank the actors, not the author,” he said. “Or ourselves, the audience.”

He looked over his shoulder. The old lady, the indigenous, the prehistoric, was being wheeled away by a footman. He rolled her through the arch. Now the lawn was empty. The line of the roof, the upright chimneys, rose hard and red against the blue of the evening. The house emerged; the house that had been obliterated. He was damned glad it was over—the scurry and the scuffle, the rouge and the rings. He stooped and raised a peony that had shed its petals. Solitude had come again. And reason and the lamplit paper…. But where was his dog? Chained in a kennel? The little veins swelled with rage on his temples. He whistled. And here, released by Candish, racing across the lawn with a fleck of foam on the nostril, came his dog.

Lucy still gazed at the lily pool. “All gone,” she murmured, “under the leaves.” Scared by shadows passing, the fish had withdrawn. She gazed at the water. Perfunctorily she caressed her cross. But her eyes went water searching, looking for fish. The lilies were shutting; the red lily, the white lily, each on its plate of leaf. Above, the air rushed; beneath was water. She stood between two fluidities, caressing her cross. Faith required hours of kneeling in the early morning. Often the delight of the roaming eye seduced her—a sunbeam, a shadow. Now the jagged leaf at the corner suggested, by its contours, Europe. There were other leaves. She fluttered her eye over the surface, naming leaves India, Africa, America. Islands of security, glossy and thick.

“Bart …” She spoke to him. She had meant to ask him about the dragon-fly—couldn’t the blue thread settle, if we destroyed it here, then there? But he had gone into the house.

Then something moved in the water; her favourite fantail. The golden orfe followed. Then she had a glimpse of silver—the great carp himself, who came to the surface so very seldom. They slid on, in and out between the stalks, silver; pink; gold; splashed; streaked; pied.

“Ourselves,” she murmured. And retrieving some glint of faith from the grey waters, hopefully, without much help from reason, she followed the fish; the speckled, streaked, and blotched; seeing in that vision beauty, power, and glory in ourselves.

Fish had faith, she reasoned. They trust us because we’ve never caught ’em. But her brother would reply: “That’s greed.” “Their beauty!” she protested. “Sex,” he would say. “Who makes sex susceptible to beauty?” she would argue. He shrugged who? Why? Silenced, she returned to her private vision; of beauty which is goodness; the sea on which we float. Mostly impervious, but surely every boat sometimes leaks?

He would carry the torch of reason till it went out in the darkness of the cave. For herself, every morning, kneeling, she protected her vision. Every night she opened the window and looked at leaves against the sky. Then slept. Then the random ribbons of birds’ voices woke her.

The fish had come to the surface. She had nothing to give them—not a crumb of bread. “Wait, my darlings,” she addressed them. She would trot into the house and ask Mrs. Sands for a biscuit. Then a shadow fell. Off they flashed. How vexatious! Who was it? Dear me, the young man whose name she had forgotten; not Jones; nor Hodge …

Dodge had left Mrs. Manresa abruptly. All over the garden he had been searching for Mrs. Swithin. Now he found her; and she had forgotten his name.

“I’m William,” he said. At that she revived, like a girl in a garden in white, among roses, who came running to meet him—an unacted part.

“I was going to get a biscuit—no, to thank the actors,” she stumbled, virginal, blushing. Then she remembered her brother. “My brother,” she added “says one mustn’t thank the author, Miss La Trobe.”

It was always “my brother … my brother” who rose from the depths of her lily pool.

As for the actors, Hammond had detached his whiskers and was now buttoning up his coat. When the chain was inserted between the buttons he was off.

Only Miss La Trobe remained, bending over something in the grass.

“The play’s over,” he said. “The actors have departed.”

“And we mustn’t, my brother says, thank the author,” Mrs. Swithin repeated, looking in the direction of Miss La Trobe.

“So I thank you,” he said. He took her hand and pressed it. Putting one thing with another, it was unlikely that they would ever meet again.

The church bells always stopped, leaving you to ask: Won’t there be another note? Isa, half-way across the lawn, listened…. Ding, dong, ding … There was not going to be another note. The congregation was assembled, on their knees, in the church. The service was beginning. The play was over; swallows skimmed the grass that had been the stage.

There was Dodge, the lip reader, her semblable, her conspirator, a seeker like her after hidden faces. He was hurrying to rejoin Mrs. Manresa who had gone in front with Giles—“the father of my children,” she muttered. The flesh poured over her, the hot, nerve wired, now lit up, now dark as the grave physical body. By way of healing the rusty fester of the poisoned dart she sought the face that all day long she had been seeking. Preening and peering, between backs, over shoulders, she had sought the man in grey. He had given her a cup of tea at a tennis party; handed her, once, a racquet. That was all. But, she was crying, had we met before the salmon leapt like a bar of silver … had we met, she was crying. And when her little boy came battling through the bodies in the Barn “Had he been his son,” she had muttered … In passing she stripped the bitter leaf that grew, as it happened, outside the nursery window. Old Man’s Beard. Shrivelling the shreds in lieu of words, for no words grow there, nor roses either, she swept past her conspirator, her semblable, the seeker after vanished faces “like Venus” he thought, making a rough translation, “to her prey …” and followed after.

Turning the corner, there was Giles attached to Mrs. Manresa. She was standing at the door of her car. Giles had his foot on the edge of the running board. Did they perceive the arrows about to strike them?

“Jump in, Bill,” Mrs. Manresa chaffed him.

And the wheels scurred on the gravel, and the car drove off.

At last, Miss La Trobe could raise herself from her stooping position. It had been prolonged to avoid attention. The bells had stopped; the audience had gone; also the actors. She could straighten her back. She could open her arms. She could say to the world, You have taken my gift! Glory possessed her—for one moment. But what had she given? A cloud that melted into the other clouds on the horizon. It was in the giving that the triumph was. And the triumph faded. Her gift meant nothing. If they had understood her meaning; if they had known their parts; if the pearls had been real and the funds illimitable—it would have been a better gift. Now it had gone to join the others.

“A failure,” she groaned, and stooped to put away the records.

Then suddenly the starlings attacked the tree behind which she had hidden. In one flock they pelted it like so many winged stones. The whole tree hummed with the whizz they made, as if each bird plucked a wire. A whizz, a buzz rose from the bird-buzzing, bird-vibrant, bird-blackened tree. The tree became a rhapsody, a quivering cacophony, a whizz and vibrant rapture, branches, leaves, birds syllabling discordantly life, life, life, without measure, without stop devouring the tree. Then up! Then off!

What interrupted? It was old Mrs. Chalmers, creeping through the grass with a bunch of flowers—pinks apparently—to fill the vase that stood on her husband’s grave. In winter it was holly, or ivy. In summer, a flower. It was she who had scared the starlings. Now she passed.

Miss La Trobe nicked the lock and hoisted the heavy case of gramophone records to her shoulder. She crossed the terrace and stopped by the tree where the starlings had gathered. It was here that she had suffered triumph, humiliation, ecstasy, despair—for nothing. Her heels had ground a hole in the grass.

It was growing dark. Since there were no clouds to trouble the sky, the blue was bluer, the green greener. There was no longer a view—no Folly, no spire of Bolney Minster. It was land merely, no land in particular. She put down her case and stood looking at the land. Then something rose to the surface.

“I should group them,” she murmured, “here.” It would be midnight; there would be two figures, half concealed by a rock. The curtain would rise. What would the first words be? The words escaped her.

Again she lifted the heavy suit case to her shoulder. She strode off across the lawn. The house was dormant; one thread of smoke thickened against the trees. It was strange that the earth, with all those flowers incandescent—the lilies, the roses, and clumps of white flowers and bushes of burning green—should still be hard. From the earth green waters seemed to rise over her. She took her voyage away from the shore, and, raising her hand, fumbled for the latch of the iron entrance gate.

She would drop her suit case in at the kitchen window, and then go on up to the Inn. Since the row with the actress who had shared her bed and her purse the need of drink had grown on her. And the horror and the terror of being alone. One of these days she would break—which of the village laws? Sobriety? Chastity? Or take something that did not properly belong to her?

At the corner she ran into old Mrs. Chalmers returning from the grave. The old woman looked down at the dead flowers she was carrying and cut her. The women in the cottages with the red geraniums always did that. She was an outcast. Nature had somehow set her apart from her kind. Yet she had scribbled in the margin of her manuscript: “I am the slave of my audience.”

She thrust her suit case in at the scullery window and walked on, till at the corner she saw the red curtain at the bar window. There would be shelter; voices; oblivion. She turned the handle of the public house door. The acrid smell of stale beer saluted her; and voices talking. They stopped. They had been talking about Bossy as they called her—it didn’t matter. She took her chair and looked through the smoke at a crude glass painting of a cow in a stable; also at a cock and a hen. She raised her glass to her lips. And drank. And listened. Words of one syllable sank down into the mud. She drowsed; she nodded. The mud became fertile. Words rose above the intolerably laden dumb oxen plodding through the mud. Words without meaning—wonderful words.

The cheap clock ticked; smoke obscured the pictures. Smoke became tart on the roof of her mouth. Smoke obscured the earth-coloured jackets. She no longer saw them, yet they upheld her, sitting arms akimbo with her glass before her. There was the high ground at midnight; there the rock; and two scarcely perceptible figures. Suddenly the tree was pelted with starlings. She set down her glass. She heard the first words.

Down in the hollow, at Pointz Hall, beneath the trees, the table was cleared in the dining room. Candish, with his curved brush had swept the crumbs; had spared the petals and finally left the family to dessert. The play was over, the strangers gone, and they were alone—the family.

Still the play hung in the sky of the mind—moving, diminishing, but still there. Dipping her raspberry in sugar, Mrs. Swithin looked at the play. She said, popping the berry into her mouth, “What did it mean?” and added: “The peasants; the kings; the fool and” (she swallowed) “ourselves?”

They all looked at the play; Isa, Giles and Mr. Oliver. Each of course saw something different. In another moment it would be beneath the horizon, gone to join the other plays. Mr. Oliver, holding out his cheroot said: “Too ambitious.” And, lighting his cheroot he added: “Considering her means.”

It was drifting away to join the other clouds: becoming invisible. Through the smoke Isa saw not the play but the audience dispersing. Some drove; others cycled. A gate swung open. A car swept up the drive to the red villa in the cornfields. Low hanging boughs of acacia brushed the roof. Acacia petalled the car arrived.

“The looking-glasses and the voices in the bushes,” she murmured. “What did she mean?”

“When Mr. Streatfield asked her to explain, she wouldn’t,” said Mrs. Swithin.

Here, with its sheaf sliced in four, exposing a white cone, Giles offered his wife a banana. She refused it. He stubbed his match on the plate. Out it went with a little fizz in the raspberry juice.

“We should be thankful,” said Mrs. Swithin, folding her napkin, “for the weather, which was perfect, save for one shower.”

Here she rose, Isa followed her across the hall to the big room.

They never pulled the curtains till it was too dark to see, nor shut the windows till it was too cold. Why shut out the day before it was over? The flowers were still bright; the birds chirped. You could see more in the evening often when nothing interrupted, when there was no fish to order, no telephone to answer. Mrs. Swithin stopped by the great picture of Venice—school of Canaletto. Possibly in the hood of the gondola there was a little figure—a woman, veiled; or a man?

Isa, sweeping her sewing from the table, sank, her knee doubled, into the chair by the window. Within the shell of the room she overlooked the summer night. Lucy returned from her voyage into the picture and stood silent. The sun made each pane of her glasses shine red. Silver sparkled on her black shawl. For a moment she looked like a tragic figure from another play.

Then she spoke in her usual voice. “We made more this year than last, he said. But then last year it rained.”

“This year, last year, next year, never …” Isa murmured. Her hand burnt in the sun on the window sill. Mrs. Swithin took her knitting from the table.

“Did you feel,” she asked “what he said: we act different parts but are the same?”

“Yes,” Isa answered. “No,” she added. It was Yes, No. Yes, yes, yes, the tide rushed out embracing. No, no no, it contracted. The old boot appeared on the shingle.

“Orts, scraps and fragments,” she quoted what she remembered of the vanishing play.

Lucy had just opened her lips to reply, and had laid her hand on her cross caressingly, when the gentlemen came in. She made her little chirruping sound of welcome. She shuffled her feet to clear a space. But in fact there was more space than was needed, and great hooded chairs.

They sat down, ennobled both of them by the setting sun. Both had changed. Giles now wore the black coat and white tie of the professional classes, which needed—Isa looked down at his feet—patent leather pumps. “Our representative, our spokesman,” she sneered. Yet he was extraordinarily handsome. “The father of my children, whom I love and hate.” Love and hate—how they tore her asunder! Surely it was time someone invented a new plot, or that the author came out from the bushes …

Here Candish came in. He brought the second post on a silver salver. There were letters; bills; and the morning paper—the paper that obliterated the day before. Like a fish rising to a crumb of biscuit, Bartholomew snapped at the paper. Giles slit the flap of an apparently business document. Lucy read a criss-cross from an old friend at Scarborough. Isa had only bills.

The usual sounds reverberated through the shell; Sands making up the fire; Candish stoking the boiler. Isa had done with her bills. Sitting in the shell of the room she watched the pageant fade. The flowers flashed before they faded. She watched them flash.

The paper crackled. The second hand jerked on. M. Daladier had pegged down the franc. The girl had gone skylarking with the troopers. She had screamed. She had hit him…. What then?

When Isa looked at the flowers again, the flowers had faded.

Bartholomew flicked on the reading lamp. The circle of the readers, attached to white papers, was lit up. There in that hollow of the sun-baked field were congregated the grasshopper, the ant, and the beetle, rolling pebbles of sun-baked earth through the glistening stubble. In that rosy corner of the sun-baked field Bartholomew, Giles and Lucy polished and nibbled and broke off crumbs. Isa watched them.

Then the newspaper dropped.

“Finished?” said Giles, taking it from his father.

The old man relinquished his paper. He basked. One hand caressing the dog rippled folds of skin towards the collar.

The clock ticked. The house gave little cracks as if it were very brittle, very dry. Isa’s hand on the window felt suddenly cold. Shadow had obliterated the garden. Roses had withdrawn for the night.

Mrs. Swithin folding her letter murmured to Isa: “I looked in and saw the babies, sound asleep, under the paper roses.”

“Left over from the coronation,” Bartholomew muttered, half asleep.

“But we needn’t have been to all that trouble with the decorations,” Lucy added, “for it didn’t rain this year.”

“This year, last year, next year, never,” Isa murmured.

“Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor,” Bartholomew echoed. He was talking in his sleep.

Lucy slipped her letter into its envelope. It was time to read now, her Outline of History. But she had lost her place. She turned the pages looking at pictures—mammoths, mastodons, prehistoric birds. Then she found the page where she had stopped.

The darkness increased. The breeze swept round the room. With a little shiver Mrs. Swithin drew her sequin shawl about her shoulders. She was too deep in the story to ask for the window to be shut. “England,” she was reading, “was then a swamp. Thick forests covered the land. On the top of their matted branches birds sang …”

The great square of the open window showed only sky now. It was drained of light, severe, stone cold. Shadows fell. Shadows crept over Bartholomew’s high forehead; over his great nose. He looked leafless, spectral, and his chair monumental. As a dog shudders its skin, his skin shuddered. He rose, shook himself, glared at nothing, and stalked from the room. They heard the dog’s paws padding on the carpet behind him.

Lucy turned the page, quickly, guiltily, like a child who will be told to go to bed before the end of the chapter.

“Prehistoric man,” she read, “half-human, half-ape, roused himself from his semi-crouching position and raised great stones.”

She slipped the letter from Scarborough between the pages to mark the end of the chapter, rose, smiled, and tiptoed silently out of the room.

The old people had gone up to bed. Giles crumpled the newspaper and turned out the light. Left alone together for the first time that day, they were silent. Alone, enmity was bared; also love. Before they slept, they must fight; after they had fought, they would embrace. From that embrace another life might be born. But first they must fight, as the dog fox fights with the vixen, in the heart of darkness, in the fields of night.

Isa let her sewing drop. The great hooded chairs had become enormous. And Giles too. And Isa too against the window. The window was all sky without colour. The house had lost its shelter. It was night before roads were made, or houses. It was the night that dwellers in caves had watched from some high place among rocks.

Then the curtain rose. They spoke.

[]

THE DEATH
OF THE MOTH,
and other essays

by
Virginia Woolf

published
1942
by
The Hogarth Press

the death of the moth

Editorial Note.

The Death of the Moth.

Evening Over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor Car.

Three Pictures.

Old Mrs. Grey.

Street Haunting: A London Adventure.

Jones and Wilkinson.

“Twelfth Night” At the Old Vic.

Madame de Sévigné.

The Humane Art.

Two Antiquaries: Walpole and Cole.

The Rev William Cole.

The Historian and “The Gibbon”.

Reflections at Sheffield Place.

The Man at the Gate.

Sara Coleridge.

“Not One of Us”.

Henry James: 1. Within the Rim.

Henry James: 2. The Old Order.

Henry James: 3. The Letters of Henry James.

George Moore.

The Novels of E.M. Forster.

Middlebrow.

The Art of Biography.

Craftsmanship.

A Letter to a Young Poet.

Why?

Professions for Women.

Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid.

[]

[The text follows the 1981 Hogarth Press edition.]

Editorial Note.

It is ten years since Virginia Woolf published her last volume of collected essays, The Common Reader: Second Series. At the time of her death she was already engaged in getting together essays for a further volume, which she proposed to publish in the autumn of 1941 or the spring of 1942. She also intended to publish a new book of short stories, including in it some or all of Monday or Tuesday, which has been long out of print.

She left behind her a considerable number of essays, sketches, and short stories, some unpublished and some previously published in newspapers; there are, indeed, enough to fill three or four volumes. For this book I have made a selection from these. Some of them are now published for the first time; others have appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, The New Statesman & Nation, The Yale Review, The New York Herald Tribune, The Atlantic Monthly, The Listener, The New Republic, and Lysistrata.

If she had lived, there is no doubt that she would have made large alterations and revisions in nearly all these essays before allowing them to appear in volume form. Knowing this, one naturally hesitates to publish them as they were left. I have decided to do so, first because they seem to me worth republishing, and second because at any rate those which have already appeared in journals have in fact been written and revised with immense care. I do not think that Virginia Woolf ever contributed any article to any paper which she did not write and rewrite several times. The following facts will, perhaps, show how seriously she took the art of writing even for the newspaper. Shortly before her death she wrote an article reviewing a book. The author of the book subsequently wrote to the editor saying that the article was so good that he would greatly like to have the typescript of it if the editor would give it to him. The editor forwarded the letter to me, saying that he had not got the typescript and suggesting that if I could find it, I might send it to the author. I found among my wife’s papers the original draft of the article in her handwriting and no fewer than eight or nine complete revisions of it which she had herself typed out.

Nearly all the longer critical essays included in this volume have been subjected by her to this kind of revision before they were originally published. This is, however, not true of the others, particularly of the first four essays. These were written by her, as usual, in handwriting and were then typed out in rather a rough state. I have printed them as they stand, except that I have punctuated them and corrected obvious verbal mistakes. I have not hesitated to do this, since I always revised the MSS. of her books and articles in this way before they were published.

Leonard Woolf.

[]

The Death of the Moth.

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

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

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

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

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

[written ca. 1927]

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Evening Over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor Car.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[written in 1930]

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Three Pictures.

The First Picture

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

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

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

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

The Second Picture

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

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

The Third Picture

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

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

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

What a picture it made!

[written in June 1929]

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Old Mrs. Grey.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The jerked limbs were still again.

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

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

[written in 1932]

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Street Haunting: A London Adventure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

She came in escorted by two women who, being of normal size, looked like benevolent giants beside her. Smiling at the shop girls, they seemed to be disclaiming any lot in her deformity and assuring her of their protection. She wore the peevish yet apologetic expression usual on the faces of the deformed. She needed their kindness, yet she resented it. But when the shop girl had been summoned and the giantesses, smiling indulgently, had asked for shoes for “this lady” and the girl had pushed the little stand in front of her, the dwarf stuck her foot out with an impetuosity which seemed to claim all our attention. Look at that! Look at that! she seemed to demand of us all, as she thrust her foot out, for behold it was the shapely, perfectly proportioned foot of a well-grown woman. It was arched; it was aristocratic. Her whole manner changed as she looked at it resting on the stand. She looked soothed and satisfied. Her manner became full of self-confidence. She sent for shoe after shoe; she tried on pair after pair. She got up and pirouetted before a glass which reflected the foot only in yellow shoes, in fawn shoes, in shoes of lizard skin. She raised her little skirts and displayed her little legs. She was thinking that, after all, feet are the most important part of the whole person; women, she said to herself, have been loved for their feet alone. Seeing nothing but her feet, she imagined perhaps that the rest of her body was of a piece with those beautiful feet. She was shabbily dressed, but she was ready to lavish any money upon her shoes. And as this was the only occasion upon which she was not afraid of being looked at but positively craved attention, she was ready to use any device to prolong the choosing and fitting. Look at my feet, she seemed to be saying, as she took a step this way and then a step that way. The shop girl good-humouredly must have said something flattering, for suddenly her face lit up in ecstasy. But, after all, the giantesses, benevolent though they were, had their own affairs to see to; she must make up her mind; she must decide which to choose. At length, the pair was chosen and, as she walked out between her guardians, with the parcel swinging from her finger, the ecstasy faded, knowledge returned, the old peevishness, the old apology came back, and by the time she had reached the street again she had become a dwarf only.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Yale Review, October 1927]

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Jones and Wilkinson.

[Drawn from the Memoirs of Tate Wilkinson, 4 vols., 1790.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Bermondsey Book, June 1926]

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“Twelfth Night” At the Old Vic.

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

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

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

[New Statesman and Nation, Sep 30, 1933]

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Madame de Sévigné.

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

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

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

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

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

Then we listen for a time, consciously. How, we wonder, does she contrive to make us follow every word of the story of the cook who killed himself because the fish failed to come in time for the royal dinner party; or the scene of the haymaking; or the anecdote of the servant whom she dismissed in a sudden rage; how does she achieve this order, this perfection of composition? Did she practise her art? It seems not. Did she tear up and correct? There is no record of any painstaking or effort. She says again and again that she writes her letters as she speaks. She begins one as she sends off another; there is the page on her desk and she fills it, in the intervals of all her other avocations. People are interrupting; servants are coming for orders. She entertains; she is at the beck and call of her friends. It seems then that she must have been so imbued with good sense, by the age she lived in, by the company she kept—La Rochefoucauld’s wisdom, Madame de La Fayette’s conversation, by hearing now a play by Racine, by reading Montaigne, Rabelais, or Pascal; perhaps by sermons, perhaps by some of those songs that Coulanges was always singing—she must have imbibed so much that was sane and wholesome unconsciously that, when she took up her pen, it followed unconsciously the laws she had learnt by heart. Marie de Rabutin it seems was born into a group where the elements were so richly and happily mixed that it drew out her virtue instead of opposing it. She was helped, not thwarted. Nothing baffled or contracted or withered her. What opposition she encountered was only enough to confirm her judgment. For she was highly conscious of folly, of vice, of pretention. She was a born critic, and a critic whose judgments were inborn, unhesitating. She is always referring her impressions to a standard—hence the incisiveness, the depth and the comedy that make those spontaneous statements so illuminating. There is nothing naive about her. She is by no means a simple spectator. Maxims fall from her pen. She sums up; she judges. But it is done effortlessly. She has inherited the standard and accepts it without effort. She is heir to a tradition, which stands guardian and gives proportion. The gaiety, the colour, the chatter, the many movements of the figures in the foreground have a background. At Les Rochers there is always Paris and the court; at Paris there is Les Rochers, with its solitude, its trees, its peasants. And behind them all again there is virtue, faith, death itself. But this background, while it gives its scale to the moment, is so well established that she is secure. She is free, thus anchored, to explore; to enjoy; to plunge this way and that; to enter wholeheartedly into the myriad humours, pleasures, oddities, and savours of her well nourished, prosperous, delightful present moment.

So she passes with free and stately step from Paris to Brittany; from Brittany in her coach and six all across France. She stays with friends on the road; she is attended by a cheerful company of familiars. Wherever she alights she attracts at once the love of some boy or girl; or the exacting admiration of a man of the world like her disagreeable cousin Bussy Rabutin, who cannot rest under her disapproval, but must be assured of her good opinion in spite of all his treachery. The famous and the brilliant also wish to have her company, for she is part of their world; and can take her share in their sophisticated conversations. There is something wise and large and sane about her which draws the confidences of her own son. Feckless and impulsive, the prey of his own weak and charming nature as he is, Charles nurses her with the utmost patience through her rheumatic fever. She laughs at his foibles; knows his failings. She is tolerant and outspoken; nothing need be hidden from her; she knows all that there is to be known of man and his passions.

So she takes her way through the world, and sends her letters, radiant and glowing with all this various traffic from one end of France to the other, twice weekly. As the fourteen volumes so spaciously unfold their story of twenty years it seems that this world is large enough to enclose everything. Here is the garden that Europe has been digging for many centuries; into which so many generations have poured their blood; here it is at last fertilized, bearing flowers. And the flowers are not those rare and solitary blossoms—great men, with their poems, and their conquests. The flowers in this garden are a whole society of full grown men and women from whom want and struggle have been removed; growing together in harmony, each contributing something that the other lacks. By way of proving it, the letters of Madame de Sévigné are often shared by other pens; now her son takes up the pen; the Abbé adds his paragraph; even the simple girl—la petite personne—is not afraid to pipe up on the same page. The month of May, 1678, at Les Rochers in Brittany, thus echoes with different voices. There are the birds singing; Pilois is planting; Madame de Sévigné roams the woods alone; her daughter is entertaining politicians in Provence; not very far away Monsieur de Rochefoucauld is engaged in telling the truth with Madame de La Fayette to prune his words; Racine is finishing the play which soon they will all be hearing together; and discussing afterwards with the King and that lady whom in the private language of their set they call Quanto. The voices mingle; they are all talking together in the garden in 1678. But what was happening outside?

[written in 1939]

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The Humane Art.

If at this moment there is little chance of re-reading the sixteen volumes of the Paget Toynbee edition of Walpole’s letters, while the prospect of possessing the magnificent Yale edition, where all the letters are to be printed with all the answers, becomes remote, this sound and sober biography of Horace Walpole by Mr. Ketton-Cremer may serve at least to inspire some random thoughts about Walpole and the humane art which owes its origin to the love of friends.

But, according to his latest biographer, Horace Walpole’s letters were inspired not by the love of friends but by the love of posterity. He had meant to write the history of his own times. After twenty years he gave it up, and decided to write another kind of history—a history ostensibly inspired by friends but in fact written for posterity. Thus Mann stood for politics; Gray for literature; Montagu and Lady Ossory for society. They were pegs, not friends, each chosen because he was “particularly connected … with one of the subjects about which he wished to enlighten and inform posterity.” But if we believe that Horace Walpole was a historian in disguise, we are denying his peculiar genius as a letter writer. The letter writer is no surreptitious historian. He is a man of short range sensibility; he speaks not to the public at large but to the individual in private. All good letter writers feel the drag of the face on the other side of the page and obey it—they take as much as they give. And Horace Walpole was no exception. There is the correspondence with Cole to prove it. We can see, in Mr. Lewis’s edition, how the Tory parson develops the radical and the free-thinker in Walpole, how the middle-class professional man brings to the surface the aristocrat and the amateur. If Cole had been nothing but a peg there would have been none of this echo, none of this mingling of voices. It is true that Walpole had an attitude and a style, and that his letters have a fine hard glaze upon them that preserves them, like the teeth of which he was so proud, from the little dents and rubs of familiarity. And of course—did he not insist that his letters must be kept?—he sometimes looked over his page at the distant horizon, as Madame de Sévigné, whom he worshipped, did too, and imagined other people in times to come reading him. But that he allowed the featureless face of posterity to stand between him and the very voice and dress of his friends, how they looked and how they thought, the letters themselves with their perpetual variety deny. Open them at random. He is writing about politics—about Wilkes and Chatham and the signs of coming revolution in France; but also about a snuffbox; and a red riband; and about two very small black dogs. Voices upon the stairs interrupt him; more sightseers have come to see Caligula with his silver eyes; a spark from the fire has burnt the page he was writing; he cannot keep the pompous style any longer, nor mend a careless phrase, and so, flexible as an eel, he winds from high politics to living faces and the past and its memories—“I tell you we should get together, and comfort ourselves with the brave days that we have known…. I wished for you; the same scenes strike us both, and the same kind of visions has amused us both ever since we were born.” It is not thus that a man writes when his correspondent is a peg and he is thinking of posterity.

Nor again was he thinking of the great public, which, in a very few years, would have paid him handsomely for the brilliant pages that he lavished upon his friends. Was it, then, the growth of writing as a paid profession, and the change which that change of focus brought with it that led, in the nineteenth century, to the decline of this humane art? Friendship flourished, nor was there any lack of gift. Who could have described a party more brilliantly than Macaulay or a landscape more exquisitely than Tennyson? But there, looking them full in the face was the present moment—the great gluttonous public; and how can a writer turn at will from that impersonal stare to the little circle in the fire-lit room? Macaulay, writing to his sister, can no more drop his public manner than an actress can scrub her cheeks clean of paint and take her place naturally at the tea table. And Tennyson with his fear of publicity—“While I live the owls, when I die the ghouls”—left nothing more succulent for the ghoul to feed upon than a handful of dry little notes that anybody could read, or print or put under glass in a museum. News and gossip, the sticks and straws out of which the old letter writer made his nest, have been snatched away. The wireless and the telephone have intervened. The letter writer has nothing now to build with except what is most private; and how monotonous after a page or two the intensity of the very private becomes! We long that Keats even should cease to talk about Fanny, and that Elizabeth and Robert Browning should slam the door of the sick room and take a breath of fresh air in an omnibus. Instead of letters posterity will have confessions, diaries, notebooks, like M. Gide’s—hybrid books in which the writer talks in the dark to himself about himself for a generation yet to be born.

Horace Walpole suffered none of these drawbacks. If he was the greatest of English letter writers it was not only thanks to his gifts but to his immense good fortune. He had his places to begin with—an income of £2,500 dropped yearly into his mouth from Collectorships and Usherships and was swallowed without a pang. “… nor can I think myself,” he wrote serenely, “as a placeman a more useless or a less legal engrosser of part of the wealth of the nation than deans and prebendaries”—indeed the money was well invested. But besides those places, there was the other—his place in the very centre of the audience, facing the stage. There he could sit and see without being seen; contemplate without being called upon to act. Above all he was blessed in his little public—a circle that surrounded him with that warm climate in which he could live the life of incessant changes which is the breath of a letter writer’s existence. Besides the wit and the anecdote and the brilliant descriptions of masquerades and midnight revelries his friends drew from him something superficial yet profound, something changing yet entire—himself shall we call it in default of one word for that which friends elicit but the great public kills? From that sprang his immortality. For a self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living. As an historian he would have stagnated among historians. But as a letter writer he buffets his way among the crowd, holding out a hand to each generation in turn—laughed at, criticized, despised, admired, but always in touch with the living. When Macaulay met him in October 1833, he struck that hand away in a burst of righteous indignation. “His mind was a bundle of inconstant whims and affectations. His features were covered by mask within mask.” His letters, like pâté de foie gras, owed their excellence “to the diseases of the wretched animal which furnishes it”—such was Macaulay’s greeting. And what greater boon can any writer ask than to be trounced by Lord Macaulay? We take the reputation he has gored, repair it and give it another spin and another direction—another lease of life. Opinion, as Mr. Ketton-Cremer says, is always changing about Walpole. “The present age looks upon him with a more friendly eye” than the last. Is it that the present age is deafened with boom and blatancy? Does it hear in Walpole’s low tones things that are more interesting, more penetrating, more true than can be said by the loud speakers? Certainly there is something wonderful to the present age in the sight of a whole human being—of a man so blessed that he could unfold every gift, every foible, whose long life spreads like a great lake reflecting houses and friends and wars and snuff boxes and revolutions and lap dogs, the great and the little, all intermingled, and behind them a stretch of the serene blue sky. “Nor will [death] I think see me very unwilling to go with him, though I have no disappointments, but I came into the world so early, and have seen so much that I am satisfied.” Satisfied with his life in the flesh, he could be still more satisfied with his life in the spirit. Even now he is being collected and pieced together, letter and answer, himself and the reflections of himself, so that whoever else may die, Horace Walpole is immortal. Whatever ruin may befall the map of Europe in years to come, there will still be people, it is consoling to reflect, to hang absorbed over the map of one human face.

[New Statesman and Nation, Jun 8, 1940]

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Two Antiquaries: Walpole and Cole.

Since to criticize the Yale edition of Horace Walpole’s letters to Cole is impossible, for there cannot in the whole universe exist a single human being whose praise or blame of such minute and monumental learning can be of any value—if such exists his knowledge has been tapped already—the only course for the reader is to say nothing about the learning and the industry, the devotion and the skill which have created these two huge volumes, and to record merely such fleeting thoughts as have formed in the mind from a single reading. To encourage ourselves, let us assert, though not with entire confidence, that books after all exist to be read—even the most learned of editors would to some extent at least agree with that. But how, the question immediately arises, can we read this magnificent instalment—for these are but the first two volumes of this edition in which Mr. Lewis will give us the complete correspondence—of our old friend Horace Walpole’s letters? Ought not the presses to have issued in a supplementary pocket a supplementary pair of eyes? Then, with the usual pair fixed upon the text, the additional pair could range the notes, thus sweeping together into one haul not only what Horace is saying to Cole and what Cole is saying to Horace, but a multitude of minor men and matters: for example, Thomas Farmer, who ran away and left two girls with child; Thomas Wood, who was never drunk but had a bad constitution and was therefore left fifty pounds and bed and furniture in Cole’s will; Cole’s broken leg, how it was broken, and why it was badly mended; Birch, who had (it is thought) an apoplectic fit riding in the Hampstead Road, fell from his horse, and died; Thomas Western (1695-1754), who was one of the pall-bearers at the funeral of Cole’s father; Cole’s niece, the daughter of a wholesale cheesemonger; John Woodyer, a man of placid disposition and great probity; Mrs. Allen Hopkins, who was born Mary Thornhill; and Lord Montfort, who—but if we want to know more about that nobleman, his lions and tigers and his “high-spirited and riotous behaviour,” we must look it up for ourselves in the Harwicke MSS. in the British Museum. There are limits even to Mr. Lewis.

This little haul, taken at random, is enough to show how great a strain the new method of editing lays upon the eye. But if the brain is at first inclined to jib at such perpetual solicitations, and to beg to be allowed to read the text in peace, it adjusts itself by degrees; grudgingly admits that many of these little facts are to the point; and finally becomes not merely a convert but a suppliant—asks not for less but for more and more and more. Why, to take one instance only, is not the name of Cole’s temporary cook’s sister divulged? Thomas Wood was his servant; Thomas was left fifty pounds and allowed Cole’s coach to run away; Thomas’s younger brother James, known as “Jem,” ran errands successfully and had a child ready to be sworn to him; their sister, Molly, was for one month at least a cook and helped in the kitchen. But there was another sister and, after learning all about the Woods, it is positively painful not to know at least her Christian name.

Yet it may be asked, what has the name of Cole’s cook’s sister got to do with Horace Walpole? That is a question which it is impossible to answer briefly; but it is proof of the editor’s triumph, justification of his system, and a complete vindication of his immense labour that he has convinced us, long before the end, that somehow or other it all hangs together. The only way to read letters is to read them thus stereoscopically. Horace is partly Cole; Cole is partly Horace; Cole’s cook is partly Cole; therefore Horace Walpole is partly Cole’s cook’s sister. Horace, the whole Horace, is made up of innumerable facts and reflections of facts. Each is infinitely minute; yet each is essential to the other. To elicit them and relate them is out of the question. Let us, then, concentrate for a moment upon the two main figures, in outline.

We have here, then, in conjunction the Honourable Horace Walpole and the Reverend William Cole. But they were two very different people. Cole, it is true, had been at Eton with Horace, where he was called by the famous Walpole group “Tozhy,” but he was not a member of that group, and socially he was greatly Walpole’s inferior. His father was a farmer, Horace’s father was a Prime Minister. Cole’s niece was the daughter of a cheesemonger; Horace’s niece married a Prince of the Blood Royal. But Cole was a man of solid good sense who made no bones of this disparity, and, after leaving Eton and Cambridge, he had become, in his quiet frequently flooded parsonage, one of the first antiquaries of the time. It was this common passion that brought the two friends together again.

For some reason, obscurely hidden in the psychology of the human race, the middle years of that eighteenth century which seems now a haven of bright calm and serene civilization, affected some who actually lived in it with a longing to escape—from its politics, from its wars, from its follies, from its drabness and its dullness, to the superior charms of the Middle Ages. “I … hope,” wrote Cole in 1765, “by the latter end of the week to be among my admired friends of the twelfth or thirteenth century. Indeed you judge very right concerning my indifference about what is going forward in the world, where I live in it as though I was no way concerned about it except in paying, with my contemporaries, the usual taxes and impositions. In good truth I am very indifferent about my Lord Bute or Mr. Pitt, as I have long been convinced and satisfied in my own mind that all oppositions are from the ins and the outs, and that power and wealth and dignity are the things struggled for, not the good of the whole…. I hope what I have said will not be offensive.” Only one weekly newspaper, the Cambridge Chronicle, brought him news of the present moment. There at Bletchley or at Milton he sat secluded, wrapped up from the least draught, for he was terribly subject to sore throats; sometimes issuing forth to conduct a service, for he was, incidentally, a clergyman; driving occasionally to Cambridge to hobnob with his cronies; but always returning with delight to his study, where he copied maps, filled in coats of arms, and pored assiduously over those budgets of old manuscripts which were, as he said, “wife and children” to him. Now and again, it is true, he looked out of the window at the antics of his dog, for whose future he was careful to provide, or at those guinea fowl whose eggs he begged off Horace—for “I have so few amusements and can see these creatures from my study window when I can’t stir out of my room.”

But neither dog nor guinea fowl seriously distracted him. The hundred and fourteen folio volumes left by him to the British Museum testify to his professional industry. And it was precisely that quality—his professional industry—that brought the two so dissimilar men together. For Horace Walpole was by temperament an amateur. He was not, Cole admitted, “a true, genuine antiquary”; nor did he think himself one. “Then I have a wicked quality in an antiquary, nay one that annihilates the essence; that is, I cannot bring myself to a habit of minute accuracy about very indifferent points,” Horace admitted. “… I bequeath free leave of correction to the microscopic intellects of my continuators.” But he had what Cole lacked—imagination, taste, style, in addition to a passion for the romantic past, so long as that romantic past was also a civilized past, for mere “bumps in the ground” or “barrows and tumuli and Roman camps” bored him to death. Above all, he had a purse long enough to give visible and tangible expression—in prints, in gates, in Gothic temples, in bowers, in old manuscripts, in a thousand gimcracks and “brittle transitory relics” to the smouldering and inarticulate passion that drove the professional antiquary to delve like some indefatigable mole underground in the darkness of the past. Horace liked his brittle relics to be pretty, and to be authentic, and he was always eager to be put on the track of more.

The greater part of the correspondence thus is concerned with antiquaries’ gossip; with parish registers and cartularies; with coats of arms and the Christian names of bishops; with the marriages of kings’ daughters; skeletons and prints; old gold rings found in a field; dates and genealogies; antique chairs in Fen farmhouses; bits of stained glass and old Apostle spoons. For Horace was furnishing Strawberry Hill; and Cole was prodigiously adept at stuffing it, until there was scarcely room to stick another knife or fork, and the gorged owner of all this priceless lumber had to cry out: “I shudder when the bell rings at the gate. It is as bad as keeping an inn.” All the week he was plagued with staring crowds.

Were this all it would be, and indeed it sometimes is, a little monotonous. But they were two very different men. They struck unexpected sparks in one another. Cole’s Walpole was not Conway’s Walpole; nor was Walpole’s Cole the good-natured old parson of the diary. Cole, of course, stressed the antiquary in Walpole; but he also brought out very clearly the limits of the antiquary in Walpole. Against Cole’s monolithic passion his own appears frivolous and flimsy. On the other hand, in contrast with Cole’s slow-plodding pen, his own shows its mettle. He cannot flash, it is true—the subject, say, the names of Edward the Fourth’s daughters, forbids it—yet how sweetly English sings on his side of the page, now in a colloquialism—“a more flannel climate”—that Cole would never have ventured; now in a strain of natural music—“Methinks as we grow old, our only business here is to adorn the graves of our friends or to dig our own.” That strain was called forth by the death of their common friend, Thomas Gray. It was a death that struck at Cole’s heart, too, but produced no such echo in that robust organ. At the mere threat of Conway’s death, Horace was all of a twitter—his nerves were “so aspen.” It was a threat only; “Still has it operated such a revolution in my mind, as no time, at my age, can efface. I have had dreams in which I thought I wished for fame—… I feel, I feel it was confined to the memory of those I love”—to which Cole replies: “For both your sakes I hope he will soon get well again. It is a misfortune to have so much sensibility in one’s nature as you are endued with: sufficient are one’s own distresses without the additional encumbrance of those of one’s friends.”

Nevertheless, Cole was by no means without distresses of his own. There was that terrible occasion when the horses ran away and his hat blew off and he sat with his legs in the air anticipating either death at the tollgate or a bad cold. Mercifully both were spared him. Again, he suffered tortures when, showing Dr. Gulston his prints, he begged him, as a matter of form, to take any he liked; whereupon Gulston—“that Algerine hog”—filled his portfolio with the most priceless. It is true that Cole made him pay for them in the end, but it was a most distressing business. And then what an agony it was when some fellow antiquaries dined with him, and, confined with the gout, he had to let them visit his study alone, to find next morning that an octavo volume, and a borrowed volume at that, was missing! “The Master is too honourable to take such a step,” but—he had his suspicions. And what was he to do? To confess the loss or to conceal it? To conceal it seemed better, and yet, if the owner found out, “I am undone.” Horace was all sympathy. He loathed the whole tribe of antiquaries—“numskulls” he called them mumbling manuscripts with their toothless jaws. “Their understandings seem as much in ruins as the things they describe,” he wrote. “I love antiquities, but I scarce ever knew an antiquary who knew how to write upon them.”

He had all the aristocrat’s contempt for the professional drudge, and no desire whatsoever to be included among the sacred band of professional authors. “They are always in earnest, and think their profession serious, and dwell upon trifles, and reverence learning,” he snapped out. And yet, when writing to Cole he could confess what to a man of his own class he would have concealed—that he, too, reverenced learning when it was real, and admired no one more than a poet if he were genuine. “A page in a great author humbles me to the dust,” he wrote. And after deriding his contemporaries added, “Don’t think me scornful. Recollect that I have seen Pope, and lived with Gray.”

Certainly Cole’s obscure but bulky form revealed a side of Horace Walpole that was lost in the glitter of the great world. With that solid man of no social gift but prodigious erudition Horace showed himself not an antiquary, not a poet, not an historian, but what he was—the aristocrat of letters, the born expert who knew the sham intellect from the genuine as surely as the antiquary knew the faked genealogy from the authentic. When Horace Walpole praised Pope and Gray he knew what he was saying and meant it; and his shame at being hoisted into such high society as theirs rings true. “I know not how others feel on such occasions, but if anyone happens to praise me, all my faults gush into my face, and make me turn my eyes inward and outward with horror. What am I but a poor old skeleton, tottering towards the grave, and conscious of ten thousand weaknesses, follies, and worse! And for talents, what are mine, but trifling and superficial; and, compared with those of men of real genius, most diminutive! … Does it become us, at past threescore each, to be saying fine things to one another? Consider how soon we shall both be nothing!” That is a tone of voice that he does not use in speaking—for his writing voice was a speaking voice—to his friends in the great world.

Again, Cole’s High Church and Tory convictions when they touched a very different vein in Walpole sometimes caused explosions. Once or twice the friends almost came to blows over religion. The Church of England had a substantial place in Cole’s esteem. But to Walpole, “Church and presbytery are human nonsense invented by knaves to govern fools. Exalted notions of church matters are contradictions in terms to the lowliness and humility of the gospel. There is nothing sublime but the Divinity. Nothing is sacred but as His work. A tree or a brute stone is more respectable as such, than a mortal called an archbishop, or an edifice called a church, which are the puny and perishable productions of men…. A Gothic church or convent fill one with romantic dreams—but for the mysterious, the Church in the abstract, it is a jargon that means nothing or a great deal too much, and I reject it and its apostles from Athanasius to Bishop Keene.” Those were outspoken words to a friend who wore a black coat. Yet they were not suffered to break up an intimacy of forty years. Cole, to whom Walpole’s little weaknesses were not unknown, contented himself by commenting sardonically at the end of the letter upon the lowliness and humility of the aristocracy, observed that “Mr. Walpole is piqued, I can see, at my reflections on Abbot’s flattery”; but in his reply to Mr. Walpole he referred only to the weather, Mr. Tyson, and the gout.

Horace’s politics were equally detestable to Cole. He was, in writing at least, a red-hot republican, the bitter enemy of all those Tory principles that Cole revered. That, again, was a difference that sometimes raised the temperature of the letters to fever heat—happily for us, for it allows us, reading over their shoulders, to see Horace Walpole roused—the dilettante become a man of action, chafing at his own inactivity “sitting with one’s arms folded” in a chair; deploring his country’s danger; remembering that if Cole is a country clergyman, he is a Walpole; the son of a Prime Minister; that his father’s son might have done more than fill Strawberry Hill with Gothic ornaments; and that his father’s reputation is extremely dear to him. And yet did not gossip whisper that he was not his father’s son, and was there not, somewhere deep within him, an uneasy suspicion that there was a blot on his scutcheon, a freakish strain in his clear Norfolk blood?

Whoever his father may have been, his mother nature had somehow queered the pitch of that very complex human being who was called Horace Walpole. He was not simple; he was not single. As Cole noted with antiquarian particularity, Mr. Walpole’s letter of Friday, May 21st, 1762, was sealed with a “seal of red wax, a cupid with a large mask of a monkey’s face. An antique. Oval.” The cupid and the monkey had each set their stamp on Horace Walpole’s wax. He was mischievous and obscene; he gibbered and mocked and pelted the holy shrines with nutshells. And yet with what a grace he did it—with what ease and brilliancy and wit! In body, too, he was a contradiction—lean as a grasshopper, yet tough as steel. He was lapped in luxury, yet never wore a great-coat, ate and drank as little as a fasting friar, and walked on wet grass in slippers. He fribbled away his time collecting bric-à-brac and drinking tea with old ladies; yet wrote the best letters in the language in the midst of the chatter; knew everyone; went everywhere; and, as he said, “lived post.” He seemed sometimes as heartless as a monkey; drove Chatterton, so people said, to suicide, and allowed old Madame du Deffand to die alone in despair. And yet who but Cupid wrote when Gray was dead, “I treated him insolently; he loved me and I did not think he did”? Or again, “One loves to find people care for one, when they can have no view in it”? But it is futile to make such contradictions clash. There were a thousand subtler impressions stamped on the wax of Horace Walpole, and it is only posterity, for whom he had a great affection, who will be able, when they have read all that he wrote to Mann and Conway and Gray and the sisters Berry and Madame du Deffand and a score of others; and what they wrote to him; and the innumerable notes at the bottom of the page about cooks and scullions and gardeners and old women in inns—it is only they who will be able, when Mr. Lewis has brought his magnificent work to an end, to say what indeed Horace Walpole was. Meanwhile, we, who only catch a fleeting glimpse and set down hastily what we make of it, can testify that he is the best company in the world—the most amusing, the most intriguing—the strangest mixture of ape and Cupid that ever was.

[Yale Review, March 1939]

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The Rev William Cole:
A Letter.

My Dear William,

In my opinion you are keeping something back. Last year when you went to Paris and did not see Madame du Deffand but measured the exact length of every nose on every tombstone—I can assure you they have grown no longer or shorter since—I was annoyed, I admit. But I had the sense to see that, after all, you were alive, and a clergyman, and from Bletchley—in fact, you were as much out of place in Paris as a cowslip impaled upon the diamond horns of a duchess’s tiara. Put him back in Bletchley, I said, plant him in his own soil, let him burble on in his own fashion, and the miracle will happen. The cows will low; the church bells will ring; all Bletchley will come alive; and, reading over William’s shoulder, we shall see deep, deep into the hearts of Mrs. Willis and Mr. Robinson.

I regret to tell you that I was wrong. You are not a cowslip. You do not bloom. The hearts of Mrs. Willis and Mr. Robinson remain sealed books to us. You write January 16th, 1766, and it is precisely as if I had written January 16th, 1932. In other words, you have rubbed all the bloom off two hundred years and that is so rare a feat—it implies something so queer in the writer—that I am intrigued and puzzled and cannot help asking you to enlighten me. Are you simply a bore, William? No, that is out of the question. In the first place, Horace Walpole did not tolerate bores, or write to them, or go for country jaunts with them; in the second, Miss Waddell loves you. You shed all round you, in the eyes of Miss Waddell, that mysterious charm which those we love impart to their meanest belongings. She loves your parrot; she commiserates your cat. Every room in your house is familiar to her. She knows about your Gothic chamber and your neat arched bed; she knows how many steps led up to the pantry and down to the summer house; she knows, she approves, how you spent every hour of your day. She sees the neighbours through the light of your eyes. She laughs at some; she likes others; she knows who was fat and who was thin, and who told lies, who had a bad leg, and who was no better than she should have been. Mr. and Mrs. Barton, Thomas Tansley, Mr. and Mrs. Lord of Mursley, the Diceys, and Dr. Pettingal are all real and alive to her: so are your roses, your horses, your nectarines and your knats.

Would that I could see through her eyes! Alas, wherever I look I see blight and mildew. The moss never grows upon your walls. Your nectarines never ripen. The blackbird sings, but out of tune. The knats—and you say “I hardly know a place so pestered with that vermin as Bletchley”—bite, just like our gnats. As for the human beings they pass through the same disenchantment. Not that I have any fault to find with your friends or with Bletchley either. Nobody is very good, but then nobody is very bad. Tom sometimes hits a hare, oftener he misses; the fish sometimes bite, but not always; if it freezes it also thaws, and though the harvest was not bad it might have been better. But now, William, confess. We know in our hearts, you and I, that England in the eighteenth century was not like this. We know from Woodforde, from Walpole, from Thomas Turner, from Skinner, from Gray, from Fielding, from Jane Austen, from scores of memoirs and letters, from a thousand forgotten stone masons, bricklayers and cabinet makers, from a myriad sources, that I have not learning to name or space to quote, that England was a substantial, beautiful country in the eighteenth century; aristocratic and common; hand-made and horse-ploughed; an eating, drinking, bastard-begetting, laughing, cursing, humorous, eccentric, lovable land. If with your pen in your hand and the dates facing you, January 16th, 1766, you see none of all this, then the fault is yours. Some spite has drawn a veil across your eyes. Indeed, there are pouches under them I could swear. You slouch as you walk. You switch at thistles half-heartedly with your stick. You do not much enjoy your food. Gossip has no relish for you. You mention the “scandalous story of Mr. Felton Hervey, his two daughters and a favourite footman” and add, “I hope it is not true.” So do I, but I cannot put much life into my hoping when you withhold the facts. You stop Pettingal in the middle of his boasting—you cut him short with a sarcasm—just as he was proving that the Greeks liked toasted cheese and was deriving the word Bergamy from the Arabic. As for Madame Geoffrin, you never lose a chance of saying something disobliging about that lady; a coffee-pot has only to be reputed French for you to defame it. Then look how touchy you are—you grumble, the servants are late with the papers, you complain, Mr. Pitt never thanked you for the pigeons (yet Horace Walpole thought you a philosopher); then how you suspect people’s motives; how you bid fathers thrash their little boys; how you are sure the servant steals the onions. All these are marks of a thin-blooded poverty-stricken disposition. And yet—you are a good man; you visit the poor; you bury the infected; you have been educated at Cambridge; you venerate antiquity. The truth is that you are concealing something, even from Miss Waddell.

Why, I ask, did you write this diary and lock it in a chest with iron hoops and insist that no one was to read it or publish it for twenty years after your death unless it were that you had something on your mind, something that you wished to confess and get rid of? You are not one of those people who love life so well that they cherish even the memory of roast mutton, like Woodforde; you did not hate life so much that you must shriek out your curse on it, like poor Skinner. You write and write, ramblingly, listlessly, like a person who is trying to bring himself to say the thing that will explain to himself what is wrong with himself. And you find it very hard. You would rather mention anything but that—Miss Chester, I mean, and the boat on the Avon. You cannot force yourself to admit that you have kept that lock of hair in your drawer these thirty years. When Mrs. Robinson, her daughter, asked you for it (March 19th, 1766) you said you could not find it. But you were not easy under that concealment. You did at length go to your private drawer (November 26th, 1766) and there it was, as you well knew. But even so, with the lock of hair in your hand, you still seek to put us off the scent. You ramble on about giving Mrs. Robinson a barrel of oysters; about potted rabbits; about the weather, until suddenly out it comes, “Gave Mrs. Robinson a braided Lock of Lady Robinson’s Mother’s hair (and Sister to Mrs. Robinson of Cransley), which I cut off in a Boat on the River Avon at Bath about 30 years ago when my Sister Jane and myself were much acquainted with her, then Miss Chester.” There we have it. The poisoned tooth is out. You were once young and ardent and very much in love. Passion overcame you. You were alone. The wind blew a lock of Miss Chester’s hair from beneath her hat. You reached forward. You cut it. And then? Nothing. That is your tragedy—you yourself failed yourself. You think of that scene twenty times a day, I believe, as you saunter, rather heavily; along the damp paths at Bletchley. That is the dreary little tune that you hum as you stoop over your parments measuring noses, deciphering dates—“I failed, failed, failed on the boat on the Avon.” That is why your nectarines are blighted; and the parrot dies; and the parlour cat is scalded; and you love nobody except, perhaps, your little dun-coloured horse. That is why you “always had a mind to live retired in Glamorganshire.” That is why Mr. Pitt never thanked you for the pigeons. That is why Mr. Stonehewer became His Majesty’s Historiographer, while you visited paupers in Fenny Stratford. That is why he never came to see you, and why you observed so bitterly, that “people suffer themselves to forget their old friends when they are surrounded by the great and are got above the world.” You see, William, if you hoard a failure, if you come to grudge even the sun for shining—and that, I think, is what you did—fruit does not ripen; a blight falls upon parrots and cats; people would actually rather that you did not give them pigeons.

But enough. I may be wrong. Miss Chester’s hair may have nothing to do with it. And Miss Waddell may be right—every good quality of heart and head may be yours. I am sure I hope so. But I beg, William, now that you are about to begin a fresh volume, at Cambridge too, with men of character and learning, that you will pull yourself together. Speak out. Justify the faith that Miss Waddell has in you. For you are keeping one of the finest scholars of her time shut up in the British Museum among mummies and policemen and wet umbrellas. There must be a trifle of ninety-five volumes more of you in those iron-bound chests. Lighten her task; relieve our anxiety, and so add to the gratitude of your obliged obedient servant,

Virginia Woolf.

[New Statesman and Nation, Feb 6, 1932]

[]

The Historian and “The Gibbon”.

“Yet, upon the whole, the History of the Decline and Fall seems to have struck root, both at home and abroad, and may, perhaps, a hundred years hence still continue to be abused.” So Gibbon wrote in the calm confidence of immortality; and let us confirm him in his own opinion of his book by showing, in the first place, that it has one quality of permanence—it still excites abuse. Few people can read the whole of the Decline and Fall without admitting that some chapters have glided away without leaving a trace; that many pages are no more than a concussion of sonorous sounds; and that innumerable figures have passed across the stage without printing even their names upon our memories. We seem, for hours on end, mounted on a celestial rocking-horse which, as it gently sways up and down, remains rooted to a single spot. In the soporific idleness thus induced we recall with regret the vivid partisanship of Macaulay, the fitful and violent poetry of Carlyle. We suspect that the vast fame with which the great historian is surrounded is one of those vague diffusions of acquiescence which gather when people are too busy, too lazy or too timid to see things for themselves. And to justify this suspicion it is easy to gather pomposities of diction—the Church has become “the sacred edifice”; and sentences so stereotyped that they chime like bells—“destroyed the confidence” must be followed by “and excited the resentment”; while characters are daubed in with single epithets like “the vicious” or “the virtuous,” and are so crudely jointed that they seem capable only of the extreme antics of puppets dangling from a string. It is easy, in short, to suppose that Gibbon owed some part of his fame to the gratitude of journalists on whom he bestowed the gift of a style singularly open to imitation and well adapted to invest little ideas with large bodies. And then we turn to the book again, and to our amazement we find that the rocking-horse has left the ground; we are mounted on a winged steed; we are sweeping in wide circles through the air and below us Europe unfolds; the ages change and pass; a miracle has taken place.

But miracle is not a word to use in writing of Gibbon. If miracle there was it lay in the inexplicable fact which Gibbon, who seldom stresses a word, himself thought worthy of italics: “… I know by experience, that from my early youth I aspired to the character of an historian.” Once that seed was planted so mysteriously in the sickly boy whose erudition amazed his tutor there was more of the rational than of the miraculous in the process by which that gift was developed and brought to fruition. Nothing, in the first place, could have been more cautious, more deliberate and more far-sighted than Gibbon’s choice of a subject. A historian he had to be; but historian of what? The history of the Swiss was rejected; the history of Florence was rejected; for a long time he played with the idea of a life of Sir Walter Raleigh. Then that, too, was rejected and for reasons that are extremely illuminating:

… I should shrink with terror from the modern history of England, where every character is a problem, and every reader a friend or an enemy; where a writer is supposed to hoist a flag of party, and is devoted to damnation by the adverse faction…. I must embrace a safer and more extensive theme.

But once found, how was he to treat the distant, the safe, the extensive theme? An attitude, a style had to be adopted; one presumably that generalized, since problems of character were to be avoided; that abolished the writer’s personality, since he was not dealing with his own times and contemporary questions; that was rhythmical and fluent, rather than abrupt and intense, since vast stretches of time had to be covered, and the reader carried smoothly through many folios of print.

At last the problem was solved; the fusion was complete; matter and manner became one; we forget the style, and are only aware that we are safe in the keeping of a great artist. He is able to make us see what he wants us to see and in the right proportions. Here he compresses; there he expands. He transposes, emphasizes, omits in the interests of order and drama. The features of the individual faces are singularly conventionalized. Here are none of those violent gestures and unmistakable voices that fill the pages of Carlyle and Macaulay with living human beings who are related to ourselves. There are no Whigs and Tories here; no eternal verities and implacable destinies. Time has cut off those quick reactions that make us love and hate. The innumerable figures are suffused in the equal blue of the far distance. They rise and fall and pass away without exciting our pity or our anger. But if the figures are small, they are innumerable; if the scene is dim it is vast. Armies wheel; hordes of barbarians are destroyed; forests are huge and dark; processions are splendid; altars rise and fall; one dynasty succeeds another. The richness, the variety of the scene absorb us. He is the most resourceful of entertainers. Without haste or effort he swings his lantern where he chooses. If sometimes the size of the whole is oppressive, and the unemphatic story monotonous, suddenly in the flash of a phrase a detail is lit up: we see the monks “in the lazy gloom of their convents”; statues become unforgettably “that inanimate people”; the “gilt and variegated armour” shines out: the splendid names of kings and countries are sonorously intoned; or the narrative parts and a scene opens:

By the order of Probus, a great quantity of large trees, torn up by the roots, were transplanted into the midst of the circus. The spacious and shady forest was immediately filled with a thousand ostriches, a thousand stags, a thousand fallow deer, and a thousand wild boars; and all this variety of game was abandoned to the riotous impetuosity of the multitude…. The air was continually refreshed by the playing of fountains, and profusely impregnated by the grateful scent of aromatics. In the centre of the edifice, the arena, or stage, was strewed with the finest sand, and successively assumed the most different forms. At one moment it seemed to rise out of the earth, like the garden of Hesperides, and was afterwards broken into the rocks and caverns of Thrace….

But it is only when we come to compress and dismember one of Gibbon’s pictures that we realize how carefully the parts have been chosen, how firmly the sentences, composed after a certain number of turns round the room and then tested by the ear and only then written down, adhere together.

But these are qualities, it might be said, that belong to the historical novelist—to Scott or to Flaubert. And Gibbon was an historian, so religiously devoted to the truth that he felt an aspersion upon his accuracy as an aspersion upon his character. Flights of notes at the bottom of the page check his pageants and verify his characters. Thus they have a different quality from scenes and characters composed from a thousand hints and suggestions in the freedom of the imagination. They are inferior, perhaps, in subtlety and in intensity. On the other hand, as Gibbon pointed out, “The Cyropaedia is vague and languid; the Anabasis circumstantial and animated. Such is the eternal difference between fiction and truth.”

The imagination of the novelist must often fail; but the historian can repose himself upon fact. And even if those facts are sometimes dubious and capable of more than one interpretation, they bring the reason into play and widen our range of interest. The vanished generations, invisible separately, have collectively spun round them intricate laws, erected marvellous structures of ceremony and belief. These can be described, analysed, recorded. The interest with which we follow him in his patient and impartial examination has an excitement peculiar to itself. History may be, as he tells us, “little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind”; but we seem, at least, as we read him raised above the tumult and the chaos into a clear and rational air.

The victories and the civilization of Constantine no longer influence the state of Europe; but a considerable portion of the globe still retains the impression which it received from the conversion of that monarch; and the ecclesiastical institutions of his reign are still connected, by an indissoluble chain, with the opinions, the passions, and the interests of the present generation.

He is not merely a master of the pageant and the story; he is also the critic and the historian of the mind.

It is here of course that we become conscious of the idiosyncrasy and of the limitations of the writer. Just as we know that Macaulay was a nineteenth-century Whig, and Carlyle a Scottish peasant with the gift of prophecy, so we know that Gibbon was rooted in the eighteenth century and indelibly stamped with its character and his own. Gradually, stealthily, with a phrase here, a gibe there, the whole solid mass is leavened with the peculiar quality of his temperament. Shades of meaning reveal themselves; the pompous language becomes delicate and exact. Sometimes a phrase is turned edgewise, so that as it slips with the usual suavity into its place it leaves a scratch. “He was even destitute of a sense of honour, which so frequently supplies the sense of public virtue.” Or the solemn rise and fall of the text above is neatly diminished by the demure particularity of a note. “The ostrich’s neck is three feet long, and composed of seventeen vertebrae. See Buffon. Hist. Naturelle.” The infallibility of historians is gravely mocked. “… their knowledge will appear gradually to increase, as their means of information must have diminished, a circumstance which frequently occurs in historical disquisitions.” Or we are urbanely asked to reflect how,

in our present state of existence, the body is so inseparably connected with the soul, that it seems to be to our interest to taste, with innocence and moderation, the enjoyments of which that faithful companion is susceptible.

The infirmities of that faithful companion provide him with a fund of perpetual amusement. Sex, for some reason connected, perhaps, with his private life, always excites a demure smile:

Twenty-two acknowledged concubines, and a library of sixty-two thousand volumes, attested the variety of his inclinations; and from the productions which he left behind him, it appears that the former as well as the latter were designed for use rather than for ostentation.

The change upon such phrases is rung again and again. Few virgins or matrons, nuns or monks leave his pages with their honour entirely unscathed. But his most insidious raillery, his most relentless reason, are directed, of course, against the Christian religion.

Fanaticism, asceticism, superstition were naturally antipathetic to him. Wherever he found them, in life or in religion, they roused his contempt and derision. The two famous chapters in which he examined “the human causes of the progress and establishment of Christianity,” though inspired by the same love of truth which in other connections excited the admiration of scholars, roused great scandal at the time. Even the eighteenth century, that “age of light and liberty,” was not entirely open to the voice of reason. “How many souls have his writings polluted!” Hannah More exclaimed when she heard of his death. “Lord preserve others from their contagion!” In such circumstances irony was the obvious weapon; the pressure of public opinion forced him to be covert, not open. And irony is a dangerous weapon; it easily becomes sidelong and furtive; the ironist seems to be darting a poisoned tongue from a place of concealment. However grave and temperate Gibbon’s irony at its best, however searching his logic and robust his contempt for the cruelty and intolerance of superstition, we sometimes feel, as he pursues his victim with incessant scorn, that he is a little limited, a little superficial, a little earthy, a little too positively and imperturbably a man of the eighteenth century and not of our own.

But then he is Gibbon; and even historians, as Professor Bury reminds us, have to be themselves. History “is in the last resort somebody’s image of the past, and the image is conditioned by the mind and experience of the person who forms it.” Without his satire, his irreverence, his mixture of sedateness and slyness, of majesty and mobility, and above all that belief in reason which pervades the whole book and gives it unity, an implicit if unspoken message, the Decline and Fall would be the work of another man. It would be the work indeed of two other men. For as we read we are perpetually creating another book, perceiving another figure. The sublime person of “the historian” as the Sheffields called him is attended by a companion whom they called, as if he were the solitary specimen of some extinct race, “the Gibbon.” The Historian and the Gibbon go hand in hand. But it is not easy to draw even a thumbnail sketch of this strange being because the autobiography, or rather the six autobiographies, compose a portrait of such masterly completeness and authority that it defies our attempts to add to it. And yet no autobiography is ever final; there is always something for the reader to add from another angle.

There is the body, in the first place—the body with all those little physical peculiarities that the outsider sees and uses to interpret what lies within. The body in Gibbon’s case was ridiculous—prodigiously fat, enormously top-heavy, precariously balanced upon little feet upon which he spun round with astonishing alacrity. Like Goldsmith he over-dressed, and for the same reason perhaps—to supply the dignity which nature denied him. But unlike Goldsmith, his ugliness caused him no embarrassment; or, if so, he had mastered it completely. He talked incessantly, and in sentences composed as carefully as his writing. To the sharp and irreverent eyes of contemporaries his vanity was perceptible and ridiculous; but it was only on the surface. There was something hard and muscular in the obese little body which turned aside the sneers of the fine gentlemen. He had roughed it, not only in the Hampshire Militia, but among his equals. He had supped “at little tables covered with a napkin, in the middle of a coffee room, upon a bit of cold meat or a Sandwich,” with twenty or thirty of the first men in the kingdom, before he retired to rule supreme over the first families of Lausanne. It was in London, among the distractions of society and politics, that he achieved that perfect poise, that perfect balance between work, society and the pleasures of the senses which composed his wholly satisfactory existence. And the balance had not been arrived at without a struggle. He was sickly; he had a spendthrift for a father; he was expelled from Oxford; his love affair was thwarted; he was short of money and had none of the advantages of birth. But he turned everything to profit. From his lack of health he learnt the love of books; from the barrack and the guardroom he learnt to understand the common people; from his exile he learnt the smallness of the English cloister; and from poverty and obscurity how to cultivate the amenities of human intercourse.

At last it seemed as if life itself were powerless to unseat this perfect master of her uncertain paces. The final buffet—the loss of his sinecure—was turned to supreme advantage; a perfect house, a perfect friend, a perfect society at once placed themselves at his service, and without loss of time or temper Gibbon entered a post-chaise with Caplin his valet and Muff his dog and bowled over Westminster Bridge to finish his history and enjoy his maturity in circumstances that were ideal.

But as we run over the familiar picture there is something that eludes us. It may be that we have not been able to find out anything for ourselves. Gibbon has always been before us. His self-knowledge was consummate; he had no illusions either about himself or about his work. He had chosen his part and he played it to perfection. Even that characteristic attitude, with his snuffbox in his hand and his body stretched out, he had noted himself, and perhaps he had adopted it as consciously as he observed it. But it is his silence that is most baffling. Even in the letters, where he drops the Historian and shortens himself now and then to “the Gib,” there are long pauses when nothing is heard even at Sheffield Place of what is going on in the study at Lausanne.

The artist after all is a solitary being. Twenty years spent in the society of the Decline and Fall are twenty years spent in solitary communion with distant events, with intricate problems of arrangement, with the minds and bodies of the dead. Much that is important to other people loses its importance; the perspective is changed when the eyes are fixed not upon the foreground but upon the mountains, not upon a living woman but upon “my other wife, the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.” And it is difficult, after casting firm sentences that will withstand the tread of time, to say “in three words, I am alone.” It is only now and then that we catch a phrase that has not been stylized, or see a little picture that he has not been able to include in the majestic design. For example, when Lord Sheffield bursts out in his downright way, “You are a right good friend …,” we see the obese little man impetuously and impulsively hoisting himself into a post-chaise and crossing a Europe ravaged by revolution to comfort a widower. And again when the old stepmother at Bath takes up her pen and quavers out a few uncomposed and unliterary sentences we see him:

I truely rejoice, & congratulate you on your being once more safely arrived in your native Country. I wish’d to tell you so yesterday, but the joy your letter gave would not suffer my hand to be steady enough to write…. Many has been the disappointments I have borne with fortitude, but the fear of having my last and only friend torn from me was very near overseting my reason…. Madame Ely and Mrs. Bonfoy are here. Mrs. Holroyd has probably told you that Miss Gould is now Mrs. Horneck. I wish she had been Mrs. Gibbon …

so the old lady rambles on, and for a moment we see him as in a cracked mirror held in a trembling hand. For a moment, a cloud crosses that august countenance. It was true. He had sometimes on returning home in the evening, sighed for a companion. He had sometimes felt that “domestic solitude … is a comfortless state.” He had conceived the romantic idea of adopting and educating a young female relative called Charlotte. But there were difficulties; the idea was abandoned. Then the cloud drifts away; common sense, indomitable cheerfulness return; once more the serene figure of the historian emerges triumphant. He had every reason to be content. The great building was complete; the mountain was off his breast; the slave was freed from the toil of the oar.

And he was by no means exhausted. Other tasks less laborious, perhaps more delightful, lay before him. His love of literature was unsated; his love of life—of the young, of the innocent, of the gay—was unblunted. It was the faithful companion, the body, unfortunately, that failed him. But his composure was unshaken. He faced death with an equanimity that speaks well for “the profane virtues of sincerity and moderation.” And as he sank into a sleep that was probably eternal, he could remember with satisfaction the view across the plain to the stupendous mountains beyond; the white acacia that grew beside the study window, and the great work which, he was not wrong in thinking, will immortalize his name.

[Times Literary Supplement, Apr 24, 1937]

[]

Reflections at Sheffield Place.

The great ponds at Sheffield Place at the right season of the year are bordered with red, white and purple reflections, for rhododendrons are massed upon the banks and when the wind passes over the real flowers the water flowers shake and break into each other. But there, in an opening among the trees stands a great fantastic house, and since it was there that John Holroyd, Lord Sheffield, lived, since it was there that Gibbon stayed, another reflection imposes itself upon the water trance. Did the historian himself ever pause here to cast a phrase, and if so what words would he have found for those same floating flowers? Great lord of language as he was, no doubt he filled his mind from the fountain of natural beauty. The exactions of the Decline and Fall meant, of course, the death and dismissal of many words deserving of immortal life. Order and seemliness were drastically imposed. It was a question, he reflected, “whether some flowers of fancy, some grateful errors, have not been eradicated with the weeds of prejudice.” Still his mind was a whispering gallery of words; the famous “barefooted friars” singing vespers may have been a recollection of Marlowe’s “And ducke as low as any bare-foot Fryar,” murmuring in the background. Be this as it may, to consider what Gibbon would have said had he seen the rhododendrons reflected in the water is an idle exercise, for in his day, late in the eighteenth century, a girl who looked out of the window of Sheffield Place saw not rhododendrons “but four young swans … now entirely grey” floating upon the water. Moreover, it is unlikely that he ever bestirred himself to walk in the grounds. “Gib,” that same girl, Maria Josepha Holroyd, remarked, “is a mortal enemy to any person taking a walk, and he is so frigid that he makes us sit by a good roasting Christmas fire every evening.” There he sat in the summer evening talking endlessly, delightfully, in the best of spirits, for no place was more like home to him than Sheffield Place, and he looked upon the Holroyds as his own flesh and blood.

Seen through Maria’s eyes Gibbon—she called him sometimes “Gib,” sometimes “le grand Gibbon,” sometimes “The Historian”—looked different from Gibbon seen by himself. In 1792 she was a girl of twenty-one; he was a man of fifty-five. To him she was “the tall and blooming Maria”; “the soft and stately Maria,” a niece by adoption, whose manners he could correct; whose future he could forecast—“That establishment must be splendid; that life must be happy”; whose style, especially one metaphor about the Rhine escaping its banks, he could approve. But to her he was often an object of ridicule; he was so fat; such a figure of fun “waddling across the room whenever she [Madame da Silva] appeared, and sitting by her and looking at her, till his round eyes run down with water”; rather testy too, an old bachelor, who lived like clockwork and hated to have his plans upset; but at the same time, she had to admit, the most delightful of talkers. That summer night he drew out the two young men who were staying in the house, Fred North and Mr. Douglas, and made them far more entertaining than they would have been without him. “It was impossible to have selected three Beaux who could have been more agreeable, whether their conversation was trifling or serious,” whether they talked about Greek and Latin or turtle soup. For that summer Mr. Gibbon was “raving” about turtles and wanted Lord Sheffield to have one brought from London. Maria’s gaze rested upon him with a mixture of amusement and respect; but it did not rest upon him alone. For not only were Fred North and Mr. Douglas in the room, and the swans on the pond outside and the woods; but soldiers were tramping past the Park gates; the Prince himself was holding a review; they were going over to inspect the camp; Mr. Gibbon and Aunt Serena in the post chaise; she, if only her father would let her, on horseback. But the sight of her father suggested other cares; he was wildly hospitable; he had asked the Prince and the Duke to stay; and as her mother was dead, all the catering, all the entertaining fell upon her. There was too something in her father’s face that made her look at Mr. Gibbon as if for support; he was the only man who could influence her father; who could bring him to reason; who could check his extravagance, restrain his … But here she paused, for there was some weakness in her father’s character that could not be put into plain language by a daughter. At any rate she was very glad when he married a second time “for I feel delighted to think when sooner or later troubles come, as we who know the gentleman must fear …” Whatever frailty of her father’s she hinted at, Mr. Gibbon was the only one of his friends whose good sense could restrain him.

The relation between the Peer and the Historian was very singular. They were devoted. But what tie was it that attached the downright, self-confident, perhaps loose-living man of the world to the suave, erudite sedentary historian?—the attraction of opposites perhaps. Sheffield, with his finger in every pie, his outright, downright man of-the-world’s good sense, supplied the historian with what he must sometimes have needed—someone to call him “you damned beast,” someone to give him a solid footing on English earth. In Parliament Gibbon was dumb; in love he was ineffective. But his friend Holroyd was a member of a dozen committees; before one wife was two years in the grave he had married another. If it is true that friends are chosen partly in order to live lives that we cannot live in our own persons, then we can understand why the Peer and the Historian were devoted; why the great writer divested himself of his purple language and wrote racy colloquial English to Sheffield; why Sheffield curbed his extravagance and restrained his passions in deference to Gibbon; why Gibbon crossed Europe, in a post chaise to console Sheffield for his wife’s death; and why Sheffield, though always busied with a thousand affairs of his own, yet found time to manage Gibbon’s tangled money matters; and was now indeed engaged in arranging the business of Aunt Hester’s legacy.

Considering Hester Gibbon’s low opinion of her nephew and her own convictions it was surprising that she had left him anything at all. To her Gibbon stood for all those lusts of the flesh, all those vanities of the intellect which many years previously she had renounced. Many years ago, many years before the summer night when they sat round the fire in the Library and discussed Latin and Greek and turtle soup, Hester Gibbon had put all such vanities behind her. She had left Putney and the paternal house to follow her brother’s tutor William Law to his home in Northamptonshire. There in the village of King’s Cliffe she lived with him trying to understand his mystic philosophy, more successfully putting it into practice; teaching the ignorant; living frugally; feeding beggars, spending her substance on charity. There at last, for she made no haste to join the Saints as her nephew observed, at the age of eighty-six she lay by Law’s side in his grave; while Mrs. Hutcheson, who had shared his house but not his love, lay in an inferior position at their feet. Every difference that could divide two human beings seems to have divided the aunt from the nephew; and yet they had something in common. The suburban world of Putney had called her mad because she believed too much; the learned world of divinity had called him wicked because he believed too little. Both aunt and nephew found it impossible to hit off the exact degree of scepticism and belief which the world holds reasonable. And this very difference perhaps had not been without its effect upon the nephew. When he was a young man practising the graces which were to conciliate the world he adored, his eccentric aunt had roused his ridicule. “Her dress and figure exceed anything we had at the masquerade; her language and ideas belong to the last century,” he wrote. In fact, though his urbanity never deserted him in writing to her—he was her heir-at-law we are reminded—his comments to others upon the Saint, the Holy Matron of Northamptonshire, as he called her, were of an acutely ironical kind; nor did he fail to note maliciously those little frailties—her anger when Mrs. Hutcheson forgot her in her will; her reprehensible desire to borrow from a nephew whom she refused to meet—which were to him so marked a feature of the saintly temper, so frequent an accompaniment of a mind clouded by enthusiasm. As Maria Holroyd observed, and others have observed after her, the great historian had a round mouth but an extremely pointed tongue; and—who knows?—it may have been Aunt Hester herself who first sharpened that weapon. Edward’s father, for instance, may have talked about William Law, his tutor—an admirable man of course; far too great a man to have been the tutor of a scatter-brained spendthrift like himself; still William Law had made himself very comfortable at the Gibbon’s house in Putney, had filled it with his own friends; had allowed Hester to fall passionately in love with him, but had never married her, since marriage was against his creed—had only accepted her devotion and her income, conduct which in another might have been condemned—so he may have gossiped. From very early days at any rate Edward must have had a private view of the eccentricities of the unworldly, of the inconsistencies of the devout. At last, however, Aunt Hester, as her nephew irreverently remarked, had “gone to sing Hallelujahs.” She lay with William Law in the grave, after a life of what ecstasies, of what tortures, of what jealousies, of what satisfactions who can say? The only fact that was certain was that she had left one hundred pounds and an estate at Newhaven to her “poor though unbelieving nephew.” “She might have done better, she might have done worse,” he observed. And by an odd coincidence her land lay not far from the Holroyd property; Lord Sheffield was eager to buy it. He could easily pay for it, he was sure, by cutting down some of the timber.

If then we accept Aunt Hester’s view, Gibbon was a worldling, wallowing in the vanities of the flesh, scoffing at the holiness of the faith. But his other aunt, his mother’s sister, took a very different view of him. To his Aunt Kitty he had been ever since he was a babe a source of acute anxiety—he was so weakly; and of intense pride—he was such a prodigy. His mother was one of those flyaway women who make great use of their unmarried sisters, since they are frequently in childbed themselves and have an appetite for pleasure when they can escape the cares of the nursery. She died, moreover, in her prime; and Kitty of course took charge of the only survivor of all those cradles, nursed him, petted him, and was the first to inspire him with that love of pagan literature which was to bring the glitter of minarets and the flash of eastern pageantry so splendidly into his sometimes too pale and pompous prose. It was Aunt Kitty who, with a prodigality that would have scandalized Aunt Hester, flung open the door of that enchanted world—the world of The Cavern of the Winds, of the Palace of Felicity, of Pope’s Homer, and of the Arabian Nights in which Edward was to roam for ever. “Where a title attracted my eye, without fear or awe I snatched the volume from the shelf; and Mrs. Porten, who indulged herself in moral and religious speculations, was more prone to encourage than to check a curiosity above the strength of a boy.” And it was she who first loosened his lips. “Her indulgent tenderness, the frankness of her temper, and my innate rising curiosity, soon removed all distance between us; like friends of an equal age, we freely conversed on every topic, familiar or abstruse.” It was she who began the conversation which was still continuing in front of the fire in the library that summer night.

What would have happened if the child had fallen into the hands of his other aunt and her companion? Should we have had the Decline and Fall if they had controlled his reading and checked his curiosity, as William Law checked all reading and condemned all curiosity? It is an interesting question. But the effect on the man of his two incompatible aunts developed a conflict in his nature. Aunt Hester, from whom he expected a fortune, encouraged, it would seem from his letters, a streak of hypocrisy, a vein of smooth and calculating conventionality. He sneered to Sheffield at her religion; when she died he hailed her departure with a flippant joke. Aunt Kitty on the other hand brought out a strain of piety, of filial devotion. When she died he wrote, as if it were she and not the Saint who made him think kindly for a moment of Christianity, “The immortality of the soul is on some occasions a very comfortable doctrine.” And it was she certainly who made him bethink him when she was asked to stay at Sheffield Place, that “Aunt Kitty has a secret wish to lye in my room; if it is not occupied, it might be indulged.” So while Aunt Hester lay with William Law in the grave, Aunt Kitty hoisted herself into the great four-poster with the help of the stool which the little man always used, and lay there, seeing the very cupboards and chairs that her nephew saw when he slept there, and the pond perhaps and the trees out of the window. The great historian, whose gaze swept far horizons and surveyed the processions of the Roman Emperors, could also fix them minutely upon a rather tedious old lady and guess her fancy to sleep in a certain bed. He was a strange mixture.

Very strange, Maria may have thought as she sat there listening to his talk while she stitched: selfish yet tender; ridiculous but sublime. Perhaps human nature was like that—by no means all of a piece; different at different moments; changing, as the furniture changed in the firelight, as the waters of the lake changed when the night wind swept over them. But it was time for bed; the party broke up. Mr. Gibbon, she noted with concern, for she was genuinely fond of him, had some difficulty in climbing the stairs. He was unwell; a slight operation for an old complaint was necessary, and he left them with regret to go to town. The operation was over; the news was good; they hoped that he would soon be with them again. Then suddenly between five and six of a January evening an express arrived at Sheffield Place to say that he was dangerously ill. Lord Sheffield and his sister Serena started immediately for London. It was fine, luckily, and the moon was up. “The night was light as day,” Serena wrote to Maria. “The beauty of it was solemn and almost melancholy with our train of ideas, but it seemed to calm our minds.” They reached Gibbon’s lodging at midnight and “poor Dussot came to the door the picture of despair to tell me he was no more….” He had died that morning; he was already laid in the shell of his coffin. A few days later they brought him back to Sheffield Place; carried him through the Park, past the ponds, and laid him under a crimson cloth among the Holroyds in the Mausoleum.

As for the “soft and stately Maria” she survived to the year 1863; and her granddaughter Kate, the mother of Bertrand Russell, marvelled that an old woman of that age should mind dying—an old woman who had lived through the French Revolution, who had entertained Gibbon at Sheffield Place.

[New Statesman and Nation, Jun 19, 1937]

[]

The Man at the Gate.

The man was Coleridge as De Quincey saw him, standing in a gateway. For it is vain to put the single word Coleridge at the head of a page—Coleridge the innumerable, the mutable, the atmospheric; Coleridge who is part of Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley; of his age and of our own; Coleridge whose written words fill hundreds of pages and overflow innumerable margins; whose spoken words still reverberate, so that as we enter his radius he seems not a man, but a swarm, a cloud, a buzz of words, darting this way and that, clustering, quivering and hanging suspended. So little of this can be caught in any reader’s net that it is well before we become dazed in the labyrinth of what we call Coleridge to have a clear picture before us—the picture of a man standing at a gate:

… his person was broad and full, and tended even to corpulence, his complexion was fair … his eyes were large and soft in their expression; and it was from the peculiar appearance of haze or dreaminess which mixed with their light, that I recognized my object.

That was in 1807. Coleridge was already incapable of movement. The Kendal black drop had robbed him of his will. “You bid me rouse myself—go, bid a man paralytic in both arms rub them briskly together.” The arms already hung flabby at his side; he was powerless to raise them. But the disease which paralysed his will left his mind unfettered. In proportion as he became incapable of action, he became capable of feeling. As he stood at the gate his vast expanse of being was a passive target for innumerable arrows, all of them sharp, many of them poisoned. To confess, to analyse, to describe was the only alleviation of his appalling torture—the prisoner’s only means of escape.

Thus there shapes itself in the volumes of Coleridge’s letters an immense mass of quivering matter, as if the swarm had attached itself to a bough and hung there pendent. Sentences roll like drops down a pane, drop collecting drop, but when they reach the bottom, the pane is smeared. A great novelist, Dickens for preference, could have formed out of this swarm and diffusion a prodigious, an immortal character. Dickens, could he have been induced to listen, would have noted—perhaps this:

Deeply wounded by very disrespectful words used concerning me, and which struggling as I have been thro’ life, and still maintaining a character and holding connections no way unworthy of my Family …

Or again:

The worst part of the charges were that I had been imprudent enough and in the second place gross and indelicate enough to send out a gentleman’s servant in his own house to a public house for a bottle of brandy …

Or again:

What Joy would it not be to you or to me, Miss Betham! to meet a Milton in a future state …

And again, on accepting a loan:

I can barely collect myself sufficiently to convey to you—first, that I receive this proof of your filial kindness with feelings not unworthy of the same … but that, whenever (if ever) my circumstances shall improve, you must permit me to remind you that what was, and forever under all conditions of fortune will be, felt as a gift, has become a Loan—and lastly, that you must let me have you as a frequent friend on whose visits I may rely as often as convenience will permit you …

The very voice (drastically cut short) of Micawber himself!

But there is a difference. For this Micawber knows that he is Micawber. He holds a looking-glass in his hand. He is a man of exaggerated self-consciousness, endowed with an astonishing power of self-analysis. Dickens would need to be doubled with Henry James, to be trebled with Proust, in order to convey the complexity and the conflict of a Pecksniff who despises his own hypocrisy, of a Micawber who is humiliated by his own humiliation. He is so made that he can hear the crepitation of a leaf, and yet remains obtuse to the claims of wife and child. An unopened letter brings great drops of sweat to his forehead; yet to lift a pen and answer it is beyond his power. The Dickens Coleridge and the Henry James Coleridge perpetually tear him asunder. The one sends out surreptitiously to Mr. Dunn the chemist for another bottle of opium; and the other analyses the motives that have led to this hypocrisy into an infinity of fine shreds.

Thus often in reading the “gallop scrawl” of the letters from Highgate in 1820 we seem to be reading notes for a late work by Henry James. He is the forerunner of all who have tried to reveal the intricacies, to take the faintest creases of the human soul. The great sentences pocketed with parentheses, expanded with dash after dash, break their walls under the strain of including and qualifying and suggesting all that Coleridge feels, fears and glimpses. Often he is prolix to the verge of incoherence, and his meaning dwindles and fades to a wisp on the mind’s horizon. Yet in our tongue-tied age there is a joy in this reckless abandonment to the glory of words. Cajoled, caressed, tossed up in handfuls, words yield those flashing phrases that hang like ripe fruit in the many-leaved tree of his immense volubility. “Brow-hanging, shoe-contemplative, strange”; there is Hazlitt. Of Dr. Darwin: “He was like a pigeon picking up peas, and afterwards voiding them with excremental additions.” Anything may tumble out of that great maw; the subtlest criticism, the wildest jest, the exact condition of his intestines. But he uses words most often to express the crepitations of his apprehensive susceptibility. They serve as a smoke-screen between him and the menace of the real world. The word screen trembles and shivers. What enemy is approaching? Nothing visible to the naked eye. And yet how he trembles and quivers! Hartley, “poor Hartley … in shrinking from the momentary pain of telling the plain truth, a truth not discreditable to him or to me, has several times inflicted an agitating pain and confusion”—by what breach of morality or dereliction of duty?—“by bringing up Mr. Bourton unexpectedly on Sundays with the intention of dining here.” Is that all? Ah, but a diseased body feels the stab of anguish if only a corn is trod upon. Anguish shoots through every fibre of his being. Has he not himself often shrunk from the momentary pain of telling the plain truth? Why has he no home to offer his son, no table to which Hartley could bring his friends uninvited? Why does he live a stranger in the house of friends, and be (at present) unable to discharge his share of the housekeeping expenses? The old train of bitter thoughts is set in motion once more. He is one hum and vibration of painful emotion. And then, giving it all the slip, he takes refuge in thought and provides Hartley with “in short, the sum of all my reading and reflections on the vast Wheel of the Mythology of the earliest and purest Heathenism.” Hartley must feed upon that and take a snack of cold meat and pickles at some inn.

Letter-writing was in its way a substitute for opium. In his letters he could persuade others to believe what he did not altogether believe himself—that he had actually written the folios, the quartos, the octavos that he had planned. Letters also relieved him of those perpetually pullulating ideas which, like Surinam toads, as he said, were always giving birth to little toads that “grow quickly and draw off attention from the mother toad.” In letters thoughts need not be brought to a conclusion. Somebody was always interrupting, and then he could throw down his pen and indulge in what was, after all, better than writing—the “insemination” of ideas without the intermediary of any gross impediment by word of mouth into the receptive, the acquiescent, the entirely passive ear, say, of Mr. Green who arrived punctually at three. Later, if it were Thursday, in came politicians, economists, musicians, business men, fine ladies, children—it mattered not who they were so long as he could talk and they would listen.

Two pious American editors have collected the comments of this various company,[◉1] and they are, of course, various. Yet it is the only way of getting at the truth—to have it broken into many splinters by many mirrors and so select. The truth about Coleridge the talker seems to have been that he rapt some listeners to the seventh heaven; bored others to extinction; and made one foolish girl giggle irrepressibly. In the same way his eyes were brown to some, grey to others, and again a very bright blue. But there is one point upon which all who listened are agreed; not one of them could remember a single word he said. All, however, with astonishing unanimity are agreed that it was “like”—the waves of the ocean, the flowing of a mighty river, the splendour of the Aurora Borealis, the radiance of the Milky Way. Almost all are equally agreed that waves, river, Borealis, and Milky Way lacked, as Lady Jerningham tersely put it, “behind.” From their accounts it is clear that he avoided contradiction; detested personality; cared nothing who you were; only needed some sound of breathing or rustle of skirts to stir his flocks of dreaming thoughts into motion and light the glitter and magic that lay sunk in the torpid flesh. Was it the mixture of body and mind in his talk that gave off some hypnotic fume that lulled the audience into drowsiness? He acted as he talked; now, if he felt the interest flag, pointing to a picture, or caressing a child, and then, as the time to make an exit approached, majestically possessed himself of a bedroom candlestick and, still discoursing, disappeared. Thus played upon by gesture and voice, brow and glittering eye, no one, as Crabb Robinson remarks, could take a note. It is then in his letters, where the body of the actor was suppressed, that we have the best record of the siren’s song. There we hear the voice that began talking at the age of two—“Nasty Doctor Young” are his first recorded words; and went on in barracks, on board ship, in pulpits, in stage coaches—it mattered not where he found himself or with whom, Keats it might be or the baker’s boy—on he went, on and on, talking about nightingales, dreams, the will, the volition, the reason, the understanding, monsters, and mermaids, until a little girl, overcome by the magic of the incantation, burst into tears when the voice ceased and left her alone in a silent world.

We too, when the voice stops only half an hour before he passed that July day in 1834 into silence, feel bereft. Is it for hours or for years that this heavily built man standing in a gate has been pouring forth this passionate soliloquy, while his “large soft eyes with a peculiar expression of haze or dreaminess mixed in their light” have been fixed upon a far-away vision that filled a very few pages with poems in which every word is exact and every image as clear as crystal?

[New Statesman and Nation, Oct 19, 1940]

[]

Sara Coleridge.

[Coleridge Fille: A Biography of Sara Coleridge. By Earl Leslie Griggs.]

Coleridge also left children of his body. One, his daughter, Sara, was a continuation of him, not of his flesh inded, for she was minute, aetherial, but of his mind, his temperament. The whole of her forty-eight years were lived in the light of his sunset, so that, like other children of great men, she is a chequered dappled figure flitting between a vanished radiance and the light of every day. And, like so many of her father’s works, Sara Coleridge remains unfinished. Mr. Griggs has written her life, exhaustively, sympathetically; but still … dots intervene. That extremely interesting fragment, her autobiography, ends with three rows of dots after twenty-six pages. She intended, she says, to end every section with a moral, or a reflection. And then “on reviewing my earlier childhood I find the predominant reflection….” There she stops. But she said many things in those twenty-six pages, and Mr. Griggs has added others that tempt us to fill in the dots, though not with the facts that she might have given us.

“Send me the very feel of her sweet Flesh, the very look and motion of that mouth—O, I could drive myself mad about her,” Coleridge wrote when she was a baby. She was a lovely child, delicate, large-eyed, musing but active, very still but always in motion, like one of her father’s poems. She remembered how he took her as a child to stay with the Wordsworths at Allan Bank. The rough farmhouse life was distasteful to her, and to her shame they bathed her in a room where men came in and out. Delicately dressed in lace and muslin, for her father liked white for girls, she was a contrast to Dora, with her wild eyes and floating yellow hair and frock of deep Prussian blue or purple—for Wordsworth liked clothes to be coloured. The visit was full of such contrasts and conflicts. Her father cherished her and petted her. “I slept with him and he would tell me fairy stories when he came to bed at twelve or one o’clock….” Then her mother, Mrs. Coleridge, arrived, and Sara flew to that honest, homely, motherly woman and “wished never to be separated from her.” At that—the memory was still bitter—“my father showed displeasure and accused me of want of affection. I could not understand why…. I think my father’s motive,” she reflected later, “must have been a wish to fasten my affections on him…. I slunk away and hid myself in the wood behind the house.”

But it was her father who, when she lay awake terrified by a horse with eyes of flame, gave her a candle. He, too, had been afraid of the dark. With his candle beside her, she lost her fear, and lay awake, listening to the sound of the river, to the thud of the forge hammer, and to the cries of stray animals in the fields. The sounds haunted her all her life. No country, no garden, no house ever compared with the Fells and the horse-shoe lawn and the room with three windows looking over the lake to the mountains. She sat there while her father, Wordsworth and De Quincey paced up and down talking. What they said she could not understand, but she “used to note the handkerchief hanging out of the pocket and long to clutch it.” When she was a child the handkerchief vanished and her father with it. After that, “I never lived with him for more than a few weeks at a time,” she wrote. A room at Greta Hall was always kept ready for him but he never came. Then the brothers, Hartley and Derwent, vanished, too; and Mrs. Coleridge and Sara stayed on with Uncle Southey, feeling their dependence and resenting it. “A house of bondage Greta Hall was to her,” Hartley wrote. Yet there was Uncle Southey’s library; and thanks to that admirable, erudite and indefatigable man, Sara became mistress of six languages, translated Dobritzhoffer from the Latin, to help pay for Hartley’s education, and qualified herself, should the worst come, to earn her living. “Should it be necessary,” Wordsworth wrote, “she will be well fitted to become a governess in a nobleman’s or gentleman’s family…. She is remarkably clever.”

But it was her beauty that took her father by surprise when at last at the age of twenty she visited him at Highgate. She was learned he knew, and he was proud of it; but he was unprepared, Mr. Griggs says, “for the dazzling vision of loveliness which stepped across the threshold one cold December day.” People rose in a public hall when she came in. “I have seen Miss Coleridge,” Lamb wrote, “and I wish I had just such a—daughter.” Did Coleridge wish to keep such a daughter? Was a father’s jealousy roused in that will-less man of inordinate susceptibility when Sara met her cousin Henry up at Highgate and almost instantly, but secretly, gave him her coral necklace in exchange for a ring with his hair? What right had a father who could not offer his daughter even a room to be told of the engagement or to object to it? He could only quiver with innumerable conflicting sensations at the thought that his nephew, whose book on the West Indies had impressed him unfavourably, was taking from him the daughter who, like Christabel, was his masterpiece, but, like Christabel, was unfinished. All he could do was to cast his magic spell. He talked. For the first time since she was a woman, Sara heard him talk. She could not remember a word of it afterwards. And she was penitent. It was partly that

my father generally discoursed on such a very extensive scale…. Henry could sometimes bring him down to narrower topics, but when alone with me he was almost always on the star-paved road, taking in the whole heavens in his circuit.

She was a heaven-haunter, too; but at the moment “I was anxious about my brothers and their prospects—about Henry’s health, and upon the subject of my engagement generally.” Her father ignored such things. Sara’s mind wandered.

The young couple, however, made ample amends for that momentary inattention. They listened to his voice for the rest of their lives. At the christening of their first child Coleridge talked for six hours without stopping. Hard-worked as Henry was, and delicate, sociable and pleasure-loving, the spell of Uncle Sam was on him, and so long as he lived he helped his wife. He annotated, he edited, he set down what he could remember of the wonderful voice. But the main labour fell on Sara. She made herself, she said, the housekeeper in that littered palace. She followed his reading; verified his quotations; defended his character; traced notes on innumerable margins; ransacked bundles; pieced beginnings together and supplied them not with ends but with continuations. A whole day’s work would result in one erasure. Cab fares to newspaper offices mounted; eyes, for she could not afford a secretary, felt the strain; but so long as a page remained obscure, a date doubtful, a reference unverified, an aspersion not disproved, “poor, dear, indefatigable Sara,” as Mrs. Wordsworth called her, worked on. And much of her work was done lastingly; editors still stand on the foundations she truly laid.

Much of it was not self-sacrifice, but self-realization. She found her father, in those blurred pages, as she had not found him in the flesh; and she found that he was herself. She did not copy him, she insisted; she was him. Often she continued his thoughts as if they had been her own. Did she not even shuffle a little in her walk, as he did, from side to side? Yet though she spent half her time in reflecting that vanished radiance, the other half was spent in the light of common day—at Chester Place, Regents Park. Children were born and children died. Her health broke down; she had her father’s legacy of harassed nerves; and, like her father, had need of opium. Pathetically she wished that she could be given “three years’ respite from child bearing.” But she wished in vain. Then Henry, whose gaiety had so often dragged her from the dark abyss, died young; leaving his notes unfinished, and two children also, and very little money, and many apartments in Uncle Sam’s great house still unswept.

She worked on. In her desolation it was her solace, her opium perhaps. “Things of the mind and intellect give me intense pleasure; they delight and amuse me as they are in themselves … and sometimes I think, the result has been too large, the harvest too abundant, in inward satisfaction. This is dangerous….” Thoughts proliferated. Like her father she had a Surinam toad in her head, breeding other toads. But his were jewelled; hers were plain. She was diffuse, unable to conclude, and without the magic that does instead of a conclusion. She would have liked, had she been able to make an end, to have written—on metaphysics, on theology, some book of criticism. Or again, politics interested her intensely, and Turner’s pictures. But “whatever subject I commence, I feel discomfort unless I could pursue it in every direction to the farthest bounds of thought…. This was the reason why my father wrote by snatches. He could not bear to complete incompletely.” So, book in hand, pen suspended, large eyes filled with a dreamy haze, she mused—“picking flowers, and finding nests, and exploring some particular nook, as I used to be when a child walking with my Uncle Southey….”

Then her children interrupted. With her son, the brilliant Herbert, she read, straight through the classics. Were there not, Mr. Justice Coleridge objected, passages in Aristophanes that they had better skip? Perhaps…. Still, Herbert took all the prizes, won all the scholarships, almost drove her to distraction with his horn-playing and, like his father, loved parties. Sara went to balls, and watched him dance waltz after waltz. She had the old lovely clothes that Henry had given her altered for her daughter, Edith. She found herself eating supper twice, she was so bored. She preferred dinner parties where she held her own with Macaulay, who was so like her father in the face, and with Carlyle—“A precious Arch-charlatan,” she called him. The young poets, like Aubrey de Vere, sought her out. She was one of those, he said, “whose thoughts are growing while they speak.” After he had gone, her thoughts followed him, in long, long letters, rambling over baptism, regenerations, metaphysics, theology, and poetry, past, present and to come. As a critic she never, like her father, grazed paths of light; she was a fertilizer, not a creator, a burrowing, tunnelling reader, throwing up molehills as she read her way through Dante, Virgil, Aristophanes, Crashaw, Jane Austen, Crabbe, to emerge suddenly, unafraid, in the very face of Keats and Shelley. “Fain would mine eyes,” she wrote, “discern the Future in the past.”

Past, present, future dappled her with a strange light. She was mixed in herself, still divided, as in the wood behind the house, between two loyalties, to the father who told her fairy stories in bed; and to the mother—Frettikins she called her—to whom she clung in the flesh. “Dear mother,” she exclaimed, “what an honest, simple, lively minded affectionate woman she was, how free from disguise or artifice….” Why, even her wig—she had cut her hair off as a girl—“was as dry and rough and dull as a piece of stubble, and as short and stumpy.” The wig and the brow—she understood them both. Could she have skipped the moral she could have told us much about that strange marriage. She meant to write her life. But she was interrupted. There was a lump on her breast. Mr. Gilman, consulted, detected cancer. She did not want to die. She had not finished editing her father’s works, she had not written her own, for she did not like to complete incompletely. But she died at forty-eight, leaving, like her father, a blank page covered with dots, and two lines:

Father, no amaranths e’er shall wreathe my brow—

Enough that round thy grave they flourish now.

[New Statesman and Nation, Oct 26, 1940]

[]

“Not One of Us”.

[A review of Shelley, His Life and Work, by Walter Edwin Peck, October 1927]

Professor Peck does not apologize for writing a new life of Shelley, nor does he give any reason for doing what has been so thoroughly done already, nor are the new documents that have come into his hands of any great importance. And yet nobody is going to complain that here are two more thick, illustrated, careful and conscientious volumes devoted to the retelling of a story which everyone knows by heart. There are some stories which have to be retold by each generation, not that we have anything new to add to them, but because of some queer quality in them which makes them not only Shelley’s story but our own. Eminent and durable they stand on the skyline, a mark past which we sail, which moves as we move and yet remains the same.

Many such changes of orientation toward Shelley have been recorded. In his own lifetime all except five people looked upon him, Shelley said, “as a rare prodigy of crime and pollution, whose look even might infect.” Sixty years later he was canonized by Edward Dowden. By Matthew Arnold he was again reduced to the ordinary human scale. How many biographers and essayists have since absolved him or sentenced him, it is impossible to say. And now comes our turn to make up our minds what manner of man Shelley was; so that we read Professor Peck’s volumes, not to find out new facts, but to get Shelley more sharply outlined against the shifting image of ourselves.

If such is our purpose, never was there a biographer who gave his readers more opportunity to fulfil it than Professor Peck. He is singularly dispassionate, and yet not colourless. He has opinions, but he does not obtrude them. His attitude to Shelley is kind but not condescending. He does not rhapsodize, but at the same time he does not scold. There are only two points which he seems to plead with any personal partiality; one, that Harriet was a much wronged woman; the other, that the political importance of Shelley’s poetry is not rated sufficiently high. Perhaps we could spare the careful analysis of so many poems. We scarcely need to know how many times mountains and precipices are mentioned in the course of Shelley’s works. But as a chronicler of great learning and lucidity, Professor Peck is admirable. Here, he seems to say, is all that is actually known about Shelley’s life. In October he did this; in November he did that; now it was that he wrote this poem; it was here that he met that friend. And, moulding the enormous mass of the Shelley papers with dexterous fingers, he contrives tactfully to embed dates and facts in feelings, in comments, in what Shelley wrote, in what Mary wrote, in what other people wrote about them, so that we seem to be breasting the full current of Shelley’s life and get the illusion that we are, this time, seeing Shelley, not through the rosy glasses or the livid glasses which sentiment and prudery have fixed on our forerunners’ noses, but plainly, as he was, In this, of course, we are mistaken; glasses we wear, though we cannot see them. But the illusion of seeing Shelley plain is sufficiently exhilarating to tempt us to try to fix it while it lasts.

There is an image of Shelley’s personal appearance in everybody’s picture gallery. He was a lean, large-boned boy, much freckled, with big, rather prominent blue eyes. His dress was careless, of course, but it was distinguished; “he wore his clothes like a gentleman.” He was courteous and gentle in manner, but he spoke in a shrill, harsh voice and soon rose to the heights of excitement. Nobody could overlook the presence of this discordant character in the room, and his presence was strangely disturbing. It was not merely that he might do something extreme, he might, somehow, make whoever was there appear absurd. From the earliest days normal people had noticed his abnormality and had done their best, following some obscure instinct of self-preservation, to make Shelley either toe the line or else quit the society of the respectable. At Eton they called him “mad Shelley” and pelted him with muddy balls. At Oxford he spilt acid over his tutor’s carpet, “a new purchase, which he thus completely destroyed,” and for other and more serious differences of opinion he was expelled.

After that he became the champion of every down-trodden cause and person. Now it was an embankment; now a publisher; now the Irish nation; now three poor weavers condemned for treason; now a flock of neglected sheep. Spinsters of all sorts who were oppressed or aspiring found in him their leader. The first years of his youth thus were spent in dropping seditious pamphlets into old women’s hoods; in shooting scabby sheep to put them out of their misery; in raising money; in writing pamphlets; in rowing out to sea and dropping bottles into the water which when broken open by the Town Clerk of Barnstable were found to contain a seditious paper, “the contents of which the mayor has not yet been able to ascertain.” In all these wanderings and peregrinations he was accompanied by a woman, or perhaps by two women, who either had young children at the breast or were shortly expecting to become mothers. And one of them, it is said, could not contain her amusement when she saw the pamphlet dropped into the old woman’s hood, but burst out laughing.

The picture is familiar enough; the only thing that changes is our attitude toward it. Shelley, excitable, uncompromising, atheistical, throwing his pamphlets into the sea in the belief that he is going to reform the world, has become a figure which is half heroic and wholly delightful. On the other hand, the world that Shelley fought has become ridiculous. Somehow the untidy, shrill-voiced boy, with his violence and his oddity has succeeded in making Eton and Oxford, the English government, the Town Clerk and Mayor of Barnstable, the country gentlemen of Sussex and innumerable obscure people whom we might call generically, after Mary’s censorious friends, the Booths and the Baxters—Shelley has succeeded in making all these look absurd.

But, unfortunately, though one may make bodies and institutions look absurd, it is extremely difficult to make private men and women look anything so simple. Human relationships are too complex; human nature is too subtle. Thus contact with Shelley turned Harriet Westbrook, who should have been the happy mother of a commonplace family, into a muddled and bewildered woman, who wanted both to reform the world and yet to possess a coach and bonnets, and was finally drawn from the Serpentine on a winter’s morning, drowned in her despair. And Mary and Miss Hitchener, and Godwin and Claire, and Hogg and Emilia Viviani, and Sophia Stacey and Jane Williams—there is nothing tragic about them, perhaps; there is, indeed, much that is ridiculous. Still, their association with Shelley does not lead to any clear and triumphant conclusion. Was he right? Were they right? The whole relationship is muddy and obscure; it baffles; it teases.

One is reminded of the private life of another man whose power of conviction was even greater than Shelley’s, and more destructive of normal human happiness. One remembers Tolstoy and his wife. The alliance of the intense belief of genius with the easy-going non-belief or compromise of ordinary humanity must, it seems, lead to disaster and to disaster of a lingering and petty kind in which the worst side of both natures is revealed. But while Tolstoy might have wrought out his philosophy alone or in a monastery, Shelley was driven by something yielding and enthusiastic in his temperament to entangle himself with men and women. “I think one is always in love with something or other,” he wrote. But this “something or other,” besides lodging in poetry and metaphysics and the good of society in general, had its dwelling in the bodies of human beings of the opposite sex. He saw “the likeness of what is perhaps eternal” in the eyes of Mary. Then it vanished, to appear in the eyes of Emilia; then there it was again manifesting itself indisputably in Sophia Stacey or in Jane Williams. What is the lover to do when the will o’ the wisp shifts its quarters? One must go on, said Shelley, until one is stopped. And what is to stop one? Not, if one is Shelley, the conventions and superstitions which bind the baser part of mankind; not the Booths and the Baxters. Oxford might expel him, England might exile him, but still, in spite of disaster and derision, he sought the “likeness of what is perhaps eternal”; he went on being in love.

But as the object of his love was a hybrid creature, half human, half divine, so the manner of his love partook of the same ambiguous nature. There was something inhuman about Shelley. Godwin, in answer to Shelley’s first letter, noticed it. He complained of the “generalizing character” of Shelley’s style, which, he said, had the effect of making him “not an individual character” to him. Mary Shelley, musing over her life when Shelley was dead, exclaimed, “What a strange life mine has been. Love, youth, fear and fearlessness led me early from the regular routine of life and I united myself to this being who, not one of us, though like us, was pursued by numberless miseries and annoyances, in all of which I shared.” Shelley was “not one of us.” He was, even to his wife, a “being,” some one who came and went like a ghost, seeking the eternal. Of the transitory, he had little notion. The joys and sorrows, from whose threads are woven the warm cocoon of private life in which most men live, had no hold upon him. A strange formality stiffens his letters; there is no intimacy in them and no fun.

At the same time it is perfectly true, and Professor Peck does well to emphasize the fact, that Shelley loved humanity if he did not love this Harriet or that Mary. A sense of the wretchedness of human beings burnt in him as brightly and as persistently as his sense of the divine beauty of nature. He loved the clouds and the mountains and the rivers more passionately than any other man loved them; but at the foot of the mountain he always saw a ruined cottage; there were criminals in chains, hoeing up the weeds in the pavement of St. Peter’s Square; there was an old woman shaking with ague on the banks of the lovely Thames. Then he would thrust aside his writing, dismiss his dreams and trudge off to physic the poor with medicine or with soup. Inevitably there collected round him, as time went on, the oddest assortment of pensioners and protégés. He took on himself the charge of deserted women and other people’s children; he paid other persons’ debts and planned their journeys and settled their relationships. The most ethereal of poets was the most practical of men.

Hence, says Professor Peck, from this union of poetry and humanity springs the true value of Shelley’s poetry. It was the poetry of a man who was not a “pure poet,” but a poet with a passion for reforming the wrongs of men. Had he lived, he would have reconciled poetry and the statement of “the necessity of certain immediate reforms in politics, society and government.” He died too young to be able to deliver his message; and the difficulty of his poetry arises from the fact that the conflict between poetry and politics rages there unresolved. We may not agree with Professor Peck’s definition, yet we have only to read Shelley again to come up against the difficulty of which he speaks. It lies partly in the disconcerting fact that we had thought his poetry so good and we find it indeed so poor. How are we to account for the fact that we remember him as a great poet and find him on opening his pages a bad one? The explanation seems to be that he was not a “pure poet.” He did not concentrate his meaning in a small space; there is nothing in Shelley’s poetry as rich and compact as the odes of Keats. His taste could be sentimental; he had all the vices of the album makers; he was unreal, strained, verbose. The lines which Professor Peck quotes with admiration: “Good night? No, love! The night is ill,” seems to us a proof of it. But if we pass from the lyrics, with all their exquisite beauty, and read ourselves into one of the longer poems, Epipsychidion or Prometheus Unbound, where the faults have space to lose themselves, we again become convinced of his greatness. And here again we are confronted by a difficulty. For if we were asked to extract the teaching from these poems we should be at a loss. We can hardly say what reform in “politics, society and government” they advocate. Their greatness seems to lie in nothing so definite as a philosophy, in nothing so pure as perfection of expression. It lies rather in a state of being. We come through skeins of clouds and gusts of whirlwind out into a space of pure calm, of intense and windless serenity. Defensibly or not, we make a distinction—The Skylark, the Ode to the West Wind are poems; the Prometheus, the Epipsychidion are poetry.

So if we outline our relationship to Shelley from the vantage ground of 1927 we shall find that his England is a barbarous place where they imprison journalists for being disrespectful to the Prince Regent, stand men in stocks for publishing attacks upon the Scriptures, execute weavers upon the suspicion of treason, and, without giving proof of strict religious belief themselves, expel a boy from Oxford for avowing his atheism. Politically, then, Shelley’s England has already receded, and his fight, valiant though it is, seems to be with monsters who are a little out of date, and therefore slightly ridiculous. But privately he is much closer to us. For alongside the public battle wages, from generation to generation, another fight which is as important as the other, though much less is said about it. Husband fights with wife and son with father. The poor fight the rich and the employer fights the employed. There is a perpetual effort on the one hand to make all these relationships more reasonable, less painful and less servile; on the other, to keep them as they are. Shelley, both as son and as husband, fought for reason and freedom in private life, and his experiments, disastrous as they were in many ways, have helped us to greater sincerity and happiness in our own conflicts. The Sir Timothys of Sussex are no longer so prompt to cut their sons off with a shilling; the Booths and the Baxters are no longer quite so sure that an unmarried wife is an unmitigated demon. The grasp of convention upon private life is no longer quite so coarse or quite so callous because of Shelley’s successes and failures.

So we see Shelley through our particular pair of spectacles—a shrill, charming, angular boy; a champion riding out against the forces of superstition and brutality with heroic courage; at the same time blind, inconsiderate, obtuse to other persons’ feelings. Rapt in his extraordinary vision, ascending to the very heights of existence, he seems, as Mary said, “a being,” “not one of us,” but better and higher and aloof and apart. Suddenly there comes a knock at the door; the Hunts and seven children are at Leghorn; Lord Byron has been rude to them; Hunt is cut to the heart. Shelley must be off at once to see that they are comfortable. And, rousing himself from his rapture, Shelley goes.

[New York Herald Tribune, Oct 23, 1927]

[]

Henry James: 1. Within the Rim.

It would be easy to justify the suspicion which the sight of Within the Rim aroused, and to make it account for the tepid and formal respect with which we own to have approached the book. Essays about the war contributed to albums and books with a charitable object even by the most distinguished of writers bear for the most part such traces of perfunctory composition, such evidence of genius forcibly harnessed to the wagon of philanthropy and sullen and stubborn beneath the lash, that one is inclined for the sake of the writer to leave them unread. But we should not have said this unless we intended immediately and completely to unsay it. The process of reading these essays was a process of recantation. It is possible that the composition of some of them was an act of duty, in the sense that the writing of a chapter of a novel was not an act of duty. But the duty was imposed upon Henry James not by the persuasions of a committee nor by the solicitations of friends, but by a power much more commanding and irresistible—a power so large and of such immense significance to him that he scarcely succeeds with all his range of expression in saying what it was or all that it meant to him. It was Belgium, it was France, it was above all England and the English tradition, it was everything that he had ever cared for of civilization, beauty and art threatened with destruction and arrayed before his imagination in one figure of tragic appeal.

Perhaps no other elderly man existed in August 1914 so well qualified to feel imaginatively all that the outbreak of war meant as Henry James. For years he had been appreciating ever more and more finely what he calls “the rare, the sole, the exquisite England”: he had relished her discriminatingly as only the alien, bred to different sounds and sights and circumstances, could relish others so distinct and so delightful in their distinctness. Knowing so well what she had given him, he was the more tenderly and scrupulously grateful to her for the very reason that she seemed to him to bestow her gifts half in ignorance of their value. Thus when the news came that England was in danger he wandered in the August sunshine half overwhelmed with the vastness of what had happened, reckoning up his debt, conscious to the verge of agony of the extent to which he had committed his own happiness to her, and analysing incessantly and acutely just what it all meant to the world and to him. At first, as he owned, he had “an elderly dread of a waste of emotion … my house of the spirit amid everything around me had become more and more the inhabited, adjusted, familiar home”; but before long he found himself

building additions and upper storeys, throwing out extensions and protrusions, indulging even, all recklessly, in gables and pinnacles and battlements—things that had presently transformed the unpretending place into I scarce know what to call it, a fortress of the faith, a palace of the soul, an extravagant, bristling, flag-flying structure which had quite as much to do with the air as with the earth.

In a succession of images not to be torn from their context he paints the state of his mind confronted by one aspect after another of what appeared to him in so many diverse lights of glory and of tragedy. His gesture as of one shrinking from the sight of the distress, combined with an irresistible instinct of pity drawing him again and again to its presence, recalls to the present writer his reluctance to take a certain road in Rye because it led past the workhouse gates and forced to his notice the dismal line of tramps waiting for admittance. But in the case of the wounded and the fugitive his humanity forced him again and again to face the sight, and brought him the triumphant reward of finding that the beauty emerging from such conditions more than matched the squalor. “… their presence,” he wrote of the wounded soldier, “is a blest renewal of faith.”

A moralist perhaps might object that terms of beauty and ugliness are not the terms in which to speak of so vast a catastrophe, nor should a writer exhibit so keen a curiosity as to the tremors and vibrations of his own spirit in face of the universal calamity. Yet, of all books describing the sights of war and appealing for our pity, this largely personal account is the one that best shows the dimensions of the whole. It is not merely or even to any great extent that we have been stimulated intellectually by the genius of Henry James to analyse shades and subtleties; but rather that for the first and only time, so far as we are aware, someone has reached an eminence sufficiently high above the scene to give it its grouping and standing in the universal. Read, for instance, the scene of the arrival of the Belgian refugees by night at Rye, which we will not curtail and thus rob of its completeness. It is precisely the same little scene of refugees hurrying by in silence save for the cry of a woman carrying her child, which, in its thousand varieties, a thousand pens have depicted during the past four years. They have done their best, and left us acknowledging their effort, but feeling it to be a kind of siege or battering ram laid to the emotions, which have obstinately refused to yield their fruits. That it is altogether otherwise with the scene painted for us by Henry James might perhaps be credited to his training as a novelist. But when, in his stately way, diminishing his stature not one whit and majestically rolling the tide of his prose over the most rocky of obstacles, he asks us for the gift of a motor-car, we cannot help feeling that if all philanthropies had such advocates our pockets would never be anything but empty. It is not that our emotions have been harassed by the sufferings of the individual case. That he can do upon occasion with beautiful effect. But what he does in this little book of less than a hundred and twenty pages is, so it seems to us, to present the best statement yet made of the largest point of view. He makes us understand what civilization meant to him and should mean to us. For him it was a spirit that overflowed the material bounds of countries, but it is in France that he sees it most plainly personified:

… what happens to France happens to all that part of ourselves which we are most proud, and most finely advised, to enlarge and cultivate and consecrate…. She is sole and single in this, that she takes charge of those of the interests of man which most dispose him to fraternize with himself, to pervade all his possibilities and to taste all his faculties, and in consequence to find and to make the earth a friendlier, an easier, and especially a more various sojourn.

If all our counsellors, we cannot help exclaiming, had spoken with that voice!

[Times Literary Supplement, Mar 27, 1919]

[]

Henry James: 2. The Old Order.

[The Middle Years. By Henry James.]

With this small volume, which brings us down to about the year 1870, the memories of Henry James break off. It is more fitting to say that they break off than that they come to an end, for although we are aware that we shall hear his voice no more, there is no hint of exhaustion or of leave-taking; the tone is as rich and deliberate as if time were unending and matter infinite; what we have seems to be but the prelude to what we are to have, but a crumb, as he says, of a banquet now forever withheld. Someone speaking once incautiously in his presence of his “completed” works drew from him the emphatic assertion that never, never so long as he lived could there be any talk of completion; his work would end only with his life; and it seems in accord with this spirit that we should feel ourselves pausing, at the end of a paragraph, while in imagination the next great wave of the wonderful voice curves into fullness.

All great writers have, of course, an atmosphere in which they seem most at their ease and at their best; a mood of the great general mind which they interpret and indeed almost discover, so that we come to read them rather for that than for any story or character or scene of separate excellence. For ourselves Henry James seems most entirely in his element, doing that is to say what everything favours his doing, when it is a question of recollection. The mellow light which swims over the past, the beauty which suffuses even the commonest little figures of that time, the shadow in which the detail of so many things can be discerned which the glare of day flattens out, the depth, the richness, the calm, the humour of the whole pageant—all this seems to have been his natural atmosphere and his most abiding mood. It is the atmosphere of all those stories in which aged Europe is the background for young America. It is the half light in which he sees most, and sees farthest. To Americans, indeed, to Henry James and to Hawthorne, we owe the best relish of the past in our literature—not the past of romance and chivalry, but the immediate past of vanished dignity and faded fashions. The novels teem with it; but wonderful as they are, we are tempted to say that the memories are yet more wonderful, in that they are more exactly Henry James, and give more precisely his tone and his gesture. In them his benignity is warmer, his humour richer, his solicitude more exquisite, his recognition of beauty, fineness, humanity more instant and direct. He comes to his task with an indescribable air of one so charged and laden with precious stuff that he hardly knows how to divest himself of it all—where to find space to set down this and that, how to resist altogether the claims of some other gleaming object in the background; appearing so busy, so unwieldy with ponderous treasure that his dexterity in disposing of it, his consummate knowledge of how best to place each fragment, afford us the greatest delight that literature has had to offer for many a year. The mere sight is enough to make anyone who has ever held a pen in his hand consider his art afresh in the light of this extraordinary example of it. And our pleasure at the mere sight soon merges in the thrill with which we recognize, if not directly then by hearsay, the old world of London life which he brings out of the shades and sets tenderly and solidly before us as if his last gift were the most perfect and precious of the treasures hoarded in “the scented chest of our savings.”

After the absence from Europe of about nine years which is recorded in Notes of a Son and Brother, he arrived in Liverpool on March 1st, 1869, and found himself “in the face of an opportunity that affected me then and there as the happiest, the most interesting, the most alluring and beguiling that could ever have opened before a somewhat disabled young man who was about to complete his twenty-sixth year.” He proceeded to London, and took up his lodging with a “kind slim celibate,” a Mr. Lazarus Fox—every detail is dear to him—who let out slices of his house in Half Moon Street to gentlemen lodgers. The London of that day, as Henry James at once proceeded to ascertain with those amazingly delicate and tenacious tentacles of his, was an extremely characteristic and uncompromising organism. “The big broom of change” had swept it hardly at all since the days of Byron at least. She was still the “unaccommodating and unaccommodated city … the city too indifferent, too proud, too unaware, too stupid even if one will, to enter any lists that involved her moving from her base and that thereby … enjoyed the enormous ‘pull,’ for making her impression, of ignoring everything but her own perversities and then of driving these home with an emphasis not to be gainsaid.” The young American (“brooding monster that I was, born to discriminate à tout propos”) was soon breakfasting with the gentleman upstairs (Mr. Albert Rutson), eating his fried sole and marmalade with other gentlemen from the Home Office, the Foreign Office, the House of Commons, whose freedom to lounge over that meal impressed him greatly, and whose close questioning as to the composition of Grant’s first Cabinet embarrassed him not a little. The whole scene, which it would be an impiety to dismember further, has the very breath of the age in it. The whiskers, the leisure, the intentness of those gentlemen upon politics, their conviction that the composition of Cabinets was the natural topic for the breakfast-table, and that a stranger unable, as Henry James found himself, to throw light upon it was “only not perfectly ridiculous because perfectly insignificant”—all this provides a picture that many of us will be able to see again as we saw it once perhaps from the perch of an obliging pair of shoulders.

The main facts about that London, as all witnesses agree in testifying, were its smallness compared with our city, the limited number of distractions and amusements available, and the consequent tendency of all people worth knowing to know each other and to form a very accessible and, at the same time, highly enviable society. Whatever the quality that gained you admittance, whether it was that you had done something or showed yourself capable of doing something worthy of respect, the compliment was not an empty one. A young man coming up to London might in a few months claim to have met Tennyson, Browning, Matthew Arnold, Carlyle, Froude, George Eliot, Herbert Spencer, Huxley, and Mill. He had met them; he had not merely brushed against them in a crowd. He had heard them talk; he had even offered something of his own. The conditions of those days allowed a kind of conversation which, so the survivors always maintain, is an art unknown in what they are pleased to call our chaos. What with recurring dinner parties and Sunday calls, and country visits lasting far beyond the week-ends of our generation, the fabric of friendship was solidly built up and carefully preserved. The tendency perhaps was rather to a good fellowship in which the talk was wide-sweeping, extremely well informed, and impersonal than to the less formal, perhaps more intense and indiscriminate, intimacies of to-day. We read of little societies of the sixties, the Cosmopolitan and the Century, meeting on Wednesday and on Sunday evenings to discuss the serious questions of the times, and we have the feeling that they could claim a more representative character than anything of the sort we can show now. We are left with the impression that whatever went forward in those days, either among the statesmen or among the men of letters—and there was a closer connection than there is now—was promoted or inspired by the members of this group. Undoubtedly the resources of the day—and how magnificent they were!—were better organized; and it must occur to every reader of their memoirs that a reason is to be found in the simplicity which accepted the greatness of certain names and imposed something like order on their immediate neighbourhood. Having crowned their king they worshipped him with the most whole-hearted loyalty. Groups of people would come together at Freshwater, in that old garden where the houses of Melbury Road now stand, or in various London centres, and live as it seems to us for months at a time, some of them indeed for the duration of their lives, in the mood of the presiding genius. Watts and Burne-Jones in one quarter of the town, Carlyle in another, George Eliot in a third, almost as much as Tennyson in his island, imposed their laws upon a circle which had spirit and beauty to recommend it as well as an uncritical devotion.

Henry James, of course, was not a person to accept laws or to make one of any circle in a sense which implies the blunting of the critical powers. Happily for us, he came over not only with the hoarded curiosity of years, but also with the detachment of the stranger and the critical sense of the artist. He was immensely appreciative, but he was also immensely observant. Thus it comes about that his fragment revives, indeed stamps afresh, the great figures of the epoch, and, what is no less important, illumines the lesser figures by whom they were surrounded. Nothing could be happier than his portrait of Mrs. Greville, “with her exquisite good nature and her innocent fatuity,” who was, of course, very much an individual, but also a type of the enthusiastic sisterhood which, with all its extravagances and generosities and what we might unkindly, but not without the authority of Henry James, call absurdity, now seems extinct. We shall not spoil the reader’s impression of the superb passage describing a visit arranged by Mrs. Greville to George Eliot by revealing what happened on that almost tragic occasion. It is more excusable to dwell for a moment upon the drawing-room at Milford Cottage,

the most embowered retreat for social innocence that it was possible to conceive…. The red candles in the red shades have remained with me, inexplicably, as a vivid note of this pitch, shedding their rosy light, with the autumn gale, the averted reality, all shut out, upon such felicities of feminine helplessness as I couldn’t have prefigured in advance, and as exemplified, for further gathering in, the possibilities of the old tone.

The drawn curtains, the “copious service,” the second volume of the new novel “half-uncut” laid ready to hand, “the exquisite head and incomparable brush of the domesticated collie”—that is the familiar setting. He recalls the high-handed manner in which these ladies took their way through life, baffling the very stroke of age and disaster with their unquenchable optimism, ladling out with both hands every sort of gift upon their passage, and bringing to port in their tow the most incongruous and battered of derelicts. No doubt “a number of the sharp truths that one might privately apprehend beat themselves beautifully in vain” against such defences. Truth, so it seems to us, was not so much disregarded as flattered out of countenance by the energy with which they pursued the beautiful, the noble, the poetic, and ignored the possibility of another side of things. The extravagant steps which they would take to snare whatever grace or atmosphere they desired at the moment lend their lives in retrospect a glamour of adventure, aspiration, and triumph such as seems for good or for evil banished from our conscious and much more critical day. Was a friend ill? A wall would be knocked down to admit the morning sun. Did the doctor prescribe fresh milk? The only perfectly healthy cow in England was at your service. All this personal exuberance Henry James brings back in the figure of Mrs. Greville, “friend of the super-eminent” and priestess at the different altars. Cannot we almost hear the “pleasant growling note of Tennyson” answering her “mild extravagance of homage” with “Oh, yes, you may do what you like—so long as you don’t kiss me before the cabman!”

And then with the entrance of Lady Waterford, Henry James ponders lovingly the quality which seems to hang about those days and people as the very scent of the flower—“the quality of personal beauty, to say nothing of personal accomplishment as our fathers were appointed to enjoy it…. Scarce to be sated that form of wonder, to my own imagination I confess.” Were they as beautiful as we like to remember them, or was it that the whole atmosphere made a beautiful presence, any sort of distinction or eminence indeed, felt in a way no longer so carefully arranged for, or so unquestionably accepted? Was it not all a part of the empty London streets, of the fourwheelers even, lined with straw, of the stuffy little boxes of the public dining rooms, of the protectedness, of the leisure? But if they had merely to stand and be looked at, how splendidly they did it! A certain width of space seems to be a necessary condition for the blooming of such splendid plants as Lady Waterford, who, when she had dazzled sufficiently with her beauty and presence, had only to take up her brush to be acclaimed the equal of Titian or of Watts.

Personality, whatever one may mean by it, seems to have been accorded a licence for the expression of itself for which we can find no parallel in the present day. The gift if you had it was encouraged and sheltered beyond the bounds of what now seems possible. Tennyson, of course, is the supreme example of what we mean, and happily for us Henry James was duly taken to that shrine and gives with extraordinary skill a new version of the mystery which in our case will supersede the old. “The fond prefigurements of youthful piety are predestined, more often than not, I think, experience interfering, to strange and violent shocks…. Fine, fine, fine, could he only be….” So he begins, and so continuing for some time leads us up to the pronouncement that “Tennyson was not Tennysonian.” The air one breathed at Aldworth was one in which nothing but “the blest obvious, or at least the blest outright, could so much as attempt to live…. It was a large and simple and almost empty occasion…. He struck me in truth as neither knowing nor communicating knowledge.” He recited Locksley Hall and “Oh dear, oh dear…. I heard him in cool surprise take even more out of his verse than he had put in.” And so by a series of qualifications which are all beautifully adapted to sharpen the image without in the least destroying it, we are led to the satisfactory and convincing conclusion, “My critical reaction hadn’t in the least invalidated our great man’s being a Bard—it had in fact made him and left him more a Bard than ever.” We see, really for the first time, how obvious and simple and almost empty it was, how “the glory was without history,” the poetic character “more worn than paid for, or at least more saved than spent,” and yet somehow the great man revives and flourishes in the new conditions and dawns upon us more of a Bard than we had got into the habit of thinking him. The same service of defining, limiting, and restoring to life he performs as beautifully for the ghost of George Eliot, and proclaims himself, as the faithful will be glad to hear, “even a very Derondist of Derondists.”

And thus looking back into the past which is all changed and gone (he could mark, he said, the very hour of the change) Henry James performs a last act of piety which is supremely characteristic of him. The English world of that day was very dear to him; it had a fineness and a distinction which he professed half humorously not to find in our “vast monotonous mob.” It had given him friendship and opportunity and much else, no doubt, that it had no consciousness of giving. Such a gift he of all people could never forget; and this book of memories sounds to us like a superb act of thanksgiving. What could he do to make up for it all, he seems to have asked himself. And then with all the creative power at his command he summons back the past and makes us a present of that. If we could have had the choice, that is what we should have chosen, not entirely for what it gives us of the dead, but also for what it gives us of him. Many will hear his voice again in these pages; they will perceive once more that solicitude for others, that immense desire to help which had its origin, one might guess, in the aloofness and loneliness of the artist’s life. It seemed as if he were grateful for the chance of taking part in the ordinary affairs of the world, of assuring himself that, in spite of his absorption with the fine and remote things of the imagination, he had not lost touch with human interests. To acknowledge any claim that was in the least connected with the friends or memories of the past gave him, for this reason, a peculiar joy; and we can believe that if he could have chosen, his last words would have been like these, words of recollection and of love.

[Times Literary Supplement, Oct 18, 1917]

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Henry James: 3. The Letters of Henry James.

[The Letters of Henry James. Edited by Percy Lubbock]

Who, on stepping from the cathedral dusk, the growl and boom of the organ still in the ears, and the eyes still shaded to observe better whatever intricacy of carving or richness of marble may there be concealed, can breast the stir of the street and instantly and briskly sum up and deliver his impressions? How discriminate, how formulate? How, Henry James may be heard grimly asking, dare you pronounce any opinion whatever upon me? In the first place only by taking cover under some such figure as implies that, still dazed and well-nigh drowned, our gesture at the finish is more one of exclamation than of interpretation. To soothe and to inspirit there comes, a moment later, the consciousness that, although in the eyes of Henry James our attempt is foredoomed to failure, nevertheless his blessing is upon it. A renewal of life, on such terms as we can grant it, upon lips, in minds, here in London, here among English men and women, would receive from him the most generous acknowledgment; and with a royal complacency, he would admit that our activities could hardly be better employed. Nor are we left to grope without a guide. It would not be easy to find a difficult task better fulfilled than by Mr. Percy Lubbock in his Introduction and connecting paragraphs. It seems to us, and this not only before reading the letters but more emphatically afterwards, that the lines of interpretation he lays down are the true ones. They end—as he is the first to declare—in the heart of darkness; but any understanding that we may have won of a difficult problem is at every point fortified and corrected by the help of his singularly thoughtful and intimate essay. His intervention is always illuminating.

It must be admitted that these remarks scarcely seem called for by anything specially abstruse in the first few chapters. If ever a young American proved himself capable of giving a clear and composed account of his experiences in Europe during the seventies of the last century that young American was Henry James. He recounts his seeings and doings, his dinings out and meetings, his country house visits, like a guest too well-bred to show surprise even if he feels it. A “cosmopolitanized American,” as he calls himself, was far more likely, it appears, to find things flat than to find them surprising; to sink into the depths of English civilization as if it were a soft feather bed inducing sleep and warmth and security rather than shocks and sensations. Henry James, of course, was much too busy recording impressions to fall asleep; it only appears that he never did anything, and never met anyone, in those early days, capable of rousing him beyond the gay and sprightly mood so easily and amusingly sustained in his letters home. Yet he went everywhere; he met everyone, as the sprinkling of famous names and great occasions abundantly testify. Let one fair specimen suffice:

Yesterday I dined with Lord Houghton—with Gladstone, Tennyson, Dr. Schliemann (the excavator of old Mycenæ, &c.), and half a dozen other men of “high culture.” I sat next but one to the Bard and heard most of his talk, which was all about port wine and tobacco; he seems to know much about them, and can drink a whole bottle of port at a sitting with no incommodity. He is very swarthy and scraggy, and strikes one at first as much less handsome than his photos: but gradually you see that it’s a face of genius. He had I know not what simplicity, speaks with a strange rustic accent and seemed altogether like a creature of some primordial English stock, a thousand miles away from American manufacture. Behold me after dinner conversing affably with Mr. Gladstone—not by my own seeking, but by the almost importunate affection of Lord H. But I was glad of a chance to feel the “personality” of a great political leader—or as G. is now thought here even, I think, by his partisans, ex-leader. That of Gladstone is very fascinating—his urbanity extreme—his eye that of a man of genius—and his apparent self-surrender to what he is talking of without a flaw. He made a great impression on me—greater than anyone I have seen here: though ’tis perhaps owing to my naïveté, and unfamiliarity with statesmen….

And so to the Oxford and Cambridge boat-race. The impression is well and brightly conveyed; what we miss, perhaps, is any body of resistance to the impression—any warrant for thinking that the receiving mind is other than a stretched white sheet. The best comment upon that comes in his own words a few pages later. “It is something to have learned how to write.” If we look upon many of these early pages as experiments in the art of writing by one whose standard of taste exacts that small things must be done perfectly before big things are even attempted, we shall understand that their perfection is of the inexpressive kind that often precedes a late maturity. He is saying all that his means allow him to say. Moreover, he is saying it already, as most good letter writers learn to say it, not to an individual but to a chosen assembly. “It is, indeed, I think, the very essence of a good letter to be shown,” he wrote; “it is wasted if it is kept for one…. I give you full leave to read mine aloud at your soirées!” Therefore, if we refrain from quotation, it is not that passages of the necessary quality are lacking. It is, rather, that while he writes charmingly, intelligently and adequately of this, that and the other, we begin by guessing and end by resenting the fact that his mind is elsewhere. It is not the dinner parties—a hundred and seven in one season—nor the ladies and gentlemen, nor even the Tennysons and the Gladstones that interest him primarily; the pageant passes before him: the impressions ceaselessly descend; and yet as we watch we also wait for the clue, the secret of it all. It is, indeed, clear that if he discharged the duties of his position with every appearance of equanimity the choice of the position itself was one of momentous importance, constantly requiring examination, and, with its promise of different possibilities, harassing his peace till the end of time. On what spot of the civilized globe was he to settle? His vibrations and vacillations in front of that problem suffer much in our report of them, but in the early days the case against America was simply that “… it takes an old civilization to set a novelist in motion.”

Next, Italy presented herself; but the seductions of “the golden climate” were fatal to work. Paris had obvious advantages, but the drawbacks were equally positive—“I have seen almost nothing of the literary fraternity, and there are fifty reasons why I should not become intimate with them. I don’t like their wares, and they don’t like any others; and, besides, they are not accueillants.” London exercised a continuous double pressure of attraction and repulsion to which finally he succumbed, to the extent of making his headquarters in the metropolis without shutting his eyes to her faults. “I am attracted to London in spite of the long list of reasons why I should not be; I think it, on the whole, the best point of view in the world…. But the question is interminable.” When he wrote that, he was thirty-seven; a mature age; an age at which the native growing confidently in his own soil is already putting forth whatever flower fate ordains and natural conditions allow. But Henry James had neither roots nor soil; he was of the tribe of wanderers and aliens; a winged visitant, ceaselessly circling and seeking, unattached, uncommitted, ranging hither and thither at his own free will, and only at length precariously settling and delicately inserting his proboscis in the thickset lusty blossoms of the old garden beds.

Here, then, we distinguish one of the strains, always to some extent present in the letters before us, from which they draw their unlikeness to any others in the language, and, indeed, bring us at times to doubt whether they are “in the language” at all. If London is primarily a point of view, if the whole field of human activity is only a prospect and a pageant, then we cannot help asking, as the store of impressions heaps itself up, what is the aim of the spectator, what is the purpose of his hoard? A spectator, alert, aloof, endlessly interested, endlessly observant, Henry James undoubtedly was; but as obviously, though not so simply, the long drawn process of adjustment and preparation was from first to last controlled and manipulated by a purpose which, as the years went by, only dealt more powerfully and completely with the treasures of a more complex sensibility. Yet, when we look to find the purpose expressed, to see the material in the act of transmutation, we are met by silence, we are blindly waved outside. “To write a series of good little tales I deem ample work for a life time. It’s at least a relief to have arranged one’s life time.” The words are youthful, perhaps intentionally light; but few and frail as they are, they have almost alone to bear the burden built upon them, to answer the questions and quiet the suspicions of those who insist that a writer must have a mission and proclaim it aloud. Scarcely for a moment does Henry James talk of his writing; never for an instant is the thought of it absent from his mind. Thus, in the letters to Stevenson abroad we hear behind everything else a brooding murmur of amazement and horror at the notion of living with savages. How, he seems to be asking himself, while on the surface all is admiration and affection, can he endure it—how could I write my books if I lived in Samoa with savages? All refers to his writing; all points in to that preoccupation. But so far as actual statement goes the books might have sprung as silently and spontaneously as daffodils in spring. No notice is taken of their birth. Nor does it matter to him what people say. Their remarks are probably wide of the point, or if they have a passing truth they are uttered in unavoidable ignorance of the fact that each book is a step onward in a gradual process of evolution, the plan of which is known only to the author himself. He remains inscrutable, silent, and assured.

How, then, are we to explain the apparent inconsistency of his disappointment when, some years later, the failure of The Bostonians and Princess Casamassima brought him face to face with the fact that he was not destined to be a popular novelist—

… I am still staggering [he wrote] a good deal under the mysterious and to me inexplicable injury wrought—apparently—upon my situation by my two last novels, the Bostonians and the Princess, from which I expected so much and derived so little. They have reduced the desire, and the demand, for my productions to zero—as I judge from the fact that though I have for a good while past been writing a number of good short things, I remain irremediably unpublished.

Compensations at once suggested themselves; he was “really in better form then ever” and found himself “holding the ‘critical world’ at large in singular contempt”; but we have Mr. Lubbock’s authority for supposing that it was chiefly a desire to retrieve the failure of the novels that led him to strive so strenuously, and in the end so disastrously, for success upon the stage. Success and failure upon the lips of a man who never for a moment doubted the authenticity of his genius or for a second lowered his standard of the artist’s duty have not their ordinary meaning. Perhaps we may hold that failure in the sense that Henry James used it meant, more than anything, failure on the part of the public to receive. That was the public’s fault, but that did not lessen the catastrophe or make less desirable the vision of an order of things where the public gratefully and with understanding accepts at the artists’ hands what is, after all, the finest essence, transmuted and returned, of the public itself. When Guy Domville failed, and Henry James for one “abominable quarter of an hour” faced the “yelling barbarians” and “learned what could be the savagery of their disappointment that one wasn’t perfectly the same as everything else they had ever seen” he had no doubt of his genius; but he went home to reflect:

I have felt for a long time past that I have fallen upon evil days—every sign and symbol of one’s being in the least wanted, anywhere or by anyone, having so utterly failed. A new generation, that I know not, and mainly prize not, has taken universal possession.

The public henceforward appeared to him, so far as it appeared at all, a barbarian crowd incapable of taking in their rude paws the beauty and delicacy that he had to offer. More and more was he confirmed in his conviction that an artist can neither live with the public, write for it, nor seek his material in the midst of it. A select group, representative of civilization, had at the same time protested its devotion, but how far can one write for a select group? Is not genius itself restricted, or at least influenced in its very essence by the consciousness that its gifts are to the few, its concern with the few, and its revelation apparent only to scattered enthusiasts who may be the advance guard of the future or only a little band strayed from the high road and doomed to extinction while civilization marches irresistibly elsewhere? All this Henry James poised, pondered, and held in debate. No doubt the influence upon the direction of his work was profound. But for all that he went serenely forward; bought a house, bought a typewriter, shut himself up, surrounded himself with furniture of the right period, and was able at the critical moment by the timely, though rash, expenditure of a little capital to ensure that certain hideous new cottages did not deface his point of view. One admits to a momentary malice. The seclusion is so deliberate; the exclusion so complete. All within the sanctuary is so prosperous and smooth. No private responsibilities harassed him; no public duties claimed him; his health was excellent and his income, in spite of his protests to the contrary, more than adequate to his needs. The voice that issued from the hermitage might well speak calmly, subtly, of exquisite emotions, and yet now and then we are warned by something exacting and even acid in its tone that the effects of seclusion are not altogether benign. “Yes. Ibsen is ugly, common, hard, prosaic, bottomlessly bourgeois …” “But, oh, yes, dear Louis, [Tess of the d’Urbervilles] is vile. The pretence of ‘sexuality’ is only equalled by the absence of it, and the abomination of the language by the author’s reputation for style.” The lack of “aesthetic curiosity” in Meredith and his circle was highly to be deplored. The artist in him “was nothing to the good citizen and liberalized bourgeois.” The works of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are “fluid puddings” and “when you ask me if I don’t feel Dostoevsky’s ‘mad jumble, that flings things down in a heap,’ nearer truth and beauty than the picking up and composing that you instance in Stevenson, I reply with emphasis that I feel nothing of the sort.” It is true that in order to keep these points at their sharpest one has had to brush aside a mass of qualification and explanation which make each the apex of a formidable body of criticism. It is only for a moment that the seclusion seems cloistered, and the feelings of an artist confounded with those of a dilettante.

Yet as that second flits across the mind, with the chill of a shadow brushing the waves, we realize what a catastrophe for all of us it would have been if the prolonged experiment, the struggle and the solitude of Henry James’s life had ended in failure. Excuses could have been found both for him and for us. It is impossible, one might have said, for the artist not to compromise, or, if he persists in his allegiance, then, almost inevitably, he must live apart, for ever alien, slowly perishing in his isolation. The history of literature is strewn with examples of both disasters. When, therefore, almost perceptibly at a given moment, late in the story, something yields, something is overcome, something dark and dense glows in splendour, it is as if the beacon flamed bright on the hilltop; as if before our eyes the crown of long deferred completion and culmination swung slowly into place. Not columns but pages, and not pages but chapters, might be filled with comment and attempted analysis of this late and mighty flowering, this vindication, this crowded gathering together and superb welding into shape of all the separate strands, alien instincts, irreconcilable desires of the twofold nature. For, as we dimly perceive, here at last two warring forces have coalesced; here, by a prodigious effort of concentration, the field of human activity is brought into fresh focus, revealing new horizons, new landmarks, and new lights upon it of right and wrong.

But it is for the reader at leisure to delve in the rich material of the later letters and build up from it the complex figure of the artist in his completeness. If we choose two passages—one upon conduct, the other upon the gift of a leather dressing case—to represent Henry James in his later mood we purposely brush aside a thousand others which have innumerable good claims to be put in their place.

If there be a wisdom in not feeling—to the last throb—the great things that happen to us, it is a wisdom that I shall never either know or esteem. Let your soul live—it’s the only life that isn’t on the whole a sell….

That [the dressing case] is the grand fact of the situation—that is the tawny lion, portentous creature in my path. I can’t get past him, I can’t get round him, and on the other hand he stands glaring at me, refusing to give way and practically blocking all my future. I can’t live with him, you see; because I can’t live up to him. His claims, his pretensions, his dimensions, his assumptions and consumptions, above all the manner in which he causes every surrounding object (on my poor premises or within my poor range) to tell a dingy or deplorable tale—all this makes him the very scourge of my life, the very blot on my scutcheon. He doesn’t regild that rusty metal—he simply takes up an attitude of gorgeous swagger, straight in front of all the rust and the rubbish, which makes me look as if I had stolen somebody else’s (regarnished blason) and were trying to palm it off as my own…. He is out of the picture—out of mine; and behold me condemned to live for ever with that canvas turned to the wall. Do you know what that means?

And so on and so on. There, portentous and prodigious, we hear unmistakably the voice of Henry James. There, to our thinking, we have exploded in our ears the report of his enormous, sustained, increasing, and overwhelming love of life. It issues from whatever tortuous channels and dark tunnels like a flood at its fullest. There is nothing too little, too large, too remote, too queer for it not to flow round, float off and make its own. Nothing in the end has chilled or repressed him; everything has fed and filled him; the saturation is complete. The labours of the morning might be elaborate and austere. There remained an irrepressible fund of vitality which the flying hand at midnight addressed fully and affectionately to friend after friend, each sentence, from the whole fling of his person to the last snap of his fingers, firmly fashioned and throwing out at its swiftest well nigh incredible felicities of phrase.

The only difficulty, perhaps, was to find an envelope that would contain the bulky product, or any reason, when two sheets were blackened, for not filling a third. Truly, Lamb House was no sanctuary, but rather a “small, crammed and wholly unlucrative hotel,” and the hermit no meagre solitary but a tough and even stoical man of the world, English in his humour, Johnsonian in his sanity, who lived every second with insatiable gusto and in the flux and fury of his impressions obeyed his own injunction to remain “as solid and fixed and dense as you can.” For to be as subtle as Henry James one must also be as robust; to enjoy his power of exquisite selection one must have “lived and loved and cursed and floundered and enjoyed and suffered,” and, with the appetite of a giant, have swallowed the whole.

Yet, if he shared with magnanimity, if he enjoyed hugely, there remained something incommunicable, something reserved, as if in the last resort, it was not to us that he turned, nor from us that he received, nor into our hands that he placed his offerings. There they stand, the many books, products of “an inexhaustible sensibility,” all with the final seal upon them of artistic form, which, as it imposes its stamp, sets apart the object thus consecrated and makes it no longer part of ourselves. In this impersonality the maker himself desired to share—“to take it,” as he said, “wholly, exclusively with the pen (the style, the genius) and absolutely not at all with the person,” to be “the mask without the face,” the alien in our midst, the worker who when his work is done turns even from that and reserves his confidence for the solitary hour, like that at midnight when, alone on the threshold of creation, Henry James speaks aloud to himself “and the prospect clears and flushes, and my poor blest old genius pats me so admirably and lovingly on the back that I turn, I screw round, and bend my lips to passionately, in my gratitude, kiss its hands.” So that is why, perhaps, as life swings and clangs, booms and reverberates, we have the sense of an altar of service, of sacrifice, to which, as we pass out, we bend the knee.

[Times Literary Supplement, Apr 8, 1920]

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George Moore.

The only criticism worth having at present is that which is spoken, not written—spoken over wineglasses and coffee-cups late at night, flashed out on the spur of the moment by people passing who have not time to finish their sentences, let alone consider the dues of editors or the feelings of friends. About living writers these talkers (it is one of their most engaging peculiarities) are always in violent disagreement. Take George Moore, for example. George Moore is the best living novelist—and the worst; writes the most beautiful prose of his time—and the feeblest; has a passion for literature which none of those dismal pundits, his contemporaries, shares; but how whimsical his judgments are, how ill-balanced, childish and egotistical, into the bargain! So they hammer the horseshoe out; so the sparks fly; and the worth of the criticism lies not so much in the accuracy of each blow as in the heat it engenders, the sense it kindles that the matter of George Moore and his works is of the highest importance, which, without waiting another instant, we must settle for ourselves.

Perhaps it is not accident only, but a vague recollection of dipping and dallying in Esther Waters, Evelyn Innes, The Lake, which makes us take down in its new and stately form Hail and Farewell (Heinemann)—the two large volumes which George Moore has written openly and directly about himself. For all his novels are written, covertly and obliquely, about himself, so at least memory would persuade us, and it may help us to understand them if we steep ourselves in the pure waters which are elsewhere tinged with fictitious flavours. But are not all novels about the writer’s self, we might ask? It is only as he sees people that we can see them; his fortunes colour and his oddities shape his vision until what we see is not the thing itself, but the thing seen and the seer inextricably mixed. There are degrees, however. The great novelist feels, sees, believes with such intensity of conviction that he hurls his belief outside himself and it flies off and lives an independent life of its own, becomes Natasha, Pierre, Levin, and is no longer Tolstoy. When, however, Mr. Moore creates a Natasha she may be charming, foolish, lovely, but her beauty, her folly, her charm are not hers, but Mr. Moore’s. All her qualities refer to him. In other words, Mr. Moore is completely lacking in dramatic power. On the face of it, Esther Waters has all the appearance of a great novel; it has sincerity, shapeliness, style; it has surpassing seriousness and integrity; but because Mr. Moore has not the strength to project Esther from himself its virtues collapse and fall about it like a tent with a broken pole. There it lies, this novel without a heroine, and what remains of it is George Moore himself, a ruin of lovely language and some exquisite descriptions of the Sussex downs. For the novelist who has no dramatic power, no fire of conviction within, leans upon nature for support; she lifts him up and enhances his mood without destroying it.

But the defects of a novelist may well be the glories of his brother the autobiographer, and we find, to our delight, that the very qualities which weaken Mr. Moore’s novels are the making of his memoirs. This complex character, at once diffident and self-assertive, this sportsman who goes out shooting in ladies’ high-heeled boots, this amateur jockey who loves literature beyond the apple of his eye, this amorist who is so innocent, this sensualist who is so ascetic, this complex and uneasy character, in short, with its lack of starch and pomp and humbug, its pliability and malice and shrewdness and incompetence, is made of too many incompatible elements to concentrate into the diamond of a great artist, and is better occupied in exploring its own vagaries than in explaining those of other people. For one thing, Mr. Moore is without that robust belief in himself which leads men to prophesy and create. Nobody was ever more diffident. As a little boy they told him that only an ugly old woman would marry him, and he has never got over it. “For it is difficult for me to believe any good of myself. Within the oftentimes bombastic and truculent appearance that I present to the world trembles a heart shy as a wren in the hedgerow or a mouse along the wainscoting.” The least noise startles him, and the ordinary proceedings of mankind fill him with wonder and alarm. Their streets have so many names; their coats have so many buttons; the ordinary business of life is altogether beyond him. But with the timidity of the mouse he has also its gigantic boldness. This meek grey innocent creature runs right over the lion’s paws. There is nothing that Mr. Moore will not say; by his own confession he ought to be excluded from every drawing-room in South Kensington. If his friends forgive him it is only because to Mr. Moore all things are forgiven. Once when he was a child, “inspired by an uncontrollable desire to break the monotony of infancy,” he threw all his clothes into a hawthorn tree and “ran naked in front of my nurse or governess screaming with delight at the embarrassment I was causing her.” The habit has remained with him. He loves to take off his clothes and run screaming with delight at the fuss and blush and embarrassment which he is causing that dear old governess, the British Public. But the antics of Mr. Moore, though impish and impudent, are, after all, so amusing and so graceful that the governess, it is said, sometimes hides behind a tree to watch. That scream of his, that garrulous chuckle as of small birds chattering in a nest, is a merry sound; and then how melodiously he draws out his long notes when dusk descends and the stars rise! Always you will find him haunting the evening, when the downs are fading into waves of silver and the grey Irish fields are melting into the grey Irish hills. The storm never breaks over his head, the thunder never roars in his ears, the rain never drenches him. No; the worst that befalls him is that Teresa has not filled the Moderator lamp sufficiently full, so that the company which is dining in the garden under the apple tree must adjourn to the dining-room, where Mr. Osborne, Mr. Hughes, Mr. Longworth, Mr. Seumas O’Sullivan, Mr. Atkinson and Mr. Yeats are awaiting them.

And then in the dining-room, Mr. Moore sitting down and offering a cigar to his friends, takes up again the thread of that interminable discourse, which, if it lapses into the gulfs of reverie for a moment, begins anew wherever he finds a bench or chair to sit on or can link his arm in a friend’s, or can find even some discreet sympathetic animal who will only occasionally lift a paw in silence. He talks incessantly about books and politics; of the vision that came to him in the Chelsea road; how Mr. Colville bred Belgian hares on the Sussex downs; about the death of his cat; the Roman Catholic religion; how dogma is the death of literature; how the names of poets determine their poetry; how Mr. Yeats is like a crow, and he himself has been forced to sit on the window sill in his pyjamas. One thing follows another; out of the present flowers the past; it is as easy, inconsequent, melodious as the smoke of those fragrant cigars. But as one listens more attentively one perceives that while each topic floats up as easily as cigar smoke into the air, the blue wreaths have a strange fixity; they do not disperse, they unite; they build up the airy chambers of a lifetime, and as we listen in the Temple Gardens, in Ebury Street, in Paris, in Dublin to Mr. Moore talking, we explore from start to finish, from those earliest days in Ireland to these latest in London, the habitation of his soul.

But let us apply Mr. Moore’s own test to Mr. Moore’s own work. What interests him, he says, is not the three or four beautiful poems that a man may have written, but the mind that he brings into the world; and “by a mind I mean a new way of feeling and seeing.” When the fierce tide of talk once more washes the battlements of Mr. Moore’s achievement let us throw into mid-stream these remarks; not one of his novels is a masterpiece; they are silken tents which have no poles; but he has brought a new mind into the world; he has given us a new way of feeling and seeing; he has devised—very painfully, for he is above all things painstaking, eking out a delicate gift laboriously—a means of liquidating the capricious and volatile essence of himself and decanting it in these memoirs; and that, whatever the degree, is triumph, achievement, immortality. If, further, we try to establish the degree we shall go on to say that no one so inveterately literary is among the great writers; literature has wound itself about him like a veil, forbidding him the free use of his limbs; the phrase comes to him before the emotion; but we must add that he is nevertheless a born writer, a man who detests meals, servants, ease, respectability or anything that gets between him and his art; who has kept his freedom when most of his contemporaries have long ago lost theirs; who is ashamed of nothing but of being ashamed; who says whatever he has it in his mind to say, and has taught himself an accent, a cadence, indeed a language, for saying it in which, though they are not English, but Irish, will give him his place among the lesser immortals of our tongue.

[Vogue, June 1925]

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The Novels of E. M. Forster.

I

There are many reasons which should prevent one from criticizing the work of contemporaries. Besides the obvious uneasiness—the fear of hurting feelings—there is too the difficulty of being just. Coming out one by one, their books seem like parts of a design which is slowly uncovered. Our appreciation may be intense, but our curiosity is even greater. Does the new fragment add anything to what went before? Does it carry out our theory of the author’s talent, or must we alter our forecast? Such questions ruffle what should be the smooth surface of our criticism and make it full of argument and interrogation. With a novelist like Mr. Forster this is specially true, for he is in any case an author about whom there is considerable disagreement. There is something baffling and evasive in the very nature of his gifts. So, remembering that we are at best only building up a theory which may be knocked down in a year or two by Mr. Forster himself, let us take Mr. Forster’s novels in the order in which they were written, and tentatively and cautiously try to make them yield us an answer.

The order in which they were written is indeed of some importance, for at the outset we see that Mr. Forster is extremely susceptible to the influence of time. He sees his people much at the mercy of those conditions which change with the years. He is acutely conscious of the bicycle and of the motor car; of the public school and of the university; of the suburb and of the city. The social historian will find his books full of illuminating information. In 1905 Lilia learned to bicycle, coasted down the High Street on Sunday evening, and fell off at the turn by the church. For this she was given a talking to by her brother-in-law which she remembered to her dying day. It is on Tuesday that the housemaid cleans out the drawing-room at Sawston. Old maids blow into their gloves when they take them off. Mr. Forster is a novelist, that is to say, who sees his people in close contact with their surroundings. And therefore the colour and constitution of the year 1905 affect him far more than any year in the calendar could affect the romantic Meredith or the poetic Hardy. But we discover as we turn the page that observation is not an end in itself; it is rather the goad, the gadfly driving Mr. Forster to provide a refuge from this misery, an escape from this meanness. Hence we arrive at that balance of forces which plays so large a part in the structure of Mr. Forster’s novels. Sawston implies Italy; timidity, wildness; convention, freedom; unreality, reality. These are the villains and heroes of much of his writing. In Where Angels Fear to Tread the disease, convention, and the remedy, nature, are provided if anything with too eager a simplicity, too simple an assurance, but with what a freshness, what a charm! Indeed it would not be excessive if we discovered in this slight first novel evidence of powers which only needed, one might hazard, a more generous diet to ripen into wealth and beauty. Twenty-two years might well have taken the sting from the satire and shifted the proportions of the whole. But, if that is to some extent true, the years have had no power to obliterate the fact that, though Mr. Forster may be sensitive to the bicycle and the duster, he is also the most persistent devotee of the soul. Beneath bicycles and dusters, Sawston and Italy, Philip, Harriet, and Miss Abbott, there always lies for him—it is this which makes him so tolerant a satirist—a burning core. It is the soul; it is reality; it is truth; it is poetry; it is love; it decks itself in many shapes, dresses itself in many disguises. But get at it he must; keep from it he cannot. Over brakes and byres, over drawing-room carpets and mahogany sideboards, he flies in pursuit. Naturally the spectacle is sometimes comic, often fatiguing; but there are moments—and his first novel provides several instances—when he lays his hands on the prize.

Yet, if we ask ourselves upon which occasions this happens and how, it will seem that those passages which are least didactic, least conscious of the pursuit of beauty, succeed best in achieving it. When he allows himself a holiday—some phrase like that comes to our lips; when he forgets the vision and frolics and sports with the fact; when, having planted the apostles of culture in their hotel, he creates airily, joyfully, spontaneously, Gino the dentist’s son sitting in the café with his friends, or describes—it is a masterpiece of comedy—the performance of Lucia di Lammermoor, it is then that we feel that his aim is achieved. Judging, therefore, on the evidence of this first book, with its fantasy, its penetration, its remarkable sense of design, we should have said that once Mr. Forster had acquired freedom, had passed beyond the boundaries of Sawston, he would stand firmly on his feet among the descendants of Jane Austen and Peacock. But the second novel, The Longest Journey, leaves us baffled and puzzled. The opposition is still the same: truth and untruth; Cambridge and Sawston; sincerity and sophistication. But everything is accentuated. He builds his Sawston of thicker bricks and destroys it with stronger blasts. The contrast between poetry and realism is much more precipitous. And now we see much more clearly to what a task his gifts commit him. We see that what might have been a passing mood is in truth a conviction. He believes that a novel must take sides in the human conflict. He sees beauty—none more keenly; but beauty imprisoned in a fortress of brick and mortar whence he must extricate her. Hence he is always constrained to build the cage—society in all its intricacy and triviality—before he can free the prisoner. The omnibus, the villa, the suburban residence, are an essential part of his design. They are required to imprison and impede the flying flame which is so remorselessly caged behind them. At the same time, as we read The Longest Journey we are aware of a mocking spirit of fantasy which flouts his seriousness. No one seizes more deftly the shades and shadows of the social comedy; no one more amusingly hits off the comedy of luncheon and tea party and a game of tennis at the rectory. His old maids, his clergy, are the most lifelike we have had since Jane Austen laid down the pen. But he has into the bargain what Jane Austen had not—the impulses of a poet. The neat surface is always being thrown into disarray by an outburst of lyric poetry. Again and again in The Longest Journey we are delighted by some exquisite description of the country; or some lovely sight—like that when Rickie and Stephen send the paper boats burning through the arch—is made visible to us forever. Here, then, is a difficult family of gifts to persuade to live in harmony together: satire and sympathy; fantasy and fact; poetry and a prim moral sense. No wonder that we are often aware of contrary currents that run counter to each other and prevent the book from bearing down upon us and overwhelming us with the authority of a masterpiece. Yet if there is one gift more essential to a novelist than another it is the power of combination—the single vision. The success of the masterpieces seems to lie not so much in their freedom from faults—indeed we tolerate the grossest errors in them all—but in the immense persuasiveness of a mind which has completely mastered its perspective.

II

We look then, as time goes on, for signs that Mr. Forster is committing himself; that he is allying himself to one of the two great camps to which most novelists belong. Speaking roughly, we may divide them into the preachers and the teachers, headed by Tolstoy and Dickens, on the one hand, and the pure artists, headed by Jane Austen and Turgenev, on the other. Mr. Forster, it seems, has a strong impulse to belong to both camps at once. He has many of the instincts and aptitudes of the pure artist (to adopt the old classification)—an exquisite prose style, an acute sense of comedy, a power of creating characters in a few strokes which live in an atmosphere of their own; but he is at the same time highly conscious of a message. Behind the rainbow of wit and sensibility there is a vision which he is determined that we shall see. But his vision is of a peculiar kind and his message of an elusive nature. He has not great interest in institutions. He has none of that wide social curiosity which marks the work of Mr. Wells. The divorce law and the poor law come in for little of his attention. His concern is with the private life; his message is addressed to the soul. “It is the private life that holds out the mirror to infinity; personal intercourse, and that alone, that ever hints at a personality beyond our daily vision.” Our business is not to build in brick and mortar, but to draw together the seen and the unseen. We must learn to build the “rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion. Without it we are meaningless fragments, half monks, half beasts.” This belief that it is the private life that matters, that it is the soul that is eternal, runs through all his writing. It is the conflict between Sawston and Italy in Where Angels Fear to Tread; between Rickie and Agnes in The Longest Journey; between Lucy and Cecil in A Room with a View. It deepens, it becomes more insistent as time passes. It forces him on from the lighter and more whimsical short novels past that curious interlude, The Celestial Omnibus, to the two large books, Howards End and A Passage to India, which mark his prime.

But before we consider those two books let us look for a moment at the nature of the problem he sets himself. It is the soul that matters; and the soul, as we have seen, is caged in a solid villa of red brick somewhere in the suburbs of London. It seems, then, that if his books are to succeed in their mission his reality must at certain points become irradiated; his brick must be lit up; we must see the whole building saturated with light. We have at once to believe in the complete reality of the suburb and in the complete reality of the soul. In this combination of realism and mysticism his closest affinity is, perhaps, with Ibsen. Ibsen has the same realistic power. A room is to him a room, a writing table a writing table, and a waste-paper basket a waste-paper basket. At the same time, the paraphernalia of reality have at certain moments to become the veil through which we see infinity. When Ibsen achieves this, as he certainly does, it is not by performing some miraculous conjuring trick at the critical moment. He achieves it by putting us into the right mood from the very start and by giving us the right materials for his purpose. He gives us the effect of ordinary life, as Mr. Forster does, but he gives it us by choosing a very few facts and those of a highly relevant kind. Thus when the moment of illumination comes we accept it implicitly. We are neither roused nor puzzled; we do not have to ask ourselves, What does this mean? We feel simply that the thing we are looking at is lit up, and its depths revealed. It has not ceased to be itself by becoming something else.

Something of the same problem lies before Mr. Forster—how to connect the actual thing with the meaning of the thing and to carry the reader’s mind across the chasm which divides the two without spilling a single drop of its belief. At certain moments on the Arno, in Hertfordshire, in Surrey, beauty leaps from the scabbard, the fire of truth flames through the crusted earth; we must see the red brick villa in the suburbs of London lit up. But it is in these great scenes which are the justification of the huge elaboration of the realistic novel that we are most aware of failure. For it is here that Mr. Forster makes the change from realism to symbolism; here that the object which has been so uncompromisingly solid becomes, or should become, luminously transparent. He fails, one is tempted to think, chiefly because that admirable gift of his for observation has served him too well. He has recorded too much and too literally. He has given us an almost photographic picture on one side of the page; on the other he asks us to see the same view transformed and radiant with eternal fires. The bookcase which falls upon Leonard Bast in Howards End should perhaps come down upon him with all the dead weight of smoke-dried culture; the Marabar caves should appear to us not real caves but, it may be, the soul of India. Miss Quested should be transformed from an English girl on a picnic to arrogant Europe straying into the heart of the East and getting lost there. We qualify these statements, for indeed we are not quite sure whether we have guessed aright. Instead of getting that sense of instant certainty which we get in The Wild Duck or in The Master Builder, we are puzzled, worried. What does this mean? we ask ourselves. What ought we to understand by this? And the hesitation is fatal. For we doubt both things—the real and the symbolical: Mrs. Moore, the nice old lady, and Mrs. Moore, the sibyl. The conjunction of these two different realities seems to cast doubt upon them both. Hence it is that there is so often an ambiguity at the heart of Mr. Forster’s novels. We feel that something has failed us at the critical moment; and instead of seeing, as we do in The Master Builder, one single whole we see two separate parts.

The stories collected under the title of The Celestial Omnibus represent, it may be, an attempt on Mr. Forster’s part to simplify the problem which so often troubles him of connecting the prose and poetry of life. Here he admits definitely if discreetly the possibility of magic. Omnibuses drive to Heaven; Pan is heard in the brushwood; girls turn into trees. The stories are extremely charming. They release the fantasticality which is laid under such heavy burdens in the novels. But the vein of fantasy is not deep enough or strong enough to fight single-handed against those other impulses which are part of his endowment. We feel that he is an uneasy truant in fairyland. Behind the hedge he always hears the motor horn and the shuffling feet of tired wayfarers, and soon he must return. One slim volume indeed contains all that he has allowed himself of pure fantasy. We pass from the freakish land where boys leap into the arms of Pan and girls become trees to the two Miss Schlegels, who have an income of six hundred pounds apiece and live in Wickham Place.

III

Much though we may regret the change, we cannot doubt that it was right. For none of the books before Howards End and A Passage to India altogether drew upon the full range of Mr. Forster’s powers. With his queer and in some ways contradictory assortment of gifts, he needed, it seemed, some subject which would stimulate his highly sensitive and active intelligence, but would not demand the extremes of romance or passion; a subject which gave him material for criticism, and invited investigation; a subject which asked to be built up of an enormous number of slight yet precise observations, capable of being tested by an extremely honest yet sympathetic mind; yet, with all this, a subject which when finally constructed would show up against the torrents of the sunset and the eternities of night with a symbolical significance. In Howards End the lower middle, the middle, the upper middle classes of English society are so built up into a complete fabric. It is an attempt on a larger scale than hitherto, and, if it fails, the size of the attempt is largely responsible. Indeed, as we think back over the many pages of this elaborate and highly skilful book, with its immense technical accomplishment, and also its penetration, its wisdom and its beauty, we may wonder in what mood of the moment we can have been prompted to call it a failure. By all the rules, still more by the keen interest with which we have read it from start to finish, we should have said success. The reason is suggested perhaps by the manner of one’s praise. Elaboration, skill, wisdom, penetration, beauty—they are all there, but they lack fusion; they lack cohesion; the book as a whole lacks force. Schlegels, Wilcoxes, and Basts, with all that they stand for of class and environment, emerge with extraordinary verisimilitude, but the whole effect is less satisfying than that of the much slighter but beautifully harmonious Where Angels Fear to Tread. Again we have the sense that there is some perversity in Mr. Forster’s endowment so that his gifts in their variety and number tend to trip each other up. If he were less scrupulous, less just, less sensitively aware of the different aspects of every case, he could, we feel, come down with greater force on one precise point. As it is, the strength of his blow is dissipated. He is like a light sleeper who is always being woken by something in the room. The poet is twitched away by the satirist; the comedian is tapped on the shoulder by the moralist; he never loses himself or forgets himself for long in sheer delight in the beauty or the interest of things as they are. For this reason the lyrical passages in his books, often of great beauty in themselves, fail of their due effect in the context. Instead of flowering naturally—as in Proust, for instance—from an overflow of interest and beauty in the object itself, we feel that they have been called into existence by some irritation, are the effort of a mind outraged by ugliness to supplement it with a beauty which, because it originates in protest, has something a little febrile about it.

Yet in Howards End there are, one feels, in solution all the qualities that are needed to make a masterpiece. The characters are extremely real to us. The ordering of the story is masterly. That indefinable but highly important thing, the atmosphere of the book, is alight with intelligence; not a speck of humbug, not an atom of falsity is allowed to settle. And again, but on a larger battlefield, the struggle goes forward which takes place in all Mr. Forster’s novels—the struggle between the things that matter and the things that do not matter, between reality and sham, between the truth and the lie. Again the comedy is exquisite and the observation faultless. But again, just as we are yielding ourselves to the pleasures of the imagination, a little jerk rouses us. We are tapped on the shoulder. We are to notice this, to take heed of that. Margaret or Helen, we are made to understand, is not speaking simply as herself; her words have another and a larger intention. So, exerting ourselves to find out the meaning, we step from the enchanted world of imagination, where our faculties work freely, to the twilight world of theory, where only our intellect functions dutifully. Such moments of disillusionment have the habit of coming when Mr. Forster is most in earnest, at the crisis of the book, where the sword falls or the bookcase drops. They bring, as we have noted already, a curious insubstantiality into the “great scenes” and the important figures. But they absent themselves entirely from the comedy. They make us wish, foolishly enough, to dispose Mr. Forster’s gifts differently and to restrict him to write comedy only. For directly he ceases to feel responsible for his characters’ behaviour, and forgets that he should solve the problem of the universe, he is the most diverting of novelists. The admirable Tibby and the exquisite Mrs. Munt in Howards End, though thrown in largely to amuse us, bring a breath of fresh air in with them. They inspire us with the intoxicating belief that they are free to wander as far from their creator as they choose. Margaret, Helen, Leonard Bast, are closely tethered and vigilantly overlooked lest they may take matters into their own hands and upset the theory. But Tibby and Mrs. Munt go where they like, say what they like, do what they like. The lesser characters and the unimportant scenes in Mr. Forster’s novels thus often remain more vivid than those with which, apparently, most pain has been taken. But it would be unjust to part from this big, serious, and highly interesting book without recognizing that it is an important if unsatisfactory piece of work which may well be the prelude to something as large but less anxious.

IV

Many years passed before A Passage to India appeared. Those who hoped that in the interval Mr. Forster might have developed his technique so that it yielded rather more easily to the impress of his whimsical mind and gave freer outlet to the poetry and fantasy which play about in him were disappointed. The attitude is precisely the same four-square attitude which walks up to life as if it were a house with a front door, puts its hat on the table in the hall, and proceeds to visit all the rooms in an orderly manner. The house is still the house of the British middle classes. But there is a change from Howards End. Hitherto Mr. Forster has been apt to pervade his books like a careful hostess who is anxious to introduce, to explain, to warn her guests of a step here, of a draught there. But here, perhaps in some disillusionment both with his guests and with his house, he seems to have relaxed these cares. We are allowed to ramble over this extraordinary continent almost alone. We notice things, about the country especially, spontaneously, accidentally almost, as if we were actually there; and now it was the sparrows flying about the pictures that caught our eyes, now the elephant with the painted forehead, now the enormous but badly designed ranges of hills. The people too, particularly the Indians, have something of the same casual, inevitable quality. They are not perhaps quite so important as the land, but they are alive; they are sensitive. No longer do we feel, as we used to feel in England, that they will be allowed to go only so far and no further lest they may upset some theory of the author’s. Aziz is a free agent. He is the most imaginative character that Mr. Forster has yet created, and recalls Gino the dentist in his first book, Where Angels Fear to Tread. We may guess indeed that it has helped Mr. Forster to have put the ocean between him and Sawston. It is a relief, for a time, to be beyond the influence of Cambridge. Though it is still a necessity for him to build a model world which he can submit to delicate and precise criticism, the model is on a larger scale. The English society, with all its pettiness and its vulgarity and its streak of heroism, is set against a bigger and a more sinister background. And though it is still true that there are ambiguities in important places, moments of imperfect symbolism, a greater accumulation of facts than the imagination is able to deal with, it seems as if the double vision which troubled us in the earlier books was in process of becoming single. The saturation is much more thorough. Mr. Forster has almost achieved the great feat of animating this dense, compact body of observation with a spiritual light. The book shows signs of fatigue and disillusionment; but it has chapters of clear and triumphant beauty, and above all it makes us wonder, What will he write next?

[Atlantic Monthly, November 1927]

[]

Middlebrow.

To the Editor of the “New Statesman”

Sir,

Will you allow me to draw your attention to the fact that in a review of a book by me (October    ) your reviewer omitted to use the word Highbrow? The review, save for that omission, gave me so much pleasure that I am driven to ask you, at the risk of appearing unduly egotistical, whether your reviewer, a man of obvious intelligence, intended to deny my claim to that title? I say “claim,” for surely I may claim that title when a great critic, who is also a great novelist, a rare and enviable combination, always calls me a highbrow when he condescends to notice my work in a great newspaper; and, further, always finds space to inform not only myself, who know it already, but the whole British Empire, who hang on his words, that I live in Bloomsbury? Is your critic unaware of that fact too? Or does he, for all his intelligence, maintain that it is unnecessary in reviewing a book to add the postal address of the writer?

His answer to these questions, though of real value to me, is of no possible interest to the public at large. Of that I am well aware. But since larger issues are involved, since the Battle of the Brows troubles, I am told, the evening air, since the finest minds of our age have lately been engaged in debating, not without that passion which befits a noble cause, what a highbrow is and what a lowbrow, which is better and which is worse, may I take this opportunity to express my opinion and at the same time draw attention to certain aspects of the question which seem to me to have been unfortunately overlooked?

Now there can be no two opinions as to what a highbrow is. He is the man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea. That is why I have always been so proud to be called highbrow. That is why, if I could be more of a highbrow I would. I honour and respect highbrows. Some of my relations have been highbrows; and some, but by no means all, of my friends. To be a highbrow, a complete and representative highbrow, a highbrow like Shakespeare, Dickens, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Charlotte Brontë, Scott, Jane Austen, Flaubert, Hardy or Henry James—to name a few highbrows from the same profession chosen at random—is of course beyond the wildest dreams of my imagination. And, though I would cheerfully lay myself down in the dust and kiss the print of their feet, no person of sense will deny that this passionate preoccupation of theirs—riding across country in pursuit of ideas—often leads to disaster. Undoubtedly, they come fearful croppers. Take Shelley—what a mess he made of his life! And Byron, getting into bed with first one woman and then with another and dying in the mud at Missolonghi. Look at Keats, loving poetry and Fanny Brawne so intemperately that he pined and died of consumption at the age of twenty-six. Charlotte Brontë again—I have been assured on good authority that Charlotte Brontë was, with the possible exception of Emily, the worst governess in the British Isles. Then there was Scott—he went bankrupt, and left, together with a few magnificent novels, one house, Abbotsford, which is perhaps the ugliest in the whole Empire. But surely these instances are enough—I need not further labour the point that highbrows, for some reason or another, are wholly incapable of dealing successfully with what is called real life. That is why, and here I come to a point that is often surprisingly ignored, they honour so wholeheartedly and depend so completely upon those who are called lowbrows. By a lowbrow is meant of course a man or a woman of thoroughbred vitality who rides his body in pursuit of a living at a gallop across life. That is why I honour and respect lowbrows—and I have never known a highbrow who did not. In so far as I am a highbrow (and my imperfections in that line are well known to me) I love lowbrows; I study them; I always sit next the conductor in an omnibus and try to get him to tell me what it is like—being a conductor. In whatever company I am I always try to know what it is like—being a conductor, being a woman with ten children and thirty-five shillings a week, being a stockbroker, being an admiral, being a bank clerk, being a dressmaker, being a duchess, being a miner, being a cook, being a prostitute. All that lowbrows do is of surpassing interest and wonder to me, because, in so far as I am a highbrow, I cannot do things myself.

This brings me to another point which is also surprisingly overlooked. Lowbrows need highbrows and honour them just as much as highbrows need lowbrows and honour them. This too is not a matter that requires much demonstration. You have only to stroll along the Strand on a wet winter’s night and watch the crowds lining up to get into the movies. These lowbrows are waiting, after the day’s work, in the rain, sometimes for hours, to get into the cheap seats and sit in hot theatres in order to see what their lives look like. Since they are lowbrows, engaged magnificently and adventurously in riding full tilt from one end of life to the other in pursuit of a living, they cannot see themselves doing it. Yet nothing interests them more. Nothing matters to them more. It is one of the prime necessities of life to them—to be shown what life looks like. And the highbrows, of course, are the only people who can show them. Since they are the only people who do not do things, they are the only people who can see things being done. This is so—and so it is I am certain; nevertheless we are told—the air buzzes with it by night, the Press booms with it by day, the very donkeys in the fields do nothing but bray it, the very curs in the streets do nothing but bark it—“Highbrows hate lowbrows! Lowbrows hate highbrows!”—when highbrows need lowbrows, when lowbrows need highbrows, when they cannot exist apart, when one is the complement and other side of the other! How has such a lie come into existence? Who has set this malicious gossip afloat?

There can be no doubt about that either. It is the doing of the middlebrows. They are the people, I confess, that I seldom regard with entire cordiality. They are the go-betweens; they are the busybodies who run from one to the other with their tittle tattle and make all the mischief—the middlebrows, I repeat. But what, you may ask, is a middlebrow? And that, to tell the truth, is no easy question to answer. They are neither one thing nor the other. They are not highbrows, whose brows are high; nor lowbrows, whose brows are low. Their brows are betwixt and between. They do not live in Bloomsbury which is on high ground; nor in Chelsea, which is on low ground. Since they must live somewhere presumably, they live perhaps in South Kensington, which is betwixt and between. The middlebrow is the man, or woman, of middlebred intelligence who ambles and saunters now on this side of the hedge, now on that, in pursuit of no single object, neither art itself nor life itself, but both mixed indistinguishably, and rather nastily, with money, fame, power, or prestige. The middlebrow curries favour with both sides equally. He goes to the lowbrows and tells them that while he is not quite one of them, he is almost their friend. Next moment he rings up the highbrows and asks them with equal geniality whether he may not come to tea. Now there are highbrows—I myself have known duchesses who were highbrows, also charwomen, and they have both told me with that vigour of language which so often unites the aristocracy with the working classes, that they would rather sit in the coal cellar, together, than in the drawing-room with middlebrows and pour out tea. I have myself been asked—but may I, for the sake of brevity, cast this scene which is only partly fictitious, into the form of fiction?—I myself, then, have been asked to come and “see” them—how strange a passion theirs is for being “seen”! They ring me up, therefore, at about eleven in the morning, and ask me to come to tea. I go to my wardrobe and consider, rather lugubriously, what is the right thing to wear? We highbrows may be smart, or we may be shabby; but we never have the right thing to wear. I proceed to ask next: What is the right thing to say? Which is the right knife to use? What is the right book to praise? All these are things I do not know for myself. We highbrows read what we like and do what we like and praise what we like. We also know what we dislike—for example, thin bread and butter tea. The difficulty of eating thin bread and butter in white kid gloves has always seemed to me one of life’s more insuperable problems. Then I dislike bound volumes of the classics behind plate glass. Then I distrust people who call both Shakespeare and Wordsworth equally “Bill”—it is a habit moreover that leads to confusion. And in the matter of clothes, I like people either to dress very well; or to dress very badly; I dislike the correct thing in clothes. Then there is the question of games. Being a highbrow I do not play them. But I love watching people play who have a passion for games. These middlebrows pat balls about; they poke their bats and muff their catches at cricket. And when poor Middlebrow mounts on horseback and that animal breaks into a canter, to me there is no sadder sight in all Rotten Row. To put it in a nutshell (in order to get on with the story) that tea party was not wholly a success, nor altogether a failure; for Middlebrow, who writes, following me to the door, clapped me briskly on the back, and said “I’m sending you my book!” (Or did he call it “stuff?”) And his book comes—sure enough, though called, so symbolically, Keepaway, [◉2] it comes. And I read a page here, and I read a page there (I am breakfasting, as usual, in bed). And it is not well written; nor is it badly written. It is not proper, nor is it improper—in short it is betwixt and between. Now if there is any sort of book for which I have, perhaps, an imperfect sympathy, it is the betwixt and between. And so, though I suffer from the gout of a morning—but if one’s ancestors for two or three centuries have tumbled into bed dead drunk one has deserved a touch of that malady—I rise. I dress. I proceed weakly to the window. I take that book in my swollen right hand and toss it gently over the hedge into the field. The hungry sheep—did I remember to say that this part of the story takes place in the country?—the hungry sheep look up but are not fed.

But to have done with fiction and its tendency to lapse into poetry—I will now report a perfectly prosaic conversation in words of one syllable. I often ask my friends the lowbrows, over our muffins and honey, why it is that while we, the highbrows, never buy a middlebrow book, or go to a middlebrow lecture, or read, unless we are paid for doing so, a middlebrow review, they, on the contrary, take these middlebrow activities so seriously? Why, I ask (not of course on the wireless), are you so damnably modest? Do you think that a description of your lives, as they are, is too sordid and too mean to be beautiful? Is that why you prefer the middlebrow version of what they have the impudence to call real humanity?—this mixture of geniality and sentiment stuck together with a sticky slime of calves-foot jelly? The truth, if you would only believe it, is much more beautiful than any lie. Then again, I continue, how can you let the middlebrows teach you how to write?—you, who write so beautifully when you write naturally, that I would give both my hands to write as you do—for which reason I never attempt it, but do my best to learn the art of writing as a highbrow should. And again, I press on, brandishing a muffin on the point of a tea spoon, how dare the middlebrows teach you how to read—Shakespeare for instance? All you have to do is to read him. The Cambridge edition is both good and cheap. If you find Hamlet difficult, ask him to tea. He is a highbrow. Ask Ophelia to meet him. She is a lowbrow. Talk to them, as you talk to me, and you will know more about Shakespeare than all the middlebrows in the world can teach you—I do not think, by the way, from certain phrases that Shakespeare liked middlebrows, or Pope either.

To all this the lowbrows reply—but I cannot imitate their style of talking—that they consider themselves to be common people without education. It is very kind of the middlebrows to try to teach them culture. And after all, the lowbrows continue, middlebrows, like other people, have to make money. There must be money in teaching and in writing books about Shakespeare. We all have to earn our livings nowadays, my friends the lowbrows remind me. I quite agree. Even those of us whose Aunts came a cropper riding in India and left them an annual income of four hundred and fifty pounds, now reduced, thanks to the war and other luxuries, to little more than two hundred odd, even we have to do that. And we do it, too, by writing about anybody who seems amusing—enough has been written about Shakespeare—Shakespeare hardly pays. We highbrows, I agree, have to earn our livings; but when we have earned enough to live on, then we live. When the middlebrows, on the contrary, have earned enough to live on, they go on earning enough to buy—what are the things that middlebrows always buy? Queen Anne furniture (faked, but none the less expensive); first editions of dead writers—always the worst; pictures, or reproductions from pictures, by dead painters; houses in what is called “the Georgian style”—but never anything new, never a picture by a living painter, or a chair by a living carpenter, or books by living writers, for to buy living art requires living taste. And, as that kind of art and that kind of taste are what middlebrows call “highbrow,” “Bloomsbury,” poor middlebrow spends vast sums on sham antiques, and has to keep at it scribbling away, year in, year out, while we highbrows ring each other up, and are off for a day’s jaunt into the country. That is the worst of course of living in a set—one likes being with one’s friends.

Have I then made my point clear, sir, that the true battle in my opinion lies not between highbrow and lowbrow, but between highbrows and lowbrows joined together in blood brotherhood against the bloodless and pernicious pest who comes between? If the B.B.C. stood for anything but the Betwixt and Between Company they would use their control of the air not to stir strife between brothers, but to broadcast the fact that highbrows and lowbrows must band together to exterminate a pest which is the bane of all thinking and living. It may be, to quote from your advertisement columns, that “terrifically sensitive” lady novelists overestimate the dampness and dinginess of this fungoid growth. But all I can say is that when, lapsing into that stream which people call, so oddly, consciousness, and gathering wool from the sheep that have been mentioned above, I ramble round my garden in the suburbs, middlebrow seems to me to be everywhere. “What’s that?” I cry. “Middlebrow on the cabbages? Middlebrow infecting that poor old sheep? And what about the moon?” I look up and, behold, the moon is under eclipse. “Middlebrow at it again!” I exclaim. “Middlebrow obscuring, dulling, tarnishing and coarsening even the silver edge of Heaven’s own scythe.” (I “draw near to poetry,” see advt.) And then my thoughts, as Freud assures us thoughts will do, rush (Middlebrow’s saunter and simper, out of respect for the Censor) to sex, and I ask of the sea-gulls who are crying on desolate sea sands and of the farm hands who are coming home rather drunk to their wives, what will become of us, men and women, if Middlebrow has his way with us, and there is only a middle sex but no husbands or wives? The next remark I address with the utmost humility to the Prime Minister. “What, sir,” I demand, “will be the fate of the British Empire and of our Dominions Across the Seas if Middlebrows prevail? Will you not, sir, read a pronouncement of an authoritative nature from Broadcasting House?”

Such are the thoughts, such are the fancies that visit “cultured invalidish ladies with private means” (see advt.) when they stroll in their suburban gardens and look at the cabbages and at the red brick villas that have been built by middlebrows so that middlebrows may look at the view. Such are the thoughts “at once gay and tragic and deeply feminine” (see advt.) of one who has not yet “been driven out of Bloomsbury” (advt. again), a place where lowbrows and highbrows live happily together on equal terms and priests are not, nor priestesses, and, to be quite frank, the adjective “priestly” is neither often heard nor held in high esteem. Such are the thoughts of one who will stay in Bloomsbury until the Duke of Bedford, rightly concerned for the respectability of his squares, raises the rent so high that Bloomsbury is safe for middlebrows to live in. Then she will leave.

May I conclude, as I began, by thanking your reviewer for his very courteous and interesting review, but may I tell him that though he did not, for reasons best known to himself, call me a highbrow, there is no name in the world that I prefer? I ask nothing better than that all reviewers, for ever, and everywhere, should call me a highbrow. I will do my best to oblige them. If they like to add Bloomsbury, W.C.1, that is the correct postal address, and my telephone number is in the Directory. But if your reviewer, or any other reviewer, dares hint that I live in South Kensington, I will sue him for libel. If any human being, man, woman, dog, cat or half-crushed worm dares call me “middlebrow” I will take my pen and stab him, dead.

Yours etc.,
Virginia Woolf.

[written in 1932, but not sent to The New Statesman]

[]

The Art of Biography.

I

The art of biography, we say—but at once go on to ask, Is biography an art? The question is foolish perhaps, and ungenerous certainly, considering the keen pleasure that biographers have given us. But the question asks itself so often that there must be something behind it. There it is, whenever a new biography is opened, casting its shadow on the page; and there would seem to be something deadly in that shadow, for after all, of the multitude of lives that are written, how few survive!

But the reason for this high death rate, the biographer might argue, is that biography, compared with the arts of poetry and fiction, is a young art. Interest in our selves and in other people’s selves is a late development of the human mind. Not until the eighteenth century in England did that curiosity express itself in writing the lives of private people. Only in the nineteenth century was biography fully grown and hugely prolific. If it is true that there have been only three great biographers—Johnson, Boswell, and Lockhart—the reason, he argues, is that the time was short; and his plea, that the art of biography has had but little time to establish itself and develop itself, is certainly borne out by the textbooks. Tempting as it is to explore the reason—why, that is, the self that writes a book of prose came into being so many centuries after the self that writes a poem, why Chaucer preceded Henry James—it is better to leave that insoluble question unasked, and so pass to his next reason for the lack of masterpieces. It is that the art of biography is the most restricted of all the arts. He has his proof ready to hand. Here it is in the preface in which Smith, who has written the life of Jones, takes this opportunity of thanking old friends who have lent letters, and “last but not least” Mrs. Jones, the widow, for that help “without which,” as he puts it, “this biography could not have been written.” Now the novelist, he points out, simply says in his foreword, “Every character in this book is fictitious.” The novelist is free; the biographer is tied.

There, perhaps, we come within hailing distance of that very difficult, again perhaps insoluble, question: What do we mean by calling a book a work of art? At any rate, here is a distinction between biography and fiction—a proof that they differ in the very stuff of which they are made. One is made with the help of friends, of facts; the other is created without any restrictions save those that the artist, for reasons that seem good to him, chooses to obey. That is a distinction; and there is good reason to think that in the past biographers have found it not only a distinction but a very cruel distinction.

The widow and the friends were hard taskmasters. Suppose, for example, that the man of genius was immoral, ill-tempered, and threw the boots at the maid’s head. The widow would say, “Still I loved him—he was the father of my children; and the public, who love his books, must on no account be disillusioned. Cover up; omit.” The biographer obeyed. And thus the majority of Victorian biographies are like the wax figures now preserved in Westminster Abbey, that were carried in funeral processions through the street—effigies that have only a smooth superficial likeness to the body in the coffin.

Then, towards the end of the nineteenth century, there was a change. Again for reasons not easy to discover, widows became broader-minded, the public keener-sighted; the effigy no longer carried conviction or satisfied curiosity. The biographer certainly won a measure of freedom. At least he could hint that there were scars and furrows on the dead man’s face. Froude’s Carlyle is by no means a wax mask painted rosy red. And following Froude there was Sir Edmund Gosse, who dared to say that his own father was a fallible human being. And following Edmund Gosse in the early years of the present century came Lytton Strachey.

II

The figure of Lytton Strachey is so important a figure in the history of biography that it compels a pause. For his three famous books, Eminent Victorians, Queen Victoria, and Elizabeth and Essex, are of a stature to show both what biography can do and what biography cannot do. Thus they suggest many possible answers to the question whether biography is an art, and if not why it fails.

Lytton Strachey came to birth as an author at a lucky moment. In 1918, when he made his first attempt, biography, with its new liberties, was a form that offered great attractions. To a writer like himself, who had wished to write poetry or plays but was doubtful of his creative power, biography seemed to offer a promising alternative. For at last it was possible to tell the truth about the dead; and the Victorian age was rich in remarkable figures many of whom had been grossly deformed by the effigies that had been plastered over them. To recreate them, to show them as they really were, was a task that called for gifts analogous to the poet’s or the novelist’s, yet did not ask that inventive power in which he found himself lacking.

It was well worth trying. And the anger and the interest that his short studies of Eminent Victorians aroused showed that he was able to make Manning, Florence Nightingale, Gordon, and the rest live as they had not lived since they were actually in the flesh. Once more they were the centre of a buzz of discussion. Did Gordon really drink, or was that an invention? Had Florence Nightingale received the Order of Merit in her bedroom or in her sitting room? He stirred the public, even though a European war was raging, to an astonishing interest in such minute matters. Anger and laughter mixed; and editions multiplied.

But these were short studies with something of the overemphasis and the foreshortening of caricatures. In the lives of the two great Queens, Elizabeth and Victoria, he attempted a far more ambitious task. Biography had never had a fairer chance of showing what it could do. For it was now being put to the test by a writer who was capable of making use of all the liberties that biography had won: he was fearless; he had proved his brilliance; and he had learned his job. The result throws great light upon the nature of biography. For who can doubt after reading the two books again, one after the other, that the Victoria is a triumphant success, and that the Elizabeth by comparison is a failure? But it seems too, as we compare them, that it was not Lytton Strachey who failed; it was the art of biography. In the Victoria he treated biography as a craft; he submitted to its limitations. In the Elizabeth he treated biography as an art; he flouted its limitations.

But we must go on to ask how we have come to this conclusion and what reasons support it. In the first place it is clear that the two Queens present very different problems to their biographer. About Queen Victoria everything was known. Everything she did, almost everything she thought, was a matter of common knowledge. No one has ever been more closely verified and exactly authenticated than Queen Victoria. The biographer could not invent her, because at every moment some document was at hand to check his invention. And, in writing of Victoria, Lytton Strachey submitted to the conditions. He used to the full the biographer’s power of selection and relation, but he kept strictly within the world of fact. Every statement was verified; every fact was authenticated. And the result is a life which, very possibly, will do for the old Queen what Boswell did for the old dictionary maker. In time to come Lytton Strachey’s Queen Victoria will be Queen Victoria, just as Boswell’s Johnson is now Dr. Johnson. The other versions will fade and disappear. It was a prodigious feat, and no doubt, having accomplished it, the author was anxious to press further. There was Queen Victoria, solid, real, palpable. But undoubtedly she was limited. Could not biography produce something of the intensity of poetry, something of the excitement of drama, and yet keep also the peculiar virtue that belongs to fact—its suggestive reality, its own proper creativeness?

Queen Elizabeth seemed to lend herself perfectly to the experiment. Very little was known about her. The society in which she lived was so remote that the habits, the motives, and even the actions of the people of that age were full of strangeness and obscurity. “By what art are we to worm our way into those strange spirits? those even stranger bodies? The more clearly we perceive it, the more remote that singular universe becomes,” Lytton Strachey remarked on one of the first pages. Yet there was evidently a “tragic history” lying dormant, half revealed, half concealed, in the story of the Queen and Essex. Everything seemed to lend itself to the making of a book that combined the advantages of both worlds, that gave the artist freedom to invent, but helped his invention with the support of facts—a book that was not only a biography but also a work of art.

Nevertheless, the combination proved unworkable; fact and fiction refused to mix. Elizabeth never became real in the sense that Queen Victoria had been real, yet she never became fictitious in the sense that Cleopatra or Falstaff is fictitious. The reason would seem to be that very little was known—he was urged to invent; yet something was known—his invention was checked. The Queen thus moves in an ambiguous world, between fact and fiction, neither embodied nor disembodied. There is a sense of vacancy and effort, of a tragedy that has no crisis, of characters that meet but do not clash.

If this diagnosis is true we are forced to say that the trouble lies with biography itself. It imposes conditions, and those conditions are that it must be based upon fact. And by fact in biography we mean facts that can be verified by other people besides the artist. If he invents facts as an artist invents them—facts that no one else can verify—and tries to combine them with facts of the other sort, they destroy each other.

Lytton Strachey himself seems in the Queen Victoria to have realized the necessity of this condition, and to have yielded to it instinctively. “The first forty-two years of the Queen’s life,” he wrote, “are illuminated by a great and varied quantity of authentic information. With Albert’s death a veil descends.” And when with Albert’s death the veil descended and authentic information failed, he knew that the biographer must follow suit. “We must be content with a brief and summary relation,” he wrote; and the last years are briefly disposed of. But the whole of Elizabeth’s life was lived behind a far thicker veil than the last years of Victoria. And yet, ignoring his own admission, he went on to write, not a brief and summary relation, but a whole book about those strange spirits and even stranger bodies of whom authentic information was lacking. On his own showing, the attempt was doomed to failure.

III

It seems, then, that when the biographer complained that he was tied by friends, letters, and documents he was laying his finger upon a necessary element in biography; and that it is also a necessary limitation. For the invented character lives in a free world where the facts are verified by one person only—the artist himself. Their authenticity lies in the truth of his own vision. The world created by that vision is rarer, intenser, and more wholly of a piece than the world that is largely made of authentic information supplied by other people. And because of this difference the two kinds of fact will not mix; if they touch they destroy each other. No one, the conclusion seems to be, can make the best of both worlds; you must choose, and you must abide by your choice.

But though the failure of Elizabeth and Essex leads to this conclusion, that failure, because it was the result of a daring experiment carried out with magnificent skill, leads the way to further discoveries. Had he lived, Lytton Strachey would no doubt himself have explored the vein that he had opened. As it is, he has shown us the way in which others may advance. The biographer is bound by facts—that is so; but, if it is so, he has the right to all the facts that are available. If Jones threw boots at the maid’s head, had a mistress at Islington, or was found drunk in a ditch after a night’s debauch, he must be free to say so—so far at least as the law of libel and human sentiment allow.

But these facts are not like the facts of science—once they are discovered, always the same. They are subject to changes of opinion; opinions change as the times change. What was thought a sin is now known, by the light of facts won for us by the psychologists, to be perhaps a misfortune; perhaps a curiosity; perhaps neither one nor the other, but a trifling foible of no great importance one way or the other. The accent on sex has changed within living memory. This leads to the destruction of a great deal of dead matter still obscuring the true features of the human face. Many of the old chapter headings—life at college, marriage, career—are shown to be very arbitrary and artificial distinctions. The real current of the hero’s existence took, very likely, a different course.

Thus the biographer must go ahead of the rest of us, like the miner’s canary, testing the atmosphere, detecting falsity, unreality, and the presence of obsolete conventions. His sense of truth must be alive and on tiptoe. Then again, since we live in an age when a thousand cameras are pointed, by newspapers, letters, and diaries, at every character from every angle, he must be prepared to admit contradictory versions of the same face. Biography will enlarge its scope by hanging up looking glasses at odd corners. And yet from all this diversity it will bring out, not a riot of confusion, but a richer unity. And again, since so much is known that used to be unknown, the question now inevitably asks itself, whether the lives of great men only should be recorded. Is not anyone who has lived a life, and left a record of that life, worthy of biography—the failures as well as the successes, the humble as well as the illustrious? And what is greatness? And what smallness? He must revise our standards of merit and set up new heroes for our admiration.

IV

Biography thus is only at the beginning of its career; it has a long and active life before it, we may be sure—a life full of difficulty, danger, and hard work. Nevertheless, we can also be sure that it is a different life from the life of poetry and fiction—a life lived at a lower degree of tension. And for that reason its creations are not destined for the immortality which the artist now and then achieves for his creations.

There would seem to be certain proof of that already. Even Dr. Johnson as created by Boswell will not live as long as Falstaff as created by Shakespeare. Micawber and Miss Bates we may be certain will survive Lockhart’s Sir Walter Scott and Lytton Strachey’s Queen Victoria. For they are made of more enduring matter. The artist’s imagination at its most intense fires out what is perishable in fact; he builds with what is durable; but the biographer must accept the perishable, build with it, imbed it in the very fabric of his work. Much will perish; little will live. And thus we come to the conclusion, that he is a craftsman, not an artist; and his work is not a work of art, but something betwixt and between.

Yet on that lower level the work of the biographer is invaluable; we cannot thank him sufficiently for what he does for us. For we are incapable of living wholly in the intense world of the imagination. The imagination is a faculty that soon tires and needs rest and refreshment. But for a tired imagination the proper food is not inferior poetry or minor fiction—indeed they blunt and debauch it—but sober fact, that “authentic information” from which, as Lytton Strachey has shown us, good biography is made. When and where did the real man live; how did he look; did he wear laced boots or elastic-sided; who were his aunts, and his friends; how did he blow his nose; whom did he love, and how; and when he came to die did he die in his bed like a Christian, or …

By telling us the true facts, by sifting the little from the big, and shaping the whole so that we perceive the outline, the biographer does more to stimulate the imagination than any poet or novelist save the very greatest. For few poets and novelists are capable of that high degree of tension which gives us reality. But almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders. Of this, too, there is certain proof. For how often, when a biography is read and tossed aside, some scene remains bright, some figure lives on in the depths of the mind, and causes us, when we read a poem or a novel, to feel a start of recognition, as if we remembered something that we had known before.

[Atlantic Monthly, April 1939]

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Craftsmanship.

The title of this series is “Words Fail Me,” and this particular talk is called “Craftsmanship.” We must suppose, therefore, that the talker is meant to discuss the craft of words—the craftsmanship of the writer. But there is something incongruous, unfitting, about the term “craftsmanship” when applied to words. The English dictionary, to which we always turn in moments of dilemma, confirms us in our doubts. It says that the word “craft” has two meanings; it means in the first place making useful objects out of solid matter—for example, a pot, a chair, a table. In the second place, the word “craft” means cajolery, cunning, deceit. Now we know little that is certain about words, but this we do know—words never make anything that is useful; and words are the only things that tell the truth and nothing but the truth. Therefore, to talk of craft in connection with words is to bring together two incongruous ideas, which if they mate can only give birth to some monster fit for a glass case in a museum. Instantly, therefore, the title of the talk must be changed, and for it substituted another—A Ramble round Words, perhaps. For when you cut off the head of a talk it behaves like a hen that has been decapitated. It runs round in a circle till it drops dead—so people say who have killed hens. And that must be the course, or circle, of this decapitated talk. Let us then take for our starting point the statement that words are not useful. This happily needs little proving, for we are all aware of it. When we travel on the Tube, for example, when we wait on the platform for a train, there, hung up in front of us, on an illuminated signboard, are the words “Passing Russell Square.” We look at those words; we repeat them; we try to impress that useful fact upon our minds; the next train will pass Russell Square. We say over and over again as we pace, “Passing Russell Square, passing Russell Square.” And then as we say them, the words shuffle and change, and we find ourselves saying, “Passing away saith the world, passing away…. The leaves decay and fall, the vapours weep their burthen to the ground. Man comes….” And then we wake up and find ourselves at King’s Cross.

Take another example. Written up opposite us in the railway carriage are the words: “Do not lean out of the window.” At the first reading the useful meaning, the surface meaning, is conveyed; but soon, as we sit looking at the words, they shuffle, they change; and we begin saying, “Windows, yes windows—casements opening on the foam of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn.” And before we know what we are doing, we have leant out of the window; we are looking for Ruth in tears amid the alien corn. The penalty for that is twenty pounds or a broken neck.

This proves, if it needs proving, how very little natural gift words have for being useful. If we insist on forcing them against their nature to be useful, we see to our cost how they mislead us, how they fool us, how they land us a crack on the head. We have been so often fooled in this way by words, they have so often proved that they hate being useful, that it is their nature not to express one simple statement but a thousand possibilities—they have done this so often that at last, happily, we are beginning to face the fact. We are beginning to invent another language—a language perfectly and beautifully adapted to express useful statements, a language of signs. There is one great living master of this language to whom we are all indebted, that anonymous writer—whether man, woman or disembodied spirit nobody knows—who describes hotels in the Michelin Guide. He wants to tell us that one hotel is moderate, another good, and a third the best in the place. How does he do it? Not with words; words would at once bring into being shrubberies and billiard tables, men and women, the moon rising and the long splash of the summer sea—all good things, but all here beside the point. He sticks to signs; one gable; two gables; three gables. That is all he says and all he needs to say. Baedeker carries the sign language still further into the sublime realms of art. When he wishes to say that a picture is good, he uses one star; if very good, two stars; when, in his opinion, it is a work of transcendent genius, three black stars shine on the page, and that is all. So with a handful of stars and daggers the whole of art criticism, the whole of literary criticism could be reduced to the size of a sixpenny bit—there are moments when one could wish it. But this suggests that in time to come writers will have two languages at their service; one for fact, one for fiction. When the biographer has to convey a useful and necessary fact, as, for example, that Oliver Smith went to college and took a third in the year 1892, he will say so with a hollow O on top of the figure five. When the novelist is forced to inform us that John rang the bell; after a pause the door was opened by a parlourmaid who said, “Mrs. Jones is not at home,” he will to our great gain and his own comfort convey that repulsive statement not in words, but in signs—say, a capital H on top of the figure three. Thus we may look forward to the day when our biographies and novels will be slim and muscular; and a railway company that says: “Do not lean out of the window” in words will be fined a penalty not exceeding five pounds for the improper use of language.

Words, then, are not useful. Let us now enquire into their other quality, their positive quality, that is, their power to tell the truth. According once more to the dictionary there are at least three kinds of truth: God’s or gospel truth; literary truth; and home truth (generally unflattering). But to consider each separately would take too long. Let us then simplify and assert that since the only test of truth is length of life, and since words survive the chops and changes of time longer than any other substance, therefore they are the truest. Buildings fall; even the earth perishes. What was yesterday a cornfield is to-day a bungalow. But words, if properly used, seem able to live for ever. What, then, we may ask next, is the proper use of words? Not, so we have said, to make a useful statement; for a useful statement is a statement that can mean only one thing. And it is the nature of words to mean many things. Take the simple sentence “Passing Russell Square.” That proved useless because besides the surface meaning it contained so many sunken meanings. The word “passing” suggested the transiency of things, the passing of time and the changes of human life. Then the word “Russell” suggested the rustling of leaves and the skirt on a polished floor; also the ducal house of Bedford and half the history of England. Finally the word “Square” brings in the sight, the shape of an actual square combined with some visual suggestion of the stark angularity of stucco. Thus one sentence of the simplest kind rouses the imagination, the memory, the eye and the ear—all combine in reading it.

But they combine—they combine unconsciously together. The moment we single out and emphasize the suggestions as we have done here they become unreal; and we, too, become unreal—specialists, word mongers, phrase finders, not readers. In reading we have to allow the sunken meanings to remain sunken, suggested, not stated; lapsing and flowing into each other like reeds on the bed of a river. But the words in that sentence—Passing Russell Square—are of course very rudimentary words. They show no trace of the strange, of the diabolical power which words possess when they are not tapped out by a typewriter but come fresh from a human brain—the power that is to suggest the writer; his character, his appearance, his wife, his family, his house—even the cat on the hearthrug. Why words do this, how they do it, how to prevent them from doing it nobody knows. They do it without the writer’s will; often against his will. No writer presumably wishes to impose his own miserable character, his own private secrets and vices upon the reader. But has any writer, who is not a typewriter, succeeded in being wholly impersonal? Always, inevitably, we know them as well as their books. Such is the suggestive power of words that they will often make a bad book into a very lovable human being, and a good book into a man whom we can hardly tolerate in the room. Even words that are hundreds of years old have this power; when they are new they have it so strongly that they deafen us to the writer’s meaning—it is them we see, them we hear. That is one reason why our judgments of living writers are so wildly erratic. Only after the writer is dead do his words to some extent become disinfected, purified of the accidents of the living body.

Now, this power of suggestion is one of the most mysterious properties of words. Everyone who has ever written a sentence must be conscious or half-conscious of it. Words, English words, are full of echoes, of memories, of associations—naturally. They have been out and about, on people’s lips, in their houses, in the streets, in the fields, for so many centuries. And that is one of the chief difficulties in writing them to-day—that they are so stored with meanings, with memories, that they have contracted so many famous marriages. The splendid word “incarnadine,” for example—who can use it without remembering also “multitudinous seas”? In the old days, of course, when English was a new language, writers could invent new words and use them. Nowadays it is easy enough to invent new words—they spring to the lips whenever we see a new sight or feel a new sensation—but we cannot use them because the language is old. You cannot use a brand new word in an old language because of the very obvious yet mysterious fact that a word is not a single and separate entity, but part of other words. It is not a word indeed until it is part of a sentence. Words belong to each other, although, of course, only a great writer knows that the word “incarnadine” belongs to “multitudinous seas.” To combine new words with old words is fatal to the constitution of the sentence. In order to use new words properly you would have to invent a new language; and that, though no doubt we shall come to it, is not at the moment our business. Our business is to see what we can do with the English language as it is. How can we combine the old words in new orders so that they survive, so that they create beauty, so that they tell the truth? That is the question.

And the person who could answer that question would deserve whatever crown of glory the world has to offer. Think what it would mean if you could teach, if you could learn, the art of writing. Why, every book, every newspaper would tell the truth, would create beauty. But there is, it would appear, some obstacle in the way, some hindrance to the teaching of words. For though at this moment at least a hundred professors are lecturing upon the literature of the past, at least a thousand critics are reviewing the literature of the present, and hundreds upon hundreds of young men and women are passing examinations in English literature with the utmost credit, still—do we write better, do we read better than we read and wrote four hundred years ago when we were unlectured, uncriticized, untaught? Is our Georgian literature a patch on the Elizabethan? Where then are we to lay the blame? Not on our professors; not on our reviewers; not on our writers; but on words. It is words that are to blame. They are the wildest, freest, most irresponsible, most unteachable of all things. Of course, you can catch them and sort them and place them in alphabetical order in dictionaries. But words do not live in dictionaries; they live in the mind. If you want proof of this, consider how often in moments of emotion when we most need words we find none. Yet there is the dictionary; there at our disposal are some half-a-million words all in alphabetical order. But can we use them? No, because words do not live in dictionaries, they live in the mind. Look again at the dictionary. There beyond a doubt lie plays more splendid than Antony and Cleopatra; poems more lovely than the Ode to a Nightingale; novels beside which Pride and Prejudice or David Copperfield are the crude bunglings of amateurs. It is only a question of finding the right words and putting them in the right order. But we cannot do it because they do not live in dictionaries; they live in the mind. And how do they live in the mind? Variously and strangely, much as human beings live, by ranging hither and thither, by falling in love, and mating together. It is true that they are much less bound by ceremony and convention than we are. Royal words mate with commoners. English words marry French words, German words, Indian words, Negro words, if they have a fancy. Indeed, the less we enquire into the past of our dear Mother English the better it will be for that lady’s reputation. For she has gone a-roving, a-roving fair maid.

Thus to lay down any laws for such irreclaimable vagabonds is worse than useless. A few trifling rules of grammar and spelling are all the constraint we can put on them. All we can say about them, as we peer at them over the edge of that deep, dark and only fitfully illuminated cavern in which they live—the mind—all we can say about them is that they seem to like people to think and to feel before they use them, but to think and to feel not about them, but about something different. They are highly sensitive, easily made self-conscious. They do not like to have their purity or their impurity discussed. If you start a Society for Pure English, they will show their resentment by starting another for impure English—hence the unnatural violence of much modern speech; it is a protest against the puritans. They are highly democratic, too; they believe that one word is as good as another; uneducated words are as good as educated words, uncultivated words as cultivated words, there are no ranks or titles in their society. Nor do they like being lifted out on the point of a pen and examined separately. They hang together, in sentences, in paragraphs, sometimes for whole pages at a time. They hate being useful; they hate making money; they hate being lectured about in public. In short, they hate anything that stamps them with one meaning or confines them to one attitude, for it is their nature to change.

Perhaps that is their most striking peculiarity—their need of change. It is because the truth they try to catch is many-sided, and they convey it by being themselves many-sided, flashing this way, then that. Thus they mean one thing to one person, another thing to another person; they are unintelligible to one generation, plain as a pikestaff to the next. And it is because of this complexity that they survive. Perhaps then one reason why we have no great poet, novelist or critic writing to-day is that we refuse words their liberty. We pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning, the meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination. And when words are pinned down they fold their wings and die. Finally, and most emphatically, words, like ourselves, in order to live at their ease, need privacy. Undoubtedly they like us to think, and they like us to feel, before we use them; but they also like us to pause; to become unconscious. Our unconsciousness is their privacy; our darkness is their light…. That pause was made, that veil of darkness was dropped, to tempt words to come together in one of those swift marriages which are perfect images and create everlasting beauty. But no—nothing of that sort is going to happen to-night. The little wretches are out of temper; disobliging; disobedient; dumb. What is it that they are muttering? “Time’s up! Silence!”

[broadcast on April 20th, 1937; Listener, May 5, 1937]

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A Letter to a Young Poet.

My Dear John,

Did you ever meet, or was he before your day, that old gentleman—I forget his name—who used to enliven conversation, especially at breakfast when the post came in, by saying that the art of letter-writing is dead? The penny post, the old gentleman used to say, has killed the art of letter-writing. Nobody, he continued, examining an envelope through his eye-glasses, has the time even to cross their t’s. We rush, he went on, spreading his toast with marmalade, to the telephone. We commit our half-formed thoughts in ungrammatical phrases to the post card. Gray is dead, he continued; Horace Walpole is dead; Madame de Sévigné—she is dead too, I suppose he was about to add, but a fit of choking cut him short, and he had to leave the room before he had time to condemn all the arts, as his pleasure was, to the cemetery. But when the post came in this morning and I opened your letter stuffed with little blue sheets written all over in a cramped but not illegible hand—I regret to say, however, that several t’s were uncrossed and the grammar of one sentence seems to me dubious—I replied after all these years to that elderly necrophilist—Nonsense. The art of letter-writing has only just come into existence. It is the child of the penny post. And there is some truth in that remark, I think. Naturally when a letter cost half a crown to send, it had to prove itself a document of some importance; it was read aloud; it was tied up with green silk; after a certain number of years it was published for the infinite delectation of posterity. But your letter, on the contrary, will have to be burnt. It only cost three-halfpence to send. Therefore you could afford to be intimate, irreticent, indiscreet in the extreme. What you tell me about poor dear C. and his adventure on the Channel boat is deadly private; your ribald jests at the expense of M. would certainly ruin your friendship if they got about; I doubt, too, that posterity, unless it is much quicker in the wit than I expect, could follow the line of your thought from the roof which leaks (“splash, splash, splash into the soap dish”) past Mrs. Gape, the charwoman, whose retort to the greengrocer gives me the keenest pleasure, via Miss Curtis and her odd confidence on the steps of the omnibus; to Siamese cats (“Wrap their noses in an old stocking my Aunt says if they howl”); so to the value of criticism to a writer; so to Donne; so to Gerard Hopkins; so to tombstones; so to gold-fish; and so with a sudden alarming swoop to “Do write and tell me where poetry’s going, or if it’s dead?” No, your letter, because it is a true letter—one that can neither be read aloud now, nor printed in time to come—will have to be burnt. Posterity must live upon Walpole and Madame de Sévigné. The great age of letter-writing, which is, of course, the present, will leave no letters behind it. And in making my reply there is only one question that I can answer or attempt to answer in public; about poetry and its death.

But before I begin, I must own up to those defects, both natural and acquired, which, as you will find, distort and invalidate all that I have to say about poetry. The lack of a sound university training has always made it impossible for me to distinguish between an iambic and a dactyl, and if this were not enough to condemn one for ever, the practice of prose has bred in me, as in most prose writers, a foolish jealousy, a righteous indignation—anyhow, an emotion which the critic should be without. For how, we despised prose writers ask when we get together, could one say what one meant and observe the rules of poetry? Conceive dragging in “blade” because one had mentioned “maid”; and pairing “sorrow” with “borrow”? Rhyme is not only childish, but dishonest, we prose writers say. Then we go on to say, And look at their rules! How easy to be a poet! How strait the path is for them, and how strict! This you must do; this you must not. I would rather be a child and walk in a crocodile down a suburban path than write poetry, I have heard prose writers say. It must be like taking the veil and entering a religious order—observing the rites and rigours of metre. That explains why they repeat the same thing over and over again. Whereas we prose writers (I am only telling you the sort of nonsense prose writers talk when they are alone) are masters of language, not its slaves; nobody can teach us; nobody can coerce us; we say what we mean; we have the whole of life for our province. We are the creators, we are the explorers…. So we run on—nonsensically enough, I must admit.

Now that I have made a clean breast of these deficiencies, let us proceed. From certain phrases in your letter I gather that you think that poetry is in a parlous way, and that your case as a poet in this particular autumn of 1931 is a great deal harder than Shakespeare’s, Dryden’s, Pope’s, or Tennyson’s. In fact it is the hardest case that has ever been known. Here you give me an opening, which I am prompt to seize, for a little lecture. Never think yourself singular, never think your own case much harder than other people’s. I admit that the age we live in makes this difficult. For the first time in history there are readers—a large body of people, occupied in business, in sport, in nursing their grandfathers, in tying up parcels behind counters—they all read now; and they want to be told how to read and what to read; and their teachers—the reviewers, the lecturers, the broadcasters—must in all humanity make reading easy for them; assure them that literature is violent and exciting, full of heroes and villains; of hostile forces perpetually in conflict; of fields strewn with bones; of solitary victors riding off on white horses wrapped in black cloaks to meet their death at the turn of the road. A pistol shot rings out. “The age of romance was over. The age of realism had begun”—you know the sort of thing. Now of course writers themselves know very well that there is not a word of truth in all this—there are no battles, and no murders and no defeats and no victories. But as it is of the utmost importance that readers should be amused, writers acquiesce. They dress themselves up. They act their parts. One leads; the other follows. One is romantic, the other realist. One is advanced, the other out of date. There is no harm in it, so long as you take it as a joke, but once you believe in it, once you begin to take yourself seriously as a leader or as a follower, as a modern or as a conservative, then you become a self-conscious, biting, and scratching little animal whose work is not of the slightest value or importance to anybody. Think of yourself rather as something much humbler and less spectacular, but to my mind far more interesting—a poet in whom live all the poets of the past, from whom all poets in time to come will spring. You have a touch of Chaucer in you, and something of Shakespeare; Dryden, Pope, Tennyson—to mention only the respectable among your ancestors—stir in your blood and sometimes move your pen a little to the right or to the left. In short you are an immensely ancient, complex, and continuous character, for which reason please treat yourself with respect and think twice before you dress up as Guy Fawkes and spring out upon timid old ladies at street corners, threatening death and demanding twopence-halfpenny.

However, as you say that you are in a fix (“it has never been so hard to write poetry as it is to-day”) and that poetry may be, you think, at its last gasp in England (“the novelists are doing all the interesting things now”), let me while away the time before the post goes in imagining your state and in hazarding one or two guesses which, since this is a letter, need not be taken too seriously or pressed too far. Let me try to put myself in your place; let me try to imagine, with your letter to help me, what it feels like to be a young poet in the autumn of 1931. (And taking my own advice, I shall treat you not as one poet in particular, but as several poets in one.) On the floor of your mind, then—is it not this that makes you a poet?—rhythm keeps up its perpetual beat. Sometimes it seems to die down to nothing; it lets you eat, sleep, talk like other people. Then again it swells and rises and attempts to sweep all the contents of your mind into one dominant dance. To-night is such an occasion. Although you are alone, and have taken one boot off and are about to undo the other, you cannot go on with the process of undressing, but must instantly write at the bidding of the dance. You snatch pen and paper; you hardly trouble to hold the one or to straighten the other. And while you write, while the first stanzas of the dance are being fastened down, I will withdraw a little and look out of the window. A woman passes, then a man; a car glides to a stop and then—but there is no need to say what I see out of the window, nor indeed is there time, for I am suddenly recalled from my observations by a cry of rage or despair. Your page is crumpled in a ball; your pen sticks upright by the nib in the carpet. If there were a cat to swing or a wife to murder now would be the time. So at least I infer from the ferocity of your expression. You are rasped, jarred, thoroughly out of temper. And if I am to guess the reason, it is, I should say, that the rhythm which was opening and shutting with a force that sent shocks of excitement from your head to your heels has encountered some hard and hostile object upon which it has smashed itself to pieces. Something has worked in which cannot be made into poetry; some foreign body, angular, sharp-edged, gritty, has refused to join in the dance. Obviously, suspicion attaches to Mrs. Gape; she has asked you to make a poem of her; then to Miss Curtis and her confidences on the omnibus; then to C., who has infected you with a wish to tell his story—and a very amusing one it was—in verse. But for some reason you cannot do their bidding. Chaucer could; Shakespeare could; so could Crabbe, Byron, and perhaps Robert Browning. But it is October 1931, and for a long time now poetry has shirked contact with—what shall we call it?—Shall we shortly and no doubt inaccurately call it life? And will you come to my help by guessing what I mean? Well then, it has left all that to the novelist. Here you see how easy it would be for me to write two or three volumes in honour of prose and in mockery of verse; to say how wide and ample is the domain of the one, how starved and stunted the little grove of the other. But it would be simpler and perhaps fairer to check these theories by opening one of the thin books of modern verse that lie on your table. I open and I find myself instantly confuted. Here are the common objects of daily prose—the bicycle and the omnibus. Obviously the poet is making his muse face facts. Listen:

Which of you waking early and watching daybreak

Will not hasten in heart, handsome, aware of wonder

At light unleashed, advancing, a leader of movement,

Breaking like surf on turf on road and roof,

Or chasing shadow on downs like whippet racing,

The stilled stone, halting at eyelash barrier,

Enforcing in face a profile, marks of misuse,

Beating impatient and importunate on boudoir shutters

Where the old life is not up yet, with rays

Exploring through rotting floor a dismantled mill—

The old life never to be born again?

Yes, but how will he get through with it? I read on and find:

Whistling as he shuts

His door behind him, travelling to work by tube

Or walking to the park to it to ease the bowels,

and read on and find again:

As a boy lately come up from country to town

Returns for the day to his village in expensive shoes—

and so on again to:

Seeking a heaven on earth he chases his shadow,

Loses his capital and his nerve in pursuing

What yachtsmen, explorers, climbers and buggers are after.

These lines and the words I have emphasized are enough to confirm me in part of my guess at least. The poet is trying to include Mrs. Gape. He is honestly of opinion that she can be brought into poetry and will do very well there. Poetry, he feels, will be improved by the actual, the colloquial. But though I honour him for the attempt, I doubt that it is wholly successful. I feel a jar. I feel a shock. I feel as if I had stubbed my toe on the corner of the wardrobe. Am I then, I go on to ask, shocked, prudishly and conventionally, by the words themselves? I think not. The shock is literally a shock. The poet as I guess has strained himself to include an emotion that is not domesticated and acclimatized to poetry; the effort has thrown him off his balance; he rights himself, as I am sure I shall find if I turn the page, by a violent recourse to the poetical—he invokes the moon or the nightingale. Anyhow, the transition is sharp. The poem is cracked in the middle. Look, it comes apart in my hands: here is reality on one side, here is beauty on the other; and instead of acquiring a whole object rounded and entire, I am left with broken parts in my hands which, since my reason has been roused and my imagination has not been allowed to take entire possession of me, I contemplate coldly, critically, and with distaste.

Such at least is the hasty analysis I make of my own sensations as a reader; but again I am interrupted. I see that you have overcome your difficulty, whatever it was; the pen is once more in action, and having torn up the first poem you are at work upon another. Now then if I want to understand your state of mind I must invent another explanation to account for this return of fluency. You have dismissed, as I suppose, all sorts of things that would come naturally to your pen if you had been writing prose—the charwoman, the omnibus, the incident on the Channel boat. Your range is restricted—I judge from your expression—concentrated and intensified. I hazard a guess that you are thinking now, not about things in general, but about yourself in particular. There is a fixity, a gloom, yet an inner glow that seem to hint that you are looking within and not without. But in order to consolidate these flimsy guesses about the meaning of an expression on a face, let me open another of the books on your table and check it by what I find there. Again I open at random and read this:

To penetrate that room is my desire,

The extreme attic of the mind, that lies

Just beyond the last bend in the corridor.

Writing I do it. Phrases, poems are keys.

Loving’s another way (but not so sure).

A fire’s in there, I think, there’s truth at last

Deep in a lumber chest. Sometimes I’m near,

But draughts puff out the matches, and I’m lost.

Sometimes I’m lucky, find a key to turn,

Open an inch or two—but always then

A bell rings, someone calls, or cries of “fire”

Arrest my hand when nothing’s known or seen,

And running down the stairs again I mourn.

and then this:

There is a dark room,

The locked and shuttered womb,

Where negative’s made positive.

Another dark room,

The blind and bolted tomb,

Where positives change to negative.

We may not undo that or escape this, who

Have birth and death coiled in our bones,

Nothing we can do

Will sweeten the real rue,

That we begin, and end, with groans.

And then this:

Never being, but always at the edge of Being

My head, like Death mask, is brought into the Sun.

The shadow pointing finger across cheek,

I move lips for tasting, I move hands for touching,

But never am nearer than touching,

Though the spirit leans outward for seeing.

Observing rose, gold, eyes, an admired landscape,

My senses record the act of wishing

Wishing to be

Rose, gold, landscape or another—

Claiming fulfilment in the act of loving.

Since these quotations are chosen at random and I have yet found three different poets writing about nothing, if not about the poet himself, I hold that the chances are that you too are engaged in the same occupation. I conclude that self offers no impediment; self joins in the dance; self lends itself to the rhythm; it is apparently easier to write a poem about oneself than about any other subject. But what does one mean by “oneself”? Not the self that Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley have described—not the self that loves a woman, or that hates a tyrant, or that broods over the mystery of the world. No, the self that you are engaged in describing is shut out from all that. It is a self that sits alone in the room at night with the blinds drawn. In other words the poet is much less interested in what we have in common than in what he has apart. Hence I suppose the extreme difficulty of these poems—and I have to confess that it would floor me completely to say from one reading or even from two or three what these poems mean. The poet is trying honestly and exactly to describe a world that has perhaps no existence except for one particular person at one particular moment. And the more sincere he is in keeping to the precise outline of the roses and cabbages of his private universe, the more he puzzles us who have agreed in a lazy spirit of compromise to see roses and cabbages as they are seen, more or less, by the twenty-six passengers on the outside of an omnibus. He strains to describe; we strain to see; he flickers his torch; we catch a flying gleam. It is exciting; it is stimulating; but is that a tree, we ask, or is it perhaps an old woman tying up her shoe in the gutter?

Well, then, if there is any truth in what I am saying—if that is you cannot write about the actual, the colloquial, Mrs. Gape or the Channel boat or Miss Curtis on the omnibus, without straining the machine of poetry, if, therefore, you are driven to contemplate landscapes and emotions within and must render visible to the world at large what you alone can see, then indeed yours is a hard case, and poetry, though still breathing—witness these little books—is drawing her breath in short, sharp gasps. Still, consider the symptoms. They are not the symptoms of death in the least. Death in literature, and I need not tell you how often literature has died in this country or in that, comes gracefully, smoothly, quietly. Lines slip easily down the accustomed grooves. The old designs are copied so glibly that we are half inclined to think them original, save for that very glibness. But here the very opposite is happening: here in my first quotation the poet breaks his machine because he will clog it with raw fact. In my second, he is unintelligible because of his desperate determination to tell the truth about himself. Thus I cannot help thinking that though you may be right in talking of the difficulty of the time, you are wrong to despair.

Is there not, alas, good reason to hope? I say “alas” because then I must give my reasons, which are bound to be foolish and certain also to cause pain to the large and highly respectable society of necrophils—Mr. Peabody, and his like—who much prefer death to life and are even now intoning the sacred and comfortable words, Keats is dead, Shelley is dead, Byron is dead. But it is late: necrophily induces slumber; the old gentlemen have fallen asleep over their classics, and if what I am about to say takes a sanguine tone—and for my part I do not believe in poets dying; Keats, Shelley, Byron are alive here in this room in you and you and you—I can take comfort from the thought that my hoping will not disturb their snoring. So to continue—why should not poetry, now that it has so honestly scraped itself free from certain falsities, the wreckage of the great Victorian age, now that it has so sincerely gone down into the mind of the poet and verified its outlines—a work of renovation that has to be done from time to time and was certainly needed, for bad poetry is almost always the result of forgetting oneself—all becomes distorted and impure if you lose sight of that central reality—now, I say, that poetry has done all this, why should it not once more open its eyes, look out of the window and write about other people? Two or three hundred years ago you were always writing about other people. Your pages were crammed with characters of the most opposite and various kinds—Hamlet, Cleopatra, Falstaff. Not only did we go to you for drama, and for the subtleties of human character, but we also went to you, incredible though this now seems, for laughter. You made us roar with laughter. Then later, not more than a hundred years ago, you were lashing our follies, trouncing our hypocrisies, and dashing off the most brilliant of satires. You were Byron, remember; you wrote Don Juan. You were Crabbe also; you took the most sordid details of the lives of peasants for your theme. Clearly therefore you have it in you to deal with a vast variety of subjects; it is only a temporary necessity that has shut you up in one room, alone, by yourself.

But how are you going to get out, into the world of other people? That is your problem now, if I may hazard a guess—to find the right relationship, now that you know yourself, between the self that you know and the world outside. It is a difficult problem. No living poet has, I think, altogether solved it. And there are a thousand voices prophesying despair. Science, they say, has made poetry impossible; there is no poetry in motor cars and wireless. And we have no religion. All is tumultuous and transitional. Therefore, so people say, there can be no relation between the poet and the present age. But surely that is nonsense. These accidents are superficial; they do not go nearly deep enough to destroy the most profound and primitive of instincts, the instinct of rhythm. All you need now is to stand at the window and let your rhythmical sense open and shut, open and shut, boldly and freely, until one thing melts in another, until the taxis are dancing with the daffodils, until a whole has been made from all these separate fragments. I am talking nonsense, I know. What I mean is, summon all your courage, exert all your vigilance, invoke all the gifts that Nature has been induced to bestow. Then let your rhythmical sense wind itself in and out among men and women, omnibuses, sparrows—whatever come along the street—until it has strung them together in one harmonious whole. That perhaps is your task—to find the relation between things that seem incompatible yet have a mysterious affinity, to absorb every experience that comes your way fearlessly and saturate it completely so that your poem is a whole, not a fragment; to re-think human life into poetry and so give us tragedy again and comedy by means of characters not spun out at length in the novelist’s way, but condensed and synthesised in the poet’s way—that is what we look to you to do now. But as I do not know what I mean by rhythm nor what I mean by life, and as most certainly I cannot tell you which objects can properly be combined together in a poem—that is entirely your affair—and as I cannot tell a dactyl from an iambic, and am therefore unable to say how you must modify and expand the rites and ceremonies of your ancient and mysterious art—I will move on to safer ground and turn again to these little books themselves.

When, then, I return to them I am, as I have admitted, filled, not with forebodings of death, but with hopes for the future. But one does not always want to be thinking of the future, if, as sometimes happens, one is living in the present. When I read these poems, now, at the present moment, I find myself—reading, you know, is rather like opening the door to a horde of rebels who swarm out attacking one in twenty places at once—hit, roused, scraped, bared, swung through the air, so that life seems to flash by; then again blinded, knocked on the head—all of which are agreeable sensations for a reader (since nothing is more dismal than to open the door and get no response), and all I believe certain proof that this poet is alive and kicking. And yet mingling with these cries of delight, of jubilation, I record also, as I read, the repetition in the bass of one word intoned over and over again by some malcontent. At last then, silencing the others, I say to this malcontent, “Well, and what do you want?” Whereupon he bursts out, rather to my discomfort, “Beauty.” Let me repeat, I take no responsibility for what my senses say when I read; I merely record the fact that there is a malcontent in me who complains that it seems to him odd, considering that English is a mixed language, a rich language; a language unmatched for its sound and colour, for its power of imagery and suggestion—it seems to him odd that these modern poets should write as if they had neither ears nor eyes, neither soles to their feet nor palms to their hands, but only honest enterprising book-fed brains, uni-sexual bodies and—but here I interrupted him. For when it comes to saying that a poet should be bi-sexual, and that I think is what he was about to say, even I, who have had no scientific training whatsoever, draw the line and tell that voice to be silent.

But how far, if we discount these obvious absurdities, do you think there is truth in this complaint? For my own part now that I have stopped reading, and can see the poems more or less as a whole, I think it is true that the eye and ear are starved of their rights. There is no sense of riches held in reserve behind the admirable exactitude of the lines I have quoted, as there is, for example, behind the exactitude of Mr. Yeats. The poet clings to his one word, his only word, as a drowning man to a spar. And if this is so, I am ready to hazard a reason for it all the more readily because I think it bears out what I have just been saying. The art of writing, and that is perhaps what my malcontent means by “beauty,” the art of having at one’s beck and call every word in the language, of knowing their weights, colours, sounds, associations, and thus making them, as is so necessary in English, suggest more than they can state, can be learnt of course to some extent by reading—it is impossible to read too much; but much more drastically and effectively by imagining that one is not oneself but somebody different. How can you learn to write if you write only about one single person? To take the obvious example. Can you doubt that the reason why Shakespeare knew every sound and syllable in the language and could do precisely what he liked with grammar and syntax, was that Hamlet, Falstaff and Cleopatra rushed him into this knowledge; that the lords, officers, dependants, murderers and common soldiers of the plays insisted that he should say exactly what they felt in the words expressing their feelings? It was they who taught him to write, not the begetter of the Sonnets. So that if you want to satisfy all those senses that rise in a swarm whenever we drop a poem among them—the reason, the imagination, the eyes, the ears, the palms of the hands and the soles of the feet, not to mention a million more that the psychologists have yet to name, you will do well to embark upon a long poem in which people as unlike yourself as possible talk at the tops of their voices. And for heaven’s sake, publish nothing before you are thirty.

That, I am sure, is of very great importance. Most of the faults in the poems I have been reading can be explained, I think, by the fact that they have been exposed to the fierce light of publicity while they were still too young to stand the strain. It has shrivelled them into a skeleton austerity, both emotional and verbal, which should not be characteristic of youth. The poet writes very well; he writes for the eye of a severe and intelligent public; but how much better he would have written if for ten years he had written for no eye but his own! After all, the years from twenty to thirty are years (let me refer to your letter again) of emotional excitement. The rain dripping, a wing flashing, someone passing—the commonest sounds and sights have power to fling one, as I seem to remember, from the heights of rapture to the depths of despair. And if the actual life is thus extreme, the visionary life should be free to follow. Write then, now that you are young, nonsense by the ream. Be silly, be sentimental, imitate Shelley, imitate Samuel Smiles; give the rein to every impulse; commit every fault of style, grammar, taste, and syntax; pour out; tumble over; loose anger, love, satire, in whatever words you can catch, coerce or create, in whatever metre, prose, poetry, or gibberish that comes to hand. Thus you will learn to write. But if you publish, your freedom will be checked; you will be thinking what people will say; you will write for others when you ought only to be writing for yourself. And what point can there be in curbing the wild torrent of spontaneous nonsense which is now, for a few years only, your divine gift in order to publish prim little books of experimental verses? To make money? That, we both know, is out of the question. To get criticism? But you friends will pepper your manuscripts with far more serious and searching criticism than any you will get from the reviewers. As for fame, look I implore you at famous people; see how the waters of dullness spread around them as they enter; observe their pomposity, their prophetic airs; reflect that the greatest poets were anonymous; think how Shakespeare cared nothing for fame; how Donne tossed his poems into the waste-paper basket; write an essay giving a single instance of any modern English writer who has survived the disciples and the admirers, the autograph hunters and the interviewers, the dinners and the luncheons, the celebrations and the commemorations with which English society so effectively stops the mouths of its singers and silences their songs.

But enough. I, at any rate, refuse to be necrophilus. So long as you and you and you, venerable and ancient representatives of Sappho, Shakespeare, and Shelley, are aged precisely twenty-three and propose—O enviable lot!—to spend the next fifty years of your lives in writing poetry, I refuse to think that the art is dead. And if ever the temptation to necrophilize comes over you, be warned by the fate of that old gentleman whose name I forget, but I think that it was Peabody. In the very act of consigning all the arts to the grave he choked over a large piece of hot buttered toast and the consolation then offered him that he was about to join the elder Pliny in the shades gave him, I am told, no sort of satisfaction whatsoever.

And now for the intimate, the indiscreet, and indeed, the only really interesting parts of this letter….

[Yale Review, June 1932]

[]

Why?

When the first number of Lysistrata appeared, I confess that I was deeply disappointed. It was so well printed, on such good paper. It looked established, prosperous. As I turned the pages it seemed to me that wealth must have descended upon Somerville, and I was about to answer the request of the editor for an article with a negative, when I read, greatly to my relief, that one of the writers was badly dressed, and gathered from another that the women’s colleges still lack power and prestige. At this I plucked up heart, and a crowd of questions that have been pressing to be asked rushed to my lips saying: “Here is our chance.”

I should explain that like so many people nowadays I am pestered with questions. I find it impossible to walk down the street without stopping, it may be in the middle of the road, to ask: Why? Churches, public houses, parliaments, shops, loud speakers, motor cars, the drone of an aeroplane in the clouds, and men and women all inspire questions. Yet what is the point of asking questions of oneself? They should be asked openly in public. But the great obstacle to asking questions openly in public is, of course, wealth. The little twisted sign that comes at the end of a question has a way of making the rich writhe; power and prestige come down upon it with all their weight. Questions, therefore, being sensitive, impulsive and often foolish, have a way of picking their asking place with care. They shrivel up in an atmosphere of power, prosperity, and time-worn stone. They die by the dozen on the threshold of great newspaper offices. They slink away to less favoured, less flourishing quarters where people are poor and therefore have nothing to give, where they have no power and therefore have nothing to lose. Now the questions that have been pestering me to ask them decided, whether rightly or wrongly, that they could be asked in Lysistrata. They said: “We do not expect you to ask us in ——,” here they named some of our most respectable dailies and weeklies; “nor in ——,” here they named some of our most venerable institutions. “But, thank Heaven!” they exclaimed, “are not women’s colleges poor and young? Are they not inventive, adventurous? Are they not out to create a new ——”

“The editor forbids feminism,” I interposed severely.

“What is feminism?” they screamed with one accord, and as I did not answer at once, a new question was flung at me: “Don’t you think it high time that a new ——”

But I stopped them by reminding them that they had only two thousand words at their disposal. Upon that, they withdrew, consulted together, and finally put forward the request that I should introduce one or two of them of the simplest, tamest, and most obvious. For example, there is the question that always bobs up at the beginning of term when societies issue their invitations and universities open their doors—why lecture, why be lectured?

In order to place this question fairly before you, I will describe, for memory has kept the picture bright, one of those rare but, as Queen Victoria would have put it, never-to-be-sufficiently-lamented occasions when in deference to friendship, or in a desperate attempt to acquire information about, perhaps, the French Revolution, it seemed necessary to attend a lecture. The room to begin with had a hybrid look—it was not for sitting in, nor yet for eating in. Perhaps there was a map on the wall; certainly there was a table on a platform, and several rows of rather small, rather hard, comfortless little chairs. These were occupied intermittently, as if they shunned each other’s company, by people of both sexes, and some had notebooks and were tapping their fountain pens, and some had none and gazed with the vacancy and placidity of bull frogs at the ceiling. A large clock displayed its cheerless face, and when the hour struck in strode a harried-looking man, a man from whose face nervousness, vanity, or perhaps the depressing and impossible nature of his task had removed all traces of ordinary humanity. There was a momentary stir. He had written a book, and for a moment it is interesting to see people who have written books. Everybody gazed at him. He was bald and not hairy; had a mouth and a chin; in short he was a man like another, although he had written a book. He cleared his throat and the lecture began. Now the human voice is an instrument of varied power; it can enchant and it can soothe; it can rage and it can despair; but when it lectures it almost always bores. What he said was sensible enough; there was learning in it and argument and reason; but as the voice went on attention wandered. The face of the clock seemed abnormally pale; the hands too suffered from some infirmity. Had they the gout? Were they swollen? They moved so slowly. They reminded one of the painful progress of a three-legged fly that has survived the winter. How many flies on an average survive the English winter, and what would be the thoughts of such an insect on waking to find itself being lectured on the French Revolution? The enquiry was fatal. A link had been lost—a paragraph dropped. It was useless to ask the lecturer to repeat his words; on he plodded with dogged pertinacity. The origin of the French Revolution was being sought for—also the thoughts of flies. Now there came one of those flat stretches of discourse when minute objects can be seen coming for two or three miles ahead. “Skip!” we entreated him—vainly. He did not skip. There was a joke. Then the voice went on again; then it seemed that the windows wanted washing; then a woman sneezed; then the voice quickened; then there was a peroration; and then—thank Heaven!—the lecture was over.

Why, since life holds only so many hours, waste one of them on being lectured? Why, since printing presses have been invented these many centuries, should he not have printed his lecture instead of speaking it? Then, by the fire in winter, or under an apple tree in summer, it could have been read, thought over, discussed; the difficult ideas pondered, the argument debated. It could have been thickened and stiffened. There would have been no need of those repetitions and dilutions with which lectures have to be watered down and brightened up, so as to attract the attention of a miscellaneous audience too apt to think about noses and chins, women sneezing and the longevity of flies.

It may be, I told these questions, that there is some reason, imperceptible to outsiders, which makes lectures an essential part of university discipline. But why—here another rushed to the forefront—why, if lectures are necessary as a form of education, should they not be abolished as a form of entertainment? Never does the crocus flower or the beech tree redden but there issues simultaneously from all the universities of England, Scotland and Ireland a shower of notes from desperate secretaries entreating So-and-so and So-and-so and So-and-so to come down and address them upon art or literature or politics or morality—And why?

In the old days, when newspapers were scarce and carefully lent about from hall to rectory, such laboured methods of rubbing up minds and imparting ideas were no doubt essential. But now, when every day of the week scatters our tables with articles and pamphlets in which every shade of opinion is expressed, far more tersely than by word of mouth, why continue an obsolete custom which not merely wastes time and temper, but incites the most debased of human passions—vanity, ostentation, self-assertion, and the desire to convert? Why encourage your elders to turn themselves into prigs and prophets, when they are ordinary men and women? Why force them to stand on a platform for forty minutes while you reflect upon the colour of their hair and the longevity of flies? Why not let them talk to you and listen to you, naturally and happily, on the floor? Why not create a new form of society founded on poverty and equality? Why not bring together people of all ages and both sexes and all shades of fame and obscurity so that they can talk, without mounting platforms or reading papers or wearing expensive clothes or eating expensive food? Would not such a society be worth, even as a form of education, all the papers on art and literature that have ever been read since the world began? Why not abolish prigs and prophets? Why not invent human intercourse? Why not try?

Here, being sick of the word “why,” I was about to indulge myself with a few reflections of a general nature upon society as it was, as it is, as it might be, with a few fancy pictures of Mrs. Thrale entertaining Dr. Johnson, Lady Holland amusing Lord Macaulay thrown in, when such a clamour arose among the questions that I could hardly hear myself think. The cause of the clamour was soon apparent. I had incautiously and foolishly used the word “literature.” Now if there is one word that excites questions and puts them in a fury it is this word “literature.” There they were, screaming and crying, asking questions about poetry and fiction and criticism, each demanding to be heard, each certain that his was the only question that deserved an answer. At last, when they had destroyed all my fancy pictures of Lady Holland and Dr. Johnson, one insisted, for he said that foolish and rash as he might be he was less so than the others, that he should be asked. And his question was, why learn English literature at universities when you can read it for yourselves in books? But I said that it is foolish to ask a question that has already been answered—English literature is, I believe, already taught at the universities. Besides, if we are going to start an argument about it, we should need at least twenty volumes, whereas we have only about seven hundred words remaining. Still, as he was importunate, I said I would ask the question and introduce it to the best of my ability, without expressing any opinion of my own, by copying down the following fragment of dialogue.

The other day I went to call upon a friend of mine who earns her living as a publisher’s reader. The room was a little dark, it seemed to me, when I went in. Yet, as the window was open and it was a fine spring day, the darkness must have been spiritual—the effect of some private sorrow I feared. Her first words as I came in confirmed my fears:

“Alas, poor boy!” she exclaimed, tossing the manuscript she was reading to the ground with a gesture of despair. Had some accident happened to one of her relations, I asked, motoring or climbing?

“If you call three hundred pages on the evolution of the Elizabethan sonnet an accident,” she said.

“Is that all?” I replied with relief.

“All?” she retaliated, “isn’t it enough?” And, beginning to pace up and down the room she exclaimed: “Once he was a clever boy; once he was worth talking to; once he cared about English literature. But now——” She threw out her hands as if words failed her—but not at all. There followed such a flood of lamentation and vituperation—but reflecting how hard her life was, reading manuscripts day in, day out, I excused her—that I could not follow the argument. All I could gather was that this lecturing about English literature—“if you want to teach them to read English,” she threw in, “teach them to read Greek”—all this passing of examinations in English literature, which led to all this writing about English literature, was bound in the end to be the death and burial of English literature. “The tombstone,” she was proceeding, “will be a bound volume of——” when I stopped her and told her not to talk such nonsense. “Then tell me,” she said, standing over me with her fists clenched, “do they write any better for it? Is poetry better, is fiction better, is criticism better now that they have been taught how to read English literature?” As if to answer her own question she read a passage from the manuscript on the floor. “And each the spit and image of the other!” she groaned, lifting it wearily to its place with the manuscripts on the shelf.

“But think of all they must know,” I tried to argue.

“Know?” she echoed me. “Know? What d’you mean by ‘know’?” As that was a difficult question to answer off-hand, I passed it over by saying: “Well, at any rate they’ll be able to make their livings and teach other people.” Whereupon she lost her temper and, seizing the unfortunate work upon the Elizabethan sonnet, whizzed it across the room. The rest of the visit passed in picking up the fragments of a teapot that had belonged to her grandmother.

Now of course a dozen other questions clamour to be asked; about churches and parliaments and public houses and shops and loudspeakers and men and women; but mercifully time is up; silence falls.

[Lysistrata, May 1934]

[]

Professions for Women.

When your secretary invited me to come here, she told me that your Society is concerned with the employment of women and she suggested that I might tell you something about my own professional experiences. It is true I am a woman; it is true I am employed; but what professional experiences have I had? It is difficult to say. My profession is literature; and in that profession there are fewer experiences for women than in any other, with the exception of the stage—fewer, I mean, that are peculiar to women. For the road was cut many years ago—by Fanny Burney, by Aphra Behn, by Harriet Martineau, by Jane Austen, by George Eliot—many famous women, and many more unknown and forgotten, have been before me, making the path smooth, and regulating my steps. Thus, when I came to write, there were very few material obstacles in my way. Writing was a reputable and harmless occupation. The family peace was not broken by the scratching of a pen. No demand was made upon the family purse. For ten and sixpence one can buy paper enough to write all the plays of Shakespeare—if one has a mind that way. Pianos and models, Paris, Vienna and Berlin, masters and mistresses, are not needed by a writer. The cheapness of writing paper is, of course, the reason why women have succeeded as writers before they have succeeded in the other professions.

But to tell you my story—it is a simple one. You have only got to figure to yourselves a girl in a bedroom with a pen in her hand. She had only to move that pen from left to right—from ten o’clock to one. Then it occurred to her to do what is simple and cheap enough after all—to slip a few of those pages into an envelope, fix a penny stamp in the corner, and drop the envelope into the red box at the corner. It was thus that I became a journalist; and my effort was rewarded on the first day of the following month—a very glorious day it was for me—by a letter from an editor containing a cheque for one pound ten shillings and sixpence. But to show you how little I deserve to be called a professional woman, how little I know of the struggles and difficulties of such lives, I have to admit that instead of spending that sum upon bread and butter, rent, shoes and stockings, or butcher’s bills, I went out and bought a cat—a beautiful cat, a Persian cat, which very soon involved me in bitter disputes with my neighbours.

What could be easier than to write articles and to buy Persian cats with the profits? But wait a moment. Articles have to be about something. Mine, I seem to remember, was about a novel by a famous man. And while I was writing this review, I discovered that if I were going to review books I should need to do battle with a certain phantom. And the phantom was a woman, and when I came to know her better I called her after the heroine of a famous poem, The Angel in the House. It was she who used to come between me and my paper when I was writing reviews. It was she who bothered me and wasted my time and so tormented me that at last I killed her. You who come of a younger and happier generation may not have heard of her—you may not know what I mean by the Angel in the House. I will describe her as shortly as I can. She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught she sat in it—in short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others. Above all—I need not say it—she was pure. Her purity was supposed to be her chief beauty—her blushes, her great grace. In those days—the last of Queen Victoria—every house had its Angel. And when I came to write I encountered her with the very first words. The shadow of her wings fell on my page; I heard the rustling of her skirts in the room. Directly, that is to say, I took my pen in my hand to review that novel by a famous man, she slipped behind me and whispered: “My dear, you are a young woman. You are writing about a book that has been written by a man. Be sympathetic; be tender; flatter; deceive; use all the arts and wiles of our sex. Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all, be pure.” And she made as if to guide my pen. I now record the one act for which I take some credit to myself, though the credit rightly belongs to some excellent ancestors of mine who left me a certain sum of money—shall we say five hundred pounds a year?—so that it was not necessary for me to depend solely on charm for my living. I turned upon her and caught her by the throat. I did my best to kill her. My excuse, if I were to be had up in a court of law, would be that I acted in self-defence. Had I not killed her she would have killed me. She would have plucked the heart out of my writing. For, as I found, directly I put pen to paper, you cannot review even a novel without having a mind of your own, without expressing what you think to be the truth about human relations, morality, sex. And all these questions, according to the Angel of the House, cannot be dealt with freely and openly by women; they must charm, they must conciliate, they must—to put it bluntly—tell lies if they are to succeed. Thus, whenever I felt the shadow of her wing or the radiance of her halo upon my page, I took up the inkpot and flung it at her. She died hard. Her fictitious nature was of great assistance to her. It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality. She was always creeping back when I thought I had despatched her. Though I flatter myself that I killed her in the end, the struggle was severe; it took much time that had better have been spent upon learning Greek grammar; or in roaming the world in search of adventures. But it was a real experience; it was an experience that was bound to befall all women writers at that time. Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer.

But to continue my story. The Angel was dead; what then remained? You may say that what remained was a simple and common object—a young woman in a bedroom with an inkpot. In other words, now that she had rid herself of falsehood, that young woman had only to be herself. Ah, but what is “herself”? I mean, what is a woman? I assure you, I do not know. I do not believe that you know. I do not believe that anybody can know until she has expressed herself in all the arts and professions open to human skill. That indeed is one of the reasons why I have come here—out of respect for you, who are in process of showing us by your experiments what a woman is, who are in process of providing us, by your failures and successes, with that extremely important piece of information.

But to continue the story of my professional experiences. I made one pound ten and six by my first review; and I bought a Persian cat with the proceeds. Then I grew ambitious. A Persian cat is all very well, I said; but a Persian cat is not enough. I must have a motor car. And it was thus that I became a novelist—for it is a very strange thing that people will give you a motor car if you will tell them a story. It is a still stranger thing that there is nothing so delightful in the world as telling stories. It is far pleasanter than writing reviews of famous novels. And yet, if I am to obey your secretary and tell you my professional experiences as a novelist, I must tell you about a very strange experience that befell me as a novelist. And to understand it you must try first to imagine a novelist’s state of mind. I hope I am not giving away professional secrets if I say that a novelist’s chief desire is to be as unconscious as possible. He has to induce in himself a state of perpetual lethargy. He wants life to proceed with the utmost quiet and regularity. He wants to see the same faces, to read the same books, to do the same things day after day, month after month, while he is writing, so that nothing may break the illusion in which he is living—so that nothing may disturb or disquiet the mysterious nosings about, feelings round, darts, dashes and sudden discoveries of that very shy and illusive spirit, the imagination. I suspect that this state is the same both for men and women. Be that as it may, I want you to imagine me writing a novel in a state of trance. I want you to figure to yourselves a girl sitting with a pen in her hand, which for minutes, and indeed for hours, she never dips into the inkpot. The image that comes to my mind when I think of this girl is the image of a fisherman lying sunk in dreams on the verge of a deep lake with a rod held out over the water. She was letting her imagination sweep unchecked round every rock and cranny of the world that lies submerged in the depths of our unconscious being. Now came the experience, the experience that I believe to be far commoner with women writers than with men. The line raced through the girl’s fingers. Her imagination had rushed away. It had sought the pools, the depths, the dark places where the largest fish slumber. And then there was a smash. There was an explosion. There was foam and confusion. The imagination had dashed itself against something hard. The girl was roused from her dream. She was indeed in a state of the most acute and difficult distress. To speak without figure she had thought of something, something about the body, about the passions which it was unfitting for her as a woman to say. Men, her reason told her, would be shocked. The consciousness of what men will say of a woman who speaks the truth about her passions had roused her from her artist’s state of unconsciousness. She could write no more. The trance was over. Her imagination could work no longer. This I believe to be a very common experience with women writers—they are impeded by the extreme conventionality of the other sex. For though men sensibly allow themselves great freedom in these respects, I doubt that they realize or can control the extreme severity with which they condemn such freedom in women.

These then were two very genuine experiences of my own. These were two of the adventures of my professional life. The first—killing the Angel in the House—I think I solved. She died. But the second, telling the truth about my own experiences as a body, I do not think I solved. I doubt that any woman has solved it yet. The obstacles against her are still immensely powerful—and yet they are very difficult to define. Outwardly, what is simpler than to write books? Outwardly, what obstacles are there for a woman rather than for a man? Inwardly, I think, the case is very different; she has still many ghosts to fight, many prejudices to overcome. Indeed it will be a long time still, I think, before a woman can sit down to write a book without finding a phantom to be slain, a rock to be dashed against. And if this is so in literature, the freest of all professions for women, how is it in the new professions which you are now for the first time entering?

Those are the questions that I should like, had I time, to ask you. And indeed, if I have laid stress upon these professional experiences of mine, it is because I believe that they are, though in different forms, yours also. Even when the path is nominally open—when there is nothing to prevent a woman from being a doctor, a lawyer, a civil servant—there are many phantoms and obstacles, as I believe, looming in her way. To discuss and define them is I think of great value and importance; for thus only can the labour be shared, the difficulties be solved. But besides this, it is necessary also to discuss the ends and the aims for which we are fighting, for which we are doing battle with these formidable obstacles. Those aims cannot be taken for granted; they must be perpetually questioned and examined. The whole position, as I see it—here in this hall surrounded by women practising for the first time in history I know not how many different professions—is one of extraordinary interest and importance. You have won rooms of your own in the house hitherto exclusively owned by men. You are able, though not without great labour and effort, to pay the rent. You are earning your five hundred pounds a year. But this freedom is only a beginning; the room is your own, but it is still bare. It has to be furnished; it has to be decorated; it has to be shared. How are you going to furnish it, how are you going to decorate it? With whom are you going to share it, and upon what terms? These, I think are questions of the utmost importance and interest. For the first time in history you are able to ask them; for the first time you are able to decide for yourselves what the answers should be. Willingly would I stay and discuss those questions and answers—but not to-night. My time is up; and I must cease.

[written in 1933; read to The Women’s Service League]

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Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid.

The Germans were over this house last night and the night before that. Here they are again. It is a queer experience, lying in the dark and listening to the zoom of a hornet which may at any moment sting you to death. It is a sound that interrupts cool and consecutive thinking about peace. Yet it is a sound—far more than prayers and anthems—that should compel one to think about peace. Unless we can think peace into existence we—not this one body in this one bed but millions of bodies yet to be born—will lie in the same darkness and hear the same death rattle overhead. Let us think what we can do to create the only efficient air-raid shelter while the guns on the hill go pop pop pop and the searchlights finger the clouds and now and then, sometimes close at hand, sometimes far away, a bomb drops.

Up there in the sky young Englishmen and young German men are fighting each other. The defenders are men, the attackers are men. Arms are not given to Englishwomen either to fight the enemy or to defend herself. She must lie weaponless to-night. Yet if she believes that the fight going on up in the sky is a fight by the English to protect freedom, by the Germans to destroy freedom, she must fight, so far as she can, on the side of the English. How far can she fight for freedom without firearms? By making arms, or clothes or food. But there is another way of fighting for freedom without arms; we can fight with the mind. We can make ideas that will help the young Englishman who is fighting up in the sky to defeat the enemy.

But to make ideas effective, we must be able to fire them off. We must put them into action. And the hornet in the sky rouses another hornet in the mind. There was one zooming in The Times this morning—a woman’s voice saying, “Women have not a word to say in politics.” There is no woman in the Cabinet; nor in any responsible post. All the idea makers who are in a position to make ideas effective are men. That is a thought that damps thinking, and encourages irresponsibility. Why not bury the head in the pillow, plug the ears, and cease this futile activity of idea-making? Because there are other tables besides officer tables and conference tables. Are we not leaving the young Englishman without a weapon that might be of value to him if we give up private thinking, tea-table thinking, because it seems useless? Are we not stressing our disability because our ability exposes us perhaps to abuse, perhaps to contempt? “I will not cease from mental fight,” Blake wrote. Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it.

That current flows fast and furious. It issues in a spate of words from the loudspeakers and the politicians. Every day they tell us that we are a free people, fighting to defend freedom. That is the current that has whirled the young airman up into the sky and keeps him circling there among the clouds. Down here, with a roof to cover us and a gas mask handy, it is our business to puncture gas bags and discover seeds of truth. It is not true that we are free. We are both prisoners to-night—he boxed up in his machine with a gun handy; we lying in the dark with a gas mask handy. If we were free we should be out in the open, dancing, at the play, or sitting at the window talking together. What is it that prevents us? “Hitler!” the loudspeakers cry with one voice. Who is Hitler? What is he? Aggressiveness, tyranny, the insane love of power made manifest, they reply. Destroy that, and you will be free.

The drone of the planes is now like the sawing of a branch overhead. Round and round it goes, sawing and sawing at a branch directly above the house. Another sound begins sawing its way in the brain. “Women of ability”—it was Lady Astor speaking in The Times this morning—“are held down because of a subconscious Hitlerism in the hearts of men.” Certainly we are held down. We are equally prisoners to-night—the Englishmen in their planes, the Englishwomen in their beds. But if he stops to think he may be killed; and we too. So let us think for him. Let us try to drag up into consciousness the subconscious Hitlerism that holds us down. It is the desire for aggression; the desire to dominate and enslave. Even in the darkness we can see that made visible. We can see shop windows blazing; and women gazing; painted women; dressed-up women; women with crimson lips and crimson fingernails. They are slaves who are trying to enslave. If we could free ourselves from slavery we should free men from tyranny. Hitlers are bred by slaves.

A bomb drops. All the windows rattle. The anti-aircraft guns are getting active. Up there on the hill under a net tagged with strips of green and brown stuff to imitate the hues of autumn leaves guns are concealed. Now they all fire at once. On the nine o’clock radio we shall be told “Forty-four enemy planes were shot down during the night, ten of them by anti-aircraft fire.” And one of the terms of peace, the loudspeakers say, is to be disarmament. There are to be no more guns, no army, no navy, no air force in the future. No more young men will be trained to fight with arms. That rouses another mind-hornet in the chambers of the brain—another quotation. “To fight against a real enemy, to earn undying honour and glory by shooting total strangers, and to come home with my breast covered with medals and decorations, that was the summit of my hope…. It was for this that my whole life so far had been dedicated, my education, training, everything….”

Those were the words of a young Englishman who fought in the last war. In the face of them, do the current thinkers honestly believe that by writing “Disarmament” on a sheet of paper at a conference table they will have done all that is needful? Othello’s occupation will be gone; but he will remain Othello. The young airman up in the sky is driven not only by the voices of loudspeakers; he is driven by voices in himself—ancient instincts, instincts fostered and cherished by education and tradition. Is he to be blamed for those instincts? Could we switch off the maternal instinct at the command of a table full of politicians? Suppose that imperative among the peace terms was: “Child-bearing is to be restricted to a very small class of specially selected women,” would we submit? Should we not say, “The maternal instinct is a woman’s glory. It was for this that my whole life has been dedicated, my education, training, everything….” But if it were necessary, for the sake of humanity, for the peace of the world, that childbearing should be restricted, the maternal instinct subdued, women would attempt it. Men would help them. They would honour them for their refusal to bear children. They would give them other openings for their creative power. That too must make part of our fight for freedom. We must help the young Englishmen to root out from themselves the love of medals and decorations. We must create more honourable activities for those who try to conquer in themselves their fighting instinct, their subconscious Hitlerism. We must compensate the man for the loss of his gun.

The sound of sawing overhead has increased. All the searchlights are erect. They point at a spot exactly above this roof. At any moment a bomb may fall on this very room. One, two, three, four, five, six … the seconds pass. The bomb did not fall. But during those seconds of suspense all thinking stopped. All feeling, save one dull dread, ceased. A nail fixed the whole being to one hard board. The emotion of fear and of hate is therefore sterile, unfertile. Directly that fear passes, the mind reaches out and instinctively revives itself by trying to create. Since the room is dark it can create only from memory. It reaches out to the memory of other Augusts—in Bayreuth, listening to Wagner; in Rome, walking over the Campagna; in London. Friends’ voices come back. Scraps of poetry return. Each of those thoughts, even in memory, was far more positive, reviving, healing and creative than the dull dread made of fear and hate. Therefore if we are to compensate the young man for the loss of his glory and of his gun, we must give him access to the creative feelings. We must make happiness. We must free him from the machine. We must bring him out of his prison into the open air. But what is the use of freeing the young Englishman if the young German and the young Italian remain slaves?

The searchlights, wavering across the flat, have picked up the plane now. From this window one can see a little silver insect turning and twisting in the light. The guns go pop pop pop. Then they cease. Probably the raider was brought down behind the hill. One of the pilots landed safe in a field near here the other day. He said to his captors, speaking fairly good English, “How glad I am that the fight is over!” Then an Englishman gave him a cigarette, and an Englishwoman made him a cup of tea. That would seem to show that if you can free the man from the machine, the seed does not fall upon altogether stony ground. The seed may be fertile.

At last all the guns have stopped firing. All the searchlights have been extinguished. The natural darkness of a summer’s night returns. The innocent sounds of the country are heard again. An apple thuds to the ground. An owl hoots, winging its way from tree to tree. And some half-forgotten words of an old English writer come to mind: “The huntsmen are up in America….” Let us send these fragmentary notes to the huntsmen who are up in America, to the men and women whose sleep has not yet been broken by machine-gun fire, in the belief that they will rethink them generously and charitably, perhaps shape them into something serviceable. And now, in the shadowed half of the world, to sleep.

[written for an American symposium on current matters concerning women; New Republic, New York, Oct 21, 1940]

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A HAUNTED
HOUSE,
and other short stories

by
Virginia Woolf

published
January 1944
by
The Hogarth Press

a haunted house

Foreword by Leonard Woolf.

The New Dress.

The Shooting Party.

Lappin and Lapinova.

Solid Objects.

The Lady in the Looking-Glass.

The Duchess and the Jeweller.

Moments of Being.

The Man Who Loved His Kind.

The Searchlight.

The Legacy.

Together and Apart.

A Summing Up.

“A Haunted House”, “Monday or Tuesday”, “An Unwritten Novel”, “The String Quartet”, “Kew Gardens” and “The Mark on the Wall”: see Monday or Tuesday.

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[The text follows the 1943 Hogarth Press edition.]

Foreword by Leonard Woolf.

Monday or Tuesday, the only book of short stories by Virginia Woolf which appeared in her lifetime, was published 22 years ago, in 1921. It has been out of print for years. All through her life, Virginia Woolf used at intervals to write short stories. It was her custom, whenever an idea for one occurred to her, to sketch it out in a very rough form and then to put it away in a drawer. Later, if an editor asked her for a short story, and she felt in the mood to write one (which was not frequent), she would take a sketch out of her drawer and rewrite it, sometimes a great many times. Or if she felt, as she often did, while writing a novel that she required to rest her mind by working at something else for a time, she would either write a critical essay or work upon one of her sketches for short stories.

For some time before her death we had often discussed the possibility of her republishing Monday or Tuesday, or publishing a new volume of collected short stories. Finally, in 1940, she decided that she would get together a new volume of such stories and include in it most of the stories which had appeared originally in Monday or Tuesday, as well as some published subsequently in magazines and some unpublished. Our idea was that she should produce a volume of critical essays in 1941 and the volume of stories in 1942.

In the present volume I have tried to carry out her intention. I have included in it six out of the eight stories or sketches which originally appeared in Monday or Tuesday. The two omitted by me are “A Society,” and “Blue and Green”; I know that she had decided not to include the first and I am practically certain that she would not have included the second. I have then printed six stories which appeared in magazines between 1922 and 1941; they are: “The New Dress,” “The Shooting Party,” “Lappin and Lapinova,” “Solid Objects,” “The Lady in the Looking-Glass,” and “The Duchess and the Jeweller.” The magazines in which they appeared were: The Forum, Harper’s Bazaar, The Athenæum, Harper’s Monthly Magazine. Finally I have included six unpublished stories. (It is possible that one of these, “Moments of Being,” was published. My own recollection was that it had been, but there is no record of its publication, and I have printed it from a typescript.) It is with some hesitation that I have included them. None of them, except “Moments of Being” and “The Searchlight,” are finally revised by her, and she would certainly have done a great deal of work on them before she published them. At least four of them are only just in the stage beyond that of her first sketch.

[]

The New Dress.

Mabel had her first serious suspicion that something was wrong as she took her cloak off and Mrs. Barnet, while handing her the mirror and touching the brushes and thus drawing her attention, perhaps rather markedly, to all the appliances for tidying and improving hair, complexion, clothes, which existed on the dressing table, confirmed the suspicion—that it was not right, not quite right, which growing stronger as she went upstairs and springing at her, with conviction as she greeted Clarissa Dalloway, she went straight to the far end of the room, to a shaded corner where a looking-glass hung and looked. No! It was not right. And at once the misery which she always tried to hide, the profound dissatisfaction—the sense she had had, ever since she was a child, of being inferior to other people—set upon her, relentlessly, remorselessly, with an intensity which she could not beat off, as she would when she woke at night at home, by reading Borrow or Scott; for oh these men, oh these women, all were thinking—“What’s Mabel wearing? What a fright she looks! What a hideous new dress!”—their eyelids flickering as they came up and then their lids shutting rather tight. It was her own appalling inadequacy; her cowardice; her mean, water-sprinkled blood that depressed her. And at once the whole of the room where, for ever so many hours, she had planned with the little dressmaker how it was to go, seemed sordid, repulsive; and her own drawing-room so shabby, and herself, going out, puffed up with vanity as she touched the letters on the hall table and said: “How dull!” to show off—all this now seemed unutterably silly, paltry, and provincial. All this had been absolutely destroyed, shown up, exploded, the moment she came into Mrs. Dalloway’s drawing-room.

What she had thought that evening when, sitting over the teacups, Mrs. Dalloway’s invitation came, was that, of course, she could not be fashionable. It was absurd to pretend it even—fashion meant cut, meant style, meant thirty guineas at least—but why not be original? Why not be herself, anyhow? And, getting up, she had taken that old fashion book of her mother’s, a Paris fashion book of the time of the Empire, and had thought how much prettier, more dignified, and more womanly they were then, and so set herself—oh, it was foolish—trying to be like them, pluming herself in fact, upon being modest and old-fashioned and very charming, giving herself up, no doubt about it, to an orgy of self-love, which deserved to be chastised, and so rigged herself out like this.

But she dared not look in the glass. She could not face the whole horror—the pale yellow, idiotically old-fashioned silk dress with its long skirt and its high sleeves and its waist and all the things that looked so charming in the fashion book, but not on her, not among all these ordinary people. She felt like a dressmaker’s dummy standing there, for young people to stick pins into.

“But, my dear, it’s perfectly charming!” Rose Shaw said, looking her up and down with that little satirical pucker of the lips which she expected—Rose herself being dressed in the height of the fashion, precisely like everybody else, always.

We are all like flies trying to crawl over the edge of the saucer, Mabel thought, and repeated the phrase as if she were crossing herself, as if she were trying to find some spell to annul this pain, to make this agony endurable. Tags of Shakespeare, lines from books she had read ages ago, suddenly came to her when she was in agony, and she repeated them over and over again. “Flies trying to crawl,” she repeated. If she could say that over often enough and make herself see the flies, she would become numb, chill, frozen, dumb. Now she could see flies crawling slowly out of a saucer of milk with their wings stuck together; and she strained and strained (standing in front of the looking-glass, listening to Rose Shaw) to make herself see Rose Shaw and all the other people there as flies, trying to hoist themselves out of something, or into something, meagre, insignificant, toiling flies. But she could not see them like that, not other people. She saw herself like that—she was a fly, but the others were dragonflies, butterflies, beautiful insects, dancing, fluttering, skimming, while she alone dragged herself up out of the saucer. (Envy and spite, the most detestable of the vices, were her chief faults.)

“I feel like some dowdy, decrepit, horribly dingy old fly,” she said, making Robert Haydon stop just to hear her say that, just to reassure herself by furbishing up a poor weak-kneed phrase and so showing how detached she was, how witty, that she did not feel in the least out of anything. And, of course, Robert Haydon answered something quite polite, quite insincere, which she saw through instantly, and said to herself, directly he went (again from some book), “Lies, lies, lies!” For a party makes things either much more real, or much less real, she thought; she saw in a flash to the bottom of Robert Haydon’s heart; she saw through everything. She saw the truth. This was true, this drawing-room, this self, and the other false. Miss Milan’s little workroom was really terribly hot, stuffy, sordid. It smelt of clothes and cabbage cooking; and yet, when Miss Milan put the glass in her hand, and she looked at herself with the dress on, finished, an extraordinary bliss shot through her heart. Suffused with light, she sprang into existence. Rid of cares and wrinkles, what she had dreamed of herself was there—a beautiful woman. Just for a second (she had not dared look longer, Miss Milan wanted to know about the length of the skirt), there looked at her, framed in the scrolloping mahogany, a grey-white, mysteriously smiling, charming girl, the core of herself, the soul of herself; and it was not vanity only, not only self-love that made her think it good, tender, and true. Miss Milan said that the skirt could not well be longer; if anything the skirt, said Miss Milan, puckering her forehead, considering with all her wits about her, must be shorter; and she felt, suddenly, honestly, full of love for Miss Milan, much, much fonder of Miss Milan than of any one in the whole world, and could have cried for pity that she should be crawling on the floor with her mouth full of pins, and her face red and her eyes bulging—that one human being should be doing this for another, and she saw them all as human beings merely, and herself going off to her party, and Miss Milan pulling the cover over the canary’s cage, or letting him pick a hemp-seed from between her lips, and the thought of it, of this side of human nature and its patience and its endurance and its being content with such miserable, scanty, sordid, little pleasures filled her eyes with tears.

And now the whole thing had vanished. The dress, the room, the love, the pity, the scrolloping looking-glass, and the canary’s cage—all had vanished, and here she was in a corner of Mrs. Dalloway’s drawing-room, suffering tortures, woken wide awake to reality.

But it was all so paltry, weak-blooded, and petty-minded to care so much at her age with two children, to be still so utterly dependent on people’s opinions and not have principles or convictions, not to be able to say as other people did, “There’s Shakespeare! There’s death! We’re all weevils in a captain’s biscuit”—or whatever it was that people did say.

She faced herself straight in the glass; she pecked at her left shoulder; she issued out into the room, as if spears were thrown at her yellow dress from all sides. But instead of looking fierce or tragic, as Rose Shaw would have done—Rose would have looked like Boadicea—she looked foolish and self-conscious, and simpered like a schoolgirl and slouched across the room, positively slinking, as if she were a beaten mongrel, and looked at a picture, an engraving. As if one went to a party to look at a picture! Everybody knew why she did it—it was from shame, from humiliation.

“Now the fly’s in the saucer,” she said to herself, “right in the middle, and can’t get out, and the milk,” she thought, rigidly staring at the picture, “is sticking its wings together.”

“It’s so old-fashioned,” she said to Charles Burt, making him stop (which by itself he hated) on his way to talk to some one else.

She meant, or she tried to make herself think that she meant, that it was the picture and not her dress, that was old-fashioned. And one word of praise, one word of affection from Charles would have made all the difference to her at the moment. If he had only said, “Mabel, you’re looking charming to-night!” it would have changed her life. But then she ought to have been truthful and direct. Charles said nothing of the kind, of course. He was malice itself. He always saw through one, especially if one were feeling particularly mean, paltry, or feeble-minded.

“Mabel’s got a new dress!” he said, and the poor fly was absolutely shoved into the middle of the saucer. Really, he would like her to drown, she believed. He had no heart, no fundamental kindness, only a veneer of friendliness. Miss Milan was much more real, much kinder. If only one could feel that and stick to it, always. “Why,” she asked herself—replying to Charles much too pertly, letting him see that she was out of temper, or “ruffled” as he called it (“Rather ruffled?” he said and went on to laugh at her with some woman over there)—“Why,” she asked herself, “can’t I feel one thing always, feel quite sure that Miss Milan is right, and Charles wrong and stick to it, feel sure about the canary and pity and love and not be whipped all round in a second by coming into a room full of people?” It was her odious, weak, vacillating character again, always giving at the critical moment and not being seriously interested in conchology, etymology, botany, archeology, cutting up potatoes and watching them fructify like Mary Dennis, like Violet Searle.

Then Mrs. Holman, seeing her standing there, bore down upon her. Of course a thing like a dress was beneath Mrs. Holman’s notice, with her family always tumbling downstairs or having the scarlet fever. Could Mabel tell her if Elmthorpe was ever let for August and September? Oh, it was a conversation that bored her unutterably!—it made her furious to be treated like a house agent or a messenger boy, to be made use of. Not to have value, that was it, she thought, trying to grasp something hard, something real, while she tried to answer sensibly about the bathroom and the south aspect and the hot water to the top of the house; and all the time she could see little bits of her yellow dress in the round looking-glass which made them all the size of boot-buttons or tadpoles; and it was amazing to think how much humiliation and agony and self-loathing and effort and passionate ups and downs of feeling were contained in a thing the size of a threepenny bit. And what was still odder, this thing, this Mabel Waring, was separate, quite disconnected; and though Mrs. Holman (the black button) was leaning forward and telling her how her eldest boy had strained his heart running, she could see her, too, quite detached in the looking-glass, and it was impossible that the black dot, leaning forward, gesticulating, should make the yellow dot, sitting solitary, self-centred, feel what the black dot was feeling, yet they pretended.

“So impossible to keep boys quiet”—that was the kind of thing one said.

And Mrs. Holman, who could never get enough sympathy and snatched what little there was greedily, as if it were her right (but she deserved much more for there was her little girl who had come down this morning with a swollen knee-joint), took this miserable offering and looked at it suspiciously, grudgingly, as if it were a halfpenny when it ought to have been a pound and put it away in her purse, must put up with it, mean and miserly though it was, times being hard, so very hard; and on she went, creaking, injured Mrs. Holman, about the girl with the swollen joints. Ah, it was tragic, this greed, this clamour of human beings, like a row of cormorants, barking and flapping their wings for sympathy—it was tragic, could one have felt it and not merely pretended to feel it!

But in her yellow dress to-night she could not wring out one drop more; she wanted it all, all for herself. She knew (she kept on looking into the glass, dipping into that dreadfully showing-up blue pool) that she was condemned, despised, left like this in a backwater, because of her being like this a feeble, vacillating creature; and it seemed to her that the yellow dress was a penance which she had deserved, and if she had been dressed like Rose Shaw, in lovely, clinging green with a ruffle of swansdown, she would have deserved that; and she thought that there was no escape for her—none whatever. But it was not her fault altogether, after all. It was being one of a family of ten; never having money enough, always skimping and paring; and her mother carrying great cans, and the linoleum worn on the stair edges, and one sordid little domestic tragedy after another—nothing catastrophic, the sheep farm failing, but not utterly; her eldest brother marrying beneath him but not very much—there was no romance, nothing extreme about them all. They petered out respectably in seaside resorts; every watering-place had one of her aunts even now asleep in some lodging with the front windows not quite facing the sea. That was so like them—they had to squint at things always. And she had done the same—she was just like her aunts. For all her dreams of living in India, married to some hero like Sir Henry Lawrence, some empire builder (still the sight of a native in a turban filled her with romance), she had failed utterly. She had married Hubert, with his safe, permanent underling’s job in the Law Courts, and they managed tolerably in a smallish house, without proper maids, and hash when she was alone or just bread and butter, but now and then—Mrs. Holman was off, thinking her the most dried-up, unsympathetic twig she had ever met, absurdly dressed, too, and would tell every one about Mabel’s fantastic appearance—now and then, thought Mabel Waring, left alone on the blue sofa, punching the cushion in order to look occupied, for she would not join Charles Burt and Rose Shaw, chattering like magpies and perhaps laughing at her by the fireplace—now and then, there did come to her delicious moments, reading the other night in bed, for instance, or down by the sea on the sand in the sun, at Easter—let her recall it—a great tuft of pale sand-grass standing all twisted like a shock of spears against the sky, which was blue like a smooth china egg, so firm, so hard, and then the melody of the waves—“Hush, hush,” they said, and the children’s shouts paddling—yes, it was a divine moment, and there she lay, she felt, in the hand of the Goddess who was the world; rather a hard-hearted, but very beautiful Goddess, a little lamb laid on the altar (one did think these silly things, and it didn’t matter so long as one never said them). And also with Hubert sometimes she had quite unexpectedly—carving the mutton for Sunday lunch, for no reason, opening a letter, coming into a room—divine moments, when she said to herself (for she would never say this to anybody else), “This is it. This has happened. This is it!” And the other way about it was equally surprising—that is, when everything was arranged—music, weather, holidays, every reason for happiness was there—then nothing happened at all. One wasn’t happy. It was flat, just flat, that was all.

Her wretched self again, no doubt! She had always been a fretful, weak, unsatisfactory mother, a wobbly wife, lolling about in a kind of twilight existence with nothing very clear or very bold, or more one thing than another, like all her brothers and sisters, except perhaps Herbert—they were all the same poor water-veined creatures who did nothing. Then in the midst of this creeping, crawling life, suddenly she was on the crest of a wave. That wretched fly—where had she read the story that kept coming into her mind about the fly and the saucer?—struggled out. Yes, she had those moments. But now that she was forty, they might come more and more seldom. By degrees she would cease to struggle any more. But that was deplorable! That was not to be endured! That made her feel ashamed of herself!

She would go to the London Library to-morrow. She would find some wonderful, helpful, astonishing book, quite by chance, a book by a clergyman, by an American no one had ever heard of; or she would walk down the Strand and drop, accidentally, into a hall where a miner was telling about the life in the pit, and suddenly she would become a new person. She would be absolutely transformed. She would wear a uniform; she would be called Sister Somebody; she would never give a thought to clothes again. And for ever after she would be perfectly clear about Charles Burt and Miss Milan and this room and that room; and it would be always, day after day, as if she were lying in the sun or carving the mutton. It would be it!

So she got up from the blue sofa, and the yellow button in the looking-glass got up too, and she waved her hand to Charles and Rose to show them she did not depend on them one scrap, and the yellow button moved out of the looking-glass, and all the spears were gathered into her breast as she walked towards Mrs. Dalloway and said, “Good night.”

“But it’s too early to go,” said Mrs. Dalloway, who was always so charming.

“I’m afraid I must,” said Mabel Waring. “But,” she added in her weak, wobbly voice which only sounded ridiculous when she tried to strengthen it, “I have enjoyed myself enormously.”

“I have enjoyed myself,” she said to Mr. Dalloway, whom she met on the stairs.

“Lies, lies, lies!” she said to herself, going downstairs, and “Right in the saucer!” she said to herself as she thanked Mrs. Barnet for helping her and wrapped herself, round and round and round, in the Chinese cloak she had worn these twenty years.

[written ca. spring 1925, published in Forum, May 1927]

[]

The Shooting Party.

She got in and put her suit case in the rack, and the brace of pheasants on top of it. Then she sat down in the corner. The train was rattling through the midlands, and the fog, which came in when she opened the door, seemed to enlarge the carriage and set the four travellers apart. Obviously M. M.—those were the initials on the suit case—had been staying the week-end with a shooting party. Obviously, for she was telling over the story now, lying back in her corner. She did not shut her eyes. But clearly she did not see the man opposite, nor the coloured photograph of York Minster. She must have heard, too, what they had been saying. For as she gazed, her lips moved; now and then she smiled. And she was handsome; a cabbage rose; a russet apple; tawny; but scarred on the jaw—the scar lengthened when she smiled. Since she was telling over the story she must have been a guest there, and yet, dressed as she was out of fashion as women dressed, years ago, in pictures, in sporting newspapers, she did not seem exactly a guest, nor yet a maid. Had she had a basket with her she would have been the woman who breeds fox terriers; the owner of the Siamese cat; some one connected with hounds and horses. But she had only a suit case and the pheasants. Somehow, therefore, she must have wormed her way into the room that she was seeing through the stuffing of the carriage, and the man’s bald head, and the picture of York Minster. And she must have listened to what they were saying, for now, like somebody imitating the noise that someone else makes, she made a little click at the back of her throat. “Chk.” Then she smiled.

“Chk,” said Miss Antonia, pinching her glasses on her nose. The damp leaves fell across the long windows of the gallery; one or two stuck, fish shaped, and lay like inlaid brown wood upon the window panes. Then the trees in the Park shivered, and the leaves, flaunting down, seemed to make the shiver visible—the damp brown shiver.

“Chk.” Miss Antonia sniffed again, and pecked at the flimsy white stuff that she held in her hands, as a hen pecks nervously rapidly at a piece of white bread.

The wind sighed. The room was draughty. The doors did not fit, nor the windows. Now and then a ripple, like a reptile, ran under the carpet. On the carpet lay panels of green and yellow, where the sun rested, and then the sun moved and pointed a finger as if in mockery at a hole in the carpet and stopped. And then on it went, the sun’s feeble but impartial finger, and lay upon the coat of arms over the fireplace—gently illumined—the shield, the pendant grapes, the mermaid, and the spears. Miss Antonia looked up as the light strengthened. Vast lands, so they said, the old people had owned—her forefathers—the Rashleighs. Over there. Up the Amazons. Freebooter. Voyagers. Sacks of emeralds. Nosing round the island. Taking captives. Maidens. There she was, all scales from the tail to the waist. Miss Antonia grinned. Down struck the finger of the sun and her eye went with it. Now it rested on a silver frame; on a photograph; on an egg-shaped baldish head; on a lip that stuck out under the moustache; and the name “Edward” written with a flourish beneath.

“The King …” Miss Antonia muttered, turning the film of white upon her knee—“had the Blue Room,” she added with a toss of her head as the light faded.

Out in the King’s Ride the pheasants were being driven across the noses of the guns. Up they spurted from the underwood like heavy rockets, reddish purple rockets, and as they rose the guns cracked in order, eagerly, sharply, as if a line of dogs had suddenly barked. Tufts of white smoke held together for a moment; then gently solved themselves, faded, and dispersed.

In the deep cut road beneath the hanger, a cart stood, laid already with soft warm bodies, with limp claws, and still lustrous eyes. The birds seemed alive still, but swooning under their rich damp feathers. They looked relaxed and comfortable, stirring slightly, as if they slept upon a warm bank of soft feathers on the floor of the cart.

Then the Squire, with the hang-dog stained face, in the shabby gaiters, cursed and raised his gun.

Miss Antonia stitched on. Now and then a tongue of flame reached round the grey log that stretched from one bar to another across the grate, ate it greedily, then died out, leaving a white bracelet where the bark had been eaten off. Miss Antonia looked up for a moment, stared wide eyed, instinctively, as a dog stares at a flame. Then the flame sank and she stitched again.

Then, silently, the enormously high door opened. Two lean men came in, and drew a table over the hole in the carpet. They went out; they came in. They laid a cloth upon the table. They went out; they came in. They brought a green baize basket of knives and forks; and glasses; and sugar casters; and salt cellars; and bread; and a silver vase with three chrysanthemums in it. And the table was laid. Miss Antonia stitched on.

Again the door opened, pushed feebly this time. A little dog trotted in, a spaniel, nosing nimbly; it paused. The door stood open. And then, leaning on her stick, heavily, old Miss Rashleigh entered. A white shawl, diamond fastened, clouded her baldness. She hobbled; crossed the room; hunched herself in the high-backed chair by the fireside. Miss Antonia went on stitching.

“Shooting,” she said at last.

Old Miss Rashleigh nodded. She gripped her stick. They sat waiting.

The shooters had moved now from the King’s Ride to the Home Woods. They stood in the purple ploughed field outside. Now and then a twig snapped; leaves came whirling. But above the mist and the smoke was an island of blue—faint blue, pure blue—alone in the sky. And in the innocent air, as if straying alone like a cherub, a bell from a far hidden steeple frolicked, gambolled, then faded. Then again up shot the rockets, the reddish purple pheasants. Up and up they went. Again the guns barked; the smoke balls formed; loosened, dispersed. And the busy little dogs ran nosing nimbly over the fields; and the warm damp bodies, still languid and soft, as if in a swoon, were bunched together by the men in gaiters and flung into the cart.

“There!” grunted Milly Masters, the house-keeper, throwing down her glasses. She was stitching, too, in the small dark room that overlooked the stable yard. The jersey, the rough woollen jersey, for her son, the boy who cleaned the Church, was finished. “The end ’o that!” she muttered. Then she heard the cart. Wheels ground on the cobbles. Up she got. With her hands to her hair, her chestnut coloured hair, she stood in the yard, in the wind.

“Coming!” she laughed, and the scar on her cheek lengthened. She unbolted the door of the game room as Wing, the keeper, drove the cart over the cobbles. The birds were dead now, their claws gripped tight, though they gripped nothing. The leathery eyelids were creased greyly over their eyes. Mrs. Masters the housekeeper, Wing the gamekeeper, took bunches of dead birds by the neck and flung them down on the slate floor of the game larder. The slate floor became smeared and spotted with blood. The pheasants looked smaller now, as if their bodies had shrunk together. Then Wing lifted the tail of the cart and drove in the pins which secured it. The sides of the cart were stuck about with little grey-blue feathers, and the floor was smeared and stained with blood. But it was empty.

“The last of the lot!” Milly Masters grinned as the cart drove off.

“Luncheon is served, ma’am,” said the butler. He pointed at the table; he directed the footman. The dish with the silver cover was placed precisely there where he pointed. They waited, the butler and the footman.

Miss Antonia laid her white film upon the basket; put away her silk; her thimble; stuck her needle through a piece of flannel; and hung her glasses on a hook upon her breast. Then she rose.

“Luncheon!” she barked in old Miss Rashleigh’s ear. One second later old Miss Rashleigh stretched her leg out; gripped her stick; and rose too. Both old women advanced slowly to the table; and were tucked in by the butler and the footman, one at this end, one at that. Off came the silver cover. And there was the pheasant, featherless, gleaming; the thighs tightly pressed to its side; and little mounds of breadcrumbs were heaped at either end.

Miss Antonia drew the carving knife across the pheasant’s breast firmly. She cut two slices and laid them on a plate. Deftly the footman whipped it from her, and old Miss Rashleigh raised her knife. Shots rang out in the wood under the window.

“Coming?” said old Miss Rashleigh, suspending her fork.

The branches flung and flaunted on the trees in the Park.

She took a mouthful of pheasant. Falling leaves flicked the window pane; one or two stuck to the glass.

“The Home Woods, now,” said Miss Antonia. “Hugh’s lost that.” “Shooting.” She drew her knife down the other side of the breast. She added potatoes and gravy, brussel sprouts and bread sauce methodically in a circle round the slices on her plate. The butler and the footman stood watching, like servers at a feast. The old ladies ate quietly; silently; nor did they hurry themselves; methodically they cleaned the bird. Bones only were left on their plates. Then the butler drew the decanter towards Miss Antonia, and paused for a moment with his head bent.

“Give it here, Griffiths,” said Miss Antonia, and took the carcase in her fingers and tossed it to the spaniel beneath the table. The butler and the footman bowed and went out.

“Coming closer,” said Miss Rashleigh, listening. The wind was rising. A brown shudder shook the air; leaves flew too fast to stick. The glass rattled in the windows.

“Birds wild,” Miss Antonia nodded, watching the helter-skelter.

Old Miss Rashleigh filled her glass. As they sipped their eyes became lustrous like half precious stones held to the light. Slate blue were Miss Rashleigh’s; Miss Antonia’s red, like port. And their laces and their flounces seemed to quiver, as if their bodies were warm and languid underneath their feathers as they drank.

“It was a day like this, d’you remember?” said old Miss Rashleigh, fingering her glass. “They brought him home—a bullet through his heart. A bramble, so they said. Tripped. Caught his foot….” She chuckled as she sipped her wine.

“And John …” said Miss Antonia. “The mare, they said, put her foot in a hole. Died in the field. The hunt rode over him. He came home, too, on a shutter….” They sipped again.

“Remember Lily?” said old Miss Rashleigh. “A bad ’un.” She shook her head. “Riding with a scarlet tassel on her cane….”

“Rotten at the heart!” cried Miss Antonia.

“Remember the Colonel’s letter? Your son rode as if he had twenty devils in him—charged at the head of his men. Then one white devil—ah hah!” She sipped again.

“The men of our house,” began Miss Rashleigh. She raised her glass. She held it high, as if she toasted the mermaid carved in plaster on the fireplace. She paused. The guns were barking. Something cracked in the woodwork. Or was it a rat running behind the plaster?

“Always women …” Miss Antonia nodded. “The men of our house. Pink and white Lucy at the Mill—d’you remember?”

“Ellen’s daughter at the Goat and Sickle,” Miss Rashleigh added.

“And the girl at the tailor’s,” Miss Antonia murmured, “where Hugh bought his riding breeches, the little dark shop on the right …”

“… that used to be flooded every winter. Its his boy,” Miss Antonia chuckled, leaning towards her sister, “that cleans the Church.”

There was a crash. A slate had fallen down the chimney. The great log had snapped in two. Flakes of plaster fell from the shield above the fireplace.

“Falling,” old Miss Rashleigh chuckled. “Falling.”

“And who,” said Miss Antonia, looking at the flakes on the carpet, “who’s to pay?”

Crowing like old babies, indifferent, reckless, they laughed; crossed to the fireplace, and sipped the sherry by the wood ashes and the plaster, until each glass held only one drop of wine, reddish purple, at the bottom. And this the old women did not wish to part with, so it seemed; for they fingered their glasses, as they sat side by side by the ashes; but they never raised them to their lips.

“Milly Masters in the still room,” began old Miss Rashleigh. “She’s our brother’s …”

A shot barked beneath the window. It cut the string that held the rain. Down it poured, down, down, down, in straight rods whipping the windows. Light faded from the carpet. Light faded in their eyes, too, as they sat by the white ashes listening. Their eyes became like pebbles, taken from water; grey stones dulled and dried. And their hands gripped their hands like the claws of dead birds gripping nothing. And they shrivelled as if the bodies inside the clothes had shrunk.

Then Miss Antonia raised her glass to the mermaid. It was the last drop; she drank it off. “Coming!” she croaked, and slapped the glass down. A door banged below. Then another. Then another. Feet could be heard trampling, yet shuffling, along the corridor towards the gallery.

“Closer! Closer!” grinned Miss Rashleigh, baring her three yellow teeth.

The immensely high door burst open. In rushed three great hounds and stood panting. Then there entered, slouching, the Squire himself in shabby gaiters. The dogs pressed round him, tossing their heads, snuffling at his pockets. Then they bounded forward. They smelt the meat. The floor of the gallery waved like a wind-lashed forest with the tails and backs of the great questing hounds. They snuffed the table. They pawed the cloth. Then, with a wild neighing whimper, they flung themselves upon the little yellow spaniel who was gnawing the carcass under the table.

“Curse you, curse you!” howled the Squire. But his voice was weak, as if he shouted against a wind. “Curse you, curse you!” he shouted, now cursing his sisters.

Miss Antonia and Miss Rashleigh rose to their feet. The great dogs had seized the spaniel. They worried him, they mauled him with their great yellow teeth. The Squire swung a leather knotted tawse this way and that way, cursing the dogs, cursing his sisters, in the voice that sounded so loud yet so weak. With one lash he curled to the ground the vase of chrysanthemums. Another caught old Miss Rashleigh on the cheek. The old woman staggered backwards. She fell against the mantelpiece. Her stick, striking wildly, struck the shield above the fireplace. She fell with a thud upon the ashes. The shield of the Rashleighs crashed from the wall. Under the mermaid, under the spears, she lay buried.

The wind lashed the panes of glass; shots volleyed in the Park and a tree fell. And then King Edward, in the silver frame, slid, toppled, and fell too.

The grey mist had thickened in the carriage. It hung down like a veil; it seemed to put the four travellers in the corners at a great distance from each other, though in fact they were as close as a third class railway carriage could bring them. The effect was strange. The handsome, if elderly, the well dressed, if rather shabby woman, who had got into the train at some station in the midlands, seemed to have lost her shape. Her body had become all mist. Only her eyes gleamed, changed, lived all by themselves, it seemed; eyes without a body; eyes seeing something invisible. In the misty air they shone out, they moved, so that in the sepulchral atmosphere—the windows were blurred, the lamps haloed with fog—they were like lights dancing, will o’ the wisps that move, people say, over the graves of unquiet sleepers in churchyards. An absurd idea? Mere fancy! Yet after all, since there is nothing that does not leave some residue, and memory is a light that dances in the mind when the reality is buried, why should not the eyes there, gleaming, moving, be the ghost of a family, of an age, of a civilization dancing over the grave?

The train slowed down. Lamps stood up. They were felled. Up they stood again as the train slid into the station. The lights blazed. And the eyes in the corner? They were shut. Perhaps the light was too strong. And of course in the full blaze of the station lamps it was plain—she was quite an ordinary, rather elderly, woman, travelling to London on some ordinary piece of business—something connected with a cat, or a horse, or a dog. She reached for her suit case, rose, and took the pheasants from the rack. But did she, all the same, as she opened the carriage door and stepped out, murmur “Chk., Chk.” as she passed?

[written in 1932, revised 1937, published in Harper’s Bazaar, March 1938]

[]

Lappin and Lapinova.

They were married. The wedding march pealed out. The pigeons fluttered. Small boys in Eton jackets threw rice; a fox terrier sauntered across the path; and Ernest Thorburn led his bride to the car through that small inquisitive crowd of complete strangers which always collects in London to enjoy other people’s happiness or unhappiness. Certainly he looked handsome and she looked shy. More rice was thrown, and the car moved off.

That was on Tuesday. Now it was Saturday. Rosalind had still to get used to the fact that she was Mrs. Ernest Thorburn. Perhaps she never would get used to the fact that she was Mrs. Ernest Anybody, she thought, as she sat in the bow window of the hotel looking over the lake to the mountains, and waited for her husband to come down to breakfast. Ernest was a difficult name to get used to. It was not the name she would have chosen. She would have preferred Timothy, Antony, or Peter. He did not look like Ernest either. The name suggested the Albert Memorial, mahogany sideboards, steel engravings of the Prince Consort with his family—her mother-in-law’s dining-room in Porchester Terrace in short.

But here he was. Thank goodness he did not look like Ernest—no. But what did he look like? She glanced at him sideways. Well, when he was eating toast he looked like a rabbit. Not that anyone else would have seen a likeness to a creature so diminutive and timid in this spruce, muscular young man with the straight nose, the blue eyes, and the very firm mouth. But that made it all the more amusing. His nose twitched very slightly when he ate. So did her pet rabbit’s. She kept watching his nose twitch; and then she had to explain, when he caught her looking at him, why she laughed.

“It’s because you’re like a rabbit, Ernest,” she said. “Like a wild rabbit,” she added, looking at him. “A hunting rabbit; a King Rabbit; a rabbit that makes laws for all the other rabbits.”

Ernest had no objection to being that kind of rabbit, and since it amused her to see him twitch his nose—he had never known that his nose twitched—he twitched it on purpose. And she laughed and laughed; and he laughed too, so that the maiden ladies and the fishing man and the Swiss waiter in his greasy black jacket all guessed right; they were very happy. But how long does such happiness last? they asked themselves; and each answered according to his own circumstances.

At lunch time, seated on a clump of heather beside the lake, “Lettuce, rabbit?” said Rosalind, holding out the lettuce that had been provided to eat with the hard-boiled eggs. “Come and take it out of my hand,” she added, and he stretched out and nibbled the lettuce and twitched his nose.

“Good rabbit, nice rabbit,” she said, patting him, as she used to pat her tame rabbit at home. But that was absurd. He was not a tame rabbit, whatever he was. She turned it into French. “Lapin,” she called him. But whatever he was, he was not a French rabbit. He was simply and solely English—born at Porchester Terrace, educated at Rugby; now a clerk in His Majesty’s Civil Service. So she tried “Bunny” next; but that was worse. “Bunny” was someone plump and soft and comic; he was thin and hard and serious. Still, his nose twitched. “Lappin,” she exclaimed suddenly; and gave a little cry as if she had found the very word she looked for.

“Lappin, Lappin, King Lappin,” she repeated. It seemed to suit him exactly; he was not Ernest, he was King Lappin. Why? She did not know.

When there was nothing new to talk about on their long solitary walks—and it rained, as everyone had warned them that it would rain; or when they were sitting over the fire in the evening, for it was cold, and the maiden ladies had gone and the fishing man, and the waiter only came if you rang the bell for him, she let her fancy play with the story of the Lappin tribe. Under her hands—she was sewing; he was reading—they became very real, very vivid, very amusing. Ernest put down the paper and helped her. There were the black rabbits and the red; there were the enemy rabbits and the friendly. There were the wood in which they lived and the outlying prairies and the swamp. Above all there was King Lappin, who, far from having only the one trick—that he twitched his nose—became as the days passed an animal of the greatest character; Rosalind was always finding new qualities in him. But above all he was a great hunter.

“And what,” said Rosalind, on the last day of the honeymoon, “did the King do to-day?”

In fact they had been climbing all day; and she had worn a blister on her heel; but she did not mean that.

“To-day,” said Ernest, twitching his nose as he bit the end off his cigar, “he chased a hare.” He paused; struck a match, and twitched again.

“A woman hare,” he added.

“A white hare!” Rosalind exclaimed, as if she had been expecting this. “Rather a small hare; silver grey; with big bright eyes?”

“Yes,” said Ernest, looking at her as she had looked at him, “a smallish animal; with eyes popping out of her head, and two little front paws dangling.” It was exactly how she sat, with her sewing dangling in her hands; and her eyes, that were so big and bright, were certainly a little prominent.

“Ah, Lapinova,” Rosalind murmured.

“Is that what she’s called?” said Ernest—“the real Rosalind?” He looked at her. He felt very much in love with her.

“Yes; that’s what she’s called,” said Rosalind. “Lapinova.” And before they went to bed that night it was all settled. He was King Lappin; she was Queen Lapinova. They were the opposite of each other; he was bold and determined; she wary and undependable. He ruled over the busy world of rabbits; her world was a desolate, mysterious place, which she ranged mostly by moonlight. All the same, their territories touched; they were King and Queen.

Thus when they came back from their honeymoon they possessed a private world, inhabited, save for the one white hare, entirely by rabbits. No one guessed that there was such a place, and that of course made it all the more amusing. It made them feel, more even than most young married couples, in league together against the rest of the world. Often they looked slyly at each other when people talked about rabbits and woods and traps and shooting. Or they winked furtively across the table when Aunt Mary said that she could never bear to see a hare in a dish—it looked so like a baby: or when John, Ernest’s sporting brother, told them what price rabbits were fetching that autumn in Wiltshire, skins and all. Sometimes when they wanted a gamekeeper, or a poacher or a Lord of the Manor, they amused themselves by distributing the parts among their friends. Ernest’s mother, Mrs. Reginald Thorburn, for example, fitted the part of the Squire to perfection. But it was all secret—that was the point of it; nobody save themselves knew that such a world existed.

Without that world, how, Rosalind wondered, that winter could she have lived at all? For instance, there was the golden-wedding party, when all the Thorburns assembled at Porchester Terrace to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of that union which had been so blessed—had it not produced Ernest Thorburn? and so fruitful—had it not produced nine other sons and daughters into the bargain, many themselves married and also fruitful? She dreaded that party. But it was inevitable. As she walked upstairs she felt bitterly that she was an only child and an orphan at that; a mere drop among all those Thorburns assembled in the great drawing-room with the shiny satin wallpaper and the lustrous family portraits. The living Thorburns much resembled the painted; save that instead of painted lips they had real lips; out of which came jokes; jokes about schoolrooms, and how they had pulled the chair from under the governess; jokes about frogs and how they had put them between the virgin sheets of maiden ladies. As for herself, she had never even made an apple-pie bed. Holding her present in her hand she advanced toward her mother-in-law sumptuous in yellow satin; and toward her father-in-law decorated with a rich yellow carnation. All round them on tables and chairs there were golden tributes, some nestling in cotton wool; others branching resplendent—candlesticks; cigar boxes; chains; each stamped with the goldsmith’s proof that it was solid gold, hall-marked, authentic. But her present was only a little pinchbeck box pierced with holes; an old sand caster, an eighteenth-century relic, once used to sprinkle sand over wet ink. Rather a senseless present she felt—in an age of blotting paper; and as she proffered it, she saw in front of her the stubby black handwriting in which her mother-in-law when they were engaged had expressed the hope that “My son will make you happy.” No, she was not happy. Not at all happy. She looked at Ernest, straight as a ramrod with a nose like all the noses in the family portraits; a nose that never twitched at all.

Then they went down to dinner. She was half hidden by the great chrysanthemums that curled their red and gold petals into large tight balls. Everything was gold. A gold-edged card with gold initials intertwined recited the list of all the dishes that would be set one after another before them. She dipped her spoon in a plate of clear golden fluid. The raw white fog outside had been turned by the lamps into a golden mesh that blurred the edges of the plates and gave the pineapples a rough golden skin. Only she herself in her white wedding dress peering ahead of her with her prominent eyes seemed insoluble as an icicle.

As the dinner wore on, however, the room grew steamy with heat. Beads of perspiration stood out on the men’s foreheads. She felt that her icicle was being turned to water. She was being melted; dispersed; dissolved into nothingness; and would soon faint. Then through the surge in her head and the din in her ears she heard a woman’s voice exclaim, “But they breed so!”

The Thorburns—yes; they breed so, she echoed; looking at all the round red faces that seemed doubled in the giddiness that overcame her; and magnified in the gold mist that enhaloed them. “They breed so.” Then John bawled:

“Little devils! … Shoot ’em! Jump on ’em with big boots! That’s the only way to deal with ’em … rabbits!”

At that word, that magic word, she revived. Peeping between the chrysanthemums she saw Ernest’s nose twitch. It rippled, it ran with successive twitches. And at that a mysterious catastrophe befell the Thorburns. The golden table became a moor with the gorse in full bloom; the din of voices turned to one peal of lark’s laughter ringing down from the sky. It was a blue sky—clouds passed slowly. And they had all been changed—the Thorburns. She looked at her father-in-law, a furtive little man with dyed moustaches. His foible was collecting things—seals, enamel boxes, trifles from eighteenth-century dressing tables which he hid in the drawers of his study from his wife. Now she saw him as he was—a poacher, stealing off with his coat bulging with pheasants and partridges to drop them stealthily into a three-legged pot in his smoky little cottage. That was her real father-in-law—a poacher. And Celia, the unmarried daughter, who always nosed out other people’s secrets, the little things they wished to hide—she was a white ferret with pink eyes, and a nose clotted with earth from her horrid underground nosings and pokings. Slung round men’s shoulders, in a net, and thrust down a hole—it was a pitiable life—Celia’s; it was none of her fault. So she saw Celia. And then she looked at her mother-in-law—whom they dubbed The Squire. Flushed, coarse, a bully—she was all that, as she stood returning thanks, but now that Rosalind—that is Lapinova—saw her, she saw behind her the decayed family mansion, the plaster peeling off the walls, and heard her, with a sob in her voice, giving thanks to her children (who hated her) for a world that had ceased to exist. There was a sudden silence. They all stood with their glasses raised; they all drank; then it was over.

“Oh, King Lappin!” she cried as they went home together in the fog, “if your nose hadn’t twitched just at that moment, I should have been trapped!”

“But you’re safe,” said King Lappin, pressing her paw.

“Quite safe,” she answered.

And they drove back through the Park, King and Queen of the marsh, of the mist, and of the gorse-scented moor.

Thus time passed; one year; two years of time. And on a winter’s night, which happened by a coincidence to be the anniversary of the golden-wedding party—but Mrs. Reginald Thorburn was dead; the house was to let; and there was only a caretaker in residence—Ernest came home from the office. They had a nice little home; half a house above a saddler’s shop in South Kensington, not far from the tube station. It was cold, with fog in the air, and Rosalind was sitting over the fire, sewing.

“What d’you think happened to me to-day?” she began as soon as he had settled himself down with his legs stretched to the blaze. “I was crossing the stream when——”

“What stream?” Ernest interrupted her.

“The stream at the bottom, where our wood meets the black wood,” she explained.

Ernest looked completely blank for a moment.

“What the deuce are you talking about?” he asked.

“My dear Ernest!” she cried in dismay. “King Lappin,” she added, dangling her little front paws in the firelight. But his nose did not twitch. Her hands—they turned to hands—clutched the stuff she was holding; her eyes popped half out of her head. It took him five minutes at least to change from Ernest Thorburn to King Lappin; and while she waited she felt a load on the back of her neck, as if somebody were about to wring it. At last he changed to King Lappin; his nose twitched; and they spent the evening roaming the woods much as usual.

But she slept badly. In the middle of the night she woke, feeling as if something strange had happened to her. She was stiff and cold. At last she turned on the light and looked at Ernest lying beside her. He was sound asleep. He snored. But even though he snored, his nose remained perfectly still. It looked as if it had never twitched at all. Was it possible that he was really Ernest; and that she was really married to Ernest? A vision of her mother-in-law’s dining-room came before her; and there they sat, she and Ernest, grown old, under the engravings, in front of the sideboard…. It was their golden-wedding day. She could not bear it.

“Lappin, King Lappin!” she whispered, and for a moment his nose seemed to twitch of its own accord. But he still slept. “Wake up, Lappin, wake up!” she cried.

Ernest woke; and seeing her sitting bolt upright beside him he asked:

“What’s the matter?”

“I thought my rabbit was dead!” she whimpered. Ernest was angry.

“Don’t talk such rubbish, Rosalind,” he said. “Lie down and go to sleep.”

He turned over. In another moment he was sound asleep and snoring.

But she could not sleep. She lay curled up on her side of the bed, like a hare in its form. She had turned out the light, but the street lamp lit the ceiling faintly, and the trees outside made a lacy network over it as if there were a shadowy grove on the ceiling in which she wandered, turning, twisting, in and out, round and round, hunting, being hunted, hearing the bay of hounds and horns; flying, escaping … until the maid drew the blinds and brought their early tea.

Next day she could settle to nothing. She seemed to have lost something. She felt as if her body had shrunk; it had grown small, and black and hard. Her joints seemed stiff too, and when she looked in the glass, which she did several times as she wandered about the flat, her eyes seemed to burst out of her head, like currants in a bun. The rooms also seemed to have shrunk. Large pieces of furniture jutted out at odd angles and she found herself knocking against them. At last she put on her hat and went out. She walked along the Cromwell Road; and every room she passed and peered into seemed to be a dining-room where people sat eating under steel engravings, with thick yellow lace curtains, and mahogany sideboards. At last she reached the Natural History Museum; she used to like it when she was a child. But the first thing she saw when she went in was a stuffed hare standing on sham snow with pink glass eyes. Somehow it made her shiver all over. Perhaps it would be better when dusk fell. She went home and sat over the fire, without a light, and tried to imagine that she was out alone on a moor; and there was a stream rushing; and beyond the stream a dark wood. But she could get no further than the stream. At last she squatted down on the bank on the wet grass, and sat crouched in her chair, with her hands dangling empty, and her eyes glazed, like glass eyes, in the firelight. Then there was the crack of a gun…. She started as if she had been shot. It was only Ernest, turning his key in the door. She waited, trembling. He came in and switched on the light. There he stood tall, handsome, rubbing his hands that were red with cold.

“Sitting in the dark?” he said.

“Oh, Ernest, Ernest!” she cried, starting up in her chair.

“Well, what’s up, now?” he asked briskly, warming his hands at the fire.

“It’s Lapinova …” she faltered, glancing wildly at him out of her great startled eyes. “She’s gone, Ernest. I’ve lost her!”

Ernest frowned. He pressed his lips tight together. “Oh, that’s what’s up, is it?” he said, smiling rather grimly at his wife. For ten seconds he stood there, silent; and she waited, feeling hands tightening at the back of her neck.

“Yes,” he said at length. “Poor Lapinova …” He straightened his tie at the looking-glass over the mantelpiece.

“Caught in a trap,” he said, “killed,” and sat down and read the newspaper.

So that was the end of that marriage.

[written autumn/winter 1938, published in Harper’s Bazaar, April 1939]

[]

Solid Objects.

The only thing that moved upon the vast semicircle of the beach was one small black spot. As it came nearer to the ribs and spine of the stranded pilchard boat, it became apparent from a certain tenuity in its blackness that this spot possessed four legs; and moment by moment it became more unmistakable that it was composed of the persons of two young men. Even thus in outline against the sand there was an unmistakable vitality in them; an indescribable vigour in the approach and withdrawal of the bodies, slight though it was, which proclaimed some violent argument issuing from the tiny mouths of the little round heads. This was corroborated on closer view by the repeated lunging of a walking-stick on the right-hand side. “You mean to tell me…. You actually believe …” thus the walking-stick on the right-hand side next the waves seemed to be asserting as it cut long straight stripes upon the sand.

“Politics be damned!” issued clearly from the body on the left-hand side, and, as these words were uttered, the mouths, noses, chins, little moustaches, tweed caps, rough boots, shooting coats, and check stockings of the two speakers became clearer and clearer; the smoke of their pipes went up into the air; nothing was so solid, so living, so hard, red, hirsute and virile as these two bodies for miles and miles of sea and sandhill.

They flung themselves down by the six ribs and spine of the black pilchard boat. You know how the body seems to shake itself free from an argument, and to apologize for a mood of exaltation; flinging itself down and expressing in the looseness of its attitude a readiness to take up with something new—whatever it may be that comes next to hand. So Charles, whose stick had been slashing the beach for half a mile or so, began skimming flat pieces of slate over the water; and John, who had exclaimed “Politics be damned!” began burrowing his fingers down, down, into the sand. As his hand went further and further beyond the wrist, so that he had to hitch his sleeve a little higher, his eyes lost their intensity, or rather the background of thought and experience which gives an inscrutable depth to the eyes of grown people disappeared, leaving only the clear transparent surface, expressing nothing but wonder, which the eyes of young children display. No doubt the act of burrowing in the sand had something to do with it. He remembered that, after digging for a little, the water oozes round your finger-tips; the hole then becomes a moat; a well; a spring; a secret channel to the sea. As he was choosing which of these things to make it, still working his fingers in the water, they curled round something hard—a full drop of solid matter—and gradually dislodged a large irregular lump, and brought it to the surface. When the sand coating was wiped off, a green tint appeared. It was a lump of glass, so thick as to be almost opaque; the smoothing of the sea had completely worn off any edge or shape, so that it was impossible to say whether it had been bottle, tumbler or window-pane; it was nothing but glass; it was almost a precious stone. You had only to enclose it in a rim of gold, or pierce it with a wire, and it became a jewel; part of a necklace, or a dull, green light upon a finger. Perhaps after all it was really a gem; something worn by a dark Princess trailing her finger in the water as she sat in the stern of the boat and listened to the slaves singing as they rowed her across the Bay. Or the oak sides of a sunk Elizabethan treasure-chest had split apart, and, rolled over and over, over and over, its emeralds had come at last to shore. John turned it in his hands; he held it to the light; he held it so that its irregular mass blotted out the body and extended right arm of his friend. The green thinned and thickened slightly as it was held against the sky or against the body. It pleased him; it puzzled him; it was so hard, so concentrated, so definite an object compared with the vague sea and the hazy shore.

Now a sigh disturbed him—profound, final, making him aware that his friend Charles had thrown all the flat stones within reach, or had come to the conclusion that it was not worth while to throw them. They ate their sandwiches side by side. When they had done, and were shaking themselves and rising to their feet, John took the lump of glass and looked at it in silence. Charles looked at it too. But he saw immediately that it was not flat, and filling his pipe he said with the energy that dismisses a foolish strain of thought:

“To return to what I was saying——”

He did not see, or if he had seen would hardly have noticed, that John, after looking at the lump for a moment, as if in hesitation, slipped it inside his pocket. That impulse, too, may have been the impulse which leads a child to pick up one pebble on a path strewn with them, promising it a life of warmth and security upon the nursery mantelpiece, delighting in the sense of power and benignity which such an action confers, and believing that the heart of the stone leaps with joy when it sees itself chosen from a million like it, to enjoy this bliss instead of a life of cold and wet upon the high road. “It might so easily have been any other of the millions of stones, but it was I, I, I!”

Whether this thought or not was in John’s mind, the lump of glass had its place upon the mantelpiece, where it stood heavy upon a little pile of bills and letters, and served not only as an excellent paper-weight, but also as a natural stopping place for the young man’s eyes when they wandered from his book. Looked at again and again half consciously by a mind thinking of something else, any object mixes itself so profoundly with the stuff of thought that it loses its actual form and recomposes itself a little differently in an ideal shape which haunts the brain when we least expect it. So John found himself attracted to the windows of curiosity shops when he was out walking, merely because he saw something which reminded him of the lump of glass. Anything, so long as it was an object of some kind, more or less round, perhaps with a dying flame deep sunk in its mass, anything—china, glass, amber, rock, marble—even the smooth oval egg of a prehistoric bird would do. He took, also, to keeping his eyes upon the ground, especially in the neighbourhood of waste land where the household refuse is thrown away. Such objects often occurred there—thrown away, of no use to anybody, shapeless, discarded. In a few months he had collected four or five specimens that took their place upon the mantelpiece. They were useful, too, for a man who is standing for Parliament upon the brink of a brilliant career has any number of papers to keep in order—addresses to constituents, declarations of policy, appeals for subscriptions, invitations to dinner, and so on.

One day, starting from his rooms in the Temple to catch a train in order to address his constituents, his eyes rested upon a remarkable object lying half-hidden in one of those little borders of grass which edge the bases of vast legal buildings. He could only touch it with the point of his stick through the railings; but he could see that it was a piece of china of the most remarkable shape, as nearly resembling a starfish as anything—shaped, or broken accidentally, into five irregular but unmistakable points. The colouring was mainly blue, but green stripes or spots of some kind overlaid the blue, and lines of crimson gave it a richness and lustre of the most attractive kind. John was determined to possess it; but the more he pushed, the further it receded. At length he was forced to go back to his rooms and improvise a wire ring attached to the end of a stick, with which, by dint of great care and skill, he finally drew the piece of china within reach of his hands. As he seized hold of it he exclaimed in triumph. At that moment the clock struck. It was out of the question that he should keep his appointment. The meeting was held without him. But how had the piece of china been broken into this remarkable shape? A careful examination put it beyond doubt that the star shape was accidental, which made it all the more strange, and it seemed unlikely that there should be another such in existence. Set at the opposite end of the mantelpiece from the lump of glass that had been dug from the sand, it looked like a creature from another world—freakish and fantastic as a harlequin. It seemed to be pirouetting through space, winking light like a fitful star. The contrast between the china so vivid and alert, and the glass so mute and contemplative, fascinated him, and wondering and amazed he asked himself how the two came to exist in the same world, let alone to stand upon the same narrow strip of marble in the same room. The question remained unanswered.

He now began to haunt the places which are most prolific of broken china, such as pieces of waste land between railway lines, sites of demolished houses, and commons in the neighbourhood of London. But china is seldom thrown from a great height; it is one of the rarest of human actions. You have to find in conjunction a very high house, and a woman of such reckless impulse and passionate prejudice that she flings her jar or pot straight from the window without thought of who is below. Broken china was to be found in plenty, but broken in some trifling domestic accident, without purpose or character. Nevertheless, he was often astonished, as he came to go into the question more deeply, by the immense variety of shapes to be found in London alone, and there was still more cause for wonder and speculation in the differences of qualities and designs. The finest specimens he would bring home and place upon his mantelpiece, where, however, their duty was more and more of an ornamental nature, since papers needing a weight to keep them down became scarcer and scarcer.

He neglected his duties, perhaps, or discharged them absent-mindedly, or his constituents when they visited him were unfavourably impressed by the appearance of his mantelpiece. At any rate he was not elected to represent them in Parliament, and his friend Charles, taking it much to heart and hurrying to condole with him, found him so little cast down by the disaster that he could only suppose that it was too serious a matter for him to realize all at once.

In truth, John had been that day to Barnes Common, and there under a furze bush had found a very remarkable piece of iron. It was almost identical with the glass in shape, massy and globular, but so cold and heavy, so black and metallic, that it was evidently alien to the earth and had its origin in one of the dead stars or was itself the cinder of a moon. It weighed his pocket down; it weighed the mantelpiece down; it radiated cold. And yet the meteorite stood upon the same ledge with the lump of glass and the star-shaped china.

As his eyes passed from one to another, the determination to possess objects that even surpassed these tormented the young man. He devoted himself more and more resolutely to the search. If he had not been consumed by ambition and convinced that one day some newly-discovered rubbish heap would reward him, the disappointments he had suffered, let alone the fatigue and derision, would have made him give up the pursuit. Provided with a bag and a long stick fitted with an adaptable hook, he ransacked all deposits of earth; raked beneath matted tangles of scrub; searched all alleys and spaces between walls where he had learned to expect to find objects of this kind thrown away. As his standard became higher and his taste more severe the disappointments were innumerable, but always some gleam of hope, some piece of china or glass curiously marked or broken, lured him on. Day after day passed. He was no longer young. His career—that is his political career—was a thing of the past. People gave up visiting him. He was too silent to be worth asking to dinner. He never talked to anyone about his serious ambitions; their lack of understanding was apparent in their behaviour.

He leaned back in his chair now and watched Charles lift the stones on the mantelpiece a dozen times and put them down emphatically to mark what he was saying about the conduct of the Government, without once noticing their existence.

“What was the truth of it, John?” asked Charles suddenly, turning and facing him. “What made you give it up like that all in a second?”

“I’ve not given it up,” John replied.

“But you’ve not the ghost of a chance now,” said Charles roughly.

“I don’t agree with you there,” said John with conviction. Charles looked at him and was profoundly uneasy; the most extraordinary doubts possessed him; he had a queer sense that they were talking about different things. He looked round to find some relief for his horrible depression, but the disorderly appearance of the room depressed him still further. What was that stick, and the old carpet bag hanging against the wall? And then those stones? Looking at John, something fixed and distant in his expression alarmed him. He knew only too well that his mere appearance upon a platform was out of the question.

“Pretty stones,” he said as cheerfully as he could; and saying that he had an appointment to keep, he left John—for ever.

[written in 1918/19, published in the Athenaeum, October 22, 1920]

[]

The Lady in the Looking-Glass.

A Reflection

People should not leave looking-glasses hanging in their rooms any more than they should leave open cheque books or letters confessing some hideous crime. One could not help looking, that summer afternoon, in the long glass that hung outside in the hall. Chance had so arranged it. From the depths of the sofa in the drawing-room one could see reflected in the Italian glass not only the marble-topped table opposite, but a stretch of the garden beyond. One could see a long grass path leading between banks of tall flowers until, slicing off an angle, the gold rim cut it off.

The house was empty, and one felt, since one was the only person in the drawing-room, like one of those naturalists who, covered with grass and leaves, lie watching the shyest animals—badgers, otters, kingfishers—moving about freely, themselves unseen. The room that afternoon was full of such shy creatures, lights and shadows, curtains blowing, petals falling—things that never happen, so it seems, if someone is looking. The quiet old country room with its rugs and stone chimney pieces, its sunken book-cases and red and gold lacquer cabinets, was full of such nocturnal creatures. They came pirouetting across the floor, stepping delicately with high-lifted feet and spread tails and pecking allusive beaks as if they had been cranes or flocks of elegant flamingoes whose pink was faded, or peacocks whose trains were veiled with silver. And there were obscure flushes and darkenings too, as if a cuttlefish had suddenly suffused the air with purple; and the room had its passions and rages and envies and sorrows coming over it and clouding it, like a human being. Nothing stayed the same for two seconds together.

But, outside, the looking-glass reflected the hall table, the sunflowers, the garden path so accurately and so fixedly that they seemed held there in their reality unescapably. It was a strange contrast—all changing here, all stillness there. One could not help looking from one to the other. Meanwhile, since all the doors and windows were open in the heat, there was a perpetual sighing and ceasing sound, the voice of the transient and the perishing, it seemed, coming and going like human breath, while in the looking-glass things had ceased to breathe and lay still in the trance of immortality.

Half an hour ago the mistress of the house, Isabella Tyson, had gone down the grass path in her thin summer dress, carrying a basket, and had vanished, sliced off by the gilt rim of the looking-glass. She had gone presumably into the lower garden to pick flowers; or as it seemed more natural to suppose, to pick something light and fantastic and leafy and trailing, travellers’ joy, or one of those elegant sprays of convolvulus that twine round ugly walls and burst here and there into white and violet blossoms. She suggested the fantastic and the tremulous convolvulus rather than the upright aster, the starched zinnia, or her own burning roses alight like lamps on the straight posts of their rose trees. The comparison showed how very little, after all these years, one knew about her; for it is impossible that any woman of flesh and blood of fifty-five or sixty should be really a wreath or a tendril. Such comparisons are worse than idle and superficial—they are cruel even, for they come like the convolvulus itself trembling between one’s eyes and the truth. There must be truth; there must be a wall. Yet it was strange that after knowing her all these years one could not say what the truth about Isabella was; one still made up phrases like this about convolvulus and travellers’ joy. As for facts, it was a fact that she was a spinster; that she was rich; that she had bought this house and collected with her own hands—often in the most obscure corners of the world and at great risk from poisonous stings and Oriental diseases—the rugs, the chairs, the cabinets which now lived their nocturnal life before one’s eyes. Sometimes it seemed as if they knew more about her than we, who sat on them, wrote at them, and trod on them so carefully, were allowed to know. In each of these cabinets were many little drawers, and each almost certainly held letters, tied with bows of ribbon, sprinkled with sticks of lavender or rose leaves. For it was another fact—if facts were what one wanted—that Isabella had known many people, had had many friends; and thus if one had the audacity to open a drawer and read her letters, one would find the traces of many agitations, of appointments to meet, of upbraidings for not having met, long letters of intimacy and affection, violent letters of jealousy and reproach, terrible final words of parting—for all those interviews and assignations had led to nothing—that is, she had never married, and yet, judging from the mask-like indifference of her face, she had gone through twenty times more of passion and experience than those whose loves are trumpeted forth for all the world to hear. Under the stress of thinking about Isabella, her room became more shadowy and symbolic; the corners seemed darker, the legs of chairs and tables more spindly and hieroglyphic.

Suddenly these reflections were ended violently and yet without a sound. A large black form loomed into the looking-glass; blotted out everything, strewed the table with a packet of marble tablets veined with pink and grey, and was gone. But the picture was entirely altered. For the moment it was unrecognizable and irrational and entirely out of focus. One could not relate these tablets to any human purpose. And then by degrees some logical process set to work on them and began ordering and arranging them and bringing them into the fold of common experience. One realized at last that they were merely letters. The man had brought the post.

There they lay on the marble-topped table, all dripping with light and colour at first and crude and unabsorbed. And then it was strange to see how they were drawn in and arranged and composed and made part of the picture and granted that stillness and immortality which the looking-glass conferred. They lay there invested with a new reality and significance and with a greater heaviness, too, as if it would have needed a chisel to dislodge them from the table. And, whether it was fancy or not, they seemed to have become not merely a handful of casual letters but to be tablets graven with eternal truth—if one could read them, one would know everything there was to be known about Isabella, yes, and about life, too. The pages inside those marble-looking envelopes must be cut deep and scored thick with meaning. Isabella would come in, and take them, one by one, very slowly, and open them, and read them carefully word by word, and then with a profound sigh of comprehension, as if she had seen to the bottom of everything, she would tear the envelopes to little bits and tie the letters together and lock the cabinet drawer in her determination to conceal what she did not wish to be known.

The thought served as a challenge. Isabella did not wish to be known—but she should no longer escape. It was absurd, it was monstrous. If she concealed so much and knew so much one must prize her open with the first tool that came to hand—the imagination. One must fix one’s mind upon her at that very moment. One must fasten her down there. One must refuse to be put off any longer with sayings and doings such as the moment brought forth—with dinners and visits and polite conversations. One must put oneself in her shoes. If one took the phrase literally, it was easy to see the shoes in which she stood, down in the lower garden, at this moment. They were very narrow and long and fashionable—they were made of the softest and most flexible leather. Like everything she wore, they were exquisite. And she would be standing under the high hedge in the lower part of the garden, raising the scissors that were tied to her waist to cut some dead flower, some overgrown branch. The sun would beat down on her face, into her eyes; but no, at the critical moment a veil of cloud covered the sun, making the expression of her eyes doubtful—was it mocking or tender, brilliant or dull? One could only see the indeterminate outline of her rather faded, fine face looking at the sky. She was thinking, perhaps, that she must order a new net for the strawberries; that she must send flowers to Johnson’s widow; that it was time she drove over to see the Hippesleys in their new house. Those were the things she talked about at dinner certainly. But one was tired of the things that she talked about at dinner. It was her profounder state of being that one wanted to catch and turn to words, the state that is to the mind what breathing is to the body, what one calls happiness or unhappiness. At the mention of those words it became obvious, surely, that she must be happy. She was rich; she was distinguished; she had many friends; she travelled—she bought rugs in Turkey and blue pots in Persia. Avenues of pleasure radiated this way and that from where she stood with her scissors raised to cut the trembling branches while the lacy clouds veiled her face.

Here with a quick movement of her scissors she snipped the spray of travellers’ joy and it fell to the ground. As it fell, surely some light came in too, surely one could penetrate a little farther into her being. Her mind then was filled with tenderness and regret…. To cut an overgrown branch saddened her because it had once lived, and life was dear to her. Yes, and at the same time the fall of the branch would suggest to her how she must die herself and all the futility and evanescence of things. And then again quickly catching this thought up, with her instant good sense, she thought life had treated her well; even if fall she must, it was to lie on the earth and moulder sweetly into the roots of violets. So she stood thinking. Without making any thought precise—for she was one of those reticent people whose minds hold their thoughts enmeshed in clouds of silence—she was filled with thoughts. Her mind was like her room, in which lights advanced and retreated, came pirouetting and stepping delicately, spread their tails, pecked their way; and then her whole being was suffused, like the room again, with a cloud of some profound knowledge, some unspoken regret, and then she was full of locked drawers, stuffed with letters, like her cabinets. To talk of “prizing her open” as if she were an oyster, to use any but the finest and subtlest and most pliable tools upon her was impious and absurd. One must imagine—here was she in the looking-glass. It made one start.

She was so far off at first that one could not see her clearly. She came lingering and pausing, here straightening a rose, there lifting a pink to smell it, but she never stopped; and all the time she became larger and larger in the looking-glass, more and more completely the person into whose mind one had been trying to penetrate. One verified her by degrees—fitted the qualities one had discovered into this visible body. There were her grey-green dress, and her long shoes, her basket, and something sparkling at her throat. She came so gradually that she did not seem to derange the pattern in the glass, but only to bring in some new element which gently moved and altered the other objects as if asking them, courteously, to make room for her. And the letters and the table and the grass walk and the sunflowers which had been waiting in the looking-glass separated and opened out so that she might be received among them. At last there she was, in the hall. She stopped dead. She stood by the table. She stood perfectly still. At once the looking-glass began to pour over her a light that seemed to fix her; that seemed like some acid to bite off the unessential and superficial and to leave only the truth. It was an enthralling spectacle. Everything dropped from her—clouds, dress, basket, diamond—all that one had called the creeper and convolvulus. Here was the hard wall beneath. Here was the woman herself. She stood naked in that pitiless light. And there was nothing. Isabella was perfectly empty. She had no thoughts. She had no friends. She cared for nobody. As for her letters, they were all bills. Look, as she stood there, old and angular, veined and lined, with her high nose and her wrinkled neck, she did not even trouble to open them.

People should not leave looking-glasses hanging in their rooms.

[written in May 1929, published in Harper’s Magazine, December 1929]

[]

The Duchess and the Jeweller.

Oliver Bacon lived at the top of a house overlooking the Green Park. He had a flat; chairs jutted out at the right angles—chairs covered in hide. Sofas filled the bays of the windows—sofas covered in tapestry. The windows, the three long windows, had the proper allowance of discreet net and figured satin. The mahogany sideboard bulged discreetly with the right brandies, whiskeys and liqueurs. And from the middle window he looked down upon the glossy roofs of fashionable cars packed in the narrow straits of Piccadilly. A more central position could not be imagined. And at eight in the morning he would have his breakfast brought in on a tray by a man-servant: the man-servant would unfold his crimson dressing-gown; he would rip his letters open with his long pointed nails and would extract thick white cards of invitation upon which the engraving stood up roughly from duchesses, countesses, viscountesses and Honourable Ladies. Then he would wash; then he would eat his toast; then he would read his paper by the bright burning fire of electric coals.

“Behold Oliver,” he would say, addressing himself. “You who began life in a filthy little alley, you who …” and he would look down at his legs, so shapely in their perfect trousers; at his boots; at his spats. They were all shapely, shining; cut from the best cloth by the best scissors in Savile Row. But he dismantled himself often and became again a little boy in a dark alley. He had once thought that the height of his ambition—selling stolen dogs to fashionable women in Whitechapel. And once he had been done. “Oh, Oliver,” his mother had wailed. “Oh, Oliver! When will you have sense, my son?” … Then he had gone behind a counter; had sold cheap watches; then he had taken a wallet to Amsterdam…. At that memory he would chuckle—the old Oliver remembering the young. Yes, he had done well with the three diamonds; also there was the commission on the emerald. After that he went into the private room behind the shop in Hatton Garden; the room with the scales, the safe, the thick magnifying glasses. And then … and then … He chuckled. When he passed through the knots of jewellers in the hot evening who were discussing prices, gold mines, diamonds, reports from South Africa, one of them would lay a finger to the side of his nose and murmur, “Hum—m—m,” as he passed. It was no more than a murmur; no more than a nudge on the shoulder, a finger on the nose, a buzz that ran through the cluster of jewellers in Hatton Garden on a hot afternoon—oh, many years ago now! But still Oliver felt it purring down his spine, the nudge, the murmur that meant, “Look at him—young Oliver, the young jeweller—there he goes.” Young he was then. And he dressed better and better; and had, first a hansom cab; then a car; and first he went up to the dress circle, then down into the stalls. And he had a villa at Richmond, overlooking the river, with trellises of red roses; and Mademoiselle used to pick one every morning and stick it in his buttonhole.

“So,” said Oliver Bacon, rising and stretching his legs. “So …”

And he stood beneath the picture of an old lady on the mantelpiece and raised his hands. “I have kept my word,” he said, laying his hands together, palm to palm, as if he were doing homage to her. “I have won my bet.” That was so; he was the richest jeweller in England; but his nose, which was long and flexible, like an elephant’s trunk, seemed to say by its curious quiver at the nostrils (but it seemed as if the whole nose quivered, not only the nostrils) that he was not satisfied yet; still smelt something under the ground a little further off. Imagine a giant hog in a pasture rich with truffles; after unearthing this truffle and that, still it smells a bigger, a blacker truffle under the ground further off. So Oliver snuffed always in the rich earth of Mayfair another truffle, a blacker, a bigger further off.

Now then he straightened the pearl in his tie, cased himself in his smart blue overcoat; took his yellow gloves and his cane; and swayed as he descended the stairs and half snuffed, half sighed through his long sharp nose as he passed out into Piccadilly. For was he not still a sad man, a dissatisfied man, a man who seeks something that is hidden, though he had won his bet?

He swayed slightly as he walked, as the camel at the zoo sways from side to side when it walks along the asphalt paths laden with grocers and their wives eating from paper bags and throwing little bits of silver paper crumpled up on to the path. The camel despises the grocers; the camel is dissatisfied with its lot; the camel sees the blue lake and the fringe of palm trees in front of it. So the great jeweller, the greatest jeweller in the whole world, swung down Piccadilly, perfectly dressed, with his gloves, with his cane; but dissatisfied still, till he reached the dark little shop, that was famous in France, in Germany, in Austria, in Italy, and all over America—the dark little shop in the street off Bond Street.

As usual, he strode through the shop without speaking, though the four men, the two old men, Marshall and Spencer, and the two young men, Hammond and Wicks, stood straight and looked at him, envying him. It was only with one finger of the amber-coloured glove, waggling, that he acknowledged their presence. And he went in and shut the door of his private room behind him.

Then he unlocked the grating that barred the window. The cries of Bond Street came in; the purr of the distant traffic. The light from reflectors at the back of the shop struck upwards. One tree waved six green leaves, for it was June. But Mademoiselle had married Mr. Pedder of the local brewery—no one stuck roses in his buttonhole now.

“So,” he half sighed, half snorted, “so——”

Then he touched a spring in the wall and slowly the panelling slid open, and behind it were the steel safes, five, no, six of them, all of burnished steel. He twisted a key; unlocked one; then another. Each was lined with a pad of deep crimson velvet; in each lay jewels—bracelets, necklaces, rings, tiaras, ducal coronets; loose stones in glass shells; rubies, emeralds, pearls, diamonds. All safe, shining, cool, yet burning, eternally, with their own compressed light.

“Tears!” said Oliver, looking at the pearls.

“Heart’s blood!” he said, looking at the rubies.

“Gunpowder!” he continued, rattling the diamonds so that they flashed and blazed.

“Gunpowder enough to blow Mayfair—sky high, high, high!” He threw his head back and made a sound like a horse neighing as he said it.

The telephone buzzed obsequiously in a low muted voice on his table. He shut the safe.

“In ten minutes,” he said. “Not before.” And he sat down at his desk and looked at the heads of the Roman emperors that were graved on his sleeve links. And again he dismantled himself and became once more the little boy playing marbles in the alley where they sell stolen dogs on Sunday. He became that wily astute little boy, with lips like wet cherries. He dabbled his fingers in ropes of tripe; he dipped them in pans of frying fish; he dodged in and out among the crowds. He was slim, lissome, with eyes like licked stones. And now—now—the hands of the clock ticked on, one, two, three, four…. The Duchess of Lambourne waited his pleasure; the Duchess of Lambourne, daughter of a hundred Earls. She would wait for ten minutes on a chair at the counter. She would wait his pleasure. She would wait till he was ready to see her. He watched the clock in its shagreen case. The hand moved on. With each tick the clock handed him—so it seemed—pâté de foie gras, a glass of champagne, another of fine brandy, a cigar costing one guinea. The clock laid them on the table beside him as the ten minutes passed. Then he heard soft slow footsteps approaching; a rustle in the corridor. The door opened. Mr. Hammond flattened himself against the wall.

“Her Grace!” he announced.

And he waited there, flattened against the wall.

And Oliver, rising, could hear the rustle of the dress of the Duchess as she came down the passage. Then she loomed up, filling the door, filling the room with the aroma, the prestige, the arrogance, the pomp, the pride of all the Dukes and Duchesses swollen in one wave. And as a wave breaks, she broke, as she sat down, spreading and splashing and falling over Oliver Bacon, the great jeweller, covering him with sparkling bright colours, green, rose, violet; and odours; and iridescences; and rays shooting from fingers, nodding from plumes, flashing from silk; for she was very large, very fat, tightly girt in pink taffeta, and past her prime. As a parasol with many flounces, as a peacock with many feathers, shuts its flounces, folds its feathers, so she subsided and shut herself as she sank down in the leather armchair.

“Good morning, Mr. Bacon,” said the Duchess. And she held out her hand which came through the slit of her white glove. And Oliver bent low as he shook it. And as their hands touched the link was forged between them once more. They were friends, yet enemies; he was master, she was mistress; each cheated the other, each needed the other, each feared the other, each felt this and knew this every time they touched hands thus in the little back room with the white light outside, and the tree with its six leaves, and the sound of the street in the distance and behind them the safes.

“And to-day, Duchess—what can I do for you to-day?” said Oliver, very softly.

The Duchess opened her heart, her private heart, gaped wide. And with a sigh but no words she took from her bag a long washleather pouch—it looked like a lean yellow ferret. And from a slit in the ferret’s belly she dropped pearls—ten pearls. They rolled from the slit in the ferret’s belly—one, two, three, four—like the eggs of some heavenly bird.

“All’s that’s left me, dear Mr. Bacon,” she moaned. Five, six, seven—down they rolled, down the slopes of the vast mountain sides that fell between her knees into one narrow valley—the eighth, the ninth, and the tenth. There they lay in the glow of the peach-blossom taffeta. Ten pearls.

“From the Appelby cincture,” she mourned. “The last … the last of them all.”

Oliver stretched out and took one of the pearls between finger and thumb. It was round, it was lustrous. But real was it, or false? Was she lying again? Did she dare?

She laid her plump padded finger across her lips. “If the Duke knew …” she whispered. “Dear Mr. Bacon, a bit of bad luck …”

Been gambling again, had she?

“That villain! That sharper!” she hissed.

The man with the chipped cheek bone? A bad ’un. And the Duke was straight as a poker; with side whiskers; would cut her off, shut her up down there if he knew—what I know, thought Oliver, and glanced at the safe.

“Araminta, Daphne, Diana,” she moaned. “It’s for them.”

The ladies Araminta, Daphne, Diana—her daughters. He knew them; adored them. But it was Diana he loved.

“You have all my secrets,” she leered. Tears slid; tears fell; tears, like diamonds, collecting powder in the ruts of her cherry blossom cheeks.

“Old friend,” she murmured, “old friend.”

“Old friend,” he repeated, “old friend,” as if he licked the words.

“How much?” he queried.

She covered the pearls with her hand.

“Twenty thousand,” she whispered.

But was it real or false, the one he held in his hand? The Appleby cincture—hadn’t she sold it already? He would ring for Spencer or Hammond. “Take it and test it,” he would say. He stretched to the bell.

“You will come down to-morrow?” she urged, she interrupted. “The Prime Minister—His Royal Highness …” She stopped. “And Diana …” she added.

Oliver took his hand off the bell.

He looked past her, at the backs of the houses in Bond Street. But he saw, not the houses in Bond Street, but a dimpling river; and trout rising and salmon; and the Prime Minister; and himself too, in white waistcoat; and then, Diana. He looked down at the pearl in his hand. But how could he test it, in the light of the river, in the light of the eyes of Diana? But the eyes of the Duchess were on him.

“Twenty thousand,” she moaned. “My honour!”

The honour of the mother of Diana! He drew his cheque book towards him; he took out his pen.

“Twenty——” he wrote. Then he stopped writing. The eyes of the old woman in the picture were on him—of the old woman his mother.

“Oliver!” she warned him. “Have sense! Don’t be a fool!”

“Oliver!” the Duchess entreated—it was “Oliver” now, not “Mr. Bacon.” “You’ll come for a long week-end?”

Alone in the woods with Diana! Riding alone in the woods with Diana!

“Thousand,” he wrote, and signed it.

“Here you are,” he said.

And there opened all the flounces of the parasol, all the plumes of the peacock, the radiance of the wave, the swords and spears of Agincourt, as she rose from her chair. And the two old men and the two young men, Spencer and Marshall, Wicks and Hammond, flattened themselves behind the counter envying him as he led her through the shop to the door. And he waggled his yellow glove in their faces, and she held her honour—a cheque for twenty thousand pounds with his signature—quite firmly in her hands.

“Are they false or are they real?” asked Oliver, shutting his private door. There they were, ten pearls on the blotting-paper on the table. He took them to the window. He held them under his lens to the light…. This, then, was the truffle he had routed out of the earth! Rotten at the centre—rotten at the core!

“Forgive me, oh, my mother!” he sighed, raising his hand as if he asked pardon of the old woman in the picture. And again he was a little boy in the alley where they sold dogs on Sunday.

“For,” he murmured, laying the palms of his hands together, “it is to be a long week-end.”

[ca. August 1938, published in Harper’s Bazaar, April 1938]

[]

Moments of Being.

“Slater’s Pins have no Points”

“Slater’s pins have no points—don’t you always find that?” said Miss Craye, turning round as the rose fell out of Fanny Wilmot’s dress, and Fanny stooped, with her ears full of the music, to look for the pin on the floor.

The words gave her an extraordinary shock, as Miss Craye struck the last chord of the Bach fugue. Did Miss Craye actually go to Slater’s and buy pins then, Fanny Wilmot asked herself, transfixed for a moment. Did she stand at the counter waiting like anybody else, and was she given a bill with coppers wrapped in it, and did she slip them into her purse and then, an hour later, stand by her dressing table and take out the pins? What need had she of pins? For she was not so much dressed as cased, like a beetle compactly in its sheath, blue in winter, green in summer. What need had she of pins—Julia Craye—who lived, it seemed, in the cool glassy world of Bach fugues, playing to herself what she liked, and only consenting to take one or two pupils at the Archer Street College of Music (so the Principal, Miss Kingston, said) as a special favour to herself, who had “the greatest admiration for her in every way.” Miss Craye was left badly off, Miss Kingston was afraid, at her brother’s death. Oh, they used to have such lovely things, when they lived at Salisbury, and her brother Julius was, of course, a very well-known man: a famous archaeologist. It was a great privilege to stay with them, Miss Kingston said (“My family had always known them—they were regular Canterbury people,” Miss Kingston said), but a little frightening for a child; one had to be careful not to slam the door or bounce into the room unexpectedly. Miss Kingston, who gave little character sketches like this on the first day of term while she received cheques and wrote out receipts for them, smiled here. Yes, she had been rather a tomboy; she had bounced in and set all those green Roman glasses and things jumping in their case. The Crayes were not used to children. The Crayes were none of them married. They kept cats; the cats, one used to feel, knew as much about the Roman urns and things as anybody.

“Far more than I did!” said Miss Kingston brightly, writing her name across the stamp in her dashing, cheerful, full-bodied hand, for she had always been practical. That was how she made her living, after all.

Perhaps then, Fanny Wilmot thought, looking for the pin, Miss Craye said that about “Slater’s pins having no points,” at a venture. None of the Crayes had ever married. She knew nothing about pins—nothing whatever. But she wanted to break the spell that had fallen on the house; to break the pane of glass which separated them from other people. When Polly Kingston, that merry little girl, had slammed the door and made the Roman vases jump, Julius, seeing that no harm was done (that would be his first instinct) looked, for the case was stood in the window, at Polly skipping home across the fields; looked with the look his sister often had, that lingering, driving look.

“Stars, sun, moon,” it seemed to say, “the daisy in the grass, fires, frost on the window pane, my heart goes out to you. But,” it always seemed to add, “you break, you pass, you go.” And simultaneously it covered the intensity of both these states of mind with “I can’t reach you—I can’t get at you,” spoken wistfully, frustratedly. And the stars faded, and the child went. That was the kind of spell that was the glassy surface, that Miss Craye wanted to break by showing, when she had played Bach beautifully as a reward to a favourite pupil (Fanny Wilmot knew that she was Miss Craye’s favourite pupil), that she, too, knew, like other people, about pins. Slater’s pins had no points.

Yes, the “famous archaeologist” had looked like that too. “The famous archaeologist”—as she said that, endorsing cheques, ascertaining the day of the month, speaking so brightly and frankly, there was in Miss Kingston’s voice an indescribable tone which hinted at something odd; something queer in Julius Craye; it was the very same thing that was odd perhaps in Julia too. One could have sworn, thought Fanny Wilmot, as she looked for the pin, that at parties, meetings (Miss Kingston’s father was a clergyman), she had picked up some piece of gossip, or it might only have been a smile, or a tone when his name was mentioned, which had given her “a feeling” about Julius Craye. Needless to say, she had never spoken about it to anybody. Probably she scarcely knew what she meant by it. But whenever she spoke of Julius, or heard him mentioned, that was the first thing that came to mind; and it was a seductive thought; there was something odd about Julius Craye.

It was so that Julia looked too, as she sat half turned on the music stool, smiling. It’s on the field, it’s on the pane, it’s in the sky—beauty; and I can’t get at it; I can’t have it—I, she seemed to add, with that little clutch of the hand which was so characteristic, who adore it so passionately, would give the whole world to possess it! And she picked up the carnation which had fallen on the floor, while Fanny searched for the pin. She crushed it, Fanny felt, voluptuously in her smooth veined hands stuck about with water-coloured rings set in pearls. The pressure of her fingers seemed to increase all that was most brilliant in the flower; to set it off; to make it more frilled, fresh, immaculate. What was odd in her, and perhaps in her brother, too, was that this crush and grasp of the finger was combined with a perpetual frustration. So it was even now with the carnation. She had her hands on it; she pressed it; but she did not possess it, enjoy it, not entirely and altogether.

None of the Crayes had married, Fanny Wilmot remembered. She had in mind how one evening when the lesson had lasted longer than usual and it was dark, Julia Craye had said “it’s the use of men, surely, to protect us,” smiling at her that same odd smile, as she stood fastening her cloak, which made her, like the flower, conscious to her finger tips of youth and brilliance, but, like the flower, too, Fanny suspected, made her feel awkward.

“Oh, but I don’t want protection,” Fanny had laughed, and when Julia Craye, fixing on her that extraordinary look, had said she was not so sure of that, Fanny positively blushed under the admiration in her eyes.

It was the only use of men, she had said. Was it for that reason then, Fanny wondered, with her eyes on the floor, that she had never married? After all, she had not lived all her life in Salisbury. “Much the nicest part of London,” she had said once, “(but I’m speaking of fifteen or twenty years ago) is Kensington. One was in the Gardens in ten minutes—it was like the heart of the country. One could dine out in one’s slippers without catching cold. Kensington—it was like a village then, you know,” she had said.

Here she broke off, to denounce acridly the draughts in the Tubes.

“It was the use of men,” she had said, with a queer wry acerbity. Did that throw any light on the problem why she had not married? One could imagine every sort of scene in her youth, when with her good blue eyes, her straight firm nose, her air of cool distinction, her piano playing, her rose flowering with chaste passion in the bosom of her muslin dress, she had attracted first the young men to whom such things, the china tea cups and the silver candlesticks and the inlaid table, for the Crayes had such nice things, were wonderful; young men not sufficiently distinguished; young men of the cathedral town with ambitions. She had attracted them first, and then her brother’s friends from Oxford or Cambridge. They would come down in the summer; row her on the river; continue the argument about Browning by letter; and arrange perhaps, on the rare occasions when she stayed in London, to show her—Kensington Gardens?

“Much the nicest part of London—Kensington (I’m speaking of fifteen or twenty years ago),” she had said once. One was in the gardens in ten minutes—in the heart of the country. One could make that yield what one liked, Fanny Wilmot thought, single out, for instance, Mr. Sherman, the painter, an old friend of hers; make him call for her, by appointment, one sunny day in June; take her to have tea under the trees. (They had met, too, at those parties to which one tripped in slippers without fear of catching cold.) The aunt or other elderly relative was to wait there while they looked at the Serpentine. They looked at the Serpentine. He may have rowed her across. They compared it with the Avon. She would have considered the comparison very furiously. Views of rivers were important to her. She sat hunched a little, a little angular, though she was graceful then, steering. At the critical moment, for he had determined that he must speak now—it was his only chance of getting her alone—he was speaking with his head turned at an absurd angle, in his great nervousness, over his shoulder—at that very moment she interrupted fiercely. He would have them into the Bridge, she cried. It was a moment of horror, of disillusionment, of revelation, for both of them. I can’t have it, I can’t possess it, she thought. He could not see why she had come then. With a great splash of his oar he pulled the boat round. Merely to snub him? He rowed her back and said good-bye to her.

The setting of that scene could be varied as one chose, Fanny Wilmot reflected. (Where had that pin fallen?) It might be Ravenna; or Edinburgh, where she had kept house for her brother. The scene could be changed; and the young man and the exact manner of it all, but one thing was constant—her refusal, and her frown, and her anger with herself afterwards, and her argument, and her relief—yes, certainly her immense relief. The very next day, perhaps, she would get up at six, put on her cloak, and walk all the way from Kensington to the river. She was so thankful that she had not sacrificed her right to go and look at things when they are at their best—before people are up, that is to say she could have her breakfast in bed if she liked. She had not sacrificed her independence.

Yes, Fanny Wilmot smiled, Julia had not endangered her habits. They remained safe; and her habits would have suffered if she had married. “They’re ogres,” she had said one evening, half laughing, when another pupil, a girl lately married, suddenly bethinking her that she would miss her husband, had rushed off in haste.

“They’re ogres,” she had said, laughing grimly. An ogre would have interfered perhaps with breakfast in bed; with walks at dawn down to the river. What would have happened (but one could hardly conceive this) had she had children? She took astonishing precautions against chills, fatigue, rich food, the wrong food, draughts, heated rooms, journeys in the Tube, for she could never determine which of these it was exactly that brought on those terrible headaches that gave her life the semblance of a battlefield. She was always engaged in outwitting the enemy, until it seemed as if the pursuit had its interest; could she have beaten the enemy finally she would have found life a little dull. As it was, the tug-of-war was perpetual—on the one side the nightingale or the view which she loved with passion—yes, for views and birds she felt nothing less than passion; on the other the damp path or the horrid long drag up a steep hill which would certainly make her good for nothing next day and bring on one of her headaches. When, therefore, from time to time, she managed her forces adroitly and brought off a visit to Hampton Court the week the crocuses—those glossy bright flowers were her favourite—were at their best, it was a victory. It was something that lasted; something that mattered for ever. She strung the afternoon on the necklace of memorable days, which was not too long for her to be able to recall this one or that one; this view, that city; to finger it, to feel it, to savour, sighing, the quality that made it unique.

“It was so beautiful last Friday,” she said, “that I determined I must go there.” So she had gone off to Waterloo on her great undertaking—to visit Hampton Court—alone. Naturally, but perhaps foolishly, one pitied her for the thing she never asked pity for (indeed she was reticent habitually, speaking of her health only as a warrior might speak of his foe)—one pitied her for always doing everything alone. Her brother was dead. Her sister was asthmatic. She found the climate of Edinburgh good for her. It was too bleak for Julia. Perhaps, too, she found the associations painful, for her brother, the famous archæologist, had died there; and she had loved her brother. She lived in a little house off the Brompton Road entirely alone.

Fanny Wilmot saw the pin; she picked it up. She looked at Miss Craye. Was Miss Craye so lonely? No, Miss Craye was steadily, blissfully, if only for that moment, a happy woman. Fanny had surprised her in a moment of ecstasy. She sat there, half turned away from the piano, with her hands clasped in her lap holding the carnation upright, while behind her was the sharp square of the window, uncurtained, purple in the evening, intensely purple after the brilliant electric lights which burnt unshaded in the bare music room. Julia Craye, sitting hunched and compact holding her flower, seemed to emerge out of the London night, seemed to fling it like a cloak behind her, it seemed, in its bareness and intensity, the effluence of her spirit, something she had made which surrounded her. Fanny stared.

All seemed transparent, for a moment, to the gaze of Fanny Wilmot, as if looking through Miss Craye, she saw the very fountain of her being spurting its pure silver drops. She saw back and back into the past behind her. She saw the green Roman vases stood in their case; heard the choristers playing cricket; saw Julia quietly descend the curving steps on to the lawn; then saw her pour out tea beneath the cedar tree; softly enclosed the old man’s hand in hers; saw her going round and about the corridors of that ancient Cathedral dwelling place with towels in her hand to mark them; lamenting, as she went, the pettiness of daily life; and slowly ageing, and putting away clothes when summer came, because at her age they were too bright to wear; and tending her father’s sickness; and cleaving her way ever more definitely as her will stiffened towards her solitary goal; travelling frugally; counting the cost and measuring out of her tight shut purse the sum needed for this journey or for that old mirror; obstinately adhering, whatever people might say, in choosing her pleasures for herself. She saw Julia——

Julia blazed. Julia kindled. Out of the night she burnt like a dead white star. Julia opened her arms. Julia kissed her on the lips. Julia possessed it.

“Slater’s pins have no points,” Miss Craye said, laughing queerly and relaxing her arms, as Fanny Wilmot pinned the flower to her breast with trembling fingers.

[written in July 1927, published in Forum, January 1928]

[]

The Man Who Loved His Kind.

Trotting through Deans Yard that afternoon, Prickett Ellis ran straight into Richard Dalloway, or rather, just as they were passing, the covert side glance which each was casting on the other, under his hat, over his shoulder, broadened and burst into recognition; they had not met for twenty years. They had been at school together. And what was Ellis doing? The Bar? Of course, of course—he had followed the case in the papers. But it was impossible to talk here. Wouldn’t he drop in that evening. (They lived in the same old place—just round the corner.) One or two people were coming. Joynson perhaps. “An awful swell now,” said Richard.

“Good—till this evening then,” said Richard, and went his way, “jolly glad” (that was quite true) to have met that queer chap, who hadn’t changed one bit since he had been at school—just the same knobbly, chubby little boy then, with prejudices sticking out all over him, but uncommonly brilliant—won the Newcastle. Well—off he went.

Prickett Ellis, however, as he turned and looked at Dalloway disappearing, wished now he had not met him or, at least, for he had always liked him personally, hadn’t promised to come to this party. Dalloway was married, gave parties; wasn’t his sort at all. He would have to dress. However, as the evening drew on, he supposed, as he had said that, and didn’t want to be rude, he must go there.

But what an appalling entertainment! There was Joynson; they had nothing to say to each other. He had been a pompous little boy; he had grown rather more self-important—that was all; there wasn’t a single other soul in the room that Prickett Ellis knew. Not one. So, as he could not go at once, without saying a word to Dalloway, who seemed altogether taken up with his duties, bustling about in a white waistcoat, there he had to stand. It was the sort of thing that made his gorge rise. Think of grown up, responsible men and women doing this every night of their lives! The lines deepened on his blue and red shaven cheeks as he leant against the wall in complete silence, for though he worked like a horse, he kept himself fit by exercise; and he looked hard and fierce, as if his moustaches were dipped in frost. He bristled; he grated. His meagre dress clothes made him look unkempt, insignificant, angular.

Idle, chattering, overdressed, without an idea in their heads, these fine ladies and gentlemen went on talking and laughing; and Prickett Ellis watched them and compared them with the Brunners who, when they won their case against Fenners’ Brewery and got two hundred pounds compensation (it was not half what they should have got) went and spent five of it on a clock for him. That was a decent sort of thing to do; that was the sort of thing that moved one, and he glared more severely than ever at these people, overdressed, cynical, prosperous, and compared what he felt now with what he felt at eleven o’clock that morning when old Brunner and Mrs. Brunner, in their best clothes, awfully respectable and clean looking old people, had called in to give him that small token, as the old man put it, standing perfectly upright to make his speech, of gratitude and respect for the very able way in which you conducted our case, and Mrs. Brunner piped up, how it was all due to him they felt. And they deeply appreciated his generosity—because, of course, he hadn’t taken a fee.

And as he took the clock and put it on the middle of his mantelpiece, he had felt that he wished nobody to see his face. That was what he worked for—that was his reward; and he looked at the people who were actually before his eyes as if they danced over that scene in his chambers and were exposed by it, and as it faded—the Brunners faded—there remained as if left of that scene, himself, confronting this hostile population, a perfectly plain, unsophisticated man, a man of the people (he straightened himself) very badly dressed, glaring, with not an air or a grace about him, a man who was an ill hand at concealing his feelings, a plain man, an ordinary human being, pitted against the evil, the corruption, the heartlessness of society. But he would not go on staring. Now he put on his spectacles and examined the pictures. He read the titles on a line of books; for the most part poetry. He would have liked well enough to read some of his old favourites again—Shakespeare, Dickens—he wished he ever had time to turn into the National Gallery, but he couldn’t—no, one could not. Really one could not—with the world in the state it was in. Not when people all day long wanted your help, fairly clamoured for help. This wasn’t an age for luxuries. And he looked at the arm chairs and the paper knives and the well bound books, and shook his head, knowing that he would never have the time, never he was glad to think have the heart, to afford himself such luxuries. The people here would be shocked if they knew what he paid for his tobacco; how he had borrowed his clothes. His one and only extravagance was his little yacht on the Norfolk Broads. And that he did allow himself. He did like once a year to get right away from everybody and lie on his back in a field. He thought how shocked they would be—these fine folk—if they realized the amount of pleasure he got from what he was old fashioned enough to call the love of nature; trees and fields he had known ever since he was a boy.

These fine people would be shocked. Indeed, standing there, putting his spectacles away in his pocket, he felt himself grow more and more shocking every instant. And it was a very disagreeable feeling. He did not feel this—that he loved humanity, that he paid only fivepence an ounce for tobacco and loved nature—naturally and quietly. Each of these pleasures had been turned into a protest. He felt that these people whom he despised made him stand and deliver and justify himself. “I am an ordinary man,” he kept saying. And what he said next he was really ashamed of saying, but he said it. “I have done more for my kind in one day than the rest of you in all your lives.” Indeed, he could not help himself; he kept recalling scene after scene, like that when the Brunners gave him the clock—he kept reminding himself of the nice things people had said of his humanity, of his generosity, how he had helped them. He kept seeing himself as the wise and tolerant servant of humanity. And he wished he could repeat his praises aloud. It was unpleasant that the sense of his goodness should boil within him. It was still more unpleasant that he could tell no one what people had said about him. Thank the Lord, he kept saying, I shall be back at work to-morrow; and yet he was no longer satisfied simply to slip through the door and go home. He must stay, he must stay until he had justified himself. But how could he? In all that room full of people, he did not know a soul to speak to.

At last Richard Dalloway came up.

“I want to introduce Miss O’Keefe,” he said. Miss O’Keefe looked him full in the eyes. She was a rather arrogant, abrupt mannered woman in the thirties.

Miss O’Keefe wanted an ice or something to drink. And the reason why she asked Prickett Ellis to give it her in what he felt a haughty, unjustifiable manner, was that she had seen a woman and two children, very poor, very tired, pressing against the railings of a square, peering in, that hot afternoon. Can’t they be let in? she had thought, her pity rising like a wave; her indignation boiling. No; she rebuked herself the next moment, roughly, as if she boxed her own ears. The whole force of the world can’t do it. So she picked up the tennis ball and hurled it back. The whole force of the world can’t do it, she said in a fury, and that was why she said so commandingly, to the unknown man:

“Give me an ice.”

Long before she had eaten it, Prickett Ellis, standing beside her without taking anything, told her that he had not been to a party for fifteen years; told her that his dress suit was lent him by his brother-in-law; told her that he did not like this sort of thing, and it would have eased him greatly to go on to say that he was a plain man, who happened to have a liking for ordinary people, and then would have told her (and been ashamed of it afterwards) about the Brunners and the clock, but she said:

“Have you seen the Tempest?”

then (for he had not seen the Tempest), had he read some book? Again no, and then, putting her ice down, did he never read poetry?

And Prickett Ellis feeling something rise within him which would decapitate this young woman, make a victim of her, massacre her, made her sit down there, where they would not be interrupted, on two chairs, in the empty garden, for everyone was upstairs, only you could hear a buzz and a hum and a chatter and a jingle, like the mad accompaniment of some phantom orchestra to a cat or two slinking across the grass, and the wavering of leaves, and the yellow and red fruit like Chinese lanterns wobbling this way and that—the talk seemed like a frantic skeleton dance music set to something very real, and full of suffering.

“How beautiful!” said Miss O’Keefe.

Oh, it was beautiful, this little patch of grass, with the towers of Westminster massed round it black, high in the air, after the drawing-room; it was silent, after that noise. After all, they had that—the tired woman, the children.

Prickett Ellis lit a pipe. That would shock her; he filled it with shag tobacco—fivepence halfpenny an ounce. He thought how he would lie in his boat smoking, he could see himself, alone, at night, smoking under the stars. For always to-night he kept thinking how he would look if these people here were to see him. He said to Miss O’Keefe, striking a match on the sole of his boot, that he couldn’t see anything particularly beautiful out here.

“Perhaps,” said Miss O’Keefe, “you don’t care for beauty.” (He had told her that he had not seen the Tempest; that he had not read a book; he looked ill-kempt, all moustache, chin, and silver watch chain.) She thought nobody need pay a penny for this; the Museums are free and the National Gallery; and the country. Of course she knew the objections—the washing, cooking, children; but the root of things, what they were all afraid of saying, was that happiness is dirt cheap. You can have it for nothing. Beauty.

Then Prickett Ellis let her have it—this pale, abrupt, arrogant woman. He told her, puffing his shag tobacco, what he had done that day. Up at six; interviews; smelling a drain in a filthy slum; then to court.

Here he hesitated, wishing to tell her something of his own doings. Suppressing that, he was all the more caustic. He said it made him sick to hear well fed, well dressed women (she twitched her lips, for she was thin, and her dress not up to standard) talk of beauty.

“Beauty!” he said. He was afraid he did not understand beauty apart from human beings.

So they glared into the empty garden where the lights were swaying, and one cat hesitating in the middle, its paw lifted.

Beauty apart from human beings? What did he mean by that? she demanded suddenly.

Well this: getting more and more wrought up, he told her the story of the Brunners and the clock, not concealing his pride in it. That was beautiful, he said.

She had no words to specify the horror his story roused in her. First his conceit; then his indecency in talking about human feelings; it was a blasphemy; no one in the whole world ought to tell a story to prove that they had loved their kind. Yet as he told it—how the old man had stood up and made his speech—tears came into her eyes; ah, if any one had ever said that to her! but then again, she felt how it was just this that condemned humanity for ever; never would they reach beyond affecting scenes with clocks; Brunners making speeches to Prickett Ellises, and the Prickett Ellises would always say how they had loved their kind; they would always be lazy, compromising, and afraid of beauty. Hence sprang revolutions; from laziness and fear and this love of affecting scenes. Still this man got pleasure from his Brunners; and she was condemned to suffer for ever and ever from her poor poor women shut out from squares. So they sat silent. Both were very unhappy. For Prickett Ellis was not in the least solaced by what he had said; instead of picking her thorn out he had rubbed it in; his happiness of the morning had been ruined. Miss O’Keefe was muddled and annoyed; she was muddy instead of clear.

“I am afraid I am one of those very ordinary people,” he said, getting up, “who love their kind.”

Upon which Miss O’Keefe almost shouted: “So do I.”

Hating each other, hating the whole houseful of people who had given them this painful, this disillusioning evening, these two lovers of their kind got up, and without a word, parted for ever.

[early 1925]

[]

The Searchlight.

The mansion of the eighteenth century Earl had been changed in the twentieth century into a Club. And it was pleasant, after dining in the great room with the pillars and the chandeliers under a glare of light to go out on to the balcony overlooking the Park. The trees were in full leaf, and had there been a moon, one could have seen the pink and cream coloured cockades on the chestnut trees. But it was a moonless night; very warm, after a fine summer’s day.

Mr. and Mrs. Ivimey’s party were drinking coffee and smoking on the balcony. As if to relieve them from the need of talking, to entertain them without any effort on their part, rods of light wheeled across the sky. It was peace then; the air force was practising; searching for enemy aircraft in the sky. After pausing to prod some suspected spot, the light wheeled, like the wings of a windmill, or again like the antennæ of some prodigious insect and revealed here a cadaverous stone front; here a chestnut tree with all its blossoms riding; and then suddenly the light struck straight at the balcony, and for a second a bright disc shone—perhaps it was a mirror in a ladies’ hand-bag.

“Look!” Mrs. Ivimey exclaimed.

The light passed. They were in darkness again.

“You’ll never guess what that made me see!” she added. Naturally, they guessed.

“No, no, no,” she protested. Nobody could guess; only she knew; only she could know, because she was the great-grand-daughter of the man himself. He had told her the story. What story? If they liked, she would try to tell it. There was still time before the play.

“But where do I begin?” she pondered. “In the year 1820? … It must have been about then that my great-grandfather was a boy. I’m not young myself”—no, but she was very well set up and handsome—“and he was a very old man when I was a child—when he told me the story. A very handsome old man, with a shock of white hair, and blue eyes. He must have been a beautiful boy. But queer…. That was only natural,” she explained, “seeing how they lived. The name was Comber. They’d come down in the world. They’d been gentlefolk; they’d owned land up in Yorkshire. But when he was a boy only the tower was left. The house was nothing but a little farmhouse, standing in the middle of fields. We saw it ten years ago and went over it. We had to leave the car and walk across the fields. There isn’t any road to the house. It stands all alone, the grass grows right up to the gate … there were chickens pecking about, running in and out of the rooms. All gone to rack and ruin. I remember a stone fell from the tower suddenly.” She paused. “There they lived,” she went on, “the old man, the woman and the boy. She wasn’t his wife, or the boy’s mother. She was just a farm hand, a girl the old man had taken to live with him when his wife died. Another reason perhaps why nobody visited them—why the whole place was gone to rack and ruin. But I remember a coat of arms over the door; and books, old books, gone mouldy. He taught himself all he knew from books. He read and read, he told me, old books, books with maps hanging out from the pages. He dragged them up to the top of the tower—the rope’s still there and the broken steps. There’s a chair still in the window with the bottom fallen out; and the window swinging open, and the panes broken, and a view for miles and miles across the moors.”

She paused as if she were up in the tower looking from the window that swung open.

“But we couldn’t,” she said, “find the telescope.” In the dining-room behind them the clatter of plates grew louder. But Mrs. Ivimey, on the balcony, seemed puzzled, because she could not find the telescope.

“Why a telescope?” someone asked her.

“Why? Because if there hadn’t been a telescope,” she laughed, “I shouldn’t be sitting here now.”

And certainly she was sitting there now, a well set-up, middle-aged woman, with something blue over her shoulders.

“It must have been there,” she resumed, “because, he told me, every night when the old people had gone to bed he sat at the window looking through the telescope at the stars. Jupiter, Aldebaran, Cassiopeia.” She waved her hand at the stars that were beginning to show over the trees. It was growing darker. And the searchlight seemed brighter, sweeping across the sky, pausing here and there to stare at the stars.

“There they were,” she went on, “the stars. And he asked himself, my great-grandfather—that boy: ‘What are they? Why are they? And who am I?’ as one does, sitting alone, with no one to talk to, looking at the stars.”

She was silent. They all looked at the stars that were coming out in the darkness over the trees. The stars seemed very permanent, very unchanging. The roar of London sank away. A hundred years seemed nothing. They felt that the boy was looking at the stars with them. They seemed to be with him, in the tower, looking out over the moors at the stars.

Then a voice behind them said:

“Right you are. Friday.”

They all turned, shifted, felt dropped down on to the balcony again.

“Ah, but there was nobody to say that to him,” she murmured. The couple rose and walked away.

“He was alone,” she resumed. “It was a fine summer’s day. A June day. One of those perfect summer days when everything seems to stand still in the heat. There were the chickens pecking in the farm-yard; the old horse stamping in the stable; the old man dozing over his glass. The woman scouring pails in the scullery. Perhaps a stone fell from the tower. It seemed as if the day would never end. And he had no one to talk to—nothing whatever to do. The whole world stretched before him. The moor rising and falling; the sky meeting the moor; green and blue, green and blue, for ever and ever.”

In the half light, they could see that Mrs. Ivimey was leaning over the balcony, with her chin propped on her hands, as if she were looking out over the moors from the top of a tower.

“Nothing but moor and sky, moor and sky, for ever and ever,” she murmured.

Then she made a movement, as if she swung something into position.

“But what did the earth look like through the telescope?” she asked.

She made another quick little movement with her fingers as if she were twirling something.

“He focussed it,” she said. “He focussed it upon the earth. He focussed it upon a dark mass of wood upon the horizon. He focussed it so that he could see … each tree … each tree separate … and the birds … rising and falling … and a stem of smoke … there … in the midst of the trees…. And then … lower … lower … (she lowered her eyes) … there was a house … a house among the trees … a farm-house … every brick showed … and the tubs on either side of the door … with flowers in them blue, pink, hydrangeas, perhaps….” She paused … “And then a girl came out of the house … wearing something blue upon her head … and stood there … feeding birds … pigeons … they came fluttering round her…. And then … look…. A man…. A man! He came round the corner. He seized her in his arms! They kissed … they kissed.”

Mrs. Ivimey opened her arms and closed them as if she were kissing someone.

“It was the first time he had seen a man kiss a woman—in his telescope—miles and miles away across the moors!”

She thrust something from her—the telescope presumably. She sat upright.

“So he ran down the stairs. He ran through the fields. He ran down lanes, out upon the high road, through woods. He ran for miles and miles, and just when the stars were showing above the trees he reached the house … covered with dust, streaming with sweat….”

She stopped, as if she saw him.

“And then, and then … what did he do then? What did he say? And the girl …” they pressed her.

A shaft of light fell upon Mrs. Ivimey as if someone had focussed the lens of a telescope upon her. (It was the air force, looking for enemy air craft.) She had risen. She had something blue on her head. She had raised her hand, as if she stood in a doorway, amazed.

“Oh the girl…. She was my——” she hesitated, as if she were about to say “myself.” But she remembered; and corrected herself. “She was my great-grandmother,” she said.

She turned to look for her cloak. It was on a chair behind her.

“But tell us—what about the other man, the man who came round the corner?” they asked.

“That man? Oh, that man,” Mrs. Ivimey murmured, stooping to fumble with her cloak (the searchlight had left the balcony), “he, I suppose, vanished.”

“The light,” she added, gathering her things about her, “only falls here and there.”

The searchlight had passed on. It was now focussed on the plain expanse of Buckingham Palace. And it was time they went on to the play.

[1929/39/41]

[]

The Legacy.

“For Sissy Miller.” Gilbert Clandon, taking up the pearl brooch that lay among a litter of rings and brooches on a little table in his wife’s drawing-room, read the inscription: “For Sissy Miller, with my love.”

It was like Angela to have remembered even Sissy Miller, her secretary. Yet how strange it was, Gilbert Clandon thought once more, that she had left everything in such order—a little gift of some sort for every one of her friends. It was as if she had foreseen her death. Yet she had been in perfect health when she left the house that morning, six weeks ago; when she stepped off the kerb in Piccadilly and the car had killed her.

He was waiting for Sissy Miller. He had asked her to come; he owed her, he felt, after all the years she had been with them, this token of consideration. Yes, he went on, as he sat there waiting, it was strange that Angela had left everything in such order. Every friend had been left some little token of her affection. Every ring, every necklace, every little Chinese box—she had a passion for little boxes—had a name on it. And each had some memory for him. This he had given her; this—the enamel dolphin with the ruby eyes—she had pounced upon one day in a back street in Venice. He could remember her little cry of delight. To him, of course, she had left nothing in particular, unless it were her diary. Fifteen little volumes, bound in green leather, stood behind him on her writing table. Ever since they were married, she had kept a diary. Some of their very few—he could not call them quarrels, say tiffs—had been about that diary. When he came in and found her writing, she always shut it or put her hand over it. “No, no, no,” he could hear her say, “After I’m dead—perhaps.” So she had left it him, as her legacy. It was the only thing they had not shared when she was alive. But he had always taken it for granted that she would outlive him. If only she had stopped one moment, and had thought what she was doing, she would be alive now. But she had stepped straight off the kerb, the driver of the car had said at the inquest. She had given him no chance to pull up…. Here the sound of voices in the hall interrupted him.

“Miss Miller, Sir,” said the maid.

She came in. He had never seen her alone in his life, nor, of course, in tears. She was terribly distressed, and no wonder. Angela had been much more to her than an employer. She had been a friend. To himself, he thought, as he pushed a chair for her and asked her to sit down, she was scarcely distinguishable from any other woman of her kind. There were thousands of Sissy Millers—drab little women in black carrying attaché cases. But Angela, with her genius for sympathy, had discovered all sorts of qualities in Sissy Miller. She was the soul of discretion; so silent; so trustworthy, one could tell her anything, and so on.

Miss Miller could not speak at first. She sat there dabbing her eyes with her pocket handkerchief. Then she made an effort.

“Pardon me, Mr. Clandon,” she said.

He murmured. Of course he understood. It was only natural. He could guess what his wife had meant to her.

“I’ve been so happy here,” she said, looking round. Her eyes rested on the writing table behind him. It was here they had worked—she and Angela. For Angela had her share of the duties that fall to the lot of a prominent politician’s wife. She had been the greatest help to him in his career. He had often seen her and Sissy sitting at that table—Sissy at the typewriter, taking down letters from her dictation. No doubt Miss Miller was thinking of that, too. Now all he had to do was to give her the brooch his wife had left her. A rather incongruous gift it seemed. It might have been better to have left her a sum of money, or even the typewriter. But there it was—“For Sissy Miller, with my love.” And, taking the brooch, he gave it her with the little speech that he had prepared. He knew, he said, that she would value it. His wife had often worn it…. And she replied, as she took it almost as if she too had prepared a speech, that it would always be a treasured possession…. She had, he supposed, other clothes upon which a pearl brooch would not look quite so incongruous. She was wearing the little black coat and skirt that seemed the uniform of her profession. Then he remembered—she was in mourning, of course. She, too, had had her tragedy—a brother, to whom she was devoted, had died only a week or two before Angela. In some accident was it? He could not remember—only Angela telling him. Angela, with her genius for sympathy, had been terribly upset. Meanwhile Sissy Miller had risen. She was putting on her gloves. Evidently she felt that she ought not to intrude. But he could not let her go without saying something about her future. What were her plans? Was there any way in which he could help her?

She was gazing at the table, where she had sat at her typewriter, where the diary lay. And, lost in her memories of Angela, she did not at once answer his suggestion that he should help her. She seemed for a moment not to understand. So he repeated:

“What are your plans, Miss Miller?”

“My plans? Oh, that’s all right, Mr. Clandon,” she exclaimed. “Please don’t bother yourself about me.”

He took her to mean that she was in no need of financial assistance. It would be better, he realized, to make any suggestion of that kind in a letter. All he could do now was to say as he pressed her hand, “Remember, Miss Miller, if there’s any way in which I can help you, it will be a pleasure….” Then he opened the door. For a moment, on the threshold, as if a sudden thought had struck her, she stopped.

“Mr. Clandon,” she said, looking straight at him for the first time, and for the first time he was struck by the expression, sympathetic yet searching, in her eyes. “If at any time,” she continued, “there’s anything I can do to help you, remember, I shall feel it, for your wife’s sake, a pleasure….”

With that she was gone. Her words and the look that went with them were unexpected. It was almost as if she believed, or hoped, that he would need her. A curious, perhaps a fantastic idea occurred to him as he returned to his chair. Could it be, that during all those years when he had scarcely noticed her, she, as the novelists say, had entertained a passion for him? He caught his own reflection in the glass as he passed. He was over fifty; but he could not help admitting that he was still, as the looking-glass showed him, a very distinguished-looking man.

“Poor Sissy Miller!” he said, half laughing. How he would have liked to share that joke with his wife! He turned instinctively to her diary. “Gilbert,” he read, opening it at random, “looked so wonderful….” It was as if she had answered his question. Of course, she seemed to say, you’re very attractive to women. Of course Sissy Miller felt that too. He read on. “How proud I am to be his wife!” And he had always been very proud to be her husband. How often, when they dined out somewhere, he had looked at her across the table and said to himself, She is the loveliest woman here! He read on. That first year he had been standing for Parliament. They had toured his constituency. “When Gilbert sat down the applause was terrific. The whole audience rose and sang: ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow.’ I was quite overcome.” He remembered that, too. She had been sitting on the platform beside him. He could still see the glance she cast at him, and how she had tears in her eyes. And then? He turned the pages. They had gone to Venice. He recalled that happy holiday after the election. “We had ices at Florians.” He smiled—she was still such a child; she loved ices. “Gilbert gave me a most interesting account of the history of Venice. He told me that the Doges …” she had written it all out in her schoolgirl hand. One of the delights of travelling with Angela had been that she was so eager to learn. She was so terribly ignorant, she used to say, as if that were not one of her charms. And then—he opened the next volume—they had come back to London. “I was so anxious to make a good impression. I wore my wedding dress.” He could see her now sitting next old Sir Edward; and making a conquest of that formidable old man, his chief. He read on rapidly, filling in scene after scene from her scrappy fragments. “Dined at the House of Commons…. To an evening party at the Lovegroves. Did I realize my responsibility, Lady L. asked me, as Gilbert’s wife?” Then, as the years passed—he took another volume from the writing table—he had become more and more absorbed in his work. And she, of course, was more often alone…. It had been a great grief to her, apparently, that they had had no children. “How I wish,” one entry read, “that Gilbert had a son!” Oddly enough he had never much regretted that himself. Life had been so full, so rich as it was. That year he had been given a minor post in the government. A minor post only, but her comment was: “I am quite certain now that he will be Prime Minister!” Well, if things had gone differently, it might have been so. He paused here to speculate upon what might have been. Politics was a gamble, he reflected; but the game wasn’t over yet. Not at fifty. He cast his eyes rapidly over more pages, full of the little trifles, the insignificant, happy, daily trifles that had made up her life.

He took up another volume and opened it at random. “What a coward I am! I let the chance slip again. But it seemed selfish to bother him with my own affairs, when he has so much to think about. And we so seldom have an evening alone.” What was the meaning of that? Oh, here was the explanation—it referred to her work in the East End. “I plucked up courage and talked to Gilbert at last. He was so kind, so good. He made no objection.” He remembered that conversation. She had told him that she felt so idle, so useless. She wished to have some work of her own. She wanted to do something—she had blushed so prettily, he remembered, as she said it, sitting in that very chair—to help others. He had bantered her a little. Hadn’t she enough to do looking after him, after her home? Still, if it amused her, of course he had no objection. What was it? Some district? Some committee? Only she must promise not to make herself ill. So it seemed that every Wednesday she went to Whitechapel. He remembered how he hated the clothes she wore on those occasions. But she had taken it very seriously, it seemed. The diary was full of references like this: “Saw Mrs. Jones…. She has ten children…. Husband lost his arm in an accident…. Did my best to find a job for Lily.” He skipped on. His own name occurred less frequently. His interest slackened. Some of the entries conveyed nothing to him. For example: “Had a heated argument about socialism with B. M.” Who was B. M.? He could not fill in the initials; some woman, he supposed, that she had met on one of her committees. “B. M. made a violent attack upon the upper classes…. I walked back after the meeting with B. M. and tried to convince him. But he is so narrow-minded.” So B. M. was a man—no doubt one of those “intellectuals,” as they call themselves, who are so violent, as Angela said, and so narrow-minded. She had invited him to come and see her apparently. “B. M. came to dinner. He shook hands with Minnie!” That note of exclamation gave another twist to his mental picture. B. M., it seemed, wasn’t used to parlourmaids; he had shaken hands with Minnie. Presumably he was one of those tame working men who air their views in ladies’ drawing-rooms. Gilbert knew the type, and had no liking for this particular specimen, whoever B. M. might be. Here he was again. “Went with B. M. to the Tower of London…. He said revolution is bound to come…. He said we live in a Fool’s Paradise.” That was just the kind of thing B. M. would say—Gilbert could hear him. He could also see him quite distinctly—a stubby little man, with a rough beard, red tie, dressed as they always did in tweeds, who had never done an honest day’s work in his life. Surely Angela had the sense to see through him? He read on. “B. M. said some very disagreeable things about ——.” The name was carefully scratched out. “I told him I would not listen to any more abuse of ——” Again the name was obliterated. Could it have been his own name? Was that why Angela covered the page so quickly when he came in? The thought added to his growing dislike of B. M. He had had the impertinence to discuss him in this very room. Why had Angela never told him? It was very unlike her to conceal anything; she had been the soul of candour. He turned the pages, picking out every reference to B. M. “B. M. told me the story of his childhood. His mother went out charring…. When I think of it, I can hardly bear to go on living in such luxury…. Three guineas for one hat!” If only she had discussed the matter with him, instead of puzzling her poor little head about questions that were much too difficult for her to understand! He had lent her books. Karl Marx, The Coming Revolution. The initials B. M., B. M., B. M., recurred repeatedly. But why never the full name? There was an informality, an intimacy in the use of initials that was very unlike Angela. Had she called him B. M. to his face? He read on. “B. M. came unexpectedly after dinner. Luckily, I was alone.” That was only a year ago. “Luckily”—why luckily?—“I was alone.” Where had he been that night? He checked the date in his engagement book. It had been the night of the Mansion House dinner. And B. M. and Angela had spent the evening alone! He tried to recall that evening. Was she waiting up for him when he came back? Had the room looked just as usual? Were there glasses on the table? Were the chairs drawn close together? He could remember nothing—nothing whatever, nothing except his own speech at the Mansion House dinner. It became more and more inexplicable to him—the whole situation: his wife receiving an unknown man alone. Perhaps the next volume would explain. Hastily he reached for the last of the diaries—the one she had left unfinished when she died. There, on the very first page, was that cursed fellow again. “Dined alone with B. M…. He became very agitated. He said it was time we understood each other…. I tried to make him listen. But he would not. He threatened that if I did not …” the rest of the page was scored over. She had written “Egypt. Egypt. Egypt,” over the whole page. He could not make out a single word; but there could be only one interpretation: the scoundrel had asked her to become his mistress. Alone in his room! The blood rushed to Gilbert Clandon’s face. He turned the pages rapidly. What had been her answer? Initials had ceased. It was simply “he” now. “He came again. I told him I could not come to any decision…. I implored him to leave me.” He had forced himself upon her in this very house. But why hadn’t she told him? How could she have hesitated for an instant? Then: “I wrote him a letter.” Then pages were left blank. Then there was this: “No answer to my letter.” Then more blank pages; and then this: “He has done what he threatened.” After that—what came after that? He turned page after page. All were blank. But there, on the very day before her death, was this entry: “Have I the courage to do it too?” That was the end.

Gilbert Clandon let the book slide to the floor. He could see her in front of him. She was standing on the kerb in Piccadilly. Her eyes stared; her fists were clenched. Here came the car….

He could not bear it. He must know the truth. He strode to the telephone.

“Miss Miller!” There was silence. Then he heard someone moving in the room.

“Sissy Miller speaking”—her voice at last answered him.

“Who,” he thundered, “is B. M.?”

He could hear the cheap clock ticking on her mantelpiece; then a long drawn sigh. Then at last she said:

“He was my brother.”

He was her brother; her brother who had killed himself. “Is there,” he heard Sissy Miller asking, “anything that I can explain?”

“Nothing!” he cried. “Nothing!”

He had received his legacy. She had told him the truth. She had stepped off the kerb to rejoin her lover. She had stepped off the kerb to escape from him.

[October 1939]

[]

Together and Apart.

Mrs. Dalloway introduced them, saying you will like him. The conversation began some minutes before anything was said, for both Mr. Serle and Miss Anning looked at the sky and in both of their minds the sky went on pouring its meaning though very differently, until the presence of Mr. Serle by her side became so distinct to Miss Anning that she could not see the sky, simply, itself, any more, but the sky shored up by the tall body, dark eyes, grey hair, clasped hands, the stern melancholy (but she had been told “falsely melancholy”) face of Roderick Serle, and, knowing how foolish it was, she yet felt impelled to say:

“What a beautiful night!”

Foolish! Idiotically foolish! But if one mayn’t be foolish at the age of forty in the presence of the sky, which makes the wisest imbecile—mere wisps of straw—she and Mr. Serle atoms, motes, standing there at Mrs. Dalloway’s window, and their lives, seen by moonlight, as long as an insect’s and no more important.

“Well!” said Miss Anning, patting the sofa cushion emphatically. And down he sat beside her. Was he “falsely melancholy,” as they said? Prompted by the sky, which seemed to make it all a little futile—what they said, what they did—she said something perfectly commonplace again:

“There was a Miss Serle who lived at Canterbury when I was a girl there.”

With the sky in his mind, all the tombs of his ancestors immediately appeared to Mr. Serle in a blue romantic light, and his eyes expanding and darkening, he said: “Yes.

“We are originally a Norman family, who came over with the Conqueror. That is a Richard Serle buried in the Cathedral. He was a knight of the garter.”

Miss Anning felt that she had struck accidentally the true man, upon whom the false man was built. Under the influence of the moon (the moon which symbolized man to her, she could see it through a chink of the curtain, and she took dips of the moon) she was capable of saying almost anything and she settled in to disinter the true man who was buried under the false, saying to herself: “On, Stanley, on”—which was a watchword of hers, a secret spur, or scourge such as middle-aged people often make to flagellate some inveterate vice, hers being a deplorable timidity, or rather indolence, for it was not so much that she lacked courage, but lacked energy, especially in talking to men, who frightened her rather, and so often her talks petered out into dull commonplaces, and she had very few men friends—very few intimate friends at all, she thought, but after all, did she want them? No. She had Sarah, Arthur, the cottage, the chow and, of course that, she thought, dipping herself, sousing herself, even as she sat on the sofa beside Mr. Serle, in that, in the sense she had coming home of something collected there, a cluster of miracles, which she could not believe other people had (since it was she only who had Arthur, Sarah, the cottage, and the chow), but she soused herself again in the deep satisfactory possession, feeling that what with this and the moon (music that was, the moon), she could afford to leave this man and that pride of his in the Serles buried. No! That was the danger—she must not sink into torpidity—not at her age. “On, Stanley, on,” she said to herself, and asked him:

“Do you know Canterbury yourself?”

Did he know Canterbury! Mr. Serle smiled, thinking how absurd a question it was—how little she knew, this nice quiet woman who played some instrument and seemed intelligent and had good eyes, and was wearing a very nice old necklace—knew what it meant. To be asked if he knew Canterbury. When the best years of his life, all his memories, things he had never been able to tell anybody, but had tried to write—ah, had tried to write (and he sighed) all had centred in Canterbury; it made him laugh.

His sigh and then his laugh, his melancholy and his humour, made people like him, and he knew it, and yet being liked had not made up for the disappointment, and if he sponged on the liking people had for him (paying long calls on sympathetic ladies, long, long calls), it was half bitterly, for he had never done a tenth part of what he could have done, and had dreamed of doing, as a boy in Canterbury. With a stranger he felt a renewal of hope because they could not say that he had not done what he had promised, and yielding to his charm would give him a fresh start—at fifty! She had touched the spring. Fields and flowers and grey buildings dripped down into his mind, formed silver drops on the gaunt, dark walls of his mind and dripped down. With such an image his poems often began. He felt the desire to make images now, sitting by this quiet woman.

“Yes, I know Canterbury,” he said, reminiscently, sentimentally, inviting, Miss Anning felt, discreet questions, and that was what made him interesting to so many people, and it was this extraordinary facility and responsiveness to talk on his part that had been his undoing, so he thought often, taking his studs out and putting his keys and small change on the dressing-table after one of these parties (and he went out sometimes almost every night in the season), and, going down to breakfast, becoming quite different, grumpy, unpleasant at breakfast to his wife, who was an invalid, and never went out, but had old friends to see her sometimes, women friends for the most part, interested in Indian philosophy and different cures and different doctors, which Roderick Serle snubbed off by some caustic remark too clever for her to meet, except by gentle expostulations and a tear or two—he had failed, he often thought, because he could not cut himself off utterly from society and the company of women, which was so necessary to him, and write. He had involved himself too deep in life—and here he would cross his knees (all his movements were a little unconventional and distinguished) and not blame himself, but put the blame off upon the richness of his nature, which he compared favourably with Wordsworth’s, for example, and, since he had given so much to people, he felt, resting his head on his hands, they in their turn should help him, and this was the prelude, tremulous, fascinating, exciting, to talk; and images bubbled up in his mind.

“She’s like a fruit tree—like a flowering cherry tree,” he said, looking at a youngish woman with fine white hair. It was a nice sort of image, Ruth Anning thought—rather nice, yet she did not feel sure that she liked this distinguished, melancholy man with his gestures; and it’s odd, she thought, how one’s feelings are influenced. She did not like him, though she rather liked that comparison of his of a woman to a cherry tree. Fibres of her were floated capriciously this way and that, like the tentacles of a sea anemone, now thrilled, now snubbed, and her brain, miles away, cool and distant, up in the air, received messages which it would sum up in time so that, when people talked about Roderick Serle (and he was a bit of a figure) she would say unhesitatingly: “I like him,” or “I don’t like him,” and her opinion would be made up for ever. An odd thought; a solemn thought; throwing a green light on what human fellowship consisted of.

“It’s odd that you should know Canterbury,” said Mr. Serle. “It’s always a shock,” he went on (the white-haired lady having passed), “when one meets someone” (they had never met before), “by chance, as it were, who touches the fringe of what has meant a great deal to oneself, touches accidentally, for I suppose Canterbury was nothing but a nice old town to you. So you stayed there one summer with an aunt?” (That was all Ruth Anning was going to tell him about her visit to Canterbury.) “And you saw the sights and went away and never thought of it again.”

Let him think so; not liking him, she wanted him to run away with an absurd idea of her. For really, her three months in Canterbury had been amazing. She remembered to the last detail, though it was merely a chance visit, going to see Miss Charlotte Serle, an acquaintance of her aunt’s. Even now she could repeat Miss Serle’s very words about the thunder. “Whenever I wake, or hear thunder in the night, I think ‘Someone has been killed’.” And she could see the hard, hairy, diamond-patterned carpet, and the twinkling, suffused, brown eyes of the elderly lady, holding the teacup out unfilled, while she said that about the thunder. And always she saw Canterbury, all thundercloud and livid apple blossom, and the long grey backs of the buildings.

The thunder roused her from her plethoric middle-aged swoon of indifference; “On, Stanley, on,” she said to herself; that is, this man shall not glide away from me, like everybody else, on this false assumption; I will tell him the truth.

“I loved Canterbury,” she said.

He kindled instantly. It was his gift, his fault, his destiny.

“Loved it,” he repeated. “I can see that you did.”

Her tentacles sent back the message that Roderick Serle was nice.

Their eyes met; collided rather, for each felt that behind the eyes the secluded being, who sits in darkness while his shallow agile companion does all the tumbling and beckoning, and keeps the show going, suddenly stood erect; flung off his cloak; confronted the other. It was alarming; it was terrific. They were elderly and burnished into a glowing smoothness, so that Roderick Serle would go, perhaps to a dozen parties in a season, and feel nothing out of the common, or only sentimental regrets, and the desire for pretty images—like this of the flowering cherry tree—and all the time there stagnated in him unstirred a sort of superiority to his company, a sense of untapped resources, which sent him back home dissatisfied with life, with himself, yawning, empty, capricious. But now, quite suddenly, like a white bolt in a mist (but this image forged itself with the inevitability of lightning and loomed up), there it had happened; the old ecstasy of life; its invincible assault, for it was unpleasant, at the same time that it rejoiced and rejuvenated and filled the veins and nerves with threads of ice and fire; it was terrifying. “Canterbury twenty years ago,” said Miss Anning, as one lays a shade over an intense light, or covers some burning peach with a green leaf, for it is too strong, too ripe, too full.

Sometimes she wished she had married. Sometimes the cool peace of middle life, with its automatic devices for shielding mind and body from bruises, seemed to her, compared with the thunder and the livid apple-blossom of Canterbury, base. She could imagine something different, more like lightning, more intense. She could imagine some physical sensation. She could imagine——

And, strangely enough, for she had never seen him before, her senses, those tentacles which were thrilled and snubbed, now sent no more messages, now lay quiescent, as if she and Mr. Serle knew each other so perfectly, were, in fact, so closely united that they had only to float side by side down this stream.

Of all things, nothing is so strange as human intercourse, she thought, because of its changes, its extraordinary irrationality, her dislike being now nothing short of the most intense and rapturous love, but directly the word “love” occurred to her, she rejected it, thinking again how obscure the mind was, with its very few words for all these astonishing perceptions, these alternations of pain and pleasure. For how did one name this. That is what she felt now, the withdrawal of human affection, Serle’s disappearance, and the instant need they were both under to cover up what was so desolating and degrading to human nature that everyone tried to bury it decently from sight—this withdrawal, this violation of trust, and, seeking some decent acknowledged and accepted burial form, she said:

“Of course, whatever they may do, they can’t spoil Canterbury.”

He smiled; he accepted it; he crossed his knees the other way about. She did her part; he his. So things came to an end. And over them both came instantly that paralysing blankness of feeling, when nothing bursts from the mind, when its walls appear like slate; when vacancy almost hurts, and the eyes petrified and fixed see the same spot—a pattern, a coal scuttle—with an exactness which is terrifying, since no emotion, no idea, no impression of any kind comes to change it, to modify it, to embellish it, since the fountains of feeling seem sealed and as the mind turns rigid, so does the body; stark, statuesque, so that neither Mr. Serle nor Miss Anning could move or speak, and they felt as if an enchanter had freed them, and spring flushed every vein with streams of life, when Mira Cartwright, tapping Mr. Serle archly on the shoulder, said:

“I saw you at the Meistersinger, and you cut me. Villain,” said Miss Cartwright, “you don’t deserve that I should ever speak to you again.”

And they could separate.

[early 1925]

[]

A Summing Up.

Since it had grown hot and crowded indoors, since there could be no danger on a night like this of damp, since the Chinese lanterns seemed hung like red and green fruit in the depths of an enchanted forest, Mr. Bertram Pritchard led Mrs. Latham into the garden.

The open air and the sense of being out of doors bewildered Sasha Latham, the tall, handsome, rather indolent looking lady, whose majesty of presence was so great that people never credited her with feeling perfectly inadequate and gauche when she had to say something at a party. But so it was; and she was glad that she was with Bertram, who could be trusted, even out of doors, to talk without stopping. Written down what he said would be incredible—not only was each thing he said in itself insignificant, but there was no connection between the different remarks. Indeed, if one had taken a pencil and written down his very words—and one night of his talk would have filled a whole book—no one could doubt, reading them, that the poor man was intellectually deficient. This was far from the case, for Mr. Pritchard was an esteemed civil servant and a Companion of the Bath; but what was even stranger was that he was almost invariably liked. There was a sound in his voice, some accent or emphasis, some lustre in the incongruity of his ideas, some emanation from his round, chubby brown face and robin redbreast’s figure, something immaterial, and unseizable, which existed and flourished and made itself felt independently of his words, indeed, often in opposition to them. Thus Sasha Latham would be thinking while he chattered on about his tour in Devonshire, about inns and landladies, about Eddie and Freddie, about cows and night travelling, about cream and stars, about continental railways and Bradshaw, catching cod, catching cold, influenza, rheumatism and Keats—she was thinking of him in the abstract as a person whose existence was good, creating him as he spoke in the guise that was different from what he said, and was certainly the true Bertram Pritchard, even though one could not prove it. How could one prove that he was a loyal friend and very sympathetic and—but here, as so often happened, talking to Bertram Pritchard, she forgot his existence and began to think of something else.

It was the night she thought of, hitching herself together in some way, taking a look up into the sky. It was the country she smelt suddenly, the sombre stillness of fields under the stars, but here, in Mrs. Dalloway’s back garden, in Westminster, the beauty, country born and bred as she was, thrilled her because of the contrast presumably; there the smell of hay in the air and behind her the rooms full of people. She walked with Bertram; she walked rather like a stag, with a little give of the ankles, fanning herself, majestic, silent, with all her senses roused, her ears pricked, snuffing the air, as if she had been some wild, but perfectly controlled creature taking its pleasure by night.

This, she thought, is the greatest of marvels; the supreme achievement of the human race. Where there were osier beds and coracles paddling through a swamp, there is this; and she thought of the dry, thick, well built house, stored with valuables, humming with people coming close to each other, going away from each other, exchanging their views, stimulating each other. And Clarissa Dalloway had made it open in the wastes of the night, had laid paving stones over the bog, and, when they came to the end of the garden (it was in fact extremely small), and she and Bertram sat down on deck chairs, she looked at the house veneratingly, enthusiastically, as if a golden shaft ran through her and tears formed on it and fell in profound thanksgiving. Shy though she was and almost incapable when suddenly presented to someone of saying anything, fundamentally humble, she cherished a profound admiration for other people. To be them would be marvellous, but she was condemned to be herself and could only in this silent enthusiastic way, sitting outside in a garden, applaud the society of humanity from which she was excluded. Tags of poetry in praise of them rose to her lips; they were adorable and good, above all courageous, triumphers over night and fens, the survivors, the company of adventurers who, set about with dangers, sail on.

By some malice of fate she was unable to join, but she could sit and praise while Betram [Bertram] chattered on, he being among the voyagers, as cabin boy or common seaman—someone who ran up masts, gaily whistling. Thinking thus, the branch of some tree in front of her became soaked and steeped in her admiration for the people of the house; dripped gold; or stood sentinel erect. It was part of the gallant and carousing company—a mast from which the flag streamed. There was a barrel of some kind against the wall, and this, too, she endowed.

Suddenly Bertram, who was restless physically, wanted to explore the grounds, and, jumping on to a heap of bricks he peered over the garden wall. Sasha peered over too. She saw a bucket or perhaps a boot. In a second the illusion vanished. There was London again; the vast inattentive impersonal world; motor omnibuses; affairs; lights before public houses; and yawning policemen.

Having satisfied his curiosity, and replenished, by a moment’s silence, his bubbling fountains of talk, Bertram invited Mr. and Mrs. Somebody to sit with them, pulling up two more chairs. There they sat again, looking at the same house, the same tree, the same barrel; only having looked over the wall and had a glimpse of the bucket, or rather of London going its ways unconcernedly, Sasha could no longer spray over the world that cloud of gold. Bertram talked and the somebodies—for the life of her she could not remember if they were called Wallace or Freeman—answered, and all their words passed through a thin haze of gold and fell into prosaic daylight. She looked at the dry, thick Queen Anne House; she did her best to remember what she had read at school about the Isle of Thorney and men in coracles, oysters, and wild duck and mists, but it seemed to her a logical affair of drains and carpenters, and this party—nothing but people in evening dress.

Then she asked herself, which view is the true one? She could see the bucket and the house half lit up, half unlit.

She asked this question of that somebody whom, in her humble way, she had composed out of the wisdom and power of other people. The answer came often by accident—she had known her old spaniel answer by wagging his tail.

Now the tree, denuded of its gilt and majesty, seemed to supply her with an answer; became a field tree—the only one in a marsh. She had often seen it; seen the red-flushed clouds between its branches, or the moon split up, darting irregular flashes of silver. But what answer? Well that the soul—for she was conscious of a movement in her of some creature beating its way about her and trying to escape which momentarily she called the soul—is by nature unmated, a widow bird; a bird perched aloof on that tree.

But then Bertram, putting his arm through hers in his familiar way, for he had known her all her life, remarked that they were not doing their duty and must go in.

At that moment, in some back street or public house, the usual terrible sexless, inarticulate voice rang out; a shriek, a cry. And the widow bird, startled, flew away, describing wider and wider circles until it became (what she called her soul) remote as a crow which has been startled up into the air by a stone thrown at it.

[ca. 1925]

the end

[]

THE
MOMENT,
and other essays

by
Virginia Woolf

published
1947
by
The Hogarth Press

the moment

Editorial Note.

The Moment: Summer’s Night.

“The Faery Queen”.

Congreve’s Comedies.

Sterne’s Ghost.

Mrs. Thrale.

Sir Walter Scott, I. Gas at Abbotsford.

Sir Walter Scott, II. “The Antiquary”.

Lockhart’s Criticism.

“David Copperfield”.

Lewis Carroll.

Edmund Gosse.

Notes on D. H. Lawrence.

Roger Fry.

The Art of Fiction.

American Fiction.

The Leaning Tower.

On Re-reading Novels.

Personalities.

Pictures.

Harriette Wilson.

Genius : R. B. Haydon.

The Enchanted Organ : Anne Thackeray.

Two Women : Emily Davies and Lady Augusta Stanley.

Ellen Terry.

To Spain.

Fishing.

The Artist and Politics.

Royalty [II].

Royalty [I].

“On Being Ill”: see On Being Ill.

[]

[The text follows the 1947 Hogarth Press edition.]

Editorial Note.

In my editorial note to The Death of the Moth I wrote that Virginia Woolf “left behind her a considerable number of essays, sketches, and short stories, some unpublished and some previously published in newspapers; there are, indeed, enough to fill three or four volumes”. Since then the short stories have been published in A Haunted House. The present volume contains a further selection of essays. I have followed the same method of selection as in The Death of the Moth, including some of all the different kinds of essay—the sketch, literary criticism, biographical, “political”—and not attempting to choose according to some scale of merit or importance. The consequence is that the standard of achievement seems to me as high in this volume as it was in The Common Reader or in The Death of the Moth, and it is the same in the essays which I have not included, but are sufficient to fill yet another volume.

Some of the essays are now published for the first time; others have appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, The Nation, the New Statesman and Nation, Time and Tide, the New York Saturday Review, New Writing. I have included two essays with the same title, Royalty; the first was commissioned, but, for obvious reasons, not published by Picture Post; the second was published in Time and Tide.

What I said with regard to the unrevised state of the essays in the editorial note to The Death of the Moth applies to the essays included in this volume. If Virginia Woolf had lived, she would have revised or rewritten nearly all of them. The essays differ considerably in their state of “finish”. All which have actually been published in newspapers have been written and rewritten and revised, though there is no doubt that the process would have continued. Some of them—e.g. On Re-reading Novels—have in fact been revised and rewritten after publication with a view to inclusion in volume form. Others, e.g. The Moment, exist only in a much earlier stage, a rather rough typescript heavily corrected in handwriting. I have printed these exactly as they were left, except for punctuation and the correction of obvious mistakes, but I have done so with some hesitation, if only because the handwriting is occasionally extremely difficult to decipher.

Leonard Woolf

The Moment: Summer’s Night.

The night was falling so that the table in the garden among the trees grew whiter and whiter; and the people round it more indistinct. An owl, blunt, obsolete looking, heavy weighted, crossed the fading sky with a black spot between its claws. The trees murmured. An aeroplane hummed like a piece of plucked wire. There was also, on the roads, the distant explosion of a motor cycle, shooting further and further away down the road. Yet what composed the present moment? If you are young, the future lies upon the present, like a piece of glass, making it tremble and quiver. If you are old, the past lies upon the present, like a thick glass, making it waver, distorting it. All the same, everybody believes that the present is something, seeks out the different elements in this situation in order to compose the truth of it, the whole of it.

To begin with: it is largely composed of visual and of sense impressions. The day was very hot. After heat, the surface of the body is opened, as if all the pores were open and everything lay exposed, not sealed and contracted, as in cold weather. The air wafts cold on the skin under one’s clothes. The soles of the feet expand in slippers after walking on hard roads. Then the sense of the light sinking back into darkness seems to be gently putting out with a damp sponge the colour in one’s own eyes. Then the leaves shiver now and again, as if a ripple of irresistible sensation ran through them, as a horse suddenly ripples its skin.

But this moment is also composed of a sense that the legs of the chair are sinking through the centre of the earth, passing through the rich garden earth; they sink, weighted down. Then the sky loses its colour perceptibly and a star here and there makes a point of light. Then changes, unseen in the day, coming in succession seem to make an order evident. One becomes aware that we are spectators and also passive participants in a pageant. And as nothing can interfere with the order, we have nothing to do but accept, and watch. Now little sparks, which are not steady, but fitful as if somebody were doubtful, come across the field. Is it time to light the lamp, the farmers’ wives are saying: can I see a little longer? The lamp sinks down; then it burns up. All doubt is over. Yes the time has come in all cottages, in all farms, to light the lamps. Thus then the moment is laced about with these weavings to and fro, these inevitable downsinkings, flights, lamp lightings.

But that is the wider circumference of the moment. Here in the centre is a knot of consciousness; a nucleus divided up into four heads, eight legs, eight arms, and four separate bodies. They are not subject to the law of the sun and the owl and the lamp. They assist it. For sometimes a hand rests on the table; sometimes a leg is thrown over a leg. Now the moment becomes shot with the extraordinary arrow which people let fly from their mouths—when they speak.

“He’ll do well with his hay.”

The words let fall this seed, but also, coming from that obscure face, and the mouth, and the hand so characteristically holding the cigarette, now hit the mind with a wad, then explode like a scent suffusing the whole dome of the mind with its incense, flavour; let fall, from their ambiguous envelope, the self-confidence of youth, but also its urgent desire, for praise, and assurance; if they were to say: “But you’re no worse looking than many—you’re no different—people don’t mark you out to laugh at you”: that he should be at once so cock-a-hoop and so ungainly makes the moment rock with laughter, and with the malice that comes from overlooking other people’s motives; and seeing what they keep hid; and so that one takes sides; he will succeed; or no he won’t; and then again, this success, will it mean my defeat; or won’t it? All this shoots through the moment, makes it quiver with malice and amusement; and the sense of watching and comparing; and the quiver meets the shore, when the owl flies out, and puts a stop to this judging, this overseeing, and with our wings spread, we too fly, take wing, with the owl, over the earth and survey the quietude of what sleeps, folded, slumbering, arm stretching in the vast dark and sucking its thumb too; the amorous and the innocent; and a sigh goes up. Could we not fly too, with broad wings and with softness; and be all one wing; all embracing, all gathering, and these boundaries, these pryings over hedge into hidden compartments of different colours be all swept into one colour by the brush of the wing; and so visit in splendour, augustly, peaks; and there lie exposed, bare, on the spine, high up, to the cold light of the moon rising, and when the moon rises, single, solitary, behold her, one, eminent over us?

Ah, yes, if we could fly, fly, fly…. Here the body is gripped; and shaken; and the throat stiffens; and the nostrils tingle; and like a rat shaken by a terrier one sneezes; and the whole universe is shaken; mountains, snows, meadows; moon; higgledly, piggledy, upside down, little splinters flying; and the head is jerked up, down. “Hay fever—what a noise!—there’s no cure. Except spending hay time on a boat. Perhaps worse than the disease, though that’s what a man did—crossing and recrossing, all the summer.”

Issuing from a white arm, a long shape, lying back, in a film of black and white, under the tree, which, down sweeping, seems a part of that curving, that flowing, the voice, with its ridicule and its sense, reveals to the shaken terrier its own insignificance. No longer part of the snow; no part of the mountain; not in the least venerable to other human beings; but ridiculous; a little accident; a thing to be laughed at; discriminated out; seen clearly cut out, sneezing, sneezing, judged and compared. Thus into the moment steals self-assertion; ah, the sneeze again; the desire to sneeze with conviction; masterfully; making oneself heard; felt; if not pitied, then somebody of importance; perhaps to break away and go. But no; the other shape has sent from its arrow another fine binding thread, “Shall I fetch my Vapex?” She, the observant, the discriminating, who keeps in mind always other instances, so that there is nothing singular in any special case—who refuses to be jumped into extravagance; and so sceptical withal; cannot believe in miracles; sees the vanity of effort there; perhaps then it would be well to try here; yet if she isolates cases from the mists of hugeness, sees what is there all the more definitely; refuses to be bamboozled; yet in this definite discrimination shows some amplitude. That is why the moment becomes harder, is intensified, diminished, begins to be stained by some expressed personal juice; with the desire to be loved, to be held close to the other shape; to put off the veil of darkness and see burning eyes.

Then a light is struck; in it appears a sunburnt face, lean, blue-eyed, and the arrow flies as the match goes out:

“He beats her every Saturday; from boredom, I should say; not drink; there’s nothing else to do.”

The moment runs like quicksilver on a sloping board into the cottage parlour; there are the tea things on the table; the hard windsor chairs; tea caddies on the shelf for ornament; the medal under a glass shade; vegetable steam curling from the pot; two children crawling on the floor; and Liz comes in and John catches her a blow on the side of her head as she slopes past him, dirty, with her hair loose and one hairpin sticking out about to fall. And she moans in a chronic animal way; and the children look up and then make a whistling noise to imitate the engine which they trail across the flags; and John sits himself down with a thump at the table and carves a hunk of bread and munches because there is nothing to be done. A steam rises from his cabbage patch. Let us do something then, something to end this horrible moment, this plausible glistening moment that reflects in its smooth sides this intolerable kitchen, this squalor; this woman moaning; and the rattle of the toy on the flags, and the man munching. Let us smash it by breaking a match. There—snap.

And then comes the low of the cows in the field; and another cow to the left answers; and all the cows seem to be moving tranquilly across the field and the owl flutes off its watery bubble. But the sun is deep below the earth. The trees are growing heavier, blacker; no order is perceptible; there is no sequence in these cries, these movements; they come from no bodies; they are cries to the left and to the right. Nothing can be seen. We can only see ourselves as outlines, cadaverous, sculpturesque. And it is more difficult for the voice to carry through this dark. The dark has stripped the fledge from the arrow—the vibrations that rise red shiver as it passes through us.

Then comes the terror, the exultation; the power to rush out unnoticed, alone; to be consumed; to be swept away to become a rider on the random wind; the tossing wind; the trampling and neighing wind; the horse with the blown-back mane; the tumbling, the foraging; he who gallops for ever, nowhither travelling, indifferent; to be part of the eyeless dark, to be rippling and streaming, to feel the glory run molten up the spine, down the limbs, making the eyes glow, burning, bright, and penetrate the buffeting waves of the wind.

“Everything’s sopping wet. It’s the dew off the grass. Time to go in.”

And then one shape heaves and surges and rises, and we pass, trailing coats, down the path towards the lighted windows, the dim glow behind the branches, and so enter the door, and the square draws its lines round us, and here is a chair, a table, glasses, knives, and thus we are boxed and housed, and will soon require a draught of soda-water and to find something to read in bed.

[written 1938/40]

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“The Faery Queen”.

The Faery Queen, it is said, has never been read to the end; no one has ever wished Paradise Lost, it is said, a word longer; and these remarks however exaggerated probably give pleasure, like a child’s laugh at a ceremony, because they express something we secretly feel and yet try to hide. Dare we then at this time of day come out with the remark that The Faery Queen is a great poem? So one might say early rising, cold bathing, abstention from wine and tobacco are good; and if one said it, a blank look would steal over the company as they made haste to agree and then to lower the tone of the conversation. Yet it is true. Here are some general observations made by one who has gone through the experience, and wishes to urge others, who may be hiding their yawns and their polite boredom, to the same experience.

The first essential is, of course, not to read The Faery Queen. Put it off as long as possible. Grind out politics; absorb science; wallow in fiction; walk about London; observe the crowds; calculate the loss of life and limb; rub shoulders with the poor in markets; buy and sell; fix the mind firmly on the financial columns of the newspapers, weather; on the crops; on the fashions. At the mere mention of chivalry shiver and snigger; detest allegory; revel in direct speech; adore all the virtues of the robust, the plain spoken; and then, when the whole being is red and brittle as sandstone in the sun, make a dash for The Faery Queen and give yourself up to it.

But reading poetry is a complex art. The mind has many layers, and the greater the poem the more of these are roused and brought into action. They seem, too, to be in order. The faculty we employ upon poetry at the first reading is sensual; the eye of the mind opens. And Spenser rouses the eye softly and brilliantly with his green trees, his pearled women, his crested and plumed knights. (Then we need to use our sympathies, not the strong passions, but the simple wish to go with our knight and his lady to feel their heat and cold, and their thirst and hunger.) And then we need movement. Their figures, as they pass along the grass track, must reach a hovel or a palace or find a man in weeds reading his book. That too is gratified. And then living thus with our eyes, with our legs and arms, with the natural quiet feelings of liking and disliking tolerantly and gently excited, we realise a more complex desire that all these emotions should combine. There must be a pervading sense of belief, or much of our emotion will be wasted. The tree must be part of the knight; the knight of the lady. All these states of mind must support one another, and the strength of the poem will come from the combination, just as it will fail if at any point the poet loses belief.

But it may be said, when a poet is dealing with Faery Land and the supernatural people who live there, belief can only be used in a special sense. We do not believe in the existence of giants and ogres, but in something that the poet himself believed them to represent. What then was Spenser’s belief, when he wrote his poem? He has himself declared that the “general intention and meaning” of The Faery Queen was “to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and noble discipline”. It would be absurd to pretend that we are more than intermittently conscious of the poet’s meaning. Yet as we read, we half consciously have the sense of some pattern hanging in the sky, so that without referring any of the words to a special place, they have that meaning which comes from their being parts of a whole design, and not an isolated fragment of unrelated loveliness. The mind is being perpetually enlarged by the power of suggestion. Much more is imagined than is stated. And it is due to this quality that the poem changes, with time, so that after four hundred years it still corresponds to something which we, who are momentarily in the flesh, feel at the moment.

The question asks itself, then, how Spenser, himself imprisoned in so many impediments of circumstance, remote from us in time, in speech, in convention, yet seems to be talking about things that are important to us too? Compare, for example, his perfect gentleman with Tennyson’s Arthur. Already, much in Tennyson’s pattern is unintelligible; an easy butt for satire. Among living writers again, there is none who is able to display a typical figure. Each seems limited to one room of the human dwelling. But with Spenser, though here in this department of our being, we seem able to unlock the door and walk about. We miss certain intensities and details; but on the other hand we are uncabined. We are allowed to give scope to a number of interests, delights, curiosities, and loves that find no satisfaction in the poetry of our own time. But though it would be easy to frame a reason for this and to generalise about the decay of faith, the rise of machines, the isolation of the human being, let us, however, work from the opposite point of view. In reading The Faery Queen the first thing, we said, was that the mind has different layers. It brings one into play and then another. The desire of the eye, the desire of the body, desires for rhythm, movement, the desire for adventure—each is gratified. And this gratification depends upon the poet’s own mobility. He is alive in all his parts. He scarcely seems to prefer one to another. We are reminded of the old myth of the body which has many organs, and the lesser and the obscure are as important as the kingly and important.

Here at any rate the poet’s body seems all alive. A fearlessness, a simplicity that is like the movement of a naked savage possesses him. He is not merely a thinking brain; he is a feeling body, a sensitive heart. He has hands and feet, and, as he says himself, a natural chastity, so that some things are judged unfit for the pen. “My chaster muse for shame doth blush to write.” In short, when we read The Faery Queen, we feel that the whole being is drawn upon, not merely a separate part.

To say this is to say that the conventions that Spenser uses are not enough to cut us off from the inner meaning. And the reason soon makes itself apparent. When we talk of the modern distaste for allegory, we are only saying that we prefer our qualities in another form. The novelist uses allegory; that is to say, when he wishes to expound his characters, he makes them think; Spenser impersonated his psychology. Thus if the novelist now wished to convey his hero’s gloom, he would tell us his thoughts; Spenser creates a figure called Despair. He has the fullest sense of what sorrow is. But he typifies it; he creates a dwelling, an old man who comes out of the house and says I cannot tell; and then the figure of Despair with his beautiful elegy. Instead of being prisoned in one breast we are shown the outer semblance. He is working thus on a larger, freer, more depersonalised scale. By making the passions into people, he gives them an amplitude. And who shall say that this is the less natural, the less realistic? For the most exact observer has to leave much of his people’s minds obscure.

Once we get him out of his private mythology, there is no mythology which can personify his actions. We wish to convey delight and have to describe an actual garden, here and now; Spenser at once calls up a picture of nymphs dancing, youth, maidens crowned. And yet it is not pictorial merely. Nothing is more refreshing, nothing serves more to sting and revive us than the spray of fresh hard words, little colloquialisms, tart green words that might have been spoken at dinner, joining in easily with the more stately tribe. But such externality is impossible to us, because we have lost our power to create symbols. Spenser’s ability to use despair in person depends on his power to create a world in which such a figure draws natural breath, living breath. He has his dwelling at the centre of a universe which offers him the use of dragons, knights, magic; and all the company that exist about them; and flowers and dawn and sunset. All this was still just within his reach. He could believe in it, his public could believe in it, sufficiently to make it serviceable. It was, of course, just slipping from his grasp. That is obvious from his own words. His poem, he says, will be called the abundance of an idle brain. His language, too, oddly compounded of the high flown and the vernacular, was just then at the turn. On the one hand we have the old smooth conventions—Tithonus, Cynthia, Phoebus, and the rest; on the other fry and rascal and losel, the common speech that was current on the lips of the women at the door. He was not asking the reader to adopt an unnatural pose; only to think poetically. And the writer’s faith is still effective. We are removed four hundred years from Spenser; and the effort to think back into his mood requires some adjustment, some oblivion; but there is nothing false in what is to be done; it is easier to read Spenser than to read William Morris.

The true difficulty lies elsewhere. It lies in the fact that the poem is a meditation, not a dramatisation. At no point is Spenser under the necessity of bringing his characters to the surface; they lack the final embodiment which is forced so drastically upon the playwright. They sink back into the poet’s mind and thus lack definition. He is talking about them; they are not using their own words. Hence the indistinctness which leads, as undoubtedly it does lead, to monotony. The verse becomes for a time a rocking horse; swaying up and down; a celestial rocking horse, whose pace is always rhythmical and seemly, but lulling, soporofic. It sings us to sleep; it lulls the teeth of the wind. On no other terms, however, could we be kept in being. And to compensate we have the quality of that mind; the sense that we are confined in one continuous consciousness, which is Spenser’s; that he has saturated and enclosed this world, that we live in a great bubble blown from the poet’s brain. Yet if it ignores our own marks, houses, chimneys, roads, the multitudinous details which serve like signposts or features to indicate to us where our emotions lie, it is not a private world of fantasy. Here are the qualities that agitate living people at the moment; spite, greed, jealousy, ugliness, poverty, pain; Spenser in his poet’s castle was as acutely aware of the rubs and tumbles of life as the living, but by virtue of his poetry blew them away into the higher air. So we feel not shut in, but freed; and take our way in a world which gives expression to sensation more vigorously, more exactly than we can manage for ourselves in the flesh. It is a world of astonishing physical brilliance and intensity; sharpened, intensified as objects are in a clearer air; such as we see them, not in dreams, but when all the faculties are alert and vigorous; when the stuffing and the detail have been brushed aside; and we see the bone and the symmetry; now in a landscape, in Ireland or in Greece; and now when we think of ourselves, under the more intense ray of poetry; under its sharper, its lovelier light.

[written ca. 1935]

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Congreve’s Comedies.

The four great plays through which Congreve is immortal take up very little space, and can be bought very cheaply; but they can be seen very seldom, and to read them, silently and in solitude, is to do them an injustice. The best way to repair that injustice is to consider them with the author’s help more critically, if more coldly, than we are able when the words are embodied on the stage. Congreve, the man of mystery, the man of superb genius who ceased to use his genius at his height, was also, as any reader may guess from almost any page, of the class of writers who are not so entirely submerged in their gift but that they can watch it curiously and to some extent guide it even when they are possessed by it. Whatever he has to say in a letter, in a dedication, in a prologue about his art is worth listening to with all our ears. Let us then put to him some of the questions that the remembrance of his plays has left over in the mind before we allow the Tattles and the Foresights, the Wishforts and the Millamants to sweep us off our feet.

First there is the old grievance which, though it sounds elementary, must always have its say: the grievance that is summed up in the absurd names he gives his characters—Vainlove, Fondlewife, and the rest—as if we were back again in the age of mummer and cart, when one humour to one character was all the audience could grasp or the actor express. To that he replies, “… the distance of the stage requires the figures represented to be something larger than the life”, a warning to the reader to suppress the desire for certain subtleties which the playwright cannot satisfy, a reminder that the imponderable suggestions which come together on silent feet in fiction are denied the playwright. He must speak; the speaking voice is the only instrument allowed him. That introduces a second question: they must speak, but why so artificially? Men and women were never so witty as he makes them; they never speak so aptly, so instantly, and with such a wealth of figure and imagery as he would have us believe. And to that he replies, “I believe if a poet should steal a dialogue of any length, from the extempore discourse of the two wittiest men upon earth, he would find the scene but coldly receiv’d by the town”. People on the stage must be larger than life because they are further from us than in the book; and cleverer than life because if he set down their actual words we should be bored to distraction. Every writer has his selection to make; his artifice to enforce; these are the playwright’s. These are the methods by which he puts us in the frame of mind needed for his purpose.

Still there remains another grievance which is not so elementary nor so easily laid to rest; and that is, of course, the plot. Who can remember the plot when the book is shut? Who has not been teased by its intricacies while the book is open? As everybody is agreed something must happen, and it matters very little what happens if it serves to make the characters more real, or more profound, than they would otherwise have been; a plot should put the characters on the rack and show them thus extended. But what are we to say when the plot merely teases and distorts the character, and distracts us from any more profound enjoyment than that of asking who is behind that door, who is behind that mask? To this Congreve the critic gives us no satisfactory answer. Sometimes, as in the preface to The Double Dealer, he prides himself that he has maintained “the unities of the drama”. But a certain doubt declares itself elsewhere. In the dedication to The Way of the World he envies Terence. Terence, he points out, had “great advantages to encourage his undertaking for he built most on the foundations of Menander; his plots were generally modelled and his characters ready drawn to his hand”. Either then, one must conclude, the old weather-worn plots which slip into the mind so smoothly that we scarcely notice them—the legendary, the prehistoric—are the only tolerable ones, or we are forced to suppose that the plot-making genius is so seldom combined with the genius for creating character that we must allow even Shakespeare to fail here—even Shakespeare sometimes lets the plot dictate to the character; suffers the story to drag the character out of its natural orbit. And Congreve, who had not Shakespeare’s miraculous fecundity, who could not cover up the farfetched and the mechanical with the abundance of his imagination and the splendour of his poetry, fails here. The character is squeezed to fit the situation; the machine has set its iron stamp upon live flesh and blood.

But, now that we have dismissed the questions that hang about an unopened book, let us submit ourselves to the dramatist in action. The dramatist is in action from the very first word on the very first page. There are no preliminaries, no introductions; the curtain rises and they are in the thick of it. Never was any prose so quick. Miraculously pat, on the spot, each speaker caps the last, without fumbling or hesitation; their minds are full charged; it seems as if they had to rein themselves in, bursting with energy as they are, alive and alert to their finger tips. It is we who fumble, make irrelevant observations, notice the chocolate or the cinnamon, the sword or the muslin, until the illusion takes hold of us, and what with the rhythm of the speech and the indescribable air of tension, of high breeding that pervades it, the world of the stage becomes the real world and the other, outside the play, but the husk and cast-off clothing. To attempt to reduce this first impression to words is as futile as to explain a physical sensation—the slap of a wave, the rush of wind, the scent of a bean field. It is conveyed by the curl of a phrase on the ear; by speed; by stillness. It is as impossible to analyse Congreve’s prose as to distinguish the elements—the bark of a dog, the song of a bird, the drone of the branches—which make the summer air. But then, since words have meaning, we notice here a sudden depth beneath the surface, a meaning not grasped but felt, and then come to realise something not merely dazzling in this world, but natural, for all its wit; even familiar, and traditional. It has a coarseness, a humour something like Shakespeare’s; a toppling imagination that heaps image upon image; a lightning swiftness of apprehension that snatches a dozen meanings and compacts them into one.

And yet it is not Shakespeare’s world; for just as we think, tossed up on the crest of some wonderful extravagance of humour, to be swept into poetry we come slap against hard common sense, and realise that here is a different combination of elements from the poet’s. There is tragedy—Lady Touchwood and Maskwell in The Double Dealer are not comic figures—but when tragedy and comedy collide it is comedy that wins. Lady Touchwood seizes her dagger; but she drops it. A moment more and it would have been too late. Already she has passed from prose to rant. Already we feel not that the scene is ridiculous, for there is passion there; but that it is unsafe. Congreve has lost his control, his fine balance is upset; he feels the ground tremble beneath him. Mr. Brisk’s comment, “This is all very surprising, let me perish”, is the appropriate one. With that he finds his feet and withdraws.

The world that we have entered, then, in Congreve’s comedies is not the world of the elemental passions. It is an enclosure surrounded with the four walls of a living room. Ladies and gentlemen go through their figures with their tongues to the measure dictated by common sense as precisely as they dance the minuet with their feet; but the image has only a superficial rightness. We have only to compare Congreve’s comedy with Goldsmith’s or with Sheridan’s, let alone with Wilde’s, to be aware that if, to distinguish him from the Elizabethans, we confine him to a room, not a world, that room is not the drawing-room of the eighteenth century, still less is it the drawing-room of the nineteenth century. Drays roar on the cobbles beneath; the brawling of street hucksters and tavern rioters comes in at the open windows. There is a coarseness of language, an extravagance of humour, and a freedom of manners which cast us back to the Elizabethans. Yet it is in a drawing-room, surrounded by all the fopperies and refinements of the most sophisticated society in the world, that these ladies and gentlemen speak so freely, drink so deeply, and smell so strong. It is the contrast, perhaps, that makes us more aware of the coarseness of the Restoration dramatists than of the Elizabethan. A great lady who spits on the floor offends where a fishwife merely amuses. And perhaps it was for this reason that Congreve incurred first the majestic censure of Dr. Johnson and then the more supercilious contempt of the Victorians who neglected, Sir Edmund Gosse informs us, either to read him or to act him. More conscious than we are of the drawing-room, they were quicker repelled perhaps by any violation of its decencies.

But however we may account for the change, to reach The Way of the World through The Old Bachelor, The Double Dealer, and Love for Love is to become more and more at loggerheads with Dr. Johnson’s dictum:

It is acknowledged, with universal conviction, that the perusal of his works will make no man better; and that their ultimate effect is to represent pleasure in alliance with vice, and to relax those obligations by which life ought to be regulated.

On the contrary, to read Congreve’s plays is to be convinced that we may learn from them many lessons much to our advantage both as writers of books and—if the division is possible—as livers of life. We might learn there, to begin with, the discipline of plain speech; to leave nothing lurking in the insidious shades of obscurity that can be said in words. The phrase is always finished; nothing is left to dwindle into darkness, to sound after the words are over. Then, when we have learnt to express ourselves, we may go on to observe the indefatigable hard work of a great writer: how he keeps us entertained because something is always happening, and on the alert because that something is always changing, and by contrasting laughter and seriousness, action and thought, keeps the edge of the emotions always sharp. To ring so many changes and keep up so rapid a speed of movement might well be enough, but in addition each of these characters has its own being, and each differs—the sea-dog from the fop, the old eccentric from the man of the world, the maid from the mistress. He has to enter into each; to leave his private pigeon-hole and invest himself with the emotions of another human being, so that speech meets speech at full tilt, each from its own angle.

A genius for phrase-making helps him. Now he strikes off a picture in a flash: “… there he lies with a great beard, like a Russian bear upon a drift of snow”. Now in a marvellous rush of rapid invention he conveys a whole chapter of guttersnipe life.

That I took from the washing of old gauze and weaving of dead hair, with a bleak blue nose, over a chafing dish of starv’d embers, and dining behind a traverse rag, in a shop no bigger than a bird cage.

Then, again, like some miraculous magpie he repeats the naïve words, follows the crude emotions, of a great gawky girl like Miss Prue. However it is done, to enter into such diverse characters is, the moralists may note, at any rate to forget your own. Undoubtedly it is true that his language is often coarse; but then it is also true that his characters are more alive, quicker to strip off veils, more intolerant of circumlocutions than the ordinary run of people. They are reduced to phrase-making oftener than we could wish, and fine phrases often sound cynical; but then the situations are often so improbable that only fine phrases will cover them, and words, we must remember, were still to Congreve’s generation as delightful as beads to a savage. Without that rapture the audacity of his splendid phrases would have been impossible.

But if we have to admit that some of the characters are immoral, and some of the opinions cynical, still we must ask how far we can call a character immoral or an opinion cynical if we feel that the author himself was aware of its immorality and intended its cynicism? And, though it is a delicate matter to separate an author from his characters and detach him from their opinions, no one can read Congreve’s comedies without detecting a common atmosphere, a general attitude that holds them together for all their diversity. The stress laid on certain features creates a common likeness as unmistakable as the eyes and nose of a family face. The plays are veined through and through with satire. “Therefore I would rail in my writings and be revenged”, says Valentine in Love for Love. Congreve’s satire seems sometimes, as Scandal says, to have the whole world for its butt. Yet there is underneath a thinking mind, a mind that doubts and questions. Some hint thrown out in passing calls us back to make us ponder it: for instance, Mellefont’s “Ay, My Lord, I shall have the same reason for happiness that your Lordship has, I shall think myself happy”. Or, again, a sudden phrase like “There’s comfort in a hand stretched out to one that’s sinking” suggests, by its contrast, a sensibility that trembles on the edge of tears. Nothing is stressed; sentiment never broadens into sentimentality; everything passes as quickly as a ray of light and blends as indistinguishably. But if we needs must prove that the creator of Sir Sampson Legend and old Foresight had not only a prodigious sense of human absurdity and a bitter conviction of its insincerity but as quick a regard for its honesty and decency as any Victorian or Dr. Johnson himself, we need only point to his simplicity. After we have run up the scale of absurdity to its sublime heights a single word again and again recalls us to common sense. “That my poor father should be so very silly” is one such comment, immensely effective in its place. Again and again we are brought back to sanity and daylight by the sound of a voice speaking in its natural tones.

But it is the Valentines, the Mirabells, the Angelicas, and the Millamants who keep us in touch with truth and, by striking a sudden serious note, bring the rest to scale. They have sharpened their emotions upon their wits. They have flouted each other; bargained; taken love and examined it by the light of reason; teased and tested each other almost beyond endurance. But when it comes to the point and she must be serious, the swiftest of all heroines, whose mind and body seem equally winged, so that there is a rush in the air as she passes and we exclaim with Scandal. “Gone; why, she was never here, nor anywhere else”, has a centre of stillness in her heart and enough emotion in her words to furbish out a dozen pages of eloquent disquisition. “Why does not the man take me? Would you have me give myself to you over again?” The words are simple, and yet, after what has already been said, so brimming with meaning that Mirabell’s reply, “Ay, over and over again”, seems to receive into itself more than words can say. And this depth of emotion, we have to reflect, the change and complexity that are implied in it, have been reached in the direct way; that is by making each character speak in his or her own person, without addition from the author or any soliloquy save such as can be spoken on the stage in the presence of an audience. No, whether we read him from the moralist’s angle or from the artist’s, to agree with Dr. Johnson is an impossibility. To read the comedies is not to “relax those obligations by which life ought to be regulated”. On the contrary, the more slowly we read him and the more carefully, the more meaning we find, the more beauty we discover.

Here perhaps, in the reflections that linger when the book is shut and The Way of the World is finished, lies the answer to the old puzzle why at the height of his powers he stopped writing. It is that he had done all that was possible in that kind. The last play held more than any audience could grasp at a single sitting. The bodily presence of actors and actresses must, it would seem, often overpower the words that they had to speak. He had forgotten, or disregarded, his own axiom that “the distance of the stage requires the figures represented to be something larger than the life”. He had written, as he says in the dedication, for “the Few”, and “but little of it was prepar’d for that general taste which seems now to be predominant in the palates of our audience”. He had come to despise his public, and it was time therefore either to write differently or to leave off. But the novel, which offered another outlet, was uncongenial; he was incorrigibly dramatic, as his one attempt at fiction shows. And poetry, too, was denied him, for though again and again he brings us to the edge of poetry in a phrase like “You’re a woman, One to whom Heav’n gave beauty, when it grafted roses on a briar”, and suggests, as Meredith does in his novels, the mood of poetry, he was unable to pass beyond human idiosyncrasy to the more general statement of poetry. He must move and laugh and bring us into touch with action instantly.

Since these two paths then were blocked, what other way was there for a writer of Congreve’s temperament but to make an end? Dangerous as it is to distinguish a writer from his work, we cannot help but recognise a man behind the plays—a man as sensitive to criticism as he was skilled in inflicting it on others; for what is his defiance of the critics but deference to them? A scholar too with all the scholar’s fastidiousness; a man of birth and breeding for whom the vulgar side of fame held little gratification; a man, in short, who might well have said with Valentine, “Nay, I am not violently bent upon the trade”, and sit, handsome and portly and sedate as his portrait shows him, “very gravely with his hat over his eyes”, as the gossips observed him, content to strive no more.

But indeed he left very little for the gossips to feed upon; no writer of his time and standing passed through the world more privately. Voltaire left a dubious anecdote; the Duchess of Marlborough, it is said, had an effigy of him set at her table after his death; his few discreet letters provide an occasional hint: “Ease and quiet is what I hunt after”; “I feel very sensibly and silently for those whom I love”—that is all. But there is a fitness in this very absence of relics as though he had consumed whatever was irrelevant to his work and left us to find him there. And there, indeed, we find something beyond himself; beyond the many figures of his fertile and brilliant imagination; beyond Tattle and Ben, Foresight and Angelica, Maskwell and Lady Wishfort, Mirabell and Mellefont and Millamant. Between them they have created what is not to be confined within the limits of a single character or expressed in any one play—a world where each part depends upon the other, the serene, impersonal, and indestructible world of art.

[Times Literary Supplement, Sep 25, 1937]

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Sterne’s Ghost.

That men have ghosts; that ghosts revisit the places where life ran quickest; that Sterne therefore haunts no churchyard, but the room where Tristram Shandy was written—all this may be taken for granted; even if we find it no such easy matter to decide in what mood and with what motives the ghost of Sterne beat regularly at midnight upon the wall of Mrs. Simpson’s best bedroom in Stonegate, Yorks.

Mrs. Simpson made no secret of the matter, which perhaps was too notorious to be concealed. Owing to the ghost, she told the young Mathews, she would let the rooms, large as they were and convenient for the theatre, very cheap indeed, and perceiving something in Mrs. Mathews’s aspect which made her think her, as indeed she was, “a candidate for literary gains”, she added how it was in this room and at that very table that a very famous book called Tristram Shandy was written, she believed, some forty years before. Even without its literary associations the cheapness of the lodging was enough to excuse the ghost, for the young Mathews were extremely poor—Charles acting at a salary of twenty-five shillings a week in Tate Wilkinson’s company, but Tate did not scruple to tell him that with his screwed-up face and threadpaper body he had better keep a shop than go upon the stage, while poor Eliza, the girl whom Charles had married, out of pity, the second Mrs. Mathews said, without “really loving her”, had not a penny to her name, which happened to be Strong. And Strong she had need to be, said Charles’s father, strong in character, strong in health, strong in principles, strong in affections, if she became the wife of the misguided boy who so wantonly preferred the stage and all its evils to selling serious books to saintly personages in the Strand. But Eliza herself was conscious of one source of strength only (besides that she was very much in love with her husband) and that was her gift for writing—her passion for literature. When Mrs. Simpson at one and the same moment lowered the rent and mentioned Sterne, the bargain was struck and the rooms taken. The ghost must be endured.

That necessity arose, indeed, the very first night the Mathews went to bed. As York Minster struck the first chimes of midnight three powerful blows resounded on the wall at the back of the young couple’s bed. The same thing happened night after night. York Minster had only to begin striking twelve and the ghost struck three. Watch was set; experiments were made; but whether it was the ghost of Sterne or the malevolence of some ill-wisher, no cause could be discovered and the young people could only move their bed, and shift their bedtime, which, as the playhouse hours were late and Charles had a passion for reading or talking late at night, was a matter of not much difficulty. Such courage could hardly have been expected of so frail a woman. But unfortunately Eliza had a reason for tolerating ghosts, if they reduced the rent, which she dared not tell her husband. Every week, like the honest and affectionate creature he was, he poured his salary—twenty-five shillings—into her lap, and every week she assured him that twenty-five shillings was ample—all their bills were paid. But every week a certain number, an increasing number, for all she could do to keep their expenses down, were slipped, unpaid, into Sterne’s table drawer. Eliza perhaps had some inkling of the fact that her husband had married her impetuously in the goodness of his heart, from pity that the only child of the late Dr. Strong should have to support herself by inculcating the principles of arithmetic into the daughters of the gentlemen of Swansea. At any rate, she was determined that he should never suffer for his generosity. Comforts he must have, and if twenty-five shillings a week were not enough to pay for them she would pay for them herself out of her own earnings. She was confident that she could do it. She would write a novel, a novel like Tristram Shandy perhaps, save that her knowledge of life was unfortunately limited, which would set all London in a roar. And then she would come to her husband with the bills receipted and her deception confessed, and give him the proceeds of her famous novel to do what he liked with. But that day was still far distant—at present she must work. While Charles was acting and reading, while Charles, who loved talk and hated bedtime, was gossiping and chattering and taking off odd characters, so that he was famous in the green room whatever he might be upon the stage, Eliza wrote. She wrote every kind of piece—novels, sonnets, elegies, love songs. The publishers took them, the publishers printed them, but they never paid her a penny for them, and on she toiled, always carefully concealing her work from her husband, so that his surprise when the day of revelation came might be entire.

Meanwhile the bills accumulated, and act as Charles might (and there were some young ladies in York who thought him the finest comic actor they had ever seen, and would stand a whole evening in the wings to hear him) his salary remained twenty-five shillings and no more. It was useless for the ghost to knock; useless for Eliza’s back to ache; useless for her good brother-in-law William to implore her to write everything twice over, peruse the best works of the best authors, and find mottoes for all her chapters—she had no choice; write she must. Surely the novel she was now engaged on—What Has Been—promised better than the others, and with a little help from William, who knew Mr. Wordsworth and could perhaps solicit the favours of reviewers, might, indeed must, bring her fame. Sitting where Sterne had sat, writing where Sterne had written, the omens were auspicious.

There, at any rate, long after the ghost had knocked thrice and York Minster had tolled twelve times, she sat writing. She neglected to take exercise. She never allowed herself to stand in the wings a whole evening to see her Charles in his comic parts. At last signs of exhaustion became apparent. Alarmed by her wasted looks, Charles brought a doctor to see her. But one glance was enough. Nothing could now be done. Whatever the cause, lack of exercise or lack of food, or whether the nervous strain of hearing those three taps delivered nightly had hopelessly injured her constitution, consumption was far advanced; and all the doctor could do was to prescribe apothecaries’ stuff, which, expensive as it was, Charles feared to be useless.

Eliza was now confined to bed. Her projects had totally failed. What Has Been appeared, but, even corrected and at least partially supplied with mottoes by the kindness of Mr. William Mathews, failed like its predecessors, and she was at an end of her resources. Even so, the worst was still to come. The butcher or the baker stopped Charles in the street and demanded payment. The drawer and its bills had to be revealed. The whole of her miserable, innocent, overwhelming deception must be confessed. Charles took the blow like an angel, said not a word of complaint, though the bills were to hang about his neck for years to come. And now, for the first time, the ghost fell silent. York Minster struck midnight and there was no reply. But really the silence was worse than the sound! To lie and wait for the three stout strokes as York Minster struck twelve, and then to hear nothing—that seemed to convey a more appalling message than the blow itself—as if the enemy had worked its will and gone its way. But this very silence inspired Eliza Mathews with a desperate courage. With the ghost quiescent, the novels unsold, the bills unpaid, Charles all day at the playhouse, often cast down by his failure and the thought of his father’s displeasure—for the God-fearing bookseller in the Strand, where the whole house was hung with portraits of the Saints framed in ebony, and canting humbugs bamboozled the simple old tradesman out of his livelihood, had been justified in his warnings—with all this that she had caused, or failed to prevent, to oppress her, and the daily decline of her own health to appal, Eliza framed a terrible and desperate resolve. There was a girl at the playhouse for whom she had an affection, a singer who was friendless as Eliza herself had been, and timid and charming. For this young woman, Anne Jackson by name, Eliza sent. She was better, Eliza claimed, as Anne came in, and indeed her looks confirmed it; much better, because of an idea that had come to her, which she counted on her friend’s help to carry out. First, before her husband came back, she wished to be propped up in bed, in order, she said mysteriously, “to be able to look at you both while I reveal my project”. Directly Charles Mathews appeared, and exclaimed in his turn at her sparkle, her animation, she began. Sitting up, forced often to pause for breath, she said how she knew her fate; death was inevitable; how the thought of her husband’s loneliness oppressed her—worse, the thought that he would marry again a woman who did not understand him. Here she paused exhausted, and Charles looked at Anne and Anne at Charles, as if to ask had she lost her reason? On she went again. It was even worse, she said, to think of Anne left in her youth and inexperience without such help as she, Eliza, might have given her. Thoughts of this kind embittered her last moments. Surely, then, they would grant the last request she would ever make? She took her husband’s hand and kissed it; then took her friend’s and kissed that too “in a solemn manner, which I remember made me tremble all over”, and at last framed her terrible request. Would they, there and then, pledge themselves to marry each other when she was dead?

Both were flabbergasted. Anne burst into floods of tears. Never, she cried, never could she contemplate marriage with Mr. Mathews She esteemed him; she admired him; she thought him the first comic actor of the age; that was all. Charles himself fairly scolded the dying woman for putting them in such an awful predicament. He ran after the sobbing girl to implore her to believe that it was none of his doing—that his wife was raving and no longer knew what she said. And so Eliza died. For months a coldness, an awkwardness, existed between the widower and his wife’s friend. They scarcely met. Then at the same moment on the same night the same vision visited them, far apart as they were, in their sleep. Eliza came imploring to the side of each. Well, said Anne, it must be destiny; Shakespeare said so; “marriage comes of destiny”, he said, and she was disposed to agree with Shakespeare. Twelve months after she had sworn that she could never feel anything but esteem for Mr. Mathews, she was his wife.

But what conclusion are we led to draw from the behaviour of Sterne’s ghost? Was it malicious or tender, did it come to warn or to mock, or merely to dip its handkerchief once more in the tears of lovers? Nobody could say. Charles Mathews told the story of the Stonegate ghost a hundred times in the green room at York, but nobody came forward with an explanation. Again one night he was telling the story, when an old actress who had returned to the stage after a long absence and had heard nothing of the ghost or of the Mathews, exclaimed in astonishment “Why, that was my dear Billy Leng!” And then she told them how they lodged next door to Mrs. Simpson’s in Stonegate; how her dear Billy had been bedridden for many years; how, as his infirmities increased, so did his fear of robbers; how, being the most methodical of men, and growing more so with age, he waited always for York Minster to chime midnight and then took his crutch-handled stick and beat forcibly on the calico at the back of his bed to warn any thief who might be concealed there. “It was no ghost,” she cried, “it was my dear Billy Leng!”

Cleared of the imputation which the ghost of Sterne had cast upon them, Mrs. Simpson now let her rooms for the ordinary sum.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Nov 7, 1925]

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Mrs. Thrale.

[Hester Lynch Piozzi (Mrs. Thrale). By James L. Clifford.]

No one can destroy Boswell’s sketch of Mrs. Thrale. It is done with such venom and such vivacity; it contains so much of Boswell himself, and, like all Boswell’s portraits, it fits so perfectly into its place in the picture. But Mr. Clifford has done what is far more valuable and more difficult. He has gone behind Boswell’s sketch and beyond it. He has amplified it and solidified it. He has brought Mrs. Thrale herself into the foreground. And by so doing he has changed the proportions of the picture.

Mrs. Thrale herself has lived an ambiguous scattered life all these years in a mass of half published or unpublished documents sprinkled over England and America. And for years Mr. Clifford has been tracking her down and piecing her together with the most devoted care and the most triumphant results. If it were not that her diary and her commonplace book are still in the hands of an American editor, we should suppose that the whole woman is now before us. As it is we know her better perhaps than almost any living person. We can follow her, as we cannot follow our friends, at a foot’s pace for more than eighty years. Yet the effect of this minute illumination is baffling. The more we know of people the less we can sum them up. Just as we think to hold the bird in our hands, the bird flits off. Who can explain, for example, why the brilliant and precocious Hester consented to marry the man whom Mr. Clifford now reveals in his entirety—the odious Thrale? When her father discovered their clandestine correspondence he fell dead in a fit. And for once the incompetent, irascible, impecunious Welsh squire was in the right. No marriage could have been more incongruous. Hester was impressionable, generous, intellectual. Thrale was a cold, callous, conventional man of business who aped the habits of the aristocracy but was without their distinction, who had the grossness of the middle class but lacked their geniality. If he had any affection besides his passion for meat and drink, it was not for Hester but for her mother. Yet Hester married him and was at once immured in the great house at Streatham, “like a kept mistress”, as Johnson said, “shut from the world”.

It was her marriage, however, that gave depth to her relationship with Johnson. Had she been happy, she would never have known him as she did. He gave her, of course, the obvious things—stimulus, society, an outlet for her irrepressible curiosity and ambition. But the friendship between the young wife and the old man was based on deeper things. Johnson was not merely a distinguished guest at dinner. He had the run of the house. He and his hostess went together behind the scenes. It was to Johnson that Mrs. Thrale turned when her eyes were red with crying—when Queeney snubbed her; when Mr. Thrale took another mistress; when ruin threatened them; when one after another the children were born, and the children fell ill and died. “What shall I do? What can I do? Has the flattery of my friends made me too proud of my Brains? and must these poor Children suffer for my crime?” she cried out to him in her anguish. He gave her counsel and confidence. In return she gave him a share in the family, a stake in the next generation, and domesticity. It was by “the pump-side in the kitchen garden” at Streatham that Johnson was caught “fusing metals” when Mr. Thrale came back from the city and put out the fire. One anecdote sums up their relationship. Johnson had been more than usually rude to her in company, and some one protested. But Mrs. Thrale passed it off with a smile. “Oh dear good man!” she said. And when the words were repeated to Johnson “he seemed much delighted … and repeated in a loud whisper, Oh dear good man!”

Why, then, when Mr. Thrale finally ate himself to death, did a friendship that had been daily rubbed and tried for sixteen years come to an end? Partly, as Mr. Clifford makes plain, because Mrs. Thrale had suppressed a great deal. She had certain individual tastes of her own. One was a romantic passion for the scenery of Wales; another was a genuine love for painting. But when the three of them travelled in Wales, neither Johnson nor Thrale had a word of praise for the landscape; and in Paris she was left to gaze for hours in the galleries alone. Again as a writer—she scribbled incessantly—she was by nature an innovator. “Why, she wondered, should there be one set of words for writing and another for speaking?” She saw no reason why one should not write as one speaks, familiarly, colloquially; and her pages, “crowded with familiar phrases and vulgar idioms”, roused the disgust of the conventional. Clearly there were a thousand curiosities and desires dormant in her that the old man could not gratify. So long as she was Thrale’s wife and the mistress of Streatham she must suppress them. But when her husband’s dead weight was lifted off her, up she sprang. She became again the precocious and impulsive Hester Salusbury. Perhaps marriage had kept her youth green in her—she was only just past forty when she became a widow. And one day before Thrale’s death Mrs. Byron had warned her, while Piozzi sang to the harpsichord: “You know, I suppose, that that man is in Love with you?”

“That man” is one of Mr. Clifford’s most remarkable reconstructions. To the Streatham circle he was merely “an Italian musick master”. When they had said that they had said enough. But in fact he was an Italian gentleman of great charm and cultivation; a composer and performer of merit; and a passionate lover of music. He travelled with a small harpsichord fitted under the seat so that he could play Mozart and Haydn on the roads. They floated on a barge down the Brenta to the strains of his music. Nor was he lacking in the sober virtues. He managed Mrs. Piozzi’s tangled money matters admirably, and he ended his days in Wales giving plum puddings to villagers and performing the duties of a country gentleman. Yet at the notion that such a man could marry a brewer’s widow, the whole company of distinguished people who had feasted at her table took flight in one flock. Johnson trumpeted his rage. “She has now become a subject for her enemies to exult over, and for her friends, if she has any left, to forget or pity.” “Heaven be praised,” exclaimed the Queen of the Blues, “that I have no daughters.” It was only charity that led her to conclude that Mrs. Thrale was mad. For Johnson there is the excuse that he had lost at one blow Streatham and its peaches and its pork pies and the undivided attention of his lady. The old elephant was jealous, and his rage has at least the dignity of wounded passion. But how are we to explain the conduct of the others? Only perhaps by supposing that it is almost impossible even for genius and learning to swim against the conventions of their time. And while genius and learning come down the stream untouched, the conventions in which they exist soon become obsolete and ridiculous. An Italian music master in the eighteenth century was, we must suppose, equal to a negro to-day. To explain the conduct of the Streatham set we must imagine the attitude of society to-day to a lady of rank who has contracted an alliance with a negro and expects Mayfair to open its doors to her dusky and illegitimate brood.

But the more we excuse the Streatham set, the more we must admire Mrs. Piozzi. Her passion for Piozzi made her for once concentrated and direct. There is a fine ring in her letter to Johnson.

The birth of my second husband [she told him] is not meaner than that of my first; his sentiments are not meaner; his profession is not meaner … till you have changed your opinion of Mr. Piozzi let us converse no more.

With those words she should have vanished down the Brenta to the strains of Mozart. Unfortunately, Mr. Clifford has an inexhaustible supply of those little facts that reduce music to common speech. With Johnson it is plain that Mrs. Thrale had lost her centre. Now there was some screw loose. The whirligig spins faster and faster. She was for ever dipping and sampling, quarrelling and chattering. She was impulsive and impressionable, but she was also obtuse and tactless. Her children found her intolerable. Fanny Burney resented her patronage. She decked her little body in grebe skins and tiger shawls and flaxen wigs and many-coloured ribbons. She made a fool of herself with her adopted nephew, and let herself be cheated out of six thousand pounds to buy him a baronetcy. There was a coarseness in her fibre and a commonness in her vision that explain why, as an observer, she was so greatly inferior to Boswell.

Yet the spin of the whirligig has its fascination. Her appetite for life was prodigious. She must have someone to worship. Mrs. Siddons succeeded Dr. Johnson. Mr. Conway succeeded Mrs. Siddons. When there was no hero to entertain, she devoured books. And when the books were read, and the letters written, and the copy books filled, she had out her telescope and scoured the horizon. One day she counted forty-one sails out to sea. Then, turning her telescope to the earth, she discovered Sir John Williams five miles away searching for something in his garden. What could it be? She could not rest until she had sent a servant to ascertain that Sir John was looking for his watch.

At last, at the age of eighty, she led the dance at her birthday party with her nephew; and danced indefatigably till dawn. That was in 1820. By that time one has almost forgotten Boswell’s sketch. It was a snapshot at one particular moment. But the moment has long been covered over. She has loved; she has travelled; she has known everybody; she has been in the depths of despair and on the crest of the wave times without counting. The portrait of the old lady in the huge bonnet shows a very modern face, with her great vivacious eyes, her loose lips, and the deep scar over the mouth which, by her own wish, the artist has faithfully depicted. For that was the scar she got when her horse threw her in 1774 at Streatham.

[New Statesman and Nation, Mar 8, 1941]

[]

Sir Walter Scott, I. Gas at Abbotsford.

Either Scott the novelist is swallowed whole and becomes part of the body and brain, or he is rejected entirely. There is no middle party in existence—no busybodies run from camp to camp with offers of mediation. For there is no war. The novels of Dickens, Trollope, Henry James, Tolstoy, the Brontës—they are discussed perpetually; the Waverley novels never. There they remain, completely accepted, entirely rejected—a queer stage in that ever-changing process which is called immortality. If anything is going to break the deadlock perhaps it is the first volume of Scott’s Journal, 1825-1826, which Mr. J. G. Tait has been at immense pains to edit and revise. As Scott’s Journals are the best life of Scott in existence, as they contain Scott in his glory and Scott in his gloom, and gossip about Byron, and the famous comment upon Jane Austen, as in a few passages Scott throws more light upon his genius and its limitations than all his critics in their innumerable volumes, this new version may one of these dark nights bring the two non-combatants to blows.

By way of inducing that desirable encounter, let us take the entry for November 21st, 1825: “Went to the Oil Gas Committee this morning, of which concern I am President or Chairman”. Scott, as Lockhart tells us and we can well believe, had a passion for gas. He loved a bright light, and he did not mind a slight smell. As for the expense of those innumerable pipes, in dining-room, drawing-room, corridors, and bedrooms, and the men’s wages—he swept all that aside in those glorious days when his imagination was at its height. “The state of an illumination was constantly kept up”; and the gas shone upon a brilliant company. Everyone was flocking to Abbotsford—dukes and duchesses, lion hunters and toadies, the famous and the obscure. “Oh dear,” Miss Scott exclaimed. “Will this never end, Papa?” And her father replied, “Let them come, the more the merrier.” And someone else walked in.

One night, a year or two before the diary begins, the stranger was a young artist. Artists were so common at Abbotsford that Scott’s dog, Maida, recognised them at sight and got up and left the room. This time it was William Bewick, obscure, penniless, in pursuit of sitters. Naturally he was a good deal dazzled both by the gas and the company. Kind Mrs. Hughes, therefore, the wife of the deaf Dean of St. Paul’s, tried to put him at his ease. She told him how she had often soothed her children’s quarrels by showing them Bewick’s woodcuts. But William Bewick was no relation of Thomas Bewick. One feels that he had heard the remark before and rather resented it, for was he not a painter himself?

He was a painter himself, and an extremely bad one. Did not Haydon say “Bewick, my pupil, has realised my hopes in his picture of Jacob and Rachel”? Did he not add, some years later, when they had quarrelled about money, “Daniel’s left foot and leg would have disgraced Bewick before he ran away from my tuition to the shelter of Academical wings”? But we know without Haydon’s testimony that Bewick’s portraits were intolerable. We know that from his writing. His friends are always painted in a state of violent physical agitation, but mentally they are stock still, stone dead. There is his picture of Hazlitt playing tennis. “He looked more like a savage animal than anything human….” He cast off his shirt; he leapt; he darted; when the game was over he rubbed himself against a post, dripping with sweat. But when he spoke, “His ejaculations were interlarded”, Bewick says, “with unintentional and unmeaning oaths.” They cannot be repeated; they must be imagined; in other words, Hazlitt was dumb. Or take Bewick’s account of an evening party in a small room when the Italian poet Foscolo met Wordsworth. They argued. Foscolo “deliberately doubled his fist and held it in Wordsworth’s face close to his nose”. Then, suddenly, he began whirling round the room, tossing his quizzing glass, rolling his R’s, bawling. The ladies “drew in their feet and costumes”. Wordsworth sat “opening his mouth and eyes, gasping for breath”. At last he spoke. For page after page he spoke; or rather dead phrases coagulated upon his lips, in frozen and lifeless entanglements. Listen for a moment. “Although I appreciate, and I hope, can admire sufficiently the beauties of Raphael’s transcendent genius … yet we must brace the sinews, so to speak, of our comprehension to grapple with the grandeur and sublimity … of Michael Angelo….” It is enough. We see Bewick’s pictures; we realise how intolerable it became to sit any longer under the portrait of Grandpapa flinging out a bare arm from the toga while the horse in the background champs his bit, paws the ground, and seems to neigh.

That night at Abbotsford the gas blazed from the three great chandeliers over the dinner-table; and the dinner, “as my friend, Thackeray, would have said, was recherché”. Then they went into the drawing-room—a vast apartment with its mirrors, its marble tables, Chantrey’s bust, the varnished woodwork and the crimson tasselled curtains pendant from handsome brass rods. They went in and Bewick was dazzled—“The brilliant gaslight, the elegance and taste displayed throughout this beautiful apartment, the costumes of the ladies, with the sparkle and glitter of the tea-table”—the scene, as Bewick describes it, brings back all the worst passages in the Waverley Novels. We can see the jewels sparkling, we can smell the gas escaping, we can hear the conversation. There is Lady Scott gossiping with kind Mrs. Hughes; there is Scott himself, prosing and pompous, grumbling about his son Charles and his passion for sport. “But I suppose it will have an end at a given time, like any other hobby of youth.” To complete the horror, the German Baron D’este strums on the guitar. He is showing “how in Germany they introduced into guitar performances of martial music the imitation of the beating of drums” Miss Scott—or is she Miss Wardour or another of the vapid and vacant Waverley novel heroines?—hangs over him entranced. Then, suddenly, the whole scene changes. Scott began in a low mournful voice to recite the ballad of Sir Patrick Spens:

Oh lang lang may their ladies sit

With their fans in their hands

Or e’er they see Sir Patrick Spens

Come sailing to the land.

The guitar stopped; Sir Walter’s lips trembled as he came to an end. So it happens, too, in the novels—the lifeless English turns to living Scots.

Bewick came again. Again he joined that extraordinary company, all distinguished either for their genius or for their rank. Again the tiny red beads of light in the chandeliers blossomed at the turn of a screw into “a gush of splendour worthy of the palace of Aladdin”. And there they all were, those gas-lit celebrities, dashed in with the usual dabs of bright oily paint: Lord Minto in plain black, wearing a most primitive tie; Lord Minto’s chaplain, with his saturnine expression and his hair combed and cut as if by the edge of a barber’s basin; Lord Minto’s servant, so enthralled by Scott’s stories that he forgot to change the plates; Sir John Malcolm wearing his star and ribbon; and little Johnny Lockhart gazing at the star. “You must try and get hold of one,” said Sir Walter, upon which Lockhart smiled, “… the only time I have observed him to relieve his fixed features from that impenetrable reserve, etc., etc.” And again they went into that beautiful apartment, and Sir John announced that he was about to tell his famous Persian story. Everybody must be summoned. Summoned they were.

From all quarters of that teeming and hospitable house guests came flocking. “One young lady, I remember, was brought from her sick-bed wrapt in blankets and laid on the sofa.” The story began; the story went on. So long was it that it had to be cut into “miles”. At the end of one Sir John stopped and asked “Shall I go on?” “Do go on, do go on, Sir John,” Lady Scott entreated, and on he went, mile after mile, until—from where?—there appeared Monsieur Alexandre, the French ventriloquist, who at once began to imitate the planing of a French-polished dinner-table. “The attitude, the action, the noise, the screeches and hitches at knots, throwing off the shavings with his left hand, were all so perfect that Lady Scott, in alarm, screamed ‘Oh! my dining-room table, you are spoiling my dining-room table! It will never be got bright again!’” And Sir Walter had to reassure her. “It is only imitation, my dear … it is only make-believe … he will not hurt the table.” And the screeching began again, and Lady Scott screamed again, and on it went, the screeching and the screaming, until the sweat poured from the ventriloquist’s forehead, and it was time for bed.

Scott took Bewick to his room; on the way he stopped; he spoke. His words were simple—oddly simple, and yet after all that gas and glitter they seem to come from the living lips of an ordinary human being. The muscles are relaxed; the toga slips off him. “You, I suppose, would be of the stock of Sir Robert Bewick?” That was all, but it was enough—enough to make Bewick feel that the great man, for all his greatness, had noted his discomfiture when Mrs. Hughes was so tactful, and wished to give him his chance. He took it. “I,” he exclaimed, “am of a very ancient family, the Bewicks of Annan, who lost their estates …” Out it all came; on it all went. Then Scott opened the bedroom door, and showed him the gas—how you can turn it up, how you can turn it down. And, expressing the hope that his guest would be comfortable—if not, he was to ring the bell—Scott left him. But Bewick could not sleep. He tossed and tumbled. He thought, as the people in his pictures must have thought, about magicians’ cells, alchemists’ spells, lions’ lairs, the pallet of poverty, and the downy couch of luxury. Then, remembering the great man and his goodness, he burst into tears, prayed, and fell asleep.

We, however, can follow Scott to his room. By the light of his journals, the natural and fitful light of happiness and sorrow, we can see him after the party was over, when poor Charlotte chattered no more, and Maida had gone where, let us hope, artists no longer paint the favourite dogs of celebrated men. But after a party is over, some saying, some figure often remains in the mind. Now it is the ventriloquist, Monsieur Alexandre. Was Scott himself, we ask, glancing at the long line of the Waverley Novels, merely the greatest of all the ventriloquist novelists, of all who imitate human speech without hurting the dining-room table—it is all make-believe, my dear, it is all imitation? Or was he the last of the playwright novelists, who, when the pressure of emotion is strong enough behind them can leap the bounds of prose and make real thoughts and real emotions issue in real words from living lips? So many playwrights did; but of novelists who—except Sir Walter and, perhaps, Dickens? To write as they did, to keep so hospitable and teeming a house, where earls and artists, ventriloquists and barons, dogs and young ladies speak each in character, must not one be as they were, half-ventriloquist, half-poet? And is it not the combination in the Waverley Novels of gas and daylight, ventriloquy and truth, that separates the two parties, and might they not, using the journals as stepping-stones, with a glance at these crude illustrations from the brush of William Bewick, break the deadlock and come to blows?

[New Statesman and Nation, Jan 27, 1940]

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Sir Walter Scott, II. “The Antiquary”.

There are some writers who have entirely ceased to influence others, whose fame is for that reason both serene and cloudless, who are enjoyed or neglected rather than criticised and read. Among them is Scott. The most impressionable beginner, whose pen oscillates if exposed within a mile of the influence of Stendhal, Flaubert, Henry James, or Chekhov, can read the Waverley Novels one after another without altering an adjective. Yet there are no books perhaps upon which at this moment more thousands of readers are brooding and feasting in a rapture of uncritical and silent satisfaction. And if this is the mood in which the Waverley Novels are read, the inference is perhaps that there is something vicious about such a pleasure; it cannot be defended; it must be enjoyed in secret. Let us run through The Antiquary again and make a note or two as we go. The first charge that is levelled against Scott is that his style is execrable. Every page of the novel, it is true, is watered down with long languid Latin words—peruse, manifest, evince. Old metaphors out of the property box come flapping their dusty wings across the sky. The sea in the heat of a crisis is “the devouring element”. A gull on the same occasion is a “winged denizen of the crag”. Taken from their context it is impossible to deny that such expressions sound wrong, though a good case might be made against the snobbery which insists upon preserving class distinctions even among words. But read currently in their places, it is difficult either to notice or to condemn them. As Scott uses them they fulfil their purpose and merge perfectly in their surroundings. Great novelists who are going to fill seventy volumes write after all in pages, not in sentences, and have at their command, and know when to use, a dozen different styles of varying intensities. The genteel pen is a very useful pen in its place. These slips and slovenlinesses serve as relaxations; they give the reader breathing space and air the book. Let us compare Scott the slovenly with Stevenson the precise. “It was as he said: there was not a breath stirring; a windless stricture of frost had bound the air; and as we went forth in the shine of the candles, the blackness was like a roof over our heads.” One may search the Waverley Novels in vain for such close writing as this. But if we get from Stevenson a much closer idea of a single object, we get from Scott an incomparably larger impression of the whole. The storm in The Antiquary, made up as it is of stage hangings and cardboard screens, of “denizens of the crags” and “clouds like disasters round a sinking empire”, nevertheless roars and splashes and almost devours the group huddled on the crag; while the storm in Kidnapped, for all its exact detail and its neat dapper adjectives, is incapable of wetting the sole of a lady’s slipper.

The much more serious charge against Scott is that he used the wrong pen, the genteel pen, not merely to fill in the background and dash off a cloud piece, but to describe the intricacies and passions of the human heart. But what language to use of the Lovels and Isabellas, the Darsies, Ediths, and Mortons! As well talk of the hearts of seagulls and the passions and intricacies of walking-sticks and umbrellas; for indeed these ladies and gentlemen are scarcely to be distinguished from the winged denizens of the crag. They are equally futile; equally impotent; they squeak; they flutter; and a strong smell of camphor exudes from their poor dried breasts when, with a dismal croaking and cawing, they emit the astonishing language of their love-making.

“Without my father’s consent, I will never entertain the addresses of anyone; and how totally impossible it is that he should countenance the partiality with which you honour me, you are yourself fully aware,” says the young lady. “Do not add to the severity of repelling my sentiments the rigour of obliging me to disavow them,” replies the young gentleman; and he may be illegitimate, and he may be the son of a peer, or he may be both one and the other, but it would take a far stronger inducement than that to make us care a straw what happens to Lovel and his Isabella.

But then, perhaps, we are not meant to care a straw. When Scott has pacified his conscience as a magistrate by alluding to the sentiments of the upper classes in tones of respect and esteem, when he has vindicated his character as a moralist by awakening “the better feelings and sympathies of his readers by strains of generous sentiment and tales of fictitious woe”, he was quit both of art and of morals, and could scribble endlessly for his own amusement. Never was a change more emphatic; never one more wholly to the good. One is tempted, indeed, to suppose that he did it, half-consciously, on purpose—he showed up the languor of the fine gentlemen who bored him by the immense vivacity of the common people whom he loved. Images, anecdotes, illustrations drawn from sea, sky, and earth, race and bubble from their lips. They shoot every thought as it flies, and bring it tumbling to the ground in metaphor. Sometimes it is a phrase—“at the back of a dyke, in a wreath o’ snaw, or in the wame o’ a wave”; sometimes a proverb—“he’ll no can haud down his head to sneeze, for fear o’ seeing his shoon”; always the dialogue is sharpened and pointed by the use of that Scottish dialect which is at once so homely and so pungent, so colloquial and so passionate, so shrewd and so melancholy into the bargain. And the result is strange. For since the sovereigns who should preside have abdicated, since we are afloat on a broad and breezy sea without a pilot, the Waverley Novels are as unmoral as Shakespeare’s plays. Nor, for some readers, is it the least part of their astonishing freshness, their perennial vitality, that you may read them over and over again, and never know for certain what Scott himself was or what Scott himself thought.

We know, however, what his characters are, and we know it almost as we know what our friends are by hearing their voices and watching their faces simultaneously. However often one may have read The Antiquary, Jonathan Oldbuck is slightly different every time. We notice different things; our observation of face and voice differs; and thus Scott’s characters, like Shakespeare’s and Jane Austen’s, have the seed of life in them. They change as we change. But though this gift is an essential element in what we call immortality, it does not by any means prove that the character lives as profoundly, as fully, as Falstaff lives or Hamlet. Scott’s characters, indeed, suffer from a serious disability; it is only when they speak that they are alive; they never think; as for prying into their minds himself, or drawing inferences from their behaviour, Scott never attempted it. “Miss Wardour, as if she felt that she had said too much, turned and got into the carriage”—he will penetrate no further into the privacy of Miss Wardour than that; and it is not far. But this matters the less because the characters he cared for were by temperament chatterboxes; Edie Ochiltree, Oldbuck, Mrs. Mucklebackit talk incessantly. They reveal their characters in talk. If they stop talking it is to act. By their talk and by their acts—that is how we know them.

But how far then can we know people, the hostile critic may ask, if we only know that they say this and do that, if they never talk about themselves, and if their creator lets them go their ways, provided they forward his plot, in complete independence of his supervision or interference? Are they not all of them, Ochiltrees, Antiquaries, Dandy Dinmonts, and the rest, merely bundles of humours, and innocent childish humours at that, who serve to beguile our dull hours and charm our sick ones, and are packed off to the nursery when the working day returns and our normal faculties crave something tough to set their teeth into? Compare the Waverley Novels with the novels of Tolstoy, of Stendhal, of Proust! These comparisons of course lead to questions that lie at the root of fiction, but without discussing them, they reveal unmistakably what Scott is not. He is not among the great observers of the intricacies of the heart. He is not going to break seals or loose fountains. But he has the power of the artist who can create a scene and leave us to analyse it for ourselves. When we read the scene in the cottage where Steenie Mucklebackit lies dead, the different emotions—the father’s grief, the mother’s irritability, the minister’s consolations—all rise spontaneously, as if Scott had merely to record, and we have merely to observe. What we lose in intricacy we gain perhaps in spontaneity and the stimulus given to our own creative powers. It is true that Scott creates carelessly, as if the parts came together without his willing it; it is true also that his scene breaks into ruin without his caring.

For who taps at the door and destroys that memorable scene? The cadaverous Earl of Glenallan; the unhappy nobleman who had married his sister in the belief that she was his cousin; and had stalked the world in sables ever after. Falsity breaks in; the peerage breaks in; all the trappings of the undertaker and heralds’ office press upon us their unwholesome claims. The emotions then in which Scott excels are not those of human beings pitted against other human beings, but of man pitted against Nature, of man in relation to fate. His romance is the romance of hunted men hiding in woods at night; of brigs standing out to sea; of waves breaking in the moonlight; of solitary sands and distant horsemen; of violence and suspense. And he is perhaps the last novelist to practise the great, the Shakespearean art, of making people reveal themselves in speech.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Nov 22, 1924]

[]

Lockhart’s Criticism.

[Lockhart’s Literary Criticism. With an Introduction and Bibliography. By M. Clive Hildyard.]

Lockhart was not an ambitious man, and, for all his powers, he was, save in one instance, rather careless in the use he made of them. As a young man he was content with the irresponsibilities of anonymous reviewing; and as an older man the same ephemeral occupation suited him well enough, though he pursued it more sedately, less anonymously and from the respectable comfort of an editor’s chair. But he held no very exalted view of his mission. The business of reviewers, he said, was “to think not of themselves, but of their author…. This excludes all chance of formal, original, or would-be original disquisition on the part of the journalist.” Hence, though Lockhart must have filled volume upon volume with his reviews, very little of Lockhart is to be found embedded in them. When his editor comes—armed with an admirable introduction—to pick out from the lumber of old Blackwoods and Quarterlies the true Lockhart himself, she finds, for all her enthusiasm, that one slim volume holds all that can now be saved.

Yet the work was well worth doing, both because Lockhart had a bold, vivacious mind which leaked into his reviews in spite of his theories, and then again, though Miss Hildyard rates him too highly as a critic, he is a fine sample of a reviewer and serves to show the nature and function of those curious creatures whose lives, if they are as gay and giddy as a gnat’s, are also as short. Here is one of them who has got himself, rather against his will, pinned down in a book; and it is highly amusing to look at him for a moment transfixed. His most necessary quality, it would seem, must be that which in other walks of life would be called, respectfully enough, courage. A new and unknown writer is a very dangerous person. Most of them die at a pinch without a gasp, but some survive and sting, and their sting can be fatal. When Lockhart, we have to remember, saw ranged on his table the usual new books, their names conveyed nothing to him. Keats, Hook, Godwin, Shelley, Brontë, Tennyson—who were they? They might be somebodies, but they might, more probably, be nobodies. It was for him to make the trial and decide the question. Advancing alone with nothing but his own judgment to support him, the reviewer had need of all his courage, his acuteness, his education. He had to switch as adroitly as he could from one subject to another. Mr. Shelley and Mr. Keats, for example, were both poets, and wrote about Greek myths. Godwin and Brontë—Brontë might possibly be a woman—were both novelists; Jeffrey was a critic; Macaulay an historian; Beckford and Borrow were travellers; Coleridge was a poet again, but at the same time a very different poet from Crabbe; somebody had written a book about heraldry, a Staff surgeon had published his memoirs, General Nott had written about Afghanistan, and there was also a valuable work about a new method of treating dry rot. All had to be read, sorted, placed, marked good or bad, and commended with a label tied round their necks to the attention or neglect of the public. The public who paid to be told what to read would be justly annoyed if they were told to read the wrong things.

Lockhart was well qualified for the business. He was a highly educated man. He had taken a first at Oxford, he had a considerable knowledge of Spanish literature, and he was more widely read than most young men of his age. All this was in his favour, but there were drawbacks. The Lockharts were an old Scottish family; and when you add an Oxford education to a young man of an old Scottish family you are making it very difficult for him to be just to apothecaries, for example, who think they can write poetry, or to Cockneys who have the temerity to talk about the Greeks. Moreover, Lockhart was one of those quick-witted indolent people who, as Sir Walter complained, feel the attractions of “the gown and slipper garb of life, and live with funny, easy companions” gossiping and telling stories instead of attending to the serious business of life and making a name for themselves. The doors and windows of his study let in rumours, prejudices, odds and ends of unsubstantiated gossip. With it all, however, he had the makings of a prince of reviewers; and those who have a kindly feeling for the race might well feel forebodings when he and his cronies picked up for review one day in 1820 a new book of poems by John Keats. Keats, Lockhart knew, was a friend of Leigh Hunt, and therefore presumably a Liberal, a Cockney. He knew vaguely that his father had kept livery stables. It was impossible, then, that he should be a gentleman and a scholar. All Lockhart’s prejudices were roused and he rushed to his doom—the worst that can befall a reviewer. He committed himself violently, he betrayed himself completely. He tried to snuff out between finger and thumb one of the immortal lights of English literature. For that failure he has been gibbeted ever since. No one who sees him swinging in the wind can help a shudder and a sigh lest the same fate may one of these days be his. After all, new books of poems still appear.

And it is plain, as we turn over the pages of Lockhart’s resurrected reviews, that to write about a new book the moment it comes out is a very different matter from writing about it fifty years afterwards. A new book is attached to life by a thousand minute filaments. Life goes on and the filaments break and disappear. But at the moment they ring and resound and set up all kinds of irrelevant responses. Keats was an apothecary and lived in Hampstead, and consorted with Leigh Hunt and the Cockneys: Shelley was an atheist and had irregular views upon marriage; the author of Jane Eyre might be a woman, and, if so, was a very coarse one. It is easy to say that these were ephemeral accidents and that Lockhart should have brushed them aside; but they rang loud in his ears, and he could no more have disregarded them and the prejudices of his readers than he could have flung aside his blue dressing-gown and marched down Albemarle Street in a tweed cap and plus fours.

But even so, Lockhart was not so far out as might be expected; in other words, he was very often of the same opinion as we are. He saw the importance of Wordsworth and Coleridge; he welcomed Borrow and Beckford; he placed Jane Eyre, in spite of its coarseness, very high. It is true that he predicted a long life for Zohrab the Hostage, who has had a short one. Probably because he was a novelist himself his criticism of fiction was erratic, and his enthusiasm for the novels of Godwin and Hook seems to show that they excited his own creative power and thus deflected his critical judgment. Tennyson he bullied with unchastened insolence, but, as Tennyson proved by accepting some of his criticism, not without acuteness. In short, the case of Lockhart would seem to show that a good reviewer of contemporary work will get the proportions roughly right, but the detail wrong. He will single out from a number of unknown writers those who are going to prove men of substance, but he cannot be certain what qualities are theirs in particular, or how the importance of one compares with the importance of another.

One may regret, since this is so, that Lockhart fixed his mind so much upon contemporaries and did not give himself the benefit of a wider perspective. He might have written with far greater safety and perhaps with far greater authority upon the dead. But he was a diffident man and a fastidious; and he knew that criticism, to be worth anything, requires more effort and more austerity than he was able to command. All the brilliance of Jeffrey, as he perceived, was not enough “to induce a man of research in the next century to turn over the volumes of his review”. And Gifford, with his “illnatured abuse and cold rancorous raillery … is exquisitely formed for the purposes of political objurgation, but not at all for those of gentle and universal criticism”. A reviewer can skim the surface, but there are “matters of such moment, that it is absolutely impossible to be a great critic while the mind remains unsettled in regard to them”. Because he was aware of this, Lockhart was a good reviewer, and content to remain one. But he was too sceptical too diffident, too handsome and well bred perhaps; he lived too much under the shadow of Sir Walter Scott, he had too many worries and sorrows and dined out too often to push on into those calm and austere regions where the mind settles down to think things out and has its dwelling in a mood of gentle and universal contemplation. So he was content to go on knocking off articles, and cutting out quotations and leaving them to moulder where they lay. But if his reviews show by their power, their insolence, their very lack of ambition, that he had it in him to do better, they also remind us that there is a virtue in familiarity. We lose something when we have ceased to be able to talk naturally of Johnny Keats, to regret the “early death of this unfortunate and misguided gentleman” Mr. Shelley. A little of the irreverence with which Lockhart treated the living would do no harm to our more sober estimates of the dead.

[Times Literary Supplement, Apr 23, 1930]

[]

“David Copperfield”.

Like the ripening of strawberries, the swelling of apples, and all other natural processes, new editions of Dickens—cheap, pleasant-looking, well printed—are born into the world and call for no more notice than the season’s plums and strawberries, save when by some chance the emergence of one of these masterpieces in its fresh green binding suggests an odd and overwhelming enterprise—that one should read David Copperfield for the second time. There is perhaps no person living who can remember reading David Copperfield for the first time. Like Robinson Crusoe and Grimm’s Fairy Tales and the Waverley Novels, Pickwick and David Copperfield are not books, but stories communicated by word of mouth in those tender years when fact and fiction merge, and thus belong to the memories and myths of life, and not to its aesthetic experience. When we lift it from this hazy atmosphere, when we consider it as a book, bound and printed and ordered by the rules of art, what impression does David Copperfield make upon us? As Peggotty and Barkis, the rooks and the workbox with the picture of St. Paul’s, Traddles who drew skeletons, the donkeys who would cross the green, Mr. Dick and the Memorial, Betsey Trotwood and Jip and Dora and Agnes and the Heeps and the Micawbers once more come to life with all their appurtenances and peculiarities, are they still possessed of the old fascination or have they in the interval been attacked by that parching wind which blows about books and, without our reading them, remodels them and changes their features while we sleep? The rumour about Dickens is to the effect that his sentiment is disgusting and his style commonplace; that in reading him every refinement must be hidden and every sensibility kept under glass; but that with these precautions and reservations he is of course Shakespearean; like Scott, a born creator; like Balzac, prodigious in his fecundity; but, rumour adds, it is strange that while one reads Shakespeare and one reads Scott, the precise moment for reading Dickens seldom comes our way.

This last charge may be resolved into this—that he lacks charm and idiosyncrasy, is everybody’s writer and no one’s in particular, is an institution, a monument, a public thoroughfare trodden dusty by a million feet. It is based largely upon the fact that of all great writers Dickens is both the least personally charming and the least personally present in his books. No one has ever loved Dickens as he loves Shakespeare and Scott. Both in his life and in his work the impression that he makes is the same. He has to perfection the virtues conventionally ascribed to the male; he is self-assertive, self-reliant, self-assured; energetic in the extreme. His message, when he parts the veil of the story and steps forward in person, is plain and forcible; he preaches the value of “plain hardworking qualities”, of punctuality, order, diligence, of doing what lies before one with all one’s might. Agitated as he was by the most violent passions, ablaze with indignation, teeming with queer characters, unable to keep the dreams out of his head at night, nobody appears, as we read him, more free from the foibles and eccentricities and charms of genius. He comes before us, as one of his biographers described him, “like a prosperous sea captain”, stalwart, weather-beaten, self-reliant, with a great contempt for the finicky, the inefficient, or the effeminate. His sympathies indeed have strict limitations. Speaking roughly, they fail him whenever a man or woman has more than two thousand a year, has been to the university, or can count his ancestors back to the third generation. They fail him when he has to treat of the mature emotions—the seduction of Emily, for example, or the death of Dora; whenever it is no longer possible to keep moving and creating, but it is necessary to stand still and search into things and penetrate to the depths of what is there. Then, indeed, he fails grotesquely, and the pages in which he describes what in our convention are the peaks and pinnacles of human life, the explanation of Mrs. Strong, the despair of Mrs. Steerforth, or the anguish of Ham, are of an indescribable unreality—of that uncomfortable complexion which, if we heard Dickens talking so in real life, would either make us blush to the roots of our hair or dash out of the room to conceal our laughter. “… Tell him then,” says Emily, “that when I hear the wind blowing at night I feel as if it was passing angrily from seeing him and uncle, and was going up to God against me.” Miss Dartle raves—about carrion and pollution and earthworms, and worthless spangles and broken toys, and how she will have Emily “proclaimed on the common stair”. The failure is akin to that other failure to think deeply, to describe beautifully. Of the men who go to make up the perfect novelist and should live in amity under his hat, two—the poet and the philosopher—failed to come when Dickens called them.

But the greater the creator the more derelict the regions where his powers fail him; all about their fertile lands are deserts where not a blade of grass grows, swamps where the foot sinks deep in mud. Nevertheless, while we are under their spell these great geniuses make us see the world any shape they choose. We remodel our psychological geography when we read Dickens; we forget that we have ever felt the delights of solitude or observed with wonder the intricate emotions of our friends, or luxuriated in the beauty of nature. What we remember is the ardour, the excitement, the humour, the oddity of people’s characters; the smell and savour and soot of London; the incredible coincidences which hook the most remote lives together; the city, the law courts; this man’s nose, that man’s limp; some scene under an archway or on the high road; and above all some gigantic and dominating figure, so stuffed and swollen with life that he does not exist singly and solitarily, but seems to need for his own realisation a host of others, to call into existence the severed parts that complete him, so that wherever he goes he is the centre of conviviality and merriment and punch-making; the room is full, the lights are bright; there are Mrs. Micawber, the twins, Traddles, Betsey Trotwood—all in full swing.

This is the power which cannot fade or fail in its effect—the power not to analyse or to interpret, but to produce, apparently without thought or effort or calculation of the effect upon the story, characters who exist not in detail, not accurately or exactly, but abundantly in a cluster of wild and yet extraordinarily revealing remarks, bubble climbing on the top of bubble as the breath of the creator fills them. And the fecundity and apparent irreflectiveness have a strange effect. They make creators of us, and not merely readers and spectators. As we listen to Micawber pouring himself forth and venturing perpetually some new flight of astonishing imagination, we see, unknown to Mr. Micawber, into the depths of his soul. We say, as Dickens himself says while Micawber holds forth: “How wonderfully like Mr. Micawber that is!” Why trouble, then, if the scenes where emotion and psychology are to be expected fail us completely? Subtlety and complexity are all there if we know where to look for them, if we can get over the surprise of finding them—as it seems to us, who have another convention in these matters—in the wrong places. As a creator of character his peculiarity is that he creates wherever his eyes rest—he has the visualising power in the extreme. His people are branded upon our eyeballs before we hear them speak, by what he sees them doing, and it seems as if it were the sight that sets his thought in action. He saw Uriah Heep “breathing into the pony’s nostrils and immediately covering them with his hand”; he saw David Copperfield looking in the glass to see how red his eyes were after his mother’s death; he saw oddities and blemishes, gestures and incidents, scars, eyebrows, everything that was in the room, in a second. His eye brings in almost too rich a harvest for him to deal with, and gives him an aloofness and a hardness which freeze his sentimentalism and make it seem a concession to the public, a veil thrown over the penetrating glance which left to itself pierced to the bone. With such a power at his command Dickens made his books blaze up, not by tightening the plot or sharpening the wit, but by throwing another handful of people upon the fire. The interest flags and he creates Miss Mowcher, completely alive, equipped in every detail as if she were to play a great part in the story, whereas once the dull stretch of road is passed by her help, she disappears; she is needed no longer. Hence a Dickens novel is apt to become a bunch of separate characters loosely held together, often by the most arbitrary conventions, who tend to fly asunder and split our attention into so many different parts that we drop the book in despair. But that danger is surmounted in David Copperfield. There, though characters swarm and life flows into every creek and cranny, some common feeling—youth, gaiety, hope—envelops the tumult, brings the scattered parts together, and invests the most perfect of all the Dickens novels with an atmosphere of beauty. [◉]

[Nation & Athenaeum, Aug 22, 1925]

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Lewis Carroll.

The complete works of Lewis Carroll have been issued by the Nonesuch Press in a stout volume of 1293 pages. So there is no excuse—Lewis Carroll ought once and for all to be complete. We ought to be able to grasp him whole and entire. But we fail—once more we fail. We think we have caught Lewis Carroll; we look again and see an Oxford clergyman. We think we have caught the Rev. C. L. Dodgson—we look again and see a fairy elf. The book breaks in two in our hands. In order to cement it, we turn to the Life.

But the Rev. C. L. Dodgson had no life. He passed through the world so lightly that he left no print. He melted so passively into Oxford that he is invisible. He accepted every convention; he was prudish, pernickety, pious, and jocose. If Oxford dons in the nineteenth century had an essence he was that essence. He was so good that his sisters worshipped him; so pure that his nephew has nothing to say about him. It is just possible, he hints, that “a shadow of disappointment lay over Lewis Carroll’s life”. Mr. Dodgson at once denies the shadow. “My life”, he says, “is free from all trial and trouble.” But this untinted jelly contained within it a perfectly hard crystal. It contained childhood. And this is very strange, for childhood normally fades slowly. Wisps of childhood persist when the boy or girl is a grown man or woman. Childhood returns sometimes by day, more often by night. But it was not so with Lewis Carroll. For some reason, we know not what, his childhood was sharply severed. It lodged in him whole and entire. He could not disperse it. And therefore as he grew older this impediment in the centre of his being, this hard block of pure childhood, starved the mature man of nourishment. He slipped through the grown-up world like a shadow, solidifying only on the beach at Eastbourne, with little girls whose frocks he pinned up with safety pins. But since childhood remained in him entire, he could do what no one else has ever been able to do—he could return to that world; he could re-create it, so that we too become children again.

In order to make us into children, he first makes us asleep. “Down, down, down, would the fall never come to an end?” Down, down, down we fall into that terrifying, wildly inconsequent, yet perfectly logical world where time races, then stands still; where space stretches, then contracts. It is the world of sleep; it is also the world of dreams. Without any conscious effort dreams come; the white rabbit, the walrus, and the carpenter, one after another, turning and changing one into the other, they come skipping and leaping across the mind. It is for this reason that the two Alices are not books for children; they are the only books in which we become children. President Wilson, Queen Victoria, The Times leader writer, the late Lord Salisbury—it does not matter how old, how important, or how insignificant you are, you become a child again. To become a child is to be very literal; to find everything so strange that nothing is surprising; to be heartless, to be ruthless, yet to be so passionate that a snub or a shadow drapes the world in gloom. It is to be Alice in Wonderland.

It is also to be Alice Through the Looking Glass. It is to see the world upside down. Many great satirists and moralists have shown us the world upside down, and have made us see it, as grown-up people see it, savagely. Only Lewis Carroll has shown us the world upside down as a child sees it, and has made us laugh as children laugh, irresponsibly. Down the groves of pure nonsense we whirl laughing, laughing—

They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care;

They pursued it with forks and hope…

And then we wake. None of the transitions in Alice in Wonderland is quite so queer. For we wake to find—is it the Rev. C. L. Dodgson? Is it Lewis Carroll? Or is it both combined? This conglomerate object intends to produce an extra-Bowdlerised edition of Shakespeare for the use of British maidens; implores them to think of death when they go to the play; and always, always to realise that “the true object of life is the development of character….” Is there, then, even in 1293 pages, any such thing as “completeness”?

[New Statesman and Nation, Dec 9, 1939]

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Edmund Gosse.

When famous writers die it is remarkable how frequently they are credited with one particular virtue—the virtue of kindness to the young and obscure. Every newspaper has lately contained that eulogy upon Arnold Bennett. And here is the same tribute paid to another writer who differed in every possible way from Arnold Bennett—Sir Edmund Gosse. He too, it is said, was generous to the young and obscure. Of Bennett it was certainly, although on some occasions rather obliquely, true. He might, that is to say, have formed a very low opinion of a book; he might have expressed that opinion as his habit was, bluntly and emphatically in print; and yet if he met the writer his sincerity, his concern, his assumption that both cared equally for the craft of letters made it perfectly easy for that unfortunate person to say, “It is all true, and more than true, Mr. Bennett; but if you hate my books, I can’t tell you how completely I loathe yours”—after which a frank discussion of fiction and its nature was possible; and a very obscure novelist was left with the feeling that a very famous one was indeed the kindest of men.

But what would have happened if, taking advantage of Sir Edmund’s generosity, and assuming a common respect for letters, one had said, “But you can’t hate my books, Sir Edmund, more than I hate yours”? Instant annihilation would have been the only and the happiest solution of the situation. But nobody who had ever seen Sir Edmund in the flesh would have risked such folly. Bristling and brilliant, formal but uneasy, he radiated even from a distance all the susceptibilities that make young writers draw in their horns. Generous was not the adjective that sprang to the lips at the sight of him, nor is it one that frequently occurs on reading the life of him by Mr. Charteris. He could be as touchy as a housemaid and as suspicious as a governess. He could smell out an offence where none was meant, and hoard a grievance for years. He could quarrel permanently because a lamp wick was snuffed out too vigorously at a table under his nose. Hostile reviews threw him into paroxysms of rage and despair. His letters are full of phrases like “Mr. Clement Shorter, in terms of unexampled insolence, speaks of me as ‘the so-called critic’…. If that insolent notice in The Times is true … it is better I should know it…. I feel I shall never have the heart to write another sentence.” It seems possible that one severe review by Churton Collins gave him more pain than he suffered from any private or public sorrow in the course of seventy-nine years. All this must have made him the most prickly of companions, and the young must have been possessed of greater tact than the young usually possess to reach the kindness that no doubt lay hid behind the thorns. For the great merit of the present biography is that it does not attempt to conceal the fact that Sir Edmund was a complex character composed of many different strains. Plain virtue was not a sure passport to his affection. He could disregard genius and ignore merit if they trod too clumsily upon his toes. On the other hand the House of Lords possessed a distinct glamour for him; the rigours of high society delighted him; and to see the words “Marlborough Club” at the head of his notepaper did, it seems, shed a certain lustre upon the page.

But these foibles, amusing and annoying as they are, become at once more interesting and less irritating when we learn that there lay behind them a very good cause—his education, his childhood. “Far more than might be supposed of his conduct in life”, writes Mr. Charteris, “was due to unconscious protest against … the things which darkened his childhood.” Readers of Father and Son know well what those things were—the narrowness, the ugliness of his upbringing; the almost insane religious mania of his father; the absence from his home of culture, beauty, urbanity, graciousness—in fact, of all those elements in life to which Edmund Gosse turned as instinctively and needed as profoundly as a flower the sun. What could be more natural than that the flower, once transplanted, should turn, almost violently, the other way, should climb too high, should twine too lavishly, should—to drop these metaphors—order clothes in Savile Row and emerge from behind the form of Dr. Fog uttering what appear at this distance of time rather excessive praises of the now little known Danish poet, Paludin Müller?—a surly poet who objected to visitors. But young Edmund Gosse triumphed. “Slowly, the poet murmured, ‘You flatter me too much, but thank you.’ The most stubborn of all the citadels had capitulated.”

Few people can have been pitchforked, as Mr. Charteris calls it, into the world by a more violent propulsion than that which Gosse was given by the bleakness of his upbringing. It was no wonder that he overshot the mark, never quite got his equilibrium at parties which he loved, required to know the maiden names of married guests, and observed formalities punctiliously which are taken as a matter of course by those who have never lived in dread of the instant coming of the Lord, and have ordered their clothes for generations in Savile Row. But the impulse itself was generous, and the tokens of kindling and expansion more admirable than ridiculous. The “sensual sufficiency in life” delighted one who had been starved of it. Happiness formed the staple of what he would certainly not have called his creed. “To feel so saturated with the love of things”, to enjoy life and “suck it as a wasp drains a peach”, to “roll the moments on one’s tongue and keep the flavour of them”; above all, to cherish friendship and exalt the ideals of friendship—such were the enjoyments that his nature, long repressed, stretched out to, generously, naturally, spontaneously. And yet…

Those who are acquainted with Sir Edmund’s lively portraits know what demure but devastating qualifications he was able to insinuate after those two small words. “He possessed the truth and answered to the heavenly calling,” he wrote of Andrew Lang, “and yet….” Such expansion was natural, was right, was creditable, and yet, we echo, how much better Gosse would have been as a writer, how much more important he would have been as a man if only he had given freer rein to his impulses, if only his pagan and sensual joy had not been dashed by perpetual caution! The peculiarity which Mr. Charteris notes in his walk—“curiously suggestive at once of eagerness and caution”—runs through his life and limits his intelligence. He hints, he qualifies, he insinuates, he suggests, but he never speaks out, for all the world as if some austere Plymouth Brother were lying in wait to make him do penance for his audacity. Yet it seems possible, given the nature of his gifts, that if only he had possessed greater boldness, if only he had pushed his curiosity further, had incurred wrath instead of irritation, and complete confusion instead of some petty social tribulation, he might have rivalled the great Boswell himself. When we read how young Edmund Gosse insinuated himself under cover of Dr. Fog into the presence of an irascible poet and won the day by the adroitness of his flattery, we are reminded of the methods of Boswell in pursuit of Paoli or Voltaire or Johnson. Both men were irresistibly attracted by genius. Both had “a medium-like” power of drawing other people’s confidences into the open. Both were astonishingly adept at reporting the talk and describing the appearance of their friends. But where Boswell is drawn headlong by the momentum of his hero and his own veneration beyond discretion, beyond vanity, beyond his fear of what people will say, down into the depths, Gosse is kept by his respect for decorum, by his decency and his timidity dipping and ducking, fingering and faltering upon the surface. Thus where Boswell left us that profound and moving masterpiece, the Life of Johnson, Gosse left us Father and Son, a classic doubtless, as Mr. Charteris claims, certainly a most original and entertaining book, but how little and light, how dapper and superficial Gosse’s portraits appear if we compare them with the portraits left by Boswell himself! Fear seems always to dog his footsteps. He dips his fingers with astonishing agility and speed into character, but if he finds something hot or gets hold of something large, he drops it and withdraws with the agility of a scalded cat. Thus we never know his sitters intimately; we never plunge into the depths of their minds or into the more profound regions of their hearts. But we know all that can be known by someone who is always a little afraid of being found out.

But if Gosse’s masterpiece and his portraits suffer from his innate regard for caution, much of the fault must be laid upon his age. Even the most superficial student of letters must be aware that in the nineteenth century literature had become, for one reason or another, a profession rather than a vocation, a married woman rather than a lady of easy virtue. It had its organisation, its functions, its emoluments, and a host of people, not primarily writers, were attached to its service. Among them Gosse, of course, was one of the most eminent. “… No public dinner where literature was involved”, writes Mr. Charteris, “was complete without Gosse to propose or to return thanks for the cause.” He welcomed strangers, addressed bodies, celebrated centenaries, presented prizes, and represented letters on all occasions and with the highest delight in the function. Then, again, some intellectual curiosity had risen in the nineties and ardent if uninstructed ladies wished to be enlightened. Here again Gosse was invaluable. By an odd irony, while Churton Collins, his deadly foe, was lecturing in St. James’s Square, Gosse was serving up Matthew Arnold to “some of the smartest women in London” in Bruton Street. After this, says Mr. Charteris, he became “a much more frequent guest in Mayfair” and his appetite for social life was whetted. Nothing would be more foolish than to sneer at a natural love of ceremony or a natural respect for the aristocracy, and yet it seems possible that this concern with the ritual of literature, this scrupulous observance of the rites of society encouraged Edmund Gosse in his growing decorum. Friendship had been his ideal; nobody can question the warmth of his youthful affection for Hamo Thornycroft; and yet when one of his friends, Robert Ross, was involved in a famous scandal he could write “I miss your charming company in which I have always delighted … I would say to you—be calm, be reasonable, turn for consolation to the infinite resources of literature…. Write to me when you feel inclined, and however busy I am I will write in reply, and in a more happy season you must come back and be truly welcomed in this house.” Is that the voice of friendship, disinterested, fearless, sincere, or the voice of an uneasy man of letters, who is terribly afraid that dear Lady C. will not ask him to dine, or that divine being the Countess of D. will not invite him for the week-end if they suspect him of harbouring Robert Ross, the friend of Oscar Wilde? And later his decorum seems to have drawn a film over his wonted perspicacity as a critic. M. Gide, for example, thought it well to mention certain facts openly in the third volume of his memoirs. “Was it wise? Was it necessary? Is it useful?” Sir Edmund cried, in “painful perplexity”. And he was terribly shocked by an incident in E. M. Forster’s Howards End. “I should like to know”, he wrote to Mr. Marsh, “what you think of the new craze for introducing into fiction the high-born maiden who has had a baby? … I do not know how an Englishman can calmly write of such a disgusting thing, with such sang-froid…. I cannot help hoping that you may be induced to say something that will redeem him.” But when Sir Edmund goes on to say that no high-bred maiden has ever had a baby illegitimately in a French novel one can only suppose that he was thinking, not unnaturally, of the House of Lords.

But if Gosse was no Boswell and still less a St. Francis, he was able to fill a place and create a legend, and perhaps we have no right to demand more. To be oneself is, after all, an achievement of some rarity, and Gosse, as everybody must agree, achieved it, both in literature and in life. As a writer he expressed himself in book after book of history, of biography, of criticism. For over fifty years he was busily concerned, as he put it, with “the literary character and the literary craft”. There is scarcely a figure of any distinction, or a book of any importance in modern letters, upon which we cannot have Gosse’s opinion if we wish for it. For instance, one may have a curiosity about Disraeli’s novels and hesitate which to begin upon. Let us consult Gosse. Gosse advises on the whole that we shall try Coningsby. He gives his reasons. He rouses us with a suggestive remark. He defines Disraeli’s quality by comparing him with Bulwer, with Mrs. Gore and Plumer Read. He tells an anecdote about Disraeli that was told him by his friend the Duke of Rutland. He breaks off a phrase here and there for our amusement or admiration. All this he does with perfect suavity and precision, so that by the time he has done Disraeli is left glowing and mantling like an old picture lit up by a dozen bright candles. To illumine, to make visible and desirable, was his aim as a critic. Literature to him was an incomparable mistress and it was his delight “to dress her charms and make her more beloved”. Lovers of course sometimes go further and a child is the result. Critics too sometimes love literature creatively and the fruit of their devotion has a toughness and a fibre that the smooth strains of Sir Edmund’s platonic devotion are entirely without. Like all critics who persist in judging without creating he forgets the risk and agony of child-birth. His criticism becomes more and more a criticism of the finished article, and not of the article in the making. The smoothness, the craftsmanship of the work rouse his appreciation and he directs our attention only to its more superficial aspects. In other words, he is a critic for those who read rather than for those who write. But then no creator possesses Gosse’s impartiality, or his width of reading, or his lightness and freedom of mind, so that if we want to hold a candle to some dark face in the long portrait gallery of literature there is no better illuminant than Edmund Gosse.

As for his own face, his own idiosyncrasy, only those who saw him at home among his books, or heard him, mimicking, remembering, in one of those club corners that he made, so characteristically, his own, can bring the odds and ends of this excitable but timid, this enthusiastic but worldly, this kindly but spiteful man into one complete synthesis. It was only in talk that he completely expressed himself. “I was not born for solitude”, he wrote. Neither was he born for old age and meditation. “You speak of ‘the peace which the years bring’, but they bring no peace for me”, he wrote. Thought and the ardours and agonies of life were not for him. “I have no idea”, he said, “how the spiritual world would look to me, for I have never glanced at it since I was a child and gorged with it.” It is a cruel fate that makes those who only come into being when they talk fall silent. It is a harsh necessity that brings these warm and mobile characters into the narrow confines of the grave. Sir Edmund was not in the least anxious to depart and leave a world which, with the solitary exception of Churton Collins, had showered upon him so many delightful gifts for seventy-nine years.

[Fortnightly Review, Jun 1, 1931]

[]

Notes on D. H. Lawrence.

The partiality, the inevitable imperfection of contemporary criticism can best be guarded against, perhaps, by making in the first place a full confession of one’s disabilities, so far as it is possible to distinguish them. Thus by way of preface to the following remarks upon D. H. Lawrence, the present writer has to state that until April 1931 he was known to her almost solely by reputation and scarcely at all by experience. His reputation, which was that of a prophet, the exponent of some mystical theory of sex, the devotee of cryptic terms, the inventor of a new terminology which made free use of such words as solar plexus and the like, was not attractive; to follow submissively in his tracks seemed an unthinkable aberration; and as chance would have it, the few pieces of his writing that issued from behind this dark cloud of reputation seemed unable to rouse any sharp curiosity or to dispel the lurid phantom. There was, to begin with, Trespassers, a hot, scented, overwrought piece of work, as it seemed; then A Prussian Officer, of which no clear impression remained except of starting muscles and forced obscenity; then The Lost Girl, a compact and seamanlike piece of work, stuffed with careful observation rather in the Bennett manner; then one or two sketches of Italian travel of great beauty, but fragmentary and broken off; and then two little books of poems, Nettles and Pansies, which read like the sayings that small boys scribble upon stiles to make housemaids jump and titter.

Meanwhile, the chants of the worshippers at the shrine of Lawrence became more rapt; their incense thicker and their gyrations more mazy and more mystic. His death last year gave them still greater liberty and still greater impetus; his death, too, irritated the respectable; and it was the irritation roused by the devout and the shocked, and the ceremonies of the devout and the scandal of the shocked, that drove one at last to read Sons and Lovers in order to see whether, as so often happens, the master is not altogether different from the travesty presented by his disciples.

This then was the angle of approach, and it will be seen that it is an angle that shuts off many views and distorts others. But read from this angle, Sons and Lovers emerged with astonishing vividness, like an island from off which the mist has suddenly lifted. Here it lay, clean cut, decisive, masterly, hard as rock, shaped, proportioned by a man who, whatever else he might be—prophet or villain, was undoubtedly the son of a miner who had been born and bred in Nottingham. But this hardness, this clarity, this admirable economy and sharpness of the stroke are not rare qualities in an age of highly efficient novelists. The lucidity, the ease, the power of the writer to indicate with one stroke and then to refrain indicated a mind of great power and penetration. But these impressions, after they had built up the lives of the Morels, their kitchens, food, sinks, manner of speech, were succeeded by another far rarer, and of far greater interest. For after we have exclaimed that this coloured and stereoscopic representation of life is so like that surely it must be alive—like the bird that pecked the cherry in the picture—one feels, from some indescribable brilliance, sombreness, significance, that the room is put into order. Some hand has been at work before we entered. Casual and natural as the arrangement seems, as if we had opened the door and come in by chance, some hand, some eye of astonishing penetration and force, has swiftly arranged the whole scene, so that we feel that it is more exciting, more moving, in some ways fuller of life than one had thought real life could be, as if a painter had brought out the leaf or the tulip or the jar by pulling a green curtain behind it. But what is the green curtain that Lawrence has pulled so as to accentuate the colours? One never catches Lawrence—this is one of his most remarkable qualities—“arranging”. Words, scenes flow as fast and direct as if he merely traced them with a free rapid hand on sheet after sheet. Not a sentence seems thought about twice: not a word added for its effect on the architecture of the phrase. There is no arrangement that makes us say: “Look at this. This scene, this dialogue has the meaning of the book hidden in it.” One of the curious qualities of Sons and Lovers is that one feels an unrest, a little quiver and shimmer in his page, as if it were composed of separate gleaming objects, by no means content to stand still and be looked at. There is a scene of course; a character; yes, and people related to each other by a net of sensations; but these are not there—as in Proust—for themselves. They do not admit of prolonged exploration, of rapture in them for the sake of rapture, as one may sit in front of the famous hawthorn hedge in Swann’s Way and look at it. No, there is always something further on, another goal. The impatience, the need for getting on beyond the object before us, seem to contract, to shrivel up, to curtail scenes to their barest, to flash character simply and starkly in front of us. We must not look for more than a second; we must hurry on. But to what?

Probably to some scene which has very little to do with character, with story, with any of the usual resting places, eminences, and consummations of the usual novel. The only thing that we are given to rest upon, to expand upon, to feel to the limits of our powers is some rapture of physical being. Such for instance is the scene when Paul and Miriam swing in the barn. Their bodies become incandescent, glowing, significant, as in other books a passage of emotion burns in that way. For the writer it seems the scene is possessed of a transcendental significance. Not in talk nor in story nor in death nor in love, but here as the body of the boy swings in the barn.

But, perhaps, because such a state cannot satisfy for long, perhaps because Lawrence lacks the final power which makes things entire in themselves, the effect of the book is that stability is never reached. The world of Sons and Lovers is perpetually in process of cohesion and dissolution. The magnet that tries to draw together the different particles of which the beautiful and vigorous world of Nottingham is made is this incandescent body, this beauty glowing in the flesh, this intense and burning light. Hence whatever we are shown seems to have a moment of its own. Nothing rests secure to be looked at. All is being sucked away by some dissatisfaction, some superior beauty, or desire, or possibility. The book therefore excites, irritates, moves, changes, seems full of stir and unrest and desire for something withheld, like the body of the hero. The whole world—it is a proof of the writer’s remarkable strength—is broken and tossed by the magnet of the young man who cannot bring the separate parts into a unity which will satisfy him.

This allows, partly at least, of a simple explanation. Paul Morel, like Lawrence himself, is the son of a miner. He is dissatisfied with his conditions. One of his first actions on selling a picture is to buy an evening suit. He is not a member, like Proust, of a settled and satisfied society. He is anxious to leave his own class and to enter another. He believes that the middle class possess what he does not possess. His natural honesty is too great to be satisfied with his mother’s argument that the common people are better than the middle class because they possess more life. The middle class, Lawrence feels, possess ideas; or something else that he wishes himself to have. This is one cause of his unrest. And it is of profound importance. For the fact that he, like Paul, was a miner’s son, and that he disliked his conditions, gave him a different approach to writing from those who have a settled station and enjoy circumstances which allow them to forget what those circumstances are.

Lawrence received a violent impetus from his birth. It set his gaze at an angle from which it took some of its most marked characteristics. He never looked back at the past, or at things as if they were curiosities of human psychology, nor was he interested in literature as literature. Everything has a use, a meaning, is not an end in itself. Comparing him again with Proust, one feels that he echoes nobody, continues no tradition, is unaware of the past, of the present save as it affects the future. As a writer, this lack of tradition affects him immensely. The thought plumps directly into his mind; up spurt the sentences as round, as hard, as direct as water thrown out in all directions by the impact of a stone. One feels that not a single word has been chosen for its beauty, or for its effect upon the architecture of the sentence.

[written in 1931]

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Roger Fry.

When I was asked to open this exhibition of Roger Fry’s pictures my first instinct I admit was to refuse, for it seemed to me that an exhibition of paintings ought to be opened by a painter or by a critic of painting. But on second thoughts it struck me that this particular exhibition, this memorial exhibition of Roger Fry’s pictures, might fitly be opened by someone who is not a painter or a critic because Roger Fry did more than anyone to make such people—such outsiders—enjoy looking at pictures. That was my experience, and I think I am right in saying that there are others in this room who have felt the same thing. Pictures were to many of us—if I may generalise—things that hung upon walls; silent inscrutable patterns; treasure houses with locked doors in front of which learned people would stop, and about which they would lecture, saying that they were of this period or of that, of this school or of that, probably by this master, but perhaps on the other hand by one of his disciples. And we would trail behind them, silent, servile, and bored. Then all of a sudden those dim pictures began to flash with light and colour; and our guides, those respectable professors, began to argue and to quarrel, called each other—if I remember rightly—liars and cheats, and altogether began to behave like living people arguing about something of vital importance. What had happened? What had brought this life and colour, this racket and din into the quiet galleries of ancient art? It was that Roger Fry had gathered together the Post-Impressionist Exhibition in Dover Street; and the names of Cézanne and Gauguin, of Matisse and Picasso, suddenly became as hotly debated, as violently defended as the names—shall we say?—of Ramsay MacDonald, Hitler, or Lloyd George. That is many years ago. The dust of that conflict has died down. But all the same pictures have never gone back to their walls. They are no longer silent, decorous, and dull. They are things we live with, and laugh at, love and discuss. And I think I am right in saying that it was Roger Fry more than anybody who brought about this change. He did it, of course, by his writing and by his lecturing. Many of you will have read his books, and will have heard his lectures. You will know better than I can describe it how profoundly he felt about the roots of art; how subtly, with that long white wand of his, standing in front of his magic lantern, he would point to this line and to that and would bring to the surface in new and startling revelation those qualities that lie deep sunk in pictures so that we saw them afresh. You will have felt this while he lectured; you will still find it, happily, in his books; but I would like, if I can, to give you some faint idea how he did it in his talk.

I remember an instance that struck me greatly one night last summer. It was at a friend’s house, and someone had brought him a picture for his opinion. It was a question whether it was a genuine picture by Degas, or whether it was an extremely skilful imitation. The picture was stood on a chair, and Roger Fry sat and looked at it. His eye ranged over it, carefully, appreciatively. It was a very good picture beyond a doubt; it was signed by Degas; it was in the manner of Degas—he was inclined to think on the whole that it was by Degas. And yet there was something that puzzled him; something—he could not say what—that made him hesitate. As if to rest himself, he turned away and took part in a discussion that was going forward in another corner of the room—a difficult discussion upon some abstract question of aesthetics. He argued and he listened to others arguing. But now and again I saw his eye go back to the picture as if it were feeling it, tasting it, making a voyage of discovery on its own. Then there was a pause. Suddenly he looked up and said: “No. No. That is not by Degas.”

There it seemed to me one had a glimpse for a moment into the process that made him so great a critic. While he was arguing about the theory of art in the abstract his eye was ranging over the picture and bringing back its spoils. Then there was a moment of fusion, of comprehension; and his mind was made up. “No,” he said. “It is not by Degas.” But how was it done? By the union, it seemed to me, of two different qualities—his reason and his sensibility. Many people have one; many people have the other. But few have both, and fewer still are able to make them both work in harmony. But that was what he did. While he was reasoning he was seeing; and while he was seeing he was reasoning. He was acutely sensitive, but at the same time he was uncompromisingly honest. Was this integrity, this honesty, a quality that he owed in part to his Quaker blood? He came, as you know, of a great Quaker family, and I have sometimes thought that this clarity, this sobriety of judgment, this determination to get beneath the appearance to the bedrock beneath are qualities that go with a Quaker upbringing. At any rate he never allowed himself merely to feel; he always checked and verified his impressions. Whether he upset other people’s views (as he did) or changed his own (and he did), he always used his brain to correct his sensibility. And what was of equal importance, he always allowed his sensibility to correct his brain.

Here I come to a point in speaking of him where I doubt if he would let me go on. For I want to say that his understanding of art owed much to his understanding of life, and yet I know that he disliked the mingling and mixing of different things. He wanted art to be art; literature to be literature; and life to be life. He was an undaunted enemy of the sloppiness, the vagueness, the sentimentality which has filled so many academies with anecdotes of dogs and duchesses. He detested the story-telling spirit which has clouded our painting and confused our criticism. But I will venture to say that one of the reasons why his criticism always grew, always went deeper, always included more, and never froze into the rigidity of death was that he himself breasted so many different currents of the stream of life. He was a man of many interests and many sympathies. As a young man he had been trained as a scientist. Science interested him profoundly. Poetry was one of his perpetual delights. He was deeply versed in French literature. He was a great lover of music. Anything that he could touch and handle and fashion with his fingers fascinated him. He made plates and pots with his own hands; he dyed stuffs; he designed furniture; he would come into the kitchen and teach the cook how to make an omelette; he would come into the drawing-room and teach the mistress how to arrange a bunch of flowers. And just as connoisseurs would bring him a picture for his opinion, so people of all kinds—and he had friends of all kinds—would bring him their lives—those canvases upon which we paint so many queer designs—and he would bring to bear upon their muddles and misfortunes the same rare mixture of logic and sympathy that made him so invigorating as a critic. He would start people living again just as he would start them painting again. And though I do not want to mix up different things, still I believe it was because so many interests, so many sympathies lived together in him that his teaching remained so fertile and so fresh.

But there was another reason why his criticism never became, as criticism so often does become, the repetition of a fixed idea. And that was of course that he always painted himself. He cared more for his painting than for his writing. The writing was done with many groans in the afternoon when the light was bad; on the tops of omnibuses; in the corners of third-class railway carriages. But painting was an instinct—a delight. If one were walking with him through the English fields, or driving with him along the roads of Italy or Greece, suddenly he would stop, and look. “I must just make a note of that,” he would say, and out would come a pencil and a piece of paper and he would make a rough-and-ready sketch on the spot.

Many of the pictures on these walls are the results of those sketches. And because he painted himself he was perpetually forced to meet with his own brush those problems with which he was dealing with his pen. He knew from his own experience what labours, joys, despairs, go to the making of pictures. A picture was to him not merely the finished canvas but the canvas in the making. Every step of that struggle, which ends sometimes in victory, but more often in defeat, was known to him from his own daily battle. It was because he painted himself that he kept so keen a sense of all the intricate processes of painting; and that was why he had so high a standard of what I may call the morality of art. No one knew better than he did how hard it is to paint well; no one knew better than he did how easy it is to palm off upon the public something that does instead. That is why his criticism is so trenchant, so witty, often so devastating in its exposure of humbug and pretence. That too is why it is so full of respect and admiration for the artist who has used his gift honourably and honestly even though it is a small one.

He was never, I think, satisfied with his own painting; he never met with the success which he deserved. But that made no difference to his interest, to his activity. He went on painting; he went on tearing up his pictures; he threw them away; he began them again. And his devotion to his art seemed, if possible, to grow stronger with the years. Had he lived to be a hundred he would have been found, I am sure, sitting in front of a canvas with a brush in his hand.

Therefore there is nothing that he would have liked more than that you should have brought together this collection of his paintings. And there is no exhibition that could rouse questions of greater interest. We may ask ourselves, as we look at these pictures, is it a good thing that an artist should be also a critic, or does it inhibit his creative power? Is it necessary that an artist, in order to use his genius fully, should live half submerged in the dim world of ignorance, or on the contrary does knowledge and the consciousness that comes with it lead him to be more daring and more drastic in his researches and discoveries, and so prolong his artistic life and give it new power and direction? Such questions can be answered here as in no other room in England; for no artist, I think I am right in saying, knew more about the problems of his art than Roger Fry, or pursued them with a deeper curiosity or with greater courage.

But here I touch upon questions that lie beyond my scope—here I come to the pictures themselves; and I am not able to speak of Roger Fry’s pictures as a fellow painter or as a fellow critic would speak of them. But speaking unprofessionally, as an outsider, I am sure that Roger Fry, were he here, would have made us all welcome equally to his exhibition. He would have asked only that we should come to it, whatever our calling, whatever our interests, with open eyes and open minds in the spirit of enjoyment. He believed that the love of art lives in most people if they will but give scope to it. He believed that the understanding of art, the enjoyment of art, are among the most profound and enduring pleasures that life has to give. I feel then that I am now asking you to embark upon a voyage—upon a voyage in which he will always be one of the great leaders, the great captains—a voyage of discovery into the mind and art of a remarkable man; and I have great pleasure in declaring this exhibition open.

[An Address given at the opening of the Roger Fry Memorial Exhibition at the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery on Friday, July 1935; pamphlet “The Roger Fry Memorial Exhibition”, Sep 18, 1935]

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The Art of Fiction.

[Aspects of the Novel, by E.M. Forster.]

That fiction is a lady, and a lady who has somehow got herself into trouble, is a thought that must often have struck her admirers. Many gallant gentlemen have ridden to her rescue, chief among them Sir Walter Raleigh and Mr. Percy Lubbock. But both were a little ceremonious in their approach; both, one felt, had a great deal of knowledge of her, but not much intimacy with her. Now comes Mr. Forster, who disclaims knowledge but cannot deny that he knows the lady well. If he lacks something of the others’ authority, he enjoys the privileges which are allowed the lover. He knocks at the bedroom door and is admitted when the lady is in slippers and dressing-gown. Drawing up their chairs to the fire they talk easily, wittily, subtly, like old friends who have no illusions, although in fact the bedroom is a lecture-room and the place the highly austere city of Cambridge.

This informal attitude on Mr. Forster’s part is of course deliberate. He is not a scholar; he refuses to be a pseudo-scholar. There remains a point of view which the lecturer can adopt usefully, if modestly. He can, as Mr. Forster puts it, “visualise the English novelists not as floating down that stream which bears all its sons away unless they are careful, but as seated together in a room, a circular room—a sort of British Museum reading-room—all writing their novels simultaneously”. So simultaneous are they, indeed, that they persist in writing out of their turn. Richardson insists that he is contemporary with Henry James. Wells will write a passage which might be written by Dickens. Being a novelist himself, Mr. Forster is not annoyed at this discovery. He knows from experience what a muddled and illogical machine the brain of a writer is. He knows how little they think about methods; how completely they forget their grandfathers; how absorbed they tend to become in some vision of their own. Thus, though the scholars have all his respect, his sympathies are with the untidy and harassed people who are scribbling away at their books. And looking down on them, not from any great height, but, as he says, over their shoulders, he makes out, as he passes, that certain shapes and ideas tend to recur in their minds whatever their period. Since story-telling began stories have always been made of much the same elements; and these, which he calls The Story, People, Plot, Fantasy, Prophecy, Pattern, and Rhythm, he now proceeds to examine.

Many are the judgments that we would willingly argue, many are the points over which we would willingly linger, as Mr. Forster passes lightly on his way. That Scott is a storyteller and nothing more; that a story is the lowest of literary organisms; that the novelist’s unnatural preoccupation with love is largely a reflection of his own state of mind while he composes—every page has a hint or a suggestion which makes us stop to think or wish to contradict. Never raising his voice above the speaking level, Mr. Forster has the art of saying things which sink airily enough into the mind to stay there and unfurl like those Japanese flowers which open up in the depths of the water. But greatly though these sayings intrigue us, we want to call a halt at some definite stopping place; we want to make Mr. Forster stand and deliver. For possibly, if fiction is, as we suggest, in difficulties, it may be because nobody grasps her firmly and defines her severely. She has had no rules drawn up for her, very little thinking done on her behalf. And though rules may be wrong and must be broken, they have this advantage—they confer dignity and order upon their subject; they admit her to a place in civilised society; they prove that she is worthy of consideration. But this part of his duty, if it is his duty, Mr. Forster expressly disowns. He is not going to theorise about fiction except incidentally; he doubts even whether she is to be approached by a critic, and if so, with what critical equipment. All we can do is to edge him into a position which is definite enough for us to see where he stands. And perhaps the best way to do this is to quote, much summarised, his estimates of three great figures—Meredith, Hardy, and Henry James. Meredith is an exploded philosopher. His vision of nature is “fluffy and lush”. When he gets serious and noble he becomes a bully. “And his novels; most of the social values are faked. The tailors are not tailors, the cricket matches are not cricket.” Hardy is a far greater writer. But he is not so successful as a novelist because his characters are “required to contribute too much to the plot; except in their rustic humours their vitality has been impoverished, they have gone thin and dry—he has emphasised causality more strongly than his medium permits”. Henry James pursued the narrow path of aesthetic duty and was successful. But at what a sacrifice? “Most of human life has to disappear before he can do us a novel. Maimed creatures can alone breathe in his novels. His characters are few in number and constructed on stingy lines.”

Now if we look at these judgments, and place beside them certain admissions and omissions, we shall see that if we cannot pin Mr. Forster to a creed we can commit him to a point of view. There is something—we hesitate to be more precise—which he calls “life”. It is to this that he brings the books of Meredith, Hardy, or James for comparison. Always their failure is some failure in relation to life. It is the humane as opposed to the aesthetic view of fiction. It maintains that the novel is “sogged with humanity”; that “human beings have their great chance in the novel”; a triumph won at the expense of life is in fact a defeat. Thus we arrive at the notably harsh judgment of Henry James. For Henry James brought into the novel something besides human beings. He created patterns which, though beautiful in themselves, are hostile to humanity. And for his neglect of life, says Mr. Forster, he will perish.

But at this point the pertinacious pupil may demand: “What is this ‘Life’ that keeps on cropping up so mysteriously and so complacently in books about fiction? Why is it absent in a pattern and present in a tea party? Why is the pleasure that we get from the pattern in The Golden Bowl less valuable than the emotion which Trollope gives us when he describes a lady drinking tea in a parsonage? Surely the definition of life is too arbitrary, and requires to be expanded.” To all of this Mr. Forster would reply, presumably, that he lays down no laws; the novel somehow seems to him too soft a substance to be carved like the other arts; he is merely telling us what moves him and what leaves him cold. Indeed, there is no other criterion. So then we are back in the old bog; nobody knows anything about the laws of fiction; or what its relation is to life; or to what effects it can lend itself. We can only trust our instincts. If instinct leads one reader to call Scott a story-teller, another to call him a master of romance; if one reader is moved by art, another by life, each is right, and each can pile a card-house of theory on top of his opinion as high as he can go. But the assumption that fiction is more intimately and humbly attached to the service of human beings than the other arts leads to a further position which Mr. Forster’s book again illustrates. It is unnecessary to dwell upon her aesthetic functions because they are so feeble that they can safely be ignored. Thus, though it is impossible to imagine a book on painting in which not a word should be said about the medium in which a painter works, a wise and brilliant book, like Mr. Forster’s, can be written about fiction without saying more than a sentence or two about the medium in which a novelist works. Almost nothing is said about words. One might suppose, unless one had read them, that a sentence means the same thing and is used for the same purposes by Sterne and by Wells. One might conclude that Tristram Shandy gains nothing from the language in which it is written. So with the other aesthetic qualities. Pattern, as we have seen, is recognised, but savagely censured for her tendency to obscure the human features. Beauty occurs but she is suspect. She makes one furtive appearance—“beauty at which a novelist should never aim, though he fails if he does not achieve it”—and the possibility that she may emerge again as rhythm is briefly discussed in a few interesting pages at the end. But for the rest fiction is treated as a parasite which draws sustenance from life and must in gratitude resemble life or perish. In poetry, in drama, words may excite and stimulate and deepen without this allegiance; but in fiction they must first and foremost hold themselves at the service of the teapot and the pug dog, and to be found wanting is to be found lacking.

Strange though this unaesthetic attitude would be in the critic of any other art, it does not surprise us in the critic of fiction. For one thing, the problem is extremely difficult. A book fades like a mist, like a dream. How are we to take a stick and point to that tone, that relation, in the vanishing pages, as Mr. Roger Fry points with his wand at a line or a colour in the picture displayed before him? Moreover, a novel in particular has roused a thousand ordinary human feelings in its progress. To drag in art in such a connection seems priggish and cold-hearted. It may well compromise the critic as a man of feeling and domestic ties. And so while the painter, the musician, and the poet come in for their share of criticism, the novelist goes unscathed. His character will be discussed; his morality, it may be his genealogy, will be examined; but his writing will go scot-free. There is not a critic alive now who will say that a novel is a work of art and that as such he will judge it.

And perhaps, as Mr. Forster insinuates, the critics are right. In England at any rate the novel is not a work of art. There are none to be stood beside War and Peace, The Brothers Karamazov, or A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. But while we accept the fact, we cannot suppress one last conjecture. In France and Russia they take fiction seriously. Flaubert spends a month seeking a phrase to describe a cabbage. Tolstoy writes War and Peace seven times over. Something of their pre-eminence may be due to the pains they take, something to the severity with which they are judged. If the English critic were less domestic, less assiduous to protect the rights of what it pleases him to call life, the novelist might be bolder too. He might cut adrift from the eternal tea-table and the plausible and preposterous formulas which are supposed to represent the whole of our human adventure. But then the story might wobble; the plot might crumble; ruin might seize upon the characters. The novel, in short, might become a work of art.

Such are the dreams that Mr. Forster leads us to cherish. For his is a book to encourage dreaming. None more suggestive has been written about the poor lady whom, with perhaps mistaken chivalry, we still persist in calling the art of fiction.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Nov 12, 1927]

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American Fiction.

Excursions into the literature of a foreign country much resemble our travels abroad. Sights that are taken for granted by the inhabitants seem to us astonishing; however well we seemed to know the language at home, it sounds differently on the lips of those who have spoken it from birth; and above all, in our desire to get at the heart of the country we seek out whatever it may be that is most unlike what we are used to, and declaring this to be the very essence of the French or American genius proceed to lavish upon it a credulous devotion, to build up upon it a structure of theory which may well amuse, annoy, or even momentarily enlighten those who are French or American by birth.

The English tourist in American literature wants above all things something different from what he has at home. For this reason the one American writer whom the English wholeheartedly admire is Walt Whitman. There, you will hear them say, is the real American undisguised. In the whole of English literature there is no figure which resembles his—among all our poetry none in the least comparable to Leaves of Grass. This very unlikeness becomes a merit, and leads us, as we steep ourselves in the refreshing unfamiliarity, to become less and less able to appreciate Emerson, Lowell, Hawthorne, who have had their counterparts among us and drew their culture from our books. The obsession, whether well or ill founded, fair or unfair in its results, persists at the present moment. To dismiss such distinguished names as those of Henry James, Mr. Hergesheimer, and Mrs. Wharton would be impossible; but their praises are qualified with the reservation—they are not Americans; they do not give us anything that we have not got already.

Thus having qualified the tourist’s attitude, in its crudity and onesidedness, let us begin our excursion into modern American fiction by asking what are the sights we ought to see. Here our bewilderment begins; for the names of so many authors, the titles of so many books, rise at once to the lips. Mr. Dreiser, Mr. Cabell, Miss Canfield, Mr. Sherwood Anderson, Miss Hurst, Mr. Sinclair Lewis, Miss Willa Cather, Mr. Ring Lardner—all have done work which, if time allowed, we should do well to examine carefully, and, if we must concentrate upon two or three at most, it is because, travellers and tourists as we are, it seems best to sketch a theory of the tendency of American fiction from the inspection of a few important books rather than to examine each writer separately by himself. Of all American novelists the most discussed and read in England at the present moment are probably Mr. Sherwood Anderson and Mr. Sinclair Lewis. And among all their fiction we find one volume, A Story Teller’s Story, which, being fact rather than fiction, may serve as interpreter, may help us to guess the nature of American writers’ problems before we see them tussled with or solved. Peering over Mr. Sherwood Anderson’s shoulder, we may get a preliminary view of the world as it looks to the novelist before it is disguised and arranged for the reception of his characters. Indeed, if we look over Mr. Anderson’s shoulder, America appears a very strange place. What is it that we see here? A vast continent, scattered here and there with brand new villages which nature has not absorbed into herself with ivy and moss, summer and winter, as in England, but man has built recently, hastily, economically, so that the village is like the suburb of a town. The slow English wagons are turned into Ford cars; the primrose banks have become heaps of old tins; the barns sheds of corrugated iron. It is cheap, it is new, it is ugly, it is made of odds and ends, hurriedly flung together, loosely tied in temporary cohesion—that is the burden of Mr. Anderson’s complaint. And, he proceeds to ask, how can the imagination of an artist take root here, where the soil is stony and the imagination stubs itself upon the rocks? There is one solution and one only—by being resolutely and defiantly American. Explicitly and implicitly that is the conclusion he reaches; that is the note which turns the discord to harmony. Mr. Anderson is for ever repeating over and over like a patient hypnotising himself, “I am the American man”. The words rise in his mind with the persistency of a submerged but fundamental desire. Yes, he is the American man; it is a terrible misfortune; it is an enormous opportunity; but for good or for bad, he is the American man. “Behold in me the American man striving to become an artist, to become conscious of himself, filled with wonder concerning himself and others, trying to have a good time and not fake a good time. I am not English, Italian, Jew, German, Frenchman, Russian. What am I?” Yes, we may be excused for repeating, what is he? One thing is certain—whatever the American man may be, he is not English; whatever he may become, he will not become an Englishman.

For that is the first step in the process of being American—to be not English. The first step in the education of an American writer is to dismiss the whole army of English words which have marched so long under the command of dead English generals. He must tame and compel to his service the “little American words”; he must forget all that he learnt in the school of Fielding and Thackeray; he must learn to write as he talks to men in Chicago bar-rooms, to men in the factories of Indiana. That is the first step; but the next step is far more difficult. For having decided what he is not, he must proceed to discover what he is. This is the beginning of a stage of acute self-consciousness which manifests itself in writers otherwise poles asunder. Nothing, indeed, surprises the English tourist more than the prevalence of this self-consciousness and the bitterness, for the most part against England, with which it is accompanied. One is reminded constantly of the attitude of another race, till lately subject and still galled by the memory of its chains. Women writers have to meet many of the same problems that beset Americans. They too are conscious of their own peculiarities as a sex; apt to suspect insolence, quick to avenge grievances, eager to shape an art of their own. In both cases all kinds of consciousness—consciousness of self, of race, of sex, of civilisation—which have nothing to do with art, have got between them and the paper, with results that are, on the surface at least, unfortunate. It is easy enough to see that Mr. Anderson, for example, would be a much more perfect artist if he could forget that he is an American; he would write better prose if he could use all words impartially, new or old, English or American, classical or slang.

Nevertheless as we turn from his autobiography to his fiction we are forced to own (as some women writers also make us own) that to come fresh to the world, to turn a new angle to the light, is so great an achievement that for its sake we can pardon the bitterness, the self-consciousness, the angularity which inevitably go with it. In The Triumph of the Egg there is some rearrangement of the old elements of art which makes us rub our eyes. The feeling recalls that with which we read Chekhov for the first time. There are no familiar handles to lay hold of in The Triumph of the Egg. The stories baffle our efforts, slip through our fingers and leave us feeling, not that it is Mr. Anderson who has failed us, but that we as readers have muffed our work and must go back, like chastened schoolchildren, and spell the lesson over again in the attempt to lay hold of the meaning.

Mr. Anderson has bored into that deeper and warmer layer of human nature which it would be frivolous to ticket new or old, American or European. In his determination to be “true to the essence of things” he has fumbled his way into something genuine, persistent, of universal significance, in proof of which he has done what, after all, very few writers succeed in doing—he has made a world of his own. It is a world in which the senses flourish; it is dominated by instincts rather than by ideas; racehorses make the hearts of little boys beat high; cornfields flow around the cheap towns like golden seas, illimitable and profound; everywhere boys and girls are dreaming of voyages and adventures, and this world of sensuality and instinctive desire is clothed in a warm cloudy atmosphere, wrapped about in a soft caressing envelope, which always seems a little too loose to fit the shape. Pointing to the formlessness of Mr. Anderson’s work, the vagueness of his language, his tendency to land his stories softly in a bog, the English tourist would say that all this confirms him in his theory of what is to be expected of an American writer of insight and sincerity. The softness, the shellessness of Mr. Anderson are inevitable since he has scooped out from the heart of America matter which has never been confined in a shell before. He is too much enamoured of this precious stuff to squeeze it into any of those old and intricate poems which the art and industry of Europe have secreted. Rather he will leave what he has found exposed, defenceless, naked to scorn and laughter.

But if this theory holds good of the work of American novelists, how then are we to account for the novels of Mr. Sinclair Lewis? Does it not explode at the first touch of Babbitt and Main Street and Our Mr. Wrenn like a soap bubble dashed against the edge of a hard mahogany wardrobe? For it is precisely by its hardness, its efficiency, its compactness that Mr. Lewis’s work excels. Yet he also is an American; he also has devoted book after book to the description and elucidation of America. Far from being shelless, however, his books, one is inclined to say, are all shell; the only doubt is whether he has left any room for the snail. At any rate Babbitt completely refutes the theory that an American writer, writing about America, must necessarily lack the finish, the technique, the power to model and control his material which one might suppose to be the bequest of an old civilisation to its artists. In all these respects, Babbitt is the equal of any novel written in English in the present century. The tourist therefore must make his choice between two alternatives. Either there is no profound difference between English and American writers, and their experience is so similar that it can be housed in the same form; or Mr. Lewis has modelled himself so closely upon the English—H. G. Wells is a very obvious master—that he has sacrificed his American characteristics in the process. But the art of reading would be simpler and less adventurous than it is if writers could be parcelled out in strips of green and blue. Study of Mr. Lewis more and more convinces us that the surface appearance of downright decision is deceptive; the outer composure hardly holds together the warring elements within; the colours have run.

For though Babbitt would appear as solid and authentic a portrait of the American business man as can well be painted, certain doubts run across us and shake our conviction. But, we may ask, where all is so masterly, self-assured, and confident, what foothold can there be for doubt to lodge upon? To begin with we doubt Mr. Lewis himself: we doubt, that is to say, that he is nearly as sure of himself or of his subject as he would have us believe. For he, too, though in a way very different from Mr. Anderson’s way, is writing with one eye on Europe, a division of attention which the reader is quick to feel and resent. He too has the American self-consciousness, though it is masterfully suppressed and allowed only to utter itself once or twice in a sharp cry of bitterness (“Babbitt was as much amused by the antiquated provincialism as any proper Englishman by any American”). But the uneasiness is there. He has not identified himself with America; rather he has constituted himself the guide and interpreter between the Americans and the English, and, as he conducts his party of Europeans over the typical American city (of which he is a native) and shows them the typical American citizen (to whom he is related) he is equally divided between shame at what he has to show and anger at the Europeans for laughing at it. Zenith is a despicable place, but the English are even more despicable for despising it.

In such an atmosphere intimacy is impossible. All that a writer of Mr. Lewis’s powers can do is to be unflinchingly accurate and more and more on his guard against giving himself away. Accordingly, never was so complete a model of a city made before. We turn on the taps and the water runs; we press a button and cigars are lit and beds warmed. But this glorification of machinery, this lust for “toothpastes, socks, tires, cameras, instantaneous hot water bottles … at first the signs, then the substitutes for joy and passion and wisdom” is only a device for putting off the evil day which Mr. Lewis sees looming ahead. However he may dread what people will think of him, he must give himself away. Babbitt must be proved to possess some share in truth and beauty, some character, some emotion of his own, or Babbitt will be nothing but an improved device for running motor cars, a convenient surface for the display of mechanical ingenuity. To make us care for Babbitt—that was his problem. With this end in view Mr. Lewis shamefacedly assures us that Babbitt has his dreams. Stout though he is, this elderly business man dreams of a fairy child waiting at a gate. “Her dear and tranquil hand caressed his cheek. He was gallant and wise and well-beloved; warm ivory were her arms; and beyond perilous moors the brave sea glittered.” But that is not a dream; that is simply the protest of a man who has never dreamed in his life, but is determined to prove that dreaming is as easy as shelling peas. What are dreams made of—the most expensive dreams? Seas, fairies, moors? Well, he will have a little of each, and if that is not a dream, he seems to demand, jumping out of bed in a fury, what then is it? With sex relations and family affection he is much more at ease. Indeed it would be impossible to deny that if we put our ears to his shell, the foremost citizen in Zenith can be heard moving cumbrously but unmistakably within. One has moments of affection for him, moments of sympathy and even of desire that some miracle may happen, the rock be cleft asunder, and the living creature, with his capacity for fun, suffering, and happiness, be set at liberty. But no; his movements are too sluggish; Babbitt will never escape; he will die in his prison, bequeathing only the chance of escape to his son.

In some such way as this, then, the English tourist makes his theory embrace both Mr. Anderson and Mr. Sinclair Lewis. Both suffer as novelists from being American; Mr. Anderson, because he must protest his pride; Mr. Lewis, because he must conceal his bitterness. Mr. Anderson’s way is the less injurious to him as an artist, and his imagination is the more vigorous of the two. He has gained more than he has lost by being the spokesman of a new country, the worker in fresh clay. Mr. Lewis it would seem was meant by nature to take his place with Mr. Wells and Mr. Bennett, and had he been born in England would undoubtedly have proved himself the equal of these two famous men. Denied, however, the richness of an old civilisation—the swarm of ideas upon which the art of Mr. Wells has battened, the solidity of custom which has nourished the art of Mr. Bennett—he has been forced to criticise rather than to explore, and the object of his criticism—the civilisation of Zenith—was unfortunately too meagre to sustain him. Yet a little reflection, and a comparison between Mr. Anderson and Mr. Lewis, put a different colour on our conclusion. Look at Americans as an American, see Mrs. Opal Emerson Mudge as she is herself, not as a type and symbol of America displayed for the amusement of the condescending Britisher, and then, we dimly suspect, Mrs. Mudge is no type, no scarecrow, no abstraction. Mrs. Mudge is—but it is not for an English writer to say what. He can only peep and peer between the chinks of the barrier and hazard the opinion that Mrs. Mudge and the Americans generally are, somehow, human beings into the bargain.

That suspicion suddenly becomes a certainty as we read the first pages of Mr. Ring Lardner’s You Know Me, Al, and the change is bewildering. Hitherto we have been kept at arm’s length, reminded constantly of our superiority, of our inferiority, of the fact, anyhow, that we are alien blood and bone. But Mr. Lardner is not merely unaware that we differ; he is unaware that we exist. When a crack player is in the middle of an exciting game of baseball he does not stop to wonder whether the audience likes the colour of his hair. All his mind is on the game. So Mr. Lardner does not waste a moment when he writes in thinking whether he is using American slang or Shakespeare’s English; whether he is remembering Fielding or forgetting Fielding; whether he is proud of being American or ashamed of not being Japanese; all his mind is on the story. Hence all our minds are on the story. Hence, incidentally, he writes the best prose that has come our way. Hence we feel at last freely admitted to the society of our fellows.

That this should be true of You Know Me, Al, a story about baseball, a game which is not played in England, a story written often in a language which is not English, gives us pause. To what does he owe his success? Besides his unconsciousness and the additional power which he is thus free to devote to his art, Mr. Lardner has talents of a remarkable order. With extraordinary ease and aptitude, with the quickest strokes, the surest touch, the sharpest insight, he lets Jack Keefe the baseball player cut out his own outline, fill in his own depths, until the figure of the foolish, boastful, innocent athlete lives before us. As he babbles out his mind on paper there rise up friends, sweethearts, the scenery, town, and country—all surround him and make him up in his completeness. We gaze into the depths of a society which goes its ways intent on its own concerns. There, perhaps, is one of the elements of Mr. Lardner’s success. He is not merely himself intent on his own game, but his characters are equally intent on theirs. It is no coincidence that the best of Mr. Lardner’s stories are about games, for one may guess that Mr. Lardner’s interest in games has solved one of the most difficult problems of the American writer; it has given him a clue, a centre, a meeting place for the divers activities of people whom a vast continent isolates, whom no tradition controls. Games give him what society gives his English brother. Whatever the precise reason, Mr. Lardner at any rate provides something unique in its kind, something indigenous to the soil, which the traveller may carry off as a trophy to prove to the incredulous that he has actually been to America and found it a foreign land. But the time has come when the tourist must reckon up his expenses and experiences, and attempt to cast up his account of the tour as a whole.

At the outset let us admit that our impressions are highly mixed and the opinions we have come to, if anything, less definite, less assured than those with which we started. For when we consider the mixed origin of the literature we are trying to understand, its youth, its age, and all those currents which are blowing across the stream of its natural development, we may well exclaim that French is simpler, English is simpler, all modern literatures are simpler to sum up and understand than this new American literature. A discord lies at the root of it; the natural bent of the American is twisted at the start. For the more sensitive he is, the more he must read English literature; the more he reads English literature, the more alive he must become to the puzzle and perplexity of this great art which uses the language on his own lips to express an experience which is not his and to mirror a civilisation which he has never known. The choice has to be made—whether to yield or to rebel. The more sensitive, or at least the more sophisticated, the Henry Jameses, the Hergesheimers, the Edith Whartons, decide in favour of England and pay the penalty by exaggerating the English culture, the traditional English good manners, and stressing too heavily or in the wrong places those social differences which, though the first to strike the foreigner, are by no means the most profound. What their work gains in refinement it loses in that perpetual distortion of values, that obsession with surface distinctions—the age of old houses, the glamour of great names—which makes it necessary to remember that Henry James was a foreigner if we are not to call him a snob.

On the other hand, the simpler and cruder writers, like Walt Whitman, Mr. Anderson, Mr. Masters—decide in favour of America, but truculently, self-consciously, protestingly, “showing off” as the nurses would say, their newness, their independence, their individuality. Both influences are unfortunate and serve to obscure and delay the development of the real American literature itself. But, some critics would interpose, are we not making mountains out of molehills, conjuring up distinctions where none exist? The “real American literature” in the time of Hawthorne, Emerson, and Lowell was much of a piece with contemporary English literature, and the present movement towards a national literature is confined to a few enthusiasts and extremists who will grow older and wiser and see the folly of their ways.

But the tourist can no longer accept this comfortable doctrine, flattering though it be to his pride of birth. Obviously there are American writers who do not care a straw for English opinion or for English culture, and write very vigorously none the less—witness Mr. Lardner; there are Americans who have all the accomplishments of culture without a trace of its excess—witness Miss Willa Cather; there are Americans whose aim it is to write a book off their own bat and no one else’s—witness Miss Fannie Hurst. But the shortest tour, the most superficial inspection, must impress him with what is of far greater importance—the fact that where the land itself is so different, and the society so different, the literature must needs differ, and differ more and more widely as time goes by, from those of other countries.

American literature will be influenced, no doubt, like all others, and the English influence may well predominate. But clearly the English tradition is already unable to cope with this vast land, these prairies, these cornfields, these lonely little groups of men and women scattered at immense distances from each other, these vast industrial cities with their skyscrapers and their night signs and their perfect organisation of machinery. It cannot extract their meaning and interpret their beauty. How could it be otherwise? The English tradition is formed upon a little country; its centre is an old house with many rooms each crammed with objects and crowded with people who know each other intimately, whose manners, thoughts, and speech are ruled all the time, if unconsciously, by the spirit of the past. But in America there is baseball instead of society; instead of the old landscape which has moved men to emotion for endless summers and springs, a new land, its tin cans, its prairies, its cornfields flung disorderly about like a mosaic of incongruous pieces waiting order at the artist’s hands; while the people are equally diversified into fragments of many nationalities.

To describe, to unify, to make order out of all these severed parts, a new art is needed and the control of a new tradition. That both are in process of birth the language itself gives us proof. For the Americans are doing what the Elizabethans did—they are coining new words. They are instinctively making the language adapt itself to their needs. In England, save for the impetus given by the war, the word-coining power has lapsed; our writers vary the metres of their poetry, remodel the rhythms of prose, but one may search English fiction in vain for a single new word. It is significant that when we want to freshen our speech we borrow from America—poppycock, rambunctious, flipflop, booster, good-mixer—all the expressive ugly vigorous slang which creeps into use among us first in talk, later in writing, comes from across the Atlantic. Nor does it need much foresight to predict that when words are being made, a literature will be made out of them. Already we hear the first jars and dissonances, the strangled difficult music of the prelude. As we shut our books and look out again upon the English fields a strident note rings in our ears. We hear the first lovemaking and the first laughter of the child who was exposed by its parents three hundred years ago upon a rocky shore and survived solely by its own exertions and is a little sore and proud and diffident and self-assertive in consequence and is now on the threshold of man’s estate.

[Saturday Review Of Literature, Aug 1, 1925]

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The Leaning Tower.

A writer is a person who sits at a desk and keeps his eye fixed, as intently as he can, upon a certain object—that figure of speech may help to keep us steady on our path if we look at it for a moment. He is an artist who sits with a sheet of paper in front of him trying to copy what he sees. What is his object—his model? Nothing so simple as a painter’s model; it is not a bowl of flowers, a naked figure, or a dish of apples and onions. Even the simplest story deals with more than one person, with more than one time. Characters begin young; they grow old; they move from scene to scene, from place to place. A writer has to keep his eye upon a model that moves, that changes, upon an object that is not one object but innumerable objects. Two words alone cover all that a writer looks at—they are, human life.

Let us look at the writer next. What do we see—only a person who sits with a pen in his hand in front of a sheet of paper? That tells us little or nothing. And we know very little. Considering how much we talk about writers, how much they talk about themselves, it is odd how little we know about them. Why are they so common sometimes; then so rare? Why do they sometimes write nothing but masterpieces, then nothing but trash? And why should a family, like the Shelleys, like the Keatses, like the Brontës, suddenly burst into flame and bring to birth Shelley, Keats, and the Brontës? What are the conditions that bring about that explosion? There is no answer—naturally. Since we have not yet discovered the germ of influenza, how should we yet have discovered the germ of genius? We know even less about the mind than about the body. We have less evidence. It is less than two hundred years since people took an interest in themselves; Boswell was almost the first writer who thought that a man’s life was worth writing a book about. Until we have more facts, more biographies, more autobiographies, we cannot know much about ordinary people, let alone about extraordinary people. Thus at present we have only theories about writers—a great many theories, but they all differ. The politician says that a writer is the product of the society in which he lives, as a screw is the product of a screw machine; the artist, that a writer is a heavenly apparition that slides across the sky, grazes the earth, and vanishes. To the psychologists a writer is an oyster; feed him on gritty facts, irritate him with ugliness, and by way of compensation, as they call it, he will produce a pearl. The genealogists say that certain stocks, certain families, breed writers as fig trees breed figs—Dryden, Swift, and Pope they tell us were all cousins. This proves that we are in the dark about writers; anybody can make a theory; the germ of a theory is almost always the wish to prove what the theorist wishes to believe.

Theories then are dangerous things. All the same we must risk making one this afternoon since we are going to discuss modern tendencies. Directly we speak of tendencies or movements we commit ourselves to the belief that there is some force, influence, outer pressure which is strong enough to stamp itself upon a whole group of different writers so that all their writing has a certain common likeness. We must then have a theory as to what this influence is. But let us always remember—influences are infinitely numerous; writers are infinitely sensitive; each writer has a different sensibility. That is why literature is always changing, like the weather, like the clouds in the sky. Read a page of Scott; then of Henry James; try to work out the influences that have transformed the one page into the other. It is beyond our skill. We can only hope therefore to single out the most obvious influences that have formed writers into groups. Yet there are groups. Books descend from books as families descend from families. Some descend from Jane Austen; others from Dickens. They resemble their parents, as human children resemble their parents; yet they differ as children differ, and revolt as children revolt. Perhaps it will be easier to understand living writers as we take a quick look at some of their forebears. We have not time to go far back—certainly we have not time to look closely. But let us glance at English writers as they were a hundred years ago—that may help us to see what we ourselves look like.

In 1815 England was at war, as England is now. And it is natural to ask, how did their war—the Napoleonic war—affect them? Was that one of the influences that formed them into groups? The answer is a very strange one. The Napoleonic wars did not affect the great majority of those writers at all. The proof of that is to be found in the work of two great novelists—Jane Austen and Walter Scott. Each lived through the Napoleonic wars; each wrote through them. But, though novelists live very close to the life of their time, neither of them in all their novels mentioned the Napoleonic wars. This shows that their model, their vision of human life, was not disturbed or agitated or changed by war. Nor were they themselves. It is easy to see why that was so. Wars were then remote; wars were carried on by soldiers and sailors, not by private people. The rumour of battles took a long time to reach England. It was only when the mail coaches clattered along the country roads hung with laurels that the people in villages like Brighton knew that a victory had been won and lit their candles and stuck them in their windows. Compare that with our state to-day. To-day we hear the gunfire in the Channel. We turn on the wireless; we hear an airman telling us how this very afternoon he shot down a raider; his machine caught fire; he plunged into the sea; the light turned green and then black; he rose to the top and was rescued by a trawler. Scott never saw the sailors drowning at Trafalgar; Jane Austen never heard the cannon roar at Waterloo. Neither of them heard Napoleon’s voice as we hear Hitler’s voice as we sit at home of an evening.

That immunity from war lasted all through the nineteenth century. England, of course, was often at war—there was the Crimean War; the Indian Mutiny; all the little Indian frontier wars, and at the end of the century the Boer War. Keats, Shelley, Byron, Dickens, Thackeray, Carlyle, Ruskin, the Brontës, George Eliot, Trollope, the Brownings—all lived through all those wars. But did they ever mention them? Only Thackeray, I think; in Vanity Fair he described the Battle of Waterloo long after it was fought; but only as an illustration, as a scene. It did not change his characters’ lives; it merely killed one of his heroes. Of the poets, only Byron and Shelley felt the influence of the nineteenth-century wars profoundly.

War then we can say, speaking roughly, did not affect either the writer or his vision of human life in the nineteenth century. But peace—let us consider the influence of peace. Were the nineteenth-century writers affected by the settled, the peaceful and prosperous state of England? Let us collect a few facts before we launch out into the dangers and delights of theory. We know for a fact, from their lives, that the nineteenth-century writers were all of them fairly well-to-do middle-class people. Most had been educated either at Oxford or at Cambridge. Some were civil servants like Trollope and Matthew Arnold. Others, like Ruskin, were professors. It is a fact that their work brought them considerable fortunes. There is visible proof of that in the houses they built. Look at Abbotsford, bought out of the proceeds of Scott’s novels; or at Farringford, built by Tennyson from his poetry. Look at Dickens’s great house in Marylebone; and at his great house at Gadshill. All these are houses needing many butlers, maids, gardeners, grooms to keep the tables spread, the cans carried, and the gardens neat and fruitful. Not only did they leave behind them large houses; they left too an immense body of literature—poems, plays, novels, essays, histories, criticism. It was a very prolific, creative, rich century—the nineteenth century. Now let us ask—is there any connection between that material prosperity and that intellectual creativeness? Did one lead to the other? How difficult it is to say—for we know so little about writers, and what conditions help them, what hinder them. It is only a guess, and a rough guess; yet I think that there is a connection. “I think”—perhaps it would be nearer the truth to say “I see”. Thinking should be based on facts; and here we have intuitions rather than facts—the lights and shades that come after books are read, the general shifting surface of a large expanse of print. What I see, glancing over that shifting surface, is the picture I have already shown you; the writer seated in front of human life in the nineteenth century; and, looking at it through their eyes, I see that life divided up, herded together, into many different classes. There is the aristocracy; the landed gentry; the professional class; the commercial class; the working class; and there, in one dark blot, is that great class which is called simply and comprehensively “The Poor”. To the nineteenth-century writer human life must have looked like a landscape cut up into separate fields. In each field was gathered a different group of people. Each to some extent had its own traditions; its own manners; its own speech; its own dress; its own occupation. But owing to that peace, to that prosperity, each group was tethered, stationary—a herd grazing within its own hedges. And the nineteenth-century writer did not seek to change those divisions; he accepted them. He accepted them so completely that he became unconscious of them. Does that serve to explain why it is that the nineteenth-century writers are able to create so many characters who are not types but individuals? Is it because he did not see the hedges that divide classes; he saw only the human beings that live within those hedges? Is that why he could get beneath the surface and create many-sided characters—Pecksniff, Becky Sharp, Mr. Woodhouse—who change with the years, as the living change? To us now the hedges are visible. We can see now that each of those writers only dealt with a very small section of human life—all Thackeray’s characters are upper middle-class people; all Dickens’s characters come from the lower or middle class. We can see that now; but the writer himself seems unconscious that he is only dealing with one type; with the type formed by the class into which the writer was born himself, with which he is most familiar. And that unconsciousness was an immense advantage to him.

Unconsciousness, which means presumably that the under-mind, works at top speed while the upper-mind drowses, is a state we all know. We all have experience of the work done by unconsciousness in our own daily lives. You have had a crowded day, let us suppose, sightseeing in London. Could you say what you had seen and done when you came back? Was it not all a blur, a confusion? But after what seemed a rest, a chance to turn aside and look at something different, the sights and sounds and sayings that had been of most interest to you swam to the surface, apparently of their own accord; and remained in memory; what was unimportant sank into forgetfulness. So it is with the writer. After a hard day’s work, trudging round, seeing all he can, feeling all he can, taking in the book of his mind innumerable notes, the writer becomes—if he can—unconscious. In fact, his under-mind works at top speed while his upper-mind drowses. Then, after a pause the veil lifts; and there is the thing—the thing he wants to write about—simplified, composed. Do we strain Wordsworth’s famous saying about emotion recollected in tranquillity when we infer that by tranquillity he meant that the writer needs to become unconscious before he can create?

If we want to risk a theory, then, we can say that peace and prosperity were influences that gave the nineteenth-century writers a family likeness. They had leisure; they had security; life was not going to change; they themselves were not going to change. They could look; and look away. They could forget; and then—in their books—remember. Those then are some of the conditions that brought about a certain family likeness, in spite of the great individual differences, among the nineteenth-century writers. The nineteenth century ended; but the same conditions went on. They lasted, roughly speaking, till the year 1914. Even in 1914 we can still see the writer sitting as he sat all through the nineteenth century looking at human life; and that human life is still divided into classes; he still looks most intently at the class from which he himself springs; the classes are still so settled that he has almost forgotten that there are classes; and he is still so secure himself that he is almost unconscious of his own position and of its security. He believes that he is looking at the whole of life; and will always so look at it. That is not altogether a fancy picture. Many of those writers are still alive. Sometimes they describe their own position as young men, beginning to write, just before August 1914. How did you learn your art? one can ask them. At College they say—by reading; by listening; by talking. What did they talk about? Here is Mr. Desmond MacCarthy’s answer, as he gave it, a week or two ago, in the Sunday Times. He was at Cambridge just before the war began and he says: “We were not very much interested in politics. Abstract speculation was much more absorbing; philosophy was more interesting to us than public causes…. What we chiefly discussed were those ‘goods’ which were ends in themselves … the search for truth, aesthetic emotions, and personal relations.” In addition they read an immense amount; Latin and Greek, and of course French and English. They wrote too—but they were in no hurry to publish. They travelled;—some of them went far afield—to India, to the South Seas. But for the most part they rambled happily in the long summer holidays through England, through France, through Italy. And now and then they published books—books like Rupert Brooke’s poems; novels like E. M. Forster’s Room with a View; essays like G. K. Chesterton’s essays, and reviews. It seemed to them that they were to go on living like that, and writing like that, for ever and ever. Then suddenly, like a chasm in a smooth road, the war came.

But before we go on with the story of what happened after 1914, let us look more closely for a moment, not at the writer himself, nor at his model; but at his chair. A chair is a very important part of a writer’s outfit. It is the chair that gives him his attitude towards his model; that decides what he sees of human life; that profoundly affects his power of telling us what he sees. By his chair we mean his upbringing, his education. It is a fact, not a theory, that all writers from Chaucer to the present day, with so few exceptions that one hand can count them, have sat upon the same kind of chair—a raised chair. They have all come from the middle class; they have had good, at least expensive, educations. They have all been raised above the mass of people upon a tower of stucco—that is their middle-class birth; and of gold—that is their expensive education. That was true of all the nineteenth-century writers, save Dickens; it was true of all the 1914 writers, save D. H. Lawrence. Let us run through what are called “representative names”: G. K. Chesterton; T. S. Eliot; Belloc; Lytton Strachey; Somerset Maugham; Hugh Walpole; Wilfred Owen; Rupert Brooke; J. E. Flecker; E. M. Forster; Aldous Huxley; G. M. Trevelyan; O. and S. Sitwell; Middleton Murry. Those are some of them; and all, with the exception of D. H. Lawrence, came of the middle class, and were educated at public schools and universities. There is another fact, equally indisputable: the books that they wrote were among the best books written between 1910 and 1925. Now let us ask, is there any connection between those facts? Is there a connection between the excellence of their work and the fact that they came of families rich enough to send them to public schools and universities?

Must we not decide, greatly though those writers differ, and shallow as we admit our knowledge of influences to be, that there must be a connection between their education and their work? It cannot be a mere chance that this minute class of educated people has produced so much that is good as writing; and that the vast mass of people without education has produced so little that is good. It is a fact, however. Take away all that the working class has given to English literature and that literature would scarcely suffer; take away all that the educated class has given, and English literature would scarcely exist. Education must then play a very important part in a writer’s work.

That seems so obvious that it is astonishing how little stress has been laid upon the writer’s education. It is perhaps because a writer’s education is so much less definite than other educations. Reading, listening, talking, travel, leisure—many different things it seems are mixed together. Life and books must be shaken and taken in the right proportions. A boy brought up alone in a library turns into a book worm; brought up alone in the fields he turns into an earth worm. To breed the kind of butterfly a writer is you must let him sun himself for three or four years at Oxford or Cambridge—so it seems. However it is done, it is there that it is done—there that he is taught his art. And he has to be taught his art. Again, is that strange? Nobody thinks it strange if you say that a painter has to be taught his art; or a musician; or an architect. Equally a writer has to be taught. For the art of writing is at least as difficult as the other arts. And though, perhaps because the education is indefinite, people ignore this education; if you look closely you will see that almost every writer who has practised his art successfully had been taught it. He had been taught it by about eleven years of education—at private schools, public schools, and universities. He sits upon a tower raised above the rest of us; a tower built first on his parents’ station, then on his parents’ gold. It is a tower of the utmost importance; it decides his angle of vision; it affects his power of communication.

All through the nineteenth century, down to August 1914, that tower was a steady tower. The writer was scarcely conscious either of his high station or of his limited vision. Many of them had sympathy, great sympathy, with other classes; they wished to help the working class to enjoy the advantages of the tower class; but they did not wish to destroy the tower, or to descend from it—rather to make it accessible to all. Nor had the model, human life, changed essentially since Trollope looked at it, since Hardy looked at it: and Henry James, in 1914, was still looking at it. Further, the tower itself held firm beneath the writer during all the most impressionable years, when he was learning his art, and receiving all those complex influences and instructions that are summed up by the word education. These were conditions that influenced their work profoundly. For when the crash came in 1914 all those young men, who were to be the representative writers of their time, had their past, their education, safe behind them, safe within them. They had known security; they had the memory of a peaceful boyhood, the knowledge of a settled civilisation. Even though the war cut into their lives, and ended some of them, they wrote, and still write, as if the tower were firm beneath them. In one word, they are aristocrats; the unconscious inheritors of a great tradition. Put a page of their writing under the magnifying-glass and you will see, far away in the distance, the Greeks, the Romans; coming nearer, the Elizabethans; coming nearer still, Dryden, Swift, Voltaire, Jane Austen, Dickens, Henry James. Each, however much he differs individually from the others, is a man of education; a man who has learnt his art.

From that group let us pass to the next—to the group which began to write about 1925 and, it may be, came to an end as a group in 1939. If you read current literary journalism you will be able to rattle off a string of names—Day Lewis, Auden, Spender, Isherwood, Louis MacNeice and so on. They adhere much more closely than the names of their predecessors. But at first sight there seems little difference, in station, in education. Mr. Auden in a poem written to Mr. Isherwood says: Behind us we have stucco suburbs and expensive educations. They are tower dwellers like their predecessors, the sons of well-to-do parents, who could afford to send them to public schools and universities. But what a difference in the tower itself, in what they saw from the tower! When they looked at human life what did they see? Everywhere change; everywhere revolution. In Germany, in Russia, in Italy, in Spain, all the old hedges were being rooted up; all the old towers were being thrown to the ground. Other hedges were being planted; other towers were being raised. There was communism in one country; in another fascism. The whole of civilisation, of society, was changing. There was, it is true, neither war nor revolution in England itself. All those writers had time to write many books before 1939. But even in England towers that were built of gold and stucco were no longer steady towers. They were leaning towers. The books were written under the influence of change, under the threat of war. That perhaps is why the names adhere so closely; there was one influence that affected them all and made them, more than their predecessors, into groups. And that influence, let us remember, may well have excluded from that string of names the poets whom posterity will value most highly, either because they could not fall into step, as leaders or as followers, or because the influence was adverse to poetry, and until that influence relaxed, they could not write. But the tendency that makes it possible for us to group the names of these writers together, and gives their work a common likeness, was the tendency of the tower they sat on—the tower of middle-class birth and expensive education—to lean.

Let us imagine, to bring this home to us, that we are actually upon a leaning tower and note our sensations. Let us see whether they correspond to the tendencies we observe in those poems, plays, and novels. Directly we feel that a tower leans we become acutely conscious that we are upon a tower. All those writers too are acutely tower conscious; conscious of their middle-class birth; of their expensive educations. Then when we come to the top of the tower how strange the view looks—not altogether upside down, but slanting, sidelong. That too is characteristic of the leaning-tower writers; they do not look any class straight in the face; they look either up, or down, or sidelong. There is no class so settled that they can explore it unconsciously. That perhaps is why they create no characters. Then what do we feel next, raised in imagination on top of the tower? First discomfort; next self-pity for that discomfort; which pity soon turns to anger—to anger against the builder, against society, for making us uncomfortable. Those too seem to be tendencies of the leaning-tower writers. Discomfort; pity for themselves; anger against society. And yet—here is another tendency—how can you altogether abuse a society that is giving you, after all, a very fine view and some sort of security? You cannot abuse that society whole-heartedly while you continue to profit by that society. And so very naturally you abuse society in the person of some retired admiral or spinster or armament manufacturer; and by abusing them hope to escape whipping yourself. The bleat of the scapegoat sounds loud in their work, and the whimper of the schoolboy crying “Please, Sir, it was the other fellow, not me”. Anger; pity; scapegoat beating; excuse finding—these are all very natural tendencies; if we were in their position we should tend to do the same. But we are not in their position; we have not had eleven years of expensive education. We have only been climbing an imaginary tower. We can cease to imagine. We can come down.

But they cannot. They cannot throw away their education; they cannot throw away their upbringing. Eleven years at school and college have been stamped upon them indelibly. And then, to their credit but to their confusion, the leaning tower not only leant in the thirties, but it leant more and more to the left. Do you remember what Mr. MacCarthy said about his own group at the university in 1914? “We were not very much interested in politics … philosophy was more interesting to us than public causes”? That shows that his tower leant neither to the right nor to the left. But in 1930 it was impossible—if you were young, sensitive, imaginative—not to be interested in politics; not to find public causes of much more pressing interest than philosophy. In 1930 young men at college were forced to be aware of what was happening in Russia; in Germany; in Italy; in Spain. They could not go on discussing aesthetic emotions and personal relations. They could not confine their reading to the poets; they had to read the politicians. They read Marx. They became communists; they became antifascists. The tower they realised was founded upon injustice and tyranny; it was wrong for a small class to possess an education that other people paid for; wrong to stand upon the gold that a bourgeois father had made from his bourgeois profession. It was wrong; yet how could they make it right? Their education could not be thrown away; as for their capital—did Dickens, did Tolstoy ever throw away their capital? Did D. H. Lawrence, a miner’s son, continue to live like a miner? No; for it is death for a writer to throw away his capital; to be forced to earn his living in a mine or a factory. And thus, trapped by their education, pinned down by their capital, they remained on top of their leaning tower, and their state of mind as we see it reflected in their poems and plays and novels is full of discord and bitterness, full of confusion and of compromise.

These tendencies are better illustrated by quotation than by analysis. There is a poem by one of those writers, Louis MacNeice, called Autumn Journal. It is dated March 1939. It is feeble as poetry, but interesting as autobiography. He begins of course with a snipe at the scapegoat—the bourgeois, middle-class family from which he sprang. The retired admirals, the retired generals, and the spinster lady have breakfasted off bacon and eggs served on a silver dish, he tells us. He sketches that family as if it were already a little remote and more than a little ridiculous. But they could afford to send him to Marlborough and then to Merton, Oxford. This is what he learnt at Oxford:

We learned that a gentleman never misplaces his accents,

That nobody knows how to speak, much less how to write

English who has not hob-nobbed with the great-grandparents of English.

Besides that he learnt at Oxford Latin and Greek; and philosophy, logic, and metaphysics:

Oxford [he says] crowded the mantelpiece with gods—

Scaliger, Heinsius, Dindorf, Bentley, Wilamowitz.

It was at Oxford that the tower began to lean. He felt that he was living under a system—

That gives the few at fancy prices their fancy lives

While ninety-nine in the hundred who never attend the banquet

Must wash the grease of ages off the knives.

But at the same time, an Oxford education had made him fastidious:

It is so hard to imagine

A world where the many would have their chance without

A fall in the standard of intellectual living

And nothing left that the highbrow cares about.

At Oxford he got his honours degree; and that degree—in humane letters—put him in the way of a “cushy job”—seven hundred a year, to be precise, and several rooms of his own.

If it were not for Lit. Hum. I might be climbing

A ladder with a hod,

And seven hundred a year

Will pay the rent and the gas and the phone and the grocer—

And yet, again, doubts break in; the “cushy job” of teaching more Latin and Greek to more undergraduates does not satisfy him—

… the so-called humane studies

May lead to cushy jobs

But leave the men who land them spiritually bankrupt,

Intellectual snobs.

And what is worse, that education and that cushy job cut one off, he complains, from the common life of one’s kind.

All that I would like to be is human, having a share

In a civilised, articulate and well-adjusted

Community where the mind is given its due

But the body is not distrusted.

Therefore in order to bring about that well-adjusted community he must turn from literature to politics, remembering, he says,

Remembering that those who by their habit

Hate politics, can no longer keep their private

Values unless they open the public gate

To a better political system.

So, in one way or another, he takes part in politics, and finally he ends:

What is it we want really?

For what end and how?

If it is something feasible, obtainable,

Let us dream it now,

And pray for a possible land

Not of sleep-walkers, not of angry puppets,

But where both heart and brain can understand

The movements of our fellows,

Where life is a choice of instruments and none

Is debarred his natural music …

Where the individual, no longer squandered

In self-assertion, works with the rest …

Those quotations give a fair description of the influences that have told upon the leaning-tower group. Others could easily be discovered. The influence of the films explains the lack of transitions in their work and the violently opposed contrasts. The influence of poets like Mr. Yeats and Mr. Eliot explains the obscurity. They took over from the elder poets a technique which, after many years of experiment, those poets used skilfully, and used it clumsily and often inappropriately. But we have time only to point to the most obvious influences; and these can be summed up as Leaning Tower Influences. If you think of them, that is, as people trapped on a leaning tower from which they cannot descend, much that is puzzling in their work is easier to understand. It explains the violence of their attack upon bourgeois society and also its half-heartedness. They are profiting by a society which they abuse. They are flogging a dead or dying horse because a living horse, if flogged, would kick them off its back. It explains the destructiveness of their work; and also its emptiness. They can destroy bourgeois society, in part at least; but what have they put in its place? How can a writer who has no first-hand experience of a towerless, of a classless society create that society? Yet as Mr. MacNeice bears witness, they feel compelled to preach, if not by their living, at least by their writing, the creation of a society in which every one is equal and every one is free. It explains the pedagogic, the didactic, the loud speaker strain that dominates their poetry. They must teach; they must preach. Everything is a duty—even love. Listen to Mr. Day Lewis ingeminating love. “Mr. Spender,” he says, “speaking from the living unit of himself and his friends appeals for the contraction of the social group to a size at which human contact may again be established and demands the destruction of all impediments to love. Listen.” And we listen to this:

We have come at last to a country

Where light, like shine from snow, strikes all faces.

Here you may wonder

How it was that works, money, interest, building could ever

Hide the palpable and obvious love of man for man.

We listen to oratory, not poetry. It is necessary, in order to feel the emotion of those lines, that other people should be listening too. We are in a group, in a class-room as we listen.

Listen now to Wordsworth:

Lover had he known in huts where poor men dwell,

His daily teachers had been woods and rills,

The silence that is in the starry sky,

The sleep that is among the lonely hills.

We listen to that when we are alone. We remember that in solitude. Is that the difference between politician’s poetry and poet’s poetry? We listen to the one in company; to the other when we are alone? But the poet in the thirties was forced to be a politician. That explains why the artist in the thirties was forced to be a scapegoat. If politics were “real”, the ivory tower was an escape from “reality”. That explains the curious, bastard language in which so much of this leaning-tower prose and poetry is written. It is not the rich speech of the aristocrat: it is not the racy speech of the peasant. It is betwixt and between. The poet is a dweller in two worlds, one dying, the other struggling to be born. And so we come to what is perhaps the most marked tendency of leaning-tower literature—the desire to be whole; to be human. “All that I would like to be is human”—that cry rings through their books—the longing to be closer to their kind, to write the common speech of their kind, to share the emotions of their kind, no longer to be isolated and exalted in solitary state upon their tower, but to be down on the ground with the mass of human kind.

These then, briefly and from a certain angle, are some of the tendencies of the modern writer who is seated upon a leaning tower. No other generation has been exposed to them. It may be that none has had such an appallingly difficult task. Who can wonder if they have been incapable of giving us great poems, great plays, great novels? They had nothing settled to look at; nothing peaceful to remember; nothing certain to come. During all the most impressionable years of their lives they were stung into consciousness—into self-consciousness, into class-consciousness, into the consciousness of things changing, of things falling, of death perhaps about to come. There was no tranquillity in which they could recollect. The inner mind was paralysed because the surface mind was always hard at work.

Yet if they have lacked the creative power of the poet and the novelist, the power—does it come from a fusion of the two minds, the upper and the under?—that creates characters that live, poems that we all remember, they have had a power which, if literature continues, may prove to be of great value in the future. They have been great egotists. That too was forced upon them by their circumstances. When everything is rocking round one, the only person who remains comparatively stable is oneself. When all faces are changing and obscured, the only face one can see clearly is one’s own. So they wrote about themselves—in their plays, in their poems, in their novels. No other ten years can have produced so much autobiography as the ten years between 1930 and 1940. No one, whatever his class or his obscurity, seems to have reached the age of thirty without writing his autobiography. But the leaning-tower writers wrote about themselves honestly, therefore creatively. They told the unpleasant truths, not only the flattering truths. That is why their autobiography is so much better than their fiction or their poetry. Consider how difficult it is to tell the truth about oneself—the unpleasant truth; to admit that one is petty, vain, mean, frustrated, tortured, unfaithful, and unsuccessful. The nineteenth-century writers never told that kind of truth, and that is why so much of the nineteenth-century writing is worthless; why, for all their genius, Dickens and Thackeray seem so often to write about dolls and puppets, not about full-grown men and women; why they are forced to evade the main themes and make do with diversions instead. If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people. As the nineteenth century wore on, the writers knew that they were crippling themselves, diminishing their material, falsifying their object. “We are condemned”, Stevenson wrote, “to avoid half the life that passes us by. What books Dickens could have written had he been permitted! Think of Thackeray as unfettered as Flaubert or Balzac! What books I might have written myself? But they give us a little box of toys and say to us ‘You mustn’t play with anything but these’!” Stevenson blamed society—bourgeois society was his scapegoat too. Why did he not blame himself? Why did he consent to go on playing with his little box of toys?

The leaning-tower writer has had the courage, at any rate, to throw that little box of toys out of the window. He has had the courage to tell the truth, the unpleasant truth, about himself. That is the first step towards telling the truth about other people. By analysing themselves honestly, with help from Dr. Freud, these writers have done a great deal to free us from nineteenth-century suppressions. The writers of the next generation may inherit from them a whole state of mind, a mind no longer crippled, evasive, divided. They may inherit that unconsciousness which, as we guessed—it is only a guess—at the beginning of this paper, is necessary if writers are to get beneath the surface, and to write something that people remember when they are alone. For that great gift of unconsciousness the next generation will have to thank the creative and honest egotism of the leaning-tower group.

The next generation—there will be a next generation, in spite of this war and whatever it brings. Have we time then for a rapid glance, for a hurried guess at the next generation? The next generation will be, when peace comes, a post-war generation too. Must it too be a leaning-tower generation—an oblique, sidelong, squinting, self-conscious generation with a foot in two worlds? Or will there be no more towers and no more classes and shall we stand, without hedges between us, on the common ground?

There are two reasons which lead us to think, perhaps to hope, that the world after the war will be a world without classes or towers. Every politician who has made a speech since September 1939 has ended with a peroration in which he has said that we are not fighting this war for conquest; but to bring about a new order in Europe. In that order, they tell us, we are all to have equal opportunities, equal chances of developing whatever gifts we may possess. That is one reason why, if they mean what they say, and can effect it, classes and towers will disappear. The other reason is given by the income tax. The income tax is already doing in its own way what the politicians are hoping to do in theirs. The income tax is saying to middle-class parents: You cannot afford to send your sons to public schools any longer; you must send them to the elementary schools. One of these parents wrote to the New Statesman a week or two ago. Her little boy, who was to have gone to Winchester, had been taken away from his elementary school and sent to the village school. “He has never been happier in his life”, she wrote. “The question of class does not arise; he is merely interested to find how many different kinds of people there are in the world….” And she is only paying twopence-halfpenny a week for that happiness and instruction instead of 35 guineas a term and extras. If the pressure of the income tax continues, classes will disappear. There will be no more upper classes; middle classes; lower classes. All classes will be merged in one class. How will that change affect the writer who sits at his desk looking at human life? It will not be divided by hedges any more. Very likely that will be the end of the novel, as we know it. Literature, as we know it, is always ending, and beginning again. Remove the hedges from Jane Austen’s world, from Trollope’s world, and how much of their comedy and tragedy would remain? We shall regret our Jane Austens and our Trollopes; they gave us comedy, tragedy, and beauty. But much of that old-class literature was very petty; very false; very dull. Much is already unreadable. The novel of a classless and towerless world should be a better novel than the old novel. The novelist will have more interesting people to describe—people who have had a chance to develop their humour, their gifts, their tastes; real people, not people cramped and squashed into featureless masses by hedges. The poet’s gain is less obvious; for he has been less under the dominion of hedges. But he should gain words; when we have pooled all the different dialects, the clipped and cabined vocabulary which is all that he uses now should be enriched. Further, there might then be a common belief which he could accept, and thus shift from his shoulders the burden of didacticism, of propaganda. These then are a few reasons, hastily snatched, why we can look forward hopefully to a stronger, a more varied literature in the classless and towerless society of the future.

But it is in the future; and there is a deep gulf to be bridged between the dying world and the world that is struggling to be born. For there are still two worlds, two separate worlds. “I want”, said the mother who wrote to the paper the other day about her boy, “the best of both worlds for my son.” She wanted, that is, the village schoool, where he learnt to mix with the living; and the other school—Winchester it was—where he mixed with the dead. “Is he to continue”, she asked, “under the system of free national education, or shall he go on—or should I say back—to the old public-school system which really is so very, very private?” She wanted the new world and the old world to unite, the world of the present and the world of the past.

But there is still a gulf between them, a dangerous gulf, in which, possibly, literature may crash and come to grief. It is easy to see that gulf; it is easy to lay the blame for it upon England. England has crammed a small aristocratic class with Latin and Greek and logic and metaphysics and mathematics until they cry out like the young men on the leaning tower, “All that I would like to be is human”. She has left the other class, the immense class to which almost all of us must belong, to pick up what we can in village schools; in factories; in workshops; behind counters; and at home. When one thinks of that criminal injustice one is tempted to say England deserves to have no literature. She deserves to have nothing but detective stories, patriotic songs, and leading articles for generals, admirals, and business men to read themselves to sleep with when they are tired of winning battles and making money. But let us not be unfair; let us avoid if we can joining the embittered and futile tribe of scapegoat hunters. For some years now England has been making an effort—at last—to bridge the gulf between the two worlds. Here is one proof of that effort—this book. This book was not bought; it was not hired. It was borrowed from a public library. England lent it to a common reader, saying “It is time that even you, whom I have shut out from all my universities for centuries, should learn to read your mother tongue. I will help you.” If England is going to help us, we must help her. But how? Look at what is written in the book she has lent us. “Readers are requested to point out any defects that they may observe to the local librarian.” That is England’s way of saying: “If I lend you books, I expect you to make yourselves critics”.

We can help England very greatly to bridge the gulf between the two worlds if we borrow the books she lends us and if we read them critically. We have got to teach ourselves to understand literature. Money is no longer going to do our thinking for us. Wealth will no longer decide who shall be taught and who not. In future it is we who shall decide whom to send to public schools and universities; how they shall be taught; and whether what they write justifies their exemption from other work. In order to do that we must teach ourselves to distinguish—which is the book that is going to pay dividends of pleasure for ever; which is the book that will pay not a penny in two years’ time? Try it for yourselves on new books as they come out; decide which are the lasting, which are the perishing. That is very difficult. Also we must become critics because in future we are not going to leave writing to be done for us by a small class of well-to-do young men who have only a pinch, a thimbleful of experience to give us. We are going to add our own experience, to make our own contribution. That is even more difficult. For that too we need to be critics. A writer, more than any other artist, needs to be a critic because words are so common, so familiar, that he must sieve them and sift them if they are to become enduring. Write daily; write freely; but let us always compare what we have written with what the great writers have written. It is humiliating, but it is essential. If we are going to preserve and to create, that is the only way. And we are going to do both. We need not wait till the end of the war. We can begin now. We can begin, practically and prosaically, by borrowing books from public libraries; by reading omnivorously, simultaneously, poems, plays, novels, histories, biographies, the old and the new. We must sample before we can select. It never does to be a nice feeder; each of us has an appetite that must find for itself the food that nourishes it. Nor let us shy away from the kings because we are commoners. That is a fatal crime in the eyes of Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Virgil, and Dante, who, if they could speak—and after all they can—would say, “Don’t leave me to the wigged and gowned. Read me, read me for yourselves.” They do not mind if we get our accents wrong, or have to read with a crib in front of us. Of course—are we not commoners, outsiders?—we shall trample many flowers and bruise much ancient grass. But let us bear in mind a piece of advice that an eminent Victorian who was also an eminent pedestrian once gave to walkers: “Whenever you see a board up with ‘Trespassers will be prosecuted’, trespass at once.”

Let us trespass at once. Literature is no one’s private ground; literature is common ground. It is not cut up into nations; there are no wars there. Let us trespass freely and fearlessly and find our own way for ourselves. It is thus that English literature will survive this war and cross the gulf—if commoners and outsiders like ourselves make that country our own country, if we teach ourselves how to read and to write, how to preserve, and how to create.

[A paper read to the Workers’ Educational Association, Brighton, May 1940; Folios of New Writing, Autumn 1940]

[]

On Re-reading Novels.

So there are to be new editions of Jane Austen and the Brontës and George Meredith. Left in trains, forgotten in lodging-houses, thumbed and tattered to destruction, the old ones have served their day, and for the new-comers in their new houses there are to be new editions and new readings and new friends. It speaks very well for the Georgians. It is still more to the credit of the Victorians. In spite of the mischief-makers, the grandchildren, it seems, get along very nicely with the grandparents; and the sight of their concord points inevitably to the later breach between the generations, a breach more complete than the other, and perhaps more momentous. The failure of the Edwardians, comparative yet disastrous—that is a question which waits to be discussed. How the year 1860 was a year of empty cradles; how the reign of Edward the Seventh was barren of poet, novelist, or critic; how it followed that the Georgians read Russian novels in translations; how they benefited and suffered; how different a story we might have told to-day had there been living heroes to worship and destroy—all this we find significant in view of the new editions of the old books. The Georgians, it seems, are in the odd predicament of turning for solace and guidance not to their parents who are alive, but to their grandparents who are dead. And so, as likely as not, we shall be faced one of these days by a young man reading Meredith for the first time. But before, inspired by his example, we risk the dangerous experiment of reading Harry Richmond for a second time, let us consider a few of the questions which the prospect of reading a long Victorian novel at once arouses in us.

First, there is the boredom of it. The national habit of reading has been formed by the drama, and the drama has always recognised the fact that human beings cannot sit for more than five hours at a stretch in front of a stage. Read Harry Richmond for five hours at a stretch and we shall only have broken off a fragment. Days may pass before we can add to it; meanwhile the plan is lost; the book pours to waste; we blame ourselves; we abuse the author; nothing is more exasperating and dispiriting. That is the first obstacle to be overcome. Next, we cannot doubt that we are by temperament and tradition poetic. There still lingers among us the belief that poetry is the senior branch of the service. If we have an hour to spend, we feel that we lay it out to better advantage with Keats than with Macaulay. Novels, however, besides being so long and so badly written, are all about the old familiar things; what we do, week in, week out, between breakfast and bedtime; they are about life, and one has life enough on one’s hands already without living it all over again in prose.

That is another obstacle. Yet these stock complaints which we begin to hear and, perhaps, to utter (as we get on in life) lose nothing of their acrimony if with the same breath we have to admit that we owe more to Tolstoy, Flaubert, and Hardy than we can measure; that if we wish to recall our happier hours, they would be those Conrad has given us and Henry James; and that to have seen a young man bolting Meredith whole recalls the pleasure of so many first readings that we are even ready to venture a second. The question is whether, if we venture ourselves a second time with Vanity Fair, the Copperfields, the Richmonds, we shall be able to find some other form of pleasure to take the place of that careless rapture which floated us along so triumphantly in the first instance. The pleasure we shall now look for will lie not so obviously on the surface; and we shall find ourselves hard pressed to make out what is the lasting quality, if such there be, which justifies these long books about modern life in prose.

Some months ago Mr. Percy Lubbock applied himself to answer some of these questions in The Craft of Fiction, a book which is likely to have much influence upon readers and may perhaps eventually reach the critics and the writers. The subject is vast and the book short; but it will be our fault, not Mr. Lubbock’s, if we talk as vaguely about novels in the future as we have done in the past. For example, do we say that we cannot read Harry Richmond twice? We are led by Mr. Lubbock to suspect that it was our first reading that was to blame. A strong but vague emotion, two or three characters, half a dozen scattered scenes—if that is all that Harry Richmond recalls to us, the fault lies perhaps not with Meredith, but with ourselves. Did we read the book as he meant it to be read, or did we not reduce it to chaos through our own incompetency? Novels, above all other books, we are reminded, bristle with temptations. We identify ourselves with this person or with that. We fasten upon the character or the scene which is congenial. We swing our imaginations capriciously from spot to spot. We compare the world of fiction with the real world and judge it by the same standards. Undoubtedly we do all this and easily find excuses for so doing. “But meanwhile the book, the thing he made, lies imprisoned in the volume, and our glimpse of it was too fleeting, it seems, to leave us with a lasting knowledge of its form.” That is the point. There is something lasting that we can know, something solid that we can lay hands on. There is, Mr. Lubbock argues, such a thing as the book itself. To perceive this we should read at arm’s length from the distractions we have named. We must receive impressions but we must relate them to each other as the author intended. And it is when we have shaped our impressions as the author intended that we are then in a position to perceive the form itself, and it is this which endures, however mood or fashion may change. In Mr. Lubbock’s own words:

But with the book in this condition of a defined shape, firm of outline, its form shows for what it is indeed—not an attribute, one of many and possibly not the most important, but the book itself, as the form of the statue is the statue itself.

Now, as Mr. Lubbock laments, the criticism of fiction is in its infancy, and its language, though not all of one syllable, is baby language. This word “form”, of course, comes from the visual arts, and for our part we wish that he could have seen his way to do without it. It is confusing. The form of the novel differs from the dramatic form—that is true; we can, if we choose, say that we see the difference in our mind’s eyes. But can we see that the form of The Egoist differs from the form of Vanity Fair? We do not raise the question in order to stickle for accuracy where most words are provisional, many metaphorical, and some on trial for the first time. The question is not one of words only. It goes deeper than that, into the very process of reading itself. Here we have Mr. Lubbock telling us that the book itself is equivalent to its form, and seeking with admirable subtlety and lucidity to trace out those methods by which novelists build up the final and enduring structure of their books. The very patness with which the image comes to the pen makes us suspect that it fits a little loosely. And in these circumstances it is best to shake oneself free from images and start afresh with a definite subject to work upon. Let us read a story and set down our impressions as we go along, and so perhaps discover what it is that bothers us in Mr. Lubbock’s use of the word form. For this purpose there is no more appropriate author than Flaubert; and, not to strain our space, let us choose a short story, Un Cœur Simple, for example, for, as it happens, it is one that we have practically forgotten.

The title gives us our bearings, and the first words direct our attention to Madame Aubain’s faithful servant Félicité. And now the impressions begin to arrive. Madame’s character; the look of her house; Félicité’s appearance; her love affair with Théodore; Madame’s children; her visitors; the angy bull. We accept them, but we do not use them. We lay them aside in reserve. Our attention flickers this way and that, from one to another. Still the impressions accumulate, and still, almost ignoring their individual quality, we read on, noting the pity, the irony, hastily observing certain relations and contrasts, but stressing nothing; always awaiting the final signal. Suddenly we have it. The mistress and the maid are turning over the dead child’s clothes. “Et des papillons s’envolèrent de l’armoire.” The mistress kisses the servant for the first time. “Félicité lui en fut reconnaissante comme d’un bienfait, et désormais la chérit avec un dévouement bestial et une vénération religieuse.” A sudden intensity of phrase, something which for good reasons or for bad we feel to be emphatic, startles us into a flash of understanding. We see now why the story was written. Later in the same way we are roused by a sentence with a very different intention: “Et Félicité priait en regardant l’image, mais de temps à autre se tournait un peu vers l’oiseau.” Again we have the same conviction that we know why the story was written. And then it is finished. All the observations which we have put aside now come out and range themselves according to the directions we have received. Some are relevant; others we can find no place for. On a second reading we are able to use our observations from the start, and they are much more precise; but they are still controlled by these moments of understanding.

Therefore the “book itself” is not form which you see, but emotion which you feel, and the more intense the writer’s feeling the more exact without slip or chink its expression in words. And whenever Mr. Lubbock talks of form it is as if something were interposed between us and the book as we know it. We feel the presence of an alien substance which requires to be visualised imposing itself upon emotions which we feel naturally, and name simply, and range in final order by feeling their right relations to each other. Thus we have reached our conception of Un Cœur Simple by working from the emotion outwards, and, the reading over, there is nothing to be seen; there is everything to be felt. And only when the emotion is feeble and the workmanship excellent can we separate what is felt from the expression and remark, for example, what excellence of form Esther Waters possesses in comparison with Jane Eyre. But consider the Princesse de Clèves. There is vision and there is expression. The two blend so perfectly that when Mr. Lubbock asks us to test the form with our eyes we see nothing at all. But we feel with singular satisfaction, and since all our feelings are in keeping, they form a whole which remains in our minds as the book itself. The point is worth labouring, not simply to substitute one word for another, but to insist, among all this talk of methods, that both in writing and in reading it is the emotion that must come first.

Still, we have only made a beginning and a very dangerous one at that. To snatch an emotion and luxuriate in it and tire of it and throw it away is as dissipating in literature as in life. Yet if we wring this pleasure from Flaubert, the most austere of writers, there is no limit to be put upon the intoxicating effects of Meredith and Dickens and Dostoevsky and Scott and Charlotte Brontë. Or rather there is a limit, and we have found it over and over again in the extremes of satiety and disillusionment. If we are to read them again we must somehow discriminate. Emotion is our material; but what value do we put on the emotion? How many different kinds of emotion are there not in one short story, of how many qualities, and composed of how many different elements? And therefore to get our emotion directly and for ourselves is only the first step. We must go on to test it and riddle it with questions. If nothing survives, well and good; toss it into the waste-paper basket and have done with it. If something survives, place it for ever among the treasures of the universe. Is there not something beyond emotion, something which though it is inspired by emotion, tranquillises it, orders it, composes it?—that which Mr. Lubbock calls form, which, for simplicity’s sake, we will call art? Can we not discover even in the vortex and whirlpool of Victorian fiction some constraint which the most ebullient of novelists forced himself to lay on his material, to reduce it to symmetry? Of a playwright it would scarcely be necessary to ask so simple-minded a question. The most casual visitor to the theatre must instantly perceive how straitly even the crudest drama is shepherded by conventions; and can bring to mind subtler instances of dramatic technique which have been in force and have obtained recognition these many hundred years. In Macbeth, for instance, critic after critic points out the effect of change from tragedy to comedy in the scene of the porter; and in the Antigone of Sophocles we are bidden to remark how the messenger rearranges the story so as make the discovery of the death of Antigone succeed, instead of preceding, the funeral.

The drama, however, is hundreds of years in advance of the novel. We must have known that a novelist, before he can persuade us that his world is real and his people alive, before he can begin to move us by the sight of their joys and sufferings, must solve certain questions and acquire certain skill. But so far we have swallowed our fiction with our eyes shut. We have not named and therefore presumably not recognised the simplest of devices by which every novel has to come into being. We have not taken the pains to watch our story-teller as he decides which method he will use; we have not applauded his choice, deplored his lack of judgment, or followed with delight and interest his use of some dangerous new device which, for all we know, may do his job to perfection or blow the whole book to smithereens.

In excuse of our slovenliness it must be admitted, not only that the methods are unnamed, but that no writer has so many at his disposal as a novelist. He can put himself at any point of view; he can to some extent combine several different views. He can appear in person, like Thackeray; or disappear (never perhaps completely), like Flaubert. He can state the facts, like Defoe, or give the thought without the fact, like Henry James. He can sweep the widest horizons, like Tolstoy, or seize upon one old apple-woman and her basket, like Tolstoy again. Where there is every freedom there is every licence; and the novel, open-armed, free to all comers, claims more victims than the other forms of literature all put together. But let us look at the victors. We are tempted, indeed, to look at them a great deal more closely than space allows. For they too look different if you watch them at work. There is Thackeray always taking measures to avoid a scene, and Dickens (save in David Copperfield) invariably seeking one. There is Tolstoy dashing into the midst of his story without staying to lay foundations, and Balzac laying foundations so deep that the story itself seems never to begin. But we must check the desire to see where Mr. Lubbock’s criticism would lead us in reading particular books. The general view is more striking and a general view is to be had.

Let us look, not at each story separately, but at the method of telling stories as a whole, and its development from generation to generation. Let us look at it in Richardson’s hands, and watch it changing and developing as Thackeray applies it, and Dickens and Tolstoy and Meredith and Flaubert and the rest. Then let us see how in the end Henry James, endowed not with greater genius but with greater knowledge and craftsmanship, surmounts in The Ambassadors problems which baffled Richardson in Clarissa. The view is difficult; the light is bad. At every angle some one rises to protest that novels are the outburst of spontaneous inspiration, and that Henry James lost as much by his devotion to art as he gained. We will not silence that protest, for it is the voice of an immediate joy in reading without which second readings would be impossible, for there would be no first. And yet the conclusion seems to us undeniable, Henry James achieved what Richardson attempted. “The only real scholar in the art” beats the amateurs. The latecomer improves upon the pioneers. More is implied than we can even attempt to state.

For from that vantage ground the art of fiction can be seen, not clearly indeed, but in a new proportion. We may speak of infancy, of youth, and of maturity. We may say that Scott is childish and Flaubert by comparison a grown man. We may go on to say that the vigour and splendour of youth almost outweigh the more deliberate virtues of maturity. And then we may pause upon the significance of “almost”, and wonder whether, perhaps, it has not some bearing upon our reluctance to read the Victorians twice. The gigantic, sprawling books still seem to reverberate the yawns and lamentations of their makers. To build a castle, sketch a profile, fire off a poem, reform a workhouse, or pull down a prison were occupations more congenial to the writers, or more befitting their manhood, than to sit chained at a desk scribbling novels for a simple-minded public. The genius of Victorian fiction seems to be making its magnificent best of an essentially bad job. But it is never possible to say of Henry James that he is making the best of a bad job. In all the long stretch of The Wings of the Dove and The Ambassadors there is not the hint of a yawn, not a sign of condescension. The novel is his job. It is the appropriate form for what he has to say. It wins a beauty from that fact—a fine and noble beauty which it has never worn before. And now at last it has worked itself free and made itself distinct from its companions. It will not burden itself with other people’s relics. It will choose to say whatever it says best. Flaubert will take for his subject an old maid and a stuffed parrot. Henry James will find all he needs round a tea-table in a drawing-room. The nightingales and roses are banished—or at least the nightingale sounds strange against the traffic, and the roses in the light of the arc lamps are not quite so red. There are new combinations of old material, and the novel, when it is used for the sake of its qualities and not for the sake of its defects, enforces fresh aspects of the perennial story.

Mr. Lubbock prudently carries his survey no further than the novels of Henry James. But already the years have mounted up. We may expect the novel to change and develop as it is explored by the most vigorous minds of a very complex age. What have we not, indeed, to expect from M. Proust alone? But if he will listen to Mr. Lubbock, the common reader will refuse to sit any longer open-mouthed in passive expectation. That is to encourage the charlatan to shock us and the conjuror to play us tricks.

From all this some conclusions seem to emerge. First, that when we speak of form we mean that certain emotions have been placed in the right relations to each other; then that the novelist is able to dispose these emotions and make them tell by methods which he inherits, bends to his purpose, models anew, or even invents for himself. Further, that the reader can detect these devices, and by so doing will deepen his understanding of the book, while, for the rest, it may be expected that novels will lose their chaos and become more and more shapely as the novelist explores and perfects his technique. Finally, perhaps, a charge is laid upon the indolence and credulity of the reader. Let him press hard upon the novelist’s heels; be quick to follow, quick to understand, and so bring to bear upon him, even in his study, with reams of paper at his disposal and publishers eager to accept the bloated productions of his solitude, the chastening and salutary pressure which a dramatist has to reckon with, from actors, the spectators, and the audience trained for generations in the art of going to the play.

[Times Literary Supplement, Jul 20, 1922]

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Personalities.

“I must have Keats’s ‘Love Letters’ out; though I confess there is something in the personality of Keats, some sort of semi-physical aroma wafted from it, which I cannot endure.” Such was the opinion of J. A. Symonds—one highly unfashionable at the present moment, and, apart from that circumstance, sufficiently remarkable in itself. For most people will exclaim that if ever there was a lovable human being, one whom one would wish to live with, walk with, go on foreign travels with, it was Keats. He was rather below middle height; his shoulders were perhaps a little broad for his size; his eyes glowed with inspiration, but at the same time expressed the greatest consideration for the feelings of others. He was vigorous but gentle in all his movements, wearing neat black shoes, trousers strapped under his insteps, and a coat that was a little shabby at the seams. His eyes were of a warm yet searching brown, his hands were broad, and the fingers, unlike those of most artists, square at the tip. So we could go on making it up, page after page, whether accurately or not does not for our present purpose very much matter. For the point we wish to make is that we are ready supplied with a picture of Keats, and have the same liking or disliking for him personally that we have for a friend last seen half an hour ago in the corner of the omnibus that plies between Holborn and Ludgate Hill. Symonds also received an impression of extreme vividness, though of a distasteful kind; and both our impressions, though they affect our feelings for the poetry, are not directly caused by it, though from what they rise it would be hard to say. “What a curious thing is that undefinable flavour of personality,” Symonds continues, “suggestion of physical quality, odour of the man in his unconscious and spontaneous self-determination, which attracts or repels so powerfully, and is at the very root of love or dislike.” How much of it, we go on to consider, enters into our feelings for books, and how difficult it is to be certain that a sense of the physical presence of the writer, with all which that implies, is not colouring our judgment of his work. Yet the critics tell us that we should be impersonal when we write, and therefore impersonal when we read. Perhaps that is true, and it may be that the greatest passages in literature have about them something of the impersonality which belongs to our own emotions at their strongest. The great poet and the lover are both representative—in some way anonymous. But these are high matters. My purpose in dwelling upon this old-fashioned view of Keats is to confess similar prejudices, partly as an act of atonement for critical malpractices, and partly in order to see whether, when they are set out, any sense can be made of them.

It seems to me possible that our attitude to Greek literature, so queer in its reverence, servility, boredom, querulousness, and uneasiness, may be due to the fact that we have either no sense or a very weak one of the personality of the Greek dramatists. The scholars may contradict this. To them Aeschylus may be as real as a man in an omnibus—as real as Keats himself; but if that is so they have been singularly unsuccessful in impressing what they feel upon the popular imagination. I shut my eyes and summon Aeschylus before me, and all I see is a venerable old man wrapped in a blanket sitting on a marble plinth in the sun. An eagle soars high in the blue. Suddenly from his beak drops a large stone. It catches Aeschylus on the back of the head, splits his skull open, and that is all. Similarly with Sappho—she leapt from a high rock into the sea. Both anecdotes have something barren and academical about them, something detached and unilluminating. If we transpose them to our own day and imagine Tennyson killed on the steps of St. Paul’s by an escaped eagle—but that is too fantastic—let us suppose him run over by a taxi cab; or George Eliot gathering her skirts about her and leaping from a cliff, the difference between our attitude to Greek and our attitude to English literature is at once apparent. If these catastrophes had happened to our great writers, we should know a multitude of additional facts—how it happened, what they said, wore, and looked like; libraries of comment and psychology would have been spun from them, and it is through that veil that we should have been forced to read In Memoriam and Middlemarch. It cannot be denied that the Greeks have a pull over us in this as in other respects. The ordinary reader resents the bareness of their literature. There is nothing in the way of anecdote to browse upon, nothing handy and personal to help oneself up by; nothing is left but the literature itself, cut off from us by time and language, unvulgarised by association, pure from contamination, but steep and isolated. That is a happy fate for a literature, if it did not follow that very few people read it and that those who do become a little priest-like—inevitably solitary and pure, reading with more ingenuity but with less humanity than the ordinary person, and thus leaving out something—is it the character, the personality “which is at the very root of love and dislike”—which we guess to be there, but which, save for glimpses, we can never find for ourselves. We are intolerably exacting. A few patient scholars, shut up in their studies—what can they do for us? Perhaps one must read collectively, learned side by side with the unlearned, for generations, as we have read Shakespeare, to work through to that kind of contact.

But directly Shakespeare is mentioned there comes to mind the popular opinion that he, of all great men, is the least familiar. Indeed very little is known of him biographically, but it is evident that most people have precisely that personal feeling for him which I think they have not for Aeschylus. There is never an essay upon Hamlet which does not make out with some confidence the author’s view of what he calls “Shakespeare the man”. Yet Shakespeare is a very queer case. Undoubtedly one has the certainty of knowing him; but it is as fleeting as it is intense. You think you have fixed him for ever; you look again, and something seems withheld. All your preconceptions are falsified. What was Shakespeare may, after all, have been Hamlet; or yourself; or poetry. These great artists who manage to infuse the whole of themselves into their works, yet contrive to universalise their identity so that, though we feel Shakespeare everywhere about, we cannot catch him at the moment in any particular spot. But it is simpler to take a much smaller example of the same quality. There is Jane Austen, thumbed, scored, annotated, magnified, living almost within the memory of man, and yet as inscrutable in her small way as Shakespeare in his vast one. She flatters and cajoles you with the promise of intimacy and then, at the last moment, there is the same blankness. Are those Jane Austen’s eyes or is it a glass, a mirror, a silver spoon held up in the sun? The people whom we admire most as writers, then, have something elusive, enigmatic, impersonal about them. They rise slowly to their heights; and there they shine. They do not win fame directly, nor are they exposed to the alternations of praise and blame which rise from the passions and prejudices of our hearts. In ransacking their drawers we shall find out little about them. All has been distilled into their books. The life is thin, modest, colourless, like blue skimmed milk at the bottom of the jar. It is the imperfect artists who never manage to say the whole thing in their books who wield the power of personality over us.

This would be all very well if we could make it square with the facts, but unfortunately with Keats as an example of the kind of writer whose personality affects us we can do no such thing. We must then go humbly and confess that our likings and dislikings for authors in their books are as varied and as little accountable as our likings for people in the flesh. Some show themselves, others hide themselves, irrespective of their greatness. Here is Jane Austen, a great writer as we all agree, but, for my own part, I would rather not find myself alone in the room with her. A sense of meaning withheld, a smile at something unseen, an atmosphere of perfect control and courtesy mixed with something finely satirical, which, were it not directed against things in general rather than against individuals, would be almost malicious, would, so I feel, make it alarming to find her at home. On the other hand Charlotte Brontë, so easily stirred by timely mention of the Duke of Wellington, so vehement, irrational, and caustic, would be far easier to know, easier, it seems to me, to love. Her very faults make a breach through which one steps into intimacy. It is the fact that one likes people in spite of their faults, and then likes the faults because they are theirs, that makes one distrust criticism, and wake, after attempting it, in horror at dead of night. It will be remembered that Charlotte Brontë made herself ridiculous when she introduced a Baroness and a footman into the pages of Jane Eyre. Mrs. Humphry Ward points out the absurdity of the scene; and into what bottomless pit of iniquity do we not drop Mrs. Humphry Ward eternally for that very just observation? Again, no one has written worse English than Mr. Hardy in some of his novels—cumbrous, stilted, ugly, and inexpressive—yes, but at the same time so strangely expressive of something attractive to us in Mr. Hardy himself that we would not change it for the perfection of Sterne at his best. It becomes coloured by its surroundings; it becomes literature. These are the passages that admirers tend to imitate; and when untinged by his character one sees clearly enough how bad they are. But we need not apologise for injustice to writers of this calibre. It is when we find ourselves swayed by passion in judging the work of contemporaries that we must be on our guard. How we, who cannot hold the reader’s attention and maunder on through chapter after chapter of colourless disquisition, yet contrive to impress him with such a distaste for our personality that he bristles at the mere mention of our names, I know not. But it is a fact. The legacy of a negligible novel is often an oddly vivid sense of the writer’s character, a fancy sketch of his circumstances, a disposition to like or dislike which works its way into the text and possibly falsifies its meaning. Or do we only read with all our faculties when we seize this impression too?

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Pictures.

Probably some professor has written a book on the subject, but it has not come our way. “The Loves of the Arts”—that is more or less the title it would bear, and it would be concerned with the flirtations between music, letters, sculpture, and architecture, and the effects that the arts have had upon each other throughout the ages. Pending his inquiry it would seem on the face of it that literature has always been the most sociable and the most impressionable of them all; that sculpture influenced Greek literature, music Elizabethan, architecture the English of the eighteenth century, and now undoubtedly we are under the dominion of painting. Were all modern paintings to be destroyed, a critic of the twenty-fifth century would be able to deduce from the works of Proust alone the existence of Matisse, Cézanne, Derain, and Picasso; he would be able to say with those books before him that painters of the highest originality and power must be covering canvas after canvas, squeezing tube after tube, in the room next door.

Yet it is extremely difficult to put one’s finger on the precise spot where paint makes itself felt in the work of so complete a writer. In the partial and incomplete writers it is much easier to detect. The world is full of cripples at the moment, victims of the art of painting who paint apples, roses, china, pomegranates, tamarinds, and glass jars as well as words can paint them, which is, of course, not very well. We can say for certain that a writer whose writing appeals mainly to the eye is a bad writer; that if in describing, say, a meeting in a garden he describes roses, lilies, carnations, and shadows on the grass, so that we can see them, but allows to be inferred from them ideas, motives, impulses, and emotions, it is that he is incapable of using his medium for the purposes for which it was created, and is as a writer a man without legs.

But it is impossible to bring that charge against Proust, Hardy, Flaubert, or Conrad. They are using their eyes without in the least impeding their pens, and they are using them as novelists have never used them before. Moors and woods, tropical seas, ships, harbours, streets, drawing-rooms, flowers, clothes, attitudes, effects of light and shade—all this they have given us with an accuracy and a subtlety that make us exclaim that now at last writers have begun to use their eyes. Not indeed that any of these great writers stops for a moment to describe a crystal jar as if it were an end in itself; the jars on their mantelpieces are always seen through the eyes of women in the room. The whole scene, however solidly and pictorially built up, is always dominated by an emotion which has nothing to do with the eye. But it is the eye that has fertilised their thought; it is the eye, in Proust above all, that has come to the help of the other senses, combined with them, and produced effects of extreme beauty, and of a subtlety hitherto unknown. Here is a scene in a theatre, for example. We have to understand the emotions of a young man for a lady in a box below. With an abundance of images and comparisons we are made to appreciate the forms, the colours, the very fibre and texture of the plush seats and the ladies’ dresses and the dullness or glow, sparkle or colour, of the light. At the same time that our senses drink in all this our minds are tunnelling logically and intellectually into the obscurity of the young man’s emotions, which as they ramify and modulate and stretch further and further, at last penetrate too far, peter out into such a shred of meaning that we can scarcely follow any more, were it not that suddenly in flash after flash, metaphor after metaphor, the eye lights up that cave of darkness and we are shown the hard tangible material shapes of bodiless thoughts hanging like bats in the primeval darkness where light has never visited them before.

A writer thus has need of a third eye whose function it is to help out the other senses when they flag. But it is extremely doubtful whether he learns anything directly from painting. Indeed it would seem to be true that writers are, of all critics of painting, the worst—the most prejudiced, the most distorted in their judgments; if we accost them in picture galleries, disarm their suspicions and get them to tell us honestly what it is that pleases them in pictures, they will confess that it is not the art of painting in the least. They are not there to understand the problems of the painter’s art. They are after something that may be helpful to themselves. It is only thus that they can turn those long galleries from torture chambers of boredom and despair into smiling avenues, pleasant places filled with birds, sanctuaries where silence reigns supreme. Free to go their own way, to pick and choose at their will, they find moden pictures, they say, very helpful, very stimulating. Cézanne, for example—no painter is more provocative to the literary sense, because his pictures are so audaciously and provocatively content to be paint that the very pigment, they say, seems to challenge us, to press on some nerve, to stimulate, to excite. That picture, for example, they explain (standing before a rocky landscape all cleft in ridges of opal colour as if by a giant’s hammer, silent, solid, serene), stirs words in us where we had not thought words to exist; suggests forms where we had never seen anything but thin air. As we gaze, words begin to raise their feeble limbs in the pale border-land of no man’s language, to sink down again in despair. We fling them like nets upon a rocky and inhospitable shore; they fade and disappear. It is vain, it is futile; but we can never resist the temptation. The silent painters, Cézanne and Mr. Sickert, make fools of us as often as they choose.

But painters lose their power directly they attempt to speak. They must say what they have to say by shading greens into blues, posing block upon block. They must weave their spells like mackerel behind the glass at the aquarium, mutely, mysteriously. Once let them raise the glass and begin to speak, and the spell is broken. A story-telling picture is as pathetic and ludicrous as a trick played by a dog, and we applaud it only because we know that it is as hard for a painter to tell a story with his brush as it is for a sheep-dog to balance a biscuit on its nose. Dr. Johnson at the Mitre is much better told by Boswell; in paint, Keats’s nightingale is dumb; with half a sheet of notepaper we can tell all the stories of all the pictures in the world.

Nevertheless, they admit, moving round the gallery, even when they do not tempt us to the heroic efforts which have produced so many abortive monsters, pictures are very pleasant things. There is a great deal to be learned from them. That picture of a wet marsh on a blowing day shows us much more clearly than we could see for ourselves the greens and silvers, the sliding streams, the gusty willows shivering in the wind, and sets us trying to find phrases for them, suggests even a figure lying there among the bulrushes, or coming out of the farmyard gate in top-boots and mackintosh. That still-life, they proceed, pointing to a jar of red-hot pokers, is to us what a beefsteak is to an invalid—an orgy of blood and nourishment, so starved we are on our diet of thin black print. We nestle into its colour, feed and fill ourselves with yellow and red and gold till we drop off, nourished and content. Our sense of colour seems miraculously sharpened. We carry those roses and red-hot pokers about with us for days, working them over again in words. From a portrait, too, we get almost always something worth having—somebody’s room, nose, or hands, some little effect of character or circumstance, some knick-knack to put in our pockets and take away. But again, the portrait painter must not attempt to speak; he must not say “This is maternity; that intellect”, the utmost he must do is to tap on the wall of the room, or the glass of the aquarium; he must come very close, but something must always separate us from him.

There are artists, indeed, who are born tappers; no sooner do we see a picture of a dancer tying up her shoe by Degas than we exclaim “How witty!” exactly as if we had read a speech by Congreve. Degas detaches a scene and comments upon it exactly as a great comic writer detaches and comments, but silently, without for a moment infringing the reticences of paint. We laugh, but not with the muscles that laugh in reading. Mlle Lessore has the same rare and curious power. How witty her circus horses are, or her groups standing with field-glasses gazing, or her fiddlers in the pit of the orchestra! How she quickens our sense of the point and gaiety of life by tapping on the other side of the wall! Matisse taps, Derain taps, Mr. Grant taps; Picasso, Sickert, Mrs. Bell, on the other hand, are all mute as mackerel.

But the writers have said enough. Their consciences are uneasy. No one knows better than they do, they murmur, that this is not the way to look at pictures; that they are irresponsible dragon-flies, mere insects, children wantonly destroying works of art by pulling petal from petal. In short, they had better be off, for here, oaring his way through the waters, mooning, abstract, contemplative, comes a painter, and stuffing their pilferings into their pockets, out they bolt, lest they should be caught at their mischief and made to suffer the most extreme of penalties, the most exquisite of tortures—to be made to look at pictures with a painter.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Apr 25, 1925]

[]

Harriette Wilson.

Across the broad continent of a woman’s life falls the shadow of a sword. On one side all is correct, definite, orderly; the paths are strait, the trees regular, the sun shaded; escorted by gentlemen, protected by policemen, wedded and buried by clergymen, she has only to walk demurely from cradle to grave and no one will touch a hair of her head. But on the other side all is confusion. Nothing follows a regular course. The paths wind between bogs and precipices. The trees roar and rock and fall in ruin. There, too, what strange company is to be met—in what bewildering variety! Stone-masons hobnob with Dukes of the blood royal—Mr. Blore treads on the heels of His Grace the Duke of Argyll. Byron rambles through, the Duke of Wellington marches in with all his orders on him. For in that strange land gentlemen are immune; any being of the male sex can cross from sun to shade with perfect safety. In that strange land money is poured out lavishly; bank-notes drop on to breakfast plates; pearl rings are found beneath pillows; champagne flows in fountains; but over it all broods the fever of a nightmare and the transiency of a dream. The brilliant fade; the great mysteriously disappear; the diamonds turn to cinders, and the Queens are left sitting on three-legged stools shivering in the cold. That great Princess, Harriette Wilson, with her box at the Opera and the Peerage at her feet, found herself before she was fifty reduced to solitude, to poverty, to life in foreign parts, to marriage with a Colonel, to scribbling for cash whatever she could remember or invent of her past.

Nevertheless it would be a grave mistake to think that Harriette repented her ways or would have chosen another career had she had the chance. She was a girl of fifteen when she stepped across the sword and became, for reasons which she will not specify, the mistress of the Earl of Craven. A few facts leak out later. She was educated at a convent and shocked the nuns. Her parents had fifteen children; their home was “truly uncomfortable”; her father was a Swiss with a passion for mathematics, always on the point of solving a problem, and furious if interrupted; while the unhappiness of her parents’ married life had decided Harriette before she was ten “to live free as air from any restraint but that of my own conscience”. So she stepped across. And at once, the instant her foot touched those shifting sands, everything wobbled; her character, her principles, the world itself—all suffered a sea change. For ever after (it is one of the curiosities of her memoirs—one of the obstacles to any certain knowledge of her character) she is outside the pale of ordinary values and must protest till she is black in the face, and run up a whole fabric of lies into the bargain, before she can make good her claim to a share in the emotions of human kind. Could an abandoned woman love a sister, could a mere prostitute grieve genuinely for a mother’s death? Mr. Thomas Seccombe, in the Dictionary of National Biography, had his doubts. Harriette Wilson, he said, described her sister’s death “with an appearance of feeling”, whereas to Mr. Seccombe Lord Hertford’s kindness in soothing the same creature’s last hours was indisputably genuine.

Outcast as she was, her position had another and an incongruous result. She was impelled, though nothing was further from her liking than serious thought, to speculate a little curiously about the law of society, to consult, with odd results, the verdict of “my own conscience”. For example, the marriage-law—was that as impeccably moral as people made out? “I cannot for the life of me divest myself of the idea that if all were alike honourable and true, as I wish to be, it would be unnecessary to bind men and women together by law, since two persons who may have chosen each other from affection, possessing heart and honour, could not part, and where there is neither the one nor the other, even marriage does not bind. My idea may be wicked or erroneous,” she adds hastily, for what could be more absurd than that Harriette Wilson should set herself up as a judge of morality—Harry, as the gentlemen called her, whose only rule of conduct was “One wants a little variety in life”, who left one man because he bored her, and another because he drew pictures of cocoa-trees on vellum paper, and seduced poor young Lord Worcester, and went off to Melton Mowbray with Mr. Meyler, and, in short, was the mistress of any man who had money and rank and a person that took her fancy? No, Harriette was not moral, nor refined, nor, it appears, very beautiful, but merely a bustling bouncing vivacious creature with good eyes and dark hair and “the manners of a wild schoolboy”, said Sir Walter Scott, who had dined in her presence. But it cannot be doubted—otherwise her triumph is inexplicable—that gifts she had, gifts of dash and go and enthusiasm, which still stir among the dead leaves of her memoirs and impart even to their rambling verbosity and archness and vulgarity some thrill of that old impetuosity, some flash of those fine dark eyes, some fling of those wild schoolboy manners which, when furbished up in plumes and red plush and diamonds, held our ancestors enthralled.

She was, of course, always falling in love. She saw a stranger riding with a Newfoundland dog in Knightsbridge and lost her heart to his “pale expressive beauty” at once. She venerated his door-knocker even, and when Lord Ponsonby—for Lord Ponsonby it was—deserted her, she flung herself sobbing on a doorstep in Half Moon Street and was carried, raving and almost dying, back to bed. Large and voluptuous herself, she loved for the most part little men with small hands and feet, and, like Mr. Meyler, skins of remarkable transparency, “churchyard skins”, foreboding perhaps an early death; “yet it would be hard to die, in the bloom of youth and beauty, beloved by everybody, and with thirty thousand a year”. She loved, too, the Apollo Belvedere, and sat entranced at the Louvre, exclaiming in ecstasy at the “quivering lips—the throat!”, till it seemed as if she must share the fate of another lady who sat by the Apollo, “whom she could not warm, till she went raving mad, and in that state died”. But it is not her loves that distinguish her; her passions tend to become perfunctory; her young men with fine skins and large fortunes innumerable; her rhapsodies and recriminations monotonous. It is when off duty, released from the necessity of painting the usual picture in the usual way, that she becomes capable of drawing one of those pictures which only seem to await some final stroke to become a page in Vanity Fair or a sketch by Hogarth. All the materials of comedy seem heaped in disorder before us as she, the most notorious woman in London, retires to Charmouth to await the return of her lover, Lord Worcester, from the Spanish wars, trots to church on the arm of the curate’s aged father, or peeps from her window at the rustic beauties of Lyme Regis tripping down to the sixpenny Assembly Rooms with “turbans or artificial flowers twined around their wigs” to dance at five in the evening on the shores of the innocent sea. So a famous prima donna, hidden behind a curtain in strict incognito, might listen to country girls singing a rustic ballad with contempt and amusement, and a dash of envy too, for how simply the good people accepted her. Harriette could not help reflecting how kindly they sympathised with her anxiety about her husband at the wars, and sat up with her to watch for the light of the postwoman’s lanthorn as she came late at night over the hill from Lyme Regis with letters from Mr. Wilson in Spain! All she could do to show her gratitude was to pay twice what they asked her, to shower clothes upon ragged children, to mend a poor countrywoman’s roof, and then, tired of the role of Lady Bountiful, she was off to join Lord Worcester in Spain.

Now, for a moment, before the old story is resumed, sketched with a stump of rapid charcoal, springs into existence, to fade for ever after, the figure of Miss Martha Edmonds, her landlady’s sister. “I am old enough,” exclaimed the gallant old maid, “and thank God I am no beauty…. I have never yet been ten miles from my native place, and I want to see the world.” She declared her intention of escorting Mrs. Wilson to Falmouth; she had her ancient habit made up for the purpose. Off they started, the old maid and the famous courtesan, to starve and freeze in an upper room of a crowded Falmouth inn, the winds being adverse, until in some mysterious way Mrs. Wilson got into touch first with the Consul and then with the Captain, who were so hospitable, so generous, so kind, that Aunt Martha bought a red rose for her cap, drank champagne, took a hand at cards, and was taught to waltz by Mr. Brown. Their gaieties were cut short, however; a letter demanded Mrs. Wilson’s instant presence in London, and Aunt Martha, deposited in Charmouth, could only regret that she had not seen something of life a little sooner, and declare that there “was a boldness and grandeur about the views in Cornwall which far exceeded anything she had seen in Devonshire”.

Involved once more with Meylers, Lornes, Lambtons, Berkeleys, Leicesters, gossiping as usual in her box at the Opera about this lady and that gentleman, letting young noblemen pull her hair, tapping late at night at Lord Hertford’s little private gate in Park Lane, Harriette’s life wound in and out among the bogs and precipices of the shadowy underworld which lies on the far side of the sword. Occasionally the jingling and junketing was interrupted by a military figure; the great Duke himself, very like a ratcatcher in his red ribbon, marched in; asked questions; left money; said he remembered her; had dreamed of her in Spain. “I dreamed you came out on my staff,” he said. Or there was Lord Byron sitting entirely alone, dressed in brown flowing robes at a masquerade, “bright, severe, beautiful”, demanding “in a tone of wild and thrilling despondency ‘Who shall console us for acute bodily anguish?’” Or again the spangled curtain goes up and we see those famous entertainers the sisters Wilson sitting at home at their ease, sparring and squabbling and joking about their lovers; Amy, who adored black puddings; good-natured Fanny, who doted upon donkey-riding; foolish Sophie, who was made a Peeress by Lord Berwick and dropped her sisters; Moll Raffles, Julia, niece to Lord Carysfort and daughter to a maid of honour with the finest legs in Europe—there they sit gossiping profanely and larding their chatter with quotations from Shakespeare and Sterne. Some died prematurely; some married and turned virtuous; some became villains, sorceresses, serpents, and had best be forgotten; while as for Harriette herself, she was scandalously treated by the Beauforts, had to retire to France with her Colonel, would continue to tell the truth about her fine friends so long as they treated her as they did, and grew, we cannot doubt, into a fat good-humoured disreputable old woman who never doubted the goodness of God or denied that the world had treated her well, or regretted, even when the darkness of obscurity and poverty blotted her entirely from view, that she had lived her life on the shady side of the sword.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Jun 13, 1925]

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Genius: R. B. Haydon.

“Genius,” cried Haydon, darting at his canvas after some momentary rebuff, “Genius is sent into the world not to obey laws, but to give them!” But he need not have said it. Genius is written large all over his memoirs. It is genius of a peculiar kind, of course. It is not the Shakespearean but the Victorian genius, not the conscious but the unconscious, not the true, but—let us pause, however, and read Haydon’s diaries with attention (they are now reprinted, with a brilliant introduction by Mr. Huxley) before we decide what kind of genius his was. That it was violent in its symptoms and remorseless in its severity, no one can doubt. Of all those men and women who have been stricken with genius (and the number in the British Isles must be great) none suffered more, or was more terribly its victim than the inspired boy with weak eyes who should have been a bookseller in his father’s shop in Plymouth, but heard himself summoned to go to London, to be a great painter, to honour his country, and to “rescue the Art from that stigma of incapacity which was impressed on it”.

He came to London. He made friends with Wilkie. He lived and painted in one room, and there, night after night, Wilkie, Du Fresne, Dr. Millingen, McClaggan, Allan (“the celebrated painter”) and Callender all met and drank his good tea out of his large cups, and argued about art and politics and divinity and medicine and how Marie Antoinette’s head was cut off (Du Fresne said he had been present and had flung his red cap into the air), while Liz of Rathbone Place, who loved their talk but was otherwise cold, sided with one, attacked another, and was found studying Reid on the Human Mind “with an expression of profound bewilderment”. “Happy period!”, Haydon burst out, “no servants—no responsibilities—reputation on the bud—ambition beginning, friends untried”, and so things might have gone on had it not been for the demon which possessed him—the devil which made him, even in those early days, indite letters, which Liz applauded, against the might of the Royal Academy, and vow to bring about their humiliation and the triumph of High Art by vast pictures of Dentatus and Macbeth and Solomon, which took months to paint, filled his living-room with the reek of oil, required that he should dissect the forequarters of an ass, bring Guardsmen on their horses into his studio, and run into debt, for, as he soon found out, “the expenses of a work of High Art in England are dreadful”.

But there was another consequence of his prepossession. High Art being of necessity large art into the bargain, only the great nobles could afford it, and in consequence the simple life with Liz and cups of good tea was abandoned for the life, or at least the dinner tables, of the Mulgraves and the Beaumonts and any other lord or lady who could be hypnotised into the belief that it was their wish to have a vast picture of Achilles in the drawing-room, and to their credit to have a man of genius talking very loud at their board. Haydon, rapt in his burning enthusiasm for the Heroic and for the Elgin Marbles and for himself, took it all seriously. He entertained fashion all day long. Instead of painting, “I walked about my room, looked into the glass, anticipated what the foreign ambassadors would say,” overhead whispers at parties, “he himself has an antique head,” and seriously believed, when the beauties put up their eyeglasses and lisped their admiration, that his fortune was made, and that “all the sovereigns of Europe would hail with delight an English youth who could paint an heroic picture”. But he was disillusioned. The great, he found, care not for art, but for what people say about pictures. “Dear Lord Mulgrave” lost his faith in Dentatus when he heard it criticised. Sir George Beaumont shillied and shallied and said at last that Macbeth was too big and Lady Beaumont had no room for it, and, “in fact, Sir George was tired and wanted another extraordinary young man, for Wilkie was an old story, and I was a nuisance”. “And so, artists,” he concluded, summing up all that he had borne from his patrons, but letting us infer how boldly he had corrected them and how terribly he had bored them, “and so, artists, be humble and discreet!”

He proved the wisdom of his own saying by marrying, in spite of his debts, a widow with two children, and by having in quick succession, six more children of his own. With all this weight on his shoulders he sank steadily more and more deeply into the mud. For his genius never deserted him. It was always flourishing irresistible subjects before his eyes. He was always rushing at his canvas and “rubbing in” the head of Alexander “gloriously”, or dashing off some gigantic group of warriors and lions when his room was bare of necessities, his furniture pawned, his wife screaming in childbirth, and the baby (it was a a way they had) sickening of a mortal illness. Where a smaller man would have been content to deal with private difficulties, Haydon took upon himself the cares of the world. He was feverishly interested in politics, in the Reform Bill, in the Trades Union movement, in the success of the British arms. Above all, he was the champion of the High Art in England. He must badger Wellington, Peel, and every Minister in turn to employ young English painters to decorate Westminster Hall and the Houses of Parliament. Nor could he let the Royal Academy sleep in peace. His friends begged him to stop; but no. “The idea of being a Luther or a John Knox in art got the better of my reason…. I attacked the Academy. I exposed their petty intrigues; I laid open their ungrateful, cruel, and heartless treatment of Wilkie. I annihilated Payne Knight’s absurd theories against great works. I proved his ignorance of Pliny”, with the result that “I had brought forty men and all their high connections on my back at twenty-six years old, and there was nothing left but Victory or Westminster Abbey. I made up my mind for the conflict, and ordered at once a larger canvas for another work.”

But on the road to Victory and Westminster Abbey lay a more sordid lodging-house, through which Haydon passed four times—the King’s Bench Prison. Servants and children, he noted, became familiar with the signs of an approaching execution. He himself learned how to pawn and how to plead, how to flatter the sheriff’s officer, how to bombard the great, who were certainly generous if they were not clever; how to appeal to the hearts of landlords, whose humanity was extraordinary; but one thing he could not do: deny the demands of his own genius. Portrait painting was an obvious resource. But then how odious to paint a little private individual, a mere Mayor, or Member of Parliament, when one’s head was swarming with Solomons and Jerusalems and Pharaohs and Crucifixions and Macbeths! He could scarcely bring himself to do it. One could make them larger than life, it is true, but then the critics sneered and said that if the ex-Mayor was the size that Haydon painted him, he must have stuck in the doorway. It was paltry work. “The trash that one is obliged to talk! The stuff that one is obliged to copy! The fidgets that are obliged to be borne! My God!”

The name of God was often on his lips. He was on terms of cordial intimacy with the deity. He could not believe that one great spirit could consent to the downfall of another. God and Napoleon and Nelson and Wellington and Haydon were all of the same calibre, all in the grand style. His mind harped on these great names constantly. And as a matter of fact, though poor Mrs. Haydon would smile when he bade her “trust in God”, his trust was often justified. He left his house in the morning with the children fighting, with Mary scolding, with no water in the cistern, to trudge all day from patron to pawn-shop, and came home at night “tired, croaking, grumbling and muddy”, when, just as hope seemed extinct, a letter arrived; it was from Lord Grey; it contained a cheque. Once more they were saved.

With it all, he declared, he was a very happy man, pink and plump, in spite of all his worries, when Wilkie, who led an abstemious bachelor’s life, was cadaverous and plaintive. Now and again they took the children to the sea or snatched an afternoon in Kensington Gardens, and if they were in the depths of despair on Wednesday, likely enough some stroke of fortune would put them in the seventh heaven by Thursday. He had his friends, too—Wordsworth and Scott and Keats and Lamb—with whom he supped and he talked. He had, above all, a mind which was for ever tossing and tumbling like a vigorous dolphin in the seas of thought. “I never feel alone”, he wrote, “with visions of ancient heroes, pictures of Christ, principles of ancient Art, humorous subjects, deductions, sarcasms against the Academy, piercing remembrance of my dear children all crowding upon me, I paint, I write, conceive, fall asleep … lamenting my mortality at being fatigued.” The power which drove him to these extremities did at least reward him with some of its delights.

But as the symptoms of inspiration multiply—this passionate joy in creation, this conviction of a divine mission—one asks oneself what then is false, for falsity there certainly seems to be. First there is something in the superabundance of protest, in the sense of persecution, which rouses suspicion; next these vast pictures of crowds, armies, raptures, agonies begin, even as he sketches them in words, to scar and wound our eyes; and finally we catch ourselves thinking, as some felicity of phrase flashes out or some pose or arrangement makes its effect, that his genius is a writer’s. He should have held a pen; of all painters, surely he was the best read. “The truth is I am fonder of books than of anything else on earth”, he wrote. He clung to his Shakespeare and his Homer when his lay figure had to go to the pawnbroker. There was even one moment when he doubted his own vocation and accused the sublime art of hampering his powers. But his instinct to express himself in words was undeniable. Overworked as he was, he always found time to write a diary which is in no way perfunctory, but follows with ease and sinuosity the ins and outs of his life. Phrases form naturally at the tip of his pen. “He sat and talked easily, lazily, gazing at the sun with his legs crossed”, he says of Chantrey. “Poor fellow,” he wrote on hearing of the burial of Wilkie at sea, “I wonder what the fish think of him, with their large glassy eyes in the gurgling deep.” Always his painter’s eye lights up his phrases, and scenes which would have been repulsive in paint shape themselves naturally and rightly into words. It was some malicious accident that made him, when he had to choose a medium, pick up a brush when the pen lay handy.

But if accident it was, his genius was unrelenting. Paint he must; paint he did. When his cartoons were rejected he learned to toss off pictures of Napoleon Musing, at the rate of one in two hours and a half. When the public deserted his last exhibition in favour of Tom Thumb next door, he darted at another picture, finished the Saxon Lord, dashed in Alfred, “worked”, he declared, “gloriously”. But at last even his prayers sound a little hoarse, and his protests without conviction. One morning after quoting Lear and writing out a list of his debts and his thoughts, he put a pistol to his forehead, gashed a razor across his throat, and spattered his unfinished picture of Alfred and the first British Jury with his blood. He was the faithful servant of genius to the last. If we seek now any relic of all those acres of canvas, those crowds of heroes, we find clean white walls, people comfortably dining, and a vague rumour that a big picture did hang here once, but the management took it away when the place was done up. The pictures are vanished; Allan, “the celebrated painter”, Du Fresne, who saw Marie Antoinette executed, Millingen, Liz of Rathbone Place, all are passed away; but still these pages that he scribbled without thought of Genius or Art or Posterity remain, holding vividly before us the struggling, greedy life with all its black smoke and its flame.

[Times Literary Supplement, Dec 18, 1926, as “Genius”]

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The Enchanted Organ: Anne Thackeray.

[Letters of Anne Thackeray Ritchie, selected and edited by her daughter, Hester Ritchie.]

The enormous respectability of Bloomsbury was broken one fine morning about 1840 by the sound of an organ and by the sight of a little girl who had escaped from her nurse and was dancing to the music. The child was Thackeray’s elder daughter, Anne. For the rest of her long life, through war and peace, calamity and prosperity, Miss Thackeray, or Mrs. Richmond Ritchie, or Lady Ritchie, was always escaping from the Victorian gloom and dancing to the strains of her own enchanted organ. The music, at once so queer and so sweet, so merry and so plaintive, so dignified and so fantastical, is to be heard very distinctly on every page of the present volume.

For Lady Ritchie was incapable at any stage of her career of striking an attitude or hiding a feeling. The guns are firing from Cremorne for the taking of Sebastopol, and there she sits scribbling brilliant nonsense in her diary about “matches and fairy tales”. “Brother Tomkins at the Oratory is starving and thrashing himself because he thinks it is right”, and Miss Thackeray is reading novels on Sunday morning “because I do not think it is wrong”. As for religion and her grandmother’s miseries and the clergyman’s exhortations to follow “the one true way”, all she knows is that it is her business to love her father and grandmother, and for the rest she supposes characteristically “that everybody is right and nobody knows anything”.

Seen through this temperament, at once so buoyant and so keen, the gloom of that famous age dissolves in an iridescent mist which lifts entirely to display radiant prospects of glittering spring, or clings to the monstrous shoulders of its prophets in many-tinted shreds. There are Mr. FitzGerald and Mr. Spedding coming to dinner “as kind and queer and melancholy as men could be”; and Mrs. Norton “looking like a beautiful slow sphinx”; and Arthur Prinsep riding in Rotten Row with violets in his buttonhole—“‘I like your violets very much,’ said I, and of course they were instantly presented to me”—and Carlyle vociferating that a cheesemite might as well understand a cow as we human mites our maker’s secrets; and George Eliot, with her steady little eyes, enunciating a prodigious sentence about building one’s cottage in a valley, and the power of influence, and respecting one’s work, which breaks off in the middle; and Herbert Spencer stopping a Beethoven sonata with “Thank you, I’m getting flushed”; and Ruskin asserting that “if you can draw a strawberry you can draw anything”; and Mrs. Cameron paddling about in cold water till two in the morning; and Jowett’s four young men looking at photographs and sipping tumblers of brandy and water until at last “poor Miss Stephen”, who has been transplanted to an island where “everybody is either a genius, or a poet, or a painter, or peculiar in some way”, ejaculates in despair, “Is there nobody commonplace?”

“Poor Miss Stephen”, bored and bewildered, staying with several cousins at the hotel, represented presumably the Puritanical conscience of the nineteenth century when confronted by a group of people who were obviously happy but not obviously bad. On the next page, however, Miss Stephen is significantly “strolling about in the moonlight”; on the next she has deserted her cousins, left the hotel, and is staying with the Thackerays in the centre of infection. The most ingrained Philistine could not remain bored, though bewildered she might be, by Miss Thackeray’s charm. For it was a charm extremely difficult to analyse. She said things that no human being could possibly mean; yet she meant them. She lost trains, mixed names, confused numbers, driving up to Town, for example, precisely a week before she was expected, and making Charles Darwin laugh—“I can’t for the life of me help laughing,” he apologised. But then, if she had gone on the right day, poor Mr. Darwin would have been dying. So with her writing, too. Her novel Angelica “went off suddenly to Australia with her feet foremost, and the proofs all wrong and end first!!!” But somehow nobody in Australia found out. Fortune rewarded the generous trust she put in it. But if her random ways were charming, who, on the other hand, could be more practical, or see things, when she liked, precisely as they were? Old Carlyle was a god on one side of his face but a “cross-grained, ungrateful, self-absorbed old nutcracker” on the other. Her most typical, and, indeed, inimitable sentences rope together a handful of swiftly gathered opposites. To embrace oddities and produce a charming, laughing harmony from incongruities was her genius in life and in letters. “I have just ordered”, she writes, “two shillings’ worth of poetry for my fisherman … we take little walks together, and he carries his shrimps and talks quite enchantingly.” She pays the old dropsical woman’s fare in the omnibus, and in return the “nice jolly nun hung with crucifixes” escorts her across the road. Nun and fisherman and dropsical old woman had never till that moment, one feels sure, realised their own charm or the gaiety of existence. She was a mistress of phrases which exalt and define and set people in the midst of a comedy. With Nature, too, her gift was equally happy. She would glance out of the window of a Brighton lodging-house and say: “The sky was like a divine parrot’s breast, just now, with a deep, deep, flapping sea”. As life drew on, with its deaths and its wars, her profound instinct for happiness had to exert itself to gild those grim faces golden, but it succeeded. Even Lord Kitchener and Lord Roberts and the South African War shine transmuted. As for the homelier objects which she preferred, the birds and the downs and the old charwoman “who has been an old angel, without wings, alas! and only a bad leg”, and the smut-black chimney-sweeps, who were “probably gods in disguise”, they never cease to the very end to glow and twinkle with merriment in her pages. For she was no visionary. Her happiness was a domestic flame, tried by many sorrows. And the music to which she dances, frail and fantastic, but true and distinct, will sound on outside our formidable residences when all the brass bands of literature have (let us hope) blared themselves to perdition.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Mar 15, 1924]

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Two Women: Emily Davies and Lady Augusta Stanley.

[Emily Davies and Girton College, by Lady Stephen.
Letters of Lady Augusta Stanley, edited by the Dean of Windsor and Hector Bolitho.]

Up to the beginning of the nineteenth century the distinguished woman had almost invariably been an aristocrat. It was the great lady who ruled and wrote letters and influenced the course of politics. From the huge middle class few women rose to eminence, nor has the drabness of their lot received the attention which has been bestowed upon the splendours of the great and the miseries of the poor. There they remain, even in the early part of the nineteenth century, a vast body, living, marrying, bearing children in dull obscurity, until at last we begin to wonder whether there was something in their condition itself—in the age at which they married, the number of children they bore, the privacy they lacked, the incomes they had not, the conventions which stifled them, and the education they never received—which so affected them that, though the middle class is the great reservoir from which we draw our distinguished men, it has thrown up singularly few women to set beside them.

The profound interest of Lady Stephen’s life of Miss Emily Davies lies in the light it throws upon this dark and obscure chapter of human history. Miss Davies was born in the year 1830, of middle-class parents who could afford to educate their sons but not their daughters. Her education was, she supposed, much the same as that of other clergymen’s daughters at that time. “Do they go to school? No. Do they have governesses at home? No. They have lessons and get on as they can.” But if their positive education had stopped at a little Latin, a little history, a little housework, it would not so much have mattered. It was what may be called the negative education, that which decrees not what you may do but what you may not do, that cramped and stifled. “Probably only women who have laboured under it can understand the weight of discouragement produced by being perpetually told that, as women, nothing much is ever expected of them…. Women who have lived in the atmosphere produced by such teaching know how it stifles and chills; how hard it is to work courageously through it.” Preachers and rulers of both sexes nevertheless formulated the creed and enforced it vigorously. Charlotte Yonge wrote: “I have no hesitation in declaring my full belief in the inferiority of woman, nor that she brought it upon herself”. She reminded her sex of a painful incident with a snake in a garden which had settled their destiny, Miss Yonge said, for ever. The mention of Women’s Rights made Queen Victoria so furious that “she cannot contain herself”. Mr. Greg, underlining his words, wrote that “the essentials of a woman’s being are that they are supported by, and they minister to, men”. The only other occupation allowed them, indeed, was to become a governess or a needlewoman, “and both these employments were naturally overstocked”. If women wanted to paint, there was, up to the year 1858, only one life class in London where they could learn. If they were musical there was the inevitable piano, but the chief aim was to produce a brilliant mechanical execution, and Trollope’s picture of four girls all in the same room playing on four pianos, all of them out of tune, seems to have been, as Trollope’s pictures usually are, based on fact. Writing was the most accessible of the arts, and write they did, but their books were deeply influenced by the angle from which they were forced to observe the world. Half occupied, always interrupted, with much leisure but little time to themselves and no money of their own, these armies of listless women were either driven to find solace and occupation in religion, or, if that failed, they took, as Miss Nightingale said, “to that perpetual day dreaming which is so dangerous”. Some, indeed, envied the working classes, and Miss Martineau frankly hailed the ruin of her family with delight. “I, who had been obliged to write before breakfast, or in some private way, had henceforth liberty to do my own work in my own way, for we had lost our gentility.” But the time had come when there were occasional exceptions, both among parents and among daughters. Mr. Leigh Smith, for example, allowed his daughter Barbara the same income that he gave his sons. She at once started a school of an advanced character. Miss Garrett became a doctor because her parents, though shocked and anxious, would be reconciled if she were a success. Miss Davies had a brother who sympathised and helped her in her determination to reform the education of women. With such encouragement the three young women started in the middle of the nineteenth century to lead the army of the unemployed in search of work. But the war of one sex upon the rights and possessions of the other is by no means a straightforward affair of attack and victory or defeat. Neither the means nor the end itself is clear-cut and recognised. There is the very potent weapon, for example, of feminine charm—what use were they to make of that? Miss Garrett said she felt “so mean in trying to come over the doctors by all kinds of little feminine dodges”. Mrs. Gurney admitted the difficulty, but pointed out that “Miss Marsh’s success among the navvies” had been mainly won by these means, which, for good or bad, were certainly of immense weight. It was agreed therefore that charm was to be employed. Thus we have the curious spectacle, at once so diverting and so humiliating, of grave and busy women doing fancy work and playing croquet in order that the male eye might be gratified and deceived. “Three lovely girls” were placed conspicuously in the front row at a meeting, and Miss Garrett herself sat there looking “exactly like one of the girls whose instinct it is to do what you tell them”. For the arguments that they had to meet by these devious means were in themselves extremely indefinite. There was a thing called “the tender home-bloom of maidenliness” which must not be touched. There was chastity, of course, and her handmaidens, innocence, sweetness, unselfishness, sympathy; all of which might suffer if women were allowed to learn Latin and Greek. The Saturday Review gave cogent expression to what men feared for women and needed of women in the year 1864. The idea of submitting young ladies to local university examinations “almost takes one’s breath away”, the writer said. If examined they must be, steps must be taken to see that “learned men advanced in years” were the examiners, and that the presumably aged wives of these aged gentlemen should occupy “a commanding position in the gallery”. Even so it would be “next to impossible to persuade the world that a pretty first-class woman came by her honours fairly”. For the truth was, the reviewer wrote, that “there is a strong and ineradicable male instinct that a learned or even an accomplished young woman is the most intolerable monster in creation”. It was against instincts and prejudices such as these, tough as roots but intangible as sea mist, that Miss Davies had to fight. Her days passed in a round of the most diverse occupations. Besides the actual labour of raising money and fighting prejudice, she had to decide the most delicate moral questions which, directly victory was within sight, began to be posed by the students and their parents. A mother, for example, would only entrust her with her daughter’s education on condition that she should come home “as if nothing had happened,” and not “take to anything eccentric”. The students, on the other hand, bored with watching the Edinburgh express slip a carriage at Hitchin or rolling the lawn with a heavy iron roller, took to playing football, and then invited their teachers to see them act scenes from Shakespeare and Swinburne dressed in men’s clothes. This indeed was a very serious matter; the great George Eliot was consulted; Mr. Russell Gurney was consulted, and also Mr. Tomkinson. They decided that it was unwomanly; Hamlet must be played in a skirt.

Miss Davies herself was decidedly austere. When money for the college flowed in she refused to spend it on luxuries. She wanted rooms—always more and more rooms to house those unhappy girls dreaming their youth away in indolence or picking up a little knowledge in the family sitting-room. “Privacy was the one luxury Miss Davies desired for the student, and in her eyes it was not a luxury—she despised luxuries—but a necessity.” But one room to themselves was enough. She did not believe that they needed armchairs to sit in or pictures to look at. She herself lived austerely in lodgings till she was seventy-two, combative, argumentative, frankly preferring a labour meeting at Venice to the pictures and the palaces, consumed with an abstract passion for justice to women which burnt up trivial personalities and made her a little intolerant of social frivolities. Was it worth while, she once asked, in her admirable, caustic manner, after meeting Lady Augusta Stanley, to go among the aristocracy? “I felt directly that if I went to Lady Stanley’s again I must get a new bonnet. And is it well to spend one’s money in bonnets and flys instead of on instructive books?” she wondered. For Miss Davies perhaps was a little deficient in feminine charm.

That was a charge that nobody could bring against Lady Augusta Stanley. No two women could on the surface have less in common. Lady Augusta, it is true, was no more highly educated in a bookish sense than the middle-class women whom Miss Davies championed. But she was the finest flower of the education which for some centuries the little class of aristocratic women had enjoyed. She had been trained in her mother’s drawing-room in Paris. She had talked to all the distinguished men and women of her time—Lamartine, Merimée, Victor Hugo, the Duc de Broglie, Sainte-Beuve, Renan, Jenny Lind, Turgenev—everybody came to talk to old Lady Elgin and to be entertained by her daughters. There she developed that abounding sensibility, that unquenchable sympathy which were to be so lavishly drawn upon in after years. For she was very young when she entered the Duchess of Kent’s household. For fifteen years of her youth she lived there. For fifteen years she was the life and soul of that “quiet affectionate dull household of old people at Frogmore and Clarence House”. Nothing whatever happened. They drove out and she thought how charming the village children looked. They walked and the Duchess picked heather. They came home and the Duchess was tired. Yet not for a moment, pouring her heart out in profuse letters to her sisters, does she complain or wish for any other existence.

Seen through her peculiar magnifying-glass the slightest event in the life of the Royal Family was either harrowing in the extreme or beyond words delightful. Prince Arthur was more handsome than ever. The Princess Helena was so lovely. Princess Ada fell from her pony. Prince Leo was naughty. The Beloved Duchess wanted a green umbrella. The measles had come out, but, alas, they threatened to go in again. One might suppose, to listen to Lady Augusta exclaiming and protesting in alternate rapture and despair, that to read aloud to the old Duchess of Kent was the most exciting of occupations, and that the old lady’s rheumatisms and headaches were catastrophes of the first order. For inevitably the power of sympathy, when so highly developed and discharged solely upon personal relations, tends to produce a hothouse atmosphere in which domestic details assume prodigious proportions and the mind feeds upon every detail of death and disease with a gluttonous relish. The space devoted in this volume to illness and marriage entirely outweighs any reference to art, literature, or politics. It is all personal, emotional, and detailed as one of the novels which were written so inevitably by women.

It was such a life as this, and such an atmosphere as this, that Mr. Greg and the Saturday Review and many men, who had themselves enjoyed the utmost rigours of education, wished to see preserved. And perhaps there was some excuse for them. It is difficult to be sure, after all, that a college don is the highest type of humanity known to us; and there is something in Lady Augusta’s power to magnify the common and illumine the dull which seems to imply a very arduous education of some sort behind it. Nevertheless as one studies the lives of the two women side by side one cannot doubt that Miss Davies got more interest, more pleasure, and more use out of one month of her life than Lady Augusta out of a whole year of hers. Some inkling of the fact seems to have reached Lady Augusta even at Windsor Castle. Perhaps being a woman of the old type is a little exhausting; perhaps it is not altogether satisfying. Lady Augusta at any rate seems to have got wind of other possibilities. She liked the society of literary people best, she said. “I had always said that I had wished to be a fellow of a college,” she added surprisingly. At any rate she was one of the first to support Miss Davies in her demand for a University education for women. Did Miss Davies sacrifice her book and buy her bonnet? Did the two women, so different in every other way, come together over this—the education of their sex? It is tempting to think so, and to imagine sprung from that union of the middle-class woman and the court lady some astonishing phoenix of the future who shall combine the new efficiency with the old amenity, the courage of the indomitable Miss Davies and Lady Augusta’s charm.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Apr 23, 1927]

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Ellen Terry.

When she came on to the stage as Lady Cicely in Captain Brassbound’s Conversion, the stage collapsed like a house of cards and all the limelights were extinguished. When she spoke it was as if someone drew a bow over a ripe, richly seasoned ’cello; it grated, it glowed, and it growled. Then she stopped speaking. She put on her glasses. She gazed intently at the back of a settee. She had forgotten her part. But did it matter? Speaking or silent, she was Lady Cicely—or was it Ellen Terry? At any rate, she filled the stage and all the other actors were put out, as electric lights are put out in the sun.

Yet this pause when she forgot what Lady Cicely said next was significant. It was a sign not that she was losing her memory and past her prime, as some said. It was a sign that Lady Cicely was not a part that suited her. Her son, Gordon Craig, insists that she only forgot her part when there was something uncongenial in the words, when some speck of grit had got into the marvellous machine of her genius. When the part was congenial, when she was Shakespeare’s Portia, Desdemona, Ophelia, every word, every comma was consumed. Even her eyelashes acted. Her body lost its weight. Her son, a mere boy, could lift her in his arms. “I am not myself,” she said. “Something comes upon me…. I am always-in-the-air, light and bodiless.” We, who can only remember her as Lady Cicely on the little stage at the Court Theatre, only remember what, compared with her Ophelia or her Portia, was as a picture postcard compared with the great Velasquez in the gallery.

It is the fate of actors to leave only picture postcards behind them. Every night when the curtain goes down the beautiful coloured canvas is rubbed out. What remains is at best only a wavering, insubstantial phantom—a verbal life on the lips of the living. Ellen Terry was well aware of it. She tried herself, overcome by the greatness of Irving as Hamlet and indignant at the caricatures of his detractors, to describe what she remembered. It was in vain. She dropped her pen in despair. “Oh God, that I were a writer!” she cried. “Surely a writer could not string words together about Henry Irving’s Hamlet and say nothing, nothing.” It never struck her, humble as she was, and obsessed by her lack of book learning, that she was, among other things, a writer. It never occurred to her when she wrote her autobiography, or scribbled page after page to Bernard Shaw late at night, dead tired after a rehearsal, that she was “writing”. The words in her beautiful rapid hand bubbled off her pen. With dashes and notes of exclamation she tried to give them the very tone and stress of the spoken word. It is true, she could not build a house with words, one room opening out of another, and a staircase connecting the whole. But whatever she took up became in her warm, sensitive grasp a tool. If it was a rolling-pin, she made perfect pastry. If it was a carving knife, perfect slices fell from the leg of mutton. If it were a pen, words peeled off, some broken, some suspended in mid-air, but all far more expressive than the tappings of the professional typewriter.

With her pen then at odds and ends of time she has painted a self-portrait. It is not an Academy portrait, glazed, framed, complete. It is rather a bundle of loose leaves upon each of which she has dashed off a sketch for a portrait—here a nose, here an arm, here a foot, and there a mere scribble in the margin. The sketches done in different moods, from different angles, sometimes contradict each other. The nose cannot belong to the eyes; the arm is out of all proportion to the foot. It is difficult to assemble them. And there are blank pages, too. Some very important features are left out. There was a self she did not know, a gap she could not fill. Did she not take Walt Whitman’s words for a motto? “Why, even I myself, I often think, know little or nothing of my real life. Only a few hints—a few diffused faint clues and indirections…. I seek … to trace out here.”

Nevertheless, the first sketch is definite enough. It is the sketch of her childhood. She was born to the stage. The stage was her cradle, her nursery. When other little girls were being taught sums and pot-hooks she was being cuffed and buffeted into the practice of her profession. Her ears were boxed, her muscles suppled. All day she was hard at work on the boards. Late at night when other children were safe in bed she was stumbling along the dark streets wrapped in her father’s cloak. And the dark street with its curtained windows was nothing but a sham to that little professional actress, and the rough and tumble life on the boards was her home, her reality. “It’s all such sham there”, she wrote—meaning by “there” what she called “life lived in houses”—“sham—cold—hard—pretending. It’s not sham here in our theatre—here all is real, warm and kind—we live a lovely spiritual life here.”

That is the first sketch. But turn to the next page. The child born to the stage has become a wife. She is married at sixteen to an elderly famous painter. The theatre has gone; its lights are out and in its place is a quiet studio in a garden. In its place is a world full of pictures and “gentle artistic people with quiet voices and elegant manners”. She sits mum in her corner while the famous elderly people talk over her head in quiet voices. She is content to wash her husband’s brushes; to sit to him; to play her simple tunes on the piano to him while he paints. In the evening she wanders over the Downs with the great poet, Tennyson. “I was in Heaven,” she wrote. “I never had one single pang of regret for the theatre.” If only it could have lasted! But somehow—here a blank page intervenes—she was an incongruous element in that quiet studio. She was too young, too vigorous, too vital, perhaps. At any rate, the marriage was a failure.

And so, skipping a page or two, we come to the next sketch. She is a mother now. Two adorable children claim all her devotion. She is living in the depths of the country, in the heart of domesticity. She is up at six. She scrubs, she cooks, she sews. She teaches the children. She harnesses the pony. She fetches the milk. And again she is perfectly happy. To live with children in a cottage, driving her little cart about the lanes, going to church on Sunday in blue and white cotton—that is the ideal life! She asks no more than that it shall go on like that for ever and ever. But one day the wheel comes off the pony cart. Huntsmen in pink leap over the hedge. One of them dismounts and offers help. He looks at the girl in a blue frock and exclaims; “Good God! It’s Nelly!” She looks at the huntsman in pink and cries, “Charles Reade!” And so, all in a jiffy, back she goes to the stage, and to forty pounds a week. For—that is the reason she gives—the bailiffs are in the house. She must make money.

At this point a very blank page confronts us. There is a gulf which we can only cross at a venture. Two sketches face each other; Ellen Terry in blue cotton among the hens; Ellen Terry robed and crowned as Lady Macbeth on the stage of the Lyceum. The two sketches are contradictory yet they are both of the same woman. She hates the stage; yet she adores it. She worships her children; yet she forsakes them. She would like to live for ever among pigs and ducks in the open air; yet she spends the rest of her life among actors and actresses in the limelight. Her own attempt to explain the discrepancy is hardly convincing. “I have always been more woman than artist,” she says. Irving put the theatre first. “He had none of what I may call my bourgeois qualities—the love of being in love, the love of a home, the dislike of solitude.” She tries to persuade us that she was an ordinary woman enough; a better hand at pastry than most; an adept at keeping house; with an eye for colour, a taste for furniture, and a positive passion for washing children’s heads. If she went back to the stage it was because—well, what else could she do when the bailiffs were in the house?

This is the little sketch that she offers us to fill in the gap between the two Ellen Terrys—Ellen the mother, and Ellen the actress. But here we remember her warning: “Why, even I myself know little or nothing of my real life.” There was something in her that she did not understand; something that came surging up from the depths and swept her away in its clutches. The voice she heard in the lane was not the voice of Charles Reade; nor was it the voice of the bailiffs. It was the voice of her genius; the urgent call of something that she could not define, could not suppress, and must obey. So she left her children and followed the voice back to the stage, back to the Lyceum, back to a long life of incessant toil, anguish, and glory.

But, having gazed at the full-length portrait of Ellen Terry as Sargeant painted her, robed and crowned as Lady Macbeth, turn to the next page. It is done from another angle. Pen in hand, she is seated at her desk. A volume of Shakespeare lies before her. It is open at Cymbeline, and she is making careful notes in the margin. The part of Imogen presents great problems. She is, she says, “on the rack” about her interpretation. Perhaps Bernard Shaw can throw light upon the question? A letter from the brilliant young critic of the Saturday Review lies beside Shakespeare. She has never met him, but for years they have written to each other, intimately, ardently, disputatiously, some of the best letters in the language. He says the most outrageous things. He compares dear Henry to an ogre, and Ellen to a captive chained in his cage. But Ellen Terry is quite capable of holding her own against Bernard Shaw. She scolds him, laughs at him, fondles him, and contradicts him. She has a curious sympathy for the advanced views that Henry Irving abominated. But what suggestions has the brilliant critic to make about Imogen? None apparently that she has not already thought for herself. She is as close and critical a student of Shakespeare as he is. She has studied every line, weighed the meaning of every word; experimented with every gesture. Each of those golden moments when she becomes bodyless, not herself, is the result of months of minute and careful study. “Art”, she quotes, “needs that which we can give her, I assure you.” In fact this mutable woman, all instinct, sympathy, and sensation, is as painstaking a student and as careful of the dignity of her art as Flaubert himself.

But once more the expression on that serious face changes. She works like a slave—none harder. But she is quick to tell Mr. Shaw that she does not work with her brain only. She is not in the least clever. Indeed, she is happy she tells him, “not to be clever”. She stresses the point with a jab of her pen. “You clever people”, as she calls him and his friends, miss so much, mar so much. As for education, she never had a day’s schooling in her life. As far as she can see, but the problem baffles her, the main spring of her art is imagination. Visit mad-houses, if you like; take notes; observe; study endlessly. But first, imagine. And so she takes her part away from the books out into the woods. Rambling down grassy rides, she lives her part until she is it. If a word jars or grates, she must re-think it, re-write it. Then when every phrase is her own, and every gesture spontaneous, out she comes on to the stage and is Imogen, Ophelia, Desdemona.

But is she, even when the great moments are on her, a great actress? She doubts it. “I cared more for love and life,” she says. Her face, too, has been no help to her. She cannot sustain emotion. Certainly she is not a great tragic actress. Now and again, perhaps, she has acted some comic part to perfection. But even while she analyses herself, as one artist to another, the sun slants upon an old kitchen chair. “Thank the Lord for my eyes!” she exclaims. What a world of joy her eyes have brought her! Gazing at the old “rush-bottomed, sturdy-legged, and wavy-backed” chair, the stage is gone, the limelights are out, the famous actress is forgotten.

Which, then, of all these women is the real Ellen Terry? How are we to put the scattered sketches together? Is she mother, wife, cook, critic, actress, or should she have been, after all, a painter? Each part seems the right part until she throws it aside and plays another. Something of Ellen Terry it seems overflowed every part and remained unacted. Shakespeare could not fit her; not Ibsen; nor Shaw. The stage could not hold her; nor the nursery. But there is, after all, a greater dramatist than Shakespeare, Ibsen, or Shaw. There is Nature. Hers is so vast a stage, and so innumerable a company of actors, that for the most part she fobs them off with a tag or two. They come on and they go off without breaking the ranks. But now and again Nature creates a new part, an original part. The actors who act that part always defy our attempts to name them. They will not act the stock parts—they forget the words, they improvise others of their own. But when they come on the stage falls like a pack of cards and the limelights are extinguished. That was Ellen Terry’s fate—to act a new part. And thus while other actors are remembered because they were Hamlet, Phèdre, or Cleopatra, Ellen Terry is remembered because she was Ellen Terry.

[New Statesman and Nation, Feb 8, 1941]

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To Spain.

You, who cross the Channel yearly, probably no longer see the house at Dieppe, no longer feel, as the train moves slowly down the street, one civilisation fall, another rise—from the ruin and chaos of British stucco this incredible pink and blue phoenix four stories high, with its flower-pots, its balconies, its servant-girl leaning on the window-sill indolently looking out. Quite unmoved you sit reading—Thomas Hardy perhaps—bridging abysses, preserving continuity, a little contemptuous of the excitement which is moving those who feel themselves liberated from one civilisation, launched upon another, to such odd gestures, such strange irreticences. But reflect how much they have already gone through. Try to recall the look of London streets seen very early, perhaps very young, from a cab window on the way to Victoria. Everywhere there is the same intensity, as if the moment instead of moving lay suddenly still, because suddenly solemn, fixed the passers-by in their most transient aspects eternally. They do not know how important they have become. If they did, perhaps they would cease to buy newspapers and scrub doorsteps. But we who are about to leave them feel all the more moved that they should continue to do these homely things on the brink of that precipice—our departure. Therefore it is natural that those who have survived the crossing, with its last scrutiny of passing faces so like a little rehearsal of death, should be shaken; should move handbags; start conversations; and tremble for one intoxicating moment upon the brink of that ideal society where everyone without fear or hesitation reveals the depths of his soul.

But it is only for a moment. Next, the disembodied spirit fluttering at the window desires above all things to be admitted to the new society where the houses are painted in lozenges of pale pink and blue; women wear shawls; trousers are baggy; there are crucifixes on hill-tops; yellow mongrel dogs; chairs in the street; cobbles—gaiety, frivolity, drama, in short. “I’m awfully sorry for Agnes because now they can’t be married till he gets a job in London. It’s too far to get back from the works for midday dinner. I should have thought the father would have done something for them.” These detached sentences, spoken a little brokenly (for they are frowning into tiny mirrors and drawing combs intently through fair bobbed hair) by two English girls, fall like the bars of a prison-house heavily across the mind. It is from them that we must escape; the hours, the works, the divisions, rigid and straight, of the old British week. Already as the train moves out of Dieppe these obstructions seem bubbling and boiling in the cauldron of a more congenial civilization. The days of the week diminished; the hours disappeared. It was five o’clock, but no banks had simultaneously shut their doors, nor from innumerable lifts had millions of citizens emerged in time for dinner, or in the poorer suburbs for slices of cold meat and Swiss roll laid orderly in shallow glass dishes. There must be divisions even for the French, but where they fall we cannot tell, and the lady in the corner, so pale, so plump, so compact, seemed as she sat smiling to be riding life over ditches and boundaries smoothed out by the genius of the Latin race.

She rose to go to the dining-car. As she sat down she took a small frying-pan from her handbag and hid it discreetly beneath a tent made from a copy of Le Temps. Deftly as each dish was served she secreted a portion in the absence of the waiter. Her husband smiled. Her husband approved. We only knew that she was brave. They might be poor. The helpings were large. The French have mothers. To redress perpetually the extravagances of life, and make the covering fit the fact instead of bulging in ostentatious emptiness, was part, no doubt, of the French genius for living. Still, when it comes to the thick yellow rind of a not fresh cheese—. Ironically smiling, she condescended, in that exquisite tongue which twinkles like diamonds with all its accents, to explain that she kept a dog. But she might have kept—anything. “Life is so simple,” she seemed to say.

“Life is so simple—life is so simple,” said the wheels of the Sud Express all night long, in that idiotic or ironic way they have, for any message less appropriate to the uneasy darkness, the clank of chains, the anguished cries of railwaymen, and in the dawn the misery of the unrested body, could scarcely be imagined. But travellers are much at the mercy of phrases. Taken from home, which like a shell has made them hard, separate, individual, vast generalisations formulate in their exposed brains; the stress of wheel or window-blind beats into rhythm idiotic sayings of false profundity about life, repeats to distraction fragments of prose, and makes them stare with ferocious melancholy at the landscape, which in the middle of France is dull enough. The French are methodical; but life is simple; the French are prosaic; the French have roads. Yes, they have roads which strike from that lean poplar there to Vienna, to Moscow; pass Tolstoy’s house, climb mountains, then march, all shop decorated, down the middle of famous cities. But in England the road runs out on to a cliff; wavers into sand at the edge of the sea. It begins to seem dangerous to live in England. Here actually one could build a house and have no neighbours; go for a walk along this eternal white road for two, three, four miles, and meet only one black dog and one old woman who, depressed perhaps by the immensity of the landscape and the futility of locomotion, has sat herself down on a bank, attached her cow to her by a rope, and there sits, unmoved, incurious, monumental. Could our English poets for a moment share her seat and think her thoughts, forget the parish, the pansy, and the sparrow’s egg, and concentrate (as she appears to do) upon the fate of men!

But as the country grows larger and larger outside Bordeaux, the concentration which is needed to produce even the simplest of little thoughts is rent as a glove is torn by the thrust of a large hand. Blessed are painters with their brushes, paints, and canvases. But words are flimsy things. They turn tail at the first approach of visual beauty. They let one down in the most literal sense into a chaotic, an alarming chasm filled—for the eye pours it all in—with white towns, with mules in single file, with solitary farms, with enormous churches, with vast fields crumbling at evening into pallor, with fruit-trees blazing askew like blown matches, and trees burning with oranges, and clouds and storms. Beauty seemed to have closed overhead and one washes this way and that in her waters. It is always on the shoulders of a human being that one climbs out; a profile in the corridor; a lady in deep mourning who steps into a motor-car and drives across an arid plain—where and why? a child in Madrid throwing confetti effusively upon the figure of Christ; an Englishman discussing, while his hat obscures half the Sierra Nevada, Mr. Churchill’s last article in The Times. “No,” one says to beauty—as one rebukes an importunate dog, “down, down; let me look at you through the eyes of human beings.”

But the Englishman’s hat is no measure of the Sierra Nevada. Setting out next day upon foot and mule-back, this wrinkled red and white screen, this background for hats, this queer comment (especially at sunset) upon Mr. Churchill’s article in The Times is found to consist of stones, olive trees, goats, asphodels, irises, bushes, ridges, shelves, clumps, tufts, and hollows innumerable, indescribable, unthinkable. The mind’s contents break into short sentences. It is hot; the old man; the frying-pan; it is hot; the image of the Virgin; the bottle of wine; it is time for lunch; it is only half-past twelve; it is hot. And then over and over again come all those objects—stones, olives, goats, asphodels, dragon-flies, irises, until by some trick of the imagination they run into phrases of command, exhortation, and encouragement such as befit soldiers marching, sentinels on lonely nights, and leaders of great battalions. But must one give up the struggle? Must one relinquish the game? Yes, for the clouds are drifting across the pass; mules mind not what they carry; mules never stumble; they know the way. Why not leave everything to them?

Riders, as night comes on (and the pass was very misty), seem to be riding out of life towards some very enticing prospect, while the four legs of their beasts carry on all necessary transactions with the earth. Riders are at rest; on they go, and on and on. And, they muse, what does it all matter; and what harm can come to a good man (behold two priests stepping out of the drizzle, bowing and disappearing) in life or after death? And then, since a fox has crossed the path, which is on turf and must be nearly at the top of the mountain, how strangely it seems as if they were riding in England, a long day’s journey, hundreds of years ago, and the danger is over, and they see the lights of the inn, and the hostess comes into the courtyard and bids them sit round the fire while she cooks dinner, which they do, half-dreaming, while clumsy boys and girls with red flowers pass and repass in the background, and the mother suckles her baby, and the old man who never speaks breaks tufts from the brushwood and throws them on the fire, which blazes up, and the whole company stares.

But good heavens! One never knows what days follow what nights. Good heavens again! “Don Fernando had a passion for pigeon pie, and so kept pigeons up here”—on his roof, that is, from which one has this astonishing, this strange, this disturbing view of the Alpujarras. “He died last summer in Granada.” Did he, indeed? It is the light, of course; a million razor-blades have shaved off the bark and the dust, and out pours pure colour; whiteness from fig-trees; red and green and again white from the enormous, the humped, the everlasting landscape. But listen to the sounds on the roof—first the fluttering pigeons; then water rushing; then an old man crying chickens for sale; then a donkey braying in the valley far below. Listen; and as one listens this random life begins to be issued from the heart of a village which has faced the African coast with a timeless and aristocratic endurance for a thousand years. But how say this (as one descends from the blaze) to the Spanish peasant woman who bids one enter her room, with its lilies and its washing, and smiles and looks out of the window as if she too had looked for a thousand years?

[Nation & Athenaeum, May 5, 1923]

[]

Fishing.

While there is a Chinese proverb which says that the fisherman is pure at heart “as a white sea-shell”, there is a Japanese poem, four lines long, which says something so true but at the same time so crude about the hearts of politicians that it had better be left in its original obscurity. It may be this contradiction—Major Hills, says his publisher, “has been a member of the House of Commons for thirty years…. Throughout his long parliamentary life he has remained faithful to his favourite sport”—which has produced a collision in his book; a confusion in the mind of the reader between fish and men.

All books are made of words, but mostly of words that flutter and agitate thought. This book on the contrary, though made of words, has a strange effect on the body. It lifts it out of the chair; stands it on the banks of a river, and strikes it dumb. The river rushes by; a voice commands: “Stand absolutely motionless…. Cast up and slightly across…. Shoot the line out…. Let the flies come well round…. On no account pull…. Do not be in a hurry to lift….” But the strain is too great, the excitement too intense. We have pulled—we have lifted. The fish is off. “Wait longer next time,” the voice commands; “wait longer and longer.”

Now, if the art of writing consists in laying an egg in the reader’s mind from which springs the thing itself—whether man or fish—and if this art requires such ardour in its practitioners that they will readily, like Flaubert, give up all their bright spring mornings to its pursuit, how does it come about that Major Hills, who has spent thirty years in the House of Commons, can do the trick? Sometimes at four in the morning, in the early spring dawn, he has roused himself, not to dandle words, but to rush down to the river—“the exquisite river, with its vivid green wooded banks, its dark rose-coloured sandstone rocks, its rushing crystalline water”, and there he has stood with his rod. There we stand too.

Look at the rod. It was bought of Strong of Carlisle and cost one pound. “It consisted of a piece of whole bamboo with a lancewood top spliced on…. Never have I had a rod sweeter to cast with and throwing a longer line.” It is not a rod; it is a tool, more beautiful than a Persian pot, more desirable than a lover. “… A friend broke it … and I could never get another like it … and I grieved sorely, for bamboo cannot be mended.” What death or disaster could be more pungent? But this is no time for sentiment. There deep under the bank lies the old male salmon. What fly will he take? The grey turkey, with a body of violet silk, the archdeacon in fact, number one? The line is cast; out it floats; down its settles. And then? “… The fish went perfectly mad, overran my reel … jammed it, and broke my twisted gut trace. It all happened in a few seconds….” But they were seconds of extraordinary intensity, seconds lived alone “in a world of strong emotion, cut off from all else”. When we look up Corby’s walks have changed. “The trees had their young light leaves, some of them golden, the wild cherry was covered with drifts of snow and the ground was covered with dog mercury, looking as though it had been newly varnished…. I felt receptive to every sight, every colour and every sound, as though I walked through a world from which a veil had been withdrawn.”

Is it possible that to remove veils from trees it is necessary to fish?—our conscious mind must be all body, and then the unconscious mind leaps to the top and strips off veils? Is it possible that, if to bare reality is to be a poet, we have, as Mr. Yeats said the other day, no great poet because since the war farmers preserve or net their waters, and vermin get up? Has the deplorable habit of Clubs to fetter anglers with ridiculous restrictions, to pamper them with insidious luxuries, somehow cramped our poets’ style? And the novelists—if we have no novelist in England to-day whose stature is higher than the third button on Sir Walter’s waistcoat, or reaches to the watch-chain of Charles Dickens, or the ring on the little finger of George Eliot, is it not that the Cumberland poachers are dying out? “They were an amusing race, full of rare humour, delightful to talk to…. We often had chats on the banks and they would tell me quite openly of their successes.” But now “the old wild days are over”; the poachers are gone. They catch trout, commercially, innumerably, for hotels. Banish from fiction all poachers’ talk, the dialect, the dialogue of Scott, the publicans, the farmers of Dickens and George Eliot, and what remains? Mouldy velvet; moth-eaten ermine; mahogany tables; and a few stuffed fowls. No wonder, since the poachers are gone, that fiction is failing…. “But this is not catching trout,” the voice commands. “Do not dawdle…. Start fishing again without delay.”

It is a bad day; the sun is up; the trout are not feeding. We fail again and again. But fishing teaches a stern morality; inculcates a remorseless honesty. The fault may be with ourselves. “Why do I go on missing at the strike? … If I had more delicacy in casting, more accuracy, if I had fished finer, should I not have done better? And the answer is—Yes!… I lost him through sinning against the light…. I failed through obstinate stupidity.” We are sunk deep in the world of meditation and remorse. “Contradiction lies at the root of all powerful emotions. We are not ruled by reason. We follow a different law, and recognise its sanctions….” Sounds from the outer world come through the roar of the river. Barbarians have invaded the upper waters of the Eden and Driffield Beck. But happily the barbarians are grayling; and the profound difference that divides the human race is a question of bait—whether to fish with worms or not; some will; to others the thought is unutterably repulsive.

But the summer’s day is fading. Night is coming on—the Northern night, which is not dark, for the light is there, but veiled. “A Cumberland night is something to remember”, and trout—for trout are “curious pieces of work”—will feed in Cumberland at midnight. Let us go down to the bank again. The river sounds louder than by day. “As I walked down I heard its varied cadence, obscured during sunlight, at one moment deep, then clamorous, then where thick beech trees hid the river subdued to a murmur…. The flowering trees had long since lost their blossoms, but on coming to a syringa bush I walked suddenly into its scent, and was drenched as in a bath. I sat on the path. I stretched my legs. I lay down, finding a tuft of grass for pillow, and the yielding sand for mattress. I fell asleep.”

And while the fisherman sleeps, we who are presumably reading—but what kind of reading is this when we see through the words Corby’s trees and trout at the bottom of the page?—wonder, what does the fisherman dream? Of all the rivers rushing past—the Eden, the Test, and the Kennet, each river different from the other, each full of shadowy fish, and each fish different from the other; the trout subtle, the salmon ingenious; each with its nerves, with its brain, its mentality that we can dimly penetrate, movements we can mystically anticipate, for just as, suddenly, Greek and Latin sort themselves in a flash, so we understand the minds of fish? Or does he dream of the wild Scottish hill in the blizzard; and the patch of windless weather behind the rock, when the pale grasses no longer bent but stood upright; or of the vision on top—twenty Whooper swans floating on the loch fearlessly, “for they had come from some land where they had never seen a man”? Or does he dream of poachers with their whisky-stained weather-beaten faces; or of Andrew Lang, drinking, and discussing the first book of Genesis; or of F. S. Oliver, whose buttons after a meal “kept popping off like broom pods in autumn”; or of Sparrow, the hunter, “a more generous animal never was seen”; or of the great Arthur Wood and all his bees? Or does he dream of places that his ghost will revisit if it ever comes to earth again—of Ramsbury, Highhead, and the Isle of Jura?

For dream he does. “I always, even now, dream that I shall astonish the world. An outstanding success….” The Premiership is it? No, this triumph, this outstanding success is not with men; it is with fish; it is with the floating line. “I believe it will come….” But here he wakes “with that sense of well-being which sleep in the open air always engenders. It was midnight, moonless and clear. I walked to the edge of the flat rock….” The trout were feeding.

[written in 1937]

[]

The Artist and Politics.

I have been asked by the Artist’s International Association to explain as shortly as I can why it is that the artist at present is interested, actively and genuinely, in politics. For it seems that there are some people to whom this interest is suspect.

That the writer is interested in politics needs no saying. Every publisher’s list, almost every book that is now issued, brings proof of the fact. The historian to-day is writing not about Greece and Rome in the past, but about Germany and Spain in the present; the biographer is writing lives of Hitler and Mussolini, not of Henry the Eighth and Charles Lamb; the poet introduces communism and fascism into his lyrics; the novelist turns from the private lives of his characters to their social surroundings and their political opinions. Obviously the writer is in such close touch with human life that any agitation in his subject matter must change his angle of vision. Either he focuses his sight upon the immediate problem; or he brings his subject matter into relation with the present; or in some cases, so paralysed is he by the agitations of the moment that he remains silent.

But why should this agitation affect the painter and the sculptor? it may be asked. He is not concerned with the feelings of his model but with its form. The rose and the apple have no political views. Why should he not spend his time contemplating them, as he has always done, in the cold north light that still falls through his studio window?

To answer this question shortly is not easy, for to understand why the artist—the plastic artist—is affected by the state of society, we must try to define the relations of the artist to society, and this is difficult, partly because no such definition has ever been made. But that there is some sort of understanding between them, most people would agree; and in times of peace it may be said roughly to run as follows. The artist on his side held that since the value of his work depended upon freedom of mind, security of person, and immunity from practical affairs—for to mix art with politics, he held, was to adulterate it—he was absolved from political duties; sacrificed many of the privileges that the active citizen enjoyed; and in return created what is called a work of art. Society on its side bound itself to run the state in such a manner that it paid the artist a living wage; asked no active help from him; and considered itself repaid by those works of art which have always formed one of its chief claims to distinction. With many lapses and breaches on both sides, the contract has been kept; society has accepted the artist’s work in lieu of other services, and the artist, living for the most part precariously on a pittance, has written or painted without regard for the political agitations of the moment. Thus it would be impossible, when we read Keats, or look at the pictures of Titian and Velasquez, or listen to the music of Mozart or Bach, to say what was the political condition of the age or the country in which these works were created. And if it were otherwise—if the Ode to a Nightingale were inspired by hatred of Germany; if Bacchus and Ariadne symbolised the conquest of Abyssinia; if Figaro expounded the doctrines of Hitler, we should feel cheated and imposed upon, as if, instead of bread made with flour, we were given bread made with plaster.

But if it is true that some such contract existed between the artist and society, in times of peace, it by no means follows that the artist is independent of society. Materially of course he depends upon it for his bread and butter. Art is the first luxury to be discarded in times of stress; the artist is the first of the workers to suffer. But intellectually also he depends upon society. Society is not only his paymaster but his patron. If the patron becomes too busy or too distracted to exercise his critical faculty, the artist will work in a vacuum and his art will suffer and perhaps perish from lack of understanding. Again, if the patron is neither poor nor indifferent, but dictatorial—if he will only buy pictures that flatter his vanity or serve his politics—then again the artist is impeded and his work becomes worthless. And even if there are some artists who can afford to disregard the patron, either because they have private means or have learnt in the course of time to form their own style and to depend upon tradition, these are for the most part only the older artists whose work is already done. Even they, however, are by no means immune. For though it would be easy to stress the point absurdly, still it is a fact that the practice of art, far from making the artist out of touch with his kind, rather increases his sensibility. It breeds in him a feeling for the passions and needs of mankind in the mass which the citizen whose duty it is to work for a particular country or for a particular party has no time and perhaps no need to cultivate. Thus even if he be ineffective, he is by no means apathetic. Perhaps indeed he suffers more than the active citizen because he has no obvious duty to discharge.

For such reasons then it is clear that the artist is affected as powerfully as other citizens when society is in chaos, although the disturbance affects him in different ways. His studio now is far from being a cloistered spot where he can contemplate his model or his apple in peace. It is besieged by voices, all disturbing, some for one reason, some for another. First there is the voice which cries: “I cannot protect you; I cannot pay you. I am so tortured and distracted that I can no longer enjoy your works of art.” Then there is the voice which asks for help. “Come down from your ivory tower, leave your studio,” it cries, “and use your gifts as doctor, as teacher, not as artist.” Again there is the voice which warns the artist that unless he can show good cause why art benefits the state he will be made to help it actively—by making aeroplanes, by firing guns. And finally there is the voice which many artists in other countries have already heard and had to obey—the voice which proclaims that the artist is the servant of the politician. “You shall only practise your art”, it says, “at our bidding. Paint us pictures, carve us statues that glorify our gospels. Celebrate fascism; celebrate communism. Preach what we bid you preach. On no other terms shall you exist.”

With all these voices crying and conflicting in his ears, how can the artist still remain at peace in his studio, contemplating his model or his apple in the cold light that comes through the studio window? He is forced to take part in politics; he must form himself into societies like the Artists’ International Association. Two causes of supreme importance to him are in peril. The first is his own survival; the other is the survival of his art.

[Daily Worker, Dec 14, 1936, as “Why Art To-Day Follows Politics”]

[]

Royalty [II]

To begin with a quotation, since it may throw light upon a very complex emotion: the accused came to town because, he said, “I wanted to see the Dukes and Kings.”

The accused also said: “The inner man tells me that I am a Duke.” Appearances were against him, and, as he had brought a pistol with him, his further actions took him to the Law Courts. But save that he went a step further than most of us, his state of mind was much the same as ours. We too want to see the Dukes and Kings. There is no denying it, for the picture papers show us what we want to see, and the picture papers are full of Dukes and Kings. Even at times which it is sufficient to call “like these” there are the little girls feeding the sea lions; there is the elderly lady accepting a bouquet; there is the young man with a ribbon across his breast. And we look at them, almost every day we look at them, because we too want to see the Dukes and Kings.

It is not a simple wish. It is very very old, to begin with, and old emotions like old families have intermarried and have many connections. Love of Royalty, or to give it its crude name, snobbery, is related to love of pageantry, which has some connection with love of beauty—a respectable connection; and again with the imagination—which is still more respectable for it creates poems and novels. Certainly an old body in black with a pair of horn spectacles on her nose required a good deal of gilding by the imagination before she became the British Empire personified. Scott undoubtedly had to use the same imagination upon George the Fourth’s tumbler to make it worth stealing that he had to use upon the Waverley Novels to make them worth reading. We must call up battles and banners and many ghosts and glories before we see whatever it is that we do see in the picture of a child feeding a bear with a bun. But perhaps the most profound satisfaction that Royalty provides is that it gives us a Paradise to inhabit, and one much more domestic than that provided by the Church of England. Pile carpets are more palpable than fields of asphodel, and the music of the Scots Greys more audible than the hymns angels play upon their harps. Moreover, real people live in Buckingham Palace, but always smiling, perfectly dressed, immune, we like to imagine, if not from death and sorrow, still from the humdrum and the pettifogging. Even though our inner man does not tell us that we are Dukes, it is a consolation to know that such beings exist. If they live, then we too live in them, vicariously. Probably most people, as they hold out a penny to the bus conductor on a rainy night, have caught themselves pretending that a beautiful lady is stooping to kiss the royal hand, and the omnibus is lit up.

The last few years, however, have done some damage to this great Victorian dream. For as we know, the Dukes and Kings refused to play their part in the game any longer. Two at least declared that they had hearts like ours; one heart loved a Smith, the other a Simpson. The danger of this admission was at once felt to be very great. A leading statesman foraged in the College of Heralds and discovered that the lady was descended, perhaps on the mother’s side, perhaps from a Knight, who had perhaps fought at the Battle of Hastings. But the public was not to be bamboozled. We said, we cannot dream our dreams about people with hearts like ours. Such names as Smith and Simpson rouse us to reality. And the emotion was finely discriminated by a Court lady, who said that though she could curtsey to Queen Elizabeth, the pink of grace and charm, there was a difference—precisely what, she omitted to say—between the curtsey she dropped an Earl’s daughter and the curtsey she gave Queen Mary the Royal. As for bending to a name which is to be read in large letters over a well-known shop in Piccadilly, her knees, she said, positively and, as it appeared, quite independently of their owner, refused to comply.

Enough has been said to show that the matter is complex. Further, blue blood by itself is not enough. For though there are extreme Royalists who can sustain themselves upon the shades of the Stuarts—do they not still come with their white roses to the Martyr’s grave?—the cruder mass of us requires that Royalty shall have its crown and sceptre. In France for example there are princes of the Houses of Bourbon and Orleans whose blood is perhaps bluer than that of our own House of Windsor. But nobody cares to see them feeding pandas. No photographs of them appear in the French picture papers. Snobbery, it seems, can get no nourishment from the stout man in a frock coat, who is the present King of France, because he has lost his palace and his crown. It is like feeding upon a painted rose. Off it flits, this queer human sensibility, in search of other food. Food it must have since it is alive and has been nourished, one way or another, ever since Hengist or Horsa, many centuries ago, made some old tin vessel serve for a crown. In France, as every traveller knows, it has found a substitute. It feeds not upon Royalty but upon religion; not indeed upon those ardours and ecstasies which are the kernel, but upon the husks and pageantry. It feeds upon processions and images; upon wayside shrines; on the holy man in cloth of gold blessing the fishing-boat; on children in white muslin; on the penny candles and the incense. The Roman Catholic religion provides with this pageantry a substitute for Royalty. It gives the poorest old crone, who has nothing but a bunch of roses to stick in a pot, something to dream about, and, what is equally important, something to do.

The English religion, however, whether because of the climate or because of the creed, has nothing of the kind to offer. It is a black and white indoor affair which makes no appeal to our senses and asks no help from our hands. If therefore Royalty fails to gratify our need of Royalty, the Protestant religion is not going to come to our help. The desire will have to find some other outlet. And the picture papers, in which we see the reflection of so many desires, are already hinting at a possible substitute. At present it is a hint only, and a very humble hint—nothing more than a caterpillar. It is true that it was a rare caterpillar; a gentleman in Kensington had found it in his back garden. And so it had its photograph in the news, and appeared almost life-size upon the very same page as the picture of the Princess who was feeding the panda. There they were, side by side. But what is important is that the eye, passing from the Princess to the caterpillar, registered a thrill which, though different from the Royalty thrill, was like enough to serve much the same purpose. The desire of the moth for the star was gratified by the caterpillar. How wonderful are caterpillars—so we may translate that thrill—symmetrical in shape and brilliantly barred; the Privet Hawk wears, not one garter ribbon across its breast, but three or four. How little—the thrill continued—we know of the lives of caterpillars, living mysteriously on the heights of elm trees; urged by instincts that are not ours; immune from worry; and capable, as we are not, of putting off this gross body and winging their way … in short, the caterpillar suggested that if a mere caterpillar found in Kensington can cause this thrill (here curtailed) and if this thrill is much the same as that which Royalty used to provide when Royalty was barred and beautiful and immune from human weakness, then perhaps Science will do instead. There is in being, if at present only in germ, some curiosity about this unknown world that might be fed. This unknown world is after all more beautiful than Buckingham Palace, and its inhabitants will never, in all probability, come down from the tree-top to mate with the Smiths and the Simpsons. If the picture papers then would come to our help, we might dream a new dream, acquire a new snobbery; we might see the coral insect at work; the panda alone in his forest; the wild yet controlled dance of the atoms which makes, it is said, the true being of the kitchen table; and spend our curiosity upon them. The camera has an immense power in its eye, if it would only turn that eye in rather a different direction. It might wean us by degrees from the Princess to the panda, and shunt us past religion to pay homage to Science, as some think a more venerable royal house than the House of Windsor. Above all it could check the most insidious and dangerous of current snobberies, which is making the workers into Kings; has invested the slum, the mine, and the factory with the old glamour of the palace, so that, as modern fiction shows, we are beginning to escape, by picturing the lives of the poor and day-dreaming about them, from the drudgery, about which there is no sort of glamour, of being ourselves.

[written in 1939]

[]

Royalty [I]

Many important autobiographies have appeared this autumn, but none stranger or in certain respects more interesting than The Story of My Life, by Marie, Queen of Roumania. The reasons seem to be that she is royal; that she can write; that no royal person has ever been able to write before; and that the consequences may well be extremely serious.

Royalty to begin with, merely as an experiment in the breeding of human nature, is of great psychological interest. For centuries a certain family has been segregated; bred with a care only lavished upon race-horses; splendidly housed, clothed, and fed; abnormally stimulated in some ways, suppressed in others; worshipped, stared at, and kept shut up, as lions and tigers are kept, in a beautiful brightly lit room behind bars. The psychological effect upon them must be profound; and the effect upon us is as remarkable. Sane men and women as we are, we cannot rid ourselves of the superstition that there is something miraculous about these people shut up in their cage. Common sense may deny it; but take common sense for a walk through the streets of London on the Duke of Kent’s wedding-day. Not only will he find himself in a minority, but as the gold coach passes and the bride bows, his hand will rise to his head; off will come his hat, or on the contrary it will be rammed firmly on his head. In either case he will recognise the divinity of royalty.

Now one of these royal animals, Queen Marie of Roumania, has done what had never been done before; she has opened the door of the cage and sauntered out into the street. Queen Marie can write; in a second, therefore, the bars are down. Instead of the expected suavities and sweetnesses we come upon sharp little words; Uncle Bertie laughs, “his laugh was a sort of crackle”; Kitty Renwick kept the medicine chest; “the castor oil pills looked like transparent white grapes with the oil moving about inside”; there were “little squares of burnt skin” on the pudding at Windsor; Queen Victoria’s teeth were “small like those of a mouse”; she had a way of shrugging her shoulders when she laughed; when they rode on the sands at evening “the shadows become so long that it is as though our horses were walking on stilts”; there was a marvellous stone in the museum, like a large piece of shortbread, that “swayed slightly up and down when held at one end”. This little girl, in short, smelt, touched, and saw as other children do; but she had an unusual power of following her feeling until she had coined the word for it. That is to say, she can write.

If we want an example of the difference between writing and non-writing we have only to compare a page of Queen Marie with a page of Queen Victoria. The old Queen was, of course, an author. She was forced by the exigencies of her profession to fill an immense number of pages, and some of these have been printed and bound between covers. But between the old Queen and the English language lay an abyss which no depth of passion and no strength of character could cross. Her works make very painful reading on that account. She has to express herself in words; but words will not come to her call. When she feels strongly and tries to say so, it is like hearing an old savage beating with a wooden spoon on a drum. “… this last refusal of Servia … almost forces us to SEE that there is no false play.” Rhythm is broken; the few poverty-stricken words are bruised and battered; now hooked together with hyphens, now desperately distended with italics and capital letters—it is all no good. In the same way her descriptions of celebrated people slip through the fingers like water. “I waited a moment in the Drawing-room to speak to Irving and Ellen Terry. He is very gentleman-like, and she, very pleasing and handsome.” This primitive little machine is all that she has with which to register some of the most extraordinary experiences that ever fell to a woman’s lot. But probably she owed much of her prestige to her inability to express herself. The majority of her subjects, knowing her through her writing, came to feel that only a woman immune from the usual frailties and passions of human nature could write as Queen Victoria wrote. It added to her royalty.

But now by some freak of fate, which Queen Victoria would have been the first to deplore, her granddaughter, the eldest child of the late Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh, has been born with a pen in her hand. Words do her bidding. Her own account of it is illuminating: “Even as a child”, she says, “I possessed a vivid imagination and I liked telling stories to my sisters…. Then one of my children said to me: ‘Mama, you ought to write all this down, it is a pity to allow so many beautiful pictures to fade away’…. I knew nothing whatever about writing, about style or composition, or about the ‘rules of the game’, but I did know how to conjure up beauty, also at times, emotion. I also had a vast store of words.” It is true; she knows nothing about “the rules of the game”; words descend and bury whole cities under them; sights that should have been seen once and for all are distracted and dissipated; she ruins her effects and muffs her chances; but still because she feels abundantly, because she rides after her emotion fearlessly and takes her fences without caring for falls, she conjures up beauty and conveys emotion. Nor is it merely that by a happy fluke she is able to hit off a moment’s impression, a vivid detail; she has the rarer power of sweeping these figures along in a torrent of language; lives grow and change beneath our eyes; scenes form themselves; details arrange themselves; all the actors come alive. Her most remarkable achievement in this way is her portrait of “Aunty”—that Queen Elizabeth of Roumania who called herself Carmen Sylva. As it happened, Queen Victoria also tried her hand at a portrait of this lady. “The dear charming Queen”, she writes, “came to luncheon…. She spoke with resignation and courage of her many trials and difficulties…. I gave her a Celtic brooch and Balmoral shawl, also some books…. The Queen read to us one of her plays, an ancient Greek story, very tragic. She read it to us most wonderfully and beautifully, and had quite an inspired look as she did so…. Many could, of course, not understand, as she read it in German, but all were interested.”

In Queen Marie’s hands this “dear charming Queen” develops out of all recognition. She becomes a complex contradictory human being, wearing floating veils and a motoring cap, at once “splendid and absurd”. We see her posing in bed under a top light; dramatising herself melodramatically; luxuriating in the flattery of sycophants; declaiming poetry through a megaphone to ships at sea; waving a napkin to grazing cows whom she mistakes for loyal subjects—deluded and fantastic, but at the same time generous and sincere. So the picture shapes itself, until all the different elements are shown in action. Two scenes stand out with genuine vitality—one where the romantic impulsive old lady seeks to enchant an ancient flame—the late Duke of Edinburgh—by dragging him to a hill-top where hidden minstrels spring out from behind rocks and bawl native melodies into his disgusted ears; the other where Queen Elizabeth of Roumania and Queen Emma of Holland sit at their needlework while the Italian secretary reads aloud. He chose Maeterlinck, and as he declaimed the famous passage where the queen bee soars higher and higher in her nuptial ecstasy till at last the male insect, ravaged by passion, drops dismembered to the ground, Carmen Sylva raised her beautiful white hands in rapture. But Queen Emma gave one look at the reader and went on hemming her duster.

Vivid as it all is, nobody is going to claim that Queen Marie ranks with Saint Simon or with Proust. Yet it would be equally absurd to deny that by virtue of her pen she has won her freedom. She is no longer a royal queen in a cage. She ranges the world, free like any other human being to laugh, to scold, to say what she likes, to be what she is. And if she has escaped, so too, thanks to her, have we. Royalty is no longer quite royal. Uncle Bertie, Onkel, Aunty, Nando, and the rest, are not mere effigies bowing and smiling, opening bazaars, expressing exalted sentiments, and remembering faces always with the same sweet smile. They are violent and eccentiric; charming and ill-tempered; some have bloodshot eyes; others handle flowers with a peculiar tenderness. In short, they are very like ourselves. They live as we do. And the effect is surprising. A month or two ago, the late Duke of Edinburgh was as dead as the dodo. Now, thanks to his daughter, we know that he liked beer; that he liked to sip it while he read his paper; that he hated music; that he loathed Roumanian melodies; and that he sat on a rock in a rage.

But what will be the consequences if this familiarity between them and us increases? Can we go on bowing and curtseying to people who are just like ourselves? Are we not already a little ashamed of the pushing and the staring now that we know from these two stout volumes that one at least of the animals can talk? We begin to wish that the Zoo should be abolished; that the royal animals should be given the run of some wider pasturage—a royal Whipsnade. And another question suggests itself. When a gift for writing lodges in a family, it often persists and improves; and if Queen Marie’s descendants improve upon her gift as much as she has improved upon Queen Victoria’s is it not quite possible that a real poet will be King of England in a hundred years time? And suppose that among the autumn books of 2034 is Prometheus Unbound, by George the Sixth, or Wuthering Heights, by Elizabeth the Second, what will be the effect upon their loyal subjects? Will the British Empire survive? Will Buckingham Palace look as solid then as it does now? Words are dangerous things, let us remember. A republic might be brought into being by a poem.

[Time and Tide, Dec 1, 1934]

[]

THE CAPTAIN’S
DEATH BED,
and other essays

by
Virginia Woolf

published
1950
by
The Hogarth Press

the captain’s death bed

Oliver Goldsmith.

White’s Selborne.

Life Itself.

Crabbe.

Selina Trimmer.

The Captain’s Death Bed.

Ruskin.

The Novels of Turgenev.

Half of Thomas Hardy.

Leslie Stephen.

Mr. Conrad: A Conversation.

The Cosmos.

Walter Raleigh.

Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.

All about Books.

Reviewing.

Modern Letters.

Reading.

The Cinema.

Walter Sickert.

Flying over London.

The Sun and the Fish.

Gas.

Thunder at Wembley.

Memories of a Working Women’s Guild.

[]

[The text follows the 1950 Hogarth Press edition.]

Editorial Note

Four volumes of Virginia Woolf’s collected essays have already been published: The Common Reader, First & Second Series, The Death of the Moth, and The Moment. This fifth volume will probably be the last. As I wrote in the editorial note to The Death of the Moth she “left behind her a considerable number of essays, sketches, and short stories, some unpublished and some previously published in newspapers; there are, indeed, enough to fill three or four volumes.” With a few unimportant exceptions, I have now included all these in the four volumes published since her death; those which have not been included were found by me to have been insufficiently revised. I must repeat what I have said before, that those which have been included would certainly have been revised or rewritten by her, had she lived. All of them have, in fact, been revised and rewritten by her, but the process would have been continued before she actually published them in a volume of collected essays.

In the previous volumes, I made no attempt to select essays in accordance with what I thought to be their merit or importance; I aimed at including in each volume some of all the various kinds of essay. The essays in this volume are, therefore, it seems to me, no different in merit and achievement from those previously published. They were written at various times in the 20 years before her death. Some are now published for the first time; others first appeared as pamphlets or in newspapers, e.g. The Times, The Times Literary Supplement, The Nation, The New Statesman & Nation, The New Republic, The Tale Review. Where ascertainable, I have noted the year in which the essay was written.

Leonard Woolf

Oliver Goldsmith.

Most writers, to hear them talk, believe in the existence of a spirit, called, according to the age they live in, the Muse, Genius or Inspiration; and it is at her command that they write. Unfortunately the historian is bound to perceive that the lady is not altogether single and solitary. She conceals behind her robes a whole bevy of understrappers—great ladies, earls, statesmen, booksellers, editors, publishers and common men and women, who control and guide no less surely than the Muse. Change is of their nature, and as ill-luck will have it they grow steadily less picturesque as time draws on. Sidney’s Lady Pembroke, dreaming over her folios in the groves of Wilton, was no mean symbol of the goddess of poetry; but her place has been taken not by one man or woman but by a vast miscellaneous crowd, who want—they do not know exactly what. They must be amused and flattered; they must be fed on scraps and scandals and, finally, they must be sent sound asleep. And who is to be blamed if what they want they get?

The patron is always changing, and for the most part imperceptibly. But one such change in the middle of the eighteenth century took place in the full light of day, and has been recorded for us with his usual vivacity by Oliver Goldsmith, who was himself one of its victims:—

When the great Somers was at the helm [he wrote] patronage was fashionable among our nobility…. I have heard an old poet of that glorious age say, that a dinner with his lordship had procured him invitations for the whole week following; that an airing in his patron’s chariot has supplied him with a citizen’s coach on every future occasion….

But this link [he continues] now seems entirely broken. Since the days of a certain prime minister of inglorious memory, the learned have been kept pretty much at a distance. A jockey or a laced player, supplies the place of the scholar, poet, or man of virtue…. He is called an author, and all know that an author is a thing only to be laughed at. His person, not his jest, becomes the mirth of the company. At his approach the most fat unthinking face brightens into malicious meaning. Even aldermen laugh, and revenge on him the ridicule which was lavished on their forefathers….

To be laughed at by aldermen instead of riding in the chariots of statesmen was a change clearly not to the liking of a writer in whom we seem to perceive a spirit sensitive to ridicule and susceptible to the seduction of bloom-coloured velvet.

But the evils of the change went deeper. In the old days, he said, the patron was a man of taste and breeding, who could be trusted to see “that all who deserved fame were in a capacity of attaining it”. Now in the mid-eighteenth century young men of brains were thrown to the mercy of the booksellers. Penny-a-lining came into fashion. Men of originality and spirit became docile drudges, voluminous hacks. They stuffed out their pages with platitudes. They “write through volumes while they do not think through a page”. Solemnity and pomposity became the rule. “On my conscience I believe we have all forgot to laugh in these days.” The new public fed greedily upon vast hunks of knowledge. They demanded huge encyclopaedias, soulless compilations, which were “carried on by different writers, cemented into one body, and concurring in the same design by the mediation of the booksellers”. All this was much to the disgust of a man who wrote clearly, shortly and outspokenly by nature; who held that “Were angels to write books, they never would write folios”; who felt himself among the angels but knew that the age of the angels was over. The chariots and the earls had winged their way back to Heaven; in their place stood a stout tradesman demanding so many lines of prose to be delivered by Saturday night without fail or the wretched hack would go without dinner on Sunday.

Goldsmith did his share of the work manfully, as a glance at the list of his works shows. But he was to find that the change from the Earl to the bookseller was not without its advantages. A new public had come into existence with new demands. Everybody was turning reader. The writer, if he had ceased to dine with the nobility, had become the friend and instructor of a vast congregation of ordinary men and women. They demanded essays as well as encyclopaedias. They allowed their writers a freedom which the old aristocracy had never permitted. As Goldsmith said, the writer could now “refuse invitations to dinner”; he “could wear just such clothes as men generally wear” and “he can bravely assert the dignity of independence”. Goldsmith by temper and training was peculiarly fitted to take advantage of the new state of things. He was a man of lively intelligence and outspoken good sense. He had the born writer’s gift of being in touch with the thing itself and not with the outer husks of words. There was something shrewd and objective in his temper which fitted him admirably to preach little sermons and wing little satires. If he had little education and no learning, he had a large and varied stock of experience to draw on. He had knocked about the world. He had seen Leyden and Paris and Padua as a foot traveller sees famous cities. But his travels, far from plunging him into reverie or giving him a passion for the solitudes and sublimities of nature, had served to make him relish human society better and had proved how slight are the differences between man and man. He preferred to call himself a Citizen of the World rather than an Englishman. “We are now become so much Englishmen, Frenchmen, Dutchmen, Spaniards or Germans that we are no longer … members of that grand society which comprehends the whole of human kind.” He insisted that we should pool our discoveries and learn from each other.

It is this detached attitude and width of view that give Goldsmith his peculiar flavour as an essayist. Other writers pack their pages fuller and bring us into closer touch with themselves. Goldsmith, on the other hand, keeps just on the edge of the crowd so that we can hear what the common people are saying and note their humours. That is why his essays, even the early ones, in The Bee, make such good reading. That is why it is just and fitting that The Bee and The Citizen of the World [◉1] should be reprinted again to-day, at a very modest price; and why Mr. Church should once more draw our attention in an excellent introduction to the unfaded merits of a book printed so long ago as 1762. The Citizen is still a most vivacious companion as he takes his walk from Charing Cross to Ludgate Hill. The streets are lit up for the Battle of Minden, and he pokes fun at the parochial patriotism of the English. He hears the shoemaker scolding his wife and forboding what will become of shoemakers “if Mounseers in wooden shoes come among us … when perhaps Madam Pompadour herself might have shoes scopped out of an old pear tree”; he hears the waiter at Ashley’s punch house boasting to the company how if he were Secretary of State he would take Paris and plant the English standard on the Bastille. He peeps into St. Paul’s and marvels at the curious lack of reverence shown by the English at their worship. He reflects that rags “which might be valued at half a string of copper money in China” yet needed a fleet and an army to win them. He marvels that the French and English are at war simply because people like their muffs edged with fur and must therefore kill each other and seize a country “belonging to people who were in possession from time immemorial”. Shrewdly and sarcastically he casts his eye, as he saunters on, upon the odd habits and sights that the English are so used to that they no longer see them. Indeed he could scarcely have chosen a method better calculated to make the new public aware of itself or one better suited to the nature of his own genius. If Goldsmith stood still he could be as flat, though not as solemn, as any of the folio makers who were his aversion. Here, however, he must keep moving; he must pass rapidly under review all kinds of men and customs and speak his mind on them. And here his novelist’s gift stood him in good stead. If he thinks he thinks in the round. An idea at once dresses itself up in flesh and blood and becomes a human being. Beau Tibbs comes to life: Vauxhall Gardens is bustling with people: the writer’s garret is before us with its broken windows and the spider’s web in the corner. He has a perpetual instinct to make concrete, to bring into being.

Perhaps it was the novelist’s gift that made him a little impatient with essay writing. The shortness of the essay made people think it superficial. “I could have made them more metaphysical had I thought fit,” he replied. But it is doubtful if he was prevented by circumstances from any depth of speculation. The real trouble was that Beau Tibbs and Vauxhall Gardens asked to be given a longer lease of life, but the end of the column was reached; down came the shears, and a new subject must be broached next week. The natural outlet, as Goldsmith found, was the novel. In those freer pages he had room to give his characters space to walk round and display themselves. Yet The Vicar of Wakefield keeps some of the characteristics that distinguish the more static art of the essayist. The characters are not quite free to go their own ways; they must come back at the tug of the string to illustrate the moral. This necessity is the stranger to us because good and bad are no longer so positively white and black; the art of the moralist is out of fashion in fiction. But Goldsmith not only believed in blackness and whiteness: he believed—perhaps one belief depends upon the other—that goodness will be rewarded, and vice punished. It is a doctrine, it may strike us when we read The Vicar of Wakefield, which imposes some restrictions on the novelist. There is no need of the mixed, of the twisted, of the profound. Lightly tinted, broadly shaded with here a foible, there a peccadillo, the characters of the Primroses are like those tropical fish who seem to have only backbones but no other organs to darken the transparency of their flesh. Our sympathies are not put upon the rack. Daughters may be seduced, houses burnt, and good men sent to prison, yet since the world is a perfectly balanced place, let it lurch as it likes, it is bound to settle into equilibrium in the long run. The most hardened of sinners—here Goldsmith stops characteristically to point out the evils of the prison system—will take to cutting tobacco stoppers if given the chance and thus enter the straight path of virtue again. Such assumptions stopped certain avenues of thought and imagination. But the limitation had its advantages; he could give all his mind to the story. All is clear, related, and uncrowded. He knew precisely what to leave out. Thus, once we begin to read we read on, not to reach the end, but to enjoy the present moment. We cannot dismember this small complete world. It hems us in, it surrounds us. We ask nothing better than to sit in the sun on the hawthorn bank and sing “Barbara Allen”, or Johnny Armstrong’s last good night. Shades of violence and wrong can scarcely trespass here. But the scene is saved from insipidity by Goldsmith’s tart eighteenth-century humour. One advantage of having a settled code of morals is that you know exactly what to laugh at.

Yet there are passages in the Vicar which give us pause. “Fudge! fudge! fudge!” Burchell exclaims, and it seems that, in order to get the full effect of the scene, we should see it in the flesh. There is no margin of suggestion in this clear prose; it creates no populous and teeming silence which would be broken by the physical presence of the actors. Indeed, when we turn from Goldsmith’s novel to Goldsmith’s plays his characters seem to gain vigour and identity by standing before us in the round. They can say everything they have to say without the intervention of the novelist. This may be taken, if we choose, as proof that they have nothing of extreme subtlety to say. Yet Goldsmith did himself a wrong when he followed the old habit of labelling his people with names—Croker, Lofty, Richlands—which seem to allow them but one quality apiece. His observation, trained in the finer discriminations of fiction, worked much more cunningly than the names suggest. Bodies and hearts are attached to these signboard faces; wit of the true spontaneous sort bubbles from their lips. He stood, of course, at the very point where comedy can flourish, as remote from the tragic violence of the Elizabethans as from the minute maze of modern psychology. The “humours” of the Elizabethan stage had fined themselves into characters. Convention and conviction and an unquestioned standard of values seem to support the large, airy world of his invention. Nothing could be more amusing than She Stoops to Conquer—one might even go so far as to say that amusement of so pure a quality will never come our way again. It demands too rare a combination of conditions. Nothing is too far fetched or fantastical to dry up the life blood in the characters themselves; we taste the double pleasure of a comic situation in which living people are the actors. It may be true that the amusement is not of the highest order. We have not gained a deeper understanding of human oddity and frailty when we have laughed to tears over the predicament of a good lady who has been driven round her house for two hours in the darkness. To mistake a private house for an inn is not a disaster that reveals the hidden depths or the highest dignity of human nature. But these are questions that fade out in the enjoyment of reading—an enjoyment which is much more composite than the simple word amusement can cover. When a thing is perfect of its kind we cannot stop, under that spell, to pick our flower to pieces. There is a unity about it which forbids us to dismember it.

Yet even so, in the midst of this harmony and completeness we hear now and again another note. “But they are dead, and their sorrows are over.” “Life at its greatest and best is but a froward child, that must be humoured and coaxed a little till it falls asleep, and then all the care is over.” “No sounds were heard but of the shrilling cock, and the deep-mouthed watch-dog at hollow distance.” A poet seems hidden on the other side of the page anxious to concentrate its good-humoured urbanity into a phrase or two of deeper meaning. And Goldsmith was a true poet, even though he could not afford to entertain the muse for long. “And thou, sweet Poetry,” he exclaimed,

My shame in crowds, my solitary pride,

Thou source of all my bliss, and all my woe,

That found’st me poor at first, and keep’st me so;

—that “dear charming nymph” fluttered her wings about him even if she made no very long stay. It is poetry of course at one remove from prose: poetry using only the greys and browns upon her palette: poetry clicking her heels together at the end of the line as though executing the steps of a courtly dance: poetry with such a sediment of good sense that it naturally crystallizes itself into epigram:—

And to party gave up what was meant for mankind;

or:—

How small of all that human hearts endure

That part which laws or kings can cause or cure.

The argument of his poems has already been stated in prose. Kingdoms grow to an unwieldy size; empires spread ruin round them; nothing is more to be valued than “a happy human face”; power and independence are to be dreaded. It has all been said before; but here the village is Auburn; the land is Ireland; all is made concrete and visualized, given a voice and a name. The world of Goldsmith’s poetry is, of course, a flat and eyeless world; swains sport with nymphs, and the deep is finny. But pathos is the more moving in the midst of reserve, and the poet’s sudden emotion tells the more when it is obviously not good manners to talk about oneself. If it is objected that Goldsmith’s imagination is too narrowly and purely domestic, that he ignores all the rubs and struggles of life to dwell upon

… the gentler morals, such as play.

Through life’s more cultured walks, and charm the way,

it is also undeniable that what he loves is not an artificial and foppish refinement. “Those calm desires that ask’d but little room” are the pith of life, the essence that he has pressed out from the turbulent and unsatisfying mass.

Yet Goldsmith has a peculiar reticence which forbids us to dwell with him in complete intimacy. It is partly no doubt that he has no such depths to reveal as some of our essayists—the solitudes and sublimities are not for him, rather the graces and amenities. And also we are kept at arm’s length by the urbanity of his style, just as good manners confer impersonality upon the well-bred. But there may be another reason for his reserve. Lamb, Hazlitt, Montaigne talk openly about themselves because their faults are not small ones; Goldsmith was reserved because his foibles are the kind that men conceal. Nobody at least can read Goldsmith in the mass without noticing how frequently, yet how indirectly, certain themes recur—dress, ugliness, awkwardness, poverty and the fear of ridicule. It is as if the genial man were haunted by some private dread, as if he were conscious that besides the angel there lived in him a less reputable companion, resembling perhaps Poor Poll. It is only necessary to open Boswell to make sure. There, at once, we see our serene and mellifluous writer in the flesh. “His person was short, his countenance coarse and vulgar, his deportment that of a scholar awkwardly affecting the easy gentleman.” With touch upon touch the unprepossessing portrait is built up. We are shown Goldsmith writhing upon the sofa in an agony of jealousy: Goldsmith thrusting himself into the talk and floundering on “without knowing how to get off”: Goldsmith full of vanities and jealousies: Goldsmith dressing up his ugly pockmarked body in a smart bloom-coloured coat. The portrait is painted without sympathy save, indeed, of that inverted kind which comes from knowing from your own experience the sufferings which you describe. Boswell, too, was jealous, and seized upon his sitter’s foibles with the malicious insight of a rival.

Yet, like all Boswell’s portraits, it has the breath of life in it. He brings the other Goldsmith to the surface—he combines them both. He proves that the silver-tongued writer was no simple soul, gently floating through life from the honeysuckle to the hawthorn hedge. On the contrary, he was a complex man, a man full of troubles, without “settled principle”; who lived from hand to mouth and from day to day; who wrote his loveliest sentences in a garret under pressure of poverty. And yet, so oddly are human faculties combined, he had only to take his pen and he was revenged upon Boswell, upon the fine gentleman who sneered at him, upon his own ugly body and stumbling tongue. He had only to write and all was clear and melodious; he had only to write and he was among the angels, speaking with a silver tongue in a world where all is ordered, rational, and serene.

[Times Literary Supplement, Mar 1, 1934]

[]

White’s Selborne.

“… there is somewhat in most genera at least, that at first sight discriminates them, and enables a judicious observer to pronounce upon them with some certainty.” Gilbert White is talking, of course, about birds; the good ornithologist, he says, should be able to distinguish them by their air—“on the ground as well as on the wing, and in the bush as well as in the hand.” But when the bird happens to be Gilbert White himself, when we try to discriminate the colour and shape of this very rare fowl, we are at a loss. Is he, like the bird so brightly coloured by hand as a frontispiece to the second volume, a hybrid—something between a hen that clucks and a nightingale that sings? It is one of those ambiguous books that seem to tell a plain story, the Natural History of Selborne, and yet by some apparently unconscious device of the author’s has a door left open, through which we hear distant sounds, a dog barking, cart wheels creaking, and see, when “all the fading landscape sinks in night”, if not Venus herself, at least a phantom owl.

His intention seems plain enough—it was to impart certain observations upon the fauna and flora of his native village to his friends Thomas Pennant and Daines Barrington. But it was not for the benefit of those gentlemen that he composed the sober yet stately description of Selborne with which the book opens. There it is before us, the village of Selborne, lying in the extreme eastern corner of the county of Hampshire, with its hanger and its sheep walks and those deep lanes “that affright the ladies and make timid horsemen shudder”. The soil is part clay, part malm; the cottages are of stone or brick; the men work in the hop gardens and in the spring and summer the women weed the corn. No novelist could have opened better. Selborne is set solidly in the foreground. But something is lacking; and so before the scene fills with birds, mice, voles, crickets, and the Duke of Richmond’s moose, before the page is loud with the chirpings, bleatings, lowings, and gruntings of their familiar intercourse, we have Queen Anne lying on the bank to watch the deer driven past. It was an anecdote, he casually remarks, that he had from an old keeper, Adams, whose great-grandfather, father and self were all keepers in the forest. And thus the single straggling street is allied with history, and shaded by tradition. No novelist could have given us more briefly and completely all that we need to know before the story begins.

The story of Selborne is a vegetable, an animal story. The gossip is about the habits of vipers and the love interest is supplied chiefly by frogs. Compared with Gilbert White the most realistic of novelists is a rash romantic. The crop of the cuckoo is examined; the viper is dissected; the grasshopper is sought with a pliant grass blade in its hole; the mouse is measured and found to weigh one copper halfpenny. Nothing can exceed the minuteness of these observations, or the scrupulous care with which they are conducted. The chief question in dispute—it is indeed the theme of the book—is the migration of swallows. Barrington believed that the swallow sleeps out the winter; White, who has a nephew in Andalusia to inform him, now inclines to migration; then draws back. Every grain of evidence is sifted; none is obscured. With all his faculties bent on this great question, the image of science at her most innocent and most sincere, he loses that self-consciousness which so often separates us from our fellow-creatures and becomes like a bird seen through a field-glass busy in a distant hedge. This is the moment then, when his eyes are fixed upon the swallow, to watch Gilbert White himself.

We observe in the first place the creature’s charming simplicity. He is quite indifferent to public opinion. He will transplant a colony of crickets to his lawn; imprison one in a paper cage on his table; bawl through a speaking trumpet at his bees—they remain indifferent; and arrive at Selborne with Aunt Snookes aged tortoise seated beside him in the post chaise. And while thus engaged he emits those little chuckles of delight, those half-conscious burblings and comments which make him as “amusive” as one of his own birds. “… But their inequality of height,” he muses, pondering the abortive match between the moose and the red deer, “must always have been a bar to any commerce of an amorous kind.” “The copulation of frogs,” he observes, “is notorious to everybody … and yet I never saw, or read, of toads being observed in the same situation.” “Pitiable seems the condition of this poor embarrassed reptile,” he laments over the tortoise, yet “there is a season (usually the beginning of June) when the tortoise walks on tip-toe” along the garden path in search of love.

And just as the vicarage garden seemed to Aunt Snookes tortoise a whole world, so, as we look through the eyes of Gilbert White, England becomes immense. The South Downs, across which he rides year after year, turn to “a vast range of mountains”. The country is very empty. He is more solitary at Selborne than a peasant to-day in the remotest Hebrides. It is true that he has—he is proud of the fact—a nephew in Andalusia; but he has no acquaintance at present among the gentlemen of the Navy; and though London and Bath exist, of course—London indeed boasts a very fine collection of horns—rumours from those capitals come very slowly across wild moors and roads which the snow has made impassable. In this quiet air sounds are magnified. We hear the whisper of the grasshopper lark; the caw of rooks is like a pack of hounds “in hollow, echoing woods”; and on a still summer evening the Portsmouth gun booms out just as the goat-sucker begins its song. His mind, like the bird’s crop that the farmer’s wife found stuffed with vegetables and cooked for her dinner, has nothing but insects in it and tender green shoots. This innocent, this unconscious happiness is conveyed, not by assertion, but much more effectively by those unsought memories that come of their own accord. They are all of hot summer evenings—at Oxford in Christ Church quadrangle; riding from Richmond to Sunbury with the swallows skimming the river. Even the strident voice of the cricket, so discordant to some, fills his mind “with a train of summer ideas, of everything that is rural, verdurous and joyful”. There is a continuity in his happiness; the same thoughts recur on the same occasions. “I made the same remark in former years as I came the same way annually.” Year after year he was thinking of the swallows.

But the landscape in which this bird roams so freely has its hedges. They shut in, but they protect. There is what he calls, so aptly, Providence. Church spires, he remarks, “are very necessary ingredients in the landscape.” Providence dwells there—inscrutable, for why does it allot so many years to Aunt Snookes tortoise? But all-wise—consider the legs of the frog—“How wonderful is the economy of Providence with regards to the limbs of so vile an animal!” In another fifty years Providence would have been neither so inscrutable nor as wise—it would have lost its shade. But Providence about 1760 was in its prime; it sets all doubts at rest, and so leaves the mind free to question practically everything. Besides Providence there are the castles and seats of the nobility. He respects them almost equally. The old families—the Howes, the Mordaunts—know their places and keep the poor in theirs. Gilbert White is far less tender to the poor—“We abound with poor,” he writes, as if the vermin were beneath his notice—than to the grasshopper whom he lifts out of its hole so carefully and once inadvertently squeezed to death. Finally, shading the landscape with its august laurel, is literature—Latin literature, naturally. His mind is haunted by the classics. He sounds a Latin phrase now and then as if to tune his English. The echo that was so famous a feature of Selborne seems of its own accord to boom out Tityre, tu patulae recubans … It was with Virgil in his mind that Gilbert White described the women making rush candles at Selborne.

So we observe through our field-glasses this very fine specimen of the eighteenth-century clerical naturalist. But just as we think to have got him named he moves. He sounds a note that is not the characteristic note of the common English clergyman. “When I hear fine music I am haunted with passages therefrom night and day; and especially at first waking, which by their importunity, give me more uneasiness than pleasure.” Why does music, he asks, “so strangely affect some men, as it were by recollection, for days after a concert is over?”

It is a question that sends us baffled to his biography. But we learn only what we knew already—that his affection for Kitty Mulso was not passionate; that he was born at Selborne in 1720 and died there in 1793; and that his “days passed with scarcely any other vicissitudes than those of the seasons.” But one fact is added—a negative, but a revealing fact; there is no portrait of him in existence. He has no face. That is why perhaps he escapes identification. His observation of the insect in the grass is minute; but he also raises his eyes to the horizon and looks and listens. In that moment of abstraction he hears sounds that make him uneasy in the early morning; he escapes from Selborne, from his own age, and comes winging his way to us in the dusk along the hedgerows. A clerical owl? A parson with the wings of a bird? A hybrid? But his own description fits him best. “The kestrel or wind-hover,” he says, “has a peculiar mode of hanging in the air in one place, his wings all the time being briskly agitated.”

[New Statesman and Nation, Sep 30, 1939]

[]

Life Itself.

One could wish that the psycho-analysts would go into the question of diary keeping. For often it is the one mysterious fact in a life otherwise as clear as the sky and as candid as the dawn. Parson Woodforde is a case in point—his diary is the only mystery about him. For forty-three years he sat down almost daily to record what he did on Monday and what he had for dinner on Tuesday; but for whom he wrote or why he wrote it is impossible to say. He does not unburden his soul in his diary; yet it is no mere record of engagements and expenses. As for literary fame, there is no sign that he ever thought of it, and finally, though the man himself is peaceable above all things, there are little indiscretions and criticisms which would have got him into trouble and hurt the feelings of his friends had they read them. What purpose, then, did the sixty-eight little books fulfil? Perhaps it was the desire for intimacy. When James Woodforde opened one of his neat manuscript books, he entered into conversation with a second James Woodforde, who was not quite the same as the reverend gentleman who visited the poor and preached in the church. These two friends said much that all the world might hear; but they had a few secrets which they shared with each other only. It was a great comfort, for example, that Christmas when Nancy, Betsy, and Mr. Walker seemed to be in conspiracy against him, to exclaim in the diary: “The treatment I meet with for my Civility this Christmas is to me abominable.” The second James Woodforde sympathized and agreed. Again, when a stranger abused his hospitality it was a relief to inform the other self who lived in the little book that he had put him to sleep in the attic story “and I treated him as one that would be too free if treated kindly”. It is easy to understand why in the quiet life of a country parish these two bachelor friends became in time inseparable. An essential part of him would have died had he been forbidden to keep his diary. And as we read—if reading is the word for it—we seem to be listening to someone who is murmuring over the events of the day to himself in the quiet space which precedes sleep. It is not writing, and to speak the truth it is not reading. It is slipping through half a dozen pages and strolling to the window and looking out. It is going on thinking about the Woodfordes while we watch the people in the street below. It is taking a walk and making up the life and character of James Woodforde as we make up our friends’ characters, turning over something they have said, pondering the meaning of something they have done, remembering how they looked one day when they thought themselves unobserved. It is not reading; it is ruminating.

James Woodforde, then, was one of those smooth-cheeked, steady-eyed men, demure to look at, whom we can never imagine except in the prime of life. He was of an equable temper, with only such acerbities and touchinesses as are generally to be found in those who have had a love affair in their youth and remained, as they fancy, unwed because of it. The Parson’s love affair, however, was nothing very tremendous. Once when he was a young man in Somerset he liked to walk over to Shepton and to visit a certain “sweet-tempered” Betsy White who lived there. He had a great mind “to make a bold stroke” and ask her to marry him. He went so far, indeed, as to propose marriage “when opportunity served” and Betsy was willing. But he delayed; time passed; four years passed, indeed, and Betsy went to Devonshire, met a Mr. Webster who had five hundred pounds a year, and married him. When James Woodforde met them in the turnpike road, he could say little, “being shy”, but to his diary he remarked—and this no doubt was his private version of the affair ever after—“she has proved herself to me a mere jilt.”

But he was a young man then, and as time went on we cannot help suspecting that he was glad to consider the question of marriage shelved once and for all, so that he might settle down with his niece Nancy at Weston Longueville and give himself simply and solely, every day and all day, to the great business of living. What else to call it we do not know. It seems to be life itself.

For James Woodforde was nothing in particular. Life had it all her own way with him. He had no special gift; he had no oddity or infirmity. It is idle to pretend that he was a zealous priest. God in Heaven was much the same to him as King George upon the throne—a kindly monarch, that is to say, whose festivals one kept by preaching a sermon on Sunday much as one kept the royal birthday by firing a blunderbuss and drinking a toast at dinner. Should anything untoward happen, like the death of a boy who was dragged and killed by a horse, he would instantly, but rather perfunctorily, exclaim: “I hope to God the Poor Boy is happy,” and add: “We all came home singing;” just as when Justice Creed’s peacock spread its tail—“and most noble it is”—he would exclaim: “How wonderful are Thy Works O God in every Being.” But there was no fanaticism, no enthusiasm, no lyric impulse about James Woodforde. In all these pages, indeed, each so neatly divided into compartments, and each of those again filled, as the days themselves were, so quietly and fully in a hand like the pacing of a well-tempered nag, one can only call to mind a single poetic phrase about the transit of Venus, how “It appeared as a black patch upon a fair Lady’s face.” The words themselves are mild enough, but they hang over the undulating expanse of the Parson’s prose with the resplendence of the star itself. So in the fen country a barn or a tree appears twice its natural size against the surrounding flats. But what led him to this palpable excess that summer’s night we do not know. It cannot have been that he was drunk. He spoke out too roundly against such failings in his brother Jack to have been guilty himself. Jack was the wild one of the family. Jack drank at the “Catherine Wheel”. Jack came home and had the impudence to defend suicide to his old father. James himself drank his pint of port, but he was a man who liked his meat. When we think of the Woodfordes, uncle and niece, we think of them as often as not waiting with some impatience for their dinner. They gravely watch the joint set upon the table; they swiftly get their knives and forks to work upon the succulent leg or loin, and without much comment, unless a word is passed about the gravy or the stuffing, go on eating. They munch, day after day, year after year, until they have devoured herds of sheep and oxen, flocks of poultry, an odd dozen or so of swans and cygnets, bushels of apples and plums, while the pastries and the jellies crumble and squash beneath their spoons in mountains, in pyramids, in pagodas. Never was there a book so stuffed with food as this one is. To read the bill of fare respectfully and punctually set forth gives one a sense of repletion. It is as if one had lunched at Simpsons daily for a week. Trout and chicken, mutton and peas, pork and apple sauce—so the joints succeed each other at dinner; and there is supper with more joints still to come, all, no doubt, home grown, and of the juiciest and sweetest; all cooked, often by the mistress herself, in the plainest English way, save when the dinner was at Weston Hall and Mrs. Custance surprised them with a London dainty—a pyramid of jelly, that is to say, with a “landscape appearing through it”. Then Mrs. Custance, for whom James Woodforde had a chivalrous devotion, would play the “Sticcardi Pastorale” and make “very soft music indeed”; or would get out her work-box and show them how neatly contrived it was, unless indeed Mrs. Custance were giving birth to another child upstairs, whom the Parson would baptize and very frequently bury. The Parson had a deep respect for the Custances. They were all that country gentry should be—a little given to the habit of keeping mistresses, perhaps, but that peccadillo could be forgiven them in view of their generosity to the poor, the kindness they showed to Nancy, and their condescension in asking the Parson to dinner when they had great people staying with them. Yet great people were not much to James’s liking. Deeply though he respected the nobility, “one must confess,” he said, “that being with our equals is much more agreeable.”

He was too fond of his ease and too shrewd a judge of the values of things to be much troubled with snobbery; he much preferred the quiet of his own fireside to adventuring after dissipation abroad. If an old man brought a Madagascar monkey to the door, or a Polish dwarf or a balloon was being shown at Norwich, the Parson would go and have a look at them, and be free with his shillings, but he was a quiet man, a man without ambition, and it is more than likely that his niece found him a little dull. It is the niece Nancy, to speak plainly, who makes us uneasy. There are the seeds of domestic disaster in her character, unless we mistake. It is true that on the afternoon of April 27th, 1780, she expressed a wish to read Aristotle’s philosophy, which Miss Millard had got of a married woman, but she is a stolid girl; she eats too much, she grumbles too much, and she takes too much to heart the loss of her red box. No doubt she was sensible enough; we will not blame her for being pert and saucy, or for losing her temper at cards, or even for hiding the parcel that came by post when her uncle longed to know what was in it, and had never done such a thing by her. But when we compare her with Betsy Davy, we realize that one human being has only to come into the room to raise our spirits, and another sets us on edge merely by the way she blows her nose. Betsy, the daughter of that frivolous wanton Mrs. Davy (who fell downstairs the day Miss Donne swallowed the barleycorn with its stalk), Betsy the shy little girl, Betsy livening up and playing with the Parson’s wig, Betsy falling in love with Mr. Walker, Betsy receiving the present of a fox’s brush from him, Betsy compromising her reputation with a scamp, Betsy bereaved of him—for Mr. Walker died at the age of twenty-three and was buried in a plain coffin—Betsy left, it is to be feared, in a very scandalous condition—Betsy always charms; we forgive Betsy anything. The trouble with Nancy is that she is beginning to find Weston dull. No suitor has yet appeared. It is but too likely that the ten years of Parson Woodforde’s life that still remain will often have to record how Nancy teased him with her grumbling.

The ten years that remain—one knows, of course, that it must come to an end. Already the Custances have gone to Bath; the Parson has had a touch of gout; far away, with a sound like distant thunder, we hear the guns of the French Revolution. But it is comforting to observe that the imprisonment of the French king and queen, and the anarchy and confusion in Paris, are only mentioned after it has been recorded that Thomas Ram has lost his cow and that Parson Woodforde has “brewed another Barrell of Table Beer to-day”. We have a notion, indeed—and here it must be confessed that we have given up reading Parson Woodforde altogether, and merely tell over the story on a stroll through fields where the hares are scampering and the rooks rising above the elm trees—we have a notion that Parson Woodforde does not die. Parson Woodforde goes on. It is we who change and perish. It is the kings and queens who lie in prison. It is the great towns that are ravaged with anarchy and confusion. But the river Wensum still flows; Mrs. Custance is brought to bed of yet another baby; there is the first swallow of the year. The spring comes, and summer with its hay and its strawberries; then autumn, when the walnuts are exceptionally fine, though the pears are poor; so we lapse into winter, which is indeed boisterous, but the house, thank God, withstands the storm; and then again there is the first swallow, and Parson Woodforde takes his greyhounds out a-coursing.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Aug 20, 1927]

[]

Crabbe.

Nothing is more remarkable in reading the life of Crabbe than his passion for weeds. After his wife’s death—she was mad for the last years of her life, alternately melancholic and exalted—he gave up weed collecting and took to fossils. But he always went fossilizing alone; though if children insisted upon coming he suffered them. “Playing with fossils,” he called it. When he went to stay with his son George he went off, always alone, to grout for fossils in the blue lias quarries; “stopping to cut up any herb not quite common that grew in his path”; and he would return loaded with them. “The dirty fossils were placed in our best bedroom, to the great diversion of the female part of my family, the herbs stuck in the borders, among my choice flowers, that he might see them when he came again. I never displaced one of them.” This gnarled and sea-salted man was no smug clergyman underneath. He had a passion for the rejected and injured, the stunted, the hardy, the wild self-grown, self-supported unsightly weed. He was himself a weed. His birth and breeding had been the weeds—at Aldeburgh, where he was born on Christmas Eve, 1754. His father was a warehouse keeper, and rose to be collector of Salt Duties, or Salt Master, in that miserable dull sea village, the sound of whose waves never went out of George’s ears, even at Belvoir or Troubridge. His mother had kept a public house, and his father, a short powerful man, who used sometimes to read poetry—Milton or Young—to his children but was fondest of mathematics, became, owing to the death of his only daughter, violent sometimes; her “untimely death drew from him those gloomy and savage tokens of misery, which haunted, fifty years after, the memory of his gentler son”. His mother was pious, resigned, and dropsical.

Such, then, was his original weedlike life, on the quays rolling casks, waiting for a signal from the offing. And nothing is more remarkable than that this pale boy should have raised himself once and for all, by the force of one letter to Burke, into a luxurious, educated, cushioned career for life. Nothing of the kind would now be possible. Burke has been supplanted by the elementary school and scholarships.

Then there were his amorous propensities. This has to be referred to by the most respectful of sons—did he not let his father’s weeds grow among his own choice flowers?—because “These things were so well-known among the circle of which at this period he formed the delight and ornament that I have thought it absurd not to dwell on them.” He suffered at the age of sixty-four more acutely from love and jealousy than most young men of twenty. Crabbe’s nature, indeed, included more than one full-grown human being. He could shine—witness his diary, brief, pointed—in the very highest society. He had admirable manners, but, though he always gave way, yet always expected to be given way to. Moreover he was untidy in the extreme. His study table was notorious. And he was genial; called his sons “old fellows” and liked to offer his friends good claret. He tipped servants, gave presents, was loved and plundered by the poor, who pestered him for shillings so that his birthday was a kind of levée for the whole neighbourhood. As a preacher too he was unconventional, and would stand in a seat near the window to finish reading his sermon in the dark. And he took opium, with very good results, in a constant and slightly increasing dose. He would wander with his children in the fields at Glemham till the moon rose, reading aloud from some novel as he walked, while the boys chased moths, filled their caps with glow worms, and the nightingales sang. He wrote innumerable books which he afterwards burnt in his garden, the children stirring up the fire and flinging on it fresh manuscripts. Thus was burnt his Essay on Botany because it was in English and his friend, Mr. Davies of Trinity College, Cambridge, “could not stomach the notion of degrading such a science by treating of it in a modern language”. For this reason he missed the honour of being known as the discoverer of the humble trefoil now known as Trofolium Suffocatum. And in 1787 he was seized one fine summer’s day with so intense a longing for the sea that he mounted his horse, rode alone to the coast of Lincolnshire sixty miles from his home, dipped in the waves that washed the beach of Aldeburgh, and returned home to sit in his untidy study, arranging minerals, shells, and insects.

[written ca. 1933]

[]

Selina Trimmer.

The gardens at Chatsworth which contained so many strange exotic plants brought by the great gardener Paxton from foreign lands, could boast, too, of one modest daisy whose surname was Trimmer and whose Christian name was Selina. She was a governess of course, and when we think what it meant to Charlotte Brontë and to Miss Weeton to be a governess in a middle-class family, the life of Selina Trimmer redounds more to the credit of the Cavendishes than all the splendours of Chatsworth, Devonshire House and Hardwick Hall. She was a governess; yet her pupil Lady Harriet wrote to her when she became engaged, “I send you the enclosed bracelet…. I often think of all your past conduct to me with affection and gratitude not to be expressed. God bless you, my dearest friend.”

Selina sheds light upon the Cavendishes, but outside that radiance little is known of her. Her life must begin with a negative—she was not her sister-in-law, the famous Mrs. Trimmer of the Tales. She had a brother who lived at Brentford. From Brentford then, about 1790, came Selina, up the great marble stairs, following a footman, to be governess to the little Cavendishes in the nursery at Devonshire House. But were they all Cavendishes—the six romping, high-spirited children she found there? Three it appeared had no right to any surname at all. And who was the Lady Elizabeth Foster who lived on such intimate terms with the disagreeable Duke, and on such friendly terms with the lovely Duchess? Soon it must have dawned upon Trimmer as she sat over her Quaker discourse when her pupils were in bed that she had taken up her lodging in the abode of vice. Downstairs there was drinking and gambling; upstairs there were bastards and mistresses. According to Brentford standards she should have drawn her skirts about her and flounced out of the polluted place at once. Yet she stayed on. Far from being vicious, the Devonshire House family was healthy and in its own way virtuous. No more devoted family existed. The children adored their mother. They were on the best of terms with one another. If the Duke was an indifferent father, his daughters were as dutiful as the daughters of any country parson. One person, it is true, all the children hated, and that was Lady Liz. But they hated her not because she was their father’s mistress, but because she was corrupt; whining and cooing, false and spiteful. Could it be possible, then, that an absence of conventional morality brings into being a real morality? Were not the little girls, Georgiana and Hary-o, [◉2] who knew from childhood all the facts that are concealed from female Trimmers till they were married women, far less sentimental, less prudish and silly, infinitely more honest, sensible and downright than the middle-class girls whose virtue was so carefully shielded at Brentford?

These were questions that Trimmer must have pondered as she walked with her dubious brood in Hyde Park or escorted them to parties. They were asked everywhere. The courtyard at Devonshire House was full of coaches by day and by night. Nobody looked askance at them. So, while she taught the little Cavendishes their sums and their pothooks, they taught her; they enlarged her mind. They laughed at her and teased her and vowed that she was carrying on a love affair with Bob Adair. But for all that they treated her as if she were a woman of flesh and blood. There was only one class for the Cavendish children, and that was their own. Whatever their faults, and Hary-o always overslept, and could never read only one book at a time, the Cavendishes were the least snobbish of people. They treated her as an equal; they accepted her as part of their pagan and classless society. When the girls began to go out into the world they wrote as frankly and freely to their “dearest Selina” about their parties and their partners as they wrote to each other.

By the time they were going out into the great world, Trimmer was well aware of its dangers. She could take comfort in the fact that Georgiana and Hary-o were spared at least one temptation—they had not their mother’s beauty. “I am delighted to be reckoned like mama,” Hary-o wrote. “ ‘A very bad edition though,’ as an honest man said of me at Mrs. Somebody’s party.” They were short, fat, and rather heavy featured. But by way of compensation they had excellent brains. Their little eyes were extremely shrewd; in mind they were precocious and caustic. Hary-o could dash off a description of her fox-hunting cousin Althorp with a vivacity that any novelist might have envied, and with a worldly wisdom that would have done credit to a dowager.

Althorp as he might have been, no reasonable woman could refuse or help loving and respecting. Althorp as he is, no reasonable woman can for a moment think of but as an eager huntsman. He has no more importance in society now (as he is, remember) than the chairs and tables…. Evenings and Sundays are to him a visible penance…. But when he appears at breakfast in his red jacket and jockey cap, it is a sort of intoxicating delight that must be seen to seem credible, and one feels the same sort of good-natured pleasure as at seeing a Newfoundland dog splash into the water, a goldfinch out of his cage, or a mouse run out of his trap. This is the man that I cannot wish to marry….

Shocked, puzzled yet charmed, Selina stayed on. But she preserved her own standards. In that intimate society where every lord and lady had a nickname, Trimmer had hers. She was called Raison Sévère, Triste Raison, Vent de Bise. Lady Bessborough lamented “… rigidly right, she forgets that one may do right without making oneself disagreeable to everyone around”. And Bess, Lady Elizabeth Foster, shivered in her presence. “Bess … says she always affects her like a North-East wind.” Trimmer was no sycophant. By degrees she assumed the part that is so often played by the humble retainer; from governess she became confidante. In that wild whirling life of incessant love-making and intrigue she represented reason, morality—something that Hary-o as she grew up missed in her mother and needed. Mama, she owned to her sister when Duncannon pestered her, was “not prudent”; mama did not mind putting her daughter into a “most awkward situation”. But Selina, on the other hand, “gave me a most furious lecture that my coquetry was dreadful, and that, without caring for my cousin, I had made him fall in love with me.” It was “merely to enjoy the triumph of supplanting Lady E.”, Trimmer said. Lady Harriet was angry at Trimmer’s plain speaking, but she respected her for it nevertheless.

More and more, as Hary-o grew older, the extraordinary complications of Devonshire House morality involved her in tortures of doubt—what was her duty to her father, what, after her mother’s death, to his mistress, and what did she owe to society? Ought she to allow Lady Liz to drag her into the company of the abandoned Mrs. Fitzherbert? “And yet I have no right to be nice about the company I go into; or rather no power, for I think no blame can be attached to me for that I so reluctantly live in.” Strangely, it was not to the Bessboroughs or to the Melbournes that Hary-o turned in her dilemma; it was to Trimmer. Though companion now to old Lady Spencer, Trimmer came back to bear Harriet company at Devonshire House when Lady Liz was queening it there, saying “we” and “us” all the time, and fondling the Duke’s spotted and speckled puppies in her shawl. Trimmer alone had the courage to show that the dogs bored her. Trimmer compelled the Duke and George Lamb to talk about “the Quaker persuasion and Mr. Boreham’s scruples about giving the oath”. In those tortured days Trimmer, “arch advocate of reason”, was the greatest blessing to her distracted pupil. And it was finally to Trimmer that Harriet turned when the crucial question of her life had to be decided. Was she to marry her aunt’s lover, Lord Granville? He had two children by Lady Bessborough. They had always been in league against her. She had hated him; yet there had come over her the spell of his wonderful almond-shaped eyes, and it would mean escape—from Lady Liz, from the ignominies and insults that her father’s mistress put upon her. What was she to do? What she did was to marry Granville—“Adored Granville, who would make a barren desert smile.” And it proved, on the face of it, an ideal union. Lord Granville became a model of the domestic virtues. Harriet developed into the most respectable of Victorian matrons, wearing a large black bonnet, setting up old orange women with baskets of trifles, illuminating book markers with texts, and attending church assiduously. She survived till 1862. But did Trimmer suffer a Victorian change? Or did Trimmer remain immutably herself? There was something hardy and perennial about Trimmer. One can imagine her grown very old and very gaunt, dwindling out her declining years in discreet obscurity. But what tales she could have told had she liked—about the lovely Duchess and the foolish Caro Ponsonby, and the Melbournes and the Bessboroughs—all vanished, all changed. The only relic of that wild world that remained was the bracelet on her wrist. It recalled much that had better be forgotten, and yet, as Trimmer looked at it, how happy she had been in Devonshire House with Hary-o, her dearest friend.

[New Statesman and Nation, Jul 6, 1940, as “Hary-o: The Letters of Lady Harriet Cavendish”]

[]

The Captain’s Death Bed.

The Captain lay dying on a mattress stretched on the floor of the boudoir room; a room whose ceiling had been painted to imitate the sky, and whose walls were painted with trellis work covered with roses upon which birds were perching. Mirrors had been let into the doors, so that the village people called the room the “Room of a Thousand Pillars” because of its reflections. It was an August morning as he lay dying; his daughter had brought him a bunch of his favourite flowers—clove pinks and moss roses; and he asked her to take down some words at his dictation:—

’Tis a lovely day [he dictated] and Augusta has just brought me three pinks and three roses, and the bouquet is charming. I have opened the windows and the air is delightful. It is now exactly nine o’clock in the morning, and I am lying on a bed in a place called Langham, two miles from the sea, on the coast of Norfolk…. To use the common sense of the word [he went on] I am happy. I have no sense of hunger whatever, or of thirst; my taste is not impaired…. After years of casual, and, latterly, months of intense thought, I feel convinced that Christianity is true … and that God is love…. It is now half-past nine o’clock. World, adieu.

Early in the morning of August 9th, 1848, just about dawn he died.

But who was the dying man whose thoughts turned to love and roses as he lay among his looking-glasses and his painted birds? Singularly enough, it was a sea captain; and still more singularly it was a sea captain who had been through the multitudinous engagements of the Napoleonic wars, who had lived a crowded life on shore, and who had written a long shelf of books of adventure, full of battle and murder and conquest. His name was Frederick Marryat. Who then was Augusta, the daughter who brought him the flowers? She was one of his eleven children; but of her the only fact that is now known to the public is that once she went ratting with her father and seized an enormous rat—“You must know that our Norfolk rats are quite as large as well-grown guinea pigs”—and held on to him with her bare hands much to the amazement of the onlookers and, we may guess, to the admiration of her father, who remarked that his daughters were “true game”. Then, again, what was Langham? Langham was an estate in Norfolk for which Captain Marryat had exchanged Sussex House over a glass of champagne. And Sussex House was a house at Hammersmith in which he lived while he was equerry to the Duke of Sussex. But here certainty begins to falter. Why he quarrelled with the Duke of Sussex and ceased to be his equerry; why, after an apparently pacific interview with Lord Auckland at the Admiralty he was in such a rage that he broke a blood vessel; why, after having eleven children by his wife, he left her; why, being possessed of a house in the country, he lived in London; why, being the centre of a gay and brilliant society he suddenly shut himself up in the country and refused to budge; why Mrs. B—— refused his love and what were his relations with Mrs. S——; these are questions that we may ask, but that we must ask in vain. For the two little volumes with very large print and very small pages in which his daughter Florence wrote his life refuse to tell us. One of the most active, odd and adventurous lives that any English novelist has ever lived is also one of the most obscure.

Some of the reasons for this obscurity lie on the surface. In the first place there was too much to tell. The Captain began his life as a midshipman in Lord Cochrane’s ship the Impérieuse in the year 1806. He was then aged fourteen. And here are a few extracts from a private log that he kept in July, 1808, when he was sixteen:—

——24th. Taking guns from the batteries.

——25th. Burning bridges and dismantling batteries to impede the French.

August 1st. Taking the brass guns from the batteries.

——15th. Took a French despatch boat off Cette.

——18th. Took and destroyed a signal post.

——19th. Blew up a signal post.

So it goes on. Every other day he was cutting out a brig, taking a tower, engaging gunboats, seizing prize ships or being chased by the French. In the first three years of his life at sea he had been in fifty fights; times out of number he jumped into the sea and rescued a drowning man. Once much against his will, for he could swim like a fish, he was rescued by an old bumboat woman who could also swim like a fish. Later he engaged with so much success in the Burmese War that he was allowed to bear a Burmese gilt war-boat on his arms. Clearly if the extracts from the private log had been expanded it would have swollen to a row of volumes; but how was the private log to be expanded by a lady who had presumably never burnt a bridge, dismantled a battery, or blown out a Frenchman’s brains in her life? Very wisely she had recourse to Marshall’s Naval Biography and to the Gazette. “Gazette details”, she remarked, “are proverbially dry, but they are trustworthy.” Therefore the public life is dealt with dryly, if trustworthily.

The private life however remained; and the private life, if we may judge from the names of the friends he had and the money he spent and the quarrels he waged, was as violent and various in its way as the other. But here again reticence prevailed. It was partly that his daughter delayed; almost twenty-four years had passed before she wrote and friends were dead and letters destroyed; and it was partly that she was his daughter, imbued with filial reverence and with the belief also that “a biographer has no business to meddle with any facts below the surface.” The famous statesman Sir R—— P—— therefore is Sir R—— P——; and Mrs. S—— is Mrs. S——. It is only now and then, almost by accident, that we are startled by a sudden groan—“I have had my swing, tried and tasted everything, and I find that it is vanity”; “I have been in a peck of troubles—domestic, agricultural, legal and pecuniary”; or just for a moment we are allowed to glance at a scene, “You reposing on the sofa, C—— sitting by you and I on the footstool” which “is constantly recurring to my memory as a picture” and has crept into one of the letters. But, as the Captain adds, “It has all vanished like ‘air, thin air’.” It has all, or almost all, vanished; and if posterity wants to know about the Captain it must read his books.

That the public still wishes to read his books is proved by the fact that the best known of them, Peter Simple and Jacob Faithful, were reprinted a few years ago in a handsome big edition, with introductions by Professor Saintsbury and Mr. Michael Sadleir. And the books are quite capable of being read, though nobody is going to pretend that they are among the masterpieces. They have not struck out any immortal scene or character; they are far from marking an epoch in the history of the novel. The critic with an eye for pedigree can trace the influence of Defoe, Fielding, and Smollett naturally asserting itself in their straightforward pages. It may well be that we are drawn to them for reasons that seem far enough from literature. The sun on the cornfield; the gull following the plough; the simple speech of country people leaning over gates, breeds the desire to cast the skin of a century and revert to those simpler days. But no living writer, try though he may, can bring the past back again, because no living writer can bring back the ordinary day. He sees it through a glass, sentimentally, romantically; it is either too pretty or too brutal; it lacks ordinariness. But the world of 1806 was to Captain Marryat what the world of 1935 is to us at this moment, a middling sort of a place, where there is nothing particular to stare at in the street or to listen to in the language. So to Captain Marryat there was nothing out of the way in a sailor with a pigtail or in a bumboat woman volleying hoarse English. Therefore the world of 1806 is real to us and ordinary, yet sharp-edged and peculiar. And when the delight of looking at a day that was the ordinary day a century ago is exhausted, we are kept reading by the fact that our critical faculties enjoy whetting themselves upon a book which is not among the classics. When the artist’s imagination is working at high pressure it leaves very little trace of his effort; we have to go gingerly on tip-toe among the invisible joins and complete marriages that take place in those high regions. Here it is easier going. Here in these cruder books we get closer to the art of fiction; we see the bones and the muscles and the arteries clearly marked. It is a good exercise in criticism to follow a sound craftsman, not marvellously but sufficiently endowed at his work. And as we read Peter Simple and Jacob Faithful there can be no doubt that Captain Marryat had in embryo at least most of the gifts that go to make a master. Do we think of him as a mere storyteller for boys? Here is a passage which shows that he could use language with the suggestiveness of a poet; though to get the full effect, as always in fiction, it must be read up to through the emotions of the characters. Jacob is alone after his father’s death on the Thames lighter at dawn:—

I looked around me—the mist of the morning was hanging over the river…. As the sun rose, the mist gradually cleared away; trees, houses and green fields, other barges coming up with the tide, boats passing and repassing, the barking of dogs, the smoke issuing from the various chimneys, all broke upon me by degrees; and I was recalled to the sense that I was in a busy world, and had my own task to perform.

Then if we want a proof that the Captain, for all his sturdiness, had that verbal sensibility which at the touch of a congenial thought lets fly a rocket, here we have a discourse on a nose.

It was not an aquiline nose, nor was it an aquiline nose reversed. It was not a nose snubbed at the extremity, gross, heavy, or carbuncled, or fluting. In all its magnitude of proportions it was an intellectual nose. It was thin, horny, transparent, and sonorous. Its snuffle was consequential, and its sneeze oracular. The very sight of it was impressive; its sound when blown in school hours was ominous.

Such was the nose that Jacob saw looming over him when he woke from his fever to hear the Dominie breathing those strange words, “Earth, lay light upon the lighter-boy—the lotus, the water-lily, that hath been cast on shore to die.” And for pages at a time he writes that terse springy prose which is the natural speech of a school of writers trained to the business of moving a large company briskly from one incident to another over the solid earth. Further, he can create a world; he has the power to set us in the midst of ships and men and sea and sky all vivid, credible, authentic, as we are made suddenly aware when Peter quotes a letter from home and the other side of the scene appears; the solid land, England, the England of Jane Austen, with its parsonages, its country houses, its young women staying at home, its young men gone to sea; and for a moment the two worlds, that are so opposite and yet so closely allied, come together. But perhaps the Captain’s greatest gift was his power of drawing character. His pages are full of marked faces. There is Captain Kearney, the magnificent liar; and Captain Horton, who lay in bed all day long; and Mr. Chucks, and Mrs. Trotter who cadges eleven pairs of cotton stockings—they are all drawn vigorously, decisively, from the living face, just as the Captain’s pen, we are told, used to dash off caricatures upon a sheet of notepaper.

With all these qualities, then, what was there stunted in his equipment? Why does the attention slip and the eye merely register printed words? One reason, of course, is that there are no heights in this level world. Violent and agitated as it is, as full of fights and escapes as Captain Marryat’s private log, yet there comes a sense of monotony; the same emotion is repeated; we never feel that we are approaching anything; the end is never a consummation. Again, emphatic and trenchant as his characters are, not one of them rounds and fills to his full size, because some of the elements that go to make character are lacking. A chance sentence suggests why this should be so. “After this we had a conversation of two hours; but what lovers say is very silly, except to themselves, and the reader need not be troubled with it.” The intenser emotions of the human race are kept out. Love is banished; and when love is banished, other valuable emotions that are allied to her are apt to go too. Humour has to have a dash of passion in it; death has to have something that makes us ponder. But here there is a kind of bright hardness. Though he has a curious love of what is physically disgusting—the face of a child nibbled by fish, a woman’s body bloated with gin—he is sexually not so much chaste as prudish, and his morality has the glib slickness of a schoolmaster preaching down to small boys. In short, after a fine burst of pleasure there comes a time when the spell that Captain Marryat lays upon us wears thin, and we see through the veil of fiction facts—facts, it is true, that are interesting in themselves; facts about yawls and jolly boats and how boats going into action are “fitted to pull with grummets upon iron thole pins”; but their interest is another kind of interest, and as much out of harmony with imagination as a bedroom cupboard is with the dream of someone waking from sleep.

Often in a shallow book, when we wake, we wake to nothing at all; but here when we wake, we wake to the presence of a personage—a retired naval officer with an active mind and a caustic tongue, who as he trundles his wife and family across the Continent in the year 1835 is forced to give expression to his opinions in a diary. Sick though he was of story-writing and bored by a literary life—“If I were not rather in want of money,” he tells his mother, “I certainly would not write any more”—he must express his mind somehow; and his mind was a courageous mind, an unconventional mind. The Press-gang, he thought an abomination. Why, he asked, do English philanthropists bother about slaves in Africa when English children are working seventeen hours a day in factories? The Game Laws are, in his opinion, a source of much misery to the poor; the law of primogeniture should be altered, and there is something to be said for the Roman Catholic religion. Every kind of topic—politics, science, religion, history—comes into view, but only for a fleeting glance. Whether the diary form was to blame or the jolting of a stage coach, or whether lack of book learning and a youth spent in cutting out brigs is a bad training for the reflective powers, the Captain’s mind, as he remarked when he stopped for two hours and had a look at it, “is like a kaleidoscope.” But no, he added with just self-analysis, it was not like a kaleidoscope; “for the patterns of kaleidoscopes are regular, and there is very little regularity in my brain, at all events.” He hops from thing to thing. Now he rattles off the history of Liége; next moment he discourses upon reason and instinct; then he considers what degree of pain is inflicted upon fish by taking them with the hook; and then, taking a walk through the streets, it strikes him how very seldom you now meet with a name beginning with X. “Rest!” he exclaims with reason; “no, the wheels of a carriage may rest, even the body for a time may rest, but the mind will not.” And so, in an excess of restlessness, he is off to America.

Nor do we catch sight of him again—for the six volumes in which he recorded his opinion of America, though they got him into trouble with the inhabitants, now throw light upon nothing in particular—until his daughter, having shut up her Dictionaries and Gazettes, bethinks her of a few “vague remembrances”. They are only trifles, she admits, and put together in a very random way, but still she remembers him very vividly. He was five foot ten and weighed fourteen stone, she remembers; he had a deep dimple in his chin, and one of his eyebrows was higher than the other, so that he always wore a look of inquiry. Indeed, he was a very restless man. He would break into his brother’s room and wake him in the middle of the night to suggest that they should start at once to Austria and buy a château in Hungary and make their fortunes. But, alas! he never did make his fortune, she recalls. What with his building at Langham, and the great decoy which he had made on his best grazing land, and other extravagances not easy for a daughter to specify, he left little wealth behind him. He had to keep hard at his writing. He wrote his books sitting at a table in the dining-room, from which he could see the lawn and his favourite bull Ben Brace grazing there. And he wrote so small a hand that the copyist had to stick a pin in to mark the place. Also he was wonderfully neat in his dress, and would have nothing but white china on his breakfast table, and kept sixteen clocks and liked to hear them all strike at once. His children called him “Baby”, though he was a man of violent passions, dangerous to thwart, and often “very grave” at home.

“These trifles put on paper look sadly insignificant,” she concludes. Yet as she rambles on they do in their butterfly way bring back the summer morning and the dying Captain after all his voyages stretched on the mattress in the boudoir room dictating those last words to his daughter about love and roses. “The more fancifully they were tied together, the better he liked it,” she says. Indeed, after his death a bunch of pinks and roses was “found pressed between his body and the mattress”.

[Times Literary Supplement, Sep 26, 1935]

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Ruskin.

What did our fathers of the nineteenth century do to deserve so much scolding? That is a question which we find ourselves asking sometimes as we dip here and there into the long row of volumes which bear the names of Carlyle and Ruskin. And if we also dip into the lives of those great men we shall find evidence that our fathers were a good deal responsible for the tone which their teachers adopted towards them. There can be no doubt that they liked their great men to be isolated from the rest of the world. Genius was nearly as antisocial and demanded almost as drastic a separation from the ordinary works and duties of mankind as insanity. Accordingly, the great man of that age had much temptation to withdraw to his pinnacle and become a prophet, denouncing a generation from whose normal activities he was secluded. When Carlyle expressed his readiness to work somewhere in a public office, no such place was found for him, and for the rest of his life he was left to grind out book after book with a bitter consciousness within him that such was not the most venerable of lives. All the worship that was offered could not sweeten what wiser treatment might have entirely blotted out. Ruskin started from the opposite pole as far as circumstances were concerned, but he too drifted into the same isolation, and he leaves us convinced that of the two, his was the sadder life.

Yet if all the fairies had conspired together at his birth to protect this man of genius and foster him to the utmost, what more could they have done? He had wealth and comfort and opportunity from the very first. While he was still a boy his genius was recognized, and he had only to publish his first book to become one of the most famous men of the day at the age of twenty-four. But the fairies after all did not give him the gifts he wanted. If one had seen Ruskin about the year 1869, according to Professor Norton, “you would tell me that you had never seen so sad a man, never one whose nature seemed to have been so sensitized to pain by the experience of life.” This surpassing gift of eloquence, in the first place, brought him far more of evil than of good. Still, after sixty years or so, the style in which page after page of Modern Painters is written takes our breath away. We find ourselves marvelling at the words, as if all the fountains of the English language had been set playing in the sunlight for our pleasure, but it seems scarcely fitting to ask what meaning they have for us. After a time, falling into a passion with this indolent pleasure-loving temper in his readers, Ruskin checked his fountains, and curbed his speech to the very spirited, free, and almost colloquial English in which Fors Clavigera and Praeterita are written. In these changes, and in the restless play of his mind upon one subject after another, there is something, we scarcely know how to define it, of the wealthy and cultivated amateur, full of fire and generosity and brilliance, who would give all he possesses of wealth and brilliance to be taken seriously, but who is fated to remain for ever an outsider. As we read these outbursts of rather petulant eloquence, we find ourselves remembering the sheltered and luxurious life, and even when we are very ignorant of the subject, the tremendous arrogance and self confidence seem to result not from knowledge, but from a tossing and splendid impatience of spirit which is not to be broken into the drudgery of learning. We remember how for years after most men are forced to match themselves with the real world “he was living in a world of his own”, to quote Professor Norton again, and losing the chance of gaining that experience with practical life, that self-control, and that development of reason which he more than most men required. If we reflect, too, that from his childhood, when he stood up among the cushions and preached, “People be good,” the passion of his life was to teach and reform, it is easy to understand how terribly and, as it must have seemed sometimes, how futilely “he hurt himself against life and the world”.

But we do him much wrong if we take him merely as a prophet—a proceeding that is rather forced upon one by his followers, and forget to read his books. For if anyone is able to make his readers feel that he is alive, wrong headed, intemperate, interesting, and lovable, that writer is Ruskin. His eagerness about everything in the world is perhaps as valuable as the concentration which in another sphere produced the works of Darwin, or the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It may be that, if we submitted his works on art to a modern art critic, or his works on economy to a modern economist, we should find that there is very little in them which is accepted by the present generation. Even an unprofessional reader, who picks up Modern Painters attracted very much by the bright patches of eloquence, is fairly startled by some of the statements concerning art and morality which are laid down with the usual air of infallibility and the usual array of polysyllables. Nor is it easy for one reading industriously in the six volumes of Fors Clavigera to find out precisely how it is that we are to save ourselves, though it is plain enough that we are all damned. Nevertheless, though his aesthetics may be wrong and his economics amateurish, you have to reckon with a force which is not to be suppressed by a whole pyramid of faults. That is why perhaps people in his lifetime got into the habit of calling him Master. He was possessed by a spirit of enthusiasm which compels those who are without it either to attack or to applaud; but beneath its influence they cannot remain merely passive. Even now the straight free lashing of Fors Clavigera seems to descend far too often for our comfort upon the skin of our own backs.

It is hard not to regret that so much of his force went into satire and attempts at reformation for which, as he knew well, he was not well-equipped by nature. It is hard too not to wish that he had lived in an age which did not isolate its great men with adulation, but encouraged them to use the best of their powers. As it is, if we want to get unalloyed good from Ruskin, we take down not Modern Painters, or the Stones of Venice, or Sesame and Lilies, but Praeterita. There he has ceased to preach or to teach or to scourge. He is writing for the last time before he enters the prolonged season of death, and his mood is still perfectly clear, more sustained than usual, and unfailingly benignant. Compared with much of his writing, it is extremely simple in style; but the simplicity is the flower of perfect skill. The words lie like a transparent veil upon his meaning. And the passage with which the book ends, though it was written when he could hardly write, is surely more beautiful than those more elaborate and gilded ones which we are apt to cut out and admire:

“Fonte Branda I last saw with Charles Norton under the same arches where Dante saw it. We drank of it together, and walked together that evening in the hills above, where the fireflies among the scented thickets shone fitfully in the still undarkened air. How they shone! moving like fine-broken starlight through the purple leaves. How they shone! through the sunset that faded into thunderous night as I entered Siena three days before, the white edges of the mountainous clouds still lighted from the west, and the openly golden sky calm behind the Gate of Siena’s heart, with its still golden words, Cor magis tibi Sena pandit, and the fireflies everywhere in sky or cloud rising and falling, mixed with the lightning, and more intense than the stars.”

[written ca. 1928]

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The Novels of Turgenev.

Rather more than fifty years ago Turgenev died in France and was buried in Russia, appropriately it may seem, if we remember how much he owed to France and yet how profoundly he belonged to his own land. The influence of both countries is to be felt if we look at his photograph for a moment before reading his books. The magnificent figure in the frock coat of Parisian civilization seems to be gazing over the houses far away at some wider view. He has the air of a wild beast who is captive but remembers whence he came. “C’est un colosse charmant, un doux géant aux cheveux blancs, qui a l’air du bienveillant génie d’une montagne ou d’une forêt” the brothers Goncourt wrote when they met him at dinner in 1863. “Il est beau, grandement beau, énormément beau, avec du bleu du ciel dans les yeux, avec le charme du chantonnement de l’accent russe, de cette cantilène où il y a un rien de l’enfant et du nègre.” And Henry James noted later the great physical splendour, the Slav languor and “the air of neglected strength, as if it had been part of his modesty never to remind himself that he was strong. He used sometimes to blush like a boy of sixteen”. Perhaps something of the same combination of qualities is to be found if we turn to his books.

At first, after years of absence it may be, they seem to us a little thin, slight and sketchlike in texture. Take Rudin, for instance—the reader will place it among the French school, among the copies rather than the originals, with the feeling that the writer has set himself an admirable model,but in following it has sacrificed something of his own character and force. But the superficial impression deepens and sharpens itself as the pages are turned. The scene has a size out of all proportion to its length. It expands in the mind and lies there giving off fresh ideas, emotions, and pictures much as a moment in real life will sometimes only yield its meaning long after it has passed. We notice that though the people talk in the most natural speaking voices, what they say is always unexpected; the meaning goes on after the sound has stopped. Moreover, they do not have to speak in order to make us feel their presence; “Volintsev started and raised his head, as though he had just waked up”—we had felt him there though he had not spoken. And when in some pause we look out of the window, the emotion is returned to us, deepened, because it is given through another medium, by the trees or the clouds, by the barking of a dog, or the song of a nightingale. Thus we are surrounded on all sides—by the talk, by the silence, by the look of things. The scene is extraordinarily complete.

It is easy to say that in order to gain a simplicity so complex Turgenev has gone through a long struggle of elimination beforehand. He knows all about his people, so that when he writes he chooses only what is most salient without apparent effort. But when we have finished Rudin, Fathers and Children, Smoke, On the Eve and the others, many questions suggest themselves to which it is not so easy to find an answer. They are so short and yet they hold so much. The emotion is so intense and yet so calm. The form is in one sense so perfect, in another so broken. They are about Russia in the fifties and sixties of the last century, and yet they are about ourselves at the present moment. Can we then find out from Turgenev himself what principles guided him—had he, for all his seeming ease and lightness, some drastic theory of art? A novelist, of course, lives so much deeper down than a critic that his statements are apt to be contradictory and confusing; they seem to break in process of coming to the surface, and do not hold together in the light of reason. Still, Turgenev was much interested in the art of fiction, and one or two of his sayings may help us to clarify our impressions of the famous novels. Once, for example, a young writer brought him the manuscript of a novel to criticize. Turgenev objected that he had made his heroine say the wrong thing. “What then ought she to have said?” the author asked. Turgenev exploded. “Trouver l’expression propre, c’est votre affaire!” But, the youth objected, he could not find it. “Eh bien! vous devez la trouver…. Ne pensez pas que je sais l’expression et que je ne veux pas vous la dire. Trouver, en la cherchant, une expression propre est impossible: elle doit couler de source. Quelquefois même, il faut créer l’expression ou le mot.” And he advised him to put away his manuscript for a month or so, when the expression might come to him. If not—“Si vous n’y arrivez pas, cela voudra dire que vous ne ferez jamais rien qui vaille.” From this it would seem that Turgenev is among those who hold that the right expression, which is of the utmost importance, is not to be had by observation, but comes from the depths unconsciously. You cannot find by looking. But then again he speaks of the novelist’s art, and now he lays the greatest emphasis upon the need of observation. The novelist must observe everything exactly, in himself and in others. “La douleur passera et la page excellente reste.” He must observe perpetually, impersonally, impartially. And still he is only at the beginning. “… il faut encore lire, toujours étudier, approfondir tout ce qui entoure, non seulement tâcher de saisir la vie dans toutes les manifestations, mais encore la comprendre, comprendre les lois d’après lesquelles elle se meut et qui ne se montrent pas toujours …” That, was how he himself worked before he grew old and lazy he said. But one has need of strong muscles to do it, he added; nor if we consider what he is asking can we accuse him of exaggeration.

For he is asking the novelist not only to do many things but some that seem incompatible. He has to observe facts impartially, yet he must also interpret them. Many novelists do the one; many do the other—we have the photograph and the poem. But few combine the fact and the vision; and the rare quality that we find in Turgenev is the result of this double process. For in these short chapters he is doing two very different things at the same time. With his infallible eye he observes everything accurately. Solomin picks up a pair of gloves; they were “white chamois-leather gloves, recently washed, every finger of which had stretched at the tip and looked like a finger-biscuit”. But he stops when he has shown us the glove exactly; the interpreter is at his elbow to insist that even a glove must be relevant to the character, or to the idea. But the idea alone is not enough; the interpreter is never allowed to mount unchecked into the realms of imagination; again the observer pulls him back and reminds him of the other truth, the truth of fact. Even Bazarov, the heroic, packed his best trousers at the top of his bag when he wanted to impress a lady. The two partners work in closest alliance. We look at the same thing from different angles, and that is one reason why the short chapters hold so much; they contain so many contrasts. On one and the same page we have irony and passion; the poetic and the commonplace; a tap drips and a nightingale sings. And yet, though the scene is made up of contrasts, it remains the same scene; our impressions are all relevant to each other.

Such a balance, of course, between two very different faculties is extremely rare, especially in English fiction, and demands some sacrifices. The great characters, with whom we are so familiar in our literature, the Micawbers, the Pecksniffs, the Becky Sharps, will not flourish under such supervision; they need, it seems, more licence; they must be allowed to dominate and perhaps to destroy other competitors. With the possible exception of Bazarov and of Harlov in A Lear of the Steppes no one character in Turgenev’s novels stands out above and beyond the rest so that we remember him apart from the book. The Rudins, the Lavretskys, the Litvinovs, the Elenas, the Lisas, the Mariannas shade off into each other, making, with all their variations, one subtle and profound type rather than several distinct and highly individualized men and women. Then, again, the poet novelists like Emily Brontë, Hardy, or Melville, to whom facts are symbols, certainly give us a more overwhelming and passionate experience in Wuthering Heights or The Return of the Native or Moby Dick than any that Turgenev offers us. And yet what Turgenev offers us not only often affects us as poetry, but his books are perhaps more completely satisfying than the others. They are curiously of our own time, undecayed, and complete in themselves.

For the other quality that Turgenev possesses in so great a degree is the rare gift of symmetry, of balance. He gives us, in comparison with other novelists, a generalized and harmonized picture of life. And this is not only because his scope is wide—he shows us different societies, the peasant’s, the intellectual’s, the aristocrat’s, the merchant’s—but we are conscious of some further control and order. Yet such symmetry, as we are reminded, perhaps, by reading A House of Gentlefolk, is not the result of a supreme gift for storytelling. Turgenev, on the contrary, often tells a story very badly. There are loops and circumlocutions in his narrative—“… we must ask the reader’s permission to break off the thread of our story for a time,” he will say. And then for fifty pages or so we are involved in greatgrandfathers and great-grandmothers, much to our confusion, until we are back with Lavretsky at O——“where we parted from him, and whither we will now ask the indulgent reader to return with us.” The good storyteller, who sees his book as a succession of events, would never have suffered that interruption. But Turgenev did not see his books as a succession of events; he saw them as a succession of emotions radiating from some character at the centre. A Bazalov, a Harlov seen in the flesh, perhaps, once in the corner of a railway carriage, becomes of paramount importance and acts as a magnet which has the power to draw things mysteriously belonging, though apparently incongruous, together. The connexion is not of events but of emotions, and if at the end of the book we feel a sense of completeness, it must be that in spite of his defects as a storyteller Turgenev’s ear for emotion was so fine that even if he uses an abrupt contrast, or passes away from his people to a description of the sky or of the forest, all is held together by the truth of his insight. He never distracts us with the real incongruity—the introduction of an emotion that is false, or a transition that is arbitrary.

It is for this reason that his novels are not merely symmetrical but make us feel so intensely. His heroes and heroines are among the few fictitious characters of whose love we are convinced. It is a passion of extraordinary purity and intensity. The love of Elena for Insarov, her anguish when he fails to come, her despair when she seeks refuge in the chapel in the rain; the death of Bazarov and the sorrow of his old father and mother remain in the mind like actual experiences. And yet, strangely enough, the individual never dominates; many other things seem to be going on at the same time. We hear the hum of life in the fields; a horse champs his bit; a butterfly circles and settles. And as we notice, without seeming to notice, life going on, we feel more intensely for the men and women themselves because they are not the whole of life, but only part of the whole. Something of this, of course, is due to the fact that Turgenev’s people are profoundly conscious of their relation to things outside themselves. “What is my youth for, what am I living for, why have I a soul, what is it all for?” Elena asks in her diary. The question is always on their lips.

It lends a profundity to talk that is otherwise light, amusing, full of exact observation. Turgenev is never, as in England he might have been, merely the brilliant historian of manners. But not only do they question the aim of their own lives but they brood over the question of Russia. The intellectuals are always working for Russia; they sit up arguing about the future of Russia till the dawn rises over the eternal samovar. “They worry and worry away at that unlucky subject, as children chew away at a bit of india-rubber,” Potugin remarks in Smoke. Turgenev, exiled in body, cannot absent himself from Russia—he has the almost morbid sensibility that comes from a feeling of inferiority and suppression. And yet he never allows himself to become a partisan, a mouthpiece. Irony never deserts him; there is always the other side, the contrast. In the midst of political ardour we are shown Fomushka and Fimushka, “chubby, spruce little things, a perfect pair of little poll-parrots,” who manage to exist very happily singing glees in spite of their country. Also it is a difficult business, he reminds us, to know the peasants, not merely to study them. “I could not simplify myself,” wrote Nezhdanov, the intellectual, before he killed himself. Moreover though Turgenev could have said with Marianna “… I suffer for all the oppressed, the poor, the wretched in Russia,” it was for the good of the cause, just as it was for the good of his art, not to expatiate, not to explain. “Non, quand tu as énoncé le fait, n’insiste pas. Que le lecteur le discute et le comprenne lui-même. Croyez-moi, c’est mieux dans l’intérêt même des idées qui vous sont chères.” He compelled himself to stand outside; he laughed at the intellectuals; he showed up the windiness of their arguments, the sublime folly of their attempts. But his emotion, and their failure, affect us all the more powerfully now because of that aloofness. Yet if this method was partly the result of discipline and theory, no theory, as Turgenev’s novels abundantly prove, is able to go to the root of the matter and eliminate the artist himself; his temperament remains ineradicable. Nobody, we say over and over again as we read him, even in a translation, could have written this except Turgenev. His birth, his race, the impressions of his childhood, pervade everything that he wrote.

But, though temperament is fated and inevitable, the writer has a choice, and a very important one, in the use he makes of it. “I” he must be; but there are many different “I’s” in the same person. Shall he be the “I” who has suffered this slight, that injury, who desires to impose his own personality, to win popularity and power for himself and his views; or shall he suppress that “I” in favour of the one who sees as far as he can impartially and honestly, without wishing to plead a cause or to justify himself? Turgenev had no doubt about his choice; he refused to write “élégamment et chaudement ce que vous ressentez à l’aspect de cette chose ou de cet homme.” He used the other self, the self which has been so rid of superfluities that it is almost impersonal in its intense individuality; the self which he defines in speaking of the actress Violetta:—

She had thrown aside everything subsidiary, everything superfluous, and found herself; a rare, a lofty delight for an artist! She had suddenly crossed the limit, which it is impossible to define, beyond which is the abiding place of beauty.

That is why his novels are still so much of our own time; no hot and personal emotion has made them local and transitory; the man who speaks is not a prophet clothed with thunder but a seer who tries to understand. Of course there are weaknesses; one grows old and lazy as he said; sometimes his books are slight, confused, and perhaps sentimental. But they dwell in “the abiding place of beauty” because he chose to write with the most fundamental part of his being as a writer; nor, for all his irony and aloofness, do we ever doubt the depth of his feeling.

[Times Literary Supplement, Dec 14, 1933]

[]

Half of Thomas Hardy.

Thomas Hardy, it is not surprising to learn, had not sufficient admiration for himself to record his recollections and not enough interest in himself to brood over his own character. “A naturalist’s interest in the hatching of a queer egg or germ is the utmost introspective consideration you should allow yourself,” he wrote, and the observation was made in a pocket-book which nobody but himself was to read. Hence, though he was forced to agree that a life of him must be written, it is by his wish a life so devoid of artifice, so simple in its structure that it resembles nothing so much as the talk of an old man over the fire about his past. Much of it indeed was written down by Mrs. Hardy as he spoke it. Many of the phrases are unmistakably his own. And whatever it may lack in substance or in symmetry is more than made up for by the sound of the speaking voice and the suggestiveness which it carries with it. Indeed, by no other method could Mrs. Hardy have kept so close to her husband’s spirit.

For Hardy was the last person to be subjected to the rigours of biography. Never was anyone less stereotyped, less formalized, less flattened out by the burden of fame and the weight of old age. He sprang up effortlessly, unconsciously, like a heather root under a stone, not by imposing his views or by impressing his personality, but by being simply and consistently himself. Everything he wrote—it is a quality that makes up for a thousand faults—had this integrity ingrained in it. One finds it again pervading his life. Fantastic as it sounds, one can scarcely help fancying that it was Hardy who imagined it all—the fiddling father, the mother who loved reading, the house “between woodland and heathland”; the old English family, with its legends of Monmouth and Sedgemoor, and its “spent social energies”, who had come down in the world—“So we go down, down, down,” said Hardy, meeting the head of his family trudging beside a common spring trap in the road. Everything takes on the colour of his own temperament. His memories have the quality of moments of vision. He could remember coming home at three in the morning from fiddling with his father—for the Hardys had fiddled in church and farm for generations without taking a penny for it, and little Tom was a dancer and a fiddler from his birth—and seeing “a white human figure without a head” in the hedge—a man almost frozen to death. He could remember the farm-women at the harvest supper “sitting on a bench against the wall in the barn and leaning against each other as they warbled,

‘Lie there, lie there, thou false-hearted man,

Lie there instead o’ me.’”

He could remember how his father, the music-loving builder, would stroll on to the heath alone with the telescope that had belonged to some sea-faring Hardy and “stay peering out into the distance by the half-hour”. He could remember how he had once stood on the heath and put that same brass telescope to his eye and seen a man in white fustian on the gallows at Dorchester. At that moment the figure “dropped downward and the faint note of the town clock struck eight”, and he seemed alone on the heath with the hanged man. But more distinctly than anything else he could remember lying on his back as a small boy and thinking how useless he was and how he did not wish to grow up—“he did not want at all to be a man, or to possess things, but to remain as he was in the same spot, and to know no more people than he already knew (about half a dozen). Yet … he was in perfect health and happy circumstances.”

So the memories succeed each other, like poems, visualized and complete. It was thus, perhaps, that Hardy’s mind worked when it was most at its ease, flashing its light fitfully and capriciously like a lantern swinging in a hand, now on a rose-bush, now on a tramp frozen in the hedge. He has none of that steady and remorseless purpose that people would attribute to him. It was by chance that he saw things, not by design. He puts the telescope to his eye and there is a man on the gallows. He walks in Dorchester High Street and sees the gipsy girls with their big brass earrings in the light from a silversmith’s shop. At once these sights shape themselves into poems and set themselves to some old tune that has been running in his mind. He stops to muse upon their meaning. He cannot hold firmly on his way. Indeed, he “cared for life only as an emotion and not as a scientific game”; he did not want to grow up and possess things. Hence the doubts and the fluctuations of his career. He might have gone to Cambridge had he chosen, but he did not make the effort. He fumbled about with architecture, pulled down the old churches that he loved and built new ones. Now he was going to devote himself to poetry, now to fiction. One result of this vacillation seems to have been that he lay singularly open to influence. He wrote a satirical novel in the manner of Defoe, and because Meredith advised him to write another with a more complicated plot, he sat down and wrote Desperate Remedies with a plot as complicated as a mediæval mouse-trap. When The Spectator said that the novel (because there is a rich spinster in it with an illegitimate child) was rightly anonymous, for even a nom-de-plume might “at some future time disgrace the family name, and still more the Christian name, of a repentant and remorseful novelist”, Hardy sat on a stile and wished himself dead. It was in deference to another critic, John Morley, that he wrote Under the Greenwood Tree in the pastoral manner; and it was in reply to the jibes of the journalists, who said that he was a house decorator, that he put aside the first version of The Woodlanders and proved his sophistication by writing The Hand of Ethelberta.

All this deference to authority, which contrasts so queerly with the perfectly uncompromising character of his genius, comes no doubt from some inertness of temper in the descendant of a spent race; but it rose, too, from a fact which Hardy himself noticed, that he came to maturity much later than most men. His gifts lay hidden far longer than is usual. Poems dropped now and again into a drawer. But the desire to write poetry seems to have been fitful and dubious even when he was at the most poetic age. Bread and butter had to be earned, however, and therefore reluctantly and hesitatingly, without the illusions or the hot-headedness of the born novelist he stumbled into a calling for which he had little respect, and for which, if he had magnificent gifts, he had also great disabilities.

For though it was all very well to write novels like Far from the Madding Crowd upon chips of wood or white leaves or even upon flat stones out-of-doors, he was persuaded that a novelist, to be successful, must describe manners and customs. He must live in town. He must frequent dinners, and clubs and crushes. He must keep a note-book. And so, though Hardy could not bear the touch of an arm upon his shoulder, and a note-book in his pocket made him “barren as the Sahara”, he faced the position squarely; rented a house in Upper Tooting, bought a note-book, and dined out nightly. “Certainly,” exclaimed Miss Thackeray, when he consulted her, “a novelist must necessarily like society!”

Society seen from Upper Tooting looked a little queer. He put the brass telescope to his eye and saw the strangest sights. Men and women were being hung even in the gayest streets. He mused upon the passions and sorrows that raged in the breasts of the crowd at the Marble Arch. He lay in bed at Upper Tooting and could not sleep because he lay so close “to a monster who had four heads and eight million eyes”. He sat next Lady Camperdown at dinner “and could not get rid of the feeling that I was close to a great naval engagement”. But he also noted down the correct things. He met Matthew Arnold, who “had a manner of having made up his mind upon everything years ago”, and Henry James, “who has a ponderously warm manner of saying nothing in infinite sentences;” and old Mrs. Proctor, “who swam about through the crowd like a swan”; and Byron’s Ianthe, “ a feeble beldame muffled up in black and furs”; and the Carnarvons and the Salisburys and the Portsmouths—and of all this he took note as a novelist should. Moreover, when the books were finished he did whatever the editors required him to do to make them saleable. Book after book appeared in magazines with passages cut out or with incidents put in to please the British public. For if the whole thing—in this case the whole thing was The Mayor of Casterbridge—was “mere journey work”, did it very much matter what compromise he made? Fiction was a trade like another—off he went to the Crawford-Dilke case, note-book in hand. Yet now and then the note-book would record a state of mind or a thought that was quite unsuitable for fiction. For instance: “… when I enter into a room to pay a simple morning call I have unconsciously the habit of regarding the scene as if I were a spectre not solid enough to influence my environment; only fit to behold and say, as another spectre said, ‘Peace be unto you’.” Or again he mused, “people are somnambulists—the material is not the real—only the visible, the real being invisible optically.”

For while with one-half of his mind Hardy noted down what a successful novelist ought to observe, the other half remorselessly saw through these observations and turned them to moonshine. Hardy, of course, might have suppressed the second half; he might have succeeded in writing agreeable cynical novels of London life like any other. But that obstinate conviction that made him for all his efforts an outsider, that faculty for putting the telescope to his eye and seeing strange, grim pictures—if he went to a First-Aid lecture he saw children in the street behind a skeleton, if he went to a French play he saw a cemetery behind the players’ heads—all this fecundity and pressure of the imagination brought about at last not a compromise but a solution. Why run about with note-books observing manners and customs when his mind involuntarily flooded itself with strange imaginations and sung itself scraps of old ballads? Why not simplify, make abstract, give the whole rather than the detail? Again the note-book records certain ideas that would be out of place in a novel. “The ‘simply natural’ is interesting no longer. The much decried, mad, late-Turner rendering is now necessary to create my interest. The exact truth as to material fact ceases to be of importance in art—I want to see the deeper reality underlying the scenic, the expression of what are sometimes called abstract imaginings.” But it was a question how far abstract imagination could be expressed in a novel. Would not realities fatally conflict with that observation of manners and customs which Hardy, so simply and so modestly, had accepted as the staple of the novelist’s trade?

The first half of Hardy’s life ends with that note of interrogation. We have reached the year 1891. He has written Tess of the D’Urbervilles. It has appeared in The Graphic. At the editor’s request, Hardy has omitted the christening scene; he has allowed the milkmaids to be wheeled across the lane in a wheelbarrow instead of being carried in Clare’s arms; and, although one father of daughters still objects that the bloodstain on the ceiling is indecent—“Hardy could never understand why”—the book is a great success. But, we ask ourselves, what is going to happen next?

[Nation & Athenaeum, Nov 24, 1928]

[]

Leslie Stephen.

By the time that his children were growing up the great days of my father’s life were over. His feats on the river and on the mountains had been won before they were born. Relics of them were to be found lying about the house—the silver cup on the study mantelpiece; the rusty alpenstocks that leant against the bookcase in the corner; and to the end of his days he would speak of great climbers and explorers with a peculiar mixture of admiration and envy. But his own years of activity were over, and my father had to content himself with pottering about the Swiss valleys or taking a stroll across the Cornish moors.

That to potter and to stroll meant more on his lips than on other people’s is becoming obvious now that some of his friends have given their own version of those expeditions. He would start off after breakfast alone, or with one companion. Shortly before dinner he would return. If the walk had been successful, he would have out his great map and commemorate a new short cut in red ink. And he was quite capable, it appears, of striding all day across the moors without speaking more than a word or two to his companion. By that time, too, he had written the History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, which is said by some to be his masterpiece; and the Science of Ethics—the book which interested him most; and The Playground of Europe, in which is to be found “The Sunset on Mont Blanc”—in his opinion the best thing he ever wrote.

He still wrote daily and methodically, though never for long at a time. In London he wrote in the large room with three long windows at the top of the house. He wrote lying almost recumbent in a low rocking chair which he tipped to and fro as he wrote, like a cradle, and as he wrote he smoked a short clay pipe, and he scattered books round him in a circle. The thud of a book dropped on the floor could be heard in the room beneath. And often as he mounted the stairs to his study with his firm, regular tread he would burst, not into song, for he was entirely unmusical, but into a strange rhythmical chant, for verse of all kinds, both “utter trash”, as he called it, and the most sublime words of Milton and Wordsworth stuck in his memory, and the act of walking or climbing seemed to inspire him to recite whichever it was that came uppermost or suited his mood.

But it was his dexterity with his fingers that delighted his children before they could potter along the lanes at his heels or read his books. He would twist a sheet of paper beneath a pair of scissors and out would drop an elephant, a stag, or a monkey with trunks, horns, and tails delicately and exactly formed. Or, taking a pencil, he would draw beast after beast—an art that he practised almost unconsciously as he read, so that the fly-leaves of his books swarm with owls and donkeys as if to illustrate the “Oh, you ass!” or “Conceited dunce”, that he was wont to scribble impatiently in the margin. Such brief comments, in which one may find the germ of the more temperate statements of his essays, recall some of the characteristics of his talk. He could be very silent, as his friends have testified. But his remarks, made suddenly in a low voice between the puffs of his pipe, were extremely effective. Sometimes with one word—but his one word was accompanied by a gesture of the hand—he would dispose of the tissue of exaggerations which his own sobriety seemed to provoke. “There are 40,000,000 unmarried women in London alone!” Lady Ritchie once informed him. “Oh, Annie, Annie!” my father exclaimed in tones of horrified but affectionate rebuke. But Lady Ritchie, as if she enjoyed being rebuked, would pile it up even higher next time she came.

The stories he told to amuse his children of adventures in the Alps—but accidents only happened, he would explain, if you were so foolish as to disobey your guides—or of those long walks, after one of which, from Cambridge to London on a hot day, “I drank, I am sorry to say, rather more than was good for me,” were told very briefly, but with a curious power to impress the scene. The things that he did not say were always there in the background. So, too, though he seldom told anecdotes, and his memory for facts was bad, when he described a person—and he had known many people, both famous and obscure—he would convey exactly what he thought of him in two or three words. And what he thought might be the opposite of what other people thought. He had a way of upsetting established reputations and disregarding conventional values that could be disconcerting, and sometimes perhaps wounding, though no one was more respectful of any feeling that seemed to him genuine. But when, suddenly opening his bright blue eyes, and rousing himself from what had seemed complete abstraction, he gave his opinion, it was difficult to disregard it. It was a habit, especially when deafness made him unaware that this opinion could be heard, that had its inconveniences.

“I am the most easily bored of men,” he wrote, truthfully as usual: and when, as was inevitable in a large family, some visitor threatened to stay not merely for tea but also for dinner, my father would express his anguish at first by twisting and untwisting a certain lock of hair. Then he would burst out, half to himself, half to the powers above, but quite audibly, “Why can’t he go? Why can’t he go?” Yet such is the charm of simplicity—and did he not say, also truthfully, that “bores are the salt of the earth”?—that the bores seldom went, or, if they did, forgave him and came again.

Too much, perhaps, has been said of his silence; too much stress has been laid upon his reserve. He loved clear thinking; he hated sentimentality and gush; but this by no means meant that he was cold and unemotional, perpetually critical and condemnatory in daily life. On the contrary, it was his power of feeling strongly and of expressing his feeling with vigour that made him sometimes so alarming as a companion. A lady, for instance, complained of the wet summer that was spoiling her tour in Cornwall. But to my father, though he never called himself a democrat, the rain meant that the corn was being laid; some poor man was being ruined; and the energy with which he expressed his sympathy—not with the lady—left her discomfited. He had something of the same respect for farmers and fishermen that he had for climbers and explorers. So, too, he talked little of patriotism, but during the South African War—and all wars were hateful to him—he lay awake thinking that he heard the guns on the battlefield. Again, neither his reason nor his cold common sense helped to convince him that a child could be late for dinner without having been maimed or killed in an accident. And not all his mathematics together with a bank balance which he insisted must be ample in the extreme, could persuade him, when it came to signing a cheque, that the whole family was not “shooting Niagara to ruin”, as he put it. The pictures that he would draw of old age and the bankruptcy court, of ruined men of letters who have to support large families in small houses at Wimbledon (he owned a very small house at Wimbledon) might have convinced those who complain of his under-statements that hyperbole was well within his reach had he chosen.

Yet the unreasonable mood was superficial, as the rapidity with which it vanished would prove. The chequebook was shut; Wimbledon and the workhouse were forgotten. Some thought of a humorous kind made him chuckle. Taking his hat and his stick, calling for his dog and his daughter, he would stride off into Kensington Gardens, where he had walked as a little boy, where his brother Fitzjames and he had made beautiful bows to young Queen Victoria and she had swept them a curtsey, and so, round the Serpentine, to Hyde Park Corner, where he had once saluted the great Duke himself; and so home. He was not then in the least “alarming”; he was very simple, very confiding; and his silence, though one might last unbroken from the Round Pond to the Marble Arch was curiously full of meaning, as if he were thinking half aloud, about poetry and philosophy and people he had known.

He himself was the most abstemious of men. He smoked a pipe perpetually, but never a cigar. He wore his clothes until they were too shabby to be tolerable; and he held old-fashioned and rather puritanical views as to the vice of luxury and the sin of idleness. The relations between parents and children to-day have a freedom that would have been impossible with my father. He expected a certain standard of behaviour, even of ceremony, in family life. Yet if freedom means the right to think one’s own thoughts and to follow one’s own pursuits, then no one respected and indeed insisted upon freedom more completely than he did. His sons, with the exception of the Army and Navy, should follow whatever professions they chose; his daughters, though he cared little enough for the higher education of women, should have the same liberty. If at one moment he rebuked a daughter sharply for smoking a cigarette—smoking was not in his opinion a nice habit in the other sex—she had only to ask him if she might become a painter, and he assured her that so long as she took her work seriously he would give her all the help he could. He had no special love for painting; but he kept his word. Freedom of that sort was worth thousands of cigarettes.

It was the same with the perhaps more difficult problem of literature. Even to-day there may be parents who would doubt the wisdom of allowing a girl of fifteen the free run of a large and quite unexpurgated library. But my father allowed it. There were certain facts—very briefly, very shyly he referred to them. Yet “Read what you like”, he said, and all his books, “mangy and worthless,” as he called them, but certainly they were many and various, were to be had without asking. To read what one liked because one liked it, never to pretend to admire what one did not—that was his only lesson in the art of reading. To write in the fewest possible words, as clearly as possible, exactly what one meant—that was his only lesson in the art of writing. All the rest must be learnt for oneself. Yet a child must have been childish in the extreme not to feel that such was the teaching of a man of great learning and wide experience, though he would never impose his own views or parade his own knowledge. For, as his tailor remarked when he saw my father walk past his shop up Bond Street, “There goes a gentleman that wears good clothes without knowing it.”

In those last years, grown solitary and very deaf, he would sometimes call himself a failure as a writer; he had been “jack of all trades, and master of none.” But whether he failed or succeeded as a writer, it is permissible to believe that he left a distinct impression of himself on the minds of his friends. Meredith saw him as “Phoebus Apollo turned fasting friar” in his earlier days; Thomas Hardy,years later, looked at the “spare and desolate figure” of the Schreckhorn and thought of

him,

Who scaled its horn with ventured life and limb,

Drawn on by vague imaginings, maybe,

Of semblance to his personality

In its quaint glooms, keen lights, and rugged trim.

But the praise he would have valued most, for though he was an agnostic nobody believed more profoundly in the worth of human relationships, was Meredith’s tribute after his death: “He was the one man to my knowledge worthy to have married your mother.” And Lowell, when he called him “L.S., the most lovable of men”, has best described the quality that makes him, after all these years, unforgettable.

[The Times, Nov 28, 1932, as “Leslie Stephen, the Philosopher at Home: A Daughter’s Memories”]

[]

Mr. Conrad: A Conversation.

The Otways, perhaps, inherited their love of reading from the ancient dramatist whose name they share, whether they descend from him (as they like to think) or not. Penelope, the oldest unmarried daughter, a small dark woman turned forty, her complexion a little roughened by country life, her eyes brown and bright, yet subject to strange long stares of meditation or vacancy, had always, since the age of seven, been engaged in reading the classics. Her father’s library, though strong chiefly in the literature of the East, had its Popes, its Drydens, its Shakespeares, in various stages of splendour and decay; and if his daughters chose to amuse themselves by reading what they liked, certainly it was a method of education which, since it spared his purse, deserved his benediction.

That education it could be called, no one nowadays would admit. All that can be said in its favour was that Penelope Otway was never dull, gallantly ambitious of surmounting small hillocks of learning, and of an enthusiasm which greater knowledge might perhaps have stinted or have diverted less fortunately into the creation of books of her own. As it was, she was content to read and to talk, reading in the intervals of household business, and talking when she could find company, on Sundays for the most part, when visitors came down, and sat on fine summer days under the splendid yew tree on the lawn.

On this occasion, a hot morning in August, her old friend David Lowe was distressed, but hardly surprised, to find five magnificent volumes lying on the grass by her chair, while Penelope acknowledged his presence by putting her fingers between the pages of a sixth and looking at the sky.

“Joseph Conrad,” he said, lifting the admirable books—solid, stately, good-looking, yet meant for a long life-time of repeated re-reading—on to his knee. “So I see you have made up your mind. Mr. Conrad is a classic.”

“Not in your opinion,” she replied; “I remember the bitter letters you wrote me when you read The Arrow of Gold and The Rescue. You compared him to an elderly and disillusioned nightingale singing over and over, but hopelessly out of tune, the one song he had learned in his youth.”

“I had forgotten,” said David, “but it is true. The books puzzled me after those early novels, Youth, Lord Jim, The Nigger of the Narcissus, which we thought so magnificent. I said to myself perhaps it is because he is a foreigner. He can understand us perfectly when we talk slowly, but not when we are excited or when we are at our ease. There is nothing colloquial in Conrad; nothing intimate; and no humour, at least of the English kind. And those are great drawbacks for a novelist, you will admit. Then, of course, it goes without saying that he is a romantic. No one objects to that. But it entails a terrible penalty—death at the age of forty—death or disillusionment. If your romantic persists in living, he must face his disillusionment. He must make his music out of contrasts. But Conrad has never faced his disillusionment. He goes on singing the same songs about sea captains and the sea, beautiful, noble, and monotonous; but now I think with a crack in the flawless strain of his youth. It is a mind of one fact; and such a mind can never be among the classics.”

“But he is a great writer! A great writer!” cried Penelope, gripping the arms of her chair. “How shall I prove it to you? Admit, in the first place, that your views are partial. You have skipped; you have sipped; you have tasted. From The Nigger of the Narcissus you have leapt to The Arrow of Gold. Your gimcrack theory is a confection of cobwebs spun while you shave, chiefly with a view to saving yourself the trouble of investigating and possibly admiring the work of a living writer in your own tongue. You are a surly watch-dog; but Conrad you will have to admit.”

“My ears are pricked,” said David; “explain your theory.”

“My theory is made of cobwebs, no doubt, like your own. But of this I am certain. Conrad is not one and simple; no, he is many and complex. That is a common case among modern writers, as we have often agreed. And it is when they bring these selves into relation—when they simplify, when they reconcile their opposites—that they bring off (generally late in life) those complete books which for that reason we call their masterpieces. And Mr. Conrad’s selves are particularly opposite. He is composed of two people who have nothing whatever in common. He is your sea captain, simple, faithful, obscure; and he is Marlow, subtle, psychological, loquacious. In the early books the Captain dominates; in the later it is Marlow at least who does all the talking. The union of these two very different men makes for all sorts of queer effects. You must have noticed the sudden silences, the awkward collisions, the immense lethargy which threatens at every moment to descend. All this, I think, must be the result of that internal conflict. For while Marlow would like to track every motive, explore every shadow, his companion the sea captain is for ever at his elbow saying ‘… the world, the temporal world, rests on a very few simple ideas; so simple that they must be as old as the hills.’ Then again, Marlow is a man of words; they are all dear to him, appealing, seductive. But the sea captain cuts him short. ‘The gift of words’, he says, ‘is no great matter’. And it is the sea captain who triumphs. In Conrad’s novels personal relations are never final. Men are tested by their attitude to august abstractions. Are they faithful, are they honourable, are they courageous? The men he loves are reserved for death in the bosom of the sea. Their elegy is Milton’s ‘Nothing is here to wail … nothing but what may quiet us in a death so noble’—an elegy which you could never possibly speak over the body of any of Henry James’ characters, whose intimacies have been personal—with each other.”

“Pardon me,” said David, “an apparent rudeness. Your theory may be a good one, but the moment you quote Conrad himself theories turn to moonshine. Unfortunate art of criticism, which only shines in the absence of the sun! I had forgotten the spell of Conrad’s prose. It must be of extraordinary strength, since the few words you have quoted rouse in me an overpowering hunger for more.” He opened The Nigger of the Narcissus and read: “On men reprieved by its disdainful mercy the immortal sea confers in its justice the full privilege of desired unrest …” “The men turned in wet and turned out stiff to face the redeeming and ruthless exactions of their obscure fate.” “It is not fair,” he said, “to quote such scraps, but even from them I get an extreme satisfaction.”

“Yes,” said Penelope, “they’re fine in the grand deliberate manner which has in it the seeds of pomposity and monotony. But I almost prefer his sudden direct pounce right across the room like a cat on a mouse. There’s Mrs. Schomberg, for instance, ‘a scraggy little woman with long ringlets and a blue tooth’, or a dying man’s voice ‘like the rustle of a single dry leaf driven along the smooth sand of a beach’. He sees once and he sees for ever. His books are full of moments of vision. They light up a whole character in a flash. Perhaps I prefer Marlow the instinctive to Captain Whalley the moralist. But the peculiar beauty is the product of the two together. The beauty of surface has always a fibre of morality within. I seem to see each of the sentences you have read advancing with resolute bearing and a calm which they have won in strenuous conflict, against the forces of falsehood, sentimentality, and slovenliness. He could not write badly, one feels, to save his life. He has his duty to letters as sailors have theirs to their ships. And indeed he praises those inveterate landlubbers, Henry James and Anatole France, as though they were bluff sea dogs who had brought their books to port without compasses in a gale of wind.”

“Certainly he was a strange apparition to descend upon these shores in the last part of the nineteenth century—an artist, an aristocrat, a Pole,” said David. “For after all these years I cannot think of him as an English writer. He is too formal, too courteous, too scrupulous in the use of a language which is not his own. Then of course he is an aristocrat to the backbone. His humour is aristocratic—ironic, sardonic, never broad and free like the common English humour which descends from Falstaff. He is infinitely reserved. And the lack of intimacy which I complain of may perhaps be due, not merely to those ‘august abstractions’ as you call them, but to the fact that there are no women in his books.”

“There are the ships, the beautiful ships,” said Penelope. “They are more feminine than his women, who are either mountains of marble or the dreams of a charming boy over the photograph of an actress. But surely a great novel can be made out of a man and a ship, a man and a storm, a man and death and dishonour?”

“Ah, we are back at the question of greatness,” said David. “Which, then, is the great book, where, as you say, the complex vision becomes simple, and Marlow and the sea captain combine to produce a world at once exquisitely subtle, psychologically profound, yet based upon a very few simple ideas ‘so simple that they must be as old as the hills’?”

“I have just read Chance,” said Penelope. “It is a great book, I think. But now you will have to read it yourself, for you are not going to accept my word, especially when it is a word which I cannot define. It is a great book, a great book,” she repeated.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Sep 1, 1923]

[]

The Cosmos.

[The Journals of Thomas James Cobden-Sanderson, 1879–1922.]

And what is Cosmos, Mr. Sanderson?’ asks Sister Edith. ‘What is the meaning of the word?’ And then I go off like a rocket and explode in stars in the empyrean.” These two large volumes are full of the sparks that fell from that constantly recurring explosion. For Mr. Cobden-Sanderson was always trying to explain to somebody—it might be Professor Tyndall (“I gave him my own view of human destiny, namely, the ultimate coalescence of the human intellect in knowledge with its other self, the Universe”), it might be Mr. Churchill, it might be a strange lady whose motor-car had broken down on the road near Malvern—what the word Cosmos meant. He had learned gradually and painfully himself. For at first the world seemed to him to have no order whatsoever. Everything was wrong. It was wrong for him to become a clergyman; it was wrong to take a degree; it was wrong to remain at the Bar. It was wrong that he, who had three dress-suits already, should order another from Poole and pay for it with his wife’s money. But what then was right? That was by no means so apparent. “What was I to do?” he asked himself at three o’clock in the morning in the year 1882, “aching with exhaustion and nervous horror.” Ought he to live in Poplar and work among the poor? Ought he to devote his life to the work of the Charity Organization Society? What ought he to give in return for all that he received? For some time—and the candour with which these private struggles are laid bare is no small part of the deep interest of these diaries—he vacillated and procrastinated and drank beef-tea at eleven o’clock in the morning. Lady Carlisle accused him of “dreamy egotism”. His doctor laughed at his concern for his health. His father was deeply disappointed that he should give up the Bar—and for what? His wife confessed that when she read “what I wrote about the mountains, and repeated little phrases, she thought me, and had always thought me at such moments, quite a lunatic!” But once in his early distress he had found that life became suddenly “rounded off and whole” by a very simple expedient; he had bought a gridiron and cooked a chop. Now, several years later, relief began to filter through from the same channels. Since he enjoyed using his hands, said Mrs. Morris when he consulted her, why should he not learn to bind books? He took lessons at once, and became, with a speed which astonished him, capable of making “something beautiful and as far as human things can be, permanent.” It was an astonishing relief from attending to the affairs of the London and North Western Railway Company. But the Book Beautiful, as he called it, though tooled magnificently and bound in rose-red morocco, was not an end in itself. It was only a humble beginning—something well-made which served to put his own mind and body in order and so in harmony with the greater order which he was beginning, as he pared and gilded, to perceive transcending all human affairs. For there was a unity of the whole in which the virtues and even the vices of mankind were caught up and put to their proper uses. Once attain to that vision, and all things fell into their places. From that vantage ground the white butterfly caught in the spider’s net was “all in the world’s plan” and Englishmen and Germans blowing each other’s heads off in the trenches were “brothers not enemies” conspiring to “create the great emotions which in turn create the greater creation.” To envisage this whole and to make the binding of books and the printing of books and everything one did and said and felt further this end was work enough for one lifetime.

But in addition, Mr. Cobden-Sanderson felt the inevitable desire to explain the meaning of the word Cosmos to all and sundry, to Sister Edith and to Professor Tyndall. The volumes are full of attempts at explanation. He was not quite certain what he meant; nevertheless he must “repeat and repeat” and so “get relief.” He laboured, too, under a groundless fear that he might catch the contagion of Jane Austen’s style. Instead of becoming clearer, therefore, the vision, iterated and reiterated, becomes more and more nebulous, until after two volumes of explanation we are left asking, with Sister Edith: “But, Mr. Sanderson, how does one ‘fly to the great Rhythm’? What is the extraordinary ring of harmony within harmony that encircles us; what reason is there to suppose that a mountain wishes us well or that a lake has a profound moral meaning to impart? What, in short, does the word Cosmos mean?” Whereupon the rocket explodes, and the red and gold showers descend, and we look on with sympathy, but feel a little chill about the feet and not very clear as to the direction of the road.

But the man himself, who sent his rockets soaring into such incongruous places (he would write a letter about the Ideal to The Times) is neither vapid nor insipid nor wrapped round, as so many idealists tend to become, in comfortable cotton wool. On the contrary, he was for ever being stung and taunted, as he carried on his business of bookbinder and printer, by the uncompromising creature who was perched upon his shoulders. There were days when the gold would not stick on his lettering; days when on “turning the leather down at the headband I found it too short.” Then he flew into a passion of rage, “tore the leather off the board, and cut it, and cut it, and slashed it with a knife.” I did this, he reflected the next moment, I who have seen the vision can yet fall into ecstasies of vulgar anger! The vision forced him to test everything by its light, no matter what the effort, the unpopularity, the despondency it caused. What did the Coronation mean? he asked. What did the Boer War mean? Nothing could be taken for granted.

But by degrees the ideal got the upper hand. The sense of reality grew fainter. Often he seemed to be passing out of the body into a trance of thought. “I think I am more related to the hills and the streams … than to men and women,” he wrote. He roamed off among the mountains to dream and worship. He felt that his part was no longer among the fighters but among the dreamers. Now and then, chiefly in the Swiss chalet of Lady Russell, he came down to dinner dressed in a dressing-gown, with a brush and comb bag on his head, housemaid’s gloves on his hands, holding a fan, and was “very merry”. But his sense of humour seems to have been suffocated by the effort which he made persistently to “overcome the ordinariness of ordinary life”. The cat was wonderful, and the moon; the charwoman and the oak tree; the bread and the butter; the night and the stars. Everything seems to suffer a curious magnification. Nothing exists in itself but only as a means to something else. The solid objects of daily life become rimmed with high purposes, significant, symbolical. The people who drift through these diaries—even Swinburne and Morris—have become curiously thin; we see the stars shining through their backbones. It is in no way incongruous or surprising then to find him in his old age slipping off secretly on dark nights to the river. In his hand he carried a mysterious box swathed round with tape. Looking round him to see that he was not observed, he pitched his burden over the parapet into the water. It was thus that he bequeathed the Doves Type to the river; thus that he saved the ideal from desecration. But one night he missed his aim. Two pages wrapped in white paper lodged upon a ledge above the stream. He could see them, but he could not reach them. What was he to do? he asked himself, in bewilderment and amazement. The authorities might send for him; he might be cross-examined. Well, so be it. If they asked him to explain himself he would “take refuge in the infinitudes”. “My idea was magnificent; the act was ridiculous,” he said. “Besides,” he reflected, “nothing was explicable.” And perhaps he was right.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Oct 9, 1926]

[]

Walter Raleigh.

On a certain Wednesday in March, 1889, Walter Raleigh, then aged twenty-eight, gave his first lecture upon English literature in Manchester. It was not his first lecture by any means, for he had already lectured the natives of India on the same subject for two years. After Manchester came Liverpool; after Liverpool, Glasgow; after Glasgow, Oxford. At all these places he lectured incessantly upon English literature. Once he lectured three times a day. He became, indeed, such an adept at the art of lecturing that towards the end “sometimes he would prepare what he had to say in his half-hour’s walk from his home at Ferry Hinksey”. People who heard him said that his lectures stimulated them, opened their eyes, made them think for themselves. “ ‘Raleigh’s not always at his best, but when he’s good nobody can touch him’—that was the general verdict.” Nevertheless, in the course of two large volumes filled with delightful and often brilliant letters it would be difficult to find a single remark of any interest whatsoever about English literature.

There is necessarily a great deal of talk about the profession of teaching literature, and the profession of writing literary text books, of “doing Chaucer in six chapters and Wordsworth, better known as Daddy, also in six chapters”. But when one looks for the unprofessional talk, the talk which is talked among friends when business hours are over, one is bewildered and disappointed. Is this all that the Professor of English literature has to say? “Scott to-morrow—not a poet I think but fine old man. Good old Scott.” “The weak point in William [Blake] is not his Reason, which is A.1, but his imagination … Wonderful things the inspired old bustard said from time to time in conversation.” “As for old Bill Wordsworth he is the same old stick-in-the-mud as ever … He gets praised chiefly for his celebrated imitation of Shakespeare (which is really very good) and for his admirable reproduction of a bleat. But he has a turn of his own, if only he would do it and be damned to him.” Any clever man at a dinner party anxious not to scare the rowing blue or the city magnate who happens to be within earshot would have talked about books exactly as Raleigh wrote about them at his leisure. There is nothing to suggest that literature was a matter of profound interest to him when he was not lecturing about it. When we read the letters of Keats, the diary of the Goncourts, the letters of Lamb, the casual remarks of that unfashionable poet Tennyson, we feel that, waking or sleeping, these men never stopped thinking about literature. It is kneaded into the stuff of their brains. Their fingers are dyed in it. Whatever they touch is stained with it. Whatever they are doing their minds fill up involuntarily with some aspect of the absorbing question. Nor does it seem to have occurred to them to wonder what the rowing blue will think of them for talking seriously about books. “I think poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity; it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts and appear almost a remembrance,” wrote Keats, and there is not a damn in the sentence. But the Professor of English literature could scarcely open his lips without dropping into slang; he could never mention Bill Blake or Bill Shakespeare or old Bill Wordsworth without seeming to apologize for bringing books into the talk at all. Yet there is no doubt, Walter Raleigh was one of the best Professors of Literature of our time; he did brilliantly whatever it is that Professors are supposed to do. How then shall we compose the difference—solve the discrepancy?

In the first place the Professor of English literature is not there to teach people how to write; he is there to teach them how to read. Moreover, those people include city magnates, politicians, schoolmistresses, soldiers, scientists, mothers of families, country clergymen in embryo. Many of them have never opened a book before. Many will seldom get a chance of opening a book again. They have to be taught—but what? Raleigh himself had no doubts on this point. His business was “only to get people to love the poets.” “To make people old or young,” he wrote, “care for say the principal English poets as much or half as much as I do—that would, I am vain enough to think, be something—if it can be done.” He obstinately refused to stuff his pupils with facts. “The facts, it is true, tell in examinations. But you will none of you be any nearer Heaven ten years hence for having taken a B.A. degree, while for a love and understanding of Keats you may raise yourself several inches.” He had himself spent no time scraping away the moss, repairing the broken noses on the fabric of English literature; and he did not press that pursuit upon his pupils. He talked his lectures almost out of his head. He joked, he told stories. He made the undergraduates rock with laughter. He drew them in crowds to his lecture room. And they went away loving something or other. Perhaps it was Keats. Perhaps it was the British Empire. Certainly it was Walter Raleigh. But we should be much surprised if anybody went away loving poetry, loving the art of letters.

Nor is it difficult to find the reason. It is written large over Walter Raleigh’s books—the English Novel, Style, Shakespeare and the rest. They have every virtue; they are readable, just, acute, stimulating, and packed with information; they are as firm in style and hard in substance as a macadamised road. But the man who wrote them had no generous measure of the gifts of a writer. The maker of these rather tight, highly academic books had never been outside the critical fence. No novel, no poem, no play had ever lured him away from his prefaces, his summings up, his surveys. The excitement, the adventure, the turmoil of creation were unknown to him. But the critic who makes us love poetry is always sufficiently gifted to have had experiences of his own. He feels his way along a line spun by his own failures and successes. He may stumble; he may stammer; he may be incapable of orderly survey. But it is the Keats, the Coleridge, the Lamb, the Flaubert who get to the heart of the matter. It is in the toil and strife of writing that they have forced the door open and gone within and told us what they have seen there. When Walter Raleigh held a pen in his hand it behaved with the utmost propriety. He never wrote a bad sentence; but he never wrote a sentence which broke down barriers. He never pressed on over the ruins of his own culture to the discovery of something better. He remained trim and detached on the high road, a perfect example of the Professor of Literature who has no influence whatever upon the art of writing. Soon, therefore, for he was by temperament highly adventurous, he began to find literature a little dull. He began to separate literature from life. He began to cry out upon “culture” and “culture bugs”. He began to despise critics and criticism. “I can’t help feeling that critical admiration for what another man has written is an emotion for spinsters,” he wrote. He really believed, he said, “not in refinement and scholarly elegance, those are only a game; but in blood feuds, and the chase of wild beasts and marriage by capture.” In short, being incapable of humbug, a man of entire sincerity and great vitality, Walter Raleigh ceased to profess literature and became instead a Professor of Life.

There is ample evidence in the letters alone that he had a remarkable aptitude for this branch of learning. He seems never to have been bored, never to have been doubtful, never to have been sentimental. He laid hold on things with enviable directness. The whole force of his being seems to have played spontaneously upon whatever he wished and yet to have been controlled by an unerring sense that some things matter and some things do not. His equilibrium was perfect. Whether he was set down in India or Oxford, among the simple or the learned, the aristocrats or the Dons, he found his balance at once and got the utmost out of the situation. It is easy to imagine the race and flash of his talk, and what fine unexpected things he said, and what pinnacles of fun he raised and how for all his extravagance and irresponsibility the world that his wit lit up was held steady by his fundamental sanity and good sense. He was the most enchanting of companions—upon that all are agreed.

But the difficulty remained. Once make the fatal distinction between life and letters, once exalt life and find literature an occupation for old maids, and inevitably, if one is Walter Raleigh, one becomes discontented with mere praise. Professors must talk; but the lover of life must live. Unfortunately life in the sense of “blood feuds and the chase of wild beasts, and marriage by capture” was hard to come by in the last years of the nineteenth century. Queen Victoria was on the throne, Lord Salisbury was in power, and the British Empire was growing daily more robust. A breath of fresh air blew in with the Boer War. Raleigh hailed it with a shout of relief “… the British officer (and man) restores one’s joy in the race,” he said. He was coming to feel that there is some close connexion between writing and fighting, that in an age like his when the fighter did not write and the writer did not fight the divorce was unfortunate—especially for literature. “Were it not better to seek training on a battlefield, and use the first words one learns at mess?” he asked. All his sympathies were tending towards action. He was growing more and more tired of culture and criticism, more definitely of opinion that the “learned critic is a beast,” that “education has taken the fine bloom off the writing of books,” less and less attracted by writing at all, until finally, in 1913, he bursts out that he “can’t read Shakespeare any more…. Not that I think him a bad author, particularly,” he adds, “but I can’t bear literature.” When the guns fired in August, 1914, no one saluted them more rapturously than the Professor of English Literature at Oxford. “The air is better to breathe than it has been for years,” he exclaimed. “I’m glad I lived to see it, and sick that I’m not in it.”

It seemed indeed as if his chance of life had come too late. He still seemed fated to praise fighting but not to fight, to lecture about life but not to live. He did what a man of his age could do. He drilled. He marched. He wrote pamphlets. He lectured more frequently than ever; he practically ceased to read. At length he was made historian of the Air Force. To his infinite satisfaction he consorted with soldiers. To his immense delight he flew to Baghdad. He died within a week or two after his return. But what did that matter? The Professor of English Literature had lived at last.

[Vogue, May 1926, as “A Professor of Life”]

[]

Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.

It seems to me possible, perhaps desirable, that I may be the only person in this room who has committed the folly of writing, trying to write, or failing to write, a novel. And when I asked myself, as your invitation to speak to you about modern fiction made me ask myself, what demon whispered in my ear and urged me to my doom, a little figure rose before me—the figure of a man, or of a woman, who said, “My name is Brown. Catch me if you can.”

Most novelists have the same experience. Some Brown, Smith, or Jones comes before them and says in the most seductive and charming way in the world, “Come and catch me if you can.” And so, led on by this will-o’-the-wisp, they flounder through volume after volume, spending the best years of their lives in the pursuit, and receiving for the most part very little cash in exchange. Few catch the phantom; most have to be content with a scrap of her dress or a wisp of her hair.

My belief that men and women write novels because they are lured on to create some character which has thus imposed itself upon them has the sanction of Mr. Arnold Bennett. In an article from which I will quote he says, “The foundation of good fiction is character-creating and nothing else…. Style counts; plot counts; originality of outlook counts. But none of these counts anything like so much as the convincingness of the characters. If the characters are real the novel will have a chance; if they are not, oblivion will be its portion….” And he goes on to draw the conclusion that we have no young novelists of first-rate importance at the present moment, because they are unable to create characters that are real, true, and convincing.

These are the questions that I want with greater boldness than discretion to discuss to-night. I want to make out what we mean when we talk about “character” in fiction; to say something about the question of reality which Mr. Bennett raises; and to suggest some reasons why the younger novelists fail to create characters, if, as Mr. Bennett asserts, it is true that fail they do. This will lead me, I am well aware, to make some very sweeping and some very vague assertions. For the question is an extremely difficult one. Think how little we know about character—think how little we know about art. But, to make a clearance before I begin, I will suggest that we range Edwardians and Georgians into two camps; Mr. Wells, Mr. Bennett, and Mr. Galsworthy I will call the Edwardians; Mr. Forster, Mr. Lawrence, Mr. Strachey, Mr. Joyce, and Mr. Eliot I will call the Georgians. And if I speak in the first person, with intolerable egotism, I will ask you to excuse me. I do not want to attribute to the world at large the opinions of one solitary, ill-informed, and misguided individual.

My first assertion is one that I think you will grant—that every one in this room is a judge of character. Indeed it would be impossible to live for a year without disaster unless one practised character-reading and had some skill in the art. Our marriages, our friendships depend on it; our business largely depends on it; every day questions arise which can only be solved by its help. And now I will hazard a second assertion, which is more disputable perhaps, to the effect that in or about December, 1910, human character changed.

I am not saying that one went out, as one might into a garden, and there saw that a rose had flowered, or that a hen had laid an egg. The change was not sudden and definite like that. But a change there was, nevertheless; and, since one must be arbitrary, let us date it about the year 1910. The first signs of it are recorded in the books of Samuel Butler, in The Way of All Flesh in particular; the plays of Bernard Shaw continue to record it. In life one can see the change, if I may use a homely illustration, in the character of one’s cook. The Victorian cook lived like a leviathan in the lower depths, formidable, silent, obscure, inscrutable; the Georgian cook is a creature of sunshine and fresh air; in and out of the drawing-room, now to borrow the Daily Herald, now to ask advice about a hat. Do you ask for more solemn instances of the power of the human race to change? Read the Agamemnon, and see whether, in process of time, your sympathies are not almost entirely with Clytemnestra. Or consider the married life of the Carlyles and bewail the waste, the futility, for him and for her, of the horrible domestic tradition which made it seemly for a woman of genius to spend her time chasing beetles, scouring saucepans, instead of writing books. All human relations have shifted—those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature. Let us agree to place one of these changes about the year 1910.

I have said that people have to acquire a good deal of skill in character-reading if they are to live a single year of life without disaster. But it is the art of the young. In middle age and in old age the art is practised mostly for its uses, and friendships and other adventures and experiments in the art of reading character are seldom made. But novelists differ from the rest of the world because they do not cease to be interested in character when they have learnt enough about it for practical purposes. They go a step further, they feel that there is something permanently interesting in character in itself. When all the practical business of life has been discharged, there is something about people which continues to seem to them of overwhelming importance, in spite of the fact that it has no bearing whatever upon their happiness, comfort, or income. The study of character becomes to them an absorbing pursuit; to impart character an obsession. And this I find it very difficult to explain: what novelists mean when they talk about character, what the impulse is that urges them so powerfully every now and then to embody their view in writing.

So, if you will allow me, instead of analysing and abstracting, I will tell you a simple story which, however pointless, has the merit of being true, of a journey from Richmond to Waterloo, in the hope that I may show you what I mean by character in itself; that you may realize the different aspects it can wear; and the hideous perils that beset you directly you try to describe it in words.

One night some weeks ago, then, I was late for the train and jumped into the first carriage I came to. As I sat down I had the strange and uncomfortable feeling that I was interrupting a conversation between two people who were already sitting there. Not that they were young or happy. Far from it. They were both elderly, the woman over sixty, the man well over forty. They were sitting opposite each other, and the man, who had been leaning over and talking emphatically to judge by his attitude and the flush on his face, sat back and became silent. I had disturbed him, and he was annoyed. The elderly lady, however, whom I will call Mrs. Brown, seemed rather relieved. She was one of those clean, threadbare old ladies whose extreme tidiness—everything buttoned, fastened, tied together, mended and brushed up—suggests more extreme poverty than rags and dirt. There was something pinched about her—a look of suffering, of apprehension, and, in addition, she was extremely small. Her feet, in their clean little boots, scarcely touched the floor. I felt that she had nobody to support her; that she had to make up her mind for herself; that, having been deserted, or left a widow, years ago, she had led an anxious, harried life, bringing up an only son, perhaps, who, as likely as not, was by this time beginning to go to the bad. All this shot through my mind as I sat down, being uncomfortable, like most people, at travelling with fellow passengers unless I have somehow or other accounted for them. Then I looked at the man. He was no relation of Mrs. Brown’s I felt sure; he was of a bigger, burlier, less refined type. He was a man of business I imagined, very likely a respectable corn-chandler from the North, dressed in good blue serge with a pocket-knife and a silk handkerchief, and a stout leather bag. Obviously, however, he had an unpleasant business to settle with Mrs. Brown; a secret, perhaps sinister business, which they did not intend to discuss in my presence.

“Yes, the Crofts have had very bad luck with their servants,” Mr. Smith (as I will call him) said in a considering way, going back to some earlier topic, with a view to keeping up appearances.

“Ah, poor people,” said Mrs. Brown, a trifle condescendingly. “My grandmother had a maid who came when she was fifteen and stayed till she was eighty” (this was said with a kind of hurt and aggressive pride to impress us both perhaps).

“One doesn’t often come across that sort of thing nowadays,” said Mr. Smith in conciliatory tones.

Then they were silent.

“It’s odd they don’t start a golf club there—I should have thought one of the young fellows would,” said Mr. Smith, for the silence obviously made him uneasy.

Mrs. Brown hardly took the trouble to answer.

“What changes they’re making in this part of the world,” said Mr. Smith looking out of the window, and looking furtively at me as he did so.

It was plain, from Mrs. Brown’s silence, from the uneasy affability with which Mr. Smith spoke, that he had some power over her which he was exerting disagreeably. It might have been her son’s downfall, or some painful episode in her past life, or her daughter’s. Perhaps she was going to London to sign some document to make over some property. Obviously against her will she was in Mr. Smith’s hands. I was beginning to feel a great deal of pity for her, when she said, suddenly and inconsequently:

“Can you tell me if an oak-tree dies when the leaves have been eaten for two years in succession by caterpillars?”

She spoke quite brightly, and rather precisely, in a cultivated, inquisitive voice.

Mr. Smith was startled, but relieved to have a safe topic of conversation given him. He told her a great deal very quickly about plagues of insects. He told her that he had a brother who kept a fruit farm in Kent. He told her what fruit farmers do every year in Kent, and so on, and so on. While he talked a very odd thing happened. Mrs. Brown took out her little white handkerchief and began to dab her eyes. She was crying. But she went on listening quite composedly to what he was saying, and he went on talking, a little louder, a little angrily, as if he had seen her cry often before; as if it were a painful habit. At last it got on his nerves. He stopped abruptly, looked out of the window, then leant towards her as he had been doing when I got in, and said in a bullying, menacing way, as if he would not stand any more nonsense:

“So about that matter we were discussing. It’ll be all right? George will be there on Tuesday?”

“We shan’t be late,” said Mrs. Brown, gathering herself together with superb dignity.

Mr. Smith said nothing. He got up, buttoned his coat, reached his bag down, and jumped out of the train before it had stopped at Clapham Junction. He had got what he wanted, but he was ashamed of himself; he was glad to get out of the old lady’s sight.

Mrs. Brown and I were left alone together. She sat in her corner opposite, very clean, very small, rather queer, and suffering intensely. The impression she made was overwhelming. It came pouring out like a draught, like a smell of burning. What was it composed of—that overwhelming and peculiar impression? Myriads of irrelevant and incongruous ideas crowd into one’s head on such occasions; one sees the person, one sees Mrs. Brown, in the centre of all sorts of different scenes. I thought of her in a seaside house, among queer ornaments: sea-urchins, models of ships in glass cases. Her husband’s medals were on the mantelpiece. She popped in and out of the room, perching on the edges of chairs, picking meals out of saucers, indulging in long, silent stares. The caterpillars and the oak-trees seemed to imply all that. And then, into this fantastic and secluded life, in broke Mr. Smith. I saw him blowing in, so to speak, on a windy day. He banged, he slammed. His dripping umbrella made a pool in the hall. They sat closeted together.

And then Mrs. Brown faced the dreadful revelation. She took her heroic decision. Early, before dawn, she packed her bag and carried it herself to the station. She would not let Smith touch it. She was wounded in her pride, unmoored from her anchorage; she came of gentlefolks who kept servants—but details could wait. The important thing was to realize her character, to steep oneself in her atmosphere. I had no time to explain why I felt it somewhat tragic, heroic, yet with a dash of the flighty, and fantastic, before the train stopped, and I watched her disappear, carrying her bag, into the vast blazing station. She looked very small, very tenacious; at once very frail and very heroic. And I have never seen her again, and I shall never know what became of her.

The story ends without any point to it. But I have not told you this anecdote to illustrate either my own ingenuity or the pleasure of travelling from Richmond to Waterloo-What I want you to see in it is this. Here is a character imposing itself upon another person. Here is Mrs. Brown making someone begin almost automatically to write a novel about her. I believe that all novels begin with an old lady in the corner opposite. I believe that all novels, that is to say, deal with character, and that it is to express character—not to preach doctrines, sing songs, or celebrate the glories of the British Empire, that the form of the novels, so clumsy, verbose, and undramatic, so rich, elastic, and alive, has been evolved. To express character, I have said; but you will at once reflect that the very widest interpretation can be put upon those words. For example, old Mrs. Brown’s character will strike you very differently according to the age and country in which you happen to be born. It would be easy enough to write three different versions of that incident in the train, an English, a French, and a Russian. The English writer would make the old lady into a “character”; he would bring out her oddities and mannerisms; her buttons and wrinkles; her ribbons and warts. Her personality would dominate the book. A French writer would rub out all that; he would sacrifice the individual Mrs. Brown to give a more general view of human nature; to make a more abstract, proportioned, and harmonious whole. The Russian would pierce through the flesh; would reveal the soul—the soul alone, wandering out into the Waterloo Road, asking of life some tremendous question which would sound on and on in our ears after the book was finished. And then besides age and country there is the writer’s temperament to be considered. You see one thing in character, and I another. You say it means this, and I that. And when it comes to writing, each makes a further selection on principles of his own. Thus Mrs. Brown can be treated in an infinite variety of ways, according to the age, country, and temperament of the writer.

But now I must recall what Mr. Arnold Bennett says. He says that it is only if the characters are real that the novel has any chance of surviving. Otherwise, die it must. But, I ask myself, what is reality? And who are the judges of reality? A character may be real to Mr. Bennett and quite unreal to me. For instance, in this article he says that Dr. Watson in Sherlock Holmes is real to him: to me Dr. Watson is a sack stuffed with straw, a dummy, a figure of fun. And so it is with character after character—in book after book. There is nothing that people differ about more than the reality of characters, especially in contemporary books. But if you take a larger view I think that Mr. Bennett is perfectly right. If, that is, you think of the novels which seem to you great novels—War and Peace, Vanity Fair, Tristram Shandy, Madame Bovary, Pride and Prejudice, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Villette—if you think of these books, you do at once think of some character who has seemed to you so real (I do not by that mean so lifelike) that it has the power to make you think not merely of it itself, but of all sorts of things through its eyes—of religion, of love, of war, of peace, of family life, of balls in country towns, of sunsets, moonrises, the immortality of the soul. There is hardly any subject of human experience that is left out of War and Peace it seems to me. And in all these novels all these great novelists have brought us to see whatever they wish us to see through some character. Otherwise, they would not be novelists; but poets, historians, or pamphleteers.

But now let us examine what Mr. Bennett went on to say—he said that there was no great novelist among the Georgian writers because they cannot create characters who are real, true, and convincing. And there I cannot agree. There are reasons, excuses, possibilities which I think put a different colour upon the case. It seems so to me at least, but I am well aware that this is a matter about which I am likely to be prejudiced, sanguine, and near-sighted. I will put my view before you in the hope that you will make it impartial, judicial, and broad-minded. Why, then, is it so hard for novelists at present to create characters which seem real, not only to Mr. Bennett, but to the world at large? Why, when October comes round, do the publishers always fail to supply us with a masterpiece?

Surely one reason is that the men and women who began writing novels in 1910 or thereabouts had this great difficulty to face—that there was no English novelist living from whom they could learn their business. Mr. Conrad is a Pole; which sets him apart, and makes him, however admirable, not very helpful. Mr. Hardy has written no novel since 1895. The most prominent and successful novelists in the year 1910 were, I suppose, Mr. Wells, Mr. Bennett, and Mr. Galsworthy. Now it seems to me that to go to these men and ask them to teach you how to write a novel—how to create characters that are real—is precisely like going to a bootmaker and asking him to teach you how to make a watch. Do not let me give you the impression that I do not admire and enjoy their books. They seem to me of great value, and indeed of great necessity. There are seasons when it is more important to have boots than to have watches. To drop metaphor, I think that after the creative activity of the Victorian age it was quite necessary, not only for literature but for life, that someone should write the books that Mr. Wells, Mr. Bennett, and Mr. Galsworthy have written. Yet what odd books they are! Sometimes I wonder if we are right to call them books at all. For they leave one with so strange a feeling of incompleteness and dissatisfaction. In order to complete them it seems necessary to do something—to join a society, or, more desperately, to write a cheque. That done, the restlessness is laid, the book finished; it can be put upon the shelf, and need never be read again. But with the work of other novelists it is different. Tristram Shandy or Pride and Prejudice is complete in itself; it is self-contained; it leaves one with no desire to do anything, except indeed to read the book again, and to understand it better. The difference perhaps is that both Sterne and Jane Austen were interested in things in themselves; in character in itself; in the book in itself. Therefore everything was inside the book, nothing outside. But the Edwardians were never interested in character in itself; or in the book in itself. They were interested in something outside. Their books, then, were incomplete as books, and required that the reader should finish them, actively and practically, for himself.

Perhaps we can make this clearer if we take the liberty of imagining a little party in the railway carriage—Mr. Wells, Mr. Galsworthy, Mr. Bennett are travelling to Waterloo with Mrs. Brown. Mrs. Brown, I have said, was poorly dressed and very small. She had an anxious, harassed look. I doubt whether she was what you call an educated woman. Seizing upon all these symptoms of the unsatisfactory condition of our primary schools with a rapidity to which I can do no justice, Mr. Wells would instantly project upon the window-pane a vision of a better, breezier, jollier, happier, more adventurous and gallant world, where these musty railway carriages and fusty old women do not exist; where miraculous barges bring tropical fruit to Camberwell by eight o’clock in the morning; where there are public nurseries, fountains, and libraries, dining-rooms, drawing-rooms, and marriages; where every citizen is generous and candid, manly and magnificent, and rather like Mr. Wells himself. But nobody is in the least like Mrs. Brown. There are no Mrs. Browns in Utopia. Indeed I do not think that Mr. Wells, in his passion to make her what she ought to be, would waste a thought upon her as she is. And what would Mr. Galsworthy see? Can we doubt that the walls of Doulton’s factory would take his fancy? There are women in that factory who make twenty-five dozen earthenware pots every day. There are mothers in the Mile End Road who depend upon the farthings which those women earn. But there are employers in Surrey who are even now smoking rich cigars while the nightingale sings. Burning with indignation, stuffed with information, arraigning civilization, Mr. Galsworthy would only see in Mrs. Brown a pot broken on the wheel and thrown into the corner.

Mr. Bennett, alone of the Edwardians, would keep his eyes in the carriage. He, indeed, would observe every detail with immense care. He would notice the advertisements; the pictures of Swanage and Portsmouth; the way in which the cushion bulged between the buttons; how Mrs. Brown wore a brooch which had cost three-and-ten-three at Whitworth’s bazaar; and had mended both gloves—indeed the thumb of the left-hand glove had been replaced. And he would observe, at length, how this was the non-stop train from Windsor which calls at Richmond for the convenience of middle-class residents, who can afford to go to the theatre but have not reached the social rank which can afford motor-cars, though it is true, there are occasions (he would tell us what), when they hire them from a company (he would tell us which). And so he would gradually sidle sedately towards Mrs. Brown, and would remark how she had been left a little copyhold, not freehold, property at Datchet, which, however, was mortgaged to Mr. Bungay the solicitor—but why should I presume to invent Mr. Bennett? Does not Mr. Bennett write novels himself? I will open the first book that chance puts in my way—Hilda Lessways. Let us see how he makes us feel that Hilda is real, true, and convincing, as a novelist should. She shut the door in a soft, controlled way, which showed the constraint of her relations with her mother. She was fond of reading Maud; she was endowed with the power to feel intensely. So far, so good; in his leisurely, surefooted way Mr. Bennett is trying in these first pages, where every touch is important, to show us the kind of girl she was.

But then he begins to describe, not Hilda Lessways, but the view from her bedroom window, the excuse being that Mr. Skellorn, the man who collects rents, is coming along that way. Mr. Bennett proceeds:

“The bailiwick of Turnhill lay behind her; and all the murky district of the Five Towns, of which Turnhill is the northern outpost, lay to the south. At the foot of Chatterley Wood the canal wound in large curves on its way towards the undefiled plains of Cheshire and the sea. On the canal-side, exactly opposite to Hilda’s window, was a flour-mill, that sometimes made nearly as much smoke as the kilns and the chimneys closing the prospect on either hand. From the flourmill a bricked path, which separated a considerable row of new cottages from their appurtenant gardens, led straight into Lessways Street, in front of Mrs. Lessway’s house. By this path Mr. Skellorn should have arrived, for he inhabited the farthest of the cottages.”

One line of insight would have done more than all those lines of description; but let them pass as the necessary drudgery of the novelist. And now—where is Hilda? Alas. Hilda is still looking out of the window. Passionate and dissatisfied as she was, she was a girl with an eye for houses. She often compared this old Mr. Skellorn with the villas she saw from her bedroom window. Therefore the villas must be described. Mr. Bennett proceeds:

“The row was called Freehold Villas: a consciously proud name in a district where much of the land was copyhold and could only change owners subject to the payment of ‘fines’, and to the feudal consent of a ‘court’ presided over by the agent of a lord of the manor. Most of the dwellings were owned by their occupiers, who, each an absolute monarch of the soil, niggled in his sooty garden of an evening amid the flutter of drying shirts and towels. Freehold Villas symbolized the final triumph of Victorian economics, the apotheosis of the prudent and industrious artisan. It corresponded with a Building Society Secretary’s dream of paradise. And indeed it was a very real achievement. Nevertheless, Hilda’s irrational contempt would not admit this.”

Heaven be praised, we cry! At last we are coming to Hilda herself. But not so fast. Hilda may have been this, that, and the other; but Hilda not only looked at houses, and thought of houses; Hilda lived in a house. And what sort of a house did Hilda live in? Mr. Bennett proceeds:

“It was one of the two middle houses of a detached terrace of four houses built by her grandfather Lessways, the teapot manufacturer; it was the chief of the four, obviously the habitation of the proprietor of the terrace. One of the corner houses comprised a grocer’s shop, and this house had been robbed of its just proportion of garden so that the seigneurial garden-plot might be triflingly larger than the other. The terrace was not a terrace of cottages, but of houses rated at from twenty-six to thirty-six pounds a year; beyond the means of artisans and petty insurance agents and rent-collectors. And further, it was well-built, generously built; and its architecture, though debased, showed some faint traces of Georgian amenity. It was admittedly the best row of houses in that newly-settled quarter of the town. In coming to it out of Freehold Villas Mr. Skellorn obviously came to something superior, wider, more liberal. Suddenly Hilda heard her mother’s voice….”

But we cannot hear her mother’s voice, or Hilda’s voice; we can only hear Mr. Bennett’s voice telling us facts about rents and freeholds and copyholds and fines. What can Mr. Bennett be about? I have formed my own opinion of what Mr. Bennett is about—he is trying to make us imagine for him; he is trying to hypnotize us into the belief that, because he has made a house, there must be a person living there. With all his powers of observation, which are marvellous, with all his sympathy and humanity, which are great, Mr. Bennett has never once looked at Mrs. Brown in her corner. There she sits in the corner of the carriage—that carriage which is travelling, not from Richmond to Waterloo, but from one age of English literature to the next, for Mrs. Brown is eternal, Mrs. Brown is human nature, Mrs. Brown changes only on the surface, it is the novelists who get in and out—there she sits and not one of the Edwardian writers has so much as looked at her. They have looked very powerfully, searchingly, and sympathetically out of the window; at factories, at Utopias, even at the decoration and upholstery of the carriage; but never at her, never at life, never at human nature. And so they have developed a technique of novel-writing which suits their purpose; they have made tools and established conventions which do their business. But those tools are not our tools, and that business is not our business. For us those conventions are ruin, those tools are death.

You may well complain of the vagueness of my language. What is a convention, a tool, you may ask, and what do you mean by saying that Mr. Bennett’s and Mr. Wells’s and Mr. Galsworthy’s conventions are the wrong conventions for the Georgians? The question is difficult: I will attempt a short cut. A convention in writing is not much different from a convention in manners. Both in life and in literature it is necessary to have some means of bridging the gulf between the hostess and her unknown guest on the one hand, the writer and his unknown reader on the other. The hostess bethinks her of the weather, for generations of hostesses have established the fact that this is a subject of universal interest in which we all believe. She begins by saying that we are having a wretched May, and, having thus got into touch with her unknown guest, proceeds to matters of greater interest. So it is in literature. The writer must get into touch with his reader by putting before him something which he recognizes, which therefore stimulates his imagination, and makes him willing to co-operate in the far more difficult business of intimacy. And it is of the highest importance that this common meeting-place should be reached easily, almost instinctively, in the dark, with one’s eyes shut. Here is Mr. Bennett making use of this common ground in the passage which I have quoted. The problem before him was to make us believe in the reality of Hilda Lessways. So he began, being an Edwardian, by describing accurately and minutely the sort of house Hilda lived in, and the sort of house she saw from the window. House property was the common ground from which the Edwardians found it easy to proceed to intimacy. Indirect as it seems to us, the convention worked admirably, and thousands of Hilda Lessways were launched upon the world by this means. For that age and generation, the convention was a good one.

But now, if you will allow me to pull my own anecdote to pieces, you will see how keenly I felt the lack of a convention, and how serious a matter it is when the tools of one generation are useless for the next. The incident had made a great impression on me. But how was I to transmit it to you? All I could do was to report as accurately as I could what was said, to describe in detail what was worn, to say, despairingly, that all sorts of scenes rushed into my mind, to proceed to tumble them out pell-mell, and to describe this vivid, this overmastering impression by likening it to a draught or a smell of burning. To tell you the truth, I was also strongly tempted to manufacture a three-volume novel about the old lady’s son, and his adventures crossing the Atlantic, and her daughter, and how she kept a milliner’s shop in Westminster, the past life of Smith himself, and his house at Sheffield, though such stories seem to me the most dreary, irrelevant, and humbugging affairs in the world.

But if I had done that I should have escaped the appalling effort of saying what I meant. And to have got at what I meant I should have had to go back and back and back; to experiment with one thing and another; to try this sentence and that, referring each word to my vision, matching it as exactly as possible, and knowing that somehow I had to find a common ground between us, a convention which would not seem to you too odd, unreal, and far-fetched to believe in. I admit that I shirked that arduous undertaking. I let my Mrs. Brown slip through my fingers. I have told you nothing whatever about her. But that is partly the great Edwardians’ fault. I asked them—they are my elders and betters—How shall I begin to describe this woman’s character? And they said: “Begin by saying that her father kept a shop in Harrogate. Ascertain the rent. Ascertain the wages of shop assistants in the year 1878. Discover what her mother died of. Describe cancer. Describe calico. Describe——” But I cried: “Stop! Stop!” And I regret to say that I threw that ugly, that clumsy, that incongruous tool out of the window, for I knew that if I began describing the cancer and the calico, my Mrs. Brown, that vision to which I cling though I know no way of imparting it to you, would have been dulled and tarnished and vanished for ever.

That is what I mean by saying that the Edwardian tools are the wrong ones for us to use. They have laid an enormous stress upon the fabric of things. They have given us a house in the hope that we may be able to deduce the human beings who live there. To give them their due, they have made that house much better worth living in. But if you hold that novels are in the first place about people, and only in the second about the houses they live in, that is the wrong way to set about it. Therefore, you see, the Georgian writer had to begin by throwing away the method that was in use at the moment. He was left alone there facing Mrs. Brown without any method of conveying her to the reader. But that is inaccurate. A writer is never alone. There is always the public with him—if not on the same seat, at least in the compartment next door. Now the public is a strange travelling companion. In England it is a very suggestible and docile creature, which, once you get it to attend, will believe implicitly what it is told for a certain number of years. If you say to the public with sufficient conviction: “All women have tails, and all men humps,” it will actually learn to see women with tails and men with humps, and will think it very revolutionary and probably improper if you say: “Nonsense. Monkeys have tails and camels humps. But men and women have brains, and they have hearts; they think and they feel,”—that will seem to it a bad joke, and an improper one into the bargain.

But to return. Here is the British public sitting by the writer’s side and saying in its vast and unanimous way: “Old women have houses. They have fathers. They have incomes. They have servants. They have hot-water bottles. That is how we know that they are old women. Mr. Wells and Mr. Bennett and Mr. Galsworthy have always taught us that this is the way to recognize them. But now with your Mrs. Brown—how are we to believe in her? We do not even know whether her villa was called Albert or Balmoral; what she paid for her gloves; or whether her mother died of cancer or of consumption. How can she be alive? No; she is a mere figment of your imagination.”

And old women of course ought to be made of freehold villas and copyhold estates, not of imagination.

The Georgian novelist, therefore, was in an awkward predicament. There was Mrs. Brown protesting that she was different, quite different, from what people made out, and luring the novelist to her rescue by the most fascinating if fleeting glimpse of her charms; there were the Edwardians handing out tools appropriate to house building and house breaking; and there was the British public asseverating that they must see the hot-water bottle first. Meanwhile the train was rushing to that station where we must all get out.

Such, I think, was the predicament in which the young Georgians found themselves about the year 1910. Many of them—I am thinking of Mr. Forster and Mr. Lawrence in particular—spoilt their early work because, instead of throwing away those tools, they tried to use them. They tried to compromise. They tried to combine their own direct sense of the oddity and significance of some character with Mr. Galsworthy’s knowledge of the Factory Acts, and Mr. Bennett’s knowledge of the Five Towns. They tried it, but they had too keen, too overpowering a sense of Mrs. Brown and her peculiarities to go on trying it much longer. Something had to be done. At whatever cost of life, limb, and damage to valuable property Mrs. Brown must be rescued, expressed, and set in her high relations to the world before the train stopped and she disappeared for ever. And so the smashing and the crashing began. Thus it is that we hear all round us, in poems and novels and biographies, even in newspaper articles and essays, the sound of breaking and falling, crashing and destruction. It is the prevailing sound of the Georgian age—rather a melancholy one if you think what melodious days there have been in the past, if you think of Shakespeare and Milton and Keats or even of Jane Austen and Thackeray and Dickens; if you think of the language, and the heights to which it can soar when free, and see the same eagle captive, bald, and croaking.

In view of these facts—with these sounds in my ears and these fancies in my brain—I am not going to deny that Mr. Bennett has some reason when he complains that our Georgian writers are unable to make us believe that our characters are real. I am forced to agree that they do not pour out three immortal masterpieces with Victorian regularity every autumn. But, instead of being gloomy, I am sanguine. For this state of things is, I think, inevitable whenever from hoar old age or callow youth the convention ceases to be a means of communication between writer and reader, and becomes instead an obstacle and an impediment. At the present moment we are suffering, not from decay, but from having no code of manners which writers and readers accept as a prelude to the more exciting intercourse of friendship. The literary convention of the time is so artificial—you have to talk about the weather and nothing but the weather throughout the entire visit—that, naturally, the feeble are tempted to outrage, and the strong are led to destroy the very foundations and rules of literary society. Signs of this are everywhere apparent. Grammar is violated; syntax disintegrated; as a boy staying with an aunt for the week-end rolls in the geranium bed out of sheer desperation as the solemnities of the sabbath wear on. The more adult writers do not, of course, indulge in such wanton exhibitions of spleen. Their sincerity is desperate, and their courage tremendous; it is only that they do not know which to use, a fork or their fingers. Thus, if you read Mr. Joyce and Mr. Eliot you will be struck by the indecency of the one, and the obscurity of the other. Mr. Joyce’s indecency in Ulysses seems to me the conscious and calculated indecency of a desperate man who feels that in order to breathe he must break the windows. At moments, when the window is broken, he is magnificent. But what a waste of energy! And, after all, how dull indecency is, when it is not the overflowing of a superabundant energy or savagery, but the determined and public-spirited act of a man who needs fresh air! Again, with the obscurity of Mr. Eliot. I think that Mr. Eliot has written some of the loveliest single lines in modern poetry. But how intolerant he is of the old usages and politenesses of society—respect for the weak, consideration for the dull! As I sun myself upon the intense and ravishing beauty of one of his lines, and reflect that I must make a dizzy and dangerous leap to the next, and so on from line to line, like an acrobat flying precariously from bar to bar, I cry out, I confess, for the old decorums, and envy the indolence of my ancestors who, instead of spinning madly through mid-air, dreamt quietly in the shade with a book. Again, in Mr. Strachey’s books, Eminent Victorians and Queen Victoria, the effort and strain of writing against the grain and current of the times is visible too. It is much less visible, of course, for not only is he dealing with facts, which are stubborn things, but he has fabricated, chiefly from eighteenth-century material, a very discreet code of manners of his own, which allows him to sit at table with the highest in the land and to say a great many things under cover of that exquisite apparel which, had they gone naked, would have been chased by the men-servants from the room. Still, if you compare Eminent Victorians with some of Lord Macaulay’s essays, though you will feel that Lord Macaulay is always wrong, and Mr. Strachey always right, you will also feel a body, a sweep, a richness in Lord Macaulay’s essays which show that his age was behind him; all his strength went straight into his work; none was used for purposes of concealment or of conversion. But Mr. Strachey has had to open our eyes before he made us see; he has had to search out and sew together a very artful manner of speech; and the effort, beautifully though it is concealed, has robbed his work of some of the force that should have gone into it, and limited his scope.

For these reasons, then, we must reconcile ourselves to a season of failures and fragments. We must reflect that where so much strength is spent on finding a way of telling the truth, the truth itself is bound to reach us in rather an exhausted and chaotic condition. Ulysses, Queen Victoria, Mr. Prufrock—to give Mrs. Brown some of the names she has made famous lately—is a little pale and dishevelled by the time her rescuers reach her. And it is the sound of their axes that we hear—a vigorous and stimulating sound in my ears—unless of course you wish to sleep, when, in the bounty of his concern, Providence has provided a host of writers anxious and able to satisfy your needs.

Thus I have tried, at tedious length, I fear, to answer some of the questions which I began by asking. I have given an account of some of the difficulties which in my view beset the Georgian writer in all his forms. I have sought to excuse him. May I end by venturing to remind you of the duties and responsibilities that are yours as partners in this business of writing books, as companions in the railway carriage, as fellow travellers with Mrs. Brown? For she is just as visible to you who remain silent as to us who tell stories about her. In the course of your daily life this past week you have had far stranger and more interesting experiences than the one I have tried to describe. You have overheard scraps of talk that filled you with amazement. You have gone to bed at night bewildered by the complexity of your feelings. In one day thousands of ideas have coursed through your brains; thousands of emotions have met, collided, and disappeared in astonishing disorder. Nevertheless, you allow the writers to palm off upon you a version of all this, an image of Mrs. Brown, which has no likeness to that surprising apparition whatsoever. In your modesty you seem to consider that writers are of different blood and bone from yourselves; that they know more of Mrs. Brown than you do. Never was there a more fatal mistake. It is this division between reader and writer, this humility on your part, these professional airs and graces on ours, that corrupt and emasculate the books which should be the healthy offspring of a close and equal alliance between us. Hence spring those sleek, smooth novels, those portentous and ridiculous biographies, that milk and watery criticism, those poems melodiously celebrating the innocence of roses and sheep which pass so plausibly for literature at the present time.

Your part is to insist that writers shall come down off their plinths and pedestals, and describe beautifully if possible, truthfully at any rate, our Mrs. Brown. You should insist that she is an old lady of unlimited capacity and infinite variety; capable of appearing in any place; wearing any dress; saying anything and doing heaven knows what. But the things she says and the things she does and her eyes and her nose and her speech and her silence have an overwhelming fascination, for she is, of course, the spirit we live by, life itself.

But do not expect just at present a complete and satisfactory presentment of her. Tolerate the spasmodic, the obscure, the fragmentary, the failure. Your help is invoked in a good cause. For I will make one final and surpassingly rash prediction—we are trembling on the verge of one of the great ages of English literature. But it can only be reached if we are determined never, never to desert Mrs. Brown.

[the New York Evening Post Literary Review, Nov 17, 1923; a paper read to the Heretics, Cambridge, on May 18th, 1924]

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All about Books.

Your last letter ends with the following sentence: “The cold profile of Mont Blanc; falling snow; peasants and pine trees; a string of stout fellows roped together with alpenstocks—such is the prospect from my window; so for pity’s sake draw your chair to the fire, take your pen in your hand and write me a long, long letter all about books.” But you must realize that a long, long letter is apt to be exaggerated, inaccurate, and full of those irreticences and hyperboles which the voice of the speaker corrects in talk. A letter is not a review; it is not a considered judgment, but, on condition that you do not believe a word I say, I will scribble for an hour or two whatever comes into my head about books.

That it has been a very bad season goes without saying. The proof of it is that old Mr. Baddeley had read Guy Mannering for the fifty-eighth time. Never was Jane Austen in greater demand. Trollope, Dickens, Carlyle, and Macaulay are all providing that solace, that security, that sense that the human heart does not change which our miserable age requires and our living authors so woefully fail to provide. When, therefore, the rumour spread that the diary of an old clergyman called Cole, who had gone to Paris in the autumn of 1765, was about to be published, and that Miss Waddell had put her brilliance and her erudition at our service, a purr of content and anticipation rose from half the armchairs of England. This Cole, moreover, was not anybody’s Cole; he was Horace Walpole’s Cole; nor does it need any pedantic familiarity with history to be aware that the autumn of 1765 was for one old blind woman in Paris the most excruciating, the most humiliating, the most ecstatic of her life. At last Horace Walpole had come—after what snubs, what humiliations, what bitter disappointments! At last Madame du Deffand would—not indeed see him in the flesh, but feel him with the spirit. He would be in the same room with her; he would talk his broken French; she would feel come over her that strange delight, that abasement, that ecstasy—call it not love, for love he would not have it called—which the presence of the elderly and elegant Horace never failed to inspire in a heart that had long outlived any sensation but boredom, despair and disgust. It was in that very autumn that Cole chose to visit Paris. Cole, it seemed probable since Walpole liked him, would have eyes in his head; certainly he had a diary in his portmanteau. What revelations might one not expect? What confidences from one Englishman to another? And Horace Walpole was willing. Every day he sent his servant to ask Cole to dinner. And every day—it is incredible what the dead will do, but it is true—Cole preferred to go sightseeing. He went to Notre Dame; he went to the Sorbonne; he went to the Convent of that Virgin, to the Cathedral of this Saint. When he came home he sat down to digest and methodize what he had seen. He was too tired to dine with Mr. Walpole. So instead of revelations we have information. “On the right hand of the High Altar as one enters…. The dome of this church is very beautiful…. Over the door is a curious alto-relievo representing the Last Supper….” That is what he writes about, and, of course, about the habits of the natives. The habits of the natives are disgusting; the women hawk on the floor; the forks are dirty; the trees are poor, the Pont Neuf is not a patch on London Bridge; the cows are skinny; morals are licentious; polish is good; cabbages cost so much; bread is made of coarse flour; Mr. Drumgold could not with patience mention the character of John James Rousseau; the Coles are distantly related to the Herberts; and a French turkey is about the size of an English hen. How natural it all is! How admirable Mr. Cole would be at home in his own parish! How gladly we will read sixteen volumes about life in Bletchley if Miss Waddell will print them! But the present volume is nothing short of torture. “Cole,” one is inclined to cry, “if you don’t give up sightseeing to-day, if you don’t dine with Mr. Walpole, if you don’t report every word he says, leaving Drumgold out of it altogether, if you don’t turn the talk somehow upon Madame du Deffand, if you don’t somehow tell us more about one of the most curious affairs of the heart that was ever transacted, or failing that, rake up a few odds and ends of interest about that amazing society that was playing spillikins on the verge of revolution, we will——” But what can we do? The dead have no sense whatever of what is due to posterity. Mr. Cole imperturbably pulls on his boots and proceeds to visit the Sorbonne.

Must one then read Guy Mannering, or take Jane Austen from the bookshelf? No, the advantage of belonging to a good library is that it is only upon very exceptional occasions that one need have recourse to the classics. New books, in fresh jackets, are delivered daily, and good books, too—Things I Remember, by the Grand Duchess Marie of Russia, for instance, a very terrible book; The Diary of a Somersetshire Parson—a very absorbing book; By Guess and by God—a very exciting yet infinitely childish book; and Scrutinies, a collection of critical essays by various writers. But what kind of book is Scrutinies? That, indeed, I cannot tell you at the moment for the good reason that I have not read it; but you can guess from the title and a glance at the table of contents that it consists of articles by the tolerably young—Messrs. Alec Brown, B. Higgins, Mary Butts, Jack Lindsay, P. Quennell, Sherard Vines, C. Saltmarshe, and so on, upon the tolerably old—Messrs. Eliot, Huxley, Joyce, Laurence, Sitwell, Strachey, and so on. And if I hesitate to read beyond the title page at present it is for the very sound and simple reason that it is so much pleasanter to look upon the young than upon the old, the young who are fresh and pliable, who have not stood out in the storm and stiffened into attitudes and hardened into wrinkles. Beauty is theirs now, as soon the future will be theirs also. Let us, therefore, leave the figures of the elders where they stand and turn our bull’s eye upon the advancing and victorious hordes of youth.

And what is our first impression as we look? A very strange one. How orderly they come! One could swear that they are all arrayed in troops, and all march in step, and all halt, charge and otherwise behave themselves under the command of officers mounted upon chargers. As far as one can see—a bull’s eye, it must be admitted, is not a very steady or comprehensive weapon—there is not a single straggler or deserter among them; there is no dancing or disorder; no wild voice cries alone; no man or woman breaks the ranks and leaves the troop and takes to the wilderness stirring desire and unrest among the hearts of his companions. All is orderly, all is preconcerted. If division there is, even that is regular. Camp is opposed to camp; the hostile parties separate, form, meet, fight, leave each other for dead upon the ground; rise, form and fight again. Classic is opposed to romantic; naturalist to metaphysic. Never was there such a sight since the world began. Never—as they come nearer this too becomes certain—were the young so well-equipped as at present. No more respectable army has ever issued from the portals of the two great Universities—none more courageous, more instructed, more outspoken, more intolerant of humbug in all its forms, better fitted to deal pretence its death and falsity its finish—and yet (for all these flowers, of course, conceal a viper) there is a fatal defect; they do not lead, they follow. Where is the adventurous, the intolerant, the immensely foolish young man or woman who dares to be himself? He or she must, of course, be there. He or she will in time to come make himself known. But at present, since he always keeps the ranks, since if he fights he is careful, like Sir Walter Blunt in Henry the Fourth, to wear the armour of his king, there is no knowing him at present from the seven hundred and fifty-five others who are similarly disguised.

If this is true, if there is now a uniformity and a drill and a discretion unknown before, what do you think can be the reason? In one word, and I have room for one only, and that is murmured in your private ear—education. Some years since, for reasons unknown, but presumably of value, it must have occurred to someone that the arts of reading and of writing can be taught. Degrees were given at the Universities to those who showed proficiency in their native tongue. And the teachers of the living language were not old and hoary; as fitted their subject they were young and supple. Persuasion sat on their tongues, and the taught, instead of mocking, loved their teachers. And the teachers took the manuscripts of the young and drew circles of blue chalk round this adjective and circles of red chalk round that adverb. They added in purple ink what Pope would have thought and what Wordsworth would have said. And the young, since they loved their teachers, believed them. Hence it came about that, instead of knowing that the sun was in the sky and the bird on the branch, the young knew the whole course of English literature from one end to another; how one age follows another; and one influence cancels another; and one style is derived from another; and one phrase is better than another. They took service under their teachers instead of riding into battle alone. All their marriages—and what are the five years between twenty and twenty-five in the life of a writer but years of courtship and wedding, of falling in love with words and learning their nature, how to mate them by one’s own decree in sentences of one’s own framing?—all their marriages were arranged in public; tutors introduced the couples; lecturers supervised the amours; and examiners finally pronounced whether the fruit of the union was blessed or the reverse. Such methods, of course, produce an erudite and eugenic offspring. But, one asks, turning over the honest, the admirable, the entirely sensible and unsentimental pages, where is love? Meaning by that, where is the sound of the sea and the red of the rose; where is music, imagery, and a voice speaking from the heart?

That this is all great nonsense I am well aware. But what else can you expect in a letter? The time has come to open Scrutinies and begin to read—no, the time has come to rake out the cinders and go to bed.

[New Statesman and Nation, Feb 28, 1931]

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Reviewing.

1

In London there are certain shop windows that always attract a crowd. The attraction is not in the finished article but in the worn-out garments that are having patches inserted in them. The crowd is watching the women at work. There they sit in the shop window putting invisible stitches into moth-eaten trousers. And this familiar sight may serve as illustration to the following paper. So our poets, playwrights, and novelists sit in the shop window, doing their work under the curious eyes of reviewers. But the reviewers are not content, like the crowd in the street, to gaze in silence; they comment aloud upon the size of the holes, upon the skill of the workers, and advise the public which of the goods in the shop window is the best worth buying. The purpose of this paper is to rouse discussion as to the value of the reviewer’s office—to the writer, to the public, to the reviewer, and to literature. But a reservation must first be made—by “the reviewer” is meant the reviewer of imaginative literature—poetry, drama, fiction; not the reviewer of history, politics, economics. His is a different office, and for reasons not to be discussed here he fulfils it in the main so adequately and indeed admirably that his value is not in question. Has the reviewer, then, of imaginative literature any value at the present time to the writer, to the public, to the reviewer, and to literature? And, if so, what? And if not, how could his function be changed, and made profitable? Let us broach these involved and complicated questions by giving one quick glance at the history of reviewing, since it may help to define the nature of a review at the present moment.

Since the review came into existence with the newspaper, that history is a brief one. Hamlet was not reviewed, nor Paradise Lost. Criticism there was but criticism conveyed by word of mouth, by the audience in the theatre, by fellow writers in taverns and private workshops. Printed criticism came into existence, presumably in a crude and primitive form, in the seventeenth century. Certainly the eighteenth century rings with the screams and catcalls of the reviewer and his victim. But towards the end of the eighteenth century there was a change—the body of criticism then seems to split into two parts. The critic and the reviewer divided the country between them. The critic—let Dr. Johnson represent him—dealt with the past and with principles; the reviewer took the measure of new books as they fell from the press. As the nineteenth century drew on, these functions became more and more distinct. There were the critics—Coleridge, Matthew Arnold—who took their time and their space; and there were the “irresponsible” and mostly anonymous reviewers who had less time and less space, and whose complex task it was partly to inform the public, partly to criticize the book, and partly to advertise its existence.

Thus, though the reviewer in the nineteenth century has much resemblance to his living representative, there were certain important differences. One difference is shown by the author of the Times History: “The books reviewed were fewer, but the reviews were longer than now…. Even a novel might get two columns and more.”—he is referring to the middle of the nineteenth century. Those differences are very important, as will be seen later. But it is worth while to pause for a moment to examine other results of the review which are first manifest then, though by no means easy to sum up; the effect that is to say of the review upon the author’s sales and upon the author’s sensibility. A review had undoubtedly a great effect upon sales. Thackeray, for instance, said that the Times’ review of Esmond “absolutely stopped the sale of the book”. The review also had an immense though less calculable effect upon the sensibility of the author. Upon Keats the effect is notorious; also upon the sensitive Tennyson. Not only did he alter his poems at the reviewer’s bidding, but actually contemplated emigration; and was thrown, according to one biographer, into such despair by the hostility of reviewers that his state of mind for a whole decade, and thus his poetry, was changed by them. But the robust and self-confident were also affected. “How can a man like Macready,” Dickens demanded, “fret and fume and chafe himself for such lice of literature as these?”—the “lice” are writers in Sunday newspapers—“rotten creatures with men’s forms and devils’ hearts?” Yet lice as they are, when they “discharge their pigmy arrows” even Dickens with all his genius and his magnificent vitality cannot help but mind and has to make a vow to overcome his rage and “to gain the victory by being indifferent and bidding them whistle on”.

In their different ways then the great poet and the great novelist both admit the power of the nineteenth-century reviewer; and it is safe to assume that behind them stood a myriad of minor poets and minor novelists whether of the sensitive variety or of the robust who were all affected in much the same way. The way was complex; it is difficult to analyse. Tennyson and Dickens are both angry and hurt; they are also ashamed of themselves for feeling such emotions. The reviewer was a louse; his bite was contemptible; yet his bite was painful. His bite injured vanity; it injured reputation; it injured sales. Undoubtedly in the nineteenth century the reviewer was a formidable insect; he had considerable power over the author’s sensibility; and upon the public taste. He could hurt the author; he could persuade the public either to buy or to refrain from buying.

2

The figures being thus set in position and their functions and powers roughly outlined, it must next be asked whether what was true then is true now. At first sight there seems to be little change. All the figures are still with us—critic; reviewer; author; public; and in much the same relations. The critic is separate from the reviewer; the function of the reviewer is partly to sort current literature; partly to advertise the author; partly to inform the public. Nevertheless there is a change; and it is a change of the highest importance. It seems to have made itself felt in the last part of the nineteenth century. It is summed up in the words of the Times’ historian already quoted: “… the tendency was for reviews to grow shorter and to be less long delayed.” But there was another tendency; not only did the reviews become shorter and quicker, but they increased immeasurably in number. The result of these three tendencies was of the highest importance. It was catastrophic indeed; between them they have brought about the decline and fall of reviewing. Because they were quicker, shorter, and more numerous the value of reviews for all parties concerned has dwindled until—is it too much to say until it has disappeared? But let us consider. The people concerned are the author, the reader, and the publisher. Placing them in this order let us ask first how these tendencies have affected the author—why the review has ceased to have any value for him? Let us assume, for brevity’s sake, that the most important value of a review to the author was its effect upon him as a writer—that it gave him an expert opinion of his work and allowed him to judge roughly how far as an artist he had failed or succeeded. That has been destroyed almost entirely by the multiplicity of reviews. Now that he has sixty reviews where in the nineteenth century he had perhaps six, he finds that there is no such thing as “an opinion” of his work. Praise cancels blame; and blame praise. There are as many different opinions of his work as there are different reviewers. Soon he comes to discount both praise and blame; they are equally worthless. He values the review only for its effect upon his reputation and for its effect upon his sales.

The same cause has also lessened the value of the review to the reader. The reader asks the reviewer to tell him whether the poem or novel is good or bad in order that he may decide whether to buy it or not. Sixty reviewers at once assure him that it is a masterpiece—and worthless. The clash of completely contradictory opinions cancel each other out. The reader suspends judgment; waits for an opportunity of seeing the book himself; very probably forgets all about it, and keeps his seven and sixpence in his pocket.

The variety and diversity of opinion affect the publisher in the same way. Aware that the public no longer trusts either praise or blame, the publisher is reduced to printing both side by side: “This is … poetry that will be remembered in hundreds of years time …” “There are several passages that make me physcially sick,” [◉3] to quote an actual instance; to which he adds very naturally, in his own person: “Why not read it yourself?” That question is enough by itself to show that reviewing as practised at present has failed in all its objects. Why bother to write reviews or to read them or to quote them if in the end the reader must decide the question for himself?

3

If the reviewer has ceased to have any value either to the author or to the public it seems a public duty to abolish him. And, indeed, the recent failure of certain magazines consisting largely of reviews seems to show that whatever the reason, such will be his fate. But it is worth while to look at him in being—a flutter of little reviews is still attached to the great political dailies and weeklies—before he is swept out of existence, in order to see what he is still trying to do; why it is so difficult for him to do it; and whether perhaps there is not some element of value that ought to be preserved. Let us ask the reviewer himself to throw light upon the nature of the problem as it appears to him. Nobody is better qualified to do so than Mr. Harold Nicolson. The other day [◉4] he dealt with the duties and the difficulties of the reviewer as they appear to him. He began by saying that the reviewer, who is “something quite different from the critic”, is “hampered by the hebdomadal nature of his task”,—in other words, he has to write too often and too much. He went on to define the nature of that task. “Is he to relate every book that he reads to the eternal standards of literary excellence? Were he to do that, his reviews would be one long ululation. Is he merely to consider the library public and to tell people what it may please them to read? Were he to do that, he would be subjugating his own level of taste to a level which is not very stimulating. How does he act?” Since he cannot refer to the eternal standards of literature; since he cannot tell the library public what they would like to read—that would be “a degradation of the mind”—there is only one thing that he can do: he can hedge. “I hedge between the two extremes. I address myself to the authors of the books which I review; I want to tell them why I either like or dislike their work; and I trust that from such a dialogue the ordinary reader will derive some information.”

That is an honest statement; and its honesty is illuminating. It shows that the review has become an expression of individual opinion, given without any attempt to refer to “eternal standards” by a man who is in a hurry; who is pressed for space; who is expected to cater in that little space for many different interests; who is bothered by the knowledge that he is not fulfilling his task; who is doubtful what that task is; and who, finally, is forced to hedge. Now the public though crass is not such an ass as to invest seven and sixpence on the advice of a reviewer writing under such conditions; and the public though dull is not such a gull as to believe in the great poets, great novelists, and epoch-making works that are weekly discovered under such conditions. Those are the conditions however; and there is good reason to think that they will become more drastic in the course of the next few years. The reviewer is already a distracted tag on the tail of the political kite. Soon he will be conditioned out of existence altogether. His work will be done—in many newspapers it is already done—by a competent official armed with scissors and paste who will be called (it may be) The Gutter. The Gutter will write out a short statement of the book; extract the plot (if it is a novel); choose a few verses (if it is a poem); quote a few anecdotes (if it is a biography). To this what is left of the reviewer—perhaps he will come to be known as the Taster—will fix a stamp—an asterisk to signify approval, a dagger to signify disapproval. This statement—this Gutter and Stamp production—will serve instead of the present discordant and distracted twitter. And there is no reason to think that it will serve two of the parties concerned worse than the present system. The library public will be told what it wishes to know—whether the book is the kind of book to order from the library; and the publisher will collect asterisks and daggers instead of going to the pains to copy out alternate phrases of praise and abuse in which neither he nor the public has any faith. Each perhaps will save a little time and a little money. There remain however, two other parties to be considered—that is the author and the reviewer. What will the Gutter and Stamp system mean to them?

To deal first with the author—his case is the more complex, for his is the more highly developed organism. During the two centuries or so in which he has been exposed to reviewers he has undoubtedly developed what may be called a reviewer consciousness. There is present in his mind a figure who is known as “the reviewer”. To Dickens he was a louse armed with pigmy arrows, having the form of a man and the heart of a devil. To Tennyson he was even more formidable. It is true that the lice are so many to-day and they bite so innumerably that the author is comparatively immune from their poison—no author now abuses reviewers as violently as Dickens or obeys them as submissively as Tennyson. Still, there are eruptions even now in the press which lead us to believe that the reviewer’s fang is still poisoned. But what part is affected by his bite?—what is the true nature of the emotion he causes? That is a complex question; but perhaps we can discover something that will serve as answer by submitting the author to a simple test. Take a sensitive author and place before him a hostile review. Symptoms of pain and anger rapidly develop. Next tell him that nobody save himself will read those abusive remarks. In five or ten minutes the pain which, if the attack had been delivered in public, would have lasted a week and bred bitter rancour, is completely over. The temperature falls; indifference returns. This proves that the sensitive part is the reputation; what the victim feared was the effect of abuse upon the opinion that other people had of him. He is afraid, too, of the effect of abuse upon his purse. But the purse sensibility is in most cases far less highly-developed than the reputation sensibility. As for the artist’s sensibility—his own opinion of his own work—that is not touched by anything good or bad that the reviewer says about it. The reputation sensibility however is still lively; and it will thus take some time to persuade authors that the Gutter and Stamp system is as satisfactory as the present reviewing system. They will say that they have “reputations”—bladders of opinion formed by what other people think about them; and that these bladders are inflated or deflated by what is said of them in print. Still, under present conditions the time is at hand when even the author will believe that nobody thinks the better or the worse of him because he is praised or blamed in print. Soon he will come to realize that his interests—his desire for fame and money—are as effectively catered for by the Gutter and Stamp system as by the present reviewing system.

But even when this stage is reached, the author may still have some ground for complaint. The reviewer did serve some end besides that of inflating reputations and stimulating sales. And Mr. Nicolson has put his finger on it. “I want to tell them why I either like or dislike their work.” The author wants to be told why Mr. Nicolson likes or dislikes his work. This is a genuine desire. It survives the test of privacy. Shut doors and windows; pull the curtains. Ensure that no fame accrues or money; and still it is a matter of the very greatest interest to a writer to know what an honest and intelligent reader thinks about his work.

4

At this point let us turn once more to the reviewer. There can be no doubt that his position at the present moment, judging both from the outspoken remarks of Mr. Nicolson and from the internal evidence of the reviews themselves, is extremely unsatisfactory. He has to write in haste and to write shortly. Most of the books he reviews are not worth the scratch of a pen upon paper—it is futile to refer them to “eternal standards”. He knows further, as Matthew Arnold has stated, that even if the conditions were favourable, it is impossible for the living to judge the works of the living. Years, many years, according to Matthew Arnold, have to pass before it is possible to deliver an opinion that is not “only personal, but personal with passion”. And the reviewer has one week. And authors are not dead but living. And the living are friends or enemies; have wives and families; personalities and politics. The reviewer knows that he is hampered, distracted, and prejudiced. Yet knowing all this and having proof in the wild contradictions of contemporary opinion that it is so, he has to submit a perpetual succession of new books to a mind as incapable of taking a fresh impression or of making a dispassionate statement as an old piece of blotting paper on a post office counter. He has to review; for he has to live; and he has to live, since most reviewers come of the educated class, according to the standards of that class. Thus he has to write often, and he has to write much. There is, it seems, only one alleviation of the horror, that he enjoys telling authors why he likes or dislikes their books.

5

The one element in reviewing that is of value to the reviewer himself (independently of the money earned) is the one element that is of value to the author. The problem then is how to preserve this value—the value of the dialogue as Mr. Nicolson calls it—and to bring both parties together in a union that is profitable, to the minds and purses of both. It should not be a difficult problem to solve. The medical profession has shown the way. With some differences the medical custom might be imitated—there are many resemblances between doctor and reviewer, between patient and author. Let the reviewers then abolish themselves or what relic remains of them, as reviewers, and resurrect themselves as doctors. Another name might be chosen—consultant, expositor or expounder; some credentials might be given, the books written rather than the examinations passed; and a list of those ready and authorized to practise made public. The writer then would submit his work to the judge of his choice; an appointment would be made; an interview arranged. In strict privacy, and with some formality—the fee, however, would be enough to ensure that the interview did not degenerate into tea-table gossip—doctor and writer would meet; and for an hour they would consult upon the book in question. They would talk, seriously and privately. This privacy in the first place would be an immeasurable advantage to them both. The consultant would speak honestly and openly, because the fear of affecting sales and of hurting feelings would be removed. Privacy would lessen the shop window temptation to cut a figure, to pay off scores. The consultant would have no library public to inform and consider; no reading public to impress and amuse. He could thus concentrate upon the book itself, and upon telling the author why he likes or dislikes it. The author would profit equally. An hour’s private talk with a critic of his own choosing would be incalculably more valuable than the five hundred words of criticism mixed with extraneous matter that is now allotted him. He could state his case. He could point to his difficulties. He would no longer feel, as so often at present, that the critic is talking about something that he has not written. Further, he would have the advantage of coming into touch with a well-stored mind, housing other books and even other literatures, and thus other standards; with a live human being, not with a man in a mask. Many bogeys would lose their horns. The louse would become a man. By degrees the writer’s “reputation” would drop off. He would become quit of that tiresome appendage and its irritable consequences—such are a few of the obvious and indisputable advantages that privacy would ensure.

Next there is the financial question—would the profession of expositor be as profitable as the profession of reviewer? How many authors are there who would wish to have an expert opinion on their work? The answer to this is to be heard crying daily and crying loudly in any publisher’s office or in any author’s post bag. “Give me advice,” they repeat, “give me criticism”. The number of authors seeking criticism and advice genuinely, not for advertising purposes but because their need is acute, is an abundant proof of the demand. But would they pay the doctor’s fee of three guineas? When they discovered, as certainly they would, how much more an hour of talk holds, even if it costs three guineas, than the hurried letter which they now extort from the harassed publisher’s reader, or the five hundred words which is all they can count on from the distracted reviewer, even the indigent would think it an investment worth making. Nor is it only the young and needy who seek advice. The art of writing is difficult; at every stage the opinion of an impersonal and disinterested critic would be of the highest value. Who would not spout the family teapot in order to talk with Keats for an hour about poetry, or with Jane Austen about the art of fiction?

6

There remains finally the most important, but the most difficult of all these questions—what effect would the abolition of the reviewer have upon literature? Some reasons for thinking that the smashing of the shop window would make for the better health of that remote goddess have already been implied. The writer would withdraw into the darkness of the workshop; he would no longer carry on his difficult and delicate task like a trouser mender in Oxford Street, with a horde of reviewers pressing their noses to the glass and commenting to a curious crowd upon each stitch. Hence his self-consciousness would diminish and his reputation would shrivel. No longer puffed this way and that, now elated, now depressed, he could attend to his work. That might make for better writing. Again the reviewer, who must now earn his pence by cutting shop window capers to amuse the public and to advertise his skill, would have only the book to think of and the writer’s needs. That might make for better criticism.

But there might be other and more positive advantages. The Gutter and Stamp system by eliminating what now passes for literary criticism—those few words devoted to “why I like or dislike this book”—will save space. Four or five thousand words, possibly, might be saved in the course of a month or two. And an editor with that space at his disposal might not only express his respect for literature, but actually prove it. He might spend that space, even in a political daily or weekly, not upon stars and snippets, but upon unsigned and uncommercial literature—upon essays, upon criticism. There may be a Montaigne among us—a Montaigne now severed into futile slices of one thousand to fifteen hundred words weekly. Given time and space he might revive, and with him an admirable and now almost extinct form of art. Or there may be a critic among us—a Coleridge, a Matthew Arnold. He is now frittering himself away, as Mr. Nicolson has shown, upon a miscellaneous heap of poems, plays, novels, all to be reviewed in one column by Wednesday next. Given four thousand words, even twice a year, the critic might emerge, and with him those standards, those “eternal standards”, which if they are never referred to, far from being eternal cease to exist. Do we not all know that Mr. A writes better or it may be worse than Mr. B? But is that all we want to know? Is that all we ought to ask?

But to sum up, or rather to heap a little cairn of conjectures and conclusions at the end of these scattered remarks for somebody else to knock down. The review, it is contended, increases selfconsciousness and diminishes strength. The shop window and the looking-glass inhibit and confine. By putting in their place discussion—fearless and disinterested discussion—the writer would gain in range, in depth, in power. And this change would tell eventually upon the public mind. Their favourite figure of fun, the author, that hybrid between the peacock and the ape, would be removed from their derision, and in his place would be an obscure workman doing his job in the darkness of the workshop and not unworthy of respect. A new relationship might come into being, less petty and less personal than the old. A new interest in literature, a new respect for literature might follow. And, financial advantages apart, what a ray of light that would bring, what a ray of pure sunlight a critical and hungry public would bring into the darkness of the workshop!

NOTE
By Leonard Woolf

This pamphlet raises questions of considerable importance to literature, journalism, and the reading public. With many of its arguments I agree, but some of its conclusions seem to me doubtful because the meaning of certain facts has been ignored or their weight under-estimated. The object of this note is to draw attention to these facts and to suggest how they may modify the conclusions.

In the eighteenth century a revolution took place in the reading public and in the economic organization of literature as a profession. Goldsmith, who lived through the revolution, has given us a clear picture of what took place and an admirable analysis of its effects. There was an enormous expansion of the reading public. Hitherto the writer had written and the publisher published for a small, cultured, literary public. The author and publisher depended economically upon a patron or patrons, and books were luxury articles produced for a small, luxury-consuming class. The expansion of the reading public destroyed this system and substituted another. It became economically possible for the publisher to publish books for “the public”; to sell a sufficient number of copies to pay his expenses, including a living wage to the author, and make a profit for himself. This killed the patronage system and eliminated the patron. It opened the way to the cheap book, read by thousands instead of by tens. The author, if he wanted to make a living by writing, now had to write for “the public” instead of for the patron. Whether this change of system was on the whole good or bad for literature and the writer may be a subject of dispute; it is, however, to be noted that Goldsmith, who had experienced both systems and is generally considered to have produced at least one “work of art”, was wholeheartedly in favour of the new. The new system inevitably produced the reviewer, just as it produced modern journalism, of which the reviewer is only a small and particular phase. As the number of readers increased and with them the number of books and writers and publishers, two things happened: writing and publishing became highly competitive trades or professions and a need arose of giving to the vast reading public information regarding the contents and quality of the books published so that each person would have something to go on in making his selection of the books to read out of the thousands published.

Modern journalism saw its opportunity to meet this demand for information about new books and invented reviewing and the reviewer. As the size, differentiation, and quality of the reading public has changed, so too have the number, variety, and quality of books changed. This has entailed, no doubt, a change in the number, the variety, and the quality of reviewers. But the function of the reviewer remains fundamentally the same: it is to give to readers a description of the book and an estimate of its quality in order that he may know whether or not it is the kind of book which he may want to read.

Reviewing is therefore quite distinct from literary criticism. The reviewer, unlike the critic, in 999 cases out of 1,000 has nothing to say to the author; he is talking to the reader. On the rare occasions when he finds that he is reviewing a real work of art, if he is honest and intelligent, he will have to warn his readers against the fact and descend or ascend for a short time into the regions of true criticism. But to assume that, because of this, the art of reviewing is easy and mechanical is a complete misapprehension. I can speak with the experience of a journalist who was responsible for years for getting reviews and reviewers on a reputable paper. Reviewing is a highly-skilled profession. There are incompetent and dishonest reviewers, just as there are incompetent and dishonest politicians, carpenters, and writers; but the standard of competence and honesty is as high in reviewing as in any other trade or profession of which I have had inside knowledge. It is not at all an easy thing to give a clear, intelligent, and honest analysis of a novel or a book of poems. The fact that in the exceptional cases in which the book reviewed may have some claims to be a new work of art two reviewers take sometimes diametrically opposite views is really irrelevant and does not alter the fact that the vast majority of reviews give an accurate and often interesting account of the book reviewed.

Literary magazines have failed because they have fallen between two stools. The modern reading public is not interested in literary criticism and you cannot sell it to them. The monthly or quarterly which hopes to print literary criticism and pay is doomed to disappointment. Most of them have therefore tried to butter the bread of criticism with reviewing. But the public which wants reviewing will not pay 2s. 6d., 3s. 6d., or 5s. for it monthly or quarterly when they can get it just as good in the dailies and weeklies.

So much for the reviewer, the reading public, and the critic. One word about the writer. The writer who wants to write works of art and make a living by doing so is in a difficult position. As an artist the critic and criticism may be of immense value or interest to him. But he has no right to complain that the reviewer does not perform the function of critic for him. If he wants criticism, he should adopt the ingenious suggestion made in this pamphlet. But that will not make the reviewer unnecessary or unimportant to him. If he wants to sell his books to the great reading public and the circulating libraries, he will still need the reviewer—and that is why he will probably, like Tennyson and Dickens, continue to abuse the reviewer when the review is not favourable.

[pamphlet, The Hogarth Press, Nov 2, 1939]

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Modern Letters.

Among the commonplaces, this one takes a prominent place—that the art of letter writing is dead; that it flourished in the days of the frank, dwindled under the penny post, and was dealt its death blow by the telephone—now it lies feebly expiring. Once in a way it might be well to look into this truism, to examine the day’s post, to compare the flimsy sheets of to-day, rapidly written over in such various hands with those statelier compositions that were a week, or perhaps a month, on the road, and were, therefore, written in much better hands upon paper that still lies crisp between thumb and finger.

There, of course, lie some of the chief distinctions between the old letters and the new, more care, more time went to their composition. But need we take it for granted that care and time are wholly to the good? A letter then was written to be read and not by one person only. It was a composition that did its best to deserve the expense it cost. The arrival of the post was an occasion. The sheets were not for the waste-paper basket in five minutes, but for handing round, and reading aloud and then for deposit in some family casket as a record. These undoubtedly were inducements to careful composition, to the finishing of sentences, the artful disposition of trifles, the polish of phrases, the elaboration of arguments and the arts of the writing master. But whether Sir William Temple, who wished to know if Dorothy was well and happy and to be assured that she loved him, enjoyed her letters as much as we enjoy them is perhaps doubtful. Sir Horace Mann or West or Gray did not, one guesses, break the seals of Walpole’s thick packets in a hurry. One can imagine that they waited for a good fire, and a bottle of wine, and a group of friends and then read the witty and delightful pages aloud, in perfect confidence that nothing was going to be said that was too private for another ear—indeed, the very opposite was the case—such wit, such polish, such a budget of news was too good for a single person and demanded to be shared with others. Often, more often than not, the great letter writers were suppressed novelists, frustrated essayists born before their time. In our day, Dorothy Osborne would have been an admirable biographer, and Walpole one of our most distinguished and prolific journalists—whether to the profit or loss of the world it is impossible to say. Indisputably they practised to perfection a peculiar art, born of special circumstances, but to go on, as we in our rash condemnatory mood so often do, to say that their art was the art of letter writing and that we have lost it, and that our art, because it differs from theirs, is no art at all, seems an unnecessary act of pessimism and self-depreciation.

Here, of course, there should be laid down once and for all the principles of letter writing. But since Aristotle never got so far and since the art has always been an anonymous and hand-to-mouth practice, whose chief adepts would have been scandalized had they been convicted of design or intention, it will be more convenient to leave those principles obscure. Let us turn, therefore, without a yard measure to examine the morning’s post, and those posts of other mornings that have been thrust pell-mell into old drawers more from laziness than from any desire to preserve a record for posterity. These pages came by post, were addressed by one person to one person, fell into the letterbox, and were laid on the breakfast table—that is all. In the first place, they are very badly written. Whether the invention of the fountain pen is to blame, certainly a well-formed handwriting is now the rarest of happy discoveries. Moreover, no common style of writing prevails. Here it slants, here it bends back; it is rapid, and running in almost every case. The paper too is of all sizes and coloured blue, green, yellow; much of it is shoddy enough, and coated with some smooth glaze which will no doubt turn traitor before fifty years are passed. This haphazard harum scarum individuality is reflected in the style. There is none at first showing—each writer makes his own. Urgent need is the begetter of most of these pages. The writers have forgotten, or want to know, or wish to be sure, or must remind one. A sentence about the weather may be thrown in as make weight; an initial is scrawled, the stamp stuck on upside down, and so off it goes. The whole affair is purely utilitarian.

Besides these, however, though not so common, are letters written mostly from abroad with the old wish to get into touch with a friend, to give news, to communicate in short what would be said in a private conversation. A friend marooned in a Spanish inn, one travelling in Italy, one who has taken up his residence in India, these are now the nearest representatives of Cowper at Olney writing to Lady Hesketh at Bath. But with what a difference! In the first place nobody would be so rash as to read a modern letter, even from Rangoon, in mixed company. One does not know what is coming next. Modern letter writers are highly indiscreet. Almost certainly there is some phrase that will cause pain. Very careful editing is needed before a letter can be read aloud to friends. And then our conventions allow of so much freedom of speech—language is so colloquial, slap dash, and unpruned that the presence of someone of another generation would be a grave deterrent. What is sincerity might be mistaken for coarseness. Further, the modern letter writer is so casual, and so careless of the forms and ceremonies of literature, that the pages do not stand the ordeal of reading aloud well. But then, on the other hand, the privacy, the intimacy of these letters make them far more immediately interesting and exciting than the old letters. There is no news for the whole world in them, because newspapers have made that unneeded. Only one person is written to, and the writer had some reason for wishing to write to him or her in particular. Its meaning is private, its news intimate. For these reasons it is a rash incriminating document and the proper place for it is not between the pages of the family Bible but in a drawer with a key.

There then, pell-mell, with all their imperfections thick upon them, they are stuffed—to-day’s post on top of yesterday’s post and so on, undocketed, unsorted, as they came. And as the years pass so they accumulate. The drawers are almost bursting with letters; some of the writers are dead, others have vanished; others write no more. What is to be done with them? Let us look quickly through them and see whether the time has not come to burn them. But once begin dipping and diving, reading this and reading that, and what to do with them is completely forgotten. Page after page is turned. Here are invitations to parties ten years old. Here are postcards demanding the return of lost umbrellas. Here are childish sheets thanking for boxes of water-colour paints. Here are calculations about the cost of building a house. Here are long, wild, profuse letters, all about somebody who did not want, it seems, to marry somebody else. The effect is indescribable. One could swear one heard certain voices, smelt certain flowers, was in Italy, was in Spain, was horribly bored, terribly unhappy, tremendously excited all over again. If the art of letter writing consists in exciting the emotions, in bringing back the past, in reviving a day, a moment, nay a very second, of past time, then these obscure correspondents, with their hasty haphazard ways, their gibes and flings, their irreverence and mockery, their careful totting up of days and dates, their general absorption in the moment and entire carelessness what posterity will think of them, beat Cowper, Walpole, and Edward Fitzgerald hollow. Yes, but what to do with them? The question remains, for as one reads it becomes perfectly plain that the art of letter writing has now reached a stage, thanks to the penny post and telephone, where it is not dead—that is the last word to apply to it—but so much alive as to be quite unprintable. The best letters of our time are precisely those that can never be published.

[written in 1930]

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Reading.

Why did they choose this particular spot to build the house on? For the sake of the view perhaps. Not, I suppose, that they looked at views as we look at them, but rather as an incentive to ambition, as a proof of power. For in time they were lords of that valley, green with trees, and owned at least all that part of the moor that lies on the right-hand side of the road. At any rate the house was built here, here a stop was put to trees and ferns; here one room was laid upon another, and down some feet into the earth foundations were thrust and deep cool cellars hollowed out.

The house had its library; a long low room, lined with little burnished books, folios, and stout blocks of divinity. The cases were carved with birds pecking at clusters of wooden fruit. A sallow priest tended them, dusting the books and the carved birds at the same time. Here they all are; Homer and Euripides; Chaucer; then Shakespeare; and the Elizabethans, and following come the plays of the Restoration, more handled these, and greased as if from midnight reading, and so down to our time or very near it, Cowper, Burns, Scott, Wordsworth and the rest. I liked that room. I liked the view across country that one had from the window, and the blue line between the gap of the trees on the moor was the North Sea. I liked to read there. One drew the pale armchair to the window, and so the light fell over the shoulder upon the page. The shadow of the gardener mowing the lawn sometimes crossed it, as he led his pony in rubber shoes up and down, the machine giving a little creak, which seemed the very voice of summer, as it turned and drew another broad belt of green by the side of the one just cut. Like the wake of ships I used to think them, especially when they curved round the flower beds for islands, and the fuchsias might be lighthouses, and the geraniums, by some freak of fancy, were Gibraltar; there were the red coats of the invincible British soldiers upon the rock.

Then tall ladies used to come out of the house and go down the grass drives to be met by the gentlemen of those days, carrying racquets and white balls which I could just see, through the bushes that hid the tennis lawn, bounding over the net, and the figures of the players passed to and fro. But they did not distract me from my book; any more than the butterflies visiting the flowers, or the bees doing their more serious business on the same blossoms, or the thrushes hopping lightly from the low branches of the sycamore to the turf, taking two steps in the direction of some slug or fly, and then hopping, with light decision, back to the low branch again. None of these things distracted me in those days; and somehow or another, the windows being open, and the book held so that it rested upon a background of escalonia hedges and distant blue, instead of being a book it seemed as if what I read was laid upon the landscape not printed, bound, or sewn up, but somehow the product of trees and fields and the hot summer sky, like the air which swam, on fine mornings, round the outlines of things.

These were circumstances, perhaps, to turn one’s mind to the past. Always behind the voice, the figure, the fountain there seemed to stretch an immeasurable avenue, that ran to a point of other voices, figures, fountains which tapered out indistinguishably upon the furthest horizon. If I looked down at my book I could see Keats and Pope behind him, and then Dryden and Sir Thomas Browne—hosts of them merging in the mass of Shakespeare, behind whom, if one peered long enough, some shapes of men in pilgrims’ dress emerged, Chaucer perhaps, and again—who was it? some uncouth poet scarcely able to syllable his words; and so they died away.

But, as I say, even the gardener leading his pony was part of the book, and, straying from the actual page, the eye rested upon his face, as if one reached it through a great depth of time. That accounted for the soft swarthy tint of the cheeks, and the lines of his body, scarcely disguised by the coarse brown stuff of his coat, might have belonged to any labouring man in any age, for the clothing of the field labourer has changed little since Saxon days, and a half-shut eye can people a field much as it was before the Norman conquest. This man took his place naturally by the side of those dead poets. He ploughed; he sowed; he drank; he marched in battle sometimes; he sang his song; he came courting and went underground raising only a green wave in the turf of the churchyard, but leaving boys and girls behind him to continue his name and lead the pony across the lawn, these hot summer mornings.

Through that same layer of time one could see, with equal clearness, the more splendid figures of knights and ladies. One could see them; that is true. The ripe apricot of the ladies’ dress, the gilt crimson of the knights set floating coloured images in the dark ripples of the lake water. In the church too you see them laid out as if in triumphant repose, their hands folded, their eyes shut, their favourite hounds at their feet, and all the shields of their ancestors, faintly touched still with blue and red, supporting them. Thus garnished and made ready they seem to await, to expect, in confidence. The day of judgment dawns. His eyes open, his hand seeks hers, he leads her forth through the opened doors and the lines of angels with their trumpets, to some smoother lawn, more regal residence and mansions of whiter masonry. Meanwhile, the silence is scarcely broken by a word. It is, after all, a question of seeing them.

For the art of speech came late to England. These Fanshawes and Leghs, Verneys, Pastons, and Hutchinsons, all well endowed by birth and nature and leaving behind them such a treasure of inlaid wood and old furniture, things curiously made and delicately figured, left with it only a very broken message or one so stiff that the ink seems to have dried as it traced the words. Did they, then, enjoy these possessions in silence, or was the business of life transacted in a stately way to match these stiff polysyllables and branching periods? Or, like children on a Sunday, did they compose themselves and cease their chatter when they sat down to write what would pass from hand to hand, serve for winter gossip round a dozen firesides, and be laid up at length with other documents of importance in the dry room above the kitchen fireplace?

“In October, as I told you,” wrote Lady Fanshawe some time about the year 1601, “my husband and I went into France by way of Portsmouth where, walking by the seaside … two ships of the Dutch shot bullets at us, so near that we heard them whiz by us: at which I called my husband to make haste back, and began to run. But he altered not his pace, saying, if we must be killed, it were as good to be killed walking as running.” There, surely, it is the spirit of dignity that controls her. The bullets whiz across the sand, but Sir Richard walks no faster, and summons up his idea of death—death visible, tangible, an enemy, but an enemy of flesh and blood to be met courageously with drawn sword like a gentleman—which temper she poor woman admires, though she cannot, on the beach at Portsmouth, altogether imitate. Dignity, loyalty, magnanimity—such are the virtues she would commend, and frame her speech to, checking it from its natural slips and trifles, and making believe that life for people of gentle birth and high morality was thus decorous and sublime. The pen, too, when the small shot of daily life came whizzing about her—eighteen children in twenty-one years she bore and buried the greater part—must curb itself to walk slowly, not to run. Writing is with them, as it can no longer be with us, making; making something that will endure and wear a brave face in the eyes of posterity. For posterity is the judge of these ideals, and it is for that distant and impartial public that Lady Fanshawe writes and Lucy Hutchinson, and not for John in London or Elizabeth married and gone to live in Sussex; there is no daily post for children and friends bringing to the breakfast table not only news of crops and servants, visitors and bad weather, but the subtler narrative of love and coldness, affection waning or carried on secure; there is no language it seems for that frail burden. Horace Walpole, Jane Carlyle, Edward Fitzgerald are ghosts on the very outskirts of time. Thus these ancestors of ours, though stately and fair to look upon, are silent; they move through galleries and parks in the midst of a little oasis of silence which holds the intruding modern spirit at bay. Here, again, are the Leghs; generations upon generations of them, all red haired, all living at Lyme, which has been building these three centuries and more, all men of education, character, and opportunity, and all, by modern standards, dumb. They will write of a fox hunt and how afterward “a Bowie of Hott Punch with ye Fox’s foot stew’d in it” was drunk, and how “Sir Willm drunk pretty plentifully, and just at last perceive’d he should be fuddled, ‘but,’ quoth he, ‘I care not if I am, I have kill’d a fox to-day’.” But having killed their fox, drunk their punch, raced their horses, fought their cocks, and toasted, discreetly, the King over the water, or, more openly, “A Fresh Earth and High Metaled Terrier,” their lips shut, their eyes close; they have nothing more to say to us. Taciturn or crass as we may think them, dull men inheriting their red hair and very little brain beneath it, nevertheless more business was discharged by them, more of life took its mould from them than we can measure, or, indeed, dispense with. If Lyme had been blotted out and the thousand other houses of equal importance which lay about England like little fortresses of civilization, where you could read books, act plays, make laws, meet your neighbours, and talk with strangers from abroad, if these spaces won from the encroaching barbarity had not persisted till the foothold was firm and the swamp withheld, how would our more delicate spirits have fared—our writers, thinkers, musicians, artists—without a wall to shelter under, or flowers upon which to sun their wings? Waging war year after year upon winter and rough weather, needing all their faculties to keep the roof sound, the larder full, the children taught and clothed, dependents cared for, naturally our ancestors appear in their spare time rather surly and silent—as ploughboys after a long day’s work scrape the mud from their boots, stretch the cramped muscles of their backs, and stumble off to bed without thought of book or pen or evening paper. The little language of affection and intimacy which we seek in vain necessitates soft pillows, easy chairs, silver forks, private rooms; it must have at its command a store of little words, nimble and domesticated, coming at the call of the lightest occasion, refining themselves to the faintest shadow. Above all perhaps, good roads and carriages, frequent meetings, partings, festivities, alliances, and ruptures are needed to break up the splendid sentences; easy chairs it may be were the death of English prose. The annals of an old and obscure family like the Leghs show clearly enough how the slow process of furnishing the bare rooms and taking coach for London, as a matter of course, abolish its isolation, merge the dialect of the district into the common speech of the land, and teach, by degrees, a uniform method of spelling. One can see in fancy the face itself changing, and the manner of father to son, mother to daughter, losing what must have been their tremendous formality, their unquestioned authority. But what dignity, what beauty broods over it all!

It’s a hot summer morning. The sun has browned the outermost leaves of the elm trees, and already, since the gale, one or two lie on the grass, having completed the whole range of existence from bud to withered fibre and become nothing but leaves to be swept up for the autumn bonfires. Through the green arches the eye with a curious desire seeks the blue which it knows to be the blue of the sea; and knowing it can somehow set the mind off upon a voyage, can somehow encircle all this substantial earth with the flowing and the unpossessed. The sea—the sea—I must drop my book, the pious Mrs. Hutchinson, and leave her to make what terms she can with Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle. There’s a sweeter air outside—how spicy, even on a still day, after the house!—and bushes of verbena and southernwood yield a leaf as one passes to be crushed and smelt. If we could see also what we can smell—if, at this moment crushing the southernwood, I could go back through the long corridor of sunny mornings, boring my way through hundreds of Augusts, I should come in the end, passing a host of less-important figures, to no less a person than Queen Elizabeth herself. Whether some tinted waxwork is the foundation of my view, I do not know; but she always appears very distinctly in the same guise. She flaunts across the terrace superbly and a little stiffly like the peacock spreading its tail. She seems slightly infirm, so that one is half inclined to smile; and then she raps out her favourite oath as Lord Herbert of Cherbury heard it, as he bowed his knee among the courtiers, when, far from being infirm, she shows a masculine and rather repulsive vigour. Perhaps, under all that stiff brocade, she has not washed her shrivelled old body? She breakfasts off beer and meat and handles the bones with fingers rough with rubies. It may be so, yet Elizabeth, of all our kings and queens, seems most fit for that gesture which bids the great sailors farewell, or welcomes them home to her presence again, her imagination still lusting for the strange tales they bring her, her imagination still young in its wrinkled and fantastic casket. It is their youth; it is their immense fund of credulity; their minds still unwritten over and capable of such enormous designs as the American forests cast upon them, or the Spanish ships, or the savages, or the soul of man—this is what makes it impossible, walking the terrace, not to look upon the blue sea line, and think of their ships. The ships, Froude says, were no bigger than a modern English yacht. As they shrink and assume the romantic proportions of the Elizabethan ship, so the sea runs enormously larger and freer and with bigger waves upon it than the sea of our time. The summons to explore, to bring back dyes and roots and oil, and find a market for wool and iron and cloth has been heard in the villages of the West. The little company gathers together somewhere off Greenwich. The courtiers come running to the palace windows; the Privy Councillors press their faces to the panes. The guns are shot off in salute, and then, as the ships swing down the tide, one sailor after another walks the hatches, climbs the shrouds, stands upon the mainyards to wave his friends a last farewell. For directly England and the coast of France are beneath the horizon, the ships swim into the unfamiliar, the air has its voices, the sea its lions and serpents, evaporations of fire and tumultuous whirlpools. The clouds but sparely hide the Divinity; the limbs of Satan are almost visible. Riding in company through the storm, suddenly one light disappears; Sir Humfrey Gilbert has gone beneath the waves: when morning comes they seek his ship in vain. Sir Hugh Willoughby sails to discover the North-West passage, and makes no return. Sometimes, a ragged and worn out man comes knocking at the door, and claims to be the boy who went years ago to sea and is now come back to his father’s house. “Sir William his father and my lady his mother knew him not to be their son, until they found a secret mark, which was a wart upon one of his knees.” But he brings with him a black stone, veined with gold, or an ivory tusk, or a lamp of silver, and stories of how such stones are strewn about to be picked up off the ground as you will. What if the passage to the fabled land of uncounted riches lay only a little further up the coast? What if the known world was only the prelude to some more splendid panorama? When, after the long voyage, the ships dropped anchor in the great river of the Plate and the men went exploring through the undulating lands, startling the grazing herds of deer and glimpsing between the trees the dusky limbs of savages, they filled their pockets with pebbles that might be emeralds, or rubies, or sand that might be gold. Sometimes, rounding a headland, they saw far off a string of savages slowly descending to the beach bearing on their heads and linking their shoulders together with heavy burdens for the Spanish king.

These are the fine stories, used effectively all through the West Country to decoy the strong men lounging by the harbour side to leave their nets and fish for gold. Less glorious but more urgent, considering the state of the country, was the summons of the more serious-minded to set on foot some intercourse between the merchants of England and the merchants of the East. For lack of work, this staid observer wrote, the poor of England were driven to crime and “daily consumed with the gallows”. Wool they had in plenty, fine, soft, strong, and durable; but no market for it and few dyes. Gradually owing to the boldness of private travellers, the native stock had been improved and embellished. Beasts and plants had been imported; and along with them the seeds of all our roses. Gradually little groups of merchant men settled here and there on the borders of the unexplored, and through their fingers the precious stream of coloured and rare and curious things begins slowly and precariously to flow towards London; our fields are sown with new flowers. In the south and west, in America and the East Indies, the life was pleasanter and success more splendid; yet in the land of long winters and squat-faced savages the very darkness and strangeness draw the imagination. Here they are, three or four men from the west of England set down in the white landscape with only the huts of savages near them, and left to make what bargains they can and pick up what knowledge they can, until the little ships, no bigger than yachts, appear at the mouth of the bay next summer. Strange must have been their thoughts; strange the sense of the unknown; and of themselves, the isolated English, burning on the very rim of the dark, and the dark full of unseen splendours. One of them, carrying a charter from his company in London, went inland as far as Moscow, and there saw the Emperor, “sitting in his chair of estate, with his crown on his head, and a staff of goldsmith work in his left hand.” All the ceremony that he saw is carefully written out, and the sight upon which the English merchant, the vanguard of civilization, first set eyes has the brilliancy still of a Roman vase or other shining ornament dug up and stood for a moment in the sun before, exposed to the air, seen by millions of eyes, it dulls and crumbles away. There, all these centuries, the glories of Moscow, the glories of Constantinople, have flowered unseen. Many are preserved as if under shades of glass. The Englishman, however, is bravely dressed for the occasion, leads in his hand, perhaps, “three fair mastiffs in coats of red cloth” and carries a letter from Elizabeth “the paper whereof did smell most fragrantly of camphor and ambergris, and the ink of perfect musk.”

Yet if by means of these old records, courts and palaces and Sultans’ presence chambers are once more displayed, stranger still are the little disks of light calling out of obscurity for a second some unadorned savage, falling like lantern light upon moving figures. Here is a story of the savage caught somewhere off the coast of Labrador, taken to England and shown about like a wild beast. Next year they bring him back and fetch a woman savage on board to keep him company. When they see each other they blush; they blush profoundly; the sailor notices it but knows not why it is. And later the two savages set up house together on board ship, she attending to his wants, he nursing her in sickness, but living as the sailors note, in perfect chastity. The erratic searchlight cast by these records falling for a second upon those blushing cheeks three hundred years ago, among the snow, sets up that sense of communication which we are apt to get only from fiction. We seem able to guess why they blushed; the Elizabethans would notice it, but it has waited over three hundred years for us to interpret it.

There are not perhaps enough blushes to keep the attention fixed upon the broad yellow-tinged pages of Hakluyt’s book. The attention wanders. Still if it wanders, it wanders in the green shade of forests. It floats far out at sea. It is soothed almost to sleep by the sweet-toned voices of pious men talking the melodious language, much broader and more sonorous sounding than our own, of the Elizabethan age. They are men of fine limbs, arched brows, beneath which the oval eyes are full and luminous, and thin golden rings are in their ears. What need have they of blushes? What meeting would rouse such emotions in them? Why should they whittle down feelings and thoughts so as to cause embarrassment and bring lines between the eyes and perplex them, so that it is no longer a ship or a man that comes before them, but some thing doubtful as a phantom, and more of a symbol than a fact? If one tires of the long dangerous and memorable voyages of M. Ralph Fitch, M. Roger Bodenham, M. Anthony Jenkinson, M. John Lok, the Earl of Cumberland and others, to Pegu and Siam, Candia and Chio, Aleppo and Muscovy, it is for the perhaps unsatisfactory reason that they make no mention of oneself; seem altogether oblivious of such an organism; and manage to exist in comfort and opulence nevertheless. For simplicity of speech by no means implies rudeness or emptiness. Indeed this free-flowing, equable narrative, though now occupied merely with the toils and adventures of ordinary ships companies, has its own true balance, owing to the poise of brain and body arrived at by the union of adventure and physical exertion with minds still tranquil and unstirred as the summer sea.

In all this there is no doubt much exaggeration, much misunderstanding. One is tempted to impute to the dead the qualities we find lacking in ourselves. There is balm for our restlessness in conjuring up visions of Elizabethan magnanimity; the very flow and fall of the sentences lulls us asleep, or carries us along as upon the back of a large, smooth-paced cart horse, through green pastures. It is the pleasantest atmosphere on a hot summer’s day. They talk of their commodities and there you see them; more clearly and separately in bulk, colour, and variety than the goods brought by steamer and piled upon docks; they talk of fruit; the red and yellow globes hang unpicked on virgin trees; so with the lands they sight; the morning mist is only just now lifting and not a flower has been plucked. The grass has long whitened tracks upon it for the first time. With the towns too discovered for the first time it is the same thing. And so, as you read on across the broad pages with as many slips and somnolences as you like, the illusion rises and holds you of banks slipping by on either side, of glades opening out, of white towers revealed, of gilt domes and ivory minarets. It is, indeed, an atmosphere, not only soft and fine, but rich, too, with more than one can grasp at any single reading.

So that, if at last I shut the book, it was only that my mind was sated, not the treasure exhausted. Moreover, what with reading and ceasing to read, taking a few steps this way and then pausing to look at the view, that same view had lost its colours, and the yellow page was almost too dim to decipher. So the book must be stood in its place, to deepen the brown line of shadow which the folios made on the wall. The books gently swelled neath my hand as I drew it across them in the dark. Travels, histories, memoirs, the fruit of innumerable lives. The dusk was brown with them. Even the hand thus sliding seemed to feel beneath its palm fulness and ripeness. Standing at the window and looking out into the garden, the lives of all these books filled the room behind with a soft murmur. Truly, a deep sea, the past, a tide which will overtake and overflow us. Yes, the tennis players looked half transparent already, as they came up the grass lawn to the house, the game being over. The tall lady stooped and picked a pallid rose; and the balls which the gentleman kept dancing up and down upon his racquet, as he walked beside her, were dim little spheres against the deep green hedge. Then, as they passed inside, the moths came out, the swift grey moths of the dusk, that only visit flowers for a second, never settling, but hanging an inch or two above the yellow of the Evening Primroses, vibrating to a blur. It was, I supposed, nearly time to go into the woods.

About an hour previously, several pieces of flannel soaked in rum and sugar had been pinned to a number of trees. The business of dinner now engrossing the grownup people we made ready our lantern, our poison jar, and took our butterfly nets in our hands. The road that skirted the wood was so pale that its hardness grated upon our boots unexpectedly. It was the last strip of reality, however, off which we stepped into the gloom of the unknown. The lantern shoved its wedge of light through the dark, as though the air were a fine black snow piling itself up in banks on either side of the yellow beam. The direction of the trees was known to the leader of the party, who walked ahead, and seemed to draw us, unheeding darkness or fear, further and further into the unknown world. Not only has the dark the power to extinguish light, but it also buries under it a great part of the human spirit. We hardly spoke, and then only in low voices which made little headway against the thoughts that filled us. The little irregular beam of light seemed the only thing that kept us together, and like a rope prevented us from falling asunder and being engulfed. It went on indefatigably all the time, making tree and bush stand forth, in their strange night-dress of paler green. Then we were told to halt while the leader went forward to ascertain which of the trees had been prepared, since it was necessary to approach gradually lest the moths should be startled by the light and fly off. We waited in a group, and the little circle of forest where we stood became as if we saw it through the lens of a very powerful magnifying glass. Every blade of grass looked larger than by day, and the crevices in the bark much more sharply cut. Our faces showed pale and as if detached in a circle. The lantern had not stood upon the ground for ten seconds before we heard (the sense of hearing too was much more acute) little crackling sounds which seemed connected with a slight waving and bending in the surrounding grass. Then there emerged here a grasshopper, there a beetle, and here again a daddylonglegs, awkwardly making his way from blade to blade. Their movements were all so awkward that they made one think of sea creatures crawling on the floor of the sea. They went straight, as if by common consent, to the lantern, and were beginning to slide or clamber up the glass panes when a shout from the leader told us to advance. The light was turned very cautiously towards the tree; first it rested upon the grass at the foot; then it mounted a few inches of the trunk; as it mounted our excitement became more and more intense; then it gradually enveloped the flannel and the cataracts of falling treacle. As it did so, several wings flitted round us. The light was covered. Once more it was cautiously turned on. There were no whirring wings this time, but here and there, dotted about on the veins of sweet stuff were soft brown lumps. These lumps seemed unspeakably precious, too deeply attached to the liquid to be disturbed. Their probosces were deep plunged, and as they drew in the sweetness, their wings quivered slightly as if in ecstasy. Even when the light was full upon them they could not tear themselves away, but sat there, quivering a little more uneasily perhaps, but allowing us to examine the tracery on the upper wing, those stains, spots, and veinings by which we decided their fate. Now and again a large moth dashed through the light. This served to increase our excitement. After taking those we wanted and gently tapping the unneeded on the nose so that they dropped off and began crawling through the grass in the direction of their sugar, we went on to the next tree. Cautiously shielding the light, we saw from far off the glow of two red lamps which faded as the light turned upon them; and there emerged the splendid body which wore those two red lamps at its head. Great underwings of glowing crimson were displayed. He was almost still, as if he had alighted with his wing open and had fallen into a trance of pleasure. He seemed to stretch across the tree, and beside him other moths looked only like little lumps and knobs on the bark. He was so splendid to look upon and so immobile that perhaps we were reluctant to end him; and yet when, as if guessing our intention and resuming a flight that had been temporarily interrupted, he roamed away, it seemed as if we had lost a possession of infinite value. Somebody cried out sharply. The lantern bearer flashed his light in the direction which the moth had taken. The space surrounding us seemed vast. Then we stood the light upon the ground, and once more after a few seconds, the grass bent, and the insects came scrambling from all quarters, greedy and yet awkward in their desire to partake of the light. Just as the eyes grow used to dimness and make out shapes where none were visible before, so sitting on the ground we felt we were surrounded by life, innumerable creatures were stirring among the trees; some creeping through the grass, others roaming through the air. It was a very still night, and the leaves intercepted any light from the young moon. Now and again a deep sigh seemed to breathe from somewhere near us, succeeded by sighs less deep, more wavering and in rapid succession, after which there was profound stillness. Perhaps it was alarming to have these evidences of unseen lives. It needed great resolution and the fear of appearing a coward to take up the light and penetrate still further into the depths of the wood. Somehow this world of night seemed hostile to us. Cold, alien, and unyielding, as if preoccupied with matters in which human beings could have no part. But the most distant tree still remained to be visited. The leader advanced unrelentingly. The white strip of road upon which our boots had grated now seemed for ever lost. We had left that world of lights and homes hours ago. So we pressed on to this remote tree in the most dense part of the forest. It stood there as if upon the very verge of the world. No moth could have come as far as this. Yet as the trunk was revealed, what did we see? The scarlet underwing was already there, immobile as before, astride a vein of sweetness, drinking deep. Without waiting a second this time the poison pot was uncovered and adroitly manœuvred so that as he sat there the moth was covered and escape cut off. There was a flash of scarlet within the glass. Then he composed himself with folded wings. He did not move again.

The glory of the moment was great. Our boldness in coming so far was rewarded, and at the same time it seemed as though we had proved our skill against the hostile and alien force. Now we could go back to bed and to the safe house. And then, standing there with the moth safely in our hands, suddenly a volley of shot rang out, a hollow rattle of sound in the deep silence of the wood which had I know not what of mournful and ominous about it. It waned and spread through the forest: it died away, then another of those deep sighs arose. An enormous silence succeeded. “A tree,” we said at last. A tree had fallen.

What is it that happens between the hour of midnight and dawn, the little shock, the queer uneasy moment, as of eyes half open to the light, after which sleep is never so sound again? Is it experience, perhaps—repeated shocks, each unfelt at the time, suddenly loosening the fabric? breaking something away? Only this image suggests collapse and disintegration, whereas the process I have in mind is just the opposite. It is not destructive whatever it may be, one might say that it was rather of a creative character.

Something definitely happens. The garden, the butterflies, the morning sounds, trees, apples, human voices have emerged, stated themselves. As with a rod of light, order has been imposed upon tumult; form upon chaos. Perhaps it would be simpler to say that one wakes, after Heaven knows what internal process, with a sense of mastery. Familiar people approach all sharply outlined in morning light. Through the tremor and vibration of daily custom one discerns bone and form, endurance and permanence. Sorrow will have the power to effect this sudden arrest of the fluidity of life, and joy will have the same power. Or it may come without apparent cause, imperceptibly, much as some bud feels a sudden release in the night and is found in the morning with all its petals shaken free. At any rate the voyages and memoirs, all the lumber and wreckage and accumulation of time which has deposited itself so thickly upon our shelves and grows like a moss at the foot of literature, is no longer definite enough for our needs. Another sort of reading matches better with the morning hours. This is not the time for foraging and rummaging, for half closed eyes and gliding voyages. We want something that has been shaped and clarified, cut to catch the light, hard as gem or rock with the seal of human experience in it, and yet sheltering as in a clear gem the flame which burns now so high and now sinks so low in our own hearts. We want what is timeless and contemporary. But one might exhaust all images, and run words through one’s fingers like water and yet not say why it is that on such a morning one wakes with a desire for poetry.

There is no difficulty in finding poetry in England. Every English home is full of it. Even the Russians have not a deeper fountain of spiritual life. With us it is, of course, sunk very deep; hidden beneath the heaviest and dampest deposit of hymn books and ledgers. Yet equally familiar and strangely persistent, in the most diverse conditions of travel and climate, is the loveliness of the hurrying clouds, of the sun-stained green, of the rapid watery atmosphere, in which clouds have been crumbled with colour until the ocean of air is at once confused and profound. There will certainly be a copy of Shakespeare in such a house, another Paradise Lost, and a little volume of George Herbert. There may be almost as probably, though perhaps more strangely, Vulgar Errors and the Religio Medici. For some reason the folios of Sir Thomas Browne are to be found on the lowest shelf of libraries in other respects entirely humdrum and utilitarian. His popularity in the small country house rests perhaps chiefly upon the fact that the Vulgar Errors treats largely of animals. Books with pictures of malformed elephants, baboons of grotesque and indecent appearance, tigers, deer, and so on, all distorted and with a queer facial likeness to human beings, are always popular among people who care nothing for literature. The text of Vulgar Errors has something of the same fascination as these woodcuts. And then it may not be fanciful to suppose that even in the year nineteen hundred and nineteen a great number of minds are still only partially lit up by the cold light of knowledge. It is the most capricious illuminant. They are still apt to ruminate, without an overpowering bias to the truth, whether a kingfisher’s body shows which way the wind blows; whether an ostrich digests iron; whether owls and ravens herald ill-fortune; and the spilling of salt bad luck; what the tingling of ears forebodes, and even to toy pleasantly with more curious speculations as to the joints of elephants and the politics of storks, which came within the province of the more fertile and better-informed brain of the author. The English mind is naturally prone to take its ease and pleasure in the loosest whimsies and humours. Sir Thomas ministers to the kind of wisdom that farmers talk over their ale, and housewives over their tea cups, proving himself much more sagacious and better informed than the rest of the company, but still with the door of his mind wide open for any curious thing that chooses to enter in. For all his learning, the doctor will consider what we have to say seriously and in good faith. He will perhaps give our modest question a turn that sends it spinning among the stars. How charming, for example, to have found a flower on a walk, or a chip of pottery or a stone, that might equally well have been thunderbolt, or cannon ball, and to have gone straightway to knock upon the doctor’s door with a question. No business would have had precedence over such a matter as this, unless indeed someone had been dying or coming into the world. For the doctor was evidently a humane man, and one good to have at the bedside, imperturbable, yet sympathetic. His consolations must have been sublime; his presence full of composure; and then, if something took his fancy, what enlivening speculations he must have poured forth, talking, one guesses, mostly in soliloquy, with the strangest sequences, in a rapt pondering manner, as if not expecting an answer, and more to himself than to a second person.

What second person, indeed, could answer him? At Montpellier and Padua he had learnt, but learning, instead of settling his questions, had, it seems, greatly increased his capacity for asking them. The door of his mind opened more and more widely. In comparison with other men he was indeed learned; he knew six languages; he knew the laws, customs, and policies of several states, the names of all the constellations, and most of the plants of his country; and yet—must one not always break off thus?—“yet methinks, I do not know so many as when I did but know a hundred, and had scarcely ever simpled further than Cheapside.” Suppose indeed that certainty had been attainable; it had been proved to be so, and so it must be; nothing would have been more intolerable to him. His imagination was made to carry pyramids. “Methinks there be not impossibilities enough in religion for an active faith.” But then the grain of dust was a pyramid. There was nothing plain in a world of mystery. Consider the body. Some men are surprised by sickness. Sir Thomas can only “wonder that we are not always so”; he sees the thousand doors that lead to death; and in addition—so he likes to speculate and fantastically accumulate considerations—“it is in the power of every hand to destroy us, and we are beholden unto everyone we meet, who doth not kill us”. What, one asks, as considerations accumulate, is ever to stop the course of such a mind, unroofed and open to the sky? Unfortunately, there was the Deity. His faith shut in his horizon. Sir Thomas himself resolutely drew that blind. His desire for knowledge, his eager ingenuity, his anticipations of truth, must submit, shut their eyes, and go to sleep. Doubts he calls them. “More of these no man hath known than myself; which I confess I conquered, not in a martial posture, but on my knees.” So lively a curiosity deserved a better fate. It would have delighted us to feed what Sir Thomas calls his doubts upon a liberal diet of modern certainties, but not if by so doing we had changed him, but that is the tribute of our gratitude. For is he not, among a variety of other things, one of the first of our writers to be definitely himself? His appearance has been recorded—his height moderate, his eyes large and luminous, his skin dark, and constantly suffused with blushes. But it is the more splendid picture of his soul that we feast upon. In that dark world, he was one of the explorers; the first to talk of himself, he broaches the subject with an immense gusto. He returns to it again and again, as if the soul were a wondrous disease and its symptoms not yet recorded. “The world that I regard is myself; it is the microcosm of my own frame that I cast mine eye on: for the other I use it but like my globe, and turn it round sometimes for my recreation.” Sometimes, he notes, and he seems to take a pride in the strange gloomy confession, he has wished for death. “I feel sometimes a hell within myself; Lucifer keeps his court in my breast; Legion is revived in me.” The strangest ideas and emotions have play in him, as he goes about his work, outwardly the most sober of mankind, and esteemed the greatest physician in Norwich. Yet, if his friends could see into his mind! But they cannot. “I am in the dark to all the world, and my nearest friends behold me but in a cloud.” Strange beyond belief are the capacities that he detects in himself, profound the meditation into which the commonest sight will plunge him, while the rest of the world passes by and sees nothing to wonder at. The tavern music, the Ave Mary Bell, the broken pot that the workman has dug out of the field—at the sight and sound of them he stops dead, as if transfixed by the astonishing vista. “And surely it is not a melancholy conceit to think we are all asleep in this world, and that the conceits of this life are as mere dreams——” No one so raises the vault of the mind, and, admitting conjecture after conjecture, positively makes us stand still in amazement, unable to bring ourselves to move on.

With such a conviction of the mystery and miracle of things, he is unable to reject, disposed to tolerate and contemplate without end. In the grossest superstition there is something of devotion; in tavern music something of divinity: in the little world of man something “that was before the elements and owes no homage unto the sun”. He is hospitable to everything and tastes freely of whatever is set before him. For upon this sublime prospect of time and eternity, the cloudy vapours which his imagination conjures up, there is cast the figure of the author. It is not merely life in general that fills him with amazement, but his own life in particular, “which to relate were not a history, but a piece of poetry, and would sound to common ears like a fable.” The littleness of egotism has not as yet attacked the health of his interest in himself. I am charitable, I am brave I am averse from nothing, I am full of feeling for others, I am merciless upon myself, “For my conversation, it is like the sun’s, with all men, and with a friendly aspect to good and bad”; I, I, I—how we have lost the secret of saying that!

In short Sir Thomas Browne brings in the whole question, which is afterwards to become of such importance, of knowing one’s author. Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied, as when, listening to a speaker, we begin to speculate about his age and habits, whether he is married, has children, and lives in Hampstead? It is a question to be asked, and not one to be answered. It will be answered, that is to say, in an instinctive and irrational manner, as our disposition inclines us. Only one must note that Sir Thomas is the first English writer to rouse this particular confusion with any briskness. Chaucer—but Chaucer’s spelling is against him. Marlowe then, Spencer, Webster, Ben Jonson? The truth is the question never presents itself quite so acutely in the case of a poet. It scarcely presents itself at all in the case of the Greeks and Latins. The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mould of the body and mind entire.

Could one not deduce from reading his books that Sir Thomas Browne, humane and tolerant in almost every respect, was nevertheless capable of a mood of dark superstition in which he would pronounce that two old women were witches and must be put to death? Some of his pedantries have the very clink of the thumbscrew: the heartless ingenuity of a spirit still cramped and fettered by the bonds of the Middle Ages. There were impulses of cruelty in him as in all people forced by their ignorance or weakness to live in a state of servility to man or nature. There were moments, brief but intense, in which his serene and magnanimous mind contracted in a spasm of terror. More often by far he is, as all great men are, a little dull. Yet the dullness of the great is distinct from the dullness of the little. It is perhaps more profound. We enter into their shades acquiescent and hopeful, convinced that if light is lacking the fault is ours. A sense of guilt, as the horror increases, mingles itself with our protest and increases the gloom. Surely, we must have missed the way? If one stitched together the passages in Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Milton, every great writer in short who has left more than a song or two behind him, where the light has failed us, and we have only gone on because of the habit of obedience, they would make a formidable volume—the dullest book in the world.

Don Quixote is very dull too. But his dullness, instead of having that lethargy as of a somnolent beast which is characteristic of great people’s dullness—“After my enormous labours, I’m asleep and intend to snore if I like,” they seem to say—instead of this dullness Don Quixote has another variety. He is telling stories to children. There they sit round the fire on a winter’s night, grown up children, women at their spinning, men relaxed and sleepy after the day’s sport, “Tell us a story—something to make us laugh—something gallant, too—about people like ourselves only more unhappy and a great deal happier.” Obedient to this demand, Cervantes, a kind accommodating man, spun them stories, about princesses lost and amorous knights, much to their taste, very tedious to ours. Let him but get back to Don Quixote and Sancho Panza and all is well, for him, we cannot help thinking, as for us. Yet what with our natural reverence and inevitable servility, we seldom make our position, as modern readers of old writers, plain. Undoubtedly all writers are immensely influenced by the people who read them. Thus, take Cervantes and his audience—we, coming four centuries later, have a sense of breaking into a happy family party. Compare that group with the group (only there are no groups now since we have become educated and isolated and read our books by our own firesides in our own copies) but compare the readers of Cera Cervantes with the readers of Thomas Hardy. Hardy whiles away no firelit hour with tales of lost princesses and amorous knights—refuses more and more sternly to make things up for our entertainment. As we read him separately so he speaks to us separately, as if we were individual men and women, rather than groups sharing the same tastes. That, too, must be taken into account. The reader of to-day accustomed to find himself in direct communication with the writer, is constantly out of touch with Cervantes. How far did he himself know what he was about—how far again do we over-interpret, mis-interpret, read into Don Quixote a meaning compounded of our own experience, as an elder person might read a meaning into a child’s story and doubt whether the child himself was aware of it? If Cervantes had felt the tragedy and the satire as we feel them, could he have foreborne as he does to stress them—could he have been as callous as he seems? Yet Shakespeare dismissed Falstaff callously enough. The great writers have this large way with them, nature’s way; which we who are further from nature call cruel, since we suffer more from the effects of cruelty, or at any rate judge our suffering of greater importance, than they did. None of this, however, impairs the main pleasure of the jolly, delightful, plain spoken book built up, foaming up, round the magnificent conception of the Knight and the world which, however people may change, must remain for ever an unassailable statement of man and the world. That will always be in existence. And as for knowing himself what he was about—perhaps great writers never do. Perhaps that is why later ages find what they seek.

But to return to the dullest book in the world. To this volume Sir Thomas has added certainly one or two pages. Yet should one desire a loophole to escape it is always possible to find one in the chance that the book is difficult, not dull. Accustomed as we are to strip a whole page of its sentences and crush their meaning out in one grasp, the obstinate resistance which a page of Urne Burial offers at first trips us and blinds us. “Though if Adam were made out of an extract of the Earth, all parts might challenge a restitution, yet few have returned their bones farre lower than they might receive them”—We must stop, go back, try out this way and that, and proceed at a foot’s pace. Reading has been made so easy in our days that to go back to these crabbed sentences is like mounting only a solemn and obstinate donkey instead of going up to town by an electric train. Dilatory, capricious, governed by no consideration save his own wish, Sir Thomas seems scarcely to be writing in the sense that Froude wrote or Matthew Arnold. A page of print now fulfils a different office. Is it not almost servile in the assiduity with which it helps us on our way, making only the standard charge on our attention and in return for that giving us the full measure, but not an ounce over or under our due? In Sir Thomas Browne’s days weights and measures were in a primitive condition, if they had any existence at all. One is conscious all the time that Sir Thomas was never paid a penny for his prose. He is free since it is the offering of his own bounty to give us as little or as much as he chooses. He is an amateur; it is the work of his leisure and pleasure; he makes no bargain with us. Therefore, as Sir Thomas has no call to conciliate his reader, these short books of his are dull if he chooses, difficult if he likes, beautiful beyond measure if he has a mind that way. Here we approach the doubtful region—the region of beauty. Are we not already lost or sunk or enticed with the very first words? “When the Funeral pyre was out, and the last valediction over, men took a lasting adieu to their interred Friends.” But why beauty should have the effect upon us that it does, the strange serene confidence that it inspires in us, none can say. Most people have tried and perhaps one of the invariable properties of beauty is that it leaves in the mind a desire to impart. Some offering we must make; some act we must dedicate, if only to move across the room and turn the rose in the jar, which, by the way, has dropped its petals.

[written in 1919]

[]

The Cinema.

People say that the savage no longer exists in us, that we are at the fag-end of civilization, that everything has been said already, and that it is too late to be ambitious. But these philosophers have presumably forgotten the movies. They have never seen the savages of the twentieth-century watching the pictures. They have never sat themselves in front of the screen and thought how for all the clothes on their backs and the carpets at their feet, no great distance separates them from those bright-eyed naked men who knocked two bars of iron together and heard in that clangour a foretaste of the music of Mozart.

The bars in this case, of course, are so highly wrought and so covered over with accretions of alien matter that it is extremely difficult to hear anything distinctly. All is hubble-bubble, swarm and chaos. We are peering over the edge of a cauldron in which fragments of all shapes and savours seem to simmer; now and again some vast form heaves itself up and seems about to haul itself out of chaos. Yet at first sight the art of the cinema seems simple, even stupid. There is the king shaking hands with a football team; there is Sir Thomas Lipton’s yacht; there is Jack Horner winning the Grand National. The eye licks it all up instantaneously, and the brain, agreeably titillated, settles down to watch things happening without bestirring itself to think. For the ordinary eye, the English unæsthetic eye, is a simple mechanism which takes care that the body does not fall down coalholes, provides the brain with toys and sweetmeats to keep it quiet, and can be trusted to go on behaving like a competent nursemaid until the brain comes to the conclusion that it is time to wake up. What is its purpose, then, to be roused suddenly in the midst of its agreeable somnolence and asked for help? The eye is in difficulties. The eye wants help. The eye says to the brain, “Something is happening which I do not in the least understand. You are needed.” Together they look at the king, the boat, the horse, and the brain sees at once that they have taken on a quality which does not belong to the simple photograph of real life. They have become not more beautiful in the sense in which pictures are beautiful, but shall we call it (our vocabulary is miserably insufficient) more real, or real with a different reality from that which we perceive in daily life? We behold them as they are when we are not there. We see life as it is when we have no part in it. As we gaze we seem to be removed from the pettiness of actual existence. The horse will not knock us down. The king will not grasp our hands. The wave will not wet our feet. From this point of vantage, as we watch the antics of our kind, we have time to feel pity and amusement, to generalize, to endow one man with the attributes of the race. Watching the boat sail and the wave break, we have time to open our minds wide to beauty, and register on top of it the queer sensation—this beauty will continue, and this beauty will flourish whether we behold it or not. Further, all this happened ten years ago, we are told. We are beholding a world which has gone beneath the waves. Brides are emerging from the abbey—they are now mothers; ushers are ardent—they are now silent; mothers are tearful; guests are joyful; this has been won and that has been lost, and it is over and done with. The war sprung its chasm at the feet of all this innocence and ignorance but it was thus that we danced and pirouetted, toiled and desired, thus that the sun shone and the clouds scudded, up to the very end.

But the picture-makers seem dissatisfied with such obvious sources of interest as the passage of time and the suggestiveness of reality. They despise the flight of gulls, ships on the Thames, the Prince of Wales, the Mile End Road, Piccadilly Circus. They want to be improving, altering, making an art of their own—naturally, for so much seems to be within their scope. So many arts seemed to stand by ready to offer their help. For example, there was literature. All the famous novels of the world, with their well-known characters and their famous scenes, only asked, it seemed, to be put on the films. What could be easier and simpler? The cinema fell upon its prey with immense rapacity, and to the moment largely subsists upon the body of its unfortunate victim. But the results are disastrous to both. The alliance is unnatural. Eye and brain are torn asunder ruthlessly as they try vainly to work in couples. The eye says “Here is Anna Karenina.” A voluptuous lady in black velvet wearing pearls comes before us. But the brain says, “That is no more Anna Karenina than it is Queen Victoria.” For the brain knows Anna almost entirely by the inside of her mind—her charm, her passion, her despair. All the emphasis is laid by the cinema upon her teeth, her pearls, and her velvet. Then “Anna falls in love with Vronsky”—that is to say, the lady in black velvet falls into the arms of a gentleman in uniform and they kiss with enormous succulence, great deliberation, and infinite gesticulation, on a sofa in an extremely well-appointed library, while a gardener incidentally mows the lawn. So we lurch and lumber through the most famous novels of the world. So we spell them out in words of one syllable, written, too, in the scrawl of an illiterate schoolboy. A kiss is love. A broken cup is jealousy. A grin is happiness. Death is a hearse. None of these things has the least connexion with the novel that Tolstoy wrote, and it is only when we give up trying to connect the pictures with the book that we guess from some accidental scene—like the gardener mowing the lawn—what the cinema might do if left to its own devices.

But what, then, are its devices? If it ceased to be a parasite, how would it walk erect? At present it is only from hints that one can frame any conjecture. For instance, at a performance of Dr. Caligari the other day a shadow shaped like a tadpole suddenly appeared at one corner of the screen. It swelled to an immense size, quivered, bulged, and sank back again into nonentity. For a moment it seemed to embody some monstrous diseased imagination of the lunatic’s brain. For a moment it seemed as if thought could be conveyed by shape more effectively than by words. The monstrous quivering tadpole seemed to be fear itself, and not the statement “I am afraid”. In fact, the shadow was accidental and the effect unintentional. But if a shadow at a certain moment can suggest so much more than the actual gestures and words of men and women in a state of fear, it seems plain that the cinema has within its grasp innumerable symbols for emotions that have so far failed to find expression. Terror has besides its ordinary forms the shape of a tadpole; it burgeons, bulges, quivers, disappears. Anger is not merely rant and rhetoric, red faces and clenched fists. It is perhaps a black line wriggling upon a white sheet. Anna and Vronsky need no longer scowl and grimace. They have at their command—but what? Is there, we ask, some secret language which we feel and see, but never speak, and, if so, could this be made visible to the eye? Is there any characteristic which thought possesses that can be rendered visible without the help of words? It has speed and slowness; dartlike directness and vaporous circumlocution. But it has, also, especially in moments of emotion, the picture-making power, the need to lift its burden to another bearer; to let an image run side by side along with it. The likeness of the thought is for some reason more beautiful, more comprehensible, more available, than the thought itself. As everybody knows, in Shakespeare the most complex ideas form chains of images through which we mount, changing and turning, until we reach the light of day. But obviously the images of a poet are not to be cast in bronze or traced by pencil. They are compact of a thousand suggestions of which the visual is only the most obvious or the uppermost. Even the simplest image “My luve’s like a red, red rose, that’s newly-sprung in June” presents us with impressions of moisture and warmth and the glow of crimson and the softness of petals inextricably mixed and strung upon the lift of a rhythm which is itself the voice of the passion and hesitation of the lover. All this, which is accessible to words and to words alone, the cinema must avoid.

Yet if so much of our thinking and feeling is connected with seeing, some residue of visual emotion which is of no use either to painter or to poet may still await the cinema. That such symbols will be quite unlike the real objects which we see before us seems highly probable. Something abstract, something which moves with controlled and conscious art, something which calls for the very slightest help from words or music to make itself intelligible, yet justly uses them subserviently—of such movements and abstractions the films may in time to come be composed. Then indeed when some new symbol for expressing thought is found, the film-maker has enormous riches at his command. The exactitude of reality and its surprising power of suggestion are to be had for the asking. Annas and Vronskys—there they are in the flesh. If into this reality he could breathe emotion, could animate the perfect form with thought, then his booty could be hauled in hand over hand. Then, as smoke pours from Vesuvius, we should be able to see thought in its wildness, in its beauty, in its oddity, pouring from men with their elbows on a table; from women with their little handbags slipping to the floor. We should see these emotions mingling together and affecting each other.

We should see violent changes of emotion produced by their collision. The most fantastic contrasts could be flashed before us with a speed which the writer can only toil after in vain; the dream architecture of arches and battlements, of cascades falling and fountains rising, which sometimes visits us in sleep or shapes itself in half-darkened rooms, could be realized before our waking eyes. No fantasy could be too far-fetched or insubstantial. The past could be unrolled, distances annihilated, and the gulfs which dislocate novels (when, for instance, Tolstoy has to pass from Levin to Anna and in doing so jars his story and wrenches and arrests our sympathies) could by the sameness of the background, by the repetition of some scene, be smoothed away.

How all this is to be attempted, much less achieved, no one at the moment can tell us. We get intimations only in the chaos of the streets, perhaps, when some momentary assembly of colour, sound, movement, suggests that here is a scene waiting a new art to be transfixed. And sometimes at the cinema in the midst of its immense dexterity and enormous technical proficiency, the curtain parts and we behold, far off, some unknown and unexpected beauty. But it is for a moment only. For a strange thing has happened—while all the other arts were born naked, this, the youngest, has been born fully-clothed. It can say everything before it has anything to say. It is as if the savage tribe, instead of finding two bars of iron to play with, had found scattering the seashore fiddles, flutes, saxophones, trumpets, grand pianos by Erard and Bechstein, and had begun with incredible energy, but without knowing a note of music, to hammer and thump upon them all at the same time.

[Arts, New York, June 1926]

[]

Walter Sickert.

Though talk is a common habit and much enjoyed, those who try to record it are aware that it runs hither and thither, seldom sticks to the point, abounds in exaggeration and inaccuracy, and has frequent stretches of extreme dullness. Thus when seven or eight people dined together the other night the first ten minutes went in saying how very difficult it is to get about London nowadays; was it quicker to walk or to drive; did the new system of coloured lights help or hinder? Just as dinner was announced, somebody asked: “But when were picture galleries invented?”, a question naturally arising, for the discussing about the value of coloured lights had led somebody to say that in the eyes of a motorist red is not a colour but simply a danger signal. We shall very soon lose our sense of colour, another added, exaggerating, of course. Colours are used so much as signals now that they will very soon suggest action merely—that is the worst of living in a highly organized community. Other instances of the change wrought upon our senses by modern conditions were then cited; how buildings are changing their character because no one can stand still to look at them; how statues and mosaics removed from their old stations and confined to the insides of churches and private houses lose the qualities proper to them in the open air. This naturally led to the question when picture galleries were first opened, and as no precise answer was forthcoming the speaker went on to sketch a fancy picture of an inventive youth having to wait his turn to cross Ludgate Circus in the reign of Queen Anne. “Look,” he said to himself, “how the coaches cut across the corner! That poor old boy,” he said, “positively had to put his hand to his pigtail. Nobody any longer stops to look at St. Paul’s. Soon all these swinging signboards will be dismantled. Let me take time by the forelock,” he said, and, going to his bank, which was near at hand, drew out what remained of his patrimony, and invested it in a neat set of rooms in Bond Street, where he hung the first show of pictures ever to be displayed to the public. Perhaps that is the origin of the House of Agnew’s; perhaps their gallery stands on the site of the house that was leased, so foreseeingly, by the young man over two hundred years ago. Perhaps, said the others; but nobody troubled to verify the statement, for it was a bitter cold night in December and the soup stood upon the table.

In course of time the talk turned, as talk has a way of turning, back on itself—to colour; how different people see colour differently; how painters are affected by their place of birth, whether in the blue South or the grey North; how colour blazes, unrelated to any object, in the eyes of children; how politicians and business men are blind, days spent in an office leading to atrophy of the eye; and so, by contrast, to those insects, said still to be found in the primeval forests of South America, in whom the eye is so developed that they are all eye, the body a tuft of leather, serving merely to connect the two great chambers of vision. Somebody had met a man whose business it was to explore the wilder parts of the world in search of cactuses, and from him had heard of these insects who are born with the flowers and die when the flowers fade. A hard-headed man, used to roughing it in all parts of the world, yet there was something moving to him in the sight of these little creatures drinking crimson until they became crimson; then flitting on to violet; then to a vivid green, and becoming for the moment the thing they saw—red, green, blue, whatever the colour of the flower might be. At the first breath of winter, he said, when the flowers died, the life went out of them, and you might mistake them as they lay on the grass for shrivelled air-balls. Were we once insects like that, too, one of the diners asked; all eye? Do we still preserve the capacity for drinking, eating, indeed becoming colour furled up in us, waiting proper conditions to develop? For as the rocks hide fossils, so we hide tigers, baboons, and perhaps insects, under our coats and hats. On first entering a picture gallery, whose stillness, warmth and seclusion from the perils of the street reproduce the conditions of the primeval forest, it often seems as if we reverted to the insect stage of our long life.

“On first entering a picture gallery”—there was silence for a moment. Many pictures were being shown in London at that time. There was the famous Holbein; there were pictures by Picasso and Matisse; young English painters were holding an exhibition in Burlington Gardens, and there was a show of Sickert’s pictures at Agnew’s. When I first went into Sickert’s show, said one of the diners, I became completely and solely an insect—all eye. I flew from colour to colour, from red to blue, from yellow to green. Colours went spirally through my body lighting a flare as if a rocket fell through the night and lit up greens and browns, grass and trees, and there in the grass a white bird. Colour warmed, thrilled, chafed, burnt, soothed, fed and finally exhausted me. For though the life of colour is a glorious life it is a short one. Soon the eye can hold no more; it shuts itself in sleep, and if the man who looks for cactuses had come by he would only have seen a shrivelled air-ball on a red plush chair.

That is an exaggeration, a dramatization, the others said. Nobody, who can walk down Bond Street in the year 1933, without exciting suspicion in the heart of the policeman, can simplify sufficiently to see colour only. One must be a fly in order to die in aromatic pain. And it is many ages now since we lost “the microscopic eye”. Ages ago we left the forest and went into the world, and the eye shrivelled and the heart grew, and the liver and the intestines and the tongue and the hands and the feet. Sickert’s show proves the truth of that soon enough. Look at his portraits: Charles Bradlaugh at the Bar of the House of Commons; the Right Honourable Winston Churchill, M.P.; Rear-Admiral Lumsden, C.I.E., C.V.O.; and Dr. Cobbledick. These gentlemen are by no means simple flowers. In front of Sickert’s portraits of them we are reminded of all that we have done with all our organs since we left the jungle. The face of a civilized human being is a summing-up, an epitome of a million acts, thoughts, statements and concealments. Yes, Sickert is a great biographer, said one of them; when he paints a portrait I read a life. Think of his picture of the disillusioned lady in full evening-dress sitting on a balcony in Venice. She has seen every sort of sunrise and sunset whether dressed in diamonds or white night-gown; now all is ruin and shipwreck; and yet the tattered ship in the background still floats. For though Sickert is a realist he is by no means a pessimist … Laughter drowned the last words. The portrait of the lady on the balcony had suggested nothing of the kind to most of the others. Had she lovers or not—it did not matter; did the ship sail or did it sink—they did not care. And they fetched a book of photographs from Sickert’s paintings and began cutting off a hand or a head, and made them connect or separate, not as a hand or a head but as if they had some quite different relationship.

Now they are going into the silent land; soon they will be out of reach of the human voice, two of the diners said, watching them. They are seeing things that we cannot see, just as a dog bristles and whines in a dark lane when nothing is visible to human eyes. They are making passes with their hands, to express what they cannot say; what excites them in those photographs is something so deeply sunk that they cannot put words to it. But we, like most English people, have been trained not to see but to talk. Yet it may be, they went on, that there is a zone of silence in the middle of every art. The artists themselves live in it. Coleridge could not explain Kubla Khan—that he left to the critics. And those who are almost on a par with the artists, like our friends who are looking at the pictures, cannot impart what they feel when they go beyond the outskirts. They can only open and shut their fingers. We must resign ourselves to the fact that we are outsiders, condemned for ever to haunt the borders and margins of this great art. Nevertheless that is a region of very strong sensations. First, on entering a picture gallery, the violent rapture of colour; then, when we have soused our eyes sufficiently in that, there is the complexity and intrigue of character. I repeat, said one of them, that Sickert is among the best of biographers. When he sits a man or woman down in front of him he sees the whole of the life that has been lived to make that face. There it is—stated. None of our biographers make such complete and flawless statements. They are tripped up by those miserable impediments called facts; was he born on such a day; was his mother’s name Jane or Mary; then the affair with the barmaid has to be suppressed out of deference to family feeling; and there is always, brooding over him with its dark wings and hooked beak, the Law of Libel. Hence the three or four hundred pages of compromise, evasion, understatement, overstatement, irrelevance and downright falsehood which we call biography. But Sickert takes his brush, squeezes his tube, looks at the face; and then, cloaked in the divine gift of silence, he paints—lies, paltriness, splendour, depravity, endurance, beauty—it is all there and nobody can say, “But his mother’s name was Jane not Mary.” Not in our time will anyone write a life as Sickert paints it. Words are an impure medium; better far to have been born into the silent kingdom of paint.

But to me Sickert always seems more of a novelist than a biographer, said the other. He likes to set his characters in motion, to watch them in action. As I remember it, his show was full of pictures that might be stories, as indeed their names suggest—Rose et Marie; Christine buys a house; A difficult moment. The figures are motionless, of course, but each has been seized in a moment of crisis; it is difficult to look at them and not to invent a plot, to hear what they are saying. You remember the picture of the old publican, with his glass on the table before him and a cigar gone cold at his lips, looking out of his shrewd little pig’s eyes at the intolerable wastes of desolation in front of him? A fat woman lounges, her arm on a cheap yellow chest of drawers, behind him. It is all over with them, one feels. The accumulated weariness of innumerable days has discharged its burden on them. They are buried under an avalanche of rubbish. In the street beneath, the trams are squeaking, children are shrieking. Even now somebody is tapping his glass impatiently on the bar counter. She will have to bestir herself; to pull her heavy, indolent body together and go and serve him. The grimness of that situation lies in the fact that there is no crisis; dull minutes are mounting, old matches are accumulating and dirty glasses and dead cigars; still on they must go, up they must get.

And yet it is beautiful, said the other; satisfactory; complete in some way. Perhaps it is the flash of the stuffed birds in the glass case, or the relation of the chest of drawers to the woman’s body; anyhow, there is a quality in that picture which makes me feel that though the publican is done for, and his disillusion complete, still in the other world, of which he is mysteriously a part without knowing it, beauty and order prevail; all is right there—or does that convey nothing to you? Perhaps that is one of the things that is better said with a flick of the fingers, said the other. But let us go on living in the world of words a little longer. Do you remember the picture of the girl sitting on the edge of her bed half naked? Perhaps it is called Nuit d’Amour. Anyhow, the night is over. The bed, a cheap iron bed, is tousled and tumbled; she has to face the day, to get her breakfast, to see about the rent. As she sits there with her night-gown slipping from her shoulders, just for a moment the truth of her life comes over her; she sees in a flash the little garden in Wales and the dripping tunnel in the Adelphi where she began, where she will end, her days. So be it, she says, and yawns and shrugs and stretches a hand for her stockings and chemise. Fate has willed it so. Now a novelist who told that story would plunge—how obviously—into the depths of sentimentality. How is he to convey in words the mixture of innocence and sordidity, pity and squalor? Sickert merely takes his brush and paints a tender green light on the faded wallpaper. Light is beautiful falling through green leaves. He has no need of explanation; green is enough. Then again there is the story of Marie and Rose—a grim, a complex, a moving and at the same time a heartening and rousing story. Marie on the chair has been sobbing out some piteous plaint of vows betrayed and hearts broken to the woman in the crimson petticoat. “Don’t be a damned fool, my dear,” says Rose, standing before her with her arms akimbo. “I know all about it,” she says, standing there in the intimacy of undress, experienced, seasoned, a woman of the world. And Marie looks up at her with all her illusions tearfully exposed and receives the full impact of the other’s knowledge, which, however, perhaps because of the glow of the crimson petticoat, does not altogether wither her. There is too much salt and savour in it. She takes heart again. Down she trips past the one-eyed char with a pail, out into the street, a wiser woman than she went in. “So that’s what life is,” she says, brushing the tear from her eye and hailing the omnibus. There are any number of stories and three-volume novels in Sickert’s exhibition.

But to what school of novelists does he belong? He is a realist, of course, nearer to Dickens than to Meredith. He has something in common with Balzac, Gissing and the earlier Arnold Bennett. The life of the lower middle class interests him most—of innkeepers, shopkeepers, music-hall actors and actresses. He seems to care little for the life of the aristocracy whether of birth or of intellect. The reason may be that people who inherit beautiful things sit much more loosely to their possessions than those who have bought them off barrows in the street with money earned by their own hands. There is a gusto in the spending of the poor; they are very close to what they possess. Hence the intimacy that seems to exist in Sickert’s pictures between his people and their rooms. The bed, the chest of drawers, the one picture and the vase on the mantelpiece are all expressive of the owner. Merely by process of use and fitness the cheap furniture has rubbed its varnish off; the grain shows through; it has the expressive quality that expensive furniture always lacks; one must call it beautiful, though outside the room in which it plays its part it would be hideous in the extreme. Diamonds and Sheraton tables never submit to use like that. But whatever Sickert paints has to submit; it has to lose its separateness; it has to compose part of his scene. He chooses, therefore, the casual clothes of daily life that have taken the shape of the body; the felt hat with one feather that a girl has bought with sixpence off a barrow in Berwick Market. He likes bodies that work, hands that work, faces that have been lined and suppled and seamed by work, because, in working, people take unconscious gestures, and their faces have the expressiveness of unconsciousness—a look that the very rich, the very beautiful and the very sophisticated seldom possess. And of course Sickert composes his picture down to the very castors on the chairs and the fire-irons in the grate just as carefully as Turgenev, of whom he sometimes reminds me, composes his scene.

There are many points one could argue in that statement, said the other. But certainly it would seem to be true that Sickert is the novelist of the middle class. At the same time, though he prefers to paint people who use their hands rather than the leisured, he never sinks below a certain level in the social scale. Like most painters, he has a profound love of the good things of life; well-cooked food, good wine, fine cigars. His world abounds in richness and succulence and humour. He could not draw breath in a starved, a stunted or a puritanical universe. His people are always well fed in body and mind; they excel in mother wit and shrewd knowledge of the world. Some of their sayings are really a little broad; I have always wondered that the censor has let them pass. There is always good company in his pictures. Nothing could be more enjoyable than to sit behind the shop with the French innkeeper—that formidable man in the frock-coat whose name I forget. He would offer us a very fine cigar; uncork a bottle kept for his private use; and Madame would join us from the glass-house where she keeps accounts, and we should sit and talk and sing songs and crack jokes.

Yes, and in the middle of our songs we should look up and see red-gold light dripping down into the green waters of the canal. We should suddenly become aware of a grey church looming over us and one pink cloud riding down the bosom of the west. We should see it suddenly over the shoulders of the innkeeper; and then we should go on talking. That is how Sickert makes us aware of beauty—over the shoulders of the innkeeper; for he is a true poet, of course, one in the long line of English poets, and not the least. Think of his Venice, of his landscapes; or of those pictures of music-halls, of circuses, of street markets, where the acute drama of human character is cut off; and we no longer make up stories but behold—is it too much to say a vision? But it would be absurd to class Sickert among the visionaries; he is not a rhapsodist; he does not gaze into the sunset; he does not lead us down glorious vistas to blue horizons and remote ecstasies. He is not a Shelley or a Blake. We see his Venice from a little table on the Piazza, just as we are lifting a glass to our lips. Then we go on talking. His paint has a tangible quality; it is made not of air and star-dust but of oil and earth. We long to lay hands on his clouds and his pinnacles; to feel his columns round and his pillars hard beneath our touch. One can almost hear his gold and red dripping with a little splash into the waters of the canal. Moreover, human nature is never exiled from his canvas—there is always a woman with a parasol in the foreground, or a man selling cabbages in the shadow of the arch. Even when he paints a formal eighteenth-century town like Bath, he puts a great cart-wheel in the middle of the road. And those long French streets of pale pink and yellow stucco are all patched and peeled; a child’s pink frock hangs out to dry; there are marble-topped tables at the corner. He never goes far from the sound of the human voice, from the mobility and idiosyncrasy of the human figure. As a poet, then, we must liken him to the poets who haunt taverns and sea beaches where the fishermen are tumbling their silver catch into wicker baskets. Crabbe, Wordsworth, Cowper are the names that come to mind, the poets who have kept close to the earth, to the house, to the sound of the natural human voice.

But here the speakers fell silent. Perhaps they were thinking that there is a vast distance between any poem and any picture; and that to compare them stretches words too far. At last, said one of them, we have reached the edge where painting breaks off and takes her way into the silent land. We shall have to set foot there soon, and all our words will fold their wings and sit huddled like rooks on the tops of the trees in winter. But since we love words let us dally for a little on the verge, said the other. Let us hold painting by the hand a moment longer, for though they must part in the end, painting and writing have much to tell each other: they have much in common. The novelist after all wants to make us see. Gardens, rivers, skies, clouds changing, the colour of a woman’s dress, landscapes that bask beneath lovers, twisted woods that people walk in when they quarrel—novels are full of pictures like these. The novelist is always saying to himself how can I bring the sun on to my page? How can I show the night and the moon rising? And he must often think that to describe a scene is the worst way to show it. It must be done with one word, or with one word in skilful contrast with another. For example, there is Shakespeare’s “Dear as the ruddy drops that visit this sad heart”. Does not “ruddy” shine out partly because “sad” comes after it; does not “sad” convey to us a double sense of the gloom of the mind and the dullness of colour? They both speak at once, striking two notes to make one chord, stimulating the eye of the mind and of the body. Then again there is Herrick’s

“More white than are the whitest creams,

Or moonlight tinselling the streams.”

where the word “tinselling” adds to the simplicity of “white” the glittering, sequined, fluid look of moonlit water. It is a very complex business, the mixing and marrying of words that goes on, probably unconsciously, in the poet’s mind to feed the reader’s eye. All great writers are great colourists, just as they are musicians into the bargain; they always contrive to make their scenes glow and darken and change to the eye. Each of Shakespeare’s plays has its dominant colour. And each writer differs of course as a colourist. Pope has no great range of colours; he is more draughtsman than colourist; clear washes of indigo, discreet blacks and violets best suit his exquisite sharp outlines—save that in the Elegy to an Unfortunate Lady there is a mass of funeral black; and the great image of the Eastern King glows, fantastically, if you like, dark crimson. Keats uses colour lavishly, lusciously, like a Venetian. In the Eve of St. Agnes he paints for lines at a time, dipping his pen in mounds of pure reds and blues. Tennyson on the other hand is never luscious; he uses the hard brush and the pure bright tints of a miniature painter. The Princess is illuminated like a monk’s manuscript; there are whole landscapes in the curves of the capital letters. You almost need a magnifying glass to see the minuteness of the detail.

Undoubtedly, they agreed, the arts are closely united. What poet sets pen to paper without first hearing a tune in his head? And the prose-writer, though he makes believe to walk soberly, in obedience to the voice of reason, excites us by perpetual changes of rhythm following the emotions with which he deals. The best critics, Dryden, Lamb, Hazlitt, were acutely aware of the mixture of elements, and wrote of literature with music and painting in their minds. Nowadays we are all so specialized that critics keep their brain fixed to the print, which accounts for the starved condition of criticism in our time, and the attenuated and partial manner in which it deals with its subject.

But we have gossiped long enough, they said; it is time to make an end. The silent land lies before us. We have come within sight of it many times while we were talking; when, for example, we said that Rose’s red petticoat satisfied us; when we said that the chest of drawers and the arm convinced us that all was well with the world as a whole. Why did the red petticoat, the yellow chest of drawers, make us feel something that had nothing to do with the story? We could not say; we could not express in words the effect of those combinations of line and colour. And, thinking back over the show, we have to admit that there is a great stretch of silent territory in Sickert’s pictures. Consider once more the picture of the music-hall. At first it suggests the husky voice of Marie Lloyd singing a song about the ruins that Cromwell knocked about a bit; then the song dies away, and we see a scooped-out space filled curiously with the curves of fiddles, bowler hats, and shirt fronts converging into a pattern with a lemon-coloured splash in the centre. It is extraordinarily satisfying. Yet the description is so formal, so superficial, that we can hardly force our lips to frame it; while the emotion is distinct, powerful and satisfactory.

Yes, said the other, it is not a description at all; it leaves out the meaning. But what sort of meaning is that which cannot be expressed in words? What is a picture when it has rid itself of the companionship of language and of music. Let us ask the critics.

But the critics were still talking with their fingers. They were still bristling and shivering like dogs in dark lanes when something passes that we cannot see.

They have gone much farther into the forest than we shall ever go, said one of the talkers, sadly. We only catch a glimpse now and then of what lives there; we try to describe it and we cannot; and then it vanishes, and having seen it and lost it, exhaustion and depression overcome us; we recognize the limitations which Nature has put upon us, and so turn back to the sunny margin where the arts flirt and joke and pay each other compliments.

But do not let us fall into despair, said the other. I once read a letter from Walter Sickert in which he said, “I have always been a literary painter, thank goodness, like all the decent painters.” Perhaps then he would not altogether despise us. When we talk of his biographies, his novels, and his poems we may not be so foolish as it seems. Among the many kinds of artists, it may be that there are some who are hybrid. Some, that is to say, bore deeper and deeper into the stuff of their own art; others are always making raids into the lands of others. Sickert it may be is among the hybrids, the raiders. His name itself suggests that he is of mixed birth. I have read that he is part German, part English, part Scandinavian perhaps; he was born in Munich, was educated at Reading, and lived in France. What more likely than that his mind is also cosmopolitan; that he sings a good song, writes a fine style, and reads enormously in four or five different languages? All this filters down into his brush. That is why he draws so many different people to look at his pictures. From his photograph you might take him for a highly distinguished lawyer with a nautical bent; the sort of man who settles a complicated case at the Law Courts, then changes into an old serge suit, pulls a yachting-cap with a green peak over his eyes and buffets about the North Sea with a volume of Æschylus in his pocket. In the intervals of hauling up and down the mainsail he wipes the salt from his eyes, whips out a canvas and paints a divinely lovely picture of Dieppe, Harwich, or the cliffs of Dover. That is the sort of man I take Walter Sickert to be. You should call him Richard Sickert, said the other—Richard Sickert, R.A. But since he is probably the best painter now living in England, whether he is called Richard or Walter, whether he has all the letters in the alphabet after his name or none, scarcely matters. Upon that they were all agreed.

[Yale Review, September 1934, as “Walter Sickert: A Conversation”]

[]

Flying over London.

Fifty or sixty aeroplanes were collected in the shed like a flock of grasshoppers. The grasshopper has the same enormous thighs, the same little boatshaped body resting between its thighs, and if touched with a blade of grass, he too springs high into the air.

The mechanics ran the areoplane out on to the turf; and Flight-Lieutenant Hopgood, at whose invitation we had come to make our first flight, stooped down and made the engine roar. A thousand pens have described the sensation of leaving earth; “The earth drops from you,” they say; one sits still and the world has fallen. It is true that the earth fell, but what was stranger was the downfall of the sky. One was not prepared within a moment of taking off to be immersed in it, alone with it, to be in the thick of it. Habit has fixed the earth immovably in the centre of the imagination like a hard ball; everything is made to the scale of houses and streets. And as one rises up into the sky, as the sky pours down over one, this little hard granular knob, with its carvings and frettings, dissolves, crumbles, loses its domes, its pinnacles, its firesides, its habits, and one becomes conscious of being a little mammal, hot-blooded, hard boned, with a clot of red blood in one’s body, trespassing up here in a fine air; repugnant to it, unclean, antipathetic. Vertebrae, ribs, entrails, and red blood belong to the earth; to the world of brussels sprouts and sheep going awkwardly on four pointed legs. Here are winds tapering, vanishing, and the untimed manoeuvre of clouds, and nothing permanent, but vanishing and melting at the touch of each other without concussion, and the fields that with us are meted into yards and grow punctually wheat and barley are here made and remade perpetually with flourishes of rain and flights of hail and spaces tranquil as the deep sea, and then all is chop and change, breeze and motion. Yet, though we flew through territories with never a hedge or stick to divide them, nameless, unowned, so inveterately anthropocentric is the mind that instinctively the aeroplane becomes a boat and we are sailing towards a harbour and there we shall be received by hands that lift themselves from swaying garments; welcoming, accepting. Wraiths (our aspirations and imaginations) have their home here; and in spite of our vertebrae, ribs, and entrails, we are also vapour and air, and shall be united.

Here Flight-Commander Hopgood by a touch on the lever, turned the nose of the Moth downwards. Nothing more fantastic could be imagined. Houses, streets, banks, public buildings, and habits and mutton and brussels sprouts had been swept into long spirals and curves of pink and purple like that a wet brush makes when it sweeps mounds of paint together. One could see through the Bank of England; all the business houses were transparent; the River Thames was as the Romans saw it, as paleolithic man saw it, at dawn from a hill shaggy with wood, with the rhinoceros digging his horn into the roots of rhododendrons. So immortally fresh and virginal London looked and England was earth merely, merely the world. Flight-Lieutenant Hopgood kept his finger still on the lever which turns the plane downwards. A spark glinted on a greenhouse. There rose a dome, a spire, a factory chimney, a gasometer. Civilization in short emerged; hands and minds worked again; and the centuries vanished and the wild rhinoceros was chased out of sight for ever. Still we descended. Here was a garden; here a football field. But no human being was yet visible; England looked like a ship that sails unmanned. Perhaps the race was dead, and we should board the world like that ship’s company who found the ship sailing with all her sails set, and the kettle on the fire, but not a soul on board. Yet a spot down there, something squat and minute, might be a horse—or a man…. But Hopgood touched another lever and we rose again like a spirit shaking contamination from its wings, shaking gasometers and factories and football fields from its feet.

It was a moment of renunciation. We prefer the other, we seemed to say. Wraiths and sand dunes and mist; imagination; this we prefer to the mutton and the entrails. It was the idea of death that now suggested itself; not being received and welcomed; not immortality but extinction. For the clouds above were black. Across them there passed in single file a flight of gulls, livid white against the leaden background, holding on their way with the authority of owners, having rights, and means of communication unknown to us, an alien, a privileged race. But where there are gulls only, life is not. Life ends; life is dowsed in that cloud as lamps are dowsed with a wet sponge. That extinction has become now desirable. For it was odd in this voyage to note how blindly the tide of the soul and its desires rolled this way and that, carrying consciousness like a feather on the top, marking the direction, not controlling it. And so we swept on now up to death.

Hopgood’s head cased in leather with a furry rim to it had the semblance of a winged pilot, of Charon’s head, remorselessly conducting his passenger to the wet sponge which annihilates. For the mind (one can but repeat these things without claiming sense or truth for them—merely that they were such) is convinced in its own fastness, in its solitude, of extinction, and what is more, proud of it, as if it deserved extinction, extinction profited it more and were more desirable than prolongation on other terms by other wills. Charon, the mind prayed to the back of Flight-Lieutenant Hopgood, carry me on; thrust me deep, deep; till every glimmer of light in me, of heat of knowledge, even the tingling I feel in my toes is dulled; after all this living, all this scratching and tingling of sensation, that too—darkness, dullness, the black wet—will be also a sensation. And such is the incurable vanity of the human mind that the cloud, the wet sponge that was to extinguish, became, now that one thought of a contact with one’s own mind, a furnace in which we roared up, and our death was a fire; brandished at the summit of life, many tongued, blood red, visible over land and sea. Extinction! The word is consummation.

Now we were in the skirts of the cloud and the wings of the aeroplane were spattered with hail; hail shot past silver and straight like the flash of steel railway lines. Innumerable arrows shot at us, down the august avenue of our approach.

Then Charon turned his head with its fringe of fur and laughed at us. It was an ugly face, with high cheek bones, and little deep sunk eyes, and all down one cheek was a crease where he had been cut and stitched together. Perhaps he weighed fifteen stone; he was oak limbed and angular. But for all this nothing now remained of Flight-Lieutenant Hopgood but a flame such as one sees blown thin and furtive at a street corner; a flame that for all its agility can hardly escape death. Such was the Flight-Lieutenant become; and ourselves too, so that the clinging hands, the embraces, the companionship of those about to die together was vanished; there was no flesh. However, just as one comes to the end of an avenue of trees and finds a pond with ducks on it, and nothing but lead-coloured water, so we came through the avenue of hail and out into a pool so still, so quiet, with haze above and cloud below it, so that we seemed to float as a duck floats on a pond. But the haze above us was compact of whiteness. As colour runs to the end of a paint brush, so the blue of the sky had run into one blob beneath it. It was white above us. And now the ribs and the entrails of the sprout-eating mammal began to be frozen, pulverized, frozen to lightness and whiteness of this spectral universe, and nothingness. For no clouds voyaged and lumbered up there; with light fondling them and masses breaking off their slopes or again towering and swelling. Here was no feather, no crease to break the steep wall ascending for ever up, for ever and ever.

And those yellowish lights, Hopgood and oneself, were put out effectively as the sun blanches the flame on a coal. No sponge effaced us, with its damp snout. Nothingness was poured down upon us like a mound of white sand. Then as if some part of us kept its ponderosity, down we fell into fleeciness, substance, and colour; all the colours of pounded plums and dolphins and blankets and seas and rain clouds crushed together, staining—purple, black, steel, all this soft ripeness seethed about us, and the eye felt as a fish feels when it slips from the rock into the depths of the sea.

For a time we were muffled in the clouds. Then the fairy earth appeared, lying far far below, a mere slice or knife blade of colour floating. It rose towards us with extreme speed, broadening and lengthening; forests appeared on it and seas; and then again an uneasy dark blot which soon began to be pricked with spires and blown into bubbles and domes. Nearer and nearer we came together and had again the whole of civilization spread beneath us, silent, empty, like a demonstration made for our instruction; the river with the steamers that bring coal and iron; the churches, the factories, the railways. Nothing moved; nobody worked the machine, until in some field on the outskirts of London one saw a dot actually and certainly move. Though the dot was the size of a bluebottle and its movement minute, reason insisted that it was a horse and it was galloping, but all speed and size were so reduced that the speed of the horse seemed very very slow, and its size minute. Now, however, there were often movements in the streets, as of sliding and stopping; and then gradually the vast creases of the stuff beneath began moving, and one saw in the creases millions of insects moving. In another second they became men, men of business, in the heart of the white city buildings.

Through a pair of Zeiss glasses one could indeed now see the tops of the heads of separate men and could distinguish a bowler from a cap, and could thus be certain of social grades—which was an employer, which was a working man. And one had to change perpetually air values into land values. There were blocks in the city of traffic sometimes almost a foot long; these had to be translated into eleven or twelve Rolls Royces in a row with city magnates waiting furious; and one had to add up the fury of the magnates; and say—even though it was all silent and the block was only a few inches in length, how scandalous the control of the traffic is in the City of London.

But with a turn of his wrist Flight-Lieutenant Hopgood flew over the poor quarters, and there through the Zeiss glasses one could see people looking up at the noise of the aeroplane, and could judge the expression on their faces. It was not one that one sees ordinarily. It was complex. “And I have to scrub the steps,” it seemed to say grudgingly. All the same, they saluted, they sent us greeting; they were capable of flight. And after all, here the head was turned down again and the scrubbing brush was grasped tightly, to fall on the pavement wouldn’t be nice. And they shook their heads; but they looked up at us again. But further on, over Oxford Street perhaps it was, nobody noticed us at all, but went on jostling each other with some furious desire absorbing them, for a sight of something (there was a yellowish flash as we passed overhead) in a shop window. Further, by Bayswater perhaps, where the press was thinner, a face, a figure, something odd in hat or person suddenly caught one’s eye. And then it was odd how one became resentful of all the flags and surfaces and of the innumerable windows symmetrical as avenues, symmetrical as forest groves, and wished for some opening, and to push indoors and be rid of surfaces. Up in Bayswater a door did open, and instantly, of course, there appeared a room, incredibly small, of course, and ridiculous in its attempt to be separate and itself, and then—it was a woman’s face, young, perhaps, at any rate with a black cloak and a red hat that made the furniture—here a bowl, there a sideboard with apples on it, cease to be interesting because the power that buys a mat, or sets two colours together, became perceptible, as one may say that the haze over an electric fire becomes perceptible. Everything had changed its values seen from the air. Personality was outside the body, abstract. And one wished to be able to animate the heart, the legs, the arms with it, to do which it would be necessary to be there, so as to collect; so as to give up this arduous game, as one flies through the air, of assembling things that lie on the surface.

And then the field curved round us, and we were caught in an eddy of green cloth and white racing palings that flew round us like tape, and touched earth and went at an enormous speed, pitching, bumping upon a rocky surface, hard curves, after the plumes of air. We had landed, and it was over.

As a matter of fact, the flight had not begun; for when Flight-Lieutenant Hopgood stooped and made the engine roar, he had found a defect of some sort in the machine, and raising his head, he had said very sheepishly, “’Fraid it’s no go to-day.”

So we had not flown after all.

[written in 1928]

[]

The Sun and the Fish.

It is an amusing game, especially for a dark winter’s morning. One says to the eye Athens; Segesta; Queen Victoria; and one waits, as submissively as possible, to see what will happen next. And perhaps nothing happens, and perhaps a great many things happen, but not the things one might expect. The old lady in horn spectacles—the late Queen—is vivid enough; but somehow she has allied herself with a soldier in Picadilly who is stooping to pick up a coin; with a yellow camel who is swaying through an archway in Kensington Gardens; with a kitchen chair and a distinguished old gentleman waving his hat. Dropped years ago into the mind, she has become stuck about with all sorts of alien matter. When one says Queen Victoria, one draws up the most heterogeneous collection of objects, which it will take a week at least to sort. On the other hand, one may say to oneself Mont Blanc at dawn, the Taj Mahal in the moonlight; and the mind remains a blank. For a sight will only survive in the queer pool in which we deposit our memories if it has the good luck to ally itself with some other emotion by which it is preserved. Sights marry, incongruously, morganatically (like the Queen and the Camel), and so keep each other alive. Mont Blanc, the Taj Mahal, sights which we travelled and toiled to see, fade and perish and disappear because they failed to find the right mate. On our deathbeds we shall see nothing more majestic than a cat on a wall or an old woman in a sun-bonnet.

So, on this dark winter’s morning, when the real world has faded, let us see what the eye can do for us. Show me the eclipse, we say to the eye; let us see that strange spectacle again. And we see at once—but the mind’s eye is only by courtesy an eye; it is a nerve which hears and smells, which transmits heat and cold, which is attached to the brain and rouses the mind to discriminate and speculate—it is only for brevity’s sake that we say that we “see” at once a railway station at night. A crowd is gathered at a barrier; but how curious a crowd! Mackintoshes are slung over their arms; in their hands they carry little cases. They have a provisional, extemporized look. They have that moving and disturbing unity which comes from the consciousness that they (but here it would be more proper to say “we”) have a purpose in common. Never was there a stranger purpose than that which brought us together that June night in Euston Railway Station. We were come to see the dawn. Trains like ours were starting all over England at that very moment to see the dawn. All noses were pointing north. When for a moment we halted in the depths of the country, there were the pale yellow lights of motor cars also pointing north. There was no sleep, no fixity in England that night. All were on the roads; all were travelling north. All were thinking of the dawn. As the night wore on, the sky, which was the object of so many million thoughts, assumed greater substance and prominence than usual. The consciousness of the whitish soft canopy above us increased in weight as the hours passed. When in chill early morning we were turned out on a Yorkshire roadside, our senses had orientated themselves differently from usual. We were no longer in the same relation to people, houses, and trees; we were related to the whole world. We had come, not to lodge in the bedroom of an inn; we were come for a few hours of disembodied intercourse with the sky.

Everything was very pale. The river was pale and the fields, brimming with grasses and tasselled flowers which should have been red, had no colour in them, but lay there whispering and waving round colourless farmhouses. Now the farmhouse door would open, and out would step to join the procession the farmer and his family in their Sunday clothes, neat, dark and silent as if they were going up hill to church; or sometimes women merely leant on the window sills of the upper rooms watching the procession pass with amused contempt, it appeared—they have come such hundreds of miles, and for what? they seemed to say—in complete silence. We had an odd sense of keeping an appointment with an actor of such vast proportions that he would come silently and be everywhere.

By the time we were at the meeting place, on a high fell where the hills stretched their limbs out over the flowing brown moorland below, we had put on too—though we were cold and with our feet stood in red bog water were likely to be still colder, though some of us were squatted on mackintoshes among cups and plates, eating, and others were fantastically accoutred and none were at their best—still we had put on a certain dignity. Rather, perhaps, we had put off the little badges and signs of individuality. We were strung out against the sky in outline and had the look of statues standing prominent on the ridge of the world. We were very, very old; we were men and women of the primeval world come to salute the dawn. So the worshippers at Stonehenge must have looked among tussocks of grass and boulders of rock. Suddenly, from the motor car of some Yorkshire squire, there bounded four large, lean, red dogs, hounds of the ancient world, hunting dogs, they seemed, leaping with their noses close to the ground on the track of boar or deer. Meanwhile, the sun was rising. A cloud glowed as a white shade glows when the light is slowly turned up behind it. Golden wedge-shaped streamers fell from it and marked the trees in the valley green and the villages blue-brown. In the sky behind us there swam white islands in pale blue lakes. The sky was open and free there, but in front of us a soft snowbank had massed itself. Yet, as we looked, we saw it proving worn and thin in patches. The gold momentarily increased, melting the whiteness to a fiery gauze, and this grew frailer and frailer till, for one instant, we saw the sun in full splendour. Then there was a pause, a moment of suspense, like that which precedes a race. The starter held his watch in his hand, counting the seconds. Now they were off.

The sun had to race through the clouds and to reach the goal, which was a thin transparency to the right, before the sacred seconds were up. He started. The clouds flung every obstacle in his way. They clung, they impeded. He dashed through them. He could be felt, flashing and flying when he was invisible. His speed was tremendous. Here he was out and bright; now he was under and lost. But always one felt him flying and thrusting through the murk to his goal. For one second he emerged and showed himself to us through our glasses, a hollowed sun, a crescent sun. Finally, he went under for his last effort. Now he was completely blotted out. The moments passed. Watches were held in hand after hand. The sacred twenty-four seconds were begun. Unless he could win through before the last one was over, he was lost. Still one felt him tearing and racing behind the clouds to win free; but the clouds held him. They spread; they thickened; they slackened; they muffled his speed. Of the twenty-four seconds only five remained, and still he was obscured. And, as the fatal seconds passed, and we realized that the sun was being defeated, had now, indeed, lost the race, all the colour began to go from the moor. The blue turned to purple; the white became livid as at the approach of a violent but windless storm. Pink faces went green, and it became colder than ever. This was the defeat of the sun, then, and this was all, so we thought, turning in disappointment from the dull cloud blanket in front of us to the moors behind. They were livid, they were purple; but suddenly one became aware that something more was about to happen; something unexpected, awful, unavoidable. The shadow growing darker and darker over the moor was like the heeling over of a boat, which, instead of righting itself at the critical moment, turns a little further and then a little further on its side; and suddenly capsizes. So the light turned and heeled over and went out. This was the end. The flesh and blood of the world was dead; only the skeleton was left. It hung beneath us, a frail shell; brown; dead; withered. Then, with some trifling movement, this profound obeisance of the light, this stooping down and abasement of all splendour was over. Lightly, on the other side of the world, up it rose; it sprang up as if the one movement, after a second’s tremendous pause, completed the other, and the light which had died here rose again elsewhere. Never was there such a sense of rejuvenescence and recovery. All the convalescences and respites of life seemed rolled into one. Yet, at first, so light and frail and strange the colour was, sprinkled rainbow-like in a hoop of colour, that it seemed as if the earth could never live decked out in such frail tints. It hung beneath us, like a cage, like a hoop, like a globe of glass. It might be blown out; it might be stove in. But steadily and surely our relief broadened and our confidence established itself as the great paint-brush washed in woods dark on the valley, and massed hills blue above them. The world became more and more solid; it became populous; it became a place where an infinite number of farmhouses, of villages, of railway lines have lodgement; until the whole fabric of civilization was modelled and moulded. But still the memory endured that the earth we stand on is made of colour; colour can be blown out; and then we stand on a dead leaf; and we who tread the earth securely now have seen it dead.

But the eye has not done with us yet. In pursuit of some logic of its own, which we cannot follow immediately, it now presents us with a picture, or generalized impression rather, of London on a hot summer day, when, to judge by the sense of concussion and confusion, the London season is at its height. It takes us a moment to realize, first, the fact that we are in some public gardens, next, from the asphalt and paper bags thrown about, that they must be the Zoological Gardens, and then without further preparation we are presented with a complete and perfect effigy of two lizards. After destruction, calm; after ruin, steadfastness—that, perhaps, is the logic of the eye at any rate. One lizard is mounted immobile on the back of another, with only the twinkle of a gold eyelid or the suction of a green flank to show that they are the living flesh, and not made of bronze. All human passion seems furtive and feverish beside this still rapture. Time seems to have stopped and we are in the presence of immortality. The tumult of the world has fallen from us like a crumbling cloud. Tanks cut in the level blackness enclose squares of immortality, worlds of settled sunshine, where there is neither rain nor cloud. There the inhabitants perform forever evolutions whose intricacy, because it has no reason, seems the more sublime. Blue and silver armies, keeping a perfect distance for all their arrowlike quickness, shoot first this way, then that. The discipline is perfect, the control absolute; reason there is none. The most majestic of human evolutions seems feeble and fluctuating compared with theirs. Each of these worlds too, which measures perhaps four feet by five, is as perfect in its order as in its method. For forests, they have half a dozen bamboo canes; for mountains, sandhills; in the curves and crinkles of a sea-shell lie for them all adventure, all romance. The rise of a bubble, negligible elsewhere, is here an event of the highest importance. The silver bead bores its way up a spiral staircase through the water to burst against the sheet of glass, which seems laid flat across the top. Nothing exists needlessly. The fish themselves seem to have been shaped deliberately and slipped into the world only to be themselves. They neither work nor weep. In their shape is their reason. For what other purpose except the sufficient one of perfect existence can they have been thus made, some so round, some so thin, some with radiating fins upon their backs, others lined with red electric light, others undulating like white pancakes on a frying pan, some armoured in blue mail, some given prodigious claws, some outrageously fringed with huge whiskers? More care has been spent upon half a dozen fish than upon all the races of men. Under our tweed and silk is nothing but a monotony of pink nakedness. Poets are not transparent to the backbone as these fish are. Bankers have no claws. Kings and Queens themselves have neither ruffs nor frills. In short, if we were to be turned naked into an aquarium—but enough. The eye shuts now. It has shown us a dead world and an immortal fish.

[Time and Tide, Feb 3, 1928]

[]

Gas.

It is not necessary, perhaps, to dwell upon the circumstances. There can be few people who have not at one time or another had a tooth out under gas. The dentist stands very clean and impersonal in his long white overcoat. He tells one not to cross one’s legs and arranges a bit under one’s chin. Then the anæsthetist comes in with his bag as clean and impersonal as the dentist and only as black as the other is white. Both seem to wear uniform and to belong to some separate order of humanity, some third sex. The ordinary conventions lapse, for in ordinary life one does not after shaking hands with an unknown man at once open one’s mouth and show him a broken tooth. The new relation with the third sex is stony, statuesque, colourless, but nevertheless humane. These are the people who manage the embarcations and disembarcations of the human spirit; these are they who stand on the border line between life and death forwarding the spirit from one to the other with clean impersonal antiseptic hands. Very well, I resign myself to your charge, one says, uncrossing one’s legs; and at your command I cease to breathe through the mouth and breathe through the nose; breathe deep, breathe quietly, and your assurance that one is doing it very nicely is a parting salute, a farewell from the officer who presides over the ritual of disembarcation. Soon one is beyond his care.

With each breath one draws in confusion; one draws in darkness, falling, scattering, like a cloud of falling soot flakes. And also one puts out to sea; with every breath one leaves the shore, one cleaves the hot waves of some new sulphurous dark existence in which one flounders without support, attended only by strange relics of old memories, elongated, stretched out, so that they seem to parody the world from which one brought them, with which one tries to keep still in touch by their means; as the curved glass at a fair makes the body seem tapering and then bloated. And as we plunge deeper and deeper away from shore, we seem to be drawn on in the wake of some fast flying always dis. appearing black object, drawn rapidly ahead of us. We become aware of something that we could never see in the other world; something that we have been sent in search of. All the old certainties become smudged and dispersed, because in comparison with this they are unimportant, like old garments crumpled up and dropped in a heap, because one needs to be naked, for this chase, this pursuit; all our most cherished beliefs and certainties and loves become like that. Scudding under a low dark sky we fly on the trail of this truth by which, if we could grasp it, we should be for ever illuminated. And we rush faster and faster and the whole world becomes spiral and like wheels and circles about us, pressing closer and closer until it seems by its pressure to force us through a central hole, very narrow through which it hurts us, squeezing us with its pressure on the head, to pass. Indeed we seem to be crushed between the upper world and the lower world and then suddenly the pressure is lessened; the whole aperture widens up; we pass through a gorge, emerge into daylight, and behold a glass dish and hear a voice saying, “Rinse the mouth. Rinse the mouth,” while a trickle of warm blood runs from between the lips. So we are received back by the officials. The truth that was being drawn so fast ahead of us vanishes.

Such is a very common experience. Everybody goes through it. But it seems to explain something that one observes very often in a third-class railway carriage for example. For it is impossible not to ask some questions as one looks down the long narrow compartment where so many different people sit facing each other. If they begin originally like that, one muses, looking at a child of three, what is the process that turns them into that? And here one looks at a heavy old man with a despatch box; or at an overdressed red-faced woman. What has made that extraordinary change? What sights, what experiences? For except in some very rare cases it seems as if the passing of sixty or seventy years had inflicted a most terrible punishment on the smooth pink face, had imparted some very strange piece of information, so that, however the features differ, the eyes of old people always have the same expression.

And what is that piece of information? one asks. Is it probably that all these people have been several times under gas? Gradually they have been made to think that what passes before them has very little substance. They know that they can be rid of it for a small sum. They can then see another thing, more important, perhaps drawn through the water. But what hardly any of them knows is whether he or she wishes to be rid of it. There they sit, the plumber with his leaden coil, the man with his despatch box, the middle-class woman with her parcel from Selfridges, revolving often unconsciously the question whether there is any meaning in this world compared with the other, and what the truth is that dashed ahead through the water. They woke before they had seized it. And the other world vanished. And perhaps to forget it, to cover it over, they went to the public house, they went to Oxford Street and bought a hat. As one looks down the third-class carriage, one sees that all the men and women over twenty have often been under gas; it is this that has done more than anything to change the expression of the face. An unchanged face would look almost idiotic. But, of course, there are a few faces which look as if they had caught the thing that dashes through the water.

[written in 1929]

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Thunder at Wembley.

It is nature that is the ruin of Wembley; yet it is difficult to see what steps Lord Stevenson, Lieutenant-General Sir Travers Clarke, and the Duke of Devonshire could have taken to keep her out. They might have eradicated the grass and felled the chestnut trees; even so the thrushes would have got in, and there would always have been the sky. At Earls Court and the White City, so far as memory serves, there was little trouble from this source. The area was too small; the light was too brilliant. If a single real moth strayed in to dally with the arc lamps, he was at once transformed into a dizzy reveller; if a laburnum tree shook her tassels, spangles of limelight floated in the violet and crimson air. Everything was intoxicated and transformed. But at Wembley nothing is changed and nobody is drunk. They say, indeed, that there is a restaurant where each diner is forced to spend a guinea upon his dinner. What vistas of cold ham that statement calls forth! What pyramids of rolls! What gallons of tea and coffee! For it is unthinkable that there should be champagne, plovers’ eggs, or peaches at Wembley. And for six and eightpence two people can buy as much ham and bread as they need. Six and eightpence is not a large sum; but neither is it a small sum. It is a moderate sum, a mediocre sum. It is the prevailing sum at Wembley. You look through an open door at a regiment of motor cars aligned in avenues. They are not opulent and powerful; they are not flimsy and cheap. Six and eightpence seems to be the price of each of them. It is the same with the machines for crushing gravel. One can imagine better; one can imagine worse. The machine before us is a serviceable type and costs, inevitably, six and eightpence. Dress fabrics, rope, table linen, old masters, sugar, wheat, filigree silver, pepper, birds’ nests (edible and exported to Hong Kong), camphor, bees-wax, rattans, and the rest—why trouble to ask the price? One knows beforehand—six and eightpence. As for the buildings themselves, those vast smooth grey palaces, no vulgar riot of ideas tumbled expensively in their architect’s head; equally, cheapness was abhorrent to him, and vulgarity anathema. Per perch, rod, or square foot, however ferro-concrete palaces are sold, they too work out at six and eightpence.

But then, just as one is beginning a little wearily to fumble with those two fine words—democracy, mediocrity—Nature asserts herself where one would least look to find her—in clergymen, school children, girls, young men, invalids in bath chairs. They pass quietly, silently, in coveys, in groups, sometimes alone. They mount the enormous staircases; they stand in queues to have their spectacles rectified gratis; to have their fountain-pens filled gratis; they gaze respectfully into sacks of grain; glance reverently at mowing machines from Canada; now and again stoop to remove some paper bag or banana skin and place it in the receptacle provided for that purpose at frequent intervals along the avenues. But what has happened to our contemporaries? Each is beautiful; each is stately. Can it be that one is seeing human beings for the first time? In streets they hurry; in houses they talk; they are bankers in banks, sell shoes in shops. Here against the enormous background of ferro-concrete Britain, of rosy Burma, at large, unoccupied, they reveal themselves simply as human beings, creatures of leisure, civilization, and dignity; a little languid, perhaps, a little attenuated, but a product to be proud of. Indeed they are the ruin of the Exhibition. The Duke of Devonshire and his colleagues should have kept them out. As you watch them trailing and flowing, dreaming and speculating, admiring this coffee-grinder, that milk and cream separator, the rest of the show becomes insignificant. And what, one asks, is the spell it lays upon them? How, with all this dignity of their own, can they bring themselves to believe in that?

But this cynical reflection, at once so chill and so superior, was made, of course, by the thrush. Down in the Amusement Compound, by some grave oversight on the part of the Committee, several trees and rhododendron bushes have been allowed to remain; and these, as anybody could have foretold, attract the birds. As you wait your turn to be hoisted into mid-air, it is impossible not to hear the thrush singing. You look up and discover a whole chestnut tree with its blossoms standing; you look down and see ordinary grass scattered with petals, harbouring insects, sprinkled with stray wild flowers. The gramophone does its best; they light a horse-shoe of fairy-lamps above the Jack and Jill; a man bangs a bladder and implores you to come and tickle monkeys; boatloads of serious men are poised on the heights of the scenic railway; but all is vain. The cry of ecstasy that should have split the sky as the boat dropped to its doom patters from leaf to leaf, dies, falls flat, while the thrush proceeds with his statement. And then some woman in the row of red-brick villas outside the grounds comes out and wrings a dish-cloth in the backyard. All this the Duke of Devonshire should have prevented.

The problem of the sky, however, remains. Is it, one wonders, lying back limp but acquiescent in a green deck-chair, part of the Exhibition? Is it lending itself with exquisite tact to show off to the best advantage snowy Palestine, ruddy Burma, sand-coloured Canada, and the minarets and pagodas of our possessions in the East? So quietly it suffers all these domes and palaces to melt into its breast; receives them with such sombre and tender discretion; so exquisitely allows the rare lamps of Jack and Jill and the Monkey-Teasers to bear themselves like stars. But even as we watch and admire what we would fain credit to the forethought of Lieutenant-General Sir Travers Clarke, a rushing sound is heard. Is it the wind, or is it the British Empire Exhibition? It is both. The wind is rising and shuffling along the avenues; the Massed Bands of Empire are assembling and marching to the Stadium. Men like pin-cushions, men like pouter pigeons, men like pillar-boxes, pass in procession. Dust swirls after them. Admirably impassive, the bands of Empire march on. Soon they will have entered the fortress; soon the gates will have clanged. But let them hasten! For either the sky has misread her directions, or some appalling catastrophe is impending. The sky is livid, lurid, sulphurine. It is in violent commotion. It is whirling water-spouts of cloud into the air; of dust in the Exhibition. Dust swirls down the avenues, hisses and hurries like erected cobras round the corners. Pagodas are dissolving in dust. Ferro-concrete is fallible. Colonies are perishing and dispersing in spray of inconceivable beauty and terror which some malignant power illuminates. Ash and violet are the colours of its decay. From every quarter human beings come flying—clergymen, school children, invalids in bath-chairs. They fly with outstretched arms, and a vast sound of wailing rolls before them, but there is neither confusion nor dismay. Humanity is rushing to destruction, but humanity is accepting its doom. Canada opens a frail tent of shelter. Clergymen and school children gain its portals. Out in the open under a cloud of electric silver the bands of Empire strike up. The bagpipes neigh. Clergy, school children, and invalids group themselves round the Prince of Wales in butter. Cracks like the white roots of trees spread themselves across the firmament. The Empire is perishing; the bands are playing; the Exhibition is in ruins. For that is what comes of letting in the sky.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Jun 28, 1924]

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Memories of a Working Women’s Guild.

When you asked me to write a preface to a book which you had collected of papers by working women I replied that I would rather be drowned than write a preface to any book whatever. Books should stand on their own feet, my argument was (and I think it is a sound one). If they need shoring up by a preface here, an introduction there, they have no more right to exist than a table that needs a wad of paper under one leg in order to stand steady. But you left me the papers, and, turning them over, I saw that on this occasion the argument did not apply; this book is not a book. Turning the pages, I began to ask myself what is this book then, if it is not a book? What quality has it? What ideas does it suggest? What old arguments and memories does it rouse in me? and as all this had nothing to do with an introduction or a preface, but brought you to mind and certain pictures from the past, I stretched my hand for a sheet of note-paper and wrote you the following letter.

You have forgotten (I wrote) a hot June morning in Manchester in the year 1913, or at least you will not remember what I remember, because you were otherwise engaged. Your attention was entirely absorbed by a green table, several sheets of paper, and a bell. Moreover, you were frequently interrupted. There was a woman wearing something like a Lord Mayor’s chain round her shoulders; she took her seat perhaps at your right; there were other women without ornament save fountain pens and despatch boxes—they sat perhaps on your left. Soon a row had been formed up there on the platform, with tables and inkstands and tumblers of water; while we, many hundreds of us, scraped and shuffled and filled the entire body of some vast municipal building beneath. Perhaps an organ played. The proceedings somehow opened. The talking and laughing and shuffling suddenly subsided. A bell struck; a figure rose; she took her way from among us; she mounted a platform; she spoke for precisely five minutes; she descended. Directly she sat down another rose; mounted the platform; spoke for precisely five minutes and descended; then a third rose; then a fourth—and so it went on, speaker following speaker, one from the right, one from the left, one from the middle, one from the background—each took her way to the stand, said what she had to say, and gave place to her successor. There was something military in the regularity of the proceeding. They were like marksmen, I thought, standing up in turn with rifle raised to aim at a target. Sometimes they missed, and there was a roar of laughter; sometimes they hit, and there was a roar of applause. But whether the particular shot hit or missed there was no doubt about the carefulness of the aim. There was no beating about the bush; there were no phrases of easy eloquence. The speaker made her way to the stand primed with her subject. Determination and resolution were stamped on her face. There was so much to be said between the strokes of the bell that she could not waste a second. The moment had come for which she had been waiting perhaps for many months. The moment had come for which she had stored hat, shoes, and dress—there was an air of discreet novelty about her clothing. But, above all, the moment had come when she was going to speak her mind, the mind of her constituency, the mind of the women who had sent her from Cornwall perhaps or Sussex, or some black mining village in Yorkshire, to speak their mind for them in Manchester.

It soon became obvious that the mind which lay spread over so wide a stretch of England was a vigorous mind working with great activity. It was thinking of June, 1913, of the reform of the divorce laws; of the taxation of land values; of the minimum wage. It was concerned with the care of maternity; with the Trades Board Act; with the education of children over fourteen; it was unanimously of opinion that adult suffrage should become a government measure—it was thinking, in short, about every sort of public question, and it was thinking constructively and pugnaciously. Accrington did not see eye to eye with Halifax, nor Middlesbrough with Plymouth. There was argument and opposition; resolutions were lost and amendments won.

Meanwhile—let me try after seventeen years to sum up the thoughts that passed through the minds of your guests, middle-class people who had come from London and elsewhere not to take part, but to listen—meanwhile, what was it all about? What was the meaning of it? These women were demanding divorce, education, the vote—all good things. They were demanding higher wages and shorter hours—what could be more reasonable? And yet though it was all so reasonable, much of it so forcible, some of it so humorous, a weight of discomfort was settling and shifting itself uneasily from side to side in your visitors’ minds. All those questions, I found myself thinking—and perhaps this was at the bottom of it—which matter so intensely to the people here, questions of sanitation and education and wages, this demand for an extra shilling, or another year at school, for eight hours instead of nine behind a counter or in a mill, leave me, in my own blood and bones, untouched. If every reform they demand was granted this very instant it would not matter to me a single jot. Hence my interest is merely altruistic. It is thin spread and moon-coloured. There is no life blood or urgency about it. However hard I clap my hands or stamp my feet, there is a hollowness in the sound which betrays me. I am a benevolent spectator. I am irretrievably cut off from the actors. I sit here hypocritically, clapping and stamping, an outcast from the flock.

On top of this too, my reason (it was in 1913, remember) could not help assuring me that even if the resolution, whatever it was, were carried unanimously, the stamping and the clapping was an empty noise. It would pass out of the open windows and become part of the clamour of the lorries and the striving of the hooves on the Manchester cobbles beneath—an inarticulate uproar. The mind might be active; the mind might be aggressive; but the mind was without a body; it had no legs and arms with which to enforce its will. In all that audience, among all those women who worked, women who had children, women who scrubbed and cooked and bargained and knew to a penny what they had to spend, there was not a single woman with a vote. Let them fire off their rifles if they liked, but they would hit no target; there were only blank cartridges inside. The thought was irritating and depressing.

The clock had now struck half past eleven; there were still then many hours to come. And if one had reached this stage of irritation and depression by half past eleven in the morning, into what depths of boredom would one not be plunged by half past five in the evening? How could one sit out another day of speechifying? How, above all, could one face you, our hostess, with the information that your Congress had proved so insupportably depressing that one was going back to London by the very first train? The only chance lay in some happy conjuring trick, some change of attitude by which the mist and blankness of the speeches could be turned to blood and bone. Otherwise they remained intolerable.

But suppose one played a childish game; suppose one said, as a child says, “Let’s pretend …”? “Let’s pretend,” one said to oneself, looking at the speaker, “that I am Mrs. Giles of Durham City.” A woman of that name had just turned to address us. “I am the wife of a miner. He comes back thick with coal grime. First he must have his bath. Then he must have his dinner. But there is only a wash tub. My range is filled with saucepans. There is no getting on with the work. All my crocks are covered with dust again…. Why in the Lord’s name have I not hot water laid on and electric light when middle-class women …” So up I jump and demand passionately “labour-saving appliances and housing reform”. Up I jump in the person of Mrs. Giles of Durham; in the person of Mrs. Phillips of Bacup; in the person of Mrs. Edwards of Wolverton. But, after all, the imagination is largely the child of the flesh. One could not be Mrs. Giles because one’s body had never stood at the wash tub; one’s hands had never wrung and scrubbed and chopped up whatever the meat may be that makes a miner’s dinner. The picture was always letting in irrelevancies. One sat in an armchair or read a book. One saw landscapes or seascapes, in Greece or perhaps in Italy, where Mrs. Giles or Mrs. Edwards must have seen slag heaps and row upon row of slate roofs in a mining village. Something at any rate was always creeping in from a world that was not their world and making the picture false and the game too much of a game to be worth playing.

It was true that one could always correct these fancy portraits by taking a look at the actual person—at Mrs. Thomas, or Mrs. Langrish, or Miss Bolt of Hebden Bridge. Certainly, there were no armchairs, electric light, or hot water laid on in their homes, no Greek hills or Mediterranean bays in their lives. They did not sign a cheque to pay the weekly bills, or order, over the telephone, a cheap but quite adequate seat at the Opera. If they travelled it was on excursion day, with paper bags and hot babies in their arms. They did not stroll through the house and say, that cover must go to the wash, or those sheets need changing. They plunged their arms in hot water and scrubbed the clothes themselves. In consequence they had thickset muscular bodies. They had large hands; they had the slow emphatic gestures of people who are often stiff and fall tired in a heap on hard-backed chairs. They touched nothing lightly. They gripped papers and pencils as if they were brooms. Their faces were firm, with heavy folds and deep lines. It seemed as if their muscles were always taut and on the stretch. Their eyes looked as if they were always set on something actual—on saucepans that were boiling over, on children who were getting into mischief. Their faces never expressed the lighter and more detached emotions that come into play when the mind is perfectly at ease about the present. They were not in the least detached and cosmopolitan. They were indigenous and rooted to one spot. Their very names were like the stones of the fields, common, grey, obscure, docked of all the splendours of association and romance. Of course they wanted baths and ovens and education and seventeen shillings instead of sixteen and freedom and air and … “And,” said Mrs. Winthrop of Spenny Moor, breaking into these thoughts with words that sounded like a refrain, “we can wait.” “Yes,” she repeated, at the conclusion of her speech—what demand she had been making I do not know—“we can wait.” And she got down rather stiffly from her perch and made her way back to her seat, an elderly woman dressed in her best clothes.

Then Mrs. Potter spoke. Then Mrs. Elphick. Then Mrs. Holmes of Edgbaston. So it went on, and at last after innumerable speeches, after many communal meals at long tables and many arguments—after seeing jams bottled and biscuits made, after some song singing and ceremonies with banners—the new President received the chain of office with a kiss from the old President; the Congress dispersed; and the separate members who had stood up and spoken out so boldly while the clock ticked its five minutes went back to Yorkshire and Wales and Sussex and Cornwall and hung their clothes in the wardrobe and plunged their hands in the wash tub again.

Later that summer the thoughts, here so inadequately described, were again discussed, but not in a public hall hung with banners and loud with voices. The head office of the Guild, the centre from which speakers, papers, inkstands, and tumblers, as I suppose, were issued, was then in Hampstead. There, if I may remind you again of what you may well have forgotten, you invited us to come; you asked us to tell you how the Congress had impressed us. But I must pause on the threshold of that very dignified old house with its eighteenth-century carvings and panelling, as we paused then in truth, for one could not enter and go upstairs without encountering Miss Wick. Miss Wick sat at her typewriter in the outer office. Miss Wick, one felt, was set as a kind of watch-dog to ward off the meddlesome middle-class wasters of time who come prying into other people’s business. Whether it was for this reason that she was dressed in a peculiar shade of deep purple I do not know. The colour seemed somehow symbolic. She was very short, but owing to the weight which sat on her brow and the gloom which seemed to issue from her dress she was also very weighty. An extra share of the world’s grievances seemed to press upon her shoulders. When she clicked her typewriter, one felt that she was making that instrument transmit messages of foreboding and ill omen to an unheeding universe. But she relented and, like all relentings after gloom, hers came with a sudden charm. We went upstairs and upstairs was a very different figure—there was Miss Janet Erskine, indeed, and Miss Erskine may have been smoking a pipe—there was one on the table. She may have been reading a detective story—there was a book of that kind on the table—at any rate, she seemed the image of detachment and equanimity. Had one not known that Miss Erskine was to the Congress what the heart is to the remoter veins—that the great engine at Manchester would not thump and throb without her—that she had collected and sorted and summoned and arranged that very intricate but orderly assembly of women—she would never have enlightened one. She had nothing whatever to do—she came to the office because an office is a good place in which to read detective stories—she licked a few stamps and addressed a few envelopes—it was a fad of hers—that was what her manner conveyed. It was Miss Erskine who moved the papers off the chairs and got the teacups out of the cupboard. It was she who answered questions about figures and put her hand on the right file of letters.

Again let me telescope into a few sentences and into one scene many random discussions at various places. We said then—for you now emerged from an inner room and if Miss Wick was purple and Miss Erskine was coffee-coloured, you, speaking pictorially (and I dare not speak more explicitly), were kingfisher blue and as arrowy and decisive as that quick bird—we said then that the Congress had roused thoughts and ideas of the most diverse nature. It had been a revelation and a disillusionment. We had been humiliated and enraged. To begin with, all their talk, we said, or the greater part of it, was of matters of fact. They wants baths and money. When people get together communally they always talk about baths and money: they alway show the least desirable of their characteristics—their lust for conquest and their desire for possessions. To expect us, whose minds, such as they are, fly free at the end of a short length of capital, to tie ourselves down again upon that narrow plot of acquisitiveness and desire is impossible. We have baths and money. Society has supplied us with all we need in that direction. Therefore however much we sympathized, our sympathy was largely fictitious. It was æsthetic sympathy, the sympathy of the eye and of the imagination, not of the heart and of the nerves; and such sympathy is always physically uncomfortable. Let us explain what we mean, we said.

The women are magnificent to look at. Ladies in evening dress are lovelier far, but they lack the sculpturesque quality that these working women have. Their arms are undeveloped. Fat has softened the lines of their muscles. And though the range of expression is narrower in working women, their expressions have a force and emphasis, of tragedy or humour, which the faces of ladies lack. But at the same time, it is much better to be a lady; ladies desire Mozart and Cézanne and Shakespeare; and not merely money and hot water laid on. Therefore to deride ladies and to imitate, as some of the speakers did, their mincing speech and little knowledge of what it pleases them to call “reality” is not merely bad manners, but it gives away the whole purpose of the Congress, for, if it is better to be a working woman, by all means let them remain so and not claim their right to undergo the contamination of wealth and comfort.

In spite of this, we went on, apart from prejudice and bandying compliments, undoubtedly the women at the Congress possess something which ladies have lost, something desirable, stimulating, and at the same time very difficult to define. One does not want to slip easily into fine phrases about “contact with life”, about “facing facts”, “the teaching of experience”, for they invariably alienate the hearer, and moreover no working man or woman works harder with his hands or is in closer touch with reality than a painter with his brush or a writer with his pen. But the quality that they have—judging from a phrase caught here and there, a laugh, or a gesture seen in passing—is a quality that Shakespeare would have liked. One can fancy him slipping away from the brilliant salons of educated people to crack a joke in Mrs. Robson’s back kitchen. Indeed, we said, one of our most curious impressions at your Congress was that “the poor”, “the working classes”, or by whatever name you choose to call them are not down-trodden, envious, and exhausted; they are humorous and vigorous and thoroughly independent. Thus, if it were possible to meet them not as sympathizers, as masters or mistresses with counters between us or kitchen tables, but casually and congenially as fellow beings with the same ends and wishes even if the dress and body are different, a great liberation would follow. How many words, for example, must lurk in those women’s vocabularies that have faded from ours! How many scenes must lie dormant in their eyes unseen by us! What images and saws and proverbial sayings must still be current with them that have never reached the surface of print; and very likely they still keep the power which we have lost of making new ones. There were many shrewd sayings in the speeches at the Congress which even the weight of a public meeting could not flatten out entirely.

But, we said, and here perhaps fiddled with a paper knife or poked the fire impatiently by way of expressing our discontent, what is the use of it all? Our sympathy is fictitious, not real. Because we pay our bills with cheques and our clothes are washed for us and we do not know the liver from the lights, we are condemned to remain forever shut up in the confines of the middles classes wearing tail coats and silk stockings and called Sir or Madam as the case may be, when we are all, in truth, simply Johns and Susans. And they remain equally deprived. For we have as much to give them as they us—wit and detachment, learning and poetry and all those good gifts which those who have never answered bells or touched their foreheads with their forefingers enjoy by right. But the barrier is impassable. And nothing perhaps exasperated us more at the Congress (you must have noticed at times a certain irritability) than the thought that this force of theirs, this smouldering heat which broke the crust now and then and licked the surface with a hot and fearless flame, is about to break through and melt us together so that life will be richer and books more complex, and society will pool its possessions instead of segregating them—all this is bound to happen inevitably thanks to you, very largely, and to Miss Erskine and to Miss Wick—but only when we are dead.

It was thus that we tried in the Guild office that afternoon to explain the nature of fictitious sympathy and how it differs from real sympathy and how defective it is because it is not based upon sharing the same important emotions unconsciously. It was thus that we tried to describe the contradictory and complex feelings which beset the middle-class visitor forced to sit out a congress of working women in silence.

Perhaps it was at this point that you unlocked a drawer and took out a packet of papers. You did not at once untie the string that fastened them. Sometimes, you said, you got a letter which you could not bring yourself to burn; once or twice a Guildswoman at your suggestion had written a few pages about her life. It might be that we should find these papers interesting; it might be that if we read them the women would cease to be symbols and become instead individuals. But they were very fragmentary and ungrammatical; they had been jotted down in the intervals of housework. Indeed, you could not at once bring yourself to give them up, as if to expose their simplicity were a breach of confidence. It might be that their illiteracy would only perplex, you said; that the writing of people who do not know how to write—but at this point we burst in. In the first place, every English woman knows how to write, in the second, even if she does not she has only to take her own life for subject and write the truth and not fiction or poetry for our interest to be so keenly roused that—in short, we cannot wait but must read the packet at once.

Thus pressed you did by degrees and with many delays—there was the war for example, and Miss Wick died, and you and Janet Erskine retired from the Guild, and a testimonial was given you in a casket, and many thousand working women tried to say how you had changed their lives—tried to say what they will feel for you to their dying day—after all these interruptions, you did at last gather the papers together and finally put them in my hands. There they were, typed and docketed with a few snapshots and rather faded photographs stuck between the pages. And when, at last, I began to read, there started up in my mind’s eye the figures that I had seen all those years ago at Manchester with such bewilderment and curiosity. But they were no longer addressing a large meeting in Manchester from a platform, dressed in their best clothes. The hot June day with its banners had vanished, and instead one looked back into the past of the women who had stood there; into the four-roomed houses of miners, into the homes of small shopkeepers and agricultural labourers, into the fields and factories of fifty or sixty years ago. Mrs. Burrows for example had worked in the Lincolnshire fens when she was eight with forty or fifty other children, and an old man had followed the gang with a long whip in his hand “which he did not forget to use”. That was a strange reflection. Most of the women had started work at seven or eight, earning a penny on Saturday for washing a doorstep, or two pence a week for carrying suppers to the men at the iron foundry. They had gone into factories when they were fourteen.

They had worked from seven in the morning till eight or nine at night and had made thirteen or fifteen shillings a week. Out of this money they had saved some pence with which to buy their mother gin—she was often very tired in the evening and had borne perhaps thirteen children in as many youthful years; or they fetched opium to assuage some miserable old woman’s ague in the fens. Betty Potter killed herself when she could get no more. They had seen half-starved women standing in rows to be paid for their match boxes while they snuffed the roast meat of their employers’ dinner cooking within. The smallpox had raged in Bethnal Green, and they had known that the boxes went on being made in the sick room and sold to the public with the infection thick on them. They had been so cold working in the wintry fields that they could not run when the ganger gave them leave. They had waded through floods when the Wash overflowed its banks. Kind old ladies had given them parcels of food which turned out to contain only crusts and rancid bacon rind.

All this they had done and seen and known when other children were still dabbling in seaside pools and spelling out fairy tales by the nursery fire. Naturally their faces had a different look on them. But they were also, one remembered, firm faces, faces with something indomitable in their expression. And the reason can only be that human nature is so tough that it will take such wounds, even at the tenderest age, and survive them. Keep a child mewed up in Bethnal Green and she will somehow snuff the country air from seeing the yellow dust on her brother’s boots, and nothing will serve her but she must go there, and see the “clean ground” as she calls it for herself. It was true that at first the “bees were very frightening”, but all the same she got to the country and the blue smoke and the cows came up to her expectations. Put girls after a childhood of minding smaller brothers and sisters and washing doorsteps into a factory when they are fourteen and their eyes will turn to the window and they will be happy because, as the work room is six stories up, the sun can be seen breaking over the hills “and that was always such a comfort and a help”.

Still stranger, if one needs additional proof of the strength of the human instinct to escape from bondage and attach itself to a country road or a sun rising over distant hills, is the fact that the highest ideals of duty flourish in an obscure hat factory as surely as on a battlefield. There were women in Christie’s hat factory, for example, who worked for “honour”. They gave their lives to the cause of putting straight stitches into the bindings of men’s hat brims. Felt is hard and thick; it is difficult to push the needle through; there are no rewards or glory to be won; but such is the incorrigible idealism of the human mind that there were “trimmers” in those obscure places who would never put a crooked stitch in their work and ruthlessly tore out the crooked stitches of others. And as they drove in their straight stitches they reverenced Queen Victoria and thanked God, drawing up to the fire, that they were all married to good Conservative working men.

Certainly that story explained something of the force, of the obstinacy which one had seen in the faces of the speakers at the Congress in Manchester. And then if one went on reading these papers, one came upon other signs of the extraordinary vitality of the human spirit. The dauntless energy which no amount of childbirth and washing up can quench entirely had reached out, it seemed and seized upon, old copies of magazines; had attached itself to Dickens; had propped the poems of Burns against a dish-cover to read while cooking. They read at meals; they read before going to the mill. They read Dickens and Scott and Henry George and Bulwer-Lytton and Ella Wheeler Wilcox and Alice Meynell and would like “to get hold of any good history of the French Revolution, not Carlyle’s please”, and B. Russell on China, and William Morris and Shelley and Florence Barclay and Samuel Butler’s Note Books—they read with the indiscriminate greed of a hungry appetite that crams itself with toffee and beef and tarts and vinegar and champagne all in one gulp.

Naturally, such reading led to argument. The younger generation had the audacity to say that Queen Victoria was no better than an honest charwoman who had brought up her children respectably. They had the temerity to doubt whether to sew straight stitches into men’s hat brims should be the sole aim and end of a woman’s life. They started arguments and even held rudimentary debating societies on the floor of the factory. In time the old trimmers even were shaken in their beliefs and came to think that there might be other ideals in the world besides straight stitches and Queen Victoria. Ideas, indeed, were seething in their brains. A girl, for instance, would reason, as she walked along the streets of a factory town, that she had no right to bring a child into the world if that child must earn its living in a mill. A chance saying in a book would fire her imagination and make her dream of future cities where there were to be baths and kitchens and wash houses and art galleries and museums and parks.

The minds of working women were humming and their imaginations were awake. But how were they to realize their ideals? How were they to express their needs? Of middle-class organizations there were many. Women were beginning to found colleges, and even here and there to enter the professions. But these were middle-class women with some amount of money and some degree of education behind them. How could women whose hands were full of work, whose kitchens were thick with steam, who had neither education nor encouragement nor leisure, remodel the world according to the ideas of working women? It was then, I suppose, some time early in the Eighties, that the Women’s Guild crept modestly and tentatively into existence, occupying for a time a certain space in the “Co-operative News” which was called the “Woman’s Corner”. It was there that Mrs. Acland asked, “Why should we not hold our Co-operative Mothers’ Meetings, when we may bring our work and sit together, one of us reading some co-operative work aloud, which may afterwards be discussed?” And on April 18th, 1883, she announced that there were seven members who had achieved this object.

This was the tiny magnet that drew to itself all that restless wishing and dreaming. This was the central meeting place where was formed and solidified what was else so scattered and incoherent. The Guild must have given the older women, with their husbands and children, what “clean ground” had given the little girl in Bethnal Green, or the view of day breaking over the hills had given to the girls in the hat factory. It gave them in the first place a room where they could sit down and think remote from boiling saucepans and crying children; and then that room became a place where one could make, and share with others in making, the model of what a working woman’s house should be. Then as the membership grew and twenty or thirty women made a practice of meeting weekly, that one house became a street of houses; and if you have a street of houses you must have stores and drains and post boxes; and at last the street becomes a town, and a town brings in questions of education and finance and the relation of one town to another town. And then the town becomes a country; it becomes England; it becomes Germany and America; and so from debating questions of butter and bacon, working women at their weekly meetings have to consider the relations of one great nation to another.

So it was that in the year 1913 Mrs. Robson and Mrs. Potter and Mrs. Wright were getting up and asking not only for baths and wages and electric light, but also for cooperative industry and adult suffrage and the taxation of land values and divorce law reform. It was thus that they were to ask, as the years went by, for peace and disarmament and the sisterhood of nations. And the force that lay behind their speeches was compact of many things—of men with whips, and sick rooms where match boxes are made, of hunger and cold, and many and difficult child-births, of much scrubbing and washing up, of reading Shelley and William Morris and Samuel Butler, of meetings of the Women’s Guild, and committees and congresses at Manchester and elsewhere. All this lay behind the speeches of Mrs. Robson and Mrs. Potter and Mrs. Wright. The papers which you sent me certainly threw some light upon those old curiosities and bewilderments.

But it cannot be denied that, as I began by saying, they do not make a book, as literature they have many limitations. The writing lacks detachment and imaginative breadth, even as the women themselves lacked variety and play of feature. Here are no reflections; no view of life as a whole; no attempt to enter into the lives of other people. It is not from the ranks of working class women that the next great poet or novelist will be drawn. Indeed, we are reminded of those obscure writers before Shakespeare who had never been beyond the borders of their own parishes and found expression difficult and words few and awkward to fit together.

And yet since writing is an impure art much infected by life, the letters you gave me seem to possess some qualities even as literature that the literate and instructed might envy. Listen, for instance, to Mrs. Scott the midwife, “I have been over the hilltops when the snowdrifts were over three feet high, and six feet in some places. I was in a blizzard in Hayfield and thought I should never get round the corners. But it was life on the moors; I seemed to know every blade of grass and where the flowers grew and all the little streams were my companions.” Could she have said that better if Oxford had made her a doctor of letters? Or take Mrs. Layton’s description of a match box factory in Bethnal Green, and how she “looked through the fence and saw three ladies sitting in the shade doing some kind of fancy work”. It has something of the accuracy and clarity of a description by Defoe. And when Mrs. Burrows brings to mind that very bitter day when the children were about to eat their cold dinner and drink their cold tea under the hedge and the ugly woman asked them into her parlour saying, “Bring these children into my house and let them eat their dinner there,” one must admit that she gets her effect, and brings the scene before us—the frozen children eating hot boiled potatoes in a ring on the floor—by whatever means she manages it. And then there is a fragment of a letter from Miss Wick, the sombre purple figure who typed as if the weight of the world rested on her shoulders. “When I was a girl of seventeen,” she writes, “my then employer, a gentleman of good position and high standing in the town, sent me to his home one night ostensibly to take a parcel of books, but really with a very different object. When I arrived at the house all the family were away, and before he would allow me to leave he forced me to yield to him. At eighteen I was a mother.” The stiff words, which conceal all emotion conventionally enough, are yet illuminating. Such then was the burden that rested upon that squat and sombre figure—such were the memories that she stored as she sat typing your letters, guarding your door with such tremendous fidelity in her purple dress.

But I will quote no more. These letters are only fragments. These voices are beginning only now to emerge from silence into half articulate speech. These lives are still half-hidden in profound obscurity. To write even what is written has been a task of labour and difficulty. The writing has been done in kitchens, at odds and ends of time, in the midst of distractions and obstacles—but really there is no need for me, in a letter addressed to you, to lay stress upon the hardships of working women’s lives. Have not you and Janet Erskine given your best years—but hush! you will not let me finish that sentence and therefore, with the old messages of friendship and admiration, I will make an end.

[Yale Review, September 1930]

[]

A
WRITER’S
DIARY

by
Virginia Woolf

published
1953
by
The Hogarth Press

a writer’s diary

1918.    1919.    1920.

1921.    1922.    1923.

1924.    1925.    1926.

1927.    1928.    1929.

1930.    1931.    1932.

1933.    1934.    1935.

1936.    1937.    1938.

1939.    1940.    1941.

[]

1918.

Monday, August 5th.

While waiting to buy a book in which to record my impressions first of Christina Rossetti, then of Byron, I had better write them here. For one thing I have hardly any money left, having bought Leconte de Lisle in great quantities. Christina has the great distinction of being a born poet, as she seems to have known very well herself. But if I were bringing a case against God she is one of the first witnesses I should call. It is melancholy reading. First she starved herself of love, which I meant also life; then of poetry in deference to what she thought her religion demanded. There were two good suitors. The first indeed had his peculiarities. He had a conscience. She could only marry a particular shade of Christian. He could only stay that shade for a few months at a time. Finally he developed Roman Catholicism and was lost. Worse still was the case of Mr Collins—a really delightful scholar—an unworldly recluse—a single-minded worshipper of Christina, who could never be brought into the fold at all. On this account she could visit him affectionately in his lodgings, which she did to the end of her life. Poetry was castrated too. She would set herself to do the psalms into verse; and to make all her poetry subservient to the Christian doctrines. Consequently, as I think, If she starved into austere emaciation a very fine original gift, which only wanted licence to take to itself a far finer form than, shall we say, Mrs Browning’s. She wrote very easily; in a spontaneous childlike kind of way one imagines, as is the case generally with a true gift; still undeveloped. She has the natural singing power. She thinks too. She has fancy. She could, one is profane enough to guess, have been ribald and witty. And, as a reward for all her sacrifices, she died in terror, uncertain of salvation. I confess though that I have only turned her poetry over, making my way inevitably to the ones I knew already.

Wednesday, August 7th.

Asheham diary drains off my meticulous observations of flowers, clouds, beetles and the price of eggs; and, being alone, there is no other event to record. Our tragedy has been the squashing of a caterpillar; our excitement the return of the servants from Lewes last night, laden with all L.’s war books and the English review for me, with Brailsford upon a League of Nations, and Katherine Mansfield on Bliss. I threw down Bliss with the exclamation, ‘She’s done for!’ Indeed I don’t see how much faith in her as woman or writer can survive that sort of story. I shall have to accept the fact, I’m afraid, that her mind is a very thin soil, laid an inch or two deep upon very barren rock. For Bliss is long enough to give her a chance of going deeper. Instead she is content with superficial smartness; and the whole conception is poor, cheap, not the vision, however imperfect, of an interesting mind. She writes badly too. And the effect was as I say, to give me an impression of her callousness and hardness as a human being. I shall read it again; but I don’t suppose I shall change. She’ll go on doing this sort of thing, perfectly to her and Murry’s satisfaction. I’m relieved now that they didn’t come. Or is it absurd to read all this criticism of her personally into a story?

Anyhow I was very glad to go on with my Byron. He has at least the male virtues. In fact, I’m amused to find how easily I can imagine the effect he had upon women—especially upon rather stupid or uneducated women, unable to stand up to him. So many, too, would wish to reclaim him. Ever since I was a child (as Gertler would say, as if it proved him a particularly remarkable person) I’ve had the habit of getting full of some biography and wanting to build up my imaginary figure of the person with every scrap of news I could find about him. During the passion, the name of Cowper or Byron or whoever it might be, seemed to start up in the most unlikely pages. And then, suddenly, the figure becomes distant and merely one of the usual dead. I’m much impressed by the extreme badness of B.’s poetry—such of it as Moore quotes with almost speechless admiration. Why did they think this Album stuff the finest fire of poetry? It reads hardly better than L.E.L. or Ella Wheeler Wilcox. And they dissuaded him from doing what he knew he could do, which was to write satire. He came home from the East with satires (parodies of Horace) in his bag and Childe Harold. He was persuaded that Childe Harold was the best poem ever written. But he never as a young man believed in his poetry; a proof, in such a confident dogmatic person, that he hadn’t the gift. The Wordsworths and Keats’ believe in that as much as they believe in anything. In his character, I’m often reminded a little of Rupert Brooke, though this is to Rupert’s disadvantage. At any rate Byron had superb force; his letters prove it. He had in many ways a very fine nature too; though as no one laughed him out of his affectations he became more like Horace Cole than one could wish. He could only be laughed at by a woman, and they worshipped instead. I haven’t yet come to Lady Byron, but I suppose, instead of laughing, she merely disapproved. And so he became Byronic.

Friday, August 9th.

In the absence of human interest, which makes us peaceful and content, one may as well go on with Byron. Having indicated that I am ready, after a century, to fall in love with him, I suppose my judgment of Don Juan may be partial. It is the most readable poem of its length ever written, I suppose: a quality which it owes in part to the springy random haphazard galloping nature of its method. This method is a discovery by itself. It’s what one has looked for in vain—an elastic shape which will hold whatever you choose to put into it. Thus he could write out his mood as it came to him; he could say whatever came into his head. He wasn’t committed to be poetical; and thus escaped his evil genius of the false romantic and imaginative. When he is serious he is sincere: and he can impinge upon any subject he likes. He writes 16 cantos without once flogging his flanks. He had, evidently, the able witty mind of what my father Sir Leslie would have called a thoroughly masculine nature. I maintain that these illicit kinds of book are far more interesting than the proper books which respect illusions devoutly all the time. Still, it doesn’t seem an easy example to follow; and indeed like all free and easy things, only the skilled and mature really bring them off successfully. But Byron was full of ideas—a quality that gives his verse a toughness and drives me to little excursions over the surrounding landscape or room in the middle of my reading. And tonight I shall have the pleasure of finishing him—though why considering that I’ve enjoyed almost every stanza, this should be a pleasure I really don’t know. But so it always is, whether the book’s a good book or a bad book. Maynard Keynes admitted in the same way that he always cuts off the advertisements at the end with one hand while he’s reading, so as to know exactly how much he has to get through.

Monday, August 19th.

I finished by the way the Electra of Sophocles, which has been dragging on down here, though it’s not so fearfully difficult after all. The thing that always impresses me fresh is the superb nature of the story. It seems hardly possible not to make a good play of it. This perhaps is the result of having traditional plots which have been made and improved and freed from superfluities by the polish of innumerable actors and authors and critics, till it becomes like a lump of glass worn smooth in the sea. Also, if everyone in the audience knows beforehand what is going to happen, much finer and subtler touches will tell, and words can be spared. At any rate my feeling always is that one can’t read too carefully, or attach enough weight to every line and hint; and that the apparent bareness is only on the surface. There does, however, remain the question of reading the wrong emotions into the text. I am generally humiliated to find how much Jebb is able to see; my only doubt is whether he doesn’t see too much—as I think one might do with a bad modern English play if one set to work. Finally, the particular charm of Greek remains as strong and as difficult to account for as ever. One feels the immeasurable difference between the text and the translation with the first words. The heroic woman is much the same in Greece and England. She is of the type of Emily Brontë. Clytaemnestra and Electra are clearly mother and daughter, and therefore should have some sympathy, though perhaps sympathy gone wrong breeds the fiercest hate. E. is the type of woman who upholds the family above everything; the father. She has more veneration for tradition than the sons of the house; feels herself born of the father’s side and not of the mother’s. It’s strange to notice how although the conventions are perfectly false and ridiculous, they never appear petty or undignified as our English conventions are constantly made to do. Electra lived a far more hedged in life than the women of the mid-Victorian age, but this has no effect upon her, except in making her harsh and splendid. She could not go out for a walk alone; with us it would be a case of a maid and a hansom cab.

Tuesday, September 10th.

Though I am not the only person in Sussex who reads Milton, I mean to write down my impressions of Paradise Lost while I am about it. Impressions fairly well describes the sort of thing left in my mind. I have left many riddles unread. I have slipped on too easily to taste the full flavour. However I see, and agree to some extent in believing, that this full flavour is the reward of highest scholarship. I am struck by the extreme difference between this poem and any other. It lies, I think, in the sublime aloofness and impersonality of the emotion. I have never read Cowper on the sofa, but I can imagine that the sofa is a degraded substitute for Paradise Lost. The substance of Milton is all made of wonderful, beautiful and masterly descriptions of angels’ bodies, battles, flights, dwelling places. He deals in horror and immensity and squalor and sublimity but never in the passions of the human heart. Has any great poem ever let in so little light upon one’s own joys and sorrows? I get no help in judging life; I scarcely feel that Milton lived or knew men and women; except for the peevish personalities about marriage and the woman’s duties. He was the first of the masculinists, but his disparagement rises from his own ill luck and seems even a spiteful last word in his domestic quarrels. But how smooth, strong and elaborate it all is! What poetry! I can conceive that even Shakespeare after this would seem a little troubled, personal, hot and imperfect. I can conceive that this is the essence, of which almost all other poetry is the dilution. The inexpressible fineness of the style, in which shade after shade is perceptible, would alone keep one gazing into it, long after the surface business in progress has been despatched. Deep down one catches still further combinations, rejections, felicities and masteries. Moreover, though there is nothing like Lady Macbeth’s terror or Hamlet’s cry, no pity or sympathy or intuition, the figures are majestic; in them is summed up much of what men thought of our place in the universe, of our duty to God, our religion.

[]

1919.

Monday, January 20th.

I mean to copy this out when I can buy a book, so I omit the flourishes proper to the new year. It is not money this time that I lack, but the capacity, after a fortnight in bed, to make the journey to Fleet Street. Even the muscles of my right hand feel as I imagine a servant’s hand to feel. Curiously enough, I have the same stiffness in manipulating sentences, though by rights I should be better equipped mentally now than I was a month ago. The fortnight in bed was the result of having a tooth out, and being tired enough to get a headache—a long dreary affair, that receded and advanced much like a mist on a January day. One hour’s writing daily is my allowance for the next few weeks; and having hoarded it this morning I may spend part of it now, since L. is out and I am much behindhand with the month of January. I note however that this diary writing does not count as writing, since I have just re-read my year’s diary and am much struck by the rapid haphazard gallop at which it swings along, sometimes indeed jerking almost intolerably over the cobbles. Still if it were not written rather faster than the fastest typewriting, if I stopped and took thought, it would never be written at all; and the advantage of the method is that it sweeps up accidentally several stray matters which I should exclude if I hesitated but which are the diamonds of the dustheap. If Virginia Woolf at the age of 50, when she sits down to build her memoirs out of these books, is unable to make a phrase as it should be made, I can only condole with her and remind her of the existence of the fireplace, where she has my leave to burn these pages to so many black films with red eyes in them. But how I envy her the task I am preparing for her! There is none I should like better. Already my 37th birthday next Saturday is robbed of some of its terrors by the thought. Partly for the benefit of this elderly lady (no subterfuges will then be possible: 50 is elderly, though I anticipate her protest and agree that it is not old) partly to give the year a solid foundation I intend to spend the evenings of this week of captivity in making out an account of my friendships and their present condition, with some account of my friends’ characters; and to add an estimate of their work and a forecast of their future works. The lady of 50 will be able to say how near to the truth I come; but I have written enough for tonight (only 15 minutes, I see).

Wednesday, March 5th.

Just back from four days at Asheham and one at Charleston. I sit waiting for Leonard to come in, with a brain still running along the railway lines, which unfits it for reading. But oh, dear, what a lot I’ve got to read! The entire works of Mr James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, so as to compare them with the entire works of Dickens and Mrs Gaskell; besides that George Eliot; and finally Hardy. And I’ve just done Aunt Anny, on a really liberal scale. Yes, since I wrote last she has died, a week ago today to be precise, at Freshwater, and was buried up at Hampstead yesterday, where six or seven years ago we saw Richmond buried in a yellow fog. I suppose my feeling for her is half moonshine; or rather half reflected from other feelings. Father cared for her; she goes down the last, almost, of that old 19th Century Hyde Park Gate world. Unlike most old ladies she showed very little anxiety to see one; felt, I sometimes think, a little painfully at the sight of us, as if we’d gone far off and recalled unhappiness, which she never liked to dwell on. Also, unlike most old Aunts she had the wits to feel how sharply we differed on current questions; and this, perhaps, gave her a sense, hardly existing with her usual circle, of age, obsoleteness, extinction. For myself, though she need have had no anxieties on this head, since I admired her sincerely; but still the generations certainly look very different ways. Two or perhaps three years ago L. and I went to see her; found her much diminished in size, wearing a feather boa round her neck and seated alone in a drawing room almost the copy, on a smaller scale, of the old drawing room; the same subdued pleasant air of the 18th Century and old portraits and old china. She had our tea waiting for us. Her manner was a little distant, and more than a little melancholy. I asked her about father, and she said how those young men laughed in a ‘loud melancholy way’ and how their generation was a very happy one, but selfish; and how ours seemed to her fine but very terrible; but we hadn’t any writers such as they had. ‘Some of them have just a touch of that quality; Bernard Shaw has; but only a touch. The pleasant thing was to know them all as ordinary people, not great men.’ And then a story of Carlyle and father; Carlyle saying he’d as soon wash his face in a dirty puddle as write journalism. She put her hand down, I remember, into a bag or box standing beside the fire, and said she had a novel, three quarters written, but couldn’t finish it. Nor do I suppose it ever was finished; but I’ve said all I can say, dressing it up a trifle rosily, in The Times tomorrow. I have written to Hester, but how I doubt the sincerity of my own emotion!

Wednesday, March 19th.

Life piles up so fast that I have no time to write out the equally fast rising mound of reflections, which I always mark down as they rise to be inserted here. I meant to write about the Barnetts and the peculiar repulsiveness of those who dabble their fingers self approvingly in the stuff of others’ souls. The Barnetts were at any rate plunged to the elbow; red handed if ever philanthropists were, which makes them good examples; and then, unquestioning and unspeculative as they were, they give themselves away almost to the undoing of my critical faculty. Is it chiefly intellectual snobbery that makes me dislike them? Is it snobbery to feel outraged when she says ‘Then I came close to the Great Gates’—or reflects that God = good, devil = evil. Has this coarseness of grain any necessary connection with labour for one’s kind? And then the smug vigour of their self-satisfaction! Never a question as to the right of what they do—always a kind of insensate forging ahead until, naturally, their undertakings are all of colossal size and portentous prosperity. Moreover, could any woman of humour or insight quote such paeans to her own genius? Perhaps the root of it all lies in the adulation of the uneducated, and the easy mastery of the will over the poor. And more and more I come to loathe any dominion of one over another; any leadership, any imposition of the will. Finally, my literary taste is outraged by the smooth way in which the tale is made to unfold into fullblown success like some profuse peony. But I only scratch the surface of what I feel about these two stout volumes.

Thursday, March 27th.

… Night and Day which L. has spent the past two mornings and evenings in reading. I own that his verdict, finally pronounced this morning, gives me immense pleasure: how far one should discount it, I don’t know. In my own opinion N. & D. is a much more mature and finished and satisfactory book than The Voyage Out; as it has reason to be. I suppose I lay myself open to the charge of niggling with emotions that don’t really matter. I certainly don’t anticipate even two editions. And yet I can’t help thinking that, English fiction being what it is, I compare for originality and sincerity rather well with most of the moderns. L. finds the philosophy very melancholy. It too much agrees with what he was saying yesterday. Yet, if one is to deal with people on a large scale and say what one thinks, how can one avoid melancholy? I don’t admit to being hopeless though: only the spectacle is a profoundly strange one; and as the current answers don’t do, one has to grope for a new one, and the process of discarding the old, when one is by no means certain what to put in their place, is a sad one. Still, if you think of it, what answers do Arnold Bennett or Thackeray, for instance, suggest? Happy ones—satisfactory solutions—answers one would accept, if one had the least respect for one’s soul? Now I have done my last odious piece of typewriting, and when I have scribbled this page, I shall write and suggest Monday as the day for coming up to lunch with Gerald. I don’t suppose I’ve ever enjoyed any writing so much as I did the last half of Night and Day. Indeed, no part of it taxed me as The Voyage Out did; and if one’s own ease and interest promise anything good, I should have hopes that some people, at least, will find it a pleasure. I wonder if I shall ever be able to read it again? Is the time coming when I can endure to read my own writing in print without blushing—shivering and wishing to take cover?

Wednesday, April 2nd.

Yesterday I took Night and Day up to Gerald and had a little half domestic half professional interview with him in his office. I don’t like the Clubman’s view of literature. For one thing it breeds in me a violent desire to boast: I boasted of Nessa and Clive and Leonard; and how much money they made. Then we undid the parcel and he liked the title but found that Miss Maud Annesley has a book called Nights and Days—which may make difficulties with Mudies. But he was certain he would wish to publish it; and we were altogether cordial; and I noticed how his hair is every blade of it white, with some space between the blades; a very sparsely sown field. I had tea at Gordon Square.

Saturday, April 12th.

These ten minutes are stolen from Moll Flanders, which I failed to finish yesterday in accordance with my time sheet, yielding to a desire to stop reading and go up to London. But I saw London, in particular the view of white city churches and palaces from Hungerford Bridge through the eyes of Defoe. I saw the old women selling matches through his eyes; and the draggled girl skirting round the pavement of St James’s Square seemed to me out of Roxana or Moll Flanders. Yes, a great writer surely to be there imposing himself on me after 200 years. A great writer—and Forster has never read his books! I was beckoned by Forster from the Library as I approached. We shook hands very cordially; and yet I always feel him shrinking sensitively from me, as a woman, a clever woman, an up to date woman. Feeling this I commanded him to read Defoe, and left him, and went and got some more Defoe, having bought one volume at Bickers on the way.

Thursday, April 17th.

However one may abuse the Stracheys their minds remain a source of joy to the end; so sparkling, definite and nimble. Need I add that I reserve the qualities I most admire for people who are not Stracheys? It is so long since I have seen Lytton that I take my impression of him too much from his writing, and his paper upon Lady Hester Stanhope was not one of his best. I could fill this page with gossip about people’s articles in the Athenaeum; since I had tea with Katherine yesterday and Murry sat there mud-coloured and mute, livening only when we talked his shop. He has the jealous partiality of a parent for his offspring already. I tried to be honest, as if honesty were part of my philosophy, and said how I disliked Grantorto on whistling birds, and Lytton and so on. The male atmosphere is disconcerting to me. Do they distrust one? despise one? and if so why do they sit on the whole length of one’s visit? The truth is that when Murry says the orthodox masculine thing about Eliot, for example, belittling my solicitude to know what he said of me, I don’t knuckle under; I think what an abrupt precipice cleaves asunder the male intelligence, and how they pride themselves upon a point of view which much resembles stupidity. I find it much easier to talk to Katherine; she gives and resists as I expect her to; we cover more ground in much less time; but I respect Murry. I wish for his good opinion. Heinemann has rejected K.M.’s stories; and she was oddly hurt that Roger had not invited her to his party. Her hard composure is much on the surface.

Easter Sunday, April 20th.

In the idleness which succeeds any long article, and Defoe is the second leader this month, I got out this diary and read, as one always does read one’s own writing, with a kind of guilty intensity. I confess that the rough and random style of it, often so ungrammatical, and crying for a word altered, afflicted me somewhat. I am trying to tell whichever self it is that reads this hereafter that I can write very much better; and take no time over this; and forbid her to let the eye of man behold it. And now I may add my little compliment to the effect that it has a slapdash and vigour and sometimes hits an unexpected bull’s-eye. But what is more to the point is my belief that the habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practice. It loosens the ligaments. Never mind the misses and the stumbles. Going at such a pace as I do I must make the most direct and instant shots at my object, and thus have to lay hands on words, choose them and shoot them with no more pause than is needed to put my pen in the ink. I believe that during the past year I can trace some increase of ease in my professional writing which I attribute to my casual half hours after tea. Moreover there looms ahead of me the shadow of some kind of form which a diary might attain to. I might in the course of time learn what it is that one can make of this loose, drifting material of life; finding another use for it than the use I put it to, so much more consciously and scrupulously, in fiction. What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace any thing, solemn, slight or beautiful that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk, or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art. The main requisite, I think on re-reading my old volumes, is not to play the part of censor, but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever; since I was curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard, and found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time. But looseness quickly becomes slovenly. A little effort is needed to face a character or an incident which needs to be recorded. Nor can one let the pen write without guidance; for fear of becoming slack and untidy like Vernon Lee. Her ligaments are too loose for my taste.

Monday, May 12th.

We are in the thick of our publishing season; Murry, Eliot and myself are in the hands of the public this morning. For this reason, perhaps, I feel slightly but decidedly depressed. I read a bound copy of Kew Gardens through; having put off the evil task until it was complete. The result is vague. It seems to me slight and short; I don’t see how the reading of it impressed Leonard so much. According to him it is the best short piece I have done yet; and this judgment led me to read the Mark on the Wall and I found a good deal of fault with that. As Sydney Waterlow once said, the worst of writing is that one depends so much upon praise. I feel rather sure that I shall get none for this story; and I shall mind a little. Unpraised, I find it hard to start writing in the morning; but the dejection lasts only 30 minutes, and once I start I forget all about it. One should aim, seriously, at disregarding ups and downs; a compliment here, silence there; Murry and Eliot ordered, and not me; the central fact remains stable, which is the fact of my own pleasure in the art. And these mists of the spirit have other causes, I expect; though they are deeply hidden. There is some ebb and flow of the tide of life which accounts for it; though what produces either ebb or flow I’m not sure.

Tuesday, June 10th.

I must use up the fifteen minutes before dinner in going on again, in order to make up the great gap. We are just in from the Club; from ordering a reprint of the Mark on the Wall at the Pelican Press; and from tea with James. His news is that Maynard in disgust at the peace terms has resigned, kicked the dust of office off him and is now an academic figure at Cambridge. But I must really sing my own praises, since I left off at the point when we came back from Asheham to find the hall table stacked, littered, with orders for Kew Gardens. They strewed the sofa and we opened them intermittently through dinner and quarrelled, I’m sorry to say, because we were both excited, and opposite tides of excitement coursed in us, and they were blown to waves by the critical blast of Charleston. All these orders—150 about, from shops and private people—come from a review in the Lit. Sup. presumably by Logan, in which as much praise was allowed me as I like to claim. And 10 days ago I was stoically facing complete failure! The pleasure of success was considerably damaged, first by our quarrel, and second by the necessity of getting some 90 copies ready, cutting covers, printing labels, glueing backs, and finally despatching, which used up all spare time and some not spare till this moment. But how success showered during those days! Gratuitously, too, I had a letter from Macmillan in New York, so much impressed by The Voyage Out that they want to read Night and Day. I think the nerve of pleasure easily becomes numb. I like little sips, but the psychology of fame is worth considering at leisure. I fancy one’s friends take the bloom off. Lytton lunched here on Saturday with the Webbs, and when I told him my various triumphs, did I imagine a little shade, instantly dispelled, but not before my rosy fruit was out of the sun. Well, I treated his triumphs in much the same way. I can’t feel gratified when he expatiates upon a copy of Eminent Victorians lined and initialled ‘M’ or ‘H’ by Mr or Mrs Asquith. Yet clearly the thought produced a comfortable glow in him. The luncheon was a success. We ate in the garden and Lytton sported very gracefully and yet with more than his old assurance over the conversation. ‘But I’m not interested in Ireland *

Saturday, July 19th.

One ought to say something about Peace day, I suppose, though whether it’s worth taking a new nib for that purpose I don’t know. I’m sitting wedged into the window and so catch almost on my head the steady drip of rain which is pattering on the leaves. In ten minutes or so the Richmond procession begins. I fear there will be few people to applaud the town councillors dressed up to look dignified and march through the streets. I’ve a sense of Holland covers on the chairs; of being left behind when everyone’s in the country. I’m desolate, dusty, and disillusioned. Of course we did not see the procession. We have only marked the bins of refuse on the outskirts. Rain held off till some half hour ago. The servants had a triumphant morning. They stood on Vauxhall Bridge and saw everything. Generals and soldiers and tanks and nurses and bands took two hours in passing. It was they said the most splendid sight of their lives. Together with the Zeppelin raid it will play a great part in the history of the Boxall family. But I don’t know—it seems to me a servants’ festival; something got up to pacify and placate ‘the people’—and now the rain’s spoiling it; and perhaps some extra treat will have to be devised for them. That’s the reason of my disillusionment I think. There’s something calculated and politic and insincere about these peace rejoicings. Moreover they are carried out with no beauty and not much spontaneity. Flags are intermittent; we have what the servants, out of snobbishness, I think, insisted upon buying, to surprise us. Yesterday in London the usual sticky stodgy conglomerations of people, sleepy and torpid as a cluster of drenched bees, were crawling over Trafalgar Square, and rocking about the pavements in the neighbourhood. The one pleasant sight I saw was due rather to the little breath of wind than to decorative skill; some long tongue-shaped streamers attached to the top of the Nelson column licked the air, furled and unfurled, like the gigantic tongues of dragons, with a slow, rather serpentine beauty. Otherwise theatres and music-halls were studded with stout glass pincushions which, rather prematurely, were all radiant within—but surely light might have shone to better advantage. However night was sultry and magnificent so far as that went, and we were kept awake some time after getting into bed, by the explosion of rockets which for a second made our room bright. (And now, in the rain, under a grey brown sky, the bells of Richmond are ringing—but church bells only recall weddings and Christian services.) I can’t deny that I feel a little mean at writing so lugubriously; since we’re all supposed to keep up the belief that we’re glad and enjoying ourselves. So on a birthday, when for some reason things have gone wrong, it was a point of honour in the nursery to pretend. Years later one could confess what a horrid fraud it seemed; and if, years later, these docile herds will own up that they too saw through it, and will have no more of it—well—should I be more cheerful? I think the dinner at the 1917 Club, and Mrs Besant’s speech rubbed the gilt, if there were any grains remaining, effectually off the gingerbread. Hobson was sardonic. She—a massive and sulky featured old lady, with a capacious head, however, thickly covered with curly white hair—began by comparing London, lit up and festive, with Lahore. And then she pitched into us for our maltreatment of India, she, apparently, being ‘them’ and not ‘us’. But I don’t think she made her case very solid, though superficially it was all believable, and the 1917 Club applauded and agreed. I can’t help listening to speaking as though it were writing and thus the flowers, which she brandished now and again, looked terribly artificial. It seems to me more and more clear that the only honest people are the artists, and that these social reformers and philanthropists get so out of hand and harbour so many discreditable desires under the disguise of loving their kind, that in the end there’s more to find fault with in them than in us. But if I were one of them?

Sunday, July 20th.

Perhaps I will finish the account of the peace celebrations. What herd animals we are after all!—even the most disillusioned. At any rate, after sitting through the procession and the peace bells unmoved, I began after dinner to feel that if something was going on, perhaps one had better be in it. I routed up poor L. and threw away my Walpole. First lighting a row of glass lamps and seeing that the rain was stopped, we went out just before tea. Explosions had for some time promised fireworks. The doors of the public house at the corner were open and the room crowded; couples waltzing; songs being shouted, waveringly, as if one must be drunk to sing. A troop of little boys with lanterns were parading the green, beating sticks. Not many shops went to the expense of electric light. A woman of the upper classes was supported dead drunk between two men partially drunk. We followed a moderate stream flowing up the Hill. Illuminations were almost extinct half way up, but we kept on till we reached the terrace. And then we did see something—not much indeed, for the damp had deadened the chemicals. Red and green and yellow and blue balls rose slowly into the air, burst, flowered into an oval of light, which dropped in minuter grains and expired. There were hazes of light at different points. Rising over the Thames, among trees, these rockets were beautiful; the light on the faces of the crowd was strange; yet of course there was grey mist muffling everything and taking the blaze off the fire. It was a melancholy thing to see the incurable soldiers lying in bed at the Star and Garter with their backs to us, smoking cigarettes and waiting for the noise to be over. We were children to be amused. So at eleven we went home and saw from my study Ealing do its best to rejoice, and indeed one fire balloon went so high that L. believed it a star; but there were nine showing. Today the rain has left us in no doubt that any remaining festivities are to be completely quenched.

Tuesday, October 21st.

This is Trafalgar day and yesterday is memorable for the appearance of Night and Day. My six copies reached me in the morning and five were despatched, so that I figure the beaks of five friends already embedded. Am I nervous? Oddly little; more excited and pleased than nervous. In the first place, there it is, out and done with; then I read a bit and liked it; then I have a kind of confidence, that the people whose judgment I value will probably think well of it, which is much reinforced by the knowledge that even if they don’t I shall pick up and start another story on my own. Of course, if Morgan and Lytton and the others should be enthusiastic, I should think the better of myself. The bore is meeting people who say the usual things. But on the whole I see what I’m aiming at; what I feel is that this time I’ve had a fair chance and done my best; so that I can be philosophic and lay the blame on God.

Thursday, October 23rd.

The first fruits of Night and Day must be entered. ‘No doubt a work of the highest genius’, Clive Bell. Well, he might not have liked it: he was critical of The Voyage Out. I own I’m pleased: yet not convinced that it is as he says. However, this is a token that I’m right to have no fears. The people whose judgment I respect won’t be so enthusiastic as he is, but they’ll come out decidedly on that side, I think.

Thursday, October 30th.

I have the excuse of rheumatism for not writing more; and my hand tired of writing, apart from rheumatism. Still, if I could treat myself professionally as a subject for analysis I could make an interesting story of the past few days, of my vicissitudes about N. and D. After Clive’s letter came Nessa’s—unstinted praise; on top of that Lytton’s: enthusiastic praise; a grand triumph; a classic; and so on; Violet’s sentence of eulogy followed; and then, yesterday morning, this line from Morgan ‘I like it less than The Voyage Out: Though he spoke also of great admiration and had read in haste and proposed re-reading, this rubbed out all the pleasure of the rest. Yes, but to continue. About 3 in the afternoon I felt happier and easier on account of his blame than on account of the others’ praise—as if one were in the human atmosphere again, after a blissful roll among elastic clouds and cushiony downs. Yet I suppose I value Morgan’s opinion as much as anybody’s. Then there’s a column in The Times this morning; high praise; and intelligent too; saying among other things that N. and D., though it has less brilliance on the surface, has more depth than the other; with which I agree. I hope this week will see me through the reviews; I should like intelligent letters to follow; but I want to be writing little stories; I feel a load off my mind all the same.

Thursday, November 6th.

Sydney and Morgan dined with us last night. On the whole, I’m glad I sacrificed a concert. The doubt about Morgan and N. and D. is removed; I understand why he likes it less than V.O.; and, in understanding, see that it is not a criticism to discourage. Perhaps intelligent criticism never is. All the same, I shirk writing it out, because I write so much criticism. What he said amounted to this: N. and D. is a strictly formal and classical work; that being so one requires, or he requires, a far greater degree of lovability in the characters than in a book like V.O., which is vague and universal. None of the characters in N. and D. is lovable. He did not care how they sorted themselves out. Neither did he care for the characters in V.O., but there he felt no need to care for them. Otherwise, he admired practically everything; his blame does not consist in saying that N. and D. is less remarkable than t’other. O and beauties it has in plenty—in fact, I see no reason to be depressed on his account. Sydney said he had been completely upset by it and was of opinion that I had on this occasion ‘brought it off’. But what a bore I’m becoming! Yes, even old Virginia will skip a good deal of this; but at the moment it seems important. The Cambridge Magazine repeats what Morgan said about dislike of the characters; yet I am in the forefront of contemporary literature. I’m cynical about my figures, they say; but directly they go into detail, Morgan, who read the Review sitting over the gas fire, began to disagree. So all critics split off, and the wretched author who tries to keep control of them is torn asunder. For the first time this many years I walked along the river bank between ten and eleven. Yes, it’s like the shut up house I once compared it to; the room with its dust sheets on the chairs. The fishermen are not out so early; an empty path; but a large aeroplane on business. We talked very rarely, the proof being that we (I anyhow) did not mind silences. Morgan has the artist’s mind; he says the simple things that clever people don’t say; I find him the best of critics for that reason. Suddenly out comes the obvious thing that one has overlooked. He is in trouble with a novel of his own, fingering the keys but only producing discords so far.

Friday, December 5th.

Another of these skips, but I think the book draws its breath steadily if with deliberation. I reflect that I’ve not opened a Greek book since we came back; hardly read outside my review books, which proves that my time for writing has not been mine at all. I’m almost alarmed to find how intensely I’m specialized. My mind turned by anxiety, or other cause, from its scrutiny of blank paper, is like a lost child—wandering the house, sitting on the bottom step to cry. Night and Day flutters—about me still, and causes great loss of time. George Eliot would never read reviews, since talk of her books hampered her writing. I begin to see what she meant. I don’t take praise or blame excessively to heart, but they interrupt, cast one’s—eyes backwards, make one wish to explain or investigate. Last week I had a cutting paragraph to myself in Wayfarer; this week Olive Heseltine applies balm. But I had rather write in my own way of Four Passionate Snails than be, as K.M. maintains, Jane Austen over again.

[]

1920.

Monday, January 26th.

The day after my birthday; in fact I’m 38, well, I’ve no doubt I’m a great deal happier than I was at 28; and happier today than I was yesterday having this afternoon arrived at some idea of a new form for a new novel. Suppose one thing should open out of another—as in An Unwritten Novel—only not for 10 pages but 200 or so—doesn’t that give the looseness and lightness I want; doesn’t that get closer and yet keep form and speed, and enclose everything, everything? My doubt is how far it will enclose the human heart—Am I sufficiently mistress of my dialogue to net it there? For I figure that the approach will be entirely different this time: no scaffolding; scarcely a brick to be seen; all crepuscular, but the heart, the passion, humour, everything as bright as fire in the mist. Then I’ll find room for so much—a gaiety—an inconsequence—a light spirited stepping at my sweet will. Whether I’m sufficiently mistress of things—that’s the doubt; but conceive(?) Mark on the Wall, K.G. and Unwritten Novel taking hands and dancing in unity. What the unity shall be I have yet to discover; the theme is a blank to me; but I see immense possibilities in the form I hit upon more or less by chance two weeks ago. I suppose the danger is the damned egotistical self; which ruins Joyce and Richardson to my mind: is one pliant and rich enough to provide a wall for the book from oneself without its becoming, as in Joyce and Richardson, narrowing and restricting? My hope is that I’ve learnt my business sufficiently now to provide all sorts of entertainments. Anyhow, I must still grope and experiment but this afternoon I had a gleam of light. Indeed, I think from the ease with which I’m developing the Unwritten Novel there must be a path for me there.

Wednesday, February 4th.

The mornings from 12 to 11 spent reading The Voyage Out. I’ve not read it since July 1913. And if you ask me what I think I must reply that I don’t know—such a harlequinade as it is—such an assortment of patches—here simple and severe—here frivolous and shallow—here like God’s truth—here strong and free flowing as I could wish. What to make of it, Heaven knows. The failures are ghastly enough to make my cheeks burn—and then a turn of the sentence, a direct look ahead of me, makes them burn in a different way. On the whole I like the young woman’s mind considerably. How gallantly she takes her fences—and my word, what a gift for pen and ink! I can do little to amend, and must go down to posterity the author of cheap witticisms, smart satires and even, I find, vulgarisms—crudities rather—that will never cease to rankle in the grave. Yet I see how people prefer it to N. and D. I don’t say admire it more, but find it a more gallant and inspiring spectacle.

Tuesday, March 9th.

In spite of some tremors I think I shall go on with this diary for the present. I sometimes think that I have worked through the layer of style which suited it—suited the comfortable bright hour after tea; and the thing I’ve reached now is less pliable. Never mind; I fancy old Virginia, putting on her spectacles to read of March 1920 will decidedly wish me to continue. Greetings! my dear ghost; and take heed that I don’t think 50 a very great age. Several good books can be written still; and here’s the bricks for a fine one. To return to the present owner of the name, on Sunday I went up to Campden Hill to hear the Schubert quintet—to see George Booth’s house—to take notes for my story—to rub shoulders with respectability—all these reasons took me there and were cheaply gratified at 7/6.

Whether people see their own rooms with the devastating clearness that I see them, thus admitted once for one hour, I doubt. Chill superficial seemliness; but thin as a March glaze of ice on a pool. A sort of mercantile smugness. Horsehair and mahogany is the truth of it; and the white panels, Vermeer reproductions, Omega table and variegated curtains rather a snobbish disguise. The least interesting of rooms; the compromise; though of course that’s interesting too. I took against the family system. Old Mrs Booth enthroned on a sort of commode in widow’s dress; flanked by devoted daughters; with grandchildren somehow symbolical cherubs. Such neat dull little boys and girls. There we all sat in our furs and white gloves.

Saturday, April10th.

I’m planning to begin Jacob’s Room next week with luck. (That’s the first time I’ve written that.) It’s the spring I have in my mind to describe; just to make this note—that one scarcely notices the leaves out on the trees this year, since they seem never entirely to have gone—never any of that iron blackness of the chestnut trunks—always something soft and tinted; such as I can’t remember in my life before. In fact, we’ve skipped a winter; had a season like the midnight sun; a new return to full daylight. So I hardly notice that chestnuts are out—the little parasols spread on our window tree; and the churchyard grass running over the old tombstones like green water.

Thursday, April 15th.

My handwriting seems to be going to the dogs. Perhaps I confuse it with my writing. I said that Richmond was enthusiastic over my James article? Well, two days ago, little elderly Walkley attacked it in The Times, said I’d fallen into H.J.’s worst mannerisms—hardbeaten ‘figures’—and hinted that I was a sentimental lady friend. Percy Lubbock was included too; but, rightly or wrongly, I delete the article from my mind with blushes, and see all my writing in the least becoming light. I suppose it’s the old matter of ‘florid gush’—no doubt a true criticism, though the disease is my own, not caught from H.J., if that’s any comfort. I must see to it though. The Times atmosphere brings it out; for one thing I have to be formal there, especially in the case of H.J., and so contrive an article rather like an elaborate design, which encourages ornament. Desmond, however, volunteered admiration. I wish one could make out some rule about praise and blame. I predict that I’m destined to have blame in any quantity. I strike the eye; and elderly gentlemen in particular get annoyed. An Unwritten Novel will certainly be abused; I can’t foretell what line they’ll take this time. Partly, it’s the ‘writing well’ that sets people off—and always has done, I suppose, ‘Pretentious’ they say; and then a woman writing well, and writing in The Times—that’s the line of it. This slightly checks me from beginning Jacob’s Room. But I value blame. It spurs one, even from Walkley; who is (I’ve looked him out) 65, and a cheap little gossip, I’m glad to think, laughed at, even by Desmond. But don’t go forgetting that there’s truth in it; more than a grain in the criticism that I’m damnably refined in The Times; refined and cordial; I don’t think it’s easy to help it; since, before beginning the H.J. article, I took a vow I’d say what I thought, and say it in my own way. Well, I’ve written all this page and not made out how to steady myself when the Unwritten Novel appears.

Tuesday, May 11th.

It is worth mentioning, for future reference, that the creative power which bubbles so pleasantly in beginning a new book quiets down after a time, and one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in. Then one becomes resigned. Determination not to give in, and the sense of an impending shape keep one at it more than anything. I’m a little anxious. How am I to bring off this conception? Directly one gets to work one is like a person walking, who has seen the country stretching out before. I want to write nothing in this book that I don’t enjoy writing. Yet writing is always difficult.

Wednesday, June 23rd.

I was struggling, at this time, to say honestly that I don’t think Conrad’s last book a good one. I have said it. It is painful (a little) to find fault there, where almost solely, one respects. I can’t help suspecting the truth to be that he never sees anyone who knows good writing from bad, and then being a foreigner, talking broken English, married to a lump of a wife, he withdraws more and more into what he once did well, only piles it on higher and higher, until what can one call it but stiff melodrama. I would not like to find The Rescue signed Virginia Woolf. But will anyone agree with this? Anyhow nothing shakes my opinion of a book. Nothing—nothing. Only perhaps if it’s the book of a young person—or of a friend—no, even so, I think myself infallible. Haven’t I lately dismissed Murry’s play, and exactly appraised K.’s story, and summed up Aldous Huxley; and doesn’t it somehow wound my sense of fitness to hear Roger mangling these exact values?

Thursday, August 5th.

Let me try to say what I think as I read Don Quixote after dinner—Principally that writing was then story telling to amuse people sitting round the fire without any of our devices for pleasure. There they sit, women spinning, men contemplative, and the jolly, fanciful, delightful tale is told to them, as to grown up children. This impresses me as the motive of D.Q.: to keep us entertained at all costs. So far as I can judge, the beauty and thought come in unawares: Cervantes scarcely conscious of serious meaning, and scarcely seeing D.Q. as we see him. Indeed that’s my difficulty—the sadness, the satire, how far are they ours, not intended—or do these great characters have it in them to change according to the generation that looks at them? Much, I admit, of the tale-telling is dull—not much, only a little at the end of the first volume, which is obviously told as a story to keep one contented. So little said out, so much kept back, as if he had not wished to develop that side of the matter—the scene of the galley slaves marching is an instance of what I mean. Did C. feel the whole of the beauty and sadness of that as I feel it? Twice I’ve spoken of ‘sadness’.

Is that essential to the modern view? Yet how splendid it is to unfurl one’s sail and blow straight ahead on the gust of the great story telling, as happens all through the first part. I suspect the Fernando-Cardino-Lucinda story was a courtly episode in the fashion of the day, anyhow dull to me. I am also reading Ghoa le Simple—bright, effective, interesting, yet so arid and spick and span. With Cervantes everything there; in solution if you like; but deep, atmospheric, living people casting shadows solid, tinted as in life. The Egyptians, like most French writers, give you a pinch of essential dust instead, much more pungent and effective, but not nearly so surrounding and spacious. By God! What stuff I’m writing! Always these images. I write Jacob every morning now, feeling each day’s work like a fence which I have to ride at, my heart in my mouth till it’s over, and I’ve cleared, or knocked the bar out. (Another image, unthinking it was one. I must somehow get Hume’s Essays and purge myself.)

Sunday, September 26th.

But I think I minded more than I let on; for somehow Jacob has come to a stop, in the middle of that party too, which I enjoyed so much. Eliot coming on the heel of a long stretch of writing fiction (two months without a break) made me listless; cast shade upon me; and the mind when engaged upon fiction wants all its boldness and self-confidence. He said nothing—but I reflected how what I’m doing is probably being better done by Mr Joyce. Then I began to wonder what it is that I am doing; to suspect, as is usual in such cases, that I have not thought my plan out plainly epough—so to dwindle, niggle, hesitate—which means that one’s lost. But I think my two months of work are the cause of it, seeing that I now find myself veering round to Evelyn and even making up a paper upon Women, as a counterblast to Mr Bennett’s adverse views reported in the paper. Two weeks ago I made up Jacob incessantly on my walks. An odd thing, the human mind! so capricious, faithless, infinitely shying at shadows. Perhaps at the bottom of my mind, I feel that I’m distanced by L. in every respect Monday, October 25th (First day of winter time)

Why is life so tragic; so like a little strip of pavement over an abyss. I look down; I feel giddy; I wonder how I am ever to walk to the end. But why do I feel this: Now that I say it I don’t feel it. The fire burns; we are going to hear the Beggar’s Opera. Only it lies about me; I can’t keep my eyes shut. It’s a feeling of impotence; of cutting no ice. Here I sit at Richmond, and like a lantern stood in the middle of a field my light goes up in darkness. Melancholy diminishes as I write. Why then don’t I write it down oftener? Well, one’s vanity forbids. I want to appear a success even to myself. Yet I don’t get to the bottom of it. It’s having no children, living away from friends, failing to write well, spending too much on food, growing old. I think too much of whys and wherefores; too much of myself. I don’t like time to flap round me. Well then, work. Yes, but I so soon tire of work—can’t read more than a little, an hour’s writing is enough for me. Out here no one comes in to waste time pleasantly. If they do, I’m cross. The labour of going to London is too great. Nessa’s children grow up, and I can’t have them in to tea, or go to the Zoo. Pocket money doesn’t allow of much. Yet I’m persuaded that these are trivial things; it’s life itself, I think sometimes, for us in our generation so tragic—no newspaper placard without its shriek of agony from someone. McSwiney this afternoon and violence in Ireland; or it’ll be the strike. Unhappiness is everywhere; just beyond the door; or stupidity, which is worse. Still I don’t pluck the nettle out of me. To write Jacob’s Room again will revive my fibres, I feel. Evelyn is due; but I don’t like what I write now. And with it all how happy I am—if it weren’t for my feeling that it’s a strip of pavement over an abyss.

[]

1921.

Tuesday, March 1st.

I am not satisfied that this book is in a healthy way. Suppose one of my myriad changes of style is antipathetic to the material? or does my style remain fixed? To my mind it changes always. But no one notices. Nor can I give it a name myself. The truth is that I have an internal, automatic scale of values; which decides what I had better do with my time. It dictates ‘this half hour must be spent on Russian’. ‘This must be given to Wordsworth.’ Or ‘Now I’d better darn my brown stockings.’ How I come by this code of values I don’t know. Perhaps it’s the legacy of puritan grandfathers. I suspect pleasure slightly. God knows. And the truth is also that writing, even here, needs screwing of the brain—not so much as Russian, but then half the time I learn Russian I look in the fire and think what I shall write tomorrow. Mrs Flanders is in the orchard. If I were at Rodmell I should have thought it all out walking on the flats. I should be in fine writing trim. As it is Ralph, Carrington and Brett have this moment gone; I’m dissipated; we dine and go out to the Guild. I can’t settle as I should to think of Mrs Flanders in the orchard.

Sunday, March 6th.

Nessa approves of Monday or Tuesday—mercifully; and thus somewhat redeems it in my eyes. But I now wonder a little what the reviewers will make of it—this time next month. Let me try to prophesy. Well, The Times will be kindly, a little cautious, Mrs Woolf, they will say, must beware of virtuosity. She must beware of obscurity. Her great natural gifts etc … She is at her best in the simple lyric, or in Kew Gardens. An Unwritten Novel is hardly a success. And as for A Society, though spirited, it is too one-sided. Still Mrs Woolf can always be read with pleasure. Then, in the Westminster, Pall Mall and other serious evening papers I shall be treated very shortly with sarcasm. The general line will be that I am becoming too much in love with the sound of my own voice; not much in what I write; indecently affected; a disagreeable woman. The truth is, I expect, that I shan’t get very much attention anywhere. Yet, I become rather well known.

Friday, April 8th. 10 minutes to 11 a.m.

And I ought to be writing Jacob’s Room; and I can’t, and instead I shall write down the reason why I can’t—this diary being a kindly blankfaced old confidante. Well, you see, I’m a failure as a writer. I’m out of fashion: old: shan’t do any better: have no headpiece: the spring is everywhere: my book out (prematurely) and nipped, a damp firework. Now the solid grain of fact is that Ralph sent my book out to The Times for review without date of publication in it. Thus a short notice is scrambled through to be in ‘on Monday at latest’, put in an obscure place, rather scrappy, complimentary enough, but quite unintelligent. I mean by that they don’t see that I’m after something interesting. So that makes me suspect that I’m not. And thus I can’t get on with Jacob. Oh and Lytton’s book is out and takes up three columns; praise I suppose. I do not trouble to sketch this in order; or how my temper sank and sank till for half an hour I was as depressed as I ever am. I mean I thought of never writing any more—save reviews. To rub this in we had a festival party at 41: to congratulate Lytton; which was all as it should be, but then he never mentioned my book, which I suppose he has read; and for the first time I have not his praise to count on. Now if I’d been saluted by the Lit. Sup. as a mystery—a riddle, I shouldn’t mind; for Lytton wouldn’t like that sort of thing, but if I’m as plain as day, and negligible?

Well, this question of praise and fame must be faced. (I forgot to say that Doran has refused the book in America.) How much difference does popularity make? (I’m putting clearly, I may add, after a pause in which Lottie has brought in the milk and the sun has ceased to eclipse itself, that I’m writing a good deal of nonsense.) One wants, as Roger said very truly yesterday, to be kept up to the mark; that people should be interested and watch one’s work. What depresses me is the thought that I have ceased to interest people—at the very moment when, by the help of the press, I thought I was becoming more myself. One does not want an established reputation, such as I think I was getting, as one of our leading female novelists. I have still, of course, to gather in all the private criticism, which is the real test. When I have weighed this I shall be able to say whether I am ‘interesting’ or obsolete. Anyhow, I feel quite alert enough to stop, if I’m obsolete. I shan’t become a machine, unless a machine for grinding articles. As I write, there rises somewhere in my head that queer and very pleasant sense of something which I want to write; my own point of view. I wonder, though, whether this feeling that I write for half a dozen instead of 1500 will pervert this?—make me eccentric—no, I think not. But, as I said, one must face the despicable vanity which is at the root of all this niggling and haggling. I think the only prescription for me is to have a thousand interests—if one is damaged, to be able instantly to let my energy flow into Russian, or Greek, or the press, or the garden, or people, or some activity disconnected with my own writing.

Sunday, April 9th.

I must note the symptoms of the disease, so as to know it next I time. The first day one’s miserable; the second happy. There I was an Affable Hawk on me in the New Statesman which at any rate made me feel important (and it’s that that one wants) and Simpkin Marshall rang up for a second fifty copies. So they must be selling. Now I have to stand all the twitching and teasing of private criticism which I shan’t enjoy. There’ll be Roger tomorrow. What a bore it all is!—and then one begins to wish one had put in other stories and left out the Haunted House, which may be sentimental.

Tuesday, April 12th.

I must hurriedly note more symptoms of the disease, so that I can turn back here and medicine myself next time. Well; I’d worn through the acute stage and come to the philosophic semi-depressed, indifferent, spent the afternoon taking parcels round the shops, going to Scotland Yard for my purse, when L. met me at tea and dropped into my ear the astonishing news that Lytton thinks the String Quartet ‘marvellous’. This came through Ralph, who doesn’t exaggerate, to whom Lytton need not lie; and did for a moment flood every nerve with pleasure, so much so that I forgot to buy my coffee and walked over Hungerford Bridge twanging and vibrating. A lovely blue evening too, the river sky colour. And then there was Roger who thinks I’m on the track of real discoveries and certainly not a fake. And we’ve broken the record of sales, so far. And I’m not nearly so pleased as I was depressed; and yet in a state of security; fate cannot touch me; the reviewers may snap; and the sales decrease. What I had feared was that I was dismissed as negligible.

Friday, April 29th.

I ought to say something of Lytton. I have seen him oftener these last days than for a whole year perhaps. We have talked about his book and my book. This particular conversation took place in Verreys: gilt feathers: mirrors: blue walls and Lytton and I taking our tea and brioche in a corner. We must have sat well over an hour.

‘And I woke last night and wondered where to place you,’ I said. ‘There’s St Simon and La Bruyère.’

‘Oh God,’ he groaned.

‘And Macaulay,’ I added.

‘Yes, Macaulay,’ he said. ‘A little better than Macaulay.’

But not his man, I insisted. ‘More civilization of course. And then you’ve only written short books.’

‘I’m going to do George IV next,’ he said.

‘Well, but your place,’ I insisted.

‘And yours?’ he asked.

‘I’m the “ablest of living women novelists”,’ I said. ‘So the British Weekly says.’

‘You influence me,’ he said.

And he said he could always recognize my writing though I wrote so many different styles.

‘Which is the result of hard work,’ I insisted. And then we discussed histories; Gibbon; a kind of Henry James, I volunteered.

‘Oh dear no—not in the least,’ he said.

‘He has a point of view and sticks to it,’ I said. ‘And so do you. I wobble.’ But what is Gibbon?

‘Oh he’s there all right,’ Lytton said. ‘Forster says he’s an Imp.

But he hadn’t many views. He believed in “virtue” perhaps.”A beautiful word,’ I said.

‘But just read how the hordes of barbarians devastated the City. It’s marvellous. True, he was queer about the early Christians—didn’t see anything in them at all. But read him. I’m going to next October. And I’m going to Florence, and I shall be very lonely in the evenings.’

‘The French have influenced you more than the English, I suppose,’ I said. ‘Yes. I have their definiteness. I’m formed.”I compared you with Carlyle the other day,’ I said. ‘I read the Reminiscences. Well, they’re the chatter of an old toothless gravedigger compared with you; only then he has phrases.’

‘Ah yes, he has them,’ said Lytton. ‘But I read him to Norton and James the other day and they shouted—they wouldn’t have it.’

‘I’m a little anxious though about “mass”.”That’s my danger, is it?’ “ ‘Yes. You may cut too fine,’ I said. ‘But it’s a magnificent subject—George IV—and what fun, setting to work on it.”And your novel?’

‘Oh, I put in my hand and rummage in the bran pie.”That’s what’s so wonderful. And it’s all different.”Yes, I’m 20 people.’

‘But one sees the whole from the outside. The worst of George IV is that no one mentions the facts I want. History must be written all over again. It’s all morality ‘

‘And battles,’ I added.

And then we walked through the streets together, for I had to buy coffee.

Thursday, May 26th.

I sat in Gordon Square yesterday for an hour and a half talking to Maynard. Sometimes I wish I put down what people say instead of describing them. The difficulty is that they say so little. Maynard said he liked praise; and always wanted to boast. He said that many men marry in order to have a wife to boast to. But, I said, it’s odd that one boasts considering that no one is ever taken in by it. It’s odd too that you, of all people, should want praise. You and Lytton are passed beyond boasting—which is the supreme triumph. There you sit and say nothing. I love praise, he said. I want it for the things I’m doubtful about. Then we got upon publishing, and The Hogarth Press; and novels. Why should they explain what bus he took? he asked. And why shouldn’t Mrs Hilbery be sometimes the daughter of Katharine. Oh, it’s a dull book, I know, I said; but don’t you I see you must put it all in before you can leave out. The best thing you ever did, he said, was your Memoir on George. You should pretend to write about real people and make it all up. I was dashed of course (and Oh dear what nonsense—for if George is my climax I’m a mere scribbler).

Saturday, August 13th.

‘Coleridge was as little fitted for action as Lamb, but on a different account. His person was of a good height, but as sluggish and solid as the other’s was light and fragile. He had, perhaps, suffered it to look old before its time, for want of exercise. His hair was white at 50; and as he generally dressed in black and had a very tranquil demeanour, his appearance was gentlemanly, and for several years before his death was reverend. Nevertheless, there was something invincibly young in the look of his face. It was round and fresh-coloured, with agreeable features, and an open, indolent, goodnatured mouth. This boylike expression was very becoming in one who dreamed and speculated as he did when he was really a boy, and who passed his life apart from the rest of the world, with a book and his flowers. His forehead was prodigious,—a great piece of placid marble;—and his fine eyes, in which all the activity of his mind seemed to concentrate, moved under it with a sprightly ease, as if it was a pastime to them to carry all that thought.

‘And it was pastime. Hazlitt said that Coleridge’s genius appeared to him like a spirit, all head and wings, eternally floating about in etherealities. He gave me a different impression. I fancied him a goodnatured wizard, very fond of earth, and conscious of reposing with weight enough in his easy chair, but able to conjure his etherealities about him in the twinkling of an eye. He could also change them by thousands and dismiss them as easily when his dinner came. It was a mighty intellect put upon a sensual body; and the reason he did little more with it than talk and dream was that it is agreeable to such a body to do little else. I do not mean that C. was a sensualist in an ill sense …’ which is all that I can take the trouble to quote from Leigh Hunt’s memoirs volume II page 223, supposing I should want to cook this up again somewhere. L.H. was our spiritual grandfather, a free man. One could have spoken to him as to Desmond. A light man, I daresay, but civilized, much more so than my grandfather in the flesh. These free, vigorous spirits advance the world, and when one lights on them in the strange waste of the past one says ‘Ah, you’re my sort’—a great compliment. Most people who died 100 years ago are like strangers. One is polite and uneasy with them. Shelley died with H.’s copy of Lamia in his hand. H. would receive it back from no other, and so burnt it on the pyre. Going home from the funeral? H. and Byron laughed till they split. This is human nature and H. doesn’t mind owning to it. Then I like his inquisitive human sympathies: history so dull because of its battles and laws; and sea voyages in books so dull because the traveller will describe beauties instead of going into the cabins and saying what the sailors looked like, wore, ate, said; how they behaved.

Lady Carlisle is dead. One likes people much better when they’re battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph. Such a stock of hope and gifts she set out with, and lost everything (so they say) and died of sleepy sickness, her 5 sons dead before her and the war crushing her hope for humanity.

Wednesday, August 17th.

To while away the time till L. comes in from London, Fergusson, office etc., I may as well scribble. Really I think my scribbling is coming back. Here I have spent the whole day, off and on, making up an article—for Squire perhaps, because he wants a story, and because Mrs Hawkesford has told Mrs Thomsett that I am one of the, if not the, cleverest women in England. It’s not nerve power so much as praise that has lacked, perhaps. Yesterday I was seized with the flux, as the Bible has it. Dr Vallence was fetched, came after dinner, and paid a call. I wish I could write down his conversation. A mild, heavy lidded, little elderly man, son of a Lewes doctor, has always lived here, existing on a few broad medical truths learnt years ago, which he applies conscientiously. He can speak French, as it were, in words of one syllable. As both L. and I knew a good deal more than he did we got upon general topics—old Verrall and how he starved himself purposely to death. ‘I could have had him sent away,’ said Dr V. meditatively. ‘He had been away once. His sister’s away to this day—quite crazy, I believe—a bad family, very bad. I sat with him in your sitting room. We had to sit right into the chimney to get warm. I tried to interest him in chess. No. He didn’t seem able to take an interest in anything. But he was too old—too weak. I couldn’t send him away.’ So he starved himself to death, pottering about his garden.

Crossing his knees and touching his little moustache meditatively now and then, V. then asked me if I did anything? (He thought me a chronic invalid, a fine lady.) I said I wrote. ‘What, novels? Light things?’ Yes, novels. ‘I have another lady novelist among my patients—Mrs Dudeny. I’ve had to buck her up—to fulfil a contract, a contract for a new novel. She finds Lewes very noisy. And then we have Marion Crawford … But Mr Dudeny is the puzzle king. Give him any puzzle—he’ll tell you the answer. He makes up the sort of puzzles shops print on their menus. He writes columns in the papers about puzzles.’

‘Did he help to answer puzzles in the war?’ I asked.

‘Well, I don’t know about that. But a great many soldiers wrote to him—the puzzle king.’ Here he crossed his legs the opposite way. Finally he went and invited L. to join the Lewes Chess Club, which I should very much like to attend myself, these glimpses into different groups always fascinating me intolerably, for I shall never join the party of Dr Vallence and the puzzle king.

Thursday, August 18th.

Nothing to record; only an intolerable fit of the fidgets to write away. Here I am chained to my rock; forced to do nothing; doomed to let every worry, spite, irritation and obsession scratch and claw and come again. This is a day that I may not walk and must not work. Whatever book I read bubbles up in my mind as part of an article I want to write. No one in the whole of Sussex is so miserable as I am; or so conscious of an infinite capacity of enjoyment hoarded in me, could I use it. The sun streams (no, never streams; floods rather) down upon all the yellow fields and the long low barns; and what wouldn’t I give to be coming through Firle woods, dirty and hot, with my nose turned home, every muscle tired and the brain laid up in sweet lavender, so sane and cool, and ripe for the morrow’s task. How I should notice everything—the phrase for it coming the moment after and fitting like a glove; and then on the dusty road, as I ground my pedals, so my story would begin telling itself; and then the sun would be down; and home, and some bout of poetry after dinner, half read, half lived, as if the flesh were dissolved and through it the flowers burst red and white. There! I’ve written out half my irritation. I hear poor L. driving the lawn mower up and down, for a wife like I am should have a latch to her cage. She bites! And he spent all yesterday running around London for me. Still if one is Prometheus, if the rock is hard and the gadflies pungent, gratitude, affection, none of the nobler feelings have sway. And so this August is wasted.

Only the thought of people suffering more than I do at all consoles; and that is an aberration of egotism, I suppose. I will now make out a time table if I can to get through these odious days.

Poor Mdlle Lenglen, finding herself beaten by Mrs Mallory, flung down her racquet and burst into tears. Her vanity I suppose is colossal. I daresay she thought that to be Mdlle Lenglen was the greatest thing in the world; invincible, like Napoleon. Armstrong, playing in the test match, took up his position against the gates and would not move, let the bowlers appoint themselves, the whole game became farcical because there was not time to play it out. But Ajax in the Greek play was of the same temper—which we all agree to call heroic in him. But then everything is forgiven to the Greeks. And I’ve not read a line of Greek since last year, this time, too. But I shall come back, if it’s only in snobbery; I shall be reading Greek when I’m old; old as the woman at the cottagè door, whose hair might be a wig in a play, it’s so white, so thick. Seldom penetrated by love for mankind as I am, I sometimes feel sorry for the poor who don’t read Shakespeare, and indeed have felt some generous democratic humbug at the Old Vic, when they played Othello and all the poor men and women and children had him there for themselves. Such splendour and such poverty. I am writing down the fidgets, so no matter if I write nonsense. Indeed, any interference with the normal proportions of things makes me uneasy. I know this room too well—this view too well—I am getting it all out of focus, because I can’t walk through it.

Monday, September 12th.

I have finished The Wings of the Dove, and make this comment. His manipulation becomes so elaborate towards the end that instead of feeling the artist you merely feel the man who is posing the subject. And then I think he loses the power to feel the crisis. He becomes merely excessively ingenious. This, you seem to hear him saying, is the way to do it. Now just when you expect a crisis, the true artist evades it. Never do the thing, and it will be all the more impressive. Finally, after all this juggling and arranging of silk pocket handkerchiefs, one ceases to have any feeling for the figure behind. Milly thus manipulated disappears. He overreaches himself. And then one can never read it again. The mental grasp and stretch are magnificent. Not a flabby or slack sentence, but much emasculated by this timidity or consciousness or whatever it is. Very highly American, I conjecture, in the determination to be highly bred, and the slight obtuseness as to what high breeding is.

Tuesday, November 15th.

Really, really—this is disgraceful—15 days of November spent and my diary none the wiser. But when nothing is written one may safely suppose that I have been stitching books; or we have had tea at 4 and I have taken my walk afterwards; or I have had to read something for next day’s writing, or I have been out late, come home with stencilling materials and sat down in excitement to try one. We went to Rodmell, and the gale blew at us all day; off arctic fields; so we spent our time attending to the fire. The day before this I wrote the last words of Jacob—on Friday November 4th to be precise, having begun it on April 16, 1920: allowing for 6 months interval due to Monday or Tuesday and illness, this makes about a year. I have not yet looked at it. I am struggling with Henry James’s ghost stories for The Times; have I not just laid them down in a mood of satiety? Then I must do Hardy; then I want to write a life of Newnes; then I shall have to furbish up Jacob; and one of these days, if only I could find energy to tackle the Paston letters, I must start Reading: directly I’ve started Reading I shall think of another novel, I daresay. So that the only question appears to be—will my fingers stand so much scribbling?

Monday, December 19th.

I will add a postscript, as I wait for my parcels to be wrapped up, on the nature of reviewing.

‘Mrs Woolf? I want to ask you one or two questions about your Henry James article.

‘First (only about the right name of one of the stories).

‘And now you use the word “lewd”. Of course, I don’t wish you to change it, but surely that is rather a strong expression to apply to anything by Henry James. I haven’t read the story lately of course—but still, my impression is ‘

‘Well, I thought that when I read it: one has to go by one’s impressions at the time.’

‘But you know the usual meaning of the word? It is—ah—

dirty. Now poor dear old Henry James At any rate, think it over and ring me up in 20 minutes.’ So I thought it over and came to the required conclusion in twelve minutes and a half. But what is one to do about it? He made it sufficiently clear not only that he wouldn’t stand ‘lewd’ but that he didn’t much like anything else. I feel that this becomes more often the case, and I wonder whether to break off, with an explanation, or to pander, or to go on writing against the current. This last is probably right, but somehow the consciousness of doing that cramps one. One writes stiffly, without spontaneity. Anyhow, for the present I shall let it be, and meet my castigation with resignation. People will complain I’m sure, and poor Bruce fondling his paper like an only child dreads public criticism, is stern with me, not so much for disrespect to poor old Henry, but for bringing blame on the Supplement. And how much time I have wasted!

[]

1922.

Wednesday, February 15th.

Of my reading I will now try to make some note. First Peacock: Nightmare Abbey, and Crotchet Castle. Both are so much better than I remember. Doubtless, Peacock is a taste acquired in maturity. When I was young, reading him in a railway carriage in Greece, sitting opposite Thoby I remember, who pleased me immensely by approving my remark that Meredith had got his women from Peacock, and that they were very charming women, then, I say, I rather had to prod my enthusiasm. Thoby liked it straight off. I wanted mystery, romance, psychology I suppose. And now more than anything I want beautiful prose. I relish it more and more exquisitely. And I enjoy satire more. I like the scepticism of his mind more. I enjoy intellectuality. Moreover, fantasticality does a good deal better than sham psychology. One touch of red in the cheek is all he gives, but I can do the rest. And then they’re so short; and I read them in little yellowish perfectly appropriate first editions.

The masterly Scott has me by the hair once more. Old Mortality. I’m in the middle; and have to put up with some dull sermons; but I doubt that he can be dull, because everything is so much in keeping—even his odd monochromatic landscape painting, done in smooth washes of sepia and burnt sienna. Edith and Henry too might be typical figures by an old master, put in exactly in the right place. And Cuddie and Mause are as usual marching straight away for all time, as lusty as life. But I daresay the lighting and the story telling business prevent him from going quite ahead with his fun as in the Antiquary.

Thursday, February 16th.

To continue—certainly the later chapters are bare and grey, ground out too palpably; authorities, I daresay, interfering with the original flow. And Morton is a prig; and Edith a stick; and Evandale a brick; and the preacher’s dulness I could take for granted. Still—still—I want to know what the next chapter brings, and these gallant old fellows can be excused practically anything.

How far can our historical portrait painters be trusted, seeing the difficulty I have in putting down the face of Violet Dickinson, whom I saw, for two hours, yesterday afternoon? One hears her talking in a swinging random way to Lottie in the hall, as she comes in. ‘Where’s my marmalade? How’s Mrs Woolf? Better eh? Where is she?’ meanwhile putting down coat and umbrella and not listening to a word. Then she seemed to me as she came in gigantically tall; tailor made; with a pearl dolphin with red tongue swinging from a black ribbon; rather stouter; with her white face, prominent blue eyes; nose with a chip off the end; and small beautifully aristocratic hands. Very well; but her talk? Since nature herself could give no account of it—since nature has wilfully left out some screw, what chance is there for me? Such nonsense putting old Ribblesdale and Horner on Boards—Ly. R. was an Astor—refused to let a penny of hers be invested. Your friend Miss Schreiner has gone to Bangkok. Don’t you remember all her boots and shoes in Eaton Square? To tell the truth I remembered neither Schreiner, her boots, or Eaton Square. Then Herman Norman is back and says things are in an awful mess at Teheran.

‘He’s my cousin,’ I said.

‘How’s that?’ Off we went on to Normans. Leonard and Ralph were having tea meanwhile and sometimes intercepted a whiff of grapeshot. Now all this, properly strung together, would make a very amusing sketch in the style of Jane Austen. But old Jane, if she had been in the mood, would have given all the other things—no, I don’t think she would; for Jane was not given to general reflections; one can’t put in the shadows that appear curving round her, and giving her a sort of beauty. She quiets down—though believing the old doctrine that talk must be incessant—and becomes humane, generous; shows that humorous sympathy which brings everything into her scope—naturally; with a touch of salt and reality; she has the range of a good novelist, bathing things in their own atmosphere too, only all so fragmentary and jerky. She told me she had no wish to live. ‘I’m very happy,’ she said. ‘Oh yes, very happy—But why should I want to go on living? What is there to live for?”Your friends?”My friends are all dead.”Ozzie?”Oh, he’d do just as well without me. I should like to tidy things up and disappear.”But you believe in immortality?”No. I don’t know that I do. Dust, ashes, I say.’ She laughed of course; and yet, as I say, has somehow the all round imaginative view which makes one believe her. Certainty I like—is love the word for these strange deep ancient affections, which began in youth and have got mixed up with so many important things? I kept looking at her large pleasant blue eyes, so candid and generous and hearty and going back to Fritham and Hyde Park Gate. But this doesn’t make a picture, all the same. I feel her somehow to be the sketch for a woman of genius. All the fluid gifts have gone in; but not the bony ones.

Friday, February 17th.

I’ve just had my dose of phenacetin—that is to say a mildly unfavourable review of Monday or Tuesday reported by Leonard from the Dial, the more depressing as I had vaguely hoped for approval in that august quarter. It seems as if I succeed nowhere. Yet, I’m glad to find, I have acquired a little philosophy. It amounts to a sense of freedom. I write what I like writing and there’s an end on it. Moreover, heaven knows I get consideration enough.

Saturday, February 18th.

Once more my mind is distracted from the thought of death. There was something about fame I had it in mind to say yesterday. Oh, I think it was that I have made up my mind that I’m not going to be popular, and so genuinely that I look upon disregard or abuse as part of my bargain. I’m to write what I like; and they’re to say what they like. My only interest as a writer lies, I begin to see, in some queer individuality; not in strength, or passion, or anything startling, but then I say to myself, is not ‘some queer individuality’ precisely the quality I respect? Peacock for example: Borrow; Donne; Douglas, in Alone, has a touch of it Who else comes to mind immediately? Fitzgerald’s Letters. People with this gift go on sounding long after the melodious vigorous music is banal. In proof of this, I read that a small boy, given a book by Marie Corelli for a Sunday school prize, at once killed himself; and the coroner remarked that one of her books was not what he himself would call ‘at all a nice book’. So perhaps the Mighty Atom is dwindling away and Night and Day arising; though The Voyage Out seems at the moment most in esteem. That encourages me. After 7 years next April the Dial speaks of its superb artistry. If they say the same of N. and D. in 7 years I shall be content; but I must wait 14 for anyone to take Monday or Tuesday to heart. I want to read Byron’s Letters, but I must go on with La Princesse de Clèves. This masterpiece has long been on my conscience. Me to talk of fiction and not to have read this classic! But reading classics is generally hard going. Especially classics like this one, which are classics because of their perfect taste, shapeliness, composure, artistry. Not a hair of its head is dishevelled. I think the beauty very great, but hard to appreciate. All the characters are noble. The movement is stately. The machinery a little cumbrous. Stories have to be told. Letters dropped. It is the action of the human heart and not of muscle or fate that we watch. But stories of noble human hearts have their movements unapproachable in other circumstances. There is a queer understated profundity in the relations between Madame de Clèves and her mother, for example. If I were reviewing it, I think I should take for my text beauty in character. Thank God though I am not reviewing it. Within the last few minutes I have skimmed the reviews in the New Statesman; between coffee and cigarette I read the Nation; now the best brains in England (metaphorically speaking) sweated themselves for I don’t know how many hours to give me this brief condescending sort of amusement. When I read reviews I crush the column together to get at one or two sentences; is it a good book or a bad? And then I discount those two sentences according to what I know of the book and of the reviewer. But when I write a review I write every sentence as if it were going to be tried before three Chief Justices. I can’t believe that I am crushed together and discounted. Reviews seem to me more and more frivolous. Criticism on the other hand absorbs me more and more. But after 6 weeks influenza my mind throws up no matutinal fountains. My note book lies by my bed unopened. At first I could hardly read for the swarm of ideas that rose involuntarily. I had to write them out at once. And this is great fun. A little air, seeing the buses go by, lounging by the river, will, please God, send the sparks flying again. I am suspended between life and death in an unfamiliar way. Where is my paper knife? I must cut Lord Byron.

Friday, June 23rd.

Jacob, as I say, is being typed by Miss Green, and crosses the Atlantic on July 14th. Then will begin my season of doubts and ups and downs. I am guarding myself in this way.I am going to be well on with a story for Eliot, lives for Squire, and Reading; so that I can vary the side of the pillow as fortune inclines. If they say this is all a clever experiment, I shall produce Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street as the finished product. If they say your fiction is impossible, I shall say what about Miss Ormerod, a fantasy. If they say ‘You can’t make us care a damn for any of your figures’, I shall say read my criticism then. Now what will they say about Jacob? Mad, I suppose: a disconnected rhapsody; I don’t know. I will confide my view to this book on re-reading. On re-reading novels is the title of a very laborious, yet rather gifted article, for the Supt.

Wednesday, July 26th.

On Sunday L. read through Jacob’s Room. He thinks it my best work. But his first remark was that it was amazingly well written. We argued about it. He calls it a work of genius; he thinks it unlike any other novel; he says that the people are ghosts; he says it is very strange: I have no philosophy of life he says; my people are puppets, moved hither and thither by fate. He doesn’t agree that fate works in this way. Thinks I should use my ‘method’ on one or two characters next time; and he found it very interesting and beautiful, and without lapse (save perhaps the party) and quite intelligible. Pocky has so disturbed my mind that I cannot write this as formally as it deserves, for I was anxious and excited. But I am on the whole pleased. Neither of us knows what the public will think. There’s no doubt in my mind that I have found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice; and that interests me so that I feel I can go ahead without praise.

Wednesday, August 16th.

I should be reading Ulysses, and fabricating my case for and against. I have read 200 pages so far—not a third; and have been amused, stimulated, charmed, interested, by the first 2 or 3 chapters—to the end of the cemetery scene; and then puzzled, bored, irritated and disillusioned by a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples. And Tom, great Tom, thinks this on a par with War and?eace\ An illiterate, underbred book it seems to me; the book of a self taught working man, and we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, and ultimately nauseating. When one can have the cooked flesh, why have the raw? But I think if you are anaemic, as Tom is, there is a glory in blood. Being fairly normal myself I am soon ready for the classics again. I may revise this later. I do not compromise my critical sagacity. I plant a stick in the ground to mark page 200.

For my own part I am laboriously dredging my mind for Mrs Dalloway and bringing up light buckets. I don’t like the feeling. I’m writing too quickly. I must press it together. I wrote 4 thousand words of Reading in record time, 10 days; but then it was merely a quick sketch of Pastons, supplied by books. Now I break off, according to my quick change theory, to write Mrs D. (who ushers in a host of others, I begin to perceive). Then I do Chaucer; and finish the first chapter early in September. By that time, I have my Greek beginning perhaps, in my head; and so the future is all pegged out; and when Jacob is rejected in America and ignored in England, I shall be philosophically driving my plough fields away. They are cutting the corn all over the country, which supplies that metaphor, and perhaps excuses it. But I need no excuses, since I am not writing for the Lit. Sup. Shall I ever write for them again?

Tuesday, August 22nd.

“The way to rock oneself back into writing is this. First gentle exercise in the air. Second the reading of good literature. It is a mistake to think that literature can be produced from the raw. One must get out of life—yes, that’s why I disliked so much the irruption of Sydney—one must become externalized; very, very concentrated, all at one point, not having to draw upon the scattered parts of one’s character, living in the brain. Sydney comes and I’m Virginia; when I write I’m merely a sensibility. Sometimes I like being Virginia, but only when I’m scattered and various and gregarious. Now, so long as we are here, I’d like to be only a sensibility. By the way, Thackeray is good reading, very vivacious, with ‘touches’ as they call them over the way at the Shanks’, of astonishing insight.

Monday, August 28th.

I am beginning Greek again, and must really make out some plan: today 28th: Mrs Dalloway finished on Saturday 2nd Sept: Sunday 3rd to Friday 8th; start Chaucer. Chaucer—that chapter, I mean, should be finished by Sept. 22nd. And then? Shall I write the next chapter of Mrs D.—if she is to have a next chapter; and shall it be The Prime Minister? which will last till the week after we get back—say October 12th. Then I must be ready to start my Greek chapter. So I have from today, 28th, till 12th—which is just over 6 weeks—but I must allow for some interruptions. Now what have I to read? Some Homer: one Greek play: some Plato: Zimmern: Sheppard, as textbook: Bentley’s Life: if done thoroughly, this will be enough. But which Greek play? and how much Homer, and what Plato? Then there’s the Anthology. All to end upon the Odyssey because of the Elizabethans. And I must read a little Ibsen to compare with Euripides—Racine with Sophocles—perhaps Marlowe with Aeschylus. Sounds very learned; but really might amuse me; and if it doesn’t, no need to go on.

Wednesday, September 6th.

My proofs come every other day and I could depress myself adequately if I went into that. The thing now reads thin and pointless; the words scarcely dint the paper; and I expect to be told I’ve written a graceful fantasy, without much bearing upon real life. Can one tell? Anyhow, nature obligingly supplies me with the illusion that I am about to write something good; something rich and deep and fluent, and hard as nails, while bright as diamonds.

I finished Ulysses and think it a mis-fire. Genius it has, I think; but of the inferior water. The book is diffuse. It is brackish. It is pretentious. It is underbred, not only in the obvious sense, but in the literary sense. A first rate writer, I mean, respects writing too much to be tricky; startling; doing stunts. I’m reminded all the time of some callow board school boy, full of wits and powers, but so self-conscious and egotistical that he loses his head, becomes extravagant, mannered, uproarious, ill at ease, makes kindly people feel sorry for him and stern ones merely annoyed; and one hopes he’ll grow out of it; but as Joyce is 40 this scarcely seems likely. I have not read it carefully; and only once; and it is very obscure; so no doubt I have scamped the virtue of it more than is fair. I feel that myriads of tiny bullets pepper one and spatter one; but one does not get one deadly wound straight in the face—as from Tolstoy, for instance; but it is entirely absurd to compare him with Tolstoy.

Thursday, September 7th.

Having written this, L. put into my hands a very intelligent review of Ulysses, in the American Nation; which, for the first time, analyses the meaning; and certainly makes it very much more impressive than I judged. Still I think there is virtue and some lasting truth in first impressions; so I don’t cancel mine. I must read some of the chapters again. Probably the final beauty of writing is never felt by contemporaries; but they ought, I think, to be bowled over; and this I was not. Then again, I had my back up on purpose; then again I was over stimulated by Tom’s praises.

Thursday, September 26th.

Wittering. Morgan came on Friday; Tom on Saturday. My talk with Tom deserves writing down, but won’t get it for the light is fading; and we cannot write talk down either, as was agreed at Charleston the other day. There was a good deal of talk about Ulysses. Tom said, ‘He is a purely literary writer. He is founded upon Walter Pater with a dash of Newman.’ I said he was virile—a he-goat; but didn’t expect Tom to agree. Tom did though; and said he left out many things that were important. The book would be a landmark, because it destroyed the whole of the 19th Century. It left Joyce himself with nothing to write another book on. It showed up the futility of all the J English styles. He thought some of the writing beautiful. But there was no ‘great conception’; that was not Joyce’s intention. He thought that Joyce did completely what he meant to do. But he did not think that he gave a new insight into human nature—said nothing new like Tolstoy. Bloom told one nothing. Indeed, he said, this new method of giving the psychology proves to my mind that it doesn’t work. It doesn’t tell as much as some casual glance from outside often tells. I said I had found Tendennis more illuminating in this way. (The horses are now cropping near my window; the little owl calling, and so I write nonsense.) So we got on to S. Sitwell, who merely explores his sensibility—one of the deadly crimes as Tom thinks: to Dostoievsky—the ruin of English literature, we agreed; Singe a fake; present state disastrous, because the form don’t fit; to his mind not even promising well; he said that one must now be a very first rate poet to be a poet at all: When there were great poets, the little ones caught some of the glow, and were not worthless. Now there’s no great poet. When was the last? I asked, and he said none that interested him since the time of Johnson. Browning he said was lazy: they are all lazy he said. And Macaulay spoilt English prose. We agreed that people are now afraid of the English language. He said it came of being bookish, but not reading books enough. One should read all styles thoroughly. He thought D.H. Lawrence came off occasionally, especially in Aaron’s Rod, the last book; had great moments; but was a most incompetent writer. He could cling tight to his conviction though. (Light now fails—7.10 after a bad rainy day.)

Wednesday, October 4th.

I am a little uppish, though, and self assertive, because Brace wrote to me yesterday, ‘We think Jacob’s Room an extraordinarily distinguished and beautiful work. You have, of course, your own method, and it is not easy to foretell how many readers it will have; surely it will have enthusiastic ones, and we delight in publishing it’, or words to that effect. As this is my first testimony from an impartial person I am pleased. For one thing it must make some impression, as a whole; and cannot be wholly frigid fireworks. We think of publishing on October 27th. I daresay Duckworth is a little cross with me. I snuff my freedom. It is I think true, soberly and not artificially for the public, that I shall go on unconcernedly whatever people say. At last, I like reading my own writing. It seems to me to fit me closer than it did before. I have done my task here better than I expected. Mrs Dallo way and the Chaucer chapter are finished: I have read 5 books of the Odyssey; Ulysses; and now begin Proust. I also read Chaucer and the Pastons. So evidently my plan of the two books running side by side is practicable and certainly I enjoy my reading with a purpose. I am committed to only one Supt. article—on essays—and that at my own time; so I am free. I shall read Greek now steadily and begin The Prime Minister on Friday morning. I shall read the Trilogy and some Sophocles and Euripides and a Plato dialogue: also the lives of Bentley and Jebb. At forty I am beginning to | learn the mechanism of my own brain—how to get the greatest amount of pleasure and work out of it. The secret is I think always so to contrive that work is pleasant.

Saturday, October 14th.

I have had two letters, from Lytton and Carrington, about Jacob’s Room, and written I don’t know how many envelopes; and here we are on the verge of publication. I must sit for my portrait to John 0’ London’s on Monday. Richmond writes to ask that date of publication may be put ahead, so that they may notice it on Thursday. My sensations? they remain calm. Yet how could Lytton have praised me more highly? prophesies immortality for it is as poetry; is afraid of my romance; but the beauty of the writing etc. Lytton praises me too highly for it to give me exquisite pleasure; or perhaps that nerve grows dulled. I want to be through the splash and swimming in calm water again. I want to be writing unobserved. Mrs Dalloway has branched into a book; and I adumbrate here a study of insanity and suicide; the world seen by the sane and the insane side by side—something like that. Septimus Smith? is that a good name? and to be more close to the fact than Jacob: but I think Jacob was a necessary step, for me, in working free. And now I must use this benignant page for making out a scheme of work.

I must get on with my reading for the Greek chapter. I shall finish The Prime Minister in another week—say 21st. Then I must be ready to start my Essay article for The Times: say on the 23rd. That will take say till 2nd November. Therefore I must now concentrate on Essays: with some Aeschylus, and I think begin Zimmern, making rather a hasty end of Bentley, who is not really much to my purpose. I think that clears the matter up—though how to read Aeschylus I don’t quite know: quickly, is my desire, but that, I see, is an illusion.

As for my views about the success of Jacob, what are they? I think we shall sell 500; it will then go slowly and reach 800 by June. It will be highly praised in some places for ‘beauty’; will be crabbed by people who want human character. The only review I am anxious about is the one in the Supt.: not that it will be the most intelligent, but it will be the most read and I can’t bear people to see me clowned in public. The W.G. will be hostile; so, very likely, the Nation. But I am perfectly serious in saying that nothing budges me from my determination to go on, or alters my pleasure; so whatever happens, though the surface may be agitated, the centre is secure.

Tuesday, October 17th.

As this is to be a chart of my progress I enter hastily here: one, a letter from Desmond who is halfway through says ‘You have never written so well … I marvel and am puzzled’—or words to that effect: two, Bunny rings up enthusiastic; says it is superb, far my best, has great vitality and importance: also he takes 36 copies, and says people already ‘clamour’. This is not confirmed by the bookshops, visited by Ralph. I have sold under 50 today; but the libraries remain and Simpkin Marshall.

Sunday, October 29th.

Miss Mary Butts being gone, and my head too stupid for reading, I may as well write here, for my amusement later perhaps. I mean I’m too riddled with talk and harassed with the usual worry of people who like and people who don’t like J.R. to concentrate. There was The Times review on Thursday—long, a little tepid, I think—saying that one can’t make characters in this way; flattering enough. Of course, I had a letter from Morgan in the opposite sense—the letter I’ve liked best of all. We have sold 650, I think; and have ordered a second edition. My sensations? as usual—mixed. I shall never write a book that is an entire success. This time the reviews are against me and the private people enthusiastic. Either I am a great writer or a nincompoop. ‘An elderly sensualist,’ the Daily News calls me. Tall Mall passes me over as negligible. I expect to be neglected and sneered at. And what will be the fate of our second thousand then? So far of course the success is much more than we expected. I think I am better pleased so far than I have ever been. Morgan, Lytton, Bunny, Violet, Logan, Philip, have all written enthusiastically. But I want to be quit of all this. It hangs about me like Mary Butts’ scent. I don’t want to be totting up compliments, and comparing reviews. I want to think out Mrs Dalloway. I want to foresee this book better than the others and get the utmost out of it. I expect I could have screwed Jacob up tighter, if I had foreseen; but I had to make my path as I went.

[]

1923.

Monday, June 4th.

I’m over peevish in private, partly in order to assert myself. I am a great deal interested suddenly in my book. I want to bring in the despicableness of people like Ott. I want to give the slipperiness of the soul. I have been too tolerant often. The truth is people scarcely care for each other. They have this insane instinct for life. But they never become attached to anything outside themselves. Puff said he loved his family and had nothing whatever to knock over. He disliked cold indecency. So did Lord David. This must be a phrase in their set. Puff said—I don’t quite know what. I walked round the vegetable garden with him, passing Lytton flirting on a green seat; and round the field with Sackville West, who said he was better, and was writing a better novel, and round the lake with Menasseh (?) an Egyptian Jew, who said he liked his family and they were mad and talked like books; and he said that they quoted my writings (the Oxford youth) and wanted me to go and speak; and then there was Mrs Asquith. I was impressed. She is stone white; with the brown veiled eyes of an aged falcon; and in them more depth and scrutiny than I expected; a character, with her friendliness and ease and decision. Oh if we could have had Shelley’s poems; and not Shelley the man! she said. Shelley was quite intolerable, she pronounced; she is a rigid frigid puritan; and in spite of spending thousands on dress. She rides life, if you like; and has picked up a thing or two, which I should like to plunder and never shall. She led Lytton off and plucked his arm, and hurried—and thought ‘people’ pursued her; yet was very affable with ‘people’ when she had to be, and sat on the window sill talking to a black shabby embroideress, to whom Ott. is being kind. That’s one of her horrors—she’s always being kind in order to say to herself at night, then Ottoline invites the poor little embroideress to her party and so to round off her own picture of herself. To sneer like this has a physical discomfort in it. She told me I looked wonderfully well, which I disliked. Why? I wonder. Because I had had a headache perhaps, partly. But to be well and use strength to get more out of life is, surely, the greatest fun in the world. What I dislike is feeling that I’m always taking care, or being taken care of. Never mind—work, work. Lytton says we have still 20 years before us. Mrs Asquith said she loved Scott.

Wednesday, June 13th.

There was Lady Colefax in her hat with the green ribbons. Did I say that I lunched with her last week? That was Derby Day and it rained, and all the light was brown and cold and she went on talking, talking, in consecutive sentences like the shavings that come from planes, artificial, but unbroken. It was not a successful party, Clive and Lytton and me. For Clive’s back; and he dined here with Leo Myers the other night; and then I went to Golders Green and sat with Mary Sheepshanks in her garden and beat up the waters of talk, as I do so courageously, so that life mayn’t be wasted. The fresh breeze went brushing all the” thick hedges which divide the gardens. Somehow, extraordinary emotions possessed me. I forget now what. Often now I have to control my excitement—as if I were pushing through a screen; or as if something beat fiercely close to me. What this portends I don’t know. It is a general sense of the poetry of existence that overcomes me. Often it is connected with the sea and St Ives. Going to 46 continues to excite. The sight of two coffins in the Underground luggage office I daresay constricts all my feelings. I have the sense of the flight of time; and this shores up my emotions.

Tuesday, June 19th.

I took up this book with a kind of idea that I might say something about my writing—which was prompted by glancing at what K.M. said about her writing in The Dove’s Nest. But I only glanced. She said a good deal about feeling things deeply: also about being pure, which I won’t criticize, though of course I very well could. But now what do I feel about my writing?—this book, that is, The Hours, if that’s its name? One must write from deep feeling, said Dostoievsky. And do I? Or do I fabricate with words, loving them as I do? No, I think not. In this book I have almost too many ideas. I want to give life and death, sanity and insanity; I want to criticize the social system, and to show it at work, at its most intense. But here I may be posing. I heard from Ka this morning that she doesn’t like In the Orchard. At once I feel refreshed. I become anonymous, a person who writes for the love of it. She takes away the motive of praise, and lets me feel that without any praise I should be content to go on. This is what Duncan said of his painting the other night. I feel as if I slipped off all my ball dresses and stood naked—which as I remember was a very pleasant thing to do. But to go on. Am I writing The Hours from deep emotion? Of course the mad part tries me so much, makes my mind squirt so badly that I can hardly face spending the next weeks at it. It’s a question though of these characters. People, like Arnold Bennett, say I can’t create, or didn’t in Jacob’s Room, characters that survive. My answer is—but I leave that to the Nation: it’s only the old argument that character is dissipated into shreds now; the old post-Dostoievsky argument. I daresay it’s true, however, that I haven’t that ‘reality’ gift. I insubstantize, wilfully to some extent, distrusting reality—its cheapness. But to get further. Have I the power of conveying the true reality? Or do I write essays about myself? Answer these questions as I may, in the uncomplimentary sense, and still there remains this excitement. To get to the bones, now I’m writing fiction again I feel my force glow straight from me at its fullest. After a dose of criticism I feel that I’m writing sideways, using only an angle of my mind. This is justification; for free use of the faculties means happiness. I’m better company, more of a human being. Nevertheless, I think it most important in this book to go for the central things. Even though they don’t submit, as they should, however, to’ beautification in language. No, I don’t nail my crest to the Murrys, who work in my flesh after the manner of the jigger insect. It’s annoying, indeed degrading, to have these bitternesses. Still, think of the 18th Century. But then they were overt, not covert, as now.

I foresee, to return to The Hours, that this is going to be the devil of a struggle. The design is so queer and so masterful. I’m always having to wrench my substance to fit it. The design is certainly original and interests me hugely. I should like to write away and away at it, very quick and fierce. Needless to say, I can’t. In three weeks from today, I shall be dried up.

Friday, August 17th.

The question I want to debate here is the question of my essays: and how to make them into a book. The brilliant idea has just come to me of embedding them in Otway conversation. The main advantage would be that I could then comment and add what I had had to leave out, or failed to get in, e.g. the one on George Eliot certainly needs an epilogue. Also to have a setting for each would ‘make a book’; and the collection of articles is in my view an inartistic method. But then this might be too artistic; it might run away with me; it will take time. Nevertheless I should very much enjoy it. I should graze nearer my own individuality. I should mitigate the pomposity and sweep in all sorts of trifles. I think I should feel more at my ease. So I think a trial should be made. The first thing to do is to get ready a certain number of essays. There could be an introductory chapter. A family which reads the papers. The thing to do would be to envelop each essay in its own atmosphere. To get them into a current of life, and so to shape the book; to get a stress upon some main line—but what the line is to be, I can only see by reading them through. No doubt fiction is the prevailing theme. Anyhow the book should end with modern literature.

Saturday, August 29th.

I’ve been battling for ever so long with The Hours, which is proving one of my most tantalizing and refractory of books. Parts are so bad, parts so good; I’m much interested; can’t stop making it up yet—yet. What is the matter with it? But I want to freshen myself, not deaden myself, so will say no more. Only I must note this odd symptom; a conviction that I shall I go on, see it through, because it interests me to write it.

Thursday, August 30th.

I was called, I think, to cut wood; we have to shape logs for the stove, for we sit in the lodge every night and my goodness, the wind! Last night we looked at the meadow trees, flinging about, and such a weight of leaves that every brandish seems the end. Only a strewing of leaves from the lime tree, though,! this morning. I read such,a white dimity rice pudding chapter of Mrs Gaskell at midnight in the gale Wives and Daughters—I think it must be better than The Old Wives’ Tale all the same. You see, I’m thinking furiously about Reading and Writing. I have no time to describe my plans. I should say a good deal about The Hours and my discovery: how I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters: I think that gives exactly what I want; humanity, humour, depth. The idea is that the caves shall connect and each comes to daylight at the present moment. Dinner!

Wednesday, September 5th.

And I’m slightly dashed by the reception of my Conrad conversation, which has been purely negative. No one has mentioned it. I don’t think M. or B. quite approved. Never mind; to be dashed is always the most bracing treatment for me. A cold douche should be taken (and generally is) before beginning a book. It invigorates; makes one say ‘Oh all right. I write to please myself and so go ahead. It also has the effect of making me more definite and outspoken in my style, which I imagine all to the good. At any rate, I began for the fifth but last time, I swear, what is now to be called The Common Reader; and did the first page quite moderately well this morning. After all this stew, it’s odd how, as soon as I begin, a new aspect, never all this two or three years thought of, at once becomes clear; and gives the whole bundle a new proportion. To curtail, I shall really investigate literature with a view to answering certain questions about ourselves. Characters are to be merely views: personality must be avoided at all costs. I’m sure my Conrad adventure taught me this. Directly you specify hair, age etc. something frivolous, or irrelevant gets into the book. Dinner!

Monday, October 15th.

I am now in the thick of the mad scene in Regent’s Park. I find I write it by clinging as tight to fact as I can, and write perhaps 50 words a morning. This I must re-write some day. I think the design is more remarkable than in any of my books. I daresay I shan’t be able to carry it out. I am stuffed with ideas for it. I feel I can use up everything I’ve ever thought. Certainly, I’m less coerced than I’ve yet been. The doubtful point is, I think, the character of Mrs Dalloway. It may be too stiff, too glittering and tinselly. But then I can bring innumerable other characters to her support. I wrote the 100th page today. Of course, I’ve only been feeling my way into it—up till last August anyhow. It took me a year’s groping to discover what I call my tunnelling process, by which I tell the past by instalments, as I have need of it. This is my prime discovery so far; and the fact that I’ve been so long finding it proves, I think, how false Percy Lubbock’s doctrine is—that you can do this sort of thing consciously. One feels about in a state of misery—indeed I made up my mind one night to abandon the book—and then one touches the hidden spring. But lor’ love me! I’ve not re-read my great discovery, and it may be nothing important whatsoever. Never mind. I own I have my hopes for this book. I am going on writing it now till, honestly, I can’t write another line. Journalism, everything, is to give way to it.

[]

1924.

Monday, May 26th.

London is enchanting. I step out upon a tawny coloured magic carpet, it seems, and get carried into beauty without raising a finger. The nights are amazing, with all the white porticos and broad silent avenues. And people pop in and out, lightly, divertingly like rabbits; and I look down Southampton Row, wet as a seal’s back or red and yellow with sunshine, and watch the omnibuses going and coming and hear the old crazy organs. One of these days I will write about London, and how it takes up the private life and carries it on, without any effort. Faces passing lift up my mind; prevent it from settling, as it does in the stillness at Rodmell.

But my mind is full of The Hours. I am now saying that I will write at it for 4 months, June, July, August and September, and then it will be done, and I shall put it away for three months, during which I shall finish my essays; and then that will be—October, November, December—January; and I shall revise it January February March April; and in April my essays will come out, and in May my novel. Such is my programme. It is reeling off my mind fast, and free now; as ever since the crisis of August last, which I count the beginning of it, it has gone quick, being much interrupted though. It is becoming more analytical and human I think; less lyrical; but I feel as if I had loosed the bonds pretty completely and could pour everything in. If so—good. Reading it remains. I aim at 80,000 words this time. And I like London for writing it, partly because, as I say, life upholds one; and with my squirrel cage mind it’s a great thing to be stopped circling. Then to see human beings freely and quickly is an infinite gain to me. And I can dart in and out and refresh my stagnancy.

Saturday, August 2nd.

Here we are at Rodmell, and I with 20 minutes to fill in before dinner. A feeling of depression is on me, as if we were old and near the end of all things. It must be the change from London and incessant occupation. Then, being at a low ebb with my book—the death of Septimus—and I begin to count myself a failure. Now the point of the Press is that it entirely prevents brooding; and gives me something solid to fall back on. Anyhow, if I can’t write, I can make other people write; I can build up a business. The country is like a convent. The soul swims to the top. Julian has just been and gone, a tall young man who, inveterately believing myself to be young as I do, seems to me like a younger brother; anyhow we sit and chatter, as easily as can be. It’s all so much the same—his school continues Thoby’s school. He tells me about boys and masters as Thoby used to. It interests me just in the same way. He’s a sensitive, very quick witted, rather combative boy; full of Wells, and discoveries and the future of the world. And, being of my own blood, easily understood. Going to be very tall, and go to the Bar, I daresay. Nevertheless, in spite of the grumbling with which this began, honestly I don’t feel old; and it’s a question of getting up my steam again in writing. If only I could get into my vein and work it thoroughly, deeply, easily, instead of hacking at this miserable 200 words a day. And then, as the manuscript grows I have the old fear of it. I shall read it and find it pale. I shall prove the truth of Murry’s saying, that there’s no way of going on after Jacob’s Room. Yet if this book proves anything, it proves that I can only write along those lines, and shall never desert them, but explore further and further and shall, heaven be praised, never bore myself an instant. But this slight depression—what is it? I think I could cure it by crossing the channel and writing nothing for a week. I want to see something going on busily without help from me: a French market town for example. Indeed, have I the energy, I’ll cross to Dieppe; or compromise by exploring Sussex on a motor bus. August ought to be hot. Deluges descend. We sheltered under a haystack today. But oh the delicacy and complexity of the soul—for haven’t I begun to tap her and listen to her breathing after all? A change of house makes me oscillate for days. And that’s life; that’s wholesome. Never to quiver is the lot of Mr Allinson, Mrs Hawkesford and Jack Squire. In two or three days, acclimatized, started, reading and writing, no more of this will exist. And if we didn’t live venturously, plucking the wild goat by the beard, and trembling over precipices, we should never be depressed, I’ve no doubt; but already should be faded, fatalistic and aged.

Sunday, August 3rd.

But it’s a question of work. I am already a good deal pulled together by sticking at my books: my 250 words at fiction first, and then a systematic beginning, I daresay the 80th, upon The Common Reader, who might be finished in a flash I think, did I see the chance to flash and have done with it. But there’s a lot of work in these things. It strikes me, I must now read Pilgrim’s Progress: Mrs Hutchinson. And should I demolish Richardson? whom I’ve never read. Yes, I’ll run through the rain into the house and see if Clarissa is there. But that’s a block out of my day and a long long novel. Then I must read the Medea. I must read a little translated Plato.

Friday, August 15th.

Into all these calculations, broke the death of Conrad, followed by a wire from the Lit. Sup. earnestly asking me kindly to do a leader on him, which flattered and loyal, but grudgingly, I did; and it’s out; and that number of the Lit. Sup. corrupted for me (for I can’t, and never shall be able to, read my own writings. Moreover, now little Walkley’s on the war path again I expect a bite next Wednesday). Yet I have never never worked so hard. For, having to do a leader in five days, I made hay after tea—and couldn’t distinguish tea hay from morning hay either. So doesn’t this give me two extra hours for critical works anyhow (as Logan calls them)? So I’m trying it—my fiction before lunch and then essays after tea. For I see that Mrs Dalloway is going to stretch beyond October. In my forecasts I always forget some most important intervening scenes: I think I can go straight at the grand party and so end; forgetting Septimus, which is a very intense and ticklish business, and jumping Peter Walsh eating his dinner, which may be some obstacle too. But I like going from one lighted room to another, such is my brain to me; lighted rooms; and the walks in the fields are corridors; and now today I’m lying thinking. By the way, why is poetry wholly an elderly taste? When I was 20, in spite of Thoby who used to be so pressing and exacting, I could not for the life of me read Shakespeare for pleasure; now it lights me as I walk to think I have two acts of King John tonight, and shall next read Richard II. It is poetry that I want now—long poems. Indeed I’m thinking of reading the Seasons. I want the concentration and the romance, and the words all glued together, fused, glowing; have no time to waste any more on prose. Yet this must be the very opposite to what people say. When I was 20 I liked 18th Century prose; I liked Hakluyt, Merimée. I read masses of Carlyle, Scott’s life and letters, Gibbon, all sorts of two volume biographies, and Shelley. Now it’s poetry I want, so I repent like a tipsy sailor in front of a public house … I don’t often trouble now to describe cornfields and groups of harvesting women in loose blues and reds, and little staring yellow frocked girls. But that’s not my eyes’ fault: coming back the other evening from Charleston, again all my nerves stood upright, flushed, electrified (what’s the word?) with the sheer beauty—beauty astounding and superabounding. So that one almost resents it, not being capable of catching it all and holding it all at the moment. One’s progress through life is made immensely interesting by trying to grasp all these developments as one passes. I feel as if I were putting out my fingers tentatively on (here is Leonard, who has ordered me a trap in which to drive Dadie to Tilton tomorrow) either side as I grope down a tunnel, rough with odds and ends. And I don’t describe encounters with herds of Alderneys any more—though this would have been necessary some years ago—how they barked and belled like stags round Grizzle; and how I waved my stick and stood at bay; and thought of Homer as they came flourishing and trampling towards me; some mimic battle. Grizzle grew more and more insolent and excited and skirmished about yapping. Ajax? That Greek, for all my ignorance, has worked its way into me.

Sunday, September 7th.

It is a disgrace that I write nothing, or if I write, write sloppily, using nothing but present participles. I find them very useful in my last lap of Mrs D. There I am now—at last at the party, which is to begin in the kitchen, and climb slowly upstairs. It is to be a most complicated, spirited, solid piece, knitting together everything and ending on three notes, at different stages of the staircase, each saying something to sum up Clarissa. Who shall say these things? Peter, Richard, and Sally Seton perhaps: but I don’t want to tie myself down to that yet. Now I do think this might be the best of my endings and come off, perhaps. But I have still to read the first chapters, and confess to dreading the madness rather; and being clever. However, I’m sure I’ve now got to work with my pick at my seam, if only because my metaphors come free, as they do here. Suppose one can keep the quality of a sketch in a finished and composed work? That is my endeavour. Anyhow, none can help and none can hinder me any more. I’ve been in for a shower of compliments too from The Times, Richmond rather touching me by saying that he gives way to my novel with all the will in the world. I should like him to read my fiction, and always suppose he doesn’t.

There I was swimming in the highest ether known to me and thinking I’d finish by Thursday; Lottie suggests to Karin we’d like to have Ann; Karin interprets my polite refusal to her own advantage and comes down herself on Saturday, blowing everything to smithereens. More and more am I solitary; the pain of these upheavals is incalculable; and I can’t explain it either … Here I am with my wrecked week—for how serene and lovely like a Lapland night was our last week together—feeling that I ought to go in and be a good aunt—which I’m not by nature; ought to ask Daisy what she wants; and by rights I fill these moments full of Mrs Dalloway’s party for tomorrow’s writing. The only solution is to stay on alone over Thursday and try my luck. A bad night (K.’s doing again) may partly account. But how entirely I live in my imagination; how completely depend upon spurts of thought, coming as I walk, as I sit; things churning up in my mind and so making a perpetual pageant, which is to be my happiness. This brew can’t sort with nondescript people. These wails must now have ending, partly because I cannot see, and my hand shakes, having carried my bag from Lewes, where I sat on the Castle top, where an old man was brushing leaves, and told me how to cure lumbago; you tie a skein of silk round you; the silk costs threepence. I saw British canoes, and the oldest plough in Sussex 1750 found at Rodmell, and a suit of armour said to have been worn at Seringapatam. All this I should like to write about, I think. And of course children are wonderful and charming creatures. I’ve had Ann in talking about the white seal and wanting me to read to her. And how Karin manages to be so aloof I can’t think. There’s a quality in their minds to me very adorable; to be alone with them, and see them day to day would be an extraordinary experience. They have what no grown up has—that directness—chatter, chatter, chatter, on Ann goes, in a kind of world of her own, with its seals and dogs; happy because she’s going to have cocoa tonight, and go black-il berrying tomorrow. The walls of her mind all hung round with l| such bright vivid things, and she doesn’t see what we see.

Friday, October 17th.

It is disgraceful. I did run upstairs thinking I’d make time to enter that astounding fact—the last words of the last page of Mrs Dalloway, but was interrupted. Anyhow, I did them a week ago yesterday. ‘For there she was,’ and I felt glad to be quit of it, for it has been a strain the last weeks, yet fresher in the head; with less I mean of the usual feeling that I’ve shaved through and just kept my feet on the tight rope. I feel indeed rather more fully relieved of my meaning than usual—whether this will stand when I re-read is doubtful. But in some ways this book is a feat; finished without break from illness, which is an exception; and written really in one year; and finally, written from the end of March to the 8th October without more than a few days’ break for writing journalism. So it may differ from the others. Anyhow, I feel that I have exorcized the spell which Murry and others said I had laid myself under after Jacob’s Room. The only difficulty is to hold myself back from writing others. My cul de sac, as they called it, stretches so far and shows such vistas. I see already the Old Man.

It strikes me that in this book I practise writing; do my scales; yes and work at certain effects. I daresay I practised Jacob here; and Mrs D. and shall invent my next book here; for here I write merely in the spirit—great fun it is too, and Old V. of 1940 will see something in it too. She will be a woman who can see, old V., everything—more than I can, I think. But I’m tired now.

Saturday, November 1st.

I must make some notes of work; for now I must buckle to. The question is how to get the two books done. I am going to skate rapidly over Mrs D„ but it will take time. No: I cannot say anything much to the point, for what I must do is to experiment next week; how much revision is needed, and how much time it takes. I am very set on getting my essays out before my novel. Yesterday I had tea in Mary’s room and saw the red lighted tugs go past and heard the swish of the river: Mary in black with lotus leaves round her neck. If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure—the relationship so sècret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it? Truthfully? As I think, the diary writing has greatly helped my style; loosened the ligatures.

Tuesday, November 18th.

What I was going to say was that I think writing must be formal. The art must be respected. This struck me reading some of my notes here, for if one lets the mind run loose it becomes egotistic; personal, which I detest. At the same time the irregular fire must be there; and perhaps to loose it one must begin by being chaotic, but not appear in public like that. I am driving my way through the mad chapters of Mrs D. My wonder is whether the book would have been better without them. But this is an afterthought, consequent upon learning how to deal with her. Always I think at the end, I see how the whole ought to have been written.

Saturday, December 13th.

I am now galloping over Mrs Dalloway, re-typing it entirely from the start, which is more or less what I did with the V.O.: a good method, I believe, as thus one works with a wet brush over the whole, and joins parts separately composed and gone dry. Really and honestly I think it the most satisfactory of my novels (but have not read it cold-bloodedly yet). The reviewers will say that it is disjointed because of the mad scenes not connecting with the Dalloway scenes. And I suppose there is some superficial glittery writing. But is it ‘unreal’? Is it mere accomplishment? I think not. And as I think I said before, it seems to leave me plunged deep in the richest strata of my mind. I can write and write and write now: the happiest feeling in the world.

Monday, December 21st.

Really it is a disgrace—the number of blank pages in this book. The effect of London on diaries is decidedly bad. This is I fancy the leanest of them all, and I doubt that I can take it to Rodmell, or if I did, whether I could add much. Indeed it has been an eventful year, as I prophesied; and the dreamer of January 3rd has dreamt much of her dream true; here we are in London, with Nelly alone, Dadie gone it is true, but Angus to replace him. What emerges is that changing houses is not so cataclysmic as I thought; after all, one doesn’t change body or brain. Still I am absorbed in ‘my writing’, putting on a spurt to have Mrs D. copied for L. to read at Rodmell; and then in I dart to deliver the final blows to The Common Reader, and then—and then I shall be free. Free at least to write out one or two more stories which have accumulated. I am less and less sure that they are stories, or what they are. Only I do feel fairly sure that I am grazing as near as I can to my own ideas, and getting a tolerable shape for them. I think there is less and less wastage. But I have my ups and downs.

[]

1925.

Wednesday, January 6th.

Rodmell was all gale and flood; these words are exact. The river overflowed. We had 7 days’ rain out of 10. Often I could not face a walk. L. pruned, which needed heroic courage. My heroism was purely literary. I revised Mrs D., the chillest part of the whole business of writing, the most depressing—exacting. The worst part is at the beginning (as usual) where the aeroplane has it all to itself for some pages and it wears thin. L. read it; thinks it my best—but then has he not got to think so? Still I agree. He thinks it has more continuity than J.’s R., but is difficult owing to the lack of connection, visible, between the two themes. Anyhow it is sent off to Clark’s, and proofs will come next week. This is for Harcourt Brace, who has accepted without seeing and raised me to 15 p.c.

Tuesday, April 8th.

I am under the impression of the moment, which is the complex one of coming back home from the South of France to this wide dim peaceful privacy—London (so it seemed last night) which is shot with the accident I saw this morning—a woman crying oh, oh, oh, faintly, pinned against the railings with a motor car on top of her. All day I have heard that voice. I did not go to her help; but then every baker and flower seller did that. A great sense of the brutality and wildness of the world remains with me—there was this woman in brown walking along the pavement—suddenly a red film car turns a somersault, lands on top of her and one hears oh, oh, oh. I was on my way to see Nessa’s new house and met Duncan in the square, but as he had seen nothing he could not in the least feel what I felt, or Nessa either, though she made some effort to connect it with Angelica’s accident last spring. But I assured her it was only a passing brown woman; and so we went over the house composedly enough.

Since I wrote, which is these last months, Jacques Raverat has died; after longing to die; and he sent me a letter about Mrs Dalloway which gave me one of the happiest days of my life. I wonder if this time I have achieved something? Well, nothing anyhow compared with Proust, in whom I am embedded now. The thing about Proust is his combination of the utmost sensibility with the utmost tenacity. He searches out these butterfly shades to the last grain. He is as tough as catgut and as evanescent as a butterfly’s bloom. And he will, I suppose, both influence me and make me out of temper with every sentence of my own. Jacques died, as I say; and at once the siege of emotions began. I got the news with a party here—Clive, Bee How, Julia Strachey, Dadie. Nevertheless, I do not any longer feel inclined to doff the cap to death. I like to go out of the room talking, with an unfinished casual sentence on my lips. That is the effect it had on me—no leavetakings, no submission, but someone stepping out into the darkness. For her though the nightmare was terrific. All I can do now is to keep natural with her, which is I believe a matter of considerable importance. More and more do I repeat my own version of Montaigne—‘It’s life that matters.’

I am waiting to see what form of itself Cassis will finally cast up in my mind. There are the rocks. We used to go out after breakfast and sit on the rocks, with the sun on us. L. used to sit without a hat, writing on his knee. One morning he found a sea urchin—they are red with spikes which quiver slightly. Then we would go and walk in the afternoon, right up over the hill, into the woods, where one day we heard the motor cars and discovered the road to La Qotat just beneath. It was stony, steep and very hot. We heard a great chattering birdlike noise once and I bethought me of the frogs. The ragged red tulips were out in the fields; all the fields were little angular shelves cut out of the hill and ruled and ribbed with vines; and all red, and rosy and purple here and there with the spray of some fruit tree in bud. Here and there was an angular white or yellow or blue washed house, with all its shutters tightly closed, and flat paths round it, and once rows of stocks; an incomparable cleanness and definiteness everywhere. At La Ciotat great orange ships rose up out of the blue water of the little bay. All these bays are very circular and fringed with the pale coloured plaster houses, very tall, shuttered, patched and peeled, now with a pot and tufts of green on them, now with clothes, drying; now an old old woman looking. On the hill, which is stony as a desert, the nets were drying; and then in the streets children and girls gossiped and meandered all in pale bright shawls and cotton frocks, while the men picked up the earth of the main square to make a paved court of it. The Hotel Cendrillon is a white house with red tiled floors, capable of housing perhaps 8 people. And then the whole hotel atmosphere provided me with many ideas: oh so cold, indifferent, superficially polite, and exhibiting such odd relationships; as if human nature were now reduced to a kind of code, which it has devised to meet these emergencies, where people who do not know each other meet and claim their rights as members of the same tribe. As a matter of fact, we got into touch all round; but our depths were not invaded. But L. and I were too too happy, as they say; if it were now to die etc. Nobody shall say of me that I have not known perfect happiness, but few could put their finger on the moment, or say what made it. Even I myself, stirring occasionally in the pool of content, could only say But this is all I want; could not think of anything better; and had only my half superstitious feeling at the Gods who must when they have created happiness, grudge it. Not if you get it in unexpected ways, though.

Sunday, April 19th.

It is now after dinner, our first summertime night, and the mood for writing has left me, only just brushed me and left me. I have not achieved my sacred half hour yet. But think—in time to come I would rather read something here than reflect that I did polish off Mr Ring Lardner successfully. I’m out to make £300 this summer by writing and build a bath and hot water range at Rodmell. But hush, hush—my books tremble on the verge of coming out and my future is uncertain. As for forecasts—it’s just on the cards Mrs Dalloway is a success (Harcourt thinks it ‘wonderful’) and sells 2,000. I don’t expect it. I expect a slow silent increase of fame, such as has come about, rather miraculously, since J.’s R. was published. My value mounting steadily as a journalist, though scarcely a copy sold. And I am not very nervous—rather; and I want as usual to dig deep down into my new stories without having a looking glass flashed in my eyes—Todd, to wit; Colefax to wit et cetera.

Monday, April 20th.

One thing, in considering my state of mind now, seems to me beyond dispute; that I have, at last, bored down into my oil well, and can’t scribble fast enough to bring it all to the surface. I have now at least 6 stories welling up in me, and feel, at last, that I can coin all my thoughts into words. Not but what an infinite number of problems remain; but I have never felt this rush and urgency before. I believe I can write much more quickly; if writing it is—this dash at the paper of a phrase, and then the typing and retyping—trying it over; the actual writing being now like the sweep of a brush; I fill it up afterwards. Now suppose I might become one of the interesting—I will not say great—but interesting novelists? Oddly, for all my vanity, I have not until now had much faith in my novels, or thought them my own expression.

Monday, April 27th.

Second selves The Common Reader was out on Thursday: this is Monday and so far I have not heard a word about it, private or public; it is as if one tossed a stone into a pond and the waters closed without a ripple. And I am perfectly content, and care less than I have ever cared, and make this note just to remind me next time of the sublime progress of my books. I have been sitting to Vogue, the Becks that is, in their mews, which Mr Woolner built as his studio, and perhaps it was there he thought of my mother, whom he wished to marry, I think. But my present reflection is that people have any number of states of consciousness: and I should like to, investigate the party consciousness, the frock consciousness etc. The fashion world at the Becks—Mrs Garland was there superintending a display—is certainly one; where people secrete an envelope which connects them and protects them from others, like myself, who am outside the envelope, foreign bodies. These states are very difficult (obviously I grope for words) but I’m always coming back to it. The party consciousness, for example: Sybil’s consciousness. You must not break it. It is something real. You must keep it up—conspire together. Still I cannot get at what I mean. Then I meant to dash off Graves before I forget him.

Friday, May 1st.

This is a note for future reference, as they say. The Common Reader came out 8 days ago and so far not a single review has appeared, and nobody has written to me or spoken to me about it, or in any way acknowledged the fact of its existence; save Maynard, Lydia, and Duncan. Clive is conspicuously dumb; Mortimer has flu and can’t review it; Nancy saw him reading it, but reported no opinion; all signs which point to a dull chill depressing reception; and complete failure. I have just come through the hoping fearing stage and now see any disappointment floating like an old bottle in my wake and am off on fresh adventures. Only if the same thing happens to Dalloway one need not be surprised. But I must write to Gwen.

Monday, May 4th.

This is the temperature chart of a book. We went to Cambridge, and Goldie said he thought me the finest living critic: said, in his jerky angular way: ‘Who wrote that extraordinarily good article on the Elizabethans two or three months ago in the Lit. Sup.?’ I pointed to my breast. Now there’s one sneering review in Country Life, almost inarticulate with feebleness, trying to say what a Common reader is, and another, says Angus, in the Star, laughing at Nessa’s cover. So from this I prognosticate a good deal of criticism on the ground that I’m obscure and odd; and some enthusiasm; and a slow sale, and an increased reputation. Oh yes, my reputation increases.

Saturday, May 9th.

As for The Common Reader, the Lit. Sup. had close on two columns sober and sensible praise—neither one thing nor the other—my fate in The Times. And Goldie writes that he thinks ‘this is the best criticism in English—humorous, witty and profound’. My fate is to be treated to all extremes and all mediocrities. But I never get an enthusiastic review in the Lit. Sup. And it will be the same for Dalloway, which now approaches.

Thursday, May 14th.

I meant to register more of my books’ temperatures. C.R. does not sell; but is praised. I was really pleased to open the Manchester Guardian this morning and read Mr Fausset on the Art of V.W.; brilliance combined with integrity; profound as well as eccentric. Now if only The Times would speak out thus, but The Times mumbles and murmurs like a man sucking pebbles. Did I say that I had nearly two mumbling columns on me there? But the odd thing is this: honestly I am scarcely a shade nervous about Mrs D. Why is this? Really I am a little bored, for the first time, at thinking how much I shall have to talk about it this summer. The truth is that writing is the profound pleasure and being read the superficial. I’m now all on the strain with desire to stop journalism and get on to To the Lighthouse. This is going to be fairly short; to have father’s character done complete in it; and mother’s; and St Ives; and childhood; and all the usual things I try to put in—life, death, etc. But the centre is father’s character, sitting in a boat, reciting We perished, each alone, while he crushes a dying mackerel. However, I must refrain. I must write a few little stories first and let the Lighthouse simmer, adding to it between tea and dinner till it is complete for writing out.

Friday, May 15th.

Two unfavourable reviews of Mrs D. (Western Mail and Scotsman); unintelligible, not art etc. and a letter from a young man in Earls Court. ‘This time you have done it—you have caught life and put it in a book …’ Please forgive this outburst, but further quotation is unnecessary; and I don’t think I should bother to write this if I weren’t jangled. What by? The sudden heat, I think, and the racket of life. It is bad for me to see my own photograph.

Wednesday, May 19th.

Well, Morgan admires. This is a weight off my mind. Better than Jacob he says: was sparing of words; kissed my hand, and on going said he was awfully pleased, very happy (or words to that effect) about it. He thinks—but I won’t go into detailed criticism; I shall hear more; and this is only about the style being simpler, more like other people’s this time.

Monday, June 1st.

Bank holiday, and we are in London. To record my books’ fates slightly bores me; but now both are floated, and Mrs D. doing surprisingly well. 1070 already sold. I recorded Morgan’s opinion; then Vita was a little doubtful; then Desmond, whom I see frequently about his book, dashed all my praise by saying that Logan thought the C.R. well enough, but nothing more. Desmond has an abnormal power for depressing me. He takes the edge off life in some extraordinary way. I love him; but his balance and goodness and humour, all heavenly in themselves, somehow diminish lustre. I think I feel this not only about my work but about life. However, now comes Mrs Hardy to say that Thomas reads, and hears the C.R. read, with ‘great pleasure’. Indeed, save for Logan, and he’s a salt-veined American, I have had high praise. Also Tauchnitz asks about them.

Sunday, June 14th.

A disgraceful confession—this is Sunday morning and just after ten, and here I am sitting down to write diary and not fiction or reviews, without any excuse, except the state of my mind. After finishing those two books, though, one can’t concentrate directly on a new one; and then the letters, the talk, the reviews, all serve to enlarge the pupil of my mind more and more. I can’t settle in, contract, and shut myself off. I’ve written 6 little stories, scrambled them down untidily and have thought out, perhaps too clearly, To the Lighthouse. And both books so far are successful. More of Dalloway has been sold this month than of Jacob in a year. I think it possible we may sell 2,000. The Common one is making money this week. And I get treated at great length and solemnity by old gentlemen.

Thursday, June 18th.

No, Lytton does not like Mrs Dalloway, and, what is odd, I like him all the better for saying so, and don’t much mind. What he says is that there is a discordancy between the ornament (extremely beautiful) and what happens (rather ordinary—or unimportant). This is caused, he thinks, by some discrepancy in Clarissa herself: he thinks she is disagreeable and limited, but that I alternately laugh at her and cover her, very remarkably, with myself. So that I think as a whole, the book does not ring solid; yet, he says, it is a whole; and he says sometimes the writing is of extreme beauty. What can one call it but genius? he said! Coming when, one never can tell. Fuller of genius, he said, than anything I had done. Perhaps, he said, you have not yet mastered your method. You should take something wilder and more fantastic, a framework that admits of anything, like Tristram Shandy. But then I should lose touch with emotions, I said. Yes, he agreed, there must be reality for you to start from. Heaven knows how you’re to do it. But he thought me at the beginning, not at the end. And he said the C.R. was divine, a classic, Mrs D. being, I fear, a flawed stone. This is very personal, he said, and old fashioned perhaps; yet I think there is some truth in it, for I remember the night at Rodmell when I decided to give it up, because I found Clarissa in some way tinselly. Then I invented her memories. But I think some distaste for her persisted. Yet, again, that was true to my feeling for Kitty and one must dislike people in art without its mattering, unless indeed it is true that certain characters detract from the importance of what happens to them. None of this hurts me, or depresses me. It’s odd that when Clive and others (several of them) say it is a masterpiece, I am not much exalted; when Lytton picks holes, I get back into my working fighting mood, which is natural to me. I don’t. Have see myself a success. I like the sense of effort better. The sales collapsed completely for three days; now a little dribble begins again. I shall be more than pleased if we sell 1500. It’s now 1250.

Saturday, June 27th.

A bitter cold day, succeeding a chilly windy night, in which were lit all the Chinese lanterns of Roger’s garden party. And I do not love my kind. I detest them. I pass them by. I let them break on me like dirty rain drops. No longer can I summon up that energy which, when it sees one of these dry little shapes floating past, or rather stuck on the rock, sweeps round them, steeps them, infuses them, nerves them, and so finally fills them and creates them. Once I had a gift for doing this, and a passion, and it made parties arduous and exciting. So when I wake early now I luxuriate most in a whole day alone; a day of easy natural poses, a little printing; slipping tranquilly off into the deep water of my own thoughts navigating the underworld; and then replenishing my cistern at night with Swift. I am going to write about Stella and Swift for Richmond, as a sign of grace, after sweeping guineas off the Vogue counter. The first fruit of the C.R. (a book too highly praised now) is a request to write for the Atlantic Monthly. So I am getting pushed into criticism. It is a great standby—this power to make large sums by formulating views on Stendhal and Swift. (But while I try to write, I am making up To the Lighthouse—the sea is to be heard all through it. I have an idea that I will invent a new name for my books to supplant ‘novel’. A new by Virginia Woolf. But what? Elegy?)

Monday, July 20th.

Here the door opened and Morgan came in to ask us out to lunch with him at the Etoile, which we did, though we had a nice veal and ham pie at home (this is in the classic style of journalists). It comes of Swift perhaps, the last words of which I have just written, and so fill up time here. I should consider my work list now. I think a little story, perhaps a review, this fortnight; having a superstitious wish to begin To the Lighthouse the first day at Monk’s House. I now think I shall finish it in the two months there. The word ‘sentimental’ sticks in my gizzard (I’ll write it out of me in a story—Ann Watkins of New York is coming on Wednesday to enquire about my stories). But this theme may be sentimental; father and mother and child in the garden; the death; the sail to the Lighthouse. I think, though, that when I begin it I shall enrich it in all sorts of ways; thicken it; give it branches—roots which I do not perceive now. It might contain all characters boiled down; and childhood; and then this impersonal thing, which I’m dared to do by my friends, the flight of time and the consequent break of unity in my design. That passage (I conceive the book in 3 parts. 1. at the drawing room window; 2. seven years passed; 3. the voyage) interests me very much. A new problem like that breaks fresh ground in one’s mind; prevents the regular ruts.

What shall I read at Rodmell? I have so many books at the back of my mind. I want to read voraciously and gather material for the Lives of the Obscure—which is to tell the whole history of England in one obscure life after another. Proust I should like to finish. Stendhal, and then to skirmish about hither and thither. These 8 weeks at Rodmell always seem capable of holding an infinite amount. Shall we buy the house at Southease? I suppose not.

Thursday, July 30th.

I am intolerably sleepy and annulled and so write here. I do want indeed to consider my next book, but I am inclined to wait for a clearer head. The thing is I vacillate between a single and intense character of father; and a far wider slower book—Bob T. telling me that my speed is terrific and distinctive. My summer’s wanderings with the pen have I think shown me one or two new dodges for catching my flies. I have sat here, like an improviser with his hands rambling over the piano. The result is perfectly inconclusive and almost illiterate. I want to learn greater quiet and force. But if I set myself that task, don’t I run the risk of falling into the flatness of N. & D.I Have I got the power needed if quiet is not to become insipid? These questions I will leave, for the moment, unanswered. So that episode is over. But, dear me, I’m too dull to write and must go and fetch Mr Dobrée’s novel and read it, I think. Yet I have a thousand things to say. I think I might do something in To the Lighthouse, to split up emotions more completely. I think I’m working in that direction.

Saturday, September 5th.

And why couldn’t I see or feel that all this time I was getting a little used up and riding on a flat tyre? So I was, as it happened; and fell down in a faint at Charleston, in the middle of Q.’s birthday party; and then have lain about here, in that odd amphibious life of headache, for a fortnight. This has rammed a big hole in my 8 weeks which were to be stuffed so full. Never mind. Arrange whatever pieces come your way.

Never be unseated by the shying of that undependable brute, life, hag-ridden as she is by my own queer, difficult, nervous system. Even at 43 I don’t know its workings, for I was saying to myself, all the summer, ‘I’m quite adamant now. I can go through a tussle of emotions peaceably that two years ago, even, would have raked me raw.’

I have made a very quick and flourishing attack on To the Lighthouse, all the same—22 pages straight off in less than a fortnight. I am still crawling and easily enfeebled, but if I could once get up steam again, I believe I could spin it off with infinite relish. Think what a labour the first pages of Dalloway were! Each word distilled by a relentless clutch on my brain.

Monday, September 13th, perhaps

A disgraceful fact—I am writing this at 10 in the morning in bed in the little room looking into the garden, the sun beaming steady, the vine leaves transparent green, and the leaves of the apple tree so brilliant that, as I had my breakfast, I invented a little story about a man who wrote a poem, I think, comparing them with diamonds, and the spiders’ webs, (which glance and disappear astonishingly) with something or other else; which led me to think of Marvell on a country life, so to Herrick and the reflection that much of it was dependent upon the town and gaiety—a reaction. However, I have forgotten the facts. I am writing this partly to test my poor bunch of nerves at the back of my neck—will they hold or give again, as they have done so often?—for I’m amphibious still, in bed and out of it; partly to glut my itch (‘glut’ an ‘itch’!) for writing. It is the great solace and scourge.

Tuesday, September 22nd.

How my handwriting goes down hill! Another sacrifice to The Hogarth Press. Yet what I owe The Hogarth Press is barely paid by the whole of my handwriting. Haven’t I just written to Herbert Fisher refusing to do a book for the Home University Series on Post-Victorian?—knowing that I can write a book, a better book, a book off my own bat, for the Press if I wish! To think of being battened down in the hold of those University Dons fairly makes my blood run cold. Yet I’m the only woman in England free to write what I like. The others must be thinking of series and editors. Yesterday I heard from Harcourt Brace that Mrs D. and C.R. are selling 148 and 73 weekly—isn’t that a surprising rate for the fourth month? Doesn’t it portend a bathroom and a w.c., either here or Southease? I am writing in the watery blue sunset, the repentance of an ill tempered morose day, which vanished, the clouds, I have no doubt, showing gold over the downs, and leaving a soft gold fringe on the top there.

Tuesday, December 7th.

I am reading the Passage to India, but will not expatiate here, as I must elsewhere. This book for the H.P. I think I will find some theory about fiction; I shall read six novels and start some hares. The one I have in view is about perspective. But I do not know. My brain may not last me out. I cannot think closely enough. But I can—if the C.R. is a test—beat up ideas and express them now without too much confusion. (By the way, Robert Bridges likes Mrs Dalloway; says no one will read it; but it is beautifully written, and some more, which L„ who was told by Morgan, cannot remember.)

I don’t think it is a matter of ‘development’ but something to do with prose and poetry, in novels; for instance Defoe at one end; E. Brontë at the other. Reality something they put at different distances. One would have to go into conventions; real life; and so on. It might last me—this theory—but I should have to support it with other things. And death—as I always feel—hurrying near. 43: how many more books? Katie came here; a sort of framework of discarded beauty hung on a battered shape now. With the firmness of the flesh and the blue; of the eye, the formidable manner has gone. I can see her as she was at 22 H.P.G. 25 years ago; in a little coat and skirt; very splendid; eyes half shut; lovely mocking voice; upright; tremendous; shy. Now she babbles along.

‘But no duke ever asked me, my dear Virginia. They called me the Ice Queen. And why did I marry Cromer? I loathed Egypt; I loathed invalids. I’ve had two very happy times in my life—childhood—not when I grew up, but later, with my boys’ club, my cottage and my chow—and now. Now I have all I want. My garden—my dog.’

I don’t think her son enters in very largely. She is one of these cold eccentric great Englishwomen, enormously enjoying her rank and the eminence it lends her in St John’s Wood, and now free to poke into all the dusty holes and corners, dressed like a charwoman, with hands like apes’ and fingernails clotted with dirt. She never stops talking. She lacks much body to her. She has almost effused in mist. But I enjoyed it, though I think she has few affections and no very passionate interests. Now, having cried my cry, and the sun coming out, to write a list of Christmas presents.

[]

1926.

Tuesday, February 23rd.

I am blown like an old flag by my novel. This one is To the Lighthouse. I think it is worth saying for my own interest that at last, at last, after that battle Jacob’s Room, that agony—all agony but the end—Mrs Dalloway, I am now writing as fast and freely as I have written in the whole of my life; more so—20 times more so—than any novel yet. I think this is the proof that I was on the right path; and that what fruit hangs in my soul is to be reached there. Amusingly, I now invent theories that fertility and fluency are the things: I used to plead for a kind of close, terse effort. Anyhow this goes on all the morning: and I have the devil’s own work not to be flogging my brain all the afternoon. I live entirely in it, and come to the surface rather obscurely and am often unable to think what to say when we walk round the Square, which is bad I know. Perhaps it may be a good sign for the book though. Of course it is largely known to me: but all my books have been that. It is, I feel that I can float everything off now; and ‘everything’ is rather a crowd and weight and confusion in the mind.

Saturday, February 27th.

I think I shall initiate a new convention for this book—beginning each day on a new page—my habit in writing serious literature. Certainly I have room to waste a little paper in this year’s book. As for the soul; why did I say I would leave it out? I forget. And the truth is, one can’t write directly about the soul. Looked at, it vanishes; but look at the ceiling, at Grizzle, at the cheaper beasts in the Zoo which are exposed to walkers in Regent’s Park, and the soul slips in. It slipped in this afternoon. I will write that I said, staring at the bison: answering L. absentmindedly: but what was I going to write?

Mrs Webb’s book has made me think a little what I could say of my own life. I read some of 1923 this morning, being headachy again, and taking a delicious draught of silence. But then there were causes in her life: prayer; principle. None in mine. Great excitability and search after something. Great content—almost always enjoying what I’m at, but with constant change of mood. I don’t think I’m ever bored. Sometimes a little stale; but I have a power of recovery—which I have tested; and am now testing for the 50th time. I have to husband my head still very carefully: but then, as I said to Leonard today, I enjoy epicurean ways of society; sipping and then shutting my eyes to taste. I enjoy almost everything. Yet I have some restless searcher in me. Why is there not a discovery in life? Something one can lay hands on and say ‘This is it’? My depression is a harassed feeling. I’m looking: but that’s not it—that’s not it. What is it? And shall I die before I find it? Then (as I was walking through Russell Square last night) I see the mountains in the sky: the great clouds; and the moon which is risen over Persia; I have a great and astonishing sense of something there, which is ‘it’. It is not exactly beauty that I mean. It is that the thing is in itself enough: satisfactory; achieved. A sense of my own strangeness, walking on the earth is there too: of the infinite oddity of the human position; trotting along Russell Square with the moon up there and those mountain clouds. Who am I, what am I, and so on: these questions are always floating about in me: and then I bump against some exact fact—a letter, a person, and come to them again with a great sense of freshness. And so it goes on. But on this showing, which is true, I think, I do fairly frequently come upon this ‘it’; and then feel quite at rest.

Tuesday, March 9th.

As for Mary’s party, there, save for the usual shyness about powder, paint, shoes and stockings, I was happy, owing to the supremacy of literature. This keeps us sweet and sane. George Moore—me I mean.

He has a pink foolish face; blue eyes like hard marbles; a crest of snow-white hair; little unmuscular hands; sloping shoulders; a high stomach; neat, purplish well-brushed clothes; and perfect manners, as I consider them. That is to say he speaks without fear or dominance; accepting me on my merits; everyone on their merits. Still in spite of all uncowed, unbeaten, lively, shrewd. As for Hardy and Henry James, though, what shall one say?

‘I am a fairly modest man; but I admit I think Esther Waters a better book than Tess. But what is there to be said for that man? He cannot write. He cannot tell a story. The whole art of fiction consists in telling a story. Now he makes a woman confess. How does he do it? In the third person—a scene that should be moving, impressive. Think how Tolstoy would have done it!’

‘But,’ said Jack, ‘War and Peace is the greatest novel in the world. I remember the scene where Natalia puts on a moustache and Rostov sees her for the first time as she is and falls in love with her.’

‘No, my good friend, there is nothing very wonderful in that. That is an ordinary piece of observation. But, my good friend (to me—half hesitating to call me this) what have you to say for Hardy? You cannot find anything to say. English fiction is the worst part of English literature. Compare it with the French—with the Russians. Henry James wrote some pretty little stories before he invented his jargon. But they were about rich people. You cannot write stories about rich people; because, I think he said, they have no instincts. But Henry James was enamoured of marble balustrades. There was no passion in any of his people. And Anne Brontë was the greatest of the Brontës and Conrad could not write,’ and so on. But this is out of date.

Saturday, March 20th.

But what is to become of all these diaries, I asked myself yesterday. If I died, what would Leo make of them? He would be disinclined to burn them; he could not publish them. Well, he should make up a book from them, I think; and then burn the body. I daresay there is a little book in them; if the scraps and scratching were straightened out a little. God knows. This is dictated by a slight melancholia, which comes upon me sometimes now and makes me think I am old; I am ugly. I am repeating things. Yet, as far as I know, as a writer I am only \ now writing out my mind.

Friday, April 30th.

The last of a wet windy month, excepting the sudden opening of all the doors at Easter and the summer displayed blazing, as it always is, I suppose, only cloud hidden. I have not said anything about Iwerne Minster. Now it would amuse me to see what I remember it by. Cranbourne Chase: the stunted aboriginal forest trees, scattered, not grouped in cultivations; anemones, bluebells, violets, all pale, sprinkled about, without colour, livid, for the sun hardly shone. Then Blackmore Vale; a vast air dome and the fields dropped to the bottom; the sun striking, there, there; a drench of rain falling, like a veil streaming from the sky, there and there; and the downs rising, very strongly scarped (if that is the word) so that they were ridged and ledged; then an inscription in a church ‘sought peace and ensured it’ and the question who wrote these sonorous stylistic epitaphs?—and all the cleanliness of Iwerne village, its happiness and well-being, making me ask, as we tended to sneer, still this is the right method, surely; and then tea and cream—these I remember: the hot baths; my new leather coat; Shaftesbury, so much lower and less commanding than my imagination, and the drive to Bournemouth and the dog and the lady behind the rock, and the view of Swanage, and coming home.

Yesterday I finished the first part of To the Lighthouse, and today began the second. I cannot make it out—here is the most difficult abstract piece of writing—I have to give an empty house, no people’s characters, the passage of time, all eyeless and featureless with nothing to cling to; well, I rush at it, and at once scatter out two pages. Is it nonsense, is it brilliance? Why am I so flown with words and apparently free to do exactly what I like? When I read a bit it seems spirited too; needs compressing, but not much else. Compare this dashing fluency with Mrs Dalloway (save the end). This is not made up; it is the literal fact.

Tuesday, May 25th.

I have finished—sketchily I admit—the second part of To the Lighthouse—and may, then, have it all written over by the end of July. A record. 7 months, if it so turns out.

Sunday, July 25th

At first I thought it was Hardy, and it was the parlourmaid, a small thin girl, wearing a proper cap. She came in with silver cake stands and so on. Mrs Hardy talked to us about her dog. How long ought we to stay? Can Mr Hardy walk much etc. I asked, making conversation, as I knew one would have to. She has the large sad lack-lustre eyes of a childless woman; great docility and readiness, as if she had learnt her part; not great alacrity, but resignation, in welcoming more visitors; wears a sprigged voile dress, black shoes and a necklace. We can’t go far now, she said, though we do walk every day, because our dog isn’t able to walk far. He bites, she told us. She became more natural and animated about the dog, who is evidently the real centre of her thoughts—then the maid came in. Then again the door opened, more sprucely, and in trotted a little puffy-cheeked cheerful old man, with an atmosphere cheerful and business-like in addressing us, rather like an old doctor’s or solicitor’s, saying ‘Well now—’ or words like that as he shook hands. He was dressed in rough grey with a striped tie. His nose has a joint in it and the end curves down. A round whitish face, the eyes now faded and rather watery, but the whole aspect cheerful and vigorous. He sat on a three-cornered chair (I am too jaded with all this coming and going to do more than gather facts) at a round table, where there were the cake stands and so on; a chocolate roll; what is called a good tea; but he only drank one cup, sitting on his three-cornered chair. He was extremely affable and aware of his duties. He did not let the talk stop or disdain making talk. He talked of father: said he had seen me, or it might have been my sister, but he thought it was me, in my cradle. He had been to Hyde Park Place—oh, Gate was it. A very quiet street. That was why my father liked it. Odd to think that in all these years he had never been down there again. He went there often. Your father took my novel—Far From the Madding Crowd. We stood shoulder to shoulder against the British public about certain matters dealt with in that novel. You may have heard. Then he said how some other novel had fallen through that was to appeal’—the parcel had been lost coming from France—not a very likely thing to happen, as your father said—a big parcel of manuscript; and he asked me to send my story. I think he broke all the Cornhill laws—not to see the whole book; so I sent it in chapter by chapter and was never late. Wonderful what youth is! I had it in my head doubtless, but I never thought twice about it. It came out every month. They were nervous, because of Miss Thackeray I think. She said she became paralysed and could not write a word directly she heard the press begin. I daresay it was bad for a novel to appear like that. One begins to think what is good for the magazine, not what is good for the novel.

“You think what makes a strong curtain,’ put in Mrs Hardy jocularly. She was leaning upon the tea table, not eating—gazing out.

Then we talked about manuscripts. Mrs Smith had found the MS of F. from the M.C. in a drawer during the war and sold it for the Red Cross. Now he has his MSS back and the printer rubs out all the marks. But he wishes they would leave them as they prove it genuine.

He puts his head down like some old pouter pigeon. He has a very long head; and quizzical bright eyes, for in talk they grow bright. He said when he was in the Strand 6 years ago he scarcely knew where he was and he used to know it all intimately. He told us that he used to buy second-hand books—nothing valuable—in Wyck Street. Then he wondered why Great James Street should be so narrow and Bedford Row so broad. He had often wondered about that. At this rate, London would soon be unrecognizable. But I shall never go there again. Mrs Hardy tried to persuade him that it was an easy drive—only 6 hours or so. I asked if she liked it, and she said Granville Barker had told her that when she was in the nursing home she had ‘the time of her life’. She knew everyone in Dorchester but she thought there were more interesting people in London. Had I often been to Siegfried’s flat? I said no. Then she asked about him and Morgan, said he was elusive, as if they enjoyed visits from him. I said I heard from Wells that Mr Hardy had been up to London to see an air raid. ‘What things they say!’ he said. ‘It was my wife. There was an air raid one night when we stayed with Barrie. We just heard a little pop in the distance. The searchlights were beautiful. I thought if a bomb now were to fall on this flat how many writers would be lost.’ And he smiled, in his queer way, which is fresh and yet sarcastic a little: anyhow shrewd. Indeed, there was no trace to my thinking of the simple peasant. He seemed perfectly aware of everything; in no doubt or hesitation; having made up his mind; and being delivered of all his work, so that he was in no doubt about that either. He was not interested much in his novels, or in anybody’s novels: took it all easily and naturally. ‘I never took long with them,’ he said. ‘The longest was The Dinnasts (so pronounced). ‘But that was really three books,’ said Mrs Hardy. ‘Yes; and that took me six years; but not working all the time.’ ‘Can you write poetry regularly?’ I asked (being beset with the desire to hear him say something about his books; but the dog kept cropping up. How he bit; how the inspector came out; how he was ill; and they could do nothing for him). ‘Would you mind if I let him in?’ asked Mrs Hardy, and in came Wessex, a very tousled, rough brown and white mongrel; got to guard the house, so naturally he bites people, said Mrs. H. ‘Well, I don’t know about that,’ said Hardy, perfectly natural, and not setting much stock by his poems either it seemed. ‘Did you write poems at the same time as your novels?’ I asked. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I wrote a great many poems. I used to send them about, but they were always returned,’ he chuckled. ‘And in those days I believed in editors. Many were lost—all the fair copies were lost. But I found the notes and I wrote them from those. I was always finding them. I found one the other day; but I don’t think I shall find any more.

‘Siegfried took rooms near here and said he was going to work very hard, but he left soon.

‘E.M. Forster takes a long time to produce anything—7 years,’ he chuckled. All this made a great impression of the ease with which he did things. ‘I daresay Far from the Madding Crowd would have been a great deal better if I had written it differently,’ he said. But as if it could not be helped and did not matter.

He used to go to the Lushingtons in Kensington Square and saw my mother there. ‘She used to come in and out when I was talking to your father.’

I wanted him to say one word about his writing before we left and could only ask which of his books he would have chosen if, like me, he had had to choose one to read in the train. I had taken the Mayor of Casterbridge. ‘That’s being dramatized,’ put in Mrs Hardy, and then brought Life’s Little Ironies.

‘And did it hold your interest?’ he asked. I stammered that I could not stop reading it, which was true, but sounded wrong. Anyhow, he was not going to be drawn and went off about giving a young lady a wedding present. ‘None of my books are fitted to be wedding presents,’ he said. ‘You must give Mrs Woolf one of your books,’ said Mrs Hardy, inevitably. “Yes I will. But I’m afraid only in the little thin paper edition,’ he said. I protested that it would be enough if he wrote his name (then was vaguely uncomfortable).

Then there was de la Mare. His last book of stories seemed to them such a pity. Hardy had liked some of his poems very much. People said he must be a sinister man to write such stories. But he is a very nice man—a very nice man indeed. He said to a friend who begged him not to give up poetry, ‘I’m afraid poetry is giving up me.’ The truth is he is a very kind man and sees anyone who wants to see him. He has 16 people for the day sometimes. ‘Do you think one can’t write poetry if one sees people?’ I asked. ‘One might be able to—I don’t see why not. It’s a question of physical strength,’ said Hardy. But clearly he preferred solitude himself. Always however he said something sensible and sincere, and thus made the obvious business of compliment-giving rather unpleasant. He seemed to be free of it all; very active minded; liking to describe people; not to talk in an abstract way; for example Col. Lawrence, bicycling with a broken arm ‘held like that’ from Lincoln to Hardy, listened at the door to hear if there was anyone there. ‘I hope he won’t commit suicide,’ said Mrs Hardy pensively, still leaning over the tea cups, gazing despondently. ‘He often says things like it, though he has never said quite that perhaps. But he has blue lines round his eyes. He calls himself Shaw in the army. No one is to know where he is. But it got into the papers.’ ‘He promised me not to go into the air,’ said Hardy. ‘My husband doesn’t like anything to do with the air,’ said Mrs Hardy.

Now we began to look at the grandfather clock in the corner. We said we must go—tried to confess we were only down for the day. I forgot to say that he offered L. whisky and water, which struck me that he was competent as a host and in every way. So we got up and signed Mrs Hardy’s visitors books; and Hardy took my Life’s Little Ironies off and trotted back with it signed; and Woolf spelt Wolff, which I daresay had given him some anxiety. Then Wessex came in again. I asked if Hardy could stroke him. So he bent down and stroked him, like the master of the house. Wessex went on wheezing away.

There was not a trace anywhere of deference to editors, or respect for rank or extreme simplicity. What impressed me was his freedom, ease and vitality. He seemed very ‘Great Victorian’ doing the whole thing with a sweep of his hand I (they are ordinary smallish, curled up hands) and setting no great stock by literature; but immensely interested in facts; » incidents; and somehow, one could imagine, naturally swept off into imagining and creating without a thought of its being difficult or remarkable; becoming obsessed; and living in imagination”. Mrs Hardy thrust his old grey hat into his hand and he trotted us out on to the road. ‘Where is that?’ I asked him, pointing to a clump of trees on the down opposite, for his house is outside the town, with open country (rolling, massive downs, crowned with little tree coronets before and behind) and he said, with interest, ‘That is Weymouth. We see the lights at night—not the lights themselves, but the reflection of them.’ And so we left and he trotted in again.

Also I asked him if I might see the picture of Tess which Morgan had described, an old picture: whereupon he led me to an awful engraving of Tess coming into a room from a picture by Herkomer. ‘That was rather my idea of her,’ he said. But I said I had been told he had an old picture. That’s fiction,’ he said. ‘I used to see people now and then with a look of her.’

Also Mrs Hardy said to me ‘Do you know Aldous Huxley?’ I said I did. They had been reading his book, which she thought ‘very clever’. But Hardy could not remember it: said his wife had to read to him—his eyes were now so bad. They’ve changed everything now,’ he said. ‘We used to think there was a beginning and a middle and an end. We believed in the Aristotelian theory. Now one of those stories came to an end with a woman going out of the room.’ He chuckled. But he no longer reads novels. The whole thing—literature, novels etc., all seemed to him an amusement, far away too, scarcely to be taken seriously. Yet he had sympathy and pity for those still engaged in it. But what his secret interests and activities are—to what occupation he trotted off when we left him—I do not know. Small boys write to him from New Zealand and have to be answered. They bring out a ‘Hardy number’ of a Japanese paper, which he produced. Talked too about Blunden. I think Mrs Hardy keeps him posted in the doings of the younger poets.

As I am not going to milk my brains for a week, I shall here write the first pages of the greatest book in the world. This is what the book would be that was made entirely solely and [ with integrity of one’s thoughts. Suppose one could catch them before they became ‘works of art’? Catch them hot and sudden as they rise in the mind—walking up Asheham hill for instance. Of course one cannot; for the process of language is slow and deluding. One must stop to find a word. Then, there is the form of the sentence, soliciting one to fill it.

Art and thought What I thought was this: if art is based on thought, what is the transmuting process? I was telling myself the story of our visit to the Hardys, and I began to compose it; that is to say to dwell on Mrs Hardy leaning on the table, looking out, apathetically, vaguely, and so would soon bring everything into harmony with that as the dominant theme. But the actual, event was different.

Next Writing by living people Tuesday. Sank into a chair, could scarcely rise; everything insipid; tasteless, colourless. Enormous desire for rest. Wednesday—only wish to be alone in the open air. Air delicious—avoided speech; could not read. Thought of my own power of writing J with veneration, as of something incredible, belonging to someone else; never again to be enjoyed by me. Mind a blank. Slept in my chair. Thursday. No pleasure in life whatsoever; but felt perhaps more attuned to existence. Character and idiosyncrasy as Virginia Woolf completely sunk out. Humble and modest. Difficulty in thinking what to say. Read automatically, like a cow chewing cud. Slept in chair. Friday: sense of physical tiredness; but slight activity of the brain. Beginning to take notice. Making one or two plans. No power of phrase-making. Difficulty in writing to Lady Colefax. Saturday (today) much clearer and lighter. Thought I could write, but resisted, or found it impossible. A desire to read poetry set in on Friday. This brings back a sense of my own individuality. Read some Dante and Bridges, without troubling to understands but got pleasure from them. Now I begin to wish to write notes, but not yet novel. But today senses quickening. No ‘making up’ power yet: no desire to cast scenes in my book. Curiosity about literature returning; want to read Dante, Havelock Ellis and Berlioz autobiography; also to make a looking glass with shell frame. These processes have sometimes been spread over several weeks.

:Proportions changed That in the evening, or on colourless days, the proportions of the landscape change suddenly. I saw people playing stool-ball in the meadow; they appeared sunk far down on a flat board; and the downs raised high up and mountainous round them. Detail was smoothed out. This was an extremely beautiful effect: the colours of the women’s dresses also showing very bright and pure in the almost untinted surroundings. I knew, also, that the proportions were abnormal—as if I were looking between my legs.

Second-rate Art i.e. C., by Maurice Baring. Within its limits, it is not second rate, or there is nothing markedly so, at first go off. The limits are the proof of its non-existence. He can only do one thing; himself to wit; charming, clean, modest, sensitive Englishman. Outside that radius and it does not carry far nor illumine much, all is—as it should be—light, sure, proportioned, affecting even; told in so well bred a manner that nothing is exaggerated, all related, proportioned. I could read this for ever, I said. L. said one would soon be sick to death of it.

Wandervôgeln of the sparrow tribe. Two resolute, sunburnt, dusty girls in jerseys and short skirts, with packs on their backs, city clerks, or secretaries, tramping along the road in the hot sunshine at Ripe. My instinct at once throws up a screen, which condemns them: I think them in every way angular, awkward and self-assertive. But all this is a great mistake. These screens shut me out. Have no screens, for screens are made out of our own integument; and get at the thing itself, which has nothing whatever in common with a screen. The screen-making habit, though, is so universal that probably it preserves our sanity. If we had not this device for shutting people off from our sympathies we might perhaps dissolve utterly; separateness would be impossible. But the screens are in the excess; not the sympathy.

Returning health.

This is shown by the power to make images; the suggestive power of every sight and word is enormously increased. Shakespeare must have had this to an extent which makes my normal state the state of a person blind, deaf, dumb, stone-stockish and fish-blooded. And I have it compared with poor Mrs Bartholomew almost to the extent that Shakespeare has it compared with me.

Bank Holiday Very fat woman, girl and man spend Bank Holiday—a day of complete sun and satisfaction—looking up family graves in the churchyard. 23 youngish men and women spend it tramping along with ugly black boxes on shoulders and arms, taking photographs. Man says to woman, ‘Some of these quiet villages don’t seem to know it’s Bank Holiday at all’ in a tone of superiority and slight contempt.

The Married Relation Arnold Bennett says that the horror of marriage lies in its ‘dailiness’. All acuteness of relationship is rubbed away by this. The truth is more like this: life—say 4 days out of 7—becomes automatic; but on the 5th day a bead of sensation (between husband and wife) forms which is all the fuller and more sensitive because of the automatic customary unconscious days on either side. That is to say the year is marked by moments of great intensity. Hardy’s ‘moments of vision’. How can a relationship endure for any length of time except under these conditions?

Friday, September 3rd.

Women in tea garden at Bramber—a sweltering hot day: rose trellises; white-washed tables; lower middle classes; motor omnibuses constantly passing; bits of grey stone scattered on a paper-strewn greensward, all that’s left of the Castle.

Woman leaning over the table, taking command of the treat, attended by two elder women, whom she pays for to girl waitress (or marmalade coloured fat girl, with a body like the softest lard, destined soon to marry, but as yet only 16 or so).

WOMAN: What can we have for tea?

GIRL (very bored, arms akimbo): Cake, bread and butter, tea. Jam?

WOMAN: Have the wasps been troublesome? They get into the jam—(as if she suspected the jam would not be worth having).

Girl agrees.

WOMAN: Ah, wasps have been very prominent this year.

GIRL: That’s right.

So she doesn’t have jam.

This amused me, I suppose.

For the rest, Charleston, Tilton,” To the Lighthouse, Vita, expeditions: the summer dominated by a feeling of washing in boundless warm fresh air—such an August not come my way for years; bicycling; no settled work done, but advantage taken of air for going to the river or over the downs. The novel is now easily within sight of the end, but this, mysteriously, comes no nearer. I am doing Lily on the lawn; but whether it’s her last lap, I don’t know. Nor am I sure of the quality; the only certainty seems to be that after tapping my antennae in the air vaguely for an hour every morning I generally write with heat and ease till 12.30; and thus do my two pages. So it will be done, written over that is, in 3 weeks, I forecast, from today. What emerges? At this moment I’m casting about for an end.

5th Sept

The problem is how to bring Lily and Mr R. together and make a combination of interest at the end. I am feathering about with various ideas. The last chapter which I begin tomorrow is In the Boat; I had meant to end with R. climbing on to the rock. If so, what becomes of Lily and her picture? Should there be a final page about her and Carmichael looking at the picture and summing up R.’s character? In that case I lose the intensity of the moment. If this intervenes between R. and the lighthouse, there’s too much chop and change, I think. Could I do it in a parenthesis? So that one had the sense of reading the two things at the same time?

I shall solve it somehow, I suppose. Then I must go on to the question of quality. I think it may run too fast and free and so be rather thin. On the other hand, I think it is subtler and more human than Jacob’s Room and Mrs Dalloway. And I am encouraged by my own abundance as I write. It is proved, I think, that what I have to say is to be said in this manner. As usual, side stories are sprouting in great variety as I wind this up: a book of characters; the whole string being pulled out from some simple sentence, like Clara Pater’s ‘Don’t you find that Barker’s pins have no points to them?’ I think I can spin out all their entrails this way; but it is hopelessly undramatic. It is all in oratio obliqua. Not quite all; for I have a few direct sentences. The lyric portions of To the Lighthouse are collected in the 10-year lapse and don’t interfere with the text so much as usual. I feel as if it fetched its circle pretty completely this time; and I don’t feel sure what the stock criticism will be. Sentimental? Victorian?

Then I must begin to plan out my book on literature for the Press. Six chapters. Why not groups of ideas, under some rough heading—for example: Symbolism. God. Nature. Plot Dialogue. Take a novel and see what the component parts are. Separate this and bring under them instances of all the books which display them biggest. Probably this would pan out historically. One could spin a theory which would bring the chapters together. I don’t feel that I can read seriously and exactly for it. Rather I want to sort out all the ideas that have accumulated in me.

Then I want to write a bunch of ‘Outlines’ to make money (for under a new arrangement, we’re to share any money over £200 that I make); this I must leave rather to chance, according to what books come my way. I am frightfully contented these last few days, by the way. I don’t quite understand it. Perhaps reason has something to do with it.

Monday, September 13th.

The blessed thing is coming to an end I say to myself with a groan. It’s like some prolonged rather painful and yet exciting process of nature, which one desires inexpressibly to have over. Oh the relief of waking and thinking it’s done—the relief and the disappointment, I suppose. I am talking of To the Lighthouse. I am exacerbated by the fact that I spent four days last week hammering out de Quincey, which has been lying about since June; so refused £30 to write on Willa Cather; and now shall be quit in a week I hope of this unprofitable fiction and could have wedged in Willa before going back. So I should have had £70 of my year’s £200 ready made by October. (My greed is immense; I want to have £50 of my own in the Bank to buy Persian carpets, pots, chairs etc.) Curse Richmond, Curse the Times, Curse my own procrastinations and nerves. I shall do Cobden Sanderson and Mrs Hemans and make something by them however. As for the book—Morgan said he felt ‘This is a failure,’ as he finished the Passage to India. I feel—what? A little stale this last week or two from steady writing. But also a little triumphant. If my feeling is correct, this is the greatest stretch I’ve put my method to, and I think it holds. By this I mean that I have been dredging up more feelings and characters, I imagine. But Lord knows, until I look at my haul. This is only my own feeling in process. Odd how I’m haunted by that damned criticism of Janet Case’s ‘it’s all dressing … technique. (Mrs Dalloway). The Common Reader has substance.’ But then in one’s strained state any fly has liberty to settle and it’s always the gadflies. Muir praising me intelligently has comparatively little power to encourage—when I’m working, that is—when the ideas halt. And this last lap, in the boat, is hard, because the material is not so rich as it was with Lily on the lawn. I am forced to be more direct and more intense. I am making more use of symbolism, I observe; and I go in dread of ‘sentimentality’. Is the whole theme open to that charge? But I doubt that any theme is in itself good or bad. It gives a chance to one’s peculiar qualities—that’s all.

Thursday, September 30th.

I wished to add some remarks to this, on the mystical side of this solicitude; how it is not oneself but something in the universe that one’s left with. It is this that is frightening and exciting in the midst of my profound gloom, depression, boredom, whatever it is. One sees a fin passing far out. What image can I reach to convey what I mean? Really there is none, I think. The interesting thing is that in all my feeling and thinking I have never come up against this before. Life is, soberly and accurately, the oddest affair; has in it the essence of reality. I used to feel this as a child—couldn’t step across a puddle once, I remember, for thinking how strange—what am I? etc. But by writing I don’t reach anything. All I mean to make is a note of a curious state of mind. I hazard the guess that it may be the impulse behind another book. At present my mind is totally blank and virgin of books. I want to watch and see how the idea at first occurs. I want to trace my own process.

Tuesday, November 23rd.

I am re-doing six pages of Lighthouse daily. This is not, I think, so quick as Mrs D: but then I find much of it very sketchy and have to improvise on the typewriter. This I find much easier than re-writing in pen and ink. My present opinion is that it is easily the best of my books: fuller than J.’s R. and less spasmodic, occupied with more interesting things than Mrs D., and not complicated with all that desperate accompaniment of madness. It is freer and subtler, I think. Yet I have no idea yet of any other to follow it: which may mean that I have made my method perfect and it will now stay like this and serve whatever use I wish to put it to. Before, some development of method brought fresh subjects in view, because I saw the chance of being able to say them. Yet I am now and then haunted by some semi-mystic very profound life of a woman, which shall all be told on one occasion; and time shall be utterly obliterated; future shall somehow blossom out of the past. One incident—say the fall of a flower—might contain it. My theory being that the actual event practically does not exist—nor time either. But I don’t want to force this. I must make up my series book.

[]

1927.

Friday, January 14th.

This is out of order, but I have no new book and so must record here (and it was here I recorded the beginning of the Lighthouse) must record here the end. This moment I have finished the final drudgery. It is now complete for Leonard to read on Monday. Thus I have done it some days under the year and feel thankful to be out of it again. Since October 25th I have been revising and retyping (some parts three times over) and no doubt I should work at it again; but I cannot. What I feel is that it is a hard muscular book, which at this age proves that I have something in me. It has not run out and gone flabby: at least such is my feeling before reading it over.

Sunday, January 23rd.

Well Leonard has read To the Lighthouse and says it is much my best book and it is a ‘masterpiece’. He said this without my asking. I came back from Knole and sat without asking him. He calls it entirely new, ‘a psychological poem’ is his name for it. An improvement upon Dalloway; more interesting. Having won this great relief, my mind dismisses the whole thing, as usual, and I forget it and shall only wake up and be worried again over proofs and then when it appears.

Saturday, February 12th.

X’s prose is too fluent. I’ve been reading it and it makes my pen run. When I’ve read a classic I am curbed and—not castrated; no, the opposite; I can’t think of the word at the moment. Had I been writing ‘Y’ I should have run off whole pools of this coloured water; and then (I think) found my own method of attack. It is my distinction as a writer to get this clear and my expression exact. Were I writing travels I should wait till some angle emerged and go for that. The method of writing smooth narration can’t be right; things don’t happen in one’s mind like that. But she is very skilful and golden voiced. This makes me think that I have to read To the Lighthouse tomorrow and Monday, straight through in print; straight through owing to my curious methods, for the first time. I want to read largely and freely once; then to niggle over details. I may note that the first symptoms of Lighthouse are unfavourable. Roger it is clear did not like ‘Time Passes’; Harpers and the Forum have refused serial rights; Brace writes, I think, a good deal less enthusiastically than of Mrs D. But these opinions refer to the rough copy, unrevised. And anyhow I feel callous: L.’s opinion keeps me steady; I’m neither one thing nor the other.

Monday, February 2 1st.

Why not invent a new kind of play; as for instance:

Woman thinks …

He does.

Organ plays.

She writes.

They say:

She sings.

Night speaks They miss

I think it must be something on this line—though I can’t now see what. Anyway from facts; free; yet concentrated; prose yet poetry; a novel and a play.

Monday, February 2 8th.

But I intend to work harder and harder. If they—the respectables, my friends, advise me against the Lighthouse, I shall write memoirs; have a plan already to get historical manuscripts and write Lives of the Obscure; but why do I pretend I should take advice? After a holiday the old ideas will come to me as usual; seeming fresher, more important than ever; and I shall be off again, feeling that extraordinary exhilaration, that ardour and lust of creation—which is odd, if what I create is, as it well may be, wholly bad.

Monday, March 14th.

Faith Henderson came to tea; and, valiantly beating the waters of conversation, I sketched the possibilities which an unattractive woman, penniless, alone, might yet bring into being, i began imagining the position—how she would stop a motor on the Dover road and so get to Dover; cross the channel etc. It struck me, vaguely, that I might write a Defoe narrative for fun. Suddenly between twelve and one I conceived a whole fantasy to be called ‘The Jessamy Brides’—why, I wonder? I have rayed round it several scenes. Two women, poor, solitary at the top of a house. One can see anything (for this is all fantasy) the Tower Bridge, clouds, aeroplanes. Also old men listening in the room over the way. Everything is to be tumbled ia pell mell. It is to be written as I write letters at the top of my speed; on the ladies of Llangollen; on Mrs Fladtgate; on people passing. No attempt is to be made to realize the character. Sapphism is to be suggested. Satire is to be the main note—satire and wildness. The ladies are to have Constantinople in view. Dreams of golden domes. My own lyric vein is to be satirized. Everything mocked. And it is to end with three dots … so. For the truth is I feel the need of an escapade after these serious poetic experimental books whose form is always so closely considered. I want to kick up my heels and be off. Orlando leading tot he waves. (8 July 1933). Want to embody all those innumerable little ideas and tiny stories which flash into my mind at all seasons. I think this will be great fun to write; and it will rest my head before starting the very serious, mystical poetical work which I want to come next. Meanwhile, before I can touch the Jessamy Brides, I have to write my book on fiction and that won’t be done till January, I suppose. I might dash off a page or two now and then by way of experiment. And it is possible that the idea will evaporate. Anyhow this records the odd horrid unexpected way in which these things suddenly create themselves—one thing on top of another in about an hour. So I made up Jacob’s Room looking at the fire at Hogarth House; so I made up the Lighthouse one afternoon in the Square here.

Monday, March 21st.

My brain is ferociously active. I want to have at my books as if I were conscious of the lapse of time; age and death. Dear me, how lovely some parts of the Lighthouse are! Soft and pliable, and I think deep, and never a word wrong for a page at a time. This I feel about the dinner party and the children in the boat; but not of Lily on the lawn. That I do not much like. But I like the end.

Sunday, May 1st.

And then I remember how my book is coming out. People will say I am irreverent—people will say a thousand things. But I think, honestly, I care very little this time—even for the opinion of my friends. I am not sure if it is good; I was disappointed when I read it through the first time. Later I liked it Anyhow it is the best I can do. But would it be a good thing to read my things when they are printed, critically? It is encouraging that in spite of obscurity, affectation and so on my sales rise steadily. We have sold, already, 1220 before publication, and I think it will be about 1500, which for a writer like I am is not bad. Yet, to show I am genuine, I find myself thinking of other things with absorption and forgetting that it will be out on Thursday.

Thursday, May 5th.

Book out. We have sold (I think) 1690 before publication—twice Dalloway. I write however in the shadow of the damp cloud of The Times Lit. Sup. review, which is an exact copy of the J.’s R., Mrs Dalloway review, gentlemanly, kindly, timid. Praising beauty, doubting character, and leaving me moderately depressed. I am anxious about Time Passes.’ Think the whole thing may be pronounced soft, shallow, insipid, sentimental. Yet, honestly, I don’t much care; want to be let alone to ruminnate.

Wednesday, May 11th.

My book. What is the use of saying one is indifferent to reviews when positive praise, though mingled with blame, gives one such a start on, that instead of feeling dried up, one feels, on the contrary, flooded with ideas? I gather from vague hints, through Margery Joad, through Clive, that some people say it is my best book. So far Vita praises; Dotty enthuses; an unknown donkey writes. No one has yet read it to the end, I daresay; and I shall hover about, not anxious but worried for two more weeks, when it will be over.

Monday, May 16th.

The book. Now on its feet so far as praise is concerned. It has been out 10 days: Thursday a week ago. Nessa enthusiastic—a sublime, almost upsetting spectacle. She says it is an amazing portrait of mother; a supreme portrait painter; has lived in it; found the rising of the dead almost painful. Then Ottoline, then Vita, then Charlie, then Lord Olivier, then Tommie, then Clive.

Saturday, June 18th.

This is a terribly thin diary for some reason. Half the year has been spent and left only these few sheets. Perhaps I have been writing too hard in the morning to write here also. Three weeks wiped out by headache. We had a week at Rodmell, of which I remember various sights, suddenly unfolding before me spontaneously (for example, the village standing out to sea in the June night, houses seeming ships; the marsh a fiery foam) and the immense comfort of lying there lapped in peace. I lay out all day in the new garden, with the terrace. It is already being made. There were blue tits nested in the hollow neck of my Venus. Vita came over one very hot afternoon and we walked to the river with her. Pinker now swims after Leonard’s stick. I read—any trash; Maurice Baring; sporting memoirs. Slowly ideas began trickling in; and then suddenly I rhapsodized (the night L. dined with the Apostles) and told over the story of the Moths, which I think I will write very quickly, perhaps in between chapters of that long impending book on fiction. Now the Moths will I think fill out the skeleton which I dashed in here; the play-poem idea; the idea of some continuous stream, not solely of human thought, but of the ship, the night etc, all flowing together: intersected by the arrival of the bright moths. A man and a woman are to be sitting at table talking. Or shall they remain silent? It is to be a love story; she is finally to let the last great moth in. The contrasts might be something of this sort; she might talk, or think, about the age of the earth; the death of humanity; then the moths keep on coming. Perhaps the man could be left absolutely dim. France: hear the sea; at night; a garden under the window. But it needs ripening. I do a little work on it in the evening when the gramophone is playing late Beethoven sonatas. (The windows fidget at their fastenings as if we were at sea.)

We saw Vita given the Hawthornden. A horrid show up, I thought: not of the gentry on the platform—Squire, Drinkwater, Binyon only—of us all; all of us chattering writers. My word! how insignificant we all looked! How can we pretend that we are interesting, that our works matter? The whole business of writing became infinitely distasteful. There was no one I could care whether he read, liked, or disliked ‘my writing’. And no one could care for my criticism either; the mildness, the conventionality of them all struck me. But there may be a stream of ink in them that matters more than the look of them—so tightly clothed, mild and decorous—showed. I felt there was no one full grown mind among us. In truth, it was the thick dull middle class of letters that met, not the aristocracy.

Wednesday, June 22nd.

Women haters depress me and both Tolstoi and Mrs Asquith hate women. I suppose my depression is a form of vanity. But then so are all strong opinions on both sides. I hate Mrs A’s hard, dogmatic empty style. But enough: I shall write about her tomorrow. I write every day about something and have deliberately set apart a few weeks to money-making, so that I may put £50 in each of our pockets by September. This will be the first money of my own since I married. I never felt the need of it till lately. And I can get it, if I want it, but shirk writing for money.

Thursday, June 23rd.

This diary shall batten on the leanness of my social life. Never have I spent so quiet a London summer. It is perfectly easy to slip out of the crush unobserved. I have set up my standard as an invalid and no one bothers me. No one asks me to do anything. Vainly, I have the feeling that this is of my choice, not theirs; and there is a luxury in being quiet in the heart of chaos. Directly I talk and exert my wits in talk I get a dull damp rather headachy day. Quiet brings me cool clear quick mornings, in which I dispose of a good deal of work and toss my brain into the air when I take a walk. I shall feel some triumph if I skirt a headache this summer.

Thursday, June 30th.

Now I must sketch out the Eclipse.

About 10 on Tuesday night several very long trains, accurately filled (ours with civil servants) left Kings Cross. In our carriage were Vita, Harold, Quentin, L. and I. This is Hatfield I daresay, I said. I was smoking a cigar. Then again, This is Peterborough, L. said. Before it got dark we kept looking at the sky; soft fleecy; but there was one star, over Alexandra Park. Look, Vita, that’s Alexandra Park, said Harold. The Nicolsons got sleepy; H. curled up with his head on V.’s knee. She looked like Sappho by Leighton, asleep; so we plunged through the midlands; made a very long stay at York. Then at 3 we got out our sandwiches and I came in from the W.C. to find Harold being rubbed clean of cream. Then he broke the china sandwich box. Here L. laughed without restraint. Then we had another doze, or the N.’s did; then here was a level crossing, at which were drawn up a long line of motor omnibuses and motors, all burning pale yellow lights. It was getting grey—still a fleecy mottled sky. We got to Richmond about 3.30; it was cold and the N.’s had a quarrel, Eddie said, about V.’s luggage. We went off in the omnibus, saw a vast castle (who does that belong to, said Vita, who is interested in castles). It had a front window added and a light I think burning. All the fields were abum with June grasses and red tasselled plants none coloured as yet, all pale. Pale and grey too were the little uncompromising Yorkshire farms. As we passed one, the farmer and his wife and sister came out, all tightly and tidily dressed in black, as if they were going to church. At another ugly square farm, two women were looking out of the upper windows. These had white blinds drawn down half across them. We were a train of 3 vast cars, one stopping to let the others go on; all very low and powerful; taking immensely steep hills. The driver once got out and put a small stone behind our wheel—inadequate. An accident would have been natural; there were also many motor cars. These suddenly increased as we crept up to the top of Bardon Fell. Here were people camping beside their cars. We got out and found ourselves very high, on a moor, boggy, heathery, with butts for grouse shooting. There were grass tracks here and there and people had already taken up positions. So we joined them, walking out to what seemed the highest point looking over Richmond. One light burned down there. Vales and moors stretched, slope after slope, round us. It was like the Haworth country. But over Richmond, where the sun was rising, was a soft grey cloud. We could see by a gold spot where the sun was. But it was early yet. We had to wait, stamping to keep warm. Ray had wrapped herself in the blue striped blanket off a double bed. She looked incredibly vast and bedroomish. Saxon looked very old. Leonard kept looking at his watch. Four great red setters came leaping over the moor. There were sheep feeding behind us. Vita had tried to buy a guinea pig—Quentin advised a savage—so she observed the animals from time to time. There were thin places in the clouds and some complete holes. The question was whether the sun would show through a cloud or through one of these hollow places when the time came. We began to get anxious. We saw rays coming through the bottom of the clouds. Then, for a moment, we saw the sun sweeping—it seemed to be sailing at a great pace and clear in a gap; we had out our smoked glasses; we saw it Crescent, burning red; next moment it had sailed fast into the cloud again; only the red streamers came from it; then only a golden haze, such as one has often seen. The moments were passing. We thought we were cheated; we looked at the sheep; they showed no fear; the setters were racing round; everyone was standing in long lines, rather dignified, looking out. I thought how we were like very old people, in the birth of the world—druids on Stonehenge; (this idea came more vividly in the first pale light though). At the back of us were great blue spaces in the cloud. These were still blue. But now the colour was going out. The clouds were turning pale; a reddish black colour. Down in the valley it was an extraordinary scrumble of red and black; there was the one light burning; all was cloud down there, and very beautiful, so delicately tinted. Nothing could be seen through the cloud. The 24 seconds were passing. Then one looked back again at the blue; and rapidly, very very quickly, all the colours faded; it became darker and darker as at the beginning of a violent storm; the light sank and sank; we kept saying this is the shadow; and we thought now it is over—this is the shadow; when suddenly the light went out. We had fallen. It was extinct. There was no colour. The earth was dead. That was the astonishing moment; and the next when as if a ball had rebounded the cloud took colour on itself again, only a sparky ethereal colour and so the light came back. I had very strongly the feeling as the light went out of some vast obeisance; something kneeling down and suddenly raised up when the colours came. The colour for some moments was of the most lovely kind—fresh, various; here blue and there brown; all new colours, as if washed over and repainted. They came back astonishingly lightly and quickly and beautifully in the valley and over the hills—at first with a miraculous glittering and ethereality, later normally almost, but with a great sense of relief. It was like recovery. We had been much worse than we had expected. We had seen the world dead. This was within the power of nature. Our greatness had been apparent too. Now we became Ray in a blanket, Saxon in a cap etc. We were bitterly cold. I should say that the cold had increased as the light went down. One felt very livid. Then—it was over till 1999. What remained was the sense of the comfort which we get used to, of plenty of light, and colour. This for some time seemed a definitely welcome thing. Yet when it became established all over the country, one rather missed the sense of its being a relief and a respite, which one had had when it came back after the darkness. How can I express the darkness? It was a sudden plunge, when one did not expect it; being at the mercy of the sky; our own nobility; the druids; Stonehenge; and the racing red dogs; all that was in one’s mind. Also, to be picked out of one’s London drawing room and set down on the wildest moors in England, was impressive. For the rest, I remember trying to keep awake in the gardens at York while Eddy talked and falling asleep. Asleep again in the train. It was hot and we were messy. The carriage was full of things. Harold was very kind and attentive. Eddy was peevish. Roast beef and pineapple chunks, he said. We got home at 8.30 perhaps.

Tuesday, September 18th.

A thousand things to be written had I time: had I power. A very little writing uses up my capacity for writing.

Laughton Place and Philip Ritchie’s death.

These as it happened synchronized. When Vita was here 10 days ago we drove over to Laughton and I broke in and explored the house. It seemed, that sunny morning, so beautiful, so peaceful; and as if it had endless old rooms. So I come home boiling with the idea of buying it; and so fired L. that we wrote to the farmer, Mr Russell, and waited, all on wires, edgy, excited for an answer. He came himself, after some days; and we were to go and see it. This arranged, and our hopes very high, I opened the Morning Post and read the death of Philip Ritchie. ‘He can’t take houses, poor Philip’ I thought. And then the usual procession of images went through my mind. Also, I think for the first time, I felt this death leaves me an elderly luggard; makes me feel I have no right to go on; as if my life were at the expense of his. And I had not been kind; not asked him to dinner and so on. So the two feelings—about buying the house and his death—fought each other; and sometimes the house won and sometimes death won; and we went to see the house and it turned out unspeakably dreary; all patched and spoilt; with grained oak and grey paper; a sodden garden and a glaring red cottage at the back. I note the strength and vividness of feelings which suddenly break and foam away. Now I forget to think about Philip Ritchie.

One of these days, though, I shall sketch here, like a grand historical picture, the outlines of all my friends. I was thinking of this in bed last night and for some reason I thought I would begin with a sketch of Gerald Brenan. There may be something in this idea. It might be a way of writing the memoirs of one’s own times during people’s lifetimes. It might be a most amusing book. The question is how to do it. Vita should be Orlando, a young nobleman. There should be Lytton; and it should be truthful but fantastic. Roger. Duncan. Clive. Adrian. Their lives should be related. But I can think of more books than I shall ever be able to write. How many little stories come into my head! For instance: Ethel Sands not looking at her letters. What this implies. One might write a book of short significant separate scenes. She did not open her letters.

Tuesday, September 25th.

On the opposite page I wrote notes for Shelley, I think, by mistake for my writing book.

Now let me become the annalist of Rodmell.

Thirty five years ago, there were 160 families living here where there are now no more than 80. It is a decaying village, which loses its boys to the towns. Not a boy of them, said the Rev. Mr Hawkesford, is being taught to plough. Rich people wanting weekend cottages buy up the old peasants’ houses for fabulous sums. Monk’s House was offered to Mr H. for £400; we gave £700. He refused it, saying he didn’t wish to own country cottages. Now Mr Allison will pay £1,200 for a couple and we he said might get £2,000 for this. He (Hawkesford) is an old decaying man, run to seed. His cynicism and the pleasant turn it gives his simple worn out sayings amuses me. He is sinking into old age, very shabby, loose limbed, wearing black woollen mittens. His life is receding like a tide, slowly; or one figures him as a dying candle, whose wick will soon sink into the warm grease and be extinct. To look at, he is like some aged bird; a little, small featured face, with heavily lidded smoky bright eyes; his complexion is still ruddy; but his beard is like an unweeded garden. Little hairs grow weakly all over his cheeks and two strands are drawn, like pencil marks, across his bald head. He tumbles into an armchair and tells over his stock of old village stories which always have this slightly mocking flavour as though, completely unambitious and by no means successful himself, he recouped himself by laughing slyly at the humours of the more energetic. The outlay these flashy newcomers make on their field and farms makes him sardonic. But he won’t raise a finger either way; likes his cup of Indian tea, which he prefers to China, and doesn’t much mind what anybody thinks. He smokes endless cigarettes and his fingers are not very clean. Talking of his well, he said ‘It would.be a different thing if one wanted baths’—which for some 70 years, presumably, he has done without. Then he likes a little practical talk about Aladdin lamps, for instance, and how the Rector at Iford has a device by which he makes the globe of the Veritas lamp, which is cheaper, serve. It appears that the Aladdin costs 10d. and 2/-. But it blackens suddenly and is useless. Leaning over stiles, it is of lamp mantles that the two rectors talk. Or he will advise about making a garage; how Percy should cut a trench and then old Fears should line the walls with cement. That is what he advises; and I fancy many many hours of his life have passed hobnobbing with Percies and Fears about cement and trenches. Of his clerical character there is little visible. He would not buy Bowen a riding school he said; her sister did that. He didn’t believe in it. She has a school at Rottingdean, keeps 12 horses, employs grooms and has to be at it all day, Sunday included. But having expressed his opinion in the family conclave he would leave it at that. Mrs H. would back Bowen. She would get her way. The Rector would slouch off to his study, where he does heaven knows what. I asked him if he had work to do: a question which amused him a little. Not work, he said; but a young woman to see. And then he settled into the armchair again and so sat out a visit of over an hour and a half.

Wednesday, October 5th.

I write in the sordid doss house atmosphere of approaching departure. Pinker is asleep in one chair; Leonard is signing cheques at the little deal table under the glare of the lamp. The fire is covered with ashes, since we have been burning it all day and Mrs B. never cleans. Envelopes lie in the grate. I am writing with a pen which is feeble and wispy; and it is a sharp fine evening with a sunset, I daresay.

We went to Amberley yesterday and think of buying a house there. For it is an astonishing forgotten lovely place, between water meadows and downs. So impulsive we both are, in spite of our years.

But we are not as old as Mrs Gray, who came to thank us for our apples. She won’t send to buy, as it looks like begging, since we never take money. Her face is cut into by wrinkles; they make weals across her. She is 86 and can never remember such a summer. In her youth it was so hot in April often that they couldn’t bear a sheet on them. Her youth must have been almost the same time as my father’s. She is 9 years younger, I make out; born in 1841. And what did she see of Victorian England I wonder.

I can make up situations, but I cannot make up plots. That is: if I pass a lame girl I can, without knowing I do it, instantly make up a scene: (now I can’t think of one). This is the germ of such fictitious gift as I have. And by the way I get letter after letter about my books and they scarcely please me.

If my pen allowed, I should now try to make out a work table, having done my last article for the Tribune, and now being free again. And instantly the usual exciting devices enter my mind: a biography beginning in the year 1500 and continuing to the present day, called Orlando: Vita; only with a change about from one sex to another. I think, for a treat, I shall let myself dash this in for a week, while …

Saturday, October 22nd.

This is a book, I think I have said before, which I write after tea. And my brain was full of ideas, but I have spent them on Mr Ashcroft and Miss Findlater, fervent admirers.

‘I shall let myself dash this in for a week’—I have done nothing, nothing, nothing else for a fortnight; and am launched somewhat furtively but with all the more passion upon Orlando: a Biography. It is to be a small book and written by Christmas. I thought I could combine it with Fiction, but once the mind gets hot it can’t stop: I walk making up phrases; sit, contriving scenes; am in short in the thick of the greatest rapture known to me; from which I have kept myself since last February, or earlier. Talk of planning a book, or waiting for an idea! Then one came in a rush; I said to pacify myself, being bored and stale with criticism and faced with that intolerable dull Fiction, ‘You shall write a page of a story for a treat; you shall stop sharp at 11.30 and then go on with the Romantics.’ I had very little idea what the story was to be about. But the relief of turning my mind that way was such that I felt happier than for months; as if put in the sun, or laid on a cushion; and after two days entirely gave up my time chart and abandoned myself to the pure delight of this farce; which I enjoy as much as I’ve ever enjoyed anything; and have written myself into half a headache and had to come to a halt, like a tired horse, and take a little sleeping draught last night; which made our breakfast fiery. I did not finish my egg. I am writing Orlando half in a mock style very clear and plain, so that people will understand every word. But the balance between truth and fantasy must be careful. It is based on Vita, Violet Trefusis, Lord Lascelles, Knole, etc.

Sunday, November 20th.

I will now snatch a moment from what Morgan calls ‘life’ to enter a hurried note. My notes have been few; life a cascade, a glissade, a torrent; all together. I think on the whole this is our happiest autumn. So much work; and success now; and life on easy terms; heaven knows what. My morning rushes, pell mell, from 10 to 1. I write so quick I can’t get it typed before lunch. This I suppose is the main backbone of my autumn—Orlando. Never do I feel this, except for a morning or two, writing criticism. Today I began the third chapter. Do I learn anything? Too much of a joke perhaps for that; yet I like these plain sentences; and the externality of it for a change. It is too thin of course; splashed over the canvas; but I shall cover the ground by January 7th (I say) and then re-write.

Wednesday, November 30th.

A hurried note about the lunch party, L. dining at the Cranium. An art of light talk; about people. Bogey Harris; Maurice Baring. B.H. ‘knows’ everyone: that is no one. Freddy Fossle? Oh yes I know him; knows Lady so-and-so. Knows everyone: can’t admit to not knowing. A polished, burnished diner out—Roman Catholic. In the middle M. Baring says: ‘But Lady B. died this morning.’ Sibyl says: ‘Say that again.”But R.M. was lunching with her yesterday,’ says Bogey. ‘Well ‘it’s in the papers she’s dead,’ says M.B. Sibyl says: ‘But she was quite young. Lord Ivor asked me to meet the young man his daughter’s to marry.”I know Lord Ivor,’ says, or would say. Bogey. ‘Well it’s odd,’ says Sibyl, giving up the attempt to wrestle with the death of the young at a lunch party. So on to wigs: ‘Lady Charlie used to have hers curled by a sailor on deck before she got up,’ says Bogey. ‘Oh, I’ve known her all my life. Went yachting with them. Lady … eyebrows fell into the soup. Sir John Cook was so fat they had to hike him up. Once he got out of bed in the middle of the night and fell on the floor, where he lay 5 hours—couldn’t move. B.M. sent me a pear by the waiter with a long letter.’ Talk of houses and periods. All very smooth and surface talk; depends on knowing people; not on saying anything interesting. Bogey’s cheeks are polished daily.

Tuesday, December 20th.

This is almost the shortest day and perhaps the coldest night of the year. We are in the black heart of a terrific frost. I notice that look of black atoms in a clear air, which for some reason I can never describe to my liking. The pavement was white with great powdery flakes the other night, walking back with Roger and Helen; this was from Nessa’s last Sunday—last, I fear, for many a month. But I have as usual ‘no time’: let me count the things I should be doing this deep winter’s night with Leonard at his last lecture and Pinker asleep in her chair. I should be reading Bagenal’s story; Julian’s play; Lord Chesterfield’s letters; and writing to Hubert (about a cheque from the Nation). There is an irrational scale of values in my mind which puts these duties higher than mere scribbling.

This flashed to my mind at Nessa’s children’s party last night. The little creatures acting moved my infinitely sentimental throat. Angelica so mature and composed; all grey and silver; such an epitome of all womanliness; and such an unopened bud of sense and sensibility; wearing a grey wig and a sea coloured dress. And yet oddly enough I scarcely want children of my own now. This insatiable desire to write something before I die, this ravaging sense of the shortness and feverishness of life, make me cling, like a man on a rock, to my one anchor. I don’t like the physicalness of having children of one’s own. This occurred to me at Rodmell; but I never wrote it down. I can dramatize myself a parent, it is true. And perhaps I have killed the feeling instinctively; or perhaps nature does.

I am still writing the third chapter of Orlando. I have had of course to give up the fancy of finishing by February and printing this spring. It is drawing out longer than I meant. I have just been thinking over the scene when O. meets a girl (Nell) in the Park and goes with her to a neat room in Gerrard Street. There she will disclose herself. They will talk. This Will lead to a diversion or two about women’s love. This will bring in O.’s night life; and her clients (that’s the word). Then she will see Dr Johnson and perhaps write (I want somehow to quote it) To all you Ladies. So I shall get some effect of years passing; and then there will be a description of the lights of the 18th Century burning; and the clouds of the 19th Century rising. Then on to the 19th. But I have not considered this. I want to write it all over hastily and so keep unity of tone, which in this book is very important. It has to be half laughing, half serious; with great splashes of exaggeration. Perhaps I shall pluck up courage to ask The Times for a rise. But could I write for my Annual I would never write for another paper. How extraordinarily unwilled by me but potent in its own right, by the way, Orlando was! as if it shoved everything aside to come into existence. Yet I see looking back just now to March that it is almost exactly in spirit, though not in actual facts, the book I planned then as an escapade; the spirit to be satiric, the structure wild. Precisely.

Yes, I repeat, a very happy, singularly happy autumn.

Thursday, December 22nd.

I just open this for a moment, being dull of the head, to enter a severe reprimand of myself to myself. The value of society is that it snubs one. I am meretricious, mediocre, a humbug; am getting into the habit of flashy talk. Tinsel it seemed last night at the Keynes. I was out of humour and so could see the transparency of my own sayings. Dadie said a true thing too; when V. lets her style get on top of her, one thinks only of that; when she uses clichés, one thinks what she means. But, he says, I have no logical power and live and write in an opium dream. And the dream is too often about myself.

Now with middle age drawing on and age ahead it is important to be severe on such faults. So easily might I become a hare-brained egotistic woman, exacting compliments, arrogant, narrow, withered. Nessa’s children (I always measure myself against her and find her much the largest, most humane of the two of us), think of her now with an admiration that has no envy in it; with some trace of the old childish feeling that we were in league together against the world; and how proud I am of her triumphant winning of all our battles; as she takes her way so nonchalantly, modestly, almost anonymously, past the goal, with her children round her; and only a little added tenderness (a moving thing in her) which shows me that she too feels wonder, surprise, at having passed so many terrors and sorrows safe …

The dream is too often about myself. To correct this; and to forget one’s own sharp absurd little personality, reputation and the rest of it, one should read; see outsiders; think more; write more logically; above all be full of work; and practise anonymity. Silence in company; or the quietest statement, not the showiest; is also ‘medicated’ as the doctors say. It was an empty party, rather, last night. Very nice here, though.

[]

1928.

Tuesday, January 17th.

Yesterday we went to Hardy’s funeral. What did I think of? Of Max Beerbohm’s letter, just read; or a lecture to the Newnhamites about women’s writing. At intervals some emotion broke in. But I doubt the capacity of the human animal for being dignified in ceremony. One catches a bishop’s frown and twitch; sees his polished shiny nose; suspects the rapt spectacled young priest, gazing at the cross he carries, of being a humbug; catches Robert Lynd’s distracted haggard eye; then thinks of the mediocrity of X.; next here is the coffin, an overgrown one; like a stage coffin, covered with a white satin cloth; bearers elderly gentlemen rather red and stiff, holding to the corners; pigeons flying outside, insufficient artificial light; procession to poets corner; dramatic ‘In sure and certain hope of immortality’ perhaps melodramatic. After dinner at Clive’s Lytton protested that the great man’s novels are the poorest of poor stuff; and can’t read them. Lytton sitting or lying inert, with his eyes shut, or exasperated with them open. Lady Strachey slowly fading, but it may take years. Over all this broods for me some uneasy sense of change and mortality and how partings are deaths; and then a sense of my own fame—why should this come over me? and then of its remoteness; and then the pressure of writing two articles on Meredith and furbishing up the Hardy. And Leonard sitting at home reading. And Max’s letter; and a sense of the futility of it all.

Saturday, February 11th.

I am so cold I can hardly hold the pen. The futility of it all—.so I broke off; and have indeed been feeling that rather persistently, or perhaps I should have written here. Hardy and Meredith together sent me torpid to bed with headache. I know the feeling now, when I can’t spin a sentence and sit mumbling and turning; and nothing flits by my brain, which is as a blank window. So I shut my studio door and go to bed, stuffing my ears with rubber; and there I lie a day or two. And what leagues I travel in, the time! Such ‘sensations’ spread over my spine and head directly I give them the chance; such an exaggerated tiredness; such anguishes and despairs; and heavenly relief and rest; and then misery again. Never was anyone so tossed up and down by the body as I am, I think. But it is over; and put away …

For some reason, I am hacking rather listlessly at the last chapter of Orlando, which was to have been the best. Always, always the last chapter slips out of my hands. One gets bored. One whips oneself up. I still hope for a fresh wind, and don’t very much bother, except that I miss the fun, which was so tremendously lively all October, November and December. I have my doubts if it is not empty; and too fantastic to write at such length.

Saturday, February 18th.

And I should be revising Lord Chesterfield at this moment, but I’m not. My mind is wool-gathering away about Women and Fiction, which I am to read at Newnham in May. The mind is the most capricious of insects—flitting, fluttering. I had thought to write the quickest most brilliant pages in Orlando yesterday—not a drop came, all, forsooth, for the usual physical reasons, which delivered themselves today. It is the oddest feeling: as if a finger stopped the flow of the ideas in the brain; it is unsealed and the blood rushes all over the place. Again, instead of writing 0., I’ve been racing up and down the whole field of my lecture. And tomorrow, alas, we motor; for I must get back into the book—which has brightened the last few days satisfactorily. Not that my sensations in writing are an infallible guide.

Sunday, March 18th.

I have lost my writing board; an excuse for the anaemic state of this book. Indeed I only write now, in between letters, to say that Orlando was finished yesterday as the clock struck one. Anyhow the canvas is covered. There will be three months of close work needed, imperatively, before it can be printed; for I have scrambled and splashed and the canvas shows through in a thousand places. But it is a serene, accomplished feeling, to write, even provisionally, the End, and we go off on Saturday, with my mind appeased.

I have written this book quicker than any; and it is all a joke; and yet gay and quick reading I think; a writer’s holiday. I feel more and more sure that I will never write a novel again. Little bits of rhyme come in. So we go motoring across France on Saturday and shall be back on April 17th for the summer. Time flies—oh yes; that summer should be here again; and I still have the faculty of wonder at it. The world I swinging round again and bringing its green and blue close to one’s eyes.

Thursday, March 22nd.

These are the last pages at the end of Orlando and it is twenty five minutes to one; and I have written everything I have to write and on Saturday we go abroad.

Yes it’s done—Orlando—begun on 8th October, as a joke; and now rather too long for my liking. It may fall between stools, be too long for a joke, and too frivolous for a serious book. All this I dismiss from a mind avid only of green fields, the sun, wine; sitting doing nothing. I have been for the last 6 weeks rather a bucket than a fountain; sitting to be shot into by one person after another. A rabbit that passes across a shooting gallery, and one’s friends go pop-pop. Heaven be praised, Sibyl today puts us off; which leaves Dadie only and a whole day’s solitude, please Heaven, tomorrow. But I intend to control this rabbit-shooting business when I come back. And money making. I hope to settle in and write one nice little discreet article for £25 each month; and so live; without stress; and so read—what I want to read. At 46 one must be a miser; only have time for essentials. But I think I have made moral reflections enough, and should describe people, save that, when seen so colourlessly, by duty not wish, one’s mind is a little slack in taking notes.

Watery blowy weather; and this time next week we shall be in the middle of France.

Tuesday, April 17th.

Home again, as foretold, last night, and to settle the dust in my mind, write here. We have been across France and back—every inch of that fertile field traversed by the admirable Singer. And now towns and spires and scenes begin to rise in my mind as the rest sinks. I see Chartres in particular, the snail, with its head straight, marching across the flat country, the most distinguished of churches. The rose window is like a jewel on black velvet. The outside is very intricate yet simple; elongated; somehow preserved from the fantastic and ornate. Grey weather dashed all over this; and I remember coming in at night in the wet often and hearing the rain in hotels. Often I was bobbing up and down on my two glasses of vin du pays. It was rather a rush and a cram—as these jumbled notes testify. Once we were high up on a mountain in a snow storm; and rather afraid of a long tunnel. Twenty miles often cut us off from civilization. One wet afternoon we punctured in a mountain village and I went in and sat with the family—a nice scrupulous polite woman, a girl who was pretty, shy, had a friend called Daisy at Earlsfield. They caught trout and wild boars. Then on we went to Florae, where I found a book—Girardin’s memoirs in the old bookcase that had been sold with the house. Always some good food and hot bottles at night. Oh and my prize—£40 from the French. And Julian. And one or two hot days and the Pont du Garde in the sun; and Les Beaux (this is where Dante got his idea of Hell, Duncan said) and mounting all the time steadily was my desire for words, till I envisaged a sheet of paper and pen and ink as something of miraculous desirability—could even relish the scratch as if it were a divine kind of relief to me. And there was St Remy and the ruins in the sun. I forget now how it all went—how thing fitted to thing; but the eminences now emerge and I noticed how, talking to Raymond at the Nation this afternoon, we had already pitched on the high points. Before that, crossing the graveyard in the bitter windy rain, we saw Hope” and a dark cultivated woman. But on they went past us, with the waver of an eye. Next moment I heard ‘Virginia’ and turned and there was Hope coming back—‘Jane’ died yesterday,’ she murmured, half asleep, talking distraught, ‘out of herself. We kissed by Cromwell’s daughter’s grave, where Shelley used to walk, for Jane’s death. She lay dead outside the graveyard in that back room where we saw her lately raised on her pillows, like a very old person whom life has tossed up and left; exalted, satisfied, exhausted. Hope the colour of dirty brown paper. Then to the office, then home to work here; and now to work and work, as hard as I can.

Saturday, April 21st.

And I find myself again in the old driving whirlwind of writing against time. Have I ever written with it? But I vow I won’t spend longer at Orlando, which is a freak; it shall come out in September, though the perfect artist would revoke and rewrite and polish—infinitely. But hours remain over to be filled with reading something or other—I’m not sure what. What sort of summer do I desire? Now that I have £16 to spend before July 1st (on our new system) I feel freer; can afford a dress and a hat and so may go about, a little, if I want. And yet the only exciting life is the imaginary one. Once I get the wheels spinning in my head, I don’t want money much, or dress, or even a cupboard, a bed at Rodmell or a sofa.

Tuesday, April 24th.

A lovely soaring summer day this; winter sent howling home to his arctic. I was reading Othello last night and was impressed by the volley and volume and tumble of his words; too many I should say, were I reviewing for The Times. He put them in when tension was slack. In the great scenes, everything fits like a glove. The mind tumbles and splashes among words when it is not being urged on; I mean, the mind of a very great master of words who is writing with one hand. He abounds. The lesser writers stint. As usual, impressed by Shakespeare. But my mind is very bare to words—English words—at the moment; they hit me, hard, I watch them bounce and spring. I’ve read only French for 4 weeks. An idea comes to me for an article on French; what we know of it.

Friday, May 4th.

And now there’s the Femina prize to record before I go off this brilliant summer day to tea with Miss Jenkins in Doughty Street. I am going dutifully, not to snub the female young. But I shall be overpowering I doubt not. But it is a wonderful day.

The prize was an affair of dull stupid hours; a function; not alarming; stupefying. Hugh Walpole saying how much he disliked my books; rather, how much he feared for his own. Little Miss Robins, like a redbreast, creeping out. ‘I remember your mother—the most beautiful Madonna and at the same time the most complete woman of the world. Used to come and see me in my flat’ (I see this as a summer visit on a hot day). ‘She never confided. She would suddenly say something so unexpected, from that Madonna face, one thought it vicious.’ This I enjoyed; nothing else made much impression. Afterwards there was the horror of having looked ugly in cheap black clothes. I cannot control this complex. I wake at dawn with a start. Also the ‘fame’ is becoming vulgar and a nuisance. It means nothing; yet takes one’s time. Americans perpetually. Croly; Gaige; offers.

Thursday, May 31 st.

The sun is out again; I have half forgotten Orlando already, since L. has read it and it has half passed out of my possession; I think it lacks the sort of hammering I should have given it if I had taken longer; is too freakish and unequal, very brilliant now and then. As for the effect of the whole, that I can’t judge. Not, I think, “important’ among my work. L. says a satire.

L. takes Orlando more seriously than I had expected. Thinks it in some ways better than the Lighthouse: about more interesting things, and with more attachment to life and larger. The truth is I expect I began it as a joke and went on with it seriously. Hence it lacks some unity. He says it is very original. Anyhow I’m glad to be quit this time of writing ‘a novel’; and hope never to be accused of it again. Now I want to write some very closely reasoned criticism; book on fiction; an essay of some sort (but not Tolstoy for The Times). Dr Burney’s Evening Tarty I think for Desmond. And then? I feel anxious to keep the hatch down; not to let too many projects come in. Something abstract poetic next time—I don’t know. I rather like the idea of these Biographies of living people. Ottoline suggests herself, but no. And I must tear up all that manuscript and write a great many notes and adventure out into the world.

June weather. Still, bright, fresh. Owing to the Lighthouse (car) I don’t feel so shut in London as usual, and can imagine the evening on some moor now, or in France without the envy I used to have, in London on a fine evening. Also London itself perpetually attracts, stimulates, gives me a play and a story and a poem without any trouble, save that of moving my legs through the streets. I walked Pinker to Grays Inn Gardens this afternoon and saw—Red Lion Square: Morris’s house; thought of them on winters evenings in the 50s; thought we are just as interesting; saw the Great Ormond Street where a dead girl was found yesterday; saw and heard the Salvation Army making Christianity gay for the people; a great deal of nudging and joking on the part of very unattractive young men and women; making it lively, I suppose; and yet, to be truthful, when I watch them I never laugh or criticize but only feel how strange and interesting this is; wonder what they mean by ‘Come to the Lord.’ I daresay exhibitionism accounts for some of it; the applause of the gallery; this lures boys to sing hymns; and kindle shop boys to announce in a loud voice that they are saved. It is what writing for the Evening Standard is for—and—I was going to say myself; but so far I have not done it Wednesday, June 20th.

So sick of Orlando I can write nothing. I have corrected the proofs in a week; and cannot spin another phrase. I detest my own volubility. Why be always spouting words? Also I have almost lost the power of reading. Correcting proofs 5, 6 or 7 hours a day, writing in this and that meticulously, I have bruised my reading faculty severely. Take up Proust after dinner and put him down. This is the worst time of all. It makes me suicidal. Nothing seems left to do. All seems insipid and worthless. Now I will watch and see how I resurrect. I think I shall read something—say life of Goethe.

Wednesday, August 9th.

… I write thus partly in order to slip the burden of writing narrative, as for instance, we came here a fortnight ago. And we lunched at Charleston and Vita came and we were offered the field and we went to see the farm at Limekiln. Yet no doubt I shall be more interested, come 10 years, in facts; and shall want, as I do when I read, to be told details, details, so that I may look up from the page and arrange them too, into one of those makings up which seem so much truer done thus, from heaps of non-assorted facts, than now I can make them, when it is almost immediately under my eyes. It was a fine day last Monday, I rather think; and we drove through Ripe; and there was a girl and her feller at the gate in a narrow lane; and we had to interrupt them to turn the motor. I thought how the things they had been saying were dammed like a river, by our interruption; and they stood there half amused yet impatient, telling us to go to the left, but the road was up. They were glad when we went; yet gave us a flash of interest. Who are these people in their motor car: where are they going? and then this sunk beneath the mind and they forgot us completely. We went on. And then we reached the farm. The oasts had umbrella spokes poking out at the top; all was so ruined and faded. The Tudor farmhouse was almost blind; very small eye-browed windows; old Stuart farmers must have peered out over the flat land, very dirty, ill kempt, like people in slums. But they had dignity; at least thick walls; fireplaces; and solidity; whereas now the house is lived in by one old weedy pink faced man, who flung himself in his armchair—go where you like—go anywhere, he said, loose jointed, somehow decayed, like the hop oasts; and damp like the mildewed carpets, and sordid, like the beds with the pots sticking out under them. The walls were sticky; the furniture mid-Victorian; little light came through. It was all dying, decaying; and he had been there 50 years and it will drop to pieces, since there is not enough beauty or strength to make anyone repair it.

Saturday, August 12th.

Shall I now continue this soliloquy, or shall I imagine an audience, which will make me describe? This sentence is due to the book on fiction which I am now writing—once more, O once more. It is a hand to mouth book. I scribble down whatever I can think of about Romance, Dickens etc. must hastily gorge on Jane Austen tonight and dish up something tomorrow.

All this criticism however may well be dislodged by the desire to write a story. The Moths hovers somewhere at the back of my brain. But Clive yesterday at Charleston said that there were no class distinctions. We had tea from bright blue cups under the pink light of the giant hollyhock. We were all a little drugged with the country; a little bucolic I thought. It was lovely enough—made me envious of its country peace; the trees all standing securely—why did my eye catch the trees? The look of things has a great power over me. Even now, I have to watch the rooks beating up against the wind, which is high, and still I say to myself instinctively ‘What’s the phrase for that?’ and try to make more and more vivid the roughness of the air current and the tremor of the rook’s wing slicing as if the air were full of ridges and ripples and roughness. They rise and sink, up and down, as if the exercise rubbed and braced them like swimmers in rough water. But what a little I can get down into my pen of what is so vivid to my eyes, and not only to my eyes; also to some nervous fibre, or fanlike membrane in my species.

Friday, August 31 st.

This is the last day of August and like almost all of them of extraordinary beauty. Each day is fine enough and hot enough for sitting out; but also full of wandering clouds; and that fading and rising of the light which so enraptures me in the downs; which I am always comparing to the light beneath an alabaster bowl. The corn is now stood about in rows of three four or five solid shaped yellow cakes—rich, it seems, with eggs and spice; good to eat. Sometimes I see the cattle galloping ‘like mad’ as Dostoievsky would say, in the brooks. The clouds—if I could describe them I would; one yesterday had flowing hair on it, like the very fine white hair of an old man. At this moment they are white in a leaden sky; but the sun behind the house, is making the grass green. I walked to the racecourse today and saw a weasel.

Monday, September 10th.

… I was amused to find that when Rebecca West says ‘men are snobs’ she gets an instant rise out of Desmond: so I retorted on him with the condescending phrase used about women novelists”limitations’ in Life and Letters. But there was no acrimony in this. We talked with fertility; never working a seam dry. Do you suppose then that we are now coming like the homing rooks back to the tops of our trees? and that all this cawing is the beginning of settling in for the night? I seem to notice in several of my friends some endearing and affecting cordiality; and a pleasure in intimacy; as if the sun were sinking. Often that image comes to me with some sense of my physical state being colder now, the sun just off one; the old disc of one’s being growing cooler—but it is only just beginning; and one will turn cold and silver like the moon. This has been a very animated summer; a summer lived almost too much in public. Often down here I have entered into a sanctuary; a nunnery; had a religious retreat; of great agony once; and always some terror; so afraid one is of loneliness; of seeing to the bottom of the vessel. That is one of the experiences I have had here in some Augusts; and got then to a consciousness of what I call ‘reality’: a thing I see before me: something abstract; but residing in the downs or sky; beside which nothing matters; in which I shall rest and continue to exist. Reality I call it. And I fancy sometimes this is the most necessary thing to me: that which I seek. But who knows—once one takes a pen and writes? How difficult not to go making ‘reality’ this and that, whereas it is one thing. Now perhaps this is my gift: this perhaps is what distinguishes me from other people: I think it may be rare to have so acute a sense of something like that—but again, who knows? I would like to express it too.

Saturday, September 22nd

This has been the finest, and not only finest, but loveliest, summer in the world. Still, though it blows, how clear and bright it is; and the clouds are opalescent; the long barns on my horizon mouse-coloured; the stacks pale gold. Owning the field has given a different orient to my feelings about Rodmell. I begin to dig myself in and take part in it. And I shall build another storey to the house if I make money. But the news of Orlando is black. We may sell a third that we sold of the Lighthouse before’ publication—not a shop will buy save in sixes and twelves. They say this is inevitable. No one wants biography. But it is a novel, says Miss Ritchie.

But it is called biography on the title page, they say. It will have to go to the Biography shelf. I doubt therefore that we shall do more than cover expenses—a high price to pay for the fun of calling it a biography. And I was so sure it was going to be the one popular book! Also it should be 10/6 or 12/6, not 9/-. Lord, lord! Thus I must write some articles this winter, if we are to have nest eggs at the Bank. Down here I have flung myself tooth and nail on my fiction book, and should have finished the first draft but for Dorothy Osborne whom I’m dashing off. It will need entire re-writing but the grind is done—the rushing through book after book and now what shall I read? These novels have hung about me so long. Mercy it is to be quit of them; and shall I read English poetry, French memoirs—shall I read now for a book to be called ‘The Lives of the Obscure’? And when, I wonder, shall I begin The Moths? Not until I am pressed into it by those insects themselves. Nor have I any notion what it is to be like—a completely new attempt I think. So I always think.

Saturday, October 27th.

A scandal, a scandal, to let so much time slip and I leaning on the Bridge watching it go. Only leaning has not been my pose; running up and down, irritably, excitedly, restlessly. And the stream viciously eddying. Why do I write these metaphors? Because I have written nothing for an age. Orlando has been published. I went to Burgundy with Vita. It flashed by. How disconnected this is! My ambition is from this very moment, 8 minutes to 6, on Saturday evening, to attain complete concentration again. When I have written here, I am going to open Fanny Burney’s diaries and work solidly at that article which poor Miss McKay cables about. I am going to read, to think. I gave up reading and thinking on 26th September when I went to France. I came back and we plunged into London and publishing. I am a little sick of Orlando. I think I am a little indifferent now what anyone thinks. Joy’s life in the doing—I murder, as usual, a quotation; I mean it’s the writing, not the being read, that excites me. And as I can’t write while I’m being read, I am always a little hollow hearted; whipped up; but not so happy as in solitude. The reception, as they say, surpassed expectation. Sales beyond our record for the first week. I was floating rather lazily on praise, when Squire barked in the Observer, but even as I sat reading him on the Backs last Sunday in the showering red leaves and their illumination, I felt the rock of self esteem untouched in me. ‘This doesn’t really hurt,’ I said to myself; even now; and sure enough, before evening I was calm, untouched. And now there’s Hugh in the Morning Post to spread the butter again, and Rebecca West—such a trumpet call of praise—that’s her way—that I feel a little sheepish and silly. And now no more of that I hope.

Thank God, my long toil at the women’s lecture is this moment ended. I am back from speaking at Girton, in floods of rain. Starved but valiant young women—that’s my impression. Intelligent, eager, poor; and destined to become schoolmistresses in shoals. I blandly told them to drink wine and have a room of their own. Why should all the splendour, all the luxury of life be lavished on the Julians and the Francises, and none on the Phares and the Thomases? There’s Julian not much relishing it, perhaps. I fancy sometimes the world changes. I think I see reason spreading. But I should have liked a closer and thicker knowledge of life. I should have liked to deal with real things sometimes. I get a sense of tingling and vitality from an evening’s talk like that; one’s angularities and obscurities are smoothed and lit. How little one counts, I think: how little anyone counts; how fast and furious and masterly life is; and how all these thousands are swimming for dear life. I felt elderly and mature. And nobody respected me. They were very eager, egotistical, or rather not much impressed by age and repute. Very little reverence or that sort of thing about. The corridors of Girton are like vaults in some horrid high church cathedral—on and on they go, cold and shiny, with a light burning. High Gothic rooms: acres of bright brown wood; here and there a photograph.

Wednesday, November 7th.

And this shall be written for my own pleasure. But that phrase inhibits me; for if one writes only for one’s own pleasure, I don’t know what it is that happens. I suppose the convention I of writing is destroyed: therefore one does not write at all. I am rather headachy and dimly obscured with sleeping draught. This is the aftermath (what does that mean?—Trench, whom I open idly apparently says nothing) of Orlando. Yes, yes: since I wrote here I have become two inches and a half higher in the public view. I think I may say that I am now among the well known writers. I had tea with Lady Cunard—might have lunched or dined any day. I found her in a little cap telephoning. It was not her atmosphere—this of solitary talk. She is too shrewd to expand and needs society to make her rash and random which is her point. Ridiculous little parrakeet faced woman; but not quite sufficiently ridiculous. I kept wishing for superlatives; could not get the illusion to flap its wings. Flunkeys, yes: but a little drab and friendly. Marble floor, yes: but no glamour; no tune strumming, for me at least. And the two of us sitting there had almost to be conventional and flat—reminds me of Sir Thomas Browne—the greatest book of our times—said a little flatly by a woman of business, to me who don’t believe in that kind of thing unless launched with champagne and garlands. Then in came Lord Donegall, a glib Irish youth, dark, sallow, slick, on the Press. ‘Don’t they treat you like a dog?’ I said. “No, not at all,’ he replied, astonished that a marquis could be treated like a dog by anyone. And then we went up and up to see pictures on stairs, in ballrooms and finally to Lady C.’s bedroom, hung entirely with flower pieces. The bed has its triangular canopy of rose red silk; the windows, looking on the Square, are hung with green brocade. Her poudreuse—like mine only painted and gilt—stood open with gold brushes, looking glasses, and there on her gold slippers were neatly laid gold stockings. All this paraphernalia for one stringy old hop o’ my thumb. She set the two great musical boxes playing and I said did she lie in bed and listen to them? But no. She has nothing fantastic in that way about her. Money is important. She told me rather sordid stories of Lady Sackville never visiting her without fobbing something off on her—now a bust, worth £5, for which she. paid £100: now a brass knocker. ‘And then her talk—I didn’t care for it…’ Somehow I saw into these sordid commonplace talks and could not sprinkle the air with gold dust easily. But no doubt she has her acuity, her sharp peck at life; only how adorable, I thought, as I tip-toed home in my tight shoes, in the fog, in the chill, could one open one of these doors that I still open so venturously, and find a live interesting real person, a Nessa, a Duncan, a Roger. Someone new, whose mind would begin vibrating. Coarse and usual and dull these Cunards and Colefaxes are—for all their astonishing competence in the commerce of life.

And I cannot think what to write next. I mean the situation is, this Orlando is of course a very quick brilliant book. Yes, but I did not try to explore. And must I always explore? Yes I think so still. Because my reaction is not the usual. Nor can I even after all these years run it off lightly. Orlando taught me how to write a direct sentence; taught me continuity and narrative and how to keep the realities at bay. But I purposely avoided of course any other difficulty. I never got down to my depths and made shapes square up, as I did in the Lighthouse.

Well but Orlando was the outcome of a perfectly definite, indeed overmastering, impulse. I want fun. I want fantasy. I want (and this was serious) to give things their caricature value. And still this mood hangs about me. I want to write a history, say of Newnham or the women’s movement, in the same vein. The vein is deep in me—at least sparkling, urgent. But is it not stimulated by applause? overstimulated? My notion is that there are offices to be discharged by talent for the relief of genius: meaning that one has the play side; the gift when it is mere gift, unapplied gift; and the gift when it is serious, going to business. And one relieves the other.

Yes, but The Moths? That was to be an abstract mystical eyeless book: a playpoem. And there may be affectation in being too mystical, too abstract; saying Nessa and Roger and Duncan and Ethel Sands admire that; it is the uncompromising side of me; therefore I had better win their approval.

Again, one reviewer says that I have come to a crisis in the matter of style: it is now so fluent and fluid that it runs through the mind like water.

That disease began in the Lighthouse. The first part came fluid—how I wrote and wrote!

Shall I now check and consolidate, more in the Dalloway and Jacob’s Room style?

I rather think the upshot will be books that relieve other books: a variety of styles and subjects: for after all, that is my temperament, I think, to be very little persuaded of the truth of anything—what I say, what people say—always to follow, blindly, instinctively with a sense of leaping over a precipice—the call of—the call of—now, if I write The Moths I must come to terms with these mystical feelings.

X destroyed our Saturday walk: he is now mouldy and to me depressing. He is perfectly reasonable and charming. Nothing surprises, nothing shocks him. He has been through it all, one feels. He has come out rolled, smoothed, rather sodden, rather creased and jumbled, like a man who has sat up all night in a third class railway carriage. His fingers are stained yellow with cigarettes. One tooth in the lower jaw is missing. His hair is dank. His eyes more than ever dubious. He has a hole in his blue sock. Yet he is resolute and determined—that’s what I find so depressing. He seems to be sure that it is his view that is the right one: ours vagaries, deviations. And if his view is the right one, God knows there is nothing to live for: not a greasy biscuit. And the egotism of men surprises and shocks me even now. Is there a woman of my acquaintance who could sit in my armchair from 3 to 6.30 without the semblance of a suspicion that I may be busy, or tired, or bored; and so sitting could talk, grumbling and grudging, of her difficulties, worries; then eat chocolates, then read a book, and go at last, apparently self-complacent and wrapped in a kind of blubber of misty self-salutation? Not the girls at Newnham or Girton. They are far too spry; far too disciplined. None of that self confidence is their lot.

Wednesday, November 28th.

Father’s birthday. He would have been 96, 96, yes, today; and could have been 96, like other people one has known: but mercifully was not. His life would have entirely 1928 ended mine. What would have happened? No writing, l832 no books;—inconceivable.

I used to think of him and mother daily; but writing the Lighthouse laid them in my mind. And now he comes back sometimes, but differently. (I believe this to be true—that I was obsessed by them both, unhealthily; and writing of them was a necessary act.) He comes back now more as a contemporary. I must read him some day. I wonder if I can feel again, I hear his voice, I know this by heart?

So the days pass and I ask myself sometimes whether one is not hypnotized, as a child by a silver globe, by life; and whether this is living. It’s very quick, bright, exciting. But superficial perhaps. I should like to take the globe in my hands and feel it quietly, round, smooth, heavy, and so hold it, day after day. I will read Proust I think. I will go backwards and forwards.

As for my next book, I am going to hold myself from writing till I have it impending in me: grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall. The Moths still haunts me, coming, as they always do, unbidden, between tea and dinner, while L. plays the gramophone. I shape a page or two; and make myself stop. Indeed I am up against some difficulties. Fame to begin with. Orlando has done very well. Now I could go on writing like that—the tug and suck are at me to do it. People say this was so spontaneous, so natural. And I would like to keep those qualities if I could without losing the others. But those qualities Were largely the result of ignoring the others. They came of writing exteriorly; and if I dig, must I not lose them? And what is my own position towards the inner and the outer? I think a kind of ease and dash are good;—yes: I think even externality is good; some combination of them ought to be possible. The idea has come to me that what I want now to do is to saturate every atom. I mean to eliminate all waste, deadness, superfluity: to give the moment whole; whatever it includes. Say that the moment is a combination of thought; sensation; the voice of the sea. Waste, deadness, come from the inclusion of things that don’t belong to the moment; this appalling narrative business of the realist: getting on from lunch to dinner: it is false, unreal, merely conventional. Why admit anything to literature that is not poetry—by which I mean saturated? Is that not my grudge against novelists? that they select nothing? The poets succeeding by simplifying: practically everything is left out. I want to put practically everything in: yet to saturate. That is what I want to do in The Moths. It must include nonsense, fact, sordidity: but made transparent. I think I must read Ibsen and Shakespeare and Racine. And I will write something about them; for that is the best spur, my mind being what it is; then I read with fury and exactness; otherwise I skip and skip; I am a lazy reader. But no: I am surprised and a little disquieted by the remorseless severity of my mind: that it never stops reading and writing; makes me write on Geraldine Jewsbury, on Hardy, on Women—is too professional, too little any longer a dreamy amateur.

Tuesday, December 18th.

L. has just been in to consult about a 3rd edition of Orlando. This has been ordered; we have sold over 6,000 copies; and sales are still amazingly brisk—150 today for instance; most days between 50 and 60; always to my surprise. Will they stop or go on? Anyhow my room is secure. For the first time since I married, 1912-1928—16 years, I have been spending money. The spending muscle does not work naturally yet. I feel guilty; put off buying, when I know that I should buy; and yet have an agreeable luxurious sense of coins in my pocket beyond my weekly 13/- which was always running out, or being encroached upon.

[]

1929.

Friday, January 4th.

Now is life very solid or shifting? I am haunted by the two contradictions. This has gone on for ever; will last for ever; goes down to the bottom of the world—this moment I stand on. Also it is transitory, flying, diaphanous. I shall pass like a cloud on the waves. Perhaps it may be that though we change, one flying after another, so quick, so quick, yet we are somehow successive and continuous we human beings, and show the light through. But what is the light? I am impressed by the transitoriness of human life to such an extent that I am often saying a farewell—after dining with Roger for instance; or reckoning how many more times I shall see Nessa.

Thursday, March 28th.

It is a disgrace indeed; no diary has been left so late in the year. The truth was that we went to Berlin on 16th January, and then I was in bed for three weeks afterwards and then could not write, perhaps for another three, and have spent my energy since in one of my excited outbursts of composition—writing what I made up in bed, a final version of Women and Fiction.

And as usual I am bored by narrative. I want only to say how I met Nessa in Tottenham Court Road this afternoon, both of us sunk fathoms deep in that wash of reflection in which we both swim about. She will be gone on Wednesday for 4 months. It is queer how instead of drawing apart, life draws us together. But I was thinking a thousand things as I carried my teapot, gramophone records and stockings under my arm. It is one of those days that I called ‘potent’ when we lived in Richmond.

Perhaps I ought not to go on repeating what I have always said about the spring. One ought perhaps to be forever finding new things to say, since life draws on. One ought to invent a fine narrative style. Certainly there are many new ideas always forming in my head. For one, that I am going to enter a nunnery these next months; and let myself down into my mind; Bloomsbury being done with. I am going to face certain things.

It is going to be a time of adventure and attack, rather lonely and painful I think. But solitude will be good for a new book. Of course, I shall make friends. I shall be external outwardly. I shall buy some good clothes and go out into new houses. All the time I shall attack this angular shape in my mind. I think The Moths (if that is what I shall call it) will be very sharply cornered. I am not satisfied though with the frame. There is this sudden fertility which may be mere fluency. In old days books were so many sentences absolutely struck with an axe out of crystal: and now my mind is so impatient, so quick, in some ways so desperate.

Sunday, May 12th.

Here, having just finished what I call the final revision of Women and Fiction so that L. can read it after tea, I stop; surfeited. And the pump, which I was so sanguine as to think ceased, begins again. About Women and Fiction I am not sure—a brilliant essay?—I daresay: it has much work in it, many opinions boiled down into a kind of jelly, which I have stained red as far as I can. But I am eager to be off—to write without any boundary coming slick in one’s eyes: here my public has been too close; facts; getting them malleable, easily yielding to each other.

Tuesday, May 28th.

Now about this book, The Moths. How am I to begin it? And what is it to be? I feel no great impulse; no fever; only a great pressure of difficulty. Why write it then? Why write at all? Every morning I write a little sketch, to amuse myself. I am not saying, I might say, that these sketches have any relevance. I am not trying to tell a story. Yet perhaps it might be done in that way. A mind thinking. They might be islands of light—islands in the stream that I am trying to convey; life itself going on. The current of the moths flying strongly this way. A lamp and a flower pot in the centre. The flower can always be changing. But there must be more unity between each scene than I can find at present. Autobiography it might be called. How am I to make one lap, or act, between the coming of the moths, more intense than another; if there are only scenes? One must get the sense that this is the beginning; this the middle; that the climax—when she opens the window and the moth comes in. I shall have the two different currents—the moths flying along; the flower upright in the centre; a perpetual crumbling and renewing of the plant. In its leaves she might see things happen. But who is she? I am very anxious that she should have no name. I don’t want a Lavinia or a Penelope: I want ‘she’. But that becomes arty, Liberty greenery yallery somehow: symbolic in loose robes. Of course I can make her think backwards and forwards; I can tell stories. But that’s not it. Also I shall do away with exact place and time. Anything may be out of the window—a ship—a desert—London.

Sunday, June 23rd.

It was very hot that day, driving to Worthing to see Leonard’s mother, my throat hurt me. Next morning I had a headache—so we stayed on at Rodmell till today. At Rodmell I read through The Common Reader; and this is very important—I must learn to write more succinctly. Especially in the general idea essays like the last, ‘How it strikes a Contemporary,’ I am horrified by my own looseness. This is partly that I don’t think things out first; partly that I stretch my style to take in crumbs of meaning. But the result is a wobble and diffusity and breathlessness which I detest. One must correct A Room ot One’s Own very carefully before printing. And so I pitched into my great lake of melancholy. Lord how deep it is! What a born melancholic I am! The only way I keep afloat is by working. A note for the summer—I must take more work than I can possibly get done.—No, I don’t know what it comes from. Directly I stop working I feel that I am sinking down, down. And as usual I feel that if I sink further I shall reach the truth. That is the only mitigation; a kind of nobility. Solemnity. I shall make myself face the fact that there is nothing—nothing for any of us. Work, reading, writing are all disguises; and relations with people. Yes, even having children would be useless.

However, I now begin to see The Moths rather too clearly, or at least strenuously, for my comfort. I think it will begin like this: dawn; the shells on a heach; I don’t know—voices of cock and nightingale; and then all the children at a long table—lessons. The beginning. Well, all sorts of characters are to be there. Then the person who is at the table can call out any one of them at any moment; and build up by that person the mood, tell a story; for instance about dogs or nurses; or some adventure of a child’s kind; all to be very Arabian Nights; and so on: this shall be childhood; but it must not be my childhood; and boats on the pond; the sense of children; unreality; things oddly proportioned. Then another person or figure must be selected. The unreal world must be round all this—the phantom waves. The Moth must come in; the beautiful single moth. Could one not get the waves to be heard all through? Or the farmyard noises? Some odd irrelevant noises. She might have a book—one book to read in—another to write in—old letters. Early morning light—but this need not be insisted on; because there must be great freedom from ‘reality’. Yet everything must have relevance.

Well all this is of course the ‘real’ life; and nothingness only comes in the absence of this. I have proved this quite certainly in the past half hour. Everything becomes green and vivified in me when I begin to think of The Moths. Also, I think, one is much better able to enter into others’

Monday, August 19th.

I suppose dinner interrupted. And I opened this book in another train of mind to record the blessed fact that for good or bad I have just set the last correction to Women and Fiction, or A Room of One’s Own. I shall never read it again I suppose. Good or bad? Has an uneasy life in it I think: you feel the creature arching its back and galloping on, though as usual much is watery and flimsy and pitched in too high a voice.

Monday September 10th.

Leonard is having a picnic at Charleston and I am here—‘tired’. But why am I tired? Well I am never alone. This is the beginning of my complaint. I am not physically tired so much as psychologically. I have strained and wrung at journalism and proof correction; and underneath has been forming my Moth book. Yes, but it forms very slowly; and what I want is not to write it, but to think it for two or three weeks say—to get into the same current of thought and let that submerge everything. Writing perhaps a few phrases here at my window in the morning. (And they’ve gone to some lovely place—Hurstmonceux perhaps, in this strange misty evening;—and yet when the time came to go, all I wanted was to walk off into the hills by myself. I am now feeling a little lonely and deserted and defrauded, inevitably.) And every time I get into my current of thought I am jerked out of it. We have the Keynes; then Vita came; then Angelica and Eve; then we went to Worthing, then my head begins throbbing—so here I am, not writing—that does not matter, but not thinking, feeling or seeing—and seizing an afternoon alone as a treasure—Leonard appeared at the glass door at this moment; and they didn’t go to Hurstmonceux or anywhere; and Sprott was there and a miner, so I missed nothing—one’s first egotistical pleasure.

Really these premonitions of a book—states of soul in creating—are very queer and little apprehended …

And then I am 47: yes; and my infirmities will of course increase. To begin with my eyes. Last year, I think, I could read without spectacles; would pick up a paper and read it in a tube; gradually I found I needed spectacles in bed; and now I can’t read a line (unless held at a very odd angle) without them. My new spectacles are much stronger than the old and when I take them off I am blinded for a moment. What other infirmities? I can hear, I think, perfectly: I think I could walk as well as ever. But then will there not be the change of life? And may that not be a difficult and even dangerous time? Obviously one can get over it by facing it with common sense—that it is a natural process; that one can lie out here and read; that one’s faculties will be the same afterwards; that one has nothing to worry about in one sense—I’ve written some interesting books, can make money, can afford a holiday—Oh no; one has nothing to bother about; and these curious intervals in life—I’ve had many—are the most fruitful artistically—one becomes fertilized—think of my madness at Hogarth—and all the little illnesses—that before I wrote the lighthouse for instance. Six weeks in bed now would make a masterpiece of Moths. But that won’t be the name. Moths, I suddenly remember, don’t fly by day. And there can’t be a lighted candle. Altogether, the shape of the book wants considering—and with time I could do it. Here I broke off.

Wednesday, September 25th.

Yesterday morning I made another start on The Moths, but that won’t be its title; and several problems cry out at once to be solved. Who thinks it? And am I outside the thinker? One wants some device which is not a trick.

Friday, October 11th.

And I snatch at the idea of writing here in order not to write Waves or Moths or whatever it is to be called. One thinks one has learnt to write quickly with gusto or pleasure: because of the concentration. I am not reeling it off; but sticking it down. Also, never, in my life, did I attack such a vague yet elaborate design; whenever I make a mark I have to think of its relation to a dozen others. And though I could go on ahead easily enough, I am always stopping to consider the whole effect. In particular is there some radical fault in my scheme? I am not quite satisfied with this method of picking out things in the room and being reminded by them of other things. Yet I can’t at the moment divine anything which keeps so close to the original design and admits of movement. Hence, perhaps, these October days are to me a little strained and surrounded with silence. What I mean by this last word I don’t quite know, since I have never stopped ‘seeing’ people—Nessa and Roger, the Jeffers, Charles Buxton, and should have seen Lord David … and am to see the Eliots—oh and there was Vita too. No, it’s not physical silence; it’s some inner loneliness—interesting to \ analyse if one could. To give an example—I was walking up Bedford Place is it—the straight street with all the boarding houses this afternoon—and I said to myself spontaneously, something like this. How I suffer. And no one knows how I suffer, walking up this street, engaged with my anguish, as I was after Thoby died—alone; fighting something alone. But then I had the devil to fight, and now nothing. And when I come indoors it is all so silent—I am not carrying a great rush . of wheels in my head—yet I am writing—oh and we are very successful—and there is—what I most love—change ahead. Yes, that last evening at Rodmell when Leonard came down against his will to fetch me, the Keynes came over. And Maynard is giving up the Nation, and so is Hubert and so no doubt shall we. And it is autumn; and the lights are going up; and Nessa is in Fitzroy Street—in a great misty room with flaring gas and unsorted plates and glasses on the floor—and the Press is booming—and this celebrity business is quite chronic—and I am richer than I have ever been—and bought a pair of earrings today—and for all this, there is vacancy and silence somewhere in the machine. On the whole, I do not much mind; because what I like is to flash and dash from side to side, goaded on by what I call reality. If I never felt these extraordinarily pervasive strains—of unrest or rest or happiness or discomfort—I should float down into acquiescence. Here is something to fight; and when I wake early I say to myself Fight, fight. If I could catch the feeling, I would; the feeling of the singing of the real world, as one is driven by loneliness and silence from the habitable world; the sense that comes to me of being bound on an adventure; of being strangely free now, with money and so on, to do anything. I go to take theatre tickets (The Matriarch) and see a list of cheap excursions hanging there, and at once think that I will go to Stratford on Avon Mop Fair tomorrow—why not?—or to Ireland or to Edinburgh for a weekend. I daresay I shan’t. But anything is possible. And this curious steed, life, is genuine. Does any of this convey what I want to say? But I have not really laid hands on the emptiness after all. It’s odd, now I come to think of it—

Wednesday, October 23rd.

As it is true—I write only for an hour, then rush back feeling I cannot keep my brain on that spin any more—then typewrite, and am done by 12. He wrote yesterday, 3 Dec. and said he very much liked it.I will here sum up my impressions before publishing A Room of One’s Own. It is a little ominous that Morgan won’t review it. It makes me suspect that there is a shrill feminine tone in it which my intimate friends will dislike.I forecast, then, that I shall get no criticism, except of the evasive jocular kind, from Lytton, Roger and Morgan; that the press will be kind and talk of its charm and sprightliness; also I shall be attacked for a feminist and hinted at for a Sapphist;

Sybil will ask me to luncheon; I shall get a good many letters from young women. I am afraid it will not be taken seriously. Mrs Woolf is so accomplished a writer that all she says makes easy reading … this very feminine logic … a book to be put in the hands of girls. I doubt that I mind very much. The Moths; but I think it is to be waves, is trudging along; and I have that to refer to, if I am damped by the other. It is a trifle, I shall say; so it is; but I wrote it with ardour and conviction.

We dined last night with the Webbs and I had Eddy and Dotty to tea. As for these mature dinner parties one has some friendly easy talk with one man—Hugh Macmillan—about the Buchans and his own career; the Webbs are friendly but can’t be influenced about Kenya; we sit in two lodging house rooms (the dining room had a brass bedstead behind a screen) eat hunks of red beef; and are offered whisky. It is the same enlightened, impersonal, perfectly aware of itself atmosphere. ‘My little boy shall have his toys’—but don’t let that go any further—‘that’s what my wife says about my being in the Cabinet.’ No they have no illusions. And I compared them with L. and myself, and felt, (I daresay for this reason) the pathos, the symbolical quality of the childless couple; standing for something, united.

Saturday, November 2nd.

Oh but I have done quite well so far with Room of One’s Own; and it sells, I think; and I get unexpected letters. But I am more concerned with my Waves. I’ve just typed out my morning’s work; and can’t feel altogether sure. There is something there (as I felt about Mrs Dalloway) but I can’t get at it, squarely; nothing like the speed and certainty of the Lighthouse: Orlando mere child’s play. Is there some falsity of method, somewhere? Something tricky?—so that the interesting things aren’t firmly based? I am in an odd state; feel a cleavage; here’s my interesting thing; and there’s no quite solid table on which to put it. It might come in a flash, on re-reading—some solvent. I am convinced that I am right to seek for a station whence I can set my people against time and the sea—but Lord, the difficulty of digging oneself in there, with conviction. Yesterday I had conviction; it has gone today.

Saturday, November 30th.

I fill in this page, nefariously; at the end of a morning’s work. I have begun the second part of Waves—I don’t know. I don’t know. I feel that I am only accumulating notes for a book—whether I shall ever face the labour of writing it, God knows. From some higher station I may be able to pull it together—at Rodmell, in my new room. Reading the Lighthouse does not make it easier to write …

Sunday, December 8th.

I read and read and finished I daresay 3 foot thick of MS. read carefully too, much of it on the border, and so needing thought. Now, with this load despatched, I am free to begin reading Elizabethans—the little unknown writers, whom I, so ignorant am I, have never heard of, Puttenham, Webb, Harvey. This thought fills me with joy—no overstatement. To begin reading with a pen in my hand, discovering, pouncing, thinking of phrases, when the ground is new, remains one of my great excitements. Oh but L. will sort apples and the little noise upsets me; I can’t think what I was going to say.

So I stopped writing, by which no great harm was done, and made out a list of Elizabethan poets. And I have, with great happiness, refused to write Rhoda Broughton, Ouida for de la Mare. That vein, popular as it is, witness Jane and Geraldine, is soon worked out in me. I want to write criticism. Yes, and one might make out an obscure figure or two. It was Elizabethan prose writers I loved first and most wildly, stirred by Hakluyt, which father lugged home for me—I think of it with some sentiment—father tramping over the Library with his little girl sitting at H.P.G. in mind. He must have been 65; I 15 or 16 then; and why I don’t know but I became enraptured, though not exactiy interested, but the sight of the large yellow page entranced me. I used to read it and dream of those obscure adventurers and no doubt practised their style in my copybook. I was then writing a long picturesque essay upon the Christian religion, I think; called Religio Laici, I believe, proving that man has need of a God; but the God was described in process of change; and I also wrote a history of Women; and a history of my own family—all very longwinded and Elizabethan in style.

RODMELL—Boxing Bay I find it almost incredibly soothing—a fortnight alone—almost impossible to let oneself have it. Relentlessly we have crushed visitors. We will be alone this once, we say; and really, it seems possible. Then Annie is to me very sympathetic. My bread bakes well. All is rather rapt, simple, quick, effective—except for my blundering on at The Waves. I write two pages of arrant nonsense; compromises; bad shots; possibilities; till my writing book is like a lunatic’s dream. Then I trust to some inspiration on re-reading; and pencil them into some sense. Still I am not satisfied. I think there is something lacking. I sacrifice nothing to seemliness. I press to my centre. I don’t care if it all is scratched out. And there is something there. I incline now to try violent shots—at London—at talk—shouldering my way ruthlessly—and then, if nothing comes of it—anyhow I have examined the possibilities. But I wish I enjoyed it more. I don’t have it in my head all day like the Lighthouse and Orlando.

[]

1930.

Sunday, January 12th.

Sunday it is. And I have just exclaimed: ‘And now I can think of nothing else.’ Thanks to my pertinacity and industry, I can now hardly stop making up The Waves. The sense of this came acutely about a week ago on beginning to write the Phantom Party: now I feel that I can rush on, after 6 months’ hacking, and finish: but without the least certainty how it’s to achieve any form. Much will have to be discarded: what is essential is to write fast and not break the mood—no holiday, no interval if possible, till it is done. Then rest. Then re-write.

Sunday, January 26th.

I am 48: we have been at Rodmell—a wet, windy day again; but on my birthday we walked among the downs, like the folded wings of grey birds: and saw first one fox, very long with his brush stretched; then a second; which had been barking, for the sun was hot over us; it leapt lightly over a fence and entered the furze—a very rare sight. How many foxes are there in England? At night I read Lord Chaplin’s life. I cannot yet write naturally in my new room, because the table is not the right height and I must stoop to warm my hands. Everything must be absolutely what I am used to.

I forgot to say that when we made up our 6 months accounts, we found I had made about £3,020 last year—the salary of a civil servant: a surprise to me, who was content with £200 for so many years. But I shall drop very heavily I think. It has sold about 6,500 today, Oct. 30th, 1931—after 3 weeks. But will stop now, I suppose.

The Waves won’t sell more than 2,000 copies. I am stuck fast in that book—I mean, glued to it, like a fly on gummed paper. Sometimes I am out of touch; but go on; then again feel that I have at last, by violent measures—like breaking through gorse—set my hands on something central. Perhaps I can now say something quite straight out; and at length; and need not be always casting a line to make my book the right shape. But how to pull it together, how to comport it—press it into one—I do not know; nor can I guess the end—it might be a gigantic conversation. The interludes are very difficult, yet I think essential; so as to bridge and also to give a background—the sea; insensitive nature—I don’t know. But I think, when I feel this sudden directness, that it must be right: anyhow no other form of fiction suggests itself except as a repetition at the moment.

Sunday, February 16th.

To lie on the sofa for a week. I am sitting up today in the usual state of unequal animation. Below normal, with spasmodic desire to write, then to doze. It is a fine cold day and if my energy and sense of duty persist, I shall drive up to Hampstead. But I doubt that I can write to any purpose. A cloud swims in my head. One is too conscious of the body and jolted out of the rut of life to get back to fiction. Once or twice I have felt that odd whirr of wings in the head, which comes when I am ill so often—last year for example at this time I lay in bed constructing A Room of One’s Own (which sold 10,000 two days ago).If I could stay in bed another fortnight (but there is no chance of that) I believe I should see the whole of The Waves. Or of course I might go off on something different. As it is I half incline to insist upon a dash to Cassis; but perhaps this needs more determination than I possess; and we shall dwindle on here. Pinker is walking about the room looking for the bright patch—a sign of spring. I believe these illnesses are in my case—how shall I express it?—partly mystical. Something happens in my mind. It refuses to go on registering impressions. It shuts itself up. It becomes chrysalis. I lie quite torpid, often with acute physical pain—as last year; only discomfort this. Then suddenly something springs. Two nights ago Vita was here; and when she went I began to feel the quality of the evening—how it was spring coming: a silver light; mixing with the early lamps; the cabs all rushing through the streets; I had a tremendous sense of life beginning; mixed with that emotion which is the essence of my feeling, but escapes description (I keep on making up the Hampton Court scene in The Waves—Lord how I wonder if I shall pull this book off! It is a litter of fragments so far). Well, as I was saying, between these long pauses, for I am swimming in the head and write rather to stabilize myself than to make a correct statement—I felt the spring beginning; and Vita’s life so full and flush; and all the doors opening; and this is I believe the moth shaking its wings in me. I then begin to make up my story whatever it is; ideas rush in me; often though this is before I can control my mind or pen. It is no use trying to write at this stage. And I doubt if I can fill this white monster. I would like to lie down and sleep, but feel ashamed. Leonard brushed off his influenza in one day and went about his business feeling ill. Here am I still loafing, undressed, with Elly coming tomorrow. But as I was saying, my mind works in idleness. To do nothing is often my most profitable way. I am reading Byron: Maurois: which sends me to Childe Harold; makes me speculate. How odd a mixture: the weakest sentimental Mrs Hemans combined with trenchant bare vigour. How did they combine? And sometimes the descriptions in C.H. are ‘beautiful’; like a great poet. There are the three elements in Byron:

1. The romantic dark haired lady singing drawing room melodies to the guitar.

‘Tambourgi! Tambourgi! thy ‘larum afar Gives hope to the valiant and promise of war;’

‘Oh! who is more brave than a dark Suliote, In his snowy camese and his shaggy capote’

—something manufactured; a pose; silliness.

2. Then there is the vigorous rhetorical, like his prose, and good as prose.

‘Hereditary Bondsmen! know ye not Who would be free themselves must strike the blow?

By their right arms the conquest must be wrought? Will Gaul or Muscovite redress ye? No! ‘

3. Then what rings to me truer, and is almost poetry.

‘Dear Nature is the kindest mother still!

Though always changing, in her aspect mild;

From her bare bosom let me take my fill,

Her never-weaned, though not her favoured child.

To me by day or night she ever smiled,

Though I have marked her when none other hath.

And sought her more and more and loved her best in wrath.’

4. And then there is of course the pure satiric, as in the description of a London Sunday; and

5. Finally (but this makes more than three) the inevitable half assumed half genuine tragic note, which comes as a refrain, about death and the loss of friends.

All thou could have of mine, stern Death! thou hast;

The parent, Friend, and now the more than Friend:

Ne’er yet for me thine arrows flew so fast,

And grief with grief continuing still to blend,

Hath snatched the little joy that life had yet to lend.

These I think make him up; and make much that is spurious, vapid, yet very changeable, and then rich and with greater range than the other poets, could he have got the whole into order. A novelist, he might have been. It is odd however to read in his letters his prose and apparently genuine feeling about Athens and to compare it with the convention he adopted in verse. (There is some sneer about the Acropolis.) But then the sneer may have been a pose too. The truth may be that if you. are charged at such high voltage you can’t fit any of the ordinary human feelings; must pose; must rhapsodize; don’t fit in. He wrote in the Fun Album that his age was 100. And this is true, measuring life by feeling.

Monday, February 17th.

And this temperature is up: but it has now gone down; and now Thursday, February loth.

I must canter my wits if I can. Perhaps some character sketches. Monday, March 17th.

The test of a book (to a writer) is if it makes a space in which, quite naturally, you can say what you want to say. As this morning I could say what Rhoda said. This proves that the book itself is alive: because it has not crushed the thing I wanted to say, but allowed me to slip it in, without any compression or alteration.

Friday, March 28th.

Yes, but this book is a very queer business. I had a day of intoxication when I said ‘Children are nothing to this’: when I sat surveying the whole book complete and quarrelled with L. (about Ethel Smyth) and walked it off, felt the pressure of the form—the splendour, the greatness—as, perhaps I have never felt them. But I shan’t race it off in intoxication. I keep pegging away; and find it the most complex and difficult of all my books. How to end, save by a tremendous discussion, in which every life shall have its voice—a mosaic I do not know.

The difficulty is that it is all at high pressure. I have not yet mastered the speaking voice. Yet I think something is there; and I propose to go on pegging it down, arduously, and then re-write, reading much of it aloud, like poetry. It will bear expansion. It is compressed I think. It is—whatever I make of it—a large and potential theme—which Orlando was not perhaps. At any rate, I have taken my fence.

Wednesday, April 9th.

What I now think (about The Waves) is that I can give in a very few strokes the essentials of a person’s character. It should be done boldly, almost as caricature. I have yesterday entered what may be the last lap. Like every piece of the book it goes by fits and starts. I never get away with it; but am tugged back. I hope this makes for solidity; and must look to my sentences. The abandonment of Orlando and Lighthouse is much checked by the extreme difficulty of the form—as it was in Jacob’s Room. I think this is the furthest development so far; but of course it may miss fire somewhere. I think I have kept stoically to the original conception. What I fear is that the rewriting will have to be so drastic that I may entirely muddle it somehow. It is bound to be very imperfect. But I think it possible that I have got my statues against the sky.

Sunday, April 13th.

I read Shakespeare directly I have finished writing. When my mind is agape and red-hot. Then it is astonishing. I never yet knew how amazing his stretch and speed and word coining power is, until I felt it utterly outpace and outrace my own, seeming to start equal and then I see him draw ahead and do things I could not in my wildest tumult and utmost press of mind imagine. Even the less known plays are written at a speed that is quicker than anybody else’s quickest; and the words drop so fast one can’t pick them up. Look at this. ‘Upon a gather’d lily almost wither’d.’ (That is a pure accident. I happen to light on it.) Evidently the pliancy of his mind was so complete that he could furbish out any train of thought; and, relaxing, let fall a shower of such unregarded flowers. Why then should anyone else attempt to write? This is not ‘writing’ at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.

Wednesday, April 23rd.

This is a very important morning in the history of The Waves, because I think I have turned the corner and see the last lap straight ahead. I think I have got Bernard into the final stride. He will go straight on now, and then stand at the door: and then there will be a last picture of the waves. We are at Rodmell and I daresay I shall stay on a day or two (if I dare) so as not to break the current and finish it. O Lord and then a rest; and then an article; and then back again to this hideous shaping and moulding. There may be some joys in it all the same.

Tuesday, April 29th.

And I have just finished, with this very nibful of ink, the last sentence of The Waves. I think I should record this for my own information. Yes, it was the greatest stretch of mind I ever knew; certainly the last pages; I don’t think they flop as much as usual. And I think I have kept starkly and ascetically to the plan. So much I will say in self-congratulation. But I have never written a book so full of holes and patches; that will need rebuilding, yes, not only re-modelling. I suspect the structure is wrong. Never mind. I might have done something easy and fluent; and this is a reach after that vision I had, the unhappy summer—or three weeks—at Rodmell, after finishing the Lighthouse. (And that reminds me—I must hastily provide my mind with something else, or it will again become pecking and wretched—something imaginative, if possible, and light; for I shall tire of Hazlitt and criticism after the first divine relief; and I feel pleasantly aware of various adumbrations in the back of my head; a life of Duncan; no, something about canvases glowing in a studio; but that can wait.) And I think to myself as I walk down Southampton Row, ‘And I have given you a new book.’

Thursday, May 1st.

And I have completely ruined my morning. Yes that is literally true. They sent a book from The Times, as if advised by Heaven of my liberty; and feeling my liberty wild upon me, I rushed to the cable and told Van Doren I would write on Scott. And now having read Scott, or the editor whom Hugh provides, I won’t and can’t; and have got into a fret trying to read it, and writing to Richmond to say I can’t: have wasted the brilliant first of May which makes my skylight blue and gold; have only a rubbish heap in my head; can’t read and can’t write and can’t think. The truth is, of course, I want to be back at The Waves. Yes that is the truth. Unlike all my other books in every way, it is unlike them in this, that I begin to re-write it, or conceive it again with ardour, directly I have done. I begin to see what I had in my mind; and want to begin cutting out masses of irrelevance and clearing, sharpening and making the good phrases shine. One wave after another. No room. And so on. But then we are going touring Devon and Cornwall on Sunday, which means a week off; and then I shall perhaps make my critical brain do a month’s work for exercise. What could it be set to? Or a story?—no, not another story now Wednesday, August loth.

The Waves is I think resolving itself (I am at page 100) into a series of dramatic soliloquies. The thing is to keep them running homogeneously in and out, in the rhythm of the waves. Can they be read consecutively? I know nothing about that. I think this is the greatest opportunity I have yet been able to give myself; therefore I suppose the most complete failure. Yet I respect myself for writing this book—yes—even though it exhibits my congenital faults.

Monday, September 8th.

I will signalize my return to life—that is writing—by beginning a new book, and it happens to be Thoby’s birthday, I remark. He would have been, I think, 50 today. After coming out here I had the usual—oh how usual—headache; and lay, like a fibre of tired muscle on my bed in the sitting room, till yesterday. Now up again and on again; with one new picture in my mind; my defiance of death in the garden.

But the sentence with which this book was to open ran ‘Nobody has ever worked so hard as I do’—exclaimed in driving a paper fastener through the 14 pages of my Hazlitt just now. Time was when I dashed off these things all in the day’s work. Now, partly because I must do them for America and make arrangements far ahead, I spend I daresay a ridiculous amount of time, more of trouble, on them. I began reading Hazlitt in January I think. And I am not sure that I have speared that little eel in the middle—that marrow—which is one’s object in criticism. A very difficult business no doubt to find it, in all these essays; so many; so short; and on all subjects. Never mind; it shall go today; and my appetite for criticism is, oddly, whetted. I have some gift that way, were it not for the grind and the screw and the torture.

Tuesday, December 2nd.

No, I cannot write that very difficult passage in The Waves this morning (how their lives hang lit up against the Palace) all because of Arnold Bennett and Ethel’s party. I can hardly get one word after another. There I was for 2 hours so it seemed, alone with B., in Ethel’s little back room. And this meeting I am convinced was engineered by B. to ‘get on good terms with Mrs Woolf’—when Heaven knows I don’t care a rap if I’m on terms with B. or not. B. I say, because he can’t say B. He ceases; shuts his eyes; leans back; one waits. ‘Begin,’ he at last articulates quietly, without any fluster. But the method lengthens out intolerably a rather uninspired discourse. It’s fun. I like the old creature. I do my best, as a writer, to detect signs of genius in his smoky brown eye: I see certain sensuality, power, I suppose; but O as he cackled out ‘What a blundering fool I am—what a baby—compared with Desmond MacCarthy—how clumsy—how could I attack professors?’ This innocence is engaging; but would be more so if I felt him, as he infers, a ‘creative artist’. He said that George Moore in The Mummer’s Wife had shown him The Five Towns: taught him what to see there: has a profound admiration for G.M.; but despises him for boasting of his sexual triumphs. ‘He told me that a young girl had come to see him. And he asked her, as she sat on the sofa, to undress. And he said she took off all her clothes and let him look at her … Now that I don’t believe … But he is a prodigious writer—he lives for words. Now he’s ill. Now he’s an awful bore—he tells the same stories over and over. And soon people will say of me “He’s dead.”’ I rashly said: ‘Of your books?’ ‘No, of me,’ he replied, attaching, I suppose, a longer life than I do to his books.

‘It’s the only life,’ he said (this incessant scribbling, one word after another, one thousand words daily). ‘I don’t want anything else. I think of nothing but writing. Some people are bored.”You have all the clothes you want, I suppose,’ I said. ‘And bath. And beds. And a yacht.”Oh yes, my clothes couldn’t be better cut.’

And at last I drew Lord David in. And we taunted the old creature with thinking us refined. He said the gates of Hatfield were shut—‘shut away from life’. ‘But open on Thursdays,’ said Lord D ‘I don’t want to go on Thursdays,’ said R ‘And you drop your aitches on purpose,’ I said, ‘think-im that you possess more “life” than we do.” I sometimes tease’ said B„ ‘but I don’t think I possess more life than you do Now I must go home. I have to write one thousand words tomorrow morning.’ And this left only the scrag end of the evening; and this left me in a state where I can hardly drive my pen across the page.

Reflection: It is presumably a bad thing to look through articles, reviews etc. to find one’s own name. Yet I often do.

Thursday, December 4th.

One word of slight snub in the Lit. Sup. today makes me determine, first, to alter the whole of The Waves; second, to put my back up against the public—one word of slight snub.

Friday, December 12th.

This, I think, is the last day’s breathing space I allow myself before I tackle the last lap of The Waves. I have had a week off—that is to say I have written three little sketches; and dawdled and spent a morning shopping and a morning, this morning, arranging my new table and doing odds and ends—but I think I have got my breath again and must be off for three or perhaps four weeks more. Then, as I think, I shall make one consecutive writing of The Waves etc.—the interludes—so as to work it into one—and then, oh dear, some must be written again; and then, corrections; and then send to Mabel; and then correct the type; and then give to Leonard. Leonard perhaps shall get it sometime late in March. Then put away; then print, perhaps in June.

Monday, December 22nd.

It occurred to me last night while listening to a Beethoven quartet that I would merge all the interjected passages into Bernard’s final speech and end with the words O solitude: thus making him absorb all those scenes and having no further break. This is also to show that the theme effort, effort, dominates: not the waves: and personality: and defiance: but I am not sure of the effect artistically; because the proportions may need the intervention of the waves finally so as to make a conclusion.

Saturday, December 27th.

But what’s the use of talking about Bernard’s final speech? We came down on Tuesday and next day my cold was the usual influenza and I am in bed with the usual temperature and can’t use my wits or, as is visible, form my letters. I daresay two days will see me normal; but then the sponge behind my forehead will be dry and pale—and so my precious fortnight of exaltation and concentration is snatched; and I shall go back to the racket and Nelly without a thing done. I clear myself by thinking that I may evolve some thoughts. Meanwhile it rains; Annie’s child is ill; the dogs next door yap and yap; all the colours are rather dim and the pulse of life dulled. I moon torpidly through book after book: Defoe’s Tour; Rowan’s autobiography; Benson’s Memoirs; Jeans: in the familiar way. The parson—Skinner—who shot himself emerges like a bloody sun in a fog: a book worth, perhaps, looking at Diary of a again in a clearer mood. He shot himself in the Somerset beechwoods above his house; he spent a life digrector. ging up stones and reducing all places to Camelodunum; quarrelled; bickered; yet loved his sons; yet turned them out of doors—a clear hard picture of one type of human life—the exasperated, unhappy, struggling, intolerably afflicted. Oh and I’ve read Q.V.’s letters; and wonder what would happen had Ellen Terry been born Queen. Complete disaster to the Empire? Q.V. entirely unaesthetic; a kind of Prussian competence and belief in herself her only prominences; material; brutal to Gladstone; like a mistress with a dishonest footman. Knew her own mind. But the mind radically commonplace, only its inherited force and cumulative sense of power making it remarkable.

Tuesday, December 30th.

What it wants is presumably unity; but it is I think rather good (I am talking to myself over the fire about The Waves). Suppose I could run all the scenes together more?—by rhythms chiefly. So as to avoid those cuts; so as to make the blood run like a torrent from end to end—I don’t want the waste that the breaks give; I want to avoid chapters; that indeed is my achievement, if any, here: a saturated unchopped completeness; changes of scene, of mind, of person, done without spilling a drop. Now if it could be worked over with heat and currency, that’s all it wants. And I am getting my blood up (temp. 99). But all the same I went into Lewes and the Keynes came to tea; and having got astride my saddle the whole world falls into shape; it is this writing that gives me my proportions.

[]

1931.

Wednesday, January 7th.

My head is not in the first spring of energy: this fortnight has brought me no views of the lapping downs—no fields and hedges—too many firelit houses and lit up pages and pen and ink—curse my influenza. It is very quiet here—not a sound but the hiss of the gas. Oh but the cold was too great at Rodmell. I was frozen like a small sparrow. And I did write a few staggering sentences. Few books have interested me more to write than The Waves. Why even now, at the end, I’m turning up a stone or two: no glibness, no assurance; you see, I could perhaps do B.’s soliloquy in such a way as to break up, dig deep, make prose move—yes I swear—as prose has never moved before; from the chuckle, the babble to the rhapsody. Something new goes into my pot every morning—something that’s never been got at before. The high wind can’t blow, because I’m chopping and tacking all the time. And I’ve stored a few ideas for articles: one on Gosse—the critic, as talker: the armchair critic; one on Letters—one on Queens.

Now this is true: The Waves is written at such high pressure that I can’t take it up and read it through between tea and dinner; I can only write it for about one hour, from 10 to 11.30. And the typing is almost the hardest part of the work. Heaven help me if all my little 80,000 word books are going in future to cost me two years! But I shall fling off, like a cutter leaning on its side, on some swifter, slighter adventure—another Orlando perhaps.

Tuesday, January 20th.

I have this moment, while having my bath, conceived an entire new book1—a sequel to A Room of One’s Own—about the sexual life of women: to be called Professions for Women (This is perhaps—Lord how exciting! This sprang out Here and Now, of my paper to be read on Wednesday to I think. Pippa’s society. Now for The Waves. Thank May ‘34.) God—but I’m very much excited.

1 Eventually Three Guineas.

Friday, January 23rd.

Too much excited, alas, to get on with The Waves. One goes on making up The Open Door’, or whatever it is to be called. The didactic demonstrative style conflicts with the dramatic: I find it hard to get back inside Bernard again.

Thursday, January 26th.

Heaven be praised, I can truthfully say on this first day of being 49 that I have shaken off the obsession of Opening the Door, and have returned to Waves: and have this instant seen the entire book whole, and now I can finish it—say in under 3 weeks. That takes me to February 16th; then I propose, after doing Gosse, or an article perhaps, to dash off the rough sketch of Open Door, to be finished by April 1st. (Easter is April 3rd.) We shall then, I hope, have an Italian journey; return say May 1st and finish Waves, so that the MS. can go to be printed in June and appear in September. These are possible dates anyhow. Yesterday at Rodmell we saw a magpie and heard the first spring birds: sharp egotistical, like man. A hot sun; walked over Caburn; home by Horley and saw three men dash from a blue car and race without hats across a field. We saw a silver and blue aeroplane in the middle of a field, apparently unhurt, among trees and cows. This morning the paper says three men were killed—the aeroplane dashing to the earth. But we went on, reminding me of that epitaph in the Greek anthology: when I sank, the other ships sailed on.

Monday, February 2nd.

I think I am about to finish The Waves. I think I might finish it on Saturday.

This is merely an author’s note: never have I screwed my brain so tight over a book. The proof is that I am almost incapable of other reading or writing. I can only flop wide once the morning is over. Oh Lord the relief when this week is over and I have at any rate the feeling that I have wound up and done with that long labour: ended that vision. I think I have just done what I meant; of course I have altered the scheme considerably; but my feeling is that I have insisted upon saying, by hook or by crook, certain things I meant to say. I imagine that the hookedness may be so great that it will be a failure from a reader’s point of view. Well, never mind: it is a brave attempt. I think, something struggled for. Oh and then the delight of skirmishing free again—the delight of being idle and not much minding what happens; and then I shall be able to read again, with all my mind—a thing I haven’t done these four months I daresay. This will have taken me 18 months to write: and we can’t publish it till the autumn I suppose.

Wednesday, February 4th.

A day ruined, for us both. L. has to go every morning at 10.15 to the Courts, where his jury is still called, but respited always till 10.15 the next day; and this morning, which should have dealt a formidable blow at The Waves—B. is within two days I think of saying O Death—was ruined by Elly, who was to have come at 9.30 sharp but did not come till n. And it is now 12.30 and we sat talking about the period and professional women, after the usual rites with the stethoscope, seeking vainly the cause of my temperature. If we like to spend 7 guineas we might catch a bug—but we don’t like. And so I am to eat Bemax and—the usual routine.

How strange and wilful these last exacerbations of The Waves are! I was to have finished it at Christmas.

Today Ethel1 comes. On Monday I went to hear her rehearse. A vast Portland Place house with the cold wedding cake Adams plaster: shabby red carpets; flat surfaces washed with dull greens. The rehearsal was in a long room with a bow window looking on, in fact in, to other houses—iron staircases, chimneys, roofs—a barren brick outlook. There was a roaring fire in the Adams grate. Lady L. a now shapeless sausage, and Mrs Hunter” a swathed satin sausage, sat side by side on a sofa. Ethel stood at the piano in the window, in her battered felt, in her jersey and short skirt conducting with a pencil. There was a drop at the end of her nose. Miss Suddaby was singing the Soul, and I observed that she went through precisely the same attitudes of ecstasy and inspiration in the room as in a hall: there were two young or youngish men. Ethel’s pince nez rode nearer and nearer the tip of her nose. She sang now and then; and once, taking the bass, made a cat squalling sound—but everything she does with such forthrightness, directness, that there is nothing ridiculous. She loses self-consciousness completely. She seems all vitalized; all energized. She knocks her hat from side to side. Strides rhythmically down the room to signify to Elizabeth that this is the Greek melody; strides back. Now the furniture moving begins, she said, referring to some supernatural gambols connected with the prisoner’s escape, or defiance or death. I suspect the music is too literary—too stressed—too didactic for my taste. But I am always impressed by the fact that it is music—I mean that she has spun these coherent chords, harmonies, melodies out of her so practical vigorous student mind. What if she should be a great composer? This fantastic idea is to her the merest commonplace: it is the fabric of her being. As she conducts, she hears music like Beethoven’s. As she strides and turns and wheels about to us perched mute on chairs she thinks this is about the most important event now taking place in London. And perhaps it is. Well—I watched the curiously sensitive, perceptive Jewish face of old Lady L. trembling like a butterfly’s antennae to the sound. How sensitive to music old Jewesses are—how pliable, how supple. Mrs Hunter sat like a wax figure, composed, upholstered, transfixed, with her gold chain purse.

Saturday, February 7th.

Here in the few minutes that remain, I must record, heaven be praised, the end of The Waves. I wrote the words O Death fifteen minutes ago, having reeled across the last ten pages with some moments of such intensity and intoxication that I seemed only to stumble after my own voice, or almost, after some sort of speaker (as when I was mad) I was almost afraid, remembering the voices that used to fly ahead. Anyhow, it is done; and I have been sitting these 15 minutes in a state of glory, and calm, and some tears, thinking of Thoby and if I could write Julian Thoby Stephen 1881-1906 on the first page. I suppose not. How physical the sense of triumph and relief is! Whether good or bad, it’s done; and, as I certainly felt at the end, not merely finished, but rounded off, completed, the thing stated—how hastily, how fragmentarily I know; but I mean that I have netted that fin in the waste of water which appeared to me over the marshes of my window at Rodmell when I was coming to an end of To the Lighthouse.

What interests me in the last stage was the freedom and boldness with which my imagination picked up, used and tossed aside all the images, symbols which I had prepared. I am sure that this is the right way of using them—not in set pieces, as I had tried at first, coherently, but simply as images, never making them work out; only suggest. Thus I hope to have kept the sound of the sea and the birds, dawn and garden subconsciously present, doing their work under ground.

Saturday, March 28th.

Arnold Bennett died last night; which leaves me sadder than I should have supposed. A lovable genuine man; impeded, somehow a little awkward in life; well meaning; ponderous; kindly; coarse; knowing he was coarse; dimly floundering and feeling for something else; glutted with success; wounded in his feelings; avid; thicklipped; prosaic intolerably; rather dignified; set upon writing; yet always taken in; deluded by splendour and success; but naive; an old bore; an egotist; much at the mercy of life for all his competence; a shopkeeper’s view of literature; yet with the rudiments, covered over with fat and prosperity and the desire for hideous Empire furniture; of sensibility. Some real understanding power, as well as a gigantic absorbing power. These are the sort of things that I think by fits and starts this morning, as I sit journalizing; I remember his determination to write 1,000 words daily; and how he trotted off to do it that night, and feel some sorrow that now he will never sit down and begin methodically covering his regulation number of pages in his workmanlike beautiful but dull hand. Queer how one regrets the dispersal of anybody who seemed—as I say—genuine: who had direct contact with life—for he abused me; and I yet rather wished him to go on abusing me; and me abusing him. An element in life—even in mine that was so remote—taken away. This is what one minds.

Saturday, April nth.

Oh I am so tired of correcting my own writing—these 8 articles—I have however learnt I think to dash: not to finick. I mean the writing is free enough; it’s the repulsiveness of correcting that nauseates me. And the cramming in and cutting out. And articles and more articles are asked for. Forever I could write articles.

But I have no pen—well, it will just make a mark. And not much to say, or rather too much and not the mood.

Wednesday, May 13th.

Unless I write a few sentences here from time to time I shall, as they say, forget the use of my pen. I am now engaged in typing out from start to finish the 332 pages of that very condensed book The Waves. I do 7 or 8 daily; by which means I hope to have the whole complete by June 16th or thereabouts. This requires some resolution; but I can see no other way to make all the corrections and keep the lilt and join up and expand and do all the other processes. It is like sweeping over an entire canvas with a wet brush.

Saturday, May 30th.

No, I have just said, it being 12.45, I cannot write any more, and indeed I cannot: I am copying the death chapter; have, re-written it twice. I shall go at it again and finish it, I hope, this afternoon. But how it rolls into a tight ball the muscles in my brain! This is the most concentrated work I have ever done—and oh the relief when it is finished. But also the most interesting.

Tuesday, June 23rd.

And yesterday, 22nd June, when, I think, the days begin to draw in, I finished my re-typing of The Waves. Not that it is finished—oh dear no. For then I must correct the re-re-typing. This work I began on May 5th, and no one can say that I have been hasty or careless this time; though I doubt not the lapses and slovenliness are innumerable.

Tuesday, July 7th.

O to seek relief from this incessant correction (I am doing the interludes) and write a few words carelessly. Still better, to write nothing; to tramp over the downs, blown like thistle, as irresponsible. And to get away from this hard knot in which my brain has been so tight spun—I mean The Waves. Such are my sentiments at half past twelve on Tuesday July 7th—a fine day I think—and everything, so the tag runs in my head, handsome about us.

Tuesday, July 14th.

It is now twelve o’clock on the morning of July 14th—and Bob1 has come in to ask me to sign a paper to get Palmer a pension. Bob says … mostly about his new house, washing basins, can he use a candle still to go to bed with; Bessy is moving in today; he is off to Italy for a month; will I send a copy of my new book to Count Moira, all Italians are Counts, once he showed four Counts round Cambridge; Palmer … … and so on: shuffling from foot to foot, taking his hat off and putting it on again, moving to the door and returning.

I had meant to say that I have just finished correcting the Hampton Court scene. (This is the final correction please God!) But my Waves account runs, I think, as follows:—I began it, seriously, about September 10th 1929. I finished the first version on April 10th 1930. I began the second version on May ist 1930. I finished the second version on February 7th 1931. I began to correct second version on May ist 1931, finished 22nd June 1931. I began to correct the typescript on 25th June 1931. Shall finish (I hope) 18th July 1931. Then remain only the proofs.

Friday, July 17th.

Yes, this morning I think I may say I have finished. That is to say I have once more, for the 18th time, copied out the opening sentences. L. will read it tomorrow; and I shall open this book to record his verdict. My own opinion—oh dear—it’s a difficult book. I don’t know that I’ve ever felt so strained. And I’m nervous, I confess, about L. For one thing he will be honest, more than usually. And it may be a failure. And I can’t do any more. And I’m inclined to think it good but incoherent, inspissate; one jerk succeeding another. Anyhow it is laboured, compact. Anyhow I had a shot at my vision—if it’s not a catch, it’s a cast in the right direction. But I’m nervous. It may be small and finicky in general effect. Lord knows. As I say, repeating it to enforce the rather unpleasant little lift in my heart, I shall be nervous to hear what L. says when he comes out, say tomorrow night or Sunday morning, to my garden room, carrying the MS. and sits himself down and begins ‘Well! ‘

Sunday, July 19th.

‘It is a masterpiece,’ said L., coming out to my lodge this morning. ‘And the best of your books.’ This note I make; adding that he also thinks the first 100 pages extremely difficult and is doubtful how far any common reader will follow. But Lord! what a relief! I stumped off in the rain to make a little round to Rat Farm in jubilation and am almost resigned to the fact that a goat farm, with a house to be built, is now in process on the slope near Northease.

Monday, August 10th.

I have now—10.45 ~ read the first chapter of The Waves, and made no changes, save 2 words and 3 commas. Yes, anyhow this is exact and to the point. I like it. And see that for once my proofs will be despatched with a few pencil strokes. Now my blood mounts: I think ‘I am taking my fences … We have asked Raymond. I am forging through the sea, in spite of headache, in spite of bitterness. I may also get a .’ I will now write a little at Flush.

Saturday, August 15th.

I am in rather a flutter—proof reading. I can only read a few pages at a time. So it was when I wrote it and Heaven knows what virtue it has, this ecstatic book.

Sunday, August 16th.

I should really apologize to this book for using it as I am doing to write off my aimlessness; that is I am doing my proofs—the last chapter this morning—and find that I must stop after half an hour and let my mind spread, after these moments of concentration. I cannot write my life of Flush, because the rhythm is wrong. I think The Waves is anyhow tense and packed; since it screws my brain up like this. And what will the reviewers say? And my friends? They can’t, of course, find anything very new to say.

Monday, August 17th.

Well now, it being just after 12.30, I have put the last corrections in The Waves; done my proofs; and they shall go tomorrow—never, never to be looked at again by me, I imagine.

Tuesday, September 22nd.

And Miss Holtby says ‘It is a poem, more completely than any of your other books, of course. It is most rarely subtle. It has seen more deeply into the human heart, perhaps, than even To the Lighthouse…’ and though I copy the sentence, because it is in the chart of my temperature, Lord, as I say, that temperature which was deathly low this time last week and then fever high, doesn’t rise: is normal. I suppose I’m safe; I think people can only repeat. And I’ve forgotten so much. What I want is to be told that this is solid and means something. What it means I myself shan’t know till I write another book. And I’m the hare, a long way ahead of the hounds my critics.

52 Tavistock Square

Monday, October 5th.

A note to say I am all trembling with pleasure—can’t go on with my Letter—because Harold Nicolson has rung up to say The Waves is a masterpiece. Ah Hah—so it wasn’t all wasted then. I mean this vision I had here has some force upon other minds. Now for a cigarette and then a return to sober composition.

Well, to continue this egotistic diary: I am not terribly excited; no; at arms length more than usual; all this talk, because if the W. is anything it is an adventure which I go on alone; and the dear old Lit. Sup: who twinkles and beams and patronizes—a long, and for The Times, kind and outspoken review—don’t stir me very much. Nor Harold in Action either. Yes; to some extent; I should have been unhappy had they blamed, but Lord, how far away I become from all this; and we’re jaded too, with people, with doing up parcels. I wonder if it is good to feel this remoteness—that is, that The Waves is not what they say. Odd, that they (The Times) should praise my characters when I meant to have none. But I’m jaded; I want my marsh, my down, a quiet waking in my airy bedroom. Broadcasting tonight; to Rodmell tomorrow. Next week I shall have to stand the racket.

Friday, October 9th.

Really, this unintelligible book is being better ‘received’ than any of them. A note in The Times proper—the first time this has been allowed me. And it sells—how unexpected, how odd that people can read that difficult grinding stuff!

Saturday, October 17th.

More notes on The Waves. The sales, these past three days, have fallen to 50 or so: after the great flare up when we sold 500 in one day, the brushwood has died down, as I foretold. (Not that I thought we should sell more than 3,000.) What has happened is that the library readers can’t get through it and are sending their copies back. So, I prophesy, it will now dribble along till we have sold 6,000 and then almost die, yet not quite. For it has been received, as I may say, quoting the stock phrases without vanity, with applause. All the provinces read enthusiastically. I am rather, in a sense, as the M.’s would say, touched. The unknown provincial reviewers say with almost one accord, here is Mrs Woolf doing her best work; it can’t be popular; but we respect her for so doing; and find The Waves positively exciting. I am in danger, indeed, of becoming our leading novelist, and not with the highbrows only.

Monday, November 16th.

Here I will give myself the pleasure—shall I?—of copying a sentence or two from Morgan’s unsolicited letter on The Waves:—

‘I expect I shall write to you again when I have re-read The Waves. I have been looking in it and talking about it at Cambridge. It’s difficult to express oneself about a work which one feels to be so very important, but I’ve the sort of excitement over it which comes from believing that one’s encountered a classic.’

But I must keep to the old style in this volume. And how, I wonder, could I do it? There must be some simpler, subtler, closer means of writing about books, as about people, could I hit upon it. (The Waves has sold more than 7,000.)

[]

1932.

Wednesday, January 13th.

Oh but this is, as I always say, making an apology myself to myself, not the first day of the year. It is the thirteenth, and I am in one of those lassitudes and ebbs of life when I cannot heave another word on to the wall. My word, what a heaving The Waves was, that I still feel the strain!

Can we count on another 20 years? I shall be fifty on 25th, Monday week that is: and sometimes feel that I have lived 250 years already, and sometimes that I am still the youngest person in the omnibus. (Nessa said that she still always thinks this, as she sits down.) And I want to write another four novels: Waves, I mean; and the Tap on the Door; and to go through English literature, like a string through cheese, or rather like some industrious insect, eating its way from book to book, from Chaucer to Lawrence. This is a programme, considering my slowness, and how I get slower, thicker, more intolerant of the fling and the rush, to last out my 20 years, if I have them.

Sunday, January 31st.

Having just finished, as I say, the final version as I call it, of my Letter to a Young Toet, I can take a moment’s liberty. From the cynical tone of this sentence I see that my finality is not secure. Writing becomes harder and harder. Things I dashed off I now compress and re-state. And for purposes which I need not go into here, I want to use these pages for dialogue for a time.

Monday, February 8th.

Why did I ever say I would produce another volume of Common Reader? It will take me week after week, month after month. However a year spent—save for diversions in Greece and Russia—in reading through English literature will no doubt do good to my fictitious brain. Rest it anyhow. One day, all of a rush, fiction will burst in. These remarks are jotted down at the end of a long morning’s work on Donne, which will have to be done again, and is it worth the doing? I wake in the night with the sense of being in an empty hall: Lytton dead and those factories building. What is the point of it—life—when I am not working—suddenly becomes thin, indifferent. Lytton is dead, and nothing definite to mark it. Also they write flimsy articles about him.

Thursday, February 11th.

My mind is set running upon A Knock on the Door (what’s its name?) owing largely to reading Wells on Woman—how she must be ancillary and decorative in the world of the future, because she has been tried, in 10 years, and has not proved anything.

Tuesday, February 16th.

And I have just ‘finished’—I use inverted commas ironically—my Donne, a great but I think well intentioned grind. And I’m quivering and itching to write my—what’s it to be called?

—“Men are like that’?—no, that’s too patently feminist. The sequel then, for which I have collected enough powder to blow up St Paul’s. It is to have four pictures. And I must go on with the Common Reader—for one thing, by way of proving my credentials.

Tuesday, May 17th.

What is the right attitude towards criticism? What ought I to feel and say when Miss B. devotes an article in Scrutiny to attacking me? She is young, Cambridge, ardent. And she says I’m a very bad writer. Now I think the thing to do is to note the pith of what is said—that I don’t think—then to use the little kick of energy which opposition supplies to be more vigorously oneself. It is perhaps true that my reputation will now decline. I shall be laughed at and pointed at. What should be my attitude—clearly Arnold Bennett and Wells took the criticism of their youngers in the wrong way. The right way is not to resent; not to be longsuffering and Christian and submissive either. Of course, with my odd mixture of extreme rashness and modesty (to analyse roughly) I very soon recover from praise and blame. But I want to find out an attitude. The most important thing is not to think very much about oneself. To investigate candidly the charge; but not fussily, not very anxiously. On no account to retaliate by going to the other extreme—thinking too much. And now that thorn is out—perhaps too easily.

Wednesday, May 25th.

Now I have ‘finished’ David Copperfield, and I say to myself can’t I escape to some pleasanter atmosphere? Can’t I expand and embalm and become a sentient living creature? Lord how I suffer! What a terrific capacity I possess for feeling with intensity—now, since we came back, I’m screwed up into a ball; can’t get into step; can’t make things dance; feel awfully detached; see youth; feel old; no, that’s not quite it: wonder how a year or so perhaps is to be endured. Think, yet people do live; can’t imagine what goes on behind faces. All is surface hard; myself only an organ that takes blows, one after another; the horror of the hard raddled faces in the flower show yesterday: the inane pointlessness of all this existence: hatred of my own brainlessness and indecision; the old treadmill feeling, of going on and on and on, for no reason: Lytton’s death; Carrington’s; a longing to speak to him; all that cut away, gone: … women: my book on professions: shall I write another novel; contempt for my lack of intellectual power; reading Wells without understanding; … society; buying clothes; Rodmell spoilt; all England spoilt: terror at night of things generally wrong in the universe; buying clothes; how I hate Bond Street and spending money on clothes: worst of all is this dejected barrenness. And my eyes hurt: and my hand trembles.

A saying of Leonard’s comes into my head in this season of complete inanity and boredom. ‘Things have gone wrong somehow.’ It was the night C. killed herself. We were walking along that silent blue street with the scaffolding. I saw all the violence and unreason crossing in the air: ourselves small; a tumult outside: something terrifying: unreason—shall I make a book out of this? It would be a way of bringing order and speed again into my world.

Thursday, May 26th.

And now today suddenly the weight on my head is lifted and I can think, reason, keep to one thing and concentrate. Perhaps this is the beginning of another spurt. Perhaps I owe it to my conversation with L. last night. I tried to analyse my depression: how my brain is jaded with the conflict within of two types of thought, the critical, the creative; how I am harassed by the strife and jar and uncertainty without. This morning the inside of my head feels cool and smooth instead of strained and turbulent.

Tuesday, June 2 8th.

Just ‘finished de Quincey’. Thus am I trying to keep pace with the days and deliver the second C.R. done on the last of June, which I see with dismay is Thursday. I spent last summer thus toiling over The Waves. This is less severe by a long chalk (what’s the origin of that? cricket pitch? billiards?) Anyhow it blazes; swoons; the heat. Royal, imperial, are the words I fumble with in the Square. So hot yesterday—so hot, when Prince Mirsky came with his fluent Russian lady: I mean she was full of temperament; had the free gestures of the Slav: but Mirsky was trap mouthed: opened and bit his remark to pieces: has yellow misplaced teeth: wrinkles his forehead; despair, suffering, very marked on his face. Has been in England, in boarding houses, for 12 years; now returns to Russia ‘forever’. I thought as I watched his eye brighten and fade—soon there’ll be a bullet through your head. That’s one of the results of war: this trapped cabin’d man. But that didn’t lubricate our tea.

Wednesday, June 29th.

Whenever I suck my pen, my lip is covered with ink. And I have no ink with which to fill my pot; and it is 10 minutes past 12; and I have just finished Hardy; and I promise myself that the C.R. will be finally done by Wednesday next. And today is Sunday. Last pight at 10 the Zeppelin came past with a string of light hanging from its navel. This consoled me for not having gone to the last night of the ballet. Now I have cleaned my table, which John inherits while I’m away. And I should now attack Ch. Rossetti. But Lord, how tired one gets of one’s own writing.

Today is Wednesday and the C.R. I confess is not yet quite done. But then—well I had to re-write the last article, which I had thought so good, entirely. Not for many years shall I collect another bunch of articles.

Monday, July nth.

I will take a new pen and a new page to record the fact which is now a fact that I have slipped a green rubber band round The Common Reader, second series, and there it lies, at 10 minutes to one, ready to take upstairs. There is no sense of glory; only of drudgery done. And yet I daresay it’s a nice enough book to read—I doubt that I shall write another like it all the same. I must find a quicker cut into books than this. But heaven be praised, not now. Now I’m taking a holiday. That is to say, what shall I write tomorrow? I can sit down and think.

Wednesday, July 13th.

I have been sleeping over a promising novel. That’s the way to write. I’m ruminating, as usual, how to improve my lot; and shall begin by walking, alone, in Regent’s Park this afternoon. What I mean is why do a single thing one doesn’t want to do—for instance buy a hat or read a book. Old Joseph Wright and old Lizzie Wright are people I respect. Indeed I do hope the second volume will come this morning. He was a maker of dialect dictionaries: he was a workhouse boy—his mother went charing. And he married Miss Lea a clergyman’s daughter. And I’ve just read their love letters with respect And he said: ‘Always please yourself—then one person’s happy at any rate.’ And she said make details part of a whole—get proportions right—contemplating marriage with Joe. Odd how rare it is to meet people who say things that we ourselves could have said. Their attitude to life much our own. Joe a very thick sturdy man—‘I am unique in certain respects,’ he said. ‘We must leave some record of Joe and Lizzie to posterity.’ Had his old working mother to Oxford. She thought All Souls would make a good Co-op. Had a fist and struck boys. His notion of learning. What is it? I sometimes would like to be “ learned myself. About sounds and dialects. Still what use is it? S I mean, if you have that mind why not make something beautiful? Yes, but then the triumph of learning is that it leaves something done solidly forever. Everybody knows now about dialect, I owing to his dictionary. He is a coarse, sturdy variety of Sidney Webb and Walter Leaf—stockish, hairy; more humorous and forcible than either. Could work all night, wash and work all next day. Miss Weisse, Tovey’s lady, brought them together—made Lizzie give up arranging the flowers in the rectory and go to Oxford. She a woman of character. Wouldn’t accept Joe’s offer of a job because he made her feel like a bear at the end of a chain. But she married him. They were lost in the woods by Virginia Water in 1896: and sat on a seat and had an hour of great suffering, after which she accepted him—they got on a baker’s cart and were taken back to Miss Weisse. An absorbing story. Joe knew all about servants. Joe taught himself to read at 14: taught mill boys in a bedroom for 2d a week: a surly but very sensitive man, apparently. Now this is a testimony to Joe and Lizzie that I’ve been thinking how I should have liked to see them—would now like to write to her. A fine face with bright big eyes. Yes, but what happens in volume two?

RODMELL

Friday, August 5th.

Yesterday L. came into my room at breakfast and said ‘Goldie1 is dead.’ I never knew him well but had the common feeling that I have with those trusty Cambridge fellows: and was pleased, of course, by what he wrote of The Waves: and so came nearer. I get the strangest feeling now of our all being in the midst of some vast operation: of the splendour of this undertaking—life: of being capable of dying: an immensity surrounds me. No—I can’t get it—shall let it brood itself into ‘a novel’ no doubt. (It’s thus I get the conception from which the book condenses.) At night L. and I talked of death again, the second time this year: how we may be like worms crushed by a motor car: what does the worm know of the car—how it is made? There may be a reason: if so not one we, as human beings, can grasp. Goldie had some mystic belief.

And now we have been to Lewes races and seen the fat lady in black with parts of her person spilling over the shooting seat on which her bulk is so insecurely poised: seen the riff raff of sporting society all lined up in their cars with the dickies bulging with picnic basket»: heard the bark of backers: seen for a second the pounding straining horses with red faced jockeys lashing them pound by. What a noise they made—what a sense of muscle hard and stretched—and beyond the downs this windy sunny day looked wild and remote; and I could rethink them into uncultivated land again.

Wednesday, August 17th.

Now I think I have corrected the C.R. till I can correct no longer. And I have a few minutes’ holiday before I need take the proofs in to L. Shall I then describe how I fainted again? That is the galloping hooves got wild in my head last Thursday night as I sat on the terrace with L. How cool it is after the heat! I said. We were watching the downs draw back into fine darkness after they had burnt like solid emerald all day. Now that was being softly finely veiled. And the white owl was crossing to fetch mice from the marsh. Then my heart leapt: and stopped: and leapt again: and I tasted that queer bitterness at the back of my throat; and the pulse leapt into my head and beat and beat, more savagely, more quickly. I am going to faint, I said, and slipped off my chair and lay on the grass. Oh no, I was not unconscious. I was alive: but possessed with this struggling team in my head: galloping, pounding. I thought something will burst in my brain if this goes on. Slowly it muffled itself. I pulled myself up and staggered, with what infinite difficulty and alarm, now truly fainting and seeing the garden painfully lengthened and distorted, back, back, back—how long it seemed—could I drag myself?—to the house: and gained my room and fell on my bed. Then pain, as of childbirth; and then that too slowly faded; and I lay presiding, like a flickering light, like a most solicitous mother, over the shattered splintered fragments of my body. A very acute and unpleasant experience.

Saturday, August 20th.

A curious day in London yesterday. I said to myself standing at L.’s window. Look at the present moment because it’s not been so hot for 21 years. There was a hot wind, as if one passed over a kitchen, going from the studio to the Press. Outside girls and young men lying in white on the square grass. So hot we couldn’t sit in the dining room. L. fetched and carried and hardly let me walk upstairs carrying my own body. Coming back we had the car shut and the windscreen open—thus sat in a hot rough gale which, as we came to the lanes and woods, became deliciously cold and green. The coolest place is the front seat of a car going at 40 or 50 miles with the windscreen open. Today, at 12.30, a wind rose: clouds descended; now at 3.45 it’s almost a normal warm summer day. For 10 days this heat has lasted. After my faint my head soon throbs; or so I think. I think a little of dying suddenly and reflect. Well then go about eating and drinking and laughing and feeding the fish. Odd—the silliness one attributes to death—the desire one has to belittle it and be found, as Montaigne said, laughing with girls and good fellows. And L. is staking out the dewpond and I am going in to be photographed. Three more books appearing on Mrs Woolf: which reminds me to make a note, sometime, on my work.

A very good summer, this, for all my shying and jibbing, my tremors this morning. Beautifully quiet, airy, powerful. I believe I want this more humane existence for my next—to spread carelessly among one’s friends—to feel the width and amusement of human life: not to strain to make a pattern just yet: to be made supple, and to let the juice of usual things, talk, character, seep through me, quietly, involuntarily, before I say Stop and take out my pen. Yes, my thighs now begin to run smooth: no longer is every nerve upright. Yesterday we took plums to old Mrs Grey. She is shrunk and sits on a hard chair in the corner. The door open. She twitches and trembles. Has the wild expressionless stare of the old. L. liked her despair: ‘I crawls up to bed hoping for the day; and I crawls down hoping for the night. I’m an ignorant old woman—can’t write or read. But I prays to God every night to take me—oh to go to my rest. Nobody can say what pains I suffer. Feel my shoulder,’ and she began shuffling with a safety pin. I felt it. ‘Hard as iron; full of water, and my legs too.’ She pulled down her stocking. ‘The dropsy. I’m ninety-two; and all my brothers and sisters are dead; my daughter’s dead; my husband is dead …’ She repeated her misery, her list of ills, over and over; could see nothing else; could only begin all over again; and kissed my hand, thanking us for our pound. This is what we make of our lives—no reading or writing—keep her alive with doctors when she wishes to die. Human ingenuity in torture is very great.

LONDON

Sunday, October 2nd.

Yes, I will allow myself a new nib. Odd how coming back here upsets my writing mood. Odder still how possessed I am with the feeling that now, aged so, I’m just poised to shoot forth quite free straight and undeflected my bolts whatever they are. Therefore all this flitter flutter of weekly newspapers interests me not at all. These are the soul’s changes. I don’t believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one’s aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism. And to alter now, cleanly and sanely, I want to shuffle off this loose living randomness: people; reviews; fame; all the glittering scales; and be withdrawn, and concentrated. So I shan’t run about, just yet, buying clothes, seeing people. We are off to Leicester tomorrow, to the Labour Party Conference. Then back to the fever of publishing. My C.R. doesn’t cause me a single tremor. Nor Holtby’s book. I’m interested in watching what goes on for the moment without wishing to take part—a good frame of mind when one’s conscious of power. Then I am backed now by the downs: the country: how happy L. and I are at Rodmell: what a free life that is—sweeping 30 or 40 miles; coming in when and how we like; sleeping in the empty house; dealing triumphantly with interruptions; and diving daily into that divine loveliness—always some walk; and the gulls on the purple plough; or going over to Tarring Neville—these are the flights I most love now—in the wide, the indifferent air. No being jerked, teased, tugged. And people come easily, flowering into intimacy in my room. But this is the past, or future. I am also reading D.H. L⁠[awrence] with the usual sense of frustration: and that he and I have too much in common—the same pressure to be ourselves: so that I don’t escape when I read him: am suspended: what I want is to be made free of another world. This Proust does. To me Lawrence is airless, confined: I don’t want this, I go on saying. And the repetition of one idea. I don’t want that either. I don’t want ‘a philosophy’ in the least: I don’t believe in other people’s reading of riddles. What I enjoy (in the Letters) is the sudden visualization: the great ghost springing over the wave (of the spray in Cornwall) but I get no satisfaction from his explanations of what he sees. And then it’s harrowing: this panting effort after something: and ‘I have £6.10 left’ and then Government hoofing him out, like a toad: and banning his book: the brutality of civilized society to this panting agonized man: and how futile it was. All this makes a sort of gasping in his letters. And none of it seems essential. So he pants and jerks. Then too I don’t like strumming with two fingers—and the arrogance. After all, English has one million words: why confine yourself to 6? and praise yourself for so doing. But it’s the preaching that rasps me. Like a person delivering judgement when only half the facts are there: and clinging to the rails and beating the cushion. Come out and see what’s up here—I want to say. I mean if s so barren: so easy: giving advice on a system. The moral is, if you want to help, never systematize—not till you’re 70: and have been supple and sympathetic and creative and tried out all your nerves and scopes. He died though at 45. And why does Aldous say he was an ‘artist’? Art is being rid of all preaching: things in themselves: the sentence in itself beautiful: multitudinous seas; daffodils that come before the swallow dares: whereas Lawrence would only say what proved something. I haven’t read him of course. But in the Letters he can’t listen beyond a point; must give advice; get you into the system too. Hence his attraction for those who want to be fitted: which I don’t; indeed I think it a blasphemy this fitting of Carswells into a Lawrence system. So much more reverent to leave them alone: nothing else to reverence except the Carswellism of Cars well. Hence his schoolboy tweaking and smacking of anyone offered to him: Lytton, Bertie, Squire—all are suburban, unclean.

His ruler coming down and measuring them. Why all this criticism of other people? Why not some system that includes the good? What a discovery that would be—a system that did not shut out Wednesday, November 2nd.

He is a rattle headed, bolt eyed young man, raw boned, loose jointed, who thinks himself the greatest poet of all time. I daresay he is—it’s not a subject that interests me enormously at the moment. What does? My own writing of course. I’ve just polished up the L.S. for The Times—a good one, I think, considering the currents that sway round that subject in The Times of all papers. And I have entirely remodelled my ‘Essay’. It’s to be an Essay-Novel called The Pargiters (The Years)—and it’s to take in everything, sex, education, life etc.: and come, with the most powerful and agile leaps, like a chamois, across precipices from 1880 to here and now. That’s the notion anyhow, and I have been in such a haze and dream and intoxication, declaiming phrases, seeing scenes, as I walk up Southampton Row that I can hardly say I have been alive at all, since 10th October.

Everything is running of its own accord into the stream, as with Orlando. What has happened of course is that after abstaining from the novel of fact all these years—since 1919—and N. & D. is dead—I find myself infinitely delighting in facts for a change, and in possession of quantities beyond counting: though I feel now and then the tug to vision, but resist it. This is the true line, I am sure, after The Waves—The Pargiters—this is what leads naturally on to the next stage—the essay-novel.

Monday, December 19th.

Yes, today I have written myself to the verge of total extinction. Praised be I can stop and wallow in coolness and downs and let the wheels of my mind—how I beg them to do this—cool and slow and stop altogether. I shall take up Flush again, to cool myself. By Heaven, I have written 60,320 words since October nth. I think this must be far the quickest going of any of my books: comes far ahead of Orlando or the Lighthouse. But then those 60 thousand will have to be sweated and dried into 30 or 40 thousand—a great grind to come. Never mind. I have secured the outline and fixed a shape for the rest. I feel, for the first time, No I mustn’t take risks crossing the road, till the book is done …

Yes, I will be free and entire and absolute and mistress of my life by October ist, 1933. Nobody shall come here on their terms; or haul me off to them on theirs. Oh and I shall write a poet’s book next. This one, however, releases such a torrent of fact as I did not know I had in me. I must have been observing and collecting these 20 years—since Jacob’s Room anyhow. Such a wealth of things seen present themselves that I can’t choose even—hence 60,000 words all about one paragraph. What I must do is to keep control; and not be too sarcastic; and keep the right degree of freedom and reserve. But oh how easy this writing is compared with The Waves! I wonder what the degree of carat-gold is in the two books. Of course this is external: but there’s a good deal of gold—more than I’d thought—in externality. Anyhow, ‘what care I for my goose leather bed? I’m off to join the raggle taggle gipsies oh!’ The gipsies, I say: not Hugh Walpole and Priestley—no. In truth The Targiters is first cousin to Orlando, though the cousin is the flesh: Orlando taught me the trick of it. Now—oh but I must stop for 10 days at least—no 14—if not 21 days—now I must compose the 1880-1900 chapter, which needs skill. But I like applying skill I own. I am going to polish off my jobs: and tomorrow we go. A very fruitful varied and I think successful autumn—thanks partly to my tired heart: so I could impose terms:—and I have never lived in such a race, such a dream, such a violent impulsion and compulsion—scarcely seeing anything but The Targiters.

RODMELL

Friday, December 23rd.

This is not the first day of the New Year: but the discrepancy may be forgiven.1 I must write off my dejected rambling misery—having just read over the 30,000 words of Flush and come to the conclusion that they won’t do. Oh what a waste—what a bore! Four months of work and heaven knows how much reading—not of an exalted kind either—and I can’t see how to make anything of it. It’s not the right subject for that length: it’s too slight and too serious. Much good in it but would have to be much better. So here I am two days before Christmas pitched into one of my grey welters. True, it’s partly over writing The Pargiters. But I can’t get back into Flush ever, I\feel: and L. will be disappointed; and the money loss too—that’s a bore. I took it up impetuously after The Waves by way of a change: no forethought in me: and so got landed: it would need a month’s hard work—and even then I doubt it. In that time I might have done Dryden and Pope. And I’m thus led to begin—no to end—the year with a doleful plaint. It is blazing hot; like spring, with the bees on the flowers. Never mind; this is not a reverse of the first order—not at all.

[]

1933.

This is in fact the last day of 1932, but I am so tired of polishing off Flush—such a pressure on the brain is caused by doing ten pages daily—that I am taking a morning off and shall use it here, in my lazy way, to sum up the whole of life … the dew pond is filling; the goldfish are dead; it is a clear pale blue eyed winter’s day; and and—and my thoughts tum with excitement to The Pargiters, for I long to feel my sails blow out and to be careering with Elvira, Maggie and the rest over the whole of human life. And indeed I cannot sum this up, being tired in my head.

January 3rd 1933

This is a little out of place,1 but then so am I. We are up for Angelica’s party last night and I have half an hour to spend before shooting in the new Lanchester (not ours—one lent) back to Rodmell. We have been there just short of one fortnight and I ate myself into the heart of print and solitude—so as to adumbrate a headache. And to wipe off the intensity of concentration trying to re-write that abominable dog Flush in 13 days, so as to be free—oh heavenly freedom—to write The Pargiters. I insisted upon a night of chatter.

Thursday, January 5th.

I am so delighted with my own ingenuity in having after only ten years or so, made myself, in five minutes, a perfect writing board, with pen tray attached, so that I can’t ever again fly into a fury bereft of ink and pen at the most critical moment of a writer’s life and see my sudden sentence dissipate itself all for lack of a pen handy—and besides I’m glad to be quit of page xoo of Flush—this the third time of writing that Whitechapel scene, and I doubt if it’s worth it, that I can’t help disporting myself on this free blue page, which thank God in Heaven, needs no re-writing. It is a wet misty day: my windows out here are all fog … if only because I’m in sublime reading fettle: seriously I believe that the strain of The Waves weakened my concentration for months—and then all that article compressing for the C.R. I am now at the height of my powers in that line, and have read, with close and powerful attention, some 12 or 15 books since I came here. What a joy—what a sense as of a Rolls Royce engine once more purring its 70 miles an horn-in my brain … I am also encouraged to read by the feeling that I am on the flood of creativeness in The Pargiters—what a liberation that gives one—as if everything added to that torrent—all books become fluid and swell the stream. But I daresay this is a sign only that I’m doing what is rather superficial and hasty and eager. I don’t know. I’ve another week of Flush here, and then shall come to grips with my 20 years in one chapter problem. I visualize this book now as a curiously uneven time sequence—a series of great balloons, linked by straight narrow passages of narrative. I can take liberties with the representational form which I could not dare when I wrote Night and Day—a book that taught me much, bad though it may be.

Sunday, January 15th.

I have come out here, our last morning, to write letters, so, naturally, I write this book. But then I haven’t written a line these three weeks—only typed Flush, which. Heaven be praised, I ‘finished’, almost without inverted commas, yesterday. Ah but my writing Flush has been gradually shoved out, as by a cuckoo born in the nest, by The Pargiters. How odd the mind’s functions are! About a week ago, I began the making up of scenes—unconsciously: saying phrases to myself; and so, for a week, I’ve sat here, staring at the typewriter and speaking aloud phrases of The Pargiters. This becomes more and more maddening. It will however all be run off in a few days, when I let myself write again. I am reading Parnell. Yes; but this scene making increases the rate of my heart with uncomfortable rapidity. While I was forcing myself to do Flush my old headache came back—for the first time this autumn. Why should the Ps. make my heart jump; why should Flush stiffen the back of my neck? What connection has the brain with the body? Nobody in Harley Street could explain, yet the symptoms are purely physical and as distinct as one book is from the other.

Thursday, January 19th.

It must be confessed that The Vargiters are like cuckoos in my nest—which should be Flush. I have only 50 pages to correct and send to Mabel; and these cursed scenes and dialogues will go on springing up in my head; and after correcting one page, I sit mooning for 20 minutes. I daresay this will increase the blood pressure when I come to write. But it is a tiresome bewildering distraction now.

Saturday, January 21st.

Well, Flush lingers on and I cannot despatch him. That’s the sad truth. I always see something I could press tighter or enwrap more completely. There’s no trifling with words—can’t be done: not when they’re to stand ‘forever’. So I am battening down my Targiters, say till Wednesday—it shan’t be later, I swear. And now I grow doubtful of the value of those figures. I’m afraid of the didactic: perhaps it was only that spurious passion that made me rattle away before Christmas. Anyhow I enjoyed it immensely and shall again—oh to be free, in fiction, making up my scenes again—however discreetly. Such is my cry this very fine cold January morning.

Thursday, January 26th.

Well, Flush is, I swear, despatched. Nobody can say I don’t take trouble with my little stories. And now, having bent my mind for 5 weeks sternly this way, I must unbend it the other—the Pargiter way. No critic ever gives full weight to the desire of the mind for change. Talk of being manysided—naturally one must go the other way. Now if I ever had the wits to go into the Shakespeare business I believe one would find the same law there—tragedy comedy and so on. Looming behind The Targiters I can just see the shape of pure poetry beckoning me. But The Targiters is a delightful solid possession to be enjoyed tomorrow. How bad I shall find it.

Thursday, February 2nd.

Not that I much want a move in March, with The Pargiters on my hands. I am going however to work largely, spaciously, fruitfully on that book. Today I finished—rather more completely than usual—revising the first chapter. I’m leaving out the interchapters—compacting them in the text: and project an appendix of dates. A good idea? And Galsworthy died two days ago, it suddenly struck me, walking just now by the Serpentine after calling on Mrs W. (who’s been dying—is recovering) with the gulls opening their scimitars—masses of gulls. Galsworthy’s dead: and A. Bennett told tne he simply couldn’t stick Galsworthy. Had to praise Jack’s books to Mrs G. But I could say what I liked against Galsworthy. That stark man lies dead.

Saturday, March 25th.

It is an utterly corrupt society I have just remarked, speaking in the person of Elvira Pargiter, and I will take nothing that it can give me etc etc: Now, as Virginia Woolf, I have to write—oh dear me what a bore—to the Vice Chancellor of Manchester University and say that I refuse to be made a Doctor of Letters. And to Lady Simon, who has been urgent in the matter and asks us to stay. Lord knows how I’m to put Elvira’s language into polite journalese. What an odd coincidence! that real life should provide precisely the situation I was writing about. I hardly know which I am, or where: Virginia or Elvira: in the Pargiters or outside. We dined with Susan Lawrence two nights ago. A Mrs Stocks of Manchester University was there. How delighted my husband will be to give you your degree in July! she began. And had rattled off a great deal about the delight of Manchester in seeing me honoured, before I had to pluck up courage and say: ‘But I won’t take it.’ After that there was a general argument, with the Nevinsons, (Evelyn Sharp) Susan Lawrence etc. They all said they would take a degree from a University though not an honour from the state. They made me feel a little silly, priggish and perhaps extreme: but only superficially. Nothing would induce me to connive at all that humbug. Nor would it give me, even illicitly, any pleasure. I really believe that Nessa and I—she went with me and used my arguments about the silliness of honours for women—are without the publicity sense. Now for the polite letters. Dear Vice Chancellor

Tuesday, March 2 8th.

The polite letters have been sent. So far I have [not] had, nor could have had, any answer. No, thank Heaven, I need not emerge from my fiction in July to have a tuft of fur put on my head. It is the finest spring ever known—soft, hot, blue, misty.

Thursday, April 6th.

Oh I’m so tired! I’ve written myself out over The Targiters, this last lap. I’ve brought it down to Elvira in bed—the scene I’ve had in my mind ever so many months, but I can’t write it now. It’s the turn of the book. It needs a great shove to swing it round on its hinges. As usual, doubts rush in. I get it all too quick, too thin, too surface bright? Well, I’m too jaded to crunch it up, if that’s so; and so shall bury it for a month—till we’re back from Italy perhaps; and write on Goldsmith etc. meanwhile. Then seize on it fresh and dash it off in June, July, August, September. Four months should finish the first draft—100,000 words, I think. 50,000 words written in 5 months—my record.

Thursday, April 13th.

No I have worked myself too dry this time. There is not one idea left in the orange. But we go today and I shall sun, with only a few books. No, I will not write; I will not see people. A little nip from Gissing in the T.L.S. which I must answer. But indeed I can’t find words—use the wrong ones—that’s my state: the familiar state after these three months writing—what fun that book is to me!

Tuesday, April 25th.

That’s all over—our ten days: and I wrote daily, almost, at Goldsmith—don’t much see the point of my Goldsmiths and so on—and read Goldsmith, and so on. Yes: I should now be correcting Flush proofs—I doubt that little book to some extent: but I’m in a doubting mood: the scrambled mood of transience, for on Friday 5th we go to Siena; so I can’t settle and make up my story, in which lies permanence. And as usual I want to seethe myself in something new—to break the mould of habit entirely and get that escape which Italy and the sun and the lounging and the indifference of all that to all this brings about. I rise, like a bubble out of a bottle …

But The Targiters. I think this will be a terrific affair. I must be bold and adventurous. I want to give the whole of the present society—nothing less: facts as well as the vision. And to combine them both. I mean, The Waves going on simultaneously with Night and Day. Is this possible? At present I have assembled 50,000 words of ‘real’ life: now in the next 50 I must somehow comment; Lord knows how—while keeping the march of events. The figure of Elvira is the difficulty. She may become too dominant. She is to be seen only in relation to other things. This should give I think a great edge to both of the realities—this contrast. At present I think the run of events is too fluid and too free. It reads thin: but lively. How am I to get the depth without becoming static? But I like these problems, and anyhow there’s a wind and a vigour in this naturalness. It should aim at immense breadth and immense intensity. It should include satire, comedy, poetry, narrative; and what form is to hold them all together? Should I bring in a play, letters, poems? I think I begin to grasp the whole. And it’s to end with the press of daily normal life continuing. And there are to be millions of ideas but no preaching—history, politics, feminism, art, literature—in short a summing up of all I know, feel, laugh at, despise, like, admire, hate and so on.

Friday, April 2 8th.

A mere note. We got out of the car last night and began walking down to the Serpentine. A summer evening. Chestnuts in their crinolines, bearing tapers; grey green water and so on. Suddenly L. bore off; and there was Shaw, dwindled shanks, white beard; striding along. We talked by a railing for 15 minutes. He stood with his arms folded, very upright, leaning back: teeth gold tipped. Just come from the dentist and ‘lured’ out for a walk by the weather. Very friendly. That is his art, to make one think he likes one. A great spurt of ideas. You forget an aeroplane is like a car—it bumps—We went over the great wall—saw a little dim object in the distance. Of course the tropics are the place. The people are the original human beings. We are smudged copies. I caught the Chinese looking at us with horror—that we should be human beings! Of course the tour cost thousands: yet to see us you’d think we hadn’t the price of the fare to Hampton Court. Lots of old spinsters had saved up for years to come. Oh but my publicity! It’s terrifying. An hour’s bombardment at every port. I made the mistake of accepting invitation. I found myself on a platform with the whole university round me. They began shouting We want Bernard Shaw. So I told them that every man at 21 must be a revolutionary. After that of course the police imprisoned them by dozens. I want to write an article for the Herald pointing out what Dickens said years ago about the folly of Parliament. Oh I could only stand the voyage by writing. I’ve written 3 or 4 books. I like to give the public full weight. Books should be sold by the pound. What a nice little dog. But aren’t I keeping you and making you cold?’ (touching my arm). Two men stopped along the path to look. Off he strode again on his dwindled legs. I said Shaw likes us. L. thinks he likes nobody. What will they say of Shaw in 50 years? He is 76 he said: too old for the tropics.

Last night—to relieve myself for a moment from correcting that silly book Flush—oh what a waste of time—I will record Bruno Walter. He is a swarthy, fattish man; not at all smart. Not at all the ‘great conductor’. He is a little Slav, a little Semitic. He is very nearly mad; that is, he can’t get ‘the poison’ as he called it of Hitler out of him. ‘You must not think of the Jews,’ he kept on saying. ‘You must think of this awful reign of intolerance. You must think of the whole state of the world. It is terrible—terrible. That this meanness, that this pettiness, should be possible! Our Germany, which I loved, with our tradition, our culture. We are now a disgrace.’ Then he told us how you can’t talk above a whisper. There are spies everywhere. He had to sit in the window of his hotel in Leipzig a whole day, telephoning. All the time soldiers were marching. They never stop marching. And on the wireless, between the turns, they play military music. Horrible, horrible! He hopes for the monarchy as the only hope. He will never go back there. His orchestra had been in existence for 150 years: but it is the spirit of the whole that is awful. We must band together. We must refuse to meet any German. We must say that they are uncivilized. We will not trade with them or play with them. We must make them feel themselves outcasts—not by fighting them; by ignoring them. Then he swept off to music. He has the intensity—genius?—which makes him live everything he feels. Described conducting: must know every player.

JUAN LES PINS

Tuesday, May 8th.

Yes, I thought, I will make a note of that face—the face of the woman stitching a very thin, lustrous green silk at a table in the restaurant where we lunched at Vienne. She was like fate—a consummate mistress of all the arts of self-preservation: hair rolled and lustrous; eyes so nonchalant; nothing could startle her; there she sat stitching her green silk with people going and coming all the time; she not looking, yet knowing, fearing nothing; expecting nothing—a perfectly equipped middle class Frenchwoman.

At Carpentras last night there was the little servant girl with honest eyes, hair brushed in a flop and one rather black tooth. I felt that life would crush her out inevitably. Perhaps 18, not more; yet on the wheel, without hope; poor, not weak but mastered—yet not enough mastered but to desire furiously travel, for a moment, a car. Ah but I am not rich, she said to me—which her cheap little stockings and shoes showed anyhow. Oh how I envy you, able to travel. You like Carpentras? But the wind blows ever so hard. You’ll come again? That’s the bell ringing. Never mind. Come over here and look at this. No, I’ve never seen anything like it. Ah yes, she always likes the English. (‘She’ was the other maid, with hair like some cactus in erection.) Yes I always like the English she said. The odd little honest face, with the black tooth, will stay on at Carpentras I suppose: will marry? will become one of those stout black women who sit in the door knitting? No: I foretell for her some tragedy: because she had enough mind to envy us the Lanchester.

PISA

Friday, May 12th.

Yes, Shelley chose better than Max Beerbohm. He chose a harbour; a bay; and his home, with a balcony, in which Mary stood, looks out across the sea. Sloping sailed boats were coming in this morning—a windy little town, of high pink and yellow southern homes, not much changed I suppose: very full of the breaking of waves, very much open to the sea; and the rather desolate house standing with the sea just in front. Shelley, I suppose, bathed, walked, sat on the beach there; and Mary and Mrs Williams had their coffee on the balcony. I daresay the clothes and the people were much the same. At any rate, a very good great man’s house in its way. What is the word for full of the sea? Can’t think tonight, sky high in a bedroom at the Nettano in Pisa, much occupied by French tourists. The Arno swimming past with the usual coffee coloured foam. Walked in the cloisters: this is true Italy, with the old dusty smell; people swarming in the streets; under the—what is the word for—I think the word for a street that has pillars is Arcade. Shelley’s house waiting by the sea, and Shelley not coming, and Mary and Mrs Williams watching from the balcony and then Trelawney coming from Pisa and burning the body on the shore—that’s in my mind. All the colours here are white bluish marble against a very light saturated sky. The tower leaning prodigiously. Clerical beggar at the door in a mock fantastic leather hat. The clergy walking. It was in these cloisters—Campo Santo—that L. and I walked 21 years ago and met the Palgraves and I tried to hide behind the pillars. And now we come in our car; and the Palgraves—are they dead, or very old? Now at any rate we have left the black country: the bald necked vulture country with its sprinkling of redroofed villas. This is the Italy one used to visit in a railway train with Violet Dickinson—taking the hotel bus.

SIENA

Saturday, May 13th.

Today we saw the most beautiful of views and the melancholy man. The view was like a line of poetry that makes itself; the shaped hill, all flushed with reds and greens; the elongated lines, cultivated every inch; old, wild, perfectly said, once and for all: and I walked up to a group and said What is that village? It called itself; and the woman with the blue eyes said, ‘Won’t you come to my house and drink?’ She was famished for talk. Four or five of them buzzed round us and made a Ciceronian speech about the beauty of the country. But I have no money to travel with, she said, wringing her hands. We would not go to her house—a cottage on the side of the hill: and shook hands: hers were dusty: she wanted to keep them from me; but we all shook hands and I wished we had gone to her house, in the loveliest of all landscapes. Then, lunching by the river, among the ants, we met the melancholy man. He had five or six little fish in his hands, which he had caught in his hands. We said it was very beautiful country; and he said no, he preferred the town. He had been to Florence: no, he did not like the country. He wanted to travel, but had no money: worked at some village: no, he did not like the country, he repeated, with his gentle cultivated voice: no theatres, no pictures, only perfect beauty. I gave him cigarettes; at first he refused, then offered us his six or seven little fish. But we could not cook them at Siena, we said. No, he agreed, and so we parted.

It is all very well, saying one will write notes, but writing is a very difficult art. That is one has always to select: and I am too sleepy and hence merely run sand through my fingers. Writing is not in the least an easy art. Thinking what to write, it seems easy; but the thought evaporates, runs hither and thither. Here we are in the noise of Siena—the vast tunnelled arched stone town, swarmed over by the chattering shrieking children.

Sunday, May 14th.

Yes, I am reading—skipping—the Sacred Fount, about the most inappropriate of all books for this din—sitting by the open window, looking across heads and heads and heads—all Siena parading in grey and pink and the cars hooting. How finely run along those involuted threads? I don’t.—that’s the answer. I let ’em break. I only mark that the sign of a masterly writer is his power to break his mould callously. None of H.J.’s timid imitators have the vigour, once they’ve spun their, sentence, to smash it. He has some native juice—figure: has driven his spoon deep into some stew of his own—some swarming mixture. That—his vitality—his vernacular—his pounce and grip and swing always spring fresh upon me, if at the same time I ask how could anyone, outside an orchid in a greenhouse, fabricate such an orchid’s dream. Oh these Edwardian ladies with pale hair, these tailored ‘my dear men’! Yet compared to that vulgar old brute Creevey—L. is here bitten by a flea—H.J. is muscular, lean. No doubt the society of the Regent—the smell of brandy and bones, the painted velvet Lawrence women—the general laxity and lushness and vulgarity are here at their superlative. Of course the Shelleys, the Wordsworths, the Coleridges existed on the other side of the hedge. But when it comes gushing out of Creevey’s page, it’s for all the world like—something between Buckingham Palace, Brighton and the Queen’s own italic style—so uncurbed, so weak: and how can one hope for a cure for a single person? There’s all the dreary Lords and Ladies ogling and overeating; and plush and gilt; and the Princess and the Prince—I think dissolution and obesity taking hold of the 18th Century and swelling it into a puff ball efflorescence. 1860 is considerably more to the point.

Monday, May 15th.

This should be all description—I mean of the little pointed green hills; and the white oxen and the poplars and the cypresses and the sculptured shaped infinitely musical, flushed green land from here to Abbazia—that is where we went today; and couldn’t find it and asked one after another of the charming tired peasants, but none had been 4 miles beyond their range, until we came to the stonebreaker and he knew. He could not stop work to come with us, because the inspector was coming tomorrow. And he was alone, alone, all day with no one to talk to. So was the aged Maria at the Abbazia. And she mumbled and slipped her words, as she showed us into the huge bare stone building; mumbled and mumbled, about the English—how beautiful they were. Are you a Contessa? she asked me. But she didn’t like Italian country either. They seem stinted, dried up; like grasshoppers and with the manners of impoverished gentle people; sad, wise, tolerant, humorous. There was the man with the mule. He let the mule gallop away down the road. We are welcome, because we might talk; they draw round and discuss us after we’re gone. Crowds of gentle kindly boys and girls always come about us and wave and touch their hats. And nobody looks at the view—except us—at the Euganean, bone white, this evening; then there’s a ruddy red farm or two; and light islands swimming here and there in the sea of shadow—for it was very showery—then there are the black stripes of cypresses round the farm; like fur edges; and the poplars and the streams and the nightingales singing and sudden gusts of orange blossom; and white alabaster oxen with swinging chins—great flaps of white leather hanging under their noses—and infinite emptiness, loneliness, silence: never a new house, or a village; but only the vineyards and the olive trees, where they have always been. The hills go pale blue, washed very sharp and soft on the sky; hill after hill.

PIACENZA

Friday, May. 19th.

It’s a queer thing that I write a date. Perhaps in this disoriented life one thinks, if I can say what day it is, then … Three dots to signify I don’t know what I mean. But we have been driving all day from Lerici over the Apennines and it is now cold, cloistral, highly uncomfortable, in a vast galleried Italian inn, so ill provided with chairs that now at this present moment we are squatted, L. in a hard chair by his bed, I on the bed, in order to take advantage of the single light which burns between us.

L. is writing directions to the Press. I am about to read Goldoni.

Lerici is hot and blue and we had a room with a balcony. There were Misses and Mothers—misses who had lost all chance of life long ago, and could with a gentle frown, a frown of mild sadness, confront a whole meal—arranged for the English—in entire silence, dressed as if for cold Sunday supper in Wimbledon. Then there’s the retired Anglo-Indian, who takes shall we say Miss Toutchet for a walk, a breezy red faced man, very fond of evensong at the Abbey. She goes to the Temple; where ‘my brother’ has rooms. Et cetera. Et cetera. Of the Apennines I have nothing to say—save that up on the top they’re like the inside of a green umbrella: spine after spine: and clouds caught on the point of the stick. And so down to Parma; hot, stony, noisy, with shops that don’t keep maps; and so on along a racing road, to Piacenza, at which we find ourselves now at 6 minutes to 9 p.m. This of course is the rub of travelling—this is the price paid for the sweep and the freedom—the dusting of our shoes and careering off tomorrow—and eating our lunch on a green plot beside a deep cold stream. It will be all over this day week—comfort—discomfort; and the zest and rush that no engagements, hours, habits give. Then we shall take them up again with more than the zest of travelling.

Sunday, May 21st.

To write to keep off sleep—that is the exalted mission of tonight—tonight sitting at the open window of a second-rate inn in Draguignan—with plane trees outside, the usual single noted bird, the usual loudspeaker. Everybody in France motors on Sunday; then sleeps it off at night. The hotel keepers are gorged and scarcely stop playing cards. But Grasse was too plethoric—we came on here late. We leave here early. I dip into Creevey; L. into Golden Bough. We long for bed. This is the tax for travelling—these sleepy uncomfortable hotel nights—sitting on hard chairs under the lamp. But the seduction works as we start—to Aix tomorrow—so home. And ‘home’ becomes a magnet, for I can’t stop making up the P’s: can’t live without that intoxicant—though this is the loveliest and most distracting alternative. But I’m full of holiday and want work—ungrateful that I am!—and yet I want the hills near Fabbria too and the hills near Siena—but no other hills—not these black and green violent monotonous southern hills. We saw poor Lawrence’s Phoenix picked out in coloured pebbles at Venice today among all the fretted lace tombs.

Tuesday, May 23rd.

I have just said to myself if it were possible to write, those white sheets would be the very thing, not too large or too small. But I do not wish to write, except as an irritant. This is the position. I sit on L.’s bed; he in the only armchair. People tap up and down on the pavement. This is Vienne. It is roasting hot—hotter and hotter it gets—and we are driving through France; and it’s Tuesday and we cross on Friday and this strange interval of travel, of sweeping away from habitation and habits will be over. On and on we go—through Aix, through Avignon, on and on, under arches of leaves, over bare sandy roads, under grey black hills with castles, beside vines: and I’m thinking of the Pargiters: and L. is driving; and when we come to poplars we get out and lunch by the river; and then on; and take a cup of tea by the river: fetch our letters, learn that Lady Cynthia Mosley is dead: picture the scene; wonder at death; and drowse and doze in the heat, and decide to sleep here—hotel de la Poste; and read another letter and learn that the Book Society will probably take Flush and speculate what we shall do if we have £1,000 or £2,000 to spend. And what would these little burghers of Vienne, who are drinking coffee, do with that sum, I ask? The girl is a typist; the young men clerks. For some reason they start discussing hotels at Lyons, I think; and they haven’t a penny piece between them; and all the men go into the urinal, one sees their legs; and the Morocco soldiers go in their great cloaks; and the children play ball and people stand lounging and everything becomes highly pictorial, composed, legs in particular—the odd angles they make: and the people dining in the hotel; and the queer air it all has, since we shall leave early tomorrow, of something designing Vienne on my mind, significantly. Now the draw of home, and freedom and no packing tells on us—oh to sit in an armchair; and read and not have to ask for Eau Mineral, with which to brush our teeth!

52 Tavistock Square

Tuesday, May 30th.

Yes, but of all things coming home from a holiday is undoubtedly the most damned. Never was there such aimlessness, such depression. Can’t read, write or think. There’s no climax here. Comfort yès: but the coffee’s not so good as I expected. And my brain is extinct—literally hasn’t the power to lift a pen. What one must do is to set it—my machine I mean—in the rails and give it a push. Lord—how I pushed yesterday to make it start running along Goldsmith again. There’s that half finished article. Lord Salisbury said something about dished up speeches being like the cold remains of last night’s supper. I see white grease on the pages of my article. Today it’s a little warmer—tepid meat: a slab of cold mutton. It’s coldish, dullish here. Yes, but I hear the clock tick and suspect, though I must not look, that the wheels are just beginning to turn on the rails. We go to Monk’s House for Whitsun, which is Monday—the suburban, the diminished Monk’s House. No, I can’t look at The Pargiters. It’s an empty snail shell. And I’m empty with a cold slab of a brain. Never mind. I shall dive head foremost into The Pargiters. And now I shall make my mind run along Italian—what’s his name—Goldoni. A few verbs I think.

And I am at once called out to draw lots in our Derby sweepstake. No favourite this year, they say.

It occurs to me that this state, my depressed state, is the state in which most people usually are.

Wednesday, May 31st.

I think I have now got to the point where I can write for four months straight ahead at The Pargiters. Oh the relief—the physical relief! I feel as if I could hardly any longer keep back—that my brain is being tortured by always butting against a blank wall—I mean Flush, Goldsmith, motoring through Italy. Now, tomorrow, I mean to run it off. And suppose only nonsense comes? The thing is to be venturous, bold, to take every possible fence. One might introduce plays, poems, letters, dialogues: must get the round, not only the flat. Not the theory only. And conversation: argument. How to do that will be one of the problems. I mean intellectual argument in the form of art: I mean how give ordinary waking Arnold Bennett life the form of art? These are rich hard problems for my four months ahead. And I don’t know my own gifts at the moment. I’m disoriented completely after four weeks’ holiday—no three—but tomorrow we go to Rodmell again. And I must fill up the chinks with reading—and don’t want to settle down to books Well, now I have to go up to Murray about my dress: and there’s Ethel round the corner; but no letters; disorganization from Whitsun again. I thought, driving through Richmond last night, something very profound about the synthesis of my being: how only writing composes it: how nothing makes a whole unless I am writing: now I have forgotten what seemed so profound. The rhododendron Eke coloured glass mounds at Kew. Oh the agitation, oh the discomfort of this mood.

Very well: the old Pargiters are beginning to run off: and I say oh to be done. I mean, writing is effort: writing is despair: and yet of course t’other day in the grilling heat at Rodmell I admit that the perspective—this I think was something like my profound thought at Richmond—shifts into focus: yes: the proportion is right: though I at the top suffer strain; suffer, as this morning, grim despair and shall O Lord when it comes to re-writing suffer an intensity of anguish ineffable (the word only means one can’t express it); holding the things;—all the things—the innumerable things—together.

Monday, July 10th.

Bella1 arrived and knocked her head upon the window of the car. She cut her nose and was dazed. And then I was in ‘one of my states’—how violent, how acute—and walked in Regent’s Park in black misery and had to summon my cohorts in the old way to see me through, which they have done more or less. A note made to testify to my own ups and downs: many of which go unrecorded though they are less violent I think than they used to be. But how familiar it was—stamping along the road, with gloom and pain constricting my heart: and the desire for death, in the old way, all for two I daresay careless words.

Thursday, July 20th.

I am again in full flood with The Vargiters after a week of very scanty pages. The trouble is to get the meat pressed in: I mean to keep the rhythm and convey the meaning. It tends more and more, I think—at any rate the E.M. scenes—to drama. I think the next lap ought to be objective, realistic, in the manner of Jane Austen: carrying the story on all the time.

Saturday, August 12th.

So naturally after Mrs Nef I was so tired—I shivered and shook. I went to bed for 2 days and slept I daresay 7 hours, visiting the silent realms again. It strikes me—what are these sudden fits of complete exhaustion? I come in here to write: can’t even finish a sentence; and am pulled under; now is this some odd effort; the subconscious pulling me down into her? I’ve been reading Faber on Newman; compared his account of a nervous breakdown; the refusal of some part of the mechanism; is that what happens to me? Not quite. Because I’m not evading anything. I long to write The Vargiters. No. I think the effort to live in two spheres: the novel; and life; is a strain. Nefs almost break me because they strain me so far from the other world; I only want walking and perfectly spontaneous childish life with L. and the accustomed when I’m writing at full tilt: to have to behave with circumspection and decision to strangers wrenches me into another region; hence the collapse.

Wednesday, August 16th.

And owing to Sir Alan Cobham’s flying and Angelica and Julian and fetching the boat I had another headache and bed and didn’t see Ethel, but heard her voice and have 6 pages on the subject this morning, and didn’t see the Wolves and am out here again1 rubbing at The Vargiters and thinking Oh Lord how am I ever going to pull all that into shape. What a tremendous struggle it’ll be! Never mind. I want to discuss 5 In her workroom at the end of Monk’s House garden.

Form, having been reading Turgenev. (But how my hand trembles after one of these headaches—can’t lay hands on words or pens exactly—the habit has been broken.)

Form, then, is the sense that one thing follows another rightly. This is partly logic. T. wrote and re-wrote. To clear the truth of the unessential. But Dostoievsky would say that everything matters. But one can’t read D. again. Now Shakespeare was constrained in form by the stage. (T. says one must find a new form for the old subject: but here, I suppose, uses the word differently.) The essential thing in a scene is to be preserved. How do you know what this is? How do we know if the D. form is better or worse than the T.? It seems less permanent. T.’s idea that the writer states the essential and lets the reader do the rest. D. to supply the reader with every possible help and suggestion. T. reduces the possibilities. The difficulty about criticism is that it is so superficial. The writer has gone so much deeper. T. kept a diary for Bozarov: wrote everything from his point of view. We have only 250 short pages. Our criticism is only a bird’s eye view of the pinnacle of an iceberg. The rest under water. One might begin it in this way. The article might be more broken, less composed than usual.

Thursday, August 24th.

A week ago, on Friday to be precise, having got my mind again, I dipped into The Pargiters and determined to sweat it bare of flesh before going on, accumulating more scenes. I am re-arranging too, all the first part, so as to bring it together. The death happens in the first chapter now. I think I shall reduce the size by half; it is however a little bare and jerky at present. Moreover it is rather a rush and a strain. I have just killed Mrs P.: and can’t shoot ahead to Oxford. For the truth is these little scenes embroil one, just as in life; and one can’t switch off to a different mood all in a second. It seems to me that the realness of the beginning is complete. I have a good excuse for poetry in the second part, if I can take it. Rather an interesting experiment—if I could see the same thing from two different views. And now I have spent the morning reading the Confession of Arsène Houssaye left here yesterday by Clive. What a vast fertility of pleasure books hold for me!

I went in and found the table laden with books. I looked in and sniffed them all. I could not resist carrying this one off and broaching it. I think I could happily live here and read forever.

Saturday, September 2nd.

Suddenly in the night I thought of Here and Now as a title for the Pargiters. I think it better. It shows what I’m after and does not compete with the Herries Saga, the Forsyte Saga and so on. I have now done the first part; I mean compressed it, shall, I think, compress Eleanor’s day, and then what? The rest does not admit of much compression. I think I have reduced it to 80,000 words perhaps: but it seems to me there must be another 40, to come. 80 plus 40 equals 120,000. If so it will be the longest of my little brood—longer than Night and Day I imagine.

Tuesday, September 26th.

Why not, one of these days, write a fantasy on the theme of Crabbe?—a biographical fantasy—an experiment in biography.

I had so much of the most profound interest to write here—a dialogue of the soul with the soul—and I have let it all slip—why? Because of feeding the goldfish, of looking at the new pond, of playing bowls. Nothing remains now. I forget what it was about. Happiness. The perfect day, which was yesterday. And so on. Now I began the morning by telephoning corrections of Twelfth Night, to the N.S.: put in a comma, take out semi-colon; and so on. Then I come out here, having seen the carp, and write Turgenev.

Monday, October 2nd.

It’s October now; and we have to go to Hastings Conference tomorrow and Wednesday, to Vita, then back to London. I opened this in order to make one of my self-admonishments previous to publishing a book. Flush will be out on Thursday and I shall be very much depressed, I think, by the kind of praise. They’ll say it’s ‘charming’, delicate, ladylike. And it will be popular. Well now I must let this slip over me without paying it any attention. I must concentrate on The Pargiters—or Here and Now. I must not let myself believe that I’m simply a ladylike prattler: for one thing it’s not true. But they’ll all say so. And I shall very much dislike the popular success of Flush. No, I must say to myself, this is a mere wisp, a veil of water; and so create, hardly, fiercely, as I feel now more able to do than ever before.

Sunday, October 29th.

No, my head is too tired to go on with Bobby and Elvira—they’re to meet at St Paul’s—this morning. I wish I could get it full and calm and unconscious. This last is difficult, owing to Flush, owing to the perpetual little spatter of comment that keeps me awake. Yesterday the Granta said I was now defunct. Orlando, Waves, Flush represent the death of a potentially great writer. This is only a rain drop, I mean the snub some little pimpled undergraduate likes to administer, just as he would put a frog in one’s bed: but then there’s all the letters and the requests for pictures—so many that, foolishly perhaps, I wrote a sarcastic letter to the NS.—thus procuring more rain drops. This metaphor shows how tremendously important unconsciousness is when one writes. But let me remember that fashion in literature is an inevitable thing; also that one must grow and change; also that I have, at last, laid hands upon my philosophy of anonymity. My letter to the N.S. is the crude public statement of a part of it. How odd last winter’s revelation was! freedom; which now I find makes it quite easy for me to refuse Sibyl’s invitations, to take life much more strongly and steadily. I will not be ‘famous’, ‘great’. I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes, refusing to be stamped and stereotyped. The thing is to free one’s self: to let it find its dimensions, not be impeded. And though this as usual is only a pot shot, there is a great deal of substance in it. October has been a bad month; but might have been much worse without my philosophy.

Thursday, December 7th.

I was walking through Leicester Square—how far from China—just now when I read ‘Death of Noted Novelist’ on the posters. And I thought of Hugh Walpole. But it is Stella Benson. Then why write anything, immediately? I did not know her; but have a sense of those fine patient eyes: the weak voice; the cough; the sense of oppression. She sat on the terrace with me at Rodmell. And now, so quickly, it is gone, what might have been a friendship. Trusty and patient and very sincere—I think of her; trying to cut through, in one of those difficult evenings, to some deeper layer—certainly we could have reached it, given the chance. I’m glad I stopped her at the door as she got into her little car and asked her to call me Virginia—to write to me. And she said: ‘There’s nothing I should like better.’ But it’s like the quenching of something—her death out there in China; and I sitting here and writing about her and so fugitive and yet so true; and no more to come. How mournful the afternoon seems, with the newspaper carts(?) dashing up Kingsway, ‘Death of Noted Novelist’ on the placard. A very fine steady mind: much suffering; suppressed;—there seems to be some sort of reproach to me in her death, as in K.M.’s. I go on; and they cease. Why? Why not my name on the posters? And I have a feeling of the protest each might make: gone with their work unfinished—each so suddenly. Stella was 41. ‘I am going to send you my book’ and so on. A dreary island she lived on, talking to colonels. A curious feeling, when a writer like S.B. dies, that one’s response is diminished: Here and Now won’t be lit up by her: it’s life lessened. My effusion—what I send out—less porous and radiant—as if the thinking stuff were a web that were fertilized only by other people’s (her that is) thinking it too: now lacks life.

Sunday, December 17th.

I finished part 4 of Here and Now yesterday and therefore in-indulge in a contemplative morning. To freshen my memory of the war, I read some old diaries.

[]

1934.

Tuesday, January 16th.

I have let all this time—three weeks at Monk’s—slip because I was there so divinely happy and pressed with ideas—another full flood of Targiters or Here and Now (odd that Goldie’s letter mentions that—The Waves is also here and now—I had forgotten). So I never wrote a word of farewell to the year; not a word describing the Keynes and the Jones; nothing about the walks I had ever so far into the downs; or the reading—Marvell of an evening, and the usual trash.

Sunday, February 18th.

And I began Here and Now again this morning, Sunday, at the point where I left off all but three weeks ago for my headache. Here I note that from two to three weeks is the right space. It has not gone cold, as after six weeks: I still carry it in my mind, and can see how to revise. It has gone—the talk during the Raid—running all over the place, because I was tired; now I must press together: get into the mood and start again. I want to raise up the magic world all round me and live strongly and quietly there for six weeks. The difficulty is the usual one—how to adjust the two worlds. It is no good getting violently excited: one must combine.

Tuesday, April 17th.

So jaded am I after last night that I cannot add a word to my Sickert or make out a sketch of the last chapters of Here and Now. A high price to pay for a hurried dinner at the Hutches: racing to Macbeth; talking to Dodo Macnaghten; then to Sir Fred Pollock on the stage of Sadlers Wells. An idea about Shakespeare.

That the play demands coming to the surface—hence insists upon a reality which the novel need not have, but perhaps should have contact with the surface, coming to the top. This is working out my theory of the different levels in writing and how to combine them: for I begin to think the combination necessary. This particular relation with the surface is imposed on the dramatist of necessity: how far did it influence Shakespeare? Idea that one could work out a theory of fiction etc. on these lines; how many levels attempted, whether kept to or not.

Wednesday, May 8th.

This, the 9th May, was our last day and fine. So we saw Warwickshire—but I’ve been reading the Monologue and note how oddly another style infects—at its best: thick green, thick leaves, stubby yellow stone houses and a fine sprinkling of Elizabethan cottages. All this led very harmoniously to Stratford on Avon; and all crabbers be damned—it is a fine, unselfconscious town, mixed, with 18th Century and the rest all standing cheek by jowl. All the flowers were out in Shakespeare’s garden. That was where his study windows looked out when he wrote The Tempest,’ said the man. And perhaps it was true. Anyhow it was a great big house, looking straight at the large windows and the grey stone of the school chapel, and when the clock struck, that was the sound Shakespeare heard. I cannot without more labour than my roadrunning mind can compass describe the queer impression of sunny impersonality. Yes, everything seemed to say, this was Shakespeare’s, had he sat and walked; but you won’t find me, not exactly in the flesh. He is serenely absent—present; both at once; radiating round one; yes; in the flowers, in the old hall, in the garden; but never to be pinned down. And we went to the church and there was the florid foolish bust, but what I had not reckoned for was the worn simple slab, turned the wrong way. Kind Friend for Jesus’ sake forbear—again he seemed to be all air and sun smiling serenely; and yet down there one foot from me lay the little bones that had spread over the world this vast illumination. Yes, and then we walked round the church and all is simple and a little worn; the river slipping past the stone wall, with a red breadth from some flowering tree, and the edge of the turf unspoilt, soft and green and muddy and two casual nonchalant swans. The church and the school and the house are all roomy spacious places, resonant, sunny today, and in and out yes, an impressive place; still living, and then the little bones lying there, which have created: to think of writing The Tempest looking out on that garden: what a rage and storm of thought to have gone over any mind; no doubt the solidity of the place was comfortable. No doubt he saw the cellars with serenity. And a few scented American girls and a good deal of parrot prattle from old gramophone discs at the birthplace, one taking up the story from the other. But isn’t it odd, the caretaker at New Place agreed, that only one genuine signature of Shakespeare’s is known; and all the rest, books, furniture, pictures etc. has completely vanished? Now I think Shakespeare was very happy in this, that there was no impediment of fame, but his genius flowed out of him and is still there, in Stratford. They were acting As You Like It I think in the theatre.

Duffers the biographers not to make more hum and melody out of New Place. I could, so I think. For the man told us that after the great grand-daughter’s death there was a sale, and why shouldn’t some of his things, he said, be lost, put away and come to light? Also, Queen H. Maria, Charles I’s queen, stayed there at New Place with the grand-daughter(?) which shows how substantial it must have been. That he told us, and I had never heard. And he said Gaskell, the clergyman, had the original house, which stretched across the garden almost to the chapel, pulled down because people bothered him, asking to see Shakespeare’s house. And there (between the window and the wall) was the room he died in. A mullberry reputes to be the scion of the tree that grew outside Shakespeare’s window. Great cushions of blue, yellow, white flowers in the garden, which is open, so that the living go on walking and sitting there.

Friday, May 18th.

I broke off, after sticking my Irish papers into the old book, and felt I suppose a little shiver. Can’t be anything I said to myself after all that holiday; but it was—the flu. So I had to resign all ideas—all flood of Pargiters and the glorious and difficult end of that book: all was blotted by the damp sponge; and now it is precisely a week since I went to bed, and here we are for Whitsun at Monk’s. What’s more amazing is that I write this with a gold Waterman, and have some thoughts of supplanting steel Woolworth. It is a sunny voluptuous day, the birds all rasping on their nests, I suppose, and cawing on the trees and early in the morning giving loud and continued bursts of songs to which I lie listening. I hear L. going about the garden with Percy. All is calm and profoundly comfortable, owing to the absence for ever even in the background of grumbling Nelly and her replacement by the steady silent unselfish Mabel. Yes, we do without a char; we are free, serene, matter of fact, oh what a relief! So if I can pull my head out of the bog, I may go back on Tuesday to the three months Immersion. But I take a day or two more to rest myself. How infinitely modest and disillusioned and without ambition of any sort I became, all because of influenza. Couldn’t believe that anyone would come and see me, let alone that I could ever again string a dozen words. Now self confidence, conceit, the blessed illusion by which we live begin to return; very gently. Smooth serenity is the first stage which I will not interrupt by writing.

Tuesday, May 22nd.

At last today, which is Tuesday, after striking the match on the box despairingly, sterilely—oh I was so overcome with rigidity and nothingness—a little flame has come. Perhaps I’m off. This refers to the devilish difficulty of starting Part 7 again after the ‘flu. Elvira and George, or John, talking in her room. I’m still miles outside them, but I think I got into the right tone of voice this morning. I make this note by way of warning. What is important now is to go very slowly; to stop in the middle of the flood; never to press on; to lie back and let the soft subconscious world become populous; not to be urging foam from my lips. There’s no hurry. I’ve enough money to last a year. If this book comes out next June year it’s time enough. The last chapters must be so rich, so resuming, so weaving together that I can only go on by letting my mind brood every morning on the whole book. There’s no longer any need to forge ahead, as the narrative part is over. What I want is to enrich and stabilize. This last chapter must equal in length and importance and volume the first book: and must in fact give the other side, the submerged side of that. I shan’t, I think, re-read; I shall summon it back—the tea party, the death, Oxford and so on, from my memory. And as the whole book depends on bringing this off, I must be very leisurely and patient and nurse my rather creaking head and dandle it with French and so on as cunningly as possible.

Monday, June 11th.

That hopeful page reads rather too credulous now, since I went back and again on Friday following shivered, and ached, was stiff as a rod, talking to Elizabeth Bowen: 101: bed: influenza: and so lay all that week, till last Sunday to be accurate: and then went to Rodmell; and there began the chapter again and had a sudden fuse of ideas and then there was the opera, the nightingale singing in the ilex tree, Christabel and Mr Olaf Hambro telling stories about the Queen and Prince: and a very hot concert yesterday, so I cannot, no I cannot, write today. Patience, as Carlyle would say (in Italian). But consider—the whole system is so strained over this end, that one tiny grit, one late night, one too tiring day—takes away all rush, all fusing. And just as I saw it clear before me: the very intricate scenes: all contrasting; building up: so wait till tomorrow.

Monday, June 18th.

Very very hot: day altered so as to go out after tea. A drought over the world. In flood with Here and Now, praise be. Yet very wary: only just now I made up the scene with Ray and Maggie: a sign I am fertilizing, for i should be doing French for Janie, who comes at 5.

Friday, July 27th.

Ah hah—but now, having despatched that entirely disagreeable day, Worthing and Mr Fears, representing Rodmell Labour Party for an hour after dinner, I’m free to begin the last chapter; and by a merciful Providence the well is full, ideas are rising and if I can keep at it widely, freely, powerfully, I shall have two months of complete immersion. Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order. I can see the day whole, proportioned—even after a long flutter of the brain such as I’ve had this morning it must be a physical, moral, mental necessity, like setting the engine off. A wild windy hot day—a tearing wind in the garden; all the July apples on the grass. I’m going to indulge in a series of quick sharp contrasts: breaking my moulds as much as ever I like. Trying every kind of experiment. Now of course I can’t write diary or letters or read because I am making up all the time. Perhaps Bob T. was right in his poem when he called me fortunate above all—I mean in having a mind that can express—no, I mean in having mobilized my being—learnt to give it complete outcome—I mean, that I have to some extent forced myself to break every mould and find a fresh form of being, that is of expression, for everything I feel or think. So that when it is working I get the sense of being fully energized—nothing stunted. But this needs constant effort, anxiety and rush. Here in Here and Now I am breaking the mould made by The Waves.

Thursday, August 2nd.

I’m worried too with my last chapters. Is it all too shrill and voluble? And then the immense length, and the perpetual ebbs and flows of invention. So divinely happy one day; so jaded the next.

Monday, August 7th.

A rather wet Bank Holiday. Tea with Keynes. Maynard had had teeth out but was very fertile. For instance: Yes, I’ve been 3 weeks in America. An impossible climate. In fact it has collected all the faults of all the climates. This carries out my theory about climate. Nobody could produce a great work in America. One sweats all day and the dirt sticks to one’s face. The nights are as hot as the days. Nobody sleeps. Everyone is kept on the go all day long by the climate. I used to dictate articles straight off. I felt perfectly well until I left. ‘So to German politics.’ They’re doing something very queer with their money.

‘I can’t make out what. It may be the Jews are taking away their capital. Let me see, if 2,000 Jews were each to take away £2,000—Anyhow, they can’t pay their Lancashire bill. Always the Germans have bought cotton from Egypt, had it spun in Lancashire; it’s a small bill, only half a million, but they can’t pay. Yet they’re buying copper all the time. What’s it for? Armaments no doubt. That’s one of the classic examples of international trade. 20,000 people out of work. But of course there’s something behind it. What is the cause of the financial crisis? They’re doing something foolish. No Treasury control of the soldiers.

(But I am thinking all the time of what is to end Here and Now. I want a chorus, a general statement, a song for four voices. How am I to get it? I am now almost within sight of the end, racing along: becoming more and more dramatic. And how to make the transition from the colloquial to the lyrical, from the particular to the general?)

Friday, August 17th.

Yes, I think owing to the sudden rush of two wakeful nights, making up early mornings rather, I think I see the end of Here and Now (or Music or Dawn or whatever I shall call it): it’s to end with Elvira going out of the house and saying What did I make this knot in my handkerchief for? and all the coppers rolling about

It’s to be all in speeches—no play. I have now made a sketch of what everyone is to say; and it ends with a supper party in the downstairs room. I think the back is broken. It will run to something like 850 of my rough pages I imagine: which is at 200, 170,000 and I shall sweat it down to 130,000.

Tuesday, August 21st.

The lesson of Here and Now is that one can use all kinds of ‘forms’ in one book. Therefore the next might be poem, reality, comedy, play; narrative, psychology all in one. Very short. This needs thinking over also, a play about the Parnells, or a biography of Mrs P.

Thursday, August 30th.

If I can’t even write here, owing to making up the last scenes, how can I possibly read Dante? Impossible. After three days’ grind, getting back, I am I think floated again. Robson comes to tea today; and the Wolves tomorrow; and … another lapse making up Elvira’s speech … ‘D’you know what I’ve been clasping in my hand all the evening? Coppers.’

Well anyhow, I’ve enough in stock to last out this chapter; I daresay another two or three weeks. Yesterday I found a new walk, and a new farm, in the fold between Asheham and Tarring Neville. Very lovely, all alone, with the down rising behind. Then I walked back by a rough broad overflowing grey river. The porpoise came up and gulped. It rained. All ugliness was dissolved. An incredibly 18th Century landscape, happily making me think less of Wilmington.

A tremendous hailstorm after tea; like white ice; broken up: lanced, lashing; like the earth being whipped. This happened several times; black clouds while we played Brahms. No letters at all this summer. But there will be many next year, I predict. And I don’t mind; the day, yesterday to be exact, being so triumphant: writing; the walk; reading, Leeson, a Saint Simon, Henry James’s preface to P. of a Lady—very clever, but one or two things I recognize; then Gide’s Journal, again full of startling recollection—things I could have said myself.

Sunday, September 2nd.

I don’t think I have ever been more excited over a book than I am writing the end of—shall it be Dawn? Or is that too emphatic, sentimental. I wrote like a—forget the word—yesterday; my cheeks burn; my hands tremble. I am doing the scene where Peggy listens to their talking and bursts out. It was this outburst that excited me so. Too much perhaps. I can’t make the transition to E.’s speech easily.

Wednesday, September 12th.

Roger died on Sunday. Tomorrow we go up, following some instinct, to the funeral. I feel dazed; very wooden. Women cry, L. says: but I don’t know why I cry—mostly with Nessa. And I’m too stupid to write anything. My head all stiff. I think the poverty of life now is what comes to me; and this blackish veil over everything. Hot weather; a wind blowing. The substance gone out of everything. I don’t think this is exaggerated.

It’ll come back I suppose. Indeed I feel a great wish, now and then, to live more all over the place, to see people, to create, only for the time one can’t make the effort. And I can’t write to Helen, but I must now shut this and try.

Maupassant, on writers (true I think). ‘En lui aucun sentiment simple n’existe plus. Tout ce qu’il voit, ses joies, ses plaisirs, ses souffrances, ses désespoirs, deviennent instantanément des sujets d’observation. Il analyse malgré tout, malgré lui, sans fin, les coeurs, les visages, les gestes, les intonations.’

Remember turning aside at mother’s bed, when she had died, and Stella took us in, to laugh, secretly, at the nurse crying. She’s pretending, I said, aged 13, and was afraid I was not feeling enough. So now. The writer’s temperament.

‘Ne jamais souffrir, penser, aimer, sentir, Sur l’eau 116 comme tout le monde, bonnement, franchement, simplement, sans s’analyser soi-même après chaque joie et après chaque sanglot.’

Saturday, September 15th.

I was glad we went to the service on Thursday. It was a very hot summer’s day. And all very simple and dignified. Music. Not a word spoken. We sat there, before the open doors that lead into the garden. Flowers and strollers which Roger would have liked. He lay under an old red brocade with two branches of very bright many coloured flowers. It is a strong instinct to be with one’s friends. I thought of him too, at intervals. Dignified and honest and large—‘large sweet soul’—something ripe and musical about him—and then the fun and the fact that he had lived with such variety and generosity and curiosity. I thought of this.

Tuesday, September 18th.

I like writing this morning because it takes off the strain on the lips. A cold dull day after all this blaze. Now we have Graham, and Mrs W., but then, perhaps, peace: and an end to the book? O if that could be! But I feel 10 miles distant—far away—detached, very jaded now.

I had a notion that I could describe the tremendous feeling at R.’s funeral: but of course I can’t. I mean the universal feeling; how we all fought with our brains, loves and so on; and must be vanquished. Then the vanquisher, this outer force became so clear; the indifferent, and we so small, fine, delicate. A fear then came to me, of death. Of course I shall lie there too before that gate and slide in; and it frightened me. But why? I mean, I felt the vainness of this perpetual fight, with our brains and loving each other against the other thing; if Roger could die.

But then, next day, today, which is Thursday, one week later, the other thing begins to work—the exalted sense of being above time and death which comes from being again in a writing mood. And this is not an illusion, so far as I can tell. Certainly I have a strong sense that Roger would be all on one’s side in this excitement, and that whatever the invisible force does, we thus get outside it. A nice letter from Helen. And today we go to Worthing--

Sunday, September 30th.

The last words of the nameless book were written 10 minutes ago, quite calmly too. 900 pages: L. says 200,000 words. Lord God what an amount of re-writing that means! But also, how heavenly to have brought the pen to a stop at the last Une, even if most of the lines have now to be rubbed out. Anyhow the design is there. And it has taken a little less than 2 years: some months less indeed, as Flush intervened; therefore it has been written at a greater gallop than any of my books. The representational part accounts for the fluency. And I should say—but do I always say this?—with greater excitement: not, I think, of the same kind quite. For I have been more general, less personal. No ‘beautiful writing’; much easier dialogue; but a great strain, because so many more faculties had to keep going at once, though none so pressed upon. No tears and exaltation at the end; but peace and breadth, I hope. Anyhow, if I die tomorrow, the line is there. And I am fresh; and shall re-write the end tomorrow. I don’t think I’m fresh enough, though, to go on ‘making up’. That was the strain—the invention: and I suspect that the last 20 pages have slightly flagged. Too many odds and ends to sweep up. But I have no idea of the whole

Tuesday, October 2nd.

Yes, but my head will never let me glory sweepingly; always a tumble. Yesterday morning the old rays of light set in; and then the sharp, the very sharp pain over my eyes; so that I sat and lay about till tea; had no walk, had not a single idea of triumph or relief. L. bought me a little travelling ink pot, by way of congratulation. I wish I could think of a name. Sons and Daughters’! Probably used already. There’s a mass to be done to the last chapter, which I shall, I hope, d.v., as they say in some circles, I suppose, still, begin tomorrow; while the putty is still soft.

So the summer is ended. Until 9th of September, when Nessa came across the terrace—how I hear that cry He’s dead—a very vigorous, happy summer. Oh the joy of walking! I’ve never felt it so strong in me. Cowper Powys, oddly enough, expresses the same thing: the trance like, swimming, flying through the air; the current of sensations and ideas; and the slow, but fresh change of down, of road, of colour; all this churned up into a fine thin sheet of perfect calm happiness. It’s true I often painted the brightest pictures on the sheet and often talked aloud. Lord how many pages of Sons and Daughters—perhaps Daughters and Sons would give a rhythm more unlike Sons and Lovers, or Wives and Daughters—I made up, chattering them in my excitement on the top of the down, in the fold. Too many buildings, alas; and gossip to the effect that Christie and the Ringmer Building Co. are buying Botten’s Farm to build on. Sunday I was worried, walking to Lewes, by the cars and the villas. But again, I’ve discovered the ghostly farm walk; and the Piddinghoe walk; and such variety and loveliness—the river lead and silver; the ship—Servic of London—going down: the bridge opened. Mushrooms and the garden at night: the moon, like a dying dolphin’s eye; or red orange, the harvest moon; or polished like a steel knife; or lambent; sometimes rushing across the sky; sometimes hanging among the branches. Now in October the thick wet mist has come, thickening and blotting. On Sunday we had Bunny and Julian.

Thursday, October 4th.

A violent rain storm on the pond. The pond is covered with little white thorns; springing up and down: the pond is bristling with leaping white thorns, like the thorns on a small porcupine; bristles; then black waves; cross it; black shudders; and the little water thorns are white; a helter skelter rain and the elms tossing it up and down; the pond overflowing on one side; lily leaves tugging; the red flower swimming about; one leaf flapping; then completely smooth for a moment; then prickled; thorns like glass; but leaping up and down incessantly; a rapid smirch of shadow. Now light from the sun; green and red; shiny; the pond a sage green; the grass brilliant green; red berries on the hedge; the cows very white; purple over Asheham.

Thursday, October 11th.

A brief note. In today’s Lit. Sup., they advertise Men Without Art, by Wyndham Lewis: chapters on Eliot, Faulkner, Hemingway, Virginia Woolf … Now I know by reason and instinct that this is an attack; that I am publicly demolished; nothing is left of me in Oxford and Cambridge and places where the young read Wyndham Lewis. My instinct is not to read it. And for that reason: Well, I open Keats and find: ‘Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works. My own domestic criticism has given me pain beyond what Blackwood or Quarterly could possibly inflict … This is a mere matter of the moment—I think I shall be among the English poets after my death. Even as a matter of present interest the attempt to crush me in the Quarterly has only brought me more into notice.’

Well: do I think I shall be among the English novelists after my death? I hardly ever think about it. Why then do I shrink from reading W.L.? Why am I sensitive? I think vanity: I dislike the thought of being laughed at: of the glow of satisfaction that A., B. and C. will get from hearing V.W. demolished: also it will strengthen further attacks: perhaps I feel uncertain of my own gifts: but then, I know more about them than W.L.: and anyhow I intend to go on writing. What I shall do is craftily to gather the nature of the indictment from talk and reviews; and, in a year perhaps, when my book is out, I shall read it. Already I am feeling the calm that always comes to me with abuse: my back is against the wall: I am writing for the sake of writing, etc.; and then there is the queer disreputable pleasure in being abused—in being a figure, in being a martyr, and so on.

Sunday, October 14th.

The trouble is I have used every ounce of my creative writing mind in The Targiters. No headache (save what Elly calls typical migraine—she came to see L. about his strain yesterday). I cannot put spurs in my flanks. It’s true I’ve planned the romantic chapter of notes: but I can’t set to. This morning I’ve taken the arrow of W.L. to my heart: he makes tremendous and delightful fun of B. and B: calls me a peeper, not a looker; a fundamental prude; but one of the four or five living (so it seems) who is an artist. That’s what I gather the flagellation amounts to: (Oh I’m underrated, Edith Sitwell says). Well: this gnat has settled and stung: and I think (12.30) the pain is over. Yes. I think it’s now rippling away. Only I can’t write. When will my brain revive? In 10 days I think. And it can read admirably: I began The Seasons last night … Well: I was going to say, I’m glad that I need not and cannot write, because the danger of being attacked is that it makes one answer back—a perfectly fatal thing to do. I mean, fatal to arrange The P-s so as to meet his criticisms. And I think my revelation two years ago stands me in sublime stead: to adventure and discover and allow no rigid poses: to be supple and naked to the truth. If there is truth in W.L., well, face it: I’ve no doubt I’m prudish and peeping. Well then live more boldly, but for God’s sake don’t try to bend my writing one way or the other. Not that one can. And there is the odd pleasure too of being abused and the feeling of being dismissed into obscurity is also pleasant and salutary.

Tuesday, October 16th.

Quite cured today. So the W.L. illness lasted two days. Helped off by old Ethel’s bluff affection and stir yesterday by buying a blouse; by falling fast asleep after dinner.

Writing away this morning.

I am so sleepy. Is this age? I can’t shake it off. And so gloomy. That’s the end of the book. I looked up past diaries—a reason for keeping them, and found the same misery after Waves—after Lighthouse I was, I remember, nearer suicide, seriously, than since 1913. It is after all natural. I’ve been galloping now for three months—so excited I made a plunge at my paper—well, cut that all off—after the first divine relief, of course some terrible blankness must spread. There’s nothing left of the people, of the ideas, of the strain, of the whole life in short that has been racing round my brain: not only the brain; it has seized hold of my leisure; think how I used to sit still on the same railway lines—running on my book. Well, so there’s nothing to be done the next two or three or even four weeks but dandle oneself; refuse to face it; refuse to think about it. This time Roger makes it harder than usual. We had tea with Nessa yesterday. Yes, his death is worse than Lytton’s. Why, I wonder? Such a blank wall. Such a silence: such a poverty. How he reverberated!

Monday, October 29th.

Reading Antigone. How powerful that spell is still—Greek, an emotion different from any other. I will read Plotinus: Herodotus: Homer I think.

Thursday, November 1st.

Ideas that came to me last night dining with Clive; talking to Aldous and the Kenneth Clarks.

About Roger’s life: that it should be written by different people to illustrate different stages.

Youth, by Margery Cambridge, by Wedd? Early London life …

Clive Sickert Bloomsbury, Desmond V.W.

Later life, Julian Blunt Heard and so on.

all to be combined say by Desmond and me together. About novels: the different strata of being: the upper, under. This is a familiar idea, partly tried in the Pargiters. But I think of writing it out more closely; and now, particularly, in my critical book: showing how the mind naturally follows that order in thinking: how it is illustrated by literature. I must now do biography and autobiography.

Friday, November 2nd.

Two teeth out with a new anaesthetic: hence I write here, not seriously. And this is another pen. And my brain is very slightly frozen, like my gums. Teeth become like old roots that one breaks off. He broke and I scarcely felt. My brain frozen thinks of Aldous and the Clarks: thinks vaguely of biography; thinks am I reviewed anywhere—can’t look—thinks it is a fine cold day.

I went upstairs to rinse my bleeding gum—the cocaine lasts half an hour; then the nerves begin to feel again—and opened the Spectator and read W.L. on me again. An answer to Spender. ‘I am not malicious. Several people call Mrs W. Felicia Hemans.’ This I suppose is another little scratch of the cat’s claws: to slip that in, by the way—‘I don’t say it—others do’. And so they are supercilious on the next page about Sickert; and so—Well L. says I should be contemptible to mind. Yes: but I do mind for 10 minutes: I mind being in the light again, just as I was sinking into my populous obscurity. I must take a pull on myself. I don’t think this attack will last more than two days. I think I shall be free from the infection by Monday. But what a bore it all is. And how many sudden shoots into nothingness open before me. But wait one moment. At the worst, should I be a quite negligible writer, I enjoy writing: I think I am an honest observer. Therefore the world will go on providing me with excitement whether I can use it or not. Also, how am I to balance W.L.’s criticism with Yeats—let alone Goldie and Morgan? Would they have felt anything if I had been negligible? And about two in the morning I am possessed of a remarkable sense of (driving eyeless) strength. And I have L. and there are his books; and our life together. And freedom, now, from money paring. And … if only for a time I could completely forget myself, my reviews, my fame, my sink in the scale—which is bound to come now and to last about 8 or 9 years—then I should be what I mostly am: very rapid, excited, amused, intense. Odd, these extravagant ups and downs of reputation; compare the Americans in the Mercury … No, for God’s sake don’t compare: let all praise and blame sink to the bottom or float to the top and let me go my ways indifferent. And care for people. And let fly, in life, on all sides.

These are very sensible sayings I think. And it’s all forgotten and over.

What is uppermost now is the question of writing R.’s life. Helen came. Says both she and M. wish it. So I wait. What do I feel about it? If I could be free, then here’s the chance of trying biography; a splendid, difficult chance—better than trying to find a subject—that is, if I am free.

Wednesday, November 14th.

And am now, 10.30 on Thursday morning, November 15th, about to tackle re-reading and re-writing The Pargiters: an awful moment.

12.45. Well, that horrid plunge has been made and I’ve started re-writing the Ps. Lord, Lord! Ten pages a day for 90 days. Three months. The thing is to contract: each scene to be a scene: much dramatized: contrasted: each to be carefully dominated by one interest: some generalized. At any rate this releases the usual flood and proves that only creating can bring about proportion: now, damnably disagreeable, as I see it will be—compacting the vast mass—I am using my faculties again, and all the flies and fleas are forgotten.

A note: despair at the badness of the book: can’t think how I ever could write such stuff—and with such excitement: that’s yesterday: today I think it good again. A note, by way of advising other Virginias with other books that this is the way of the thing: up down up down—and Lord knows the truth.

Wednesday, November 21st.

Margery Fry to tea on Sunday. A long debate about the book on Roger: not very conclusive. She says she wants a study by me, reinforced with chapters on other aspects. I say, Well, but those books are unreadable. Oh of course I want you to be quite free, she says. I should have to say something about his life, I say. The family—Now there of course I’m afraid I should have to ask you to be careful, she says. The upshot of all of which is that she’s to write to the N.S. asking for letters; that I’m to go through them; that we’re then to discuss—so it will drag on these many months, I suppose. And I plan working at Ps: and getting in reading time with Roger’s papers, so that by October next I could write, if that’s the decision. But what?

Monday, December 3rd.

Isn’t it odd? Some days I can’t read Dante at all after revising The Ps.: other days I find it very sublime and helpful. Raises one out of the chatter of words. But today (doing the scene at the Lodge) I’m too excited. I think it a good book today. I’m in the thick again. But I will stop at the end of the funeral scene and calm my brain. That is I will write the play for Christmas: Freshwater a farce—for a joke. And rig up my Contemporary Criticism article; and look around. David Cecil on fiction: a good book for readers, not for writers—all so elementary; but some good points made, from the outside. I’ve done though with that sort of criticism. And he’s often wrong: gets W.H. wrong, I think; wants to have a profound theory. We—Bloomsbury—are dead; so says Joad. I snap my fingers at him. Lytton and I the two distractions. Poor Francis lies in a hotel bedroom in Russell Square this rainy morning. I went in and sat with him. Quite himself with a lump on his forehead. And is aware of it all. May die under another operation, or slowly stiffen into complete paralysis. His brain may go. All this he knows; and there it was between us, as we joked. He came to the verge of it once or twice. But I can’t feel any more at the moment—not after Roger. I cannot go through that again. That’s my feeling. I kissed him. ‘This is the first time—this chaste kiss,’ he said. So I kissed him again. But I must not cry, I thought, and so went.

Tuesday, December 18th.

Talk with Francis yesterday. He is dying: but makes no bones about it. Only his expression is quite different. Has no hope. The man says he asks every hour how long will this go on, and hopes for the end. He was exactly as usual; no wandering, no incoherence. A credit to Athens. The soul deserves to be immortal, as L. said. We walked back, glad to be alive, numb somehow. I can’t use my imagination on that theme. What would it be like to lie there, expecting death? and how odd and strange a death. I write hurriedly, going to Angelica’s concert this fine soft day.

Sunday, December 30th.

Since I forgot to bring my writing book, I must fill up here, on loose sheets. End the year: with these cursed dogs barking: and I am sitting in my new house; and it is, of all hours, 3.10; and it is raining; and the cow has the sciatica; and we are taking her into Lewes to catch a train to London; after which we have tea at Charleston, act the play and dine there. It has been the wettest Christmas, I should say, drawing a bow at a venture, on record. Only yesterday did I manage my phantom farm walk; but pray God, with Christmas over, the rain will stop falling. Miss Emery’s dogs barking.

It was stupid to come without a book, seeing that I end every morning with a head full of ideas about The Pargiters. It is very interesting to write out. I am re-writing considerably. My idea is to contract the scenes; very intense, less so; then drama; then narrative. Keeping a kind of swing and rhythm through them all. Anyhow it admits of great variety—this book. I think it shall be called Ordinary People. I finished, more or less, Maggie and Sarah, the first scene, in the bedroom: with what excitement I wrote it! And now hardly a line of the original is left. Yes, but the spirit is caught I think. I write perhaps 60 pages before I catch that. And coming back I see it hopping like a yellow canary on its perch. I want to make both S. and M. bold characters, using character dialogue. Then we go on to Martin’s visit to Eleanor: then the long day that ends with the King’s death. I have sweated off 80 or 90 pages, mosdy due to a fault in paging though.

End of the year: and Francis transacting his death at that nursing home in Collingham Place. The expression on his face is what I see: as if he were facing a peculiar lonely sorrow. One’s own death—think of lying there alone, looking at it, at 45 or so: with a great desire to live. ‘And so the New Statesman’s going to be the best paper that ever was, is it?’ ‘He’s dead though,’ (of Brimley Johnson) spoken with a kind of bitterness. None of these words are exactly right.

And here we are, chafed by the cow’s lame leg and the dogs; yet as usual very happy I think: ever so full of ideas. L. finishing his Quack Quack of a morning: the Zet1 crawling from one chair to the other—picking at his head.

And Roger dead. And am I to write about him? And the stirring of the embers—I mean the wish to make up as much of a fire as possible. So to get ready for the wet drive. Dogs still barking.

[]

1935.

Tuesday, January 1st.

The play (Freshwater) rather tosh; but I’m not going to bother about making a good impression as a playwright. And I have a lovely old year’s walk yesterday round the rat farm valley, by a new way and met Mr Freeth, and talked about road making; and then into Lewes to take the car to Martin’s and then home and read St Paul and the papers. I must buy the Old Testament. I am reading the Acts of the Apostles. At last I am illuminating that dark spot in my reading. What happened in Rome? And there are seven volumes of Renan. Lytton calls him ‘mellifluous’. Yeats and Aldous agreed, the other day, that their great aim in writing is to avoid the ‘literary’. Aldous said how extraordinary the ‘literary’ fetish had been among the Victorians. Yeats said that he wanted only to use the words that real people say. That his change had come through writing plays. And I said, rashly, that all the same his meaning was very difficult. And what is ‘the literary’. That’s rather an interesting question. Might go into that, if I ever write my critical book. But now I want to write On being despised. My mind will go on plumping up ideas for that. And I must finish Ordinary People: and then there’s Roger and writing despised. Begin Roger in October 1935. Is that possible? Publish O.P. in October; and work at these two during 1936. Lord knows! But I must press a good) deal of work in—remembering 53—54—55 are on me. And how excited I get over my ideas! And there’s people to see.

Friday, January 11th.

This spring will be on us all of a clap. Very windy; today; a dumb misted walk two days ago to Piddinghoe. Now the men are threshing. Nessa and Angelica and Eve yesterday. We talk a great deal about the play. An amusing incident. And I shall hire a donkey’s head to take my call in—by way of saying This is a donkey’s work. I make out that I shall reduce The Caravan (so called suddenly) to 150,000: and shall finish re-typing in May. I wonder. It is compressed I think. And sometimes my brain threatens to split with all the meaning I think I could press into it. The discovery of this book, it dawns upon me, is the combination of the external and the internal. I am using both, freely. And my eye has gathered in a good many externals in its time.

Saturday, January 19th.

The play came off last night, with the result that I am dry-brained this morning and can only use this book as a pillow. It was said, inevitably, to be a great success; and I enjoyed—let me see what? Bunny’s praise; Oliver’s; but not much Christabel’s or the standing about pumping up vivacities with David, Cory, Elizabeth Bowen: yet on the whole it is good to have an unbuttoned laughing evening once in a way. Roger’s ghost knocked at the door—his portrait of Charlie Sanger was delivered in the thick of the rehearsal. And how Francis would have enjoyed this, Leonard said. These are our ghosts now. But they would applaud the attempt. So to sleep: and now, God bless my soul, as Tennyson would say, I must rinse and freshen my mind and make it work soberly on something hard. There’s my Dante; and Renan. And the horrid winter lap begins; the pale unbecoming days, like an ageing woman seen at 11 o’clock. However, L. and I shall go for a walk this afternoon; and that seems to me an enormous balance at the Bank! solid happiness.

I have an idea for a ‘play’. Summer’s night. Someone on a seat. And voices speaking from the flowers.

Wednesday, January 23rd.

Yes, I ought to have explained why I wrote the Sickert. I always think of things too late. I am reading The Faery Queen—with delight. I shall write about it. I took Angelica shopping. ‘Do you mind if I read The Heir of Redcliffe?’ she said at tea, amusing me. What a curious sense the clothes sense is! Buying her coat, mine, hearing the women talk, as of race horses, about new skirts. And I am fluttered because I must lunch with Clive tomorrow in my new coat. And I can’t think out what I mean about conception: the idea behind F.Q. How to express a kind of natural transition from state to state. And the air of natural beauty. It is better to read the originals. Well, Clive’s lunch will jump me out of this. And now that the play is over, we must begin to see people here: and go to Hamlet and plan our spring journey. I am taking a fortnight off fiction. My mind became knotted. I think of making Theresa sing: and so lyricize the argument. Get as far from T (so called after my Sarah and Elvira provisionally). But oh heavens the duck squashy—this is from the pressed duck Jack once gave us: all juice; one squab of juice. I am reading Point Counter-. point. Not a good novel. All raw, uncooked, protesting. A descendant, oddly enough, of Mrs H. Ward: interest in ideas; makes people into ideas. A man from America returns my letters and says he is glad to see me as I am.

Friday, February 1st.

And again this morning, Friday, I’m too tired to go on with Ps. Why? Talking too much I daresay. I thought, though, I wanted ‘society’: and saw Helen, Mary, Gillett. Ann tonight. I think The Ps. however a promising work. Only nerve vigour wanted. A day off today.

Wednesday, February 20th.

Sarah is the real difficulty: I can’t get her into the main stream, yet she is essential. A very difficult problem; this transition business. And the burden of something that I won’t call propaganda. I have a horror of the Aldous novel: that must be avoided. But ideas are sticky things: won’t coalesce: hold up the creative, subconscious faculty; that’s it I suppose. I’ve written the chophouse scene I don’t know how many times.

Tuesday, February 26th.

A very fine skyblue day, my windows completely filled with blue for a wonder. Mr Riley has just mended them. And I have been writing and writing and re-writing the scene by the Round Pond. What I want to do is to reduce it all so that each sentence, though perfectly natural dialogue, has a great pressure of meaning behind it. And the most careful harmony and contrast of scene—the boats colliding etc.—has also to be arranged. Hence the extreme difficulty. But I hope perhaps tomorrow to have done, and then the dinner party and Kitty in the country should go quicker. At least I find the upper air scenes much simpler; and I think it’s right to keep them so. But Lord what a lot of work still to do! It won’t be done before August. And here I am plagued by the sudden wish to write an anti-Fascist pamphlet.

Wednesday, February 27th.

And I’ve just written it all over again. But it must do this time, I say to myself. Yet I know that I must put the screw on and write some pages again. It’s too jerky: too—. It’s obvious that one person sees one thing and another another; and that one has to draw them together. Who was it who said through the unconscious one comes to the conscious, and then again to the unconscious?

I now feel a strong desire to stop reading F.Q.: to read Cicero’s letters, and the Chateaubriand Memoirs. As far as I can see, this is the natural swing of the pendulum. To particularize after the generalization of romantic poetry.

Monday, March 11th.

How I should like, I thought some time on the drive up this afternoon, to write a sentence again! How delightful to feel it form and curve under my fingers! Since October 16th I have not written one new sentence, but only copied and typed. A typed sentence somehow differs; for one thing it is formed out of what is already there: it does not spring fresh from the mind. But this copying must go on, I see, till August. I am only now in the first war scene: with luck I shall get to E. in Oxford Street before we go in May: and spend June and July on the grand orchestral finale. Then in August I shall write again.

Saturday, March 16th.

I have had three severe swingeings lately: Wyndham Lewis; Mirsky; and now Swinnerton. Bloomsbury is ridiculed; and I am dismissed with it. I didn’t read W.L.: and Swinnerton only affected me as a robin affects a rhinoceros—except in the depths of the night. How resilient I am; and how fatalistic now; and how little I mind and how much; and how good my novel is; and how tired I am this morning; and how I like praise; and how full of ideas I am; and Tom and Stephen came to tea, and Ray and William dine; and I forgot to describe my interesting talk with Nessa about my criticizing her children; and I left out—I forget what. My head is numb today and I can scarcely read Osbert on Brighton, let alone Dante.

In last week’s Time and Tide St John Ervine called Lytton ‘that servile minded man … that Pandar’ or words to that effect. I’m thinking whether, if I write about Roger, I shall include a note, a sarcastic note, on the Bloomsbury baiters. No, I suppose not. Write them down—that’s the only way.

Monday, March 18th.

The only thing worth doing in this book is to stick it out: stick to the idea and don’t lower it an inch, in deference to anyone. What’s so odd is the way the whole thing dissolves in company and then comes back with a rush; and Swinnerton’s sneers and Mirsky’s—making me feel that I’m hated and despised and ridiculed—well, this is the only answer: to stick to my ideas. And I wish I need never read about myself or think about myself, anyhow till it’s done, but look firmly at my object and think only of expressing it. Oh what a grind it is embodying all these ideas and having perpetually to expose my mind, opened and intensified as it is by the heat of creation, to the blasts of the outer world. If I didn’t feel so much, how easy it would be to go on.

Having just written a letter about Bloomsbury I cannot control my mind enough to go on with The Ps. I woke in the night and thought of it. But whether to send it or not, I don’t know. But now I must think of something else. Julian and Helen last night.

L. advised me not to send the letter and after two seconds I see he is right. It is better, he says, to be able to say we don’t answer. But we suggest a comic guide to Bloomsbury by Morgan and he nibbles.

Thursday, March 21st.

Too jaded again to tackle that very difficult much too crowded raid chapter. In fact I am on the verge of the usual headache—for one thing yesterday was such a scramble.

I have resolved to leave that blasted chapter here and do nothing at Rodmell. Yet, as I see, I cannot read; my mind is all tight like a ball of string. A most unpleasant variety of headache; but I think soon over. Only a little change needed. Not a real bad headache. Why make this note? Because reading is beyond me and writing is like humming a song. But what a worthless song! And it is the spring.

Monday, March 25th.

And this morning, in spite of being in a rage, I wrote the whole of that d d chapter again, in a spasm of desperation and, I think, got it right, by breaking up, the use of thought skipping and parentheses. Anyhow that’s the hang of it. And I cut from 20 to 30 pages.

Wednesday, March 27th.

I see I am becoming a regular diarizer. The reason is that I cannot make the transition from Pargiters to Dante without some bridge. And this cools my mind. I am rather worried about the raid chapter: afraid if I compress and worry that I shall spoil. Never mind. Forge ahead and see what comes next.

Yesterday we went to the Tower, which is an impressive murderous bloody grey raven haunted Ailitary barrack prison dungeon place; like the prison of English splendour; the reformatory at the back of history; where we shot and tortured and imprisoned. Prisoners scratched their names, very beautifully, on the walls. And the crown jewels blazed, very tawdry.

and there were the orders, like Spinks or a Regent Street jewellers. And we watched the Scots Guards drill: and an officer doing a kind of tiger pace up and down—a wax faced barbers block officer trained to a certain impassive balancing. The sergeant major barked and swore. All in a hoarse bark: the men stamped and wheeled like—machines: then the officer also barked: all precise, inhuman, showing off. A degrading, stupefying sight. But in keeping with the grey walls, the cobbles, the executioner’s block. People sitting on the river bank among old cannon. Steps etc. very romantic: a dungeon like feeling.

Monday, April 1st.

At this rate I shall never finish the Purgatorio. But what’s the use of reading with half one’s mind running on Eleanor and Kitty. Oh that scene wants compacting. It’s too thin run. But I shall finish it before I go away. We think of three weeks in Holland and France; a week in Rome, flying there. We went to Kew yesterday and if vegetable notes are needed this is to signify that yesterday was the prime day for cherry blossom, pear trees and magnolia. A lovely white one with black cups to the flowers; another purple tinted, just falling. Another and another. And the yellow bushes and the daffodils in the grass. So to walk through Richmond—a long walk by the ponds. I verified certain details.

Tuesday, April 9th.

I met Morgan in the London Library yesterday and flew into a passion.

‘Virginia, my dear,’ he said. I was pleased by that little affectionate familiar tag.

‘Being a good boy and getting books on Bloomsbury?’ I said.

“Yes. You listen. Is my book down?’ he asked Mr Mannering.

‘We were just posting it,’ said Mr M.

‘And, Virginia, you know I’m on the Committee here,’ said Morgan. ‘And we’ve been discussing whether to allow ladies’—It came over me that they were going to put me on: and I was then to refuse: ‘Oh but they do,’ I said. ‘There was Mrs Green.’

‘Yes, yes. There was Mrs Green. And Sir Leslie Stephen said never again. She was so troublesome. And I said haven’t ladies improved? But they were all quite determined. No, no, no, ladies are quite impossible. They wouldn’t hear of it.’

See how my hand trembles. I was so angry (also very tired) standing. And I saw the whole slate smeared. I thought how perhaps M. had mentioned my name, and they had said no no no: ladies are impossible. And so I quieted down and said nothing and this morning in my bath I made up a phrase in my book On Being Despised which is to run—a friend of mine, who was offered … one of those prizes—for her sake the great exception was to be made—who was in short to be given an honour—I forget what … She said And they actually thought I would take it. They were, on my honour, surprised, even at my very modified and humble rejection. You didn’t tell them what you thought of them for daring to suggest that you should rub your nose in that pail of offal? I remarked. Not for a hundred years, she observed. And I will bring in M. Pattison: and I will say sympathy uses the same force required to lay 700 bricks. And I will show how you can’t sit on committees if you also pour out tea—that by the way Sir L.S. spent his evenings with widow Green: yes, these flares up are very good for my book: for they simmer and become transparent: and I see how I can transmute them into beautiful clear reasonable ironical prose. God damn Morgan for thinking I’d have taken that … And dear old Morgan comes to tea today and then sits with Berry who’s had cataract.

The veil of the temple—which, whether university or cathedral, academic or ecclesiastical, I forget—was to be raised and as an exception she was to be allowed to enter in. But what about my civilization? For 2,000 years we have done things without being paid for doing them. You can’t bribe me now. Pail of offal? No: I said while very deeply appreciating the hon … In short one must tell lies, and apply every emollient in our power to the swollen skin of our brothers’ so terribly inflamed vanity. Truth is only to be spoken by those women whose fathers were pork butchers and left them a share in the pig factory.

Friday, April 12th.

This little piece of rant won’t be very intelligible in a year’s time. Yet there are some useful facts and phrases in it. I rather itch to be at that book. But I have been skirmishing round a headache, and can’t pull my weight in the morning.

Saturday, April 13th.

Let me make a note that it would be much wiser not to attempt to sketch a draft of On Being Despised, or whatever it is to be called, until The Ts. is done with. I was vagrant this morning and made a rash attempt, with the interesting discovery that one can’t propagate at the same time as write fiction. And as this fiction is dangerously near propaganda, I must keep my hands clear.

It’s true I’m half asleep, after the Zoo and Willy. But he threw some coals on my fire: the horror of the legal profession: its immense wealth: its conventions: a Royal Commission now sitting: its hidebound hoariness and so on: worth going into one of these days: and the medical profession and the osteopaths—worth a fling of laughter. But oh dear, not now. Now for Alfieri and Nash and other notables: so happy I was reading alone last night. We saw the great dumb fish at the Zoo and the gorillas: storms of rain, cloud: and I read Annie S. Swan on her life with considerable respect. Almost always this comes from autobiography: a liking, at least some imaginative stir: for no doubt her books, which she can’t count, and has no illusions about, but she can’t stop telling stories, are wash, pigs’, hogs’—any wash you choose. But she is a shrewd capable old woman.

Saturday, April 20th.

The scene has now changed to Rodmell, and I am writing at the table L. made (supported on a cushion) and it is raining. Good Friday was a complete fraud—rain and more rain. I tried walking along the bank and saw a mole, running on the meadow—it glides rather—is like an elongated guinea pig. Pinka1 went and nuzzled it and then it managed to slide into a hole. At the same time through the rain I heard the cuckoo’s song. Then I came home and read and read—Stephen Spender: too quick to stop to think: shall I stop to think? read it again? It has considerable swing and fluency; and some general ideas; but peters out in the usual litter of an undergraduate’s table: wants to get everything in and report and answer all the chatter. But I want to investigate certain questions: why do I always fight shy of my contemporaries? What is really the woman’s angle? Why does so much of this seem to me in the air? But I recognize my own limitation: not a good ratiocinator, Lytton used to say. Do I instinctively keep my mind from analysing, which would impair its creativeness? I think there’s something in that. No creative writer can swallow another contemporary. The reception of living work is too coarse and partial if you’re doing the same thing yourself. But I admire Stephen for trying to grapple with these problems. Only of course he has to hitch them round—to use his own predicament as a magnet and thus the pattern is too arbitrary: if you’re not in his predicament. But as I say, I read it at a gulp without screwing my wits tight to the argument. This is a method I find very profitable: then go back and screw.

Saturday, April 27th.

All desire to practise the art of a writer has completely left me. I cannot imagine what it would be like: that is, more accurately, I cannot curve my mind to the line of a book; no, nor of an article. It’s not the writing but the architecting that strains. If I write this paragraph, then there is the next and then the next. But after a month’s holiday I shall be as tough and springy as—say heather root: and the arches and the domes will spring into the air as firm as steel and light as cloud—but all these words miss the mark. Stephen Spender demands a letter of criticism; can’t write it. Nor can I describe with any certainty Mrs Collett, with whom both L. and I fell in love yesterday. A whippet woman; steel blue eyes; silver spotted jersey; completely free, edged, outspoken, the widow of the Lord Mayor’s son, who was killed before her eyes flying: After that she broke down and the only cure she said was to go to Hong Kong and stay with Bella. From that we did not expect anything much, to tell the truth; whereas she ridiculed the jubilee, the Lord Mayor and told us all about life in the Mansion House. The L.M. spends £20,000 out of his own pocket on his year of office; 10,000 on his sheriffdom; then buys an ermine coat for £1,000 in which to admit the King to Temple Bar. It rains; the King flashes past and the coat is spoilt. Her mother in law is a perfectly natural sensible woman who goes buying fish with a bag. The Queen gave her as a token of esteem two large shells engraved with the story of George and the Dragon. These mercifully are left at the Mansion House. The L.M. wears a dress that is heavy with bullion. A terrible state of display and ugliness—but she was so nice and unexpected I actually asked her to come and see us—which, had she known it, is a compliment we never pay even the royal family.

JOURNEY TO HOLLAND, GERMANY, ITALY AND FRANCE

Monday, May 6th. Zutphen Ideas that struck me.

That the more complex a vision the less it lends itself to satire: the more it understands the less it is able to sum up and make linear. For example: Shakespeare and Dostoievsky, neither of them satirize. The age of understanding: the age of destroying—and so on.

Belchamber.

A moving, in its way, completed story. But shallow. A superficial book. But also a finished one. Rounded off. Only possible if you keep one inch below; because the people, like Sainty, have to do things without diving deep; and this runs in the current; which lends itself to completeness. That is, if a writer accepts the conventions and lets his characters be guided by them, not conflict with them, he can produce an effect of symmetry: very pleasant, suggestive; but only on the surface. That is, I can’t care what happens: yet I like the design. Also disgust at the cat monkey psychology, to which he is admirably faithful. A sensitive sincere mind—however, doing his embroidery and making his acute observation. Not a snob either.

Thursday, May 9th.

Silting in the sun outside the German Customs. A car with the swastika on the back window has just passed through the barrier into Germany. L. is in the Customs. I am nibbling at Aaron’s Rod. Ought I to go in and see what is happening? A fine dry windy morning. The Dutch Customs took 10 seconds. This has taken 10 minutes already. The windows are barred. Here they came out and the grim man laughed at Mitzi.But L. said that when a peasant came in and stood with his hat on, the man said this office is like a church and made him move it. Heil Hitler said the little thin boy opening his bag, perhaps with an apple in it, at the barrier. We become obsequious—delighted that is when the officer smiles at Mitzi—the first stoop in our back.

That a work of art means that one part gets strength from another part.

Monday, May 13th. Brenner

Odd to see the countries change into each other. Beds now made of layers on top. No sheets. Houses building. Austrian, dignified. Winter lasts at Innsbruck till July. No spring. Italy fronts me on a blue bar. The Czecho-Slovaks are in front going to the Customs house.

Terugia Came through Florence today. Saw the green and white cathedral and the yellow Arno dribbling into shallows. A thunderstorm. Irises purple against the clouds. So to Arezzo. A most superb church with dropped hull.

Lake Trasimen: stood in a field of red purple clover: plover’s egg lake; grey olives, exquisite, subtle; sea cold, shell green. So on, regretting that we did not stay to Perugia. Brafani where we stayed in 1908. Now all the same. The same ardent sunburnt women. But lace and so on for sale. Better to have stayed at Trasimen. I went into an Albergo yesterday to buy rolls and found a sculptured fireplace, all patriarchal—servants and masters. Cauldron on the fire. Probably not much change since 16th century: the people preserve liquids. Men and women scything. A nightingale singing where we sat. Little frogs jumping into the stream.

Brafani: three people watching the door open and shut. Commenting on visitors like fates—summing up, placing. A woman with a hard lined aquiline face—red lips—bird like—perfectly self-satisfied. French pendulous men, a rather poor sister. Now they sit nibbling at human nature. We are rescued by the excellence of our luggage.

Rome: tea. Tea in café. Ladies in bright coats and white hats. Music. Look out and see people like movies. Abyssinia. Children lugging. Café haunters. Ices. Old man who haunts the Greco.

Sunday café: N. and A. drawing. Very cold. Rome a mitigated but perceptible Sunday. Fierce large jowled old ladies. Q. talking about Monaco. Talleyrand. Some very poor black wispy women. The effect of dowdiness produced by wispy hair. The Prime Minister’s letter offering to recommend me for the Companion of Honour. No.

Tuesday, May 2 ist.

Oddities of the human brain: woke early and again considered dashing off my book on Professions, to which I had not given a single thought these 7 or 8 days. Why? This vacillates with my novel—how are they both to come out simultaneously. But it is a sign that I must get pen to paper again. Yet at the moment I am going rag marketing with N. and A., who don’t come.

Sunday, May 26th.

I’m writing at six on a Sunday evening, with a band playing and stopping and children shouting in a too luxurious hotel where the waiters bring one the menu and I mix my French scandalously with odd scraps of painfully acquired Italian. Still I can rattle off Gli Indifferenti lying on my bed for pleasure. Oh the loveliness of the land still here and there—for instance that first morning’s drive out of Rome—the sea and the lip of the unviolated land: and the umbrella pines, after Civita Vecchia: then of course all the intense boredom of Genoa and the Riviera, with its geraniums and its bougainvillea and its sense of shoving you between hill and sea and keeping you there in a bright luxury light without room to turn, so steep the vulture neck hills come down. But we slept at Lerici the first night which does the bay, the brimming sea and the green sailing ship and the island and the sparkling fading red and yellow night lamps to perfection. But that kind of perfection no longer makes me feel for my pen. It’s too easy. But driving today I was thinking of Roger—Brignolles—Corges—my word, the olives and the rust red earth and the flat green and the trees. But now the band has begun again and we must go down to dine sumptuously off local trout. Off tomorrow and home on Friday. But though I’m impatient for my brain to eat again, I can dally out these last days better than sometimes. Why? Why? I go on asking myself. And feel I could soon polish off those final scenes: a possible amplification of the first paragraph occurred to me. But I don’t want to grind at ‘writing’ too hard. To open my net wide. It occurs to me, as we drive, how I’m disliked, how I’m laughed at; and I’m rather proud of my intention to take the fence gallantly. But writing again!

Wednesday, June 5th.

Back here1 again, and the grim wooden feeling that has made me think myself dead since we came back is softening slightly. It’s beginning this cursed dry hand empty chapter again in part. Every time I say it will be the devil! but I never believe it. And then the usual depressions come. And I wish for death. But I am now seeing that the last 200 pages will assert themselves and force me to write a play more or less: all broken up: and I stop to begin making up; Also, after the queer interlude, at once life—that is the telephone beginning—starts. So that one is forcibly chafed. (I meant to make a note about the dramatic shape which forces itself upon me.)

Monday, June 10th. Whit Monday

At Monk’s House. Working very hard. I think I shall rush these scenes off. Yet I cannot write this morning (Tuesday). How can I say, naturally, I have inherited the Rose and the Star!

Thursday, June 13th.

In some ways, it’s rather like writing The Waves—these last scenes. I bring my brain to a state of congestion, have to stop; go upstairs, run into towsled Mrs Brewster, come back; find a little flow of words. It’s the extreme condensation; the contrasts; the keeping it all together. Does this mean that it’s good? I feel I have a round of great pillar to set up and can only drag and sweat. It’s something like that. It’s getting barer and more intense. And then what a relief when I have the upper air scenes—like the one with Eleanor! only they have to be condensed too. It’s the proper placing that strains me.

Tuesday, July 16th.

A curious sense of complete failure. Margery hasn’t written to me about my speech: according to Janie, Pamela thought the whole thing a failure. And it was for this that I ruined my last pages! I can’t write this morning, can’t get into the swing. Innumerable worries, about getting people to dine and so on, afflict me. My head is all jangled. And I have to get that d d speech printed, or refuse to. The director has written. Never again, oh never again!

I think though that I can get the last pages right, if I can only dream myself back into them. Yes, but how dream, when I have to see Susie and Ethel, to see Miss Belsher’s house, to ring up and write notes and order this and that? Well, be still and ruminate; it’s only 16th: there’s a fortnight before August. And I’m sure that there is a remarkable shape somewhere concealed there. It’s not mere verbiage, I think. If necessary I could put it away. But I think no: merely go on and perhaps write a very rapid short sketch, in ink—that’s a good plan. Go back and get the central idea, and then rocket into it. And be very controlled and keep a hand on myself too. And perhaps read a little Shakespeare. Yes, one of the last plays: I think I will do that, so as to loosen my muscles. But oh this anxiety, and the perpetual knocking of the cup out of my hand.

Wednesday, July 17th.

Just now I finished my first wild re-typing and find the book comes to 740 pages: that is 148,000 words; but I think I can shorten: all the last part is still rudimentary and wants shaping; but I’m too tired in the head to do it seriously this moment.

I think all the same I can reduce it; and then ? Dear me.

I see why I fled, after The Waves, to Flush. One wants simply to sit on a bank and throw stones. I want also to read with a free mind. And to let the wrinkles smooth themselves out. Susie Buchan, Ethel, then Julian—so I talked from 4.30 till 1 a.m. with only two hours for dinner and silence.

I think I see that the last chapter should be formed round N.’s speech: it must be much more formal; and I think I see how I can bring in interludes—I mean spaces of silence, and poetry and contrast.

Friday, July 19th.

No. I go on getting preliminary headaches. It is no good trying to do the last spurt, which should be much like a breeze in the heavy elms, these last days here: yes, a wind blowing in the trees that are thick with green leaves. For there must be movement as well as some weight, something for the breeze to lift.

Friday, August 16th.

I cannot make a single note here, because I am so terrifically pressed re-writing—yes, typing out again at the rate, if possible, of 100 pages a week, this impossible eternal book. I work without looking up till one; which it now is, and therefore I must go in, leaving a whole heap of things unsaid; so many people, so many scenes, and beauty, and a fox and sudden ideas.

Wednesday, August 21st.

Up in London yesterday. And I saw this about myself in a book at The Times—the most patient and conscientious of artists—which I think is true, considering how I slave at every word of that book. My head is like a like a—pudding is it—something that mildly throbs and can’t breed a word at the end of the morning. I begin fresh enough. And I sent off the first 20 pages or so to Mabel yesterday.

Margery Fry comes on Friday with her hands full of papers, she says. Another book. Have I the indomitable courage to start on another? Think of the writing and re-writing. Also there will be joys and ecstasies though. Again very hot. I am going to re-paint this room. Went to Carpenters yesterday and chose chintzes. Is this worth writing? Perhaps.

Thursday, September 5th.

I’ve had to give up writing The Years—that’s what it’s to be called—this morning. Absolutely floored. Can’t pump up a word. Yet I can see, just, that something’s there; so I shall wait, a day or two, and let the well fill. It has to be damned deep this time. 740 pages in it. I think, psychologically, this is the oddest of my adventures. Half my brain dries completely; but I’ve only to turn over and there’s the other half, I think, ready, quite happily to write a little article. Oh if only anyone knew anything about the brain. And, even today, when I’m desperate, almost in tears looking at the chapter, unable to add to it, I feel I’ve only got to fumble and find the end of the ball of string—some start off place, someone to look at [?] perhaps—no, I don’t know—and my head would fill and the tiredness go. But I’ve been waking and worrying.

Friday, September 6th.

I am going to wrap my brain in green dock leaves for a few days: 5, if I can hold out; till the children, L.’s nieces, have gone. If I can—for I think a scene is forming. Why not make an easier transition: Maggie looking at the Serpentine say; and so avoid that abrupt spring? Isn’t it odd that this was the scene I had almost a fit to prevent myself writing? This will be the most exciting thing I ever wrote, I kept saying. And now it’s the stumbling block. I wonder why? Too personal, is that it? Out of key? But I won’t think.

Saturday, September 7th.

A heavenly quiet morning reading Alfieri by the open window and not smoking. I believe one could get back to the old rapture of reading if one did not write. The difficulty is, writing makes one’s brain so hot it can’t settle to read; and then when the heat goes, I’m so tired in the head I can only skirmish. But I’ve stopped two days now The Years: and feel the power to settle calmly and firmly on books coming back at once. John Bailey’s life, come today, makes me doubt though. What? Everything. Sounds like a mouse squeaking under a mattress. But I’ve only just glanced and got the smell of Lit. dinner, Lit. Sup., lit this that and the other—and one remark to the effect that Virginia Woolf of all people has been given Cowper by Desmond and likes it! I, who read Cowper when I was 15—d--d nonsense.

Thursday, September 12th.

Mornings which are neither quiet nor heavenly, but mixed of hell and ecstasy: never have I had such a hot balloon in my head as re-writing The Years: because it’s so long; and the pressure is so terrific. But I will use all my art to keep my head sane. I will stop writing at 11.30 and read Italian or Dryden and so dandle myself along. To Ethel at Miss Hudson’s yesterday. As I sat in the complete English gentleman’s home, I wondered how anybody could tolerate that equipage; and thought how a house should be portable like a snail shell. In future perhaps people will flirt out houses like little fans; and go on. There’ll be no settled life within walls. There were endless clean, well repaired rooms. A maid in a cap. Cakes on pagoda trays. A terrible array of glossy brown furniture and books—red sham leather. Many nice old rooms, but the manor house has been embellished and made of course self consciously elaborate. A ballroom; a library—empty. And Miss Hudson all brushed up with her Pekinese, a competent ex-mayor of Eastbourne, with waved grey hair; and all so neat and stout; and the silver frames askew; and the air of order, respectability, commonplace. ‘I’m going to call on the vicar’s wife.’ Ethel immensely red and stout: churning out, poor old woman, the usual indefatigable egotism about deafness and her Mass. She must have a scene every six months. No. But of course, to go deaf, to be 76—well, back to Charleston with Eve and Angelica.

Friday, September 13th.

What a combination for the superstitious! Driving off to visit Margaret and Lilian at Dorking: and I have got into a mild flood I think with The Years. The difficulty is always at the beginning of chapters or sections where a whole new mood has to be caught, plumb in the centre Richmond accepts my Marryat and thanks me for his poor little knighthood!

Wednesday, October 2nd.

Yesterday we went to the L.P. meeting at Brighton and, of course, though I have refused to go again this morning, I am so thrown out of my stride that I can’t hitch on to The Years again. Why? The immersion in all that energy and all that striving for something that is quite oblivious of me; making me feel that I am oblivious of it. No, that’s not got it. It was very dramatic. Bevin’s attack on Lansbury. Tears came to my eyes as L. spoke. And yet he was posing I felt, acting, unconsciously, the battered Christian man. Then Bevin too acted I suppose. He sank his head in his vast shoulders till he looked like a tortoise. Told L. not to go hawking his conscience round. And what is my duty as a human being? The women delegates were very thin voiced and unsubstantial. On Monday one said It is time we gave up washing up. A thin frail protest but genuine. A little reed piping, but what chance against all this weight of roast beef and beer—which she must cook? All very vivid and interesting; but overlapping: too much rhetoric, and what a partial view: altering the structure of society; yes, but when it’s altered? Do I trust Bevin to produce a good world when he has his equal rights? Had he been born a duke … My sympathies were with Salter who preached non-resistance. He’s quite right. That should be our view. But then if society is in its present state? Happily, uneducated and voteless, I am not responsible for the state of society. These are some of the murmurs that go round my head, and distract me from what is, after all, my work. A good thing to have a day of disturbance—two days even—but not three. So I didn’t go; and can’t really write. However I will make myself when I’ve done this. Odd the enormous susceptibility of my mind to surface impressions: how I suck them in and let them swirl about. And how far does anybody’s single mind or work matter? Ought we all to be engaged in altering the structure of society? Louie said this morning she had quite enjoyed doing for us, was sorry we were going. That’s a piece of work too in its way. And yet I can’t deny my love of fashioning sentences. And yet … L. has gone there and I daresay I’ll discuss it with him. He says politics ought to be separate from art. We walked out in the cold over the marsh and discussed this. The fact is too my head easily tires. Yes, too tired to write.

Tuesday, October 15th.

Since we came back I have been in such full flush, with Years all the morning, Roger between tea and dinner, a walk, and people, that here’s a blank. And I only scamp Roger this evening because I wore a hole in my back yesterday; couldn’t write this morning; and must go up and receive Miss Grueber (to discuss a book on women and fascism—a pure have yer on as Lottie would say) in ten minutes. Yes, it has been 10 days of calm full complete bliss. And I thought how I shall hate it. Not a bit. London is quiet, dry, comfortable. I find my dinner cooked for me. No children screaming. And the sense of forging ahead, easily, strongly (this petered out today) at The Years. Three days I got into wild excitement over The Next War. Did I say the result of the L.P. at Brighton was the breaking of that dam between me and the new book, so that I couldn’t resist dashing off a chapter; stopped myself; but have all ready to develop—the form good I think—as soon as I get time? And I plan to do this sometime this next spring, while I go on accumulating Roger. This division is by the way perfect and I wonder I never hit on it before—some book or work for a book that’s quite the other side of the brain between times. It’s the only way of stopping the wheels and making them turn the other way, to my great refreshment and I hope improvement. Alas, now for Grueber.

Wednesday, October 16th.

What I have discovered in writing The Years is that you can only get comedy by using the surface layer—for example, the scene on the terrace. The question is can I get at quite different layers by bringing in music and painting together with certain groupings of human beings? This is what I want to try for in the raid scene: to keep going and influencing each other: the picture; the music; and the other direction—the action—I mean character telling a character—while the movement (that is the change of feeling as the raid goes on) continues. Anyhow, in this book I have discovered that there must be contrast; one strata or layer can’t be developed intensively, as I did I expect in The Waves, without harm to the others. Thus a kind of form is, I hope, imposing itself, corresponding to the dimensions of the human being; one should be able to feel a wall made out of all the influences; and this should in the last chapter close round them at the party so that you feel that while they go on individually it has completed itself. But I haven’t yet got at this. I’m doing Crosby—an upper air scene this morning. The rest of going from one to another seems to me to prove that this is the right sequence for me at any rate. I’m enjoying the sequence, without that strain I had in The Waves.

Tuesday, October 22nd.

I am again held up in The Years by my accursed love of talk. That is to say, if I talk to Rose Macaulay from 4-6.30: to Elizabeth Bowen from 8-12 I have a dull heavy hot mop inside my brain next day and am a prey to every flea, ant, gnat. So I have shut the book—Sal and Martin in Hyde Park—and spent the morning typing out Roger’s memoirs. This is a most admirable sedative and refresher. I wish I always had it at hand. Two days rest of that nerve is my prescription; but rest is hard to come by. I think I shall refuse all invitations to chatter parties till I’m done. Could it only be by Christmas! For instance, if I go to Edith Sitwell’s cocktail this evening I shall only pick up some exacerbating picture: I shall froth myself into sparklets; and there’ll be the whole smoothing and freshening to begin again. But alter The Years is done then I shall go everywhere: and expose every cranny to the light. As it is, who doesn’t come here? Every day this week I must talk. But in my own room I’m happier, I think. So I will now plod quietly through the Bridges letters and perhaps begin to arrange all Helen’s tangled mass.

Sunday, October 27th.

Adrian’s birthday, it strikes me. And we asked him to dine. No, I will not hurry this book. I’m going to let every scene shape fully and easily in my hands, before sending it to be typed, even if it has to wait another year. I wonder why time is always allowed to harry one. I think it rather good this morning. I’m doing Kitty’s party. And in spite of the terrific curb on my impatience—never have I held myself back so drastically—I’m enjoying this writing more fully and with less strain—and what’s the word?—I mean it’s giving me more natural pleasure than the others. But I have such a pressure of other books kicking their heels in the hall it’s difficult to go on very slowly. Yesterday we walked across Ken Wood to Highgate and looked at the two little old Fry houses. That’s where Roger was born and saw the poppy. I think of beginning with that scene. Yes, that book shapes itself. Then there’s my next war—which at any moment becomes absolutely wild, like being harnessed to a shark; and I dash off scene after scene. I think I must do it directly The Years is done. Suppose I finish The Years in January: then dash off the War (or whatever I call it) in six weeks: and do Roger next summer?

Monday, November 18th.

It struck me tho’ that I have now reached a further stage in my writer’s advance. I see that there are four? dimensions: all to be produced, in human life: and that leads to a far richer grouping and proportion. I mean: I; and the not I; and the outer and the inner—no I’m too tired to say: but I see it: and this will affect my book on Roger. Very exciting, to grope on like this. New combination in psychology and body—rather like painting. This will be the next novel, after The Years.

Thursday, November 21st.

Yes, but these upper air scenes get too thin. Reflection after a morning of Kitty and Edward in Richmond. At first they’re such a relief though after the other that one gets blown—flies ahead. The thing is to take it quietly: go back: and rub out detail; too many ‘points’ made; too jerky, and as it were talking ‘at’. I want to keep the individual and the sense of things coming over and over again and yet changing. That’s what’s so difficult, to combine the two.

Wednesday, November 27th.

Too many specimen days—so I can’t write. Yet, heaven help me, have a feeling that I’ve reached the no man’s land that I’m after; and can pass from outer to inner and inhabit eternity. A queer very happy free feeling, such as I’ve not had at the finish of any other book. And this too is a prodigious long one. So what does it mean? Another balk this morning; can’t get the start off of the last chapter right. What’s wrong I don’t know. But I needn’t hurry. And the main thing is to let ideas blow easily; and come softly pouring. And not to be too emphatic. Of course to step straight into the middle of a new character is difficult: North: and I’m a little exacerbated; meant to have a quiet week, and here’s Nelly C. and Nan Hudson both asking to come; and will I ring up; and Nan has a Turkish friend. But I will not be rushed. No.

Saturday, December 28th.

It’s all very well to write that date in a nice clear hand, because it begins this new book, but I cannot disguise the fact that I’m almost extinct, like a charwoman’s duster; that is my brain; what with the last revision of the last pages of The Years. And is it the last revision? And why should I lead the dance of the days with this tipsy little spin? But in fact I must stretch my cramped muscles: it’s only half past eleven on a damp grey morning, and I want a quiet occupation for an hour. That reminds me—I must divine some let down for myself that won’t be too sudden when the end is reached. An article on Gray I think. But how the whole prospect will take different proportions, once I’ve relaxed this effort. Shall I ever write a long book again—a long novel that has to be held in the brain at full stretch—for close on three years? Nor do I even attempt to ask if it’s worth while. There are mornings so congested I can’t even copy out Roger. Goldie depresses me unspeakably. Always alone on a mountain top asking himself how to live, theorizing about life; never living. Roger always down in the succulent valleys, living. But what a thin whistle of hot air Goldie lets out through his front teeth. Always live in the whole, life in the one: always Shelley and Goethe, and then he loses his hot water bottle; and never notices a face or a cat or a dog or a flower, except in the flow of the universal. This explains why his highminded books are unreadable. Yet he was so charming, intermittently.

Sunday, December 29th.

I have in fact just put the last words to The Years—rolling, rolling, though it’s only Sunday and I allowed myself till Wednesday. And I am not in such a twitter as usual. But then I meant it to end calmly—a prose work. And is it good? That I cannot possibly tell. Does it hang together? Does one part support another? Can I flatter myself that it composes; and is a whole? Well there still remains a great deal to do. I must still condense and point: give pauses their effect, and repetitions, and the run on. It runs in this version to 797 pages: say 200 each (but that’s liberal) it comes to roughly 157,000—shall we say 140,000. Yes, it needs sharpening, some bold cuts and emphases. That will take me another T I don’t know how long. And I must subconsciously wean my mind from it finally and prepare another creative mood, or I shall sink into acute despair. How odd—that this will all fade away and something else take its place. And by this time next year I shall be sitting here with a vast bundle of press cuttings—no; not in the flesh I hope: but in my mind there will be the usual chorus of what people have said about this mass of scribbled typewriting, and I shall be saying, That was an attempt at that: and now I must do something different. And all the old, or new, problems will be in front of me. Anyhow the main feeling about this book is vitality, fruitfulness, energy. Never did I enjoy writing a book more, I think: only with the whole mind in action: not so intensely as The Waves.

Monday, December 30th.

And today, no, it’s no go. I can’t write a word: too much headache. Can only look back at The Years as an inaccessible Rocky Island; which I can’t explore, can’t even think of. At Charleston yesterday. The great yellow table with very few places. Reading Roger I became haunted by him. What an odd posthumous friendship—in some ways more intimate than any I had in life. The things I guessed are now revealed; and the actual voice gone.

I had an idea—I wish they’d sleep—while dressing—how to make my war book (Three Guineas)—to pretend if s all the articles editors have asked me to write during the past few years—on all sorts of subjects—should women smoke: Short skirts: War etc. This would give me the right to wander; also put me in the position of the one asked. And excuse the method: while giving continuity. And there might be a preface saying this, to give the right tone. I think that’s got it. A wild wet night—floods out: rain as I go to bed: dogs barking: wind battering. Now I shall slink indoors I think and read some remote book.

[]

1936.

Friday, January 3rd.

I began the year with three entirely submerged days, headache, head bursting, head so full, racing with ideas; and the rain pouring; the floods out; when we stumbled out yesterday the mud came over my great rubber boots; the water squelched in my soles; so this Christmas has been, as far as country is concerned, a failure, and in spite of what London can do to chafe and annoy I’m glad to go back and have, rather guiltily, begged not to stay here another week. Today it is a yellow grey foggy day; so that I can only see the hump, a wet gleam, but no Caburn. I am content though because I think that I have recovered enough balance in the head to begin The Years, I mean the final revision on Monday. This suddenly becomes a little urgent, because for the first time for some years, L. says I have not made enough to pay my share of the house, and have to find £70 out of my hoard. This is now reduced to £700 and I must fill it up. Amusing, in its way, to think of economy again. But it would be a strain to think seriously; and worse—a brutal interruption—had I to make money by journalism. The next book I think of calling Answers to Correspondents … But I must not at once stop and make it up. No. I must find a patient and quiet method of soothing that excitable nerve to sleep until The Years is on the table—finished. In February? Oh the relief—as if a vast—what can I say—bony excrescence—bag of muscle—were cut out of my brain. Yet it’s better to write that than the other. A queer light on my psychology. I can no longer write for papers. I must write for my own book. I mean I at once adapt what I’m going to say, if I think of a newspaper.

Saturday, January 4th.

The weather has improved and we have decided to stay till Wednesday. It will now of course rain. But I will make some good resolutions: to read as few weekly papers, which are apt to prick me into recollection of myself, as possible, until this Years is over: to fill my brain with remote books and habits; not to think of Answers to Correspondents; and altogether to be as fundamental and as little superficial, to be as physical, as little apprehensive, as possible. And now to do Roger; and then to relax. For, to tell the truth, my head is still all nerves; and one false move means racing despair, exaltation, and all the rest of that familiar misery: that long scale of unhappiness. So I have ordered a sirloin and we shall go for a drive.

Sunday, January 5th.

I have had another morning at the old plague. I rather suspect that I have said the thing I meant, and any further work will only muddle. Further work must be merely to tidy and smooth out. This seems likely because I’m so calm. I feel well, that’s done. I want to be off on something else. Whether good or bad, I don’t know. And my head is quiet today, soothed by reading The Trumpet Major last night and a drive to the floods. The clouds were an extraordinary tropical birds wing colour: an impure purple; and the lakes reflected it, and there were droves of plover, black and white; and all very linear in line and pure and subtle in colour. How I slept!

Tuesday, January 7th.

I have again copied out the last pages, and I think got the spacing better. Many details and some fundamentals remain. The snow scene for example, and I suspect a good many unfaced passages remain. But I preserve my sense that it’s stated; and I need only use my craft, not my creation.

Thursday, January 16th.

Seldom have I been more completely miserable than I was about 6.30 last night, reading over the last part of The Years. Such feeble twaddle—such twilight gossip it seemed; such a show up of my own decrepitude, and at such huge length. I could only plump it down on the table and rush upstairs with burning cheeks to L. He said: ‘This always happens.’ But I felt, No, it has never been so bad as this. I make this note should I be in the same state after another book. Now this morning, dipping in, it seems to me, on the contrary, a full, bustling live book. I looked at the early pages. I think there’s something to it. But I must now force myself to begin regular sending to Mabel. 100 pages go tonight I swear.

Tuesday, February 25th.

And this will show how hard I work. This is the first moment—this five minutes before lunch—that I’ve had to write here. I work all the morning: I work from 5 to 7 most days. Then I’ve had headaches: vanquish them by lying still and binding books and reading David Copperfield. I have sworn that the script shall be ready, typed and corrected, on 10th March. L. will then read it. And I’ve still all the Richmond and El. scene to type out: many corrections in that most accursed raid scene to make: all this to have typed: if I can by the 1st which is Sunday; and then I must begin at the beginning and read straight through. So I’m quite unable either to write here or to do Roger. On the whole, I’m enjoying it—that’s odd—though in the ups and downs and with no general opinion.

Wednesday, March 4th.

Well, I’m almost through copying the raid scene, I should think for the 13th time. Then it will go tomorrow; and I shall have I think one day’s full holiday—if I dare—before re-reading. So I’m in sight of the end: that is in sight of the beginning of the other book which keeps knocking unmercifully at the door. Oh to be able once more to write freely every morning, spinning my own words afresh—what a boon—what a physical relief, rest, delight after these last months—since October year more or less—of perpetual compressing and re-writing always at that one book.

Wednesday, March nth.

Well yesterday I sent off 132 pages to Clark. We have decided to take this unusual course—that is to print it in galleys before L. sees it, and send it to America.

Friday, March 13th.

Getting along rather better. So I steal 10 minutes before lunch. Never have I worked so hard at any book. My aim is not to alter a thing in proof. And I begin to suspect there’s something there—it hasn’t flopped yet. But enough of The Years. We walked round Kensington Gardens yesterday discussing politics. Aldous refuses to sign the latest manifesto because it approves sanctions. He’s a pacifist. So am I. Ought I to resign. L. says that considering Europe is now on the verge of the greatest smash for 600 years, one must sink private differences and support the League. He’s at a special L. Party meeting this morning. This is the most feverish overworked political week we’ve yet had. Hitler has his army on the Rhine. Meetings taking place in London. So serious are the French that they’re—the little Intelligence group—is sending a man to confer here tomorrow: a touching belief in English intellectuals. Another meeting tomorrow. As usual, I think, Oh this will blow over. But it’s odd, how near the guns have got to our private life again. I can quite distinctly see them and hear a roar, even though I go on, like a doomed mouse, nibbling at my daily page. What else is there to do—except answer the incessant telephones, and listen to what L. says. Everything goes by the board. Happily we have put off all dinners and so on, on account of The Years. A very concentrated, laborious spring this is: with perhaps two fine days: crocuses out: then bitter black and cold. It all seems in keeping: my drudgery: our unsociability: the crisis: meetings: dark—and what it all means, no one knows. Privately … no, I doubt that I’ve seen anyone, or done anything but walk and work—walk for an hour after lunch—and so on.

Monday, March 16th.

I ought not to be doing this: but I cannot go on bothering with those excruciating pages any more. I shall come in at 3 and do some: and again after tea. For my own guidance, I have never suffered, since The Voyage Out, such acute despair on rereading, as this time. On Saturday for instance: there I was, faced with complete failure: and yet the book is being printed. Then I set to: in despair; thought of throwing it away: but went on typing. After an hour, the line began to tauten.

Yesterday I read it again; and I think it may be my best book.

However … I’m only at the King’s death. I think the change of scene is what’s so exhausting: the catching people plumb in the middle: then jerking off. Every beginning seems lifeless—and then I have to re-type. I’ve more or less done 250: and there’s 700 to do. A walk down the river and through Richmond Park did more than anything to pump blood in.

Wednesday, March 18th.

It now seems to me so good—still talking about The Years—that I can’t go on correcting. In fact I do think the scene at Witterings is about the best, in that line, I ever wrote. First proofs just come: so there’s a cold douche waiting me there. And I can’t concentrate this morning—must make up Letter to an Englishman. I think, once more, that is the final form it will take.

Tuesday, March 24th.

A very good weekend. Trees coming out: hyacinths; crocuses. Hot. The first spring weekend. Then we walked up to Rat Farm—looked for violets. Still spring here. Am tinkering—in a drowsy state. And I’m so absorbed in Two Guineas—that’s what I’m going to call it. I must very nearly verge on insanity I think, I get so deep in this book I don’t know what I’m doing. Find myself walking along the Strand talking aloud.

Sunday, March 29th.

Now it’s Sunday and I’m still forging ahead. Done Eleanor in Oxford Street for the 20th time this morning. I’ve plotted it out now and shall have done by Tuesday 7th April, I tell myself. And I can’t help thinking it’s rather good. But no more of that. One bad head this week, lying prostrate.

Thursday, April 9th.

Now will come the season of depression, after congestion, suffocation. The last batch was posted to Clark at Brighton yesterday. L. is in process of reading. I daresay I’m pessimistic, but I fancy a certain tepidity in his verdict so far: but then it’s provisional. At any rate these are disgusting, racking at the same time enervated days, and must be thrown on the bonfire. The horror is that tomorrow, after this one windy day of respite—oh the cold north wind that has blown ravaging daily since we came, but I’ve had no ears, eyes, or nose: only making my quick transits from house to room, often in despair—after this one day’s respite, I say, I must begin at the beginning and go through 600 pages of cold proof. Why, oh why? Never again, never again. No sooner have I written that, than I make up the first pages of Two Guineas, and begin a congenial ramble about Roger. But seriously I think this shall be my last ‘novel’. But then I want to tackle criticism too.

Thursday, June 11th.

I can only, after two months, make this brief note, to say at last after two months dismal and worse, almost catastrophic illness—never been so near the precipice to my own feeling since 1913—I’m again on top. I have to re-write, I mean interpolate, and rub out most of The Years in proof. But I can’t go into that. Can only do an hour or so. Oh but the divine joy of being mistress of my mind again! Back from M.H. yesterday. Now I am going to live like a cat stepping on eggs till my 600 pages are done. I think I can—I think I can—but must have immense courage and buoyancy to compass it. This, as I say, my first voluntary writing since April 9th, after which I pitched into bed: then to Cornwall—no note of that: then back: saw Elly: then to M.H.: home yesterday for a fortnight’s trial. And the blood has mounted to my head. Wrote 1880 this morning.

Sunday, June 21st.

After a week of intense suffering—indeed mornings of torture—and I’m not exaggerating—pain in my head—a feeling of complete despair and failure—a head inside like the nostrils after hay fever—here is a cool quiet morning again, a feeling of relief, respite, hope. Just done the Robson: think it good. I am living so constrainedly: so repressedly: I can’t make notes of life. Everything is planned, battened down. I do half an hour down here: go up, often in despair: lie down: walk round the Square: come back and do another ten lines. Then to Lords yesterday. Always with a feeling of having to repress control. I see people lying on sofa between tea and dinner. Rose M„ Elizabeth Bowen, Nessa. Sat in the Square last night. Saw the dripping green leaves. Thunder and lightning. Purple sky. N. and A. discussing 4/8 time. Cats stealing round. L. dining with Tom and Bella. A very strange, most remarkable summer. New emotions: humility: impersonal joy: literary despair. I am learning my craft in the most fierce conditions. Really reading Flaubert’s letters I hear my own voice cry out Oh art! Patience: find him consoling, admonishing. I must get this book quietly, strongly, daringly into shape. But it won’t be out till next year. Yet I think it has possibilities, could I seize them. I am trying to cut the characters deep in a phrase: to pare off and compact scenes: to envelop the whole in a medium.

Tuesday, June 23rd.

A good day—a bad day—so it goes on. Few people can be so tortured by writing as I am. Only Flaubert I think. Yet I see it now, as a whole. I think I can bring it off, if I only have courage and patience: take each scene quietly: compose: I think it may be a good book. And then—oh when it’s finished!

Not so clear today, because I went to dentist and then shopped. My brain is like a scale: one grain pulls it down. Yesterday it balanced: today dips.

Friday, October 30th.

I do not wish for the moment to write out the story of the months since I made the last mark here. I do not wish, for reasons I cannot now develop, to analyse that extraordinary summer. It will be more helpful and healthy for me to write scenes; to take up my pen and describe actual events: good practice too for my stumbling and doubting pen. Can I still ‘write’? That is the question, you see. And now I will try to prove if the gift is dead, or dormant.

Tuesday, November 3rd.

Miracles will never cease—L. actually liked The Years! He thinks it so far—as far as the wind chapter—as good as any of my books. I will put down the actual facts. On Sunday I started to read the proofs. When I had read to the end of the first section I was in despair: stony but convinced despair. I made myself yesterday read on to Present Time. When I reached that landmark I said, ‘This is happily so bad that there can be no question about it. I must carry the proofs, like a dead cat, to L. and tell him to burn them unread.’ This I did. And a weight fell off my shoulders. That is true. I felt relieved of some great pack. It was cold and dry and very grey and I went out and walked through the graveyard with Cromwell’s daughter’s tomb down through Grays Inn along Holborn and so back. Now I was no longer Virginia, the genius, but only a perfectly magnificent yet content—shall I call it spirit? a body? And very tired. Very old. But at the same time content to join these 100 years with Leonard. So we lunched in a constraint: a grey acceptance: and I said to L. I will write to Richmond and ask for books to review. The proofs will cost I suppose between £200 and £300 which I will pay out of my hoard. As I have £700 this will leave £400. I was not unhappy. And L. said he thought I might be wrong about the book. Then ever so many strange men arrived: Mr Mumford, mahogany coloured, lean, with a very hard bowler and a cane; whom I put in the drawing room with a cigarette: Mr very heavy and large, who said Pardon me and knocked at the door. And Lord and Lady Cecil rang up to ask us to lunch to meet the Spanish Ambassador. (I am making up Three Guineas.) Then, after tea, we went to the Sunday Times book show. How stuffy it was! How dead I felt—Oh how infinitely tired! And Miss White came up, a hard little woman with a cheery wooden face, and talked about her book and reviews. And then Ursula Strachey came across from Duckworths and said You don’t know who I am? And I remembered the moonlit river. And then Roger Senhouse tapped me on the shoulder. We went home and L. read and read and said nothing: I began to feel actively depressed; yet could make up The Years differently—I’ve thought of a scheme for another book—it should be told in the first person. Would that do as a form for Roger?—and I fell into one of my horrid heats and deep slumbers, as if the blood in my head were cut off. Suddenly L. put down his proof and said he thought it extraordinarily good—as good as any of them. And now he is reading on, and tired out with the exertion of writing these pages I’m going up to read the Italian book.

Wednesday, November 4th.

L. who has now read to the end of 1914, still thinks it extraordinarily good: very strange: very interesting: very sad. We discussed my sadness. But my difficulty is this: I cannot bring myself to believe that he is right. It may be simply that I exaggerated its badness, and therefore he now, finding it not so bad, exaggerates its goodness. If it is to be published. I must at once sit down and correct: how can I? Every other sentence seemed to me bad. But I am shelving the question till he has done, which should be tonight.

Thursday, November 5th.

The miracle is accomplished. L. put down the last sheet about 12 last night; and could not speak. He was in tears. He says it is ‘a most remarkable book’—he likes it better than The Waves—and has not a spark of doubt that it must be published. I, as a witness, not only to his emotion but to his absorption, for he read on and on, can’t doubt his opinion. What about my own? Anyhow the moment of relief was divine. I hardly know yet if I’m on my heels or head, so amazing is the reversal since Tuesday morning. I have never had such an experience before.

Monday, November 9th.

I must make some resolutions about this book. I find it extremely difficult. I get into despair. It seems so bad. I can only cling to L.’s verdict. Then I get distracted: I tried, as an anodyne, to take up an article; a memoir; to review a book for The Listener. They make my mind race. I must fix it upon The Years. I must do my proofs—send them off. I must fix my mind on it all the morning. I think the only way is to do that, and then let myself do something else between tea and dinner. But immerse in The Years all the morning—nothing else. If the chapter is difficult, concentrate for a short time. Then write here. But don’t dash off into other writing till after tea. When it is done, we can always ask Morgan.

Tuesday, November 10th.

On the whole it has gone better this morning. It’s true my brain is so tired of this job it aches after an hour or less. So I must dandle it, and gently immerse it. Yes, I think it’s good; in its very difficult way.

I wonder if anyone has ever suffered so much from a book as I have from The Years. Once out I will never look at it again. It’s like a long childbirth. Think of that summer, every morning a headache, and forcing myself into that room in my nightgown; and lying down after a page: and always with the certainty of failure. Now that certainty is mercifully removed to some extent. But now I feel I don’t care what anyone says so long as I’m rid of it. And for some reason I feel I’m respected and liked. But this is only the haze dance of illusion, always changing. Never write a long book again. Yet I feel I shall write more fiction—scenes will form. But I am tired this morning: too much strain and racing yesterday.

Monday, November 30th.

There is no need whatever in my opinion to be unhappy about The Years. It seems to me to come off at the end. Anyhow, to be a taut, real, strenuous book. Just finished it; and feel a little exalted. It’s different from the others of course: has I think more ‘real’ life in it; more blood and bone. But anyhow, even if there are appalling watery patches, and a grinding at the beginning, I don’t think I need lie quaking at nights. I think I can feel assured. This I say sincerely to myself; to hold to myself during the weeks of dull anticipation. Nor need I care much what people say. In fact I hand my compliment to that terribly depressed woman, myself, whose head ached so often; who was so entirely convinced a failure; for in spite of everything I think she brought it off and is to be congratulated. How she did it, with her head like an old cloth, I don’t know. But now for rest: and Gibbon.

Thursday, December 31st.

There in front of me lie the proofs—the galleys—to go off today, a sort of stinging nettle that I cover over. Nor do I wish even to write about it here.

A divine relief has possessed me these last days—at being quit of it—good or bad. And, for the first time since February I should say my mind has sprung up like a tree shaking off a load. And I’ve plunged into Gibbon and read and read, for the first time since February, I think. Now for action and pleasure again and going about. I could make some interesting and perhaps valuable notes on the absolute necessity for me of my work. Always to be after something. I’m not sure that the intensiveness and exclusiveness of writing a long book is a possible state: I mean, if ever in future I do such a thing—and I doubt it—I will force myself to vary it with little articles. Anyhow, now I am not going to think Can I write? I am going to rush into unselfconsciousness and work: at Gibbon first; then Roger and Three Guineas. Which of the two comes first, how to dovetail, I don’t know. Anyhow even if The Years is a failure, I’ve thought considerably and collected a little hoard of ideas. Perhaps I’m now again on one of those peaks where I shall write two or three little books quickly; and then have another break. At least I feel myself possessed of skill enough to go on with. No emptiness. And in proof of this will go in, get my Gibbon notes and begin a careful sketch of the article.

[]

1937.

Thursday, January 28th.

Sunk once more in the happy tumultuous dream: that is to say began Three Guineas this morning and can’t stop thinking it. My plan is to write it out now, without more palaver, and think perhaps it might be roughed in by Easter; but I shall allow myself, make myself, scribble a little article or two between whiles. Then I hope to float over the horrid March 15th: wire today to say Years haven’t reached America. I must plate myself against that sinking and mud. And so far as I can tell, this method is almost too effective.

Thursday, February 18th.

I have now written for three weeks at Three Guineas and have done 38 pages. Now I’ve used up that vein momently and want a few days change. At what? Can’t at the moment think.

Saturday, February 20th.

I turn my eyes away from the Press as I go upstairs, because there are all the review copies of The Years packed and packing. They go out next week: this is my last weekend of comparative peace. What do I anticipate with such clammy coldness? I think chiefly that my friends won’t mention it; will turn the conversation rather awkwardly. I think I anticipate considerable lukewarmness among the friendly reviewers—respectful tepidity; and a whoop of Red Indian delight from the Grigs who will joyfully and loudly announce that this is the longdrawn twaddle of a prim prudish bourgeois mind, and say that now no one can take Mrs W. seriously again. But violence I shan’t so much mind. What I think I shall mind most is the awkwardness when I go, say to Tilton or Charleston, and they don’t know what to say. And since we shan’t get away till June I must expect a very full exposure to this damp firework atmosphere. They will say it’s a tired book; a last effort … Well, now that I’ve written that down I feel that even so I can exist in that shadow. That is if I keep hard at work. And there’s no lack of that. I discussed a book of illustrated incidents with Nessa yesterday; we are going to produce 12 lithographs for Christmas, printed by ourselves. As we were talking, Margery Fry rang up to ask me to see Julian Fry about Roger. So that begins to press on me. Then L. wants if possible to have Three Guineas for the autumn: and I have my Gibbon, my broadcast, and a possible leader on Biography to fill in chinks. I plan to keep out of literary circles till the mild boom is over. And this, waiting, under consideration, is after all the worst. This time next month I shall feel more at ease. And it’s only now and then I mind now.

Sunday, February 21st.

I’m off again, after five days lapse (writing Faces and Voices) on Three Guineas: after a most dismal hacking got a little canter and hope now to spin ahead. Odd that one sometimes does a transition quite quickly. A quiet day for a wonder—no one seen yesterday: so I went to Caledonian Market, couldn’t find spoon shop: bought yellow gloves 3/- and stockings 1/- and so home. Started reading French again: Misanthrope and Colette’s memoirs given me last summer by Janie when I was in the dismal drowse and couldn’t fix on that or anything. Today the reviewers (oh d n this silly thought) have their teeth fixed in me; but what care I for a goosefeather bed, etc. In fact, once I get into the canter over Three Guineas I think I shall see only the flash of the white rails and pound along to the goal.

Sunday, February 28th.

I’m so entirely imbued with Three Guineas that I can hardly jerk myself away to write here. (Here in fact I again dropped my pen to think about my next paragraph—universities)—how will that lead to professions and so on. It’s a bad habit.

Sunday, March 7th.

As will be seen on the last page my spiritual temperature went up with a rush; why I don’t know, save that I’ve been having a good gallop at Three Guineas. Now I have broached the fatal week and must expect a sudden drop. It’s going to be pretty bad, I’m certain; but at the same time I am convinced that the drop needn’t be fatal: that is, the book may be damned, with faint praise; but the point is that I myself know why it’s a failure, and that its failure is deliberate. I also know that I have reached my point of view, as writer, as being. As writer I am fitted out for another two books—Three Guineas and Roger (let alone articles): as being the interest and safety of my present life are unthrowable. This I have, honestly, proved this winter. Ifs not a gesture. And honestly the diminution of fame, that people aren’t any longer enthusiastic, gives me the chance to observe quietly. Also I am in a position to hold myself aloof. I need never seek out anyone. In short either way I’m safe, and look forward, after the unavoidable tosses and tumbles of the next ten days, to a slow, dark, fruitful spring, summer and autumn. This is set down I hope once and for all. And please to remember it on Friday when the reviews come in.

Friday, March 12th.

Oh the relief! L. brought the Lit. Sup. to me in bed and said It’s quite good. And so it is; and Time and Tide says I’m a first rate novelist and a great lyrical poet. And I can already hardly read through the reviews: but feel a little dazed, to think then it’s not nonsense; it does make an effect. Yet of course not in the least the effect I meant. But now, my dear, after all that agony, I’m free, whole; round: can go full ahead. And so stop this cry of content and sober joy. Off to M.H. Julian back today. I use my last five minutes before lunch to note that though I have slipped the gall and fret and despair even of the past few weeks wholly today, and shan’t I think renew them; I have once more loaded myself with the strain of Three Guineas, at which I have been writing hard and laboriously. So now I’m straining to draw that cart across the rough ground. It seems therefore that there is no rest; no sense of It’s finished. One always harnesses oneself by instinct; and can’t live without the strain. Now The Years will completely die out from my mind.

Car mended. But rain pouring.

Sunday, March 14th.

I am in such a twitter owing to two columns in the Observer praising The Years that I can’t, as I foretold, go on with Three Guineas. Why I even sat back just now and thought with pleasure of people reading that review. And when I think of the agony I went through in this room, just over a year ago … when it dawned on me that the whole of three years’ work was a complete failure: and then when I think of the mornings here when I used to stumble out and cut up those proofs and write three lines and then go back and lie on my bed—the worst summer in my life, but at the same time the most illuminating—it’s no wonder my hand trembles. What most pleases me though is the obvious chance now since de Selincourt sees it, that my intention in The Years may be not so entirely muted and obscured as I feared. The TLS. spoke as if it were merely the death song of the middle classes: a series of exquisite impressions: but he sees that it is a creative, a constructive book. Not that I’ve yet altogether read him: but he has pounced on some of the key sentences. And this means that it will be debated, and this means that Three Guineas will strike very sharp and clear on a hot iron: so that my immensely careful planning won’t be baulked by time of life etc. as I had made certain. Making certain however was an enormous discovery for me, though.

Friday, March 19th.

Now this is one of the strangest of my experiences—‘they’ say almost universally that The Years is a masterpiece. The Times says so. Bunny etc: Howard Spring. If somebody had told me I should write this, even a week, ago, let alone six months ago, I should have given a jump like a shot hare. How entirely and absolutely incredible it would have been! The praise chorus began yesterday: by the way I was walking in Covent Garden and found St Pauls, C.G., for the first time, heard the old char singing as she cleaned the chairs in the ante hall; then went to Burnets; chose stuff; bought the Evening Standard and found myself glorified as I read it in the Tube. A calm quiet feeling, glory: and I’m so steeled now I don’t think the flutter will much worry me. Now I must begin again on Three Guineas.

Saturday, March 27th.

No, I am not going to titivate Gibbon—that is condense by a thousand words. Too much screw needed, and my brain unstrung. Merely scribbling here: over a log fire, on a cold but bright Easter morning; sudden shafts of sun, a scatter of snow on the hills early; sudden storms, ink black, octopus pouring, coming up; and the rooks fidgeting and pecking on the elm trees. As for the beauty, as I always say when I walk the terrace after breakfast, too much for one pair of eyes. Enough to float a whole population in happiness, if only they would look. Curiously a combination, this garden, with the church, and the cross of the church black against Asheham Hill. That is all the elements of the English brought together, accidentally. We came down on Thursday, packed in the rush in London; cars spinning all along the roads: yesterday at last perfect freedom from telephones and reviews, and no one rang up. I began Lord Ormont and his Aminta and found it so rich, so knotted, so alive, and muscular after the pale little fiction I’m used to, that, alas, it made me wish to write fiction again. Meredith underrated. I like his effort to escape plain prose. And he had humour and some insight too—more than they allow him now. Also Gibbon. And so I’m well fitted out; but can’t write more than this without the old tightening and throbbing at the back of the head.

Friday, April 2nd.

How I interest myself! Quite set up and perky today with a mind brimming because I was so damnably depressed and smacked on the cheek by Edwin Muir in the Listener and by Scott James in the Life and Letters on Friday. They both gave me a smart snubbing: E.M. says The Years is dead and disappointing. So in effect did S. James. All the lights sank; my reed bent to the ground. Dead and disappointing—so I’m found out and that odious rice pudding of a book is what I thought it—a dank failure. No life in it. Much inferior to the bitter truth and intense originality of Miss Compton Burnett. Now this pain woke me at 4 a.m. and I suffered acutely. All day driving to Janet and back I was under the cloud. But about 7 it lifted; there was a good review, of 4 lines, in the Empire Review. The best of my books: did that help? I don’t think very much. But the delight of being exploded is quite real. One feels braced for some reason; amused; round; combative; more than by praise.

Saturday, April 3rd.

Now I have to broadcast on 29th. It will go like this: can’t be a craft of words. Am going to disregard the title and talk about words: why they won’t let themselves be made a craft of. They tell the truth: they aren’t useful. That there should be two languages: fiction and fact. Words are inhuman … won’t make money—need privacy. Why. For their embraces, to continue the race. A dead word. The purists and the impurists. These are only impressions, not fixations. I respect words too. Associations of words. Felicity brings in absent thee. We can easily make new words. Squish squash: crick crack. But we can’t use them in writing.

Sunday, April 4th.

Another curious idiosyncrasy. Maynard thinks The Years my best book: thinks one scene, E. and Crosby, beats Tchekhov’s Cherry Orchard—and this opinion though from the centre, from a very fine mind, doesn’t flutter me as much as Muir’s blame; it sinks in slowly and deeply. It’s not a vanity feeling; the other is; the other will die as soon as the week’s number of the Listener is past. L. went to Tilton and had a long quiet cronies talk. Maynard said that he thought The Years very moving: more tender than any of my books: did not puzzle him like The Waves; symbolism not a worry; very beautiful; and no more said than was needed; hadn’t yet finished it. But how compose the two opinions; it’s my most human book; and most inhuman? Oh to forget all this and write—as I must tomorrow.

Friday, April 9th.

‘Such happiness wherever it is known is to be pitied for ’tis surely blind.’ Yes, but my happiness isn’t blind. That is the achievement, I was thinking between 3 and 4 this morning, of my 55 years. I lay awake so calm, so content, as if I’d stepped off the whirling world into a deep blue quiet space and there open eyed existed, beyond harm; armed against all that can happen. I have never had this feeling before in all my life; but I have had it several times since last summer: when I reached it, in my worst depression, as if I stepped out, throwing aside a cloak, lying in bed, looking at the stars, these nights at Monk’s House. Of course it ruffles, in the day, but there it is. There it was yesterday when old Hugh came and said nothing about The Years.

Monday, June 1st. Monk’s House

I have at last got going with Three Guineas—after five days’ grind, re-copying, to some extent re-writing; my poor old brain hums again—largely I think because I had a good long walk yesterday and so routed the drowse—it was very hot. At any rate I must use this page as a running ground—for I can’t screw all the three hours; I must relax and race here the last hour. That’s the worst of writing—its waste. What can I do with the last hour of my morning? Dante again. But oh how my heart leaps up to think that never again shall I be harnessed to a long book. No. Always short ones in future. The long book still won’t be altogether downed—its reverberations grumble. Did I say—no, the London days were too tight, too hot, and distracted for this book—that H. Brace wrote and said they were happy to find that The Years is the best-selling novel in America? This was confirmed by my place at the head of the list in the Herald Tribune. They have sold 25,000—my record, easily. (Now I am dreaming of Three Guineas.) We think if we make money of buying perhaps an annuity. The great desirable is not to have to earn money by writing. I am doubtful if I shall ever write another novel. Certainly not unless under great compulsion such as The Years inspired in me. Were I another person, I would say to myself, Please write criticism; biography; invent a new form for both: also write some completely unformal fiction: short: and poetry. Fate has here a hand in it, for when I’ve done Three Guineas—which I hope to have written, not yet for publication though, in August—I intend to put the script aside and write Roger. What I think best would be to work hard at Three Guineas for a month—June: than begin reading and re-reading my Roger notes. By the way, I have been sharply abused in Scrutiny who, L. says, calls me a cheat in The Waves and The Years-, most intelligently (and highly) praised by F. Faulkner in America—and that’s all. (I mean that’s all I need I think write about reviews now: I suspect the clever young man is going to enjoy downing me—so be it: but in private Sally Graves and Stephen Spender approve: so, to sum up, I don’t know, this is honest, where I stand; but intend to think no more of it. Gibbon was rejected by the N. Republic, so I shall send no more to America. Nor will I write articles at all except for the Lit. Sup. for whom I am going now to do Congreve.) silence; and the solitude. I can’t though. But shan’t I, one of these days, indulge myself in some short releases into that world? Short now for ever. No more long grinds: only sudden intensities. If I could think out another adventure. Oddly enough I see it now ahead of me—in Charing Cross Road yesterday—as to do with books: some new combination. Brighton? A round room on the pier—and people shopping, I missing each other—a story Angelica told in the summer. But how does this make up with criticism? I’m trying to get the four dimensions of the mind … life in connection with emotions from literature. A day’s walk—a mind’s adventure; something like that. And it’s useless to repeat my old experiments: they must be new to be experiments.

Wednesday, June 23rd.

It’s ill writing after reading Love lor Love—a masterpiece. I never knew how good it is. And what exhilaration there is in reading these masterpieces. This superb hard English! Yes, always keep the classics at hand to prevent flop. I can’t write out my feeling, though; must decant it tomorrow in an article. But neither can I settle to read poor Rosemary’s verses, as I should with a view to this evening. How could L.S. in D.N.B. deny C. feeling, pain—more in that one play than in all Thackeray: and the indecency often honesty. But enough—I went shopping, whitebait hunting, to Selfridges yesterday and it grew roasting hot and I was in black—such astonishing chops and changes this summer—often one’s caught in a storm, frozen or roasted. As I reached 52, a long trail of fugitives—like a caravan in a desert—came through the square: Spaniards flying from Bilbao, which has fallen, I suppose. Somehow brought tears to my eyes, though no one seemed surprised. Children trudging along; women in London cheap jackets with gay handkerchiefs on their heads, young men, and all carrying either cheap cases, and bright blue enamel kettles, very large, and canisters, fitted I suppose with gifts from some charity—a shuffling trudging procession, flying—impelled by machine gun in Spanish fields to trudge through Tavistock Square, along Gordon Square, then where?—clasping their enamel kettles. A strange spectacle. They went on, knowing which way: I suppose someone directed them. One boy was chatting, the others absorbed, like people on the trek. A reason why we can’t write like Congreve I suppose.

Sunday, July 11th.

A gap: not in life, but in comment. I have been in full flood every morning with Three Guineas. Whether I shall finish by August becomes doubtful. But I am in the middle of my magic bubble. Had I time I would like to describe the curious glance of the world—the pale disillusioned world—that I get so violently now and then, when the wall thins—either I’m tired or interrupted. Then I think of Julian near Madrid: and so on. Margaret LI. Da vies writes that Janet is dying, and will I write on her for The Times—a curious thought, rather: as if it mattered who wrote, or not. But this flooded me with the idea of Janet yesterday. I think writing, my writing, is a species of mediumship. I become the person.

Monday, July 19th.

Just back from M.H. but I can’t and won’t write anything—too bothered and dithered. Also, I screwed my head tight—too tight—knocking together a little obituary of Janet for The Times. And couldn’t make it take the folds well: too stiff and mannered. She died. Three notes from Emphie this morning. She died on Thursday, shut her eyes and ‘looks so beautiful’. Today they are cremating her, and she had had printed a little funeral service—with the death day left blank. No words: an adagio from Beethoven and a text about gentleness and faith which I would have included had I known. But what does my writing matter? There is something fitting and complete about the memory of her, thus consummated. Dear old harum scarum Emphie will have her solitary moments to herself. To us she will always be a scatterbrain; yet to me very touching and I remember that phrase in her letter, how she ran into Janet’s room at midnight, and they had a nice little time together. She was always running in. Janet was the steadfast contemplative one, anchored in some private faith which didn’t correspond with the world’s. But she was oddly inarticulate. No hand for words. Her letters, save that the last began ‘My beloved Virginia’, always cool and casual. And how I loved her, at Hyde Park Gate: and how I went hot and cold going to Windmill Hill: and how great a visionary part she has played in my life, till the visionary became a part of the fictitious, not of the real life.

Friday, August 6th.

Will another novel ever swim up? If so, how? The only hint I have towards it is that it’s to be dialogue: and poetry: and prose; all quite distinct. No more long closely written books. But I have no impulse; and shall wait; and shan’t mind if the impulse never formulates; though I suspect one of these days I shall get that old rapture. I don’t want to write more fiction. I want to explore a new criticism. One thing I think proved, I shall never write to ‘please’, to convert; now am entirely and for ever my own mistress.

Tuesday, August 17th.

Not much to say. It’s true, the only life this summer is in the brain. I get excited writing. Three hours pass like 10 minutes. This morning I had a moment of the old rapture—think of it!—over copying The Duchess and the Jeweller for Chambrun, N.Y. I had to send a synopsis. I expect he’ll regret the synopsis. But there was the old excitement, even in that little extravagant flash—more than in criticism I think.

Happily—if that’s the word—I get these electric shocks—Cables asking me to write. Chambrun offer £500 for a 9,000 word story. And I at once begin making up adventures—ten days of adventures—a man rowing with black knitted stockings on his arms. Do I ever write, even here, for my own eye? If not, for whose eye? An interesting question, rather.

Tuesday, October 12th. London

Yes, we are back at Tavistock Square; and I’ve never written a word since September 27th. That shows how every morning was crammed to the margin with Three Guineas. This is the first morning I write, because at 12, ten minutes ago, I wrote what I think is the last page of Three Guineas. Oh how violently I have been galloping through these mornings! It has pressed and spurted out of me. If that’s any proof of virtue, like a physical volcano. And my brain feels cool and quiet after the expulsion. I’ve had it sizzling now since—well I was thinking of it at Delphi I remember. And then I forced myself to put it into fiction first. No, the fiction came first. The Years. And how I held myself back, all through the terrible depression, and refused, save for some frantic notes, to tap it until The Years—that awful burden—was off me. So that I have deserved this gallop. And taken time and thought too. But whether it is good or bad, how can I tell? I must now add the bibliography and notes. And have a week’s respite.

Tuesday, October 19th.

It came over me suddenly last night as I was reading The Shooting Tarty—the story that I’m to send to America, H.B.—that I saw the form of a new novel. It’s to be first the statement of the theme: then the restatement: and so on: repeating the same story: singling out this and then that, until the central idea is stated.

This might also lend itself to my book of criticism. But how I don’t know, being very jaded in the brain, try to discover. What happened was this: when I finished the S.P., I thought, now that the woman has called a taxi; I will go on to meet, say, Christabel, at T. Square who tells the story again: or I will expatiate upon my own idea in telling the story; or I will find some other person at the S.T. whose life I will tell: but all the scenes must be controlled and radiate to a centre. I think this is a possible idea; and would admit of doing it in short bursts: could be a concentrated small book: could contain many varieties of mood. And possibly criticism. I must keep the idea at the back of my mind for a year or two, while I do Roger etc.

[]

1938.

Sunday, January 9th.

Yes, I will force myself to begin this cursed year. For one thing I have ‘finished’ the last chapter of Three Guineas and for the first time since I don’t know when have stopped writing in the middle of the morning.

Friday, February 4th.

A ten minutes spin here. L. gravely approves Three Guineas. Thinks it an extremely clear analysis. On the whole I’m content. One can’t expect emotion, for as he says, it’s not on a par with the novels. Yet I think it may have more practical value. But I’m much more indifferent, that’s true: feel it a good piece of donkey work, and don’t think it affects me either way as the novels do.

Tuesday, April 11th.

Anyhow, on April 1st I think, I started Roger: and with the help of his memoirs have covered the time till Clifton. Much of it donkey work; and I suppose to be re-written. Still there is 20 pages put down, after being so long put off. And it is an immense solace to have this sober drudgery to take to instantly and so tide over the horrid anticlimax of Three Guineas. I didn’t get so much praise from L. as I hoped. He had to swallow the notes at a gulp though. And I suspect I shall find the page proofs (due tomorrow) a chill bath of disillusionment. But I wanted—how violently—how persistently, pressingly, compulsorily I can’t say—to write this book: and have a quiet composed feeling: as if I had said my say: take it or leave it: I’m quit of that: free for fresh adventures—at the age of 56. Last night I began making up again: summer’s night: a complete whole: that’s my idea. Roger surrounds me: and then to M.H. on Thursday, and that infernal bundle of proofs. Am I right though in thinking that it has some importance—Three Guineas—as a point of view: shows industry; fertility; and is here and there, as ‘well written’ (considering the technical problems—quotations, arguments etc.) as any of my rather skimble skamble works! I think there’s more to it than to a Room: which, on re-reading, seems to me a little egotistic, flaunting, sketchy: but has its brilliance—its speed. I’m suspicious of the vulgarity of the notes of a certain insistence.

Tuesday, April 26th.

We had our Easter at M.H.: but as for the sun, it never shone; was colder than Christmas; a grudging lead-coloured sky; razor wind; winter clothes; proofs; much acute despair; curbed however by the aid of divine philosophy; a joy in discovering Mandeville’s Bees (this really a fruitful book; the very book I want). Then Q. rings up; to warn you: Have you had a letter from Pipsy? Ottoline is dead. They told her P. might die, and the shock killed her: and he’s asking you to write about her (with Mr Wicks and Mr Mussell exploring the attics for the new room). So I had to write; and the horrid little pellet screwed my brain; leaves it giddy. Yet in spite of that here am I sketching out a new book; only don’t please impose that huge burden on me again, I implore. Let it be random and tentative: something I can blow of a morning, to relieve myself of Roger: don’t, I implore, lay down a scheme; call in all the cosmic immensities; and force my tired and diffident brain to embrace another whole—all parts contributing—not yet awhile. But to amuse myself, let me note: Why not Voyntzet Hall: a centre: all literature discussed in connection with real little incongruous living humour: and anything that comes into my head; but T rejected: ‘We’ substituted: to whom at the end there shall be an invocation? ‘We’ … the composed of many different things … we all life, all art, all waifs and strays—a rambling capricious but somehow unified whole—the present state of mind? And English country; and a scenic old house—and a terrace where nursemaids walk—and people passing—and a perpetual variety and change from intensity to prose, and facts—and notes; and—but eno’! I must read Roger: and go to Ott’s memorial service, representing also T.S. Eliot at his absurd command. 2.30 at Martin’s in the Fields.

Ottoline’s burial service. Oh dear, oh dear the lack of intensity; the wailing and mumbling; the fumbling with bags; the shuffling; the vast brown mass of respectable old South Kensington ladies. And then the hymns; and the clergyman with a bar of medals across his surplice; and the orange and blue windows; and a toy Union Jack sticking from a cranny. What all this had to do with Ottoline, or our feelings? Save that the address was to the point: a critical study, written presumably by Philip and delivered, very resonantly, by Mr Speaight the actor: a sober, and secular speech, which made one at least think of a human being, though the reference to her beautiful voice caused one to think of that queer nasal moan: however that too was to the good in deflating immensities. P.’s secretary buttonholed me and told me to sit high up. The pew was blocked by a vast furred lady who said, ‘I’m afraid I can’t move’—as indeed seemed the fact. So I stationed myself rather behind: near enough though to see the very well set up back of P. in his thick coat; and his red ram’s head turned now and then looking along the ranks; also I pressed his hand, simulated, I fear, more emotion than I felt when he asked me, had I liked the address? and so slowly moved out to the steps—past Jack and Mary, Sturge Moores, Molly etc: Gertler having tears in his eyes; various household staffs: was then pounced on and pinioned by Lady Oxford: who was hard as whipcord; upright; a little vacant in the eye, in spite of make up which made it shine. She said she had expostulated with Ott. about the voice; Mere affectation. But a wonderful woman. Tell me, though, why did her friends quarrel with her? Pause. She was exigeante, Duncan volunteered at last. And so Margot refused to ask further; and modulated into stories of Symonds and Jowett, when I bantered her on her obituary. Mine, of Ott. for The Times, has not appeared, nor do I much regret …

Walked in Dulwich yesterday and lost my brooch by way of a freshener when confronted with the final proofs just today (April 28th) done: and to be sent this afternoon: a book I shall never look at again. But I now feel entirely free. Why? Have committed myself, am afraid of nothing. Can do anything I like. No longer famous, no longer on a pedestal: no longer hawked in by societies: on my own, forever. That’s my feeling: a sense of expansion, like putting on slippers. Why this should be so, why I feel myself enfranchised till death, and quit of all humbug, when I daresay it’s not a good book and will excite nothing but mild sneers; and how very inconsequent and egotistical V.W. is—why, why I can’t analyse: being fluttered this morning.

The difficulty is that I get so absorbed in this fantastic Poyntz Hall I can’t attend to Roger. So what am I to do? This however is only my first day of freedom: and I have been rendered self-conscious by a notice of Three Guineas on the front page of the new bloated T.L.S. Well it can’t be helped; and I must cling to my ‘freedom’—that mysterious hand that was reached out to me about four years ago.

Tuesday, May 5th.

Pouring now; the drought broken; the worst spring on record; my pens diseased, even the new box; my eyes ache with Roger and I’m a little appalled at the prospect of the grind this book will be. I must somehow shorten and loosen; I can’t (remember) stretch it to a long painstaking literal book: later I must generalize and let fly. But then, what about all the letters? How can one cut loose from facts, when there they are, contradicting my theories? A problem. But I’m convinced I can’t, physically, strain after an R.A. portrait. What was I going to say with this defective nib?

Friday, May 20th.

Time and again I have meant to write down my expectations, dreads and so on, waiting the publication on—I think June 2nd—of Three Guineas: but haven’t, because what with living in the solid world of Roger and then (again this morning) in the airy world of Voyntz Hall I feel extremely little. And don’t want to rouse feeling. What I’m afraid of is the taunt charm and emptiness. The book I wrote with such violent feeling to relieve that immense pressure will not dimple the surface. That is my fear. Also I’m uneasy at taking this role in the public eye—afraid of autobiography in public. But the fears are entirely outbalanced (this is honest) by the immense relief and peace I have gained and enjoy this moment. Now I am quit of that poison and excitement. Nor is that all. For having spat it out, my mind is made up. I need never recur or repeat. I am an outsider. I can take my way: experiment with my own imagination in my own way. The pack may howl, but it shall never catch me. And even if the pack—reviewers, friends, enemies—pays me no attention or sneers, still I’m free. This is the actual result of that spiritual conversion (I can’t bother to get the right words) in the autumn of 1933 or 4—when I rushed through London buying, I remember, a great magnifying glass, from sheer ecstasy, near Blackfriars: when I gave the man who played the harp half a crown for talking to me about his life in the tube station. The omens are mixed: L. is less excited than I hoped: Nessa highly ambiguous: Miss Hepworth and Mrs Nicolls say, ‘Women owe a great deal to Mrs Woolf and I have promised Pippa to supply books. Now for R’s letter. Monk’s House at the moment windy and cold.

Tuesday, May 17th.

I’m pleased this morning because Lady Rhondda writes that she is profoundly excited and moved by Three Guineas. Theo Bosanquet who has a review copy read her extracts. And she thinks it may have a great effect, and signs herself my grateful outsider. A good omen; because this shows that certain people will be stirred; will think; will discuss; it won’t altogether be frittered away. Of course Lady R. is already partly on my side; but again as she’s highly patriotic and citizenlike she might have been roused to object. It’s on the cards that it will make more splash among the inkpots than I thought—feeling very dim and cold these last weeks, and indifferent too; and oblivious of the great excitement and intensity with which (certainly) I wrote. But as the whole of Europe may be in flames—it’s on the cards. One more shot at a policeman and the Germans, Czechs, French will begin the old horror. The 4th of August may come next week. At the moment there is a lull. L. says K. Martin says we say (The P.M.) that we will fight this time. Hitler therefore is chewing his little bristling moustache. But the whole thing trembles: and my book may be like a moth dancing over a bonfire—consumed in less than one second.

Friday, May 27th.

It’s odd to be working at half cock after all those months of high pressure. The result is half an hour every day to write here. Roger I’m retyping: and shall then sketch Walpole. I have just been signing in bright green ink those circulars. But I will not expatiate on the dreariness of doing things one ought to do. A letter, grateful, from Bruce Richmond, ending my 30 years connection with him—the Lit. Sup. How pleased I used to be when L. called me ‘You’re wanted by the Major Journal!’ and I ran down to the telephone to take my almost weekly orders at Hogarth House! I learnt a lot of my craft writing for him: how to compress; how to enliven; and also was made to read with a pen and notebook, seriously. I am now waiting for today week—when that’s over, my swell will subside. And can’t I prophesy? On the whole I shall get more pain than pleasure; I shall mind the sneers more than I shall enjoy Lady Rhondda’s enthusiasm. There’ll be many sneers—some very angry letters. Some silences. And then—three weeks yesterday—we shall be off. And by July 7th when we come back—or sooner, for we dread too many hotels—it will be over, almost entirely; and then for two years I think I shall publish nothing, save American articles. And this week of waiting is the worst, and it’s not very bad—nothing in the least comparable to the horror of The Years: (that deadened into indifference, so sure was I of failure).

Tuesday, May 31st.

A letter from Pippa. She is enthusiastic. So this is the last load off my mind—which weighed it rather heavy, for I felt if I had written all that, if it was not to her liking I should have to brace myself pretty severely in my own private esteem. But she says it’s the very thing for which they have panted: and the poison is now drawn. Now I can face the music, or donkey’s bray or geese’s cackle of the Reviews so indifferently that (truthfully) I find myself forgetting that they’ll all be out this weekend. Never have I faced review day so composedly. Also I don’t much mind my Cambridge friends either. Maynard may have a gibe; but what care I?

Friday, June 3rd.

Rodmell This is the coming out day of Three Guineas. And the Lit. Sup. has two columns and a leader; and the Referee a great black bar Woman declares sex war, or some such caption. And it makes so much less difference than any other cackle on coming out day that I’ve written quietly at Toyntz Hall: haven’t even troubled to read R. Lynd, nor look at the Ref. nor read through The Times article. It’s true I have a sense of quiet and relief. But no wish to read reviews, or hear opinions.

I wonder why this is? Because it’s a fact I want to communicate rather than a poem? I daresay something of the kind. Mercifully we have 50 miles of felt between ourselves and the din. It is sunny, warm, dry and like a June day but will rain later. Oh it pleased me that the Lit. Sup. says I’m the most brilliant pamphleteer in England. Also that this book may mark an epoch if taken seriously. Also that the Listener says I am scrupulously fair, and puritanically deny myself flights. But that’s about all.

Anyhow that’s the end of six years floundering, striving, much agony, some ecstasy: lumping the Years and Three Guineas together as one book—as indeed they are. And now I can be off again, as indeed I long to be. Oh to be private, alone, submerged.

Sunday, June 5th.

This is the mildest childbirth I have ever had. Compare it with The Years! I wake knowing the yap will begin and never bother my head. Yesterday I had Time and Tide, and various London obscurities: today Observer: Selincourt. A terrible indictment Sunday Times, New Statesman and Spectator, reserved for next week presumably. So the temperature remains steady. I foretell a great many letters on Tuesday night: some anonymous and abusive. But I have already gained my point: I’m taken seriously, not dismissed as a charming prattler as I feared. The Times yesterday had a paragraph headed ‘Mrs Woolf’s call to women’ a serious challenge that must be answered by all thinkers—or something like that: prefacing the Lit. Sup. advt: unknown before I think; and must be some serious intention behind it Thursday, June 16th. Baldock Stop to light a pipe on the Icknield Way, a scrubby street of yellow villas. Now St James Deeping. After Croyland, a magnificent moulded Church. Now very hot: flat; an old gent, fishing. Spread out and exposed. River above road level. On now to Gainsborough. Lunch at Peterborough: factory chimneys. Railway gate opened; off again. Gainsborough. A red Venetian palace rising among bungalows: in a square of unkempt grass. Long windows, leaning walls. A maze of little lanes. A strange forgotten town. Sunday at Housesteads. Thorn trees: sheep. The wall and white headed boys in front. Miles and miles of lavender campagna. One thread coloured frail road crossing the vast uncultivated lonely land. Today all cloud and blue and wind. The wall is a wave with a sharp crest, as of a wave drawn up to break. Then flat. Bogs under the crest Waiting now for the rain to stop, for it blew and rained that day on the wall. Now a few miles from Corbridge waiting in the middle of the moor. Very black. Larks singing. Lunch deferred. A party of ninety lunching at the Inn at Piercebridge. A sense of local life 18th century inn diners to celebrate some sport. So on to a Manse in a garden: a very solid private house that takes in residents. Hot ham and fruit, but real cream, looking over an ugly range. The country early today was fen Wash country. Then the Pennines. These are shrouded in a heat mist. Larks singing. L. now looking for water for Sally (but this should precede the wall). Sunday. Sitting by the road under the Roman wall while L. cleans sparking plugs. And I have been reading translations of Greek verse and thinking idly. When one reads the mind is like an aeroplane propeller invisibly quick and unconscious—a state seldom achieved. Not a bad Oxford introduction, trying to be in touch, up to date: scholarly but Oxford. Cows moving to the top of the hill by some simultaneous sympathy. One draws the others. Wind rocks the car. Too windy to climb up and look at the lake. Reason why the hills are still Roman—the landscape immortal … what they saw I see. The wind, the June wind, the water, and snow. Sheep bedded in the long turf like pearls. No shade, no shelter. Romans looking over the border. Now nothing comes.

Tuesday.

Now in Midlothian. Stopping for petrol. On the way to Stirling. Scotch mist driven across the trees. Normal Scots weather. Great hills. Ugly puritanical houses. The Hydro built 90 years ago. A woman called and said she had seen Mrs Woolf walking in Melrose on Saturday. Second sight as I was not there. Galashiels a manufacturing town. Hideous. Fragments of talk overheard at the Hydro Melrose. Soft voiced old Scotch ladies sitting in their accredited places by the fire under the window. ‘I was wondering why you walked about with, an umbrella.’ One who is stitching, ‘I wonder if I should wash it and begin again. I’m working on a dirty ground.’ Here I interpose: We stopped at Dryburgh to see Scott grave. It is under the broken palanquin of a ruined chapel. Just enough roof to cover it. And there he lies—Sir Walter Scott, Baronet. In a caddy made of chocolate blancmange with these words cut large and plain on the lid. As Dame Charlotte who is buried beside him is covered with the same chocolate slab it must have been his taste. And there’s something fitting in it. For the Abbey is impressive and the river running at the bottom of the field. And all the old Scots ruins standing round him. I picked a white syringa in memory but lost it. An airy place but Scott is much pressed together. The col. by his side and Lockhart his son in law at his feet. Then there’s Haig’s stuck about with dark red poppies. But the old ladies are discussing Dr John Brown whose brother was a doctor in Melrose. Soon one’s head would ache and one’s senses fuddle. One would eat too many cakes at tea and there’s a huge dinner at 7. ‘I think he’s very nice—her husband. She’s got a personality of her own. A very nice cir-r-cle. Where do they live? Retired to Perthshire … I’m three stitches out … Miss Peace came along to the reading room with her friend and wanted a fire. Couldn’t she have rung the bell or something? Out you come! (unpicking the knitting). There so much opened up now. Two years ago was the Centenary (of Dryburgh?). I went to the meeting. There was a service—most interesting. All the Ministers. Five on the platform. Possibly the Moderator. At any rate it was very nice and it was a beautiful day and the place was very full. The birds joined in the music. Alan Haig’s birthday. There was a service at Dryburgh. I like D. I’ve not been to Jedburgh—awfully pretty.’ No, I don’t think I can write it all out. The old creatures are sitting on a sofa not much older than I am I daresay. Yes, they’re about 65. ‘Edinburgh’s nice—I like it. We have to go away before we appreciate it. You have to go away from your birthplace. Then when you go back everything changed. A year does it—two years do it. I should leave it (of the work) and see the effect afterwards. What church d’you go to? Church of Scotland—not to St Giles. It used to be the Tron. We go to St Giles. It was St George’s parish—my husband was an elder in St George’s parish Charlotte Square. D’you like Waugh? I like him in a way I don’t hear him, and it’s a common complaint. He gives very hard sermons—you can’t take anything away. The choir’s beautiful. I can’t get a sitting from which you can hear. I feel it infra dig rushing with the crowd. The crowd hasn’t reached—I’ve just got to sit still—I’m having a service—I hear the prayers, the young men the music. It was pretty well where they come in from the Thistle chapel. They passed me bang. I rose and moved along. There are some seats the people never come to, and often the best seats. I like St Giles, a lovely old place. The old lady whose seat I had told me the church was all renovated. Chambers did it, and when it came to the opening not a seat retained for the Chambers family. Badly arranged. Someone provided seats for them. A stupid thing. Always some higher church alteration. I like the episcopal. If it be episcopal let it be; if Church of Scotland, let it be Church of Scotland. Dr Waugh’s brother is at Dundee. He would like Roseneath. Someone said that the minister at Roseneath is delicate.’

Wind rages: trees leafless: bannocks and a blue pound note the only changes. Glencoe. Menacing. Leaf green hills, islands floating. A moving string of cars; no inhabitants, only tourists…. Ben Nevis with stripes of snow. The sea. Little boats: feeling of Greece and Cornwall. Yellow flags and great foxgloves: no farms, villages or cottages: a dead land over-run with insects. An old man who could not get up from his chair. Two other ladies, her legs overflowing her shoes. All dress for dinner, and sit in the drawing room. This was the good inn at Crianlarich. Lake with hanging stalactites green trees in the middle. Bowl of the hills. Hills with velvet leaf green. The Bannington of Eaton Place. She had found winter green for her father-in-law, a botanist. Sky light at n. Bad review of Three Guineas by G.M. Young. Pain lasted ten minutes: over then. Loch Ness swallowed Mrs Hambro. She was wearing pearls.

And then, sick of copying, I tore the rest of it up—a lesson, next journey, not to make endless pencil notes that need copying. Some too I regret. Some Boswell experiments in inns. Also the woman whose grandmother worked for the Wordsworths and remembered him as an old man in a cloak with a red lining muttering poetry. Sometimes he would pat the children on the head but never spoke to them. On the other hand, H. Coleridge was always drinking at the pub with the men.

Thursday, July 7th.

Oh the appalling grind of getting back to Roger, after these violent oscillations, Three Guineas and T.H. How can I concentrate upon minute facts in letters? This morning I have forced myself back to Failand in 1888. But Jumbol last night threw cold water on the whole idea of biography of those who have no lives. Roger had, she says, no life that can be written. I daresay this is true. And here am I sweating over minute facts. If s all too minute and tied down—documented. Is it to be done on this scale? Is he interesting to other people in that light? I think I will go on doggedly till I meet him myself—1909—and then attempt something more fictitious. But must plod on through all these letters till then. I think contrast the two all the time. My view: his—and other people’s. And then his books.

Saturday, August 7th.

Rather enjoy doing T.H. That’s something, for it won’t please anyone, if anyone should ever read it. Ann Watkins, by the way, says the Atlantic readers haven’t read enough of Walpole to understand my article. Refused.

Wednesday, August 17th.

No I won’t go on doing Roger—abstracting with blood and sweat from the old Articles—right up to lunch. I will steal 25 minutes. In fact I’ve been getting absorbed in Roger. Didn’t I say I wouldn’t? Didn’t L. say there’s no hurry? Except that I’m 56; and think that Gibbon then allowed himself 12 years, and died instantly. Still why always chafe and urge and strain at the leash? What I want is a season of calm weather. Contemplation. I get this sometimes about 3 a.m. when I always wake, open my window and look at the sky over the apple trees. A tearing wind last night. Every sort of scenic effect—a prodigious toppling and clearing and massing, after the sunset that was so amazing. L. made me come and look out of the bathroom window—a flurry of red clouds; hard; a water colour mass of purple and black, soft as a water ice; then hard slices of intense green stone; blue stone and a ripple of crimson light. No: that won’t convey it: and then there were the trees in the garden; and the reflected light: our hot pokers burning on the edge of the steep. So, at supper, we discussed our generation: and the prospects of war. Hitler has his million men now under arms. Is it only summer manoeuvres or ?

Harold broadcasting in his man of the world manner hints it may be war. That is the complete ruin not only of civilization in Europe, but of our last lap. Quentin conscripted etc. One ceases to think about it—that’s all. Goes on discussing the new room, new chair, new books. What else can a gnat on a blade of grass do? And I would like to write P.H.: and other things.

Sunday, August 28th.

The character of this summer is extreme drought. Brooks dry. Not a mushroom yet. Sunday is the devil’s own day at M.H.: dogs, children, bells … there they go for evensong. I can’t settle anywhere. Beaten after three hard fights at bowls. Bowls is our mania. Reading rather scamped. I’m strung into a ball with Roger: got him, very stiffly, to the verge of America. I shall take a dive into fiction: then compose the chapter that leads to the change. But is it readable—and Lord to think of the further compressing and leavening. Ding dong bell … ding dong—why did we settle in a village? And how deliberately we are digging ourselves in! And at any moment the guns may go off and explode us. L. is very black. Hitler has his hounds only very lightly held. A single step—in Czechoslovakia—like the Austrian Archduke in 1914—and again it’s 1914. Ding dong ding dong. People all strolling up and down the fields. A grey close evening.

Thursday, September 1st.

A very fine clear September day. Sybil threatens to dine, but may put us off—should a Cabinet Minister crop up. Politics marking time. A violent attack on Three Guineas in Scrutiny by Q. Leavis. I don’t think it gave me an entire single thrill of horror. And I didn’t read it through. A symbol though of what wiggings are to come. But I read enough to see that it was all personal—about Queenie’s own grievances and retorts to my snubs. Why I don’t care more for praise or wigging I don’t know. Yet it’s true. A slight distaste for my biography of Roger this morning: too detailed and flat. But I must take it up tomorrow, and lay aside P.H. I fear. Quentin over to finish his table. We have settled to keep the roof Cornish cream colour.. I found a new walk down Telscombe Valley to the river yesterday.

Oh Queenie was at once cancelled by a letter from Jane Walker—a thousand thanks … Three Guineas ought to be in the hands of every English speaking man and woman etc.

Monday, September 5th.

It’s odd to be sitting here, looking up littie facts about Roger and the M.M. in New York, with a sparrow tapping on my roof this fine September morning when it may be 3rd August 1914 … What would war mean? Darkness, strain: I suppose conceivably death. And all the horror of friends: and Quentin: … All that lies over the water in the brain of that ridiculous little man. Why ridiculous? Because none of it fits: encloses no reality. Death and war and darkness representing nothing that any human being from the pork butcher to the Prime Minister cares one straw about. Not liberty, not life. Merely a housemaid’s dream, and we woke from that dream and had the Cenotaph to remind us of the fruits. Well, I can’t spread my mind wide enough to take it in, intelligibly. If it were real, one could make something of it. But as it is it merely grumbles, in an inarticulate way, behind reality. We may hear his mad voice vociferating tonight. Nuremberg rally begun: but it goes on for another week. And what will be happening this time 10 days? Suppose we skim across, still at any moment any accident may suddenly bring out the uproar. But this time everyone’s agog. That the difference. And as we’re all equally in the dark we can’t cluster and group: we are beginning to feel the herd impulse: everyone asks everyone Any news? What d’you think? The only answer is Wait and see.

Old Mr Thompsett meanwhile after driving horses to the brooks and about the fields for 74 years has died in the hospital. And L. is to read his will on Wednesday.

Saturday, September 10th.

I don’t feel that the crisis is real—not so real as Roger in 1910 at Gordon Square, about which I’ve just been writing; and now switch off with some difficulty to use the last 20 minutes that are over before lunch. Of course we may be at war this time next week. The papers each in turn warn Hitler in the same set, grim but composed words, dictated by the Government presumably, that if he forces us we shall fight. They are all equally calm and good tempered. Nothing is to be said to provoke. Every allowance is to be made. In fact we are simply marking time as calmly as possible until Monday or Tuesday, when the oracle will speak. And we mean him to know what we think. The only doubt is whether what we say reaches his own much cumbered long ears. (I’m thinking of Roger not of Hitler—how I bless Roger and wish I could tell him so, for giving me himself to think of—what a help he remains in this welter of unreality.) All these grim men appear to me like grown ups staring incredulously at a child’s sand castle which for some inexplicable reason has become a real vast castle, needing gunpowder and dynamite to destroy it. Nobody in their senses can believe in it. Yet nobody must tell the truth. So one forgets. Meanwhile the aeroplanes are on the prowl, crossing the downs. Every preparation is made. Sirens will hoot in a particular way when there’s the first hint of a raid. L. and I no longer talk about it. Much better to play bowls and pick dahlias. They’re blazing in the sitting room, orange against the black last night. Our balcony is now up.

Tuesday, September 20th.

Since I’m too stale to work—rather headachy—I may as well write a sketch roughly of the next chapter. (I’ve been rather absorbed in P.H., hence headache. Note: fiction is far more a strain than biography—that’s the excitement.)

Suppose I make a break after H’s death (madness). A separate paragraph quoting what R. himself said. Then a break. Then begin definitely with the first meeting. That is the first impression: a man of the world, not professor or Bohemian. Then give facts in his letters to his mother. Then back to the second meeting. Pictures: talk about art: I look out of window. His persuasiveness—a certain density—wished to persuade you to like what he liked. Eagerness, absorption, stir—a kind of vibration like a hawkmoth round him. Or shall I make a scene here—at Ott.’s? Then Cple. Driving out: getting things in: his deftness in combining. Then quote the letters to R.

The first 1910 show.

The ridicule. Quote W. Blunt.

Effect on R. Another close-up.

The letter to MacColl. His own personal liberation.

Excitement. Found his method (but this wasn’t lasting. His letters to V. show that he was swayed too much by her.)

Love. How to say that he never was in love?

Give the pre-war atmosphere. Ott. Duncan. France.

Letter to Bridges about beauty and sensuality. His exactingness. Logic.

Thursday, September 22nd.

By mistake I wrote some pages of Roger here; a proof, if proof is needed, as I’m in the habit of saying, that my books are in a muddle. Yes, at this moment, there are packets of letters to V.B. 1910-1916—packets of testimonials for the Oxford Slade—endless folders, each containing different letters, press cuttings and extracts from books. In between come my own, now numerous, semi-official Three Guineas letters (now sold 7.017 …) No sober silent weeks of work alone all day as we’d planned, when the Bells went. I suppose one enjoys it. Yet I was just getting into the old, very old, rhythm of regular reading, first this book then that: Roger all the morning; walk from 2 to 4; bowls 5 to 6.30; then Madame de Sévigné; get dinner 7.30; read Roger; listen to music; bind Eddie’s Candide; read Siegfried Sassoon; and so bed at 11.30 or so. A very good rhythm; but I can only manage it for a few days it seems. Next week all broken.

Thursday, October 6th.

Another 10 minutes. I’m taking a frisk at P.H. at which I can only write for one hour. Like the Waves. I enjoy it intensely: head screwed up over Roger. A violent storm two days ago. No walking. Apples down. Electric light cut off. We used the four 6d. candlesticks bought at Woolworths. Dinner cooked, and smoked, on dining room fire. Men now staining boards. The room will be done actually this week. Politics now a mere ‘I told you so … You did. I didn’t.’ I shall cease to read the papers. Sink at last into contemplation. Peace for our lifetime: why not try to believe it? Can’t make a push and go to S. Remy. Want to: don’t want to. Long for change: love reading Sévigné even by candlelight. Long for London and lights; long for vintage; long for complete solitude. All this discussed with L. walking to Piddinghoe yesterday.

Friday, October 14th.

Two things I mean to do when the long dark evenings come: to write, on the spur of the moment, as now, lots of little poems to go into P.H.: as they may come in handy: to collect, even bind together, my innumerable TX.S. notes: to consider them as material for some kind of critical book: quotations? comments? ranging all through English literature as I’ve read it and noted it during the past 20 years.

Tuesday, November 1st.

Max1 like a Cheshire cat. Orbicular. Jowled. Blue eyed. Eyes grow vague. Something like Bruce Richmond—all curves. What he said was, I’ve never been in a group. No, not even as a young man. It was a serious fault. When you’re a young man you ought to think There’s only one right way. And I thought This is very profound, but you mayn’t realize it. ‘It takes all sorts to make a world.’ I was outside all the groups. Now dear Roger Fry who liked me, was a born leader. No one so ‘illuminated’. He looked it. Never saw anyone look it so much. I heard him lecture, on the Aesthetics of Art. I was disappointed. He kept on turning the page—turning the page … Hampstead hasn’t yet been spoilt. I stayed at Jack Straw’s Castle some years ago. My wife had been having influenza. And the barmaid, looking over her shoulder, said—my wife had had influenza twice—‘Quite a greedy one aren’t you?’ Now that’s immortal. There’s all the race of barmaids in that. I suppose I’ve been ten times into public houses. George Moore never used his eyes. He never knew what men and women think. He got it all out of books. Ah I was afraid you would remind me of Ave atque Vale. Yes; that’s beautiful. Yes, it’s true he used his eyes then. Otherwise it’s like a lovely lake, with no fish in it. The Brook Kerith … Coulson Kernahan? (I told how C.K. stopped me in Hastings. Are you Edith Sitwell? No, Mrs W. And you? Coulson Kernahan.) At this Max gobbled. Instantly said he had known him in Yellow Book days. He wrote God and the Ant. Sold 12 million copies. And a book of reminiscences. How I visited Lord Roberts … The great man rose from his chair. His eyes—were they hazel? were they blue? were they brown—no they were just soldier’s eyes. And he wrote, Celebrities I have not met, Max Beerbohm.

About his own writing: dear Lytton Strachey said to me: first I write one sentence: then I write another. That’s how I write. And so I go on. But I have a feeling writing ought to be like running through a field. That’s your way. Now how do you go down to your room, after breakfast—what do you feel? I used to look at the clock and say oh dear me, it’s time I began my article … No, I’ll read the paper first. I never wanted to write. But I used to come home from a dinner party and take my brush and draw caricature after caricature. They seemed to bubble up from here … ne pressed his stomach. That was a kind of inspiration, I suppose. What you said in your beautiful essay about me and Charles Lamb was quite true. He was crazy: he had the gift: genius. I’m too like Jack Horner. I pull out my plum. It’s too rounded, too perfect … I have a public of about 1,500. Oh I’m famous, largely thanks to you, and people of importance at the top like you. I often read over my own work. And I have a habit of reading it through the eyes of people I respect. I often read it as Virginia Woolf would read it—picking out the kind of things you would like. You never do that? Oh you should try it.

Isherwood and I met on the doorstep. He is a slip of a wild boy: with quicksilver eyes: nipped: jockeylike. That young man, said W. Maugham ‘holds the future of the English novel in his hands’. Very enthusiastic. In spite of Max’s brilliance, and idiosyncrasy, which he completely realizes, and does not overstep, this was a surface evening; as I proved, because I found I could not smoke the cigar which I had brought. That was on the deeper level. All kept to the same surface level by Sybil’s hostess-craft. Stories, compliments. The house: its shell like whites and silvers and greens: its panelling: its old furniture.

Wednesday, November 16th.

There are very few mountain summit moments. I mean looking out at peace from a height. I made this reflection going upstairs. That is symbolical. I’m ‘going upstairs’ now, when I write Biography. Shall I have a moment on top? Or when I’ve done Roger? Or tonight, in bed, between 2 and 3? They come spasmodically. Often when I was so miserable about The Years.

Viola Tree died last night, of pleurisy: two years younger than I am.

I remember the quality of her skin: like an apricot; a few amber coloured hairs. Eyes blistered with paint underneath. A huge Goddess woman, who was also an old drudge; a big boned striding figure; much got up, of late. Last time I saw her at the Gargoyle Cocktail; when she was in her abundant expansive mood. I never reached any other; yet always liked her. Met her perhaps once a year, about her books. She dined here the night her Castles in Spain came out. And I went to tea in Woburn Square, and the butter was wrapped in a newspaper. And there was an Italian double bed in the drawing room. She was instinctive; and had the charm of good actress manners; and their Bohemianism and sentimentality. But I think was a sterling spontaneous mother and daughter; not ambitious; a great hand at life; I suppose harassed for money; and extravagant; and very bold; and courageous—a maker of picturesque surroundings. So strong and large that she should have lived to be 80; yet no doubt undermined that castle, with late hours: I don’t know. She could transmit something into words. Her daughter Virginia to be married this week. And think of Viola lying dead. How out of place—unnecessary.

Tuesday, November 22nd.

I meant to write Reflections on my position as a writer. I don’t want to read Dante; have ten minutes over from rehashing ‘Lappin and Lapinova,’ a story written I think at Asheham 20 years ago or more; when I was writing Night and Day perhaps.

That’s a long stretch. And apparently I’ve been exalted to a very high position, say about 10 years ago: then was decapitated by W. Lewis, and Miss Stein; am now I think—let me see—out of date, of course; not a patch, with the young, on Morgan. Yet wrote The Waves-, yet am unlikely to write anything good again; am a secondrate and likely, I think, to be discarded altogether. I think that’s my public reputation at the moment. It is based largely on C. Connolly’s cocktail criticism: a sheaf of feathers in the wind. How much do I mind? Less than I expected. But then of course; it’s all less than I realized. I mean, I never thought I was so famous; so don’t feel the decapitation. Yet it’s true that after The Waves, or Flush, Scrutiny I think found me out. W.L. attacked me. I was aware of an active opposition. Yes I used to be praised by the young and attacked by the elderly. Three Guineas has queered the pitch. For the G.M. Youngs and the Scrutineers both attack that. And my own friends have sent me to Coventry over it. So my position is ambiguous. Undoubtedly Morgan’s reputation is much higher than my own. So is Tom’s. Well? In a way it is a relief. I’m fundamentally, I think, an outsider. I do my best work and feel most braced with my back to the wall. It’s an odd feeling though, writing against the current: difficult entirely to disregard the current. Yet of course I shall. And it remains to be seen if there’s anything in P.H. In any case I have my critical brain to fall back on.

Monday, December 19th.

I will spend the last morning—for tomorrow will be an odious scramble—in summing up the year. True, there are 10 days or so to run: but the liberty of this book allows these—I was going to say liberties, but my meticulous conscience bids me look for another word. That raises some questions: but I leave them: questions about my concern with the art of writing. On the whole the art becomes absorbing—more? no, I think it’s been absorbing ever since I was a little creature, scribbling a story in the manner of Hawthorne on the green plush sofa in the drawing room at St Ives while the grown ups dined. The last dinner of the year was to Tom.

This year I have worked at Three Guineas: and begun, about April ist, Roger: whom I have brought to the year 1919. I have also written Walpole; Lappin Lapinova; and The Art of Biography. The reception of Three Guineas has been interesting, unexpected—only I’m not sure what I expected. 8,000 sold. Not one of my friends has mentioned it. My wide circle has widened—but I’m altogether in the dark as to the true merits of the book. Is it …? No, I won’t even formulate qualities; for, it’s true, no one has yet summed it up. Much less unanimity than about Room of One’s Own. A suspended judgement upon that work then seems fittest. I’ve written too 120 pages of Toyntz Hall. I think of making it a 220 page book. A medley. I rush to it for relief after a long pressure of Fry facts. But I think I see a whole somewhere—it was simply seized, one day, about April, as a dangling thread: no notion what page came next. And then they came. To be written for pleasure.

[]

1939.

Friday, January 5th.

So I take a new nib, after bringing Roger to the verge of Josette with the old one, and spend my last five minutes, this very fine January morning, in writing the first page of the New Year. Last five minutes before lunch—how inaugurate this important volume in that time, with this brain? A brain still running in the rut of the last sentence. Which last sentence will be re-written a dozen times, too. So the dominant theme is work: Roger: the others the usual Rodmell themes. That is, I’ve let the frost go too far away. We came down 14 or 15 days ago and found all pipes frozen. There was snow for five days—bitter cold: wind. We staggered for one hour through the blizzard. Chains were on our wheels. We ground over to Charleston and Tilton on Christmas day. Then, two days later, woke to find green grass everywhere. The long spikes of ice that hung down the kitchen window had drops on their noses. Thèy melted. The pipes thawed. Now it’s a June morning with an east wind. And time’s up. But the book’s begun anyhow. And perhaps I shall get a clearer head and say 10 minutes tomorrow.

Monday, January 8th.

Now that I have brought my brain to the state of an old washerwoman’s flannel over Roger—Lord the Josette chapter—and it’s all too detailed, too tied down—I must expand, first on this irresponsible page and then, for four days I swear, before we go back on Sunday, in fiction. Though I’ve ground out most wish to write, even fiction. Rodmell is a grind on the brain: in winter especially. I write three solid hours: walk two: then we read, with intervals for cooking dinner, music, news, till 11.30. I’ve thus read ever so many packets of R.’s letters; and some Sévigné; Chaucer—and some nonsense books.

Thursday, January 18th.

It is undoubtedly a great freshener to have my story taken by Harpers. I heard this morning. A beautiful story, enchanted to have it. 600 dollars made then. But the encouragement, I must note, by way of suppling my theories that one should do without encouragement, is a warmer, a reviver. I can’t deny it. I was, perhaps partly on that account, in full flood this morning with P.H. I think I have got at a more direct method of summarizing relations; and then the poems (in metre) ran off the prose lyric vein, which, as I agree with Roger, I overdo. That was, by the way, the best criticism I’ve had for a long time: that I poetize my inanimate scenes, stress my personality; don’t let the meaning emerge from the matière.

Tuesday, February 28th.

It is unfortunate for truth’s sake that I never write here except when jangled with talk. I only record the dumps and the dismals and them very barely. A holiday from Roger. And one day’s happiness with P.H. Then too many parcels; books coming out; and a head numb at the back. As usual, when I’m prone, all the gnats settle. The usual ones. I needn’t specify. I have to ‘speak’ to polytechnics; and engagements multiply. Innumerable refugees to add to the tangle. There—I’ve recorded them when I said I wouldn’t.

Saturday, March 11th.

Yesterday, that is Friday 10th, I set the last word to the first sketch of Roger. And now I have to begin—well not even to begin, but to revise and revise. A terrible grind to come: and innumerable doubts of myself as biographer: of the possibility of doing it at all: all the same I’ve carried through to the end; and may allow myself one moment’s mild gratification. There are the facts more or less extracted. And I’ve no time to go into all the innumerable horrors. There may be a flick of life in it—or is it all dust and ashes?

Tuesday, April 11th.

I am reading Dickens; by way of a refresher. How he lives: not writes: both a virtue and a fault. Like seeing something emerge; without containing mind. Yet the accuracy and even sometimes the penetration—into Miss Squeers and Miss Price and the farmer for example—remarkable. I can’t dip my critical mind, even if I try to. Then I’m reading Sévigné, professionally, for that quick amalgamation of books that I intend. In future, I’m to write quick, intense, short books, and never be tied down. This is the way to keep off the settling down and refrigeration of old age. And to flout all preconceived theories. For more and more I doubt if enough is known to sketch even probable lines, all too emphatic and conventional. Maurice, the last of the LI. Davies brothers, is dead; and Margaret lives—lives too carefully of life, I used to feel Why drag on, always measuring and testing one’s little bit of strength and setting it easy tasks so as to accumulate years? Also I’m reading Rochefoucauld. That’s the real point of my little brown book—that it makes me read—with a pen—following the scent; and read the good books: not the slither of MSS and the stridency of the young chawking—the word expresses callow bills agape and chattering—for sympathy. Chaucer I take at need. So if I had any time—but perhaps next week will be more solitudinous—I should, if it weren’t for the war—glide my way up and up into that exciting layer so rarely lived in: where my mind works so quick it seems asleep; like the aeroplane propellers. But I must re-type the last Clifton passage; and so be quit for tomorrow and clear the decks for Cambridge. Rather good, I expect it is: condensed and moulded.

Thursday, April 13th.

Two days of influenza after that, mild but sucking one’s head as usual, so I’m out here this morning only to drone my way through a few Roger letters. I finished my first 40 pages—childhood etc.—well under the week; but then they were largely autobiography; Now politics impend. Chamberlain’s statement in the House today. War I suppose not tomorrow, but nearer.

I read about 100 pages of Dickens yesterday, and see something vague about the drama and fiction; how the emphasis, the caricature of these innumerable scenes, forever forming character, descend from the stage. Literature—that is the shading, suggesting, as of Henry James, hardly used. All bold and coloured. Rather monotonous; yet so abundant, so creative: yes, but not highly creative: not suggestive. Everything laid on the table. Nothing to engender in solitude. That’s why it’s so rapid and attractive. Nothing to make one put the book down and think. But these are influenza musings; and I’m so muddled I shall take Sir Edward into the house and extract him over the fire.

Saturday, April 15th.

I’ve done rather well at Roger considering: I don’t think I shall take two weeks over each chapter. And it’s rather amusing—dealing drastically with this year’s drudgery. I think I see how it shapes: and my compiling method was a good one. Perhaps it’s too like a novel. I don’t bother. No letters; no news; and my head too staked for reading. L. galloping through his book. I should like a holiday—a few days in France—or a run through the Cotswolds. But considering how many things I have that I like—What’s odd—(I’m always beginning like this) is the severance that war seems to bring: everything becomes meaningless: can’t plan: then there comes too the community feeling: all England thinking the same thing—this horror of war—at the same moment. Never felt it so strong before. Then the lull and one lapses again into private separation.

But I must order macaroni from London.

Wednesday, April 2 6th.

I’ve done a quarter—100 pages of Roger which I shall have by tomorrow. As there are 400 pages, and one hundred takes three weeks (oh but I was interrupted)—it will take nine weeks to finish. Yes, I ought to have finished it by the end of July. Only we may go away. Say August. And have it all typed in September … Well—then it will be out this time next year. And I shall be free in August—What a grind it is; and I suppose of little interest except to six or seven people. And I shall be abused.

Thursday, June 29th.

The grind of doing Roger and P I P makes my head spin and I let it reel itself off for 10 minutes here. I wonder why; and if I shall ever read this again. Perhaps if I go on with my memoirs, also a relief from R„ I shall make use of it. A dismal day yesterday; shoe hunting in Fortnums. A sale, but only of the unsaleable. And the atmosphere, British upper classes; all tight and red nailed; myself a figure of fun—whips my skin: I fidget: but recoup myself walking in the rain through the Parks. Come home and try to concentrate on Pascal. I can’t. Still it’s the only way of tuning up, and I get a calm, if not understanding. These pin points of theology need a grasp beyond me. Still I see Lytton’s point—my dear old serpent. What a dream life is to be sure—that he should be dead, and I reading him: and trying to make out that we indented ourselves in the world; whereas I sometimes feel it’s been an illusion—gone so fast; lived so quickly; and nothing to show for it, save these little books. But that makes me dig my feet in and squeeze the moment. So after dinner I walked to the Clinic with L.; waited outside with Sally tugging; watched the evening sight: oh and the purple grey clouds above Regent’s Park with the violent and yellow sky signs made me leap with pleasure.

Monday, August 7th.

I am now going to make the rash and bold experiment of breaking off, from condensing Vision and Design; to write here for 10 minutes instead of revising, as I ought, my morning’s grind.

Oh yes, I thought of several things to write about. Not exactly diary. Reflections. That’s the fashionable dodge. Peter Lucas and Gide both at it. Neither can settle to creative art. (I think, sans Roger, I could.) It’s the comment—the daily interjection—that comes handy in times like these. I too feel it. But what was I thinking? I have been thinking about Censors. How visionary figures admonish us. That’s clear in an MS I’m reading.

If I say this, So-and-so will think me sentimental. If that … will think me bourgeois. All books now seem to me surrounded by a circle of invisible censors. Hence their selfconsciousness, their restlessness. It would be worth while trying to discover what they are at the moment. Did Wordsworth have them?

I doubt it. I read ‘Ruth’ before breakfast. Its stillness, its unconsciousness, its lack of distraction, its concentration and the resulting ‘beauty’ struck me. As if the mind must be allowed to settle undisturbed over the object in order to secrete the pearl.

That’s an idea for an article.

The figurative expression is that all the surroundings of the mind have come much closer. A child crying in the field brings poverty: my comfort; to mind. Ought I to go to the village sports? ‘Ought’ thus breaks into my contemplation.

Oh and I thought, as I was dressing, how interesting it would be to describe the approach of age, and the gradual coming of death. As people describe love. To note every symptom of failure: but why failure? To treat age as an experience that is different from the others; and to detect every one of the gradual stages towards death which is a tremendous experience, and not as unconscious, at least in its approaches, as birth is. I must now return to my grind, I think rather refreshed.

Wednesday, August 9th.

My grind has left me dazed and depressed. How on earth to bring off this chapter? God knows.

Thursday, August 24th.

Perhaps it is more interesting to describe ‘the crisis’ than R.’s love affairs. Yes we are in the very thick of it. Are we at war? At one I’m going to listen in. It’s very different, emotionally, from last September. In London yesterday there was indifference almost. No crowd in the train—we went by train. No stir in the streets. One of the removers called up. It’s fate, as the foreman said. What can you do against fate? Complete chaos at 37.1 Anna met in graveyard. No war, of course now, she said. John said® ‘Well I don’t know what to think.’ But as a dress rehearsal it’s complete. Museums shut. Searchlight on Rodmell Hill. Chamberlain says danger imminent. The Russian pact a disagreeable and unforeseen surprise. Rather like a herd of sheep we are. No enthusiasm. Patient bewilderment. I suspect some desire ‘to get on with it’. Order double supplies and some coal. Aunt Violet in refuge at Charleston. Unreal. Whiffs of despair. Difficult to work. Offer of £200 from Chambers for a story. Haze over the marsh. Aeroplanes. One touch on the switch and we shall be at war. Danzig not yet taken. Clerks cheerful. I add one little straw to another, waiting to go in, palsied with writing. There’s no cause now to fight for, said Ann. Communists baffled. Railway strike off. Lord Halifax broadcasts in his country gentleman voice. Louie says will clothes be dear? Underneath of course wells of pessimism. Young men torn to bits: mothers like Nessa two years ago. But again, some swerve to the right may come at any moment. The common feeling covers the private, then recedes. Discomfort and distraction. And all mixed with the mess at 37.

Wednesday, September 6th.

Our first air raid warning at 8.30 this morning. A warbling that gradually insinuates itself as I lay in bed. So dressed and walked on the terrace with L. Sky clear. All cottages shut. Breakfast. All clear. During the interval a raid on Southwark. No news. The Hepworths came on Monday. Rather like a sea voyage. Forced conversation. Boredom. All meaning has run out of everything. Scarcely worth reading papers. The B.B.C. gives any news the day before. Emptiness. Inefficiency. I may as well record these things. My plan is to force my brain to work on Roger. But Lord this is the worst of all my life’s experiences. It means feeling only bodily feelings: one gets cold and torpid. Endless interruptions. We have done the curtains. We have carried coals etc. into the cottage for the 8 Battersea women and children. The expectant mothers are all quarrelling. Some went back yesterday. We took the car to be hooded, met Nessa, were driven to tea at Charleston. Yes, it’s an empty meaningless world now. Am I a coward? Physically I expect I am. Going to London tomorrow I expect frightens me. At a pinch enough adrenalin is secreted to keep one calm. But my brain stops. I took up my watch this morning and then put it down. Lost. That kind of thing annoys me. No doubt one can conquer this. But my mind seems to curl up and become undecided. To cure this one had better read a solid book like Tawney. An exercise of the muscles. The Hepworths are travelling books in Brighton. Shall I walk? Yes. It’s the gnats and flies that settle on non-combatants. This war has begun in cold blood. One merely feels that the killing machine has to be set in action.

So far, the Athenia has been sunk. It seems entirely meaningless—a perfunctory slaughter. Like taking a jar in one hand, a hammer in the other. Why must this be smashed? Nobody knows. This feeling is different from any before. And all the blood has been let out of common life. No movies or theatres allowed. No letters, except strays from America. Reviewing rejected by Atlantic. No friends write or ring up. Yes, a long sea voyage, with strangers making conversation, and lots of small bothers and arrangements, seems the closest I can get. Of course all creative power is cut off. Perfect summer weather.

It’s like an invalid who can look up and take a cup of tea. Suddenly one can take to the pen with relief. Result of a walk in the heat, clearing the fug and setting the blood working. This book will serve to accumulate notes, the first of such quickenings. And for the hundredth time I repeat—any idea is more real than any amount of war misery. And what one’s made for. And the only contribution one can make—this little pitter patter of ideas is my whiff of shot in the cause of freedom. So I tell myself. Thus bolstering up a figment—a phantom: recovering that sense of something pressing from outside which consolidates the mist, the non-existent.

I conceived the idea, walking in the sunbaked marsh where I saw one clouded yellow, of making an article out of these is odd diaries. This will be an easy slope of work: not the steep grind of Roger. But shall I ever have a few hours to read in? I must. Tonight the Raid has diminished from a raid on Southwark; on Portsmouth; on Scarborough, to an attempt on the East Coast without damage. Tomorrow we go up.

Monday, September nth.

I have just read 3 or 4 characters of Theophrastus, stumbling from Greek to English, and may as well make a note of it. Trying to anchor my mind on Greek. Rather successful. As usual, how Greek sticks, darts, eels in and out! No Latin would have noted that a boor remembers his loans in the middle of the night. The Greek has his eye on the object. But it’s a long distance one has to roll away to get at Theophrastus and Plato. But worth the effort.

Thursday, September 28th.

No, I’m not sure of the date. And Vita is lunching here. I’m going to stop R. at 12, then read something real. I’m not going to let my brain addle. Little sharp notes. For somehow my brain is not very vigorous at the end of a book though I could dash off fiction or an article merrily enough. Why not relieve it then? Wasn’t it my conscientious grind at The Years that killed it. So I whizz off to Stevenson—Jekyll and Hyde—not much to my liking. Very fine clear September weather. Windy but lovely light. And I can’t form letters.

Friday, October 6th.

Well I have succeeded in despite of distractions to belong to other nations in copying out again the whole of Roger. Needless to say, it’s still to be revised, compacted, vitalized. And can I ever do it? The distractions are so incessant. I compose articles on Lewis Carroll and read a great variety of books—Flaubert’s life, R.’s lectures, out at last, a life of Erasmus and Jacques Blanche. We are asked to lunch with Mrs Webb, who so often talks of us. And my hand seems as tremulous as an aspen. I have composed myself by tidying my room. Can’t quite see my way now as to the next step in composition. Tom this weekend. I meant to record a Third Class Railway Carriage conversation. The talk of business men. Their male detached lives. All politics. Deliberate, well set up, contemptuous and indifferent of the feminine. For example: one man hands the Evening Standard, points to a woman’s photograph. ‘Women? Let her go home and bowl her hoop,’ said the man in blue serge with one smashed eye. ‘She’s a drag on him,’ another fragment. The son is going to lectures every night. Odd to look into this cool man’s world: so weather tight: insurance clerks all on top of their work; sealed up; self-sufficient; admirable; caustic; laconic; objective; and completely provided for. Yet thin, sensitive: yet schoolboys; yet men who earn their livings. In the early train they said, ‘Can’t think how people have time to go to war. It must be that the blokes haven’t got jobs.’ ‘I prefer a fool’s paradise to a real hell.’ ‘War’s lunacy. Mr Hitler and his set are gangsters. Like A1 Capone.’ Not a chink through which one can see art, or books. They play crosswords when insurance shop fails.

Saturday, October 7th.

If s odd how those first days of complete nullity when war broke out have given place to such a pressure of ideas and work that I feel the old throb and spin in my head more of a drain than ever. The result partly of taking up journalism. A good move, I daresay; for it compacts; and forces me to organize. I’m masterfully pulling together those diffuse chapters of R. because I know I must stop and do an article. Ideas for articles obsess me. Why not try the one for The Times No sooner said than I’m ravaged by ideas. Have to hold the Roger fort—for I will have the whole book typed and in Nessa’s hands by Christmas—by force.

Thursday, November 9th.

How glad I am to escape to my free page. But I think I’m nearing the end of my trouble with Roger. Doing once more, the last pages: and I think I like it better than before. I think the idea of breaking up the last chapter into sections was a good one. If only I can bring that end off. The worst of journalism is that it distracts, like a shower on the top of the sea.

Reviewing1 came out last week; and was not let slip into obscurity as I expected. Lit. Sup. had a tart and peevish leader; the old tone of voice I know so well—rasped and injured. Then Y.Y. polite but aghast in the NS. And then my answer—why an answer should always make me dance like a monkey at the Zoo, gibbering it over as I walk, and then re-writing, I don’t know. It wasted a day. I suppose it’s all pure waste: yet if one’s an outsider, be an outsider. Only don’t for God’s sake attitudinize and take up the striking, the becoming attitude.

Thursday, November 30th.

Very jaded and tired and depressed and cross, and so take the liberty of expressing my feelings here. R. a failure—and what a grind … no more of that. I’m brain fagged and must resist the desire to tear up and cross out—must fill my mind with air and light; and walk and blanket it in fog. Rubber boots help. I can flounder over the marsh. No, I will write a little memoir.

Saturday, December 2nd.

Tiredness and dejection give way if one day off is taken instantly. I went in and did my cushion. In the evening my pain in my head calmed. Ideas came back. This is a hint to be remembered. Always turn the pillow. Then I become a swarm of ideas. Only I must hive them till R. is done. It was annoying to get on to the surface and be so stung with my pamphlet. No more controversy for a year, I vow. Ideas: about writers’ duty. No, I’ll shelve that. Began reading Freud last night; to enlarge the circumference: to give my brain a wider scope: to make it objective; to get outside. Thus defeat the shrinkage of age. Always take on new things. Break the rhythm etc. Use this page now and then, for notes. Only they escape after the morning’s grind.

Saturday, December 16th.

The litter in this room is so appalling that it takes me five minutes to find my pen. R. all unsewn in bits. And I must take 50 pages, should be 100, up on Monday. Can’t get the marriage chapter right. Proportion all wrong. Alteration, quotation, makes it worse. But it’s true I don’t fuss quite so much as over a novel. I learned a lesson in re-writing The Years which I shall never forget. Always I say to myself Remember the horror of that. Yesterday I was, I suppose, cheerful. Two letters from admirers of Three Guineas: both genuine: one a soldier in the trenches; the other a distracted middle class woman.

Monday, December 18th.

Once more, as so often, I hunt for my dear old red-covered book, with what an instinct I’m not quite sure. For what the point of making these notes is I don’t know; save that it becomes a necessity to uncramp, and some of it may interest me later. But what? For I never reach the depths; I’m too surface blown. And always scribble before going in—look quickly at my watch. Yes, 10 minutes left—what can I say. Nothing that needs thought; which is provoking; for I often think. And think the very thought I could write here. About being an outsider. About my defiance of professional decency. Another allusion of a tart kind to Mrs W., and her desire to kill reviewers in the Lit. Sup. yesterday. Frank Swinnerton is the good boy and I’m the bad little girl. And this is trivial, compared with what? Oh the Graf Spee is going to steam out of Monte Video today into the jaws of death. And journalists and rich people are hiring aeroplanes from which to see the sight. This seems to me to bring war into a new angle; and our psychology. No time to work out. Anyhow the eyes of the whole world (B.B.C.) are on the game; and several people will lie dead tonight, or in agony. And we shall have it served up for us as we sit over our logs this bitter winter night. And the British Captain has been given a K.C.B. and Horizon is out; and Louie has had her teeth out; and we ate too much hare pie last night; and I read Freud on Groups; and I’ve been titivating Roger: and this is the last page; and the year draws to an end; and we’ve asked Plomer for Christmas; and—now time’s up as usual. I’m reading Ricketts diary—all about the war—the last war; and the Herbert diaries and … yes, Dadie’s Shakespeare, and notes overflow into my two books.

[]

1940.

Saturday, January 6th.

An obituary: Humbert Wolfe. Once I shared a packet of choc, creams with him, at Eileen Powers. An admirer sent them. This was a fitting tribute. A theatrical looking glib man. Told me he was often asked if I were his wife. Volunteered that he was happily married, though his wife lived—Geneva? I forget. Remember thinking, Why protest? What’s worrying you? Oh it was the night Arnold Bennett attacked me in the Evening Standard. Orlando? I was going to meet him at Sybil’s next day. There was a queer histrionic look in him, perhaps strain in him. Very self assured, outwardly. Inwardly lacerated by the taunt that he wrote too easily and deified satire; that’s my salvage from an autobiography of him—one of many, as if he were dissatisfied and must always draw and re-draw his own picture. I suppose the origin of many of the new middle aged autos. So the inspirer of these vague winter night memories—he who sends for the last time a faint film across my tired head—lies with those blackberry eyes shut in that sulphurous cavernous face. (If I were writing I should have to remove either lies or eyes. Is this right? Yes, I think for me; nor need it spoil the run: only one must always practise every style: it’s the only way to keep on the boil: I mean the only way to avoid crust is to set a faggot of words in a blaze. That phrase flags. Well, let it. These pages only cost a fraction of a farthing, so that my exchequer isn’t imperilled.) Mill I should be reading. Or Little Dorrit, but both are gone stale, like a cheese that’s been cut and left. The first slice is always the best.

Friday, January 26th.

These moments of despair—I mean glacial suspense—a painted fly in a glass case—have given way as they so often do to ecstasy. Is it that I have thrown off those two dead pigeons—my story, my Gas at Abbotsford (printed today)—and so ideas rush in. I began one night, absolutely submerged, throttled, held in a vice with my nose rubbed against Roger—no way out—all hard as iron—to read Julian. And off winged my mind along those wild uplands. A hint for the future. Always relieve pressure by a flight. Always violently turn the pillow: hack an outlet. Often a trifle does. A review offered of Marie Corelli by the Listener. These are travellers notes which I offer myself should I again be lost. I think the last chapter must be sweated from 20,000 to 10,000. This is an attempt at the first words:

‘Transformation is the title that Roger Fry gave to his last book of essays. And it seems natural enough, looking back at the last ten years of his life, to choose it by way of title for them too.

‘They were years not of repose and stagnation, but of perpetual experiment and experience. His position as a critic became established. “At the time of his death,” writes Howard Hannay, “Roger Fry’s position in the English art world was unique, and the only parallel to it is that of Ruskin at the height of his reputation.”

‘But that position was the result of the freedom and the vigour with which he carried on his intellectual life; and with which he extended and enlarged his views. Nor was he less adventurous in the other life. And these two transformations resulted in something permanent. As Sir K. Clark says, “Although he was remarkably consistent in the main outlines of his beliefs, his mind was invincibly experimental and ready for any adventure, however far it might lead him beyond the boundaries of academic tradition.”

‘Physically, the strain was very great. His health had suffered from the long years at the Omega.’

No, I cannot reel it off at all. How queer the change is from private writing to public writing. And how exhausting. My little fund of gossip and comment is dried up. What was I going to say? Oh that the lyric mood of the winter—its intense spiritual exaltation—is over. The thaw has set in; and rain and wind; and the marsh is soggy and patched with white, and two very small lambs were staggering in the east wind. One dead ewe was being carted off; and shirking the horror I crept back by the hanger. Nor have I spent a virtuous evening, hacking at these phrases. I’m enjoying Burke though, and shall tune up on the French Revolution.

Friday, February 2nd.

Only the fire sets me dreaming—of all the things I mean to write. The break in our lives from London to country is a far more complete one than any change of house. Yes, but I haven’t got the hang of it altogether. The immense space suddenly becomes vacant: then illuminated. And London, in nips, is cramped and creased. Odd how often I think with what is love I suppose of the City: of the walk to the Tower: that is my England: I mean, if a bomb destroyed one of those little alleys with the brass bound curtains and the river smell and the old woman reading, I should feel—well, what the patriots feel.

Friday, February 9th.

For some reason hope has revived. Now what served as bait? A letter from Joe Ackerly approving my Corelli? Not much. Tom dining with us? No. I think it was largely reading Stephen’s autobiography: though it gave me a pang of envy, by its youth and its vigour, and some good novelist’s touches—I could pick holes though. But it’s odd—reading that and South Riding both mint new, gives me a fillip after all the evenings I grind at Burke and Mill. A good thing to read one’s contemporaries, even rapid twinkling slice of life novels like poor W.H.’s. And then, I’ve polished off, to the last gaiter button, the three d d chapters for London on Monday; and got my teeth I think firm into the last Transformations: and though of course I shall get the black shivers when I re-read, let alone submit to Nessa and Margery, I can’t help thinking I’ve caught a good deal of that iridescent man in my oh so laborious butterfly net. I daresay I’ve written every page—certainly the last—10 or 15 times over. And I don’t think I’ve killed: I think I’ve brisked. Hence an evening glow. Yet the wind cuts like a scythe; the dining room carpet is turning to mould; and John Buchan has fallen on his head and is, apparently, dying. Monty Shearman is also dead;, and Campbell. L.’s absurd nice old parson friend—his bachelor Buffy friend. Now the wind rises: something rattles, and thank God I’m not on the North Sea, nor taking off to raid Heligoland. Now I’m going to read Freud. Yes, Stephen gave me three hours of continuous illusion—and if one can get that still, there’s a world—what’s the quotation?—there’s a world outside? No. From Coriolanus?

Sunday, February 11th.

By way of postponing the writing of cheques—the war, by the way, has tied up my purse strings again, as in the old days of 11/- a week pocket money—I write here: and note that the authentic glow of finishing a book is on me. Does this mean it’s good; or only that I have delivered my mind successfully? Anyhow, after shivering yesterday, today I made a stride, and shall I think finish this week at 37. It’s tight and conscientious anyhow. So, walking this mildish day, up to Telscombe I invented pages and pages of my lecture: which is to be full and fertile. The idea struck me that the Leaning Tower school is the school of auto-analysis after the suppression of the 19th century. Quote Stevenson. This explains Stephen’s autobiography: Louis MacNeice etc. Also I get the idea of cerebration: poetry that is not unconscious, but stirred by surface irritation, to which the alien matter of politics, that can’t be fused, contributes. Hence the lack of suggestive power. Is the best poetry that which is most suggestive—is it made of the fusion of many different ideas, so that it says more than is explicable? Well, that’s the line; and it leads to Public Libraries: and the supersession of aristocratic culture by common readers: also to the end of class literature: the beginning of character literature: new words from new blood; and the comparison with the Elizabethans. I think there’s something in the psycho-analysis idea: that the Leaning Tower writer couldn’t describe society: had therefore to describe himself, as the product, or victim: a necessary step towards freeing the next generation of repressions. A new conception of the writer needed: and they have demolished the romance of ‘genius’ of the great man, by diminishing themselves. They haven’t explored, like H. James, the individual: they haven’t deepened; they’ve cut the outline sharper. And so on. L. saw a grey heraldic bird: I only saw my thoughts.

Sunday, February 18th.

This diary might be divided into London diary and country. I think there is a division. Just back from the London chapter. Bitter cold. This shortened my walk, which I meant to be through crowded streets. Then the dark—no lighted windows, depressed me. Standing in Whitehall, I said to my horses ‘Home, John’ and drove back in the grey dawn light, the cheerless spectral light of fading evening in houses—so much more cheerless than the country evening—to Holborn, and so to the bright cave, which I liked better, having shifted the chairs. How silent it is there—and London silent: a great dumb ox lying couchant.

Monday, February 19th.

I may as well make a note I say to myself: thinking sometimes who’s going to read all this scribble? I think one day I may brew a tiny ingot out of it—in my memoirs. Lytton is hinted as my next task by the way. And Three Guineas a dead failure in the U.SA.; but enough.

Wednesday, March 20th.

Yes, another attack, in fact two other attacks: one Sunday week—101 with Angelica there to put me to bed; t’other last Friday, 102 after lunch. So to bed up here in L.’s room, and Dr Tooth, who keeps me in bed (where I sit up with L. reading proofs) till tomorrow. That’s the boring history. What they call recurring with slight bronchitis. Yes. One Sunday (the 101 Sunday) L. gave me a very severe lecture on the first half. We walked in the meadows. It was like being pecked by a very hard strong beak. The more he pecked the deeper, as always happens. At last he was almost angry that I’d chosen ‘what seems to me the wrong method. It’s merely analysis, not history. Austere repression. In fact dull to the outsider. All those dead quotations.’ His theme was that you can’t treat a life like that; must be seen from the writer’s angle, unless the liver is himself a seer, which R. wasn’t. It was a curious example of L. at his most rational and impersonal: rather impressive: yet so definite, so emphatic, that I felt convinced: I mean of failure; save for one odd gleam, that he was himself on the wrong tack, and persisting for some deep reason—dissympathy with R.? lack of interest in personality? Lord knows. I note this plaited strand in my mind; and even while we walked and the beak struck deeper, deeper, had this completely detached interest in L.’s character. Then Nessa came; disagreed; Margery’s letter ‘Very alive and interesting’; then L. read the second half; thought it ended on the doorstep at Bernard Street: then N.’s note ‘I’m crying can’t thank you’—then N. and D. to tea up here; forbid me to alter anything; then Margery’s final letter ‘It’s him … unbounded admiration’. There I pause. Well, I think I re-write certain passages, have even in bed sketched them, but how in time for this spring? That I shelve till tomorrow. Great relief all the same.

Thursday, March 1st.

Here is the Good Friday festival beginning. How one can sense that in a garden, with flowers and birds only, I can’t say. Now for me begins the twilight hour, the emerging hour, of disagreeable compromise. Up to lunch. In the sitting room for tea. You know the dreary, messy, uncomfortable paper strewn, picking at this and that, frame of mind. And with R. hanging over me. Walk out as soon as possible and keep on reading Hervey’s memoirs. And so come to the top slowly. I’m thinking of some articles. Sidney Smith. Madame de Staël. Virgil. Tolstoy, or perhaps Gogol. Now I’ll get L. to find a life of Smith in the Lewes Library. A good idea. I’ll ring up Nessa about sending Helen that chapter, and establish an engagement. I read Tolstoy at breakfast—Goldenweiser that I translated with Kot in 1923 and have almost forgotten. Always the same reality—like touching an exposed electric wire. Even so imperfectly conveyed—his rugged short cut mind—to me the most, not sympathetic, but inspiring, rousing: genius in the raw. Thus more disturbing, more ‘shocking’, more of a thunderclap, even on art, even on literature, than any other writer. I remember that was my feeling about War and Peace, read in bed at Twickenham. Old Savage picked it up, ‘Splendid stuff!’ and Jean tried to admire what was a revelation to me. It’s directness, its reality. Yet he’s against photographic realism. Sally is lame and has to go to the vet. Sun coming out. One bird pierces like a needle. All crocuses and squills out. No leaves or buds on trees. I’m quoted, about Russian, in Lit. Sup. leader, oddly enough.

Friday, March 29th.

What shall I think of that’s liberating and freshening? I’m in the mood when I open my window at night and look at the stars. Unfortunately it’s 12.15 on a grey dull day, the aeroplanes are active, Botten2 is to be buried at 3; and I’m brain creased after Margery, after John and after Q. But it’s the little antlike nibblings of M. that infect me—ants run in my brain—emendations, tributes, feelings, dates—and all the detail that seems to the non-writer so easy—(‘just to add this about Joan’ etc) and to me is torture. Thumbing those old pages—and copying into the carbon. Lord, lord! And influenza damped. Well I recur, what shall I think of? The river. Say the Thames at London Bridge: and buying a notebook; and then walking along the Strand and letting each face give me a buffet; and each shop; and perhaps a Penguin. For we’re up in London on Monday. Then I think I’ll read an Elizabethan—like swinging from bough to bough. Then back here I’ll saunter … oh yes and we’ll travel our books round the Coast—and have tea in a shop and look at antiques; and there’ll be a lovely farmhouse—or a new lane—and flowers; and bowls with L., and reading very calmly for C.R.s. but no pressure; and May coming and asparagus and butterflies. Perhaps I’ll garden a little; oh and print; and change my bedroom furniture. Is it age, or what, that makes life here alone, no London, no visitors, seem a long trance of pleasure … I’m inducing a state of peace and sensation feeling—not idea feeling. The truth is we’ve not seen spring in the country since I was ill at Asheham—1914—and that had its holiness in spite of the depression. I think I’ll also dream a poet-prose book; perhaps make a cake now and then. Now, now—never any more future skirmishing or past regretting. Relish the Monday and the Tuesday, and don’t take on the guilt of selfishness feeling: for in God’s name I’ve done my share, with pen and talk, for the human race. I mean young writers can stand on their own feet. Yes, I deserve a spring—I owe nobody nothing. Not a letter I need write (there are the poems in MS all waiting) nor need I have week-enders. For others can do that as well as I can, this spring. Now being drowned by the flow of running water, I will read Whymper till lunch time.

Sunday, March 31st.

I would like to tell myself a nice little wild improbable story to spread my wings after this cramped ant-like morning—which I will not detail—for details are the death of me. Thank God, this time next week I shall be free—free of entering M.’s corrections and my own into margins. The story? Oh, about the life of a bird, its cheep cheep—its brandishing of a twig by my window—its sensations. Or about Botten becoming one with the mud—the glory fading—the million tinted flowers sent by the doleful mourners. All black like a moving pillar box the woman was—or the man in a black cardboard casing. A story doesn’t come. No, but I may unfurl a metaphor—No. The windows very dove grey and dim blue islanded—a rust red on L. and V. and the marsh green and dark like the floor of the sea. At the back of my head the string is still wound tight. I will unwind it playing bowls. To carry the virtues of the sketch—its random reaches, its happy finds—into the finished work is probably beyond me. Sydney Smith did in talk.

Saturday, April 6th.

I spent one afternoon at the L.L., looking up quotes. Another buying silk for vests. And we did not dine with the Hutchinsons to meet Tom and Desmond. And how glad I was of the drowsy evening. And so at 12.45 yesterday handed L. the two MSS and we drove off as happy as Bank Holiday clerks That’s off my shoulders! Good or bad—done. So I felt wings on my shoulders: and brooded quietly till the tyre punctured: we had to jackal in midroad; and I was like a stalk, all crumpled, when we got here. And it’s a keen spring day; infinitely lit and tinted and cold and soft: all the groups of daffodils yellow along the bank; lost my three games, and want nothing but sleep.

Monday, May 13th.

I admit to some content, some closing of a chapter and peace that comes with it, from posting my proofs today. I admit—because we’re in the third day of ‘the greatest battle in history’. It began (here) with the 8 o’clock wireless announcing as I lay half asleep the invasion of Holland and Belgium. The third day of the Battle of Waterloo. Apple blossom snowing the garden. A bowl lost in the pond. Churchill exhorting all men to stand together. ‘I have nothing to offer but blood and tears and sweat.’ These vast formless shapes further circulate. They aren’t substances: but they make everything else minute. Duncan saw an air battle over Charleston—a silver pencil and a puff of smoke. Percy has seen the wounded arriving in their boots. So my little moment of peace comes in a yawning hollow. But though L. says he has petrol in the garage for suicide should Hitler win, we go on. It’s the vastness, and the smallness, that makes this possible. So intense are my feelings (about Roger); yet the circumference (the war) seems to make a hoop round them. No, I can’t get the odd incongruity of feeling intensely and at the same time knowing that there’s no importance in that feeling. Or is there, as I sometimes think, more importance than ever?

Monday, May 20th.

This idea was meant to be more impressive. It bobbed up I suppose in one of the sentient moments. The war is like a disperate illness. For a day it entirely obsesses: then the feeling faculty gives out; next day one is disembodied, in the air. Then the battery is re-charged and again—what? Well, the bomb terror. Going to London to be bombed. And the catastrophe—if they break through: Channel this morning said to be their objective. Last night Churchill asked us to reflect, when being bombed, that we were at least drawing fire from the soldiers, for once. Desmond and Moore1 are at this moment reading … i.e. talking under the apple trees. A fine windy morning.

Saturday, May 25th.

Then we went up to what has been so far the worst week in the war. And so remains. On Tuesday evening, after my freshener, before Tom and Wm. P. came, the B.B.C. announced the taking of Amiens and Arras. The French P.M. told the truth and knocked all our ‘holding’ to atoms. On Monday they broke through. It’s tedious picking up details. It seems they raid with tanks and parachutists: roads crammed with refugees can’t be bombed. They crash on. Now are at Boulogne. But it also seems these occupations aren’t altogether solid. What are the great armies doing to let this 25 mile hole stay open? The feeling is we’re outwitted. They’re agile and fearless and up to any new dodge. The French forgot to blow up bridges. The Germans seem youthful, fresh, inventive. We plod behind. This went on the three London days.

Rodmell burns with rumours. Are we to be bombed, evacuated? Guns that shake the windows. Hospital ships sunk. So it comes our way.

Today’s rumour is the Nun in the bus who pays her fare with a man’s hand.

Tuesday, May 28th.

And today at 8, the French P.M. broadcast the treachery of the Belgian King. The Belgians have capitulated. The Government is not capitulating. Churchill to broadcast at 4. A wet dull day.

Wednesday, May 29th.

But hope revives. I don’t know why. A desperate battle. The Allies holding. How sick one gets of the phrase—how easy to make a Duff Cooper speech about valour; and history, where one knows the end of the sentence. Still it cheers, somehow. Poetry as Tom said is easier to write than prose. I could reel off patriotic speeches by the dozen. L. has been in London. A great thunderstorm. I was walking on the marsh and thought it was the guns on the channel ports. Then, as they swerved, I conceived a raid on London; turned on the wireless; heard some prattler; and then the guns began to lighten; then it rained. Began P.H. again today and threshed and threshed till perhaps a little grain can be collected. I sent off my Walpole too. After dinner I began Sidney Smith; plan being to keep short flights going; P-H. in between. Oh yes—one can’t plan, any more, a long book. H. Brace cable that they accept Roger—whom, which, I’d almost forgotten. So that’s a success: where I’d been expecting failure. It can’t be so bad as all that. 250 advance. But we shall I suppose certainly postpone. Reading masses of Coleridge and Wordsworth letters of a night—curiously untwisting and burrowing into that plaited nest.

Thursday, May 30th.

Walking today (Nessa’s birthday) by Kingfisher pool saw my first hospital train—laden, not funereal but weighty, as if not to shake bones: something—what is the word I want—grieving and tender and heavy laden and private—bringing our wounded back carefully through the green fields at which I suppose some looked. Not that I could see them. And the faculty for seeing in imagination always leaves me so suffused with something partly visual, partly emotional, I can’t, though it’s very pervasive, catch it when I come home—the slowness, cadaverousness, grief of the long heavy train, taking its burden through the fields. Very quietly it slid into the cutting at Lewes. Instantly wild duck flights of aeroplanes came over head; manoeuvred; took up positions and passed over Caburn.

Friday, May 31st.

Scraps, orts and fragments, as I said in P.H., which is now bubbling. I’m playing with words: and think I owe some dexterity to finger exercises here—but the scraps: Louie has seen Mr Westmacott’s man. ‘It’s an eyesore’—his description of fighting near Boulogne. Percy weeding: ‘I shall conquer ’em in the end. If I was sure of our winning the other battle …’ Raid, said to be warned, last night. All the searchlights in extreme continual vibration: they have blots of light, like beads of dew on a stalk. Mr Hanna ‘stood by’ half the night Rumour, very likely: rumour, which has transported the English in Belgium who, with their golf sticks, ball and some nets in a car coming from Flanders, were taken for parachutists: condemned to death; released; and returned to Seaford. Rumour, via Percy, transplanted them to ‘somewhere near Eastbourne’ and the villagers armed with rifles, pitchforks etc. Shows what a surplus of unused imagination we possess. We—the educated—check it; as I checked my cavalry on the down at Telscombe and transformed them into cows drinking. Making up again. So that I couldn’t remember, coming home, if I’d come by the mushroom path or the field. How amazing that I can tap that old river again: and how satisfying. But will it last? I made out the whole of the end: and need only fill in: the faculty, dormant under the weight of Roger, springs up. And to me it’s the voice on the scent again. ‘Any waste paper?’ Here I was interrupted by the jangling bell. Small boy in white sweater come, I suppose, for Scouts, and Mabel says they pester us daily at 37; and make off with the spoils. Desperate fighting. The same perorations. Coming through Southease I saw Mrs Cockell in old garden hat weeding. Out comes a maid in muslin apron and cap tied with blue riband. Why? To keep up standards of civilization?

Friday, June 7th.

Just back this roasting hot evening. The great battle which decides our life or death goes on. Last night an air raid here. Today battle sparks. Up till 2.30 this morning.

Sunday, June 9th.

I will continue—but can I? The pressure of this battle wipes out London pretty quick. A gritting day. As sample of my present mood, I reflect: capitulation will mean All Jews to be given up. Concentration camps. So to our garage. That’s behind correcting Roger, playing bowls. One taps any source of comfort—Leigh Ashton at Charleston yesterday for instance. But today the line is bulging. Last night aeroplanes (G.?) over: shafts of light following. I papered my windows. Another reflection: I don’t want to go to bed at midday: this refers to the garage.

what we dread (it’s no exaggeration) is the news that the French Government have left Paris. A kind of growl behind the cuckoos and t’other birds. A furnace behind the sky. It struck me that one curious feeling is, that the writing ‘I’ has vanished. No audience. No echo. That’s part of one’s death. Not altogether serious, for I correct Roger, send finally I hope tomorrow: and could finish P.H. But it is a fact—this disparition of an echo.

Monday, June 10th.

A day off. I mean one of those odd lapses of anxiety which may be false. Anyhow they said this morning that the line is unbroken—save at certain points. And our army has left Norway and is going to their help. Anyhow—it’s a day off—a coal gritty day. L. breakfasted by electric light. And cool mercifully after the furnace. Today, too, I sent off my page proofs, and then have read my Roger for the last time. The Index remains. And I’m in the doldrums; a little sunk, and open to the suggestion, conveyed by the memory of Leonard’s coolness, enforced by John’s silence, that it’s one of my failures.

Saturday, June 22nd.

Waterloo I suppose. And the fighting goes on in France; and the terms aren’t yet public; and it’s a heavy grey day, and I’ve been beaten at bowls, feel depressed and irritated and vow I’ll play no more, but read my book. My book is Coleridge: Rose Macaulay; the Bessborough letters—rather a foolish flight inspired by Hary-o: I would like to find one book and stick to it. But can’t. I feel, if this is my last lap, oughtn’t I to read Shakespeare? But can’t. I feel oughtn’t I to finish off P.H.: oughtn’t I to finish something by way of an end? The end gives its vividness, even its gaiety and recklessness to the random daily life. This, I thought yesterday, may be my last walk. On the down above Bay dean I found some green glass tubes. The corn was glowing with poppies in it. And I read my Shelley at night. How delicate and pure and musical and uncorrupt he and Coleridge read, after the Left Wing Group. How lightly and firmly they put down their feet, and how they sing; and how they compact; and fuse and deepen. I wish I could invent a new critical method—something swifter and lighter and more colloquial and yet intense: more to the point and less composed; more fluid and following the flight; than my C.R. essays. The old problem: how to keep the flight of the mind, yet be exact. All the difference between the sketch and the finished work. And now dinner to cook. A role. Nightly raids in the east and south coast. 6, 3, 22 people killed nightly.

A high wind was blowing: Mabel, Louie picking currants and gooseberries. Then a visit to Charleston threw another stone into the pond. And at the moment, with P.H. only to fix upon, I’m loosely anchored. Further, the war—our waiting while the knives sharpen for the operation—has taken away the outer wall of security. No echo comes back. I have no surroundings. I have so little sense of a public that I forget about Roger coming or not coming out. Those familiar circumvolutions—those standards—which have for so many years given back an echo and so thickened my identity are all wide and wild as the desert now. I mean, there is no ‘autumn’, no winter. We pour to the edge of a precipice … and then? I can’t conceive that there will be a 27th June 1941. This cuts away something even at tea at Charleston. We drop another afternoon into the millrace.

Wednesday, July 24th.

Yes, there are things to write about: but I want at the moment, the eve of publication moment, to discover my emotions. They are fitful: thus not very strong—nothing like so strong as before The Years—oh dear, nothing like. Still they twinge. I wish it were this time next week. There’ll be Morgan and Desmond. And I fear Morgan will say—just enough to show he doesn’t like, but is kind. D. will certainly depress. The Times Lit. Sup. (after its ill temper about Reviewing) will find chinks. T. and T. will be enthusiastic. And—that’s all. I repeat that two strains, as usual, will develop: fascinating; dull: life-like; dead. So why do I twinge? Knowing it almost by heart. But not quite. Mrs Lehmann enthusiastic. John silent. I shall of course be sneered at by those who sniff at Bloomsbury. I’d forgotten that. But as L. is combing Sally I can’t concentrate. No room of my own. For 11 days I’ve been contracting in the glare of different faces. It ended yesterday with the W.I.: my talk—it was talked—about the Dreadnought. A simple, on the whole natural, friendly occasion. Cups of tea: biscuits; and Mrs Chavasse, in a tight dress, presiding: out of respect for me, it was a Book tea. Miss Gardner had Three Guineas pinned to her frock: Mrs Thompsett Three Weeks: and someone else a silver spoon. No I can’t go on to Ray’s death, about which I know nothing, save that that very large woman, with the shock of grey hair, and the bruised lip; that monster, whom I remember typical of young womanhood, has suddenly gone. She had a kind of representative quality, in her white coat and trousers; wall building; disappointed, courageous, without—what?—imagination?

Lady Oxford said that there was no virtue in saving, more in spending. She hung over my neck in a spasm of tears. Mrs Campbell has cancer. But in a twinkling she recovered, began to spend. A cold chicken, she said, was always under cover on the sideboard at my service. The country people used butter. She was beautifully dressed in a rayed silk, with a dark blue tie; a dark blue “fluted Russian cap with red flap. This was given her by her milliner: the fruit of spending.

All the walls, the protecting and reflecting walls, wear so terribly thin in this war. There’s no standard to write for: no public to echo back; even the ‘tradition’ has become transparent. Hence a certain energy and recklessness—part good part bad I daresay. But ifs the only line to take. And perhaps the walls, if violently beaten against, will finally contain me. I feel tonight still veiled. The veil will be lifted tomorrow when my book comes out. That’s what may be painful: may be cordial. And then I may feel once more round me the wall I’ve missed—or vacancy? or chill? I make these notes, but am tired of notes, tired of Gide, tired of de Vigny notebooks. I want something sequacious now and robust. In the first days of the war I could read notes only.

Thursday, July 25th.

I’m not very nervous at the moment: indeed at worst it’s only a skin deep nervousness; for after all, the main people approve: still I shall be relieved if Morgan approves. That I suppose I shall know tomorrow. The first review (Lynd) says: ‘deep imaginative sympathy … makes him an attractive figure (in spite of wild phrases): There is little drama … at the same time those interested in modern art will find it of absorbing interest..

What a curious relation is mine with Roger at this moment—I who have given him a kind of shape after his death. Was he like that? I feel very much in his presence at the moment; as if I were intimately connected with him: as if we together had given birth to this vision of him: a child born of us. Yet he had no power to alter it. And yet for some years it will represent him.

Friday, July 2 6th.

I think I have taken, say a good second, judging from the Lit. Sup. review. No Morgan. Times say it takes a very high place indeed among biographies. Times say I have a genius for the relevant. Times (art critic I gather) goes on to analyse Roger’s tones etc. Times intelligent, but not room for more. It’s a nice quiet feeling now. With my Coleridge beneath me, and this over, as it really very nearly (how I hate that clash) is, I’m aware of something permanent and real in my existence. By the way, I’m rather proud of having done a solid work. I am content, somehow. But when I read my post it’s like putting my hand in a jar of leeches and so I’ve a mint of dull dreary letters to write. But it’s an incredibly lovely—yes lovely is the word—transient, changing, warm, capricious summer evening. Also I won two games. A large hedgehog was found drowned in the lily pool; L. tried to resuscitate it. An amusing sight. 2/6 is offered by the Government for live hedgehogs. I’m reading Ruth Benedict with pressure of suggestions—about culture patterns—which suggests rather too much. Six volumes of Aug. Hare also suggest—little articles. But I’m very peaceful, momentarily, this evening. Saturday I suppose a no review day. Immune is again the right word. No, John hasn’t read it. When the twelve planes went over, out to sea, to fight, last evening, I had I think an individual, not communal B.B.C. dictated feeling. I almost instinctively wished them luck. I should like to be able to take scientific notes of reactions. Invasion may be tonight: or not at all—that’s Joubert’s summing up. And—I had something else to say—but what? And dinner to get ready.

Friday, August 2nd.

Complete silence surrounds that book. It might have sailed into the blue and been lost. ‘One of our books did not return’ as the B.B.C. puts it. No review by Morgan: no review at all. No letter. And though I suspect Morgan has refused, finding it unpalatable, still I remain—yes, honestly—quiet minded and prepared to face a complete, lasting silence.

Sunday, August 4th.

Just time, while Judith and Leslie1 finish their game, to record on a great relief—Desmond’s review really says all I wanted said. The book delights friends and the younger generation say Yes, yes, we know him: and it’s not only delightful but important. That’s enough. And it gave me a very calm rewarded feeling—not the old triumph, as over a novel, but the feeling I’ve done what was asked of me, given my friends what they wanted. Just as I’d decided I’d given them nothing but the materials for a book I hadn’t written. Now I can be content: needn’t worry what people think: for Desmond is a good bell-ringer; and will start the others—I mean, the talk among intimates will follow, more or less, his lines. Herbert Read and Maccoll have bit their hardest; put their case; now only Morgan remains, and perhaps a personal dart from W. Lewis.

Tuesday, August 6th.

Yes, I was very happy again when I saw Clive’s blue envelope at breakfast (with John) this morning: It’s Clive almost—what?—devout: no, quiet, serious, completely without sneer, approving. As good in its way as the best of my books—the best biography for many years—the first part as good as the last and no break. So I’m confirmed in what I felt, even when I had that beak pecking walk in March with a temperature of 101 with Leonard—confirmed in what I feel—that the first part is really more generally interesting, though less complex and intensified than the last. I’m sure it was necessary—as a solid pavement for the whole to stand on.

Saturday, August 10th.

And then Morgan slightly damped me: but I was damp already from Leslie hum haw the night before and the day before and again tomorrow. So Morgan and Vita slightly damped: and Bob slightly elated and Ethel, and some old boy in the Spectator, attacking Read. But God’s truth, that’s the end of it all. No more reviews and if I had solitude—no men driving stakes, digging pink gun emplacements, and no neighbours, doubtless I could expand and soar—into P.H., into Coleridge; but must first—damn John—re-write the L.T. Incessant company is as bad as solitary confinement.

Friday, August 16th.

Third edition ordered. L. said, at 37 on Wednesday ‘It’s booming.’ The boom is dulled by our distance. And why does a word of tepidity depress more than a word of praise exalts? I don’t know. I refer to Waley: I don’t refer to Pamela—great work of art etc. Well, it’s taking its way. It’s settling. It’s done. And I’m writing P.H., which leaves a spare hour. Many air raids. One as I walked. A haystack was handy. But walked on, and so home. All clear. Then sirens again. Then Judith and Leslie. Bowls. Then Mrs Ebbs etc. to borrow table. All clear. I must make a stopgap for the last hour, or I shall dwindle, as I’m doing here. But P.H. is a concentration—a screw. So I will go in; and read Hare and write to Ethel. Very hot, even out here.

They came very close. We lay down under the tree. The sound was like someone sawing in the air just above us. We lay flat on our faces, hands behind head. Don’t close your teeth, said L. They seemed to be sawing at something stationary. Bombs shook the windows of my lodge. Will it drop I asked? If so, we shall be broken together. I thought, I think, of nothingness—flatness, my mood being flat. Some fear I suppose. Should we take Mabel to garage. Too risky to cross the garden L. said. Then another came from Newhaven. Hum and saw and buzz all round us. A horse neighed in the marsh. Very sultry. Is it thunder? I said. No, guns, said L., from Ringmer, from Charleston way. Then slowly the sound lessened. Mabel in kitchen said the windows shook. Air raid still on: distant planes; Leslie playing bowls. I well beaten. My books only gave me pain, Charlotte Brontë said. Today I agree. Very heavy, dull and damp. This must at once be cured. The all clear. 5 to 7. 144 down last night.

Monday, August 19th.

Yesterday, 18th, Sunday, there was a roar. Right on top of us they came. I looked at the plane, like a minnow at a roaring shark. Over they flashed—three I think. Olive green. Then pop pop pop—German? Again pop pop pop, over Kingston. Said to be five bombers hedge hopping on their way to London. The closest shave so far. 144 brought down—no that was last time. And no raid (so far) today. Rehearsal. I cannot read Remorse. Why not say so?

Friday, August 23rd.

Book flopped. Sales down to 15 a day since air raid on London. Is that the reason? Will it pick up?

Wednesday, August 28th.

How I should like to write poetry all day long—that’s the gift to me of poor X, who never reads poetry because she hated it at school. She stayed from Tuesday to Sunday night, to be exact: and almost had me down. Why? Because (partly) she has the artist’s temperament without being an artist. She’s temperamental, but has no outlet. I find her charming: individual: honest and somehow pathetic. Her curious obtusity, her staleness of mind, is perceptible to her. And she hesitates. Ought one to make up? Y. says yes—I say no. The truth is she has no instinct for colour: no more than for music or pictures. A great deal of force and spirit and yet always at the leap something balks her. I can imagine her crying herself to sleep. So, having brought no rations, or books, she floundered on here. I called her, to mitigate her burden. My good dog. My Afghan hound—with her long too thick legs and her long body; and the shock of wild unbrushed hair on top. I’m glad I’m so nice looking, she said. And she is. But well, it taught me, that week of unintermittent interruptions, bowls, tea parties, droppings in, what public school is like—no privacy. A good rub with a coarse towel for my old mind, no doubt. And Judith and Leslie are about to play bowls. This is why, my first solitary morning, after London and the protracted air raid—from 9.30 to 4 a.m.—I was so light, so free, so happy I wrote what I call P.H. poetry. Is it good? I suppose not, very. I should say, to placate V.W. when she wishes to know what was happening in August, 1940—that the air raids are now at their prelude. Invasion, if it comes, must come within three weeks. The harrying of the public is now in full swing. The air saws: the wasps drone; the siren—it’s now Weeping Willie in the papers—is as punctual as the vespers … We’ve not had our raid yet, we say. Two in London. One caught me in the London Library. There I saw reading in Scrutiny that Mrs W. after all was better than the young. At this I was pleased. John Buchan—‘V.W. is our best critic since M. Arnold and wiser and juster’ also pleased me. I must write to Pamela. Sales a little better.

P.S. to the last page. We went out on to the terrace; began playing. A large two decker plane came heavily and slowly. L. said a Wellesley something. A training plane said Leslie. Suddenly there was pop pop from behind the church. Practising we said. The plane circled slowly out over the marsh and back, very close to the ground and to us. Then a whole volley of pops (like bags burst) came together. The plane swung off, slow and heavy and circling towards Lewes. We looked. Leslie saw the German black cross. All the workmen were looking. It’s a German: that dawned. It was the enemy. It dipped among the fir trees over Lewes and did not rise. Then we heard the drone. Looked up and saw two planes very high. They made for us. We started to shelter in the lodge. But they wheeled and Leslie saw the English sign. So we watched—they side slipped, glided, swooped and roared for about five minutes round the fallen plane as if identifying and making sure. Then made off towards London. Our version is that it was a wounded plane, looking for a landing. ‘It was a Jerry sure enough,’ the men said: the men who are making a gun hiding by the gate. It would have been a peaceful matter of fact death to be popped off on the terrace playing bowls this very fine cool sunny August evening.

Saturday, August 31st.

Now we are in the war. England is being attacked. I got this feeling for the first time completely yesterday; the feeling of pressure, danger, horror. The feeling is that a battle is going on—fierce battle. May last four weeks. Am I afraid? Intermittently. The worst of it is one’s mind won’t work with a spring next morning. Of course this may be the beginning of invasion. A sense of pressure. Endless local stories. No—it’s no good trying to capture the feeling of England being in a battle. I daresay if I write fiction and Coleridge and not that infernal bomb article for U.S.A. I shall swim into quiet water.

Monday, September 2nd.

There might be no war, the past two days. Only one raid warning. Perfectly quiet nights. A lull after the attacks on London.

Thursday, September 5th.

Hot, hot, hot. Record heat wave, record summer if we kept records this summer. At 2.30 a plane zooms: 10 minutes later air raid sounds; 20 later, all clear. Hot, I repeat; and doubt if I’m a poet. H.P. hard labour. Brain w—no, I can’t think of the word—yes, wilts. An idea. All writers are unhappy. The picture of the world in books is thus too dark. The wordless are the happy: women in cottage gardens: Mrs Chavasse. Not a true picture of the world; only a writer’s picture. Are musicians, painters, happy? Is their world happier?

Tuesday, September 10th.

Back from half a day in London—perhaps our strangest visit. When we got to Gower Street a barrier with diversion on it. No sign of damage. But coming to Doughty Street a crowd. Then Miss Perkins at the window. Meek. S. roped off. Wardens there. Not allowed in. The house about 30 yards from ours struck at one in the morning by a bomb. Completely ruined. Another bomb in the square still unexploded. We walked round the back. Stood by Jane Harrison’s house. The house was still smouldering. That is a great pile of bricks. Underneath all the people who had gone down to their shelter. Scraps of cloth hanging to the bare walls at the side still standing. A looking glass I think swinging. Like a tooth knocked out—a clean cut. Our house undamaged. No windows yet broken—perhaps the bomb has now broken them. We saw Bernai with an arm band jumping on top of the bricks. Who lived there? I suppose the casual young men and women I used to see from my window; the flat dwellers who used to have flower pots and sit in the balcony. All now blown to bits. The garage man at the back—blear eyed and jerky—told us he had been blown out of his bed by the explosion: made to take shelter in a church. ‘A hard cold seat,’ he said, ‘and a small boy lying in my arms. I cheered when the all clear sounded. I’m aching all over.’ He said the Jerries had been over for three nights ‘trying to bomb King’s Cross. They had destroyed half Argyll Street, also shops in Grays Inn Road. Then Mr Pritchard ambled up. Took the news as calm as a grig. They actually have the impertinence to say this will make us accept peace …!’ he said: he watches raids from his flat roof and sleeps like a hog. So, after talking to Miss Perkins, Mrs Jackson—but both serene—Miss P. had slept on a camp bed in her shelter—we went on to Grays Inn. Left the car and saw Holborn. A vast gap at the top of Chancery Lane. Smoking still. Some great shop entirely destroyed: the hotel opposite like a shell. In a wine shop there were no windows left. People standing at the tables—I think drink being served. Heaps of blue green glass in the road at Chancery Lane. Men breaking off fragments left in the frames. Glass falling. Then into Lincoln’s Inn. To the NS. office: windows broken, but house untouched. We went over it. Deserted. Wet passages. Glass on stairs. Doors locked. So back to the car. A great block of traffic. The Cinema behind Madame Tussaud’s torn open: the stage visible; some decoration swinging. All the R. Park houses with broken windows, but undamaged. And then miles and miles of orderly ordinary streets—all Bayswater, and Sussex Square as usual—streets empty—faces set and eyes bleared. In Chancery Lane I saw a man with a barrow of music books. My typist’s office destroyed. Then at Wimbledon a siren: people began running. We drove, through almost empty streets, as fast as possible. Horses taken out of the shafts. Cars pulled up. Then the all clear. The people I think of now are the very grimy lodging house keepers, say in Heathcote Street: with another night to face: old wretched women standing at their doors; dirty, miserable. Well—as Nessa said on the phone, it’s coming very near. I had thought myself a coward for suggesting that we should not sleep two nights at 37. I was greatly relieved when Miss P. telephoned advising us not to stay, and L. agreed.

Wednesday, September 11th.

Churchill has just spoken. A clear, measured, robust, speech. Says the invasion is being prepared. It’s for the next two weeks apparently if at all. Ships and barges massing at French ports. The bombing of London of course preparatory to invasion. Our majestic City—etc., which touches me, for I feel London majestic. Our courage etc. Another raid last night on London. Time bomb struck the Palace. John rang up. He was in Mecklenburgh Square the night of the raid: wants the Press moved at once. L. is to go up on Friday. Our windows are broken, John says. He is lodging out somewhere. Mecklenburgh Square evacuated. A plane shot down before our eyes just before tea: over the racecourse; a scuffle; a swerve; then a plunge; and a burst of thick black smoke. Percy says the pilot baled out We count now on an air raid about 8.30. Anyhow, whether or not, we hear the sinister sawing noise about then, which loudens and fades; then a pause; then another comes. ‘They’re at it again’ we say as we sit, I doing my work. L. making cigarettes. Now and then there’s a thud. The windows shake. So we know London is raided again.

Thursday, September 12th.

A gale has risen. Weather broken. Armada weather. No sound of planes today, only wind. Terrific air traffic last night. But the raid beaten off by new London barrage. This is cheering. If we can hold out this week—next week—week after—if the weather’s turned—if the force of the raids on London is broken—we go up tomorrow to see John about moving Press; to patch the windows, rescue valuables and get letters—if, that is, we’re allowed in the Square. Oh, blackberrying I conceived, or re-moulded, an idea for a Common History book—to read from one end of literature including biography; and range at will, consecutively.

Friday, September 13th.

A strong feeling of invasion in the air. Roads crowded with army wagons, soldiers. Just back from hard day in London. Raid, unheard by us, started outside Wimbledon. A sudden stagnation. People vanished. Yet some cars went on. We decided to visit lavatory on the hill: shut. So L. made use of tree. Pouring. Guns in the distance. Saw a pink brick shelter. That was the only interest of our journey—our talk with the man, woman and child who were living there. They had been bombed at Clapham. Their house unsafe; so they hiked to Wimbledon. Preferred this unfinished gun emplacement to a refugee overcrowded house. They had a roadman’s lamp; a saucepan and could boil tea. The night watchman wouldn’t accept their tea; had his own; someone gave them a bath. In one of the Wimbledon houses there was only a caretaker. Of course they couldn’t house us. But she was very nice—gave them a sit down. We all talked. Middle class smartish lady on her way to Epsom regretted she couldn’t have the child. But we wouldn’t part with her, they said—the man a voluble emotional Kelt, the woman placid Saxon. As long as she’s all right we don’t mind. They sleep on some shavings. Bombs had dropped on the Common. He a house-painter. Very friendly and hospitable. They liked having people in to talk. What will they do? The man thought Hitler would soon be over. The lady in the cocks hat said Never. Twice we left: more guns: came back. At last started, keeping an eye on shelters and people’s behaviour. Reached Russell Hotel. No John. Loud gunfire. We sheltered. Started for Mecklenburgh Square; met John, who said the Square still closed; so lunched in the hotel: decided the Press emergency—to employ Garden City Press—in 20 minutes. Raid still on. Walked to Mecklenburgh Square.

Saturday, September 14th.

A sense of invasion—that is lorries of soldiers and machines—like cranes—walloping along to Newhaven. An air raid is on. A little pop rattle which I take to be machine gun, just gone off. Planes roaring and roaring. Percy and L. say some are English. Mabel comes out and looks: asks if we want fish fried or boiled.

The great advantage of this page is that it gives me a fidget ground. Fidgets: caused by losing at bowls and invasion: caused by another howling banshee, by having no book I must read: and so on. I am reading Sévigné: how recuperative last week; gone stale a little with that mannered and sterile Burney now: even through the centuries his acid dandified somehow supercilious well what?—can’t find the word—this manner of his, this character penetrates; and moreover reminds me of someone I dislike. Is it Logan? There’s a ceremony in him that reminds me of Tom. There’s a parched artificial cruelty and—oh the word! the word! Am I over-I suggest sensitive to character in writing? I think we supercilious. moderns lack love. Our torture makes us writhe.

But I can’t go into that—a phrase that brings in Old Rose, to whom I mean to write. One always thinks there’s a landing place coming. But there aint. A stage, a branch, an end. I dislike writing letters of thanks about Roger. I’ve said it so many times. I think I will begin my new book by reading Ifor Evans, 6d. Penguin.

Monday, September 16th.

Well, we’re alone in our ship. A very wet stormy day. Mabel stumped off, with her bunions, carrying her bags at 10. Thank you for all your kindness; she said the same to us both. Also would I give her a reference? ‘I hope we shall meet again,’ I said. She said ‘Oh no doubt’ thinking I referred to death. So that 5 years’ uneasy mute but very passive and calm relation is over: a heavy unsunned pear dropped from a twig. And we’re freer, alone. No responsibility: for her. The house solution is to have no residents. But I’m stupid; have been dallying with Mr Williamson’s confessions, appalled by his egocentricity.

Are all writers as magnified in their own eyes? He can’t move an inch from the glare of his own personality—his fame. And I’ve never read one of those immortal works. To Charleston this afternoon, after provisioning for our siege in Lewes. Last night we saw tinsel sparks here and there in the sky over the flat. L. thought they were shells bursting from the London barrage. Great air traffic all night. Some loud explosions. I listened for church bells, thinking largely, I admit, of finding ourselves prisoned here with Mabel. She thought the same. Said that if one is to be killed one will be killed. Prefers death in a Holloway shelter playing cards—naturally—to death here.

Tuesday, September 17th.

No invasion. High wind. Yesterday in the Public Library I took down a book of X.’s criticism. This turned me against writing my book. London Library atmosphere effused. Turned me against all literary criticism: these so clever, so airless, so fleshless ingenuities and attempts to prove—that T.S. Eliot for example is a worse critic than X. Is all literary criticism that kind of exhausted air?—book dust, London Library, air. Or is it only that X. is a second hand, frozen fingered, university specialist, don trying to be creative, don all stuffed with books, writer? Would one say the same of the Common Reader? I dipped for five minutes and put the book back depressed. The man asked ‘What do you want, Mrs Woolf?’ I said a history of English literature. But was so sickened I couldn’t look. There were so many. Nor could I remember the name of Stopford Brooke.

I continue, after winning two games of bowls. Our island is a desert island. No letters from Meek. No coffee. Papers between 3 and 4. Can’t get on to Meek, when we ring up. Some letters take 5 days coming. Trains uncertain. One must get out at Croydon. Angelica goes to Hilton via Oxford. So we, L. and I, are almost cut off. We found a young soldier in the garden last night, coming back. ‘Can I speak to Mr Woolf?’ I thought it meant billeting for certain. No. Could we lend a typewriter? Officer on hill had gone and taken his. So we produced my portable. Then he said: ‘Pardon sir, Do you play chess?’ He plays chess with passion. So we asked him to tea on Saturday to play. He is with the anti-aircraft searchlight on the hill. Finds it dull. Can’t get a bath. A straight good natured young man. Professional soldier? I think the son, say of an estate agent, or small shopkeeper. Not public school. Not lower class. But I shall investigate. ‘Sorry to break into your private life’ he said. Also that on Saturday he went to the pictures in Lewes.

Wednesday, September 18th.

‘We have need of all our courage’ are the words that come to the surface this morning: on hearing that all our windows are broken, ceilings down, and most of our china smashed at Mecklenburgh Square. The bomb exploded. Why did we ever leave Tavistock? What’s the good of thinking that? We were about to start for London, when we got on to Miss Perkins who told us. The Press—what remains—is to be moved to Letchworth. A grim morning. How can one settle into Michelet and Coleridge? As I say, we have need of courage. A very bad raid last night on London—waiting for the wireless. But I did forge ahead with P.H. all the same.

Thursday, September 19th.

Less need of courage today. I suppose the impression of Miss P.’s voice describing the damage wears off.

Wednesday, September 25th.

All day—Monday—in London; in the flat; dark; carpets nailed to windows; ceilings down in patches; heaps of grey dust and china under kitchen table; back rooms untouched. A lovely September day—tender—three days of tender weather—John came. We are moved to Letchworth. The Garden City was moving us that day. Roger surprisingly sells. The bomb in Brunswick Square exploded. I was in the baker’s. Comforted the agitated worn women.

Sunday, September 29th.

A bomb dropped so close I cursed L. for slamming the window. I was writing to Hugh, and the pen jumped from my finger.

Raid still on. It’s like a sheep dog, chasing a fox out of the fold. You see them yapping and biting and then the marauder, dropping a bone, a bomb towards Newhaven, flies. All clear. Bowls. Villagers at their doors. Cold. All now become familiar. I was thinking (among other things) that this is a lazy life. Breakfast in bed. Read in bed. Bath. Order dinner. Out to Lodge. After re-arranging my room (turning table to get the sun: church on right; window left: a new very lovely view) tune up, with cigarette: write till 12: stop: visit L.: look at papers; return; type till 1. Listen in: Lunch. Sore jaw: can’t bite. Read papers. Walk to Southease. Back 3. Gather and arrange apples. Tea. Write a letter. Bowls. Type again. Read Michelet or write here. Cook dinner. Music. Embroidery. 9.30 read (or sleep) till 11.30. Bed. Compare with the old London day. Three afternoons someone coming. One night, dinner party. Saturday a walk. Thursday shopping. Tuesday going to tea with Nessa. One City walk. Telephone ringing. L. to meetings. K.M. or Robson bothering. That was an average week: with Friday to Monday here. I think, now we’re marooned, I ought to cram in a little more reading. Yet why? A happy, a very free, and disengaged—a life that rings from one simple melody to another. Yes: why not enjoy this after all those years of the other? Yet I compare with Miss Perkins’ day.

Wednesday, October 2nd.

Ought I not to look at the sunset rather than write this? A flush of red in the blue; the haystack on the marsh catches the glow; behind me, the apples are red in the trees. L. is gathering them. Now a plume of smoke goes from the train under Caburn. And all the air a solemn stillness holds. Till 8.30 when the cadaverous twanging in the sky begins; the planes going to London. Well it’s an hour still to that. Cows feeding. The elm tree sprinkling its little leaves against the sky. Our pear tree swagged with pears; and the weathercock above the triangular church tower above it. Why try again to make the familiar catalogue, from which something escapes. Should I think of death? Last night a great heavy plunge of bomb under the window. So near we both started. A plane had passed dropping this fruit. We went on to the terrace. Trinkets of stars sprinkled and glittering. All quiet. The bombs dropped on Itford Hill.

There are two by the river, marked with white wooden crosses, still unburst. I said to L.: I don’t want to die yet. The chances are against it. But they’re aiming at the railway and the power works. They get closer every time. Caburn was crowned with what looked like a settled moth, wings extended—a Messerschmitt it was, shot down on Sunday. I had a nice gallop this morning with Coleridge—Sara. I’m to make £20 with two articles. Books still held up. And Spiras free, and Margot1 writes to say ‘I did it’ and adds ‘a long letter all about yourself and what you believe’. What do I? Can’t at the moment remember. Oh I try to imagine how one’s killed by a bomb. I’ve got it fairly vivid—the sensation: but can’t see anything but suffocating nonentity following after. I shall think—oh I wanted another 10 years—not this—and shan’t, for once, be able to describe it. It—I mean death; no, the scrunching and scrambling, the crushing of my bone shade in on my very active eye and brain: the process of putting out the light—painful? Yes. Terrifying. I suppose so. Then a swoon; a drain; two or three gulps attempting consciousness—and then dot dot dot.

Sunday, October 6th.

I snatch this page with Anreps and Ruth Beresford imminent to say—what? Will it ever seem strange that L. and I walking on the marsh first look at a bomb crater: then listen to the German drone above: then I take two paces nearer L„ prudently deciding that two birds had better be killed with one stone? They got Lewes at last yesterday.

Saturday, October 12th.

I would like to pack my day rather fuller: most reading must be munching. If it were not treasonable to say so, a day like this is almost too—I won’t say happy: but amenable. The tune varies, from one nice melody to another. All is played (today) in such a theatre. Hills and fields; I can’t stop looking; October blooms; brown plough; and the fading and freshening of the marsh. Now the mist comes up. And one thing’s ‘pleasant’ after another: breakfast, writing, walking, tea, bowls, reading, sweets, bed. A letter from Rose about her day. I let it almost break mine. Mine recovers. The globe rounds again. Behind it—oh yes. But I was thinking I must intensify. Partly Rose. Partly I’m terrified of passive acquiescence. I live in intensity. In London, now, or two years ago, I’d be owling through the streets. More pack and thrill than here. So I must supply that—how? I think book inventing. And there’s always the chance of a rough wave: no, I won’t once more turn my magnifying glass on that. Scraps of memoirs come so coolingly to my mind. Wound up by those three little articles (one sent today) I unwound a page about Thoby. Fish forgotten. I must invent a dinner. But it’s all so heavenly free and easy—L. and I alone. I’ve my rug on hand too. Another pleasure. And all the clothes drudgery, Sybil drudgery, society drudgery obliterated. But I want to look back on these war years as years of positive something or other. L. gathering apples. Sally barks. I imagine a village invasion. Queer the contraction of life to the village radius. Wood bought enough to stock many winters. All our friends are isolated over winter fires. Chance of interruption small now. No cars. No petrol. Trains uncertain. And we on our lovely free autumn island. But I will read Dante, and for my trip through English literature book. I was glad to see the C.R. all spotted with readers at the Free Library to which I think of belonging.

Thursday, October 17th.

Our private luck has turned. John says Tavistock Square is no more. If that’s so, I need no longer wake in the night thinking the Wolves luck has taken a downward turn. For the first time they were rash and foolish. Second, an urgent request from Harpers Bazaar for an article or story. So that tree, far from being barren, as I thought, is fruit bearing. And I’ve spent I don’t know how much brain nerve earning 30 gns. with three little articles. But I say, the effort has its reward; for I’m worth, owing to that insect like conscience and diligence, £120 to the U.S.A. A perfect day—a red admiral feasting on an apple day. A red rotten apple lying on the grass; butterfly on it, beyond a soft blue warm coloured down and field. Everything dropping through soft air to rest on the earth. The light is now fading. Soon the siren: then the twang of plucked strings … But it’s almost forgettable still; the nightly operation on the tortured London. Mabel wants to leave it. L. sawing wood. The funny little cross on the church shows against the downs. We go up tomorrow. A mist is rising; a long fleece of white on the marshes. I must black out. I had so much to say. I am filling my mind slowly with Elizabethans: that is to say letting my mind feed like the Red Admiral—the siren, just as I had drawn the curtains. Now the unpleasant part begins. Who’ll be killed tonight? Not us, I suppose. One doesn’t think of that—save as a quickener. Indeed I often think our Indian summer was deserved: after all those London years. I mean, this quickens it. Every day seen against a very faint shade of bodily risk. And I returned to V.H. today; and am to transfer my habitual note taking I think—what I do on odd days—to random reading. The idea is, accumulate notes. Oh and I’ve mastered the iron curtain for my brain. Down I shut when I’m tied tight. No reading, no writing. No claims, no ‘must’ I walk—yesterday in the rain over the Piddinghoe down—a new line.

Sunday, October 20th.

The most—what?—impressive, no, that’s not it—sight in London on Friday was the queue, mostly children with suitcases, outside Warren Street tube. This was about 11.30. We thought they were evacuees waiting for a bus. But there they were, in a much longer line, with women, men, more bags, blankets, sitting still at 3. Lining up for the shelter in the night’s raid—which came of course. Thus, if they left the tube at 6 (a bad raid on Thursday) they were back again at 11. So to Tavistock Square. With a sigh of relief saw a heap of ruins. Three houses, I should say, gone. Basement all rubble. Only relics an old basket chair (bought in Fitzroy Square days) and Penman’s board To Let. Otherwise bricks and wood splinters. One glass door in the next house hanging. I could just see a piece of my studio wall standing: otherwise rubble where I wrote so many books. Open air where we sat so many nights, gave so many parties. The hotel not touched. So to Meek. All again. Litter, glass, black soft dust, plaster powder. Miss T. and Miss E. in trousers, overalls and turbans, sweeping. I noted the flutter of Miss T.’s hands: the same as Miss Perkins’. Of course friendly and hospitable in the extreme. Jaunty jerky talk. Repetitions. So sorry we hadn’t had her card … to save you the shock. It’s awful … Upstairs she propped a leaning bookcase for us. Books all over dining room floor. In my sitting room glass all over Mrs Hunter’s cabinet—and so on. Only the drawing room with windows almost whole. A wind blowing though. I began to hunt out diaries. What could we salvage in this little car? Darwin and the silver, and some glass and china.

Then lunch off tongue, in the drawing room. John came. I forgot The Voyage of the Beagle. No raid the whole day. So about 2.30 drove home.

Exhilaration at losing possessions—save at times I want my books and chairs and carpets and beds. How I worked to buy them—one by one—and the pictures. But to be free of Meek., would now be a relief. Almost certainly it will be destroyed—and our queer tenancy of that sunny flat over … In spite of the move and the expense, no doubt, if we save our things we shall be cheaply quit—I mean, if we’d stayed at 52 and lost all our possessions. But it’s odd—the relief at losing possessions. I should like to start life, in peace, almost bare—free to go anywhere. Can we be rid of Meek, though?

Friday, November 1st.

A gloomy evening, spiritually: alone over the fire—and by way of conversation, apply to this too stout volume. My Times book for the week is E.F. Benson’s last autobiography—in which he tried to rasp himself clean of his barnacles. I learn there the perils of glibness. I too can flick phrases. He said, ‘One must discover new depths in oneself.’ Well I don’t bother about that here. I will note, though, the perils of glibness. And add, considering how I feel in my fingers the weight of every word, even of a review, need I feel guilty?

Sunday, November 3rd.

Yesterday the river burst its banks. The marsh is now a sea with gulls on it. L. and I walked down to the hanger. Water broken, white, roaring, pouring down through the gap by the pill-box. A bomb exploded last month; old Thompsett told me it took a month to mend. For some reason (bank weakened Everest says by pill-box) it burst again. Today the rain is tremendous. And gale. As if dear old nature were kicking up her heels. Down to the hanger again. Flood deeper and fuller. Bridge cut off. Water made road impassable by the farm. So all my marsh walks are gone—until? Another break in the bank. It comes over in a cascade: the sea is unfathomable. Yes, now it has crept up round Botten’s haystack—the haystack in the floods—and is at the bottom of our field. Lovely if the sun were out. Medieval in the mist tonight. I am happy, quit of my money-making; back at P.H. writing in spurts; covering, I’m glad to say, a small canvas. Oh the freedom

Tuesday, November 5th.

The haystack in the floods is of such incredible beauty … When I look up I see all the marsh water. In the sun deep blue, gulls caraway seeds: snowstorms: Atlantic floor: yellow islands: leafless trees: red cottage roofs. Oh may the flood last for ever. A virgin lip: no bungalows; as it was in the beginning. Now it’s lead grey with the red leaves in front. Our inland sea. Caburn is become a cliff. I was thinking: the University fills shells like H.A.L.F. and Trevelyan. They are their product. Also: Never have I been so fertile. Also: the old hunger for books is on me: the childish passion. So that I am very ‘happy’ as the saying is: and excited by P.H. This diary shorthand comes in useful. A new style—to mix.

Sunday, November 17th.

I observe, as a curious trifle in mental history—I should like to take naturalist’s notes—human naturalist’s notes—that it is the rhythm of a book that, by running in the head, winds one into a ball; and so jades one. The rhythm of P.H. (the last chapter) became so obsessive that I heard it, perhaps used it, in every sentence I spoke. By reading the notes for memoirs I broke this up. The rhythm of the notes is far freer and looser. Two days of writing in that rhythm has completely refreshed me. So I go back to P.H. tomorrow. This I think is rather profound.

Saturday, November 23rd.

Having this moment finished the Pageant—or Poyntz Hall?—(begun perhaps April 1938) my thoughts turn well up, to write the first chapter of the next book (nameless) Anon, it will be called. The exact narrative of this last morning should refer to Louie’s interruption, holding a glass jar, in whose thin milk was a pat of butter. Then I went in with her to skim the milk off: then I took the pat and showed it to Leonard. This was a moment of great household triumph.

I am a little triumphant about the book. I think if s an interesting attempt in a new method. I think it’s more quintessential than the others. More milk skimmed off. A richer pat, certainly a fresher than that misery The Years. I’ve enjoyed writing almost every page. This book was only (I must note) written at intervals when the pressure was at its highest, during the drudgery of Roger. I think I shall make this my scheme: if the new book can be made to serve as daily drudgery—only I hope to lessen that—anyhow it will be a supported on fact book—then I shall brew some moments of high pressure. I think of taking my mountain top—that persistent vision—as a starting point. Then see what comes. If nothing, it won’t matter.

Sunday, December 22nd.

How beautiful they were, those old people—I mean father and mother—how simple, how clear, how untroubled. I have been dipping into old letters and father’s memoirs. He loved her: oh and was so candid and reasonable and transparent—and had such a fastidious delicate mind, educated, and transparent. How serene and gay even, their life reads to me: no mud; no whirlpools. And so human—with the children and the little hum and song of the nursery. But if I read as a contemporary I shall lose my child’s vision and so must stop. Nothing turbulent; nothing involved; no introspection.

Sunday, December 29th.

There are moments when the sail flaps. Then, being a great amateur of the art of life, determined to suck my orange, off, like a wasp if the blossom I’m on fades, as It did yesterday—I ride across the downs to the cliffs. A roll of barbed wire is hooped on the edge. I rubbed my mind brisk along the Newhaven road. Shabby old maids buying groceries, in that desert road with the villas; in the wet. And Newhaven gashed. But tire the body and the mind sleeps. All desire to write diary here has flagged. What is the right antidote? I must sniff round. I think Mme de Sévigné. Writing to be a daily pleasure. I detest the hardness of old age—I feel it. I rasp. I’m tart.

The foot less prompt to meet the morning dew,

The heart less bounding at emotion new.

And hope, once crush’d, less quick to spring again.

I actually opened Matthew Arnold and copied these lines. While doing so, the idea came to me that why I dislike, and like, so many things idiosyncratically now, is because of my growing detachment from the hierarchy, the patriarchy. When Desmond praises East Coker, and I am jealous, I walk over the marsh saying, I am I: and must follow that furrow, not copy another. That is the only justification for my writing, living. How one enjoys food now: I make up imaginary meals.

[]

1941.

Wednesday, January 1st.

On Sunday night, as I was reading about the Great fire, in a very accurate detailed book, London was burning. Eight of my city churches destroyed, and the Guildhall. This belongs to last year. This first day of the new year has a slice of wind like a circular saw. This book was salvaged from 37: I brought it down from the shop, with a handful of Elizabethans for my book, now called Turning a Page. A psychologist would see that the above was written with someone, and a dog, in the room. To add in private: I think I will be less verbose here perhaps—but what does it matter, writing too many pages. No printer to consider. No public.

Thursday, January 9th.

A blank. All frost. Still frost. Burning white. Burning blue. The elms red. I did not mean to describe, once more, the downs in snow; but it came. And I can’t help even now turning to look at Asheham down, red, purple, dove blue grey, with the cross so melodramatically against it. What is the phrase I always remember—or forget. Look your last on all tilings lovely. Yesterday Mrs X. was buried upside down. A mishap. Such a heavy woman, as Louie put it, feasting spontaneously upon the grave. Today she buries the Aunt whose husband saw the vision at Seaford. Their house was bombed by the bomb we heard early one morning last week. And L. is lecturing and arranging the room. Are these the things that are interesting? that recall: that say Stop, you are so fair? Well, all life is so fair, at my age. I mean, without much more of it I suppose to follow. And t’other side of the hill there’ll be no rosy blue red snow. I am copying P.H.

Wednesday, January 15th.

Parsimony may be the end of this book. Also shame at my own verbosity, which comes over me when I see the 20 it is—books shuffled together in my room. Who am I ashamed of? Myself reading them. Then Joyce is dead: Joyce about a fortnight younger than I am. I remember Miss Weaver, in wool gloves, bringing Ulysses in typescript to our tea table at Hogarth House. Roger I think sent her. Would we devote our lives to printing it? The indecent pages looked so incongruous: she was spinsterly, buttoned up. And the pages reeled with indecency. I put it in the drawer of the inlaid cabinet. One day Katherine Mansfield came, and I had it out. She began to read, ridiculing: then suddenly said, But there’s something in this: a scene that should figure I suppose in the history of literature. He was about the place, but I never saw him. Then I remember Tom in Ottoline’s room at Garsington saying—it was published then—how could anyone write again after achieving the immense prodigy of the last chapter? He was, for the first time in my knowledge, rapt, enthusiastic. I bought the blue paper book, and read it here one summer I think with spasms of wonder, of discovery, and then again with long lapses of intense boredom. This goes back to a pre-historic world. And now all the gents are furbishing up their opinions, and the books, I suppose, take their place in the long procession.

We were in London on Monday. I went to London Bridge. I looked at the river; very misty; some tufts of smoke, perhaps from burning houses. There was another fire on Saturday. Then I saw a cliff of wall, eaten out, at one corner; a great corner all smashed; a Bank; the Monument erect: tried to get a bus; but such a block I dismounted; and the second bus advised me to walk. A complete jam of traffic; for streets were being blown up. So by Tube to the Temple; and there wandered in the desolate ruins of my old squares: gashed; dismantled; the old red bricks all white powder, something like a builder’s yard. Grey dirt and broken windows. Sightseers; all that completeness ravished and demolished.

Sunday, January 26th.

A battle against depression, rejection (by Harpers of my story and Ellen Terry) routed today (I hope) by clearing out kitchen; by sending the article (a lame one) to N.S.: and by breaking into P.H. two days, I think, of memoir writing. This trough of despair shall not, I swear, engulf me. The solitude is great.

Rodmell life is very small beer. The house is damp. The house is untidy. But there is no alternative. Also days will lengthen. What I need is the old spurt. ‘Your true life, like mine, is in ideas’ Desmond said to me once. But one must remember one can’t pump ideas. I begin to dislike introspection: sleep and slackness; musing; reading; cooking; cycling: oh and a good hard rather rocky book—viz: Herbert Fisher. This is my prescription.

There’s a lull in the war. Six nights without raids. But Garvin says the greatest struggle is about to come—say in three weeks—and every man, woman, dog, cat, even weevil must girt their arms, their faith—and so on. It’s the cold hour, this: before the lights go up. A few snowdrops in the garden. Yes, I was thinking: we live without a future. That’s what’s queer: with our noses pressed to a closed door. Now to write, with a new nib, to Enid Jones.

Friday, February 7th.

Why was I depressed? I cannot remember. We have been to Charlie Chaplin. Like the milk girl we found it boring. I have been writing with some glow. Mrs Thrale is to be done before we go to Cambridge. A week of broken water impends.

Sunday, February 16th.

In the wild grey water after last week’s turmoil. I liked the dinner with Dadie best. All very lit up and confidential. I liked the soft grey night at Newnham. We found Pernel in her high ceremonial room, all polished and spectatorial. She was in soft reds and blacks. We sat by a bright fire. Curious flitting talk. She leaves next year. Then Letchworth—the slaves chained to their typewriters, and their drawn set faces and the machines—the incessant more and more competent machines, folding, pressing, gluing and issuing perfect books. They can stamp cloth to imitate leather. Our Press is up in a glass case. No country to look at. Very long train journeys. Food skimpy. No butter, no jam. Old couples hoarding marmalade and grape nuts on their tables. Conversation half whispered round the lounge fire. Elizabeth Bowen arriyed two hours after we got back, and went yesterday: and tomorrow Vita; then Enid; then perhaps I shall re-enter one of my higher lives. But not yet.

Wednesday, February 26th.

My ‘higher life’ is almost entirely the Elizabethan play. Finished Poyntz Hall, the Pageant; the play—finally Between the Acts this morning.

Sunday, March 8th.

Just back from L.’s speech at Brighton. Like a foreign town: the first spring day. Women sitting on seats. A pretty hat in a teashop—how fashion revives the eye! And the shell encrusted old women, rouged, decked, cadaverous at the teashop. The waitress in checked cotton. No: I intend no introspection. I mark Henry James’ sentence: observe perpetually. Observe the oncome of age. Observe greed. Observe my own despondency. By that means it becomes serviceable. Or so I hope. I insist upon spending this time to the best advantage. I will go down with my colours flying. This I see verges on introspection; but doesn’t quite fall in. Suppose I bought a ticket at the Museum; biked in daily and read history. Suppose I selected one dominant figure in every age and wrote round and about. Occupation is essential. And now with some pleasure I find that it’s seven; and must cook dinner. Haddock and sausage meat. I think it is true that one gains a certain hold on sausage and haddock by writing them down.

I scarcely ever read it. But, owing to his giving me the books, I am now reading C. by M. Baring. I am surprised to find it as good as it is. But how good is it? Easy to say it is not a great book. But what qualities does it lack? That it adds nothing to one’s vision of life, perhaps. Yet it is hard to find a serious flaw. My wonder is that entirely second rate work like this, poured out in profusion by at least 20 people yearly, I suppose, has so much merit. Never reading it, I get into the way of thinking it non-existent. So it is, speaking with the utmost strictness. That is, it will not exist in 2026; but it has some existence now, which puzzles me a little. Now Clarissa bores me; yet I feel this is important. And why?

My own brain Here is a whole nervous breakdown in miniature. We came on I daresay that gives me more substantial pleasure than any letter I’ve had about any book. Yes, I think it does, coming from Morgan. For one thing it gives me reason to think I shall be right to go on along this very lonely path. I mean in the City today I was thinking of another book—about shopkeepers, and publicans, with low life scenes: and I ratified this sketch by Morgan’s judgement. Dadie agrees too. Oh yes, between 50 and 60 I think I shall write out some very singular books, if I live. I mean I think I am about to embody at last the exact shapes my brain holds. What a long toil to reach this beginning—if The Waves is my first work in my own style! To be noted, as curiosities of my literary history: I sedulously avoid meeting Roger and Lytton whom I suspect do not like The Waves.

I am working very hard—in my way, to furbish up two long Elizabethan articles to front a new Common Reader: then I must go through the whole long list of those articles. I feel too, at the back of my brain, that I can devise a new critical method; something far less stiff and formal than these Times articles.

[]

THE
LETTERS

of
Virginia Woolf
& Lytton Strachey

edited by
Leonard Woolf &
James Strachey

published
1956
by
The Hogarth Press

the woolf–strachey letters

Letters November 1906–November 1909

Letters November 1911–November 1919

Letters February 1920–December 1931

[]

Glossary of Names

Adrian—Adrian Stephen, Virginia Woolf’s brother

Bunny—David Garnett

Carrington—D. Carrington, the painter

Clive—Clive Bell, Nessa’s husband

Desmond—Desmond MacCarthy

Duncan—Duncan Grant, Lytton Strachey’s cousin

Goldie—G. Lowes Dickinson

James—Lytton Strachey’s brother

Leonard—Leonard Woolf, Virginia Woolf’s husband

Maynard—John Maynard Keynes

Morgan—E. M. Forster

Nessa—Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf’s sister

Ottoline or Ott—Lady Ottoline Morrell

Roger—Roger Fry

Saxon—Saxon Sydney-Turner

Tom—T. S. Eliot

Letters November 1906–November 1909

Thursday. [November 22, 1906.]

46 Gordon Sq.

Dear Mr. Strachey,

We should like so much to see you, if you could come one day. I wonder if this next Sunday would suit you, about 6 o’clock in the evening? Vanessa is much better, and would like to talk to you.

Yours sincerely,
Virginia Stephen

[]

Wednesday. [April 22, 1908.]

Trevose House, Draycot Terrace, St. Ives, Cornwall.

Dear Lytton,

The only notepaper to be had in the county of Cornwall is this—what they call commercial. Indeed, if you could see under what circumstances I write a letter you would think me something of a moralist. I have a sitting room, which is the dining room, and it has a side board, with a cruet and a silver biscuit box. I write at the dining table, having lifted a corner of the table cloth, and pushed away several small silver pots of flowers. This might be the beginning of a novel by Mr. Galsworthy. My landlady, though a woman of 50, has nine children, and once had 11; and the youngest is able to cry all day long. When you consider that the family sitting room is next mine, and we are parted by folding doors only—what kind of sentence do you call this?—you will understand that I find it hard to write of Delane “the Man” I have had a long letter of instruction from Smith. He bids me bring out the human side, “his unswerving loyalty, alike to subordinates and chief,—in a word the high qualities of head and heart which” etc. etc. “Nay, my dear Miss Stephen, there is no comparison, for the real human interest, which the Cornhill seeks, between Delane and Mrs. Abercrombie.” “I really believe, dear Miss Stephen, that if you will put heart and head into it, you will make a mark in reviewing.” Did you ever have a compliment like that?

I spend most of my time, however, alone with my God, on the moors. I sat for an hour (perhaps it was 10 minutes) on a rock this afternoon, and considered how I should describe the colour of the Atlantic. It has strange shivers of purple and green, but if you call them blushes, you introduce unpleasant associations of red flesh. I am afraid you have little feeling for nature. I have seen innumerable things since I came here that would be worth writing down—“yellow gorse, and sea—“ trees against the sea—but I should no doubt use so many words wrongly that it would be necessary to write this letter over again […] I have read a good many books, it seems to me. Your Pascal is looked at suspiciously by the servant. I picked a branch of white blossom yesterday, and asked her what it was. She said it was May. Somehow I thought that May was pink.

It will be a charity if you will write an answer. I am amazingly garrulous, because I have not spoken since I saw you, except to discuss the joints of animals.

Yr. Ever,
V. S.

[]

April 23rd, 1908.

67 Belsize Park Gardens, Hampstead, N.W.

Dear Virginia,

Your letter came to console me in a solitude-caused by a return of my cold in a more violently nasal form than ever. I am trying the desperate remedy of staying in one room. I have been here the whole of yesterday, and shall be the whole of today, and I suppose tomorrow, and so on for ever and ever, crouching over a gas fire and snivelling and cursing and drinking quinine. This sounds like the end of a novel by a decadent Frenchman. I prefer Galsworthy—as you write him, and I’m really jealous of you and your Cornwall, with its Nature that I have very little feeling for. You should see the dreadful state of rainy fog going on here now, and you should feel the cold wind on your backbone—but I daresay you really do, for your descriptions sounded to me a little too literary, what with the gorse—is gorse really yellow?—and the white May which ought to have been pink, and the Atlantic. And, dear Miss Stephen, I don’t believe a word you say about poor Mr. Smith. It’s all a gross libel and invention, and I won’t believe it till I see it in his own hand.

I went away last Friday, partly to get rid of my cold, to the Green Dragon on Salisbury Plain, where James and Keynes and others were for Easter. Of course it finally destroyed me—the coldest winds you can imagine sweeping over the plain, and inferior food, and not enough comfortable chairs. But on the whole I was amused. The others were Bob Trevy, Sanger, Moore, Hawtrey, and a young undergraduate called Rupert Brooke—isn’t it a romantic name?—with pink cheeks and bright yellow hair—it sounds horrible, but it wasn’t. Moore is a colossal being, and he also sings and plays in a wonderful way, so that the evenings passed pleasantly. I wish you could have been there-disguised, perhaps, as another undergraduate. Would you have been bored to death? The conversation is less political than you think, but I daresay you would have found the jokes a little heavy—as for me, I laughed enormously, and whenever I began to feel dull I could look at the yellow hair and pink cheeks of Rupert. James, too, is an interesting figure—very mysterious and reserved, and either incredibly young or inconceivably old. I constantly looked out of window, in the hopes of seeing Adrian come stalking over the plain in his lavender stockings, but he never appeared. Have you heard from him? I wonder what adventures he’s been having at his inns.

Oh, adventures! Does one have them nowadays? Your letter was for me, but I can think of no other, though I think I do occasionally have them. Do you? Is the Atlantic enough for you? I am a wild man of the woods, I often think, and perhaps inexplicable to civilised people who live in Cornwall and write on Delane as a man.

I have been out into the cold for dinner, and I’m back again very unhappy and chilly, wishing I hadn’t moved, with snow dropping down the chimney and spitting in the fire. I should like to talk to someone. If you’d walk in it would be delightful, especially as I might then explain exactly what I meant by saying I was a wild man of the woods—but of course I never would explain it really; but there would be a chair for you to sit in, and some warmth, and some conversation. As it is I imagine you in your dining-room listening to your landlady’s children, and inventing scandalous letters from Mr. Smith. Or are you perhaps starting the Description of Cornwall? That would be exciting. I have been reading Racine once more, with almost complete pleasure. There was never a greater artist. And he writes about the only thing worth writing about, in my opinion,—the human heart!

“J’aimais jusqu’a ses pleurs que je faisais couler”,—very, very divine!

It’s getting late, and I must go to bed. This will start off to you tomorrow morning. I’m afraid it’s rather an invalid’s letter. I actually sat down to write the minute I’d read yours. So you must answer. Do you really live in Trevose house? Rhyming to nose? Your writing’s a little doubtful. It seems a queer name.

Yours ever,
G. L. S.

[]

Tuesday. [April 28, 1908.]

Trevose House, Draycot Terrace, St. Ives, Cornwall.

Dear Lytton,

Your letter was a great solace to me. I had begun to doubt my own identity—and imagined I was part of a seagull, and dreamt at night of deep pools of blue water, full of eels. However, Adrian came suddenly that very day, like some grim figure out of a North-em Saga—so I imagine—some ice bound captain, travelling for centuries with a frozen beard. He had been snowed upon, and hailed upon and rained upon, and when he descended towards evening upon some lonely farm, the good women cowered behind the door, and bethought them of their honour. Sometimes, such was their modesty, he had to walk 4 miles at the end of the day’s journey. However, he had had a very good time, and had met many worthies, and had many stories to tell. Then Nessa and Clive and the Baby and the Nurse all came, and we have been so domestic that I have not read, or wrote. My article upon Delane is left in the middle of a page thus—“But what of the Man?”—To answer that question, it will be necessary to come back—Saturday—but you will have time to write here, and to notice that my “b” is like that and my “v” is like that. A child is the very devil—calling out, as I believe, all the worst and least explicable passions of the parents—and the Aunts. When we talk of marriage, friendship or prose, we are suddenly held up by Nessa, who has heard a cry, and then we must all distinguish whether it is Julian’s cry, or the cry of the 2 year old, who has an abcess, and uses therefore a different scale.

Adrian went back last night, to have tea with S. T: dine with S. T. and discuss the opera with S. T. I sent him a large pot of cream, and I expect a letter in Ciceronian Latin. “Did you approve of my use of cur [?] with the Dative, or do you think it too Tacitean?” You terrify me with your congregations of intellect upon Salisbury plain. My reverence for clever young men affects me with a kind of mental palsy. I really cannot conceive what the united minds of all those you name produced in the way of talk. Did you—but I can’t begin to consider it even. I saw Rupert Brooke once, leaning over the gallery at Newnham, in midst of Miss Reeves and the Fabians.

We are going to a place called the Gurnard’s Head this afternoon—and now I look up and behold it pours! So we shall sit over the fire instead, and I shall say some very sharp things, and Clive and Nessa will treat me like a spoilt monkey, and the Baby will cry. However, I daresay Hampstead is under snow. How is your cold? I got a stiff neck on the rocks—but it went.

Yr. ever,
A. V. S.

[]

Monday [May 18, 1908].

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

Dear Lytton,

Could you come to tea with me on Thursday? I have got so miserably involved in opera and the German language that that seems to be the only free afternoon, but it would be delightful if you could come then. I have been getting my books in order, you will be glad to hear: the gaps are awful.

Yours ever,
V. S.

[]

[July 28, 1908.]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

Dear Lytton,

I shall be in on Thursday at 4.30, and delighted if you will come. Why are you a suppliant—why was your name once Lytton?

I go to spend a month at the theological college at Wells on Saturday.

Yours ever,
A. V. S.

[]

Aug. 24th, 1908.

Milton Cottage, Rothiemurchus, Aviemore, N.B.

Dear Virginia,

I suggested some time ago Boswell’s letters to Frank Sidgwick as a book to publish. He agreed and asked me to write an “Introduction”, offering 5 gs. and saying it must be done by Sept. 15th, on which I refused. He then asked if I knew anyone who could do the job—I’ve just written suggesting that you possibly might care to, so if you hear from him, be prepared. It seems to me damned little pay, but what finally put me off was the necessity of doing it so soon. I can’t bear this hideous worry and hurry, I must breathe. At present I’m hardly breathing, but when I do it’s good clear Scotch air, which is something. I’ve been here I think about a fortnight, after a wild wet week in Skye. This place is, qua place, perfection—one begins to realise in it that Nature may be romantic and beautiful. I linger by lakes, and tear up mountains, all day long. The nights are spent over a peat fire writing endless letters which—it seems to me—are never answered. Are you in Wales? Perhaps if you are you will meet brother James with a company of Fabians—but I hardly think so. A letter came from Clive in Wiltshire to tell me (among other things) that after Catullus “and perhaps some others” my poems appealed to him most of all. This is very encouraging. I suppose he and Vanessa are at this moment playing bridge in a shooting lodge. What curious things we all seem to do. I have been reading Voltaire, Vathek, and Mlle de Lespinasse; and I think I shall soon go on to Darwin (Emma). Do you really start for Italy the day after tomorrow? Quelle joie! When you are among your olives, think occasionally of a panic-stricken and scribbling ghost, through whose phantasmal brain a million frenzies are forever pouring—in vain! in vain!

To my somewhat dilapidated imagination you seem to me, at this particular moment, to be a woman of sound and solid common sense. I rave, and you order a pill for the liver. Is this true? My whole being is so faint and frail that I haven’t any idea. My only consolation is that my health, as a matter of fact, is almost tolerable. I am sun-burnt, and I digest. Do write to me if you can. Pippa and Pemel are in a cottage half a mile away, and hundreds of dread relations lurk behind every bush. They are of all varieties-countesses, country cousins, faded civil servants, and young heirs to landed property—and all eminently repellent. I think I shall make an Encyclopaedia of them. It would be enormously large.

Yours
Lytton Strachey

[]

Sunday. [August 30, 1908.]

Manorbier, South Wales.

Dear Lytton,

I haven’t heard from Frank Sidgwick, so I expect he must have found some one else to write for him. It would be a charming book to do, but I don’t see how I could manage it in the time. I shall be knocking about in Italian Inns, without an inkpot or a scrap of blotting paper, and I suppose, one French novel.

Well—I have been spending a delightful holiday, given up to reflection and the beauties of nature. I hardly know how I shall emerge again, or whether I shan’t speak in words of one syllable. I live in the greatest discomfort, but have hired a room in another house, where I retire to mumble over Moore, and to exclaim “My wig! What a man!” when I read Racine. Adventures I have none—unless you can count a sage correspondence with Saxon, something after the manner of the Dutch school of painting. He sends me an inventory of his bedroom furniture, and I answer—it’s my only defence—with the most dissolute of metaphors. I was also invited to spend a week with the [Bertrand] Russells, and meet Mr. and Mrs. Gilbert Murray, Jane Harrison and [F. M.] Cornford and Miss Sheepshanks. It was a little too elderly: I couldn’t face it. Yes Clive spoke very highly of your poems, and I got them out of Nessa at last. They lie on the table before me, and I read them when I happen to be feeling pure. Compliments I know mean nothing to you; nor my green blushes, nor any other form of adulation. If you think of me as a woman of sound common sense, I have a vivid picture of you—an oriental potentate, in a flowered dressing gown.

Nessa and Clive seem horribly bored in the Highlands—and no wonder. The Scotch are an amazing people. I spent this morning toiling over a number of Scotch women, your relative Mrs. Grant of Laggan among them; and had to draw largely upon my imagination.

O what a mercy to write no more, but to lie on one’s back in a vineyard, and let grapes drop down one’s throat—But I must go and pack—I go to London tomorrow.

Yrs. ever,
V.S.

[]

Sept. 27th, 1908.

67 Belsize Park Gardens, Hampsteady N,W.

Dear Virginia,

I’ve no idea whether this will reach you. Turner murmured something about Voltaire, so I’m trying a random shot. There’s no reason for it, other than mere conversation, and as I gather you’re to return very soon there’s not much chance of a reply.

I returned about a week ago to the London Life, and am already up to the eyes in it.—Very dim and misty I find it. I’ve been of course to two plays and to Simpson’s not to mention the London Library and the Spectator office. I’ve spent several shillings in taxi-cabs, and at the present moment I’m writing a review of Mr. Swinburne on the Elizabethans. Did you ever hear such a hideous record? You I imagine exhilarated in the Place de la Concorde—is it fine or horrible? Several weeks ago in Scotland I thought for a moment that I should like to be in Paris, but the feeling hasn’t returned, and now I think I should burst into tears if I woke up and found myself on the Pont Neuf. If you appeared it might comfort me—dashing the three of you to the Louvre in a cab. But I daresay out of sheer inanition I should let you go by.

There are moments—on the Heath, of course,—when I seem to myself to see life steadily and see it whole, but they’re only moments; as a rule I can make nothing out. You don’t find much difficulty, I think. Is it because you are a virgin? Or because, from some elevation or another, it’s possible to manage it, and you happen to be there? Ah! there are so many difficulties! So many difficulties! I want to write a novel about a Lord Chancellor and his naughty son, but I can’t for the life of me think of anything like the shadow of a plot, and then—the British public! Oh dear, let’s all go off to the Faroe Islands, and forget the existence of Robin Mayor and Mrs. Humphrey Ward, and drink rum punch of an evening, and live happily ever after! It’s really monstrous that we shouldn’t be able to. Vanessa would cook for us. Why not?—But you must come back to London first.

Yours ever,
Lytton Strachey

I can’t write to this address without sending my respects to the ghost of the dear old skeleton. Will you give them him? Have you seen him yet?

[]

Sunday. [October 4, 1908.]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

Dear Lytton,

It was charming to get a letter from you in Paris. We came back two or three days ago—Adrian is just back—there are concerts and reviews and Saxon till 3 o’clock in the morning—it’s all begun again: We had very successful travels however, and ended with a week in Paris and mild Bohemian society. We drank an immense amount of coffee and sat out under the electric light talking about art. I wish we were 10 years younger, or 20 years older, and could settle to our brandy and cultivate the senses. As it was, I sometimes thought of other things—novels and adventures. Why don’t you bring off your novel? You must. Plots don’t matter, and as for passion and style and immorality, what more do you want? Have you been attending to English literature all this time? I must buy the Spectator. I feel as though I wanted to read through whole libraries—but of course I shan’t. There are books all round my chair, and I can’t bother to pick them up. Adrian has just told me a dream of his—how he travelled for 40 years with the Hermit of the Dead Sea—It was Saxon.

Yr. ever,
A. V. S.

[]

Nov. 17th, 1908.

Penmenner House [The Lizard.]

Dear Virginia,

Ten o’clock. I wonder where you are at this minute—perhaps at Gordon Square. It seems preposterous that you shouldn’t all be sitting round the fire here as usual. As it is, imagine me in extraordinary solitude, willing to sell my soul for a little conversation. How long I shall bear it I haven’t the faintest idea. There have already been moments in the long evening when I’ve shuddered, but Saint Simon supports me, wonderful as ever. Oh, Madame de Chaulnes! Oh, le Président Harlay (for the second time too)! Oh, Mademoiselle Choin! Oh, les Parvuls de Meudon! Don’t you wish you’d got to them all? I don’t know what I shall do when I come to the end—but that’s still 15 ½ volumes off. And I suppose one can always begin again.

I had two charming walks today. I don’t think I could ever grow tired of this country. One looks down over precipices into such astounding surges and there are so many changes, and then, when one’s tired of the sea, one can begin to attend to the coast, which is divine. The chief excitement of the afternoon was an auction, which occurred a little way down the road, outside a cottage, a variegated crowd of village ladies and gentlemen attending. The auctioneer was red, fat, and raucous, and amazingly (I thought) unsuccessful.—“These two nice little vaises—how much now?—sixpence—did I hear someone say sixpence?—fivepence, then, going”—but I didn’t dare to stay very long, for fear of having part of a dinner service and 5 egg cups knocked down to me for eightpence—I’m sure it could have happened if I’d looked at him at a critical moment—in fact it did happen to one poor lady who got a glass lampshade for 3d. quite by accident, and it couldn’t be helped.

Did you find a nice fog waiting for you at Paddington? And how many letters at Fitzroy Square? When you get this it’ll be Thursday, which seems very far off. By that time I daresay I shall be fuming and packing my bag, especially if it rains, and I believe it will, confound it. But it doesn’t matter—it will have been worth it—those two wonderful sunny mornings were alone worth the voyage. Tell Adrian that he’s a perfect pig to have taken away the decent map and left nothing but a little wretch of an object, 600 miles to an inch. Tomorrow perhaps I shall go to Mullion in a motor bus.

Yours,
G. L. S.

[]

20th Nov, [1908].

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

Dear Lytton,

The Lizard is but a dream to me now. I really can’t believe in you at all. The Daily Telegraph talks of “forget-me-nots, primroses and apple blossom” flowering in profusion on the coast. So I think of you as a kind of Venetian prince, in sky blue tights, lying on your back in an orchard, or balancing an exquisite leg in the air while I—It wasn’t actually foggy, but worse, a dun coloured mist, through which all the poor and the meat and the gas jets were visible. I had a number of letters, mostly bills, but a scattering of invitations, from Lady Pollock, Trevelyans, and Protheros. I accept them all of course. Last night we had Duncan Grant, who thinks your address is Penzance; and tonight we dine at the Friday Club, off a 2 shilling dinner. It sounds a little pandemoniac; in the intervals I try to read Romeo and Juliet! I have a dread lest my St. Simon, about which I was so parsimonious, should be castrated, and when I get where you are, I shall find stars. But it will be a long time before that happens. I want a fire and an arm chair, silence, and hours of solitude. You enjoy all these things, in you island. Do you think much?—have you written more poems? I had cut my novel, and thought it ghastly dull. When shall you come back?

By the way, if Esther should approach you with two pairs of scissors, will you stick to them. For some reason I was sent off with two, and came back with none. Adrian meant to leave a map, but packed it, but if you want it he will send it. He has invented a sister taken ill at the Lizard, staying in a friend’s house, with appendicitis-crisis lasted 48 hours, but operation avoided (for the present). She had a touch of it in Athens.

Yours,
A. V. S.

[]

[December 1, 1908.]

29, Fitzroy Square, W.

Dear Lytton,

I was being suffocated in Lady Pollock’s drawing room this afternoon—you never saw such a sight.

I shall be in on Thursday if you could come then.

O how those old women spoil my life. Think of the embraces of Mrs. Clifford and Aunt Anny!

Yrs.
A. V. S.

[]

[December 25, 1908.]

29, Fitzroy Square, W.

Dear Lytton,

We have asked the Fishers to come on the 7th—a Thursday. Will you come then—I suppose we must dress. I imagine that you are now leading your Aunt into dinner. We are comatose—ham divine, but turkey oppressive, and we shall lie before the fire, speechless, till bed time.

Yrs.
V. S.

[]

Jan 3rd. 1909.

Mermaid Club, Rye, Sussex.

Dear Virginia,

Perhaps you have heard rumours of my flight here. I arrived on Thursday and have been spending the time since in a semi-stupor, among mists and golfers, so that by this time I’m feeling so much à la hashisch that I can hardly imagine that I shall ever be anywhere else, or in fact that anywhere else exists. However, by an effort of will I can just bring to my mind a dim vision of Bond Street, the Heath, and a Square or two. Have you really been there all this time, and are you there still? I shall come and see on Thursday. I wonder if I shall find the Fishers, but if I do I shall be able to speak of nothing but cleeks and greens—though no doubt Herbert would be very well able to cope with that. Besides the golfers there are some of the higher clergy—bishops and wardens—and two lawyers at the chancery bar. Of course these are all golfers as well, so it all comes to very much the same thing. Their conversation is quite amazing, and when I consider that there must be numbers of persons more stupid still, I begin to see the human race en noir. Oh God! Oh God! The slowness of them, the pomp, and the fatuity! They’re certainly at their best when they argue, which they did last night on the subject of cruelty and sport.—“I console myself with the thought that animals themselves are very cruel—of course not stags, no—but look at a weasel!” I shrieked with laughter, and it was quite unnecessary to control myself, because they can notice nothing. Good heavens, how happy they must be!

In the intervals of sleep I read those Lettres à une Inconnue, which have troubled us so. They’re an odd mixture of disillusionment and flatness—I don’t know exactly what—very ‘brilliant’ and well written, and yet somehow strangely grey. The French seem to me a melancholy race—is it because they have no imagination, so that they have no outlets when they find themselves (as all intelligent people must) vis-à-vis with the horrors of the world? There’s a sort of dry desperation about some of them which I don’t believe exists with the English—even with Swift. Talking of Great Authors, I’ve seen Henry James twice since I came, and was immensely impressed. I mean only seen with the eye—I wish I knew him! He appeared at his window as I passed the other day—most remarkable! So conscientious and worried and important—he was like an admirable tradesman trying his best to give satisfaction, infinitely solemn and polite. Is there any truth in this? It has since occurred to me that his novels are really remarkable for their lack of humour. But I think it’s very odd that he should have written precisely them and look precisely so. Perhaps if one talked to him one would understand.

Write to me if you can an enormous letter full of exciting narrative and profound reflexions upon human life. Of course you can—but will you? Even a quarter of a sheet would be an oasis in my desolation. I’ve been rather ill, but I’m better—I’ve also been rather upset.—I wish I were a golfer. Has Gordon Square returned yet? What happened at Rumpelmayer’s? Has Adrian had another brief? R.S.V.P.

Yours
G. L. S.

[]

[January 4, 1909.]

29 Fitzroy Sq.

Dear Lytton,

I had heard vaguely of your flight to Rye. Isn’t the Mermaid rather dismal—like a battleship in the time of Nelson—I remember creeping into it one day, and an old woman chased me out. I am sorry you have been ill. Was it Christmas? We sat over the fire and watched the snow, in an odd white glare. Now Adrian is down in Wiltshire, tramping in the mud, I suppose; and I don’t know what I have been doing—seeing [Edith Blank], I think. She deluged me till 1.30 in the morning with the most vapid and melancholy revelations—Imagine 17 [Blanks] in a [Birmingham] slum, and [Edith] (so she says) the brightest of the lot—and then she told stories of women betrayed and love rejected, and cold and poverty and old age with the creeping paralysis—and the upshot of it all was that one should reform the divorce laws. That is what I find so depressing about her—She comes to a dead stop in front of some sordid matter of fact. Like the French she has no outlets. “At the age of 20”, she said, “’I ought to have married a curate.” Was that her delicate way of putting it?

You are going to meet the Fishers on Thursday—You and Herbert must talk about Voltaire, and I shall say how I have just been seeing his waxwork at Madame Tussaud’s. I can’t help thinking he is rather a fraud (H. F. I mean). He is impossibly enlightened and humane. She is a bright woman.

I read the letters to the unknown when I was supposed to be boiling goats milk in Athens, and I remember that I found them rather comforting in the circumstances. They seemed so cynical—an arid elderly couple, with all their wits about them. I hate their precise ways.

I am sitting over my fire towards midnight, having put the dog to bed, and have just finished the Ajax. The ancients puzzle me—they are either so profound or so elementary, and when one has to spell out every word one can’t tell which. However, there is at least one passage of great beauty although I find that it can be read 20 different ways. Yesterday I saw [X.] with his evil goat’s eyes—and Saxon was there too, and Nessa and Clive. Clive seemed to me depressed, but I think one must ignore it. The Freshfields have asked us to stay: Sidney Lee is coming to tea with me—that is all my news. I have also been asked to write ‘impressions’ of Walter Headlam, for his Life. But they would have to be lies.

Now I must go to bed, and read some of my exquisite Cowper.

Yr.
V. S.

[]

Jan. 27th, 1909.

67 Belsize Park Gardens, Hampstead, N. W.

So shocking! Your glove appeared the minute you’d left the house. I’m afraid you must have shivered without it. I’ve just finished my solitary dinner (the whole of my family are at Brighton, I believe, for suffragism), and now I’ve settled down for the evening before my gas fire, surrounded by my Maintenon and the Dictionary of National Biography. I envy you, talking at Gordon Square. If I could have my way, I should go out to dinner every night, and then to a party or an opera, and then I should have a champagne supper, and then I should go to bed in some wonderful person’s arms. Wouldn’t you? When one reflects upon one’s pallid actual existence one shudders. But I suppose there are always the triumphs of Art.

I forgot to tell you how extraordinary my novel about the Lord Chancellor is becoming, as I lie in bed creating it after breakfast. You never heard such conversations, or imagined such scenes! But they’re most of them a little too scabreux, and they’re none of them written. What’s so remarkable is the way in which I penetrate into every sphere of life. My footmen are amazing, and so are my prostitutes. There’s a Prime Minister who should be fine, and there’s a don’s wife à faire mourir de rire. But it’s impossible to get any of it together.

By the bye, will you send me all the particulars as to the Correspondence? I’m dying to hear from Adrian. I wonder how old I am. Thirty-five? Are you going to write to Lady Eastnor?

Yours
G. L. S.

I wish you’ld come to tea with me every day.

[]

Thursday [January 28, 1909.]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

Here are the papers. I hope you will see the whole thing—I can’t say I do at this moment. Caroline is the most alive to me, with her dead husband Sir Julius, who wore a white slip beneath his waistcoat I imagine, and waxed his moustache. Nessa and Humphry Maitland are discharging their views already. I think you ought to begin at once.

Oh what a day! It clings to the fingers and creeps beneath the nails: Why do you tantalise me with stories of your novel? I wish you would confine your genius to one department, it’s too bad to have you dancing like some (oh well—I’ll drop the metaphor) over all departments of literature—poetry, criticism (both scientific & humane) art—belles lettres—and now fiction. A painstaking woman who wishes to treat of life as she finds it, and to give voice to some of the perplexities of her sex, in plain English, has no chance at all.

My glove was a disreputable object.

Here I sit, waiting for Adrian and Saxon to stagger in from the opera, and bury their noses in a pie. Life surely should mean more than this. And yet, it all seems very reasonable. I will ask Saxon.

Yr.
V. S.

[]

Jan. 31st 1909.

67 Belsize Park Gardens, Hampstead, N. W.

My dear Miss Hadyng

I am visiting my editor on Tuesday, and before I return to my suburb I shall appear in Coram Street, if there’s a chance of my finding you and some tea there. I was at the Philips’s this afternoon, and found the poor lady in bed, as beautiful as ever. She was very interesting on Lady Eastnor, and on everything else, but was she a little uneasy? I’ve been immured for so long that I’m out of date—or think I am, and even that’s exasperating. To my unaccustomed eye she seemed to be watching dear James more carefully even than usual. Perhaps you will be able to tell me how absurd I am, at tea on Tuesday. If you don’t, I warn you that I shall jump to the most extraordinary conclusions; and on the whole I rather hope you won’t, because as I advance in life I grow more and more convinced that extraordinary conclusions are the only things I care for.

Yours very sincerely
Vane Hatherley

[]

Feb. 1st. [1909.]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

Dear Mr Hatherly,

I shall be happy to give you tea tomorrow. If there’s one thing a Yorkshire woman can cook, it’s a muffin.

I missed you by 10 minutes at the Philips’ the other day.

So you’ve noticed it then? How clever you are, and how unkind! For don’t you think that these “extraordinary conclusions” you like so much may be rather uncomfortable for me and perhaps (though I really won’t admit it) a little uncomfortable for Clarissa? We were not happy—no—and yet I know its dangerous to imagine people in love with one, and so I told myself all the time. But James is really—sometimes a woman feels so much older than a man. There! that’s worthy of Lady Eastnor. I am thinking of his face, as he helped me on with my cloak, and said good night. I don’t admit for a moment that you have any real ground for your “extraordinary conclusions”, and I suppose I should do better to say no more about them. You always tempt me to run on, and justify myself and explain myself, with your hints and subtleties and suggestive catlike ways. Could you come early tomorrow—by the bye? Mr. Ilchester has sent me a ticket for the Wagner opera—what d’you call it—and I don’t want to miss the overture.

Yours very sincerely
Eleanor Hadyng

[]

[Feb, 9, 1909.]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

I shall be in to tea tomorrow.

We are just back half dazed from the opera—six solid hours of it—and if it were properly edited one might get through in 30 minutes.

V. S.

I laid out 6d. upon the Spectator and was rewarded—only it means I must read another book now.

[]

[February 16, 1909.]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

Dear Lytton,

Thank you for the shilling—I believe it was only sixpence though—so one day I will give you six coppers. I am sorry you have a cold—you would have died at Oxford. Our marrow was frozen, and our spirit chilled to death. There was [K. L.]—a weak man, I am glad to find, though plausible, and Humphrey Paul—and endless others.

Herbert [Fisher] gave voice to one profound remark—“G. L. Strachey must be related to Sir Frederick Pollock”.

Yr.
V. S.

[]

March 9, 1909.

Extract from letter from Lytton Strachey to James Strachey

“… In my efforts to escape, I had a decided reverse the other day. I haven’t mentioned the incident before for various reasons. On Feb. 19th I proposed to Virginia, and was accepted. It was an awkward moment, as you may imagine, especially as I realised, the very minute it was happening, that the whole thing was repulsive to me. Her sense was amazing, and luckily it turned out that she’s not in love. The result was that I was able to manage a fairly honourable retreat. The story is really rather amusing and singular, but its effect has been to drive me on to these shoals more furiously than ever. I need hardly mention the immense secrecy of the affair …”

[]

Feb. 17th 1909.

67 Belsize Park Gardens, Hampstead, N.W.

I’m still rather agitated and exhausted. I try to imagine you at your Green Street dinner, between Lord Dunsany and Thomas Hardy, but it’s difficult. I do hope you’re cheerful! As for me, I’m all of a heap, and the future seems blank to me. But whatever happens, as you said, the important thing is that we should like each other: and we can neither of us have any doubt that we do.

I hope to see Vanessa tomorrow morning. This world is so difficult to manage.

Your
Lytton

[]

June 4th [1909.]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

Dear Lytton,

I hear that we missed you at Cambridge the other day. We had an exquisite vision of the place. There was a wonderful young man in a shooting jacket and black trousers, with the head of a Faun—who was he? I daresay you know.

The whirl of the London season is upon us. We are entertaining Jack Pollock. Lady Ottoline [Morrell]. I am penetrating into the most mysterious places. There is a Jewess who spends 50 guineas on a hat, and wishes to meet me, not that we may exchange views on that subject, I imagine. We see her at the opera, where she displays a wonderful arm upon the ledge of her box. Then, upstairs we meet Charlie Sanger, and Saxon and the great Mr. Loeb who has the finest collection of operatic photographs and autographs in Europe. […]

I am absorbed in Michelet. Is it really a vile book? It is thus that I should write the history of the Restoration if I were a man.

We stayed with the Freshfields a week ago. Nature and art did their best; it was sumptuous; but they were like wax-works, slightly running in the sun, except for Gussie, who has the spirit of a Roman Empress. I daresay she is a hard woman. We sat in a little summer house and discussed the immortality of the soul, and mid-Victorian scandal. I never saw anything so remote as she and poor Douglas. He seems to have stiffened all over, and is now practically jointless.

This is only by way of conversation; and you must not answer, if writing is a bore, as I daresay it is.

Heaven knows what address I am to put.

Yours ever,
V.S.

[]

Friday. [June 25, 1909.]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

Dear Lytton,

Why don’t you come and see me—or am I a brazen hussy to ask you—however FU risk it. I shall be in today, or Tuesday for tea, and it would be charming to see you.

Society is very hollow. I am going to write about Sterne. Would [you] lend me a book called the Princesse de Cleves? The L.L. [London Library] has lost it.

Yours ever,
V. S.

Such a night last night—Dodd feeling compelled, as a Blacksmith’s grandson, to tell Lady Ottoline that he was—constipated!

[]

Wednesday [October 6, 1909.]

29 F. S.

Dear Lytton,

I am told that you came here the other day, when I was away. I was just writing to ask you to dine with us when I hear from Nessa that you have disappeared to some seaside Inn, dragging with you Mr. Norton, whom I dare not call by any other name, who was to have taken Ottoline off our hands tomorrow. God knows what will happen now. She will languish like a sick and yellow alligator. To make up, you must write and say what you’re after. Our summer has been strange—scarcely credible indeed, what with American prima donnas needing advice in their bedrooms, and asking questions about Saxon, in private, and young men from Cook’s, and pure English maidens, among whom I have no right to class myself. Anyhow, we have seen what people call life.

Now we are back again, living on culture chiefly, the Sangers, and King Lear, and the memory—alas it fades!—of conversations with Walter Lamb. I wish (as usual) that earth would open her womb and let some new creature out. They are grown very stale, and one will have to go back to nature I foresee.

How are you? I hope you got some good in your retreat—did you have adventures?

Nessa and Clive come back tomorrow.

Yr. ever,
V.S.

[]

Oct. 13th. 1909.

Belvidere Mansion Hotel, 61, King’s Road, Brighton.

I hope to come tomorrow evening, or at any rate to tea on Friday. On Saturday I go to my moated grange. If I can, I shall stay there for ever, but I suppose I can’t. My health seems still to be something of a Mahomet’s coffin. However, vogue la galère!

Yours
Lytton

[]

Nov. 26th [1909.]

Pythagoras House, Cambridge.

I learn that you are to be at the George Darwin’s. Dear [Arthur] has been asked there to supper to meet you: I have not. Couldn’t you have lunch here on Monday? You might perhaps apparently go away in the morning. It seems melancholy not to meet. I shall call there at the tea hour, and try to intrigue, but it will be difficult.

The so-called Greek Play has begun. I imagine you will go on Saturday. How dreadfully bored you’ll be, to be sure! I hear, too, that there’s to be no one beautiful.

Yr.
G. L. S.

[]

Letters November 1911–November 1919

[November 6, 1911.]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

Dearest Papa,

Will it suit you to come to the dancers tomorrow night—dining here at 7.30 first? They’re only amphitheatre this time; but when they do the other thing we will go to the stalls.

Life is very full—so full that my head is chock full down to the very nostrils, and strain as I may, nothing comes out. I’ve just come back from the Cornfords—from the 7th Symphony, from a scene with ——, from an interview in a W.C. and, while I wash my teeth, a painter sings on a board outside my window.

Who was my mother by the way, Lady S.?

Yr. affectionate daughter
V. S.

If you can’t come, telephone. Wrap up well—especially the left foot. Bring your muffler, blue spectacles, and lozenges.

[]

Monday [November 20, 1911.] 9.30

The Vienna Café.

Will you come to the dancers tomorrow? I hope to get stalls. You will sit between two seductive women.

If you can’t come, would you telephone to Gordon Sq. If you can, will you meet us in the box office hall (I mean the ordinary big hall) at the opera, 25 minutes past 8—the opera beginning at 8.30, I presume, being out of the way of reading newspapers. My God!—whatever you do, put all your wits into few volumes. All day I’ve been lifting Swift, Dryden, Carlyle—such mountains they wrote, and only half an inch worth reading. I can’t offer you dinner—but will you come to tea with me on Friday? There may be just room for your legs and a tea cup on the point of the knee by then. I’ve just been dining in this sordid place alone, and chose all the wrong things. The waiter has been cheeky to the young lady—she threatens to tell Mr. Joseph.

Now I go back to break my first bed in Brunswick—what is the right, yet delicate expression?

Yrs.
V. S.

Your ticket will be sent in the course of the day.

No: I will bring it with me.

[]

[February 16, 1912.]

38 Brunswick Square, W.C.

Address for Miss Berry is

Burley

Cambridge Park

Twickenham

Dear Lytton,

I’ve got to spend 2 weeks in bed. Could you be angelic and send me the Memoirs of Miss Berry? I expect they’d do splendidly: and I’ll take immense care not to spot them.

I hope you are well.

Woolf has all your manuscripts and letters. Letters amazing! My God what an insight I have now in to that cosmogony!

Yr.
V. S.

[]

21st May [1912.]

38 Brunswick Square, W.C.

Dear Lytton,

How difficult it is to write to you! It’s all Cambridge—that detestable place; and the ap—s—les are so unreal, and their loves are so unreal, and yet I suppose it’s all going on still—swarming in the sun—and perhaps not as bad as I imagine. But when I think of it, I vomit—that’s all—a green vomit, which gets into the ink and blisters the paper. How is your tragedy comedy? and are you aware that [Arthur’s] been satisfactorily delivered—are you aware of June 5th, and the treat? We go up the river, swing, eat, make merry; that’s plain sailing; but afterwards in the dusk, in the college garden, with Jane Harrison to make proclamation, we have the tragedy from start to finish, and Choristers hidden in the Elms sing [Arthur’s] songs to [Arthur’s] music. There’s no escaping. And after that, cold salmon and lemonade in the moonlight.

London is not rich in news—Dora’s alive and so is Charlie; and they don’t dress in black because their father’s dead. […] Nessa has got over the measles, and they trail about Italy, rather uncomfortably I expect, and Clive takes the thermometer to bed with him. As for Thomas Hardy, he’s a great man; his style is not made to fit, but what of that? If we had but his ribs, his thighs, his stomach and his entrails! As a matter of fact this is more hearsay than anything else; and I dont know what vapours overcome me in Bedford Square; I ramble like a drunken moth. Desmond, who is now dusty as a very old bottle of brandy, turns up for lunch—tea—dinner; and we go over the story of Donne’s life. As the greater part of the history of England is somehow coming in, the book will be apoplectic. He is going to be as prolific as Miss Broughton “One volume and a half every year” he says—What’ll the half volumes be d’you think? Hom was here once, the attenuated Forster, and a very great writer called Bojer. Ask Desmond about him when you meet. His theme is Conscience.

But the most interesting thing to observe, as I have often told you, is not these distinguished spirits, but the humble ones, the slightly touched, the eccentric. Alas! you’re not interested in them, or I would tell you the story of Mary Coombes and the German student.

One more piece of gossip reaches me for your ear alone—that [Z.], after seeing several students wearing white spats, at once took to her bed, and sacrificed her ovaries.

Yrs.
V.S.

[]

38 Brunswick Square. W.C.

Ha! Ha!

Virginia Stephen
Leonard Woolf

6th June, 1912.
[Announcing their engagement]

[]

[August 16, 1912.]

[Picture postcard of Alfoxton House]

[Halford, Somerset]

Here we are in the middle of divine country, literary associations, cream for every meal, but cold as Christmas and steady rain.

Leonard is learning Spanish and I am reading the Heir of Redcliffe. We go to France on Sunday—I will send addresses.

Love to Henry.

V.W.

Who lived at Alfoxton?

[]

Sept. 1st 1912.

Tarragona.

Dear Lytton,

I wonder if you got a card written at the beginning of our tour, from the home of Coleridge and Southey? That is now remembered by us chiefly for its leg of mutton. We’ve travelled far, & beef has become mutton, chicken partridge—I should hardly know now if you gave me pork to eat. This is a sad state of things only balanced by the beauties of nature and the antiquities of man, upon which I would discourse if you would listen, but to tell the truth it is the food one thinks of more than anything abroad. When I tell you that the W.C. opposite our room has not been emptied for 3 days, and you can there distinguish the droppings of Christian, Jew, Latin and Saxon—you can imagine the rest. This is Tarragona; we go on to Madrid, and from Madrid to Venice. Our habits are simple; 2 days in a place, one day in a train; we walk in the morning, read in the afternoon, make our tea, which is the point we have just passed, then walk on the seashore; and after dinner sit by a café, and, as its Sunday tonight, listen to the military band. Several times the proper business of bed has been interrupted by mosquitoes. They bloody the wall by morning—they always choose my left eye, Leonard’s right ear. Whatever position they chance to find us in. This does not sound to you a happy life, I know; but you see, that in between the crevices we stuff an enormous amount of exciting conversation—also literature. My God! You can’t think with what a fury we fall on printed matter, so long denied us by our own writing! I read 3 new novels in two days: Leonard waltzed through the Old Wives Tale like a kitten after its tail: after this giddy career I have now run full tilt into Crime et Châtiment, fifty pages before tea, and I see there are only 800; so I shall be through in no time. It is directly obvious that he is the greatest writer ever born: and if he chooses to become horrible what will happen to us? Honeymoon completely dashed. If he says it—human hope—had better end, what will be left but suicide in the Grand Canal. Have you been writing about him? As you can imagine, we mean to be very various and active in the winter. Just about this moment, you’re settling down over the fire, having returned from a brisk walk among the Scotch firs in a Scotch mist, and saying (something I can’t spell—it’s French) to the effect that life holds nothing but copulation, after which you groan from the profundities of the stomach, which reminds you that there is venison?—partridge? mutton?—for dinner, whereupon you take down Pope, your pocket copy, and proceed for the 150th time to read … , when the bell rings and the sandy-haired girl, whom you wish was a boy, says “Dinner on the table” … whereas I’m just off to walk by the shores of the Mediterranean, by the beams of the dying sun, which is still hot enough to make a cotton dress and a parasol necessary, while the military band plays the Barcarolle from Hoffmann’s Tales, and the naked boys run like snipe along the beach, balancing their buttocks in the pellucid air.

Please write to Brunswick Square: all the news; we’ve not seen an Englishman, or heard of London for a fortnight.

Leonard sends love.

Yrs.
V.W.

[]

Friday Nov. 8th 1912.

The Chestnuts, East Ilsley, Berks.

I saw you for such a short time the other day: it was tantalizing. I should like to see you every day for hours. I have always wanted to. Why is it impossible? Why is everything that is satisfactory in this life impregnated with unsatisfactoriness? Alack! (as Mrs. Humphrey Ward’s characters all say—have you noticed it?) Why is London the only place to live in, and why must one have the strength of a cart-horse, or you, to be able to manage it? You are not to suppose from this that I am unhappy here. No, my hours pass in such a floating stream of purely self-regarding comfort that that’s impossible, only one does have regrets…. Will you at any rate write to me? I hardly think so. You always say you love writing letters, but you never do it. The inconsistency of your sex, I suppose. Yours would be more soothing to read than George Meredith’s. What do you think? I opened that volume just before I left Belsize yesterday, and was so nauseated by the few sentences that met my eye, that I shut it up, put it down, and deliberately left it behind, so if you want it you must ask them to send it you. Nothing will induce me to read another word the man wrote. Is it prejudice, do you think, that makes us hate the Victorians, or is it the truth of the case? They seem to me a set of mouthing bungling hypocrites; but perhaps really there is a baroque charm about them which will be discovered by our great-great-grandchildren, as we have discovered the charm of Donne, who seemed intolerable to the i8th century. Only I don’t believe it. Thackeray and G. Meredith will go the way of Calprenede & Scudery; they’ll be curious relics in 50 years. I should like to have for another 200 years (to be moderate). The literature of the future will, I clearly see, be amazing. At last it’ll tell the truth, and be indecent, and amusing, and romantic, and even (after about 100 years) be written well. Quelle joie!—To live in those days, when books will pour out from the press reeking with all the filth of Petronius, all the frenzy of Dostoievsky, all the romance of the Arabian Nights, and all the exquisiteness of Voltaire! But it won’t only be the books that will be charming then.—The people!—The young men! … even the young women! …—But these vistas are too exacerbating.—

I’ve spent today trying to write in an unemphatic and yet forceful manner for the Edinburgh. It’s very difficult. How, oh how, do you avoid periods? My paragraphs will all wind themselves up to a crisis, and come down with a thump—it’s most distressing. I believe there’s some trick for getting round it, which I should be glad if you’ld tell me. Horace Walpole seems to avoid it. It’s some sort of whisk of the tail that one has to give. But if one hasn’t a tail to whisk?

Tell Leonard that I wrote a wild letter to his 2 brothers the other day, and have had no answer. Are they enraged?

Also, talking of Victorians, did I enrage you, by my rather curt remarks on ton père? I meant to imply the necessary reservations, but I’m afraid I didn’t. Of course I think qua man he was divine.

Your
Lytton

[]

Nov 16 [1912.]

13 Cliffords Inn

Really, if you go on writing, you will vitiate John Bailey’s stock phrase “the art of letter writing is dying out—” Of course my objection to letters is that they were all written in the 18th Century, an age I find unlovable. Still, there seems no reason why we shouldn’t write letters even upon the 16th of November—anyhow why you shouldn’t. Of course for a wife and a woman the case is different. Do the race horses champ beneath you? I dreamt of race horses all night which is partly why I take up the pen—when I ought to be reading and reviewing. Isn’t it damnable to have begun that again? and yet it’s rather inspiriting. I feel like a child switching off the heads of poppies—it’s such a joke now, writing reviews, and I once took it seriously. Poor old Desmond was here again yesterday, with his despatch box in which was a half-written review of George Trevelyan’s edition of Meredith’s poetry—Out it came and we went through it with a pencil. “Now please suggest some alternative for ‘revelling in romance’—I don’t like ‘revelling in romance’—‘exalting in the magnificence?’ No—that’s not quite it-However, let’s go on.” On we went, defining youth, poetry and what precisely is meant by optimism. It was awfully gloomy—this poor man searching about in the roots of things at 2 guineas a column, and sweating and grunting and saying “If I had time, of course, I could do something better than this” and yet it was stiff with thought. He seemed to me altogether dismal. Starting for Biarritz where he is to help Paley with a book on Political Economy. The kind of thing they debate is whether to call Disraeli Lord Beaconsfield, the late Mr. Disraeli, or Disraeli pure and simple, which Desmond advises, provided the sentence will stand it. Our great event has been that Arnold has taken Leonard’s novel with great praise. Of course he makes it a condition that certain passages are to go out—which, we don’t yet know. It’s triumphant to have made a complete outsider believe in one’s figments. I don’t suppose I altogether agree about the 19th Century. It’s a good deal hotter in the head than the 18th. But you didn’t shock my feelings as a daughter. The difference probably is that I attach more importance to his divinity “qua man” even in his books than you do. It always seems to me to count considerably. But my feeling for literature is by no means pure.

Ottoline has been seen by several observers—not by me—passing through on her way South again, the gold streamers pendent from each ear, and trailing on the ground, amid a myriad of pointed foxes’ tails—So Leonard, who’s not given to exaggeration, describes her.

We are sitting over the fire, in complete quiet, save for an occasional van down Fetter Lane—L. half way through an immense Blue Book on Divorce, upon which he has to write an article for that oozing officious man, Haynes.

London is very nice—a trifle too rackety I agree-but we are off, thank God, tomorrow to Asheham, where we shall discuss the shepherd’s morals—he’s had a child at 60, and this gives rise to talk—with Mrs. Funnell.

Yr.
V.W.

Is this letter written upon Bumf? It looks like it. Isn’t it a shame that Marjorie is not going to be a publisher? We urged it all we could.

[]

Dec. 1st 1912.

The Chestnuts, East llsley, Berks,

Ah! Quelle vie! Quelle vie! Breakfast at 8 (and in this weather too), forthing 9-10 (frozen entrails), 10-11 prayers, 11-1 gallopading on a grey pony over the downs, mad with terror and ecstasy, 1-2 lunch, 2-3 assoupissement général, 3-4 a brisk walk, 4 o’c tea (Sir A. Clark’s blend), 4.30-7.30, desperate efforts with Madame du Deffand … how after such a day am I to keep alive the art of letter-writing, and vitiate John Bailey. I leave it to you. I am dying to hear from you again. My silence has been scandalous, I feel, after your 4 large pages of bumpf (oh! I see I’ve put in a supernumerary P—never mind): but I have constantly written you brilliant letters in the spirit. How are you? Is Clifford’s Inn as cosy as ever? What books do you review? It was superb to hear that Leonard’s novel had been accepted. I hope the negotiations have been successful, and that he has insisted on a royalty. When is it coming out?—And yours?—

The account of Ottoline you gave me “passing through on her way South again”, was mysterious, and the style hardly seemed to be Leonard’s. However, she is established 6 miles off—the South?—across the downs, rather like Mariana with a blue fly buzzing on the pane, or words to that effect. I went over to see her, and spent the night unexpectedly in Philip’s nightgown (pale blue cambric)—otherwise all went well. Her health seems to be getting on as well as can be expected after the terrors of Combe and Lausanne; but she is to return there. I am écrasé by the loss of Bedford Square, but I suppose you hardly feel it. I think you’ve never taken to that caviare. As for Desmond, I had an immense tête-à-tête with him at the Savile when I was last in London, and found him singularly soothing. The thing is to keep him off literature, and insist on his doing Music Hall turns: if he’d only make that his profession he’d make thousands. Can’t you see him coming on in a mackintosh?

I’m reading among other things (a) Un Adolescent, by Dostoievsky—more frantic than any, I think—12 new characters on every page, and the mind quite dazed by the conversations; and (b) the Note Books of Sam. Butler—have you read them? They are full of amusement, and the man was certainly very intelligent, and writes very well; but he’s oddly limited. The Victorian taint, perhaps, was on him too, though to be sure he wore it with a difference. Such an anaesthetic view of life! No swaggering at all—only paradoxes-intellectual acrobatics. One longs for a panache. However, I rather gather from a remark in F. Jones’s preface that there are lots of indecent things left out. It’s odd how he resembles the author of Hudibras. But I imagine he was ruined by a perverse character. He ought to have written nothing but satire, and he would devote himself to the Odyssey and Shakespeare’s Sonnets and his rubbishy science and philosophy—which of course nobody could put up with, and so he became a disappointed man and said he was writing for posterity. Can you conceive anyone writing for posterity? or indeed for anyone? or indeed writing at all?—

I expect to hear any day that Henry has returned to Hampstead. How long he intends to stay there I don’t know. […] Have you seen John’s pictures at the New English? Are they as collossal as the Times says. It is all I can do to prevent myself tearing up to the Metropolis to see them—but Madame du Deff and holds me—just holds me—by the leg.

It’s the Victorians I hate—not the nineteenth Century. Had Tennyson a better head than Pope?

Your
Lytton

[]

Boxing day [1912.]

Asheham, Rodmell.

Dear Lytton,

I meant long ago to write to you, in London, but one can’t write in London. In fact we’re driven to think that the country is our destiny, partly led thereto by the charms of Mrs. Funnell, Old Funnell, their son, and a soldier nephew who served in Egypt, who are all at this moment sitting in the kitchen, eating a great sugar cake, which I bore in and presented, amid subdued cheers. As for the boy he has the figure of a God—a very small, tightly curled head, set upon gigantic shoulders. That’s the style I admire; and there he sits speechless, reading the cookery book.

We have just had dinner—Leonard is reading the poems of John Donne: I am half way through the Return of the Native, a novel by Thomas Hardy. We go back tomorrow, alas. Were there time I would tell you about Brighton on Christmas Eve; we spent 2 hours in the Aquarium. The common fish are perfectly wonderful. Soles laid flat on the bottom; cray fish crawling; mackerel shooting endlessly round and round, like torpedo boats; fat white anemones blooming from rocky corners. Then there is the monkey house. For some reason, the mackerel put me in mind of Ottoline and her troupe; she ought to be put in a tank; it’s absurd to expect her to stand scrutiny for ways and motives, which is her lot at present.

I suppose you have heard of various disasters in London—Nessa more or less broken down—Roger rampant, but at one point forced to sit with his head in his hands, giddy if he so much as saw a picture. They’re starting on furniture now—have you heard? All good reasons for living in the country. [P.] turned up two days ago—but if one sees much of [Q.] one wants less of [P.], which does not mean that I don’t find him large and serene & as satisfactory as a great big pigeon. This metaphor might be more fitting if I weren’t here interrupted by Mrs. F: who says she can’t eat curry; it repeats so dreadful—also how she saw her saucepan once float in at the back door—in a flood.

Are you writing? Have you despatched that wrinkled old hag? and are you still interrupted by the champing of the race horses beneath? O I saw [G. H.] too; and if it weren’t wicked could make you laugh-How anyone has the face to be so magnificently egoistical one can’t conceive; he lives in the centre of domes upon domes of bubbles. His play has been refused. But he has hopes of a more brilliant future than falls to most of us—a Librarianship—(but this is a secret).

Yr. V.W.

[]

[January 17, 1914.]

Would you be very kind and send me your articles, which I think you have bound together? I will be very careful, and return them. I am reading Lord Lytton, and I think you wrote one upon him, and the others I’d like to read too.

V.W.

Asheham
Rodmell.

[]

Jan. 29th [1914.]

Asheham Rodmell

The one volume of essays has arrived—I still await the second—But this is really to ask you whether you have manuscripts that want typewriting. I should very much like to do them if you have, supposing that you are not in a great hurry and it would save you l0d. a 1000. Can you lend us the Edinburgh?

V.W.

I’ ready to begin on typing now. I don’t altogether agree about Miss N. Is it true that you refused to do her? What a pity. I read nothing but biographies of statesmen—I wish you would recommend some.

[]

Feb. 7th [1914.]

Asheham

I shall be delighted to do Esmeralda—and anything else chaste or otherwise.

We hear that Arnold is glad to publish the Wise Virgins, if L. will cut out some sentences—finds it gives “fresh proof of your power as a writer.”

Your second volume came this morning. Many thanks.

[]

[? December, 1914.]

The Lacket, Lockeridge, Marlborough.

Dear Lytton,

We have both enjoyed ourselves very much here. It has been perfect in every way. Except for the house decoration and choice of books (a little heavy, don’t you think) and the weather too has been bad but not bad enough to keep us indoors. It is evidently magnificent country—to my thinking better—at least more solid—than Sussex—but L. don’t agree. The cooking—the food—the discrete old lady who is as noiseless as an elephantine kind of mouse—all have been perfect. Shall you come and see us again?

Many thanks
Yr. V. S.

In spite of great temptation, your letters remain virgin.

[]

[? 1915.]

17, The Green, Richmond.

Here is the book, which I hope will help the birth of many more Victorian lives. I have seldom enjoyed myself more than I did last night, reading Manning In fact, I couldn’t stop, and preserved some pages only by force of will to read after dinner. It is quite superb—It is far the best thing you have ever written, I believe—To begin with, what a miracle it is that such a group should have existed—and then how divinely amusing and exciting and alive you make it. I command you to complete a whole series: you can’t think how I enjoy your writing.

Yr.
V.W.

[]

Feb. 28th. 1915.

The Lacket, Lockeridge, Marlborough.

My dearest Creature

I was very glad to get your letter this morning. Won’t you & Leonard come down here for the next week-end? Couldn’t you come on Friday? It would be very nice if you could.

As for gossip—no doubt there’s a lot going about, but … but … One lives on such volcanoes nowadays. […] Oh, mon dieu!—I spent a few days at Gordon Square the week before last, and enjoyed myself greatly. But I lived in almost too extreme a whirl of gaiety, and tottered back here at last quite worn out—and it took me days to recover.

I think your idea of the Parrot is an excellent one—though I rather doubt whether we should be able to find a really adequate one at the Docks. The best plan would be for you to go out to the Amazons and catch one there, which you could afterwards train. The presentation ceremony, too, would be pretty.

I am in rather a state just now with Miss Nightingale, who is proving distinctly indigestible. It’s a fearful business—putting pen to paper—almost inconceivable. What happens? And how on earth does one ever manage to pull through in the end?

Well, I hope I shall see you before long. What do you think occurs tomorrow? I shall be 35!—

ever your dévoué
Lytton

[]

22nd Oct. [1915.]

Asheham Rodmell Lewes.

Dear Lytton,

I think it is about time we took up our correspondence again. Surely you must have amassed a million adventures since we met. I can’t feel altogether sure that you still persist in the flesh—my friends—ah, but [U. V.] tells me I have none. By God! What a bore that man is! I don’t know why exactly, but no one I’ve ever met seems to me more palpably second rate and now the poor creature resigns himself to it. […] I am really all right again, and weigh 12 stone!—three more than I’ve ever had, and the consequence is I can hardly toil uphill, but it’s evidently good for the health. I am as happy as the day is long, and look forward to being rid of the nurse soon (she is at present dusting the room, and arranging the books). We come up on the 5th; as the summer seems to have broken up.

I should think I had read 600 books since we met. Please tell me what merit you find in Henry James. I have disabused Leonard of him; but we have his works here, and I read, and can’t find anything but faintly tinged rose water, urbane & sleek, but vulgar, and as pale as [E. F.]. Is there really any sense in it? I admit I can’t be bothered to snuff out his meaning when it’s very obscure. I am beginning the Insulted and Injured; which sweeps me away. Have you read it. But this will not lead you (O God, how this woman annoys me with her remarks “The Dardanelles, Mrs.Woolf, would they be in France?”) to think that I am spending long hours with my favourites, as Ott. used to say she delighted to do, in the long country days. Have you seen her? Have you seen anyone? What are you writing? Please lend us your last Edinburgh article. Leonard is writing so many different books—one for the morning, another for the afternoon. His life, so he said yesterday, is to be spent on a History of Diplomacy, but as the Webbs have their claws fixed in his entrails, I see no hope for him.

Nurse now thinks I must stop writing. I tell her I’m only scribbling to a relative, an elderly spinster, who suffers from gout, and lives on scraps of family news. “Poor thing!” says nurse. “Arthritis it is”, I remark. But it won’t do!

Yrs.
V.W.

[]

Feb. 25th 1916.

6 Belsize Park Gardens, N.W.

Dearest Lady,

I wonder if you’ve got 3 stout volumes of Miss Berry’s life and letters, belonging to me? I have a dim memory of having lent them to you some centuries ago. If by any chance you have got them, and would send them to me—by special truck, I should think—I should be very grateful. I have engaged to write one of those Edinburgh articles on Horace W⁠[alpole], and thought I might drag in something about the Berrys too—and, perhaps, General O’Hara.

My conduct has been so shocking about writing to you that it’s far beyond excuses. There are moments when it seems clear to me that I can never possibly be forgiven; and other moments when I realise that you, if no one else, will be able to tout comprendre et tout pardonner. I have been in such a sluggish, deathly state for the last—I don’t know how many months! Malebolge, I think it must be. And the worst of it is that these torpors do not entirely overcome one—if they did one would at any rate be unaware of one’s horrid state; but they leave one conscious—hideously conscious—of one’s utter damnation.

Well! I seem to be rising a little out of them now. I don’t know why—perhaps because the horrors of the outer world are beginning to assert themselves—local tribunals, and such things—and one really can’t lie still under that. At any rate, here I am, positively with a pen in my hand, and writing a letter—who could have believed such a thing? The nuisance is that there’s so much to write about that I don’t see how I’m to write anything at all. For instance, The Voyage Out—! You know how I adore that book. I read it with breathless pleasure, the minute it came out—a special messenger came running out with it from Bickers. I don’t think I ever enjoyed the reading of a book so much. And I was surprised by it. I had naturally expected wit and exquisiteness—what people call ‘brilliance’, but it’s a wretched word—but what amazed me was to find such a wonderful solidity as well! Something Tolstoyan, I thought—especially that last account of the illness, which really well!—And then the people were not mere satirical silhouettes, but solid too, with other sides to them: Shakespeare wouldn’t have been ashamed of some of them, I thought. I love, too, the feeling reigning throughout—perhaps the most important part of any book—the secular sense of it all—18th century in its absence of folly, but with the colour and amusement of modern life as well. Oh, it’s very, very unvictorian! The handling of the detail always seemed to me divine. My one criticism is about the conception of it as a whole—which I am doubtful about. As I read I felt that it perhaps lacked the cohesion of a dominating idea—I don’t mean in the spirit—but in the action. I wonder if you at all agree about this—but it is difficult to explain in writing. There seemed such an enormous quantity of things in it that I couldn’t help wanting still more. At the end I felt as if it was really only the beginning of an enormous novel, which had been—almost accidentally—cut short by the death of Rachel. But perhaps that really was your conception.—I won’t say any more now, we must meet soon, and talk about it. But oh! the Chapel scene!—That I think is the best morceau of all.—And the Dalloways—oh!—

This is very helter-skelter stuff, I’m afraid. But what can you expect from an aged inhabitant of the Inferno? Write me a word or two, Santa Beatrice, and ask me to tea.

Yours ever
Lytton

[]

28th Feb. [1916.]

Hogarth.

Dearest Lytton,

What a treat to hear from you!—still it don’t make much difference whether you write or not and I always feel you will turn up safe in the end, and in fact you never really disappear. Miss Berry shall be sent off at once, and also a volume or two of Madame de Genlis, which I always suppose to be yours.

Your praise is far the nicest of any I’ve had—having as you know, an ancient reverence for your understanding of these things, so that I can hardly believe that you do like that book. You almost give me courage to read it, which I’ve not done since it was printed, and I wonder how it would strike me now. I suspect your criticism about the failure of conception is quite right. I think I had a conception, but I don’t think it made itself felt. What I wanted to do was to give the feeling of a vast tumult of life, as various and disorderly as possible, which should be cut short for a moment by the death, and go on again—and the whole was to have a sort of pattern, and be somehow controlled. The difficulty was to keep any sort of coherence,—also to give enough detail to make the characters interesting—which Forster says I didn’t do. I really wanted three volumes. Do you think it is impossible to get this sort of effect in a novel;—is the result bound to be too scattered to be intelligible? I expect one may learn to get more control in time. One gets too much involved in details—But let us meet and have a long gossip—What about next Sunday? -Will you come to dinner—or tea—and spend the night? I asked Pernel to come, but Duncan tells me she is away, and as I haven’t heard from her, I suppose she doesn’t mean to come. Ring us up—and if that day doesn’t do, suggest another—We almost always have a spare room.

What are you about—are you in love?—are you writing?—I suppose you will come out brilliantly with the flowers of spring. I do wish you’d print all your works at once—Talking of which, I’ve just been sent an appeal to me as a ‘passionate soul’ to subscribe to a private indecency press called the Rainbow, for the production of that and other works—

Yr.
V.W.

[]

Ap. 15th 1916.

Garsington.

I am looking forward to coming to Asheham on Thursday—probably hand in hand with Sanger. I hope you are getting over your flu all right. I am still rather delabre, in spite of the infinite solicitudes of her Ladyship. It’s a great bore. I lie about in a limp state, reading the Republic, which I find a surprisingly interesting work. I should like to have a chat with the Author.

Do you think I might have either rice or macaroni with the meat course at lunch & dinner? Dr. Overy insists on it, so if it could be managed without too much bother I should be much obliged.

Enclosed is a poem, written the other day. Her Ladyship would have it typewritten by Philip’s secretary at the Ministry of Munitions—a dozen copies—so here is one.

With love your
Lytton

Who has not, down the street, with a fond eye,

Gone vaguely voyaging, Love’s secret spy?

Searching with subtle glance the moving crowd

For some new beauty—sweet, or quaint, or proud—

Some ravishing creature, whose delicious sight

Shall fill the soul with sudden long delight?

For me, how often all an idle day

Like a soft Summer cloud has trailed away,

While my rapt steps have led me unawares

Lingering amid the thronging thoroughfares

Entranced, and my quick spirit, like a bee

At multitudinous flowers, sipped ecstasy!

For often—such has been my happiness—

Some gentle genii have conspired to bless

The hour, the place, the mood, and I have found

Myself a traveller o’er enchanted ground.

Where, at each turn, on my exploring eyes.

Shock after charming shock of rich surprise

—Visions delectable, and colours rare.

And sweet, strange looks, and smiles, and marvellous hair—

Came pressing, till I have felt as one who holds

A spell to cast o’er all things more than gold’s

Glory in a glance, and like the Sun to blaze:

For loveliness was living in my gaze.

Yet oft it has befallen far otherwise;

Each barren minute has withheld its prize;

Beauty has sulked, and joy has hid his head;

And empty-eyed the grudging day has fled.

But then, sometimes, perhaps as the calm night

Came slowly on, and in ambiguous light.

Floating in veils before her, wrapped the world,

I have caught an eye that glowed, a lip that curled,

A form, a being, sudden, precious, blest;

My quivering heart has gasped within my breast,

My startled brain re-echoed with dim cries,

And all my senses rushed into my eyes.

And I have seen incomparable things

—Heavenly and unknown imaginings,

Visible there before me in the mesh

And moving miracle of human flesh

—Mysterious beauty! Whose far depths disclose,

Like the unfolding passion of the rose.

In beauty’s heart still sweeter beauty wound.

The mysteries lost in mysteries more profound.

And I have known that all at once I’d come

Into my spirit’s long-appointed home,

The gracious harbour in whose bosom deep

My ocean-wandering desires would sleep,

And all my doubts and all my pains be past,

—All, all, I’d ever sought for found at last!

[]

July 17th, 1916.

Garsington Manor Oxford.

Dearest Virginia

I emerge from my wickedness once more, and beg to know what is happening to you. Are you well and at work? I heard a rumour the other day of your appearance at a Co-op. congress, so I suppose you’re the former; as for the latter, your well known industry no doubt continues to carry you along. But do let me hear about these matters, and all others.

I finished (some months ago) that little dialogue, but thought it not pompous enough to send you by post in a large envelope, so it lingers in the discreet oblivion of my chest of drawers. Perhaps some day I might come and read you the rest of it at Asheham. Are you going there this summer? It would be delightful to tread those downs once more. So ask me; if you can. I leave this Home of Mystery or Palais d’Alcine at the end of this week for Ray & Oliver who are now established in Roger’s house at Guildford—Perhaps I shall get a little Quiet there—God knows I need it after the incredible Hurricane of this ménage. There were 16 souls here for the week-end that’s just over: from Friday onwards the door seemed to open every two hours and new arrivals appeared in batches of five or seven. I at last lost count and consciousness, going off into a cosmic trance, from which I was only awakened by the frenzied strains of the pianola playing desperate rag-time, to which thirty feet were executing a frantic concatenation of thuds.

Among the rout was “Katherine Mansfield”—if that’s her real name—I could never quite make sure. Have you ever heard of her? Or read any of her productions? She wrote some rather—in fact distinctly—bright storyettes in a wretched little thing called the Signature, which you may have seen, under the name of Matilda Berry. She was decidedly an interesting creature, I thought—very amusing and sufficiently mysterious. She spoke with great enthusiasm about the Voyage Out, and said she wanted to make your acquaintance more than anyone else’s. So I said I thought it might be managed. Was I rash? I really believe you’ld find her entertaining. But just now she’s in the recesses of Cornwall, so it must be later on, if at all. I may add that she has an ugly impassive mask of a face—cut in wood, with brown hair and brown eyes very far apart; and a sharp and slightly vulgarly-fanciful intellect sitting behind it.

How is Leonard? Give him my love, and ask him if he remembers the name of that Inn in the Quantocks where you stayed once—or perhaps you do—and if either of you do, could it be sent me on a postcard—as I had a notion of trying to drift there in September?

The week-end is over—true enough—but … the party still goes on. Carrington and Brett are here (ever heard of them?) and now, a few minutes ago, Gertler (ever heard of him?) turned up. The ragtime has begun again. I have fled into the garden-but one might as well try to fly from the Eye of the Lord. So if you find this letter syncopated, you’ll know the reason.

ever your
Lytton

[]

25th July. [1916.]

Hogarth Home, Richmond.

We’ve been wandering about from Asheham to Wissett, and I’m so stiff with weeding and herding geese that I can hardly walk. Could you come to Asheham from the 15th to the 21st? Moore will be there then I think. Please bring the dialogues, and any other pieces lately composed, and then we will set you to read aloud after dinner. My industry has the most minute results, and I begin to despair of finishing a book on this method—I write one sentence—the clock strikes—Leonard appears with a glass of milk. However, I daresay it don’t much matter. Wissett seems to lull asleep all ambition—Don’t you think they have discovered the secret of life? I thought it wonderfully harmonious. The Inn, by the way, is The Plough Inn, Holford. The man’s name I can’t remember—but I daresay it isn’t needed.

Katherine Mansfield has dogged my steps for three years—I’m always on the point of meeting her, or of reading her stories, and I have never managed to do either. But once Sydney Waterlow produced Middleton Murry instead of her—a moon calf looking youth—her husband? Do arrange a meeting—We go to Cornwall in September, and if I see anyone answering to your account on a rock or in the sea I shall accost her.

Duncan was very bitter against your—what shall we call her?—but you know whom I mean—He said she was raddled and putrid and kept him on the stretch for 48 hours. I wonder if you’ve got your cottage.

Leonard sends his love—he is reading the proofs of the French translation of his book, in which every word is rendered literally.

Yr.
V.W.

[]

July 28th, 1916.

Savile Club 107, Piccadilly, W.

This is just to say that I’m afraid I shan’t be able to come to Asheham in August, as I have engaged myself to go [to] Wales then, with a small juvenile party. I shall be at large in September, and will try to wend my way towards Cornwall, & find you there—also K. Mansfield.

Many thanks for the Inn name. I might go there too.

No time for more. I am just up for a couple [of] nights, for Mozart & Bach operas—very nice, but damned hot. Tomorrow I go to Wittering.

Your
Lytton

No. I have not, and shall not (unless Fate is completely against me) get a cottage in the neighbourhood of the lady to whom you refer so delicately. I see now that it would not do. But I must find somewhere else, or I shall be ruined.

How does one get Leonard’s book, I wonder? My only bookseller has mysteriously vanished—and I don’t know its name.

Is it the secret of life or of … something else … I don’t quite know what? … Oblivion? Stupor? Incurable looseness?—that they’ve discovered at Wissett? I loved it, and never wanted to go away.

Give my love to Moore, if he goes to Asheham—It’s sad that I can’t come too.

[]

Feb. 21st, 1917.

6, Belsize Park Gardens, Hampstead, N.W.

That wretched woman, the Lady O. Morrell writes to me as follows—“Do you think you could write to Virginia, & ask her if she could get Sassoon’s book of Poems, and if she would review it kindly…. I think if he heard that his work had ‘Promise’ it might make him want to Live—to do things in the Future. But it is all ghastly and he can hardly bear it. Shall I shoot Lloyd George?”

It is indeed “all ghastly”, and probably you could hardly bear it. But you see that you now have Siegfried’s life, to say nothing of Lloyd George’s, on your hands. I suppose you don’t as a rule review what they call “poetry”. Perhaps if you wrote to Richmond suggesting that the bloody book should be noticed, it would suffice. Or what?—Let me know so that I may send some reply to that creature, who is now I think almost at the last gasp—infinitely old, ill, depressed, and bad tempered—she is soon to sink into a nursing-home, where she will be fed on nuts, and allowed to receive visitors (in bed).

Shall I come to tea with you on Sunday? With or without Carrington?

Your
Lytton.

[]

Aug. 15th [? 13th] 1917.

Durbin’s Guildford Surrey.

I hope you won’t have been put out by my wire, I find myself plunged in a gulf of Gordon, from which it is impossible to emerge for 2 or 3 days. Then I hope the crisis will be over—though there’ll still be some finishing paragraphs to be applied. Please expect me on Thursday. I shall hope to be permitted to crouch in some corner, of a morning, with my pen and paper, and gigantic authorities. It is all extremely exhausting, but I suppose in the end I shall drag through still breathing.

How does one get to you from Lewes? In a taxi? Are there any left? With apologies and regrets

Your
Lytton

[]

Aug 14th [1917.]

Asheham House, Rodmell, Lewes.

Naturally, we are much grieved, but if Gordon comes to birth and is read regularly after dinner, we forgive. We all retire to compose after breakfast, the sheep occasionally come into the field, but that’s about all. The trains are these: 2.13 from Guildford to Brighton; arrives Brighton 4.14: catch a train arriving Lewes at 4.46. Or go to London, and take 3.20 from Victoria. The only way out is a taxi, or fly, unless you walk.

I have been sent 20 of these leaflets by old Mrs. Hobhouse,

Yr.
V. W.

[]

Dec. 21st, 1917.

The Mill House, Tidmarsh, Pangbourne,

Could you someday send that
General here, do you think?
No particular hurry.

Here I am, in considerable agony. Nature turned crusty, the “pipes” are congealed, and it has been so cold that my nose (to say nothing of other parts) dripped in icicles. My female companion—but I must observe that it has now begun to thaw, so that no doubt now the “pipes” (what are they?) will [be burst] and we shall be deluged; but no matter.—My female companion keeps herself warm by unpacking, painting, pruning the creepers, knocking in nails, etc. Tomorrow [night (?) James and] Alix arrive—what they [? will] do, I can’t imagine. […] late. I try to console myself with Queen Victoria’s letters—but I should prefer yours. Please write. I remain here for at least another week; after that, I gather I’m doomed to Garsington for the New Year; after that, here again, I fancy. I still have a notion that I may be able to work in this seclusion, when all the nails have been finally knocked in. Nous verrons.

[…] A little advice also on a plot for a comedy would be useful. The worst of it is, it must be fit for publication. Otherwise “Le Bougre Marié” might be a good title. But how would it end? …

Will you tell Leonard that I was very sorry not to be able to go and see Philip? I had very few mornings, and they were all filled. I was very glad he liked Gordon. Have you read it yet? My fear is that it may be, in places, emphatic. [Do] you think so? The adjectives seemed to get a little thick at times, and the style altogether,—if you observed anything of the sort, alt⁠[erations mig]⁠ht be made. Or in other directions. You see, [there are plenty of things] to write to me about, so you really must. It [is ? …] having so little conversation with you; and this method’s better than nothing, I think.

Who is staying with [you]? Are you too very dank and cold? Or will you pretend that the sun has been shining over your downs? I refuse to believe it. Nessa and Duncan I suppose you’ll be seeing, with Maynard thrown in, wondrously agreeable. Ah, dearie, dearie me, I am nodding over the fire, and she’s sowing an edge to the carpet, with a diligence … Ah, la vie! it grows more remarkable every minute.

Your
Lytton

[The original is much damaged by damp and in places illegible.]

[]

[December 28, 1917.] Friday.

Asheham Lewes.

It was a great treat to get your letter, which, you know, is the first of a series, gradually becoming more and more indiscreet, until every dot has given place to fact. Besides, how can you be indiscreet with me? Don’t I live in the middle of padded walls, through which not a sound escapes but what is to everyone’s credit? Remember my blazing testimony—the Mansfield affair.

I suppose, not altogether hope, that some of our blessings have reached the Mill on the Pang by now; sun, light, running taps, frisking cowherds etc; but I can’t believe that your spiritual level is quite up to ours. […]

Gordon, as I knew he would, cast a gloom upon my festival. I thought him masterly—indeed, it’s amazing how from all these complications you contrive to reel off such a straight and dashing story, and how you weave in every scrap—my God, what scraps!—of interest to be had, like (you must pardon one metaphor) a snake insinuating himself through innumerable golden rings—(Do snakes?—I hope so) I don’t see how the skill could be carried further. My only criticism, which I ought to hesitate to give until a second reading, is that I’m not sure whether the character of Gordon altogether “convinces”. I felt a little difficulty in bridging the gulfs, but I rather think this is inevitable from the method, which flashes light and dark this side and that—and then the crowd of facts to be found room for—and so perhaps one can’t get that shifting and muddling which produces atmosphere. I daresay I’m really putting in a claim for the novel form; and it doesn’t read very lucidly. The writing I thought more than usually unadorned, and surely the most flawless example of the master’s style in its maturity. I will read it once more—unless you want it back at once?—with a pencil.

We go back on Thursday. Shall you be passing through, and will you come to tea or something? I saw Molly the other day, and she, on the advice of Arnold Bennett, has sent her novel to Chatto and Windus, who are, he says, the most intelligent publishers in London. Have they answered?

It’s now Sunday; this letter has hung about, and Julian has splashed cocoa over it, and if I don’t write it again it’s because my fingers refuse their office. Cold has set in; Ka is here; Bunny imminent; Julian and Quentin are spending the week end. I meant to tell you about the 17 Club; (but now it’s too stale), and how I surprised the secret of [T.’s] fascination; it’s virility; (perhaps to lose one’s parts sends the semen to the surface—it seemed to splash and sparkle like phosphorescent cod’s roe from every glance)—and [R.] all a tremble at one corner, and Miss [S.] immensely receptive at the other—I thought him a random untrustworthy mongrel, utterly incontinent.

This must go, I suppose to Garsington. My love to Ottoline. By God’s prevision among my presents was a box of sealing wax, to unstick which warmth must be applied, and warmth is rare. Look for the impression of a perfect rose.

But then, as you justly say, what is there that needs sticking or unsticking? …………………………… (that’s cribbed from you).

Please write,
Yr, V. W.

[]

15th March [1918.]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey.

Couldn’t it be arranged that you should come to Asheham on Thursday 28th, stay over Monday and go on to Charleston? We have felt bound to ask [M.] who has been rejected by Vanessa, but she is half engaged to Tidmarsh apparently, and if Carrington exerted a little pressure I think she would yield.

I’ve been having faint doubts, by the way, about reviewing your book. In the first place, if I review yours, then why not Clive’s, Desmond’s, Molly’s and Fredegond’s, which would be more than I could stand. In the second, I was rather snubbed by Bruce Richmond the other day, who thought, wrongly, that I was trying to get a friend’s book reviewed, and told me it wasn’t considered the thing to do—so I don’t much like asking him. But these reasons aren’t serious if you think it would be a real advantage. My feeling is that no review counts either way as far as making money is concerned. But I suppose you’re certain of a long and flattering review anyhow. Mine would be highly flattering, of course. It’s quite possible, though, that he’ll send it me of his own accord.

I hope you got off safely today. We had an appalling Sunday—incessant chatter, or rather incessant gloom, and such spots on [Y.’s] face, such morose stupidity on Gerald Duckworth’s—the only person with a spark of spunk was poor Nick, who pretended, I suppose. Katherine Mansfield has been dangerously ill, and is still pretty bad, so that Murry was sunk in the depths, what with that and overwork, poor wretch.

Yr.
V. W.

With or without [M.] we hope you’ll come.

[]

March 19th, 1918.

6 B. P G.

I should like very much to come to Asheham on Thursday 28th. Will you expect me for then, unless I write again? I have not yet consulted Carrington, but I hope to be able to induce her to remain at Tidmarsh with [M.], while I gallivant. Also, I don’t know definitely when Vanessa can have me, as she was very vague and perhaps drunk when I talked to her about it. But I’ll write and find out. Perhaps, if necessary, you would be able to keep me on at Asheham for a few days after the Easter week-end?

It seems to me you had much better not take any steps about the Victorians. It would never do to get into trouble with Richmond, and so far as I’m concerned, though I should be delighted if you did review it, because you would be more on the spot than anyone else, I quite agree with you that reviews one way or the other probably make no difference. If Richmond sends it you of his own accord, so much the better.

My “medical board” yesterday pronounced me “permanently & totally unfit for any form of Military Service”—which is a great relief. The whole thing was infinitely more civilised than I’ve ever known it before. The doctors, and even the clerks, were positively polite.

Your
Lytton.

[]

Sunday. [March 24, 1918.]

Asheham.

We look forward with great pleasure to seeing you on Thursday: any time. As far as I know the trains are unchanged, we came by a very good one, 5.20 from Victoria, which connects almost exactly with another to Glynde, so that you get here for dinner. If you want to drive, you can order a fly from

Slaughter

Friar’s Walk

Lewes

or a taxi from

Castle Garage,

High St.

Lewes.

Perhaps you wouldn’t mind handing this on to Barbara who seems to be staying with you. Our only difficulty is that we are strictly rationed—thus, I think if you want meat, sugar or butter you must bring your cards. According to Leonard, it is easy to make these available at Lewes. The question of food is the only drawback to your staying on, which we should like you to do. With Noel and James in the house you might find yourself starved—But by the time you come we may have made better arrangements.

It’s all very well to come to the country in order to write, but the animals are carrying on so frantically and indecently that I can’t hear myself speak. Lambs, thrushes, ewes, rooks—their conduct too is distracting. I find that scarcely anything but impassioned meditation stands up against it, and the passion tends to run much in a groove. D’you find that too? It’s true. Mill on Liberty mayn’t be the proper channel. But what divine days life holds, to be sure. Duncan has just been in, in corduroy breeches & gaiters, mumbling in his inspired way, like the first born of the human race, not yet entirely conscious.

Do bring some manuscript to read.

Yrs.
V. W.

[]

23rd April [1918.]

Hogarth.

I wrote to ask Richmond to let me do your book. He answers that though willing and anxious that I should, he has to make it a rule that reviewers don’t review their friends—not that he’s afraid I should be partial, but that people would guess, and say I was partial, which he admits to be base on his part, but he’s afraid he must stick to it. I’m very sorry. Of course you will get enough praise to sell your book as much as reviews do sell books. I rubbed it well in to Richmond that it was a work of surpassing merit. But I had a great many things I wanted to say, and felt already an affection for my masterpiece, as well as yours. Leonard suggests that I should write a short review for War and Peace. But I shouldn’t be able to take a purely literary line there, of course, and the circulation isn’t such that it will be worth the sale of even half a copy. Do you think there’s any use doing it? Anyhow you needn’t bother about getting an advance copy. But I’m very anxious to see it.

We are sitting in the same fog that began 21 days ago. Sometimes we dimly discern snow falling—we have electric light for meals, but they talk of cutting that off. I was at Guildford the other day and there it was worse, so don’t talk to me about the country.

We’ve been asked to print Mr. Joyce’s new novel, every printer in London and most in the provinces having refused. First there’s a dog that p’s—then there’s a man that forths, and one can be monotonous even on that subject—moreover, I don’t believe that his method, which is highly developed, means much more than cutting out the explanations and putting in the thoughts between dashes. So I don’t think we shall do it.

By the way, you’ve got my copy of the other one.

Yr.
V. W.

[]

24 May, 1918.

Asheham House.

I think your suggestion of “Patriotism and History” on Marriott’s book sounds very good. I will write for the book and have it sent to you.

I haven’t altered your article on Peace Traps, as Balfour’s speech was really negligible and the point seemed rather niggling.

We’ve been here a week in almost perfect weather and what is almost more perfect solitude. Except for Roger who came last night and left this morning. Why is it that we are all valetudinarians? Rogers lies on his back before and after meals and even so is afflicted with perpetual gripes, a swollen jaw, a diseased tooth, an incipient cold in the head, a decaying brain, and melancholia amatoria. Saxon’s head has sunk permanently upon his chest from rheumatoid arthritis. And even you suffer from green vomit. I am unfit for any kind of military service and Virginia’s record is not of the cleanest. I don’t understand this early valetudinarianism which seems to descend upon us.

V. wants me to thank you for your book. It seemed to me most imposing when one could read them all between the same black cover. I started on Arnold the evening it came, and could not stop reading it while V.’s co-operative women sang hymns in the dining room.

L⁠[eonard]

The sun has completely dried the ink on my pen, or I would have written. And then L., by way of being a practical man went and packed for me, and left out your book, which I meant to read here. So I can’t write that delightful letter which I’d meant to. Besides to tell the truth, rumours of your success have poisoned my peace even here. Do write and tell me how complete it’s been—how many copies you’ve sold, how many guineas, how many Countesses, how many adorations and whether at heart you’re still the same. […]

[V. W.]

[]

Oct 12th [1918.]

Hogarth House Paradise Road Richmond

Dearest Lytton,

I’m extremely sorry to hear distressing accounts of your diseases. Goldie has been having the shingles too, and goes to a marvellous doctor, a quack, I suppose, who is curing him quickly and completely. He lays his fingers upon the tips of the nerves, and you can see the poison withdrawing as you watch. Would it be worth while to find out something more strictly accurate?

However, you must consider that boils, blisters, rashes, green and blue vomits are all appointed by God himself to those whose books go into 4 editions within 6 months. Shingles, I can assure you, is only a first instalment; don’t complain if the mange visits you, and the scurvy, and your feet swell and the dropsy distends and the scab itches—I mean you won’t get any sympathy from me. Did I tell you that Violet Dickinson encountered Mrs. H. Ward who was raging publicly against the defamation of her grandfather, and thereby giving the liveliest joy to Lady Horner, who feels that you have worked off several old scores beyond her reach, and therefore blesses you every night as a benefactor? I’m now going to discover the Cromer attitude to Gordon in private.

Here we are back in Richmond again, and even plunged into a mild form of society, mild to you that is—to me the climax of dissipation. What with the approach of peace and the Russian dancers, the gallant Sitwells, and the poetical Edith, Ottoline utterly abandoned and nefarious, Duncan covered with paint from head to foot, Nessa abounding in babies, Saxon wrung with rheumatics, Robbie Ross found dead in his shirtsleeves, Roger going to lay him out, [M.’s] widow bursting in dead drunk—and so forth—all the things that invariably happen in London in October—it’s a pleasant change. We went to hear Lord Grey’s speech to begin with, and I had the pleasure of sitting exactly behind Mrs. Asquith and Elizabeth. I felt, at that distance, fairly secure against their fascination, and when McKenna and Lord Harcourt came in and sat down beside them I felt it would be a very great condescension on my part to drink tea out of the same cup—which I suspect to be one of their domestic habits. However I was impressed and exalted by Lord Grey. What an Englishman! What a gentleman! As for accusing him of dishonesty, one might as well accuse a pair of brown boots—of which indeed he constantly reminded me. His speech was nothing to get excited over, but on the other hand it was obviously impossible for him to manage any kind of peroration, which I thought much to his credit. Then there was the Sitwells’ party, at which it was proposed to read aloud a sentence of banishment upon Ottoline (whose conduct seems to have surpassed itself—and yet even in vice what a magnificence she has!)—but this of course meant no more than that we withdrew to somebody’s bedroom in great numbers and left Ottoline, got up to look precisely like the Spanish Armada in full sail, in possession of the drawing room. Perhaps more happened after I left. But how fearfully old one’s getting! There I left her, with equanimity, to have her feathers pulled out by the vicious old Roger, who has a febrile senility coming on, as I told him in the cab, quite unlike our elderly benignity—It’s an attempt at youth perhaps—Do you feel this tolerance creeping into your veins too? Literature remains of course—however there’s no room to begin upon that. I read the Greeks, but I am extremely doubtful whether I understand anything they say; also I have read the whole of Milton, without throwing any light upon my own soul, but that I rather like. Don’t you think it very queer though that he entirely neglects the human heart? Is that the result of writing one’s masterpiece at the age of 50? What about your masterpiece? And when are you coming to London? Please tell Carrington that we are waiting for her wood-cuts. Leonard sends his love.

Yr.
V. W.

[]

Jan. 29th, 1919.

Tidmarsh.

I’m afraid you will think me quite undependable. I find London impossible—James has the flu in the house, and Calvé is ill, and cannot meet me at Heinemann’s—and so here I am. Will you overlook it? Later on, later on, when the snow has vanished … It is dreadfully dull down here, but healthy and for the moment there are fires. I foresee that I shall soon be forced to begin writing again through sheer désoeuvrement. Leonard, I fear, will hardly forgive me. But I send him my love.

Your
Lytton

[]

Thursday. [January 30, 1919.]

Hogarth.

Desolated, but acquiescent. Will you ask Carrington whether she is going to produce her wood cuts—if so, when; and will you see that she does it.

V.W.

[]

Monday. [May 26, 1919.]

Hogarth.

I forgot to ask you about the meeting with the Webbs. Saturday, 7th June, appears to be the day, and that is the Saturday before Whit Sunday. As far as I know it does for the Webbs. Will you let me know about you, and then I will write to them.

We go to Asheham tomorrow. Ottoline seems to have caught Picasso after all. But we shall be away from these gaieties—and Murry wants me to review Belshazzar—his poem—in the Athenaeum. For God’s sake, say you’ll do it instead. I shall try to wriggle out on the ground of my connection, and pecuniary interest. Addison improves a little—if one likes that sort of thing. I mean he’s very much better than Robert Lynd or [I. J.]—O what a party! I may tell you that your illegitimate sister-in-law would have been a beacon of light, an oasis of green, in that assembly. “Yes, I give these parties because they’re cheap” said Mrs [K.], and continued in that style on a sofa in a draught and without respite for ¾ of an hour: the last quarter was occupied by old decayed Cobden Sanderson, wearing a red ribbon round his neck, and a workman’s blue shirt—but not very inspiring all the same. Moreover, [K.] himself was more repulsive than words can express, and malignant into the bargain. As for the conduct and appearance of the rest, it was deplorable to conceive oneself of the same shape, more or less—not altogether thank God! Please assure me that we are rather different—some of us at least.

How did [D. E.] impress you? I have sheets from Ottoline this morning calling her “statuesque” and lamenting her lack of passion; so that I suppose she failed to respond to pressure—But what’s the use of asking questions, eh?—Since the telephone rings, and Lady Cunard, or Princess Arthur of Connaught requests the pleasure—but no! it’s Mrs. Saxton Noble to meet Mr. Walter Lamb this time, so you can spare a moment. Clive assures me that he lunches out every day

“Where?”

“Ah, with beautiful creatures!” Still, if you can’t put a name to them—

Yr.
V.W.

[]

May 27th, 1919.

6 South Hill Park, Hampstead Heath, N. W,

June 7th will suit me very well for Webbism—lunch, of course. I again forgot to get Kew Gardens. Could you send me a copy of it and Eliot’s poems? Or if you haven’t got any with you, reserve them?

Garsington was terribly trying. I was often on the point of screaming from sheer despair, and the beauty of the surroundings only intensified the agony. Ott I really think is in the last stages—infinitely antique, racked in every joint, hobbling through the buttercups in cheap shoes with nails that run into her feet, every stile a crisis, and of an imbecility. She is rongée, too, by malevolence; every tea party in London to which she hasn’t been invited is wormwood, wormwood. The great Picasso question plunges her into inconceivable agitations—in vain I tell her he is only a silent Spaniard—she wires to Osbert daily, and is convinced that Roger has intrigued to prevent them meeting. However, at the last moment she typically recovered, appearing in a yellow straw top hat, in which she drove me and [D. E.] to Oxford in the finest manner. [D. E.] makes the heart sink within one—a sharp twist to the neck would be the thing for her. Bertie worked his circular saw as usual. I’ve never been able to feel at ease with him, and I can only suppose that he dislikes me—pourquoi?

It’s a mercy to be back here again, even though the Duchesses seem to have dropped me. I was rung up just now, though, and by—who do you think?—Vanessa, who’s in Gordon Square apparently. I dine there tonight. Clive’s luncheons are certainly mysterious, and I fancy apocryphal—I think when you return we’d better put on white masks and track him out.

Review Murry! Ho, Ho!

Your Lytton

[]

Sunday [September] 14th [1919.]

Monk’s House Rodmell Lewes.

Dearest Lytton,

I wish we had been able to see you; but we were in our agony when you were at Charleston. Things aren’t much better yet, owing to domestic horrors, it now looks as if the kitchen would have to be re-built. What can one do with a sweating floor? However, there are charms in this place, though very humble and unromantic compared with Asheham. I like the morning sun in one’s window, though, and the youth of the village nightly play cricket outside the garden wall, which would recommend itself to you.

What are you doing? Polishing Old Victoria? Legends of your high flyings pass across our horizon now and then. I’m not really anxious. Maynard seems much the same as ever only more and more genial, and, superficially, kind! I suppose the danger lies in becoming too kind. I think you’re a little inclined that way already—take the case of Ottoline. It seems to me a dark one. Still, kindness don’t flourish in our corner of Sussex. I spent the day at Charleston yesterday, & came away feeling purged, bruised, scraped & raw, but morally regenerated. I’ve no news whatever to give you. About lo days ago I had a letter from Nick Bagenal. They seem all right. I rather hope I may get one from Saxon. The effect of a move upon the intellects and morals is utterly destructive. Moreover Leonard has become what I daresay is called garden proud. We can’t resist going out to look at pears, and then the potatoes have to be weighed. I suppose you couldn’t guess what they weigh. We are very charitable too, and when they want sprays for funerals they come and ask us. Altogether, I find it very hard to settle to my book, which is, at this moment, the complete works of George Eliot. But you have never read them. I wish you had, because then perhaps you would explain the whole puzzle. At anyrate you might write me a letter, which is the sole object of this one. I read Wilfrid Blunt (diaries) at breakfast; I don’t like aristocratic writing, do you? I don’t like the Souls; I don’t like George Wyndham; Heaven knows what one does like, though, on the whole, what I like is first going a walk; then having tea; then sitting and imagining all the pleasant things that might happen to one. I should like to be asked to Tidmarsh for a week end in October. But you will be in Spain, perhaps.

Leonard sends his love—in all sincerity.

Yr.
V.W.

[]

Sept 28th, 1919.

The Mill House, Tidmarsh, Pangbourne.

It was charming of you to write to me. Please do so again, in spite of my backwardness in answering. Also inability. I, who once filled reams a day, now sit gnawing my pen after the first sentence. Old age? Middle age? Or what? In any case—something deplorable.

It makes me weep to think that I’ve seen the last of Asheham, and even the chaste beauties of your Monks’ residence will never really console me. How can you bear it? And what has happened to the cottages in Cornwall? I rather fancy that they’re mythical.

I have been having a grim time of it, presiding (or rather assisting) in the move which is shortly to take place of my family from Belsize Park to Gordon Square—for that is where pure Chance has decided that they’re to dwell in the future. No. 51. Yes. A few doors along. Very soon I foresee that the whole square will become a sort of College. And the rencontres in the garden I shudder to think of. The business of packing, deciding what is to be sold, what sent to Tidmarsh, what given to the deserving poor, etc. has been fearful, and is still proceeding, the brunt of it of course falling upon the unfortunate Pippa. I am fit for very little more than wringing my hands. In the intervals I go to the British Museum, and try to dig up scandals about Queen Victoria. Altogether a distracting life, and the comble was reached in the small hours of Friday morning, when the policeman’s wife who acts as caretaker gave birth to a baby just outside my bedroom door. After that I retreated down here, and now the railway strike …. what, oh what! is going to happen? I am alone, with a strange servant lent by the Anreps, no newspapers reach me, I know nothing, and I daresay the next thing I shall hear will be the proclamation of the Soviet Government. Have you decided what steps to take in that eventuality? Leonard, at any rate, will hardly escape the guillotine.

Your appearances in the Athenaeum alone keep me in good temper with existence. You should have seen Mrs. Berenson heaving with laughter over the Royal Academy article, in the train, en route for … well, never mind. When is your novel coming out?

I had lunch with Nessa and Duncan the other day in the Regent Square domicile. […]

Adieu
Your Lytton

I’m very glad you dislike Wilfrid Blunt, and I hope you’ll write about him.

[]

Oct 28th [1919.]

Hogarth Richmond.

Ah, how delightful to be praised by you! I tell myself that of course you’re always too generous about me, and one ought to discount it, but I can’t bring myself to. I enjoy every word. I don’t suppose there’s anything in the way of praise that means more to me than yours. There are myriads of things I want to ask you; about the male characters for instance. Do they convince? Then was Rodney’s change of heart sufficiently prepared for to be credible? It came into my head on the spur of the moment that he was in love with Cassandra, and afterwards it seemed a little violent. I take your point about the tupping and had meant to introduce a little in that line, but somehow it seemed out of the picture—still, I regret it. Never mind; I’ve an idea for a story where all the characters do nothing else—but they’re all quadrupeds! However, as I’m afflicted with rheumatism, this had better wait, I only wanted to say how happy your letter had made me,—dialogue was what I was after in this book—so I’m very glad you hit on that; I mean it was one of the things—there are so many million others!—but I can’t help thinking it’s the problem, if one is to write novels at all, which is a moot point.

Tell Carrington I went into the question of the roses with some care, and will write to her on the subject. It’s not as simple as it sounds. Was it stated in the book that Elizabeth Datchet took a first prize for them the year before? She did however and so—but I can’t go into all this at length.

We should like immensely to come on the 8th—and why ask anyone? Don’t for our sakes. We shall be quite content with the two natives.

Your
Virginia

There’s an amusing book just come out—Miss Eden’s letters, Edited by Violet Dickinson.

[]

Wednesday [November 26, 1919.]

Hogarth.

An American publisher wants to bring out Night and Day and the Voyage Out—indeed, I can’t resist telling you that I’ve had offers from two—asked to write for an American paper (don’t ask which), asked to write for the London Mercury, invited to meet Miss Elizabeth Asquith, Lady Russell; and Miss Constance Miles—Still I’ve not time to go into this with any fulness.

But would you be so angelic as to tell me if any special misprints obscurities or vulgarities in either occur to you. I have to send the books off on Monday and they say the more alterations the better—because of copyright. I’ve just glanced between the boards and see that the whole thing must be re-written from the beginning—and only 2 days to do it in!

I never wrote a Collins to say how much I enjoyed Tidmarsh, but I did.

Yr.
V.W.

If you can send any corrections, could you let me have them by Saturday?

[]

Nov. 27th, 1919.

The Mill House, Tidmarsh, Pangbourne.

Well, well, well! I hope soon to meet you at the dear Duchess’s, the dear Princess’s, and dear Mrs. Colefax’s. Or I should say to hear your accounts of them, as I have retired, probably permanently, into this acidulation of ice. As for America, I hope you’ll make a decent bargain, but probably it’s difficult. But don’t, I adjure you, write for the London Mercury. Anything rather than that.

Short of rewriting Night & Day from start to finish, no alterations are required. Except, perhaps, on p. 34 (line 5) where a grammatical looseness occurs (pointed out by Saxon, I need hardly say). The age of seventeen or eighteen appears to belong to Mrs. Hilbery. I did notice I think two mere misprints, but failed to mark them, so they’ve vanished, but I daresay you’ve seen them yourself.

Have you read Ethel Smyth’s reminiscences? They’re extremely entertaining, not to say interesting. Curiously old-fashioned, too. The Education of Henry Adams I have only just got hold of—do you know it? Really I think a most remarkable work. I am now setting forth on Sam. Butler I see it will last me some time.

I have lost Philip’saddress. If Leonard would send it me on a postcard I could then send on Mr. Stephen Graham, poor man.

It is far far too cold-I can’t articulate-My stomach is congealed.

Your
Lytton

[]

[November 30, 1919.]

Sunday. Hogarth

Many thanks for the correction; I have put it in; undoubtedly there are hundreds more, but it can’t be helped.

Philip’s address is

Greenmoor Hill Farm

Woodcot

Oxon.

Leonard was there yesterday, and found him fearfully dark and dismal, and apparently breaking down in health into the bargain. No cook, no food, and half his house pulled down.

O no, I shall never reach your heights. Elizabeth Asquith will be at once the beginning and the end; but I’ll write and tell you what passes between us. Gerald Duckworth has entire control of my arrangements so I expect nothing. Did you see Massingham’s onslaught in the Nation? I wonder why. But I feel it’s to my credit, whereas when the Bishop of Exeter’s wife says she feels certain I’m a Christian, I’m a good deal depressed. [E.] has been put in his place.

I’m in the 2nd. vol. of Ethel Smyth. I think she shows up triumphantly, through sheer force of honesty. It’s a pity she can’t write; for I don’t suppose one could read it again. But it fascinates me all the same. I saw her at a concert two days ago—striding up the gangway in coat and skirt and spats and talking at the top of her voice. Near at hand one sees that she’s all wrinkled and fallen in, and eyes running blue on to the cheeks; but she keeps up the figure of the nineties to perfection. Of course the book is the soul of the nineties. Did you ever know Sue Lushington? Much the same type. Then Ethel’s passion for the W.C. (it occurs in every chapter) is of the highest merit.

We’ve got to buy 2 more houses; both servants are leaving; and the Int Review is coming to an end.

Yr. V.W.

[]

Letters February 1920–December 1931

21st Feb. Saturday [1920.]

Monk’s House Rodmell Lewes.

As you see, we are already here. The difficulty about coming next Saturday, which is I admit the most attractive prospect that life has to offer, is that we have to attend two auctions, buy 2 army huts, get them carted over here, put into position and transformed into a kitchen if possible by Saturday—As the huts are connected with Colonel Young who is connected with Mrs. Grant, who is connected with Duncan whose new studio depends on them, you will see how complicated it is, and how unlikely to end well. Also Leonard is entirely re-making the garden.

But couldn’t we induce Tidmarsh to come to Rodmell? Please convey a warm invitation on our part to Mr. [Ralph] Partridge; press Carrington’s hand-stroke your own beard. Beds abound; our cook turns out excellent—and they say there’s a peculiar virtue in spending the 40th birthday between strange sheets: that is if you want to beget sons, and keep your hair. An uncle of mine—but I’ll tell you his story if you’ll come. If you won’t surely we might meet somehow? Leonard suggests that you should stay on and deal with Vic. here: he very much wishes to see Mr. Partridge.

Yr.
V. W.

[]

Ap. 3rd. 1920.

[Picture Postcard]

Well, how are you? We arrived here yesterday-very chirpy. But so far I have not bought a herd of black pigs.

Lytton

[]

Jan. 24th 1921.

The Mill House, Tidmarsh, Pangbourne.

A slightly pointless book, I’m afraid, on a distinctly-depressing subject. However, such as it is, may I dedicate it to you? I feel that the mystic initials V. W. would cast a halo—and besides that as you’re more unlike Old Vic than anyone else in the world, it’s only proper that she should be inscribed to you.

I go to 51 Gordon Square tomorrow. Are you coming to Tidmarsh next Saturday? I hope so.

With love
from Lytton

[]

Jan 25th [1921.]

Hogarth.

Ah—but this is what I may have dreamed of, but never hoped for. What could I like better? Only my inordinate vanity whispers might it not be Virginia Woolf in full? Some Victoria Worms or Vincent Woodlouse is certain to say it’s them, and I want all the glory to be mine for ever. But it’s better than a glory and comes on my birthday too.

We look forward to Saturday, and shall we have Vic?

Dearest Lytton, Your V. W.

[]

Wednesday March ? [1921.]

Penion Zennor St. Ives.

The enclosed card gives you no idea of the place, which is indescribable—far better than the Lizard or the Land’s End, or St Ives, or indeed anywhere. (I have just had to move my chair out of the blazing sun) One walks out of the window on to the cliff. There are 2 seals bathing in the bay. Two adders curling round my ankles. Gorse, cowries, Cliffs, Choughs, Ravens, Cream, solitude, sublimity and all the rest of it. It’s true that Ka is perched on the hill a mile and a half away, with the oddest collection of good little grey men who spend their time scrambling up chimneys and funnels and are hardly articulate in consequence. But there is [W. X.] for you—not for me. I’ve not seen him. We take our books out and lie in the sun; occasionally I say, why aren’t you here?—but even so, a general benignity pervades us. I like Will better, and have looked through portfolios of grey-blue rock scapes—not of Cornwall; of Italy as it was before the war. I met a man yesterday by appointment to discuss literature—“which is my whole life, Mrs. Woolf.” But I can give you no idea—He lives with a half perished dumb wife on a headland in a cottage with Everyman’s Library entire. “I read no moderns. Life is not long enough for anything save the best. Hardy has taught me to look into my heart. I have enjoyed this conversation, Mrs. Woolf. It has confirmed me in my own opinions.” This stunted animal was a clerk in the post office, became infected with books, and is now like the oldest kernel of a monkey’s nut in the Gray’s Inn Road. However—why is it that human beings are so terribly pathetic? God knows. Or am I becoming rotten with middle age? I did refrain from asking him to correspond; but left with tears in my eyes—almost. I can’t help thinking that we are hopelessly muddled. Then there was the theosophist, Mr. [Watt] in the cottage which I once hired; and he lives on nuts from Self ridges, and a few vegetables, and has visions, and wears boots with soles like slabs of beef and an orange tie; and then his wife crept out of her hole, all blue, with orange hair, and cryptic ornaments, serpents, you know, swallowing their tails in token of eternity, round her neck. The rain, they said, often comes through the walls on a wet day, so I’m glad I didn’t settle there. But can you explain the human race at all—I mean these queer fragments of it which are so terribly like ourselves, and so like Chimpanzees at the same time, and so lofty and high minded, with their little shelves of classics and clean china and nice check curtains and purity that I can’t see why its all wrong. We tried to imagine you there, snipping their heads off with something very witty.

Well, I shall read Queen Victoria and try to see how its done. I see the New Republic is publishing it, and it’s an incredible gem, and a masterpiece of prose. I quite believe it, though my jealousy is twinged—and I thought I had no vices left in me after this week. I thought I was going to read the whole of Shakespeare and I haven’t; but I come back longing to get my teeth into your book—Is it quite magnificent? And why weren’t you here? And now I must take a last look at the country: which will dissolve me in tears.

Give my love to your mother.

Yr.
V.W.

[]

Sunday April 17th [1921.]

Hogarth

Well, I feel I must write to you either in your own style or in Victoria’s. There’s no escaping you after reading the book. Indeed, it is quite magnificent, better as a whole I should say, than the other. I’ve seldom enjoyed anything more. I suppose the chief marvel is the way you spin the story perfectly straightforwardly, never a line slack, and yet contrive those wonderful little portraits, one after another, each exactly in its place, illuminating, without interruption or fuss or for a moment stopping, it seems, to go on talking simply. The effect is not merely satiric by any means. You seem to have reduced it to the last possible ounce, and yet to have kept all the meat and bone and guts. The great moments seem to me really moving. And the Queen herself comes out somehow surprising, solid and angular, and touching, though not exactly sympathetic. Amazing woman! My only criticism (and I’m not sure of its truth) is that occasionally I think one is a little conscious of being entertained. It’s a little too luxurious reading—I mean, one is willing perhaps to take more pains than you allow. I couldn’t bear to sacrifice any of the amusements (the boy Jones is superb, and there are a million others) but now and again perhaps, where the space is so limited, the jokes are a little on the surface—But I don’t know. I must read it through. The first time one races. Literally I snatched it up, put it down, snatched it up, till it was all done. One of the things I thought particularly magnificent and original was the description of the possessions. It was so massive, and summed it all up, and opened up, I thought, infinite vistas of new forms. But we must talk about it when you come.

Yr.
V.W.

Oh, and I must say how I enjoyed your Batesian version of the Queen on the Great Exhibition. “Sir George Grey in tears, and everybody astonished and delighted.”

[]

Aug. 23rd, 1921.

c/o Mrs. Wilson, Watendlath Farm Keswick Cumberland,

Have you read “Biographical Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters”? I think it might amuse you—by Beckford, and in the pseudo-romantic style. But it only lasts for half-an-hour—which is annoying, as, in the scarcity of books, I feel myself driven ever nearer and nearer to the abyss of Swann—I shudder and draw back—interpose Maynard on Probability, “The Group Mind” by Mary Creighton’s […] husband. Lord Esher on Lord Kitchener, and the insipid memoirs of De Thou. All is in vain, and Swann continues to loom. There is only now the first half of Colonel Repington between me and it, for I cannot read Signor Croce on Corneille and Ariosto, which seems to be the only alternative, except a study of Strindberg in American, proving that he was probably homosexual and certainly in love with his mother—the conclusion is too obvious, one passes on, though one sentence is attractive—“In the Belvidere he stood for an hour before the Venus of Guido Reni, resembling his adored wife in every respect, and all of a sudden he felt an irresistible longing for her person, packed his grip and returned suddenly.” This is what the language of Milton has come to.

I am sitting, as you may guess, rather comatose, in a small cottage apartment, green mountains out of window, the stuffed head of a very old female sheep over the window, etc. etc. Alix, James, Mr. & Mrs. P. and l’ami Brenan wander in and out with fish-hooks and hard-boiled eggs done up in newspaper. Some of them declare that they are going out to squat among the heather and the damp ferns, in order to have lunch and tea. Needless to say, James and I remain at home—James on an enormous air-cushion balanced upon a horsehair sofa, reading the psychopathology of day-dreams, by Dr. Varendonck … One wonders whether one has been quite wise in coming North. The rain and cold have been fairly continuous, though for three or four days it was extremely hot, and we walked over the stoney hills until our feet were covered with blisters—they still are—at least mine are, and I can only wear silk socks and slippers, in which I totter occasionally into the air. But the air is unfortunately relaxing, as they say,—very different from yours, which I wish I was breathing—are you enjoying it and growing robust? If you can’t write, perhaps Leonard will, with all the news. I wonder whether Monk’s House is doomed—or what. Have you been having visitors? And how are the inhabitants of Charleston? In about a fortnight I shall be floating towards your smooth downs and redbrick houses—or so I hope—and what a relief it will be! Oh, to see an outline, instead of ^^”^”””^ “^^ ^^ ^^^ on the horizon! But I must turn away from such visions, and face the inevitable Swann.

Your,
Lytton

[]

Aug 29, 1921.

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes.

What a devil you are not to write oftener—considering your command of the language.

When are you coming? That is the purpose of this letter. We want to avoid an encounter between you and [K. L.]. Yes: it is quite true; he has been asked.

I’ve seen nobody; I have done nothing. All sorts of plagues descended upon me, very wearisome, but, thank God, suddenly disappeared. I’m now recovered, gained 6 lbs; and we’re off to look at a farmhouse. Ted Hunter is going to build a cottage overlooking the orchard; I believe him to be a partner of Haynes. And one hears Mrs. [F.], over the wall, asking [F.] whether he’d like his cocktail mixed. The worst of it is that the country is lovelier and lovelier. We have put brick edges to the flower beds. We have a garden room. Tell Ralph that every flower that grows blows here. We have pears for breakfast. I have taken out a subscription to Lewes free library, which exactly suits my case. But even there Lytton Strachey predominates. I want to turn an honest penny; and behold, when I come to write about old Mrs. Gilbert, it runs of its own accord into two semi-colons, dash, note of exclamation, full stop. Do you recognise your style?

I’ve not seen Charleston; but L. has. Mary, Sprott, Duncan, Clive, Maynard (very argumentative), Nessa, refusing like all Stephen women to lie down and drink milk, or go to bed before 2 a.m.; Clive writing an article upon the obscure, which can’t be done without consulting Virginia. Virginia rather testy; says she’s not obscure; Duncan offers to come over—bicycle broken; Mr. Botten’s horse drops dead in the field of strangled guts—but this probably belongs to Rodmell news, and is indeed all I can think of—The Literary Supt. by the way, says that Prewett is a poet; perhaps a great one.

So do come, and let us know, & we’ll keep off the [L.s] and the [F.s].

Yr.
V. W.

I am reading Evan Morgan’s novel: “‘Je suis vaincue,’ and she sobbed on his breast, clinging to him. Both were exhausted, the emotions of the soul had overpowered them, they fell half fainting against the cool grey stone, and there … they leant in the twilight against the protecting buttress of the House of God, the God of Love and of Life.”

[]

[February 1, 1922.]

Hogarth. Wednesday.

The one thing needed, so the doctor says, is a letter from the great master of biography. That would set me on my feet again. So please put down whoever it is—can’t be still Voltaire?—and write a long long overflowing letter.

No news here, except what I collect through Ralph—highly amusing and gratifying I must say. This refers to Maynard. The other news—how you’re a sharper—also gratifies. I guessed that long ago.

Couldn’t you lend me the proofs of your new volume?

That would be something to read. With all your faults—how is it that one enjoys reading you?

V. W.

[]

Feb. 6th 1922.

The Mill House, Tidmarsh, Pangbourne.

It is sad to think of you ill, and sadder still to think that your recovery depends upon your friends’ letters. Good heavens! Your case is hopeless! How can anyone write to you, I should like to know? Certainly I can’t. Perhaps [N.] can. I envision his elegant elaborations. Only, if they cause your recovery, I shall never speak to you again, and in that case will recovery be worth while? Better to languish and languish into an at least honourable grave. But I expect everyone (except [N.]) is more or less languishing at the present moment. My state has long been quite deplorable. I put it down to the Winter—the agony of thick underclothes, etc. etc.; but of course it may be sheer deliquescence of the brain. Anyhow, from whatever cause, I am sans eyes, sans teeth, sans prick, sans … but after that there can be no more sanses,—and on the whole I feel more like a fish gasping on a bank than anything else. It is terrible. I hope wildly that a change will come with the swallows (whenever that may be), and in the meantime I pretend to read. Books arrive from the Times Book Club (I am a guaranteed subscriber). But I hardly look at them. I spend hours turning over the leaves of the Dictionary of National Biography. When that gets too exhausting, I take to Who’s Who. I sometimes dip into the Old Masters. I find Swift very good, though a dreadfully unpleasant character; Dante ditto; Milton ditto. Does one have to be dreadfully unpleasant to be in the first division of the first class, do you think? But then there is Rabelais, who is reassuring. To descend abruptly, I wonder if you will be able to get through [Q’s] little volume. I suppose there is some kind of cleverness in it, but—how I hate the woman, with her dried pea of a soul! “The Four Ages of Poetry”is brilliant. That man knew how to write prose—vide the last enormous sentence—which is more than Shelley or Browning did. Yet, besides Clive, who has heard of him?

The Maynard affair is most peculiar. So far I have only heard Vanessa’s account, but I hope before very long to get a first hand one. What are we all coming to, pray? The Universe totters.

Do you know that I have joined the Oriental Club? You must come and have lunch with me there when the swallows are with us.—A vast hideous building-have you been there?—filled with vast hideous Anglo-Indians, very old and very rich. One becomes 65, with an income of 5000 a year, directly one enters it. One is so stout one can hardly walk, and one’s brain works with an extraordinary slowness. Just the place for me, you see, in my present condition. I pass almost unnoticed with my glazed eyes and white hair, as I sink into a leather chair heavily with a copy of the Field in hand. Excellent claret too—one of the best cellars in London, by Jove. You must come! I’ll write again soon, if you can bear it.

Your
Lytton

[]

Feb.10th, 1922.

The Mill House, Tidmarsh, Pangbourne.

The accounts of you lately have not been very good, but I hope that you are now beginning to be on the mend, and that letters load your plate every morning. If one has to be in bed, this is certainly a good time to choose for it. The horror of getting up is unparalleled, and I am filled with amazement every morning when I find that I have done it. To my mind there is clearly only one test of wealth, and that is—a fire in one’s bedroom. Until one can have that at any and every moment, one is poor. Oh, for a housemaid at dawn!

Have you looked at the [Q.’s] piddlings? And don’t you think them vile? The horrid atmosphere of “luxe” over them!—Poinsettias—what on earth are they?—and chandeliers. But the reviews, such as I have seen, have been pretty crushing. Mr. Masefield has produced a very strange little book—an “adaptation” of Racine’s Esther—the most deplorable give-away you ever saw. And the Lit. Sup. treats it quite seriously, and implies that Mr. M. is a better poet than Racine. We are a nation of barbarians, I fear. The wretched man clearly hadn’t the faintest idea what he was up to. Oh! oh! Style, words, common decency, mean nothing to him—or to the Lit. Sup.—nothing. He converts Racine’s exquisite silk, length after length of it, into patches of rough canvass with perfect complacency—and the Lit. Sup. is charmed. However, he’s sent me back to my old love, and I spent last night in a rapture over Athalie, which I had rather forgotten—good gracious me! Reading it, I almost felt a Frenchman, and that there really was nothing like that in the world. It took quite an effort to remember King Lear and in fact I’m still rather doubtful whether … Well, I’m coming up to London next week, and hope you’ll be well enough to see me a little then. I’ll ring up Leonard.

May Sinclair’s book, “The Life & Death of Harriet Frean”—has some merit, though nasty. Have you seen it?

I wish you would read my proof-sheets. I don’t know yet when they’ll begin.

Your Lytton

[]

Saturday 8th? 9th? [11th] Feb. [1922.]

Hogarth House.

Your correspondence is about the only bright spot in my day so please continue. My lethargy is that of the alligator at the Zoo. And the alligator doesn’t have very clear ideas of Racine. A. B. W. in the Times almost suffocated me by saying that Molière, Don Juan, is tedious twaddle. Surely it is the best of the lot—so I seem to remember. Then that Mule, Alice Meynell, says that Jane Austen is a frump, and that Mr. Pat-more is equal to Milton and that Tristram Shandy should be read in Prof. Morley’s edition with every 10th page cut out. There can’t be anything left to castrate of Meynell, or I should do it myself. Alligators can’t endure the moderns—Peacock is what I like. You don’t know how good he is—Crotchet Castle—surely nothing survives except the perfection of prose. And you read Miss Sinclair! So shall I perhaps. But I’d rather read Lytton Strachey.

Well, if you do come it will be something to look forward to. […] Roger looms in the distance, so let me know which day.

The infirmity of this handwriting is not entirely heart disease: I am reduced to a fountain pen. And you make them work.

[Q.] exactly suits my tank. Poinsettias, arum lilies, copulation in tepid water, spume, sperm, semen—that’s my atmosphere. She doesn’t shock me as [D.] does, all the same.

Yr.
V.

[]

Aug. 22nd, 1922.

c/o Mrs. Edwards Solva Pembrokeshire.

I think of moving through Sussex early in September. Would it be possible for you to house me from (approx:) the 8th (Friday) to the 11th? I suggest going to Charleston from (approx:) the 5th to the 8th, and have written to Clive to that effect, adding that if it was more convenient I might invert the order—or come later, if necessary, but that would not be so easy.

I am almost completely shattered—simply by the weather. Otherwise (apart from fiendish expense and the vileness of hotels) all goes well. This place is in the region of Manor bier—near St Davids, if you know where that is, and I believe very pretty, but the snow and sleet have prevented my seeing much of it. The ice carnival takes place this afternoon—and we shall all look charming in our furs, cutting figures of eight. Did you know that the Atlantic is often quite frozen over up here? The seals look so funny, sprawling almost among the glaciers, poor things—and then you should see the cormorants breaking the ice with their long bills and pulling out the jelly-fish—so cleverly!

Have you any news? The prospectus of the “Criterion” reached me in these fastnesses the other day, and I was glad to see that the world was still wagging. But I may no longer. I am stiff—frozen stiff—a rigid icicle. I hang at this address for another week, and then slowly melt southwards and eastwards—a weeping relic of what was once your old friend.

[]

Aug. 24th, 1922.

Monks House Rodmell.

Yes, 8th to 11th, (but why not a little longer?) will suit us perfectly—so we will consider that fixed.

I don’t know that one can call Sydney Waterlow news. He has been here; he has found God—only Mr. Sullivan: he bathed; the Ouse was too shallow; he says Katherine Mansfield, completely recovered, is at Bretts. […]

Well, we’ve been eating ices at Brighton, too hot to stir—early tea today, and then a loiter through the cornfields […] A record crop of pears; green peas for dinner; and after dinner we light the Tortoise stove, which I assure you burns whole books—which do instead of coal, and are ever so much hotter, did you know that?

Yr. V. W.

Love to C: [arrington] to whom I now write with the debauched remnants of the pen with which I have written a story for the Criterion, which (I use too many whiches) which the C. will reject. Alas, alas, it is clouding over.

[]

Sept. 19th, 1922.

Tidmarsh.

I totally forgot to leave a pourboire for the admirable Lottie. Will you therefore kindly press the enclosed piece of paper into her palm for me, with appropriate speeches? She really is very obliging. […]

My week-end at Garsington was not very stimulating. Mr. & Mrs. W. J. Turner were the only other guests. He said he had met you—admires you very much, etc. etc.—a very small bird-like man with a desolating accent, good deal to say for himself—but punctuated by strange hesitations—impediments—rather distressing; but really a nice little fellow, when one has got over the way in which he says “count”. Ott. was dreadfully dégringolée […] I found I wanted to howl like an Irish wolf—but perhaps the result produced in you was different.

Your visit, I gather, had been the greatest success, and you were the only person mentioned without some virulent acidity.

The Turner man told me that [X.] was completely changed by a little alcohol—which makes him “a different being”—he flows, beams, etc. A pity we didn’t know this—we might have had an uproarious evening.

I wish I saw you both more often.

ever your
Lytton

[]

Oct. 9th, 1922.

The Mill House, Tidmarsh, Pangbourne.

I finished Jacob last night—a most wonderful achievement—more like poetry, it seems to me, than anything else, and as such I prophecy immortal. The technique of the narrative is astonishing—how you manage to leave out everything that’s dreary, and yet retain enough string for your pearls I can hardly understand. I occasionally almost screamed with joy at the writing. Of course you’re very romantic—which alarms me slightly—I am such a Bonamy. Once or twice I thought you were in danger of becoming George-Meredithian in style—or was that a delusion? Something of the sort certainly seems to me the danger for your genre. But so far you’re safe. You’re a romantic in Sirius, I fancy—which after all is a good way off from Box Hill. The impression left on one as a whole is glorious. And then, as one remembers detail after detail—the pier at Scarborough, the rooks and the dinner-bell, the clergyman’s wife on the moors, St Paul’s, The British Museum at night, the Parthenon—one’s head whirls round and round. Jacob himself I think is very successful—in a most remarkable & original way. Of course I see something of Thoby in him, as I suppose was intended.

It’s not much good writing—we must talk soon. By a sickening mischance I went and engaged myself for Wednesday—will you tell Leonard?—to some old cats here. If Thursday or Friday would suit him they’ld do for me perfectly—he can tell Ralph. If Wednesday is for him the only good day, I’ll come then, and cut the cats.

Your loving
Lytton

A horrid misprint page 190-Dick for Nick. There’s also Dick Graves, as well as Dick Bonamy-rather a plethora perhaps.

[]

Oct. 9th [10th?] 1922.

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey.

I breathe more freely now that I have your letter, though I think your praise is extravagant—I can’t believe you really like a work so utterly devoid of so many virtues; but it gives me immense pleasure to dream that you do. Of course you put your infallible finger upon the spot—romanticism. How do I catch it? Not from my father. I think it must have been my Great Aunts. But some of it, I think, comes from the effort of breaking with complete representation. One flies into the air. Next time, I mean to stick closer to facts. There are millions of things I want to get your opinion on—This is merely to heave a sigh of relief that you don’t cast me off, for nobody else’s praise ever gives me quite as much pleasure as yours.

Thursday, lunch.
Your loving Virginia.

[]

[Postcard]

I should be very grateful for a line to say whether you advise me to buy the new Congreve.

Does it give more (of importance) than the usual editions: or prove that they are bowdlerized? It is a serious matter to part with ;£3/3 but I would, in a good cause.

Yr.
V. W.

Hogarth. Thursday. [October 4, 1923.]

[]

Oct, 6th, 1923.

The Mill House, Tidmarsh, Pangbourne.

I think for ordinary purposes there’s no point in getting the new Congreve. The new material is really quite unimportant. Squire Trelooby is nothing—otherwise there are 3 or 4 jokes, which were cut out of the comedies after the first editions. Also, Mr. Montague Summers is extremely trying and much too much in evidence. The Mermaid Edition, though, has one rather annoying blemish—it divides up the acts—heaven knows why—into tiresome scenes, which detract (unless one realises that they’re really non-existent) from the sense of unity and continuity. An early 18th century edition would be all right; and I think Mr. George Street’s 2 vol. edition of the Comedies is quite satisfactory—though to be sure it seems a pity not to have that clever piece the Mourning Bride.

I hope to send Leonard my Nation lucubration on this subject in 2 days. They cannot by any stretch come under the heading of “a study of past characters”, I’m afraid; so I shall do one of those—perhaps to some extent on Bentley—for Oct. 28th. I had got one all ready on Sir John Harington—a very amusing person—but the appearance of Raleigh’s collected essays with one on him has ruined me. If it had only come out a fortnight later I should have been saved.

Won’t you come down here and examine the Nonesuch Congreve for several days?

Your
Lytton

[]

March 21st, 1924.

52 Tavistock Square, London, W.C.1.

Dearest Lytton,

I am greatly distressed to hear that you are still plagued by diseases of all kinds—just as I was snatching a few moments to read Books & Characters too. Why do I always fly to your works when the electricians are in the hall, the gasmen in the basement, and the telephone ringing with Tom’s sepulchral voice? It’s a very queer fact, but in moments of crisis I always turn to you; but supply me with another book soon. I open at page 173, and say Oh but I know this by heart; and it will soon be the case with all the pages: and this is no exaggeration; and I daresay no particular praise either; only one of your peculiarities as an author. Another is to beget [X.’s]. But the mixture is not appetising to me, for all the praises of Clive & Desmond, who have drunk too many glasses of his champagne to be trusted. But then Byron seems to me tawdry and melodramatic. And Claire & Trelawny and so on and so on—I conceive them like a cave at some Earl’s Court Exhibition—a grotto I mean lined with distorting mirrors & plastered with oyster shells. Do not trouble to unwind this metaphor. I am jangled and splintered by the move, and only hook together words by the force of affection: Say one word, and I will come down, and talk in a gentle and soothing voice about—well, did you hear how I rushed into [Z.’s] arms at the Nation dinner the other night? He forced himself upon me. He has rolling and oleaginous eyes. 1 said we were enemies. He said we were in different camps. He said one must write with one’s instincts. I said one must write with one’s mind. He said Bloomsbury was a tangle of exquisite sensibilities. I said come and see me there. He said no. I said very well. He said I like you. I said come and see me then. He said no. So I got up and flounced out of the room, saying Not for ten years—Undoubtedly, he has been rolling in dung, and smells impure.

We live largely in the basement—The confusion is still confounded—busts of my mother standing upon rolls of carpet, chamber pots stuffed full of book binding tools, and my unfortunate books—oh never let the undertakers pack your books when you move—I haven’t a single volume left whole. In compensation, Nessa & Duncan have painted me a room, where you must come instantly and sit and talk and talk and talk, and never have to catch a taxi, and so by degrees get delivered of that vast mass of communication which I assure you has been hoarding up within me, and so perhaps in you, these ten years. We will sit in the Square and let Dadie play tennis before us. This will be in the summer, with the leaves out, and exquisite ladies—but your taste doesn’t lie that way.

I will write more coherently later.

Ask Carrington to let me hear how you are.

Yr.
V. W.

[]

May 1st, 1924.

The Mill House, Tidmarsh, Pangbourne.

Could you come for the week-end on Sat. week—viz May 11th, je pense? You and he—I hope Sebastian may be here, and that the sun by that time may be shining. Please make the effort—and perhaps we might go over & look at the new house. I wish we could have panels in it a la yours—but …

I am overwhelmed with horrible letters to publishers and monsters of all sorts, so

good-bye
Your Lytton

[]

[2 May, 1924.]

52 Tavistock Sqre. W.C.

Could you conceivably have us on the Friday, till Sunday, and could you conceivably motor, or convey Leonard, on Sunday afternoon to Sutton, where he has to make a speech?

Otherwise, he’s afraid he can’t get out of the speech,—can’t come.

But this may well be impracticable.

I dream at night of your beech trees.

Just off to meet Walter Lamb at the Royal Academy private view.

Yr. V. W.

L says that he could come & leave on Saturday night.

[]

11.11.24.

Invoice

52 Tavistock Square, London, W.C.1

|  | £. | s. | d.  |
To a/c rendered |  | 1 | 7 | 0 |
” 1 West’s Seducers | @ 4/6  |  | 4 | 6 |
” 1 Avvakum | @ 6/0 |  | 6 | 0 |
” 1 Ransom’s Grace  | @ 4/6 |  | 4 | 6 |
” 3 Pamphlets | @ 2/6 |  | 2 | 6 |
” 1 do | @ 3/6 |  | 3 | 6 |
|  | £2  | 14 | 0 | [sic]
to 1 Kenya | @ 15/- net  |  | 15  | 0 |
|  | £3 | 4 | 0 | [sic]

[in V. W.’s handwriting.]

Lytton Strachey Esq.,
Ham Spray House,
Hungerford,
Berks.

Your attention is particularly called to the above account outstanding since May,—causing the devil of a bother in our Books; which won’t balance till you pay; as an Englishman, on Armistice day, we implore.

Signed: 

2 Woolves
1 Dadie
1 Mrs Joad
in love and reverence

[]

[January 31, 1925]

52 Tavistock Sqre.

An appalling party is being given by Woolves & Stephens at No 50 Gordon Sqre. on Wednesday next—9-30.

No wine; no food; nothing, (except indeed Philip Ritchie)

If you like to come, we shall be enchanted.

I’m in bed with the influenza: but recovering.

Yr. V. W.

A letter would be comforting.

[]

Sept 8th [1925.]

Monk’s House Rodmell.

Dearest Lytton,

Do you remember one of Leslie Stephen’s daughters, the younger, I think, called Virginia? She married a chap called Woolf in the Indian, or Ceylon, Civil Service. Well, they write. Indeed she wrote a book, essays and so on; and wants to know if you could help her to correct a misprint or so—that is, if you remember her—a tall girl, she was, rather badly dressed, parted her hair in the middle.

Does this form of address wring your withers? No; But all the same you might tell me what the misprint in the Common Reader was that you snarled out at Leonard once in Gordon Sqre. We hope to reprint, and I’m collecting the more obvious and glaring howlers with which, I’m told, the book pullulates.

I don’t much think we shall see you this summer. But we shan’t be hurt; we shan’t think the better of your taste to hear that you’re at Maynards, but, I repeat, we shall love you all the same—and the beds here are damnably uncomfortable. […]

I have been spending 10 days there, blasted by dissipation & headache. When I was at my worst, Leonard made me eat an entire cold duck, and, for the first and only time in my life, I was sick! What a hideous and awful experience! And you are sick every Monday, I’m told: after that, we can forgive much.

Find me a house where no one can ever come.

I like talking to you, but to no one else in the whole world.

Your old, rake, and fireside hag.

V.

[]

Sept. 11th, 1925.

Ham Spray House, Hungerford, Berks.

My conduct is certainly shocking—but there!—I cannot stay with you. I am booked for Charleston and Mr. and Mrs. K; but shan’t I see you? I arrive at Iford about Sept. 24th—in tears, I expect. I feel, too, as if I should not be able to write anything for the Nation for many a long day. It is all most disgraceful. And the comble is that I cannot recall the misprint in the Common Reader. All this is I believe the result of Sir Almeric Fitzroy, whose “memoirs” I have been reading, and who has reduced me to a state of sawdust equal to his own.

Your letter is obscure in parts—Where were you sick after the complete duck? […] Unfortunately, I am never sick now—only sterile—every Monday, and all the other days of the week.

Your
Lytton

[]

Jan 26th [1926.]

52 Tavistock Square, London, W.C.1.

Dearest Lytton,

Read the enclosed letter, but don’t blame me for it. I have told Aldington that he may write straight to you. And I don’t want it back—nevertheless you might write to me. I hear of you fascinating rabbits at parties. Also it is said that you are getting up a subscription to give Edmund Gosse gold sleevelinks on his 100th birthday […]

I have had chickenpox whooping cough influenza and cowpox. I lead the life of a widow of 90, whose sons all perished in the Indian Mutiny or Crimean war, I forget which. This venerable lady finds her chief consolation in the works of Shakespeare—Lytton Strachey. And Mrs. Smith of Cheltenham writes that she loves L. S. for having dedicated Q. V. to V. W. So we are brought together mysteriously. […]

Do tell Carrington to come and see me.

Yr. V. W.

[]

[? March, 1927.]

Could you be so angelic as to tell us the name of the hotel in Rome? any other information gratefully received.

I’m afraid I seemed rather brusque—not sympathetic last night—owing to circumstances. I do feel that love is such a horror I would advise anyone to break off. But I see the difficulties. I hope to make the young man’s acquaintance when we come back.

We have collapsed under typhoid—I verge on 102—is it worth it? I wonder. So goodbye—

V. W.

[]

3rd Sept. 1927.

Monk’s House, Rodmell.

Dearest Lytton,

A rumour has reached me via Nessa and Raymond that you aren’t well. I hope this may be untrue; but if true, please bestir yourself and get well instantly. If you can’t sleep, try Audit ale; very effective, with no evil consequences, and any fellow of any college, of whom you must know millions, can get it for you. I was going to recommend the Mysteries of Udolpho; they send one into a mooney trance which is very refreshing; but also Mrs. Radcliffe has her moments of inspiration. Her landscapes are sublime. I adore soft music at evening, and indeed I think Jane Austen might have done worse than take a leaf from Radcliffe’s book. This you may put down, with other notorious faults, to my unfortunate romanticism—I can’t help it. What’s more, I don’t want to help it. I have come to a time of life when I can help nothing.

This was, in fact, what I was saying to Sheppard last night, at Tilton, when we picked the bones of Maynard’s grouse […] We had a brilliant entertainment afterwards in the new Loggia, with a rustic audience. Sheppard half naked, tightly swathed in red silk, shingled as to his head, with coloured garters, was Miss T. to perfection: Maynard was crapulous and obscene beyond words, lifting his left leg and singing a song about Women. Lydia was Queen Victoria dancing to a bust of Albert. What did the yokels make of it? I wish you had been there—which reminds me, there was a good deal of talk about you at dinner, some for you, I, of course, against; some saying you had a good influence, Sheppard and I sticking it out it was wholly vile. I said, if you drop a little salt on a snail it foams. Lytton was the salt: Sheppard the foam. He said this summed up, admirably and completely, his entire life, which has been a failure. That round faced innocent Taylor was there, and seemed to take it all very seriously.

All the rest of the news is motor car gossip. We flash through Sussex almost daily; drop in after dinner; visit ruins; muse by retired moats, of which Sussex is full; surprise Colonels—it is a perfect invention. What we did without it passes comprehension. Most of the Victorian horror seems explicable by the fact that they walked, or sat behind stout sweating horses.

Do you know the story of L. E. L.?—the poetess, who committed suicide, as some say; but others feel sure was murdered? Your blue stocking Hampstead friend, Enfield, has written a life of her which we are to publish. If only every good spectacled Don and schoolgirl did not think themselves Lytton Strachey and proceed to put it into practice! But I have made this complaint not for the first, nor the second, nor the last time. For God’s sake, come out with Betsy and make them all skip. It’s better in French: I have just read Disraeli by Maurois.

They are starting a cement works at Asheham. A railway line runs round the field, and the down behind is nothing but chalk. Isn’t it damnable? What is to become of us? Are we to migrate to the South of France? or Rome? or where?

[G.] was here last week end, very polished and agreeable; and I daresay it’s supercilious to refer to the end of his nose, or his clothes, or his modernity which seems to me miraculous, as if he had already been to a lunch party which has not yet been given. Still,—Still, he’s very intelligent, which as the old Serpent used to say—in his fiery days when he branded so many of us for ever—is the only thing that matters. And Roger was here with a new theory about Lord Salisbury’s foreign policy which drove Leonard almost frantic. He has taken up meteorology, and is off to Vichy

Morgan is coming here next week, and Dadie some time; but I hope I shall see you if you are at Charleston. I should like you to see me driving along the Eastbourne road at 50 miles an hour.

Leonard sends his love.

Yr. V. W.

[]

Sept. 16th, 1927.

Ham Spray House, Hungerford, Berks.

My dearest Virginia,

I was on the point of answering your charming letter, when the news of Philip’s death came—and now it seems impossible to say very much. Only it was really divine of you to write to me so entrancingly—as I read I felt my health positively mounting upwards and my spirits, etc. I am now decidedly better. I hope to see you ere long. My love to you both.

Lytton

[]

Dec. 21st, 1928.

Ham Spray.

Nobody in the world but you could have produced such a perfect piece. It is absolutely right—most beautiful, most ingenious—moving too, for me—but you will understand all that. Yes—the bulk! How on earth did they manage it? By some eliminations, presumably—a sort of pruning—not going very deep, consciously at any rate, in certain directions. Anyhow, the result was superb.

Dearest creature, we shall all be most grateful to you. But that is not the word for what I feel.

your devoted
Lytton

[]

Xmas day. [1928.]

52 T. Sqre.

It was the greatest relief, getting your letter, dearest Lytton. I was so afraid I had said only commonplace things. One can’t say the things that matter—and it all seemed rather unreal.

She was very real to me—oddly so, seeing how little I saw her; and I keep thinking of her. She used to descend upon me sometimes in Fitzroy Square and talk about you.

Love and blessings
Virginia

[]

10 Dec, [1931.]

52 Tavistock Sqre.

“I arise from dreams of thee”—that’s why I write. I have just woken from a dream in which I was at a play, in the pit and suddenly you, who were sitting across a gangway in a row in front, turned and looked at me, and we both went into fits of laughter. What the play was, what we laughed at, I’ve no notion, but we were both very young (no, for you had your beard) and at the age when we used to write to each other. Why are these dreams more vivid than real life?—Anyhow while it hangs about me, I can’t help writing to the bearded serpent, especially as Clive tells me you are off to Malaya for months and the chances are we shan’t meet till Gordon Sqre. is full of tulips and [Arthur] Waley is playing tennis with Alix in white flannels.

I’m recumbent, lazy, content, reading book after book. And what are you doing? Reading Shakespeare I hope and occasionally making a note very neatly in a very beautiful book. By the way I read As you like it the other day and was almost sending you a wire to ask what is the truth about Jacques—What is it? His last speech reads so very odd.

This is all my news, as I see no one, not Ottoline, not Charlie Chaplin—no one but Clive who runs in to see me between a lunch party that ends at 5 and a dinner party that begins at 8.30 and goes on till the sparrows are rising in flocks from the Embankment. Lord—how I’d like to lead his life.

Well, this is only a dream letter and needs no answer, unless you can tell me what we laughed at; but when you’re in London with the tulips & Waley’s white flannels, please come and see your old and attached friend

Virginia

[This was almost certainly never read by Lytton, who was already very ill when it arrived.]

[]

GRANITE
AND
RAINBOW

by
Virginia Woolf

published
1958
by
The Hogarth Press

granite and rainbow

Editorial Note.

Part I: The Art of Fiction.

The Narrow Bridge of Art.

Hours in a Library.

Impassioned Prose.

Life and the Novelist.

On Rereading Meredith.

The Anatomy of Fiction.

Gothic Romance.

The Supernatural in Fiction.

Henry James’s Ghost Stories.

A Terribly Sensitive Mind.

Women and Fiction.

An Essay in Criticism.

Phases of Fiction.

Part II: The Art of Biography.

The New Biography.

A Talk about Memoirs.

Sir Walter Raleigh.

Sterne.

Eliza and Sterne.

Horace Walpole.

A Friend of Johnson.

Fanny Burney’s Half-Sister.

Money and Love.

The Dream.

The Fleeting Portrait: 1. Waxworks at the Abbey.

The Fleeting Portrait: 2. The Royal Academy.

Poe’s Helen.

Visits to Walt Whitman.

Oliver Wendell Holmes.

[]

[The text follows the 1958 Hogarth Press edition.]

Editorial Note

Virginia Woolf published during her life two volumes of collected essays: The Common Reader, First and Second Series. After her death I took steps to gather together her essays which had not been included in those volumes. There were a considerable number of them; most of them had been published in journals, but a few had never been published. They proved sufficient to fill three posthumous volumes: The Death of the Moth, 1942; The Moment, 1947, and The Captain’s Death Bed, 1950. I included in those volumes only those essays which seemed to me of the same order of excellence as those which she herself had chosen to reprint in The Common Reader. When I published The Captain’s Death Bed, I thought that I had been able to identify all the essays which had appeared in journals and I wrote in the Editorial Note to that volume that it would be the last book of collected essays, since I had now included in the posthumous volumes all her essays, with a few unimportant exceptions.

I was mistaken about this, for those who had searched the records, including myself, had overlooked a considerable number of essays of the same kind and of the same merit as those published in the five volumes. There were several reasons for this. Virginia Woolf only spasmodically kept copies of essays and reviews written by her for journals and there was often no record of their publication among her papers. This accounted for the fact that the existence of the long essay, Phases of Fiction, published in The Bookman in 1929, was forgotten. Another difficulty was that so many of her essays appeared anonymously in papers like the Times Literary Supplement, and a further complication, not noticed by the searchers, was that in some cases they had been written under her maiden name, Virginia Stephen. The discovery of the essays now published was due to the zeal and intelligence of Miss B. L. Kirkpatrick and Dr. Mary Lyon. Miss Kirkpatrick has devoted infinite pains to the preparation of her Bibliography of Virginia Woolf. Dr. Lyon is Director of Graduate Residence of Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Mass., and teacher of a literature course at Harvard University. She is writing a book on Virginia Woolf as Critic, and came to England on a visit in order to do some research on her subject. She took much trouble to determine what had or had not been published and republished. Without the work of Miss Kirkpatrick and Dr. Mary Lyon I should never have found the essays now published in this volume. The journals in which they first appeared are given by me in footnotes to the essays.

Leonard Woolf

[]

Part I: The Art of Fiction.

The Narrow Bridge of Art.

Far the greater number of critics turn their backs upon the present and gaze steadily into the past. Wisely, no doubt, they make no comment upon what is being actually written at the moment; they leave that duty to the race of reviewers whose very title seems to imply transiency in themselves and in the objects they survey. But one has sometimes asked oneself, must the duty of the critic always be to the past, must his gaze always be fixed backward? Could he not sometimes turn round and, shading his eyes in the manner of Robinson Crusoe on the desert island, look into the future and trace on its mist the faint lines of the land which some day perhaps we may reach? The truth of such speculations can never be proved, of course, but in an age like ours there is a great temptation to indulge in them. For it is an age clearly when we are not fast anchored where we are; things are moving round us; we are moving ourselves. Is it not the critic’s duty to tell us, or to guess at least, where we are going?

Obviously the inquiry must narrow itself very strictly, but it might perhaps be possible in a short space to take one instance of dissatisfaction and difficulty, and, having examined into that, we might be the better able to guess the direction in which, when we have surmounted it, we shall go.

Nobody indeed can read much modern literature without being aware that some dissatisfaction, some difficulty, is lying in our way. On all sides writers are attempting what they cannot achieve, are forcing the form they use to contain a meaning which is strange to it. Many reasons might be given, but here let us select only one, and that is the failure of poetry to serve us as it has served so many generations of our fathers. Poetry is not lending her services to us nearly as freely as she did to them. The great channel of expression which has carried away so much energy, so much genius, seems to have narrowed itself or to have turned aside.

That is true only within certain limits of course; our age is rich in lyric poetry; no age perhaps has been richer. But for our generation and the generation that is coming the lyric cry of ecstasy or despair, which is so intense, so personal, and so limited, is not enough. The mind is full of monstrous, hybrid, unmanageable emotions. That the age of the earth is 3,000,000,000 years; that human life lasts but a second; that the capacity of the human mind is nevertheless boundless; that life is infinitely beautiful yet repulsive; that one’s fellow creatures are adorable but disgusting; that science and religion have between them destroyed belief; that all bonds of union seem broken, yet some control must exist—it is in this atmosphere of doubt and conflict that writers have now to create, and the fine fabric of a lyric is no more fitted to contain this point of view than a rose leaf to envelop the rugged immensity of a rock.

But when we ask ourselves what has in the past served to express such an attitude as this—an attitude which is full of contrast and collision; an attitude which seems to demand the conflict of one character upon another, and at the same time to stand in need of some general shaping power, some conception which lends the whole harmony and force, we must reply that there was a form once, and it was not the form of lyric poetry; it was the form of the drama, of the poetic drama of the Elizabethan age. And that is the one form which seems dead beyond all possibility of resurrection to-day.

For if we look at the state of the poetic play we must have grave doubts that any force on earth can now revive it. It has been practised and is still practised by writers of the highest genius and ambition. Since the death of Dryden every great poet it seems has had his fling. Wordsworth and Coleridge, Shelley and Keats, Tennyson, Swinburne, and Browning (to name the dead only) have all written poetic plays, but none has succeeded. Of all the plays they wrote, probably only Swinburne’s Atalanta and Shelley’s Prometheus are still read, and they less frequently than other works by the same writers. All the rest have climbed to the top shelves of our bookcases, put their heads under their wings, and gone to sleep. No one will willingly disturb those slumbers.

Yet it is tempting to try to find some explanation of this failure in case it should throw light upon the future which we are considering. The reason why poets can no longer write poetic plays lies somewhere perhaps in this direction.

There is a vague, mysterious thing called an attitude toward life. We all know people—if we turn from literature to life for a moment—who are at loggerheads with existence; unhappy people who never get what they want; are baffled, complaining, who stand at an uncomfortable angle whence they see everything askew. There are others again who, though they appear perfectly content, seem to have lost all touch with reality. They lavish all their affections upon little dogs and old china. They take interest in nothing but the vicissitudes of their own health and the ups and downs of social snobbery. There are, however, others who strike us, why precisely it would be difficult to say, as being by nature or circumstances in a position where they can use their faculties to the full upon things that are of importance. They are not necessarily happy or successful, but there is a zest in their presence, an interest in their doings. They seem alive all over. This may be partly the result of circumstances—they have been born into surroundings that suit them—but much more is the result of some happy balance of qualities in themselves so that they see things not at an awkward angle, all askew; nor distorted through a mist; but four square, in proportion; they grasp something hard; when they come into action they cut real ice.

A writer too has in the same way an attitude toward life, though it is a different life from the other. They too can stand at an uncomfortable angle; can be baffled, frustrated, unable to get at what they want as writers. This is true, for example, of the novels of George Gissing. Then, again, they can retire to the suburbs and lavish their interest upon pet dogs and duchesses—prettinesses, sentimentalities, snobberies, and this is true of some of our most highly successful novelists. But there are others who seem by nature or circumstances so placed that they can use their faculties freely upon important things. It is not that they write quickly or easily, or become at once successful or celebrated. One is rather trying to analyse a quality which is present in most of the great ages of literature and is most marked in the work of Elizabethan dramatists. They seem to have an attitude toward life, a position which allows them to move their limbs freely; a view which, though made up of all sorts of different things, falls into the right perspective for their purposes.

In part, of course, this was the result of circumstances. The public appetite, not for books, but for the drama, the smallness of the towns, the distance which separated people, the ignorance in which even the educated then lived, all made it natural for the Elizabethan imagination to fill itself with lions and unicorns, dukes and duchesses, violence and mystery. This was reinforced by something which we cannot explain so simply, but which we can certainly feel. They had an attitude toward life which made them able to express themselves freely and fully. Shakespeare’s plays are not the work of a baffled and frustrated mind; they are the perfectly elastic envelope of his thought. Without a hitch he turns from philosophy to a drunken brawl; from love songs to an argument; from simply merriment to profound speculation. And it is true of all the Elizabethan dramatists that though they may bore us—and they do—they never make us feel that they are afraid or self-conscious, or that there is anything hindering, hampering, inhibiting the full current of their minds.

Yet our first thought when we open a modern poetic play—and this applies to much modern poetry—is that the writer is not at his ease. He is afraid, he is forced, he is self-conscious. And with what good reason! we may exclaim, for which of us is perfectly at his ease with a man in a toga called Xenocrates, or with a woman in a blanket called Eudoxa? Yet for some reason the modern poetic play is always about Xenocrates and not about Mr. Robinson; it is about Thessaly and not about Charing Cross Road. When the Elizabethans laid their scenes in foreign parts and made their heroes and heroines princes and princesses they only shifted the scene from one side to the other of a very thin veil. It was a natural device which gave depth and distance to their figures. But the country remained English; and the Bohemian prince was the same person as the English noble. Our modern poetic playwrights, however, seem to seek the veil of the past and of distance for a different reason. They want not a veil that heightens but a curtain that conceals; they lay their scene in the past because they are afraid of the present. They are aware that if they tried to express the thoughts, the visions, the sympathies and antipathies which are actually turning and tumbling in their brains in this year of grace 1927 the poetic decencies would be violated; they could only stammer and stumble and perhaps have to sit down or to leave the room. The Elizabethans had an attitude which allowed them complete freedom; the modern playwright has either no attitude at all, or one so strained that it cramps his limbs and distorts his vision. He has therefore to take refuge with Xenocrates, who says nothing or only what blank verse can with decency say.

But can we explain ourselves a little more fully? What has changed, what has happened, what has put the writer now at such an angle that he cannot pour his mind straight into the old channels of English poetry? Some sort of answer may be suggested by a walk through the streets of any large town. The long avenue of brick is cut up into boxes, each of which is inhabited by a different human being who has put locks on his doors and bolts on his windows to ensure some privacy, yet is linked to his fellows by wires which pass overhead, by waves of sound which pour through the roof and speak aloud to him of battles and murders and strikes and revolutions all over the world. And if we go in and talk to him we shall find that he is a wary, secretive, suspicious animal, extremely self-conscious, extremely careful not to give himself away. Indeed, there is nothing in modern life which forces him to do it. There is no violence in private life; we are polite, tolerant, agreeable, when we meet. War even is conducted by companies and communities rather than by individuals. Duelling is extinct. The marriage bond can stretch indefinitely without snapping. The ordinary person is calmer, smoother, more self-contained than he used to be.

But again we should find if we took a walk with our friend that he is extremely alive to everything—to ugliness, sordidity, beauty, amusement. He follows every thought careless where it may lead him. He discusses openly what used never to be mentioned even privately. And this very freedom and curiosity are perhaps the cause of what appears to be his most marked characteristic—the strange way in which things that have no apparent connection are associated in his mind. Feelings which used to come single and separate do so no longer. Beauty is part ugliness; amusement part disgust; pleasure part pain. Emotions which used to enter the mind whole are now broken up on the threshold.

For example: It is a spring night, the moon is up, the nightingale singing, the willows bending over the river. Yes, but at the same time a diseased old woman is picking over her greasy rags on a hideous iron bench. She and the spring enter his mind together; they blend but do not mix. The two emotions, so incongruously coupled, bite and kick at each other in unison. But the emotion which Keats felt when he heard the song of the nightingale is one and entire, though it passes from joy in beauty to sorrow at the unhappiness of human fate. He makes no contrast. In his poem sorrow is the shadow which accompanies beauty. In the modern mind beauty is accompanied not by its shadow but by its opposite. The modern poet talks of the nightingale who sings ‘jug jug to dirty ears’. There trips along by the side of our modern beauty some mocking spirit which sneers at beauty for being beautiful; which turns the looking-glass and shows us that the other side of her cheek is pitted and deformed. It is as if the modern mind, wishing always to verify its emotions, had lost the power of accepting anything simply for what it is. Undoubtedly this sceptical and testing spirit has led to a great freshening and quickening of soul. There is a candour, an honesty in modern writing which is salutary if not supremely delightful. Modern literature, which had grown a little sultry and scented with Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater, revived instantly from her nineteenth-century languor when Samuel Butler and Bernard Shaw began to burn their feathers and apply their salts to her nose. She awoke; she sat up; she sneezed. Naturally, the poets were frightened away.

For of course poetry has always been overwhelmingly on the side of beauty. She has always insisted on certain rights, such as rhyme, metre, poetic diction. She has never been used for the common purpose of life. Prose has taken all the dirty work on to her own shoulders; has answered letters, paid bills, written articles, made speeches, served the needs of businessmen, shopkeepers, lawyers, soldiers, peasants.

Poetry has remained aloof in the possession of her priests. She has perhaps paid the penalty for this seclusion by becoming a little stiff. Her presence with all her apparatus—her veils, her garlands, her memories, her associations—affects us the moment she speaks. Thus when we ask poetry to express this discord, this incongruity, this sneer, this contrast, this curiosity, the quick, queer emotions which are bred in small separate rooms, the wide, general ideas which civilization teaches, she cannot move quickly enough, simply enough, or broadly enough to do it. Her accent is too marked; her manner too emphatic. She gives us instead lovely lyric cries of passion; with a majestic sweep of her arm she bids us take refuge in the past; but she does not keep pace with the mind and fling herself subtly, quickly, passionately into its various sufferings and joys. Byron in Don Juan pointed the way; he showed how flexible an instrument poetry might become, but none has followed his example or put his tool to further use. We remain without a poetic play.

Thus we are brought to reflect whether poetry is capable of the task which we are now setting her. It may be that the emotions here sketched in such rude outline and imputed to the modern mind submit more readily to prose than to poetry. It may be possible that prose is going to take over—has, indeed, already taken over—some of the duties which were once discharged by poetry.

If, then, we are daring and risk ridicule and try to see in what direction we who seem to be moving so fast are going, we may guess that we are going in the direction of prose and that in ten or fifteen years’ time prose will be used for purposes for which prose has never been used before. That cannibal, the novel, which has devoured so many forms of art will by then have devoured even more. We shall be forced to invent new names for the different books which masquerade under this one heading. And it is possible that there will be among the so-called novels one which we shall scarcely know how to christen. It will be written in prose, but in prose which has many of the characteristics of poetry. It will have something of the exaltation of poetry, but much of the ordinariness of prose. It will be dramatic, and yet not a play. It will be read, not acted. By what name we are to call it is not a matter of very great importance. What is important is that this book which we see on the horizon may serve to express some of those feelings which seem at the moment to be balked by poetry pure and simple and to find the drama equally inhospitable to them. Let us try, then, to come to closer terms with it and to imagine what may be its scope and nature.

In the first place, one may guess that it will differ from the novel as we know it now chiefly in that it will stand further back from life. It will give, as poetry does, the outline rather than the detail. It will make little use of the marvellous fact-recording power, which is one of the attributes of fiction. It will tell us very little about the houses, incomes, occupations of its characters; it will have little kinship with the sociological novel or the novel of environment. With these limitations it will express the feeling and ideas of the characters closely and vividly, but from a different angle. It will resemble poetry in this that it will give not only or mainly people’s relations to each other and their activities together, as the novel has hitherto done, but it will give the relation of the mind to general ideas and its soliloquy in solitude. For under the dominion of the novel we have scrutinized one part of the mind closely and left another unexplored. We have come to forget that a large and important part of life consists in our emotions toward such things as roses and nightingales, the dawn, the sunset, life, death, and fate; we forget that we spend much time sleeping, dreaming, thinking, reading, alone; we are not entirely occupied in personal relations; all our energies are not absorbed in making our livings. The psychological novelist has been too prone to limit psychology to the psychology of personal intercourse; we long sometimes to escape from the incessant, the remorseless analysis of falling into love and falling out of love, of what Tom feels for Judith and Judith does or does not altogether feel for Tom. We long for some more impersonal relationship. We long for ideas, for dreams, for imaginations, for poetry.

And it is one of the glories of the Elizabethan dramatists that they give us this. The poet is always able to transcend the particularity of Hamlet’s relation to Ophelia and to give us his questioning not of his own personal lot alone but of the state and being of all human life. In Measure for Measure, for example, passages of extreme psychological subtlety are mingled with profound reflections, tremendous imaginations. Yet it is worth noticing that if Shakespeare gives us this profundity, this psychology, at the same time Shakespeare makes no attempt to give us certain other things. The plays are of no use whatever as ‘applied sociology’. If we had to depend upon them for a knowledge of the social and economic conditions of Elizabethan life, we should be hopelessly at sea.

In these respects then the novel or the variety of the novel which will be written in time to come will take on some of the attributes of poetry. It will give the relations of man to nature, to fate; his imagination; his dreams. But it will also give the sneer, the contrast, the question, the closeness and complexity of life. It will take the mould of that queer conglomeration of incongruous things—the modern mind. Therefore it will clasp to its breast the precious prerogatives of the democratic art of prose; its freedom, its fearlessness, its flexibility. For prose is so humble that it can go anywhere; no place is too low, too sordid, or too mean for it to enter. It is infinitely patient, too, humbly acquisitive. It can lick up with its long glutinous tongue the most minute fragments of fact and mass them into the most subtle labyrinths, and listen silently at doors behind which only a murmur, only a whisper, is to be heard. With all the suppleness of a tool which is in constant use it can follow the windings and record the changes which are typical of the modern mind. To this, with Proust and Dostoevsky behind us, we must agree.

But can prose, we may ask, adequate though it is to deal with the common and the complex—can prose say the simple things which are so tremendous? Give the sudden emotions which are so surprising? Can it chant the elegy, or hymn the love, or shriek in terror, or praise the rose, the nightingale, or the beauty of the night? Can it leap at one spring at the heart of its subject as the poet does? I think not. That is the penalty it pays for having dispensed with the incantation and the mystery, with rhyme and metre. It is true that prose writers are daring; they are constantly forcing their instrument to make the attempt. But one has always a feeling of discomfort in the presence of the purple patch or the prose poem. The objection to the purple patch, however, is not that it is purple but that it is a patch. Recall for instance Meredith’s ‘Diversion on a Penny Whistle’ in Richard Feveral. How awkwardly, how emphatically, with a broken poetic metre it begins: ‘Golden lie the meadows; golden run the streams; red-gold is on the pine-stems. The sun is coming down to earth and walks the fields and the waters.’ Or recall the famous description of the storm at the end of Charlotte Brontë’s Villette. These passages are eloquent, lyrical, splendid; they read very well cut out and stuck in an anthology; but in the context of the novel they make us uncomfortable. For both Meredith and Charlotte Brontë called themselves novelists; they stood close up to life; they led us to expect the rhythm, the observation, and the perspective of poetry. We feel the jerk and the effort; we are half woken from that trance of consent and illusion in which our submission to the power of the writer’s imagination is most complete.

But let us now consider another book, which though written in prose and by way of being called a novel, adopts from the start a different attitude, a different rhythm, which stands back from life, and leads us to expect a different perspective—Tristram Shandy. It is a book full of poetry, but we never notice it; it is a book stained deep purple, which is yet never patchy. Here though the mood is changing always, there is no jerk, no jolt in that change to waken us from the depths of consent and belief. In the same breath Sterne laughs, sneers, cuts some indecent ribaldry, and passes on to a passage like this:

Time wastes too fast: every letter I trace tells me with what rapidity life follows my pen; the days and hours of it more precious—my dear Jenny—than the rubies about thy neck, are flying over our heads like light clouds of a windy day, never to return more; everything presses on—whilst thou are twisting that lock—see! it grows gray; and every time I kiss thy hand to bid adieu, and every absence which follows it, are preludes to that eternal separation which we are shortly to make.—Heaven have mercy upon us both!

CHAP. IX

Now, for what the world thinks of that ejaculation—I would not give a groat.

And he goes on to my Uncle Toby, the Corporal, Mrs. Shandy, and the rest of them.

There, one sees, is poetry changing easily and naturally into prose, prose into poetry. Standing a little aloof, Sterne lays his hands lightly upon imagination, wit, fantasy; and reaching high up among the branches where these things grow, naturally and no doubt willingly forfeits his right to the more substantial vegetables that grow on the ground. For, unfortunately, it seems true that some renunciation is inevitable. You cannot cross the narrow bridge of art carrying all its tools in your hands. Some you must leave behind, or you will drop them in midstream or, what is worse, overbalance and be drowned yourself.

So, then, this unnamed variety of the novel will be written standing back from life, because in that way a larger view is to be obtained of some important features of it; it will be written in prose, because prose, if you free it from the beast-of-burden work which so many novelists necessarily lay upon it, of carrying loads of details, bushels of fact—prose thus treated will show itself capable of rising high from the ground, not in one dart, but in sweeps and circles, and of keeping at the same time in touch with the amusements and idiosyncrasies of human character in daily life.

There remains, however, a further question. Can prose be dramatic? It is obvious, of course, that Shaw and Ibsen have used prose dramatically with the highest success, but they have been faithful to the dramatic form. This form one may prophesy is not the one which the poetic dramatist of the future will find fit for his needs. A prose play is too rigid, too limited, too emphatic for his purposes. It lets slip between its meshes half the things that he wants to say. He cannot compress into dialogue all the comment, all the analysis, all the richness that he wants to give. Yet he covets the explosive emotional effect of the drama; he wants to draw blood from his readers, and not merely to stroke and tickle their intellectual susceptibilities. The looseness and freedom of Tristram Shandy, wonderfully though they encircle and float off such characters as Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim, do not attempt to range and marshal these people in dramatic contrast together. Therefore it will be necessary for the writer of this exacting book to bring to bear upon his tumultuous and contradictory emotions the generalizing and simplifying power of a strict and logical imagination. Tumult is vile; confusion is hateful; everything in a work of art should be mastered and ordered. His effort will be to generalize and split up. Instead of enumerating details he will mould blocks. His characters thus will have a dramatic power which the minutely realized characters of contemporary fiction often sacrifice in the interests of psychology. And then, though this is scarcely visible, so far distant it lies on the rim of the horizon—one can imagine that he will have extended the scope of his interest so as to dramatize some of those influences which play so large a part in life, yet have so far escaped the novelist—the power of music, the stimulus of sight, the effect on us of the shape of trees or the play of colour, the emotions bred in us by crowds, the obscure terrors and hatreds which come so irrationally in certain places or from certain people, the delight of movement, the intoxication of wine. Every moment is the centre and meeting-place of an extraordinary number of perceptions which have not yet been expressed. Life is always and inevitably much richer than we who try to express it.

But it needs no great gift of prophecy to be certain that whoever attempts to do what is outlined above will have need of all his courage. Prose is not going to learn a new step at the bidding of the first comer. Yet if the signs of the times are worth anything the need of fresh developments is being felt. It is certain that there are scattered about in England, France, and America writers who are trying to work themselves free from a bondage which has become irksome to them; writers who are trying to readjust their attitude so that they may once more stand easily and naturally in a position where their powers have full play upon important things. And it is when a book strikes us as the result of that attitude rather than by its beauty or its brilliancy that we know that it has in it the seeds of an enduring existence.

[New York Herald Tribune, Aug 14, 1927, as “Poetry, Fiction and the Future”]

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Hours in a Library.

Let us begin by clearing up the old confusion between the man who loves learning and the man who loves reading, and point out that there is no connexion whatever between the two. A learned man is a sedentary, concentrated solitary enthusiast, who searches through books to discover some particular grain of truth upon which he has set his heart. If the passion for reading conquers him, his gains dwindle and vanish between his fingers. A reader, on the other hand, must check the desire for learning at the outset; if knowledge sticks to him well and good, but to go in pursuit of it, to read on a system, to become a specialist or an authority, is very apt to kill what it suits us to consider the more humane passion for pure and disinterested reading.

In spite of all this we can easily conjure up a picture which does service for the bookish man and raises a smile at his expense. We conceive a pale, attenuated figure in a dressing-gown, lost in speculation, unable to lift a kettle from the hob, or address a lady without blushing, ignorant of the daily news, though versed in the catalogues of the second-hand booksellers, in whose dark premises he spends the hours of sunlight—a delightful character, no doubt, in his crabbed simplicity, but not in the least resembling that other to whom we would direct attention. For the true reader is essentially young. He is a man of intense curiosity; of ideas; open minded and communicative, to whom reading is more of the nature of brisk exercise in the open air than of sheltered study; he trudges the high road, he climbs higher and higher upon the hills until the atmosphere is almost too fine to breathe in; to him it is not a sedentary pursuit at all.

But, apart from general statements, it would not be hard to prove by an assembly of facts that the great season for reading is the season between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four. The bare list of what is read then fills the heart of older people with despair. It is not only that we read so many books, but that we had such books to read. If we wish to refresh our memories, let us take down one of those old notebooks which we have all, at one time or another, had a passion for beginning. Most of the pages are blank, it is true; but at the beginning we shall find a certain number very beautifully covered with a strikingly legible hand-writing. Here we have written down the names of great writers in their order of merit; here we have copied out fine passages from the classics; here are lists of books to be read; and here, most interesting of all, lists of books that have actually been read, as the reader testifies with some youthful vanity by a dash of red ink. We will quote a list of the books that some one read in a past January at the age of twenty, most of them probably for the first time. i. Rhoda Fleming, 2. The Shaving of Shagpat. 3. Tom Jones. 4. The Laodicean. 5. Dewey’s Psychology. 6. The Book of Job. 7. Webbe’s Discourse of Poesie. 8. The Duchess of Malfi. 9. The Revenger’s Tragedy. And so he goes on from month to month, until, as such lists will, it suddenly stops in the month of June. But if we follow the reader through his months it is clear that he can have done practically nothing but read. Elizabethan literature is gone through with some thoroughness; he read a great deal of Webster, Browning, Shelley, Spenser, and Congreve; Peacock he read from start to finish; and most of Jane Austen’s novels two or three times over. He read the whole of Meredith, the whole of Ibsen, and a little of Bernard Shaw. We may be fairly certain, too, that the time not spent in reading was spent in some stupendous argument in which the Greeks were pitted against the moderns, romance against realism, Racine against Shakespeare, until the lights were seen to have grown pale in the dawn.

The old lists are there to make us smile and perhaps to sigh a little, but we would give much to recall also the mood in which this orgy of reading was done. Happily, this reader was no prodigy, and with a little thought we can most of us recall the stages at least of our own initiation. The books we read in childhood, having purloined them from some shelf supposed to be inaccessible, have something of the unreality and awfulness of a stolen sight of the dawn coming over quiet fields when the household is asleep. Peeping between the curtains we see strange shapes of misty trees which we hardly recognize, though we may remember them all our lives; for children have a strange premonition of what is to come. But the later reading of which the above list is an example is quite a different matter. For the first time, perhaps, all restrictions have been removed, we can read what we like; libraries are at our command, and, best of all, friends who find themselves in the same position. For days upon end we do nothing but read. It is a time of extraordinary excitement and exaltation. We seem to rush about recognizing heroes. There is a sort of wonderment in our minds that we ourselves are really doing this, and mixed with it an absurd arrogance and desire to show our familiarity with the greatest human beings who have ever lived in the world. The passion for knowledge is then at its keenest, or at least most confident, and we have, too, an intense singleness of mind which the great writers gratify by making it appear that they are at one with us in their estimate of what is good in life. And as it is necessary to hold one’s own against some one who has adopted Pope, let us say, instead of Sir Thomas Browne, for a hero, we conceive a deep affection for these men, and feel that we know them not as other people know them, but privately by ourselves. We are fighting under their leadership, and almost in the light of their eyes. So we haunt the old bookshops and drag home folios and quartos, Euripides in wooden boards, and Voltaire in eighty-nine volumes octavo.

But these lists are curious documents, in that they seem to include scarcely any of the contemporary writers. Meredith and Hardy and Henry James were of course alive when this reader came to them, but they were already accepted among the classics. There is no man of his own generation who influences him as Carlyle, or Tennyson, or Ruskin influenced the young of their day. And this we believe to be very characteristic of youth, for unless there is some admitted giant he will have nothing to do with the smaller men, although they deal with the world he lives in. He will rather go back to the classics, and consort entirely with minds of the very first order. For the time being he holds himself aloof from all the activities of men, and, looking at them from a distance, judges them with superb severity.

Indeed, one of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them. We should like to think that we keep our standard as high as ever; but we certainly take more interest in the writings of our contemporaries and pardon their lack of inspiration for the sake of something that brings them nearer to us. It is even arguable that we get actually more from the living, although they may be much inferior, than from the dead. In the first place there can be no secret vanity in reading our contemporaries, and the kind of admiration which they inspire is extremely warm and genuine because in order to give way to our belief in them we have often to sacrifice some very respectable prejudice which does us credit. We have also to find our own reasons for what we like and dislike, which acts as a spur to our attention, and is the best way of proving that we have read the classics with understanding.

Thus to stand in a great bookshop crammed with books so new that their pages almost stick together, and the gilt on their backs is still fresh, has an excitement no less delightful than the old excitement of the second-hand bookstall. It is not perhaps so exalted. But the old hunger to know what the immortals thought has given place to a far more tolerant curiosity to know what our own generation is thinking. What do living men and women feel, what are their houses like and what clothes do they wear, what money have they and what food do they eat, what do they love and hate, what do they see of the surrounding world, and what is the dream that fills the spaces of their active lives? They tell us all these things in their books. In them we can see as much both of the mind and of the body of our time as we have eyes for seeing.

When such a spirit of curiosity has fully taken hold of us, the dust will soon lie thick upon the classics unless some necessity forces us to read them. For the living voices are, after all, the ones we understand the best. We can treat them as we treat our equals; they are guessing our riddles, and, what is perhaps more important, we understand their jokes. And we soon develop another taste, unsatisfied by the great—not a valuable taste, perhaps, but certainly a very pleasant possession—the taste for bad books. Without committing the indiscretion of naming names we know which authors can be trusted to produce yearly (for happily they are prolific) a novel, a book of poems or essays, which affords us indescribable pleasure. We owe a great deal to bad books; indeed, we come to count their authors and their heroes among those figures who play so large a part in our silent life. Something of the same sort happens in the case of the memoir writers and autobiographers, who have created almost a fresh branch of literature in our age. They are not all of them important people, but strangely enough, only the most important, the dukes and the statesmen, are ever really dull. The men and women who set out, with no excuse except perhaps that they saw the Duke of Wellington once, to confide to us their opinions, their quarrels, their aspirations, and their diseases, generally end by becoming, for the time at least, actors in those private dramas with which we beguile our solitary walks and our sleepless hours. Refine all this out of our consciousness and we should be poor indeed. And then there are the books of facts and history, books about bees and wasps and industries and gold mines and Empresses and diplomatic intrigues, about rivers and savages, trade unions, and Acts of Parliament, which we always read and always, alas! forget. Perhaps we are not making out a good case for a bookshop when we have to confess that it gratifies so many desires which have apparently nothing to do with literature. But let us remember that here we have a literature in the making. From these new books our children will select the one or two by which we shall be known for ever. Here, if we could recognize it, lies some poem, or novel, or history which will stand up and speak with other ages about our age when we lie prone and silent as the crowd of Shakespeare’s day is silent and lives for us only in the pages of his poetry.

This we believe to be true; and yet it is oddly difficult in the case of new books to know which are the real books and what it is that they are telling us, and which are the stuffed books which will come to pieces when they have lain about for a year or two. We can see that there are many books, and we are frequently told that every one can write nowadays. That may be true; yet we do not doubt that at the heart of this immense volubility, this flood and foam of language, this irreticence and vulgarity and triviality, there lies the heat of some great passion which only needs the accident of a brain more happily turned than the rest to issue in a shape which will last from age to age. It should be our delight to watch this turmoil, to do battle with the ideas and visions of our own time, to seize what we can use, to kill what we consider worthless, and above all to realize that we must be generous to the people who are giving shape as best they can to the ideas within them. No age of literature is so little submissive to authority as ours, so free from the dominion of the great; none seems so wayward with its gift of reverence, or so volatile in its experiments. It may well seem, even to the attentive, that there is no trace of school or aim in the work of our poets and novelists. But the pessimist is inevitable, and he shall not persuade us that our literature is dead, or prevent us from feeling how true and vivid a beauty flashes out as the young writers draw together to form their new vision, the ancient words of the most beautiful of living languages. Whatever we may have learnt from reading the classics we need now in order to judge the work of our contemporaries, for whenever there is life in them they will be casting their net out over some unknown abyss to snare new shapes, and we must throw our imaginations after them if we are to accept with understanding the strange gifts they bring back to us.

But if we need all our knowledge of the old writers in order to follow what the new writers are attempting, it is certainly true that we come from adventuring among new books with a far keener eye for the old. It seems that we should now be able to surprise their secrets; to look deep down into their work and see the parts come together, because we have watched the making of new books, and with eyes clear of prejudice can judge more truly what it is that they are doing, and what is good and what bad. We shall find, probably, that some of the great are less venerable than we thought them. Indeed, they are not so accomplished or so profound as some of our own time. But if in one or two cases this seems to be true, a kind of humiliation mixed with joy overcomes us in front of others. Take Shakespeare, or Milton, or Sir Thomas Browne. Our little knowledge of how things are done does not avail us much here, but it does lend an added zest to our enjoyment. Did we ever in our youngest days feel such amazement at their achievement as that which fills us now that we have sifted myriads of words and gone along uncharted ways in search of new forms for our new sensations? New books may be more stimulating and in some ways more suggestive than the old, but they do not give us that absolute certainty of delight which breathes through us when we come back again to Comus, or Lycidas, Urn Burial, or Antony and Cleopatra. Far be it from us to hazard any theory as to the nature of art. It may be that we shall never know more about it than we know by nature, and our longer experience of it teaches us this only—that of all our pleasures those we get from the great artists are indisputably among the best; and more we may not know. But, advancing no theory, we shall find one or two qualities in such works as these which we can hardly expect to find in books made within the span of our lifetime. Age itself may have an alchemy of its own. But this is true: you can read them as often as you will without finding that they have yielded any virtue and left a meaningless husk of words; and there is a complete finality about them. No cloud of suggestions hangs about them teasing us with a multitude of irrelevant ideas. But all our faculties are summoned to the task, as in the great moments of our own experience; and some consecration descends upon us from their hands which we return to life, feeling it more keenly and understanding it more deeply than before.

[Times Literary Supplement, Nov 30, 1916]

[]

Impassioned Prose.

When he was still a boy, his own discrimination led De Quincey to doubt whether ‘his natural vocation lay towards poetry’. He wrote poetry, eloquently and profusely, and his poetry was praised; but even so he decided that he was no poet, and the sixteen volumes of his collected works are written entirely in prose. After the fashion of his time, he wrote on many subjects—on political economy, on philosophy, on history; he wrote essays and biographies and confessions and memoirs. But as we stand before the long row of his books and make, as we are bound to make after all these years, our own selection, the whole mass and range of these sixteen volumes seems to reduce itself to one sombre level in which hang a few splendid stars. He dwells in our memory because he could make phrases like ‘trepidations of innumerable fugitives’, because he could compose scenes like that of the laurelled coach driving into the midnight market-place, because he could tell stories like that of the phantom woodcutter heard by his brother on the desert island. And, if we examine our choice and give a reason for it, we have to confess that, prose writer though he is, it is for his poetry that we read him and not for his prose.

What could be more damaging, to him as writer, to us as readers, than this confession? For if the critics agree on any point it is on this, that nothing is more reprehensible than for a prose writer to write like a poet. Poetry is poetry and prose is prose—how often have we not heard that! Poetry has one mission and prose another. Prose, Mr. Binyon wrote the other day, ‘is a medium primarily addressed to the intelligence, poetry to feeling and imagination’. And again, ‘the poetical prose has but a bastard kind of beauty, easily appearing overdressed’. It is impossible not to admit, in part at least, the truth of these remarks. Memory supplies but too many instances of discomfort, of anguish, when in the midst of sober prose suddenly the temperature rises, the rhythm changes, we go up with a lurch, come down with a bang, and wake, roused and angry. But memory supplies also a number of passages—in Browne, in Landor, in Carlyle, in Ruskin, in Emily Brontë—where there is no such jerk, no such sense (for this perhaps is at the root of our discomfort) of something unfused, unwrought, incongruous, and casting ridicule upon the rest. The prose writer has subdued his army of facts; he has brought them all under the same laws of perspective. They work upon our minds as poetry works upon them. We are not woken; we reach the next point—and it may well be highly commonplace—without any sense of strain.

But, unfortunately for those who would wish to see a great many more things said in prose than are now thought proper, we live under the rule of the novelists. If we talk of prose we mean in fact prose fiction. And of all writers the novelist has his hands fullest of facts. Smith gets up, shaves, has his breakfast, taps his egg, reads The Times. How can we ask the panting, the perspiring, the industrious scribe with all this on his hands to modulate beautifully off into rhapsodies about Time and Death and what the hunters are doing at the Antipodes? It would upset the whole proportions of his day. It would cast grave doubt upon his veracity. Moreover, the greatest of his order seem deliberately to prefer a method which is the antithesis of prose poetry. A shrug of the shoulders, a turn of the head, a few words spoken in a hurry at a moment of crisis—that is all. But the train has been laid so deep beneath page after page and chapter after chapter that the single word when it is spoken is enough to start an explosion. We have so lived and thought with these men and women that they need only raise a finger and it seems to reach the skies. To elaborate that gesture would be to spoil it. The whole tendency therefore of fiction is against prose poetry. The lesser novelists are not going to take risks which the greater deliberately avoid. They trust that, if only the egg is real and the kettle boils, stars and nightingales will somehow be thrown in by the imagination of the reader. And therefore all that side of the mind which is exposed in solitude they ignore. They ignore its thoughts, its rhapsodies, its dreams, with the result that the people of fiction bursting with energy on one side are atrophied on the other; while prose itself, so long in service to this drastic master, has suffered the same deformity, and will be fit, after another hundred years of such discipline, to write nothing but the immortal works of Bradshaw and Baedeker.

But happily there are in every age some writers who puzzle the critics, who refuse to go in with the herd. They stand obstinately across the boundary lines, and do a greater service by enlarging and fertilizing and influencing than by their actual achievement, which, indeed, is often too eccentric to be satisfactory. Browning did a service of this kind to poetry. Peacock and Samuel Butler have both had an influence upon novelists which is out of all proportion to their own popularity. And one of De Quincey’s claims to our gratitude, one of his main holds upon our interest, is that he was an exception and a solitary. He made a class for himself. He widened the choice for others. Faced with the usual problem of what to write, since write he must, he decided that with all his poetic sensibility he was not a poet. He lacked the fire and the concentration. Nor, again, was he a novelist. With immense powers of language at his command, he was incapable of a sustained and passionate interest in the affairs of other people. It was his disease, he said, ‘to meditate too much and to observe too little’. He would follow a poor family who went marketing on a Saturday night, sympathetically, but at a distance. He was intimate with no one. Then, again, he had an extraordinary gift for the dead languages, and a passion for acquiring knowledge of all kinds. Yet there was some quality in him which forbade him to shut himself up alone with his books, as such gifts seemed to indicate. The truth was that he dreamed—he was always dreaming. The faculty was his long before he took to eating opium. When he was a child he stood by his sister’s dead body and suddenly

a vault seemed to open in the zenith of the far blue sky, a shaft which ran up for ever. I, in spirit, rose as on billows that also ran up the shaft for ever; and the billows seemed to pursue the throne of God; but that also ran before us and fled away continually.

The visions were of extreme vividness; they made life seem a little dull in comparison; they extended it, they completed it. But in what form was he to express this that was the most real part of his own existence? There was none ready made to his hand. He invented, as he claimed, ‘modes of impassioned prose’. With immense elaboration and art he formed a style in which to express these ‘visionary scenes derived from the world of dreams’. For such prose there were no precedents, he believed; and he begged the reader to remember ‘the perilous difficulty’ of an attempt where ‘a single false note, a single word in a wrong key, ruins the whole music’.

Added to that ‘perilous difficulty’ was another which is often forced upon the reader’s attention. A prose writer may dream dreams and see visions, but they cannot be allowed to lie scattered, single, solitary upon the page. So spaced out they die. For prose has neither the intensity nor the self-sufficiency of poetry. It rises slowly off the ground; it must be connected on this side and on that. There must be some medium in which its ardours and ecstasies can float without incongruity, from which they receive support and impetus. Here was a difficulty which De Quincey often faced and often failed to solve. Many of his most tiresome and disfiguring faults are the result of the dilemma into which his genius plunged him. There was something in the story before him which kindled his interest and quickened his powers. For example, the Spanish Military Nun, as she descends half starved and frozen from the Andes, sees before her a belt of trees which promises safety. As if De Quincey had himself reached that shelter and could breathe in safety, he broadens out—

Oh! verdure of dark olive foliage, offered suddenly to fainting eyes, as if by some winged patriarchal herald of wrath relenting—solitary Arab’s tent, rising with saintly signals of peace in the dreadful desert, must Kate indeed die even yet, whilst she sees but cannot reach you? Outpost on the frontier of man’s dominions, standing within life, but looking out upon everlasting death, wilt thou hold up the anguish of thy mocking invitation only to betray?

Alas, how easy it is to rise, how dangerous to fall! He has Kate on his hands; he is half-way through with her story; he must rouse himself, he must collect himself, he must descend from these happy heights to the levels of ordinary existence. And, again and again, it is in returning to earth that De Quincey is undone. How is he to bridge the horrid transition? How is he to turn from an angel with wings of flame and eyes of fire to a gentleman in black who talks sense? Sometimes he makes a joke—it is generally painful. Sometimes he tells a story—it is always irrelevant. Most often he spreads himself out in a waste of verbosity, where any interest that there may have been peters out dismally and loses itself in the sand. We can read no more.

It is tempting to say that De Quincey failed because he was not a novelist. He ought to have left Kate alone; he had not a novelist’s sense of character and action. To a critic such formulas are helpful; unfortunately, they are often false. For in fact, De Quincey can convey character admirably; he is a master of the art of narrative once he has succeeded (and the condition is indispensable for all writers) in adjusting the perspective to suit his own eyesight. It was a sight, it is true, that required a most curious rearrangement of the landscape. Nothing must come too close. A veil must be drawn over the multitudinous disorder of human affairs. It must always be possible, without distressing the reader, to allude to a girl as ‘a prepossessing young female’. A mist must lie upon the human face. The hills must be higher and the distances bluer than they are in the world we know. He required, too, endless leisure and ample elbow-room. He wanted time to soliloquize and loiter; here to pick up some trifle and bestow upon it all his powers of analysis and decoration; here to brush aside such patient discrimination and widen and enlarge and amplify until nothing remains but the level sands and the immense sea. He wanted a subject that would allow him all possible freedom and yet possess enough emotional warmth to curb his inborn verbosity.

He found it, naturally, in himself. He was a born autobiographer. If the Opium Eater remains his masterpiece, a longer and less perfect book, the Autobiographic Sketches, runs it very close. For here it is fitting that he should stand a little apart, should look back, under cover of his raised hand, at scenes which had almost melted into the past. His enemy, the hard fact, became cloudlike and supple under his hands. He was under no obligation to recite ‘the old hackneyed roll-call, chronologically arranged, of inevitable facts in a man’s life’. It was his object to record impressions, to render states of mind without particularizing the features of the precise person who had experienced them. A serene and lovely light lies over the whole of that distant prospect of his childhood. The house, the fields, the garden, even the neighbouring town of Manchester, all seem to exist, but far away on some island separated from us by a veil of blue. On this background, where no detail is accurately rendered, the little group of children and parents, the little island of home and garden, are all distinctly visible and yet as if they moved and had their being behind a veil. Upon the opening chapters rests the solemnity of a splendid summer’s day, whose radiance, long since sunk, has something awful in it, in whose profound stillness sounds strangely reverberate—the sounds of hooves on the far-away high road, the sound of words like ‘palm’, the sound of that ‘solemn wind, the saddest that ear ever heard’, which was for ever to haunt the mind of the little boy who now heard it for the first time. Nor, so long as he keeps within the circle of the past, is it necessary that he should face the disagreeable necessity of waking. About the reality of childhood still hung some of the charm of illusion. If the peace is broken, it is by an apparition like that of the mad dog which passes and pauses with something of the terror of a dream. If he needs variety, he finds it in describing with a whimsical humour perfectly suited to the subject the raptures and miseries of childhood. He mocks; he dilates; he makes the very small very great; then he describes the war with the mill hands, the brothers’ imaginary kingdoms, his brother’s boast that he could walk upon the ceiling like a fly, with admirable particularity. He can rise easily and fall naturally here. Here too, given his own memories to work upon, he can exercise his extraordinary powers of description. He was never exact; he disliked glitter and emphasis; he sacrificed the showy triumphs of the art; but he had to perfection the gift of composition. Scenes come together under his hands like congregations of clouds which gently join and slowly disperse or hang solemnly still. So displayed before us we see the coaches gathering at the post office in all their splendour; the lady in the carriage to whom the news of victory brings only sorrow; the couple surprised on the road at midnight by the thunder of the mail coach and the threat of death; Lamb asleep in his chair; Ann disappearing for ever into the dark London night. All these scenes have something of the soundlessness and the lustre of dreams. They swim up to the surface, they sink down again into the depths. They have, into the bargain, the strange power of growing in our minds, so that it is always a surprise to come upon them again and see what, in the interval, our minds have done to alter and expand.

Meanwhile, all these scenes compose an autobiography of a kind, but of a kind which is so unusual that one is forced to ask what one has learnt from it about De Quincey in the end. Of facts, scarcely anything. One has been told only what De Quincey wished us to know; and even that has been chosen for the sake of some adventitious quality—as that it fitted in here, or was the right colour to go there—never for its truth. But nevertheless there grows upon us a curious sense of intimacy. It is an intimacy with the mind, and not with the body; yet we cannot help figuring to ourselves, as the rush of eloquence flows, the fragile little body, the fluttering hands, the glowing eyes, the alabaster cheeks, the glass of opium on the table. We can guess that no one so gifted with silver speech, so prone to plunge into reverie and awe, held his own imperturbably among his fellows. We can guess at his evasion and unpunctualities; at the hordes of old papers that littered his room; at the courtesy which excused his inability to abide by the ordinary rules of life; at the overmastering desire that possessed him to wander and dream on the hills alone; at the seasons of gloom and irritability with which he paid for that exquisite fineness of ear that tuned each word to harmony and set each paragraph flowing and following like the waves of the sea. All this we know or guess. But it is odd to reflect how little, after all, we have been admitted to intimacy. In spite of the fact that he talks of confessions and calls the work by which he set most store Suspiria de Profundis, he is always self-possessed, secretive, and composed. His confession is not that he has sinned but that he has dreamed. Hence it comes about that his most perfect passages are not lyrical but descriptive. They are not cries of anguish which admit us to closeness and sympathy; they are descriptions of states of mind in which, often, time is miraculously prolonged and space miraculously expanded. When in the Suspiria de Profundis he tries to rise straight from the ground and to achieve in a few pages without prelude or sequence his own peculiar effects of majesty and distance, his force is not sufficient to bear him the whole distance. There juts up a comment upon the rules of Eton, a note to remind us that this refers to the tobacco States of North America, in the midst of ‘Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow’, which puts their sweet-tongued phrases sadly out of countenance.

But if he was not a lyric writer, he was undoubtedly a descriptive writer, a reflective writer, who with only prose at his command—an instrument hedged about with restrictions, debased by a thousand common uses—made his way into precincts which are terribly difficult to approach. The breakfast table, he seems to say, is only a temporary apparition which we can think into non-existence, or invest with such associations that even its mahogany legs have their charm. To sit cheek by jowl with our fellows cramped up together is distasteful, indeed repulsive. But draw a little apart, see people in groups, as outlines, and they become at once memorable and full of beauty. Then it is not the actual sight or sound itself that matters, but the reverberations that it makes as it travels through our minds. These are often to be found far away, strangely transformed; but it is only by gathering up and putting together these echoes and fragments that we arrive at the true nature of our experience. So thinking, he altered slightly the ordinary relationships. He shifted the values of familiar things. And this he did in prose, which makes us wonder whether, then, it is quite so limited as the critics say, and ask further whether the prose writer, the novelist, might not capture fuller and finer truths than are now his aim if he ventured into those shadowy regions where De Quincey has been before him.

[Times Literary Supplement, Sep 16, 1926]

[]

Life and the Novelist.

The novelist—it is his distinction and his danger—is terribly exposed to life. Other artists, partially at least, withdraw; they shut themselves up for weeks alone with a dish of apples and a paint-box, or a roll of music paper and a piano. When they emerge it is to forget and distract themselves. But the novelist never forgets and is seldom distracted. He fills his glass and lights his cigarette, he enjoys presumably all the pleasures of talk and table, but always with a sense that he is being stimulated and played upon by the subject-matter of his art. Taste, sound, movement, a few words here, a gesture there, a man coming in, a woman going out, even the motor that passes in the street or the beggar who shuffles along the pavement, and all the reds and blues and lights and shades of the scene claim his attention and rouse his curiosity. He can no more cease to receive impressions than a fish in mid-ocean can cease to let the water rush through his gills.

But if this sensibility is one of the conditions of the novelist’s life, it is obvious that all writers whose books survive have known how to master it and make it serve their purposes. They have finished the wine and paid the bill and gone off, alone, into some solitary room where, with toil and pause, in agony (like Flaubert), with struggle and rush, tumultuously (like Dostoevsky) they have mastered their perceptions, hardened them, and changed them into the fabrics of their art.

So drastic is the process of selection that in its final state we can often find no trace of the actual scene upon which the chapter was based. For in that solitary room, whose door the critics are for ever trying to unlock, processes of the strangest kind are gone through. Life is subjected to a thousand disciplines and exercises. It is curbed; it is killed. It is mixed with this, stiffened with that, brought into contrast with something else; so that when we get our scene at a café a year later the surface signs by which we remembered it have disappeared. There emerges from the mist something stark, something formidable and enduring, the bone and substance upon which our rush of indiscriminating emotion was founded.

Of these two processes, the first—to receive impressions—is undoubtedly the easier, the simpler, and the pleasanter. And it is quite possible, provided one is gifted with a sufficiently receptive temperament and a vocabulary rich enough to meet its demands, to make a book out of this preliminary emotion alone. Three-quarters of the novels that appear to-day are concocted of experience to which no discipline, except the mild curb of grammer and the occasional rigours of chapter divisions, has been applied. Is Miss Stern’s A Deputy Was King another example of this class of writing, has she taken her material away with her into solitude, or is it neither one nor the other, but an incongruous mixture of soft and hard, transient and enduring?

A Deputy Was King continues the story of the Rakonitz family which was begun some years ago in The Matriarch. It is a welcome reappearance, for the Rakonitz family is a gifted and cosmopolitan family with the admirable quality, so rare now in English fiction, of belonging to no particular sect. No parish boundary contains them. They overflow the continent. They are to be found in Italy and Austria, in Paris and Bohemia. If they lodge temporarily in some London studio they are not condemning themselves thereby to wear forever the livery of Chelsea, or Bloomsbury, or Kensington. Abundantly nourished on a diet of rich meats and rare wines, expensively but exquisitely clothed, enviably though inexplicably flush of ready money, no restraint of class or convention lies upon them, if we except the year 1921; it is essential that they should be up to date. They dance, they marry, they live with this man or with that; they bask in the Italian sun; they swarm in and out of each other’s houses and studios, gossiping, quarrelling, making it up again. For, after all, besides the constraint of fashion, they lie, consciously or unconsciously, under the bond of family. They have that Jewish tenacity of affection which common hardship has bred in an outcast race. Hence, in spite of their surface gregariousness, they are fundamentally loyal to each other underneath. Toni and Val and Loraine may quarrel and tear each other asunder publicly, but in private the Rakonitz women are indissolubly united. The present instalment of the family history, which, though it introduces the Goddards and relates the marriage of Toni and Giles Goddard, is really the history of a family, and not of an episode, pauses, for the time presumably, in an Italian villa provided with seventeen bedrooms, so that uncles, aunts, cousins can all come to lodge there. For Toni Goddard, with all her fashion and modernity, would rather shelter uncles and aunts than entertain emperors, and a second cousin whom she has not seen since she was a child is a prize above rubies.

From such materials surely a good novel might be made—that is what one catches oneself saying, before a hundred pages are finished. And this voice, which is not altogether our own, but the voice of that dissentient spirit which may split off and take a line of its own as we read, should be cross-examined instantly, lest its hints should spoil the pleasure of the whole. What, then, does it mean by insinuating this doubtful, grudging sentiment in the midst of our general well-being? Hitherto nothing has interfered with our enjoyment. Short of being a Rakonitz oneself, of actually taking part in one of those ‘diamonded evenings’, dancing, drinking, flirting with the snow upon the roof and the gramophone braying out ‘It’s moonlight in Kalua’, short of seeing Betty and Colin ‘slightly grotesque advancing … in full panoply; velvet spread like a huge inverted cup round Betty’s feet, as she minced over the pure, sparkling strip of snow, the absurd tangle of plumes on Colin’s helmet’—short of taking hold of all this glitter and fantasy with one’s own fingers and thumbs, what is better than Miss Sterne’s report of it?

The grudging voice will concede that it is all very brilliant; will admit that a hundred pages have flashed by like a hedge seen from an express train; but will reiterate that for all that something is wrong. A man can elope with a woman without our noticing it. That is a proof that there are no values. There is no shape for these apparitions. Scene melts into scene; person into person. People rise out of a fog of talk, and sink back into talk again. They are soft and shapeless with words. There is no grasping them.

The charge has substance in it, because it is true, when we consider it, that Giles Goddard can run off with Loraine, and it is to us as if somebody had got up and gone out of the room—a matter of no importance. We have been letting ourselves bask in appearances. All this representation of the movement of life has sapped our imaginative power. We have sat receptive and watched, with our eyes rather than with our minds, as we do at the cinema, what passes on the screen in front of us. When we want to use what we have learnt about one of the characters to urge them through some crisis we realize that we have no steam up; no energy at our disposal. How they dressed, what they ate, the slang they used—we know all that; but not what they are. For what we know about these people has been given us (with one exception) by following the methods of life. The characters are built up by observing the incoherence, the fresh natural sequences of a person who, wishing to tell the story of a friend’s life in talk, breaks off a thousand times to bring in something fresh, to add something forgotten, so that in the end, though one may feel that one has been in the presence of life, the particular life in question remains vague. This hand-to-mouth method, this ladling out of sentences which have the dripping brilliance of words that live upon real lips, is admirable for one purpose, disastrous for another. All is fluent and graphic; but no character or situation emerges cleanly. Bits of extraneous matter are left sticking to the edges. For all their brilliancy the scenes are clouded; the crises are blurred. A passage of description will make both the merit and the defect of the method clear. Miss Sterne wants us to realize the beauty of a Chinese coat.

Gazing at it, you might think you had never seen embroidery before, for it was the very climax of all that was brilliant and exotic. The flower-petals were worked in a flaming pattern round the broad bands of kingfisher blue embroidery; and again round each oval plaque that was woven of a silvery heron with a long green beak, and behind his outstretched wings a rainbow. All among the silver arabesques, butterflies were delicately poised, golden butterflies and black butterflies, and butterflies that were gold and black. The closer you looked the more there was to see; intricate markings on the butterfly wings, purple and grass-green and apricot …

As if we had not enough to see already, she goes on to add how there were tiny stamens springing from every flower, and circles ringing the eye of each separate stork, until the Chinese coat wobbles before our eyes and merges in one brilliant blur.

The same method applied to people has the same result. Quality is added to quality, fact to fact, until we cease to discriminate and our interest is suffocated under a plethora of words. For it is true of every object—coat or human being—that the more one looks the more there is to see. The writer’s task is to take one thing and let it stand for twenty: a task of danger and difficulty; but only so is the reader relieved of the swarm and confusion of life and branded effectively with the particular aspect which the writer wishes him to see. That Miss Sterne has other tools at her disposal, and could use them if she liked, is hinted now and again, and is revealed for a moment in the brief chapter describing the death of the matriarch, Anastasia Rakonitz. Here suddenly the flow of words seems to darken and thicken. We are aware of something beneath the surface, something left unsaid for us to find out for ourselves and think over. The two pages in which we are told how the old woman died asking for gooseliver sausage and a tortoise-shell comb, short though they are, hold, to my thinking, twice the substance of any other thirty pages in the book.

These remarks bring me back to the question with which I started: the relation of the novelist to life and what it should be. That he is terribly exposed to life A Deputy Was King proves once more. He can sit and watch life and make his book out of the very foam and effervescence of his emotions; or he can put his glass down, retire to his room and subject his trophy to those mysterious processes by which life becomes, like the Chinese coat, able to stand by itself—a sort of impersonal miracle. But in either case he is faced by a problem which does not afflict the workers in any other arts to the same extent. Stridently, clamorously, life is forever pleading that she is the proper end of fiction and that the more he sees of her and catches of her the better his book will be. She does not add, however, that she is grossly impure; and that the side she flaunts uppermost is often, for the novelist, of no value whatever. Appearance and movement are the lures she trails to entice him after her, as if these were her essence, and by catching them he gained his goal. So believing, he rushes feverishly in her wake, ascertains what fox-trot is being played at the Embassy, what skirt is being worn in Bond Street, worms and winds his way into the last flings of topical slang, and imitates to perfection the last toss of colloquial jargon. He becomes terrified more than anything of falling behind the times: his chief concern is that the thing described shall be fresh from the shell with the down on its head.

This kind of work requires great dexterity and nimbleness, and gratifies a real desire. To know the outside of one’s age, its dresses and its dances and its catchwords, has an interest and even a value which the spiritual adventures of a curate, or the aspirations of a high-minded schoolmistress, solemn as they are, for the most part lack. It might well be claimed, too, that to deal with the crowded dance of modern life so as to produce the illusion of reality needs far higher literary skill than to write a serious essay upon the poetry of John Donne or the novels of M. Proust. The novelist, then, who is a slave to life and concocts his books out of the froth of the moment is doing something difficult, something which pleases, something which, if you have a mind that way, may even instruct. But his work passes as the year 1921 passes, as fox-trots pass, and in three years’ time looks as dowdy and dull as any other fashion which has served its turn and gone its way.

On the other hand, to retire to one’s study in fear of life is equally fatal. It is true that plausible imitations of Addison, say, can be manufactured in the quiet there, but they are as brittle as plaster and as insipid. To survive, each sentence must have, at its heart, a little spark of fire, and this, whatever the risk, the novelist must pluck with his own hands from the blaze. His state then is a precarious one. He must expose himself to life; he must risk the danger of being led away and tricked by her deceitfulness; he must seize her treasure from her and let her trash run to waste. But at a certain moment he must leave the company and withdraw, alone, to that mysterious room where his body is hardened and fashioned into permanence by processes which, if they elude the critic, hold for him so profound a fascination.

[New York Herald Tribune, Nov 7, 1926]

[]

On Rereading Meredith.

This new study [◉1] of Meredith is not a text-book to be held in one hand while in the other you hold The Shaving of Shagpat or Modern Love; it is addressed to those who have so far solved the difficulties of the Master that they wish to make up their minds as to his final position in English literature. The book should do much to crystallize opinion upon Meredith, if only because it will induce many people to read him again. For Mr. Crees has written in a spirit of enthusiasm which makes it easy to do so. He summons Diana and Willoughby Patterne and Richard Feverel from the shelves where they have fallen a little silent lately and in a moment the air is full of high-pitched, resonant voices, speaking the unmistakable language of metaphor, epigram, and fantastic poetic dialogue. Some readers, to judge from our own case, will feel a momentary qualm, as at meeting after the lapse of years some hero so ardently admired once that his eccentricities and foibles are now scarcely tolerable; they seem to preserve too well the faults of our own youth. Further, in the presence of so faithful an admirer as Mr. Crees we may be reminded of some intervening disloyalties. It was not Thackeray or Dickens or George Eliot who seriously tempted us from our allegiance; but can we say the same of the great Russians? Oddly enough, when Mr. Crees is taking Meredith’s measure by comparing him with his contemporaries he makes no mention of Turgenev, Tolstoy, or Dostoevsky. But it was Fathers and Sons, War and Peace, Crime and Punishment that seduced multitudes of the faithful and, worse still, seemed for the time to reduce Meredith to an insular hero bred and cherished for the delight of connoisseurs in some sheltered corner of a Victorian hothouse.

The Russians might well overcome us, for they seemed to possess an entirely new conception of the novel and one that was larger, saner, and much more profound than ours. It was one that allowed human life in all its width and depth, with every shade of feeling and subtlety of thought, to flow into their pages without the distortion of personal eccentricity or mannerism. Life was too serious to be juggled with. It was too important to be manipulated. Could any English novel survive in the furnace of that overpowering sincerity? For some time the verdict seemed to go tacitly against Meredith. His fine phrases, his perpetual imagery, the superabundant individuality which so much resembled an overweening egotism seemed to be the very stuff to perish in that uncompromising flame. Perhaps some of us went as far as to believe that the process had already been accomplished and that it was useless to open books in which you would find nothing but charred bones and masses of contorted wire. The poems, Modern Love, Love in the Valley, and some of the shorter pieces survived the ordeal more successfully and did perhaps keep alive that latent enthusiasm upon which Mr. Crees now blows with the highest praise that it is possible to bestow upon literature. He does not scruple to compare Meredith with Shakespeare. Shakespeare alone, he says, could have written the ‘Diversion Played upon a Penny Whistle’ in Richard Feverel. Meredith ‘illustrates better than any since Shakespeare that impetuous mental energy which Matthew Arnold deemed the source of our literary greatness’. One might even infer from some statements that Meredith was the undisputed equal of the greatest of poets. ‘No man has ever been endowed with richer gifts.’ He was the possessor of ‘in some ways the most consummate intellect that has ever been devoted to literature’. These, moreover, are not the irresponsible flings of a momentary enthusiasm but the considered opinion of a man who writes with ability and critical insight and has reached his superlatives by intelligible degrees of appreciation. We should perhaps alter his scale by putting Donne in the place of Shakespeare; but however we may regulate our superlatives he creates the right mood for reading Meredith again.

The right mood for reading Meredith should have a large proportion of enthusiasm in it, for Meredith aims at, and when he is successful has his dwelling in, the very heart of the emotions. There, indeed, we have one of the chief differences between him and the Russians. They accumulate; they accept ugliness; they seek to understand; they penetrate further and further into the human soul with their terrible power of sustained insight and their undeviating reverence for truth. But Meredith takes truth by storm; he takes it with a phrase, and his best phrases are not mere phrases but are compact of many different observations, fused into one and flashed out in a line of brilliant light. It is by such phrases that we get to know his characters. They come to mind at once in thinking of them. Sir Willoughby ‘has a leg’. Clara Middleton ‘carries youth like a flag’. Vernon Whitford is ‘Phoebus Apollo turned fasting Friar’; every one who has read the novels holds a store of such phrases in his memory. But the same process is applied not only to single characters but to large and complicated situations where a number of different states of mind are represented. Here, too, he wishes to crush the truth out in a series of metaphors or a string of epigrams with as little resort to dull fact as may be. Then, indeed, the effort is prodigious, and the confusion often chaotic. But the failure arises from the enormous scope of his ambition. Let us suppose that he has to describe a tea party; he will begin by destroying everything by which it is easy to recognize a tea party—chairs, tables, cups, and the rest; he will represent the scene merely by a ring on a finger and a plume passing the window. But into the ring and plume he puts such passion and character and such penetrating rays of vision play about the denuded room that we seem to be in possession of all the details as if a painstaking realist had described each one of them separately. To have produced this effect as often as Meredith has done so is an enormous feat. That is the way, as one trusts at such moments, that the art of fiction will develop. For such beauty and such high emotional excitement it is well worth while to exchange the solidity which is the result of knowing the day of the week, how the ladies are dressed, and by what series of credible events the great crisis was accomplished. But the doubt will suggest itself whether we are not sacrificing something of greater importance than mere solidity. We have gained moments of astonishing intensity; we have gained a high level of sustained beauty; but perhaps the beauty is lacking in some quality that makes it a satisfying beauty? ‘My love’, Meredith wrote, ‘is for epical subjects—nor for cobwebs in a putrid corner, though I know the fascination of unravelling them.’ He avoids ugliness as he avoids dullness. ‘Sheer realism’, he wrote, ‘is at best the breeder of the dungfly.’ Sheer romance breeds an insect more diaphanous, but it tends perhaps to be even more heartless than the dungfly. A touch of realism—or is it a touch of something more akin to sympathy?—would have kept the Meredith hero from being the honourable but tedious gentleman that, with deference to Mr. Crees, we have always found him. It would have charged the high mountain air of his books with the greater variety of clouds.

But, for good or for ill, Meredith has the habit of nobleness ingrained in him. No modern writer, for example, has so completely ignored the colloquial turns of speech and cast his dialogue in sentences that could without impropriety have been spoken by Queen Elizabeth in person. ‘Out of my sight, I say!’ ‘I went to him of my own will to run from your heartlessness, mother—that I call mother!’ are two examples found upon turning two pages of The Tragic Comedians. That is his natural pitch, although we may guess that the long indifference of the public increased his tendency to the strained and the artificial. For this, among other reasons, it is easy to complain that his world is an aristocratic world, strictly bounded, thinly populated, a little hard-hearted, and not to be entered by the poor, the vulgar, the stupid, or that very common and interesting individual who is a mixture of all three.

And yet there can be no doubt that, even judged by his novels alone, Meredith remains a great writer. The doubt is rather whether he can be called a great novelist; whether, indeed, anyone to whom the technique of novel writing had so much that was repulsive in it can excel compared with those who are writing, not against the grain, but with it. He struggles to escape, and the chapters of amazing but fruitless energy which he produces in his struggle to escape are the true obstacles to the enjoyment of Meredith. What, we ask, is he struggling against? What is he striving for? Was he, perhaps, a dramatist born out of due time—an Elizabethan sometimes, and sometimes, as the last chapters of The Egoist suggest, a dramatist of the Restoration? Like a dramatist, he flouts probability, disdains coherency, and lives from one high moment to the next. His dialogue often seems to crave the relief of blank verse. And for all his analytic industry in the dissection of character, he creates not the living men and women who justify modern fiction, but superb conceptions who have more of the general than of the particular in them. There is a large and beautiful conception of womanhood in Diana rather than a single woman; there is the fervour of romantic love in Richard Feverel, but the faces of the lovers are dim in the rosy light. In this lies both the strength and the weakness of his books, but, if the weakness is at all of the kind we have indicated, the strength is of a nature to counterbalance it. His English power of imagination, with its immense audacity and fertility, his superb mastery of the great emotions of courage and love, his power of summoning nature into sympathy with man and of merging him in her vastness, his glory in all fine living and thinking—these are the qualities that give his conceptions their size and universality. In these respects we must recognize his true descent from the greatest of English writers and his enjoyment of qualities that are expressed nowhere save in the masterpieces of our literature.

[Times Literary Supplement, Jul 25, 1918]

[]

The Anatomy of Fiction.

Sometimes at country fairs you may have seen a professor on a platform exhorting the peasants to come up and buy his wonder-working pills. Whatever their disease, whether of body or mind, he has a name for it and a cure; and if they hang back in doubt he whips out a diagram and points with a stick at different parts of the human anatomy, and gabbles so quickly such long Latin words that first one shyly stumbles forward and then another, and takes his bolus and carries it away and unwraps it secretly and swallows it in hope. ‘The young aspirant to the art of fiction who knows himself to be an incipient realist’, Mr. Hamilton vociferates from his platform, [◉2] and the incipient realists advance and receive—for the professor is generous—five pills together with nine suggestions for home treatment. In other words they are given five ‘review questions’ to answer, and are advised to read nine books or parts of books. ‘1. Define the difference between realism and romance. 2. What are the advantages and disadvantages of the realistic method? 3. What are the advantages and disadvantages of the romantic method?’—that is the kind of thing they work out at home, and with such success that a ‘revised and enlarged edition’ of the book has been issued on the tenth anniversary of the first publication. In America, evidently, Mr. Hamilton is considered a very good professor, and has no doubt a bundle of testimonials to the miraculous nature of his cures. But let us consider: Mr. Hamilton is not a professor; we are not credulous ploughboys; and fiction is not a disease.

In England we have been in the habit of saying that fiction is an art. We are not taught to write novels; dissuasion is our most usual incentive; and though perhaps the critics have ‘deduced and formulated the general principles of the art of fiction’, they have done their work as a good housemaid does hers; they have tidied up after the party is over. Criticism seldom or never applies to the problems of the present moment. On the other hand, any good novelist, whether he be dead or alive, has something to say about them, though it is said very indirectly, differently to different people, and differently at different stages of the same person’s development. Thus, if anything is essential, it is essential to do your reading with your own eyes. But, to tell the truth, Mr. Hamilton has sickened us of the didactic style. Nothing appears to be essential save perhaps an elementary knowledge of the A.B.C., and it is pleasant to remember that Henry James, when he took to dictation, dispensed even with that. Still, if you have a natural taste for books it is probable that after reading Emma, to take an instance, some reflections upon the art of Jane Austen may occur to you—how exquisitely one incident relieves another; how definitely, by not saying something, she says it; how surprising, therefore, her expressive phrases when they come. Between the sentences, apart from the story, a little shape of some kind builds itself up. But learning from books is a capricious business at best, and the teaching so vague and changeable that in the end, far from calling books either ‘romantic’ or ‘realistic’, you will be more inclined to think them, as you think people, very mixed, very distinct, very unlike one another. But this would never do for Mr. Hamilton. According to him every work of art can be taken to pieces, and those pieces can be named and numbered, divided and subdivided, and given their order of precedence, like the internal organs of a frog. Thus we learn how to put them together again—that is, according to Mr. Hamilton, we learn how to write. There is the complication, the major knot, and the explication; the inductive and the deductive methods; the kinetic and the static; the direct and the indirect with subdivisions of the same; connotation, annotation, personal equation, and denotation; logical sequence and chronological succession—all parts of the frog and all capable of further dissection. Take the case of ‘emphasis’ alone. There are eleven kinds of emphasis. Emphasis by terminal position, by initial position, by pause, by direct proportion, by inverse proportion, by iteration, by antithesis, by surprise, by suspense—are you tired already? But consider the Americans. They have written one story eleven times over, with a different kind of emphasis in each. Indeed, Mr. Hamilton’s book teaches us a great deal about the Americans.

Still, as Mr. Hamilton uneasily perceives now and then, you may dissect your frog, but you cannot make it hop; there is, unfortunately, such a thing as life. Directions for imparting life to fiction are given, such as to ‘train yourself rigorously never to be bored’, and to cultivate ‘a lively curiosity and a ready sympathy’. But it is evident that Mr. Hamilton does not like life, and, with such a tidy museum as his, who can blame him? He has found life very troublesome, and, if you come to consider it, rather unnecessary; for, after all, there are books. But Mr. Hamilton’s views on life are so illuminating that they must be given in his own words:

Perhaps in the actual world we should never bother to converse with illiterate provincial people; and yet we do not feel it a waste of time and energy to meet them in the pages of Middlemarch. For my own part, I have always, in actual life, avoided meeting the sort of people that appear in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair; and yet I find it not only interesting but profitable to associate with them through the entire extent of a rather lengthy novel.

‘Illiterate provincial people’—‘interesting but profitable’—‘waste of time and energy’—now after much wandering and painful toil we are on the right track at last. For long it seemed that nothing could reward the American people for having written eleven themes upon the eleven kinds of emphasis. But now we perceive dimly that there is something to be gained by the daily flagellation of the exhausted brain. It is not a title; it has nothing to do with pleasure or with literature; but it appears that Mr. Hamilton and his industrious band see far off upon the horizon a circle of superior enlightenment to which, if only they can keep on reading long enough, they may attain. Every book demolished is a milestone passed. Books in foreign languages count twice over. And a book like this is of the nature of a dissertation to be sent up to the supreme examiner, who may be, for anything we know, the ghost of Matthew Arnold. Will Mr. Hamilton be admitted? Can they have the heart to reject anyone so ardent, so dusty, so worthy, so out of breath? Alas! look at his quotations; consider his comments upon them:

‘The murmuring of innumerable bees.’ … The word innumerable, which denotes to the intellect merely ‘incapable of being numbered,’ is, in this connection, made to suggest to the senses the murmuring of bees.

The credulous ploughboy could have told him more than that. It is not necessary to quote what he says about ‘magic casements’ and the ‘iniquity of oblivion’. Is there not, upon page 208, a definition of style?

No; Mr. Hamilton will never be admitted; he and his disciples must toil for ever in the desert sand, and the circle of illumination will, we fear, grow fainter and farther upon their horizon. It is curious to find, after writing the above sentence, how little one is ashamed of being, where literature is concerned, an unmitigated snob.

[Athenaeum, May 16, 1919]

[]

Gothic Romance.

It says much for Miss Birkhead’s [◉3] natural good sense that she has been able to keep her head where many people would have lost theirs. She has read a great many books without being suffocated. She has analysed a great many plots without being nauseated. Her sense of literature has not been extinguished by the waste-paper baskets full of old novels so courageously heaped on top of it. For her ‘attempt to trace in outline the origin of the Gothic romance and the tale of terror’ has necessarily led her to grope in basements and attics where the light is dim and the dust is thick. To trace the course of one strand in the thick skein of our literature is well worth doing. But perhaps Miss Birkhead would have increased the interest of her work if she had enlarged her scope to include some critical discussion of the aesthetic value of shock and terror, and had ventured some analysis of the taste which demands this particular stimulus. But her narrative is quite readable enough to supply the student with material for pushing the enquiry a little further.

Since it is held that Gothic romance was introduced by Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, in the year 1764, there is no need to confound it with the romance of Spenser or of Shakespeare. It is a parasite, an artificial commodity, produced half in joke in reaction against the current style, or in relief from it. If we run over the names of the most famous of the Gothic romancers—Clara Reeve, Mrs. Radcliffe, Monk Lewis, Charles Maturin, Sarah Wilkinson—we shall smile at the absurdity of the visions which they conjure up. We shall, perhaps, congratulate ourselves upon our improvement. Yet since our ancestors bought two thousand copies of Mrs. Bennett’s Beggar Girl and her Benefactors, on the day of publication, at a cost of thirty-six shillings for the seven volumes, there must have been something in the trash that was appetizing, or something in the appetites that was coarse. It is only polite to give our ancestors the benefit of the doubt. Let us try to put ourselves in their places. The books that formed part of the ordinary library in the year 1764 were, presumably, Johnson’s Vanity of Human Wishes, Gray’s Poems, Richardson’s Clarissa, Addison’s Cato, Pope’s Essay on Man. No one could wish for a more distinguished company. At the same time, as literary critics are too little aware, a love of literature is often roused and for the first years nourished not by the good books, but by the bad. It will be an ill day when all the reading is done in libraries and none of it in tubes. In the eighteenth century there must have been a very large public which found no delight in the peculiar literary merits of the age; and if we reflect how long the days were and how empty of distraction, we need not be surprised to find a school of writers grown up in flat defiance of the prevailing masters. Horace Walpole, Clara Reeve, and Mrs. Radcliffe all turned their backs upon their time and plunged into the delightful obscurity of the Middle Ages, which were so much richer than the eighteenth century in castles, barons, moats, and murders.

What Horace Walpole began half in fun was continued seriously and with considerable power by Mrs. Radcliffe. That she had a conscience in the matter is evident from the pains she is at to explain her mysteries when they have done their work. The human body ‘decayed and disfigured by worms, which were visible in the features and hands’, turns out to be a waxen image credibly placed there in fulfilment of a vow. But there is little wonder that a novelist perpetually on the stretch first to invent mysteries and then to explain them had no leisure for the refinements of the art. ‘Mrs. Radcliffe’s heroines’, says Miss Birkhead, ‘resemble nothing more than a composite photograph in which all distinctive traits are merged into an expressionless type.’ The same fault can be found with most books of sensation and adventure, and is, after all, inherent in the subject; for it is unlikely that a lady confronted by a male body stark naked, wreathed in worms, where she had looked, maybe, for a pleasant landscape in oils, should do more than give a loud cry and drop senseless. And women who give loud cries and drop senseless do it in much the same way. That is one of the reasons why it is extremely difficult to write a tale of terror which continues to shock and does not first become insipid and later ridiculous. Even Miss Wilkinson, who wrote that ‘Adeline Barnett was fair as a lily, tall as the pine, her fine dark eyes sparkling as diamonds, and she moved with the majestic air of a goddess’, had to ridicule her own favourite style before she had done. Scott, Jane Austen, and Peacock stooped from their heights to laugh at the absurdity of the convention and drove it, at any rate, to take refuge underground. For it flourished subterraneously all through the nineteenth century, and for sixpence you can buy to-day at the bookstall the recognizable descendant of the Mysteries of Udolpho. Nor is Adeline Barnett by any means defunct. She is probably an earl’s daughter at the present moment; vicious, painted; in society. But if you call her Miss Wilkinson’s Adeline she will have to answer none the less.

It would be a fine exercise in discrimination to decide the precise point at which romance becomes Gothic and imagination moonshine. Coleridge’s lines in Kubla Khan about the woman wailing for her demon lover are a perfect example of the successful use of emotion. The difficulty, as Miss Birkhead shows, is to know where to stop. Humour is comparatively easy to control; psychology is too toilsome to be frequently overdone; but a gift for romance easily escapes control and cruelly plunges its possessor into disrepute. Maturin and Monk Lewis heaped up horrors until Mrs. Radcliffe herself appeared calm and composed. And they have paid the penalty. The skull-headed lady, the vampire gentleman, the whole troop of monks and monsters who once froze and terrified now gibber in some dark cupboard of the servants’ hall. In our day we flatter ourselves the effect is produced by subtler means. It is at the ghosts within us that we shudder, and not at the decaying bodies of barons or the subterranean activities of ghouls. Yet the desire to widen our boundaries, to feel excitement without danger, and to escape as far as possible from the facts of life drive us perpetually to trifle with the risky ingredients of the mysterious and the unknown. Science, as Miss Birkhead suggests, will modify the Gothic romance of the future with the aeroplane and the telephone. Already the bolder of our novelists have made use of psycho-analysis to startle and dismay. And already such perils attend the use of the abnormal in fiction—the younger generation has been heard to complain that the horror of the Turn of the Screw is altogether too tame and conventional to lift a hair of their heads. But can we possibly say that Henry James was a Goth?

[Times Literary Supplement, May 5, 1921]

[]

The Supernatural in Fiction.

When Miss Scarborough [◉4] describes the results of her inquiries into the supernatural in fiction as ‘suggestive rather than exhaustive’ we have only to add that in any discussion of the supernatural suggestion is perhaps more useful than an attempt at science. To mass together all sorts of cases of the supernatural in literature without much more system or theory than the indication of dates supplies leaves the reader free where freedom has a special value. Perhaps some psychological law lies hidden beneath the hundreds of stories about ghosts and abnormal states of mind (for stories about abnormal states of mind are included with those that are strictly supernatural) which are referred to in her pages; but in our twilight state it is better to guess than to assert, to feel than to classify our feelings. So much evidence of the delight which human nature takes in stories of the supernatural will inevitably lead one to ask what this interest implies both in the writer and in the reader.

In the first place, how are we to account for the strange human craving for the pleasure of feeling afraid which is so much involved in our love of ghost stories? It is pleasant to be afraid when we are conscious that we are in no kind of danger, and it is even more pleasant to be assured of the mind’s capacity to penetrate those barriers which for twenty-three hours out of the twenty-four remain impassable. Crude fear, with its anticipation of physical pain or of terrifying uproar, is an undignified and demoralizing sensation, while the mastery of fear only produces a respectable mask of courage, which is of no great interest to ourselves, although it may impose upon others. But the fear which we get from reading ghost stories of the supernatural is a refined and spiritualized essence of fear. It is a fear which we can examine and play with. Far from despising ourselves for being frightened by a ghost story we are proud of this proof of sensibility, and perhaps unconsciously welcome the chance for the licit gratification of certain instincts which we are wont to treat as outlaws. It is worth noticing that the craving for the supernatural in literature coincided in the eighteenth century with a period of rationalism in thought, as if the effect of damming the human instincts at one point causes them to overflow at another. Such instincts were certainly at full flood when the writings of Mrs. Radcliffe were their chosen channel. Her ghosts and ruins have long suffered the fate which so swiftly waits upon any exaggeration of the supernatural and substitutes our ridicule for our awe. But although we are quick to throw away imaginative symbols which have served our turn, the desire persists. Mrs. Radcliffe may vanish, but the craving for the supernatural survives. Some element of the supernatural is so constant in poetry that one has come to look upon it as part of the normal fabric of the art; but in poetry, being etherealized, it scarcely provokes any emotion so gross as fear. Nobody was ever afraid to walk down a dark passage after reading The Ancient Mariner, but rather inclined to venture out to meet whatever ghosts might deign to visit him. Probably some degree of reality is necessary in order to produce fear; and reality is best conveyed by prose. Certainly one of the finest ghost stories, Wandering Willie’s Tale in Redgauntlet, gains immensely from the homely truth of the setting, to which the use of the Scotch dialect contributes. The hero is a real man, the country is as solid as can be; and suddenly in the midst of the green and gray landscape opens up the crimson transparency of Redgauntlet Castle with the dead sinners at their feasting.

The superb genius of Scott here achieves a triumph which should keep this story immortal however the fashion in the supernatural may change. Steenie Steenson is himself so real and his belief in the phantoms is so vivid that we draw our fear through our perception of his fear, the story itself being of a kind that has ceased to frighten us. In fact, the vision of the dead carousing would now be treated in a humorous, romantic or perhaps patriotic spirit, but scarcely with any hope of making our flesh creep. To do that the author must change his direction; he must seek to terrify us not by the ghosts of the dead, but by those ghosts which are living within ourselves. The great increase of the psychical ghost story in late years, to which Miss Scarborough bears witness, testifies to the fact that our sense of our own ghostliness has much quickened. A rational age is succeeded by one which seeks the supernatural in the soul of man, and the development of psychical research offers a basis of disputed fact for this desire to feed upon. Henry James, indeed, was of opinion before writing The Turn of the Screw that ‘the good, the really effective and heart-shaking ghost stories (roughly so to term them) appeared all to have been told…. The new type, indeed, the mere modern “psychical case”, washed clean of all queerness as by exposure to a flowing laboratory tap, … the new type clearly promised little.’ Since The Turn of the Screw, however, and no doubt largely owing to that masterpiece, the new type has justified its existence by rousing, if not ‘the dear old sacred terror’, still a very effective modern representative. If you wish to guess what our ancestors felt when they read The Mysteries of Udolpho you cannot do better than read The Turn of the Screw.

Experiment proves that the new fear resembles the old in producing physical sensations as of erect hair, dilated pupils, rigid muscles, and an intensified perception of sound and movement. But what is it that we are afraid of? We are not afraid of ruins, or moonlight, or ghosts. Indeed, we should be relieved to find that Quint and Miss Jessel are ghosts, but they have neither the substance nor the independent existence of ghosts. The odious creatures are much closer to us than ghosts have ever been. The governess is not so much frightened of them as of the sudden extension of her own field of perception, which in this case widens to reveal to her the presence all about her of an unmentionable evil. The appearance of the figures is an illustration, not in itself specially alarming, of a state of mind which is profoundly mysterious and terrifying. It is a state of mind; even the external objects are made to testify to their subjection. The oncoming of the state is preceded not by the storms and howlings of the old romances, but by an absolute hush and lapse of nature which we feel to represent the ominous trance of her own mind. ‘The rooks stopped cawing in the golden sky, and the friendly evening hour lost for the unspeakable minute all its voice.’ The horror of the story comes from the force with which it makes us realize the power that our minds possess for such excursions into the darkness; when certain lights sink or certain barriers are lowered, the ghosts of the mind, untracked desires, indistinct intimations, are seen to be a large company.

In the hands of such masters as Scott and Henry James the supernatural is so wrought in with the natural that fear is kept from a dangerous exaggeration into simple disgust or disbelief verging upon ridicule. Mr. Kipling’s stories The Mark of the Beast and The Return of Imray are powerful enough to repel one by their horror, but they are too violent to appeal to our sense of wonder. For it would be a mistake to suppose that supernatural fiction always seeks to produce fear, or that the best ghost stories are those which most accurately and medically describe abnormal states of mind. On the contrary, a vast amount of fiction both in prose and in verse now assures us that the world to which we shut our eyes is far more friendly and inviting, more beautiful by day and more holy by night, than the world which we persist in thinking the real world. The country is peopled with nymphs and dryads, and Pan, far from being dead, is at his pranks in all the villages of England. Much of this mythology is used not for its own sake, but for purposes of satire and allegory; but there exists a group of writers who have the sense of the unseen without such alloy. Such a sense may bring visions of fairies or phantoms, or it may lead to a quickened perception of the relations existing between men and plants, or houses and their inhabitants, or any one of those innumerable alliances which somehow or other we spin between ourselves and other objects in our passage.

[Times Literary Supplement, Jan 31, 1918 as “Across the Border”]

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Henry James’s Ghost Stories.

It is plain that Henry James was a good deal attracted by the ghost story, or, to speak more accurately, by the story of the supernatural. He wrote at least eight of them, and if we wish to see what led him to do so, and what opinion he had of his success, nothing is simpler than to read his own account in the preface to the volume containing Altar of the Dead. Yet perhaps we shall keep our own view more distinct if we neglect the preface. As the years go by certain qualities appear, and others disappear. We shall only muddle our own estimate if we try, dutifully, to make it square with the verdict which the author at the time passed on his own work. For example, what did Henry James say of The Great Good Place?

There remains The Great Good Place (1900)—to the spirit of which, however, it strikes me that any gloss or comment would be a tactless challenge. It embodies a calculated effect, and to plunge into it, I find, even for a beguiled glance—a course I indeed recommend—is to have left all else outside.

And to us, in 1921, The Great Good Place is a failure. It is another example of the fact that when a writer is completely and even ecstatically conscious of success he has, as likely as not, written his worst. We ought, we feel, to be inside, and we remain coldly outside. Something has failed to work, and we are inclined to accuse the supernatural. The challenge may be tactless, but challenge it we must.

That The Great Good Place begins admirably, no one will deny. Without the waste of a word we find ourselves at once in the heart of a situation. The harassed celebrity, George Dane, is surrounded by unopened letters and unread books; telegrams arrive; invitations accumulate; and the things of value lie hopelessly buried beneath the litter. Meanwhile, Brown the manservant announces that a strange young man has arrived to breakfast. Dane touches the young man’s hand, and, at this culminating point of annoyance, lapses into a trance or wakes up in another world. He finds himself in a celestial rest-cure establishment. Far bells toll; flowers are fragrant; and after a time the inner life revives. But directly the change is accomplished we are aware that something is wrong with the story. The movement flags; the emotion is monotonous. The enchanter waves his wand and the cows go on grazing. All the characteristic phrases are there in waiting—the silver bowls, the melted hours—but there is no work for them to do. The story dwindles to a sweet soliloquy. Dane and the Brothers become angelic allegorical figures pacing a world that is like ours but smoother and emptier. As if he felt the need of something hard and objective the author invokes the name of the city of Bradford; but it is vain. The Great Good Place is an example of the sentimental use of the supernatural and for that reason no doubt Henry James would be likely to feel that he had been more than usually intimate and expressive.

The other stories will presently prove that the supernatural offers great prizes as well as great risks; but let us for a moment dwell upon the risks. The first is undoubtedly that it removes the shocks and buffetings of experience. In the breakfast-room with Brown and the telegram Henry James was forced to keep moving by the pressure of reality; the door must open; the hour must strike. Directly he sank through the solid ground he gained possession of a world which he could fashion to his liking. In the dream world the door need not open; the clock need not strike; beauty is to be had for the asking. But beauty is the most perverse of spirits; it seems as if she must pass through ugliness or lie down with disorder before she can rise in her own person. The ready-made beauty of the dream world produces only an anaemic and conventionalized version of the world we know. And Henry James was much too fond of the world we know to create one that we do not know. The visionary imagination was by no means his. His genius was dramatic, not lyric. Even his characters wilt in the thin atmosphere he provides for them, and we are presented with a Brother when we would much rather grasp the substantial person of Brown.

We have been piling the risks, rather unfairly, upon one story in particular. The truth is perhaps that we have become fundamentally sceptical. Mrs. Radcliffe amused our ancestors because they were our ancestors; because they lived with very few books, an occasional post, a newspaper superannuated before it reached them, in the depths of the country or in a town which resembled the more modest of our villages, with long hours to spend sitting over the fire drinking wine by the light of half a dozen candles. Nowadays we breakfast upon a richer feast of horror than served them for a twelvemonth. We are tired of violence; we suspect mystery. Surely, we might say to a writer set upon the supernatural, there are facts enough in the world to go round; surely it is safer to stay in the breakfast-room with Brown. Moreover, we are impervious to fear. Your ghosts will only make us laugh, and if you try to express some tender and intimate vision of a world stripped of its hide we shall be forced (and there is nothing more uncomfortable) to look the other way. But writers, if they are worth their salt, never take advice. They always run risks. To admit that the supernatural was used for the last time by Mrs. Radcliffe and that modern nerves are immune from the wonder and terror which ghosts have always inspired would be to throw up the sponge too easily. If the old methods are obsolete, it is the business of a writer to discover new ones. The public can feel again what it has once felt—there can be no doubt about that; only from time to time the point of attack must be changed.

How consciously Henry James set himself to look for the weak place in our armour of insensibility it is not necessary to decide. Let us turn to another story, The Friends of the Friends, and judge whether he succeeded. This is the story of a man and woman who have been trying for years to meet but only accomplish their meeting on the night of the woman’s death. After her death the meetings are continued, and when this is divined by the woman he is engaged to marry she refuses to go on with the marriage. The relationship is altered. Another person, she says, has come between them. ‘You see her—you see her; you see her every night!’ It is what we have come to call a typically Henry James situation. It is the same theme that was treated with enormous elaboration in The Wings of the Dove. Only there, when Milly has come between Kate and Densher and altered their relationship for ever, she has ceased to exist; here the anonymous lady goes on with her work after death. And yet—does it make very much difference? Henry James has only to take the smallest of steps and he is over the border. His characters with their extreme fineness of perception are already half-way out of the body. There is nothing violent in their release. They seem rather to have achieved at last what they have long been attempting—communication without obstacle. But Henry James, after all, kept his ghosts for his ghost stories. Obstacles are essential to The Wings of the Dove. When he removed them by supernatural means as he did in The Friends of the Friends he did so in order to produce a particular effect. The story is very short; there is no time to elaborate the relationship; but the point can be pressed home by a shock. The supernatural is brought in to provide that shock. It is the queerest of shocks—tranquil, beautiful, like the closing of chords in harmony; and yet, somehow obscene. The living and the dead by virtue of their superior sensibility have reached across the gulf; that is beautiful. The live man and the dead woman have met alone at night. They have their relationship. The spiritual and the carnal meeting together produce a strange emotion—not exactly fear, nor yet excitement. It is a feeling that we do not immediately recognize. There is a weak spot in our armour somewhere. Perhaps Henry James will penetrate by methods such as these.

Next, however, we turn to Owen Wingrave, and the enticing game of pinning your author to the board by detecting once more traces of his fineness, his subtlety, whatever his prevailing characteristics may be, is rudely interrupted. Pinioned, tied down, to all appearance lifeless, up he jumps and walks away. Somehow one has forgotten to account for the genius, for the driving power which is so incalculable and so essential. With Henry James in particular we tend, in wonder at his prodigious dexterity, to forget that he had a crude and simple passion for telling stories. The preface to Owen Wingrave throws light upon that fact, and incidentally suggests why it is that Owen Wingrave as a ghost story misses its mark. One summer’s afternoon, many years ago, he tells us, he sat on a penny chair under a great tree in Kensington Gardens. A slim young man sat down upon another chair near by and began to read a book.

Did the young man then, on the spot, just become Owen Wingrave, establishing by the mere magic of type the situation, creating at a stroke all the implications and filling out all the pictures? … my poor point is only that at the beginning of my session in the penny chair the seedless fable hadn’t a claim to make or an excuse to give, and that, the very next thing, the penny-worth still partly unconsumed, it was fairly bristling with pretexts. ‘Dramatize it, dramatize it!’ would seem to have rung with sudden intensity in my ears.

So the theory of a conscious artist taking out his little grain of matter and working it into the finished fabric is another of our critical fables. The truth appears to be that he sat on a chair, saw a young man, and fell asleep. At any rate, once the group, the man, or perhaps only the sky and the trees become significant, the rest is there inevitably. Given Owen Wingrave, then Spencer Coyle, Mrs. Coyle, Kate Julian, the old house, the season, the atmosphere must be in existence. Owen Wingrave implies all that. The artist has simply to see that the relations between these places and people are the right ones. When we say that Henry James had a passion for story-telling we mean that when his significant moment came to him the accessories were ready to flock in.

In this instance they flocked in almost too readily. There they are on the spot with all the stir and importance that belong to living people. Miss Wingrave seated in her Baker Street lodging with ‘a fat catalogue of the Army and Navy Stores, which reposed on a vast desolate table-cover of false blue’; Mrs. Coyle, ‘a fair fresh slow woman’, who admitted and indeed gloried in the fact that she was in love with her husband’s pupils, ‘Which shows that the subject between them was treated in a liberal spirit’; Spencer Coyle himself, and the boyLechmere—all bear, of course, upon the question of Owen’s temperament and situation, and yet they bear on so many other things besides. We seem to be settling in for a long absorbing narrative; and then, rudely, incongruously, a shriek rings out; poor Owen is found stretched on the threshold of the haunted room; the supernatural has cut the book in two. It is violent; it is sensational; but if Henry James himself were to ask us: ‘Now, have I frightened you?’ we should be forced to reply: ‘Not a bit’. The catastrophe has not the right relations to what has gone before. The vision in Kensington Gardens did not, perhaps, embrace the whole. Out of sheer bounty the author has given us a scene rich in possibilities—a young man whose problem (he detests war and is condemned to be a soldier) has a deep psychological interest; a girl whose subtlety and oddity are purposely defined as if in readiness for future use. Yet what use is made of them? Kate Julian has merely to dare a young man to sleep in a haunted room; a plump Miss from a parsonage would have done as well. What use is made of the supernatural? Poor Owen Wingrave is knocked on the head by the ghost of an ancestor; a stable bucket in a dark passage would have done it better.

The stories in which Henry James uses the supernatural effectively are, then, those where some quality in a character or in a situation can only be given its fullest meaning by being cut free from facts. Its progress in the unseen world must be closely related to what goes on in this. We must be made to feel that the apparition fits the crisis of passion or of conscience which sent it forth so exactly that the ghost story, besides its virtues as a ghost story, has the additional charm of being also symbolical. Thus the ghost of Sir Edmund Orme appears to the lady who jilted him long ago whenever her daughter shows signs of becoming engaged. The apparition is the result of her guilty conscience, but it is more than that. It is the guardian of the rights of lovers. It fits what has gone before; it completes. The use of the supernatural draws out a harmony which would otherwise be inaudible. We hear the first note close at hand, and then, a moment after, the second chimes far away.

Henry James’s ghosts have nothing in common with the violent old ghosts—the blood-stained sea captains, the white horses, the headless ladies of dark lanes and windy commons. They have their origin within us. They are present whenever the significant overflows our powers of expressing it; whenever the ordinary appears ringed by the strange. The baffling things that are left over, the frightening ones that persist—these are the emotions that he takes, embodies, makes consoling and companionable. But how can we be afraid? As the gentleman says when he has seen the ghost of Sir Edmund Orme for the first time: ‘I was ready to answer for it to all and sundry that ghosts are much less alarming and more amusing than was commonly supposed’. The beautiful urbane spirits are only not of this world because they are too fine for it. They have taken with them across the border their clothes, their manners, their breeding, their band-boxes, and valets and ladies’ maids. They remain always a little worldly. We may feel clumsy in their presence, but we cannot feel afraid. What does it matter, then, if we do pick up the Turn of the Screw an hour or so before bedtime? After an exquisite entertainment we shall, if the other stories are to be trusted, end with this fine music in our ears, and sleep the sounder.

Perhaps it is the silence that first impresses us. Everything at Bly is so profoundly quiet. The twitter of birds at dawn, the far-away cries of children, faint footsteps in the distance stir it but leave it unbroken. It accumulates; it weighs us down; it makes us strangely apprehensive of noise. At last the house and garden die out beneath it. ‘I can hear again, as I write, the intense hush in which the sounds of evening dropped. The rooks stopped cawing in the golden sky, and the unfriendly hour lost for the unspeakable minute all its voice.’ It is unspeakable. We know that the man who stands on the tower staring down at the governess beneath is evil. Some unutterable obscenity has come to the surface. It tries to get in; it tries to get at something. The exquisite little beings who lie innocently asleep must at all costs be protected. But the horror grows. Is it possible that the little girl, as she turns back from the window, has seen the woman outside? Has she been with Miss Jessel? Has Quint visited the boy? It is Quint who hangs about us in the dark; who is there in that corner and again there in that. It is Quint who must be reasoned away, and for all our reasoning returns. Can it be that we are afraid? But it is not a man with red hair and a white face whom we fear. We are afraid of something, perhaps, in ourselves. In short, we turn on the light. If by its beams we examine the story in safety, note how masterly the telling is, how each sentence is stretched, each image filled, how the inner world gains from the robustness of the outer, how beauty and obscenity twined together worm their way to the depths—still we must own that something remains unaccounted for. We must admit that Henry James has conquered. That courtly, worldly, sentimental old gentleman can still make us afraid of the dark.

[Times Literary Supplement, Dec 22, 1921]

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A Terribly Sensitive Mind.

The most distinguished writers of short stories in England are agreed, says Mr. Murry, that as a writer of short stories Katherine Mansfield was hors concours. No one has succeeded her, and no critic has been able to define her quality. But the reader of her journal is well content to let such questions be. It is not the quality of her writing or the degree of her fame that interest us in her diary, but the spectacle of a mind—a terribly sensitive mind—receiving one after another the haphazard impressions of eight years of life. Her diary was a mystical companion. ‘Come my unseen, my unknown, let us talk together’, she says on beginning a new volume. In it she noted facts—the weather, an engagement; she sketched scenes; she analyzed her character; she described a pigeon or a dream or a conversation, nothing could be more fragmentary; nothing more private. We feel that we are watching a mind which is alone with itself; a mind which has so little thought of an audience that it will make use of a shorthand of its own now and then, or, as the mind in its loneliness tends to do, divide into two and talk to itself. Katherine Mansfield about Katherine Mansfield.

But then as the scraps accumulate we find ourselves giving them, or more probably receiving from Katherine Mansfield herself, a direction. From what point of view is she looking at life as she sits there, terribly sensitive, registering one after another such diverse impressions? She is a writer; a born writer. Everything she feels and hears and sees is not fragmentary and separate; it belongs together as writing. Sometimes the note is directly made for a story. ‘Let me remember when I write about that fiddle how it runs up lightly and swings down sorrowful; how it searches’, she notes. Or, ‘Lumbago. This is a very queer thing. So sudden, so painful, I must remember it when I write about an old man. The start to get up, the pause, the look of fury, and how, lying at night, one seems to get locked.’ …

Again, the moment itself suddenly puts on significance, and she traces the outline as if to preserve it. ‘It’s raining, but the air is soft, smoky, warm. Big drops patter on the languid leaves, the tobacco flowers lean over. Now there is a rustle in the ivy. Wingly has appeared from the garden next door; he bounds from the wall. And delicately, lifting his paws, pointing his ears, very afraid the big wave will overtake him, he wades over the lake of green grass.’ The Sister of Nazareth ‘showing her pale gums and big discoloured teeth’ asks for money. The thin dog. So thin that his body is like ‘a cage on four wooden pegs’, runs down the street. In some sense, she feels, the thin dog is the street. In all this we seem to be in the midst of unfinished stories; here is a beginning; here an end. They only need a loop of words thrown round them to be complete.

But then the diary is so private and so instinctive that it allows another self to break off from the self that writes and to stand a little apart watching it write. The writing self was a queer self; sometimes nothing would induce it to write. ‘There is so much to do and I do so little. Life would be almost perfect here if only when I was pretending to work I always was working. Look at the stories that wait and wait just at the threshold…. Next day. Yet take this morning, for instance. I don’t want to write anything. It’s gray; it’s heavy and dull. And short stories seem unreal and not worth doing. I don’t want to write; I want to live. What does she mean by that? It’s not easy to say. But there you are!’

What does she mean by that? No one felt more seriously the importance of writing than she did. In all the pages of her journal, instinctive, rapid as they are, her attitude toward her work is admirable, sane, caustic, and austere. There is no literary gossip; no vanity; no jealousy. Although during her last years she must have been aware of her success she makes no allusion to it. Her own comments upon her work are always penetrating and disparaging. Her stories wanted richness and depth; she was only ‘skimming the top—no more’. But writing, the mere expression of things adequately and sensitively, is not enough. It is founded upon something unexpressed; and this something must be solid and entire. Under the desperate pressure of increasing illness she began a curious and difficult search, of which we catch glimpses only and those hard to interpret, after the crystal clearness which is needed if one is to write truthfully. ‘Nothing of any worth can come of a disunited being’, she wrote. One must have health in one’s self. After five years of struggle she gave up the search after physical health not in despair, but because she thought the malady was of the soul and that the cure lay not in any physical treatment, but in some such ‘spiritual brotherhood’ as that at Fontainebleau, in which the last months of her life were spent. But before she went she wrote the summing up of her position with which the journal ends.

She wanted health, she wrote; but what did she mean by health? ‘By health’, she wrote, ‘I mean the power to lead a full, adult, living, breathing life in close contact with what I love—the earth and the wonders thereof—the sea—the sun…. Then I want to work. At what? I want so to live that I work with my hands and my feeling and my brain. I want a garden, a small house, grass, animals, books, pictures, music. And out of this, the expression of this, I want to be writing. (Though I may write about cabmen. That’s no matter.)’ The diary ends with the words ‘All is well’. And since she died three months later it is tempting to think that the words stood for some conclusion which illness and the intensity of her own nature drove her to find at an age when most of us are loitering easily among those appearances and impressions, those amusements and sensations, which none had loved better than she.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Sep 10, 1927]

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Women and Fiction.

The title of this article can be read in two ways: it may allude to women and the fiction that they write, or to women and the fiction that is written about them. The ambiguity is intentional, for in dealing with women as writers, as much elasticity as possible is desirable; it is necessary to leave oneself room to deal with other things besides their work, so much has that work been influenced by conditions that have nothing whatever to do with art.

The most superficial inquiry into women’s writing instantly raises a host of questions. Why, we ask at once, was there no continuous writing done by women before the eighteenth century? Why did they then write almost as habitually as men, and in the course of that writing produce, one after another, some of the classics of English fiction? And why did their art then, and why to some extent does their art still, take the form of fiction?

A little thought will show us that we are asking questions to which we shall get, as answer, only further fiction. The answer lies at present locked in old diaries, stuffed away in old drawers, half-obliterated in the memories of the aged. It is to be found in the lives of the obscure—in those almost unlit corridors of history where the figures of generations of women are so dimly, so fitfully perceived. For very little is known about women. The history of England is the history of the male line, not of the female. Of our fathers we know always some fact, some distinction. They were soldiers or they were sailors; they filled that office or they made that law. But of our mothers, our grandmothers, our great-grandmothers, what remains? Nothing but a tradition. One was beautiful; one was red-haired; one was kissed by a Queen. We know nothing of them except their names and the dates of their marriages and the number of children they bore.

Thus, if we wish to know why at any particular time women did this or that, why they wrote nothing, why on the other hand they wrote masterpieces, it is extremely difficult to tell. Anyone who should seek among those old papers, who should turn history wrong side out and so construct a faithful picture of the daily life of the ordinary woman in Shakespeare’s time, in Milton’s time, in Johnson’s time, would not only write a book of astonishing interest, but would furnish the critic with a weapon which he now lacks. The extraordinary woman depends on the ordinary woman. It is only when we know what were the conditions of the average woman’s life—the number of her children, whether she had money of her own, if she had a room to herself, whether she had help in bringing up her family, if she had servants, whether part of the housework was her task—it is only when we can measure the way of life and the experience of life made possible to the ordinary woman that we can account for the success or failure of the extraordinary woman as a writer.

Strange spaces of silence seem to separate one period of activity from another. There was Sappho and a little group of women all writing poetry on a Greek island six hundred years before the birth of Christ. They fall silent. Then about the year 1000 we find a certain court lady, the Lady Murasaki, writing a very long and beautiful novel in Japan. But in England in the sixteenth century, when the dramatists and poets were most active, the women were dumb. Elizabethan literature is exclusively masculine. Then, at the end of the eighteenth century and in the beginning of the nineteenth, we find women again writing—this time in England—with extraordinary frequency and success.

Law and custom were of course largely responsible for these strange intermissions of silence and speech. When a woman was liable, as she was in the fifteenth century, to be beaten and flung about the room if she did not marry the man of her parents’ choice, the spiritual atmosphere was not favourable to the production of works of art. When she was married without her own consent to a man who thereupon became her lord and master, ‘so far at least as law and custom could make him’, as she was in the time of the Stuarts, it is likely she had little time for writing, and less encouragement. The immense effect of environment and suggestion upon the mind, we in our psychoanalytical age are beginning to realize. Again, with memoirs and letters to help us, we are beginning to understand how abnormal is the effort needed to produce a work of art, and what shelter and what support the mind of the artist requires. Of those facts the lives and letters of men like Keats and Carlyle and Flaubert assure us.

Thus it is clear that the extraordinary outburst of fiction in the beginning of the nineteenth century in England was heralded by innumerable slight changes in law and customs and manners. And women of the nineteenth century had some leisure; they had some education. It was no longer the exception for women of the middle and upper classes to choose their own husbands. And it is significant that of the four great women novelists—Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot—not one had a child, and two were unmarried.

Yet, though it is clear that the ban upon writing had been removed, there was still, it would seem, considerable pressure upon women to write novels. No four women can have been more unlike in genius and character than these four. Jane Austen can have had nothing in common with George Eliot; George Eliot was the direct opposite of Emily Brontë. Yet all were trained for the same profession; all, when they wrote, wrote novels.

Fiction was, as fiction still is, the easiest thing for a woman to write. Nor is it difficult to find the reason. A novel is the least concentrated form of art. A novel can be taken up or put down more easily than a play or a poem. George Eliot left her work to nurse her father. Charlotte Brontë put down her pen to pick the eyes out of the potatoes. And living as she did in the common sitting-room, surrounded by people, a woman was trained to use her mind in observation and upon the analysis of character. She was trained to be a novelist and not to be a poet.

Even in the nineteenth century, a woman lived almost solely in her home and her emotions. And those nineteenth-century novels, remarkable as they were, were profoundly influenced by the fact that the women who wrote them were excluded by their sex from certain kinds of experience. That experience has a great influence upon fiction is indisputable. The best part of Conrad’s novels, for instance, would be destroyed if it had been impossible for him to be a sailor. Take away all that Tolstoi knew of war as a soldier, of life and society as a rich young man whose education admitted him to all sorts of experience, and War and Peace would be incredibly impoverished.

Yet Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, Villette, and Middlemarch were written by women from whom was forcibly withheld all experience save that which could be met with in a middle-class drawing-room. No first-hand experience of war or seafaring or politics or business was possible for them. Even their emotional life was strictly regulated by law and custom. When George Eliot ventured to live with Mr. Lewes without being his wife, public opinion was scandalized. Under its pressure she withdrew into a suburban seclusion which, inevitably, had the worst possible effects upon her work. She wrote that unless people asked of their own accord to come and see her, she never invited them. At the same time, on the other side of Europe, Tolstoi was living a free life as a soldier, with men and women of all classes, for which nobody censured him and from which his novels drew much of their astonishing breadth and vigour.

But the novels of women were not affected only by the necessarily narrow range of the writer’s experience. They showed, at least in the nineteenth century, another characteristic which may be traced to the writer’s sex. In Middlemarch and in Jane Eyre we are conscious not merely of the writer’s character, as we are conscious of the character of Charles Dickens, but we are conscious of a woman’s presence—of someone resenting the treatment of her sex and pleading for its rights. This brings into women’s writing an element which is entirely absent from a man’s, unless, indeed, he happens to be a working-man, a negro, or one who for some other reason is conscious of disability. It introduces a distortion and is frequently the cause of weakness. The desire to plead some personal cause or to make a character the mouthpiece of some personal discontent or grievance always has a distressing effect, as if the spot at which the reader’s attention is directed were suddenly twofold instead of single.

The genius of Jane Austen and Emily Brontë is never more convincing than in their power to ignore such claims and solicitations and to hold on their way unperturbed by scorn or censure. But it needed a very serene or a very powerful mind to resist the temptation to anger. The ridicule, the censure, the assurance of inferiority in one form or another which were lavished upon women who practised an art, provoked such reactions naturally enough. One sees the effect in Charlotte Brontë’s indignation, in George Eliot’s resignation. Again and again one finds it in the work of the lesser women writers—in their choice of a subject, in their unnatural self-assertiveness, in their unnatural docility. Moreover, insincerity leaks in almost unconsciously. They adopt a view in deference to authority. The vision becomes too masculine or it becomes too feminine; it loses its perfect integrity and, with that, its most essential quality as a work of art.

The great change that has crept into women’s writing is, it would seem, a change of attitude. The woman writer is no longer bitter. She is no longer angry. She is no longer pleading and protesting as she writes. We are approaching, if we have not yet reached, the time when her writing will have little or no foreign influence to disturb it. She will be able to concentrate upon her vision without distraction from outside. The aloofness that was once within the reach of genius and originality is only now coming within the reach of ordinary women. Therefore the average novel by a woman is far more genuine and far more interesting to-day than it was a hundred or even fifty years ago.

But it is still true that before a woman can write exactly as she wishes to write, she has many difficulties to face. To begin with, there is the technical difficulty—so simple, apparently; in reality, so baffling—that the very form of the sentence does not fit her. It is a sentence made by men; it is too loose, too heavy, too pompous for a woman’s use. Yet in a novel, which covers so wide a stretch of ground, an ordinary and usual type of sentence has to be found to carry the reader on easily and naturally from one end of the book to the other. And this a woman must make for herself, altering and adapting the current sentence until she writes one that takes the natural shape of her thought without crushing or distorting it.

But that, after all, is only a means to an end, and the end is still to be reached only when a woman has the courage to surmount opposition and the determination to be true to herself. For a novel, after all, is a statement about a thousand different objects—human, natural, divine; it is an attempt to relate them to each other. In every novel of merit these different elements are held in place by the force of the writer’s vision. But they have another order also, which is the order imposed upon them by convention. And as men are the arbiters of that convention, as they have established an order of values in life, so too, since fiction is largely based on life, these values prevail there also to a very great extent.

It is probable, however, that both in life and in art the values of a woman are not the values of a man. Thus, when a woman comes to write a novel, she will find that she is perpetually wishing to alter the established values—to make serious what appears insignificant to a man, and trivial what is to him important. And for that, of course, she will be criticized; for the critic of the opposite sex will be genuinely puzzled and surprised by an attempt to alter the current scale of values, and will see in it not merely a difference of view, but a view that is weak, or trivial, or sentimental, because it differs from his own.

But here, too, women are coming to be more independent of opinion. They are beginning to respect their own sense of values. And for this reason the subject matter of their novels begins to show certain changes. They are less interested, it would seem, in themselves; on the other hand, they are more interested in other women. In the early nineteenth century, women’s novels were largely autobiographical. One of the motives that led them to write was the desire to expose their own suffering, to plead their own cause. Now that this desire is no longer so urgent, women are beginning to explore their own sex, to write of women as women have never been written of before; for of course, until very lately, women in literature were the creation of men.

Here again there are difficulties to overcome, for, if one may generalize, not only do women submit less readily to observation than men, but their lives are far less tested and examined by the ordinary processes of life. Often nothing tangible remains of a woman’s day. The food that has been cooked is eaten; the children that have been nursed have gone out into the world. Where does the accent fall? What is the salient point for the novelist to seize upon? It is difficult to say. Her life has an anonymous character which is baffling and puzzling in the extreme. For the first time, this dark country is beginning to be explored in fiction; and at the same moment a woman has also to record the changes in women’s minds and habits which the opening of the professions has introduced. She has to observe how their lives are ceasing to run underground; she has to discover what new colours and shadows are showing in them now that they are exposed to the outer world.

If, then, one should try to sum up the character of women’s fiction at the present moment, one would say that it is courageous; it is sincere; it keeps closely to what women feel. It is not bitter. It does not insist upon its femininity. But at the same time, a woman’s book is not written as a man would write it. These qualities are much commoner than they were, and they give even to second- and third-rate work the value of truth and the interest of sincerity.

But in addition to these good qualities, there are two that call for a word more of discussion. The change which has turned the English woman from a nondescript influence, fluctuating and vague, to a voter, a wage-earner, a responsible citizen, has given her both in her life and in her art a turn toward the impersonal. Her relations now are not only emotional; they are intellectual, they are political. The old system which condemned her to squint askance at things through the eyes or through the interests of husband or brother, has given place to the direct and practical interests of one who must act for herself, and not merely influence the acts of others. Hence her attention is being directed away from the personal centre which engaged it exclusively in the past to the impersonal, and her novels naturally become more critical of society, and less analytical of individual lives.

We may expect that the office of gadfly to the state, which has been so far a male prerogative, will now be discharged by women also. Their novels will deal with social evils and remedies. Their men and women will not be observed wholly in relation to each other emotionally, but as they cohere and clash in groups and classes and races. That is one change of some importance. But there is another more interesting to those who prefer the butterfly to the gadfly—that is to say, the artist to the reformer. The greater impersonality of women’s lives will encourage the poetic spirit, and it is in poetry that women’s fiction is still weakest. It will lead them to be less absorbed in facts and no longer content to record with astonishing acuteness the minute details which fall under their own observation. They will look beyond the personal and political relationships to the wider questions which the poet tries to solve—of our destiny and the meaning of life.

The basis of the poetic attitude is of course largely founded upon material things. It depends upon leisure, and a little money, and the chance which money and leisure give to observe impersonally and dispassionately. With money and leisure at their service, women will naturally occupy themselves more than has hitherto been possible with the craft of letters. They will make a fuller and a more subtle use of the instrument of writing. Their technique will become bolder and richer.

In the past, the virtue of women’s writing often lay in its divine spontaneity, like that of the blackbird’s song or the thrush’s. It was untaught; it was from the heart. But it was also, and much more often, chattering and garrulous—mere talk spilt over paper and left to dry in pools and blots. In future, granted time and books and a little space in the house for herself, literature will become for women, as for men, an art to be studied. Women’s gift will be trained and strengthened. The novel will cease to be the dumping-ground for the personal emotions. It will become, more than at present, a work of art like any other, and its resources and its limitations will be explored.

From this it is a short step to the practice of the sophisticated arts, hitherto so little practised by women—to the writing of essays and criticism, of history and biography. And that, too, if we are considering the novel, will be of advantage; for besides improving the quality of the novel itself, it will draw off the aliens who have been attracted to fiction by its accessibility while their hearts lay elsewhere. Thus will the novel be rid of those excrescences of history and fact which, in our time, have made it so shapeless.

So, if we may prophesy, women in time to come will write fewer novels, but better novels; and not novels only, but poetry and criticism and history. But in this, to be sure, one is looking ahead to that golden, that perhaps fabulous, age when women will have what has so long been denied them—leisure, and money, and a room to themselves.

[Forum, New York, March 1929]

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An Essay in Criticism.

Human credulity is indeed wonderful. There may be good reasons for believing in a King or a Judge or a Lord Mayor. When we see them go sweeping by in their robes and their wigs, with their heralds and their outriders, our knees begin to shake and our looks to falter. But what reason there is for believing in critics it is impossible to say. They have neither wigs nor outriders. They differ in no way from other people if one sees them in the flesh. Yet these insignificant fellow creatures have only to shut themselves up in a room, dip a pen in the ink, and call themselves ‘we’, for the rest of us to believe that they are somehow exalted, inspired, infallible. Wigs grow on their heads. Robes cover their limbs. No greater miracle was ever performed by the power of human credulity. And, like most miracles, this one, too, has had a weakening effect upon the mind of the believer. He begins to think that critics, because they call themselves so, must be right. He begins to suppose that something actually happens to a book when it has been praised or denounced in print. He begins to doubt and conceal his own sensitive, hesitating apprehensions when they conflict with the critics’ decrees.

And yet, barring the learned (and learning is chiefly useful in judging the work of the dead), the critic is rather more fallible than the rest of us. He has to give us his opinion of a book that has been published two days, perhaps, with the shell still sticking to its head. He has to get outside that cloud of fertile, but unrealized, sensation which hangs about a reader, to solidify it, to sum it up. The chances are that he does this before the time is ripe; he does it too rapidly and too definitely. He says that it is a great book or a bad book. Yet, as he knows, when he is content to read only, it is neither. He is driven by force of circumstances and some human vanity to hide those hesitations which beset him as he reads, to smooth out all traces of that crab-like and crooked path by which he has reached what he choses to call ‘a conclusion’. So the crude trumpet blasts of critical opinion blow loud and shrill, and we, humble readers that we are, bow our submissive heads.

But let us see whether we can do away with these pretences for a season and pull down the imposing curtain which hides the critical process until it is complete. Let us give the mind a new book, as one drops a lump of fish into a cage of fringed and eager sea anemones, and watch it pausing, pondering, considering its attack. Let us see what prejudices affect it; what influences tell upon it. And if the conclusion becomes in the process a little less conclusive, it may, for that very reason, approach nearer to the truth. The first thing that the mind desires is some foothold of fact upon which it can lodge before it takes flight upon its speculative career. Vague rumours attach themselves to people’s names. Of Mr. Hemingway, we know that he is an American living in France, an ‘advanced’ writer, we suspect, connected with what is called a movement, though which of the many we own that we do not know. It will be well to make a little more certain of these matters by reading first Mr. Hemingway’s earlier book, The Sun Also Rises, and it soon becomes clear from this that, if Mr. Hemingway is ‘advanced’, it is not in the way that is to us most interesting. A prejudice of which the reader would do well to take account is here exposed; the critic is a modernist. Yes, the excuse would be because the moderns make us aware of what we feel subconsciously; they are truer to our own experience; they even anticipate it, and this gives us a particular excitement. But nothing new is revealed about any of the characters in The Sun Also Rises. They come before us shaped, proportioned, weighed, exactly as the characters of Maupassant are shaped and proportioned. They are seen from the old angle; the old reticences, the old relations between author and character are observed.

But the critic has the grace to reflect that this demand for new aspects and new perspectives may well be overdone. It may become whimsical. It may become foolish. For why should not art be traditional as well as original? Are we not attaching too much importance to an excitement which, though agreeable, may not be valuable in itself, so that we are led to make the fatal mistake of overriding the writer’s gift?

At any rate, Mr. Hemingway is not modern in the sense given; and it would appear from his first novel that this rumour of modernity must have sprung from his subject matter and from his treatment of it rather than from any fundamental novelty in his conception of the art of fiction. It is a bare, abrupt, outspoken book. Life as people live it in Paris in 1927 or even in 1928 is described as we of this age do describe life (it is here that we steal a march upon the Victorians) openly, frankly, without prudery, but also without surprise. The immoralities and moralities of Paris are described as we are apt to hear them spoken of in private life. Such candour is modern and it is admirable. Then, for qualities grow together in art as in life, we find attached to this admirable frankness an equal bareness of style. Nobody speaks for more than a line or two. Half a line is mostly sufficient. If a hill or a town is described (and there is always some reason for its description) there it is, exactly and literally built up of little facts, literal enough, but chosen, as the final sharpness of the outline proves, with the utmost care. Therefore, a few words like these: ‘The grain was just beginning to ripen and the fields were full of poppies. The pasture land was green and there were fine trees, and sometimes big rivers and chateaux off in the trees’—which have a curious force. Each word pulls its weight in the sentence. And the prevailing atmosphere is fine and sharp, like that of winter days when the boughs are bare against the sky. (But if we had to choose one sentence with which to describe what Mr. Hemingway attempts and sometimes achieves, we should quote a passage from a description of a bullfight: ‘Romero never made any contortions, always it was straight and pure and natural in line. The others twisted themselves like corkscrews, their elbows raised and leaned against the flanks of the bull after his horns had passed, to give a faked look of danger. Afterwards, all that was faked turned bad and gave an unpleasant feeling. Romero’s bullfighting gave real emotion, because he kept the absolute purity of line in his movements and always quietly and calmly let the horns pass him close each time.’) Mr. Hemingway’s writing, one might paraphrase, gives us now and then a real emotion, because he keeps absolute purity of line in his movements and lets the horns (which are truth, fact, reality) pass him close each time. But there is something faked, too, which turns bad and gives an unpleasant feeling—that also we must face in course of time.

And here, indeed, we may conveniently pause and sum up what point we have reached in our critical progress. Mr. Hemingway is not an advanced writer in the sense that he is looking at life from a new angle. What he sees is a tolerably familiar sight. Common objects like beer bottles and journalists figure largely in the foreground. But he is a skilled and conscientious writer. He has an aim and makes for it without fear or circumlocution. We have, therefore, to take his measure against somebody of substance, and not merely line him, for form’s sake, beside the indistinct bulk of some ephemeral shape largely stuffed with straw. Reluctantly we reach this decision, for this process of measurement is one of the most difficult of a critic’s tasks. He has to decide which are the most salient points of the book he has just read; to distinguish accurately to what kind they belong, and then, holding them against whatever model is chosen for comparison, to bring out their deficiency or their adequacy.

Recalling The Sun Also Rises, certain scenes rise in memory: the bullfight, the character of the Englishman, Harris; here a little landscape which seems to grow behind the people naturally; here a long, lean phrase which goes curling round a situation like the lash of a whip. Now and again this phrase evokes a character brilliantly, more often a scene. Of character, there is little that remains firmly and solidly elucidated. Something indeed seems wrong with the people. If we place them (the comparison is bad) against Tchekov’s people, they are flat as cardboard. If we place them (the comparison is better) against Maupassant’s people they are crude as a photograph. If we place them (the comparison may be illegitimate) against real people, the people we liken them to are of an unreal type. They are people one may have seen showing off at some café; talking a rapid, high-pitched slang, because slang is the speech of the herd, seemingly much at their ease, and yet if we look at them a little from the shadow not at their ease at all, and, indeed, terribly afraid of being themselves, or they would say things simply in their natural voices. So it would seem that the thing that is faked is character; Mr. Hemingway leans against the flanks of that particular bull after the horns have passed.

After this preliminary study of Mr. Hemingway’s first book, we come to the new book, Men Without Women, possessed of certain views or prejudices. His talent plainly may develop along different lines. It may broaden and fill out; it may take a little more time and go into things—human beings in particular—rather more deeply. And even if this meant the sacrifice of some energy and point, the exchange would be to our private liking. On the other hand, his is a talent which may contract and harden still further! it may come to depend more and more upon the emphatic moment; make more and more use of dialogue, and cast narrative and description overboard as an encumbrance.

The fact that Men Without Women consists of short stories, makes it probable that Mr. Hemingway has taken the second line. But, before we explore the new book, a word should be said which is generally left unsaid, about the implications of the title. As the publisher puts it … ‘the softening feminine influence is absent—either through training, discipline, death, or situation’. Whether we are to understand by this that women are incapable of training, discipline, death, or situation, we do not know. But it is undoubtedly true, if we are going to persevere in our attempt to reveal the processes of the critic’s mind, that any emphasis laid upon sex is dangerous. Tell a man that this is a woman’s book, or a woman that this is a man’s, and you have brought into play sympathies and antipathies which have nothing to do with art. The greatest writers lay no stress upon sex one way or the other. The critic is not reminded as he reads them that he belongs to the masculine or the feminine gender. But in our time, thanks to our sexual perturbations, sex consciousness is strong, and shows itself in literature by an exaggeration, a protest of sexual characteristics which in either case is disagreeable. Thus Mr. Lawrence, Mr. Douglas, and Mr. Joyce partly spoil their books for women readers by their display of self-conscious virility; and Mr. Hemingway, but much less violently, follows suit. All we can do, whether we are men or women, is to admit the influence, look the fact in the face, and so hope to stare it out of countenance.

To proceed then—Men Without Women consists of short stories in the French rather than in the Russian manner. The great French masters, Mérimée and Maupassant, made their stories as self-conscious and compact as possible. There is never a thread left hanging; indeed, so contracted are they that when the last sentence of the last page flares up, as it so often does, we see by its light the whole circumference and significance of the story revealed. The Tchekov method is, of course, the very opposite of this. Everything is cloudy and vague, loosely trailing rather than tightly furled. The stories move slowly out of sight like clouds in the summer air, leaving a wake of meaning in our minds which gradually fades away. Of the two methods, who shall say which is the better? At any rate, Mr. Hemingway, enlisting under the French masters, carries out their teaching up to a point with considerable success.

There are in Men Without Women many stories which, if life were longer, one would wish to read again. Most of them indeed are so competent, so efficient, and so bare of superfluity that one wonders why they do not make a deeper dent in the mind than they do. Take the pathetic story of the Major whose wife died—‘In Another Country’; or the sardonic story of a conversation in a railway carriage—‘A Canary for One’; or stories like ‘The Undefeated’ and ‘Fifty Grand’ which are full of the sordidness and heroism of bull-fighting and boxing—all of these are good trenchant stories, quick, terse, and strong. If one had not summoned the ghosts of Tchekov, Mérimée, and Maupassant, no doubt one would be enthusiastic. As it is, one looks about for something, fails to find something, and so is brought again to the old familiar business of ringing impressions on the counter, and asking what is wrong?

For some reason the book of short stories does not seem to us to go as deep or to promise as much as the novel. Perhaps it is the excessive use of dialogue, for Mr. Hemingway’s use of it is surely excessive. A writer will always be chary of dialogue because dialogue puts the most violent pressure upon the reader’s attention. He has to hear, to see, to supply the right tone, and to fill in the background from what the characters say without any help from the author. Therefore, when fictitious people are allowed to speak it must be because they have something so important to say that it stimulates the reader to do rather more than his share of the work of creation. But, although Mr. Hemingway keeps us under the fire of dialogue constantly, his people, half the time, are saying what the author could say much more economically for them. At last we are inclined to cry out with the little girl in ‘Hills Like White Elephants’: ‘Would you please please please please please please stop talking?’

And probably it is this superfluity of dialogue which leads to that other fault which is always lying in wait for the writer of short stories: the lack of proportion. A paragraph in excess will make these little craft lopsided and will bring about that blurred effect which, when one is out for clarity and point, so baffles the reader. And both these faults, the tendency to flood the page with unnecessary dialogue and the lack of sharp, unmistakable points by which we can take hold of the story, come from the more fundamental fact that, though Mr. Hemingway is brilliantly and enormously skilful, he lets his dexterity, like the bullfighter’s cloak, get between him and the fact. For in truth story-writing has much in common with bullfighting. One may twist one’s self like a corkscrew and go through every sort of contortion so that the public thinks one is running every risk and displaying superb gallantry. But the true writer stands close up to the bull and lets the horns—call them life, truth, reality, whatever you like—pass him close each time.

Mr. Hemingway, then, is courageous; he is candid; he is highly skilled; he plants words precisely where he wishes; he has moments of bare and nervous beauty; he is modern in manner but not in vision; he is self-consciously virile; his talent has contracted rather than expanded; compared with his novel his stories are a little dry and sterile. So we sum him up. So we reveal some of the prejudices, the instincts and the fallacies out of which what it pleases us to call criticism is made.

[New York Herald Tribune, Oct 9, 1927]

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Phases of Fiction.

The following pages attempt to record the impressions made upon the mind by reading a certain number of novels in succession. In deciding which book to begin with and which book to go on with, the mind was not pressed to make a choice. It was allowed to read what it liked. It was not, that is to say, asked to read historically, nor was it asked to read critically. It was asked to read only for interest and pleasure, and, at the same time, to comment as it read upon the nature of the interest and the pleasure that it found. It went its way, therefore, independent of time and reputation. It read Trollope before it read Jane Austen and skipped, by chance or negligence, some of the most celebrated books in English fiction. Thus, there is little reference or none to Fielding, Richardson, or Thackeray.

Yet, if nobody save the professed historian and critic reads to understand a period or to revise a reputation, nobody reads simply by chance or without a definite scale of values. There is, to speak metaphorically, some design that has been traced upon our minds which reading brings to light. Desires, appetites, however we may come by them, fill it in, scoring now in this direction, now in that. Hence, an ordinary reader can often trace his course through literature with great exactness and can even think himself, from time to time, in possession of a whole world as inhabitable as the real world. Such a world, it may be urged against it, is always in process of creation. Such a world, it may be added, likewise against it, is a personal world, a world limited and unhabitable perhaps by other people, a world created in obedience to tastes that may be peculiar to one temperament and distasteful to another—indeed, any such record of reading, it will be concluded, is bound to be limited, personal, erratic.

In its defence, however, it may be claimed that if the critic and the historian speak a more universal language, a more learned language, they are also likely to miss the centre and to lose their way for the simple reason that they know so many things about a writer that a writer does not know about himself. Writers are heard to complain that influences—education, heredity, theory—are given weight of which they themselves are unconscious in the act of creation. Is the author in question the son of an architect or a bricklayer? Was he educated at home or at the university? Does he come before or after Thomas Hardy? Yet not one of these things is in his mind, perhaps, as he writes and the reader’s ignorance, narrowing and limiting as it is, has at least the advantage that it leaves unhampered what the reader has in common with the writer, though much more feebly: the desire to create.

Here, then, very briefly and with inevitable simplifications, an attempt is made to show the mind at work upon a shelf full of novels and to watch it as it chooses and rejects, making itself a dwelling-place in accordance with its own appetites. Of these appetites, perhaps, the simplest is the desire to believe wholly and entirely in something which is fictitious. That appetite leads on all the others in turn. There is no saying, for they change so much at different ages, that one appetite is better than another. The common reader is, moreover, suspicious of fixed labels and settled hierarchies. Still, since there must be an original impulse, let us give the lead to this one and start upon the shelf full of novels in order to gratify our wish to believe.

The Truth-Tellers

In English fiction there are a number of writers who gratify our sense of belief—Defoe, Swift, Trollope, Borrow, W. E. Norris, for example; among the French, one thinks instantly of Maupassant. Each of them assures us that things are precisely as they say they are. What they describe happens actually before our eyes. We get from their novels the same sort of refreshment and delight that we get from seeing something actually happen in the street below. A dustman, for example, by an awkward movement of his arm knocks over a bottle apparently containing Condy’s Fluid which cracks upon the pavement. The dustman gets down; he picks up the jagged fragments of the broken bottle; he turns to a man who is passing in the street. We cannot take our eyes off him until we have feasted our powers of belief to the full. It is as if a channel were cut, into which suddenly and with great relief an emotion hitherto restrained rushes and pours. We forget whatever else we may be doing. This positive experience overpowers all the mixed and ambiguous feelings of which we may be possessed at the moment. The dustman has knocked over a bottle; the red stain is spreading on the pavement. It happens precisely so.

The novels of the great truth-tellers, of whom Defoe is easily the English chief, procure for us a refreshment of this kind. He tells us the story of Moll Flanders, of Robinson Crusoe, of Roxana, and we feel our powers of belief rush into the channel, thus cut, instantly, fertilizing and refreshing our entire being. To believe seems the greatest of all pleasures. It is impossible to glut our greed for truth, so rapacious is it. There is not a shadowy or insubstantial word in the whole book to startle our nervous sense of security. Three or four strong, direct strokes of the pen carve out Roxana’s character. Her dinner is set indisputably on the table. It consists of veal and turnips. The day is fine or cloudy; the month is April or September. Persistently, naturally, with a curious, almost unconscious iteration, emphasis is laid upon the very facts that most reassure us of stability in real life, upon money, furniture, food, until we seem wedged among solid objects in a solid universe.

One element of our delight comes from the sense that this world, with all its circumstantiality, bright and round and hard as it is, is yet complete, so that in whatever direction we reach out for assurance we receive it. If we press on beyond the confines of each page, as it is our instinct to do, completing what the writer has left unsaid, we shall find that we can trace our way; that there are indications which let us realize them; there is an under side, a dark side to this world. Defoe presided over his universe with the omnipotence of a God, so that his world is perfectly in scale. Nothing is so large that it makes another thing too small; nothing so small that it makes another thing too large.

The name of God is often found on the lips of his people, but they invoke a deity only a little less substantial than they are themselves, a being seated solidly not so very far above them in the tree tops. A divinity more mystical, could Defoe have made us believe in him, would so have discredited the landscape and cast doubt upon the substance of the men and women that our belief in them would have perished at the heart. Or, suppose that he let himself dwell upon the green shades of the forest depths or upon the sliding glass of the summer stream. Again, however much we were delighted by the description, we should have been uneasy because this other reality would have wronged the massive and monumental reality of Crusoe and Moll Flanders. As it is, saturated with the truth of his own universe, no such discrepancy is allowed to intrude. God, man, nature are all real, and they are all real with the same kind of reality—an astonishing feat, since it implies complete and perpetual submission on the writer’s part to his conviction, an obdurate deafness to all the voices which seduce and tempt him to gratify other moods. We have only to reflect how seldom a book is carried through on the same impulse of belief, so that its perspective is harmonious throughout, to realize how great a writer Defoe was. One could number on one’s fingers half a dozen novels which set out to be masterpieces and yet have failed because the belief flags; the realities are mixed; the perspective shifts and, instead of a final clarity, we get a baffling, if only a momentary, confusion.

Having, now, feasted our powers of belief to the full and so enjoyed the relief and rest of this positive world existing so palpably and completely outside of us, there begins to come over us that slackening of attention which means that the nerve in use is sated for the time being. We have absorbed as much of this literal truth as we can and we begin to crave for something to vary it that will yet be in harmony with it. We do not want, except in a flash or a hint, such truth as Roxana offers us when she tells us how her master, the Prince, would sit by their child and ‘loved to look at it when it was asleep’. For that truth is hidden truth; it makes us dive beneath the surface to realize it and so holds up the action. It is, then, action that we want. One desire having run its course, another leaps forward to take up the burden and no sooner have we formulated our desire than Defoe has given it to us. ‘On with the story’—that cry is forever on his lips. No sooner has he got his facts assembled than the burden is floated. Perpetually springing up, fresh and effortless, action and event, quickly succeeding each other thus set in motion this dense accumulation of facts and keep the breeze blowing in our faces. It becomes obvious, then, that if his people are sparely equipped and bereft of certain affections, such as love of husband and child, which we expect of people at leisure, it is that they may move quicker. They must travel light since it is for adventure that they are made. They will need quick wits, strong muscles, and rocky common sense on the road they are to travel rather than sentiment, reflection, or the power of self-analysis.

Belief, then, is completely gratified by Defoe. Here, the reader can rest himself and enter into possession of a large part of his domain. He tests it; he tries it; he feels nothing give under him or fade before him. Still, belief seeks fresh sustenance as a sleeper seeks a fresh side of the pillow. He may turn, and this is likely, to someone closer to him in time than Defoe in order to gratify his desire for belief (for distance of time in a novel sets up picturesqueness, hence unfamiliarity). If he should take down, for example, some book of a prolific and once esteemed novelist, like W. E. Norris, he will find that the juxtaposition of the two books brings each out more clearly.

W. E. Norris was an industrious writer who is well worth singling out for inquiry if only because he represents that vast body of forgotten novelists by whose labours fiction is kept alive in the absence of the great masters. At first, we seem to be given all that we need: girls and boys, cricket, shooting, dancing, boating, lovemaking, marriage; a park here; a London drawing-room there; here, an English gentleman; there, a cad; dinners, tea-parties, canters in the Row; and, behind it all, green and gray, domestic and venerable, the fields and manor houses of England. Then, as one scene succeeds another, half-way through the book, we seem to have a great deal more belief on our hands than we know what to do with. We have exhausted the vividness of slang; the modernity, the adroit turn of mood. We loiter on the threshold of the scene, asking to be allowed to press a little further; we take some phrase, and look at it as if it ought to yield us more. Then, turning our eyes from the main figures, we try to sketch out something in the background, to pursue these feelings and relations away from the present moment; not, needless to say, with a view to discovering some over-arching conception, something which we may call ‘a reading of life’. No, our desire is otherwise: some shadow of depth appropriate to the bulk of the figures; some Providence such as Defoe provides or morality such as he suggests, so that we can go beyond the age itself without falling into inanity.

Then, we discover it is the mark of a second-rate writer that he cannot pause here or suggest there. All his powers are strained in keeping the scene before us, its brightness and its credibility. The surface is all; there is nothing beyond.

Our capacity for belief, however, is not in the least exhausted. It is only a question of finding something that will revive it for us. Not Shakespeare and not Shelley and not Hardy; perhaps, Trollope, Swift, Maupassant. Above all, Maupassant is the most promising at the moment, for Maupassant enjoys the great advantage that he writes in French. Not from any merit of his own, he gives us that little fillip which we get from reading a language whose edges have not been smoothed for us by daily use. The very sentences shape themselves in a way that is definitely charming. The words tingle and sparkle. As for English, alas, it is our language—shop-worn, not so desirable, perhaps. Moreover, each of these compact little stories has its pinch of gunpowder, artfully placed so as to explode when we tread on its tail. The last words are always highly charged. Off they go, bang, in our faces and there is lit up for us in one uncompromising glare someone with his hand lifted, someone sneering, someone turning his back, someone catching an omnibus, as if this insignificant action, whatever it may be, summed up the whole situation forever.

The reality that Maupassant brings before us is always one of the body, of the senses—the ripe flesh of a servant girl, for example, or the succulence of food. ‘Elle restait inerte, ne sentant plus son corps, et l’esprit dispersé, comme si quelqu’un l’eût d’échiqueté avec un de ces instruments dont se servent les cardeurs pour effiloquer la laine des matelas.’ Or her tears dried themselves upon her cheeks ‘comme des gouttes d’eau sur du fer rouge’. It is all concrete; it is all visualized. It is a world, then, in which one can believe with one’s eyes and one’s nose and one’s senses; nevertheless, it is a world which secretes perpetually a little drop of bitterness. Is this all? And, if this is all, is it enough? Must we, then, believe this? So we ask. Now that we are given truth unadorned, a disagreeable sensation seems attached to it, which we must analyse before we go further.

Suppose that one of the conditions of things as they are is that they are unpleasant, have we strength enough to support that unpleasantness for the sake of the delight of believing in it? Are we not shocked somehow by Gulliver’s Travels and Boule de suif and La Maison Tellier? Shall we not always be trying to get round the obstacle of ugliness by saying that Maupassant and his like are narrow, cynical, and unimaginative when, in fact, it is their truthfulness that we resent—the fact that leeches suck the naked legs of servant girls, that there are brothels, that human nature is fundamentally cold, selfish, corrupt? This discomfort at the disagreeableness of truth is one of the first things that shakes very lightly our desire to believe. Our Anglo-Saxon blood, perhaps, has given us an instinct that truth is, if not exactly beautiful, at least pleasant or virtuous to behold. But let us look once more at truth and, this time, through the eyes of Anthony Trollope, ‘a big, blustering, spectacled, loud voiced hunting man … whose language in male society was, I believe, so lurid that I was not admitted to breakfast with him … who rode about the country establishing penny posts, and wrote, as the story goes, so many thousand words before breakfast every day of his life’. [◉5]

Certainly, the Barchester novels tell the truth, and the English truth, at first sight, is almost as plain of feature as the French truth, though with a difference. Mr. Slope is a hypocrite, with a ‘pawing, greasy way with him’. Mrs. Proudie is a domineering bully. The Archdeacon is well-meaning but coarse-grained and thick-cut. Thanks to the vigour of the author, the world of which these are the most prominent inhabitants goes through its daily rigmarole of feeding and begetting children and worshipping with a thoroughness, a gusto, which leave us no loophole of escape. We believe in Barchester as we believe in the reality of our own weekly bills. Nor, indeed, do we wish to escape from the consequences of our belief, for the truth of the Slopes and the Proudies, the truth of the evening party where Mrs. Proudie has her dress torn off her back under the light of eleven gas jets, is entirely acceptable.

At the top of his bent Trollope is a big, if not first-rate novelist, and the top of his bent came when he drove his pen hard and fast after the humours of provincial life and scored, without cruelty but with hale and hearty common sense, the portraits of those well-fed, black-coated, unimaginative men and women of the fifties. In his manner with them, and his manner is marked, there is an admirable shrewdness, like that of a family doctor or solicitor, too well acquainted with human foibles to judge them other than tolerantly and not above the human weakness of liking one person a great deal better  han another for no good reason. Indeed, though he does his best to be severe and is at his best when most so, he could not hold himself aloof, but let us know that he loved the pretty girl and hated the oily humbug so vehemently that it is only by a great pull on his reins that he keeps himself straight. It is a family party over which he presides and the reader who becomes, as time goes on, one of Trollope’s most intimate cronies has a seat at his right hand. Their relation becomes confidential.

All this, of course, complicates what was simple enough in Defoe and Maupassant. There, we were plainly and straightforwardly asked to believe. Here, we are asked to believe, but to believe through the medium of Trollope’s temperament and, thus, a second relationship is set up with Trollope himself which, if it diverts us, distracts us also. The truth is no longer quite so true. The clear cold truth, which seems to lie before us unveiled in Gulliver’s Travels and Moll Flanders and La Maison Tellier, is here garnished with a charming embroidery. But it is not from this attractive embellishment of Trollope’s personality that the disease comes which in the end proves fatal to the huge, substantial, well buttressed, and authenticated truth of the Barchester novels. Truth itself, however unpleasant, is interesting always. But, unfortunately, the conditions of storytelling are harsh; they demand that scene shall follow scene; that party shall be supported by another party, one parsonage by another parsonage; that all shall be of the same calibre; that the same values shall prevail. If we are told here that the palace was lit by gas, we must be told there that the manor house was faithful to the oil lamp. But what will happen if, in process of solidifying the entire body of his story, the novelist finds himself out of facts or flagging in his invention? Must he then go on? Yes, for the story has to be finished: the intrigue discovered, the guilty punished, the lovers married in the end. The record, therefore, becomes at times merely a chronicle. Truth peters out into a thin-blooded catalogue. Better would it be, we feel, to leave a blank or even to outrage our sense of probability than to stuff the crevices with this makeshift substance: the wrong side of truth is a worn, dull fabric, unsteeped in the waters of imagination and scorched. But the novel has issued her orders; I consist, she says, of two and thirty chapters; and who am I, we seem to hear the sagacious and humble Trollope ask, with his usual good sense, that I should go disobeying the novel? And he manfully provides us with makeshifts.

If, then, we reckon up what we have got from the truth-tellers, we find that it is a world where our attention is always being drawn to things which can be seen, touched, and tasted, so that we get an acute sense of the reality of our physical existence. Having thus established our belief, the truth-tellers at once contrive that its solidity shall be broken before it becomes oppressive by action. Events happen; coincidence complicates the plain story. But their actions are all in keeping one with another and they are extremely careful not to discredit them or alter the emphasis in any way by making their characters other than such people as naturally express themselves to the full in active and adventurous careers. Then, again, they hold the three great powers which dominate fiction—God, Nature, and Man—in stable relation so that we look at a world in proper perspective; where, moreover, things hold good not only here at the moment in front of us but, there, behind that tree or among those unknown people far away in the shadow behind those hills. At the same time, truth-telling implies disagreeableness. It is part of truth—the sting and edge of it. We cannot deny that Swift, Defoe, and Maupassant all convince us that they reach a more profound depth in their ugliness than Trollope in his pleasantness. For this reason, truth-telling easily swerves a little to one side and becomes satiric. It walks beside the fact and apes it, like a shadow which is only a little more humped and angular than the object which casts it. Yet, in its perfect state, when we can believe absolutely, our satisfaction is complete. Then, we can say, though other states may exist which are better or more exalted, there is none that makes this unnecessary, none that supersedes it. But truth-telling carries in its breast a weakness which is apparent in the works of the lesser writers or in the masters themselves when they are exhausted. Truth-telling is liable to degenerate into perfunctory fact-recording, the repetition of the statement that it was on Wednesday that the Vicar held his mother’s meeting which was often attended by Mrs. Brown and Miss Dobson in their pony carriage, a statement which, as the reader is quick to perceive, has nothing of truth in it but the respectable outside.

At length, then, taking into account the perfunctory fact-recording, the lack of metaphor, the plainness of the language, and the fact that we believe most when the truth is most painful to us, it is not strange that we should become aware of another desire welling up spontaneously and making its way into those cracks which the great monuments of the truth-tellers wear inevitably upon their solid bases. A desire for distance, for music, for shadow, for space, takes hold of us. The dustman has picked up his broken bottle; he has crossed the road; he begins to lose solidity and detail over there in the evening dusk.

The Romantics

‘It was a November morning, and the cliffs which overlooked the ocean were hung with thick and heavy mist, when the portals of the ancient and half ruinous tower, in which Lord Ravenswood had spent the last and troubled years of his life, opened, that his mortal remains might pass forward to an abode yet more dreary and lonely.’

No change could be more complete. The dustman has become a Lord; the present has become the past; homely Anglo-Saxon speech has become Latin and many syllabled; instead of pots and pans, gas jets and snug broughams, we have a half-ruinous tower and cliffs, the ocean and November, heavy in mist. This past and this ruin, this lord and this autumn, this ocean and this cliff are as delightful to us as the change from a close room and voices to the night and the open air. The curious softness and remoteness of the Bride of Lammermoor, the atmosphere of rusty moorland and splashing waves, the dark and the distance actually seem to be adding themselves to that other more truthful scene which we still hold in mind, and to be giving it completeness. After that storm this peace, after that glare this coolness. The truth-tellers had very little love, it seems, of nature. They used nature almost entirely as an obstacle to overcome or as a background to complete, not æsthetically for contemplation or for any part it might play in the affairs of their characters. The town, after all, was their natural haunt. But let us compare them in more essential qualities in their treatment of people. There comes towards us a girl tripping lightly and leaning on her father’s arm:

… ‘Lucy Ashton’s exquisitely beautiful, yet somewhat girlish features, were formed to express peace of mind, serenity, and indifference to the tinsel of worldly pleasure. Her locks, which were of shadowy gold, divided on a brow of exquisite whiteness, like a gleam of broken and pallid sunshine upon a hill of snow. The expression of the countenance was in the last degree gentle, soft, timid and feminine, and seemed rather to shrink from the most casual look of a stranger than to court his admiration.’

Nobody could less resemble Moll Flanders or Mrs. Proudie. Lucy Ashton is incapable of action or of self-control. The bull runs at her and she sinks to the ground; the thunder peals and she faints. She falters out the strangest little language of ceremony and politeness, ‘O if you be a man, if you be a gentleman assist me to find my father’. One might say that she has no character except the traditional; to her father she is filial; to her lover, modest; to the poor, benevolent. Compared with Moll Flanders, she is a doll with sawdust in her veins and wax in her cheeks. Yet we have read ourselves into the book and grow familiar with its proportions. We come, at length, to see that anything more individual or eccentric or marked would lay emphasis where we want none. This tapering wraith hovers over the landscape and is part of it. She and Edgar Ravenswood are needed to support this romantic world with their bare forms, to clasp it round with that theme of unhappy love which is needed to hold the rest together. But the world that they clasp has its own laws. It leaves out and eliminates no less drastically than the other. On the one hand, we have feelings of the utmost exaltation—love, hate, jealousy, remorse; on the other hand, raciness and simplicity in the extreme. The rhetoric of the Ashtons and Ravenswoods is completed by the humours of peasants and cackle of village women. The true romantic can swing us from earth to sky; and the great master of romantic fiction, who is undoubtedly Sir Walter Scott, uses his liberty to the full. At the same time, we retort upon this melancholy which he has called forth, as in the Bride of Lammermoor. We laugh at ourselves for having been so moved by machinery so absurd. However, before we impute this defect to romance itself, we must consider whether it is not Scott’s fault. This lazy-minded man was quite capable when the cold fit was on him of filling a chapter or two currently, conventionally, from a fountain of empty, journalistic phrases which, for all that they have a charm of their own, let the slackened attention sag still further.

Carelessness has never been laid to the charge of Robert Louis Stevenson. He was careful, careful to a fault—a man who combined most strangely boy’s psychology with the extreme sophistication of an artist. Yet, he obeyed no less implicitly than Walter Scott the laws of romance. He lays his scene in the past; he is always putting his characters to the sword’s point with some desperate adventure; he caps his tragedy with homespun humour. Nor can there be any doubt that his conscience and his seriousness as a writer have stood him in good stead. Take any page of The Master of Ballantrae and it still stands wear and tear; but the fabric of the Bride of Lammermoor is full of holes and patches; it is scamped, botched, hastily flung together. Here, in Stevenson, romance is treated seriously and given all the advantages of the most refined literary art, with the result that we are never left to consider what an absurd situation this is or to reflect that we have no emotion left with which to meet the demand made upon us. We get, on the contrary, a firm, credible story, which never betrays us for a second, but is corroborated, substantiated, made good in every detail. With what precision and cunning a scene will be made visible to us as if the pen were a knife which sliced away the covering and left the core bare!

‘It was as he said: there was no breath stirring; a windless stricture of frost had bound the air; and as we went forth in the shine of the candles, the blackness was like a roof over our heads.’ Or, again: ‘All the 27th that rigorous weather endured; a stifling cold; folk passing about like smoking chimneys; the wide hearth in the hall piled high with fuel; some of the spring birds that had already blundered north into our neighbourhood besieging the windows of the house or trotting on the frozen turf like things distracted.’

‘A windless stricture of frost … folk passing about like smoking chimneys’—one may search the Waverley Novels in vain for such close writing as this. Separately, these descriptions are lovely and brilliant. The fault lies elsewhere, in the whole of which they are a part. For in those critical minutes which decide a book’s fate, when it is finished and the book swims up complete in the mind and lets us look at it, something seems lacking. Perhaps it is that the detail sticks out too prominently. The mind is caught up by this fine passage of description, by that curious exactitude of phrase; but the rhythm and sweep of emotion which the story has started in us are denied satisfaction. We are plucked back when we should be swinging free. Our attention is caught by some knot of ribbon or refinement of tracery when in fact we desire only a bare body against the sky.

Scott repels our taste in a thousand ways. But the crisis, that is the point where the accent falls and shapes the book under it, is right. Slouching, careless as he is, he will at the critical moment pull himself together and strike the one stroke needed, the stroke which gives the book its vividness in memory. Lucy sits gibbering ‘couched like a hare upon its form’. ‘So, you have ta’en up your bonnie bridegroom?’ she says, dropping her fine lady’s mincing speech for the vernacular. Ravenswood sinks beneath the quicksands. ‘One only vestige of his fate appeared. A large sable feather had been detached from his hat, and the rippling waves of the rising tide wafted it to Caleb’s feet. The old man took it up, dried it, and placed it in his bosom.’ At both these points the writer’s hand is on the book and it falls from him shaped. But in The Master of Ballantrae, though each detail is right and wrought so as separately to move our highest admiration, there is no such final consummation. What should have gone to help it seems, in retrospect, to stand apart from it. We remember the detail, but not the whole. Lord Durisdeer and the Master die together but we scarcely notice it. Our attention has been frittered away elsewhere.

It would seem that the romantic spirit is an exacting one; if it sees a man crossing the road in the lamplight and then lost in the gloom of the evening, it at once dictates what course the writer must pursue. We do not wish, it will say, to know much about him. We desire that he shall express our capacity for being noble and adventurous; that he shall dwell among wild places and suffer the extremes of fortune; that he be endowed with youth and distinction and allied with moors, winds, and wild birds. He is, moreover, to be a lover, not in a minute, introspective way, but largely and in outline. His feelings must be part of the landscape; the shallow browns and blues of distant woods and harvest fields are to enter into them; a tower, perhaps, and a castle where the snapdragon flowers. Above all, the romantic spirit demands here a crisis and there a crisis in which the wave that has swollen in the breast shall break. Such feelings Scott gratifies more completely than Stevenson, though with enough qualification to make us pursue the question of romance and its scope and its limitations a little further. Perhaps here it might be interesting to read The Mysteries of Udolpho.

The Mysteries of Udolpho have been so much laughed at as the type of Gothic absurdity that it is difficult to come at the book with a fresh eye. We come, expecting to ridicule. Then, when we find beauty, as we do, we go to the other extreme and rhapsodize. But the beauty and the absurdity of romance are both present and the book is a good test of the romantic attitude, since Mrs. Radcliffe pushes the liberties of romance to the extreme. Where Scott will go back a hundred years to get the effect of distance, Mrs. Radcliffe will go back three hundred. With one stroke, she frees herself from a host of disagreeables and enjoys her freedom lavishly.

As a novelist, it is her desire to describe scenery and it is there that her great gift lies. Like every true writer, she shoulders her way past every obstacle to her goal. She brings us into a huge, empty, airy world. A few ladies and gentlemen, who are purely eighteenth century in mind, manner, and speech, wander about in vast champaigns, listen to nightingales singing amorously in midnight woods; see the sun set over the lagoon of Venice; and watch the distant Alps turn pink and blue from the turrets of an Italian castle. These people, when they are well born, are of the same blood as Scott’s gentry; attenuated and formal silhouettes who have the same curious power of being in themselves negligible and insipid but of merging harmoniously in the design.

Again, we feel the force which the romantic acquires by obliterating facts. With the sinking of the lights, the solidity of the foreground disappears, other shapes become apparent and other senses are roused. We become aware of the danger and darkness of our existence; comfortable reality has proved itself a phantom too. Outside our little shelter we hear the wind raging and the waves breaking. In this mood our senses are strained and apprehensive. Noises are audible which we should not hear normally. Curtains rustle. Something in the semi-darkness seems to move. Is it alive? And what is it? And what is it seeking here? Mrs. Radcliffe succeeds in making us feel all this, largely because she is able to make us aware of the landscape and, thus, induces a detached mood favourable to romance; but in her, more plainly than in Scott or Stevenson, the absurdity is evident, the wheels of the machine are visible and the grinding is heard. She lets us see more clearly than they do what demands the romantic writer makes upon us.

Both Scott and Stevenson, with the true instinct of the imagination, introduced rustic comedy and broad Scots dialect. It is in that direction, as they rightly divined, that the mind will unbend when it relaxes. Mrs. Radcliffe, on the other hand, having climbed to the top of her pinnacle, finds it impossible to come down. She tries to solace us with comic passages, put naturally into the mouths of Annette and Ludovico who are servants. But the break is too steep for her limited and ladylike mind and she pieces out her high moments and her beautiful atmosphere with a pale reflection of romance which is more tedious than any ribaldry. Mysteries abound. Murdered bodies multiply; but she is incapable of creating the emotion to feel them by, with the result that they lie there, unbelieved in; hence, ridiculous. The veil is drawn; there is the concealed figure; there is the decayed face; there are the writhing worms—and we laugh.

Directly the power which lives in a book sinks, the whole fabric of the book, its sentences, the length and shape of them, its inflections, its mannerisms, all that it wore proudly and naturally under the impulse of a true emotion become stale, forced, unappetizing. Mrs. Radcliffe slips limply into the faded Scott manner and reels off page after page in a style illustrated by this example:

Emily, who had always endeavoured to regulate her conduct by the nicest laws, and whose mind was finely sensible, not only of what is just in morals, but of whatever is beautiful in the feminine character, was shocked by these words.

And so it slips along and so we sink and drown in the pale tide. Nevertheless, Udolpho passes this test: it gives us an emotion which is both distinct and unique, however high or low we rate the emotion itself.

If we see now where the danger of romance lies: how difficult the mood is to sustain; how it needs the relief of comedy; how the very distance from common human experience and strangeness of its elements become ridiculous—if we see these things, we see also that these emotions are in themselves priceless jewels. The romantic novel realizes for us an emotion which is deep and genuine. Scott, Stevenson, Mrs. Radcliffe, all in their different ways, unveil another country of the land of fiction; and it is not the least proof of their power that they breed in us a keen desire for something different.

The Character-Mongers and Comedians

The novels which make us live imaginatively, with the whole of the body as well as the mind, produce in us the physical sensations of heat and cold, noise and silence, one reason perhaps why we desire change and why our reactions to them vary so much at different times. Only, of course, the change must not be violent. It is rather that we need a new scene; a return to human faces; a sense of walls and towns about us, with their lights and their characters after the silence of the wind-blown heath.

After reading the romances of Scott and Stevenson and Mrs. Radcliffe, our eyes seem stretched, their sight a little blurred, as if they had been gazing into the distance and it would be a relief to turn for contrast to a strongly marked human face, to characters of extravagant force and character in keeping with our romantic mood. Such figures are most easily to be found in Dickens, of course, and particularly in Bleak House where, as Dickens said, ‘I have purposely dwelt upon the romantic side of familiar things’. They are found there with peculiar aptness—for if the characters satisfy us by their eccentricity and vigour, London and the landscape of the Dedlocks’ place at Chesney Wold are in the mood of the moor, only more luridly lit up and more sharply dark and bright because in Dickens the character-making power is so prodigious that the very houses and streets and fields are strongly featured in sympathy with the people. The character-making power is so prodigious, indeed, that it has little need to make use of observation, and a great part of the delight of Dickens lies in the sense we have of wantoning with human beings twice or ten times their natural size of smallness who retain only enough human likeness to make us refer their feelings very broadly, not to our own, but to those of odd figures seen casually through the half-opened doors of public houses, lounging on quays, slinking mysteriously down little alleys which lie about Holborn and the Law Courts. We enter at once into the spirit of exaggeration.

Who, in the course of a long life, has met Mr. Chadband or Mr. Turveydrop or Miss Elite? Who has met anybody who, whatever the day of the occasion, can be trusted to say the same phrase, to repeat the same action? This perpetual repetition has, of course, an enormous power to drive these characters home, to stabilize them. Mr. Vholes, with his three dear girls at home and his father to support in the Vale of Taunton, Mrs. Jellyby and the natives of Borrioboola-Gha, Mr. Turveydrop and his deportment, all serve as stationary points in the flow and confusion of the narrative; they have a decorative effect as if they were gargoyles carved, motionless, at the corner of a composition. Wherever we may have wandered, we shall come back and find them there. They uphold the extraordinary intricacy of the plot in whose confusion we are often sunk up to our lips. For it is impossible to imagine that the Jellybys and the Turveydrops are ever affected by human emotions or that their habitual routine is disturbed by the astonishing events which blow through the pages of the book, from so many quarters at the same time. Thus they have a force, a sublimity, which the slighter and more idiosyncratic characters miss.

After all, is not life itself, with its coincidences and its convolutions, astonishingly queer? ‘What connexion,’ Dickens himself exclaims, ‘can there have been between many people in the innumerable histories of this world, who, from opposite sides of great gulfs, have, nevertheless, been very curiously brought together!’ One after another his characters come into being, called into existence by an eye which has only to glance into a room to take in every object, human or inanimate, that is there; by an eye which sees once and for all; which snatches at a woman’s steel hair-curlers, a pair of red-rimmed eyes, a white scar and makes them somehow reveal the essence of a character; an eye gluttonous, restless, insatiable, creating more than it can use. Thus, the prevailing impression is one of movement, of the endless ebb and flow of life round one or two stationary points.

Often we cease to worry about the plot and wander off down some strange avenue of suggestion stirred in this vast and mobile world by a casual movement, a word, a glance. ‘Still, very steadfastly and quietly walking towards it, a peaceful figure, too, in the landscape, went Mademoiselle Hortense, shoeless, through the wet grass.’ She goes and she leaves a strange wake of emotion behind her. Or, again, a door is flung open in the misty purlieus of London; there is Mr. Tulkinghorn’s friend, who appears once and once only—‘a man of the same mould and a lawyer too, who lived the same kind of life until he was seventy-five years old, and then, suddenly conceiving (as it is supposed) an impression that it was too monotonous, gave his gold watch to his hairdresser one summer evening, and walked leisurely home to the Temple, and hanged himself’.

This sense that the meaning goes on after the words are spoken, that doors open and let us look through them, is full of romance. But romance in Dickens is impressed on us through characters, through extreme types of human beings, not through castles or banners, not through the violence of action, adventure, or nature. Human faces, scowling, grinning, malignant, benevolent, are projected at us from every corner. Everything is unmitigated and extreme.

But at last, among all these characters who are so static and so extreme, we come upon one—Inspector Bucket, the detective—which is not, as the others are, of a piece, but made up of contrasts and discrepancies. The romantic power of the single-piece character is lost. For the character is no longer fixed and part of the design; it is in itself of interest. Its movements and changes compel us to watch it. We try to understand this many-sided man who has brushed his hair, which is thin, with a wet brush; who has his bombastic, official side, yet with it combines, as we see when the mine sprung, ability, conscience, even compassion—for all these qualities are displayed by turns in the astonishingly vivid account of the drive through the night and the storm, in pursuit of Esther’s mother. If much more were added, so that Inspector Bucket drew more of our attention to him and diverted it from the story, we should begin with his new scale of values in our eyes to find the glaring opposites in use elsewhere too violent to be tolerable. But Dickens committed no such sin against his readers. He uses this clear-cut, many-faced figure to sharpen his final scenes and, then, letting Inspector Bucket of the detective force disappear, gathers the loose folds of the story into one prodigious armful and makes an end. But he has sharpened our curiosity and made us dissatisfied with the limitations and even with the exuberance of his genius. The scene becomes too elastic, too voluminous, too cloud-like in its contours. The very abundance of it tires us, as well as the impossibility of holding it all together. We are always straying down bypaths and into alleys where we lose our way and cannot remember where we were going.

Though the heart of Dickens burned with indignation for public wrongs, he lacked sensitiveness privately, so that his attempts at intimacy failed. His great figures are on too large a scale to fit nicely into each other. They do not interlock. They need company to show them off and action to bring out their humours. They are often out of touch with each other. In Tolstoy, in the scenes between Princess Marya and her father, the old Prince, the pressure of character upon character is never relaxed. The tension is perpetual, every nerve in the character is alive. It may be for this reason that Tolstoy is the greatest of novelists. In Dickens the characters are impressive in themselves but not in their personal relations. Often, indeed, when they talk to each other they are vapid in the extreme or sentimental beyond belief. One thinks of them as independent, existing forever, unchanged, like monoliths looking up into the sky. So it is that we begin to want something smaller, more intense, more intricate. Dickens has, himself, given us a taste of the pleasure we derive from looking curiously and intently into another character. He has made us instinctively reduce the size of the scene in proportion to the figure of a normal man, and now we seek this intensification, this reduction, carried out more perfectly and more completely, we shall find, in the novels of Jane Austen.

At once, when we open Pride and Prejudice, we are aware that the sentence has taken on a different character. Dickens, of course, at full stride is as free-paced and far-stretched as possible. But in comparison with this nervous style, how large-limbed and how loose. The sentence here runs like a knife, in and out, cutting a shape clear. It is done in a drawing-room. It is done by the use of dialogue. Half a dozen people come together after dinner and begin, as they so well might, to discuss letter-writing. Mr. Darcy writes slowly and ‘studies too much for words of four syllables’. Mr. Bingley, on the other hand (for it is necessary that we should get to know them both and they can be quickest shown if they are opposed) ‘leaves out half his words and blots the rest’. But such is only the first rough shaping that gives the outline of the face. We go on to define and distinguish. Bingley, says Darcy, is really boasting, when he calls himself a careless letter-writer because he thinks the defect interesting. It was a boast when he told Mrs. Bennet that if he left Nethfield he would be gone in five minutes. And this little passage of analysis on Darcy’s part, besides proving his astuteness and his cool observant temper, rouses Bingley to show us a vivacious picture of Darcy at home. ‘I don’t know a more awful object than Darcy, on particular occasions, and in particular places; at his own house especially, and of a Sunday evening, when he has nothing to do.’

So, by means of perfectly natural question and answer, everyone is defined and, as they talk, they become not only more clearly seen, but each stroke of the dialogue brings them together or moves them apart, so that the group is no longer casual but interlocked. The talk is not mere talk; it has an emotional intensity which gives it more than brilliance. Light, landscape—everything that lies outside the drawing-room is arranged to illumine it. Distances are made exact; arrangements accurate. It is one mile from Meryton; it is Sunday and not Monday. We want all suspicions and questions laid at rest. It is necessary that the characters should lie before us in as clear and quiet a light as possible since every flicker and tremor is to be observed. Nothing happens, as things so often happen in Dickens, for its own oddity or curiosity but with relation to something else. No avenues of suggestion are opened up, no doors are suddenly flung wide; the ropes which tighten the structure, since they are all rooted in the heart, are so held firmly and tightly. For, in order to develop personal relations to the utmost, it is important to keep out of the range of the abstract, the impersonal; and to suggest that there is anything that lies outside men and women would be to cast the shadow of doubt upon the comedy of their relationships and its sufficiency. So with edged phrases where often one word, set against the current of the phrase, serves to fledge it (thus: ‘and whenever any of the cottagers were disposed to be quarrelsome, discontented, or too poor’) we go down to the depths, for deep they are, for all their clarity.

But personal relations have limits, as Jane Austen seems to realize by stressing their comedy. Everything, she seems to say, has, if we could discover it, a reasonable summing up; and it is extremely amusing and interesting to see the efforts of people to upset the reasonable order, defeated as they invariably are. But if, complaining of the lack of poetry or the lack of tragedy, we are about to frame the familiar statement that this is a world which is too small to satisfy us, a prosaic world, a world of inches and blades of grass, we are brought to a pause by another impression which requires a moment further of analysis. Among all the elements which play upon us in reading fiction there has always been, though in different degrees, some voice, accent, or temperament clearly heard, though behind the scenes of the book. ‘Trollope, the novelist, a big, blustering, spectacled, loud-voiced, hunting man’; Scott, the ruined, country gentleman, whose very pigs trotted after him, so gracious was the sound of his voice—both come to us with the gesture of hosts, welcoming us, and we fall under the spell of their charm or the interest of their characters.

We cannot say this of Jane Austen, and her absence has the effect of making us detached from her work and of giving it, for all its sparkle and animation, a certain aloofness and completeness. Her genius compelled her to absent herself. So truthful, so clear, so sane a vision would not tolerate distraction, even if it came from her own claims, nor allow the actual experience of a transitory woman to colour what should be unstained by personality. For this reason, then, though we may be less swayed by her, we are less dissatisfied. It may be the very idiosyncrasy of a writer that tires us of him. Jane Austen, who has so little that is peculiar, does not tire us, nor does she breed in us a desire for those writers whose method and style differ altogether from hers. Thus, instead of being urged as the last page is finished to start in search of something that contrasts and completes, we pause when we have read Pride and Prejudice.

The pause is the result of a satisfaction which turns our minds back upon what we have just read, rather than forward to something fresh. Satisfaction is, by its nature, removed from analysis, for the quality which satisfies us is the sum of many different parts, so that if we begin praising Pride and Prejudice for the qualities that compose it—its wit, its truth, its profound comic power—we shall still not praise it for the quality which is the sum of all these. At this point, then, the mind, brought to bay, escapes the dilemma and has recourse to images. We compare Pride and Prejudice to something else because, since satisfaction can be defined no further, all the mind can do is to make a likeness of the thing, and, by giving it another shape, cherish the illusion that it is explaining it, whereas it is, in fact, only looking at it afresh. To say that Pride and Prejudice is like a shell, a gem, a crystal, whatever image we may choose, is to see the same thing under a different guise. Yet, perhaps, if we compare Pride and Prejudice to something concrete, it is because we are trying to express the sense we have in other novels imperfectly, here with distinctness, of a quality which is not in the story but above it, not in the things themselves but in their arrangement.

Pride and Prejudice, one says, has form; Bleak House has not. The eye (so active always in fiction) gives its own interpretation of impressions that the mind has been receiving in different terms. The mind has been conscious in Pride and Prejudice that things are said, for all their naturalness, with a purpose; one emotion has been contrasted with another; one scene has been short, the next long; so that all the time, instead of reading at random, without control, snatching at this and that, stressing one thing or another, as the mood takes us, we have been aware of check and stimulus, of spectral architecture built up behind the animation and variety of the scene. It is a quality so precise it is not to be found either in what is said or in what is done; that is, it escapes analysis. It is a quality, too, that is much at the mercy of fiction. Its control is invariably weak there, much weaker than in poetry or in drama because fiction runs so close to life the two are always coming into collison. That this architectural quality can be possessed by a novelist, Jane Austen proves. And she proves, too, that far from chilling the interest or withdrawing the attention from the characters, it seems on the contrary to focus it and add an extra pleasure to the book, a significance. It makes it seem that here is something good in itself, quite apart from our personal feelings.

Not to seek contrast but to start afresh—this is the impulse which urges us on after finishing Pride and Prejudice. We must make a fresh start altogether. Personal relations, we recall, have limits. In order to keep their edges sharp, the mysterious, the unknown, the accidental, the strange subside; their intervention would be confusing and distressing. The writer adopts an ironic attitude to her creatures, because she has denied them so many adventures and experiences. A suitable marriage is, after all, the upshot of all this coming together and drawing apart. A world which so often ends in a suitable marriage is not a world to wring one’s hands over. On the contrary, it is a world about which we can be sarcastic; into which we can peer endlessly, as we fit the jagged pieces one into another. Thus, it is possible to ask not that her world shall be improved or altered (that our satisfaction forbids) but that another shall be struck off, whose constitution shall be different and shall allow of the other relations. People’s relations shall be with God or nature. They shall think. They shall sit, like Dorothea Casaubon in Middlemarch, drawing plans for other people’s houses; they shall suffer like Gissing’s characters in solitude; they shall be alone. Pride and Prejudice, because it has such integrity of its own, never for an instant encroaches on other provinces, and, thus, leaves them more clearly defined.

Nothing could be more complete than the difference between Pride and Prejudice and Silas Marner. Between us and the scene which was so near, so distinct, is now cast a shadow. Something intervenes. The character of Silas Marner is removed from us. It is held in relation to other men and his life compared with human life. This comparison is perpetually made and illustrated by somebody not implicit in the book but inside it, somebody who at once reveals herself as ‘I’, so that there can be no doubt from the first that we are not going to get the relations of people together, but the spectacle of life so far as ‘I’ can show it to us. ‘I’ will do my best to illumine these particular examples of men and women with all the knowledge, all the reflections that ‘I’ can offer you.

‘I’, we at once perceive, has access to many more experiences and reflections than can have come the way of the rustics themselves. She discovers what a simple weaver’s emotions on leaving his native village are, by comparing them with those of other people. ‘People whose lives have been made various by learning, sometimes find it hard to keep a fast hold on their habitual views of life, on their faith in the Invisible….’ It is the observer speaking and we are at once in communication with a grave mind—a mind which it is part of our business to understand. This, of course, darkens and thickens the atmosphere, for we see through so many temperaments; so many side-lights from knowledge, from reflection, play upon what we see; often, even as we are watching the weaver, our minds circle round him and we observe him with an amusement, compassion, or interest which it is impossible that he should feel himself.

Raveloe is not simply a town like Meryton now in existence with certain shops and assembly room; it has a past and therefore the present becomes fleeting, and we enjoy, among other things, the feeling that this is a world in process of change and decay, whose charm is due partly to the fact that it is past. Perhaps we compare it in our own minds with the England of to-day and the Napoleonic wars with those of our own time. All this, if it serves to enlarge the horizon, also makes the village and the people in it who are placed against so wide a view smaller and their impact on each other less sharp. The novelist who believes that personal relations are enough, intensifies them and sharpens them and devotes his power to their investigation. But if the end of life is not to meet, to part, to love, to laugh, if we are at the mercy of other forces, some of them unknown, all of them beyond our power, the urgency of these meetings and partings is blurred and lessened. The edges of the coming together are blunted and the comedy tends to widen itself into a larger sphere and so to modulate into something melancholy, tolerant, and perhaps resigned. George Eliot has removed herself too far from her characters to dissect them keenly or finely, but she has gained the use of her own mind upon these same characters. Jane Austen went in and out of her people’s minds like the blood in their veins.

George Eliot has kept the engine of her clumsy and powerful mind at her own disposal. She can use it, when she has created enough matter to use it upon, freely. She can stop at any moment to reason out the motives of the mind that has created it. When Silas Marner discovers that his gold has been stolen, he has recourse to ‘that sort of refuge which always comes with the prostration of thought under an overpowering passion; it was that expectation of impossibilities, that belief in contradictory images, which is still distinct from madness, because it is capable of being dissipated by the external fact’. Such analysis is unthinkable in Dickens or in Jane Austen. But it adds something to the character which the character lacked before. It makes us feel not only that the working of the mind is interesting but that we shall get a much truer and subtler understanding of what is actually said and done if we so observe it. We shall perceive that often an action has only a slight relation to a feeling and, thus, that the truth-tellers, who are content to record accurately what is said and done are often ludicrously deceived and out in their estimate. In other directions there are changes. The use of dialogue is limited; for people can say very little directly. Much more can be said for them or about them by the writer himself. Then, the writer’s mind, his knowledge, his skill, not merely the colour of his temperament, become means for bringing out the disposition of the character and also for relating it to other times and places. There is thus revealed underneath a state of mind which often runs counter to the action and the speech.

It is in this direction that George Eliot turns her characters and her scenes. Shadows checker them. All sorts of influences of history, or time, or reflection play upon them. If we consult our own difficult and mixed emotions as we read, it becomes clear that we are fast moving out of the range of pure character-mongering, of comedy, into a far more dubious region.

The Psychologists

Indeed, we have a strange sense of having left every world when we take up What Maisie Knew, of being without some support which, even if it impeded us in Dickens and George Eliot, upheld us and controlled us. The visual sense which has hitherto been so active, perpetually sketching fields and farmhouses and faces, seems now to fail or to use its powers to illumine the mind within rather than the world without. Henry James has to find an equivalent for the processes of the mind, to make concrete a mental state. He says, she was ‘a ready vessel for bitterness, a deep little porcelain cup in which biting acids could be mixed’. He is forever using this intellectual imagery. The usual supports, the props and struts of the conventions, expressed or observed by the writer, are removed. Everything seems aloof from interference, thrown open to discussion and light, though resting on no visible support. For the minds of which this world is composed seem oddly freed from the pressure of the old encumbrances and raised above the stress of circumstances.

Crises cannot be precipitated by any of the old devices which Dickens and George Eliot used. Murders, rapes, seductions, sudden deaths have no power over this high, aloof world. Here the people are the sport only of delicate influences: of thoughts that people think, but hardly state, about each other; of judgments which people whose time is unoccupied have leisure to devise and apply. In consequence, these characters seem held in a vacuum at a great move from the substantial, lumbering worlds of Dickens and George Eliot or from the precise crisscross of convention which metes out the world of Jane Austen. They live in a cocoon, spun from the finest shades of meaning, which a society, completely unoccupied by the business of getting its living, has time to spin round and about itself. Hence, we are at once conscious of using faculties hitherto dormant, ingenuity and skill, a mental nimbleness and dexterity such as serve to solve a puzzle ingeniously; our pleasure becomes split up, refined, its substance infinitely divided instead of being served to us in one lump.

Maisie, the little girl who is the bone of contention between two parents, each of them claiming her for six months, each of them finally marrying a second husband or wife, lies sunk beneath the depths of suggestion, hint, and conjecture, so that she can only affect us very indirectly, each feeling of hers being deflected and reaching us after glancing off the mind of some other person. Therefore she rouses in us no simple and direct emotion. We always have time to watch it coming and to calculate its pathway, now to the right, now to the left. Cool, amused, intrigued, at every second trying to refine our senses still further and to marshal all that we have of sophisticated intelligence into one section of ourselves, we hang suspended over this aloof little world and watch with intellectual curiosity for the event.

In spite of the fact that our pleasure is less direct, less the result of feeling strongly in sympathy with some pleasure or sorrow, it has a fineness, a sweetness, which the more direct writers fail to give us. This comes in part from the fact that a thousand emotional veins and streaks are perceptible in this twilight or dawn which are lost in the full light of midday.

Besides this fineness and sweetness we get another pleasure which comes when the mind is freed from the perpetual demand of the novelist that we shall feel with his characters. By cutting off the responses which are called out in actual life, the novelist frees us to take delight, as we do when ill or travelling, in things in themselves. We can see the strangeness of them only when habit has ceased to immerse us in them, and we stand outside watching what has no power over us one way or the other. Then we see the mind at work; we are amused by its power to make patterns; by its power to bring out relations in things and disparities which are covered over when we are acting by habit or driven on by the ordinary impulses. It is a pleasure somewhat akin, perhaps, to the pleasure of mathematics or the pleasure of music. Only, of course, since the novelist is using men and women as his subjects, he is perpetually exciting feelings which are opposed to the impersonality of numbers and sound; he seems, in fact, to ignore and to repress their natural feelings, to be coercing them into a plan which we call with vague resentment ‘artificial’ though it is probable that we are not so foolish as to resent artifice in art. Either through a feeling of timidity or prudery or through a lack of imaginative audacity, Henry James diminishes the interest and importance of his subject in order to bring about a symmetry which is dear to him. This his readers resent. We feel him there, as the suave showman, skilfully manipulating his characters; nipping, repressing; dexterously evading and ignoring, where a writer of greater depth or natural spirits would have taken the risk which his material imposes, let his sails blow full and so, perhaps, achieved symmetry and pattern, in themselves so delightful, all the same.

But it is the measure of Henry James’s greatness that he has given us so definite a world, so distinct and peculiar a beauty that we cannot rest satisfied but want to experiment further with these extraordinary perceptions, to understand more and more, but to be free from the perpetual tutelage of the author’s presence, his arrangements, his anxieties. To gratify this desire, naturally, we turn to the work of Proust, where we find at once an expansion of sympathy so great that it almost defeats its own object. If we are going to become conscious of everything, how shall we realize anything? Yet if Henry James’s world, after the worlds of Dickens and George Eliot, seemed without material boundaries, if everything was pervious to thought and susceptible of twenty shades of meaning, here illumination and analysis are carried far beyond those bounds. For one thing, Henry James himself, the American, ill at ease for all his magnificent urbanity in a strange civilization, was an obstacle never perfectly assimilated even by the juices of his own art. Proust, the product of the civilization which he describes, is so porous, so pliable, so perfectly receptive that we realize him only as an envelope, thin but elastic, which stretches wider and wider and serves not to enforce a view but to enclose a world. His whole universe is steeped in the light of intelligence. The commonest object, such as the telephone, loses its simplicity, its solidity, and becomes a part of life and transparent. The commonest actions, such as going up in an elevator or eating cake, instead of being discharged automatically, rake up in their progress a whole series of thoughts, sensations, ideas, memories which were apparently sleeping on the walls of the mind.

What are we to do with it all? we cannot help asking, as these trophies are piled up round us. The mind cannot be content with holding sensation after sensation passively to itself; something must be done with them; their abundance must be shaped. Yet at first it would seem as if this vitalizing power has become so fertile that it cumbers the way and trips us up, even when we have need to go quickest, by putting some curious object enticingly in our way. We have to stop and look even against our will.

Thus, when his mother calls him to come to his grandmother’s deathbed, the author says, ‘“I was not asleep,” I answered as I awoke’. Then, even in this crisis, he pauses to explain carefully and subtly why at the moment of waking we so often think for a second that we have not been to sleep. The pause, which is all the more marked because the reflection is not made by ‘I’ himself but is supplied impersonally by the narrator and therefore, from a different angle, lays a great strain upon the mind, stretched by the urgency of the situation to focus itself upon the dying woman in the next room.

Much of the difficulty of reading Proust comes from this content obliquity. In Proust, the accumulation of objects which surround any central point is so vast and they are often so remote, so difficult of approach and of apprehension that this drawing-together process is gradual, tortuous, and the final relation difficult in the extreme. There is so much more to think about them than one had supposed. One’s relations are not only with another person but with the weather, food, clothes, smells, with art and religion and science and history and a thousand other influences.

If one begins to analyse consciousness, it will be found that it is stirred by thousands of small, irrelevant ideas stuffed with odds and ends of knowledge. When, therefore, we come to say something so usual as ‘I kissed her’, we may well have to explain also how a girl jumped over a man in a deck-chair on the beach before we come tortuously and gradually to the difficult process of describing what a kiss means. In any crisis, such as the death of the grandmother or that moment when the Duchess learns as she steps into her carriage that her old friend Swann is fatally ill, the number of emotions that compose each of these scenes is immensely larger, and they are themselves much more incongruous and difficult of relation than any other scene laid before us by a novelist.

Moreover, if we ask for help in finding our way, it does not come through any of the usual channels. We are never told, as the English novelists so frequently tell us, that one way is right and the other wrong. Every way is thrown open without reserve and without prejudice. Everything that can be felt can be said. The mind of Proust lies open with the sympathy of a poet and the detachment of a scientist to everything that it has the power to feel. Direction or emphasis, to be told that that is right, to be nudged and bidden to attend to that, would fall like a shadow on this profound luminosity and cut off some section of it from our view. The common stuff of the book is made of this deep reservoir of perception. It is from these depths that his characters rise, like waves forming, then break and sink again into the moving sea of thought and comment and analysis which gave them birth.

In retrospect, thus, though as dominant as any characters in fiction, the characters of Proust seem made of a different substance. Thoughts, dreams, knowledge are part of them. They have grown to their full stature, and their actions have met with no rebuff. If we look for direction to help us put them in their places in the universe, we find it negatively in an absence of direction—perhaps sympathy is of more value than interference, understanding than judgment. As a consequence of the union of the thinker and the poet, often, on the heel of some fanatically precise observation, we come upon a flight of imagery—beautiful, coloured, visual, as if the mind, having carried its powers as far as possible in analysis, suddenly rose in the air and from a station high up gave us a different view of the same object in terms of metaphor. This dual vision makes the great characters in Proust and the whole world from which they spring more like a globe, of which one side is always hidden, than a scene laid flat before us, the whole of which we can take in at one glance.

To make this more precise, it might be well to choose another writer, of foreign birth also, who has the same power of illuminating the consciousness from its roots to the surface. Directly we step from the world of Proust to the world of Dostoevsky, we are startled by differences which for a time absorb all our attention. How positive the Russian is, in comparison with the Frenchman. He strikes out a character or a scene by the use of glaring oppositions which are left unbridged. Extreme terms like ‘love’ and ‘hate’ are used so lavishly that we must race our imaginations to cover the ground between them. One feels that the mesh of civilization here is made of a coarse netting and the holes are wide apart. Men and women have escaped, compared with the imprisonment that they suffer in Paris. They are free to throw themselves from side to side, to gesticulate, to hiss, to rant, to fall into paroxysms of rage and excitement. They are free, with the freedom that violent emotion gives, from hesitation, from scruple, from analysis. At first we are amazed by the emptiness and the crudity of this world compared with the other. But when we have arranged our perspective a little, it is clear that we are still in the same world—that it is the mind which entices us and the adventures of the mind that concern us. Other worlds, such as Scott’s or Defoe’s, are incredible. Of this we are assured when we begin to encounter those curious contradictions of which Dostoevsky is so prolific. There is a simplicity in violence which we find nowhere in Proust, but violence also lays bare regions deep down in the mind where contradiction prevails. That contrast which marked Stavrogin’s appearance, so that he was at once ‘a paragon of beauty, yet at the same time there seemed something repellent about him’, is but the crude outer sign of the vice and virtue we meet, at full tilt, in the same breast. The simplification is only on the surface; when the bold and ruthless process, which seems to punch out characters, then to group them together and then to set them all in violent motion, so energetically, so impatiently, is complete, we are shown how, beneath this crude surface, all is chaos and complication. We feel at first that we are in a savage society where the emotions are much simpler and stronger and more impressive than any we encounter in A la Recherche du Temps perdu.

Since there are so few conventions, so few barriers (Stavrogin, for instance, passes easily from the depths to the heights of society) the complexity would appear to lie deeper, and these strange contradictions and anomalies which make a man at once divine and bestial would seem to be deep in the heart and not superimposed. Hence, the strange emotional effect of The Possessed. It appears to be written by a fanatic ready to sacrifice skill and artifice in order to reveal the soul’s difficulties and confusions. The novels of Dostoevsky are pervaded with mysticism; he speaks not as a writer but as a sage, sitting by the roadside in a blanket, with infinite knowledge and infinite patience.

‘Yes,’ she answered, ‘the mother of God is the great mother—the damp earth, and therein lies great joy for men. And every earthly woe and every earthly fear is a joy for us; and when you water the earth with your tears a foot deep, you will rejoice at everything at once, and your sorrow will be no more, such is the prophecy.’ That word sank into my heart at the time. Since then when I bow down to the ground at my prayers, I’ve taken to kissing the earth. I kiss it and weep.

Such is a characteristic passage. But in a novel the voice of the teacher, however exalted, is not enough. We have too many interests to consider, too many problems to face. Consider a scene like that extraordinary party to which Varvara Petrovna has brought Marya, the lame idiot, whom Stavrogin has married ‘from a passion for martyrdom, from a craving for remorse, through moral sensuality’. We cannot read to the end without feeling as if a thumb were pressing on a button in us, when we have no emotion left to answer the call. It is a day of surprises, a day of startling revelations, a day of strange coincidences. For several of the people there (and they come flocking to the room from all quarters) the scene has the greater emotional importance. Everything is done to suggest the intensity of their emotions. They turn pale; they shake with terror; they go into hysterics. They are thus brought before us in flashes of extreme brilliance—the mad woman with the paper rose in her hat; the young man whose words patter out ‘like smooth big grains…. One somehow began to imaging that he must have a tongue of special shape, somehow exceptionally long and thin, and extremely red, with a very sharp everlastingly active little tip.’

Yet though they stamp and scream, we hear the sound as if it went on next door. Perhaps the truth is that hate, surprise, anger, horror, are all too strong to be felt continuously. This emptiness and noise lead us to wonder whether the novel of psychology, which projects its drama in the mind, should not, as the truth-tellers showed us, vary and diversify its emotions, lest we shall become numb with exhaustion. To brush aside civilization and plunge into the depths of the soul is not really to enrich. We have, if we turn to Proust, more emotion in a scene which is not supposed to be remarkable, like that in the restaurant in the fog. There we live along a thread of observation which is always going in and out of this mind and that mind; which gathers information from different social levels, which makes us now feel with a prince, now with a restaurant keeper, and brings us into touch with different physical experiences such as light after darkness, safety after danger, so that the imagination is being stimulated on all sides to close slowly, gradually, without being goaded by screams or violence, completely round the object. Proust is determined to bring before the reader every piece of evidence upon which any state of mind is founded; so convinced is Dostoevsky of some point of truth that he sees before him, he will skip and leap to his conclusion with a spontaneity that is in itself stimulating.

By this distortion the psychologist reveals himself. The intellect, which analyses and discriminates, is always and almost at once overpowered by the rush to feeling; whether it is sympathy or anger. Hence, there is something illogical and contradictory often in the characters, perhaps because they are exposed to so much more than the usual current of emotional force. Why does he act like this? we ask again and again, and answer rather doubtfully, that so perhaps madmen act. In Proust, on the other hand, the approach is equally indirect, but it is through what people think and what is thought about them, through the knowledge and thoughts of the author himself, that we come to understand them very slowly and laboriously, but with the whole of our minds.

The books, however, with all these dissimilarities, are alike in this; both are permeated with unhappiness. And this would seem to be inevitable when the mind is not given a direct grasp of whatever it may be. Dickens is in many ways like Dostoevsky; he is prodigiously fertile and he has immense powers of caricature. But Micawber, David Copperfield, and Mrs. Gamp are placed directly before us, as if the author saw them from the same angle, and had nothing to do, and no conclusion to draw, except direct amusement or interest. The mind of the author is nothing but a glass between us, or, at most, serves to put a frame round them. All the author’s emotional power has gone into them. The surplus of thought and feeling which remained after the characters had been created in George Eliot, to cloud and darken her page, has been used up in the characters of Dickens. Nothing of importance remains over.

But in Proust and Dostoevsky, in Henry James, too, and in all those who set themselves to follow feelings and thoughts, there is always an overflow of emotion from the author as if characters of such subtlety and complexity could be created only when the rest of the book is a deep reservoir of thought and emotion. Thus, though the author himself is not present, characters like Stephen Trofimovitch and Charlus can exist only in a world made of the same stuff as they are, though left unformulated. The effect of this brooding and analysing mind is always to produce an atmosphere of doubt, of questioning, of pain, perhaps of despair. At least, such would seem to be the result of reading A la Recherche du Temps perdu and The Possessed.

The Satirists and Fantastics

The confused feelings which the psychologists have roused in us, the extraordinary intricacy which they have revealed to us, the network of fine and scarcely intelligible yet profoundly interesting emotions in which they have involved us, set up a craving for relief, at first so primitive that it is almost a physical sensation. The mind feels like a sponge saturated full with sympathy and understanding; it needs to dry itself, to contract upon something hard. Satire and the sense that the satirist gives us that he has the world well within his grasp, so that it is at the mercy of his pen, precisely fulfil our needs.

A further instinct will lead us to pass over such famous satirists as Voltaire and Anatole France in favour of someone writing in our own tongue, writing English. For without any disrespect to the translator we have grown intolerably weary in reading Dostoevsky, as if we were reading with the wrong spectacles or as if a mist had formed between us and the page. We come to feel that every idea is slipping about in a suit badly cut and many sizes too large for it. For a translation makes us understand more clearly than the lectures of any professor the difference between raw words and written words; the nature and importance of what we call style. Even an inferior writer, using his own tongue upon his own ideas, works a change at once which is agreeable and remarkable. Under his pen the sentence shrinks and wraps itself firmly round the meaning, if it be but a little one. The loose, the baggy, shrivels up. And while a writer of passable English will do this, a writer like Peacock does infinitely more.

When we open Crotchet Castle and read that first very long sentence which begins, ‘In one of those beautiful valleys, through which the Thames (not yet polluted by the tide, the scouring of cities or even the minor defilement of the sandy streams of Surrey)’, it would be difficult to describe the relief it gives us, except metaphorically. First there is the shape which recalls something visually delightful, like a flowing wave or the lash of a whip vigorously flung; then as phrase joins phrase and one parenthesis after another pours in its tributary, we have a sense of the whole swimming stream gliding beneath old walls with the shadows of ancient buildings and the glow of green lawns reflected in it. And what is even more delightful after the immensities and obscurities in which we have been living, we are in a world so manageable in scale that we can take its measure, tease it and ridicule it. It is like stepping out into the garden on a perfect September morning when every shadow is sharp and every colour bright after a night of storm and thunder. Nature has submitted to the direction of man. Man himself is dominated by his intelligence. Instead of being many-sided, complicated, elusive, people possess one idiosyncrasy apiece, which crystallizes them into sharp separate characters, colliding briskly when they meet. They seem ridiculously and grotesquely simplified out of all knowledge. Dr. Folliott, Mr. Firedamp, Mr. Skionar, Mr. Chainmail, and the rest seem after the tremendous thickness and bulk of the Guermantes and the Stavrogins nothing but agreeable caricatures which a clever old scholar has cut out of a sheet of black paper with a pair of scissors. But on looking closer we find that though it would be absurd to credit Peacock with any desire or perhaps capacity to explore the depths of the soul, his reticence is not empty but suggestive. The character of Dr. Folliott is drawn in three strokes of the pen. What lies between is left out. But each stroke indicates the mass behind it, so that the reader can make it out for himself; while it has, because of this apparent simplicity, all the sharpness of a caricature. The world so happily constituted that there is always trout for breakfast, wine in the cellar, and some amusing contretemps, such as the cook setting herself alight and being put out by the footman, to make us laugh—a world where there is nothing more pressing to do than to ‘glide over the face of the waters, discussing everything and settling nothing’, is not the world of pure fantasy; it is close enough to be a parody of our world and to make our own follies and the solemnities of our institutions look a little silly.

The satirist does not, like the psychologist, labour under the oppression of omniscience. He has leisure to play with his mind freely, ironically. His sympathies are not deeply engaged. His sense of humour is not submerged.

But the prime distinction lies in the changed attitude towards reality. In the psychologists the huge burden of facts is based upon a firm foundation of dinner, luncheon, bed and breakfast. It is with surprise, yet with relief and a start of pleasure, that we accept Peacock’s version of the world, which ignores so much, simplifies so much, gives the old globe a spin and shows another face of it on the other side. It is unnecessary to be quite so painstaking, it seems. And, after all, is not this quite as real, as true as the other? And perhaps all this pother about ‘reality’ is overdone. The great gain is perhaps that our relation with things is more distant. We reap the benefit of a more poetic point of view. A line like the charming ‘At Godstow, they gathered hazel on the grave of Rosamond’ could be written only by a writer who was at a certain distance from his people, so that there need be no explanations. For certainly with Trollope’s people explanations would have been necessary; we should have wanted to know what they had been doing, gathering hazel, and where they had gone for dinner afterwards and how the carriage had met them. ‘They’, however, being Chainmail, Skionar, and the rest, are at liberty to gather hazel on the grave of Rosamond if they like; as they are free to sing a song if it so pleases them or to debate the march of mind.

The romantic took the same liberty but for another purpose. In the satirist we get not a sense of wildness and the soul’s adventures, but that the mind is free and therefore sees through and dispenses with much that is taken seriously by writers of another calibre.

There are, of course, limitations, reminders, even in the midst of our pleasure, of boundaries that we must not pass. We cannot imagine in the first place that the writer of such exquisite sentences can cover many reams of paper; they cost too much to make. Then again a writer who gives us so keen a sense of his own personality by the shape of his phrase is limited. We are always being brought into touch, not with Peacock himself, as with Trollope himself (for there is no giving away of his own secrets; he does not conjure up the very shape of himself and the sound of his laughter as Trollope does), but all the time our thought is taking the colour of his thought, we are insensibly thinking in his measure. If we write, we try to write in his manner, and this brings us into far greater intimacy with him than with writers like Trollope again or Scott, who wrap their thought up quite adequately in a duffle gray blanket which wears well and suits everything. This may in the end, of course, lead to some restriction. Style may carry with it, especially in prose, so much personality that it keeps us within the range of that personality. Peacock pervades his book.

In order that we may consider this more fully let us turn from Peacock to Sterne, a much greater writer, yet sufficiently in the family of Peacock to let us carry on the same train of thought uninterruptedly.

At once we are aware that we are in the presence of a much subtler mind, a mind of far greater reach and intensity. Peacock’s sentences, firmly shaped and beautifully polished as they are, cannot stretch as these can. Here our sense of elasticity is increased so much that we scarcely know where we are. We lose our sense of direction. We go backwards instead of forwards. A simple statement starts a digression; we circle; we soar; we turn round; and at last back we come again to Uncle Toby who has been sitting meanwhile in his black plush breeches with his pipe in his hand. Proust, it may be said, was as tortuous, but his indirectness was due to his immense powers of analysis and to the fact that directly he had made a simple statement he perceived and must make us perceive all that it implied. Sterne is not an analyst of other people’s sensations. Those remain simple, eccentric, erratic. It is his own mind that fascinates him, its oddities and its whims, its fancies and its sensibilities; and it is his own mind that colours the book and gives it walls and shape. Yet it is obvious that his claim is just when he says that however widely he may digress, to my Aunt Dinah and the coachman and then ‘some millions of miles into the very heart of the planetary system’, when he is by way of telling about Uncle Toby’s character, still ‘the drawing of my Uncle Toby’s character went on gently all the time—not the great contours of it—that was impossible—but some familiar strokes and faint designations of it … so that you are much better acquainted with my Uncle Toby now than you were before’. It is true, for we are always alighting as we skim and circle to deposit some little grain of observation upon the figure of Uncle Toby sitting there with his pipe in his hand. There is thus built up intermittently, irregularly, an extraordinary portrait of a character—a character shown most often in a passive state, sitting still, through the quick glancing eyes of an erratic observer, who never lets his character speak more than a few words or take more than a few steps in his proper person, but is forever circling round and playing with the lapels of his coat and peering up into his face and teasing him affectionately, whimsically, as if he were the attendant sprite in charge of some unconscious mortal. Two such opposites were made to see each other off and draw each other out. One relishes the simplicity, the modesty, of Uncle Toby all the more for comparing them with the witty, indecent, disagreeable, yet highly sympathetic, character of the author.

All through Tristram Shandy we are aware of this blend and contrast. Laurence Sterne is the most important character in the book. It is true that at the critical moment the author obliterates himself and gives his characters that little extra push which frees them from his tutelage so that they are something more than the whims and fancies of a brilliant brain. But since character is largely made up of surroundings and circumstances, these people whose surroundings are so queer, who are often silent themselves but always so whimsically talked about, are a race apart among the people of fiction. There is nothing like them elsewhere, for in no other book are the characters so closely dependent on the author. In no other book are the writer and reader so involved together. So, finally, we get a book in which all the usual conventions are consumed and yet no ruin or catastrophe comes to pass; the whole subsists complete by itself, like a house which is miraculously habitable without the help of walls, staircases, or partitions. We live in the humours, contortions, and oddities of the spirit, not in the slow unrolling of the long length of life. And the reflection comes, as we sun ourselves on one of these high pinnacles, can we not escape even further, so that we are not conscious of any author at all? Can we not find poetry in some novel or other? For Sterne by the beauty of his style has let us pass beyond the range of personality into a world which is not altogether the world of fiction. It is above.

The Poets

Certain phrases have brought about this change in us. They have raised us out of the atmosphere of fiction; they have made us pause to wonder. For instance:

I will not argue the matter; Time wastes too fast: every letter I trace tells me with what rapidity Life follows my pen; the days and hours of it more precious,—my dear Jenny—than the rubies about thy neck, are flying over our heads like light clouds of a windy day, never to return more; everything presses on,—whilst thou art twisting that lock;—see! it grows grey; and every time I kiss thy hand to bid adieu, and every absence which follows it, are preludes to that eternal separation which we are shortly to make.

Phrases like this bring, by the curious rhythm of their phrasing, by a touch on the visual sense, an alteration in the movement of the mind which makes it pause and widen its gaze and slightly change its attention. We are looking out at life in general.

But though Sterne with his extraordinary elasticity could use this effect, too, without incongruity, that is only possible because his genius is rich enough to let him sacrifice some of the qualities that are native to the character of the novel without our feeling it. It is obvious that there is no massing together of the experiences of many lives and many minds as in War and Peace; and, too, that there is something of the essayist, something of the soliloquist in the quips and quirks of this brilliant mind. He is sometimes sentimental, as if after so great a display of singularity he must assert his interest in the normal lives and affections of his people. Tears are necessary; tears are pumped up. Be that as it may, exquisite and individual as his poetry is, there is another poetry which is more natural to the novel, because it uses the material which the novelist provides. It is the poetry of situation rather than of language, the poetry which we perceive when Catherine in Wuthering Heights pulls the feathers from the pillow; when Natasha in War and Peace looks out of the window at the stars. And it is significant that we recall this poetry, not as we recall it in verse, by the words, but by the scene. The prose remains casual and quiet enough so that to quote it is to do little or nothing to explain its effect. Often we have to go far back and read a chapter or more before we can come by the impression of beauty or intensity that possessed us.

Yet it is not to be denied that two of the novelists who are most frequently poetical—Meredith and Hardy—are as novelists imperfect. Both The Ordeal of Richard Feverel and Far from the Madding Crowd are books of great inequality. In both we feel a lack of control, an incoherence such as we never feel in War and Peace or in A la Recherche du Temps perdu or in Pride and Prejudice. Both Hardy and Meredith are too fully charged, it would seem, with a sense of poetry and have too limited or too imperfect a sympathy with human beings to express it adequately through that channel. Hence, as we so often find in Hardy, the impersonal element—Fate, the Gods, whatever name we choose to call it—dominates the people. They appear wooden, melodramatic, unreal. They cannot express the poetry with which the writer himself is charged through their own lips, for their psychology is inadequate, and thus the expression is left to the writer, who assumes a character apart from his people and cannot return to them with perfect ease when the time comes.

Again, in Meredith the writer’s sense of the poetry of youth, of love, of nature is heard like a song to which the characters listen passively without moving a muscle; and then, when the song is done, on they move again with a jerk. This would seem to prove that a profound poetic sense is a dangerous gift for the novelist; for in Hardy and Meredith poetry seems to mean something impersonal, generalized, hostile to the idiosyncrasy of character, so that the two suffer if brought into touch. It may be that the perfect novelist expresses a different sort of poetry, or has the power of expressing it in a manner which is not harmful to the other qualities of the novel. If we recall the passages that have seemed to us, in retrospect at any rate, to be poetical in fiction we remember them as part of the novel. When Natasha in War and Peace looks out of the window at the stars, Tolstoy produces a feeling of deep and intense poetry without any disruption or that disquieting sense of song being sung to people who listen. He does this because his poetic sense finds expression in the poetry of the situation or because his character express it in their own words, which are often of the simplest. We have been living in them and knowing them, so that, when Natasha leans on the window sill and thinks of her life to come, our feelings of the poetry of the moment do not lie in what she says so much as in our sense of her who is saying it.

Wuthering Heights again is steeped in poetry. But here there is a difference, for one can hardly say that the profound poetry of the scene where Catherine pulls the feathers from the pillow has anything to do with our knowledge of her or adds to our understanding or our feeling about her future. Rather it deepens and controls the wild, stormy atmosphere of the whole book. By a master stroke of vision, rarer in prose than in poetry, people and scenery and atmosphere are all in keeping. And, what is still rarer and more impressive, through that atmosphere we seem to catch sight of larger men and women, of other symbols and significances. Yet the characters of Heathcliff and Catherine are perfectly natural; they contain all the poetry that Emily Brontë herself feels without effort. We never feel that this is a poetic moment, apart from the rest, or that here Emily Brontë is speaking to us through her characters. Her emotion has not overflowed and risen up independently, in some comment or attitude of her own. She is using her characters to express her conception, so that her people are active agents in the book’s life, adding to its impetus and not impeding it. The same thing happens, more explicitly but with less concentration, in Moby Dick. In both books we get a vision of presence outside the human beings, of a meaning that they stand for, without ceasing to be themselves. But it is notable that both Emily Brontë and Herman Melville ignore the greater part of those spoils of the modern spirit which Proust grasps so tenaciously and transforms so triumphantly. Both the earlier writers simplify their characters till only the great contour, the clefts and ridges of the face, are visible. Both seem to have been content with the novel as their form and with prose as their instrument provided that they could remove the scene far from towns, simplify the actors and allow nature at her wildest to take part in the scene. Thus we can say that there is poetry in novels both where the poetry is expressed not so much by the particular character in a particular situation, like Natasha in the window, but rather by the whole mood and temper of the book, like the mood and temper of Wuthering Heights or Moby Dick to which the characters of Catherine or Heathcliff or Captain Ahab give expression.

In A la Recherche du Temps perdu, however, there is as much poetry as in any of these books; but it is poetry of a different kind. The analysis of emotion is carried further by Proust than by any other novelist; and the poetry comes, not in the situation, which is too fretted and voluminous for such an effect, but in those frequent passages of elaborate metaphor, which spring out of the rock of thought like fountains of sweet water and serve as translations from one language into another. It is as though there were two faces to every situation; one full in the light so that it can be described as accurately and examined as minutely as possible; the other half in shadow so that it can be described only in a moment of faith and vision by the use of metaphor. The longer the novelist pores over his analysis, the more he becomes conscious of something that forever escapes. And it is this double vision that makes the work of Proust to us in our generation so spherical, so comprehensive. Thus, while Emily Brontë and Herman Melville turn the novel away from shore out to sea, Proust on the other hand rivets his eyes on men.

And here we may pause, not, certainly, that there are no more books to read or no more changes of mood to satisfy, but for a reason which springs from the youth and vigour of the art itself. We can imagine so many different sorts of novels, we are conscious of so many relations and susceptibilities the novelist had not expressed that we break off in the middle with Emily Brontë or with Tolstoy without any pretence that the phases of fiction are complete or that our desires as a reader have received full satisfaction. On the contrary, reading excites them; they well up and make us inarticulately aware of a dozen different novels that wait just below the horizon unwritten. Hence the futility at present of any theory of ‘the future of fiction’. The next ten years will certainly upset it; the next century will blow it to the winds. We have only to remember the comparative youth of the novel, that it is, roughly speaking, about the age of English poetry in the time of Shakespeare, to realize the folly of any summary, or theory of the future of the art. Moreover, prose itself is still in its infancy, and capable, no doubt, of infinite change and development.

But our rapid journey from book to book has left us with some notes made by the way and these we may sort out, not so much to seek a conclusion as to express the brooding, the meditative mood which follows the activity of reading. So then, in the first place, even though the time at our disposal has been short, we have travelled, in reading these few books, a great distance emotionally. We have plodded soberly along the high road talking plain sense and meeting many interesting adventures; turning romantic, we have lived in castles and been hunted on moors and fought gallantly and died; then tired of this, we have come into touch with humanity again, at first romantically prodigiously, enjoying the society of giants and dwarfs, the huge and the deformed, and then again tiring of this extravagance, have reduced them, by means of Jane Austen’s microscope, to perfectly proportioned and normal men and women and the chaotic world to English parsonage, shrubberies, and lawns.

But a shadow next falls upon that bright prospect, distorting the lovely harmony of its proportions. The shadow of our own minds has fallen upon it and gradually we have drawn within, and gone exploring with Henry James endless filaments of feeling and relationship in which men and women are enmeshed, and so we have been led on with Dostoevsky to descend miles and miles into the deep and yeasty surges of the soul.

At last Proust brings the light of an immensely civilized and saturated intelligence to bear upon this chaos and reveals the infinite range and complexity of human sensibility. But in following him we lose the sense of outline, and to recover it seek out the satirists and the fantastics, who stand aloof and hold the world at a distance and eliminate and reduce so that we have the satisfaction of seeing round things after being immersed in them. And the satirists and the fantastics, like Peacock and Sterne, because of their detachment, write often as poets write, for the sake of the beauty of the sentence and not for the sake of its use, and so stimulate us to wish for poetry in the novel. Poetry, it would seem, requires a different ordering of the scene; human beings are needed, but needed in their relation to love, or death, or nature rather than to each other. For this reason their psychology is simplified, as it is both in Meredith and Hardy, and instead of feeling the intricacy of life, we feel its passion, its tragedy. In Wuthering Heights and in Moby Dick this simplification, far from being empty, has greatness, and we feel that something beyond, which is not human yet does not destroy their humanity or the actions. So, briefly, we may sum up our impressions. Brief and fragmentary as they are, we have gained some sense of the vastness of fiction and the width of its range.

As we look back it seems that the novelist can do anything. There is room in a novel for story-telling, for comedy, for tragedy, for criticism and information and philosophy and poetry. Something of its appeal lies in the width of its scope and the satisfaction it offers to so many different moods, desires, and instincts on the part of the reader. But however the novelist may vary his scene and alter the relations of one thing to another—and as we look back we see the whole world in perpetual transformation—one element remains constant in all novels, and that is the human element; they are about people, they excite in us the feelings that people excite in us in real life. The novel is the only form of art which seeks to make us believe that it is giving a full and truthful record of the life of a real person. And in order to give that full record of life, not the climax and the crisis but the growth and development of feelings, which is the novelist’s aim, he copies the order of the day, observes the sequence of ordinary things even if such fidelity entails chapters of description and hours of research. Thus we glide into the novel with far less effort and less break with our surroundings than into any other form of imaginative literature. We seem to be continuing to live, only in another house or country perhaps. Our most habitual and natural sympathies are roused with the first words; we feel them expand and contract, in liking or disliking, hope or fear on every page. We watch the character and behaviour of Becky Sharp or Richard Feverel and instinctively come to an opinion about them as about real people, tacitly accepting this or that impression, judging each motive, and forming the opinion that they are charming but insincere, good or dull, secretive but interesting, as we make up our minds about the characters of the people we meet.

This engaging lack of artifice and the strength of the emotion that he is able to excite are great advantages to the novelist, but they are also great dangers. For it is inevitable that the reader who is invited to live in novels as in life should go on feeling as he feels in life. Novel and life are laid side by side. We want happiness for the character we like, punishment for those we dislike. We have secret sympathies for those who seem to resemble us. It is difficult to admit that the book may have merit if it outrages our sympathies, or describes a life which seems unreal to us. Again we are acutely aware of the novelist’s character and speculate upon his life and adventures. These personal standards extend in every direction, for every sort of prejudice, every sort of vanity, can be snubbed or soothed by the novelist. Indeed the enormous growth of the psychological novel in our time has been prompted largely by the mistaken belief, which the reader has imposed upon the novelist, that truth is always good; even when it is the truth of the psychoanalyst and not the truth of imagination.

Such vanities and emotions on the part of the reader are perpetually forcing the novelist to gratify them. And the result, though it may give the novel a short life of extreme vigour, is, as we know even while we are enjoying the tears and laughs and excitement of that life, fatal to its endurance. For the accuracy of representation, the looseness and simplicity of its method, its denial of artifice and convention, its immense power to imitate the surface reality—all the qualities that make a novel the most popular form of literature—also make it, even as we read it, turn stale and perish on our hands. Already some of the ‘great novels’ of the past, like Robert Elsmere or Uncle Tom’s Cabin, are perished except in patches because they were originally bolstered up with so much that had virtue and vividness only for those who lived at the moment that the books were written. Directly manners change, or the contemporary idiom alters, page after page, chapter after chapter, become obsolete and lifeless.

But the novelist is aware of this too and, while he uses the power of exciting human sympathy which belongs to him, he also attempts to control it. Indeed the first sign that we are reading a writer of merit is that we feel this control at work on us. The barrier between us and the book is raised higher. We do not slip so instinctively and so easily into a world that we know already. We feel that we are being compelled to accept an order and to arrange the elements of the novel—man, nature, God—in certain relations at the novelist’s bidding. In looking back at the few novels that we have glanced at here we can see how astonishingly we lend ourselves to first one vision and then to another which is its opposite. We obliterate a whole universe at the command of Defoe; we see every blade of grass and snail shell at the command of Proust. From the first page we feel our minds trained upon a point which becomes more and more perceptible as the book proceeds and the writer brings his conception out of darkness. At last the whole is exposed to view. And then, when the book is finished, we seem to see (it is strange how visual the impression is) something girding it about like the firm road of Defoe’s storytelling; or we see it shaped and symmetrical with dome and column complete, like Pride and Prejudice and Emma. A power which is not the power of accuracy or of humour or of pathos is also used by the great novelists to shape their work. As the pages are turned, something is built up which is not the story itself. And this power, if it accentuates and concentrates and gives the fluidity of the novel endurance and strength, so that no novel can survive even a few years without it, is also a danger. For the most characteristic qualities of the novel—that it registers the slow growth and development of feeling, that it follows many lives and traces their unions and fortunes over a long stretch of time—are the very qualities that are most incompatible with design and order. It is the gift of style, arrangement, construction, to put us at a distance from the special life and to obliterate its features; while it is the gift of the novel to bring us into close touch with life. The two powers fight if they are brought into combination. The most complete novelist must be the novelist who can balance the two powers so that the one enhances the other.

This would seem to prove that the novel is by its nature doomed to compromise, wedded to mediocrity. Its province, one may conclude, is to deal with the commoner but weaker emotions; to express the bulk and not the essence of life. But any such verdict must be based upon the supposition that ‘the novel’ has a certain character which is now fixed and cannot be altered, that ‘life’ has a certain limit which can be defined. And it is precisely this conclusion that the novels we have been reading tend to upset.

The process of discovery goes on perpetually. Always more of life is being reclaimed and recognized. Therefore, to fix the character of the novel, which is the youngest and most vigorous of the arts, at this moment would be like fixing the character of poetry in the eighteenth century and saying that because Gray’s Elegy was ‘poetry’ Don Juan was impossible. An art practised by hosts of people, sheltering diverse minds, is also bound to be simmering, volatile, unstable. And for some reason not here to be examined, fiction is the most hospitable of hosts; fiction to-day draws to itself writers who would even yesterday have been poets, dramatists, pamphleteers, historians. Thus ‘the novel’, as we still call it with such parsimony of language, is clearly splitting apart into books which have nothing in common but this one inadequate title. Already the novelists are so far apart that they scarcely communicate, and to one novelist the work of another is quite genuinely unintelligible or quite genuinely negligible.

The most significant proof of this fertility, however, is provided by our sense of feeling something that has not yet been said; of some desire still unsatisfied. A very general, a very elementary, view of this desire would seem to show that it points in two directions. Life—it is a commonplace—is growing more complex. Our self-consciousness is becoming far more alert and better trained. We are aware of relations and subtleties which have not yet been explored. Of this school Proust is the pioneer, and undoubtedly there are still to be born writers who will carry the analysis of Henry James still further, who will reveal and relate finer threads of feeling, stranger and more obscure imaginations.

But also we desire synthesis. The novel, it is agreed, can follow life; it can amass details. But can it also select? Can it symbolize? Can it give us an epitome as well as an inventory? It was some such function as this that poetry discharged in the past. But, whether for the moment or for some longer time, poetry with her rhythms, her poetic diction, her strong flavour of tradition, is too far from us to-day to do for us what she did for our parents. Prose perhaps is the instrument best fitted to the complexity and difficulty of modern life. And prose—we have to repeat it—is still so youthful that we scarcely know what powers it may not hold concealed within it. Thus it is possible that the novel in time to come may differ as widely from the novel of Tolstoy and Jane Austen as the poetry of Browning and Byron differs from the poetry of Lydgate and Spenser. In time to come—but time to come lies far beyond our province.

[Bookman, New York, April/June 1929]

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Part II: The Art of Biography.

The New Biography.

‘The aim of biography’, said Sir Sydney Lee, who had perhaps read and written more lives than any man of his time, ‘is the truthful transmission of personality’, and no single sentence could more neatly split up into two parts the whole problem of biography as it presents itself to us to-day. On the one hand there is truth; on the other there is personality. And if we think of truth as something of granite-like solidity and of personality as something of rainbow-like intangibility and reflect that the aim of biography is to weld these two into one seamless whole, we shall admit that the problem is a stiff one and that we need not wonder if biographers have for the most part failed to solve it.

For the truth of which Sir Sidney speaks, the truth which biography demands, is truth in its hardest, most obdurate form; it is truth as truth is to be found in the British Museum; it is truth out of which all vapour of falsehood has been pressed by the weight of research. Only when truth had been thus established did Sir Sidney Lee use it in the building of his monument; and no one can be so foolish as to deny that the piles be raised of such hard facts, whether one is called Shakespeare or King Edward the Seventh, are worthy of all our respect. For there is a virtue in truth; it has an almost mystic power. Like radium, it seems able to give off forever and ever grains of energy, atoms of light. It stimulates the mind, which is endowed with a curious susceptibility in this direction as no fiction, however artful or highly coloured, can stimulate it. Truth being thus efficacious and supreme, we can only explain the fact that Sir Sidney’s life of Shakespeare is dull, and that his life of Edward the Seventh is unreadable, by supposing that though both are stuffed with truth, he failed to choose those truths which transmit personality. For in order that the light of personality may shine through, facts must be manipulated; some must be brightened; others shaded; yet, in the process, they must never lose their integrity. And it is obvious that it is easier to obey these precepts by considering that the true life of your subject shows itself in action which is evident rather than in that inner life of thought and emotion which meanders darkly and obscurely through the hidden channels of the soul. Hence, in the old days, the biographer chose the easier path. A life, even when it was lived by a divine, was a series of exploits. The biographer, whether he was Izaak Walton or Mrs. Hutchinson or that unknown writer who is often so surprisingly eloquent on tombstones and memorial tablets, told a tale of battle and victory. With their stately phrasing and their deliberate artistic purpose, such records transmit personality with a formal sincerity which is perfectly satisfactory of its kind. And so, perhaps, biography might have pursued its way, draping the robes decorously over the recumbent figures of the dead, had there not arisen toward the end of the eighteenth century one of those curious men of genius who seem able to break up the stiffness into which the company has fallen by speaking in his natural voice. So Boswell spoke. So we hear booming out from Boswell’s page the voice of Samuel Johnson. ‘No, sir; stark insensibility’, we hear him say. Once we have heard those words we are aware that there is an incalculable presence among us which will go on ringing and reverberating in widening circles however times may change and ourselves. All the draperies and decencies of biography fall to the ground. We can no longer maintain that life consists in actions only or in works. It consists in personality. Something has been liberated beside which all else seems cold and colourless. We are freed from a servitude which is now seen to be intolerable. No longer need we pass solemnly and stiffly from camp to council chamber. We may sit, even with the great and good, over the table and talk.

Through the influence of Boswell, presumably, biography all through the nineteenth century concerned itself as much with the lives of the sedentary as with the lives of the active. It sought painstakingly and devotedly to express not only the outer life of work and activity but the inner life of emotion and thought. The uneventful lives of poets and painters were written out as lengthily as the lives of soldiers and statesmen. But the Victorian biography was a parti-coloured, hybrid, monstrous birth. For though truth of fact was observed as scrupulously as Boswell observed it, the personality which Boswell’s genius set free was hampered and distorted. The convention which Boswell had destroyed settled again, only in a different form, upon biographers who lacked his art. Where the Mrs. Hutchinsons and the Izaak Waltons had wished to prove that their heroes were prodigies of courage and learning the Victorian biographer was dominated by the idea of goodness. Noble, upright, chaste, severe; it is thus that the Victorian worthies are presented to us. The figure is almost always above life size in top-hat and frock-coat, and the manner of presentation becomes increasingly clumsy and laborious. For lives which no longer express themselves in action take shape in innumerable words. The conscientious biographer may not tell a fine tale with a flourish, but must toil through endless labyrinths and embarrass himself with countless documents. In the end he produces an amorphous mass, a life of Tennyson, or of Gladstone, in which we go seeking disconsolately for voice or laughter, for curse or anger, for any trace that this fossil was once a living man. Often, indeed, we bring back some invaluable trophy, for Victorian biographies are laden with truth; but always we rummage among them with a sense of the prodigious waste, of the artistic wrongheadedness of such a method.

With the twentieth century, however, a change came over biography, as it came over fiction and poetry. The first and most visible sign of it was in the difference in size. In the first twenty years of the new century biographies must have lost half their weight. Mr. Strachey compressed four stout Victorians into one slim volume; M. Maurois boiled the usual two volumes of a Shelley life into one little book the size of a novel. But the diminution of size was only the outward token of an inward change. The point of view had completely altered. If we open one of the new school of biographies its bareness, its emptiness makes us at once aware that the author’s relation to his subject is different. He is no longer the serious and sympathetic companion, toiling even slavishly in the footsteps of his hero. Whether friend or enemy, admiring or critical, he is an equal. In any case, he preserves his freedom and his right to independent judgment. Moreover, he does not think himself constrained to follow every step of the way. Raised upon a little eminence which his independence has made for him, he sees his subject spread about him. He chooses; he synthesizes; in short, he has ceased to be the chronicler; he has become an artist.

Few books illustrate the new attitude to biography better than Some People, by Harold Nicolson. In his biographies of Tennyson and of Byron Mr. Nicolson followed the path which had been already trodden by Mr. Strachey and others. Here he has taken a step on his own initiative. For here he has devised a method of writing about people and about himself as though they were at once real and imaginary. He has succeeded remarkably, if not entirely, in making the best of both worlds. Some People is not fiction because it has the substance, the reality of truth. It is not biography because it has the freedom, the artistry of fiction. And if we try to discover how he has won the liberty which enables him to present us with these extremely amusing pages we must in the first place credit him with having had the courage to rid himself of a mountain of illusion. An English diplomat is offered all the bribes which usually induce people to swallow humbug in large doses with composure. If Mr. Nicolson wrote about Lord Curzon it should have been solemnly. If he mentioned the Foreign Office it should have been respectfully. His tone toward the world of Bognors and Whitehall should have been friendly but devout. But thanks to a number of influences and people, among whom one might mention Max Beerbohm and Voltaire, the attitude of the bribed and docile official has been blown to atoms. Mr. Nicolson laughs. He laughs at Lord Curzon; he laughs at the Foreign Office; he laughs at himself. And since his laughter is the laughter of the intelligence it has the effect of making us take the people he laughs at seriously. The figure of Lord Curzon concealed behind the figure of a drunken valet is touched off with merriment and irreverence; yet of all the studies of Lord Curzon which have been written since his death none makes us think more kindly of that preposterous but, it appears, extremely human man.

So it would seem as if one of the great advantages of the new school to which Mr. Nicolson belongs is the lack of pose, humbug, solemnity. They approach their bigwigs fearlessly. They have no fixed scheme of the universe, no standard of courage or morality to which they insist that he shall conform. The man himself is the supreme object of their curiosity. Further, and it is this chiefly which has so reduced the bulk of biography, they maintain that the man himself, the pith and essence of his character, shows itself to the observant eye in the tone of a voice, the turn of a head, some little phrase or anecdote picked up in passing. Thus in two subtle phrases, in one passage of brilliant description, whole chapters of the Victorian volume are synthesized and summed up. Some People is full of examples of this new phase of the biographer’s art. Mr. Nicolson wants to describe a governess and he tells us that she had a drop at the end of her nose and made him salute the quarterdeck. He wants to describe Lord Curzon, and he makes him lose his trousers and recite ‘Tears, Idle Tears’. He does not cumber himself with a single fact about them. He waits till they have said or done something characteristic, and then he pounces on it with glee. But, though he waits with an intention of pouncing which might well make his victims uneasy if they guessed it, he lays suspicion by appearing himself in his own proper person in no flattering light. He has a scrubby dinner-jacket, he tells us; a pink bumptious face, curly hair, and a curly nose. He is as much the subject of his own irony and observation as they are. He lies in wait for his own absurdities as artfully as for theirs. Indeed, by the end of the book we realize that the figure which has been most completely and most subtly displayed is that of the author. Each of the supposed subjects holds up in his or her small bright diminishing mirror a different reflection of Harold Nicolson. And though the figure thus revealed is not noble or impressive or shown in a very heroic attitude, it is for these very reasons extremely like a real human being. It is thus, he would seem to say, in the mirrors of our friends, that we chiefly live.

To have contrived this effect is a triumph not of skill only, but of those positive qualities which we are likely to treat as if they were negative—freedom from pose, from sentimentality, from illusion. And the victory is definite enough to leave us asking what territory it has won for the art of biography. Mr. Nicolson has proved that one can use many of the devices of fiction in dealing with real life. He has shown that a little fiction mixed with fact can be made to transmit personality very effectively. But some objections or qualifications suggest themselves. Undoubtedly the figures in Some People are all rather below life size. The irony with which they are treated, though it has its tenderness, stunts their growth. It dreads nothing more than that one of these little beings should grow up and becomes serious or perhaps tragic. And, again, they never occupy the stage for more than a few brief moments. They do not want to be looked at very closely. They have not a great deal to show us. Mr. Nicolson makes us feel, in short, that he is playing with very dangerous elements. An incautious movement and the book will be blown sky high. He is trying to mix the truth of real life and the truth of fiction. He can only do it by using no more than a pinch of either. For though both truths are genuine, they are antagonistic; let them meet and they destroy each other. Even here, where the imagination is not deeply engaged, when we find people whom we know to be real like Lord Oxford or Lady Colefax, mingling with Miss Plimsoll and Marstock, whose reality we doubt, the one casts suspicion upon the other. Let it be fact, one feels, or let it be fiction; the imagination will not serve under two masters simultaneously.

And here we again approach the difficulty which, for all his ingenuity, the biographer still has to face. Truth of fact and truth of fiction are incompatible; yet he is now more than ever urged to combine them. For it would seem that the life which is increasingly real to us is the fictitious life; it dwells in the personality rather than in the act. Each of us is more Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, than he is John Smith of the Corn Exchange. Thus, the biographer’s imagination is always being stimulated to use the novelist’s art of arrangement, suggestion, dramatic effect to expound the private life. Yet if he carries the use of fiction too far, so that he disregards the truth, or can only introduce it with incongruity, he loses both worlds; he has neither the freedom of fiction nor the substance of fact. Boswell’s astonishing power over us is based largely upon his obstinate veracity, so that we have implicit belief in what he tells us. When Johnson says ‘No, sir; stark insensibility’, the voice has a ring in it because we have been told, soberly and prosaically, a few pages earlier, that Johnson ‘was entered a Commoner of Pembroke, on the 31st of October, 1728, being then in his nineteenth year’. We are in the world of brick and pavement; of birth, marriage, and death; of Acts of Parliament; of Pitt and Burke and Sir Joshua Reynolds. Whether this is a more real world than the world of Bohemia and Hamlet and Macbeth we doubt; but the mixture of the two is abhorrent.

Be that as it may we can assure ourselves by a very simple experiment that the days of Victorian biography are over. Consider one’s own life; pass under review a few years that one has actually lived. Conceive how Lord Morley would have expounded them; how Sir Sidney Lee would have documented them; how strangely all that has been most real in them would have slipped through their fingers. Nor can we name the biographer whose art is subtle and bold enough to present that queer amalgamation of dream and reality, that perpetual marriage of granite and rainbow. His method still remains to be discovered. But Mr. Nicolson with his mixture of biography and autobiography, of fact and fiction, of Lord Curzon’s trousers and Miss Plimsoll’s nose, waves his hand airily in a possible direction.

[New York Herald Tribune, Oct 30, 1927]

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A Talk about Memoirs.

Judith: I wonder—shall I give my bird a real beak or an orange one? Whatever they may say, silks have been ruined by the war. But what are you looking behind the curtain for? Ann: There is no gentleman present? Judith: None, unless you count the oil portrait of Uncle John. Ann: Oh, then, we can talk about the Greeks! There is not a single memoir in the whole of Greek literature. There! You can’t contradict me; and so we go on to wonder how the ladies of the race spent the morning when it was wet and the hours between tea and dinner when it was dark. Judith: The mornings never are wet in Athens. Then they don’t drink tea. They drink a red sweet stuff out of glasses, and eat lumps of Turkish delight with it. Ann: Ah, that explains! A dry, hot climate, no twilight, wine, and blue sky. In England the atmosphere is naturally aqueous, and as if there weren’t enough outside, we drench ourselves with tea and coffee at least four times a day. It’s atmosphere that makes English literature unlike any other—clouds, sunsets, fogs, exhalations, miasmas. And I believe that the element of water is supplied chiefly by the memoir writers. Look what great swollen books they are! (She lifts five volumes in her hands, one after another.) Dropsical. Still, there are times—I suppose it’s the lack of wine in my blood—when the mere thought of a classic is repulsive. Judith: I agree with you. The classics—oh dear, what was I going to say?—something very wise, I know. But I can’t embroider a parrot and talk about Milton in the same breath. Ann: Whereas you could embroider a parrot and talk about Lady Georgiana Peel? Judith: Precisely. Do tell me about Lady Georgiana Peel and the rest. Those are the books I love. Ann: I do more than love them; I reverence them as the parents and begetters of our race. And if I knew Mr. Lytton Strachey, I’d tell him what I think of him for behaving disrespectfully of the great English art of biography. My dear Judith, I had a vision last night of a widow with a taper setting fire to a basketful of memoirs—half a million words—two volumes—stout—blue—with a crest—genealogical trees—family portraits—all complete. ‘Art be damned!’ I cried, and woke in a frenzy. Judith: Well, I fancy she heard you. But let’s begin on Lady Georgiana Peel. Ann: Lady Georgiana Peel [◉6] was born in the year 1836, and was the daughter of Lord John Russell. The Russells are said to be descended from Thor, the God of Thunder; their more direct ancestor being one Henri de Rozel, who, in the eleventh century—Judith: We’ll take their word for it. Ann: Very well. But don’t forget it. The Russells are cold in temperament, contradictious by nature. Ahem! Lord and Lady John were resting under an oak tree in Richmond Park when Lord John remarked how pleasant it would be to live in that white house behind the palings for the rest of their lives. No sooner said than the owner falls ill and dies. The Queen, with that unfailing insight, etc., sends for Lord John, etc., and offers him the lodge for life, etc., etc., etc. I mean they lived happily ever after, though as time went by, a factory chimney somewhat spoilt the view. Judith: And Lady Georgiana? Ann: Well, there’s not much about Lady Georgiana. She saw the Queen having her hair brushed, and she went to stay at Woburn. And what d’you think they did there? They threw mutton chops out of the window ‘for whoever cared to pick them up’. And each guest had a piece of paper by his plate ‘in which to wrap up an eatable for the people waiting outside’. Judith: Mutton chops! people waiting outside! Ann: Ah, now the charm begins to work. A snowy Christmas—imagine a fair-haired little girl at the window—early in the forties the scene is—frost on the ground—a mutton chop descending. Don’t you see all the arms going up and the poor wretches trampling the flower-beds in their struggles? But, ‘I think’, she says, ‘the custom died out.’ And then she married, and her husband’s riding was the pride of the county; and when he won a race he gave something to the village church. But I don’t know that there’s much more to be said. Judith: Please go on. The charm is working; I’m not asleep; I’m in the drawing-room at Woburn in the forties. Ann: Lady Georgiana being, as I told you, descended from the God of Thunder, is not one to take liberties with life. The scene is a little empty. There’s Charles Dickens wearing a pink shirt front embroidered with white; the Russell mausoleum in the background; sailors with icicles hanging from their whiskers; the Grosvenor boys shooting snipe in Belgrave Square; Lord John handing the Queen down to dinner—and so forth. Let’s consult Mr. Bridges. [◉7] He may help us to fill it in. ‘Our mothers were modelled as closely as might be on the example of the Great Queen…. If they were not always either beautiful or wise they gained love and respect everywhere without being either…. But, whatever happens, women will still be women and men men.’ Shall I go on skipping? Judith: I seem to gather that the wallpapers were dark and the sideboards substantial. Ann: Yes, but we’ve too much furniture already. Life is what we want. (She turns over the pages of several volumes without saying anything.) Judith: Oh, Ann; it’s fearfully dull at Woburn in the forties. Moreover, my parrot is turning into a sacred fowl. I shall be presenting him to the village church next. Is no one coming to call? Ann: Wait a moment. I fancy I see Miss Dempster [◉8] approaching. Judith: Quick; let me look at her picture. A devout, confidential lady—Bedchamber woman to Queen Victoria, I should guess. I can fancy her murmuring: ‘Poor, poor Princess’; or, ‘Dearest Lady Charlotte has had a sad loss in the death of her favourite gillie’, as she extracts from the Royal Head a sleek tortoiseshell pin and lays it reverently in the golden tray. By the way, can you imagine Queen Victoria’s hair? I can’t. Ann: Lady Georgiana says it was ‘long and fair’. Be that as it may, Miss Dempster had nothing to do with her hair-pins—save that, I think it likely her daydreams took that direction. She was a penniless lass with a long pedigree; Scotch, of course, moving in the best society—‘one of the Shropshire Corbets who (through the Leycesters) is a cousin of Dean Stanley’—that’s her way of describing people; and for my part I find it very descriptive. But wait—here’s a scene that promises well. Imagine the terrace of the Blythswoods’ villa at Cannes. An eclipse of the moon is taking place; the Emperor Dom Pedro of Portugal has his eye fixed to the telescope; it is chilly, and a copper-coloured haze suffuses the sky. Meanwhile, Miss Dempster and the Prince of Hohenzollern walk up and down talking. What d’ye think they talk about? … ‘we agreed that it had never occurred to us before that somewhere our Earth’s shadow must be ever falling…. Speaking of the dark and shadowed days of human life I quoted Mrs. Browning’s lines: “Think, the passing of a trail, To the nature most undone, Like the shadow on the dial, Proves the presence of the sun.”’ You don’t want to hear about the death of the Duke of Albany and his appearance in his coffin or the Emperor of Germany and his cancer? Judith: For Heaven’s sake, no! Ann: Well, then, we must shut up Miss Dempster. But isn’t it queer how Lady Georgiana and the rest have made us feel like naughty, dirty, mischievous children? I don’t altogether enjoy the feeling, and yet there is something august in their unyielding authority. They have fronts of brass; not a doubt or a desire disturbs them outwardly; and so they proceed over a world which for us is alternately a desert or a flowering wilderness stuck about with burning bushes and mocking macaws, as if it were Piccadilly or the Cromwell Road at three o’clock in the afternoon. I detect passions and pieties and convictions all dumb and deep sunk which serve them for a kind of spiritual petrol. What, my dear Judith, have we got in its place? Judith: If, like me, you’d been sitting in the drawing-room at Woburn for the past fifty years, you would be feeling a little stiff. Did they never amuse themselves? Was death their only amusement, and rank their sole romance? Ann: There were horses. I see your eyes turned with longing to Dorothea Conyers [◉9] and John Porter. [◉10] Now you can get up and come to the stables. Now, I assure you, things are going to hum a little. In both these books we get what I own was somewhat disguised in the others—a passion for life. I confess that I like John Porter’s view of life better than Dorothea Conyers’, though, from the lips of a novelist, there is charm in her reflection: ‘Unfortunately, I shall never be a popular short-story writer: I do something just wrong’; one feels inclined to tell her to shorten her stirrups or have her fetlocks fired and see whether that wouldn’t do the trick. But this cherry-cheeked elderly gentleman, this quintessence of all good coachmen and trusty servants, this lean old trainer with his shrewd little eyes, and the horseshoe tiepin and the look of integrity and service honestly performed, of devotion given and returned—I can’t help feeling that he is the pick of the bunch. I like his assumption that the whole world exists for racing, or, as he is careful to put it, for ‘the amelioration of the thoroughbred’. I like the warmth with which he praises his horses for holding their own on the course and begetting fine children at the stud. ‘I thought the world of him,’ he says of Isonomy, ‘and his achievements as a sire strengthened my regard and admiration.’ ‘That the horse I almost worshipped was afflicted with wind infirmity’, he says in another place, nearly killed him; and when Ormonde, for he it was, proved incurable and went to Australia, John Porter plucked a few hairs from tail and mane to keep, doubtless in some inner pocket, ‘as a memento of a great and noble creature’. What character he detects in them, and how humanely he respects it! Madam Eglantyne must be humoured in her fancy to be delivered of her children under a tree in the park. Sir Joseph Hawley—not a racehorse, but the owner of race-horses—what a character—what a fine fellow he was!—‘a really great man … a noble friend to me and my family … stern, straight and fearless’; so John Porter writes of him, and when the Baronet for the last time left his cigar to waste on the mantelpiece, John Porter pocketed the ashes and has them now ‘put carefully away’ in memory of his master. Then I like to read how Ormonde was born at half-past six on a Sunday evening, as the stable boys were going to Church, with a mane three inches long, and how always at the critical moment Fred Archer made a little movement in the saddle and ‘lengthening his stride, Ormonde shot ahead, to win in a canter’; and how he was not only a giant among giants, but, like all magnanimous heroes, had the disposition of a lamb, and would eat cakes and carnations out of a Queen’s hand. How splendid we should think it if it were written in Greek! Indeed, how Greek it all is! Judith: Are you sure there is nothing about the village church? Ann: Well, yes. John Porter did in token of gratitude add ‘some suitable embellishments to the village church’; but, then (as there are no gentlemen present) so did the Greeks, and we think no worse of them for doing so. Judith: Perhaps. Anyhow, John Porter is the pick of the bunch. He enjoyed life; that’s what the Victorians—but, go on—tell me how Orme was poisoned.

[New Statesman, Mar 6, 1920]

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Sir Walter Raleigh.

To most of us, says Miss Hadow in her introduction to a book of selections from the prose of Sir Walter Raleigh, ‘the Elizabethan Age stands for one of two things: it is the age of jewelled magnificence, of pomp and profusion and colour, of stately ceremonial and Court pageant, of poetry and drama; or it is the age of enterprise and exploration’. But though we have every reason for being grateful to Miss Hadow for her part in the production of this astonishing little book, we cannot go with her in this initial distinction. If Shakespeare, as literature is the only thing that survives in its completeness, may be held to represent the Elizabethan age, are not enterprise and exploration a part of Shakespeare? If there are some who read him without any thought save for the poetry, to most of us, we believe, the world of Shakespeare is the world of Hakluyt and of Raleigh; on that map Guiana and the River of the Plate are not very far distant or easily distinguishable from the Forest of Arden and Elsinore. The navigator and the explorer made their voyage by ship instead of by the mind, but over Hakluyt’s pages broods the very same lustre of the imagination. Those vast rivers and fertile valleys, those forests of odorous trees and mines of gold and ruby, fill up the background of the plays as, in our fancy, the blue of the distant plains of America seems to lie behind the golden cross of St. Paul’s and the bristling chimneys of Elizabethan London.

No man was a truer representative of this Elizabethan world than Sir Walter Raleigh. From the intrigues and splendours of the Court he sailed to an unknown land inhabited by savages; from discourse with Marlowe and Spenser he went to sea-battle with the Spaniard. Merely to read over the list of his pursuits gives one a sense of the space and opportunity of the Elizabethan age; courtier and admiral, soldier and explorer, member of Parliament and poet, musician and historian—he was all those things, and still kept such a curiosity alive in him that he must practise chemistry in his cabin when he had leisure at sea, or beg an old henhouse from the Governor of the Tower in which to pursue his search for ‘the Great Elixir’. It is little wonder that Rumour should still be telling her stories about his cloak, his pipe with the silver bowl, his potatoes, his mahogany, his orange trees, after all these years; for though Rumour may lie, there is always good judgment in her falsehood.

When we come to read what remains of his writing—and in this little book the indispensable part of it is preserved—we get what Rumour cannot give us: the likeness of an extremely vigorous and individual mind, scarcely dominated by the ‘vast and devouring space’ of the centuries. It is well, perhaps, to begin by reading the last fight of the Revenge, the letters about Cadiz and Guiana, and that to his wife written in expectation of death, before reading the extracts from the Historie of the World, and to end with the preface to that work, as one leaves a church with the sound of the organ in one’s ears. His adventures by sea and land, his quest of Eldorado and the great gold mine of his dreams, his sentence of death and long imprisonment—glimpses of that ‘day of a tempestuous life’ are to be found in these pages. They give us some idea of its storm and its sunshine. Naturally the style of them is very different from that of the preface. They are full of hurry and turmoil, or impetuosity and self-assertiveness. He is always eager to justify his own daring, and to proclaim the supremacy of the English among other peoples. Even ‘our common English soldier, leavied in haste, from following the Cart, or sitting on the shop-stall’, surpasses in valour the best of Roman soldiers. Of the landing in Fayal in the year 1597 he writes, ‘For I thought it to belong unto the honor of our Prince & Nation, that a few Ilanders should not think any advantage great enough, against a fleet set forth by Q. Elizabeth’; although he had to admit that ‘I had more regard of reputation, in that businesse, than of safetie’.

But if we had to justify our love of these old voyagers we should not lay stress upon the boastful and magnificent strain in them; we should point, rather, to the strain of poetry—the meditative mood fostered by long days at sea, sleep and dreams under strange stars, and lonely effort in the face of death. We would recall the words of Sir Humfrey Gilbert, when the storm broke upon his ship, ‘sitting abaft with a book in his hand … and crying (so oft as we did approach within hearing) “We are as near to Heaven by sea as by land”’. And so Sir Walter Raleigh, whose character was subject to much criticism during his lifetime, who had been alternately exalted and debased by fortune, who had lived with the passion of a great lover, turns finally to thoughts of the littleness of all human things and to a magnanimous contemplation of the lot of mankind. His thoughts seem inspired by a knowledge of life both at its best and its worst; in the solitude of the Tower his memory is haunted by the sound of the sea. From the sea he takes his most frequent and splendid imagery. It comes naturally to him to speak of the ‘Navigation of this life’, of ‘the Port of death, to which all winds drive us’. Our false friends, he says, ‘forsake us in the first tempest of misfortune and steere away before the Sea and Winde.’ So in old age we find that our joy and our woe have ‘sayled out of sight’. Often he must have looked into the sky from the deck of his ship and thought how ‘The Heavens are high, farr off, and unsearcheable’; and his experience as a ruler of uncivilized races must have made him consider what fame ‘the boundless ambition in mortal men’ is wont to leave behind it:

‘They themselves would then rather have wished, to have stolen out of the world without noise, than to be put in minde, that they have purchased the report of their actions in the world, by rapine, oppression, and crueltie, by giving in spoile the innocent and labouring soul to the idle and insolent, and by having emptied the cities of the world of their ancient Inhabitants, and filled them againe with so many and so variable sorts of sorrowes.’

But although the sounds of life and the waves of the sea are constantly in his ears, so that at any moment he is ready to throw away his pen and take command of an expedition, he seems in his deepest moods to reject the show and splendour of the world, to see the vanity of gold mines and of all expeditions save those of the soul.

‘For the rest, as all fables were commonly grounded upon some true stories of other things done; so might these tales of the Griffins receive this moral. That if those men which fight against so many dangerous passages for gold, or other riches of this world, had their perfect senses … they would content themselves with a quiet and moderate estate.’

The thought of the passing of time and the uncertainty of human lot was a favourite one with the Elizabethans, whose lives were more at the mercy of fortune than ours are. In Raleigh’s prose the same theme is constantly treated, but with an absence of the characteristic Elizabethan conceits, which brings it nearer to the taste of our own time; a divine unconsciousness seems to pervade it. Take this passage upon the passing of youth:

‘So as who-so-ever hee bee, to whome Fortune hath beene a servant, and the Time a friend: let him but take the accompt of his memory (for wee have no other keeper of our pleasures past) and truelie examine what it hath reserved, either of beauty and youth, or foregone delights; what it hath saved, that it might last, of his dearest affections, or of whatever else the amorous Springtime gave his thoughts of contentment, then unvaluable; and hee shall finde that all the art which his elder yeares have, can draw no other vapour out of these dissolutions, than heavie, secret, and sad sighs…. Onely those few blacke Swans I must except; who having had the grace to value worldly vanities at no more than their owne price; doe, by retayning the comfortable memorie of a well acted life, behold death without dread, and the grave without feare; and embrace both, as necessary guides to endlesse glorie.’

This is no sudden effort of eloquence; it is prefaced and continued by words of almost equal beauty. In its melody and strength, its natural symmetry of form, it is a perfect speech, fit for letters of gold and the echoes of cathedral aisles, or for the tenderness of noble human intercourse. It reaches us almost with the very accent of Raleigh’s voice. There is a magnificence with which such a being relinquishes his hopes in life and dismisses the cares of ‘this ridiculous world’ which is the counterpart of his great zest in living. We hear it in the deeply burdened sigh with which he takes his farewell of his wife. ‘For the rest, when you have travailled and wearied all your thoughts, over all sorts of worldly cogitations, you shall but sitt downe by sorrowe in the end.’ But it is most evident in his thought upon death. The thought of death tolls all through Elizabethan literature lugubriously enough in our ears, for whom, perhaps, existence has been made less palpable by dint of much thinking and death more of a shade than a substance. But to the Elizabethans a great part of the proper conduct of life consisted in meeting the idea of death, which to them was not an idea but a person, with fortitude. And to Raleigh in particular, death was a very definite enemy—death, ‘which doth pursue us and hold us in chace from our infancy’. A true man, he says, despises death. And yet even as he says this there come to life before his eyes the ‘mishapen and ouglye shapes’ with which death tortures the imagination. And at last, when he has taken the idea of death to him and triumphed over it, there rises from his lips that magnificent strain of reconciliation and acknowledgment which sounds for ever in the ears of those who have heard it once: ‘O eloquent, just and mightie Death! whom none could advise, thou hast perswaded: what none hath dared, thou hast done.’

[Times Literary Supplement, Mar 15, 1917]

[]

Sterne.

It is the custom to draw a distinction between a man and his works and to add that, although the world has a claim to read every line of his writing, it must not ask questions about the author. The distinction has arisen, we may believe, because the art of biography has fallen very low, and people of good taste infer that a ‘life’ will merely gratify a base curiosity, or will set up a respectable figure of sawdust. It is therefore a wise precaution to limit one’s study of a writer to the study of his works; but, like other precautions, it implies some loss. We sacrifice an aesthetic pleasure, possibly of first-rate value—a life of Johnson, for example—and we raise boundaries where there should be none. A writer is a writer from his cradle; in his dealings with the world, in his affections, in his attitude to the thousand small things that happen between dawn and sunset, he shows the same point of view as that which he elaborates afterwards with a pen in his hand. It is more fragmentary and incoherent, but it is also more intense. To this, which one may call the aesthetic interest of his character, there are added the various interests of circumstance—where and how he was born and bred and educated—which all men share, but which are of greater interest as they affect a more original talent. The weakness of modern biographers seems to lie not in their failure to realize that both elements are present in the life of a writer, but in their determination to separate them. It is easier for them to draw distinctions than to see things whole. There is a common formula, in which, having delivered judgment upon his work, they state that ‘a few facts about his life’ may not be inappropriate, or, writing from the opposite standpoint, proclaim that their concern is ‘with the man and not with his works’. A distinction is made in this way which we do not find in the original, and from this reason mainly arises the common complaint against a biography, that it is ‘not like’. We have lives that are all ceremony and work; and lives that are all chatter and scandal. A certain stigma is attached to the biography which deals mainly with a man’s personal history, and the writer who sees him most clearly in that light is driven to represent him under the cover of fiction. The fascination of novel writing lies in its freedom; the dull parts can be skipped, and the excitements intensified; but above all the character can be placed artistically, set, that is, in fitting surroundings and composed so as to give whatever impression you choose. The traditional form is far less definite in the case of novels than in the case of biographies, because (one may guess) the sensibilities of conventional people have much less say in the matter. One of the objects of biography is to make men appear as they ought to be, for they are husbands and brothers; but no one takes a character in fiction quite seriously. It is there, indeed, that the main disadvantage of novel writing lies, for the aesthetic effect of truth is only to be equalled by the imagination of genius. There are a dozen incidents in a second-rate novel which might have happened in a dozen different ways, and the least consciousness of indecision blurs the effect; but the bare statement of facts has an indisputable power, if we have reason to think them true. The knowledge that they are true, it may be, leads us to connect them with other ideas; but if we know that they never happened at all, and doubt that they could have happened in this way, they suggest nothing distinct, because they are not distinct themselves. Again, a real life is wonderfully prolific; it passes through such strange places and draws along with it a train of adventure that no novelist can better them, if only he can deal with them as with his own inventions.

Certainly, no novelist could wish for finer material than the life of Sterne affords him. His story was ‘like a romance’ and his genius was of the rarest. There is a trace of the usual apology in Professor Cross’s preface, [◉11] to the effect that he is not going to pass judgment on the writings, but merely to give the facts of the life. In his opinion such facts would be dull enough, if it did not ‘turn out’, as he remarks, that the writings are in part autobiographical, so that one may consider his life without irrelevance. But Professor Cross has surely underrated the value of his material, or the use he has made of it, for the book makes excellent reading from start to finish, and persuades us that we know Sterne better than we did before.

There are certain scenes upon which, were one writing a novel, one would like to dwell. The story of his youth is one; he was dragged about England and Ireland in the train of the regiment which his father served. His mother was a vulgar woman, daughter of a sutler, and his father was a ‘little smart man’ who got the wound that killed him in a quarrel over a goose. The family trailed about, always in straits for money, from one garrison town to another. Sometimes they were taken in by a rich cousin, for the Sternes were of old descent; sometimes in crossing the Channel they were ‘nearly cast away by a leak springing up on board ship’. Little brothers and sisters were born on their wanderings, and died, ‘being of a fine delicate frame not made to last long’. Sterne, after the death of his father, was taken in charge by his cousin, Richard Sterne of Elvington, and sent to Cambridge. He sat with John Hall-Stevenson under a great walnut tree in the court of Jesus College, reading Rabelais, Rochester, and Aphra Behn, Homer, Virgil, and Theocritus, evil books and good books, so that they called the tree the tree of knowledge. Sterne, further, railed at ‘rhetoric, logic, and metaphysics … amused that intellect should employ itself in that way’.

But it is at Sutton, eight miles from York, that we should like to pause and draw the portrait of the vicar. ‘So slovenly was his dress and strange his gait, that the little boys used to flock round him and walk by his side.’ He would stop on his way to church, if his pointer started a covey of partridges, and leave his flock without a sermon while he shot. Once, when his wife was out of her mind for a while and thought herself Queen of Bohemia, Sterne drove her through the stubble fields with bladders fastened to the wheels of her chaise to make a noise ‘and then I told her this is the way they course in Bohemia’. He farmed his own land, played the violin, took lessons in painting and drawing, and drove into York for the races. In addition he was a violent partisan in the ecclesiastical disputes and drew Dr. Slop from the life. Then, when he was tired of parochial life he could drive over to the great stone house with the moat of stagnant water round it where John Hall-Stevenson lived, in retreat from the world, humouring his fancies. If the weathercock which he saw from his bed pointed to the north-east, for example, Mr. Hall-Stevenson would lie all day in bed. If he could be induced to rise, he spent his time in writing indecent rhymes and in reading with his friend among the old and obscene books in the library. Then, in October, the brotherhood of the Demoniacs met at the Hall, in imitation of the monks of Medmenham Abbey; but it was a rustic copy, for they were ‘noisy Yorkshire squires and gentlemen’, who hunted by day, drank deep into the night, and told rude stories over their burgundy. Their spirit and their oddity (for they were the freaks of the countryside) rejoiced Sterne hugely, just as he loved the immense freedom of the old writers. When he was back in his parsonage again he had books all round him to take the place of talk. York was full of books, for the sales of the county took place there. Sterne’s love of books reminds us sometimes of Charles Lamb. He loved the vast forgotten folios, where a lifetime of learning and fancy has been poured into the notes; he loved Burton and Bouchet and Bruscambille; Montaigne, Rabelais, and Cervantes he loved of course; but one may believe that he delighted most in his wild researches into medicine, midwifery, and military engineering. He was only brought to a stop by the difficulty of understanding in what way a cannon ball travels, for the ‘laws of the parabola’ were not to his mind.

He was forty-five before it occurred to him that these vivid experiences among the parsons, the country peasants, and the wits of Crazy Castle had given him a view of the world which it would be possible to put into shape. The first books of Tristram Shandy were written at fever heat, ‘quaint demons grinning and clawing at his head’, ideas striking him as he walked, and sending him back home at a run to secure them. It is in this way that the first books still impress us; a wonderful conception, long imprisoned in the brain and delicately formed, seems to leap out, surprising and intoxicating the writer himself. He had found a key to the world. He thought he could go on like this, at the rate of two volumes a year, for ever, for a miracle had happened which turned all his experiences to words; to write about them was to be master of all that was in him and all that was to come. A slight knowledge of his life is enough to identify many of the characters with real people and to trace the humours of Uncle Toby and Mr. Shandy to the oddities of Crazy Castle and to the studies of the writer himself. But these are merely marks on the surface, and the source from which they sprang lies very deep. Wilfully strange and whimsical of course Sterne was, but the spirit which inspires his humours and connects them is the spirit of the humourist; the world is an absurd place, and to prove it he invents absurdities which he shows to be as sensible as the views by which the world is governed. The stranger’s nose, it will be remembered, ‘just served as a frigate to launch them into a gulf of school divinity, and then they all sailed before the wind’. Whichever way the story winds it is accompanied by a jibing at ‘great wigs, grave faces, and other implements of deceit’, and thus the innumerable darts and spurts of fancy, in spite of their variety, have a certain likeness.

Shandy Hall, the home of cranks and eccentricities, nevertheless contrives to make the whole of the outer world appear heavy, and dull and brutal, and teased by innumerable imps. But it is probable that this effect is given quite as much by indirect means as by direct satire and parody. The form of the book, which seems to allow the writer to put down at once the first thought that comes into his head, suggests freedom; and then the thoughts themselves are so informal, so small, private, and far-fetched, that the reader is amazed and delighted to think how easy it must be to write. Even his indecency impresses one as an odd kind of honesty. In comparison other novels seem intolerably portly and platitudinous and remote from life. At the same time, what kind of life is it that Sterne can show us? It is easy to see that it has nothing in common with what, in the shorthand of speech, one calls ‘real life’. Sterne skips immense tracts of living in order to concentrate upon the little whim or the oddity which most delighted him. His people are always at high pressure, with their brains in a state of abnormal activity. Their wills and their affections can make small way against their intellects. Uncle Toby, it will be remembered, picks up a Bible directly he has made his offer of marriage, and becomes so much engrossed by the siege of Jericho that he leaves his proposal ‘to work with her after its own way’. When the news of his son’s death reaches Mr. Shandy, his mind at once fills with the fine sayings of the philosophers, and in spouting them his private sorrow is completely forgotten. Nevertheless, although such reversals of ordinary experience startle us, they do not seem to us unnatural—they do not turn to chill conceits—because Sterne, the first of ‘motive-mongers’, has observed the humours of man with an exquisite subtlety. His sphere is in the most exalted regions, where the thought and not the act is the thing criticized; where the thought, moreover, is almost completely severed from ordinary associations and the support of facts. Uncle Toby, with his simple questionings and avowals—‘You puzzle me to death’—plays a most important part by bringing his brother’s flights to earth and giving them that contrast with normal human thought in which the essence of humour lies.

Yet there are moments, especially in the later books of Tristram Shandy, where the hobby-horse is ridden to death, and Mr. Shandy’s invariable eccentricity tries our patience. The truth is that we cannot live happily in such fine air for long, and that we begin to become conscious of limitations; moreover, this astonishing vivacity has something a little chill about it. The same qualities that were so exhilarating at first—the malice, the wit, and the irresponsibility—are less pleasing when they seem less spontaneous, like the grin on a weary face; or, it may be, when one has had enough of them. A writer who feels his responsibility to his characters tries to give vent to portentous groans at intervals; he does his best to insist that he is a showman merely, that his judgments are fallible, and that a great mystery lies round us all. But Sterne’s sense of humour will suffer no mystery to settle on his page; he is never sublime like Meredith, but on the other hand he is never ridiculous like Thackeray. When he wished to get some relief from his fantastic brilliancy, he sought it in the portrayal of exquisite instants and pangs of emotion. The famous account of Uncle Toby and the fly—‘“Go,” says he, lifting up the sash, and opening his hand as he spoke, to let it escape; “go, poor devil; get thee gone, why should I hurt thee? The world surely is wide enough to hold both thee and me”’—is followed by a description of the effect which such words had upon Sterne himself. They ‘instantly set my whole frame into one vibration of most pleasurable sensation’. It is this strange contradiction, as it seems, between feeling pain and joy acutely, and at the same time, observing and admiring his own power to do so, that has thrown so much discredit upon the famous ‘sentimentality’, and has so much perplexed his admirers. The amazing truth of these observations is the best proof that he felt them; but when it becomes obvious that he has now time to think of himself our attention strays also, and we ask irrelevant questions—whether, for instance, Sterne was a good man. Sometimes—the incident of the donkey in Tristram Shandy is a good example—his method is brilliantly successful, for he touches upon the emotion, and passes on to show us how it travels through his mind, and what associations cling to it; different ideas meet and disperse, naturally as it seems; and the whole scene is lit for the moment with air and colour. In The Sentimental Journey, however, Sterne seems anxious to suppress his natural curiosity, and to have a double intention in his sentiment—to convey a feeling to the reader, but with the object of winning admiration for his own simple virtues. It is when his unmixed sentiment falls very flat that we begin to ask ourselves whether we like the writer, and to call him hypocrite. ‘The pauvre honteux [to whom Sterne had given alms] could say nothing; he pull’d out a little handkerchief, and wiped his face as he turned away—and I thought he thanked me more than them all.’ The last words, with their affectation of simplicity, are like eyes turned unctiously to Heaven.

There is abundant evidence in the story of his life to show how strange and complicated was the state of mind that produced such works of art. Sterne was a man of many passions, driven ‘according as the fly stings’; but the most serious was said to have been inspired by Mrs. Draper, the Eliza of the letters. Nevertheless, sentiments that had done duty for his wife in 1740 were copied out, with a change of name, and made to serve again for Eliza, in the year 1767; and again if he had turned a phrase happily in writing to Eliza, Lydia, his daughter, was given the benefit of it. Shall we infer from this that Sterne cared nothing for wife or mistress or daughter, or shall we believe that he was, before everything else, and with all the failing of his kind, a great artist? If he had been among the greatest, no doubt these little economies would not have been necessary; but with his exquisite and penetrating but not very exuberant genius it was essential to make shifts and to eke out as best he might. Accordingly, we have, as Professor Cross demonstrates, the strange spectacle of a man who uses his emotions twice over, for different purposes. The Journal to Eliza in which the most secret passions of his heart are laid bare is but the note-book for passages in The Sentimental Journey which all the world may read. Sterne himself, no doubt, scarcely knew at what point his own pain was dissolved in the joy of an artist. We at this distance of time, might speculate indefinitely.

Indeed, however we may test it, there is no life which is harder to judge; its eccentricities are often genuine, and its impulses are often premeditated. In the same way the final impression is twofold in its nature, for we must combine a life of extraordinary flightiness and oddity with the infinite painstaking and self-consciousness of an artist. This thin, excitable man, who was devoured by consumption, who said of himself that he generally acted on the first impulse, and was a bundle of sensations scarcely checked by reason, not only kept a record of all that he felt, but could sit close at his table, arranging and rearranging, adding and altering, until every scene was clear, every tone was felt, and each word was fit and in its place. ‘How do the slight touches of the chisel,’ he exclaimed in Tristram Shandy, ‘the pencil, the pen, the fiddle stick, et cetera, give the true swell, which gives the true pleasure! O, my fellow countrymen!—be nice; be cautious of your language—and never, O! never let it be forgotten upon what small particles your eloquence and your fame depend.’ His fame depends partly upon that inimitable style, but rests most safely upon the extraordinary zest with which he lived, and upon the joy with which his mind worked ceaselessly upon the world.

[Times Literary Supplement, Aug 12, 1909]

[]

Eliza and Sterne.

Of the many difficulties which afflict the biographer, the moral difficulty must surely be the greatest. By what standard, that is to say, is he to judge the morals of the dead? By that of their day, or that of his own? Or should he, before putting pen to paper, arrive at some absolute standard of right and wrong by which he can try Socrates and Shelley and Byron and Queen Victoria and Mr. Lloyd George? The problem, though it lies at the root of biography and affects it in every fibre, is for the most part solved or shelved by taking it for granted that the truth was revealed about the year 1850 to the fortunate natives of the British Isles, who need only in future take into account circumstances of date, country, and sex in order to come to a satisfactory conclusion upon all cases of moral eccentricity submitted to their judgment. If we write the life of Elizabeth Draper, for instance, we must lay great stress upon the question of the morality or immorality of her relations with Sterne. We must ransack the evidence and profess relief or censure as the balance sways for her or against. We must attach more importance to her conduct in this respect than in any other. Mr. Wright and Mr. Sclater go through the ceremony with rigid consistency. Her ‘moral culpability’ is debated at every point, and we are invited to assist at a trial which, as it proceeds, comes to have less and less reality either for us or for anybody else. But in saying that we admit no levity. We are only saying what every reader of biography knows but few writers care to confess—that times are changed; that in 1850 Eliza would not have been invited to Court, but that in 1922 we should all be delighted to sit next her at dinner.

Yet morality, though it may be the crucial difficulty, is by no means the only difficulty that the biographer has to face. There are the white ants of Anjengo—‘a peculiarly voracious breed’, who, not satisfied with devouring the ‘bulk of the old archives’ of a town which is at once the birthplace of Eliza and the seat of the pepper industry, have eaten away a much more precious material—the life of Eliza herself. Again and again her conscientious biographers have to admit that the facts are lost. ‘History … is often most tantalizingly silent upon points of real interest.’ The chief actor leaves the stage, often at the crisis of her fate, and in her absence our attention is directed to the antiseptic quality of wood ashes in the treatment of smallpox; to the different natures of the Hooka, the Calloon, and the Kerim Can; to the method, still in vogue, of hunting deer with cheetahs; and to the fact that one of Eliza’s uncles was killed by a sack of caraway seeds falling on his head as he walked up St. Mary-at-Hill in the year 1778. These familiar diversions, which do not perhaps advance the cause of biography, are excusable when the subject is, as Eliza Draper was, an obscure woman, dead almost a century and a half, whose thirty-five years would have been utterly forgotten were it not that for three months in one of them she was loved by Laurence Sterne.

She was loved, but the depredations of time and the white ants leave us in little doubt that the love was on his side, not on hers. If she was anybody’s Eliza (which is by no means certain) she was Thomas Limbrey Sclater’s Eliza. To him she wrote affectionately all her life; to him she sent one of Sterne’s love-letters; and it was of him she thought when the ship was carrying her back to India and away from Sterne for ever. She should have had more sense of the becoming. She should have realized the predicament in which she places posterity. But Eliza was a woman of impulse rather than of reflection. ‘Committing matrimony’, as her sister called it, with Daniel Draper of Bombay at the age of fourteen she ruined her chances for ever. He was thirty-four, had several illegitimate children, was afflicted with the writer’s cramp, and possessed all those virtues which lead officials to the highest promotion and make their wives jump into the arms of Commodore Clarke.

‘… By nature cool, Phlegmatic, and not adorned by Education with any of those pleasing Acquirements which help to fill up the Vacuums of time agreeably, if not usefully, added to which, Methodically formed, in the Extreme, by long habit, and not easily roused into active measures by any Motive Unconnected with his sense of duty.’

Such a man (Eliza wrote of her husband in words which, since her emotions were strong and her grammar weak, we take the liberty of paraphrasing) is quite unfitted to be the husband of a lady entitled to ‘the Appellation of Belle Indian’; who loved society much but solitude more; who read Montaigne and the Spectator; who was fourth if not third upon the Governor’s invitation list; who wrote letters which some thought worthy of publication; who had been told finally by a friend that nature designed her for the wife of ‘a very feeling Poet and Philosopher, rather than to a Gentleman of Indépendance and General Talents, and the reason he was pleased to assign to it was, the natural and supposed qualities of my heart, together with an expressive Countenance and a manner capable of doing justice to the tender Passions’.

This ‘acknowledged Judge of Physiognomy’ was, we may guess, no less a person than the great Mr. Sterne. Eliza met him at the house of Mrs. James in Gerrard Street in the year 1767. Draper’s increasing cramp had the somewhat incongruous effect of bringing them together. Having tried the English spas without success, Draper returned to Bombay and Eliza was left in London to continue the conversation with Sterne. From the Journal to Eliza we can judge fairly accurately what they talked about. Eliza was the most charming of women, Sterne the most passionate of men. Life was cruel, Mrs. Sterne intolerable, early marriages deplorable, Bombay distant, and husbands exacting. The only happiness to mingle thoughts and tears, to share ecstasies and exchange portraits, and pray for some miracle, such as the simultaneous deaths of Elizabeth Sterne and Daniel Draper, which might unite them eternally in the future. But though this was undoubtedly what they said, it is no such easy matter to be certain what they meant. Sterne was fifty-four, and Eliza twenty-two. Sterne was at the height of his fame, and Eliza at the height not of her beauty, which was little, but of her charm, which was great. But Sterne was engaged in writing The Sentimental Journey, and Eliza must sometimes have felt that though it was most wonderful and flattering to have a celebrated author sitting by her bedside when she fell ill, and reading her letters aloud to the ladies and gentlemen of the highest rank, and displaying her picture, and buying ten handsome brass screws for her cabin, and running her errands round London, still he was fifty-four, had a dreadful cough, and sometimes, she noticed, looked out of the window in a very curious way. No doubt he was thinking about his writing. He assured her that he found her of the very greatest help. And he told her that he had brought her name and picture into his work, ‘where’, he said, ‘they will remain when you and I are at rest’; and he went on to write an elegy upon her, and no doubt worked himself up into one of those accesses of emotion which any woman would have given her eyes to inspire, yet lying ill in bed Eliza found them a little fatiguing, and could not help thinking that Thomas Limbrey Sclater, who was not in the least likely to become immortal, was a great deal more to her taste than Laurence Sterne. Thus, if we must censure Eliza, it is not for being in love with Sterne, but for not being in love with him. She let him write her the letters of a lover and propose to her the rights of a husband. But when she reached India she had almost forgotten him, and his death recalled only ‘the mild generous good Yorick’ whose picture hung, not above her heart, but over her writing-table.

Arrived in India with eleven years of life before her, the provoking creature proceeded to live them as if she did not care a straw for those ‘Annotators and Explainers’ who would, Sterne said, busy themselves in after ages with their names. She gave herself up to trivial interests and nameless captains; to sitting till three in the morning upon a ‘cool Terrasse’; to hunting antelopes with leopards; to driving down the streets of Tellicherry with an escort of armed Sepoys; to playing with her children and pouring out her soul in long, long letters to Mr. Sclater and Mrs. James; to that petty process of living, in short, which is of such inexplicable interest to others engaged in the same pursuit. It is all very obscure and highly conjectural. She was very happy at Tellicherry in the year 1769 and very unhappy in the year 1770. She was always being happy and then unhappy and blaming herself and hoping that her daughter would be a better woman than her mother. Yet Eliza did not think altogether badly of herself. It was her complexion that was to blame, and the ‘happy flexibility’ of her temper. Vain, charming, gifted, sympathetic, her relations with her husband grew steadily more and more desperate. At last, when it was quite certain that Draper loved Leeds, her maid, and neither on Tuesday nor on Wednesday did he say that word ‘sympathetick of regret’ which ‘would have saved me the perilous adventure’, Eliza either jumped from her window into a boat or was otherwise conveyed to the flagship of Sir John Clarke and thence to her uncle’s house at Masulipatam. This time, without a doubt, her biographers regretfully conclude, ‘Eliza was “lost”’. But Eliza was not in the least of that opinion herself. She turned up imperturbably in Queen Anne Street, Cavendish Square, ‘which shows that she had considerable social resources’; but there, alas, proceeded to fall in love with the Abbé Raynal. Was she incorrigible or was he, perhaps like others of his countrymen, apt to exaggerate? The terms in which he addressed Anjengo would lead one to suspect the latter. But death, with infinite discretion, spares us the inquiry. Eliza died at the age of thirty-five, and some unknown friend raised a monument to her memory in Bristol Cathedral with the figures of Genius and Benevolence on either side and a bird in the act of feeding its young. So after all somebody liked Eliza, and it is as certain as anything can be that a woman with such a tombstone was moving in the highest circles of Bristol society at the time of her death.

[Times Literary Supplement, Dec 14, 1922]

[]

Horace Walpole.

One hundred and ten letters by Horace Walpole are here printed by Dr. Toynbee for the first time. [◉12] These, together with twenty-three now printed in full, new matter from hitherto unpublished material, and Dr. Toynbee’s notes, make up two volumes of rare delight. If the two volumes were ten we should still urge Dr. Toynbee to fresh researches; we should still welcome the discovery of a large chest put away in some old country house and stuffed to the brim with Walpole’s letters. Although there is nothing in the new letters of surpassing brilliance, nothing that draws a new line on the familiar face, there is once more, and for too short a time, the peculiar and unmistakable pleasure of Walpole’s society. He does not need to be brilliant; he does not need to be indiscreet; let him draw up to the table, take the pen in his gouty fingers, and write—anything, everything, so long as he continues to write. These last letters, swept up from many different sources with intervals between them and lacking continuity, are yet neither trivial nor disconnected. We fall into step at once. We take our delightful promenade through the greater part of the eighteenth century. We see in passing many old friends. It is as entertaining as ever. The first solemn chimes of the nineteenth century, which mean that Horace Walpole must retire, are as vexatious to us as the clock that strikes and sends a child complaining up to bed.

Perhaps it is fanciful to detect the charm of the mature Walpole in ‘My first letter to my mother’, with which the book opens: ‘Dear Mama, I hop you are wall and I am very wall and I hop papa is wall … and I am very glad to hear by Tom that all my cruataurs ar all wall’. Yet this is an engaging letter, as the dark-eyed little boy in the miniature is a charming little boy; and there can be no doubt that Walpole far sooner than most children knew his own mind and could overcome the difficulties of spelling. There was never a transition stage of awkward immaturity when he said more than he meant, or less than he meant, or what he did not mean. At the age of twenty-three he appears in Rome a complete man of the world, and so much his own master that he can already quiz the great ladies who are seeing the sights, execute commissions for fans and snuffboxes, exchange compliments with learned men, keep his own mind admirably free from enthusiasm, and end a letter:

Good-night, child, I am in a violent hurry. Oh, Porto Bello, the delightful news! Corradini is certainly to be Pope, and soon. Next post I shall probably be able to tell you he certainly is not.

The author of that sentence is already completely equipped for his part. He has broken the back of the stubborn English tongue; for ever more it is going to run his errands, carry his light burdens, do his behests; he has at his disposal an indefatigable slave. More than that, he has already taken up his position, sees the spectacle from his own angle, and for close on eighty years there will he stand, witty, malicious, observant, detached, the liveliest of gossips, the most alert of friends. The son of a Prime Minister endowed with a handsome sinecure, a position of some sort was assured him had he been both dunce and dullard. But Horace Walpole was not a dullard, and he was much more than the son of a Prime Minister. He stood out against his hereditary doom with a resolution which commands our respect, though it has caused him to be disparaged since, as no doubt it raised a laugh against him at the time. He would not drink; he would not dice; he would not be a country gentleman; he would not be a politician. He would, in short, be nothing save what it pleased him to be.

On the whole it pleased him best to be a gentleman, for there is no reason why a gentleman should not write the wittiest letters in the world, provided that he does it carelessly, and has for correspondents the most exalted and the most accomplished of his time. The chief characteristic of this class he had acquired very young, perhaps at the cost of some labour—even, it is possible, of some renunciation. ‘Good-night, child, I am in a violent hurry.’ Whatever pains his letter had cost him, it was essential to pass it off as the merest trifle, something dashed down while he waited for the rain to stop—something, as the phrasing shows, spontaneous, careless, but spoken naturally in a tone of the highest breeding. He was careful to repeat the boast that he was in a violent hurry whenever he wrote anything. As for rhapsody of emotion or profundity of learning, those qualities he left to the professional writers who had only their brains to live by. Moreover, it is permissible for the amateur to spend his time over problems which fascinated Walpole, though no man of sense could waste a thought upon them. Since no one, himself least of all, took him seriously, he could devote several pages to the discussion of that difficult and vexed question—the age at which Lady Desmond died. Was she really 163, and could it be possible that she had danced with Richard the Third? For some reason these questions stirred his imagination. His eagerness to know the exact condition of Queen Catherine Parr’s corpse, when it was dug up and examined, would seem excessive—save indeed that the lady was of the highest rank. For it is not possible to deny that he was a snob, and of the determined breed whose mothers have been Shorters while their fathers, though not of noble birth, have been exalted by their abilities to familiar converse with the great. Yet once that dart is levelled, no other can find a lodgment. It is not easy to call him dilettante or gossip, poetaster or dandy, when before these charges are out of your mouth the culprit has owned them of his own accord and gone out of his way to pronounce his sentence:

Good God! Sir, what am I that I should be offended at, or above, criticism or correction? I do not know who ought to be—I am sure no author. I am a private man of no consequence, and at best an author of very moderate abilities.

Even in matters of taste, upon which he had spent most of his life and a large part of his fortune, he was open to correction by people possessed of greater learning than he could claim. He was nothing but a private gentleman.

The reader will perceive that the habit of understatement is not only the essence of good breeding, but also a tool of great value in the hand of a writer. An author who knows no more than other people, who has no dignity to keep up, no convictions to enforce, no philosophy to expound, can say what he likes and think what he chooses. No one need attend to him. But if, in addition, by a mere stroke of luck, he possesses the wittiest of pens and the most observant of eyes, if he knows everybody worth knowing and sees everything worth seeing, we shall of course get every word he writes by heart. Since, however, writers should be serious, we shall in revenge allow him very little credit for his performance. It is the fashion to say that Walpole was so amusing because he was so frivolous, so witty because he was so heartless. He was certainly very much put out when old Madame du Deffand fell in love with him, and thought that at her age she could afford to talk about it openly. ‘Dès le moment que je cessai d’être jeune, j’ai eu une peur horrible de devenir un vieillard ridicule’, he wrote to her; and she replied, ‘Vos craintes sur le ridicule sont des terreurs paniques, mais on ne guérit point de la peur; je n’ai point vu une semblable faiblesse’. He was terribly afraid of ridicule, and yet the old lady, whose passion he had snubbed, showed considerable penetration when she spoke of ‘l’extrême vérité de votre caractère’. Understatement long persisted in, partly from motives of taste and propriety and partly from fear of ridicule, had disciplined Walpole’s emotions so that they scarcely dared show themselves above ground; yet what there is of them, as sometimes happens with emotions repressed rather than exploited, rings startlingly true. ‘… he loved me and I did not think he did’, he wrote of his quarrel with Gray, when Gray was dead. But as for his heart, let that rest in peace; there is some indecency in prying into it, and he would certainly prefer that we should credit him with none at all than allow him a grain too much. His brain is our affair.

And yet here once more shall we not be guilty of some credulity if we accept him entirely at his own estimate? The affectation of indifference, the pose of amateurishness, were common foibles at that time among men of birth whose brains could not abstain altogether from the inkpot. But perhaps there were moments when Walpole wished that his father’s name had been Shorter as well as his mother’s, and that fate had required him to use pen and paper in earnest and not merely provide them, at a handsome salary, for the use of the young men at the Treasury. At any rate his warmest praises in the present volume are not for Lady Di’s illustrations in ‘Sut water’ to the Mysterious Mother, nor even for Mrs. Damer’s model of ‘a shock dog in wax’, but for the plays of Shakespeare. ‘Moi, je me ferais brûler pour la primauté de Shakespeare.’ Admiring the French and owing much to them, still when it comes to tragedy what are Voltaire and Racine and Corneille, compared with Shakespeare? How did Voltaire dare criticize Shakespeare? ‘Grossly ignorant and tasteless’ was he not to see that the phrase ‘a bare bodkin’ is as sublime in one way as the simplicity of Lady Percy’s speech is sublime in another? ‘I had rather have written the two speeches of Lady Percy in the second part of Henry IV than all Voltaire…. But my enthusiasm for Shakespeare runs away with me.’ That is, indeed, an unwonted spectacle. But perhaps young Mr. Jephson, the playwright, owed all this talk about Shakespeare and the English language ‘far more energie, and more sonorous too, than the French’, and these interesting speculations about ‘a novel diction’, ‘a very new and peculiar style’ which might have amazing effect, ‘by fixing on some region of whose language we have little or no idea’—perhaps Mr. Jephson drew all this down upon himself because the old dandy and aristocrat did for the time being envy young Mr. Jephson, who could set himself seriously to the task of writing and need not, since his name was Jephson, scribble off a tragedy ‘in a violent hurry’.

A queer sort of imagination haunted the seemingly prosaic edifice of Walpole’s mind. What but imagination gone astray and vagrant over pots and pans instead of firmly held in place was his love of knick-knacks and antiquities, Strawberry hills and decomposing royalties? And once at least Walpole made a little confession to Madame du Deffand. Of all his works he preferred The Castle of Otranto, for there he said ‘j’ai laissé courir mon imagination; les visions et les passions m’échauffaient’. Vision and passion are not the gifts that we should ascribe offhand to Horace Walpole; and yet as we lose ourselves in the enormous variety and entertainment of his letters we must allow that somehow from his own angle he saw truly, he judged independently. Somehow he was not only the wittiest of men, but the most observant and not the least kindly. And among the writers of English prose he wears for ever and with a peculiar grace a coronet of his own earning.

[Times Literary Supplement, Jul 31, 1919]

[]

A Friend of Johnson.

A great book, like a great nature, may have disastrous effects upon other people. It robs them of their character and substitutes its own. No one, for instance, who has read what Carlyle has to say about Lamb ever rids his mind completely of the impression, in spite of the fact that we judge the writer of it far more than his victim. Some deposit remains with us. It is strange to reflect what numbers of men and women live in our minds merely because Boswell took a note of their talk. Two or three such lines have a generating power; a body grows from the seed. The ordinary English reader knows Baretti solely through Johnson. ‘His account of Italy’, said Johnson, ‘is a very entertaining book; and, Sir, I know no man who carries his head higher in conversation than Baretti. There are strong powers in his mind. He has not, indeed, many hooks, but with what hooks he has he grapples very forcibly.’ This may be, as Mr. Collison-Morley [◉13] says, ‘a very good summary’, and yet his character is scarcely to be summarized thus; his vitality is too great for that. Mr. Collison-Morley, further, has the advantage of knowing the Italian side of the story.

The Barettis came from Piedmont, and Giuseppe boasted romantically of his noble birth. He could not live at home, where they wished to train him for a lawyer, but ran away to see the world. He lived at Milan, Venice, and Turin by his pen, turning out ceremonial verses to order. His qualities, however, were not those that bring success. He was susceptible, but so importunate that a certain Mrs. Paradise had to snub him with boiling water from her tea urn. Great animal vigour and a powerful mind made him insolent and overbearing in manner before his fame authorized it. Thus he took it upon himself as a young writer to denounce Goldoni, the Arcadians, and Italian blank verse, when they were in fashion; later, when archaeology was the rage, he declared that antiquaries should be clapped into lunatic asylums, seeing merely the pedantic side of the pursuit and failing from some lack of imagination to foretell its future. To succeed in letters needed in that age the utmost tact. Then as now France supplied Italy with her reading to a great extent, for every province had its own dialect; authors were miserably paid, and their manuscripts had to be passed by two censors. Italy afforded no place for a man whose intellect led him to despise mere grace and scholarship, and whose temper urged him to speak out.

He decided to try his fortune in England. He was amazed by London: Lincoln’s Inn, he wrote home, was three times the size of St. Mark’s Square; ‘a great street, hung with painted signs and clamourous with droves of oxen and of sheep, carriages and foot passengers, ran right through the city; the wheels splash you with mud black as ink; there are women of “perfect beauty” mixing with horrid cripples’; Fielding told him that a thousand or even two thousand die every year from want and hunger, ‘but London is so large it is hardly noticed’; a din of whips and curses lasts all day long, and at night the watchmen cry the hours hoarsely, ‘vile hounds’ ring bells as they collect the letters; sweeps, milk-women, oyster-sellers vociferate perpetually. In spite of this London gradually ousted all other places in his affections. To begin with he found that the Italian language was in fashion, for an Italian tour was essential; and the Italian opera was so popular that the audience followed the words by the light of private candles. He could thus keep himself by teaching—one of his pupils being the famous Mrs. Lennox, by whom he was introduced to Johnson. The merits of the society which Johnson ruled were precisely to the taste of Baretti. He loved to stretch his legs, to talk enormously, to mix with men of all callings, to ramble the streets at night with a companion, and the booksellers with their vast and indiscriminate greed for copy suited his powers admirably. His mind, we know, had strong hooks, and having set himself to learn English he made extraordinary progress in ‘that strange and most irregular tongue’. He could speak street slang even, and soon could carry on a controversy in vigorous English prose. It is typical of him that he could acquire any living language with enthusiasm, but the dead languages bored him. He turned out dictionaries, and translations and travels, with the printer’s devil waiting at the door, until a lump grew on his finger where the pen rested. His struggle to live by his brains is, for us, full of picturesque adventures. A dissertation upon the Italian poets introduced him to a wealthy English gentleman who had been engaged on a translation of Ariosto for twenty years. For the sake of Baretti’s advice and conversation he offered him a house and garden in his park, a gold watch worth forty guineas, and a wife. But the friendship ended in bitterness; it was said that the watch was only lent. Whether it was that Baretti had a drop of hot Southern blood in him, or whether the society of scholars was in truth a rough and hasty world, we certainly find matter, even in a slight memoir like the present, for comparisons between that age and this. One cannot imagine, for instance, that writers then retired to their studies or worked by the clock. They seem to have learnt by talk; their friendships thus were important and outspoken. Conversation was a kind of strife, and the jealousies and contradictions which attended the display gave it at least an eager excitement. Goldsmith found Baretti ‘insolent and overbearing’, Baretti thought Goldsmith ‘an unpolished man, and an absurd companion’. Mrs. Lennox, having complained that Baretti paid more attention to her child than to herself, he retorted: ‘You are a child in stature and a child in understanding’, being generally provoking, where opportunity offered. Indeed a society of clever people whose witticisms, jealousies, and emotions circulate is much like a society of children. Reticence and ceremony seem to mark middle age.

The life of Baretti reminds us, too, in a singular way of the rudeness that lay outside the coffee-houses and the clubs. One afternoon in October, 1769, he walked from Soho to the Orange coffee-house in the Haymarket. On his way back a woman sitting on a doorstep jumped up and struck him. In the darkness he returned the blow, whereupon three bullies set upon him, and he was chased along Oxenden Street, shouting ‘Murder’ with a crowd at his heels, who reviled him for a Frenchman. One man made dashes for his pigtail, and to save himself Baretti drew a silver-bladed fruit knife, and stabbed him twice. As the only means of escape, for he was stout, near-sighted, and the road swam with puddles, he burst into a shop and gave himself up to the police. Goldsmith, we notice, drove with him to the prison and offered him ‘every shilling’ in his purse. The man died from the blow; Baretti was acquitted, and the fruit knife used to be shown at dessert. The same kind of roughness marks the famous friendship with the Thrales, of which Mr. Collison-Morley gives a very lively account. He lived in the family, not as a regular tutor with a salary, but as a hired friend who must talk in return for board and lodging, and might hope for an occasional present. The good-natured Mrs. Thrale stood it for nearly three years, and then, finding him intolerable with his airs and arrogances, treated him ‘with some coldness’; whereupon he set down his dish of tea, ‘not half drank’, went ‘for my hat and stick that lay in the corner of the room’, and walked off to London without saying goodbye. Johnson pleaded for him. ‘Forgive him, dearest lady, the rather because of his misbehaviour; I am afraid he has learned part of me.’ It was true, no doubt, that he traded upon a certain likeness to the doctor, and expected the same consideration, but he learnt much from him that was wholly admirable. When he went back to Italy in 1763 he found that the old abuses at which he had tilted as a boy were still rampant. He decided to bring out a review, on the model of the Rambler, in which he could lash the Arcadians freely. In the person of Aristarco he delivered himself of his views upon the state of Italian literature, upon blank verse, Goldoni and the antiquaries, retailing at the same time some of Johnson’s peculiarities—that the Scotch are inferior, and that Milton is sometimes dull. Nevertheless, his satire told, and his controversies raised such an outcry that the Frusta letteraria was suspended. But ‘no such criticism had as yet appeared in Italy’ and it is to-day a classic among his countrymen. But he ‘could not enjoy his own country’. England rewarded him with a Secretaryship at the Royal Academy, and added a pension in his later years. For, industrious as he was, and in receipt sometimes of huge profits, his earnings never stuck to him. A strange kind of clumsiness united to a passionate nature seemed to make a child of him. What, for instance, could be more childish than the quarrel with Johnson as to whether Omai, an Otaheitan, had beaten him at chess or not? ‘Do you think I should be conquered at chess by a savage?’ ‘I know you were’, says Johnson. The two men, who respected each other, parted and never met again. English people now scarcely read his books, unless it be the Italian dictionary, but his life is worth reading, because he exhibits so curious a mixture of power and weakness; he is in many ways so true a type of the man who lived by his pen in the eighteenth century; and Mr. Collison-Morley fills in the old story as Boswell and Mrs. Thrale told it with new matter from Italian sources. His life was full and vigorous; as for his works, he wished that every page lay at the bottom of the sea.

[Times Literary Supplement, Jul 29, 1909]

[]

Fanny Burney’s Half-Sister.

Since a copy of Evelina was lately sold for the enormous sum of four thousand pounds; since the Clarendon Press has lately bestowed the magnificent compliment of a new edition upon Evelina; since Maria Allen was the half-sister of the authoress of Evelina; since the story of Evelina owed much to the story of Maria Allen, it may not be impertinent to consider what is still to be collected of the history of that misguided and unfortunate girl.

As is well known, Dr. Burney was twice married. He took for his second wife a Mrs. Allen of Lynn, the widow of a substantial citizen who left her with a fortune which she promptly lost, and with three children, of whom one, Maria, was almost the same age as Fanny Burney when Dr. Burney’s second marriage made them half-sisters. And half-sisters they might have remained with none but a formal tie between them, had not the differences between the two families brought about a much closer relationship. The Burneys were the gifted children of gifted parents. They had enjoyed all the stimulus that comes from running in and out of rooms where grown-up people are talking about books and music, where the piano is always open, and somebody—it may be David Garrick, it may be Mrs. Thrale—is always dropping in to dinner. Maria, on the other hand, had been bred in the provinces. The great figures of Lynn were well known to her, but the great figures of Lynn were merely Miss Dolly Young—who was so ugly—or Mr. Richard Warren, who was so handsome. The talk she heard was the talk of squires and merchants. Her greatest excitement was a dance at the Assembly Rooms or a scandal in the town.

Thus she was rustic and unsophisticated where the Burneys were metropolitan and cultivated. But she was bold and dashing where they were timid and reserved. She was all agog for life and adventure where they were always running away in agonies of shyness to commit their innumerable observations to reams of paper. Unrefined, but generous and unaffected, she brought to Poland Street that whiff of fresh air, that contact with ordinary life and ease in the presence of ordinary things, which the precocious family lacked themselves and found most refreshing in others. Sometimes she visited them in London; sometimes they stayed with her at Lynn. Soon she came to feel for them all, but for Fanny in particular, a warm, a genuine, a surprised admiration. They were so learned and so innocent; they knew so many things, and yet they did not know half as much about life as she did. It was to them, naturally, that she confided her own peccadilloes and adventures, wishing perhaps for counsel, wishing perhaps to impress. Fanny was one of those shy people—‘I am not near so squeamish as you are’, Maria observed—who draw out the confidences of their bolder friends and delight in accounts of actions which they could not possibly commit themselves. Thus in 1770 Fanny was imparting to her diary certain confidences that Maria had made her of such a nature that when she read the book later she judged it best to tear out twelve pages and burn them. Happily, a packet of letters survives which, though rather meagrely doled out by an editor in the eighties, who thought them too full of dashes to be worthy of the dignity of print, allow us to guess pretty clearly what kind of secret Maria confided and Fanny recorded, and Fanny, grown mature, then tore up.

For example, there was an Assembly at Lynn some time in 1770 to which Maria did not want to go. Bet Dickens, however, overcame her scruples, and she went. However, she was determined not to dance. However, she did dance. Martin was there. She broke her earring. She danced a minuet à quatre. She got into the chariot to come home. She came home. ‘Was I alone?—guess—well, all is vanity and vexations of spirit.’ It needs little ingenuity to interpret these nods and winks and innuendoes. Maria danced with Martin. She came home with Martin. She sat alone with Martin, and she had been strictly forbidden by her mother to meet Martin. That is obvious. But what is not, after all these years, quite so clear is for what reason Mrs. Allen disapproved. On the face of it Martin Rishton was a very good match for Maria Allen. He was well born, he had been educated at Oxford, he was the heir of his uncle Sir Richard Bettenson, and Sir Richard Bettenson had five thousand a year and no children. Nevertheless, Maria’s mother warmly opposed the match. She said rather vaguely that Martin ‘had been extravagant at Oxford, and that she had heard some story that he had done something unworthy of a gentleman’. But her ostensible objections were based perhaps upon others which were less easy to state. There was her daughter’s character, for example. Maria was ‘a droll girl with a very great love of sport and mirth’. Her temper was lively and warm. She was extremely outspoken. ‘If possible,’ Fanny said, ‘she is too sincere. She pays too little regard to the world; and indulges herself with too much freedom of raillery and pride of disdain towards those whose vices and follies offend her.’ When Mrs. Allen looked from Maria to Martin she saw, there can be no doubt, something that made her uneasy. But what? Perhaps it was nothing more than that Martin was particular about appearances and Maria rather slack; that Martin was conventional by nature and Maria the very opposite; that Martin liked dress and decorum and that Maria was one of those heedless girls who say the first thing that comes into their heads and never reflect, if they are amused themselves, what people will say if they have holes in their stockings. Whatever the reason, Mrs. Allen forbade the match; and Sir Richard Bettenson, whether to meet her views or for educational purposes, sent his nephew in the beginning of 1771 to travel for two years abroad. Maria remained at Lynn.

Five months, however, had not passed before Martin burst in unexpectedly at a dinner party of relations in Welbeck Street. He looked very well, but when he was asked why he had come back in such a hurry, ‘he smiled, but said nothing to the question’. Maria, although still at Lynn, at once got wind of his arrival. Soon she saw him at a dance, but she did not dance with him and the ban was evidently enforced, for her letters become plaintive and agitated and hint at secrets that she cannot reveal, even to her dear toads the Burneys. It was now her turn to be sent abroad, partly to be out of Martin’s way, partly to finish her education. She was dispatched to Geneva. But the Burneys soon received a packet from her. In the first place, she had some little commissions that she must ask them to discharge. Would they send her a pianoforte, some music, Fordyce’s sermons, a tea cadet, an ebony inkstand with silver-plated tops, and a very pretty naked wax doll with blue eyes to be had in Fleet-street for half a crown—all of which, if well wrapped up, could travel safely in the case of the pianoforte. She had no money to pay with at the moment, for she had been persuaded and indeed was sure that it was true economy if one passed through Paris to spend all one’s money on clothes. But she could always sell her diamonds or she would give them ‘a bill on somebody in London’. These trifling matters dispatched, she turned to something of far greater importance. Indeed, what she had to say was so important that it must be burnt at once. Indeed, it was only her great distress and being alone in a foreign land that led her to tell them at all. But the truth was—so far as can now be ascertained among the fragments and the dashes—the truth was that she had gone much farther with Martin than anybody knew. She had in fact confessed her love to him. And he had proposed something which had made her very angry. She had refused to do it. She had written him a very angry letter. She had had indeed to write it three times over before she got it right. When he read it he was furious. ‘Did my character’, he wrote, ‘ever give you reason to imagine I should expose you because you loved me? ’Tis thoroughly unnatural—I defy the world to bring an instance of my behaving unworthy the Character of a Gentleman.’ These were his very words. And, Maria wrote, ‘I think such the sentiments of a Man of Honour, and such I hope to find him’, she concluded; for although she knew very well that Hetty Burney and Mr. Crisp disliked him, he was—here she came out with it—the man ‘on whom all my happiness in this Life depends and in whom I wish to see no faults’. The Burneys hid the letters, breathed not a word to their parents, and waited in suspense. Nor did they have to wait long. Before the spring was over Maria was back again in Poland Street and in circumstances so romantic, so exciting and above all so secret that ‘I dare not,’ Fanny exclaimed, ‘commit particulars to paper.’ This much (and one would have thought it enough) only could be said: ‘Miss Allen—for the last time I shall call her so,—came home on Monday last … she—was married last Saturday!’ It was true. Martin Rishton had gone out secretly to join her abroad. They had been married at Ypres on May 16, 1772. On the 18th Maria reached England and confided the grand secret to Fanny and Susan Burney, but she told no one else. They were afraid to tell her mother. They were afraid to tell Dr. Burney. In their dilemma they turned to the strange man who was always their confidant—to Samuel Crisp of Chesington.

Many years before this Samuel Crisp had retired from the world. He had been a man of parts, a man of fashion, and a man of great social charm. But his fine friends had wasted his substance and his clever friends had damned his play. In disgust with the insincerity of fashionable life and the fickleness of fame he had withdrawn to a decayed manor house near London, which, however, was so far from the high road and so hidden from travellers in the waste of a common that no one could find it unless specially instructed. But Mr. Crisp was careful to issue no instructions. The Burneys were almost the only friends who knew the way across the fields to his door. But the Burneys could never come often enough. He depended upon the Burneys for life and society and for news of the great world which he despised and yet could not forget. The Burney children stood to him in the place of his own children. Upon them he lavished all the shrewdness and knowledge and disillusionment which he had won at such cost to himself and now found so useless in an old manor house on a wild common with only old Mrs. Hamilton and young Kitty Cook to bear him company.

It was, then, to Chesington and to Daddy Crisp that Maria Rishton and Susan Burney made their way on June 7 with their tremendous secret burning in their breasts. At first Maria was too nervous to tell him the plain truth. She tried to enlighten him with hints and hums and haws. But she succeeded only in rousing his wrath against Martin, which he expressed so strongly, ‘almost calling him a Mahoon’, that Maria began to kindle and ran off in a huff to her bedroom. Here she resolved to take the bull by the horns. She summoned Kitty Cook and sent her to Mr. Crisp with a saucy message: ‘Mrs. Rishton sent compts. and hoped to see him at Stanhoe this summer’. Upon receiving the message Mr. Crisp came in haste to the girls’ bedroom. An extraordinary scene then took place. Maria knelt on the floor and hid her face in the bedclothes. Mr. Crisp commanded her to tell the truth—was she indeed Mrs. Rishton? Maria could not speak. Kitty Cook ‘claw’d hold of her left hand and shew’d him the ring’. Then Susan produced two letters from Martin which proved the fact beyond doubt. They had been married legally. They were man and wife. If that were so, there was only one thing to be done, Mr. Crisp declared—Mrs. Burney must be informed and the marriage must be made public at once. He behaved with all the sense and decision of a man of the world. He wrote to Maria’s mother—he explained the whole situation. On getting the letter Mrs. Burney was extremely angry. She received the couple—she could do nothing else—but she never liked Martin and she never altogether forgave her daughter. However, the deed was done, and now the young couple had nothing to do but to settle down to enjoy the delights which they had snatched so impetuously.

All now depended, for those who loved Maria—and Fanny Burney loved her very dearly—upon the character of Martin Rishton. Was he, as Mr. Crisp almost said, a Mahoon? Or was he, as his sister openly declared, a Bashaw? Would he make her happy or would he not? The discerning and affectionate eyes of Fanny were now turned observingly upon Martin to find out. And yet it was very difficult to find out anything for certain. He was a strange mixture. He was high-spirited; he was ‘prodigiously agreeable’. But he was somehow, with his talk of vulgarity and distinction, rather exacting—he liked his wife to do him credit. For example, the Rishtons went on to take the waters at Bath, and there were the usual gaieties in progress. Fischer was giving a concert, and the eldest Miss Linley was singing, perhaps for the last time. All Bath would be there. But poor Maria sat alone in the lodgings writing to Fanny, and the reason she gave was a strange one. Martin, ‘who is rather more exact about dress than I am, can’t think of my appearing’ unless she bought a ‘suit of mignionet linen fringed for second mourning’ to go in. She refused; the dress was too expensive; ‘and as he was unwilling I should appear else, I gave up the dear Fischer—see what a cruel thing to have a sposo who is rather a p-p-y in those sort of things’. So there she sat alone; and she hated Bath; and she found servants such a nuisance—she had had to dismiss the butler already. At the same time, she was head over heels in love with her Rishy, and one would like to suppose that the tiff about the dress was made up by the present of Romeo, the remarkably fine brown Pomeranian dog, which Martin bought for a large sum at this time and gave her. Martin himself had a passion for dogs.

It was no doubt in order to gratify his love of sport and Maria’s dislike of towns that they moved on later that spring to Teignmouth, or as Maria calls it, to ‘Tingmouth’, in Devon. The move was entirely to her liking. Her letters gushed and burbled, had fewer stops and more dashes than ever, as she endeavoured to describe the delights of Tingmouth to Fanny in London. Their cottage was ‘one of the neatest Thatch’d cottages you ever saw’. It belonged to a sea captain. It was full of china glass flowers that he had brought home from his voyages. It was hung with prints from the Prayer-book and the Bible. There were also two pictures, one said to be by Raphael, the other by Correggio. The Miss Minifies might have described it as a retreat for a heroine. It looked on to a green. The fisher-people were simple and happy. Their cottages were clean and their children were healthy. The sea was full of whiting, salmon, and young mackerel. Martin had bought a brace of beautiful spaniels. It was a great diversion to make them go into the water. ‘Indeed, we intend getting a very large Newfoundland dog before we leave this place.’ And they intended to go for expeditions and take their dinner with them. And Fanny must come. Nothing could serve them but that Fanny should come and stay. It was monstrous for her to say that she must stop at home and copy her father’s manuscripts. She must come at once; and if she came she need not spend a penny, for Maria wore nothing but a common linen gown and had not had her hair dressed once since she came here. In short, Fanny must come.

Thus solicited, Fanny arrived some time in July, 1773, and for almost two months lodged in the boxroom—the other rooms were so littered with dogs and poultry that they had to put her in the boxroom—and observed the humours of Tingmouth society and the moods of the lovers. There could be no doubt that they were still very much in love, but the truth was that Tingmouth was very gay. A great many families made it their summer resort; there were the Phippses and the Hurrels and the Westerns and the Colbournes; there was Mr. Crispen—perhaps the most distinguished man in Tingmouth—Mr. Green who lodged with Mr. Crispen and Miss Bowdler. Naturally, in so small a place, everybody knew everybody. The Phippses, the Hurrels, the Rishtons, the Colbournes, Mr. Crispen, Mr. Green and Miss Bowdler must meet incessantly. They must make up parties to go to the wrestling matches, and attend the races in their whiskeys, and see the country people run after a pig whose tail had been cut off. Much coming and going was inevitable; but, as Fanny soon observed, it was not altogether to Martin’s liking. ‘They will soon make this as errant a public place as Bristol Hotwells or any other place,’ he grumbled. He had nothing whatever to say against the Phippses or the Westerns; he had the greatest respect for the Hurrels, which was odd, considering how very fat and greedy Mr. Hurrel was; Mr. Crispen, of course, who lived at Bath and spoke Italian perfectly, one must respect; but the fact was, Martin confided to Fanny, that he ‘almost detested’ Miss Bowdler. Miss Bowdler came of a respectable family. Her brother was destined to edit Shakespeare. Her family were old friends of the Allens. One could not forbid her the house; in fact she was always in and out of it; and yet, said Martin, ‘he could not endure even the sight of her’. ‘A woman’, said Martin, ‘who despises the customs and manners of the country she lives in, must, consequently, conduct herself with impropriety.’ And, indeed, she did. For though she was only twenty-six she had come to Tingmouth alone; and then she made no secret of the fact, indeed she avowed it quite openly ‘in the fair face of day’, that she visited Mr. Crispen in his lodgings, and not merely paid a call but stayed to supper. Nobody had ‘the most distant shadow of doubt of Miss Bowdler’s being equally innocent with those who have more worldly prudence’ but at the same time nobody could doubt that Miss Bowdler found the society of gentlemen more entertaining than that of ladies—or could deny that though Mr. Crispen was old, Mr. Green who lodged with him was young. Then, of course, she came on to the Rishtons and encouraged Maria in her least desirable attribute—her levity, her love of chaff, her carelessness of dress and deportment. It was deplorable.

Fanny Burney liked Martin very much and listened to his complaints with sympathy; but for all her charm and distinction, indeed because of them, she was destined unfortunately to make matters worse. Among her gifts she had the art of being extremely attractive to elderly gentlemen. Soon Mr. Crispen was paying her outrageous attentions. ‘Little Burney’ he said was irresistible; the name of Burney would be found—with many others, Miss Bowdler interjected—cut upon his heart. Mr. Crispen must implore one kiss. It was said of course in jest, but Miss Bowdler took it of course in earnest. Had she not nursed Mr. Crispen through a dangerous illness? Had she not sacrificed her maidenly reputation by visiting him in his cottage? And then Martin, who had been perhaps already annoyed by Mr. Crispen’s social predominance, found it galling in the extreme to have that gentleman always in the house, always paying outrageous compliments to his guest. Anything that ‘led towards flirtation’ he disliked; and soon Mr. Crispen had become, Fanny observed, almost as odious as Miss Bowdler. He threw himself into the study of Italian grammar; he read aloud to Maria and Fanny from the Faery Queen, ‘omitting whatever, to the poet’s great disgrace, has crept in that is improper for a woman’s ear’. But what with Miss Bowdler, Mr. Crispen, the Tingmothians and the influence of undesirable acquaintances upon his wife, there can be no doubt that Martin was very uncomfortable at Tingmouth, and when the time came, on September 17, to say good-bye he appeared ‘in monstrous spirits’. Perhaps everybody was glad that the summer was at an end. They were glad to say good-bye and glad to be able to say it in civil terms. Mr. Crispen left for Bath; and Miss Bowdler—there is no rashness in the assumption—left, for Bath also.

The Rishtons proceeded in their whiskey with all their dogs to visit the Westerns, one of the few families with whom Martin cared to associate. But the journey was unfortunate. They began by taking the wrong turning, then they ran over Tingmouth, the Newfoundland dog, who was running under the body of the whiskey. Then at Oxford Maria longed to see the colleges, but feeling sure that Martin’s pride would be hurt at showing himself in a whiskey with a wife where in the old days he had ‘shone forth a gay bachelor with a phaeton and four bays’, she refused his offer to take her, and had her hair dressed, very badly, instead. Off they went again, and again they ran over two more dogs. Worst of all, when they arrived at the Westerns’ they found the whole house shut up and the Westerns gone to Buckinghamshire. Altogether it was an unfortunate expedition. And it is impossible, as one reads Maria’s breathless volubility to Fanny, to resist the conviction that the journey with its accidents and mistakes, with its troop of dogs, and Martin’s pride, and Maria’s fears and her recourse to the hairdresser and the hairdresser’s ill success, and Martin’s memories of gay bachelor days and phaetons and bay horses and his respect for the Westerns and his love of servants was typical of the obscure years of married life that were now to succeed each other at Stanhoe, in Norfolk.

At Stanhoe they lived the lives of country gentry. They repaired the ancient house, though they had but the lease of it. They planted and cleaned and cut new walks in the garden. They bought a cow and started a dairy for Maria. Dog was added to dog—rare dogs, wonderful dogs, spaniels, lurchers, Portugal pointers from the banks of the Dowrow. To keep up the establishment as establishments should be kept up, nine servants, in Martin’s opinion, were none too many. And so, though she had no children, Maria found that all her time was occupied with her household and the care of her establishment. But how far better, she wrote, to be active like this instead of leading ‘the loitering life’ she had led at Tingmouth! Surely, Maria continued, scribbling her heart out ungrammatically to Fanny Burney, ‘there are pleasures for every station and employment’, and one cannot be bored if ‘as I hope I am acting properly’; so that in sober truth she did not envy Fanny Lord Stanhope’s fête-champêtre, since she had her chickens and her dairy, and Tingmouth, who had had the distemper, must be led out on a string. Why, then, regret Miss Bowdler and Mr. Crispen and the sport and gaiety of the old days at Tingmouth? Nevertheless, the old days kept coming back to her mind. At Tingmouth, she reflected, they had only kept a man and a maid. Here they had nine servants, and the more there are the more ‘cabally and insolent’ they become. And then relations came over from Lynn and pried into her kitchen and made her more ‘bashful’, as Martin would say, than ever. And then if she sat down to her tambour for half an hour Martin, ‘who is I believe the Most Active Creature alive’, would burst in and say. ‘Come Maria, you must go with me and see how charmingly Damon hunts’—or he would say ‘I know of a pheasant’s nest about two miles off, you shall go and see it’.

‘Then away we trail broiling over Cornfields—and when we come to the pit some Unlucky boy has Stole the Eggs … then I spend Whole Mornings seeing him Shoot Rooks—grub up trees—and at night for we never come in now till Nine o’clock—when tea is over and I have settled my accounts or done some company business—bed-time Comes.’

Bedtime had come; and the day had been somehow disappointing.

How could she mend matters? How could she save money so that Martin could buy the phaeton upon which his heart had been set ever since they were married? She might save on dress, for she did not mind what she wore; but alas; Martin was very particular still; he did not like her to dress in linen. So she must manage better in the house, and she was not formed to manage servants. Thus she began to dwell upon those happy days before she had gone to Tingmouth, before she had married, before she had nine servants and a phaeton and ever so many dogs. She began to brood over that still more distant time when she had first known the Burneys and they had sat ‘browsing over my little [fire] and eating good things out of the closet by the fire side’. Her thoughts turned to all those friends whom she had lost, to that ‘lovd society which I remember with the greatest pleasure’; and she could never forget in particular the paternal kindness of Dr. Burney. Oh, she sighed as she sat alone in Norfolk among the pheasants and the fields, how she wished that ‘none of my family had ever quitted his sheltering roof till placed under the protection of a worthy husband’. For her own marriage—but enough; they had been very much in love; they had been very happy; she must go and do her hair; she must try to please her Rishy. And so the obscure history of the Rishtons fades away, save what is preserved by the sprightly pen of Maria’s half-sister in the pages of Evelina. And yet—the reflection will occur—if Fanny had seen more of Maria, and more of Mr. Crispen and even more of Miss Bowdler and the Tingmouth set, her later books, had they been less refined, might have been as amusing as her first.

[Times Literary Supplement, Aug 28, 1930]

[]

Money and Love.

Steep though the ascent may be, the reward is ours when we stand on the top of the hill; stout though the biography undoubtedly is, the prospect falls into shape directly we have found the connecting word. The diligent reader of memoirs seeks it on every page—never rests until he has found it. Is it love or ambition, commerce, religion, or sport? It may be none of these, but something deep sunk beneath the surface, scattered in fragments, disguised behind frippery. Whatever it be, wherever it be, once found there is no biography without its form, no figure without its force. Stumbling and blundering in the first volume of Mr. Coleridge’s life of Thomas Coutts, [◉14] we laid hands at length upon two words which between them licked rather a portly subject into shape, doing their work, as might be expected from their opposite natures, first this side, then that, until what with a blow here and a blow there poor Thomas Coutts was almost buffeted to death. Yet the friction kept him alive; he lived, in an emaciated condition, to the age of eighty-six. And of the two words one is money and the other is love.

Love in the first place had it all its own way. He married his brother’s servant, Susannah Starkie, a woman older than himself. If he had been a poor man the marriage would have been thought sensible enough and the wife, one may be sure, would have come in for a word of praise from the biographers. But as he was always a rich man, and became eventually the richest man in the whole of England, it was incumbent on Thomas Coutts to prove that the Starkies, though now declined, were descended from the ancient family of the Starkies of Leigh and Pennington, and it is inevitable that we should inquire whether Mrs. Coutts broke her heart and lost her wits ‘beneath the burden of an honour to which she was not born’. There is no doubt that she lost her wits. Her heart, one must suppose, since no sound of its breakage has escaped, was smothered to death. She is scarcely mentioned. Perhaps she dropped her aitches. Perhaps it was as much as she could do to stand upright at the top of the staircase in Stratton Street and shake hands with the Royal Dukes without displaying her origin. She contrived never to give offence and never to attract attention; and, from a housemaid, what more could be expected? Save for one sinister gleam when she speaks a whole sentence in her proper person, it is all dark and dim and decorous. She had her children, it is true; of whom three daughters survived. But the children were heiresses, and must be sent to fashionable schools, where Mr. Coutts, more ambitious for them than for himself, hinted his wish that they should make friends with the daughters of Lord George Sutton, ‘as I should like them to be acquainted with honest people’. They had a French Countess of the old nobility for their governess. From their birth onwards they were swathed and swaddled in money.

In his office in the Strand, year in, year out, Thomas Coutts made his fortune by methods which will be plain enough to some readers and must remain a matter of mystery to others. He was a hard-headed man of business; he was indefatigable; he ‘knew how to be complaisant and how and when to assert his independence’; he was judicious in the floating of Government loans; and he lived within his means. We may accept Mr. Coleridge’s summary of his business career, and take his word for it that the rolling up of money went forward uneventfully enough. To the outsider there is a certain grimness in the spectacle. Who is master and who is slave? The two seem mixed in bitter conflict of some sort—such groans escape him now and then, and the lean, wire-drawn face, with the tight-closed lips and the anxious eyes, wears such an expression of nervous apprehension. Once, when he was driving with his old friend Colonel Crawfurd, he sat silent hour after hour, and the Colonel, reaching home, wrote in a fury to demand an explanation of ‘this silent contempt’, which in another would have demanded sword or pistol. ‘It is too, too foolish’, exclaimed poor Coutts; the truth was merely that ‘my spirit’s gone, and my mind worn and harras’d’, and ‘I am now rather an object of pity than resentment’.

But whatever secret anguish compelled the richest man in England to drive hour after hour in silence, there were also amenities and privileges attached to his state which lightened the office gloom and tinged the ledgers with radiance. The reader becomes aware of a curious note in the tone in which his correspondents address him. There is an intimate, agonized strain in all their voices. His correspondents were some of the greatest people in the land; yet they wrote generally with their own hands, and often added the injunction: ‘Burn this Letter the moment it is read’ … ‘Name it not to my Lord’, this particular document continues, ‘or to any creature on earth’. For royal as they were, beautiful, highly gifted, they were all in straits for money; all came to Thomas Coutts; all approached him as suppliants and sinners beseeching his help and confessing their follies as if he were something between doctor and priest. He hard from Lady Chatham the story of her distress when the payment of Chatham’s pension was delayed; he bestowed £10,000 upon Charles James Fox, and earned his effusive gratitude; the Royal Dukes laid their said circumstances before him; Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, confessed her gambling losses, called him her dear friend and died in his debt. Lady Hester Stanhope thundered and growled melodiously enough from the top of Mount Lebanon. Naturally, then, Thomas Coutts had only to say what he wanted, and some very powerful people bestirred themselves to get it for him. He wanted introductions for his daughters among the French nobility; he wanted George the Fourth to bank with him; he wanted the King’s leave to drive his carriage through St. James’s Park. But he wanted some things that not even the Duchess of Devonshire could procure. He wanted health; he wanted a son-in-law.

There was, Mr. Coleridge says, ‘a singular dearth of suitors for his daughters and his ducats’. Was it that Mrs. Coutts had in her housemaid days thrown soapsuds over Lord Dundonald? Or was it that the presence of madness in the Coutts family showed itself unmistakably in the frequent ‘nervous complaints’ of the three sisters? At any rate, Sophia, the youngest, was nineteen when she became engaged to Francis Burdett; and heiresses presumably should be wearing their coronets years before that. Then her two elder sisters pledged their affections suitably enough. But love always came among the Couttses wearing the mask of tragedy or comedy, or both together in grotesque combination. The two young men, thus singled out, against all advice and entreaty rushed the Falls of Schaffhausen in an open punt. Both were drowned. Two years later Susan recovered sufficiently to marry Lord Guilford, and after mourning for seven years Fanny accepted Lord Bute; but Lord Bute was a widower of fifty-six with nine children, and Lord Guilford fell from his horse ‘when in the act of presenting a basket of fruit to Miss Coutts’, and so injured his spine that he languished in bodily suffering for years before, prematurely, he died.

But from all those impressions and turns of phrase which, more than any statement of facts, shape life in biographies as they do in reality, we are convinced that Thomas Coutts loved his daughters intensely and sincerely, pitying their sufferings, devising pleasures and comforts for them, and sometimes, perhaps, wishing to be assured that when all was said and done they were happy, which, upon the same evidence, it is easy to guess that they were not. Even in these days Sir Francis Burdett caused his father-in-law some anxiety. The following extract hints the reason of it:

Going to Piccadilly yesterday at two o’clock, I met Mr. Burdett…. I asked him where he was going … I asked him if he had been under any engagement to Mr. Whitefoord, upon which, to do him justice, he blushed—and, with great signs of astonishment, confessed that he had entirely forgot it, though he had particularly remembered it the day before … To us, exact people, these things seem strange.

Probably Mr. Coutts was not altogether surprised to find that a man who was capable of forgetting an enagement could defy the House of Commons, stand a siege in his house, be taken forth by Life Guards through a crowd shouting ‘Burdett for ever!’ and suffer imprisonment in the Tower. Later, Coutts had to insist that his son-in-law should leave his house; but on that occasion our sympathies are with the banker. Like most people, Sir Francis lost his temper, his manners, his humanity, and everything decent about him when he was in danger of losing a legacy. But for the present the legacies were secure, and the surface of life was splendid and serene. Mr. and Mrs. Coutts lived in the great house in Stratton Street; they travelled from one fine country seat to another, the guests of a Duke here, of an Earl there; their wealth increased and increased, and Thomas Coutts was consulted upon delicate matters by Prime Ministers and Kings. He acted as ambassador between the House of Hanover and the House of Stuart—almost equally to his delight, he transmitted winter petticoats from Paris to Devonshire House.

But the splendid surface had deep cracks in it, and when William the Fourth dined with the Couttses, Mrs. Coutts—so he declared—would always whisper to him on the way downstairs, ‘Sir, are you not George the Third’s father?’ ‘I always answered in the affirmative,’ said the King … ‘there’s no use contradicting women, young or old, eh?’ She was losing her wits. For the last ten years of her life she was out of her mind. But old Coutts would have her lead the King down to dinner, and would tend her faithfully himself when doctors and daughters besought him to put her under control. He was a devoted husband.

At the same time he was a devoted lover. During the ten years that Mrs. Coutts was going from bad to worse and being tenderly cared for by her husband, he was lavishing horses, carriages, villas, sums in the ‘Long Annuities’, upon a young actress in Little Russell Street. The paradox has disturbed his biographers. Leaving to others the task of determining how far the relation between the old banker and the young woman was immoral, we must admit that we like him all the better for it; more, it seems to prove that he loved his wife. For the first time he hears the birds at dawn and notices the spring leaves. Like his Harriot, birds and leaves seem to him innocent and fresh.

You who can look to Heaven with so much pleasure and so pure a heart must have great pleasure in viewing such beautiful skies … eat light nourishing food—mutton roast and broiled is the best—porter is not good for you … I kiss the paper you are to look upon and beg you to kiss it just here. Your dear lips will then have touched what mine touch just now…. The estate of Otham, you see, I have enquired about. Your 3 p. ct. Consol and Long Annuity….

So it goes on from birds to flannel night-caps, from eternal devotion to profitable investments; but the strain that links together all these diverse notes is his recurring and constant adoration for Harriot’s ‘pure, innocent, honest, kind, affectionate heart’. It was a terrible blow to his daughters and sons-in-law to find that at his age he was capable of entertaining such illusions. When it came out that, four days after Mrs. Coutts was buried, the old gentleman of seventy-nine had hurried off to St. Paneras Church and married himself (illegally, as it turned out, by one of those misadventures which always beset the Coutts family when they were in love) to an actress of no birth and robust physique, the lamentations that rent the family in twain were bitter in the extreme. What would become of his money? As they could not ask this openly, they took the more roundabout way of ‘imputing to the servants’ at Stratton Street that Mrs. Coutts was poisoning her husband and was in the habit of receiving men in her bedroom when half-undressed. Coutts replied to his daughters and his sons-in-law in bitter, agitated letters which make painful, though spirited, reading after a hundred years. How they tortured him! How they grudged him his happiness! How grateful he would have been for a word of sympathy! Still, he had his Harriot, and though she was only gone into the next room, he must write her a letter to say how he loves her and trusts her and begs her not to mind the spiteful things that his family say about her. ‘Your constant, happy, and most affectionate husband’ he signs himself, and she invokes ‘My beloved Tom!’ Indeed, Harriot deserved every penny she got, and we rejoice to think that she got them all. She was a generous woman. She was bountiful to her stepdaughters; she was always burying broken-down actors in luxury, and putting up marble tablets to their memories; and she married a Duke. But every year of her life she drove down to Little Russell Street, got out of her carriage, dismissed her servants, and walked along the dirty lane to have a look at the house where she had begun life as ‘a poor little player child’. And once, long after Tom was dead, she dreamed of Tom, and noted on the flyleaf of her Prayer Book how he had come to her looking ‘well, tranquil, and divine. He anxiously desired me to change my shoes’, which was, no doubt, true to the life; but in the dream it was ‘for fear of taking cold, as I had walked through waters to him’, which somehow touches us as if Tom and Harriot had walked through bitter waters to rescue their little fragment of love from all that money.

[Athenaeum, Mar 12, 1920]

[]

The Dream.

This is a depressing book. [◉15] It leaves one with a feeling not of humiliation, that is too strong a word, nor of disgust, that is too strong also. It makes us feel—it is to Mr. Bullock’s credit as a biographer—that we have been watching a stout white dog performing tricks in front of an audience which eggs it on, but at the same time jeers. There is nothing in the life and death of a best-seller that need cause us this queasiness. The lives of those glorious geese Florence Barclay and Ella Wheeler Wilcox can be read without a blush for them or for ourselves. They were performers too—conjurors who tumbled bank notes, billiard balls, fluttering pigeons out of very seedy hats. But they lived, and they lived with such gusto that no one can fail to share it. With Marie Corelli it was different.

Her life began with a trick and rather a shady trick. The editor of the Illustrated London News, a married man, ‘wandering round Stratford-on-Avon church’ fell in love with a woman. That bald statement must be draped. Dr. Mackay committed an immoral act with a female who was not of his own social standing. ‘This unwelcome flowering of his lighter moments’, as Mr. Bullock calls it—Corelliism is catching—was a child. But she was not called Marie and she was not called Corelli. Those were names that she invented later to drape the fact. Most of her childhood was spent draping facts in the ‘Dream Hole’, a mossy retreat in a dell at Box Hill. Sometimes George Meredith appeared for a moment among the tendrils. But she never saw him. Wrapped in what she called later ‘the flitting phantasmagoria of the universal dream’ she saw only one person—herself. And that self, sometimes called Thelma, sometimes Mavis Clare, draped in white satin, hung with pure lilies, and exhibited twice a year in stout volumes for which the public paid her ten thousand pounds apiece, is as damning an indictment of Victorian taste in one way as the Albert Memorial is in another. Of those two excrescences, perhaps that which we call Marie Corelli is the more painful. The Albert Memorial is empty; but within the other erection was a live human being. It was not her fault; society blew that golden bubble, as Miss Corelli herself might have written, from the black seed of shame. She was ashamed of her mother. She was ashamed of her birth. She was ashamed of her face, of her accent, of her poverty. Most girls, as empty-headed and commonplace as she was, would have shared her shame, but they would have hidden it—under the table-cloth, behind the chiffonier. But nature had endowed her with a prodigious power of making public confession of this small ignoble vice. Instead of hiding herself she exposed herself. From her earliest days she had a rage for publicity. ‘I’ll be “somebody”’, she told her governess. ‘I’ll be as unlike anybody else as I can!’ ‘That would hardly be wise,’ said Miss Knox placidly. ‘You would then be called eccentric.’ But Miss Knox need not have been afraid. Marie Corelli did not wish to be unlike anybody else; she wanted to be as like everybody else in general, and the British aristocracy in particular, as it was possible to be. But to attain that object she had only one weapon—the dream. Dreams, apparently, if made of the right material, can be astonishingly effective. She dreamt so hard, she dreamt so efficiently, that with two exceptions all her dreams came true. Not even Marie Corelli could dream her shifty half-brother into the greatest of English poets, though she worked hard to ‘get him made Poet Laureate’, or transform her very dubious father into an eminent Victorian man of letters. All that she could do for Dr. Mackay was to engage the Caledonian pipers to play at his funeral and to postpone that function from a foggy day to a fine one in order that his last appearance might be given full publicity. Otherwise all her dreams materialized. Ponies, motor-cars, dresses, houses furnished ‘like the tea lounge at the Earl’s Court Exhibition’, gondolas, expensively-bound editions of Shakespeare—all were hers. Cheques accumulated. Invitations showered. The Prince of Wales held her hand in his. ‘Out of small things what wonders rise’, he murmured. Gladstone called on her and stayed for two hours. ‘Ardath’, he is reported to have said, ‘is a magnificent conception.’ On Easter Sunday the Dean of Westminster quoted Barabbas from the pulpit. No words, the Dean said, could be more beautiful. Rostand translated her novels. The whole audience at Stratford-on-Avon rose to its feet when she came into the theatre.

All her dreams came true. But it was the dream that killed her. For inside that ever-thickening carapace of solid dream the commonplace vigorous little woman gradually ceased to live. She became harder, duller, more prudish, more conventional; and at the same time more envious and more uneasy. The only remedy that revived her was publicity. And like other drug-takers she could only live by increasing the dose. Her tricks became more and more extravagant. On May Day she drove through the streets behind ponies wreathed in flowers; she floated down the Avon in a gondola called The Dream with a real gondolier in a scarlet sash. The press resounded with her lawsuits, her angry letters, her speeches. And then even the Press turned nasty. They omitted to say that she had been present at the Braemar gathering. They gave full publicity to the fact that she had been caught hoarding sugar.

For her there is some excuse. But how are we to excuse the audience that applauded the exhibition. Queen Victoria and Mr. Gladstone can be excepted. The taste of the exalted is apt to become dropsical. And there is excuse for ‘the million’, as Marie Corelli called them—if her books saved one working-man from suicide, or allowed a dressmaker’s drudge here and there to dream that she, too, was Thelma or Mavis Clare, there were not films then to sustain them with plush and glow and rapture after the day’s work. But what are we to say of Oscar Wilde? His compliments may have been ambiguous; but he paid them, and he printed her stories. And what are we to say of the great ladies of her adored aristocracy? ‘She is a common little thing’, one of them remarked. But no lunch or dinner party was complete without her. And what are we to say of Mr. Arthur Severn? ‘Pendennis’ she called him. He accepted her hospitality, tolerated that effusion which she was pleased to call her passion, and then made fun of her accent. ‘Ouwels’, she said instead of ‘owls’, and he laughed at her. And what are we to say of the press that levelled all its cameras at the stout old woman who was ashamed of her birth, ‘got busy’ about her mother—was her name Cody or was it Kirtland?—was she a bricklayer’s daughter or an Italian countess?—who had borne this illegitimate child?

But though it would be a relief to end in a burst of righteous indignation, the worst of this book is that it provokes no such glow, but only the queasiness with which we watch a decked-up dog performing rather ordinary tricks. It is a relief when the performance is over. Only, unfortunately, that is not altogether the fact. For, still at Stratford-on-Avon, Mason Croft is kept precisely as it was when Marie Corelli lived there. There is the silver ink-pot still full of ink as she left it; the hands of the clock still point to 7.15 as they did when she died; all her manuscripts are carefully preserved under glass cases; and the ‘large, empty bed, covered with a heavy white quilt, which is more awe-inspiring than a corpse, as a scarcely clothed dancer excites more than does a nude’ awaits the dreamer. So Stratford-on-Avon, along with other relics, preserves a lasting monument to the taste of the Victorian Age.

[Listener, Feb 15, 1940]

[]

The Fleeting Portrait:
1. Waxworks at the Abbey.

Nobody but a very great man could have worn the Duke of Wellington’s top hat. It is as tall as a chimney, as straight as a ramrod, as black as a rock. One could have seen it a mile off advancing indomitably down the street. It must have been to this emblem of incorruptible dignity that the Duke raised his two fingers when passers-by respectfully saluted him. One is almost tempted to salute it now.

The connexion between the waxworks in the Abbey and the Duke of Wellington’s top hat is one that the reader will discover if he goes to the Abbey when the waxworks are shut. The waxworks have their hours of audience like other potentates. And if that hour is four and it is now a trifle past two, one may spend the intervening moments profitably in the United Services Museum in Whitehall, among cannon and torpedos and gun-carriages and helmets and spurs and faded uniforms and the thousand other objects which piety and curiosity have saved from time and treasured and numbered and stuck in glass cases forever. When the time comes to go, indeed, there is not as much contrast as one would wish, perhaps, between the Museum at one end of Whitehall and the Abbey at the other. Too many monuments solicit attention with outstretched hands; too many placards explain this and forbid that; too many sightseers shuffle and stare for the past and the dead and the mystic nature of the place to have full sway. Solitude is impossible. Do we wish to see the Chapels? We are shepherded in flocks by gentlemen in black gowns who are for ever locking us in or locking us out; round whom we press and gape; from whom drop raucously all kinds of dry unappetizing facts; how much beauty this tomb has; how much age that; when they were destroyed; by whom they were restored and what the cost was—until everybody longs to be let off a tomb or two and is thankful when the lesson hour is over. However, if one is very wicked, and very bored, and lags a little behind; if the key is left in the door and turns quite easily, so that after all it is an open question whether one has broken one’s country’s laws or not, then one can slip aside, run up a little dark staircase and find oneself in a very small chamber alone with Queen Elizabeth.

The Queen dominates the room as she once dominated England. Leaning a little forward so that she seems to beckon you to come to her, she stands, holding her sceptre in one hand, her orb in the other. It is a drawn, anguished figure, with the pursed look of someone who goes in perpetual dread of poison or of trap; yet forever braces herself to meet the terror unflinchingly. Her eyes are wide and vigilant; her nose thin as the beak of a hawk; her lips shut tight; her eyebrows arched; only the jowl gives the fine drawn face its massiveness. The orb and the sceptre are held in the long thin hands of an artist, as if the fingers thrilled at the touch of them. She is immensely intellectual, suffering, and tyrannical. She will not allow one to look elsewhere.

Yet in fact the little room is crowded. There are many hands here holding other sceptres and orbs. It is only beside Queen Elizabeth that the rest of the company seems insignificant. Flowing in velvet they fill their glass cases, as they once filled their thrones, with dignity. William and Mary are an amiable pair of monarchs; bazaar-opening, hospital-inspecting, modern; though the King, unfortunately, is a little short in the legs. Queen Anne fondles her orb in her lap with plump womanly hands that should have held a baby there. It is only by accident that they have clapped a great crown on her hair and told her to rule a kingdom, when she would so much rather have flirted discreetly—she was a pretty woman; or run to greet her husband smiling—she was a kindly one. Her type of beauty in its homeliness, its domesticity, comes down to us less impaired by time than the grander style. The Duchess of Richmond, who gave her face to Britannia on the coins, is out of fashion now. Only the carriage of the little head on the long neck, and the simper and the still look of one who has always stood still to be looked at assure us that she was beautiful once and had lovers beyond belief. The parrot sitting on its perch in the corner of the case seems to make its ironical comment on all that. Once only are we reminded of the fact that these effigies were moulded from the dead and that they were laid upon coffins and carried through the streets. The young Duke of Buckingham who died at Rome of consumption is the only one of them who has resigned himself to death. He lies very still with the ermine on his shoulders and the coronet on his brows, but his eyes are shut; his nose is a great peak between two sunk cheeks; he has succumbed to death and lies steeped in its calm. His aloofness compares strangely with the carnality of Charles the Second round the corner. King Charles still seems quivering with the passions and the greeds of life. The great lips are still pouting and watering and asking for more. The eyes are pouched and creased with all the long nights they have watched out—the torches, the dancing, and the women. In his dirty feathers and lace he is the very symbol of voluptuousness and dissipation, and his great blue-veined nose seems an irreverence on the part of the modeller, as if to set the crowd, as the procession comes by, nudging each other in the ribs and telling merry stories of the monarch.

And so from this garish bright assembly we run downstairs again into the Abbey, and enter that strange muddle and miscellany of objects both hallowed and ridiculous. Yet now the impression is less tumultuous than before. Two presences seem to control its incoherence, as sometimes a chattering group of people is ordered and quieted by the entry of someone before whom, they know not why, they fall silent. One is Elizabeth, beckoning; the other is an old top-hat.

[New Republic, Apr 11, 1928]

[]

The Fleeting Portrait:
2. The Royal Academy.

‘The motor-cars of Empire—the bodyguard of Europe—the stainless knight of Belgium’—such is our English romance that nine out of ten of those passing from the indiscriminate variety of Piccadilly to the courtyard of Burlington House do homage to the embattled tyres and the kingly presence of Albert on his high-minded charger with some nonsense of this sort. They are, of course, only the motor-cars of the rich grouped round a statue; but whether the quadrangle in which they stand radiates back the significance of everything fourfold, so that King Albert and the motor-cars exude the essence of kingliness and the soul of vehicular traffic, or whether the crowd is the cause of it, or the ceremonious steps leading up, the swing-doors admitting and the flunkeys fawning, it is true that, once you are within the precincts, everything appears symbolic, and the state of mind in which you ascend the broad stairs to the picture galleries is both heated and romantic.

Whatever visions we may have indulged, we find ourselves on entering confronted by a lady in full evening dress. She stands at the top of a staircase, one hand loosely closed round a sheaf of lilies, while the other is about to greet someone of distinction who advances towards her up the stairs. Not a hair is out of place. Her lips are just parted. She is about to say, ‘How nice of you to come!’ But such is the skill of the artist that one does not willingly cross the range of her cordial and yet condescending eye. One prefers to look at her obliquely. She said, ‘How nice of you to come!’ so often and so graciously while I stood there that at last my eye wandered off in search of people of sufficient distinction for her to say it to. There was no difficulty in finding them. Here was a nobleman in a kilt, the Duke of R——; here a young officer in khaki, and, to keep him company, the head and shoulders of a young girl, whose upturned eyes and pouting lips appear to be entreating the sky to be bluer, roses to be redder, ices to be sweeter, and men to be manlier for her sake. To do her justice, the gallant youth seemed to respond. As they stepped up the staircase to the lady in foaming white he vowed that come what might—the flag of England—sweet chimes of home—a woman’s honour—an Englishman’s word—only a scrap of paper—for your sake, Alice—God save the King—and all the rest of it. The range of her vocabulary was more limited. She kept her gaze upon the sky or the ice or whatever it might be with a simple sincerity which was enforced by a single row of pearls and a little drapery of white tulle about the shoulders. ‘How nice of you to come!’ said the hostess once more. But immediately behind them stumped the Duke, a bluff nobleman, ‘more at home on the brae-side than among these kickshaws and knick-knacks, my lady. Splendid sport. Twenty antlers and Buck Royal. Clean between the eyes, eh what? Out all day. Never know when I’m done. Cold bath, hard bed, glass of whiskey. A mere nothing. Damned foreigners. Post of duty. The Guard dies, but never surrenders. The ladies of our family—Up, Guards, and at them! Gentlemen—’ and, as he utters the last words in a voice choked with emotion, the entire company swing round upon their heels, displaying only a hind view of their perfectly fitting mess-jackets, since there are some sights that it is not good for man to look upon.

The scene, though not all the phrases, comes from a story by Rudyard Kipling. But scenes from Rudyard Kipling must take place with astonishing frequency at these parties in order that the English maidens and gallant officers may have occasion to insist upon their chastity on the one hand and protect it on the other, without which, so far as one can see, there would be no reason for their existence. Therefore it was natural to look about me, a little shyly, for the sinister person of the seducer. There is, I can truthfully say, no such cur in the whole of the Royal Academy; and it was only when I had gone through the rooms twice and was about to inform the maiden that her apprehensions, though highly creditable, were in no way necessary that my eye was caught by the white underside of an excessively fine fish. ‘The Duke caught that!’ I exclaimed, being still within the radius of the ducal glory. But I was wrong. Though fine enough, the fish, as a second glance put it beyond a doubt, was not ducal; its triangular shape, let alone the fact that a small urchin in corduroys held it suspended by the tail, was enough to start me in the right direction. Ah, yes—the harvest of the sea, toilers of the deep, a fisherman’s home, nature’s bounty—such phrases formed themselves with alarming rapidity—but to descend to details. The picture, No. 306, represents a young woman holding a baby on her knee. The child is playing with the rough model of a ship; the large fish is being dangled before his eyes by a brother a year or two older in a pair of corduroys which have been cut down from those worn by the fisherman engaged in cleaning cod on the edge of the waves. Judging from the superb rosiness, fatness, and blueness of every object depicted, even the sea itself wearing the look of a prize animal tricked out for a fair, it seemed certain that the artist intended a compliment in a general way to the island race. But something in the woman’s eye arrested me. A veil of white dimmed the straightforward lustre. It is thus that painters represent the tears that do not fall. But what, we asked, had this great hulk of a matron surrounded by fish, any one of which was worth eighteenpence the pound, to cry for? Look at the little boy’s breeches. They are not, if you look closely, of the same pattern as the fisherman’s. Once that fact is grasped, the story reels itself out like a line with a salmon on the end of it. Don’t the waves break with a sound of mockery on the beach? Don’t her eyes cloud with memories at the sight of a toy boat? It is not always summer. The sea has another voice than this; and, since her husband will never want his breeches any more—but the story when written out is painful, and rather obvious into the bargain.

The point of a good Academy picture is that you can search the canvas for ten minutes or so and still be doubtful whether you have extracted the whole meaning. There is, for example, No. 248, ‘Cocaine’. A young man in evening dress lies, drugged, with his head upon the pink satin of a woman’s knee. The ornamental clock assures us that it is exactly eleven minutes to five. The burning lamp proves that it is dawn. He, then, has come home to find her waiting? She has interrupted his debauch? For my part, I prefer to imagine what in painters’ language (a tongue well worth separate study) would be called ‘a dreary vigil’. There she has sat since eight-thirty, alone, in pink satin. Once she rose and pressed the photograph in the silver frame to her lips. She might have married that man (unless it is her father, of which one cannot be sure). She was a thoughtless girl, and he left her to meet his death on the field of battle. Through her tears she gazes at the next photograph—presumably that of a baby (again the painter has been content with a suggestion). As she looks a hand fumbles at the door. ‘Thank God!’ she cries as her husband staggers in and falls helpless across her knees, ‘thank God our Teddy died!’ So there she sits, staring disillusionment in the eyes, and whether she gives way to temptation, or breathes a vow to the photographs, or gets him to bed before the maid comes down, or sits there for ever, must be left to the imagination of the onlooker.

But the queer thing is that one wants to be her. For a moment one pretends that one sits alone, disillusioned, in pink satin. And then people in the little group of gazers begin to boast that they have known sadder cases themselves. Friends of theirs took cocaine. ‘I myself as a boy for a joke—’ ‘No, George—but how fearfully rash!’ Everyone wished to cap that story with a better, save for one lady who, from her expression, was acting the part of consoler, had got the poor thing to bed, undressed her, soothed her, and even spoken with considerable sharpness to that unworthy brute, unfit to be a husband, before she moved on in a pleasant glow of self-satisfaction. Every picture before which one of these little groups had gathered seemed to radiate the strange power to make the beholder more heroic and more romantic; memories of childhood, visions of possibilities, illusions of all kinds poured down upon us from the walls. In a cooler mood one might accuse the painters of some exaggeration. There must be well over ten thousand delphiniums in the Royal Academy, and not one is other than a perfect specimen. The condition of the turf is beyond praise. The sun is exquisitely adapted to the needs of the sundials. The yew hedges are irreproachable; the manor house a miracle of timeworn dignity; and as for the old man with a scythe, the girl at the well, the village donkey, the widow lady, the gipsies’ caravan, the boy with a rod, each is not only the saddest, sweetest, quaintest, most picturesque, tenderest, jolliest of its kind, but has a symbolical meaning much to the credit of England. The geese are English geese, and even the polar bears, though they have not that advantage, seem, such is the persuasion of the atmosphere, to be turning to carriage rugs as we look at them.

It is indeed a very powerful atmosphere; so charged with manliness and womanliness, pathos and purity, sunsets and Union Jacks, that the shabbiest and most suburban catch a reflection of the rosy glow. ‘This is England! these are the English!’ one might exclaim if a foreigner were at hand. But one need not say that to one’s compatriots. They are, perhaps, not quite up to the level of the pictures. Some are meagre; others obese; many have put on what is too obviously the only complete outfit that they possess. But the legend on the catalogue explains any such discrepancy in a convincing manner. ‘To give unto them beauty for ashes. Isaiah lxi. 3’—that is the office of this exhibition. Our ashes will be transformed if only we expose them openly enough to the benignant influence of the canvas. So we look again at the Lord Chancellor and Mr. Balfour, at the Lady B., at the Duke of R., at Mr. Ennever of the Pelman Institute, at officers of all descriptions, architects, surgeons, peers, dentists, doctors, lawyers, archbishops, roses, sundials, battlefields, fish, and Skye terriers. From wall to wall, glowing with colour, glistening with oil, framed in gilt, and protected by glass, they ogle and elevate, inspire and command. But they overdo it. One is not altogether such a bundle of ashes as they suppose, or sometimes the magic fails to work. A large picture by Mr. Sargent called ‘Gassed’ at last pricked some nerve of protest, or perhaps of humanity. In order to emphasize his point that the soldiers wearing bandages round their eyes cannot see, and therefore claim our compassion, he makes one of them raise his leg to the level of his elbow in order to mount a step an inch or two above the ground. This little piece of over-emphasis was the final scratch of the surgeon’s knife which is said to hurt more than the whole operation. After all, one had been jabbed and stabbed, slashed and sliced for close on two hours. The lady began it, the Duke continued it; little children had wrung tears; great men extorted veneration. From first to last each canvas had rubbed in some emotion, and what the paint failed to say the catalogue had enforced in words. But Mr. Sargent was the last straw. Suddenly the great rooms rang like a parrot-house with the intolerable vociferations of gaudy and brainless birds. How they shrieked and gibbered! How they danced and sidled! Honour, patriotism, chastity, wealth, success, importance, position, patronage, power—their cries rang and echoed from all quarters. ‘Anywhere, anywhere, out of this world!’ was the only exclamation with which one could stave off the brazen din as one fled downstairs, out of doors, round the motor-cars, beneath the disdain of the horse and its rider, and so out into the comparative sobriety of Piccadilly. No doubt the reaction was excessive; and I must leave it to Mr. Roger Fry to decide whether the emotions here recorded are the proper result of one thousand six hundred and seventy-four works of art.

[Athenaeum, Aug 22, 1919]

[]

Poe’s Helen.

The real interest of Miss Ticknor’s volume [◉16] lies in the figure of Mrs. Whitman, and not in the love letters from Poe, which have already been published. It is true that if it had not been for her connexion with Poe we should never have heard of Helen Whitman; but it is also true that Poe’s connexion with Mrs. Whitman was neither much to his credit nor a matter of moment to the world at large. If it were our object to enhance the charm of ‘the only true romantic figure in our literature’, as Miss Ticknor calls him, we should have suppressed his love letters altogether. Mrs. Whitman, on the other hand, comes very well out of the ordeal, and was evidently, apart from Poe, a curious and interesting person.

She wrote poetry from her childhood, and when in early youth she was left a widow she settled down to lead a literary life in earnest. In those days and in America this was not so simple a proceeding as it has since become. If you wrote an essay upon Shelley, for example, the most influential family in Providence considered that you had fallen from grace. If, like Mr. Ellery Channing, you went to Europe and left your wife behind, this was sufficient proof that you were not a ‘great perfect man’, as the true poet is bound to be. Mrs. Whitman took her stand against such crudities, and, indeed, rather went out of her way to invite attack. Whatever the fashion and whatever the season she wore her ‘floating veils’ and her thin slippers, and carried a fan in her hand. By means of ‘inverting her lampshades’ and hanging up bits of drapery her sitting-room was kept in a perpetual twilight. It was the age of the Transcendentalists, and the fans and the veils and the twilight were, no doubt, intended to mitigate the solidity of matter, and entice the soul out of the body with as little friction as possible. Nature too had been kind in endowing her with a pale, eager face, a spiritual expression, and deep-set eyes that gazed ‘beyond but never at you’.

Her house became a centre for the poets of the district, for she was witty and charming as well as enthusiastic. John Hay, G. W. Curtis, and the Hon. Wilkins Updike used to send her their works to criticize, or in very long and abstruse letters tried to define what they meant by poetry. The mark of that particular set, which was more or less connected with Emerson and Margaret Fuller, was an enthusiastic championship of the rights of the soul. They ventured into a sphere where words naturally were unable to support them. ‘Poetry’, as Mr. Curtis said, ‘is the adaption of music to an intellectual sphere. But it must therefore be revealed through souls too fine to be measured justly by the intellect…. Music … is a womanly accomplishment, because it is sentiment, and the instinct declares its nature’, etc. This exalted mood never quite deserted them when they were writing about matters of fact. When Mrs. Whitman forgot to answer a letter Mr. Curtis inquired whether she was ill ‘or has the autumn which lies round the horizon like a beautifully hued serpent crushing the flower of summer fascinated you to silence with its soft, calm eyes?’ Mrs. Whitman, it is clear, was the person who kept them all up to this very high standard. Thus things went on until Mrs. Whitman had reached the age of forty-two. One July night, in 1845, she happened to be wandering in her garden in the moonlight when Edgar Allan Poe passed by and saw her. ‘From that hour I loved you’, he wrote later. ‘… your unknown heart seemed to pass into my bosom—there to dwell for ever.’ The immediate result was that he wrote the verses To Helen which he sent her. Three years later, when he was the famous poet of The Raven, Mrs. Whitman replied with a valentine, of which the last stanza runs—

Then, oh grim and. ghastly Raven

Wilt thou to my heart and ear

Be a Raven true as ever

Flapped his wings and croaked ‘Despair’?

Not a bird that roams the forest

Shall our lofty eyrie share.

For some time their meeting was postponed, and no word of prose passed between them. It might have been postponed for ever had it not been for another copy of verses which Mrs. Whitman ended with the line

I dwell with ‘Beauty which is Hope’.

Upon receipt of these verses Poe immediately procured a letter of introduction and set off to Providence. His declaration of love took place in the course of the next fortnight during a walk in the cemetery. Mrs. Whitman would not consent to an engagement, but she agreed to write to him, and thus the famous correspondence began.

Professor Harrison can only compare Poe’s letters to the letters of Abelard and Eloise or to the Sonnets from the Portuguese; Miss Ticknor says that they have won themselves a niche among the world’s classic love letters. Professor Woodberry, on the other hand, thinks that they should never have been published. We agree with Professor Woodberry, not because they do damage to Poe’s reputation, but because we find them very tedious compositions. Whether you are writing a review or a love letter the great thing is to be confronted with a very vivid idea of your subject. When Poe wrote to Mrs. Whitman he might have been addressing a fashion plate in a ladies’ newspaper—a fashion plate which walks the cemetery by moonlight, for the atmosphere is one of withered roses and moonshine. The fact that he had buried Virginia a short time before, that he denied his love for her, that he was writing to Annie at the same time and in the same style, that he was about to propose to a widow for the sake of her money—all his perfidies and meannesses do not by themselves make it impossible that he loved Mrs. Whitman genuinely. Were it not for the letters we might accept the charitable view that this was his last effort at redemption. But when we read the letters we feel that the man who wrote them had no emotion left about anything; his world was a world of phantoms and fashion plates; his phrases are the cast-off phrases that were not quite good enough for a story. He could see neither himself nor others save through a mist of opium and alcohol. The engagement, which had been made conditional upon his reform, was broken off; Mrs. Whitman sank on to a sofa holding a handkerchief ‘drenched in ether’ to her face, and her old mother rather pointedly observed to Poe that the train was about to leave for New York.

Cynical though it sounds, we doubt whether Mrs. Whitman lost as much as she gained by the unfortunate end of her love affair. Her feeling for Poe was probably more that of a benefactress than of a lover; for she was one of those people who ‘devoutly believe that serpents may be reclaimed. This is only effected by patience and prayer—but the results are wonderful.’ This particular serpent was irreclaimable; he was picked up unconscious in the street and died a year later. But he left behind him a crop of reptiles who taxed Mrs. Whitman’s patience and needed her prayers for the rest of her life. She became the recognized authority upon Poe, and whenever a biographer was in need of facts or old Mrs. Clemm was in need of money they applied to her. She had to decide the disputes of the different ladies as to which had been loved the most, and to keep the peace between the rival historians, for whether a woman is more vain of her love or an author of his work has yet to be decided. But the opportunities which such a position gave her of endless charity and literary discussion evidently suited her and the good sense and wit of the bird-like little woman, who was extremely poor and had an eccentric sister to provide for, seem to justify her statement that ‘the results are wonderful’.

[Times Literary Supplement, Apr 5, 1917]

[]

Visits to Walt Whitman.

The great fires of intellectual life which burn at Oxford and at Cambridge are so well tended and long established that it is difficult to feel the wonder of this concentration upon immaterial things as one should. When, however, one stumbles by chance upon an isolated fire burning brightly without associations or encouragement to guard it, the flame of the spirit becomes a visible hearth where one may warm one’s hands and utter one’s thanksgiving. It is only by chance that one comes upon them; they burn in unlikely places. If asked to sketch the condition of Bolton about the year 1885 one’s thoughts would certainly revolve round the cotton market, as if the true heart of Bolton’s prosperity must lie there. No mention would be made of the group of young men—clergymen, manufacturers, artisans, and bank clerks by profession—who met on Monday evenings, made a point of talking about something serious, could broach the most intimate and controversial matters frankly and without fear of giving offence, and held in particular the view that Walt Whitman was ‘the greatest epochal figure in all literature’. Yet who shall set a limit to the effect of such talking? In this instance, besides the invaluable spiritual service, it also had some surprisingly tangible results. As a consequence of those meetings two of the talkers crossed the Atlantic; a steady flow of presents and messages set in between Bolton and Camden; and Whitman as he lay dying had the thought of ‘those good Lancashire chaps’ in his mind. The book [◉17] recounting these events has been published before, but it is well worth reprinting for the light it sheds upon a new type of hero and the kind of worship which was acceptable to him.

To Whitman there was nothing unbefitting the dignity of a human being in the acceptance either of money or of underwear, but he said that there is no need to speak of these things as gifts. On the other hand, he had no relish for a worship founded upon the illusion that he was somehow better or other than the mass of human beings. ‘Well,’ he said, stretching out his hand to greet Mr. Wallace, ‘you’ve come to be disillusioned, have you?’ And Mr. Wallace owned to himself that he was a little disillusioned. Nothing in Walt Whitman’s appearance was out of keeping with the loftiest poetic tradition. He was a magnificent old man, massive, shapely, impressive by reason of his power, his delicacy, and his unfathomable depths of sympathy. The disillusionment lay in the fact that ‘the greatest epochal figure in all literature’ was ‘simpler, homelier, and more intimately related to myself than I had imagined’. Indeed, the poet seems to have been at pains to bring his common humanity to the forefront. And everything about him was as rough as it could be. The floor, which was only half carpeted, was covered with masses of papers; eating and washing things mixed themselves with proofs and newspaper cuttings in such ancient accumulations that a precious letter from Emerson dropped out accidentally from the mass after years of interment. In the midst of all this litter Walt Whitman sat spotlessly clean in his rough grey suit, with much more likeness to a retired farmer whose working days are over; it pleased him to talk of this man and of that, to ask questions about their children and their land; and, whether it was the result of thinking back over places and human beings rather than over books and thoughts, his mood was uniformly benignant. His temperament, and no sense of duty, led him to this point of view, for in his opinion it behoved him to ‘give out or express what I really was, and, if I felt like the Devil, to say so!’

And then it appeared that this wise and free-thinking old farmer was getting letters from Symonds and sending messages to Tennyson, and was indisputably, both in his opinion and in yours, of the same stature and importance as any of the heroic figures of the past or present. Their names dropped into his talk as the names of equals. Indeed, now and then something seemed ‘to set him apart in spiritual isolation and to give him at times an air of wistful sadness’, while into his free and easy gossip drifted without effort the phrases and ideas of his poems. Superiority and vitality lay not in a class but in the bulk; the average of the American people, he insisted, was immense, ‘though no man can become truly heroic who is really poor’. And ‘Shakespeare and suchlike’ come in of their own accord on the heels of other matters. ‘Shakespeare is the poet of great personalities.’ As for passion, ‘I rather think Æschylus greater’. ‘A ship in full sail is the grandest sight in the world, and it has never yet been put into a poem.’ Or he would throw off comments as from an equal height upon his great English contemporaries. Carlyle, he said, ‘lacked amorousness’. Carlyle was a growler. When the stars shone brightly—‘I guess an exception in that country’—and some one said ‘It’s a beautiful sight’, Carlyle said, ‘It’s a sad sight’…. ‘What a growler he was!’

It is inevitable that one should compare the old age of two men who steered such different courses until one saw nothing but sadness in the shining of the stars and the other could sink into a reverie of bliss over the scent of an orange. In Whitman the capacity for pleasure seemed never to diminish, and the power to include grew greater and greater; so that although the authors of this book lament that they have only a trivial bunch of sayings to offer us, we are left with a sense of an ‘immense background or vista’ and stars shining more brightly than in our climate.

[Times Literary Supplement, Jan 3, 1918]

[]

Oliver Wendell Holmes.

A hundred years ago one might talk more glibly of American literature than it is safe to do at present. The ships that pass each other on the Atlantic do more than lift a handful of Americans and Englishmen from one shore to another; they have dulled our national self-consciousness. Save for the voice and certain small differences of manner which give them a flavour of their own, Americans sink into us, over here, like raindrops into the sea. On their side they have lost much of that nervous desire to assert their own independence and maturity in opposition to a mother country which was always reminding them of their tender age. Such questions as Lowell conceived—‘A country of parvenus, with a horrible consciousness of shoddy running through politics, manners, art, literature, nay, religion itself?’ and answered as we may guess, no longer fret them; the old adjectives which Hawthorne rapped out—‘the boorishness, the stolidity, the self-sufficiency, the contemptuous jealousy, the half sagacity (etc., etc.) that characterize this strange people’—are left for their daily Press in moments of panic; for international criticism, as Mr. Henry James has proved, has become a very delicate and serious matter. The truth is that time and the steamboats have rubbed out these crudities; and if we wish to understand American art, or politics, or literature, we must look as closely as we look when blood and speech are strange to us.

The men who were most outspoken against us brought about this reasonable relationship partly because we read their books as our own, and partly because literature is able to suggest the surroundings in which it is produced. We are now able to think of Boston or Cambridge as places with a life of their own as distinct and as different from ours as the London of Pope is different from the London of Edward VII. The man who contributed to this intimacy, which is founded upon an understanding that we differ in many ways, as much as any of the rest, was undoubtedly Oliver Wendell Holmes, although he did it by means that were very different from theirs. He was, in some respects, the most complete American of them all.

He was born in 1809 of the best blood in the country, for his father, the Rev. Abiel Holmes, came from an old Puritan stock which might be traced to a lawyer of Gray’s Inn in the sixteenth century, and his mother, Sarah Wendell, had distinguished blood from many sources, Dutch and Norman and good American. His father was stern and handsome, and taught ‘the old-fashioned Calvinism, with all its horrors’; his mother was a little sprightly woman, inquisitive and emotional. People who knew them said that the son inherited more from her than from his father. It was one of the charming characteristics of the mature man that he was always looking back to his childhood, and steeping it in such shade and quaintness as a ‘gambrel-roofed house’ built in 1730 will provide; like Hawthorne he had a pathetic desire to mix his childish memories with something old, mysterious, and beautiful in itself. There were dents in the floor where the soldiers had dropped their muskets during the Revolution; the family portraits had been slashed by British rapiers; and there was a chair where Lord Percy had sat to have his hair dressed. From the vague memories that hang about his early years, and inspire some of the pleasantest pages in his books, one may choose two for their importance. ‘I might have been a minister myself, for aught I know, if —— had not looked and talked so like an undertaker.’ It was not until much later that he could analyse what had happened to him as a child. When he could read he was taught that ‘We were a set of little fallen wretches, exposed to the wrath of God by the fact of that existence which we could not help.’ He was roused in revolt against what he called ‘the inherited servitude of my ancestors’, and not only decided against the ministry as a calling, but never ceased to preach the beliefs which his early revolt had taught him. These beliefs were started in him, or at any rate his old views were shaken for ever, by a peep through a telescope on the common at the transit of Venus. He looked, and the thought came to him, like a shock, that the earth too was no bigger than a marble; he went on to think how this planet is ‘equipped and provisioned for a long voyage in space’. The shock seems to have shown him both that we are part of a great system, and also that our world will last for a period ‘transcending all our ordinary measures of time’. If it is true that we are to continue indefinitely, then it is possible, he found, to consider that ‘this colony of the universe is an educational institution’ and this is ‘the only theory which can “justify the way of God to man”’. We may disbelieve in the Garden of Eden and in the fall of man; and we may believe that ‘this so-called evil to which I cannot close’ is a passing condition from which we shall emerge. He had found a basis for that optimism which inspired his teaching, and, if the reasons which he gave seem insufficient, his conclusions and the way they came to him—looking through a telescope for ten cents at the transit of Venus—bear out much that we think when we know him better. The practical result of the conflict was that he became a doctor instead of a clergyman, spent two years in Paris studying his profession, visited England and Italy on his way, and returned to practise in Boston, living there and at Cambridge, with the exception of his hundred days in Europe, for the rest of his life.

The most diligent of biographers can find little to add to such a record, nor did Dr. Holmes come to the rescue. His letters are not intimate; like other people who write much about themselves in public, he has little to say in private. As a doctor he never won a large practice, for he not only collected a volume of poetry from time to time, but smiled when the door was opened and made jokes upon the staircase. When someone asked him what part of anatomy he liked best, he answered: ‘The bones; they are cleanest’. The answer shows us the ‘plain little dapper man’, who could never bear the sights of a sick-room, who laughed to relieve the tension, who would run away when a rabbit was to be chloroformed, who was clean and scrupulous in all respects, and inclined, as a young man, to satirize the world with a somewhat acrid humour. Two friends have put together a picture of him. ‘A small, compact, little man … buzzing about like a bee, or fluttering like a humming bird, exceedingly difficult to catch unless he be really wanted for some kind act, and then you are sure of him.’ The other adds that he has a ‘powerful jaw and a thick strong under-lip, that gives decision to his look, with a dash of pertness. In conversation he is animated and cordial—sharp, too, taking the words out of one’s mouth.’

At this time, before the publication of the Autocrat, he was famous for his talk and for his verses. The verses were for the most part inspired by dinners and ‘occasions’; they light up for us the circle of American men of letters who met and talked at Parker’s Hotel, as men had talked at Will’s Coffee House; they are addressed to people who know each other well. His reputation, therefore, independently of his medical works, was very intense, but very local. He was almost fifty when the first of the Autocrat papers ‘came from my mind almost with an explosion’. The Professor and The Poet followed; then there were the two novels; he became, in short, a man of letters from whom the public expects a regular statement of opinion. Even at this distance it is easy to imagine the rush with which the Autocrat came into the world. Every breakfast-table in Boston knew the writer by repute, knew of his birth and traditions, and read his views in print with a kind of personal pride, as though he were the mouthpiece of a family. Those associations are no longer ours; but, as the manner of beauty clings when beauty is gone, so we can still relish the gusto with which Dr. Holmes addressed himself to his fellow-citizens.

This is true, and yet is it possible that we should not dwell upon such considerations if we were altogether beneath the Autocrat’s spell? There is, we must own it, a little temptation to try to account for our ancestors’ tastes, and so to avoid formulating our own. The chief interest, however, of these centenary celebrations is that they provide an opportunity for one generation to speak its mind of another with a candour and perhaps with an insight which contemporaries may hardly possess. The trial is sharp, for the books that live to such an age will live to a much greater age, and raise the standard of merit very high. Let us own at once that Dr. Holmes’s works can hardly be said to survive in the sense that they still play any part in our lives; nor is he among the writers who live on without any message to deliver because of the sheer delight that we take in their art. The fact that there is someone who will write a centenary biography for a public that reads the Autocrat cannot be set down to either of these causes; and yet, if we seek it on a lower plane, we shall surely find reason enough. There is, to begin with, the reason that our own experience affords us. When we take it up at a tender age—for it is one of the first books that one reads for oneself—it tastes like champagne after breakfast cups of weak tea. The miraculous ease with which the talk flows on, the richness of simile and anecdote, the humour and the pathos, the astonishing maturity of the style, and, above all, some quality less easy to define, as though fruits just beyond our reach were being dropped plump into our hands and proving deliciously firm and bright—these sensations make it impossible to think of the Autocrat save as an elderly relative who has pressed half-sovereigns into one’s palm and at the same time flattered one’s self-esteem. Later, if some of the charm is gone, one is able to appraise these virtues more soberly. They have, curiously enough, far more of the useful than of the ornamental in their composition. We are more impressed, that is, by the honesty and the common sense of the Autocrat’s remarks, and by the fact that they are the fruit of wide observation, than by the devices with which they are decked out.

The pages of the book abound with passages like the following:

Two men are walking by the polyphlœsbœan ocean, one of them having a small tin cup with which he can scoop up a gill of sea-water when he will, and the other nothing but his hands, which will hardly hold water at all—and you call the tin cup a miraculous possession! It is the ocean that is the miracle, my infant apostle! Nothing is clearer than that all things are in all things, and that just according to the intensity and extension of our mental being we shall see the many in the one and the one in the many. Did Sir Isaac think what he was saying when he made his speech about the ocean—the child and the pebbles, you know? Did he mean to speak slightingly of a pebble? Of a spherical solid which stood sentinel over its compartment of space before the stone that became the pyramids had grown solid, and has watched it until now! A body which knows all the currents of force that traverse the globe; which holds by invisible threads to the ring of Saturn and the belt of Orion! A body from the contemplation of which an archangel could infer the entire inorganic universe as the simplest of corollaries! A throne of the all-pervading Deity, who has guided its very atom since the rosary of heaven was strung with beaded stars!

This is sufficiently plausible and yet light in weight; the style shares what we are apt to think the typical American defect of over-ingenuity and an uneasy love of decoration; as though they had not yet learnt the art of sitting still. The universe to him, as he says, ‘swam in an ocean of similitudes and analogies’; but the imaginative power which is thus implied is often more simply and more happily displayed. The sight of old things inspires him, or memories of boyhood.

Now, the sloop-of-war the Wasp, Captain Blakely, after gloriously capturing the Reindeer and the Avon, had disappeared from the face of the ocean, and was supposed to be lost. But there was no proof of it, and, of course, for a time, hopes were entertained that she might be heard from. Long after the last real chance had utterly vanished, I pleased myself with the fond illusion that somewhere on the waste of waters she was still floating, and there were years during which I never heard the sound of the great gun booming inland from the Navy-yard without saying to myself, ‘The Wasp has come!’ and almost thinking I could see her, as she rolled in, crumpling the water before her, weather-beaten, barnacled, with shattered spars and threadbare canvas, welcomed by the shouts and tears of thousands. This was one of those dreams that I nursed and never told. Let me make a clean breast of it now, and say that, so late as to have outgrown childhood, perhaps to have got far on towards manhood, when the roar of the cannon has struck suddenly on my ear, I have started with a thrill of vague expectation and tremulous delight, and the long-unspoken words have articulated themselves in the mind’s dumb whisper, The Wasp has come!

The useful virtues are there, nevertheless. The love of joy, in the first place, which raced in his blood from the cradle was even more of a virtue when the Autocrat was published than it is now. There were strict parents who forbade their children to read the book because it made free with the gloomy morality of the time. His sincerity, too, which would show itself in an acrid humour as a young man, gives an air of pugnacity to the kindly pages of the Autocrat. He hated pomp, and stupidity, and disease. It may not be due to the presence of high virtues, and yet how briskly his writing moves along! We can almost hear him talk, ‘taking the words out of one’s mouth’, in his eagerness to get them said. Much of this animation is due to the easy and almost incessant play of the Autocrat’s humour; and yet we doubt whether Dr. Holmes can be called a humourist in the true sense of the word. There is something that paralyses the will in humour, and Dr. Holmes was primarily a medical man who valued sanity above all things. Laughter is good, as fresh air is good, but he retracts instinctively if there is any fear that he has gone too deep:

I know it is a sin

For me to sit and grin—

that is the kindly spirit that gives his humour its lightness, and, it must be added, its shallowness. For, when the range is so scrupulously limited, only a superficial insight is possible; if the world is only moderately ridiculous it can never be very sublime. But it is easy enough to account for the fact that his characters have little hold upon our sympathies by reflecting that Dr. Holmes did not write in order to create men and women, but in order to state the opinions which a lifetime of observation had taught him. We feel this even in the book which has at least the form of a novel. In Elsie Venner he wished to answer the question which he had asked as a child; can we be justly punished for an hereditary sin? The result is that we watch a skilful experiment; all Dr. Holmes’s humour and learning (he kept a live rattlesnake for months, and read ‘all printed knowledge’ about poison) play round the subject, and he makes us perceive how curious and interesting the case is. But—for this is the sum of our objections—we are not interested in the heroine; and the novel so far as it seeks to convince us emotionally is a failure. Even so, Dr. Holmes succeeds, as he nearly always does succeed, in making us think; he presents so many facts about rattlesnakes and provincial life, so many reflections upon human life in general, with such briskness and such a lively interest in his own ideas, that the portentous ‘physiological conception, fertilized by a theological idea’, is as fresh and almost as amusing as the Autocrat or The Professor. The likeness to these works, which no disguise of fiction will obscure, proves again that he could not, as he puts it, ‘get cut of his personality’, but by that we only mean to define his powers in certain respects, for ‘personality’ limits Shakespeare himself. We mean that he is one of those writers who do not see much more than other people see, and yet they see it with some indescribable turn of vision, which reveals their own character and serves to form their views into a coherent creed. Thus it is that his readers always talk of their ‘intimacy’ with Dr. Holmes; they know what kind of person he was as well as what he taught. They know that he loved rowing and horses and great trees; that he was full of sentiment for his childhood; that he liked men to be strong and sanguine, and honoured the weakness of women; that he loathed all gloom and unhealthiness; that charity and tolerance were the virtues he loved, and if one could combine them with wit it was so much to the good. Above all, one must enjoy life and live to the utmost of one’s powers. It reads something like a medical prescription, and one does not want health alone. Nevertheless, when the obvious objections are made, we need not doubt that it will benefit thousands in the future, and they will love the man who lived as he wrote.

[Times Literary Supplement, Aug 26, 1909]

[]

MRS DALLOWAY’S
PARTY

by
Virginia Woolf

published
1973
by
The Hogarth Press

mrs dalloway’s party

1. Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street.

3. The Introduction.

4. Ancestors.

“2. The man who loved his kind”, “5. Together and apart”, “6. The new dress”, and “7. A summing up”: see A Haunted House

[]

[The texts follow The Complete Shorter Fiction, Hogarth Press 1985.]

Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street.

Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the gloves herself.

Big Ben was striking as she stepped out into the street. It was eleven o’clock and the unused hour was fresh as if issued to children on a beach. But there was something solemn in the deliberate swing of the repeated strokes; something stirring in the murmur of wheels and the shuffle of footsteps.

No doubt they were not all bound on errands of happiness. There is much more to be said about us than that we walk the streets of Westminster. Big Ben too is nothing but steel rods consumed by rust were it not for the care of H.M.’s Office of Works. Only for Mrs Dalloway the moment was complete; for Mrs Dalloway June was fresh. A happy childhood—and it was not to his daughters only that Justin Parry had seemed a fine fellow (weak of course on the Bench); flowers at evening, smoke rising; the caw of rooks falling from ever so high, down down through the October air—there is nothing to take the place of childhood. A leaf of mint brings it back: or a cup with a blue ring.

Poor little wretches, she sighed, and pressed forward. Oh, right under the horses’ noses, you little demon! and there she was left on the kerb stretching her hand out, while Jimmy Dawes grinned on the further side.

A charming woman, poised, eager, strangely white-haired for her pink cheeks, so Scope Purvis, C. B., saw her as he hurried to his office. She stiffened a little, waiting for Durtnall’s van to pass. Big Ben struck the tenth; struck the eleventh stroke. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. Pride held her erect, inheriting, handing on, acquainted with discipline and with suffering. How people suffered, how they suffered, she thought, thinking of Mrs Foxcroft at the Embassy last night decked with jewels, eating her heart out, because that nice boy was dead, and now the old Manor House (Durtnall’s van passed) must go to a cousin.

‘Good morning to you!’ said Hugh Whitbread raising his hat rather extravagantly by the china shop, for they had known each other as children. ‘Where are you off to?’

‘I love walking in London,’ said Mrs Dalloway. ‘Really it’s better than walking in the country!’

‘We’ve just come up,’ said Hugh Whitbread. ‘Unfortunately to see doctors.’

‘Milly?’ said Mrs Dalloway, instantly compassionate.

‘Out of sorts,’ said Hugh Whitbread. ‘That sort of thing. Dick all right?’

‘First rate!’ said Clarissa.

Of course, she thought, walking on, Milly is about my age—fifty—fifty-two. So it is probably that, Hugh’s manner had said so, said it perfectly—dear old Hugh, thought Mrs Dalloway, remembering with amusement, with gratitude, with emotion, how shy, like a brother—one would rather die than speak to one’s brother—Hugh had always been, when he was at Oxford, and came over, and perhaps one of them (drat the thing!) couldn’t ride. How then could women sit in Parliament? How could they do things with men? For there is this extraordinarily deep instinct, something inside one; you can’t get over it; it’s no use trying; and men like Hugh respect it without our saying it, which is what one loves, thought Clarissa, in dear old Hugh.

She had passed through the Admiralty Arch and saw at the end of the empty road with its thin trees Victoria’s white mound, Victoria’s billowing motherliness, amplitude and homeliness, always ridiculous, yet how sublime, thought Mrs Dalloway, remembering Kensington Gardens and the old lady in horn spectacles and being told by Nanny to stop dead still and bow to the Queen. The flag flew above the Palace. The King and Queen were back then. Dick had met her at lunch the other day—a thoroughly nice woman. It matters so much to the poor, thought Clarissa, and to the soldiers. A man in bronze stood heroically on a pedestal with a gun on her left hand side—the South African war. It matters, thought Mrs Dalloway walking towards Buckingham Palace. There it stood four-square, in the broad sunshine, uncompromising, plain. But it was character, she thought; something inborn in the race; what Indians respected. The Queen went to hospitals, opened bazaars—the Queen of England, thought Clarissa, looking at the Palace. Already at this hour a motor car passed out at the gates; soldiers saluted; the gates were shut. And Clarissa, crossing the road, entered the Park, holding herself upright.

June had drawn out every leaf on the trees. The mothers of Westminster with mottled breasts gave suck to their young. Quite respectable girls lay stretched on the grass. An elderly man, stooping very stiffly, picked up a crumpled paper, spread it out flat and flung it away. How horrible! Last night at the Embassy Sir Dighton had said, ‘If I want a fellow to hold my horse, I have only to put up my hand.’ But the religious question is far more serious than the economic, Sir Dighton had said, which she thought extraordinarily interesting, from a man like Sir Dighton. ‘Oh, the country will never know what it has lost,’ he had said, talking of his own accord, about dear Jack Stewart.

She mounted the little hill lightly. The air stirred with energy. Messages were passing from the Fleet to the Admiralty. Piccadilly and Arlington Street and the Mall seemed to chafe the very air in the Park and lift its leaves hotly, brilliantly, upon waves of that divine vitality which Clarissa loved. To ride; to dance; she had adored all that. Or going long walks in the country, talking, about books, what to do with one’s life, for young people were amazingly priggish—oh, the things one had said! But one had conviction. Middle age is the devil. People like Jack’ll never know that, she thought; for he never once thought of death, never, they said, knew he was dying. And now can never mourn—how did it go?—a head grown grey … From the contagion of the world’s slow stain … have drunk their cup a round or two before…. From the contagion of the world’s slow stain! She held herself upright.

But how Jack would have shouted! Quoting Shelley, in Piccadilly! ‘You want a pin,’ he would have said. He hated frumps. ‘My God Clarissa! My God Clarissa!”—she could hear him now at the Devonshire House party, about poor Sylvia Hunt in her amber necklace and that dowdy old silk. Clarissa held herself upright for she had spoken aloud and now she was in Piccadilly, passing the house with the slender green columns, and the balconies; passing club windows full of newspapers; passing old Lady Burdett-Coutts’ house where the glazed white parrot used to hang; and Devonshire House, without its gilt leopards; and Claridge’s, where she must remember Dick wanted her to leave a card on Mrs Jepson or she would be gone. Rich Americans can be very charming. There was St James’s Palace; like a child’s game with bricks; and now—she had passed Bond Street—she was by Hatchard’s book shop. The stream was endless—endless—endless. Lords, Ascot, Hurlingham—what was it? What a duck, she thought, looking at the frontispiece of some book of memoirs spread wide in the bow window, Sir Joshua perhaps or Romney; arch, bright, demure; the sort of girl—like her own Elizabeth—the only real sort of girl. And there was that absurd book, Soapy Sponge, which Jim used to quote by the yard; and Shakespeare’s Sonnets. She knew them by heart. Phil and she had argued all day about the Dark Lady, and Dick had said straight out at dinner that night that he had never heard of her. Really, she had married him for that! He had never read Shakespeare! There must be some little cheap book she could buy for Milly—Cranford of course! Was there ever anything so enchanting as the cow in petticoats? If only people had that sort of humour, that sort of self-respect now, thought Clarissa, for she remembered the broad pages; the sentences ending; the characters—how one talked about them as if they were real. For all the great things one must go to the past, she thought. From the contagion of the world’s slow stain … Fear no more the heat o’ the sun…. And now can never mourn, can never mourn, she repeated, her eyes straying over the window; for it ran in her head; the test of great poetry; the moderns had never written anything one wanted to read about death, she thought; and turned.

Omnibuses joined motor cars; motor cars vans; vans taxicabs, taxicabs motor cars—here was an open motor car with a girl, alone. Up till four, her feet tingling, I know, thought Clarissa, for the girl looked washed out, half asleep, in the corner of the car after the dance. And another car came; and another. No! No! No! Clarissa smiled good-naturedly. The fat lady had taken every sort of trouble, but diamonds! orchids! at this hour of the morning! No! No! No! The excellent policeman would, when the time came, hold up his hand. Another motor car passed. How utterly unattractive! Why should a girl of that age paint black round her eyes? And a young man, with a girl, at this hour, when the country—The admirable policeman raised his hand and Clarissa acknowledging his sway, taking her time, crossed, walked towards Bond Street; saw the narrow crooked street, the yellow banners; the thick notched telegraph wires stretched across the sky.

A hundred years ago her great-great-grandfather, Seymour Parry, who ran away with Conway’s daughter, had walked down Bond Street. Down Bond Street the Parrys had walked for a hundred years, and might have met the Dalloways (Leighs on the mother’s side) going up. Her father got his clothes from Hill’s. There was a roll of cloth in the window, and here just one jar on a black table, incredibly expensive; like the thick pink salmon on the ice block at the fish-monger’s. The jewels were exquisite—pink and orange stars, paste, Spanish, she thought, and chains of old gold; starry buckles, little brooches which had been worn on sea-green satin by ladies with high head-dresses. But no good looking! One must economise. She must go on past the picture dealer’s where one of the odd French pictures hung, as if people had thrown confetti—pink and blue—for a joke. If you had lived with pictures (and it’s the same with books and music) thought Clarissa, passing the Aeolian Hall, you can’t be taken in by a joke.

The river of Bond Street was clogged. There, like a Queen at a tournament, raised, regal, was Lady Bexborough. She sat in her carriage, upright, alone, looking through her glasses. The white glove was loose at her wrist. She was in black, quite shabby, yet, thought Clarissa, how extraordinarily it tells, breeding, self-respect, never saying a word too much or letting people gossip; an astonishing friend; no one can pick a hole in her after all these years, and now, there she is, thought Clarissa, passing the Countess who waited powdered, perfectly still, and Clarissa would have given anything to be like that, the mistress of Clarefield, talking politics, like a man. But she never goes anywhere, thought Clarissa, and it’s quite useless to ask her, and the carriage went on and Lady Bexborough was borne past like a Queen at a tournament, though she had nothing to live for and the old man is failing and they say she is sick of it all, thought Clarissa and the tears actually rose to her eyes as she entered the shop.

‘Good morning,’ said Clarissa in her charming voice. ‘Gloves,’ she said with her exquisite friendliness and putting her bag on the counter began, very slowly, to undo the buttons. ‘White gloves,’ she said. ‘Above the elbow,’ and she looked straight into the shop-woman’s face—but this was not the girl she remembered? She looked quite old. ‘These really don’t fit,’ said Clarissa. The shop-girl looked at them. ‘Madame wears bracelets?’ Clarissa spread out her fingers. ‘Perhaps it’s my rings.’ And the girl took the grey gloves with her to the end of the counter.

Yes, thought Clarissa, if it’s the girl I remember, she’s twenty years older…. There was only one other customer, sitting sideways at the counter, her elbow poised, her bare hand drooping, vacant; like a figure on a Japanese fan, thought Clarissa, too vacant perhaps, yet some men would adore her. The lady shook her head sadly. Again the gloves were too large. She turned round the glass. ‘Above the wrist,’ she reproached the grey-headed woman; who looked and agreed.

They waited; a clock ticked; Bond Street hummed, dulled, distant; the woman went away holding gloves. ‘Above the wrist,’ said the lady, mournfully, raising her voice. And she would have to order chairs, ices, flowers, and cloak-room tickets, thought Clarissa. The people she didn’t want would come; the others wouldn’t. She would stand by the door. They sold stockings—silk stockings. A lady is known by her gloves and her shoes, old Uncle William used to say. And through the hanging silk stockings quivering silver she looked at the lady, sloping shouldered, her hand drooping, her bag slipping, her eyes vacantly on the floor. It would be intolerable if dowdy women came to her party! Would one have liked Keats if he had worn red socks? Oh, at last—she drew into the counter and it flashed into her mind:

‘Do you remember before the war you had gloves with pearl buttons?’

‘French gloves, Madame?’

‘Yes, they were French,’ said Clarissa. The other lady rose very sadly and took her bag, and looked at the gloves on the counter. But they were all too large—always too large at the wrist.

‘With pearl buttons,’ said the shop-girl, who looked ever so much older. She split the lengths of tissue paper apart on the counter. With pearl buttons, thought Clarissa, perfectly simple—how French!

‘Madame’s hands are so slender,’ said the shop-girl, drawing the glove firmly, smoothly, down over her rings. And Clarissa looked at her arm in the looking-glass. The glove hardly came to the elbow. Were there others half an inch longer? Still it seemed tiresome to bother her—perhaps the one day in the month, thought Clarissa, when it’s an agony to stand. ‘Oh, don’t bother,’ she said. But the gloves were brought.

‘Don’t you get fearfully tired,’ she said in her charming voice, ‘standing? When d’you get your holiday?’

‘In September, Madame, when we’re not so busy.’

When we’re in the country thought Clarissa. Or shooting. She has a fortnight at Brighton. In some stuffy lodging. The landlady takes the sugar. Nothing would be easier than to send her to Mrs Lumley’s right in the country (and it was on the tip of her tongue). But then she remembered how on their honeymoon Dick had shown her the folly of giving impulsively. It was much more important, he said, to get trade with China. Of course he was right. And she could feel the girl wouldn’t like to be given things. There she was in her place. So was Dick. Selling gloves was her job. She had her own sorrows quite separate, ‘and now can never mourn, can never mourn,’ the words ran in her head. ‘From the contagion of the world’s slow stain,’ thought Clarissa holding her arm stiff, for there are moments when it seems utterly futile (the glove was drawn off leaving her arm flecked with powder)—simply one doesn’t believe, thought Clarissa, any more in God.

The traffic suddenly roared; the silk stockings brightened. A customer came in.

‘White gloves,’ she said, with some ring in her voice that Clarissa remembered.

It used, thought Clarissa, to be so simple. Down down through the air came the caw of the rooks. When Sylvia died, hundreds of years ago, the yew hedges looked so lovely with the diamond webs in the mist before early church. But if Dick were to die tomorrow, as for believing in God—no, she would let the children choose, but for herself, like Lady Bexborough, who opened the bazaar, they say, with the telegram in her hand—Roden, her favourite, killed—she would go on. But why, if one doesn’t believe? For the sake of others, she thought, taking the glove in her hand. The girl would be much more unhappy if she didn’t believe.

‘Thirty shillings,’ said the shop-woman. ‘No, pardon me Madame, thirty-five. The French gloves are more.’

For one doesn’t live for oneself, thought Clarissa.

And then the other customer took a glove, tugged it, and it split.

‘There!’ she exclaimed.

‘A fault of the skin,’ said the grey-headed woman hurriedly. ‘Sometimes a drop of acid in tanning. Try this pair, Madame.’

‘But it’s an awful swindle to ask two pound ten!’

Clarissa looked at the lady; the lady looked at Clarissa.

‘Gloves have never been quite so reliable since the war,’ said the shop-girl, apologising, to Clarissa.

But where had she seen the other lady?—elderly, with a frill under her chin; wearing a black ribbon for gold eyeglasses; sensual, clever, like a Sargent drawing. How one can tell from a voice when people are in the habit, thought Clarissa, of making other people—‘It’s a shade too tight,’ she said—obey. The shop-woman went off again. Clarissa was left waiting. Fear no more she repeated, playing her finger on the counter. Fear no more the heat o’ the sun. Fear no more she repeated. There were little brown spots on her arm. And the girl crawled like a snail. Thou thy worldly task hast done. Thousands of young men had died that things might go on. At last! Half an inch above the elbow; pearl buttons; five and a quarter. My dear slow coach, thought Clarissa, do you think I can sit here the whole morning? Now you’ll take twenty-five minutes to bring me my change!

There was a violent explosion in the street outside. The shop-women cowered behind the counters. But Clarissa, sitting very upright, smiled at the other lady. ‘Miss Anstruther!’ she exclaimed.

[written ca. summer 1922, published in Dial, July 1923]

[]

The Introduction.

Lily Everit saw Mrs Dalloway bearing down on her from the other side of the room, and could have prayed her not to come and disturb her; and yet, as Mrs Dalloway approached with her right hand raised and a smile which Lily knew (though this was her first party) meant: ‘But you’ve got to come out of your corner and talk,’ a smile at once benevolent and drastic, commanding, she felt the strangest mixture of excitement and fear, of desire to be left alone and of longing to be taken out and thrown down, down into the boiling depths. But Mrs Dalloway was intercepted; caught by an old gentleman with white moustaches, and thus Lily Everit had two minutes respite in which to hug to herself, like a spar in the sea, to sip, like a glass of wine, the thought of her essay upon the character of Dean Swift which Professor Miller had marked that morning with three red stars; First rate. First rate; she repeated that to herself, but the cordial was ever so much weaker now than it had been when she stood before the long glass being finished off (a pat here, a dab there) by her sister and Mildred, the housemaid. For as their hands moved about her, she felt that they were fidgeting agreeably on the surface but beneath lay untouched like a lump of glowing metal her essay on the character of Dean Swift, and all their praises when she came downstairs and stood in the hall waiting for a cab—Rupert had come out of his room and said what a swell she looked—ruffled the surface, went like a breeze among ribbons, but no more. One divided life (she felt sure of it) into fact, this essay, and into fiction, this going out, into rock and into wave, she thought, driving along and seeing things with such intensity that for ever she would see the truth and herself, a white reflection in the driver’s dark back inextricably mixed: the moment of vision. Then as she came into the house, at the very first sight of people moving up stairs, down stairs, this hard lump (her essay on the character of Swift) wobbled, began melting, she could not keep hold of it, and all her being (no longer sharp as a diamond cleaving the heart of life asunder) turned to a mist of alarm, apprehension, and defence as she stood at bay in her corner. This was the famous place: the world.

Looking out, Lily Everit instinctively hid that essay of hers, so ashamed was she now, so bewildered too, and on tiptoe nevertheless to adjust her focus and get into right proportions (the old having been shamefully wrong) these diminishing and expanding things (what could one call them? people—impressions of people’s lives?) which seemed to menace her and mount over her, to turn everything to water, leaving her only—for that she would not resign—the power to stand at bay.

Now Mrs Dalloway, who had never quite dropped her arm, had shown by the way she moved it while she stood talking that she remembered, was only interrupted by the old soldier with the white moustaches, raised it again definitely and came straight down on her, and said to the shy charming girl, with her pale skin, her bright eyes, the dark hair which clustered poetically round her head and the thin body in a dress which seemed slipping off, ‘Come and let me introduce you,’ and there Mrs Dalloway hesitated, and then remembering that Lily was the clever one, who read poetry, looked about for some young man, some young man just down from Oxford, who would have read everything and could talk about Shelley. And holding Lily Everit’s hand [she] led her towards a group where there were young people talking, and Bob Brinsley.

Lily Everit hung back a little, might have been the wayward sailing boat curtseying in the wake of a steamer, and felt as Mrs Dalloway led her on, that it was now going to happen; that nothing could prevent it now; or save her (and she only wanted it to be over now) from being flung into a whirlpool where either she would perish or be saved. But what was the whirlpool?

Oh it was made of a million things and each was distinct to her; Westminster Abbey; the sense of enormously high solemn buildings surrounding them; being a woman. Perhaps that was the thing that came out, that remained, it was partly the dress, but all the little chivalries and respects of the drawing-room—all made her feel that she had come out of her chrysalis and was being proclaimed what in the comfortable darkness of childhood she had never been—this frail and beautiful creature, before whom men bowed, this limited and circumscribed creature who could not do what she liked, this butterfly with a thousand facets to its eyes and delicate fine plumage, and difficulties and sensibilities and sadnesses innumerable; a woman.

As she walked with Mrs Dalloway across the room she accepted the part which was now laid on her and, naturally, overdid it a little as a soldier, proud of the traditions of an old and famous uniform might overdo it, feeling conscious as she walked, of her finery; of her tight shoes; of her coiled and twisted hair; and how if she dropped a handkerchief (this had happened) a man would stoop precipitately and give it her; thus accentuating the delicacy, the artificiality of her bearing unnaturally, for they were not hers after all.

Hers it was, rather, to run and hurry and ponder on long solitary walks, climbing gates, stepping through the mud, and through the blur, the dream, the ecstasy of loneliness, to see the plover’s wheel and surprise the rabbits, and come in the hearts of woods or wide lonely moors upon little ceremonies which had no audience, private rites, pure beauty offered by beetles and lilies of the valley and dead leaves and still pools, without any care whatever what human beings thought of them, which filled her mind with rapture and wonder and held her there till she must touch the gate post to recollect herself—all this was, until tonight her ordinary being, by which she knew and liked herself and crept into the heart of mother and father and brothers and sisters; and this other was a flower which had opened in ten minutes. As the flower opened so too [came], incontrovertibly, the flower’s world, so different, so strange; the towers of Westminster; the high and formal buildings; talk; this civilisation, she felt, hanging back, as Mrs Dalloway led her on, this regulated way of life, which fell like a yoke about her neck, softly, indomitably, from the skies, a statement which there was no gainsaying. Glancing at her essay, the three red stars dulled to obscurity, but peacefully, pensively, as if yielding to the pressure of unquestionable might, that is the conviction that it was not hers to dominate, or to assert; rather to air and embellish this orderly life where all was done already; high towers, solemn bells, flats built every brick of them by men’s toil, churches built by men’s toil, parliaments too; and even the criss-cross of telegraph wires she thought looking at the window as she walked. What had she to oppose to this massive masculine achievement? An essay on the character of Dean Swift! And as she came up to the group, which Bob Brinsley dominated, (with his heel on the fender, and his head back), with his great honest forehead, and his self-assurance, and his delicacy, and honour and robust physical well being, and sunburn, and airiness and direct descent from Shakespeare, what could she do but lay her essay, oh and the whole of her being, on the floor as a cloak for him to trample on, as a rose for him to rifle. Which she did, emphatically, when Mrs Dalloway said, still holding her hand as if she would run away from this supreme trial, this introduction, ‘Mr Brinsley—Miss Everit. Both of you love Shelley.’ But hers was not love compared with his.

Saying this, Mrs Dalloway felt, as she always felt remembering her youth, absurdly moved; youth meeting youth at her hands, and there flashing, as at the concussion of steel upon flint (both stiffened to her feeling perceptibly) the loveliest and most ancient of all fires as she saw in Bob Brinsley’s change of expression from carelessness to conformity, to formality, as he shook hands, which foreboded Clarissa thought, the tenderness, the goodness, the carefulness of women latent in all men, to her a sight to bring tears to the eyes, as it moved her even more intimately, to see in Lily herself the shy look, the startled look, surely the loveliest of all looks on a girl’s face; and man feeling this for woman, and woman that for man, and there flowing from that contact all those homes, trials, sorrows, profound joy and ultimate staunchness in the face of catastrophe, humanity was sweet at its heart, thought Clarissa, and her own life (to introduce a couple made her think of meeting Richard for the first time!) infinitely blessed. And on she went.

But, thought Lily Everit. But—but—but what?

Oh nothing, she thought hastily smothering down softly her sharp instinct. Yes, she said. She did like reading.

‘And I suppose you write?” he said, ‘poems presumably?’

‘Essays,’ she said. And she would not let this horror get possession of her. Churches and parliaments, flats, even the telegraph wires—all, she told herself, made by men’s toil, and this young man, she told herself, is in direct descent from Shakespeare, so she would not let this terror, this suspicion of something different, get hold of her and shrivel up her wings and drive her out into loneliness. But as she said this, she saw him—how else could she describe it—kill a fly. He tore the wings off a fly, standing with his foot on the fender his head thrown back, talking insolently about himself, arrogantly, but she didn’t mind how insolent and arrogant he was to her, if only he had not been brutal to flies.

But she said, fidgeting as she smothered down that idea, why not, since he is the greatest of all worldly objects? And to worship, to adorn, to embellish was her task, and to be worshipped, her wings were for that. But he talked; but he looked; but he laughed; he tore the wings off a fly. He pulled the wings off its back with his clever strong hands, and she saw him do it; and she could not hide the knowledge from herself. But it is necessary that it should be so, she argued, thinking of the churches, of the parliaments and the blocks of flats, and so tried to crouch and cower and fold the wings down flat on her back. But—but, what was it why was it? In spite of all she could do her essay upon the character of Swift became more and more obtrusive and the three stars burnt quite bright again, only no longer clear and brilliant, but troubled and bloodstained as if this man, this great Mr Brinsley, had just by pulling the wings off a fly as he talked (about his essay, about himself and once laughing, about a girl there) charged her light being with cloud, and confused her for ever and ever and shrivelled her wings on her back, and, as he turned away from her, he made her think of the towers and civilisation with horror, and the yoke that had fallen from the skies onto her neck crushed her, and she felt like a naked wretch who having sought shelter in some shady garden is turned out and told—no, that there are no sanctuaries, or butterflies, in this world, and this civilisation, churches, parliaments and flats—this civilisation, said Lily Everit to herself, as she accepted the kind compliments of old Mrs Bromley on her appearance⁠[, depends upon me,] and Mrs Bromley said later that like all the Everits Lily looked ‘as if she had the weight of the world upon her shoulders’.

[ca. spring 1925]

[]

Ancestors.

Mrs Vallance, as Jack Renshaw made that silly, rather conceited remark of his about not liking to watch cricket matches, felt that she must draw his attention somehow, must make him understand, yes, and all the other young people whom she saw, what her father would have said; how different her father and mother, yes and she too were from all this; and how compared to really dignified simple men and women like her father, like her dear mother, all this seemed to her so trivial.

‘Here we all are,’ she said suddenly, ‘cooped up in this stuffy room while in the country at home—in Scotland’ (she owed it to these foolish young men who were after all quite nice, though a little under-sized⁠[,] to make them understand what her father, what her mother and she herself too, for she was like them at heart, felt).

‘Are you Scotch?’ he asked.

He did not know then, he did not know who her father was; that he was John Ellis Rattray; and her mother was Catherine Macdonald.

He had stopped in Edinburgh for a night once, Mr Renshaw said.

One night in Edinburgh! And she had spent all those wonderful years there—there and at Elliottshaw, on the Northumbrian border. There she had run wild among the currant bushes; there her father’s friends had come, and [she] only a girl as she was, had heard the most wonderful talk of her time. She could see them still, her father, Sir Duncan Clements, Mr Rogers (old Mr Rogers was her ideal of a Greek sage), sitting under the cedar tree; after dinner in the starlight. They talked [about] everything in the whole world, it seemed to her now; they [were too] large minded ever to laugh at other people. They had taught her to revere beauty. What was there beautiful in this stuffy London room?

‘Those poor flowers,’ she exclaimed, for petals of flowers all crumpled and crushed, a carnation or two, were actually trodden under foot; but, she felt, she cared almost too much for flowers. Her mother had loved flowers: ever since she was a child she had been brought up to feel that to hurt a flower was to hurt the most exquisite thing in nature. Nature had always been a passion with her; the mountains, the sea. Here in London, one looked out of the window and saw more houses—human beings packed on top of each other in little boxes. It was an atmosphere in which she could not possibly live; herself. She could not bear to walk in London and see the children playing in the streets. She was perhaps too sensitive; life would be impossible if everyone was like her, but when she remembered her own childhood, and her father and mother, and the beauty and care that were lavished on them—

‘What a lovely frock!’ said Jack Renshaw; and that seemed to her altogether wrong—for a young man to be noticing women’s clothes at all.

Her father was full of reverence for women but he never thought of noticing what they wore. And of all these girls, there was not a single one of them one could call beautiful—as she remembered her mother,—her dear stately mother, who never seemed to dress differently summer or winter, whether they had people or were alone, but always looked herself in lace, and as she grew older, a little cap. When she was a widow, [she] would sit among her flowers by the hour, and she seemed to be more with ghosts than with them all, dreaming of the past, which is, Mrs Vallance thought, somehow so much more real than the present. But why. It is in the past, with those wonderful men and women, she thought, that I really live: it is they who know me; it is those people only (and she thought of the starlit garden and the trees and old Mr Rogers, and her father, in his white linen coat smoking) who understood me. She felt her eyes soften and deepen as at the approach of tears, standing there in Mrs Dalloway’s drawing-room, looking not at these people, these flowers, this chattering crowd, but at herself, that little girl who was to travel so far, picking Sweet Alice, and then sitting up in bed in the attic which smelt of pine wood reading stories, poetry. She had read all Shelley between the ages of twelve and fifteen, and used to say it to her father, holding her hands behind her back, while he shaved. The tears began, down in the back of her head to rise, as she looked at this picture of herself, and added the suffering of a lifetime (she had suffered abominably)—life had passed over her like a wheel—life was not what it had seemed then—it was like this party) to the child standing there, reciting Shelley; with her dark wild eyes. But what had they not seen later. And it was only those people, dead now, laid away in quiet Scotland, who had known her, who knew what she had it in her to be—and now the tears came closer, as she thought of the little girl in the cotton frock; how large and dark her eyes were; how beautiful she looked repeating the ‘Ode to the West Wind’; how proud her father was of her, and how great he was, and how great her mother was, and how when she was with them she was so pure so good so gifted that she had it in her to be anything. That if they had lived, and she had always been with them in that garden (which now appeared to her the place where she had spent her whole childhood, and it was always starlit, and always summer, and they were always sitting out under the cedar tree smoking, except that somehow her mother was dreaming alone, in her widow’s cap among her flowers—and how good and kind and respectful the old servants were, Andrewes the gardener, Jersy the cook; and old Sultan, the Newfoundland dog; and the vine, and the pond, and the pump—and Mrs Vallance looking very fierce and proud and satirical, compared her life with other peoples’ lives) and if that life could have gone on for ever, then Mrs Vallance felt none of this—and she looked at Jack Renshaw and the girl whose clothes he admired—could have had any existence, and she would have been oh perfectly happy, perfectly good, instead of which here she was forced to listen to a young man saying—and she laughed almost scornfully and yet tears were in her eyes—that he could not bear to watch cricket matches!

[May 1925]

[]

THE
LONDON
SCENE

by
Virginia Woolf

published
1975
by
Frank Hallman, New York

the london scene

The Docks of London.

Oxford Street Tide.

Great Men’s Houses.

Abbeys and Cathedrals.

“This is the House of Commons”.

Portrait of a Londoner.

[]

[The text follows the 1982 Random House edition.]

The Docks of London.

“Whither, O splendid ship” the poet asked as he lay on the shore and watched the great sailing ship pass away on the horizon. Perhaps, as he imagined, it was making for some port in the Pacific; but one day almost certainly it must have heard an irresistible call and come past the North Foreland and the Reculvers, and entered the narrow waters of the Port of London, sailed past the low banks of Gravesend and Northfleet and Tilbury, up Erith Reach and Barking Reach and Gallion’s Reach, past the gas works and the sewage works till it found, for all the world like a car on a parking ground, a space reserved for it in the deep waters of the Docks. There it furled its sails and dropped anchor.

However romantic and free and fitful they may seem, there is scarcely a ship on the seas that does not come to anchor in the Port of London in time. From a launch in midstream one can see them swimming up the river with all the marks of their voyage still on them. Liners come, high-decked, with their galleries and their awnings and their passengers grasping their bags and leaning over the rail, while the lascars tumble and scurry below—home they come, a thousand of these big ships every week of the year to anchor in the docks of London. They take their way majestically through a crowd of tramp steamers, and colliers and barges heaped with coal and swaying red sailed boats, which, amateurish though they look, are bringing bricks from Harwich or cement from Colchester—for all is business; there are no pleasure boats on this river. Drawn by some irresistible current, they come from the storms and calms of the sea, its silence and loneliness to their allotted anchorage. The engines stop; the sails are furled; and suddenly the gaudy funnels and the tall masts show up incongruously against a row of workmen’s houses, against the black walls of huge warehouses. A curious change takes place. They have no longer the proper perspective of sea and sky behind them, and no longer the proper space in which to stretch their limbs. They lie captive, like soaring and winged creatures who have got themselves caught by the leg and lie tethered on dry land.

With the sea blowing its salt into our nostrils, nothing can be more stimulating than to watch the ships coming up the Thames—the big ships and the little ships, the battered and the splendid, ships from India, from Russia, from South America, ships from Australia coming from silence and danger and loneliness past us, home to harbour. But once they drop anchor, once the cranes begin their dipping and their swinging, it seems as if all romance were over. If we turn and go past the anchored ships towards London, we see surely the most dismal prospect in the world. The banks of the river are lined with dingy, decrepit-looking warehouses. They huddle on land that has become flat and slimy mud. The same air of decrepitude and of being run up provisionally stamps them all. If a window is broken, broken it remains. A fire that has lately blackened and blistered one of them seems to have left it no more forlorn and joyless than its neighbours. Behind the masts and funnels lies a sinister dwarf city of workmen’s houses. In the foreground cranes and warehouses, scaffolding and gasometers line the banks with a skeleton architecture.

When, suddenly, after acres and acres of this desolation one floats past an old stone house standing in a real field, with real trees growing in clumps, the sight is disconcerting. Can it be possible that there is earth, that there once were fields and crops beneath this desolation and disorder? Trees and fields seem to survive incongruously like a sample of another civilisation among the wall-paper factories and soap factories that have stamped out old lawns and terraces. Still more incongruously one passes an old grey country church which still rings its bells, and keeps its churchyard green as if country people were still coming across the fields to service. Further down, an inn with swelling bow windows still wears a strange air of dissipation and pleasure making. In the middle years of the nineteenth century it was a favourite resort of pleasure makers, and figured in some of the most famous divorce cases of the time. Now pleasure has gone and labour has come; and it stands derelict like some beauty in her midnight finery looking out over mud flats and candle works, while malodorous mounds of earth, upon which trucks are perpetually tipping fresh heaps, have entirely consumed the fields where, a hundred years ago, lovers wandered and picked violets.

As we go on steaming up the river to London we meet its refuse coming down. Barges heaped with old buckets, razor blades, fish tails, newspapers and ashes—whatever we leave on our plates and throw into our dust bins—are discharging their cargoes upon the most desolate land in the world. The long mounds have been fuming and smoking and harbouring innumerable rats and growing a rank coarse grass and giving off a gritty, acrid air for fifty years. The dumps get higher and higher, and thicker and thicker, their sides more precipitous with tin cans, their pinnacles more angular with ashes year by year. But then, past all this sordidity, sweeps indifferently a great liner, bound for India. She takes her way through rubbish barges, and sewage barges, and dredgers out to sea. A little further, on the left hand, we are suddenly surprised—the sight upsets all our proportions once more—by what appear to be the stateliest buildings ever raised by the hand of man. Greenwich Hospital with all its columns and domes comes down in perfect symmetry to the water’s edge, and makes the river again a stately waterway where the nobility of England once walked at their ease on green lawns, or descended stone steps to their pleasure barges. As we come closer to the Tower Bridge the authority of the city begins to assert itself. The buildings thicken and heap themselves higher. The sky seems laden with heavier, purpler clouds. Domes swell; church spires, white with age, mingle with the tapering, pencil-shaped chimneys of factories. One hears the roar and the resonance of London itself. Here at last, we have landed at that thick and formidable circle of ancient stone, where so many drums have beaten and heads have fallen, the Tower of London itself. This is the knot, the clue, the hub of all those scattered miles of skeleton desolation and ant-like activity. Here growls and grumbles that rough city song that has called the ships from the sea and brought them to lie captive beneath its warehouses.

Now from the dock side we look down into the heart of the ship that has been lured from its voyaging and tethered to the dry land. The passengers and their bags have disappeared; the sailors have gone too. Indefatigable cranes are now at work, dipping and swinging, swinging and dipping. Barrels, sacks, crates are being picked up out of the hold and swung regularly on shore. Rhythmically, dexterously, with an order that has some æsthetic delight in it, barrel is laid by barrel, case by case, cask by cask, one behind another, one on top of another, one beside another in endless array down the aisles and arcades of the immense low-ceiled, entirely plain and unornamented warehouses. Timber, iron, grain, wine, sugar, paper, tallow, fruit—whatever the ship has gathered from the plains, from the forests, from the pastures of the whole world is here lifted from its hold and set in its right place. A thousand ships with a thousand cargoes are being unladen every week. And not only is each package of this vast and varied merchandise picked up and set down accurately, but each is weighed and opened, sampled and recorded, and again stitched up and laid in its place, without haste, or waste, or hurry, or confusion by a very few men in shirt-sleeves, who, working with the utmost organisation in the common interest—for buyers will take their word and abide by their decision—are yet able to pause in their work and say to the casual visitor, “Would you like to see what sort of thing we sometimes find in sacks of cinnamon? Look at this snake!”

A snake, a scorpion, a beetle, a lump of amber, the diseased tooth of an elephant, a basin of quicksilver—these are some of the rarities and oddities that have been picked out of this vast merchandise and stood on a table. But with this one concession to curiosity, the temper of the Docks is severely utilitarian. Oddities, beauties, rarities may occur, but if so, they are instantly tested for their mercantile value. Laid on the floor among the circles of elephant tusks is a heap of larger and browner tusks than the rest. Brown they well may be, for these are the tusks of mammoths that have lain frozen in Siberian ice for fifty thousand years; but fifty thousand years are suspect in the eyes of the ivory expert. Mammoth ivory tends to warp; you cannot extract billiard balls from mammoths, but only umbrella handles and the backs of the cheaper kind of hand-glass. Thus if you buy an umbrella or a looking-glass not of the finest quality, it is likely that you are buying the tusk of a brute that roamed through Asian forests before England was an island.

One tusk makes a billiard ball, another serves for a shoehorn—every commodity in the world has been examined and graded according to its use and value. Trade is ingenious and indefatigable beyond the bounds of imagination. None of all the multitudinous products and waste products of the earth but has been tested and found some possible use for. The bales of wool that are being swung from the hold of an Australian ship are girt, to save space, with iron hoops; but the hoops do not litter the floor; they are sent to Germany and made into safety razors. The wool itself exudes a coarse greasiness. This grease, which is harmful to blankets, serves, when extracted, to make face cream. Even the burrs that stick in the wool of certain breeds of sheep have their use, for they prove that the sheep undoubtedly were fed on certain rich pastures. Not a burr, not a tuft of wool, not an iron hoop is unaccounted for. And the aptness of everything to its purpose, the forethought and readiness which have provided for every process, come, as if by the back door, to provide that element of beauty which nobody in the Docks has ever given half a second of thought to. The warehouse is perfectly fit to be a warehouse; the crane to be a crane. Hence beauty begins to steal in. The cranes dip and swing, and there is rhythm in their regularity. The warehouse walls are open wide to admit sacks and barrels; but through them one sees all the roofs of London, its masts and spires, and the unconscious, vigorous movements of men lifting and unloading. Because barrels of wine require to be laid on their sides in cool vaults all the mystery of dim lights, all the beauty of low arches is thrown in as an extra.

The wine vaults present a scene of extraordinary solemnity. Waving long blades of wood to which lamps have been fixed, we peer about, in what seems to be a vast cathedral, at cask after cask lying in a dim sacerdotal atmosphere, gravely maturing, slowly ripening. We might be priests worshipping in the temple of some silent religion and not merely wine tasters and Customs’ Officers as we wander, waving our lamps up this aisle, down that. A yellow cat precedes us; otherwise the vaults are empty of all human life. Here side by side the objects of our worship lie swollen with sweet liquor, spouting red wine if tapped. A winy sweetness fills the vaults like incense. Here and there a gas jet flares, not indeed to give light, or because of the beauty of the green and grey arches which it calls up in endless procession, down avenue after avenue, but simply because so much heat is required to mellow the wine. Use produces beauty as a bye-product. [by-product.] From the low arches a white cotton-wool-like growth depends. It is a fungus, but whether lovely or loathsome matters not; it is welcome because it proves that the air possesses the right degree of dampness for the health of the precious fluid.

Even the English language has adapted itself to the needs of commerce. Words have formed round objects and taken their exact outline. One may look in the dictionary in vain for the warehouse meaning of “valinch,” “shrive,” “shirt,” and “flogger,” but in the warehouse they have formed naturally on the tip of the tongue. So too the light stroke on either side of the barrel which makes the bung start has been arrived at by years of trial and experiment. It is the quickest, the most effective of actions. Dexterity can go no further.

The only thing, one comes to feel, that can change the routine of the docks is a change in ourselves. Suppose, for instance, that we gave up drinking claret, or took to using rubber instead of wool for our blankets, the whole machinery of production and distribution would rock and reel and seek about to adapt itself afresh. It is we—our tastes, our fashions, our needs—that make the cranes dip and swing, that call the ships from the sea. Our body is their master. We demand shoes, furs, bags, stoves, oil, rice puddings, candles; and they are brought us. Trade watches us anxiously to see what new desires are beginning to grow in us, what new dislikes. One feels an important, a complex, a necessary animal as one stands on the quayside watching the cranes hoist this barrel, that crate, that other bale from the holds of the ships that have come to anchor. Because one chooses to light a cigarette, all those barrels of Virginian tobacco are swung on shore. Flocks upon flocks of Australian sheep have submitted to the shears because we demand woollen overcoats in winter. As for the umbrella that we swing idly to and fro, a mammoth who roared through the swamps fifty thousand years ago has yielded up its tusk to make the handle.

Meanwhile the ship flying the Blue Peter moves slowly out of the dock; it has turned its bows to India or Australia once more. But in the Port of London, lorries jostle each other in the little street that leads from the dock—for there has been a great sale, and the cart horses are struggling and striving to distribute the wool over England.

[Good Housekeeping, December 1931]

[]

Oxford Street Tide.

Down in the docks one sees things in their crudity, their bulk, their enormity. Here in Oxford Street they have been refined and transformed. The huge barrels of damp tobacco have been rolled into innumerable neat cigarettes laid in silver paper. The corpulent bales of wool have been spun into thin vests and soft stockings. The grease of sheep’s thick wool has become scented cream for delicate skins. And those who buy and those who sell have suffered the same city change. Tripping, mincing, in black coats, in satin dresses, the human form has adapted itself no less than the animal product. Instead of hauling and heaving, it deftly opens drawers, rolls out silk on counters, measures and snips with yard sticks and scissors.

Oxford Street, it goes without saying, is not London’s most distinguished thoroughfare. Moralists have been known to point the finger of scorn at those who buy there, and they have the support of the dandies. Fashion has secret crannies off Hanover Square, round about Bond Street, to which it withdraws discreetly to perform its more sublime rites. In Oxford Street there are too many bargains, too many sales, too many goods marked down to one and eleven three that only last week cost two and six. The buying and selling is too blatant and raucous. But as one saunters towards the sunset—and what with artificial light and mounds of silk and gleaming omnibuses, a perpetual sunset seems to brood over the Marble Arch—the garishness and gaudiness of the great rolling ribbon of Oxford Street has its fascination. It is like the pebbly bed of a river whose stones are for ever washed by a bright stream. Everything glitters and twinkles. The first spring day brings out barrows frilled with tulips, violets, daffodils in brilliant layers. The frail vessels eddy vaguely across the stream of the traffic. At one corner seedy magicians are making slips of coloured paper expand in magic tumblers into bristling forests of splendidly tinted flora—a subaqueous flower garden. At another, tortoises repose on litters of grass. The slowest and most contemplative of creatures display their mild activities on a foot or two of pavement, jealously guarded from passing feet. One infers that the desire of man for the tortoise, like the desire of the moth for the star, is a constant element in human nature. Nevertheless, to see a woman stop and add a tortoise to her string of parcels is perhaps the rarest sight that human eyes can look upon.

Taking all this into account—the auctions, the barrows, the cheapness, the glitter—it cannot be said that the character of Oxford Street is refined. It is a breeding ground, a forcing house of sensation. The pavement seems to sprout horrid tragedies; the divorces of actresses, the suicides of millionaires occur here with a frequency that is unknown in the more austere pavements of the residential districts. News changes quicker than in any other part of London. The press of people passing seems to lick the ink off the placards and to consume more of them and to demand fresh supplies of later editions faster than elsewhere. The mind becomes a glutinous slab that takes impressions and Oxford Street rolls off upon it a perpetual ribbon of changing sights, sounds and movement. Parcels slap and hit; motor omnibuses graze the kerb; the blare of a whole brass band in full tongue dwindles to a thin reed of sound. Buses, vans, cars, barrows stream past like the fragments of a picture puzzle; a white arm rises; the puzzle runs thick, coagulates, stops; the white arm sinks, and away it streams again, streaked, twisted, higgledy-piggledy, in perpetual race and disorder. The puzzle never fits itself together, however long we look.

On the banks of this river of turning wheels our modern aristocrats have built palaces just as in ancient days the Dukes of Somerset and Northumberland, the Earls of Dorset and Salisbury lined the Strand with their stately mansions. The different houses of the great firms testify to the courage, initiative, the audacity of their creators much as the great houses of Cavendish and Percy testify to such qualities in some faraway shire. From the loins of our merchants will spring the Cavendishes and the Percys of the future. Indeed, the great Lords of Oxford Street are as magnanimous as any Duke or Earl who scattered gold or doled out loaves to the poor at his gates. Only their largesse takes a different form. It takes the form of excitement, of display, of entertainment, of windows lit up by night, of banners flaunting by day. They give us the latest news for nothing. Music streams from their banqueting rooms free. You need not spend more than one and eleven three to enjoy all the shelter that high and airy halls provide; and the soft pile of carpets, and the luxury of lifts, and the glow of fabrics, and carpets and silver. Percy and Cavendish could give no more. These gifts of course have an object—to entice the shilling and eleven pennies as freely from our pockets as possible; but the Percys and the Cavendishes were not munificent either without hope of some return, whether it was a dedication from a poet or a vote from a farmer. And both the old lords and the new added considerably to the decoration and entertainment of human life.

But it cannot be denied that these Oxford Street palaces are rather flimsy abodes—perhaps grounds rather than dwelling places. One is conscious that one is walking on a strip of wood laid upon steel girders, and that the outer wall, for all its florid stone ornamentation, is only thick enough to withstand the force of the wind. A vigorous prod with an umbrella point might well inflict irreparable damage upon the fabric. Many a country cottage built to house farmer or miller when Queen Elizabeth was on the throne will live to see these palaces fall into the dust. The old cottage walls, with their oak beams and their layers of honest brick soundly cemented together still put up a stout resistance to the drills and bores that attempt to introduce the modern blessing of electricity. But any day of the week one may see Oxford Street vanishing at the tap of a workman’s pick as he stands perilously balanced on a dusty pinnacle knocking down walls and façades as lightly as if they were made of yellow cardboard and sugar icing.

And again the moralists point the finger of scorn. For such thinness, such papery stone and powdery brick reflect, they say, the levity, the ostentation, the haste and irresponsibility of our age. Yet perhaps they are as much out in their scorn as we should be if we asked of the lily that it should be cast in bronze, or of the daisy that it should have petals of imperishable enamel. The charm of modern London is that it is not built to last; it is built to pass. Its glassiness, its transparency, its surging waves of coloured plaster give a different pleasure and achieve a different end from that which was desired and attempted by the old builders and their patrons, the nobility of England. Their pride required the illusion of permanence. Ours, on the contrary, seems to delight in proving that we can make stone and brick as transitory as our own desires. We do not build for our descendants, who may live up in the clouds or down in the earth, but for ourselves and our own needs. We knock down and rebuild as we expect to be knocked down and rebuilt. It is an impulse that makes for creation and fertility. Discovery is stimulated and invention on the alert.

The palaces of Oxford Street ignore what seemed good to the Greeks, to the Elizabethan, to the eighteenth-century nobleman; they are overwhelmingly conscious that unless they can devise an architecture that shows off the dressing-case, the Paris frock, the cheap stockings, and the jar of bath salts to perfection, their palaces, their mansions and motor-cars and the little villas out at Croydon and Surbiton where their shop assistants live, not so badly after all, with a gramophone and wireless, and money to spend at the movies—all this will be swept to ruin. Hence they stretch stone fantastically; crush together in one wild confusion the styles of Greece, Egypt, Italy, America; and boldly attempt an air of lavishness, opulence, in their effort to persuade the multitude that here unending beauty, ever fresh, ever new, very cheap and within the reach of everybody, bubbles up every day of the week from an inexhaustible well. The mere thought of age, of solidity, of lasting for ever is abhorrent to Oxford Street.

Therefore if the moralist chooses to take his afternoon walk along this particular thoroughfare, he must tune his strain so that it receives into it some queer, incongruous voices. Above the racket of van and omnibus we can hear them crying. God knows, says the man who sells tortoises, that my arm aches; my chance of selling a tortoise is small; but courage! there may come along a buyer; my bed tonight depends on it; so on I must go, as slowly as the police allow, wheeling tortoises down Oxford Street from dawn till dusk. True, says the great merchant, I am not thinking of educating the mass to a higher standard of æsthetic sensibility. It taxes all my wits to think how I can display my goods with the minimum of waste and the maximum of effectiveness. Green dragons on the top of Corinthian columns may help; let us try. I grant, says the middle-class woman, that I linger and look and barter and cheapen and turn over basket after basket of remnants hour by hour. My eyes glisten unseemlily I know, and I grab and pounce with disgusting greed. But my husband is a small clerk in a bank; I have only fifteen pounds a year to dress on; so here I come, to linger and loiter and look, if I can, as well dressed as my neighbours. I am a thief, says a woman of that persuasion, and a lady of easy virtue into the bargain. But it takes a good deal of pluck to snatch a bag from a counter when a customer is not looking; and it may contain only spectacles and old bus tickets after all. So here goes!

A thousand such voices are always crying aloud in Oxford Street. All are tense, all are real, all are urged out of their speakers by the pressure of making a living, finding a bed, somehow keeping afloat on the bounding, careless, remorseless tide of the street. And even a moralist, who is, one must suppose, since he can spend the afternoon dreaming, a man with a balance in the bank—even a moralist must allow that this gaudy, bustling, vulgar street reminds us that life is a struggle; that all building is perishable; that all display is vanity; from which we may conclude—but until some adroit shopkeeper has caught on to the idea and opened cells for solitary thinkers hung with green plush and provided with automatic glowworms and a sprinkling of genuine death’s-head moths to induce thought and reflection, it is vain to try to come to a conclusion in Oxford Street.

[Good Housekeeping, January 1932]

[]

Great Men’s Houses.

London, happily, is becoming full of great men’s houses, bought for the nation and preserved entire with the chairs they sat on and the cups they drank from, their umbrellas and their chests of drawers. And it is no frivolous curiosity that sends us to Dickens’s house and Johnson’s house and Carlyle’s house and Keats’s house. We know them from their houses—it would seem to be a fact that writers stamp themselves upon their possessions more indelibly than other people. Of artistic taste they may have none; but they seem always to possess a much rarer and more interesting gift—a faculty for housing themselves appropriately, for making the table, the chair, the curtain, the carpet into their own image.

Take the Carlyles, for instance. One hour spent in 5 Cheyne Row will tell us more about them and their lives than we can learn from all the biographies. Go down into the kitchen. There, in two seconds, one is made acquainted with a fact that escaped the attention of Froude, and yet was of incalculable importance—they had no water laid on. Every drop that the Carlyles used—and they were Scots, fanatical in their cleanliness—had to be pumped by hand from a well in the kitchen. There is the well at this moment and the pump and the stone trough into which the cold water trickled. And here, too, is the wide and wasteful old grate upon which all kettles had to be boiled if they wanted a hot bath; and here is the cracked yellow tin bath, so deep and so narrow, which had to be filled with the cans of hot water that the maid first pumped and then boiled and then carried up three flights of stairs from the basement.

The high old house without water, without electric light, without gas fires, full of books and coal smoke and four-poster beds and mahogany cupboards, where two of the most nervous and exacting people of their time lived, year in year out, was served by one unfortunate maid. All through the mid-Victorian age the house was necessarily a battlefield where daily, summer and winter, mistress and maid fought against dirt and cold for cleanliness and warmth. The stairs, carved as they are and wide and dignified, seem worn by the feet of harassed women carrying tin cans. The high panelled rooms seem to echo with the sound of pumping and the swish of scrubbing. The voice of the house—and all houses have voices—is the voice of pumping and scrubbing, of coughing and groaning. Up in the attic under a skylight Carlyle groaned, as he wrestled with his history, on a horsehair chair, while a yellow shaft of London light fell upon his papers and the rattle of a barrel organ and the raucous shouts of street hawkers came through walls whose double thickness distorted but by no means excluded the sound. And the season of the house—for every house has its season—seems to be always the month of February, when cold and fog are in the street and torches flare and the rattle of wheels grows suddenly loud and dies away. February after February Mrs. Carlyle lay coughing in the large four-poster hung with maroon curtains in which she was born, and as she coughed the many problems of the incessant battle, against dirt, against cold, came before her. The horsehair couch needed recovering; the drawing-room paper with its small, dark pattern needed cleaning; the yellow varnish on the panels was cracked and peeling—all must be stitched, cleansed, scoured with her own hands; and had she, or had she not, demolished the bugs that bred and bred in the ancient wood panelling? So the long watches of the sleepless night passed, and then she heard Mr. Carlyle stir above her, and held her breath and wondered if Helen were up and had lit the fire and heated the water for his shaving. Another day had dawned and the pumping and the scrubbing must begin again.

Thus number 5 Cheyne Row is not so much a dwelling-place as a battlefield—the scene of labour, effort and perpetual struggle. Few of the spoils of life—its graces and its luxuries—survive to tell us that the battle was worth the effort. The relics of drawing-room and study are like the relics picked up on other battlefields. Here is a packet of old steel nibs; a broken clay pipe; a pen-holder such as schoolboys use; a few cups of white and gold china, much chipped; a horsehair sofa and a yellow tin bath. Here, too, is a cast of the thin worn hands that worked here; and of the excruciated and ravished face of Carlyle when his life was done and he lay dead here. Even the garden at the back of the house seems to be not a place of rest and recreation, but another smaller battlefield marked with a tombstone beneath which a dog lies buried. By pumping and by scrubbing, days of victory, evenings of peace and splendour were won, of course. Mrs. Carlyle sat, as we see from the picture, in a fine silk dress, in a chair pulled up to a blazing fire and had everything seemly and solid about her; but at what cost had she won it! Her cheeks are hollow; bitterness and suffering mingle in the half-tender, half-tortured expression of the eyes. Such is the effect of a pump in the basement and a yellow tin bath up three pairs of stairs. Both husband and wife had genius; they loved each other; but what can genius and love avail against bugs and tin baths and pumps in the basement?

It is impossible not to believe that half their quarrels might have been spared and their lives immeasurably sweetened if only number 5 Cheyne Row had possessed, as the house agents put it, bath, h. and c., gas fires in the bedrooms, all modern conveniences and indoor sanitation. But then, we reflect, as we cross the worn threshold, Carlyle with hot water laid on would not have been Carlyle; and Mrs. Carlyle without bugs to kill would have been a different woman from the one we know.

An age seems to separate the house in Chelsea where the Carlyles lived from the house in Hampstead which was shared by Keats and Brown and the Brawnes. If houses have their voices and places their seasons, it is always spring in Hampstead as it is always February in Cheyne Row. By some miracle, too, Hampstead has always remained not a suburb or a piece of antiquity engulfed in the modern world, but a place with a character peculiar to itself. It is not a place where one makes money, or goes when one has money to spend. The signs of discreet retirement are stamped on it. Its houses are neat boxes such as front the sea at Brighton with bow windows and balconies and deck chairs on verandahs. It has style and intention as if designed for people of modest income and some leisure who seek rest and recreation. Its prevailing colours are the pale pinks and blues that seem to harmonise with the blue sea and the white sand; and yet there is an urbanity in the style which proclaims the neighbourhood of a great city. Even in the twentieth century this serenity still pervades the suburb of Hampstead. Its bow windows still look out upon vales and trees and ponds and barking dogs and couples sauntering arm in arm and pausing, here on the hill-top, to look at the distant domes and pinnacles of London, as they sauntered and paused and looked when Keats lived here. For Keats lived up the lane in a little white house behind wooden palings. Nothing has been much changed since his day. But as we enter the house in which Keats lived some mournful shadow seems to fall across the garden. A tree has fallen and lies propped. Waving branches cast their shadows up and down over the flat white walls of the house. Here, for all the gaiety and serenity of the neighbourhood, the nightingale sang; here, if anywhere, fever and anguish had their dwelling and paced this little green plot oppressed with the sense of quick-coming death and the shortness of life and the passion of love and its misery.

Yet if Keats left any impress upon his house it is the impression not of fever, but of that clarity and dignity which come from order and self-control. The rooms are small but shapely; downstairs the long windows are so large that half the wall seems made of light. Two chairs turned together are close to the window as if someone had sat there reading and had just got up and left the room. The figure of the reader must have been splashed with shade and sun as the hanging leaves stirred in the breeze. Birds must have hopped close to his foot. The room is empty save for the two chairs, for Keats had few possessions, little furniture and not more, he said, than one hundred and fifty books. And perhaps it is because the rooms are so empty and furnished rather with light and shadow than with chairs and tables that one does not think of people, here where so many people have lived. The imagination does not evoke scenes. It does not strike one that there must have been eating and drinking here; people must have come in and out; they must have put down bags, left parcels; they must have scrubbed and cleaned and done battle with dirt and disorder and carried cans of water from the basement to the bedrooms. All the traffic of life is silenced. The voice of the house is the voice of leaves brushing in the wind; of branches stirring in the garden. Only one presence—that of Keats himself—dwells here. And even he, though his picture is on every wall, seems to come silently, on the broad shafts of light, without body or footfall. Here he sat on the chair in the window and listened without moving, and saw without starting, and turned the page without haste though his time was so short.

There is an air of heroic equanimity about the house in spite of the death masks and the brittle yellow wreaths and the other grisly memorials which remind us that Keats died young and unknown and in exile. Life goes on outside the window. Behind this calm, this rustling of leaves, one hears the far-off rattle of wheels, the bark of dogs fetching and carrying sticks from the pond. Life goes on outside the wooden paling. When we shut the gate upon the grass and the tree where the nightingale sang we find, quite rightly, the butcher delivering his meat from a small red motor van at the house next door. If we cross the road, taking care not to be cut down by some rash driver—for they drive at a great pace down these wide streets—we shall find ourselves on top of the hill and beneath shall see the whole of London lying below us. It is a view of perpetual fascination at all hours and in all seasons. One sees London as a whole—London crowded and ribbed and compact, with its dominant domes, its guardian cathedrals; its chimneys and spires; its cranes and gasometers; and the perpetual smoke which no spring or autumn ever blows away. London has lain there time out of mind scarring that stretch of earth deeper and deeper, making it more uneasy, lumped and tumultuous, branding it for ever with an indelible scar. There it lies in layers, in strata, bristling and billowing with rolls of smoke always caught on its pinnacles. And yet from Parliament Hill one can see, too, the country beyond. There are hills on the further side in whose woods birds are singing, and some stoat or rabbit pauses, in dead silence, with paw lifted to listen intently to rustlings among the leaves. To look over London from this hill Keats came and Coleridge and Shakespeare, perhaps. And here at this very moment the usual young man sits on an iron bench clasping to his arms the usual young woman.

[Good Housekeeping, March 1932]

[]

Abbeys and Cathedrals.

It is a commonplace, but we cannot help repeating it, that St. Paul’s dominates London. It swells like a great grey bubble from a distance; it looms over us, huge and menacing, as we approach. But suddenly St. Paul’s vanishes. And behind St. Paul’s, beneath St. Paul’s, round St. Paul’s when we cannot see St. Paul’s, how London has shrunk! Once there were colleges and quadrangles and monasteries with fish ponds and cloisters; and sheep grazing on the greensward; and inns where great poets stretched their legs and talked at their ease. Now all this space has shrivelled. The fields are gone and the fish ponds and the cloisters; even men and women seem to have shrunk and become multitudinous and minute instead of single and substantial. Where Shakespeare and Jonson once fronted each other and had their talk out, a million Mr. Smiths and Miss Browns scuttle and hurry, swing off omnibuses, dive into tubes. They seem too many, too minute, too like each other to have each a name, a character, a separate life of their own.

If we leave the street and step into a city church, the space that the dead enjoy compared with what the living now enjoy, is brought home to us. In the year 1737 a man called Howard died and was buried in St. Mary-le-Bow. A whole wall is covered with the list of his virtues. “He was blessed with a sound and intelligent mind which shone forth conspicuously in the habitual exercise of great and godlike virtues…. In the midst of a profligate age he was inviolably attached to justice, sincerity and truth.” He occupies space that might serve almost for an office and demand a rent of many hundreds a year. In our day a man of equal obscurity would be allotted one slice of white stone of the regulation size among a thousand others and his great and godlike virtues would have to go unrecorded. Again, in St. Mary-le-Bow all posterity is asked to pause and rejoice that Mrs. Mary Lloyd “closed an exemplary and spotless life” without suffering and indeed without regaining consciousness, aged 79 years.

Pause, reflect, admire, take heed of your ways—so these ancient tablets are always advising and exhorting us. One leaves the church marvelling at the spacious days when unknown citizens could occupy so much room with their bones and confidently request so much attention for their virtues when we—behold how we jostle and skip and circumvent each other in the street, how sharply we cut corners, how nimbly we skip beneath motor cars. The mere process of keeping alive needs all our energy. We have no time, we were about to say, to think about life or death either, when suddenly we run against the enormous walls of St. Paul’s. Here it is again, looming over us, mountainous, immense, greyer, colder, quieter than before. And directly we enter we undergo that pause and expansion and release from hurry and effort which it is in the power of St. Paul’s, more than any other building in the world, to bestow.

Something of the splendour of St. Paul’s lies simply in its vast size, in its colourless serenity. Mind and body seem both to widen in this enclosure, to expand under this huge canopy where the light is neither daylight nor lamplight, but an ambiguous element something between the two. One window shakes down a broad green shaft; another tinges the flagstones beneath a cool, pale purple. There is space for each broad band of light to fall smoothly. Very large, very square, hollow-sounding, echoing with a perpetual shuffling and booming, the Cathedral is august in the extreme; but not in the least mysterious. Tombs heaped like majestic beds lie between the pillars. Here is the dignified reposing room to which great statesmen and men of action retire, robed in all their splendour, to accept the thanks and applause of their fellow-citizens. They still wear their stars and garters, their emblems of civic pomp and military pride. Their tombs are clean and comely. No rust or stain has been allowed to spot them. Even Nelson looks a little smug. Even the contorted and agonised figure of John Donne, wrapped in the marble twists of his grave clothes, looks as if it had left the stonemason’s yard but yesterday. Yet it has stood here in its agony for three hundred years and has passed through the flames of the fire of London. But death and the corruption of death are forbidden to enter. Here civic virtue and civic greatness are ensconced securely. True, a heavy bossed door has above it the legend that through the gate of death we pass to our joyful resurrection; but somehow the massive portals suggest that they open not upon fields of amaranth and moly where harps sound and heavenly choirs sing, but upon flights of marble steps that lead on to solemn council chambers and splendid halls, loud with trumpets and hung with banners. Effort and agony and ecstasy have no place in this majestic building.

No contrast could be greater than that between St. Paul’s and Westminster Abbey. Far from being spacious and serene, the Abbey is narrow and pointed, worn, restless and animated. One feels as if one had stepped from the democratic helter skelter, the hubbub and hum-drum of the street, into a brilliant assembly, a select society of men and women of the highest distinction. The company seems to be in full conclave. Gladstone starts forward and then Disraeli. From every corner, from every wall, somebody leans or listens or bends forward as if about to speak. The recumbent even seem to lie attentive, as if to rise next minute. Their hands nervously grasp their sceptres, their lips are compressed for a fleeting silence, their eyes lightly closed as if for a moment’s thought. These dead, if dead they are, have lived to the full. Their faces are worn, their noses high, their cheeks hollowed. Even the stone of the old columns seems rubbed and chafed by the intensity of the life that has been fretting it all these centuries. Voice and organ vibrate wirily among the chasings and intricacies of the roof. The fine fans of stone that spread themselves to make a ceiling seem like bare boughs withered of all their leaves and about to toss in the wintry gale. But their austerity is beautifully softened. Lights and shadows are changing and conflicting every moment. Blue, gold and violet pass, dappling, quickening, fading. The grey stone, ancient as it is, changes like a live thing under the incessant ripple of changing light.

Thus the Abbey is no place of death and rest; no reposing-room where the virtuous lie in state to receive the rewards of virtue. Is it, indeed, through their virtues that these dead have come here? Often they have been violent; they have been vicious. Often it is only the greatness of their birth that has exalted them. The Abbey is full of Kings and Queens, Dukes and Princes. The light falls upon gold coronets, and gold still lingers in the folds of ceremonial robes. Reds and yellows still blazon coats of arms and lions and unicorns. But it is full also of another and even more potent royalty. Here are the dead poets, still musing, still pondering, still questioning the meaning of existence. “Life is a jest and all things show it. I thought so once, and now I know it,” Gay laughs. Chaucer, Spenser, Dryden and the rest still seem to listen with all their faculties on the alert as the clean-shaven clergyman in his spick-and-span red-and-white robes intones for the millionth time the commands of the Bible. His voice rings ripely, authoritatively through the building, and if it were not irreverent one might suppose that Gladstone and Disraeli were about to put the statement just propounded—that children should honour their parents—to the vote. Everybody in this brilliant assembly has a mind and a will of his own. The Abbey is shot with high-pitched voices; its peace is broken by emphatic gestures and characteristic attitudes. Not an inch of its walls but speaks and claims and illustrates. Kings and Queens, poets and statesmen still act their parts and are not suffered to turn quietly to dust. Still in animated debate they rise above the flood and waste of average human life, with their fists clenched and their lips parted, with an orb in one hand, a sceptre in another, as if we had forced them to rise on our behalf and testify that human nature can now and then exalt itself above the hum-drum democratic disorder of the hurrying street. Arrested, transfixed, there they stand suffering a splendid crucifixion.

Where then can one go in London to find peace and the assurance that the dead sleep and are at rest? London, after all, is a city of tombs. But London nevertheless is a city in the full tide and race of human life. Even St. Clement Danes—that venerable pile planted in the mid-stream of the Strand—has been docked of all those peaceful perquisites—the weeping trees, the waving grasses that the humblest village church enjoys by right. Omnibuses and vans have long since shorn it of these dues. It stands, like an island, with only the narrowest rim of pavement to separate it from the sea. And moreover, St. Clement Danes has its duties to the living. As likely as not it is participating vociferously, stridently, with almost frantic joy, but hoarsely as if its tongue were rough with the rust of centuries, in the happiness of two living mortals. A wedding is in progress. All down the Strand St. Clement Danes roars its welcome to the bridegroom in tail coat and grey trousers; to the bridesmaids virginal in white; and finally to the bride herself whose car draws up to the porch, and out she steps and passes undulating with a flash of white finery into the inner gloom to make her marriage vows to the roar of omnibuses, while outside the pigeons, alarmed, sweep in circles, and Gladstone’s statue is crowded, like a rock with gulls, with nodding, waving, enthusiastic sightseers.

The only peaceful places in the whole city are perhaps those old graveyards which have become gardens and playgrounds. The tombstones no longer serve to mark the graves, but line the walls with their white tablets. Here and there a finely sculptured tomb plays the part of garden ornament. Flowers light up the turf, and there are benches under the trees for mothers and nursemaids to sit on, while the children bowl hoops and play hopscotch in safety. Here one might sit and read Pamela from cover to cover. Here one might drowse away the first days of spring or the last days of autumn without feeling too keenly the stir of youth or the sadness of old age. For here the dead sleep in peace, proving nothing, testifying nothing, claiming nothing save that we shall enjoy the peace that their old bones provide for us. Unreluctantly they have given up their human rights to separate names or peculiar virtues. But they have no cause for grievance. When the gardener plants his bulbs or sows his grass they flower again and spread the ground with green and elastic turf. Here mothers and nursemaids gossip; children play; and the old beggar, after eating his dinner from a paper bag, scatters crumbs to the sparrows. These garden graveyards are the most peaceful of our London sanctuaries and their dead the quietest.

[Good Housekeeping, May 1932]

[]

“This is the House of Commons.”

Outside the House of Commons stand the statues of great statesmen, black and sleek and shiny as sea lions that have just risen from the water. And inside the Houses of Parliament, in those windy, echoing halls, where people are for ever passing and repassing, taking green cards from policemen, asking questions, staring, accosting members, trooping at the heels of schoolmasters, nodding and laughing and running messages and hurrying through swing doors with papers and attaché cases and all the other emblems of business and haste—here, too, are statues—Gladstone, Granville, Lord John Russell—white statues, gazing from white eyes at the old scenes of stir and bustle in which, not so very long ago, they played their part.

There is nothing venerable or time-worn, or musical, or ceremonious here. A raucous voice bawling “The Speaker!” heralds the tramp of a plain democratic procession whose only pomp is provided by the mace and the Speaker’s wig and gown and gold badges of the head waiters. The raucous voice bawls again, “Hats off, Strangers!” upon which a number of dingy felt hats are flourished obediently and the head waiters bow from the middle downwards. That is all. And yet the bawling voice, the black gown, the tramp of feet on the stone, the mace and the dingy felt hats somehow suggest, better than scarlet and trumpets, that the Commons are taking their seats in their own House to proceed with the business of governing their own country. Vague though our history may be, we somehow feel that we common people won this right centuries ago, and have held it for centuries past, and the mace is our mace and the Speaker is our speaker and we have no need of trumpeters and gold and scarlet to usher our representative into our own House of Commons.

Certainly our own House of Commons from inside is not in the least noble or majestic or even dignified. It is as shiny and as ugly as any other moderate-sized public hall. The oak, of course, is grained yellow. The windows, of course, are painted with ugly coats of arms. The floor, of course, is laid with strips of red matting. The benches, of course, are covered with serviceable leather. Wherever one looks one says, “of course.” It is an untidy, informal-looking assembly. Sheets of white paper seem to be always fluttering to the floor. People are always coming in and out incessantly. Men are whispering and gossiping and cracking jokes over each other’s shoulders. The swing doors are perpetually swinging. Even the central island of control and dignity where the Speaker sits under his canopy, is a perching ground for casual members who seem to be taking a peep at the proceedings at their ease. Legs rest on the edge of the table where the mace lies suspended; and the secrets which repose in the two brass-bound chests on either side of the table are not immune from the prod of an occasional toe. Dipping and rising, moving and settling, the Commons remind one of a flock of birds settling on a stretch of ploughed land. They never alight for more than a few minutes; some are always flying off, others are always settling again. And from the flock rises the gabbling, the cawing, the croaking of a flock of birds, disputing merrily and with occasional vivacity over some seed, worm, or buried grain.

One has to say to oneself severely, “But this is the House of Commons. Here the destinies of the world are altered. Here Gladstone fought, and Palmerston and Disraeli. It is by these men that we are governed. We obey their orders every day of the year. Our purses are at their mercy. They decide how fast we shall drive our cars in Hyde Park; also whether we shall have war or peace.” But we have to remind ourselves; for to look at they do not differ much from other people. The standard of dress is perhaps rather high. We look down upon some of the glossiest top hats still to be seen in England. A magnificent scarlet buttonhole blazes here and there. Everybody has been well fed and given a good education doubtless. But what with their chatter and laughter, their high spirits, and impatience and irreverence, they are not a whit more judicious, or more dignified, or more respectable-looking than any other assembly of citizens met to debate parish business or to give prizes for fat oxen. This is true; but after a time some curious difference makes itself suspected. We feel that the Commons is a body of a certain character; it has been in existence for a long time; it has its own laws and licences. It is irreverent in a way of its own; and so, presumably, reverent too in its own way. It has somehow a code of its own. People who disregard this code will be unmercifully chastened; those who are in accord with it will be easily condoned. But what it condemns and what it condones, only those who are in the secret of the House can say. All we can be sure of is that a secret there is. Perched up high as we are, under the rule of an official who follows the prevailing informality by crossing his legs and scribbling notes on his knee, we feel sure that nothing could be easier than to say the wrong thing, either with the wrong levity or the wrong seriousness, and that no assurance of virtue, genius, valour is here sure of success if something else—some indefinable quality—is omitted.

But how, one asks, remembering Parliament Square, are any of these competent, well-groomed gentlemen going to turn into statues? For Gladstone, for Pitt, or for Palmerston even, the transition was perfectly easy. But look at Mr. Baldwin—he has all the look of a country gentleman poking pigs; how is he going to mount a plinth and wrap himself decorously in a towel of black marble? No statue that did not render the shine of Sir Austen’s top hat could do justice to him. Mr. Henderson seems constitutionally opposed to the pallor and severity of marble. As he stands there answering questions his fair complexion flushes scarlet, and his yellow hair seems to have been sleeked down with a wet brush ten minutes ago. Sir William Jowitt, it is true, might, if one took off his spruce bow tie, sit to some sculptor for a bust much in the style of the Prince Consort. Ramsay MacDonald has “features,” as the photographers say, and could fill a marble chair in a public square without looking conspicuously ridiculous. But for the rest, the transition into marble is unthinkable. Mobile, irreverent, commonplace, snub-nosed, red-jowled, squires, lawyers, men of business—their prime quality, their enormous virtue lies surely in the fact that no more normal, average, decent-looking set of human beings could be found in the four kingdoms. The flashing eye, the arched brow, the nervous, sensitive hand—these would be unseemly and out of place here. The abnormal man would be pecked to death by all these cheerful sparrows. Look how irreverently they treat the Prime Minister himself. He has to submit to being questioned and cross-examined by a youth who seems to have rolled out of a punt on the river; or again to be heckled by a stubby little man who, to judge by his accent, must have been shovelling sugar into little blue bags behind a counter before he came to Westminster. Neither shows the least trace of fear or reverence. If the Prime Minister should one of these days turn into a statue, this apotheosis will not be reached here among the irreverent Commons.

All this time the fire of question and answer had popped and cracked incessantly; at last it stopped. The Secretary for Foreign Affairs rose, raised some typewritten sheets and read, clearly and firmly, a statement about some difficulty with Germany. He had seen the German Ambassador at the Foreign Office on Friday; he had said this, he had said that. He had crossed to Paris and seen M. Briand on Monday. They had agreed to this, they had suggested that. A plainer, a graver, a more business-like pronouncement could not be imagined. And as he spoke so directly, so firmly, a block of rough stone seemed to erect itself there on the Government benches. In other words, as one listened to the Secretary for Foreign Affairs endeavouring to guide our relations with Germany, it seemed clear that these ordinary-looking business-like men are responsible for acts which will remain when their red cheeks and top hats and check trousers are dust and ashes. Matters of great moment, which affect the happiness of people, the destinies of nations, are here at work chiselling and carving these very ordinary human beings. Down on this stuff of common humanity comes the stamp of a huge machine. And the machine itself and the man upon whom the stamp of the machine descends are both plain, featureless, impersonal.

Time was when the Foreign Secretary manipulated facts, toyed with them, elaborated them, and used all the resources of art and eloquence to make them appear what he chose they should appear to the people who had to accept his will. He was no common hard-worked man of business, with a small car and a villa and a great longing to get an afternoon off and play golf with his sons and daughters on a Surrey common. The Minister was once dressed to fit his part. Fulminations, perorations shook the air. Men were persuaded, juggled with, played upon. Pitt thundered; Burke was sublime. Individuality was allowed to unfold itself. Now no single human being can withstand the pressure of human affairs. They sweep over him and obliterate him; they leave him featureless, anonymous, their instrument merely. The conduct of affairs has passed from the hands of individuals to the hands of committees. Even committees can only guide them and hasten them and sweep them on to other committees. The intricacies and elegancies of personality are trappings that get in the way of business. The supreme need is despatch. A thousand ships come to anchor in the docks every week; how many thousand causes do not come daily to be decided in the House of Commons? Thus if statues are to be raised, they will become more and more monolithic, plain and featureless. They will cease to record Gladstone’s collars, Dizzy’s curl and Palmerston’s wisp of straw. They will be like granite plinths set on the tops of moors to mark battles. The days of single men and personal power are over. Wit, invective, passion, are no longer called for. Mr. MacDonald is addressing not the small separate ears of his audience in the House of Commons, but men and women in factories, in shops, in farms on the veldt, in Indian villages. He is speaking to all men everywhere, not to us sitting here. Hence the clarity, the gravity, the plain impersonality of his statement. But if the days of the small separate statue are over, why should not the age of architecture dawn? That question asks itself as we leave the House of Commons. Westminster Hall raises its immense dignity as we pass out. Little men and women are moving soundlessly about the floor. They appear minute, perhaps pitiable; but also venerable and beautiful under the curve of the vast dome, under the perspective of the huge columns. One would rather like to be a small nameless animal in a vast cathedral. Let us rebuild the world then as a splendid hall; let us give up making statues and inscribing them with impossible virtues.

Let us see whether democracy which makes halls cannot surpass the aristocracy which carved statues. But there are still innumerable policemen. A blue giant stands at every door to see that we do not hurry on with our democracy too fast. “Admission is on Saturdays only between the hours of ten and twelve.” That is the kind of notice that checks our dreaming progress. And must we not admit a distinct tendency in our corrupt mind soaked with habit to stop and think: “Here stood King Charles when they sentenced him to death; here the Earl of Essex; and Guy Fawkes; and Sir Thomas More.” The mind, it seems, likes to perch, in its flight through empty space, upon some remarkable nose, some trembling hand; it loves the flashing eye, the arched brow, the abnormal, the particular, the splendid human being. So let us hope that democracy will come, but only a hundred years hence, when we are beneath the grass; or that by some stupendous stroke of genius both will be combined, the vast hall and the small, the particular, the individual human being.

[Good Housekeeping, October 1932]

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Portrait of a Londoner.

Nobody can be said to know London who does not know one true Cockney—who cannot turn down a side street, away from the shops and the theatres, and knock at a private door in a street of private houses.

Private houses in London are apt to be much of a muchness. The door opens on a dark hall; from the dark hall rises a narrow staircase; off the landing opens a double drawing-room, and in this double drawing-room are two sofas on each side of a blazing fire, six armchairs, and three long windows giving upon the street. What happens in the back half of the drawing-room which looks upon the gardens of other houses is often a matter of considerable conjecture. But it is with the front drawing-room that we are here concerned; for Mrs. Crowe always sat there in an armchair by the fire; it was there that she had her being; it was there that she poured out tea.

That she was born in the country seems, though strange, to be a fact: that she sometimes left London, in those summer weeks when London ceases to be London, is also true. But where she went or what she did when she was out of London, when her chair was empty, her fire unlit and her table unlaid, nobody knew or could imagine. To figure Mrs. Crowe in her black dress and her veil and her cap, walking in a field among turnips or climbing a hill where cows were grazing, is beyond the scope of the wildest imagination.

There by the fire in winter, by the window in summer, she had sat for sixty years—but not alone. There was always someone in the armchair opposite, paying a call. And before the first caller had been seated ten minutes the door always opened, and the maid Maria, she of the prominent eyes and prominent teeth, who had opened the door for sixty years, opened it once more and announced a second visitor; and then a third, and then a fourth.

A tête-à-tête with Mrs. Crowe was unknown. She disliked tête-à-têtes. It was part of a peculiarity that she shared with many hostesses that she was never specially intimate with anyone. For example, there was always an elderly man in the corner by the cabinet—who seemed, indeed, as much a part of that admirable piece of eighteenth-century furniture as its own brass claws. But he was always addressed as Mr. Graham—never John, never William: though sometimes she would call him “dear Mr. Graham” as if to mark the fact that she had known him for sixty years.

The truth was she did not want intimacy; she wanted conversation. Intimacy has a way of breeding silence, and silence she abhorred. There must be talk, and it must be general, and it must be about everything. It must not go too deep, and it must not be too clever, for if it went too far in either of these directions somebody was sure to feel out of it, and to sit balancing his tea-cup, saying nothing.

Thus Mrs. Crowe’s drawing-room had little in common with the celebrated salons of the memoir writers. Clever people often came there—judges, doctors, members of parliament, writers, musicians, people who travelled, people who played polo, actors and complete nonentities, but if anyone said a brilliant thing it was felt to be rather a breach of etiquette—an accident that one ignored, like a fit of sneezing, or some catastrophe with a muffin. The talk that Mrs. Crowe liked and inspired was a glorified version of village gossip. The village was London, and the gossip was about London life. But Mrs. Crowe’s great gift consisted in making the vast metropolis seem as small as a village with one church, one manor house and twenty-five cottages. She had first-hand information about every play, every picture show, every trial, every divorce case. She knew who was marrying, who was dying, who was in town and who was out. She would mention the fact that she had just seen Lady Umphleby’s car go by, and hazard a guess that she was going to visit her daughter whose baby had been born last night, just as a village woman speaks of the Squire’s lady driving to the station to meet Mr. John, who is expected down from town.

And as she had made these observations for the past fifty years or so, she had acquired an amazing store of information about the lives of other people. When Mr. Smedley, for instance, said that his daughter was engaged to Arthur Beecham, Mrs. Crowe at once remarked that in that case she would be a cousin twice removed to Mrs. Firebrace, and in a sense niece to Mrs. Burns, by her first marriage with Mr. Minchin of Blackwater Grange. But Mrs. Crowe was not in the least a snob. She was merely a collector of relationships; and her amazing skill in this direction served to give a family and domestic character to her gatherings, for it is surprising how many people are twentieth cousins, if they did but know it.

To be admitted to Mrs. Crowe’s house was therefore to become the member of a club, and the subscription demanded was the payment of so many items of gossip every year. Many people’s first thought when the house caught fire or the pipes burst or the housemaid decamped with the butler, must have been “I will run round and tell that to Mrs. Crowe.” But here again distinctions had to be observed. Certain people had the right to run round at lunchtime; others, and these were the most numerous, must go between the hours of five and seven. The class who had the privilege of dining with Mrs. Crowe was a small one. Perhaps only Mr. Graham and Mrs. Burke actually dined with her, for she was not a rich woman. Her black dress was a trifle shabby; her diamond brooch was always the same diamond brooch. Her favourite meal was tea, because the tea-table can be supplied economically, and there is an elasticity about tea which suited her gregarious temper. But whether it was lunch or tea, the meal had a distinct character, just as a dress and her jewellery suited her to perfection and had a fashion of their own. There would be a special cake, a special pudding—something peculiar to the house and as much part of the establishment as Maria the old servant, or Mr. Graham the old friend, or the old chintz on the chair, or the old carpet on the floor.

That Mrs. Crowe must sometimes have taken the air, that she did sometimes become a guest at other people’s luncheons and teas, is true. But in society she seemed furtive and fragmentary and incomplete, as if she had merely looked in at the wedding or the evening party or the funeral to pick up some scraps of news that she needed to complete her own hoard. Thus she was seldom induced to take a seat; she was always on the wing. She looked out of place among other people’s chairs and tables; she must have her own chintzes and her own cabinet and her own Mr. Graham under it in order to be completely herself. As years went on these little raids into the outer world practically ceased. She had made her nest so compact and so complete that the outer world had not a feather or a twig to add to it. Her own cronies were so faithful, moreover, that she could trust them to convey any little piece of news that she ought to add to her collection. It was unnecessary that she should leave her own chair by the fire in winter, by the window in summer. And with the passage of years her knowledge became, not more profound—profundity was not her line—but more rounded, and more complete. Thus if a new play were a great success, Mrs. Crowe was able next day not merely to record the fact with a sprinkle of amusing gossip from behind the scenes, but she could cast back to other first nights, in the eighties, in the nineties, and describe what Ellen Terry had worn, what Duse had done, how dear Mr. Henry James had said—nothing very remarkable perhaps; but as she spoke it seemed as if all the pages of London life for fifty years past were being lightly shuffled for one’s amusement. There were many; and the pictures on them were bright and brilliant and of famous people; but Mrs. Crowe by no means dwelt on the past—she by no means exalted it above the present.

Indeed, it was always the last page, the present moment that mattered most. The delightful thing about London was that it was always giving one something new to look at, something fresh to talk about. One only had to keep one’s eyes open; to sit down in one’s own chair from five to seven every day of the week. As she sat in her chair with her guests ranged round she would give from time to time a quick bird-like glance over her shoulder at the window, as if she had half an eye on the street, as if she had half an ear upon the cars and the omnibuses and the cries of the paper boys under the window. Why, something new might be happening this very moment. One could not spend too much time on the past: one must not give all one’s attention to the present.

Nothing was more characteristic and perhaps a little disconcerting than the eagerness with which she would look up and break her sentence in the middle when the door opened and Maria, grown very portly and a little deaf, announced someone new. Who was about to enter? What had he or she got to add to the talk? But her deftness in extracting whatever might be their gift, her skill in throwing it into the common pool, were such that no harm was done; and it was part of her peculiar triumph that the door never opened too often; the circle never grew beyond her sway.

Thus, to know London not merely as a gorgeous spectacle, a mart, a court, a hive of industry, but as a place where people meet and talk, laugh, marry, and die, paint, write and act, rule and legislate, it was essential to know Mrs. Crowe. It was in her drawing-room that the innumerable fragments of the vast metropolis seemed to come together into one lively, comprehensible, amusing and agreeable whole. Travellers absent for years, battered and sun-dried men just landed from India or Africa, from remote travels and adventures among savages and tigers, would come straight to the little house in the quiet street to be taken back into the heart of civilisation at one stride. But even London itself could not keep Mrs. Crowe alive for ever. It is a fact that one day Mrs. Crowe was not sitting in the armchair by the fire as the clock struck five; Maria did not open the door; Mr. Graham had detached himself from the cabinet. Mrs. Crowe is dead, and London—no, though London still exists, London will never be the same city again.

[Good Housekeeping, December 1932]

[]

THE
LETTERS

of
Virginia Woolf

edited by
Nigel Nicolson &
Joanne Trautmann

published
1975-1980
by
The Hogarth Press

the letters

The Flight of the Mind [The Letters Vol. I: 1888-1912] (Virginia Stephen)

Letters 1-7

Letters 8-41

Letters 42-164

Letters 165-178

Letters 179-188

Letters 189-221

Letters 222-285

Letters 286-326

Letters 327-388

Letters 389-447

Letters 448-498

Letters 499-515

Letters 516-548

Letters 549-570

Letters 571-592

Letters 593-638

The Question of Things Happening [The Letters Vol. II: 1912-1922]

Letters 639-656 (August-December 1912)

Letters 657-674 (January-June 1913)

Letters 675-682 (July-December 1913)

Letters 683-707 (January-July 1914)

Letters 708-716 (August-December 1914)

Letters 717-738 (January-December 1915)

Letters 739-756 (January-April 1916)

Letters 757-788 (May-mid-September 1916)

Letters 789-813 (mid-September-December 1916)

Letters 814-855 (January-July 1917)

Letters 856-899 (August-December 1917)

Letters 900-932 (January-mid-May 1918)

Letters 933-987 (mid-May-mid-November 1918)

Letters 988-1001 (mid-November-December 1918)

Letters 1002-1065 (January-June 1919)

Letters 1066-1106 (July-December 1919)

Letters 1107-1160 (January-December 1920)

Letters 1161-1179 (January-May 1921)

Letters 1180-1208 (June-December 1921)

Letters 1209-1261 (January-June 1922)

Letters 1262-1295 (July-early-October 1922)

Letters 1296-1340 (October-December 1922)

A Change of Perspective [The Letters Vol. III: 1923-1928]

Letters 1341-1373 (January–March 1923)

Letters 1374-1382 (April 1923)

Letters 1383-1414 (May–July 1923)

Letters 1415-1434 (August–December 1923)

Letters 1435-1457 (January–mid-April 1924)

Letters 1458-1488 (mid-April–July 1924)

Letters 1489-1522 (August–December 1924)

Letters 1523-1544 (January–March 1925)

Letters 1545-1570 (April–July 1925)

Letters 1571-1601 (August–November 1925)

Letters 1602-1612 (December 25–mid-January 1926)

Letters 1613-1637 (mid-January–mid-May 1926)

Letters 1638-1658 (mid-May–July 1926)

Letters 1659-1679 (August–mid. October 1926)

Letters 1680-1702 (mid October–December 1926)

Letters 1703-1740 (January–March 1927)

Letters 1741-1748 (April 1923)

Letters 1749-1792 (May–July 1927)

Letters 1793-1818 (August–early-October 1927)

Letters 1819-1843 (October–December 1927)

Letters 1844-1874 (January–March 1928)

Letters 1875-1910 (end-March–mid-July 1928)

Letters 1911-1925 (July–September 1928)

Letters 1926-1935 (end-September–early-October 1928)

Letters 1936-1977 (early-October–December 1928)

A Reflection of the Other Person [The Letters Vol. IV: 1929-1931]

Letters 1978-2006 (January–February 1929)

Letters 2007-2035 (March–May 1929)

Letters 2036-2078 (June–September 1929)

Letters 2079-2119 (October–December 1929)

Letters 2120-2145 (January-February 1930)

Letters 2146-2171 (February–April 1930)

Letters 2172-2213 (May–July 1930)

Letters 2214-2246 (August–September 1930)

Letters 2247-2299 (October–December 1930)

Letters 2300-2353 (January–April 1931)

Letters 2354-2367 (April 1931)

Letters 2368-2406 (May–July 1931)

Letters 2407-2450 (July–October 1931)

The Sickle Side of the Moon [The Letters Vol. V: 1932-1935]

Letters 2501-2572 (January-April 1932)

Letters 2573-2585 (April-May 1932)

Letters 2586-2615 (May-July 1932)

Letters 2616-2639 (August-September 1932)

Letters 2640-2687 (October-December 1932)

Letters 2688-2733 (January-April 1933)

Letters 2734-2739 (May 1933)

Letters 2740-2767 (June-July 1933)

Letters 2768-2800 (August-September 1933)

Letters 2801-2841 (October-December 1933)

Letters 2842-2882 (January-April 1934)

Letters 2883-2889 (April-May 1934)

Letters 2890-2914 (May-July 1934)

Letters 2915-2937 (August-September 1934)

Letters 2938-2970 (October-December 1934)

Letters 2971-3014 (January-April 1935)

Letters 3015-3025 (May 1935)

Letters 3026-3066 (June-September 1935)

Letters 3067-3091 (October-December 1935)

Leave the Letters Till We’re Dead [The Letters Vol. VI: 1936-1941]

Letters 3092-3117 (January-March 1936)

Letters 3118-3151 (April-July 1936)

Letters 3152-3179 (July-October 1936)

Letters 3180-3206 (October-December 1936)

Letters 3207-3247 (January-May 1937)

Letters 3248-3285 (May-July 1937)

Letters 3286-3321 (August-October 1937)

Letters 3322-3344 (October-December 1937)

Letters 3345-3401 (January-June 1938)

Letters 3402-3426 (June-July 1938)

Letters 3427-3458 (August-October 1938)

Letters 3459-3474 (October-December 1938)

Letters 3475-3518 (January-June 1939)

Letters 3519-3549 (June-September 1939)

Letters 3550-3577 (September-December 1939)

Letters 3578-3603 (January-April 1940)

Letters 3604-3642 (May-September 1940)

Letters 3643-3674 (September-December 1940)

Letters 3675-3701 (January-mid-March 1941)

Letters 3702-3710 (March 18-28, 1941)

[]

Abbreviations at foot of letters

Berg: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature in the New York Public Library (Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations).

Sussex: University of Sussex Library, Brighton.

Hatfield: The Marquess of Salisbury (Cecil Papers), Hatfield House, Hertfordshire.

Texas; The Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas, at Austin, Texas.

King’s: King’s College Library, Cambridge.

The Flight of the Mind
[The Letters Vol. I: 1888-1912]
(Virginia Stephen)

Letters 1-7

1: To James Russell Lowell, From Leslie Stephen and Virginia Stephen

20.8.88

[22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.]

My dear Lowell,

This is a spontaneous production of Miss Stephen, on seeing a picture of the Adirondacks and hearing that you had been there. She expresses the sentiments of the family in the last clause of the document. You will see that I am lazy in the mornings and amusing myself by reading lessons with the children instead of dictionarying. I am thereby growing fat and shall be glad indeed if I can bestow some of my idleness upon you. We are all well—the children in exuberant spirits and we have better weather here than elsewhere in these islands. So come and have your share.

Ever yours afftely,

L. Stephen

my dear godpapa have you been to the adirondacks and have you seen lots of wild beasts and a lot of birds in their nests you are a naughty man not to come here good bye

Your affecte
virginia

Houghton Library, Harvard University

[]

2: To Thoby Stephen

Friday March 6th [1896]

Typewritten

[22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.]

My dear Thoby,

How does the [family] Museum get on? Father says that they have discovered an ape which is nearer to a man than anything else which has been yet found. Of course they mean the genus “Sambo”, which doubtless you remember capturing twenty years ago with me. Mr Gibbses Butlers wife, keeps a venerable dachshund. This animal resolutely refuses to wear a muzzle, she says it screams at the sight of one, and so they are going to buy a cage to take it out in!

It is so windy to day, that Miss Jan [Virginia herself] is quite afraid of venturing out. The other day her skirt was blown over her head, and she trotted along in a pair of red flannel drawers to the great amusement of the Curate who happened to be coming out of Church. She swears that she blushed the colour of the said drawers, but that must be taken for granted. I have nothing to tell you, Your Highness; and my candle insists upon tumbling over every five minutes; and Nessa is snarling at the noise; and my Virgil must be looked out; and I expect that you must go into school; so Good Bye, your Mightiness; write to me when feel so inclined; your loving Goatus Esq….

Are you interested in the Italians, and what is it all about, and which side am I?

Dictated by father

I want to see how quick this wretched girl can typewrite. I think that she does it rather better than I had expected. My cold is better and I hope that I shall see you on Thursday.

Leslie Stephen

King’s

[]

3: To Thoby Stephen

[26 January 1897]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My dear Thoby,

The size of the film is 3½ x 2 5/8. We have just finished the remains of my cake, which was an extremely good plumless Madeira one! Gerald [Duckworth] tipped me £1, Stella [Duckworth] gave me the arm chair in which I am now sitting, Adrian [Stephen] a holder for my pen, father a Lockhart’s Life of Scott (which has not yet come), cousin Mia a diary, and Mrs [F. W.] Gibbs a most gorgeous gilt edged, wide margined beautifully printed and engraved book by Mr Creighton—a life of Queen Elizabeth—which I shall have to try and get through—

Adrian was very much pleased when I told him of Georgie’s [Duckworth] 10 shillings, which came this morning—We are eating Aunt Marys [Fisher] jams—How do you like your lot?

This is not supposed to be a proper letter, such as you are going to write me, but there is nothing much to say. It is quite freezing today, with the coldest wind I ever felt—I have taken to wearing red woollen cuffs, and sit over the fire all day long—

Goodbye,

Your loving,
Goat

King’s

[]

4: To Thoby Stephen

[1 February 1897]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My dear Thoby,

Your films came last night, and I found them awaiting me on my supper plate—Two beautiful packets of superfine celluloid Films! A thousand thanks (as the French say) my dear Herbert for this munificent gift—I shall devote not a few to your remarkable face—at no distant date I trust—Tollbar>that inducement arrives to lure them forth to the light of day, they are securely locked up in the darkest draw [sic] of the “oak davenport”.

Gradually all my presents have arrived—Fathers Lockhart came the evening I wrote to you—ten most exquisite little volumes, half bound in purple leather, with gilt scrolls and twirls and thistles everywhere, and a most artistic blue and brown mottling on their other parts. So my blinded eyesight is poring more fervidly than ever over miserable books—only not even you, my dear brother, could give such an epithet to these lovely creatures. Then Jack [Hills] gave me a pair of “Monier Williams” skates, the best on the market, sir, costing 17s 6d (I had the buying of ’em!) and screwed on to your feet by 8 little screws. They are going to be honored by a special pair of boots, reserved entirely for them during the winter months—a stout but elegant pair, laced, with strong new soles—Such a pair was prepared (quite unintentional) for me just as the frost departed this land, and now the skates along with the films and other precious things are shut up in the oak Davenport—Then a day or two ago I had a letter from Georgie offering me an enclosure, which however was not enclosed—But this morning came a second letter, and a cheque for £1. So our finances are looking up, and will be able to bear the strain of Stella’s wedding presents, tolerably well. How does thy purse conduct itself My Herbert? I hope that the six pots of jam have saved it something as yet—indeed it will require a little time for you to dispose of that jam—our pots were very juiceless and inferior.

There mi-lord! I have just written a long letter to George,—terrible discovery! The leather of one of my Scotts is scratched and shows a bloody red line—I suspect Pauline.

Goodbye, milord, mind you write an answer to this letter, the first half only of which is a letter of thanks.

Your loving,
Goatus Esq

A libel I protest—my skating is particularly graceful and I never once have come to grief this winter—Maria [Vanessa] shall not ornament my letters again in a hurry—

King’s

[]

5: To Thoby Stephen

[24 February 1897]

[22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.]

My dear Thoby,

It is almost halfway through the term now, and no letter has reached me from my beloved brother. “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may”, as your favourite poet says—which is not a very apt quotation I grieve to find on examining my meaning—but the long and short business like non-poetical sum total—is that you must mend your pen without delay, and despatch to dear Viginea (as her friends call her) as many epistles as you can—

The beauty of my language is sick, that I am driven to confess the reason o’t—Mr Payn sent father a book which is a great help to him (Mr Payn) in his writings—called the Thesaurus of English Words—Perhaps you can explain Thesaurus—but the object of the Work is to provide poor scant languaged authors, with three or four different words for the same idea, so that their sentences may not jar—This father took as an insult, and accordingly handed it over to me—and I have been trying to make use of it—

This afternoon Stella and I walked through the Park in hopes of catching a glimpse of Her Majesty the Queen—who is in London for a drawing room. We did not meet her however, and had given up all hopes of bowing to her or waving our packlywanks when, on coming back homewards to Hyde Park Corner, to catch our bus, we found a tremendous crowd—Miss Becca (Stella) piloted us across to the gateway, through which the Queen was to pass, and which was lined with people—Just as we got across, there was a general rush and scramble—policemen waving their arms to clear the road, hats flying into the air—and four beautiful horses trotted past us—that was about as much as we saw—the crowd tumbled over us, and only showed one a glimpse of the Queens bonnet bobbing up and down, and her two Highlanders—After this excitement we had to recross the street—Poor Janet [Virginia] was almost crushed by the agitated ladies (they were almost all stout females from the country) who were also making for the pavement—The carriages and busses which had been held back, now poured down thicker than ever, and it was with the greatest relief my dear Herbert that I found myself stranded by St Georges Hospital—Then three or four gorgeous red and gold carriages with red and gold gentlemen inside, passed into the Park—and ladies in white and ostrich feathers from the drawing room, and the sight was over.

The most loyal of Her Majestys subjects stood in the road till she should return from her drive, but I regret to say that not even another sight of the top of the Queens bonnet was strong enough inducement to prevent Becca and me from hailing the nearest Hansom and driving home to tea—All the Green park was crowded, and all Hyde Park—The poor old lady is huzzaed whenever she appears, and crowds watch Buckingham Palace to have the opportunity—

That is all my Court News—now for 22 H P G.

Georgie came back yesterday, and brought a box of presents with him—for Stella a splendid fan—real lace, and real tortoiseshell, with her initials in diamonds; for Jack a medal which a young man always gives in France to his young lady—a picture on it of cupid and a pair of lovers receiving rings—for Gerald a machine with which you make your cigarettes and for father chocolates and French novels, for Nessa a fan, and for Adrian and me portfolios which French school boys use. Stella’s fan cost £20 almost, and Nessa’s a pound each (she has two) so you may imagine what your brother has been spending in Paris.

I do a few lessons with Stella every morning, but nothing very great.

Goodbye your loving,
Goatus Esq

King’s

[]

6: To Thoby Stephen

[14 May 1897]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My dear Thoby,

You do not say whether you consented to write an account of the Museum—but of course, my dear brother, you must do so—this will make your name known in Scientific circles—Talking of Entomology etc: I must tell you that our respected Aunt at Cambridge [Caroline Emelia Stephen] has entrapped a basket full of wireworms by putting sweet cake underground. She cheerfully proposed to present the Society [of Stephens] with this prize; however, I wrote a vehement letter (in shorthand) requesting her to put an end to the creatures at once, or at any rate to keep them for her own private enjoyment only. To which comes an answer (in vehement shorthand also) to say that they have been made way with long ago—how she does not state—

There is no more entomological news for you—except that the chrysalises are still in their maiden(?) state, and likely to remain so—

By the bye—yesterday, while conducting some evacuations in the back garden (for purposes which I will explain later on) we discovered a repulsive shiny brown chrysalis—kicking its tail with the greatest animation. After some discussion we (The President [Leslie Stephen] and I) decided that the pupa was only that of a beetle—and as such was exposed upon the garden wall, to take its chance—of death, by sparrows, or by the entomological investigations of the garden black cat—

The said evacuations have been organised by my revered father: he has presented me with a set of gardening tools—and commands me to convert the back garden—Already we have created a flower bed (minus the flowers it is true) and we propose to renew the grass—to have a border of lilies and other flowers—to rake the whole place clean—in short do not be surprised if you behold a miniature Kew when you are next here—Then, that we may not be wholly ornamental and wasteful—when the winter comes the flower beds are to be planted with cabbages—and one of these days we hope to install a cow or at least a sheep on the luxuriant pastures—

There mi’ lord—this is a truly business like account of my occupations.

Today Stella went out for the first time in a bath chair—she is much better I think—she really looks fairly well and plump. Dr Seton only comes every other day, and he is quite comfortable about her—one of her nurses has gone, and I think the other goes tomorrow or the day after. I spend most of my day over there—when Nessa is at her drawing—

My Dear Dr Seton says I must not do any lessons this term; so I am cast upon the four winds—or whatever the proverb is—Nevertheless, my beloved Macaulay (with miserable eyesight etc—quoth JT.S [Thoby]) is most comforting—and Nessa and Adrian are terribly industrious. A. has just come in to say that he is going to sing in the School Concert!!! What is the world coming to? Now milord: this is a model letter: four closely packed sheets: go thou and do likewise!

Good bye—your loving,
Goat

King’s

[]

7: To Thoby Stephen

Monday [24 May 1897]

[22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.]

My dear Thoby,

I have found out all the paints that Nessa wants, and their prices on the Store list—They are a good deal more expensive than I thought—Adrian is not saying how much money he has got—Stella keeps it for him—and so he cannot say exactly how much he will be able to give—but I expect not quite half. They altogether come to 9s. 4.½.—If you will look at the list, and then send it with a postal order to the stores, so that they may come before Sunday. I will write again, and say how much Adrian can give.

Mr [F. W.] Gibbs has given Nessa and me three tickets to see the Procession—from St Thomas’s Hospital—they are very good places he says. He does not know whether he can go with us himself but he told us to look out for a young man in want of a place who could look after us—So we are going to see him; and ask him whether you do not fulfil all the requirements!

Write to me directly if you think 9s. 4½ too much, and I will tell you of something else to get her.

Your loving,
Goat

Fill in the date at the top of the form. I am signing it.

King’s

[]

Letters 8-41

8: To Thoby Stephen

Monday [27 September 1897]

[Corby Castle, Carlisle]

My dear old Gribbs,

We are left to ourselves this afternoon, and, as some relief to my feelings, I will write to your Highness.

First of all, what a racoon—a wool-gathering racoon—you are to forget the bugs! Now I suppose you will not be able to go in for the prize unless we send them down in a Postal Box—what think you of that plan?

We got here on Saturday, at about 6, having started at 11.30. The house is a great red square country house—rather like the Park at Painswick. There is a great hall where you go in, and drawing rooms opening out of it. I have never been in the midst of such gorgeosity in the whole of my long life. Nessa has a great room, and I have a small one next door. There are innumerable rooms and servants (four gents to wait on us at dinner!) and state rooms and a gallery, and smoking room—We have long long dinners—seven courses—and everything is very stately and uncomfortable. Susan Lushington is here, which is a blessing as she does all the talking, but she goes tomorrow. The river is quite near the house—a river quite different from our beloved Thames—it is most fiery and excitable—Jack has been fishing all this morning but has caught nothing. He is going to fish again this afternoon, and we are going to watch him. Yesterday we did nothing, as Mrs Hills is very religious, and disaproves of fishing and bugging on the Sabbath. Tonight however we are going to sugar. Today we went for a long drive to an old Church [Lanercost Priory] where the Howards are buried, and we have just had luncheon.

It is very dismal and strange, and I wish to goodness I had the wishing gift, and could find myself—next minute—sitting in my armchair over my own beautiful fire at home. Perhaps we shall be able to get away on Friday—I hope so. This place is rather too much of a good thing.

How are you milord, and what are you about? I wish you were here, to wake them all up a little. Mrs Hills has a horrible pet dog, which is always getting ill—it was sick all over the carpet when we arrived on Saturday, and Jack has to hunt for it.

Oh dear oh dear—I wish we were on our native pavement (High St) at this moment—It is overpowering.

Nessa thinks you will never get through this letter, and I hae me doots—

Goodbye my Lord,
Your loving Goatus Esq

King’s

[]

9: To Thoby Stephen

Sunday, Oct. 24th [1897]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My dear old Thoby,

I have not written to you since that awful week at Corby—so methinks it is about time for me to approach your Highness again—

Shall I do any bug looking out? I have plenty of time for it, and I am very often in the [illegible] region—if it would be of any use I can easily do it.

I am beginning Greek at Kings College [London] and two history Lectures—We have got as far as the first verb in our Greek, and by the Christmas holidays you will have to take me in hand—Nessa goes on at her studio every other day, and I march down there to fetch her back generally. That is how we spend our days almost always. I have to write essays upon historical subjects for my history class, and on Tuesday I am going to have my first essay given back to me with the masters corrections.

Jack came back from Corby at 8 o’clock this morning. He is to stay here till his house in Victoria Grove is finished. He has brought a huge salmon, which he caught yesterday. Yesterday afternoon Georgie took Nessa and me to the Moore and Benson minstrels—they are very much the same kind of thing that goes on at Brighton, so you may imagine that dear Dorothea and Rosamond [Stephen] felt themselves rather above such an amusement—However, as a change they [illegible] amusing. I have been typewriting Dorothea’s poems for the last fortnight, and I have grave fears lest her style should have infected me.

Jack brought back the catties [catkins]—he read in his book that to plant them was worse than useless.

Here are some of our Corby photographs—The dog is called Rap, and lives in a huge cart—I dont know to what species he belongs, but he is very well bred and a great beauty Jack says—

The man with the black dog is Taddenham the keeper—and I hope you can recognise Jack fishing in the river—

Goodbye my lord: I must now learn my Greek for tomorrow. My handwriting is rather illegible tonight—so I hope you will have got my drift safely.

Your loving Goatus Esq

King’s

[]

10: To Thoby Stephen

Sunday December 5th [1897]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My Dear Thoby,

Our correspondence has not flourished this term, the fault lying with you methinks? Now the holidays will soon come—thanks be to the Lord. On Friday dear Dobbythinga [Dorothea Stephen] arrived. She is to be here for a week, and already we feel quite swamped. She talks, in the voice you know, every minute of the day, wants no encouragement but goes on so, and will only be stopped by your going out of the room. Then last night as a relief to this, Georgie suggested that she should play to us. Thereupon she started forth to strum upon her mandolin. She sang to it in the most extraordinary voice that ever existed—very high and shrill, and absolutely out of tune from the very beginning. Oh dear what a wonderful creature she is! She has now—6.30—gone to church for the second time today. She refuses to take a cab on Sunday, and has carried off my watch so that she may be sure to be in time for supper.

Yesterday afternoon the Chief came to see us. I only saw her for a moment, but I expect we shall see a lot of them as they have a house in Princes Gardens.

My studies end with an examination, which I shant go in for; Nessa only stops on Christmas Eve.

Oh milord, my fingers are so cold that my handwriting is sadly unlike itself—almost illegible one might say. It is freezing, and the Pond is covered with a thin piece of ice—certainly we ought to have skating by the time you are here. Then I shall have the joy of showing you my room—it is most choice—perfectly sweet, and the most artistic in the whole house.

The Mackenzies [neighbours] dog—a little pugnacious brown mongrel whom perhaps you know, met with an accident the other day—A cab slowly passed over its middle: we were watching and saw it get up and run about as though it was not hurt. But that night it became unconscious and died—I believe Nessas curse had something to do with it. She has a great hatred of the beast—it always fights strays, and a dog fight is her “abhorence” “I wish the little fiend were killed, she said, but I fear there is no such luck” I implored her as a touching and graceful act, to send a wreath to its funeral in token of forgiveness: this I think she would have done, had she not met Mrs [Enid] M[ackenzie] on her way to the Lost Dogs home to buy a new creature.

Gerald is at Eton for Sunday; I suppose you know about the great firm?

Now milord, goodbye. You seem to have been altogether triumphant and glorious this term! Your report was enough to put father in a good humour for a week—

We shall soon meet, but if you feel kindly disposed you might write me a letter.

I am so penetrated with Dotty’s [Dorothea’s] style of conversation that I cant help writing exactly like her.

Your loving Goat

Have you heard anything of the bugs?

King’s

[]

11: To Emma Vaughan

[January 1898]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My dearest Toad,

Your letter was a most delightful surprise—not that I ever expected you to write with such distractions around you!

Here it is so beastly that I envy you: it is freezing hard, and there is a horrible wind. Every morning begins with a deep yellow fog, and we have candles at 3.30.

This afternoon I went to Greek for the first time. There was only Miss Holland, tell Marny, who said she worked two hours a day at her preparation and thought that too little! Dr. Warr asked most tenderly after Marny and said that he should be very much pleased if she would do the exercises and send them to him to correct, and he will give them to me. Of course this is only if she means to come back this term—I said I thought she did. So will you tell her that the exercises for next time are Nos. 56 and 58? Make her do them.

Will [Fisher] has just been here. Hervey [Fisher] seems to have been rather bad, but the other Fishers sound very flourishing. Will you see them again?

Aunt Minna [Duckworth] has gone out suddenly to Monte Carlo and is going to Valescure on her way home. Gerald is also going there in a few days time. He comes back on the 27th.

Mr [F. W.] Gibbs is still living, but they say he must die soon, and Nun (father’s sister) [Caroline Emelia Stephen] has been staying here to say goodbye to him. She caught cold and was ill for 10 days, which was rather idiotic but now, thank goodness, she has gone back to Cambridge.

Mia [Maria Macnamara] came on Sunday—Pat has been almost killed on his bicycle by a waggon, Maive has sprained her thumb, Dorothy is almost mad with earache, Bertie has been ordered to fight the “Bonerwals” and they mayn’t be able to get home in time for the wedding. The best man has had to go to sea, so it will have to be put off. There is all the Macnamara news!

How are you, and why on earth don’t you practise? If you haven’t learnt something new to play to me by the time you come home you know what to expect!

Give my love to Marny and impress upon her her Greek duties.

Goodbye now.

Your loving Virginia

Sussex

[]

12: To George Duckworth

[April 1898]

5 Mills Terrace [Hove, Sussex]

My dear old Bar,

I have been meaning to write to your ever since Sunday, but the post goes at 6, and I have always missed it. This morning your letter with the photograph came. You don’t say what your address at Porto Fino is, so I shall have to send this after you to Rome. By the time you get it we shall be back in London again, which will be a mercy—We have quite come to an end of things to do and Nessa and I spend our time shopping in the Western Road! The Fishers are rather depressed—Uncle Herbert looks very shaky, Emmie [Emmeline] insists upon rushing off to Lyme Regis to a wedding, and Boo [Cordelia] has been in bed with a chill. However last night they heard that Charles [Fisher] has got a first in Mods, and they are all very much pleased. Also your oranges came yesterday and they have stuck them up in the drawing room. It is fine but very windy, and bicycling is very hard work. Yesterday Charles and Nessa and Thoby and I went for a row. None of us could row, and we were almost swamped by Thoby—but we got back safely. In the evening we bicycled to Shoreham and back—and that is about all we have done.

Adeline [Vaughan Williams] and Will [Fisher] have just appeared—Adeline looks most flourishing, and Ralph [Vaughan Williams] is huge.

Thoby has managed father splendidly—Father dines with the Fishers almost every night, and spends the rest of the time lying flat on the sofa—He is extremely well, and says that he is going to set to work again when he gets back. Adrian is of course at 2nd Avenue [the Fisher’s house] all day long. He and Tom [Edwin Fisher] shrimp and fish and hunt days together and I think he has got rather fatter. Nessa and I take walks in the evening when it is cool along the beach; and discuss the universe. We are both eating heaps, and I dine downstairs whenever father is away.

Rezia [Rasponi] does not look beautiful, though she is better than I expected.

Now Nessa and I are going to take some books back to the library. Father and Thoby are going to see the Bird Museum.

Gerald was here on Sunday, and very well and prosperous.

I hope you are enjoying yourself before you come back to your slums. I am only thankful that I am not abroad—London is by far the best of places.

Your loving old Goat

Henry Duckworth

[]

13: To George Duckworth

Saturday April 23rd [1898]

9 St Aubyns, Hove [Sussex]

My dear old Bar,

Nessa has just gone off to the private view at the New Gallery, where she is to meet Gerald. She looked extremely nice, with her Mrs [Sally] Young [dress] and her big hat on. We have just had Adeline and Ralph here, to ask about nurses for Roland Vaughan Williams [Ralph’s uncle] who is ill with peritonitis. But he is getting better now they said. Ralph of course was left outside.

I suppose Nessa told you about our journey: it was successful on the whole, and my bicycle which was left behind arrived yesterday. Father has begun work again; and is making poor old Thobs cram all the morning. Adrian had Macpherter here this morning and Nessa and I went to High Street. We met Kitty [Maxse] which was nice: she was just rushing off to stay with Margaret [Massingberd] at Gunby [Hall, Lincolnshire].

Nessa looks very well I think. The books and everything have been quite easy, and Thoby keeps father quiet. Gerald last night went to a party of spinsters which Miss May Balfour was giving. His two first books were out yesterday. All the trees are out, and the gardens are full of flowers. We have quite as blue a sky as you, I am sure; and altogether it is splendid to be back again. The servants are all well and seem to have enjoyed their holidays. The dining room carpet is a blow—it is much too small, and Gerald says of the worst lodginghouse colour and pattern—but it is going to be removed. Mrs Rowes is coming to lunch with us next Saturday, but you will just miss her!

You do seem to be having a busy time with all those people. I hope the Countess will be nice—Carnarvon I mean. Aunt Mary [Fisher] was so much delighted to hear that Nessa was asked to stay there and says she must go next year.

Now I am going to develop our Frena [?] photographs as I am alone and have nothing else to do. Give Rezia [Rasponi] my love. We must see her some day. She sounds and looks charming.

Take care of yourself and come back fatter.

Your loving old Goat

Henry Duckworth

[]

14: To Thoby Stephen

Wednesday—May 25th [1898]

[22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.]

My dear Thoby,

Your letters have been pouring in upon us—My letter I was greatly pleased to get. I found it on Sunday night, when we came home from Godmanchester. Perhaps Nessa has told you of our heroic determination to pay a one days visit there. We killed two lively rooks with one stone—Nun [Caroline Emelia]; and Lady Stephen. Nun we had lunch with on Saturday, and we spent the afternoon sitting in her garden watching Leah [maid] planting flowers. Then at 4.30 we—Nessa and I—went on to Godmanchester. It is a much nicer place than one would think: very old and quiet and respectable. [letter torn] … have a comfortable house just … and we spent Saturday evening rowing about with Rosamond [Stephen]. Imagine our feelings!—just as we neared a lawnful of people Rosamond struck up “Farewell Manchester” at the top of her voice. It was most terrifying. However now that good work is done and we can rest quiet in our beds. I dont mean to leave London again in a hurry.

You heard about our burglars I suppose? They were and are very exciting. We all lie awake at night and imagine creepy crawly creatures stealing about downstairs. Nessa is most courageous, and only longs to have heard them as they got into the little room. She would then have rushed forth and engaged with them single handed. I, at the top of the house, feel tolerably [letter torn] … they would have to wade through … Sophia before they hurt me. Poor Sophie locks her door carefully and vows that she will die on top of the silver chest—wh. is underneath her bed. By the way—she has been given by Isabel a box of South African butterflies—which box she has given to us. Would you like us to send them on to you? They are not much good, I am afraid. They are unset and most of their wings are off—however some of them are whole and in a good state. Only I dont see quite what we are to do with them. Nessa has been out to three or four dances, but she is still rather scornful of that amusement—poor old creature. I look forward to the time when “Mr. Stephen, the Senior Wrangler etc. etc. etc.” shall escort her—I cant think how she has the courage to go through with it—Fancy sitting out a two hour long dinner, with two strange young men on either side of you! Such gaities [sic] are not in my line. What are you going to give her for her birthday? You know it is on Monday. I should think you had better buy something yourself at Clifton and send it to her [letter torn] … know at all what she wants … to do with drawing or painting comes in useful. You must trust to your wisdom.

Georgie goes tomorrow to Aldershot for a week of camp. It sounds rather beastly. Will you ever have to do it? Our houses for the summer are as vague as ever. Father says he doesn’t care and then insists upon impossible conditions. The [New] Forest though is almost done for: there seem to be no houses for let. Jack [Hills] knows of Rogers’ house in Wiltshire, and Mrs Darwin has been telling Georgie of a large house 4 miles fr. Stroud. I dont hanker after that though.

Goodbye Milord. Remember Nessas birthday—

Your loving Goatus Esq

King’s

[]

15: To Thoby Stephen

Wednesday [15 June 1898]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My dear Thoby,

I doubt very much if you ever answered a long letter I wrote you—except by sending Nessa a birthday present. However tonight I am in solitary grandeur. Nessa and father have gone to dine with Jack, and Georgie and Gerald of course are out. Adrian I have just sent up to bed, after he has toiled through his algebra poor wretch.

Last night we went to the first of our four operas—it was rather long, but we managed to sit it out without a yawn. Adeline and Ralph went with us, and sat holding each others hands, and most enthusiastic. We go every Tuesday and Friday for a fortnight—Think—my dear Lord—you may have the honour of receiving both your dear sisters at your country house [Clifton College] on the 25th. We have both accepted, and if I can summon up courage to sit out a luncheon with the Bogey [Housemaster], and then to undergo a garden party I shall come. I have never really seen your residence—and this time next year you will be flitting. I will try to dress respectably, and behave in all respects as a good goat should. But the prospect is rather alarming.

I had a visit from Madge this morning. I dont know when she is going to Clifton but I think soon. There is no news to tell you and I am dead sleepy, after a day spent in writing Greek exercises and in trudging along the river bank with father from Hammersmith to Putney.

Houses for the summer are still mythical. Aunt Minna wishes us to take a small hotel—at about 20 guineas a week. You would have to act as head butler and Adrian would have to clean the boots. Father has a wild idea of Coniston (7 hours by train and a long drive) but we all sit all our weight on him.

Now Milord we shall meet soon—on Saturday week is it not!

Fond love,
Goatus

King’s

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16: To Thoby Stephen

[June/July 1898]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My dear Thoby,

It has struck me that perhaps Madge and Will would like a photograph of Nessa by Cousin Henry for their present from us. Would you give it the thought of your great mind. I dont know what it would cost, but nothing very great, and I think it is the best present I can think of.

Madge and Will both admire Nessa greatly, and Madge was asking me only the other day whether Nessa could not be made to have her photograph taken. Would your Highness let me know soon if you agree, as we should have to be seeing about it. It could be made a present both to Will and to Madge.

Your loving Goatus Esq

King’s

[]

17: To Emma Vaughan

Aug. 18th 98

[The Manor House, Ringwood, Hampshire]

This stamp was left us by Morants, but I have put it on crooked.

My dearest Toad,

I have no notion where you may be at the present moment—You have made no sign, but remain dumb like others of your race—at any rate, I suppose you are not in London—We were all excited this morning by a letter from Herbert [H. A. L.] Fisher to Father announcing his engagement to Miss Lettice Ilbert—the daughter of Sir Courtenay Ilbert of Oxford. I wonder whether this is news to you, or whether you have heard before from Aunt Mary. At any rate, it is most exciting. Georgie says she is very pretty, and Father imagines her to have money, so it sounds satisfactory.

This house is very nice—the garden is large and the house is comfortable though rather hideous—It has been so hot that we have hardly done anything. Nessa has been lent a horse and she and Georgie ride everywhere: I drive in a sedate pony carriage. We have not been free from visitors since we left London. First we had the three Italians [Rezia, Guido and Nerino Rasponi] for a fortnight, then Susan Lushington and now Aunt Minna. However, she is the last. I wonder what you and Marny are doing. What news have you of Will and Madge (as cousin Mia would say). We are quite in the dark about them—I have lost the address you gave me, and the others say that such a place as Arolla does not exist. But I think you said that that was the place? Are they well, and happy, and behaving in all ways as beseems? Everyone is marrying now—last year we were all single. It is a very sad thought—I am counting the weeks till the 22nd September when we return to our beloved city. I know you share my feelings. At the present moment a tremendous storm is raging. I write by the light of lightning—and rain drips on my head. It will I hope be cooler tomorrow. Nessa and I undo our dresses, pull our skirts over our knees and let down our stockings—but we still drip all over. These are improper details but there is nothing to tell you. I should visit Hanwell if I stay here much longer—is not that your opinion? Tell Marny that I am reading Homer! I can’t do it in the least. I have to look out every word—but I have made out three lines unhelped this afternoon and I feel very wise—Xenophon is too dull to read much of—I fear that Marny has been much more industrious than I have—but looking out words in this kind of weather is too much of a good thing.

Nessa sends her best love and is particularly anxious to know anything about her young people (as she calls them now) that you can tell. Only do write soon, my dear Toad—You said you would write first—I do hope you are having as good a time as you can, but summer in the country is a loathsome thing—

Your loving,
Ginia

Sussex

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18: To Emma Vaughan

Sept. 11th [1898]

The Manor House, Ringwood [Hampshire]

This is a photograph of me which I think is a very striking likeness!

My dearest Toad,

I have been meaning to write ever since I got your last letter, but writing in the country in this heat is very hard. We have had Charlie and Cordelia [Fisher] here for a week and Cordelia is a handful as you know. However, now they are gone. We have had a stream of visitors ever since we came here but no one interesting—unless Dermod O’Brien interests you? Such a fat conceited young man never was. He had an attack in his inside when he was here, and had to go to bed the moment he reached London. It has been so baking that we have been able to do nothing. The only cool thing was to wade in the river over our knees with our garments huddled up in a most indecent fashion. We go back to London in 10 days now—on the 21st—It seems very near, and only the other day since we came here, but I rejoice at the thought of getting back. I have thoughts of learning Latin next term at King’s College. Would you come too? You know some and I know a little, and it would be great fun going together. Besides you would make the acquaintance of dear old Warr. The term only begins on the 17th so you would be back in time. Do think of it.

I suppose the young people are now on their way home—Nessa’s photographs have come, but I dont think them good.

Give my love to Marny, and tell her that I have done hardly any Greek. Xenophon is too dull to puzzle over.

Write soon.

Your loving Virginia

Aunt Anny is about the same but has got to have another operation I am afraid.

Sussex

[]

19: To Emma Vaughan

Sept. 17th [1898]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My dearest Toad,

I find that my beloved Warr gives his Latin classes on a day which is impossible for me, so that I mean to go to Miss Paters Intermediate Latin class, on Tuesdays at 2. You only do reading—Virgil—with her—wont you come to that? I should think it was quite amusing.

Nessa says do you by chance know of any housemaid likely to suit us? Lizzy is going to be married on the 1st October, and we have not got anyone, or heard of anyone yet. Dont trouble—but if you should happen to hear of anyone you might tell us—I am much distressed about your jacket.

Yr loving
Ginia

Sussex

[]

20: To Emma Vaughan

Monday, March 13th [1899]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My Beloved Toad,

In case you have not read your Times this morning, I send you this extract—Goodenough—on the 11th inst. the wife [Maive Macnamara] of Frederick Goodenough Esq., of—Gladstone Road, of a son.

Does not that send you off your head? It cannot have been expected so soon. Think of Mia!

Nessa writes this morning that she does not come until 4.30 so I can give you no news of her visit.

I am now rushing off to dear old Warr. I shall give him Marny’s love. Only one more lesson. You might write and say how the invalided creature gets on.

Your loving,
Goat

Sussex

[]

21: To George Duckworth

[April 1899]

9 St Aubyns, Hove [Sussex]

My dearest Georgie,

Our arrival has been rather disastrous. Thoby had a feverish cold as Nessa told you, but he came on here yesterday evening and seemed almost all right. He had a little fever this morning—101 and we got Dr Branfoot this afternoon. He says that Thoby has a little pneumonia in the right lung, but very slight. He says Thoby is in very good condition and is a very strong constitution. His words were “This is merely a little accident. Otherwise he is perfectly sound, and he will be right in two or three days”. He has to be fed every two hours, and has poultices. We are getting a nurse for the night to feed him. We have not yet got one, but Dr. B. says he is certain of finding one before this night. He says there is no need for the slightest anxiety. Nessa is with him, but I get her out for walks, and I shall make her go to bed early. I think I have told you everything about him. It seems rather ridiculous—He talks away, and is perfectly comfortable now, and an excellent patient Nessa says. We have got everything we want. Father insisted upon having Dr B. again tonight, though Dr. B. said it was quite unnecessary. The Clifton doctor must have been idiotic. Thoby was in bed with fever the whole day on Tuesday, and had pains in his chest, and yet they let him travel the two journeys.

Gerald wrote this morning to say that he had a telegram from Mrs Graves at Davos, saying that she is dangerously ill and asking him to come at once. So he is going directly, and will be away for 10 days. The nurse has just arrived, so that is all right. Father is dining with the Fishers. He is quite cheerful now, and I really think everything is as satisfactory as possible. We went to Nun this evening. She is in good spirits, and comfortable. Rosamond [Stephen] arrives today at Sir Henry Cunningham’s.

We are all flourishing. Aunt Mary said she thought Nessa looked extremely well, which pleased me. We are most calm, and even amused—it is all so Dr. Branfoot is very nice and clever, and Thoby likes him. Nessa has not taken Thoby’s temperature this evening but she thinks it is below 101 and he has no pain. Dr. B. says he is over the worst of it.

So you need not worry about us. I am telling you exactly all I know.

Yr loving,
Goat

8.30. The Doctor has just been—He says Thoby has less pain and is going on as well as possible, and that we have the best nurse in Brighton. Father says I am to send his love. Adrian is very much in want of money to pay debts for birthday presents and for extra reading lessons. Could you sign three cheques for him and send them as soon as you can—

Nessa says you are on no account to come.

Henry Duckworth

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22: To Emma Vaughan

[April 1899]

9 St Aubyns, Hove [Sussex]

My dearest Toad,

I have not forgotten your disgraceful behaviour on the platform which amused our fellow passengers highly. But I cannot send back “Madame” because the sheep dog has devoured it, along with a Cheddar cheese, a shoe of mine, a pudding and a bath bun. But our woes are many, nor do I know how to enter upon my discourse, dearly beloved Toad. But imagine our situation. Thoby arrived on Wednesday evening, apparently well save for a cold. He went to bed early, woke with slight fever—we sent for Dr Branfoot who said to our horror that there was Pneumonia in the right lung! We straightaway sent for a nurse for the night, and next day Aunt Mary insisted upon another for the day. Little Branfoot was most depressing—as he always is, the Fishers say; but after giving us all a scare he said it was a very slight case and that it would be gone in two or three days. However, Thoby is such a marvellous creature that he is already recovered, save for weakness. His temperature is normal, he is allowed solid food, and his lungs are alright. But you can conceive that this was not altogether the most cheerful way of beginning our holiday. We managed it all in the most businesslike fashion possible and they say that he could not have gone on better. But, my dear Toad, the aggravating and damnable (to put it briefly and forcibly) thing about it was that this need never have happened but for the “gross carelessness”, to quote Dr. Branfoot, of your blessed Clifton doctor. Thoby was ill in bed with fever and with a slight tendency to pneumonia the day before he started, and yet the doctor allowed him to take the two journeys all the same—it is only a wonder that things were not much worse than they have been, and if Thoby were not as strong as a horse, he would probably have been ill for weeks. So there! We are all furious about it: Father has written very strongly to the man himself, and Aunt Mary is dreading sending Edwin back to such a hole. Really it is rather maddening. We have had a curious time since Wednesday. Miss [Caroline Emelia] Stephen is here and the divine Rosamond. Rosamond came to tea the other day with Charlie and attacked us before him, whom she had never seen before, on our religious faith! It was amusing: then the day after she came at 10.30 and took us out on to the beach and discussed a future life at great length. I think she is a match for dear Aunt Hester. Lord, what a long letter this is—and you will never be able to read it—I purposely write to you and not to Marny so that her eyes may yet survive to tackle with Miss Pater’s Greek.

It is a vile wet day, with a wind fit to blow the house down. This is just the hour when you and Marny ought to be sitting at tea with us in the drawing room at home. But this time next week we shall be nearer heaven. Brighton is a very good copy of the other place—what do you think? We have really done nothing—Thoby has upset all our plans so much. Nessa and I struggle out with the sheep dog—whose name is Gurth after the sheep herd in Ivanhoe—at our heels, to buy medicine and cotton wool in Church Road. I had a vision today, Jack [Hills] is here for Sunday—we were sitting in the drawing room after lunch. Suddenly I looked up and saw Nessa sitting writing in her trousers!!! My feelings you may imagine—She had forgotten her safety pin—and her skirt had all come undone and this was the result. I laughed so much that I could not say what was the matter. Jack discreetly looked the other way, and Nessa went behind a screen. This is the sort of thing that I have to write to you about. There is nothing else to do.

Oh my dear Toad, how I do love London! It is the most beautiful place on the face of the earth—

The Fishers are all well tho’ I have seen very little of them. How are the Andante’s? We long for news. And the divinity of the Roseate Nose and Aunt Hester, and Ellen, and Towler, and Marny, and the discreet reptile herself! I have a vague idea that your caution is thawed when you take a pen in your hand. Surely it is very different to write secrets than to speak them. I am quite sure that this is your weak point. Please forget your character and write to me as soon as you can. Are you in touch with a curate?

Goodbye at last. I must stop

Your loving,
AVS Goat

Sussex

[]

23: To Emma Vaughan

Thursday [20 April 1899]

9 St Aubyns, Hove [Sussex]

My dearest Toad,

This is only to tell you that my dearly beloved brother is now convalescent—indeed he is to sit up for a short time today, and is allowed mutton chops and beer, without stint.

We shall all return on Wednesday—oh, most blessed day—doubly blessed—though I regret to say that the anniversary was forgotten by us.

I have bought myself a box of nibs broad and vulgar, but more suited to the eyes of creatures that inhabit swamps. The garment in which Vanessa was left sitting was her TROUSERS: Trousers: trousers: trousers now, does the obtuse beast understand?

Oh my dear Toad, tho’ I love writing to you this handwriting is too heavy a cross. It is so devoid of imagination and character. Did you ever write about that Bus horse?

We had tea with Emmy [Emmeline Fisher] yesterday and she told us a piece of gossip which I am sure that you, my dear Toad, will guard from public knowledge despite your naturally expansive nature—

That an engagement will shortly be announced between Olivia Freshfield and Dermod O’Brien!!!

This may be Emmy’s invention, of course.

Give our affectionate love to dear Marny. Nessa and Adrian are at the present moment riding in du Ponts School, and now I must set forth to fetch them. Would that I beheld at my feet a humble creature indeed: but affectionate—The Toadus St. Albaniensis.

Adieu—Your loving Goat

The dog eat a chocolate (2 cs.?) cake yesterday and a cream cheese. This morning he was ill under Nessa’s bed.

I think you might give me some Andante gossip in return for my engagement.

Sussex

[]

24: To Emma Vaughan

[April 1899]

9 St Aubyns, Hove [Sussex]

My dearest Toad,

This is the last letter I shall write, I promise, and it shall not be long.

It has been settled that we are to stay here till Friday which is sufficiently ahemable. But it is raining steadily and there is a cold wind, and though Branfoot says that Thoby may travel on Wednesday, I expect we shall certainly have to stay till Friday, so that I shall not really be in London till Saturday and there will be no time to see about King’s College. So, my dear Toad, I write to ask you to diverge into King’s College one day when you are naturally in the neighbourhood and buy me a Syllabus, the biggest kind they have—Price 3d. You would be angelic if you would.

The weather is vile and my temper is akin to the weather.

Give our love to Marny: Nessa is going to write to her—

Your loving,
Goatus

Sussex

[]

25: To Emma Vaughan

Tuesday June 13th 1899

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My dear and ancient Toad,

We transacted a small piece of business for you this morning; which I hope you will think satisfactory so far. We went to your friend Mr. Swendene (did you get St Albans Rd from him?) and asked further about the Sussex Villas house. It is practically let already, he says; but there is another, No. 6 Sussex Villas, a very nice old house, that is to be let in a month or two; for 75 per ann; and a small premium down. He says the people are open to any reasonable offer. He seemed to think that your not wanting it till the spring was quite a good thing—these people may take it on for another few months. At any rate he is going to write to Marny, and arrange a time for her to go over the place, which, as people are in it, is rather difficult. He said too, by the way, that people had been to him a short time ago asking if St. Albans was to let, or if it was going to be let; but he had said that Miss Vaughan had it—He said that Miss Vaughan would be exactly suited by this house in Sussex Villas, and might make a very valuable property of it if she chose! There—that is very long and explicit! though perhaps not readable to the naked eye of a Toad.

My dear Toad, I cannot write the multitude of questions that arise in my head when I sit down to write to thee—Especially when you are in such company I can only hope that you are noticing and treasuring every word, glance and gesture. You have been away a week today—when do you mean to come back again? Even now you may be seated in the house of my dear old friend Aunt Hester. Oh Toad, you are indeed a privileged animal to have such relations! Did Nessa tell you about Dorothea [Stephen]? We found two postcards from her one morning. On one she said “I intend to spend a week in London from the 24th of June. If my cousins wish, I will honour them by my company”!!!!!!!! The other said among other things—“We shall be very glad if you will spend the summer near us at Warboys—only we think that you will have to change the name to Peace Girls.”!!!!! She is overpowering.

Our news does not run to much. The marriage was rather dull—Emmy hysterical—swarms of Freshfields, Ritchies etc. Florence [Maitland, born Fisher] was there with the children. Aunt Mary almost crazy with delight. Our paper knife was quite successful—but they had 4 others! We have been to our Latin this afternoon; and yesterday was Greek. We had a most delightful lesson tell Marny. We read some of the Apologia and Miss Pater was perfectly delightful—she must come back again. We have practically taken the Huntingdon House. The Parson will accept 9 gns and only minor details have to be settled.

Would that I could utter

The thoughts that arise in me.

(as the poet says).

But I must wait till I see you. I have thought constantly of you—Why do you have all your meals in the garden? It sounds odd to us, we have almost had fires it has been so cold. What are Madge’s household arrangements like and has she said anything about the room on the stairs—the cook’s bedroom. I fear I wax illegible; my fingers cleave to each other—I have been using situation, I can hardly form one letter different from another. Give my fond love to Aunt Hester—and to dear Marny.

Always your humble,
Capra

Sussex

[]

26: To Emma Vaughan

12 August 1899

Warboys Rectory, Warboys, Huntingdonshire (this is all the address necessary)

Dearly beloved Toad,

This morning we heard from Susan Lushington that she arrives on Monday at Huntingdon about 12.30. Some of us must, I expect, meet her there, which means that we shall not be back here until 1.30—I do not know when you will arrive (if at all) but we expect you for luncheon: therefore, to be brief and at the same time explicit; if we are not all here to greet you on your arrival, shd. your arrival take place much before 1.30, we beg that you will in no way feel slighted, but that you will make yourself at home. Go on the Punt—feed the sea gull—visit the stables—examine the photographs—and take possession of our bedrooms and their appurtenances. I fear that Susan Lushington may in some way interrupt our afternoon, but she is sure to be unpacking, resting, and letter writing; besides she is a charming animal and can play the Spinet to perfection. Some other people—toads I should say—nasty slimy crawling things—think they can play—ahem!

You see, my dear toad, that the terrible depression of this climate has not yet affected my spirits. I suspect you and Marny of ulterior motives in thus blackening our minds, or perhaps you are too unimaginative and soulless to feel the beauty of the place. Take my word for it Todkins, I have never been in a house, garden, or country that I liked half so well, leaving St. Ives out of account. Yesterday we bicycled to Huntingdon—and paid a visit to our relatives [Lady Stephen]. Coming back we forgot all our cares—(and they were many—Nessa and I each had a large string bag full of melons which bumped against our knees at every movement) in gazing—absorbing—sinking into the Sky. You dont see the sky until you live here. We have ceased to be dwellers on the earth. We are really made of clouds. We are mystical and dreamy and perform Fugues on the Harmonium. Have you ever read your sister in laws Doges Farm? Well that describes much the same sort of country that this is; and you see how she, a person of true artistic soul, revels in the land. I shall think it a test of friends for the future whether they can appreciate the Fen country. I want to read books about it, and to write sonnets about it all day long. It is the only place for rest of mind and body, and for contentment and creamy potatoes and all the joys of life. I am growing like a meditative Alderney cow. And there are people who think it dull and uninteresting!!!!

This all flowed from my lips without my desire or knowledge. I meant only to be short and businesslike. Poor Toad—when you come I shall say to you—Have you read my letter—And you will confess that you did try a bit on the road and you really do mean to have another shot on the way back. And you are only waiting for a rainy day to finish it altogether. Augusta thinks it bad for your eyesight and Marny has telegraphed “Forbid you to read Virginias letters”. I am a little cracky this afternoon, its the hottest day I have yet lived thro’. I have read a whole long novel through; beginning at breakfast this morning and ending at 4 p.m.

It is now tea time. (Thank Heavens, Toadus inquit)

I am very sorry to have written such a long letter, but I will write a digest in very black ink so as to make up.

Love to dear Marny and all my nieces and nephew.

Yr always,
Goatus

Do find some news to tell us.

We long for some.

Oh October October

I wish you were ober

This letter only to say that we have to meet Susan Lushington on Monday morning so that we may be late for you, but shall be in for luncheon 1.30 anyhow and beg that you will Make Yourselves at Home—and not think yourselves slighted!

The rest all the better for keeping. News of a certain person and another unknown urgently required.

Do you see how much superior this paper is to yours?

Sussex

[]

27: To Emma Vaughan

Monday 11th September 1899

The Rectory, Warboys [Huntingdonshire]

1 Tuesday | 12th
2 Wednesday  | 13th
3 Thursday | 14th
4 Friday | 15th
5 Saturday | 16th
6 Sunday | 17th
7 Monday | 18th
8 Tuesday | 19th
9 Wednesday | 20th
THURSDAY | 21

My dearest Todkins,

You see what a faithful creature I am! At the cost of many hours, and of much hard thought I have observed my promise to you. I have written a long account of our great accident; and I expect a very nice letter to thank me. Do you see? You must read my work carefully—not missing my peculiar words—and then tell me your criticisms and humble thanks. Really I am an angel—no other word describes my character so well. You will find my handwriting a little crabbed perhaps; but this is owing to my enthusiasm in your cause. Yesterday was nipping cold and my hands were incapable of writing neatly; but I said No the Toad shall not have to wait any longer. I will finish this by tomorrow. Well, my dear Todkins—What have you been doing with yourself? Have you had any more attacks, or have you been a healthy toad? Do write me a letter full of thoughts: I like thoughts in a letter—not facts only. By the way, did Nessa tell you of her long letter from Madge—she said that—but I remember you think it wrong to repeat other people’s letters, so I certainly will not say any more about it. Only there were some facts in this letter of great interest.

Tomorrow, dear Marny comes. We had a wild idea of going to Ely and picking up Marny at Wilberton on our way back, but it is rather complicated, and I think we shall stay at home. There is nothing of great interest to tell you; and my hand is so sick of writing after the innumerable pages I have transcribed for you, that I will make my adieux.

Remember Discretion must be exercised. The work is strictly private.

The punt got full of water in the rain that we have had all last week and then Adrian pushed it off into the middle of the pond so that now it is drifting about there almost under water; and if it rains again, it must sink. But we are all too lazy to rescue it. A week on Thursday, my dear Toad! Oh, I shall be happy when I get back to London. All the same our time here has seemed extraordinarily short, and not so bad as usual. Indeed, I think this is a Place of great charms. Nessa and I went for a long walk alone this afternoon; along the road where we drove that evening and you were so frightened of the hay-cart. We walked and walked and walked for miles and never met a creature. Then we sat down by the wayside and gossiped; it was quite Divine. It is Autumn here; the leaves quite turned to gold etc. This is a photograph which you have not seen. I think it somewhat like an ancient beast of my acquaintance.

This is vilely written I admit; but I am writing against time, that is in a few minutes I shall have to light a candle and my arms ache all the way down and I am all bundled up in my chair with an old bit of cardboard to put my paper on. But the great work is written with an imaginative elegance which few can rival. Well, I will not utterly extinguish your eyes. When we next meet—I shall be tapping along Gloucester Road with a stick and a dog to lead me and a green shade over my eyes. You will give me a penny and say “Poor old creature, look Marny—she really is like that old goat we used to know”. Give my love to Virginia and to John and to Millicent and to Maryanne [?] and all my dear friends. Do send me some gossip. It would be like water to a fish.

Your loving Goat

Take two coos Taffy—take two coos (that is what the evening pigeons are saying all round at the present moment).

Sussex

[]

28: To Emma Vaughan

19th April [1900] (Primrose Day)

9 St Aubyns, Hove, Brighton

Beloved Todkins,

I was most grateful for your letter, but for goodness sake do tell me the story of Madge and the telegram—I am longing to hear it and my desolute condition needs all the comfort possible. The ancient animal left for Paris yesterday morning at 8.15 and I expect she will be away one entire week. I am growing into my shell like a tortoise—I am so old and respectable and hardly human. Thoby is here today, but he goes tomorrow morning and then I shall be left alone with my Parent. However I have endless books and Greek (tell Marny—the greatest of comforts to me) and so the time moves along, though I could swear that at least a week has passed since I saw my poor dear old Sheep dog [Vanessa]. We had a telegram last night to say that she had arrived safely, but no letter as yet. She was buoyed up by the thought of seeing the Louvre but otherwise she was rather depressed. Do you know Paris my dear Toad, and what do you think of it? Her address is—Hotel St. Romain, Rue de Roch, Paris, in case you think of writing to her. Oh my dear Tods, what a vile place this is! It is baking hot, with no wind and not a sign of Spring—however that is preferable to a gale on the whole. The place is swarming with actresses and females of all descriptions; we go for walks along the Parade and moralise and look at the Niggers. All the old entertainments are going on, which I remember since I was a Babe in arms—I long for a ride on a donkey.

The Fishers overflow, but they are gradually dispersing—Adeline and Willy have gone and Lettice and Herbert at last. Lettice is looked upon with dislike by most of the Fishers now. They say she is much too talkative and pushing and without a sense of humour. They all adore Janie and Jo [Edmund Fisher], however—and the baby is a great cause of rejoicing. Poor Aunt Mary looks like a washed out ghost. She does everything—runs messages—looks after them all—and no one but Adeline thinks of helping her. Well—I suppose you two infants have been vaccinated and you will soon be flying for foreign parts. Jack [Hills] says that Italy is simply gorgeous now—hot and all the flowers out and the sky as blue as—my brain gives out—this ink will have to do for a simile. At the present moment, it is a most lovely and remarkable blue but I daresay when you get this, it will have turned muddy coloured.

We have no news I think. I hope you will be an angel and write to me soon again. I am as melancholy as Hamlet, and only long to sit alone and read or write to a reptile. I think sisters are too expensive luxuries: I mean to tell mine so, but the worst of it is that there is no way of getting rid of them—

My dear, do you realise how many months it will be before we meet again? Will you have grown a beard, do you think, or shall I have sprouted horns?—

Give my dear love to Marny whom I think of constantly and with tears in my eyes. I do hope Vere [Isham] is reading Thackeray. There is no picture in my mind that gives me more pleasure than that of him reading and rereading Thackeray and playing a tune on the Cello between whiles. It takes me back to the days of my childhood. He ought to write letters like Edward Fitzgerald—The Omar Khayyam man you know—who had much the same tastes and was a man of genius into the bargain.

Thoby clamours for Tea—so goodbye, my dear little swampy reptile.

Always thine,
AVS

[]

29: To George Duckworth

Sunday [22 April 1900]

9 St Aubyns [Hove, Sussex]

My dear old Bar.

This is just a line, because it is time for post, to thank you for your long and most interesting letter—and also to say that there is no earthly reason why you should hurry back [from Paris] on Tuesday, if you want to stay. I am sure that Nessa is really enjoying herself thoroughly, and it is a chance not to be lost. Of course I want her; but a day more or less does not matter—and after all we see each other every day of our lives. So don’t consider me—I am simply flourishing and so is father. We get on perfectly comfortably together. Aunt Mary has told him not to take me for long walks—and our life is most salubrious and comfortable.

Nessa’s letters are frantic with excitement. My only fear is lest she should find it all too fascinating ever to leave it. Don’t let her get engaged to a charming French Marquis—I am sure that they have not the constitution of good husbands. And don’t let her see too many improper studios—The artist’s temperament is such a difficult thing to manage and she has volcanoes underneath her sedate manner.

Father is stretched at full length snoring on the sofa, and this annoys me so much that I can’t write sense. Thank goodness—he has now waked up (is that grammar?) and is going to play Patience. He must go to a dentist. Could you not write and tell him so?

Thoby’s luggage has never turned up, Gerald says. Gerald and Jack have been here all today—Gerald is still very liverish and I am sure he ought to be resting.

Well let me know when you are coming—Will you both come here straight from Dover—or what? It is baking hot—no wind—quite unlike Brighton.

Yr loving,
Goat

Henry Duckworth

[]

30: To George Duckworth

Thursday [26 April 1900]

9 St Aubyns, Hove [Sussex]

My dear old Bar,

I was very much surprised to hear on Tuesday morning that Nessa was going to arrive in the evening. I had made up my mind not to see her till Wednesday or Thursday. But I was very joyful as you may imagine. She will have told you of her adventures—What a lucky chance it was to meet the Gibbs, but father was horrified at your having gone all the way to Calais with her. He said ‘What extraordinary things he is always doing!’

Well—I think it has been a most successful expedition. She looks very well indeed, and seems quite intoxicated with all the things she has done and seen. We have talked hard ever since she came back, and we have not come to an end of it yet. She says she felt like a child, and enjoyed everything like a child. The pictures have got into her brain. She is always bursting forth into raptures about them and [illegible] and the other artist interested her enormously—Everything was interesting—and as for the eating! Words fail her when she tries to describe what that was like. She says she will never be able to go to a London place again. I am rejoicing now that she went. It sounds quite perfect—weather and all.

Your parasols were greatly appreciated. Aunt Mary really liked hers and Boo’s [Cordelia Fisher] came at a most fortunate moment. Aunt Mary had been trying to make her use an old black one, but Boo said it was too ugly and refused. She was very much attracted by the thought of having a real Parisian one, unlike anyone elses. My green and white is the one I really adore. I met an old gentleman on the Parade with a huge one just like it, and I feel that it falls in with my character. The other one too is most elegant—only too elegant.

We shall talk and think of Paris for months to come I am sure. I had no idea that she would enjoy it all so much. You must have managed everything with the utmost skill and care and I am most grateful to you.

I wonder if this will reach you in time. It is cold and windy and horrible since yesterday.

Yr loving,
Goat

Henry Duckworth

[]

31: To Emma Vaughan

[17 ? June 1900]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My beloved Todelkrancz,

Marny insinuates that I have planted the green Fiend in your heart—which makes me exceedingly glad—I wish though that the green Fiend or any other fiend would prompt you to write to me. I have had to make all the advances in this friendship, which is quite against my morals. Marny holds out visionary hopes of a letter—but the posts ‘return the posts return and fall’ and no letter falls on me. Ahem—Imagine whom I have seen within the last week! The very Margaret [Madge] Vaughan herself! and old Sym [Mrs. John Addington Symonds, her mother] into the bargain! I was sitting after breakfast waiting for Nessa to come in from her ride, when a hansom (naturally a hansom) drove up to the door, and the two remarkable females got out—I had to entertain them with my heart in my mouth for 10 minutes all alone—and I would sooner fight under Lord Methuen than do it again! I barely had courage to look at the Arch Vaughan herself—but I thought she seemed very happy and as talkative as a jay. I really have an enormous crow to pluck with you—The first words Madge said were to ask me if I had heard about Will and Sedberg (how do you spell it?) No said I—and then she explained what I suppose you and your fellow conspirator have been sitting on for the last 6 months—like two old mother birds on their eggs. Of course I do not blame you—oh no—but since you think discretion such an invaluable possession, I will try to exercise a little on my own account—Oh it is so interesting about—but I stop myself at once.

Well my dear Todkins—my encounters with the notorious family have been surprisingly frequent. Yesterday Thoby and I and father (Nessa is away for Saturday to Monday with the Normans, whom you and Marny know—at least you have seen young W. Norman) went to Emma Winkworth’s garden party. There we met both the Paters—dressed in the oddest fashions—like Botichelli angels—and as I stood talking to Clara there advanced upon me a tall and middle aged lady in Blue, with a little grocer like man beside her. Good Heavens—who is this I thought, for she was evidently bent on shaking hands with me—Really and honestly, for the moment I did not recognise your beloved Lotta in this apparition! She is enormous. As for her body, I never saw such a shape save in those who are doing business with Infants—and surely she can not already be advanced to such a degree. The waist was just under her armpits, and then she became vast—really noticeable. And her face too was quite changed—grown quite fat and rather dusky red. It is not a change for the better by any means, and I defy you and Marny, as members of the Church of England, to insist upon her Beauty any longer. Even her eyes, which used to be large and sad and mysterious are become commonplace—overwhelmed by the increase of her cheeks. It is most distressing. And she was so silent and stolid and staid and middle aged—save her voice nothing remained to tell of her kinship with the great and glorious Madge. Madge too told us that she had been overhauling Lotta’s wardrobe and—well—it was dull—so respectable—and Lotta thinks she must be middle aged and dress in black always. I think it such a mistake, and I told her so! Cant you imagine Madge’s voice emphasising that? Since I wrote to Marny we have been to Cambridge for the May week, and I have danced at my first Ball. It was the Trinity ball, and the largest of all. We got there late, and everyone was already full up, and Thoby knew very few people, so we did not dance much. Florence and Boo were there, and Alice Pollock and the Hugh Bells (if you know them—M.A.P. calls them ‘the most brilliant girl conversationalists in London’—and Thoby was much attracted by them, and them by him) and various other pretty young ladies of that description—no dear charming old fashioned quiet lovely Toads—but flaunting and frivolous and as garrulous as blackbirds. Boo [Cordelia Fisher] I was rather disappointed in as to looks. Florence had done her hair, in what she called a ‘Roman’ way, very smooth and low on the neck, and with a thick net stretched tight over it front and back. Somehow her face does not light up, as it should, and she refused to dance with ‘horrible undergraduates’ in a manner which reminded me slightly of you! So she and Florence and I sat on a kind of platform most of the time from which we could watch the dancing, without being disturbed. Florence I admire immensely. She is a true descendant of our beloved old French grandmothers and great grandmothers. Nun (Miss Stephen) told me that Florence always reminded her of Aunt Julia [Cameron] in her way of talking; and she is really most beautiful and enough to charm your head off.

Heavens! what a long letter this is! But it is Sunday morning, and I am sitting solitary in my room with no dear sheep dog to talk to, and I cant help writing for the life of me, and you must be my receptacle. Talking of receptacles, I wonder if your arrangements in Switzerland are productive of amusement? Why on earth you should leave Italy—for good as Marny cheerfully says—for all the Alps in creation, I cannot understand. Italy, my dear Toad—only think of it. Aunt Mary writes that Emmy has been ill with dysentery in Florence—having parted with Fanny Noel in a burst of anger—Fanny—my dear Fanny—having so At. M[ary Fisher] says, refused to look after Emmeline, and altogether behaved in the most unkind manner. However Emmy is now recovering and is staying with an Aunt outside Florence. I confess I sympathise with Fanny. Emmy is a trial. Adeline I have not seen for ages, and my practising is now at a standstill. I am, however, feeling a little triumph over the Latin language as though I had stolen a march on it—great rough beast that it is! As for Greek, it is my daily bread, and a keen delight to me. For goodness sake prod Marny till she opens her Greek books again. It seems to me absurd when she has just climbed to the top of the mountain to let herself roll down again like a senseless stone. My metaphors are jangled out of tune by St Mary Abbotts bells, which insist upon calling for parishoners all the morning.

Now it is Monday morning—(I imitate Marny’s habit of writing letters when the inspiration takes me—though I have not Marny’s divine gift of losing the frenzy in the middle of a sentence and bolting off into the other side of the hemispheres—Her last letter was written in installments in this way). Last night we had Sally Norton and Professor Norton (her father) to supper. Mr Norton talked to me about Greek (he is the most cultivated and wisest of men—so father says—and is over here now as Ruskins executor and told me emphatically to read Edward Fitzgeralds translations of Sophocles). Do hand this on to Marny—Nothing else, he says, gives the spirit so splendidly. We have just had a letter from Rezia, in which she says she has been to call on you, and found you gone. Aunt Mary also writes that Emmeline and Rezia have struck up a great friendship, and At. M. is very anxious that Rezia should travel back to England with Emmy, and come and stay at Second Avenue! Rezia promises to come, if only for 10 days.

This letter is apalling; when do you mean to come back my dear Toad, and what do you do then? St Albans is being decorated, and looks altogether dishevelled, with huge white boards up.

Do write to me and make Marny write too.

Give my love to her

Yr loving Goat

Marny’s letter arrived this morning. Thank her a thousand times. Wednesday.

Sussex

[]

32: To Emma and Margaret Vaughan

Monday Aug. 6th [1900]—only one week!!!!!!!!!!

Fritham House, Lyndhurst [Hampshire]

Beloved Animals, and Cousins,

I must send you a word of welcome and greeting, now that you are Home again at last—at least I pray that you are home—you will have set off today (Monday) I suppose—and—Heavens—what a passage you will have tomorrow if our wind here is any relation to the Channel wind! I pity you from the bottom of my heart. However by the time you read this, you will want to forget all your woes, cast off your travelling-clothes, unpack your boxes, and sink into the ancestral arm chairs. I envy you, coming back to England with fresh eyes, and absorbing it all with double keenness. I adore the country now—at any rate this country—and so will you shortly—my dear cousins.

Dear Marny says nothing of her visit, which must take place soon after the Toads. We are breathlessly awaiting an answer from—Clara! We have actually asked her to stay here—and probably some of her visit (if she comes) will over lap the Toads!

Oh Lord—what Talk we shall have in our bedrooms—and wandering down the garden paths o’night, while the moon rises over the Forest and the lights of Southampton shine out in the distance. This place would turn a Grasshopper into a Poet—and we all come out with sudden spasms of sentiment.

I have a Pony and a respectable trap all to myself—the others ride and cycle all day—and in this I drive solitary miles and miles—through the forest and over the moor, and Heaven knows where—Soon they will be no longer solitary. A jewelled reptile will be by my side—“Oh Goat Goat—do take the reins—here’s a Haycart coming!” Do you remember that! Oh my children how many things we shall remember, and what tales you will unfold! Six months almost isn’t it? I shall drive down to the Station to meet you, Reptile, at whatever hour of night or morning you choose to arrive, and then we shall have a gorgeous 10 mile drive up here.

Now, you must go and wash, or have tea, or something, and I have, alas, to change for dinner—

Till the 13th,

Your expectant cousin,
Il Giotto

Do make some mark of your affection for me—Do write me a nice letter,—Here is Nessa just come in from a long ride. She has had tea with our neighbours Mr and Mrs Weston. Mrs Weston is a relation of yours—by all that’s supernatural! and knows both of you well—She was a St John (is it true?) and a great niece of Mrs Pell—She asked tenderly after you. How odd—isn’t it? According to Nessa, she is also the ugliest woman she has ever seen, which lends colour to the St. John story. They are the ugliest race under the sun—and their defects culminate in a certain sancta Johanna who shall be nameless (this is a libel entirely—you are both—ahem—I pine for a sight of Marny’s profile, like a sensitive Madonna—or Whistler etching—and Toad—half of her our dear French great-grandmother—and half a little imp of wickedness.

Sussex

[]

33: To Emma Vaughan

27th Sept. [1900]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My dearest Toad,

Look at this precious scrap which fell at my feet this morning as I was turning out an old drawer full of odds and ends. Where the other half is, goodness knows but I am sure you will prize this as a relique.

Oh Lord, what a long time since Fritham! I have no time now for a long letter. Nessa has gone to stay with Kitty [Maxse] at Dunley till Saturday or Monday and so I am solitary—and you might write and tell me your reptilian doings. I want to know so much, and your news only oozes on to me in drops. What has dear Marny settled to do? Georgie strongly advises Weimar in every way but I am afraid this is too new an idea to be accepted at so late a date. But you are going to take the plunge—you most courageous of all reptiles! I do admire you for it, I can’t say how much.

We saw Madge and Will the other day passing through, and like glimpses of morning sun (what metaphors!) the house echoed all through with shrieks and excitement. Old Lotta came too, staid and matronly, and vague as ever. Shall we really meet at 6 Sussex Place? I know we shall laugh and shock Walter [Leaf]—Oh, how comic to think of!

I don’t know where you are, but as Millicent [Isham] is at Brighton (I think) I suppose you are at Augusta’s [Croft], or at any rate, she will forward to you. By the way, do you see that Warboys has been almost burnt to the ground? 16 cottages, a brewery and a cycle manufactory (Ingle Piggott—do you remember him?) I only fear that poor old Miss Noble has been burnt too—her dairy and cows and pigs all new, which she had just started. I have written for news but hear nothing—poor old Love.

Now I must really dis-robe and wash for dinner—Heavens, I shall have to sit at the head of the Table!

Give my fondest love to dear Marny. We must meet often in London. How long do you stay?

Ask John [Isham] if he remembers me and tell him I am craving for a pillow fight.

Give my love to Augusta.

Your loving
Goat

I wrote c/o on the first envelope—have to take another for all your scruples—Your aristocratic St. John? another envelope wrong—have to take a 3rd!!

Sussex

[]

34: To Emma Vaughan

Tuesday, October 23rd [1900]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My dearest Reptile,

By this time you will be established, I suppose, though we have heard no news of you since Marny wrote and told us of your adventurous journey [to Germany]. I longed for a foreign Count some where in the story, and still believe in one, though the discreet Marny leaves him out altogether. Dear Marny has retired to Barton, as you know, and so our Vaughan news has almost come to an end. But I hope she will find lodgings before long, and then we shall be neighbours. Another house is to be let in Canning Place—do you think that quite impossible still?

Well our only news is the Symondsian wedding—it was the comicest wedding I have ever been at, and I can hardly believe that they are lawfully wedded. It was at 11 o’clock, of all cold unhappy hours, and the day was grey and melancholy. Very few people had been invited too, save gloomy Symonds relations—However, Katharine was as merry as a Grig—laughed and talked to her bridesmaids before the wedding, and walked up the aisle actually nodding here and there as she went. I have never seen a bride so comfortable and composed. But alas—she wore an immense white collar, right up in peaks under her ears, and did not look her best. I am afraid this is the Furse influence. They raced through the service, had no address, and it was all over in a twinkling. Both of them made their answers loudly and in their ordinary voices. Katharine’s veil came off as she walked down on Charles’ arm, and Charles stopped and borrowed a pin and pinned it on again, to the great amusement of the congregation. And the organ played real dance music—which seemed quite appropriate to this peculiar wedding. Then we all went and had ices (of all things at 12 O’clock on an October morning!) and cucumber sandwiches—in the Hotel. Old Sym [Mrs J. A. Symonds] came out quite lively and gracious—indeed I rather think that ‘the last of my daughters married’ is a relief to her—Katharine looked like a splendid nude statue with a Dantesque wreath round her forehead, and a kind of majestic monumental expression. Charles was in his element—talking hard the whole time—and oh Heavens—what creatures the female Furses are! Imagine all Charles’ little ways in a woman! and his looks too—Madge [Vaughan] and Lotta [Leaf] undulated about—Lotta magnificent in dark crimson velvet—which now suits her stately form. Her nose too had lost that delicate blush rose tint which you and Marny used to admire so—like sunset over Mont Blanc. The Bridesmaids poor things were very cold, and only one of them [Vanessa] was beautiful, but she, as you can imagine, had looks enough to endow the whole lot, and leave a margin for herself. Madge gave me violets from her bouquet, and Katharine this sprig of I don’t know what. I am sure you would like to add them to your collection—though I am afraid you treated my last contribution with scorn.

There, I think that will do for the Symondses, this time. Will and Madge looked both of them extremely well, and Will showed everyone photographs of the infant [Janet Vaughan]—If the Furses are as successful as that pair, they wont do badly. I am so in the dark as to all your proceedings, that I dont know what questions to ask you, but you must answer them as though I had asked. I hope you have got over your first lonely miseries—you poor strange little Welsh Toad! and I know that in time you will rave about Dresden, and discover some perfect Dresdenite—of the other sex.

The sheep dog [Vanessa] is staying away this Sunday with Georgie at the Craig Sellars, if you know who they are. I dont very well—but Mrs Craig Sellar is a charming elderly lady, who has lost her husband, and cant think of anything else, which makes her all the more charming. And there are two Miss Sellars and a W. Sellar—and they are all delightful and musical, according to Jack. I am going to my Queens Hall concert this afternoon, with a Miss Snowden, who works at the Academy and is rather an amusing little creature. But I cant help wishing for another little creature who shall be nameless.

We had a long visit from Adeline the other day, who discussed your character at great length, and said some things which I know you are too modest to wish to hear repeated—what do you think about an addition in that department! We thought there were possible signs, but I dont know. I wish there could be, she drifts about rather aimlessly with that great Ralph [Vaughan Williams], who goes on writing unpublished masterpieces, and grows his hair longer and longer.

Tottie Pater is still ill, but gets better slowly. Tomorrow I am going to have my first class with Miss [Clara] Pater, she looks very white and shrivelled, poor Love—Dont you think those two old ladies most pathetic, growing old together, and one of them will drop off, and the other will be left. They seem so desolate with no young friends or relations. Angela James is expecting a little James at any moment—so is Margaret Phillimore, and Helen is well on with the making of one mercifully.

It is beautiful, cold October weather, all the leaves coming off, and wonderful mists and sunsets. Dont you long for London, and St Pauls, and doesn’t a foreign town seem clean and clear and unromantic after this wonderful town?

Now, my dearest Toad—the Swiss has come in to put out my clothes and she drives me mad with her boots which creak loud enough to be heard in Dresden.

So I must say Goodbye. You must answer this and then the sheepdog [Vanessa] will write next week, and so we shall keep our agreement.

Yr loving,
Goat

I hope you havent already heard the startling piece of news that dear old Mildred Massingberd is engaged to Major Leonard Darwin a widower of 50 whose wife died two years ago!!! They are very happy, and are to be married at Gunby at the end of this month or next.

This letter was forgotten under a pile of papers on Nessa’s writing table till today, Nov 11th, when Beloved Marny came to supper and took it away with her—so you are not as faithless as I thought. Write at once.

Sussex

[]

35: To Emma Vaughan

23rd April [1901]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

These [smudge] are not dirty finger marks!!

My dearest Toad,

Have we quarrelled? But it takes two to make a quarrel and I never felt more kindly disposed to the whole of the reptile family in my life. Why don’t we ever hear from each other then? I want to write, the sheepdog wants to write—but somehow the letters never get written, and I have not seen the Dresden postmark for six good months. It reminds me of the game we played at Fritham “Silence in the Pig Market. The first who speaks is the old sow.” I am the old sow, I always was if you remember, but you must write and call me so.

Well my dearest Toad, one disadvantage of writing so seldom is that it is so difficult to write when one does write. Do you know that we have been to Lyme Regis for a fortnight—that the sheepdog is going to try for the [Royal] Academy [Schools] in July—do you know anything of our movements or do you think us all dead and buried in the deep sea? Marny flies in for a cup of tea some afternoons when she is in London—in Hoxton rather, and so we hear a little gossip about you.

Will told me that you were getting rather tired of Dresden but he seemed vague. Madge said “Emma never writes to me. I hear nothing of her except from Marny”. They were very well and almost too happy, one never found Madge without Will or Will without Madge. Old Sym loomed in the back-ground, very massive, almost too massive for her aquiline nose and tragedy: she has grown mellower and grandmotherly too, and seemed to take a human and not vulturish view of life. She adores Will; Walter bores her and Lotta’s children are so dull that she won’t go to see them. I rather expect that the divine Lotta herself “the most beautiful woman in London” is not quite up to the Symondsian mark—rather county councilish—Walter will be Walter leaf M.P., one of these days. What a good creature! Katharine and Charles [Furse] have just come back to London. Nessa met Charles at the New Gallery the other day. He asked her to come and stay with them in their new house, and she accepted.

Oh, you reptile, I do wonder what you do, and what you are going to do. What you think about all day. My old piano must be almost dumb by this time—you know it had a tendency that way—so few people play on it now.

Aunt Mary suddenly came here two days ago. It is all very tragic. Hervey [Fisher] seemed to get better for some weeks, and then suddenly went worse than ever—so bad that [Dr] Branfoot said he must be put in an asylum. So they brought him up to London and he is now in Bethlehem. Just as this was settled, they heard that Arthur was to arrive at Southampton, invalided home; they went to meet him and were met by a doctor who said they must not see him: he was in his cabin ill with a sunstroke. He was taken to Netley Hospital, where he will have to be a month or six weeks, and then I suppose it will take some time to get quite well as he had three sunstrokes on the top of each other. Oh dear, this sounds so like Cousin Mia [Maria Macnamara]! But if ever there were a Greek tragedy the Fisher family is one. Poor Aunt Mary looked worn out; she had all along refused to let Hervey be taken to an Asylum; and she will feel the want of him more than anyone, I suppose, yet it seems really better that he should be away from them all, and I think the cost is very little at Bethlehem.

The only thing in this world is music—music and books and one or two pictures. I am going to found a colony where there shall be no marrying—unless you happen to fall in love with a symphony of Beethoven—no human element at all, except what comes through Art—nothing but ideal peace and endless meditation. This world of human beings grows too complicated, my only wonder is that we don’t fill more madhouses: the insane view of life has much to be said for it—perhaps its the sane one after all: and we, the sad sober respectable citizens really rave every moment of our lives and deserve to be shut up perpetually. My spring melancholy is developing in these hot days into summer madness.

We have had no going out—to return to the world as it is—since the Queen died [22 January 1901], or only very quiet parties. Nevertheless, we have bought dresses from Mrs [Sally] young which deserve to be shown. Remember our great dinner party in your honour, my dear Toad; you will see them there. Do write soon—and let it be long. I have unlimited affection for you and admiration.

Goodbye dearest Toad, dear lovely charming gifted Toad!!

Sussex

[]

36: To Thoby Stephen

Wednesday [July 1901]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My dear Thoby,

Your Bill was not in your room, but by one of my brilliant flights—half imagination half sober reasoning—I conceived that it was to be found on the writhing table in the drawing room—where it was and here it is—Give my affectionate love and greetings to the White Ws. Now we—that is you—have done our work for the year. I am very glad that you got these particular Bugs because our Hairstreaks are rather poor, and they always attract me as a family—Where and how did you get them? However I shank know till we meet at Fritham. I will tell Jack about it if he comes tonight.

I had meant on my own account to write to you. Father has begun to say “We must talk about what you are to read at Fritham”. I have told him that you have promised to help me with a Greek Play or two—Sophocles I think. Father wants to get for me from the Library Jebbs Sophocles, only it is in seven volumes. So he says would you send a line with your invaluable advice—which play it had better be? I have read the Antigone—Edipus [sic] Coloneus—and I am in the middle of the Trachiniae. I should rather like to read the Antigone again—and any others you advise. I find to my immense pride that I really enjoy not only admire Sophocles. So after all there is hope for Shakespeare.

London grows steadily hotter and drier and browner; I long for Fritham and my apoplectic pony and my choice selection of books. I feel a maggot in my brain—I want to read myself blue in the nose—I never read a line in London—not a line that I like that is to say. Only Greek Histories and German novels—which is worst I dont know.

We are in the middle of the Examination [at the Royal Academy Schools]. So far it seems to have gone well, as far as we know. All the others are rather inferior, and she [Vanessa] has a good model and a good place, certainly if there is an Artist or a gentleman on the Council the result is certain. Privately I dont think anyhow there can be much doubt. The Schools are very empty, so they will let in bad people. We shall hear what has happened the day we go to the Forest probably.

Yr loving,
Goat

I have just had a tragic letter from Miss Noble [of Warboys, Huntingdonshire]. Her Horse ran away and hurt himself so badly that he had to be shot, and her cow died. She says she would like to see you “When she has got over her great trouble”.

King’s

[]

37: To Emma Vaughan

Aug 8th [1901]

Fritham House [Lyndhurst, Hampshire]

Dearest Todger,

How much longer are you going to live in Switzerland? You will be naturalised a Swiss subject before you know where you are, if you don’t take care. Will you speak French or German and do you wear mourning for the Empress Frederick? Enlighten me on all these points to-morrow when you look out your largest sheet of gray paper and your stoutest quill (only you don’t write with quills) to answer this. What on earth can you find to do in Switzerland. For goodness sake, don’t take to climbing mountains. Every newspaper almost, has a Matterhorn tragedy in it. Are you anywhere near the Matterhorn? I have the vaguest idea of your or anybodies geography. Our London season about which you ask, was of the dullest description. I only went to three dances—and I think nothing else. But the truth of it is, as we frequently tell each other, we are failures. Really, we can’t shine in Society. I don’t know how it’s done. We aint popular—we sit in corners and look like mutes who are longing for a funeral. However, there are more important things in this life—from all I hear I shan’t be asked to dance in the next, and that is one of the reasons why I hope to go there. This is the kind of thing I say to Dorothea [Stephen] and she glows like a sunset over Mont Blanc (can you see Mont Blanc from the window to disprove my metaphor?) and says “Shut up!” One of the last things we did before coming away, was a quite unexpected one—we went to tea with Aunt Virginia. This was led up to by something even more unexpected. One night we gave a small dinner party to which Bee Cameron came and when we came up for dinner, we saw a large white form artistically grouped on the sofa by the open window. It was Aunt Virginia! So then she asked us to tea with her. She talked a great deal about you, my dear Toad and said how clever you were and how much she admired your spirit in going off to Dresden and wanted to know all about you, but as you hadn’t written for so long, we couldn’t tell her much. However, you see we got a compliment for you, which I know you will scoff at. I can never quite see Aunt V’s surpassing charm or beauty. The charm at anyrate need not have vanished though the beauty has almost entirely. Save her great eyes, which are beautiful—and her enthusiasms and loud whispers and French manners, I think she was rather disappointing. But perhaps it wasn’t a good day. Georgie met the Kay Shuttleworths just after they had come back from Mürren. They were full of both of your charms. “So very nice and agreeable—They made our stay so much more enjoyable than it would otherwise have been” Think of that my dear Toad! What a priviledge you must have felt it!

We are in the midst of London society here, though happily separated by a few miles of forest. The Lyulph Stanleys—the Richard Stracheys—the Freshfields—lie all round us and occasionally ask us to tea parties. I won’t say anything about the forest itself or the view from my window, which was the view from your window, because I remember a remark you made last year when we drove you through the most beautiful forest drive that exists. “Ugh, my dear Goat, smells like a fried fish shop!” I wonder what that diseased nose of yours smells in Switzerland—the nectar and Ambrosia of the Gods, I suppose. Fried fish I must say, has a great charm for me. Isn’t this a fearful long letter? and my handwriting is apoplectic and paralytic. But I have a steel pen which writes like a rusty nail. How is dear Marny and her leg? and how are you?—write a long letter full of meat.

Your loving,
Goat

I defy anyone to prove which of these two letters was written first! [other letter missing]

Sussex

[]

38: To Thoby Stephen

[October? 1901]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My dear Thoby,

I dont know whether I imagined it, or whether you once did say really that you wanted a kitten for your rooms. Anyhow, if you do I could send you in a hamper a very nice black kitten with signs of distinguished birth about it—and a charming and lovable disposition (like mine!) I have been offered it by Miss Power, but my room apparently would not suit it, as it ought to be able to get out of doors—which it could do in your rooms. However, I am afraid you will be able to get a Cambridge kitten (if you want one) without this bother of sending it. Only could you let me know as soon as you get this?

Yr. Goat

King’s

[]

39: To Thoby Stephen

Nov 5th [1901]

[22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.]

My dear Grim,

Father has had a letter this morning to say that the degree [Hon. D. Litt., Oxford] is put off till the 26 Nov. and he wanted you to know, as you spoke of going there. We have been asked to stay the night by two separate lots of people—but I dont know—Oxford as you can imagine would draw me from my bestial comforts if any place would, but the bestial comforts (they come into Plato this morning, and seemed rather appropriate) are growing rampant. My real object in writing is to make a confession—which is to take back a whole cartload of goatisms which I used at Fritham and elsewhere in speaking of a certain great English writer—the greatest: I have been reading Marlow, and I was so much more impressed by him than I thought I should be, that I read Cymbeline just to see if there mightnt be more in the great William than I supposed. And I was quite upset! Really and truly I am now let in to [the] company of worshippers—though I still feel a little oppressed by his—greatness I suppose. I shall want a lecture when I see you; to clear up some points about the Plays. I mean about the characters. Why aren’t they more human? Imogen and Posthumous and Cymbeline—I find them beyond me—Is this my feminine weakness in the upper region? But really they might have been cut out with a pair of scissors—as far as mere humanity goes—Of course they talk divinely. I have spotted the best lines in the play—almost in any play I should think—

Imogen says—Think that you are upon a rock, and now throw me again! and Posthumous answers—Hang there like fruit, my Soul, till the tree die [Cymbeline: V. v. 262-5]! Now if that doesn’t send a shiver down your spine, even if you are in the middle of cold grouse and coffee—you are no true Shakespearian! Oh dear oh dear—just as I feel in the mood to talk about these things, you go and plant yourself in Cambridge.

Tomorrow I go on to Ben Jonson, but I scant like him as much as Marlow. I read Dr Faustus, and Edward II—I thought them very near the great man—with more humanity I should say—not all on such a grand tragic scale. Of course Shakespeares smaller characters are human; what I say is that superhuman ones are superhuman. Just explain this to me—and also why his plots are just cracky things—Marlows are flimsier; the whole thing is flimsier, but there are some very “booming” (Stracheys word) lines and speeches and whole scenes—when Edward dies for instance—and then when Kent is taken away to be executed, and the little King wont have it done, and his mother tries to make him forget and asks him to ride with her in the Park, and he says “And will Uncle Edmund ride with us?” That is a human touch! What a dotard you will think me! but I thought I must just write and tell you—

I write even less connectedly and legibly than usual, because 3 or 400 years ago a wretched Italian tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament! So we English are celebrating the day at this moment—which would be all very well if the children in the muse (see how I spell it!) mews opposite didnt think it necessary to join in with horrible crackers and bonfires and shoutings and whoopings—It seems quite superfluous. Georgie came back last night; and his baggage—made up of turkey carpets, and Rose leaf jam from the Sultans preserves—and Eastern embroideries and bags of precious stones uncut—and all kinds of extraordinary things—is bumping into the hall at this moment.

Did you go to Miss Noble [of Warboys]?

Yr. Goat

King’s

[]

40: To Thoby Stephen

29th Jan. [1902]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My dear Thoby,

Your book has come, and delights me. These little Epigrams I think I appreciate most of all Greek—as the feminine mind would, according to my theory. And MacKail isnt so precious as I thought—and some—most that I know—of the epigrams are divine—I read them over and over again, for—[torn] … sound—when I dont know the [torn] … Nothing to my mind could be more Greek in [torn] … body—than these are. I [torn] … through them at my leisure, and the reading is made so easy by the crib at the bottom.

Thank you a thousand times, as old Ladies say. This is a real addition to my library—

Yr. Goat

King’s

[]

41: To Henry Newbolt

[January 1902?]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

Dear Mr. Newbolt,

You must have been good enough to send me a post card with a little poem on it which gives me great pleasure and pride. I have spent Sunday at a house where the only book was your Admirals All—and now I come back to find this. Father is rehearsing Drakes Drum for Wednesday.

Thank you so much.

Yrs very sincerely,
Virginia Stephen

Geroge Spater

[]

Letters 42-164

42: To Violet Dickinson

[Early 1902?]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My dear Miss Dickinson,

Nessa says that she told you that I have discovered your Scotts diary. I meant that in Scotts life [Lockhart’s] there is his diary of a voyage to the lighthouses on the Scotch coast, but I dont know if that is what you want.

I do not think it is published separately—it is not very long. I have got the Life in several small volumes. Shall I send you the one with the diary? and if it is not right you can send it back.

Yours sincerely,
Virginia Stephen

Berg

[]

43: To Violet Dickinson

[April 1902]

Hind Head Copse, Haslemere [Surrey]

My dear Violet,

I should like to come and see you anytime—but may I write in a day or two? Father hasnt been well, and the doctor here wants him to see a specialist, so we go to London tomorrow.

We are afraid there may have to be an operation, but I shall know more on Monday, and I will write then.

Anyhow I dont think I will come to dinner but to tea, as all 4 males [Leslie, Gerald, Thoby and Adrian] are at home and I cant very well be out for dinner. (You see, I write you very cool letters!)

Nessa sends me long letters—and I think she enjoys herself though she pretends Rome is above her. I sent her to the protestant cemetry [sic] with red roses, and she found Shelleys grave, and enjoyed herself enormously. I believe the portrait [unidentified] is really beautiful, but I haven’t seen it yet. This place where we are staying is a sham country cottage—all white paint and [William] Morris patterns, and green wood furniture. I cant bear the washy-artistic style and I long for something honestly ugly. Their taste was originally Early Victorian, because I find remains in corners, but now they have given up their souls. I haven’t talked to an educated woman (except the cook) for a fortnight, and I dont feel fit for the drawing room—so you must make allowances.

I hope I shall be able to come one of the days you say, but at this moment I dont quite know whats going to happen.

Yrs aff’ly,
VS

Why cant we marry Peers for the day? and see Katie in her glory.

Why is your knee delayed? You never seem to work properly all over.

Berg

[]

44: To Violet Dickinson

[April? 1902]

[22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.]

My dear Violet,

I have offered your improper books to two men, and one said he’d give me one shilling and the other rose to nine, and would give more if the binding was better. Shall I close with this man, or try two others that I know of? They might be better—or not—write soon and say, because my 9s. man wont wait.

If one man thinks them worth nine times as much as another there’s no reason why some other man shouldn’t give nine times as much again. Are you ever coming here again? or does your first visit last you still?

This is vile paper, and viler pen, but we seem to have run out.

If you are in London do come here soon—if your legs will carry you (which is always doubtful).

Yr aff.,
AVS

Berg

[]

45: To Violet Dickinson

[April 1902]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My dear Violet,

There is to be an operation but it is slighter than we thought, and it can be done here. I dont quite know when it is to be, but not this week anyhow. I think Father is perfectly well now, and he doesn’t mind the thought of it as much as I thought he would. It isnt a bad operation, but I’m afraid that he will always have to be very careful afterwards.

I will come on Wednesday about 4.30. Unless I suddenly hear from Nessa that she is coming then, which I hope I shant.

Yr. aff’ate,
VS

Berg

[]

46: To Violet Dickinson

[April 1902]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My dear Violet,

Allingham cant come till Tuesday, so the operation cant be done till then. It is a great bother, and Nessa and Georgie might have stayed on as long as they had meant. They have come back very well and cheerful, though they didn’t see much of Florence.

Yr. aff. AVS

I will write and say how he goes on. Of course I know you care about it—only I really think there need be no anxiety about the operation itself. Please get your knees well.

Berg

[]

47: To Thoby Stephen

[May 1902]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My dear Thoby,

Any of those Art books she [Vanessa] would like. She has the Fra Angelico—Rembrandt—Botticelli—and father is going to give her some-ones Life of Sir Joshua—But I know she wants to get as many of the series as she can, so any one of them she would like.

No. Bugs are out in either case, so I am afraid they must have overslept themselves—gone on a long journey as the woman said of the pony at Ringwood.

My mind is dazed with Sidney Lee. He has come to consult about the Dictionary—(How I wish it at the bottom of the sea!) and his squeak sounds like a tormented Rat—

We shall meet before long. Mrs George has now invited us—also Bessy Darwin—either would be better than Nun, but it cant be helped.

Yr. loving,
Goat

What Books have you got? I am really rather a good binder.

King’s

[]

48: To Violet Dickinson

[early August 1902]

Fritham [Lyndhurst, Hampshire]

My dear Violet,

I’m afraid Nessa raised your hopes too high, and you will be very much disappointed—but the man hasnt sent the photographs yet—and they mayn’t do me justice—indeed I dont expect they will. If you are very kind to me, and spoil me thoroughly, and behave in every way tenderly you shall have one when you come here. (They belong to George.) That is something to look forward to?

I wish you were here now—only you are so fashionable you must stay in London for the Coronation. Look out for Adrian among the Westminster boys in the Abbey. Will you herd with the Peeresses—Katie [Cromer]? If you go, do tell us if she looked like a real Lady. She can—but she wants humanising—and there’s no one to do it, unless you will. Nessa has asked Beatrice to come here. We went to lunch there one day, and Beatrice hobbled about the room in a dirty white flannel coat and enormous slippers. But Nessa will have told you about that lunch.

Katie has withdrawn from this world more and more I feel—soon she will be beyond human help or reach. But as a goddess she is divine.

I wish you were here (this is just what I said before, and if I say it again it will be true) but this is really something my idea of a Better World.

For one thing there is very little need of clothing, which I always think a great point about Heaven, and we do just what we like. Nessa and I trot about the forest together and look for foxes. Last year we saw two. By the way, the pony you are going to be driven about in, has an impediment, not in his speech, but his pace, and he suddenly stands still and kicks if you whip him. There is another pony which Nessa rides, but I am not allowed to drive him except with a man and that I don’t think proper (I have very nice feeling on these points.) Nessa got this paper—isn’t it vile? Half I say doesn’t come out—which is such a pity.

Now I really do wish you were here. We are all alone—and I like Nessa very much, but she gets so bored with me (tho’ she’s very fond of me too).

Yrs. aff.,
AVS

Father is very well and cheerful. The dr. said he thought him extraordinarily well, and not getting worse.

Berg

[]

49: To Violet Dickinson

[20 September 1902]

[22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.]

Your [sic] a blessed old ——, I cant think of any way to begin because Aunt Maria wont do—so you’ll have to do without. How could I write to you. What with feeling as shy as I do, and all my being got packed in the horse box. I was this moment pulling up my sleeves to paint my floor in a sudden fit of inspiration when Adrian brought up your letter.

Do tell me Katies messages—as water to one in a desert. I have only 10 minutes to write this in—and an Aunt and Cousin downstairs. We came back last night. It was glorious and gloriouser in the New Forest. We went out hunting at 6 one morning and my boots were like damp brown paper at the end. So tell me your mans name. You have made a lifelong friend of Georgie! What on earth did you and he say to each other? He is quite brisk and important. Gerald is very gloomy.

He passed over Westminster Bridge last night and a man ran in front of his cabhorse, and jumped into the river. “I jumped out too, said Gerald, and found myself ready to go after him. I never was so much surprised in my life. But providentially there was a boat in the distance.” He begins the story by saying I almost earned the Royal Humane Societies’ medal!

I tell you I hate writing letters, and Adrian stands over me. But do you go and write a long long letter about 6 pages to celebrate the Sabbath. I will write another, only I am so cracked today, and I can’t find anything to write with. Tell us every thing you do.

Yr. AVS

I half sent you a telegram but Gerald thought me such a fool.

Berg

[]

50: To Violet Dickinson

[September 1902]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My Aunt,

Do be a woman of honour, and send me your bootmaker[’s] name and place at once. Honestly, I have only one pair left, and my naked claws are heard tapping the pavement—which is so pathetic. Why the D—— cant you come up to London? Then I should be petted again perhaps, and mine is such a singularly loveable nature dont you think so?

I cant think how one writes to an intimate friend. Once I called Kitty darling in a telegram! and we have never been on good terms since. She wrote a long letter this morning, but she’s freezing hard. Leo will be the death of her.

The academy began this morning. Nessa is very happy, with a live head to paint, and [John Macallan] Swan to teach her. I don’t know if he’s much good. The picture is really first rate, and the heather too, which was rather like anchovies spread on bread and butter, or whatever that pink paste is. I always get it at teaparties and then I have to pocket it. Last night I went out to dinner all glorious without—Sally Young etc. but a mass of festering corruption within—that is the string of a certain undergarment—not the one one talks about—broke, and the result was painful—in the middle of the drawing room too as I said good bye. I scattered gloves and fan and handkerchief, and plucked em all up together, and ran downstairs clutching my skirts under my arm. Then I came home and held them up in the drawing room, and Georgie was fearfully pained. But you have made a new man of him. He has been so lenient that I cant behave improper if I wanted to.

We have subscribed, and bought a Pianola! Father almost weeps over us, and all his ladies are tender and reproachfull.

I don’t get any attention now. Nessa gets it all. She has so many intimates. Be a woman—write and tell me how all your Nellies [Lady Robert Cecil] and Katies and Beatrices are. Beatrice wrote “Dear Vanessa by Violets orders”!

Yr. loving,
Sparroy

Do remember the Boots—hellcat that you are. I am training for a curate and 11 children. Curate first children after of course.

Can you screw a set of teeth out of my dresses? As it is I spend most days having holes bored in me—and it really isnt worthwhile. Such an expense of temper.

Berg

[]

51: To Violet Dickinson

[September 1902?]

[22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.]

Woman,

Is there a train about 1.30, from here? You said there was, but it doesn’t come into Bradshaw. Make it plain. Do we go to Welwyn?

You will be swarming with intimates.

This fog is a nightmare of the soul as well as the body, and [Vanessa’s] painting’s impossible.

Sparroy

I bought a pair of boots.

Berg

[]

52: To Violet Dickinson

[September 1902]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My Woman,

Could you send me as quick as you can—as the matter is very important—the number on the back of the 3 quarters face photograph of beloved Sparroy, as I am getting some copies for a few of my intimates. I have risen a step in the world since my motor drive.

Yr. Sp.

How did you toil up with all those parcels?

Berg

[]

53: To Emma Vaughan

[October 1902]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

Darling Todger,

Come on Tuesday—to lunch, 1.30 or a little later—Do come to lunch—then we can begin directly afterwards. I don’t know what you want to learn exactly—or whether I can teach you anything you dont know by the light of nature, but if you will bring something to start upon we can see. I have been making endless experiments and almost smelt my room out this afternoon trying to do gold lettering. Tomorrow I shall experiment with gold on cloth. I believe there is an immense field for this kind of thing. There seem ever so many ways of making covers—of leather—linen—silk—parchment—vellum—japanese paper etc. etc. etc. which the ordinary lidders never think of. Dont go and give the show away to Glazebrook [?]—or make her pay you handsome for your advice.

Marny showed me an account book you did for her—which I honestly took for a professional job—I am sure all your finger exercises have made you very nimble and neat—which is your nature too—and you will do a roaring trade.

The thing I find so difficult is the lettering—that can only be done by practice—still you can give more time to it in one week than I have done in the whole of my career. I am a little hurt that the Rustic taste did not approve of my Green linen dress—perhaps it was beyond them. I bought it of a little man in Lyndhurst.

You are a dissolute woman—staying away till this time of year—Now Parliament’s sitting you may find London fashionable enough for you. Otherwise, I suppose you would imitate Dukes and shoot pheasants till January. I hear you charmed the notorious family [the Will Vaughans?] so that the unborn sang for joy. (this is Marny’s indecency, not mine) and they asked you to stay on. The Pianola is flourishing, and plays after dinner till the other side (the Mackenzies, who only do hand playing) are vanquished. Really it is a wonderful machine—beyond a machine in that it lets your own soul flow thro’. Even the carping Adeline was a little surprised. But I write to a still more carping Toad. Mrs William Darwin’s dead. Everyone seems to be dying—but I can still hope while Millicent [Isham] lives—She is like the sun through a fog—Adeline [Vaughan Williams] etc., are the fog. Give her my love.

AVS

Sussex

[]

54: To Violet Dickinson

[October/November 1902]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My woman,

Tuesday will do perfectly, about 5.

Father sees [Dr] Seton tomorrow, and something more may be settled, but Seton is such a woolgatherer. Jack and George and Gerald have all asked father to wait, or to see someone else, but he says it will save him pain if the operation is done now, before he is any worse. He wont believe that there is any chance of his getting better. However there is nothing more to be said now. I feel rather a brute, bothering you with all these things. Is that the way intimates are treated?

Kitty’s [Maxse] very well, but planted at Hatfield with her Violet.

Yr. Sparroy

What are you planting?

Berg

[]

55: To Violet Dickinson

[October/November 1902]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My woman,

I dont want a prize for coming to see you—however much it rains. I am very fond of you. But books do delight my soul. Your [sic] a blessed hell cat and an angel in one. What a squaling [sic] and a squeaking there must be inside you. I put it where I can look up and see it. It is so refined and pathetic. I am sure it has a past—like Gerald. How do you come by it, woman? I can read the Greek pretty easily, not but what Case says I’m a fool. Think of your poor Sparroy beginning the first page of the Greek grammar this morning! I go over it and over it, and nothing can I understand.

I think of you and your holy life on the mount. I came home and raved about it—and then there was a letter from the man at Broomy to say he’s only got the house for the winter—and Georgie has written to ask if he can take it for a ‘term of years’. It really looks like business—but the house wont be nearly as good as yours—and not much lonelier though we are 8 miles from a station. Dont chop any more paths, and dont make it too bald up round the house. When I come and stay I should like to have green shade in my windows. This you will consider I know. Still I dream of it—really I cant imagine anything better than the wood and the unexpected gardens, and the red tree. What I fear is that much digging will give your soul a peace such as no Sparroy will disturb. I feel the same thing with Greek. Time spent with dead Greeks is de-humanising—scraping about in the earth is de-humanising. Dont get too Holy.

The hedgerow has had high praise from [Margery] Snow, who is thought rather a judge. Snow is come. Kitty [Maxse] is looming. Duff Baker is on the verge. So you see it is high time for you to have your fringe pulled. I’m afraid no one sees to it when I’m not there. Just count the words in this letter, and write me as many back, and I like them hot and affectionate. I am going to bed with your Greek book—under my pillow (not so improper as it looks). Tell me how your blessed wood gets on. Have the trees got yellow? Have you finished your hedging—or whatever you call it. How are my beloved Chalky Charlie and Quint. Quint sounds like Dickens. Did you get your hatchet sharpened—hatchet sounds so mediaeval—you are a rum lot. I have one idea of you—at the station that pouring day which gives me fits whenever I think of it. Whenever N[essa] sees me laughing to myself, I say its only Violet.

Yr. lover,
Sparroy

Berg

[]

56: To Thoby Stephen

[October/November 1902]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My dear Thoby,

Father is very cross because you have neither of you written to him this week. So do send a line, or we shall have resort to telegraphs.

Would Wednesday next week suit you and Adrian for a descent—that seems our only day. Nessa has just sent up her drawings and had one (out of three) returned—and the one is a painted head which she did carelessly, as it is always said that the Judges judge you by your antique work. So now she has three days a week with nothing to do—and Sargent teaching her the other three. He is a splendid teacher, and very kind to her.

What has been happening to you, all this time? And Adrian? He writes very formal letters—but then the difficulties of writing to ones family are great I know. We seem to dribble along, with endless affectionate old ladies to tea, and admirers of fathers, who all come here now. Father has probably told you that he is going to see Treves on Thursday. Seton says he had better, just to quiet his mind. Seton still is certain that he is better if anything, certainly not worse—Now we have heard that Nun is coming for two days—and Nessa is going to stay with the [Earl and Countess] Carnarvons—so I shall have only my one body between those two—(you appreciate the metaphor) I am helping Nessa to give Gurth a powder and to ointment his ear while I write—so you need only expect dull dutiful news—But I will write you a very nice letter soon. Has Byron come to a decent end? Lord preserve me from spending my fine brains over other peoples bones! and for goodness sake, dont you either. You are an Original Genius, my Lord.

Is there any news? Georgie has gone 5 hours in the train to hear Austen make a speech tonight—his devotion is touching—but he has to work pretty hard. The Pianola is going strong. Broomy was a false alarm. Only Hayes Turner had underlet it to someone for 3 months. But if we wait 4 years we can have it. I saw a blue bird with a yellow chest and cheeks on my window sill, the other morning. What should you think he was. “My dear Goat—no woman knows how to describe a thing accurately!”

Yr. loving Goat

Answer about Wednesday.

King’s

[]

57: To Violet Dickinson

[October/November 1902]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My Woman,

Why dont you come to London? Have you taken root in the soil—as I foretold lost to civilisation and all the graces. Really a cook more or less doesn’t much matter. We lived on an old decrepit pious woman for a week the other day, when Sophy went for a holiday. The food was unexpected, but amusing, and added rather to the harmony of the household. But I know it isnt that that keeps you—its the slow effect of digging and planting all day long, which leaves you naked like Eve so that you dont dare show yourself in London—naked as to the spirit I mean, as we shall all be before the Lord. This evening for 2 hours I have tried to write sensible letters to old Aunts and family friends, and I haven’t finished one of’em—I cant write sensible letters, and you dont matter.

Nessa has got Sargent at the Academy now, and the Denty’s daughter sitting to her tomorrow. Sargent is worth all the other teaching she’s ever had. As far as I can make out, he likes her things but artists are so inarticulate. Anyhow she likes him—his voice—even his green eyes. He stands staring straight at the canvas for 10 minutes, and then says ‘Youve got the right idea.’ All the other scrubby creatures turn green with jealousy. What women are! I go and rummage in the London Library now. I got into the vaults where they keep the Times yesterday, and had to be fished out by a man. But too many books have been written already—its no use making more. Eleanor is said to be a worse Prig acted than written—all talk. I’m going to write a great play which shall be all talk too—but so exciting you’ll squirm in your seat. That is a plan of mine and Jacks—we are going to write it together—it could be done Im sure. Im going to have a man and a woman—show them growing up—never meeting—not knowing each other—but all the time you’ll feel them come nearer and nearer. This will be the real exciting part (as you see)—but when they almost meet—only a door between—you see how they just miss—and go off at a tangent, and never come anywhere near again. There’ll be oceans of talk and emotions without end. Im sure all this interests you so much!

I went to the zoo today and I want to get a nice green monkey.

Do write a good hot letter. Nessa going to stay with Ly. Carnarvon Friday to Monday so if yr in London you must come then.

Berg

[]

58: To Violet Dickinson

[October/November 1902]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My woman,

Nessa is going away early on Friday till Monday so that we couldn’t come to lunch. Friday week is a long time off. Couldn’t you manage before that—anyhow stick to Friday week. I hope your grinders are all right, and the rest of your works well oiled. Father is seeing Treves tomorrow, and we are pestered with sentimental relations.

Yr. Sparroy

Father is seeing Treves only for his own peace of mind, because he wont believe that Seton is right in thinking him better. He says there is no chance of an operation—Seton I mean.

Berg

[]

59: To Violet Dickinson

[October/November 1902]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My woman,

Treves is rather worrying. He thinks father not so well, and says he will probably have to have the operation in about six weeks.

But Seton says just the opposite: he thinks Treves has forgotten how bad father was in the summer, and doesn’t see that he is better now than he was then. Seton still is certain that father is better. But Seton cant say this to Treves, apparently. Last time Treves was here he said that he wouldn’t do the operation unless there was actual pain—and there is none at all—because the operation itself is such a horrid thing, and doesnt of course cure him. This time he said nothing of that—but advised father to have it done as soon as he thought it worthwhile. I think that father has never realized how bad he will be afterwards—at least if what Seton and Treves himself said in the summer was true. He only wants to get rid of the present discomfort as quickly as possible—and thinks he will be all right afterwards. I hope we shall get Allingham to see him first anyhow, but then great doctors are so queer, and Seton wont say anything decided.

Of course if he were in pain it would be worthwhile—only from what everyone says, it isn’t a cure or much of a relief—at any rate at first, and then any operation however slight—this one is perfectly easy they say—must be bad when you’r [sic] old. He is extraordinarily anxious to have it, and says he is going to make Seton settle a time on Monday, but I don’t think Seton will let him. It would be idiotic to have it done before any of the things have happened which Treves says will happen, if there’s the least chance that he really is getting better. Treves might easily have forgotten exactly how he was in the summer.

Its all d——d——He is such an attractive creature, and we get on so well when were alone, and lose our tempers and all the rest [sic].

Nessa went off cursing to the Carnarvons. I hope she’ll like it once she’s there. Wednesday we’re going to Cambridge—come another day Lover.

Yr. wm. Sparroy

Berg

[]

60: To Violet Dickinson

[12 December 1902]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My child,

Everything seems to be going perfectly well. Treves saw him again this evening and said he could not be better—his temperature normal, and he has no pain or sickness. He may see someone tomorrow if he likes. Treves evidently thinks very little of the operation itself. So I dont think there is any need to worry now. He was quite cheerful, and likes his room and the nurses.

We are all in roaring spirits, playing wedding marches. Nevertheless it wasn’t cheerful this morning. First, just as we got ready to start, there came a telegram to the Irish parlourmaid to say her brother died yesterday, and so she and her sister, who’s the slopper, started off for Ireland, for the funeral—which seems a consolation—and all the kitchen was in tears from sympathy.

Then it was terrible gloomy last night, and waiting this morning in a kind of Dentists waiting room, and a cold fog for Treves. Howsomever, Sparroy sings a Heathen song of praise tonight.

What a world it is! on the whole though I dont want to creep into my narrow bed—which is the grave—this very night.

Have you a real affection for the Sparroy? She folds you in her feathery arms, so that you may feel the Heart in her ribs. Rather mild, but these emotions are very upsetting.

With deep affection,

Yr. Sparroy

Berg

[]

61: To Violet Dickinson

[13 December 1902]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My woman,

We have just come back from seeing father!

He had a very good night—no pain—temperature normal—and the nurse told us he was quite unusually well.

We only stayed a minute, but he was quite cheerful, and like himself.

I have to keep up a conversation with a huge black female while I write this—who wants disgusting details—but wont have ’em!

Settle a time for coming. Black female triumphs.

Sparroy

Berg

[]

62: To Violet Dickinson

[27? December 1902]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My woman,

Father is very well. He had two bad days this week when they were rather anxious, but the dr. this morning was delighted and said he had done wonderfully, and may get up on Thursday or Friday. I wish all your intimates weren’t in such low water, I mean the Lytteltons, and dragging the poor Hell Cat [Violet] down with them.

Christmas is the Devils own feast not the other way round, as generally supposed. Once when our singing mistress asked me why I hung up my stocking on Christmas Eve, I said it was to celebrate the crucifixtion (or however you spell it—not fiction I am sure—but the x looks so peculiar). We spent a very mild Christmas day. Nessa and I both forgot it was Christmas—a sign of age, and many lost illusions—Violet the latest. I am sure you cant be happy in a great strange house [Longleat?], with brilliant Ladies in diamonds, and no loveable Sparroy waiting to be attended to.

All that splendour must seem so hollow without the one true heart.

Georgie’s away. We four have been playing Bridge all the evening!! not a very good game for the feeble minded. Nessa is an authority upon it. She and Adrian argued over a Bridge book till they both felt too much to speak. I went to Two Dances last week but I think Providence inscrutably decreed some other destiny for me. Adrian and I waltzed (to a Polka!), and Adrian says he can’t conceive how anyone can be idiotic enough to find amusement in dancing, and I see how they do it but feel all the pretty young Ladies far removed into another sphere—which is so pathetic—and I would give all my profound Greek to dance really well, and so would Adrian give anything he had. Nessa will talk to me all the time, so this letter is not written with that sense and sensibility to which you are accustomed.

Father thinks you a ‘particularly nice woman’ and would like to see you when next in London.

Are you in good working order. Especially as to the seat of the affections, which is the heart. Dont let Beatrice [Thynne] behave too much like a Lady in a novel with her cigarettes and diamonds.

There are many very nice people in the world, but few of whom it can be said ‘She has such a singularly loveable nature.’

Sparroy is very much attached to you. She blesses you.

Sparroy

Berg

[]

63: To Emma Vaughan

[Late December 1902]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

Darling Todger,

You are a reprobate to remember my peculiarities as fruit eater—but the two pears were a bright spot in my day, and made me feel a new Goat. Also, I am almost convinced after much consideration, and personal experience, that Butts is the first Kensington fruiterer.

I hope you are regaining your wonted activity—and not imitating the ways of the Church—which seems utterly gone over to the bad.

Madge sent Nessa Halford’s photograph—which I gaze at with not a little foreboding. Some woman will suffer, mark my words, from that mouth and chin, one of these days. Clearly the Vaughan brew resists any adulteration from weak Symonds’ stock—which may be a pleasure to you—but as I say, it seems to me anything but a comfortable look-out. I am let in for a 2/6d room (my share 2/6d—the rent 10/-) at the other end of Queen’s Road. If I had a little black Vaughan blood in me—if I could sit and scowl and clench my teeth as that nephew of yours does—I shouldn’t be landed in such undertakings. At this moment, instead of writing to you, I ought to tell Stebbing that I accept. But in the same way that I can’t make up my mind to say no—I can’t say yes, which is the most pitiable pass. The Somervells came to dine here the other night—there is something rather fishy about her, I don’t know what—However I won’t poison your mind. We sent Clara [Pater] a flower for Christmas; the old wretch hasn’t answered. I expect she and Totty [Pater] are celebrating Christmas in bed—I believe a good dose of bed and doctor’s visits is a real treat to them—and excitement—like going to the play or taking a drop too much, to us.

I saw Hester Ritchie the other day, and she showed me a leather book she had bound—lettered though, by a shop. But it was unpleasantly well done. Are you reaping commissions? If I weren’t the sweetest tempered old nanny-goat in the world, I should feel rather green at the thought of your gold letters and general promise. I am only a broken down failure at this art, and have to grow old and see the younger generation shoot ahead of me. How are the family—or is the family—since so united and peacable a family deserve a singular. I write nonsense, because the pianola is playing with extreme brilliance and precision in the next room.

Your loving,
Goat

Sussex

[]

64: To Violet Dickinson

[January 1903]

[22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.]

My woman,

If you come at 4.30 you can go and see father first. Then reserve your energies for the nieces [Virginia and Vanessa]. The other niece is splitting with desire to discuss the Studio, which is realized tomorrow.

Sparroy says its a question of D [eus] V [olens] whether shes in for tea tomorrow. Misery sits on her doorstep. Uncle dying—in fact dead mourning for the flesh indispensable—dressmaker incompetent—Sparroy not what you call a strict woman of business. But Hell Cat rakes up the embers of my burnt heart—Why are you flirting with old [Aunt] Minna [Duckworth]? Does she tell you of the offer she had once. He went mad, so that if she had accepted her children might have inherited this, ‘So lucky I didnt’. Such a strange businesslike Duckworth foresight.

Sparroy

Berg

[]

65: To Violet Dickinson

[25 January 1903]

[22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.]

My woman,

It sends real pangs through my heart to take things from your lean hands. Nessa produced your envelope this morning—and I said ‘Dont tell me its more than a letter of affection’. But inside was a round hard substance, as might have been a heart of flesh, but turned out the same thing translated into gold and pearls. The blessings of friendship are indeed far beyond the gold and pearls of this planet—nevertheless Sparroy pins one outside and keeps the other close locked within. My dear woman, it is full of infinite tenderness and sentiment to me—it has a certain pathos, as though it had held the hair of long dead Sparroys and Violets—and now it shall descend to the illegitimates as a pledge that their mother had the friendship of very respectable women once. It is already doing a kind of Hester Lytteltons duty among the tangled overgrowth of my bosom, holding bunches of dirty lace and unexpected progeny of chemise etc.

I have had to confute the Christian religion tonight, and though that has been well done, my thoughts dont flow as easy as usual.

Will you name a day to meet the two Taylor children, who are too strong taken pure, but mixed with V. D. will go down smooth. Really it is the kind of tea party one doesn’t have often in this world, so screw yourself up, and come and Bless your love token on S[parroy]’s Bosom.

Please ask Hester L[yttelton] to supply me with a God quick—not the Christian God.

Yr Sp: Blessings.

Berg

[]

66: To Thoby Stephen

[25? January 1903]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My dear Grim,

You are an angel to have routed out a Montaigne for me. I was getting quite desperate. I have hunted him 3 years. This one is better than a Florio I think—I once had a chance of a 2nd Edition Florio [1613] in my penniless days—I may have told you the story—but it is a badly printed book, very black and close, and I dont think there is much to choose between the translations. I always read Montaigne in bed, and these books will do beautifully. The Bacon is one of my choicest works—especially the note on the title page. I haven’t got a copy, so I shall stick to these; it looks to me as though it had worn its corners round in some coat pocket. I shall carry it in my fur coat many a mile and many a mile—Yours are the only books I had given me. Gerald gave me a magnificent pearl necklace—which I smashed first thing, and all my other presents were jewels of some kind.

I have made myself thoroughly objectionable to Georgie about our money, and I think the wretched bankers are this moment dividing our shares, and paying mine and yours to our Banks. I haven’t touched a penny of Gibbs yet—Father went for a drive this morning and spends most of the day downstairs. Seton says he is first rate—He only comes every 2 or 3 days now.

I have routed out your grammar and Plato, and they shall be sent tomorrow. Plato was lost in the Nurses room, and I had some difficulty in getting in. Also my whole existence seems to pass in doing up books. All fathers ladies send him books, which have to be returned. Would you ask David [bookseller] to try and get a Hollinshead, not black letters, for me some time? I could afford 2 or 3 pounds now—because I am already £50 in debt, and depending on my mythical accumulations to pay with.

Beccae is far and away the best play of Euripides I have read. When you come to London, I will give you tea in my shop—I wash up the tea things myself, and I have just bought 100 logs of ship wood for 6 shillings. I have invented a new way of bookbinding, which takes half the time, is just as strong etc. etc.—I will write a long letter some day to tell you several interesting things.

Yr. Goatus

King’s

[]

67: To Thoby Stephen

[27? January 1903]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My dear Thoby,

Georgie has opened accounts at the Union of London and Smiths Banks for you and me and paid our money in. They want your signature. Would you sent it to me. There will be about £40 odd of balance—but this isn’t yet paid in.

Send your signature quick. Blow up Adrian for not thanking G.[eorge] for the wine, or telling him where the French picture books are.

Yr. Goat

We had a long visit from [Clive] Bell on Sunday. The Montaigne and Bacon are a continual delight to me.

King’s

[]

68: To Margaret and Emma Vaughan

Jan. 27th [1903]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

Dearest Marny and Toad,

You are wonderful people! I dont know if I have said it before—but I say it now—nothing—not the Equator itself—impresses me with such awe adoration and surprise as your power of posting letters! When I post them, they never arrive on the day they were meant to: no birthday letter of mine reaches within a week of the proper time—and yours always do—I wish you would tell me how you do it—for it is one of the gifts that give most pleasure—my plate would have been empty, but for your genius—you just rescued me from despair and made me feel young again, when a birthday was a birthday. Marny is full of mysteries—which we cant solve—I know it is something indecent—but Marny’s hoary cheeks are beyond blushes. Please remember how young and innocent we are, and how little we know of the world and dont let your licentious passions run away with you—Toad—restrain her! Of course, I overslept myself on Saturday till St. Pauls was hopeless, so I didn’t go at all, and now I curse myself for it—At. Minna was here yesterday and rather discouraging, I’m afraid. She had counted on letting her house for a large sum, but no one offers to take it and so she says she doubts whether she can afford to pay any expenses at all, in fact, she may give up all idea of a companion. She had decided that Ethel Clifford anyhow wont do. However, we must wait and see. She is a stupid old thing, and I feel very cross with her—I wonder how dear Marny is, and what you do all day, and what has happened about Canning Place. I hope you will walk in one day soon both of you, in good health, and invite us to tea, at No. 8 C.P.

Sheep dog sends her love. I am yawning so that I cant write sense or nonsense.

Yr loving,
Goat

I shouldn’t quite give up hope of Sicily—But At. M. has got a fit of economy, which may blow over, or it mayn’t.

Sussex

[]

69: To Thoby Stephen

[January/February 1903]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My dear Grim,

I suppose the Bank wants your signature not from mere curiosity or for purposes of decoration—or to put in its autograph book—but simply so that unscrupulous persons may not forge your cheques. Write your name again as you will always write it on the back of cheques and send it to

the Union of London and Smiths Bank Ltd.
Charing Cross Branch,
66 Charing Cross,
S.W.

Yr. Goat

King’s

[]

70: To Emma Vaughan

[February 1903]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

Dearest Toad,

I have had my interview which results thus: At. M[inna Duckworth] is willing to pay the hotel bills but not railway or steamboat, which to Naples would cost about £12—single fare—I don’t know whether this puts it out of the question; but I went on and said how you had called and incidentally mentioned your wish to travel etc.—without explaining my share in the talk—Then would she like you for a companion? She said she had actually thought of asking you, but had not, because she knew you so little, and wasn’t sure if you would be good to travel with—I said you were an excellent person—that I should much prefer you to Ethel Clifford—whom At. M. rather inclined to—that you were very cheerful talkative—independent—and able to look after yourself. She said the qualities she wanted were independence—conversation—good temper—and interest in general subjects—the thing she most disliked was boredom. I casually mentioned that you were a great patience player and hated doing sights and galleries—both of which points greatly took her fancy.

She said finally, that she had heard of a Miss Musgrove an old friend—who was going to Sicily quite independently at the same time—so that she was no longer so much in want of a companion—but that she should prefer one—and that there were one or two poor friends to whom she felt rather bound, but nothing yet was settled. I perjured myself, and said I had told you nothing of her plan—only thought it was worth mentioning to her—she said I had done quite right—and that she would certainly keep you in mind and asked me to sound you for your views later—but at present she said I was not to say a word of this to you! Her last words were—“Would Emma be in London and able to come and see me? We seem to have many points in common—but anyhow I cant settle yet”. I don’t know whether you will think this good enough—I wish it could be managed somehow—she particularly wanted to know if you were fond of reading, and well read? I said certainly—and had a great acquaintance with modern French and German authors!

Yr. loving Goat

Sussex

[]

71: To Violet Dickinson

[February? 1903]

[22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.]

Woman,

Come any day you can—everyday—if you come here you will see father who rampages for you—but whistle and Sparroy will come to you. Father is a fraud, only an invalid for the sake of his ladies. I wish I could be an invalid and have ladies. I am so susceptible to female charms, in fact I offered my blistered heart to one in Paris, if not to two. But first by a long way is that divine Venus who is Katie [Lady Cromer] and you and Nessa and all good and beautiful (which are you I wonder?) women—whom I adore. I weep tears of tenderness to think of that great heart of pity for Sparroy locked up in stone—never to throw her arms round me—as she would, if only she could—I know it and feel it. Honestly there was a look of Katie in her stupid beautiful head, and Katie in a bath towel would have what you call a bust just like hers, only Katie wont ever open her arms (which aren’t of stone—the Venus hasn’t got any by the way) for this poor Sparroy to enter. Then there was another, but the woman waits for the letters. Gerald insults me—says I drink whiskey—utterance so thick—I say mixture of Venus and Violet.

Yr. S.

Berg

[]

72: To Violet Dickinson

[1903?]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My woman,

I did not realize all the splendours of your book till I opened it—and it gave me shivers down my back with joy. I believe its an heirloom, and you ought to keep it. But I cant help saying that it gives me—though sinfully—great joy. Your soul will be warm (as with fur cloaks) in Paradise but how will your poor bones get through this world if you give away your substance like this? I curled up in my chair and read it all this evening.

Our little Swiss maid cant believe that the cloak is mine. She thinks its either lent or left by mistake, and so she hangs it over the back of a chair and wont put it away.

My woman—I am afraid your intimates are a darned troublesome lot, and you were trotted off your feet today and you will be in bed tomorrow. Were you very much exhausted?

The devotion of the Sparroy is not much to offer but such as it is—(a very tender passage).

Yr. Sparroy

[Ella] Crum will tip you a pound tomorrow.

Berg

[]

73: To Violet Dickinson

[1903?]

[22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.]

My child,

Sparroy will come on Thursday. If only the Duckworth family hadn’t wool where the brain ought to be, her pockets would be lined with gold, and we would have drinks all round. I have tea on the housetop tomorrow. Crum coming.

Sp:

Berg

[]

74: To Violet Dickinson

[March 1903]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My Child,

Why do you confuse the infant mind with three addresses for two days? It makes me feel so nervous. However if this goes wrong it wont much matter—though it may pollute a maiden mind before the end, but Sparroy only flaps her warm blooded paw, and says she has tender memories of a long embrace, in a bedroom. Remember it is my turn for a moveable inside next. Dont go back to that wretched Cousin. Hell will hold no horrors for you if you exhaust all such things here. At this moment you are comforting the afflicted I know, and the heathen Sparroy reads Greek! I was alone all Sunday—Nessa went to the Watts—and thought affectionately of that great intimacy which means so much to both of us. I sent you the Poetess. I wish Providence were a better judge of literature and then we should be spared Humphrey Wards, or she might publish them in Paradise.

The new nurse has come, and creaks about, but I haven’t seen her yet.

Dont be a bad woman. Say your prayers every night—if only for sake of Sparroys soul—which doesn’t get many prayers to wash it.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

75: To Violet Dickinson

[early April 1903]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My Woman,

All your letters are only addresses. I read every word, damaging my eyesight, and only make out when your [sic] not in London. May is practically here, and then you will be bedded out for good, and a whole vol: of our intimacy closed. These gaps are so disturbing, and letters are only fit for friendship.

Intimacy ought to take to telegraphs. Your letter-style is rather telegraphic. But now you can really be useful, and tell us where to get coffers cheap. We want a country house for Easter. Do you know anyone, near London, and comfortable who would let for a fortnight before 24th April? Father finds it more romantic on the whole not to go away, but if he can say “my children drag me” he will agree, only we’ve nowhere to go to, and it ought to be cheap.

The brilliant Sparroy, who really is a kind of female Kitchener has almost clawed two country houses, but they may fall through, though inspired by genius, anyhow, Violet is the family friend we all cling to when we’ve drowning.

A great flea jumped on to my Aeschylus as I read with [Janet] Case the other day—and now bites large holes in me. I was too polite to catch him with Cases eye on me.

Adrian and Thoby have come back [from Cambridge], and Thoby might really stand nude with Katie in the Louvre. He is a Greek God but rather too massive for the drawing room. We have endless arguments—about literature! Beatrice Chamberlain is a real woman of genius, and a cut above literature. I wish I had half her brains to make books with. She talked a whole evening about Russia and Thackeray and all kinds of things, and everyone else went down like reeds in the wind. We had a twittering little Freshfield to meet her and Charles Trevelyan who had to be kept quiet over art with Nessa in the back room—otherwise old Beatrice would have charged him.

Are the ceilings sticking, and does it look the kind of place to end one’s days in, which is what one wants in the country.

Something pious and full of associations. Talking of associations, would you like the wardrobe in Nessas room, which is full of ’em, but ......

[last page missing]

Berg

[]

76: To Violet Dickinson

[10 April 1903]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My woman,

Sparroys blessing alights on the house, and breaks a bottle of champagne over it. Good Friday too. Do you feel that you have settled down to pass your remaining days among cows and crocuses? Don’t get too pious and simple minded—too pure to associate with the battered Sparroy. What does it feel like sleeping the first night in a house [Burnham Wood] one has built—solemn? Is the garden divine now? Even London streets are like gardens today—so you must be walking fields of amaranth and asphodel.

Do you see that there are 40 illegits: to every 1000 legal births? Doesn’t it make you feel nervous. The risk of going wrong seems to be enormously increased, in fact inevitable practically, since I read that.

Plant a flower for Sparroy. Heartsease or Forgetmenot, or something that climbs and is evergreen, typical of much. Sparroy’s tendril heart for instance. A fruitful vine for Katie [Cromer]—What a start in life that child will have.

Keep your own heart green and tender at least in that corner where Sparroy is planted.

An old Lady in Surrey is letting us her house [Blatchfield, Chilworth]. Where exactly I dont know. We probably go, if we come to terms, on 16th.

Tell me what you do, and if you feel a good woman. Spring in the country is like a clean bath. I get born anew into bosom of my God once a year—a God half Katie and some rakish old Pagan, like you.

Blessings on the house, and my Violet, who is a kind of home for the orphaned and widows herself, flower grown too.

Yr. Sparroy

Berg

[]

77: To Violet Dickinson

[mid-April 1903]

Blatchfield, Chilworth, Surrey

My woman,

It seems fated that theres no room for you, which is very depressing. I have got a double bed—some strange foresight made them give it me—I wish you could come, but I shall see you somehow in London, or your house.

Surrey is a sham country. This place isn’t so bad as Hindhead, but its over run with Cockneys and Culture. Everyone artistic seems to retire here, and build a red brick house with sham Elizabethan white and black. However this house is better than that—three old cottages run together, and comfortable which is the main thing. The cold is still rather bad. Father likes the place, though, and has a very comfortable room and sitting room to himself. But he cant get out much, and I dont think he is better.

Shall you be in London anymore, or have you let your house, or what? The cottage is a delight to think of, if only you dont get it tainted with Deaths and sorrows, such as always cling to you, and make you a kind of walking hospital. Poor Sparroy will ask for a bed there soon.

Has your husband heard about his exam:?

Thoby and Adrian are here. Adrian goes tomorrow, but Thoby stays till Sunday. He is a charming great inarticulate creature, with torrents of things shut up in him. Adrian babbles away, 15 years younger than all the rest of us. He grows too fast to think or feel, or do anything but eat. The excellent George, fresh from his Countess [Carnarvon] probably comes tomorrow—then I shall shock someone again which I haven’t done for a fortnight. Gerald has taken up with an American millionaire and is cruising with him down the coast of Italy. He meant to go to Venice, but the yatcht [sic] was too tempting ‘Everything is done in first rate style’. So Venice will have to be dropped. The honours of the family are many!

Write here and be a Kind Woman.

Yr. loving,
Sparroy

Berg

[]

78: To Violet Dickinson

28th April [1903]

Blatchfield, Chilworth, Surrey

My woman,

We come home on Thursday. I haven’t any notion where you are or are going to be, so I write. There is really no use in telling it you—my poor intimate—but since we have been here, the nurse has told us that she thinks Father weaker. Seton said so in London and wrote to Georgie and Jack. They know very little—only that the thing is getting worse—has got much worse quite lately. Seton expects some other complication, but they can tell nothing for certain. It may be 6 months or a year or even longer. Treves is the only person who could say more, and we think of having him if we can without frightening father. At present he seems to guess nothing; he goes by his nights, which have been good since we came here. I think you have really known all this. Apparently Treves expected it, only would not tell us, or told Georgie who did not understand. Anyhow theres nothing to be done, and sometimes I cant believe that it is true. Father is exactly as usual, to talk to; even writing, only he can not walk far, and gets tired. But everything goes on as usual, and I would not write to you, only writing is easier than talking, and perhaps I shant see you. Did the other nurse at the London Hospital tell you anything? He seemed to stay about the same, for a long time, and then suddenly to get much weaker. I think this nurse thinks him worse than he really is.

Anyhow I’m sure he doesn’t yet notice anything. He told me today that he thought he was getting slowly stronger. The fear is that his sister and other people will let him see it.

The world’s a strange place. At this moment it none of it seems true, so I am callous and burden you with all these things.

Be a kind woman.

He is such a loveable creature.

Yr. Sparroy

Berg

[]

79: To Violet Dickinson

April 30th [1903]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My beloved Woman,

You are the only sympathetic person in the world. Thats why everybody comes to you with their troubles. I feel as though perhaps I oughtn’t to have told you. Written down it sounds worse, for here seeing him, things go on as usual, and I cant help thinking that they are wrong. Of course theres really no chance of that, but I feel rather a brute to have told you all this without any need. If you saw him, you wouldn’t see any difference I think. I sometimes wish everything would happen directly, and be done with. Theres nothing so bad as waiting and not knowing.

However that’s what one has to do now.

Do come here, or I will come to you; but the great thing is that he should see people, especially just these next weeks, when he may begin to realise that he cant work.

Gerald is giving us his views upon Florence. You are the only person I ever do feel the least inclined to talk to—poor intimate. You dont talk damned theories, or expect sentiments.

Take care of yourself, and slaughter chickens by the farmyard full if they do your precious bones good.

Yr. Sp.

Write again.

Berg

[]

80: To Violet Dickinson

[4 May? 1903]

[22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.]

My Beloved Woman,

Your letters come like balm on the heart. I really think I must do what I never have done—try to keep them. I’ve never kept a single letter all my life—but this romantic friendship ought to be preserved. Very few people have any feelings to express—at least of affection or sympathy—and if those that do feel dont express—the worlds so much more like a burnt out moon—cold living for the Sparroys and Violets. This is because you think, or say, you oughtn’t to write nice hot letters. Kitty never pierces my tough hide, or tries to. She came to see father the other day, the first time since his illness, and asked him why he hadn’t been to call on her, all this time, which was rather too fashionable, I thought. And didnt volunteer more than a fishy white glove to me—perhaps naturally—only this explains why in crises of emotion, Violet is the Sympathetic Sink, not Kitty.

All Stephen’s are self centred by nature; taking more than giving—but if you once understand that, and it cant be helped you can get on all right with them. Indeed some of them are really rather loveable people.

You are a madwoman—why trudge all the way to Southwold to meet damp streets and stringy fowls. I wish you had sense about your own inside—if my pulse were weak, and sciatica in my joints you wouldn’t hear of such things. You remind me, all along, of Mrs Carlyle. I am reading her too. Father says she’s the most wonderful letter writer in the language. She certainly has a strong likeness to my Violet—she gets into just the same queer places as you do—and has to do with exactly your queer kind of people. She was a human woman too—only there you see your warning. How she drove in Hyde Park—and her heart stopped—so for Gods sake (you are so religious) take care of your bones—dont get anything more—feed and fatten. I shall take to talking about health.

Nothing has happened here. Nurse says father oughtn’t even now, to go to the study, but he had better try, if he wants to. As yet he has stayed downstairs. Georgie is writing to Seton to say we are anxious for Treves, if it can be managed without worrying father. Seton apparently is really anxious for a thorough examination—and father refuses to let Seton touch him.

Come on Wed: 5.

Yr. Sparroy

Berg

[]

81: To Thoby Stephen

[May 1903]

[22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.]

My dear Cresty,

It seems about time that I should write to you, and that you should write to me—But there aint much news to tell you—We have just had Nun’s visit—which, as you can imagine, was not cheerful. After half an hours talk one begins to wish that there were a way invented of stopping her. She seems to work round in a circle—But she is pathetic! Are you to write for Trevelyan? Jack has a very strong opinion that you ought to go to the Bar—He says it wouldn’t be so very expensive—and youre made for a Judge—I wish you would—You would give judgments uninfluenced by emotion I know—and if I had reason on my side, you should be my lawyer. Should you like it better than Treasury or Colonial Office? I dont get anybody to argue with me now, and feel the want. I have to delve from books, painfully and all alone, what you get every evening sitting over your fire and smoking your pipe with Strachey etc. No wonder my knowledge is but scant. Theres nothing like talk as an educator I’m sure. Still I try my best with Shakespeare—I read Sidney Lees Life—What do you think of his sonnet theory? It seems to me a little too like Sidney Lee—all that about Shakespeare’s eye to the main chance—his flattery of Southampton etc.—But the Mr W. H. is sensible—I must read the sonnets and find my own opinion. Sidney says that Shakespeare felt none of it—I mean that not a word applies to him personally—But it is a satisfactory book—doesn’t pretend to make theories—and only gives the most authentic facts.

The Season is beginning—not that that affects me much—but Georgie and Gerald are out every night—balls and operas. Nessa and I grub along in our own ways. She has nude models here 3 days a week—and the vigorous [Janet] Case has swept down from Hampstead. Seton was here the other day—He thought father a little weaker than when we went away—but says theres no use in having Treves. It might bother father, and nothing more can be done. Father is very cheerful, and talks away, but he doesn’t get up to the study—and cant do much work. He was very much pleased with your letter—and handwriting! I think one of us might see Treves—without telling father—even tho’ he cant do anything, he might tell us more.

Dont work too hard—or do anything foolish—and take care of your lovely crest—which must be sadly out of order now—

Yr. loving,
Goat

King’s

[]

82: To Violet Dickinson

[19 May? 1903]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My woman,

Treves came suddenly today. He says that six months is the longest it can last. There are complications which may happen before that; he cannot say definitely whether they will happen, but he thinks it more likely than not.

He told us that when he saw Father last he did not expect him to live six weeks. He thinks that at this moment he is better than he was then. I cant understand what he means by this. I think he must have forgotten. When he saw father last he was walking all round the gardens. But he thought him today extraordinarily vigorous in mind and cheerful. It was a specially good day, and the nurse says that Seton absolutely forgot to tell him some of father’s symptoms, and made out that he was able to go for long walks. However I dont suppose it matters. Treves said there was nothing to be done. So now we seem to know everything there is to be known. Treves was decided that Father shd. do everything he felt he could do—walk and work and see people. He said we had certainly better go away in August as usual, though not to Fritham. He thought it was better to run some risks than to miss anything he liked doing.

He said he would grow slowly weaker, without pain, but it would be most merciful if he did not have to wait and know that it was coming. Georgie tries to make out that Treves is mistaken this time as he was before, and says he is certain father is getting better. However that is all part of the job, I suppose, and happily he is generally out.

I have had to write all this to the old sister [Caroline Emelia], and I think I put it rather brutally. Oh dear—what a queer world it is, and there doesn’t seem to be anything more to say. Everybody comes in and says how much better he looks, and Heaven knows what the truth is, only one does know, but I cant think of it. Write if you ever come up—I suppose not till next week.

Yr. S.

Treves was absolutely decided and straightforward, and talked to Nessa and not to Georgie.

Berg

[]

83: To Violet Dickinson

[4 June? 1903]

[22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.]

My Violet,

Would Friday 12th do instead of Thursday? If it collides with Katie, or is anyhow else inconvenient I will come on Thursday.

Beatrice is to be taken to Beresford [the photographer] on Thursday, which will be an entertainment. We had tea at Manchester Square, with Lady Bath behind the gorgeous teapot. Nessa tackled her and stopped her whispers (about distemper in dogs) with another Elderly Countess, and she woke up and pealed with laughter—and asked if we were at last settled in London? Her manners are a treat. Last night we had tickets given us for the opera and took Beatrice. She only wants hatching, that poor hardboiled creature, to make her heart beat. We stopped her shrieks, and made her talk like other people almost—not like Thynnes—for an hour. But she is pathetic I feel—grown into middle aged fast set womanhood without any caring for or sympathy, I am sure. And there was Katie in a box behind us, like some Justice or Victory with her calm brows, so majestic and tired, and more than ever like the Venus in the Louvre. But as far as I could see, she didn’t look ill—only a little pale. We had a grim day, only unspeakably humourous too, yesterday—when the old Quaker Sister came again—begged us not to leave her alone with father, and then sat down solemnly and talked about the weather. Father was bored before the first five minutes were over, and could hardly sit in his chair. She saw it, and wanted to cry, and could only thump her old brains for commonplaces, which were worse than nothing. Finally she decided to catch an earlier train, ‘I see it isnt safe to stay longer’ she said. They had one flash up together and she finally collapsed in the hall—and said it had been very nice to see him—but very agitating—blowing her great nose louder than ever, and pouring tears down her pendulous cheeks. Oh Lord—we laughed—and yet it is damned pathetic—in a small way. I know she cried all the way home in the train.

Nessa has been lunching with Crum, and lunches there tomorrow too! Take care before you let loose savage intimates upon her again. The [John] Baileys are to be introduced. Madge Vaughan dines here tonight. We had six people to tea. I wish you were a Kangaroo and had a pouch for small Kangaroos to creep to.

Nothing much changes here.

Are you well, after those horrid Hospital operations?

Yr. Sp:

Berg

[]

84: To Violet Dickinson

8th June 1903

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My Woman,

If I come Friday I shant clash with Katie shall I? If so, manage another day for me. I should feel like a soiled worldling, thick boots on, trampling the Elysian meadows.

Crum has asked me to dinner—I feel sure you have given me a character whereas I have—what you call fallen more than once—I dont mean precisely that I have done what the unfortunates do—but if my character and virtue consist in amusing the Crum dinner table, then I am an ‘unfortunate’ woman. I have sold my brains, which are my virtue. Never any lost woman felt so degraded as I do tonight. All relationdom safely out of the house, takes to writing letters. ‘Darling, tell me if I can do anything—I will come at any moment.’ The precise and only thing that anyone can do is to stay away and be silent. But thats past praying for. Friendship, relationship at anyrate, consists in talk, or letter writing of some sort. But the normal state of things now is a kind of grimness—and nothing much matters. I am sure the facts of life—the marryings and bearings and buryings are the least important and one acts one’s drama under the hat—Lord—this is drivel—but Nessa and Jack talk on over their coffee. I think of Katie as Heaven and Peace—poor Love, probably a very hell if one were in her inside.

Father isnt so well I think—he had a giddy attack on Friday, and a rather bad symptom has come back, but not one that bothers him, so he is cheerful, and thats the main thing.

Georgie stays on at Pixton—weighing the worth of a somewhat elderly, but quite untarnished, Coronet—would it be permanent, supposing he asked her? And could she go to Court. Those two questions give him sleepless nights, and will decide his life for him. Poor old creature—his virtues sink to the bottom I know, and I’m too lazy to fish them up, as I had ought. Katie must look like a Pagan goddess, sitting out in the grass—a Greek goddess before the fall of the world—you know they are in hiding somewhere—a practical idea—and one has an English Countess’s Coronet on her head—(my mind runs on Coronets—) Athena married to Lord Cromer!

Yr. Sp.

Crum calls me “Sparroi”.

Berg

[]

85: To Violet Dickinson

[June 1903]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My Violet,

Your letter makes me very unhappy, and I wish to the Lord it hadn’t happened, and that I knew you were all right. Ask Mrs. Crum to send me a line, dont bother yourself. You are such a poor boney old cab horse. Have you anybody respectable to look after you. I feel sure your worse than you say, and I shall probably come down and plant myself outside your door and whine till your well.

If you are still at Welwyn on Saturday we might come, but I expect you had better stay silent, my poor intimate you are a luckless Rake Cat.

I will write again, only send me word somehow.

No photograph even to cheer me, however I will have that out in another letter.

Take care of yrself.

Yr. Sparroy

Berg

[]

86: To Violet Dickinson

[June 1903]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My Violet,

It is really too brutal that this should have happened. It makes me furious. And now you have to lie there in the heat, for 10 blessed days, my poor woman. I wish these things would happen to me and not to you. I could carry on my existence quite well flat on my back, but you are a toiler, and I know you hate it. Only do take care, and get quite cured.

One of us will come Monday or Tuesday. Probably the eternal Sparroy, who inflicts herself all round, but is always conscious of her peculiarities. We are inflicting ourselves on Katie today, which I feel to be rather an unnecessary thing to do—and Heaven knows it wont be an easy job. Kitty is evidently worshipped there—they all sit in her bedroom at night, and she spends the whole day talking ‘theories’ I suppose with Katie. I know Alice and Lady Bath and Katie and Beatrice will all sit round like the magnificent aristocrats they are, and there wont be an opening for the nimble witted but entirely middle class literary Sparroy. However it cant be helped.

I cant express my feelings about your back. Fate is a brutal sledge hammer, missing all the people she might knock on the head, and crashing into the midst of such sensitive and exquisite creatures as my Violet. I wish I could shield you with my gross corpse.

I will write and tell you how we come through this afternoon, which makes me feel as though I were 11 and going to a childrens party.

Keep quiet and dont think of anyone but yourself, unless you like to turn over in your mind the tender affection which Sparroy bears for you.

Yr. Sp:

Berg

[]

87: To Violet Dickinson

[June 1903]

[22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.]

My Violet,

I wish your letter had come before 8 last night—then we might have come to you on our way to or from St. Albans. That was a pilgrimage—But are you really better? I dont much believe it—and I feel very unhappy about you—lying there alone poor beast, and we might have come in. Aren’t there any Crums about?

Shall I come on Tuesday? only I know you will have swarms upon you then.

We got off easier than I thought yesterday. We had Katie and Beatrice alone at first—Katie like a bit of a Greek temple lying in the grass—and Beatrice a gargoyle come to life! Lady Robert [Cecil] was there—such a little lady—but sitting apart deaf, unless some one shouted at her, which was rather hard to do. I told them about you—I wish I could hurt my back, and have all the beautiful ladies holding up their hands and saying Darling! You are the most popular woman in England—and much more than that—But you like your Sparroy? (you observe how thick the ink gets at this point—quite spontaneous) Katie has a splendid manner too—she waved everything about the way she wanted it to go—turned from one to another—but was just as simple and easy as ever—and I do like a Great Lady—when she’s a goddess too. She isnt exactly easy—except in manner—but infinitely beautiful.

Shall I come Tuesday. Send a line or ask Mrs. Crum to—my Violet! I hope and hope your better.

Yr. Sp:

Berg

[]

88: To Violet Dickinson

[30 June? 1903]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My Violet,

You are too far off to write to—besides you have been carrying on a most improper clandestine correspondence, of which I dont at all approve. Really you ought never to have seen that literary effort. It wasn’t meant for anybody to read—not in that nude, really indecent state. I wrote it all by scraps when we were at Chilworth, and in a sentimental mood, which has leaked out damn it—and I haven’t the patience to write it again. This is all to prove that if I had sat down solidly every morning and made it thoroughly substantial all through, it would have been a work of genius whereas, as it is—you have to pump up Compliments. Poor Violet. I think literary advice is a very ticklish thing. Of course I should be grateful for criticism as all writers are—the candider the better. I always think I might write so much better if I took time or trouble—or something else which I never do take. This is a very interesting subject—to you especially.

I only had one small scrawl from you. Buy some intimate notepaper—size of this.

I have been writing to try and patch up our quarrel with At. Minna—and all my ideas have been spent on that. Besides it is grilling hot.

We are going to a dance tonight. I cant imagine anyone less dance like than Tom. When are you coming back to your Sp’s bosom? Kitty is eternal—cool and fashionable—white from tip to toe has little aristocratic stories without much point—which is the point. But, as you say, she is a good woman—and etc etc etc. I write half a sentence, very moral too, and forget how it was to end. Nessa has filched you I feel, and I only pick up the Crums that fall from her table (a joke failed, like a bad egg).

It is a toilsome world—I shall have earned my kangaroo nest before I die. The heat is rather bad for father—but he is extraordinarily cheerful, and writes and enjoys talking, and some days looks so well, and one cant believe that it is true. It is a strange pause with nothing much happening—and the world going on as usual.

Come here the moment you are in London. Friendship I say is the vineprop of life. Many other pretty things I might say—only God has seen fit to withold them this afternoon. Nessa said your husband had passed—anyhow thats a mercy.

The Bath family have faded—as is their habit—gone out like fireworks. Beatrice made erratic efforts—spasmodic was the word I meant—(she is spasmodic) to come here, or to get us there—but once paper and pen gets between a Thynne and the world—the rest is silence. I think of you with tender longing. It would draw tears from your stony eyes to see little Wallaby nosing around with her soft wet snout for a letter—and none comes. Give my respectful remembrances to Hester [Lyttelton]—tell her I often think of the Goldfinch—and what it meant for both of us! Ah me! I met a very kind large shaggy Miss Talbot the other night. I only felt inclined to say—Be a Kangaroo to me! and she wouldn’t have understood.

It’s d——d hot. My wallaby paws stick to the paper as I write—and my letters are convulsive. Write to me, and tell me that you love me dearest. I wish no more. My food is affection!

Yr. Sp:

Berg

[]

89: To Violet Dickinson

[June/July 1903]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My child,

I will come with joy on Friday, but it grieves me to think that your works are rusty. I see they want a good licking by the devoted Sparroy—poor Beast.

I think £1 is about right for the Holy State. My copy is very chipped and part written by hand, so I got it cheap. I will bring it along with me, and the Booksellers list. I haven’t got anything to say but I am going on just to show you I can spoil clean sheets, like a thorough Grubstreeter, which is what I shall come to.

You are a Carping Rake, to imitate your Sparroys little peculiarities. Anybody can write half a sheet, but can anybody cram in the amount of pure hot affection that I do? And its not appreciated, only imitated and ridiculed, typical of so much in my life. I cant write a line because my head is smelt out with bundles of Mimosa, sent from New York by a Lady admirer of father’s.

Crum is carrying on awful. She wont come here, which is so suspicious, but makes what you call assignations at her house.

Tell Beatrice that [William] Rothenstein has asked leave to make a drawing of father; and is coming here for sittings so we shall make conversation over her bones.

Have you any stays?

I tried to saw mine through this morning, but couldnt. What iron boned conventionality we live in—stays suggest many lively thoughts, but the letters are going.

But I’ve covered all sheets, and now you know what it is like you wont imitate Sparroy again.

I will lick you tenderly.

Yr. Sparroy

Berg

[]

90: To Violet Dickinson

[June/July 1903]

[22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.]

My Violet,

Will you give these to your husband. I think there are about 12. I would have got a postal order, but a shilling postal order must be such a horrible thing, and if I’d made it four and six it would have come back like Beatrices. Please thank him very much. I drove home like a duchess, and had 2d over for a treat, and also for the flowers, which not yet shed a petal.

Little Rothenstein has been here drawing father—he says Lady Beatrice Thynne is in some ways the most remarkable person I’ve ever known. When she comes into a room you feel expanded: in some lights her head is perfectly Greek etc. etc. etc. This isn’t meant to be repeated, but half a compliment would do the old hard minded apple good.

Unholy chaos all round—my box is open at my side—waiting for something flat and very precious to lie on top. What’d you think it is? It is a source of unending joy to me. Really a wonderful photograph—

Father isnt quite so well these last 2 days. The discharge has come back which makes him tired, but not really bad. He is very cheerful.

Yr. Sp.

Berg

[]

91: To Violet Dickinson

[7? July 1903]

Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My Violet,

I wish you would write and explain what you do. Are you coming to London ever? The summer is winding up, and then two months will separate our friendship. It is astonishing what depths—hot volcano depths—your finger has stirred in Sparroy—hitherto entirely quiescent. I know you are sitting by some bedside—either physical or mental. However thats your life—and the Almighty keeps you supplied.

The religious allusion on the last page drifted in, or was pounded in, by a fat religious cousin [Dorothea Stephen], very red in the face, who is arguing Christianity with Thoby. She is trying to prove that certain sections of her soul are alive and afloat while ours are ‘atrophied.’ She has now found a Bible, a sort of instinct (probably miraculous) leading her to the only Bible in the room, and has just read a psalm aloud, something about being saved from a Dog and her bowels. We try to look as though we are in church. Adrian entirely collapsed. She is now intoning through her nose, in an uplifted and sonorous voice. Oh my Violet, what a jumble the world is.

I dont know that things change much, but I feel somehow that father is a good deal weaker. He seems to feel weaker in himself, but he says nothing, and there’s nothing to be said.

We go to various rather inharmonious parties. Sparroy isn’t a social success. She stands in corners—never gets swept away into the whirlpool. Dorothea’s metaphors affect my brain. She is expounding the mystery of sin—dictating from behind two very fat red hands—as though she were a prophetess behind a veil. I thank God that the underground is created, and her last train will soon be due.

Are you quite well my Violet, and wading through your sorrows? The only reason I have to believe in a God is that some life grows in one and out-grows most things. But otherwise—it seems to me he has a heavy hand.

I see Lord de Vesci is dead.

Kitty was spending today at St. Albans.

Write me a good letter—if you dont come. You have the art of saying things.

Yr. Sparroy

Berg

[]

92: To Violet Dickinson

[22 July 1903]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My woman,

This is practically the end of the week and no signs of you. Nessa and Adrian and I are going to spend Friday at Cambridge buying furniture for his new rooms, and going for a picnic up the river. He begs humbly that you will come too. (The wonderful instinct this family has for clinging to you!) Really couldn’t you? Or if that is too much of a job when will you come? our intimacy has been separated by more than a month, which is very trying.

Besides Kitty [Maxse] swoops down in a yellow bodied wasp like motor (Lady Alices) with Violet Cecil and Nessa disappears into their silklined maw, and I see nothing of her. My intimate I know is happy and engrossed with her plants and livestock, but she must cultivate this particular Sparroy plant.

Write and say when you’ll come, or what arrangement for meeting we’re to make.

We go [to Salisbury] on the 31st. When are you coming there? Georgie comes on the 18th for a fortnight.

Are we to ask [Lady] Beatrice [Thynne] this year, or is she better left with Katie?

Father is about the same. The nurse says he is rather more comfortable just now. [Dr] Seton hasn’t been for a month.

We’re just off to have tea on the terrace at Westminster. I hope the last of our amusements!

Yr. Warm Sparroy

Berg

[]

93: To Violet Dickinson

[23 July 1903]

[22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.]

My Violet,

You sound rather depressed. I hope your not really—else whats to become of the creepers and clingers who make you their pole? The world aint worth a damn—of that I’m convinced. Come on Monday and make all our hearts glad. We are really the cheerfullest family in Kensington. Noise puts an end to everything else. Father has been extraordinarily well these last two days—and it seems entirely impossible that this thing should be going on getting worse all the time. Then sometimes he is so bad. Anyhow its no use thinking about things, and mercifully the creator hasn’t contrived us with that capability—at least not much.

Are you quite well—or are your bones feeling rusted—and the Crums.

I wish I had married Crum—for the cohabitation with you. You have at least ten husbands and wives (and children, only this isnt proper to be said—so skip) and one Wallaby (only one).

You will probably find the faithful [Margery] Snowden here on Monday. She is a commonplace tragic creature, going off to spend her life at Harrogate with a provincial family after three years in London. That is a kind of a tragedy—though not in this case romantic.

We are flourishing well—going off to Cambridge tomorrow morning—and it will be Paradise to get into the country. I imagine Salisbury to be ancient and dreamy, and no parties and no conversation. But the Fishers threaten to come—I think I told you—to a house lent them in the Close. Possibly they wont.

Anyhow you are going to come—the 12th is rather close on Georgies heels, who comes the 18th—but I’m no good at dates.

Take care of yourself, and keep happy, and be a good child.

Yr. Sparroy
Wallaby

Berg

[]

94: To Emma Vaughan

[24 July 1903]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

Dearest Todger,

I hope your throat is smooth again—and that you can talk without shut doors and that blessed haloed Marn hasn’t caught one too—else you will be a pair of Clara’s [Pater]—We have spent the day at Cambridge, buying furniture for Adrian’s new rooms in College and eating more ices than I remember in my Herbert and Jones days. I am waiting subsequent events now. We had a final burst of Dorothea [Stephen]—entirely triumphant as far as I am concerned. We have quarrelled happily! I had her and Pernel Strachey to tea at the [bookbinding] workshop, and with some malice contrived to say “Lady Stephen” in the course of conversation. This is a thing she [Dorothea] feels strongly about. She got purple like an apoplectic Alderman after dinner—took up a plate of hard biscuits which I had laid in for her rapacious and capacious maw—and pelted me viciously with each in turn, which was rather painful. And then the savage old beast threatened me with fat strawberries if I wouldn’t unsay which I had said. Of course I wouldn’t, so she deluged me with squashy strawberries and stained all my white dress (tell Marny). She came to an end of missiles, so got up like the ponderous elephant she is, trumpeting loudly, and pounded round the room after me. I shrieked with laughter, which irritated her all the more, and she got me into a corner and pummelled me—till I told her she was too heavy to take such exercise in the heat and her behaviour was that of a infuriate cow. After that our relations were strained—we said not a word all dinner—and she said goodbye and went, probably we shan’t meet again. England will be lighter when she is gone—that is undeniable. That is the way to treat relations—(nothing personal meant—you see I don’t instinctively include you and Marn in the same species as F[isher]s. and Dorotheas)

Nothing more has been heard of the Fs. I am afraid their silence means that we’re to meet later. Tell Marny we went to the Labalmondiers and didn’t know a soul there—but Mrs L. was like a charming old French picture. A fresh lot of tunes came today chosen by Adrian and a very mixed set—Bach and Schumann and the Washington Post, and the Dead March in Saul, and Pinafore and the Messiah. We find the difference in quality a very good thing because all our servants sit beneath the open drawing room window all the evening while we play—and by experiment we have discovered that if we play dance music all their crossnesses vanish and the whole room rings with their shrieks and then we tame them down so sentimentally with Saul or boredom with Schumann—on the whole their silence is the most desirable thing. This is the sort of letter—at least the sort of length, Dorothea writes about Christianity. Thoby and she are still arguing by letter. We hear that there is an unfortunate tendency among the Hindus at present—at least the better class—to imitate the English custom of taking only one wife. We thought Dorothea had fair chance of say fourth place, considering her handsome white hide. But the old buffalo has gone back to her native wilds, so there’s no need to say anything more about her at present.

I have Marny’s photograph on my shelf, like a madonna to which I pray. She makes my room refined, as lavender in my drawers—(!!)

I hope you are recovered and not needing [Dr] Smallfoot’s attendance any more.

Your,
Goat

Sussex

[]

95: To Violet Dickinson

[end July 1903]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My woman,

I dont think the vile business of life will let us come down either day. I have to go and rout out books at the Library one day, which takes hours, and I must buy clothing of some sort, Damn it. Then we go Thursday. But you will have had a tender invitation to visit us, which you shall Accept, as you love your Sparroy (which you do, and cant deny it). Why didnt you call your house the Garden of Eden. If you cast it over in your mind you will see the advantages it has. Pious to begin with, and then it somehow connects your maternal ancestry with the very respectable stork of Adam. But Adrian is grinding operas on the piano, and Nessa and Thoby are discussing God Almighty. I went to see Everyman last night, only it was wretchedly acted. God Almighty had goggles on and a beard.

Yr. Sp:

[Janet] Case ends “yours affect’ly”. Lord, isn’t that a triumph of mind over matter!

She sent me in her bill, added up wrong, so I wrote back and said “Corrections are useless. I can only put notes of exclamation”—which I did, all over the page.

Wasn’t that witty?

Berg

[]

96: To Violet Dickinson

[August 1903]

Netherhampton House, Salisbury

My Violet,

We are safe here—Father came in great luxury with the nurse. He is very tired today, and has been asleep most of the morning in his chair, but he seems to like the place. The nurse thinks his room and all the arrangements as good as possible.

It is a perfect house for us—roomy and comfortable—and the garden, if it would only get hot, looks delicious. I have a vast whitewashed attic to myself. Nessa has a magnificent room too. These people have good taste I think.

How are you my Violet—write and say. Your little notes are most refreshing—about the only person who writes as she talks. I will scrawl again soon—the effect of the open air upon me is to make me so sleepy I can hardly think a whole sentence.

George and Thoby come today—Susan [Lushington] tomorrow—and Violet when?

Yr photograph on my shelf—

AVS

Berg

[]

97: To Violet Dickinson

Wednesday [August 1903]

[Netherhampton House, Salisbury]

My Violet,

Your telegram was an immense relief. Only take care, and run no risks, and do all your doctors tell you.

We are all the better, morally mentally and physically, for your visit. Such are the alleviations of our lot, I believe. Nurse says she is so glad Miss Dickinson is coming back—‘it is an excellent plan’ according to that sensible woman. I have had 2 long talks with her since you left—see what fruit your words have borne! and I think she liked it, and we talked of all kinds of things, and made a great advance. I shall go in to her every day now—and only wish I had begun before—

She told me, I dont know whether to comfort or because she believes it, that she is practically certain that the end will be this perforation. The haemorrhage going on all this time means that the growth is going that way—She says.

He is very weak today, and talks more about it now that only Nessa and I are here. He tried to walk with me, and when we got to the end of the garden he was so tired he had to go back—and he groaned and said he felt so bad—But nothing more has happened—I mean he has not asked us anything. I think he knows all but absolute facts really.

He said to me ‘Does Violet Dickinson like me d’you think’ and was pleased like a child, or Sparroy, when I said yes. I told him you had enjoyed your talk—and he said, voluntary, what a charming woman you were. It’s a terrible flirtation.

Now we have just had a telegram to say that Ronnie Norman is coming tomorrow. He is a good young man, and wont bother—so it dont much matter. Old Beatrice [Thynne] has written a laborious letter to put us off—she cant have Katie—but we try to make her come next week. No Fishers yet—I’m afraid everything points to a visit tomorrow, but my illegitimate Aunt [Violet Dickinson] is the happy background on these occasions as on all others. I turn to her when I am weary, and like the wicked cease from troubling. The Nurse is a find: it is marvellous what a blind ostrich Sparroy can be—do you remember the incident of her and her intimate in the early days? and now hasn’t that blossomed (an afterthought you perceive.)

Yr. Sp:

Berg

[]

98: To Violet Dickinson

Sunday, 30th August [1903]

[Netherhampton House, Salisbury]

My Violet,

You are a stinging reptile—one sheet to an intimate, and I told you to buy some large paper for me. Also you say nothing about your beast of a back—Nessa says its too elongated to be much practical use in this world. However, we hope it will come in in the next. When you next write put some affection in to your letters—like sugar in otherwise rather bitter tea. I always do. I suppose you are plunged in sadness—your Nelly [Cecil] will be taking up your attention. That strongheaded old Beatrice has put us off for good now—says she cant leave her mother [Lady Bath] and her Aunt. I cant help thinking she has shied at the last moment at the idea of the Stephen family. I cant imagine how she can possibly comfort Manchester Square—Beatrice is not the person I should turn to for comfort in the house at such moments. Her sympathy would be spasmodic—I mean muscularly spasmodic. However if we go so soon there really wouldn’t be time for her here—and perhaps it’s as well.

We have suffered from a plague of males since you left—Ronny Norman, an Indian cousin, besides Jack [Hills] and Gerald. Norman is a dry dog—theres no denying it. He has ruled out half the pleasures and beauties of life already, and will spend the rest of his days in very narrow limits. I speak like a prophetess. I have always foretold it.

Nessa has written to you about your plans. I tried to but my literary style was choked and strangled, and I have come to the conclusion that letters is a fraud, and what shall I do when I have to write to the trades-people—being the wife of a poor curate, and the mother of six children, born in 3 and ½ years? I shall go to the nearest post office and wire for Violet!!! That is practically what I spend my time in doing.

I have also now discovered that the nurse though only 29 years of age (I thought her 39) is a woman of great practical ability—and endless conversation. I go in regularly and sit on her bed—or she comes to our rooms, and we sit talking till next meal time. When I finish this interesting—very interesting letter—I am going down to see her. Nessa will have told you about father—I mean there isnt much change, though I daresay a fresh person would see that he is weaker. This haemorrhage hasn’t stopped once the whole time—almost seems to get worse. He thinks about it I am sure—but says very little. Yesterday we went for a drive together to Bemerton and Wilton. He liked it I think and would get out and look for George Herberts monument, and walked for a few minutes in the gardens at Wilton—but he is very weak. Heaven knows what we shall do when we get back—London empty, and he too weak to leave the house. But these things always come to pass in some mysterious way. It isn’t lively—

We are very good about going out—we spend most of the day out, though it rains so that sitting in the garden is impossible. But I quite see that air now is very important—and I insist upon it, being a woman of much authority.

When you come, do stay a reasonable time. Those two days were a horrid scramble.

Yr. Sp:

Berg

[]

99: To Emma Vaughan

30th Aug [1903]

Netherhampton House, Salisbury (our address)

Dearest Todger,

I dreamt of you last night which moves me to write today. We met in London and you said “At last the summer is over” which is what you will be saying under those conditions in a month’s time. But the summer is a vain imagination of our hearts—it has rained I think every day since we came and we call it fine when a hurricane blows. It is doing both today, being a wretched Sunday. You have vanished into fine air—Marny said something about your going on a bicycle tour in which case I rather give up hope of ever seeing you again. I am going to keep to four walls when I get back to London—or I shall be disappearing too. I wonder if you have met Miss Hickman on your wanderings. She is to be seen all over England at present. Our nurse is greatly excited about it. She knows the hospital and the Italian Quarter, and was once lost there herself. But by the time you get this, if you ever do, all that will have blown over.

The Fishers, now, are of permanent interest. They are a source of some amusement to us. I saw Adeline and Ralph [Vaughan Williams] at the station on the day they arrived, but Adeline stared so that I rushed past without a word. I’m not going to make advances Then we heard nothing whatever for 10 days when At. Mary wrote “am I never going to see you?” We called then—Nessa and I—and had a most depressing interview. The Fishers would have made Eden un-inhabitable: At. Mary sat at a square table on a hard straight chair, writing—there is half a fire in the grate, which won’t burn—it drizzles outside. There is one red cushionless sofa and in the middle of the room a draped table, like Fairbanks’ waiting room, with books at intervals. No wonder when one looks out of the window to see Hervey lying flat on his face on a blanket in the middle of the lawn. Emmy was in a temper—hardly spoke—black goggles and weeds—Charles unwashed and unkempt, also black goggles—and so on and so on. They murmured something about tea but we fled and felt damp and depressed all the afternoon. They have been here twice. I saw them neither time and they go on the 10th.

We shall probably be back about the 18th—father hasn’t been so well here and he is anxious to be at home. I wonder where on earth you are—this kind of weather is what you like I suppose. We tramp out along the road in the mud every evening and squat black toads come flopping under our feet—but for love of you we let them be (honestly, I shouldn’t at all like squashing a toad—but it sounds better the other way) How is the haloed Marn? She seemed to be quite happy alone in London and having a thorough treat at Hoxton. I believe smallpox was all an excuse. Write and tell your news. How is Padstow and is the world to be re-stocked yet by a fresh supply of Vaughans and how is the [Millicent and Vere] Isham family and what are your plans?

Your loving,
AVS

Sussex

[]

100: To Emma Vaughan

2nd Sept [1903]

Netherhampton House, Salisbury

Dearest Todger,

Some spirit surely connects us. As I sat writing to you on Sunday evening, I said to myself, or rather, as is the way with inspirations, had it said in to my ear—“The toad is at this moment writing to you”. I almost put this in my letter—except that I knew if I did it wouldn’t be so—to such depths of superstition have I come.

But really it is odd that after a silence of over six weeks, we should simultaneously think—with no particular reason—that we must that very moment write to each other. I had had a vague idea of writing to you, for several days, but it became imperative on Sunday—Heaven knows why. We have done this before too. I hope that frozen old Marn will write us a full and vivid account of Padstow. Are you going there? How is John [Isham]? I know who it is your going to ride with—another case of sympathy—and her name begins with a W!!

No signs of the Fishers—except Charles who came over the other day as though he had just got out of bed—that’s the way they all look now. Excuse this illiterate and spasmodic letter. I think I am threatened with writer’s cramp and palsy of the brain. Kiss the flags of Kensington for me—not that I in the least wish to see them again—I should think you might see Totty and Clara [Pater] in their red cloaks—they were coming back about now, their summer disorders generally drive them back to town and doctors about the first week in September. I suppose you are feeling thoroughly happy snuffing High Street airs. One might do that just as well as sit like I do and watch the rain on the pane. We have a Lady pony here, who is, I opine, long past child-bearing. She is a disappointed woman, and has no ambitions in life, and objects to hills, and nearly runs me into all the hay carts I meet. I go driving with Father, and when we meet anything else he seizes the reins, and I drop the whip and we are landed in the hedge to the vast amusement of the rustics! Don’t disappear—whatever you do. Insanity seems to be coming over half the women in London.

I wonder if you’re writing to me now, now that I’ve said that of course you won’t.

Yours,
Goat

Sussex

[]

101: To Violet Dickinson

[19? September 1903]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My Violet,

Here we are back. Nurse says father is less tired than she expected—and he is certainly extraordinarily happy to be back. How things will settle down, I dont know. At present it feels rather grim, sitting here and waiting, and no escape—even of leaving this house. But I suppose we shall go back to our usual ways.

I wrote you a Collins—but forgot to send it—this is rather late in the day—but you will understand it as written—all very soft and secret. I didn’t read your letter to Nessa, and we have made an agreement that your letters are to be included under the same rule as Snows—no one else is to read them. So dont hesitate to bare your boney bosom and that extinct volcanoe that calls itself a heart. How was Nelly?—how is your back?

My brain is dry of any thing today—for one thing it is so dull to be in London again, which is as though we had left yesterday and the house is a muddle and a chaos. Jack downstairs talking to Nessa—Sparroy scribbling at her blue table—a large family dinner party in half an hour. That is the state of things and has been for many years.

Kitty has suddenly realized that father is ill, and writes very affectionate letters to Nessa. She is a good woman and all that, and would do anything for Nessa I know, and as it is does a good deal—but the end of the long sentence is that she and Sparroy aren’t what you call sympathetic—and her attitude on these matters makes me unreasonably irritated. But then her attitude is the worlds—and only my Violet says the right thing, and feels it too. George says nothing more, but asks every day almost how we think father is? like a pathetic dog—and yet he doesn’t understand when we tell him. He is altogether well meaning though and would do anything to help—if he were more articulate. He trots up to father and asks how he feels, and father says much the same—and George comes over to us beaming. But he has given up his room—and all his little ornaments, and that means a good deal.

This letter is, what Kitty would call, a sign of the literary temperament d——d egotistic . . But I dont care a hang!! You’ve got to put up with it—my poor Violet.

Yr. Sp:

Yr letter just come—temperature below normal.

Berg

[]

102: To Violet Dickinson

[late September? 1903]

[22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.]

My Violet,

No time for a proper, or even improper, such as I usually write, letter. You must have these pens at once—because Sp: wants another communication. Yrs. are like the scent of profane Violets on my plate at breakfast, such as grow in the unhallowed part of a churchyard, where I shall be buried one day.

It is perfect hot sunshine here too, but there never was any time of the year so sad as this. Kitty says ‘nonsense’. It always makes me think of death’s and dyings.

Yr. Sp:

Berg

[]

103: To Violet Dickinson

[late September 1903]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My Violet,

Do write and get the slothful Crum to write to say how you are. I believe your d——d bad, and hiding it all this time. For Gods sake and Sparroys (two names not often joined) take care, and tell me what is the matter. This is sober truth.

You remember how my soft nose wrinkled in the carriage that day, well, its doing that now, only worse.

This is the important part of my letter.

We have had a debauch of the Thynne family. Katie [Cromer] and Beatrice [Thynne] sprang up suddenly in the drawing room one afternoon. There was a crowd of other people, and the whole thing was overwhelming, but Katie fits in here somehow. She is tired but very beautiful—a pathetic look of weary motherhood already.

Then we lunched at Manchester Square today to meet Katie, but she never came—Lord knows why—no getting Beatrice to make a consecutive explanation. We lunched silently with Lady Bath and Beatrice, three footmen, all silent but the dogs munching our chicken bones in the corner and the tick of Lady Bs Waterbury watch. ‘Nobody praises me’ said Beatrice once. She is enough to bring tears to the eyes sometimes. My Woman, are you a good happy woman, or a bony scratchy scrawly woman, and would you like to feel the Wallaby snout on your bosom? Say Come and I Come, Go and I Go, ‘to the ends of the earth she followed her’. I wish I knew my Holy Bible better. That is a quotation (very apt) from Ruth you perceive. The toils of the world are drawing round us. Case begins next week and the Academy, but shall I come down and see you? Say brutally no, I dont care a damn.

We are in most ways the same here. It is very slow, but comes nearer every day, I see. Well, I suppose we shall get through somehow, but it is a bad time, and nothing can stop it.

One thing is good: Gerald talked to Nessa and takes our view most strongly, says we must of course leave this house, and he wants to take rooms separate. I believe he has wanted this a long time. He said he felt that he and Georgie were a generation older, and that we must make our own lives independently. He thought we ought to take a small house, Bloomsbury possibly, and be four together. He is going to urge this on Georgie.

Goodnight my Violet. Believe that I snuffle all over you, very soft and comforting, and only get well.

Yr. Sp.

Berg

[]

104: To Violet Dickinson

[end September 1903]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My Violet,

Here is your letter. Read it with a magnifying glass if you like, and send it back, and own that I was entirely right. What could poor Sparroy have done under the circumstances? Really I couldn’t evolve the maid and the Tongue and the three pounds of gold, from these materials [inexplicable].

Yesterday was a great refreshment bodily and spiritual. If I lived in your Cottage [Burnham Wood] I should turn Saint.

Would you be careful to impress upon your husband not to talk a word to anybody about possible changes in our family [moving house]? If George or Gerald, even, were to hear anything of the kind they would be horrified, and make things much more difficult. Gerald was anxious that we should not talk to anyone, until he had settled things with George.

Of course it doesn’t matter a bit your talking to your husband—and I know he wont repeat—only I am always in difficulties from indiscretions! (poor Sparroy!)

Yr. Sp.

Berg

[]

105: To Violet Dickinson

Friday, 2nd October [1903]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My Violet,

I wonder how you managed that journey. I think of your white cheeks—and the pain going on all the time, and the long travelling day and night. But you are there [Bordighera] now—that’s something. As you love Sparroy come back very much better. I do hate you to be ill.

Its a brute of a world, and I’m in a damned bad temper. I hope you dont mind bad language and bad writing and bad everything. We have had endless affectionate sentimental visiting here, at their wits end what to say I suppose, and so saying the wrong thing. Why cant people be simple and straightforward in this world—thats what I want to know. I always say what I mean, even if I say it with my Wallaby snout—with squeaks and grunts and pawings of the claw—but I say it—and I’m no Saint. Life would be so much simpler if we could flay the outside skin all the talk and pretences and sentiments one doesn’t feel etc etc etc—Thats why I get on with you isn’t it? (here you must show great emotion.)

But to business, my Violet. No news of Katie—except a line the evening I saw you from Beatrice. She says Katie and the Baby are well, and its nice to hear a child’s voice. I never thought of it, but wont that—I mean the child—solve some of old Beatrice’s knots? I believe it will. It will be something spontaneous in that grim house—and thank God wont have learnt the Bath manner yet. D’you suppose two footmen will stand beside its cradle? Gerald passed you in Paris—no talking done yet—except that Nessa and Thoby sit together and plan his career—(two Es!) It is this kind of thing thats so damned pathetic. I do hate taking life seriously, and making plans and thinking about money and the future—but one must. Thoby wants to go to the Bar, and I am sure he will eventually. [Janet] Case is started again [Greek lessons]—so is the Academy [for Vanessa]. My poor Violet—what a lot of dry details you have thrust upon you. Tell me truly if you are worse or better or what. You remember there is a very fine instinct wireless telepathy nothing to it—in women—the darlings—which fizzles up pretences, and I know what you mean though you dont say it, and I hope its the same with you—’Cos I’ve written this letter without any effort to make it grammatical. John Bailey wouldn’t approve. Is Hester [Lyttelton] back? is Margaret Lyttelton back? George is full of Elsie [Elizabeth, Countess Carnarvon]—but merely filial. The Duckworth temperament I believe likes these temperate (John would scratch out this sentence) relationships. Sisters and mothers but not wives.

Nurse comes in to get a book—wants to know how you are ‘Miss Dickinson would make a good nurse’ she says—so strong minded, unselfish, and practical—those were her very words—and that is the last praise she reserves for the elect. Do you remember one day at Fritham in the spring of our relationship—how I said to you ‘I should like to be nursed by you when I’m ill.’ Wasn’t that prophetic and instinctive? Typical of so much in our lives.

My Violet, how are you? I dont like letters which ask many silly questions, and repetition is a sign of weakness, but tell me true, I repeat again. It was I felt a melancholy last sight of you—that.

Does Cook find abroad satisfying? She must be a woman of great imagination.

The London hospital haunts me. I dream I’m a nurse there—which is of all likelihoods the least likely.

There isnt much change here—but it is extraordinarily pathetic somehow, to use an odd word. But there is nothing to be unhappy about.

My Violet—take care

Yr. Sp. AVS

Berg

[]

106: To Violet Dickinson

Sunday [early October 1903]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My Violet,

I am afraid you will have had to wait for letters, but I didnt grasp the difficulties of the post. But really there is nothing to be said. He gets steadily weaker, I think—less able to read or talk and more inclined to spend his day with his eyes shut or asleep. He asks to see people, for the sake of the change, I think, so Beatrice went in once, and Mr. Lushington [father of Kitty and Susan].

I hope as the weakness increases he will worry less about money and his own helplessness. He has been very much depressed the last 2 or 3 days. Of course they still say ‘no change’—but Nurse thinks him growing weaker; otherwise there is nothing they can tell us, so we dont ask questions.

Beatrice comes regularly—the faithful old thing. I dont know how much she does because she thinks she ought, but I think she is amused more than at Manchester Square, and she has certainly been a godsend all round, these long dull days. Thoby and Adrian like having her.

Kitty makes me angry and she hasn’t been once, but writes sympathetic notes, and now she has gone North for a week. without coming here at all. Of course there are excuses, but it is silly to repeat as she does that she doesnt come because she can be no use. What can anybody do but come and see one, and talk? She is an odd fish, but I feel angry. I think Nessa is hurt by it.

However [Margery] Snowden comes in a few days, and she [Vanessa] really does enjoy seeing her—an incredible taste to me! and Jack also—and Beatrice is regular, and my Violet will come soon, who is the person I most want to see.

I cant write tonight—but I must tell you that we have had a certain amount of talk with G and G. about our prospects, and Gerald says he’s going to leave us, and George says he’s going to stay whatever happens—and they both agree that Bloomsbury is the best place. George has been so extraordinarily understanding and feeling about all this that one forgets his irritating ways, and I believe we shall all get on very well together.

This is a selfish letter!

We live such a queer mole like life: the outside world seems to have ceased—but you are in the thick of it.

Goodbye

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

107: To Violet Dickinson

[11? October 1903]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S. W.

My Violet,

I’m afraid you may object to this sheet of paper—but God wills it. You sent me one good letter. Such as it behoves an honest woman. Should you think that was pretty sound grammar? I tell you I write under great difficulties—because my electric light is seized with a sort of Vitus’s dance—all because its wire is worn through—and poor Sparroy—never was a little Wallaby made to sweat so for her virtue—sweat, literally sweat. Today I put on combies, flannel trousers, sky blue—suspenders—all most hygenic—but so hot! My flesh is melting in streams of affection—and my skin is that irritable. Does one get used to it? And as if this weren’t enough I was persuaded to buy a handsome black coat which I think was originally meant for lady and child—child contained within, you understand. Besides which the coat is inches thick—stands out stiff like armour, and weighs pounds and pounds. My combies are like sackcloth must have been, which one wore next to one’s skin in penance.

My Violet, how is the spine? is it any better—any worse—or the same? Anyhow tell me quite truly; and for Gods sake and Sparroys take care. Do you feel pretty happy or pretty miserable, or a mix? Do you think of Sparroy with content and comfort? Do you love her much? You are to me a rock in the quicksand of Kitties and Snows.

We went and asked after Katie [Cromer] the other day ‘Her Ladyship going on very well—and the baby’—that must be a load off their queer spasmodic minds. We must try and get hold of Beatrice [Thynne] before she ships off to Egypt. Kitty is in the very heart of the politix—at Birmingham with Joe [Chamberlain] and [George] Milner. Her head will spin right off with theories. George has moved to the treasury—has a rise of salary and is head secretary. When we came to breakfast this morning there was a giant man in the hall. The treasury messenger with important letters from Cabinet ministers, which mustn’t wait even the Sabbath. George touches his high water mark of worldly happiness at moments like these. But Sparroy has come to one mournful egoistical conclusion—she’s a fool. I cant understand all these facts and figures for the life of me—and all the rest talk glibly. Do you understand? The British brain feeds on facts—flourishes on nothing else—but I cant reason. Do you mind—do you think it’ll make me a foolish writer?

Nessa turns green to hear of your husband and Sargent. They have him next month at the Academy. [Janet] Case is as regular as a Clock. She’s a nice woman really—and sometimes puts her arm round Sparroy!! As for the Nurse—she flourishes. When she buys flowers she gives us each a bunch. She runs here at all hours—when I’m in bed even—and spouts talk. I never heard anyone with such a lot to say (Sparroys letters are rather garrulous) She is so exquisitely clean and healthy and normal. I feel she bathes one all over—not with talk only.

Father gets weaker I suppose: he hasn’t been out once since we were back—except that time he went half way up the street. He is finishing Hobbes. There are some small things he can do afterwards. He said the other day, to the old Quaker sister, that he felt much weaker, but couldn’t make out what was the matter and didn’t like to ask Nurse. He enjoys seeing people for half an hour or so and talks away—but most of the day he is very tired. He said he didn’t mind dying for himself, but he should like to see a little more of the children. He feels, I think, that we are just grown up, and able to talk to him—and he wants to see what becomes of us. In that way its hard—for him—but not really I think.

No talking to Georgie or Gerald; they are a marvelous pair. A dinner with them is something to laugh over ten days later. Character is what amuses me. Lord—they are comic—Gerald a little jealous and Georgie the good boy whose virtue has been rewarded. If ever I write a novel, those two shall go in large as life. ‘People always tell me George ought to have been a diplomat’ says Gerald—‘now I think I should have made a good diplomat’—and waits for our answer. Georgie explains very earnestly how one should always get up to open the door for a lady in a diplomatic household! Pixton [Countess Carnarvon’s house] is the diplomatic household for him.

This is terrible garrulous—and not all of it exceedingly interesting. It rains all day—all night—I believe it would be very bad for you, so dont rush back like a homesick child. Is it very beastly—no one to talk to—and nothing to do? But if you can come home with a sound back for the winter, it’ll be worth while. Tomorrow I am going to buy a gold pen—I go through miseries with my pens—all my paws black at the end too. Should you call this a pretty good hand? The truth is I want appreciation.

Why not see Nelly [Cecil]? She is an exquisite little creature—nothing like a woman of that kind and Violets kind in the world: they are all the things we poor writers try to write—and cant. Isn’t that rather pretty? My Violet goodbye, and Bless you.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

108: To Violet Dickinson

[late October 1903]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My Violet,

We tramped Bond Street, missed our way, and then found that last Tuesday was the end lecture, and there is none tomorrow, and you are a foolish woman to imagine lectures where there are none!

Thoby thanks you very much, and would have come with joy. Fate has sent him a ticket for the opening of Parliament instead: he goes in dress suit and light trousers, more like a nigger on the Brighton Parade than anything else. Will you come and bring Miss Margaret Lyttelton to tea? It will be one of the ghastly times of life—half an hour of white agony talking to strange young ladies. Why do you insist upon it? She wont enjoy it either, and we shall look at each other like wild beasts caged.

Father is about the same. temp up again rather. Nurse thinks him not so well.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

109: To Violet Dickinson

Wednesday [October/November 1903]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My Violet,

This is only a d——d. scrawl—like those you send me—nothing much to say. Affection? heaps of it. You are a star, a comet rather always wandering in our darkness. After I left you I had such a dose of concentrated relationism—a lecture 2 hours long from the little attitudinising woman [Adeline Vaughan Williams] you remember at Salisbury Station. She says we haven’t shown any wish to see our relations, and they are hurt, and will give us up in future. Things usen’t to be like this etc. etc. I’m no good at mending quarrels—being of a pugnacious disposition—so I left things rather worse than I found them. Sparroy among other things was accused of making a God of intellect, and shifting the burden of the world, which seems to consist of family affection, on to other shoulders! Well, I couldn’t deny that could I? Such a nest of emotion we live in. Today the Quaker [Aunt Caroline Emelia, ‘Nun’] has been again—tearful and always saying the one wrong thing. She comes again tomorrow. Everybody is told now not to stay more than 15 minutes, which is an excellent thing I think. He doesn’t really enjoy people for longer, however fond he is of them. And the majority are easily despatched in 10 minutes.

Kitty back and going strong. Jack back tonight, so beloved Nessa has her cisterns full again—not a wholly apt metaphor. I write in such a tearing hurry—to catch the post as you would say.

Was the hat a success? Does the Boarding house still keep its character? (These two questions have nothing whatever to do with each other.)

Nurse stammers a little over ‘love’ wh. I propose to send to you from her, but asks when she shall see you again. Oh such lectures from her too. Sparroy thinks of nothing but self cultivation, never does a practical stroke for anyone else. Do you think thats true, my Violet. Dont say so, if you do.

We go to see Katie and the Baby on Sunday. I always wonder whether those ghastly expeditions are worthwhile.

Are you pretty cheerful my Violet, and good and affectionate, and loving Sparroy?

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

110: To Violet Dickinson

[October/November 1903]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My Violet,

What a wonderful woman you are for harbouring colds. Take the Sparroy to your breast instead! Father has had rather a bad tired day, after a restless night, but they dont seem to think anything of it.

Thoby wants me to ask you whether you would appoint a time for him to come and see you, and ask your advice about a tramp he is going to take on Sunday near Welwyn. Any time before Saturday. He says that your character interests him a good deal. He now examines everyone as though they were in the witness box and he a judge in ermine. He is always telling me to explain myself clearly, and to say what I mean—the which is always beyond me, but I have a singular genius in saying all kinds of things I dont mean. Kitty has been here 1½ hours talking politics: I should feel more confidence in her schemes for setting the Empire on its legs again if they were ever exactly the opposite of ‘what Leo thinks’ (as she always begins her sentences.)

If you aren’t well tomorrow, Sparroy will come in and see you—only you swarm with disolute Duchesses.

Did Margaret Lyttelton give you a chill last night? I should have rheumatism in all my bones if I sat next her at the play. Georgie wears white gloves at the play: ‘a habit I picked up in Paris.’ Paris is the home of diplomacy, so that it is distinguished to do what is the fashion there, though it has not yet been adopted in this benighted country.

I dont see any reason why this delightful letter should ever stop. I like drivelling away, as a Baby slobbers, to my Violet. By the way, talking of Babies I always feel impelled to mention a certain fact about Mrs. Crum when I am in any very public place, say in an omnibus, on Piccadilly Circus.

Goodbye my Violet. Send a boy messenger with a chain to fetch me whenever you want me. I am rather in request just now. I was asked to spend an evening in Montpelier Square [Kitty Maxse’s house], but I said ‘No I have other engagements’ which I hadn’t, but I thought it set a higher price on my head, and you know every Sparroy is numbered.

Yr. AVS

Remember about Thoby.

I got such a nice pen to write with I couldn’t stop.

Berg

[]

111: To Violet Dickinson

[October/November 1903]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My child,

The letters came all right. I shall send you my manuscripts to read, as you seem so tender.

Are you recovered? You write in pencil which to the eye of affection may mean that yours is the couch of affliction. I sincerely trust not. Did the concert get into your Bronchials? George Eliot caught her death in St James Hall, but she had not a fur coated Sparroy hot of heart with a beautiful though incomplete pair of scissors to keep her warm. Think ‘if you come to your coffin through coffin’ [coughing] how mournful how pathetic and yet how divinely Greek! I must go to Sally Young [dressmaker], but I think you are too debilitated.

Yr. Sparroy

I have a great affection for you so on my account oil well those works of God and nature, lent you here for a brief space, but to be accounted for later on that day when the secrets of all souls, and the entrails of all Bodies shall stand before their Creator.

Berg

[]

112: To Violet Dickinson

[Autumn 1903]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My Violet,

I only got in at 4.30 and found your letter, so I couldn’t come. My poor old Animal—what sorrows do beset the flesh. I will come, I think, sometime tomorrow afternoon, as I have nothing to do, and so dont see me for an instant if you had better not, as I expect. I shall just ask about you. It is d——d—all your difficulties. Beatrice was here 2 hours, and saw father, which was successful, so was Nelly’s visit, but I cant write a line.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

113: To Violet Dickinson

[Autumn 1903]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My Violet,

May I come to lunch Thursday, 1:30, without being a bore—that modest I am! It is easier than coming in afterwards.

Things the same here. I have no time to write, what with other necessary letters, so I must tell you anything there is to be said. What a universal receptacle you are!

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

114: To Violet Dickinson

[Autumn 1903]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My Violet,

Rigby came this morning. He is astonished at father—says he could never have thought it possible that he could stay like this. He has not lost strength in 5 weeks: if anything he is more comfortable. He says he cant make any kind of guess at how long this will last. Of course he cant gain strength—but he may keep the same for some time longer. Oh what an odd world. Sometimes we are reprieved—and it is so queer, and almost hard to face the months that one may have to—and get a relief at the same time.

I am in such a hurry I cant write details, but he thinks we had better try one nurse as [Nures] Traill is so anxious for it. [Nurse] McKechnie goes on 21st. We have more chance of getting her again when necessary if we let her go now, but I think it will be difficult.

What a dear Beast you are!

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

115: To Violet Dickinson

Sunday night [Autumn 1903]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My Violet,

I hate to write this letter to make you unhappy, but I know you want to hear. Father has some inflammation—it came on 2 days ago, and Nurse says tonight she thinks it is more serious than they thought and he may become unconscious at any moment. It may spread to the kidneys. Seton said at first that he thought it would go away, but it is no better, and they think that means that it is spreading. Rigby is coming tomorrow. We may know more then, and of course it is still quite possible that it will go down, but we have written to tell Adrian to come [from Cambridge], as it is not safe to wait. He has no pain, only discomfort, and a little fever. He is lying in his room reading, and he knows he is getting worse but he doesn’t know that this inflammation is serious. He is quite cheerful. He may get over this of course, but I almost wish it could come now. He cant leave his room these last three days, and I think he wants to die.

I will telegraph at once what Rigby says—or if there is any change tomorrow. Dont think of coming anyhow till you have heard. If he doesn’t get worse things will go on as usual, and we mustn’t give up. If he does die you are the only person who can help—and I will tell you to come. He would get unconscious, and could only live a few days without pain.

My Violet, it is very hard, but you are a comfort.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

116: To Violet Dickinson

Tuesday morning [Autumn 1903]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My Violet,

Rigby just gone. He says there’s no immediate danger, but there may be a change at any moment. He thinks it more likely that he will live till Christmas, and get gradually weaker. He examined him, and found that the growth has increased very fast. He is to keep in bed as much as possible, and not to go downstairs again. We are to have a dr. every day, if not oftener, as he will have to be carefully watched. He cant come himself, so he is getting a friend [Dr Wilson] who lives in Kensington to come. He himself comes every 3 days. He is indignant with Seton, who ought to have been every day.

Yr. AVS

Adrian goes this evening as he cant stay, but it is very hard on him. Father saw him and was pleased, and not surprised. Rigby thinks he understands how ill he is, but he didn’t ask.

Berg

[]

117: To Violet Dickinson

Wednesday [Autumn 1903]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My Violet,

Only a scrawl. Kitty here (11.30) talking her Trade, and a kind of Platonic dialogue, which has long ago ceased to be intelligible to me. Father is the same—he saw Romer today—poor Romer hadn’t known that he was ill; also At. Anny. The Quaker Aunt writes just now in great perturbation. Suddenly seized with a panic lest he should think her ‘neglectful’—and so she comes up tomorrow afternoon. Mind you come. You will be badly wanted. She must only see Father for a second, if at all.

Yr. Sp:

Berg

[]

118: To Violet Dickinson

[Autumn 1903]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My Violet,

I suppose the Horners bagged you. Rigby came this morning and was delighted with fathers state—that is he has got rid of the inflammation, and there is now no complication. It was mainly Setons wrong medicines that caused it—the wretch. Of course they cant do anything to stop the weakness, but anyhow he has absolutely no pain, and he is much more cheerful, though so weak.

I suppose we shant see you till next week—a sad separation.

Kitty came again today—and the Quaker. Father said ‘Dont go’ to her half way through her visit, which she repeated, with tears in her eyes. ‘Quite worth coming up for’ she said—poor old creature. Kitty is unsatisfactory to me. I like something stronger tasting—like my Violet, or even the gawky old Beatrice. But she is entirely a good woman. Poor Wallaby has such cold paws, or he would write more fluent. How is Sarah? Nothing in this world but deaths and illnesses it seems.

I have to write six letters all about Father etc etc etc. You can’t think how I hate it—old paws and all.

What a comfort is friendship in this world. My Violet, how you do toil for other people—house hunting, all the rest of it. It is those things that count in the next world!—not going into picturesque Retreat in this.

Yr. Sp:

Berg

[]

119: To Violet Dickinson

[Autumn 1903]

[22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.]

My Violet,

This is written under some difficulties—very cold, and pencil seems the only thing available. I ought to be dressing for dinner. Nothing changed here. One day is like another. I dont know what they expect. Send me your address, and I will write a real proper letter. Take care of the elongated back. Give Hester my affectionate respects. I go to the Greek play with Susan and Mr Lushington. It is an experiment: I have never spent 5 minutes alone with Susan in my life.

Goodbye my Violet—poor Sparroys claws are petrified cold.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

120: To Violet Dickinson

[Autumn 1903]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My Violet,

Do come tomorrow if you can—I haven’t seen you this 6 weeks.

Such a rush—of people to tea—all talking for 2 hours on end—now I must dress for dinner with Beatrice and the Ray [Lady Bath?]. Father seems rather better today, but his temp. is still above normal. Dr cant find anything wrong—thinks its poison from the growth—but it is, he thinks, going off now.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

121: To Violet Dickinson

[Autumn 1903]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My Violet,

I couldn’t come that afternoon—Case stayed so late. When will you come? Only it seems brutal to drag you across London so often. Father had two bad days—Friday and Saturday—but today is better. He slept well and the doctor is satisfied. He says we must expect a great many ups and downs.

I suppose you are at Manchester St [Violet’s London house] Monday morning—but in an absent minded moment I took your letter into the bathroom, where I wash my hands, and dropped it into scalding water—all sense washed out of it, therefore—affection remains indelible.

The Relations Swarm. I liken them to all kinds of parasitic animals etc etc: really I think they deserve no better. Three mornings have I spent having my hand held, and my emotions pumped out of me, quite unsuccessfully. They are good people, I know, but it would be merciful if they could keep their virtues and affections and all the rest of it to themselves. Why I like you is because your vicious. Entirely vicious.

George has been calling on the Talbots. They sing your praises—though they are Bishops.

Nurse is mysterious: on Friday she sent for the doctor twice: we naturally thought something was wrong, but she refused to tell us. So Thoby saw him when he came, and it turned out that the haemorrhage had started again, nothing serious, but Nurse thought we should be alarmed. And yet think of all the alarms she has given us, more or less for nothing. I believe McKechnie makes her professional again, and we are going to be kept in the dark.

Yr. Sparroy

Berg

[]

122: To Violet Dickinson

Saturday [Friday] night [27 November 1903]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My Violet,

Such a cruel day for your journey—the careful Sparroy thinks. What a terrible thing motherhood, for instance, would be, if an intimacy increases the cares of daily life to this extent—but theres no immediate prospect of that. An afternoon indoors, by the fire, is a rare treat in this world. I began to write to you, and then Case knocked vigorously. She blushes like a maiden (I say nothing against her morals) when I say I am writing to you. She says ‘Miss Dickinson (you’ll be Violet soon) has such a sensible look in her eyes’ but I wont listen to such stuff. Everyone sings your praises. Madge Vaughan has just been here—takes down your photograph from the mantelpiece—‘Oh I have heard so much about her’ aint it sickening? One thing I cant stand is flattery—Aunt Anny Ritchie says will you go to tea with her? Kitty says your a woman of genius—tells a long story of a party in some seaside village, which was made brilliant by your gifts. Then she produces some fine theory of genius to meet your case.

But this is a very dull letter. I never can write three lines without somebody coming in—never for any purpose. Madge has been here from 5 to 8—three whole hours, talking hard in my arm chair. She is a strange creature—half a child—but marriage is a heavy burden. She doesn’t think much of John Bailey either. Those words will jump out writ in scarlet in the Lyttelton atmosphere. We passed Diana R[ussell]. in the street the other day, tripping along with bright red cheeks, as though no evil doings were on her conscience—as there are, or ought to be. A Flora-George marriage would not be unlike a Madge-Will Vaughan marriage—Madge tired out with brilliancies and speculating and home difficulties accepts finally the quite orthodox Will—and it is, as marriage goes (Sp: always a sceptic) a success. But I rather doubt. Flora will be settled into all her ways, and not willing to take the plunge soon. This letter anyhow, will have to be burnt as soon as read. I cant write happily with only skeleton initials.

I write this under some difficulty tonight. Susan L[ushington]. calls for me at 10 tomorrow—It will be, I know, rather a ponderous day—all that good behaviour, and white gloves like Beatrice. (However shabby her dress is she always wears tight, brilliant white gloves) But Adrian and his rooms are a cheerful sight. I feel a great affection for him, poor little boy.

Did you say goodbye to Katie? I suppose she is on the sea, or rocking in the rain tonight in all this wind, and Baby crying too.

I dont expect Hester [Lyttelton] has really such a loveable character as Sparroy—at least that is my guess. What should you think? This ink is diluted. Do you have much time for reading letters in the country—because I had thoughts of taking another sheet—Lord knows theres nothing to say. We have daily tea parties—oh so dull—distinguished old gentlemen for the most part, and a few sentimental Ladies. ‘Your father looks so much better’ etc etc. What d’you think they say it for? Well this business is a revelation of what human nature can be—in the way of sentimentality and uselessness—all save my Violet, who rises firm as a lighthouse above it all—what an apt simile. (Violet gets too many compliments)

Father is just about the same—and now it is the end of November—tomorrow his 71st birthday, and the day on which Minnie [Harriet Thackeray], his wife, died, long ago [1875]. He asks no questions, sometimes says hes wondering what it means, but I believe he hardly thinks of death, or any future—or he would worry—The Nurse [Traill] has gone behind her mask again—the mysterious woman. She and McKechnie sit talking till 1.30 A.M. and drinking tea, but not a word is breathed to us. I cant help feeling that she is mentally tired of it all—almost bored. But she is a strange woman.

We have had no relations—at least missed them.

My Violet, are you good and well, and feeling pretty happy? Such a brilliant woman as you are (I cant get that word out of my head) ought to be happy—all her friends cawing with open beaks for her to feed them—Sparroy widest agape of all. Can you come next week—really I could come to you, if it is easier.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

123: To Violet Dickinson

[December? 1903]

[22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.]

My Woman,

A presentiment told me you wouldn’t come today. We spend tomorrow at Cambridge—back in the evening. When are you up again. What Heavenly mercy that Lance is knocked on the head—but how? Is your husband all right? Things are rather bad here—at least one of the complications has come back, which makes him very tired, and very much depressed about himself. However he doesn’t say much—

Seton says [Sir Frederick] Treves was certain that a complication would happen—but this wasn’t what he said at the time.

What a damed [sic] mercy you haven’t gone.

Write to Sparroy.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

124: To Violet Dickinson

[December? 1903]

[22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.]

My Violet,

Temp. has been 101 all day—this evening it has dropped to normal. He has slept most of the time; and it has been like other days. Beatrice was here. We went out with her. Remember you lunch tomorrow.

1.30 or rather later.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

125: To Violet Dickinson

[December? 1903]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My Violet,

He has had another very bad night, and he is very tired today. But except for this there is nothing much to be said. Haldane comes this evening. Father wants to see him but says he is too tired to see anybody else.

Tearing wind, as I suppose with you, but otherwise rather a nice day, and we have been walking in the gardens.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

126: To Violet Dickinson

[December? 1903]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My Violet,

I meant to write yesterday, but there wasn’t time. There is no change: he had a fair night, and the day is about the same. He is very tired and sleeps a great deal, but is quite cheerful when he wakes. He saw Romer today. He must see you tomorrow. Adrian is up today, much happier and more like himself I think. Last time it was all such a bad dream to him.

I have just been writing to Helen Holland wh. makes me feel swimming in the head. Post going, joy to see you.

Case so excited about you. Thinks you charming and most original, and so honest, and wants to meet again, etc. etc. etc.

Yr. Sp.

Berg

[]

127: To Violet Dickinson

Monday night [December? 1903]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My Violet,

There is really no change—if anything he is a little better, his temperature is lower.

But we know nothing, and we can only wait. Perhaps Rigby will tell us more.

I myself think that he will get through this. It would be best not, I know. He seems weaker today, but of course that is natural. He is lying in his room, reading a little. Adrian is here—poor little boy—he had guessed nothing, and he is terribly upset, though he says hardly anything.

Oh dear—if we only hadn’t got to wait for weeks to come, but this is what I dread.

I will telegraph at once what Rigby says. He must know more.

Yr. AVS

I wish you weren’t coming up earlier. If anybody can do anything you can—but I know we shall have just to keep on as usual.

Berg

[]

128: To Violet Dickinson

Monday [December? 1903]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My Violet,

There is nothing much to say—his temp. stays 100, but I suppose will go higher tonight. He seems very weak and depressed, and not able to read much. His whole state seems to be a little worse than it was, with this continual fever. He saw Sir Alfred Lyall; no one else—but I dont think he wanted more visitors.

Kitty suddenly turned up for dinner, and she and Nessa and Thoby and George are at this moment discussing politics in the drawing room—she is a good woman really! It is odd how she casts back to 10 years ago every now and then, and is more recognisable, and one likes her better. I believe if she ever stayed long she would wear off the other Maxse varnish.

This is the kind of letter the Quaker writes!

I will send a line tomorrow.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

129: To Violet Dickinson

[December? 1903]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My Violet,

He seems very weak today, and has stayed in bed altogether. Nurse thinks he will hardly be able to get up again, so we have put a bed in the sitting room, and emptied it, and I expect he will be moved in there tomorrow. His temperature is below normal today. Nurse thinks he gets quickly weaker. Rigby is bringing his friend [Dr Wilson] tomorrow. I don’t suppose there will be anything fresh. Father seems to like the idea of having a new doctor—not Seton, I mean. He is quite cheerful, but one can only stay with him a few minutes, and he cant talk much.

He knows everything I am sure.

Nessa is very anxious to see you. Possibly we might come tomorrow afternoon, but I don’t know what time, or whether she can manage it—but she wants to. So dont stay in, if you are about, but I imagine you are in bed. How is your husband. My Violet, you are a comfort.

Yr. Sparroy

Berg

[]

130: To Violet Dickinson

[December? 1903]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My Violet,

Things are bad today. He had a sudden shivering fit this morning. and his temp. went up to 104. It went down again; and he has slept most of the day. Wilson doesn’t know what it means, probably something to do with the bladder, but says theres no immediate danger. This evening he was very sick, and we sent for Wilson who has just gone: 11 PM. He says the sickness may be only indigestion—or it may be a symptom of other trouble. His temp. tonight is 104. pt 2. Nurse thinks him very ill. He is only to have a milk diet. Of course they may get this under—but they can tell nothing. They dont know whats happening. Wilson comes at 9 tomorrow morning. I will telegraph how he is.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

131: To Violet Dickinson

[December? 1903]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My Violet,

I have got you two sponge bags.

We expect you tomorrow at 1.30.

Yr. AVS

A pot of flowers stands on my table, sent mysteriously, but I think by you. Thank you. You have done more than I ever deserved.

Berg

[]

132: To Violet Dickinson

[December? 1903]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My Violet,

Dont think me damned sentimental but its peace and balm to talk to you, and that is the only kind of good there is in the world. What all these tragedies are made for I believe. Otherwise it seems needless torture.

But you are a beloved creature—that is what I wanted to say—and it makes it all different to have you.

Yr. Sparroy

Berg

[]

133: To Violet Dickinson

[December? 1903]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My Violet,

Another very bad night, hardly any sleep at all, but his temp. is not very high. Wilson thinks that he has got weaker rather rapidly in the last few days, and says all the symptoms are more serious—but cant of course make any prophecy. He is really fairly cheerful and able to read a little—but doesn’t get any sleep really. He is to have a sleeping draught tonight.

I am writing to Hester [Lyttelton] tonight—forgot to last night. I have searched the Times but cant find your lecture anywhere. Tomorrow I will go to Bond St—oh what a good Sparroy—on my tender Pads. It is soaking wet here. I only hope the Cottage has held together, and all your maternal ladies haven’t suffered. Kitty dined here Friday. Came in after the meat was done, quite unexpected, and stayed till past 11. Really I shall have to revise my judgment. She is going back to her early ways again, and she is then charming.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

134: To Violet Dickinson

[December? 1903]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My Violet,

Father is about the same today. Wilson says he thinks the growth may be spreading to the bladder now, which is what they have always feared, or it may be only an irritation which will go away. They cant tell yet. He seems very weak today, so that Wilson is inclined to think the growth is spreading. We have had so many alarms though. Anyhow they cant say anything now. He is not very comfortable, and had a restless night.

I will write tomorrow. You must come on Sunday.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

135: To Violet Dickinson

10 P.M. [December? 1903]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My Violet,

Wilson has just been. He says there is no change since this morning. His temp. goes up and down every hour, but his pulse is about the same. He is perfectly comfortable; and talked naturally just now when we said good night.

Beatrice was here this evening. The Quaker [Caroline Emelia Stephen] has settled to stay, I hope only for tonight, at a Hotel near. She evidently wanted to, and she saw Father again and he knew her and she was pleased.

My Violet, you are a help.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

136: To Violet Dickinson

[December? 1903]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My Violet,

He is about the same—he had rather a restless night, but Wilson thinks him not changed and cant tell anything. He said to nurse ‘We give him two months if all goes well’—but they have said so many things, one doesn’t believe in them quite. Nurse herself says no one can tell anything. I am afraid Jack [Hills] may come to dine tomorrow night, but G[erald] and G[eorge] are away. Anyhow you come—You are a prop to this shaky Sparroy at any rate.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

137: To Violet Dickinson

[December? 1903]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My Violet,

Fathers temp. has gone down again. It is just under 101 tonight, but of course it may rise again. He has been asleep almost all day, and hasn’t wanted to see any visitors. They cant explain it at all—Wilson thinks him weaker, and says he cant rally very much oftener, but thinks he will get through this, unless the temp. goes very high again, which he says is unlikely.

Take care, my Good Woman, and clear your pipes in the air.

Beatrice is more eccentric than fish flesh or good red herring!

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

138: To Violet Dickinson

10 PM [December? 1903]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My Violet,

Wilson has been twice again, but says there is no change. His temp. is 103 pt 6. tonight. Wilson says the early hours of the morning are the critical ones, it is just a question of how often he can live through them. But he says his vitality is still great, and he does not expect any change tonight.

Kitty came this evening again. I spent the afternoon driving with Beatrice. She is really a good woman.

Yr. AVS

Come tomorrow, only dont if you feel too tired.

Berg

[]

139: To Violet Dickinson

Wednesday night [December? 1903]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My Violet,

His temp. is 100, but they say this doesnt count much. He is very weak, and Heaven knows what is going to happen. It cant go on like this much longer. But they dont really know what it is—and contradict themselves as usual. Stay till Saturday if they want you to—we are astonishingly sane, and go about our daily works as usual. It is much better so, and evidently there is no immediate danger.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

140: To Violet Dickinson

Thursday [December? 1903]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My Violet,

I’m afraid your cold must be worse. Do take care, and stay in bed. No change here—his temp. stays 99—but nurse says it doesn’t mean anything. Wilson is only coming every other day in future. He says his visits are useless, and they worry Father. He says he gets steadily weaker, but still has wonderful strength—terrible strength. There he lies all day, almost asleep, hardly able to read, but he does still enjoy seeing people. He had Romer and Will Vaughan today, Kitty yesterday.

Dont come tomorrow, please, if there is the least reason against it. Beatrice was here to lunch today. You will meet Nessa and George tomorrow.

Yr. Sp.

Berg

[]

141: To Violet Dickinson

[December? 1903]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My Violet,

I’m afraid your cold must be worse—and Beatrice didnt come so we had no news.

Father has still some fever—just 100 all day, and it goes up at night, but Wilson doesn’t seem to think it means anything. They really expect another violent attack like the first, I think—but he says he sees no signs of it yet. He is very tired today but saw two or three people. He has been asleep almost all day, till tea time, hardly reading at all.

I do hope you arent really bad. I know nothing about your colds—what they run to.

Kitty away—Jack back—Snow rampant. Beatrice deserted—various callers, infinitely dull.

Nessa begins Academy on Wed: probably, wh. seems the best thing to do, and I shall set to work steadily at my Greek. I suppose we shall come thru’ somehow—but it is marvellously hard—I never thought to have to go through all this.

My Violet, take care.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

142: To Violet Dickinson

[December? 1903]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

Woman,

Why do you pitch on Tuesday? I cant get rid of Case, and Nessa has her life man that day, dam it. Couldn’t we come some other time. Friday next is just possible, or Wednesday week after next which would do better. Rack your ruinous brains and find out a way, and send me some more trains. And write a still longer letter. You see what with trains and things one cant read there isnt very much left of your letter at the end.

Aunt Minna hasn’t been written to yet. We are having a shot at a studio here.

Sparroy

How are your works? For goodness sake dont get married. Remember, Sparroy is an appendage if you do.

Berg

[]

143: To Violet Dickinson

Christmas day [1903]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My Violet,

I can only write a scrawl tonight—and it wont reach [you] till goodness knows when. Father is just the same—but it is very hard work. He does want to have done with it all, so, and can hardly read or amuse himself, and yet must go on, day after day. He is comfortable, and happily sleeps a good deal. They seem as much in the dark as ever—dont know from day to day whats going to happen—and refuse to make any prophesy. If only it could be quicker!—but theres no use in writing all this—which only comes over me at times, and I daresay he forgets it too, sometimes.

Beatrice is a fixture here—dont tell her that—but I love her, and she may come as often as she likes, and stay all day if she will. We were out with her all yesterday afternoon—and she came to lunch today—and stayed till 7.30 and she comes to lunch tomorrow!

All the same she dont cut you out—I hope you are getting through with your Balls. Christmas went off here solidly, without much difference, and we are getting back to our old everyday ways, as tho’ nothing had happened or were going to happen.

We must go abroad sometime—right away to Italy.

Goodnight my Violet. You have made yourself indispensable here.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

144: To Violet Dickinson

Monday 28 [December 1903]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My Violet,

Father has been very tired all day, and tonight his temp. is up to 100 after all these days of normal. It may mean nothing—Nurse cant tell anything—but if there is any change tomorrow I will telegraph at once, and dont bother if you dont hear. He is so fearfully weak. Any small thing wd. make such a difference, and he has got weaker even the last few days I think.

Your letter is just in. It will be merciful to see you again. Beatrice took us driving today; she brings tears to my eyes sometimes. ‘I like being stroked. No one strokes me’ she says simply as a child.

But Violet is my woman. It is ages since you left—and months and months since all this began—a fortnight really, but there never was any time so long.

What has come to my wrist I dont know, but I cant make two consecutive letters, and the whole thing is laboursome.

Take care of your back—I am terrible sorry it is bad again. Do get well.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

145: To Violet Dickinson

Thursday night [31 December 1903]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My Violet,

Wilson thought Father weaker this morning—his pulse not so good. His temp. has been 100 all day; at 2 AM. it goes up to 102. Wilson thinks the temp. may go down as it did before—but I dont know whether father will be able to live through the weakness which must come afterwards. He has been asleep most of today, very quietly. He sleeps more and more, but is perfectly conscious when he wakes. I think he gets weaker every day—and he takes nothing but a little milk and meatjuice, and that with difficulty. But in a way I feel happier about him—he is less able to think and to worry—and that is the worst thing. But however you look at it, it is a miserable time. If he had died at first it would have been easier, but now one has to give up more—I mean all these days he has been there, and able to talk a little, and one has had time to think—however, I know I shall be glad for him.

We have been tramping Bloomsbury this afternoon with Beatrice, and staring up at dingy houses. There are lots to be had—but Lord how dreary! It seems so far away, and so cold and gloomy—but that was due to the dark and the cold I expect. Really we shall never get a house we like so well as this, but it is better to go.

We are the sanest family in London and talk and laugh as though nothing were happening; Adrian and Thoby are going to sing the new year in! We should never get on without this kind of thing.

I write letters all about ourselves. Dont really hurry back because of us. It will make your husband angry, and there’s no real reason except that we want you, which isnt sufficient.

The nurses are rather bothersome, but have now settled to dignity and silence, which is peaceful at anyrate. Traill is depressed, I think a little tired of it all.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

146: To Violet Dickinson

[January 1904]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My Violet,

This is written in a tearing hurry 11 P.M. We went over the house today. The only thing is we think the rooms too small. It seems absurd, but Thoby and Adrian, possibly George do take up a lot of space, and I think that is a real objection. There isn’t one big room, all through. Jack went with us, sensible but discouraging, showed us the neighbourhood which he thinks bad and says we should never get anybody to come and see us, or to dine. The walk to a cab is of course a drawback. He thinks we should have to spend a great deal in doing up, and doubts what we should get for this house. Altogether I think it is rather impossible. For two people, of course it would be perfect. The garden and steps and peace make my mouth water. If only there were more room, and they needed less doing up. Nothing settled yet—but I dont believe we shall take it—Oh Lord—what a bore it is, and my poor Violet took such a lot of trouble, and in some ways I know we shant get nothing near so nice.

Goodnight my Violet and Blessings for all you have done, and do for us.

Yr. Sp.

Berg

[]

147: To Violet Dickinson

[January 1904]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My Violet,

This evening he has had a bad attack of sickness again. Wilson doesn’t know what it is, but thinks it may not mean anything. Anyhow Rigby comes tomorrow morning, so we shall know more. I believe we have got through the worst, and whatever happens now wont be long. But its a strange world to insist upon these things. You have been—but I find no words to express you!

Take great care of yourself, and come back fresh.

We will telegraph and send all news.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

148: To Violet Dickinson

Tuesday morning [January 1904]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My Violet,

Fathers temp. is still up—101 this morning and they think it may go higher. Wilson can say nothing, except that it is another attack like the first, but whether there will be another fall of temp. or whether he can live through this fever, he cant tell at all. He is fearfully weak, but of course he has still wonderful vitality. It is no use to make up one’s mind again that this is to be the last attack; anyhow he will live some days at least. So we are just going about as usual, and trying not to think. Wilson says the whole thing is so mysterious that he would rather not say anything. There is no doubt of course that the bladder is perforated, but as they cant tell what gave that sudden relief, they dont know whether it will return or not.

I will write tonight, and telegraph if there is any sudden change.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

149: To Violet Dickinson

Wed: morning [January 1904]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My Violet,

He is very weak this morning, and can take nothing but milk, but the dr. says there is no real change. He thinks it bad. Temp: going up and down, and he is fearfully weak. It is the same as last time. He is very sick.

I will write again.

Yr. VS

Berg

[]

150: To Violet Dickinson

Thursday [January 1904]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My Violet,

Father is not so well today, his temp. has suddenly gone up to 102 pt 6—almost 103—and nurse expects it to go still higher tonight late. This is higher than it has been since the first attack, and Nessa evidently thinks it serious though she cant say anything. But of course it may go down again—its no use making up my mind to anything I feel. I think I had better not come to lunch tomorrow—as Wilson is coming in the morning, which may mean about 1. I will let you know what he says, but I dont suppose he will be able to tell anything.

Yr. AVS

I shall probably come round to you about 3 tomorrow, unless you stop me—probably I mayn’t, but I shall try.

Berg

[]

151: To Violet Dickinson

[January 1904]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My Violet,

Just a line. He hasn’t been quite so well today; his temperature has gone up a little—over 100, but he says he has no pain, and Nurse thinks it mayn’t mean anything. He enjoyed seeing you immensely—and talked to me about you—said you were so charming, and he liked seeing you so much, and thought you were fond of him. He said you had talked of me—and did you talk of him? Wasn’t that like Sparroy? I will write tomorrow.

Yr. Sp.

Berg

[]

152: To Violet Dickinson

[25 January 1904]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My Violet,

I wish I had time, as I have thought to write you a really pretty letter. Such as Sparroy can write. But why the Devil do you think or say that you bore me? You are a strange woman. Have you ever bored me or said anything but what was wise witty and delightful in the course of our long and tender intimacy? Modesty is attractive—but Lord preserve me from a fit of it! Your little Book lies by me, very fragrant.

I have had gorgeous presents today. Father gave me a ring—really a beautiful one, which I love—the first ring I have ever had. This time even, has compensations. It amazes me how much I get out of my Father, still—and he says I am a very good daughter! He is the most delightful of people—and Lord knows how we shall ever get along alone. But this is not what I want to say—but blessings on you, past future and present. Think we have asked Nelly [Cecil] to lunch and this coming. Oh Lord!

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

153: To Violet Dickinson

Wednesday [February 1904]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My Violet,

Rigby agrees with Wilson. Says he can give us no idea of how long this can last. He thinks father will go on getting weaker and will become unconscious without pain—but I have no idea how long they expect.

It does seem very hard. Life, I am sure, is no pleasure to him—and he would have been glad to die a week ago—but theres no help for it. It is so hard to wait and see him get slowly weaker day by day. But these are the things one has to go through in this Brute of a world apparently.

We were out morning and afternoon, and Beatrice came to tea. She is extraordinarily honest and deep feeling and inarticulate. She lunches with us tomorrow, and brings her carriage.

I will write more another day.

Books are such a mercy.

Yr. AVS

Tell me all about your clothes, and triumphs.

Berg

[]

154: To Violet Dickinson

Sunday night [February 1904]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My Violet,

Father is worse today, and Wilson thinks he cant get over it. His temp. is 103 and his pulse is very bad. Wilson says he thinks it probable that he will not live a week. He is so much exhausted. Except for the weakness he has no pain, or even discomfort, and he speaks like himself, only he is so terribly weak. Wilson comes tomorrow at 9.30 and will be able to tell us more then, and what we ought to do about sending for Adrian. Nurse is much better; and of course now there can be no question of sending for a new one.

I know that death is what he wants, but oh Lord, it is hard my Violet.

I will telegraph after Wilson has been.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

155: To Janet Case

[February 1904]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

Dear Miss Case,

Father is very weak, and has a great deal of fever, but he is without actual pain. He has so much vitality—but they can do nothing. He is quite conscious when you speak to him, and talks as he always did. He asked me today when you were coming, and what I was reading. But he is fearfully tired. Thank you for your letter. I dont think there is any good in going through these things—and it is all pure loss. But that one realises afterwards. You see I’m not in a pious frame of mind!

But we have all been so happy together and there never was anybody so loveable.

Yr. aff.
AVS

Sussex

[]

156: To Janet Case

[February 1904]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

Dear Miss Case,

I suppose you are right, but it seems rather absurd—Your talk is as good as a lesson, and it was my choice too.

Please come sometime—only tell me when, so that I may give orders that they are to let you in.

Father is weaker, I think, but the doctors still say there is no change.

My hand is paralytic with virtuous letters—all so dull and dreary, six of them tonight—

Yr. AVS

Sussex

[]

157: To Violet Dickinson

[February 1904]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My Violet,

Wilson thinks he is getting quickly weaker, and does not expect him to rally, but cant say any more. He said at any rate he would live through the next few days. He is more comfortable and like himself, and is going to see Haldane today, as he wants to. His pulse is bad.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

158: To Violet Dickinson

[February 1904]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My Violet,

Wilson says he is practically the same. He has no doubt that the growth or a clot of blood is preventing the poison from reaching the bladder as quick as it was doing, but he says this may break down at any moment.

Oh dear—it is very hard. He may live a week or so I suppose, or the end may come at any time! They cant tell, and we just have to sit here. But he has no pain, and the fever just now is less. I begin to wish for anything to end this. The waiting is intolerable—but Lord, these things have to be and we have to grin and bear them! The worst of it is he is so tired and worn out, and wants to die I think, and is just kept alive. I shall do my best to ruin my constitution before I get to his age, so as to die quicker!

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

159: To Violet Dickinson

[February 1904]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My Violet,

Wilson this evening thinks him rather worse. He said a week was the longest. but he may become unconscious at any moment. His temp. now is 103 pt. 4. It went up to 104 again this evening. He says it probably wont go down at all. He was wonderfully cheerful when we went up to say good night, and had asked to see the paper. Rigby comes tomorrow at 12.30. Wilson comes at 9.

It will be a comfort to have you.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

160: To Janet Case

[February 1904]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

Dear Miss Case,

Father is getting slowly weaker, and they say that he can only live two or three days. But he has absolutely no pain, and still knows us and can speak a little. There doesn’t seem to be anything to say. It is so strange. You will understand, I know.

Yr. aff.
AVS

I will write

Wednesday night

Sussex

[]

161: To Violet Dickinson

[February 1904]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My Violet,

Father is suddenly a good deal worse. He has had a shivering fit, and they think the kidneys are affected. He is wandering. Wilson is away till 6.30 this evening. I will write tonight. This may go on some days, I suppose. The nurses cant really tell one anything.

AVS

Berg

[]

162: To Violet Dickinson

[February 1904]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My Violet,

Wilson says theres no change tonight. His pulse is a little stronger if anything. He thinks he sees people in the room sometimes, but when we said good night he was perfectly like himself.

Kitty came this evening, and Nessa was pleased, also Jack. Kitty was very nice, Nessa said. I didnt see her.

AVS

Berg

[]

163: To Violet Dickinson

[February 1904]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My Violet,

Don’t think me a crazy tempered Beast for the way I growl. With no one else shd. I dare to behave so badly. But this is devilish hard, and I believe he is very bad. Nurse thinks this may be the beginning of unconsciousness—he is wandering a little tonight. However, there’s nothing to be said—but that at all times you are the comfort.

Yr. Sp.

Berg

[]

164: To Violet Dickinson

[21 February 1904]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My Violet,

Father has been becoming less conscious all the afternoon and evening. He now does not know us. Wilson says the poison must have reached the kidneys, and he does not think it possible for him to get any better. He says he may die tonight. It is 11.30 now, and he comes again later, so I will add anything. Father was very restless, talking to himself, but Wilson has given him morphia so that he now lies quite quietly.

11.30. Wilson just been. He says there is no change, and thinks he will probably get through the night. They give him morphia if he is at all restless, so he has no pain, and simply lies without moving most of the time. I will telegraph tomorrow morning. We are sending for Adrian.

Dont come, my Violet. Stay quiet, and get well. There is nothing to be done. I have been sitting with him—so have we all. It is quite peaceful. He doesn’t take any notice. He seemed a little better this morning. and saw Kitty and talked away: it came on quite suddenly at 2.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

Letters 165-178

165: To Janet Case

Tuesday night [23 February 1904]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

Dear Miss Case,

It [the funeral] is to be tomorrow at 3 at Golders Green. We shall go.

Father died very peacefully, as we sat by him. I know it was what he wanted most. Nothing now can hurt him, and that is what one has dreaded.

But how to go on without him, I dont know. All these years we have hardly been apart, and I want him every moment of the day. But we still have each other—Nessa and Thoby and Adrian and I, and when we are together he and Mother do not seem far off.

Yr. aff.
AVS

Sussex

[]

166: To Janet Case

[26? February 1904]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My dear Miss Case,

I send you these books which I hope you will like to have. I can hear his voice in every word of them, and that is what one wants more and more—I think of all the things one might have said and done, and never did.

Thank you so much for coming the other day. It was a real pleasure—though I feel a brute for talking of our bothers when you have so many of your own.

Yr. aff.
Virginia Stephen

Sussex

[]

167: To Violet Dickinson

28 February 1904

Manorbier R.S.O., Pembrokeshire

My Violet,

I am happy about that ring. I dont mind how much foil they put so long as I have it the same as when he [her father] gave it to me. I began to think I might have spolit it for ever.

We have come to the right place. Never were people so lucky as we are in practical things. The house holds us perfectly, and is warm and comfortable, and I havent seen such splendid wild country since St. Ives—indeed one thinks of St. Ives in many ways. We have already spent an astonishing amount of time walking about on the cliffs. Even lying in the sun. We live almost under the shadow of a great feudal castle, which stands on a cliff over the sea. Nessa and I have walked right along the coast already, never meeting anyone.

There are about 3 houses here, and a wild queer Church on the hill. It is cold, but very clear and bright, and no sound but wind and sea.

Thoby is wild with his Birds—there are all kinds here; and George tramps about too with his glasses.

I dont want to think; I feel like a cow with her nose in the grass, but I know that here in this quiet [illegible] it seems more natural and less terrible than it did. The dreadful thing is that I never did enough for him all those years. He was so lonely often, and I never helped him as I might have done. This is the worst part of it now. If he had only lived we could have been so happy. But it is all gone.

However, I wont write it; and generally I am in such an animal state that I dont think it.

We are all very well, and this is the most resting of lives. It is a comfort to write to you.

My Violet.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

168: To Violet Dickinson

Friday [4 March 1904]

Manorbier R.S.O., Pembrokeshire

My Violet,

I have been a bad beast about writing, but mercifully that doesn’t affect you. The relations have been relieving their souls in pen and ink ever since we came here—saying quantities of things which dont mean much, and clamouring for letters. I saw the Pilot and some other newspapers, but not one seems to me to have said a word that one cares to remember. I daresay somebody who takes more trouble will write something in one of the Reviews, but it dont much matter. Father used to say that it would amuse him to read his own obituary notices, but I dont think he would have got through these. Stupid fools! I could have written them better. Aint it odd what very dull impressions people seem to have got of him.

What are your views about coming down? It is rather a delicate question, so that we had our doubts about writing. Your husband may think it bad for you, and you may have heaps of things to do—and you wont like to say so. There’s nothing like simplicity in these matters, and I trust you somehow to say what you think. As you know by this time, you harmonise us wonderful well.

The only attractions we can offer are that the house is pretty warm and comfortable and our climate is much better than yours, so you could lead the quietest life—nothing agitating about us! Large tea and other meals and no more walking or talking than you like. Is this a good advertisement? We are entirely barbaric, do nothing all day long, and really there is some joy in the country.

This paper is like granite slabs to write upon, which affects my very brain.

We make queer little expeditions every other day with Georgie. He seems to think it helps to pass the time, as I daresay it does.

I begin to want my books again—and yet half dread them.

There are quantities of pictures for Nessa I should think, even from the windows.

I am priming myself to write to Nelly after this. Lord how I hate it!

All this stupid writing and reading about father seems to put him further away, only I know nothing can do that, and I have the curious feeling of living with him every day. I often wonder as we sit talking what it is I am waiting for, and then I know I want to hear what he thinks. It was a most exquisite feeling to be with him, even to touch his hand—he was so quick, and that one finds in no one else.

My Violet—I hope to see you—but if not—Sparroy is firmly planted in that cabbage patch you call yr heart.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

169: To Lady Robert Cecil

4th March [1904]

Manorbier, R.S.O., Pembrokeshire

My dear Nelly,

We never thanked you for a carriage you send some time ago, which took us for a long drive. It was very good of you to think of it. I remember it came round just as we wanted an excuse to get out of the house, and escape relations!

This is a very strange wild place, something like the Cornish Coast. We live like barbarians, and never see anyone, but I hope Violet may come down. I dont know how long we are going to stay here, as there doesn’t seem much object in anything. But I hope we shall see you, if we are in London together. You have been so good to us. Violet doesn’t say how you are. I’m afraid weather like this is not encouraging, anyhow it cant be worse.

Vanessa sends our love. We have two Uncles with us here—one old and one young.

Your affate,
Virginia Stephen

Hatfield

[]

170: To Violet Dickinson

8 March 1904

[Manorbier, Pembrokeshire]

My Violet,

Should you mind being bothered with a horrid job? I must get some clothes. Could you buy for me anywhere stuff to make 2 blouses; one thin, sort of muslin or something: one thicker, black, and send the stuff to this address

E. Clarke
35, Green Street
Chelsea, S.W.

I think they might be spotted or striped or something not quite plain. Oh how I should swear if you were to ask me to do this kind of job! I dont know how many yards one wants. The shop would know. Would you pay out of this cheque?

George has gone back, which is, though I am a brute to say so, a relief. He never lets one alone a moment. Very well meant, but wearisome. I begin to dread our joint household, but it cant be helped. Nessa and Thoby and I get on very well together. It is so odd being alone, for the first time in our lives.

It poured all yesterday. Today Thoby has gone fox hunting on foot. His energy is marvellous.

My ring has come back, but it is very disappointing. The man says I have ruined the stone. It is rather a better colour, but full of odd cracks, and marks, as it was before. They must be in the emerald itself. I dont know what to do, as it isnt a bit like what it was when he gave it to me—and yet I dont like having a new stone put. I think I must though. Waters says he has done everything possible.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

171: To Violet Dickinson

[March 1904]

[Manorbier, Pembrokeshire]

My Violet,

You are a good woman. The stuff is perfectly right, much better than I could ever have got for myself.

Our plans are upset again. Gerald says he’s going to Venice on the 1st and suggests taking us, which is I suppose sensible. Then we could meet you in Florence about the 7th—or whenever you chose. What a dream it sounds! I suppose it will turn out real though. I dont find the affairs of this world easy to realise. Much thinking would send me down bottomless pits I know.

I cant believe that all our life with Father is over and he dead. If one could only tell him how one cared, as I dreamt I did last night. You dont mind my filling my letters with egoistical complaining—very dull, but I cant help writing them to you. It is so hard to talk even to ones own brothers and sisters.

Since I wrote my ring has improved wonderfully. I cant think why, unless its being in the light that does it—but it has got much cleaner and a better colour. I shall certainly keep it. Of course it isnt right, but it is rather attractive looking.

I have had a long letter from [Nurse] Traill. She is in Edinburgh, but is going to the Barnardistons at York soon, which she seems to enjoy. No letter from Beatrice. I can see her biting her pen to the stump!

Why stay with Earle? She is a rancorous woman. I never read such positive nonsense as her books are.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

172: To Charles Eliot Norton

13th March 1904

[Manorbier, Pembrokeshire]

My dear Mr Norton,

You will of course have heard long ago of Father’s death, but I should like to tell you that it was in every way the end that we wished for him. He was talking to us all on Sunday morning in his most vigorous and cheerful way—about books and people—and saying that he felt less tired than usual. He also saw a friend and she was amazed at his strength and interest in everything. Half an hour afterwards he became unconscious, at least he did not know us though he talked to himself constantly. This was on Sunday afternoon—All that evening he grew weaker, apparently without any pain—and he died at 7 on Monday morning so peacefully that one could only feel happy for him.

His dread always was lest he should lose his power of thinking, or should have to suffer pain. Of course all through this long illness he was often very tired and weak, but he had no actual pain, and his mind never seemed clearer or more brilliant. He was able to read on the last morning of his life, asking me to bring him an article on Shakespeare and a new poem by Thomas Hardy—and almost every day he saw two or three friends. Even though he was so ill I think this last year of his life was a happy one; he seemed so peaceful and glad—almost surprised—at the love of all his friends and the admiration which people have shown him more than ever before. I think there was no one so loveable. He often talked of you, and enjoyed every letter you sent him. Your letters, he told me, were some of the very few he cared to keep, and he gave me each as it came to add to the others. The last you wrote reached us after his death, and I have put it with the rest. I do not know if you have any photograph of him or would like to have one. We had several taken just before his operation in December 1902. They are, I think, as good as photographs can be, though he looks more ill than he did afterwards. I will send you one, in case you may like it.

Your affectionate,
Virginia Stephen

Houghton Library, Harvard University

[]

173: To Violet Dickinson

[March 1904]

[Manorbier, Pembrokeshire]

My Violet,

My plate would be empty without your letters. Of course come to lunch on Tuesday. I suppose we are to spend next week in a devils whirlpool of shops and dentists. I shut my eyes, and trust to luck to land me safe somehow and some time at Venice.

Great travelling enthusiasm has seized us: we spend our evening following impossible routes with our fingers across the map—all wish to go different ways.

The difficulty seems to be Gerald: however I let that slide with the rest. We are to travel through Good Friday. Somehow Geralds figure never did make part of the Venetian foreground I have in my mind!

That scrap of Beatrice is characteristic: that is her great merit—never does or says anything quite as other people do. Did she mean that she couldn’t write us banalities, or you?

I never seemed to realise that you were still to let Manchester St.—shows what a egoist (as Kitty would say) I am. But for Gods sake dont get carried away to Chelsea or Kensington. Kitty already screams against Bloomsbury. I dont think Nessa much minds—or thinks that distance from Montpelier [Kitty Maxse’s house] is a drawback to her friendship. After all, I beseiged your icy heart in Manchester Street. That I always hold up as the type of an adventurous expedition—North Pole nothing to it!

I had a letter from Nelly too: but I shant make much of a job in that quarter. And now Hester is lost to us: who can you find me to flirt with?

I find the country a good place to work in. I have really finished quite a lot. So has Nessa.

Now we have to look for rooms for Adrian [at Manorbier]: his landlady has just had a Baby, which will be a source of interest to him. He is domestic.

Oh dear, what a world it is! I keep thinking I shall find Father at home—and what I shall tell him—I wonder how we go on as we do, as merry as grigs all day long.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

174: To Violet Dickinson

[March 1904]

[Manorbier, Pembrokeshire]

My Violet,

We come back late on Saturday. I suppose you will be at the cottage. Thoby has an exam: on Monday, I think. I must say I shall be rather glad to get back—why I dont know. This place is really beautiful, but the nature of the beast is perverse.

Adrian came down yesterday, and we have now decided that he can easily go with us for the first 3 weeks. He stays on here alone to work, and then we shall all go out [to Italy] together. I expect Gerald will find it more convenient on the whole to go alone. Five of us is too large a party to be luxurious.

Adrian is wildly excited already—talks of nothing but Venice and gondolas. This is the right spirit. You cant think how amicable we all are together—like husband and wives, more than anything else—and the odd thing is we dont get bored at all, but go our own ways, and meet fresh and cheerful.

I am reading and writing and have almost finished a Greek tragedy in the last few days—and that is what I call sensible!

Nessa has made a really good little picture of Thoby sitting by the window, and reading. It is very clever, and alive I think. Now we are all going out for 2 hours walk along the cliff to show Adrian the beauties of the place.

We saw Choughs and Ravens the other day, climbing up rocks to get at them, and rolling about in the maddest way.

Our only excitement has been the death of the washerwoman! As she stood at her tub. The village thought there ought to be an inquest, but didn’t know how to begin; the doctor and policeman arrived separately from neighbouring villages, and refused to do anything without the other. So finally the village determined on its own account that death was due to natural causes, and have just buried her, going past the window in the oddest way. The first 6 rows of mourners held black edged handkerchiefs to their eyes, or mouths: they weren’t crying; and the rest look fairly cheerful. Aint it barbaric? As you can imagine the whole village turned out to watch, and last night the young men who have nice soft voices sang a hymn under our windows.

My ring has certainly improved since it came back: it still has cracks and queer things if you look into it, but the general effect is rather beautiful, and I shant anyhow change it.

I had a beautiful letter from Fred Maitland this morning: almost the only one I have had worth keeping.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

175: To Violet Dickinson

Thursday night [31 March 1904]

22 Hyde Park Gate, S.W.

My Violet,

I must write you my last intelligible line, because I know it wont be possible in Venice—I only hope you are having a good rest, and that Crum doesn’t worry you—as I do. I wish I didn’t exhaust you over my affairs, but you cant think what a relief it is to have someone—that is you, because there isnt anyone else to talk to.

You mustnt think that I always feel as I do sometimes. I know that I wasn’t really wrong: it had to be—but I cant bear to think of his loneliness, and that I might have helped, and didn’t.

If he had only lived I could have made up. I think he just knew how much I cared, and the happy time was just beginning—and now it is all over. That is what seems so cruel. If I could only tell him once—but its no use writing it. But we have been very happy together. My Violet—it is a help even to write this to you.

Keep well, and come out as soon as you can, and dont worry about me, because I have a faculty for turning my mind on to other things, and I never stay long in one mood. Besides I know that Father was happy at the end, if only he could have lived. People dont believe it, but I know he wanted to go on living. Just as a young man does.

Goodbye my Violet

Write one of your beautiful little letters, all illegible tho’ they be!

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

176: To Violet Dickinson

4 April [1904]

Grand Hotel, Venice

My Violet

This is the first possible chance of writing a letter. Think of this—when we arrived at midnight on Saturday we were told there were no rooms here or anywhere in Venice! Finally we got three very dingy little rooms—sleeping together in a dirty little place off the Piazza S Mark. We spent Sunday walking the streets—went to your rooms—all the rooms we had ever heard of—but all were full—and we had to go back for another night. Today we have got 3 rooms here. Nessa and I sleeping together: it is extravagant but it cant be helped. Of course we were fools not to settle beforehand.

However it dont much matter: we are quite happy lounging about and looking at things. There never was such an amusing and beautiful place. Gerald is bored to death, and very cross, and makes us take gondolas and doesn’t like exploring back streets at all. Thoby and Adrian are rampant with excitement; A. wants to settle here for ever. They go about shouting with laughter and trying to speak Italian. We have a room here right at the top just at the side of the Grand Canal: beneath all the gondolas are moored, and the gondoliers make such a noise I cant think coherently. It was the strangest dream to step out into our gondola after those two days of train. But I cant be bothered to write about it! Nessa sits scribbling at the same table. It is rather cold today: yesterday was divine: only the place is crowded. We travelled with the Humphry Wards who, happily, have disappeared. It was an exciting journey, though it seemed endless—There was a snowstorm on the St. Gotthard: we came down into brilliant sun shine, and the lakes were pure blue. The mountains had snow all over them. Isnt this like a guide book? I wish we knew Italian. It is stupid to have to talk broken English and French—and, as I say, we get cheated everywhere. But they are a delightful people, and we—us four at least—are rapidly approaching their state of mind—general benevolence. I wish you would come out as soon as ever you can. I dont think Florence will come up to this. I cant quite believe it is a real place yet and I wander about open mouthed. We have had to go to so many rooms that we haven’t done any sightseeing, except such as comes in every street. We walked all down the Schiavoni last night—where the buildings looked cut out of marble, and a great gondola hung with coloured lamps floated by. But I cant find words yet. Gerald probably goes on Thursday or Friday. I think he will be glad to get safe to Monte Carlo. Come as soon as you can.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

177: To Emma Vaughan

25th April 1904

Palace Hotel, Florence

My dearest Toad,

We called at the Post Office the other day, providentially as it turned out, because your Post Card had just arrived. As you can imagine it is very precious to me—but how on earth did you come by it? Are you staying in Canterbury—have you run away with Canon [F. J.] Holland, are you married to the Sub Dean? Anyhow, how is it that you are in these sacred Precincts? There is no lovelier place in the world than Canterbury—that I say with my hand on my heart as I sit in Florence—and I have seen Venice too. Venice is a place to die in beautifully: but to live [in] I never felt more depressed—that is exaggerated, but still it does shut one in and make one feel like a Bird in a Cage after a time. We had a horrible big Hotel to stay in, which is not favourable to sentimental impressions. Still the pictures are pictures: till you have seen Tintoretto you don’t know what paint can do. We floated in gondolas, eat ices at Florians, while the band played, and met more honeymooners than I like. All the world seems to be coupling itself. We are told that you never see Venice until you are just married; 2 is the right number—and we were 5!

We have been here a fortnight: it is a lovely place, just not lovelier than Canterbury, I think—but I dont know. The view from Fiesole—the country round Fiesole, San Servasio etc., is almost more beautiful than anything I have seen. I wont write a dissertation upon the Italian landscape because I know it would bore you. It is an amusing pretence to leave England by going to Florence (grammar all wrong). We find Prinseps, Lytteltons, Humphry Wards, Cambridge Undergraduates, Carnarvons, and finally to make us fell quite at home, Aunt Minna [Duckworth] and Edith!!! We went to see them at their hotel, a gloomy lodging house near San Servasio. Aunt Minna looks more wrinkled and faded than ever, but she talks of people who are “much older and deafer than I am”. May we all die like that!—she doesn’t mean to die though.

Our next move is vague—our travelling is not so delightful that we wish more than is necessary. There never was a beastlier nation than this in its railways, its streets, its shops, its beggars, and many of its habits. My dear Toad, where is a decent woman to look sometimes? We went to Prato today and it poured all the time, and we saw the only thing worth seeing, and were set upon in the streets by innumerable small boys, and cripples. We walked faster than the cripples, but one devil of a small boy had the diabolic idea of following us wherever we went; and finally promised to leave us for 2 soldi. We didn’t pay him, and he cursed us and went. Was there ever such a nation?

We have had a good offer for Hyde Park Gate; that makes us anxious to get back, as our new house must be got ready as soon as possible. We shall probably be in London again about the middle—14—of May. I think we shall stay in Paris for a week or so and leave here in two or three days. Violet D. is with us. Adrian has gone, and Thoby is walking among the Apennines.

Couldn’t you write me a long letter as soon as you get this, addressed to me C/o Thomas Cook, 1 Place de l’Opera, Paris, I do want to hear everything: especially Fisher news, music news, any news. Everything English sounds clean and beautiful: we seldom see the papers, and to live in a degenerate tho’ beautiful country is depressing. Thank God, I say, I was born an Englishwoman. Adrian and I sang paeans of thanksgiving on the top of San Miniato, one evening. Germans are brutes:—and there is a strange race that haunts Hotels—gnome like women, who are like creatures that come out in the dark. An hotel is a sort of black cave. This one is really very good of its kind.

Love to Marny. How are M[adge] and W[ill]?

Yr. AVS

Sussex

[]

178: To Violet Dickinson

[6? May 1904]

[Paris]

My Violet,

I discovered a letter written to you, but not sent. It was in my pocket all the time, when it should have been sending shocks and thrills through a maiden bosom in [Welwyn] Hertfordshire. We have had our Beatrice [Thynne] and she has flashed across us, and disappeared, leaving us rather gaping. She stayed exactly two days, in which she managed many more sights than you ever did, and preached like the valiant old Heathen she is. She is as red and tough as a very fine apple; her face is positively muscular, with character which seems to have stiffened there. We took her to dine with Bell last night, a real Bohemian party, after her heart. Kelly the painter was there, and we stayed talking of Art, Sculpture and Music till 11.30. This was all in the common cafe, while we smoked half a dozen cigarettes a piece. Kelly is an enthusiast, and Beatrice seeing this contradicted him. She expounded theories on Wagner which were, I know, made that moment. He actually shook his fist at her across the table, and at one moment I held her down—a stormy scene.

She left early this morning: to dine with some Cromer relations. She has originally meant to stay 6 weeks with us: I cant say, though I love her, that I think 6 weeks would have been successful. Now we go and see Rodins studio tomorrow morning, with Bell and Kelly—and that is our last expedition! Oh Lord, how cross I have been, how dull, how tempersome,—and am still. You had much to stand: I wish I could repay all the bad times with good times. There should be some system of repayment in this world—you believe in a next, I know, for that purpose. Oh my Violet if you could only find me a great solid bit of work to do when I get back that will make me forget my own stupidity I should be so grateful. I must work. We leave early on Monday. When will you come? Case says that Katharine [Horner] works hard, with a little pressure, but she gives no opinion of her brains. I would sell mine cheap at this moment. I cant write a word I want to, as I have forgotten everything.

Keep well. Both nieces will never forget all you did for them.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

Letters 179-188

179: To Violet Dickinson

[September 1904]

[The Manor House, Teversal, Nottinghamshire]

My Violet,

Nessa said you wouldn’t mind coming. I dont know how to write to you now, but if you didn’t hate it too much I should like to see you. I haven’t done a thing you told me to.

Yr. loving
AVS

Berg

[]

180: To Violet Dickinson

17 Sept. [1904]

[The Manor House] Teversal [Nottinghamshire]

My Violet,

You are an angel to write. I think you have set us on our legs again. Really, I have been a good beast since you went—no grumblings—this is quite true. [Nurse] Traill and I and Thoby and Adrian begin the morning with an hours walk, directly after breakfast. From 10.30 to 12.30 I do Latin with Thoby. Then we play tennis, lunch, and go for a drive. After tea we play tennis, and have a walk when it is dark. I hope this interests you! At any rate it is some kind of a plan to go by.

Nessa has got a model. You know we really get on very harmoniously together, and I dont mean to have any more disgusting scenes over food.

Savage is away—drat him! You have heard that our last begging letter has been answered—and we are lent a Town house this time. I think we shall go there on Friday the 7th. Also we have had an estimate for moving wh. comes to £18.10. Also Colvin and Spielmann think that At. Virginia ought to fetch 200 or 250 if sold to the family. The decorations at Gordon Square are to be done in a fortnight. I cant think of any other businesslike facts.

Traill has been offered a case in Paris this winter, which has put her into a good temper. Altogether we are in better spirits than before you came. Isnt this a tribute to your beneficent powers? You cant think what a difference you made. Thoby and Adrian ask why you aren’t coming here again?

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

181: To Violet Dickinson

[22? September 1904]

Manor House, Teversal, Notts.

My Violet,

It is a great filip [sic] to get your letters—short though they be. You will be glad to hear that your Sparroy feels herself a recovered bird. I think the blood has really been getting into my brain at last. It is the oddest feeling, as though a dead part of me were coming to life. I cant tell you how delightful it is—and I dont mind how much I eat to keep it going. All the voices I used to hear telling me to do all kinds of wild things have gone—and Nessa says they were always only my imagination. They used to drive me nearly mad at Welwyn, and I thought they came from overeating—but they cant, as I still stuff and they are gone. [Dr.] Savage hasn’t written, but I dont so much mind about that now.

I am glad cats are so prolific at Welwyn, and that my germs haven’t killed them all. I wish you would convey to your husband how immensely grateful we are to him—and I had no way of showing it or feeling it at Welwyn. I think of all the ferns I ought to have pulled up, and of the dining-room floor. Do give him any message that is proper, and make him understand our thanks.

Nessa looks really better, and we are very happy together. I really think she is happy with me now. I am glad about Miss de Rhode [unidentified]. I am sure she has a character. What will happen to the Governess?

Bless you.

Yr. Sp:

Even this letter would have been beyond me before.

Berg

[]

182: To Violet Dickinson

26 Sept. [1904]

Manor House, Teversal [Nottinghamshire]

My Violet,

If we go up on the 8th we shant begin operations [on the move to Gordon Square] till the 10th—when your help will be badly needed by your nieces. I hope your Husband, and Mrs Lyttelton dont think that we are exacting too much—of course we are!

Oh my Violet, if there were a God I should bless him for having delivered me safe and sound from the miseries of the last six months! You cant think what an exquisite joy every minute of my life is to me now, and my only prayer is that I may live to be 70. I do think I may emerge less selfish and cocksure than I went in and with greater understanding of the troubles of others.

Sorrow, such as I feel now for Father, is soothing and natural, and makes life more worth having, if sadder. I can never tell you what you have been to me all this time—for one thing you wouldn’t believe it—but if affection is worth anything you have, and always will have, mine.

It is queer now that I am better that I feel physically so much more. I am rather bothered with neuralgia, but that goes away with food and fresh air, and I hardly attempt to do more than bask and eat.

It will be nice to see you again. Nessa so happy.

Yr. loving,
AVS

I am longing to begin work.

Berg

[]

183: To Violet Dickinson

30 Sept. [1904]

Manor House, Teversal [Nottinghamshire]

My Violet,

All the things belong to us, the paper knife is my most valued possession!—but could you keep them and bring them up with you to London, if it’s not too much bother. We leave so soon, that it doesn’t seem worth while having them here.

I am so happy that people are fond of me—you cant think. Beatrice wrote me a letter which I shall treasure. I do love affection!

We have got [Margery] Snow[den] and [Clive] Bell here, both very easy people, who can be left to their own devices.

We take immense walks, from 9.30 to 1. which are a balm and blessing to my spirit.

I am longing to begin work. I know I can write, and one of these days I mean to produce a good book. What do you think? Life interests me intensely, and writing is I know my natural means of expression. I dont feel up to much, as far as my brain goes. At least I soon get tired of reading, and I haven’t tried to write, more than letters. I have a headache at this moment, so I wont go on.

I have taken to smoking a pipe, which the doctor thinks an excellent thing, and I find it very soothing.

Oh my Violet, I do want Father so—and yet I am very happy in a way.

Your loving,
AVS

Take care of yourself. I am going to write to your husband and Mrs Crum.

Berg

[]

184: To Violet Dickinson

Saturday [22 October 1904]

The Porch, Cambridge

My Violet,

Your letter just come, which keeps me in touch with the outer world.

This is an ideal retreat for me. I feel as though I were living in a Cathedral Close, with the big bell of the Quakers [Caroline Emelia] voice tolling at intervals. She is soporific, and leisurely to an excess, and my desire begins to be to blow her up with gunpowder, and see what would happen! However, as you say, she is a real Lady, and large minded, after her fashion, which aint mine!

I slept this morning till 4.30, which is the best nights sleep I have had for a week, and sleep makes all the difference to me. I can sit alone by an open window for hours if I like, and hear only birds songs, and the rustle of leaves. The trees are pure gold and orange, and no place in the world can be lovelier than Cambridge. It is a very small world, I expect, as far as society goes, but what there is is amazing, and all well known to me.

Florence Maitland took me for a walk this morning. She is one of the most delightful, original, and beautiful people I know, and it is a real treat to see her. I am going this afternoon with her, and Adrian and the Quaker to hear Fred [Maitland] give the Sidgwick lecture at Newnham. Florence is most amusing: “Jane Harrison has let herself go” she said to me. “Jane is a great admirer of Freds. I had to tell her she was positively indecent! She thinks Fred so beautiful that she would go anywhere to see him. Repulsive woman!” She is great fun, and is going to introduce me to the repulsive Jane, and all the other learned Ladies, which amuses me.

Oh my Violet, do you think I am going to stay 3 months at every house I visit, that you send me provisions for an army! However, the Quaker biscuits are always stale, and when I wake I eat yours always, and drink chocolate. That supports me till it is time to get up. You are a wretched spendthrift woman—who is going to feed you with biscuits when you are in the workhouse, I should like to know? Coffee too this morning: the stuff they give me is undrinkable. Tomorrow I am to have yours.

I heard from Nessa, very happy, in the arms of her Kitty [Maxse], who comes of course the moment my surly back is turned. But I am very glad.

I am going to see Fred Maitland on Monday, which I very much want to do. I feel as though I could write something worth adding or quoting, to the Life [of Leslie Stephen]. But he is perfectly capable of understanding everything.

I hear the Quaker trumpeting like an escaped elephant on the stairs, which means that it is near lunch time, and Quakers dont like to be kept waiting for their meals! I will introduce the subject of the book, and your stay here. Copies abound, and she is as vain as most authors. I want Beatrice to come and stay too: else I shall hardly see her before she goes.

Adrian is delightful and glad to have me, I think. Really I feel better out of that whirlpool.

Yr. loving,
AVS

Berg

[]

185: To Violet Dickinson

24th Oct: [1904]

The Porch, Cambridge

My Violet,

Your letter is a treat. I feel established in this minute Cambridge world already. Lord! how dull it would be to live here! There seem to be about 10 nice and interesting people, who circulate in each other’s houses—Darwins, Maitlands, Newnham, etc. I went to see the Maitlands yesterday, and he is coming to talk to me this afternoon. I am going to offer to write down some of the things I remember—especially of this last year, when he was out of England. Nun wants me to very much. I see she is rather nervous of giving her own recollections, which weren’t altogether happy or characteristic, and yet she seems to be the great authority. She has a very good hoard of diaries, of her own and her Mothers. Her Mothers are most amusing and interesting. She kept records of all her children said and did from the time they were born till 1873. Some of the child sayings are quite delightful, and extraordinarily characteristic of him as a man, and of the Quaker, who always makes haste to agree and to offer Lellie [Leslie] her best toy when he has broken his! I want Fred to get hold of some letters and publish them. Nun has a few, but they are excellent—beautifully natural and expressive like his talk. The difficulty is to find who has got, and kept, his letters. I have none.

I dont sleep much: otherwise I am very well, much less tired than I was in London. A bad night doesn’t make the difference it did, and I have had no headaches since I came here—so I think the Quaker must be doing good.

I quite understand—only too well—Fathers point of view about her. I dont know what it is, but I can sometimes hardly sit still, she irritates me so. She is perpetually flowing with rather trivial talk, which nevertheless she takes great, and painful, care to express well, and pronounce exquisitely. Also I disagree entirely with her whole system of toleration and resignation, and general benignity, which does seem to me so woolly. I cant tell you how she maddens me when she begins to talk about Father. It is pathetic too—but oh such trash! She always manages to get hold of the wrong explanation of everything he ever said or did or wrote—at least so it seems to me. She always gives in to my opinion, and says “Oh of course you knew him much better than I did.” It is a good deal to dispose of her theories that I want to write something for Fred, who must naturally be guided a good deal by her.

Now, my woman, to business. When could you come here, and should you really like to come? I am perfectly happy alone, so dont come out of charity. Of course, I want to see you, and so does the quacking Quaker, who says she feels much in common with you, and can never thank you sufficiently for all you have done for her dear ones! This week, I think Nessa is coming on Wednesday for 2 nights, and Nun has asked Dorothea Stephen for 1 night on Friday. So could you come on Monday, or early next week? and stay as long as you can. She was much touched by your wanting ‘Quaker Strongholds’ and I think wants to give it you herself, and inscribe it when you come. Nessa seems to have done most of Gordon Square housework, and to be dining with Kitty and various people. Make her understand that she is on no account to make an effort to come, if she is busy, because, tho’ I want her naturally, I can subsist without her, and I am very well. I think she would be amused with 2 days here, and Adrian is very anxious that she should come—also the Quaker. Also Fred Maitland wants to see her, but I suppose that could wait. Dont let her come if she has other things to do.

I went to Meeting on Sunday, but as this is a devilish long letter, I wont say any more. It will be fun if you come!

Yr. loving,
AVS

Berg

[]

186: To Violet Dickinson

30th Oct: [1904]

The Porch, Cambridge

My Violet,

I was very glad of your letter. Nessa’s visit was delightful, and we talked the whole time, not on altogether soothing subjects though. I cant make her, or you, or anybody, see that it is a great hardship to me to have to spend two more long months wandering about in other peoples comfortless houses, when I have my own house [Gordon Square] waiting for me and rent paid regular on Quarter day. It is such a natural thing from an outsiders point of view, that I get only congratulations, and people say how lucky I am, and how glad I ought to be to be out of London. They dont realise that London means my own home, and books, and pictures, and music, from all of which I have been parted since February now,—and I have never spent such a wretched 8 months in my life. And yet that tyrannical, and as I think, shortsighted Savage insists upon another two. I told him when I saw him that the only place I can be quiet and free is in my home, with Nessa: she understands my moods, and lets me alone in them, whereas with strangers like Nun I have to explain every random word—and it is so exhausting. I long for a large room to myself, with books and nothing else, where I can shut myself up, and see no one, and read myself into peace. This would be possible at Gordon Sq: and nowhere else. I wonder why Savage doesn’t see this. As a matter of fact my sleep hasn’t improved a scrap since I have been here, and his sleeping draught gives me a headache, and nothing else. However I shall have a few days in London next week, which will be some relief, and meanwhile I can let off my irritation upon you! Nessa contrived to say that it didn’t much matter to anyone, her included, I suppose, whether I was here or in London, which made me angry, but then she has a genius for stating unpleasant truths in her matter of fact voice!

I have written to ask Madge [Vaughan] to have me about the 16th, as Savage approves—really a doctor is worse than a husband! Oh how thankful I shall be to be my own mistress and throw their silly medicines down the slop pail! I never shall believe, or have believed, in anything any doctor says—I learnt their utter helplessness when Father was ill. They can guess at what’s the matter, but they cant put it right.

This is a long and egoistical grumble, but I do get so sick of it all at times; this eternal resting and fussing, and being told not to do this and that. I wish I could cut off my leg at once and have done with it rather than go through the endless bothers and delays of a nervous breakdown.

However, I have had an amusing day with Beatrice, who is splendid fun. We lunched with Adrian, and went to a divinely beautiful service in Kings Chapel. Nothing comes up to the Church Service in these old Cathedrals; though I dont believe a word of it and never shall. Still the language and the sentiment of it all are dignified and grand above words. Beatrice’s high voice is now going on down stairs, as she sits opposite the Quaker, and they discourse to each other till 7, when I get up—I am lying down, and descend. Beatrice leaves at 8. I think she has enjoyed herself, and I always feel that she is one of the pathetic people who do enjoy a happy day to the full.

I am getting through my copying—and now I have to go through 2 vols: of extracts from Father’s and Mother’s letters to each other. They are so private that Fred wont look at them himself, and I have to decide what he ought to see and possibly publish. I am very anxious to get on and write something, very short of course, which Fred can read and get a hint from or possibly quote from. I think I shall do this at Giggleswick where I can be really quiet. But there is so much writing of different kinds to be got through while Fred is in England, that the other must wait.

The Quaker has stupidly asked a great dull Stephen cousin to stay here for 2 nights—Monday to Wednesday. You will be a great relief afterwards, and we will go to Meeting together. Would Mrs Lyttelton like a description of a Q. Meeting from my gifted pen, d’you think. I dont know if I shall have time, but it might be amusing. G[eorge]. and Margaret [Duckworth] talk of coming down here one day—and I devoutly pray it may be when you are here. Otherwise I shall hardly see her till after Christmas—a hardship I can bear more philosophically than some! He will be buzzing round Gordon Sq: Indeed everyone is except one of its lawful owners!

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

187: To Emma Vaughan

1st Nov: 1904

The Porch, Cambridge

Dearest Todger,

To begin with, admire our new address—not that it is a faithful guide, because I am at this moment staying with the Quaker Aunt at Cambridge. Do you remember a terrible afternoon last spring, the 10th May, about when you came to call—and borrowed some letters! (wh. I hope you have safe) I was then hardly knowing what I did or said, and wondered if you noticed it. Well, for at least three months after than, I was more or less incapable of doing anything but eat and sleep, and had to be watched by three fiends of nurses. However, thank Heaven, that nightmare has dispersed at last: only Savage says I must live like Totty or Clara [Pater] the life of a valetudinarian for the next year. My main grievance at present is that I have to spend the next two months out of London—and as Gordon Square is ready and lovely, full of books and pictures, my language is not measured. When I tell you that I am going in about ten days to stay with your dear sister-in-law and brother, the Head Master, at Giggleswick, you will wish yourself in my place, I know!

This summary of the six and a half months that have passed since we met is necessary, though egoistical. Go then, and do likewise my dear Todger. As for you you have vanished in blue mist: where I ask Marny repeatedly in a letter, ‘where is the Toad—is she eloped or married or what.’ She pointedly ignores my questions and discourses of Hogsden [Hoxton] instead. However, with patience I have extracted the news that you are in Dresden, enjoying yourself hugely. How long are you going to enjoy yourself hugely in the middle of Europe, the oracle sayeth not—nor in what particular line your enjoyment lies. Do throw aside your toadish dumbness, which seems to have infected the Marn and give a brilliant account of yourself. Also say at what date your clammy feet will touch these shores—and come and pay your respects at Gordon first thing. We have had some interesting passages with the Fishers, of a highly diplomatic kind. I called at At. Mary the first thing during my ten days’ visit to London—which ended in Exile here. She was immensely touched to see me, though I only stayed ten minutes. Then Nessa called and saw her, and took Tom [Edwin Fisher], who is nice, back to Gordon Sq. I have had several affectionate letters form her—but the amazing thing is that the ice cold Adeline [Vaughan Williams] has descended from her heights and has left a card on us—which happily found us out. After our heroics last winter when she practically said all was over between us, I was amused. The fact is, she is anxious to have a finger in the pie, and has now no legitimate excuse for a grievance. So it is more picturesque to be friend—however, she dont say nasty things for nothing—and I have climbed my heights and stay there at present, calmly indifferent. The great Ralph [Vaughan Williams], I hear, from Florence, is giving a concert at the Queen’s Hall, composed entirely of his works: on the 2nd Dec: I think—when I shall be at Giggleswick, probably.

I must explain this big envelope, and the MS inside. The other day I turned out the accumulations of my writing case, and a sallow, Egyptian looking parchment caught my eye, covered with hieroglyphs. It was the MS of the famous account of our never to be forgotten (as your Germans would say) punt disaster, which had stuck to me, humbly and dumbly, through all these years of neglect. So, having nothing better to do and a pair of gold rimmed spectacles—mark my age, I read it, and copied it as best I could in the largest and boldest hand—so that even your toad-dark eyes may read. I hope you will feel a little English when you read this account of the joys of an English summer. Oh how vividly that all comes back to me now!

I suppose you have heard the two tragedies which made last week one of the gloomiest I have known—The death of Charles Furse, and the death of Margaret Hills, Eustace’s wife, in a bicycle accident. Of the two, Margaret’s death is the sadder, I think; though they are both sad enough, but she had had fewer years of life, and her death seems merely aimless and cruel. Had she waited two minutes longer on the road—had her wheel not slipped—had it not rained the night before—she might be well and strong, and live to 90. Whereas, Charles’ death was long thought of, I suppose, both by him and Katharine; and she must have known what a risk she was taking when she married him. But what a wrong thing it was of him to ask—and of her to accept, one sees now that she is left with two baby sons. She is to live at Netherhampton with Harry Furse and his sister.

I am going up to London on Monday for a week, to have my teeth mended and a dress made, and then I go down to Madge’s for a week, I suppose: then back here to Cambridge till the 10th Dec: when Adrian’s holidays begin and then we go together on a wild expedition by steamer to Edinburgh! Ain’t that sporting! It is cheap, anyway—five days, there and back, for £2.10.0 and we love the sea. Then we all four hope to get lent At. Minna’s cottage in the New Forest for Christmas—and then—and then—to settle down at home. That is the goal to which I look forward. You remember what your homeless vagrant days were like, without a picture or a book of your own, and only the houses of strangers. I have done that for seven months now—have to get through two months more—and never has a time been more miserable. Now, in answer to all this and in gratitude for the MS, write me a long, long letter—46 Gordon Square will always find me, as I can’t give exact addresses now.

Your loving,
AVS

Sussex

[]

188: To Violet Dickinson

[November 1904]

The Porch [Cambridge]

My Violet,

I am dreadfully sorry you cant come—and so is the Quaker—but I suppose you are right, and anyhow I shall see you Monday or Tuesday.

As a matter of fact I ought to stick to me letter reading and copying so as to give Fred [Maitland] an important bundle before I leave. I thought it would take 2 days—and it has taken six!—but I hope to finish tomorrow. Then I have all Fathers and Mothers and Minny’s [Harriet Thackeray] letters to read, select, and copy, which will be the hardest job of the lot. It is not made easier by the excellent Jack Hills: I told him casually that I was going to do this, whereupon he wrote an emphatic solicitorial letter beginning “Whatever you do, dont publish anything too intimate” etc etc etc. ending however, that he knew my views were totally wrong, and he should dislike whatever I did. So I wrote another and better explanation pointing out that I probably cared 10,000 times more for delicacy and reserve where my own Father and Mother are concerned than he could; and declaring that anyhow if I made a selection, it was to be final. Then comes a letter of 8 sheets; all abuse of my principles of selection; ridiculing the idea that I should set myself up to judge what it was good for the world to know etc etc etc. and repeating as usual that whatever I did, was sure to be wrong. Now, as I am doing what I dislike, against my will at Freds wish, and as the excellent Jack never knew nor understood Father, and has no more sense of what a book ought to be than the fat cow in the field opposite—I was considerably angry—and wrote him the letter which I am thinking of enclosing for your amusement. Burn it, and dont tell Nessa you have seen it. She substantially, in fact wholly, agrees with me, but I see from her letter this morning, that she cant stand up against the authoritative Jack. He deserved something a good deal sharper I think; and if I have to discuss the question any more, he shall get it. After all, it is not I that am writing the Life: My whole part in it is to copy and select from letters, and Fred Maitland has his own notion of what a life ought to be, and will carry it out without asking my opinion. If Jack wants to interfere, he ought to write to him direct, instead of pestering me with his thickskulled proprieties!!!

Jack always manages to put his great hoof down with a clatter on precisely the most delicate and difficult side of every question. He is legal and dry as dust to the back bone, poor little redtape tied parchment Solicitor! But I wont have him interfering where Father is concerned!

There—I let off the remains of my indignation upon you. Happily the Quaker has mounted her warhorse too, and strongly disapproves of the “very unintelligent behaviour” she calls it of Mr Jack Hills. Fred has, as I knew he would have, very clearset opinions of his own: if I wanted to, I could not alter them—but as it happens I entirely agree. It is a mercy that we have him to write it: else some one of the Hills variety might do it, and that would make me turn in my grave.

My life here is practically spent with old letters, and so my news is limited, Nessa was here for 2 nights, very cheerful and happy. The Quaker intones as usual. Adrian comes in like a vigorous daddy-long-leg’s, and brings a breath of fresh air into the place. Otherwise it is a humdrum little society, which has but a small orbit or axel or whatever the thing is—to revolve upon. I am going with Florence Maitland this afternoon to interview a blue Persian Kitten which I think of buying for my room at Gordon Sq: I cant sleep a bit better, and I know as certainly as before, that Gordon Square is the only place where I can be quiet. However I dont expect any doctor to listen to reason.

I shall be glad to see you—and take care of yourself.

Yr. AVS

You see the degenerating effect of much writing upon my hand!

Berg

[]

Letters 189-221

189: To Violet Dickinson

[8 November 1904]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My Violet,

As I came up in the train today, I thought to myself can I afford to buy a really nice china inkpot, for my walnut desk. And I came to the virtuous conclusion that I must put up with an ordinary glass one. This was virtue rewarded, because, when I came into my room, the first thing I saw was your lovely and most satisfactory and exactly what I had thought of inkpot, with all his holes, and a well for ink deep enough to write a dozen articles for the Guardian. But you know you’ve no right to make me presents, and your a bad beast. I’m going to get some real good black ink tomorrow, to christen it with. Gordon Sq: when I’m not there indulges in slate coloured water, like that I’m writing with.

I am feeling really quiet and happy and able to stretch my legs out on a sofa for the first time for 7 months. If only that pigheaded man Savage will see that this is sober truth and no excuse!—I know I shall sleep tonight as I haven’t for a month. The house is a dream of loveliness after the Quaker brown paper. Nessa very very happy. We will pick you up tomorrow. The row with Jack has blown over. Violet’s delicious.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

190: To Violet Dickinson

Thursday [10 November 1904]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My Violet,

I came upon this kind of essay which I wrote at Manorbier. It aint up to much, as I was writing then to prove to myself that there was nothing wrong with me—which I was already beginning to fear there was. Also I wrote very quick and hasty—without thought, as they say, of publication. But the Quakers words bear fruit; and I think I may as well send this to Mrs Lyttelton to show her the kind of thing I do. Of course I dont for a moment expect her to take this which is probably too long or too short, or in some way utterly unsuitable. I only want to get some idea as to whether possibly she would like me to write something in the future—at Giggleswick for instance. Could you address this to her office address, which I dont know. I dont want her to think that she has got to show me the least favour, because of you!

Miss Case is very anxious that you should come with us up to Hampstead next Wednesday afternoon? Can you?

We are going.

Sleep no better—but I am much better here than anywhere else.

I do want to see you.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

191: To Violet Dickinson

11th Nov: [1904]

[46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury]

My Violet,

What a bore about poor old Case—she was anxious to cultivate her friendship with you. Of course you and your husband must come to dinner. We had Florence Maitland here today, and she said that my diamond and ruby ring was supposed to be priceless, and originally belonged to our greatgreatgrandmother [Thérèse de l’Etang], the Frenchwoman whose portrait Nessa wears in her locket. She (Florence) has a sapphire brooch which belonged to her, for which she was offered £500!! She was a rich old Lady, and most of our things apparently descend from her, and are old French.

I dont in the least expect Mrs Lyttelton to take that article—I stupidly didn’t typewrite it—indeed wrote it myself rather hurriedly and illegibly as I hate copying—and forgot to give my address, or to enclose a stamped envelope for return. So I dont think my chances are good. I dont in the least want Mrs L’s candid criticism; I want her cheque! I know all about my merits and failings better than she can from the sight of one article, but it would be a great relief to know that I could make a few pence easily in this way—as our passbooks came last night, and they are greatly overdrawn. It is all the result of this idiotic illness, and I should be glad to write something which would pay for small extras. I honestly think I can write better stuff than that wretched article you sent me. Why on earth does she take such trash?—But there is a knack of writing for newspapers which has to be learnt, and is quite independent of literary merits.

So I dont much care if she does say my writing wont do; except that I must try and get someone to take it. My hope is that she will say she would like to see other things. I could easily re-write some old things, or write new ones, if I have time, better than the Manorbier I sent her.

You will come to lunch on Tuesday.

My sleep is not better, except that I think I am less wide awake and get more rest, although I do lie awake from 4 onwards. I have a kind of feeling that I shall sleep when I go to bed, and that is half the battle. I am miles better than I was, and I cant see the sense of going away again. I am better and quieter here than at Cambridge.

Yr. AVS

I will try your prescription!

Berg

[]

192: To Violet Dickinson

Monday. 14th Nov: [1904]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My Violet,

Mrs Lyttelton must be a very sensible woman. Do bring her letter with you to lunch, as if I’m to try any other paper with the Manorbier article her criticisms however stringent will be worth attending to. Of course Manorbier was rough as hemp, under the circumstances—and I think anyhow, with a renewed brain I ought to do better now. But 1,500 words rather apalls me. I could write 3,000 twice as easily; 1500 is a very short article, and would have to be boiled down. However I am too delighted to have a chance of turning an honest penny to mind what I do for it—and she is very generous to allow me any subject—as that gives me a large field.

My precious MS. book, which would have given me hints for dozens of articles is lost in the move, so I shall have to write something new. At present I must toil at the [Leslie Stephen] letters, which are in four great bundles; besides I have 3 great bundles of [Charles Eliot] Norton letters to read through and mark, and Fred [Maitland] writes this morning that he cant get through all he hoped to do before sailing, and wants to leave a good deal for me to finish—references and copying I suppose, which takes time. Then I have to write something for him—however that can wait—and a cheque or two wouldn’t come at all amiss. The family coffers are low—I sent my pass book to the Bank 10 days ago, and they have never sent it back, so I dont know the state of my private income. Still I want if possible, to pay rather more than my share this winter, to make up a little for those d——d nurses and doctors.

D’you think Mrs Lyttelton will let me write fairly often?—and what does she pay for these little articles? Not much, I suppose—indeed they aren’t worth much—and I cant conceive why she has them. Would she let me review ever? I want to get the Cornhill or some magazine like that to take longer and better articles. Leo Maxse [Editor of the National Review] might!—however that must wait.

Fred sails on the 10th, so I shall have finished by then.

Sleep better rather last night. It will be a treat to see your elongated shanks again—and at dinner too. Pernel Strachey is lunching.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

193: To Violet Dickinson

21st Nov. [1904]

Giggleswick School, Settle, Yorkshire

My Violet,

Here I am, sitting at my window under the moors, which are all white with snow and frost, and the temperature is below freezing. I keep warm with a fire, and a fur rug; and I might be in the heart of the Alps. The snow stays sometimes on the Hills till June or July, they say. The School is in a little hollow by itself, with great craggy moors on all four sides. I am longing to get a good walk out among them, but so far Madge has had bothersome little School duties to do, and I have not had a chance to get beyond the garden hardly. The country with its moors breaking into gray stone and gray stone walls instead of hedges and stone houses reminds me of Cornwall, and I always expect to find the Atlantic.

I have done my round of School duties—Lectures, Concerts, Chapel, Hall—and my word it is deadly. We have not had a meal alone so far—always either boys or masters. So I dont get much talk with Madge, and whenever we are alone for a minute in blunders Will, like George, and begs me not to let Madge talk morbidly. He is rather afraid that my influence upon her is not a good one, she says—and is always reminding her of her duties as the Headmasters wife. He is curiously like George: only with more solid brains; but he is conventional to the back bone, and loves all the small dignities and duties of his position. Madge only longs for amusing unconventional people—artists and writers—and as she says—only Madge says many things without meaning them—Will is a Philistine and thinks there’s something wrong in cleverness. I cant help wondering whether she wouldn’t have been happier unmarried—at least to Will. She does seem thrown away here. She loves the country of course, but the life is deadly, and she has no friends—there aren’t any people for her to be friends with—except among the masters and one or two old Maids in the village. She is very charming, and artistic, and works away like a hero, and tries to take an interest in football and school contests but I cant conceive a drearier life for anyone—let alone Madge. She is probably planted here for life. Will is an excellent old Blunderbuss, very sterling and honest, but thickheaded and conventional till, as I say, he rivals his cousin George. He has none of George’s tact, so that daily life is not made smooth by him. The children are delightful; very healthy independent little animals, not in the least shy of me; indeed I have just had to drive them all off my knee, and to refuse to tell them another long story about a Dog. I have already invented a great many wonderful facts about Wolves and Horses which they absorb very literally, and ask me all kinds of impossible questions. I was amused yesterday when in answer to Janets [Vaughan] demands I described the appearance and habits of the dragon—whose picture I wear in my watch chain. I had to make him as horrid as possible; and suddenly I found that Wills paternal eye was on me disapprovingly; he didn’t like his children to be told fables, especially on Sunday. They have their Sunday books—but I must say, they dont seem to suffer in spirit. Madge is always trying to make them go their own way, and have their own ideas—and Will wants to “discipline” them in true pedagogic manner. However he is a most devoted Father, and husband for the matter of that—though somewhat a blind one, I think.

I think I sleep rather better—more soundly when I do sleep, and that makes a great difference.

Madge is longing to know you, and asks me always to describe you—which is difficult—except that you are 6 feet 2, and very comic looking!! She is very anxious to come and stay with us, as soon as she can get away from this infernal school, and she wants to meet people. She is like a starved bird up here, and it is quite pathetic how eager she is to talk, and how full of idea’s and theories—which have to be silenced the moment Will comes in to the room—or he would call them “morbid”.

Here a maid comes in to say that the gardener is taken very ill, and may she go for a doctor. Madge of course has to go off in the snow to the gardeners cottage—Will wont let her take brandy unless the doctor orders it. So here she comes back again; the doctor does order Brandy, as the man’s heart is bad in the sudden cold; so she makes another journey, and then the maid tells her that she must have a Char in to help—and so it goes on—and the unfortunate novel which Madge is longing to write at, having the mood on her, wont get much done to it this morning I foresee. Will takes it all as part of the days work, and novel writing and everything else of an artistic kind must give way before it. I must say Madge takes it like an angel. It makes me rather angry though.

Mrs Lyttelton hasnt sent me any books yet, but as I haven’t had a moment to write—except at the letters—I am rather glad. I expect they will turn up today. I hope she will say when she wants the reviews, and I will do my best to make a good impression.

I was to tell the truth, which need not be repeated, a little taken aback by [Lady] Margaret [Duckworth]. She is elderly and dried up, and no mistake: I tried to be affectionate, but she evidently preferred to talk about the weather, so I didn’t bother myself. She is clearly kind and good meaning, but there is nothing interesting or attractive about her—and never will be—that is the worst of it. If she were young, one could have hopes—but she will stay just as she is till she dies—dull and respectable and with beautiful manners. However they sound happy, and if they can manage that it dont matter what I say. Write again.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

194: To Violet Dickinson

26th Nov. [1904]

Giggleswick [Settle, Yorkshire]

My Violet,

I begin to loathe pen and ink after copying letters all the morning, and writing stupid articles for Mrs Lyttelton. She has sent me a book by Howells, which she says is good; I haven’t read it yet. I wish people wouldn’t tell me what they think of books when I know I’m sure to disagree! However I must do my best. I have written her an article on Haworth, so I wont go into details about that. I wrote it in less than 2 hours, so I dont suppose it is very good; but I never do know about my things, and Madge likes it.

Here we go on in the same way—endless teaparties of boys and masters and now the old ladies of Giggleswick have taken to asking us out—so we are rather sociable. I have had two good walks on the Moors though, alone, which I thoroughly enjoyed. The snow is as hard as ice, and not melted at all. It was 13 degrees below freezing last night, and except for the sun it aint much warmer today.

Madge is delightful, and we discuss literature and other things for hours on end. She is like a clever and loveable child, but not in the least mature. She and Will as I see more every day, are perfectly happy. She says herself that no life could suit her better, though she makes the most of her grumbles. She worships him, and refers to him in everything; and there is a great deal that is charming and clever about him besides all his solid good qualities. He is really the saving of her, and keeps her going in all kinds of ways. I cant imagine what she would do without him to decide things for her. They are a charming pair.

That silly old Nessa has been absorbing Savages theories as usual. I cant conceive how anybody can be fool enough to believe in a doctor. I know he will soon climb down and tell me what is the fact. That I am quicker and better in London than anywhere else—just as he had to give in about walking alone, and being isolated. My life is a constant fight against Doctors follies, it seems to me. Of course I dont sleep any better here, though I get quite a good amount and feel perfectly well. I think of my perfectly quiet room at home, where I need never talk or be disturbed with a pang. Lord what fools people are. I am coming up on Tuesday.

Yr. AVS

(here are some Brontë pictures for you) [postcards]

Berg

[]

195: To Emma Vaughan

Nov: 27th [1904]

Giggleswick School, Settle, Yorkshire

Dearest Toadlebinks,

This is practically my last day here, and I know you would like a letter from the sacred precincts—(I wish to goodness Giggleswick Church Bells could be silenced, or rung in tune—my lack of harmony must be put down to them).

I have been here 10 days and go on Tuesday. Time enough to observe the Vaughan family and my conclusion is entirely favourable, your Brother, the Headmaster, is a most charming man; and his wife is very lucky in her husband—but then he is very lucky in his wife, they are equally blessed. Really they are delightful people to stay with; and for the first time in my life I have seen Madge perfectly happy and content with her lot. She doesn’t rant—except against the world in general—and has developed a passion for paying calls, so if you walk with her down the main street, she stops and speaks to every other person, and she seems to enjoy it fully. Oh Lord those bells! The vicar seems determined that those who don’t go to Church shall have their evening spoilt. It is deafening. I think the ringers are trying to keep themselves warm with hard arm-work. It is 13 degrees below freezing, snow fell a week ago and is now hard ice; the roads are glistening like glass; the boys spend their time tobogganing, and Madge as you can think, is in her element. At last she begins to respect our English climate.

Your nephew and nieces are most delightful children. I have at last found someone to understand me and that is Barbara, who can’t yet speak but cuddles in my arms. Children are really the greatest fun in the world—the only happy people. Janet is very lively and handsome, but at this moment inclined to be uppish and pushing. That will wear off as Madge and Will snub her; Halford is much slower, but a darling fat sleepy little boy with lots of character and determination. A regular Vaughan in fact, whereas Janet is a Symonds. We have endless boys and masters to tea, who are none of them very exciting, but they are nice—Madge gets on splendidly.

I have to go to Cambridge next till the 10th then we all go to Minna’s cottage at Lyndhurst for Xmas, and we settle down I hope at Gordon for the New Year. I saw Marny the other day, who seemed very well and happy. When in the name of wonder are you coming back? Not till January I suppose. I have forgotten your address, so I must send this via Marny.

Yours,
AVS

By the way, I am reviewing novels and writing articles for the Guardian and so hope to make a little money—which was our old ambition.

Sussex

[]

196: To Violet Dickinson

29th [November 1904]

[46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury]

My Violet,

Why didn’t you come round this afternoon? I arrived safe 2.15. Couldn’t you lunch tomorrow, or tea or anytime. I have no engagements. I go to the Quaker on Saturday anyhow—also George and Margaret go (1st class) to the Darwins. It will be great fun, not but what I hate starting off again.

I have an article for you to criticise: I think I’ll send it now and you can give it me with yr. remarks: I dont know if its any good or not.

Yr. AVS

Why is life “Beastly”?

Berg

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197: To Madge Vaughan

30th Nov. [1904]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

Dearest Mama Vaughan,

Your infant travelled quite safely, and changed at the right place, and didn’t lose anything—except the precious stick, which I left at St Pancras and can easily get back. I finished my novel in the train, and wrote my review this morning in ½ an hour, and sent it off, so that was pretty quick, I wont say good, work. Here I find everything much as usual, the house very lovely, with certain improvements in furniture, which have been exciting Nessa’s mind a good deal. Gerald did come to dinner, as I foretold; and is very anxious to stay with you, so do ask him. It would be very good for him to lead a healthy life, and he would be much touched to be asked. He said with great pathos “Dear Madge, I always liked her, but I thought she didn’t care about me” I went out and got you 2 patterns of chinz; the green is the one I have: the blue is the same, save for the background. The price is on them. They come from Maples. I like the green up immensely, and I think it would do very well in your room. Also it doesn’t Dirty soon. I also send Thoby’s pamphlet which will make you laugh, I think, and an article in the 19th Century about Palmistry in China, which amused and interested me. I will snuff round Covent Garden for vegetables in a day or two.

I am extremely well, and all the better morally and physically for my moor air; and the equally bracing fireside breezes. Now to what do you think that refers? I hope I taught you the rudiments of petting foster children, but you will have to stay here to be made perfect—do you hear—I walked to the zoo this afternoon, tell Brotherboy [Halford], and found it quite near, and heard all the Dragons lashing their tails and gnashing their teeth till the blue fire spurted from them—oh horrible! I have several more true and unhappy stories for them, as well as a few untrue and happy: how like life! Sophia is longing to make a big cake for Brother boys tea.

I find Nessa and Thoby in the whirl of fashionable dissipation—out every night, I think. All my invitations have been refused, so I sit over the fire alone, and long for a good talk with a Brazilian Ape [Madge], only she always got so sleepy. As I write these photographs arrived, and I send two of the best. Will you return them as I have to send them to Fred Maitland. If you wd. care to have them, I can easily get you copies. No news from that wretched man your husband, so I suppose his scruples or whatever they are have taken him to the St Pancras Hotel. I wish he would find my stick.

Kiss my beloved Carry [Barbara] for me, and Janet and Brother Boy—only he’ll have forgotten Cousin Virginia as he threatened.

Yr. loving AVS

I must send the photograph tomorrow as they are too large for an envelope. Send me my George Eliot with an inscription.

Sussex

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198: To Madge Vaughan

1st Dec. [1904]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My dearest Madge,

I wish you would send your long rigmaroles—but in default I like your coherent letters very much too—too much. I do enjoy flattery! I never seriously meant to deny myself the pleasure of writing, however bad it be for the public morals!—As a matter of fact I am vain enough to think it had better read me than more popular authors. “Genius” is not a word to be used rashly; it gives me enormous pleasure, and something more than pleasure, that you should find anything of that kind in me. I am no judge; and honestly dont know from hour to hour whether my gifts are first—second or tenth rate. I go from one extreme to another; but when I am in my lowest depths I shall haul myself out of the water by reading your words of encouragement because, however extravagant, I know you mean them honestly. I cant help writing—so there’s an end of it. I am very glad too, that in spite of my imperfections I did not seem to you finally intolerant and hard—which are two things I very much dislike. Your researches into my hand went to show that my heart was just as strong as my head, remember; and if I’m not sure of my brains power I am quite sure of my hearts power; and that I do care for certain people—you for example and those heavenly—(and earthly) Babies. Quite permanently. So let us strike a friendship! It came over me in the train that instead of staying with people in future, I should take two rooms by myself, next time. London gets too hot. This was not suggested by any discomforts at Giggleswick!!—but I thought that 2 rooms of my own, would give me greater freedom, and I could stay longer without the witness of a visitors book! So your suggestion of a room at Brookside is very timely. I will let you know when I feel inclined to come—and then I should be free, and we could see as much or as little of each other as we wanted. Dont forget the house for the summer.

I am just back from a tea with Lotta [Leaf, Madge’s sister], who wished for news of you, which Will had already given her. I found Katharine [Furse, also Madge’s sister] and Lina Waterfield on the doorstep, and had a talk with Katharine which I very much enjoyed. She is very sad and splendid, and strikes one at once as full of a grave kind of courage—a reasoned courage I mean, which will last her all through this terrible time I know. For however she takes it [Charles Furse’s death], it is terrible, as one can see. I was amazed at the way she talked—so sweetly and naturally and she is coming to see us. She is one of the people I should like best to know. Lina was very beautiful, and softer than I expected but I did not talk to her. She seemed much more un-affected than I used to think—not that I ever knew her.

Your letter was a real treat; so write again.

Yr. AVS

Sussex

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199: To Violet Dickinson

Tuesday [6 December 1904]

[The Porch, Cambridge]

My Violet,

Here I have been going on much as you left me. The Quaker is slightly more vegetable, without you to stir her up, and has begun to get out family annals which bore me to death, and reads them aloud after dinner. She reads as though she were intoning a prayer, and I have to call all my niecely duty to bear it.

I lunched with Adrian today, and met Mr Headlam, whom I always like, though you think him a flirt. He is one of the people who really cared for Father and Mother—he has pictures of them both in his rooms—and besides he is a true artist in his way, which attracts me more than anything else in people. An artist is always so much more simple and sincere than anyone else, though he may be flirtatious too. Still there are flirts who aren’t artists. It is pouring wet, for which reason perhaps I have had a pain in my back most of the day, though I had quite a good night, except for dreams. It is rather a bore, and I have to go out to tea with a great stupid school girl whom Nun wants me to befriend. However I daresay my tonic will take away the pain. It is such a bore to feel useless.

I am writing a comic life of Aunt [Mary] Fisher, as a pendant to the Life of Caroline Emelia. I think it ought to be amusing, as she is a promising subject. Two novels which look bad have come from Mrs Lyttelton. I haven’t heard whether she will take my Haworth or what she thinks of it. Dont bother to read through the green book; those things are only essays and experiments and I dont think I want to print any of them—I had rather write fresh things than polish up the old—and they would want a lot of polishing. I think I have about finished the Letters for Fred, as the 2 last bundles have nothing worth copying in them. They are merely scraps about us, and other worries—of which they had many. The history of Laura is really the most tragic thing in his life I think; and one that one can hardly describe in the life. The letters are full of her. If you see Mrs Lyttelton try to find out how often I may write for her with a chance of being accepted.

Your AVS

I got you and your husband (!) a Christmas present yesterday!

Berg

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200: To Violet Dickinson

8th Dec. [1904]

[The Porch, Cambridge]

My Violet,

Why should you trouble to write two letters, when one is quite good enough—too good—for me? Really I am surprised that you find that blessed green book any good at all. I remember hammering out those articles when I ought to have been doing Greek grammar—and having to stop writing of a sudden when Case came into the room. So I concluded that they couldn’t be much good. I think you quite a first rate critic! and I’m not sure I shant appoint you Critic in Ordinary.

I wrote a review this morning, and also an obituary notice of poor old Shag, who was killed by a hansom, Nessa says. His was a most pathetic history, and I hope Mrs. L[yttelton] will print it, and make poor Sophies [Farrell the Cook] heart glad. She never could get reconciled to Gurth. But you will probably think it trash—and say so, if you do. Dont bother Mrs L: if she’s busy. My proofs haven’t come, but I dont want them. I want to get on with Mary Fisher while I am in the mood. These things amuse me, and if they make you grin, so much the better. Its the Quakers 70th birthday today; so I gave her two pots of flowers, and she gave me some frills such as she wears for my neck and wrists! which she sat up to make last night. They are really rather nice. I told her I wanted a treat to celebrate the day, so as she was going out, she stopped at a shop and bought me some chocolates, and herself some solid almond paste, and Adrian some chestnuts. We are going to eat as much as we can after dinner over the drawing room fire! Really the old Lady has a sense of humour; and I ventured to say that death on her 70th birthday from a surfeit of almond paste would not be a seemly end for the Light of the Quakers of Cambridge—at which she laughed.

My back hasn’t ached for 2 days, thanks to the tonic, though I had rather a bad night again last night. I dont feel so tired today though.

I shall come up on Saturday afternoon—and oh the peace of being at home again! This week has been long.

Yr. AVS

I saw Fred M[aitland] this afternoon for the last time. He wants me to write something of what I remember, for him—so that will give me something to do after Xmas. I want to do it as well as I can.

Berg

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201: To Madge Vaughan

11th Dec. [1904]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

Dearest Foster Parent—if that is your proper title—

I am very glad that Brother boy [Halford Vaughan] likes his book and liked opening his parcel, which is the chief joy of getting presents. It is quite true that I still know all my beasts from their pictures in Bewick which we were shown before we could listen to reading aloud. I should think Pennant was not a great naturalist! I have been to Cambridge and come back, and now have no more visits to pay, thank the Lord!—isnt that polite! The Quaker was still quaking much as I had left her. Indeed she will still be there in her same gray dress and shawl 100 years hence. I dont think she will ever die. For one thing she spends so little vitality, of which she has originally a great fund—never walks, or goes out, and does nothing but talk mellifluously and eat great quantities of cake and almond paste. So I dont see why she should ever come to an end. I dont know why I discuss this cheerful subject! I hope, on the whole, you wont adopt Quaker principles—which do the human spirit cool—except the dress—But even that is too tolerant, and shapeless to be beautiful. I was rather bored with her discourse, except when I excited her to a religious discussion. You will say that I am criticising as usual—but after all it strikes me that you were the more critical of the two of us at Giggleswick! I mean you criticised me, certainly; which I dont mind, because I think criticism the only sound basis of appreciation—What a grand sentence—fit for the Guardian! The Quaker has the deepest horror of criticism and is always pulling herself up for it; but her tolerance is far more severe than any criticism—She is never enthusiastic.

Here I find that the world gets on pretty well without me: Nessa and Thoby dine out a great deal, and go to dances, where they distinguish themselves. And here comes Adrian, just arrived from Cambridge who must go and change into his dress clothes immediately for a grand dinner in Grosvenor Square! I foresee that I shall often be left by my fireside!

I have written 2 more reviews for Mrs Lyttleton, of silly novels; and worse than silly, being sensible; and she has taken my Haworth and likes it, and the other review, and you will see two of my works in Wednesdays Guardian I think.

I got sat upon as usual by the Quaker—(who thinks it right to criticise her relations, and never to praise them) for “journalism”—She thinks I am going to sell my soul for gold, which I should willingly do for gold enough, and wants me to write a solid historical work!! People do take themselves so seriously: she sits and twiddles her fingers all day long, but she exhorts me to realise the “beauty of hard work” as she says profoundly. Give my love to all the Babies, especially to Carrie, whose photograph I kiss. It is the most delightful photograph of you all. Love to the Headmaster. Write: AVS

Sussex

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202: To Madge Vaughan

[Mid-December 1904]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

Dearest Foster Madge,

I got you the gloves, 6¼ size, because I find that these gloves stretch, and one’s ordinary size is too big almost. They last indefinitely; the pair I had at Giggleswick I got in October, and it has had hard daily wear; and is shamefully black and dirty, but it is not otherwise in the least worn out. I wish I could meet you—but we go to Lyndhurst on Wednesday for a fortnight, and I’m afraid you will be passing through one of those days. You may expect in a day or two a hamper of assorted vegetables, which I am going to try and get tomorrow in the Market. I shall pick out all the odd things I can see, as I know Brazilian Apes are accustomed to queer food! This may come in useful for the Old Boys.

My Haworth article has been taken, and comes out next week or the week after, I had a review in last week, and she has sent me others to do—so I dont fail for lack of scribbling—though not of an exalted kind! I wish you would hand me on Mr Maurice Hewlett, or any body indeed whom you reject: I should like to [give] that affected Dandy his due! My real delight in reviewing is to say nasty things; and hitherto I have had to [be] respectful. The worst of it is, I find, that very few people have the brains to write a really bad novel; whereas anyone can turn out a respectable dull one.

My family continue intensely sociable; and old Thoby spends every other night in waltzing with lovely young ladies. I can only hope for their sake that he knows a little more about it than he did when I last had the pleasure of dancing with him!

I wish you could see my room at this moment, on a dark winter’s evening—all my beloved leather backed books standing up so handsome in their shelves, and a nice fire, and the electric light burning, and a huge mass of manuscripts and letters and proof-sheets and pens and inks over the floor and everywhere. Tomorrow week they will be bad enough for a general clearance; then I start tidy and gradually work myself up into a happy frenzy of litter. I wish I could write letters like John Baileys. If I could find a French Memoir I would copy the first extract I came across for your benefit, but I am so illiterate! By the way, I am going to see Mrs Arthur Lyttelton tomorrow, my Editress. I hear that she thinks it an honour to publish John Baileys works. What then, must she feel it to publish mine, I ask you? But answer there is none!

Give my love to all the darling Babies. Are they going to have a Christmas tree? I must find a nice soft Beast for Carry.

Yr. loving AVS Write.

Sussex

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203: To Lady Robert Cecil

22nd Dec. [1904]

Lane End, Bank, Lyndhurst [Hampshire]

My dear Nelly,

(are you spelt like a bulldog or a human being?)

I meant to thank you before for your letter, which is the first letter I have ever had about my literary productions, and therefore very delightful! You cant think what vain beasts writers are—but Nessa will tell you. I dont think the artist is so much tempted that way, because all her or his, work is done in the open, and is therefore always criticised, whereas a poor wretch of an author keeps all his thoughts in a dark attic in his own brain, and when they come out in print they look so shivering and naked. So for other people to like them is a great encouragement. Not that a review deserves praise, it is necessarily rather dull work reviewing I think, and I hate the critical attitude of mind because all the time I know what a humbug I am, and ask myself what right I have to dictate whats good and bad, when I couldn’t, probably, do as well myself!

Please think over in your own mind some serious subject that wants writing about, and tell me when we next meet. I am a lady in search of a job at present—that is a good large ambitious subject to which to devote the next ten years of my life. I asked somebody who knows about such things, and he advised history of some kind, and added “When you’r 70 you will begin to put it on paper” Really I cant guarantee that I shall be in a fit state for putting it on paper, when I am 70; but these little considerations didn’t seem to occurr to him (2 r’s in occur?) where such a thing as history is concerned.

We came down here yesterday, after 10 days of fog in London. You see how delicately I tell you the news of the metropolis: were you picking roses and walking about under a Parasol all the time! Here we saw the sun for the first time—at any rate what was left of the sun, as it was just setting. However it rose all right this morning, as healthy as possible. It is the loveliest place. When you want to build another cottage, build one here. We have Beech trees practically poking their heads in at the front door—at least Adrian says he can smell them in the drawing room, and Forest ponies come when you call them—and Thoby saw a cow chasing a Fox in a field last night in the moonlight. This morning—I dont know that the fox has anything to do with it—he shaved off his moustache—in the hope of looking more like a lawyer. Nessa and I have hired bicycles: my front wheel went off like a pistol this afternoon, and has a great gash in its side. I dont know why I have written such a long letter when you didn’t really particularly want it, but there are no books, and when I see a pen and ink, I cant help taking to it, as some people do to gin.

Your affate,
AVS

Please say what you dont dare to say!

Hatfield

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204: To Violet Dickinson

Xmas day [1904]

Lane End, Bank, Lyndhurst [Hampshire]

My Violet,

What is the use of my giving you our address before we went—as you know I did—when you go on amusing yourself by writing imaginary descriptions of a literary kind upon your envelopes. Only postmen with a taste for the higher kinds of literature will appreciate the task of making out your addresses. However the letters come right, which is a great tribute to their—the postmens—education. Now do remember what I have written at the top, and try and put it right next time.

It is Christmas evening, and we are all soporific from the effects of a Christmas tea eaten on top of a Christmas turkey. Sophie never lets us off on Christmas day at all, and when this letter is finished, I shall have to go down and attack the turkeys legs which were left intact. Thoby had such a large helping that another plate had to receive the overflow, and he eat impartially from both. They spent the afternoon in making Rum Punch, which is made half of rum half of brandy, with sugar and lemon and hot water thrown in: the house smells like a public house in consequence, and we shall have a very merry evening. Isn’t this better than your high and dry aristocrats? We all talk at once, and make such brilliant jokes as never were seen. Thoby and Adrian have hunted from 10.30 to 5 every day since we have been here, and propose to hunt every day till we leave—on their own hind legs, unless they can one day afford a horse. Old Gerald has sent us £2.10. each, and they are going to have horses out of this. There is a book I have long had my eye on which I shall now buy the first moment I am in London, and I am already rather excited about it. Nessa and I spend our days very harmoniously, a good deal out of doors, when we walk into the beech woods which come up to the house. Really old Minna showed some sense when she built this house, though she did make such a bad bargain of it. The house itself is really pretty and comfortable, and the position is divine. Tomorrow Nessa and I are going to hire a Bank Holiday pony and drive to the meet about 5 miles off, and have a picnic in the woods together. I shall probably make scrambled eggs. Lord! I wish you were with us!

I rather put my foot into it with Mrs Lyttelton, I am afraid; she wanted to cut out certain things in Shag [the dog article], and I wrote and said please do, and always alter my things as you like. I only meant—cut out if too long. I didn’t mean in this cool way to ask her to do all the dirty work of correcting and polishing for me. I think I shall have to tell her so. I had 2 proofs of Reviews this morning, which were very badly printed, so I was in need of your proof correcting book, which I have left at home. I do nothing but read here, all day long, which is what I most enjoy, but I begin to feel the desire of the pen in my blood, and have hard work not to write. I dont want to be forever scribbling. I am just finishing the Life of B[urne-]. J[ones]. which begins to bore me slightly—not the Life, which is excellent, but the man. He seems rather a backboneless charming creature, and when one knows that he was not a great painter but only a glorified kind of decorator, all the anecdotes and letters etc. are rather too much of a good thing. I suppose he was a loveable sort of man, but not remarkable in any way. There’s rather a nice page about our Prinsep relations. I always feel, though it is snobbish—only not really, because with the true great one doesn’t feel it—that he isnt a gentleman—not in anything, not with the education or restraint or character of a gentleman. His letters I rather loathe.

Write, and address.

Yr. AVS

Berg

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205: To Violet Dickinson

Friday [30 December 1904]

Lane End, Bank [Lyndhurst, Hampshire]

My Violet,

I cant think why you condemn me to suffer so needlessly. Mightn’t you have saved me 2 sleepless nights—if not 3—by telling me straight out what Mr [Richard Burdon] Haldane said of Haworth? Anyhow, you needn’t have told me he was very severe; now you must send me the whole letter without delay, and put me out of my agony. Really I think I shall give up writing, or at any rate showing my things to other people: I only get criticism and abuse, and no one thinks it necessary to be grateful. After all I didnt ask Haldane to criticise me—and yet he thinks he has a right to be very severe. Send it on, anyhow, now—severe or not.

Now, also, in your next letter written immediately on getting this, tell me if Mrs. Lyttelton thought me impertinent for telling her to do what she liked with my articles.

There was a third command I had to give, which I cant remember at this moment.

If Haldane is severe, I shall give up literature and take to art, I am already a draughtsman of great promise. I draw for 2 hours every evening after dinner, and make copies of all kinds of pictures, which Nessa says show a very remarkable feeling for line. Pictures are easier to understand than subtle literature, so I think I shall become an artist to the public, and keep my writing to myself. I am probably the only living person who can understand it. Bold politicians cant.

I am reading,

Your Life in 15 Century Mrs J. R. Green.

Life of William Morris.

Layards Nineveh

History of Music

Not Wisely but too Well by Miss Rhoda Broughton—also 2 bound

volumes of the Windsor Magazine, which I hire for 2d a week, a ridiculously cheap price. I have a whole bottle of amber coloured Barley Sugar which I bought for one shilling, and Thoby has another of raspberry coloured Barley Sugar, and Nessa and Adrian have tins of stuff called American Butter Toffee, and we all draw up round the fire, and suck long sticks, which gradually melt; now if this aint luxury I should like to know what is—especially when you have been tramping six miles through bog and dead leaves in the forest following a huntsman’s horn. Thoby and Adrian rode for close on 12 hours yesterday, a hunting; and today they are so stiff they growl like tired dogs when ever they move. By the way I have just broken a tooth over a bit of barley sugar, which will rather spoil my looks.

Kitty writes very charming long letters—not to me, I’m sorry to say. She wouldn’t tell me half a sentence in one letter and leave me to wait 3 days for it to be finished. But then I always did think Maxses a superior race of people. My tooth has just come out, and what remains feels like a ruined castle.

Why do I waste so much paper and good ink—let alone my time a laying of it on, as the man says in Punch—upon a quadruped—a longshanked reptile, who puts me off with half sheets left in the Ducal blotting book? I am using my very best paper too, which I reserve for the peerage, as a rule.

I have written an article here, and done up 3 old articles which you haven’t seen, which ought to do for Mrs. L[yttelton]. I had some thoughts of sending them to you to see first, but I shant now. I hope you mind that, but I’m afraid its not likely. Shall I enclose the half of my tooth instead? It is an interesting relic of better days, and I think you might like to have it mounted as a pin or a brooch, with a suitable inscription. It had a large stopping in one side of it. You shall have this too when it comes out.

Georges hired motor has been burnt as it was being cleaned. I am afraid this will stint their generosity, which has not been strikingly shown yet.

I am corresponding with a woman called Sheepshanks—what a good name for you—Violet Sheepshanks—who wishes me either to hold what she calls a ‘social evening’ or to teach English grammar!! I have had to tell her that I am not sociable, and I dont know any grammar. She lives in a Palace at Norwich, and I dont think my principles probably would suit.

I cant tell you what an inexpressibly bad woman I think you—so good bye, woman Sheepshanks.

Berg

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206: To Violet Dickinson

[early January 1905]

New Forest [Lane End, Bank, Hampshire]

My Violet,

I am so cross today, crosser than ever—that fool of a man, the Cornhill editor [Reginald Smith], sends me back my Article—Boswells letters—without a word, but a printed slip. I never expected him to take it, since I found that it would only make 2 Cornhill pages which is impossibly short of course—but I thought he might say so. Also Haldane isnt exactly warm in his praise, and altogether I feel, as you read in the Bible, despised and rejected of men. I was a fool not to find something suitable for the Cornhill, instead of sending an old and fragmentary bit—but I dont take this as an insult to my literary genius—only a d——d bore, because I want to make money—and I shant have time to write after we go back, except an occasional review. I had a letter from Fred Maitland saying that his materials come to an end in 1890, and will I try and rake some more letters up, and write as much as I can of all the last years myself—which will take me all my time—as it means going through letters which I had put away as useless—again. Also he wants me to try and make out a Bibliography, which is sure to be a tiresome and difficult job, also to collect articles which ought to be reprinted. And I had made a 1905 vow to keep myself in pocket money at least this year by my writing! However we have an extra £50, which will more than pay our bills and leave a little balance for the new year.

I have been writing 2 little articles for Mrs L:—I suppose she’ll refuse them—one on Christchurch—the other on the Forest—which I have tried to make good and careful. Then I have read a good deal, of many things, and reading makes me intensely happy, and culminates in a fit of writing always.

How are you, my Sheepshanks dear? The original [Mary] Sheepshanks wants me to go and see her, and talk over my views, which I aint none. She thinks I might combine amusement and instruction—a little gossip and sympathy, and then ‘talks’ about books and pictures. I’m sure I dont mind how much I talk, and I really dont see any limit to the things I might talk about. However as she is sure—the good Sheepshanks—that I shall be of the greatest use—I dont mind trying. I enclose some early works [drawings]—in fact the first I did when the divine inspiration seized me—and I am now improved, according to severe critics, and draw ponies out of my head, and domestic groups. We certainly are domestic: we all draw for 1 hour and ½ after dinner, and Nessa reads aloud, the silliest novel we can find, at which we all roar with laughter, and Thoby draws murderers escaping and criminals being hung—and once, I’m sorry to say, the back view of God Almighty—and Adrian draws foxes, as large as deer, running along with their tongues out, and a beautiful gent. on a horse, who’s himself, galloping up in front of the hounds. They have just come in from their second and last hunt on horseback, which wasn’t as good as the last, but they seem generally in good spirits. I never saw people eat as they do, and the result in Thoby’s case is really rather alarming. He expands in his waistcoat, and rolls 2 double chins out of his collar.

I shall be rather—in fact very—glad to be home, in my own room, with my books, and I want to work like a steam engine, though editors wont take what I write. I must show you what I have done, when it is typed, and please be very kind. Mrs. L[yttelton] or Margaret L[yttelton] rather cobbled my poor Shag between them: I wish they would let me do it if it has to be done, and please dont say you want to alter heaps of things or I shall give up writing altogether and take to drink or society. When shall you be in London? Write a long long letter.

Yr. AVS

Berg

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207: To Violet Dickinson

[early January 1905]

[46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury]

My Violet,

Two good letters this morning, so you deserve a real treat—2 delightful manuscripts to read. I’m not sure whether they’re worth sending to Mrs L. or not; only I took quite a lot of trouble over the New Forest one, and wrote it with sweat and toil, though it is so short.

You shall have heaps more when you come back. You are the person I can best stand criticism from—which aint saying much.

Yr. AVS

Berg

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208: To Madge Vaughan

[early January 1905]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

Dearest Madge,

I hope the 16th, as you say on the flyleaf of your envelope, is the likely date, and not the 13th—and couldn’t you make it the 17th—and stay more than 1 night? Adrian is here till the 17th, and we have no extra room: at least we could make an extra room, but we are without a bed, and washing things: so do come on the 17th and stay longer, and then we could do something really amusing.

Our last amusement is a silver point press, which prints off delightful little reddy brown drawings, and even my works of art, which are of the most primitive description being entirely a self taught genius—dont turn out so bad.

Lets have a dinner party for you, and introduce you to some Bohemian lights, after your own heart!

You will be amused to hear that I am going to teach a class of working women in the Waterloo Road [Morley College], upon English Literature! They begged me to give a course of lectures—which I feebly declined, and said I would rather get to know them personally than instruct them—but they are much too keen to let me off—and probably have the whole thing at their fingers ends.

We have just come back from the New Forest, where we spent the loneliest of Christmasses, which was very nice, and barbaric. Thoby and Adrian hunted regularly every day, and Nessa and I wandered about among dead leaves and bogs and forest ponies, and I never once changed for dinner, which is my height of bliss.

Please thank your son and daughter when you see them for their extremely interesting and confidential letters; Janets shows a really masterly grasp of—all kinds of things—and Halford imparted quantities of useful information. What a nice way to write a letter there’s [sic] is! I think I shall correspond with my affectionate Aunts on the same principle. Wont Halford come up and meet his Mama here, and visit the Bears with Cousin Virginia? Just think what [a] thing that would be to look back upon, and how it would stay in his mind all his life!

We hope very much to see Katherine [Furse] one day, if she is in London again, but I suppose she has heaps to do. By the way, the Watts show is atrocious: my last illusion is gone. Nessa and I walked through the rooms, almost in tears. Some of his work indeed most of it—is quite childlike. Will you please express to Mrs Symonds [Madge’s mother] my—I dont quite know what—she will probably have forgotten who I am—but explain that I am another kind of Foundling, like Margaret Down—or whatever you called her—and likely to prove quite as troublesome. Mrs Symonds, then, is some kind of Grand Mother! I wish she would ever come and see us. Now write a sensible description of your plans, with proper dates—

Yr. loving AVS

Sussex

[]

209: To Violet Dickinson

Sunday [early January 1905]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My Violet,

I will come and dine Monday, and not Tues, with pleasure. Here are two of my masterpieces—Nessa has bought a silver point press, and these are my first attempts; one is a Rose, which I use as a bookplate in Fitzgeralds books, the other is a copy of Shakespeare’s death mask!—rather elongated you will see, but I have not yet mastered my medium, which is a very fascinating one. However I can tell you all about it when we meet. I am booked for Morley College!

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

210: To Violet Dickinson

[January 1905]

Postcard

[46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury]

Please inscribe and send me another copy of Anthony Harte, as my copy is all wrongly bound, and numbered, and the same pages are repeated.

I think them excellent however in spite of this drawback, from which I hope the Hospital copies are free. I like the great sneeze! and I am sure my weary nights which aren’t really weary, will be sweetened and made profitable. Dont cut a poor devil out whose trying to make a living by her pen.

AVS

Berg

[]

211: To Violet Dickinson

[14 January 1905]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My Violet,

I am discharged cured! Aint it a joke! Savage was quite satisfied, and said he wanted me to go back to my ordinary life in everything and to go out and see people, and work, and to forget my illness. He asked me to go and dine with him! He thinks me quite normally well now, and there need be no special care, which is such a mercy.

Morley College work is all right, but he wont say it mayn’t possibly be too much. I have told Miss S[heepshanks] that I think there is no risk of illness, so I will start, if she likes now.

AVS

Berg

[]

212: To Violet Dickinson

[January 1905]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My Violet,

I am rushing off to my workers, so I cant write—which I wish to—my sentiments. Ask Nessa if I was cheerful last night! But what I want immediate is the address of Miss Burney who typewrites. I have to send some of Freds MS. to be done. I will write again.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

213: To Violet Dickinson

[January? 1905]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My Violet,

Of course come any time—dinner tea, lunch.

Mrs L: asks for articles. I hope you didn’t drop a hint?

A mercy to see you in this weary world.

Just off to Morley.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

214: To Lady Robert Cecil

[January? 1905]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

Dear Nelly,

I was prevented from writing yesterday—I went out at 3 and did not get back till 12.30. You are a dreadful bane to authors; they cant withstand flattery, and though at present I know when I am being demoralised, I shall soon be too far gone for that: in which case I shall be more or less a responsibility to you for the rest of my life.

I didn’t send you any works because for one thing I expect you have enough to do for your employers: and also from pure vanity—because so far what I have done is very experimental, and must all be rewritten. However here is the last production. I shall rewrite it in 5 years time; at present it is all disjointed.

Thank you very much for asking me to come some time. I shall be very glad to. I shall also like very much to come out on Wednesday. We can then talk shop as much as you like. I have a little book called The ‘Authors Progress’ which is the kind of thing we talk put into print. I have said that it is a most depressing and ugly book, and treats Literature like a trade.

Yr. aff.
AVS

Hatfield

[]

215: To Violet Dickinson

[January 1905]

[46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury]

My Violet,

What a mercy you approve! I really did get depressed about that thing, as I especially wanted it to be good. You are an honest woman in what you say? Really that is a load off my mind if you like it, because I can trust your judgment in these matters.

Mrs Lyttleton has just been—she is a delightful big sensible woman. I wish she would pet me! I think she has possibilities that way! Just off to the Crums, where I know I shall be a howling failure.

When are we going to see you?

AVS

Berg

[]

216: To Violet Dickinson

[February 1905]

46 Gordon Sq:

My Violet,

I cant think where this odd bit of paper comes from, but it seems obviously meant for you, by reason of its stripes. Now do you see the joke? The whole of my reputation depends on it!

Nelly was like lavender and cream after Kitty: she made one or two corrections, which I had expected, but otherwise said she would like it [the memoir for Maitland] printed as it stands, and she does really like it, and thinks Kitty’s point of view absurd. So you can imagine that I think her a woman of the finest critical judgement, and I am going to send the wretched thing off to Fred at once, without corrections. They can be made later if he wishes to print, but I shall make it clear that I dont wish it printed. Poor Violet—what it is to have a scribbling maniac among your dependents! I send you with this the miserable article which I have screwed out with a view to Leo: say if it wont do. It is the last I shall do, as I have taken a plunge into tough Greek, and that has so much attraction for me—Heaven knows why—That I dont want to do anything else. I am really rather good at Greek.

We had Margaret L[yttleton] yesterday, who did her best to talk, but she is rather a stiff and starched young woman. I think she is really nice though, and asked us to go and see her. Tomorrow your blessed Katharine Horner is coming to tea—so the young ladies are appeased—and then I shall shut myself up and translate Greek history, and nobody shall criticise me at all.

Tell Mrs Crum that I went to my women yesterday, and had 4, as against 2 last week, and we discussed Venice, and I showed them pictures, and they were nice and friendly and full of interest, and told me about their Aunts who said that there was water in all the streets in Venice, and was it true, and the Clergyman at home (Yorkshire) had been to Rome, and shown them pictures of it. You will have to come down and talk to them one week—lots of jokes is what they like—and then they blossom out—and say how they have written poetry since the age of 11!

When am I going to see you again. This year—next year—now—or never! Aint it comic Nessa and [Nurse] Fardell having assignations at your house?

Nessa is sending her article to the Saturday Review, I think, on Thoby’s advice.

When will you come and dine!

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

217: To Violet Dickinson

[mid-February 1905]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

Wretched Woman,

Leo is delighted to accept my charming article [Street Music]—so there! After your croaks and groans I thought that little job was a failure anyhow. I think you must be too good a critic to see what will sell—that is my melancholy conclusion, and if my article had been really good, Leo wouldn’t have taken it. But I want a little base popularity at this moment—I spend 5 days of precious time toiling through Henry James’ subleties for Mrs Lyttleton, and write a very hardworking review for her; then come orders to cut out quite half of it—at once, as it has to go into next weeks Guardian, and the Parsonesses, I suppose, prefer midwifery, to literature. So I gave up 10 minutes, all I had, to laying about me with a pair of scissors: literally I cut two sheets to pieces, wrote a scrawl to mend them together, and so sent the maimed thing off—with a curse. I never hope to see it again. It was quite good before the official eye fell upon it; now it is worthless, and doesn’t in the least represent all the toil I put into it—and the book deserved a good, and careful review. However, to make up, the Times has sent me two trashy books, about Thackeray and Dickens and I may write 1500 words or so—Bruce Richmond is generous—and this, with the Nat: give me a little cause for joy in the face of that righteous old Guardian. Really I never read such pedantic commonplace as the Guardianese: it takes up the line of a Governess, and maiden Lady, and high church Parson mixed; how they ever got such a black little goat into their fold, I cant conceive.

I spent all today reading Latin, out of pure virtue; so you needn’t preach. What a bore about the Watts article! I think the Outlook and the Independent are the only possible two now—but I dont know that she wants to try elsewhere.

At [Dr] Savages dinner, which was more heavy and dreary than you can conceive, every person I talked to spoke almost with tears of the greatness and beauty of Watts—and wouldn’t admit the possibility of criticism, and this, I suppose, is the sample British Public. Savage lives with an odd lot of people; a daughter who is not up to his level, and strange fossils.

I suppose we shant meet till the 1st when I hope to have the pleasure of shaking your hand on the staircase.

We are going to tea with the Horners tomorrow; a long letter from Katharine, insisting on Christian names!

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

218: To Emma Vaughan

23rd Feb: [1905]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

Dearest Toadlebinks,

I perambulate Long Acre, and Hatton Garden, and Young Street, and keep my tryst, which we made for the 13th Jan: if you remember, but the faithless Toad comes not—and news of her there is none. You know, I suppose, that there is only one possible construction to be put upon your conduct. By the way, Todger, it will soon be a whole year since we met, and if you can face that fact without emotion you are a heartless scoundrel! We saw the Marn the other day, and I thought she looked rather particularly well, so I don’t think you need worry about her. She takes to Hoxton a little more intemperately when you are not there to restrain her, but she seems happy and says she don’t mind living alone. But I very much mind losing a sane first Cousin in the German Ocean. How you can stand Dutchmen, when you might be living at the very hub of the universe, I can’t imagine.

Now do you realise that the Stephen family are making their debut in the world next Wednesday as ever is—the 1st March, 9.30 P.M.—at home, house warming. If you have an ounce of warm blood in you, you will come back in time for this. Marn is coming, and half the notabilities of Kensington, and Bloomsbury. Our suite of apartments is to be flung open for the occasion, and four superb objects of art—the 4 Stephens in fact—are to be on view. It really ought to be great fun—only why the d———l aren’t you there? The Fishers are coming in cabs and four-wheelers, and hackney coaches—a grand reconciliation scene is going to take place in the front drawing-room, when with one accord Vanessa and Adeline, Virginia and Emmie, At. Mary and Gerald, Tom [Edwin] and Thoby, Boo [Cordelia] and Adrian are going to fall upon each others necks, and then proceed to lobster and champagne. Clara [Pater], if health permits, is coming in a new Empire gown of scarlet plush, with amber beads, and a little old Lace: Totty [Pater], unfortunately, cannot, for obvious reasons [illness], go far from the house. Mia [Macnamara] is marching from Chorley Wood; and is said to have started already, with a selection of the Chicks—Even the Headmaster at Giggleswick [Will Vaughan] is said to have made arrangements with Mr Mott to take evening prayers—Lotta [Leaf] is—oh heavens, Descending upon us!

We have been rather gay—at least Nessa and Thoby dine out a good deal, and we see a certain amount of our dearly beloved and intensely respectable sister in law [Lady Margaret Duckworth]. I am realising the ambition of our youth, and actually making money—which, however, I spend long before I make. I am writing for—now for my boast—

The Times Lit. Supplement.

The Academy

The National Review

The Guardian—

Aint that respectable. My National Review article is about [Street] Music so you can imagine what a flutter is going through the musical world—it has probably reached Dresden. My remarks will revolutionise the whole future of music.

Now write, like a good amphibious little beast!

Yours,
AVS

Sussex

[]

219: To Violet Dickinson

[28 February 1905]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My Violet,

As I can make my boasts in public, I must send a line to say that I have heard from Fred Maitland, and he says my thing is “beautiful. Really it is beautiful, and if this were a proper occasion I would write a page of praise. But of course I know that this is not what you would like and I can only say that what you write is just what your Father would have wished you to write. Whether all of it will be printed I cannot yet say; but you well know that my inclination will be to print as much as possible.”

So thats a mercy and now my mind is at ease and Kitty may pipe to the Devil. He is a really good judge. But I shall have to make it plain that none of it is to be printed—I dont think that would be possible.

That wretched Academy! It sent me a proof, word for word as I had written my article, and now I buy a copy and find they have changed the title from “A plague of Essays” to “The decay of essay writing” which means nothing; cut out a good half—and altered words on their own account, without giving me a chance to protest. I shouldn’t so much mind if they hadn’t clapped on my name in full at the end—to which I do object.

Just sent off an article to Mrs. L: She is really angelic in comparison.

The household is working up for tomorrow night, and our spirits are rising!

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

220: To Violet Dickinson

[early March 1905]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My Violet,

I cant come to lunch Thursday—d. it: 2 cousins are coming. and I have to go to a concert with them. Could I come to tea after it—rather late, 5.30?

A novel comes in from the Times; otherwise I havent any work, and I have spent the last fortnight reading Greek—lots of Greek, so I deserve a treat.

Just off to a dance!—where we shant know a soul. Does Lady Alice expect me to lunch, or what?

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

221: To Violet Dickinson

[11? March 1905]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My Violet,

I felt myself rather a selfish brute to talk so much of my own affairs—but that is the use I always seem to make of you.

I rather repent too, because I think I made too much of my being “driven”—only on that evening, happening to be depressed, I made the most of my grumble. Really I lead a very healthy life, and I dont think as a rule I do—or shall—go out very much—only things always come in a rush, and then I curse. Dont talk to Nessa, I really dont think talking does any good, and it really lies in my hands, and I shall make a stand if necessary. It is blowing and raining, and we have got to change and go and lunch with Lady Alice—which somehow seems rather a reasonless thing to do.

I have been toiling at a beast of a review all the morning, which I cant write and hate writing and write d——d badly. By the way I was in Fridays Times, and Bruce Richmond thought it “admirable” and now sends me another great, fat book—which I dont much want to do—as I know nothing of the subject.

I despair of my brains, which seem to be guttering like a tallow candle.

You are a really comforting woman, and where I should be without you, I dont know. That is the kind of testimonial that is worth having in this world.

Love to Nelly.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

Letters 222-285

222: To Violet Dickinson

April 5th [1905]

Somewhere off the Coast of Spain

My Violet,

I may have a chance of posting this at Oporto this afternoon, so I write now. So far we have had a splendid journey, thought at the end we begin to get a little bored, mainly owing to our fellow passengers. We stayed a day at Havre, and went to Rouen, and saw the 3 churches, and then set sail again. Unfortunately something went wrong with our engines, and we had to stop and drift with sails for about 7 hours, which was very dull. However this morning we woke to find the Coast of Spain in sight, and now we are passing along quite close beneath it, and the Captain expects to land at Oporto this afternoon. We have changed our plans a little; as we shall have to wait an extra long time to mend our engines we have settled to take train to Lisbon from Oporto, instead of going by sea. It is not a very long train journey, and it seems a waste of time to spend two days at Oporto. As far as I can make out our addresses and dates will be—

arrive Lisbon April 6th.

arrive Seville Hotel Madrid April 7th

arrive Granada Hotel Washington Irving April 11th.

arrive Lisbon Poste Restante April 17th.

leave in the [S.S.] Madeirensa, April 19th and get to Liverpool on the 22nd. So do write if you can. I am very hard up for letters. I feel as though I had been cut adrift from the world altogether; we lead such an odd dreamy existence. I am out of doors a good 8 hours a day, inhaling sea breezes enough to make the dead walk, and eating hugely, to pass the time, and I have had no pain the last 3 days, and sleep like a top. I am getting rather impatient to land, and see things—not but what the sea is beautiful to watch—but the ship is crowded, and one cant escape voices. There is one old bore of the worst type, who makes my life a burden. Happily we have discovered a place on the top of the engine room, to which an iron ladder leads, and we have taken our chairs there, and have escaped so far. We had the loveliest sight of Cornwall, and the Lands End, passing so close that we saw the houses and the people. I haven’t seen Cornwall since we left St Ives. There are a great many Portuguese Jews on board, and other repulsive objects, but we keep clear of them. The only people we talk to are the Lloyds. She is a daughter of Alfred Booth, the owner of the line and rather a useful acquaintance. There is also a man who knows all about Spanish hotels and travelling, and I think we shall manage all right. Everyone says that Granada and Seville are the two places best worth seeing in Spain, and this is just the right time of year. It is brilliantly fine, and so hot today that I can bask on deck without a rug.

You see, there aint much news; you cant think how bored everybody is, and how hard up for something to do or think about. They play the piano all day long, and eat sandwiches and drink soup.

I wonder what you are doing. I haven’t heard a word from anyone since we left—a week ago today—and I dont know where Nessa is. We get back the day before Easter Sunday.

I wonder whether that wretched Sichel review came out in the Times, but I feel safe from editors, and even your criticism will lose its sting! In fact I feel completely demoralised, as though I were going through a second rest cure. My conscience is waking now that we are near shore, and if I am virtuous I shall write to the Quaker, but I think that can be left till after lunch!

Adrian is very happy, and takes great care of me, and does my hair at night, and fastens my dress. When I got on board I found that I had brought no sponges or combs, and had to buy them from the ships barber. But otherwise I have not thrown myself on the mercies of Providence.

We sit at the Captains table, and I have to talk to him about twin screws. Would you like to marry a sailor? After all, I’m not sure that it isnt a better trade than letters.

Remember to write, and tell me how you are, and all your domestic affairs, as I shall get quite de-humanised.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

223: To Violet Dickinson

10th April [1905]

Seville, Hotel Roma

My Violet,

We are now in Seville, as you may see. We came here on Saturday from Lisbon, and found rooms in this hotel, which isnt bad, and is cheap. It is a most attractive place—not that the Cathedral comes up to my hopes—but it is far and away the most Southern place I have seen—and the life is amusing for a time. Of course today it has rained as they say it hasn’t rained all the winter, and we have had to spend most of our time exploring vague tombs in the Cathedral. If only the sun would come out it would be divine. The orange blossoms are out everywhere, and all kinds of trees; in fact an English August isn’t more full summer. We went over the Alcazar this afternoon, in the rain. However, I am no good at guide books. We drove in the gardens yesterday—it is a queer deserted ramshackle place, like all Italian towns, and of course full of beggars, and guides. We shall only stay here over tomorrow, and then go on to the Washington Irving at Granada. I hope to get a letter from you somewhere—none here, or at Lisbon.

It is a great relief to be off the steamer at last. The people got intolerable, as they thought it necessary to be friendly and talkative. Our boat back only takes 3 days, so they wont have time to bore.

Lisbon is a splendid town, with at any rate one beautiful building, the Great Church at Belem.

We went up to the English Cemetry and saw [Henry] Fieldings tomb! The heat, until today, has been perfectly delicious. I wore my fur coat and sat wrapped in a rug all the voyage, but the moment we landed at Oporto the climate changed, and I longed for a cotton dress. Today we have gone back to an English April.

The people here are beginning to make ready for the festival. They have stood huge wax figures in the Cathedral—I cant conceive why—and they are building stands. Placards about the bull fight are up everywhere. I am glad we just miss it.

I have had 2 letters from Nessa—otherwise no English news at all—nor have we seen a newspaper. In fact we feel entirely adrift, and it seems 6 months since we left. I feel ready for all kinds of work, and most flourishing.

We have managed our journey quite successfully, though we discovered on the voyage out that we ought to have booked passage on the return boat, which is very full, and we were told that it was doubtful if there would be room. If Adrians degree depends upon our getting back on the 22nd we were a little nervous; but the agent at Lisbon promises that it will be all right. I am afraid I shall have to sleep with a Portuguese Jew.

How are you—and what are you doing? I suppose you are now packing up for the summer.

I wish I could screw out an article for Mrs L[yttelton] but I doubt it. We are living as cheap as we can—but these journeys are expensive. I hope I shall get a lot of work to do this summer, so as to make both ends meet. I ought at this moment to be reading some English history for my women—I dont know a thing about it—but trust to luck.

Have the Crumbos [Walter and Ella Crum] ceased from troubling or what is happening; this time last year there was a general muddle.

We shall soon be back now, for which I shall be glad, though I have enjoyed myself, and so has Adrian.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

224: To Violet Dickinson

Bank Holiday [24 April 1905]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My Violet,

Thanks to our boat we only reached Liverpool last night late, and came up by the first train this morning, when I found your letter, which I now answer, after writing I dont know how many letters, so my hand is cramped, my brain barren, and Heaven knows what kind of letter you expect, as you live in a country cottage where the postman calls once a week, and not then if it rains, and which is a house, a prison rather, of unpleasant memories for one poor unfortunate at anyrate!! That is a sentence worthy of the Guardian at its best—might be printed just as it stands, without a single editorial comma—and would make the Church of England shiver in its vitals. The sea leaves my head in a state of swimmy swammy swampiness, so that I have sat the whole afternoon on Nessa’s lap, in a maudlin condition. Didnt I say in one of my inspired writings, which you threw into the fire, that coming home was the best part of being away? It really is. Especially when you travel in Spain, where the trains stop to breathe every 5 minutes and then the idiotic boat is late at Lisbon. But to take up my pen again when we got to Granada—There we were very comfortable in the Washington Irving—I asked if anyone remembered an English Lady the length of seven fine males [Violet], travelling with a beautiful but haughty aristocrat [Hester Lyttelton], with their own bath in a waterproof jacket—but your fame has left Granada at anyrate.

It is far and away the best place we saw—almost have seen I think—I basked like a lizard in the gardens, and it was as hot as an English August, which conveys nothing to your mind but think of orange trees, with oranges, and every other kind of tree with large green leaves, and all the blossoms you can think of. The cottage garden is nothing to it. There my descriptive faculty is blasted.

Then we had to travel 24, or 48 hours to Lisbon, and slept one night at a little country wayside inn—where the fire burnt in the middle of the room, and the company of Spanish peasants sat round and drank and stared at us, and we expected to have knives in our throats every moment. Then we were given one room—the only sleeping room—with one bed—and a canvas door between us and the family who undressed outside, and we locked our door as best we could—and lay down delicately side by side in our clothes, and heard the old woman counting her money, and swearing and spitting, and by degrees we went to sleep, and at 9 they brought us goats milk, and told us to get up and be gone. This all happened on the edge of an arid desert, lit by stars, smelling of meadow sweet beneath the shadow of a Moorish Castle!

Next day we went on to Badajoz—and came on Tuesday to Lisbon, where we had baths, and that is the most delightful thing we did there. We had to wait 2 days for the ship, and sailed on Thursday. The ship was very small, very sea-smelly, and the moment we got out to sea it began to roll like an inebriate, and I sat down to dinner, and suddenly got up, and without words left the room. It was beastly cold and dreary—however next day was better and after all we had a fair voyage, and last night at eleven we got into the dock, and slept still in our berths.

So now our travels are over. Everything here is safe and clean and happy. Nessa looks very well, and says she liked [Margery] Snow[den] more the more she knew, and they were very intimate and shared the same room! Well that is more than I could have done. Here I come back to letters from Fred Maitland, among other people, and he is just back and wants to come and see me on Wednesday, and bring the rough sheets of the book. Then Bruce Richmond returns my Sichel review which is excellent, he says, but not what they want—that is a serious criticism from a historical point of view. I am really thankful to have the beastly thing in my waste paper basket, though I did waste time over it, as it was bad, and I knew it. However, he’s sending me more books, and is polite.

Shall I come down and see you one afternoon—only I forgot that Mrs L. will be with you. I must break the evil spell some day.

Well, it is a mercy to be back, and within your range again.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

225: To Violet Dickinson

[April 1905]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My Violet,

I forgot to send these queer bits of stuff, which I found at Granada. I dont suppose you will like them, or find them in the least useful. But really you must take them.

I am getting famous at last, by reason of the article which I did not write. Bruce Richmond says the Times is an academic paper, and treats books in the academic spirit—whereas I do not. Do send me the review if you have it. I suppose they praise learnedly: really it was a secondrate book.

We are now shivering over the New Gallery, which has its private view, and we dont know whether Nelly is hung or not. I am going off at daybreak to buy a catalogue. I hope it will be there, though Nessa says she would rather not.

Fred Maitland has just been here for 2 hours, and is sending his ms. for us to read. He is evidently some way on with it. I like him more and more, and I know I shall like his writing.

People are beginning to hop in and out like rabbits. Beatrice I think, dines tonight; Madge and Will tomorrow. I wish you could meet her.

I am trying to write but my writing is so bad that I really think I must spend the summer reading stiff books; and making English History lectures for my women. I know this is what you want—only reviews, for the sake of money, and no silly articles.

Yr. AVS

We met Walter Crum in the street today, looking for a yeoman in a boarding house. He wants to tramp with Thoby.

Berg

[]

226: To Violet Dickinson

30th April [1905]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My Violet,

Great family rejoicings, the first commission! A Mrs Seton wants a life size portrait of her son, aged 4—or of her son and daughter. This is very immediate fruit. She liked the portrait of Lady Robert Cecil. So now one niece [Vanessa] at anyrate is launched—and the good Aunt ought to be proud, I think. Really it aint bad, as the woman is a perfect stranger, and the show has only been open 2 days.

We saw Beatrice on Friday—more tawny and unkempt than ever—both shoe laces untied, so I suppose marriage is quite out of the question. She chuckled and chattered like a mischievous bird, and we smoked cigarettes at 3.30 in the Bath drawing room!

[Nurse] Fardell was here today, but I sat in my room. She has been nursing Lord Edward Cecil. Now Jack [Hills] sits downstairs, and I have 3 fat books about Spain to read for the Times—a peace offering after the Sichel affair. You will be surprised to hear that I am an authority upon Spain—but so it is.

Nessa and I have been arguing the ethics of suicide all the morning, as we are alone, and what is an immoral act. You see how badly we need your chaste mind.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

227: To Violet Dickinson

[May 1905]

46 Gordon Square

My Violet,

You really have no right to scold—you dont write letters; an intoxicated fly might do what you do on a sheet of paper. Really next time send me news, and not all curses; besides which if our long and devoted friendship subsists on letters, dead it is by this time. Making a living, as I do, by the pen, it is indecent to use it for the purpose of friendship, so you would feel, if you had what we call a ‘nice mind’.

I have been splashing about in racing society since I saw you—that is dined with George at Lady Carnarvons—young Lady C. this time, thank God. It was the night of the Kemptown race, and we talked about horses all night, which are probably more interesting than books. Then I have seen Margaret [Duckworth], who is a nice woman, and our acquaintance begins to grow promising. We shall have to know each other all our lives, so we can take time about it.

I have been reading Miss Robin’s book all the evening, till the last pages. It explains how you fall in love with your doctor, if you have a rest cure. She is a clever woman, if she weren’t so brutal. By the way, I am going to write history one of these days. I always did love it; if I could find the bit I want. I have got a ticket for Dr Williams Library across the square, and describe myself as a ‘journalist who wants to read history’ and so I do feel a professional Lady. It is now time to apologise for my egoism, and ask you how you are. However, one more thing. Kitty writes that she has made great friends with the writer of Elizabeth’s German Garden ; who says, what is the point of the story, that my article on Music interested her so much!!! By the way, what did Herbert Paul say on the same subject? I have always meant to ask you.

Now, I have looked through several bookstalls for your flower book, but cant find it. It is more than ever borne in on me that the Quaker secretes one about her person; write, and make her disgorge.

I have been pouring my life blood into the grim bones of early English history all the morning : they wont care for it. I cant screw up my courage to send anything to Mrs Lyttelton, or the Academy (I am back, I see, insensibly, on the old subject!) The Times sent me a proof of the Spanish books. I changed a little, to make my criticism less abrupt. Look in Friday’s paper; or I’ll send it you.

What news of the Lord Chancellor? I see one of the Mackenzies is to marry some one very grand. When do you come back again?

Write a good letter next time.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

228: To Violet Dickinson

[May 1905]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My Violet,

This morning comes a letter from Leo [Maxse] to say that my Music ‘was very much appreciated’ and he hopes I will send him something else—‘a paradox is always popular’! So I think I shall shoot my Spanish rubbish [The Andalusian Inn] in that hole; and thank my stars that it hasn’t already gone to the High Church parsonesses [the Guardian]. I am touching it up a little and adding a final chapter; do you really think it good enough to send—because I needn’t? As a matter of fact, I didn’t mean to write any articles this summer under my name, which is becoming rather thread bare.

Tomorrow at 1.30 I expect an addition to my family the Male Chinchilla. I go to meet him at the station. I read a story the other day about a woman who could only paint with a doll on her bed; here shall I satisfy maternal cravings with a kitten?

I am just off to my Morley; where I am to begin with Early Britain and Celts, and they will yawn I know.

Yr. AVS

What do you buy turf for; and how old is it:

Perhaps O. will get his rise still. Has anything been said?

Berg

[]

229: To Violet Dickinson

[May 1905]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My Violet,

Tomorrow I have to spend in the dentists arm chair as usual—so think of me groaning whenever you feel particularly happy.

A letter from Ella [Crum] just came, in which she alludes to that delightful meeting which she did so enjoy a week ago!! Shant I broil in Hell one day? Tomorrow also is my working women, for whom I have been making out a vivid account of the battle of Hastings. I hope to make their flesh creep! Aint it ridiculous—teaching working women about the ancient Britons!

The cat was taken into the Square today, where it was drenched in a thunder shower, and had to be taken home, and my arms are scratched all over in consequence.

Why do I go on writing to you, when there are three serious and sober and very intelligent letters that I must write? It is because you are one of those dangerous women who exercise not at all the right kind of influence over young girls—and Virginia should be so careful whom she knows—I dont think Violet Dickinson is at all the friend I should like for my girls. No darling; she interfered with poor Mr Crum, and made him marry a woman who might sit upon committees—etc etc etc. Ah if you could have seen his poor Mother as I did when she heard the news—No, I do not like Violet Dickinson.

Ask me another day, when Margaret Lyttelton’s cease from troubling.

I suppose the holy rites of all the Bishops are now over, and the Lyttelton family more virtuous than ever.

Come up again, before we are all burnt to cinders. My skirt has just come off.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

230: To Violet Dickinson

Sunday [18 June 1905]

46 Gordon Square

My Violet,

Think to what a pass things have come when I have to write for news of you to Ella [Crum]! And now it appears—as we say in the newspapers—that you have been in London all the time. Why do you say your journey is off? Just as I have worked myself into an unselfish frame of mind and tell everyone how glad I am you are going? Now must I show that the Devil is not dead in me and that my real feeling is purely selfish. But your utterances are so cryptic and epigrammatic that I really dont know what you mean, or why.

We went to our dance at Trinity, where we stayed till 5.30 and we had tea with Mr [Walter] Headlam, and sat with him in King’s Gardens afterwards, which was well expounded to the Quaker, and we had a picnic up the river, and dropped our lunch basket into the water, and eat sandwiches soaked in the Cam, and I talked to Fred Maitland for 3 hours, and we dined with Adrian and we lunched with [Clive] Bell, and Nessa smoked cigarettes instead of dancing, and we came back on Thursday night, and we have been more or less dissolute ever since.

Such gaities make it impossible to sit down like a virtuous penny-a-liner, and Nessa and I have been arguing for six hours consecutively—which means generally that I lose my temper in some very remote cause—as for instance the Ethics of Empire (dont that sound grand). Old Thoby went off like the disreputable old ruffian he is to look for birds on the Norfolk broads. Poor Adrian was beginning to feel that his Cambridge was over, and we had to say goodbye to his rooms. It is rather sad to think that he must give up being taught—or rather amused—for ever, and earn his own living. He took a third—so at any rate he has his degree, though not a brilliant one.

Yesterday I did a very melancholy thing—which was to take my working women over the Abbey. Only one came!—and we solemnly went round the Chapel and the waxworks together, and saw the mummy of a 40 year old parrot—which makes history so interesting miss!

Ella asks me to meet Mr Buxton the Principal of Morley: so I am rising in philanthropic circles, as I sink in literary ones. No books whatever to review, and I grind at my history with a sense of utterly unrequited energy.

We also stayed at Oxford—this letter is what you might call a news sheet—and we were introduced to six new undergraduates at every meal, and in the intervals—it was a very wet day—the excellent Lettice [Fisher], expounded her theories, always proving them in her own person—how, for instance, the ideal life is the married life—the life of a worker—she teaches—the life of a philanthropist—she runs a slum. We had to confess that our lives were not after this pattern. Why is virtue so unattractive—only the utterly dissolute really appeals to me—Herbert [H. A. L. Fisher] writes his histories, and makes his jokes; and they combine intellect and humanity—and Lord, what a bore it all is! But she is really a nice woman.

I find a letter from Dorothea Stephen—that cumbersome square footed cousin—to say, as one might say it was hot weather—that “Christianity rests on a fact—the Resurrection. Believe this or be damned. Goodbye.” Why these sudden pieces of news? They are startling in the middle of a dinner party of undergraduates. Now write a coherent letter, and explain what you mean, or what Nelly means. If she changes her plans now, she will prove herself an Aristocrat of the deepest dye. Quaker sends her love. She was quite amusing.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

231: To Lady Robert Cecil

[June 1905]

[46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury]

My dear Nelly,

I ought to have written yesterday, but many things prevented it—one of our young Uncles [Adrian] arrived suddenly with three sofas, several tables, and a ton of books from Cambridge.

I shall be delighted to come on Saturday : though I am honestly afraid of boring you, and my habits are very untidy in the house.

Mrs Lyttelton wants me to write her a ‘literary article’ so I shall sit in a corner and wrestle with some melancholy minor poet. Can you suggest anybody?

I meant to write to you to demand an apology. It is a very bad look out for us if Violet is now found to be necessary to settle legal matters at the Antipodes. I am thinking of drawing up a set of regulations for the use of Violet: not to be taken out of the kingdom etc. etc. etc. Besides which, I dont see that you have any right to go round the world. You owe duties in Gordon Square, for one thing. However, I will explain all this to you when we meet.

Yrs. affly,
Virginia Stephen

Hatfield

[]

232: To Violet Dickinson

[29 June 1905]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My Violet,

You will see in the Times that we have a Nephew [Henry Duckworth], born at 10 this morning, after some difficulty. However Margaret is extremely well, and her son is a true Herbert, with a hooked nose, and a light pink skin—poor little wretch. George sat up for two nights in misery, and hardly knows what he does today—so he took us all to eat ices at Gunters for a treat.

Oh Lord, what a fool I am? I go through 2 days of misery, thinking whether to stay with Nelly for a Sunday or not, and then I say yes, and now I hear she has her sister there; and I shall be in acute agony the whole time. Never will I accept any invitation again.

We have six people dining here. Beatrice among them. I have been doing entirely the wrong thing at Morley—Sheepshanks showed wolf’s fangs.

Shall we ever find rest in this toilsome world?

Mrs Lyttelton never writes; so I sit and suck my pen.

I ran against Leo and Kitty last night, and rejected my editor this time.

Oh why did I ever accept Nelly? I might sit and read my book in peace, if only I had had the wisdom of a sucking child.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

233: To Lady Robert Cecil

[3? July 1905]

46 Gordon Sq.

My dear Nelly,

If you were not such a cynical woman you would believe me when I say how much I enjoyed myself with you. Really you made me very happy, in spite of my boring you etc. etc. etc. I think you are a very good person to stay with though I will not here give my reasons—my English being valuable—about a farthing, every 10 words, I should say.

Nessa was given a hot house bundle of exotics—double carnations, and strange unwholesome things grown under glass. My blue flowers beat them completely; and the Fresh fields adorn the Hall. But you oughtn’t to have spoilt that border. There are three distinct colours—light blue—dark blue, and purple.

I am now going to begin my Mrs Carlyle. What a mercy it would be if one could write without reading—or read without writing, but a wretch of a journalist never can separate the two.

What a beautiful handwriting this is—and how you can allow your visitors book to be bescrawled with a certain round and deceptive signature [Violet’s?] I dont know.

We travelled up this morning with 2 nuns, and one of them said she was being asphyxiated, and must be taken out: but no one paid her any attention and so she recovered.

Now, do you understand that I wish to thank you?

Ever affate,
Virginia Stephen

Hatfield

[]

234: To Lady Robert Cecil

[July? 1905]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

Dear Nelly,

Thank you so much for writing. I didn’t mean you to take so much trouble. It’s the kind of letter you particularly hate writing too. The Old Maid was only meant for a joke, and a contrast; and if the flash didn’t come in the right place she was a failure. And I think she was a failure. I like the old Home best myself and I dont care about the Professor at all—And as for sending my works to live professors—I get steadily further from it. The temptation to stick things into a great desk that I have, is increasing. I dont see why one should ever be read.

Do send me, however, something of yours to read. I think you owe me that.

I must rush and dress for the [Charles] Booths, and as Nessa is out my younger Uncle [Adrian] is going to act Lady’s maid, or chief groom. This will explain the fact that my skirt was back to front, and my hooks undone—upon which you will probably be reflecting when you get this! Why does that Stephen girl go out at nights? It is such a pity for people who write to pretend they can behave in drawingrooms etc. etc. etc. This is the theme of a new story:

Send me your Manuscript:

Yr. aff.
AVS

Hatfield

[]

235: To Lady Robert Cecil

[July 1905]

46 Gordon Sq.

My dear Nelly,

Thank you very much for writing again. You cant think how delightful it is when people do like your writing; that makes it worth while to write—almost to print. But you are a spirited woman—and here is the address.

Miss Burney (or successor) [typist]
48 Bedford Row,
W.C.

There is a new woman, whose name I forget; but the address is right.

I will keep the conditions faithfully: I saw Violet, and never whispered a word [about Nelly’s writings]!

I feel always that writing is an irreticent thing to be kept in the dark—like hysterics.

Yr. aff.
AVS

Send me the things very soon; and why not 4 chapters!

Hatfield

[]

236: To Lady Robert Cecil

[July 1905]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My dear Nelly,

You are rather severe with me I think, to send two chapters out of a book, and not the beginning chapter.

But I have read them with great interest all the same. Does this seem to you the sort of humbug literary people generally write? Honestly you seem to me to have real gifts. In the first place, you can put great live men on the scene and move them about as they ought to move: 2ndly, you can talk without self consciousness: 3rdly you write what I call a pure and candid style. It is clear, without being prismatic; and nervous without being muscular, like Meredith for example. So with these gifts—and you know they are gifts, I dont see why you shouldn’t write a really good novel—The faults that strike me—but I’m not quite sure because that is such a fragment to dogmatise upon—are a little tendency to write with your eye off the object; that is, you might concentrate a little more; and I am not sure that you should dwell so long upon a hero’s parents. But that is a matter of proportion, and depends on the length of the book.

But do please go on with it: because I think you have a vein of rather refreshing humour in you: and you are so clean handed, and sensitive of touch. And I am sure you have the feeling of live people in you, and the way they act and react; I recognise it, because I am wholly without it.

This is written rather hurriedly, because I am coming to dine with you: so if I am late you are really responsible; and I mayn’t plead this excuse before Nessa, or Sloper [the butler], I suppose.

“My mistress a horthur? What now!”

Your affate,
AVS

Send me the rest; and finish the book for the autumn Season. I will send the MS tomorrow.

Hatfield

[]

237: To Violet Dickinson

[July 1905]

[46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury]

My Violet,

Tuesday will do just as well for me as Thursday, or any other day. But remember that you lunch here on Friday this week—and think on the seas that will soon divide us!

I have been trying to analyse Mrs Carlyle all the morning; and find I write such marvellous dry nonsense. I sometimes doubt the value of words, which is a terrible confession for a journalist to make. Proofs come of the Andalusian Inn, and a short review, which is a shade more scornful than I meant. But I dont suppose the most sensitive of authors cares what the Guardian says of him—preaching the charities of the parish in the next breath. Perhaps Mrs Lyttelton will have some sea sanity blown into her brains.

I went to a shop to look for little travelling books for you today—but they had only the usual Temple Classics. Here they are, in case you find them useful.

We take chairs and sit on our balcony after dinner, and watch the servant girls giggling with waiters in the shade of the trees. Really Gordon Square with the lamps lit and the light on the green is a romantic place—even hangouts may be will o’the wisps. I say in my Carlyle article “Coruscations are more in letters”!! Such and so profound is my wisdom. Do you like my fluent rounded style, or my curt and mordant style the best?—or the better—as the [Edith] Sichels of this world have it.

I am dining with Savage tomorrow night, and I think I shall ask him what bee gets into my bonnet when I write to you. Sympathetic insanity, I expect it is. You know you must really be insane to leave England and think to widen your mind by knocking round the world. You will bring back photographs to show us! Here I state my firm refusal to look at one of them. I am treated with sympathy now, as one about to lose her solitary friend. Indeed I cant conceive a more pathetic case, and I shed secret and bitter tears over it. No one to ask me if my back aches, or if I have written anything lately—or to promise well for my future. Letters must come hot from the Equator with praise, or I shall give up literature and take to marriage. We saw Georges baby take his bottle the other day, looking more like a Christian now he can eat. His eyes are still shut, and squint; and he is supposed to be like his cousin, Lord Porchester!

But all this is profoundly uninteresting; and I begin to think that one sentence of my article at any rate is true. I am going to dine with the Buxtons to discuss my good—would be good at any rate—works—Letters are not literature! It is so odd to plunge into philanthropic society, living on the other side of the river of a sudden.

Now I must write 2 other letters.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

238: To Emma Vaughan

[11 July 1905]

46 Gordon Square,

Dearest Todger,

You are a provoking reptile to sit tight in your hole when we come to see you. How could I know that Out meant In—you ought to have a voice in [the arrangements of] your hall now you are back. But it will take some time to wean Marny from her bachelor ways, and make her understand that Miss Vaughan has a sister.

Now concentrate your dusky jewel on the question how are we to meet? Do you realise that we are altogether new to you and therefore you must lunch here and be shown over the house, which is our favourite diversion nowadays. Will you come on Wednesday next at 1.30 to lunch—or suggest a day if that dont do.

I suppose Marny is taking the bankrupt ladies place by this time and is perpetually out, and really, as a matter of fact never finds it necessary to move that mendacious wooden [In and Out] statement—no word in the English language can I find to describe the instrument which flats keep in their halls.

There are innumerable things to talk about. Marny says “Toad and I have been talking wildly”—but it is nothing to the thunderstorms and lightning shafts which will break over your head once you set foot in this house. To begin with—we have a nephew—rather, more properly should I have begun—we have a sister-in-law—We have a new house, in which I own two rooms; one the loveliest Palace on earth; I have stayed with all your available relations, Lamport is at last familiar to me and the loveliest of all its children, Virginia [Isham, b. 1898]: These drops prelude the shower.

Really, my chick, I think you might have called on your fond old cousins before this—my darling—here I am—if ever you want me—you have only to remember—there she is—a telegram—a post card—a boy messenger—and I shall be with you in a moment—Marny is so disrespectful about the Fishers; she comes here and stumps up and down the room by the hour with a poker, which she thumps, and talks of Herbert, and shuts one eye—till at last we have had to explain that we dont think such conduct quite loyal—

It is over a year since I saw you and how many such years do the scripture allow us—one of them you willfully spend on fat German sausage eaters—never again do such a thing.

Now write and say you will come.

This lunacy is written waiting for dinner.

Yr. loving,
AVS

Sussex

[]

239: To Emma Vaughan

Friday [July? 1905]

[46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury]

My dearest Todger,

Marny threw out cryptic hints the other day that you are on the look out for a profession and might possibly take some work at Morley. I am dining with the Principal, Mr Buxton, on Monday, and if you liked, I could offer him your invaluable services. There is work of all kinds going, and they are perfectly delighted to find helpers. I am certain you would do it splendidly, and it is really interesting, I think—so much better than the poverty and crime in which Marny’s lurid soul delights.

However, this may not be your wish at all. Send me a line; or, much better still, come here, and see us—which it is your duty to do. Come Saturday or Sunday at tea-time.

Your loving
Goatus

Sussex

[]

240: To Lady Robert Cecil

[July 1905]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My dear Nelly,

You see what it is to have an author to stay with you—what torrents you bring down on your head. Please behave like the brutal and candid reader you are in your professional capacity. Of course I couldn’t say all, or indeed half, what I wanted; it is too long even now I think. So I have had to cramp and cut short. She was a wonderful woman [Mrs Carlyle]—the more I think so the more I read her—I read your work the other day—and I couldn’t see what was wrong with the grammar. Why mayn’t one say “and which”? I always do. It seems to me yours is a harder job than mere reviewing: because people may act on your advice, and they certainly never do on mine!

Your aff.,
AVS

Hatfield

[]

241: To Lady Robert Cecil

[July 1905]

46 Gordon Sq.

Dear Nelly,

Thank you very much for your criticisms which are so good that I have actually attended to them!

It is thankless work writing these horrible little snap shots—Six volumes of real genius boiled down into 1,500 words of solid prose! When I said that she [Mrs. Carlyle] wrote her letters with a particular object etc., I didn’t mean that she wrote them to serve a useful purpose, so to speak; but she did write them with a distinct view of her correspondent—and with no thought of a possible biographer. However, I can’t express myself this morning!

I am so sorry that you were made ill by my writing. That is really an unfortunate effect to have!

Your affate,
AVS

Hatfield

[]

242: To Violet Dickinson

[July 1905]

[46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury]

My Violet,

Here is Jane [Carlyle]—not much good I am afraid. Nelly doesn’t feel enthusiastic; says its ‘hard end’ for the Guardian; and I have altered words to suit her. Bring it up tomorrow.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

243: To Violet Dickinson

[July 1905]

[46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury]

My Violet,

I will come next Thursday unless I am told not to—and I have a horror of inflicting myself on Welwyn again. For Gods sake dont have Thomas to meet me. I feel that everything I do in that enchanted cottage has a spell over it!

We have got through our Sunday, which I cant help feeling a mercy, though it wasn’t so bad. But there were 10 other people, mostly relations, and the river [Thames] swarms with paint and powder and brass bands all day long. Old Lady Young is a fine old woman; really rather clever and wise, and amusing. Otherwise the people weren’t amusing.

No other news can I think of tonight. Nessa had her Committee, wh. sat for two hours on very few eggs: decided to take a room in S. Kensington, of all unearthly places. Nessa is Secretary, and will want all her diplomacy—one half of the committee shriek Whistler and French impressionists, and the other are stalwart British. George has been fluttering about, but I dont see him. All the Herbert family are to vouch for that baby’s morals [as Godparents]—and Austen Chamberlain!

I had a long letter from Ella [Crum] to say did she ever tell me what a wonderful thing it is to have me at Morley. I do love flattery.

My cat is lost—out all day and night, and not back yet. I suppose some cat stealer has taken him, but I hope not. I am very fond of him; poor little beast.

No news from [Mrs] Lyttelton. I wish you could induce Nelly to like my writing.

Really it is better than that mild and mellifluous cant. If only I could attack the Church of England! Whenever I take up my pen for the Guardian Saxon comes behind and suggests all sorts of proprieties.

Nessa is dining with Ronny Norman and his wife. Oh Lord the respectable stupidities of their world. George and he will govern us all one of these days, by sheer force of stupidity. One almost has to respect such a talent.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

244: To Violet Dickinson

[July 1905]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My Violet,

I sent off in great haste two wretched little attempts—say which is the least wretched, because I want to send the survivor to the Academy.

I am going to make as much use of you as I can before you are beyond reach. O my Violet, why do you go when you have successfully trained me to climb round you? That is an image which should appeal to your feelings as a gardener.

We had a long argument last night about the friends who were to be invited to St Ives; and it took rather an odd form, for we found that everybody wanted the others to ask their friends. And we each had to produce the names of two, and I had the greatest difficulty in finding even that number; and one of them was decided properly to belong to Nessa. My trump card is no use this year. “Violet is quite an exceptional person” say both Thoby and Adrian.

I have been sent the proof of Mrs Carlyle. O Lord, it is bad—such an ugly angular piece of writing, all jagged edges.

Do you feel convinced I can write? I am going to produce a real historical work this summer; for which I have solidly read and annotated 4 volumes of medieval English.

Fred Maitland was here this afternoon. There is a man I respect. He would read 4 volumes to write two words, and think nothing of it.

The Baby, Henry Austen George Herbert de l’Etang [Duckworth], was christened this morning, and I hope sleeps the sounder for it; but his aunts weren’t there.

Somehow manage to come when you are next in London.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

245: To Lady Robert Cecil

[August 1905]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My dear Nelly,

Here are the ever youthful poets. They are rather a melancholy company, I think. However the eldest cant be over 25. I read a real poem in the Daily Chronicle this morning, which had a right to be melancholy. It was written by a charwoman, on a piece of paper in which sugar was wrapped, and she then went and hung herself.

“Here lies a poor woman who always was tired

She lived in a house where help was not hired.

Her last words on earth were “Dear friend I am going

Where washing aint done, nor sweeping nor sewing;

But everything there is exact to my wishes,

For where they dont eat theres no washing of dishes.

I’ll be where loud anthems will always be ringing:

But having no voice I’ll be clear of the singing:

Dont mourn for me now, dont mourn for me never;

I’m going to do nothing for ever and ever.”

The jury said unanimously that she was mad, which proves once more what it is to be a poet in these days. However these seven poets have no such mania in them.

Why do I write all about suicide and mad people?—it is not a cheerful way of saying goodbye.

Please keep Violet in very good order, and write long letters. We are stationary: and a letter is bound to hit us. And remember that you are never to go round the world again.

Yr. aff.
AVS

Hatfield

[]

246: To Violet Dickinson

[13? August 1905]

[Trevose View, Carbis Bay, Cornwall]

My Violet,

Here we are settled comfortably, and with the divinest view in Europe, I maintain. You wont find a better though you go round the world for it.

The house is at any rate separate from other houses, and there are plenty of windows. Nessa has been draping the chairs, which are blue plush with yellow patterns. We have linoleum carpets, and works of art thrown in. However, it really dont much matter. I look across the bay, and see the ships pass on the sky line, and think that yours will be one, which of course it wont.

It is a strange dream to come back here again. The first night we groped our way up to Talland House in the dark, and just peeped at it from behind the Escalonia hedge. It was a ghostly thing to do: it all looked quite unchanged. Old people meet us and stop and talk to us, and remember us playing on the beach.

However, it is the loveliest country, whatever age you happen to be, and really not spoilt. We went for a walk this afternoon which we used to go every Sunday, and saw the Lizard and [St] Michaels Mount. I find it so difficult to write here, but I must set to work tomorrow. The Academy has sent me a book of famous women with a polite letter hoping I will write for them—and this is not to be despised—my balance is very light at the bank.

We seem to live in a perpetual love making, and giving in marriage.

By the way, I read that the Japanese bathe always 3 times a day: Sometimes more often. So your sponges will probably do more for you than passports.

My friend, Pernel Strachey, has got diptheria, in a friends house, so she cant come here.

This is not a valedictory (a long word which I keep generally for the Guardian) letter. I mean I shall write or somehow say good bye again. Lord how I hate saying good bye!

This object must be pinched in the middle when it squirts you. I cant conceive anything more wholly useless, and unnecessary—however, you can leave it tactfully behind, and I will never ask whether it was a success.

AVS

The squirt wont get into the envelope; so you must imagine a most beautiful silver squirt, shaped like a watch, and fountains of nectar gushing from it at a touch.

Berg

[]

247: To Violet Dickinson

[August 1905]

[Trevose View, Carbis Bay, Cornwall]

My Violet,

There is nothing so abominable as saying goodbye in this world; and we have all been wound up for months to expect it which makes it still worse. You wont get this letter after all, so it dont very much matter. If you do, I want to charge you to take the very greatest care of every bone in your long and attenuated body. Nelly has a husband; but your husbands are many and your family numerous, so your responsibility is all the greater.

It is a delicious clam sea today, so perhaps you will have the same at Liverpool.

Dont think anything uncharitable of me; and try to come back an unspoilt virgin in spite of your widened mind.

Yr. loving,
AVS

Berg

[]

248: To Violet Dickinson

27th Aug. [1905]

[Trevose View, Carbis Bay Cornwall]

My Violet,

I feel entirely at sea where or when this will reach you, if it ever does. It is too late to make a shot at Vancouver. We have 6 separate lists of addresses, which are all ingeniously varied; in case we should get bored I suppose.

I find some difficulty in conceiving that the things we do at this moment here will interest you in some months time on the other side of the globe. Nothing has happened, however. We have had no visitors, as Elena Rathbone and Pernel Strachey both fell through, and we have only Gerald to look forward to next week. So our life is one of pastoral simplicity: read and write all the morning, and walk in the afternoon, and play Bridge after dinner. And you are flying across continents!

But it isn’t as dull as it sounds, and the country makes up for the society of most people. Most was underlined with a purpose, my Violet.

We watched the sea for the seven days we supposed that you were on it, and it was rough every one of the seven. I do wonder how you got through the voyage in your tiny cabin. Did Nelly and you share it; and were there delicacies innumerable? I can imagine vivid blushes, and shouted confidences. Thank God I was not in your place.

I suppose you have permanently attached to yourself at least six fellow passengers, and that all the steerage wives bore their babies under your guidance. [Nurse] Traill, by the way, is going through a course of maternity work. However that wont interest you. Have you bought any photographs yet? You dont go by Niagara, I hope. Lord, there are quantities of things I want answered at once. Not having a map here, you have now sailed entirely out of my ken. My mental geography ends at America. ‘Where is Yokohama?’ says Nessa!

Thoby and Adrian are very nice, and easy going; they play piquet when they are not arguing points of law. Nessa produces 2 canvases a day; and is mad with the difficulties of the sea.

This is a divine place; none other like it in the world. I cant remember where your cottage is to be. We seriously think of buying a farm here for £10 a year; it would be an economical thing to do, I think.

I am writing for my own pleasure, which is rather a relief after my Guardian drudgery, and I can assail the sanctity of Love and Religion without care for the Parsons morals.

The Quaker has written a pamphlet about Christian Science, to confute Mrs Butler. The Stephen family seems to think no controversy complete without their printed opinion. A wonderful race!

What a mercy it is, my good woman, that I can write to you, as old ladies say, with perfect freedom. Otherwise this letter would read a little incoherent.

Thoby has written to Bell to say he is very sorry; Nessa told him, as she thought it better, and he says he long suspected it. Bell had confessed that he could even give up hunting if necessary in order to marry. No news from Bell. No one, I will here state, has yet asked me in marriage.

I am writing 2 large works; one upon the letters of the Paston family; the other upon the nature and characteristics of the county of Cornwall; I want to learn how to write descriptions without adjective. Both works show remarkable promise—because they are still unwritten.

I dont suppose European weather can interest you, but try and imagine that it has been raining for 3 days running. Can you remember what rain looks like?

I imagine that I am going to address this letter to Singapore, or Yokohama. At any rate you will have crossed another sea; and your next step will be taken in my direction. At present I can only think of a long and attenuated form striding rapidly away from me across half the blue paper in the map. Take care of yourself my Violet. I have not left much room for emotion, which you must see in all the blank spaces. It is painfully borne in upon me that I have no right to be extravagant with my friends—lavishing them all over the world. I hope you feel vigorous and imperial spirited. Is the mind beginning to stretch? It is a painful process I expect. It will be terrible when you can only talk of our colonies, and blood and water. Give my love, if that conveys anything to you, to Nelly, and make it as hot as you can. I swear it leaves me alive and kicking. Write—and be a good woman. We want you badly.

AVS

Berg

[]

249: To Emma Vaughan

17th Sept. 1905

Trevose View, Carbis Bay, Cornwall

Dearest Todger,

Your letter came just as we were wondering what had become of you. I cant say it set our minds at ease. Really for two virgins you do penetrate into the most impossible positions. Art, even in Suffolk, rouses the emotions and is besides such a veil for intimacy. Marny at a street corner beneath an umbrella, may conceal much. And Miss Harris I firmly believe to be a myth. Who the—what the, where the—is Miss Harris? Another umbrella, I think.

Here we have been living among the fields of paradise, among Gods. You can’t think how people strip themselves of their coverings at the sea and appear as nature made them. The Stephen family disports almost—no, I will not finish that sentence. Two youths, bachelors, will stay here shortly: and Cornwall is worse than any amount of sketching. Why do you go to Suffolk when you might come here? We have a little lodging house, of the most glaring description, but the divinest country all round. Moors, seas, hills, rocks, a land flowing not only with honey but with cream. Here Nessa paints all the afternoon; and I write all the morning: from 10 to 1. Thoby and Adrian discuss points of law; and then take to piquet. We all walk and wander like so many disembodied ghosts. We go to tea with the people who now own Talland. They are a delightful pair of artists, with a family of the age we used to be. Oh Lord it is Sunday morning, and the vapours distilled by innumerable congregations, of whom you are one, I hope reach me even in this unpolluted spot.

I am always put into clean clothes on Sunday which I do hate. No news of the Fishers, no news of anyone—but stay—as the villain says in the melodrama. We hear that Tisdale will give Lady Isham his best professional attention and Miss Sheepshanks writes that Miss Vaughan will help in the Library [at Morley] possibly twice a week. My night is Wednesday at 9. Dont translate Sheepshanks into Lamblegs; she is rather a watery kind of woman.

I heard from Madge this morning. The Moors are better than the Alps after all, and they have sold Davos. What an odd end to all their agitations. Write and say what you do next. I wish you would visit Paston on the Norfolk Coast. Love to the dissolute figure beneath the umbrella.

Your Goatus

Sussex

[]

250: To Violet Dickinson

1st Oct: [1905]

Trevose View, Carbis Bay, Cornwall

My Violet,

We are already rather mixed by your systems of addresses. Kitty says you wont go to Singapore at all: however this must take its chance.

Writing to you at this distance is like talking to someone in the dark; and beggarly pen and ink though the staff of my life (just received a cheque for £5 from the Guardian) carry a very short way. Besides which when you have sat stationary a whole 8 weeks in the country it seems unnecessary to write letters about nothing. Our longest expedition was to the Lands End and just 15 miles; and meanwhile you whirl thousands I daresay. However to a person of imagination the Lands End is as impressive as the Equator.

We find some news of you in the papers; the Victorian went ashore after you left her. Perhaps you dont know it? What a chance for you! A real shipwreck, groaning victims, corpses perhaps; what a pity you were done out of it.

Oh Lord there are thousands of things I want to know and to ask. We have had visitors for the last 4 weeks; Kitty and Leo [Maxse] in lodgings; Gerald, Imogen Booth, Sylvia Milman, Jack [Hills], and now two Cambridge youths [Sydney-Turner and? Hawtrey]. These last are a great trial. They sit silent, absolutely silent, all the time; occasionally they escape to a corner and chuckle over a Latin joke. Perhaps they are falling in love with Nessa; who knows? It would be a silent and very learned process. However I dont think they are robust enough to feel very much. Oh women are my line and not these inanimate creatures. The worst of it is that they have not the energy to go, and in all probability they will travel up to London with us on Thursday. It is now Sunday, and the first fire of the winter has been lit—It is rather exciting to get back and begin work again, although the country is so divine I hate to shut it out. It is quite deserted now, and the leaves falling; you are in full summer I suppose. Here I sit cold in my room, writing by candlelight though it is not much after six. Is there any place in the world—literally one may ask you that now—like Cornwall? All this morning I have tried to spin out words about it; so that the fine cream has been taken off my brain already. This is only skim milk for you. I have written quite a lot, always with your stern eye searching me out across the world. I wish I had you here to encourage. No one really takes very much interest, why should they, in my scribblings. Do you think I shall ever write a really good book? Anyhow I can manage rather better than I did though there are still awful bare and unprolific patches. Also I have read a good deal, mostly 18th century; that was my weak point. Writing is a divine art, and the more I write and read the more I love it. Nessa has done a lot of work, and far and away, I think, her best work. Some of it is really good; I want her to hire a room and have a small show this winter. Her [Friday] Club flourishes, and will begin immediately, I suppose. So we shall all get into swing again. I do wish you were in London; that is quite honest; I feel more than usually incompetent without you, and no one has quite your genius. Only the effervescent Crum remains; and Kitty who is to me as salt to a very sensitive snail. I liked her better this time, rather simplified in the country, but there is always Leo in every sentence she speaks. Oh damn Leo I say. She lives in an unreal Paradise; I am a kind of slug or snail there. By the way, Imogen Booth is a real find; very clever and broadminded, with a great deal of character. But she is off to America. Dont tell me you mean to stay away till February—or I shall take the pledge never to get on kissing terms with woman more—and think what that would mean to me. I am going to write to Nelly: though I think it is a case of bread on the waters, to be washed up perhaps six months hence in Grove End Road. How allegoric I am tonight! I feel that these words ought to be more durable than brass to travel all the way—where? Singapore, or Yokohama. That must be decided now; I think I shall toss. I hear that you are everything to Nelly; nothing left for me then. No news of your Lyttelton. I hope she will send more work. We are all flourishing, and as brown as your housemaid. I wish I could conceive of you at all. Thoby says you have all been received by the Mikado. Take care you dont get into Punch as an international joker. I can imagine you sprawling half across a cartoon.

Take great care of yourself, and consider that you only hold your shanks in trust. That sounds a Christian sentiment to end with. Come back soon, and we shall rejoice.

Yr. loving AVS

Berg

[]

251: To Violet Dickinson

Nov. 9th [1905]

46 Gordon Square

My Violet,

It suddenly strikes me that I shall only just catch you as it is; so have you been flying through space. I did write to you the other day, but finding it all dusty and out of date I think I must try again.

It is odd to think that we were at St Ives when I wrote before; we seem rooted and settled here for ages. In fact I hardly know where in our manifold activities to begin. Should you think that was English? Heaven knows.

I have had such a run of work as is not remembered for I cant say how many years; books from the Times, the Academy, the Guardian—it must be confessed that I write great nonsense, but you will understand that I have to make money to pay my bills. The Quaker wont see it; and talks with deep significance of serious work, not pot boilers. Really I have almost more reviewing than I feel to be quite moral; but I manage some Greek and good English in between.

Then Nessa has fairly got her [Friday] Club started; and they are to have an Exhibition at once, and you will just be in time to go with me to see it. Really that gives me quite a thrill. I have been friendless so long that I shall suddenly feel respectable. Shall I buy a new hat to celebrate your return? I tell you an emphatic red line is drawn under Dec: 3rd in my calendar.

Nessa has written you so many sheets that I suppose I may be as foolish as I like here. Then we have our Thursdays; your husband came to one, in the midst of discussion upon the birth place of Jesus Christ; the little poets were rather afraid of his evening dress, and huddled together in corners like moping owls. But he was very good for them.

Then on Wednesdays I have my English Composition; 10 people; 4 men 6 women. It is I suppose the most useless class in the College; and so Sheepshanks thinks. She sat through the whole lesson last night; and almost stamped with impatience. But what can I do? I have an old Socialist of 50, who thinks he must bring the Parasite (the Aristocrat, that is you and Nelly) into an essay upon Autumn; and a Dutchman who thinks—at the end of the class too—that I have been teaching him Arithmetic; and anaemic shop girls who say they would write more but they only get an hour for their dinner, and there doesn’t seem much time for writing. Adrian started a Greek class; which lived for two lessons, and came to an end last night. Oh Morley College is a fine place and—can you end the quotation?

The other night I had such a desire for you that I took down and read through your Tract, which brought me great comfort. Oh thank God now you will have seen the world, and know all that is to be known; the mind of man, and the heart of woman. So stay at home and teach the young bears how to grow.

I have made tentative efforts to ingratiate myself with Margaret Lyttelton and Katharine Horner; but Katharine answers vaguely that she is in the country, and dear Margaret though a great force is rather oppressive in a drawing room. But I adore all young women. Kate Greenaways life is just out. “Intimacy with Miss Violet Dickinson” has a paragraph to itself. “As Miss D. is particularly tall and slim etc etc etc” Anyhow you seem to have been a great comfort to her; you have had a past my Violet. It strikes me that you are really something of a celebrity—and not an improper one either. Aunt Anny [Ritchie] says that Mrs Lyttelton gives a “melancholy roar of laughter”; I went to tea with her, and she roared at me, like a shaggy old Lioness with wide jaws, and gave me 4 books to review; I am still stuck in the 4th.

I got two most charming letters from you and Nelly the other day; just as [Dr] Wilson had put some stuff in my eyes so that for nearly 3 days I couldn’t read a word. It was really tantalising; and Adrian had to decipher Nelly’s, as I couldn’t wait for Nessa to come down and I didnt dare give him yours.

What fragment of your body will be thrown to me among the howling crowd of your friends? The widening of your mind has been a painful discipline. Dont buy me things: come back well and affectionate.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

252: To Lady Robert Cecil

Nov. 10th [1905]

46 Gordon Square

Dear Nelly,

Your letter of the other morning gave me great delight. It seems to me that you have a valuable talent which it is your duty to exercise, as my Quaker Aunt would say. I am an authority upon Japan now; I daresay I shall be given the Japanese books to do for the Times.

It seems absurd that we should still be in the same place where you left us. However I cant help it; and I really feel it difficult to find anything to tell you about the Capital—or Mother City of the Empire—as I suppose you now call it. Blood, you will begin when we next meet, is thicker etc. etc. We have just been having our Lord Mayor’s Show. It was Dr Barnardo’s homes, and the Entente Cordiale this time. I cannot say that I saw even the crowd. It is great fun to start the year again, and we are in full swing—painting, writing—Thursday evenings—and tonight we all go off with Beatrice Thynne to Nessa’s Young Artists Club. They are very catholic in their tastes and call Thoby an artist because he doesn’t paint—perhaps that is the long sought definition—and me one because? perhaps because I write reviews. Now would you like some Grub Street Shop? You are in the trade too. I have been scribbling all the time you have been sailing, and if all the sheets I have written were pasted together they would just catch you up—all but three feet 2 inches and ¼. It is the busy season, and I have never been without 3 books in hand since I came back. The Times sends me one novel every week; which has to be read on Sunday, written on Monday, and printed on Friday. In America, as you know, they make sausages like that. Mrs Lyttelton asked me to tea, and gave me a prize of 4 books afterwards; the Academy thinks I can write about Wilhelmina, Margravine of Bayreuth.

Kitty distrusts the neighbourhood of the British Museum; Virginia might marry an author and they always talk about themselves! The Quaker writes “When I asked what you were doing I meant writing”. Do you see the excessively subtle point of that sentence? Somehow she drew a distinction between reviewing and other kinds of literature. I wish you were back, and I could have tea with you in your country house. You will find it difficult at first to remember at what precise spot on the globe you are; and you may overshoot the mark occasionally and take the train to Cumberland instead of the Bus to Gordon Square. But I believe the brain recovers in a month or two. Anyhow a few hundred miles wont make much difference.

There is a rumour, I hope your friend lies, that you are going to stay in the Riviera when Violet comes back. I assure you that London is looking its best; Gordon Square in particular is full of a romantic and tender grace. The one quality lacking in Japan is what the Greeks (and the Cockneys) call Pathos. A bare tree visible in the Light of Human Suffering means more than all the Pagodas in Tokio. I am trying to evolve a theory for tonight: that is the inward and intimate meaning of the last few remarks. Tell me honestly what you think of my Style? Do you know I lecture on English Composition at Morley? “Is this an Arithmetic Class Miss?” a new Dutchman asked me last time when I had done. “It is clear that you must join the Elocution Class next door” I said.

Mrs Lyttelton told me terrible stories of her letter writing industry: how Violet will be snowed up with thick dispatches about Womens Interests and the Factory girls Morals etc. She writes once a week. Mrs Crum has found it necessary to contract her hand in order to let Violet share the difficulties of the adopted son. Should he be allowed cake—or only jam at tea—and which first—if either, as indeed she thinks herself—but Walter says—only you know Walter is so fussy—

Do write again: would red ink make that more emphatic? I have just written a very vivid account of the Desert myself: I confess I should have felt more at my ease in Japan. You and Violet seem to have explored each other with entirely satisfactory results; I wish you would now write an account of that journey for me; I dont so much care for Red Seas, and Rocky Mountains; but I love this Human Inside—

Come back soon. You cant think how crusty and forlorn I am getting, Nessa is just humanised by Kitty.

Yr. affate,
AVS

Hatfield

[]

253: To Violet Dickinson

[early December 1905]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My Violet,

I dont know if you are really back. I am much excited to think you are. It is an immense pleasure—no English will do the work.

Let me know whenever you are not in the arms of Crum, Lyttelton etc etc; and I recognise your husbands claims.

Oh Lord—you are a good woman to have come home at last. I can come most times.

Yr. loving AVS

Berg

[]

254: To Violet Dickinson

Sunday [3 December 1905]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My Violet,

It is a great and damnable disappointment that you aren’t back. I had counted upon this Sunday. However, there is no more to be said; and I hope your brother is better, and that this will [not] be too late to catch you.

You were badly wanted yesterday, at Nessa’s Exhibition, it was successful, I think, except that the room was small and dingy and dark, and we had to carry round lamps when the light gave out. But I think people were interested in the pictures, and there were no very bad ones. Nessa’s showed up well.

The [Friday] Club flourishes, and begins to quarrel which is a healthy sign. You will be in the thick of it all soon, so I wont go into details. As a study of human nature I find it very amusing; but thank the Lord I am not responsible. Old Nessa goes ahead, and slashes about her, and manages all the business, and rejects all her friends pictures, and dont mind a bit. She is said to have a genius for organisation; and it all seems to interest her—it would bore me to death.

On Friday Ella dines here and goes with us.

But you will hear all these things yourself: what a mercy! I think I hate writing letters about facts, and I grow too stupid to write fiction.

I had a most charming letter from Nelly: the only thing that palls is her praise of you. It isn’t healthy to be so appreciative. A good quarrel—nasty sarcasm—and home truths—that is the right stuff for friendship. I think with pleasure of several edged words we have had together. The last on the platform of the underground railway!

I am going to lunch with [Mrs] Lyttelton on Tuesday, asked a fortnight ago, so I suppose there is a literary party. I have written a lot for her lately; I enclose two proofs; they aren’t really up to much; but one was a job that I had to get through. I could wish that she had a finer literary taste sometimes; she sticks her broad thumb into the middle of my delicate sentences and improves the moral tone. If I could get enough work elsewhere I dont think I should bother about the Guardian. The Speaker happily wants me to write for them; and they have just sent 2 vols. of Aingers Essays for me to review. This is more interesting than novels; and it is not a bad paper. You see, when you aren’t here I have no one to talk to with perfectly unrestrained egoism.

Last night we dined with Savage; a party of 16, and my word, it was dull. You must make some orderly disposition of your corpse before you get back; I dont think Ella now that she has adopted a son is in the running at all. There are quantities of things I want to talk to you about; but I shant attempt to write.

Yr. loving,
AVS

I saw Katharine Horner the other day; with Lady Marjorie Manners, Cecily and someone else; they all sat on the floor, and talked Hornerese.

Berg

[]

255: To Lady Robert Cecil

[December 1905]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My dear Nelly,

Violet says you really are back, which I thought extremely unlikely, knowing your habits. I expect you wont want to see mere Europeans; but if you do etc. etc. This is written in a great hurry; we are having a dinner party, and I haven’t begun to wash.

I lunched with Violet today: she looks extraordinarily well; I dont think I have ever seen her look better. And she seems to have enjoyed every moment of the journey; and is full of fresh views on life, and experiences, and friendship I suppose.

Shall we come and see you? Anyhow it is a great thing that you are back safe.

Your affate,
AVS

Have you many books to read? I have been reviewing one of your firms novels, “The Autobiography of a Red Haired Woman” I expect you... [last page missing]

Hatfield

[]

256: To Violet Dickinson

[3? January 1906]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My Violet,

My letters are getting rare and few. We all grow old and bald and toothless—and this is one of my aged foibles. As a matter of fact nothing much has happened I think. Nessa and I have been going about, but Christmas is a dismal time. I have been writing all the mornings; not a word will ever be seen in print or by mortal eyes: except mine. Doesn’t that excite you? Shall you be able to sleep tonight? This mystery is an exchange for your mystery. What great scheme can you and B[eatrice] possibly have made. Are we all to share bedrooms in some country cottage; or is Dickinson and Stephen started with a capital of £50,000? Your brain is such a boiling fizz of plots that any one may hatch at any moment. Why dont you say how your bronchitis is, or how you feel or anything about your vile body? I confess I do hate it, but these are the penalties of friendship.

Nelly looked very ill and shrunk I thought—but I am no judge, and it may be temporary. It really is something to weep over when one sees her; I mean her deafness. She couldn’t keep a diary abroad she said, because she liked to write what people said, and she had heard nothing! Aunt Minna and she seem both beyond the reach of human help; but At. Minna has had her day.

I always feel talk bores Nelly too; so one doesn’t know what to do for her. She said you had been an ideal companion; and I really think she meant it; always amused, and full of life etc etc.

I am reading a Greek play, and Virgil and Shakespeare. By the way I bought my £5 worth. So really I feel virtuous, and no pot boiler.

Nessa has done a picture of me, and a picture of 3 different reds. However she shall tell you. Oh Lord do come back, without any chitis this time. We are landed with Miss Forrest, as you are landed with us. She sits vaguely in the drawing room for hours, and forgets whether she had tea or dinner last, whether children have meat or wine. My head spins with her stories; until I say sternly ‘Miss Forrest take my advice and learn Greek’ it is like a nightmare.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

257: To Lady Robert Cecil

[1906?]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

Dear Nelly,

I will come on Monday next, about 4.30—unless your mind changes in the interval and you feel you cannot bear it. Dont insult your inferiors; you know a Reader is to a Reviewer what a Judge is to a struggling barrister.

Your affate,
AVS

Hatfield

[]

258: To Emma Vaughan

[1906?]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

Dearest Todger,

I hear you are going to do your duty by Ralph [Vaughan Williams], which fires me to come too. I see the concert is at 8.30 I am going to get myself a 2/- ticket. May I suggest myself to come and dine with you at 7.15, or thereabouts? Or we might pleasantly picnic in High St? The reason I suggest this is because I must be in Hampstead, and therefore on the underground, and therefore I could come to you with greater ease than you to me, and if we were to meet at the place we should miss—which is a Bull. (I always said I was a Celt at heart)

If this plan commends itself don’t write; I shall turn up about 7 in time for 7.15 dinner or picnic. If you are adverse, say so, like an Englishwoman.

I warn you I shall descend like a Fury from the Hellenic Heights of Hampstead and you had better have my Hat ready for me. And what do I owe you (that is the tactful way of asking for a bill).

The corn plaster gave more pleasure than plasters are wont to do. I thought to myself, Toad will have forgotten—and behold, next morning there it was in its little box and I put it on, with profound relief, tho’ Heaven knows why ones corn should budge an inch. It smells very vigorous.

Yr. loving,
Goatus

Sussex

[]

259: To Violet Dickinson

Tuesday [16 January 1906]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My Violet,

Are you back, or where are you? Would you like me to come and bore you one afternoon. I think [I] have seen the tip of your long tail only twice since you came back.

However, dont bother if you are overwhelmed. I am sorry that your brother didn’t get it. But politics make dry dogs; Jack has been here; gets on his legs before the fire and asks us if we think about the great questions of our time: Chinese Labour and Protection! and comes to the conclusion that the young generation is materialistic.

What news of Beatrice [Thynne] and the [Cromer] Baby?

Mrs Lyttelton came to tea the other day: with [Nurse] Traill!

I went to a dance last night, and found a dim corner where I sat and read In Memoriam. While Nessa danced every dance till 2.30. I had one argument about the Roman Empire—you see I am not successful.

Aunt Fisher was there also, in another corner; embracing old friends and shedding quiet tears. It was a lively evening altogether.

Have you disowned your Sp[arroy]?

A book—novel—from the Times this morning.

We had [Fanny] Fletcher last week; her looks are the origin of your story I believe; otherwise she seemed nice.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

260: To Violet Dickinson

[January 1906]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My Violet,

It doesn’t matter when you come. But we have heard that [Desmond] MacCarthy has postponed his paper till the Friday after; Miss [Fanny] Fletcher is put off till then. But do come both times all the same, if it wont bore you. You had better make Lamb’s acquaintance in a friendly way before hearing the debate. I have a great deal to tell you about; about my paper knife, about a talk I had with Herbert Fisher—and various other things. Besides I have 2 printed articles to give you to add to your unique collection of the early works of Adeline V.S.

But I am racing to Morley. I have just written to J. W. Hills M.P.—it looks so natural he might have had it in the cradle. I cant imagine anyone better fitted to represent his country.

Really it is a great mercy he is in, and I hope it means that his luck will turn in other ways too.

The editor of the Guardian (not Mrs L:) has sent me 7 volumes of poetry and tragedy to review!

Dont tell the Quaker: but I can retaliate now with the Hilbert Journal. At least I never write for that. Paper knife sends his love, and says it is a hardworked place you’ve sent him to; and poets print on very woolly paper.

Yr. AVS

So glad about the Cromer baby. Is Beatrice coming back.

Berg

[]

261: To Violet Dickinson

[1906]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My Violet,

I will come with great delight, as nature made me.

It is sinful to see how old birds [Violet] peck their young ones [Virginia] from the nest when their season is over. I see Margaret Lyttelton and Katharine Horner, and [Elinor] Monsell and [Lucia] Creighton all poking their ugly beaks and chirping for more, where I used to snuggle in my baby days—We went to Court today and saw Leo tried for defaming a judge. It was very tame, and he merely apologised.

Do try and pretend you have a vacant place for me, old Stepdame.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

262: To Violet Dickinson

[March? 1906]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My Violet

Here is another work for you to sleep over. You see what a modest kind of author I am by that sentence. Dont bother to read it quick; I am in no hurry.

We had Sarah [Mrs John] Bailey to tea; and Lucia Creighton and 2 Monsells: My God! We are beginning to follow your example.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

263: To Violet Dickinson

[end-March 1906]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My Violet,

I will dine with you on Friday with pleasure and cut the Friday Club. Nessa’s birthday isn’t till 30th May: so you have plenty of time to feel inspired. I have been driving with Nelly in the motor car all the afternoon; and writing marvellous Rot; and corresponding with Widow Green and getting huge lumps of manuscript from Madge Vaughan which lies round me like a Learned Pig (make that sentence clear, as I say to my class, to which I go this instant.) and Eily Monsell is engaged to marry Bernard Darwin ; and [Henry] Lambs portrait is finished and it is bad.

And now I must go and catch my Bus.

Yr. AVS

Berg Collection

[]

264: To Violet Dickinson

[April 1906]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My Violet,

I sent off the books; the Library had them all, for a wonder. Will your husband send them back to me when he has done with them. An art book got sent by mistake.

There is no news, so why should I write a letter? However—there are various things. One is this. Did you say you knew of a table with a desk—because I have smashed mine, or rather Maud [maid] sat down on it—and I want to get another. So if you know of one, as you said, how much is it, and whose is it?

I sent my H[umphry] Ward to the Speaker, but I see they have a review already, longer and even more vindictive than mine. They call her a snob, and a sentimentalist, with no knowledge of art, or humanity. So the honor of English literature is saved, and I can meet Mrs Ward unblushing. Lamb and Nina have finally drifted into marriage. At the Friday Club last week, we sat and listened to this kind of thing Nessa: “Well, Nina. Are you married”. Nina: “Married? O no, I’m not married. That is I am married. I think I was married yesterday, and I was so hungry the whole time, and I had a new blouse, and a cake.” Lamb was out. Aunt Minna says to me solemnly “You must have seen that he is a woman. I have no doubt she does it from the best motives, but it is really too obvious—poor girl.”

Anyhow they are a stunted kind of nightmare, and I can’t even take a psy…. igal interest in them.

By the way, what quality do I lack. Tell me this: I cant sleep at night for thinking that Nelly has found me out.

Nothing has happened, or is likely to happen, but my great brain goes on all the same, and that after all is the important thing. I am going to write a review tomorrow of a book of letters, garrulous silly old letters that ought to have been burnt when they were written. That gives me a horror of letter writing—for wh. reason I write to you, and you must write to me.

AVS

Berg

[]

265: To Madge Vaughan

[April 1906]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

Dearest Madge,

I hope my sudden telegram didn’t give you much bother. But after consulting with Marny and Emma who proposed to go with me somewhere, we found it impossible to combine, and the Giggleswick plan was in the end the only one that had anything to say for itself. So I hope to arrive—somewhere—on the 12th. If you will send me the address I will make the woman understand. I promise not to bother you: you shant see me at all, except passing in the road, when we will bow, and go our ways. I feel rather an intrusive bore, stationing myself in your preserves when you probably want to be alone and quiet. I am bringing a great box of books, and I shall shut myself in my room and read.

I will bring with me the manuscripts [Madge’s] which I have read with great interest and pleasure. Doesn’t that sound a lie? but it isnt. Castle Stopping is on the whole I think the most successful. It is certainly most spirited and amusing, and so recognisable, in spite of the caricature. Then I liked next best the girl and the American where you seemed to me to have given a very vivid picture in a very short space. The Pity of It we have already. I think I see what Henry Sidgwick meant, though I should have put it differently. You seem to have invoked very tremendous powers—love and death—for the sake of rather a superficial effect—and you have been content when you got your effect to go no further. That is my objection, put very roughly, and crudely. It remains all rather misty and intangible, though picturesque of course, as I think all you write is. It amazes me to see the date on these things—1889—when you were 20. When I was 20 I couldn’t have written anything like that. You must have had a very mature mind. It strikes me that you might make a really good book out of that Diary. Suppose you went on day by day, writing out soberly and exactly, what you think, feel, see, hear and talk about, as you have done that one day, all things growing naturally out of each other as they do—wouldn’t the result be something very true and remarkable? Because, without counting your mind, your life is remarkable, and lived in a remarkable place. It is a book I should very much like to see, and I believe you could do it.

What other criticisms I have are just detail, so they will keep. Isn’t this the letter of a miserable creature who writes reviews?

It suddenly seems to me quite possible that the woman wont have her rooms free for that time. However, I am very free, and can change at the last moment.

Yr. loving,
AVS

Sussex

[]

266: To Violet Dickinson

Monday [16 April 1906]

At Mrs Turners, Giggleswick, Settle, Yorkshire

My Violet,

When you write you only use a few oaths, and misaddress your letter, and make hieroglyphics—so what is the use of pretending that we can correspond? I have all the work to do; look at this sheet. You have never had such a one in the house, nor is there a single pen in Burnham whose constitution would last the strain of covering it.

This is how I write to the Quaker, which I did for an Easter Sunday penance.

I came here on Thursday: I am in lodgings, I am 10 minutes walk from the Vaughans. Nessa comes I think on Saturday: we shall both go back together probably on Wednesday, in order to be at Morley, d—— the place.

I lead the life of a Solitary: read and write and eat my meal, and walk out upon the moor, and have tea with Madge, and talk to her, and then dine alone and read my book, which I might be doing now if I weren’t writing to you.

There is a discreet elderly person called Mrs James who waits on me, and provides meals whenever I want them; I had sausages for dinner last night. But she is taciturn, and has a family somewhere downstairs. When I want my bath I stand in the hall and shout for it; and a man answers. Mrs Turner is gone below Miss. In the morning she brings a thing like a childs coffin to my room, which she calls ‘it.’ Coffins are neither sex, but strictly impersonal.

There is a Greek austerity about my life which is beautiful and might go straight into a bas relief. You can imagine that I never wash, or do my hair; but stride with gigantic strides over the wild moorside, shouting odes of Pindar, as I leap from crag to crag, and exulting in the air which buffets me, and caresses me, like a stern but affectionate parent! That is Stephen Brontëised; almost as good as the real thing.

Nessa has not written to day, and I am imagining a variety of horrors; motor car accidents and elopements with the Bishop of Stepney. I had one letter, in which she said it was her fate to meet Bisons, but they seemed to her tainted; she hoped he hadn’t noticed. But if she turns her face away, and holds her skirts about her feet, even a Bison will turn, I tell her. Otherwise she sounded happy; and had started the picture [of Lord Robert Cecil], and thinks he makes a splendid subject.

Otherwise I have not read a paper, or received any attention.

It is a very odd perpetually recurring society here; old creatures who are semi-official, and middle aged spinsters, who drop in for tea. Madge is a charming woman; full of theories and emotions, and innumerable questions, like a child of 2, but I like being with her, and somehow odd and unexpected though it is, we get on very well together.

She took me to see a Master and his wife today, who are the intellect of Giggleswick; raw Newnham let loose upon the moors; to grow crabbed and stiff, and call it originality. I know the kind! She offered to lend me her bicycle to bicycle 16 miles to see a River “green like a Cornish sea”; (or her carpet ha-ha!!) and then presented me with 2 volumes of a poetess who killed herself. However, I am what Madge calls “disloyal”; and Will calls something else to write horrid details to you.

I feel slightly melancholy and undomesticated; nor can I write well; and altogether mine is a case that needs affection and sympathy. Why did you steal way to Burnham, and never ask me to come and see you? Why does the viper woman Crum coil herself in the hot embers of your heart? And why dont you write me a letter in which all these things are explained. Then I will tell you all about the Moors.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

267: To Lady Robert Cecil

Wednesday [18 April 1906]

C/o Mrs Turner, Giggleswick, Settle, Yorkshire

Dear Nelly,

I was very glad to get your letter. From what Nessa says—and I dont see why she should lie—she has enjoyed her time with you immensely. I am almost unselfish enough to wish that it might have been longer. Indeed I did write to urge her not to come up here for such a short stay—at least not on my account. But I have no letter today. I have been amusing myself very much alone—I dont quite know how; except that I just do what pleases me—and only see people for 2 hours a day. It is the kind of country that makes me quite content: and I could wander about it till I was gray, I think. However, I shall be very glad if Nessa does come; I want to talk for 10 hours without stopping.

It is odd that you should have Landor to read; I am reading Pericles and Aspasia for the first time. It is almost the only thing of his I have read. Of course it is beautifully written; but just too much of a Greek copy to be quite the real thing, I think. But beautiful writing is like music often, the wrong notes, and discords and barbarities that one hears generally—and makes too. I am very glad that you liked my works—though you haven’t said how much you disliked them at the same time. They were only half baked experiments, and I go on saying I shall do better. But really I feel rather hopeless about my writing—When it is done it is such a feeble thing. This is the salutary effect of the Moors and the Vaughans: and I’m not fishing for a compliment in Sussex waters!

I am going to get up at 6.30 tomorrow morning, and take my 2 small cousins [Halford and Janet Vaughan], aged 3 and 6 with their father to Manchester for the day. We are to see the zoo, and have all their hairs cut—and they have each got a shilling to spend. It will take us 2 hours in the train to get there. I must say it seems an heroic expedition; however I know it will be great fun—if it does end in tears.

If you look at this sheet of paper you will see a kind of inscription stamped upon it: that was where I was taught my alphabet this afternoon by the 6 year old cousin: the pencil broke in the middle: but I came out bottom.

I had a hieroglyph from Violet: the Crums seem to have collapsed somewhere on the East Coast. But the Crums leave me more than usual calm.

I must now go and try to trim a hat for tomorrow.

I hope we shall meet soon.

Yr. affate,
AVS

Hatfield

[]

268: To Emma Vaughan

21st April [1906]

At Mrs Turners, Giggleswick

Dearest Todger,

I was very glad to get your letter, although I feel guilty that I made you waste some beautiful days in London.

The weather is said to be breaking up here—After a week of summer, it is blowing and raining like a disreputable October.

I have enjoyed myself very much and I wish you would have come too. My life is simple and sedate, and is spent mostly alone. I have tea with Madge generally; or the children have tea with me here. They are a delightful happy family; I dont know which is most promising. Janet is growing into a very handsome and intelligent woman; and Halford is almost ready for school; and Carry [Barbara] is a very strong-willed affectionate creature, with a huge sense of humour; and no beauty.

Will was at Clifton when I got here; but he came home that day and has been here all the time. I think he is going to Oxford now, as he still has about a fortnight of holiday. I have been for one or two walks with him. He is extremely well, and vigorous, I think; and does the family great credit. Yesterday he and I, Janet and Halford and Nurse, had a long day of it. We started at 8 for Manchester, where the children had their hair cut, and we saw the zoo and got back at 5.30. They were all shouting about beasts when I left them, and Madge was screaming with laughter—as noisy as any family in England. I must say they are great fun, and Madge is really at her best as the mother of children. I see a good deal of her, at odd moments; and we have seen a little of the society of Giggleswick—The Motts, Bearcroft etc. There was a Committee of Ladies, also to consider the boarding out of workhouse children. Madge seems to be a power of some kind among all these people. Today she is giving an Easter Egg Hunt. I don’t quite know what it means, but it is what my good Turner calls a “wild day”.

I order my meals; at least say when I want them—have a sitting room, and a great bedroom; and all kinds of Yorkshire cakes and muffins. It is a splendid place to come to—but I have not yet had my bill. I go for long walks with Gurth, who has won old Turner’s heart.

You see I am practically without news, and totally without ideas: but that is the effect of solitude. Tonight Nessa arrives. I am afraid we must go back on Wednesday, to be at that…. Morley. I suppose Shaxby [Morley’s librarian?] will be at your desk. Sheep[shanks] is gone to Italy till Whitsuntide. Madge sings your praises: one morning you did wonders in entertaining etc.; and I sing accompaniment in the base. Write to me again—to London, I am afraid—and give my love to the Old ’Un; as Adrian calls Nessa. Marny is too respectable a name for the likes of her. My blood creeps at the thought of losing a L[ondon L[ibrary] book; it haunts me. I think I should jump off Waterloo Bridge if I ever did such a thing.

Loving
Goatus

Sussex

[]

269: To Madge Vaughan

[27 April 1906]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

Dearest Madge,

I feel that I ought to write some kind of Collins to thank you for your great kindness and hospitality etc. etc. etc. However, you may understand all that. I have been rubbing shoulders with my kind all along Oxford St. this afternoon, and that leaves me singularly dissolute and debased. I think in what a noble spirit I ascended and descended your mountains. London is crowded and very brisk and cold. We have begun our Bohemian dissipations: tonight Thoby is reading a paper to the Friday Club upon the Decadence of Modern Art. I am going to say that if all artists lived in Yorkshire they would be as healthy as—the Vaughan family. I often think of the children; and try to repeat their sayings and doings. Does Brother boy [Halford] call me that horrid tease?

This is only a brief and inadequate note: because I must dress, at least wash, and go off.

I shall send you a longer letter, some manuscripts, both of mine and of yours. By the way, would you, when you think of it, return that Brontë book—as it belongs to the Times?

I did enjoy myself immensely with you; independently of the children, and of the country. And please understand this as written, because I cant analyse my feelings with any success.

Yr. loving,
AVS

Sussex

[]

270: To Violet Dickinson

[May 1906]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My Violet,

I met the table yesterday. She is a lady to her finger tips; and more splendid than any thing I conceived. She is just too high for my chair, so I shall have her side legs cut off. But my good woman—I insist on paying her price.

That is the honest truth. Otherwise I shd. never have asked for her.

So send me the bill. She stands before my chair, ready to hold all the folios in the Brit. Mus.

Also her little pads for ink pots are cut; and she is so steady and discreet, and gives such an air to the room. I send for carpenter at once to make a ledge.

Send the bill.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

271: To Violet Dickinson

[early June 1906]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My Violet,

We shall be in to tea on Tuesday, whever you come. I have taken steps about the table, and it is to be done tomorrow. It has all kinds of complications internally, and Shaw says it is an excellent piece of work.

But please do tell me the price; because I dont think it right to take such gifts—and ask for them as I did. And it will last me till I die; and serve for all the books I shall ever write, and uphold the learning of the ages, and as my eyes fail, so the table raises itself. In fact there never was such a table. The little flaps appeal to me like human beings and Christians: something so natural and appealing and homely about them.

You never tell me what Nelly says I lack: until you set my mind at rest I cant think of going to tea with her; even when tempered with Miss Dickinson.

The good Times wants me to write 2 columns on the Lakes for them!! I have never been there—but the Imagination, as the poet says, has wings.

Give any version of my love to the Crum that you like: I feel deeply-honestly sympathetic. In fact I think she is some measure of a heroine.

Yr. AVS

At last my doubts about the t in Chestnut are set at rest.

Berg

[]

272: To Madge Vaughan

[June? 1906]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My dearest Madge,

I feel rather guilty to have made you write so much and read so much in the midst of everything else. But I am and that I hope you will believe.

I do agree with every word you say, and I think I understand your meaning.

My only defence is that I write of things as I see them; and I am quite conscious all the time that it is a very narrow, and rather bloodless point of view. I think—if I were Mr Gosse writing to Mrs Green! I could explain a little why this is so from external reasons; such as education, way of life etc. And so perhaps I may get something better as I grow older. George Eliot was near 40 I think, when she wrote her first novel—the Scenes [of Clerical Life].

But my present feeling is that this vague and dream like world, without love, or heart, or passion, or sex, is the world I really care about, and find interesting. For, though they are dreams to you, and I cant express them at all adequately, these things are perfectly real to me.

But please dont think for a moment that I am satisfied, or think that my view takes in any whole. Only it seems to me better to write of the things I do feel, than to dabble in things I frankly dont understand in the least. That is the kind of blunder—in literature—which seems to me ghastly and unpardonable: people, I mean, who wallow in emotions without understanding them. Then they are merely animal and hideous. But, of course, any great writer treats them so that they are beautiful, and turns statues into men and women. I wonder if you understand my priggish and immature mind at all? The things I sent you were mere experiments; and I shall never try to put them forward as my finished work. They shall sit in a desk till they are burnt! But I am very glad that you were so frank; because I have had so very little criticism upon my work that I really dont know what kind of impression I make. But do please remember, that if I am heartless when I write, I am very sentimental really, only I dont know how to express it, and devoted to you and the babies; and I only want to be treated like a nice child. I do hope you are better.

Shall I send some vegetables? or what do you like out of this vast and wicked town? Please say,

Yr. loving AVS

Sussex

[]

273: To Violet Dickinson

[June? 1906]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My Violet,

Do come on Tuesday—though how you begin a journey to Cornwall with lunch here, I cant conceive.

We are preparing for a Thursday, having asked Margaret Lyttelton at the last moment. Last Thursday [Clive] Bell came!—he behaved with great self possession: looked and laughed and jerked his head: and in fact I think he must have made up his mind to think no more of it. Nessa is afraid of showing ‘encouragement’—but I think it is much more sensible to get back on to easy terms; and he evidently wishes it.

These affairs of the heart are so perplexing! I shall never understand Bell’s; unless he has them written red across his shirt front.

Nessa has done some really good pictures for the show; and Eily Monsell thinks them excellent. Lord Bob came back this evening, and looks much better framed.

Madge tells me I have no heart—at least in my writing: really I begin to get alarmed. If marriage is necessary to one’s style, I shall have to think about it. There is some truth in it, isn’t there?—but not the whole truth. And there is something indecent, to my virgin mind, in a maiden having that kind of heart. “The air is full of it” says Madge: but I breathe something else. I have written such a lot: I think. You must read them now. Fred Maitland is sending MS: the Quaker’s book is just coming out: I feel the Stephen family ought to refrain from the ink pot: but they cant. The table is a fresh temptation. Did you get the books, and were they right?

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

274: To Violet Dickinson

[29 June 1906]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My Violet,

I am shocked to hear of your leg: which however being of the consistency of a daddy longlegs doesn’t really matter. It is said that they dont notice how many they have, till they put on their stockings.

We have been to a wet garden party; where we had to protest the grass was dry: and now we are just off to the Friday Club, and tomorrow I go to the Quaker.

Is it true that you are coming to Greece: Clarke [?] told Nessa she has an Aunt, who may be made useful for the first time in her life. I make out that we can do the whole thing easily in 5 weeks: I week is ample for Noels [at Achmetaga, Euboea].

The cases are only to be had at Boots’, and though I tramped Oxford St. in love and charity I couldn’t find one. This may do, if so keep it. It is a handsome present. I wish you would come and see us. I dined out last night, and felt like a Hyena on a bank; never a drink for me. Is it, say I, because Hyena’s are rare and fair; or because the stream dont want them?

I cannot write a letter at the best of times.

Margaret [Duckworth] sends a post card to say ‘I quite understand. Shant expect you at Devonshire House or Osterley or anywhere’ is that a snub? I think so—but we had to bring it upon us, and the sooner the better. And now we are free women! Any form of slavery is Degrading—and the damage done to the mind is worse than that done to the body!! Do come up soon. It is a dreary desert; and I howl and swear, and scribble away—but so badly. I go to Nelly’s for a Sunday: but O how I should like to be left alone; and I’m not a success there: tho’ I love her: it is a stream that runs delicately up hill, and is very tortuous. If your husband has done his books will he send em back? The library is rather bothersome: but dont matter if he wants to keep them longer.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

275: To Madge Vaughan

[July 1906]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

Dearest Madge,

I sent back today—at last—the Flaubert which you lent me. I read it some time ago, and put off writing till I should have time to say how very much I was interested by it. It seemed to me one might write volumes upon all the questions it brought up. I think no letters I have read interest me more, or seem more beautiful and more suggestive. I know his novels but I know them much better now. She brings out all his peculiar qualities so finely that no autobiography could tell so much as he tells almost unconsciously. I have read none of her novels: but only the autobiography. It is an immense lucid kind of mind, something like a natural force—with no effort or consciousness about it. I think I understand his artistic creed better: I knew all his features and boundaries—but I sink into her and am engulphed! I wanted to endorse, and add to, your pencil marks; whole passages seemed to start up as though writ in old ink. They penetrate so far and sum up so much that is universal as well as individual, and they say things that almost can’t be said.

Aren’t letters of literary criticism dull? I have just come back from a Sunday with my Quaker Aunt—who is very like your Miss Clifford to look at, at any rate. We talked for some 9 hours; and she poured forth all her spiritual experiences, and then descended and became a very wise and witty old lady. I never knew anyone with such a collection of stories—which all have some odd twist in them—natural or supernatural. All her life she has been listening to inner voices, and talking with spirits: and she is like a person who sees ghosts, or rather disembodied souls, instead of bodies. She now sits in her garden, surrounded with roses, in voluminous shawls and draperies, and accumulates and pours forth wisdom upon all subjects. All the young Quakers go and see her, and she is a kind of modern prophetess. I think you would like her very much; and her grey dressing gowns. We have been watching the pairing season here, which is still noisy and brilliant, though by no means lovely. We dont do very much of it ourselves; but we are now getting up a dance at the Friday Club! Also we have our Thursday evenings—and talk a great deal about Style, and various geniuses, whom we discover—but the world doesn’t recognise them! I hope you are well—and the children. Am I to have another photograph? I want one.

Yr. AVS

I dreamt of Giggleswick the other night—and its trees were quite bare!

Sussex

[]

276: To Violet Dickinson

Monday [2 July 1906]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My Violet,

I am going to Nelly on Saturday, unfortunately. I cant pretend at this moment that I want to; as I dont succeed there; and my jokes are very thin and bald.

I was very glad to get a letter at the Porch [the Quaker’s house, Cambridge]; a voice from a live world into that remote part of it!

But the Quaker was charming and wise and humane, and less of an inspired prophetess than usual. She is a remarkable woman I always feel when I see her; and a great deal better than her eloquence and her mastery of the language make one expect. We talked about 8 hours; and she dived into the ample recesses of her mind, and spun stories of her souls adventures and disasters; but she has swum through them all. I never saw anyone float through life as complacently and even gracefully as she does now, and the young Quakers and Quakeresses flourish beneath her shower. Death is what she wants, she says: because it will be so infinitely better than life. Meanwhile she cuts off dead roses, reads her philosophies, and talks and meditates. I should like to write [about] her later; but perhaps not in a letter!

How bad is your leg? I didnt think that stumbling over a tree meant much—unless you were William of Orange—but I suppose your joints are weak. Let me come down some afternoon. What about Greece? The Quaker says she will think badly of us if we dont go.

Yr. loving,
AVS

Berg

[]

277: To Violet Dickinson

[7 July 1906]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My Violet,

I forgot when you were here that we have promised to go to Eton on Tuesday for the Cornish wedding—so I cant come to you, which is a great bore. But we have promised to go. And now the Quaker writes she is coming here from Wed. to Friday; and I dine out on Friday and we go to the play on Saturday—so it must be next week. Which day can you have me? I could come any day, I think, except Wednesday, 18th.

O what a bore these engagements are! not yours, I mean; which is a relief for the spirit, but here I sit before an empty box which must be ready in an hour; to start for Nelly. And I never get any work done. The dance was a great success, I think. What is Miss Clarkes version?

How is the knee?

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

278: To Lady Robert Cecil

[July 1906]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My dear Nelly,

I got home safely, three or four days ago. The journey was very easy, and I did not lose my train or my temper or my luggage, and I have not been in the train ever since. But this Collins is a very formidable Collins; it has grown with waiting. Next time you will say you dont ask me to write Collinses. You will suggest that I had better send them to John Murray [the publisher]. Really when I think of Periwinkle I feel compunction. But dont bother when you read these—they cant wait; and dont write an answer—unless you like writing answers. Wasn’t that put tactfully?

Now I shall say how much I enjoyed myself at Gale. I really did: and if I had the pen of my Quaker Aunt I should say so in such a way that you would weep.

I think you are a very good person to stay with. Sloper [the butler] and I like belonging to you. You will have to send me ointment for my nose too. Compliments are best for my skin—the vet says.

When are you going to your next party? It was a brilliant success last night wasn’t it?

Your aff.,
AVS

Hatfield

[]

279: To Violet Dickinson

[22 July 1906]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My Violet,

I sent off some books yesterday, but not the right ones, I am afraid. The Butcher Aspects of Greek Genius, is rather good, I think; but you will have a mind like a bran pie after reading these odds and ends! Dont get Greece and Japan and the history of Welwyn all mixed; and tell us about Dr Young on the Acropolis—the man who wrote the Anthology—or Night Thoughts.

I am so sneering because: well for various reasons; nature, and Jack [Hills] and the Sabbath, and the cheque for £9.7. which lies before me: or beneath me. This is the largest sum I have ever made at one blow; it is the gift of the Times.

But now to business:

George was here on Saturday; very earnest and eager to impress upon us the fact that women cant travel by themselves in Constantinople. Margaret went with a servant, and was insulted. He says also the heat in Greece is really bad; He thinks we ought to do Constantinople on the way back with Thoby and Adrian. Have you heard anything of the kind?

If it is true, it is worth thinking about. I went to Cooks, and found a stupid man who said that there was no tour to Constant: they cd. make out tickets. He is sending a list of routes and prices which I will forward.

Shall I come down again one day this week. Friday? But dont let me dislodge Mrs Lyttelton; or all my articles will be refused. But the Times appreciates me! Thoby made £1000. one thousand pounds by selling 10 pages of Thackerays Lord Bateman. George sold it to Pierpont Morgan. So all Bar expenses and Greek expenses are more than paid for. I wish my manuscripts would sell for more than their meaning!

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

280: To Violet Dickinson

[July 1906]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My Violet,

I have heard from Cook: the whole thing with Constantinople works out at £37.5: first class. I think you stop as long as you like at places. I will come down on Friday, with great joy: by the same train; only I must leave before dinner, as we have people here, and the Friday Club.

The Quaker arrived this afternoon: and has talked incessantly till this hour—10.45.

By the way, dont say anything about Thoby’s sale of the MS. or his price. It is rather a secret, I think.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

281: To Violet Dickinson

[2 August 1906]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My Violet,

Here is Cooks letter. Keep it.

Your husband makes it clear that you can come, as far as fares are concerned. Do you want to come?

I think you must. I dream of it all night.

Really it is worth while to take a spirited view of the future. Things are bound to turn up.

Your husband seemed very anxious for you to go.

We are in a great mess and uproar; T. and A buying green spectacles and hammocks; and family agreements needing signatures, and Nina [Lamb] on top of it all!

We dined with Nelly and Ld. Bob last night, in the garden. It was great fun.

Yr. AVS

We go tomorrow.

Our address is

Blo’ Norton Hall,
East Harling
Thetford
Norfolk.

Berg

[]

282: To Violet Dickinson

Saturday [4 August 1906]

Blo’ Norton Hall, East Harling, Norfolk

My Violet,

The difficulties of writing in this place are many. However, I must tell you first that we can provide any surplus you want. Thoby has left special instructions; at all costs you are to be brought. Besides Nessa and I are rolling like drunken sailors on the profits of our works. That blessed Lyttelton takes every word I write and corrects the spelling.

If only I had chosen a better moment to write to you, I would describe this place. Which now I shant do. It is 300 years old, striped with oak bars inside, old staircases, ancestral vats, and portraits; there is a garden; and a moat. You see people of taste can get houses cheap: the station is 6 miles off, and there is nothing to do. Nessa paints windmills in the afternoon, and I tramp the country for miles with a map, leap ditches, scale walls and desecrate churches, making out beautiful brilliant stories every step of the way. One is actually being—as we geniuses say—transferred to paper at this moment. That might mean that this letter was it: but it isn’t.

Read your Guardian carefully, and see if you find anything about Henry James; the first words, like [a] coin with a head on it, will tell you who wrote it.

Nessa and I have to go now and call on the Parson and we haven’t been inside the church, even to sight see. Really this is a charming country, and even beautiful, or rather quaint as we say of things that are long and attenuated and more grotesque than shapely—because their hearts are so good.

You will be off to Cornwall now. I do envy you that; because it is far the most Greek of any place in England. Thats how we shall talk, of noses and places.

Thoby and A. went yesterday, with ‘hundreds of things left undone’ They are at Milan now. We shall get post cards. Aunt Sophie, the improper Monte Carlo Great Aunt, sends us a cutting all about English travellers and brigands and how no one must pay ransoms. We read Greek—Greek—all day long. I can shout oaths, of the classical period, and laments over unburied bodies. Do you think that will come in useful? Write you Tawny Devil.

This is the most important part of the letter. Will you come here after Cornwall? We have room: and house till 31st.

Berg

[]

283: To Violet Dickinson

Aug. 24th [1906]

Blo’ Norton Hall, East Harling, Norfolk

My Violet,

Your letters are as scraggy as—well comparisons are odious. But if you weighed my words—independently of their meaning, you would find 6 3/5 in of your letters go to one of mine. We’ve measured it to the inch!

Nessa and I enjoy a kind of honeymoon, interrupted it is true with horrible guests. We have had 2 cousins; one [Hester Ritchie] is with us, and proposes not to leave us till we go—and there are moments when it seems best to go. However the poor thing only suffers from an empty head, in which whims go eddying all day long; and the Lord gave her a good heart; so she isn’t as utterly damned as some of us.

I cannot write a letter here as the Quaker would tell you if you dropped on her now. To tell the truth, I cant read my grandfathers letters; because I cant swallow her short cuts. (Lyttelton would correct that metaphor.) But the Quaker has a well worn semi religious vocabulary; left her by the late Sir James, I think; and when she talks of chaff and grain and gold and ore, and winnowing feelings, and upward tending lives, and yielding to the light, and bearings of fruit, I slip and slide and read no more.

We have had long letters from Thoby and Adrian. They have drifted down the coast, which is full of unknown towns and Roman ruins, and they landed at Cattaro, and were going to ride in Montenegro. They say it has been perfect; and the weather like a cool English June. They will ride for 10 days, and go to Corfu and Patras. I begin to chafe to be off. This is lovely old country, and I walk miles every afternoon, and leap ditches, and wade rivers. Still, it will be great fun to rush through Europe, and climb the Acropolis. I cant settle to read Greek history and Antiquities so I shall make the scenery—in fact the atmosphere and the colour my job: after all, I shall say, one doesn’t come to Greece to look at ruins. And what answer will you have to that? And when you begin about the school of Pheidias, I shall look at the sunset, and make you feel a Vulgar Prig. However, I shant give away my secrets any more. I have written 40 pages of manuscript since I came here; that is about 3 a day, or rather more; because, of course, one must leave out Sundays.

George is coming here for Sunday; to impress upon us some last cautions, I think. He is a wonderful man. Aunt Mary says that Greece makes her think of Brigands and the dreadful story of the year 1856. And, is ‘that Miss Dickinson’ going with you? She didn’t say that, but I felt it.

We haven’t heard of Beatrice or of Nelly, or of anyone for 3 weeks. But it is great fun to dive beneath the sea as we do here, and find all the curates wives, and village post offices going on in spite of everything.

Here are some masterpieces. Do send them back if you remember; because I have a penance, which consists in reading my works over at intervals of 6 months.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

284: To Madge Vaughan

[early September? 1906]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

Dearest Madge,

Thank you so much for the berries. They are just the things I like, and make the whole room bright. I never saw such a splendid family! You should be a proud parent—you seem supported and protected on every side. They come just in the order we did.

I sent off some stuff to you today—I send tomorrow some nice sticky sweets for the children.

Do give them my love—only that conveys nothing!

Yr. AVS

Sussex

[]

285: To Lady Robert Cecil

[early September 1906]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My dear Nelly,

Violet brought a great many pyjamas to dinner tonight. My underclothes are generally very simple, and I shall feel a real lady for almost the first time when I put these on in a Greek bedroom: or when I come in to the room suddenly and see them lying on the quilt—or rather the straw. I think few things show a more generous nature than the loan of ones own underclothes to strangers—not even blood relations.

I will take the greatest care—only that’s not much really, I must own, and I wont pack my sponge in them, or use them to dry my feet on.

Dont you think this opens a very intimate and slightly bizarre chapter in our relationship. “The ladies were in the habit of lending each other their pyjamas”. I am fizzing with excitement, and my temper is therefore very bad: so Nessa and Violet tell me all the evening. But think of Athens and Olympia and Delphi!!!

Only I feel that this should be the crown of a long life spent in teaching Greek verbs, to schoolgirls; instead of which I have done nothing whatever except write a cheque. That is the kind of thing that looks nice written down; as you are in the trade yourself, I will own that I never did think or feel anything like it till just now.

You will be romping along among all the books; I shall drop out; you will finish your novel; you will write Leaders for the Times; I cant help hungering a little for the ‘book season’ as my publisher brother [Gerald] calls it. Rather a good show this year he says; he had only 10 days holiday, because his authors are such a team to drive.

You have got to have that Ms: ready to show me, 20,000 words complete, on 1st November. Do you hear? or I shall retain the pyjamas. That is our contract. Now any true author will sell his brains for pyjamas; Shakespeare did, as we know.

Please write, and they will forward. I will send you a card of the Acropolis. Love from Nessa.

Your affate,
AVS

Hatfield

[]

Letters 286-326

286: To Violet Dickinson

[7? November 1906]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My Violet,

Nessa seems much happier and less tired this evening. She enjoyed Nelly and George and is certainly in better spirits. She says it would make all the difference to her to be at home, if it could be managed.

[Margery] Snow[den] telegraphs that she arrives tomorrow at 6. A.M. so Adrian meets her and brings her straight here. This has cheered Nessa.

Thoby has a temp. of 103 and is a great deal bothered with his inside but [Dr] Thompson is satisfied. Thoby thinks him very slow and Savage will be a blessing.

I cant help feeling rather more cheerful tonight. It will be such a mercy to have things settled.

You are an Angel with wings dipped in the skies (whatever your crooked old talons may be. They hold burning coals for little Wallabies soft snouts.)

Blankets and quilt arrived: Nessa delighted.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

287: To Violet Dickinson

[8? November 1906]

[46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury]

My Violet,

We have had a hard days work—but successful. Snow arrived at 6 AM and is staying here. Nessa is delighted, and she seems exactly right. Then Savage came at 2. rather hurried and determined that a home was necessary before he saw Nessa. She couldn’t explain—he talked so hard and was so vague—thought she couldn’t eat and had diarrhoea. Then he dashed off—saying that today was a bright day, but you were not an alarmist and therefore she must be very weak. So I felt rather in despair. Then [Dr] Thompson came—I had a long talk, and explained Vs views—he was very nice, and said that if she really minded fearfully he would consult Savage and tell me. Now he has just been again and had a talk with V herself. He says they will certainly allow her to be here; with [Nurse] Fardell, in her own room. Savage says it is not a case of nervous breakdown but merely general tiredness, and therefore the treatment need not be so strict. He says it will certainly not take 6 weeks, and he thinks we can perfectly well manage here, if she prefers it.

So I am going to London [Hospital] to get Fardell, and we shall start probably middle of next week.

Both Savage and Thompson think it will be a quick case, and say there is nothing serious the matter.

Nessa is very much cheered up, and says she can stand this quite well, and it makes all the difference being here.

Thompson was very nice, and very glad to discuss the whole thing, and to hear about her.

Thoby has taken a sudden turn for the better and his temp. is only 100. They think this is really the final drop now—so we go to bed cheerful. Perhaps I may come round tomorrow morning.

AVS

Berg

[]

288: To Violet Dickinson

[9? November 1906]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My Violet,

I am so sorry about the influenza. In case I dont see you I write this. Nessa is bright and not at all tired after a good night. She had [Clive] Bell yesterday, as he asked specially to come, but she was not tired, or says she feels happier for seeing him.

Thoby is kept back by the diarrhoea which is still severe and keeps his temp. up. I am asking Thompson to get a specialist, as the nurse has rather alarmed Nessa, and is alarmed herself. Thompson says it is quite unnecessary; that it is irritation caused by grape pips which he passes in great quantities. But the pain is bad, and I think it will be best to know everything that can be known.

Nessa and Snow are very happy together. I think that was a really good move. I am writing to Lückes about Fardell.

Get well and dont bother.

It is such a mercy about Nessa. Savage and Thompson both say it is not a severe case, and they expect a quick recovery, as it is more physical exhaustion than nervous. Nessa says she feels she can get perfectly right here.

AVS

Berg

[]

289: To Clive Bell

[10? November 1906]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

Dear Mr Bell,

I find that it would suit Vanessa better if you could come at 2 tomorrow instead of 5. Could you lunch here first at 1.30. Adrian will be in.

Thoby seems really better tonight; his temp is only 100 pt 8, and though he has some pain it is less, and he is far more like himself. The dr says he may see a friend for 2 minutes tomorrow, and I hope Mr Sydney Turner may be able to come.

Your very sincerely,
Virginia Stephen

Quentin Bell

[]

290: To Violet Dickinson

[11? November 1906]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My Violet,

I started out to come, and was stopped again. Fardell came, and we are trying to get round Lückes. Nessa seems well today and says she knows a rest cure is unnecessary. However I dont think she will worry if she is here.

Thoby’s temp. is still up, and his inside is rather painful, but the dr. declares it is all accounted for; and says it wd. be waste to have another man. But we are prepared to have one at any moment.—I feel complete trust in Thompson. He is now alive to our anxiety.

Bell comes to lunch and sees Nessa afterwards. I think she enjoys it in an odd way. He is certainly very controlled.

I wish I cd. manage to come round and see or hear how you are. But it is useless at present: something always stops me, and I sit with T. a good deal. Snow is excellent—as sensible as a Hen—if hens are sensible.

I will get a note to you tomorrow. Dont bother, and dont write.

AVS

Berg

[]

291: To Violet Dickinson

Tuesday [13 November 1906]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My Violet,

Ella [Crum] says I may write to you, so though it shall be short it shall be extremely affectionate. However you will want horrid details. The doctor says Nessa is decidedly better; she weighs nine stones naked, which is very little less than she ought to weigh—and I should like to know what you weigh—the weight of bones, I should think. I have got Mackechnie the nice Scotch nurse to come, and we are going to start massage and food tomorrow. But both Savage and Thompson agree that it is not necessary to isolate her, so she is going to see us as usual though no one else. Then we can get stricter if necessary; but they are very much pleased with her improvement. Thoby is just the same today, which is as they hoped. There are no complications, and he is doing as well as possible. Snow goes tomorrow.

Adrian and I flourish.

I dont know when you will be able to see me: and of course the doorstep will be crowded. However I wait my turn. Only do get well, and dont think of Stephens, or other horrors. We send our love. Wall[aby] wags his soft tail.

Yr. loving,
AVS

Dr. says Nessa is doing “wonderfully well” and looks miles better already. Weight satisfactory.

Berg

[]

292: To Clive Bell

Tuesday evening [13 November 1906]

Postcard

[46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury]

Thoby had a good sleep this evening and the dr says he has had a better day altogether than yesterday. He is asleep now—Everything so far is satisfactory. The dr disapproves of reading—says talk is better.

AVS

Quentin Bell

[]

293: To Madge Vaughan

[14 November 1906.]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

Dearest Madge,

I meant to write before. The doctors are now certain that Thoby has Typhoid. The pneumonia was only part of it and is now almost gone. They hope he is through the worst of it,—he is certainly going on as well as possible. They think him better tonight. Of course it is a very long business, and the next week must be anxious, but his pulse is wonderfully good, and there are no complications.

The doctor is very anxious that Nessa should get completely strong after appendicitis,—advises keeping her in bed for the next week or two, with rubbing and feeding up. She is decidedly better, and they say that she will get perfectly right with rest and care in a short time. She has been rushing about ever since she had it. I will send a card to say how T. gets on.

Yr. AVS

Sussex

[]

294: To Clive Bell

Wednesday, [14 November 1906]

Postcard

[46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury]

The doctor says that Thoby has had a really satisfactory day, and thinks him better in every way.

I am sorry you couldn’t see him today. Could you come tomorrow at 3.30? I am going out then, and possibly you could sit with him or read to him. The dr discourages reading, but doesn’t mind a visit.

AVS

Quentin Bell

[]

295: To Violet Dickinson

Wednesday [14 November 1906]

[46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury]

My Violet,

I’m as hot—I can only think of one comparison, and I believe that aint proper. It isn’t hell fire, so dont guess that. We are really merry grigs in this family, and any allusion to Greece is received with hysterical applause.

Visitors come and use their handkerchiefs a great deal; I begin now by saying my brother has typhoid my sister appendicitis—dont laugh. Thoby has had an excellent day and the doctor says we can be quite happy, his temp. is going down, and everything is satisfactory.

McKechnie came today, and the rest cure has begun—but it is a very jovial business, and Thompson says she has made excellent progress, and will be completely right in a very short time. He is surprised at the way she has picked up. So here I sit and think of many things: such as drains and boilers and carbolic and bedpans—why they always will come in I dont know. I think my heroic conduct in Greece has stayed in my mind. I discuss enemas at afternoon tea with Peter [Clive Bell]—whether you call them èn ma or en ma—or enigma—what the difference between turpentine and glycerine may properly be thought to be. This is humanising him. Is this hot enough? old furry fleasome one? Beatrice [Thynne] comes as punctually as a piano tuner, and from the same excellent motives. But when she goes we kiss each other, and sometimes there is a tender passage on the chest in the hall, while she prods her umbrella on my toe.

Snow went this morning; and if she weren’t so sensible and so nice and so proper and so like a lady I should be very fond of her. But she did a good days work; and I really am fond of her—and that is an egoistical way of putting it. Then I see Nelly, who is well—all that Nelly is you know better than I do—anyhow the surface is very exquisite and we talk about you, and the single spot.

I know you are a celebrated invalid; if I didn’t love you, I should be so d—d bored. But remembering the passage from Ostende to Dover, and the lady who had to be screened with the cover of Madame Bovary—and the white cliffs and George and the tea basket and the bed pan—you see how my mind runs—remembering all this, I feel myself curled up snugly in old mother wallabies pouch. My little claws nestle round my furry cheeks. Is mother wallaby soft and tender to her little one? He will come and lick her poor lean mangy face. When you are at your worst do you think of Mrs Lyttelton, Mrs Crum, or me. Think this out. When you wake in the night, I suppose you feel my arms round you.

Yr. loving,
AVS

Berg

[]

296: To Violet Dickinson

Thursday night [15 November 1906]

46 Gordon Sq.

My Violet,

Your nephews and nieces do you credit. Thoby is as well as anyone can be who has typhoid, and his temp begins to come down, and all will go well. Old Nessa, jumping on to her weighing machine in a night gown, says the dr. with a blush, scales 9.4—so she has either put on 3 lbs since yesterday, or her weighing was wrong. The dr. says she may cut off a week of her rest, and 2 weeks will see her resurrection. I need not say—after all our chastening interludes—you will remember them—that I look upon her convalescence but as another chance for defacing—or is it effacing—myself. So when you come to Gordon Square and eat the fatted pig you will just walk through a cold mist, a little sharp upon the skin—which will be me. Now what news is there to break the day upon? surmising that you have passed a sleepless night? Shall we say Love? If you could put your hand in that nest of fur where my heart beats you would feel the thump of the steadiest organ in London—all beating for my Violet. Sometimes, when I am ordering dinner, or emptying—a flower vase—a great tide runs from my toe to my crown, which is the thought of you.

I have been talking nurses for 24 hours, pure and simple; I only see Nessa twice a day for 10 minutes. She does not have visitors, or letters, but sits up in bed, and writes with a tender pencil to Snow. The family are all on a system, and have their hours.

Beatrice was somehow averted today: providence sent the rain instead. I get post cards from the Quaker about ‘our’ Violet. How many people share you? I wont go lots with Mrs. Lyttelton. The world is singularly purposeless without a friend to tell me how well I write; of course I might have made a prettier sentence, but I didn’t. Now then will you believe that I am devoted to every hair, and every ridge and every hollow, and every spot upon your body? How many letters may I write to you? But they will pour, without any word from you. Remember that few people have so much responsibility as you do; it is all your habit of making friends. Wall[aby] wipes his tender nose, and nuzzles you.

AVS

Berg

[]

297: To Clive Bell

Friday morning [16 November 1906]

Postcard

[46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury]

Thoby is distinctly better this morning. He had a fair night and all his symptoms have improved, and the nurse thinks he is well over the worst. I couldn’t write last night, as I had relations here. I think it possible T. might see you this afternoon, but it is a chance of course.

AVS

Quentin Bell

[]

298: To Violet Dickinson

Friday night [16 November 1906]

[46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury]

My Violet,

Consider the difficulties of writing a letter while Peter [Clive Bell] discusses modern verse, with a jerk and a twist. I look at him and think how one day I shall look him in the eye and say your not good enough—and then he will kiss me, and Nessa will wipe a great tear, and say we shall always have a room for you.

I get such vague reports that I dont know which disease I am addressing. I need hardly say that I respect them all.

We have taken a decided turn in our household. Thoby has rounded the corner, and we think he will now go on straight, and Nessa is ‘tons better’ says the dr. He sits and talks to her, till I think I must interrupt. Then we have George and Gerald and Margaret, and old Aunts with pheasants and carnations, and many tears and embraces, and Kitty has gone off to the north and promised a dressing jacket which never comes—and Jack [Hills] has gone off shooting and lent us £100—but this is the kind of sentence which no human being with a temperature over 98 pt. 4. ought to read.

I went out this afternoon and saw Ella, and then I had a long call from Mrs [Charles] Booth, who has got enough wisdom to salt 20 dozen ordinary people, and it reminds me of you. But then you are a d—d practical woman, with a sharp edge to your tongue. Still take you all in all—at anyrate we celebrate you at lunch tea and dinner—and Aunt Fisher writes to enquire after ‘poor Miss D’ She has just driven up on a growler (10. P.M) to hear the last news, and driven off again, like an evil witch, before we could stop her. I heard a scrannel voice in the hall.

Now my beloved Violet, if there is a single thing in this world or the next, in the world beneath or the world above, that I can get for you or do for you—well there’s no harm in promising—and Wallaby goes to bed with wet eyes thinking of his lean mother lying out in the brushwood with alien foxes round her, “alien” is a pretty word, aint it? If I could smooth a pillow, or boil a saucepan, or fetch a hot bottle, you know I would do it all wrong, with the best intentions possible. Wall rubs his soft nose on the quilt.

He is a dear little beast, and loves his mother.

Sp.

Berg

[]

299: To Clive Bell

[17 November 1906]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

Dear Mr Bell,

Thoby is worse this morning, and the dr. thinks that there is some perforation. They advise an operation at once—at 12 this morning—and will then sew up the ulcer in order to prevent the poison from leaking. It is a serious risk, but they give us hope as his pulse is good.

Vanessa thought you would like to know.

Yrs. AVS

Quentin Bell

[]

300: To Violet Dickinson

Monday [19 November 1906]

[46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury]

My Violet,

I dont know what variety of spots yours are. Thoby swears he beats your temperature, and we are a little scornful of the Dickinson typhoid compared to the Stephen typhoid. However we are improving; and Nessa’s recovery is a little too rapid for my liking. The dr. goes in a stern sad man and come out a little weak round the lips: “Your sister is so remarkably sensible. We had better leave it to her.” However, belief in her own power of taming doctors is really bracing, and she has the weighing machine to bear witness. She weighs 9.4: I dont; you dont; nurse dont; Gerald with a latch key and a watch chain and £2 10 in his pocket weights 14—or is it 15? yes 15. We all looked the other way.

Old Thoby says “I must be bad indeed before I shall forget you” to his nurse. So between the two—typhoid and appendicitis—all emotions seem to be germinating. It is dull to be a healthy happy Wallaby, with no heart and no inside. But then, I begin to see that every bed made for others, and every saucepan washed for others opens a new window into the soul. So I am all windows and no Wallaby. It is rather like being in a lighthouse.

Now I have dear Peter Bell to talk to. He thinks there never was a family like ours; never was a sister like ours. So I agree and we hint at love and marriage and what will be good for a woman who has had appendicitis, and a proposal, a woman of very scrupulous mind and unselfish nature.

Then I jumped in and said you are all sensitive appreciations, Mr Bell; you have no character. You want bottom.

He blushed like a sunset over Mont Blanc, blinked like a windmill, and said You are quite right Miss Stephen: it is very painful.

Then I said, “but many good qualities are dormant. You need family life”.

‘I do’ he sighed, with such significance, that I said ‘you must really be one of our family’ So we approach and recede—and if he dont call me Virginia and kiss me on the doorstep before the days out—I dont love my Violet. And that is the oath to swear by. I feel all my heart drawn to you. Upon that I cuddle on my mat, and roll over and let you look for fleas. Wall kisses you.

AVS

Berg

[]

301: To Violet Dickinson

Tuesday [20 November 1906]

[46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury]

My Violet,

How you can trust any nurse to write down your vocabulary I dont know. My patient [Vanessa] is only allowed to write a very occasional letter to Miss Snowden—thats the drs. orders. He thinks you agitate—any woman that size must be eccentric—whereas he saw Snow for himself, and diagnosed her case.

We are going on well through our stages. It’s a long business, but there’s no need to be anxious. I must get out my pen again, and make that do its business. I reviewed 2 silly novels; no 3—and a 4th remains. My aim now is to pour out 500 chaste words in order, symmetry and taste—no matter what they mean.

Why dont you read the Creevey Papers through? I cant stop imbibing disreputable gossip; I begin to see what it is to have a taste for memoirs—like Lady Hilton, and Margaret. Is this conceited? but take the leavings of my brains when they have spent themselves on appendicitis and they stick like a leech to Creevey. I think I shall write an article for the Academy. But this dont interest you. What you like is oaths and scandal. So mark then, my weazened pimpernel, I shall have a niece in February.

Susie Grosvenor is engaged to John Buchan; and the wise—that is Jack—predict tragedy. How is she to live with a clever man all the days of her life? She is pretty and flaxen and brainless (this is Jacks voice) must have a man to hold her handkerchief—but her heart is excellent—He has a brain, edits the Spectator and thinks of politics. Now make a story out of this as you lie in bed, and think of me.

Weighing day tomorrow I think, if the machine aint broke by Gerald.

Goodnight and God—have I a right to a God? send you sleep.

Wall nuzzles in and wants love.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

302: To Lytton Strachey

Thursday [22 November 1906]

46 Gordon Square

Dear Mr Strachey,

We should like so much to see you, if you could come one day. I wonder if this next Sunday would suit you, about 6 o’clock in the evening? Vanessa is much better, and would like to talk to you.

Yours very sincerely,
Virginia Stephen

Frances Hooper

[]

303: To Violet Dickinson

Thursday [22 November 1906]

[46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury]

My Violet,

I’m in a tearing hurry—Beatrice and Peter [Clive Bell] talking behind me. It is a mercy you are doing so well; a temperate life the dr. says is the specific for typhoid. You are as fussy as a hen—how d’you know my back aches? The dr. makes me share Nessa’s rest cure, and I have milk and tonics and for the last 3 days I have had no more pain than a Caryatid.

Leo wants me to write an article for the National—not criticism but anything else.

Nessa gained 2 1/2 lbs this week, on half rations; she really is a wonderful old thing; and the dr. thinks her a credit to the race; says her nerves are ‘beautiful’—one of the few people who have a sound body—and rest for a week or two more will set her quite straight. He is a very good kind of man, and he has set himself to understand Nessa now, and spends hours with her—talking mostly about football and electric light. Thoby is well as possible. We aren’t anxious. His nurses really are nice women; and full of fight and energy—and so far there have been no quarrels. Indeed I had the greatest compliment I have had yet—“you really are more sensible than other people, Miss Stephen”—and she didn’t know that I am also more inspired than most people—Aint I?

I feel I write like an eccentric typewriter; but I have to scrawl ‘lines’ on postcards to all the d—d relations, who think it so much to their credit to ask for news. Aunt Fisher limps in by the back door—why—no one knows.

Margaret offers me underclothes. Really the different departments of the Sparroy are being undertaken by different people—but none like you—Oh how pretty.

Yr. loving,
AVS

Berg

[]

304: To Violet Dickinson

[23? November 1906]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My Violet,

There isnt much change. His temp. is up to 104 again this afternoon, but otherwise his pulse is good, and he takes milk well. The nurse is nice and quiet. The dr. hasn’t been yet, but I write to catch the post. I dont think he will say anything.

Nessa had a rather tiring morning, as Kitty stayed an hour and I am afraid was rather full of agitating talk. But Nessa was set on having her. She has seen no one this afternoon, and though she looks tired she seems cheerful—reading illustrated papers.

I must go and give her tea.

You do her good I am certain, and I think Kitty will be good after the first interview wh. was bound to excite. Jack like an idiot told her to stay as long as she liked, and I had gone out with George.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

305: To Madge Vaughan

[24 November 1906]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

Dearest Madge,

Nessa wants me to tell you that she is engaged to marry Mr Clive Bell. It happened 2 days ago: he was a great friend of Thobys and Adrians at College—and we have seen a good deal of him.

She is wonderfully happy, and it is beautiful to see her.

Yr. loving,
AVS

Sussex

[]

306: To Violet Dickinson

25th [November 1906]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My Violet,

You should have had a letter from Nessa before this. She wrote, and I suppose I put it down somewhere, as my habit still is.

You cant think what feats I have done with Snows telegrams and letters.

Thoby is going on splendidly. He is very cross with his nurses, because they wont give him mutton chops and beer; and he asks why he cant go for a ride with Bell, and look for wild geese. Then nurse says “wont tame ones do” at which we laugh.

Nessa also increases steadily. Really I think we are through our troubles—but it has been the devil of a time. I have tried to write—but perpetual sense has consolidated my brains. Thoby has been reading reviews of the Life [of Leslie Stephen], and wants to know if you are up to that? The dr. says his brain is the strongest he knows; and his heart is fit to do the work of two men. Still, it is a long job, as you have to be so careful with food—and then as his lungs were bad there is the danger of cold—and he is like a child. We hope he will get away in 3 weeks, with Bell; and Nessa will be more than ready to go before that. She is to get up and come down if she likes this week—but I have made her promise to stay more or less in her room till she goes away—at least to make that her headquarters. She really is a wonderful woman. She sat down solidly to get well, confronted all the doctors, and has proved that she was right all the time. She saw Kitty one day, but as a rule she only sees us. They let her do as she thinks fit now; I feel happier about her than I have done for months. She does seem to me rested all through—brain and body—and ready to begin again as fresh as paint.

And now that Thoby is out of danger things will go swimmingly: only my dear old furry one must heal up—and come to a festal dinner. This is perhaps the dullest letter that my pen ever wrote; of course if Snow had written it, or Ella, or Herbert Paul—one would have thought differently of them. I went to the zoo this morning with Adrian; and a Kingajou[sic] hung on to my hand: O Kingajou, I said—if I were you! You will understand that that is exclamatory, and it is a poem too. And I saw the kangaroo, with its baby in its pouch, and it licked its nose, and wiped its eyes. That is Violet I cried.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

307: To Lady Robert Cecil

[November 1906]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

Dearest Nelly,

I will come to lunch on Friday if that does. I feel it rather wrong to inflict myself upon other people just now—but I suppose that is morbid. Anyhow Nessa is divinely happy, and looks like a beautiful wise child. I only see her twice a day as Mr Bell is there the rest of the time—but I am trying to work.

Yr. AVS

Hatfield

[]

308: To Violet Dickinson

Monday [26? November 1906]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My Violet,

The Doctor says that Nessa will be able to go away today fortnight—as near as he can tell. She is to keep to the rest cure for another 5 or 6 days, and she wont really come down much before she goes. Adrian’s friend Cole has offered us his house in Wiltshire—or Berkshire—It is large and comfortable—the dr. thinks it just right—and Thoby would join us there when he could come, or go for a little to the sea first with Bell. Bell comes everyday to see him and read to him—which is really the best possible arrangement—though one door is shut! Sydney-Turner came back from Copenhagen on hearing of Thoby’s illness—giving up 2 out of his years 6 weeks holiday; really Thoby is spoilt by his friends. Kitty comes. Nelly sends him carnations. Of course he is fearfully weak after all his fever—he did have it high really till last week—but he is all right.

I dont feel as though I had any grip of a pen left—common sense does dry the intellect. The nurses get a little bored when there is nothing to do but feed up; but on the whole the menagerie behaves itself, and I stand in the center with a long whip. Really all your talk of housekeeping was a fraud; I do the bills, and the rates and the costs and it only wants 2 minutes and I spend 20 balancing a sentence. I try to hammer out an article for Leo; something fantastic about Greece, but it wont come smooth.

I had a walk on the Embankment with Katharine Furse the other day; it was like walking with a steam engine, and her mind never stops going. Still, it is a healthy kind of machine—and I suppose she has to get through her life somehow.

Also I saw Kitty; and as usual I recant a great deal that I said, though I think the main lines hold good. She seems fairly happy—well, its an odd world.

Thoby sends his love. So does Nessa—but Wallabie love is the nicest kind to get.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

309: To Violet Dickinson

[28? November 1906]

46 Gordon Sq.

My Violet,

Your husband is a very forgetful man; but in spite of that failing—O how unlike us, Miss Beale and Miss Buss—we get on very well. And is that an improper and impertinent remark? Well: now for business.

The old fraud (so we call Nessa now—yes, I know she was exhausted by years of unselfish labour on behalf of a sister)—sits hung with variegated gems, by a large vase of roses, and a fire of hot coals. She neither writes, reads, nor in any way toils or spins; but just exhales a great bounteous atmosphere—the essence of amethyst and amber. Cant you imagine it?—well, it does want imagination. Thoby doesn’t sleep very much, but otherwise he is all right, and is having whey, and chicken broth—chicken pounded to dust. Next week they talk of jelly, which makes his mouth water. He doesn’t read much, but likes to be read to, and Peter is willing. One of these days I shall have to thank him. Nelly has just been; at least I find pheasants in the hall—and she rains pheasants.

I read in the Brit. Mus. all the morning, and sermons on the death of Christina Rossetti. Do you know she was about as good as poetesses are made, since Sappho jumped. Why where and when did Sappho jump? Dont excite the patient.

At Christmas time perhaps we shall all take up our beds: while you are quiescent I wish you would write down in your mind a list of friends; not in alphabetical but in sentimental order: L. [for Lyttelton] comes first in that alphabet doesn’t it. V. is A in mine!! Now that was crabby; and little Walls can be ignorant, selfish, and arrogant little walls, if they can only spell like that.

Are you reading the Iliad? Do you remember Mycenae? How I wish I’d written something there.

I must wash, and give Adrian his dinner. He says he L. L. L. likes you! Why did he stammer so?

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

310: To Violet Dickinson

Thursday [29 November 1906]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My Violet,

Here is the morning’s post, like the morning’s milk—20 letters for Miss Dickinson. Which will she open first? The fat one, with the large hand and the hand and the coronet and the sealing wax: so my genius tells me.

Well, my Violet, did you sleep, and did you dream—and did you dream of me? You see I ask and ask, but answer there is none.

Nessa has gained another 2 lbs: the dr. says it is about time to stop—and she may get up on Sunday. She does get up every day—and puts roses behind her ear, and wears the pink opera cloak we bought at Constantinople to sit by her fire in, while she eats her pheasant and drinks her milk. Is that a sentence? no, it is a disjointed alligator.

Dear old Thoby is still on his back—but manages to be about as full of life in that position as most people are on their hind legs. He asks daily after you, and whether you have sloughed yet, and how many spots you had, and what your temp. is. Shall he come and see you, or will you come and see him first? Peter is an angel—I always forget whether I kiss him or not. Altogether, the hospital is satisfactory; and so far I have not let out my true character. You cant think what a triumph it is to be asked to buy waterproof sheeting, as though one understood; and had never written a line in ones life.

I have afternoon tea with the dr. sometimes, and he is going to send me a pamphlet on the state endowment of hospitals. I picked up some hints from Ozzy [Dickinson] about that—only unfortunately Thompson thinks the other way round—and though I was able to agree, I cant argue.

When the dr. feels your pulse next, I wish you would ask him from a friend who wishes to be nameless but is interested in the question whether he thinks your heart a good one, and if he can discover any particular tendernesses in it—and if there is one for —— But the secret would be out. Give my love discreetly all round.

Yr. loving,
Wall

Berg

[]

311: To Violet Dickinson

[30? November 1906]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My Violet,

This can only be a scrawl, as Beatrice is dining here and Sydney Turner and Peter—and Heaven knows how we’re to feed off a pheasant. I saw Kitty this morning. She tells me to dress better and I may marry—she aint sanguine. Still she is the best of women, with a heart of gold. O dear, that I should ever come to say that of her.

Nessa flourishes, and still sits by her fire. Savage came today, and says she has a splendid constitution and we need never feel any anguish about her health. He says she was quite right: and no rest cure was really necessary.

Thoby slept better. He still isn’t allowed to move, but next week the feeding stage will begin.

This is dull and dreary. But the talk of nurses is like opium to the brain—only it dont soothe.

Your AVS

Berg

[]

312: To Violet Dickinson

[1? December 1906]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My Violet,

I hear you are doing as well as possible. That is the usual phrase. So are we here—but doing as well as possible still takes time. Nessa has beaten you all—She really is renovated all through—and you should see her with a rose in her hair by her fire! Thoby has little ups and downs; last night he slept badly, indeed that has been the difficulty with him all along, only the dr. doesn’t seem to think it matters much. Otherwise he is getting on, and we begin to scent the country in the distance. I have no idea how long these diseases take. He sends his love.

Adrian has gone off to Cambridge for Sunday, so I am sitting over my solitary fire and reading Dean Swift. If you want to limit and define your own miseries, compare them with his. However I daresay you are glad to take them as they are.

I lunched with Nelly today, and we talked our literary shop. If I were Edmund Gosse, I should enjoy it better—and my puzzle is that she cant really be amused. But then you see her great melancholy eyes—and O Lord what a mercy it is to have something to talk about!

Katharine Furse is a fine woman as you know; only I dont think she is a woman at all, but a great virgin tomboy with a life time of sorrow set down in her suddenly. She doesn’t know what to make of it; it is all crude and uncomfortable. You know only very rich soft natures like Nessa’s absorb their experiences.

O how I wish I could write English. I have been reading Shelley all the evening, till George came in and thought me lonely, and asked me to go and dine with them. So I made an excuse. Did you ever read Shelley? It is about as good as most things—as walking or running or talking or writing to Violet.

Well—I must put out the lights, and take this to the post. It is a lovely night—but I hope you will sleep through it.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

313: To Violet Dickinson

Sunday [2 December 1906]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My Violet,

If only the British public would not celebrate their makers praise—or if only their maker would provide adequate voices, and Broadwood pianos. O God! how I suffer. You will tell me it is nothing to typhoid fever—but the injury to the mind is greater than the injury to the body. Read your Plato.

Well—I am so sick of writing bulletins—and I know yours is the kind of mind that is really happiest in a sick room. Ah ha—you cant call me a healthy happy Wallaby!

But I must waste this sheet of paper. Which is perhaps the most sacred of Gods handiwork. I must sully it with this kind of stuff—when really I might inscribe words of fire and flame. What is the difference between a word of fire and a word of flame?

Ask Swinburne or Ella, if she is in the room.

Nessa is so well I cant think of any sickroom details about her—except that she said she was having indigestion yesterday and so they are giving up her milk. Thompson comes to see her tomorrow for the last time. He says she is “splendid”—you will give me a prod in the ribs of course and tell me to efface myself—efface myself and efface myself—but when you see me next you will regret the loss of my nose. Some people thought it was my finest feature: others hinted that a little pumice stone applied to the tip, or as they called it ‘the point’ might be as well: only one, Miss Violet Dickinson, said “Rub it off altogether: pain on earth is ease in Heaven. The noseless enter where the nosy are denied.” Aint that the kind of thing you write and have found in red?

Now, after this respite, about Thoby. He is going on slowly but satisfactorily. Everything is healing, but he is not to eat anything solid yet, and he is not to sit up. He draws birds in bed, and Peter reads Milton to him. He cant write much, and he dont get letters. He is wonderfully good, and Simon, his lawyer, has written a charming letter returning his fee, and hoping he will come back as soon as he can. I suppose you and he are about at the same stage now, only I think he has had a much sharper attack. Still Thompson is quite satisfied.

Adrian has gone for a walk with George [Macaulay] Trevelyan today, or he would send his love; indeed he does send his love—it is a permanent article. I can take as much of it as I like. Now are you fond of me?

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

314: To Lady Robert Cecil

Sunday [2? December 1906]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

Dear Nelly,

The tea gown was a great success—she is having the blue one copied. Thank Heaven I didn’t have to choose for myself. She is coming down to dinner tonight, and when I pass her door, I hear not only perpetual voices but laughter. I ask what they [Vanessa and Clive] talk about, they say art. Do you believe it? Well, you may mix art with many things.

Please dont keep any one out of Gale on our account. I feel January is a vague term—and there are the relations in law [Clive’s parents] to visit. But as you know, or ought to know, we should like to come.

I cant help feeling though that the more I work and the less I talk the better—at least the less bad—for the world at present.

This is not a remark that calls for a compliment.

Yr. aff.
AVS

Hatfield

[]

315: To Violet Dickinson

[4? December 1906]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My Violet,

The nurse says you are not to read for more than 5 minutes which I take to be a hint as polite as the obtuse race can make them. So you must swallow news in pills: Nessa has been sitting up for about 2 hours with no ill effects.

Thoby is more hungry but healthy and rather better they say. I suppose he cant get stronger till he eats. These dreary details you will supply for yourself. They say his attack must have been worse than yours as his temp. was so high, but its a thing that leaves no ill effects—indeed it recoats your inside—so you can look forward to a double life in purity and cleanliness.

Now is 5 minutes up?

Yes Miss: and your handwriting takes double time.

Sydney Turner is talking and drinking and smoking and purring all at once.

Love from Adrian.

AVS

Berg

[]

316: To Violet Dickinson

Wednesday [5 December 1906]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My Violet,

Here’s your five minutes worth.

All is going as well as—what is the metaphor? ask Ella. Nessa gained 2 lbs. again this week. She will soon scale 10 stone as nature made her—and that without isolation—and with no excess of food. She sits up for 2 or 3 hours in the evening over her dinner, and smokes a cigarette and doubtless thinks of Peter—though we skirt that subject. Thoby goes on slowly, but there’s only one pace in typhoid they say, and you must stick to that. He likes being read to, and Peter drones on by the hour—Peacock and William Morris—and Gibbon.

We begin to flirt with our nurses, and call them ‘my woman’ and they knit pale blue ties which they promise him, if he’s good—so he takes his medicine, and chocolate instead of food. He says he’s been worse than you—and much worse than Nessa. He had drs. 3 times a day.

And now aint it time for poor little Wall to make his mew? Who thinks of him now, or licks his under fur. There are many who can grate their tongues over his outer fur; but it needs a subtle lip to find his down.

I lunched with Gerald at the Savoy today. We had—5 minutes up—all right nurse—dont tell my patient about solid food. O damn these women! I shall never fight my way through the threefold barrier: Ozzy, Mrs Lyttelton, Ella. But suppose I do, and come bleeding into your room will you cherish me, and entertain me comfortably. Aint that in the Bible? O my Violet, get well, and stay well, and think of nothing but a holy future life.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

317: To Violet Dickinson

Sat. [8 December 1906]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My Violet,

Nessa got off safely, wrapped in innumerable petticoats. I heard this morning that she is well and safe, and the country is lovely, and the house is comfortable, and Snow is placid, and they sit with their feet on the fender, and take a walk in the sun. It is the life that suits her though I should ask for the nearest pond. She is going to paint. Thompson says she has a constitution to be proud of; I always said so, in spite of sisters.

Thoby wont get away for Xmas; I shouldn’t think; but they think he will be up—We can go away afterwards. At. Minna has offered us her house [Bank, New Forest], and Nessa could come and join us there. He is going on well, and the faithful Peter comes with his book under his arm, though the house must have lost its jewel.

Well, it rains outside, and the only comfort is a book and a fire; and these you can have too I hope, besides which you may think of your hall table with its flowers and its coronets; and of your husband, and of your Kathleen—I dont know what is missing in your Heaven; except a small animal that burrows with its snout.

I have been writing at my article; but it is vile bad, and I sometimes think incessant sense, (sense is almost chronic with me now) has paralysed my genius.

Still, I can invent new puddings!

I want to write about Christina Rossetti; so if you can find out what she thought about Christianity and what effect religion had upon her poetry, and will write it on a post card you will do more for me than if you looked out a train, and bought a new hat.

So goodbye, my dear treasure; do you think anybody in the world is quite as nice as you are? Are you modest or are you vain? I think the Christian soul can make a retreat of illness.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

318: To Violet Dickinson

Monday [10 December 1906]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My Violet,

Nessa is very happy and well. So Snow writes. I get close letters, all detail that I hate. And you want more of it! Well—Thoby is going on well; he has chicken broth of a kind, and will be up by Christmas. The dr. approves of his trip with Peter, but wont say yet when that will be. I suppose early in January. He has a great many flowers and attentions, and is very good and delights his nurses. The dr. says he has a remarkable mind. Now, are the invalids disposed of? And is it right to end a sentence with a preposition?

We will turn to more interesting subjects—as, Walter Headlam and my manuscripts. Now Violet raises herself in bed, and calls to the nurse to draw the blind a little higher, and bids them tell Mrs Crum not to come in yet awhile.

I am to send him all my unpublished works; and he will write me a sober criticism. Doesn’t that do you good, and make you believe that life holds possibilities? Further, he wishes to dedicate his translation of the Agamennon to me, instead of to Swinburne; in gratitude for 3 pages of the finest criticism known to him which I wrote and despatched 4 years ago! How many of my letters will thus rise up and bear fruit? I may be incubating heaven knows what glories.

Then I saw Fred Maitland, whom I love. He gets more meaning into 10 words than I do into 100 and than Snow does into a 1000—we will not go on with the calculation which might be painful. Anyhow, he brought me a packet of letters from distinguished people about the book, and 2 of them say that my part of it was ‘beautifully done’. I cant keep off the Sacred Subject; my nose will have to be tapped when you come out. May I make your Mellins for you in future? He (this is F.M.) is really satisfied, I think, and goes out happy to Teneriffe.

Are you in what state of body or mind? My plan is to treat you as detached spirit; maybe your body has typhoid; that is immaterial (you will be glad to hear) I address the immortal part, and shoot words of fire into the upper aer [sic] which spirits inhabit. They pierce you like lightning, and quicken your soul; whereas, if I said How have you slept, and what food are you taking, you would sink into your nerves and arteries and your gross pads of flesh, and perhaps your flame might snuff and die there. Who knows?

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

319: To Violet Dickinson

Wednesday [12 December 1906]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My Violet,

For a woman who writes tracts you are singularly untractable. I swear that joke swelled on my pen, like a drop of perspiration—or did I mean inspiration?

O why do you dwell upon the material point of view—what are chills, what are hot water bottles, when the Xtian faith is celebrating (beneath my window) its 1906th anniversary?

Well; Thoby is going strong—at least the dr. is satisfied, and the nurses are pleased: he begins to curse a good deal, and points out the virtues of a mutton chop. Are you allowed solids yet, he wants to know. The dr. promises to get him up by Christmas. He means to go first to Bournemouth and then to Wiltshire when he is quite cured to hunt with Peter. Snow sends me an occasional line; but she has a Harrogate sense of humour. However, I gather that Nessa is extremely well, and very happy; they walk every afternoon. I dont hear from Nessa. The address is:

West Woodhay House
Newbury
Berks.

So now we may listen to our carols again. What a strange religion—and to think that you and Christina Rossetti and the boarding houses of Bloomsbury all worship at the same shrine. Now supposing I went and danced chaste Bacchic dances beneath the plane trees, and chanted the odes of Sappho, the next policeman would put me in an ambulance. Do come out from your sickroom a Buddhist.

I dined with George and Margaret last night, and we had some very exquisite conversation; I do like refined home life—connubial maternal and civic affections all sound and serious. If Plato were alive I should take him to Charles Street; Margaret would entertain him, as George says. Really she is a good woman; in 10 years I shall love her. I look at the germ sometimes, and it is a healthy growth, but some what stunted.

I am so sorry about your husband. Nor do I know what degree of affection one may offer through the post.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

320: To Violet Dickinson

[13? December 1906]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My Violet,

I hope your husband is all right. I check your stage by Thobys; he is very cheerful today, and saw Peter. Nelly sent him some flowers; and next week visitors are to be admitted.

Snow sends her daily report; it is always excellent, and rather soporific. They find each other’s company satisfactory at all points: I do think that is like a taste for oysters—or shall we say clams? But it comes in useful now. It is plain to me that I am a very inefficient sister; but I also perceive that I can housekeep. You should hear my morning dialogues—what invention and resource, skill and courage I show! Books too high!! What is this price of veal cutlets a lb? Where is the second leg of yesterday’s chicken? O my eye—why should it be confined to the drawing room, or style to the study?

I am going to see Kitty tomorrow, a curious woman with a soul the colour of an opal. Now I like wrapping up profound little sentences like that for you to unroll as you lie and look at your counterpane. I—well, what about I? too much about I. Dont I remember the crossing from Ostende, and the yellow lover, and the tame gold finch, and the voice that went on, like the voice of judgment, solemn and insatiable at my ear—while the sea blew grey?

So now about V: well, V. does equally for I and for Vanessa—but I am surfeited with Vanessa; and therefore I will talk about Violet. Is she a good happy resigned woman? Christina Rossetti positively liked being ill she said; it reminded her of her narrow bed, and of the chance of hell fire, and the probability of eternal torment. And to a Christian this is about the most cheerful thought in the world. I think that is enough about the next world. You see I did try and be unselfish.

I think it must be bad for your moral soul to inhale quite so much incense as the morning post offers up punctually at your bedside; “Darlings” from Kathleen “Beloveds” from Ella—and all kinds of significant silent things (I got that in a novel) from Haldanes and Horners.

You will gather there is no news.

I wish we could put our pens in the fire, and take to the material embrace.

Yr. AVS

My MSS went to Headlam today.

Berg

[]

321: To Violet Dickinson

[14? December 1906]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My Violet,

Well, my good woman; as sure as the sun rises, here am I. Wonderful is the force of pen and ink. I like finding a pencil twitter on my plate at breakfast—old Mum Wallabys feeble voice, querulous with love (and chiding) for her offspring. I do hope the other orphan convalesces too; there are rumours floating down Piccadilly, and out of the Club windows, that Miss Dickinson eat a fish, and one has it that it was a sole, and another says plaice.

Thoby is going on too, and will have some minced chicken tomorrow; anything solid to bite he says. They give him chocolate mean while. Snow didn’t write today; because, I suppose, I leave her letters mostly unanswered. The kind of reflection you get of Nessa through Snow through the post, is watery and virtuous but somewhat vaccuous (does that mean cowlike?) They eat and sleep, and do little sketches, and I daresay talk more about Peter than about art.

My sweet nose is held to the grindstone of real life; (you will be glad to hear) I had a visit from Thena Clough today and Mrs Prothero. Thena is like a plump brown thrush, as she certainly sings a wise song. I liked her—though why I take it for granted that I know her, I cannot say. She seems to be included somehow in my knowledge of human nature; not precisely specified.

Well, I saw Kitty too; and you malign her. She is ever human, and capable of understanding that I differ, and yet live, and am perhaps human and perfectable. She will never believe that I write; but you are one of the few people who will believe it.

Gerald has gone off to Egypt, for a month. He wants to feel warm, and the Club fire wont do. Really, I love Gerald: he has been very sympathetic and useful all this time.

Now, my Violet; take your medicine and think of me.

Shall we ever meet again?

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

322: To Violet Dickinson

[15? December 1906]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My Violet,

If there is one book that I want more than another—no, its not the Bible—it is the Poems of John Keats, in a brand new edition complete in one vol. published by the Clarendon Press at Oxford. Give me that and I shall dream all day beneath leafless trees.

Do you think that intelligent nurse could carry out this prescription, and see that the book is brown, with a white label—not unlike a fine posset?

Adrian says what may I send Violet as a token of my affection?

Your Love, sez I.

But she has that already, sez he.

“I would rather be near Violet than anyone else in London” is another literal quotation.

I felt peace drop upon my soul this afternoon, and my temper is excellent this evening. You know, there is nothing like friendship in this world!

Do sleep and dream sweetly.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

323: To Violet Dickinson

Sunday [16 December 1906]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My Violet,

I am sorry about your husband, but I dont see that I can do anything, as the Aunts all say. You know my beautifully spiritual theory, that friendship is entirely a thing of the mind, and a thought is worth perhaps twenty dozen deeds. A profound truth is hid beneath that seemingly smooth surface. Break it, and dive beneath.

Thoby has a Buffon already, but, acting again on my system, he thanks you as much, no more, for the thought than the deed. He is really getting on well, and we talk of getting up, and going away, and the future. Old Nessa, hybernating like a sleepy bear sends inarticulate messages through the literal Snow: Nessa sends her best love, and says it’s fine day. What is to be done with a mind like that I ask you? If I had it I should first try the power of affliction, then of religion, then of education; I should wreak it and furnish it and stamp it and pinch it till it bore some resemblance to human nature. However she says that Nessa “Looks extraordinarily well already.” I copy words because you wont believe mine.

I have been having a debauch of music and hearing certain notes to which I could be wed—pure simple notes—smooth from all passion and frailty, and flawless as gems. That means so much to me, and so little to you! Now do you know that sound has shape and colour and texture as well?

A London Sunday affords no topics for letters, unless it be the singular and by no means edifying topic of the Christian religion. A church bell—they ring them for 2 hours daily—says something to me hardly to be translated: there again it is sound that wraps up the meaning and colours it and translates it and keeps it mystic and unexpressed meanwhile. Should you think there was any sense in that? A letter should be flawless as a gem, continuous as an eggshell, and lucid as glass. I give you that for your next tract. I am going to be Librarian at Morley. Miss Sheep[shanks] says that she thinks my gift is rather influence than direct intellectual teaching.

Do get well, beloved Violet.

AVS

Berg

[]

324: To Violet Dickinson

[17 December 1906]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My Violet,

This must be an inarticulate scrawl, like the twitter of some frozen sparrow in the graveyard behind your house.

[Dr] Thompson suddenly proposes to move Thoby at the end of the week—Friday or Saturday—to the New Forest. He sat up out of bed today, and the great thing is to get away as soon as possible. It seems rather marvellous, as this is the first time he has been up—but it will be a mercy if we can do it.

Aunt Minna will let us have her house, and if all goes well and Adrian and I, Thoby and a nurse move there on Friday I expect to avoid the crowd.

He is decidedly better, and gains every day something.

Very good news of Nessa through the usual illiterate medium.

I wish you could get away at the same time and Ozzy too.

I hope he is better.

Yr. in haste but in love,
AVS

Berg

[]

325: To Madge Vaughan

Monday [17 December 1906]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My dearest Madge,

I know I ought to have written, but took it that you would understand.

Your plans are not to be realised; Nessa and Clive are to live in a separate house, probably in Bloomsbury. Adrian and I must turn out and find a smaller one, perhaps up here too. I think it would be a real mistake to live together; I think the same square or the same street would be dangerous—ten minutes walk is what we propose.

This does not mean that I expect to quarrel; I like him very much—and you know what Nessa is—but the only chance for us is to start fresh again—They must have their life, if we are to get any good from it—and I mean to—and we must have ours, if we are to profit.

But leaving theories—I hate them—Nessa is wonderfully well, and went off last Thursday with Clive to stay with his family in Wiltshire. They are good country people, and certainly very kind and considerate of her. She sounds as happy—well—as happy as she can be; and that, as I always suspected, is a large order. When you ask me what I think of her engagement you ask more than I can say, because I dont think very much yet. I know I like him, and I like him most when I see him with her. He is very honest, and unselfish and scrupulous; he is clever, and cultivated—more taste, I think, than genius; but he has a gift for making other people shine, and he is very affectionate. You must make a character out of these hints—I write in the middle of a tea party—They are a most reasonable pair of lovers, and tell me that they discuss art as much when they are alone as when they are with us; but there is a good deal else. They are devoted.

Vanessa’s illness was not really serious, and the dr. is surprised and delighted at the way she picked up. She will be away with Clive till the beginning of January: and they mean to marry later in February. Adrian and I go to the New Forest for Xmas week—then stay with the Bells for 2 or 3 days, and then back here. I hope we may see you sometime. It was a most happy chance that you asked Thoby for a photograph: he was taken by Beresford [facing p. 201] the week he left England. I will send you one when they come; they are good—but not very much when you think of him. There is nothing I can say about that that you dont know. Adrian is well and so am I, and we must ‘make the best of things’ as father would have said. I stayed with Katherine [Furse] yesterday; she is a wholesome person to see; I begin to realise what her loneliness must be. Love to the children.

Yr. loving AVS

I got some flame coloured stuff in Constantinople which reminded me of you. I will send it off, in case you like to have it. It will cover a chair anyhow!

Sussex

[]

326: To Violet Dickinson

[18 December 1906]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

Beloved Violet,

Do you hate me for telling so many lies? You know we had to do it. You must think that Nessa is radiantly happy and Thoby was splendid to the end.

These great things are not terrible, and I know we can still make a good job of it—and we want you more and more. I never knew till this happened how I should turn to you and want you with me when no one else could help.

This is quite true, my beloved Violet, and I must write it down for once. I think of you as one of the people—Adrian is the other—who make it worth while to live and be happy. You are part of all that is best, and happiest in our lives. Thoby was always asking me about you. I know you loved him, and he loved you.

The only thing I feel I could not bear would be to think that this news should make you worse. It would not be right. I can feel happy about him; he was so brave and strong, and his life was perfect.

Now we must be more to each other than ever; and there will be all Nessa’s life to look forward to. She is wonderfully well.

“I think on the whole I get happier every day—though it’s difficult to think that I can ever be much happier than I have often been at moments during the last few weeks.” That is what she writes today.

Beloved, get well and come back to your Wall who loves you.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

Letters 327-388

327: To Violet Dickinson

Tuesday [18 December 1906]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

Beloved Violet,

Here is a line to wish you good night—whereas it will wish you good morning. And you must imagine the most compassionable and soft of Baby Walls just climbing on to your bed—one claw catches in the quilt and nurse raps his behind. If I were given to prayer I should pray that you might have slept well, and woken peacefully. I know all good people think very much the same about dying and being born; and there is nothing dreadful is there?—in what comes so naturally.

But I dont need to preach—you know it all better than I do. I shall come to you very soon for—well, not for consolation, but for all the things that make life worth having.

And if that is not what one would choose to have written on one’s tombstone I can think of nothing else.

Nessa became engaged 2 days after Thoby died; but she was really engaged I think the moment she saw Clive, (as I call him!) She could never let him go back. So she went through those days in a kind of dream. I feel perfectly happy about her. When you see them together you realise that he does understand every side, and all that is best in her. I never saw anything so beautiful as she was. He is very considerate and unselfish, and he is really interesting and clever besides.

You know what she has in her, and all that seems now called out; she is a splendid creature, and makes me hope all kinds of things.

She will write and tell you all this herself. It seems so natural and right that she should marry Clive that I can really imagine nothing else—or wish for anyone but him.

Adrian and I go down to the Forest on Friday.

I will write. I will do anything as you know that would help you—but I am a very incompetent person, specially at boiling milk.

Good night: beloved creature.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

328: To Clive Bell

Thursday [20 December 1906]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My dear Clive,

I can quite believe that you are very happy with Vanessa—but as she also seems to be very happy with you, I dont see that my sisterly solicitude has any right to complain. My friends take very good care that I shant be lonely. I never knew that Lady Pollock came under that head till this afternoon. Jack is so fond of you, and she believes you have a very pretty sister, and she supposes we shall get a house in this neighbourhood to be near the British Museum.

I wish you would write a description of yourself—your features your gifts your prospects your parents—that I might know exactly who you are and what you are and above all whether you are worthy of Vanessa. The general opinion seems to be that no one can be worthy of her; but as you are unknown this is no reflection upon you. Only it will show you the kind of reputation she has; perhaps you know it already. I begin to wish she were a little more various—but I do homage all day long prostrate and acquiescent, before her shrine. And I suppose incense rises in the fields of Wiltshire also; the last worshipper was Pippa Strachey who lunched with me today. She has an immense admiration—you can put the accents on ——— for Vanessa—and thinks no man good enough. This letter can be divided into equal parts if necessary; but I have an instinct that one word does for the two of you.

I am writing to your mother to suggest that Adrian and I should come on the Monday after Christmas—I suppose it has a date.

I gather from Vanessa’s letter—she doesn’t say so in so many words—that I shall be treated to some of the purest commonsense—the commonsense of lovers that is perched on the peak of the world—if I dont appreciate your family. Really I dont see the terrible gulf that divides one from the Bell family and the human race.

Here is a house agents list: the Queen Square house is all panels and old oak.

Please add a word to Nessa’s letters now and then to say that she is well in your eyes besides her own. I can read for myself that she is happy.

Your aff.
AVS

Quentin Bell

[]

329: To Violet Dickinson

Saturday [22 December 1906]

Lane End, Bank, Lyndhurst [Hampshire]

My Violet,

Your parcels come dropping in by every post. I really have very little morality about giving and receiving; only I doubt that you should be so excessively blessed. Adrian has been turning over the question of the cheque all day; finally I made him promise to use so much as will provide a horse for 5 days. There never was a happier present; he had only funds for one hunt—and there is nothing he cares for more. And it will keep him out all day, and make him think of other things—poor little boy. So you see, as usual you simplified and adorned our lifes; lying on your sick bed, and groaning I daresay—At least that improves the picture.

Now for a list of my presents; there was the Keats which I cut solemnly and savouringly (as Mrs H. Ward has it) with the carving knife after tea; there was the paper and there were the skins. So, if there was only a little pen and ink thrown in, we should have our great book complete! It is odd what funny unorthodox tastes we share together—for handmade paper, and strange tawny skins. Further, my benefactress, there was your letter, which should rightly head the list of your charities. Really it was a pious searching letter such as Mother Abbesses might write to their nuns, in spiritual crises. For while it poured balm, it also pointed a higher way, and that is the kind of encouragement I value. You inspired a very affectionate letter to the old happy gipsy—and you so smoothed all the edges of my torn feelings that I have thought of her easily and without bitterness. I think I had felt rather harshly; and perhaps I had said something too sharp to be pleasant, though it was true. Now you have made 2 people—3 people counting Adrian—happy today; because I know very well that my feelings still have power to affect Nessa, whatever I may say. And I have the natural feeling now that any happiness is so rare that it must be treated tenderly at all costs. I think that is why she is so completely happy; it is a kind of economy, because it mayn’t last. But, with my usual confidence, I am pretty sure that it will last, to her dying day.

It is as beautiful as it can be here, clear and sharp and all the trees are full of colour and line. We have been walking in the forest and meeting deer. How I wish you could be out, knocking about in the bogs and tearing through holly bushes! I feel a sort of animal desire to breathe and move and do nothing that needs intelligence.

But I have a good many books, and I do vaguely wish to work too. Indeed I have read rather a lot, sitting over the fire with Adrian. Only I think less than is conceivable, and hear words droning through my mind without troubling to attend.

Adrian and I talk a great deal of our future; and it really begins to look quite vigorous and healthy. He drew plans of phantom dinner parties that are to be given in the new house in March: and a certain V. D. comes at the corner, in the middle, sometimes she even carries the joint, to make the sexes equal!

How are you I wonder?

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

330: To Violet Dickinson

Sunday [23 December 1906]

Lane End [Bank, Lyndhurst, Hampshire]

My Violet,

Your letter gave me the first news of Freds [Maitland] death. Then Adrian went and read it in a paper. O dear—the earth seems swept very bare—and the amount of pain that accumulates for some one to feel grows every day. I dont know that he would have minded dying, he was already so refined away that the body seems to be a small part of him. But he was very human and loveable—and everything to her and the children. I hate to think that they should begin to suffer. I was thinking that I should see him often, and perhaps he would come and dine with us—and anyhow he would be there always.

He was one of the few, the very very few, who wrote me something about Thoby which seemed true and inspiring. He was a real genius; father always said so. He made everybody else seem clumsy and verbose. But these things are only the odd thoughts that come through my mind. I do admire so few people—none I think as I admired him—and somehow the loss is very great.

There is nothing to tell you today—but that we walked in the forest. It was a beautiful day, and quite sunny. Then I have just finished a Life of York Powell—and I heard from Nessa that she is still happy, and means to be married in a mauve dress with a red rose; and they are discussing what hat Clive shall wear.

Now I must write to Kitty. Adrian is brewing whisky toddy over the fire, and shouting out stories of father when he was an undergraduate. It is a blessing we have that book. I think Fred knew that.

This is a d——d dull letter. I hope you will eat Turkey for your dinner, and drink a glass of champagne.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

331: To Violet Dickinson

[25 December 1906]

[Lane End] Bank, Lyndhurst [Hampshire]

My Violet,

It has been quite an absurd Christmas day—think—I was woken by sunlight dancing on my nose, and cursed, and woke and saw the whole pane blue, and then the whole field white, and little birds and modest cottages, and blue smoke, and peaceful trees: I should have saluted the happy morn had I been a Christian. As it was I went and knocked up Adrian and we came down to our letters and parcels. Then in the intervals of eating turkey we have tramped in the forest, which is as a painted wood, all clear sharp tints, and delicate lines, and crisp white spaces. If Clive were here to sum up the scene, as is his way, he would call it ‘obvious’ I suppose; it is convenient to have a mouthpiece for one’s own cynicism anyhow.

We lost ourselves thoroughly, or rather, for Adrian will never admit that he can lose himself, the road took us wrong, and we had a very long walk, till it was dusk. And then we sat and read. I am reading now a book by Renan called his Memories of Childhood [Cahiers de Jeunesse, 1906]: O my word it is beautiful—like the chime of silver bells; and when his old peasant mother writes it is the same thing, so that I think it a virtue in the French language that it submits to prose, whereas English curls and knots and breaks off in short spasms of rage. Also I am reading my dear Christina Rossetti with her kind voice and her prominent eyes, and her acquiescent piety: but all the same she sings like a robin and sometimes like a nightingale—the first of our English poetesses. She doesn’t think, I imagine; but just throws up her head and sends forth her song, and never listens, but makes another. O you Christians have much to answer for! She died surrounded by all the horrors of the Church, poor woman. Then I am reading your Keats, with the pleasure of one handling great luminous stones. I rise and shout in ecstasy, and my eyes brim with such pleasure that I must drop the book and gaze from the window. It is a beautiful edition.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

332: To Violet Dickinson

[28? December 1906]

[Lane End, Bank, Lyndhurst, Hampshire]

My Violet,

I am glad you have been up. It is freezing cold here so that Adrian couldn’t hunt and we went for a walk instead. Yesterday I lost myself, and got home so sleepy that I couldn’t write—but, my word, trees are better than people. I have a long letter from Clive, pompous and polished as usual, but not amusing. He is a careful youth, and realises his own luck which is something. He says his family is “tiresome”—to which I always feel inclined to say a family is always as good as you deserve. Nobody is ever too good for their own flesh and blood. But he takes pains to show that he sees their limitations.

Why on earth does Nelly say I have a ’steady head!? and what do you know about the way I have come through these months? I wonder. I am amused by the indiscriminate praise I get; however Walter Headlam will tell me the truth.

I think housekeeping is what I do best, and I mean to run our house on very remarkable lines. Does housekeeping interest you at all? I think it really ought to be just as good as writing, and I never see—as I argued the other day with Nessa—where the separation between the two comes in. At least if you must put books on one side and life on t’ other, each is a poor and bloodless thing. But my theory is that they mix indistinguishably.

I had a letter from Katharine Furse asking me to go and stay with her, but I shant, though I think she is a good person to be with. She has a real thread of courage running through her, which is better than genius, and better than virtue; indeed I put it first of all qualities. She makes herself go on, and never says a word about it, though every day is hard work, like some one cutting steps in the ice. Kitty [Maxse] also writes, and [Janet] Case and Jack [Hills] and various relations. I suppose you are swamped too.

I have 5 volumes of poetry to review for the Guardian—and one takes for hero the Almighty, and Jesus Christ, and the villain is Satan. How I am to discuss the character drawing without losing my place I dont know.

No letter from Nessa today.

I met an old man on the village green yesterday, lame and frost bitten and ruddy and white haired who told me he had had goose for dinner and “really thought he was the happiest old man in the world” He looked so convinced of it and so stealthy as though happiness was not altogether respectable that I told him he was a credit to the race and upon wh. he shambled off to the public house, and I nearly followed.

Get well; read, and flourish.

We go on Monday.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

333: To Violet Dickinson

[30? December 1906]

[Lane End, Bank, Lyndhurst, Hampshire]

My Violet,

There is but little news, and my mind misgives me that I wrote you a very acid letter the other day—but I had a d———d pain in my head which made me snarl. However it is quite gone, you will be glad to hear—poor Violet, you have enough pains of your own to think about, and I am as sweet as usual.

I shall want all my sweetness to gild Nessa’s happiness. It does seem strange and intolerable sometimes. When I think of father and Thoby and then see that funny little creature twitching his pink skin and jerking out his little spasm of laughter I wonder what odd freak there is in Nessa’s eyesight. But I dont say this, and I wont say it, except to you. Tell me if it bores you; I dont want to make things worse for you, and I know my letters aren’t soothing.

It is so cold that we can hardly leave the fire. Adrian comes down in his gaiters every morning and prods the earth with his stick; and it rings like iron, and then there is no hunt. So we walk in the afternoon, along drives that are frozen into ridges, and laid with ice. It is very lovely and silent; we meet no one, but a deer now and then. Then the sunsets and all the trees look as though their tips had been dyed red, and they are combed out against the sky, and we wonder whether nature is not a little gaudy sometimes. The forest always disappoints me—it is too orderly and picturesque.

I have been reading Keats most of the day. I think he is about the greatest of all—and no d——d humanity. I like cool Greek Gods, and amber skies, and shadow like running water, and all his great palpable words—symbols for immaterial things. O isn’t this nonsense? Adrian plays patience at my side. I have done my 5 reviews also, and my mind feels as though a torrent of weak tea had been poured over it. I do think all good and evil comes from words. I have to tune myself into a good temper with something musical, and I run to a book as a child to its mother. Dont you think the flesh is a cumbersome illustration, and the text is all written or spoken in half a dozen words? I am so stupid I cant follow out what I meant to say.

Get well do; however Ozzy is the best argument for that, and Kathleen, and Ella. Where do I stand in the hierarchy? Anyhow, you are a game old thing and that is what I like about you. Write—or dont if it tires you.

AVS

Berg

[]

334: To Violet Dickinson

[31 December 1906]

Lane End [Bank, Lyndhurst, Hampshire]

My Violet,

This is only a line as I have to write various dull letters before going.

Nessa sounds happier and happier but wants to see us. I have long letters fr. Kitty and George.

The world is full of kindness and stupidity, I wish everyone didn’t tell me to marry. Is it crude human nature breaking out? I call it disgusting. It is thawing now, and the snow is all dirty. I shall be glad to go, and I only wish I was coming back to London and cd. sit with you in the fire light.

I wish I knew how you are. Sleep is the very devil, and drugs are worst of all. I read your Keats all day. O divine!

I will write again.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

335: To Violet Dickinson

Wednesday [2 January 1907]

Cleeve House, Melksham, Wilts.

My Violet,

The thickness of this nib and the luxury of this paper will show you that I am in a rich and illiterate house, set in its own grounds, gothic, barbaric. I dip my pen into the hoof of an old hunter.

But to business. We came here late on Monday, and were greeted by Vanessa and Clive, standing like husband and wife before a great log fire. It was a symbolic attitude. Vanessa—you see how pompous I am—certainly looks well. I thought her thinner, but her weight has gone up slightly. I wont talk of her health, because I am always prejudiced, and you know it. Besides it is a subject upon wh. I cannot speak without a quickened pulse. It was strange and rather strained, but by no means alarming. A little rabbit faced woman, craning forward and attenuated, with wisps of white hair, delicate creases in her face, and eager abstract blue eyes: that is Mrs Bell; then Mr Bell is light and simple—not as solid as I expected—a very cheerful cordial and obvious country gentleman who has probably not been at college. The daughters are so exactly what one would have guessed; it is absurd to write it out. They play hockey and beagle, and laugh at Adrians jokes, and come down to dinner in pale blue satin with satin bows in their hair.

Neither of us had a moments shyness, indeed I made soliloquies, vague and rather fantastic, and Mrs Bell looks as though she thought us a parcel of clever children, who have yet to learn the meaning of things.

Yesterday I rather lost my temper and went out to trample it into the mud. But since that I have been very nice and sweet tempered, and I feel calm and domestic. Clive certainly is an interesting person, and I really feel happier, and get some glimpse of what Nessa means by marrying him. She is as happy as anyone can be; and more like herself than she was. She seems to have taken her bearings, and to see her life ahead of her in her own clear and reasonable way.

I dont think marriage will make any difference, because the best of us survives though it is d——d painful to cut away the inferior parts. They talk of 7th Feb. and will be away almost 3 months. Also they take on Gordon Sq: so we are free to choose our house at once.

Are you well today—how is Ozzy [Dickinson]? I could write a good deal about you but I daresay you would be bored. We sleep Thursday night in London and go on to Booths Friday morning—A[drian] hunting.

AVS

Berg

[]

336: To Violet Dickinson

Thursday [3 January 1907]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My Violet,

Here we are for the night, passing through. We spent the day at Bath—a Meredithian expedition—so far as Nessa and Clive were concerned. They swung along the streets arm in arm; she had a gauze streamer, red as blood flying over her shoulder, a purple scarf, a shooting cap, tweed skirt and great brown boots. Then her hair swept across her forehead, and she was tawny and jubilant and lusty as a young God. I never saw her look better. Indeed our two days were more of a treat than I expected; I am not unselfish, as you know; but selfishly I do enjoy life and beauty and audacity, and all that freedom and generosity which seem to bathe her like her own proper atmosphere. And Clive as I think I said, is perfectly fit to receive all this; I think he has a very sweet and sincere nature, and capable brains and great artistic sensibility of every kind. What you miss is inspiration of any kind, but then old Nessa is no genius, though she has all the human gifts; and genius is an accident. They are the most honest couple I ever saw; a little more imagination and they would be less scrupulous—but on the whole, I doubt that man and woman are made much better in the world. I did not see Nessa alone, but I realise that that is all over, and I shall never see her alone any more; and Clive is a new part of her, which I must learn to accept.

Still—O this is a selfish letter—I can make a living out of what is left; and it is the purest of all earthly affections; so even you must admit I think.

If either you or Kitty ever speak of my marriage again I shall write you such a lecture upon the carnal sins as will make you fall into each others arms; but you shall never come near me any more. Ever since Thoby died women have hinted at this, till I could almost turn against my own sex! But this will make no impression upon either of you.

Tomorrow I spend at the dentist till we go to the [Charles] Booths: they are jovial and domestic and rather beautiful as far as they go--a sort of harmony of affection which is pleasant at a distance.

I am so confused and egoistical tonight that I cant write a sympathetic letter; but you always have Ozzy as I reflect with some satisfaction. Do get well and enjoy your life. So few people have as much cause for happiness as you have. Beloved Violet—you have a pure fount of sweet water in you—miraculous to me.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

337: To Violet Dickinson

Saturday [5 January 1907]

[Gracedieu Manor, Whitwick, Leicestershire]

My Violet,

Here I am again in a luxurious country house , with butler and footman, and the whole place flowing with cheerful domestic life, and kindness and sweetness—but I dont feel myself a part of it. Still, it is really worth seeing, because they are none of them extraordinary and yet set in motion like this the whole effect is harmonious like a comfortable family picture by a Dutch painter (shall we say?) I feel devilish stupid, and only half in my right senses. I cant talk good sense for long, and I had to sit by a great fire and discuss the state of the church in France.

Adrian has gone off shooting, and I spent the morning decorating a Christmas tree, hanging long chains of silver balls across it and funny little candles to all the twigs. This reminded me of my own youth. Then we sprinkled the whole thing with stuff like fishes scales, and wrapped the pot in scarlet cloth.

Then I stuck a lump of toffee and an orange into a green muslin bag. Then I was shown the kitchen and the family dinner. O dear how odd and simple all this is—and I suppose it is as good a way of spending ones life as another. It is very melodious, as I say to Nessa and Clive when I want to be laughed at.

It is a large family, and they marry, and produce children, and come and settle near, and you feel that the prolific power of the race is boundless. Moreover they mix with great smoothness and sweetness, and circle round Mr and Mrs Booth like so many humming tops. Mrs Booth is charming; she sits upright and talks admirable sense in a clear high voice—takes broad views of the church in France, quotes [Jacques-Bénigne] Bossuet, discusses politics, and meanwhile sympathises and advises with each daughter and son and baby, and keeps them all depended from her middle finger.

Now I must go and light my candles, which I have perched in a way of my own; I have also to show them how you fasten a sponge to a stick. I shall be given a yellow bag of toffee when it is all over, and we end with snap dragons.

I am so sorry (O read it how you like!) that Ozzie is so bad. It is damnable for you. I suppose you will wait to go away till he is better. I am glad that you can hop round the room; only do take care. You are an impetuous woman. Another very happy and charitable letter from Nessa. I think our visit really was a success.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

338: To Lady Robert Cecil

Monday [January 1907]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My dear Nelly,

The worst of waiting to write to you is that meanwhile the benefits accumulate—pheasants and furs—I daresay flowers and fruits—And it is only by scrutiny that I charge you with half your sins: “We think it was Lady Robert” or Kitty mumbles something about Nelly, and jumps into her cab, and leaves a great box in the hall.

Now the pheasants are long since gone, and I think they were specially nice pheasants, and I gave my solitary wing some special attention—considering it as a piece of tender meat, critically. Why is there nothing written about food—only so much thought? I think a new school might arise, with new adjectives and new epithets, and a strange beautiful sensation, all new to print. How generous I am! I might have kept this all to myself. But the fur is another matter. It is a very subtle and serious matter, wrapped round the most secret fibres of our consciousness; you dont know what a lot might be said and felt and thought—what reams, therefore might be written—about such a gift; and here am I going to squeeze all this in to the usual Thank you. I think I ought to be hurt, and then angry, and then apologetic, and then generous, and then sentimental and then philosophical, and then merely friendly. Whereas I am none of these things; only I think I am grateful—because, if I have none of the finer feelings, I am yet fitted with a marvellous simplicity of nature so that to buy a fur is impossible to me, but to accept a fur is quite easy and pleasant. O well—this is the way we writers write—when we wish not to say something. As you are a novelist yourself you need no further explanation.

I think you ought to write novels: you can write letters which is far harder. I never say what I mean to say; because I seem to have told you that I didn’t want to come to Gale. What I meant I think was that there are times when my company seems an infliction to myself, and therefore a curse to others; but whereas I can drug it (that is me) in a book, or an ink pot, you would have the creature crude and naked, and therefore it would be best to keep within reach of drugs for the present. And it is also true as you say, that I have to talk a great many words, from a very shallow mind at present; Is this about enough about myself? I have 10—no 12 letters to write in an hours time; and I mustn’t stay chattering here all day.

Nessa drives morning and afternoon in a carriage and pair with her husband (what is the word?) and finds her family [the Bells] honest and kind: now you can make a picture of all that, from the topmost twig to the profoundest root.

Yr. AVS

Hatfield

[]

339: To Violet Dickinson

[6 February 1907]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My Violet,

This is written in the midst of our last night. We have all been to Fidelio.

These days seem very turbulent but tomorrow it will be all over. Really marriage makes very little difference—Tho’ I hate her going away. But I really have been quite good tempered. I say not at home to everyone. Margaret Lyttelton is coming one day, and Katharine Furse.

I hope you really are well and comfortable, and dwelling upon a cheerful future. Your present is lovely. Settlements signed and done.

I will write again.

AVS

Berg

[]

340: To Violet Dickinson

[8 February 1907]

Postcard

[46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury]

Wedding successful,—very quick and simple. But Nessa and I got lost going in the Pentonville Rd. and the motor took a short cut so that they missed their train—and had to wait till 12.40. Nessa sent in a line, much amused.

AVS

Berg

[]

341: To Violet Dickinson

[February 1907]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My Violet,

I know I have behaved very lazily and selfishly, and not cheerfully as Ozzy would have me.

I feel numb and dumb, and unable to lay hands on any words. It is quite calm and pleasant today, and I feel elderly and prosaic, and much as though I were 50.

Nessa hasn’t written yet, but I suppose they arrived. George and his motor were bound to upset everything. There is no news I think; I saw some houses this afternoon, and I think we shall get one at our leisure. There are so many, and people are so anxious to let.

How are you—and what do you do I wonder?

Dont write letters about me or my feelings; but about yourself.

Adrian is perfectly charming, and I do want to make a cheerful place for him. It is terrible that he should have no brother.

But we go along—and I wrote this morning—rather well I think.

Margaret L[yttelton] comes tomorrow. I like her, but it is like making Pyramids when you talk to her.

Take care.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

342: To Violet Dickinson

Tuesday [February 1907]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My Violet,

You do make me feel penitent. When I hear of your worries and wishes—I dont know if a pen is as fatal to you as it is to me—I feel positively fraudulent—like one who gets sympathy on false pretences. Remember my dear delightful exquisite and eccentric—how shall we end it?—perhaps Giraffe, that I hate writing letters. I would rather send telegrams, save that my style is too expensive.

But I am perfectly well: aren’t I the healthiest woman in London? I do regret that I expressed myself so forcibly that day: it was only a passing melancholy. I dont think I can do very good work just yet, but I take infinite delight in exploring my own mind. I am going to write something serious, needing work; and I am stumbling through Lucretius. I hope also, but this I must whisper, that I have found a house, in Fitzroy Square. Bernard Shaw and his mother lived there for many years. There are the usual intricacies; but Adrian is rather eager—and I dont think we shall do much better. Still this is only a phantom so far.

Then every morning I come down to a great sheet signed Vanessa Bell. “Put in as many superlatives as you like in your account of me. You cant say too much. You cant think how delicious it is here. It’s simply divine, warm and sunny. We lead the most healthy existence—early to bed and late to rise, a walk on the beach in the morning—and by the fissures in the afternoon. Clive thinks me looking remarkably well, he says. O I am d——d d——d happy. I am doing a sketch of my husband reading. I find it most exciting beginning again.”

So you can read many chapters there. It really does make me less cynical to read her letters.

I had 6 invitations yesterday: one from Ly. Young , to stay with her ‘for weeks’ as a great kindness. I have had this proof sent: I wrote it in the summer: it is only a dutiful exercise. Margaret L. and I kissed on the doorstep. I think she is a very nice woman. I like kissing people: handshakes are abhorrent. Now I will write: but for Gods sake dont think of me. Do SLEEP.

Yr. AVS

I spent Sunday motoring with Katharine Furse. Who is much like a Greek statue draped.

The old Times sends me a novel every week.

Berg

[]

343: To Lady Robert Cecil

[February 1907]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My dear Nelly,

Your chauffeur left 2 bunches of tulips on me. Will you thank him—Is it proper? You must settle this for me. Anyhow I thought it a very pleasant attention.

Mrs Bell is struggling with the English language: there aren’t enough words for happiness—besides hers is a special kind of happiness. Husband too: there should be accents or inflexions. Finally I have written out a code, which can be used in telegrams: there are 4 ds. She uses 6.

I have been teaching a Milkman [at Morley College] to write English for 2 hours; and the effect is so singular that I had better say no more. It is like floating your brains in cold mist.

Yr. aff.
AVS

Hatfield

[]

344: To Violet Dickinson

[February 1907]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My Violet,

I couldn’t come later, but I will try and come at 4.15 tomorrow.

O dear what endless pain there is for someone to feel—poor Margaret. Now we hear that Moorsom a friend of Thoby’s and Adrians has killed himself. He was dining here the other day.

I saw a very likely house in Upper Montagu St. today. Adrian wants me to say that he has lost your cheque. Aint it like the family!

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

345: To Clive Bell

[February 1907]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My dear Clive,

Your letter surely craves a premeditated answer; yet how did the correspondents of Gibbon achieve their share of the task? did they perambulate the study table too, casting periods as the angler casts his line or did they commend themselves to the sheet as simply as the child betakes itself to the Lords Prayer? I have a fancy that the great man was content with little eloquence in his friends if their attitude was pious.

A true letter, so my theory runs, should be as a film of wax pressed close to the graving in the mind; but if I followed my own prescription this sheet would be scored with some very tortuous and angular incisions. Let me explain that I began some minutes since to review a novel and made its faults, by a process common among minds of a certain order or disorder, the text for a soliloquy upon many matters of importance; the sky and the breeze were part of my theme. A telegram however, with its necessary knock and its flagrant yellow, and its curt phrase of vicious English—I know not which sense was most offended—hit me in the wing and I fell a heaped corpse upon the earth. The sense, if that can be said to have sense which had so little sound, was to discredit the respectability of a house in Fitzroy Square. And there you see me in the mud. Shall I argue that a mind that knows not Gibbon knows not morality? or shall I affirm that bad English and respectability are twin sisters, dear to the telegram and odious to the artist? I state the question and leave it; for it will ramify if I mistake not through all the limbs of my soul and clasp the very Judgment seat of God. So then let us turn—and where? First, I think, to Vanessa; and I am almost inclined to let her name stand alone upon the page. It contains all the beauty of the sky, and the melancholy of the sea, and the laughter of the Dolphins in its circumference, first in the mystic Van, spread like a mirror of grey glass to Heaven. Next in the swishing tail of its successive esses, and finally in the grave pause and suspension of the ultimate A breathing peace like the respiration of Earth itself.

If I write of books you will understand that I continue the theme though in another key; for are not all Arts her tributaries, all sciences her continents and the globe itself but a painted ball in the enclosure of her arms? But you dwell in the Temple, and I am a worshipper without. It behoves me then to speak of common things, that are and cease to be; of people and of houses, of Empires and of governments.

I read then, and feel beauty swell like ripe fruit within my palm: I hear music woven from the azure skeins of air; and gazing into deep pools skimmed with the Italian veil I see youth and melancholy walking hand in hand. Yet why separate and distinguish when all are pressed to your ardent lips in one clear draught?

Let us then have make [sic] an ending: for in truth I must copy out this sheet.

Yours ever,
AVS

Quentin Bell

[]

346: To Madge Vaughan

15th Feb [1907]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

Dearest Madge,

I am returning your basket with some vegetables. I hope you are cut off from spinach still! I think the railway will either send them up to you, or tell you where they are. They should arrive tomorrow (Sat.) morning.

I found the other day a manuscript belonging to you. I will send it—and I hope you wont think that I am never to be trusted again. We had a very sensible and businesslike wedding in the registry office behind St Pancras workhouse. Nessa and I lost our way in a motor, they were married and paid 7/6—and finally they lost their train at Paddington. But they are happy enough to be quite beyond the reach of accidents, and Nessa wrote her first letter to me sitting in the waiting room, very much amused. They sound so happy that they make noises like children instead of writing. It is very strange to watch—or rather not to watch—It does seem all a dream still.

Adrian and I try to get a house, and I hope I have found one now in Fitzroy Square—but they always fall through at the last.

You and your 4 children are just by my inkstand. They give me great pleasure—so does their mother. Thoby used to say that you were the most beautiful person he had ever seen.

It is very hard not to have him here—I cant get reconciled—but we have to go on. Adrian is well—but I cant be a brother to him!

Yr. loving,
AVS

Sussex

[]

347: To Violet Dickinson

Friday [15 February 1907]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My Violet,

You will be glad or sorry or mostly indifferent to hear that George has another son—born this morning at 9.30—both well. I feel some kind of affection, though our kinship is much diluted—Herberts and Duckworths!

But now to business. I really do want your advice about this house [Fitzroy Square]. Will you listen to the facts and give me your verdict?

Sophia [Farrell] approves of it in every particular; Shaw [the builder] tells me it is in a sound state, well built can be decorated for £150—most of wh. is outer paint, supplied by our landlord. They will put in a bath. There is electric light. All things about the place are satisfactory; and the Agents believe that we shall get it for £120.

Beatrice comes round, inarticulate with meaning, and begs me not to take the house because of the neighbourhood. You say something about that this evening. Well—how am I to judge—or what importance ought I to attach to respectability? There is a Boys College on one side: a dr. [doctor] on the other: there are hospitals and institutions at intervals, nursing homes. Bernard Shaw, or his mother, was the last tenant. The streets surrounding are dingy, but no worse than they are here I should say.

Anyhow you see my predicament. If I hint at any question of respectability to George Gerald or Jack, they will refuse to let me take it—and yet I have spent every day for a month looking for houses, and I feel—desperate I should say if you would let me exaggerate—when I think of beginning all over again. The only alternative is the Upper Montagu Street house, which I saw today with Sophia. She says it is ‘not a patch on Fitzroy Square and very dirty, but we could manage there.’ I dont want to take a house which would be unpleasantly disreputable. I dont want to be frightened off a house by a vague phantom, probably unnoticeable. Can you discriminate between all these interests? Such are the trials of affection. Your word would settle my mind either way. I do begin to feel that we must make up our minds; and the last week or two have produced no possible houses.

Thank the Lord, that discourse is over. Do you want to see me or dont you? I made some kind of tentative proposal to come down for a night which like so many sensitive ideas of mine died of silence. I could always come for a night. I dont realise your plan.

Walter Headlam came to tea today, with Lytton Strachey. I hate pouring out tea, and talking like a lady, and realise my own inadequacy without Nessa. However it has to be faced.

I wonder—you wouldn’t think it!—how you are, and whether you sleep at night, and when I may expect to find your body and soul harmonious again. Your soul was floating like a captive balloon last time I saw you; a white globe, transparent and ethereal, veined with fire. O isn’t that pretty? I am spending all my hoarded garrulity upon you because Adrian is dining out, and I should be reading a novel called “Temptation” for the Times. But such is my prudery, that when temptation is written out in plain English, I throw the book under the sofa, and take to my virgin sheet. Living much alone as I do I find it necessary to think of pleasant things: Lucretius and Violet.

Tomorrow we go down to the Quaker: I dont look forward to it—to her—but I suppose we shall do some gymnastic feat of the emotions, some crisis, or reconciliation. All my friends are silent, like frogs when the moon rises; or house sparrows at sunset. Katharine Furse is too erratic to count upon. Beatrice almost too energetic. I love them both: I love them when they are not there—they leave beautiful spaces behind them. Now some people I love in the flesh.

I am trying every morning to finish a long drawn out piece of writing, which dwindles on like some elongated misshapen—tallow candle?—and then I shall plunge into the depths of some soporific work, needing green spectacles. I cant write—but I suppose it doesn’t matter. Why did you show Walter Crum that proof? It was really only a dutiful exercise. But any praise is welcome.

Nessa still writes very inarticulate letters. I dont much realise what has happened. Still it would have been unbearable if she hadn’t married. I dont get reconciled to anything.

The thought of you makes a considerable difference: do you see that written out letter for letter?

Write one line: dont bother.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

348: To Violet Dickinson

[17 February 1907]

The Porch [Cambridge]

My Violet,

I feel rather repentant when I think what a very long letter I wrote you, long and vehement and egoistical, and all about that d———d house. Somehow I got in rather a state of mind about it. I think we have settled to take it now: I hope I shant find that you disagree.

But the advantages seem to me to be solid; and the disadvantages are mythical; and Adrian approves, and Sophie urges with all the force at her command, and it is considerable: she promises health and happiness, low books, and no repairs.

We are doing what I seem to have done very often before—spending a quiet Sunday here. The Quaker is like some glossy evergreen; I feel she will rustle her leaves over all our graves. She thinks we both look extremely well—whereas she had expected—hoped rather—that after all we had gone through we might be morbid in some way. However she is predicting a very curious death for old Aunt [Lady] Stephen: “indeed one cant wish her to live”. She is a little melancholy about you: you say you are better, but she hears you dont sleep.

Do you sleep? Say so: if you do. I know few things more weary and pale and ashen than a sleepless night.

I have had one moderate bout of argument—it always begins with the question of my literary career—very tentative and significant and eager for hints though cautious; and we always end with our old argument: had father an imagination or not? She has just produced some documents from a portfolio to prove her side, and vanishes, to rest.

But with all her faults—and who am I to call my family perfect?—she is about as tough an old heathen as they make; we shant develop such thews and sinews not if we live 80 years. She never alters, but she is thoroughly well seasoned, and if you wish to—Well, anyhow, I shall talk till 11 tonight, I suppose Adrian is dining out.

We go back early tomorrow; and I hope to have the question of the house finally knocked on the head. O what a mercy! Then I shall work.

Write sometimes—not if it tires you. How is Ozzy?

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

349: To Violet Dickinson

[February 1907]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My Violet,

I am sorry for your disapproval [of Fitzroy Square], but I dont think I take Mrs Crums verdict. After all, I was strongly warned against Manchester St. as most disreputable by our agent. I have written to Jack to ask him to find out at once, and let me know. I discussed it with the Quaker; and she says that unless the house itself was in disreputable hands she thinks it would be a pity to go by what people say of the neighbourhood. If the house had a bad name it might be unpleasant, but I cant believe it has.

But of course, when one asks for advice it means agreement, and I come to a pass where I must settle for myself. Please dont bother, or write to [G. B.] Shaw, or do anything.

These things dont matter a 2d. damn, except that I swear.

I will write again. Upper Montagu St. has fallen through, as the woman wont take off her premium.

I am a troublesome scratching fleasome and fretful beast—but eternally grateful. How shall I ever say that loud enough? Shall I come down to Aldeburgh [Suffolk] for the night?

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

350: To Violet Dickinson

[February 1907]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My Violet,

We have waited: I cant go into all our reasons and emotions. Anyhow the thing isn’t settled, and we try to come to a clear judgment. Only it is about as difficult as it can be: Jack writes it is he believes ‘perfectly respectable.’ Shaw the builder says he wd. send his own wife there: the Sq. itself is all right but he has gone to ask at the Police Station. I shall hear the result tomorrow. It’s no use writing; of course it is damnably disappointing—

The worst of it is that it seems so impossible to make a good decision; supposing things are as Mrs Shaw says wd. they really be so unpleasant as to make the house untenable?

Really it is an excellent house: we shant get a better, and Shaw agrees.

AVS

I will come on Friday 4. and I will come down to the cott. on Sat. but its no good my coming if I have to start house hunting again. Wd. it be easier if I came for Sunday—early and went late—save a bed?

Berg

[]

351: To Violet Dickinson

[February 1907]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My Violet,

No letter from Jack or from Mr Shaw: so we have made an offer for the house, and I think we have probably got it. I am sure this is right. Here is a card from the Quaker.

I am sorry I bothered you. I dont think I have asked in a hurry, and I dont mean to repent. I have still to interview lawyers.

I cant dine on Friday, as Gerald is coming here to go to the Friday Club—but I will come to tea—4.30—or 4—

Yr. AVS

Adrian and Sophia are both unhesitating.

Berg

[]

352: To Violet Dickinson

[26? February 1907]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My Violet,

I had time to ponder your merits on the platform this morning—a gracious occupation—you can believe as much as you like.

It was the easiest journey [from Suffolk]; I read my Balzac, and got home in time to call Adrian, and found hot coffee waiting me.

I hear that our terms are accepted—the lease is being made out. So God be thanked!

Adrian’s plan for next Sunday has fallen through: he asks if he might come to you? He would get down later, as he is drilling; and he would take a walk on Sunday, and he would enjoy it very much. But say if you dont find it convenient. I cherish your wisdom, which is the sweetest and sometimes the bitterest known to me.

Now I must take the brush to my head, and try and dine out like a Lady.

Yr. AVS

Dont think I purposely withhold your cover coat: I try to remember it.

Berg

[]

353: To Violet Dickinson

[2? March 1907]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My Violet,

I couldn’t manage today, as I had rather a rush, and a German lesson to end it. Sophie and I and Shaw tramped the house, and smelt into corners, and it is all highly satisfactory, and I am supposed to have a nose for a house, and I hope we start work next week.

I dont know how to make plans, but I somehow think that Life or Fate or Providence (as the Quaker would say wishing to spin out a sentence) will cast us together somehow somewhere and somewhen.

Adrian and I are just off to a party at the Trevelyans, for which I feel singularly unfit—but we must take to the water again.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

354: To Violet Dickinson

[March 1907]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My Violet,

We are going to a concert on Tuesday, or we would have come. Shall I come to tea on Monday?

I have a favour—a very great one—to ask: could we possibly spend Sat. to Mon: the 23rd at Manchester St.? We would have all meals out of course: it is only a question of a bed while the move goes on. But dont hesitate—as the old ladies say—to refuse.

Nothing in the Times this week is mine, so dont praise the wrong people.

I wrote to Nelly and sent her my Greek book. O the vanity of Authors!

I had a serious interview with [Walter] Headlam: he said he was miserable that I didnt marry, but sat alone and moped. What am I to do! Am I such a d———d failure. We talked for 2 hours.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

355: To Clive Bell

Friday [22 March 1907]

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

My dear Clive,

I can conceive no possible circumstance less suited to writing a letter, or even an address, than those in which I am at this moment. Still you know, for you have discussed my theory I hear, that there is a kind of sting in such grotesqueness. And besides, if I dont write to you now, I shall never write to you again. Honestly, I withdraw into a strange upper world when I sit down before a table; very soon it will be withdrawn beyond sight, and belief. O God, the world it frets and rages: little chopped waves have surged to the very roof of the house. My room is a bare island in the midst. After luncheon I shall be swamped too.

Well then, how am I to write a letter? But perhaps you have observed that this is a favourite device with letter writers, they are always in haste, or in discomfort, or in a temper, so that you only get the dregs of their genius, and you can speculate what a letter it would have been—seeing there are six careful sheets already—had he had time or temper, or so on. And I put ‘he’ because a woman, dear Creature, is always naked of artifice; and that is why she generally lives so well, and writes so badly.

I had another argument with Walter Headlam yesterday, and I was triumphant. It didn’t, even, come to argument, because a week at Cambridge gave him leisure to reflect that he knew little of humanity, and very little of Stephen humanity; and he met me in a gentler acquiescent mood, ready to learn and believe, and tentative in his theories. He destroyed his own argument by some ghastly blunders in my own proper science: the theory of Vanessa. He said of her that she was sweet and gentle and good, but neither interested in people—nor—but this is malice on my part—could he see her beauty! And then he had to own that he really knew nothing about us.

I have been reading a book which I should tell you to read, but that I dont want a snub: “my dear good Virginia, when I was a boy of 20,” and so on. At any rate, it is the Life of Sidney by Greville, and it has some passages of the ripest melody, like plaited columns of marble, if I may mix my metaphors and confuse my sense. And if there are such books in the world, I shall continue to live and read.

Well, well, there are many things to talk about, for as the weather warms so do my ideas kindle. I think you suffer from the same complaint, which is Gods own malady. give my love to my sister, and, if you like, kiss her left eye, with the eyelid smoothed over the curve, and just blue on the crest.

Yr. AVS

Quentin Bell

[]

356: To Madge Vaughan

2nd April [1907]

Hotel Rastadt, 4 Rue Daunou, Paris

Dearest Madge,

I got your letter when I was sitting on a cupboard in the drawing room, directing painters. We fled after 3 nights without sheets in bleak rooms; but it was all very amusing. In a week we shall be back—the 12th that is. I wonder if you will come?

It makes me shudder when my own words come back to me, written or spoken. When I said ‘happy’, I was using a short cut; for I dont know what I mean by happy—except when I see Nessa, and she doesn’t explain. I think in your case I meant wise, and mellow, and permanent; as though you had found a dwelling place after all, from which to deliver judgments. I think it may be rather a melancholy position; only it is true and lasting. That is a paradox if you are also like a bird. Did I say that? I think I meant again that your eye glanced and flitted, fetching food for your soul; but I maintain that the spirit is stationary. That is what your children give you, and life I suppose. Anyhow it seems to me delightful. What a racy old woman you will make, and what a mother for Janet!

Now have I been saying rash things that will require explanation? It is quite likely, because I write in a hotel bedroom, and in a minute I must get ready for dinner in some eccentric tavern in Montmartre with Nessa and Clive.

They are in another hotel but we see a good deal of them, and they are really a pleasure, if only to look at. I cant believe that Nessa wasn’t born married, because it seems so natural and appropriate. She sings to herself as she walks, and buys strange plumes and draperies in the Louvre; but as we decided at lunch, she looks best undressed. We talk a great deal about beauty and Art, and meet various old bachelors who have known Whistler, and play the violin, and cant paint.

I am longing to be in my own house, and start work. We are having bright green carpets and I want to buy old furniture.

Violet Dickinson came in 2 minutes after we left that day. But it is just as well to begin with her drawing room.

I hope we shall meet.

Yr. loving,
AVS

Sussex

[]

357: To Violet Dickinson

12th April [1907]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My Violet,

You have made a monstrosity of our address—29 Gordon Square. However, your letter did come at last. What with your Homers and your Jekylls, your new puppies and your budding trees—was there ever such a good gardener as Ozzy?—I am melted into an indistinguishable mass; pearl grey, and vaporous.

Well, God knows where one should begin a letter, seeing that I have been to Paris and back, changed my house, entered a new study all in the interval.

Now I am learning to write to the tune of twenty railway vans, which grind rough music beneath my window; but the grey houses opposite and the trees which are just beginning to grow green, are expected to heal the damage to my style.

The house isn’t nearly ready; but we are waiting for carpets and book cases. Your little man is very good and intelligent, and he is now turning a French bed into a sofa. Nessa and Clive bought one in Paris.

I haven’t seen Nessa alone once since she was married; and you know the kind of image one gets of her, coloured by Clive—It is very beautiful and happy and all that; but it is rather tantalising. But it is clear to the most prejudiced eye that God made her for marriage; and she basks there like an old seal on a rock. I dont think we shall see very much of them; as all our habits seem to be rather different.

I had 3 letters from Walter Headlam while I was in Paris; the last sending me love ‘as to a sister.’ I know the cynical, even I will say the Kittylike, attitude with which you receive these confidences!

I am trying to write 3 articles for the Times: I begin in the linen cupboard, and work my way up to the top of the house. Today I am sitting in my own room for the first time.

Do you see I have curtailed my correspondence to a half sheet? But you also see that on some occasions I increase the measure: it is a very great compliment. But then I am such an interesting person to write about.

Now do send a whole letter—you strange sensitive creature with horns flickering like a snail. How is Ella? O damn Morley. I spent 2 hours there on Wed: and no class came.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

358: To Madge Vaughan

[April 1907]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

Dearest Madge,

Your flowers were—and still are—delicious. I think I see that the children have been picking them, perhaps in the wood where we played Bears once, last Easter. I wish you would bring them to London: they will forget their Elderly Cousin, or think her a horrible Myth—such as I think some of my relations. Will saw us when we were barely in: I am still arranging books, and we have practically no furniture. There are a great number of empty sitting rooms. Nessa and Clive are also established [at 46 Gordon Square], and I think their house is rather beautiful. But then they had wedding presents to lay out—they bought beds and chairs in Paris, and old silver and unbleached linen in London. He is writing and she is painting, and we all seem very busy.

Shall you come down ever? I think you will grow into a Northern Moor one of these days; I shall climb your heights. That is meant for a compliment. I wish I could play with the children, and have you to treat me as a child—a very nice child.

Yr. VS

King’s

[]

359: To Violet Dickinson

[23? April 1907]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My Violet,

Why dont you lunch here on Thursday or Friday, or at any rate come to see me. Then I can tell you all about the house—if that is what you want to know, though God knows other peoples houses dont interest me.

You are very polite about my writing; I think that is the best thing I have written; and Headlam thinks—many things too subtle to be said here—about my style.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

360: To Violet Dickinson

[3 May 1907]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My Violet,

I cant come on Monday or Wednesday as we go to the Opera both nights. Couldn’t I come some other day?

I have this moment used your name in a lie, invented to excuse my lunching with Margaret today. So remember: you are lunching with me today—Friday 3rd May, on your way through London.

We have made another £70 this morning by selling 3 tea pots and a mug. So if I want double windows I shall get them; but my carpet is now down, and the noise is only like a melancholy Atlantic sea, and not really bothersome. I think I shall get rather fond of it.

I will send you some writing; but I have frittered away my time talking to plumbers and sewing women.

Write me a nice letter. I want Affection. I dont get None. I sing your praises.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

361: To Violet Dickinson

[May 1907]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My Violet,

You told me—so Nessa and I thought—that you were going to send a line to say whether I was to come on Thursday or Friday. So I waited, and never heard, and supposed it was today. O Lord, what a nuisance all dates are—they never come right. I wish I had gone, as I did almost, on the chance it was Thursday.

Here is some bread for your tea.

Shall I come another day—all next week, except Monday, is free.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

362: To Lady Robert Cecil

[May 1907]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My dear Nelly,

Thank you very much for asking me; I wish I could have come in for my share of Ponds Extract and Ellimans Embrocation, and I love shut windows. But we are going to the Meistersinger tonight, and to more music tomorrow and I couldn’t very well come away.

Will you tell Violet that she has a singular view of life, and that I am very anxious to contradict all she says. We bought a dog [Hans] at the dog Home the other day: it is perhaps the most witty, and also cynical person I have ever known. When I talk of the domestic virtues, and in particular of tolerance and love it howls. Its father was a sheep dog, and though it must have had a mother no one knows who she was.

Are you reading that very ... book by Kitty’s friend—yours?

Yr. aff.
AVS

Hatfield

[]

363: To Violet Dickinson

[May 1907]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My Violet,

I can be free all day on Thursday—lunch or tea?—let me know. It isnt the Opera after all on Monday. However, I am having Walter Headlam, and I think that should be a private interview. I saw him at Cambridge last week, and found him ‘changed and altered’ as Mary Cholomly would say: he had never got my letter and thought me fickle and cold and treacherous. But we made it up—a subtle phrase secret and ambiguous. How d’you think we made it up?

I have just begun to do the drawing room books, but it needs immense determination. All the volumes are lost, or upstairs or downstairs, and they must be herded and separated, like the sparrows whom God counts.

O it is a hot afternoon, and I wish I were basking on the back seat of the carriage, driving to Eleusis. I heard a mystic story about Eleusis from Miss Case the other day: how all the fields are covered with flowers in the evening, as you drive back, and there are none at midday.

I think I shall have double windows, as a luxury, as I cant quite get used to the carts.

Here is a review, which was originally long and vigorous; the Times have cut it down and tamed it. I wanted to scourge that Fine Lady the Baroness—Kitties friend: it is chatter and trash. I have reviewed a novel called The Glen O’Weeping; damned it, and now all the other reviewers are exclaiming, and there is a 2nd edition.

How did you enjoy the Bells?

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

364: To Violet Dickinson

[May 1907]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My Violet,

Do come to lunch on Monday. We shall be just back from Hampton Court, rasped and corrugated, I suppose, but you like rough skins.

O why do I ever let any one read what I write! Every time I have to go through a breakfast with a letter of criticism I swear I will write for my own praise and blame in future. It is a misery.

The Quaker is really a woman with a stupendous belief in her qualities: I must have a bed and a washstand, turn the drawing room into bed room, and grant interviews all day long—to hear mild optimism and weak interest—and criticism too—why dont I work harder?—Is it worth it, I ask you?

We are trying to choose curtains, and I have ordered myself some double windows. But whats the use of windows when there’s no plant to foster?

Snow is staying at Gordon Square; everybodies pictures have been accepted for the Friday Club. Even Mary Creighton is to illumine the world with four separate panes of glass.

There is no more news than this, except that the other night at the opera I looked up and saw Katie [Cromer] in the middle of the Royal Box; and all the house looked pale and stunted, and she blossomed like a Rose—you will know the kind; but whether it was imagination or truth, I never saw such a gigantic woman, flowing over regal arm chairs; and rearing herself like some Matron on the Parthenon; the style of thing you dont appreciate. Now had she been a ragged beggar at a street corner, with a string of onions and a patch work shawl, you would have crowed and chuckled. I am going to write a book upon the Aesthetic Sense in Violet and Nelly.

You see, I want affection! And think of Creightons tomorrow: intelligent questions when I ask for love, and a high standard of family life! But Walter Headlam has just sent me a Poem.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

365: To Violet Dickinson

[1907]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My Violet,

It doesn’t in the least matter. I dont think I should have sat out the Horners anyhow. They terrify me.

I will come to tea tomorrow. 5.

So sorry you have troubles.

Yr. V.

Berg

[]

366: To Violet Dickinson

[1907?]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My Violet,

I will come Thursday at 5.

I enclose a letter from Margaret. I think Nessa told me that you had heard Hort well spoken of.

I have not told Nessa. It seems to me quite unnecessary to upset her mind again about this, unless there is really good reason.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

367: To Lady Robert Cecil

[May? 1907]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

Dear Nelly,

Do come on Wednesday—at 5 I shall be in—and as I have never before or since that visit of yours—thank God—had so many people to tea at once—and never shall if I spend 20 years in this house, you will have no fashion to be afraid of. You keep a cup of acid on your writing table, I observe, and sometimes dip your pen in that: it is said to colour the ink better. I believe there is some other version of what Violet’s friend said the other day about Lady Roberts values; anyhow you dont have to contend with obscene old women, and young women too with beaks dripping gore, who advise you to marry. That is my daily penance, and has been these six months. “I think you should keep a maid Virginia—to do your hair—it makes such a difference—Men notice these things—not of course”—and so on and so on. Well, one of these days they shall have their paragraph—That is a terrible threat!

I had an exquisite niece of yours today to lunch—and we talked of Aunts, how some are dull, and some bore their nieces. She is like—what shall I say—down off a swan’s neck. Well, I will tell you all these things on Wed.

Yr. AVS

Hatfield

[]

368: To Violet Dickinson

June 3rd [1907]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My Violet,

This is rather a nice letter, isn’t it? You see I turn to you as the natural echo of my praises. Send it back, because I want to flaunt it in the Quakers face.

We had a dulcet visit; at least she writes that she is thankful for my love and friendship.

Are you coming up again and if so—well! I wont ask for more. I realise how many Halls are open, footmen waiting, and Ladies and Empire builders expectant.

Dodd, a little New English Club artist, half drunk, and ecstatic, wishes to paint my portrait—and I am to sit in the afternoon from 2 to 4.30. Alone?

Nelly and I have had a spirited correspondence: “Violet says you think me vulgar.” “O you damned Woman of title and fashion! So on, and so on. I am going to tea with her. I told her you and she and Kitty terrify me, as beings moving in a higher world, with voices like the ripple of Arcadian streams.

I had a happy day yesterday, talking to Nessa, now that Snow has gone. After all, she might marry 20 Clives and still be the most delightful creature in the world. And I like him better too; I think he unfolds, and they are beginning to accept invitations, and give little parties. She overflows in all ways.

Here is a nice letter, 2 whole sheets. So write.

Yr. AVS

Adrian has passed his final, and is called to the Bar tomorrow.

Berg

[]

369: To Violet Dickinson

Sunday [7 July 1907]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My Violet,

If you knew the misery it is to me to sit down to a writing table and begin a letter!—I do it once a week, with the groans of a martyr tied to the stake, while a vulture pecks my back. And there is the Quaker who doesn’t like to be kept waiting, because if I have anything to say, I can barely say it on one precise day.

Well—I have been alone this Sunday, Nessa Clive and Adrian have taken lodgings at Cambridge, which I refused to do—as I meant to read, or write, or somehow enjoy myself—and 4 people in lodgings is no better than a prolonged Bank Holiday. I should have lost my temper, and had to waste hours recovering it, as on the Acropolis [September/October 1906]—do you remember. So the consequence was I had down all the books I want to read, French and Latin and English and Greek—and then all the Square filled with volunteers; however I read on and on, and never was so happy in my life—a little beast in a green forest, with all its fruit and nuts. But this morning I knew I must see Life; so I went in the Tube to Golders Green, and walked through some dusty fields to Hampstead; and I sat down in one, where there was a corner empty, and eat my sandwiches, and a cake with sugar on the top which I had with me in a piece of gray paper. Then I found a farm, with a stuffed jay in the window, where the people were having Sunday dinner; then I climbed the top of the Hill, and saw St Pauls on one side and Harrow on the other. This is a beautiful story—such as I shall tell Nessas children; and they will say here “Do go on, Aunt Virginia; what happened next?” “An Ogre” I shall say: and they will know and believe; but Violet who has lived all her life among sophisticated people so that thick white scales, like those that drop off dried fish hung in the sun, grow on her eyes—Violet shant hear anymore of this story.

Well then I came home—and you cant guess what I did—I slept in my chair—and I washed—and put on a skirt which has lately been cleaned. And I went and called on Margaret [Duckworth]! Now there was a loosely built fresh coloured gentleman there in a frock coat, who might have come out of a novel; he was a Racing man, and he said the country was going to the Dogs—German’s [sic] invading us. Charlie Beresford says we have no fleet—and Trades Unions at the bottom of it all! Free thinking is all very well in itself, but free thinkers must be kept silent. Let the people hear, and theres a kettle of fish.

And I saw George and Margaret, and felt as I always feel 10 years old, with Aunts and Uncles and nice manners: and I always expect George to give me half a crown and Margaret to open a cupboard and bring out a box and take off the lid very slowly, and give me a large, rather nasty sweet, with almond or fruit, or something I dont like, which I shall drop in the gutter on the way home. I think old George is a little hurt, because he counted the weeks since we had met, and said he never saw his ‘family’ now. I see he is too much hurt to speak naturally even of Nessa and Clive.

But what my position among them all is, I dont know; I see what you call their kindness, and Margarets good feelings; and Georges odd relics of what was once affection—and then there is Nessa, like a wasteful child pulling the heads off flowers—beautiful as a Goddess (at which you always smile) and Clive with his nice tastes, and kindness to me, and his slightness and acidity—well, I might pour out the English language without making a coherent story of it.

Anyhow, I’ve written such a letter as it is not decent to receive at breakfast time, when you have guests. It looks too intimate. Now I am going to get out all my books again, after I have written to the Quaker, and I am going to write in my head, where I always write immortal works, an article upon Lady Fanshawe, and I am going to walk round my desk and then take out certain manuscripts which lie there like wine, sweetening as they grow old. I shall be miserable, or happy; a wordy sentimental creature, or a writer of such English as shall one day burn the pages.

All the lights in the Square are lighting, and it is turning silver gray, and there are beautiful young women still playing tennis on the grass.

Shall you be in London, and shall you come and see me?

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

370: To Violet Dickinson

[July 1907]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My Violet,

I was at the point of writing you a long letter—20 sheets—all numbered, perhaps transfixed with tape—when yours came. I was going to ask whether I could come down and see you.

I cant come on Wednesday unluckily, as Nelly is coming here. I can come on Thursday, Friday or Saturday.

I have been spending Sunday at Cambridge with Nessa and Clive not with the Quaker.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

371: To Violet Dickinson

Saturday [20 July 1907]

29 F. Sq.

My Violet,

Here is a nice pleasant tawny old book, which I daresay you have got already, or wont read anyhow. If so, do send it me back. I got it from an old Jew, who always spends an hour or so in discourse with me; and we stroke all the venerable books, and discuss title pages, which he can read, whatever the language, and print, and the degeneracy of people who buy new books, and all sorts of interesting subjects, even Tristram Shandy ‘no one would wish for a complete set—I myself have never read it through, though I take it up often’—So it dont matter that the book is without a title page, and 3 sheets of introduction: it is white as driven snow within, and outside like a ripe fiddle. “Have you a friend with a garden, he said; who likes sullets—sullads you understand” That is the amount of his learning. So my good woman,—this is a specimen of my narrative style, which is far from good, seeing that I am forever knotting it and twisting it in conformity with the coils in my own brain, and a narrative should be as straight and flexible as the line you stretch between pear trees, with your linen on drying—I felt in my pocket and counted out minute silver pieces, and gross coppers, which fell short, as I piled them in a row on the table. So he forgave me the rest, magnanimously, as between scholars. Now after some conversation between us, I have never read the book, but I like snatches, it is going down to Welwyn, where it shall live among trees.

I have finished this beautiful discourse; and I dont think I have another to begin on. Last night I dined out in Chelsea, and mauled the dead and rotten carcases of several works written by my friends; how I hate intellect! There were several brilliant young men, whose lights had been kindled at Cambridge, and burnt all of them precisely in the same way; and some said they were artificial, supplied by the county loan at so much the cube. You turn them off, when company isnt there, to prevent waste; and you know what you have spent, to a penny. An elderly man who had somehow got my name right, said to me “In the course of your life Miss Stephen, you must have known many distinguished people. Stevenson, I suppose?” Yes and George Eliot, and Tennyson before he grew a beard I said. But the astonishing thing is that these great people always talked much as you and I talk; Tennyson, for instance, would say to me, “Pass the salt” or Thank you for the butter. “Ah indeed; you should write your memoirs; one gets paid for that kind of thing” he said; being a dealer in pictures.

At this moment I should be cobbling a terrific passage in my article on Lady Fanshawe; which begins reptile and turns quadruped in the middle. If only my flights were longer, and less variable I should make solid blocks of sentences, carven and wrought from pure marble; or the Greek marble which absorbs colours. One of my disasters is that I have lost that green book in which I used to write when the Bug hit me. But as I was telling you, Lady Fanshawe is rather disappointing; only a thread of a story, and some nameless descendant has tied a volume of dry little notes to her tail; and the Times say they must have my article at once, and that flurries me—so instead of writing it I write to you.

All the money I earned last month I threw away in one handful to Katharine Horner; who will sniff and turn aside to the last ducal spray of diamonds. I got her a nice old lookingglass, with Lady dolphins naked to the waist clasping arms round it. She is something of a sea green mermaid herself, so I gave it her; half of her lives beneath a sliding tide—O damn the i’s in this English language!—remote and half dim.

On Monday Lady Gwendolen Godolphin Osborne comes to lunch. “Miss Dickinson told me I might call; but I didn’t dare. Now I may come, invited, I shall love it.” Are these human or mermaid manners? “Lady Gwendolen, I shall say, how was the Queen looking at the Ball the other night?” I passed through ranks of carriages driving home from Chelsea; and tried to imagine splendours, but all the coachmen were smoking pipes and reading pink papers; and I could rise no higher than Mr and Lady Margaret Duckworth, who were there; Margaret under the Ladies—George under the Mrs.

Isn’t this a nice long happy unselfish letter, for me to have written on a hot summer morning, standing at my desk, looking at ancient grey stone, and a cat that clasps her paws upon a white butterfly, and then rolls over and sleeps again: When shall you have the pleasure, as Ly G[wendolen] G[odolphin] O[sborne] would say, of seeing me?

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

372: To Lady Robert Cecil

[August 1907]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My dear Nelly,

These were found in the hall when you had gone, and they dont—the pencil naturally wouldn’t—fit our door.

Do you think you will come and see us at Rye? That would be a great pleasure—indeed if I had your nieces manner I could tell you how very much I enjoyed your visit yesterday. It was time anyhow.

Your aff.
AVS

Hatfield

[]

373: To Violet Dickinson

[early August 1907]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My Violet,

I was only for a Sunday at Cleeve [the Bells]—came back first thing Monday to make room for the sister, nurses and doctors. Nessa seemed very well—very happy. Sitting all day with Clive.

I am alone here till I go on Thursday, as Adrian has gone down to Camp.

Shall I see you?

What the D—l you mean by your allusions to Fanshawe [Virginia’s review] I dont know. I am corresponding with the editor [H. C. Fanshawe] who writes 12 sheets to the Times pointing out his virtues. The Times says it read my review with the greatest pleasure. Such is the gossip in the literary world!

Write.

AVS

Berg

[]

374: To Lady Robert Cecil

[August 1907]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My dear Nelly,

My brother would like in some way to convey to you that he does not frighten you; and that we hope very much for the honour—O for the style of Lady Gwendolen Godolphin-Osborne. Any day between the days you mention does us. You will be given a chair beneath an Apple tree, and left there. Such are the manners of—a certain class of English society.

I have been writing for 2 hours: I had 12 sheets from Mr Fanshawe this morning, who says I did not justice to the gravestone, with a correct inscription, lately put up to his ancestress; or to several new facts; and how can I say “Lady F. it seems is still a grandmother” when no grandson of hers is alive.

But the Times tell me they read my remarks with the greatest enjoyment.

Yr. aff.
AVS

Hatfield

[]

375: To Violet Dickinson

[August 1907]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My Violet,

Here is this work, very hastily polished off this morning. Indeed it is a hasty job altogether; however you and Nelly are to be the only readers.

I heard from Nessa this morning that she feels extremely well, and the sickness is quite stopped. This rejoices me; and, as you say “your affection is wholly selfish” O woman with a tongue dropping livid poison!

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

376: To Violet Dickinson

[8 August 1907]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My Violet,

It was very tender and kind of you to write. One feels so ossified; things go on and have to go on, and the pain [of Thoby’s death] is always the same, I think. It is so odd the way you remember that.

However, my great religion is to be happy—I really care very much that Adrian should be happy—selfish as I am.

I am sitting among shrouded chairs, smoking a cigarette, before I go to catch my train. The country will be a delight. Our address is

The Steps
Playden
Sussex.

I think B[eatrice Thynne] comes tomorrow, with Adrian. Shall you write to me?

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

377: To Lady Robert Cecil

Friday [16 August 1907]

The Steps, Playden, Sussex

My dear Nelly,

The effort it is to write, not to you, I mean; for I have written to no one. But I feel like one rolled at the bottom of a green flood, smoothed, obliterated, how should my pockets still be full of words? This comes of sitting all day, before a tremendous view, flat as sand; the sea once came right up to the foot of the Cliff on which this house is built; now it has withdrawn, and instead of bleached bones, and the ribs of ships hung with weed, there are sheep, and cottages, and cornfields. But you dont like descriptions of places—a needless extravagance you call it.

Are you coming here? I am like the Syren who stretches her arm through the water to pull the sailors on top down to her. If you keep The Life, or Myth, dont quote it—see my vanity! and dont show it: I cant remember now how bad it is; but I know it will have to be re-written in six months; and I shant do it; and I dont want immaturities, things torn out of time, preserved, unless in some strong casket, with one key only.

What are you doing? I am embalmed in a book of Henry James: The American Scene: like a fly in amber. I dont expect to get out; but it is very quiet and luminous.

Yr. aff.
AVS

Hatfield

[]

378: To Clive Bell

[18 August 1907]

The Steps, Playden, Sussex

My dear Clive,

As there is a tremendous downpour which will last some 3 hours—we can foretell about how long it takes to empty a sky’s landscape full of clouds upon us—I will answer you first: go on with Mistress Dolphin [Vanessa]; then despatch some transactions. I did get and read Le Ferment, the other day; and thought it a remarkable work; so that I shall try to snatch the others too from your grasp. But the L[ondon] L[ibrary] politely hint that 25 books exceeds the orthodox 15—by—how many? I wont count. Mérimée I read on that occasion which I have so graphically described. The long season of ‘boiling, boiling—boiling’. The Athenian goats boil over with far greater effervescence than other goats; so that often the end of a sentence recalled me to—what some call life. I even wrote an ingenious essay on the Inconnue ; one page has the blood of a mosquitoe on it, like a flying red comet.

I have read the Maria Tellier, and the Rouge et le Noir [Stendhal]—but as for the rest, you know I plod consistently behind the times, in the worn rut of convention, deserted of all the gamesome young dogs, and it will be a gymnastic exercise for me to undertake Prévost and Barrès. But I am very glad of the list.

Well—all my news seems to live in Wiltshire. I am reading Henry James on America; and feel myself as one embalmed in a block of smooth amber: it is not unpleasant, very tranquil, as a twilight shore—but such is not the stuff of genius: no, it should be a swift stream. I am reading Flaubert’s letters and the Christian Morals of Sir T[homas] B[rowne] which seems to me to include some splendid things, among many hints and exquisite adumbrations.

How is my —— I dont know what degree of reticence should be between us; but you can fill up the blank with any figure you like; my balance is boundless. Ah, I often think—was thinking but yesterday, how the best thing one can say of this world is that such a creature can grow there. How she contrives it, how she draws honey and not poison through all the black veins which spout their malevolence into our eyes is proof of her—I hesitate for a word, because I wont attribute such qualities to Heaven. Heaven made Sunday: and on Sunday theres no letter for me—There’s Roast Beef—a downpour. Moreover in the course of this garrulous letter I have tramped 2 miles and lost my amethyst brooch. But we had Bath Buns for tea, and I have made a tie of purple silk for Adrian. Both eyes are to be kissed, the tip of the right ear, and the snout if its wet.

Yr. AVS

Quentin Bell

[]

379: To Lady Robert Cecil

[August 1907]

The Steps, Playden, Sussex

My dear Nelly,

It was charming of you to repeat the compliments of my editor. They fell like sweet rain on an Earth cracked with drought; I feel as though I should never write a decent word, whatever editors say.

You dont say whether you will come here—I hope you may. We are, I think, empty—our bedroom is—till about the 3rd Sept. If any day happened to suit you it would be, as you know and as I, no Lady Gwendolen Godolphin, cant say, great fun for us if you could come.

Nessa comes to her house on the 25th.

I hope you are protecting literature: did you recommend [John] Murray to print Landor on Fox?

Yr. very aff.
AVS

Hatfield

[]

380: To Violet Dickinson

Sunday [25 August 1907]

[The Steps, Playden, Sussex]

My Violet,

You drive me to write. O melancholy creature why do you see specialists? I wish to god you wouldnt. What you want, probably, is air and food and good society; here you should have a couch beneath an Apple tree, and sometimes I would sing to you, and sometimes I would leap from branch to branch, and sometimes I would recite, my own works, to the Zither.

There comes a time, you see, when condolences are no use; I cant figure to myself any fate so miserable as yours—except that I daresay you prefer it to paying visits; and your house is your own house, and there are books, and all the things that you like I suppose. You see how tame I’m getting. Nelly wrote and told me: all I can say is, why do you see doctors? They are a profoundly untrustworthy race; either they lie, or they mistake.

Still, you will say, what the d—— does she know what it is to have a pain in the back—the worst thing about that little black devil is that she cant sympathise, once you get off her paper or her own spirits she feels nothing. Now, dirty devil (for your language is hot and strong—comes bubbling from the deep natural spring) amuse me. Well then, we went and had tea with Henry James today, and Mr and Mrs [George] Prothero, at the golf club; and Henry James fixed me with his staring blank eye—it is like a childs marble—and said “My dear Virginia, they tell me—they tell me—they tell me—that you—as indeed being your fathers daughter nay your grandfathers grandchild—the descendant I may say of a century—of a century—of quill pens and ink—ink—ink pots, yes, yes, yes, they tell me—ahm m m—that you, that you, that you write in short.” This went on in the public street, while we all waited, as farmers wait for the hen to lay an egg—do they?—nervous, polite, and now on this foot now on that. I felt like a condemned person, who sees the knife drop and stick and drop again. Never did any woman hate ‘writing’ as much as I do. But when I am old and famous I shall discourse like Henry James. We had to stop periodically to let him shake himself free of the thing; he made phrases over the bread and butter ‘rude and rapid’ it was, and told us all the scandal of Rye. “Mr Jones has eloped, I regret to say, to Tasmania; leaving 12 little Jones, and a possible 13th to Mrs Jones; most regrettable, most unfortunate, and yet not wholly an action to which one has no private key of ones own so to speak.”

Well—this ceases now to interest you: great Barking Sultan; if you could see how painfully I drive a pen, which confesses itself a martyr to the sleepy staggers, you might pity me. But I dont think you would; for you have a maxim about the enjoyment of our gifts, how it is a trust, with income payable to so and so and so and so.

Some doubt is felt, by those who read your last letters, and unfurled the curling tendrils, as to whether you wished for a picture post card of Rye, or such rude figure as I can make with words. For one moment I thought you wished me to draw, which indeed I can do, having already designed many triangles surmounted by oblong boxes, which are ornamented with Christian crosses, on my blotting paper.

From our garden we look over a dead marsh; flat as the sea, and the simile has the more truth in that the sea was once where the marsh is now. But at night a whole flower bed of fitful lighthouses blooms—O what a sentence!—but irritants are good I am told—along the edge; indeed you can follow the sea all round the cliff on which we stand, till you perceive Rye floating out to meet it, getting stranded halfway on the shingle, like—nothing so much as a red brick town. But then “red brick towns dont float; and these semi metaphors of yours are a proof that you dip hastily into a pocket full of words, and fling out the first come; and that is why your writing is so ...” Anyhow, we have a real country cottage—white walls, and bright pictures, and cheerful manly books, Stevenson and Thoreau, and a garden, and an orchard; I dont really enjoy any of these things; it bores me dreadfully to cut the flowers, and I am determined that Mrs Dew Smith is a vague weak shallow kind of person; who has realised all her dreams in this house, and will be told forever, how charming it is, and how clever she is.

Gerald [Duckworth] has been here today; my spirits spring like fire now that he is gone; Adrian and I had the heaviest work; for we ran out of our talk on the way up from the station, and then we each took turns with a question, till when it came to mine I could only say “What do you usually have for lunch on Sunday Gerald?” Which however was best of all, for he remembered the lunches of 20 years ago. “O those puffs! not short pastry, but puff pastry—There was one dish, my dear, just black at the bottom, all flaky, done with more butter than she uses now—which I shall remember till my dying day.” Then we talked about beef; and at last he fell asleep; as a prize pig, well entertained might sleep. This is brutal, because he took a great deal of trouble to come; and I should be affectionate. Nessa comes tomorrow—what one calls Nessa; but it means husband and baby, and of sister there is less than there used to be. But perhaps it is better; so the sanguine say. We are having Katharine Stephen for 2 nights, and then [Walter] Lamb and [Saxon] Sydney Turner; but I shall read and write, and only occasionally expose myself to their wisdom. I have 7 volumes of poetic drama to review for the Guardian, and a novel for the Times, and I want to write out many small chapters that form in my head; and to read Pindar, and a mass of other books; I know I shant. I begin to understand that I never shall.

You will probably suffer from many long, and diffuse, egoistical, ill written, disconnected, delightful letters, because solitary as I am, and fertile as a tea pot, it becomes necessary to empty the brew on someone; and there you are recumbent at Welwyn—what more can you expect, my good woman. “Those tiresome Stephens!” Ella’s epigram. Ellas only epigram.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

381: To Violet Dickinson

Sunday [1 September 1907]

The Steps, Playden [Sussex]

My Violet,

I think few acts more deserve admiration than this which I now undertake of my own accord; for I have sent you I dont know how many sheets the other day, and I have had no answer but a growling letter asking nay, demanding, a post card. If you would do me a favour, you Bio—or mytho—grapher, tell me why you want letters, what you get from them, what you miss without them—in short, explain the whole situation; because I may be feeding an impure hunger. God, I wish I could make this pen wed this paper; I bought them both, for love of you, in Rye; and the discord is painful at every step.

I consider now what there is to tell you, if that is what you want; how I haven’t moved from Rye since I came here, how the French are still on the other side of the channel, how certain stars still hang above me at night, and the moon is steady. But you dont care a b——y d——n (My Violet, what language—even disembowelled thus!) for generalities however literary and picturesque; and if I could so fashion the globe and my own dent on it as to pack it harmoniously within this sheet you would think it out of place at breakfast, ask Ozzie to put it behind the bookshelf, and talk about something else.

Nessa and Clive are here, and Snow is with them, and we meet every day, to walk, or smoke, and talk together; once we took a drive to a Church on a hill—that was on Thursday when we had Katharine Stephen with us; once we had the Prothero’s and Henry James to tea on the verandah here; and there was such talk—as you might have this very afternoon in Welwyn. Now I have sketched the situation; placing all my pieces in position, and a woman of imagination can surely put them in motion for herself.

Further, I write in the morning and read Pindar, in a room which overlooks the Marsh; beneath Adrian takes notes on English History, and spells out Wagner on the piano. Once more, I have a letter from B[ruce] Richmond asking me to review a novel by Marten Maartens at once, at some length, for Fridays Times; and a letter from Leo [Maxse] in which he says that he is “constantly trying to think of subjects what would be likely to appeal to you” and is open to any suggestions.

Now my authors vanity is appeased; shall we hint that it was the pricking of this that made me write to you! O no, it was affection, boiling, like that goats milk used to boil in Athens.

You really dont give me a chance to be unselfish; I cant—literary sense forbids—fill the page with questions, do you sleep, eat, suffer pain? and you wont write, and I must write to you, and the only thing there is to write about is—well it aint neuter anyhow.

Katharine Stephen stayed 2 nights; and it was like sleeping on the bosom of a maternal cow, cool, wholesome, not too soft, but fragrant. She has a smoother surface than the rest of her race, as though rubbed down by the attrition of countless human bodies; but her milk lies in deep places, and so issue fresh and sweet, like something kept in a shaded cavern, packed in ice. She asked me to stay with her; and used at odd moments of the day, to remark that she felt happy.

Margaret Lyttelton cant come; but that was not unexpected; [Walter] Lamb comes on Friday, and then [Saxon] Sydney Turner.

Nessa is like a great child, more happy and serene than ever; sketching with Snow, draped in a long robe of crimson, or raspberry coloured silk, with clear drops of amethyst and things she calls ‘cairngorm’ about it, and old yellow lace.

To be with her is to sit in autumn sunlight; but then there is Clive! Snow dined here last night, and says they are completely suited—completely happy. It bears in upon me more and more that we are all so much dry or green wood, thrown on her flame; and it dont much matter to that portent what it feeds on: it “transmutes”.

Now I must set myself down to my novel [review], and then to my 7 poetic dramas; shall I ever bear a child I wonder?

Adrian and I think of letting Fitzroy Square, and living in rooms, to escape the burden of a household.

How am I, in this half inch of paper, to assure you of all my devotions, and enquiries—how you are, what you do, and the rest of it? It cant be done. So, kiss your dog on its tender snout, and think him me. In fact make him into an idol of me and I will so worship the hall clock.

Berg

[]

382: To Elinor Monsell [Mrs Bernard Darwin]

Sunday, [22 September 1907]

The Steps, Playden [Sussex]

Dear Eily,

If you knew how much I enjoy getting a letter I dont deserve you would write oftener—all about yourself and God, or Art, and the chickens and the Darwins—Ah what dumb creatures we are! There was an age when I went about exhorting people to write and talk and run bodkins through their veins, but they wouldn’t, and wont; but go like sealed casks through life, musty and mildewed before any one tastes a drop of them. I am in the middle of Flaubert’s letters; and your wail is exactly in sympathy with his, which was absolutely continuous—Really it gives one a physical headache to listen to him—And such it is to know what a prose style should be, or to have an image of Gods or costermongers in ones brain. I think your misery is a healthy one; I hope so, because I share it. Still, these are glimpses, such as never visit the Dobbins and the Thompsons; and all our [illegible] are a form of incense at the altar.

Nessa is here, and we talk—when her husband is gone for a walk alone and that is seldom—of art and life, and marriage and motherhood, and she always comes back to it—being the richest and ripest old creature under the sun—that Art is the only thing; the lasting thing, though the others are splendid. It is an agony though, but the mercy is to suffer and seethe, and not live as the —— I wont use proper names again as you will tweak my tail for it—the animals do. But by the time you get this you will be coaxing some work of genius out of you, and what I say will be morbid garrulity.

I like your poem; indeed it is a theory of mine that happiness and sorrow are equally good, and beautiful, if you can only find the form for them, because that tickles, supplies, the sense which is above the reach of these accidents. If you had a young man [Saxon Sydney-Turner] exquisitely cultivated, almost omniescient, pale as a lily and dusky as a cedar, picking out hymn tunes in the room beneath you, you wouldn’t write sense either.

Nessa is very well and beautiful and happy as some rich flower drawing nourishment tranquilly all day long. It is a game of mine to find figures for her; but they always perish before her. Did you do a drawing for me? That was divine charity: was it the one I saw? I should honestly like to have it, if I may. You know I like your drawings: some of them particularly. This is curious, charming country: I dont feel so sure of Mrs Dew Smiths taste as you do; dont you think she has lapses. But it is a perfect house for us; and Adrian and I begin to feel responsible people. I hope you will write again; I am very fond of you, and you seem to me one of the quickest of women; quivering your feet like a moth on the wing. We have great Hawkmoths here, over the tobacco plants, at night.

Yr. AVS

Lady Darwin

[]

383: To Violet Dickinson

Sunday [22 September 1907]

The Steps, Playden [Sussex]

My Violet,

I wish sometimes the unpremeditated desire to write to me would come over you. Every word I must earn before I have it. And yet you are a good, generous, woman too; and would give me pounds or blood if I asked it.

Where are you, how are you, and do you love me—or have you found some choicer specimen somewhere! O no—I wont believe it.

I have been talking to young men for the last fortnight—Lamb and Sidney-Turner, but they remain so disinterested that I see how I shall spend my days a virgin, an Aunt, an authoress. S. T. is now downstairs with Adrian, making out a chess problem, or fingering his own opera on the piano. For they can write music, as well as Latin and Greek and all the rest of it. [Lytton] Strachey is with Nessa and Clive. My God, they are a happy couple! I used to think it might be intermittent, but now I see with pulse serene the very heart of the machine—how for weeks together they seem to hover over the same flower. We have gone on, having picnics and walks and so forth, you will tell me how fortunate and happy I am.

We go back on Thursday, and I want to write for six months unceasingly—about the pace I go now—ink pots drying beneath me—paper withering, as beneath the blast of some Tropic wind.

On Monday I go to Morley and lecture on Keats. Adrian is going to the Working Men to teach them History; he has found a man to read with. My letters are horribly egoistic—but whats an Aunt for?

I think you might tell me when you will come and see me. Have you heard from Nelly? I was talking today—singing rather—the praises of that exquisite constellation—Nelly and Violet and Ly. G. God: Osborne. Like a hot goat, I am pining for my garden of beautiful women.

No news of Kitty.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

384: To Emma Vaughan

[29 September 1907]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

Dearest Todger,

You are a good faithful little beast to write; I daresay damp, marshy, island places develop your virtues. There was a great toad at Rye, who used to climb on to my knee and exhibit his jewel, and I kissed him. We got back two days ago: and I received a summons from Morley to attend on Mondays! I blasphemed Sheep [shanks] on a post card, and got a curt reply to say I had chosen Monday myself and alterations are now very difficult. However, nothing will induce me to sacrifice my Richter : I go tomorrow and tackle the egg eater.

There is a certain smugness about Sussex, and I envy you your Highlands, in spite of the Scotch. Didn’t you know that my Scotch blood had mixed long ago with the French and English, so that the finest conoisseur, tasting, it, can detect only a peculiar sweetness, neither French nor English but like the essence or soul of something long since dead? That is why—but you know what the effect has been.

I found yesterday a man who cures corns, called Lenfestry—wealthy, though undistinguished. Will he be Marn’s father-in-law? I don’t like to write to her. I heard from Aunt Mary the other day; and the ten children are all either coming to-day for the night, going to balls, staying at Seaford, hearing R[alph Vaughan Williams]s piece at Cardiff, producing children—while Aunt M. sits at home, praying that Emmie’s next attack may seize her on a visit. Do you know of anyone who wants, not a secretary or a journalist, or a nurserymaid or a governess, or a cook, but a—Cordelia [Fisher] in short?

I suppose you will now be in the train or on the boat. So I will send this to the flat.

Yours,
AVS

Sussex

[]

385: To R. C. Trevelyan

[Autumn 1907?]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

Dear Mr Trevelyan,

Thank you for sending me the notice of Mr Binyon’s lectures, which I had not seen. I am afraid I cannot go myself, but I will certainly tell others.

Yours sincerely,
Virginia Stephen

Trinity College, Cambridge

[]

386: To Violet Dickinson

Tuesday [1 October 1907]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My Violet,

God knows where you may be at this moment, and as you dont write I see no way of beginning or going on with this letter. I cant tell you for instance how I sat to [Francis] Dodd today—or saw someone like Katie—only overgrown as a ripe mulberry tree—at the concert the other night.

I gave a lecture to 4 working men yesterday: one stutters on his ms—and another is an Italian and reads English as though it were mediaeval Latin—and another is my degenerate poet, who rants and blushes, and almost seizes my hand when we happen to like the same lines. But I dont have any notes—I can tell you the first sentence of my lecture: “The poet Keats died when he was 25: and he wrote all his works before that.” Indeed—how very interesting, Miss Stephen.

By the way. You are a d——d bad woman: I asked you not to show my writing, and you read it to the Crums. Do send it back here at once. Please never read, or quote or show—it puts me in a misery only to imagine it.

We are all driving our pens like so many ploughs: Clive is starting his reviews and articles and novels; Nessa is getting models; Adrian analyses old ladies wills; I—as usual. To punish you, you shant know what it is that I’m doing—and yet,—well it needs reading in the British Museum, and a special ticket.

I am beginning to like this house; and to wish to make—a little money and buy furniture.

Now write, or telegraph: I will pay you 6d.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

387: To Violet Dickinson

[Autumn 1907?]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My Violet,

I dont think I can afford a dress at this moment.

Will you send me back the copy of my Life of you? I always forget it, and I want to have it, great work as it is!

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

388: To Lady Robert Cecil

[October? 1907]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My dear Nelly,

It will be delightful if you will come to tea. Would Tuesday or Wednesday next week suit you?

Why should I be angry—or is the temper of the beast such that you must always take precautions? Of course I was angry—that you didn’t come and stay with us. Now you see my manners are aping those of Ly G. God[olphin]-O[sborne]—but there is always this unfortunate drawback to a perfect success—that I cant, nor if I die for it, tell a lie.

Are you condemning authors as usual?

Yr. affate
VS

Hatfield

[]

Letters 389-447

389: To Violet Dickinson

Tuesday [15? October 1907]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My Violet,

I wrote you a long letter, and lost it. When I got back my heart leapt up to see the flowers, until I checked myself and supposed that they were a present from the gardener to Sophy—you know my modest way! Then it was explained how a maid had brought them, with Miss Dickinsons or Miss Lytteltons love. A van outside confounded the two. I didn’t think Lyttelton was likely.

My writing makes me tremble; it seems so likely that it will be d—d bad—or only slight—after the manner of Vernon Lee. This isn’t a catch for compliments. I will send you something when I have written it, but I have wasted all my time trying to begin things and taking up different points of view, and dropping them, and grinding out the dullest stuff, which makes my blood run thick. However, I shall begin again now: I have 4 books of white paper waiting me.

When shall you come through London. I think I might somehow insinuate myself inside a cab; or wait on the top of a box, or roll into a rug somewhere. Why do you stay at Aldeburgh, there are east winds there, both of God and man.

Nessa and Clive came back yesterday—but I cant now go into his character; it will really be some time before I can separate him from her. I dont think I have spoken to him alone since they married.

Adrian is going off to his new man on Thursday. Altogether, as you are a woman of discrimination you can picture us, as Aunt Fisher says: she has just written to beg us to dine with her—any night—any time—any clothes. I am sitting to Dodd once more tomorrow. I have got to review a book on Marie Antoinette.

Now shall you write and tell me—your letters aren’t letters—but as though the Chow had got his tail in the ink. Beatrice has sent Nessa some gigantic 3 pronged forks.

AVS

Berg

[]

390: To Vanessa Bell

[October? 1907]

[29 Fitzroy Square, W.]

Beloved,

We missed you today. Here is a cheque. Harry [Stephen] writes that as he only spends 2 days in London he wants to meet you and Clive at dinner on Tuesday if possible. Could you dine here, at 8?

I have Dodd tomorrow, so God knows if I shall see you. O misery. But why should I intrude upon your circle of bliss? Especially when I can think of nothing but my novel.

Yr. B.

I hear that you have sent some venison. It is very convenient—we shall make a pasty.

Berg

[]

391: To Violet Dickinson

[November 1907]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My Violet,

Here is the Review. Well, going through it again, I think it is fairly clear that the whole of Nelly’s objection to Miss Sinclair is a moral one. She thinks that Miss S. holds up a bad man to our admiration. She makes one or two purely artistic criticisms, as to likeness to life and so on, that I cant judge, as I havent read the book.

I think her position is quite tenable if she could explain her reason for thinking that morality is essential to art—But this she refuses to do. By Miss S’s insincerity I think she means “bad morality” or that she knows such conduct to be wrong, and advocates it, for the sake of unconventionality. But I dont think she proves either that such conduct is wrong; or that Miss S. advocates it; or that, supposing both those things are so, that they damage the book as a work of art. I have made some more remarks in the margin—as I went along rather hastily—so dont show them to Nelly.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

392: To Violet Dickinson

[4 November 1907]

Postcard

[29 Fitzroy Square, W.]

Dont say a word to Nelly of my criticisms, as they are hasty, and probably some of them unsound.

AVS

Berg

[]

393: To Lady Robert Cecil

[November 1907]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

Dear Nelly,

Dont you think ‘Our book box’ is not the right name? R. Smith suggests it this morning. Personally I should like something simpler, and not jocular. I dont know what you feel. ‘A monthly review’ ‘The book of the month’ ‘Our Review’ ‘The Reviewers Choice’—‘The Book on the Table’—Lord how bad they all are. ‘A book! The Monthly Book’ and that suggests nurse—Only I think it should be something formal and not trivial and chatty. But you will make your own suggestion—I am writing to him too.

Yrs. AVS

Hatfield

[]

394: To Lady Robert Cecil

[November 1907]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My dear Nelly,

Would you and Lord Robert dine with us on the 12th at 8? It will be a really disreputable dinner—not even a party, and not much of a dinner. If we dress, we dress in soft old time stained clothes.

I have been writing to Reginald [Smith]—Really, you know it will be great fun! Of course I talk of Lady Rs [Robert’s] modesty, and we shake our heads over it together.

Yr. AVS

Hatfield

[]

395: To Madge Vaughan

Nov. 6th [1907]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

Dearest Madge,

Dont you think it disgraceful the way you neglect your foster child? I should have a case against you in any law court—not one letter since—last Christmas I should think.

I want to know what each of your sons and daughters is like—in face and character: what their mother does and thinks—is she writing a great work—on the lines I once laid down [in Letter 265]?

We spent the summer, which seems a long time ago, in Rye, and saw a great deal of Henry James, who talked about you, and made a dreadful picture of a young woman forced by circumstance to spend her life among high places in the midst of perpetual winters. I have not seen any of your relations—not even Marny, who stayed with you, I think.

Adrian and I have settled down for the winter; and I begin to feel that we are staying in this house, not merely passing through, as I did. I am trying to beautify it; but as I cant buy priceless looking glasses, and we want to keep free from arm chairs, there is not much to be done. Think how near to the Zoo we are!—and Adrian means to become a member. He is working away, and enjoying his Law.

Nessa and Clive live, as I think, much like great ladies in a French salon; they have all the wits and the poets; and Nessa sits among them like a Goddess. I think you know that we also are going to have our Janets and Halfords—It is exciting: I shall spend most of my time in the nursery, I foresee; and leave the wits downstairs.

Have you been writing in the Times lately; do tell me when anything comes out.

I wonder how Miss Perfect and Mr Birkbeck are [teachers at Giggleswick]. Dont you think one evening, when Will has gone to dine with the gentleman who doesn’t ask you, that you might write me an account of all these things? Are you coming to London? Would you like some Vegetables? Give the Children my love—only it wont mean anything to them. I hear you saw Adeline [Vaughan Williams], and went to Ralphs music.

Your loving,
AVS

Sussex

[]

396: To Lady Robert Cecil

[November? 1907]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

Dear Nelly,

I am sorry I did not let you know, but I never thought of it—why didn’t you ask?

I can’t see that it matters if all the books are autobiography—as the understanding was that we were to choose what we thought interesting. I don’t see that R. Smith can complain if we make a good choice.

Of course I can easily send you a line to say what I am going to do—but I always leave it to the last minute, and at this moment have no ideas at all.

Yr. aff.
AVS

Hatfield

[]

397: To Violet Dickinson

[December 1907]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My Violet,

Thank you very much for your letter.

Am I not to come and see you?

Well—of course if it bores you and distresses you, I suppose I must refrain. But you might consider my feelings rather more than you do I think.

I have been staying at Oxford, and stretching my brains with trained Arabs, with not an ounce of flesh on them. The atmosphere of Oxford is quite the chilliest and least human known to me; you see brains floating like so many sea anemonies, nor have they shape or colour. They are bloodless, with great veins on them. (This reads like a school childs exercise—so precise and true is it.) Of course Herbert Fisher has his merits; but what can you do with a brain so competent that nothing resists it—because after all, it attempts only solid things—histories, and triumphant little text books. Now my brain I will confess, for I dont like to talk of it, floats in blue air; where there are circling clouds, soft sunbeams of elastic gold, and fairy gossamers—things that cant be cut—that must be tenderly enclosed, and expressed in a globe of exquisitely coloured words. At the mere prick of steel they vanish.

I wish you could tell me of some book to write about. I am sobbing with misery over Vernon Lee, who really turns all good writing to vapour, with her fluency and insipidity—the plausible woman! I put her on my black list, with Mrs. Humphry Ward. But though this is true as truth, as the Sage said in the fairy tale, still it can’t be said in print; anymore than I can sit to Dodd naked. Though Heaven knows the verdict of my glass is—Damn modesty.

The Quaker has written me a ‘spout of pure joy, from my entrails’ O Childhood! O Motherhood! O Lamb of Light! O Babe of Purity! O! O! O! Tell me my darling, how you feel this wondrous blessing? Ah God, I would as soon tell the butcher which was my jugular artery, or the thief which was my diamond ring. She hopes to suck blood and bread from me.

Well—you see the advantage of writing to you is that I needn’t see when you yawn, and look like a restive mare at Ella’s clock. All chattering, hurrying, inarticulate, importunate, busy bees come from Ella in this world: that reminds me I must at once write to Sheepshanks and say that I will teach no more. ‘O no more—darkness has vanquished Light.’ I dined out last night, but I have only as usual to damn my kind and the poisoned world where I live.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

398: To Lady Robert Cecil

[December 1907]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

Dear Nelly,

I ought to have thanked you before this for the poem which came some days ago. She wrote some things I have read elsewhere, and remembered. They have great charm—but I think H. Newbolt has printed too many fragments dont you? Some read like rash experiments. But they are very interesting. I am asked by the Friday Club to ‘approach’ Lord Robert. If he would consent to speak for 10 minutes, on any Friday night, on any subject, except politics, they would be delighted. I daresay however his own mind is in no doubt whatever. But it would be splendid if he would. And I want also to bother you with my good working man [from Morley College]—who is a socialist, of a kind, and a poet; but also very clever and enthusiastic, and he can write short hand, and is a good man at accounts, and has a testimonial. His name is Cyril Zeldwyn, 29 Montagu St.—But I’m afraid there is no chance that you will want him—and dont bother—

Yr. AVS

Hatfield

[]

399: To Lady Robert Cecil

[December 1907]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My dear Nelly,

I am very grateful to Lord Robert for offering to see Mr Zeldwyn. I will certainly tell him. I dont know what job he is after now—I dont think he is really very exciting; but what you call a deserving case.

Will you and Lord Robert dine with us on Thursday 16th? We will try and be disreputable, but I am afraid we are more likely to be respectable middle class, which is so dull. Anyhow, will you dress as little as is consistent with your part—We will have Herrings and Tripe.

We dine—if you can call it dinner—at 8.

Yr. aff.
AVS

Hatfield

[]

400: To Lady Robert Cecil

[1908?]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My dear Nelly,

I am so sorry about Lord Robert, I hope he is better now. I had a card from Violet to say ‘Don’t go to Grove End Road’ which was peremptory.

I wish it wasn’t part of Violet’s charm to be cryptic, and inaccurate; I wish she didn’t select what she thinks amusing. I wish you both weren’t so modest, so sharp of tongue. ‘South Kensington Venus of Milo’ is excellent, from one who has studied Keats for ‘20 years or so’. What is there left for me to say? or is it any use for me to unsay what I never said? Vulgarity is a world I never thought about you; but your education is no excuse; it sounds better than mine. After all, what have you to excuse? Really I don’t know what its all about; (my Aunt stays in the house, and confuses my mind). I can’t help wishing that there was some simpler way of expression between reasonable people; less charm and less modesty. However, it is the creed of all good women.

These are the preachings of that Venus, I suppose; and you will run away, or feel crushed—or quote Milton. If you knew how alarming you and Kitty, and Violet are! I won’t quote though; when shall I come and see you? Only you must promise not to laugh at me.

Your affte.
AVS

I have forgotten to thank you for the 19th Century which I enjoyed very much.

Hatfield

[]

401: To Violet Dickinson

[26? January 1908]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My Violet,

Your wishes are very kind—I suppose. What does one say on these occasions? I am speculating about a book; I enjoy this more even than buying one. It flatters my vanity. Why? Now this is a subtle psychological question, and perhaps you will decide it.

Nessa and Clive dined here last night; she had a long visit from Katie [Cromer], which she said was like the descent of Artemis or Aphrodite. Did Nessa ever say anything so literary? No—but Aphrodite pushing through fields of Amaranth, and plucking berries of amber, while jays twittered on her shoulder. If Katie should ever attain to that rank where a Court Poet or fool is needed—there is one—I need say no more.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

402: To Madge Vaughan

[February 1908]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My dear Madge,

I thought I had written to you. All is as well as possible with both of them—the baby flourishes, and Nessa has got on steadily from the first. She is to get up today, and next week will begin going out the Doctor says.

I find it hard to describe Julian, save that he is healthy and fair, with large blue eyes. Nessa takes great pleasure in him, though she is also very critical.

Well—it is a mercy that is over, and I go about congratulating myself all day long.

I hope you have lost your cold. Everyone here, except ourselves, has influenza. That wont interest you! but I write in haste.

Yr. AVS

King’s

[]

403: To Violet Dickinson

[February 1908]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My Violet,

Now I shall have to get you a postal order. I have my eye on a beautiful Molière, for which I shall appropriate 10/-and that is altogether too much. But flesh is weak.

We had Miss Daniel. She seems quick and merry and I think will do very well. Nessa flourishes—the doctor has given up daily visits.

I shall like my book.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

404: To Lady Robert Cecil

[early March 1908]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

Dear Nelly,

I am afraid I cant come to lunch, as I have my German lesson on Tuesday which I had forgotten. But my sister is bringing me to pay you a visit—unasked—Well, I daresay I shall be in the way, but I like poignant situations.

Here is your review. I think it tenderer than the woman deserves, though if I were she I should gather some meanings between the lines; of course it is quite fair, and plain and reasonable; good criticism I call it—because while it gives an opinion it also shows what the stuff is like. Do you say ‘By comparison’ or ‘from comparison’—I say ‘from’—only for the sound, I think. Legouis is a man who writes on Wordsworth’s youth , I think: we have his books—unread. Well well—what are we coming to when the aristocracy can write literary criticism! I must tell my friend—brother—citizen—[Francis] Dodd.

Yr. AVS

I like that last sentence—applied to others.

Hatfield

[]

405: To Lady Robert Cecil

[April 1908]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My dear Nelly,

I ought to have thanked you before for the National Review. I will send it back. B[ernard] Holland writes a good deal beside the point; but he quotes some lovely little poems, which I had not read. I think she has a curious magic for 2 or 3 lines, or even more; but it seems to fade very easily. I don’t suppose she could have managed a long poem—but some of these are perfect.

By the way, [Reginald] Smith, the good grocer, wants me to write about Delanes life ; and I find it is all politics. I will try, but if I fail, as seems likely, I will write about Mr Abercrombies poems. I expect to spend my holiday wrestling with them on the moors. They may be works of genius: I haven’t read them!

I hope De Morgan is done to your liking. I am so sick of writing at this moment!

Yr. VS

Hatfield

[]

406: To Clive Bell

Wednesday [15 April 1908]

[29 Fitzroy Square, W.]

My dear Clive,

I have been reading your letter aloud to Adrian and Saxon, who is dining with us. I wonder how much you contribute to these conversations of yours. I never hear them; nor does Saxon. Once in a German railway station he met an American who seemed to him a sensible man. He, Saxon, is very considerate and even caressing tonight, and asks me what preparations I have made for St Ives. Have I ever read Apuleius? No—but I have heard of the Golden Ass—and such is his charity that he thinks this creditable. I had Janet Vaughan and Hester Ritchie to tea with me, and I find myself rather good with children. But I take it for granted that they have only reached a certain stage, which I invent for them; and now and then I imagine that they have their suspicions.

You see, I am dull, and uninformed. Delane is infinitely depressing, because he managed to live a substantial life without once disarranging anything. I cant get at him at all. Imagine a gigantic George, with all George’s palpable illusions, as to the value of coronets, and the authority of white waistcoats come true. For I cant believe in wars and politics. I think I shall write about Abercrombie after all, but to do that I must read him.

I dreamt last night that I was showing father the manuscript of my novel; and he snorted, and dropped it on to a table, and I was very melancholy, and read it this morning, and thought it bad. You dont realise the depth of modesty in to which I fall.

Thanks to Nessa’s warning, we have prevented our landlord from robbing us of £4.5/- I told him we could reclaim the tax; and he said I was quite right.

I have been writing Nessa’s life; and I am going to send you 2 chapters in a day or two. It might have been so good! As it is, I am too near, and too far; and it seems to be blurred, and I ask myself why write it at all? seeing I never shall recapture what you have, by your side this minute. I should like to write a very subtle work on the proper writing of lives. What it is that you can write—and what writing is. It comes over me that I know nothing of the art; but blunder in a rash way after motive, and human character; and that I suppose is the uncritical British method; for I should choose my writing to be judged as a chiselled block, unconnected with my hand entirely.

I gather that you are going to a dance; and I believe you go because you think your wife the most beautiful woman in England, and she goes because she thinks so too. Kiss her, most passionately, in all my private places—neck—, and arm, and eyeball, and tell her—what new thing is there to tell her? how fond I am of her husband?

Your AVS

My address at St Ives will be,

Trevose House,

Draycot Terrace.

Quentin Bell

[]

407: To Clive Bell

Monday [20 April 1908]

Trevose House, St Ives, Cornwall

Dear Clive,

What an inquisitor you are! Such gifts surely are ill spent upon the placid fortunes of your sister in law; you should create a young lady to deserve them. But if silence whets your appetite, I can always be discreet.

Mercifully Bank Holiday is over, and the wind is sinking. No fishing boat could venture out today, so my landladies daughter told me at breakfast, and the family depend upon the sale of mackerel—and its lodgers. There are two here, upstairs; a ‘confidential man’, and his wife, and child; and not one of the three has had a bath in the 7 weeks they have been here. So Mrs Rouncefield told me, with a suspicion of pride. I had a very strenuous walk against a 40 mile wind this afternoon, but I found some gorse bushes, which smelt of nuts, as George Meredith says they do; and I took shelter beneath a grey rock, hollowed by Druids, I suppose. Also I observed the singular beauty of leafless but budding trees against a deep blue sea. The sea is a miracle—more congenial to me than any human being. Yes, you talk of average men and women—and I am glad, though you wont allow it, to believe that the average woman has her superior. But—how am I to account for George, and Hugo, and Walter Headlam? No, the eternal puzzle still forbids me to accept your enviable decisions. There are moods when I doubt that we even are as extraordinary as you would have us. At least if we are extraordinary—cheepers and chirpers and childbearers and scribblers as we are—What must the rest be! The human race seems to drop down a bottomless pit. My mood is embittered by the Life of Delane, which I have been reading all day. I must write about it tomorrow—and it closes me round with depression. How people can live that life, and why they should write about it, or why in the last instance I should spend one moment or one drop of ink over it—is all a chain of rusty iron to me. I am the slave at the end.

Your dog [Gurth] happily was induced to sit in a trough today, under the belief that he was going the best way to drink it; and so matters are improved.

Tell Nessa to bring all her thick clothes. It is very cold, but divinely beautiful. Tomorrow I am going to Tren Crom.

Yr. aff.
AVS

Quentin Bell

[]

408: To Lytton Strachey

Wednesday [22 April 1908]

Trevose House, Draycott Terrace, St Ives, Cornwall

Dear Lytton,

The only notepaper to be had in the county of Cornwall is this—what they call commercial. Indeed, if you could see under what circumstances I write a letter you would think me something of a moralist. I have a sitting room, which is the dining room, and it has a side-board, with a cruet and a silver biscuit box. I write at the dining table, having lifted a corner of the table cloth, and pushed away several small silver pots of flowers. This might be the beginning of a novel by Mr Galsworthy. My landlady, though a woman of 50, has nine children, and once had 11; and the youngest is able to cry all day long. When you consider that the family sitting room is next mine, and we are parted by folding doors only—what kind of sentence do you call this?—you will understand that I find it hard to write of Delane “the Man”. I have had a long letter of instruction from [Reginald] Smith. He bids me bring out the human side, “his unswerving loyalty, alike to subordinates and chief,—in a word the high qualities of head and heart which” etc. etc. “Nay, my dear Miss Stephen, there is no comparison, for the real human interest, which the Cornhill seeks, between Delane and Mr Abercrombie.” “I really believe, dear Miss Stephen, that if you will put heart and head into it, you will make a mark in reviewing.” Did you ever have a compliment like that?

I spend most of my time, however, alone with my God, on the moors. I sat for an hour (perhaps it was 10 minutes) on a rock this afternoon, and considered how I should describe the colour of the Atlantic. It has strange shivers of purple and green, but if you call them blushes, you introduce unpleasant associations of red flesh. I am afraid you have little feeling for nature. I have seen innumerable things since I came here that would be worth writing down—“yellow gorse, and sea—” trees against the sea—but I should no doubt use so many words wrongly that it would be necessary to write this letter over again—like Clive. I have read a good many books, it seems to me. Your Pascal is looked at suspiciously by the servant. I picked a branch of white blossom yesterday, and asked her what it was. She said it was May. Somehow I thought that May was pink.

It will be a charity if you will write an answer. I am amazingly garrulous, because I have not spoken since I saw you, except to discuss the joints of animals.

Yr. Ever,
VS

Frances Hooper

[]

409: To Lytton Strachey

Tuesday [28 April 1908]

Trevose House, Draycott Terrace, St Ives, Cornwall

Dear Lytton,

Your letter was a great solace to me. I had begun to doubt my own identity—and imagined I was part of a sea-gull, and dreamt at night of deep pools of blue water, full of eels. However, Adrian came suddenly that very day, like some grim figure out of a Northern Saga—so I imagine—some ice bound captain, travelling for centuries with a frozen beard. He had been snowed upon, and hailed upon and rained upon, and when he descended towards evening upon some lonely farm, the good women cowered behind the door, and bethought them of their honour. Sometimes, such was their modesty, he had to walk 4 miles at the end of the day’s journey. However, he had had a very good time, and had met many worthies, and had many stories to tell. Then Nessa and Clive and the Baby and the Nurse all came, and we have been so domestic that I have not read, or wrote. My article upon Delane is left in the middle of a page thus—“But what of the Man?”—To answer that question, it will be necessary to come back—Saturday—but you will have time to write here, and to notice that my “b” is like that and my “v” is like that. A child is the very devil—calling out, as I believe, all the worst and least explicable passions of the parents—and the Aunts. When we talk of marriage, friendship or prose, we are suddenly held up by Nessa, who has heard a cry, and then we must all distinguish whether it is Julian’s cry, or the cry of the 2 year old, who has an abscess, and uses therefore a different scale.

Adrian went back last night, to have tea with S: T: [Saxon Sydney-Turner] dine with S. T. and discuss the opera with S. T. I sent him a large pot of cream, and I expect a letter in Ciceronian Latin. “Did you approve of my use of cur with the Dative, or do you think it too Tacitean?” You terrify me with your congregations of intellect upon Salisbury plain. My reverence for clever young men affects me with a kind of mental palsy. I really cannot conceive what the united minds of all those you name produced in the way of talk. Did you—but I can’t begin to consider it even. I saw Rupert Brooke once, leaning over the gallery at Newnham, in midst of Miss [Amber] Reeves and the Fabians.

We are going to a place called the Gurnard’s Head this afternoon—and now I look up and behold it pours! So we shall sit over the fire instead, and I shall say some very sharp things, and Clive and Nessa will treat me like a spoilt monkey, and the Baby will cry. However, I daresay Hampstead is under snow. How is your cold? I got a stiff neck on the rocks—but it went.

Yr. ever,
AVS

Frances Hooper

[]

410: To Clive Bell

Wednesday [6 May 1908]

[29 Fitzroy Square, W.]

My dear Clive,

I have taken this great sheet, but I dont know whether I shall fill it, or whether loosing my garrulous tongue, I shall reach the uttermost corner, and crawl even into the crevices. Now there are 3 hard cs already; they dog me, and pepper my page with their brazen rings. I saw Saxon last night—did we not see the dawn rise, and the milk carts begin? A merry humour came over us, after a ‘fairly satisfactory—yes, I think I may say, very fairly satisfactory’ performance of the Gotterdammerung and we sat here, over our galantine, till three thirty. He read us 2 letters—one from Nessa, with—‘very affectionate’ at the end, exquisitely soft and just, like the fall of a cat’s paw; and one from you—you brought a tear to my eye, and a blush to my cheek, by speaking of bandaged hands and crippled knees. A little forethought over night would have saved it; but my train came upon me so suddenly. Before I had arranged my pose as woman of action I was called away; you know the results of disturbing the pen inchoate. But I should apologise; a subtle sense of what is due, however, makes me think that Nessa is the injured party. God knows it may be a punishment that I have no letter today. Perhaps you are in bed, for gravel may have got into the wound. Well, how am I to make you understand my contrition!

Why do you torment me with half uttered and ambiguous sentences? my presence is ‘vivid and strange and bewildering’. I read your letter again and again, and wonder whether you have found me out, or, more likely, determined that there is nothing but an incomprehensible and quite negligible femininity to find out. I was certainly of opinion, though we did not kiss—(I was willing and offered once—but let that be)—I think we ‘achieved the heights’ as you put it. But did you realise how profoundly I was moved, and at the same time, restricted, by the sight of your daily life. Ah—such beauty—grandeur—and freedom—as of panthers treading in their wilds—I never saw in any other pair. When Nessa is bumbling about the world, and making each thorn blossom, what room is there for me? Seriously nature has done so much more for her than for me. I shrank to my narrowest limits, and you found me more than usually complex, and contained. Chivalrous as you are, however, you took infinite pains with me, and I am very grateful. There are various matters I should like to talk to you about; for, with my loose pen I am always afraid of inflicting gashes on your ears. I have been reading Lamb and Landor—and set beside them a page of my own prose. Lord! what vapid stuff! If you could have seen my misery as I was at this exercise you might have believed in my modesty. I see all you say of my looseness—great gaps are in all my sentences, stitched across with conjunctions—and verbosity—and emphasis. If I had had a good grounding in Greek, I might have done better.

I have been writing Delane, and now I must face my novel. I think you will laugh at the natural trend of this letter; I have read it over, and half think to burn it; but if I do I shall have no answer, and no—truth.

I had no notion what an exquisite writer Lamb is; and thus I have a juster opinion of Miss V. S: and God knows how I shall have the courage to dip my pen tomorrow.

Yr. aff.
AVS

Quentin Bell

[]

411: To Lady Robert Cecil

[May 1908]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My dear Nelly,

I was very sorry not to come that day, but our opera began at 4.30. I don’t know whether you are in London or away, your letters have the charm of mystery. You hint at politics, and strange summonses, and forget that we plebeians know nothing of these matters.

I have not heard from Violet, and Ozzy, and I do not correspond.

I have written a commonplace article about the solid virtues of Mr Delane, which, when compressed into 5 pages, lose all their meaning. However—it is an ill omen—Reginald approves. What is your next? I must send back your Nat. Rev.

Yr. aff. AVS

Hatfield

[]

412: To Violet Dickinson

May 13th [1908]

29 Fitzroy Sq.

My Violet,

I dont know whether this will catch you anywhere, since I have no notion when boats sail, or how long they take. I made an attempt to follow the course of the Trent, but I have mixed Barbadoes and Bermuda in my mind. As you can imagine my chief curiosity is not about Barbadoes but simply: how do you and Beatrice get on? I try to imagine long hot days on deck, and meals, and odd little middle aged women, who will confide their histories to you, and Beatrice will scowl at them, but get a great deal of information from stewards and captains.

These are my speculations; and I should also ask you how you are, but you will have forgotten all about that I hope: anyhow you may tell me when you write.

I had a fortnight at St Ives; Adrian and Nessa and Clive came for the last week. I doubt that I shall ever have a baby. Its voice is too terrible, a senseless scream, like an ill omened cat. Nobody could wish to comfort it, or pretend that it was a human being. Now, thank God, it sleeps with its nurse. Now and then it smiled at Nessa, and it has a very nice back; but the amount of business that has to be got through before you can enjoy it, is dismaying. Clive and I went for some long walks; but I felt that we were deserters, but then I was quite useless, as a nurse, and Clive will not even hold it.

Now I am at work again, and in a state of acute misery: I have had to write an article upon Delane, which Smith likes, and it is therefore bad. I have refused to review any more novels for the Times; and they send me Philosophy. I am struggling with my work of the Fancy and the Affections [Melymbrosia].

In your tropic sea, with green palm trees blowing on the shore, and naked boys fishing sponges from the rocks, or Beatrices half pence, none of these matters affect you at all. The Quaker has just published, and sent me, a book called “The Arising Light; Some Thoughts on The Central Radiance.” It is a gloomy work I know, all gray abstractions, and tremulous ecstasies, and shows a beautiful spirit.

We go almost nightly to the opera, and in the afternoon we have our German [with Miss Daniel]. Yesterday we came to a passage about maidens and the perils of war, at which she blushed and said to me, as one woman to another, “We will not read this, as It is not nice.” She has, as the young poets say “an incomparable virginity.” Sheer virtue as love alone could drive me, on this hot afternoon with a hand all tremulous with pen driving, to fill this great white sheet; no one has asked me to marry them, and I have had no more illicit kisses. In short, we are as you can imagine us; I saw George in the Strand, and ran, and caught a Bus—the wrong one—but he never saw me. John Bailey has been cross examined by Eustace Hills, and it is said that the Times have been shamefully treated; and that Murray has triumphed unjustly.

The desolation of London when Manchester St. and Square are empty is apalling; I must write to B ; I try to call forth her laugh, as of a startled jay, and to imagine her figure, in the striped coat, in New York. Keep the interviews for me. If she sticks anyone in the eye with a bonnet pin she will undoubtly be taken for the Indiana murderess.

I hope you sleep all day, and dream of me; writing is the very devil; I sit over a fireless grate with my head in my hands. Are you happy?

AVS

Berg

[]

413: To Lady Robert Cecil

[May 1908]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My dear Nelly,

Thank you very much for sending Violets letter, I had one later, just before they reached New York. It was hot, and she longed to be home!—but I daresay boredom is a healthy sign. I am sure she is bored—but so should we all be.

The National Review is here, polluting my room with its abuse of the late Sir Henry C[ampbell] B[annerman]. I think politicians and journalists must be the lowest of Gods creatures, creeping perpetually in the mud, and biting with one end and stinging with the other, in spite of your connections. Mary Coleridge is in odd company. You are sarcastic, but I shall certainly come to see you, if only I saw my way to cover my head and my back. Half my life is blighted by the necessity of dressing; all my friendships suffer; some die. Have you an affection for me? old and bitter as I am! and, to end this egoistical sheet, Smith has added words to my sentences, cut out others, till I threaten to resign. I am furious.

Yr. AVS

Hatfield

[]

414: To Lytton Strachey

Monday [18 May 1908]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

Dear Lytton,

Could you come to tea with me on Thursday? I have got so miserably involved in opera and the German language that that seems to be the only free afternoon, but it would be delightful if you could come then. I have been getting my books in order, you will be glad to hear: the gaps are awful.

Yours ever,
VS

Frances Hooper

[]

415: To Lady Robert Cecil

[May? 1908]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My dear Nelly,

I am going to another opera on Tuesday, so, unless I could come early, I am afraid that afternoon is useless.

I am so bewildered with operas—we go regularly—that I cant make sensible engagements. Shall I come down one day and see you, and return by the night train?

I dont know how to settle these matters.

Why dont you stay in London?

When is Violet coming back!

Yr. AVS

Hatfield

[]

416: To Clive Bell

[May 1908]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My dear Clive,

It was charming to get your letter this morning. I also consider the subject, conscious of great warmth, and at the same time of a wish to make things clear. (I choose a bad moment—carts roaring, dogs barking, the cock calling for his hen) But it would be comfortable to reach a simple state in which we could feel easy, which might last too. Are explanations any use, I wonder? If I could make you see the state in which half my days are spent you might realise many things. When you and Adrian are talking I plunge about in a phantom world, and wonder who the people are in hansoms, and what is going on in a certain place in the New Forest. But I dont see that these matters are very exalted, or any better than your manly talk. Nevertheless I am sometimes (to be candid) bored by general conversation, and usually very much excited by what I am thinking myself. Then you come with your singular gift, and tell me that what I think is the thing; and my head spins—I feel above the Gods.

But is it really the thing? Isn’t there a kind of talk which we could all talk, without these mystic reservations? That is what I grope after, and believe we ought to find. As it is, I bid fair to become a prophetess, with only one worshipper. Saxon, Adrian and the rest accept my lowest estimate of myself, and think it handsome. These are all contrary blasts, as you will preceive, and whirl me to those extremes which we both regret. And you are partly responsible! Honestly I find it very hard, when I am not with you, to realise what you say. When I am with you, I realise my limitations distinctly. Nessa has all that I should like to have, and you, besides your own charms and exquisite fine sweetnesses (which I always appreciate somehow) have her. Thus I seem often to be only an erratic external force, capable of shocks, but without any lodging in your lives. But the main point of all this is that we are very fond of each other; and I expect we shall make out a compromise in time. I suppose we shall see more clearly what is what; and if we do our best to realise that, I cant see that much else matters. As for the value I put upon the truth of all these theories, my feeling, I mean, for you and Nessa, that is unspeakable. A miserable shifting, grey day, like today, is made tolerable only when I think of you.

I have been slashing at Melymbrosia!

This might go on for ever; but my hands are cold, and the light fades, wire by wire. Are you in the dark too, I wonder? My answer always is that you are happy whatever anybody else may be. Think of old Nessa in her armchair, with her red petticoat showing, and the Westminster [Gazette] on her knee!

Why dont you come to lunch with me on Thursday, 1.30? That seems the only time. Will you and your wife also dine with us on Thursday?

This letter has just come. Imagine the fields of Paradise and father and [Nun] Aunt!

Yr. AVS

Quentin Bell

[]

417: To John Waller Hills

[May 1908]

29 Fitzroy, W.

Dearest Jack,

I am very sorry. I am afraid it must have been a great shock to you.

Your aff’ate
VS

Nessa comes back on Sunday.

Berg

[]

418: To Violet Dickinson

[June 1908]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My Violet,

What a wonder that you are really back again. I have no trust in ships, and didn’t expect anything so definite. You dont say how you are. I will come on Wednesday, but I must go back by the 6 something, because we are going to the opera. I will come by the 3.9. and find my way up. We all flourish—Julian vaccinated—I am rushing off to Hampstead.

AVS

Berg

[]

419: To Lady Robert Cecil

[June 1908]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My dear Nelly,

Could I come down to you on Wednesday, 17th! I have lost your letter, in which I think you told me about trains. There must be one in the morning however, and another in the evening—which would bring me back at bed time. It would be a great treat, as a railway journey is a great excitement.

We went to Hampton Court yesterday, and to Kew the other day, and to Hampstead, and Dulwich, coming home at night—and the romance of the suburbs almost astounds me. There are enormous trees, and great lakes of water, and profound solitudes. This is what Adrian calls ‘phrase making’. I went down to Welwyn and had tea with Violet; she says she’s no better. I believe Welwyn will do more than the tropics.

Yr. VS

Hatfield

[]

420: To Madge Vaughan

Sunday [28 June 1908]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

Dearest Madge,

I waited to answer your letter, so that I might hear something more about Walter Headlam—I had only seen the paper. I hear, from Mr Sanger, that he came up from Cambridge on Friday, and was perfectly well; he went to a hotel, and was taken ill on Friday night, and moved to a hospital, where he died on Saturday [20 June]. No one knew what was the matter, nor was there any operation. He could tell me no more than this, and it seems very strange. He was supposed to have recovered entirely from his illness—indeed it was thought to be very much his own imagination. Anyhow, it is tragic, for he always seemed disappointed and aggrieved with the world. Last time I saw him he complained as usual, but thought that he was becoming known, and he had almost finished some edition of Aeschylus. I think there was something very charming about him, but he was difficult and I think he had quarrelled with most of the people at Cambridge.

I met your friend, Mr Norton, the other night. The guess was quite right—he was travelling with an Aunt, and knew that Will was a schoolmaster, and lived at Giggleswick, but did not know his name.

Are you coming to London at all? I think it is time.

It is impossible in a letter to describe our habits—I dont know that you asked me to describe them. As you know, I write, like some city clerk, and after all, it is quite harmless. Adrian is learning about wills. We have parties, and discuss the arts—I expect you would descend upon us like a prophetess with streaming black hair, and eyes of coal, and denounce us. However, I should welcome it, and refuse to be cowed.

Give my love to the children.

AVS

Sussex

[]

421: To Clive Bell

[Summer 1908?]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My dear Clive,

Here is another of my works, written last summer. It is rather thin and hasty, and as you will see, I have had to refrain and conventionalise where I might have been pointed. Even so, Violet thinks it a little harsh—such is the vanity of the modest. It has been copied by a Professional; and the other writings which I find are in such a horrid state that I cant read them myself even—and you know how I love my own works. Indeed that revelation of the passionate maiden heart is no longer concealed from you—but I still have some decency. I still think I will find other things to talk about, the Prime Minister, or Poetry.

Kiss my sister. “Clive whats that letter about? O these Authoresses!”

Yr AVS

Quentin Bell

[]

422: To Violet Dickinson

[July 1908]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My Violet,

I wont stay with you for Sunday, because I want to write a long review, and that is my best day. But, if you will have me, I will come on Saturday, 11th, and stay to dinner, and go back late. If you are asking some one else to come down, I will come another day—most days suit me.

I have got 2 huge volumes of Ly Bury’s Diaries to read and write about. Was she a relation or friend of yours? She lived in the time of the Regency, with which I always connect you. That reminds me that I have thrown away your envelope flap and cant remember the name of the book you want. Tell me, and I will bring it down. I have also been writing about President Roosevelt, for Smith, at his command. The sublety [sic] of the insinuations is so serpentine that no Smith in Europe will see how I jeer the President to derision, seeming to approve the while. I have also—you like to hear literary gossip!—entered into a long correspondence with Prothero, and we decide that I am probably to write about Ly. May Montagu. Will you give me some address in Wells to write to, as the time draws near, and Wells [Somerset] seems the most likely place.

We have a party tonight; at which a young lady, not V. S., is to meet her lover.

What are you doing, lying beneath your trees?

Case and I correspond with enthusiasm, and discuss you; Daniel sings your praises.

Yr. AVS

I have to spend tomorrow in a pilgrimage to Godmanchester [Lady Stephen]. 3 hours in train 3 hours there!

Berg

[]

423: To Violet Dickinson

[July 1908]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My Violet,

Thank you very much for all your singular goodness about my rooms. I have got them in the Vicars Close [Wells] for a week, and then I shall look about. Ought I to thank Mr Tudway? if that is his name?

This is the first letter of friendship that I have written for 6 weeks. Nothing happens here, except that I write and write, and curse and burn. It is regular as the seasons. I missed a visit from B. Richmond the day I came to you; however, nothing would alarm me more than to give him tea.

Lady Gwendolen [Godolphin Osborne] hopes I will go and see her at Windsor, if I’m not too much bored, or have her here. I sit every afternoon, in low neck, to Dodd, who is etching a picture, like George Eliot meditating the Spanish Gipsey [sic]. I am going to review a German book for the Times, and Daniel is giving me special lessons on it.

Shall I see you again?

Or are you off?

AVS

Berg

[]

424: To Violet Dickinson

[July? 1908]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My Violet,

Do tell me how I write to a Duchess:

1. My dear Duchess, (too familiar?)

2. Dear Duchess of Leeds, (too formal?)

3. Dear Duchess, nondescript?

Leeds has asked us to dine to meet Mr Ponsonby, but we cant go, or wont go.

I counted the hours I spent with you yesterday on my watch—3 or 4 they were—very serene for me—but how did you sleep, I wonder, after the sudden revelations I made you—of my genius, and charm, and melancholy, and love and beauty, and misunderstandings. I think with joy of certain exquisite moments when Rupert [the chow] and I lick your forhead [sic] with a red tongue and a purple tongue; and twine your hairs round our noses.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

425: To Lytton Strachey

[28 July 1908]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

Dear Lytton,

I shall be in on Thursday at 4.30, and delighted if you will come. Why are you a suppliant—why was your name once Lytton?

I go to spend a month at the theological college at Wells on Saturday.

Yours ever,
AVS

Frances Hooper

[]

426: To Clive Bell

Monday [3 August 1908]

Vicars Close, Wells [Somerset]

My dear Clive,

First, let me implore you to tell me what I should have seen had I looked out of the window at Slough? was it a naked Goddess or a Wesleyan Chapel? I mixed Slough with Swindon.

I am in the midst of ecclesiasticism here, bells, tolling for prayer; clerics sauntering past, ladies with wreaths, choir boys—Above me is a theological student, and last night Mrs Wall [landlady] came to ask whether I would receive a visit from him. I hesitated—upon which she said that he was a perfect gentleman, named Dallas, and it did seem a pity as two people should meet on the stairs and not know each other. I should have been an outcast had I refused, so I sent a message to say that I should be delighted. I hastily disposed my books—and hid my cigarette, and made out that I was studying a map of Somersetshire. He came in a minute, and we were both horribly shy, and he took a shiny armchair, and I another, with a lamp between us. In three months he will be ordained, and become one of 10 curates at St Mary Abbotts. I asked him whether he liked preaching and visiting—but he said he had done nothing but read so far. “Have you read both sides?” I ventured, at which he grew uncomfortable, suspected I meant Roman Catholicism—and said he had done all that at Oxford. “But of course, one has to read what the laymen are reading, in order to keep in touch.” His Bishop, also, liked him to hunt in order to keep in touch with the hunting men, and his ambition was to have a parish, in a good hunting centre, not too far from a town. Then we talked about winter sports, the different sets at Wells Cathedral, town and county, all very dull and set on tennis parties. “They ask you when they’ve only met you once”—and Miss Margaret Cowper, the Music Hall singer. In the midst of these matters—I think I kept my end up pretty well, by pretending that I hunted in the New Forest—he told me that Raphael was the greatest painter, and he would go anywhere to see his works. I am afraid he saw through me, at the end, because he asked me if I was the Miss Stephens who wrote for the Tatler. “I spell my name without an s” I said, and so we got on to names, and he went at last; I asked him to look in again, as meanly as I could—but God knows what we should find to say. I was driven to this kind of thing “Do you know some people called Lawrence? I think they went to the winter sports once.”

I must thank you for your exquisite allegory, which, if I play the part of Waterfall, seems to me pitched in your usual strains of aetherial flattery, I cant protest, because so much of what I must praise in you is included in the praise of myself. But—if you could see me under the influence of Lytton, Saxon and Miss Sheepshanks—“Miss Stephen do you ever think!” you would liken me rather to some swaying reed which swings with the stream. But enough of this—Shall I venture a 2nd sheet and delay my walk on the Mendips a few moments. The afternoon sun is still hot, and both the dogs [Gurth and Hans] show an apoplectic tendency. Indeed the rustic humour is entirely occupied with the dogs. “What a fat dog! D’you think he can see?” and so on.

I am climbing Moore like some industrious insect, who is determined to build a nest on the top of a Cathedral spire. One sentence, a string of “desires” makes my head spin with the infinite meaning of words unadorned; otherwise I have gone happily.

The Cathedral noises are more disturbing than good horse waggons; in this hot weather, old ladies chatter their gossip across the Close, and love making begins with the rise of the moon. But passion is proper to the season: and I shake my head, but resign myself. I screwed out a page of Melymbrosia—did you know that was the name?—this morning, but with such rage, such interruptions, that I must bargain for an upper room. Ah, but the rapture of being once more among my loves!

I read a considerable amount—St Simon, and Les Oberìé and so on: but I should soon tire of acquiring knowledge—(and I here beg pardon for my cacophonies), and feel ripe for a debouch of speech. Perhaps I shall enjoy an ecstasy upon the summit of the downs, from which Mrs Wall once, some 40 years ago, saw the sea. I am tempted to rush up to Manorbier for 10 days after this in order to look at some waves and cliffs; I am almost drowned in earth and antiquity here. Kiss your wife and whisper to her that if I were to write all that I think of Julian, you would draw a long sigh—keep silence, but meditate in your brain thoughts not to be uttered to women. If Adrian were there, a glance would pass between you. I will let you know my train when Bank Holiday is over.

Yr. AVS

Quentin Bell

[]

427: To Vanessa Bell

Tuesday [4 August 1908]

The Close, Wells [Somerset]

Beloved,

As you do not praise my blue paper you shall have a bit of white, albeit the edge is dusty. Pray thank your husband for his letter; I will be at the station at the time he says; he is a demon to tantalise me with his “small post”. Perhaps you will explain. An honest mind has no secrets.

I woke from a terrible dream, in which Jack [Hills] was breaking to me the news of your fatal injury from an omnibus, and found your letter; well, my good beast, things sound better. Julian good, a studio, and somewhere to sit in. I am hopelessly confused about my visit; but I had taken no steps.

This morning I had a letter from Hilton Young, sending me an address at a farm house, and asking when I should be in Marlborough, so that he might come and have tea with me. Olive Ilbert wrote by the same post, begging for news of our Thursday Evenings—who had come and what had been said. I am rather pleased with the idea of Manorbier; so I shall tell H. Y. that I shant be at Marlborough. I shall write with friendliness—but I have no discretion—no kind of instinct in me, such as most women have, in affairs of sex. Is it a fancy, a truth? But what should I say to Olive if he did propose to me? There would be a situation fit for the stage. She begs that you will write to her; and means to write me a long letter on landing, so I think she means to keep her eye on me.

I have been to Glastonbury by train this afternoon—the kind of expedition you hate—and it wasn’t one of my best. It was dark and windy; I missed the ruins, and found them, and thought them not half as good as the Glastonbury I have had in my head. They are too clean, and too dilapidated; besides new scaffolding is all over them, and there are benches at the proper views, notices about the sacred building; and middle class bicylists resting their ugly bodies all over the place. A man was digging and throwing up bits of pottery, which was like Greece; but who wants to discover more stone pillars of mutilated Early English architecture! So let us hear no more about them, my good Ape.

I cant get on with my writing, and I sit in an upper room and look into a glass case of black theology; and Cynthia will not speak, and my ship is like to sink.

However, it is always so when I take it up again, and it is worse than usual in a lodging, so perhaps it will come in time. Have you any news of Eily? I only see the Daily Mail; and I suppose you have a Times. Nun also writes, in fine feather; “The lads of Martineau Hall at Oxford” have asked her to discourse to them upon Quakerism and Free Thought; she has agreed, all in a tremor.

Aren’t you amazed at the superstition still alive for picturesque old Ladies, fluttering about the inner mysteries! There is here a book called “The Preachers Promptuary of Anecdote”, and I find the originals of all our Cabbin Boys in it. Amazing—“The lying woman of Devizes” who was struck dead in the marketplace—the little boy who dug holes on the sea shore, to hold the sea—the little boy who said an Alphabet because he did not know the Lord’s Prayer!

My student [Dallas] greets me curtly; I believe he has discovered that I am one of a blasted race.

O what joy to see you! I should rather like to see Julian, ripening like a nectarine in the sun, but I daresay it is better not. But kiss him, and just shiver his head with your finger tops. I catch myself comparing him with other babies, and when I see small boys of 8 or 10 I marvel to think that we shall have one going about the world with us, and asking information. “Who was Cousin Mia? Dont you like Uncle George? Why has Aunt Goat never married? I think you very beautiful Mama!”

Yr. B.

Husband writes a charming letter; dont believe him if he ever feels old again; he has the clown in him still.

Berg

[]

428: To Vanessa Bell

Friday [7 August 1908]

[The Close, Wells, Somerset]

Beloved,

I managed my journey [from Bath] with consummate skill, walking from one end of Shepton Mallet to the other, and avoiding the wrong train. I always ask everything—owing to certain adventures which I have no time to relate, and I find an astounding humanity in the race.

But I was fretful and peevish all the evening, because I had had my delight taken from me. For the first time, I could neither write nor read, but got out my calendar, and calculated the days to Saturday.

I did not have a letter from you this morning, but a solemn letter from Dorothea, saying that Helen is very seriously ill, has been growing weaker for the last ten days, and Herbert and Katharine are with her. She is conscious, and has no pain. It sounds desperate—but I dont know what to do. I must write an affectionate letter. They are all solidly devoted, of course, but I dont remember Helen much—except once, when we asked if she could play, and she strummed through a Beethoven Sonata, with the tramp of a regiment of dragoons. Num also writes, to tell me the same thing, with a sigh of relief.

I wonder if you talked about me, as you went home, or thought of me when the moon rose, and the rabbits who nibble the carnations came out to play. How should I know about the rabbits and the carnations, unless I had read Clive’s letters? I like to have a little scene, in which I am the leading lady; when I marry I shall never be quite so eminent. Indeed, I never am eminent, as it is, except when you and Clive are there to hint at catastrophes, and last times.

O I have been so peevish all day! I balanced one table on another, and put my writing book on top, and stood on a mound of cushions and tried to write Melymbrosia. But a violin began 2 doors off, and all the tradesmen called, and they came and bashed the floor over my head. Then I went out and bought my Daily Telegraph, which I hand over to Mrs Wall, when I have done with it. ‘I do like a bit of news’—and I bought a note book. I have bought a note book in every country town in England, I believe—and tried to evolve an article for the Cornhill, upon Mlle. de la Vallière. It is a choice between her and Miss Beale—but will the Cornhill call a prostitute a prostitute, or a mistress a mistress? However, I shall write it, at Manorbier, post it, so that R[eginald] S[mith] gets it when I am out of England. Do not understand by this that Miss Beale was a prostitute.

You will say I know, that it is well to keep me hungry, and one treat a week is enough for me. I believe I could manage whole fortnights, with outspread wings, at a great altitude, with no descent. Has it ever struck you that the way we take our pleasures is very unlike? Does it strike you that this letter is neatly written, in a hand that would do no discredit to Margaret, and that the sentences, though dull, are much of a size, and finish neatly? That is because you told me that I wrote you careless letters. But the truth is we are too intimate for letter writing; style dissolves as though in a furnace; all the blood and bones come through; now, to write well there should be a perfect balance; and I believe (o another sheet, one of the sheets I ruined for H. Young) that if I ever find a form that does suit you, I shall produce some of my finest work. As it is, I am either too formal, or too feverish. There, Mistress!

By the way, all the names will have to be changed again—Cynthia dont do. All fine ladies, ingenuous young ladies, with Meredithian blood in them, are called Cynthia; do find me another.

I spent a whole hour reading my 100 pages, and came to the conclusion that there is something of a structure in it; I did mean something; though there are such lapses that I almost fall wide awake—feel as old Sheep feels, as she goes about her world. However, the effect of reading is to make me very anxious to finish what I have to say. Sometimes I felt like a happy animal in its own burrow—weather tight and safe; and of course I think it can be improved. I made out various matters on a walk today. I sat on a hill and observed the Champaign, which is very noble, like a background in Velasquez. Ah well, I wont venture anymore. Why dont you write to me about pictures?

I must now write to Nelly, Violet, Dorothea, Nun, Aunt Mary, and I should write to Olive [Ilbert].

Her address is,

British Embassy
c/o G. Young.
Manchester on Sea
Mass. U.S.A.

Yr. B.

My caramels are very nasty—a sad disappointment—I eat your chocolate, and wish I always took your advice—My lip is bleeding. I bit it.

(Tomorrow it will be, Mrs Oram, Cathedral Green)

Berg

[]

429: To Clive Bell

Sunday [9 August 1908]

5 Cathedral Green, Wells [Somerset]

My dear Clive,

If you could have seen how often I read and reread your letter, deciphering every word, feeling every comma, and deciding in my own mind why some words had been rejected and others chosen, you would not accuse me of neglect. I then turned to Lytton’s poems—a pretty occupation for a virgin on the Sabbath! Yes, they are exquisite, and a little anthology I have here of minor Victorian verse shows none better. But (you will expect that but, and relish it) there is something of ingenuity that prevents me from approving as warmly as I should; do you know what I mean when I talk of his verbal felicities, which somehow evade, when a true poet, I think, would have committed himself? “Enormous mouth”, “unimaginable repose”, “mysterious ease”, “incomparably dim”; when I come upon these I hesitate; I roll them upon my tongue; I do not feel that I am breasting fresh streams. But then I am a contemporary, a jealous contemporary, and I see perhaps the marks of the tool where Julian will see the entire shape. I sometimes think that Lytton’s mind is too pliant and supple ever to make anything lasting; his resources are infinite. Jealousy—no doubt!

I have had the luck to pitch on the single house in Wells, I believe, where there are two children, between 3 and 5, who play all day long beneath my windows, and shriek incessantly. They tease the dogs and make them growl; they open the door and let them in; they peep in shyly, and ask to look at my ink pot. Their parents come after them, to apologise, and stay half an hour, telling me stories of their health and intelligence. The man has an impediment, which makes him repeat all he says twice over, and the woman is deaf, so that I have to repeat all I say twice over. However—she can make a salad and fry potatoes, and that amounts to genius in a landlady.

I think of Nessa with Julian! A page of Melymbrosia was strangled in the birth this morning. I look on the tombstones for a name for Cynthia, and found one lady called “Trideswide”. Belinda is perhaps a little too dainty for my woman, and what I conceive of her destiny. But I talk grandly, feeling in my heart some doubt that she will ever have a destiny.

Dorothea—to turn to business—writes that Helen [Stephen] may die at any moment; it is hopeless; and thinks that Katharine might possibly like to see her. I must offer, very tentatively, to go to Bristol, but I cant think that she will wish it—I hope not. If I go to Bath on Saturday, and to Wales on Monday, I ought to despatch Gurth on Friday. Will you send directions? I have not heard from Wales; could you possibly send me the exact name of someone who might have information?

Kiss my yellow honey Bee; you cant think how I look for letters and long for Saturday. I could write another sheet on that theme and make you blush—but—I am really shy of expressing my affection for you. Why? Do you know women? I had a walk yesterday after tea, between the downs, that almost crazed me with a desire to express it; I gave up at last, and lay with tremulous wings. I wish for nothing better—unless it were a kiss to crown all.

Quentin Bell

[]

430: To Violet Dickinson

Sunday [9 August 1908]

(All the bells ringing, and the fashion of Wells parading before me. It is a lovely place, and the country round is as good as it can be. 5 Cathedral Green, Wells)

My Violet,

I have no notion where you are, but I have promised to ask you whether you remember Mrs Wall, the widow of a railway guard, who was at your mothers wedding, knew your grandfather, and knows you by sight. ‘A very tall lady.’ I couldn’t say that you had mentioned her, but I was sure you would remember. She burst into tears when your brother was defeated [at the Election], and damns all liberals and non-conformists for his sake. Indeed I am in a hot bed of family traditions and generally pass for Bishop Aucklands great niece. I am urged to find his tomb, and I pretend to all kinds of knowledge—how sad it was when Miss Tudway went on the stage, how sorry I am that Mrs Tudway dont get on with her daughter in law, and how we shall all miss the old lady ‘when the day comes for her to go.’

I spent a week in the Close, and then the theological students turned me out. But I hover beneath the sacred shade, living now in a vergers house, called Oram; they come in to tell me I must dine early, in order to go to service.

I had lunch with Nessa and Clive in Bath the other day, and Nessa said she was finding this summer more tolerable than last. She has a barn where she paints the village children, and sees very little of her family except Julian. Her nurse has now gone on a weeks holiday, so she sees nothing but Julian. Lord! What it must be to have a child!

I tramp the downs, and goad myself till I foam at the lips with all the bad qualities I possess—selfish and shallow as I am. What are you about—and how are you?

I think of going on to Manorbier in a week, as Nessa and Clive go to Scotland, and there writing an article about Miss Beale as a prostitute. I am sick of the whole thing, and yet it is very difficult to sit down after breakfast in a lodging parlour, opposite a portrait of Prince Albert, without a desk, or a table that stands, and conceive scenes in a novel.

Helen Stephen, Katharines sister, has suddenly been taken desperately ill at Bristol; she is dying, and possibly I may go to Bristol to see Katharine, but I dont want to. I dont see that it ever does any good. Poor old Aunt Stephen is also helpless, and the Quaker forebodes tragedy everywhere.

I read a number of things, think sometimes of your good qualities, and wonder whether you are fond of me. Are you a fine character now? What is your cardinal point, by which one might pick you out in Heaven? Where do you place yourself in the scale of humanity? Now if, as I imagine, you are sitting in some ancestral garden beneath a white umbrella you will have time to answer my question, and to assure me of your affection.

Yr. Sp.

Berg

[]

431: To Saxon Sydney-Turner

Aug. 10th [1908]

5 Cathedral Green, Wells, Somerset

My dear Saxon,

I was very glad to hear from you. Adrian confirms what you say of the beauties of Rothenburg, and adds that the German temperament is sympathetic to him. The little boys don’t laugh. I wish I could say as much for the population of Somerset, but my appearance, when I have been on the downs in a shower, and jumped a ditch on the way home, delights the people of Wells—draws a smile even from their Bishop. You will see that I have moved into the very shadow of the Cathedral. My windows are said to look at the West Front (perhaps it is the East) but as a matter of fact they are obscured by a gigantic and probably primeval oak.

As for news, I am entirely without it. I am even driven to fabricate it. I told Adrian that Clive was meditating a small ‘post’—on re-reading his letter, in a less sanguine frame of mind, I see it is ‘past’—to make my meaning clear, I will call it ‘the irrevocable’. I met Nessa and Clive in Bath the other day, and over our buns at Forts we read your letters. We then strolled round the Circus* where a band of white haired gentlemen played selections from Glück and Handel. Once I clapped, and all the eyeglasses were raised in astonishment. The fashion paraded past us, at a foots pace; and Clive and Nessa vowed that they had never felt more perfectly content. Clive quoted Landor.

I have been reading an immense number of books, and look forward to my nightly 10 pages of [G. E.] Moore, when the bells have done tolling and my landladies children are in bed, with something like excitement. Well—there are numbers of things in the world which I don’t know—numbers I shall never understand. I sent myself to sleep last night by thinking what I feel at the prospect of eating an ice; and woke this morning convinced that Moore is right. He calls it a glass of port wine, but I suppose that makes no difference? Will you tell Adrian that Helen Stephen is dying—may be dead at this moment. She had a habit of always talking to dogs, when people were in the room. I think of going to Manorbier on Monday, but I cannot hear of rooms. My future, therefore, is quite vague, and I study the map continually, to see upon what coasts the different lines debouch. Hans jumped into the moat yesterday, (Sunday) and chased all the episcopal swans and ducks, to the consternation of the inhabitants; there is one swan which rings a bell, and the birds are blessed annually. My theological student never came again, and was very curt when we met.

I hope you will write and describe the operas—unworthy as I am to hear. Will you dine with me on the 1st Sept: 8 o’clock.

Yr. AVS

* and the Crescent, and sat in some garden

Sussex

[]

432: To Vanessa Bell

Monday [10 August 1908]

5 Cathedral Green, Wells [Somerset]

Beloved,

By some miracle a 2nd letter has just arrived from you, it being 5.30. Does that mean I shant get one tomorrow? Ah, woe’s me. I will observe all your directions; but for Gods sake, do let us meet somehow. As for Manorbier, I am still without an answer. Either my letter has gone to the wrong person, or they have no rooms. Could you give me an exact address? I dont want to stay on here, Marlborough is impossible, and I am taken with a passionate desire for Manorbier. Besides, I must write Smith’s article.

Well, what news is there? No news, and if I were to write my heart out, as sometimes seems to me possible, I must set about it seriously. I gather you dont think much of Hilton Young. Am I to have no proposal then? If I had had the chance, and determined against it, I could settle to virginity with greater composure than I can, when my womanhood is at question. I should flaunt it in Snows face. I should be respectable at all parties, and look wise when Imogen [Booth] talked of lovers. But the truth is I dont think he will do; and whenever we meet we feel the incongruity, so instead of proposing he may withdraw.

At this season we should be walking together; I am in just the mood to discuss winter plans. Leaves are falling, and there is a soft gusty wind, not too cold though; I should make you stay out till dinner time, and I have found the perfect evening walk, with such a view for the home coming, which was wont to be the best time. We had got excited, then, and were saying what we really thought, of our gifts and futures; and sometimes you said such delicious things, and I walked like a peacock, all aglow. I wonder if I ever said such things to you. Did you ever feel neglected? Well, your daughter will know one day more than I ever shall.

By the way, I have imagined precisely what it is like to have a child. I woke up, and understood, as in a revelation, the precise nature of the pain. Now, if I could only see my novel like that—I have being [sic] trying to arrange a method of imagining scenes, and writing them, and wrote rather better this morning. I heard from Violet, who sounds in her most dashing and successful mood, staying with some aristocrat who is mad but delightful—says rather improper things, and fills her house with 16 visitors when there are only 11 beds. You can imagine the jokes! Then Dodd writes that he is much pleased with his print of me, and will send me a copy; it looked rather too stout, so he added flounces to the dress. The only good part was the line of the skirt—so my vanity once more will be shocked. My lip is probably a chronic blemish; I always forget to anoint it—and how do you account for that, considering my vanity? By this mornings post, too, I got a card, with musical hieroglyphs; halfway through breakfast, I sang my song to keep myself in spirits, and saw it, as though in a mirror before me—mocking me. I at once changed my tune, and sang the second song, which no one knows. Tell the Chipmonk [Clive] his malice is thwarted; I sang for half an hour, and all the house crouched on the step to listen.

I dont think I can offer to go to Bristol ; what should I do? I shall write and say that I am near.

I have been polishing my periods, and sending a letter to Saxon—I did mean to end ‘affectionately’ but was crowded out. If Saxon could read the meaning of such an ending, from a virgin to a bachelor, he would know that it was passions knell.

Find me a name for Cynthia, good Beast, with all speed; and if it could have the same number of syllables, so much the better. I read every birth and death, shop sign, and tombstone, without success. Lettice is almost Kitty [Maxse] verbatim; what would happen if she guessed? Never was there such an improvident author—Flaubert would turn in his grave.

You see I am in the predicament of a shy caller, a shy adorer rather; I have nothing to say, and I cant go. I have everything to say. The children here bring me their dolls to mend, and I am planning a sentimental expedition; I shall take them to the sweet shop, and let them choose. The slavy here sleeps in a hole in the wall, with a window the size of a slate, and a basin like a pudding bowl. A candle burns perpetually in a corner of the stair case, and there are banisters of carved oak, and great halls on the landings. The womans husband says that there is a good deal more of the gentleman about Gurth than about Hans: two small boys with white heads stopped me on the road today and asked if I had a Bear?

Well, goodbye, my honeybee; Tell me Julians witticisms. You have a touch in letter writing that is beyond me. Something unexpected, like coming round a corner in a rose garden and finding it still daylight.

B.

Berg

[]

433: To Vanessa Bell

Tuesday [11 August 1908]

5 [Cathedral Green, Wells, Somerset]

Beloved,

I have had an immense number of letters today.

Helen in the first place, died on Sunday night, very peacefully. Nun writes that Lady Stephen’s [Helen’s mother] life will be shortened, but that Helen herself could not wish to live, which makes her death all the sadder. So she, at least, is satisfied. Rosamond [Helen’s sister] says that Lady S. is well, though tired. I pity her, poor old creature, and, Katharine too, who thought Helen the most congenial and gifted of them all—so she told me the other day.

Then I have this letter from H[ilton] Y[oung] which I enclose, that you may be witness to all my actions.

I shall say that I go away on Saturday, but that if he likes to come before then, I shall be delighted to give him lunch. He is still jocose, and if he wishes to propose, he may as well get it over; but I think he only means a friendly talk; and in either case, I think there is no use in avoiding him.

But I cant walk all the way to Cheddar with him.

Saxon and Adrian both write; they have heard Parsifal, and I cant pretend that I have yet mastered Saxons reasons for not finding it so exciting at the first time of hearing as some others; or Adrians reasons for feeling just the opposite. I imagine some tart scenes between them. However, Adrian is delighted with the Germans, has paid calls, and finds his German better than Saxons “who is always at a loss.” Nelly writes that she wishes to treat Miss Beale, the book I had half marked for myself. Miss Beale educated Miss [May ]Sinclair—“of course I shall draw attention to the fact with appropriate comments.”

Eily writes, 2 quarto sheets; wishes to know in particular what I think of Clive? Is he a genius? She knows he is interesting to talk to, and sees he has had good effects on your art—but would like, if it is not impertinent, to know more. Is Clive a genius? What is Clive like? An exquisite, fastidious little Chipmonk, with the liveliest affections, and the most tender instincts—a man of parts, and sensibilities—a man of character and judgment—a man with a style, who writes some of the best letters in the English tongue, and meditates a phrase as other men meditate an action—But a man of genius? This long paragraph is too long to rewrite; but you will see that it is inadequate even as prose; and as the truth—well, you sit yourself on his knee. Ah, I’m so excited about my novel! I read 2 pages, and thought them good. I dont rhapsodise anymore, but believe that the best novels are deposited, carefully, bit by bit; and in the end, perhaps they live in all their parts. ‘Perhaps’—I write as Julian sucks his bottle; a necessary occupation, but not of intense interest to you perhaps. Write a sonnet to his eyelashes.

No news from Manorbier.

Yr. B.

Berg

[]

434: To Vanessa Bell

Wednesday [12 August 1908]

5 Cathedral Green [Wells, Somerset]

Beloved,

To my great melancholy, I have had no letter from you today, but a card from your husband. I wont disparage his card—still a letter would have been pleasant.

If I were to hint at all the miseries which steal out when you dont lull them to sleep, I should only be chidden. I suppose all the blame rests with the post, and there is nothing to fear.

I have been attacked by toothache; Heaven knows why; but it has suddenly gone again, so I only tell you in order to get pity.

I heard from Manorbier at last; Mrs John knows of a small cottage, which wouldn’t suit me she thinks, but it is the only place to be had. Apparently, it is very humble, and the woman cant provide hot baths—but I dont see that that matters. At the same time, Sheep[shanks] writes and asks whether I will join her at some Devon village, where are to be found Mr and Mrs Gilbert Murray, Mr and Mrs Bertie Russell, Jane Harrison and [Francis] Cornford! Too much elderly brilliance for my taste; besides Sheep: might sit down on me by mistake, and I should never recover. However, I have no doubt I am missing lifelong friendships, and all for the sake of lonely walks along the sea shore, with an occasional leap over a fissure. I wish we could meet for more than our 3 hours on Saturday; they leave me melancholy, but I look forward to them with impossible hopes. One of these days, I am determined, you shall have a country house, with stone balls on its terrace, and a lawn; and a little cottage in the trees at the bottom of the garden. There I shall have a room, a great table, some books, and a looking glass, besides a curious cabinet, full of small drawers, in which your children shall search for secrets. I am pleased to find that the children here find me rather amusing. What shall I tell you? I wish, someday, you would write down what you need in a letter; some facts I know; but as for the padding, the reflections and affections, I never know your taste. About my novel, for example—does it bore you? As you cant answer, I will tell you that I wrote rather well this morning, in spite of my tooth, and in spite of my habit which I can never outgrow, of hiding my manuscript when anyone who does not know my trade comes into the room and pretending that I am reading letters. The woman says she never had such a busy lodger. I like her, and her name is Dorothy, but that wont do for Cynthia. No answer from H[ilton] Y[oung] I begin to feel nervous, and wish I had your approbation. But then you wont post your letters in time. I walked to the top of a hill today, imagining that I was Christ ascending Calvary, and cheered myself so that I laughed aloud, and proceeded to think of Dobbins and Sheeps ; and various quips of my own; but the weather is cold.

I will send your dog. I should be glad to keep him, for he is really rather an engaging beast, but I suppose he will be better with W. L. [Walter Lamb]

O God! I must write my mortuary letters [about Helen Stephen?]; and I have only 10 minutes before post. Still they are better done in hot blood. Saxon is only “affate” to me.

Yr. B.

Berg

[]

435: To Saxon Sydney-Turner

[14 August 1908]

5 Cathedral Green, Wells, Somerset

My dear Saxon,

A postcard has just been brought to me from you, with a picture of Hans Sachs on it. He looks very much what he does upon the stage, which is always a satisfaction.

I have been horribly disabused by visiting Glastonbury and Cheddar; Cheddar is exactly like the scenic railway at the Exhibition, and I was not in the least anxious to be reminded of that; besides there was no switch back, and the populace was disgusting as usual. In my absence,—this was yesterday—(you must put up with small beer) Hans and Gurth were taken for a walk by the slavy; they both escaped, raced round the town, and were taken in charge by a policeman, who put them into prison. Mr Oram, a verger, and my landlord, had released them, but I found the household almost hysterical, and I had a solemn interview with Mr Oram, who begged me not to be agitated, and assured me that I was not, strictly speaking, a criminal. Gurth had no name on his collar, and the law etc., etc., Mr Oram has an impediment in his speech, which makes him repeat everything twice over. He also insists upon calling Hans ‘Miss Hans’ and was very arch about ‘His Lordship’ (Gurth) running after ‘this young lady’. “You know how it is with gentlemen, Miss Stephens—pardon me the liberty” I had to pretend that I was deeply moved. Do you think all the lower classes are naturally idiotic? I can’t conceive how this man who is the father of two children, gets through his life, or for the matter of that, buttons his waistcoat in the morning. His youngest, or as Clive would have it, younger, daughter, has just declared her wish that I should be her stepmother.

I go to Manorbier on Monday, and I think my address will be Sea View, but post office would find me. Letters are a great treat, but I have not yet begun to feel bored; and I think a change of scene will just carry me through—especially as I have to write an article upon Mlle de la Vallière, and to contrive some decent way of alluding to her relations with Louis. I think R. Smith will strike out the word ‘mistress’ and substitute ‘unfortunate attachment’.

I have been reading a good deal, and make some way with Moore, though I have to crawl over the same page a number of times, till I almost see my own tracks. I shall ask you to enlighten me, but I doubt that I can even ask an intelligible question.

The Daily Telegraph is discussing the sanctity of marriage, and Haynes is giving tongue, and all the deserted wives and husbands in the country are wondering [how] far the marriage service represents the true word of God. Such a display of imbecility is hardly credible; it is like stirring a muddy pool, and waking innumerable newts.

What do you think of Adrian’s German?

Your affate VS

Sussex

[]

436: To Lady Robert Cecil

Aug. 14th [1908]

5 Cathedral Green, Wells, Somerset

My dear Nelly,

I am once more sunk into a state of complete indolence, when I love getting letters, but hate answering them. I wish providence would let me lie on my back, and send flights of Nellys over me, with letters in their bills, and I should only have to gape and swallow them. But the laws of nature forbid. I wish, too, that you didn’t keep my letters in the china cupboard; because then you are liable at any moment to confront me with some rash judgment, meant only for the morning fire. Did I say that Mary Coleridges poems would fade? I meant only that they are very slight; some seem to me first rate, in that line; they say exactly what she meant. I dont know what happens to such things, but I expect one or two manage to go on, for hundreds of years, like those anonymous poems, which are so charming, in the Anthologies.

I have been drowsing here in the most ancient and most respectable of cities for a fortnight till I feel that I must get onto a cliff and scream at the Atlantic. Is it the Atlantic at South Wales? I dont know, but I think of going to a place called Manorbier on Monday, for another fortnight. It is as lovely as the Hebrides, with a ruined Castle in every bay.

I am going to write an article for “our Good Grocer” [Reginald Smith] upon Mademoiselle de la Valliere; I dare not tell him, lest he insists upon a study of Sir Henry Campbell Bannerman; and I dont know how I am to allude to the fact that she was Louis 14th ———. Shall I simply leave it out? and merely hint at an unfortunate attachment. I expect that’s the phrase. If I were going to write upon Miss Beale I should point out how easy it is to be a good schoolmistress, and spread awe in the hearts of tremulous, half educated, earnest women. I have just been looking at the book. It is a type of the official biography: all committees and organisations—and what an ugly woman! She always allowed 2 hours to catch any train, and brushed away her breadcrumbs herself. In these matters she always had the good of her school at heart! O what inflictions people are with their dreary phrases! I sometimes think no crime is so bad—the suffocation of life—But it is authorised, on the contrary, and if you had to bring up a child you could not avoid the Miss Beales and Miss Busses. But to explain what I mean would take too long, and I never can explain it.

Dont you think you might write me a long letter, within the next fortnight? My address will be, Sea View, Manorbier, R.S.O. Pembrokeshire, S. Wales.

I expect to be horribly uncomfortable. What are you doing? I haven’t seen you for 6 months and missed your exquisite incredible niece the other day.

Yr. aff. AVS

Hatfield

[]

437: To Vanessa Bell

Friday [14 August 1908]

[5 Cathedral Green, Wells, Somerset]

Beloved,

Have you been having the Devil of a time with Julian? I gather that you have, and all my peaceful hours are made to blush for their ease. What with milk and washing, crying and grumbling, you must have spent a miserable week. Poor woman! I adore you.

I have heard nothing from H. Y. [Hilton Young]: and it strikes me that I probably led him to think that I should be here till Saturday week. He said something about being away. However, I may have been too cold, or too hot, or he may have thought better of it. Anyhow, my chance of a proposal dwindles, and I feel complacent. I shall see you tomorrow! Indeed, if I were wiser I should hoard my sweetness, and spend it like a king. I shall probably weep when I leave you tomorrow evening, for more than a fortnight.

I went to Cheddar, found it a wretched place, like the scenery beside a switch back, crowded, and full of grottoes and caves, into which I could not bother to look.

A drunk man terrified a little girl in the carriage next mine, so that the train had to be stopped, she taken out, and put in with me. She was like a frightened rabbit, and crouched in her corner.

When I got home I was solemnly waited on by Mr Oram, who begged me not to be agitated, but said he had a painful story to tell me. The slavy had taken the dogs for a walk, they had escaped; they had ‘cruised about the town’, till a policeman found them, and put them in prison, finding that Gurth had no address on his collar.

Mr Oram had fetched them back; but the policeman wished to see me. All this he repeated over and over again, adding his theory: that “Miss Hans had run away, and his Lordship (Gurth) followed after. O she’s a sprightly little lady. But dont be agitated ma’am: my advice to you is this; say that the address is now being engraved. I would not recommend anybody to trifle with their conscience in an ordinary way, but a young lady, travelling alone—its very awkward. Do not consider, ma’am, that you are, in the eye of the law, a criminal. We will sit down, if I may take the liberty, and consider what is best to be done.” I should think this lasted a good hour.

I met the policeman this morning, as I took Gurth to the station, and he merely suggested that some day I had better get a new collar. Gurth was very good, and the guard promised to see to him. Hans has just been violently sick.

Such is my news.

Do you see that Dodo has a daughter? Well, the rabbits of the field multiply, and replenish the earth with their bones.

Shall you kiss me tomorrow? Yes, Yes, Yes. Ah, I cannot bear being without you. I was thinking today of my greatest happiness, a walk along a cliff by the sea, and you at the end of it. I am determined to burn all my life of you, and begin another; for I have made out a pleasant scheme of you.

Bruce Richmond writes that he wants to send me a book on famous Scotchwomen. So I suppose the autumn season has begun. I wish Prothero would write. Saxon sends me the information, on a card, that the back of Hans Sachs house is more beautiful than the front. Clives theory is right I am sure; the younger Pliny.

O tomorrow!

Yr. B.

Berg

[]

438: To Clive Bell

Aug. 19th [1908]

Sea View, Manorbier [Pembrokeshire]

My dear Clive,

There is no doubt but that I was well advised in telling you to come here for your honeymoon. I am surprised to find how beautiful it all is—more than I remembered—how lovely, and how primitive. I have not been on the cliffs yet, my business yesterday keeping me on the trot, but directly this letter is done, I am off to Proud Giltar.

Ah, it is the sea that does it! perpetual movement, and a border of mystery, solving the limits of fields, and silencing their prose. I am now writing in the private room and at the desk of a gentleman farmer called Barkley; he is about thirty, and has a face like the present Duke of Devonshire. He has just been in to ask me to use his books, if I find any to my taste. I find odd volumes of Scott, some standard novels, others that are not standard and the ‘Popular Educator’ in a leather binding. After I wrote yesterday, Mrs Lewis had the brilliant idea that the house just behind hers, on the hill, was furnished, but unlet. She sent for Mr Barkley, the owner, who agreed to let me one room, with a great bow window facing the sea, several deep arm chairs, and a desk. So I am in luxury; I have brought my books up, come and go when I like—it is but a minute from the cottage, and begin to write tomorrow. Nobody disturbs me, they light a lamp for me after dinner, and the only noises I can detect, with my window open, are distant sounds of cows, a bluebottle outside on the cistern and at the moment the flapping of a red admiral who has come in and like all insects, cant get out.

Well, what shall we discourse about? If I begin upon literature, and slip by easy stages to a certain work; and I may as well ask you what you think of a Spanish name for the lady [Rachel Vinrace]. Cintra? Andalusia? Her father touched at many ports and sailors like sentimental names: he may have had other reasons too, not to be defined.

Smith has written to me again, repeating with mild compliments that he would like me to write a series of articles upon Men and Women, as I see them in their biographies. I must repeat what I said before. Professor Sully, and Mr Stebbing both ‘say nice things’ of my writing. I believe I shall become a popular lady biographist, safe for—graceful portrait, and such a lady!

I think a great deal of my future, and settle what book I am to write—how I shall re-form the novel and capture multitudes of things at present fugitive, enclose the whole, and shape infinite strange shapes. I take a good look at woods in the sunset, and fix men who are breaking stones with an intense gaze, meant to sever them from the past and the future—all these excitements last out my walk, but tomorrow I know, I shall be sitting down to the inanimate old phrases. As a matter of fact, Mlle de la Valliere ought to make into something graceful at least; and I am going to contrive a scheme as I walk.

Poor Clive! What a sister-in-law! But if you were not so polite you would have none of it. There was a day when I never talked of my writing to you. I have passed your house, and imagined numbers of things. There is a certain road, with shadows across it, leading to the sea where Nessa and I walked, and she declared that Romance was not a thing of the past, as she had thought, but was going on all round us. The Bensons have never let, and there are three other houses unlet, and not one is building. Next year we might come here.

I split my head over [G. E.] Moore every night, feeling ideas travelling to the remotest part of my brain, and setting up a feeble disturbance, hardly to be called thought. It is almost a physical feeling, as though some little coil of brain unvisited by any blood so far, and pale as wax, had got a little life into it at last; but had not strength to keep it. I have a very-clear notion which parts of my brain think. Enough, however; Nessa is horribly bored, and says I take too much pains when I write to you. But this letter is not well written. Did I tell you that I went to Evening Service on Sunday—a bat was in the church, all the women frightened for their hair—and I walked off with the Cathedral hymn book?

Yr. AVS

Kiss my old Tawny, on all her private places—kiss her eyes, and her neck socket.

Quentin Bell

[]

439: To Vanessa Bell

Thursday [20 August 1908]

Manorbier [Pembrokeshire]

Beloved,

Why did my letter give you the impression of such gloom, I wonder? I cant remember any plaints; but I see that you attribute it to H[ilton] Y[oung]. I dont think that whatever he could do would bother me much—might of course make shiver my vanity—but I expect the real cause was that lodgings are vile, and children shriek.

I am quite happy here, in my big room with a comfortable chair, and no one ever disturbs me.

It pours, beneath a drifting mist, and I have been writing the first pages of Mlle de la Valliere, and snapping my fingers at all the storms and all the lovers (who wont love me) in the world. I always want you; but save for that, I haven’t been lonely yet, and I have been away for 20 days.

You dont give me your address, and your punishment will be a severe one. ‘No letters? Clive.’ ‘Yes, my honey jar; one from Snow, from Kitty, from Walter Lamb.’ ‘Oh I dont count them. No letter from my Apekin I mean?’ “No; not a line.” ‘Oh how I hate Scotch moors.’

I have another letter from good Mary Sheep; the [Bertrand] Russells telegraphed on Monday to ask me to stay with them for four days, but as I had gone the telegram was returned. Ought I to write to Mrs Russell? I have never seen her. Sheep: ends ‘The life of the senses is more within my reach than the life of the mind’. Well, it depends what she means by the senses.

I walked along the Cliff yesterday, and found myself slipping on a little ridge just at the edge of a red fissure. I did not remember that they came so near the path; I have no wish to perish. I can imagine sticking out ones arms on the way down, and feeling them tear, and finally whirling over, and cracking ones head. I think I should feel as though I saw a china vase fall from the table; a useless thing to happen—and without any reason or good in it. But numbers of people do fall over; my good landlady tells me stories. Her son in law was found dead in the road, his horses coming home before him, and no one knew how it happened. She is full of saws, and wisdom about making the best of things, and ‘here we are, and we must grin and bear it’. She offered me a horn cup, made from an ancestral cow, which I had to refuse as well as I could; and then said that I was like the gentleman she had just had—a true lady.

I dont think the Cliffs are as fine as Cornish cliffs, and the land is certainly tamer, but then Manorbier is practically in the 40ties; there was a school treat on the beach yesterday, and for some reason it seemed to me exactly the kind of thing that happened in the year 1845. They drove off in a two horse waggon, with little bonnets, and side whiskers.

Well—if I am to go out, and I get bitchy if I stay in, I must tramp now, in my great boots and water proof.

Were you sorry to leave Julian? Tell me what Scotland is like.

My book for the Times about Scottish women has just come—a fat dull work, I expect. Write an immense long letter. I pine if they dont come. Kiss your hand.

B.

Berg

[]

440: To Emma Vaughan

[August 1908]

Manorbier [Pembrokeshire]

Dearest Toad,

Yes, it is all very well for you to be indiscreet—but what if you knew what I know? Have you heard that—No, I won’t reveal other people’s secrets. Still, she shouldn’t go to a lecture if she can’t control herself; or the Committee should put locks on the doors. Why she did it then, instead of waiting till—I can’t make out; but for the last month or two I have suspected—from the colour and shape and so on—well, she signs her name now with a hyphen.

Poor cousin Mia! is it out at last? I was afraid that last meeting at the Jolly Miller would do for her. Can you imagine? She drove up, in the village omnibus (which takes the Coroner about) at 6 o’clock—not more than a shawl over her shoulder, and her right leg bare. She asked if she were a flower-bed that they raked her so?, and sang and sang about geraniums and roses. “Monty’s in the cupboard!” she cried at last, and fell into the cistern, afishing for black beetles. But that’s the beginning—Aunt Mary heard, and set off at once, in a veil with cupid in the border, chasing butterflies, and reached Rickmansworth just as Charlie was talking to the beadle. She sat with him beneath the plum tree in the garden till the sun went down and at night cried “I’m only a little bag of bones—And the bed is so big!”...

At the same time, poor Aunt Minna who has been brooding constantly over her disappointment with Marny in the summer, set out for Rickmansworth, to find the bluebell walk. She got to Richmond and asked everyone she met whether bluebottles weren’t very late this year? “Have you any bluebottles? Is this the Star and Garter? Then I must be at Greenwich after all. But why did naughty Margaret Vaughan tell me B. stood for bug?” Well, well; I could run on, if you could call it running, when every sentence draws a tear. So poor Will has followed John Bailey’s example after all—with the exception of the bedroom poker, I hope. We call it poker—though it has another name. It’s worse, though, when the quakers run amok: here’s a letter from Cambridge just come—‘Can you not persuade your Aunt that at her age more clothing is needed? and the neighbours complain of the noise.’ What am I to do? Margaret on my hands too, with her visions of a world where they neither marry nor wear wedding rings. Happily, though the earth spins round me, and it is rumoured in Hoxton that Marny had a hand in the last butchers bill at the hospital (Yes—she knows what I mean—) I keep calm and virtuous here by the sea shore. I don’t agree that your native country surpasses any I have ever seen (for we must now talk moralities, so that Hilda, who stays with you, shan’t blush) but it is passable—a good country for toads. Rain all day, storms at night, and such a croaking in the swamp as sends all the dreams away, if you sleep with your window open. However, they believe in the virtues of toadskin here, laid upon burns, or upon the brows of guilty women. It brings vice to the surface, they say, in a yellow patch. Many of the village women are disfigured. I lodge in one cottage, but have my sitting-room in another. The room belongs to a young farmer, Mr Barclay, who let it me on condition that I would write neither fiction nor poetry at his table. I said my time was mostly taken up in corresponding with my cousins, two maiden ladies, the name of Vaughan. “What, Vaughan of Upton Castle?” he said. “The oldest name in the kingdom—but not one of the most respectable. Old blood will have its humours. Your cousins now are they virtuous young women?” I then told him the story of Marny and the Bishop’s chaplain. We laughed till the spiders waltzed in the corners, and were strangled in their own webs. I am to drink a glass of port with him tonight.

Yours,
G.

Sussex

[]

441: To Vanessa Bell

Wednesday [26 August 1908]

Manorbier [Pembrokeshire]

Beloved,

I had a piteous disappointment yesterday. I kept your letter till tea time, and went for a long walk planning a surprise at the end. I lost my way, sat on a hedge and directed myself all wrong by the map, and had to tramp till 6. The one thing that quickened my step was the thought of your letter—and when I got home, rushed to my room looked on the table. There was nothing there!

Nor is there any letter this morning. Damn these posts! But lamentations are dull. Reginald Smith bandies compliments with me, wont entirely give up the idea, and says that if I had read more I shouldn’t think and write with that originality which the Cornhill loves! Of course, I had been posing as an illiterate woman, who had twice as much difficulty in writing an article as other people.

Nelly’s latest has been sent me also—upon Galsworthy. She means to be honest, and to blurt out the truth without thought for style—but the result is mere rant. I cant even make out this time what her grievance is, but she is denouncing somebody—I think it is the people who call her an aristocrat. I had better send it to you.

O dear O dear! The second and last post has come, and there is no letter again. Are you ill, have you been shot, or is it merely some trick of the posts? I cant make out how it can take 3 days to get a letter here—I have tried to walk myself into a philosophic mood, in the churchyard, but I cant help feeling melancholy. It rains and blows—and here I must sit and wait till tomorrow morning—and perhaps even then—

However, I must take a book and read, and try to forget all about you. There are poisonous gnats (in North London) I read; perhaps you have been stung—or do you remember that young lady of title last year, whom Violet felt for so much, whose husband shot her by mistake for a rabbit.

A woman [Mrs Luard]—colonels wife—has been murdered in Kent—All the consolation I get is a card from the London Library to say that I can have Saxons book on astrology [recommended by him] if I want it.

I am inclined to stay here till Monday now; my tooth has stopped aching, and I see I shant have done my writing till Sunday, and I am much happier here than I should be in London. Much happier!—that is mere optimism. I dont see how I am to stagger to the end of this sheet when I dont know whether you are in a state to read it. I turn to your letter and try to make out that you have no post out on Sunday, and only one early in the morning on week days, so that, if you missed this, I should not get a letter till tomorrow morning. I sink to the lowest depths of acquiescence, and consider that after all we are mere lumps of flesh, propelled about the world for a season, and our sufferings are shocks leading nowhere. I am myself a worm, with a spade cutting through it.

It is now thundering out at sea, and some silly women, out for a holiday, are bathing. It is too fantastic of them—but they wont drown. Monster that you are—I adore you.

Yr. B.

Berg

[]

442: To Clive Bell

Friday [28 August 1908]

Manorbier [Pembrokeshire]

My dear Clive,

I must answer you today, though I have not much time to do it properly. I am going to Tenby, for the sake of having my tea in a shop, and making choice of buns, and also because it is alternately raining and shining.

Ah well!—I am in a mood today to care very little what anybody says about Melymbrosia. The mood has lasted indeed seven days. I cant see what you have to ‘up-blow’ me for, since in my eyes the changing of names is the most trivial of occupations, and I am aware that the only thing that matters is a thing that you cant control, nor I neither. (I think it should be ‘either’) Whether my conception is solid is a vastly important matter to me, but at the same time, almost impersonal. I mean to stand at my desk this autumn and work doggedly, in the dark, without lifting the lid off the pot, more than I can help, or inviting people to come and have a sniff. But as you know, I count immensely on your encouragement. How is all this to be reconciled? Well, let us turn to another matter. You ask me whether I like your letters. In what sense do you mean, I wonder? That is the worst of being in Wales; I can’t wait to get an answer, and so must hazard some kind of criticism that mayn’t be at all what you want. Anyhow, I reread them all this morning, and found only one sentence improperly understood before. They are very pleasant letters—there can be no doubt that I like them. For one thing, they are very affectionate—show a spirit exquisitely poised, so far as I am concerned. They are deliberate, a trifle ‘reminiscent’, but for all that personal in the best sense. I expect that we differ a little in our view of what a letter should be, for I expect (as I read them) that you think more pains are needed than I do. But I dont imagine that you want literary criticism from me; so the only view I will put forward is that you might put your style at the gallop rather more than you do. After all, the only way of expanding it is to try to grasp things that you dont quite grasp: and a slight tone of monotony, which I detect sometimes, seems to me to come from the fact that you are content to do things that you can do very well. But I tremble as I write! After all, you may have meant me to answer quite a different question. I often think that we are most unlike in the values we attach to things; you will take seriously what is frivolous to me and vice versa. If I had time I would explain more fully—Anyhow, dont write differently, and the [more] often you write the better I should like it—and I keep your letters. Kiss Dolphins nose—if it isnt too wet—and tap pony smartly on the snout. Whisper into your wife’s ear that I love her. I expect she will scold you for tickling her (when she hears the message)

Yr. affate
AVS

Quentin Bell

[]

443: To Saxon Sydney-Turner

Aug. 28th [1908]

Manorbier, South Wales

My dear Saxon,

I suppose you are back again, and I note what you say about the concert. I am pining for music. Could you, if you think it necessary, get me a ticket for Tuesday night? where ever you choose. I will order dinner at 7. to give us time. I shall only get back on Monday evening, but if I find a card saying that you had no time to get a ticket, I will try for one on Tuesday. How I hate making arrangements!

The weather here is quite hysterical—passionate storms for no reason, and then brilliant sun. It has been doing this for a week, and my good landlady says that it will soon have her windows in. She faces the sea. So I expect to spend the night soon in the fowl house.

I have had no news from Adrian since you left him, and only letters every 3 days from Nessa and Clive. They have nothing but abuse for highland scenery, and Nessa is much distressed because Clive will shoot rabbits. I also heard from Lytton the other day, about a small literary job, and he sounds in great spirits, adoring the lochs and burns and all the rest of it. The country here isn’t nearly up to Cornwall, though I prefer it to the floridity (is there such a word?) of Somerset. I am always glad to find that Cornwall remains unapproached.

I have just had a card from the London Library to say that Lilly’s astrology is at my service. Are you still pursuing that science?

I much look forward to seeing you and hearing your adventures.

Yr. aff.
AVS

Sussex

[]

444: To Vanessa Bell

Saturday [29 August 1908]

Manorbier [Pembrokeshire]

Beloved,

I had your charming letter this morning—for your letters do charm and you know it; and if you pretend to fear our sense of style, it is only because you despise it. Besides no one can say that my letters are well written; I am much too vain to think it.

I had my tea in Tenby yesterday, but chanced on a dull dirty shop, where I was charged a shilling for a stale bun, and thus the great object of my journey failed. But it is very difficult to walk here, because when it isnt raining it is blowing so hard that I can hardly see my way along the Cliff. I end upon the beach generally,—find a corner where I can sit and invent images from the shapes of the waves. A child of 12, a pretty little girl, does the same thing also, and will always sit me out; but I daren’t ask her what she is thinking, though I want to know. How ridiculous it all is! I sometimes feel surprised when I realise that we are all set out on our journey, as human beings, with all our ceremonies, and marriages.

I had a letter from poor old Case yesterday; she inverts her address ‘Virginia, dear’, which is a sign of tenderness, I think; and tells me how she has been nursing a friend in London who died on the same day that Helen Stephen died, but will be more missed. She is full of tender humanities, and a kind of cultured Christianity, though she is too well educated to be a Christian.

This time next week we shall be at Siena! Divine! If I weren’t to be with you, I should be rather sorry to end my solitude. It is amazingly comfortable to stretch ones legs and have one’s read out, and not to be interrupted at half past six, and spend the evening at the opera, or in talk about it. I never knew I had such a desire to read; and in London it is always fretted and stinted, and always will be. I wish one could sweep ones days clean; say not at home, and refuse ever to go out. But dont understand—or understand with discretion—that I grumble at Adrian, or at anyone; the great gain of here is really, I believe, that one can see such beautiful pleasant things, and smell, and be at peace; and if I live in London, I must, I suppose, see people.

Do you call this well written? careful, and rhythmical? if so, my good beast, your ear is stuffed with feathery down. I am also sunk into such a simple inarticulate mood, that I doubt whether you will understand my bleatings. The only words I have spoken for four weeks, except when I saw you, have been very loud and hearty. “Fine day! No, he wont bite. I should like a fowl tonight.” One has to be so cheerful with the lower classes, or they think one diseased.

I ordered two pounds of tea from the Stores and gave them to Mrs Lewis today. She was greatly moved, and has been fluttering about me, asking whether there isn’t anything I should like to take away with me. I have suggested a bunch of flowers (which I am certain to leave in the train) but I dread the horn mug. Now, you dont suffer from the desire to be liked so much that you would write a letter to the Stores; I expect I shall leave all my fortune to a home for stray pug dogs, having become entirely maudlin in my old age.

I finished Moore last night; he has a fine flare of arrogance at the end—and no wonder. I am not so dumb foundered as I was; but the more I understand, the more I admire. He is so humane in spite of his desire to know the truth; and I believe I can disagree with him, over one matter.

I am sending you the Cornhill, in case it arrives just in time for your journey, you may like to see Nelly.

It is far more vexatious to understand her meaning than Moores; there are some sentences which seem to graze two different meanings, and then to be draped in an alien metaphor; it makes one’s head spin, as in a nightmare.

Have you any theory about the Leward [sic] murder—or was it suicide?

If you leave on Tuesday, and it takes 2 days to reach you, I shall only write one more letter, I suppose. As I am discharging pale soliloquies without a grain of fact in them, it is about time I said no more—but embraced you!

Yr. B.

Berg

[]

445: To Lytton Strachey

Sunday [30 August 1908]

Manorbier, South Wales

Dear Lytton,

I haven’t heard from Frank Sidgwick, so I expect he must have found some one else to write for him. It would be a charming book [Boswell’s Letters] to do, but I don’t see how I could manage it in the time. I shall be knocking about in Italian Inns, without an inkpot or a scrap of blotting paper, and I suppose, one French novel.

Well—I have been spending a delightful holiday, given up to reflection and the beauties of nature. I hardly know how I shall emerge again, or whether I shan’t speak in words of one syllable. I live in the greatest discomfort, but have hired a room in another house, where I retire to mumble over Moore, and to exclaim “My wig! What a man!” when I read Racine.

Adventures I have none—unless you can count a sage correspondence with Saxon, something after the manner of the Dutch school of painting. He sends me an inventory of his bedroom furniture, and I answer—it’s my only defence—with the most dissolute of metaphors. I was also invited to spend a week with the [Bertrand] Russells, and meet Mr and Mrs Gilbert Murray, Jane Harrison and [Francis] Cornford and Miss Sheepshanks. It was a little too elderly: I couldn’t face it. Yes Clive spoke very highly of your poems, and I got them out of Nessa at last. They lie on the table before me, and I read them when I happen to be feeling pure. Compliments I know mean nothing to you; nor my green blushes, nor any other form of adulation. If you think of me as a woman of sound common sense, I have a vivid picture of you—an oriental potentate, in a flowered dressing gown.

Nessa and Clive seem horribly bored in the Highlands—and no wonder. The Scotch are an amazing people. I spent this morning toiling over a number of Scotch women, your relative Mrs Grant of Laggan among them; and had to draw largely upon my imagination.

O what a mercy to write no more, but to lie on one’s back in a vineyard, and let grapes drop down one’s throat—But I must go and pack—I go to London tomorrow.

Yrs. ever,
VS

Frances Hooper

[]

446: To Vanessa Bell

[30 August 1908]

[Manorbier, Pembrokeshire]

Beloved,

I dont know whether this will get to you, and I have only time for a scrawl, being perplexed with innumerable small jobs. All my things have to be carted down, boxes packed; bills paid; and I tremble at the thought of tomorrow.

I sometimes think I will never travel again. My articles are all unfinished and hideous, and the Times say they must have them by Tuesday.

Ah what pleasure to see you again—and with God be the rest—or at rest, I cant remember which. In spite of my complacency yesterday, I feel rather wild, and in need of domestication.

Perhaps we shall have a tremendous shower of talk; but you are in no need, and I fear you will be very practical. ‘Now make haste. Have you packed your hair oil’ and so on.

I have had no letters, and so I have no news; but if I waited till I had been for a walk and filled my brain, that might do instead; unfortunately the post goes at 5.30. I have been writing to Lytton and to Case; I feel somehow that Lytton is a trifle Blasé, and our friendship is strictly and even cynically Platonic. He says that Clive thinks his poems almost as good as Catullus (after some others). Where are my works then? I shall have to alter my standard for judging Clive’s praise—sad, oh sad. But I feel so full of ideas at this moment, for a book I am going to write; and I believe I shall carry through Melymbrosia, and I believe I care less than ever before for what people say.

This is gibberish tho’; and if I were a vain woman, vain of my letters that is, I would never let this go: I wish you would consider what I say about burning letters. I admit that it flatters me to think they are kept; but it also hampers me in the least literary of my intercourse. Did you ever read the beautiful poem in which Browning (now in what tone of voice do you deliver that, I wonder?) explained how one writes to one, ‘and one only’?

I fancy you stumbling through these words—sometimes coming to a stop altogether, and muttering ‘well, if she will write such balderdash’ and then there will be half a minutes interruption while Clive makes you repeat your next word.

I dreamt of Clarissa last night; she was new born, and had a fine row of teeth, which were without roots; and she could say ‘no objection’ which I thought proved something out of Moore.

Yr. B.

Berg

[]

447: To Violet Dickinson

30th Aug. 08

Manorbier [Pembrokeshire]

My Violet,

I write in the most horrid Chaos, on the verge of going up to London. Still, as you wont write to me, I must write to you. But what with writing for Smith and writing for the Times, and writing to Nessa, and writing cheques, post cards and love letters, my pen is worn to the stump. Besides, to keep a correspondence warm it should be constant; and you may be on the seas, or in bed, for anything I know.

I have enjoyed myself very much here. Wells became rather too venerable and hot, towards the end of the time; but I got onto the Mendips once, and saw the place where my great uncle the Bishop eat his Lambs tails. That track had an immense success in Wells; ‘Yes, my uncle was very fond of Lambs tails; I fancy them myself.’ It was so homely, and familiar. But happily it wasn’t the season for Lambs or I should have eaten nothing else, but their tails.

Then I came on here; and found myself lodged in the cottage of a stone mason, with no conveniences of any kind. But I take my cold tub like an Englishman, and I hired a room in the house of a gentleman farmer and there I sat and read, and wrote those brilliant articles which I speak of. Read your Times with attention for the next two or three weeks, and see if you can spot me. Bruce Richmond and I keep up a mildly humorous correspondence. But I have had no adventures, to speak of. Often I get no letters for 3 days at a time, Nessa being in Scotland, and Adrian in Germany, and Violet estranged, and I rarely open my lips. I talk a little to my landlady about the rheumatics, and which is the best way of cooking eggs. We have just had an affecting scene. I asked her for her bill, and she scratched her head and said ‘I shall charge you for one egg a day. Fires cost nothing, fowls cost nothing. It has been a pleasure to serve you.’ And then you call me an egoist—a woman who doesn’t love her kind! I think of becoming a philanthropist this winter, and perfecting that side of my character, which some judge defective. Where will you be then—when Nelly asks me to her bedside, and I take Kitty to the surgeon, and Hester has her next baby in my house, and Beatrice confides to me the tragedy of her life!

We go to Italy on Thursday, and if you were a woman of any vitality you would write me a long letter, and try to explain yourself. Supposing we drift entirely apart, in the next 3 years, so that we blush when we meet and remember our ancient correspondence. Will it be your fault or mine? Yours, I think; because you are always so unselfish. When you write to me, you talk of other people, so that I begin to forget what you are like. I can conjure up one or two grimaces.

I have been writing at my work of imagination [Melymbrosia]; and have now done one hundred pages. I begin to ask, whether I shall ever dare to print them? I shall work hard at it this winter, and see at any rate whether I can finish it.

Nessa is in her shooting box, alone, with three men. She says the Highlands are like Christmas cards, and she will be very glad to get to Italy. Her son takes up a great deal of her mind, and she is beginning to boast not only of his beauty, but of his character and wit. I am rather fond of him too; he has changed completely since I last saw him.

I suppose you are staying in some great house, where they dress for dinner, and drive about in brakes. I suppose you are very witty at dinner, and all the old generals confide in you. When the ladies go to bed, Lady Cynthia or Mildred comes to your room, and asks your advice. You are rather random and free spoken, which however, she finds the greatest refreshment: and says she never met anyone like you (Lord, what a long letter this is. I meant to contain myself in one sheet, but all my books are packed, and I like writing to you, once I get started). You kiss each other, and next time I come to Manchester St Rose will tell me you are engaged with a young lady in the drawing room. O if you would only write your life!—much better than editing your great grandmother.

I heard from Nelly the other day, from the Highlands. She will make jokes. I spend my time deciphering them. But you think me unjust to Nelly; and I believe she gets irritated with me, and does her best to flout all my prejudices. Still, she is a very charming woman!

Do you like my writing? Have you changed your opinion of it?

I begin to believe that I shall write rather well one of these days.

The Quaker is rejoicing over Helen Stephen’s death, and meditating an address to an Oxford College in November. What the difference is between her inspiration and my journalism I dont know.

Are you fond of me?

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

Letters 448-498

448: To Clive Bell

[1? October 1908]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

Dear Clive,

There is nothing much in this, but I send it partly to show my sense of gratitude for your services with my box and to supplicate that the novel I left behind may be sent, and to thank also for my entertainment at your hands, and those of my great mistress. I was very happy … [in Italy and Paris]

Yr. AVS

Quentin Bell

[]

449: To Lytton Strachey

Sunday [4 October 1908]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

Dear Lytton,

It was charming to get a letter from you in Paris. We came back two or three days ago—Adrian is just back—there are concerts and reviews and Saxon till 3 o’clock in the morning—it’s all begun again: We had very successful travels however, and ended with a week in Paris and mild Bohemian society. We drank an immense amount of coffee and sat out under the electric light talking about art. I wish we were 10 years younger, or 20 years older, and could settle to our brandy and cultivate the senses. As it was, I sometimes thought of other things—novels and adventures. Why don’t you bring off your novel? You must. Plots don’t matter, and as for passion and style and immorality, what more do you want? Have you been attending to English literature all this time? I must buy the Spectator. I feel as though I wanted to read through whole libraries—but of course I shan’t. There are books all round my chair, and I can’t bother to pick them up. Adrian has just told me a dream of his—how he travelled for 40 years with the Hermit of the Dead Sea—It was Saxon.

Yr. ever,
AVS

Frances Hooper

[]

450: To Violet Dickinson

Sunday [4 October 1908]

[29 Fitzroy Square, W.]

My Violet,

It was very pleasing to find your letter waiting me—among a rubbish heap of bills. We got back on Thursday, and Adrian came on Friday, so we are all started again. We had a very successful journey, Clive is an admirable man, and I never did a thing or wrote a line. We lounged about in Siena and Perugia and Paris. I liked Italy much better this time, except for the people. But the country was beautiful—all the grapes ripe, and the earth warm. We met Elsie, Ly Carnarvon, at Perugia, who asked us about George, and I haven’t seen him for six months.

It is very thick and hot here, and I cant make up my mind to put anything straight, but the dear old Times wants me to set to work. I bought a chair and a sofa in Paris. Do you realise that you have never been inside this house?

Julian looks about 2 years old, and is quite responsible now. Nessa will probably make a very nice child of him. He has beautiful eyes, and a great big head.

I have a petition to make; although I packed with the utmost discretion, I left behind me the 2 things I love best—and thus leave out to the last—my fur slippers. I have to go to my bath now on naked soles, and when the cold weather comes I shall get chillblains. Can you tell me where you get them, or would you like to give me my Christmas present now—or, if I got some small beasts skins would you sew them up, as you did before?

Where is Nelly? I heard from Beatrice—like the growl of a dog with a bone.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

451: To Clive Bell

[October? 1908]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My dear Clive,

Will you think me a great bore if I turn to the dreary subject again, and ask you whether you have anything to say about that unfortunate work? I have a feeling at this moment that it is all a mistake, and I believe you could tell me.

At any rate I put myself in your hands with great confidence; I dont really think you will be bored by my demands, and I believe you do speak the truth.

At the same time, I groan over my egoism that wont let me or anyone else think of better things.

Yr. affate,
AVS

Dont bother to write at length—in fact, dont write if you had rather not.

Quentin Bell

[]

452: To Lady Robert Cecil

[26 October 1908]

Postcard

[29 Fitzroy Square, W.]

Your Miss Beale is admirable. You find much more to be said for her than I saw—indeed she becomes impressive. But she was ugly too, with her horrid Gothic brick all round her.

AVS

Hatfield

[]

453: To Violet Dickinson

Thursday [29 October 1908]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My Violet,

It is too touching that you should send me shoes. I did not mean that you should keep my wardrobe supplied. I thought you had a great hecatomb of Somersetshire lambs, offered up to the shade of your Grandfather (and my Great Uncle) the Bishop [Lord Auckland].

I went out to get you a book in thanks; but found nothing, and now I have written for some elegies which will come in a day or two.

I met Bruce Richmond last night at a concert, and we had an awkward moment. He has shrunk, and become a lively little old man—I thought he was younger and bigger. I want to ask him to dinner—but do I dare? I also saw the benignant goddess, Katie [Cromer], and helped her into her jacket, which was all inside out. Could I ask her to tea, do you think? I am writing all day long about Ly. Holland. I think Nelly is much better on Miss Beale. I told her so—but I think she suspects me.

Yr. Sp.

The shoes fit excellently, and I go to my bath in them. The shape is wonderful, like coal scuttles.

Berg

[]

454: To Madge Vaughan

Nov. 1st [1908]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

Dearest Madge,

I was very glad to get your letter. How am I to protest that I don’t forget any of you? You, or the children or the moors. I met a young man who admires you the other night—Arthur Daykins, and if you had heard me describe you—you would have felt quite secure about me. But to sit down and write a letter is such a misery. I always want to find a larger sheet and I don’t keep any. We are all back and very industrious as usual. How any woman lives who has 4 children, I can’t imagine; I stagger along, like a washerwoman with a basket on her head—and yet I am single.

Julian is quite grown up—I dont see why we treat children as Babies at all. He is perfectly rational; and very busy with his own business; I think he is rather quick and practical—very sweet tempered, and I suppose he will be beautiful.

Are you writing? I always ask that question, and you always tell me it is better to be married. Arthur Daykins, who seemed a very cultivated young man, was anxious that you should publish a novel. I have read Mr Forsters book—but it repeats what he has said already—However, it is very amusing.

I hoped to see you the other day. We shall be here I suppose for Christmas. I am often imagining myself on the moors. I think about you and the children too. I always believe that I know all about them—but Janet is older than I thought possible. Do write again. I was very happy to get your letter.

Yr. AVS

I have just routed out your letter, which had got beneath bills, and you ask about Italy. We had a splendid time. I never saw such a beautiful country. All the vines were ripe, and we wandered about in the evening and came upon odd little farm houses and women picking maize—Is that likely? I thought of you there too—for we went to Perugia, and stayed at your hotel, and all the visitors were reading Miss Symonds, and saying how it was the best guide book in Italy. We made a great stir by saying that we knew you. People used to take us with them for walks on the strength of it. We went to Sienna—which I liked better than Perugia, partly because there were fewer English. Then we spent a week in Paris. But London is really more beautiful than Paris—This is all very fragmentary! I find it so difficult to see how a letter ought to be written—Show me.

Sussex

[]

455: To Madge Vaughan

19th Nov. 08

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

Dearest Madge,

I have been disgracefully long in thanking you. Your book arrived just as I was plunging off by the Cornish Express to spend a week at the Lizard! I have read the introduction, and I think it is very good indeed. It is more restrained than usual; more direct, I think, and somehow mature and wise. You seem to speak with experience. You get a great deal of colour into your writing, and she must have been a great character. I have read the book; but I shall read it again. I should like to ‘review’ it—but the only work I do is for The Times, and I don’t think they care about reprints at this season—I asked the other day about another book. If you could suggest a place to write in, I would gladly do it. I am deep in Venetian history at this moment—fascinated, like a Lizard in the sun.

I remember that you want a drawing by Thoby. Nessa has them, and she promised to bring one, but I shall write now, and send it later. It is just two years since he died, and I feel immensely old, and as though the best in us had gone. But what use is it to write? It is such an odd life without him.

Give my love to the Children. Janet will be out before I turn round.

When shall I see them—and you?

Thank you very much for the book. I am glad to have it.

Yr. AVS

Sussex

[]

456: To Lytton Strachey

20th Nov. [1908]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

Dear Lytton,

The Lizard is but a dream to me now. I really can’t believe in you at all. The Daily Telegraph talks of “forget-me-nots, primroses and apple blossom” flowering in profusion on the coast. So I think of you as a kind of Venetian prince, in sky blue tights, lying on your back in an orchard, or balancing an exquisite leg in the air while I—It wasn’t actually foggy, but worse, a dun coloured mist, through which all the poor and the meat and the gas jets were visible. I had a number of letters, mostly bills, but a scattering of invitations, from Lady Pollock, Trevelyans, and Protheros. I accept them all of course. Last night we had Duncan Grant who thinks your address is Penzance; and tonight we dine at the Friday Club, off a 2 shilling dinner. It sounds a little pandemoniac; in the intervals I try to read Romeo and Juliet! I have a dread lest my St Simon, about which I was so parsimonious, should be castrated, and when I get where you are, I shall find stars. But it will be a long time before that happens. I want a fire and an arm chair silence, and hours of solitude. You enjoy all these things, in your island. Do you think much?—have you written more poems? I had cut my [review] novel, and thought it ghastly dull. When shall you come back?

By the way, if Esther [maid?] should approach you with two pairs of scissors, will you stick to them. For some reason I was sent off with two, and came back with none. Adrian meant to leave a map, but packed it, but if you want it he will send it. He has invented a sister taken ill at the Lizard, staying in a friend’s house, with appendicitis—crisis lasted 48 hours, but operation avoided (for the present). She had a touch of it in Athens.

Yours,
AVS

Frances Hooper

[]

457: To Violet Dickinson

[24 November 1908]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My Violet,

I behaved with great stupidity and tore up the card with your book’s name on it. If you would repeat it, I would go and get it. As for your compliments—they fall like dew. Shall I make you understand that I am greatly refreshed by seeing you, and boring you, and talking of unwritten works?

O if you could see me struggle with my novel—it is a most agitating work—and probably a will o’ the wisp. My reviews dont count at all.

I am just off to Godmanchester [Lady Stephen]. Lady Gwendolen [Godolphin Osborne] came yesterday, and stayed 2 hours. She was charming, and really more human. I liked her. We discussed our views of the world, and how she lived and how I lived.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

458: To Lytton Strachey

[1 December 1908]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

Dear Lytton,

I was being suffocated in Lady Pollock’s drawing room this afternoon—you never saw such a sight.

I shall be in on Thursday if you could come then.

O how those old women spoil my life. Think of the embraces of Mrs Clifford and Aunt Anny!

Yrs. AVS

Frances Hooper

[]

459: To Violet Dickinson

[December 1908]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My Violet,

I have been at Newnham [College, Cambridge], cold and ill-tempered. Do give me the Oxford Book of French Verse. Edited by St John Lucas. I have never got it, and want it.

Now you must tell me also what you shall have.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

460: To Violet Dickinson

[17? December 1908]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My Violet,

Why didnt you come up? I was merely walking round and round my room and looking at the backs of books. You might have jogged my ideas.

Well—how am I to make any engagement? Nessa says you are going to France: I stay here till Easter. I have no particular engagements. Couldn’t I come and see you one day or will you lunch? On Monday I have Ottoline and Miss Case, who wish to discuss the morality of Baroness de Mayer. I have just written an immense dull article upon Venetian history for the Times, rather in the style of Herbert Fisher and Miss [Edith] Sichel.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

461: To Lytton Strachey

[25 December 1908]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

Dear Lytton,

We have asked the [H. A. L.] Fishers to come on the 7th—a Thursday. Will you come then—I suppose we must dress. I imagine that you are now leading your Aunt into dinner. We are comatose—ham divine, but turkey oppressive, and we shall lie before the fire, speechless, till bed time.

Yrs VS

Frances Hooper

[]

462: To Clive Bell

Christmas Day [1908]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My dear Clive,

How am I to thank you for your present? The chairs were laden with it this morning. I have seldom enjoyed a happier breakfast. First I saw that it was Byron—a poet I have never read, for lack of an edition to read him in. Then I saw the margins, and the binding, and the print. The magnificence was overwhelming—We carried them like a train of ants into the study. I have been fingering them all day. I have written all this without a word of thanks—but you know your sister-in-laws temper by this time. She is a good garrulous creature, who says many things, and feels intensities, but seldom manages to say them right. Your wife gave me such a talking to the other day; she will deny it, but dont believe her. She said I never gave, but always took. In this case, as she must own, I have been forced to take. I have to leap over ramparts of books in order to leave the study. All you get from me is a discreet Brass tray. Will you employ some dingy afternoon in finding or framing (that would be better) an inscription for the title page. Really they are magnificent. Besides Don Juan and the rest, I think also of ‘the thought’ as people say. I find it very comforting.

Well—as for news, you deserve a letter, and not Nessa this time. She must be thanked however. She sent me a beautiful skewer. The Apes [Virginia, though plural] thought it was a rod at first, but being satisfied by their nurse, they are now sucking at it in a row, something like Julian and the sugar tongs, save that they turn it over now and then, put their noses through the loop, and make a little odd chuckling noise. It keeps them happy by the hour.

We had Lytton last night; you will be glad to hear that I am not in love with him, nor is there any sign that he is in love with me. Then Duncan Grant came; we had very desultory talk. D. G. is difficult, but charming. He said he was alone, so we asked him to lunch today. He was difficult again; I think he has too many ideas, and no way to get rid of them. I daresay Adrian and I aren’t particularly sympathetic—but, again, I think him charming. Lytton told me the whole story of Adrian’s love affair the other day—how he had wept in Boswells rooms, and yet had never spoken to the man. This is all my news.

It has been perfectly grey from daybreak (I imagine) and the view only became tolerable when the lamps on the other side of the square were lit. We have dozed over the fire.

It will be a great relief when you are back [from Clive’s parents].

Yr. aff.
VS

Quentin Bell

[]

463: To Violet Dickinson

[late December 1908]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My Violet,

I found that Sophie [Farrell] was hoarding a parcel, with a great variety of things in it. My book and my knocker are both very charming; your power of finding presents is remarkable. It is the result of a generous nature, which never forgets, but buys in June, if it sees something; whereas all my presents are bought on Christmas Eve, and never fit. Yours, by the way, is for New Year.

Will you come to tea with me?—when?—Dont drop me; as Mary Sheepshanks says. These new years are dreadful trials. Isn’t it creditable that we still—have some affection!

Yr. VS

Berg

[]

464: To Lytton Strachey

[4 January 1909]

29 Fitzroy Square

Dear Lytton,

I had heard vaguely of your flight to Rye. Isn’t the Mermaid [Inn] rather dismal—like a battleship in the time of Nelson—I remember creeping into it one day, and an old woman chased me out. I am sorry you have been ill. Was it Christmas? We sat over the fire and watched the snow, in an odd white glare. Now Adrian is down in Wiltshire, tramping in the mud, I suppose; and I don’t know what I have been doing—seeing Mary Sheepshanks, I think. She deluged me till 1.30 in the morning with the most vapid and melancholy revelations—Imagine 17 Sheepshanks in a Liverpool slum, and Mary (so she says) the brightest of the lot—and then she told stories of women betrayed and love rejected, and cold and poverty and old age with the creeping paralysis—and the upshot of it all was that one should reform the divorce laws. That is what I find so depressing about her—She comes to a dead stop in front of some sordid matter of fact. Like the French she has no outlets. “At the age of 20”, she said, “I ought to have married a curate.” Was that her delicate way of putting it?

You are going to meet the Fishers on Thursday—You and Herbert must talk about Voltaire, and I shall say how I have just been seeing his waxwork at Madame Tussaud’s. I can’t help thinking he is rather a fraud (H. F. I mean). He is impossibly enlightened and humane. She is a bright woman.

I read the letters to the unknown [Mérimée] when I was supposed to be boiling goats milk in Athens, and I remember that I found them rather comforting in the circumstances. They seemed so cynical—an arid elderly couple, with all their wits about them. I hate their precise ways.

I am sitting over my fire towards midnight, having put the dog to bed, and have just finished the Ajax [Sophocles]. The ancients puzzle me—they are either so profound or so elementary, and when one has to spell out every word one can’t tell which. However, there is at least one passage of great beauty although I find that it can be read 20 different ways. Yesterday I saw Henry Lamb with his evil goat’s eyes—and Saxon was there too, and Nessa and Clive. Clive seemed to me depressed, but I think one must ignore it. The Freshfields have asked us to stay: Sidney Lee is coming to tea with me—that is all my news. I have also been asked to write ‘impressions’ of Walter Headlam, for his Life. But they would have to be lies.

Now I must go to bed, and read some of my exquisite Cowper.

Yr. VS

Frances Hooper

[]

465: To Violet Dickinson

Monday [4 January 1909]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My Violet,

It was no good trying to answer a letter dated motor car somewhere on the Road to Avignon. If you had given me a proper address you should have had a letter on new years day precisely, with a sentimental retrospect,—melancholy anticipation (I have just been writing that phrase somewhere; and I never can get the sound of my own writing out of my head. That’s what comes of being as selfish as I am. I shouldn’t wonder if God struck me deaf and blasted me blind and set my own tunes grinding perpetually through my brain, as penance).

Well—when are you coming back? It is already next year. How was your party? I never envisaged (as the French have it) anything so ghastly. Think of the long white roads, and the dusky inns at night, and the intelligent American with her guide Henry James, and Violet with her practical instincts all alive, for fleas and smelly water.

How is Ozzy—and how is your spine, with all its delicate tendrils. Whenever we have Herring for dinner, I think of you.

Nothing has happened to me, except that I have ground out two long articles, for the Times. One upon Boswell I think rather good. As for the work of imagination I turn hot and cold over it, and all my friends tell me its no good for me to write a novel. They say my creatures are all cold blooded, like those same Herrings. But you dont, my Violet, do you? Ever since we trod the groves together you have seen that my passion was for love and humanity; though it has had to kindle through depths of green water.

Julian has cut a tooth. Nessa and Clive are very flourishing—so happy, that I think of marriage.

Write to me.

AVS

Berg

[]

466: To Violet Dickinson

Thursday [14 January 1909]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My Violet,

I am distressed at the accounts of your [motor] accident, but Thank God that France grows stout trees. You really are too complicated to keep in motion. Perhaps you were an air animal, born before your time; or perhaps you are some curious but inconvenient survival. Once you swam over the Houses of Parliament, and Westminster Bridge Road, when they were under water. But as for walking on dry land—Providence never made you for that. Throw this theory at your doctor.

I meant to explain that if you skip Greece, with all its painful memories, you will come to Italy last autumn. It isn’t amusing at all—as your house-maid asked (with a fine critical taste) that it should be. But I have written nothing whatever that she would pass. What glory it would be to amuse your housemaid!

I have just come back from the Freshfields, where I talked for long stretches about Tolstoy. Mrs F: has lost the use of her right arm; and has a good deal of pain, but she seems to me a valiant woman, who keeps afloat. and strews her bed with the last French review, and the last English memoir.

‘So convenient for my daughters that I can read: they can leave me alone.’ Old people are either tragic or very happy. That sounds deep—dont think too much what it means. It is not really meant for a concussed brain. I was forgetting.

What are my shoes?

Yr. VS

Berg

[]

467: To Violet Dickinson

[26? January 1909]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My Violet,

You are much too generous. It should have been 5 and not 15 [shillings]. What book shall I get you? You said you would tell me.

I am considering which book I shall get—a very pleasant situation. Especially as I have been very economical in that line lately.

I feel immensely old—old as a hoary grey tortoise, who only comes out in the sun.

How are you?

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

468: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Jan. 16th [1909]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

Dearest Ottoline,

What a pleasure to get your letter! It made me very happy. Thank you for writing. If you will have me for a friend, it will be a great joy for me. Shyness, I suppose, makes it difficult to say that it is delightful to know you and like you as I do. I wish I could tell you how much pleasure your letter gave me.

Your affectionate,
V.S.

Texas

[]

469: To Lytton Strachey

Thursday [28 January 1909]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

Here are the papers. I hope you will see the whole thing—I can’t say I do at this moment. Caroline is the most alive to me, with her dead husband Sir Julius, who wore a white slip beneath his waistcoat I imagine, and waxed his moustache. Nessa and Humphry Maitland are discharging their views already. I think you ought to begin at once.

Oh what a day! It clings to the fingers and creeps beneath the nails: Why do you tantalise me with stories of your novel? I wish you would confine your genius to one department, it’s too bad to have you dancing like some (oh well—I’ll drop the metaphor) over all departments of literature—poetry, criticism (both scientific & humane) art—belles lettres—and now fiction. A painstaking woman who wishes to treat of life as she finds it, and to give voice to some of the perplexities of her sex, in plain English, has no chance at all.

My glove was a disreputable object.

Here I sit, waiting for Adrian and Saxon to stagger in from the opera, and bury their noses in a pie. Life surely should mean more than this. And yet, it all seems very reasonable. I will ask Saxon.

Yrs. VS

Frances Hooper

[]

470: To Lytton Strachey

Feb. 1st [1909]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

Dear Mr Hatherly,

I shall be happy to give you tea tomorrow. If there’s one thing a Yorkshire woman can cook, it’s a muffin.

I missed you by 10 minutes at the Philips’ the other day.

So you’ve noticed it then? How clever you are, and how unkind! For don’t you think that these “extraordinary conclusions” you like so much may be rather uncomfortable for me and perhaps (though I really won’t admit it) a little uncomfortable for Clarissa? We were not happy—no—and yet I know its dangerous to imagine people in love with one, and so I told myself all the time. But James is really—sometimes a woman feels so much older than a man. There! that’s worthy of Lady Eastnor [Ottoline]. I am thinking of his face, as he helped me on with my cloak, and said good night. I don’t admit for a moment that you have any real ground for your “extraordinary conclusions”, and I suppose I should do better to say no more about them. You always tempt me to run on, and justify myself and explain myself, with your hints and subtleties and suggestive catlike ways. Could you come early tomorrow—by the bye? Mr Ilchester [Saxon] has sent me a ticket for the Wagner opera—what d’you call it—and I don’t want to miss the overture.

Your very sincerely,
Eleanor Hadyng

Frances Hooper

[]

471: To Clive Bell

Sunday [7? February 1909]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My dear Clive,

You are really angelic to take so much pains to give reasons and advice. They seem to me excellent; for you have laid your finger on spots already suspected by me. I will only offer some explanation of the wretched first volume. Those bare passages of biography were not meant to remain in the text. They are notes to solidify my own conception of the people characters. I thought it a good plan to write them down; but having served their purpose, they shall go. Helen’s letter also was an experiment. When I read the thing over (one very grey evening) I thought it so flat and monotonous that I did not even feel ‘the atmosphere’: certainly there was no character in it. Next morning I proceeded to slash and rewrite, in the hope of animating it; and (as I suspect for I have not re-read it) destroyed the one virtue it had—a kind of continuity; for I wrote it originally in a dream like state, which was at any rate, unbroken. My intention now is to write straight on, and finish the book; and then, if that day ever comes, to catch if possible the first imagination and go over the beginning again with broad touches, keeping much of the original draft, and trying to deepen the atmosphere—Giving the feel of running water, and not much else. I have kept all the pages I cut out; so the thing can be reconstructed precisely as it was. Your objection, that my prejudice against men makes me didactic ‘not to say priggish’, has not quite the same force with me; I dont remember what I said that suggests the remark; I daresay it came out without my knowledge, but I will bear it in mind. I never meant to preach, and agree that like God, one shouldn’t. Possibly, for psychological reasons which seem to me very interesting, a man, in the present state of the world, is not a very good judge of his sex; and a ‘creation’ may seem to him ‘didactic’. I admit the justice of your hint that sometimes I have had an inkling of the way the book might be written by other people. It is very difficult to fight against it; as difficult as to ignore the opinion of one’s probable readers—I think I gather courage as I go on. The only possible reason for writing down all this, is that it represents roughly a view of one’s own. My boldness terrifies me. I feel I have so few of the gifts that make novels amusing.

I expect your praise is immensely exaggerated: you (I guess) have so much more of the dramatic instinct than I have that you see it into my scenes. But I take praise very gratefully; long for some assurance that all my words aren’t vapour. They accumulate behind one in such masses—dreadful, if they are nothing but muddy water. I think myself that the last part is really the best; at least I have written it with far greater relish, and with the sense of having the thing before me. What vanity these sheets will seem, one of these days, when Melymbrosia is a dusty book on your shelves, which Julian tries to read, but cant! However, there are numbers of things that I should be interested to say about the book; and we need not always be thinking of posterity. I too write in haste, just before dressing to go out. I will only add here I have blind faith in my power of making sentences presentable, so that I leave bald patches gaily, to furbish up next winter.

I was a little afraid that you would accuse me of compromise; but I was also quite sure that, made as I am, that sequel was the only one possible. I want to bring out a stir of live men and women, against a background. I think I am quite right to attempt it, but it is immensely difficult to do. Ah, how you encourage me! It makes all the difference. Are you really interested? I suppose so, since you say it; but you have no notion how pale and transparent it reads to me sometimes—though I write with heat enough. That will do, for one evening!

I have also a number of things to say of your Peacocks, but doubt that you care much to hear them. They are not merely polite; they are questions, for the most part, that I should like to ask you. If I can be interested in Miss Warmington (a delightful woman) why cant I be interested in you? After all, you have a point of view. I will suggest no more, at present, as Nessa says you are depressed, and my talk might drive you mad. Praise too, I suppose you dont care about.

You said something about Clarissa [Vanessa]; if you meant seriously that you wished me to go away with her I am very willing. I am sure a few days away would be an excellent thing; 10 days in bed must leave a weakness in the joints. However, she seems very truculent.

Yr. affate,
VS

Quentin Bell

[]

472: To Lytton Strachey

[9 February 1909]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

I shall be in to tea tomorrow.

We are just back half dazed from the opera—six solid hours of it—and if it were properly edited one might get through in 30 minutes.

VS

I laid out 6d upon the Spectator and was rewarded—only it means I must read another book now.

Frances Hooper

[]

473: To Lytton Strachey

[16 February 1909]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

Dear Lytton,

Thank you for the shilling—I believe it was only sixpence though—so one day I will give you six coppers. I am sorry you have a cold—you would have died at Oxford. Our marrow was frozen, and our spirit chilled to death. There was [K.L.]—a weak man, I am glad to find, though plausible, and Humphrey Paul—and endless others.

Herbert [Fisher] gave voice to one profound remark—“G. L. Strachey must be related to Sir Frederick Pollock”.

Yr. VS

Frances Hooper

[]

474: To Clive Bell

Feb. 19th [1909]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My dear James [Philips],

I ought to have written before, and you must lay the blame on Mrs Harley Sebright [H. A. L. Fisher] that I didn’t. I took pen and paper to Oxford and calculated upon one of those warm confidential hours, when one has slipped one’s silk dress off, and huddled one’s dressing gown on, when the fire blazes, and all the brilliant talk is over. No wonder that this hour has been dedicated by generations of women to the prosecution of their friendships. The intimate, emotional, and (it must be confessed) often irrational, though entirely delightful nature of their relationships is to be fixed on it. One cant write epigrams, or talk politics or housekeeping in one’s dressing gown, with the hair about one’s shoulders; one cant part without a kiss.

These reflections are superfluous though, seeing that I had no fire, no conversation and no friend. I couldn’t even write you a letter.

The Sebrights have a new red villa, standing in its own grounds. Cabbages tap at the dining room windows; great white fowls run across the lawn. I wonder how many conversations that room has heard about hen keeping and vegetable produce—how often Mr Sebright has said to the lady next him ‘We never buy an egg’, and Mrs Sebright has flushed with pleasure and called across to him ‘Next year we shall have our own potatoes’ You can imagine how the talk goes after that. This is the groundwork of the establishment, but the rarest culture flowers on top of it. There were Regius Professors at dinner, and undergraduates who had won prizes without number, and were consequently unable to talk—as though they sucked their prizes, as babies suck their corals. Why is it that women of 18 and young men of 21 have less to say to each other than any other of God’s creatures? They terrify me; I know, as I have sometimes been terrified by the critical gaze of your son Peter [Julian], who cant talk yet, and is so innocent.

The poor woman has no children, and therefore all the matrons are very tolerant of her cats. I was scratched, but Lady M said to me, in such a voice ‘That is Molly’s [Lettice] favourite puss’ that I couldn’t complain. Her chickens, her cabbages, and her philanthropy are humoured for the same reason. Mr Sebright is an excellent specimen—really, I dont mean to sneer, the one fault is that he is a specimen—He is like a bunch of perfect blossoms, or a basket of picked strawberries; and for my part I like the varieties better. If you were to take the normal Englishman of culture and put him under a magnifying glass you would have Harley Sebright.

I should like to turn Oxford into a Cathedral city and people it with Deans and widow ladies. The profession of learning should be carried on in a manufacturing town. Perhaps in your 18th century they managed things better, I detest the modern way of it. I detest pale scholars with their questioning about life, and the message of the classics, and the bearing of Greek thought upon modern problems. [Richard] Porson was always drunk; [Richard] Bentley was notorious—for something disreputable; and the only true scholar I ever knew ended his days in a madhouse. My week, on the whole, has been rather a busy one. I dined with my publisher [Bruce Richmond], and felt like a cannibal because the dinner was so good, and I knew what went to make it—the blood of respectable young men and women like myself and my neighbour. I am afraid that one cant believe nowadays in starving genius, frozen in a garret.

We were a dreadful set of harpies; Middle aged writers of mild distinction are singularly unpleasant to my taste. They remind me of those bald-necked vultures at the zoo, with their drooping blood-shot eyes, who are always on the look out for a lump of raw meat. You should have heard the chattering and squabbling that went on among them, and the soft complacent coo of those that had been fed. That great goose Lady G[regory?] was the loudest in her squawking; the rest of us sat round and twittered, half in envy and half in derision.

For some reason I am tormented this morning by the image of a great brown woolly bear, which comes crawling across my page, and curls up into a ball when I touch it with my pen. It is deliciously soft, and rolls about in the palm of my hand. I think it has something to do with Clarissa [Vanessa]. We used to be told when we were children that woolly bears could sting. I must now change my tone, and write to the consumptive daughter of a literary Duchess. How little letters say!

Your ever,
Eleanor Hadyng

Quentin Bell

[]

475: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Thursday [11 March 1909]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My dear Ottoline,

Adrian and I shall come if possible—if we dont have to see an Aunt [Caroline Emelia] who is very melancholy about our morals—with great pleasure on Sunday. We were so dirty and ill-tempered on Tuesday, after travelling all day, that we thought we should disgrace your drawing room. You would have had to take us into corners, and draw screens round us. But however dirty you may be tonight, we insist upon your coming to us.

Although there wasn’t a bath, we were very happy in Cornwall. I wish one could manage so that Bloomsbury was on the sea shore; and all your company sat among sandhills. Think of Eddie Marsh smoothing down the bristles for all his ladies! Then one could roll occasionally, which would be such an advantage.

Your aff.ate,
V.S.

Texas

[]

476: To Violet Dickinson

[mid-March 1909]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My Violet,

I was beginning to wonder whether some saying, blasphemous and obscene, overheard in the underground, in which your name occurred, had been repeated to you by—God knows who—Ella Crum—who is never guilty of indiscretion besides—is out of London. Adrian has been in bed with a bad cold, and is now tolerably recovered. The Quaker is very bad. She has to have a nurse, and I cant understand what’s the matter, but I think it sounds rather serious. I saw her two weeks ago, we were to have stayed this week, but she puts us off indefinitely. I cant have you to tea on Wednesday—because I am having a tea party that day, at which Beatrice is going to meet Lady Ottoline I hope. Could you come next Monday or Tuesday? I would try to get Nessa—but I dont know whether Julian could be brought too.

I have been writing—oh—a d——d dull review of a book by a woman who had a child before she married—Mrs Henry Cust—and atones for it by studying mediaeval Germany profoundly. My review is going to deal with the subject of the illicit passions in a masterly way—and to suggest better means of penitence. Then, I am going to write about the Carlyle love letters. The Times, you see, gives me all the subtle and doubtful passions to discuss.

I would come and see you if you liked.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

477: To Madge Vaughan

21st March [1909]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My dearest Madge,

I saw Emma the other day, and she says you are still at Bournemouth. I didn’t know it; and I am so sorry. You have been having a very bad time, I am afraid; I do hope you are happier now.

It is months and months since I heard from you or saw you. I think the only plan will be to set up a spare bed in the linen cupboard, and lock you in there when you are passing through.

Things seem to go on here much in the same way. As a matter of fact I suppose there are all kinds of changes, as life is certainly very exciting, but one would have to be a novelist to describe them. Oh how I wish I could write a novel! People and their passions, or even their lives without passions, are the things to write about. Have you finished your book? Anyhow, the stuff of infinite novels must be in you. Children seem to me so queer—so much that is definite in them from the first moment. Julian is a miracle; but I dont pretend to understand them. Nessa and Clive are going off to Italy after Easter; my plans are vague. I hope very much that somehow I may see you.

Dont write if you are busy; I shall hear about you from the Vaughans.

Give the children my love.

Your loving,
VS

Sussex

[]

478: To Violet Dickinson

[March 1909]

29 Fitzroy, Square, W.

My Violet,

Thank you for sending the book.

Shall I come and see you again? I imagine that you are too busy.

Adrian and I think of taking a steamer in the middle of the night and landing at St Malo, as the First Cock rises to crow on Easter day. There is a night when the Bird of Dawning croweth all night long. I have been a craven, and left my gentleman to go to his concert alone. He sent me a ticket for tonight.

The Quaker sounds very bad; but there is a great reticence in naming internal complaints, so I know nothing definite.

Well—I wish I ever saw you: a fine spirit, like some pale taper in a gale—Do you see yourself—flowing all night long—the flame streaming like a river.

VS

Berg

[]

479: To Violet Dickinson

[9? April 1909]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My Violet,

The Quaker died on Wednesday night. I heard this morning. I suppose it was much best that she should die—but it seems rather melancholy now. She was so remote, and yet full of life too.

We didn’t go to St Malo after all: it suddenly occurred to us both that we could afford something more exciting. Adrian went off to Venice this morning. I shall wait till the 23rd and go to Florence, with Nessa, which will be divine.

How are you? Dont bother to write.

You were very exquisite the other night, and I suppose I was very egoistical.

Perhaps I shall see you again. Anyhow, I have your address.

Yr. AVS

Berg

[]

480: To Lady Robert Cecil

Tuesday April 13th [Monday, 12 April 1909]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My dear Nelly,

When you wrote to me you did not think I should answer on a great sheet like this—however, it is very doubtful whether I shall finish it.

The effect of this ghastly [bank] holiday which leaves me alone in London, and shuts all the shops, and gives all the postmen a day off, is to make me turn to my friends. There should be threads floating in the air, which would merely have to be taken hold of, in order to talk. You would walk about the world like a spider in the middle of a web. In 100 years time, I daresay these psychical people will have made all this apparent—now seen only by the eye of genius. As it is—how I hate writing!

Yesterday I met your friend Miss [May] Sinclair. I confess, I rather sympathised with you! She seemed to me a woman of obtrusive, and medicinal morality; and prodded it home with little round eyes bright as steel—talked very seriously of her ‘work’; and ecstatic moods in which she swings (like a spider again) half way to Heaven, detached from earth. This was at Mrs Protheros.

My brother and I spent six hours the other day walking the streets of London, and trying to decide where we should spend Easter. This was on Good Friday Eve. At last, just as the clock struck 5, he bought a ticket for Venice, and started at day break; and I bought one for Florence. I am going with Vanessa and her husband in a weeks time. I believe there will be roses and wisterias hanging over yellow walls, and their golden river—immense bare hills all round, and little pink villas scattered like egg shells about them. I never get used to the bareness of Italy, the grass is so mangy. Oh how I should like to—discover how to write!

Now Swinburne is dead, Meredith dumb, and Henry James inarticulate, things are in a bad way. The Cornhill seems to me singularly dull; Nelly wont publish her novel; and Virginia Stephen knows nothing about humanity. I have been writing an obituary all the morning of an Aunt who died. She was a quaker and this article is written for the Guardian. If one could only say what one thinks, some good might come of it; but I can’t see the need for respectful lamentations. When you die, I shall tell the truth about you. It would be a very interesting article—something like a Japanese watercolour, with an angular ivory face. I wish I could understand where the puritan strain comes in: the Lambtons were jolly country squires, weren’t they? with curious manners at table.

I saw Violet the other day. She was just going to take to her bed, at a friend’s house. She looked very tired; and then there was Ozzy. Do you think his manner is a disease?

Do write to me or come and have tea. My drawing room mourns, like the sea, in flowing purple. It is new since you were here; as for my sitting room, there are great pyramids of books, with trailing mists between them; partly dust, and partly cigarette smoke.

I hope you are well, and fond of me.

Yr. aff.
VS

Hatfield

[]

481: To Clive Bell

Tuesday [13 April 1909]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My dear Clive,

Your first letter was so delightful, and so unexpected that it should have had an answer directly. Why should I excite you? Why should you be glad to hear that I and my bundle of tempers come with you to Italy? Ah, how pleasant a world, where such facts do exist! how exquisite that you should recognise them. When I have melted down the whole of my illusions, one or two things remain, bright as gold, or diamond. One is—well, that you care for me, and that we are likely to spend many years in the same neighbourhood. I have spent such a sepulchral day! Where am I to begin, in describing it? First, as to the [Quaker’s] Will. It is very disappointing. Nessa and Adrian each have £100: I have £2,500. The rest goes in legacies, to the other Stephens. Katharine [Stephen] has about £3,000—including the Porch and the Public House—It is miserable for Nessa; still worse for Adrian; I am determined to make him share mine—but there’s no need to talk of that act of feminine weakness.

George came here, and we went to Golders Green [Crematorium], in profuse, watery rain. He is almost circular with flesh, soft as a babies, infinitely respectable, and more clearly in the wrong than I ever saw him—full of solicitude about Aunt Stephens health, and slipping in phrases used by the Archbishop of Canterbury—a very good humoured philanthropic creature, but, I thought, a mere lump of flesh, veined with sentiment. There were perhaps six people in the Chapel; two of whom, Albert [Venn] Dicey and Alice the maid, wept audibly; Sir Herbert [Stephen] was there, upright as a dragoon, and Dorothea [Stephen] in a pork pie hat. I was much puzzled by the burial service; but the whole ceremony was very thin and prosaic—it ended by my having Dorothea, Leah [servant], and Alice to lunch. George considerately hinted that it was the proper thing to do.

I have spent the afternoon hearing curious medical details and superstitions—how the last time Nun stood up was to watch Ruby’s [dog] funeral—how she read a particular hymn on a particular morning—Oh and loathsome details without end from Leah and Dorothea—and then Albert Dicey came to tea, and I have just packed them all off in a fourwheeler. A bonfire in the back garden would have done equally well. We might have danced round it.

As for Lytton, I haven’t seen him; feeling out of the mood at present, and I suppose he thinks I went to France. Do you see that R. K. Gaye has been found shot? Killed himself, I suppose. I wonder why.

I hear that Miss Una Birch thinks you the most fascinating man she ever met. This is not to repay your compliments.

Oh, you should see my Obituary! It is a pity to curtail a pen which floats and flies to the step of a funeral horse, with a tight black tail—but it had to be.

I wish I could write on; but I want this to catch the country post. I shall dine with you tomorrow. Kiss my Dol—phin.

Yr. VS

Quentin Bell

[]

482: To Violet Dickinson

[13 April 1909]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My Violet,

I was sorry I couldn’t come the other day. Will you ask me—or tell Miss Dodge to ask me—(not necessarily to a meat meal) sometime before the 23rd. Unless you ought to see no one.

I have been attending the Quakers cremation today; a dreary business. Leah came home to lunch, and Dorothea; they wept and told curious anecdotes all the afternoon, and at one point Leah and I fell on each others necks—an experience never to be repeated, I suppose. There was something very gloomy in the picture of dying alone with Leah to sustain one. “She called me Bearkin” said Leah.

Look out in the Times for an article upon the opera. I had a visit from Bruce Richmond the other day. We had a strange tea party, and talked shop. I hope to write an occasional essay.

Take care of yourself.

Yr. VS

Berg

[]

483: To Violet Dickinson

[15? April 1909]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My Violet,

I cant dine, but might I come to tea tomorrow? 5.

Please dont dwell upon my exaggerated account of love; as a matter of fact I am a woman with very little sexual charm. Warming to the task, I often represent myself as irresistible.

The ashes do go to a Quaker cemetery. It was very chill at Golders Green. I have been describing her—in the Guardian!

Yr. VS

Berg

[]

484: To Clive Bell

[April 1909]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My dear Clive,

Friday would be best, and very charming, I need not say. Old Case comes on Monday. Perhaps we shall meet at the Freshfields music tonight. We have endless documents to sign on your behalf. I hope you are touching a large amount of capital.

Yr. AVS

Quentin Bell

[]

485: To Madge Vaughan

[8 May 1909]

Hotel Manin, Milan

Dearest Madge,

I meant to write from Florence, but now I am on my way back, spending a few hours at Milan. (This pen is impossible). I hope you are happy again about the children. We spent a fortnight in Florence, and Nessa and Clive are staying on till the end of the month. We had a tremendous tea party one day with Mrs Ross. She was inclined to be fierce, until we explained that we knew you, when she at once knew all about us—our grandparents and great uncles on both sides. She certainly looks remarkable, and had type written manuscripts scattered about the room. I suppose she writes books. There were numbers of weak young men, and old ladies kept arriving in four wheelers; she sent them out to look at her garden. Is she a great friend of yours? I imagine she has had a past—but old ladies, when they are distinguished, become so imperious. Lina Waterfield also came in for a moment, but I hardly spoke to her. She has beautiful eyes. The garden; though it rained, was wonderful; I could fancy you wandering about it, and eating un-ripe oranges. Florence was lovely—more lovely than seems possible. We used to wander about along the river at all hours; or sit and bask on the hills. We talked a great deal—such talk as you and I might have in the small hours. I wish that ever did happen now.

I must now try to find my way to the station, and then discover the right train. I know not a word of Italian, and seldom go right even in England, so that this letter is something like a farewell. Last night I sat up with a party of nuns; who looked extremely contented and aloof, but would not stop whispering—whether about their souls or their neighbours I dont know. The Italians are a charming people—I dont see how they can help it, with so much air, and so few slums.

Do write, if you ever have time; but I shall hear of you from Marny. Give all your children my love. Elsie often talks of them.

Yr. loving,
VS

Sussex

[]

486: To Violet Dickinson

Thursday [13? May 1909]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My Violet,

Why dont you write to me? I might be buried in Messina, or bugeaten in Florence, or vanished, or prostitute, or in love, or pregnant, and you would not know or care. It is always the part of the older woman to write. However, I feel amazingly old. What have you been doing? How are you? Last time we met was in that sumptuous Jewesses [Miss Schreiner] room, when everything was like an illusion. Do you remember that curious episode on the empire sofa, when she played Brahms or Schumann to us, and all her boots?

We had a very lazy time in Florence. There were squalls at the street corner—squalls of weather I mean. We saw Rezia [Corsini] and Mrs Ross; and they both disappointed me. It is very difficult to take up a friendship again. I am now writing about Mrs Carlyle; wish you would write and encourage me. Every other night, I look into the middle box on the pit tier, and see Beatrice [Thynne], black and red, resting an imperious fist on the ledge. She looks as though she were ruling modern society; like a Roman Empress, with a drop of hot Tartar blood.

I often think of you; twice shot through Welwyn lately, and seen your yellow road. Can I do anything for you? as Aunt Mary would say.

Ottoline is slowly growing rather fond of me. It is like sitting beneath an Arum lily; with a thick golden bar in the middle, dropping pollen, or whatever that is which seduces the male bee.

Nessa has a picture in the New English [Art Club], and all her friends are envious.

Do write, my Violet. You would scarcely believe how fond I am of you. How are you?

Yr. Sp.

Berg

[]

487: To Madge Vaughan

[May 1909]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

Dearest Madge,

I was very glad to get your letter. I wish you sounded happier about Barbara. Lady Cromer’s little boy has just had the same operation, and is getting on well. I wish we could take a house near you this summer. Adrian and I are going to Bayreuth in August, but I shall come back before the end. I should very much like to come up sometime—about then. I could always get rooms with my friend Mrs Turner, if it were convenient. Nessa has to spend some weeks with her family in law; and I expect they will stay down in the West. I sat next Walter Leaf at dinner the other night; but he would not tell me much about you. They seemed to me a middle aged pair. We go to a few dinner parties; they are very solemn, and as unlike life as can be. I think you get the better of us there. Do you remember the Miss Perfects tea party? Then we have people here on Thursdays, and go to innumerable operas. We have just got to know a wonderful Lady Ottoline Morrell, who has the head of a Medusa; but she is very simple and innocent in spite of it, and worships the arts. I gave your message to Elsie. She seems very happy, and always talks about you and the children. It would be much nicer to talk to you than to write to you. I want to get Barbara a toy; or whatever she likes. Do send me one line on a card to say. Julian is fascinating.

Yr. VS

Sussex

[]

488: To Vanessa Bell

Tuesday [18 May 1909]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

Beloved,

This is the last letter, thank God, written to the tune of the pianola. You haven’t written today—The Singes [Virginia herself] in consequence are all hooting and copulating. When I was in my bath this morning Maud [maid] came and rattled, and said that Mrs [Madge] Vaughan was in my bedroom. I went down, and found that she had rushed up to London last night, hearing that Barbara was worse, and was on her way to the station. I dressed, and we had a long conversation. She was in a wild state, as you can imagine. She seemed to think that Barbara was dying, and that it was the doctors fault, or hers for having a new nurse. It was mixed up with rhapsodies about fate, and God, and religion: she made swoops all the time, in her usual way, to explain things—and lay down the law. I think it has been ghastly. But I found it hard to say anything. Her mind goes off at such a tangent. She picked up a novel of Aunt Annys [Ritchie], and insisted upon my reading the first paragraph. “It is true—whatever you may say.” As it was a mild disquisition upon a spinsters old age, I couldn’t see the force of it. All the old torments about Emma [Vaughan]. “I who only thinks of the cost of bananas and Lady Somers tea parties” and Marny, and Will’s stoicism came up. She said she was certain the Vaughans were scrofulous “one has only to look at Marny’s face.”; whereas the doctors said that the Symonds were consumptive.

She is like an excitable child, working itself into a passion. I think there is something very loveable about her in spite of her incoherencies.

The unfortunate child [Barbara], anyhow, has been so scarred that her looks will be spoilt for life.

I went round to Gordon Square yesterday, and saw your cook; who wished me to tell you that Gurth is in excellent health. We have accepted the Frankfurts and rejected the Creightons for next Sunday; so you will be free of me till Monday afternoon probably.

You may not know that George Meredith is dead : how I wish the Quarterly would ask me to explain him, once and for all! Adrian thinks of pointing out that 1909 is as disastrous as 1809 was prolific—

We are now going to hear a play by Somerset Maugham, as Armide has been put off. You will have it next week, I suppose.

I hear the bell!

Beloved, I adore you, more than I can say.

Yr. B.

Berg

[]

489: To John Maynard Keynes

[May 1909?]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

Dear Mr Keynes,

Will you dine with me next Thursday—the 27th. at 8. I hope you may be in London.

Yours sincerely,
Virginia Stephen

King’s

[]

490: To Violet Dickinson

[May? 1909]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My Violet,

Do come to tea on Wednesday.

We are just going to the funeral of Madges child [Barbara]—a melancholy thing to do.

Yr. VS

Berg

[]

491: To Lady Robert Cecil

Sunday [30 May 1909]

29 Fitzroy Square

My dear Nelly,

I am abominable to sit in silence all this time when you were so kind as to write to me, and praise me (which I loved). I want to know too, why I am a strange woman; and now, to punish me, I daresay you won’t explain I shall come up one evening, and take possession of your arm chair and sit there till you give me a reason for your remarks.

I have been staying with the Freshfields. I have been writing, like a Bank Clerk, and I don’t think that I have any news whatever. So what does one write letters about? You know, I imagine. But then you live in the world. You have a garden too, with trees against the sky, and a bonfire in the middle distance. I could make an exquisite story out of you—so don’t imagine that all the insight is on your side. I can imagine you, from the moment you wake in the morning till you go to bed again, without leaving my chair.

I am going to see Violet tomorrow. These accidents, I believe, are in the nature of spiritual retreats; she has much of the mystic in her, and she gets no time for it when she’s up. I hear she looks very well, and is very cheerful—so that I am probably right.

What are you writing? Why don’t you ever take a great sheet (like this one) and scribble on your knee (as I am doing) and send it to me? I do nothing but read Mrs Carlyle and Thomas Hardy; about whom I am going to write perhaps—only not in the same article. I am also promoted to dine with Reginald; and to have the Brontë manuscripts shown me.

Yours affly,
VS

Hatfield

[]

492: To Lytton Strachey

June 4th [1909]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

Dear Lytton,

I hear that we missed you at Cambridge the other day. We had an exquisite vision of the place. There was a wonderful young man in a shooting jacket and black trousers, with the head of a Faun—who was he? I daresay you know.

The whirl of the London season is upon us. We are entertaining Jack Pollock. Lady Ottoline. I am penetrating into the most mysterious places. There is a Jewess who spends 50 guineas on a hat, and wishes to meet me, not that we may exchange views on that subject, I imagine. We see her at the opera, where she displays a wonderful arm upon the ledge of her box. Then, upstairs we meet Charlie Sanger, and Saxon and the great Mr Loeb who has the finest collection of operatic photographs and autographs in Europe. Saxon—however that subject is beaten red. We are taking him to a Fancy Dress Ball, he is appearing in the character of Gunnar.

I am absorbed in Michelet. Is it really a vile book? It is thus that I should write the history of the Restoration of I were a man.

We stayed with the Freshfields a week ago. Nature and art did their best; it was sumptuous; but they were like wax-works, slightly running in the sun, except for Gussie [Mrs Douglas Freshfield], who has the spirit of a Roman Empress. I daresay she is a hard woman. We sat in a little summer house and discussed the immortality of the soul, and mid-Victorian scandal. I never saw anything so remote as she and poor Douglas. He seems to have stiffened all over, and is now practically jointless. This is only by way of conversation; and you must not answer, if writing is a bore, as I daresay it is.

Heaven knows what address I am to put.

Frances Hooper

[]

493: To Lady Robert Cecil

6th June 09

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My dear Nelly,

The other day I was sitting on that superb terrace and overlooking your woods. However, they said you were away. I talked a great deal about you, and pretended to have an insight into your heart which the Almighty might envy. Your praises were sounded, and from the hoards of my knowledge I added a piercing note. This went on in a very hot little summer house, I having been excused lawn tennis on the ground of general incompetency. It is dreadful to come down to breakfast with great coils of hair, sticking feebly with pins, touching ones shoulders. How do young women manage? They were very kind and said nothing, but over their fires at night—oh I tremble to think of it!

Italy was really beyond words—even a trifle melodramatic—not unlike a Meredith novel—too brilliant to be quite natural. This refers to the sight of Florence in sunset from the hills above. There were gruff old ladies in villas, with whom we had tea. I find England far more mysterious. Your Sussex really overcomes one—with laughter sometimes. It is a little ridiculous. All the cocks crowing, and the cottage gardens and Priests touching their hats to us.

I almost went to see the British horses yesterday with Violet. But every ticket was sold—it would have been a sight, and Violet’s knowledge of horseflesh is profound I expect. Besides, she would have known half the country squires. There is something very racy about her.

If I knew where you were, I should write a more coherent letter; but it is like shooting into the air. I wish you would write to me. How are you—what are you about?

Your affate,
VS

Hatfield

[]

494: To Lytton Strachey

Friday [25 June 1909]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

Dear Lytton,

Why don’t you come and see me—or am I a brazen hussy to ask you—however I’ll risk it. I shall be in today, or Tuesday for tea, and it would be charming to see you.

Society is very hollow. I am going to write about Sterne . Would [you] lend me a book called the Princesse de Cleves? The L.L. [London Library] has lost it.

Yours ever,
VS

Such a night last night—[Francis] Dodd feeling compelled, as a Blacksmith’s grandson, to tell Lady Ottoline that he was—constipated!

Frances Hooper

[]

495: To Violet Dickinson

[early July 1909]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My Violet,

I go to Cambridge on the 10th—and both Thursday and Friday are taken up with opera.

Couldn’t I come one day by that train which gets in after lunch, and then I can go back in time for dinner, or bed.

My head spins with Vernon Lee, whom I have to review. What a woman! Like a garrulous baby. However, I suppose she has a sense of beauty, in a vague way—but such a watery mind.

Thank you for asking me!

Yr. VS

Berg

[]

496: To Violet Dickinson

[July 1909]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My Violet,

If you could have me another day next week, it would be easier—as I only come up from Cambridge on Monday morning, and we are going to the opera in the evening. I am free most days; but if Monday is your only day, we had much better stick to it.

I have a good deal of work to do—and cant do it!

You are an absurd woman to pretend that you think I hate coming.

I am probably fonder of you than most people are. My nature is so pure. Let me have a line.

VS

Berg

[]

497: To Violet Dickinson

[July 1909]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My Violet,

This is not a Collins (though I enjoyed myself very much)—but to ask if there is any chance that the cottage you had in Cornwall would be to let for a month from Sept: 10th? Nessa thinks Cornwall wd. be much nicer than Northumberland.

They want 5 bedrooms, and to be near a beach for Julian.

If you could give me the address of the man, I would write.

Yr. VS

Berg

[]

498: To Clive Bell

Tuesday [July 1909]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My dear Clive,

Here is Marjorie Strachey who wants to come and see me. Shall I be acting with my usual lack of consideration if I ask you to come on Thursday? A rare compliment is implied. Of course, I could have you both together; but what pleasure would that be?—mixing my champagne with ginger beer. And yet, as the poor woman is going North eternally, I hardly like to refuse; and if I have her to lunch, I must sacrifice those four volumes of Sterne. Thursday or Friday suit me. Then you shall hear how the fragment of a compliment has been paid me. You and Nessa would tread it under heel. If you come on Thursday you shall have the money I owe you; a manuscript, and the conversation of a charming young woman.

I am not really inconsiderate am I? If so, it is because love is blind.

How pretty!

VS

Quentin Bell

[]

Letters 499-515

499: To Vanessa Bell

Saturday [7 August 1909]

Bayreuth

Beloved,

We arrived yesterday without adventure. Adrian did most of the management, but it seemed very simple.

The crossing was like floating down an Indian river; we lay and smoked for hours in the sun, and it was perfectly clam. Holland looked a very charming country. There was a fair going on and all the women wore great white caps, with gold balls over their ears. However, you know all about that.

Our lodgings here are much better than I expected. They are clean and bare, without carpets, and almost without ornaments. We have a little sitting room too. Our house is in a street of villas with small gardens, where the family spend their time, talking, and there is a kind of partition where the children play. There is a small boy of Julians age, who sits there alone, and makes sand heaps quite happily. We wandered about Bayreuth after we arrived. It is like an English market town—with a great many ironmongers, and a broad street with a fountain in the middle, and an 18th Century mayors house. Unfortunately the shops are full of cards and Holy Grails. The cards interest Saxon profoundly, as they show the singers in different parts, and thus lead to a good many comparisons. We are very minute in our ways already. We sat and watched the people in the park for an hour. My God, they are hideous! The women have a strap round their waists, a green hunting cap, with a feather, and short skirts. They are never fashionable. I dont cause any horror. We dined at the foreigners restaurant, and even there they are incredibly stout and garish. Every young woman, too, brings an old house-keeper, less smart than Sophie [Farrell], to look after her. They eat enormously, off great joints, covered with fat.

This is a very dull letter, but I haven’t collected my wits yet. Saxon is very amiable, but almost stone dumb—or whatever the phrase is. He upset the ink at breakfast, and tried to clean his chair with the end of a handkerchief dipped in milk. It was like an ineffectual old cat. Then he cleaned a pair of scissors on a piece of bread. He says that he may have to spend some time at the dentist, as a stopping has come out. He slightly prefers travelling with his back to the engine. He is gentle, and full of consideration, and ineffective ways. Adrian grows a little tart with him.

Now we are going to read Parsifal, and then lunch, and then we shall hear the immortal work.

It is the hottest day we have had this summer. I suppose it is the same with you.

Yr. B.

Berg

[]

500: To Vanessa Bell

Sunday [8 August 1909]

Bayreuth

Beloved,

No letter has yet come from you. I hope this heat has not turned you apoplectic: it is roasting like Hell here. We heard Parsifal yesterday—a very mysterious emotional work, unlike any of the others I thought. There is no love in it; it is more religious than anything. People dress in half mourning, and you are hissed if you try to clap. As the emotions are all abstract—I mean not between men and women—the effect is very much diffused; and peaceful on the whole. However, Saxon and Adrian say that it was not a good performance, and that I shant know anything about it until I have heard it 4 times. Between the acts, one goes and sits in a field, and watches a man hoeing turnips. The audience is very dowdy, and the look of the house is drab; one has hardly any room for ones knees, and it is very intense. I think earnest people only go—Germans for the most part, in sacks, with symbolical braid. Everything is new art—the restaurants have single lines drawn up the walls, with triangles suddenly bursting out—the kind of thing one sees in the Studio [the art magazine]. The grossness of the race is astonishing—but they seem very clean and kind. They suit Saxon very well. He thinks them so sensible.

So far, we have got on without more than a temporary tartness. Saxon cant decide anything—even what he wants to eat—but Adrian is very prompt and business like. I am haunted by the thought that I can never know what anyone is feeling, but I suppose at my age it cant be helped. It is like trying to jump my shadow.

We have been discussing obscure points in Parsifal all the morning. It seems to me weak vague stuff, with the usual enormities, but I can only read the German with great difficulty.

The time seems to go in preparing for the opera, listening to it, and discussing it afterwards—but tomorrow I must begin to write—you will laugh.

I left behind a good many necessary things, and brought impossible precautions.

I dreamt all night that I was arguing with you; and you showed a peculiar bright malice, which I sometimes see in you. I wish I had that picture of you.

How does Sophie do?

Give her my love.

Yr. B.

Berg

[]

501: To Vanessa Bell

Tuesday [10 August 1909]

[Bayreuth]

Beloved,

I believe Saxon sent you a long and erudite letter this morning. He has been composing it at meal times, and humming it all day. Some of it ‘rather pleased’ him.

We have got into our stride, I think, and it is really rather an amusing life. I spend the morning writing, and the others go for a walk; we meet for lunch, and this afternoon, as it is an off day, we walked out to the Hermitage. This is a place built in imitation of Versailles; and it is all overgrown and deserted, with little French Temples, and ruins, and courtyards. Wherever one goes, one finds a garden set with tables, where monster men and women drink great jugs of beer and eat meat—although it is a blazing hot day. The weather tends to break up. The colours are very beautiful—yellow and leaden. We walked home through the fields. I dont much admire the country, because it is very florid and without shadow; and one feels wedged into the earth, with no sea anywhere. However the town is charming; most of it built in the 18th century; there are very wide streets, with solid grey houses, like Cambridge houses, only somehow rather rustic. Last night we walked about after dinner, and all the people were singing over their beer. As there was very little light, and a few people peeping out of windows, and virgins tripping by in cloaks, and a great yellow coach standing in the middle of the road, one might have been in the year 1750. Saxon is dormant all day, and rather peevish if you interrupt him. He hops along, before or behind, swinging his ugly stick, and humming, like a stridulous grasshopper. He reminds me a little of father. He clenches his fists, and scowls in the same way; and stops at once if you look at him. Adrian and I wink at each other, and get caught sometimes. About 11 o’clock at night, when we begin to yawn, he brightens up, and comes out with some very acute and rather acid question. We argued till 1.30 this morning. It was about something Adrian had said two or possibly three Thursdays ago, which Saxon had not understood. He hoards things, like a dormouse. His mind is marvellously accurate, but I am rather surprised by his intellect. He sometimes seems quite fresh and about 26, and manly. I think he suspects that we think him obsolete, and wants to assert himself. I dont know what Adrian has told you, but I am surprised at our good temper, so far. We are rather austere, like monks and nuns, speak little, and—oh I long for you! There are bullocks here, with eyes like yours, and beautiful trembling nostrils.

Adrian has just brought me your letter, for which I thank God; I was fretting the drought. You are a tawny devil to talk of your letters being dull! My conclusion was that the way to get life into letters was to be interested in other people. You have an atmosphere. Ah! there’s no doubt I love you better than anyone in the world! I dont think I am selfish about you. I wish you were out of London; and I am seriously alarmed to think that you contemplate another [baby] Bunting. Do wait another year, if you fill her veins with salt, she may take after her aunt; but a watered child would very likely be a true woman. I dont in the least mind your showing Clive my letters; because I dont make much difference between you; only they are dull. He mustn’t criticise. As for ‘genius’, even I have done with that. Pernel [Strachey] thought Olive [Ilbert] a great bore, and rather disagreeable. The lodgings sound exactly right. Are you boiled alive?

B.

Would you keep me a copy of the [Times] supplement with my Sterne in it? It comes out on Thursday: also wd. you keep my Holmes on the 26th. I paste them in a book.

Berg

[]

502: To Vanessa Bell

Thursday [12 August 1909]

Bayreuth

Beloved,

I suppose you are toiling to God[manchester] in the heat. It is cooler here, though hot enough; and I dont see that I can get any sympathy in that way. A great bug stung me on the second joint of the third finger yesterday; it swelled at once to a bright red mound, and if I had been a married woman with a sentimental affection to removing the wedding ring, a blacksmith might have been needed. As it is, though still ‘itching’ (as Saxon says) I am comparatively calm. We heard Parsifal yesterday; it was much better done, and I felt within a space of tears. I expect it is the most remarkable of the operas; it slides from music to words almost imperceptibly. However, I have been niggling at the effect all the morning, without much success. It is very hard to write in ones bedroom, without any books to look at, or my especial rabbit path, into the next room. I have balanced my box on my commode, and made a shaky desk.

Saxon seems rather more shrivelled every day. I believe you would find him more trying to travel with than—the great B. (which some interpret Bore). He is a dead weight. Nevertheless, we are all cool and pure. I always have to scribble to you after lunch, before changing for the opera. They make me read the libretto in German, which troubles me a good deal.

Is Sophie as dear as Mirtilla [servant]? I expect she is lazier.

I have had no news or letters, except yours last night. Aunt Stephen seems to me a good deal rubbed out. Do you like your portrait of Kate [Katharine Stephen]?

Oh my God, I must change now: it is very hot, and a great many fashionable women have arrived, who stare at me between the acts, and, as my head was washed yesterday, my hair is unusually free.

I haven’t seen one German woman who has a face; they are puddings of red dough, and they dress in high art colours, with symbolical embroideries, rather like old Irish jewels, in their backs. I am beginning to make winter plans. Shall you kiss me ever? I cant imagine why Clive wants to read these letters; perhaps he dont! They are dull, but affectionate.

I adore you.

Yr. B.

Berg

[]

503: To Vanessa Bell

Monday [16 August 1909]

Bayreuth

Beloved,

No letter today. As it is hotter than ever here, I’m afraid you may be burnt up, or possibly country letters take longer to come. I write in haste—this is no device, to excuse my dulness—but I am scrambling through my article, which has got into a fix, and the opera at 4 cuts the day short.

They dont do the thing as well as we do it, I think: our seats are very near, and the ugly creatures look still uglier. I can never quite get over the florid Teuton spirit, with its gross symbolism—and its flaxen tresses. Imagine a heroine in a nightgown, with a pig tail on each shoulder, and watery eyes ogling heaven. Saxon says nothing; Adrian prods him for an opinion. He reclines on his hip between the acts, and pulls at a weed. There is a great crowd, and we get stared at, not for our beauty. Yesterday, a lean woman with a face like a ferret bowed to me, and looked familiar, but I cant think who she is—a Coltman, or a Bonham Carter, perhaps. The Meinertzhagens run into us sometimes, but we dont meet other wise. Adrian seems quite indifferent, and so is she, as far as I can judge.

Saxon spent the morning writing a letter; I asked him who to?—and he said ‘no one’. It has just occurred to him that he will send it to Clive. Last night he burst out into a very quick shrill sing song, in German: it meant come come come and be killed, Nicholas, my goose! He had made it up at dinner, he told us, which accounted for his absorption; Adrian and I talk to each other. He sneezes a great deal, like a dog, and he always says that he can see nothing funny in it.

These are the humours, sweet honeybee; writing seems to me a queer thing. It does make a difference. I should never talk to you like this. For one thing, I dont know what mood you are in, and then—but the subtleties are infinite. The truth is, I am always trying to get behind words; and they flop down upon me suddenly. When I write to Ottoline or Lytton, I honour all the conventions, and love them. And then, you are much simpler than I am. I thought about that at the opera last night. How do you manage to see only one thing at a time? Without any of those reflections that distract me so much, and make people call me bad names. I suppose you are, as Lytton once said, the most complete human being of us all; and your simplicity is really that you take in much more than I do, who intensify atoms. I have been thinking a great deal about father too, and discussing him with Adrian. I believe he was really very modest; he was certainly not selfconscious in his work; nor was he an egoist, as I am. He had very few sympathies though; and practically no imagination. You might give your view; this is much at random. God! how happy to be with you again! and then these letters will seem absurd. Do you want me too? It would be rather nice if I slipped in now? I have got a great many plans in my head.

Yr. B.

The Apes kiss you.

We go on Saturday to Dresden—address, c/o. Fraulein Meincke, Prager Strasse, 38. Dresden. A.

Berg

[]

504: To Vanessa Bell

Thursday [19 August 1909]

Bayreuth

Beloved,

To my joy I had a letter from you this morning. I had made up my mind to some catastrophe, and suspected that Clives letter to Saxon was a tactful way of hinting that you were in bed with appendicitis, or nursing Julian through convulsions.

You will be glad to hear that I decided that if you died, my life would be worthless, and went on of course, to enjoy the picture. We spent a lazy day yesterday, indoors most of the time, as it rained, and there was no opera. We talked amicably, and kept ourselves quite happy. Saxon says he is feeling distinctly better, and he is almost sprightly. His conversation is still odd.

“What did you mean, Virginia, when you said, about three years ago, that your view of life was that of a Henry James novel, and mine of a George Meredith?.” I had to invent a meaning, and he actually told me that he thought me a very clever young woman—which is the highest praise I have ever had from him.

Olives [Ilbert] letter was most irritating. She begins by saying that she fears she has offended me—but that I am so much above her etc. She goes on to make some arid jokes, and ends up with what I take to be pinprick—how she knows me better now than she did a year ago, and hopes I am not breaking hearts.

I cant think why she wants to keep in touch with me; her letter is full of hints, but I shall write—if I write—like a superb Elephant.

We certainly shant be back by the 28th. I begin to see that Adrian will stay in Dresden. Have you heard anything about Hyde Park Gate?

We have got to have tea with old [Francis Warre] Cornish and the Meinertzhagens [daughters of Georgina and Daniel] this afternoon, between the acts. They seem to me like pink dish clothes, which have hung out all night in the rain. Adrian is brotherly to them—cuffs them with his paw like a big dog.

Did Sophie discover what happened to your milk?

I have been writing at Holmes all the morning; it keeps my temper very sweet. We have not quarelled once, and I believe we are rather more friendly than when we started. There is certainly something very attractive—not physically—about Saxon. His purity of mind is such. Also Adrian is for the most part, not only clever but even affectionate. For Gods sake, dont tell him so! This year has made a great difference in him—as Aunt Mary might say.

We are now going out to Lohengrin—a very dull opera, and this is, I expect, a damnably dull letter, but the quickest Ape brain always flags after dinner. It is thought that it is partly a recollection of struggle for food, when in a wild state. I should point out to you, that it is very dangerous to allow these animals to go long uncared for: they are apt to return to their savage ways. At present, I must confess, I never saw a more engaging troop: their fur is in excellent condition—teeth white, and lips inviting. They gibber if I only say ‘Maria’ [Vanessa] to them. I think you would be touched. No one kisses them here.

When do you go to Poole? Is there a house for me?

VS

Berg

[]

505: To Vanessa Bell

Tuesday [24 August 1909]

[Prager Strasse 38] Dresden

Beloved,

There is no letter from you today, and Adrian curses you. However, I gather you are run off your feet; how ghastly to go on, after London, with a week of being nurse! I see no end to your toils. Moreover, you have twice as long to send as usual. What a world—what a world!

Saxon is happily better today; and he has made one or two remarks at meals to Fraulein Meinke. As they were lamenting the badness of servants, he said that the Athenian ladies 2,000 years ago, made the same complaint. They understood him to say 200, and old Meinke explained that she had read the Life of Johnson. Meanwhile, the Singer tells us how she has a contract for 5 years at the opera here lying on her table; but she cant make up her mind to sign it. The strain is such that the old mother has gone to bed with neuralgia. We have heard all the rights and wrongs of the case at least 10 times over. They like best to talk about food, and really know nothing about music. Muffins make them quite lyrical “with a whole pat of butter on top, for breakfast.”

We went to Salome, (Strauss, as you may know) last night. I was much excited, and believe that it is a new discovery. He gets great emotion into his music, without any beauty. However, Saxon thought we were encroaching upon Wagner, and we had a long and rather acid discussion. He has an amazing knowledge of detail—I cant think why he doesn’t say something more interesting. It is like reading a dictionary. We went to the pictures this morning. Saxon of course made straight for the Van Eyk; Adrian and I did the Italians. It is a very poor show; there are 4 good Veroneses, one genuine Titian—but they have scraped it to the bone—and the Rafaels. They are smooth works, beautiful in colour, but insipid. Saxon discovered a painter called Van Dreft—who has one picture. It is very beautiful—Saxon says “painted with such tenderness”. But we couldn’t see the Dutch. This will bore you.

I got my Holmes article done in time, and sent it, so I didn’t think I need write to Bruce Richmond.

A thoughtless bird has performed upon my straw hat. Surely there were thousands of hats that would have done, and women are so little able to cope with such disasters. I have also spilt the ink over my clean skirt—and, trying to make a dash with my combs, one fell, dragging the side locks with it.

Oh my beloved creature, how little use I am in the world! Selfish, vain, egoistical, and incompetent. Will you think out a training to make me less selfish? It is pathetic to see Adrian developing virtues, as my faults grow. He and Saxon discuss how to mend my plaquet hole.

I must start for the opera.

Yr. B.

Write me a nice letter; you are rather cold.

Berg

[]

506: To Vanessa Bell

Wednesday [25 August 1909]

[Prager Strasse 38] Dresden

Beloved,

I am very glad you are going earlier to Studland [Dorset]. Do you think you could take me a bedroom and a sitting room there for a fortnight from the 16th—and say that I may want another bedroom part of the time? If I had the address I would write myself.

Adrian had a letter this morning from his clerk here to say that he sent him a brief to Fitzroy Square on the 13th. Waller has written to ask why it has not been done. We have not heard anything about it. Did Sophie show it to you, or say she had a letter for Adrian? Probably she thought it not worth forwarding; and the idiotic clerk must have forgotten to say that it was to be sent on. Adrian is rather perturbed, naturally; as Waller will be annoyed. We have telegraphed to the clerk.

We went to the pictures again this morning, and discovered several Italians. Vermeer is the man I meant. I love it and Palma Vecchio’s 3 Sisters. I have been talking to Saxon for 2 hours about art—you would have laughed. Van Eyk is the greatest of all he says. Every picture is different—such work in it. Italians dont see.

Here is Adrian and I must rush. Adrian has been closeted for 2 hours with the Singer, discussing a private legal affair. She almost wept on his shoulder.

He wont say what.

Yr. B.

Berg

[]

507: To Violet Dickinson

21st Sept. 09

[The Cottage, Studland, Dorset]

My Violet,

I took your letter to Bayreuth and meant to answer it. But the opera was always interrupting. Now, having waited goodness knows how long, you may be dead. After all, the last thing was that you had overthrown a market gardener. If you were dead, how would you be buried. I have often gone over in my mind, the habits of the Cowper family. What odd people you know!—there was the lady [Miss Sandeman] who fed the Toads and married an Italian Marquis also. Has that turned out well—are there many children?

We went to Dresden, where we became intimate with an American opera singer, who was on the verge of a lawsuit, and conferred with Adrian every afternoon in her bedroom and now wishes me to buy her a marabout boa with chenille trimming. Then we came back to London, and now I have rented a small cottage for a fortnight, near Nessa.

Julian rushes straight into the sea, and falls flat on his face. Nessa tucks her skirts up, and wades about with him. Clive meanwhile dives from a boat, in a tight black suit. Yesterday, I hired a gentlemans or ladies—it was bisexual—bathing dress, and swam far out, until the seagulls played over my head, mistaking me for a drifting sea anemone. Today, however, it is raining; and so you have the joy of this letter. I make my own breakfast, every morning, and take in the eggs and milk, in my nightgown. Milk goes sour very quickly, and turns to a smooth kind of custard. Butter and bacon, on the other hand, will keep, with luck, a week. Do write, and tell me how you are; and remember me to Miss Schreiner, of whom I have such happy recollections. Do you remember when she played to us in the empire drawing room, with all the objects?

Yr. VS

Berg

[]

508: To Lytton Strachey

Wednesday [6 October 1909]

29 F.S.

Dear Lytton,

I am told that you came here the other day, when I was away. I was just writing to ask you to dine with us when I hear from Nessa that you have disappeared to some seaside Inn, dragging with you Mr Norton, whom I dare not call by any other name, who was to have taken Ottoline off our hands tomorrow. God knows what will happen now. She will languish like a sick and yellow alligator. To make up, you must write and say what you’re after. Our summer has been strange—scarcely credible indeed, what with American prima donnas needing advice in their bedrooms, and asking questions about Saxon, in private, and young men from Cook’s, and pure English maidens, among whom I have no right to class myself. Anyhow, we have seen what people call life.

Now we are back again, living on culture chiefly, the [Charles] Sangers, and King Lear, and the memory—alas it fades!—of conversations with Walter Lamb. I wish (as usual) that earth would open her womb and let some new creature out. They are grown very stale, and one will have to go back to nature I foresee.

How are you? I hope you got some good in your retreat—did you have adventures?

Nessa and Clive come back tomorrow.

Yr. ever,
VS

Frances Hooper

[]

509: To Violet Dickinson

Monday [11 October 1909]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My Violet,

Are you in London?

Shall I come and see you? We are all back now.

How are you? Adrian says he thinks he met you today, but couldn’t make up his mind. The lady smiled—was it you, or a prostitute?

Yr. VS

Berg

[]

510: To Clive Bell

Thursday [28 October 1909]

29 F.S.

My dear Clive,

I will answer your letter though I hope to see you this evening. As for that article, I am very glad that you thought it imaginative—because of course that matters more than mere cleverness, and makes me hopeful about the future of the series (as I suggest to Smith that it shall become) However—it it was the last sentence in your letter that I wanted to answer, and even to contradict. On the whole, I think our interview was successful. Considering how rusty we have grown in each other’s company of late I was surprised to find how naturally I could talk to you, and how very nice it was. I suppose, as usual, I didn’t see what you felt, but it wasn’t spilt milk to me. If we are formal at first, isn’t that because we have got out of the habit of talking? I open these difficult questions with trembling, feeling always that you and Nessa may find me morbid (as is the nature of spinsters, living alone)—However, if you don’t think the habit a bad one, I am quite sure that I enjoy seeing you. But I shall leave it to you, because I have proved myself hopelessly incompetent in the past!

Your affectionate,
VS

Quentin Bell

[]

511: To Violet Dickinson

[6 December 1909]

Postcard

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

Friday would be delightful. I think Adrian arrives from America on Tuesday, if the Mauretania isn’t late.

I suppose dinner is 8, and trust God that ones natural beauty will suffice.

VS

Berg

[]

512: To Vanessa Bell

Christmas Day [1909]

Lelant Hotel, Lelant R.S.O., Cornwall

Beloved,

I went for a walk in Regents Park yesterday morning, and it suddenly struck me how absurd it was to stay in London, with Cornwall going on all the time. I bought an A.B.C. and found there was a train at 1. It was then 12.30. However, I caught it, and arrived at 10.30 last night.

Adrian simultaneously made up his mind to go to Brockenhurst [New Forest]. At breakfast we had both decided to stay in London. Sophie was hysterical, and I have no pocket handkerchief, watch key, notepaper, spectacles, cheque book, looking glass, or coat. However, it is a hot spring day. I have been walking along the sands, and sitting in the sun, and when I have done this, I am going to Trick Robbin. Lytton came to tea on Thursday, day, and we were very intimate and easy and I have no doubts of his charm. But Duncan Grant also arrived, which was a little difficult. He went in ten minutes.

At seven o’clock Desmond MacCarthy appeared, wanting tea. I suppose the scandal will be spread now. He told me how much he disliked going to South Africa, and how his novel was becoming ridiculous. He seemed whimsical, but slightly tragic. He gave me a small humming bird—dead—which he had bought near the British Museum. Then Castle came to dinner, and I was very much bored. He has a dull fluent mind, tinged with romanticism—but I daresay Irene would never find it out. I doubt though that he would master her sufficiently for her respect.

Then there came Lytton and James [Strachey] and Frankie Birrell, Duncan Grant, Keynes, Norton, and [Horace] Cole. They sat round mostly silent, and I wished for any woman—and you would have been a miracle. I talked to Frankie and Keynes most of the time. But it was desperate work. However Frankie (if that is his name) told me how he had an idiot brother, and we discussed sex and illegal rites. Cole, of course, was disastrous. He began to tell stories about shooting policemen and challenging Hugh Lane which I had to answer, across the room, and everyone sat silent. Then he stayed till 2 talking about Mildred and the Pasolinis.

Everyone left—even Norton couldn’t sit him out. I told Norton that you were asking him to dinner on Thursday; if you aren’t he is going to dine with us. I saw him blush at your name—but all the intimacies were impossible.

It was like climbing a wall perpetually. I am so drugged with fresh air that I cant write, and now my ink fails. As for the beauty of this place, it surpasses every other season. I have the hotel to myself—and get a very nice sitting room for nothing. It is very comfortable and humble, and infinitely better than the Lizard or St Ives. The subtleties of the landscape—they must wait. How I wish you were coming out with me now—it is very warm, bright blue sky and sea, and no wind and smells heavenly. What a mercy about H.P.G. [Hyde Park Gate].

Yr. B.

Berg

[]

513: To Clive Bell

26th Dec [1909]

Lelant Hotel, Lelant [Cornwall]

My dear Clive,

It is past nine o’clock, and the people still sing carols beneath my window, which is open, owing to the clemency of the night. I am at the crossroads, and at the centre of the gossip of the village. The young men spend most of the day leaning against the wall, and sometimes spitting. Innumerable hymns and carols issue from barns and doorsteps. Several windows, behind which matrons sit, are red and yellow, and a number of couples are wandering up and down the roads, which shine dimly. Then there is the [Godrevy] lighthouse, seen as through steamy glass, and a grey flat where the sea is. There is no moon, or stars, but the air is soft as down, and one can see trees on the ridge of the road, and the shapes of everything without any detail. No one seems to have any wish to go to bed. They circle aimlessly. Is this going on in all the villages of England now? After dinner is a very pleasant time. One feels in the mood for phrases, as one sits by the fire, thinking how one staggered up Tren Crom in the mist this afternoon, and sat on a granite tomb on the top, and surveyed the land, with the rain dripping against one’s skin. There are—as you may remember—rocks comparable to couchant camels, and granite gate posts, with a smooth turf road between them. Thinking it over is the pleasant thing. By writing to you I am sparing the 20 last pages of La Terre qui Meurt [René Bazin], for bedtime. Is it a good book? I suspect not very. It is accomplished, but not moving. But I suspend judgement—Then I have run through a great part of Lady Hester Stanhopes memoirs, and curse my folly in not bringing the six volumes. One reads like an express train—from tea to bedtime. It makes me rock with delight—thinking what a number of wonderful things I shall dig out of it in my article. One gradually sees shapes and thinks oneself in the middle of a world.

The life I lead is very nearly perfect. A horrid tone of egoistic joy pervades this sheet I know. What with the silence, and the possibility of walking out, at any moment, over long wonderfully coloured roads to cliffs with the sea beneath, and coming back past lighted windows to one’s tea and fire and book—and then one has thoughts and a conception of the world and moments like a dragon fly in air—with all this I am kept very lively in my head. For conversation there are the maid and the landlady, who tell me about the moon and the chickens and the wreck. A ferryman this morning told me about trawling and angling and drowned sailors. I pick up a certain amount of gossip by stretching my head out of the window and listening to the leaning men beneath. Now, suddenly at half past nine, the carols have stopped, and there is only one man walking quickly, and whistling. A strange affair is life! However, one might run on and on, covering sheets, with mysticism, ridiculous in the daylight. My Lady Hester got into the habit of talking so that she could never read, and must dictate letters, and took herself for the Messiah. Suppose I stayed here, and thought myself an early virgin, and danced on May nights, in the British camp!—a scandalous Aunt for Julian, and yet rather pleasant, when he was older, like Norton, and wished for eccentric relations. Can’t you imagine how airily he would produce her, on Thursday nights. “I have an Aunt who copulates in a tree, and thinks herself with child by a grasshopper—charming isn’t it? She dresses in green, and my mother sends her nuts from the Stores”. But Norton will become a politician, and cease to woo the arts with hairy arms. Spite toils in me, you see, even by the side of the green ocean.

I forgot to tell you how I travelled down with a youth who had had brain fever three times, and was bound to become excited as the lights of Truro appeared (his sister explained, and he grinned at her) Happily he took to running in the corridor, and showing people the moon. His sister said that she often feared for his life, especially on moonlight nights—did he take the stars for the lights of Truro?—but was herself sailing for South Africa, where a brother kept an Inn. Then there was a woman with eyes like those bunches of frosted grapes one sees in grocers shops—who divides her time between Spain and Penzance, thinking that they have much in common, owing to the Armada. Then there was a virgin, who only thought of her own hat, which, with its dead seagull, would lop sideways—and in the midst of them all sat an aged couple, growing colder and colder, on a polytechnic tour.

But I must now go to bed.

Yr. VS

Quentin Bell

[]

514: To Violet Dickinson

Dec. 27th [1909]

Lelant Hotel, Lelant, Cornwall

My Violet,

I meant to stay in London, but rushed off here on the spur of the moment. The idea came to me at 12.30—and the train left at 1. Accordingly I am less competent, as regards underclothes and shoes, than usual. Maud packs old amethyst necklaces, but forgets pocket handkerchiefs. The landladies husband had to lend me his watch key, and I borrow pencils and stamps. However it has been quite worth it. There is no one else in the hotel, and all the festivals have passed over my head without a trace. I have been tramping about the country, and dabbling in the Atlantic. It is as soft as Spring, and at ten o’clock at night I sit with my window open; old farmers are saying good night, and calling the weather dirty beneath me.

How any one, with an immortal soul can live inland, I cant imagine; only clods and animals should be able to endure it. As for news, I have none—only Saturdays paper, with lists of preachers in London.

Was Lady Hester Stanhope an Aunt of yours, or a friend of your Aunts? I have to write about her, and spend my time, reading, not a silly new book by a woman called Roundell, but the old diaries written by her doctor, which keep me entirely happy. She seems to have been an insolent noble aristocrat, not unlike Beatrice, only crazed about the Messiah, and the stars; with a passion for conversation. She was a niece of Pitts’, and talks of Miss [Eleanor] Eden, who was to have married him, and how she peeped at her at church, and she was beautiful as an angel. Families lose their features terribly.

What have you been doing? I meant to buy you a Christmas present, but forgot; the truth is, I was on my way to buy it, when I had the idea of coming to Cornwall, and that took all my money. It shall be now for the new year. I did get you a card, only sent it to Sophie instead. It was of waves, breaking on a promontory.

I start early tomorrow, and leave all this. It is very melancholy to be shut up in London again. Only the delights of human intercourse reconcile me to it. Are you coming to tea—or are you staying in great houses? I suppose you see many sides of life.

Yr. VS

Berg

[]

515: To Clive Bell

[31? December 1909]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My dear Clive,

I deserve your taunt and I am stung by it. But why do I always feel self-conscious when I write to you? I wish you would think that out and tell me. In Cornwall it was worse than ever, because I had talked my tongue sore, and my brain was full of the ghosts of phrases. I am speechless now, but I should very much like to pour out my discontent upon you. Unhappily, the post goes, I have been talking incessantly since 4.30 yesterday afternoon, when I had Pernel, Lytton and Irene [Noel] in a heap—We went on with the usual selection and we discussed love and sex and filth and Sir Joshua’s pictures and ethics—Nessa I suppose has told you the new facts—which already seem stable and fly blown—about Adrian , and Irene’s affections. My conclusion is that one’s world must be smashed to atoms. We are merely treading old ground. You should have heard Norton upon his soul and beauty. One thing pleases me—a poem. Did I ever tell you so? I suppose not. I meant to, in Cornwall, but the d---d smugness overcame me. I am still very shy of saying what I feel. It is a very great pleasure though.

Will you come to tea, and let me rave?

Your very affectionate,
VS

Quentin Bell

[]

Letters 516-548

516: To Janet Case

1st Jan. [1910]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

Dear Miss Case,

Would it be any use if I spent an afternoon or two weekly in addressing envelopes for the Adult Suffragists?

I dont know anything about the question. Perhaps you could send me a pamphlet, or give me the address of the office. I could neither do sums or argue, or speak, but I could do the humbler work if that is any good. You impressed me so much the other night with the wrongness of the present state of affairs that I feel that action is necessary. Your position seemed to me intolerable. The only way to better it is to do some thing I suppose. How melancholy it is that conversation isn’t enough!

Your aff.
VS

Sussex

[]

517: To Violet Dickinson

Monday [14 February 1910]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My Violet,

Why didn’t you come in the other day? Your modesty is too great. Scarcely an inch of flesh was showing. I could then have told you about our visit to the Dreadnought. It is now a dull story. Two interviewers have been today, and one wishes for my portrait in evening dress! Also what age, and creed am I?

Do come in; or let me come.

Yr. VS

Berg

[]

518: To Violet Dickinson

Sunday [27 February 1910]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My Violet,

I find that the 1st is a Tuesday, and on that day I have to go to my Adult Suffrage; so that I should have to leave you as soon as I had eaten. Our meeting seems like the marriage of mountains. Does this put you out? Could you have me another day? It is damnable. Life becomes more and more complex. But pages are occasionally added to the work of fancy.

How fond should you think you were of me now?

I saw a bookseller the other day who says that first editions of Miss Austen are very valuable. Have you sold yours?

I spend hours writing names like Cowgill on envelopes. People say that Adult Suffrage is a bad thing; but they will never get it owing to my efforts. The office, with its ardent but educated young women, and brotherly clerks, is just like a Wells novel.

Beatrice came here the other day, with a funeral horses headdress nodding over her rich red face. For some time, I used a kindly but subdued manner, for, as I never read the morning Post, I thought that Lady Bath might be somewhere beneath a tomb. However, it was a spinster aunt.

I wish you would enlighten me upon human nature. The deeper one gets, the muddier it is.

Will you ask me another day?

Yr. VS

Berg

[]

519: To Violet Dickinson

[8? March 1910]

Lelant Hotel, Cornwall

My Violet,

I dashed off here, and forgot to write. The whole [Dreadnought] affair is at an end; and without a scratch. Adrian and Mr [Duncan] Grant saw McKenna. He merely laughed at them, and supposed they had come to save themselves. When they said that they wished to apologise in order to get the officers out of the scrape, he was amazed. He said that it was ridiculous to suppose that anyone on board could be blamed for an instant. In fact, he seemed to think the suggestion impertinent, and said that an apology was not to be thought of. He advised us not to do it again; but it is certain that it has had no bad results for anyone. The story about the Admiral must be pure fiction.

We came here suddenly—Nessa and I and Clive. We have had one beautiful day, and now it pours. I will try to come to tea on Wednesday, but I mayn’t be able to.

Yr. VS

Berg

[]

520: To Saxon Sydney-Turner

[9 March 1910]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

Dear Saxon,

I have a card from Dr. Williams’s Library to say that they cant renew vols 1 and 3 of Pausanias.

Would you bring them here on Thursday, or could you send them to Dr. Ws., Gordon Square.

Bernard Shaw kept us on the rack for 3 hours last night; his mind is that of a disgustingly precocious child of 2—a sad and improper spectacle to my thinking.

Yr very aff.
VS

Sussex

[]

521: To Violet Dickinson

Monday [25 April 1910]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My Violet,

I didn’t know you had gone already. We got back 10 days ago. I stupidly made my head bad again, and have been doing nothing. However, [Dr] Savage thinks that it will get quite right if I keep quiet. I feel a good deal better, only cant do any work, which is a great bore.

Write and say what you’re doing. Is there any chance that you will be in London?

We had 2 splendid weeks at Studland, and the third was pretty good.

Yr. VS

Berg

[]

522: To Vanessa Bell

[1? May 1910]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

Beloved,

I had a very good night—slept like a top from 12 till 8.30 without pain.

I had Marjorie [Strachey] to dine. She was calm, expecting to be sick, but very nice. As she wished to be sick into her own basin, she went early.

Today we went for a motor car drive to Hendon. Then Olive came to tea. She plunged into Hilton after hinting for some time. She evidently thinks that I am wavering, and taking up Adult Suffrage with a view to my future. I was reticent. She looks rather melancholy and dry eyed, and has some internal complaint.

I shall see you at dinner. I hope the Ws. do.

Yr. B.

I have a long letter from Walter Lamb, enquiring about me, who says that Lytton is much broken in mind and health and is looking for lodgings for the term. Perhaps this is the result of the letter.

Quentin Bell

[]

523: To Clive Bell

[16 May 1910.]

Postcard

29 F.S.

It is possible that there will be tickets for Tristan at the opera itself: if not, Adrian advises the tobacconist, and there is a Keith Prowse in Langham Place who is often surprisingly good.

A garden tonight would be Heaven.

D [Duncan or ‘Dolphin’] is here.

VS

Quentin Bell

[]

524: To Clive Bell

Monday [6 June 1910]

Canterbury

My dear Clive,

It is very doubtful whether a woman of my defective taste should write a letter of affection. It wont reach you either, till I’m with you. Then we may quarrel, and the thought of what I have said will eat into my brain. All I wanted to say was—how very much attached to you I am, and how much pleasure you give me. I see that I never did understand so much as I thought: perhaps I didnt have the chance. The future will be made much more pleasant by being more appreciative of you. I cant go on to say in what directions I am more appreciative, being stupid with paying bills, but I think that if you saw what I meant you would be pleased. I expect that what I mean will wear through in time.

For Gods sake, dont say that this is ‘being nice’ to you!

Yr. affate,
VS

Quentin Bell

[]

525: To Lady Robert Cecil

June 13th [1910]

[The Moat House, Blean, nr. Canterbury]

Dear Nelly,

What a ghastly apparition you have just made! After an absence of ten years, you come to the surface again, beside our moat, spouting horrid blasphemies. Are you much changed by contact with the world? Is it any use for me to write, I wonder?

Really, I remember you quite well, and was trying to draw you only last night. When shown to the company it was pronounced ‘head of a male, unknown’. Dont you think you might sit in your tiled room, on the chintz sofa, by the low table, covered with books, where the Chow (what was his name?) still scratches—I remember everything, as though it were yesterday, instead of ten years ago,—and write to me?

Where have you been all this time? and has your view of the world changed? Are you still an aristocrat? are you exquisite or shabby? Are you a friend of Kitty’s—or—? How painful these questions are: People oughtn’t to go away for ten years.

I had the great pleasure of seeing your exquisite but not altogether incredible niece the other day. It was like watching a white moth quiver over a flower. One couldn’t call it conversation. If my shadow had fallen she would have been out of the window.

Dont you think that Miss [Edith] Sichel, that talented Jewess, has trampled Mary Coleridge a little flat? But I didn’t know her. From her poems, one expected something—I dont know what.

Is Violet still alive! This is like shouting through a fog horn, and you may never hear me.

But a letter would be a great delight, even if dictated by a heart in which the flame of affection has long ceased to flare. For 3 months I have lived like a tame Rabbit. Are books still reviewed, I wonder? Is Reginald [Smith] writing letters?

By the way, are you an Adult Suffragist? This is a real question.

Yrs. ever,
VS

Hatfield

[]

526: To Saxon Sydney-Turner

Monday [13 June 1910]

Moat House, Blean, nr. Canterbury

My dear Saxon,

I write, more to mitigate my own lot than to please you. The rain falls, and the birds never give over singing, and hot sulphur fumes rise from the valleys, and the red cow in the field roars for her calf. In these circumstances you would address yourself to Chaucer, and master his habits before tea. I have tried, but cant persist—I pick chocolates out of a box, and worry my sister. Shortly before the rain began, three days ago, we had our windows prized open by a Smith. The decay of centuries had sealed them. No human force can now shut them. Thus we sit exposed to wind and wet by day; and by night, we are invaded by flocks of white moths. They frizzle in the candles, and crawl up my skirts to die, in the hollow of my knee. There is something unspeakably repugnant in the feel of creatures who have lost their legs.

However, Nessa has done her best for us. She has invented an old woman, who comes before anyone asks her, to stop the chimbleys smoking, and finds eggs, by looking for them, on the common. Then Nessa said at breakfast, “What a very large family Mr Lefevre must have!” and pointed to a photograph of gospel preachers since the time of Wiclif. The poor old man who owns this house, Mr Lefevre, called here the other day; and said that his happiest hours had been spent here, but times were changed. He alluded to the death of his prolific wife, which happened in sad circumstances which I will explain one day. At this, Nessa and Clive suddenly lost their tempers and showed their intolerant brutality in such a way that the old man was led out by his daughter (herself much moved) in tears.

If you should write to me, in one of the living languages, preferably Romance, I should have one happy breakfast. Hitherto, they have been dependent on Nessa’s charity. She is having a long correspondence upon illegitimacy with Snow [Margery Snowden].

Shall you come and stay here one Sunday? The weather is changing as I write. It would be dry by the time you came.

Yr. very aff.,
VS

As this was not posted, owing to an expedition to Whitstable, your letter has arrived, with its strange, sad, and utterly unexpected, but unmistakable, signs of inebriety. But this shall go no further.

Barbara Bagenal

[]

527: To Saxon Sydney-Turner

Tuesday [June 1910]

[The Moat House, Blean, nr. Canterbury]

Dear Saxon,

It was like your malice to profit by the ignorance of a poor creature; however, you show your parts very well in French. You appear more like an exquisite black Cat, tipped with white at the paws, than ever. You should have lived in an age when fencing was part of the learning of a gentleman.

This morning I was put in a high position by the arrival of a parcel for me, and no one else had anything. The envious couple [the Bells] have hardly yet done making their allusions. What shall I send in return? Oh yes—this is the treat for you, the policemen are performing at Maidstone tomorrow. I got you four tickets, in case you should like to take three friends.

The serious part of this letter, I may say, is now to come. Will you spend next Sunday here—accurately speaking part of Saturday, and part of Monday, with the whole of Sunday?

I shall probably be alone. But I dont know what operas there may be.

Julian has just raised a blush on the face of the parlourmaid by calling his mother a -----! When she said “Hush!” he replied ---- ----! Did you ever? He has been burning his mouth with peppermints.

Your very aff.
VS

Sussex

[]

528: To Violet Dickinson

Tuesday [21 June 1910]

Moat House, Blean, nr. Canterbury

My Violet,

We have been here for a fortnight, and your letter was sent on. I’m afraid I cant come, because I shall stay here another 10 days. Savage thought I had better go away for a bit, as I couldn’t do much in London.

Nessa and Clive and Julian have been here; Nessa goes back today.

We have a circular lawn and a moat. We get walks through the woods—not, so far, discovered by Helen Holland, who is a mile off. Do write.

It takes a long time to get ones faculties to work again. I wish I could have come.

Yr. VS

Berg

[]

529: To Vanessa Bell

Friday [24 June 1910]

[The Moat House, Blean, nr. Canterbury]

Beloved,

Savages decision is of course, rather depressing; but not unexpected. I only feel cross that he didn’t insist at once.

I suppose you didn’t ask about the cost. I’m afraid it will be great. Also I should like to begin without delay, and not stay on here till Thursday. I suppose Savage will tell me as soon as he knows.

I’ve no doubt it will be damnable, and the thought of the nurses and the food and the boredom is disgusting; but I also imagine the delights of being sane again. He says he wont insist on complete isolation, so I suppose I shant be as badly off as I was before.

There isnt much news to tell you. Sophie [Farrell] seemed on the point of collapse at first, and has to sit while I order dinner. But she is as mild as milk, and Georges guinea makes her almost weep. I think we ought to start a sinking fund for her.

When I heard the cocks crow last night, I thought she was gurgling her last. With great cunning, I told her how Jessie had complained of the range; she at once became very magnanimous, and said that Jessie hadn’t had her experience; and that as a matter of fact, the range here is a very good range as ranges go. The one at St Ives was a bad range, but she often cooked for 30 people on that. However, her system of stoking produces warm drinking water, which almost makes Clive sick.

She was carrying on a lively badinage with the boy when I was in the W.C. just now. The Reginald Smiths have written to ask me and Adrian to join a small “Cornhill party” on Thursday night; when someone is going to recite “The Contributors Dream”. I rather wish I could go. The glimpse I get of society in your and Adrian’s letters makes me, of course, long to be in the thick of it.

Did you have any intercourse with Dorothea, or Hilton? George has written two very repulsive letters, oozing with patronage, and semi-lunacy. He thinks apparently that I must be smoking too much, in order to ward off mosquitoes from the moat. I rather expect a patent head net, of the newest pattern, such as the peasants wear on the campagna. He wants us to go to the Pollards again. I think I shall say that I expect to be confined next month, and let him muddle it out for himself. He will suspect Saxon, and take immediate steps to have him promoted. He will also run down to Brighton, and negotiate a settlement with Saxon père. How tactful he would be with the lunatics at lunch! bringing down a basket of plovers eggs, I expect.

Did Clive tell you of our melancholy discussion yesterday, in the intervals of a thunder storm? I fear you abuse me a good deal in private, and it is very galling to think of it. I begin to appreciate Clives position under Lyttons treatment. However, I daresay you feel something, too, that Lytton doesn’t. Only, as I never abuse you, I feel it rather hard; and possibly I ought to consider a scheme for the future.

But I daresay this is all great nonsense; and if it isn’t, there may be no use in saying it. Of course, I adore you!

I wonder what you make of Adrian.

Saxon has written to say that he cannot get leave for Monday, or he would have come. I suppose he would have to go up on Sunday night, which certainly would kill him.

Would you let me know what the rent of Lingfield Road is. Clive is doing my income tax, and has lost his note.

Your letters are a source of great joy. I’m afraid you had a dismal time here, and that I have altogether been the devil of a bore. Your husband is extraordinarily sympathetic and charming.

Yr. VS

Will you thank Adrian for his letters. I will write.

Berg

[]

530: To Violet Dickinson

Tuesday [28 June 1910]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My Violet,

I return the stamps which I got on false pretences. I’m cursing my luck. Savage now insists on a rest cure, and I’m to retreat to a woman at Twickenham for a month.

It’s a great bore, and I suppose my niece will arrive without me.

Nor shall I see you again for some months, and you will have forgotten the very charming cast of my nature.

Do write from the top of your alp.

Yr. VS

Berg

[]

531: To Vanessa Bell

July 28th [1910]

Burley, Cambridge Park, Twickenham

Beloved, or rather, Dark Devil,

I meant to write several days ago, although you do say you dont care a damn. But in that too I was hoodwinked by Miss Thomas. I gather that some great conspiracy is going on behind my back. What a mercy we cant have at each other! or we should quarrel till midnight, and Clarissas [the coming ‘niece’] deformities, inherited from generations of hard drinking Bells, would be laid at my door. She—(Miss T.) wont read me or quote your letters. But I gather that you want me to stay on here.

She is in a highly wrought state, as the lunatic upstairs has somehow brought her case into court; and I cant make her speak calmly. Do write and explain. Having read your last letter at least 10 times—so that Miss Bradbury [nurse] is sure it is a love letter and looks very arch—I cant find a word about my future. I had agreed to come up on Monday; which would leave time for walking. Savage wanted me to stay in bed more or less this week. As I must see him again, I suppose I must wait over Monday. But I really dont think I can stand much more of this.

Miss T. is charming, and Miss Bradbury is a good woman, but you cant conceive how I want intelligent conversation—even yours. Religion seems to me to have ruined them all. Miss T. is always culminating in silent prayer. Miss Somerville [patient], the absent minded one with the deaf dog, wears two crucifixes. Miss B. says Church Bells are the sweetest sound on earth. She also says that the old Queen the Queen Mother and the present Queen represent the highest womanhood. They reverence my gifts, although God has left me in the dark. They are always wondering what God is up to. The religious mind is quite amazing.

However, what I mean is that I shall soon have to jump out of a window. The ugliness of the house is almost inexplicable—having white, and mottled green and red. Then there is all the eating and drinking and being shut up in the dark.

My God! What a mercy to be done with it!

Now, my sweet Honey Bee, you know how you would feel if you had stayed in bed alone here for 4 weeks. But I wont argue, as I dont know what you have said. Anyhow, I will abide by Savage.

Miss T. and I have long conversations. She has a charming nature; rather whimsical, and even sensual. But there again, religion comes in; and she leads a spotless life. Apparently she is well off, and takes patients more or less as a spiritual work. She has harboured innumerable young women in love difficulties. They are always turning up to lunch, and I creep out of bed and look at them. At present there is one upstairs, and a barren wife across the passage. The utmost tact is shown with regard to our complaints; and I make Miss T. blush by asking if they’re mad.

Miss Somerville has periods of excitement, when she pulls up all the roses, and goes to church. Then she is silent for weeks. She is now being silent; and is made very nervous by the sight of me. As I went out into the garden yesterday in a blanket with bare legs, she has some reason. Miss Bradbury is the woman you saw out of the window and said was homicidial [sic]. I was very kind with her at dinner, but she then put me to bed, and is a trained nurse.

Miss T. talks about you with awe. How you smile, and say such quaint things—how your eyes fill with tears—how beautiful your soul is—and your hands. She also thinks you write such beautiful English! Your language is so apt and so expressive. Julian is the most remarkable child she ever saw. The worst of her is that she is a little too emotional.

I have been out in the garden for 2 hours; and feel quite normal. I feel my brains, like a pear, to see if its ripe; it will be exquisite by September.

Will you tell Duncan that I was told he had called, and that I am furious that they didn’t let me see him. Miss T. thought him an extremely nice young man.

Do write, today. I long to see you. Its damned dull being here alone. Write sheets. Give Clive my love. His visits are my brightest spots. He must come again.

I will be very reasonable.

Yr. B.

Berg

[]

532: To Clive Bell

[2 August 1910]

Postcard

Burley, Cambridge Park, Twickenham

Can you possibly come down tomorrow (Wednesday) afternoon? Savage is ill and cant come. It would be a great joy to see you—Could you wire if you cant come.

VS

(as early as possible)

3.30 from Waterloo.

Quentin Bell

[]

533: To Saxon Sydney-Turner

Monday [August 1910]

The Wharncliffe Hotel, Tintagel, Cornwall

My dear Saxon,

I meant to ask you the name of the hotel in the Scillies, but forgot. Could you send me a card? We think of going there on Thursday.

Really, there is no place quite so beautiful as Cornwall—in spite of the inconvenience caused by several passionate lovers. You come upon them on the cliffs. If I am ever a lover, I shall try to convey to the world my great amiability. Even when clasped round the neck, I shall try to encourage timid maiden ladies to approach.

Last night we crept under the windows of the grand hotel, and saw Miss Mickle and Mr Thomas Dunhill playing Brahms to a great drawing room full of dowagers and athletes.

Yr. aff.
VS

I hope you have had no more fits.

Sussex

[]

534: To Clive Bell

Sunday [4 September 1910]

Berrymans Farm, Gurnards Head [Cornwall]

Dearest Clive,

I should have written long ago, to thank you for your letters, which were a great delight. You cant imagine, though, how little human I have become. One is a very nice animal, apart from books and culture, but almost dumb.

I begin to wish now to talk to you, at an inopportune moment, partly because I am so happy. I have had to borrow a long-necked ink pot from Mrs Berryman. One dips, like a sparrow, and how to blot is a problem, when I turn over.

Our travels I suppose Nessa has told you about; yesterday we walked along the coast from St Just. We walked till 5 in the afternoon, through a perfect September day, along little paths in the turf, looking into deep sea. We tried for tea at this farm house, and were told we could sleep as well. As the one lodging at Zennor was filled 10 times over, virgins sleeping with matrons in one feather bed, we were much relieved.

We have had no adventures to tell you about; it seems likely that two large steamers are going to collide in three minutes. The pigs and geese are making the farmer, a stout man, with a bad leg, hobble across the yard. From what Mrs Berryman says, the great dispute, which parts husband and wife, is whether the geese shall feed on the fields or the moor. She has practically told us that life is full of trouble; and as she is a great black woman, there must be truth in it. The one interesting letter I have had, is from Madge, who also finds life a handful. She is moved, hearing that I have had a rest cure, to look in the looking glass. There she sees a face scarred with care and passion. Rest cures (though urgently advised) would do her no good: besides, to fight on is the only remedy for some. Then she hints that her heart is gnawn by sorrow, that the people of Surrey are fat, and cannot understand lean spirits who have been in Arcady. “But, thank God, I have been in Arcady—no rest cure for me, in this world, but Arcady, denied to—” Apparently denied to Will, and me and the ladies at the next table in the hotel at Mürren [Switzerland]. She ends, “I wish to get to know Clive. I feel drawn to him”. She is really a very attractive woman.

This letter is taken up, after sitting on the Gurnards Head, watching a 3 masted sailing ship fetching a compass, as Wattie [Walter Lamb] would say, which makes me glad he isn’t here, but mumbling his tragedy beneath yew trees, with moping James [Strachey]. It appears that the geese, in taking flight from the tail of the wain, grazed 3 inches of skin off the smallest brats leg. Mrs B., bringing in jam tarts, an apple pasty, and cream for tea, remarks that one’s always in some trouble. So I was right.

I remember that you asked me some searching questions about my health. I feel that this fortnight has done a great deal of good, and brought back that kind of spring which has been lost all this time. But a bad night certainly is able to make me incapable again, and it seems very easy at present to make a bad night. My resolution is to be cautious at Studland, not walking too far, or exciting the emotions, and taking great care to circumvent headaches. Will you try not to irritate the beast, for amusement? As to my being recovered, I think there is no doubt. You will find me scarlet and brown and I believe, fatter.

With regard to happiness—what an interesting topic that is! Walking about here, with Jean [Thomas] for a companion, I feel a great mastery over the world. My conclusion upon marriage might interest you. So happy I am it seems a pity not to be happier; and yet when I imagine the man to whom I shall say certain things, it isn’t my dear Lytton, or Hilton either. Its strange how much one is occupied in imagining the delights of sympathy. The future, as usual with these sanguine apes, seems full of wonder.

It is pure—affection, I suppose—that makes me run on, because I doubt that you will have time to answer. I have been thinking of Thoby all the time here; I suppose it is the birds. Tomorrow we walk over to Lelant, where we sleep, and go to London on Tuesday. By this post I am writing to Mr Child (on my last sheet of paper) and I hope to work on Women every morning at Studland. I have only one book here—a small Pope. I fumble the words, awkwardly, with a kind of awe, like a rustic. That world becomes astonishingly far away. How odd—that one writes oneself!

Your verdict upon Mr Wedgewood has set my mind at rest—but have you tried Miss Murray? You see, she has 9 years in which to catch me up, if she isn’t level already.

We have been walking among the most remarkable moors, among barrows, British villages, stone maidens, and beehive huts. If it weren’t for the excitability of geese at night, this would be the place I should like to live in.

It will be very nice to see you.

Yr. aff.
VS

Quentin Bell

[]

535: To Clive Bell

Thursday [8 September 1910]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

Dearest Clive,

I’m very sorry that I didn’t write before, but I thought that you saw all my letters to Nessa; and I was purposely very lazy. But I did write, as a matter of fact; and didn’t send it, when Nessa’s letter came, as I thought it looked like asking for Lytton’s letter. However, waiting didn’t do any good apparently; and I suppose I have made you angry. I half meant to put an explanation at the end, to assure you that I wrote without that object; but only managed to say that I didn’t want an answer. Well—it doesn’t much matter either way.

I’ve had a good many small incidents—a very strange conversation with Mr [Harold] Child, upon sexual relations a certain number of delightful compliments and I’m now pledged to do a good deal of work.

Also Wattie has written—insinuating, as I think, that Miss C. has refused him. His tragedy promises well.

I lay awake till 5 this morning, for some unknown reason, and in consequence I am so heavy lidded that I can hardly see. But it hasn’t made my head ache—stupid though it is. I drove with Nessa today.

Yr. VS

The cheque is for the pound you gave me.

Quentin Bell

[]

536: To John Waller Hills

5 October [1910]

The Cottage, Studland, Dorset

Dearest Jack,

I ought to have thanked you long ago for the partridges. They were delicious, and came in very handy.

I suppose you will be at Highhead until Parliament meets. It’s so gorgeous here, that it seems a pity ever to go back.

Nessa is here with her two sons. They are very happy, and Julian is now most attractive. Claudian [Quentin]—the baby—is too small to count much yet.

What an excitement about Eustace and Nina Kay-Shuttleworth! I wonder if you expected it. I hope he is very happy.

Your aff’ate,
VS

Berg

[]

537: To Violet Dickinson

17th Oct. [1910]

Court Place, Iffley, Oxford

My Violet,

I should have written before to thank you for the charming pouch, which looks as though gold were shovelled into it—But laziness is a great curse. Are you in London? I go there tomorrow, for good, I hope. Savage has still to decide my future, but I now feel very well again.

Nessa’s son is better, and Julian is now a strapping schoolboy, very domineering, but attractive.

What are you doing? Vapours seem to hang between us. You might be (as you will be one day) chanting in Heaven. I am staying here with a remarkable family—Costelloes and Pearsall Smiths. Mrs Pearsall Smith is a very spruce and practical edition of the Quaker, without any mysticism about her, though she too is a great light! I imagine they might have been rivals, for Mrs P. S. also writes books upon the soul, and hers are translated into Chinese. She unmasks all the hypocrisies—how the Friends prophecy at dinner, out of malice, so as to cheat someone of a hot dish. Religion would be amusing if one could get priests to be honest.

Are you in London?

I met Katie [Cromer] in the street the other day—in straight American clothes, and rather lined. I remember her as one of the beauties of her age—now some decades ago. Aunt Minna [Duckworth], however, still lives, and makes one feel young.

Yrs. VS

Berg

[]

538: To Madge Vaughan

[Autumn 1910?]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

Dearest Madge,

We caught our train, in spite of Robin’s predictions. Now we are back again, and crouching over our fire, which isn’t as splendid as yours.

It was a wonderful sight—the School [Wellington] I mean, and all the different people—the Canon, and Mr. [R. St. C] Talboys—I keep thinking of it all. I wish I had seen more of you, but if talking is bad for you, perhaps it was better not. I did enjoy talking to you. It was a great treat to see you, and Janet and David. I’ve been telling Nessa all about it.

I most stupidly left my spectacles in my bedroom. Could you be very kind and send them—or perhaps Janet would. Give her my love. The toads are in excellent condition tell her; so she must make haste and come and see them.

Adrian sends his love.

Yr. loving,
VS

Sussex

[]

539: To Clive Bell

[Autumn 1910?]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

Dear Mr Bell,

There was great excitement in the singeries last night when a tall black man, muffled in an overcoat, left a box at the door. There was straw in it. We opened it—Wombat got the straw for his litter. The pot is a beautiful pot. May we hope Mr Bell that you and Mistress will baptise it one of these days? The smaller monkeys we dont allow to touch it—young beasts are so quisitive and their fingers is so many claws. We shant allow them to drink out of it, as they might be drownded, all out of curiosity too. Mango always looks for his reflection in tea pots, what he is [is] a Vain Rake, and one day God will punish him. If you please sir, kiss our mistress when she’s not looking and tell her its Us.

Your obedient singes and Wombatts

Quentin Bell

[]

540: To Violet Dickinson

Monday [14 November 1910]

29 Fitzroy Sq., W.

My Violet,

Why didn’t you tell me that you had influenza before? I would have sat by your bedside. Perhaps it struck you that that wasn’t my gift. I would have read aloud to you from my own works. Can I come to tea, and stay for as long as you like, on Friday? I suppose you wouldn’t be well enough to come on to the Friday Club and hear Helen Verrall read a paper upon ghosts? They have found out something about the soul, which one ought to know.

My time has been wasted a good deal upon Suffrage. We went to two meetings, at which about a dozen people spoke, like the tollings of a bell. If they spoke faster all their words went into one. It was at the Albert Hall. The only amusement was that a baby cried incessantly, and this was taken by some as a bitter sarcasm against woman having a vote.

George turned up yesterday, with a kind of white frill under his waistcoat, and a gigantic diamond, set in green enamel, which is chipping off. He looked like a valet; and I do not think that my bitter remarks about him were wrong. He supposes that we all feel honoured by Lords calling, and that exasperates one. He has bought a country house, on the advice of some Irish peer. It has to be large enough to hold Lady Vera, who never travels without a maid and a man. I passed her the other day in Grosvenor Square, walking with Elsie [Dowager Countess Carnarvon]. As she wore crimson velvet, up to her knees, and her knees had grey stockings on, while Elsie was smothered in good black cloth, and brown fur, I took them for a good woman rescuing a prostitute, and exercising her in the afternoon.

Do you take Sanatogen? I find it very warming to the brain.

I have to write a review about the Duke of Newcastle this week; and next week I begin my work of imagination. You will then hear a good deal about it. When you were ill, did you think at all about the chances of liking me better? I refrained from writing to you, though wishing to, because of the sad revelations made at our last meeting. Would you inform me?

I hear that Margaret Lyttelton continues to sit silent, though people explode gunpowder beneath her. She has been made a Younger Suffragist, but they say that she is fit for the grandmothers. I went down to Twickenham, (Miss Thomas) last week, and had a most interesting time, trying to ignore the oddities of several not altogether like other people women. One of them leapt with fright when one looked at her, and shook her fork in one’s face. The thing was to keep on talking. Are you thinking of sending Beatrice there?

Are you really better? Can I send you anything?

Yr. VS

Berg

[]

541: To Clive Bell

Monday [14? November 1910]

29 F.S.

Dearest Clive,

How complicated life is! Suppose I were to come to tea with you, and Mr Rendel were to call, and Vanessa were to tell him you were in (Adrian met the Sheep on the stairs) would you send down to say you were engaged—or would you not let him up, and trust that I should stay on, and that he would take the hint and go? That was what I hoped you would do. It never occurred to me that I could stop her. As for its being a choice between her and you, I merely pitied myself (with my usual egoism) for losing my pleasure, and having to undergo an infliction. If one of us was going to lose a temper, I thought it should be me. She [Mary Sheepshanks] stayed for two hours, flopping like some debauched and battered moth, round her own discontent. She was as ugly as a dirty rain drop—a swollen one, that has run down a window, and got all the smuts in to it.

Contrasting this with what it might have been—its too damnable. Next time (which I dont dare to suggest) I will make the proper arrangements, but I’m certain that I shall never have the courage to turn people out when they’re on the stairs—not if I’m in my lovers arms!

Yr. VS

No, I dont see why you should be furious—with me, at least.

My sister threw me over this afternoon, because it was fine—but I wasn’t angry—I’ve been trained.

Quentin Bell

[]

542: To Violet Dickinson

Sunday [27 November 1910]

29 Fitzroy Square

My Violet,

You should have had the decency to write from your retirement. Dont you see that, having cast this umbrage upon your emotion for me, you put me in a very delicate position—so far as being inoportunate [sic] with letters is concerned? Suppose you just sniff ‘Oh that tiresome chit, again’ and roll a ball for your dog to gnaw out of my sentiments, how can I proceed without caution?

How are you? Where are you? If in London, would you like to see me? I cant help hoping that you’re alone at Welwyn, and that it is pouring as it is here, so that you cant go out for fear of the rheumatics, and the leaves are sticking to the window panes. You will then have time to think over your wasted youth, and friendships thrown away.

We are so much oppressed by this election, and the rain, that we have to dine out in a little restaurant off Soho, where prostitutes lure young men. The wickedness of London on a day like this is inconceivable; one imagines vice smelling in stuffy rooms.

I suppose you have been going everywhere—to the Grafton Galleries, and the Bernard Shaw play [Misalliance]. Now that Clive is in the van of aesthetic opinion, I hear a great deal about pictures. I dont think them so good as books. But why all the Duchesses are insulted by the post-impressionists, a modest sample set of painters, innocent even of indecency, I cant conceive. However, one mustn’t say that they are like other pictures, only better, because that makes everyone angry.

You will be glad to hear that I am seething with fragments of love, morals, ethics, comedy tragedy, and so on; and every morning pour them out into a manuscript book [Melymbrosia?]. Never shall I write a review again. Do you think it would be indecent to put Aunt Minna upon the stage, and Aunt Fisher, and the Quaker? Such riches as we have in our relations it seems a pity to neglect.

One of Miss Thomas’s most excitable lunatics—the one who leapt when she saw me—has been almost dying, but is now better again. Miss Thomas says that these excitements are the wine of life. This bears out my theory, based on Aunt Fisher, and all the other sepulchral women, that what people like is feeling—it dont matter what. Last Sunday I stayed with the Cornishes at Eton, and heard the most singular conversations carried on by old Mrs C. alone, over everybodies head. What is love? What is vice? What is religion? “Oh, d’you know that Virginia has the most lovely little sins?” She has now written to congratulate me upon an article by John Bailey upon Tolstoy “No one but you, Virginia, could have written it.” When the old talk they are very alarming. Old Mr Cornish talked too.

Write, even a post card, to say how you are, and whether I shall send you anything—a hot water bottle, or a bit of binding?

Yr. VS

Berg

[]

543: To Violet Dickinson

[December? 1910]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My Violet,

I will come on Saturday with great pleasure—no clothes—not very clean. Just back from a political meeting, and sat on the platform (for the sake of my Christian blood) next Portuguese Jews, whose sweat ran into powder, caked, and blew off.

Yr. VS

Berg

[]

544: To Violet Dickinson

[December 1910]

[29 Fitzroy Square, W.]

My Violet,

It is a great pity that I am a prose writing and not a poetic animal. Then I could express my feelings, gratitude, contentment, spiritual joy, physical comfort, friendship, appreciation—all these you should take and shake, and make rhyme. There are many others.

When they all come together, one is really very enviable.

I was very happy in my comfortable bed; also at meals; also sitting over the fire.

Of course, I had to wrestle with my stout devil selfishness. Did you notice it? Sometimes it takes an hour before breakfast to subdue him. But then, what a glorious victory! What a snowy soul! What a delightful creature, in short!

This must stop (though it could go on) in order to catch the post.

Besides, you have a dozen sheets to read I know. With great affection.

Yr. Sp.

Berg

[]

545: To Janet Case

[December? 1910]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

Dear Miss Case,

I am dining out on Tuesday, so I dont expect we shall meet till May or June. But we can always hope. Do you ever take that side of politics into account—the inhuman side, and how all the best feelings are shrivelled? It is just the same with philanthropy, and that is why it attracts the bloodless women who dont care for their own relations. Miss Emphie Case [Janet’s sister] will see my point. I know 2 Duchesses, so I am still one up—if a Dowager counts. Is yours Sutherland or Rutland or neither? I saw Miss LL. Davies at a lighted window in Barton St with all the conspirators round her, and cursed under my breath.

Yr. aff.
VS

Sussex

[]

546: To Vanessa Bell

Christmas Day [1910]

Pelham Arms, St Anns, Lewes [Sussex]

Beloved;

Breakfast was as bleak as a workhouse today; not one letter, not one parcel; the postman actually passed the door.

Miraculously, he returned, with your short, but expressive, curse. As for forgetting you, the poor Ape was preparing for a day of stoic endurance upon the downs. Adrian saying that Claudian [Quentin] was probably in convulsions.

My only other letter was from Jean [Thomas], enclosing ‘What I believe’ by Tolstoy. She sent a long serious letter with it, exhorting me to Christianity, which will save me from insanity. How we are persecuted! The self conceit of Christians is really unendurable. But the poor woman has got into one of her phrases, which lasts a whole letter, about something lacking in your life, which alone will bring etc. etc. Then it all comes over the other way round.

The weather has been surprising; we walked on the downs this morning, explored the town this afternoon, and are now going to church.

The eccentricity of our appearance is magnificent. Adrians hair flows like a crazy poets; then we bought him a Harvest hat for a shilling, a strawberry roan colour, suited for an August afternoon.

I wear a bright purple cloak, over my red dress, with a smart black toque.

Asking about church just now, Mrs Mears said “There is a Roman Catholic church two doors down” evidently placing us among the foreign Christians. Yesterday by the way (Adrian will tell the story) I got past the ticket inspector with a dog ticket. Hans had mine. I was given a packet by Sophie, inscribed “For dear Hans”, and asked to give it him on Christmas day. It was a bar of milk chocolate. Clearly, something softens in servants brains.

We have just discovered that one can telephone from here; Duncan can be talked to for two pence. Adrian comes up beaming, from Love, I suppose. I withdrew discreetly. He says talking is much more satisfactory than writing.

Last night before dinner we wandered in the streets, and spent about ten shillings upon various small objects, calculated to make us cheerful—a flying bird, now whizzing round, a pencil, a cooks knife to cut the pencil, an earthenware pot, a jar of Aspenalls black enamel, a walking stick—in short a great many small objects.

Have you had any excitements? Letters? Confidences? Compliments?

As usual, I am violently in favour of a country life. I like walking and coming back for tea, and finding letters (oh what a sarcasm.) and having tea, and then writing over the fire, or reading a book about the poor. (a safety pin for the bird to hang to has now been stuck into the ceiling)

I like looking out places on the map; already I have bought two guides, and planned several expeditions.

The country is very beautiful; we jest, pithily, about greens and purples and how you would say “What a wonderful red that green moss is!” One becomes so simple in the country—running out at all hours.

Why did you go to a pottery at Bristol?

Yr. B.

Berg

[]

547: To Vanessa Bell

Tuesday [27 December 1910]

Pelham Arms [Lewes, Sussex]

Beloved

No letter from you today, which is rather mean, I think, considering how long mine are, and written under such difficulties.

I have just come back from my visit to Brighton. It was the bleakest thing I ever did.

A strong wind was blowing on the downs, but I had a beautiful walk until I sighted a white tower on the race course. Then I descended into the suburbs of Brighton, which are dusty and windbitten, and got a tram to the Pavilion. A little red-nosed clerk [Saxon] appeared, so much like other people that I didn’t know him. Far from lunching out in some queer angle of the Pavilion, as I expected, he told me that we were to lunch with his family. We drove to the far end of Hove. He lives in a street of small villas. The house has a great air of poverty. It is too bare to be ugly—linoleum carpets, and only very low fires. A Miss Charlotte, practically bald and very lean and cold, was crouching in the dining room.

Then Mrs Turner appeared and took me to her room, which reminded me of Aunt Marys. The brushes were so mangy in bristles, and the combs yellow and broken. She is as attenuated as a field mouse—but you have seen her. Then we lunched, and old Turner, called ‘the doctor’, a Mr Stafford, who is afflicted in every way,—can hardly speak—Ravenscroft and Saxon came in. We had the remains of several hearts, which would hardly go round; and portions were sent up on plates for people in their rooms. Your picture of Saxon hangs over the sideboard on a dull red paper, and looks oddly out of place.

I kept up a feeble conversation about the beauties of Lewes with Mr and Mrs Turner; Saxon did not say a word; but smiled at me once. They were all very lean and uncomfortable. After lunch I was taken to the drawing room, where they had lighted a fire in my honour. It is a bright yellow room stuffed with very cheap objects. Mrs Turner began to talk about Saxon. He appeared and murmured “Shall I go up to Mr Palmer?” “He’s gone to sit with one of my patients” she said “so that I may talk to you. Now, isn’t that wonderful of the boy? Not many sons would do that.” She told me how he had learnt his letters before he could talk, how he had had the whooping cough when he was nine months old, and often turned as black as the poker “for a child of that age couldn’t understand about coughing the phlegm up”, how he had never given her a moments anxiety; except about his food. His sciatica chiefly comes from eating the wrong things; and going without dinner. She only wished he could find a good wife! but he showed no signs of it. I’m sure she thought that I was after him, and had come over to pursue him. Then she told me all about Cuthbert, who is six feet 1 and looks every inch of it; very different from Saxon; very handsome; and would die if he had to sit in an office like Saxon; he has shot 3 elephants; one cant imagine Saxon shooting an elephant!—but still, if he chose there’s nothing he couldn’t do. He has the sweetest nature of any living creature. Then we talked about his dinners again, and she asked me to speak to him seriously; and about his landlady, and about his constitution, which is naturally very tough, for though small-boned, he has a great deal of strength in him, more than Cuthbert; though people always think Saxon the weaker of the two.

Then we got on to Julian, and the nameless one, who ought to be called Vivian, or Fabian or Virginius, according to her.

At last I said I must go; and she evidently had many patients waiting for her. Miss Charlotte is a patient. Evidently, they are very poor patients.

Saxon took me to the station; and we hardly spoke. It was very gritty and windy, and as there were no shops open, rather dull; there was no sunset, so that the glass didn’t burn; and it reminded me of many dismal hours; and the Fishers.

I feel that one ought to think very kindly of Saxon. It is such a poverty-stricken middle class family, and if I were as distinguished and nice as Saxon, I should be much more arrogant. Think of Ottoline, in comparison!—how one might boast of having risen to know her. But of course he is completely placid and sincere, and always remembers his mother’s hard lot. It was amazingly without colour.

Adrian is spending the day with Duncan. He did manage to catch his train last night.

Yr. B.

Berg

[]

548: To Clive Bell

Thursday [29 December 1910]

The Pelham Arms, Lewes [Sussex]

Dearest Clive,

I didn’t deserve another letter from you because that old Bitch left off suckling her whelps and wrote—However, I did deserve one, because of the quantity that goes into mine. I didn’t neglect you; it seemed to me as though I were vociferating to a stone wall. So please write again—Nessa has a chow hand—three words, with all the fur on them, take up a line. With Adrian and Duncan swarming on the floor, making it like the bottom of an alligators tank, one gets no chance of reading. But I read your review with great pleasure—here you snort; partly derived from comparing it with what I should have written (this sounds natural) partly, from its own merits. You are much sturdier on your legs than you were; you stride over the ground, and plant words firmly, in a way I admire. My tendency would be to insinuate. But I’m glad that I need no longer pay compliments to Mr Buxton Forman ; it seems a pity that one’s writing should be loaded with that kind of weight. I think you’re good enough now to fly straight. I dont think I feel as warmly as you do about Trelawny’s letters, which I’ve just finished. The imagination is often very watery, and the strength the strength of a man of action, whose brain is a simple machine divorced from his body. The quotation I liked was about the fleas: “he piqued himself upon being as dirty; having as much vermin, and letting them loose from his fingers in the same dignified manner, as if sparing a conquered enemy”. Isn’t that what Cole would do, supposing he caught a large bug in company? But I like the later letters, harping upon Shelley.

Here comes an eccentric post, with a letter from Madge, about her soul, which now, clothed in flesh, floats among the “elemental feelings which are the Best,” and scorns the “panoply of existence”. Her pen has a way of squeaking like a slate pencil; I always make it squeak now. But at the same time dear Ott[oline]: asks me to stay with her: and Molly MacCarthy asks me to lunch; these small attentions are very comforting.

I probably go back on Sunday night, so as to start fresh on Monday; Jean comes tomorrow for the night; Adrian has just gone. As for my writing—you will have to wait for Mel[ymbrosia]. to see what has become of it. The Lit. Supt. doesn’t print my single review; and the [Guardian’s] Womans Supt. I take to be dead, and giving off odours. I should say that my great change was in the way of courage, or conceit; and that I had given up adventuring after other people’s forms, as I used. But I expect that I am really less sensitive to style than you are, and so seem more steadfast. I’m not particularly conceited at this moment. No compliments come my way!

Will you really come and stay with me, if I buy this cottage? Will the old Butcher’s dog [Vanessa]—or will she always make excuses? If I were sure of that, I shouldn’t hesitate; as it is, I think I’m going to risk it. For one thing, the charges at this Inn are so exorbitant that one couldn’t come often; and then another side of life reveals itself in the country, which I cant help thinking of amazing interest. It is precisely as though one clapped on a solid half-globe to one’s London life, and had hitherto always walked upon a strip of pavement. But I will do nothing without taking advice. Adrian wont share for a year anyhow, as he is going abroad for his holidays.

Your buns have just come—a great delight.

Yr. VS

Running on like this, I have missed the post.

Quentin Bell

[]

Letters 549-570

549: To Violet Dickinson

New Years Day [1911]

Pelham Arms, Lewes [Sussex]

My Violet,

Many happy returns of the day. The only present I have got for you is a picture of some cattle, which will interest you when you hear that the same people use them as used them when the Domesday Book was written. So the guide book says. In fact, it is altogether an interesting picture, when you think that your Sp: may be going to take a cottage in the neighborhood. It is a very ugly villa; but underneath the downs, in a charming village [Firle].

We have been spending Christmas here, with an extremely considerate landlady, who is so much struck by my incompetence to face life, that she always offers to lace my boots, and give me bath. Miss Thomas came down for a night, in an interval between discharging a woman who wished to commit murder, and taking one, who wants to kill herself. Can you imagine living like that?—always watching the knives, and expecting to find bedroom doors locked, or a corpse in the bath? I said I thought it was too great a strain—but, upheld by Christianity, I believe she will do it.

What have you been doing? I forgot to tell you that Sophia cherishes a passion for celery, and devoured your roots by herself. Would you give your blessing to my cottage? I am very much tempted to take it, for £19.10 a year.

Nessa is with the old Bells, who talk of nothing but hockey and dill water. However, as it is Christmas, they have champagne for dinner, and she manages to get slightly tipsy every night, so as to think it all a dream. They want to call the baby a new name, as everyone dislikes Claudian.

I’m very much excited by the thought of going back and writing the work of imagination. What a good thing the Quaker wont be shocked by it—she wanted me to write a life of Henry the 8th! One doesn’t really think about her much now; that’s what comes of being a mystic, I believe. They fade. But perhaps in Heaven they are as solid as brick.

A great attack was made upon my faith this Christmas, and I am led to think that Atheists are still persecuted. For instance, wishing to read just now, I was dinned crazy by a cracked church bell, which didn’t peal, but merely hammered, like an arrogant and bigoted street seller. Then the congregation sings without understanding, and as for the psalms, which all the little news boys and errand boys, sing, I never heard anything so senseless less in my life. However, I suppose it would be too rash to burn them all. They must have imaginations. I am more charitable about them than they are about me.

This new year is not sanguine. It has been raining all the morning, and is now so dark—partly because the blinds wont pull up—that I am writing at 3 by firelight. In an hour it will be pitch dark. A summer night with stars is brighter. If you are at Longleat [Marquess of Bath], perhaps you have electric light, gramophones, telephones, and forget the seasons. If Beatrice is there give her my love, and tell her to write to me; if she wont do that, to come and see me. What is the price of the matting you have at the cottage? expensive?

I saw Aunt Minna, who was starting for Teneriffe, for winter sketching. Colours have to be very bright for her to see them; what with moss, lichens and sea birds, the rock is green, vermilion and Chinese white. She is taking glasses, like the window panes in country public houses; and with these she can see stationary objects that are not too near and not too far. She is a valiant old woman.

Yr. VS

How is Mrs Crum? Is there any news of Walter?

I go back tonight.

Berg

[]

550: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Sunday [1 January 1911]

The Pelham Arms, Lewes

Dearest Ottoline,

It must be delightful [for Philip Morrell] to be in [Parliament], so triumphantly—and what a mercy to have it over—only aren’t you worked to the bone? We went to one meeting only, and that, what with cheering and stamping and emotions of all kinds, was very exhausting. The candidate was a loathsome Portuguese Jew. But the crowd is far more exciting than anything else, and makes it almost impossible to sit down and read in ones room again.

Here I am sitting over an inn fire, and listening to the creaking of an enormous sign, painted with your family arms. They look rather beautiful, and I hope they wont be done away with when the Lords go. I wish I’d heard you upon morals in high life! But there are merits in the aristocracy which dont appear to you—and manners, and freedom.

I am very much tempted to buy a house here. One has the most lovely downs at one’s door, and there are beautiful 18th century houses, with Corinthian pillars inside, oak panels, and marble mantelpieces. Are country cottages very expensive? Do the roofs leak? One misses such a lot in London. Even now, when it is about to rain, there are wonderful colours.

I suppose you have heard of the terrible ructions which have split our world in two since you went away . The plan is now to give a fancy dress ball, where Clive shall be a Guardsman, and Lytton a ballet girl, and they will embrace before they discover, and make it up. But quarrels are really rather exciting.

Is our world very small compared with yours? I am now going out to walk for miles and miles. I wish you were here.

Do let me come down for the day some time. I should love it.

Yours aff.ate,
V.S.

Texas

[]

551: To Clive Bell

[23 January 1911]

Bagley Wood, Oxford

Dearest Clive,

Tuesday would be best and, I need hardly say, delightful. On Friday I dont really get back till 5.30. Here I am in the heart (or perhaps that isnt the typical feature) of young womanhood. I like clever young women, in spite of my brother in law (That was said to tease).

Gumbo [Marjorie Strachey] is seated at the piano, dressed in a tight green jersey, which makes her resemble the lean cat in the advertisement, singing O Dolche Amor, to her own accompaniment. The accompaniment ends: she flings her hands up, and gives vent to a passionate shriek; crashes her hands down again and goes on. A dry yellow skin has formed round her lips, owing to her having a fried egg for breakfast. Save that her songs are passionate, we have not mentioned the subject. But Roger [Fry] is discussed perpetually, and she has a letter from him, about her Friday Club paper, which he takes to be a direct attack upon himself. Beginning my dear Marjorie: it ends Yrs. very sincerely. I have not seen her alone, as I went first to Court Place , and was there made to play Scramble patience for some hours. We had an icy motor drive over to Bagley. The motor broke down on the slope of a steep muddy hill; and Gumbo was seized with hysterics, imagining that a dog would run between her legs. I said that she need fear nothing of the kind, but did not give my reasons: and the baying of a hound in a far away farm made her fling herself upon Ray. Last night Gumbo gave us a long disquisition upon her character, talents, passions, and so forth; and told us that she would give all the praise she has for brilliance, if one person (preferably a man) would say she was lovely. No one rose. She has improved; and we get on better. No one makes me laugh more. She is a real figure.

Thus far I got; and then Ray’s Miss Cox arrived. Miss Cox is one of the younger Newnhamites, and it is said that she will marry either a Keynes or a Brook. She has a superficial resemblance to a far younger and prettier Sheepshanks. She is a bright, intelligent, nice creature; who has, she says, very few emotions, but thinks so highly of Gwen [Drawin] that she even copies her way of speech. I am writing this in the waiting room at Oxford, having caught an unexpected omnibus on the high road, and thus arrived ½ an hour early. We played patience to an early hour this morning; and became very frank and indecent. Gumbo told us how her period affected her entrails, and finally destroyed her voice, upon which we all asked (she had been singing Brahms) whether she was now indisposed. It appeared that she was suffering from diarrhoea—all this pleased me very much, and I repeat that I like clever young women. Also I had a compliment on my beauty. This was a little dashed by hearing that Gumbo had felt a distinct emotion of love upon last seeing Nessa.

Yrs. V.S.

Quentin Bell

[]

552: To Violet Dickinson

24th Jan [1911]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My Violet,

You couldn’t have given me a more useful or delightful present. I’ve just had to throw away my old book stand. This one comes like a miracle to replace it. You are a wonderful woman! Are you in London? Shall I come and see you? I’m very much excited—furnishing my cottage, and staining the floors the colour of the Atlantic in a storm. Are you well?

With great affection,

Yr. Sp:

Berg

[]

553: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

[end-January 1911]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

Dearest Ottoline,

I wish I could come next Sunday. It would be enchanting (perhaps not for your maid though!) and we could leave Desmond [MacCarthy], as one leaves a kettle on the hob.

But, alas, I’ve got to go down [to Firle] and make curtains and move beds at the cottage, having been so rash as to ask 5 people to stay the week after. Nessa is bringing a sewing machine; and in the intervals, I shall spur her to bouts of talk. Then we shall become very intimate, and matronly, and discuss the past and the future. Will you let me come some other time, for the night, as before? That visit remains so clear in my mind, as a thing I enjoyed immensely. You give your friends great happiness. Desmond was purring all over.

It was very good of you to write to Mr Pearsall Smith. It isn’t an audience to be afraid of—mostly eager gulls.

I suppose Harry Lamb is back again, with all his whims. He was seen in London. Marjorie [Strachey], I think, has cooled down. I spent a Sunday there; and she seemed switched off on another tack. She has taken to painting pictures. I cant help wishing (its a thing I dont often notice) that she wouldnt wear drawers of shiny black alpaca, like a chemists coat.

Yr. aff.ate,
V.S.

Texas

[]

554: To Violet Dickinson

Sunday [29 January? 1911]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My Violet,

I will come to lunch on Thursday with pleasure.

I spent yesterday finishing off the cottage. Its right underneath the downs, and though itself an eyesore, still that dont matter when one’s inside. I have one gooseberry bush; 3 mongrels, thought by some to grow currants. Shall you ever come and stay there? There is a Bath, and a W. C.

Yr. VS

We shall be on the telephone on Tuesday—797 Mayfair.

Berg

[]

555: To James Strachey

[3rd March 1911]

Postcard

29 Fitzroy Sq.

Dear James,

Will you come and stay at Firle on the 18th? I warn you it won’t be comfortable; there will only be the pleasures of the soul—Nessa, Norton (perhaps) and me. I hope you will brave it.

Yrs. VS

Strachey Trust

[]

556: To James Strachey

[10 March 1911]

29 Fitzroy Sq.

Dear James,

Do come [to Firle] on Friday, leave, if you must, and come again. There are many trains; not extravagant—weekend tickets etc.

I think Nessa will be all right; though we have reasons for wishing otherwise.

Chaperones I know we must have; my heart being inflammable.

But couldn’t you really burke your function; and stay on—it would be much better.

Yrs. VS

Strachey Trust

[]

557: To Saxon Sydney-Turner

[11 March 1911]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My Dear Saxon,

I went to the library about your quotation. They had only got the volumes up to 1907. I looked through them (from 1902) and could not find any paper by Gaye [?]. Shall I look in the British Museum? The Library would get in the later volumes for me, but it would take time—and I think you are in a hurry.

I’ll look in Dr Williams [Library]—in case he has them.

By the way, I saw Ottoline the other night, who talked of you with her usual mixture of awe and affection; and read me a letter from Harry Lamb, describing your ‘supremacy’ not daring to ask you to tea. She wanted me to explain that she is at home now for 3 Thursdays. Then we discussed Harry Lamb at great length—then I saw Walter and heard the story of his correspondence with Dr somebody or other about Christianity. Dr —— says “How I wish I had a man like you on my staff!” Walter is making himself exceedingly agreeable to the young things at Newnham. His stone is melting.

Yr. very aff.,
VS

Barbara Bagenal

[]

558: To Clive Bell

Saturday [March 1911]

Little Talland House, Firle

Dearest Clive,

Your wife having given me a good snubbing, I was too proud to ask you to come down, though much tempted to. I cant help thinking that you have missed more than Roger Fry will replace—not conversation, no—but a starlight walk upon the downs, a horse nibbling and taking one for a great white sheep, a flock ringing bells, startled birds and the sea too. All these things I have had to myself—remembering certain strictures, I will keep them to myself. Only, as I’ve seen no one but the woman Nessa calls Widow Simpson (wife Stephens—she gave me a bunch of her own early violets) I cant be garrulous on those lines. The only event has been a telegram from Adrian, to say that [Horace] Cole has made him miss his train; and he’s motoring down. This almost threatens Cole himself. Anyhow I shall hear the last gossip of that sordid, gas-lit Piccadilly circus affair. As both Cole and Irene are upon the downward path, sampling human nature and spitting it out, why not marry them together? I cant help thinking that he has more heroic qualities than her other samples.

In default of company (a rusty sneer intended!) I have done nothing but read. Meals take 10 minutes to prepare, if one is sagacious enough to begin one’s potatoes after breakfast. Owing to this foresight, I had a potatoes so cooked that its skin rose in crackling bubbles, on the surface, and it was soft to the heart. Also a tapioca pudding.

I have just upon finished Desmonds Santayana, with amazement—whether at his powers or my own, or at the thoughts in the world, I cannot say. I think it is really astonishment at the number of disembodied things of great importance shut up in books. Having lived an active talkative life so long, prying into people through their sayings, I had rather forgotten how much thinking is done outside my own head. And yet, reading is like shutting the doors of a Cathedral, one becomes so pure. This would not apply to works of imagination, I suppose. Are you still a reader?

Active life again encroaches—Widow Hughes, this time, who can cook, and feels terrible lonesome at home, would like to be my cook, just to have something to do. Now that her lodger, a gamekeeper, is gone to better himself, and her eleven children are placed in the world (all except the little girl who’s not quite like other people) she often stands outside her door of a morning and says “Which way shall I go?” Being very fond of the hills, she goes up there sometimes at dawn, and picks mushrooms in the Summer. But then theres the day, and the long evenings—and so on. The question is, how to dispose of Widow Stephens, who is favoured by the Vicar, and given the Church to clean, though she’s going through her funny time of life, when women often feel too queer to clean their own houses, let alone other peoples—

(Sunday)

Adrian arrived at nine. The Cole affair has broken out again. Lilian has disappeared. Adrian was whirled about until 6 o’clock—Various brothels were visited. One of the men left Paris yesterday, the theory is that she killed her illegitimate child: and the Jew, knowing this, does what he likes with her. She had had a mysterious letter. But killing an illegitimate child would surely be a slight crime; and she cant care for her character. Yet she has got no money out of Cole, so that it does not seem politic to bolt just yet.

However this was all washed out of my head by a tremendous walk which we’ve just come back from. We found the churchyard [at Bishopstone, near Lewes] where Rutherford is buried, and Saxon stood bareheaded. It was a divine Spring day. Not only the Parliament, but several singing birds have been at it. Adrian is now occupied, like a wizard brewing potions in a cell, peeling onions, with his great horn spectacles on, and a pipe in his mouth. The hotch potch is being prepared. I, you see, escape to the drawing room. My head feels like a gently bubbling kettle—an ideal state; though perhaps you wont see the virtues of it reflected here. By the way, I’m told that I said that Duncan disliked R.Fs [Roger Fry] picture: I think I said that he thought it nice but weak. O these misunderstandings.

Quentin Bell

[]

559: To Molly Maccarthy

[March 1911]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

Dear Molly,

I shall be delighted to come to lunch on Thursday, only I’m afraid I must go sooner than I generally do go, when I come to see you, as I have to dress up again as a South Sea Savage, to figure in a picture. Its an awful bore! How angelic of you to have sent those things! They hadn’t come on Monday, but we left very early, and I expect they are there now.

Will you tell Desmond that I am sending back his Santayana, which I enjoyed immensely, and read straight off in amazement at the number of ideas in the world. I am sending, too, the old book which he lent father years ago not to forget it.

Here, at last, is what we owe for the tickets.

I met Miss Ponsonby the other day: and shall like very much to meet her again.

I hope the dance didn’t exhaust you. Was I less alarming as a savage—or as bad as ever?

Yr. aff.
VS

Mrs Michael MacCarthy

[]

560: To Jacques Raverat

[late March 1911]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

Dear Mr Raverat,

On hearing of your important engagement, I was ready to let you off the other one. But Gwen says you will come, without cursing. The train is the 3.20 from Victoria on Saturday. We are going by that, so I hope you may be able to.

My congratulations are very warm. As I said, I have heard so much of you, that I can congratulate her too.

Yours,
Virginia Stephen

It will probably be ghastly uncomfortable at Firle. Take a week end ticket to Lewes.

Sussex

[]

561: To Molly Maccarthy

[April 1911]

Little Talland House, Firle, near Lewes, Sussex

My dear Molly,

I’m so sorry I couldn’t come to see you. Desmond asked me to come one day, but then we had a great presentation to manage—we gave the cook a clock.

I wonder whether possibly you and Desmond would come down and stay with me? I shall be at Firle till the 21st. There are two week-ends—8th and 15th. I wonder if you could manage either—only do come for more than a week-end.

I’m very ignorant about what one does after a child has been born.

I shall have a cook, but not great comfort to offer. Still the downs ought to be nice. The villa is inconceivably ugly, done up in patches of post-impressionist colour. I never thanked you for the furniture. The chair is the perfection of comfort. It was angelic of you.

It is delightful that you have another son. It’s such a mercy to start fresh with no child in prospect. What about all our Clubs and performances.

We enjoyed Desmond’s letter immensely.

Your affect.,
VS

Mrs. Michael MacCarthy

[]

562: To Vanessa Bell

April 6th [1911]

Little Talland House, Firle, Lewes, Sussex

Beloved,

I suppose you had a record bad crossing [en route to Turkey]. Really, luck is the very devil. However, its no use speculating now about it, as I shant hear; and you are crossing Europe.

I am alone; Ray [Rachel Costelloe] has just gone. We had meant to motor, but the snow kept us indoors. We went out once, and got bleached and drenched; she floundered like a calf. However, talk proved interesting. Here comes a piece of gossip which you must keep private. Talking of Oliver Strachey, she said “I can quite imagine falling in love with him”. I said “I suppose you mean you are in love with him”. She said “No: I only see that I might be—but dont want to be.” I said “Is he in love with you?” She said “Oh no—not a bit. But he was very friendly.” This morning however, she had a letter from him asking her to go over some railway works. This evidently pleased her very much. I’m pretty sure there will be an affair in that direction; she is either in love, or on the verge of it, so if it happens dont say “Poor Synge [Virginia]! snubbed again!”

At any rate, it seems clear that he is in a very susceptible state of mind, and you must therefore discount his attentions to me. The [Bertrand] Russells, Ray says, are trying to bring off a match between him and Isabel Fry [Roger’s sister]. Poor wretch!—he has jumped into a kettle, as you would say. It promises to be a lively summer.

Ray told me that she is really very susceptible to men, though no man has been in love with her. She always stakes out the ground, as she calls it, with a new man; and considers the possibilities. “Could you marry Adrian?” I asked her. She said that would be impossible.

She is a good satisfactory creature, as downright as a poker, and very queer in the tremors of imagined love. But perhaps one would find her a little heavy? She told me that Mrs [Bernard] Berenson had treated old Costelloe very badly, as he really had great merits. It now seems possible (this is further gossip, secret, and probably inaccurate) that she will leave B. as his temper has grown intolerable; and she is very unhappy. What a sheet of amorous gossip! But now that I’m alone you wont have anything but talk of trees and downs.

If only it would stop blowing and snowing, I should be very happy.

Having servants, turns this house into a comfortable respectable place. They are very goodhumoured, though Sophie seems to jam in the doors rather.

Ray is coming back next week. I’ve not heard from Saxon or the MacCarthy’s; but I should rather like a week alone.

I feel a little worried about you. I see that the Ostend boat had to wait an hour at Dover. I feel pretty sure that I shall have to announce Olivers engagement to Ray in my next!

Yr. B.

Berg

[]

563: To Vanessa Bell

April 8th [1911]

Little Talland House, Firle, Lewes, Sussex

Beloved,

Another card came this morning from Passau, which I told Sophie, is in Germany. Anyhow, you sound safe so far. I think Mother Sill [seasick remedy] is only bad if you take a quantity.

My news threatens to dry up—and there’s always the doubt whether you’ll get the letter.

I’ve had letters from Ray, Molly MacCarthy, and Saxon. I think Rays letter hints at possible mysteries: she says that fate is interfering with her plans—Can Oliver have proposed? She spent 4 days with him; and they met at Oxford—it might have happened. There can be no doubt, I think about her side of it. She said she’d felt much the same for 4 or 5 other men. But I thought there was something on his side too. What old gossips we are!

Molly and Desmond are in the Isle of Wight, so they cant come. Saxon sends a very exquisite letter in red ink; he talks of ‘they’ and ‘he’, and wishes me to propose another literary work for his evenings; he is feeling very cold, and cannot risk coming here. I shall probably be alone till the 19th. I am rather amused at being alone. I haven’t been alone in the country since that summer at Wells, when I used to get letters from Hilton [Young].

I write all the morning, walk all the afternoon, and read and write and look out of the window the rest of the time.

The country is so amazingly beautiful, that I frequently have to stop and say “Good God!” I went to a mediaeval castle [Laughton Place] in the marsh this afternoon. Well—I wont describe; but promise me to come here the Sunday after you get back, and to say whether anything in Europe beats it.

The plovers were in a tremendous excitement. I met Lord Gage in the village. He’s not only crouch backed, but he is bitten by the same disease as Porchy [Lord Porchester]. He has a face like a dead hares, only white and scarlet. He was hobbling along on the Vicars arm, to inspect the tombs in the church. They looked at me; and I’d fallen into [a] dike, and got mud up to the knees! Happily, Maud had put a tuck into my petticoat.

The old gentleman, a clergyman, is being persuaded to bury the head of Cromwell. They say its indecent to keep it in a box.

I have the greatest desire to see it; and even stroke it. Haven’t you?

That is really the only news in England. If anyone praises me, say so. Its odd, retiring from the world like this. I feel as if I were 15 again—one begins to think of books and describing scenery just as one used. I am reading the Liasion Dangereuses with great delight.

This is all very dull. Adrian has got to Marseilles, and suddenly discovers Hans’ chain in his pocket. This causes a good deal of excitement in the kitchen. Sophie and Maud sit all day machining curtains in the dining room, and talking very comfortably and incessantly. What can they have to say, I wonder?

Yr. B.

You’ll be at Constantinople today. How exciting! I suppose tomorrow I ought to write to Greece, but I’m not sure.

Berg

[]

564: To Jacques Raverat

9th April [1911]

Little Talland House, Firle, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Jacques,

I’ve been long in writing, but I knew you would put that down to the infernal confusion of London—not to ingratitude. It was delightful of you to think of sending that book. In fact you have a delightful nature. Thank you so much. I’ve just been cutting the pages, and seeing several bold words which tempt me on, in spite of the Sabbath. I shall begin seriously after dinner.

We left London in a flurry, but now I’m here alone and shall be alone for a fortnight. I read furiously and write and walk. Its a very satisfactory life, and much more exciting, even than talking. As for the country, I never imagined anything so beautiful. I’ve discovered several new walks.

You and Gwen must come here again. By the way, would this house be any use to you both for a week or fortnight after 23rd? I shall probably be in France with Ka; away anyhow; and it seems a pity that all these sights shouldn’t be seen.

One can put up six, as you know.

Thank you again.

Yours ever,
Virginia Stephen

I can’t remember your address. I hope your walk was good.

Sussex

[]

565: To Saxon Sydney-Turner

April 13th [1911]

Little Talland House, Firle, Lewes, Sussex

My dear Saxon,

The addresses are

C/o Cook
Place de la Constitution,
Athens

from April 20th to 27th.

After that C/o Ionian Bank,

Patras.

I dont know how late that may mean. Adrian is,

C/o Cook,
Galleria Vittoria,
Via Chiatamone,
Naples.

The weather being now divine I’ve spend a happy week alone. I think I shall be alone till Wednesday. I believe its the ideal life—one reads so much. I suppose you do that in London, certainly its very pleasant. George and Margaret [Duckworth] came yesterday, but thank God I was out, having fallen into the canal. Margaret was heard to say she’d never seen a prettier house. I am reading the Prelude [Wordsworth]. Dont you think it one of the greatest works ever written? Some of it, anyhow, is sublime; it may get worse. I am reading Liaisons Dangereuses. I wish you would bring out the classics facing an English translation; but that needing money, why not translate some Plato adequately? I suppose your taste though is for rare authors. I haven’t seen H. O. Meredith’s poems. I should like to. I’ve heard from Nessa and Clive; they are very well; Clive at Dover determined to give up the tour, but Nessa got on to the ship and sat down, and would not move. Roger fell flat on his back, but did not injure his spine as they feared. This letter from Adrian may amuse you.

Yr. VS

Sussex

[]

566: To Clive Bell

18th April [1911]

Little Talland House, Firle, Lewes, Sussex

Dearest Clive,

Before you get this you will, I hope, have been calling me a foolish creature for sending you a wire. My excuse is that I cant altogether quiet the alarm that Nessa has been taken ill in some way; and this made you stay on. I agree that I ought to be easy with your tout va bien; but as I shant hear till Thursday or Friday, and the letter may miss me (you seem to think I’m in London—and I shall be at [Dr] Savages) well—I was extravagant. I am encouraged, by seeing that your plans seem to change a good deal. According to your list, you left Cple. on the 17th for good.

Having been kept awake till 4 this morning by dogs barking, and waked at 7 by pumps beginning and cocks, I am stupid and cross; though my head rides triumphant. Your letters have been falling in a shower—a great joy. I’m as uneventful as a parish magazine compared with you; but still, very happy. At any moment my Neo Pagan Cox may descend. I had a shout from her yesterday. “O this Sun! I’ve been tramping all day, and singing. I want to talk to everyone I meet about the sun! They say its a fine Easter. Life’s good.”

I’m very reluctant to be broken in upon, by anyone; unless indeed it were someone I couldn’t touch with a short stick! I’ve seldom enjoyed myself more than I have this fortnight. Perhaps theres vanity in it. Perhaps one’s proud of being a self sufficient animal, like the camel of the desert, who eats his own hump. Nessa can tell you about him. I’ve found a new walk every day. You must come here and go there with me. There are plains, rivers, downs and the sea to choose from. You will wag your head, and say “Poor creature! Cornwall again!” I admit the Spring may have something to do with it. Its odd how completely one can withdraw from the world. I can hardly believe I was splashing about in Ott’s drawing room only a fortnight ago. The succession of holidays, and the perfectly fine days, make one feel as though everything had gone to sleep. Jean [Thomas], indeed, comes knocking at the door. She had a river party yesterday with a very clever, but not merely clever, cousin who is fellow of Trinity Dublin; She asked me to go. What will be the end of Jean I cant think. My letters are scattered about Europe, so you mayn’t have heard of her determination to study French history. Suppose this ends in Atheism, and she gives up lunatic keeping: well, her blood will be on my head.

I have had few letters of interest. Saxon writes, to draw my attention to the works of Theophrastus. I see that Saxon is now going to become a Grammarians Funeral. He is going to edit some immense, corrupt, quite worthless work, in his leisure, just because other people wont do it. It will appear about 1950, he’ll be made O.M. and the young will imitate his habits, as they do the habits of Fred Maitland.

Jacques writes to me, from Cornwall. He wants to settle about our Camp. He is quite red, quite unshaven, hatless, with only one book—Rabelais; in two months, he says, … That I take to mean, bed with Gwen. It is portentous; I think the dots give the feeling rather well. How malicious we are about them! But I suppose they have their own brand of malice.

Yesterday I finished the 8th Chapter of Mel[ymbrosia]: which brings them within sight of the South American shore. That is a third of the book done, I think. From sheer cowardice, I didn’t bring the other chapters here. If I thought “There! thats solid and done with” I’m sure I should have the palsy. Some of it, I’m certain, will have the pallor of headache upon it. But its no good attempting to rewrite. Eily [Darwin] comes tomorrow morning; I shall probably go up to London on Friday night; (21st) and to Savages on Saturday. I hope we shall start for France on the Monday—24th but when I have seen Ka, I shall know more. I mean to throw myself into youth, sunshine, nature, primitive art. Cakes with sugar on the top, love, lust, paganism, general bawdiness, for a fortnight at least; and not write a line.

What news is there to fill the page? I’m not engaged; the affairs of Ray and Oliver are, I suppose, at a standstill. She writes me from Corfe, where she is staying with Elly [Elinor Rendel]. Observing one day that Elly seemed low spirited, she looked and saw that Elly had gone blind; not only so, but was afraid of madness too. She had been walking with her eyes shut. Something suddenly went wrong; and she has to keep her eyes shut for a week, until she can get glasses. The madness was induced by brooding. As she has just failed to get some post, her gloom is profound.

This house has been turned into a very comfortable villa. “You wouldn’t like to be public, Miss” said Maud; and put up thick curtains. I had been sitting naked before the Vicars gardener. The tailor having refused to make chair covers, I have persuaded the dressmaker.

Give the old creature an embrace—I wish I knew that she is quite well. But I shall hear this evening. “Firle, England” is address for wires.

Yr. VS

Quentin Bell

[]

567: To Vanessa Bell

19th April [1911]

Little Talland House, Firle, Lewes, Sussex

Beloved,

I’ve just come in from meeting Eily, and find your wire. As you say all is well, I suppose I am a fool to worry. At any rate all my doubts will be cleared up tomorrow or Friday, so I wont waste paper describing them. Only if you knew what anxieties you can send across the ocean, you would be excessively careful. You seem to do so much; aren’t your males a little exacting?

I’ve had some intercourse with the world since I wrote. Ka came striding along the road in time for lunch yesterday; with a knapsack on her back, a row of red beads, and daisies stuck in her coat. Her innocent face was brown. We went for a walk; and lay on the grass, and surveyed the view. Then she began to tell me of her private affairs, which are very private; so dont share them. What advice would you have given I wonder? The state of the case is this.

Jacques, as you know, proposed to her, less than a year ago. She refused him several times. At last this autumn, thinking she would never care, she urged him to consider Gwen. Gwen quickly fell in love; and Jacques, seeing this, was overcome, proposed, and was accepted. He says now that he is in love with them both; and asks Ka to be his mistress, and Gwen to satisfy his mind. Gwen is made very jealous; Ka evidently cares a good deal for Jacques.

Obviously (in my view) J. is very much in love with K: and not much, if at all, with Gwen. Ought they to break off the engagement? J. has doubts, occasionally; Ka sometimes thinks she could marry him; Gwen alternately grows desperate, and then, accepting J’s advanced views, suggests that Ka shall live with them, and bear children, while she paints.

There are endless possibilities of discomfort; but cynically considering the infantine natures of all concerned, I predict nothing serious. Ka will marry a Brooke next year, I expect. J. will always be a Volatile Frog. Gwen will bear children, and paint pictures; clearly though, J. and K. would be the proper match.

I’ve just seen Ka off, and fetched Eily here. Eily is very stout; but very nice. In the pauses between raptures over hills and clouds, she gave me her version of the affair.

She agrees with me that J. is much more in love with K. than with Gwen; she thinks the risks tremendous; but says that if it is broken off, Gwen will certainly go off her head.

I rather doubt that; but she would be very unhappy, and perhaps this is her only chance. The trouble is, to my mind, that they’re none of them clever enough to carry the thing through successfully; and J. has muddied their minds with talk of the unchastity of chastity.

God! how I wish I knew about you! I am now going to take Eily for a walk. She has already told me that its a great bore marrying a man without taste. Having made a large sum by a story, Bernard [Darwin] bought her a picture, as a surprise; it was a work by a man called [George] Belcher, who draws for Punch. She says she found it very difficult to be grateful.

We shall go to France on Monday night, 24th. Address letters to Post Restante, Poitiers. until 31st. I shall come back on the 1st I think. All the places are close, so Poitiers will be our headquarters.

Yr. B.

The man at the post office has supplied me with this remarkable address.

Berg

[]

568: To Vanessa Bell

April 20th [1911]

Little Talland House, Firle, Lewes, Sussex

Beloved,

I’m writing in haste, before starting for an expedition to the sea with Eily. No letter has come from you, which is disappointing; but as Clive wires to London, you may think I’m there.

We have talked a good deal; she is a nice woman, in spite of her marriage. I have heard about Conder; and Bernards past. He was neglected as a small boy, by his stepmother; and this led him to take to golf, which Eily says has ruined his life. When he has enough to live on, he will do nothing but play.

One can only hope he will be struck dead on the golf course, for I suppose one can grow too old for golf. Her memories of [Augustus] John and [Charles] Conder are far more alive than anything else. But she is much agitated now about the Gwen and Jacques affair. Gwen comes to her and sobs, because she is so jealous, but wont say who she’s jealous of. I’m sure J. will always be susceptible; and as Gwen will grow stout, he will roam widely.

The only other gossip was about Olive [Ilbert]. Hilton cut her at some party; she was desperate. She wrote to Fredegond, and said that if Fredegond did not bring about a meeting and a reconciliation before the end of the year, she would kill herself. F: doesn’t even know Hilton; but was much agitated and went to Frances Cornford. Frances, having seen Hilton, understood that Olives case was hopeless, and wrote to Olive a very strong letter; abusing her for preying upon Fredegond. All this has only just happened. Olive says there is something on her conscience, which she must put right by seeing him. Can this be anything to do with me? Eily of course, knew about my affair; she says Olive has told the story to all the young generation.

I must stop, as we have to catch a train. Eily goes tomorrow. Oh dear, I wish I’d heard from you. I’m flourishing.

Yr. B.

I cant help wishing you’d be more explicit in your telegrams, but its no use wishing!

Eily sends this!

Berg

[]

569: To Violet Dickinson

Thursday [25 May 1911]

29 Fitzroy Sq.

My Violet,

It is an age since I heard from you. Are you visible? Did you hear of our adventures in the East? Nessa managed to bring off a miscarriage in Broussa, a days journey from Constantinople. I went out, and found her surrounded by males, with a chemist for doctor. We had to get a litter made, and carry her stretched on it, through Constantinople and home by the Orient Express. It was the oddest parody of what we did five years ago [in Greece]. Since coming back she has recovered, and will get away for a bit I hope next week. But their holiday was more than ruined—all owing to the stupidity of a dreary little doctor who ought never to have let her start.

I daresay you’ve heard all this, and find it very dull. I wish you’d let me come and see you, if you are in London. I am now just settling to work again after these agitations. I know most of the parts of the female inside by now, but that is useless knowledge in my trade, the british public being what it is. We have been spending our days going to music lately. Today I ran into that elongated Miss Ponsonby, whose teeth continue long after her lip has stopped. I suppose that you have gone to Welwyn. My cottage is so beautiful that I can hardly stay in London. Would one be as foolish about one’s baby? I suppose so.

I have now entered into a treaty with my widow who eats my scraps and cooks at a low rate, and also steals flowers off the great estate [Firle Place], and gives me a great bunch every Monday.

We had the oddest time abroad. I was there for a week. Roger put everything down to insanity, which was puzzling at first. There was also a crude Cambridge mathematician [H. T. J. Norton], who used to draw diagrams of the Ovaries on the table cloth, taking it for granted that a woman is the same shape as a kind of monkey.

Do write and say what has been happening. Aunt Minna hovers round, with new glasses, which enlarge one eye to the size of a cows. All my friends are getting married. We have to go to Cambridge on Saturday to see the last one of the Darwins. I did my best by indiscretions to break it off—without success!

Your VS

D’you mind taking one of these prospectuses.

Berg

[]

570: To Vanessa Bell

Thursday [8? June 1911]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

Beloved,

A dreadful Whitsunday blankness has descended upon us. We hoped that the storm would lighten the air—far from it. The storm was terrific. As nearly as possible Synge [Virginia] was taken from you. A great flash almost came in at the window. A church was set on fire.

Did you feel horribly depressed? I did. I could not write, and all the devils came out—hairy black ones. To be 29 and unmarried—to be a failure—childless—insane too, no writer. I went off to the Museum to try and subdue them, and having an ice afterwards, met Rupert Brooke, with, presumably, a Miss Olivier. Her beauty was marred by protruberant blemishes; as she wasn’t beautiful, only a pretty chit, perhaps she wasn’t Miss Olivier.

Today things are rather less sultry, in spite of the fact that we have just had Saxon to dinner.

Mauds brother has had four fingers cut off by a machine for making pear drops. The sweets stuck—he put his hand in to free them, and it was drawn into the mill. The misery of the lower classes impresses me very much. Think of losing a hand making pear drops!

Marjorie [Strachey] has just telephoned goodbye. Tomorrow she goes into a Rest Cure in Mecklenburgh Square. She has some strange symptoms which do not get better. At the same time Elly [Rendel] has broken down; she too goes into a nursing home.

I think a good deal about you. How are you feeling? What a mercy it would be if you came back completely cured! How the apes would rejoice.

The tea party is tomorrow. I will wire if Billy [Virginia] gets the first prize.

Please get Roger to settle what day he will come to Firle, and press him to. Then I will get Desmond. Everyone is away now I suppose.

I shall probably go down to Firle alone on Saturday, which will be rather a treat.

As it is very hot, and Adrian and Saxon are sweating at the opera, I am going up to Hampstead to see if I can drag old [Janet] Case out for a walk among the lovers on the heath.

This haste explains the dulness of this letter: nevertheless every word glows like a horseshoe on the anvil with passion. These June nights!—how amorous they make one. Tell me how you are and any adventures.

Yr. B.

Berg

[]

Letters 571-592

571: To Leonard Woolf

8 July [1911]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

Dear Mr Wolf,

Would you come down to Firle for a week end? It is a cottage in the Sussex downs. Either the 22nd or the 29th would suit.

I hope you will.

Yours sincerely,
Virginia Stephen

Sussex

[]

572: To Lady Robert Cecil

[July 1911]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

Dear Nelly,

What a pleasure to be asked to tea with you! I will come on Wednesday with great pleasure. I’ve been explaining to your evanescent (which suggests phosphorescent) niece why it is that one cant ask to come and see you. Vanity we decided it was. If I hadn’t been vain I should have shoved through the smoke and the feathered women that night and insisted upon asking you. Have you finished your novel? I hear you gave a dance, and a Suffrage Meeting, and I think it rather hard luck that I don’t come under one heading or the other.

Yr. aff.
VS

This ink has had a slight admixture of strawberry jam so that it wont dry properly.

Hatfield

[]

573: To Vanessa Bell

Wednesday [July 1911]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

Beloved,

This is first of the new series of letters, which is written for you only; and Clive shall have letters for himself only, and so we shall all profit, by the gain in passion.

I suppose he described that vast melancholy party. What added to my depression was the fact that every watery matron of them all, as well as bald old gentlemen, invariably began “Hows Vanessa? Where’s Vanessa?”. All I could do was to invent a disease for you, which puzzled Mrs Booth herself. Half the child, I said, had miscarried in London—the other half, the legs presumably, miscarried at Broussa. This intrigued her considerably, as the case was not the same as Dodos [Antonia Macnaghten]: however, if you take the greatest care for six months she thinks there may be no danger in bearing a child next year—indeed sometimes one finds that that is the best cure of all. My Dodo etc. etc.

It was strangely like a Winkworth party, only we were all 10 years older. I was glad to find that they are as vapid and commonplace as we used to find them, so that we [were] right to hate them.

The old passion to fly before them overcame me. Imagine Margy drifting—Bella trumpeting—Mrs Humphrey Ward shrilling—Imogen mincing—Meg flopping—Aunt Minna—she was almost impressive from her obvious nearness to death.

I have been to tea with Nelly [Cecil] this afternoon. There is no doubt that she is the best of those elderly aristocrats. I was very happy with her, sitting in the garden. What mind she has is quite honest. She told me that we had behaved very badly to Kitty [Maxse]. I said that Kitty was obsolete, and had to be dropped, but I denied that she had been dropped. She said that both Kitty and Leo were 20 years behind the times; and gave me to understand that Kitty is a foolish thimble-pated woman, living in a swarm of smart people she doesn’t care about, but quite happy. You see Nelly is a good deal above that.

I feel a certain pathos in seeing these people again. Nothing seems to have happened, that one can talk about. However she reads a good deal. She has the illegitimate niece to stay with her. She also has several friendly char-women as crossing sweepers, but she doesn’t patronise them as Kitty used to.

We went over Bedford Sq. this afternoon. We mapped out rooms on paper. It would exactly do; the one drawback is that the 2 front rooms may be noisy. Duncan is going to have a great garden room, and I am to have a tremendous square room, at the back. There is a studio for you, adjoining a W.C.

Savage has asked me to dine, in 4 nights, to meet Jean [Thomas], [Harris?] Rackham and [Dr Seymour?] Sharkey!

Yr. B.

Are you feeling well?

Berg

[]

574: To Vanessa Bell

Friday [21 July 1911]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

Beloved,

It is a great devotion to write, as the heat is something awful.

We had our great expedition yesterday. It was all very odd. First of all it was rather strained; we lay under the trees and discussed the Bedford Sq. plan. Then we walked and he [Walter Lamb] began lamenting the lack of noble souls. We discussed love and women in the abstract. At last he sat down and said “Will you tell me if you’ve ever been in love?” I asked him whether he knew about the Lytton affair. He said “Clive told me a good deal”, which made me angry, but cant be helped. Then I said I would tell him about it if he really wanted to know, and not out of curiosity. He said he wanted to find out what I felt, and would be glad to hear anything. I gave him an abstract. Then he said “Do you want to have children and love in the normal way?” I said “Yes”. He said “I do care for you very much.” I said “But you’re quite happy?” He said, “There are such dreadful complications.” I said “What.” He said “You live in a hornets nest. Beside[s] marriage is so difficult. Will you let me wait? Dont hurry me.”

I said “There is no reason why we shouldn’t be friends—or why we should change things and get agitated.” He said “Of course its wonderful as it is.”

Then we went rambling on; and I gathered that he felt he could not let himself fall in love because he doubted what I felt; and he also was puzzled by parts of my character. He said I made things into webs, and might turn fiercely upon him for his faults. I owned to great egoism and absorption and vanity and all my vices. He said Clive had told him dreadful stories to illustrate my faults (for God’s sake, dont repeat this) I said that I liked him, and thought we could be friends. I tried to make this clear.

Then he talked a great deal about you—how noble and divine you were—how you frightened him—how he wished to talk to you, how he had an aesthetic love for you etc. etc.

We talked of general things after that—his gout a good deal—and then had tea and went home, and went to the opera. There was an enormous crowd of cultivated ones.—Sangers, Forster, Rupert, Ka, James, Wolf, etc. Walter walked home, and came in and drank here, as Adrian was out.

He began again about our relationship, and said he would like to live near me in the autumn, but didn’t add much. It is uneasy, because he is always trying to find out what I feel, and I can only talk about the beauty of friendship.

Of course I liked him much better than I have ever done, as he was quite direct and really felt a good deal (unless I’m too vain to judge). But the thing is left in an uncomfortable state. He wants to come to Firle in September. I do like him, but the prospect of many long talks, rather appals me. There is something pathetic in him. He’s so desperately afraid of making a fool of himself, and yet conscious that his caution is a little absurd.

I think I’ve told all I can remember—at least the gist of it. No doubt some further compliments to you will be washed up.

Oh how I’m damned by Roger! Refinement! and we in a Post Impressionist age. You dont deserve any compliments for sending me that one.

By the way, the last thing W. said before we were interrupted was that he could not see that I had a single fault! “Not even as a wife?” I said. “No: not even as a wife.” In my opinion, he is in love with me; but that you must hush up.

I’m in great difficulties with my engagements. Eily won’t answer; and I think she must have written to Firle. If she puts me off, I might come down next Thursday or Friday for the night (if you’ll have me). Case comes on Monday, and wont say for how long. Then Savage asks me for Thursday, and I accepted for Wednesday. Jean is in a fury—flings the telephone from her ear—because she thinks I’m trying to avoid dining with her. Saxon has become very pathetic about Bayreuth.

Altogether, its a hornets nest, as W. said. He meant that we lived in the centre of intrigues, which distressed him, and he asked about Harry [Norton] and Roger and Desmond. He asked whether I should flirt if I married. I said “not if I were in love with my husband.” But that was bold.

Are you better? Does this heat hurt you? At lunch I compared you with a South American forest, with panthers sleeping beneath the trees. I also gave a passionate vision of our love—yours for me, I mean.

Yr. B.

Berg

[]

575: To Violet Dickinson

Sunday [23 July 1911]

Little Talland House, Firle, Lewes, Sussex

My Violet,

Nessa is supposed to keep quiet, but she is practically all right. She is beginning to do things as usual. But the dr. says she ought to be very careful. The miscarriage went on for such an age, and it is very exhausting. I hope they’ll take a house in the country next month. She has had no real holiday for an age. Happily the children both flourish.

I’m here for Sunday. A tremendous wind is blowing.

How are you? Should you call yourself fond of me, or merely indifferent?

Yr. VS

Berg

[]

576: To Vanessa Bell

[25? July 1911]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

Beloved,

I’m sorry if I wrote, as I gather is your opinion, with more maggots in my head than wits. Reports of talk, I agree, cant be taken as evidence; I was going by this. W[alter] told me he had talked to Adrian, who had given a sketch of my vices. “But, said W. “it was done kindly; and Clive blackened you with bitterness.” Then he told me some of the things Clive had said. They were mixed with rhapsody, but they were unpleasant. I was angry at the impression it had made on W. for that is definite enough, and must have come there somehow and, after all, why should he be biassed? Clive quarreled with Lytton for that reason; but I don’t mean to quarrel, only to cry out ‘God! The gnats are biting!’ as you do, almost perpetually throughout a summer evening.

Kiss my snout, beloved, you did tap it.

I have just come back from Firle, where I had an interesting time with Case. She is a woman of great magnanimity, and even said some things in praise of you. (you can see me curling up to your side). She said how great your beauty was, and your dignity of character.

We talked incessantly.

I gathered that she has had several proposals, but, cherishing the image of a deceased father, who kept a school, she refused them all.

Doesn’t it seem to you odd that she has never told either Emphie [Case] or Margaret [Llewelyn] Davies about any of them—“but we have sometimes discussed marriage in an abstract way.” She had brought down a handsome reticule, into which she drops bits of torn lace from time to time; and this she takes away on visits. So she sat stitching with an expression such as Marny has when she goes watercolour sketching, and listened to a magnificent tirade which I delivered upon life in general.

She has a calm interest in copulation (having got over her dislike of naming it by the need of discussing Emphies symptoms with a male doctor) and this led us to the revelation of all Georges malefactions. To my surprise, she has always had an intense dislike of him; and used to say “Whew—you nasty creature”, when he came in and began fondling me over my Greek. When I got to the bedroom scenes, she dropped her lace, and gasped like a benevolent gudgeon. By bedtime she said she was feeling quite sick, and did go to the W.C., which, needless to say, had no water in it.

I discussed the Bedford Sq. plan with her, the theory of which she thinks noble, but she thought we should get dirty.

If Adrian is with you, would you tell him that 2 or 3 sets of people have been to see the house, and one liked it so much that he was going straight back to Maples.

Of course, I half dread the moment when we let it; and the thing becomes serious. Sophie and Maud!

Do you think it would be a good plan to expose a letter, explaining it, and so break the shock?

I found a letter from Eily at Firle, who can have me some time later so I could come down to you on Thursday if that does.

I am also embroiled in one of my hottest broils with Jean [Thomas]. It is about a dinner at Savages: she says I offered ‘to go on Wednesday, knowing that she’ couldn’t go that day; and thus showed callousness, brutality, immorality, lack of justice (“which one can see in your writings”) and a “truly dreadful lack of consideration for the feelings and desires of your friends”. To this I answered in sober fact; with one plain curse. I found a reply at Firle, which I read to Case. It was a masterpiece. It seems likely that one will have to give her a sharp rap—the sort you give me; only she would die, while I manage to survive.

I have also had 3 letters from W. [Walter Lamb]. What to say to him, I dont know. He wants to come here. I have written to say that I can only repeat what I said before, and that it seems not worth while to come up and hear that. However, as I said he could choose for himself, I must let him—this time.

With all my gross and inordinate vanity, my vampire like suction and (I know my faults by this time) I dont see that I can go on letting him praise me, unless I shall fall in love—and that seems as though one said unless I grow a beak. I’ve no doubt there is vanity in this too.

I would not write so much, except that I’ve got no one to talk to, and the night is so hot that I cant play, or read. Janet C. said suddenly in the train “What are you thinking of, Virginia?” Imprudently I answered “Supposing next time we meet a baby leaps within me?” She said that was not the way to talk.

I suppose Duncan has seduced A[drian]. I imagine a great orgy on the river tonight.

Yr. B.

Tell Adrian I had a long talk with Saxon about the Society [The Apostles] in the course of which he said “There is just a something about them—” and then giggled.

Berg

[]

577: To Sir Sidney Lee

29th July 1911

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

Dear Sir Sidney,

I ought to have written before to thank you for your book. I have read it with great pleasure. Of course I was very much pleased by what you wrote of my father. It was so sympathetic and fine. But I read it all with great interest. Thank you for sending it to me.

Yours very sincerely,
Virginia Stephen

Bodleian Library, Oxford

[]

578: To Roger Fry

Monday [August 1911]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My dear Roger,

I’m afraid from what I hear that Nessa is still rather bad. Would you tell me if you think it better that I should not come? I had meant to come on Wednesday or Thursday; but I can see that it might be better not. Of course I want to, but I have a great fear of being too tiring.

We are callous—in the way we lay burdens upon you!

Yours ever,
Virginia Stephen

I must get my urinal. “A Venetian flower pot” I shall call it, to the chaste.

Sussex

[]

579: To Roger Fry

[August 1911]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My dear Roger,

I expect I had better not come—at any rate now—if Clive is against it. I’m inclined to agree with you in thinking that it wouldn’t do any harm, but his feeling is a reason in itself. I’m fearfully sorry that I allowed myself to talk and her to talk, only she doesn’t make it easy to be discreet!

I’m going to Ottoline [at Peppard Cottage] on the 12th, and to Firle or Cambridge I think on Saturday, so I couldn’t be at Guildford long anyhow.

I hope very much that you and Vanessa mean to come to Firle some time later. I think you’d forget all that outraged you, when looking at the cornfields.

Yours very sincerely,
Virginia Stephen

Sussex

[]

580: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

[16 August 1911]

The Old Vicarage, Grantchester

My dear Ottoline,

It is the greatest difficulty to get pen and paper here, because Rupert [Brooke] apparently writes all his poems in pencil on the backs of envelopes. But I hope you’ll be able to read this, because I enjoyed being with you so very much. It is such a relief that your feelings are not those of hatred mixed with contempt! I was very happy with you.

I am leading a queer life here, of perpetual conversation by day and by night. Yesterday we saw the Cornfords. I think you would like her, and him too, if only because he looks like something carved in green marble on a tomb. This has the effect of making him very silent; but she talks, and is better than her poems. Then there is a man—Sydney Waterlow—who has just separated from his wife, and is seeing life for the first time, being about 35. Otherwise Cambridge is empty.

I wonder if you are going abroad. It will be very nice to see you in the autumn.

Yr. aff.ate,
Virginia Stephen

Texas

[]

581: To Vanessa Bell

Tuesday [22? August 1911]

Little Talland House, Firle, Lewes, Sussex

Beloved,

I am very sorry about Quentin. It does seem abominable that you should have all these bothers, and I’m afraid that you’re not feeling very well—poor honey-buzzard. I wonder if your affairs have stopped.

It is very melancholy that you cant come, but we must fix our hopes on October, when this country will be even nicer, and we can carry our lunch to the top of the downs.

I’ve just heard from Frances Cornford, who is staying at Forest Row [the Freshfields’ house] with Eily and wants me to go there, or to come here—its too annoying—I could have had you and Roger as well.

I am cursing domesticity too, but only in a very mild way. The servants have arrived, and made everything pompous and heavy-footed. Why we have them, I cant think. There is always a certain amount of grumbling to be lived down, because of the heat of the kitchen etc.

But of course this is a gnats bite to your miseries. I suppose though there is a kind of unity in marriage (barring children) which one doesn’t get from liaisons. I’m thinking a good deal, at intervals, about marriage. My quarrel with it is that the pace is so slow, when you are two people.

As a painter, I believe you are much less conscious of the drone of daily life than I am, as a writer. You are a painter. I think a good deal about you, for purposes of my own, and this seems to me clear. This explains your simplicity. What have you to do with all this turmoil? What you want is a studio where you can see things.

If this is wrong, you might sent me a telegram. God! I shall enjoy talking to you again.

I saw as much of the strike as anyone saw. They said there would be fewer trains at Victoria; as a matter of fact there was an extra one, and they were punctual. One or two stations were held by soldiers, who lay on their elbows smoking; and there was a soldier by a signal box. Otherwise there was no difference, except for empty trains standing about. All this was what I foresaw. Rupert [Brooke] tried to work up some Socialist enthusiasm. He does not eat meat, except when he stays here, and lives very cheaply.

There was a great wedding here on Saturday, and I found a note from George in the dining room. “Beloved Old Goat—we have come over for Monk Bretton’s wedding and hoped to have tea with you” etc.

They had mentioned Margaret’s title to Mrs. Stephens [the cook] who was a good deal impressed. I have great luck in missing them.

Saxon writes that he wants to come over here from Haywards Heath where he has to spend what remains of his holiday with his parents poor wretch. I gather that the whole of Bayreuth was rather a failure, as far as the music went.

It is detestable, hearing servants moving about. Isn’t it a good argument against Seend [Clive’s parents] that it doesn’t suit the children. I wish you’d gone straight to Studland. When would you like me to come there? I thought I could take a room. I do hope the brats are better, beloved creature.

Yr. B.

Berg

[]

582: To Leonard Woolf

Aug. 31st [1911]

Little Talland House, Firle, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Mr Woolf,

(It would be much nicer to use Christian names).

I am very glad you can come. Saturday week, the 9th, suits me very well, or any time, the week after. I shall be here, I expect, until the 18th. This is not a cottage, but a hideous suburban villa—I have to prepare people for the shock.

Yours sincerely,
Virginia Stephen

I will explain the trains, if you will say which time suits you.

Sussex

[]

583: To Roger Fry

[early September 1911]

Little Talland House, Firle, Lewes, Sussex

My dear Roger,

You can guess how grateful I am for the exquisite Pot which arrived without a flaw. It is now my chief ornament, and I think it will be the instrument of much good, breaking down barriers, introducing the topics most worth discussing, etc. I couldn’t thank you before, as I have been down in [Clifford Bridge, Drewsteignton] Devonshire living in a Camp with eleven other people. From my observations shaving is unknown among the younger generation. They were all densely wooded. Perhaps your pot will bring in that reform too. I wonder if you could possibly come here for next week end? Adrian and Duncan are coming. It would be a great pleasure—but dont bother to write if you cant. I had a very interesting time with Ottoline.

I think we have let Fitzroy Square, so that I shall probably be in London next week, and shall try to come down and see you. But I hope you may come here.

Yours very sincerely,
Virginia Stephen

Sussex

[]

584: To Desmond MacCarthy

Sept. 4th [1911]

Little Talland House, Firle, Lewes, Sussex

My dear Desmond,

Yes, I had been feeling a kind of instinct so that you ought to write to me.

Is there any chance that you would come here for the weekend on the 16th? L. Woolf is coming, and Marjorie Strachey, I think. The cook is here, so you would be more comfortable than last time.

I enjoyed my visit to Ottoline very much, and now, I hope we shall go on smoothly for the rest of our lives. Then I wandered about in various places, trying Camp life at one point—sleeping on the ground, waking at dawn, and swimming in a river. And all this time you have been earning your 16 pounds a week. I do admire that, but aren’t you worn and thin as a rake? I cant imagine anything more exhausting. Do keep it up: it makes Saturday much more amusing than it would otherwise be. It makes me feel a perfect amateur—sitting here before white sheets, every now and then chuckling at one of my own jokes—

Thank you for the name of the book—I have sent it on to Beatrice.

Yr. aff.
Virginia Stephen

Mrs Michael MacCarthy

[]

585: To Leonard Woolf

4 September [1911]

Little Talland House, Firle, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Leonard,

The 16th will suit me very well. If you can come on Friday, do.

Yours sincerely,
Virginia Stephen

The station is Lewes.

Sussex

[]

586: To Leonard Woolf

Thursday [14 September 1911]

Postcard

Firle [Lewes, Sussex]

A fly will be at Lewes for the 11.6 on Saturday. Desmond MacCarthy and Marjorie Strachey are coming by some train, I think. Please bring no clothes.

VS

Sussex

[]

587: To Saxon Sydney-Turner

[September 1911]

2 Harmony Cottages, Studland [Dorset]

Dear Saxon,

Thank you very much for seeing about my ticket. I was putting my faith in you.

I am coming up tomorrow and shall be delighted if you will dine with me on Sunday. Where is Adrian, I wonder? How is he? He has completely vanished. I spread a story that he is to be met with in the North of England, leading a horse, attended by a flock of fowls, from which he chooses his dinner now and then. Is this all a lie?

Lytton has been staying here, and left 2 days ago, to cross to Brest, in a violent storm: nothing has been heard of him either. Roger has been here, and we made a great expedition to Poole and got taken on a tug with two barges up to Wareham, which is one of the most lovely towns I have ever seen.

Everyone is well—and send (or sends) love.

Excuse pencil. My lodgings dont run to ink.

Yr. VS

Sussex

[]

588: To Leonard Woolf

[21 October 1911]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

Dear Leonard,

(I stupidly forgot to telephone) Thank you very much—I am going to this cycle [The Ring], but if I might come to your box for Siegfried on Monday I should like to. But perhaps you want to get the same person to go to all three. So write and stop me if you do.

I’m now engaged in a most spirited controversy about W.C.’s and E.Cs [earth closets] with Mr Hoper. Owing to you I’ve practically got that house. The only question is whether Mrs Hoper—a very old woman—shall be made to clean out the E.C. or construct a private drain: which would be best? It seems to me that both must require cesspools: and W.C’s are certainly pleasanter in wet weather. I had a splendid day down there investigating all this.

Yrs.
VS

Sussex

[]

589: To Lytton Strachey

[6 November 1911]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

Dearest Papa,

Will it suit you to come to the dancers tomorrow night—dining here at 7.30 first? They’re only amphitheatre this time; but when they do the other thing we will go to the stalls.

Life is very full—so full that my head is chock full down to the very nostrils, and strain as I may, nothing comes out. I’ve just come back from the [Francis] Cornfords—from the 7th Symphony, from a scene with —— ——, from an interview in a W.C. and, while I wash my teeth, a painter sings on a board outside my window.

Who was my mother by the way, Lady S. [Strachey]?

Yr. affectionate
daughter, VS

If you can’t come, telephone. Wrap up well—especially the left foot. Bring your muffler, blue spectacles, and lozenges.

Frances Hooper

[]

590: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Thursday [9 November 1911]

29 Fitzroy Square, W.

My dear Ottoline,

I have wanted to come and see you—but we’ve been living in a desperate state of confusion—a great deal our own incompetence.

I’m afraid I shall be away this Saturday, and not back till Tuesday or Wednesday. We actually move in [to Brunswick Square] on Friday: and then we have to disappear to let the servants get straight. But if you’re in London next week, may I come round some time? I should so much like to.

Our new address is 38 Brunswick Square. Its ever so much nicer than this—so quiet, and a graveyard behind. We are going to try all kinds of experiments. The one thing that seems certain is that a house is the cheapest way of living, and if you have a house you must have servants. We have spent a month discussing how to live.

How are you?

Yours affectionate,
Virginia Stephen

Texas

[]

591: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Monday [13 November 1911]

Little Talland House, Firle, Lewes, Sussex

My dear Ottoline,

Next Tuesday would suit me very well. I will come to tea, unless you stop me.

I’ve fled here to escape the mess—but go back tomorrow. We are becoming boarding house keepers. It will mean keeping accounts, which begins to alarm me.

The country is amazingly beautiful, now that the leaves are off. Its a great question—where one ought to live. When do you move to the new house, I wonder?

I must now go and make hare soup.

Your ever affectionate,
V.S.

Texas

[]

592: To Lytton Strachey

Monday [20 November 1911], 9.30

The Vienna Café

Will you come to the dancers tomorrow? I hope to get stalls. You will sit between two seductive women.

If you can’t come, would you telephone to Gordon Sq. If you can, will you meet us in the box office hall (I mean the ordinary big hall) at the opera, 25 minutes past 8—the opera beginning at 8.30, I presume, being out of the way of reading newspapers. My God!—whatever you do, put all your wits into few volumes. All day I’ve been lifting Swift, Dryden, Carlyle—such mountains they wrote, and only half an inch worth reading. I can’t offer you dinner—but will you come to tea with me on Friday? There may be just room for your legs and a tea cup on the point of the knee by then. I’ve just been dining in this sordid place alone, and chose all the wrong things. The waiter has been cheeky to the young lady—she threatens to tell Mr Joseph.

Now I go back to break my first bed in Brunswick [Square], what is the right, yet delicate expression?

Yrs.
VS

Your ticket will be sent in the course of the day. [This sentence is crossed out.] No: I will bring it with me.

Frances Hooper

[]

Letters 593-638

593: To Violet Dickinson

Nov 20 1911

38 Brunswick Sq., W.C.

My Violet,

Would it bore you too intensely to have me to lunch one day this week—Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday?

If it would, you need merely spit and say so.

I am now undertaking an entirely new branch of life, and if you can give me advice, so much the better.

What have you been doing? Why did you never answer my letters? At last I got to feel like a dog left out at night, barking at the moon.

We are still on the streets. Cant get rid of painters and plumbers.

Yr. VS

It would be very nice to see you again.

Berg

[]

594: To Violet Dickinson

[November 1911]

38 Brunswick Square, W.C.

My Violet,

Damn Ella [Crum]! Damn Margaret Lyttelton. Whats the use of my coming on the top of her? I cant dine with you on Wednesday or Thursday—I suppose Friday’s no good? If not, I must wait till next week, which is mercifully free.

I’m now in the middle of putting my books up. You cant think what a job it is—but the Sq. is like Paradise, and there are the Foundlings [Hospital] for angels.

I didn’t write about Hannah [More?]—didnt ever read her—but I suppose it must have been very very good.

Do settle a time. What a lying creature you are! Friendship!—

Yr. VS

That is the title of my novel by the way.

Berg

[]

595: To Leonard Woolf

Dec 2nd [1911]

38 Brunswick Square, W.C.

Dear Leonard,

Here is the scheme of the house. I think I told you about most of the things before. The servants are quite amenable. All they beg is that we shall be punctual. I’m expecting you to come in for tea on Monday. Your rooms are now papered white and look much nicer. There aren’t any curtains; but there are blinds and I think we can rig something up. I hope it wont be very uncomfortable at first.

As to the rent of the room, Adrian and I think that probably 35/- a week would be about fair. This is to include light, coals, hot baths, and service.

We dont want to do anything but share the expenses of the house—Possibly this is too high a rent. I’m going to wait and examine the expenses after the first week, and then tell you, if you dont mind, what the cost of living and washing is.

I feel quite sanguine, because having gone into it all with the servants, they seem prepared and rather amused than otherwise. I want to ask you about other small things: whether you like fish—but that can wait.

Yrs.
VS

There is a book case in your room.

[Enclosure]

Meals are:

Breakfast  | 9 a.m.
Lunch | 1.
Tea | 4.30 p.m.
Dinner | 8 p.m.

Trays will be placed in the hall punctually at these hours. Inmates are requested to carry up their own trays; and to put the dirty plates on them and carry them down again as soon as the meal is finished.

Inmates are requested to put their initials upon the kitchen instruction tablet hung in the hall against all meals required that day before 9.30 am.

If notice of absence is given before 6 p.m. the dinner can be cancelled; if given before 12 a.m. the lunch can be cancelled.

The meals will consist of tea, egg and bacon, toast or roll for breakfast: meat, vegetables, and sweet for lunch: tea, buns, for tea: fish, meat, sweet, for dinner. It is not possible as a general rule to cater for guests as well as inmates. If notice is given, exceptions can sometimes be made. Particular desires will be considered. A box will be placed in the hall in which it is requested that inmates shall place their requests or complaints.

It is hoped that inmates will make a special effort to be punctual, for thus the work of service will be much lightened.

The proprietors reserve the right of ceasing to supply service at any time: there will probably be holidays at Christmas, Easter, and in the summer. But at these times, a caretaker will be in the house, capable of supplying breakfast, and doing rooms.

Sussex

[]

596: To Sydney Waterlow

Dec. 9th [1911]

38 Brunswick Square, W.C.

Dear Sydney,

I meant to have answered your letter sooner. I’m very glad you dont reproach yourself, because I’m certain that there’s nothing to reproach yourself for. All you say I think I understand, and it seems to me very reasonable.

But I feel that I must on my side make clear what I didn’t make clear that night. I dont think I shall ever feel for you what I must feel for the man I marry. I am very anxious that you should know this, so that you may take it into account. I feel that you have it in your power to stop thinking of me as the person you want to marry. It would be unpardonable of me if I did not do everything to save you from what must—as far as I can tell—be a great waste.

Please write and say whatever you wish to me at any time, and behave exactly as you wish. I hope we shall go on being good friends anyhow.

Yours ever,
Virginia Stephen

John Waterlow

[]

597: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

[December ? 1911]

38 Brunswick Square, W.C.

My dear Ottoline,

I was so disgusted not to come last night. But I’d been foolish and got a headache, and am now a complete coward about headaches. Adrian and Duncan say it was most delightful—and I was hoping, of course, that something awful would happen—the teapot blow up, or the lights go out, or Lytton’s beard catch in the candle—to spoil it all.

May I come and see you some time? I am cross about last night.

Yrs. V.S.

Texas

[]

598: To Clive Bell

Friday [December 1911]

38 Brunswick Square, W.C.

My dear Clive,

This is going to be an infernally dull letter of business. Did I tell you about Mauds brother? He had 3 fingers cut off in a sweet making machine, 6 months ago. His firm is Kearly & Tonge, Whitechapel; the head of it is Lord Devonport. He went to a solicitor who advised him not to take his half pay but to hold out for compensation. The firm said they would give him another job if he did not bring the case into Court. Now they have paid him £127 and tell him that they cant find him work. He has no written promise, and is completely up a tree.

Why I write to you is that I have written to George and Gerald; and George says that Lord Devonport is a strong Radical and that you must have had dealings with him. I dont for a moment think you have; but its just possible your father may know of the right thing to do. Anyhow, as they’re in great straits, I thought I might ask. He can write and do accounts. Oh God how dull! This is the 4th time I have written about Mauds brother, and it becomes less and less credible every time. Once I had a clear vision of a knife sticky with raspberry drops sweeping off his finger, and the blood mixing with the cochineal. I’ve just come back from having tea with Richmond Ritchie, who has lumbago. He became so lecherous that I had to leave. When old men are very lecherous, their beards and jowls are so unpleasant. He told a story of Queen Victoria congested with roast beef, which she eat all through the summer, surrounded by 4 great pillars of ice to keep the temperature down. Don’t bother to write if there’s nothing to say.

Yr. VS

Quentin Bell

[]

599: To Saxon Sydney-Turner

[23 December 1911]

[38 Brunswick Square, W.C.]

My dear Saxon,

I could only get 5/6 tickets for Tuesday, but I got these. They are at the back—however they say one can see everywhere. I’m afraid I cant get dinner here early. So I’d better meet you there. Here is your ticket.

I saw Zimmern on a bookstall today, and a pang of horror went through me remembering all the times I had forgotten it. If you’ve already had it, will you send it back, as it looks interesting, and I should like to read it.

Yr. aff.
VS

Adrian is going on very well and comes out [from a nursing home] on Tuesday. Happy Christmas! and Bright New Year.

I see that both tickets are in one. As you are less likely to lose it than I am, I send it. I will be in the booking hall at 5 minutes to 8. Or perhaps you will dine with me first at the Tower of Eiffel, bottom of Charlotte Street, 7 o’clock.

Sussex

[]

600: To Leonard Woolf

Saturday [13 January 1912]

38 Brunswick Square, W.C.

My dear Leonard,

I am rushing for a train so I can only send a line in answer. There isn’t anything really for me to say, except that I should like to go on as before; and that you should leave me free, and that I should be honest. As to faults, I expect mine are just as bad—less noble perhaps. But of course they are not really the question. I have decided to keep this completely secret, except for Vanessa; and I have made her promise not to tell Clive. I told Adrian that you had come up about a job which was promised you. So keep this up if he asks.

I am very sorry to be the cause of so much rush and worry. I am just off to Firle.

Yrs. VS

Sussex

[]

601: To Violet Dickinson

[January 1912]

38 Brunswick Square, W.C.

My Violet,

Do come to tea on Friday. I am selfish and ask you to come here, because I now live like the Tortoise at the zoo—once a day I make an excursion for food—otherwise sleep. But as you know, there was once a sleeping beauty, and some have been kind enough to hint—in short, I have no objection to being kissed.

Friday 4.30.

Yr. VS

Berg

[]

602: To Katherine Cox

7th February [1912]

38 Brunswick Square, W.C.

My dear Ka,

I was just writing to you when your letter came. I’ve been ill, but I’m practically all right again now. It was a touch of my usual disease, in the head you know. I spent a week in bed, but now that’s all over, except for miraculous dreams at night. I live the life of an old old Tom cat. You would weep to see me. An old gentleman who by the formation of his hip has to trot or he would topple, trips round the Square with me every morning: but we never speak to each other. I can’t give you much news. You would have been touched to know how often I’ve wished I heard your pad on the stairs, and your snuff snuffle at the door. At the very moment that I collapsed Nessa and Clive stayed with Hilton Young, who gave them influenza; so we could only send our love; but everyone is now established, though my novel—Oh God! it is a d——d bore not to be able to write at that.

Last Sunday we went down to housewarm Asheham. Adrian, Woolf, Marjorie and I went. It was the coldest day for 40 years; all the pipes were frozen; the birds were starving against the window panes; some had got in, and sat by the fire; the bottom fell out of the grates; suddenly Marjorie, who was reciting Racine, stopped dead and said “I have got chicken pox”. We put her to bed, and I don’t think its true, but Lytton, whom I saw today, forgot to ask what was the matter.

I’ll write again and sketch the state of the world for you—only there’s no point in that, as you say you know everything.

Do come back soon; you can’t think how essential you are to the proper aspect of things; that is why animals were made; to balance human beings. In spite of the frost, the accounts from the zoo are thoroughly satisfactory. They’ve come to the stage, I am told, when they must be taught habits; and you know how important this is, so come back on that account.

Ottoline floats about; but I’m not really in the swim now, and feel like an anemone at the bottom of an aquarium, seeing the fishes and the weeds—and not caring for anyone a damn—except B … [Bruin] and … [Leonard?]. A great excitement is now taking place in the dramatic world, engineered by Desmond so I have little hope—As you’ll be back by the 21st, I’ll say no more.

I’m very glad Rupert [Brooke] is better. Please give him my love.

Write again.
VS

Mark Arnold-Forster

[]

603: To Violet Dickinson

[7? February 1912]

[38 Brunswick Square, W.C.]

My Violet,

I was just on the point of writing to you—only impeded by the loss of paper, ink and penny stamps—which miracle supplied all in a twinkling. I was going in that letter, which will never be written and was one of the wittiest and profoundest for its size of any in Europe—to have thanked you for the paper weight, which puzzles me as much as it charms. Is it Greek or Russian? Where from? What used for? Anyhow, it shall lie upon your letters: I’ve just fed it with that miserable Crumb. No wonder Jesus starved.

We went to Asheham on Saturday—my God! What a day: all pipes frozen; grates with false bottoms; no E.Cs; one bedroom can supplied, for the purpose, which it needed a conjuring trick to hit; then the chicken pox broke out in the only guest. However, it was great fun.

Shall I come and see you? I’m now rampant, feeding on bullocks blood, and henbane; or the heads of red poppies which make me dream wild dreams—about you, and alabaster pillars, and dogs defiling them.

Yr. V.S.

Berg

[]

604: To Violet Dickinson

[mid-February 1912]

38 Brunswick Square, W.C.

My Violet,

I’m so sorry, but Savage is making me spend a fortnight in bed, as I cant sleep. It is very ridiculous.

After that, I shall come and dine—if you’ll have me.

I liked the pictures. Its quite obvious that Mrs C. [unidentified] was a solid provincial Lady, from the look of the house. One ought always to see peoples houses.

Yr. VS

Berg

[]

605: To Lytton Strachey

[16 February 1912]

38 Brunswick Square, W.C.

Address for Miss Berry

is

Burley
Cambridge Park
Twickenham.

Dear Lytton,

I’ve got to spend 2 weeks in bed. Could you be angelic and send me the Memoirs of Miss Berry? I expect they’d do splendidly: and I’ll take immense care not to spot them.

I hope you are well.

Woolf has all your manuscripts and letters. Letters amazing! My God what an insight I have now in to that cosmogony!

Yr. VS

Frances Hooper

[]

606: To Leonard Woolf

Tuesday [5 March 1912]

38 Brunswick Square, W.C.

My dear Leonard,

You hit off my taste in reading very well. I should have thanked you before, but writing was forbidden. I shall tell you wonderful stories of the lunatics. By the bye, they’ve elected me King. There can be no doubt about it. I summoned a conclave, and made a proclamation about Christianity.

I had other adventures, and some disasters, the fruit of a too passionate and enquiring disposition. I avoided both love and hatred. I now feel very clear, calm, and move slowly, like one of the great big animals at the zoo. Knitting is the saving of life; Adrian has taken to it too. The wondrous thing is that it transmutes Stephenese into Saxonese, so much that the poor old creature thinks himself echoed, and suspects malice.

Today Lytton came to tea, and was very charming and amenable to all the strictures I made upon Cambridge life and the … ums [The Apostles]. He practically agreed with me that the Hearthrug was rotten, and the whales a-stink. I said you did too, and he groaned at the spread of light.

They have all gone to hear a concert at Gordon Square. I resisted, and now try to think that they’ll all be a gabbling of fundamental realities and essential chords, which I should loathe.

I think the Chinese book is most interesting. There is such a delicacy in the commonest things, pork stuffed with hyacinths. Thank you very much for sending it and the others.

I must go out and post this. I have got 5/- which I am going to spend on chocolates and a sleeping draught, if the shops are open, and I escape molestation. I shan’t want the sleeping draught—in any case.

Yr. VS

Sussex

[]

607: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

[March 1912]

38 Brunswick Square, W.C.

My dear Ottoline,

I am so sorry that you have had this dreadful anxiety. I hope it is going right, as the maid seemed to think this evening. I will call again to hear—but of course dont wake or take any notice. I know you must be exhausted. I am so very sorry for you and Mr Morrell.

Yr. aff.
V.S.

Texas

[]

608: To Molly Maccarthy

[March 1912]

38 Brunswick Square, W.C.

My dear Molly,

I began a letter to you, and then went off to bed and never sent it. All I had to say was thank you for writing—advice and all!

I didn’t mean to make you think that I was against marriage. Of course I’m not, though the extreme safeness and sobriety of young couples does apall me, but then so do the random melancholy old maids. I began life with a tremendous, absurd, ideal of marriage, then my bird’s eye view of many marriages disgusted me, and I thought I must be asking what was not to be had. But that has passed too. Now I only ask for someone to make me vehement, and then I’ll marry him! The fault of our society always seems to me to be timidity and self consciousness; and I feel oddly vehement, and very exacting, and so difficult to live with and so very intemperate and changeable, now thinking one thing and now another. But in my heart I always expect to be floated over all crises, when the moment comes, and landed heaven knows where! I don’t really worry about W[oolf]: though I think I made out that I did. He is going to stay longer anyhow, and perhaps he will stay in England anyhow, so the responsibility is lifted off me.

No, I shan’t float into a bloodless alliance with Lytton—though he is in some ways perfect as a friend, only he’s a female friend.

I saw Desmond the other day, who said you had gone off to Devon. I think that shows great determination. I wish you would write, if you dont hate writing, and say what you are doing.

I spent a strange fortnight in bed, among faded old ladies, who might have been weeds at the bottom of a river, they were so placid and remote from everything, and yet alive. I am now leading a semi-invalid life, and it is very nice, when the days are fine, doesn’t that sound old! I wish you would come for a day’s outing with me to Richmond or somewhere, where after sitting by a flower bed for some hours, we could have an enormous meal.

Please go on being a friend, whatever I take it into my head to do.

Yrs. aff.
VS

Mrs Michael MacCarthy

[]

609: To Sydney Waterlow

March 21st [1912]

38 Brunswick Square, W.C.

Dear Sydney,

I was very glad indeed to get your letter. I needn’t say that your friendship will be a great delight, and the more I have of it the better. I’ve been a shameful time in writing, but one day after another has been knocked on the head by sleeping draughts. They are a good deal worse than sleeplessness, and the colour of the blood of bloated bugs.

My plans are rather vague; I do hate Easter, but if you’re going to be in London, please suggest some time for coming. At this moment I’m kept from visitors, but in a week or two I shall be alright.

I read your article, guessing it must be you, and thought it excellent, because, imbecile as I am in such matters, I could understand and enjoy. I wish I’d known your facts about Gissing. Desmond told me something, which was then contradicted and I felt I was writing about a ghost.

It’s a great gain that you’re going to live in London. I wonder where. My weekends in Cambridge [with the Quaker] make lurid pictures, like cheap lantern slides in my mind. Where are you going now?

Yours ever,
Virginia Stephen

John Waterlow

[]

610: To Leonard Woolf

[April 1912]

38 Brunswick Square, W.C.

Nessa and Roger want to come to Asheham on Saturday—so, if you’re not going to Cornwall will you come too.

I write this, as I vaguely think you may be starting at Dawn, and also Bob T:[R. C. Trevelyan] has arrived, and you may want an excuse.

Sussex

[]

611: To Katherine Cox

[April 1912]

38 Brunswick Square, W.C.

Dear Bruin Cox,

Are you coming to spend Sunday with me.

If the weather continues, we might see some wonderful things.

Anyhow, come to lunch at one, and we will invent something. What I should like best would be a great deal of eating in 18th Century houses by the river side, then a walk among daffodils and small blue flowers. Then more eating, this time in a great Inn on a hill with bow windows, where there is a nightingale outside. Then a return through market gardens by moonlight—the whole to include 8 hours of fresh air, 3 meals with a cost 1/9½.

Yrs. VS

Mark Arnold-Forster

[]

612: To Violet Dickinson

[April 1912]

38 Brunswick Square, W.C.

My Violet,

I should like to come to tea on Friday, better than to lunch. I’ve not yet disappeared, except for Easter Monday. It was gorgeous down at Asheham. We spent two days laying tiles, and now every bone is stiff, and I can neither sit, stand, or write, owing to a great circle of bare flesh in my palm, where I flourished a hoe, and broke it. I see the management of the earth is a great art.

Yr. VS

Berg

[]

613: To Katherine Cox

[April 1912]

Asheham, Rodmell [Sussex]

Dear Ka,

What a singularly foolish letter! I mean about cleaning your head before you come here. Start on Friday, walk all night, and at dawn accept the first lift offered you by a South-going waggon. Anyhow, whichever way you go, you must arrive here on Saturday.

Marriages are happening so fast that you should look upon them merely as a natural act, and not write letters, make wills etc—But my God, your family seems to melt like the candle now perched on the arm of my chair.

Is the Stockbroker practically the same as the Surgeon? Will Aunt Hester come up from Wimbledon? She’s certain to have a stroke this time.

We came here yesterday, and since then we have scarcely moved out of the sun on the terrace except to eat and sleep. Mrs Funnell—but you don’t know her—and how she brings puddings up with a rush, one end or t’other, that lie upon her like blankets—she has just been telling us how her Grandfather got a penny a tail for moles, and kept 100 tails in a tin box, which his wife hid in a cupboard in the corner.

I never saw the downs so splendid as they are now.

Why not wash your head here? Accident gave me this large sheet of paper; and now I can think of no gossip. Rupert and Bryn [Brynhild Olivier] came to tea the other day; she has a glass eye—one can imagine her wiping it bright in the morning with a duster. Rupert I thought slightly Byronic. Then I had a long walk with Walter [Lamb], which completely did for me, and I am only now un-freezing my wits. Why is it that he is like a deep well to draw words from? We went to Kew, and a leaden cloud at once overspread every bush, so bright a week ago. Vanessa’s character remains very hard, and calculated to outlast the Sphinx. Marjorie is pursuing Yeats in Dublin, who is at No. 23 Southampton Row. Henry [Lamb] and Lytton rode in Dorset, and Henry was thrown again. But what’s the use of telling you news—when every tremor reaches you by post or telegraph. What I should really like to do now, but must refrain, is to write a full account of the wreck of the Titanic. Do you know it’s a fact that ships don’t sink at that depth, but remain poised half way down, and become perfectly flat, so that Mrs Stead is now like a pancake, and her eyes like copper coins. A curious fact, not to be circulated, out of respect for the relatives.

We are sitting over the fire, occasionally telling stories of our past.

Do come on Saturday, good, dear, Bruin Cox!

VS

Mark Arnold-Forster

[]

614: To Leonard Woolf

[30 April 1912]

Postcard

Asheham, Lewes [Sussex]

A sad picture—We dont appear in any of them, and Ka’s photograph was mere smudge. Waiting for the train after a tremendous walk in record time.

VS

Sussex

[]

615: To Leonard Woolf

May 1st [1912]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest Leonard,

To deal with the facts first (my fingers are so cold I can hardly write) I shall be back about 7 tomorrow, so there will be time to discuss—but what does it mean? You can’t take the leave, I suppose if you are going to resign certainly at the end of it. Anyhow, it shows what a career you’re ruining!

Well then, as to all the rest. It seems to me that I am giving you a great deal of pain—some in the most casual way—and therefore I ought to be as plain with you as I can, because half the time I suspect, you’re in a fog which I don’t see at all. Of course I can’t explain what I feel—these are some of the things that strike me. The obvious advantages of marriage stand in my way. I say to myself. Anyhow, you’ll be quite happy with him; and he will give you companionship, children, and a busy life—then I say By God, I will not look upon marriage as a profession. The only people who know of it, all think it suitable; and that makes me scrutinise my own motives all the more. Then, of course, I feel angry sometimes at the strength of your desire. Possibly, your being a Jew comes in also at this point. You seem so foreign. And then I am fearfully unstable. I pass from hot to cold in an instant, without any reason; except that I believe sheer physical effort and exhaustion influence me. All I can say is that in spite of these feelings which go chasing each other all day long when I am with you, there is some feeling which is permanent, and growing. You want to know of course whether it will ever make me marry you. How can I say? I think it will, because there seems no reason why it shouldn’t—But I don’t know what the future will bring. I’m half afraid of myself. I sometimes feel that no one ever has or ever can share something—Its the thing that makes you call me like a hill, or a rock. Again, I want everything—love, children, adventure, intimacy, work. (Can you make any sense out of this ramble? I am putting down one thing after another). So I go from being half in love with you, and wanting you to be with me always, and know everything about me, to the extreme of wildness and aloofness. I sometimes think that if I married you, I could have everything—and then—is it the sexual side of it that comes between us? As I told you brutally the other day, I feel no physical attraction in you. There are moments—when you kissed me the other day was one—when I feel no more than a rock. And yet your caring for me as you do almost overwhelms me. It is so real, and so strange. Why should you? What am I really except a pleasant attractive creature? But its just because you care so much that I feel I’ve got to care before I marry you. I feel I must give you everything; and that if I can’t, well, marriage would only be second-best for you as well as for me. If you can still go on, as before, letting me find my own way, as that is what would please me best; and then we must both take the risks. But you have made me very happy too. We both of us want a marriage that is a tremendous living thing, always alive, always hot, not dead and easy in parts as most marriages are. We ask a great deal of life, don’t we? Perhaps we shall get it; then, how splendid!

One doesn’t get much said in a letter does one? I haven’t touched upon the enormous variety of things that have been happening here—but they can wait.

D’you like this photograph?—rather too noble, I think. Here’s another.

Yrs. VS

Sussex

[]

616: To Katherine Cox

May 2nd [1912]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dear Ka,

Here is a cheque for the concert, though, considering I was in bed at Twickenham at the time, I didn’t hear much ancient music for my money. I was up in London for a day, and retrieved your letter; 18 miles in 5 hours is good going; with a pack on the back I count it pretty fair, though that time I walked through the Marches of Wales taking one thing with another, bulls, morasses, declivities and precipices, I suppose I must have done about 20. But then I was 5 years younger than I am now. Janet never came, so I’m here alone, and go back rather melancholy this afternoon to settle in for the Summer, which will be absolutely dry, and all awhirl with Wagner, and Russian dancers. By the way, young Mr Funnell came running into his mother and said “I’ve just seen an old Trampwoman pass, with her bundle on her back”. “That’s not an old Trampwoman: that’s Miss Cox” said Mrs F. looking out of the window. “She’s walking to Woking.” “That young woman’s in need of a job” was all Mr Funnell could say.

I’ve heard about every household between this and Newhaven now, and I regret to say that the proportion of illegitimate children is quite amazing. Babies are born to old shepherds of 80, who never ask themselves what everyone’s asking themselves all day long. So you see, gossip is not confined to the Ap … les [Apostles] and their satellites.

Come and see me soon.

Yr. VS

See what you missed! The young man with the pursed mouth is the new peer. The elderly gentlemen, Uncles, military; and they didn’t have tea, when they went back, but sherry and sandwiches.

Mark Arnold-Forster

[]

617: To Lytton Strachey

21st May [1912]

38 Brunswick Square, W.C.

Dear Lytton,

How difficult it is to write to you! It’s all Cambridge—that detestable place; and the ap-s-les are so unreal, and their loves are so unreal, and yet I suppose it’s all going on still—swarming in the sun—and perhaps not as bad as I imagine. But when I think of it, I vomit—that’s all—a green vomit, which gets into the ink and blisters the paper. How is your tragedy comedy? and are you aware that Walter’s [Lamb] been satisfactorily delivered—are you aware of June 5th and the treat? We go up the river, swing, eat, make merry; that’s plain sailing; but afterwards in the dusk, in the college garden, with Jane Harrison to make proclamation, we have the tragedy from start to finish, and Choristers hidden in the Elms sing Walter’s songs to Walter’s music. There’s no escaping. And after that, cold salmon and lemonade in the moonlight.

London is not rich in news—Dora’s alive and so is Charlie [Sanger]; and they don’t dress in black because their father’s dead. Then Bobo Meinertzhagen has broken off her engagement with Brother Mayor because he lacks imagination, but still she exclaims, “He is the best man in the world!” Don’t you think its time that ambling vague young ladies were taught their places? She is a sentimental Jewess—but you know her. Nessa has got over the measles, and they trail about Italy, rather uncomfortably I expect, and Clive takes the thermometer to bed with him.

As for Thomas Hardy, he’s a great man; his style is not made to fit, but what of that? If we had but his ribs, his thighs, his stomach and his entrails! As a matter of fact this is more hearsay than anything else; and I dont know what vapours overcome me in Bedford Square [Ottoline]; I ramble like a drunken moth. Desmond, who is now dusty as a very old bottle of brandy, turns up for lunch—tea—dinner; and we go over the story of Donne’s life. As the greater part of the history of England is somehow coming in, the book will be apoplectic. He is going to be as prolific as Miss [Rhoda] Broughton “One volume and a half every year” he says—What’ll the half volumes be d’you think? Hom [Meredith] was here once, the attenuated [E. M.] Forster, and a very great writer called Bojer. Ask Desmond about him when you meet. His theme is Conscience.

But the most interesting thing to observe, as I have often told you, is not these distinguished spirits, but the humble ones, the slightly touched, the eccentric. Alas! you’re not interested in them, or I would tell you the story of Mary Coombes and the German student.

One more piece of gossip reaches me for your ear alone—that Pernel [Lytton’s sister], after seeing several student wearing white spats, at once took to her bed, and sacrificed her ovaries.

Yrs. VS

Frances Hooper

[]

618: To Violet Dickinson

22nd May [1912]

38 Brunswick Square, W.C.

My Violet,

Next time you begin a letter: ‘Are you pregnant, or married?’ do for Goodness Sake, put the right number. Your envelope reached me open, and on it was written, “Opened by J. Stephen.”—who lives at 32, and when she saw what was in it, she promptly gave it back—but what of my character? The postman drew his own conclusions.

I will come down one day, if you will have me, and there is a train after lunch. But which day? Please tell me—not Whitsuntide—some day next week. We go on much as usual. Nessa started measles in Milan—isn’t it amazing? Roger and Clive may still get it. Anyhow, the tour is ruined; though she is now all right. They are in Florence, I think. Every morning I write 500 words [of The Voyage Out]; and have already passed my natural limit; but must go on for another 5 chapters. The worst of it is, you wont like it; you’ll tell me I’m a failure as a writer, as well as a failure as a woman. Then I shall take a dive into the Serpentine which, I see, is 6 feet deep in malodorous mud. By the way, Are you fond of me?

Yr. VS

Berg

[]

619: To Violet Dickinson

[May 1912]

38 Brunswick Square, W.C.

My Violet,

All next week is in a hopeless state of muddle, so might I come down the week after?

I should like to come down for the day, after lunch, and return when the nightingales are out. Please choose the day—all are now free.

I’m working very hard—in sight of the end.

Yr. VS

Berg

[]

620: To Violet Dickinson

[4 June 1912]

38 Brunswick Square, W.C.

My Violet,

I’ve got a confession to make. I’m going to marry Leonard Wolf [sic]. He’s a penniless Jew. I’m more happy than anyone ever said was possible—but I insist upon your liking him too. May we both come on Tuesday? Would you rather I come alone? He was a great friend of Thobys, went out to India—came back last summer when I saw him and he’s been living here since the winter.

You have always been such a splendid and delightful creature, whom I’ve loved ever since I was a mere chit, that I couldn’t bear it if you disapproved of my husband. We’ve been talking a great deal about you. I tell him you [are] 6 ft 8: and that you love me.

My novels just upon finished. L. thinks my writing the best part of me. We’re going to work very hard. Is this too incoherent? The one thing that must be made plain is my intense feeling of affection for you. How I’ve bothered you—and what a lot you’ve always given me.

Yr. Sp.

Berg

[]

621: To Madge Vaughan

[June 1912]

38 Brunswick Square, W.C.

Dearest Madge,

I want to tell you that I’m going to marry Leonard Wolf [sic]. He was one of Thoby’s greatest friends. I’m very very happy—and I know you’ll be glad.

May we come and see you some day? I want you to know him, and I dont mean there to be any lapse in our friendship, which has always been a joy, since—oh what years ago!

I’ve just finished my novel—all but one chapter—and I hope to publish it in the autumn. I will write to Mr Sully, whom I well remember.

Leonard is far and away the most interesting and charming man I know, and I feel that I shall have to increase in virtue as his wife. We mean to do quantities of things. He wishes to know whether he may send his love—I’ve talked a great deal about you.

Yr. loving,
VS

Sussex

[]

622: To Janet Case

[June 1912]

38 Brunswick Square, W.C.

My Dear Janet,

I want to tell you that I’m going to marry Leonard Wolf—he is a penniless Jew. He was a friend of Thoby’s,—and I’m so happy—Its not at all what people say, but so much better. I dont think I’m nearly worth what he is. May we come and see you? You’ve always been angelic to me—no, much nicer than angelic, and I want you to like him. It has been worth waiting for.

Yours aff,
VS

Sussex

[]

623: To Lytton Strachey

6th June [1912]

38 Brunswick Square, W.C.

Ha! Ha!

Virginia Stephen
Leonard Woolf

Frances Hooper

[]

624: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

[June 1912]

38 Brunswick Square, W.C.

Dearest Ottoline,

This is to tell you that I’m going to marry Leonard Woolf. I’m very happy—and find him more necessary every day. Do you like him? I hope so, because I want to be a friend of yours all my life.

Forgive this scrawl written in bed, but I wanted to tell you.

Yr. aff.
V.S.

Texas

[]

625: To Violet Dickinson

[June 1912]

38 Brunswick Square, W.C.

My Violet,

Friday is no good—would Saturday do? If not, it must be one day next week. Please settle, (except Tuesday and Wednesday) It was idiotic to put you off—I’ve been rather headachy, and had a bad night, and Leonard made me into a comatose invalid.

We want very much to come. He is a most charming man, and I get steadily happier. By the way, my novel is getting on, in spite of interruptions, and L. wants me to say that if I cease to write when married, I shall be divorced.

Please have us.

Yr. VS

Berg

[]

626: To Violet Dickinson

[June 1912]

38 Brunswick Square, W.C.

My Violet,

My head goes on aching stupidly, and we’ve decided to go off to the sea this week end and cure it. So will you let us come Wednesday—Please do—and nothing will induce me to put it off again. Work and love and Jews in Putney take it out of one.

Yr. VS

Love to Nelly. I’m writing to her.

Berg

[]

627: To Janet Case

[June 1912]

38 Brunswick Square, W.C.

My dear Janet,

Shall you be in tomorrow night about 9 or so?

We should like to come in if you are not too tired.

That seems the only time this week—relations have begun, and such a tea party at Putney.

“A sandwich, Miss Stephen—or may I call you Virginia?”.

“What? Ham sandwiches for tea?”.

“Not Ham: potted meat. We don’t eat Ham or bacon or Shellfish in this house.”

“Not Shellfish? Why not shellfish?”.

“Because it says in the Scriptures that they are unclean creatures, and our Mr Josephs at the Synagogue —— and—

It was queer—

Yrs. aff.
VS

Sussex

[]

628: To Madge Vaughan

[June 1912]

38 Brunswick Square, W.C.

Dearest Madge,

Thank you both for the telegram and for the letter.

We should like to come down some day after the 15th—Just now, everything’s so unsettled—I mean work and engagements and so on—that we can’t fix a day—but may I write later, and ask?

Meanwhile, how am I to begin about Leonard? First he is a Jew: second he is 31; third, he spent 7 years in Ceylon, governing natives, inventing ploughs, shooting tigers, and did so well that they offered him a very high place the other day, which he refused, wishing to marry me, and gave up his entire career there on the chance that I would agree. He has no money of his own. He has been living at Brunswick Sq. since December—we know each other as I imagine few people do before marriage. I’ve only known him 6 months, but from the first I have found him the one person to talk to. He interests me immensely, besides all the rest. We mean to marry in August, and he wants to find out about labour and factories and to keep outside Government and do things on his own account. He has also written a novel, and means to write as well as be practical. We shall, I think, take a small house and try to live cheaply, so as not to have to make money.

O what an egoist I am! but you asked for details.

Do send me Janet’s photograph. I’ve got all those of the children as babies which you gave me at Giggleswick.

At first I felt stunned, but now every day the happiness becomes more complete—even though it does seem a fearful chance—my having found any man who gives me what Leonard does.

You will come and see us, won’t you, when we are married, and continue to be that eccentric but engaging animal, the Barbary Ape?

Yr. loving,
VS

Sussex

[]

629: To Lady Robert Cecil

[June 1912]

Bell Hotel, Walberswick, nr Southwold [Suffolk]

My dear Nelly,

I wrote to you, but the difficulty of describing my husband overcame me, and I tore it up.

I quite agree that he ought to see something of the gardens at St Johns Wood, after 7 years in the East.

I think you will like him—though you will probably wonder why on earth he should marry me—considering that he has ruled India, hung black men, and shot tigers. He has written a novel; so have I: we both hope to publish them in the autumn.

I am very very happy, and I hope when I’m married that you will come and see me—or ask me to see you—oftener than in the past. Now please bear this in mind.

Yrs. Ever,
VS

I’m writing in an Inn, rain outside, 3 old spinsters discussing the beauties of river scenery.

Hatfield

[]

630: To Lady Robert Cecil

[June 1912]

38 Brunswick Square, W.C.

My dear Nelly,

When I got home yesterday I found my first wedding present—yours. If they’re all going to be as nice, I shall be in luck. I love your old glasses, which will adorn my table, directly I have one. You are extremely clever, as well as nice.

This is the prelude to asking whether we may come to tea with you—and would Tuesday next week suit? That seems the first afternoon. Heaven knows what happens to them—they melt away, and I shall soon find myself confronted by a wedding day. Is it an awful experience? Will you tell us truthfully all about it, when we come—that is if we may come?

Thank you again—I wish there was some new way of saying that which came out absolutely truthfully.

Your aff. VS

Hatfield

[]

631: To Violet Dickinson

Monday [24 June 1912]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

My Violet,

It was quite unnecessary to thank us for coming, considering that we both enjoyed it immensely. My husband says he never met anyone he liked so much as you. There is something very like Thoby about him, not only in his face. I feel I shall get fearfully spoilt—but at the same time he’ll keep me in good condition as far as other things go. But wont it be awful if after all your care, my character, which promised so well, finally rots in marriage? We’ve been spending Sunday here—absolutely divine—but everything has over-grown during the week. We are now taking the garden in hand, and going to write for a longer lease. I’m inclined to start with only rooms in London, until we see how much we’ve got. It seems idiotic to put Leonard into an office, for the sake of a bigger income.

I hope you realise that I shall not talk less about myself and my own affairs now; I mean you must make up your mind to go on chastening me. Sophie [Farrell] was very proud of her flowers, which were put out in the middle of the bread she was baking. Shall we see you again? We go back this afternoon, and have to face Aunt Ritchie tomorrow. I’m having 2 dresses made by Nelly’s woman.

Yr. VS

Berg

[]

632: To Violet Dickinson

[July 1912]

38 Brunswick Square, W.C.

My Violet,

Unluckily we’ve got some one coming down to Asheham this week, or we should have liked to come very much.

Shall you be in London at all? We’re plucking up courage, now that we’re more or less dressed to go and see George, but it does take a lot of virtue. Plans spin every day. I’ve just been riding in Richmond with L[eonard]. Great fun, though the horse was surprised.

Yr. VS
(working hard)

Berg

[]

633: To Violet Dickinson

[July 1912]

38 Brunswick Square, W.C.

My Violet,

I feel quite incapable of saying what I want for a wedding present, though I expect I want everything. At this moment we vaguely think of rooms in Grays Inn—they’d be very small, but cheap, and sufficient for a start. However, we haven’t let these yet, and our plans depend on that. I think you must wait till the autumn.

Leonard hasn’t yet got a profession—the Board of Trade would give him a job, but we should have to take it at once; and get no holiday till next June, and that doesn’t seem worth while.

We’re both writing hard; he has some journalism to do, and my novel is at last dying. O how sad when it’s done! I think some of its very, or rather, amusing; and as it gets shoved out of my head, another begins; but next year I must have a child. I saw Nelly yesterday; it seemed to me the most ghastly fate imaginable, to sit and look on at other people talking all ones life.

Shall I see you again? We expect to marry about the 8th or 9th of August.

Yr. VS

My husband is much too good for me, but I’m very happy.

Berg

[]

634: To Katherine Cox

[July 1912]

38 Brunswick Square, W.C.

Dear Ka,

Your growl, though slightly muffled, was very welcome. I’m in the midst of writing letters too intimate even for me; and feel inclined to write like Gwen, short sentences torn from the heart. Damn that woman! I’ve never answered her. Now the proposition I have to lay before you with all possible speed is this: will you come to Asheham this week, Saturday, and spend Bank Holiday? Leonard and I shall be alone. It would be a great joy … couldn’t you leave the Aunts to the Americans who will welcome a touch of real life, real English ladies, real paralysis, real etc. Otherwise I shall not see you: wedding is 12th August, probably then Italy, Spain, and a steamer that crosses to Africa and Italy like an old lady making cats cradles. Iceland is in midwinter now, with yellow fog, and cataracts bursting out of rocks.

Do come.

Yr. V.

Shove has just taken 2 rooms [at Brunswick Square]. 2 still going.

Mark Arnold-Forster

[]

635: To Violet Dickinson

[3 August 1912]

Little Talland House, Firle, Lewes, Sussex

My Violet,

I suppose you are hunting or fishing somewhere or other. So I doubt whether you will ever get this, and it wont be much loss if you dont, because I am without ideas.

We are going to our registry office today week, attended by a singular old cousin, who trots if you whistle, and gallops if you sing, George in white waistcoat, Nessa in Turkish silk, and Aunt Mary with a crutch—she has again been blown over a milk cart—in her widows weeds. Then we go to the Quantock hills—where I dont know for 4 days—and then straight off to France, Spain and Italy.

We shall be back in October. At first we shall stay at Brunswick Sq: but we hope to take rooms somewhere this week. Everything has been left to the last—but the Novels are finished—and that is a great relief. In October we shall read them over, and decide whether they are to go straight into Hell. I shall write to you from some remote hill top—you might answer. L. sends his love.

Yr. VS

Berg

[]

636: To Emma Vaughan

Aug 7th [1912]

38 Brunswick Square, W.C.

Dearest Todger,

Its very exciting to have a present to look forward to. I shall remind you of it later. Iceland is, alas, knocked on the head—too late in the year. But we’re doing Italy and Spain instead—We marry on Saturday, so this is the last letter you will ever have from your loving

Virginia Stephen

Sussex

[]

637: To Duncan Grant

[8 August 1912]

38 Brunswick Square, W.C.

My dear Duncan,

A rumour has reached me that you might come up for the wedding. I should like it very much if you did—but this is only to say that we are going to be done on Saturday—day after tomorrow—at 12.15 at St Pancras Town Hall, in case you had any thoughts. I believe that Dora Sanger, George, Richmond Ritchie, and old Albert Dicey (for Gods sake dont whistle or he will run) are coming, so you might get a slight amusement. However, we’ve had such rows with poor old Mother Wolf, who says she never imagined such a slight as not being asked to the wedding, that its doubtful whether anyone will come.

I forgot to send on this letter; I hope its all right. I have an immense amount of gossip in my head, about all our relations, but I’m in such a rush that I cant tell you.

I hope you’re enjoying yourself.

Yours,
V.S.

(God! this is the last of S!)

Duncan Grant

[]

638: To John Maynard Keynes

9th August 1912

38 Brunswick Square, W.C.

Dear Maynard,

I enclose your bill—a curmudgeonly thing to do on the last night before ones marriage—but many bills have to be settled—board wages etc. As you see, April is doubtful—

Would you be so kind as to send the cheque to me at London Joint Stock Bank, 1 Woburn Place, Russell Sq. as I’m going away. Only a caretaker capable of bed and breakfast, but no more, will be here till 1st October.

Yours V. Stephen

King’s

[]

Appendix
NICKNAMES USED IN VOLUME 1

Anny: | Anne Ritchie (Thackeray)
Apes, Singes: | Virginia
Aunt: | Violet Dickinson
Bar: | George Duckworth
Barbary Ape: | Madge Vaughan
Becca: | Stella Duckworth
Bee: | Beatrice Cameron
Billy Goat, Billy, B.: | Virginia (to Vanessa)
Bob: | R. C. Trevelyan
Bobo: | Beatrice Meinertzhagen
Boo: | Cordelia Fisher
Brotherboy: | Halford Vaughan
Bruin, ‘the Bear’: | Katherine Cox
Capra (Goat): | Virginia
Carrie: | Barbara Vaughan
Chief, The: | Madge Vaughan
Chipmonk: | Clive Bell
Cresty: | Thoby Stephen
Crumbos: | Walter and Ella Crum
Dodo: | Antonia Booth (Macnaghten)
Dolphin: | Vanessa Stephen (Bell)
Dotty, Dobbythinga: | Dorothea Stephen
Eily: | Elinor Monsell (Darwin)
Elly: | Elinor Rendel
Emmy: | Emmeline Fisher
Georgie: | George Duckworth
Ginia: | Virginia
Goat, Goatus, Il Giotto: | Virginia
Gribbs: | Thoby Stephen
Grim: | Thoby Stephen
Gumbo: | Marjorie Strachey
Herbert: | Thoby Stephen
Hom: | H. O. Meredith
Janet, Jan: | Virginia
Ka: | Katherine Cox (Arnold-Forster)
Kangaroo: | Virginia (to Violet Dickinson)
Katie: | Lady Cromer
Lellie: | Leslie Stephen
Lotta: | Charlotte Symonds (Leaf)
Madge: | Margaret Symonds (Vaughan)
Mango: | Adrian Stephen (?)
Maria: | Vanessa Stephen
Marny: | Margaret Vaughan
Mia: | Maria Macnamara
Minna: | Sarah Duckworth
Minny: | Harriet Thackeray (Stephen)
Nelly: | Lady Robert Cecil
Nessa: | Vanessa Stephen (Bell)
Nun: | Caroline Emelia Stephen
Old ’Un: | Vanessa (by Adrian Stephen)
Ott: | Lady Ottoline Morrell
Papa: | Lytton Strachey
Peter: | Clive Bell
Porchy: | Lord Porchester
Quaker: | Caroline Emelia Stephen
Ray: | Rachel Costelloe (Strachey)
Sheep: | Mary Sheepshanks
Sheepdog: | Vanessa Bell
Singes, the: | Virginia (the Singerie)
Snow: | Margery Snowden
Sparroy, Sp.: | Virginia (to Violet Dickinson)
Sym: | Mrs J. A. Symonds
Synge: | Virginia
Tawny: | Vanessa Bell
Thobs: | Thoby Stephen
Toad, Todkins, Toadlebinks: | Emma Vaughan
Tom: | Edwin Fisher
Totty: | Charlotte Pater
Uncles: | Thoby and Adrian Stephen
Wallaby, Wall: | Virginia (to Violet Dickinson)
Wattie: | Walter Lamb
Wombat: | Hans (dog)

[]

The Question of Things Happening
[The Letters Vol. II: 1912-1922]

“There’s the whole question, which interested me … of the things one doesn’t say; what effect does that have? and how far do our feelings take their colour from the dive underground? I mean, what is the reality of any feeling? … And then there’s the question of things happening, normally, all the time.”

Virginia Woolf to Janet Case
19 November 1919

Letters 639-656 (August-December 1912)

639: To Clive Bell

[13 August 1912]

38 Brunswick Square, W.C.

Dearest Clive,

Your letter made a great deal of difference to both of us.

I dont think its only vanity that makes me glad that you should care—No, its because I do care for you that I want you to sympathise, and I can only say again you cant think how happy your letter has made me.

Leonard sends his love.

Ever your affectionate
V.W.

Quentin Bell

[]

640: To Janet Case

Tuesday [13 August 1912]

38 Brunswick Square, W.C.

My dear Janet,

Its quite the nicest present I’ve yet had. I couldn’t make out who had sent it and suddenly thought how cruelly I had misjudged some cousins living in Kent, which was the postmark. Then I found your letter and understood the mystery. But how you found such a wonderfully beautiful brooch, and where it comes from I should very much like to know. Do remember to tell me. I’ve been wearing it all day. The box too is a most charming box for it—and who made that?

Well, I’m married—married since Saturday. We went down to Asheham and now we’re staying the night here on our way through to Somersetshire. There we sit in the sun for a few days, and then go to Spain and Italy.

Please tell Emphie [Janet’s sister] that she must get perfectly well without delay, because I want to bring my husband to see her, and have even been so bold as to promise him an egg with his tea.

How are you? I wish you were as happy as I am—and its quite clear that I shall never be ill again because with Leonard I get no chance!

It really was delightful of you to give me that brooch. Oh, if you could have seen the one that Margaret Duckworth gave me! still unthanked for—a red and green crescent of precious stones!

Yrs affate
Virginia Woolf

Leonard asks me to send you his love and might you not by a stretch of boldness call him Leonard?

Sussex

[]

641: To Lytton Strachey

[16 August 1912]

Postcard

[Holford, Somerset]

Here we are in the middle of divine country, literary associations, cream for every meal, but cold as Christmas and steady rain.

Leonard is learning Spanish and I am reading the Heir of Redcliffe. We go to France on Sunday—I will send addresses.

Love to Henry.

V.W.

Who lived at Alfoxton?

Frances Hooper

[]

642: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Aug 17th [1912]

The Plough Inn, Holford, Somerset

My Dearest Ottoline,

The great red cover came just before we left—it is most splendid. Whatever glum we get into, it will light up, and give us delight till the end of our days. Thank you again and again. Its the kind of thing one never gets tired of, or ceases to enjoy.

We were married on the 10th—quite suddenly, as Nessa and Clive wanted to be there, and they were going away. It was done in a Registry Office, in the intervals of a thunderstorm; the storm has practically never stopped, and we are sitting over a fire at this moment in the middle of the Quantock hills. But we are both as happy as we can be—at least I am—I suppose one oughtn’t to say that of ones husband—but I think we do get an enormous amount of pleasure out of being together. On Sunday we go to Avignon,—snow storms are in the South, I hear.

Thank you again, and please believe—but that sounds conceited—I mean, I wish you would understand how very fond I am of you.

Your affectionate
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

643: To Janet Case

[17 August 1912]

The Plough Inn, Holford, Somerset

My dear Janet,

I meant to send you this [see postscript], but forgot.

Its really a very good way to be married—very simple and soon done. You stand up and repeat two sentences, and then sign your name. Nothing went wrong, the only disturbance was about Vanessa and Virginia, which the registrar, who was half blind and otherwise deformed, mixed hopelessly and Nessa upset him worse by suddenly deciding to change her son’s name from Quentin to Christopher.

It thundered all the time, but we enjoyed it all. Afterwards there was a very odd lunch party—George and Gerald [Duckworth] in frock coats looking very suspiciously at Duncan [Grant], and an odd little painter, who came in, and could only talk about pawning clothes. I suppose one oughtn’t to enjoy one’s wedding, but I did, and I enjoy the honeymoon even more. We’ve seen nothing of the Quantocks, except great shapes of mist, but we’ve walked to the top of them, and now we sit over a fire and read novels like tigers. Now that we’ve done our own its great fun to read other people’s. Its not stopped raining once, I think since we came: tomorrow we cross to France, where there are snowstorms, so we see, and then we go on to Spain and Italy.

We are in treaty for rooms in Kings Bench Walk [Inner Temple]; but its uncertain whether we can get them, and anyhow we start for a week or two at Brunswick Square. Its great fun making plans, and we expect to be enormously busy, and never to have a real house. One was lent us with 5 servants, which depressed us so that we have made this vow.

Leonard* instructs the world upon scientific management; I think he’s a fraud, but no one seems to know anything. My name is really Woolf, only to shops I shall be the ordinary animal, because its simpler.

What adventures my brooch had! But I’m very glad it survived so triumphantly.

Now I must get my husband to pack my box for me.

Yr aff. V.W.

[in Leonard’s handwriting]* Virginia says I’m to say that I’m not. She is just dropping off to sleep in a chair in front of the fire or possibly she might say so herself.

[in Virginia’s handwriting] What I meant to send was the notice of our wedding in St Pancras Registry Office, but now I cant find it. If you ever want a most comfortable Inn, delicious food, cream for every meal, quite cheap, come here. Please take a holiday some time.

Sussex

[]

644: To Lytton Strachey

Sept. 1st 1912

Tarragona [Spain]

Dear Lytton,

I wonder if you got a card written at the beginning of our tour, from the home of Coleridge and Southey? That is now remembered by us chiefly for its leg of mutton. We’ve travelled far, and beef has become mutton, chicken partridge—I should hardly know now if you gave me pork to eat. This is a sad state of things only balanced by the beauties of nature and the antiquities of man, upon which I would discourse if you would listen, but to tell the truth it is the food one thinks of more than anything abroad. When I tell you that the W.C. opposite our room has not been emptied for 3 days, and you can there distinguish the droppings of Christian, Jew, Latin and Saxon—you can imagine the rest. This is Tarragona; we go on to Madrid, and from Madrid to Venice. Our habits are simple; 2 days in a place, one day in a train; we walk in the morning, read in the afternoon, make our tea, which is the point we have just passed, then walk on the sea-shore; and after dinner sit by a café, and, as its Sunday tonight, listen to the military band. Several times the proper business of bed has been interrupted by mosquitoes. They bloody the wall by morning—they always choose my left eye, Leonard’s right ear. Whatever position they chance to find us in. This does not sound to you a happy life, I know; but you see, that in between the crevices we stuff an enormous amount of exciting conversation—also literature. My God! You can’t think with what a fury we fall on printed matter, so long denied us by our own writing! I read 3 new novels in two days: Leonard waltzed through the Old Wives Tale like a kitten after its tail: after this giddy career I have now run full tilt into Crime et Châtiment, fifty pages before tea, and I see there are only 800; so I shall be through in no time. It is directly obvious that he [Dostoevsky] is the greatest writer ever born: and if he chooses to become horrible what will happen to us? Honeymoon completely dashed. If he says it—human hope—had better end, what will be left but suicide in the Grand Canal. Have you been writing about him?

As you can imagine, we mean to be very various and active in the winter. Just about this moment, you’re settling down over the fire, having returned from a brisk walk among the Scotch firs in a Scotch mist, and saying (something I can’t spell—it’s French) to the effect that life holds nothing but copulation, after which you groan from the profundities of the stomach, which reminds you that there is venison?—partridge? mutton?—for dinner, whereupon you take down Pope, your pocket copy, and proceed for the 150th time to read …, when the bell rings and the sandy haired girl, whom you wish was a boy, says “Dinner on the table”… whereas I’m just off to walk by the shores of the Mediterranean, by the beams of the dying sun, which is still hot enough to make a cotton dress and a parasol necessary, while the military band plays the Barcarolle from Hoffman’s Tales, and the naked boys run like snipe along the beach, balancing their buttocks in the pellucid air.

Please write to Brunswick Square: all the news; we’ve not seen an Englishman, or heard of London for a fortnight.

Leonard sends love.

Yrs. V.W.

Frances Hooper

[]

645: To Katherine Cox

Sept 4th [1912]

Zarazoga—Saragossa [Spain]

My dear Bruin,

It seems to me about time that you took a pen in your paw and wrote to me. I find it more and more difficult to put myself in your position, not I hope on account of the encroachments of marriage—I don’t condescend so far do I?—but because our climate has so completely changed. It is now 17 days since I have seen a cloud or a drop of water, other than man-made water. Whereas, when I wrote to an Aunt at Huntingdon [Lady Stephen], hoping that her rheumatism was better, she replied, “We leave the house in barges”. It is true that she is very fat, but can it be possible?

I’ve not heard, practically, from any sane person since we went away. However, my State is independent of accurate news; we go from town to town, investigating the back streets and the rivers and the market places, wandering along the avenues at night until we find a place to drink at. We’ve seen 10 towns since we started; they get steadily more remarkable and highly coloured. This is certainly the best country I’ve ever seen, and we have it to ourselves. Finally we shall come out upon the coast and take a ship to Italy. I need hardly say that we talk a great deal; what is more remarkable is that we read with fury, having denied ourselves books until our novels were done. Had that thunderclap reached you—they are done? But at this very moment Leonard sits on a red plush chair about 6 feet away from me, opposite him my open box with drawers hanging out, and a handsome cupboard by his side, writing the first chapter of his new great work, which is about the suburbs. I have thrown aside Crime and Punishment to write to you, having already read the Antiquary [Scott], Trespassers, Yonder, the Heir of Redcliffe [Yonge], not all this afternoon, but since I lost my virginity.

Why do you think people make such a fuss about marriage and copulation? Why do some of our friends change upon losing chastity? Possibly my great age makes it less of a catastrophe; but certainly I find the climax immensely exaggerated. Except for a sustained good humour (Leonard shan’t see this) due to the fact that every twinge of anger is at once visited upon my husband, I might be still Miss S.

This is all very egoistical—I think I shall take another sheet however, from Leonard’s novel, and begin it by saying what have you been doing, where are you, what are your plans? I heard of you last riding alone with Maynard. No: being in Spain does not make me love him better.

I can’t help supposing that you have been supporting James [Strachey] intermittently, and tending incipient paralytics, and telling Margaret [Ka Cox’s sister] how to be honest with young Stockbrokers.

Leonard and I, I need hardly say, have a bees-nest of plans and theories in our heads; people in London found us a bore before we married. How I come back to egoism again. We have not let my two rooms. Being so far away, we feel helpless, and turn to you, not to do anything in particular, but if you could keep this in mind, please do. Possibly there are people coming down from Cambridge? Anyhow, we don’t mean to stay longer in Brunswick than is necessary to find rooms. We may get some in the Temple. But we are both determined that to go back to joint life would be impossible.

Do write when you get this, and if you send it to Brunswick Square there is a beetle headed woman living in the basement who forwards our things.

Leonard here looks up from his composition and sends his love; Come and see us about the 5th of October.

Yr V.W.

Mark Arnold-Forster

[]

645a: To Duncan Grant

Sept 8th [1912]

Toledo, [Spain]

My dear Duncan,

I very much doubt that this will ever reach you however I shall write in the hopes of drawing an answer. We’ve given up sight seeing for the morning, though only eleven o’clock; but it is burning hot, and will stay so I suppose till after tea. That’s the great objection now—we’ve got so far south that half the day has to be spent indoors. We’ve not seen a cloud or had a drop of rain since we left England. Occasionally we get a paper, which describes towns sinking under water, and whole cities of old ladies going to church in a barge. My letters have to be carefully castrated so as to avoid descriptions of country and works of art, which does not leave one much to write about, seeing that we are the only two people approximating to British blood in the whole of Spain, and generally the only visitors in the hotel. This is in some ways lucky, as I can never find our bedroom, and visit five or six in various costumes at all hours of the night in return from W.Cs. But my god! What places those are!—often only a hole, between two stone models of the human sole, upon which one has to balance, and trust to a steady centre to guide one.

We came here yesterday from Madrid. Madrid is without exception the beastliest place I have ever seen. We saw the pictures…... [sic]; unfortunately Leonard had an attack of his fever [malaria], which made it more dismal than it is by nature, and we came on here in blazing sun, with his temperature 101. Apparently it is produced by the sudden determination of microbes to copulate, incited to love by an East wind. Happily he’s all right again today.

We have had a most splendid time however in every way, and happily there’s still a good deal to come. Spain is far the most magnificent country I have ever seen. It’s on a much larger scale than Italy, and the colour … you begin with sand colour, go on with—however, when I come to describe I can’t even name the colours right. Then there are vast rivers; every evening we go for a walk somewhere, in fact we are very lazy about sights. The Cathedral here is the best thing we’ve seen; I expect this town is too, but at present it is ringing with barrel organs, and the vociferations of voluptuous women. The middle class women grow to an immense size, which is shot forward to such a degree that’s its wonderful how they keep their feet at all. The poor women are sometimes most lovely; they have such good shaped heads, and beautiful clothes. We come in for immense interest, and amusement, especially our shoes. Almost the best thing we did was to go to the top of Mont Serrat, only I was never so frightened in my life. We went up in a motor bus which dashes round and round a ledge, just big enough for it, on one side a precipice sheer into the valley, with no wall, on the other a steep rock. The bus whizzed round the corners, and if the breaks [sic] had not acted we should have been over in an instant. This went for an hour until we were right on the top. I insisted upon walking down.

My husband is an extraordinarily good person to travel with, and if people give him long enough he can come out with a long sentence in Spanish. I’m sorry that Maynard found the caretaker such a hag: she’s Maud’s sister, and I always understood that she had indeed induced a tumour in the brain by her study of mathematics. Leonard wants me to send his love. Do write. The hag will forward.

Yrs V.W.

Estate of Duncan Grant. Modern Fiction Studies. Vol. 30. Summer 1984.

[]

646: To Saxon Sydney-Turner

17th Sept 1912

Hotel Nettuno, Pisa

My dear Saxon,

I opened the enclosed letter, which was sent on here, having been returned to Brunswick Square by Frau Kanoldt. As Adrian told me to write to Brunswick Square, I cant do anything further with it. Perhaps by this time he has sent them some address.

We have reached Pisa in our wanderings. We came up the coast of Spain in a little rusty iron ship about the size of a large walrus; where I was sick, but Leonard triumphed, and we ate our meals off a packing case in our cabin—sprats arranged in the form of a star with yellow oil for sauce.

I read Crime and Punishment, and Le Rouge and Le Noir. At Valencia I found a really well printed edition, the first volume enchanted me but the second hangs a little heavy. Is this as it should be?

The only fault we have to find with our journey is that it was a great deal too hot at Madrid and Toledo, and that these southern skies are too invariably blue. Occasionally we get an old copy of the Times, and there read of floods and cloudbursts.

I think Spain is far the most magnificent country I have ever seen—and we are planning the purchase of a great Spanish mule; if we had one, Leonard thinks we could ride across it. The mule would carry our beds, and run behind. We are both starved for music—have to trail about after town bands.

We are now going out to see some pictures—

I hope your Sciatica is better.

Yours V.W.

Leonard sends his love, and thanks you for your letter.

Sussex

[]

647: To Molly Maccarthy, From Leonard Woolf

28th Sept. 1912

Casa Biondetti, Venice

My Dear Molly,

Virginia is very lazy, she’s lying on a sofa eating chocolates and reading and looking at pictures, including her own portrait, in the Strand Magazine. She ought to be writing to you, but as I’m sure she won’t before tea, I’m doing it for her.

I’m very sorry you’re giving up Hoxton in a way, though really I don’t much believe in that work after what I saw of it. Miss Booth wrote and asked me to become Secretary but I had to refuse as I don’t know yet what I shall be doing or whether I’d have any time for it.

I have, I believe, a considerable knowledge of your character, and one of its characteristics is curiosity. Therefore if Virginia were writing this letter she’d probably try to satisfy it. As I’m writing for her, have I got to try to do the same? The first question you want to know about is how we get on together. I believe you’d rather have Virginia’s version than mine, but there’s no chance of your getting that today. I don’t feel like a married man which I think is a good test of happiness. I believe it would be far easier to satisfy your curiosity, if the opposite were true and we had quarrelled and bored one another. It would be so much more amusing—but after all, you don’t want to hear that I’m sorry we’ve got to be back in London next Thursday and that it’s as pleasant to be with Virginia in the furnace of Spain as in the rain and biting wind of the Grand Canal of Venice. I never of course really did expect to be able to satisfy your curiosity.

We haven’t yet got anywhere to go except two rooms in Brunswick Sq. But we hope to get rooms in the temple and live a nomadic life. I expect you’ll think that rather silly—but I hope when I die like a good Jew at 70 I shall still have no home.

Well, I’m now going to give Virginia her tea. She’s made the great discovery that one can drink both tea and chocolate and coffee at the same time as buttered toast, cakes and ices for tea! I also benefit by this discovery.

L.S.W.

[in Virginia’s handwriting]

Many thanks for your letter which was a great pleasure—though rather a shock too. I’ve finished the Strand Magazine and read Pendennis [Thackeray]. Like the letters of all married people, this is doomed to insincerity—However, I’m … That describes my state of mind. Very well. We’ve talked incessantly for 7 weeks, and become chronically nomadic and monogamic.

Yr. V.W.

Mrs Michael MacCarthy

[]

648: To Violet Dickinson

[9? October 1912]

38 Brunswick Sqre, W.C.

My Violet,

Yesterday, happening to go into one of the bachelor sitting rooms, I discovered a cradle, fit for the illegitimate son of an Empress. When I brought forth my theory however, they fathered the cradle on me. I blushed, disclaimed any intention and so on; and blushing leant my elbow on a table. “What a beautiful table this is anyhow!” I exclaimed, thinking to lead the conversation away from my lost virginity and the probable fruits of it. The table was disclaimed too. Bit by bit I pieced together the story—how a great packing case had arrived, how Miss Dickinson etc etc. Nobody but Miss Dickinson could deal with the facts of life so boldly of course. Nobody else ever routed old shops to such effect. My baby shall sleep in the cradle; I’m going to eat my dinner off the table tonight.

We got back almost a week ago, and I begin to wonder if marriage is a sin, and makes one’s friends not speak to one. You might write—I’m here interrupted to unpack a golden cross, once belonging to Mrs Lushington—weren’t you supposed to be the Second? We had a splendid holiday—Spain, France, Italy. Now we’re on the verge of moving into rooms in Cliffords Inn, I think; just off the Strand, but quiet, and a char will do for us. My husband sends his love—rather forward.

Yr VSW

Berg

[]

649: To Violet Dickinson

[29? October 1912]

38 Brunswick Sq [W.C.]

My Violet,

When will the presents cease? What other operation of nature can you provide for? Anyhow, we shall drink out of your glasses to the end of our lives, so long as we have a table to stand them on. They are perfect.

At this moment we are on the eve of our move to Cliffords Inn. I look forward to a week of intense misery, two weeks of profound discomfort, and finally, about Christmas, absolute happiness. Really our rooms are very nice. There’s a little patch of green for my brats to play in; and a porter and a bedmaker, like a Cambridge College. I suppose you dont know of a bachelor wanting a charming bed room and sitting room, with service good coal and light for £150 a year? We’re very anxious to let my rooms. Leonard spends his afternoons at the Grafton Galleries—I’m writing hard.

I hope to see you—but in the present state of dissolution dont see what to suggest.

Yr Sp[arroy]

which is why I enclose this sheet [an announcement of the Post-Impressionist Exhibition].

Berg

[]

650: To Emma Vaughan

30th Oct. [1912]

13 Cliffords Inn, E.C.

Dearest Toad,

All my nicest presents have come at the end, and yours is most lovely. Where did you get the beautiful pattern? I can hardly imagine the state of skill needed to produce it. I shall certainly wear it with great pride. We are just moving into these rooms and in such a state of chaos that I can hardly write. However, we hope to be straight in about a week and I hope soon you’ll come and see us. It’s the next turning after Chancery Lane. Thank you again.

Your loving,
V.W.

Sussex

[]

651: To Katherine Cox

[November? 1912]

13 Cliffords Inn, E.C.

Dear Bruin,

As you can imagine it took me about 20 minutes to discover your note—then look on the floor. When I did I was in a state of keen joy—and at once fastened the embroideries first to a table, then a sofa, finally to our 2 arm chairs. Desmond [MacCarthy] chancing to come in, I put him against the purple one; my Jew had the one with the green border. I never saw two more handsome men. They are lovely—the embroideries, and in the daylight they will be better still. My life as you know is one long agony of emulation and envy, and I’ve already had the joy of hearing my rooms praised—very highly, more highly than Nessa’s; on account of your present.

I came in 2 minutes I daresay after you went waddling across London with about 6 parcels—3 mutton cutlets, eggs, a cake, and a pound of potatoes. We had dinner in tonight off these, but I see that cutlets must be hung before eating, and the heart stays blooded long after the outside is brown. Karin came to lunch, old Cousins half way through the afternoon, so I was late in going out, and thus missed Bru Cox; but she might name another day.

The world offers so much to say that I really can’t even touch upon it in the remaining space especially as the geyser is alight.

Our servant shows extreme merit in not minding the sight of us naked which she has every morning. Indeed this is the kind of thing I hear. “And your husband, Mrs Worsley—now what Society is he insured in?”—“A postman? O well—they must give him a rise then after 5 years, in the Naval Reserve too”—and all this with Leonard naked in his bath—Mrs W. leaning on the W.C. door looking at him.

Yr. V.W.

Mark Arnold-Forster

[]

652: To Leonard Woolf

[November 1912]

Asheham House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

Dearest Mongoose,

Nothing has happened, I need hardly say—except a considerable amount of ferretting in the woods. Shot [dog] was taken out this morning—reeking of ointment. We were in fear of burglars last night, owing to the mysterious apparition of two lanterns among the trees late at night.

Were you very cold and uncomfortable? I’ve been reading the Village in the J.[ungle] which seems to me amazingly good. I hope Lytton insists upon publication, or at any rate puts some clear course before you.

I enclose a letter, which was sent with a pamphlet, for you. Quite cracked. Ka [Cox] and I stitch, gossip, grumble, as you can imagine. I read her article last night, which is very inarticulate and makes me think there’s more in writing than one remembers. She’s just off to [her] Cousin Emily.

Are you well? Shall you get any ’assions from Craig?

Yr M[andril]

Can you possibly get some more powders for Shot in Lewes. If possible, also, bring typewriter—unless too difficult.

Sussex

[]

653: To Lytton Strachey

Nov. 16[1912]

13 Cliffords Inn [E.C.]

Really, if you go on writing, you will vitiate John Bailey’s stock phrase “the art of letter writing is dying out—” Of course my objection to letters is that they were all written in the 18th Century, an age I find unlovable. Still, there seems no reason why we shouldn’t write letters even upon the 16th of November—anyhow why you shouldn’t. Of course for a wife and a woman the case is different. Do the race horses champ beneath you? I dreamt of race horses all night which is partly why I take up the pen—when I ought to be reading and reviewing. Isn’t it damnable to have begun that again? and yet it’s rather inspiriting. I feel like a child switching off the heads of poppies—it’s such a joke now, writing reviews, and I once took it seriously. Poor old Desmond [MacCarthy] was here again yesterday, with his despatch box in which was a half written review of George Trevelyan’s edition of Meredith’s poetry—Out it came and we went through it with a pencil. “Now please suggest some alternative for ‘revelling in romance’—I don’t like ‘revelling in romance’—‘exalting in the magnificence?’ No—that’s not quite it—However, let’s go on.” On we went, defining youth, poetry and what precisely is meant by optimism. It was awfully gloomy—this poor man searching about in the roots of things at 2 guineas a column, and sweating and grunting and saying “If I had time, of course, I could do something better than this” and yet it was stiff with thought. He seemed to me altogether dismal. Starting for Biarritz where he is to help Paley with a book on Political Economy. The kind of thing they debate is whether to call Disraeli Lord Beaconsfield, the late Mr Disraeli, or Disraeli pure and simple, which Desmond advises, provided the sentence will stand it.

Our great event has been that [Edward] Arnold has taken Leonard’s novel with great praise. Of course he makes it a condition that certain passages are to go out—which, we don’t yet know. It’s triumphant to have made a complete outsider believe in one’s figments. I don’t suppose I altogether agree about the 19th Century. It’s a good deal hotter in the head than the 18th. But you didn’t shock my feelings as a daughter. The difference probably is that I attach more importance to his divinity “qua man” even in his books than you do. It always seems to me to count considerably. But my feeling for literature is by no means pure.

Ottoline has been seen by several observers—not by me—passing through on her way South again, the gold streamers pendent from each ear, and trailing on the ground, amid a myriad of pointed foxes’ tails—So Leonard, who’s not given to exaggeration, describes her.

We are sitting over the fire, in complete quiet, save for an occasional van down Fetter Lane—L. half way through an immense Blue Book on Divorce, upon which he has to write an article, for that oozing officious man, Haynes.

London is very nice—a trifle too rackety I agree—but we are off, thank God, tomorrow to Asheham, where we shall discuss the shepherd’s morals—he’s had a child at 60, and this gives rise to talk—with Mrs Funnell [shepherd’s wife at Asheham].

Yr. V.W.

Is this letter written upon Bumf? It looks like it. Isn’t it a shame that Marjorie is not going to be a publisher? We urged it all we could.

Frances Hooper

[]

654: To Violet Dickinson

[December 1912]

13 Cliffords Inn, Fleet Street, E.C.

My Violet,

We were fearfully sorry to put off coming last night. I had a headache and then Leonard developed an attack of malaria, and had to go to bed. He’s better today, but its a beastly thing and we were very sorry not to come. I suppose you’re going away directly. But will you and Ozzie [Violet’s brother] come and dine with us at the Cock after Christmas. I’ll write later.

Yr. V.W.

Berg

[]

655: To Violet Dickinson

24th Dec. [1912]

Asheham, Lewes [Sussex]

My Violet,

I think Nessa is better—though she never seems to have got rid of the effects of that miscarriage, and I dont see how she’s ever going to in the midst of all the rush at Gordon Square. They’re coming down here for some time after Christmas. I suppose it will be better than London, but I wish she could have a month somewhere by herself without children or servants. She’s had a good many bothers this winter, besides any amount of exhibitions and art.

We’re here for Christmas. We shall be back in a few days. Is it really possible to be inoculated for malaria? It would be well worth doing. Leonard hasn’t heard of it. At this moment its raining hard, but we are very happy here—I think its best in winter. In fact I think it would be nice to leave all ones clothes in a great box in London, and turn into a kind of muddy turnip root, with Mrs Funnell to talk to. My husband wants to buy 2 cows, and 20 hens, which supplied with one cock would give us eggs and fowl, and the cows would give milk and butter, and eventually, from the butter we should create a pig; and then rent a little shooting. Do you keep wildstock of any kind, except the virgin goat?

Do you know of anyone wanting a Secretary? The Grafton [Post-Impressionist Exhibition], thank God, is over; artists are an abominable race. The furious excitement of these people all the winter over their pieces of canvas coloured green and blue, is odious. Roger is now turning them upon chairs and tables: there’s to be a shop and a warehouse next month.

Yr. V.W.

Please come and see us in London—we’re now quite straight.

Berg

[]

656: To Lytton Strachey

Boxing Day [1912]

Asheham, Rodmell [Sussex]

Dear Lytton,

I meant long ago to write to you, in London, but one can’t write in London. In fact we’re driven to think that the country is our destiny, partly led thereto by the charms of Mrs Funnell, Old Funnell, their son, and a soldier nephew who served in Egypt, who are all at this moment sitting in the kitchen, eating a great sugar cake, which I bore in and presented, amid subdued cheers. As for the boy he has the figure of a God—a very small, tightly curled head, set upon gigantic shoulders. That’s the style I admire; and there he sits speechless, reading the cookery book.

We have just had dinner—Leonard is reading the poems of John Donne: I am half way through the Return of the Native, a novel by Thomas Hardy. We go back tomorrow, alas. Were there time I would tell you about Brighton on Christmas Eve; we spent 2 hours in the Aquarium. The common fish are perfectly wonderful. Soles laid flat on the bottom; cray fish crawling; mackerel shooting endlessly round and round, like torpedo boats; fat white anemones blooming from rocky corners. Then there is the monkey house. For some reason, the mackerel put me in mind of Ottoline and her troupe; she ought to be put in a tank; it’s absurd to expect her to stand scrutiny for ways and motives, which is her lot at present.

I suppose you have heard of various disasters in London—Nessa more or less broken down—Roger rampant, but at one point forced to sit with his head in his hands, giddy if he so much as saw a picture. They’re starting on furniture now—have you heard? All good reasons for living in the country. Hom turned up two days ago—but if one sees much of Sydney one wants less of Hom, which does not mean that I don’t find him large and serene and as satisfactory as a great big pigeon. This metaphor might be more fitting if I werent here interrupted by Mrs F: who says she can’t eat curry; it repeats so dreadful—also how she saw her saucepan once float in at the back door—in a flood.

Are you writing? Have you despatched that wrinkled old hag? and are you still interrupted by the champing of the race horses beneath? O I saw Walter Lamb too; and if it weren’t wicked could make you laugh—How anyone has the face to be so magnificently egoistical one can’t conceive; he lives in the centre of domes upon domes of bubbles. His play has been refused. But he has hopes of a more brilliant future than falls to most of us—a Librarianship—(but this is a secret).

Yr. V.W.

Frances Hooper

[]

Letters 657-674 (January-June 1913)

657: To Violet Dickinson

[January 1913]

13 Cliffords Inn, Fleet Street, E.C.

My Violet,

I ought to have written before—We’ve been down at Asheham, which was very unfortunate to miss you and the young man—I didnt know we knew anyone who looked fashionable.

As far as one can tell in these complaints, Nessa is much better—but one cant tell very much, as down there she does nothing—and how she’s ever to get absolutely right in the midst of family life I dont know. However, its no good interfering in the lives of others. I’m quite certain that 2 months of sensible life would cure her for ever, which is what makes one lose one’s temper.

Will you and Ozzy dine with us at the Cock on Wednesday 22nd 8.? coming here first, not dressing. If Ozzy cant, will you? But both would be better.

Yr V.W.

Berg

[]

658: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Friday [7 March 1913]

13 Cliffords Inn [E.C.]

My dear Ottoline,

We’ve promised to go to the Gills on the 22nd unfortunately; it would have been very nice to come down to you instead—I have the greatest difficult in talking to artists and when they talk themselves its so philosophical and religious and profound.

We hope you’ll ask us again.

London is very much like Hell and has been for the last 6 weeks. We disappear as often as we can to Asheham—however, London has a great charm too, especially the Strand. Are you coming back? What do you do. I suppose you’ve read every book worth reading, and I hope you begin to to consider writing a book. Everyone seems on the verge of having a book out—Desmond has them three at a birth. I’m told awful stories of Molly and Desmond up at 5 writing for 6 hours by an open window to keep their heads fresh.

Yr affate
V.W.

Texas

[]

659: To Lady Robert Cecil

11 March [1913]

The Queen’s Hotel, Manchester

Dear Nelly,

Its no use for me to say that I’m glad you liked Leonard’s book [The Village in the Jungle], as you know too well the profound and secret vices of Authors.

This is only to warn you against going to Cliffords Inn, just now, unless you like looking at names on doors, and milk jars—(by the way, the young lady who feeds pigeons opposite with chunks of bread flung herself in full light, curtains up, into a young mans arms the other evening, and as they remained like that for 10 minutes, we conclude that they love each other—L thinks it would be rash to say they are engaged)

I recognise the portrait of Beatrice [Thynne] with delight. If she got to the end of the book [The Village in the Jungle], she has now read 23—not counting the Bible, and the History of the Church, which she was made to read.

We are going about to see factories, and as we spent 8 hours walking through them today, I’m very sleepy. Why the poor dont take knives and chase us out of our houses, I cant think. They stand for 8 hours tying up 6 gross of jampots.

We shall be back in 10 days and I hope then you will come and see us.

Yr affate
V.W.

Hatfield

[]

659a: To Duncan Grant

Sunday [16 March 1913]

In the train near Edinburgh

My dear Duncan,

They’re already beginning to talk Scotch all round us which reminds me of you—in fact you were born at Edinburgh weren’t you, if it wasn’t Rangoon. We’re having a wonderful time—I don’t know how long one could go on seeing machines and factories, but so far it’s amazingly interesting—biscuits, soap, jam, boots, furniture, laundry, clothes—There are about 17 different machines for making a pair of boots, and the poor wretches are kept making button holes for eight hours a day. The worst of it is when they begin to do ornaments. The lithography business is a fair nightmare. They print those huge pictures of fruit and little girls which they hang up in grocers shops. The layers of colour are put on over each other—sometimes 20 different layers before they get it right, and it gets more and more polished and hideous every time. Also they can carve wood in the most amazing shapes—I don’t feel that there is much hope for the working classes. We spend about 8 hours a day with respectable retired shopkeepers, who are very conservative and religious, and very kind to us. We always get given a large lunch and a meat tea, as well as samples from every factory we visit, which we have to leave behind in the motel. We are now on our way to Glasgow, having been to Liverpool, Manchester and Leeds. These towns have a mania for public statues—every large square has Albert, Gladstone and Nelson stark naked, save for a little bit of flag between the legs. We saw Snow last night who gave us an amusing account of Roger’s [Fry] lecture in Leeds. She went home in a tram full of people discussing it. One woman said, “Well anyhow, he has a nice voice.” A man replies, “O I don’t say anything against his voice, or his manner, and after all it was the manner I went for, not the sense” whereupon they all chimed in that he was as mad as a hatter. The business mind is very odd—however I have only made one mistake—which was to ask whether they counted seven or eight days in a week. It’s really six—but they are very kind to the ladies, as they call them, and always take me to the millinery department.

Leonard gets a letter praising his novel at every town—which you must admit is pretty depressing for me. He has evidently sent Dora quite over the border “You make me realize the animality of the people and their closeness to and yet their difference from the animals so vividly—and you make one feel the futility and cruelty of nature to such a degree that to tell the truth I could not finish your book. I believe there is some way of facing the misery and pain of the universe and remaining happy but I have not discovered it—The tropics are terrible—… and the contemplation of them always fills me with terror” So, poor woman, she sounds far gone. All the train is full of Miss Lorraines Theatrical company—big bottoms and no stomachs.

Yrs VW

Estate of Duncan Grant. Modern Fiction Studies. Vol. 30. Summer 1984.

[]

660: To Katherine Cox

[18 March 1913]

Grand Hotel, Leicester

My Dear Ka,

Having lost my spectacles I can hardly see to write, but the female gynaecologist at the table and Leonard over the fire scribble scribble scribble so I suppose I must too. You would like to have my impressions of the condition of the working classes (the reason why I think she is a female g. is that when I came in she was pointing very low down in the body of a large diagram of the female body and saying to a sad elderly woman, “That’s what we must have out”—ovaries, I presume).

We have been to Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Glasgow, and now end with the boot factory here. Many valuable things come into my head at once; it is as if the thaw were beginning—seeing machines freezes the top of one’s head. It’s the oddest feeling, providential, I suppose, so as to keep the poor quiet. The melancholy thing is that they seem perfectly respectable and content, rather like old gentlemen in Clubs, supposing they were worn down and out at elbows. I cant help thinking that fiery reformers fly completely over their heads. But my dear Ka, I see at a glance that nothing—except perhaps novel writing—can compare with the excitement of controlling the masses. The letters you’d get! The jobs you’d be sent on—and then people would always be telling you things, and if you could move them you would feel like a God. I see now where Margaret [Llewelyn Davies] and even Mary MacArthur get their Imperial tread. The mistake I’ve made is in mixing up what they do with philanthropy. Why don’t you force yourself into some post when you get back—in 6 months time you’d be driving about 6,000 helpless women in front of you. L. and I seriously consider branching out in some such line. I mean, he should branch: reviewing French poetry which is what he is now doing is only fit for crazy creatures, who have been in asylums.

We go back tomorrow. What are you doing? I’m glad you liked L’s novel—(you can’t see how insincerely I say that, and its no use grinning at me in Berlin). He gets a terrible lot of praise, and it seems to make no difference. My novel—but having said that, I’m now trained to stop short: isn’t it wonderful? Its all Leonard’s doing.*

Things in London were much the same as usual 10 days ago. A good deal of love, spite, art gossip, and opera. We dine at the Cock, and see the usual run. However, we shall probably retire after Easter and live sensibly. By the way, we want to buy a horse. How does one do it?

Yes, I’m very fond of you, and often think how I’d like to have my Bruin opposite. When shall I? Don’t marry till you’re 30—if then.

Yr. V.W.

[in Leonard’s handwriting]

*No reflection on me. Vide.

Mark Arnold-Forster

[]

661: To Gwen Raverat

Sunday [23 March 1913]

Asheham House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

Dear Gwen,

I didn’t realise that you’d insulted me, or rather the people who live in London. Of course, your letters generally make me very angry, but thats because of the spirit of neo-paganism that breathes so fierce in them, and I’m sure you dont mean to apologise for that—utterly damnable though it is—(and perhaps the insult wasn’t in a letter after all).

Anyhow, I wish I could see you on Tuesday, but we dont get back till about 7.30 which is too late, I’m afraid. Perhaps you’ll be passing through again—if not, you and Jacques must come down here. I dont believe you’ve ever seen this place, anyhow not since it was lived in and had something like a garden—20 daffodils and ½ a dozen crocuses. Its far the liveliest place in the world.

Yrs. V.W.

We must have been just before you at Harbour View.

Sussex

[]

662: To Violet Dickinson

[late March 1913]

13 Cliffords Inn, E.C.

My Violet,

We shall be delighted if you will come to tea on Wednesday. We’ve been away, or we should have been to see you.

I haven’t seen Nessa for some time, but I hear she’s much better, and they’re coming back to London next week.

Yr V.W.

Have you got a beautiful old edition of Jane Austen which you would like to lend me?

Berg

[]

663: To Leonard Woolf

Tuesday [8 April 1913]

Asheham House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

Sweet Mongoose,

I doubt that this will reach you—but I’m going down to Rodmell with M[arjorie Strachey].

It is very fine, but singularly dull without my little beast. I’ve spent the morning writing, the afternoon putting tulips in the pots. M. sat on the terrace making a genealogical table of the Austen family. At intervals we have wild discussions—she spits and I become vague as a wholly sheep.

She is of opinion that my book is lost, or rejected. God! I wish you were here. It would have been a splendid day. Your telegram came—I suppose there’s no change—so I hope you will come.

We’ve discussed Clive’s article, Jane Austen, novels, pessimism, Roger—I broke off abuse of Henry Lamb to write this. She says he’s poisoning Lytton.

Now we must go—as with a wrung heel we shall be slow.

Yr darling Mandril

Love to everyone—your mother particularly.

Sussex

[]

664: To Vanessa Bell

Thursday [10? April 1913]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

Beloved,

I hope Clive is all right and that you haven’t had to go down to Seend [Clive’s parents]. This is to impose some miserable duties upon you, which however, you needn’t do.

Could you send the Day Library books back to Days, 96 Mount St. W. I think you’ve got 3.

Could you give directions about bookcases, so that if we called we could get them. They are badly wanted here, but we dont want to buy more than necessary. We got one earthenware pot down with such labour that we shant attempt others. Also, Mrs F[unnell] buys breadpots which, if they had their bottoms pierced, wd. really do better.

The garden does you great credit—numerous daffodils, tulips, flocks, and nameless leaves—also a fine blue flower. We are now going to buy a Rhododendron hedge to put against the fence, and summer seeds.

Saxon [Sydney-Turner] is here, in difficulties with his teeth. He stays behind after every meal to rinse them.

An aeroplane has just flown over the house—it makes a noise like a motor bus.

We may meet again, or we may not, but I do not forget the scene of passionate love which you did not succeed in repressing—though you did your best.

Yr V.W.

Ransome refuses to pump unless we give him 5/ as you did—so the F[unnell]s have stepped in again—and they all seem violently at war.

Berg

[]

665: To Violet Dickinson

Friday, April 11th [1913]

Asheham House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

My Violet,

I was very glad to hear from you but you really must buy some great sheets like this to accommodate your lean long hand, if our intimacy is to live on ink. We come up to London this day, and wish you would ask us to tea, but I suppose you are now settled in at the [Burnham] Wood [Welwyn].

Perhaps you will invite us for 3 hours there.

We shall live here more or less this summer, but spend one out of 3 weeks in London.

We aren’t going to have a baby, but we want to have one, and 6 months in the country or so is said to be necessary first.

However, on the whole, in spite of rain, there’s nothing so nice as this place. We are wrestling with the garden. It is riddled with weeds, with roots a yard long, and finally we’ve had to dig a vast ditch, fill it with wood and straw, lay the earth on top, and set fire, in the hope that the nettles will be burnt out. After digging and fetching for 6 hours, until we both rained sweat and were the laughing stock of the yokels, we poured a can of paraffin on top and set alight—when a storm burst, and put the fire out, damped the earth, so that we must now begin again. We’re also re-constructing the terrace and fighting moles rabbits and mysterious flower diseases, which attack tulips so that they never unfold. You must come here, and give advice. Will you?

We want to buy 2 horses. Can you recommend any? Isn’t there a hunting peeress of your acquaintance who would part with a thoroughbred on condition we loved him? I only know one huntress, and she is now incapable, owing to marriage.

All the morning we write in two separate rooms. Leonard is in the middle of a new novel [The Wise Virgins]; but as the clock strikes twelve, he begins an article upon Labour for some pale sheet, or a review of French literature for the Times, or a history of Co-operation.

We sew [sic] articles over the world—I’m writing a lot for the Times too, reviews and articles and biographies of dead women—so we hope to make enough to keep our horses. I’ve sent my book to Gerald, but have heard nothing so far, and expect to have it rejected—which may not be in all ways a bad thing.

We are only waiting for £2,000 to start the best magazine the world has ever seen. Everyone agrees that it is the best idea in the world, but also hints that they cant support the bankrupt. Still, we go on looking up to Heaven.

We spent a fortnight moving from factory to factory in the North, getting as far as Glasgow and seeing every kind of horror and miracle. As you can imagine, I dont follow these economic questions very easily, but Leonard seems to be able to read and write and talk to enthusiasts without turning a hair. His book seems to be a great success—the reviews all compare him with Kipling—but I cant see that he has the vanity of the true author—which is a serious reason against his being one. I’ve never met a writer who didn’t nurse an enormous vanity, which at last made him unapproachable like Meredith whose letters I am reading—who seems to me as hard as an old crab at the bottom of the sea.

Please write again. I suppose my character doesn’t improve?

Aunt Minna [Duckworth] arrived at Cliffords Inn in a fly, and was unable to get out, so we had to stand in the Strand for half an hour with Angelo [her Italian manservant] dressed up as a footman—

Yr V.W.

Berg

[]

666: To Vanessa Bell

Friday 25th April [1913]

Asheham House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

Beloved

I’m glad to find that you dislike Venice because I thought it detestable when we were there, both times—once it might be due to insanity but not twice, so I thought it must be my fault. I suppose the obscurer reaches might be beautiful. There isnt much news to tell you, except of a very rural kind. The garden certainly does you great credit. Both the long beds are now full of flowers, mostly out, and every day new ones bloom—except the peonies, which are out in front, but not at the back.

We are undertaking tremendous labours. The large round bed has been thoroughly burnt for 2 days—mercifully the rain held off. I am terracing, and tomorrow we begin digging under the trees and planting foxgloves and wall flowers. However, much remains to be done—we mean to renovate the grass entirely. To our horror, when we came down, two raw new Christmas trees, each with a note tied to it, were planted in front of the windows, the work of Jean and a lunatic, escaped from Eastbourne. The question is how to destroy them tactfully. No doubt you can suggest means. As they are to commemorate our marriage and novels, it will be difficult simply to uproot them.

We were invaded by Marny and Emma two days ago. It was as hot as June, and they arrived in thick stuff coats and skirts, with mufflers made of white blanketing, for as Marny said, one never knows in April when it wont turn suddenly cold, although today it does seem fine at last—so unlike the past week—but last year if you remember. So she ran on for 3 or 4 hours, and Leonard was entranced, though so physically repulsed by Emma who became skittish at the sight of him that he couldn’t sit near her. They said that they dread the long summer evenings particularly—which are always so disappointing, and one cant light lamps, though it isnt really daylight. They have been lent a house, in the midst of George and Freshfields, who all patronise them—lend them motors and so on. Lisa has not yet turned up.

We saw Ottoline before we came here, and found her charming, with a bloom upon her cheeks, and certainly more life in her. She has bought a house, 15th century, with enormous yew hedges, and everything in keeping. When she doesn’t languish, I think she is well worth seeing. Tomorrow Sydney [Waterlow] comes here, to recoup for his divorce case, which he has invited Leonard to attend. We shall make him dig. Mrs Funnells daughter has now been taken ill; she has swollen to a great size, and Mrs F. suspects dropsy. Considering her symptoms I should say a child, but I suppose they wd. be on the lookout for that. I have just heard that the bookcases have come.

We have also heard that L. has sold 600 copies of his book, which is thought to be very good. We shall probably go up to London on Wednesday, and attempt again to buy a house. This place gets better and better—3 days so hot that we sat out in the shade. I lead a very healthy life. The clock now strikes nine, and I begin to undress, L. then fetches me a great tumbler of milk. wh. I wallop down. Then sleep 8 hours—then lie down in the afternoon—then bask in the garden where a snake 3 ft. long was killed today. There is a pest among the lambs. They creep up to the hedge and die.

Yr. B.

I am amazed to hear that you have fallen in love at last. I only hope you were smartly repulsed. Sydney says your and his and Shoves stories were the best. I’ve heard great praise of yours from various quarters. Sydneys almost made me sick, throwing up blood over the bread and butter. He read it at dinner.

Berg

[]

667: To Clive Bell

[May? 1913]

13 Cliffords Inn, Fleet Street, E.C.

Dearest Clive,

You were quite right—Leonard when I told him it was Tuesday reminded me that we are going to a lecture upon management where L. may speak on Tuesday. Therefore it must be Thursday. Please dont think me too idiotic.

The exaltation of last night and Saxons sudden spiritual escape, as if his soul had been underground for centuries, flurried me considerably.

If not Thursday, then Friday. Until I hear, both shall be kept free, and please forgive if I’ve made you miss something.

Yr V.W.
great haste.

Quentin Bell

[]

668: To Katherine Cox

May 16th [1913]

13 Clifford’s Inn [E.C.]

My dear Ka,

You seem to be a very famous person—the vaguest rumours are afloat about you—By some it is said that you have actually been seen in the Kremlin, which is thought to be a church—others, among them Helen Verrall, and an awful elongated woman called Graham report that you fed the swans in the Kaisergarten last Tuesday at four—Anyhow you wont get this letter I suppose, but as we are sitting over the fire together and Leonard wants to work, I shall write to you—Otherwise, as you know, I am always looking up and saying “now do tell me honestly, am I more clever than beautiful, or beautiful than clever, or good than either”—which is the very devil when you want to read economics.

We came up here 10 days ago to attend the Ring—and I hereby state that I will never go again, and you must help us both to keep to that. My eyes are bruised, my ears dulled, my brain a mere pudding of pulp—O the noise and the heat, and the bawling sentimentality, which used once to carry me away, and now leaves me sitting perfectly still. Everyone seems to have come to this opinion, though some pretend to believe still. We combined this with the sight of a great many people, whom you may still remember, and can now probably judge at their right value. Is it high or low, or, as I rather suspect, about middling? Then we have written many thousand words, and Leonard has undertaken to lecture and write and listen to people preaching in obscure but enlightened northern towns, and they are to found a College, and I have hopes—I will not say more than hopes—of sitting on a Committee in 3 years time. All your friends write to you, I suppose, and you know far more of the inner history of the times than I can pretend to.

We meet James [Strachey] floating down the Strand at midnight, rather like a Chinese girl who has somehow gone astray, poor woman—His cheeks are a lovely pink. At Asheham the other day we saw a fine sight—old Marjorie [Strachey] in a short white skirt,—an orange jersey and knapsack, armed with a hunting knife, to repel accosters, limping, dead lame, on a walking tour which lasted 3 days, covered 15 miles, and ended in our armchair where she sat incessantly eating sweets—reading novels which she had acquired at Lending libraries on the way. That was what had struck her—you can get novels for 2d—She was to have gone to Gordon Craig, but that is off, owing to his fault, as I suppose will be the case most often. The truth about Marjorie is that with the sweetest nature in the world, the human race are to her as fish—We swim past, divided by glass plates—its queer, considering her qualities, (but then it mayn’t be true). Having to give up facts, you see, I may as well write psychology, only its dangerous. My words are always coming back to me, and in Russia I suppose, we must be careful.

Do write and describe Russia; and put in a little psychology too.

Tomorrow we go down to Asheham, where we have first to survive a visit from Lytton-Desmond, and then to relapse peacefully into a rural life, which now centres round a horse—to buy a horse seems to be as difficult as to write a novel, but I think we may be on the track of one now.

When are you coming back? I search the world for the like of you, but haven’t found her; and if there’s one thing I love it is female society. Are you happy—(that’s a question you wont answer) and well? I liked the photograph, and Mrs Funnell rescued it from the fire once, where it fell by mistake, and pinned it in the middle of the wall. Public news I do not give—private is that Sydney is divorced—Nessa Roger and Clive still abroad—but seem uneventful this time.

Leonard sends his love, and hopes you will soon come back—a nice wise friendly Bruin, and so sagacious too, after seeing the world, but will she have forgotten me?

Yr V.W.

Mark Arnold-Forster

[]

669: To Lady Robert Cecil

[17 May? 1913]

13 Cliffords Inn, Fleet Street, E.C.

My dear Nelly,

Its very bad luck but we are going to Asheham today. Perhaps you will ask us another time—at least that is what we hope.

But please come to tea again—I’ve just got some new curtains and rearranged the room—said to be a great improvement.

The gentleman opposite has just got up in his pyjamas and fed his canary while the art student in the garret has got about 20 pigeons sitting on the sill.

Yr. V.W.

Hatfield

[]

670: To Violet Dickinson

[late May 1913]

[Asheham, Rodmell, Sussex]

My Violet,

Many thanks for your scrap of notepaper. Janet Case who is here has lent me her pen to try, but it slobbers like a week old baby.

Jane Austen was received with pleasure by some, hatred by others. It has won for me the friendship of a tawny bitch in South Kensington, Edith Sichel, who is black to the 3rd finger joint in ink.

We’re down here, but come up for a few days, and then retire to New Castle on Tyne, to join the Cooperative Women. It seems impossible to foretell where life will take one.

Nessa I believe has come back, laden with works of indisputable genius bought off peasants in the Umbrian mountains. They are beginning to paint boxes and arm chairs in Fitzroy Sqre [the Omega Workshops]. Personally I dont feel in Roger Fry the inspiration of Morris, but no doubt I’m wrong.

Gerald has accepted my book (I dont think he got through it) and I’m now correcting proofs.

I shall suggest later that you shd. come and stay with us.

We have bought a Broodmare, and I have a grey pony, so we ride on the downs.

Yr. V.W.

Last night our charwomans daughter, aged 18, produced an illegitimate child without warning.

Berg

[]

671: To Molly Maccarthy

28th May [1913]

Asheham, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

My dear Molly,

I was very grateful for your letter, which made me also slightly envious.

I dont meet such charming old ladies lying in their deck chairs when I go for walks. Have you read her poems, and what are they like? But we have given up walking—we ride on the downs and 2 days ago I was thrown off, ignominiously, but it is said that riding astride one must expect half a dozen falls, and they dont hurt. Only I’m so stiff at this moment that if one wrote letters with ones legs, I couldnt write this.

We have settled down to a country life, which is full of strange discoveries. For one thing the days shoot past so that there is scarcely time to take ones food before one goes to bed again. Did you find this—if so what a queer affair your life at Timworth must have been—I’d never realised it before—perhaps that explains the tendency which we both observe in you to—dulness, in short.

I cant remember a single thing that we’ve done since Desmond was here. Mrs Funnell’s daughter provided the only incident. At ten o’clock one night she began to have a baby, being 18 years of age, unmarried of course, and so far as they knew a virgin! with a tendency to dropsy. That was how she explained her figure. But it was a child, which has flourished, and after a certain amount of scolding she has promised not to do it again, and they’ve all settled down, and apparently feel none the worse which seems very much superior to us in such circumstances.

I wish I could tell you that we’d been thinking, of learning Italian, or doing anything likely to make you think well of us. The one thing that makes Monday different from Sunday is the morning post so do write again, and describe life in London, and help to preserve us from becoming dull too.

We come up to London on the 2nd, and I hope we shall meet, but I imagine somehow that you’re whats called in a vortex. London altogether seems so strange; I believe our half in half existence is ideal—a taste of people, and then a drench of sleep and forgetfulness, and then another look at the world, and back again.

The only exciting thing I have forgotten—that Leonard caught two moles this morning.

yrs V.W.

Mrs Michael MacCarthy

[]

672: To Lady Robert Cecil

[28? May 1913]

Asheham House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

My dear Nelly,

It isnt often that I address you upon public matters, and it is now only upon compulsion from Miss Llewelyn Davies who could compel a steam roller to waltz.

There is going to be a deputation to the Prime Minister on the Divorce Question. It will go for getting the recommendations of the majority report. Is there any chance that you will join the deputation, or support it in any way? I could not describe your views, but thought it worth asking, and if you are opposed to such a thing, dont bother to take notice of this.

We are very hot, having chased a horse vainly round a field. It is a wonderful night, and you I suppose are attending some great ball; wearing a coronet, dressed all in pale green satin, with ropes of pearls, and diamonds on your brow. We come to London on Monday, and I shall try to see you, but I think of London now as a vast rabbit warren, and the rabbits pop in and out, and never stay still for more than 2 minutes at a time.

yrs aff
V.W.

Hatfield

[]

673: To Katherine Cox

Friday 13th July [error for 13 June 1913]

13 Cliffords Inn, Fleet Street, E.C.

My dear Ka,

I was sitting alone and thinking of you with extreme desire and affection when your letter came.

You really are wanted back again—and there’ll be such a set on you that I know I shall only grasp a handfull of Bruin fur.

We are here till Wednesday next, 18th, when we retire to Asheham again. We’ve been up for a week, but how small and provincial it must all sound to you—whereas, you’re like a brilliant Cockatoo out of the desert to me—

Will you ring up (Holborn 5711) and suggest lunch, tea, dinner—Leonard sends love. We are both happy at the thought of seeing Bruin again.

Yr V.W.

Mark Arnold-Forster

[]

674: To Molly Maccarthy

[late June 1913]

Asheham, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

My dear Molly,

Do you remember promising at midnight under the archway of Clifford’s Inn to come here on Saturday? I can quite believe that you’ve repented since, but this is to remind you. Are you groaning?

You will find [E.M.] Forster here, but he is going to be put on the brood mare, who has become very fresh, so we shan’t see much of him.

We’ve been having [H.T.J.] Norton, who was charming and remarkable—so many ideas, and quite willing to be amused—Otherwise nothing but country life, so I cant write a letter—but you in the midst of frivolity might. Is it the fact everyone undressed at 3 A.M. in Brunswick Sqre and proceeded to act and James Strachey left the house in disgust? However, you’ll be able to describe it when we meet.

Yr V.W.

The 3.20 from Victoria is the best. Take week end [ticket] to Lewes and small train on to Southease, where you will be met. Love to Desmond. We enjoyed his last in the Statesman.

Mrs Michael MacCarthy

[]

Letters 675-682 (July-December 1913)

675: To Leonard Woolf

[28 July 1913]

Burley, Cambridge Park, Twickenham

Darling Mongoose,

I got your two letters this morning. They made me very happy, but you shouldn’t have gone out to the post again—poor tired little beast.

How are you, darling Mongoose? I’m very well, slept well, and they make me eat all day. But I think of you and want you. Keep well. We shall be together soon, I know. I get happiness from seeing you. I hope you’ve been out and not worked too much.

Darling I love you—
yr M.

Sussex

[]

676: To Leonard Woolf

[1 August 1913]

Burley, Cambridge Park, Twickenham

Dearest,

I got up and dressed last night after you were gone, wanting to come back to you. You do represent all thats best, and I lie here thinking. I think of you in your white nightgown mongoose.

yr M.

I thought we were walking back to Cliffords Inn together Darling.

Sussex

[]

677: To Leonard Woolf

[2 August 1913]

Burley, Cambridge Park, Twickenham

Dearest,

You cant stay in London any more in this heat. Do get away. Couldn’t you go to Lytton until Thursday? Jean [Thomas] says she will keep me till then.

I want to see you, but this is best.

yr. M.

Sussex

[]

678: To Leonard Woolf

[3 August 1913]

Burley, Cambridge Park, Twickenham

Dearest Mongoose,

I hope you got my wire this morning.

Are you well, are you resting, are you out of doors? Do you do your little tricks? Here it is all the same…. I’ve not been very good I’m afraid—but I do think it will be better when we’re together. Here its all so unreal.

Have you written your review? How are you feeling? Is Asheham nice? I want you Mongoose, and I do love you, little beast, if only I weren’t so appallingly stupid a mandril. Can you really love me—yes, I believe it, and we will make a happy life. You’re so loveable. Tell me exactly how you are.

M.

Sussex

[]

679: To Leonard Woolf

Monday [4 August 1913]

Burley, Cambridge Park, Twickenham

Darling Mongoose,

I did like your two letters this morning. They make all the difference.

But I wish you weren’t working. I’m enormously fat, and well—very sleepy.

Have you ridden?

Nothing you have ever done since I knew you has been in any way beastly—how could it? You’ve been absolutely perfect to me. Its all my fault. But when we’re together—and I go on thinking—it must be all right. And we shall be on Thursday—How are you? you dont say—I think about you and think of the things we’ve had together. Anyhow, you’ve given me the best things in my life.

Do try and get out, and rest, my honey mongoose. You did look so bad. When you say sleepy you mean tired, poor beast.

I have been trying to read American magazines which are lent to me by Miss Funk a tall American.

I do believe in you absolutely, and never for a second do I think you’ve told me a lie—

Goodbye, darling mongoose—I do want you and I believe in spite of my vile imaginations the other day that I love you and that you love me.

Yr M.

Sussex

[]

680: To Leonard Woolf

[5 August 1913]

[Burley, Twickenham]

Darling Mongoose,

This is only to say Goodnight—Dearest, I have been disgraceful—to you, I mean.

Savage was here today—says I may go on Thursday. Will you come tomorrow?

You’ve been working all day and I’ve been doing nothing. We went on the river.

Nothing has happened. I keep thinking of you and want to get to you.

Yr M.

Sussex

[]

681: To Leonard Woolf

Thursday [4 December 1913]

Asheham [Lewes, Sussex]

Dearest Mongoose,

To begin with, I am to say from nurse, that I have been very good. I add that I have been very dull without you—I don’t like being left with the female creatures—still, they’re both very kind.

We have been cleaning the drawing room. Its really rather fun, and makes a wonderful difference, even in the smell of the air. Then I’ve been for a walk—nurse has been to Lewes—lots of odd jobs have been done.

Still, I think of you a great deal, though you wont believe it, and resent being kept with my head on a platter, like some gigantic sow, when you are doing all the appalling drudgeries. I daresay you only snatch a bite and sleep on boards. D’you know, I believe I like you better and better? Feelings arise in me, such as I have not had for long.

I keep thinking that you ought to be an independent man, doing things, instead of wasting your life—but you’ll be bored by this.

A good many parcels have come for you; your novel etc; but nothing to forward.

Shot [her dog] is melancholy. Do if you can, stay over the weekend. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t.

Its blowing great guns, and we are now going down to the Post Office.

Dearest Mongoose, I wish you would believe how much I am grateful and repentant. You have made me so happy.

Yr old M.

Are you going to see Col. Banister [unidentified]? How are you?

Sussex

[]

682: To Leonard Woolf

Sunday [December ? 1913]

Asheham House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Immundus Mongoosius Felicissimus, I could write this letter in beautiful silver Latin, but then the scurvy little heap of dusty fur could not read it. Would it make you very conceited if I told you that I love you more than I have ever done since I took you into service, and find you beautiful, and indispensable? I am afraid that is the truth.

Goodbye Mongoose, and be a devoted animal, and never leave the great variegated creature. She wishes me to inform you delicately that her flanks and rump are now in finest plumage, and invites you to an exhibition. Kisses on you dear little pate. Darling Mongoose.

Mandril

Sussex

[]

Letters 683-707 (January-July 1914)

683: To Leonard Woolf

Wednesday [7 January 1914]

Asheham, Rodmell [Sussex]

Dearest,

Owing to curiosity I opened this letter. Old [Edmund] Haynes shows some sense.

Nothing has happened—Very fine—very cold. Ka, I suppose, is striding over the downs at this moment.

Dont you think it might be a good thing to go and see Arnold, and ask about the V. in J?

It’ll be very nice to see you again, I had your letter. O my dear little beast, I do think we care for each other.

Are you going to see your mother?

I must take this to the post.

yr M.

Sussex

[]

684: To Violet Dickinson

Thursday [15? January 1914]

Asheham, Rodmell [Sussex]

My Violet

I was just writing to thank for the shoes when the jersey turned up. You couldnt have sent anything more timely.

There is a bitter wind directly one gets out beyond the trees.

It was good of you.

The boots are wonderful. They seem to send warmth all through.

I wish you’d ever send the name of a good book on a card if you happen to hear of one.

Yr V.W.

Berg

[]

685: To Lytton Strachey

[17 January 1914]

Asheham, Rodmell [Sussex]

Would you be very kind and send me your articles, which I think you have bound together? I will be very careful, and return them. I am reading Lord Lytton, and I think you wrote one upon him, and the others I’d like to read too.

V.W.

Frances Hooper

[]

686: To Janet Case

[22? January 1914]

Asheham House, Rodmell [Sussex]

My dear Janet,

This is in the first place to thank you for the tulips which enliven even this bitter cold day. But really I want to thank you for the pleasure which you gave by your visit. It was a delight—and makes me wish again that you’d come long ago! But still—I eat up the black and doubtful pieces of meat in memory—

I wonder how Bristol went. What news is there to give you? Bitter cold—and the great excitement now impending of a visit to Seaford.

Thank you again for coming. It was a real pleasure.

your affate
V.W.

Sussex

[]

687: To Lytton Strachey

Jan. 29th [1914]

Asheham, Rodmell [Sussex]

The one volume of essays has arrived—I still await the second—But this is really to ask you whether you have any manuscripts that want typewriting. I should very much like to do them if you have, supposing that you are not in a great hurry and it would save you 10d. a 1000. Can you lend us the Edinburgh [Review]?

V.W.

I’m ready to begin on typing now. I don’t altogether agree about Miss N. Is it true that you refused to do her? What a pity. I read nothing but biographies of statesmen—I wish you would recommend some.

Frances Hooper

[]

688: To Lytton Strachey

Feb. 7th [1914]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

I shall be delighted to do [type] Esmeralda—and anything else chaste or otherwise.

We hear that Arnold is glad to publish the Wise Virgins, if L. will cut out some sentences—finds it gives “fresh proof of your power as a writer.”

Your second volume came this morning. Many thanks.

Frances Hooper

[]

689: To Violet Dickinson

[11? February 1914]

[Asheham, Rodmell, Sussex]

My Violet

It was very nice to get a letter from you—tho’ I find it hard to believe in the existence of Kitty [Maxse], or Nelly [Cecil] or Katie [Cromer].

Are you better?

Here, after a week of midsummer, it rains steadily. Leonard has gone to London to see Arnold about his book. Arnold is anxious to publish it, but the question is what L’s. family will think.

We are starting a kitchen garden—with the hope one day of eating our own growing. Does this take long, and need great care? Any hints would be welcome, as there is no gardener. As to flowers, we have sown seeds in soap boxes filled with earth. Is this right?

We’re trying hard to find a houseparlour maid.

It will be such a mercy to get rid of nurses and all this ridiculous nonsense. Leonard will I hope get a holiday soon. Nessa was here the other day, with several fans which she was painting, and rugs she was designing. Have you been to the Omega? What do you think of it?

I suppose you dont know a man and wife who’d do for us.

Yr V.W.

Berg

[]

690: To Violet Dickinson

[18 February? 1914]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

My Violet,

You’re very good to write—But you mustn’t enclose cheques.

We are not really very hard up, at this moment—If we ever are, I promise that we will come to you—anyhow its extraordinarily nice of you to think of it. I hope that we shall now lead an economical life—no nurses, and weekly books fairly low.

Did I tell you Arnold has accepted Leonards new novel?—and the Village in the Jungle has done very well.

I see Clives book [Art] announced—

Not much happens here, except adventures with the dogs and cats, who seem to feel the Spring in their bones, and behave according.

Are you recovered? I’ve got a funny old picture of you, taken by Beresford—d’you remember?

Yr V.W.

Berg

[]

691: To Leonard Woolf

[7 March 1914]

Asheham House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

Dearest,

Everything all right—very quiet—pouring rain most of the time since you left.

Janet works at Womens Suffrage—I read Clive, very laboriously, so as to be able to argue with you. At present, I’m inclined to think it good—anyhow very clear and brisk.

I must stop as Janet waits and the dogs are frantic.

How are you?

Yr. M.

Sussex

[]

692: To Violet Dickinson

[7? March 1914]

Asheham House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

My Violet,

The gardening things are very tempting, and just come at the right moment. But you shower too many gifts, and the next parcel will have to be burnt unopened.

We’re planting vegetables, but have to war with fowls, and now a fold of ewes about to bring forth young. Leonard is in London, and Janet Case is here, who wishes me to send her love. She sits over the fire concocting lectures upon Divorce, Woman Suffrage, and Moral Hygiene.

Yr V.W.

By the way, I wish you’d let me do typing of any kind for you.

Berg

[]

693: To Leonard Woolf

Sunday morning [8 March 1914]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest,

If you could have seen my sorrow after you went you would have had no doubts about my affection. My darling old beast—I do wonder how you got on.

We walked—our only excitement being that Mike [dog] ran out of the house at tea time, and wasn’t back by bedtime, so that we had to go to the farm to ask for him—About eleven he appeared—from where we dont know. Otherwise all right.

I’m now waiting to begin porridge. Janet [Case] very nice and very moral.

Make Lytton take care of you—and stay in bed if your head aches, and dont get into long arguments but rest your poor pate.

I sent on Bella’s [Leonard’s sister] wire.

Old Mandril does want her master so badly and last night his empty bed was so dismal, and she went and kissed the pillow.

Yr. M.

Sussex

[]

694: To Leonard Woolf

Monday [9 March 1914]

Asheham House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

Dearest Honey,

I was glad of your letter this morning—It has poured practically ever since you left, and is now driving across the house, so that we cower over the fire, reading and gossiping. I shall take this letter to the post, and exercise the dogs. Three is a fair handful, but there have been no adventures, save two sharp quarrels between Mike and Shot. I dont like Mike—

Lord! I dont much envy you with such great intellects on either side of you. However, Norton is really nice—and I hope they cossett you, my pet brute.

By the way I gave Janet your Pearl Fisher story to real—and found her in tears! She thought it very beautiful and impressive, and says you must publish it. What else is there to tell you?

I’m really very cheerful—in spite of the fact that Cascara [a laxative] has failed to work the 2nd day running.

I suppose you read Roger on Clive in the Nation—I also suppose you discuss that book a good deal—But there’s not much point in one’s friends praises—poor old Roger—so humble and appreciative and eager that people should take Clive seriously.

I hope you get out, and to bed, and have some good weather. I’ve done Leicester, and am half way through Bradford. Any gossip gratefully received.

Love from Janet, who says we’re having a very nice time.

Be careful, and come home cured to your dear Brute, and we shall have a happy spring. J. says “V. is a model of virtue, discretion, and reasonableness” Ha ha!

Yr. M.

Tell Lytton I shall start his work tomorrow when my typewriter comes back.

Sussex

[]

695: To Leonard Woolf

Tuesday [10 March 1914]

Asheham House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

Dearest Honey,

There is not much news—but no news is good news—isnt that a fine sentence for the great Brute.

I’m glad you’re staying on with Lytton, and if your head improves with him you must be recovering.

Janet went this morning, and Ka arrived 10 minutes before she went, so I haven’t had a minute alone. Ka is very nice, full of people she’s seen—Publishing is over for the present, and she’s looking about for a new job. Arnold would take her but she thinks him such a bore that she wont.

O the dogs are uproarious! Shot crashed through the drawing room window this morning, but didnt cut himself wonderful to say. Mrs. Bedford [cook] departed; a man came in a motor car, very smart, from Brighton to say that the typewriter will cost 10/- to repair, or £2.10. to do thoroughly, or they would give me a new one for £12.10. Meanwhile they have lent me a new one until the repairs are done, in the hope I suppose that I shall buy. It is a marvellous machine, with every kind of dodge, and I shall do Lytton’s story on it. I wish he’d send me some more.

How are you, my pet beast? Your old Mandril cries so pathetically when it crawls into its straw, and sees your basket empty.

Yr. M.

Sussex

[]

696: To Leonard Woolf

Wednesday [11 March 1914]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest,

It is now beautiful and sunny, and all the lambs are out in the field.

I had your 2 letters this morning, which was very nice.

The new cook [Annie] came last night, and she seems friendly and easy, and of course her cooking is at present very good. And now the prostitute is arriving, and Ellen [maid] is gone. So I feel settled in. I’ve been typing Lyttons story—and now we’re going to the post.

I do hope you’re better. Once your head is right it’ll stay right. I get no letters now that you’re away. But I’m good and cheerful, though I should like to cuddle my dear little creature in my arms.

Is Lytton nice? or pernickety?

Yr. M.

Sussex

[]

697: To Leonard Woolf

Thursday [12 March 1914]

[Asheham, Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest,

You are certainly not to come back here until Wednesday next—It really would be foolish to cut short your time. A day or two more will make all the difference. I’m very cheerful, very good, so there’s no need for you—(I own I should like to have you to kiss, my dear little beast, and its very flat without you). O dear, you don’t realise what a difference you make.

Ka is very nice, but as slow headed as an old cow. This household will be in apple pie order by the time you come back.

Lily has cleaned our room so that its like a new pin. She seems very nice, and they both say they like the place.

If I were you I’d stay all the time with Lytton. Its really more of a rest—and I wouldn’t go to Bella at all this time. You could go to her for a week end later. Must you go to Kettering? There’s no news, except that I want you, and love you more than you’d expect, and its very dull without you.

Yrs. M.

Sussex

[]

698: To Leonard Woolf

Friday [13 March 1914]

Asheham House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

Dearest,

I had a good long letter from you today. Is your head really better, and keeping better, and do you tell me the truth, or rather improve upon it? Dont: but be my honest Beast—for which quality indeed, I bought you.

Do you want to go to Bella—however, its no use asking, since you’re already with her.

I enclose a letter from Arnold, which I thought might be the Times proof.

Ka went this morning—Janet arrived. Margaret [Llewelyn Davies] you’ll be glad to hear, is quite recovered, and welcomed the Labour leaders at the Docks. Otherwise, I dont think I’ve any news—except that I want very much to see you—and love every fur on your dear little thin fleasome body (you know Mongoose was a fleay beast, and I see that Scarlet fever depends greatly upon fleas.)

The taupe is a marvel of consideration. I forgot to tell you that he praised the Village highly.

Love to Bella, and a kiss for M’s snout.

Yr. M.

Sussex

[]

699: To Leonard Woolf

Saturday [14 March 1914]

Asheham House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

Dearest,

It was nice to see your little cramped claw this morning. I do hope Bella’s over the influenza and not infectious.

Here it rains more or less steadily, and the downs are hidden in white mist. Perhaps Birmingham’s better, but you certainly didn’t get a good week for your holiday.

You see this card from [J. C.] Squire. I’ve looked in your room for the article, but dont see it. Wire if I can take steps.

We go on our way placidly. The cook is really a great improvement—she makes very good bread—and the whole house is much cleaner and nicer. Lily is a real servant in the way of brushing ones clothes etc.

All the morning I typewrite—then read your Co.op: books, and make futile notes I expect.

Do come back a brisk well mongoose, with a feather in your cap.

My pet, you would never doubt my caring for you if you saw me wanting to kiss you, and nuzzle you in my arms. After all, we shall have a happy life together now, wont we?

Yr. M.

Sussex

[]

700: To Leonard Woolf

[16 March 1914]

Asheham House, Rodmell, Lewes[Sussex]

Dearest,

I dont know whether this will reach you—in any case its only a line, to catch the post.

We go on very smoothly—really its delightful to be so clean and sweet again—The servants are really good. You’ll be amused to hear that the cook’s young man is in the Newhaven Co.op: Says they work him very hard. To balance cleanliness, the dogs have begun to wet the stairs—An elm at the back was blown down. To our great excitement.

I am glad you’re better in the head—I love your little ribby body, my pet. Dont get too tired.

Yr. M.

Sussex

[]

701: To Janet Case

[20? March 1914]

Asheham House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

My dear Janet,

It’s all very well to get rid of you, but then you turn up practically every morning in one way or another. Please, for Gods sake, Hell take you, dont send anything more—nevertheless, I’m very grateful—what a bother buying things for other people is—and you a busy woman. I’ll keep everything—The gaiters fit perfectly—the knickerbockers I can never remember to try on, as they have taken lodgment in the drawing room. And then there’s your hot bottle, off which a label has come.

Leonard is better, according to him, and to me too. In fact I think if only I can behave now, he will soon be quite right. [Dr Maurice] Craig gave him a new medicine, and said he would get well if he was sensible. He’s now fixed his mind upon weighing eleven stones, and so he certainly will.

By occupying myself with typewriting and Co-operative manuals, I keep cheerful, which I see does more to inspirit L. than anything else, and induces submission (on my part).

I gave Nessa your messages. She replied that she hoped to see you, and that Vanessa is equivalent to Janet.

The items of our life, as Mrs Bedford says, are various. As to dogs, I was met by a gamekeeper from the next farmer, who said Max and Shot had been ranging the hills all morning alone, and would have to be punished. We seriously think we must get rid of one—as they’re not to be trusted even in the garden—I also had a conversation with Annie [cook], about Gunn [local bailiff] and gentlemen visitors generally, feeling the greatest humbug; and ruled that Gunn should only visit once a fortnight, and the friend also—which she took with amazing docility, in fact I believe they like rules.

No one else would draw upon herself such details as these—but then you have your reward in being yourself, which must be so heavenly. Think of waking in the morning and finding oneself Janet!

Well—anyhow you’ve done a great deal to put us on our feet, I feel. I really think L. is better and happier.

What a table and what beds you keep! Three sorts of marmalade, porridge like cream, biscuits in a box by the pillow—these stories have urged me to begin making petticoats for all our washstands.

Yr. affate
V.W.

A cheque will follow—if you will add up these sums.

| £. | s. | d.
Hot Bottle |  | ? | ?
Knickerbockers |  | ? | ?
Gaiters |  | 5. | 9.

Please make Miss Emphie understand how much I thank her for letting you come, and I do realise what a piece of work it is to duty as Pest 2 weekends.

Sussex

[]

702: To Clive Bell

Friday [20? March 1914]

Asheham House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

My dear Clive,

I ought to have thanked you before for sending me your book [Art], considering that I read it through at once, and enjoyed it very much—I liked the chapters of theory more than the historical chapters, which seem to me too much of a generalisation—and sometimes perhaps too smart, and of course there are a great many things I dont agree with, where I understand. But its great fun, and full of ideas and I suppose will put people’s backs up like cats on a roof at night—but all this you will enjoy. What do the reviews say?

yrs V.W.

Quentin Bell

[]

703: To Molly Maccarthy

[early April 1914]

Asheham House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

Dearest Molly,

What a treat to get a letter from you! I wish it were possible to make a contract by which you should write once a month regularly. Perhaps when all your bothers have cleared up, you will. I do hope they’re better. Well, I envy you all your bothers and your monkey life and the banderlogging etc—which is after all more normal than a life of milk, green fields, early bed, and contemplation. However its beginning to be very nice here, and I’m trying to titivate the house. We’ve let it to Keynes for a reading party next week, and we go off to Cornwall, while they’re here. Perhaps you will see them. I gather they are to be mostly Apostles.

By the way—we’ve been getting into hot water with the farmers over Shot. He is beautiful and charming, but we cant stop him from hunting, so do you think you could possibly negotiate for the people he came from to take him back? This seems very ungracious, and he’s so charming that it is a great blow to part from him—but it seems the only thing to do. If you would give me the address I’d write.

Its very like living at the bottom of the sea being here—one sometimes hears rumours of what is going on overhead—reconciliations with Ottoline and so on. But oh dear, it is awful to be such a fool!

Do you think you’ll retire to the country! Perhaps we shall meet some day—if you’re still at Ford when we get back—It would be very nice.

Give love to Desmond,
yrs. V.W.

Do you remember the wonderful poetess in the conservatory at Freshwater?

Mrs Michael MacCarthy

[]

704: To Violet Dickinson

[mid-April 1914]

Carbis Bay Hotel, Carbis Bay, Cornwall

My Violet,

I ought to have thanked you for the book before—but it came as we were starting for this place—He’s a queer card—no one less likely to write a romantic book about trees exists, I should think—

We are in great luck for weather, and we’ve been rambling over our old haunts—We crept into Talland House itself yesterday, and found it wonderfully done up and spick and span, and all the garden brimming with flowers and rock gardens—very unlike what it was in our day.

I wonder where you are? and is your garden wonderful now? Nessa is at Asheham—or was—People all round me are talking golf—Thank you very much for your book. I wear your jacket daily.

Yr V.W.

Berg

[]

705: To Violet Dickinson

[27 April 1914]

Godrevy, Carbis Bay, Cornwall

My Violet,

We have been moving about from one lodging to another. Its amazing weather here, and we’ve just been to some races, in the middle of the hills. As to Nina Lamb, I think she is by this time a professional mistress. She has lived with various people. Last time I saw her she was in company with a little creature Adrian used to know—but I heard the other day that she had taken a house at Hammersmith, and was living with some one else.

I believe she’s rather nice and pretty—but without any morals.

She began life in Manchester—her mother being apparently in the same line of life. She had a little money of her own, and she used to wander about London and Manchester (where a club was formed to protect her virtue) until she became H. Lamb’s mistress, and then his wife. They separated soon after that, and when we were in Paris a year or two afterwards she was a well known character.

However, I dont think she’s wanting, and she certainly was amazingly pretty. I think she moves from person to person—I could write pages of her adventures, because she used to appear at intervals with amazing stories of her doings, which were partly invented, but I think she was very attractive to a good many people.

Yr V.W.

We go back to Asheham on the 1st.

Berg

[]

706: To Violet Dickinson

June 2nd [1914]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

My Violet,

It was very nice to hear from you—We shall be here till August when we think of going to Northumberland, letting this to the Bells.

Leonard is hard at work—reviewing for the Times and the New Statesman—my occupation is to renovate this house which is falling down, wilting and fading in every direction—but much can be done by polish.

I’m very sorry about Lord Cromer—but nothing appears in the papers. Is he very bad? Our excitement is a motor lorry overturned yesterday in our field—running away down hill and throwing 4 people over—but one only hurt.

Yr V.W.

Berg

[]

707: To Violet Dickinson

[June 1914]

Asheham House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

My Violet,

I’m afraid we can’t come on Saturday, as we’re only just back from an extravagant visit to London—but perhaps you would come here, either then or some other time.

Leonard sends you his love.

Yr V.W.

Berg

[]

Letters 708-716 (August-December 1914)

708: To Vanessa Bell

Monday [3 August 1914]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest,

Would it be possible for you to let us have half the rent—£15—before we go away? I’m afraid this sounds like poor relations, but we’ve got very little balance, and, if war breaks out, we shall probably be in difficulties for ready money. Of course, dont bother, if you are in the same state. We can always give up going to Northumberland, and stay here till you come, and so save railway fares etc.

We are just (4. P.M.) off to Lewes to get a paper. There were none at breakfast this morning, but the postman brought rumours that 2 of our warships were sunk—however, when we did get papers we found that peace still exists—save for a stop press message that England has joined in. It is rather like Napoleonic times I daresay, and being Bank holiday of course makes us more remote from life than ever.

The only difference here is that a great many special trains are being run to take English people off the boats from France; and there are no boat trains from Victoria. Duncan went off yesterday, hoping that war would make yachting impossible. Your jewels have not come yet.

It was a vision of pleasure to see you; I’ve thought of you 50 times each day—in fact you may be said to be a kind of running bass.

We shall come up on Thursday I suppose. I do adore thee.

Yr B.

Berg

[]

709: To Katherine Cox

Aug. 12th [1914]

The Cottage Hotel, Wooler, Northumberland

My dear Ka,

We’ve been having an argument as to whether you really went to Ireland or not—so I write to find out, though it seems as unlikely as possible that you will ever get this letter. It is thought that you are probably doing service somewhere, either as a nurse, or part of the military. I never felt anything like the general insecurity. We left Asheham a week ago, and it was practically under martial law. There were soldiers marching up and down the line, and men digging trenches and it was said that Asheham barn was to be used as a hospital. All the people expected an invasion—Then we went through London—and oh Lord! what a lot of talk there was! Roger, of course, had private information from the Admiralty, and had been seeing the German Ambassadress [Princess Lichnowsky], and Clive was having tea with Ottoline, and they talked and talked, and said it was the end of civilisation, and the rest of our lives was worthless. I do wish you would write and tell us what you hear—They say there must be a great battle, and here, where we are 15 miles from the North Sea, they expect to be in the midst of it, but then so they did at Seaford.

Your future is practically blasted, because you will be on 20 different committees. The very earnest and competent are already coming to town, with their practical habits—but I never could see the use of committees.

We have struck about the most beautiful country I’ve ever seen here. Except that it has no sea, I think it is better than Cornwall—great moors, and flat meadows with very quick rivers. We are in an Inn full of north country people, who are very grim to look at, but so up to date that one blushes with shame. They discuss Thomson’s poetry, and post impressionism, and have read everything, and at the same time control all the trade in Hides, and can sing comic songs and do music hall turns—in fact the Bloomsbury group was stunted in the chrysalis compared with them—But why did you never prepare me for the Scotch dialect, and the melodious voice which makes me laugh whenever I hear it?

Leonard is very well, I think, and gets a lot of information from the merchants.

We shall be here a fortnight anyhow.

A letter would be a great treat.

Yrs V.W.

Have you settled about publishing?

Mark Arnold-Forster

[]

710: To Molly Maccarthy

Thursday [1 October 1914]

Asheham House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

Dearest Molly,

You can’t think what a difference it makes when one returns to life to find you and Desmond waiting for one. You have been such a delight and comfort.

Here we are once more, and it’s so lovely and fresh on a beautiful autumn day that we regret having let it and London seems a boiling cauldron. And this morning we hear that our charming £40 a year Twickenham house is almost certainly let which is a great blow. Heaven knows how we are to find another in 10 days, but still, one always does manage. Sydney Street is too grimy and noisy I suppose.

It was very bad luck to come in 10 minutes after Desmond went the other night. Please give him our love and tell him I am sending back a parcel of his books.

Well, wherever we do settle, do please come and see us, as often as you can. It was so nice to come and see you again.

Your affectionate
V.W.

I am sending a few relics of flowers—but don’t write—they are only scraps.

Mrs Michael MacCarthy

[]

711: To Lytton Strachey

[8 December 1914]

The Lacket, Lockeridge, Marlborough

Dear Lytton,

We have both enjoyed ourselves very much here. It has been perfect in every way. Except for the house decoration and choice of books (a little heavy, don’t you think) and the weather too has been bad but not bad enough to keep us indoors. It is evidently magnificent country—to my thinking better—at least more solid—than Sussex—but L. don’t agree. The cooking—the food—the discreet old lady [Mrs Templeton] who is as noiseless as an elephantine kind of mouse—all have been perfect. Shall you come and see us again?

Many thanks
Yr. V.W.

In spite of great temptation, your letters remain virgin.

Frances Hooper

[]

712: To Margaret Llewelyn Davies

Wednesday Dec. 9 [1914]

17 The Green, Richmond

Dear Margaret,

It was very good of you to write. I had a feeling that you were coming here somehow under false pretences—however, I can’t explain it and it isn’t worth explaining—anyhow, I don’t feel that now.

I never see you without thinking of all that we once had—for Arthur and Theodore seem to belong to it so much—and so do you—and you are different from other people because of that.

Do come on Friday—only when? Leonard thinks you mean Friday night,—we have to go out to a Chelsea evening but if its teatime, that will suit perfectly.

The Sidney Webbs ask us to dinner about once a week, and Leonard has got to go tomorrow, though it sounds too dismal. They’ve clawed him for a huge job—but he’ll tell you about it.

He says he will give the lectures, but wants to ask what sort of thing you want.

Do publish those letters. I wish they could all be in full.

Yrs. V.W.

Sussex

[]

713: To Clive Bell

9th Dec. [1914]

17 The Green, Richmond

Dear Clive,

Would you mind lending me the first two volumes of your Michelets history? I noticed that you had it. I can only get it in a miserable small type at the London Library. However, I well understand horror at lending books, so dont bother if you’d rather not.

I also noticed that you have No. 11 in the red edition of Ibsen—which is missing from our set. Is it possible that someone staying at Asheham, took it away with them? You seemed only to have odd volumes, so I thought it possible.

Yrs V.W.

Nessa said she’d ring us up. Someone has been ringing up, while we were away—If its her, wd you say we’re generally out this week till about 4.30.

Quentin Bell

[]

714: To Janet Case

10th Dec. [1914]

17 The Green, Richmond

My Dear Janet,

It was only the other day that I suddenly said to myself “Janet will soon be ill”—and here it is. If you remember, I also foretold the murder of the Archduke, and the death of Mrs R. L. Stevenson, so its not surprising. But how very foolish of you, and I can quite imagine the blouse and petticoat dodge: though I also remember something about doing things thoroughly while one’s about them. Please do—you are so much more worth keeping going than almost anyone. You should hear Leonard and me going through your merits—and we are both very scathing as a rule: you would blush, I hope.

However, my views of humanity are changing, since I spent yesterday cooking at an institution in Victoria Street. The charm of the young English-woman is inconceivable. She has eyes like a dogs, and a great plait down her back, and she is really stupider than I am, but so adorable. Why did you never tell me that?

At one end of the room are sailors, and then there are a few greyheaded ladies of great culture and refinement, dabbling in the insides of chickens, and some very smart, come to improve their knowledge of dinner party soup. I distinguished myself by cooking my wedding ring into a suet pudding! Its really great fun.

Annie (our cook) is coming to the Garden City [Hampstead] in a few days. Might she call on your maids? But dont bother about that now—In fact, please do nothing but get well. I shall certainly come when you’re better, but its foolish to be seeing outsiders now.

Have you read Thomas Hardy’s new poems? They’re quite the most beautiful things I’ve read since—certainly since Meredith—Shall I send you them? Also Arnold Bennetts Price of Love [1914] is good—but I daresay you dont want books.

Only get well.

Yrs. aff.
V.W.

Sussex

[]

715: To Clive Bell

13th December [1914]

17 The Green, Richmond

My Dear Clive,

(You will be bored by these perpetual demands)—We rather think of spending a week at Marlborough at Christmas if possible in lodgings—I seem to remember that you once told me of some in the High Street, or other pleasant part. If you could put the name on a postcard, we shd. be grateful as lodgings are so much better than Inns. It seemed divine country.

Yr V.W.

Quentin Bell

[]

716: To Molly Maccarthy

15th December [1914]

17 The Green, Richmond

Dearest Molly,

It would be most delightful to see you. We shall go off, I think, for a week at Christmas; so come either before that, or afterwards. I think Windsor is on the Richmond line—at the same time its amazingly easy to reach from most parts of London. I don’t know where Berkely Gardens is, but I expect near some tube or underground. And we are about 3 minutes from the Station, this end. If you would ring us up, we are always in in the mornings.

I’ve just been taking a course of cookery lessons, at an institution in Victoria St.

I do hope you’re going to have Rachel taught plain cooking and needlework, as well as Icelandic and Portuguese. It is dreadful how we were neglected, and yet its not hard to be practical, up to a point, and such an advantage, I hope.

Yes, that damnable book is coming out. To my great relief, I find that though long and dull, still one sentence more or less follows another, and I had become convinced that it was pure gibberish.

We heard tell of Desmond, in various parts of London, as one hears of a shooting star, or an aeroplane. I do hope he’s well, and not seeing things that will haunt his pillow for years.

Have you had a horrid winter? I must say I think you are the most unselfish and adventurous woman I know.

Yr. loving,
V.W.

Mrs Michael MacCarthy

[]

Letters 717-738 (January-December 1915)

717: To Duncan Grant

[3 January 1915]

17 The Green, Richmond

My dear Duncan,

What hellish luck—to miss you—and all for the sake of a Queens Hall concert, where the patriotic sentiment was so revolting that I was nearly sick. We were so late that we had tea in London—And there was a delicious tea here, which you ought to have taken for yourself, of honey and Cornish cream. You would have been made to stay, however, and help entertain a Jewess, who is now upon us, and I’ve not changed yet.

Will you come again? Any day to tea, if you’ll say which. Please do. It was really abominable to find your note when I got back—

Yrs V.W.

Richard Shone

[]

718: To Lytton Strachey

[early January 1915]

17 The Green, Richmond

Here is the book, which I hope will help the birth of many more Victorian lives. I have seldom enjoyed myself more than I did last night, reading Manning. In fact, I couldn’t stop, and preserved some pages only by force of will to read after dinner. It is quite superb—It is far the best thing you have ever written, I believe—To begin with, what a miracle it is that such a group should have existed—and then how divinely amusing and exciting and alive you make it. I command you to complete a whole series: you can’t think how I enjoy your writing.

Yr. V.W.

Frances Hooper

[]

719: To Thomas Hardy

17th Jan. 1915

17 The Green, Richmond

Dear Mr Hardy,

I have long wished to tell you how profoundly grateful I am to you for your poems and novels, but naturally it seemed an impertinence to do so. When however, your poem to my father, Leslie Stephen, appeared in Satires of Circumstance this autumn, I felt that I might perhaps be allowed to thank you for that at least. That poem, and the reminiscences you contributed to Professor [F. W.] Maitland’s Life of him [1906], remain in my mind as incomparably the truest and most imaginative portrait of him in existence, for which alone his children should be always grateful to you.

But besides this one would like to thank you for the magnificent work which you have already done, and are still to do. The younger generation, who care for poetry and literature, owe you an immeasurable debt, and in particular for your last volume of poems which, to me at any rate, is the most remarkable book to appear in my lifetime.

I write only to satisfy a very old desire, and not to trouble you to reply.

Believe me
Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Trustees of the Hardy Memorial Collection, Dorset County Museum, Dorchester

[]

720: To Janet Case

Tuesday [26 January 1915]

17 The Green, Richmond

My dear Janet,

What a damnable bore it all is! We are so sorry about Emphie [Case] and the Cook. Do you get any food? Do you stay in bed? Does anyone look after you? I shall come tomorrow about 5, and try to investigate. If you don’t want to see me, you needn’t—but influenza germs have no power over me, and Leonard has been sitting with an influenza patient without any bad results.

I wish you’d take me on as your cook. I’m sure I could manage perfectly, and I should like handling all those blue plates.

I feel a selfish desire as usual to see you, and get purified from a debauch of gossip.

Leonard came back from you the other day wondering whether you would let him come regularly and read to you—which he would love to do, for the sake of being with you—Would you like it, I wonder, or anything we could think of?

I do hope Emphie’s not got it badly. Give her our love.

Yrs. aff. V.W.

Just got this letter from Thomas Hardy! I wrote to thank him for his poem about father—Will you keep it for me.

Sussex

[]

721: To Margaret Llewelyn Davies

22nd Feb [1915]

17 The Green, Richmond

My dear Margaret,

I wrote to Gerald [Duckworth] about the letters and here is his answer, (which I don’t want back). We are sending them, and Leonard will go and see him if he wants to be seen. I do hope they will be printed—with lots of photographs. They are so amazing.

Have you heard about our Printing Press? We’re both so excited that we can talk and think of nothing else, and I think there’s chance of damaging the Webb influence irretrievably, (which is my ambition in life). Presses only cost £17.17, and can be worked easily.

By the way—is there any chance that you have got the works of William Morris—and if so, would you lend me one called “The Pilgrims of Hope”. There was a review of it in the Times last week and it sounds magnificent, but I can’t get it at the Library. It came out in 1885-6 in the Commonweal, and has only been reprinted in America—but possibly you took in the Commonweal.

I do hope you’ll come and see us often in our house—Hogarth House—Its far the nicest house in England—and it would be so nice to see you there.

Your affate,
V.W.

Of course don’t answer if you haven’t got the Morris.

Sussex

[]

722: To Margaret Llewelyn Davies

Thursday [25 February 1915]

17 The Green, Richmond

My dear Margaret,

Thank you so much for troubling about the Morris. I shd. very much like to see it.

I want just to tell you how wonderfully things have changed in the last few days. I am now all right though rather tired. It is so wonderful that I can hardly believe it.

And I wanted to say that all through that terrible time I thought of you, and wanted to look at a picture of you, but was afraid to ask! You saved Leonard I think, for which I shall always bless you, by giving him things to do. It seems odd, for I know you so little, but I felt you had a grasp on me, and I could not utterly sink. I write this because I do not want to say it, and yet I think you will like to know it. Our happiness now is something I cannot even think about.

Please come. We have given up the [G. B.] Shaws, and Saturday afternoon about 4 would suit me. I cant do much but lie still, but I should like immensely to see you and gossip about Madame Tournier and other friends.^

Dear Margaret, I so often think of you, and thank you for what you have done for us both, and one cd. do nothing to show what it meant.

Yrs. V.W.

I wanted to tell Janet what I have told you but Leonard thought better not. Her goodness was so great.

Sussex

[]

723: To Lytton Strachey

Friday [26 February 1915]

17 The Green [Richmond]

Dearest Lytton,

This is just to say that I am now well again and it is very wonderful, but I dont want to talk about it. I should like to see you. I wonder where you are. I want oceans of gossip. Ottoline’s teeth for instance—has she got new ones?

Also a bright idea strikes me. Let us all subscribe to buy a Parrot for Clive. It must be a bold primitive bird, trained of course to talk nothing but filth, and to indulge in obscene caresses—the brighter coloured the better. I believe we can get them cheap and gaudy at the Docks.

The thing is for us all to persuade him that the love of birds is the last word in Civilisation—You might draw attention, to begin with, to the Pheasants of Saxby, which heard the guns on the North Sea before the Parson did—We must interest him in birdlife of all forms; he has already a pair of Zests [Zeiss] glasses. The advantages of the plan are in the first place that Vanessa, in his absence, could put the Parrot in the basement, or cover the cage with a towel—and secondly, he would very likely after a year or two, write another book on Birds—The fowl could be called Molly or Polly. I commend this to you: get subscriptions. I head the list with 6d.

I have to keep lying down, but I am getting better.

Our happiness is wonderful.

Your loving
V.W.

Berg

[]

724: To Margaret Llewelyn Davies

28 Feb 1915

[in Leonard’s handwriting]

17 The Green, Richmond

Dear Margaret,

Leonard is writing for me. Thank you for coming yesterday, when to have you there gave me extraordinary pleasure. I hope it did not tire you much. I meant to ask you for a photograph of yourself, as I am no longer afraid, and I look forward to the bread and the chocolate creams.

If you see Janet, would you give her my love and tell her that it is horrid that we should neither of us be able to move when I want to see her so much. Please come again.

V.

I write this in my own person. I think Virginia is decidedly a little better today. Your visit certainly did her good—she enjoyed it so much—and already last evening she felt more restful. It was so nice to see you.

Leonard

Sussex

[]

725: To Margaret Llewelyn Davies

2 March 1915

[in Leonard’s handwriting]

17 The Green, Richmond

Dear Margaret,

This letter is from Virginia. Thank you very much for the photographs. I have spent most of the morning looking at them, and I have come to the conclusion that the one with the japanese umbrella is one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen. However in case you should feel elated I must add that that is possibly due to the umbrella. (I am going to add three notes of exclamation to that sentence in order to show that it is a joke)

Did I tell you that I have decided to write all the novels of Mrs Humphry Ward and all the diaries of Mrs Sidney Webb? It will be my life work. (Leonard has not yet laughed at any of these jokes though I think them rather good)

But what I really want to tell you is that now I only see beautiful things, you and Janet and the downs. You must come to Asheham and we will sit and look at them.

V.

V. is still a little better I think. She would like so much to see you if you would come on Friday. Could you come to tea about 4-4.30 that day? I enclose a time table.

Leonard

Sussex

[]

726: To Margaret Llewelyn Davies

Tuesday [31 August 1915]

Postcard

[Hogarth House, Richmond]

Your letter still delights me. I take it up at intervals to get into closer touch with Madame T. But my dear Margaret, whats the use of my writing novels? You’ve got the whole thing at your fingers ends—and it will be envy not boredom that alienates my affections. I saw Forster, who is timid as a mouse, but when he creeps out of his hole very charming. He spends his time in rowing old ladies upon the river, and is not able to get on with his novel. Also I saw Ray Strachey, but alas, she makes me feel like a faint autumnal mist—she’s so effective, and thinks me such a goose. If I were allowed a proper sheet, I would now explain how it is that you are so much superior as a visitor, and in every other way, to the rest. Please write if ever you have time. The potted meat has a lovely jar. I have not begun to eat it yet. I havent got the Meredith poem.

Sussex

[]

727: To Lady Robert Cecil

[13 September 1915]

Postcard

Asheham House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

Dear Nelly,

I am only now allowed to write cards, and this is to thank you for your letter and to entreat another. We came have 2 days ago, and to my delight I am allowed short walks in a kind of nightgown, and then retire to a bed which overlooks, or looks up to the Downs; and perhaps the ridge on which you sit. It is so lovely that one walk gives me something to see for hours. O do write a book for me to read! I read everything, but one’s friends should certainly write novels. How are you, and what are you doing, and will you ask me to tea again someday? What has happened to your distinguished niece, Guendolen? and Beatrice Thynne? Your letter was such a delight; and with only one post a day I beg of you to sit down at once and reply, so that I may imagine you again. I often do think of you—you’ll be amused to hear.

V.

Hatfield

[]

728: To Lady Robert Cecil

29th Sept. [1915]

Asheham House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

My dear Nelly,

This is merely to inveigle you into writing again. I’m only allowed to write to the end of the page, which has a paralysing effect.

I rejoiced to hear of you following the zeppelin in a taxi; such it is to have the blue blood of England in one’s veins: my literary friends hide in cellars, and never walk at night without looking at the sky.

Your book must be about the aristocracy. I can’t think what to tell you about my life. It passes much like old Lady Baths, checked by Waterbury watches. Bed-walk-bed-walk-bed-sleep. The downs however change perpetually, even in this rain drift. Sometimes we have a troop of cavalry in our orchard—at others a bat in the drawing room. I try to paint and embroider, but these arts are so vapid after writing.

I am reading Mrs Gaskell. What a modest, capable woman! It is so cold my fingers move like dry twigs: the Beagle, our dog, has got inside the fender; I wish you would turn your motor car up our drive and bring word of the great world. However, this is a very pleasant one: swallows, rooks, thistledown, men thatching ricks. Do I never miss anyone? I am 33, and have decided that I am completely misunderstood. So please write again, and say how very nice I am—

Yr. aff. V.

Hatfield

[]

729: To Margaret Llewelyn Davies

Thursday [30 Sept 1915]

Asheham, Rodmell [Sussex]

I suppose, Miss Davies, you are full of good works as usual. Did you see your very warm review in the Times? Your Guild I find quoted everywhere.

The telegraphic style is needed as usual; only to the end of the page, Mrs Woolf, says Nurse. I am petrified with fear. Its odd how formidable you grow at a distance. The country makes one feel very pure—especially these cold autumn days. I have just drunk a large cup of hot cocoa: my fur cloak is over me, and my feet are wrapped in woollen jackets.

I am reading Latin, and French—and how I wish I could march round to an office and impose my will upon the mysterious Harris. How I envy you—partly your face, and partly your intellect.

I hear from Vanessa that old father Bell threatens complete rupture with Clive if he writes more in the style of the pamphlet. Vanessa is delighted, as she has her income safe, and need not stay with the Bells at Christmas! What a callous brood we are! I hear that Karin wants to remove Adrian from the U.D.C. as his work there is elementary. Lowes Dickinson wants Leonard to introduce him to the Webbs. A funny mixture. I still feel that Mrs Webb appreciates me more than old Ragbag LI. Davies does.

Now I must stop. I am so flourishing in health that I stop here more for your sake than for mine. Please write—but I suppose you are too busy. Hah Ha!

V.

Sussex

[]

730: To Vanessa Bell

[October 1915?]

[Asheham, Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest,

Here are two dismal letters which Madge [Vaughan] has sent me. I should rather like to keep Stella’s [Duckworth]—miserable though it is.

How are you? I have heard nothing since the appendicitis scare. I hope you are being sensible. I don’t see much chance of meeting at present, I’m afraid. My affairs have taken to coming back so that I scarcely go out. However I think they are now in hand.

The only news is that our hens lay eggs without shells. What does it mean?

Yr. B.

[in Leonard’s handwriting]

I am sending you a product of our garden.

LW

Berg

[]

731: To Lady Robert Cecil

14th Oct [1915]

Asheham, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

My dear Nelly,

This is to wake you to your sense of duty to an old, though humble, friend. It seems to me inevitable that you and Lord Robert will one of these days rule England, and I shall smuggle into your Receptions and hide behind the vast pyramids of orchids and peaches. What fun it will be! My idea is to become a waitress, for which only a neat black dress is needed. Have you my passion for seeing the splendours of the world? I don’t want to touch them or speak to them: as I’m afraid they would shiver. But I am often comforted to think that Lord Robert has some authority—

Leonard me Lloyd George the other day, and brought back a shocking account.

Here the time passes too quick. Do you feel that the days in October melt into each other, the night being almost indistinguishable from the day? We begin with mist and end with mist. We have about 5 hours of soft sunshine in the middle.

We have just made pounds of blackberry jam; now we are going to pick mushrooms, and we have a tree which spills walnuts over our garden. I have never got so much out of nature before.

I have just read Conrad’s book; with distant admiration, but no passion for his villains, who had much better shoot themselves, I think. And I have become rather bored by Sylvia’s Lovers—although the substance of it is very satisfactory. What I object to in the mid Victorians is their instinctive fluency—as if Mrs G. sat down to her writing with the cat on her knee—But the nurse will not let me explain my profound wisdom to you—nurses are strange beings—After all, some things are better worth having than flawless health—Perhaps its the mushrooms she’s after.

You must come to Hogarth one day—and sit in our small garden. It would be extraordinarily nice to see you again.

“A very long letter, Mrs Woolf?”

O—so now we must go out.

Yr. affate
V.W.

I am very nice—getting nicer with age, too.

Hatfield

[]

732: To Lytton Strachey

22nd Oct. [1915]

Asheham, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

Dear Lytton,

I think it is about time we took up our correspondence again. Surely you must have amassed a million adventures since we met. I can’t feel altogether sure that you still persist in the flesh—my friends—ah, but Sydney Waterlow tells me I have none. By God! What a bore that man is! I don’t know why exactly, but no one I’ve ever met seems to me more palpably second rate and now the poor creature resigns himself to it and proposes to live next door to us at Richmond and there copulate day and night and produce 6 little Waterlows. This house for a long time stank to me of dried semen. And its only a kind of mutton fat in his case. You see what straits we are reduced to.

I am really all right again, and weigh 12 stone!—three more than I’ve ever had, and the consequence is I can hardly toil uphill, but it’s evidently good for the health. I am as happy as the day is long, and look forward to being rid of the nurse soon (she is at present dusting the room, and arranging the books). We come up on the 5th; as the summer seems to have broken up.

I should think I had read 600 books since we met. Please tell me what merit you find in Henry James. I have disabused Leonard of him; but we have his works here, and I read, and can’t find anything but faintly tinged rose water, urbane and sleek, but vulgar, and as pale as Walter Lamb. Is there really any sense in it? I admit I can’t be bothered to snuff out his meaning when it’s very obscure. I am beginning the Insulted and Injured [Dostoevsky, 1862]; which sweeps me away. Have you read it. But this will not lead you (O God, how this woman annoys me with her remarks “The Dardanelles, Mrs Woolf, would they be in France?”) to think that I am spending long hours with my favourites, as Ott. used to say she delighted to do, in the long country days. Have you seen her? Have you seen anyone? What are you writing? Please lend us your last Edinburgh [Review] article. Leonard is writing so many different books—one for the morning, another for the afternoon. His life, so he said yesterday, is to be spent on a History of Diplomacy, but as the Webbs have their claws fixed in his entrails, I see no hope for him.

Nurse now thinks I must stop writing. I tell her I’m only scribbling to a relative, an elderly spinster, who suffers from gout, and lives on scraps of family news. “Poor thing!” says nurse. “Arthritis it is”, I remark. But it won’t do!

Yrs. V.W.

Frances Hooper

[]

733: To Lady Robert Cecil

25th Oct [1915]

Asheham, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

My dear Nelly,

Far be it from me to say pleasant things, for the mere sake of giving pleasure—you will acquit me of that I’m sure. No, it is purely selfish with a view to getting further letters; but certainly you are cut out for a correspondent: far the best of those that write to me.

Of course, having access to the great official world of the “people who count” according to Mrs Humphry Ward, it is comparatively easy for you to be witty, instructive, and well packed. By the way, I’ve just read Eltham House, by that old mangy hack; and I wonder what you’d say to it. It seems to me the writing of a woman who has been accidentally locked in to the housekeeper’s room of Longleat say for the past 20 years; and has done nothing but absorb family portraits and family plate. According to her, 12 people, all related, rule England. But its a vile book, and after gulping it down, I felt morally debased. My nurse however, is absorbed by it.

We are coming back to Hogarth House next week as the summer has toppled over, and the woods are ruined. For 6 days, the leaves flew past incessantly, and now only a few pure golden ones still hang, which is the loveliest time of all, though very muddy, for those elderly, like myself, who change their stockings.

Did I tell you that on part of the proceeds of the Voyage Out we went for a treat to Brighton; and had a delightful time—wandering into back streets full of most improper little shops, and past the great bow windows, where the old ladies and their pets were sunning themselves. I love seaside places, for about 6 hours. I wish you’d come with me some day. We had a grand luncheon.

How does Guendolen make out our relationship? I wish she’d tell me. I always mean to write a history of my Great Aunts, who are said in the family to have been incomparably beautiful and romantic, though I never heard of a Duke of Leeds.

Do you find any charms in the 1860’s? They seem—my mother’s family I mean—to float in a wonderful air—all a lie, I daresay, concocted because one forgets their kitchens and catching trains and so on. Still, they were beautiful anyhow, and French which used to make us so angry as children.

Leonard’s view of Lloyd George was only from the pit of a hall; but he thought his appearance and views all very shocking.

Please come out one day and see us—Its so far that I hardly like to suggest it—I suppose I shan’t be allowed to walk about in London much yet, though I’m ever so much stronger.

Yrs. V.W.

Hatfield

[]

734: To Margaret Llewelyn Davies

Nov. 2nd [1915]

Asheham, Rodmell [Sussex]

Dearest Margaret,

I wish you would thank the great and mysterious Harris for her pamphlet. The human brain is amazing—first to have invented such complications, then to understand them. She must be powerful, I see. Do you understand all that too?

We have been having the Shoves [Gerald and Fredegond] to stay with us. He edits War and Peace [magazine], and she is a poetess and brought her poems. They are going to retire to the country and write books, and they seemed very young and incompetent, and I was filled with pity for them. We gave them good advice. In particular, I urged her to join her Co-op stores, but I could not rouse her enthusiasm. I quite understand that the cultured, enthusiastic but utterly scatterbrained young must be very trying.

The weather has been vile lately, but very beautiful none the less, if Nurse didnt attach so much importance to wet feet.

We have got a new parlour maid, grey haired, about 45, with no visible attractions, but seems sensible in the house. Annie seems to wish to stay on.

It has been very nice here—a great deal of reading and wandering about on the Downs. Leonard, of course, writes away at Cooperation, and reviews so many books about the war that his brain ought to spin—but it doesnt. He has a whole shelf of odious mustard coloured volumes, with the Kaisers Head or Eagle on the back, which have to be tackled by degrees.

We are very happy, and both very much want to see you again. It is most delightful to think that you exist up at Hampstead, and I hope we may inveigle you to Richmond sometimes—No one is really (ah—but I mustn’t say ‘really’ according to you) quite so inspiriting to see, as you are—and thank God. Those flashing half hours won’t destroy us any more. (by which I mean that they were the saving of life to me but not to see you rush out of the room will be so pleasant)

Max is climbing over me, so I cannot write sense. Leonard who is scribbling away by my side, sends his love, and hopes to see you soon.

We come up on Thursday

Yr. V. W.

Sussex

[]

735: To Katherine Cox

Sunday [14? November 1915]

Hogarth House, Richmond

My dear Bruin Cox,

It seems a very long time since I saw your nice furry body. I think it is greatly to my credit that I have left you at peace for so long. However, as I shant want your services in the medical line for 10 years I hope, we really might meet I think.

I am afraid that all my friends are dead. Most it is true I dont miss at all—I rather like snuffing their graves when I go into London—Ottoline and such like, I mean. But I dont want poor Bruin dead just yet. I am often seriously alarmed when I hear that the zeppelins have been over London, but accounts from Sydney and Nessa prove that you never turn a hair, but merely take a look at them, put the cowards in the cellar, and then walk the streets till you’ve seen all the fires! Poor Sydney took it very differently, and was so much disturbed by the notion of dying, I suppose, and his own cowardice, that he never stopped analysing his character at Asheham—when it wasnt his character it was Hom’s [H. O. Meredith], which is rotting according to him. But I suppose all this sort of thing happens at your evenings—shall we be asked to them?

My difficulty is to find any clothes—my weight is 12 stones—Leonard says you weigh 13.10—but this I dont believe. Anyhow I’m very well, and enjoy sitting in this mound of flesh. I spend my spare time in bed, but I’m allowed out in the afternoons, and thank God the last Nurse is gone. I’m sure that the effort of keeping them going is a great strain on the nerves. We had to play cards every evening, but she was always beaten.

Are you still making socks for Queen Mary?—I make so many careers for you as I lie comfortably before the fire. I think you ought to knock down our present civilisation, with your great square head.

Will you dine with us one night? not to meet Walter Lamb this time. The house is really rather nice, or will be when I have done a few repairs.

L. sends love

Yr V.

Mark Arnold-Forster

[]

736: To Duncan Grant

Monday Nov. 15th [1915]

[Hogarth House, Richmond]

My dear Duncan,

I have always meant to ask you whether you left a coat and umbrella here last summer? There is nothing on them to prove it, but it has long been rumoured that they are yours.

I should very much like to hear from you an account of your doings, as it seems many a long age since I saw you. Someone said you had gone to Paris. I was meaning to call on you, but can’t remember your number. Paris I daresay is full of interest—the streets, so I read, given up to prostitutes turned patriotic. Shall you escape conscription? The revelation of what our compatriots feel about life is very distressing. One might have thought in peace time that they were harmless, if stupid: but now that they have been roused they seem full of the most violent and filthy passions. Are the French better? This I gather only from newspapers as we haven’t seen many people.

We are settled here again, and thank God, the last nurse is gone. So much of my energy went into making conversation that I feel better instantly. I am to be allowed to write, and gradually return to the world. However, I dont seem to know any of the young sparks who have sprung since my time. There is a man called Garnett, and one Montague, and another Allan, so I hear, and innumerable Miss Trees. I daresay they are more lively than we old creatures used to be. Lord! what a strain the Cambridge intellect used to be! Does Noel still exist, and the Stracheys? I hear from Sydney [Waterlow] that Gumbo [Marjorie Strachey] gives satisfaction in Manchester. He, poor man, has inadvertently begotten another child; and has no money, and therefore has taken a house in Gipsy Hill [S.E. London], where he is going to bury Mrs W: and her litter. The Zeppelins have frightened him away from London, and he lodges near us. The mange has attacked his head—a more depressing spectacle I have seldom seen.

I wish you’d come and see us. I should like to hear your views on many subjects. Richmond is certainly the place to live in, partly because London then becomes so full of romance. I am going up to the dentist this afternoon, and then I shall wander through the streets till I find a good place to have tea in, and then I shall read my newspapers, and find the way to the Underground. I suppose middle age makes one want only simple pleasures. How old are you? How is Aunt Hen?—(I’m sure she’ll be murdered one of these days)

May I come to tea with you one day when you get back?

Yrs V.W.

Duncan Grant

[]

737: To Margaret Llewelyn Davies

[25 November 1915]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dearest Margaret,

Far from being tired I was, as usual, much refreshed by you, but going home I thought of you climbing that hill in the dark again to a severe Harris waiting with her pen behind her ear among the papers.

Yes, Miss Davies, I enjoyed my visit, and my egg. I think you are a very nice person to see, and I quite agree to a weekly visit—Wednesday? Any day so far suits me.

Do think of Christmas or the days after Christmas at Asheham. We should both like to have you so much. I prescribe a change for you, and a roll down the hills, and sitting in the sun in our garden, and an unlimited amount of talk with Leonard, and I should bargain for a certain amount of tenderness towards me.

I’ve just written with such appalling difficulty to old Bee Webb.

Yr. V.W.

Of course we use Pelaw polish. The Jewish Chronicle wants to interview L. on any Jewish subject.

Sussex

[]

738: To Roger Fry

Boxing Day [26 December 1915]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

My Dear Roger,

The translations are very interesting and have led to much discussion between James Strachey Leonard and me, though mostly upon the question of metre and rhyme. They think that theres not enough feeling for the metre in Apparition, and it should be rhymed, and more formal.* I myself felt the metre very strongly in your version and did not miss the rhyme. My only criticisms are that you might perhaps get greater richness of language if you were less literal—and also I dont like (as a matter of detail) ‘beauty sleep’ which reminds me somehow of a beauty specialists advertisement in a Ladies paper. But otherwise I think them very interesting, and I hope you mean to do them all. I’m sure you have a great gift in that way, and translations like these are exactly what people without much French like myself want, and never get, for translators are apt to be so entirely wrong in feeling.

I hope this is coherent, but I write in the usual Asheham chaos—Max has just been sick, having voided a large worm earlier in the day.

It was most delightful to see you, and I hope we may discuss everything under the sun before we die—though I’m sure you’ll outlive us all, and only reach a kind of brilliant middle age when you’re about 80, and the rest of us will hate you for not letting our poor old brains rest at the very end—

Leonard has just read aloud a passionate poem by Lawrence, which perhaps made Max sick, but I expect you would have enlightened it somehow.

We go back on Thursday. Won’t you stay with us when you do the Hampton Court frescoes?

Yrs ever,
V.W.

* They like the other one very much: so do I.

Sussex

[]

Letters 739-756 (January-April 1916)

739: To Katherine Cox

12th Jan [1916]

Hogarth [House], Richmond

Dearest Ka,

I’m afraid we shan’t be able to come tonight, as I’m rather headachy and have to stay quiet, and Leonard is going to the House to hear the debate. I wish we could come, though I daresay the room will be full of people wanting private last words, and cursing the others.

Yes—Asheham you must write with red ink in your book. Did I tell you how I mean to have a motor boat next summer?

I thought perhaps I was arrogant or scratchy in the way I talked of Rupert the other day. I never think his poetry good enough for him, but I did admire him very much indeed, and he always seemed to me like a fully grown person among mummies and starvelings (which refers to the people I lived among). But it seems to me sometimes that our casual way of talking must sound silly to anyone like you who knew him really, and therefore understood what he might do. And I don’t like my Bruin to think me silly, or to confound me with the artistic. Now, will she be a careful sensitive creature, and realise that her life is worth that of 20 Quakers? Besides, Quakers are notoriously long-lived and unsusceptible to shock. They stand any amount of strain, and have practically no feelings. Is this what you call a literary letter? (It suddenly strikes me, I should like to know what you mean by that).

Anyhow, please write occasionally, and for God’s sake don’t sacrifice anything to your country. Leonard sends his love, and you will believe in our deep affection.

Yrs. V.W.

Mark Arnold-Forster

[]

740: To Margaret Llewelyn Davies

Sunday [23 January 1916]

Hogarth House [Richmond]

Dearest Margaret,

It was very nice to get your letter, though we think scent a little luxurious—Ottoline scents her cigarettes. No doubt you are emulating her virtues. Kind acts from morning to night don’t seem much in your line, I must admit. Do you ever get out onto your [Hampstead] Heath? I often think of you, as I pace beside my river, which surely surpasses anything you have.

The big mouthed red haired woman was, alas, my sister in law Karin. There can be no doubt of it. She sat 2 seats from L. at the [Bertrand Russell] lecture, and fills him with such physical repulsion that he can hardly endure to look at her. He says the lecture was interesting, though hard to follow. I hope to go next Tuesday, more to see the audience than to listen, I’m afraid. Then there’ll be Mrs Sidney Webb, who attacks at great length. I don’t see that there’s much good in Lectures—clever people go home and gossip about them, and thats about all. But then, my dear Miss Davies, what does do good? You say sitting on Town Councils and upholding one’s ideals. I incline to think that that merely improves one’s own soul—still, I daresay the Women’s Guild has done something; isn’t it touching how I return to that achievement of yours always for comfort?

I’ve been reading Carlyle’s Past and Present, and wondering whether all his rant has made a scrap of difference practically. But Bertie [Russell], according to Bob Trevelyan who lunched here, takes his lectures very seriously, and thinks he’s going to found new civilisations. I become steadily more feminist, owing to the Times, which I read at breakfast and wonder how this preposterous masculine fiction [the war] keeps going a day longer—without some vigorous young woman pulling us together and marching through it—Do you see any sense in it? I feel as if I were reading about some curious tribe in Central Africa—And now they’ll give us votes; and you say—what do you say Miss Ll.D? I wish I could borrow your mind about 3 days a week.

We’re asking Miss Harris the great, and Miss Sheepshanks the able to dine—which is a bold step, I think. But Leonard’s got to cope with them.

I enclose a poem, in return for the immortal Bishop. The authoress, an insinuating elderly lady, called the other morning, and made me buy 4, at 3d a piece—and they don’t rhyme or make sense—Lord Kitchener had thought them very pretty. Its rather a good idea—to sell one’s works in person—

I’m quite well again, and hope to come up very soon, if you’re visible. But this week is rather full. We saw the Dr, who says that in time I shall be able to do much more, but it will be a long time; still, I feel amazingly well.

Leonard sends his love.

Any roots will be most acceptable, though the garden is run wild.

Yr. V.W.

Sussex

[]

741: To Katherine Cox

Feb. 12th [1916]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest Ka,

We were very much delighted to hear from you. I think if the Serbians haven’t got typhus, which you dont say anything about, you are happier among the Eucalyptus than here. How long do you mean to stay? We came here yesterday, leaving London in fog and rain. We stopped at a small and peculiar shop, in Lewes, where Leonard buys his bleached socks, and we got you some stockings. If they suit, let me know, and I will get some more. We are here for a week, partly to see the spring come in, and partly to collect half the furniture in this house, which Miss [Jean] Thomas lent me and now claims—damn her soul. Needless to say, it is all broken, stained and damp eaten.

London goes on much as usual. I dip in occasionally, and shake my ears well when I get back to the purer air of Richmond. Nessa has had a picture show, which the Times critic says errs on the side of beauty, ‘the national fault’. I predict the complete rout of post impressionism, chiefly because Roger, who has been staying with us, is now turning to literature, and says pictures only do ‘to look at about 4 times.’ He has lent us two of his works.

Old Bob Trevelyan and Mrs B. have been ranging about London. They came twice to Richmond, having nothing whatever to do and Bob talked quite incessantly, asking after you, and Mrs Bob blew her nose in a great white handkerchief, and attended very carefully to all that was said, like a scrupulous Dutchwoman. Did you realise that all Bob’s earlier works were written lying recumbent on the ground, with his legs supported on a tree trunk, so that the blood might flow to his head?

Then one day we went to lunch with the Waterlows at Gipsy Hill. We saw a tall stout gentleman pacing up and down a suburban street, reading a book, which was Sydney, taking the air before lunch. Inside, Margery was very sleekly brushed, pregnant; and by God—what a house! Have you been there? The Omega curtains—hard bright blues—mustard coloured chairs—all very clean and cheerless. However, we agreed that after talking to Margery for some time,—forgetting her appearance, she is rather nice. It is a comic situation—to be perched on a bleak hillside, under the eye of the Crystal Palace, with an increasing family.

Leonard is very well, and working at his supplement and reviews, and lunching with the Webbs, who maintain that the war will end in October. Margaret suggests a new society or scheme on the telephone about every other day. Bertie lectures on Tuesdays, and thinks to issue a new constitution, so we are told, with the help of young Cambridge. I went to one lecture, and sat near the poisonous Widow Whitehead, who wore tortoiseshell antennae in her hat, and looked more livid and snakelike than I can tell—the spirit of evil. Didn’t she once say that I was a hard woman?

So we go on: personally, I am very happy and sanguine, because I think—I was going to say that even the purest are better than the state we were in, but that of course is a lie,—I suppose I am happy merely because it is so pleasant to be well again, and allowed to write for a little every day. I do think Richmond has great charms also, and now we have Roger’s servants, we keep clean.

We go back in a few days—and please, good Bruin, write again, and do, as you love me, keep well, and dont think that life is a thing to be thrown up into the air like a ball, which I’m sure is your present frame of mind.

Leonard sends love

Yr V.W.

Mark Arnold-Forster

[]

742: To Saxon Sydney-Turner

15th Feb. [1916]

Asheham House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

My dear Saxon,

There was a time when it would have caused you some pain to think you had not seen us for three months, but I suppose years and official splendours have much hardened your heart.

Will you come and stay with us this next week end?—Saturday the 19th, I suppose it is. We would take you along the river, and into Kew Gardens, where the rhododendrons are all in flower.

Why is it that nobody ever seems to see you now? Rumours are about that you have enlisted for garrison duty, in discharge of which you married a Sea Captain’s daughter who can speak 6 languages—none of which I believe.

We came here a few days ago for quiet and fresh air. The rooms were all a soft grey with mildew, and Leonard, sitting in a steaming arm chair, caught a cold in his head, which has just come to me.

Every night it roars with wind and rain, and last night we had to shout to each other in our bedroom about 3.A.M. and could only just hear, above the hail which rattled on the panes, and the wind which came pouring down the chimney. We had only a very small bit of candle, and Leonard’s watch had stopped. Suddenly there was an explosion on the terrace—nothing to be seen, of course; but this morning we find two great trees have been blown down, and lie across the drawing room roof, completely blocking up the end window so that I write in semi darkness, looking into a kind of jungle. There is a great hole in the garden wall—tiles off the roof, our terrace uprooted, branches everywhere, and my great Italian pot smashed to atoms. Its a great pity, as the trees were very beautiful. Our servants, who were Rogers, were delighted to be out of the way of zeppelin raids, but are rather doubtful now. Still, the country is full of charms.

I am learning Italian, and want some help from you badly. Are there any easy, and not altogether insipid books to read?

We lunched with the Waterlows the other day. My God! What a neighbourhood! They spoke of you with awe and love. Owing to L. playing chess, we had to rush for a train, and took the wrong one, and circled round the Crystal Palace for about an hour, until we reached Gipsy Hill again.

Ka writes that she is in Corsica, washing verminous Serbians, quite well herself, very hot, and in need of white stockings.

Ring us up on Saturday morning, or Friday night and say you will come. We very much want to see you.

Telephone number, 496 Richmond

Yrs V.W.

Sussex

[]

743: To Lady Robert Cecil

Feb 18th [1916]

Asheham House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

My dear Nelly,

It is a strange fact that I always think of you when I am down here. Yesterday was so clear that we could see the ridge where you sit surrounded by Freshfields, Duckworths etc., I cant help feeling that we are very superior in our isolation. We go back to Richmond this afternoon, having been here a week. The first two nights it was impossible to sleep owing to the gale, and when one did sleep, one dreamt of the traffic in Chancery Lane. About two o’clock the uproar was so terrific that we lighted a small stump of candle, and sat up in bed and listened, it being almost impossible to hear ourselves talk. Then there was a great explosion in the garden, and in the morning the maid pulled us out of bed to see a great tree which was blocking up the window. It had fallen right across our drawing room, and crashed through the garden wall, and brought down two trees under it! I sit and write looking into a deep tangle of branches and leaves, which Leonard says is exactly like the jungle. He went out next morning to chop up the branches for firewood, the gale still howling; and suddenly there was another explosion and a very high dead tree fell right on top of the others. I thought he must be crushed, but happily he had seen it shaking, and had moved away just in time. It was a great escape. Now we are cutting the branches into logs, and burning them. They make the room smell delicious and have lovely thin flames. The worst thing is that they are always falling out of the grate onto the carpet into the middle of a mass of dogs.

By the way, I meant to write and tell you how unreasonable your conduct was in that train, going back from Richmond. You see, if you had sat firmly in the one we put you into, you would have got to Charing Cross, without any change. Then there was the Bakerloo waiting for you. The story of your wanderings made us both feel very guilty. The same thing happened to us the other day, when we went to see some friends who have settled for some obscure reason at Gipsy Hill. We went round and round the Crystal Palace for an hour, and it was like a very long, bad dream. One goes through Tooting and Peckham, and Norwood, and Balling or Balham, and how we cursed our friends for living in such places!

May I now come and see you?

I have been reading Mr Strutts musical reminiscences, with interest. I must have seen him at every concert and opera I ever went to, and he often describes the same concerts. It is very outspoken criticism, which is refreshing. I have also been reading Mr Arnold Bennett who depresses me with his very astute realism, and Miss Viola Meynell who depresses me with her lack of realism—so perhaps I am hard to please. However, I am in the middle of 2 huge volumes by Mr Shorter upon the Brontës, [which] rakes up every scrap of paper they ever wrote upon, so that it is something like a realistic novel, and, as usual, absorbing.

Now I must go and get ready.

Yrs. aff. V.W.

Hatfield

[]

744: To Lady Robert Cecil

[21? February 1916]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond

My Dear Nelly,

We should like very much to come to tea, and will come Wednesday week, 5 o’clock, 1st March, unless you stop us. I have rather muddled up my engagements, and possibly have arranged for something else on that day, in which case we will let you know. Therefore don’t seclude yourself from Freshfields etc. and if we find them in possession we will behave with self restraint. Living in the suburbs one tends to set apart days weeks ahead, and then to get them all mixed (I speak for myself, not Leonard).

The Brontë book is edited by that reptile C. K. Shorter: however, it’s mostly letters, and well worth reading. I only borrow it, or I should send it to you.

Yr. affate,
V.W.

Hatfield

[]

745: To Lytton Strachey

28th Feb. [1916]

Hogarth [House], Richmond

Dearest Lytton,

What a treat to hear from you!—still it don’t make much difference whether you write or not and I always feel you will turn up safe in the end, and in fact you never really disappear. Miss Berry shall be sent off at once, and also a volume or two of Madame de Genlis, which I always suppose to be yours.

Your praise [of The Voyage out] is far the nicest of any I’ve had—having as you know, an ancient reverence for your understanding of these things, so that I can hardly believe that you do like that book. You almost give me courage to read it, which I’ve not done since it was printed, and I wonder how it would strike me now. I suspect your criticism about the failure of conception is quite right. I think I had a conception, but I don’t think it made itself felt. What I wanted to do was to give the feeling of a vast tumult of life, as various and disorderly as possible, which should be cut short for a moment by the death, and go on again—and the whole was to have a sort of pattern, and be somehow controlled. The difficulty was to keep any sort of coherence,—also to give enough detail to make the characters interesting—which Forster says I didn’t do. I really wanted three volumes. Do you think it is impossible to get this sort of effect in a novel;—is the result bound to be too scattered to be intelligible? I expect one may learn to get more control in time. One gets too much involved in details—But let us meet and have a long gossip—What about next Sunday? Will you come to dinner—or tea—and spend the night? I asked Pernel [Strachey] to come, but Duncan tells me she is away, and as I haven’t heard from her, I suppose she doesn’t mean to come. Ring us up—and if that day doesn’t do, suggest another—We almost always have a spare room.

What are you about—are you in love?—are you writing?—I suppose you will come out brilliantly with the flowers of spring. I do wish you’d print all your works at once—Talking of which, I’ve just been sent an appeal to me as a ‘passionate soul’ to subscribe to a private indecency press called the Rainbow, for the production of that and other works—

Yr. V.W.

Frances Hooper

[]

746: To Katherine Cox

Sunday, March 19th [1916]

Hogarth House [Richmond]

Dearest Ka,

We are very sorry to hear about your disease. Dont you think that’s a good reason for coming home? The night your letter came with (if you remember) certain remarks, upon Waterlows and Eckhards, Sydney was dining with us, and Margery Oliver, and he was telling us with his usual ponderous devotion, how you had malaria, but were better. Next minute, there was a snuff-snuffling at the door, and Bruin’s letter came in. I expect your present state gossip is most acceptable—not indeed that I ever write a letter about anything else. Do you suppose that Dora Sanger writes letters about the Russian atrocities? In the 19th century, of course, they discussed politics and religion. Margery Olivier had not been in the room a minute before she said “I’ve just refused a proposal of marriage!” Nobody knew what to say. For some reason we all felt very awkward. She told us that the man is unknown to us, has £2,000 a year, and is employed in munition work: aged 32. Who can he be? Leonard inclines to think that she suffers from a disease of advanced virginity in which one imagines proposals at every tea party. Certainly, she’s in a very odd state of mind.

We go on much as usual. It is with great difficulty that I can be routed from bed and sofa, where I make myself a kind of Bruin lair, snug from this damnable spring. A perpetual white or greyish fog has succeeded the snow. Old Margaret Davies and Janet are inclined to melancholy, and begin to feel very old. I think 50 must be the very devil—only one’s decline into old age before one, and strength enough to realise the horror. You have heard how Duncan has become a fruit farmer in Suffolk with Bunny Garnett? He came up after a week of it and says he finds it very soothing, and all his faculties sink to sleep. He is out picking Big Bug off the currant bushes for 8 hours a day: sleeps all night, paints on Sundays. I daresay he will paint better, though I think he’s very good; but sitting over one’s work in Fitzroy Street, with a pat of butter turning yellow in a paint box seems to me infernally dreary. Nessa is going to keep house for him perhaps all the summer. So you see, Bloomsbury is vanished like the morning mist.

Leonard is as usual writing away at about 6 books, and he has now trained himself to compose straight on to a typewriter, without a mistake in sense or spelling. I feel like the owner of some marvellous dog who does tricks—there’s pointing to my husband’s gifts. Max had a fit in the drawing room last night: he rolled off his chair, lay twitching on the floor, then walked with great difficulty, and then recovered completely. Do you think it was a fit? Oughtn’t they to foam green at the mouth?

Henry James is dead [28 February 1916]. His last words, according to Sydney [Waterlow], were to his secretary, whom he sent for. “I wish to dictate a few faint and faded words—” after which he was silent and never spoke again.

Ray [Strachey] is having her usual operation, with a view to a child. I am writing reviews. We go to Asheham for Easter—and wont you turn up one fine spring morning? Leonard has just come in, says this letter is absurdly long, sends his love, and says I cant write any more, so I must leave out about our Printing Press, and our motor Boat, and how I’ve sold 2,000 copies of the Voyage Out.

Write and take care.
Yr V.W.

Mark Arnold-Forster

[]

747: To Duncan Grant

March 26th [1916]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond

My dear Duncan,

I hope this letter will arrive after you have spent 10 hours among the Big Bug—and I hope you wont have had any letters for a week, and then you will say, now, I must answer at once or I shan’t get another. However I am also writing to thank you for the picture, which seems to me very massive and splendid. I like it immensely. It was all wrapped in the Westminster Gazette, I got safely with it into the Tube, when the paper slipped down, and all the old ladies began peering and squinting and looking at me with horror. Finally a very nice old Frenchman offered to hold it for me and so we got home.

You said you would like gossip. I collect what I can, and prick up my ears in company, but my opportunities are not what they were. People dont seem to trust me now, except poor old zanies like Margery Olivier, who ran into the room the other night crying “I’ve just had a proposal! I’ve just had a proposal!” Sydney Waterlow was there, and we were inclined to be ponderous. Who can it be? He has £2,000 a year: aged 32; very nice, but she wont have him. Leonard thinks its all imagination, a disease affecting the unmarried of her temperament.

The other day we went to tea with Nelly Cecil, and met old Beatrice Thynne, who is more like a sunburnt tinker who has just had a mug of beer than ever, notwithstanding the death of her mother and nephew. She was as black as a rook, with one very large Bumble Bee, carried out in pearls and sapphires, attached to her throat. She is going to live in lodgings over St Johns Wood post office, in order to economise; she uses margarine instead of butter; and wears no underclothes. She spends all her time reading family letters, and tying them up in bundles, as they are too many to burn, and all perfectly dull. Nelly is going to economise by living in Henry James’ flat. It is wonderful how entirely detached from sanity the aristocracy are; one feels like a fly on a ceiling when one talks to them.

Yesterday we went to the (Military and Appeal] Tribunal here, but there was only one interesting case—that of a young man who wakes up every morning ‘wet to the ankles’ ‘which would quite unfit him for military life’ his father said. There seemed to be a good deal of doubt about this however, and I dont think he got off. Did you see that 4 conscientious objectors were exempted on condition they worked at agriculture?—it was somewhere in the country, I forget where.

What happened at Wyndham Lewises that afternoon? Did you feel that he was master of horrid secrets, or merely quite ordinary? I do hope other people haven’t some secret about life up their sleeves, which makes me appear to them an innocent lamb. Henry Lamb (talking of lambs) always gave me that feeling. Thank God, he’s now exposed.

Yrs V.W.

Duncan Grant

[]

748: To Margaret Llewelyn Davies

Monday [27 March 1916]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dearest Margaret,

Wrong as usual. Miss Harris, right as usual. How could it be fish? It didn’t taste of fish or feel like fish. It was Semolina (comes from flour, as you would know if you had been over the C.W.S. mill). I grant that it looked rather like the roe of cod, but you show how far you are from reality, and being a woman, not a lady—ha, ha! If it weren’t for Semolina how should working women ever make both ends meet? Semolina is to us what cream, butter, eggs etc., are to you. We often eat nothing else for weeks. Try it with a spoonful of lard for supper.

Leonard says he has 4 brothers, none in the least like him, by which he means that they are all inferior. He was a strict Jew as a small boy, and he can still sing in Hebrew. Next time you come, we’ll make him tell us all about it.

Lytton Strachey was here yesterday and described how he had to wait 4 hours at the White City to be medically examined. They then found that his right lung was diseased and exempted him immediately. Of course there is nothing the matter with his lungs, but he let this pass,—is now off to Ottoline, with a ticket exempting him for ever.

The classes are getting hopelessly mixed—when you speak of Janet at a lecture, do you mean the teacher or the cook? I hope it was Janet Case.

I want to go to Ireland, but we want to do so many things. Why cant one be turned back and live everything over again, perhaps rather more slowly?

I don’t believe you for a second when you say you don’t want your life over again.

Yrs. V.W.

We are always talking about Loonsdale. How many servants did they keep at Loonsfield? Did they have a carriage? Did they have prayers? Did any of them go to the bad? I didnt ask many questions that I really wanted to ask, out of politeness. Leonard is very anxious to know more about the brethren.

Sussex

[]

749: To Violet Dickinson

Sunday [2 April 1916]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond

My Violet,

I daresay you want to drop us—if so, spit it out like a woman. If not, shall I come to tea with you one day? Are you still living on Manchester Street? Do you still think me very wicked for living at Brunswick Square with a household of young men? Does marriage purge one of impurity, or am I for ever contaminated?

I saw Nelly the other day and Beatrice as grimy as a coalheaver, what with mourning and the dust of old letters.

Leonard sends his love.

Yr Sp.

Berg

[]

750: To Violet Dickinson

[5 April 1916]

Postcard

Hogarth House, Richmond

I cant come on Friday, but I should like to come on Tuesday, 4.30. and hope to find a nice hot bun. Its your aristocratic aloofness that intimidates me—who always was so soft and attached, like an adhesive oyster—full of pearls, I need hardly say.

V.W.

Berg

[]

751: To Vanessa Bell

5 April [1916]

Hogarth [House], Richmond

Dearest,

I was on the point of writing to you when your parcel of daffodils came in, which I suppose I may interpret as an embrace. (but you have to write as well) Are they wild ones? They look like it. I suppose they grow all about your lake, with blue flowers, and pear blossom,—and you’re as happy as the day, and have quite forgotten the fleasome Singes? [Virginia]

I dont know what news there is to tell you—but I daresay one or two things have happened. I went to tea with old Janet Case the other day, and found her mending Emphie’s mole grey blouse, with an edging of white frill, which took me back to the 1890ties. She is still more or less bedridden, and keeps her disease in the dark, though she was writing an article upon illegitimacy in Sweden for a newspaper. Downstairs, Emphie was playing very badly on the violin to a party of wounded soldiers. The house is crowded with photographs of old pupils, deceased parents and the Elgin Marbles, and they have covers to all the po’s. Does this convey any of the spirit of Hampstead to you? They seem to float along very cheerfully, and with amazing sweetness of temper. I sat and gossiped, and Janet mended her blouse all wrong, and did it over again.

Then we went to tea with the [J.C.] Squires, who live at Chiswick; and we found a childrens party going on, and several gaunt prolific mothers, and we were much in the way, as Squire was out. So we walked up and down the embankment, and then went back, and were shown all his first editions. The children were very inferior to Quentin and Julian—such common lumpish brats, without any spirit—However, 2 were too young to talk. Squire had just bought a book for a shilling that was worth £10; and he had exchanged it for an ancient Breviary which seemed to me very dull. He is a thorough collector and journalist—but I rather like her.

By the way, I’ve got into touch with Violet again. I thought I’d write and ask her why she objected to my living at Brunswick Sqre., and whether she wished to drop me on that account. She writes back in the usual jocular style, doesn’t mention Brunswick Sqre, and asks me to tea, which I shall do, and then I shall tease her.

Did you answer Madge?—and what did you say? Nelly [Boxall] and Lottie [Hope] went to tea with Jessie [Vanessa’s cook], and evidently had a terrific gossip about Sophie, who is coming here tomorrow. Jessie said she had behaved disgracefully, and she would never go near her again, which was unfortunate, as I had been telling Nelly all Sophie’s virtues, and want them to give her tea in the kitchen. Nelly is an odd character—she sits up every night till I watching for zeppelins, and so I said she had better sleep in the kitchen, as a joke. But she took it up very seriously, and is going to force Lottie to sleep with her in camp beds, among all the beetles. Do the zeppelins come near you?

What do you do? Happy? I’m going to write Duncan a criticism on his picture soon. What do you and he think of Turner? I’ve got to review a book on Ruskin. I wish you’d tell me something about Ruskin and Turner.

Write, Dolphin, and you’ll then get an answer.

You cant think how I miss you. I’m going to the dentist, and if you were there, I shd. come in to tea.

Yr B

Berg

[]

752: To Vanessa Bell

Friday [14 April 1916]

Hogarth House, Richmond

Dearest,

I am much better now—in fact I got up yesterday for an hour, and I am to go out, if fine, on Sunday. Leonard is going to Asheham with Lottie on Monday to warm the house, and I shall go on Tuesday. We’ve got Lytton and [C. P.] Sanger coming on Thursday for Easter. [Dr] Fergusson says I shall have to be very careful for a fortnight, but I shan’t trouble my head about visitors. It will be a mercy to get into the country.

I think you have a very great gift for writing. I enjoyed your description of country life immensely. But dont you miss that sweet voiced bright eyed Ape? Otherwise I think it must be heavenly to feel theres no telephone, and gossip is for the moment stilled. I’ve got absolutely no news, as I’ve not seen anyone. Violet Dickinson is coming to tea today, and I’ll question her about you and Brunswick if I can. I had a long visit from Sophy the day I got ill. She has grown quite thin, and very small. She was very dismal and affectionate—doesn’t at all like being with Aunt Minna [Duckworth], and lives on her memories of the past. She is almost doddering about St Ives, and old furniture and old days, and said she had nothing now to look forward to.

Then we had Gerald and Adrian and Karin. Gerald was very urbane, and grey as a badger. He asked after you, and was much amused to hear of your anticonscription work. He treated us all as small children, and it made me feel how hopelessly in the minority we are. Sylvia has been writing to Leonard about watching Tribunals—very official and pompous.

I am being very careful, as I dont at all want to have to go to bed at Asheham. I suppose I shan’t be able to go to that house again—but Leonard might. Your daffodils are most lovely, and there were such lots that the servants had some too.

Do write soon—I do like getting your letters. We shall be a fortnight at least at Asheham. I wish you’d come and stay with us.

Yr B.

Give my love to Duncan—I should much appreciate a letter from him.

Berg

[]

753: To Leonard Woolf

Monday April 17th [1916]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Precious Mongoose,

This is just to tell you what a wonderfully good beast I am. I’ve done everything in order, not forgetting medicine twice. Fergusson came this morning, and said it was the best thing for me to get away tomorrow. He had been seeing Craig, who had sent a message to tell me to stay in bed every morning, and always have a sleeping draught at hand, to take at the least wakefulness—and altogether to be very careful for a fortnight. Fergy said my pulse was quite different from last summer—not only much steadier, but much stronger. I am to go on spraying my throat. He seemed very pleased with me.

I had a letter and a poem from Lytton—the poem very Lyttonian, but I’ll bring it to show you—Also a letter from Janet who is in her farm house in Herts. I rang up Molly and asked her to tea, as I thought my solitary afternoon without darling grey goose would be so dismal, and she’s coming. Desmond suggested coming with her, but I said you were away, so I think he thought better of it. Thats all my news, but I lie and think of my precious beast, who does make me more happy every day and instant of my life than I thought it possible to be. There’s no doubt I’m terribly in love with you. I keep thinking what you’re doing, and have to stop—it makes me want to kiss you so.

Its quite fine, though windy, and I’m going out for a short walk. Fergy says its very good for me to go for a short walk every day.

I’m now going to write to Mrs Langston about the room. I think I must subscribe to their Social, as we’re not going.

It will be joyful to see your dear funny face tomorrow.

The Marmots kiss you.
Yr MANDRILL

Fergy is sending round some more sleeping draught.

Sussex

[]

754: To Vanessa Bell

Saturday [22 April 1916]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest,

Here we are sitting in the drawing room with the windows open and the rooks cawing. Sangers voice is to be heard bubbling up one bright remark after another. Lytton is rather languid and cadaverous, but as smooth as silk. I have to spend the morning sequestered, as [Dr] Craig sent a message to tell me to stay in bed till lunch. However, I rather like it, as I just dip in when I feel in the mood for conversation. Its no good worrying about one’s visitors, and if they find it dull, I dont see that it can be helped.

Its been quite fine since Thursday, though to begin with we had gales and rain, and various misadventures. L. came down on Monday to find no fires lit, and he and Lottie had to set to and get the house ready. Bella Wooler [daily servant] burst into tears, and refuses to do anything more for us, party I think because of the coal, so L. has to pump and do the E.Cs. Then Lottie said she thought she’d got influenza, and had to be put to bed—but she recovered at once, and works like a horse, and chatters to everyone without any fear.

London seems miles away, except for these damned newspapers—Sanger has awful stories about conscientious objectors shipped to France and there shot. He is very red eyed and wizened and overworked but he pumps up the most amazing quips and cranks, and his eyes glow and he looks like one of the dwarfs in the Ring. We went for a walk yesterday and he told me how his father was a chemist, and made a small fortune and bought a house at Dorking and longed for the county to call upon him, but they wouldnt, and then when Charlie was doing well at Cambridge, old Sanger got the asthma, and couldn’t receive guests, so he died, and his life was a tragedy, and now the chemists business is going bust, owing to the war. Sanger trots about in white trousers with black stripes, like the deck of a ship, and a black coat on top. Lytton and I gossip about Ottoline and books, and last night he read us his Florence Nightingale, which is very amusing.

However, you say you want gossip about Gerald [Duckworth]. I plunged into the nineties last week—what with Gerald and Violet. The odd thing is that they haven’t changed since Hyde Park Gate. Violet still very slapdash and jocular in a blue serge tailor made, slapping her thighs, and asking innumerable questions. Gerald paternal and white-haired and rather patronising. Ozzie [Dickinson] says Gerald is violently in love—but Violet couldn’t remember who with. Then we heard all about Lady Bath’s death, and her silk dresses hanging in the wardrobe, and lovely little Russian jackets for the boy who died, and Beatrice [Thynne] counted out 50 matches and said the cook must make them last a week, and she has £2,000 a year, and a flat in Grays Inn, and Katie [Cromer] cooks the legs of rabbits in a keepers lodge at Welwyn, and Lord Cromer has the backs, and Katie wears a nightgown under her dress to save packing, and Ozzie dines with the Asquiths, and Mrs Drew eats raw carrots and is cured of rheumatism, and Violet packs pyjamas in the Mile End Road and Lady Desborough has had all Rupert’s [Brooke] poems printed privately, and Violet Asquith says she loved him as she has never loved any man, and Asquith is carried to bed drunk by Lillah MacCarthy—Now in return for all this, for God’s sake tell me how Ott: and Roger have made it up, together with any other items of Bloomsbury gossip.

I saw Molly [MacCarthy], who was going to Ott. for Easter, rather brisked in the head by a Swedish doctor, but not very quick in the wits. By the way, Helen and Bernard Holland have both become Roman Catholics.

Yr. B.

Berg

[]

755: To Vanessa Bell

Sunday [23 April 1916]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest,

I forgot yesterday to ask you what I wanted to ask you—which is, will you out of the overflowing generosity and superabundance of your magnanimous heart (in which I have always believed) design me a sketch for my summer cloak? I bought some grey silk and sent it to Miss Joy, who can’t make it for lack of a sketch. What I want is something light and simple—I should think perhaps a kind of kimono. It is the colour of a young elephant, with a slight crinkle. I couldn’t get what I wanted, owing to the presence of Amber Reeves, who haunts me. If you could send the sketch straight to Miss Joy, I should bless your shadow.

She has just sent me my blue summer dress, which I like very much—in fact, I think even as an advertisement I should pay the Omega, as I’m always being asked who made my things. It’s a superb spring morning, and Lytton and Sanger are in high good temper reading on the terrace. This is far the loveliest country in Europe.

Expecting a letter from you,

I am your faithful
Singe

Berg

[]

756: To Violet Dickinson

Easter Monday [24 April 1916]

Asheham House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

My Violet,

Here we are sitting with open windows looking onto the meadow in which a lamb has just died. We have been crawling about the downs, but we haven’t found any plovers nests—Nessa has, but I thought only trained farmers knew where to look for them. It has been most lovely here, and I wish you would appear swinging over the gate with a dog. We have got a very much overworked barrister [C. P. Sanger] staying with us, and Lytton Strachey, and they moan and growl over the newspapers all day long. To make things worse, our meat supply has run out, because they eat such an enormous amount, and the spring chickens are only as big as thrushes, so today we’ve got to starve, and Leonards two sisters may turn up at any moment, and so we’ve got to knock up a village shop two miles off—

We are strewn with fallen trees, which L. chops up for the fire, but the garden, such as it was, is ruined. Plants are very odd things. Bulbs I planted 3 years ago suddenly come up in odd corners, and tulips with gigantic heads on very short stalks.

We come back again next week—and perhaps you will ask me to tea, or I shall ask you, and then we might gossip about our youth—Nessa is trying to breed rabbits, but discovered after buying that they are all varieties of the male sex!

Yr Sp.

Leonard says he would like to see you again.

Berg

[]

Letters 757-788 (May-mid-September 1916)

757: To Vanessa Bell

14th May [1916]

Hogarth House, Richmond

Dearest,

I was getting quite alarmed, not hearing from you, and remembering your promise to write at least twice a week. However, I guessed that you must have been having the devil of a time. I know nothing about the Tribunal beyond what I saw in the Daily News. It was headed ‘A Follower of Tolstoy’ who had been brought up by his mother to believe in Tolstoy, and there was an artist aged 31, also refused. What steps will they take now? Do they mean to go to prison?

Leonard went to Craig who said that he would give him a certificate of unfitness on his own account, as well as mine. He has written a very strong letter, saying that L. is highly nervous, suffers from permanent tremor, and would probably break down if in the army. Also that I am still in a very shaky state, and would very likely have a bad mental breakdown if they took him. He thinks they ought to give L. complete exemption on these grounds, and strongly advises him not to put in anything about conscience, which annoys them. It is rather difficult to know what to do, as the Tribunals are so erratic.

L. lunched with the Sidney Webbs, who of course professed to be behind the scenes; and according to them, the War Office has already too many men, and will connive at any gentleman getting off; so the thing to do is to produce letters from Harley St. doctors, or the peerage. They think that the war will probably be over before October, as Germany seems to be crumbling internally. L. went to a committee, where Buxton said that we are now considering terms of peace, and only the amount of compensation remains to be settled. I daresay this is mere gossip, but there does seem some chance that things are changing. Also, the government seems to be thoroughly badgered by the number of C.O.s.

What is Clive doing? I suppose a rupture is about the best excuse one can have. I wonder what you’ll do, if Duncan and Bunny are made to do some national work. I wish you’d leave Wissett, and take Charleston. Leonard went over it, and says its a most delightful house and strongly advises you to take it. It is about a mile from Firle, on that little path which leads under the downs. It has a charming garden, with a pond, and fruit trees, and vegetables, all now rather run wild, but you could make it lovely. The house is very nice, with large rooms, and one room with big windows fit for a studio. At present it is used apparently as a weekend place, by a couple who keep innumerable animals, and most of the rooms are used by animals only. They say it only takes half an hour to walk to Glynde Station, through the Park, and you have Firle, with its telephone, quite near, so you would be more accessible than we are. There is a w. c. and a bathroom, but the bath only has cold water. The house wants doing up—and the wallpapers are awful. But it sounds a most attractive place—and 4 miles from us, so you wouldn’t be badgered by us.

I suppose I must write and tell all this to Karin; but I’d much rather you had it than they.

Walking in Kew Gardens the other day, who should we run into but Watty [Walter Lamb], as spruce as a Bank Clerk, and as bald as an egg. He took us back to tea in his exquisite residence [on Kew Green], which has walls of ducks egg green, and delicately tinted engravings of 18th century buildings hang perfectly straight, and all his books polished and in order, and a green baize board with crowds of invitation cards. He goes to dances every night, and has become a sham man of the world. Art interests him less and less. And then he began upon the King and Queen, and the President [of the Royal Academy], and how wonderful the President thinks him, and his kidneys, and his rheumatism, and long long stories about Princess Mary and her Lord in waiting, whom she made wear a gas mask and then gave orders to his man, in a corner of the R. A—which Watty thought showed a fine wit—Poor creature! He knows he’s but a slug, and all the time he tries to excuse himself.

We left Molly [MacCarthy] at Asheham, where she was to finish her novel; once more verging on collapse, and, poor creature, resigned to her deafness, which the dr. says is permanent, as the nerve of her right ear is destroyed. People are much nicer when they stay with one—I wont say nicer, but more natural.

What do you think of a country life? James went before his National Service Com: and they said he must work on the land, which he refused to do; but we think if L. gets allowed that, we might retire to Asheham, and take service under Gun [local bailliff]. O God! I’ve got to go and see At. Minna [Duckworth], and At. Mary [Fisher]!

Yr B.

Leonard says that the caretaker at Charleston said that Mr Stacy to whom the house belonged, when he heard that Mr Ray the present tenant, wanted to sublet it, said he wouldn’t let him sublet it. The Rays are very bad tenants and have let the house get out of repair; so you’d probably have to negotiate with Mr Stacy, but I shd. think he’d certainly prefer you as tenants.

Berg

[]

758: To Margaret Llewelyn Davies

Tuesday [23 May 1916]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dearest Margaret,

Do come next Monday; and stay more than one night if you will—We do love having you.

Leonard has gone down to Janet [Case] today, but comes back tomorrow.

Yrs. V.W.

Sussex

[]

759: To Violet Dickinson

May 26th [1916]

Hogarth House, Richmond

My Violet,

I was much amused to hear of your meeting with Mrs [Neville] Chamberlain. She was very attractive when I last saw her; much nicer than Horace Cole, her brother. But I see occasionally that she has had another child, and I suppose being a Chamberlain is pretty stodgy.

I envy you your nightingales—We get them sometimes at Asheham. This afternoon we’ve got to go and see Aunt Mary Fisher. Doesn’t it take one back to Hyde Park Gate days? She always gives L. a book of old photographs to look at, and half kisses him in the Hall.

Did you know old Samuel Butler? I have got to write about him. I wish I’d known him—O and by the way, I’m told that you produced your life of your Aunt or grandmother, and made a tremendous success. Please lend me a copy—nothing is quite nice as old family letters.

Yr Sp.

Berg

[]

760: To Vanessa Bell

Saturday [3 June 1916]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dearest,

Clive has just rung up and says that Duncan has had his questions put to him. He seemed rather doubtful what I’d better do about Nelly, but on thinking it over it seemed to me best to write to her at once, telling her about Duncan, and saying that if she thought she could do anything I would send her details in a day or two. So I hope you will let me have them.

I do hope it will come all right.

Yr B.

Berg

[]

761: To Lady Robert Cecil

[3 June 1916]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond

Dear Nelly,

I wonder if it would bore you or be in any way distasteful to you if I told you about the case of Duncan Grant the painter, who is a conscientious objector and will be coming before the Central Tribunal in a week or two.

If you didnt mind, and felt that you could possibly say anything on his behalf to Lord Salisbury who is on the Tribunal, I would send you details in a day or two. He is perfectly honest in his objections, and also remarkable as a painter. But I dont want to become a pest to you, though I have a great wish to help Duncan if I can. I am told that the Central Tribunal enquires into the good faith of applicants—and I’ve known Duncan many years and very well, and could testify to his honesty—

Yours ever,
Virginia Woolf

Hatfield

[]

762: To Vanessa Bell

[6 June 1916]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richard

Dearest,

This letter has just come from Nelly.

If Lord Salisbury wants outside testimony, what had I better do? Get Roger or Clive or someone to write or see him? I’m writing to thank Nelly, and saying that theres any amount of testimony if Ld. S. wants it. I’ll let you know if I hear again.

Yr B.

I suppose Lord S. will want testimony as to Duncan’s conscience, and not as to his artistic genius. Please write, in case I hear again from Nelly.

Do you see that Charles Fisher [Virginia’s cousin] went down on the Invincible!

Berg

[]

763: To Lady Robert Cecil

[6 June 1916]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond

My dear Nelly,

Thank you for taking so much trouble. It is very good of you.

If Lord Salisbury should care to have outside Testimony there are many people who would like to give it—

By the way, being asked the other day if you would like an invitation to the Womens Co-operative Guild Conference which is to be held at the end of this month in London, I boldly said yes—so you will get a ticket, and if you liked to look in, we might meet there. It is worth seeing.

Have you taken Henry James’ flat?

Yrs. aff.
Virginia Woolf

Hatfield

[]

764: To Vanessa Bell

Wednesday [7 June 1916]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond

Dearest,

I have just had the enclosed letter from Nelly. Before it came, I had your telegram, which as you see, reads rather mysteriously. I think you must have written “outside evidence sent officially”—not send, as I haven’t any to send.

I sent a messenger to Nelly before I got her letter (as she is away for the day) asking her to tell Lord Salisbury about Duncan at once, and repeating about his being very honest and a good painter. It sounds from her letter rather as though Lord S. didn’t wish to be approached unofficially—but I hope she will at any rate send him Duncans name.

I am telephoning to Clive and telling him about Nelly’s letter, in case he thinks we had better take any further steps.

Yr B.

Berg

[]

765: To Vanessa Bell

Saturday [10 June 1916]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dearest,

I’m afraid I cant come on Wednesday, much though I should like to. We are going out on Wednesday night, and we go to the Webbs on Saturday, so that wouldn’t leave much time—only Friday really. But I hope you’ll ask me—or us—again.

I think it was all right with Nelly, as I said the Tribunals had been very stupid which was our reason for asking her help, and we’d no wish to do anything underhand. I suppose it is probably true that Lord S. always does do his best for everyone.

Yr B.

Berg

[]

766: To Vanessa Bell

[16 June 1916]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond

Dearest,

Nelly writes this, so I’m afraid its been not much good applying to her, but of course the Cecils are incredibly conscientious. Do tell me what happens about Duncan.

I had this letter from Aunt Mary who seems to me to be altogether wandering what with age and misery, poor woman—Now John, Millicents son, is killed too.

Yr B.

Berg

[]

767: To Lady Robert Cecil

[16 June 1916]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond

Dear Nelly,

I quite understand about Lord Salisbury, and of course it is what one feels to be right.

The first Tribunal was so prejudiced against C.Os. that one felt it was rather hopeless to expect a fair hearing, but I’ve no doubt the Central Tribunal will be quite different, and will see that Duncan is speaking the truth. Thank you very much indeed—It was very good of you to take so much trouble—One does hate writing to one’s relations—at least I do.

The war is a nightmare isn’t it—two cousins of mine were killed this last week, and I suppose in other families its much worse.

Yr. V.W.

Hatfield

[]

768: To James Strachey

Saturday [17 June 1916]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dear James,

Margery not having answered, I suppose she can’t be coming—anyhow do persuade Miss A.S.F. (if those are her initials) to come—we shall be delighted to see her at last—you’d have to be very tactful, as we’ve never met her, and when here you would have to bridge all our gulfs—age and youth, I mean.

We’re just off to the Webbs, possibly to meet the Shaws, and if it weren’t for the boasting I should collapse altogether.

Yrs V.W.

Leonard has got complete exemption, did you hear, owing to his tremor.

Strachey Trust

[]

769: To Lady Robert Cecil

[June 1916]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond

My dear Nelly,

We have been asked to get people interested in these Women farmers, and so I apply to you, though there doesn’t seem much reason why you should again be bothered, I admit. Leonard went over their farm, and thinks they ought to do very well with a little encouragement. But dont trouble to answer this.

We were down next door to Gale last week end, marching through woods with Mr and Mrs Sidney Webb, and Mr and Mrs Bernard Shaw, who all talked so incessantly upon so many different subjects that I never saw a single tree, and rather wished I could open your garden gate. Still, they were very kind.

I hope we may meet on Tuesday.

Yrs. V.W.

Duncan Grant has heard nothing of his case so far.

Hatfield

[]

770: To Katherine Cox

June 25th [1916]

Hogarth House [Richmond]

Dearest Ka,

It was a great pleasure to get your letter. I had become so much in want of news of you and there were such rumours about your state, that I actually wrote to Mrs Wilson [Ka’s sister Hester], who agrees with me that you are a desperate spirit, bent on destruction. I wish you’d say more exactly how you are though—do you have to be very careful and wear wool, and sleep between blankets, like Saxon? You needn’t think that you’re forgotten here. Last week I saw James [Strachey], Miss Alix Florence, Margery Olivier, and Olive Heseltine, and they all asked warmly after you: indeed it was proposed to send you a Round Robin, to make you come back. Still I daresay I’m fonder of you than they are, with my warm heart. Anyhow I often wish I could see anyone as nice and sensible and courageous as my Bruin is.

It is very difficult to collect the wrecks of life and describe them to you. Bloomsbury is pretty well exploded, only Clive and Mary Hutchinson remain; Adrian and Karin have taken a house in a dismal sounding place called Tanza Road, somewhere behind Rays [Strachey] in Hampstead. Nessa and Duncan remain at Wissett, waiting for the Central Tribunal to decide whats to be done with Duncan. Leonard has been completely exempted from serving the Country in any capacity. He went before the military doctors trembling like an aspen leaf, with certificates to say that he would tremble and has trembled and will never cease from trembling. It’s a great mercy for us. But the whole of our world does nothing but talk about conscription, and their chances of getting off; and they are all taken up with different societies and meetings and wire pulling—Clive having breakfasted with Lloyd George, and even I got in touch with Lord Salisbury! The latest rumour is that all C.Os are to be interned as Alien enemies—You’re very lucky to be out of it all, I think, especially as we have had a perfectly unalterable black cloud over us all through June, and a hot dusty wind which has turned the trees dark green already.

Last week end we spent with the Sidney Webbs, in Sussex (next door to Dalingridge) and there were the Bernard Shaws, and they all talked incessantly. I liked it better than I expected. At anyrate one can say what one likes, which is unusual with the middle aged; indeed I felt much more of a mature woman with a passionate past than Mrs Webb, who seemed to me astonishingly young and crude and without atmosphere, and as keen as a knife—rather like [H.T.J.] Norton or Hawtrey or [Maynard] Keynes indeed, and so is Sidney, except that he is rather more pompous. This doesn’t apply to poor Mrs Shaw though, who is very stupid, and has rolled herself up in Indian mysticism, like a caterpillar in a cocoon, in self defence. When she got me alone she tried to convert me, and lent me little books about the Seutras, which she had to hide from Mrs Webb. Bernard Shaw is rather more remote than the others, but when stirred up he told stories, all about himself, without stopping—at intervals he wrote letters to the newspapers, which he read aloud.

Two nights ago we dined with Olive [Heseltine], and there was a little private secretary called Davies, who had been to one of your evenings in search (did you know?) of a wife, but found none presentable in Downing Street. It was all incredibly mild and Oxford and worldly, and Leonard was almost sick with disgust. We stayed with Roger too, though it seems a long time ago. Lady Strachey [Lytton’s mother] was there and Pippa, and we made Lady S. read Pope aloud to us, until her nose bled, which shows what a spirited old creature she is. Roger I thought rather melancholy. He talked a lot about old age, and the horrors of loneliness; the poor man can’t make up his mind to have done with youth, and his attempts to keep with the young are rather pathetic.

Leonard is very well (so am I) and has a book [International Government] coming out next month, which I may send to you: but I think I shall keep it for you—seeing that you must come home, my dear Bruin; there is nobody who takes your place at all.

We go to Asheham in August, and plan to have a fortnight in Cornwall in September. Do come with us. Sydney [Waterlow] is said to have had a child, but no one knows the sex. Bryn has one—a daughter. Poor Molly MacCarthy is about as deaf as Karin: and so melancholy one doesn’t know what to do with her and the Dr says its incurable.

Please write again soon. Love from Leonard.

Yrs. V.W.

Mark Arnold-Forster

[]

771: To Vanessa Bell

28th June [1916]

Hogarth House [Richmond]

Dearest,

It’s very odd about Duncan, isn’t it? We dined with the Heseltines the other night and there we met one of Asquith’s secretaries, who said, in confidence, that all C.O.s in future who are imprisoned are to be interned as alien enemies. If this is true, I suppose Asquith will say so in the House today.

About coming to you—we should like to very much, but we are going to Asheham on the 7th for a fortnight, so our best time would be between the 21st July, and 7th August. I daresay you’ll have other plans for that time, so would you say what time suits you. All are equally good for us, I think.

I always keep a sort of pouch of gossip for you in my mind—I imagine you have a very soft trembling silken nose—but let me think now about our weekend with the Webbs. The Bernard Shaws were there. We talked quite incessantly—we were taken for brisk walks, still talking hard, through kind of Dalingridge country. Mrs Webb pounces on one, rather like a moulting eagle, with a bald neck and a bloodstained beak. However, I got on with her better than I expected. She seems very open minded, for an elderly person, and with no illusions or passions, or mysteries, so I daresay one would find her rather dull in the long run; she reminded me of one of the undergraduates of our youth. Shaw went fast asleep apparently, in the midst of all the talk and then woke up and rambled on into interminable stories about himself, and his backbone which is crooked, and his uncle who tried to commit suicide by shutting his head in a carpet bag, and his father who played on the ophicleide and died insane as they all do, and so on and so on. Poor Mrs Shaw was completely out of it, and she took me for a motor drive, and confided to me that Beatrice and Sidney, though wonderful people, had no idea of religion; and then she told me all about her conversion to Indian mysticism, and lent me little books, which unluckily, Mrs Webb got hold of, and she jeered at poor old Mrs Shaw, who sat in her corner, like a fat white Persian cat, making straw mats. I think I should be driven to mysticising if I saw much of the Webbs.

I wish you’d tell me more about your visitors—Lytton and Norton—is Norton just the same? We’ve sent in our income tax papers, but so far we haven’t got any money. I hope we shall get the press this summer, and start in the autumn. The question now is, who will write for us? Will you? We shall certainly want some endpapers.

By the way, we’re in the middle of spring cleaning, and Lottie unearthed the Watts drawing of mother and an early work of yours—Hayle harbour [Cornwall]. It is so good—grey, pink and buff colour (in my opinion) that I have hung it up. I should like a great big one of yours, to put in the staircase.

Olive has become rather smart, and as brisk as a well groomed hunter—hair all glossy, and cheekbones bright red—and a lot of chains and bits of green silk. She talks of Michael as if he were a pet dog. The little private secretary [J. T. Davies] is the son of a Bayswater boardinghouse keeper, and so he never gets asked out, except by Olive, and he wants to marry a wife, so Olive took him to Ka’s but he thought none of the young women there would do in Downing St. I heard from Ka, who seems to be staying on, and is apparently all right—and also from Aunt Anny [Ritchie], but it’s all about books and rather dull. Sydney Waterlow has a son; Bryn a daughter. I liked Miss Sargant Florence, who was brought here by James. Now I’ve got to go to the Womens Guild Congress. Dont you wish you were coming?

If I stay with you, shall I get special attention? petting and free rights of kissing and stroking the ladies mile. Eh?

Yr B.

Berg

[]

772: To Margaret Llewelyn Davies

[late June 1916]

Hoarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond

Dearest Margaret,

We go to Asheham on the 7th till the 21st. We are hoping you will be able to come—the sooner you come and the longer you stay the better we shall like it—

This is only to tell you the dates—dont bother to fix on dates if it isn’t easy to now. A line the day before is all we want.

Yrs. V.W.

[in Leonard’s handwriting]

I hope you will come. I enjoyed [the Women’s Guild] Congress enormously. I thought yesterday morning was better almost than I had ever heard it before. They really are wonderful. The boy who brought in the Press telegrams became so absorbed in listening to the speeches that some one had to prod him in order to make him realise that he had to go off to the post with one.

Sussex

[]

773: To Katherine Cox

Wednesday [11 July 1916]

Asheham, Lewes [Sussex]

Dearest Ka,

I hope there was a real live Bruin at the end of the telephone the other morning, but I begin to doubt it. Perhaps you died that very moment in Corsica. However, this is merely to say that we shall be here till the 21st, so come any time, but dont let it be a beggarly week end, and this doesn’t count as your proper visit. Would you like to meet anyone—or to bring some one down with you? We have plenty of room.

I suppose you are now in the midst of a swarm. How do you feel?

The maggots got into the mutton today—otherwise no adventures.

Yr V.W.

Mark Arnold-Forster

[]

774: To Vanessa Bell

Sunday [16 July 1916]

Asheham, Lewes [Sussex]

Dearest,

Would it suit you if we came next Friday to Monday? That seems the only time. Could you let me know as soon as possible if this suits you—and if so, what your station is, and which afternoon train is best. We should come straight from here, and I hope you wont mind my having no clothes.

I’d better keep such fragments of gossip as I have till we meet—but nothing much has happened down here. Did you see Ka in London? She rang me up just as we were going to say she’d come back, in order apparently to be inoculated. I’m very glad Duncan has got off. They’ll certainly let him stay on, I suppose; but what a farce it all is!

I rather hope you wont settle at Wissett. I miss your company very sadly. Yesterday a great wad of matted hair had to be cut from my head, so I’m nearly bald.

I make bread every morning here, but I haven’t mastered the art yet. Can you do it.

O the Apes [Virginia] are so excited at the thought of seeing you.

By the way, have you invited Leonard, or haven’t you? Perhaps there isn’t room.

Yr B.

Berg

[]

775: To Lytton Strachey

25th July [1916]

Hogarth House, Richmond

We’ve been wandering about from Asheham to Wissett, and I’m so stiff with weeding and herding geese that I can hardly walk. Could you come to Asheham from the 15th to the 21st? Moore will be there then I think. Please bring the dialogues, and any other pieces lately composed, and then we will set you to read aloud after dinner. My industry has the most minute results, and I begin to despair of finishing a book on this method—I write one sentence—the clock strikes—Leonard appears with a glass of milk. However, I daresay it don’t much matter. Wissett seems to lull asleep all ambition—Don’t you think they have discovered the secret of life? I thought it wonderfully harmonious. The Inn, by the way, is The Plough Inn, Holford [Somerset]. The man’s name I can’t remember—but I daresay it isn’t needed.

Katherine Mansfield has dogged my steps for three years—I’m always on the point of meeting her, or of reading her stories, and I have never managed to do either. But once Sydney Waterlow produced Middleton Murry instead of her—a moon calf looking youth—her husband? Do arrange a meeting—We go to Cornwall in September, and if I see anyone answering to your account on a rock or in the sea I shall accost her.

Duncan was very bitter against your—what shall we call her?—but you know who(m?) I mean [Ottoline Morrell]—He said she was raddled and putrid and kept him on the stretch for 48 hours. I wonder if you’ve got your cottage.

Leonard sends his love—he is reading the proofs of the French translation of his book, in which every word is rendered literally.

Yr. V.W.

Frances Hooper

[]

776: To Vanessa Bell

Sunday [30 July 1916]

Hogarth House, Richmond

Dearest Creature,

Before I forget, did I leave my umbrella at Wissett and take away one almost identically like it, only larger? When I got into the tube I found myself with a strange umbrella, not so refined as my own, which I am ready to return, but I fear it really belongs to a very smart tradesman who travelled with us.

Also, we never paid for our trap—what was it?

We came back to the usual run of small incidents, which I think you are lucky to avoid. You heard about Adrian and Gerald [Shove] I suppose? I met Fredegond and Gerald in a teashop in the Strand, and they were thinking of appealing, as they dont want to become agricultural labourers. Having ones own land of course, makes all the difference, and I daresay they’ll all try to come to Wissett, but I suppose you dont much want them. I said I thought there wasn’t much room. Fredegond is really rather beautiful I think, though a little too austere and reminiscent sometimes of Aunt Mary.

I’ve seldom enjoyed myself more than I did with you, and I cant make out exactly how you manage. One seems to get into such a contented state of mind. I heard from Lytton who feels the same, and says he would like to live with you forever. He’s rather off Ottoline, I gather—at any rate he doesn’t mean to live with her, and is looking for some other lodgment. He is off to Wales, so I dont suppose we shall see him.

I talked to Ka on the telephone—she wasn’t well enough to come here, and has gone to Aldbourne, rather ill I think, with bad earache. She is coming to Asheham—but I suppose she is in need of a rest cure. England is too horrible to stay in she says, but so it would be if one only saw Dominic [Spring-Rice] and Dudley Ward and had to soothe their miseries all day.

I sent you some velvet slippers, which cost 4/11—but I dont know if they’ll do. They will change them if they are too large—Sears, George Street, Richmond. But I will take them off you, as I really want a new pair. Their toes looked a little odd.

I greatly envy you your brats. They are very interesting. How odd it will be when Julian is a very clever, severe, undergraduate as I see he will be.

I think you ought to take a holiday sometime; you do keep at it so, and having responsibilities is a great strain. Desmond dined with us last night, and said he supposed you were perfectly happy, in a state of complete mental suspension, like a big dog—whereas you’re as active as a grasshopper. I hope to go to Seven Dials and get the silkwinder tomorrow. The Stores dont keep them. We go to Asheham on Tuesday. The servants [Nellie Boxall and Lottie Hope] now propose to stay with us forever.

Please write, and tell me what flowers to plant. I want to begin at once. I have made your rolls, not so good yet as yours, but better than Nellys. That egg savoury is made by boiling the semolina in milk, not water.

I am very much interested in your life, which I think of writing another novel about. Its fatal staying with you—you start so many new ideas.

Berg

[]

777: To Saxon Sydney-Turner

Aug. 10th [1916]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

My dear Saxon,

Is there any chance that you could come here for a week end? Would the 8th suit you? Do come if you can.

I am reading Count Carlo Gozzi in his own tongue, and dont find it very difficult, but then they only use about 16 words.

It is very nice here—grass being cut down by Leonard, mice caught in traps, and Hawks falling dead at my feet—

Tomorrow we go for a treat to Brighton.

Yr. affate,
V.W.

Sussex

[]

778: To Vanessa Bell

16th August [1916]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest,

I suppose you are still in the flesh at Wissett—such as there is of it. I do think you ought to drink more milk. Leonard thought you had grown much thinner—so did someone else. You are always on the trot, if not gallop. Please take 2 glasses, and keep well, for love of me. Duncan also is said to look ill. Your life may be tiring without your knowing it, owing to the difference between it and Gordon Square. Here I lie in bed, 12 AM, a glass of milk by my side. [G. E.] Moore and Leonard on the terrace, and Pernel [Strachey] deep in the very latest book.

We are once more in domestic difficulties. After saying she was quite content, Nelly told me two days ago that she finds Asheham too depressing to stay, and, though Lottie would stay with her, she wont without her. They like Richmond, and its only a question of Asheham, but it seems to me too difficult to arrange to get different people every time we come here; so I must find a new couple by Oct. 1st. Do you think there is any chance that Blanche and Jessie [Vanessa’s maids] would come, if Maynard doesn’t take Gordon Square? Or, if he does, what sort of person is Miss Chapman? Would she come as cook?

I should be very grateful if you would answer as soon as possible about Blanche and Jessie, as I foresee we shall have difficulties in getting anyone.

I have been considering the question of having Sophy [Farrell] back. She wrote me another melancholy letter the other day, but I daresay she would prefer to stay with Aunt Minna in H. P. G. [Hyde Park Gate] to coming out to Richmond, and being rather humble. Also, I dont know whether she would be very expensive—in weekly books I mean, for the expense of a slopper isn’t much—and very tyrannical.

I wish you would give me your sage advice on the subject. Lottie cheerfully says we shall find no one who likes Richmond and Asheham; and of course Asheham, without the train, and no shops sending out, is very lonely, if one doesn’t care for the country.

Sydney Waterlow has invited himself to stay here at the end of the month, so I will tell him about Gower St—but you’d better tell me the rent, and the exact address.

Adrian and Karin were here the other day, and went to see Charleston, which they liked so much that they are going to take it, and let it for the first year, probably to the Squires. I wish you’d taken it. I suppose you’ve heard that they’ve settled at Cheltenham, with 6 C. O.’s, near the Milmans.

Leonard has just been offered the Secretaryship of the National Council for Liberty (that isnt quite the right name)—the thing Langdon Davies runs; they offer £3 to £400 a year, but it doesn’t seem worthwhile if he has to go there all day and every day. I think he is going to offer to run it with a secretary under him, going 3 days a week; but that mayn’t be possible. I should find it very dull if he were out all day, and it would mean that he gave up all his other work.

Then we have heard of a house in Maids of Honour Row on the [Richmond] green, and Leonard is a good deal in favour of moving, because they are lovely houses with gardens, and perfect quiet, no further from the station than we are; but I dont know that they are really so much better than Hogarth to make the move worthwhile.

Alix S[argant]. F[lorence]. was here the other day. She seemed to me to talk without ceasing, very positive and intelligent, and liking serious arguments, as we did in youth, and letting no vague statement pass without examination. I gathered a few crumbs for you—chiefly about Dobbin, who was set to paint frescoes with Mrs S. F [Alix’s mother]: and bored her to death. Dobbins work had to be painted over mostly when she left. It is thought that she is taking up literature instead of painting, having married a literary and very nervous man, who has to live in the country.

My God! What colours you are responsible for! Karins clothes almost wrenched my eyes from the sockets—a skirt barred with reds and yellows of the vilest kind, and a pea green blouse on top, with a gaudy handkerchief on her head, supposed to be the very boldest taste. I shall retire into dove colour and old lavender, with a lace collar, and lawn wristlets.

Please write as soon as you can.

Yr B.

Berg

[]

779: To Vanessa Bell

Sunday [20 August 1916]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest,

I went into the shop at Firle the other day, and the man took me for you, and said you owed him 17/6 for butter which he sent you to Gordon Sqre 2 years ago. He was rather cross, and I said I would send you the bill, and that you would certainly pay at once, if correct.

Adrian and Karin, Leonard and Alix S. F. are all playing Bridge and making such a gabble I can hardly write.

I sent Julian a silkwinder, which I hope will make silk dresses for us all.

Yr V.W.

Berg

[]

780: To R. C. Trevelyan

Aug. 21st [1916]

Asheham House, Rodmell [Sussex]

Dear Mr Trevelyan,

We are very glad that you can come on Saturday.

When you get to Lewes you can either wait till 5.7, when there is a train to Glynde, which is 2 miles from us; or you can take a taxi out here, 4 miles. If you only bring a knapsack, Leonard would meet you at Glynde, and carry it out for you. But in this case, would you send a card?

Otherwise, we shall expect you about tea time—Needless to say, we do not change our clothes.

Yours sincerely,
Virginia Woolf

Sussex

[]

781: To Vanessa Bell

Friday [25 August 1916]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest,

Its no good sending me a postal order which I can only cash at Wissett, you foolish animal! Will you give it to Quentin for a birthday present, as I had meant to send him one; and then we shall be quits.

I wrote to Sophy, asking her to come back, and offering a kitchen maid, and got a fearful snubbing! She said she had been very unhappy when Mr Adrian sent her away, and Miss [Minna] Duckworth had taken her when no one else wanted her, and she thought it her duty to stay. I think she has washed her hands of us, and will never come back—I feel I’ve done my duty anyhow, though in many ways, I wish she had come back. Servant hunting is such a bore; and they’ll all leave again, I suppose. However, there seem to be any number going at Lewes; I shall try for an elderly cook, and saw one most charming old lady, who was of course, just engaged. I cant help being selfishly rather glad that you may spend part of the winter in London, especially with these raids going on. We actually had a zeppelin over the house here—in broad daylight. We were away, but the servants say the sound is unmistakable, and were in a panic; Nelly hiding in the wood, and Lottie running to the Woolers, where Mrs Wooler did nothing but dash into her house and out again. But it was so high up that no one saw it. Eleven aeroplanes chased it. I cant help thinking it was really English.

Moore and Pernel were a great success, though we poisoned Pernel with sour milk, and she looked rather cadaverous. Moore sang to us every night. He is quite easy, and much more human than his followers; but one can see how they’ve copied him, but he has much more vigour than they have. Perhaps they no longer exist though. Karin thinks that B. B. is going to cut off her allowance, owing to being a C. O, so they cant take Charleston after all.

Sydney W: comes next week, so you’d better tell me anything about the house that you think necessary.

What old wives letters these are! All about cooks and plans. We ought to be walking up and down making our winter plans now, but I suppose you dont want me as much as I want you. Write. Do you take milk?

B.

Berg

[]

782: To Molly Maccarthy

Saturday [26 August 1916]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest Molly,

We are much disappointed at not having you. The worst of it is that I’m afraid we’re already full up on 9th Sept: which is our last week end here, as we go to Cornwall for the end of the month. I wish I’d known before and I would have swept everyone else away with a broom.

What a life you lead, to be sure! And here am I sitting up in bed, with large glasses of milk—however, both my servants are leaving, and I have had to write already one dozen letters. Jane Blackman—I hear that you want a situation—etc.,

Now we are setting off to meet Bob [Trevelyan] and James S[trachey], who suddenly says he is coming, and I wish you were going to be found in Lewes station too.

We shall be in Richmond on Oct 1st, if we can find anyone to cook and make beds.

Do you hear that Clive is settled as farm labourer at Garsington? The war at anyrate has done some funny things among our friends.

I’ve just read Mrs Mordaunts latest novel “The Park Wall”, very good I think, and if it weren’t for you, I should again attempt to write to her. Have you ever read Cashel Byron’s Profession? [1886] much the best thing Shaw ever wrote, to my mind.

Your loving,
V.W.

Mrs Michael MacCarthy

[]

783: To Vanessa Bell

Monday [28 August 1916]

[Asheham, Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest

Do you see that Aunt Mary has been killed by a motor car?

Bob Trevelyan is here, and his wife had just heard—

(I see it is in the Times this morning.)

Yr B.

Berg

[]

784: To Vanessa Bell

Sunday [10 September 1916]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest,

Look, what promptitude I show! The thing is this—if you want me to do anything about the farm, you must send instructions at once, as we go away next Saturday.

I’ve not seen Gunn, but I daresay he has written to you. As far as I can make out the farm [Itford Farm] has probably 6 bedrooms, and 3 sitting rooms. Nelly was shown over the house, and say its much darker and lower than this. It was I, with my usual spurt of intelligence, who suggested the plan to Roger; so I quite approve of your being here, and only stipulate for the usual rights, in precedence of the legitimate brats. Gunn has laid by money, and has bought a farm at the foot of Mount Caburn, by Glynde, where he moves at the end of the month. I think it might be worthwhile for you to suggest taking that, if this one isn’t feasible; he might let it for the war, I should think. If these dont do, what about Charleston? Mr Stacey has a large farm there, and I’ve no doubt wants labour, though I know nothing of his views about C.Os. The house is furnished in a kind of way, I think. Limpsfield must be swarming with your friends; and Cheltenham, with that solid breezy woman [Karin] would drive me to drink at once.

I thought Aunt Mary’s death a positive stroke of genius—I mean the discomfort and self sacrifice of it—no trouble to anyone; and yet done out of life by the inhumanity of someone else. I believe a woman motor driver was driving at 30 miles, some people said; but others said only 6. Of course At. Mary wouldn’t be able to get out of the way, if she were alone. I wrote to Adeline with great difficulty, and like all my mortuary letters, it was a great success. As she was perishing by degrees, I think its a great mercy for her, poor old creature; though really one can hardly think of her as a live human being.

Sydney [Waterlow] was here with Roger, and was anxious to know how the report of their leaving Gipsy Hill had got about, as they’ve no idea of doing so. After listening to our talk for an hour or two he said “Its no use my going to bed tonight. I shan’t be able to sleep after this excitement.” When asked what excitement, he said “The excitement of seeing you all again.”—which I thought threw a ghastly light upon their evenings at Gipsy Hill.

At this moment I am doing my duty by having my family in law to spend the weekend—Bella and Herbert. Bella is dressed all in black silk, with long widow streamers. She goes to Bexhill to run a Little Folks childrens hospital, where she meets Lady Egerton, Aunt Stephen’s sister, who seems to know all about us. I spend my time in trying to see which of Bella’s eyes works, and she talks incessantly, and is always making jokes, though I gather she is really much depressed by the loss of her husband, who was practically the same thing as a cauliflower (he was a botanist) and he died in his bath.

We are going to

Gwel Marten,
Carbis Bay [Cornwall]

next Monday for a fortnight. Margaret Davies has asked to come too, in order, partly, to discuss her future, which is very complicated owing to cancer etc; and I hope to upset all her plans, and attack her in every possible way, so as to keep things brisk. I believe its the only way of keeping these ardent spirits from overwhelming one entirely.

Ka writes that her doctor wont let her go back to Corsica till the end of October. Leonard has suggested that she should take on his job at the Civil Liberty Society, as he thinks its too great a bore to do himself; and Ka would suit it exactly.

Nelly and Lottie are now very anxious to stay on, though I’d almost got a cook; we are getting a slopper.

Now answer at once, and do tell me about Otts: visit, and Bertie’s [Russell] letter.

I will go to any house, before Saturday, and use my sagacity, as I should much like to have you.

Yr B.

Berg

[]

785: To Roger Fry

Sunday [10 September 1916]

Asheham House [Rodmell, Sussex]

My dear Roger,

I’ve been trying in vain, I need hardly say, to collect ten penny stamps for you in return for the Cigarettes, which came in the nick of time—Thank you very much for them.

I meant to ask whether you have a list of possible buyers at the Omega which you would lend us when it comes to sending post cards about the press. However, this can wait.

Our address in Cornwall, by the way, is

Gwel Marten,
Carbis Bay,
Cornwall,

if by any chance you could come.

The Club I’m sure would take wing in 10 seconds if you think it a feasible plan—I wonder what fire and light would come to: and the room you must charge for of course. I think a life of three months is about right for that kind of thing, and no host or hostess, but you have to have the right of producing some entertainment, such as reading, or magic lantern, if you could. I think there’s a lot to be said for something of the sort.

Nessa seems enthusiastic (for one of her temperament) about coming to the farm, but I dont know whether Gunn is agreeable, and whether the farm is large enough.

I think one way or another we shall rake together some sort of civilisation, independently of Ottoline, so as to make Geneva unneccessary.

Anyhow, do light upon us whenever you can.

I imagine you sitting on this misty morning with the great white Chigaco [sic] teeth flashing incessantly—And I’ve got my relations in law!

Yrs. V.W.

Sussex

[]

786: To Vanessa Bell

Monday [11 September 1916]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest,

I forgot to say, will you be careful not to tell anyone about the farm being to let, if you dont take it? So many of our friends have been asking about houses here, and we’re not at all anxious to have neighbours (unless you).

Did you see this in the Times?

Yr. B.

Berg

[]

787: To Vanessa Bell

Tuesday [12 September 1916]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest,

I have been talking to Nelly about your taking the [Itford] farm, and she says it is said to be very unhealthy. The Mockford children are always being ill there, and the little boy has just been having tonsilitis very badly. The doctor said that the house was much too low. Also the Woolers who used to be there say that their children were never well there. Mrs Mockford doesn’t know that you may take it, so I dont think this was said to put you off. I thought I’d better tell you, though one never knows how much faith to put in these people. If you could get work on Staceys farm, I expect the Charleston house would be a much better one.

Yr B.

Berg

[]

788: To Vanessa Bell

Saturday Evening [16 September 1916]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond

Dearest,

We have seen a very nice house, which we are much tempted by; and now it strikes us that we must let Asheham for the winter. Would it be any good to you? We thought of asking £2.2 a week. We want to let it until 15th December anyhow—possibly till the spring, but that we can’t settle now. If Madame Vandervelde takes it, she will be there possibly till Oct. 1st—certainly not longer, so you could go there on the 1st—or if you only wanted it for 2 or 3 weeks while getting into another house, we would let it.

Its a miserable state of things that I shouldn’t see my dear old Dolphin,—I did want to extremely, but perhaps we can [arrange] to meet before long. We shall be in Cornwall till Oct. 1st.

It seems to me a great thing that Gunn will take D. and B. on to work for him—and I should think you could certainly get some sort of house in the neighbourhood. Do stay on as long as you want to (if M. Vand. doesn’t come—and I dont think she will) Mrs Attfield [caretaker] seems very willing—I hope you’ll be decently comfortable.

Yr. B.

Berg

[]

Letters 789-813 (mid-September-December 1916)

789: To Vanessa Bell

Sunday [24 September 1916]

Gwel Marten, Carbis Bay, Cornwall

Dearest,

It is very exciting to think that you may get Charleston. I hope you will. Leonard says that there are certainly 8 bedrooms, probably more, and very good ones, two big sitting rooms on the ground floor and one small one; and very good large rooms on the first floor. He says the garden could be made lovely—there are fruit trees, and vegetables, and a most charming walk under trees. The only drawbacks seemed to be that there is cold water, and no hot, in the bathroom; not a very nice w.c, and a cesspool in the tennis court. But he thought it almost as nice as Asheham. Whatever you may say, I think the country there is superb to live in—I always want to come back again, and one never feels it dull, but then, not being an artist, my feelings are not to be considered ha! ha!—As to the beds etc—you did once send me a list, which may be in existence. Perhaps Jessie might know. Anyhow you shall have your dues. The green china certainly shall go, as we have enough. But could we arrange to send it by some carrier already bringing things?—they charge so tremendously for carting now. I do envy you, taking a new house—Nothing in the world is so exciting. And I shall remind you of my services in getting it from time to time; and you will then always have to give me complete rights for 5 minutes by the clock.

The romance of Cornwall has once more overcome me. I find that one lapses into a particular mood of absolute enjoyment—which takes me back to my childhood.

I hope Quentins cut is better. I think one was rather proud of being cut—my legs are all over scars, but not so good as his.

We are a very funny party. Miss [Lilian] Harris has turned up, Margarets secretary, an old creature of 50, extremely sensible and unselfish, and independent, who smokes a pipe, and lives alone in lodgings, and reminds us both so much of Saxon in her sayings and habits that we frequently disgrace ourselves. When Margaret gets excited she calls her “John”, and Miss Harris calls Margaret “Jim”. They go out sketching all day, and produce their sketches, and want to be praised. They think it is a very bad thing to use Chinese white in water colours, and that real artists leave bits of white paper, so I said I would ask you. I have had several arguments about art and morality with Margaret, and I hope I have done some damage, but a life rooted in good works is hard to injure—especially as she always assumes that I think what Oscar Wilde thought in the 8oties.

I wish you were here—as only the Cornish bred really see its stupendous merits—not but what Leonard is very appreciative, and Margaret gets her aesthetic emotions roused in great outbursts, when the clouds have reflections in the sea.

Please write soon and say what happens. I’m sure, if you get Charleston, you’ll end by buying it forever. If you lived there, you could make it absolutely divine.

Yr B.

We are here till Oct 1st—then Richmond.

Berg

[]

790: To Saxon Sydney-Turner

Sept 30th [1916]

Gwel Marten, Carbis Bay, Cornwall

My dear Saxon,

I cannot help thinking of you coming into the dining room at Carbis Bay with your bag weighed down with books [in 1905], which was the foundation of my reverence for your character.

We are next door to that house, and I wish you were here to read a little Leopardi with me—not that I find him very difficult so far. We have been here a fortnight with Margaret Davies and an elderly secretary of hers, by name Lilian Harris. The secretary is a most interesting and sensible person, and I think you would have much in common—In fact you are very like her when you smoke your pipe and say nothing. She lives alone in lodgings at Hampstead, and smokes about 8 pipes a day, and is very fond of good wine and cigars. She has asked me to bring you to tea—Will you come?—her other taste is for statistics.

We had [G. E.] Moore to stay with us at Asheham. He, too, came with a box like lead, and it was full of music books, which he meant to sing to us, but we had no piano, so he sang without one—some very nice old German and English songs. Do you know one about the “foggy foggy dew”, and another about “lost in the Lowland seas”? He is a very great man, I think, so solid and direct: and not the least hard to talk to. He knows all the wild flowers and butterflies. He spent his time writing a review, and when he went he had scratched it all out and begun a new one.

We also had Bob Trevelyan: you can imagine what it was like walking on the top of the Downs in a high wind, with him talking quite incessantly about poetry religion etc. beside one. At last, about 11 o’clock at night, he stopped and said he really didnt know what he was talking about.

Have you heard whether Nessa has finally taken Charleston? Adrian writes that he has 30 cows and 6 C.Os. under him, near Cheltenham.

We come back on Monday, and the first thing we do is to go to the city and buy our own press—so please look and see what old manuscripts you have. We shall begin with short poems.

It is a perfect day, and we are going to the Gurnards Head.

Yrs V.W.

Leonard sends his love.

Sussex

[]

791: To Lady Robert Cecil

Monday [October 1916?]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond

Dear Nelly,

I’m afraid this Wednesday will not do after all. May we come next Wednesday week, about 5? We shall come then unless you prevent us. Leonard would very much like to come too.

We are thinking of starting a printing press, for all our friends stories. Dont you think its a good idea?

Yrs V.W.

Hatfield

[]

792: To Roger Fry

Sunday [8 October 1916]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road Richmond

My dear Roger,

The photographs certainly are masterpieces—the one of Leonard is far the best that I’ve ever seen of him—How does that minute camera produce such large pictures?

We are back, and should like it very much if you can come. Would Wednesday and Thursday this week suit you? You might ring up and say if they do—

Tim [dog] has just been found to swarm with nits—I’m not sure that my own head is free from them—but its no good looking into the future. We have rubbed him with paraffin.

Yours ever,
Virginia Woolf

Sussex

[]

793: To Vanessa Bell

Monday [9? October 1916]

Hogarth House, Richmond

Dearest,

I saw Lytton yesterday, who told me he had heard that you and Duncan and possibly others had all got influenza at Wissett. I should be very grateful if anyone who hasn’t got it would send a line to say how you are. I hear Clive had it, and Adrian too, and Nellie went for a holiday and was in bed with [it] all the time; and Ott’s got it.

Both the dogs have got nits.

Gwen Raverat is going to have a baby. So is Frances Cornford.

I saw Ka, who seems rather feeble still. I do hope you are all right. Please dont start a move with the germs still in you.

Have you got Charleston?

Yr B.

Berg

[]

794: To Janet Case

Oct. 10th [1916]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond

My dear Janet,

Words fail me to express my thanks and admiration—It is not only a miracle of work (“Thats a gift that comes from nature—well, one cant have everything!”, Lottie said looking at it) but it comes when I was completely out of nightgowns—they hang in loops about me. How did you make this one? Did you have a pattern? Is it thinkable that I could ever make one like it—so open at the neck—so beautifully shaped on the shoulders—and with all those wonderful small stitches.

My dear Janet, you are too good to think of doing such a thing—and then to go and do it! Now what I pray for is a mild attack of influenza, so that I may really look like a lady in bed—But I cant get over your skill—Nice you always were—If you want work, why dont you open a shop for underlinen? The ladies who merely flirt with Greek take underclothes seriously—But I’m very proud that you made one for me.

Yr affate and grateful,
V.W.

Sussex

[]

795: To Dora Carrington

Sunday [15 October 1916]

[Hogarth House, Richmond]

Dear Miss Carrington,

Roger Fry says you are doing some work at Hampton Court [on the Mantegna paintings]. Could you dine with us on Thursday next, 7.30—of course without dressing? I am very anxious to hear what state Asheham was in the other day—were there trays about, that hadn’t been cleaned?

We hope you may be able to come—We are about 5 minutes walk from Richmond Station—anyone will tell you the way.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

I think James Strachey is coming.

Robert H. Taylor

[]

796: To Vanessa Bell

Tuesday [17 October 1916]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond

Dearest,

We are going to Asheham this Friday, till Tuesday. Shall you be at Charleston? If so, perhaps you’d come over. Anyhow, I’ll try to find the list of furniture, and show Mrs Attfield which it is, so that if you send for it, she can show the man which it is.

Yr B.

Berg

[]

797: To Vanessa Bell

[19? October 1916]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond

Dearest,

Do come over on Monday. We shall expect you for lunch, at 1, and tea, and dinner if you will. The furniture is certain to take some time.

Your best way to come, if you bicycle, is to take the path to Firle, under the Park wall. Then you may have to go down into the main road; but if you are clever, you will find a turning to your left (There is a signpost saying “To the Hill”) which leads you up to a machine for pumping water—and then the path goes straight on, beneath the downs, till it joins the main Beddingham road to Asheham. This cuts off at least 2 miles from the main road way. Or would you sleep the night, and go home next day?

I see you’re going to say that Charleston is better than Asheham—It cuts me to the heart. I dreamt I was sitting in a kind of portable w. c. at Charleston, painted grey, like a Beehive to look at.

B.

Berg

[]

798: To David Garnett

Saturday [21 October 1916]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dear Mr Garnett,

As a matter of fact, we are not at all annoyed [by the Asheham escapade]—It seems a very sensible thing to do—The caretaker (who saw you vanishing) was a good deal alarmed, thinking we should blame her, and gave such an account of tables upset, beds stripped etc; that we thought strange villagers must have been playing a joke. So its a relief to find it was you—

It flatters us a good deal to see what a reputation for temper we’ve got—I telephoned to Miss Carrington, and heard her quake at the sound of my voice miles off!

Leonard is reading your poems [in manuscript], and says they are the best return you could make for the raid.

Yours Sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Berg

[]

799: To Vanessa Bell

Tuesday [24 October 1916]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest,

It was a great disappointment that you didn’t come—but it would have been perfect madness—think of bicycling 9 miles on the first day of one’s affairs! I half thought of coming over, but it struck me you might be out on business, or have some one—I dont know when we shall be here again—anyhow for Christmas—perhaps for a weekend before.

I could come and see you at Gordon Sqre. on Thursday, but I suppose this wouldn’t suit—Friday we dine out, so I suppose I mustn’t—God damn!

I have looked for the list but can find it nowhere. There are now 7 beds here (not counting a camp bed—) and a cot. Can you remember whether you sent your beds when I was at Firle or at Asheham? I know I had 4 beds (not counting Jeans) at Firle; last year we bought 2 more—That only leaves 1 bed, a camp bed, and a cot for you. If you sent the beds to Firle, however, then others belong to you. Perhaps you can tell yours by looking at them. Mrs Attfield thinks that her husband could take the furniture for you, if Gunn let him have a cart, which she thinks possible. I have told her to ask Gunn at once, and to send you a card. I have also said that you will come over on Monday next, and show her the furniture. If you cant, you might send a line to Mrs Attfield, Asheham Cottages—The rest of the things you will find easily—When you have taken the furniture would you let me know what it amounts to, as we might have to get more, before Christmas.

Would you ask Bunny if he took The Oxford Book of Poetry when he came? It was in my bedroom; I can’t find it—and possibly he did—I always read it while I’m waiting for breakfast—and I cant find anything else to read.

How pleasant it would be to see you here, or to roll on the downs together, and the Ape would steal kisses from the most secluded parts!

I hope we shall get our press now, as we’ve just heard that they are soon sending our money.

I keep dreaming of Charleston—I shd. like to see it. Perhaps we cd. arrange a meeting here one weekend.

Yr B.

Berg

[]

800: To Vanessa Bell

Thursday [9 November 1916]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond

Dearest,

My affairs have just come on, so I’m afraid I shan’t be able to come up until Saturday, when we thought of going to Maynards party—Damn it all! I had meant to go to the Omega show tomorrow, but I suppose I mustnt. Shall you be at the party? If so, I could possibly settle to come on Sunday some time—

We had an awful time with Jean [Thomas] about the furniture—however I’ll tell you about it when I see you, as I hope I may do.

If we come to the party we shall come very early and go very early.

I will keep Sunday afternoon free on the chance that you will stay on.

Yr B.

Berg

[]

801: To Vanessa Bell

Monday [13? November 1916]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dearest,

I think, from what Leonard says, that I must have given a wrong account of what Maynard said about having a room at Charleston. L. says he only said that he hoped he might have one; but was quite doubtful.

I expect L. is right, as you know I don’t attend very carefully—

Yr B.

I’ve just had a wonderful letter fr. Aunt Minna, saying that in your precubist days you might have liked to paint a fallen tree in her garden, but not now—Also, did she give us a silver tea pot for a wedding present, as one is missing, in her chest.

Berg

[]

802: To Barbara Hiles

Friday [24 November 1916]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond

Dear Barbara

(I hope you wont mind my calling you so—)

Is there any chance that you would come and see us? We should like it so much. Could you come next Wednesday to tea and stay to dinner.

Your best way to come is to get the train at Finchley Road Station direct to Richmond.

A train leaves Finchley Road at 4.8 which would bring you here in time for tea. We are about 5 minutes from the station. Anyone would tell you the way.

Yours
Virginia Woolf

Berg

[]

803: To Saxon Sydney-Turner

Friday [24 November 1916]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond

My dear Saxon,

I was just going to write when your letter came this evening—not that I have much to tell you except that I have been feeling oddly happy all day, because somehow I think that you are. And as you ought to know, that does seem to me one of the very best things that could happen.

I’ve a feeling that I want somehow to give you back or that some one else should give you back what you lost in Thoby. For I’ve often thought that you were the one person who understood about him—I mean his death meant almost more to you and me than to anyone, and I think we shared together some of the worst things. I know anyhow that you helped me then—and often I’ve known that we both kept him with us, though we did not talk of him. But this is not what I meant to say.

I never dreamt that you had been selfish about Barbara. I had an idea that she was extremely young and so might not perhaps understand the situation unless you explained it. But on thinking it over I dont see there is any reason to think this—in fact its absurd.

I wrote and asked her to tea and dinner on Wednesday. I do wonder what I shall think of her. Of course I hope you will marry her if she’s what I think she must be—because I do want someone to explore all the exquisiteness of your nature—and then after all, to love is so much the best of all things. I’m often amazed to find what it means, and I believe no one has more power of caring than you have. Shall I be very jealous? Ah—but I think I know some things about you that no one else does.

I wonder how your dinner with Nick is going off. I’m in the train, since I took to purple ink, so I daresay I’m writing nonsense, but its my way of kissing you as I should like to do—dear old Saxon.

Please write if it doesn’t bother you; or do come and have a walk in the Park.

Yr. loving V.W.

Sussex

[]

804: To Mary Booth

26th Nov [1916]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond

Dearest Mrs Booth,

I think nobody can have given more to other people than you and Mr Booth did, and so I cannot help writing one word to you, and think you will not mind it.

So often when Thoby died it was like finding our own home again to come into yours, and the thought of you has always been an extraordinary comfort.

Your loving,
Virginia Woolf

University of London

[]

805: To Saxon Sydney-Turner

Monday [27 November 1916]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond

My dear Saxon,

Whatever your state of mind, you must say I’m an obedient creature to sit down and write to you, directly I’ve finished tea—However, I admit I like writing to you very much, though its rather like writing to an elf bathed in moonlight on the top of some hill. And I’ve nothing to say—except that I owe you 5/5 for the chess book, which I will send you tomorrow, if I can remember, as I think I shall.

Probably I ought to insist upon rest and food at this juncture. If you dont sleep or eat, your feelings will become so much of a puzzle that you’ll waste these exquisite days merely scratching your head. For I’m convinced they are exquisite days—more entirely exquisite for you than for most, because all your feelings are so true. Have I ever heard you say an insincere thing? Never. Now I think you can trust yourself because you have made a habit of honesty. And, dear me, one never regrets feeling things in this life; not even if mere disappointment follows, which I think utterly impossible in this particular case. You will say I know nothing about it; and very properly give me one of your slight raps on the nose, but in spite of being in some ways foolish, I am sensible in others. I know, being civilised as we are, we can’t help watching our feelings, and being incredulous of them. But that I believe to be the proper way to feel, and later when things are less new, one loses this self-consciousness, and enjoys the fact that our feelings have been so watched, and are therefore so good—I’ve never had to go back on any of mine for Leonard, or indeed for any of my friends. I dont think this is very well expressed, but no doubt you will see what it means.

How delightful it is to think of you. Are you writing any poetry? I am reading Mendel, which is rather interesting, and makes me think of Barbara, not that she occurs in it, I suppose, but all the young do, and I wonder if they’re so very different from us. I think life for us was more complicated at that sort of age—

We went to a concert on Friday, and met Gertler and Carrington, and Walter Lamb, who came home with us—O dear! But the main point is that I hope you will write to me; and I think you a most adorable and tender hearted sprite? no, spirit.

Yrs. V.W.

Sussex

[]

806: To Vanessa Bell

Sunday [3? December 1916]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dearest,

We have now got £15 from the income tax, instead of the £35 we hoped for—As the press costs £20, and we are rather hard up just now, I’m afraid we shall have to wait to buy it until March, unless we can raise some money on the Vanity Fair page. D’you think there’s any chance of selling this before Christmas?—I don’t remember what you settled to do—Of course, if its better to wait, we must. My fear is that the £15 will be used for house expenses, and the hope of the press disappear—

Saxon is here, saying he feels that he must now look after his body, as his mind is more settled, now that he sees he cant get what he wants. He reads Jane Austen to Barbara, and says she is extremely natural and nice to him; but I think he’s pretty hopeless—However, one can’t be sure whether he’s really in love, as other people are; perhaps he would be content if B. married Nick, and he became a member of the household. I think he means to stay some time with you.

I’ve had a letter from Mrs Booth, describing Charles’ death, which was very peaceful, and he knew them all and only died because his body was entirely worn out—so it seems to be a typical ending for that family—she seems to have the deepest feelings for us all.

If you ever feel lonely, which I dont suppose you do, I could always come down for a night or two in the middle of the week—But I suppose you will be having Snow and Saxon—We heard Desmond introduce Shaw’s lecture; and he spoke so long that the audience coughed him down, which was rather terrible. I saw old Dobbin [Mary Creighton] and her husband—much alike, and quite unchanged.

Yr B.

Berg

[]

807: To Barbara Hiles

Monday [4 December 1916]

Postcard

Hogarth House [Richmond]

Will you come to tea—stay to dinner on Thursday next, catching the same train? We should like it very much.

V. Woolf

Bring your sewing, and I will do mine!

Berg

[]

808: To Vanessa Bell

Tuesday [12 December 1916]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dearest,

I’m afraid I can’t come, because we have people dining here on Wednesday, and we dine out on Saturday.

However, I hope I shall see you next week, and perhaps you’ll ask me later. We shall be coming down next Thursday to Asheham, and I think we shall stay a fortnight, so I daresay you’ll see as much of me as you want to.

Its very exciting about your new children. I suppose Amber’s brat is the bastard, which is said to make them interesting. Do you think Saxon has any chance [with Barbara Hiles]? or what is their relationship? I think we have Ka for Christmas, and perhaps Desmond, but as the servants aren’t coming we shall be alone for the most part.

I very much want to see Charleston. It is said the Apes have a special sunny room there kept for them.

Yr B.

Berg

[]

809: To Duncan Grant

Sunday 17th Dec [1916]

Hogarth House [Richmond]

My dear Duncan,

I began a letter to you, in my head at least, some days ago, after seeing your pictures at the Omega. I liked the one over the fireplace immensely: the green and blue one, I mean; which seemed to me divinely romantic and imaginative. Lord! how tired I got of those sturdy pots and pans, with red billiard balls attached to them! I daresay I am saying all the wrong things—I was taken round by Roger, and felt innumerable eggs crack beneath me. I was very much struck by his sensibility: he showed me minute patches of black, and scrapings of a sort of graining upon which the whole composition depended. And I believe it did too. Certainly, it is a most remarkable art. I can’t pretend to “buy” another picture of yours, but I wish I could. However, when we have a success with our press, I shall make a little hoard with a view to a picture.

I am involved in the romance of Saxon and Barbara. I dont know what to think of the state of things—if I had Saxon attached to me indefinitely, madness would be the least of my sensations. Surely she must think him a possible husband? Anyhow they dined here the other night, and after dinner what with the cold and the silence I committed some hideous breach of manners,—how I dont know—and was rung up next day by Saxon, and told I had been very unkind to him!—What I said, as far as I can remember, was that people ought not to be reserved about their emotions—He ought to have thought this a compliment; only I wasn’t thinking of him at all. But of course his state is for him what ours would be if we discovered a tremendous pair of white wings sprouting between our shoulder blades.

Last night we dined with the [J. C.] Squires on Chiswick Mall. O my God! what an evening! All the lights went out, dinner an hour late, pheasants bleeding on the plate, no knives, tumblers or spoons; poor Mrs Squire thought to laugh it over, but became distracted; Squire ferocious. Strange figures wandered in and out, among them Mrs Hannay, an artist—Pike an inventor, Scott a don. Stove smoked, fog thick. Trains stopped. Bed.

Yrs V.W.

Duncan Grant

[]

810: To Saxon Sydney-Turner

Christmas Day [1916]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

My dear Saxon,

I hope to go and see your mother one day soon, but would you send me the number of the house, as I stupidly left your letter at home. But your implied stricture makes me rather doubtful as to my power of being useful to you by seeing people.

I did not ‘obviously mean to be very charming’ at your expense the other day—I thought twice before telling the story of the organ grinder, and decided to tell it because it comes natural to me to behave in that way, and to be tongue tied on these occasions lands me in insincerity. In fact, I expect I am the worst possible confidant for many reasons—but I think they are reasons and not merely the desire for admiration—But this applies rather to Barbara than to your mother, with whom I shall naturally be on my guard.

Except for the wind, it might be April here. Duncan and Maynard came over yesterday, as Maynard has been sent for by the Treasury, and so cannot stay here. The rest of the time I think we shall be alone.

I am quite well—I was rather depressed at being told to rest again, but it is very difficult to keep at the weight which [Dr] Craig thinks necessary—However he was very encouraging about the future—if one is careful now. Certainly, you were not to blame—

Ka and Leonard send their love. She goes early tomorrow, and we are going to try and get the train stopped for her at Rodmell.

Yrs. V.W.

Sussex

[]

811: To Vanessa Bell

Wednesday [27 December 1916]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest,

Would it suit you if we came over on Monday, and I spent the night? We should arrive about tea time, and Leonard would fetch me the next day.

I’m very well, but Craig thinks I’ve been losing weight too fast, and wants me not to walk much; and as I very much want to avoid having to go to bed, I am being very cautious. But he was very cheerful—

I think we go back on Thursday next—but its perfect down here. If I dont hear, we shall turn up on Monday afternoon. I am longing for a good gossip with my dear Dolphin.

Yr B.

Berg

[]

812: To Margaret Llewelyn Davies

Friday [29 December 1916]

Asheham, Lewes [Sussex]

Dearest Margaret,

There isn’t much news to tell you; however I should like to get a good thick letter from you, so I must write.

Perhaps you are in the midst of moving to the cellar—Do you know that if people live in the dark, they become bleached all over and very likely their eyes turn pink? I should mention this to Lilian [Harris]. But from the papers I see that you have all been in deep fog. Here of course the sun has been such that lying in bed I’ve had to pull the curtains; frost on the ground, and the downs most lovely. We found a hare dying the other afternoon, and then a green plover, turning its head from side to side, with its eyes shut. Today we meant to go and have a treat at Brighton, so of course the wind has risen and covered the whole place with sea mist. Nevertheless we are full of small occupations which keep us so busy that the time flies.

Leonard is writing an article about beasts in Ceylon for the New Statesman; I am—or was—reading Greek! I can’t make out what the fascination of Greek is, seeing that I have to look out every other word, and then fit them together like a puzzle.

The voice of the Webbs has reached us even here—Sydney much aggrieved that Leonard doesn’t jump at his offer, seeing that the Committee were unanimous, and asking us to dine and discuss it at length, which of course I should like to do for the sake of squeezing a compliment, addressed to me but intended for my husband, from that barren woman. But compared with Widow Whitehead, how she shines! Widow Whitehead was one of your very worst—

We had Ka for Christmas, and Maynard Keynes and Duncan came over, and tomorrow I’m going over to spend the night at Charleston, which they’ve covered with various bright shades of Distemper. I shall note down the effects for you.

Maynard thinks that we may be on the verge of ruin, and thus of peace; and possibly [President Woodrow] Wilson intends to cut off our supplies and altogether he was quite hopeful. He dined with the Asquiths two nights after their downfall, though Asquith himself was quite unmoved and most magnanimous, Margot [Asquith] started to cry with the soup, sent for cigarettes, and dropped tears and ashes together into her plate—utterly overcome. Maynard has a great admiration for Asquith who had perpetually to stand buffer between [Lloyd] George and McKenna, who hate each other like poison.

I’ve just finished Bertie upon Reconstruction, with a melancholy feeling that this sort of lecturing does me no good, but only exasperates me with the rest of the world. However, others say they think it does good—to the working classes perhaps—

Give my love to Lilian, and tell her that it needn’t necessarily be beetles; it might be butterflies, or even wildflowers, or heraldry, or old china; the main point is it mustn’t be for the good of the race—

We come back on Thursday and then hope etc, etc,—If you do any painting, you will let me help wont you? or moving books.

L. sends his love

Yr V.W.

Sussex

[]

813: To Saxon Sydney-Turner

Sunday [31 December 1916]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

My dear Saxon,

I am much relieved to find that no stricture was implied; and hereby declare you forgiven. But I would point out that my sensibility is a tribute to you—there’s nothing I should dislike more than to hurt you in a matter of this sort; and that is what I thought I must have done. And I was hurt to think that you could have been hurt.

Yesterday we went to Brighton and thinking it possible that your mother might see me, I rang them up. Your father answered, and I had the greatest difficulty in making him understand who I was. After repeated spelling he grasped the name of Woolf, and Asheham—but neither conveyed anything to him—I was about to ring off, when suddenly it occurred to him that I was “Virginia” by which name and no other he said he knew me. He thought I had better not come, for fear of infection, though your mother is much better. He was so decided that I agreed not to come, though I’m afraid I shan’t be able to go over again before we leave. I go to Charleston tomorrow, which only leaves one day possible, and though I myself would go, I find Leonard is against it—as it means a four mile walk to Glynde and back?—Would it be any use to suggest to Nessa that she should go one day? I suppose she sometimes does leave Charleston—or I could write to your mother. Your father wanted news of you, and said there had been a death in the house, but things were now rather better.

We have done nothing except visit Brighton and fetch the milk from Beddingham. Almost every day has been lovely for some reason or other—all different—and only one actually wet. Duncan and Maynard—but I think I told you they had been over. I think the maledictions against Ka are quite unfounded in fact, though she has some mannerisms—like the rest of us, only not quite the same ones—

Now I am going to read the Greek Anthology (in a copy you gave me once) which I find very hard and quite absorbing. I beg to point out that there is time for me to get another letter; and I want news of Barbara; in default of news, reflections about her!

Yr. V.W.

’Ηδη λευκοιον θαλλει, θαλλει δε ϕιλομβρος

ναρκισσος, θαλλει δ’ουρεσιϕοιτα κρινα.

ἠδη δ’ἡ ϕιλεραστος, ἐν ἀνθεσιν ὡριμον ἀνθος,

βαρβαρα Πειθους ἡδυ τεθηλε ῥοδον.

λειμωνες, τι ματαια κομαις ἐπι ϕαιδρα γελατε;

ἁ γαρ παις κρεσσων ἁδυπνοων στεϕανων.

Sussex

[]

Letters 814-855 (January-July 1917)

814: To Saxon Sydney-Turner

Tuesday [16 January 1917]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond

My dear Saxon,

It was very pleasant to get a letter from you, in spite of your asperity about my Greek—I maintain though, that right or wrong the quotation was a very good one.

Would it suit you to dine on Sunday here? I find that is better for us than Saturday, and I am writing now to ask Barbara. This morning I heard from Carrington, who says that Barbara is delighted by the idea of Asheham, and they hope to go in about a fortnight. I should suggest your going too. It is a place that makes me feel completely natural—which, whether one is anxious or not, always makes life easier. This afternoon we are going to a Beethoven concert, opening Wigmore Hall (the old Bechstein)—I am glad that Barbara is busy, for after all, people have to help themselves through these things; and after her work, I am sure you are the person best able to help. I shall concoct a few more stories for her. I wonder if she would be interested by the amazing story of Sydney Waterlow? We have been having a crisis with him, really unthinkable with any one else, and its not yet over.

By the way, I must seriously lecture you upon late hours. Twice you date your letters 2 a.m. and if so, how can you possibly be well? Even if you dont sleep, try going to bed at 10. I find nothing makes so much difference. One late night is sufficient to start a headache. However, I shall speak to Barbara.

Yr. V.W.

The snow is beginning to drip through my roof again.

Sussex

[]

815: To Barbara Hiles

Tuesday [16 January 1917]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond

Dear Barbara,

Will you come to dinner next Sunday? I have asked Saxon to come.

I am coming to the Omega on Thursday, to be slightly altered, but it is really a great success, and such a mercy to creep into ones fur like an animal.

Please make Saxon keep earlier hours. He writes to me at 2 in the morning. It is absolute ruin to the health. I hope you are sensible too—but how dangerous it must be to live with a packet of pins in one’s mouth, year in, year out.

I am longing to hear about Kenilworth on Christmas day, and whether it was as we imagined it—Or is it really a sink of iniquity? I can imagine most lurid military amours taking place under the Elizabethan ruins.

I heard from Carrington that you may be able to go to Asheham in a fortnight. We shall like you to be there—which is more than we can say of some of our friends, but I will not be so indiscreet as to say which.

We were divinely happy there at Christmas; the weather like spring, and not a soul to be seen. You must make Saxon go with you; then take him to the top of the downs; while Carrington asks him something about the man on the moon, you run behind, give him a shove, and send him rolling to the bottom. We used to do this with Vanessa, and it made a new woman of her.

Your affate
V.W.

Berg

[]

816: To Dora Carrington

Wednesday [17 January 1917]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond

Dear Carrington,

I hope you will be able to go to Asheham. It doesn’t matter when, so long as you let me know in time to warn the caretaker. I shall have to explain a good many things, about food, as our arrangements are now very difficult there, without trains.

Could you dine with me on Friday next, 7-30? Perhaps you would spend the night. There are trains up early in the morning.

I shall be alone, and it would be very nice.

As letters seem to take so long, would you ring me up tomorrow morning.

Yours affate
Virginia Woolf

Robert H. Taylor

[]

817: To Vanessa Bell

Monday [22 January 1917]

[Hogarth House, Richmond]

Dearest,

You didn’t send me the recipes—but never mind—perhaps you will one day—We had Saxon and Barbara and Adrian and Saxon [error for Karin] last night; and Saxon wanted to know whether he might suggest a visit to you on Tuesday, till Saturday. He is ordered a rest; and we have lent them Asheham. Carrington is going with them.

But he told me that Roger said you were overworked, and was therefore doubtful about coming. I think its most likely that you are overworked—and I do think it a most ridiculous thing, knowing what horror illness is. I now take 3 glasses of milk daily. If you would take one, some good would be done. You use every part of you, so incessantly. I cant think how you manage visitors. But I wish you’d send me a line to say how you really are. If you’d ever like comparative quiet here, we both wish that you’d come. My husband is nursing a hopeful passion for you—and as for me!

Adrian and Karin have got a place in Hertfordshire, much to their delight. Saxon and Barbara seem both of them on the verge of some form of melancholia, and I think you’d better not have him, as his silence and look of disease infect one after a time. However, I’m sure he meant to come. Then you’ll have them all over from Asheham.

I wonder how the Amber brats are doing. Personally, I think its better not to teach one’s own children;—are you sure you couldn’t bed out one of our enlightened virgins, an Olivier say, (Daphne might do) in Firle, and make her teach everything? I meant to write a long, passionate, and interesting letter, but Saxon has just rung me up, and kept me so long talking, that I must now dress. He says he’s going to you—and you say you’re all right. But I dont much believe it. The fog is permanent here; by night we have the Aurora Borealis, which a man in the street took to be zeppelins, so shouted out loud under the servants window. At midnight we heard them carrying their bedding to the kitchen, there to lie on the floor till day—With great difficulty we got them up again, and lectured them on the nature of northern lights. I think I must write the stories of our youth for Julian. Aunt Ena is dead.

Yr B.

I should very much like to stay with you—but I don’t know when.

I found this letter.

Leonard saw Sydney [Waterlow]—we had him here—but not much result—

I think he’s hopeless—not being chosen an Apostle wrecked his life he says.

Berg

[]

818: To Margaret Llewelyn Davies

Jan. 24th [1917]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond

Dearest Margaret,

I hope you are better. Leonard never went to that Committee. Would Saturday suit you as well as Sunday to dine here? On Sunday we have Roger, I think, and it would be perhaps nicer for you and for us to meet alone.

We had a very remarkable Guild meeting last night, which I must tell you about. A speaker [Mrs Bessie Ward] from the Civil Liberty Council, lectured us upon Venereal Diseases, and moral risks for our sons. I felt that the audience was queer, and as no one spoke, I got up and thanked her, whereupon two women left the room, and I saw that another gigantic fat one was in tears. However, they all went, except Mrs Langston who told the lecturer it was a most cruel speech, and only a childless woman could have made it “for we mothers try to forget what our sons have to go through”. Then she began to cry. Did you ever hear such—nonsense it seems to me. The poor speaker said she was used to it. I do think its odd—the servants tell me that great indignation was expressed by most of the women at the mention in public of such subjects—however, I must stop—

Are you really all right? I will come and see Miss Kidd of course if she would ever like it.

Yr. V.W.

Sussex

[]

819: To Margaret Llewelyn Davies

Friday [26 January 1917]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dearest Margaret,

I expect that, writing in a hurry, I gave you rather a wrong impression of what happened at the meeting. I have asked the servants since what the women who objected said about the lecture. Their chief objection seems to have been that she spoke in the presence of two girls—Gladys, our tweeny, aged 16; and Mrs Reed’s daughter, 16 or 17. They thought this very wrong. But then Mrs Ward (Mrs Bessie Ward) specially noticed the presence of girls, said that she was going to speak on moral questions, and asked whether she was to go on. They all agreed; at any rate none objected. As a matter of fact, Mrs Reed, the girl’s mother, thought the lecture splendid, and did not mind her daughter hearing it. Mrs Miller also said it was the best lecture we had ever had, and offered to do anything, wished us to affiliate to the Council of C[ivil] L[iberties]; etc. There were three who objected strongly, (partly because of the presence of girls) only one of whom I spoke to, Mrs Langston. I thought her unreasonable, because she seemed to take it as a personal insult on the part of Mrs Ward—and I was surprised because Mrs Langston is on a good many local Committees, I think, and is by way of being among the most broad minded. But I quite agree that their point of view about their sons is quite easy to understand and sympathise with—I thought Mrs Ward a nice woman, evidently trying to make her remarks as general as possible; half the lecture was about the conscription of women; only a small part was devoted to Venereal Diseases.

I think that the objection raised by other branches to whom she had spoken was patriotic—certainly in one case; they said nothing but sang God Save the King. It is queer though, that that class shouldn’t discuss these questions openly, considering how much more they are affected by them than we are. I spoke to Nelly (the cook) afterwards, and after being a little shocked, she agreed that it was most important that women should have knowledge in such matters—and then she told me stories of friends and relations, and how they’d suffered, and so on.

Dont bother to answer.

Yr. V.W.

Sussex

[]

820: To Vanessa Bell

[end January 1917]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond

Dearest,

Would you be so good as to explain on the enclosed card in what proportions one mixes the size and the paint and water. The people at the shop didn’t know. If you could answer at once, we should be grateful as we want to paint the dining room on Sunday.

Give my love to Saxon. I saw Barbara yesterday, and explained everything about Asheham.

Yr V.W.

Berg

[]

821: To Saxon Sydney-Turner

Saturday [3 February 1917]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

My dear Saxon,

You must put it down much to my credit that I write, as the cold is nipping my fingers. However, I daresay its nothing to what you have been suffering. I am very sorry about the pipes and Mrs Attfield [caretaker]. I hope you now use her, and there’s no need for you to make beds and break ice, which will undo the good of the air. Your praise of Asheham pleased us very much. I don’t think Charleston can hold a candle to it, and that, owing to the vileness of human nature, pleases us too.

What is the truth of the rumour that Barbara is going on the Music Hall Stage? I went to hear a new Debussy sonata for the harp flute and viola yesterday, and there met Adrian and Karin, who told me she had accepted an offer—I hope its not true, because I want to feel that for ever and ever she will make my clothes*—and in fact I had a vision of some adaptation of dress contrived by her and Faith to do away with underclothes and be attached by a solitary button.

I went to tea with Roger yesterday, and there met his Belgian Vandervelde, and Lady Constance Stuart Richardson. Save that the titled lady wore top boots, such as the foresters in Shakespeare wear, I saw nothing strange and even improper about her; but we all made believe that the whole of life was an unsealed book to us. I rather liked the Sonata (this is in your later manner).

We are going skating today on the Pen Ponds [Richmond Park] and tomorrow we have induced Lytton to come too. As to the William Watson, I prefer his pomp to his wit. The epigrams are like crackers that dont go off—As to Aeschylus, on the other hand, I’ve been reading him in French which is better than English; I dont think I have read anything else. Aeschylus however excited my spirits to such an extent that, hearing my husband snore in the night, I woke him to light his torch and look for zeppelins. He then applied the Freud system to my mind, and analysed it down to Clytemnestra and the watch fires, which so pleased him that he forgave me. All the morning I have been reviewing with great labour an American essayist; and therefore I can’t think of any good jokes. But from Adrian’s account you are all like rosy elves; and I seriously hope that you have rested and not worried. After all I think your situation must be extremely good, from all points of view, and you will have a solid experience to look back upon, more satisfactory than visits and journeys in the Tube.

Please write again and give my love to Barbara and Carrington, and I hope we shall all meet as soon as you come back.

Yr. V.W.

* Tell her the dress has come back, altered, and greatly improved. Many thanks.

Sussex

[]

822: To Violet Dickinson

Sunday [4 February 1917]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond

My Violet,

I have been meaning to ask whether I might come to tea one day; also I have been meaning to thank you for the fur boots, which I am still wearing—the third winter I think—They’re quite unapproachable. As our coal gave out the other day, they were my chief support for a week.

How are you? Are you writing (as is rumoured) a History of the Eden family since the Fall I suppose you have been charged with all the horrors of the death of Lord Cromer, arranging everything—If you are in London I hope I may see you. We have been at Asheham, where the entire garden has been crushed out by fallen trees, and we have to start all over again. Nessa is settled about 4 miles off, and has adopted two small girls. Aunt Mary (did you see) was run over by a taxicab. Let me know some afternoon when you wd be in.

Yr Sp:

Berg

[]

823: To Dora Carrington

Monday [5 February 1917]

Hogarth House, Richmond

Dear Carrington,

I wonder whether you are still at Asheham.

This is to ask you whether, if you are, you will be so very kind as to bring back my Kodak with you. It is in the drawing room, and has some films wh. ought to be developed.

I hope your difficulties are less—they cant be over so long as this frost holds—our sufferings here are very great; one day last week we had no coal, no milk, no telephone.

Please come and dine and bring the Kodak when you get back.

Yr V.W.

Love to Barbara and Saxon.

Robert H. Taylor

[]

824: To Vanessa Bell

Sunday [11 February 1917]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dearest,

We shall be very glad to sell you the apples, at whatever price is their due, as I don’t think they’ll keep till Easter.

But I dont know how you’re to get them—or the carpet. Do you deal with Bannisters? If so, his cart might bring them. If not, shall I ask Mrs Attfield if she can manage it?

I wish you would send me details of your housekeeping. My books run to about 17/- a head; but then I suppose 5 cost more to feed in proportion than 9. I believe the only way to be cheap is to get rid of respectable servants; for there’s no checking them, short of dismissing them altogether. Have you any cheap dishes you could recommend? It would be a great comfort to get rid of the feeling of waste, let alone spending so much on such dull things.

London always seems to me rich in romance when I dip into it, which I do about twice a week, but thank God I don’t live there. I find that when I’ve seen a certain number of people my mind becomes like an old match box—the part one strikes on, I mean. But its pleasant seeing our friends a-hopping in the frying pan. I met Vandervelde and Lady Stuart Richardson last week—rather elderly both of them, and without obvious attractions. We went up yesterday, and at once ran into Ka, and Roger, separately—Ka flying to Wimbledon, as her pipes are burst, Roger returning from Lady Constance. And we dined with the [Desmond] MacCarthys, and met Alix [Sargant-Florence] and that strange phantom Abbott, with the disease which makes the touch of human flesh repulsive to him.

I must consider what gossip I put in my pouch for you. Dr Seton is dead, aged 90, and lived in the next street to us here. I saw Mrs Cole in the park. Leonard knew her. I only saw a great proboscis flash by. Molly’s [MacCarthy] ear specialist (a new one) seems to think her case hopeless; but she was very sprightly, and her children are certainly very charming—I wont say more charming than yours—which reminds me—did Julian get a parcel of various toys which I sent at the same time as the book? If not, I had better ask—Here I was rung up by Saxon; seems in the depths of depression, about his health, as far as I could gather. The doctor, whom he had just seen, may send him away for a long time. However he’s coming to tea, and he was so testy that I think he must be rather bad, or Barbara changed. He wrote to me that he was always repeating to himself “The happy ghost”—which I recognise among the signs of mania. He wanted Barbara to stay at Asheham for the rest of the war, which we dont at all wish for—In fact we may come down next week, as our domestic difficulties are likely to be great. Last week we ran out of coal, and managed to get one ton, which is now almost finished, and it seems impossible to get any more. During the worst of the frost we had to live on coal bricks, bought from an old woman in the street; then our milk gave out, and then the telephone.

However we have had amazing bright sun, and skating at Hampton Court. I bought a pair, and found I could get along, and enjoyed it very much, but now its thawing hard. Old Lady Strachey has taken to reading us plays, which is rather amusing. She reads for 2 ½ hours without stopping, acting every part (cutting out obscenity alone) and has only one eye; she is far the best reader I have ever heard. There was a woman there called Miss Ammonia. I have had a slight rapprochement with Katherine Mansfield; who seems to me an unpleasant but forcible and utterly unscrupulous character, in whom I think you might find a ‘companion’—

What are the Amber Brats like? I can’t remember a word of tonic-sol-fa—I could get you books if you like.

Yr B.

Berg

[]

825: To Duncan Grant

Tuesday [6 March 1917]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond

My dear Duncan,

I hope by this time you have got all covered with mud and manure again, so that a letter from a suburb even may have some romance. You were like a beautiful but rather faded moth, the other day, after your nights debauch among the red hot pokers and passion flowers of Hampstead. Directly I left you, by the way, I ran straight into Lord Ribblesdale, the very image of his picture—only obviously seedy and dissolute. Then I had my tooth out, and dreamt such a terrifically exciting and somehow sexual dream that I woke up laughing, upon which the military doctor said “I declare you are laughing Mrs Woolf! Now do tell us what your dream was about?” which I could not do.

It is very difficult to get in to touch with people who live in the country. I am sitting alone by myself over a large fire after dinner, Leonard having gone up to see Mrs Hamilton; and if you were opposite we should soon be wagging our tongues like a pack of hounds. As for gossip, I daresay I had better think what there is, though I expect the true version of every single thing is known at Charleston long before it is here. In fact, I always think of you and Nessa like the young women at the telephone exchange, with the wires ringing little bells round them, as loves, divorces, and copulations and insanities blaze out in London.

Last night the Hawtreys dined here—an odd couple. Almost her first words were “Do you like Lady Ottoline?”. As far as I can make out Mrs H: must have failed in that circle, for her disapproval of their ways went on practically the whole evening. It was odd to see Hawtrey as a married man—especially married to a practically barbaric Pole—or so she seemed to me, with ungoverned passions and the brain of a yellow cockatoo. She described his proposal, which took place in the middle of a Beethoven quarter. “I love you” he said “and I didn’t know at first whether he meant me or another girl” upon which Hawtrey tapped her archly upon the nose (in our house, I mean—he was very arch and sprightly with her, and she very amorous). Then I had tea with dear old Violet Dickinson, who, I must say, has more of the flesh of humanity about her than those rather disembodied young women at the Omega. However, I see I am getting as crusty as old Nessa; but I get on better with mellow spinsters like Violet, who have had their noses in every cesspool since about the year 1870. When I was there a young woman arrived to ask her advice about a paralysed doctor to whom she (the young lady) is engaged; and that has been going on without ceasing since the days of the first Jubilee, at least. She had been consulted by the Turtons, parents of Nina’s Turton; old family friends of course, Nina has now taken away the baby. She knew Turton himself, who had only one fault—his chivalry; and he believed Nina to be the deserted wife of an officer who only wanted a chance to reform; at least so he told the Dickinsons, just before he went to the front. And then I heard about Katie [Cromer], who makes a beautiful widow; and how Violet met Helen Holland roaming about a railway station all in black, and saying when spoken to “Mother has just gone home”, which meant that Aunt Ena’s coffin was in the van.

However, I daresay all this will sound very unreal, when it gets among the sheep and the downs; and old Nessa (who has become a Shakespeare character in my mind, so that I often put her into action for my amusement)—she, I suppose, is long past reading letters by this time—what with the dirt, the itch, the brats, the paints; and is it true, by the way that she said the other day “Its the last feather in the Camels Cap”, meaning, it is thought (Heaven knows why) that she was unable to break the ice in her Po? And I suppose speech will be beyond her soon; Maynard seemed to think so, not that she ever had a complete vocabulary—I wish when you write me that very long letter which you will do this evening you would tell me what her habits are. People are always asking after her; indeed one of the concealed worms of my life has been a sisters jealousy—of a sister I mean; and to feed this I have invented such a myth about her that I scarcely know one from tother.

I saw Sylvia Milman and her husband the other night; at least Sylvia M: and a kind of Belgian Shakespeare in brown velveteen, whom I took to be her husband, but they are dining with us, so I shall see.

I wish I could stop writing this letter—it is like an extremely long visit to the W.C. when, do what you will, fresh coils appear, and duty seems to urge you to break off, and then another inch protrudes, which must be the last; and it isnt the last—and so on, until—However—I must not tell you about Sydney Waterlow; or Leonard’s misconduct in the Strachey drawing room; but do tell Nessa this one flaming invention of mine—I make my own sanitary towels, and save at least 2/6 a month.

I hope you get half a day off, and will spend it in writing a long letter to me.

Yr V.W.

Duncan Grant

[]

826: To Vanessa Bell

Friday [23 March 1917]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dearest,

I write to suggest that you should pay us a little visit at Asheham. Do you think it would be possible? Our visitors go on the 10th, and then we shall be there alone for a week—and we should needless to say, be extremely happy if you would come for that week. The brats would be near enough for you to keep an eye on them, and you could paint, and be alone most of the day, and call me in for a gossip when wanted.

I did think you looked in want of a holiday—and coming to London is only the fire after the frying pan, as you would say.

The spring season is full of disease; and a small break in your life might keep you healthy for a year. However, I admit I really dont ask you for any unselfish reason, but because it would be such fun if you did come, and we shan’t be having any one else then.

I think we come down on the 3rd. Marjorie [Strachey] and [C. P.] Sanger arrive on the 5th. So do think it over and say you will.

Have you got rid of the Ambers? I hope so.

I gather you didn’t see Walter [Lamb] after all—

I must stop—as we are going to the Farrington Rd. [error for Farringdon St] to buy our press.

Love to Duncan.

Yr B.

Berg

[]

827: To Violet Dickinson

Tuesday [10 April 1917]

Asheham, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

My Violet,

It was very nice to read—or rather decipher—your very distinguished hand again. I wish you would write oftener; but its almost impossible to write letters. I can only just manage it now that our visitors have gone. We have talked incessantly for 5 days; one was a very minute, half starved barrister, with views upon every political question—indeed upon every possible question; the other was one of the Stracheys who has taken to board school teaching, and had to argue the whole question of Education. What a mercy it is when one’s friends go! But we were hoping that you would come down to Richmond. Could it be arranged, or are you settled now for the summer?

I didn’t honestly think that Lady Newton had made the best of her Lyme papers; the truth was that the Legh’s were almost invariably stupid—which accounts, I suppose, for their centuries of life on the same spot. Do you know them in the flesh? I should like immensely to write a book of that sort, if someone would trust me to tell the truth about their relations. It’s so queer the sentiment she had for them. If you have got Mrs Lyttelton, do hand her on to me. I know its a base pleasure that one takes in these indecent revelations—why do they do it? But if they enjoy it, I dont see why we shouldn’t. Was Alfred a fraud?—half a fraud, I suppose; a sort of glorified George [Duckworth]; a much nicer George—but still in that line of business. But I know nothing about it.

Nessa and Duncan came over yesterday, having previously washed themselves; and then went back in a storm late at night to help ducklings out of their eggs, for they were heard quacking inside, and couldn’t break through. Nessa seems to have slipped civilization off her back, and splashes about entirely nude, without shame, and enormous spirit. Indeed, Clive now takes up the line that she has ceased to be a presentable lady—I think it all works admirably. The wind rages incessantly, and Leonard spends his day cutting up the fallen trees. We live on the wood, which smells so delicious. I am trying to read Conrad’s new book, but owing to endless talk, I haven’t got far. Now we are going to Lewes to buy some plants—for the summer. Potatoes there are none. However, the old ewes give birth nightly behind hurdles at the back of the house. And all day the lambs keep up an extraordinary loud noise.

I hope I shall see you again soon—We have bought our Press! We don’t know how to work it, but now I must find some young novelists or poets. Do you know any?

Leonard sends his love, and says he hopes you will come and see us. I liked my tea with you so much—

Yr Sp.

Berg

[]

828: To Lady Robert Cecil

Saturday 14th April [1917]

Asheham, Rodmell, Lewes

My dear Nelly,

Whenever I come here, I think of you—I don’t exactly know why, but I feel its a great compliment to you even when its pouring with rain and the downs are half covered with mist. I saw Violet the other day, and she said something about your being on the move. Is it to the flat in Victoria or to Henry James’ sister in law’s flat?

Its melancholy to think that you have left St John’s Wood, with that square garden, and the trees which I always think of bare, as trees ought to be. However, Violet is so much of an enchantress that I daresay she made this all up in her head. Dont you know the sort of unreal haphazard air which meets one on the staircase in Manchester Street [Violet’s London house]?

We came here for Easter, and every day we had either a gale or a snowstorm. We had two visitors [Marjorie Strachey and C. P. Sanger], one a barrister, and such a lot of talk that I used to go up to my room and fall upon a French novel like a starving dog. They were both very nice; and I suppose being both hard at work the rest of the year their minds ran away with them with no work to do. Or do you find that barristers are always like that? The world seems so definite to them—so full of information.

When I’m in the country I like sitting over a great wood fire and reading—or thinking I’m going to read. I’ve just read Conrad’s latest. Have you? Its very beautiful and very calm. I wish I knew how he gets his effect of space.

By the way, we’ve bought our printing Press. We are going to start work directly we go back, next Tuesday. Heaven knows how one prints—but please consider whether you haven’t a page or two of practically faultless prose in some desk. We want to start on something very short and very sublime.

May I come to tea with you some day, if you’re in a house where that is possible. I must send this to St John’s Wood.

Nessa is 4 miles on the other side of the down, living like an old hen wife among ducks, chickens and children. She never wants to put on proper clothes again—even a bath seems to distress her. Her children are for ever asking her questions and she invents all sorts of answers, never having known very accurately about facts.

Yr. V.W.

Hatfield

[]

829: To Vanessa Bell

April 26th [1917]

Hogarth House [Richmond]

Dearest,

I went to Bumpus [book shop] the other day, and the man seemed to think that books about making things are to be had, but was out of them. Perhaps you could say, more exactly what you want—I’m not sure I’ve got it right. I got a book of Bucklands, which Leonard used to know by heart, as a small present.

Wouldn’t bugs be a good thing to start?—what fun to sugar the trees again. When Moore was with us last summer he discovered several varieties of Blue [butterflies] on the downs.

It was disappointing not to see you, and we had a fine roast fowl for dinner, but I hardly thought you would come. I must now bethink me as usual of my gossip, though I maintain its a case of coals to Newcastle. Various Stracheys have descended upon us. That letter from Jos set the affair going again—at least Marjorie [Strachey] spent two days with him, and left a brooch in his room, which had to be telegraphed for, and it is thought her character is gone. What happened no one knows—but she appeared on Sunday saying that either she must get a letter delivered at once, or go to Staffordshire by the next train. They are filled with disgust. Lytton has had his exemption taken away by the Tribunal, and is going to appeal. Rodker has been arrested, and declared insane (but something may have happened later). So far, nothing has been done to us. I collected this at dinner last night with Alix and Carrington, where there was also a most singular speckly eyed young man—Aldous Huxley—who owing to Ka, has got put into a government office. I warned him of what might happen to his soul; however, he spends his time translating French poetry.

Did you hear of Maynards terrible outburst at Easter, when he said that Asquith is more intelligent than Lytton? Lytton thinks this a very serious symptom. I had a wonderful plunge however from this exalted society to—what? Imagine Marny, all black, incredibly faded and genteel, on the platform at Victoria!—carrying a small bag, with gold rimmed pince-nezs! There was no escape; she asked about 20 questions. “Where is Nessa? Does she live at Asheham now? How are her children? Have you got a house? Isn’t Richmond very pretty?”—happily her train came; but next day I was rung up by Toad, who seemed quivering with excitement, and insists upon dining here. But I know I shall enjoy it. I rather gather that Marny disapproves of her [Emma’s] work for the Germans [prisoners of war].

Our press arrived on Tuesday. We unpacked it with enormous excitement, finally with Nelly’s help, carried it into the drawing room, set it on its stand—and discovered it was smashed in half! It is a great weight, and they never screwed it down; but the shop has probably got a spare part. Anyhow the arrangement of the type is such a business that we shant be ready to start printing directly. One has great blocks of type, which have to be divided into their separate letters, and founts, and then put into the right partitions. The work of ages, especially when you mix the h’s with the ns, as I did yesterday. We get so absorbed we can’t stop; I see that real printing will devour one’s entire life. I am going to see Katherine Mansfield, to get a story from her, perhaps; please experiment with papers.

Nelly gave notice our last day at Asheham—as I expected. Neither she nor Lotty feel they can face 6 weeks there in the summer; so I’m speculating on a complete change—one servant, and meals from the communal kitchen, which is going to be started, near us I hope. What do you think?

We shall count upon your coming here. I think I shall invite a small, and select party to meet you—or would you like a drunken riot? I want to give a party. We might take float upon the river—I hear from Lytton that the Omega Club is doomed—very few go, and only the dullest—I did an awful thing on Sunday—lost poor old Tim [dog]—I’ve done it hundreds of times, but he never came back, and we can hear nothing of him. The police say he cant be run over—

Promise to come for 2 nights at least—I particularly need to inspect you.

Love to Duncan.

B.

Berg

[]

830: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

[end April 1917]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond

My dear Ottoline

It was a great surprise and pleasure to see your hand again. I haven’t forgotten you—indeed you have become one of the romantic myths of my life, and when I hear of other people seeing you, I don’t believe them. I daresay this is a form of jealousy though.

Anyhow, I shall like very much to come to tea on Thursday.

Your affate
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

831: To Margaret Llewelyn Davies

Wednesday [2 May 1917]

Hogarth House [Richmond]

Dearest Margaret,

It is a damned bore (as Lilian [Harris] would say) that you should be so weak still. I daresay you have deserved it, what with one thing and another, if that is any consolation to you. You must keep us all at bay, until you are prepared to fling yourself into the most absorbing of all pursuits. After 2 hours work at the press, Leonard heaved a terrific sigh and said “I wish to God we’d never bought the cursed thing!” To my relief, though not surprise, he added “Because I shall never do anything else”. You can’t think how exciting, soothing, ennobling and satisfying it is. And so far we’ve only done the dullest and most difficult part—setting up a notice, which you will receive one day. We cant print it off yet, because, to our horror, the press arrived smashed, and it will take some time to get it mended. Meanwhile our brains buzz with all sorts of works—but the great thing is to annoy the secretive and reticent—Lilian, Janet, Emphie, Mrs Copper; they must all take to the pen.

This has rather swamped everything else. I dont know what I’ve been doing since we came back—thats to my credit I mean. Two meetings of the Guild I’ve presided over. We are trying to set up a Bread Shop here; we held a committee to decide about it, at which we all told stories about our household difficulties. Mrs Langston is helping the ladies of Richmond to found a Communal Kitchen. She says “What can you expect of ladies? They dont know anything”—“And Lady Yoxall isn’t a real lady—she was only a school teacher before she married”. Anyhow, according to Mrs Langston they’re going to make a mess of it. I propose to get our food there.

I’ve been exchanging compliments with Ottoline. She protests that I must have forgotten her. I say No, that’s quite impossible. I’m to go to tea with her tomorrow. I am told that she is deserted and despised, and claws you like a famished tigress to go to Garsington, where no one will now stay, save the C.Os, who have to; but I’ve heard this story so often, and no one has the strength of mind to stop going. But I feel as if I were stepping into a Tomb. Please recover at once, and come and see us. Its such an age since we met.

Yr. V.W.

Sussex

[]

832: To Margaret Llewelyn Davies

[7 May 1917]

[Hogarth House, Richmond]

Dearest Margaret,

I will come on Thursday, 4.30, with great pleasure (unless you stop me) Here is the first proof from the press—We did it by hand, as the machine is still broken, so its not a fair sample. We’ve been staying with the Trevelyans for Sunday—very nice both of them, but how I hate Surrey!

Your, V.W.

Sussex

[]

833: To Violet Dickinson

[May 1917]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond

My Violet

I hope you’re still in London. Would you come to tea next Tuesday, 15th, and stay to an early dinner? We should enjoy seeing you very much. I’ve just finished Alfred Lyttelton. I suppose the only excuse is that it was a relief to her feelings to write it, but the horror of having that sprawling and emotional stuff written about one, and all ones private papers hung up in public, seems to me considerable. Poor Laura! And Alfred himself seems to have [been] against lives on the whole. The truth is that those very sentimental and adoring circles dont last very well—after 20 years, only the gush still gushes: and then I was roused to anger by Alfreds ecstasy over a dead lion, and rhapsodies at communion 2 days later. Poor man! I suppose she drove him on to be a celebrity and a politician, which wasn’t his line—However, all his sins are paid for by this sort of monument. We’re sitting in our backgarden after tea enjoying the sun.

I hope you’ll come.

Yr V.W

Berg

[]

834: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

[May 1917]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond

My dear Ottoline,

I should like to come very much—but whether I can persuade Leonard to get over his quite unreasonable terror of a week end, I dont know. Would some week end in June, the 23rd or 30th suit you?

We go away for Whitsun and may stay away for a bit, so I put it late.

My images, after leaving you, were all of the depths of the sea—mermaid Queens, shells, the bones of the shipwrecked. I was incapacitated for normal life for some time after seeing you. It was a great pleasure, and reassurement to find that my memory had not been nearly mythical or romantic enough. But in what condition you are when the clock strikes 11 in the morning, I cant conceive—or how you order dinner;—or, in short, I shall follow you with my mouth agape. I’ve just sent you a halfpenny envelope containing a notice of our first publication. We find we have only 50 friends in the world—and most of them stingy. Could you think of any generous people—they need not be very generous—whose names you would send me? If so, I should be very grateful—

Your ever affate
Virginia Woolf.

Texas

[]

835: To R. C. Trevelyan

May 20th [1917]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

My dear Bob,

I am writing to ask what of course you must refuse if inconvenient—would you come and speak to my Guild of Co-operative Women (Margaret Davies’ affair) on Tuesday, 5th June? Any subject does—not literature perhaps, but travel, or politics. The talk should last half an hour. The audience consists of about 12 mothers of families. They listen with great attention.

If you could, as I much hope, would you dine here at 7 first, and spend the night.

Yours ever,
Virginia Woolf

Sussex

[]

836: To Violet Dickinson

[May 1917]

Hogarth House [Richmond]

My Violet,

Here are some of our new notices, in case you are able to distribute them among the great. There is nothing in the stories to shock the King—in fact they are very mild. We’ve just stopped printing after three hours—it is so fascinating that we can hardly bear to stop.

Do come and see us again whenever you have time. We both so much enjoyed it, and you should be made to lend a hand.

Leonard sends his love

Yr V.W.

We’ve got 50 people now.

Berg

[]

837: To Vanessa Bell

May 22nd [1917]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dearest,

We are coming to Asheham on Friday till Tuesday, so I hope we may meet. Perhaps you would say what suits you—We shall be alone. I suppose you wouldn’t come for the night?—and Duncan?

We’ve been so absorbed in printing that I am about as much of a farmyard sheep dog as you are. I can hardly tear myself away to go to London, or see anyone. We have just started printing Leonards story; I haven’t produced mine yet, but there’s nothing in writing compared with printing. I want your advice about covers.

We’ve got about 60 orders already, which shows a trusting spirit, especially as most of them come from old ladies and poets in the North, recommended by Bob Trevelyan, whom we’ve never heard of. Not one of our intimates has yet bought a copy (this arrow is not aimed at you.)

However, I did rouse myself to go and see Ott. I was so much overcome by her beauty that I really felt as if I’d suddenly got into the sea, and heard the mermaids fluting on their rocks. How it was done I cant think; but she had red-gold hair in masses, cheeks as soft as cushions with a lovely deep crimson on the crest of them, and a body shaped more after my notion of a mermaids than I’ve ever seen; not a wrinkle or blemish—swelling, but smooth.

Our conversation was rather on those lines, so I’m not surprised that I made a good impression. She didn’t seem so much of a fool as I’d been led to think; she was quite shrewd, though vapid in the intervals. I begged her to revive Bedford Sqre and the salon, which she said she would, if anyone missed her. Then came protestations, invitations—in fact I dont see how we can get out of going there [Garsington], though Leonard says he wont, and I know it will be a disillusionment. However, my tack is to tell her she is nothing but an illusion, which is true, and then perhaps she’ll live up to it. She was full of your praises. “That exquisite head, on that lovely body—a Demeter—promising loaves and legs of mutton for us, and such sympathy, more feeling for others now. I did so enjoy my time at Wissett.”

Emma Vaughan came; and I was plunged fathoms deep in St Albans Road [the Vaughan house], and Sunday tea. She is rather more set, and has a blankness in the eye which is precisely that of a toad glutted with large moths. Do you remember the look—how desperate it makes one feel—and then some perfectly banal remark or laugh in the manner of Aunt Virginia. She woke up however about the war, and was very pro-German within limits. She visits wounded Germans in camps, and works from 10 to 7 every day, and has a great many sensible things to say, so I daresay she is going to become a respectable middle aged person. Then we had a visit from Violet [Dickinson], who assured us from private sources that the war will be over in August—but really the ramshackleness of the aristocratic mind is a marvel. They seem to be incapable of thinking and skate along from one extraordinary rumour to another. She said the King would certainly buy copies of our pamphlet—and I got her to tell me a series of death bed scenes of the Lyttelton family—the poor old Bishop Arthur L. was pestered to death by them. “Now you’re practically dead, Arthur, you must collect yourself and tell us what you see. Dont you feel anything like immortality coming on?” and so on, till he was forced to say that [he] was merely bored and nothing else.

Lytton has just rung up to say that he goes before his Tribunal tomorrow, and expects the worst. So far, we have escaped; but I suppose our minutes are numbered.

I’ve still got some gossip left, so you had better not make up your mind, as I see you doing, that the Apes [Virginia] are too fleasome a brood to visit when one can get their news without.

Do you really love me? How often a day do you think of me? How is Julian’s foot? Why dont you get Saxons cousin (the son of the ichthyologist) to live with you!

Yr B.

I daren’t go to the Omega, for fear I shall be made to buy a hat. Miss Gill knows nothing about the pictures you said I could have.

Berg

[]

838: To R. C. Trevelyan

[late May 1917]

[Hogarth House, Richmond]

My dear Bob,

It is very good of you to say you will speak on the 5th.

Morgan [Forster] and someone else have already spoken about India, so perhaps Java and China would be better—or, if you prefer it, choose any labour problem, or social question. I didn’t mean to limit you to travels.

Though apparently apathetic, the audience is really very keen, and of course, labour in its sympathies.

There’s no need to tell me the subject beforehand.

Dinner is at 7.

Yours ever
Virginia Woolf

Sussex

[]

839: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

June 5th [1917]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond

My dear Ottoline,

Thank you for sending Mr Sassoons letter. I am so glad he liked the review. I’ve reviewed so little poetry that I was rather nervous, and I liked his poems very much.

We will come with pleasure on the 23rd, in spite of the fact that Garsington is a dull conventional place to stay at.

Please dont treat me as an invalid—save for breakfast in bed (which is now a luxury and not a necessity) I do exactly as others do.

Have the Shoves gone? I heard from Fredegond that they were off, but she didn’t say where to.

Your affate
Virginia Woolf

I never thanked you for the Palatine Review. I liked Mr Huxleys story (part of it at least) Poor Bob is as large as life—even the facts were true, I’m told. It will be very nice to see you again.

Texas

[]

840: To Vanessa Bell

Friday [8 June 1917]

Hogarth House [Richmond]

Dearest,

It will be great fun if you and Duncan will come next week end—the 16th, it is, I think. Dont make an engagement for Saturday night, and we will get some one to dine. Who would you like to meet?

We dont go to Ottoline until the end of the month.

I should like to come to Charleston very much—perhaps in July, some time?—only Julian must take my fish off the hooks, and put my worms on. I will do the rest. Tell him he needn’t write and thank for the book if he ever thought of doing so—It was a very dull one we happened to have, but I thought the pictures might amuse him, and I know dull books were rather impressive when one was a brat.

I hope his foot is all right. It sounds too fearful—the agitation of having those limbs (of Satan) loose in the house.

I must keep such gossip as I have (very little, as I do nothing but print) till we meet.

I have heard of a shop where you can get wonderful coloured papers. We’re half way through L’s story—it gets ever so much quicker, and the fascination is something extreme.

Yr B.

Berg

[]

841: To Vanessa Bell

Wednesday [27 June 1917]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dearest,

I saw Katherine Mansfield last night, and asked her about the chance of getting reviewing. She thought it would be far best for Bunny [Garnett] to get work on The Daily News, as Desmond, the man who wrote on land and country things has been made prisoner. [Middleton] Murry knows [Robert] Lynd the Editor; and if Bunny would write a specimen article on some country subject, and also explain what sort of work he wants, Murry would speak to Lynd. She thinks he had better do this as soon as he can. I should send it to Murry, c/o Katherine Mansfield, 141A Church Street, Chelsea, S. W. 3. Leonard will talk to [J. C.] Squire when he sees him. K. seemed to think there was a good chance now for anyone who is a specialist about agriculture.

I haven’t been able to see the C. O. yet, as she has had to keep a place open for her sister. The worst of it is that our domestics seem determined at last to settle in for ever; but our books are so high, and the difficulty of Asheham so great, that I think anyhow I must change. If the C. O. says she can’t come, I shall go straight to Mary H[utchinson]. I shall make it plain to the C. O. that I can’t do a stroke myself—

What about coming to you for 2 nights at the beginning of August, and going on to Asheham? But perhaps you will be full up.

We have just got a handsome sum back on our income tax, which we mean to spend on a press (I need hardly say) which will print 8 pages at a time, and then we shall be very professional.

I had an odd talk with K. Mansfield last night. She seems to have gone every sort of hog since she was 17, which is interesting; I also think she has a much better idea of writing than most. She’s an odd character—admired what she could see of you, of course.

L. says the [Apostles] dinner was rather better than usual last night. Desmond [MacCarthy] made a very good speech; and rang us up at 8.30 this morning to ask if he could come round at once with Moore and spend the day. Its now 12.30; and I think they’ve just arrived, so I must take a bath.

It was a pleasant sight to see my Dolphin disporting, and the lovely creature asleep in bed that morning was almost irresistible.

Yr B.

Is there any chance that you’ll come again? Tell Quentin I like my necklace very much.

Berg

[]

842: To Vanessa Bell

Tuesday [3 July 1917]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond

Dearest,

This must be a dull, domestic letter. First a million thanks for the potatoes and greens. We still live upon them, and they have far more potato in them than shop ones—But you mustn’t be so generous.

I am sending back the hamper today. We were able to get you 2 lbs. of icing sugar, which I am sending. I dont think we can get more than 1 lb: a week for you regularly—in fact they may put an end to this, but I will get it and hoard it, unless you think its too expensive—9d a lb.

I have had a long talk with Nelly, and she agrees that they will never like Asheham, and so had better go. I then told her about Mary H[utchinson]: and drew the most inviting picture I could of the place, but she said she did not wish to go there. It came out finally that Jessie [Vanessa’s maid] had told her that Mary had been rude to Ethel [Mary’s maid]—for God’s sake, dont tell this to Mary: I merely told her they wanted to live in Guildford. Anyhow, Nelly thought it wasn’t a good place, and also they don’t want to be in London, and nothing I could say would change them. I cant get any answer from the C. O. who is now in the country, so I have asked Ethel to wait a week, in case I want her to come—She says she will wait as long as there is any chance, as she has a passion apparently for Asheham; so I expect I shall get her and the cook in the end—That will be cheaper anyhow than our present system, and I daresay the other idea wouldn’t have worked. It was very clever of you to think of this arrangement; though I’m afraid poor Mary H: is left in a hole. Evidently there is a secret society among servants; I believe Nelly knew perfectly I was going to give her warning, and she didn’t seem at all surprised when I told her that Ethel wanted to come. You had better put this letter down the W.C. That is the only safe method, we find.

I saw Lytton the other night. He says that Charleston runs Asheham close—Damn him! I think he wants to spent [sic] August between the two of us. Carrington is doing us some woodcuts for our pamphlet [Two Stories], but they’re not done yet. Are you coming up any time? I do look forward to Asheham this year. Ask Julian why he has never written? I think it a great pity that he doesn’t practise writing, as he has such a gift for it.

Yr B.

Jessie said that she was going to complain to you of Ethels treatment—Did she?

If you would prefer it, I could send your sugar every week instead of waiting.

Berg

[]

843: To Vanessa Bell

Friday [6 July 1917]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dearest,

To continue the great story of the servants. After talking to Nelly, and thinking all was happily over, Lottie came to me, and said they had never meant that they would not go to Asheham; in fact they were quite ready to go, and couldn’t think why I had given them notice for that reason. So I had to talk to Nelly, and she accused me of plotting behind her back with Ethel, and protested that though she disliked Asheham, she would go there—or would have gone there, but now of course, she saw I was better suited elsewhere etc—So I put it to them whether they would come whenever we wanted, and whether they would do without a tweeny—and offered to keep them on these conditions—but they are now convinced that I want them to go, and Lottie (who is quite sensible) says that Nelly would always object to Asheham, and she thinks it would be more sensible to make the break now. I rather agree with her, but of course its very uncomfortable, and they won’t believe that I really thought they wouldnt come and will have it that I’ve been scheming to send them off.

Meanwhile, Mary H: says that there are certain things she would like me to know before engaging her domestics—wh. sounds rather mysterious. I am to see her on Tuesday, and then I hope it will be settled.

The worst of it is that Lottie wd. evidently stay on and like Asheham, if it weren’t for Nelly and it seems a pity to lose her—but Nelly makes things too difficult with her boredom at Asheham.

We put off going to Ottoline last week end because I had rather a headache and now I hear from Philip that she’s got measles. I’ve been extremely sensible, and I’m all right again. Its possible that we shall come down to Asheham next Friday till Tuesday, but I will tell you if we do.

I dont think Mary H’s difficulties arise from a lack of virginity, but from her temper—anyhow I did my best to persuade N. and L. and they were quite resolute partly owing to Jessies account of her [Mary Hutchinson’s] dealings with Trissie [Vanessa’s cook, previously Mary’s] and Ethel, and partly to their dislike of London.

I shall be guided by what you say about Ethel however. I had a most charming letter from Julian yesterday. I will write to him soon. He must not tell the farmer about the fox or it will be poisoned as ours were. Did Bunny have any success with the Daily News? L. hasn’t seen Squire yet.

Berg

[]

844: To Dora Carrington

[13 July 1917]

[Hogarth House, Richmond]

Dear Carrington,

We like the wood cuts immensely. It was very good of you to bring them yourself—We have printed them off, and they make the book much more interesting than it would have been without. The ones I like best are the servant girl and the plates, and the Snail.

Our difficulty was that the margins would mark; we bought a chisel, and chopped away, I am afraid rather spoiling one edge, but we came to the conclusion at last that the rollers scrape up the wood as they pass, as sometimes the impression would be clean to start with, and end with smudges. Next time we must have them cut exactly round the picture by a shop. Nevertheless, we are both very much pleased, and think them a great acquisition. and they print very well. Will you let us know what your expenses (including fare, and one halfpenny newspaper) come to, so that your pittance may be doled out to you. We are just off to Asheham, and can’t get the books sewn to send out before; but we shall finish next week.

Are you in the country with Alix? Give her my love; tell her Margaret Ll. Davies was asking after her last night, and it occurs to me that if Alix liked to work for her instead of for us, she would be delighted, and the work (for Womens Cooperative Guild) no doubt more amusing. Still, I hope she’s thinking over our offer.

We both find that printing far cuts into every other occupation. We are in treaty for a press, once costing £100—so it looks as if your friends figures would come true. It is specially good at printing pictures, and we see that we must make a practice of always having pictures.

Ring us up and come to dinner when you come back—

Yr affate
V.W.

Robert H. Taylor

[]

845: To R. C. Trevelyan

13 July [1917]

[Leonard’s contribution typewritten]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dear Bob,

Why Minna is Minna I do not know but she is. She is about 90 years old, and a very sporting old lady who paints little water colour sketches of trees and flowers. She is, I imagine, a sister of George Duckworth’s deceased father and therefore of Virginia’s mother’s first husband. At any rate we call her Aunt Minna, though she also answers to the name of Miss S. O. Duckworth.

Your idea about Roger’s essays is a very good one. We have finished printing the pamphlet and are off to Asheham until Tuesday. We shall get them sent out towards the end of next week.

Yours
Leonard Woolf

[in Virginia’s handwriting]

Aunt Minna’s baptismal names are Sarah Emily (not Olivia). On attaining the age of puberty she christened herself Minna—I have always supposed after a herione in one of the Waverley novels—anyhow, as she is rather the Robin Mayor type, it exactly suits her.

V.W.

Sussex

[]

846: To Vanessa Bell

Saturday [14? July 1917]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest,

I really don’t think its worth while for you to come all this way for such a short time on Sunday—especially if you’ve not been well—Are you better? Do take care.

I would offer to come to Firle and have a picnic, but I’ve promised not to walk at all, and I suppose I must abide by it.

Of course we could give you a bed on Monday if you could come, but I suppose you can’t—Its a great nuisance altogether, but I’m sure you’d better not bicycle all those miles in this heat.

I’ll send your sugar by post.

Have you been doing too much?

I’ve finally taken Ethel and the Cook [servants of Mary Hutchinson]—after a good many difficulties with the others.

Yr B.

Of course we shall be in on Sunday if you should come, but don’t make any effort.

Berg

[]

847: To Margaret Llewelyn Davies

[15 July 1917]

[Asheham, Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest Margaret,

The place we told you of at Southease hasn’t got a room free till Aug. 18th, but we could get you rooms at the farm (15 minutes walk from here) on 8th August. There is a good big sitting room, 2 bedrooms opening out of each other. The woman would cook for you. The rooms are rather rough, and the beds looked hard, but clean, and the farm is a nice old house. She would charge 25/- a week for everything including sitting room. We looked at the farm when we sat on the edge of the down that afternoon. It is a good deal nearer us than Southease—not quite so comfortable I should think.

I said you would let her know at once if you wanted the rooms, as other people are after them.

The address is,

Mrs Woolgar,
Itford Farm,
Rodmell,
Lewes.

We’ve been having a perfect time—and go back tomorrow.

Yr. aff.
V.W.

Would you settle a time to come to us before the 17th [August]—We come here on the 3rd—Perhaps Janet could come too?

Sussex

[]

848: To Dora Carrington

[18 July 1917]

Postcard

[Hogarth House, Richmond]

“Moorland Cottage near “Gurnards Head”; wild and remote; 2 guests 30/each weekly, full board, private sitting room if desired.—Miss Hardwicke, Ninnis Manning Cottage; Newmill, nr Penzance”

from this weeks Cambridge Review—the best part of all.

V.W.

Robert H. Taylor

[]

849: To Katherine Cox

[18 July 1917]

Hogarth House [Richmond]

Dearest Ka,

Do come to us for that week end. You don’t like company I remember—and I don’t think you’ll have any. I’m settling in a new cook and maid, and therefore asked no one—but you don’t count.

It was so divinely lovely that I can’t feel contented here—We had a swarm of bees in the attic and a nursery of swallows in the E.C. German prisoners on all sides with absurd little soldiers guarding them and now we’re to have a real fur coated Bruin. Did it ever strike you that that’s why you feel the heat so? A visit to the Barber once a month might help you—They have some very nice patterns too—a bald rump, with two rosettes left on the flanks (something in the poodle style, but with more dignity—)

May we come to supper next Monday—7.30 I suppose—

Yr V.W.

Mark Arnold-Forster

[]

850: To Violet Dickinson

July 21st [1917]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

My Violet,

We are very glad you like the book [Two Stories]. It is tremendous fun doing it, and we are now in treaty for a much larger press, and mean to take it up seriously and produce novels with it. And we are even getting an apprentice!

We are nearly at an end of our copies, and have raised the price from 1/6 to 2/—

If you want 4 in spite of the price, we will send them to you. It has been quite a success. One of the greatest helps in doing it was that table you gave me, which rears up, so that one can put the drawers of type on a slope, and sit in front of it. I dont know what we should have done without it.

We go to Asheham on the 3rd. Shall you be in Sussex at all? If so, couldn’t you drop in upon us?

Leonard sends his love.

Yr V.W.

Berg

[]

851: To Roger Fry

22nd July [1917]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

My dear Roger,

Would you say what time in Sept. would suit you best. It would be very nice to have Pamela [Roger’s daughter]. The only difficulty about August is that we’ve asked people who wont answer. Lytton is coming on the 17th to 24th—and we’ve asked Katherine Mansfield, but if she cant come, would that suit you and Pamela? Anyhow, you must come—so please consider a way of doing it.

How damnable people are about doing the sensible things! I still believe though that the loan scheme will succeed; it only wants time to sink in. I sent my form off. Would it be possible to change oftener than once a year?

I’m sending a copy of the book to Durbins; and 4 to the Omega, but we’re very nearly sold out, so if you dont want them there, we shall be quite glad to have them back. You will see lots of mistakes, but we’re rather proud, considering we learnt as we went.

Tomorrow we are going to see a £100 press which we are told is the best made,—particularly good for reproducing pictures. This opens up fresh plans, as you will see. Wouldn’t it be fun to have books of pictures only, reproductions of new pictures—but we must get you to tell us a little about how one does this. Carrington is swarming with woodcuts. Its most fascinating work.

By the by—we have been talking of a book of your old articles—what do you think?

Yrs in haste,
V.W.

Sussex

[]

852: To Clive Bell

Tuesday [24 July 1917]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

My dear Clive,

I’ve always thought it very fine—the way you run risks, though I don’t see that there’s much risk in sending such a letter to such a woman. You know you always told me I was notorious for vanity, and its still a fine plant, though growing old.

But please dont put it all down to vanity. I do like you to praise me, not only because of your gift for knowing whats what, but for what you would call sentimental reasons too—as for instance that you were the first person who ever thought I’d write well. We talked so much about writing too. I should like to discuss this with you, and see why you think it good—Its an absorbing thing (I mean writing is) and its high time we found some new shapes, don’t you think so? As for Mr Joyce, I can’t see what he’s after, though having spent 5/- on him, I did my level best, and was only beaten by the unutterable boredom—As you don’t waste your time on reviews, but sit in a farmhouse [Garsington], and occasionally turn over a vegetable marrow—why don’t you try a few experiments—our press you know, is to give birth to every monster in the vicinity.

It was very nice of you to write—If you’re at Charleston this summer, won’t you come and see us?

Yr. aff.
V.W.

Quentin Bell

[]

853: To David Garnett

26th July [1917]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dear Bunny,

I hope you dont mind, but as I always hear of you as Bunny and you of me as Virginia, I think we might venture—

Thank you very much for writing. I’m very glad you liked the story. In a way its easier to do a short thing, all in one flight than a novel. Novels are frightfully clumsy and overpowering of course; still if one could only get hold of them it would be superb. I daresay one ought to invent a completely new form. Anyhow its very amusing to try with these short things, and the greatest mercy to be able to do what one likes—no editors, or publishers, and only people to read who more or less like that sort of thing. We’ve been seeing a Russian called Koteliansky who says that to write for a small public is damnation. However, I dont like writing for my half brother George [Gerald].

We had a second swarm of bees. They went down the chimney of the attic; we shut the door and left them swarming in the grate. What ought we to do? Any advice would be welcomed. We go down tomorrow week. Have you any honey to sell?

By the way, you dont enclose a postal order—and I must tell you the terrible fact that we have raised the price to 2/- We have only got 9 left; do you want one or 2 or none at all?

Would you come over and spend Saturday night, Aug 4th, and tell us what to do about the bees—Ka will be there.

Yours
Virginia Woolf

Berg

[]

854: To Vanessa Bell

Thursday [26 July 1917]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dearest,

We should very much like you and Duncan to do a book of wood cuts—in fact we are getting a machine that is specially good for printing pictures, as we want to do pictures just as much as writing. Of course they would take much less time to do. At present we’ve promised to do Katherine Mansfields story, but Alix is probably coming as apprentice, so that we could get on quicker, and might do your book before Christmas. However, there will be many details to discuss, which we could do when we meet. The difficulty with Carringtons wood cuts was that she didn’t cut the margins low enough, and we hadn’t the proper tools for doing it, so that we had to take very light impressions, in order not to get black marks on the margin—which even so we didn’t altogether avoid. But do go ahead, and get your book arranged. We went to see the head of a great printing school in the city the other day, and he is going to look out for a press at a sale, and we shall get it by the autumn. It will be quite easy to print a large number of copies on it—as one does at least 4 sheets at a time.

I suppose the size would either be the size of our book, or twice as large—however, we could tell you more later. It is tremendous fun, and it makes all the difference writing anything one likes, and not for an Editor.

The servant problems are really more interesting than anything else. On Monday night, I got a letter from the cook, saying she did not like a basement, and would not come. I thought this very odd, as after seeing the kitchen she had told me she thought it perfectly all right, and she had told Nelly the same thing. Also, it seemed queer that she had waited a week before telling me. The question then was whether to get another cook, or to ask Nelly and Lottie to stay on. It seemed absurd not to ask them, as they were so sorry to go, and so I did; and find them delighted to stay, even though it means going to Asheham, and having no tweeny. I didn’t like Mary H’s. cook at all, when I saw her here, so I am extremely glad to be rid of her. It seemed very hard on Ethel, but I wrote at once explaining and sent her a months wages. Yesterday she rang me up (from a post office) and said that she was completely taken by surprise; the cook had never told her she wasn’t coming until the night before, and then had told her that she was going to be married and therefore would not take a new place for a short time. I said that she told me it was the basement; but Ethel said this was quite untrue, as she had found no fault with it. I also told her that the cook was staying on with Mary H. (as you said)—which was entirely new to her, and made her very angry. She said Mrs H: had spoken to her that morning, seeming very confused, but had said nothing about the cook staying. However, Ethel most wanted us to realise that she hadn’t any share in it—and also to thank you for having taken so much trouble. I’m afraid she wanted to come to Asheham, but she was very nice about it.

I think its probable that Mary H. offered the cook a rise, and persuaded her to stay on; anyhow I’m thankful, as its much nicer to keep Lottie and Nelly, and they have made up their minds to put up with Asheham. The amusing thing is that they had decided to go to Mary H: after all, if on seeing the cook and Ethel, they came to the conclusion that there wasn’t anything in their stories against her. However, the first words they said (which they wont repeat) determined them to have nothing to do with it, and the cook in particular said that she strongly advised them not to, and though she had only been 6 weeks there, it seemed like 6 years!—so I dont suppose she’ll stay very long. I feel slightly cross and malicious against Mary H: as they didn’t leave me much time to get a cook, supposing Nelly and Lottie hadn’t been ready to stay on. But isn’t it all fascinating?

We’re coming down on Friday—and old Ka has asked to come for Bank Holiday and Alix after that, so I’m afraid I shan’t be able to come to you that week. But I expect you’ll be overflowing. People simply clamour to be asked now—I suppose we make a very nice centre. I’m afraid I shall have to be rather careful about coming over, as Leonard has been in rather a state again, and I’ve promised to be very quiet. I feel all right, but I’ve gone down rather in weight though I still weigh only just under 10 stones, which is half a stone and more beyond what I’ve ever weighed. I dont see how one can expect to keep the results of a rest cure permanently. But I shall come and stay the night some time.

Tell Saxon the Squires aren’t at Asheham, so he can get blankets and stay there if he likes. It will be empty till we come. Leonard started to go and see you, but found both his tyres punctured and so had to come back.

We had another swarm in the attics—but I must ask Bunny about them.

We shall expect any one who likes to come on Sunday or Monday.

Yr B.

Berg

[]

855: To Violet Dickinson

July 26th [1917]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

My Violet,

I am sending you one copy today. There’s no reason on earth why you shouldn’t have 3 more if you want them. We have about 10 left, and if you want any more, will you write at once, as we are still getting orders, and shall be sold out (we have broken up the type and can’t print any more)

By the way, they are only 2/ a copy, not 2/3—

Give my love to the Wicked Walter [Crum] if you ever see him—I wish I ever did—I’m sure my morals would have been worse—

Yr V.W.

Berg

[]

Letters 856-899 (August-December 1917)

856: To Vanessa Bell

Saturday [4 August 1917]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest,

We hope you may come to tea and stay to dinner tomorrow. If you dont, I will try to come to tea and stay dinner and go home early on Monday—but I dont know whether I shall be able to.

I want to hear about Chapman [maid], also, why can’t I have your pictures?

I cant get over the perfection in River House.

Yr V.W.

L. thinks it too far for me to bicycle, wh. is absurd, but I cant very well do it if it makes him in a state. I think its quite unreasonable, so I shall do my best if you dont come.

Berg

[]

857: To Vanessa Bell

Sunday [5 August 1917]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest,

We thought of having a picnic at Firle tomorrow, Monday. We shall be at the Post office there at 4 (or shortly before) and we shall bring some food and tea. It would be very nice if you could meet us at the P. Office, and we could go up into the wood. I find that Leonard thinks this much less tiring then for me to go to Charleston!

I sent a wire which I daresay won’t get to you. However that old servant, Emily Hunt, has suddenly turned up, and is posting this in Lewes.

We cant bring enough tea for more than 2, but we could bring enough eatables for more, I expect.

We shant wait beyond 4.15 if you dont turn up, but I hope you may be able to, with the brats.

I’m taking it for granted your not coming today, as I dont much expect you will.

We’ve asked Pierpont [Morgan] £200 for the page. Do you think thats about right?

B.

Berg

[]

858: To Dora Carrington

Sunday [12 August 1917]

Asheham House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

My dear Carrington

It wasn’t Alix’s fault that I asked you for the weekend, but your own remark, in your letter that next week you went with your brother.

The nuisance is that any other date seems impossible for us. Katherine Mansfield comes on the 17th, and we are full up till the 24th, which is I suppose about the time you go to Charleston.

Anyhow, you might come over and see us from Charleston. September of course, is no good for you.

We want to hear about the letters, and the design for the cover. We are undertaking a book of woodcuts by Nessa and Duncan. They thought the printing quite good enough, in fact Nessa says that the greyness of the wood cuts seems better to her than the extreme blackness: your wood cuts have certainly been a great success.

We are waiting to hear of a sale of presses, which should be soon. We are sold out, and more: offers have even been made for our spoiled copies!

Yr aff
Virginia Woolf

Robert H. Taylor

[]

859: To Lytton Strachey

Aug. 14th [1917]

Asheham House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

Naturally, we are much grieved, but if Gordon comes to birth and is read regularly after dinner, we forgive. We all retire to compose after breakfast, the sheep occasionally come into the field, but that’s about all. The trains are these: 2.13 from Guildford to Brighton; arrives Brighton 4.14: catch a train arriving Lewes at 4.46. Or go to London, and take 3.20 from Victoria. The only way out is a taxi, or fly, unless you walk.

I have been sent 20 of these leaflets by old Mrs Hobhouse.

Yr. V.W.

Frances Hooper

[]

860: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Aug. 15th [1917]

Asheham House, Rodmell Lewes [Sussex]

My dear Ottoline,

I couldn’t help feeling rather relieved when I heard that you had the measles, because then all the blame wasn’t on my head—but it certainly was a most malicious freak on the part of fate—I’m quite well again and hope I’ve earned some sort of reward by being so good. Leonard wants me to say that he does not think Garsington too tiring, and will you ask us in the autumn?

We are here till October, and have various people staying with us (Goldie [G. Lowes Dickinson] at this moment)—In October we have promised to go North, for Leonard to lecture for the League of Nations, but the date is not yet settled.

You are again becoming almost too mythical to be believed in any longer; I catch scraps about you and the garden and keep you going in my mind. Clive’s visit was quite innocent; I dont think any mischief was made about anyone. I’ve been out of that particular society for so long, that I’ve rather lost my bearings in it.

What is happening to Sassoon? Can they keep him shut up indefinitely? We thought his letter a very good one. It was a splendid thing to do. I ran into Mrs Hobhouse the other day, and had these notices of her book pressed on me. I send one though you are sure to have seen it.

It is very lovely here, and we meet Nessa and Duncan and have picnics on the downs; they seem perfectly happy, painting, making jam, getting all their own vegetables, and yesterday Nessa went to Brighton and bought a donkey.

Please write again some time—Katherine Mansfield describes your garden, the rose leaves drying in the sun, the pool, and long conversations between people wandering up and down in the moonlight. It calls out her romantic side; which I think rather a relief after the actresses, A.B.C’s. [teashops] and paint pots.

Yr affate
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

861: To Katherine Cox

Wednesday [15 August 1917]

Asheham House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

My dear Bruin,

I’m very glad you’re going—but how penny-wise to take only one week! Why not 3 while you are doing it?

However this is to hand you Mrs Hobhouse’s leaflet. You can read the book in the train, full of ghastly details.

Goldie is here, has borrowed a typewriter, is clattering out articles all day long, so illegible even he can’t read them, even on a typewriter, owing to his habit of striking 3 letters at once.

All Charleston is expected to tea: so I must go and make bread.

We note (as they say in Government offices) invite to Aldbourne, prox: but we don’t know if circs permit.

Yrs. V.W.

Enclosure. | I circ for self
| I for distribution

Mark Arnold-Forster

[]

862: To Saxon Sydney-Turner

Friday [17 August 1917]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

My dear Saxon,

Do you think in memory of our old friendship, you would buy me 3 packets of Bastos cigarettes price 1/- each. (They are in a blue packet, with a red rosette) and send as soon as you can. The younger generation (Alix) has failed, and I am running out. I will faithfully send P.O. tomorrow. Lytton and Goldie are talking over my head, and Leonard getting out his chess men—I wish you were here, but its too confusing to write.

Yr V.W.

The enclosed scrap will show you the right kind; Alix got them wrong. Salmon and Gluckstein keep them.

Sussex

[]

863: To R. C. Trevelyan

Sunday Aug. 19 1917

Postcard

Asheham House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

We the undersigned, wish to say that we have read the Pterodamozels with great pleasure, and wish to thank the author.

Virginia Woolf
Katherine Mansfield
Lytton Strachey
Edward Garnett

Sussex

[]

864: To R. C. Trevelyan

[27 August 1917]

Postcard

Asheham House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

We have sold all our copies of the two stories; we did send Morgan [Forster] a notice—We have promised to print one or two things, so that we shouldn’t be able to undertake anything just now, and of course it would be much better to have the Greek done with your translation.

V. Woolf

It was Garnett, the father, not son.

Sussex

[]

865: To Vanessa Bell

Thursday [30 August 1917]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest,

We didn’t start on Sunday, as it seemed hopeless. Our trees are almost like winter now.

We live almost entirely upon roast apples.

I’m afraid its not much good your bringing Roger over on Sunday, as we have Mrs Woolf, Bella, Herbert, and a Norwegian whom I’ve never seen. On Monday we shall be alone (Thank God!) and it would be very nice if he and you could come (any time); if he hasn’t already gone. Tomorrow (Friday) we shall be alone, and in about 5.30 (we go to Eastbourne to buy Glidine) if it were fine, and you could come over.

We shall be alone most of next week, until Friday, when we have Pernel Strachey, Philip Morrell, and Sydney Waterlow. However you’d better come whenever you can.

God! its now raining again—we thought it was really fine at last. I suppose Barbara will now be permanently indoors and Nick too.

I think donkeys are the nicest animals in the world.

I wish the children would come again. We could stable the beast.

Yr V.W.

Berg

[]

866: To Vanessa Bell

Friday [7 September 1917]

Asheham House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

Dearest,

We really might be in London for all we see of each other, but I see it can’t be helped—These damned people always seem to flock.

If it’s fine on Sunday, we thought we might try and have a picnic, at the usual place, at 5. Sydney and Philip would both much like to see you I’m sure.

Pernel comes today, and I’ll bring her too, if she doesn’t think it too far. They go on Tuesday; and I think I could bicycle over to see you on Wednesday if that suits you. Might I come for lunch, and go back after tea? Please say if you have other occupations. I could come for 2 nights when Duncan and Bunny go; in fact, our people are only coming for the week ends now, so I shall be much more free. But I dont suppose this applies to you. I’m afraid you’ve had an awful doing. Has Barbara come back? I made such a pointed remark to her about staying at Charleston (not thinking of her but of Alix) that I hope she won’t settle down again. I hear from Alix that she’s gone to Ireland for a month with [H. T. J.] Norton. I think it would be a most suitable match. She is determined to do the printing, I’m afraid.

You might send a line if you cant come on Sunday; otherwise we shall come to the same place.

My servants say that they have actually enjoyed Asheham this year—but they say its all owing to Charleston!

Yr B.

Berg

[]

867: To Margaret Llewelyn Davies

9th Sept. [1917]

Asheham, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

Dearest Margaret,

I wish you wouldn’t withdraw into the clouds in the way you do. We are now without even your address, and have to make you up entirely fresh in our minds, and then you become so alarming—such flashing eyes, such scorn, such majesty in every joint, that I can hardly dare write to you. Did you refuse an honour? or are you now a Dame? At this moment we’ve got Sydney Waterlow (the man who confides in Leonard) and Philip Morrell and Pernel Strachey (of Newnham) staying with us. We were told that Philip was so lonely, and had never once been asked to stay away by himself, that Leonard insisted upon asking him; I rather think it is true. It must be fairly crushing to live in the shade—at least in the atmosphere—of Ottoline. I dont think he’s ever had his opinions listened to before; he is now sitting on the terrace and holding forth at a great rate about politics. He says that opinion in Burnley has so changed about the war, that its quite possible they may ask him to stand again. The local papers print strong pacifist articles. In fact he thinks that if someone in power now demanded peace the whole country would back him. But oh dear, how little one believes what anyone says now. I feel we’ve sunk lower than ever before this summer.

And then we’ve seen a lot of the younger generation, who seem to me the essence of good sense, honesty, sobriety and kindliness, without that romance, that flash of lightning splendour which mark—well, Miss Davies, and Miss Case. How is Janet?, but she too has vanished into the past. The younger generation walk across the downs in brown corduroy trousers, blue shirts, grey socks, and no hats no their heads, which are cropped, so that as I sit on the terrace, I really don’t know Barbara Hiles from Nick Bagenal, who is in the Irish Guards. It seems to me quite impossible to wear trousers.

We are going to attempt a picnic today with Vanessa, and her 5 children; she has now got the 3 little MacCarthy’s staying with her, and can scarcely leave them, as Julian is so powerful, and they are very gentle. However, our weather is thoroughly broken; I suppose it will rain.

Now isnt this a good long letter?—and doesn’t it soften even your heart? Are you having a holiday or have you constructed a few more new systems, sitting over the fire, with your pipe? I am upsetting my inkpot, so I had better stop, though I have a great deal to discuss with you, and we should both be much happier if we saw you coming up the drive. Leonard sends love. Please give Lilian our affectionate respects. Has she read Trents Last Case? What did she think of it?

Yr aff.
V.W.

Is there any news of William Sheepshanks?

Sussex

[]

868: To Vanessa Bell

Friday [14? September 1917]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest,

I have another suggestion to make about the wood cuts. Mightn’t we print them, not in a book, but as separate sheets, one wood cut to one sheet? We would get a certain number of people, the ones you suggested if possible, to do two or three wood cuts each; we would send out notices to say that we were printing a set of wood cuts by different artists, which we would sell in sets, in envelopes. Then it would be open to the buyer of the set to order more copies of any single wood cut. By this method, all difficulties of binding, cover, title page, would be got over, and one would probably do more justice to the wood cuts if they were on separate sheets; also I think people would prefer them in this form, as they could easily be framed, or pinned up. Also I expect many people would want to buy extra copies of one of the wood cuts, without having to buy a whole book over again. In addition, it would be much simpler and considerably cheaper to do, and after issuing the sets we could print off separate copies as they were ordered, so we should run less risk. The artist whose work was liked would make more profit, which seems fair.

This only occurred to me yesterday, and I haven’t thought out any details of payment etc; but Leonard thinks favourably of the plan, which seems to involve no aesthetic judgment on our part, and we would like to know if you think there is anything in it.

I hope you will consider it, not only because I think there is a good deal to be said for it, but also because I should very much like to produce your and Duncan’s pictures.

Yr B.

We shall be at Firle post office on Sunday, at 3.30, as we want to have a picnic in those woods. If you could come it wd. be very nice and we cd. discuss it. We will anyhow bring a tea cup and enough tea for you in case you come, but don’t bother, as we are going anyhow—only if fine, of course.

Berg

[]

869: To Clive Bell

17th Sept. [1917]

Asheham, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

My dear Clive,

As to the K. M. affair, I expect the most sensible thing for me to do would be to keep silent. I have torn up a letter in which I gave my version. But I really do not wish to become further involved in it, or in a discussion of it, so I think all I’ll say is that I deny entirely that I said what I’m reported to have said. When I see K. M. no doubt we shall be able to arrive at a more correct version of the facts. The present one, I should have thought, is on the face of it absurd. The only thing I really regret is that there should be any rupture between Philip [Morrell] and [Middleton] Murry.

I very much want to keep out of these affairs in future. So I think you can have more trust in me than usual about the gossip of Garsington.

Yes—I certainly think its time the feud was buried. I didn’t feel even the most distant rumours of it the other day, and I’m glad you didn’t either.

Yrs ever,
V.W.

Quentin Bell

[]

870: To Katherine Cox

18th Sept [1917]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest Ka,

Its a great pleasure to feel that we’ve really been asked, though I’m afraid we cant come. Desmond is coming today, and when he goes I’m going over to Charleston for a night or two, and then to wind up we have Roger, and I’m trembling on the verge of asking your Mrs [Molly] Hamilton, whom I’ve never seen, and don’t know that I shall ever want to see, after one weekend. We go back about the 3rd Oct. when printing will begin upon a story by Katherine Mansfield [Prelude].

Do you mean that you might have been taken (disguised as the stuffed umbrella stand) to America on a destroyer with Lord Reading? You might be more explicit. Have you become Matron of the British Empire, and must one call you Dame Bruin in future?

It is now setting in wet, but we seem to have done far better than the rest of England.

Did Dawks Waterlow tell you that we are going to stay with her mother in Manchester? I’m afraid we shall be there early in November. Have you only got one week off in the whole summer?

Yrs V.W.

We have been out, and got wet through, come back, and now sit over a log fire hoping for tea. Perhaps you will ring me up.

Mark Arnold-Forster

[]

871: To Saxon Sydney-Turner

Tuesday [18 September 1917]

Asheham House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

My dear Saxon,

I ought to have thanked you for your efforts about the cigarettes, I hear that its almost impossible to get them, and it says much for Barbara [Hiles], and rehabilitates (in part) the intellect of the younger generation, that in spite of this she found out the last 2 packets in England and ran them to earth; but I was pleased to hear how the tobacconist spotted her youth and innocence and warned her against such strong smokes. Its really no good wearing corduroy trousers when even a tobacconist sees through one.

As you have perhaps guessed, this is not a letter of gratitude at all, but a letter of self defence. Its been raining all day; we set out to walk to Glynde, in order that Leonard might get his hair cut, and were driven back at the corner by the watermill, (the skeleton thing thats in the corner of the field belonging to the two old ladies who keep the Alderney cows and the coffee coloured collies). It is too hot to light the fire; too early for tea. It is true that I might read the Sense of the Past, or practically any one of the works of Shakespeare, Scott, Balzac or Swinburne. I should much prefer to talk about them and if I had a ring, I would rub it and you should gently well up in the yellow arm chair, with your usual expression of sapient composure! We expect Desmond at any moment; but then we expected him (and Molly into the bargain) all yesterday. Molly evaporated in the course of the day, having reached, according to her telegram, a railway station in Portsmouth; but Desmond is still on the road. Whenever I hear a wheel I get up and look out of the window. As a large beer lorry has broken down and is being hitched on to another van there is a good deal to look at.

What is there to say about The Sense of the Past? I’m afraid my old image must still hold good as far as I’m concerned—the laborious striking of whole boxfulls of damp matches—lovely phrases of course but—but—but. Sydney Waterlow sat on me with all the solemn weight (which is after all so light) of his portentous haystack for saying this; but we made it up, you’ll be glad to hear, and his eyeglasses are fixed upon me not without some melancholy hope that I shall escape the doom of my sex and prove quite worth talking to (if one discounts the inevitable insincerity) one of these days. His absurdity is really delightful and even lovable.

O My dear Saxon, they’re laying tea! We come back about the 3rd and I hope you’ll take the hint, and come soon. I thought Barbara looked very well. Nick [Bagenal] seemed to us both very charming. I hope he’s all right.

Yr V.W.

Sussex

[]

872: To Vanessa Bell

[21? September 1917]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest,

The weather has been too vile for anything. Desmond is still here—in fact, I think he means to stay till Monday.

I am full of envy of Roger. How crafty of him to slink in and have a whole week of you to himself! I dont quite know what to do about coming. I have promised to write a long article upon Henry James, and the book may arrive in a day or two, in which case I should have to spend next week doing it, and it means such a lot of reading as well as writing that there wouldn’t be much point in coming to you—Or it mayn’t come till the end of the week.

Would it suit you if I came on Monday 1st for one or 2 nights? Of course it would be ideal to see you alone, but I see that can’t be managed, unless indeed Roger didn’t come to you till Wednesday, and I could come this next Monday? You might let me know if there’s any chance of this.

I’m very sorry about your domestic worries. I spoke to Mrs Hammond this morning, and she said she would like to think it over. I think it wd. be a good thing if you could tell me when you want her, and if you want her permanently, and what wages you pay. She is very nice and clean, I think, and was a housemaid, though she’s not much of a cook. She seemed quite favourable, but she’s very silent. I will certainly ask Nelly if she falls through. I think one ought easily to be able to find some one among their friends.

Couldn’t I see about a governess in London? The Cases might know of one. Shall I write to them—a nursery governess, do you call her?

I’m glad the Kodak was all right; I thought it would be, but on the other hand, I’m sorry that my idea about the woodcuts won’t work. Couldn’t we invent another?

Yr B.

Berg

[]

873: To Vanessa Bell

Monday [24 September 1917]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest,

I have just seen this advertisement in the Times today.

No salary: Young lady with Oxford senior certificate wishes to teach and take care of children, in family or school. Time for study required.

Advertiser, Box F. 95, The Times,

Printing House Sqre.

London, E. C. 4.

She could be shut up to study in the evenings, and so be no bother at all.

I’ve just come back from Lewes, where I sent you a card, which I daresay you won’t get, though I posted it myself. I met Duncan at Glynde; I hope we shall be able to arrange a meeting before we go. I think we stay until about the 4th. My difficulty, as I explained in the last letter, is about a review, which I may have to do this week—but this is uncertain, so you’d better say what suits you, and then I’ll try and manage it.

Mrs Hammond asked whether I’d heard from you about wages and when you want her, so I think she is probably considering it. She is very nice, silent, clean, and has a large sheep dog. She does for us and Desmond entirely without help, and manages very well—in fact I think its much nicer than having 2.

Yr B.

Berg

[]

874: To Vanessa Bell

Wednesday [26 September 1917]

Asheham House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

Dearest,

What an age it takes to get a letter from Charleston to Asheham! I got yours this morning.

About our plans of meeting—we should of course be delighted if you and Roger would come to tea and stay to dinner tomorrow (Thursday).

If you dont, I could come on Friday and spend the night, though I feel this is rather hard upon Roger, who has already had one of his days taken from him.

Or I could come for lunch and go back after tea, on Friday. What I had meant was to stay a night with you on our way back—say Thursday night next week—but I daresay this would not fit in.

I spoke to Mrs Hammond, who says that she has promised to stay with a sister in law and therefore only wanted a temporary place. I told her I thought you could probably arrange for Ivy to stay a week or 2 longer, if that would do. She said she would like to think it over. I daresay it would be a good thing if you could see her yourself (as you could do if you came on Thursday) as with a little management I believe she would come. She is certainly very clean and hard working, a very sensible nice sort of person, as far as I can tell.

I talked to Duncan about the wood cuts, and he said he would like to do some, if we undertook the whole thing. Would you think this possible for yourself?

However, we could talk this over, if, as I hope, we manage to meet.

I’m taking this to catch the evening post, and have hope it may reach you by the second post tomorrow.

If I come on Friday, I will come to lunch if I’m going back after tea; and to tea, if I’m going to stay the night.

Yr B.

Berg

[]

875: To Vanessa Bell

Wednesday [3 October 1917]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest,

I have looked through the governesses in the East Sussex News, but there aren’t any this week—except a Tutor at Eastbourne. So I will tell them to send you a copy on Friday, which is the day it comes out.

I think it would be worth your while to go to the Sussex Registry Office in Friars Walk, about 5 minutes from the station in Lewes; first turn to the right, past the Churchyard. There is rather a nice woman there and though she deals in servants, very likely she would have someone just above a servant, or anyhow could tell you the best way of getting hold of a governess.

By the way, if you do want that carpet, we shall be very glad for you to have it, as it is probably only getting the mildew. I will tell Mrs Attwood that you may call for it some day.

I think you had better call at her house for the key, if you do come, as she gets rather alarmed, if people get in without her knowledge. I enjoyed myself very much, I need hardly say, and I think my behaviour was irreproachable.

I tried to sing the Wolf song this morning, tell Quentin.

Would you send me (to Hogarth) the recipes? I did the tea cakes from memory today, and they were a great success.

Yr B.

Mrs Attwoods hen has started laying, so perhaps a red comb does foretell it.

Berg

[]

876: To Dora Carrington

[5 October 1917]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dear Carrington,

I hope this cheque wont seem to you to prove that we are slave drivers—it is very small—but our profits [£6.7.0.] aren’t much on this venture. Anyhow, I’m sure your pictures will attract lots of people who are repelled by print (very rightly too).

As you will see from the form I send, our prices have already gone up 6d.—They will rise steadily as the copies give out—and I daresay the last and worst will sell for over a sovereign—in a hot competition too of elderly ladies who never read a line just because it is the last—

Leonard has been rung up by Kabotinsky (?) [S. S. Koteliansky], and we’re asking him to dine on Sunday. Will you come too? I’ve asked the price of Salmon, but its much too dear. Never mind: the welcome of the heart—that is what you’ll get, and think it sufficient, I know.

The truth is, there was something I had to remember to ask you, and its gone clean out of my head, and thats why I go on writing this letter—Cant think what it was—Something very important and interesting too—We had such a divine time at Asheham, except for one terrifying moment. A swarm of bees conglobulated suddenly over our heads on the terrace—in an ecstasy of lust—drove us in—then made for the chimney, and all settled in the attic. Please tell us what to do. We want the honey; the males were all dead—But I forgot: you dont like the fact of copulation, only the theory—What an odd generation yours is! but this isn’t the interesting thing. Give my love to Alix.

Yr V.W.

Robert H. Taylor

[]

877: To Vanessa Bell

Saturday morning [6 October 1917]

[Hogarth House, Richmond]

16 German aeroplanes have just passed over Richmond—They haven’t done us any harm—We went and sat in the cellar and listened to them, and Nelly nearly had hysterics. The people next door saw them perfectly from the top window. A man in the street says one has been brought down in the Park—They sounded quite near, but I dont know if they dropped bombs, or whether it was only our guns. Carrington has just rung up to say there were 35 over Gordon Sqre but didnt drop bombs.

Berg

[]

878: To Emma Vaughan

[7? October 1917]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond

Dearest Toad,

We would like everything! In fact, if we have anything, the remains wouldn’t be much good to the Isle of Man. It is most angelic of you; I think the presses will come in most useful, though what a “Kipping” press is, I don’t know.

The sending them here ought to be quite simple. All you have to do is to stick a Carter Paterson card in the window. The smaller things need only be tied in a bundle with a label; and the bigger ones not packed at all. I expect the Porter and the C.P. man between them could easily lift the presses as they are downstairs; then we would pay him when he delivered them here. We deal with C.P. a lot, and haven’t found any difficulty in getting them, in spite of the war.

What luck I stepped in and frustrated the Isle of Man! But are you sure you couldn’t get a pound or two on them?—We would like to give whatever you might have had.

Love to Marny. I suppose the bombs on Hoxton respected her Saintly body—We had 16 Germans over our house, but they did no harm.

Yrs. V.W.

Sussex

[]

879: To Emma Vaughan

Wednesday [10 October 1917]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dearest Toad,

I should never have suggested such a gift if I had known how magnificent it is. All the things came safely yesterday, and they will be of the greatest use to us. I do feel sorry for the prisoners, and only hope they never saw what they have lost. The cutting press is exactly what we want—Wont you come and dine with us one night and see them? We are only just back from Asheham, having missed all the raids. Give my love to Marny and tell her I think she might come too, but I believe you prefer to be apart and I suppose you are both out all day, eating sandwiches in the park, or, as I imagine, forgetting to eat anything at all. Don’t forget to send the bill, and don’t forget to put in everything, including Oliver’s [the porter] time, and any damage done.

Yr. V.W.

Sussex

[]

880: To Vanessa Bell

[17 October 1917]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dearest,

I wonder whether it would suit you to have me for 2 nights from Wed. 31st to Friday 2nd Nov:? I rather expect it won’t, as your governess must be coming about then, and visitors would be a nuisance. We have decided that its more sensible for me not to go north with Leonard, as its sure to be rather exhausting, let alone the expense. Therefore I thought it would be a good chance to come, but I could go either to Ka at Aldbourne, or to Roger, I think, if I didn’t want to be here, or to Asheham, so dont consider for a second anything but your convenience. I should bring some work, and write in my bedroom.

I’ve just been to see the pictures, and to tea with Ottoline and Roger. I didnt see much of the pictures—but I was much impressed by one of yours—a brass pot on its side, or something of that sort. In fact I think you’re about our best painter—such imagination; such a way of seeing, so that the thing seems a beautiful, queer, whole. But as I say I met Aldous Huxley, and to look at pictures was useless. Besides, Ott: and Roger were very awkward. I’ve fallen from my height with her. She was rather distant—though I think this was partly due to the discomfort with Roger. She told me they couldn’t get on at all.

We went to Kingston Barracks, and after saying, I suppose to insult him, that L. had senile tremor, and suspecting a sham, they gave him complete exemption which they said was probably permanent. It was only due to [Drs] Craig and Wright though.

Alix came to print one afternoon, and was so bored that she has given it up—rather a relief. I’m now asking Barbara.

Could you let me know rather soon whether I could come, as I had better settle something or other.

I enclose the films.

Yr. B

Berg

[]

881: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Thursday [18 October 1917]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

My dear Ottoline

I’ve just telephoned to say that I’m afraid I shan’t be able to come tomorrow. I expect I shall be in London, but I don’t see how I can get to Tilney St. before 5.30—and you wanted me to come early I think. Besides, I should have to leave at once—thats the worst of Richmond. After leaving you I spent over half an hour wedged in a crowd, at Charing Cross, and only got back here at 7.30.

If you come up again, do (if you would like to see me) let me know and then I could arrange it—you don’t realise, at least I sometimes think you dont, how nice it is to see you—not only romantic, but nice. My flowers, which I saved in the crush, still breathe of Tottenham Court Road in the rain—

Yr affate
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

882: To Vanessa Bell

Saturday [20 October 1917]

Hogarth House [Richmond]

Dearest,

I am very sorry to hear of your domestic worries—I thought I’d better stir up Mrs Hunt myself, so I went there yesterday, and was told they had no h. parl’s [house parlourmaids] on their books at present; but would ring me up directly there was a chance of one. I’ve also been to two agencies here; the first had one, but she wouldn’t go to the country. The second also had one, and she wouldn’t go either. As I was there however, a servant came in, who wanted to be houseparl. and didn’t mind the country, but I didn’t much like the looks of her. She was leaving because the gentleman said she coughed too much, but has a character from another place. I said I’d see it; but I don’t think she is worth having really, as she looked very ill, and also rather shifty and dirty and the sort of person who might drink.

By a miracle, I’ve kept the address of a very good agency in Chelsea, recommended by Pinkie Ritchie, where I’ll go if I can on Monday. It would be too awful if Trissie [Vanessa’s cook] went—but I feel pretty sure I can get you someone from one of these places. Meanwhile Nelly is routing about among her friends and the servants where they are. She strongly advises you to advertise in the West Sussex Gazette, which one can get at Lewes. She says that all the servants round Guilford go to it for places, and its much better than an agency. It must be an awful nuisance with Eva Edwards arriving and all the rest of it. I suppose a temporary would be no good? I expect its much easier to get a permanent one in the summer. Also I expect it might be worth trying the agencies in Brighton and Eastbourne.

We had Zeppelins over last night. They are said to have destroyed Swan and Edgar at Piccadilly. We only heard the guns at a distance, and never heard the warning at all.

Have you seen this from the Cambridge Magazine?

I will write if I discover any one, as I hope to—its rather like hunting a Swallowtail [butterfly]—I get quite excited.

Yr B.

Berg

[]

883: To Vanessa Bell

Monday [22 October 1917]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dearest,

I’m very glad that you’ve caught your servant. It certainly seemed rather hopeless here.

I’ve just rung up Saxon and offered him and Barbara Asheham. She is away at this moment, and he thinks that Nick may be back soon, in which case B. would stay in London. However, if not, they would like nothing better than Asheham—in fact he wants to go there on Monday anyhow, and to spend his holiday there. Possibly I shall go there on Monday, and he rather wants me to stay and keep him company, if Barbara doesn’t come. I daresay as a matter of fact, you’d be well pleased to be without visitors while you’re starting your new arrangements. Anyhow, you’re quite free from Barbara and you can see how you get on and let me know anytime about coming, as I shall certainly either stay here or go to Asheham.

We are plunged in (temporary) difficulties: Liz [Nellie Boxall’s sister] has at last had her baby and her husband has been wounded at the same time, so that Nelly has had to go and look after her—however, I suppose we shall manage all right. We had 6 hours of Walter Lamb the other day—his qualities are such that in spite of everything it is really worth while, once a year.

Yr B.

Berg

[]

884: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Oct. 25th [1917]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

My dear Ottoline

I think your quarrel with London is much more the result of being tired than of being old, ugly, or useless. But I’m not going to run down London, because as you know, my perfectly selfish ambition is to have you at Bedford Sqre. again. But coming up for a day or two one gets, I used to think, violent and exaggerated impressions; my impression was of beauty mixed with the usual melancholy misunderstanding of all complex and sensitive people, the other day. I’m talking of Rogers tea party. The walk in the rain was romantic and so satisfactory from my point of view—but then I like you yourself, beneath the depressions and agitations and varieties of the surface. By this time surely, our degree of polish is scratched through, and we have come upon something—I have, anyhow—human and true beneath.

I’m very glad you saw Desmond; I think his mixture of intelligence and standard combined with sympathy is rare among us—I couldn’t have come, for after a wretched hunt for servants in London I was degraded by tea time.

We are just starting for the North—at least Leonard is. The difficulty of going was so great that I’m staying here or going down to Asheham and Charleston till he comes back. I feel that he’ll be too tired to go anywhere for a bit; but would the 17th Nov: suit you? Do you mind our having no clothes? Philip will have told you how we live like superior mechanics.

Dont—if you can have us—bother about Clive. That difficulty is formally buried.

Your carnations are still in front of me!

Yr very affate
Virginia

Texas

[]

885: To Vanessa Bell

Saturday [27 October 1917]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dearest,

I have settled to go to Asheham on Monday with Saxon, and then to come to you, if I may, on Wednesday, till Friday. I think Saxon is going to Brighton on Wednesday; we have lent the house to him, Barbara and Nick for Nicks leave, and B. and N. come down on Friday I think.

Of course if you liked to come over to see us, we should be delighted, but anyhow I’ll turn up for tea on Wednesday with great joy. By the way, if a parcel should come for me from the Times, do you think your servants would re-address it to Asheham and give it back to the postman? Its just possible they’ll send it to you; and I’m in rather a hurry.

Barbara seems very anxious to do the printing, and evidently she’s much more capable than Alix, but as long as Nick’s in England she has to be with him.

I shan’t bring any clothes. I hope Miss Edwards [the governess] won’t mind but I’ll try to make up by the elegance of my conversation.

Yr B.

I’m also having my letters sent to Charleston, but will you keep them—its only the parcel I should like forwarded to Asheham.

Berg

[]

886: To Leonard Woolf

[29 October 1917]

[Hogarth House, Richmond]

My Darling Goose M;

Here I am, just having had a very good luncheon, ending with an apple. I did my business this morning, and bought a fine pair of check slippers, which fasten with a clip. I couldn’t find Miss Kelley, so I had to bring my cloak home again. I bought 2 torches, 1/11 each for the children; I dont suppose they’re good, but then they’ll be smashed. I am now practically ready to start—I am taking my basket, and its as light as a feather. I suppose at this moment you’re cracking your bone, poor little darling, and some old woman being overcome by your sweet appearance, is offering you a piece of biscuit. I copied out the notes, have put them all in order on your table (this is a lie, but I will do so) and sent the book off.

I’m going to catch the 2.30 and its now nearly 2, so I’d better finish off my small jobs.

I promise faithfully to do everything as if you were there, but you wont be there, and I shall find Saxon such a stick and such a pussy cat after my own passionate and ferocious and entirely adorable M.

Yrs. M.

Thank Mrs E. from me.

Sussex

[]

887: To Leonard Woolf

Tuesday [30 October 1917]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

Darling Mr Mongoose,

Thank God, one day is over. I keep wondering how you’ve got on—what people said about the lecture, whether you were nervous, wetted, etc etc—but I must wait till tomorrow morning.

I met Saxon at Victoria; he had already taken our seats, and bought 1st class tickets, because, having made up his mind to economise, he had carried his own bag, and found it so heavy that he couldn’t, and so he thought it was better to not to attempt travelling 3rd. I explain this for the benefit of that generous old gentleman Mr Household [Leonard]—of course our carriage was quite full—golf playing stockbrokers who began by saying that it was the poor who did all the eating and over eating and then fell asleep—disgusting hogs. We did our shopping successfully in Lewes, found our taxi—a new man who had to have a boy as he didn’t know the way—and came home. By the mercy of providence, I bought eggs butter and milk in Lewes; the Killicks had none over. When we got to Asheham all the windows were dark, and the door locked; so we had to go down to the cottage, where we found a party going on in the Attfields, and Mrs A. declaring I had never said what time, and therefore she had not lighted any fires. However all the beds had been thoroughly aired. I said we must have dinner at once, so Will was sent up with us, and it was managed all right though rather late. The truth was she hadn’t expected me, and didn’t much mind what happened to Mr [Sydney] Turner and the young ladies.

We had a very good dinner—and she was extremely apologetic. The house was perfectly dry, and looks very clean—but of that I’m no judge. Saxon and I had a splendid fire, and he talked a great deal about marriage and Barbara, and said how our marriage seemed the best of any he knew, and how coming to see us one night, he had understood for the first time the advantages of being married, which I thought a pretty compliment. He has brought French and Italian novels, and he produced a bottle of Brandy at dinner and made me have a sip. It was wonderful stuff, and cost 25/- a bottle. I see why Desmond likes it. I had a very good night, and didn’t need any aspirin. Of course I had no letters this morning, and Saxon prefers not to take in a paper, so it was rather dull and I feel very much buried—but thats being without you really.

This morning I did a little writing in my room. The first thing was that Saxon cut 2 fingers opening a bottle of patent medicine; but as he had cotton wool, sticking plaster and ointment, we hope it wont mortify. He is incredibly timid and uniniatived [sic] (a very long word that). He cant make up his mind about anything—He takes as long to decide whether to order beef or coals as you do to write an article. I find it very odd and rather irritating. However, he’s extremely nice and very attentive.

We must now go to the Killicks for the milk. It has poured all the morning, but I foretold a fine afternoon and so it is. Will has done nothing to the garden. The sunflowers are dead. The wall flowers look very healthy. Will has got off again. This is a hideous dull letter I know. I have rested, and done everything as if you were here.

Its no good repeating that I adore you, is it? That seems to be a well known fact. Its so frightfully tame without you.

For Gods sake don’t get overtired; or a chill; the little beasts have all crept out and kiss the page.

Yrs. M.

Sussex

[]

888: To Leonard Woolf

Wednesday [31 October 1917]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

My darling Goose M,

I got your card this morning which was a great relief, as I forgot to tell the Post Office at Lewes to forward letters. However they’ve sent them all on; but I only wanted yours, and I’m longing for a proper one, with a full account. The rumour is that there was a raid on Monday night—I’ve no paper, but I can’t think it went to Bolton. I’m forwarding Norgates and Unwin’s [publishers] letters. I wonder what your agreement with Norgate was. Its clear that they’re determined to keep your book, and I’m amused to see how the publishers squabble for you—you must admit its rather a compliment. All I had was a card from Aunt Minna [Duckworth] asking us any week end—

There is very little in the way of news. We fetched our milk, and Saxon carried it back, and then we settled down to gossip, in the usual minute way. We spend a great time working out infinitely unimportant details—whether he shall go to Brighton, where he shall buy coal—his indecision and meticulousness rather surprise me. Its so odd, after my rapid bold Mong[oose]. I have to make up his mind, but I can’t get him to settle whether he means to stay here or go to Brighton. They’re very anxious for me to come [stay] here till Saturday, but I shan’t; I dont want to lose the chance of your coming; in fact I couldn’t bear to be away an hour more than’s necessary. I’ve ordered my taxi for Friday.

Then I said I must read my book, and he got out Aristotle, but the poor old creature really wants to discuss himself and Barbara more than anything, so I didn’t read much. He consulted me upon what he calls “the moral question” of whether it is right for him to go on seeing B. in Nick’s absence, supposing that by so doing he may make her fall in love with him—“although that possibility is hardly a serious one. I must seem to her very dull, I think I am very dull—Well, I’m middle aged; in fact I dont at all suppose I shall live to be twice my present age. My landlady hopes I shall stay another 13 years with her; then I shall be 50. I’ve been 13 years with her already….. I think a difference of 11 years is too much—between me and Barbara I mean. I saw Nick in his bath the other day. It struck me that he was much more suitable. However, I don’t worry about that—I shouldn’t mind if he did marry her”. etc, etc, etc. He’s a dear old creature—but what a frightfully vivid view of a person’s peculiarities one gets by staying with them! No, mongoose, he wouldn’t at all have done for a Servant! We’ve discussed that too; and he concluded that the reason he’d never been in love with me was that Thoby’s death had made us so intimate that it wasn’t necessary—besides he had always thought I should marry you.

Its a lovely still day—perfect for bicycling and I shall start after luncheon. I’m drinking my glass of milk and ovaltine as I write. I’ve not done any work this morning, as I must finish my Review book, which it is impossible to do with Saxon in the room. I feel extremely well, and slept perfectly, and stayed in bed rather late with my window open, and then had a hot bath; and then walked for 5 minutes on the terrace, and then made my bread, which I must now go down and knead. Saxon I hear wandering from room to room; in a way which would madden you.

By the way, I travelled up from Richmond with Jean [Thomas]! She was in the next carriage, through a glass door, and didn’t see me—at least we made no signs—She got out at Hammersmith.

God, how I want to know what you’re up to—Please tell me honestly if its very tiring, and cold; and if you’re perfectly well in every way—no headache, or ears bad; or inside; and as cheerful as can be expected. I’m perfectly honest; I eat exactly as if you were here, and I think its done me good. Its so quite and lovely. When do you get back at night after the lecture? Do they question you much?

Darling love I kiss thee.

M.

Sussex

[]

889: To Saxon Sydney-Turner

Friday [2 November 1917]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

I found this letter waiting here. I can’t think why they’ve sent it back. I never gave any orders to the Post Office about my letters. Perhaps you ought to explain that you’re staying on at Asheham.

Love to everyone. I shall expect a nice long letter some day, when you feel in the mood for writing. I enjoyed my evening with you, my dear Saxon, and it was not due to Brandy (though that was a divine pleasure) but to your exquisite nature.

Sussex

[]

890: To Vanessa Bell

[11 November 1917]

[Hogarth House, Richmond]

Dearest,

The boots were sent off; Julian’s cost 4/6 which seems absurd, but the others were old stock and his were new, so they cost more. Wouldn’t you like a pair for your own feet? They are amazingly comfortable.

I went off [from Gordon Square] the other night forgetting your pictures and my umbrella of course; but I shall go tomorrow if I can. I think you’re very generous. My opinion of your art is so high that I suppose you think it worthless. Of course I only saw the [Omega] Show in half light the other day; but I got some quite strong feelings from it, good or bad. I think you exaggerate the lack of sensibility; you see the worst of art is that it appeals solely to the aesthetic faculties, and one’s extremely shy and snobbish about giving away ones deficiency or eccentricity about them. Of course, I committed myself all wrong to poor old Roger, about his cold hard little compositions and called them literary, which he said they aren’t. I was a good deal impressed by Gertler, much more at this Show than at the other.

What a divine hours I had at Gordon Sqre! I enjoyed it, like Saxon’s brandy—the unreality, and bloom of the sensations went to my head, but of course if I’d stayed I should have run to ground. Was it great fun all through? I hope not.

The real point of this letter is to say that you owe me 11/—but I think you ought to deduct something for the port. Then we want to make a stove for the drawing room. If you could give us any hints we should be grateful. We’re buying 10 tiles and arranging them like yours, but I can’t remember how the hood on top went.

I suppose you’re dining at Asheham today, to meet Faith [Henderson]. I’m sure she’ll have our letter out.

I must now get ready to lunch with the Webbs. Do tell me how your educational plans work out. My feeling is that excessive masculinity has to be guarded against; I mean young men do seem to me so selfish and assertive; which tends to my thinking to be frightfully boring, (but I wont go on, as I know you dont agree, and also I’ve no time.) Anyhow, Julian’s a very attractive brat, and as full of brains as an egg (this is really a compliment).

Yr B.

Berg

[]

891: To Barbara Hiles

Tuesday [13 November 1917]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dear Barbara,

I’m glad to hear that you’ve enjoyed yourselves; I was afraid from Faith’s account that the difficulties were rather great. I wonder if you’re coming back on Friday (do stay on as long as ever you want to, short of Christmas)—and if you are whether you would be so very good as to bring us back a little tea. When I was in Lewes one could get it easily at Roberts; 2 lbs; or less would be very welcome. I daresay the Coops: dont allow any. Here we are reduced to our last spoonful, which has hit the servants more than any disaster in the course of the war—We bear up, because we like coffee.

We are starting printing [Prelude] in earnest, having just got our paper.

Love to everyone.

Yrs. V.W.

Berg

[]

892: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Wednesday [21 November 1917]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

My dear Ottoline,

It is quite impossible to write with Barbara taking her first lesson in printing, and Leonard mending the machine which has broken of course; but we did enjoy ourselves immensely. I hope this simple and sincere statement will not be brushed aside by you in a cynical way. As an artist, I suppose I ought to quarrel with you—to put the aristocracy beneath my feet. I’m sure thats why they are so disagreeable—I mean the artists.

Anyhow Garsington struck me as quite enough of a work of art to justify you in casting us off—But dont do it just yet.

We took about 6 hours to get back; but we stopped at Oxford, where I bought 2 lovely writing books, not so gorgeous as Brett’s but more practical; and then we lunched at Reading, and then we got out at Ealing, and home at last to find Alix waiting.

Leonard wishes to be remembered to you. We both feel freshened up and set going by all the enjoyments you gave us. I couldn’t put half of them in my diary.

Your affate
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

893: To Vanessa Bell

Tuesday [27 November 1917]

Hogarth House [Richmond]

Dearest,

I’m sorry I haven’t been able to go to the Bead Shop yet, but I will do my best tomorrow when I’m going to the dentist. I dreamt about you and Duncan all night; how you were going off to live on a ranch in California because it was the only way to paint—and you were very bitter—didn’t want ever to see me again.

The following conversation took place a few nights ago at Rogers:

R. “Vanessa really gets more and more amazing—I mean her character.

Clive: Yes. She’s quite sublime.

V. W: Her natural piety has greatly increased.

R: And then her painting. Sickert says he’d rather have her picture of apples than a Chardin. She’s gone miles ahead of any one.

Clive: That picture is what one may call a diploma picture. It marks a stage.

V. W: Thats the one I wanted to buy.

Roger: You cant now, for Lalla [Vandervelde] has bought it.

V. W. Damned old Jewess!

Clive: But you know its her character!

Roger: The greatness!

Clive: The originality!

V. W: We’ve talked enough about Nessa—

In fact there was much more in this loathsome strain, which I cant bring myself to write down. I said the truest thing though—about natural piety—

I suppose the whole of our weekend has been told you in detail before now. There wasn’t very much to tell. The worst of a week end on that scale is that one gets rather stupefied before its over. I had a private talk with Ott; and on the whole I think that she has been slightly maligned. At least she was more vivacious and malicious and less vapourish than I expected. She said that she was now happier than ever before, though she had had many bitter disappointments in friendship; and couldn’t understand why Lawrence and Murry and Katherine all turned against her. I said it was a form of inverted snobbishness; and she quoted long passages from L’s novel [The Rainbow], and was very discreet about Katharine—in fact she was rather reserved, thinking most unjustly that I do sometimes let things out. There were endless young men from Oxford, and Brett and Lytton and Aldous Huxley who talks too much about his prose romances for my taste, and falls into deep glooms, when, according to Ott: he is thinking of Maria. I saw Fredegond [Shove], and we had a family gossip—all I remember of interest is that Ermengarde [her sister] has just become a Quaker. At least Fredegond was sending her a post card to ask if this was true. Gerald [Shove] poured out his miseries to Leonard, and is secretly trying to get moved. They have a dismal little cottage, I thought, and the whole situation for both parties seemed to me intolerable. Brett is a queer imp. She took me to her studio and is evidently very proud of a great picture full of blue umbrellas, which seems to console her for being deaf. There was a poet called Evan Morgan, in black velvet with a scarlet ribbon and a ruff: a twitching man called Earp: Philip all gaitered and very well-meaning but I should fancy a dreary old death’s head in the long run.

I had my period 2 days ago and spent one morning reading old letters. Needless to say yours beat the literary gents quite hollow. I was amused by your account of meeting “Barnes” at Florence in the year 1909. I must copy it for you.

“On our evening walk we met the Barnes’. I dislike her. In fact I came to the conclusion that the new generation of females is not a patch upon the old. They have the hardness of youth and the self-possession of age—a horrid mixture. They have none of that endearing gaucherie which you and I must have possessed in abundance. Adams, Meynell, Barnes, all are alike, but Barnes and Meynell, on account of their upbringing are also aesthetic. On the whole I prefer the unaesthetic Adams, who might I think have been shaken out of her self-possession.” That pretty well does for Barnes!

Barbara is constantly bursting into my room for help in printing. She comes 3 days a week and has lunch and tea, and has already told me that I am to tell her honestly if I ever want to be rid of her—so what is one to do?

Yr B.

Barbara says that your getting rid of Miss E[dwards, the governess]. I rather thought you would. Let me know if I can be of use. I could easily go and see any at Mrs Hunts or elsewhere.

Berg

[]

894: To Vanessa Bell

Sunday [9 December 1917]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dearest,

I enclose a sketch—in fact it’s word for word true—of Marny’s conversation, as a thank offering for the loan of your picture; and if you think it a fair exchange, we might do traffic on these lines. There was a great deal more of Marny, as you may suppose, since she spent 2 ½ hours here. She sent you her love and I told her you had particularly wished me to give her yours, when I told you she was coming. This gave her immense pleasure; and I think you ought to ask her to stop and lunch with you next time she goes to Hastings. We are now corresponding about bread making.

I’m afraid the chances are that I shan’t be able to come to your party—my affairs will probably choose that day. The servants are already half tipsy at the idea, and have planned all sorts of assignations by moonlight with Sid and Will. Noel [Olivier] can’t get away, and James [Strachey] wants to stay in London to see her, so I think we shall be alone for Christmas itself. Then Ray [Strachey] is coming for a few days, and Ka I think—Shall we meet at all?

Could you tell me if Julian would like Scotts Tales of a Grandfather? I’ve got our old copy which I would give him—but I want to find a lighter book too, but I dont know what. Have you any photographs of father? A man who is writing a book on Meredith has written to ask me for one, about 1870-9—I can’t find any; but I suppose Aunt Julia’s is in existence—

I hear you took Widow Brereton. Do take care what you say about death, separation, divorce and concubines—Be tactful about her children’s faces; say nothing about the Church, for you can’t be sure that she is an atheist, merely because her husband is a clergyman. I can see you whisking your tail on her innermost entrails and then asking why she minds, seeing he’s dead—which he isn’t of course, or has that point been established?

Yr B.

I’m not giving you a [Christmas] present. I trust to your honour not to give me one. (or merely a passionate outburst of embraces)

Typewritten

SATURDAY, 8th Dec;—

Today, Saturday, we walked to Twickenham where L. took the train for Staines, and I got back late to find Marny waiting. I found her sitting bolt upright, away from the fire, as if she wouldnt encroach upon it, dressed in a sleek black coat of some fabricated fur; large muff; little bit of lace at her throat; thin gold chain; all infinitely decorous and after the pattern of the spinsters of breeding who buy their goods at Barkers, and wait to be served in Kensington Post Office, and are always kept waiting, and then become plaintive, but never angry. Her face is more than ever the face of the emaciated saint with a dash of the sheep, and the eyes of a child. So we greeted each other.

V. . Dear Marny, how nice to see you—after all these years!

M… O Goat dear, how charming to see you, and Ive been using up your lovely fire, for I caught my train, which one cant be sure of doing in these times; and I found my way up so beautifully. I’ll take off my gloves but not my coat, and I’ve such heaps of things to ask and to hear—

and so we sat down to tea; and straightway lighted—(it didnt seem to matter where one lighted—) upon Florence Bishop.

M… O but you mustn’t call her Bishop. Shes married a naval doctor and her name’s Burke. Yes, she still keeps up with us, for we met in the street one day and she asked us to tea. She lives in a little flat in the Earls Court Road, for she’s not at all well off, you know; I fancy old Mr Bishop was a foolish old man. But she gives you Tiptree jam for tea, and she looks like a picture. Such a pretty flat, and her white hair so becoming, and everything as nice as possible … But not as nice as this; no, Goat dear, no one ever has tea’s like your’s. We havent had butter (this is butter isnt it?) for a long time, and sometimes we can’t even get the nice kind of margarine; but I won’t deal at Barkers, no I dont think its right to deal at Barkers, after the evidence at that dreadful fire—I thought it gave one a dreadful idea of him. And we seem quite in the region for fires. Wright’s coal shed burnt down behind us the other night—all that good coal wasted; it seemed such a pity, didnt it? and last winter we quite ran out of coal. It was a Saturday too, and I went from shop to shop begging—even a scuttlefull will take us over Sunday I said, but they hadnt got any, and who should I meet at Knightsbridge but Kitty Maxse? and she said, “O I’ll give you some coal; I’ve got two cellars full, and sure enough, though I begged her not to, that very afternoon up she drove in a taxi with a sack full, and that saw us through, but I’ve not seen her since that day, so distinguished looking and not a year older, though she must be going on for fifty. Why, I’m 55, and Toad 43—but one forgets peoples ages, and I’m sure I dont feel old, and you look like 25, and Nessa as lovely as ever I suppose! with those great blue eyes—

(here followed the whole history, very skillfully concocted by me, of the more reputable side of Nessa, Clive, Adrian, Duncan, Bunny, and ourselves—also, the Shoves came in, and how Ermengarde [Maitland] has turned Quaker, and probably has more in her than Fredegond, though she’s not attractive, or beautiful in the family way—“Still, Goat dear, looks arent everything …”)

M…. Dear me, how we all move about, partly owing to the war to be sure; though I do manage to see some of my old friends still, like Miss Harris; Nessa would remember her; she paints really remarkably well, but she won’t exhibit, because she thinks she’s not worthy, and she’s given it up now, like most people, for war work. And Hilda Lightbody, I see her sometimes. Yes, she’s a widow—oh, for years now, and Mr Lightbody was always a great invalid, and now she makes papier maché splints down in West-minster, and I believe we’re going to tea with her next Wednesday. Yes, I keep up with Adeline [Vaughan Williams]; I’m not so naughty about the Fishers as you and Nessa are; and she hasn’t changed at all—such lovely golden hair, not a white hair in her head, though she has this dreadful arthritis, and can’t get out of her chair without a stick. She took Hervey [Fisher] to Hastings for a change, and theyve stayed on, for there wasn’t any reason why they shouldnt stay on, and the lodgings suited them, and Hervey liked the air, and Millicent isn’t very far off. Poor Millicent [Marny’s sister]—she suffered terribly over poor John [Isham]. It was the camp, bad drains we think—though no one knows and he’d always meant to be a soldier anyhow, which makes it rather better perhaps…

And Virginia [Isham] milks cows at Lord Rayleighs place in Essex. She prefers horses, but she couldnt get horses, and she’s very fond of cows. No, I dont think they’ll ever leave Hastings, though Millicent would rather be in the real country or in the real town; but then they know people and she does a lot in a social way. Last winter she got up dances though she didnt feel like dancing I’m sure, but she thinks young people ought to have their gaieties, in spite of this dreadful war. What a terrible tragedy it all is, Goat dear! And what does Leonard think of it all? I suppose he cant say for certain when we shall have peace—nobody seems able to tell one that. And the children grow up—its quite wicked how they grow up, and Nessa’s children just the same I suppose, big boys, both of them, and I hope they look like her. Yes, Halford [Vaughan] is quite a man, with a poetic side but very practical in other ways, I’m glad to say; and Janet [Vaughan] so like Madge [Vaughan, née Symonds, their mother] to look at, but I dont think she’ll take to writing—but I wish you could make Madge write. Perhaps she’d be happier then, though I dont think anything could make Madge really happy; its not in the Symonds nature, though theyre such wonderful people in their way . . I was so glad to hear that Katharine [Furse née Symonds] has quarrelled with that odious Northcliffe. I’m told they never see each other now. And I do feel that he’s at the bottom of all our troubles, though the Prussians seem to have acted in a very high handed way, I must say; but the fault can’t be entirely with them as people make out. I believe the south Germans want peace just as much as we do ...Yes, we had the raid the other night, and we went and sat in the Wales’ room on the ground floor. We all sat in the passage till it was over, and then we went to bed. And Toad had dropped off to sleep, when I heard a dreadful moaning noise, and I knew it couldnt be the raid, so I didn’t wake her up. And then it came again, and I wondered whether it could mean that the Germans were actually there; so I put on my dressing gown, and looked out of the window and saw nothing, and suddenly it sounded just beneath my windows, so I thought, “well, this time I will make sure, for if its any thing queer we oughtnt to be up in the roof like this”, and I went out on to the staircase, and I met a lady dressed for walking and she said, O’theres nothing to be frightened about, Thats the all clear Bugle” So I went back again, but I think the authorities ought to tell one, dont you?”

Berg

[]

895: To Vanessa Bell

Wednesday [19 December 1917]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dearest,

I think it would be a pity to put your party on to Saturday, as my affairs are quite undependable, and anyhow it might pour. But leave it on Monday, and if I can and its tolerably fine I’ll come to lunch and Leonard will come to tea and we’ll go home afterwards.

I’m sending Quentin’s present addressed to you today, as its too bulky to pack. We had a raid last night—Bob [Trevelyan] was dining with us and talked so loud that we couldn’t hear the guns; but Saxon says it was rather bad in London. We ate most of our dinner in the coal cellar.

Yr B.

Berg

[]

896: To Clive Bell

Saturday [22 December 1917]

Asheham [Rodnell, Sussex]

My dear Clive,

It was unanimously agreed at a party of your democratic friends the other night that you could only fitly be answered in verse. I wait the rhymes and they won’t come. I compare my dumbness with your exquisite larks carolling. And then I remember how its been said that I cant even criticise verse—which are reasons enough you will agree to keep me silent. But in some capacity or other I was so much enchanted by the pirouettings of the scarlet elf upon my breakfast plate the other morning that I can’t forbear to croak a kind of frog’s chorus in which the note of envy is plainly to be heard.

He is an exquisite original—this elf. Criticism, I repeat, is not for a Times reviewer, and who am I to predict which of these pages will be found in the anthologies of the future? I know which particular one I would back with some confidence, and V.S. [Virginia Stephen] 1909 a good second. But leaving the actual selection for better eyes I will only express the view that to my feeling you have quite undoubtedly twitched aside the veil and penetrated to the heart which perversely enough resists the solemn and premeditated assaults of Eddie’s strenuous young men. I read them in the coal cellar the other night during the bombardment and turned to you when the explosions had subsided. I suppose that you have enjoyed making exceptions among your friends; Gumbo [Marjorie Strachey] was complaining bitterly; Bob T: not without foreboding. Might I buy a copy to send to an elderly philanthropist [Margaret Llewelyn Davies] in bed with a cold? I will send a P.O. if you will tell me how much.

Yrs V.W.

We are just off for a day on Brighton front.

Did you ever pull off the hood of a scarlet flower whose name I forget? Thats what I see you doing, and letting loose scores of them in the fog and frost too. I daresay they were called pimpernels [Eschscholtzia]; they had long green hoods shaped like extinguishers. The flower was folded up inside—then came loose.

Quentin Bell

[]

897: To Vanessa Bell

Wednesday [26 December 1917]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest

I’ve found out that I can borrow a mattress from Mrs Attfield, so that we shall have 2 beds free on Saturday, unless by any chance Ray, who’s not come, should want to stay over Sunday. But I would send a wire if that were so.

If not, do bring the children—wont you come to lunch? Roger, too, if he’s there.

I think we can manage enough milk—you might let me know what meals they usually have.

Its quite all right that Barbara should go to you, if its only till the 10th.

Its very melancholy how life is disposed of by periods.

Do come on Saturday if you can.

Yr B

Berg

[]

898: To Vanessa Bell

Friday [28 December 1917]

[Asheham, Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest,

It will be quite all right for the children to come this weekend. Ray is ill, and can’t come. The only thing we’re short of is sugar. If they could bring what they would have at home, everything else is quite easy.

We shall expect you, and children and Roger if possible, for lunch tomorrow.

I never thanked you for the flowers which are lovely.

Would it be a good plan for me to bring the children back—on Monday and possibly stay the night?

V.W.

Berg

[]

899: To Lytton Strachey

Friday [28 December 1917]

Asheham, Lewes [Sussex]

It was a great treat to get your letter, which, you know, is the first of a series, gradually becoming more and more indiscreet, until every dot has given place to fact. Besides, how can you be indiscreet with me? Don’t I live in the middle of padded walls, through which not a sound escapes but what is to everyone’s credit? Remember my blazing testimony—the Mansfield affair.

I suppose, not altogether hope, that some of our blessings have reached the Mill on the Pang by now: sun, light, running taps, frisking cowherds etc; but I can’t believe that your spiritual level is quite up to ours. We had Maynard and the author [Clive] of Ad Fam [Ad Familiares] the other day—both extremely agreeable, and the author so modest—though he had a bundle of compliments collected in a large envelope—that I couldn’t find it in my heart to be clever at his expense, though as you say—Leonard is seized with a spasmodic clutch at the mere sight of the affair. I confess that I fairly cut adrift, and mounted in my litter, produced a crowing and cocking imitation of his own foppery. Do you call it foppery, or turkery? Its the only way, I assure you, and whatever you do, don’t discourage an annual exhibition.

Gordon, as I knew he would, cast a gloom upon my festival. I thought him masterly—indeed, it’s amazing how from all these complications you contrive to reel off such a straight and dashing story, and how you weave in every scrap—my God, what scraps!—of interest to be had, like (you must pardon one metaphor) a snake insinuating himself through innumerable golden rings—(Do snakes?—I hope so) I don’t see how the skill could be carried further. My only criticism, which I ought to hesitate to give until a second reading, is that I’m not sure whether the character of Gordon altogether “convinces”. I felt a little difficulty in bridging the gulfs, but I rather think this is inevitable from the method, which flashes light and dark this side and that—and then the crowd of facts to be found room for—and so perhaps one can’t get that shifting and muddling which produces atmosphere. I daresay I’m really putting in a claim for the novel form; and it doesn’t read very lucidly. The writing I thought more than usually unadorned, and surely the most flawless example of the master’s style in its maturity. I will read it once more—unless you want it back at once?—with a pencil.

We go back on Thursday. Shall you be passing through, and will you come to tea or something? I saw Molly the other day, and she, on the advice of Arnold Bennett, has sent her novel to Chatto and Windus, who are, he says, the most intelligent publishers in London. Have they answered?

It’s now Sunday; this letter has hung about, and Julian has splashed cocoa over it, and if I don’t write it again it’s because my fingers refuse their office. Cold has set in; Ka is here; Bunny imminent; Julian and Quentin are spending the weekend. I meant to tell you about the 17 Club; (but now it’s too stale), and how I surprised the secret of Jos’s fascination; it’s virility; (perhaps to lose one’s parts sends the semen to the surface—it seemed to splash and sparkle like phosphorescent cod’s roe from every glance)—Marjorie [Strachey] all a tremble at one corner, and Miss Dudley immensely receptive at the other—I thought him a random untrustworthy mongrel, utterly incontinent.

This must go, I suppose to Garsington. My love to Ottoline. By God’s prevision among my presents was a box of sealing wax, to unstick which warmth must be applied, and warmth is rare. Look for the impression of a perfect rose.

But then, as you justly say, what is there that needs sticking or unsticking? … [dots in original] (that’s cribbed from you).

Please write,

Yr. V.W.

Frances Hooper

[]

Letters 900-932 (January-mid-May 1918)

900: To Vanessa Bell

Wednesday [2 January 1918]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest,

Nelly [Boxall] is coming to say good bye; so I am sending the paints and 2 boxes of pens by her.

Would you be so kind as to give her my umbrella, which you forgot to remind me to take—having designs of your own, I daresay.

I enclose Aunt A’s: letter in case it may amuse you—but would you send it back. It was very melancholy not to see more of you but the little I did see seemed in fine feather, and I had some difficulty in restraining poor B’s [Virginia’s] amorosity, which became at moments violent—Never was there a more lovely creature—and I’m afraid the children mean to make me jealous. I enjoyed myself greatly, and hope you will ask me in Feb:

Love to Poor Bun [David Garnett]

Yr B.

Berg

[]

901: To Margaret Llewelyn Davies

Wednesday [2 January 1918]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest Margaret,

It is a proof of great devotion on my part to write a letter—but I see that its the only thing to do. We must try to write once a month, and then when we meet at the end of 25 years or so, it will be very interesting to see what sort of people we really are. In fact, that might make a good story, don’t you think? I know what sort of idea I should have of you. But the reason I am now writing is to send you a copy of Ad Familiares. When I saw it, I thought at once how you’d relish it, and so I persuaded Clive to give me another copy. What do you think of it? Here is a text for your next letter.

The time passes with such speed that now we’re at our last day, and I’ve not done a thing I meant to do, except read one or two books. All our visitors failed us at Christmas, rather to our relief, though it seems selfish to enjoy our chicken and be in the sun here all alone. Then Ka Cox came, and Nessa’s children. I’ve been spending the night at Charleston, and organising a small boys’ school with Vanessa. She wants to take in 8 small boys, a tutor and a governess next summer, so as to avoid public schools, and has already both tutor and governess in view, and now only wants small boys, but that’s the difficulty, because one can’t imagine any morbidly careful parents—say the Trevelyans—trusting their children to grow up in a happy state without passing examinations, and only learning sensible things. She’s got a Mrs Brereton to make a start—a wife separated from a husband who’s a clergyman.

Isn’t it appalling to find what wits the younger generation have? They begin asking questions about the Roman Empire, and whatever one may say, there’s something about a mind which hasn’t been used at all which makes one shudder at the degradation of human beings. In fact I believe the only hope for the world is to put all children of all countries together on an island and let them start fresh without knowing what a hideous system we have invented here. All the things they’re interested in seem to me sensible and not half pretence, as ours are for the most part. I mean honours, degrees, and governments and so on. Or would they hark back to the same ways of their own accord?

We’ve had our usual prophecies from Maynard Keynes, but these officials have to knock up something definite to say and so are always proved wrong—He says L. George is on his last legs, only no one can stand up to him, such is his fascination; and the country is practically ruined, and no one, after another year, will have more than 2,000 a year—but what does it amount to? We did our best to persuade both Maynard and Ka that if they stay any longer in offices they will be lost to humanity—as indeed I think they almost are. They can’t help believing in a system which pays them £700, or whatever it may be.

However, I must stop; why is it so pleasant to damn one’s friends?

Love to Lilian.

Yr. V. W.

Sussex

[]

902: To Violet Dickinson

Jan. 14th [1918]

Hogarth House, Richmond

My Violet,

Leonard’s brother has gone on very well—in fact I think he’s leaving his convalescent home this week—I’m afraid he’s pretty wretched.

They [Cecil and Philip] had always done everything together and I don’t know how he’ll get on alone.

We are hard at work printing a long story [Prelude] by a woman called Katherine Mansfield. I think it’ll be out by Easter, and I shall come round with my wares like a peddlar. It’s very good I think; but the publisher wouldn’t take it.

I hear about once a month from Aunt Minna. She is generally under the impression that we’re coming to stay with her for the week end. Why should she ever die? It seems to me that no Duckworth need ever give way.

Shall you ever come and see us again? We are increasing our printing stock largely.

L sends his love, and hopes to see you.

Yr Sp:

Berg

[]

903: To Vanessa Bell

Jan. 17th [1918]

Hogarth House [Richmond]

Dearest,

How nice it will be for you if I fill this entire page with gossip, as I mean to do. Before starting, I may tell you all the kind unselfish acts I’ve done in your behalf—some fruitless its true, but what is an act if judged by its fruit? Often no better than a rotten quince. Well—yesterday I went to Robersons and bought 3 ½ lb: tubes of white paint. Mr Roberson was most attentive and charming, and remarked that several people had been in for white paint lately, which he would sell as long as he had any. The difficulty about paints is that they’re made with oil, “Now you may not know that every gun when its first cast has to be dipped in a bath of oil, or after the first or second shot, I daresay, it would explode, for the outside cools quicker than the in. That means one thousand gallons of oil for each gun—and when the guns dipped in the oil, d’you think much oil is left? No, not a drop—But you come and ask me for what you want and I’ll let you have it—”

Your brown paper books are sold out, but there may be others in a fortnight. As Mrs Grant refuses to tell me her watchmakers name, being doubtless a good deal upset still by the burglary and the Bird, I can’t take any steps about your watch. Duncan’s continues to go—only after being wound up though, I could of course ask if there’s anything odd about that—How I’ve enjoyed that story! It shows signs of growth too. It is passing into the currency. I may say that the current into which I now drop my little . . (I must and will avoid what shocks Julian—although it would be vivid and picturesque to bring in here the [lavatory] seat which is always frozen at Charleston)—The centre of life I should say; is now undoubtedly the 17 Club. I’m going to give you tea there; and you may write a letter on stamped paper, and they have nibs, and real ink—the sort that runs, I mean. The chief disfigurements, if one dislikes ones friends, are Babs Hanning in a crimson dress like a servants petticoat, and you don’t care about Faith [Henderson] I believe, but she’s only sometimes there. Alix however is quite invariable, and I suppose permanent now that she’s been finally ousted from Gordon Square, which operation, she told me yesterday, was firmly carried out by Norton or Maynard or both. She is now trying to fix herself upon Fredegond [Shove]; and its like watching a poor silver fish enveloped by a mass of jelly fish, to hear them debating about a house which Alix wants to share, and Gerald [Shove] won’t let Fredegond take with Alix, and Fredegond of course half promises, and Alix intones like a funeral bell, and becomes more and more insistent, though incapable of making up her own mind, or doing anything but cloud the entire aquarium for miles around. At length (this is a perfectly true scene, and happened yesterday) F: lost her head completely, beckoned me out of the room, and begged me to tell her whether she was to tell Alix the truth, or shift along with lies. My candid spirit had no doubt whatever. I said Alix must know the truth. I left F: to tell it her. It will be a blow; but Alix bears no malice, and I have a plan on foot for establishing her in Ormond Street above Saxon. Who knows? His gloom and her despair meeting may build a rainbow.

Saxon’s gloom has now passed beyond a joke. And it is all connected with another scene on another day at the 17 Club. Now here we come to delicate matters which must not be shouted across the table next time Barbara stays with you. I had just finished my toast, bought my cigarette, and dared Lytton to break up a party of Cambridge intellects gathered round the other fire—yes, you must be told about them. First theres Hogben the poet; a youth of genius; a shock headed but fresh coloured ardent man of perhaps 22, either hiding from the Police or a C. O. He is always at the Club, and he always has a play in a despatch box by his side; and when more than four are gathered round him, he will take this play out of the box, and after a little persuasion will lend it to a stout girl with a very large pipe. This being done, a second girl with an enormous cleft in one cheek, coloured grey, since identified, (and I’ve no doubt the fact’s responsible for the cleft,) as Jos Wedgwood’s daughter, throws herself on her knees and begs to be lent the play too. Hogben lends it. Next time they all get together and say how unconventional it is, and how the public can’t be expected to understand, though to my elderly and sarcastic view, the public would swallow the whole of them without turning a hair.

Well, I dared Lytton to break in upon them, which he did, by lingering ostentatiously in the background, and was soon in the chair next Hogben, whose hair by the way practically grows into his left eye, so you’ll know him when you see him.

This being arranged Faith, Fredegond and I had some intimate discourse about Barbara and her faithful troop. Poor Nick, they say, is moping and pining and longing to pull out all Saxon’s feathers, and no wonder. Under the shield of immaculate altruism, that old wretch has won the prize, and refuses to own that he has, and makes an elaborate pretence of sharing, which is vinegar to Poor Nick, who is too high minded to protest, and has to agree to be a disembodied Saint. Barbara ended the time at Asheham by refusing Nick once more, and takes no pains to hide the fact that she prefers Saxon, always has Saxon about when Nick comes to town, and means to marry neither. I’ve no doubt that Faith makes this blacker and bitterer than it need be, and if one should prefer Saxon, then there’s no help for it; but at the root of it, still according to Faith, there is nothing but a perverted wish to do what Bloomsbury approves.

The Bloomsbury hypnotism, I may say, is rank, and threatens the sanity of all the poor Bunnies, who are perpetually feeling their hind legs to see if they haven’t turned into hares. I tried tactfully to explain to Faith that once a Bunny, always a Bunny; and what great Bloomsbury respects is the recognition by the B’s that they are Bs. But they’re going through a terrible season of delusion. Barbara can’t bear that Nick should be seen with her in Bloomsbury. That is the height of his ambition; a dinner with Maynard would glorify him for ever. He is very humble, a devout admirer, and has taken to reading hard in order to qualify. For my part, I’m going to ask him here, to show my deep respect for him, and then casually and tactfully to assure Barbara that she’s worthy of him neither in brain nor in education. You and Duncan can imagine how gracefully this will be done. Now Saxon droops because he’s discovered that human nature is fallible; if only she didn’t prefer him, he’d be quite happy. I can’t help thinking that there is something rather sublime about us. I often feel very sublime myself—Odd, disconnected thoughts of undoubted spiritual beauty come upon me unawares.

Your lost Cockatoo [Clive] (a lady in Hammersmith is offering a suitable reward for a lost Green Lovebird) came here last Sunday, with Gerald and Fredegond and we had a fine gossip. They carry out all I say about Bloomsbury hypnotism. F. and G. went over to Tidmarsh the other day, and after tea Lytton and Carrington left the room ostensibly to copulate; but suspicion was aroused by a measured sound proceeding from the room, and on listening at the keyhole it was discovered that they were reading aloud Macaulays Essays! Barbara herself has finished vol. 2 of Tom Jones, and hopes by persevering to see it through next summer in the tent at Charleston.

Sunday.

Barbara and Nick came last night, and its perfectly true what I say about his intelligence and education. He described Erasmus. Barbara thought he meant Erasmus Darwin who was killed; not a bit of it; he also talked about Cardinal Mazarin; and the works of Synge. But my tender heart was distressed to hear that Bunny has infected you all with his disease [influenza]. Barbara was rather vague, and thought that Duncan and Julian and possibly you were all ill in some way. Please send a line to say if this is so. She had just seen Bunny, looking very ill, and saying that he had been ill off and on since the day I was there.

This has so dashed my spirits that I think I will end here, and keep Lady Strachey and one or two other small fragments for another time, so that I can send this off, and you may let me have a line, whichever of you is able to write. The only interesting incident, however, with Lady S: was my terrible faux pas: “Have you yet been to Tidmarsh, Lady S.?”

She became perfectly glum and stony: and said at length, to L: “Well, what d’you think of it all?”

L: thinking she meant the relationship between Lytton and Carrington was beginning a long account of his views on buggery, when we realised that she was changing the conversation to the food famine!

Yr B.

Do you want the white paint sent, or shall I keep it until you come?

Berg

[]

904: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

[24 January 1918]

Hogarth House, Richmond

My dear Ottoline

Of course every horror seems to settle itself upon Thursday, but we hope to come, if not tonight, next time.

I should like to come to tea, if I can find my way—perhaps Tuesday might suit you—but here I am writing with a pen point in circumstances which rasp and desiccate the soul—One does pray that there is some difference between us and them—(or rather me and them—you don’t fit in at all).

Yr. V.W.

Texas

[]

905: To Vanessa Bell

Tuesday [29 January 1918]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dearest,

I now begin another letter, partly that should I die tonight you may know that my last thoughts were of you. Not that you care—but think of all the gossip you’d miss—yes, that touches the one sensitive spot. My chief item—Barbara—is stale by this time. I daresay you’ve written her an expressive letter in your best style. She burst in this morning saying she was going to be married on Friday. With consummate presence of mind I exclaimed “Then you’ve chosen the right man!” I hadn’t the least notion which. She said “Yes, its Nick.” So I said “Of course Nick’s the right man”, and she said, “Yes, he’s the right man to marry, but Saxon is very wonderful as a friend. And its not going to make the least difference to any of us. We’ve all discussed it, and we’re all agreed, and we’re going to Tidmarsh for the honeymoon, and Carrington and Lytton’ll be there—which makes it all the nicer.” I cant say I altogether understand the young; I’m not sure, I mean, that I dont see a reversion to the devoted submission of our grandmothers. Do you think she’s in love? Isn’t she merely doing what will make him happy? However the sober sense of it all is sublime; in many ways this method of abolishing private property in love has its exaltation. Perhaps it doesn’t imply the highest mental gifts; one might hint at physical deficiencies; or do you think that absolute sublimity in emotion is reserved for eunuchs? Think of the three of them discussing the question over the stove in her studio, and Nick saying “No, Saxon: you must marry her;” and Saxon refusing to be happy save in their happiness, and Barbara suggesting copulation with each on alternate nights, but at once realising her own selfishness and saying she’d marry either—only it must be the one she didn’t most want to—Or how did they settle it? I’m told Saxon has written a full account to you.

Thursday. Well, you almost lost me. Nine bombs on Kew; 7 people killed in one house, a hotel crushed—but not a hair of Wattie’s [Walter Lamb] head was touched. I know raids dont interest you when no one you know is killed, so I won’t describe our night in the kitchen. Barbara was with us and we all slept on the floor—We have mattresses laid there every night. Talking to the servants from 8 to 1.15 (as we did first time) is so boring—“but not so boring as a description” as you justly remark—so I pass rapidly to Ottoline.

She is up for a few days, and sent for me, I rather thought with a view to extracting something.

Friday.

To continue. Imagine Ottoline in a small triangular bedroom, at the top of a Bloomsbury hotel; dressed in black velvet which was dusty, and looking much like a shop walker in Marshall and Snellgroves. I suppose the light was bad for painting; it was amazingly visible; and a piece of cotton wool had got stuck in her hair; but she wore a great enamelled plate with pearls attached, round her neck. We sat on bedroom chairs and had tea out of a pewter pot, and there was practically no room for anything but a po-cupboard and a large double bed.

I didn’t find any particular reason why she should want to see me—her only anxiety seemed to be that Leonard might stand as a Cooperative member which is apparently her ambition for Philip—Or he may become a writer—I suppose the truth is she must provide him with something to keep him from home. She is coming to town for 3 weeks. I think Fredegond’s desertion has alarmed her slightly, and she wants to spread her net over another shoal of fish. But she’s got Murry back again, so that’s forgiven me. {However she [Mary Hutchinson] warned me not to believe a word that Clive may say, and told me that the wretched cockatoo [Clive] assures her that he and I have started a correspondence—and she thinks that he says this in order that poor Poll of Hammersmith [Mary] may be jealous, since Poll is supposed to have her own flirtations. But as I’ve never written to Clive, nor he to me, for the last 4 years, I think he must have been pulling one of her long and fishy feet. She lent me Mary’s story in the Egoist [War] the one you meant, I suppose. It seems to me merely a piece of Omega linen surrounded by twenty looking glasses, and entirely arranged for the eye of the Master [Clive]; but as you know, I can’t endure other peoples successes. In fact it struck me rather as the exquisite nymphs of our Hyde Park Gate days used to strike me at a dance at the Freshfields: I can’t conceive how they bring it off. What Mary’s mind is like I’ve no idea,- I mean her manners are so perfect; you will see that I am slightly malicious. A little admiration for the completeness of the pose enters in.}

After Ottoline, what on Earth’s surface am I to tell you about? You see I go round pocketing small eatables for you. (This week we are without meat and butter; are you too?) Well, old Desmond [MacCarthy] turned up the other day, and I have scented a minute romance for you—I’m afraid only a figment, but still better than nothing. Did you ever meet a woman called Enid Bagnold—would be clever, and also smart? who went to Ottoline’s parties, and now lives at Woolwich and nurses soldiers? “That disagreeable chit?” Yes, that is my opinion too. But she has evidently enmeshed poor old Desmond. She has written a book, called, as you can imagine, “A diary without dates”, all to prove that she’s the most attractive, and popular and exquisite of creatures—all her patients fall in love with her—her feet are the smallest in Middlesex—one night she missed her Bus and a solider was rude to her in the dark—that sort of thing. Desmond insists that I shall review it in the Times. First he writes a letter; then he comes and dines; then he gives me the book; then he invites me to lunch with a Prince Bibesco, who is apparently one of Bagnolds lovers; then he writes again—and every visit and letter ends with the same command—For God’s sake review this book!

So far I have resisted; but I don’t know that Desmond’s charms won’t overcome me in time. The Roumanian Prince too has the most exquisite voice. To charm me further, Desmond rang him up, and I listened—but the appalling thing is that Desmond is now, whether from drink, Bagnold or bankruptcy in such a state of dissolution that one has to be very careful what one says. In the middle of a silence, he suddenly starts up and cries out, “O dear! O dear! O dear!” something father used to do. I guess that Molly’s novel has been refused. I suspect that he has finally lost or burnt his proof sheets; and then, as he says, he feels it incumbent on him to eat and drink as much as he can when he dines out, so that his digestion is ruined.

Bagnold has said to him “Now I won’t kiss you” (or whatever it is they do) “until you’ve got my book reviewed in the Times.” Bagnold has him in her toils.

The question is, am I a match for Bagnold? You would be, of course, but then I’m so susceptible. Bagnold paints too.

I must bring this to an end, which will be most gracefully done on the subject of kindness to sisters. I took your watch, to the wrong man. But how can there be two watchmakers on Poland St one called Pilfduck, and the other Pfalmer? Pilfduck is my discovery; and according to Pilfduck the balance wheel of your watch is worn out, and no one in England can mend it until the war is over. So I brought it back, and Barbara, enchanted to be of the least service to you who are her moon of women and phoenix of desire, has now taken it to Pfalmer, who is quite different, she says, from Pilfduck, though I should prefer Pilfduck if it were a question of my watch which by the way it now is. Still there’s Duncan’s watch ticking away in my room—which is not what a watch should do, and if he likes I’ll take it to Pilfduck and we’ll—but this sort of thing doesn’t really amuse you, as you say.

The general sentiment is always to the effect that you are the most beautiful and gifted of our friends. Your withdrawal has only veiled you with mystery. I am sometimes welcomed as the Toad who has heard the nightingale’s song. Several people have told me that your picture of the enormous women was a revelation to them. Thank God, I say, that she doesn’t write. Ask Julian why we should be glad that cows dont fly: and tell him that I am going to send him a birthday present—only what?

How are you? Influenza, [Dr] Craig told me, poisons the nervous system, and nourishment is the only way to get rid of it. Do take milk and ovaltine. I have 2 glasses a day.

Yr B.

Berg. {Excluded passage restored from Virginia Woolf Miscellany. Number 8. Summer 1977.}

[]

906: To Clive Bell

Tuesday [19 February 1918]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

My dear Clive,

I haven’t seen such a splendid bunch of grapes since the early nineties when such gifts were not uncommon in our circles. The pink paper brought it all back. The grapes were delicious.

We are off to Asheham this afternoon. We have spent the last 3 nights more or less in the cellar, though there wasn’t much need, but when the servants take cover I can’t help thinking what an irony if they should escape and we be killed.

I hear Molly’s novel is taken; the Shoves have broken loose, and it is rumoured that you have bought the Egoist, and engaged Bob T. [Trevelyan] permanently as your poet.

Yr. V.W.

Quentin Bell

[]

907: To Margaret Llewelyn Davies

Tuesday [19 February 1918]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dearest Margaret,

It was a great delight to get your letter, though tantalising to be told that you would come and see me, when I couldn’t get the dr. to allow it. Of course I said you didn’t count—were hardly visible and spiritually insignificant—No good. And now I hear you’ve collapsed and gone off to an Inn where Leonard and I had tea one January afternoon, and saw a trout farm.

We are off to Asheham today. Its as cold as—what is the opposite of Hell? We had a very distant raid last night; the third running, so that we merely go to bed in the kitchen and wait till its over. Even the servants are getting used to it and play patience on a wooden box dressed in macintoshes, in the midst of the coal.

Its a great nuisance having to go away just as we were at last getting ahead with our printing. Our next effort will be a book of woodcuts by Carrington and fables by Lytton Strachey. That I’m sure you’ll like. I agree with you about Clive. Most people are mixed, but I’ve never seen anyone quite so jumbled as he is. One of the poems [in Ad Familiares] I thought really good—the last one. And now he writes to the Cambridge Review to say that he adores the ladies! I dont expect you make enough allowance for the complexity of the literary temperament, though. Social workers have their particular vanity—hah! you can’t contradict me! but then they huddle it up in a general cloud of benevolence to their kind.

I could go on upon this theme, but here’s L: to make me get ready.

We both send our love. Get well.

Yr. V.W.

Sussex

[]

908: To Vanessa Bell

Saturday [23 February 1918]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest,

Dont bother about the milk as we’ve now persuaded the Dairy at Southease to let us have a quart a day. I am shocked to think that it was only what you call your monthlies that prevented you from bicycling here and back with a can round your neck. I wish I could impress on you some of the remarks about influenza and the nervous system which I had to hear every day from [Dr] Fergusson. You certainly mustn’t come unless you can spend the night. I doubt whether Leonard is going to London; if he does it will be either Monday or Tuesday; but couldn’t you come any day next week, and spend the night, and then we could gossip together all the morning in my room?

I think we shall go back next Friday or Saturday. I would offer to come to you for a night, but I’m expecting my affairs; they’re already overdue, and I’ve had to promise to spend 2 days recumbent in future. You see, I’m rapidly becoming like poor Mrs Litchfield, whose doctor called every morning, but it isn’t altogether my fault. In fact I’ve been grumbling a good deal—I’m not allowed even to work yet, which is the pit of Hell as you’ll agree.

I had a mysterious letter from Fredegond yesterday; there is a wonderful piece of gossip abroad, she says, too risky to send in a letter. The only possible victim this time seems to me to be Norton; perhaps he’s engaged to Pernel Strachey; or there’s Ka; or perhaps Alix may have taken a turn—Do you know the facts? Gerald has been offered 2 jobs in London—and I hear from Karin that Adrian’s tribunal want him to go back to work on the land.

We had a very melancholy letter from Saxon. He says that the sight of married happiness is at present too much for him, and so he hadn’t been to see us, but he does not mean to go on being unhappy—poor old wretch.

However I mustn’t part with all my crumbs, or I shall never tempt my gilded dolphin to the surface.

You must teach Julian Greek. I find my chief consolation now in making out Greek plays, and even with what I know its quite worth while. Besides, it would be something to break his teeth against.

He wrote me a very charming letter. I think he has the Stephen gift of language (not that its much to boast of—) by the way I’ve been in communication with Mrs [Reginald] Smith about some of father’s manuscripts—I’m also in touch both with Gerald Duckworth and with Waller. These crumbs are artfully scattered on the rim of the deep lake, and I have already counted 3 bubbles which show that the spangled monster is meditating whether to rise—or not.

We hope Bunny will come over to any meal tomorrow. We’re well supplied with food. As Duncan knows—but I expect he wants to paint.

V.W.

Berg

[]

909: To Vanessa Bell

Monday [25 February 1918]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]]

Dearest,

It will be enchanting to see you on Thursday. We shall expect you for tea. I’m sorry we didn’t let you know about the milk before; I thought my letter would reach you on Sunday morning. Trissie [Vanessa’s cook] says you’ve kept some for us—which doesn’t mean, I hope, that you’ve stinted yourselves—so Leonard may come over tomorrow and fetch it.

We are going on Friday, I think, but we are seriously considering whether we shant come back here for good, or anyhow for the moons, as its so delicious. We might possibly bring our little press down. But we can certainly let you have the blankets. I forget how many you want. As long as you could send them back in case we came you could have all we’ve got.

I suppose the country can’t always be so nice—but at present it seems to me like a perpetual dance of the nymphs—which is exactly to my taste. But thats partly because of my sense of the presence behind the hill of the great mother of all the familiars—Didn’t we have one once called Quince? There was Pert and Wilson and Peter Wombat who went to earth at Ely of course; and poor Mango, who died, and a red-haired one; delightful creatures! Happily they’re all well and fairly randy at present, owing to the season of the year—but what can one expect?—

It seems to me that Comedy has never been quite so bold in her advances as when she planted you and your establishment down at Charleston. Think of the arrival of Fossdyke, or whatever his name is, tomorrow! Fate having touched his wits is such a fine conception too—but I must stop.

We can give you enough blankets for one bed to take back on Friday.

Yr B

Berg

[]

910: To Saxon Sydney-Turner

Feb. 25th [1918]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]]

Dearest Saxon,

Neither of us (I speak for myself at least) was ‘hurt’ by the silence between us, in the sense, that is, of thinking that it implied any change of affection; I’m afraid whatever you do or don’t do you’ll never shake my absolute trust in that; but a sense of your being possibly unhappy did hang about us and make us wish in spite of knowing that you did not know what we felt, to see you, or hear of you or have you in the room. I don’t think that being happy makes one want ones friends less—Is this partly selfish? Perhaps it is; but not all your craft shall persuade me that my feeling for you has more than a thread of vice in it; the rest is heavenly true.

Perhaps you dont realise that those are Shakespeare’s words. I’m thinking of reading Measure for Measure this afternoon, and I wish you could be here, and then we’d ramble on about all sorts of things. I daresay you share my feeling that Asheham is the best place in the world for reading Shakespeare. Asheham is very lovely at this moment. I started upon Sophocles the day after we came—the Electra, which has made me plan to read all Greek straight through. Why doesn’t one? why shouldn’t we combine? I suppose life’s too short or too merciless for such felicity—what with the trains going so early, and human nature being so imperfect: (this refers to myself, I need hardly say.) Still, the classics are very pleasant, and even, I must confess, the mortals. I found great consolation during the influenza in the works of Leonard Merrick, a poor unappreciated second rate pot-boiling writer of stories about the stage, whom I deduce to be a negro, mulatto or quadroon; at any rate he has a grudge against the world, and might have done much better if he hadn’t at the age of 20 married a chorus girl, had by her 15 coffee coloured brats and lived for the rest of the time in a villa in Brixton, where he ekes out his living by giving lessons in elocution to the natives—Now if this were about a Greek writer, it would be what is called constructive criticism, wouldn’t it? I’m not at all pleased with Jebb by the way, he never risks anything in his guesses: his sense of language seems to me stiff, safe, prosaic and utterly impossible for any Greek to understand. Now surely they launched out into flowering phrases not strictly related, much as Shakespeare did. Jebb splits them up into separate and uncongenial accuracies. But I’m too lazy to look up the particular one I mean: something about an old man’s hair. I can remember Jebb coming to dinner with us, and sitting at the far end of the room with Nessa and Thoby. I there and then saw and perhaps said that he had the soul and innumerable legs of a black beetle. I am appalled at the number of things I can remember. Meredith, Henry James; a great many others too, if I could think of their names; Lowell, Mrs Humphry Ward; Herbert Spencer, once; John Addington Symonds, and any number of Watts’, Burne Jones’ and Leightons.

Its so nice writing to you that I just run on, and it strikes me that this may seem to you not only foolish, which I don’t mind, but lacking in understanding, which I should mind—I’ve been sitting in the garden all the afternoon, reading Measure for Measure, looking at the trees, and thinking as much of you as of anything. I suppose it would be merely silly to try to say what one thinks of you—moreover I hope that by this time you know.

Nessa is coming over on Thursday for the night. The new tutor arrives [at Charleston] tomorrow. I gather that he is recovering from a nervous breakdown, which is supposed to give him a chance of suiting the general atmosphere. I think we come back either on Friday or Saturday—If you want to come, do; but if you don’t want to we shall take it for granted that you’ll say whenever you do.

Yrs. V.W.

Sussex

[]

911: To Vanessa Bell

Tuesday [26 February 1918]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]]

Dearest,

If you liked I could come back with you on Friday and spend the night, as Leonard has just heard that he must go back to London early on Friday morning. I could then help you to cart the blankets too. However, there’s no need to let me know until you come—The servants were just starting for Charleston—but they now find they can’t get Mrs Hammonds bicycle, so I must send this by post. You must tell me what you spent on the milk.

Yr B.

Berg

[]

912: To Katherine Cox

27th Feb. [1918]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest Ka,

I think it would have been the part of a good Bruin to write to me. Rumour has it that you’ve been decorated with an order of the British Empire, and that after having this attached by King George’s own hand, you ascend to a higher stool in an upper storey of a larger building in Whitehall. People are said to be jealous of you, and £500 a year is the least you earn. I’ve had to live on nothing but rumour the last fortnight, having spent 8 days in bed with influenza and come down here to recover. Thats another reason why you should have written. I believe though you’re in the country; I hope you may be. Its very much better than the Strand at this moment. We sat through three raids on three nights running; and seriously think of moving down here for the rest of the war. Its not the noise I mind, but the infernal boredom of kitchen conversation.

Since we’ve been here I’ve read perhaps 20 books and not exchanged a rational word with any human being (I dont count Leonard, or servants, or cat). I can’t say that I should mind the tap of a claw upon the drawing room window, followed by the soft bulk of the brute’s body. Nessa comes tomorrow having now acquired a male teacher called Fossdyke [Moss] to supplement Mrs Brereton. He is touched in the head, which is said to be no disqualification and may even make him feel more readily at home. Then there’s all poor Saxon’s sorrow to be discussed; are you one of those who implored Barbara at the last moment to hold? Nessa put the case against marriage very forcibly, I’m told, her letter arriving on the wedding morning, and she still predicts the worst—openly, to all three of them. I’ve no room to give my opinions; which are subtle, searching and comprehensive; but there’s not an atom of doubt but that poor old Saxon is as unhappy as he can be. Having said he didn’t mind of course makes it all the worse. I’m in perfect health again and we come back on Saturday, hoping one day soon to see our glorious and be-ribboned Bear.

Yrs V.W.

Mark Arnold-Forster

[]

913: To Vanessa Bell

March 8th [1918]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dearest,

I’ve just had this letter from Fergusson. I’m afraid it isn’t very helpful. How would it be, by the way, to try Lytton’s dr, Dr Brinton, who lives in Kensington and is said to be very good? I believe the Vaughans have a very good doctor; and also there was Dr Venning, [Dr Edward] Horts partner, who came to Adrian once, and attended Barbara Vaughan. But I’m afraid this is rather vague. I could find out more if you liked.

Life in London seems to me slightly tepid. We had a raid last night, though there’s no moon. It sounded as if something blew up, but there are only the wildest rumours about at present. It lasted about 2 hours and went round and round us—

Nick came and gave his lecture the other night, and seemed very much in love, very proud of the fact that Barbara made a conquest of an auctioneer in Gloucestershire; and I can’t see that he differs from any other newly married husband. I’ve talked with Saxon on the telephone, and couldn’t detect any signs of despair, but it was mostly details about health—you’ve heard, I suppose, that he’s setting up with Alix in Faiths house? I met her at the 17 Club, more sunk than ever; and I think a little suspicious that the world would laugh at two rejected lovers keeping house—Imagine how they’ll compare notes! Saxon was only afraid, she said, that he’d depress her, but I think the race is nearly equal; in fact, I’d back Alix. I did my best to be very liberal, low in tone, and dismal myself; I find its my good spirits that makes her and Fredegond so melancholy. Barbara and Nick are giving a party and were set upon having you—even Nick’s voice is now that of the true Charlestonian; reverent, awestruck, grateful for trifles—even a smart rap on the snout is better than nothing. Shall you go? My husband is a good deal against my going, and the trains make it rather hopeless of course. But his tone about Charleston is distinctly modified. He was very amiable about you when I came back. An invitation would completely convert him I believe—though he’s so odd in this mood that one can never tell.

I wish my life promised many mornings alone with you and Duncan. But I’m not a Charlestonian of course; my devotion is founded upon reason, and you both know what a solid diamond that is. Consider what it’ll be too when I’ve been Pelmanized.

Love to Moss and B. They are a perpetual delight to me.

Yr B.

Berg

[]

914: To Lytton Strachey

15th March [1918]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Couldn’t it be arranged that you should come to Asheham on Thursday 28th, stay over Monday and go on to Charleston? We have felt bound to ask Barbara who has been rejected by Vanessa, but she is half engaged to Tidmarsh [Lytton] apparently, and if Carrington exerted a little pressure I think she would yield.

I’ve been having faint doubts, by the way, about reviewing your book. In the first place, if I review yours, then why not Clive’s, Desmond’s, Molly’s and Fredegond’s, which would be more than I could stand. In the second, I was rather snubbed by Bruce Richmond the other day, who thought, wrongly, that I was trying to get a friend’s book reviewed, and told me it wasn’t considered the thing to do—so I don’t much like asking him. But these reasons aren’t serious if you think it would be a real advantage. My feeling is that no review counts either way as far as making money is concerned. But I supposed you’re certain of a long and flattering review anyhow. Mine would be highly flattering, of course. It’s quite possible, though, that he’ll send it me of his own accord.

I hope you got off safely today. We had an appalling Sunday—incessant chatter, or rather incessant gloom, and such spots on Saxon’s face, such morose stupidity on Gerald Duckworth’s—the only person with a spark of spunk was poor Nick, who pretended, I suppose. Katherine Mansfield has been dangerously ill, and is still pretty bad, so that [Middleton] Murry was sunk in the depths, what with that and overwork, poor wretch.

Yr. V.W.

With or without Barbara we hope you’ll come.

Frances Hooper

[]

915: To Vanessa Bell

Tuesday [19 March 1918]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dearest

Do you want to sell the Meredith letter to you on father’s death, which was printed? I didn’t put it up with the others, and now it strikes me you might think it better to sell it too—If so, would you let me have a line at once? I’m taking the Thackeray Ms. and the 1st edition of Modern Love [Meredith] and the letters to Sotheby today. L. wrote to them and they advise us to sell now, as they say that people are giving very high prices. In fact, I see that a Thackeray letter sold for £84 the other day.

I thought we might rake up a few more letters and books and send them later. But I’d better send your letter with the others I expect.

I shall ask their advice as to what reserve to put—also whether they think its any good selling father’s mss. wh. L. doubts.

I cant think what happened to our telephone—it was working all right this end. However I could hardly have come, as we’ve been working at a book of Cecil Woolf’s poems and only just got them done.

I was never told that the day of the party was changed, so we went to the opera, but I don’t suppose I should have gone anyhow. Lytton says that you and Fredegond were the success of the evening—incredibly brilliant—I wish I’d been there to see Dolphin balancing on her nose. We had an incredible visit from Gerald: also Saxon, Nick, Barbara and Murry—but I must tell you later—

I must rush off. We are hoping to get milk at Southease.

Yr B.

I’ll try to bring the clothes.

Berg

[]

916: To Vanessa Bell

Friday [22 March 1918]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

We now find it impossible to get any milk at all. We should be very grateful if you could help us. If your man could leave some at Glynde every other day we could go and fetch it—the more the better. It would be very kind of you if you would explain to Nelly any way of getting some; and could you be so angelic as to give her a drop (if you can spare any) to bring back. The man at Southease promised to let us have more this time, so we thought ourselves safe. He says its the lambs, however, and I’m afraid you may have run dry too.

I suppose our best way of meeting would be to walk to Firle and have a picnic there some afternoon, but I don’t know what your circumstances are.

Lytton is coming here next Thursday for Easter and wants to stay on if you cant have him, which he’s not certain of. As we have James [Strachey] and Noel [Olivier] coming the Tuesday after Easter, I rather hope you may be able to take him in—however, we can manage if you cant. Barbara may be coming, but I think there’s a chance she’ll go to Tidmarsh.

I got your letter in time and sent the Meredith letter with the rest. I saw Sotheby, who seemed to think highly of our chances with the Thackeray ms; he also advised us strongly to sell fathers’ mss. and said they were of distinct value, so I sent him the Hours in a Library and Playground of Europe ones. The sale won’t be till May, so I could send him some books when I go back. I sent Modern Love. He said that one couldn’t say what things are worth, as they never know what people will give.

Yr B.

Gunn has just been and says he can supply us [milk] at Glynde—but if you could let us have any today we shd. be very grateful. You must tell Nelly what it costs.

Berg

[]

917: To James Strachey

March 24th 1918

Asheham House, Rodmell, Lewes

Dear James,

I think you had better find out what the trains are in April. They haven’t changed so far. If you want a taxi to meet you at Lewes, you had better order one from

the County Garage
High St. Lewes,

if a fly, from

Slaughter,
Friars Walk,
Lewes.

I’m afraid you’ll have to bring whatever cards for meat, sugar, butter you possess as we are strictly rationed here. Also could you let me know whether you’ll be staying on after Thursday or Friday, so that I can arrange with a woman to do for you? Our present female believes, on what authority I don’t know, that she is going to have a baby, but there is another I could get, if you’d tell me.

It is more than usually divine here.

Your V.W.

Strachey Trust

[]

918: To Lytton Strachey

Sunday [24 March 1918]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

We look forward with great pleasure to seeing you on Thursday: any time. As far as I know the trains are unchanged, we came by a very good one, 5.20 from Victoria, which connects almost exactly with another to Glynde, so that you get here for dinner. If you want to drive, you can order a fly from

Slaughter,
Friar’s Walk,
Lewes

or a taxi from

County Garage,
High St,
Lewes

Perhaps you wouldn’t mind handing this on to Barbara who seems to be staying with you. Our only difficulty is that we are strictly rationed—thus, I think if you want meat, sugar or butter you must bring your cards. According to Leonard, it is easy to make these available at Lewes. The question of food is the only drawback to your staying on, which we should like you to do. With Noel and James in the house you might find yourself starved—But by the time you come we may have made better arrangements.

It’s all very well to come to the country in order to write, but the animals are carrying on so frantically and indecently that I can’t hear myself speak. Lambs, thrushes, ewes, rooks—their conduct too is distracting. I find that scarcely anything but impassioned meditation stands up against it, and the passion tends to run much in a groove. D’you find that too? It’s true, [J.S.] Mill on Liberty mayn’t be the proper channel. But what divine days life holds, to be sure. Duncan has just been in, in corduroy breeches and gaiters, mumbling in his inspired way, like the first born of the human race, not yet entirely conscious.

Do bring some manuscript to read.

Yrs. V.W.

Frances Hooper

[]

919: To James Strachey

March 27th [1918]

Asheham House, Rodmell, Lewes

Dear James,

There need be no difficulty about the cards—anyhow in your case—All you have to do is to get your cook at Belsize [Park] to get you a week’s rations of butter, sugar and meat which you pack in your bag and bring with you. The alternative is to get the meat from our butcher in Lewes, but to do this you’d have to go to the Food Control Office, West St, Lewes, and get yourself transferred for a week—which is perfectly easy to do, and then we’d pay for your meat with ours, which justice requires. Our Butcher is Marsh in the High St. But I believe you’d find it simpler to get your rations from your usual source and bring them. You cant get either butter or sugar in Lewes, so my cook says, so those anyhow you had better bring. We can supply all the other things, save meat, but don’t fling out of your house in a temper if you find our diet dull. I’ll write to Noel [Olivier] and try to explain some scheme for her—though I dont see why a dr. differs from the rest—It will be quite easy for you to stay on till Monday 8th—grave doubt is now cast upon the pregnancy [of the daily woman]—in fact her health is better than ever—Noel might examine into the matter.

I suppose nothing would induce you to bring a few Rupert [Brooke] letters?

Yrs V.W.

I’ve now read your letter properly and see you say teatime.

Strachey Trust

[]

920: To Vanessa Bell

Wednesday [27 March 1918]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest,

Its odd we didn’t meet yesterday. I was in Lewes too. I went from Glynde. It would, I needn’t say, be enchanting to see you, but I really dont think its worth your coming all that way—and the weather seems broken too—only for tea. Couldn’t you come for lunch and go back after tea or dinner? We have a bed free in spite of Lytton and Barbara, and the best thing of all would be for you to stay the night—Surely Mrs B[rereton]: can run the house? Otherwise I was going to have suggested first that I should come for the night—which, I leave to you; second, that we should have a picnic at Firle on Sunday if fine. Barbara stays till Tuesday, and wd. of course grasp at any chance of the Charleston heights. I hope to God Nick isn’t already killed.

I’ve told all my visitors that they must either bring meat, sugar and butter, or their cards. James says this is very difficult, but I dont see why. One can get an emergency card at Lewes quite easily. Lytton hasn’t got any cards I believe, but I’m hoping he’ll bring his own supplies. I told him he must, and if you like I’ll explain that you’re rationed just as we are. They could get what they liked at Tidmarsh.

It’ll suit us quite well if you have him on Wednesday. Noel and James come on Tuesday and stay on after we go. My affairs were too damnable on Sunday; they’ve taken to being punctual to the hour, and invariably upset something I particularly want to do.

Yr. B.

We shall be in both Thursday and Friday, but do consider staying the night, if not lunch. I hear that Adrian’s got off [military service]. Lytton and Bar [bara]. come tomorrow. We made Nelly believe that the aeroplanes were German.

Berg

[]

921: To Vanessa Bell

[9? April 1918]

[Hogarth House, Richmond]

Dearest,

Nelly has just heard that her niece has taken a permanent place, thinking that you only wanted her temporarily. What a nuisance—But there is a chance that Liz, the other sister may know of some one. Nelly has written to ask her. Shall I take any steps? I could go to registry offices easily.

I saw Barbara on Sunday, who had heard from Nick. He seems to be out of immediate danger.

Great haste,

B.

Berg

[]

922: To Nicholas Bagenal

April 15th 1918

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond

Dear Nick,

I was immensely pleased to get your letter this morning, and to see that you are really much the same as ever. I’m told that a kidney more or less is a matter of no importance. And now you’ll be back in the midst of us all again, but you’ll never hear to your face all the fine flattering things your friends have been saying about you. The other day for example at the 17 Club there was Goldie [G. Lowes Dickinson], Leonard and myself—Well, I wont repeat what might still make you blush and possibly raise your temperature. The upshot of it was that you’re proposed by Leonard (who’s going to write to you) and seconded by Goldie, and its generally felt by the Club that you’re badly wanted there. We must arrange a tea party.

We went and had tea with Barbara, and found her curled up asleep in an arm chair. One of her eyes remained shut for quite a long time. She had had your letter the night before and was feeling fairly elated. Saxon had just washed his head in an inner room, and was stepping about among the crockery in a brown vest like a Siamese cat. We had a splendid tea—two kinds of cake and a loaf specially baked by the char womans husband. We laughed a great deal at Barbara for missing all the trains to Asheham. It proves beyond doubt that her next visit must be made in company with her husband.

Since beginning this letter I’ve spent a night at Guildford with Roger, and read his translation of the Lysistrata, and talked about every kind of thing, and finally this morning I went to Gordon Sqre with him, and there we met Nessa and Maynard and Shepherd. Nessa left the room and reappeared with a small parcel about the size of a large slab of chocolate. On one side are painted 6 apples by Cezanne. Roger very nearly lost his senses. I’ve never seen such a sight of intoxication He was like a bee on a sunflower. Imagine snow falling outside, a wind like there is in the Tube, an atmosphere of yellow grains of dust, and us all gloating upon these apples. They really are very superb. The longer one looks the larger and heavier and greener and redder they become. The artists amused me very much, discussing whether he’d used veridian or emerald green, and Roger knowing the day, practically the hour, they were done by some brush mark in the background.

I cant say much for the beauty of Richmond at this moment. We’re so busy printing that we hardly notice. And Leonard has Americans to lunch who begin at once “We place you, Mr Woolf, at the very top of the men who are doing the constructive thinking of our time—at the very top.” After 2½ hours of this, they tear themselves away saying “Well well, we’re due at Mr Balfour’s now, but we’ve only scratched your surface so far, Mr Woolf—and we have to thank you, Mrs Woolf, for showing us the interior of an English home.”

They’re on their way to the front; but you wont meet them—

Then a compatriot of yours, called James Joyce, wants us to print his new novel. I should hesitate to put it into the hand of Barbara, even though she is a married woman. The directness of the language, and the choice of incidents, if there is any choice, but as far as I can see there’s a certain sameness—have raised a blush even upon such a cheek as mine. Is this an Irish quality?

Well, I must immediately wash, for I’m all over printers ink, and the Mothers [Co-operative Guild] arrive in 20 minutes. I hardly like to have Joyce even in the next room to them.

There’ll be great competition to come and see you in the hospital, and Leonard and I take up a position which is firm, obstinate, and patient. We want to see you very much.

Yr
Virginia Woolf

Berg

[]

923: To Vanessa Bell

Monday [22 April 1918]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dearest,

I’m very glad the operation is over. It sounds rather horrid. I daresay you’d be surprised to know how often I thought of you and the Brats on Saturday.

The whole of the Stores would only produce one box of chocolates; its a most desolate sight. I hope Julian may be sufficiently well to eat them. I’m also sending [Enid] Bagnold and Nevinson, though it strikes me that even you can’t be hard up for books at Durbins.

I wish I had any gossip to tell you. I’ve just come in from tea at the [1917] Club, where I talked to Ermengard Maitland. She is a stout handsome woman of about thirty, motherly and yet virginal, to me rather a consoling type, after our cropheads and their dauntless ways. She keeps a farm, and breeds prize oxen, which she says is far the most interesting of country pursuits. You never know what sort of calf you’re going to get, and you go round the markets and try to judge the best sire to mate with your cow.

“Well then, what do you do in the evenings?” I said.

“I play the double bass. It is an enormous instrument, the largest of all, and it plays an octave below the cello, so that its the foundation of the whole orchestra—I also write children’s stories—improper ones.”

“But, my dear Ermengard, you’ve just become a Quaker—

“Well, I know that. But I told them I meant to write improper stories—and they’re not improper in your sense.” However she wouldn’t tell me in what sense they were improper. I think it rather a masterly conception, to breed bulls and write improper stories and be a Quaker.

The Shoves are off tomorrow to try and get work on a farm in Hertfordshire.

But I can’t describe to you what an agony this afternoon was to me. You know the horror of buying clothes, especially for one forced as I am to keep my underclothes pinned together by brooches. However things have come to a pass; so I flung myself into a shop in Holborn. I should certainly always paint shops with lots of looking glasses and boxes bursting with white frills, and all the young ladies powdered and painted, and their hair scraped tight back, and one enormous Jewess in black satin issuing solemnly from a wardrobe. The impropriety seemed to me beyond anything we know. So it went on: I tried shop after shop; and then in a perfectly random way went and bought a wine-coloured black striped coat or dress, for £6.10! in Leicester Sqre. Good Heavens! What a world we live in! The pressure of solid matter never seems sufficient to keep one altogether straight.

I’ve been writing about you all the morning, and have made you wear a blue dress; you’ve got to be immensely mysterious and romantic, which of course you are; yes, but its the combination that’s so enthralling; to crack through the paving stone and be enveloped in the mist. You must admit that that puts the matter in a nutshell. However I must stop, though I believe I like writing to you better than seeing you—I mean, when we meet at Gordon Sqre, the lyric mood has to be suppressed. But have you got a servant? Nelly says Drewet in the High St is very good indeed. And Aunt Minna has suddenly emerged, asking us to lunch, and wishing particularly for news of Vanessa, and is she in London? She asks us to meet “the Orchardleigh Children” Who on earth can they be? The days of childbearing for Edith and Amy must be over, and without result, so I’ve always thought.

Please send me another line about the children. If a word of love for the Apes were thrown in—They were enraptured the other day to find themselves one rung higher on the ladder than Roger. You did say so; you cant deny it. Dont get overtired.

Yr B.

I’ve just had Sotheby’s Catalogue. They want to know what reserve to put, if any. I’m telling them to put a reserve of £100 on the Vanity Fair. Do you agree? but none on the Meredith mss.

Berg

[]

924: To Lytton Strachey

23rd April [1918]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

I wrote to ask [Bruce] Richmond to let me do your book. He answers that though willing and anxious that I should, he has to make it a rule that reviewers don’t review their friends—not that he’s afraid I should be partial, but that people would guess, and say I was partial, which he admits to be base on his part, but he’s afraid he must stick to it. I’m very sorry. Of course you will get enough praise to sell your book as much as reviews do sell books. I rubbed it well into Richmond that it was a work of surpassing merit. But I had a great many things I wanted to say, and felt already an affection for my masterpiece, as well as yours. Leonard suggests that I should write a short review for War and Peace. But I shouldn’t be able to take a purely literary line there, of course, and the circulation isn’t such that it will be worth the sale of even half a copy. Do you think there’s any use doing it? Anyhow you needn’t bother about getting an advance copy. But I’m very anxious to see it.

We are sitting in the same fog that began 21 days ago. Sometimes we dimly discern snow falling—we have electric light for meals, but they talk of cutting that off. I was at Guildford the other day and there it was worse, so don’t talk to me about the country.

We’ve been asked to print Mr Joyce’s new novel, every printer in London and most in the provinces having refused. First there’s a dog that p’s—then there’s a man that forths, and one can be monotonous even on that subject—moreover, I don’t believe that his method, which is highly developed, means much more than cutting out the explanations and putting in the thoughts between dashes. So I don’t think we shall do it.

By the way, you’ve got my copy of the other one.

Yr. V.W.

Frances Hooper

[]

925: To Roger Fry

Wednesday [24 April 1918]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

My dear Roger,

I haven’t forgotten the cigarettes. In fact I went directly I got back, but owing to the approach of the Budget the man hadn’t got them. He will have them in a day or two and I will send them at once.

It sounds as if you had all had a horrid time with these operations [Julian’s, Quentin’s and Pamela’s]. Give Pamela my love, and tell her she has roused my ancient passion for books, and I’ve been wasting hours, and finally bought the Poems of Collins for 6d—a most charming little book, as nice as hers, but 5d dearer.

I enclose Murry’s review of Et Cie. It isn’t a very good one—at least I think there was more to be said. The book diminishes in goodness rather as it goes on, I think, and gets rather clogged and costive. The truth is these Jews have such terrifically clear sight, and never know what to leave out and ram it all in with such emphasis. Still, he’s far better than anyone we have, unless everything sounds better in French, as I rather think it does.

I’ve been reading Joyce’s novel. Its interesting as an experiment; he leaves out the narrative, and tries to give the thoughts, but I dont know that he’s got anything very interesting to say, and after all the p - ing of a dog isn’t very different from the p - ing of a man. Three hundred pages of it might be boring. Anyhow its too long for us to attempt, though I think someone ought to bring out a piece of it.

I wish I had the chance of being thoroughly enkindled by you rather oftener. I suppose you dont know your own powers in that line, which I hesitate to call divine, but still the amount of spirit that radiates from you may, for all I know, come straight from a holy source. It may be a variety of Quakerism. In fact I rather expect it is. Anyhow it gives me great pleasure, so don’t get blown up or trodden underfoot, or made someone so important that it will be necessary to take you seriously

Have you been invited to the opening of [William] Rothenstein’s show?

Yrs. V.W.

Sussex

[]

926: To Vanessa Bell

Sunday [28 April 1918]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dearest,

I’m afraid Liz [Nelly Boxall’s sister] is no good. She heard of a woman, but she didn’t want to be so far from home. Shan’t I go and see Mrs Hunt, or try some other registry office—I know there’s supposed to be a good one in Chelsea. I forget what wages you give. It would be perfectly easy for me to go, as I’m always rambling about London—and my well known talents might find you a woman who would die in your service, not directly, I mean, but after some 40 years service. You would then put a notice about her in the Times.

I see that you are very prominent in the Nation this week. I suppose £100 isn’t asking too much?—or does it work out at that? I saw some private school asked that, and I suppose ordinary people might think they gave more for the money there.

We are expecting Desmond for the night, and he assures me that he is going to tell me a great deal of news, so I hope I may have some for you. I went to the Hippodrome the other night by myself; we had a visit from Walter Lamb; all our guns went off in the middle of Friday night and we had just got the beds made in the kitchen when the bugles sounded and there wasn’t any raid. The Academicians are trying to get rid of Poynter, and wrote him a letter to say the work was too much for him, but he says it isn’t. They mean to elect Sargent. Owing to Wattie’s [Walter Lamb] influence the R. A will be smaller than usual this year. There is nothing of startling merit. Eighteen pictures from the Diploma Gallery have been put in one of the Tubes (for safety). Lord Canterbury is a nephew of the Duke of Rutland. He is a bugger. I can’t think of anything else, except that the Whithams have asked us to stay with them in Devonshire, and Jan finds agricultural work very good for his writing. On second thoughts, I put a reserve of £70. on the Thackeray, as I thought we should take that on the whole. I hope you agree.

Yr. B.

Let me know about the servant. How many do you say there are in the house?

Berg

[]

927: To Desmond MacCarthy

[early May 1918]

[Hogarth House, Richmond]

My dear Desmond,

This card arrived for you this morning. I send it on, though I see its no good, discreetly enclosed in an envelope.

I suppose you can’t leave your mother, as you haven’t rung up—I’m very sorry chiefly for my own disappointment, I admit. About the Princes [Bibesco] luncheon (how romantic that sounds) I don’t know whether it was a real invitation for Thursday, or only a hint of possibilities. Anyhow, I don’t think I can mange this Thursday but I have hopes that he may ask me, if he did ask me, for another.

Did you like the Times review? It wasn’t half as good as mine.

Yr affate
V.W.

Mrs Michael MacCarthy

[]

928: To Vanessa Bell

[4 May 1918]

[Hogarth House, Richmond]

Dearest,

I went to the Registry Office yesterday and heard of a servant [Ellen Walker] who wants to be in the country and is free on the 15th May. She wants from £26 to 28. She is 26 years old. She is leaving because her mistress is giving up the house. She has a very good character, and the woman at the registry knows her and says she is very nice and quiet. I am going to see her on Wednesday. Do you give me a free hand to take her if she seems all right? Shall I offer £28 if she seems wavering? Mrs Lucas, (the registry woman—a friend of Aunt Annies and most refined) said that owing to the size of the family she might want more—Do you want her on the 15th? Shall I advance her her fare?

Mrs Lucas has a perfect parlourmaid wanting to be near Lewes!—but thats no good of course.

Could you let me know before Wednesday.

Yr. B.

Berg

[]

929: To Vanessa Bell

Tuesday [7 May 1918]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dearest,

I heard from the woman this morning who says she could not take a situation where there is such a large family. I suppose it would have been better not to tell her what the family was until I saw her.

I’ve written to say that the place is really an easy one, and that you do your waiting yourselves and so on, and I’ve asked her to meet me at the Registry Office on Wednesday at 3.30. I shall go there anyhow, because Mrs Lucas told me that now is the best time for getting servants, and that she has never had so many wanting country places as this year, though of course they get snapped up at once.

I dont much think Ellen Walker will think it worth her while to come, so that if I were you I shouldn’t bother about coming all that way. The address is 222A Kings Road, about 10 minutes from Sloane Sqre Station.

It might be a good thing for you to see Mrs Lucas yourself however.

If you do come I could meet you at 3.20 at Sloane Sqre Station, as the office is rather difficult to find.

Would you ring up tomorrow morning and say what you want to do.

I could come on to tea anyhow.

Nelly is going home for Whitsun, and holds out hope that she might find someone among her friends.

We are coming to Asheham for 10 days or so.

Yr B.

Berg

[]

930: To Nicholas Bagenal

[12 May 1918]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond

Dear Nick,

We met Barbara at the Club the other day, and asked whether we might pay you a visit. We should very much like to.

Would next Tuesday about 4 suit you? I don’t think you will have time to let us know, so we will come then. If it won’t do, I have written our telephone number, and perhaps some one could ring us up.

A vote of sympathy, congratulation and anticipation of further favours was passed by my Mothers [the Guild]. I said I would hand it on. A great deal of emotion was displayed; you are called “The Lieutenant;”—we are having an address on Sex Education next week, and you’ll be surprised to hear that after thinking over the paper on Syphilis for six months or so, they have come to the conclusion that it is all true and “most valuable.” So although it takes some time, one need never give up hope of something or other. I expect they still brood upon what you said.

I’ve been submerged in the waters of family life. I’ve had to go to tea with Aunts of 92; to dinner with cousins who retired from the Calcutta bench 10 years ago; and only by the skin of my teeth did I avoid lunching with a Roumanian Prince [Antoine Bibesco] whose mistress has written a book, which I did not review; but all the same they cherish hopes that we may print her play. At least, this is the only reason I can see for a grand party with Lady Cunard, Mr. Birrell, the Prince, and a wretched, illdressed, inkstained Suburban such as I am.

Of course in my own mind I don’t think them worth a damn;—still flattery is flattery.

I see that none of us is really proof against that libidinous Ape Mrs [Margot] Asquith, if she chooses to reach a paw for us. The only hope for the preservation of our society is that people like you and Barbara, still comparatively young and uncontaminated, should make an enclosed space of virtuous life where we can be out of temptation. Saxon shall be the guardian. Nothing could corrupt Saxon. Imagine his bright sword descending upon Lady Diana Manners, and leaving nothing but a corpulent trunk! I can see him wiping the blade upon silk and coming in to tea as calm as a seraph.

But this is for you to develop. I am running on because I am waiting for my tea, and Leonard won’t come in. The church bells and the trumpets are fairly distracting.

Have you seen Clives book [Pot-Boilers]? If not, please dont believe that Virginia Woolf wishes to be called next to Hardy and Conrad, the best living novelist; or that Duncan thinks himself the greatest European painter, or that Vanessa is—I forget what—equal to Duncan perhaps.

Here is Leonard.

Yours
Virginia Woolf

Berg

[]

931: To Vanessa Bell

Wednesday [15 May 1918]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dearest,

I’ve just been to the Registry Office without success, I’m afraid.

She has a Cook who wants to be near Lewes, and is very good—but I suppose thats useless. However, she said this was the worst week for them to come in, owing to Whitsun, and she expects more next week. I said she was to write to you if she heard of anyone, and I would let her know—or it would be simpler if you wrote straight, Mrs Lucas, 222A Kings Rd Chelsea—to say if you want her to get a temporary, which she thinks she could do without much difficulty.

Perhaps it would be worth waiting to see if Nelly can get anyone.

We come down tomorrow. I hope we may meet.

Yr B.

Berg

[]

932: To Duncan Grant

Wednesday [15 May 1918]

[Hogarth House, Richmond]

My dear Duncan,

I wonder whether Nessa when she got back gave any account of a vow she made in Fitzroy Square, which was sealed with a sisters kiss. She promised to drink 2 glasses of milk a day, until the end of the war. I think she made it a condition that you did too. I feel convinced its the only way in which either of you will pull through without some temporary absence, in one of those secluded houses where I’m such a brilliant success.

Now, my dear Duncan, I appeal to you to carry this out, with immense confidence in your fund of masterly common sense. Milk is at your door; it is cheap; it is the only pure food left; there is nothing but a queer superstition in Nessa’s mind, derived I believe, from Aunt [Mary] Fisher, against drinking it. You haven’t this in your blood; I entreat you therefore drink milk twice a day, and each time think of me with tenderness. Its remarkable to see how all our friends are shedding their flesh until in some cases only an arrangement of bones, loosely covered with skin, and I suppose, an intestine or two, remain. I’ve just been seeing Fredegond, Aunt Minna, and Sir Harry Stephen. Aunt Minna is shrunk to a small wizened brown kernel, and as she still wears her black velvet dress, you can almost see her shaking from side to side. I’m full of gossip for you. Sir Harry told us the life history of Great Uncle William, who was, in the 18th Century the illegitimate son of the first James Stephen [c.1733-79]. “I shall call the lady whom he seduced Lucy Waters, thought that was not her name,” he said. This chivalry, considering she died 150 years ago struck me very much. He is an amiable old creature, and I believe secretly wishes to live apart from Barbara [his wife] and become a pacifist, and our greatest friend—but I must own he did’nt say so.

I had a very cool reception from Sophie. She was knitting bed socks, and I think she has turned entirely Duckworth, and might indeed be their illegitimate sister. I’ve always thought them likely to cohabit with stout kitchen maids. Aunt Minna said she heard that Clive was doing good work in Paris, and an irreproachable black female today asked me whether, as a reviewer, I considered that the Morning Post was fair to novels of the occult. She had just written one; but a gentleman friend, who also writes novels of the occult, had told her that the Morning Post disliked the occult “which makes it rather hard on us, as all our friends go by the Morning Post of course”—

I have seen Nick who lies on a terrace looking at the river and watching an old gentleman, whom Carrington says is Pissarro, painting on a pier. Nick was apparently nearly well, and only slightly irritable. Saxon I hear moans aloud and says that he envies Bertie in prison because life outside is so unendurable. All Nessa’s predictions are coming true.

I had a romantic moonlight walk with Desmond in Richmond Park. The Bibesco [-Bagnold] mystery is still unsolved, but Desmond was at some pains to explain that his relations with Molly are of the very best, and he considers her far more intellectual than most women who pass for such—Bonham Carter for instance.

I had a most satisfactory and fascinating renewal of my friendship with Katherine Mansfield. She is extremely ill, but is going to Cornwall with Estelle Rhys [Rice], a woman painter, whom I’m sure is the worst of woman painters. But all the same Katherine is the very best of women writers—always of course passing over one fine but very modest example.

Please see about the milk. I am bringing you 2 small packets of chocolate, which are best eaten with milk.

Yrs., V.W.

Duncan Grant

[]

Letters 933-987 (mid-May-mid-November 1918)

933: To Miss Harriet Weaver

17 May 1918

Typewritten

Asheham House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Miss Weaver,

Thank you very much for your letter. We are down in the country for a fortnight, so I am afraid that I cannot come and see you as I should have liked to have done.

We have read the chapters of Mr Joyce’s novel [Ulysses] with great interest, and we wish that we could offer to print it. But the length is an insuperable difficulty to us at present. We can get no one to help us, and at our rate of progress a book of 300 pages would take at least two years to produce—which is, of course, out of the question for you or Mr Joyce.

We very much regret this as it is our aim to produce writing of merit which the ordinary publisher refuses. Our equipment is so small, however, that we are finding it difficult to bring out a book of less [more] than 100 pages. We have tried to buy a larger press but without success, and therefore we are afraid that it is useless to attempt anything more ambitious. I have told my servants to send the MS back to you, by registered post next Tuesday or Wednesday.

With many thanks for letting us see the manuscript,

Yours sincerely,
Virginia Woolf

British Museum

[]

934: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

May 24th [1918]

Asheham House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

My dear Ottoline

We should very much like to come down, but might it be one week end in July?

June seems already rather crowded, partly because we have to finish and send out Katherine Mansfields story.

But that must be finished in a few weeks now.

We are down here, and have been arguing for the last 24 hours with Roger on every possible subject without ceasing. He hadnt been 10 minutes in the house before he began to discuss the immortality of the soul, in spite of having had a tooth out a few hours before. We are now moping over a fire, all traces of summer having disappeared.

I will send you a packet of my Belgian cigarettes. The address is on the cover. I think they’re still nicer than any others, though they vary in goodness. But they only cost 11d for 20.

It would be very nice to see not only Garsington but you too. But can it possibly be more romantic than it was in the autumn?

Do you mind being looked upon rather as a mermaid in a divine aquarium?

But perhaps the image must be changed for another.

I saw Katherine Middleton Murry the other day—very ill, I thought, but very inscrutable and fascinating. After a good deal of worrying by me, she confessed that she was immensely happy married to Murry, though for some reason she makes out that marriage is of no more importance than engaging a charwoman. Part of her fascination lies in the obligation she is under to say absurd things. I wish she and Murry didn’t think [J. D.] Ferguson a great artist. He has done a design for her story which makes our gorges rise, to such an extent that we can hardly bring ourselves to print it.

We hope you will let us come some time in July.

Yours affate
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

935: To Lytton Strachey

24 May, 1918

[Leonard’s contribution typewritten]

Asheham House [Rodmell, Sussex]

I think your suggestion of “Patriotism and History” on Marriott’s book sounds very good. I will write for the book and have it sent to you. I haven’t altered your article on Peace Traps, as [A. J.] Balfour’s speech was really negligible and the point seemed rather niggling.

We’ve been here a week in almost perfect weather and what is almost more perfect solitude. Except for Roger who came last night and left this morning. Why is it that we are all valetudinarians? Roger lies on his back before and after meals and even so is afflicted with perpetual gripes, a swollen jaw, a diseased tooth, an incipient cold in the head, a decaying brain, and melancholia amatoria. Saxon’s head has sunk permanently upon his chest from rheumatoid arthritis. And even you suffer from green vomit. I am unfit for any kind of military service and Virginia’s record is not of the cleanest. I don’t understand this early valetudinarianism which seems to descend upon us.

V. wants me to thank you for your book [Eminent Victorians]. It seemed to me most imposing when one could read them all between the same black cover. I started on Arnold the evening it came, and could not stop reading it while V.’s co-operative women sang hymns in the dining room.

Leonard

The sun has completely dried the ink on my pen, or I would have written. And then L., by way of being a practical man went and packed for me, and left out your book, which I meant to read here. So I can’t write that delightful letter which I’d meant to. Besides to tell the truth, rumours of your success have poisoned my peace even here. Do write and tell me how complete it’s been—how many copies you’ve sold, how many guineas, how many Countesses, how many adorations and whether at heart you’re still the same.

V.W.

Frances Hooper

[]

936: To Vanessa Bell

[30? May 1918]

1917 Club, 4 Gerrard Street, W.1.

Dearest,

I have just bought you a present which may be slightly better than Rebecca West—at anyrate the subject is more in your line. However, I’m writing chiefly to avoid joining in the general conversation with Nick and Alix. Nick seems to be going to Hampshire—not Eastbourne. I had a typical letter from Saxon saying that Barbara had an instinct that I was annoyed with them, and as Barbara’s instincts are always right, he must apologise, and so on—

Let me know when Duncans and Bunny’s plans are settled. When Leonard asked me the question which Lytton may ask I said I was completely ignorant, and quite convinced him, so I think it’ll be perfectly safe. Nelly remarked today that she thought being a nurse was as nice as being a cook. And she told me she liked taking a baby from the month [old], and had managed 3. However, do be discreet. They would never forgive me if Trissie heard anything.

Do take care.

Yr B.

Berg

[]

937: To Vanessa Bell

[early June? 1918]

[Hogarth House, Richmond]

Dearest,

I have been to a new agency and have heard of two quite likely house-parlourmaids who want to be in the country (permanent). The man says that he thinks he can be fairly certain of suiting you before July 1st. Shall I do the whole business? He has also a housemaid and a houseparlourmaid, but I suppose you only want the one.

I shall probably see her tomorrow or the day after, I am writing in a p. o to catch post.

Mrs Lucas and Mrs Hunt were pretty hopeless—Write any directions at once.

Yr B

If its necessary to take her tomorrow I shall risk it—but I dont suppose it will be.

Berg

[]

938: To Clive Bell

Thursday [6 June 1918]

Hogarth [House], Richmond

My dear Clive,

I wish I could dine with you on Monday, but unfortunately I have let myself in for I don’t know how many engagements. Is it possible that I might be asked on another occasion? It would be great fun.

I had a long moonlit walk with Desmond the other night through the grove in which Miss Hickman’s body was found, but he was brimming with good will—in fact quite tipsy—and said not a word against you.

I’ve not seen or heard from Molly for ages. It seems an unreasonable accusation on her part, considering that the gossip came from so many sources.

I take it for granted that you would prefer K. M. [Katherine Mansfield] without the bold black woodcuts of Mr [J. D.] Fergusson. We are printing some plain.

Yrs ever,
Virginia Woolf

Quentin Bell

[]

939: To Molly Maccarthy

June 7th [1918]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond

Dearest Molly,

Dont you think its time that you remembered my existence? Am I to be for ever shouting out in tubes “Dont you think me the nicest person you ever saw?” Isn’t it time that you wrote, off your own bat, and said so?

I came in contact with Miss [Helen] Dudley one day at the Club, and she said you were off for the rest of the summer. But what are you doing? How dare you wash your hands of us all in this perfectly irresponsible way? Dont you want us? I believe the truth is that you dont. There is an element of bluntness about you which has to be reckoned with. The vague softness is only half an inch deep, and beneath is rock or marble. Please go in to the matter fully when you answer this letter. It is being written, I may say, in the greatest difficulties, for I’m keeping up a lively discussion with Leonard about life in general. Is he happy? Are we successful? Do people like us? What shall we do when the war’s over?

I saw a great many people yesterday, and I heard that Jos Wedgwood is marrying a deaf governess, and Lytton’s book is going into a 2nd edition, and Katherine Mansfield has married Middleton Murry, and Maynard Keynes has refused to argue about the war and Barbara Bagenal is going to have a baby! They feel very strongly about Maynard; they say he must be talked to. Our standard of honesty is frightfully high—high, but peculiar. (I add this thinking of some incidents in my own past)

We are going to stay with the Waterlows next Sunday. And then we are going to stay with Ottoline, and then, thank God, about August we shall withdraw to Asheham.

I am now going to read Rebecca West’s new novel. Please spend 1½d on me, as I do on you, and let me find a letter, an enormous long letter, to read at breakfast. Next time I will tell you all about the books I am reading. But I must first feel in touch with you—I mean, do you really like me, Molly?

Yr. V.W.

L sends his love—

Mrs Michael MacCarthy

[]

940: To Vanessa Bell

Monday [10 June 1918]

[Hogarth House, Richmond]

Dearest,

I didn’t speak to Nelly at once, as Leonard was rather doubtful about it—However, I’ve just spoken to her, and suggested that she and Lottie should go to you on the 1st July and stay till October.

They were on the point of offering to go themselves, and are very much excited and pleased, so I dont think there’ll be any difficulty about that. I told her you were going to have a baby; I didnt say anything about staying on and becoming your nurse, as Leonard is doubtful of the experiment from our point of view, and thinks that we should at any rate see how it answers temporarily before we give them up entirely.

Would you therefore agree to say nothing to them or to anyone else about staying on permanently and treat it as a purely temporary arrangement?

We should know how it worked from our point of view by July and we could discuss it when we come down in August. But until we are more decided we think it most important not to unsettle them by suggesting something which we may never seriously think of doing.

Nelly seems quite ready to do house work or cook or anything, or run the whole house. Perhaps you’d better write to her.

We made £68 by the sale, but I don’t know whether we sold the Thackeray or not. I hope not. If so, its pretty bad—

This is written in haste.

Yr. V.W.

We also think we ought to make it understood that we can have them back in case of illness or emergency—You’d better burn this.

Berg

[]

941: To Violet Dickinson

10th June [1918]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond

My Violet,

It was very noble of you to buy two copies of Katherine Mansfield’s book. I hope you’ll like it—and I think you will. She is a woman from New Zealand, with a passion for writing, and she’s had every sort of experience, wandering about with traveling circuses over the moors of Scotland, and has kept herself by writing stories in the New Age; but this is much the best thing she’s yet done.

We’ve been at Asheham, and come back again. I saw Nessa while I was there, in the midst of a whole colony of hares, rabbits, chickens and pigs. She has also a tutor and a governess, 2 children besides her own as boarders, and two others as day boys. She runs it all with small girls from the village to help and a cook who calls everyone by their Christian names—in fact I never saw such a jumble.

Leonard is working tremendously hard, and he spends all his spare time printing, which becomes more and more fascinating. We are just bargaining for a new press, which we shall put in the basement. We both think its high time you came and saw us, but I suppose we probably shan’t meet till the course of nature has opened either your grave or mine. But you will bring a small bunch of flowers to drop upon the coffin; won’t you? I went to see Aunt Minna the other day; and her grave still seems fairly far off. In fact she’s just taken on her house for another 5 years.

Yr Sp:

Leonard sends his love.

Berg

[]

942: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

10th June [1918]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond

My dear Ottoline

We’re back here more or less until August, and so if you’re in London we might manage to meet. The reasons against asking you here are that I dont like my chair covers, (I lost my head one day at the Omega) and the sordidity of our life might deprive you of breath. However as an experiment it would certainly possess a fearful interest.

I’m curious to hear about Lady Margaret Sackville; but I dont see why you should write to your cowboy and not to me. I suppose the truth of it is that the extremes of society are more picturesque than the upper middle class—which Dora Sanger accused me of being last night. How wretched she always makes me feel! If one has anything tender, morbid, uneasy about one she always comes down with her heel and gives it a good squirming.

Murry was here too, and such a suicidal conversation I’ve never listened to in my life. According to Murry we must choose between suicide and indifference, and he vacillates between them. Dora agreed rapturously.

Leonard says that we should like very much to come one day in July.

Yrs V.W.

Texas

[]

943: To Vanessa Bell

Tuesday [11 June 1918]

[Hogarth House, Richmond]

Dearest,

I’ve just come in and found your telegram. I can’t think why you haven’t already had my letter, as I posted it myself yesterday afternoon. I suppose you’ll have had it by the time you get this, so I needn’t repeat all I said.

I put off speaking to the servants because after we came back I got a bad throat and Leonard said it was out of the question to do without servants, and in fact I thought it was hopeless to persuade him. However, he gradually came round to the idea, and I have now, I think, got a daily woman to do for us. I hope you don’t mind having them in July, but that will give us a month in which to see how it works here.

I haven’t said anything to Nelly about our not being able to afford to keep them, as Leonard thought it would be better to wait, though I dont really agree. I find today that they’re both rather suspicious that we do mean to get rid of them permanently and Nelly told me that they counted upon coming back in October. I think she’ll want rather careful handling, and I think you’d better say nothing to her about staying on at first. But she’s so changeable that one doesn’t know what she does want to do, and I’ve no doubt that she would stay if we decided against having them.

Of course you may think it would be better policy to secure Mr Ford’s daughter—

Personally I’m very anxious to try another way of living, and our books have been so high lately that I think we must try some change.

I’ve just been meeting Lytton, who is like a newly wedded Bride. He pretends to be made rather uncomfortable by his fame, but he’s obviously in a state of rapture, and so sought after already that he’s no time for anything. Clive’s giving a party in his honour tonight, but unfortunately I cant go.

I’ve got any amount of things to write to you about, but I’ve no time now, and these blessed servants want such a lot of discussing, dont they—

Nelly said she was very fond of you, and they were both much excited at the prospect of a baby, so I expect you could seduce them in your usual way, and I feel pretty sure I can make my old woman a success.

Yr B.

Berg

[]

944: To Vanessa Bell

Thursday [13 June 1918]

[Hogarth House, Richmond]

Dearest,

Nelly asked me this morning whether I would say for certain that we would have them back in October. I therefore thought it best to tell her that I didn’t think you would want them if they had decided that they couldn’t stay more than 3 months. We’ve had a terrific discussion. Finally they said that they couldn’t make up their minds until they had been with you for some time. They say that they might want to stay on or they might not. I thought the only thing to do was to wire and tell you, and leave it to you to decide whether you think the risk is worth running. At the present moment I think they want to stay on with us, but once they were settled I expect they would get attached. From our point of view the position is that we can’t in the least tell how our scheme will work. Therefore we feel we must have the right to take them back in October; and in fact they insist that they shall be asked in October what they want to do. Both Leonard and I want to try the experiment, but as you will realise we don’t want to feel that we’ve cut ourselves off for good.

Personally I think they’re such good servants that some risk is worth running on your part—but its all very complicated, and you’re not in the least bound to have them in July. You need only write to me when you’ve made up your mind. (as soon as you can)

I must now rush off to see about my daily but I’ve not taken her. I’ve been careful not to say a word to N & L. [Nellie and Lottie] about our wishing them to go. I’ve said it was entirely your suggestion—directly they thought I wanted them to to go, they said they wouldn’t go to you. So its important to keep up the idea that its done to oblige you and that Nelly herself suggested it—and that I’m not involved at all—

B.

Berg

[]

945: To Vanessa Bell

Tuesday [18 June 1918]

[Hogarth House, Richmond]

Dearest,

I wrote in such a hurry the other day to catch the post that I expect I didn’t explain myself very clearly. I quite realise that you don’t expect N. and L to bind themselves to stay with you. I only thought that as you had a chance of a permanent servant it was absurd for them to go if they’d decided not to stay beyond October. But I made it perfectly clear that the chance of getting Miss Ford was what had changed the situation, and they agreed that it was perfectly reasonable that you should wish to know if there was a chance, and not in the least insincere.

As a matter of fact, ever since I first spoke about it they’ve said that they knew you would want them to stay because you’d be no better off in October. Nelly told me she meant to pack all her clothes, as she was sure you would persuade her to stay on—and this was before your letter came. What they seem to fear is that you will be very charming, and that I shall give them no choice of coming back here—so now I’ve promised that I will ask them in October, but they are to be perfectly free to stay with you.

The reason why they are ready to go to you if they think that I want them is that if they were certain that I didn’t want them they would prefer to take a place at once either in London or near Guildford—at least this is what they say. But I agree its impossible to go into details, Also they change their minds every day, so I’m now going to refuse to discuss it any more with them.

I think Nelly would prefer that Trissie should have a holiday as her fear seems to be that there won’t be enough for her to do, and also that she won’t get on with Trissie—but I assure her that Trissie will be perfectly easy and friendly.

I believe myself that there would be more chance of her staying on if you made her a definite offer of a place as your nurse than if she stayed in a half and half place with you, neither cook nor housemaid. But it certainly wouldn’t do to suggest this for some time. However, when you’ve got them you’ll probably see how the land lies for yourself. Its frightfully difficult to describe, and I always feel I’m writing gibberish when I begin upon their condition. They make my head whirl.

But next time I write perhaps I shall be able to discuss something more interesting. Do tell me about your letters—or send them. [Mark] Gertler has suddenly asked to dine with us tonight—God knows why.

Yr B.

We spent the week end with the Waterlows—their brats are inconceivably ugly and we discussed S’s past with Margery [his wife]. He met Mrs Finberg in the park. She has married another man and he has been divorced; and Finberg has married another woman and Jos Wedgwood is marrying his deaf governess.

Berg

[]

946: To Vanessa Bell

Friday afternoon [21 June 1918]

[Hogarth House, Richmond]

Dearest,

Trissie will have told you of our adventures. As far as one can tell, I think we’ve been very lucky. I thought Mrs Paton was rather particularly nice—very quiet and unpretending, and evidently delighted to be in a farm in the country. Mrs Bridger whom I saw about her character said she’d only been there for about 3 months, but she was a very good worker, and certainly came with a good character, though she couldn’t remember much about it. The only fault she had to find with her was that she was apt to be untidy—but I said you would excuse that. As a matter of fact she’s rather beautiful—something in the style of Bobo [Beatrice Mayor], with large dark eyes and a very sallow face. I suppose Trissie told you that she has a sister of 18 who has been in service and would like a place in the country. It struck me that you might turn Mrs Paton into your nurse, as she has her own child, and have the sister as well. But that can wait. I’ve just rung up the Registry Office who wanted to know the result of our visit, and the woman there says she knows that Mrs Paton is very respectable, although she was only a short time in her place.

She lives just behind the 17 Club; so I could easily go and see her one day next week, if you want any final arrangements made.

What on earth’s happening with N. and L. I dont know. They seem to have spent most of the morning while I was out sobbing in Leonard’s room—but they were so incoherent that he has told them to calm down and talk to me this evening. If the worst comes to the worst, we can always go down to Asheham and get Mrs Gell [Geall] to do for us. I think you’re much better off without them, as they’d have made endless difficulties, and probably upset Trissie too.

I enclose the Agents card. Will you let them know as soon as you’ve taken Mrs P[aton].

I suppose you’ll have to pay them at the same time.

Yr B.

Berg

[]

947: To Vanessa Bell

Tuesday [25 June 1918]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dearest,

I needn’t say that I’m fearfully sorry that the affair has turned out in this way. I dont think I’ve ever spent a more miserable three weeks, and of course its been much worse for you.

I didn’t mean to discuss it any more in writing, but as you’ve written I think I’d better say that I dont think you quite understand what happened. I gather that you feel that Leonard was always against their coming. This is not so. He only wished it to be clear that we had the right of asking them back in October. He himself was the first to suggest that they should go to you on July 1st, and he has never changed his mind that it was best that they should do so. He spent an afternoon in the kitchen trying to persuade them to.

He never produced a document for them to sign. I suggested to them, without telling him, that we should write a statement promising to ask them to return in October, as it seemed at the moment, the only thing needed to persuade them to go. In the end they said this was unnecessary, and I only told Leonard of my suggestion, afterwards, and he never spoke a word to them about it. In fact he can’t remember that I ever told him.

The only point L. and I disagreed upon was as to whether it was best to tell them of our need for economy at first. He was against this, and I for it. Except for this, on which I gave way, he has agreed with me about everything, and never interfered with what I said, or tried to make the servants decide in any way against going. I think he’s writing to you himself; but I wanted to make it clear that he never put the least pressure on me, and we’ve never confused the servants by giving them two points of view.

Since I wrote, N. and L. have told me the real reason why they did not want to go—at least they now say it is the real reason. They particularly ask me not to write about it, but to tell you when I see you. If they’d only told me at first we should have saved all this bother—and I cant think why they didn’t. But it is nothing to do with the question of your wishing them to stay on (I read them of course the letter in which you made this perfectly clear) or of my wishing to get rid of them. Of course this doesn’t alter the fact that they’ve treated you disgracefully. I think they’re thoroughly ashamed of themselves.

However badly they’ve behaved, I rather wish Trissie had consulted me before she told them that we could not afford to keep them, but were unwilling to tell them so.

When I came down to tell them about the difficulty, I found she had already told them, and being apparently very angry with me, had added all kinds of things about my dishonourable conduct. I suppose you must have told her, and of course it doesn’t matter, though, as she met Mrs Langston, one of my cooperative women [at Richmond], and told her also that my behaviour was not that of a lady, I’ve had to spend a good deal of time in these idiotic conversations, and I wish to goodness she had charged me with all my sins to my face.

The servants want to stay on with us, but I’ve told them that we must discuss it later when we know for certain whether Leonard is going to get this editorship, or not. We may hear next month.

I shan’t hear from Sotheby’s till July 4th. They sold the Meredith poems separately, and only got £2 which is wretched. The story seems to me very bad now, and not worth printing, but I’ll send it you if you like—I thought perhaps I could rewrite it. I mean to write a good many short things at Asheham and I wish you would consider illustrating them all. We want to bring out a series of short pamphlets in the autumn. Gertler admired your pictures greatly the other night. We talked mostly about his views of art; I didn’t much like him, but I suppose he is what they call ‘powerful’. I’m going to see Jacques Raverat’s pictures at the New English [Art Club].

Dont let Trissie in her anger with me persuade you that I was cross at going to Registry offices—its always a divine pleasure to do anything for you, and I trust to you and Duncan to tell me if I can do anything, though God knows, I shan’t try another experiment as long as I live. I’m always in London, and I’ve heard of several new offices.

But I hope the new woman [Mrs Paton] may do. I thought she looked much nicer than they usually do.

Yr B.

Berg

[]

948: To Clive Bell

Sunday [30 June 1918]

Hogarth House [Richmond]

My dear Clive,

We shall be in on Wednesday, so do come in after the pictures, and anyhow stay to supper.

I’m a little alarmed at the ugliness of my chair covers, thrust upon me by the Omega, remembering Mary Hutchinsons house—however—she must excuse.

Lytton has come to such a stage that he affects positive disgust at the thought of admiration—How elderly we grow!

Yr. V.W.

Quentin Bell

[]

949: To Vanessa Bell

Monday [1 July 1918]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dearest,

Nelly has just been in to me to suggest that she should come to you for a fortnight when Trissie has her holiday. This is entirely her own suggestion, and she is writing to you herself. I dont know if you have made other arrangements; but we can manage all right, as Lottie has offered to do for us, so do have her if its any use. Only neither Leonard or I take any responsibility!

Would the last 2 weeks in July suit you; Then she could come on straight to Asheham—

I wash my hands of the whole horror, (I believe my character was damaged by Trissie, but nothing else suffered)—Poor old Leonard never for an instance tried to prevent them from going on July 1st; he always encouraged it—and I had only one moment of panic after Trissie had gone, when I thought she’d persuaded them to leave us anyhow, and didn’t know if I could get anyone. But 4 daily women turned up the day after, without any effort on my part.

However, this is my swan song; I am now mute for ever. The only disaster that I still have to face is that my letters are evidently read by Trissie. She quoted a sentence from one of them, which makes me shiver slightly—I could of course write a truthful and highly unpleasant account of her soul as it was revealed to me in flashes of lightning the other day; but then there are other things to talk about. I dont want to devote my entire life to Trissie. What am I to do?

I try to get away from the servants but I cant—Karins couple have given notice, on the ground that they once had to wash Ann’s tea cup, so Adrian has appealed to Sophie; they hope to get her for ever and ever. That was in my head for you—not that you should pension her. I’ve had a letter from Gerald, which I enclose. Isn’t it superb to see how the Duckworths settle down like blue bottles directly any one’s dead [Aunt Minna] upon the will?

I had a most interesting talk with Waller [Hills], at Rays [Strachey] party, which I should like to describe, but the small leaden eyes of Trissie are fixed upon this page. Isn’t it wretched? However he was inconceivably like my memory of him—holding forth upon education; and very nice and affectionate, and I laughed at him all the time, and he told me how he’d had a row with George [Duckworth] at the Munition’s office, and George was incredibly stupid, and then Margaret [George’s wife] sent for him and told him he mustn’t hurt dear George’s feelings—“You say Vanessa has decided against the public school for her boys. Well, my dear, its a gamble, yes, its a gamble. The public school is far from perfect. But its the intellectual stimulus of companionship that one gets there. Yes, Eton did more for me than Balliol; but I suffered all my life from having no sisters. I never knew the woman’s side of life until I met your family. All boys ought to know that. Now, take the case of my nephews; both of them killed now. They changed at Harrow; they changed for the worse. But you and Nessa are both of you confirmed gamblers. Well, so am I. I’ve never been able to conform, my dear Ginia; that whats the matter with me. I’m not in the hierarchy. I shall never be in the government. No, I’ve gambled, and I’ve thrown away the game. Still, I find life gets more and more interesting—and I’m horrified at my age. Why, I’m 51; yes, I want you and Nessa to laugh at me, but I still find one or two people who don’t take me seriously, Thank God.”

He was extraordinarily nice; he seems to have lost a great many teeth; he is coming to dine with us.

The parrokeets [Clive Bell and Mary Hutchinson] have invited themselves for Wednesday, which makes me rather nervous. Gravé has made me 2 dresses. She’s infinitely better than anyone save Mrs Young, I think.

I’m sending my story [Kew Gardens]; you will see that’s its a case of atmosphere, and I dont think I’ve got it quite. Don’t you think you might design a title page? Tell me what you think of the story. I’m going to write an account of my emotions towards one of your pictures, which gives me infinite pleasure, and has changed my views upon aesthetics; and I’m now so lacerated by my chair covers and the carpet that I’ve got to take steps—I can hardly sit in the drawing room—but all this is very complicated, and I must write a special letter about it. Its a question of half developed aesthetic emotions, constantly checked by others of a literary nature—in fact its all very interesting and intense. Jacques Raverat has revived the art of Ary Sheffer. Dr May used to like his picture of Christ so much. Stone coloured smooth literary and yet falsely artistic pictures, pictures ashamed of being literary and yet crammed with suggestions of character and sublimity in every line. But what a show! The drowsy stupidity of the painter’s point of view appalled me. There was a picture of a theatre that I liked; but I thought a John drawing knocked everything else out. There was a robust and uncompromising Rothenstein—protesting his fine simple emotions. I’m writing in a hurry, and I mustn’t do injustice to my aesthetic philosophy.

How are you?

B.

Abbey Agency have rung up to know if you’ve taken Mrs Paton. Will you write straight to them? Someone else wants her. How is the baby?

Berg

[]

950: To Vanessa Bell

Monday [8 July 1918]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dearest,

I’ve now heard from Sotheby. They sold the Thackeray for £45—the reserve I put on it—the Meredith letter for £21—the one to you for £1-10. fathers mss. for £1-8. They charge £8-12-6 commission, so that your share comes to £21-0-9. I enclose a cheque.

It’s not very good, but as we couldn’t get a private buyer I suppose we must be content. But I don’t think its worth selling any more books there; I believe we should get as much from a bookseller like Quaritch, and we shouldn’t have to pay a commission.

I fully intend to write my aesthetics for your derision, but I can’t do anything just now except fold and staple 300 copies of K. M.’s story. It takes a good deal of time by hand, but we hope to send out some copies on Thursday. The parrokeets brought Borenius; and we all chattered away at a great rate, except Mary [Hutchinson], who scarcely spoke. However we agreed to advance to Christian names, and we’re probably going to print a story of her’s.

If you do any woodcuts for my story, they’d better be about the size of Carrington’s in our first book, I should think—anything that you like—I don’t see that it matters whether it’s about the story or not. My only doubt is whether we shall print it after all; I don’t myself think its altogether good; and I’ve an idea for another, which might be better. Still, it might be worse.

There was an awful hymn of praise to you and Duncan from the art critics the other day; thank God, you don’t write.

Yr B.

Do say how you are. Are you still feeling sick—I do wish it would stop—Still I’ve no doubt the baby will be something miraculous. You ought to burn my letters always.

Berg

[]

951: To Vanessa Bell

Monday [15 July 1918]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dearest,

I’ve been and bought this lovely sheet of paper—a dozen for 1/6 about—solely to write to you on; such is love; but I wish I hadn’t talked about aesthetics. I was merely extremely interested in my own sensations about your picture. First, however, I think your drawing [for Kew Gardens] is a most successful piece; and just in the mood I wanted. As a piece of black and white it is extremely decorative—you see my language is already tainted. Then second or perhaps its third, many thanks for the cheque; if you still want a copy of Prelude, will you remit 3/6—otherwise our accounts get wrong. But I daresay your appetite is satiated. Anyhow tell me what you think of it; and should you say that you dont like it as much as Kew Gardens, I shant think less highly of you; but my jealousy, I repeat, is only a film on the surface beneath which is nothing but pure generosity.

As for my aesthetic views, I can’t do them justice, because I’m writing waiting for dinner, and in the suburbs an open window lets in passionate male and female voices all the time. We have a music teacher opposite; and also the Richmond mortuary, which accounts for the extra-ordinary number of coffins one sees about. Coffins at luncheon, coffins as I come back from London; and the gentleman next door is dead of the influenza.

However, the thing that happened was this. For some weeks I have been coming to dislike a chair covered in bright yellow check, bought at the Omega. It became like a small raw spot which I touched each time I came into the room. I brought your picture of the vase and the long flower in from the dining room, and used to sit upon the yellow check looking at it. It gave me exquisite pleasure—so cool, so harmonious, so exquisitely tinted; then I began to conceive the room as a whole, in relation to your picture. Now the yellow cover made me nearly frantic, and to cut a long story short, I went to Burnets. But there I was paralysed, for though I dislike things after a time I find it very difficult to combine them in my mind. I refrained from buying. I went to the National Gallery. It was shut, save to soldiers and nurses in uniform; I went to the National Portrait Gallery; it was shut, save to the widows of officers. You’ll hardly believe my disconsolate state, with this picture tempting me to excursions in building up rooms harmonious with it, and no sort of power to fulfil my wishes. Finally, I went to Souhamis. The first time I brought back 2 18th century pieces of embroidery. At the sight of 18th century embroidery my confidence in my own taste completely returned. I flung them upon the yellow chair—for which I now felt little short of physical rage. No. Something again was wrong. Back I went to Souhamis’, and now I have a blue and green Persian cover, on a yellow-white background. But you see what prospects are opened up. I came to the conclusion that there is a quality in your picture which though perceptible is at present much beyond me, but that in the main my aesthetic feelings are so undeveloped that I had better begin at the very beginning. But do you think that this semi-conscious process of coming to dislike one colour very much and liking a picture better and better points to some sort of live instinct trying to come to existence? I humbly hope so.

At any rate, there is no doubt that your painting gives me more pleasure than any painting in the National Gallery. I got in there this afternoon.

This letter is already so long and rather incoherent too I’m afraid, that I’d better perhaps draw to an end. But I must tell you of my melancholy at the National Gallery. How, I ask, can you expect English people to like art when they are treated thus? There is a room devoted to battle pictures; there is Millais’ Gladstone, and Furses Return from the ride (the black in the hind quarters of the horse is all sunk in and dead—still the silk dress stands out quite stiffly); there are some large dull Italians; any number of the polished Dutch; and the rest I suppose, put away in the cellars. A herd of poor children was being swept from picture to picture by a wretched little servant girl, with a face like the inside of a penny bun; and her lecture always began “Now, children, dont stand too near or you cant see; and dont shuffle your feet so. D’you think they polish the floors for you to slide on? This is the Descent of our Lord from the Cross. etc etc” Now I wish you’d tell me what is the point of Veronese: a picture, I mean of a Goddess asleep and a man in armour approaching her: I see the nice warm ripe colours; but they dont much excite me; Delacroix I saw no point in: Botticelli, the round one of the Madonna may I daresay be beautiful, but to me it looks like a very perfect passage of pure style; but when I draw near the French I am at once amused and very much pleased. I refer in particular to Berthe Morrisot; her picture of 2 women in a boat is the kind of picture I like; it gives me great pleasure, and I seem able to understand it. Also the Renoir umbrellas; also a picture of still life on a mantelpiece by Vuillard; also a beach by Boudin (?); but I dont much care for Corot.

The English I think are far best at landscape; they have a feeling for that; I like Cox and Constable; I like pictures of Norfolk heaths with windmills against the sky; I found a Turner which I thought very beautiful—a sketch, I suppose, since the iridescent haze had been left out. Then there were a great many Rubens drawings, or said to be by Rubens, which convey nothing to me. Mancini I see no point in. I liked a picture of men round a table by Legros; and a very dark amber coloured landscape with one red cow in it, by an 18th [17th] century Frenchman called perhaps Bourdon; that, again, is the sort of picture I should like to have.

What I am driving at is this; could you see your way to lend me any more pictures? Could I have any from Gordon Square?—(I like Fantin Latour’s apples on a plate) would it be possible to get any lent me at the Omega on payment of a small sum? I want to change such as I have about; and we are badly in want of some at Asheham.

I’m now thinking of going to the Allied Artists; and I will give you an account of them; since I suppose that there may be the same curious interest in a writer’s account of pictures as the other way round. And yet the queer thing is that I accept your or Duncan’s view of writing absolutely seriously.

I dont think your drawing, by the way is too big; the difficulty is, suppose we decide not to print that story after all?

In the world of letters Lytton is still predominant. I think his fame has changed him, as love might; he is immensely appreciative, even tender; jumps up and seizes withered virgins like Vernon Lee, and leaves them gibbering with ecstasy. He spent last week end with the Duchess of Marlborough. Mrs Asquith, poor woman, does for herself by talking about books, and as her method is to say startling things and she can’t settle down to discuss them, she becomes a fearful bore, and as wrong as she can be. Still, he admits that its all very pleasant; though agitating, because he fears it will soon die down. We are going to Tidmarsh on Saturday. Gumbo [Marjorie Strachey] is going to be there. She has renounced Josh[Wedgwood] and is as sprightly as can be—You heard, I suppose, that Mrs H[umphry] Ward accuses Lytton in the Lit. Suppt. of being a pro-German on account of the brutality of his methods?

Adrian has become a violent politician; and delivered an address on Peace to my Guild with the greatest success. He and Karin talk of finding rooms near us in August; possibly at Southease. I wish he hadn’t married her (you put this straight in the locked drawer, if not the w.c. dont you?) A good cob of a woman; but so hearty and so without shade or softness. Age too will harden her; as it is she takes a businesslike view of life and duty and death too I daresay; and her family will coarsen her. I think its absurd to call Adrian a bore; he has great distinction; not that I could ever live with him tolerably.

Shall we get up a pageant of the 90ties? Waller [Hills] and Pippa [Strachey] are dining with us I think. Thank God for old Snow [Margery Snowden]; I hope I may see her, though I really prefer thinking of her since she dislikes me, I fear. I hope you’ll bring the unborn baby up to appreciate me; I’m already half in love with her/him. It will have lovely great eyes; soft hair; a divine mouth; and then only think what a gifted lovable sprite it will be so understanding from its earliest years, and as wise as an idol, and as witty as a humming bird.

Yr B.

Berg

[]

952: To Clive Bell

Tuesday [16 July 1918]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

My dear Clive,

We aren’t coming to Garsington this week end as we’re staying at Tidmarsh [Lytton Strachey]. Ottoline, I believe, has done her best to insist that the whole party shall remove to Garsington,—but so far without success. I’m afraid you’re away the week end after when I suppose we do come.

I’m amused to hear of the Murry affair; I read his review without recognising it. The tone seems a little superior for I think there’s some merit in the war poems anyhow—still Ott’s methods are monstrous, and I’m glad Murry didn’t bow down.

I only maintain that K. M.’s story has a certain quality as a work of art besides the obvious cleverness, which made it worth printing, and a good deal better than most stories anyhow.

I’m sorry I was gracious to Mary: I didn’t mean to have that effect, but I daresay its inevitable from one of my age to one of hers. Anyhow I hope you’ll keep her to her story.

Yours, V.W.

Quentin Bell

[]

953: To Vanessa Bell

Friday [26 July 1918]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, S.W.

Dearest,

Here is the picture. I hope you will do as many more as you can both for that story [Kew Gardens], and for the one about the party. We could easily make the books a little bigger for the sake of the pictures.

Here it is pouring hard, and I am going in my devotion, to Gordon Sqre to fetch my pictures. No confirmation of the Ka rumour has been had, and I am half hoping that it mayn’t be true.

We are committed not only to give Adrian and Karin meals, but to have Ann in the house! I don’t mind Ann, but the thought of Mabel [Karin’s maid] rather alarms me. I’m going to take to sealing my letters for reasons which I will give you when we meet.

Sotheby’s has sent me £1-16 for the Meredith poems; I will send you your miserable share.

Leonard has been asked to stand for Parliament. By the way, I find that Carrington cross examined him about my new nephew. I rather think it would be best to tell him what I know. He would then be able to put dust in their eyes. As it is he has his doubts and rather increases theirs perhaps. But I wont say anything unless you tell me I can. I suppose Lytton put her up to it, and they probably think we know. I enjoyed my vision of Dolphin in her majestic glory.

B.

But do you really mean that I dont know anything about human nature?

Berg

[]

954: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

[1? August 1918]

Asheham, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

My dear Ottoline,

This letter is belated, owing to the difficulty of writing even a letter when one is moving. Moreover to describe my pleasure [at Garsington] during the week end is very difficult. I liked it all so much, from the comfort of my bed to the beauty of the view—and that is saying nothing about the human beings, who were all wonderfully interesting I thought. It is the loveliest of places.

This is lovely too, but very different—Entirely overgrown with weeds for one thing, and suffering from a plague of small frogs and black beetles, who come in through the windows. However one of these days we hope you will come and see it for yourself, though I should feel alarmed—not that I suspect you of travelling with six maids, but you carry your standards with you.

We expect the Murry’s tomorrow, if they manage the journey, which is so horrid now that I shant be surprised if they dont.

We met Koteliansky in London, who wanted us to come and meet [D. H.] Lawrence. I’m in two minds—tempted, but alarmed. I sometimes wonder why the intelligent people are so made that one can’t see them without quarrelling—but it seems a law. I’m thinking of the Murry’s and Lawrence, not of you and me!

I brought your flowers here—they were too lovely to leave, and the carnations are on the table as bright as ever.

We shall look anxiously for Philip’s [Morrell] speech—

Leonard wishes to be remembered.

Yr aff
V.W.

Texas

[]

955: To Katherine Cox

Aug. 3rd [1918]

Asheham, Rodmell Lewes [Sussex]

Dearest Ka,

I had heard from Bob [Trevelyan], but he was so muddled that I wasn’t certain, and then we came here, and I was on the point of writing to you. Of course, as you know very well, no one seems to me more superbly fitted for every kind of blessing than my dear Bruin Cox. The only trouble is that I admired her so profoundly in her single state that I dont see how even marriage can improve her. Nor can I believe that any one loves her better or has more reason to bless her than I have. No, I don’t think that even Will [Arnold-Forster] will ever know as many good things about you as Leonard and I do.

It’s odd how little I know him (why shan’t I like him?) My chief impression is that I’m immensely old and that he’s extremely young; and we are sitting at Fitzroy Sqre on a Thursday evening hundreds of years ago discussing art.

But the point is now will you both come here next Friday to Monday? Please do. Ask him from us. Its our only free weekend for some time; and make it be Friday to Monday—The other is so short. If Will can’t come, come alone, but we very much want to see him too. We shall be by ourselves.

Yrs V.W.

I am immensely pleased.

Mark Arnold-Forster

[]

956: To Vanessa Bell

Thursday [8 August 1918]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest,

The servants want me to send you a note, so as to give them an excuse for going to Charleston and making it up with Trissie, if she’s willing.

I wish we could meet, but I dont know what to suggest—the weather is so vile. Perhaps I might come over to lunch one day next week if it suited you—I rather think we have Ka and Arnold Forster here for the week end, but I’m not certain. If so, I expect they’ll want to see you. If it were fine, perhaps we could have a picnic, otherwise I might suggest they’re walking over on Sunday, if you dont object—unless Duncan and Bunny would come here, which would be charming. There may be a very dull man called Bonwick who is coming to talk about starting the new [international] review.

Adrian and Karin are coming next week—for a fortnight, as their lodgings fell through. Ann has gone to Mabel’s home.

I went to Gordon Sqre to fetch the pictures, but after searching everywhere could only find the one in the frame. Blanche [maid] thought that Clive had taken them to Charleston. If so, would you give them to the servants to bring back, or any others, as I’m in fearful straits, and have even had to unearth the Sargent portrait of Henry James—Did I tell you about our week end at Garsington? This is one of the crumbs I keep to tempt my Dolphin out of her pool with.

Yr B.

Berg

[]

957: To Vanessa Bell

Friday [9 August 1918]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest,

What a devil you were about the pictures! But as you’ve promised to give me 3 large ones, I’ll let you off this time—still, your craft was scandalous.

I’ve heard from Ka that she and Will (as she calls him) have to work in their offices this Sunday, and they want to come later. Bonwick is coming—and probably (but we’re in a great mess with our visitors) either Margery Strachey, Mrs [Molly] Hamilton, both, or neither. Its too vague to make any plans, so you’d better not expect us for lunch. If we came we would bring our own food.

Didn’t you know that Ka was engaged? I had a letter from her. She says he’s a “wild creature”, and that I probably shan’t like him, and that she’s in love with him. They don’t mean to be married till after the war—as I suppose the country must come first.

Do you think you could ask the Stephens [Karin and Adrian] for the 31st weekend? They go back on the Monday following, and we shall have Ka and Will and Pernel I think, so it would be a great convenience to us, and save them going to rooms in Lewes.

They arrive next Friday, and go to the Pelham Arms, and come to us on Monday. We are going to be strictly independent, and only to meet at meals, and only to speak when we wish, so that perhaps we shant altogether come to grief, as you think likely.

If we don’t meet on Sunday, shall I come to lunch and spend the afternoon next Wednesday?

Katherine and Murry never came, as she is ill again. I’m a little disturbed by a story of hers in the English Review. Its—well I wont say; and anyhow, please tell Maynard, its a great deal better than Margot’s Love Letters. I live to a large extent upon her literary criticisms which Lytton hands on.

Yr B.

Give my love to my nephews; and say I should like to have a visit from them. Perhaps we might manage a treat for Quentin’s birthday [19 August]—Tell me what he’d like for a present.

Berg

[]

958: To Dora Carrington

Sunday [11 August 1918]

Asheham House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

My dear Carrington

Will you come and stay with us next week end—17th? Now please do. I’ve asked Norton but even without him there are attractions enough, animal and spiritual. Also, I promise you shan’t be tormented; you shall be treated like a real young lady on a visit, and given flowers in your bedroom and a lid upon your po.

Its terrifically hot. Imagine the corn all turning different shades of yellow over the downs; and then theres a green patch, and a red one, and so on—Even you might be tempted to—I will not say what. Its odd that painting should appeal to your modesty as personal chastity appealed to our mothers’. It must be a kind of inversion, I think. You young things are not to escape the curse of Eve as easily as all that. Nature will have her rights. (this is part of a lecture I’m going to deliver next Saturday—)

Leonard has taken our new friend Mr Bonwick of Purley over to Charleston, which he won’t enjoy, but still it breaks up the afternoon. Mr Bonwick has the facial twitch, he is infinitely beneath us in social standing, dressed all in black, with great black boots, but morally so exalted that we only recover our balance by boasting of people like Lytton—and even so, moral height wins the day. Moral height without much in the way of intellect, so there’s a chance for poor old Nick still. Still, Lytton’s range will never include Mr Bonwick of Purley—oh no!

Would you have the great goodness to let me know about the week end as soon as you can?

Yr V.W.

Robert H. Taylor

[]

959: To Katherine Cox

Aug 13th [1918]

Asheham, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

Dearest Ka,

Our letters have crossed, I suppose: Are you to be married at once? I thought you said something about waiting till after the war—but this is much more satisfactory.

Anyhow, shall you be able to come on the 31st? It would suit us perfectly. Adrian and Karin will have withdrawn by then. As for Asheham now, with the corn ripe in a blazing sun I feel inclined to think all human arrangements a little insignificant compared with it.

I wrote the article on Rupert in the Times. Bruce Richmond sent the book to me; but when I came to do it I felt that to say out loud what even I knew of Rupert was utterly repulsive, so I merely trod out my 2 columns as decorously as possible. It seemed useless to pitch into Eddy [Marsh]. James [Strachey] meant to try, but gave it up. I think it was one of the most repulsive biographies I’ve ever read (this, of course, is a little overstated!). He contrived to make the [Brooke] letters as superficial and affected as his own account of Rupert. We’re now suggesting that James should write something for us to print. He’s sending us the letters to look at. But if you tell Mrs Brooke would you ask her not to tell anyone else, as Richmond is always anxious it shouldn’t get out who has done reviews.

I must now go and feed my white cat, and bicycle over to Charleston to spend the night. Leonard is up at York, interviewing Mr Rowntree about his new review.

Let me know whether you and Will will come here; and do come unless you are too tired and worried and cross and snarly or happy and engrossed etc. I’ve just seen the notice in the Court Circular, and realise with dismay that you’ll be a niece of Mrs Humphrey Wards!

Yr V.W.

I suppose you couldn’t tell Mrs Brooke, if you wish, that I remember her with the greatest clearness, at St Ives, when Rupert was 5 and I was 10 and Dick [his brother] played cricket with us, and we all went fishing. I can see her wrinkles at this moment—and feel a great respect for her, partly from hearing Rupert read aloud her letters—wh. were superb.

Mark Arnold-Forster

[]

960: To Katherine Cox

Thursday [15 August 1918]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest Ka,

How utterly damnable! I’m very sorry too that you’ve been bothered in this way. I suppose there’s no use in trying to seduce you to come here by yourself, though I may point out that marriage is a lifelong affair, and I expect a short stay with us would do you an immense amount of good. I hear that you look worn owing to the burden of love and Empire and the heat and the general horror. Anyhow, if you should change your mind your room is waiting.

There are thousands of things I want to say to you: and I don’t much expect we shall ever meet once youre married—One question is, what would you like for a wedding present? We all want to know—(Adrian and Karin too) and why do you say you are going to live in Lancaster Place? Surely only the widows of judges live there—and what’s going to happen to Cliffords Inn—But whats the use of beginning, when I wanted merely to have you about the place, saying your wise things, and creating an atmosphere of sagacious peace—snuffing at the doors before you come in, and rolling in the long grass.

Please tell Will how sorry we are.

Yrs V.W.

I heard from Mrs Brooke, who wants me to come and see her.

Shall I come and wait at the corner to see you married?

Mark Arnold-Forster

[]

961: To Dora Carrington

[16 August 1918]

Postcard

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

Very glad you can come. Will you bring your butter, as we’re rather badly off.

V.W.

Robert H. Taylor

[]

962: To Vanessa Bell

[17? August 1918]

[Asheham, Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest

I got the best toys I could for Quentin, but there wasn’t much choice. The gun was 2/6 and the boat was 2/6—the writing book 4d. If you and Duncan like to give these, will you give him the other things as my present.

Carrington is coming, but Norton can’t.

If its weather like this tomorrow, there won’t be much use in having a picnic, I’m afraid.

The Stephen’s come up this afternoon—so our trial will begin.

How delightful it was for you to have me the other day!

Is Barbara staying with you?

I’m writing to ask Duncan if he’ll spend the night tomorrow. It would not only enchant us (this he knows too well) but Carrington, so I hope he’ll come.

Yr B.

If we can’t come tomorrow, we will send the cake.

I’ve been hanging the pictures. They have given me several new ideas on art.

Berg

[]

963: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Sunday 18th Aug. [1918]

Asheham, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

My dear Ottoline

I think you must be the only hostess who actually thanks her guests for having enjoyed themselves! As I always believe you have a conception of life which is far more magnificent than any that can be realised with the sort of material available. But it is superb that you should go on trying to make us out more beautiful and brilliant and humane than we can ever possibly be.

I can’t think whats happened since we were at Garsington. The time passes, with proper nights and days, I suppose, but one seems to float through them in a disembodied kind of way here. For one thing we’ve been practically alone, which has a very spiritual effect upon the mind. No gossip, no malevolence, no support from one’s fellow creatures.

I can’t think why one doesn’t spend the whole year in this way. I see—though I dont expect you to agree—that after 6 months I should be a kind of Saint, and Leonard an undoubted prophet. We should shed virtue on people as we walked along the roads. To prevent this transformation, Carrington and Adrian and Karin arrived last night, and I had such a bath of the flesh that I am far from unspotted this morning. We gossipped for 5 hours.

Carrington is a most useful guest, so broken into unselfishness by the Stracheys that she insists either upon cutting the grass or pumping the water. Lytton is staying with the Asquiths and wearing a whole wardrobe of new clothes. Katherine and Murry never came after all, so we couldn’t go on discussing the review—but I believe Sassoon has got far more praise because of it in all the other papers. The Statesman is full of him. Katherine was too ill to travel. She wrote me a line, only to say that her mother had died, and she was very unhappy.

Please write again; and do set aside an hour from your house, and begin your book.

Your aff
V.W.

Texas

[]

964: To Duncan Grant

Wednesday [21 August 1918]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex

My dear Duncan,

I confess it cut me to the heart to see that you preferred Barbara to me. However, there’s now the attraction of Karin to offer you—so won’t you come over and spend Saturday night? Then perhaps we could have a picnic on Sunday, and so take you home again. Barbara and Saxon threatened to spend a fortnight here—they still haunt my dreams. I won’t say any more because I know my letter will lie about on the mantelpiece at Charleston. I might say a great deal of infinite interest. O what thousands of compliments rained over me the other day for you and Nessa, I mean. Carrington came back in a tipsy condition from seeing your pictures.

I have just written to the Pelman Institute for a series of Grey Books.

I want to hear about Trissie.

Your V.W.

Duncan Grant

[]

965: To Mrs M. R. Brooke

21st Aug. 1918

Asheham House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Mrs Brooke,

It was a great pleasure to get your letter this morning. I had rather hoped that you would not see my review, as I felt that I had not been able to say what I wanted to say about Rupert. Also I am afraid that I gave the impression that I disliked Mr Marsh’s memoir much more than I meant to. If I was at all disappointed it was that he gave of course rather his impression of Rupert than the impression which one had always had of him partly from the Stracheys and other friends of his own age. But then Mr Marsh could not have done otherwise, and one is very glad to have the Memoir as it is. Rupert was so great a figure in his friends eyes that no memoir could possibly be good enough. Indeed, I felt it to be useless to try to write about him. One couldn’t get near to his extraordinary charm and goodness. I was 5 years older than he was, and I saw him very little compared with most people, but perhaps because of the St Ives days I always felt that I knew him as one knows one’s own family. I stayed a week with him at Grantchester [1911] and then he came down here, and we met sometimes in London. He was a wonderful friend. I married in 1912, and was ill for a long time afterwards, and never saw him after he went to America.

It would be a great pleasure to me if I might come and see you when you are in London. We go back to Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, S. W. in October.

Perhaps you would write and tell me if you ever cared to see me.

Thank you again for your letter, and believe me

Yours sincerely,
Virginia Woolf

King’s

[]

966: To Vanessa Bell

Thursday [5? September 1918]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest,

Liz says that she thinks she had better not take the place, on account of her baby, as she thinks it would be impossible to look after him and do the work.

Mrs Hammond is willing to come to you on the 16th for a fortnight; if that would suit you. She says she does not want to take a permanent place.

Liz would have liked to come apparently, if it hadn’t been for the baby.

Mrs Hammond would like to see you. I will come over tomorrow, Friday, after lunch, about 2.30. and perhaps we could make arrangements then.

Of course the servants are going home soon and might hear of one of their friends. However, we can discuss this tomorrow.

Yr. B.

Berg

[]

967: To Vanessa Bell

[8 September 1918]

[Asheham, Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest,

Mrs Hammond will come on the 16th for 2 weeks certainly, probably longer if you want her. At first she said she must have 20/—but I said this was absurd, and she seems quite glad to come for 15/—

Nelly says the pay has gone up. They all went to the picnic place to meet you yesterday. Nelly rode to Charleston twice but did not dare go in lest T[rissie]. should see her.

Apparently Liz had made up her mind that she would go to you, if you asked her to. I think there’s no doubt she would come later as nurse if you wanted her.

I’ve said that you dont want to settle anything yet, and anyhow you wont want her as cook.

They quite enjoyed their picnic, so it didn’t matter. Leonard would like to come and see you one afternoon this week if its agreeable to you.

The reason he was so silent with Duncan was that he went out into the garden and was sick, and felt sick all the evening, without saying so. We heard this morning that he is now made Editor of the New Review—also that we can take Asheham on by the year—though they see no prospect at present of turning us out.

I’d like to come over again more than anything—in hopes of grading [apples]—but I must give this to Bunny, who has been very charming.

Yr B.

Berg

[]

968: To Dora Carrington

Sept. 9th [1918]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dear Carrington

We have just finished tea with your butter, and we dont know how to thank you. It seems to me that one can only compare you to one of the heroes of history or to the Pelican. We had dwindled to miserable dabs, the size of a finger nail, half dissolved, and spotted with flies. Then there’s the shortbread. I have made enquiries and find that it only costs the incredibly low sum of 1/- a round. Our winter prospects are immensely brightened. You must come to tea. I’ve just bought 8 combs of honey, from poor Bunny, who develops distinct signs of humanity—if you dig long enough. He forced me to give him 2 photographs of Alix, and went off mumbling over them in a most touching way.

I dont know that there’s any other news. Duncan came round in a passion and tore down the picture over the fireplace, which he says, he particularly dislikes. Nessa did the same by one of hers. Its mere vanity, and at their age absurd. Ka was married at 11 this morning, at which hour a cloud passed over the sun, and I seemed to hear the tolling of a bell.

We expect the Sidney Webbs and a maniac called George Young, brother of Hilton, on Saturday. This maniac believes that he and the Webbs together can end the war—so if you read of a sudden peace, armies disbanded, terms settled, you’ll know where it comes from. Anyhow it will be a most painful weekend for me. Leonard is now a proper editor with offices in Fleet Street; he is conducting his operations at my ear, so I must stop, but he says I am to thank you again for his tea, and give his love to Lytton to whom he is writing.

Yr V.W.

We never meant that Wooler itself was good, but only that it was the only place to stay in the neighbourhood.

Robert H. Taylor

[]

969: To Vanessa Bell

Tuesday [10 September 1918]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest,

I haven’t heard from Clive, so I don’t know what he wants to do. As a matter of fact it would as it turns out suit us best to have them for the night of the 16th, as the servants will still be here. Wouldn’t it be possible for them to bring the children here, and for Nelly to take them on to Charleston?

Mrs Hammond doesn’t know the way, so that Nelly was anyhow going to take her on Monday, and I’m sure she’d take the children if they could get here fairly early.

I’ve asked Gertler to come for the 21st-23rd week end, and I thought perhaps you’d ask him over to you on Sunday. We may have a Jewish week end with my family in law. Leonard will come over the first fairly fine afternoon.

I’ll come anyhow one day—but I think he’d like a little conversation with you alone.

Now that your domestic troubles are over, mine are beginning. I spent the whole morning in the usual horrors—but I don’t think they amount to much.

If I don’t hear from Clive I shall take it for granted they’re not coming.

Your B.

We have settled to stay on here till Oct. 6th

It would give me infinite pleasure to see you.

Berg

[]

970: To Vanessa Bell

Thursday [12 September 1918]

[Asheham, Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest,

Leonard means to try and come in spite of the weather. I’ve not heard from Clive. We can have them later for the night if they dont mind putting up with our solitary char.

I don’t quite know what arrangements to make about coming over, as I shall have my affairs next week. I’d like to come tomorrow, but I don’t know if I shall be able to in this weather.

I suppose it wd. be all right if I turned up. Gertler is coming on Saturday week.

Both the servants have now given notice! Its the most idiotic story I ever heard, but Leonard will tell you. I don’t think they will go in the end, as Nelly is very anxious to stay—still, I’m not going to press them this time.

Barbara [Bagenal] seems to have been too silly, and started all kinds of gossip about them down here, which adds to the difficulties. It’s a lesson against lending one’s house.

Do you think you have any small Chinese coat or wrapper which I could wear in the evening while the Webbs are here? My evening clothes are so thin they seem rather foolish. Also, have you any lace fronts that I could wear inside my little blue jacket instead of my yellow handkerchief. I seem to have got fearfully shabby and G. Young is coming too. Anything you could spare I should be glad of—and I would send them back on Monday—by Nelly. Do you want Mrs Hammond to bring all her ration cards? I suppose so.

I’ve lost the woollen cap you made me. This is a hint.

Yr B.

Perhaps the best plan wd. be for me to come tomorrow for the night, if that suits you.

Dont tell Trissie anything about N. and L: as she of course seems to have been doing her best to get them to leave, and made some impression on Lottie, though none on N.

Berg

[]

971: To Molly Maccarthy

[September ? 1918]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest Molly,

I know you detest getting letters, so this will only be the shortest possible line to say how greatly and sincerely I’ve enjoyed your book [A Pier and a Band] and only wished at the end that there was another volume to begin again.

For goodness sake write another entirely made of letters. I liked them best. I didn’t care for the building disputes, or for Mr Tippits, or Sir John or Mr Villiers; I didn’t want to be told about the German Empire; all the rest I thought purely delightful, and how I envied you your beautiful malicious phrases which look so simple to begin with and then give a flick of their tails and sum up an entire character or situation—Perdita’s power, of course, which makes her so uncompromising, in spite of the fact that her manners are exquisite—indeed, one of the few ladies in modern fiction.

Fitzgerald is one of the most delightful characters in real life—But I assure you that you must at once begin another book entirely of letters.

Now, that’s over! Aren’t you glad!

Yrs V.W.

Mrs Michael MacCarthy

[]

972: To Clive Bell

Saturday [14 September 1918]

Postcard

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

Tuesday next would suit as well as any other night, if you and Mary [Hutchinson] liked to stop here on your way to Charleston.

The week end is no good for us—Would you let me have a line?

V.W.

Quentin Bell

[]

973: To Vanessa Bell

Monday [16 September 1918]

[Asheham, Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest

There seems a fate against my coming. I’ve had to lend Nelly my bicycle today, and also I’ve got to interview Mrs Geall [daily help], so I cant get over. I daresay its just as well, and your brats will be coming, and I should be jealous.

I will try and come tomorrow, Early, about 11. or 11.30. and come back here for tea. Clive wrote, and I suggested they should come here for Tuesday night so I should have to get back; but it seems the only chance of seeing you.

God! What a week end we had! Incessant talk for 46 hours, and the Webbs up at 5.30 chattering in their rooms, and George Young, just like Hilton, holding forth in the most serious and romantic way, very slow and stiff and incredibly honourable.

It was really rather fun—anyhow now that it’s over. But I must tell you—

Yr B.

Berg

[]

974: To Roger Fry

17th Sept. [1918]

Asheham House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

My dear Roger,

Is there any chance that you would come to us on Saturday next, 21st: for the week end? I’ve just seen Clive and Mary and they say they’re not going to you till later, and are staying at Charleston over the week end. Gertler is coming to us; so it would be very suitable if you would come, and very delightful too, and then you could take Nessa back to Guildford with you (you see I am making out an unanswerable case).

I’m telling Gertler to catch the 1.55 at Victoria, and then catch the 3.58 on to Glynde and walk out, as I don’t suppose he’ll be able to afford a fly, and the trains connect, for a wonder.

Would you bring your butter, as we are kept very short of what we’re allowed even. I cant promise much in the way of cooking, as the servants are on their holidays, but if you’ll tell me what you’re ordered, I will do my best to get it.

Its very lovely here. Even the barren heart of Mrs Webb kindled slightly at the view, and she has instructed me to find her a house near where she can die in—that being her mania, apparently. We had a wonderful week end, and I feel the whole world, and all its population, flattened out for myriads of miles in consequence of our argument.

Yr. V.W.

Sussex

[]

975: To Barbara Bagenal

20th Sept. [1918]

Asheham, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

Dear Barbara,

We can’t thank you at all adequately for your pat of butter. Butter is far the most precious thing in the world here, because the Co-ops can only give us 2 ozs. a week, which merely greases the top of one’s toast at breakfast, and leaves one to dry bread at tea. Now we look forward to 7 good teas; at each one you and Nick shall be blessed by name. But how on earth do you manage to spare it? It seems to me the height of generosity.

I had never missed the Hardy, I confess, but I am very glad to have it back again. It is infinite ages since we met—the last time is connected in my mind chiefly, but not entirely, with your very handsome brindled cat. I feel that your house will always be comfortable and distinguished with such a cat. But where is your house going to be, and is it true that Nick is becoming a farmer? Well, I don’t suppose any woman in Hampstead has lived through so many things in a year as you have. Printing at Hogarth must look like something seen through opera glasses upside down. I am so domestic as to think that nothing can be quite so important as child bearing, and I’m so envious that I dont think I shall speak to you; and yet they tell me you pretend to dismiss it all with a shrug, and the brat is to be looked after by a committee of matrons!

I have been entirely sunk in the pitchy and indeed stinking waters of domestic strife—in which by the way you are remotely concerned. After suffering for a long time, I told Lottie she must clean our jugs and basins. This, as I expected, produced first a torrent of abuse; then she gave notice; then she accused me of lending my house to strangers, who left it very dirty, and gave her a bad name with the cottagers, and used up all the coal. This refers to Mrs Mason [servant] of course. Do you think there’s any truth in it?—I dont for a moment suppose that she left the house dirtier than she found it, but I wonder if she complained to Mrs Attfield, and also whether there was some mystery about the coal? Lottie now, as usual, wants to stay on; but we are assured that our coal has been stolen. Can you remember if there was much when you came, and any left when you went? It really doesn’t matter, as we cant do anything more than buy a new padlock, which we have already done; and leaving the house as we do, one must expect a good deal of dirt and some stealing I suppose.

Charleston is full of Clive and Mary and Mrs B[rereton] come back, and the children home again. Clive and Mary should be here at this moment, but she took ill, as they say; and as we’ve only a charwoman, and Mary can’t help being a lady, I’m a little relieved. We’ve been having the Sidney Webbs, and tomorrow Gertler comes, and then, thank God, absolute silence and sloth for 10 days. But shall you be in London on the 7th October? Are you going to take to vegetables too? I’ll try to write to Saxon, but I feel unable to conceive him in a Homburg hat, on the Parade or in the Wall before breakfast.

We’re sending you some mushrooms that we picked in the hollow this afternoon in thanksgiving for the butter.

Yr V.W.

Berg

[]

976: To Clive Bell

Friday [20 September 1918]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

My dear Clive,

We were very sorry that you couldn’t come yesterday, especially as it seems impossible to suggest any feasible plan for meeting. I can’t come over today, not only because of the weather and my puncture (I smashed the pump too, trying to blow the type up and so had to walk home) but also I have to squeeze out suddenly a long review.

We will try to manage something on Sunday. Roger can’t come, so Gertler will be here alone.

I hope Mary is better. I can’t help suspecting that she was overcome, on setting out, by her fear of meeting my just curiosity about that story [for the Hogarth Press].

Would she have the kindness to send me Eliots address once more. I lost it the first time.

Your V.W.

If anyone comes to lunch on Sunday they will bring their own food.

Quentin Bell

[]

977: To Vanessa Bell

Saturday [5 October 1918]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest,

What a fearful bore about your attempted miscarriage! For Gods sake be careful, and remember your responsibilities. The only 7 months child known to me was Hugo Montgomerie [unidentified], and I dont want my pick and cream of creation to go giving young women in hansom cabs khaki bibles.

I am immensely interested by the servant developments. I rather suspected something of the kind though Nelly said nothing about it when she wrote except that she had seen you. I dont think there’s any good attempting to forecast what they will wish to do. Only 2 days before the row Nelly told me that they had never felt so settled—But if they say that they want to go to you I shall certainly not attempt to persuade them to stay. I’m unselfish enough to be rather anxious that they should go to you, as I believe they’d be on their honour to behave well, and you’d find them a great comfort compared with Emily—(God! what horrors you do have!) Anyhow, I’m not going to say anything, but I shall let them broach the whole matter to me. Of course, I don’t altogether want them to go, from our point of view as they have great merits, and Nelly has been extremely nice all this time. On the other hand, I don’t believe Lottie will ever swallow all her grievances (I wonder what she said that they were?) and of course I’m a good deal tempted by the idea of running Asheham and Hogarth on quite a different system. I will come to tea on Wednesday, and then I suppose I shall have discussed the whole thing about 20 times over with them, and may be able to throw some light on it. My own impression from what Nelly told me is that Lottie wants to go because she thinks we don’t appreciate her, and she herself wants to stay.

Except for Gertler’s visit we’ve been quite alone here, and there’s a great deal to be said for living in the country. I wanted to ask the children over for the day, but I didn’t know whether Mrs B. would like it—I suppose you have been in the heart of civilisation—I wish I knew whether you are really better. I don’t believe you realise what a frightful grind you’ve had, what with rabbits, house moving, agriculture, governesses, for the last two years. Never have another child, and eat every bone in Gordon Sqre. I had a doleful letter from Barbara, who seemed to think that her life would be lightened if we asked her here, but I sent her some mushrooms instead—I had Mrs Sturgeon, Mr Sturgeon and Flora Woolf [Leonard’s sister] who’s now Mrs George Sturgeon over, and they told us all sorts of gossip about the country side. They want us to go and play tennis next summer. There’s a house to let at Kingston.

B.

I think it would be wise to burn this letter at once.

Berg

[]

978: To Lytton Strachey

Oct. 12th [1918]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond

Dearest Lytton,

I’m extremely sorry to hear distressing accounts of your diseases. Goldie [G. Lowes Dickinson] has been having the shingles too, and goes to a marvellous doctor, a quack, I suppose, who is curing him quickly and completely. He lays his fingers upon the tips of the nerves, and you can see the poison withdrawing as you watch. Would it be worth while to find out something more strictly accurate?

However, you must consider that boils, blisters, rashes, green and blue vomits are all appointed by God himself to those whose books go into 4 editions within 6 months. Shingles, I can assure you, is only a first instalment; don’t complain if the mange visits you, and the scurvy, and your feet swell and the dropsy distends and the scab itches—I mean you won’t get any sympathy from me. Did I tell you that Violet Dickinson encountered Mrs H. Ward who was raging publicly against the defamation of her grandfather, and thereby giving the liveliest joy to Lady Horner, who feels that you have worked off several old scores beyond her reach, and therefore blesses you every night as a benefactor? I’m now going to discover the Cromer attitude to Gordon in private.

Here we are back in Richmond again, and even plunged into a mild form of society, mild to you that is—to me the climax of dissipation. What with the approach of peace and the Russian dancers [Diaghilev], the gallant Sitwells, and the poetical Edith, Ottoline utterly abandoned and nefarious, Duncan covered with paint from head to foot, Nessa abounding in babies, Saxon wrung with rheumatics, Robbie Ross found dead in his shirtsleeves, Roger going to lay him out, Oscar Wilde’s widow bursting in dead drunk—and so forth—all the things that invariably happen in London in October—it’s a pleasant change. We went to hear Lord Grey’s speech to begin with, and I had the pleasure of sitting exactly behind Mrs Asquith and Elizabeth [her daughter]. I felt, at that distance, fairly secure against their fascination, and when [Reginald] McKenna and Lord Harcourt came in and sat down beside them I felt it would be a very great condescension on my part to drink tea out of the same cup—which I suspect to be one of their domestic habits. However I was impressed and exalted by Lord Grey. What an Englishman! What a gentleman! As for accusing him of dishonesty, one might as well accuse a pair of brown boots—of which indeed he constantly reminded me. His speech was nothing to get excited over, but on the other hand it was obviously impossible for him to manage any kind of peroration, which I thought much to his credit.

Then there was the Sitwells’ party, at which it was proposed to read aloud a sentence of banishment upon Ottoline (whose conduct seems to have surpassed itself—and yet even in vice what a magnificence she has!)—but this of course meant no more than that we withdrew to somebody’s bedroom in great numbers and left Ottoline, got up to look precisely like the Spanish Armada in full sail, in possession of the drawing room. Perhaps more happened after I left. But how fearfully old one’s getting! There I left her, with equanimity, to have her feathers pulled out by the vicious old Roger, who has a febrile senility coming on, as I told him in the cab, quite unlike our elderly benignity—It’s an attempt at youth perhaps—Do you feel this tolerance creeping into your veins too? Literature remains of course—however there’s no room to begin upon that. I read the Greeks [Sophocles], but I am extremely doubtful whether I understand anything they say; also I have read the whole of Milton, without throwing any light upon my own soul, but that I rather like. Don’t you think it very queer though that he entirely neglects the human heart? Is that the result of writing one’s masterpiece at the age of 50? What about your masterpiece? And when are you coming to London? Please tell Carrington that we are waiting for her wood-cuts. Leonard sends his love.

Yr. V.W.

Frances Hooper

[]

979: To Roger Fry

15th Oct. [1918]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, S.W.

My dear Roger,

I am sending you a spare copy of our pamphlet [Two Stories]—rather damaged, but I daresay you won’t see much to choose between it and the perfect copies. You never told me what you thought of Prelude. We are asking Eliot to let us print a poem, and I’ve done a new short story [Kew Gardens], illustrated by Nessa, and we’ve some [projected] woodcuts by Carrington, but we labour as usual under the difficulty of getting our [new] press delivered—it withdraws further and further.

Did you pick out any of Ottoline’s fine tail feathers the other night? I heard of her early morning raid upon Gordon Sqre, and how Nessa demolished her, and how the angularity of her body appeared like that of a foundered cab horse in the morning light. But with such a fund of dishonesty and vitality how is any arrow of ours to strike her heart?—it is a movable target—that, I believe, is what we find so disconcerting.

I had two hours alone with Herbert Fisher last night, and found him though sedate and even aged infinitely improved from what he used to be at Oxford. Even Parliament, I suppose, is an improvement upon that. But what humbugs they all are!—or rather hypnotised by the incantation of some siren quite invisible to the outside world, as I tried to explain to him, without much success.

Yr. V.W.

Sussex

[]

980: To Vanessa Bell

Saturday [19 October 1918]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dearest,

I am sure you would like a little gossip from me this morning; and perhaps take to your old dried pen in response. Suppose I gave you a new one?

What I really want to know is how your domestic affairs are turning out? I suppose the cook has now come. I’m sure that I could find you not only a cook but a nurse, if she doesn’t do; so please tell me and let me set my wits to work.

I expect the tide is already setting back to service again, and few things give me a greater sense of being like other mature women, which as you know is the ambition of my life, than going to registry offices, and talking about “my sister has a governess and two small boys.” I feel at once on the road to reality or whatever one may call it. As for my domestics, they are now unfortunately, grovelling at our feet; Lottie and Leonard twit each other about their bad tempers, and of course its all very expensive and not really to my taste so nice as being with Mrs Geall at Asheham, except for the comfort.

Did I tell you how I had a visit from Herbert Fisher last Sunday? I was sitting alone at tea, very shabby, and the servants out when the bell rang, and I opened the door thinking to find the milk man and found Herbert and Olive and Michael Heseltine! Happily the Heseltines disappeared, and I had about 2 hours tête a tête with Herbert. He has become rather like one of those wise old sheep dogs whose eyes have become slightly pale; but he is much less supercilious than he was at Oxford. He had just seen Lord Milner [Secretary of State for War] who said that we had won the war that day and we shall have peace by Christmas; Apparently the French are sticking out for the evacuation of Alsace-Lorraine before they will agree to an armistice; but according to Lord Milner the Germans are so sensible that they see that it is best now to accept any terms and mean to fight no more. But I suppose you have heard all this from Maynard.

Herbert was surprisingly sensible—perhaps because he knew our opinions—about war in general: however, he believes in public schools, and said you’d better send Julian and Quentin to Winchester, where they get the best education in the world.

Then we had old Ka to dinner. Will is once more in hospital—this time with water on the knee—from what you and Duncan will doubtless draw your own conclusions. Clive and Mary whom I floundered in upon at Gordon Sqre are of opinion that some enlargement of his parts is necessary, though I dont believe they’d consent to undertake that at a naval hospital, and anyhow Ka doesn’t mean to have a family until they’re settled in the country. They are going to live on the top of one of the Wiltshire downs, so that Will can see nothing but the sky, which is the only thing he likes to paint though a certain amount of green is admitted very low down on the edge of the canvas. She said that his pictures—which are the passion of his life—are very old fashioned, but very remarkable.

It sounds to me about as bad as it can be, which is of course very satisfactory, and she also has to make out that he is very wild and mad—He is heir to an estate and a large income; but he has given it all up to his younger brother—so you can judge exactly the sort of pictures he must paint and in fact all about him. We’re going to dine with them, so I’ll let you know more, if the subject interests you. Unfortunately I’ve got my affairs and can’t go to a large family tea party which Ka’s sister is giving in Harley St. today—though it would give me infinite pleasure.

Then we had Saxon. Everybody, of course, has entirely failed to see what I saw at the first glance; he is happier than he has ever been in his life. After a short conversation I saw that Mrs Stagg is far more to him than Barbara; and then he has got a complete or almost complete set of gold teeth. This is one of the great interests of his life. He takes them out and hands them round, and explains exactly which of the teeth are useful, which ornamental, and at what points others will probably—not certainly—have to be added next year. He has got through love, and has got down to the solid foundations—Stagg and false teeth. He is already talking of Bayreuth, and whether we shall have an opera next year—if so, will [Arthur] Nikish or [Richard] Strauss conduct—then the singers—and so on—Barbara was merely an interlude owing to there being no opera.

I have begun my artistic education again. I went to see the Rodins at the Albert Museum [posthumous exhibition]. I didn’t think at all highly of them, except from the literary point of view, and even so they’re not as good as Epsteins. But I see I shall have to write a novel entirely about carpets, old silver, cut glass and furniture. The desire to describe becomes almost a torment; and also the covetousness to possess. I dont think this has much to do with their artistic value though. Please tell me what picture shows there are.

How are you, and the remarkable baby upon whom all my future hopes for the world may be said to rest?

Yr B

Have you cut the wood blocks? Would you send them? We hope to begin next week. We have a chance of another press.

Did you find out anything about twilight sleep.

Berg

[]

981: To Roger Fry

Monday [21 October 1918]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, S.W.

My dear Roger,

I saw your father’s death in the paper—it must have been a great mercy, after all these months. I’m afraid though all the surroundings must be half gloomy and horrible perhaps and how strange for you to be there arranging things.

I can’t come this Thursday, as I’m going out—but could you ask me the week after—any night but Monday or Tuesday would suit me. I’m immensely pleased, of course, with what you say about the Mark [on the Wall], and would like to believe it true, since the quality you speak of is one I recognise certainly in others. I’m not sure that a perverted plastic sense doesn’t somehow work itself out in words for me.

I spent an hour looking at pots and carpets in the museums the other day, until the desire to describe them became like the desire for the lusts of the flesh.

However, I’m rushing to catch a train, and I must hope to see you and have an enormous talk.

Yours ever,
Virginia Woolf

Sussex

[]

982: To Vanessa Bell

Friday [25 October 1918]

1917 Club, 4 Gerrard Street, W.1.

Dearest,

I’ve just been to the Omega show, and had the great pleasure of seeing your picture sold for £15 to Mr Jowett, so Roger said—however I’m not writing to say that but to have some occupation which shall save me from Jack Squire, in the midst of the most appalling uproar, of the most degraded looking C. O’s who are all met here to croak like so many dull raucous vociferating and disgorging cormorants. This being so, I can’t give you my extreme and intense impressions of the show, as I mean to. I have to wait for Leonard to come out to dinner. There is Mrs Manus, and Langdon Davies, and Old Hobson and Commander Grenfell—but I fail to convey the horror of their joint attack. We’ve just had tea with Roger and discussed the Burial Service [of Roger’s father]; and Lytton has wired to us in “extreme desolation” to go there for the week end; which L. is going to do—at least for Saturday only. Oliver [Strachey] says the twilight of Carrington approaches. I feel more and more convinced that advanced views are purely a matter of physiognomy. For instance the lady in green, with check trimmings in her hat and a face like a ruddy but diseased apple—one cleft asunder by a brown growth—had nother [sic] excuse for existence. The noise is terrific.

Perhaps I can pull an evening paper towards me. The show was a great success—according to Roger—drawings selling like potatoes. Bobo [Mayor] was there, sumptuous and prolific: Sitwell: Irene [Noel-Baker] is going to have a baby.

Berg

[]

983: To Vanessa Bell

Sunday [27 October 1918]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dearest,

I dont know whether to laugh or hold up my hands in amazement at the charges made against me in the Mary [Hutchinson]—Gertler affair, and at the general state of affairs revealed by your letter and Lytton’s account, both of which were sprung upon me yesterday. However, I’d better tell you what happened at Asheham. We both remember quite well the only conversation with Gertler about Mary, and agree as to what was said. Gertler told us how extremely interesting Mary was, how easy he found her, and how they discussed every subject together. I said that I’d no doubt this was true, but that she was always very silent with me, and that I scarcely knew her. There was no question as to whether I liked her or not. Gertler then said how strange it was that she was silent with us and asked whether I had ever seen her at Charleston and whether she was silent there too. I said that I’d only seen her there once, but that I thought she was just as silent with you as with me. There was absolutely no discussion as to what you thought of Mary. Gertler did not ask me; and was much more interested in discussing his own relations with her than anyone elses.

In fact, I’m prepared to write to Mary or to swear in a court of law that nothing was said or insinuated which could have led Gertler to suppose that you were bored by Mary, criticised her, or in any sort of way found fault with her.

After all, why should I have made out that you dislike Mary? You’ve certainly always said you liked her to me, and I’ve always maintained that the whole of your relationship is a triumph of sense and civilisation for every one concerned. As Shearman and Hutchinson have a motive for making mischief I should have thought it was more reasonable to impute it entirely to them. I don’t think Gertler was in the least malicious or even inquisitive, but entirely absorbed in himself and his own relations as usual.

At the same time I cant conceive why, even had I said that you disliked Mary, it should have ‘nearly had disastrous results’ for you, as you say, or upset Mary for more than a moment. She had only to go to you and ask you the truth, and spend an hour or two in abusing me, which she is quite welcome to do. The exaggeration seems to me terrific and absurd.

However, thats none of my business. What I object to, naturally I think, is being made the victim of this infernal spy system. It’s quite plain that it’s hopeless for us to try and know each other’s friends, and in future I shall try and steer clear of Gertler, Shearman, Mary, Jack, Clive and all the rest of that set. I suppose I should have been wise if I had done so in the beginning. But shall I wind up my relations with Mary by writing her an exact copy of what I have said to you?

Now I’ve wasted all my time writing this, and I cant go on to tell you about Edith Sichel’s life, or Saxon or Lady Mary Murray—After all, how am I to know that Mrs Stagg mayn’t have committed suicide already on hearing through Barbara through Trissie through Blanche that I said he preferred his gold teeth to her?

Yr B.

Berg

[]

984: To Lady Robert Cecil

Nov. 4th [1918]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond

Dear Nelly,

How delightful to hear from you again! I wanted to write to you the other day at Asheham, but not knowing your address seemed to make it perfectly useless.

I’m afraid luncheon on Sunday is impossible, but would it suit you if we came about 4 that afternoon instead? We should very much like to.

With all respect for your neighbours the Sidney Webbs, Mrs Green, and the Herbert Fishers, I dont think they’re a good exchange for Grove End Road. Still, I remember finding the river very pleasant to look at when I’ve been sitting in the Webbs drawing room feeling more than usually convinced of my own ignorance. In future (that is if I’m ever asked again) I shall fix my mind upon you.

Your aff.
Virginia Woolf

Hatfield

[]

985: To Vanessa Bell

Thursday [7 November 1918]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dearest,

There are so many different matters to go into that I think I’d better address you in the form of a newspaper. In the first place,

Domestic Quarrels.

The situation is much calmer. I daresay Lytton’s account of Mary was rather highly coloured. I got the impression that she was conveyed about London in taxi cabs in a fainting condition, only recovering to execrate me and then burst into tears, fling herself into Clives arms, grovel on the floor at your feet, denounce us all for traitors and vipers, so that finally Lytton himself had to be invoked to assure her that she was universally (with the insignificant exception of V. W.) adored. Naturally, I contrasted this with my own unflinching courage under far worse persecution; and you enduring spites and malevolences innumerable with the scorn of Cleopatra’s needle. I said to myself (everything in future is to be said to myself) that if Mary plays games she oughtn’t to mind burning candles; the truth is that these young people rush into situations which they can’t carry out. The only solution for Mary seems to me divorce; otherwise she must spend the rest of her life in the swamp with these stinging but semi animate reptiles.

But I must also clear my reputation for common sense. Carrington had warned me about Gertler as well as you; so that my position was guarded in the extreme. If you could have heard my fulsome praises of Ottoline—and how I picked my way whenever Mary was mentioned with the foresight of an elephant—moreover, except to you I never find fault with Mary and the utmost I’ve ever said about her was that she was sleeping in a forest with the cockatoo’s singing their sweetest in the moonlight—purely visionary remarks, since to me she is little more (at present, and I suppose forever) than a highly sympathetic shade. Molly [MacCarthy] seems to have struck up a friendship with her.

Practical Affairs.

I have sent you a parcel of eatables, which, they say, will be at Glynde station on Saturday morning without fail. They wouldn’t go by post, so they had to go by train. I chose them rather at random, so please tell me which turns out best, and please eat some of them yourself.

Woodcuts

I enclose a proof—not nearly black enough, but we only had our hand machine. If you can’t see the details, I will get a better one done on the printers machine. We should be very glad of another, if you would do one; but it ought to be small—about half the size of this. I think the book will be a great success—owing to you: and my vision comes out much as I had it, so I suppose, in spite of everything, God made our brains upon the same lines, only leaving out 2 or 3 pieces in mine.

Art. Gossip. Friendship etc. etc. etc.

I’ve got any amount to say, having been to the Omega twice, the National Gallery once; having gone to tea with Katherine Murry, and dined with Ka and Will, and promised to go to tea with Nelly Cecil, and having some compliments for you, as well as a profoundly interesting theory about Duncan’s painting: and theres Miss Sichel too—I could write pages about her—but I’ve been seized by toothache, and I must now rush off to the dentist, and I couldn’t do my ideas justice. Please tell me how you are.

Embrace Duncan.

Yr B.

Am I to write to Mary?

Berg

[]

986: To Vanessa Bell

11.30, Nov. 11th [Armistice Day, 1918]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dearest,

The guns have been going off for half an hour, and the sirens whistling; so I suppose we are at peace, and I cant help being glad that your precious imp will be born into a moderately reasonable world. I see we’re not going to be allowed any quiet all day, as people seem to be whistling and giving catcalls and stirring up the dogs to bark, though its all done in such an intermittent kind of way that its not in the least impressive—only unsettling. Besides its very grey and smoky,—oh dear, now drunken soldiers are beginning to cheer.

How am I to write my last chapter with all this shindy, and Nelly and Lottie bursting in to ask—here is Nelly with 4 different flags which she is putting in all the front rooms. Lottie says we ought to do something, and I see she is going to burst into tears. She insists upon polishing the door knocker, and shouting out across the road to the old fireman who lives opposite. O God! What a noise they make—and I, on the whole though rather emotional (would you be, I wonder?) feel also immensely melancholy; yes, you’re well out of it, because every taxi is now hooting, and the school children I know will form up round the flag in a moment. There is certainly an atmosphere of the death bed too. At this moment a harmonium is playing a hymn, and a large Union Jack has been hoisted onto a pole. But this must be fearfully dull to read about.

As to gossip, we went to tea with Nelly [Cecil] yesterday, and afterwards to a concert given at Shelley House; but first imagine poor Nelly more shrivelled and sunken than ever, wearing the most piteous expression, like an imprisoned monkey; I’ve never seen anyone who seemed to ask one more to put her out of her misery. They’ve moved to a horrid little house on the Embankment, which she has done up in the old Kitty [Maxse], chinz curtains, white walls, green boards style. I rather liked her though. She agreed that Leo and Lord Northcliffe ought to be banished as well as the Kaiser, and said she thought the English in many ways worse than the Germans. And then we went on to this appalling [Shelley] house, where I’d been asked by Bruce Richmond, and there I saw our entire past, alive, incredibly the same as ever—Mrs Rathbone, Mrs Muir MacKenzie, Enid M. M., precisely as she was at Hyde Park Gate, Hervey Vaughan Williams, any number of people who weren’t exactly George [Duckworth] but might have been; all dressed up so irreproachably so nice, kind, respectable—so insufferable—. You remember the kind of politeness, and the little jokes, and all the deference, and opening doors for one, and looking as if the mention of the w.c. even would convey nothing whatever to them. I enjoyed it immensely; but I couldn’t help seeing us in white satin Mrs Young’s being taken down to supper. The house itself is incredible—an enormous, cultivated, sham 18th century house, with vast portraits of young girls holding bunches of roses, and looking into the future, while a small white path meanders away under apple trees in the distance. And then, painted on the panels, were those sort of geographical pictures which are meant to be not quite serious but very charming; maps of Chelsea hospital, with decorative clouds, all very flat, and brightly coloured. And pale green Morris curtains; and china pots standing on little wooden stools; Italy represented too, by casts of the Virgin and child; scrolls of Japanese figures; but all infinitely pale, watery, and ugly, far worse than any plush lodging house.

This, by the way, applies also to the decorations of Wills and Ka’s flat, which impressed me very disagreeably; acid lemon colours against black curtains, and one white rose against a wall the colour of skim milk. There’s no doubt that you have done a great work in rolling up the shams; at least I dislike a great many things now with an intensity which owing to my punishment in the case of Mary [Hutchinson], I daresay I should be wise to hide.

What one instinctively says about Will is “What a Whippersnapper!” but I implore you, don’t give this out as my considered opinion. Its the effect of his little mongrel cur’s body; his face which appears powdered and painted like a very refined old suburban harlots; and his ridiculous little voice. I saw Ka get nervous when my eyes rested too long upon him. She was much relieved when he began to use slang and talk manly; and I daresay he has his parts, (I dont mean only in the physical sense) but I’m as convinced as I am that the church bells have now begun to ring that he’ll never be a painter. I saw one worried and fretful work of his—the downs by moonlight; but he said it was a sketch, and hinted very modestly that he didn’t belong to the Omega school. He expressed great admiration for you and Duncan, as painters; and you’d be amused to hear what an impression you as a human being made on him. You had only to come into the Friday Club he said to change the feeling completely; I gathered you made things real, and large, and infinitely composed and profound.

“Yes, I’ll always maintain, said old Ka, who sat on the hearthrug stitching at one of her usual cushions, that Vanessa is one of the few great people I’ve ever known.”

“Ah but my dear Ka, try and explain how she does it!” I cried.

Then we set to and analysed the famous remark of mine about your reality, which they both said that they felt strongly, and thought most remarkable, so I’m not alone.

You will have heard of Barbara’s brat. Saxon seems fairly composed, and means to call it Judith. According to Oliver [Strachey] he assumes that he is the spiritual begetter at any rate, and Nick scarcely counts even for that act; Oliver agrees with me that Saxon is happier than usual.

Then we had [H. T. J.] Norton to dinner, and I felt a kind of reverence for him, as the representative of old Cambridge, as we knew it, in the days of “personal emotions”; I must say I think it probably the highest type in the world, and it solves all my religious feelings. We’ve now had marriage bells, one hymn, God save the King twice over, about a dozen separate cheers, and the old gentleman opposite has climbed to the top of a tree with an immense Union Jack.

Yr VW

Berg

[]

987: To Vanessa Bell

Wednesday [13 November 1918]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dearest,

Modesty requires me to say that you will be sick of the sight of my handwriting—So now thats said. The truth is that its still very difficult to settle to anything. Peace seems to make much more difference than one could have thought possible, though I think the rejoicing, so far as I’ve seen it, has been very sordid and depressing. I expect it was much better in the country, and I wish we’d been at Asheham, and come over and had a civilised debauch with you and the brats.

I had to go to the dentist in Wigmore St. on Monday, at 3, and by 4 the streets were in such a state that if I hadn’t met L: and buffeted through the crowd with him I dont think I should have got home. As it was a small boy was almost crushed in the tube at my feet; we were so packed we could hardly pick him out; everyone seemed half drunk—beer bottles were passed round—every wounded soldier was kissed, by women; nobody had any notion where to go or what to do; it poured steadily; crowds drifted up and down the pavements waving flags and jumping into omnibuses, but in such a disorganised, half hearted, sordid state that I felt more and more melancholy and hopeless of the human race. The London poor, half drunk and very sentimental or completely stolid with their hideous voices and clothes and bad teeth, make one doubt whether any decent life will ever be possible, or whether it matters if we’re at war or at peace. But I suppose the poor wretches haven’t much notion how to express their feelings. At present it seems to be a mixture of Bank Holiday and Sunday. The clocks strike incessantly, in a very disordered way. So far the only change I’ve noticed is that we get no newspapers because the boys won’t deliver them, and the buses are lit up, but our lamps are as dark as ever, and the telephones have practically broken down.

I’m going up to see Katherine Mansfield today, and I shall ask Fortnum and Masons about your parcel. It contained only delicacies like paté de foie gras and short bread which won’t go bad; and I think its most likely that the trains were too disorganised to deliver it. But I’ll add a note at the end of this to say what the people at the shop think.

Did Bunny ever get a letter from me containing a £1 note for honey, I must have sent it more than a week ago; I hope it wasn’t stolen; we’ve had to take to making our own butter by shaking milk in a bottle, as our allowance is very scanty. Jam also is rather scarce, so I hope we may get our honey in time.

Poor Katherine Mansfield seems very bad, though I dont like to ask her how bad, and she says she’s going to Switzerland with Murry and will be cured. I can’t help finding her very interesting, in spite of her story [Bliss] in the English Review; at least she cares about writing, which as I’m coming to think, is about the rarest and most desirable of gifts. I had a fearfully depressing talk with old Janet Case the other day; at the end of which I came to the conclusion that when nice educated people who’ve spent their lives in teaching Greek and ought to know something about it, have less feeling for modern fiction, including my own which she advised me to give up and take to biography instead since that was ‘useful’, than a stranded jelly fish on which the flies have already settled, its high time for us writers to retire to the South Seas.

There’s practically no one in London now whom I can talk to either about my own writing or Shakespeares. I’m beginning to think that I’d better stop writing novels, since no one cares a damn whether one writes them or not. Do you ever feel that your entire life is useless—passed in a dream, into which now and then these brutal buffaloes come butting? or are you always certain that you matter, and matter more than other people? I believe having children must make a lot of difference; and yet perhaps its no good making them responsible for one’s own inefficiency—but I mean rather transparency—nonentity—unreality.

Here I am now at the 17 Club. London seems quieted down—only one drunken soldier abusing an officer—only one old lady making a speech in the train about “what we owe you boys.”

I’ve been to Fortnum’s and Masons, who say that the parcel was probably not sent last week owing to the rush they were in. If it hasn’t come in the next day or two, would you send me a line, as they will find out about it.

I’ve sent the woodcut. I’m very pleased you’re doing another. We are getting along with the printing so send them as soon as you can—at least the big one. The other wd. do later.

What are Duncan and Bunny going to do? Adrian seems to be staying on at present—so does Norton—Gerald [Shove] asked L. to lunch today, I suppose to discuss how he’s to get work.

Now I must go—but I feel as if I could write you sheets every day. For example, I want to express my views as to your and Duncan’s duty to civilisation in future—but as I say, that must wait. I ran into Mrs Flower [unidentified] in the London Library. We merely spat at each other. Here is Oliver’s jolly lady. And Oliver [Strachey] too!

B.

Oliver’s young lady has a thin, disagreeable face (O here’s Oliver coming over)

Berg

[]

Letters 988-1001 (mid-November-December 1918)

988: To Roger Fry

Monday [18 November 1918]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

My dear Roger,

I was just writing to insist upon being asked to dine with you, but was prevented by the fear that you might think it a bore. (I imagine you, quite honestly, having all sorts of people always about you, and rather liking to settle down alone occasionally). But there’s nothing I should like better, and I only wish it happened oftener. What about next Friday, about 7.30, I suppose.

I think you are enviable, in spite of what you say, I dont mean so much in circumstances as in being yourself. I envy you for being that, but my envy is only skin deep, partly a measure of self-protection, and it doesn’t interfere in the least with my profound affection. I’d much rather dine alone with you, and talk of innumerable things.

We’ve been having that strange young man Eliot to dinner. His sentences take such an enormous time to spread themselves out that we didn’t get very far; but we did reach Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis, and how they were great geniuses, and so is Mr James Joyce—which I’m more prepared to agree to, but why has Eliot stuck in this mud? Can’t his culture carry him through, or does culture land one there? Not that I’ve read more than 10 words by Ezra Pound by [sic] my conviction of his humbug is unalterable.

Yes, Roger, the more I think of it—and I often do—the more I am convinced that you are of immense importance in the world.

Yours ever
V.W.

Sussex

[]

989: To Vanessa Bell

Tuesday [19 November 1918]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dearest,

I hope I shall be praised for taking up the pen so soon again. But you know the form of thanks I like—a few reflections, however bald; not but what you possess a natural style of considerable eloquence and vigour, as I have told you more than once.

As to business—in the first place about Asheham. I think it can be managed all right if you would let me know fairly soon which weekend you want to have it. We had some thoughts of going down ourselves one weekend before long—Would it do if the children had our bedroom, and Mrs B[rereton, the governess]. my study, and do you think they could manage with one sitting room—either Leonard’s or the drawing room?

I don’t expect they’d use much coal, but the rooms would have to be aired first, and we’ve got to make our coal last over Christmas—but I think we’ve got plenty. There’s a certain amount of wood cut up in the little room out of Leonard’s room. We always use this in the sitting room; and I think there’s enough for a week end. I’m sure Mrs B. is most economical; implore her not to say anything about the filthy condition of the house; nor to be shocked at the number of my old skirts.

Let me know when they want it, and I’ll write to Mrs Geall [caretaker]. She’s very good if they should want her to do anything.

We’re getting on with the printing [Kew Gardens]. Have you any idea how many copies we ought to sell—what price we could ask? I saw a dummy copy of the Omega book, which is very magnificent but fearfully expensive; I don’t see how one’s to buy it; and the sands are running out; soon it will be 15/-.

Possibly you know some names of artists whom I might send notices to; we think of getting 2 or 3 little books ready before we send out, so as to give people something at once.

By the way, is there any paper thats specially good for wood cuts? I rather think we shall print the big one on a separate sheet and paste it in, so we could get the right paper for it—What about the cover? I dont think Roger’s prices have gone down, but I’m dining with him tonight, and I’ll ask. Suppose I dashed off another little story, would you do some pictures for that, or is the priceless specimen, my nephew, too near to make it possible? Talking of babies, [G. E.] Moore has got a son today; and Gladys Holman Hunt is married to a captain of some kind—a bold kind I should think to wipe up that appalling mid Victorian mess. When did it happen? In the early nineties of last Century? I know I was mad at Welwyn at the time [1904]. And as for gossip, you’ll be amused and delighted to hear how Ottoline spent the first day of peace. She wrote an account of it to Katherine [Mansfield]. She has reached the depths of disillusionment. Siegfried Sassoon was there and “terribly, terribly Spoilt. I never want to see him again—so coarse, so ordinary, so just like any other conceited young guardsman—I felt he had been seeing odious people, who had changed him completely.” That was more or less her account of it; and she said how she was tired of doing kindnesses, and having her hand bitten in return; and how though on peace day she put a candle in every window, she didn’t feel happy in the least.

I’m pretty certain that Gertler has made mischief there too; she’s been in London for a week or so and never asked me to see her. The malice of that man must be considerable. Did he really make out I’d had several conversations with him about Mary? I expect that was his purpose in coming to Asheham.

The question of peace is an extremely interesting one. We literary people have been comparing our feelings a good deal. Desmond heard the news early in the morning, and went straight to Buckingham Palace. He says the crowd was very good there, and they had bands, and climbed all over the Victoria memorial, pulling themselves up by her nose and breasts; then the King and Queen came out; like two little dolls. Afterwards he wandered into a restaurant and found two men fighting, and tried to separate them and was knocked on the head, and then they apologised, and he led one of them off, whose nose was bleeding, and they spent some time in a lavatory; and he became rather depressed, and wandered off, and found things a little flat, and gave a great shout by himself on the Kings Road, and nobody took any notice of it. But he is writing an account of his feeling. I think I shall too. The dazed discontented aimless feeling was so queer; starting with such emotions and high passions, and getting gradually more and more sodden and depressed, and wanting to do something very exciting and not knowing what. [Middleton] Murry was at the War Office. He said he tried to feel but couldn’t feel anything except horror and misery. Old war office officials began saying the most extraordinary things; but he remained completely cold and disgusted. Harrison, the dentist, said that peace was much worse than war; nobody kept their appointments. Harry Stephen said that Mafeking night was far better; James Strachey didn’t seem to have noticed much difference; Oliver thought the spectacle slightly sad, but rather amusing; we’ve been trying to get up a peace party, but Ray has influenza, and no one will lend a room. Everybody walks about the streets, and looks very happy.

B.

Berg

[]

990: To Vanessa Bell

Tuesday [26 November 1918]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dearest,

Nothing would please me better than a letter every day in your roughly eloquent style. Even the handwriting has the quality of a great sheep dogs paw—a sheep dog which has been trotting sagaciously through the mud after its lambs all day long—

But to business. I haven’t been able to take a proof of the caterpillar yet [for Kew Gardens]; but I will in a day or two, and send you one. Here is another of the women, which I think comes out much more clearly. What we want to suggest is that you should now do a full page wood cut for the cover—anything of course that you like, without reference to the story. Would it be possible to cut the words Kew Gardens. Virginia Woolf. somewhere in the design? We had a notion that if you would do this we could get a wood cutter later to cut out the writing, and use the design, with another title, for further stories. If you did this, would you remember to cut the letters as clearly as possible. I enclose a sheet of paper to show you the exact size of the cover. Rogers coloured papers are very nice, but so thin that one would have to fold them over something else; and I’d much rather have a design by you—believing that your designs will be a tremendous draw. There now remains the question of what it is fair to do about payment. We think of printing 150 copies, and don’t want to charge more than 1/- each; if all are sold that makes, I think £7-10. Would you rather have a commission on the sale, or a sum down; and have you any idea how to arrange it?

I suppose the blocks themselves are rather expensive. Then we thought of putting on our notice that copies of the wood cuts are to be had separately—say at 6d each; by which means we might sell some more. One shilling is very little, considering the pictures, but the story is so short that we can easily reprint, and we want to keep our prices as low as we can.

Eliot has sent us some of his poems, which we are going to print as soon as Kew Gardens is done. Then I suppose we shall do Carrington, and perhaps a thing by Murry; and issue them all at the same time. I’ve just started another story, which may never be finished, or may go wrong; so I dont think its worth your while to do a design, though if it comes off, I hope you might do a picture for it—in fact I mean to retain your services for all my works. The story begins with two young men sitting on a beach under the skeleton of an old pilchard boat. One young man is throwing stones into the sea; the other is burrowing a hole in the sand. The beach is a long semi circular one, and they are quite near the sea (as of course they must be to throw stones into it.)

I dont see much force in Mrs B[rereton]’s. arguments against Asheham. If you would let me know in time, Mrs Geall, who is to be depended on, would have fires burning in readiness, and there’s absolutely no reason, from our point of view, why they shouldn’t stay a week.

They could have hot baths when they arrived if they got wet. I should prefer the variety of a daughter—how I should adore her!—but why talk of it?—the abundance of Judiths makes another boy inevitable; and I own so far you’ve produced nothing unseemly; its the possibilities of womanhood derived from you that I dream of.

Nick has just rung up to say how lonely Barbara is, and will I go and see her—upon some desolate promontory near Primrose Hill; which I suppose I must do; and also have Nick himself to dinner. Two nights ago we had Saxon. He told us he did not wish to live, and had decided the exact day on which he knew he would die; but when the day came, though he remembered in the morning, he forgot all about it afterwards, and so supposes that his foreboding meant nothing. He rang me up later to say that it was chiefly the rheumatism that made him dismal, but he had no absolute desire for death since the pain in his head went; and rheumatism was to be expected in November. I still think there’s some truth in my diagnosis; the gold teeth and Mrs Stagg do count for a good deal; also the opera’s coming in February. Roger and I had a frogs chorus such as you might have heard at Charleston; but you’d only have asked Duncan to shut the window if you had.

“Yes she’s the most remarkable human being I’ve ever known in my life” was the theme of it. You can imagine the dismal croaks—how we loved and sang and despaired. I rather suspect that a very grave miscarriage of emotion, portending terrific developments of a sensational kind, has happened. I got a letter from Roger this morning, no doubt continuing our rhapsody and despair; but when I opened it, it began “My dear Marie, Do come to lunch on Wednesday etc etc.” Marie must have got mine. I rang up the Omega, and the Omega says it is Marie Beerbohm [the actress]; I have written to Marie Beerbohm; begging her to read no further if her letter begins “My dear Virginia—As we said last night, my whole happiness depends upon Vanessa etc etc etc” But Marie will read further. What a set! What a set! We had Eliot, I may tell you, one of Mary’s friends; and when it came to mentioning Hammersmith I said Ealing on purpose, sacrificing veracity, even sense, upon the altar of Mary’s susceptibilities; Mary, you see, lives, or once lived at Hammersmith; and I suppose I had led Eliot to think and therefore repeat that I loathed Hammersmith? (This is now one of my favourite jokes.)

Eliot, I may add, said that he greatly admired your painting, and thought it superior even to Duncans! And yesterday I went to the London Group; couldn’t bear Allinson, or the lady whose name I cant remember, I like the witty Mdlle Lessore; and Ethel Sands has two commendable pieces, until you see that she can do nothing different; [C. R. W.] Nevinson has a piece of wall paper representing the seasons—each different, like eggs out of a hat—to me very depressing; purely conjuring tricks; Nina Hamnet does roofs; why are you artists so repetitious; does the eye for months together see nothing but roofs? Gertler certainly dominates his wall; and rather impresses me; I believe Roger has taken a turn. Who d’you think I met at Charing X? George Booth! We had an affectionate conversation. Mrs Booth has 22 grandchildren, she prefers on the whole to live alone—“but we are all near her.”

Yr B.

Berg

[]

991: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

[early December 1918?]

Hogarth House, Richmond

My dear Ottoline

Leonard has to be out all Thursday, and feels that it would be better, if we might come in after dinner, the Thursday following, the 12th. We will keep that free, and then, we shall enjoy it enormously.

I heard a fascinating account from Mary Hutchinson of the delight of real conversation in a chair. It sounded too good.

Your affate
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

992: To Vanessa Bell

Monday [9 December 1918]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dearest,

I am very much concerned to hear that you are diseased. For Gods sake be careful. Is there anything I could get for you—either food or medicine? Would you dose yourself with malt extract, if I sent you a bottle? I take it twice daily; I have also an excellent tonic the only one that really improves the spirits perceptibly; if I got that would you take it?

But I know your unscrupulous disposition. You read all that sort of thing with a buzzing sound like a large Bee; it’s only when you come to the gossip that you pay attention, more or less like a human being. Chiefly for your sake, I went to another concert at Shelley House yesterday, and there I saw Miss [Ethel] Sands, Morty Sands, Katie Cromer, John Bailey and daughters, Elena Richmond, Logan [Pearsall Smith]; Bowyer Nicholls. Ethel Sands, sitting behind me, touched me with one of her bony claws and said “Now, I know you don’t remember me, Mrs Woolf—” I replied without hesitation “I’ve just been admiring your pictures at Heals.”

“O those were things I did a long time ago. I’ve been nursing in France for four years . . so interesting—the French soldiers so grateful—life my own children. Yes, it’s been a great sacrifice not to paint all this time, but I’ve owed so much happiness to France—I felt I must do something for them…. What a lovely picture Vanessa has at the Omega! I do admire her things so much … Where is she now?”

So I said very loud “Vanessa has a farm for Conscientious Objectors.” “Doesn’t she find them very troublesome?” “O no. They’re her friends—Duncan and Bunny Garnett.” Poor old Ethel didn’t much like this, but had to pretend that it was monstrous that Duncan should be made to dig fields instead of painting pictures. You can’t conceive the atmosphere of opulent respectability and refinement of mind in that room. Then I saw old Katie [Cromer] bobbing her head at me. She is still rather a superb figure, slightly afflicted with a twitch of the lower jaw, but well shaped especially in the upper part of the head. Unfortunately she tends to be too much of an aristocratic matron. However I went up and spoke to her, and she was very amiable, though we had nothing whatever to say, and then Elena [Richmond] came across and I was, as usual, overcome by feminine charm. She hasn’t much changed. I suppose she’s as stupid as a stone, but her manner is adorable. She made me promise to go and see her, which I shall do, and tell you about it. What does one talk about to Elena? I cant conceive how she spends her day; or attempt to imagine her and Bruce performing any of the operations of nature. I’m very curious to discover exactly when and how they become so different from, shall we say, Carrington or Gertler, or Roger. Its all a great mystery. I suppose you know for a fact that they’re damned?

But then, after all, so is Barbara. I went to tea with her at her Home—a dismal affair, as she shared a room with a widow, in order to cheer the widow up. The sight of Nick was supposed to reconcile her to her own loss—not that I said anything of the sort to Barbara; but it made conversation difficult. She seemed slightly depressed, I thought, for one thing because her doctor had told her that she must feed her baby for 9 months; which she said would entirely cut her off from society, and also ruin her health, which is already giving way from the demands of nature, and she has now gone to stay with George de Vesci for a fortnight. You see how our past finds us out. I shouldn’t be surprised to hear that the Viscountess wishes to renew her acquaintance with us. She takes in soldiers wives after childbirth as a charity in her house at Englefield Green. Of course Barbara is as open as a summers day, but I’m not sure that thats not a duller form of damnation than the Philistines; because it’s so transparent. However, I admit we could neither of us show at our best under the widows eye. Judith is exactly like Nick—small featured, brown eyed, snub nosed. Adrian’s Judith, according to him, is a very lively, swarthy, vigorous baby, but I haven’t been there. Then we had Sydney Waterlow to dinner, who told us a most dismal story of Saxon’s condition. “I am bored when I am with other people, and lonely when I’m by myself” he said. he agreed that the only remedy was to find some one to marry, but he said that he had now no opportunities of meeting young women, and was inclined to think that he had better emigrate. He was not actively unhappy, according to Sydney, but completely hopeless. Of course I can’t help thinking that this is a judgment upon Cambridge generally; its what happens if you go on telling the truth. You lose all generosity and all power of imagination. Moreover, you inevitably become a complete egoist. Please impress this upon Julian and Quentin, to say nothing of the nameless one, whom I dreamt of last night, and of course it was a boy.

Roger has now told me the story about our birth. His latest discovery is Mrs McColl, as you probably know. He told her to read The Voyage Out. She asked Mr Cox, the elderly gentleman at the London Library, for it. “Thats by Virginia Woolf isnt it?” he said. “She’s a sister of Mrs Clive Bell. Strange whats come to those two girls. Such a nice home they had. Sir Leslie our President. But of course they weren’t baptised!” So you see, how even in the London Library they follow us up; its thought you’re slightly worse than I am; but Mrs McColl said there wasn’t much to choose between us. Your life’s pretty bad, but my writing is considered coarse.

Now, to the business of the wood cuts. Wouldn’t the simplest plan be to share the profits? first deducting our expenses of paper and postage and possible advertisements, and your expense, for wood blocks? We don’t count our printing time; and I expect the artists time and the writers time were about equal in this case. We now think of charging 1/6 anyhow; so we ought each to get a certain amount.

The other way would be to pay you something for each block. I wonder what your arrangement with Roger for the Omega book is? We might go by that.

The idea of the marbled covers is very attractive, if it wouldn’t use up all our profits. If Duncan would explain the method to Wolfe I could go and see him one day this week, and perhaps he’d give me an estimate.

If its too expensive, I should be inclined to have a plain white paper cover, with the title merely.

I see we shan’t print the wood cuts nearly as well as Roger’s man; but apparently one ought to use a special ink, so we may get them a good deal better than those first proofs.

The printing is almost done, but as usual we have to wait for the printers [McDermott’s] press to be free.

I’ve a good many schemes on hand for future works which I should like to explain to you.

We shall probably come to Asheham on the 20th or 21st, and I think the Shoves are coming either for Christmas or after it. I should be very grateful for a line to say how you are. You might remember to say whether I can send you anything; also what are your plans for the future?—Have you got a nurse and a doctor? But I meant by the future the future of your whole establishment; which I suppose may be practically anything. At any rate its certain to be a source of acute delight to me.

I’m sending you Desmond’s account of peace day. It sometimes fills me with depression to think of all the things you must have let fall upon public occasions and life in general without me to hear them. Just consider that immortal evening last summer when you summed up the situation over a bottle of wine—the cinema and the submarine. Does Duncan see what a joke you are? I trust Sebastian [Vanessa’s unborn child] will.

Your
B.

We make out, roughly, that our expenses will come to between £2 and £3.

Berg

[]

993: To Vanessa Bell

Thursday [12 December 1918]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dearest,

Of course we will have the children [Julian and Quentin]—there is nothing I should like better, and I will do my best not to let them come to grief in any way. Our plans are to go to Asheham on the 20th, and to come back here on Jan. 3rd. Duncan or Bunny could bring them over at any time while we were there, as I will have the room ready for them. If the baby doesn’t arrive till after the 3rd you could send me a telegram and I would meet them at Victoria, and bring them here. But there’s no hurry about that. Suggest whatever suits you about the time of their coming—whether before the baby arrives or after.

The only difficulties I can think of are the difficulties about milk at Asheham, which I suppose we shall find it very hard to get—Do they want a great deal?—Also, can they safely be left to amuse themselves with occasional visits most of the morning? Some mornings I have to write in order to get reviews finished. Otherwise everything would be perfectly easy, and I should enjoy it immensely. Perhaps you could let me have a sketch of their hours and meals—what time they go to bed, and whether they sleep in the afternoon—in fact any hints so that I mayn’t get them into bad habits. Dont bother to settle how long they’re to stay—I shall expect them for a fortnight, and longer if its better for you not to have them back. Its most important that you shouldn’t hurry back to ordinary life. Even Barbara, in the lap of luxury, said 3 weeks was too short. As for payment, I never heard such nonsense.

I’d somehow thought the baby wasn’t due till the middle of January. I hope I may see you before it comes—anyhow I adore every hair on your head, which is also true of Duncans—many though they are.

Yr. B.

The Shoves are only coming for the week end after Christmas.

Berg

[]

994: To Vanessa Bell

Tuesday [17 December 1918]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dearest,

We can easily have the children on the 28th—in fact it is more convenient to know exactly when they will come. We can settle whatever suits you best about they’re going to you and coming back here. Nelly and Lottie are overjoyed at the thought of having them—in fact I see you will have great difficulty in getting them back again. I’m going to take them to the pantomime, and I’ve a great many plans for enjoying myself with them. I know I shall be more envious of you than ever when I get to know all their attractive ways—and of course they are the most adorable creatures. I find myself constantly thinking about them.

As for Trissie—Nelly and Lottie would much rather she did not come here, and I don’t think there’ll be the least need of help. But if she very much wants to come, of course I don’t want to prevent her. She’s never communicated with the servants since she’s been in London; so they thought she meant to drop them after the row. I will ask Mabel [Trissie’s sister] to come.

N. and L: are going home for Christmas; I will tell them to look out for your needs; several of their friends have already gone back to service, so there may be a chance. Mrs Lucas is not in the telephone book; I believe her address is 122A Kings Rd., Chelsea, because I’ve got it down 222A, and I know that was wrong.

This is only about the children, so I will write again, if I can get any gossip; you having no need of affection ha! ha!

B

I go to Asheham on Friday.

Berg

[]

995: To Vanessa Bell

Saturday [21 December 1918]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest,

The servants are coming here on the 27th—so its quite all right about the children. I’ve no intention whatever of letting them wear me out—on the contrary I expect to lead a more healthy life than usual, as I shall take them for regular walks, and spend my afternoons in the open air instead of gadding up to London. However, we shall have a few dissipations—such as the British Museum and the Pantomime—perhaps they would like a Cinema? You see how craftily I shall work in my favorite expeditions. I rather think of teaching Julian the Greek alphabet, and making them both write me essays.

I will get Quentin his boots in Richmond.

I don’t suppose Mabel has much time off, but I’ll tell her to come whenever she can. I shall leave N. and L: to do what they like about Trissie; they seem to have all sorts of feelings about her—but I daresay they’ll strike up another violent friendship in the end.

I came down by myself yesterday, as Leonard had to stay till today about the [International] Review. I should like to come over for the day one of these days, if the baby doesn’t interfere. Perhaps I’d better keep my gossip such as it is until I see you; it only amounts to my tea with Elena and Bruce [Richmond] in South Kensington. I despair of conveying to you, either in writing or speech, the utter and immense horror of that visit. Of course, Barbara and even Nick are as Princes of Light compared with them—the banality, the frigidity, the sterility, the respectability of that couple; and underneath perfect callousness, and, I suspect, even brutality—at anyrate a stupidity so crass that they would trample you to death without seeing it. I was there for an hour; and we began by talking of country cottages, and we were still talking of country cottages when I left. Elena is a buxom matron, with white hair, but no longer more than comely. She is almost inanimate with stupidity. She sits looking at the fire like a spaniel. And my God! What a room! She told me that her only ideas of decoration were that she liked brown carpets and blue curtains; so she had blue of the colour of bad ink, and brown of the colour of musty chocolate; walls glistening and cold as wedding cake; a few chill water colours of Pompeii; and sham Sheraton bookcases, filled with shiny books under glass. Not a chair or cup out of place; a silver table; all so polished you could see your face. There were terrible pauses, when she clearly was slightly afraid of me, and he disapproved. Thats the man I write for! Good God! And they wanted to know if you’d ever let them Charleston; upon which I said “Well, Vanessa’s ideas of decoration—” but I couldn’t go on. “Yes?” said Elena. “She’s done most of it herself—stuck up bits of paper, you know—” Here came one of the horrid pauses. “I’m sure she must have made it look very nice” Elena said kindly; but Bruce, who’s got some sort of wits about him, was not sure. “I suppose the eldest boy is at school now,” Elena continued. I couldn’t go into that, so I said that the difficulties of education in the country were very great; and then we got back to country cottages again; and how Elena had been to a delightful party at the [Ralph] Vaughan Williamses and met Susan Lushington. All my illusions are gone.

B.

I asked Murry to send you the Mrs Ward; it seemed to me a masterpiece without rival—Have you reached the account of Tottie and Clara?

Would you say if you wd. like me to come before, or wd. rather wait till afterwards.

Berg

[]

996: To Vanessa Bell

[24 December 1918]

Postcard

[Asheham, Rodmell, Sussex]

Necklace just arrived—exquisite and my only remaining jewels—a thousand thanks. May I come to lunch on Boxing Day, if fine, 1. P. M. and go back after tea.

V.W.

Berg

[]

997: To Vanessa Bell

Saturday [28 December 1918]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest,

Owing to this beastly weather I have had to yield to Leonard and not come this morning, much against my will. I’m fearfully cross and disappointed, especially as the wind seems to be going down now—but I shall try to come tomorrow anyhow, about 12.30. and stay to luncheon. You cant imagine how excited I was to hear of my niece—in fact I think even you would have been touched to know how completely my pleasure here was spoilt until I heard it was over. I see I’m going to become a perfectly sentimental old Aunt (I’m dropping into Aunt Marys language already) about her. She must be the most adorable little creature.

But I want most to know how you are—whether sensible, ruminative, tender, peaceful and sublime.

Perhaps Leonard will bring me some news. I should only bore you if I went on saying be careful.

Ka and Will are not coming, so its easier than ever to have the children, and the servants are enraptured. It is just possible that Nelly is in touch with two friends who might come to you—but I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow.

Clarissa.
Miriam.
Rachel.
Venetia.
Sabina.
Clara.
Sarah.
Sara.
Euphrosyne.

I think on the whole I prefer Clarissa but I know there’s a better one on the verge of my brain which I cant remember.

O damn! how I wish I were with you and had disregarded my husband flatly. It’s not going to rain after all, and I said it wasn’t.

A thousand embraces in all the tenderest parts from your Apes. Has Clarissa got a lovely little down at the back of her neck. Shall we all be allowed to kiss her?

Yr. B.

Berg

[]

998: To Duncan Grant

Sunday [29 December 1918]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

My dear Duncan,

What a nuisance about the milk. I hope it is better today, but I feel sure that it is best not to see anyone for the first week, as the Gamp always says: and I could very likely bring the children back at the end of the time and stay a night, when Nessa would enjoy it more. However, let me know what you think. Also would you say whether I’m to bring the children over on Thursday. We can quite easily take them to Richmond on Friday if that is what is wanted.

They haven’t got any pocket handkerchiefs. Perhaps you would send me the book Adrian gave Julian. We tried a Waverley novel last night, but found it too dull, and I’m afraid we haven’t any good ones. They are perfectly well, and angelic in behaviour. Julian says he slept all night long—he was fast asleep at 8, and I uncovered his head without waking him. It was rather marvellous, considering that we were roused at 12.20 by Nelly with the news that Lottie thought she was dying. We found her in a state of hysterics for no reason that we could discover except that she felt very cold, and thought she had influenza. However she made a great noise which happily did not wake the children, and this morning seems all right though very lugubrious. This is the fourth time apparently she has woken Nelly and said she was dying and had to be given brandy. The wonders of the domestic world will never cease. The thing which really settled her was when we took her temperature with a broken thermometer and told her it was normal.

Give my love to the old creature.

Yr V.W.

Duncan Grant

[]

999: To Katherine Arnold-Forster

Dec. 30th [1918]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest Ka,

It’s a great pity, but we go back to Richmond on Friday, taking the children with us, so that I’m afraid we can’t even offer you a week end of a sort there.

Have you heard of Nessa’s daughter? She was born on Christmas Day, very successfully, and they both seem to be doing well. Nessa sounds very happy, and says the baby is already perfectly beautiful—with large blue eyes, Greek nose, lovely mouth, and adorable character. She was very pleased it was a daughter, and so am I—As you politely say beauty and talents seem inevitable, considering her Aunt.

But what a nuisance not to see you and Will here. It’s the only place for seeing people. However, do ring us up after Friday and suggest something. I’m longing to hear about Cousin Mary Augusta. Her book was the last Nessa read before the birth—the first she asked for afterwards. She and Duncan can talk of nothing else. They knew several passages by heart—the Memoirs, I mean, not the last novel. In its way it seems to me only comparable with Hamlet—for the insight it gives one into the recesses of the human heart. And what a heart! And you know her in the flesh.

What part of Cornwall are you going to? Is this the beginning of complete retirement? Shall you see no one but Sydney Waterlow for the rest of your lives, and the old woman who does for you? But read carefully this last sentence contains a hint—a hint and a grievance too—the poor Wolves were never asked to Aldbourne, and they took it a good deal to heart.

Your V.W.

Mark Arnold-Forster

[]

1000: To Vanessa Bell

Tuesday [31 December 1918]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest,

Its most disappointing that I shan’t see you and Anonyma [Angelica] before we go, but we’ve now settled to go tomorrow, and I’m afraid I shan’t be able to come over today. The children are both perfectly well, and more angelic than words can say. Lottie however has surpassed herself; she has got into such a state about her own health that she makes life here impossible and it seems best to go back where at any rate we are near doctors and chemists. If it weren’t so irritating it would really be very amusing. After waking us up to say she was dying, she said next day that she felt perfectly well. However, when night came she again got into a panic, though her only symptoms were that her feet were very cold and her head was very hot. She said of course that she was in a raging fever; we could not take her temperature as the tube was broken. Happily I had an old sleeping draught which we gave her, and she went to sleep at once. Next day she said she was certain she was very ill indeed, and must see a doctor. It was Sunday, and finally she agreed that if we got a temperature tube and found that she was normal she would be content. So we sent Will off to Lewes: to ring up a chemist, but the chemist was sold out of temperature tubes. Then I gave her a talking to, and said there was nothing whatever the matter with her, and she ought to be ashamed of herself. This had some effect, and we got through the night without being called. Yesterday morning she was worse than ever, and accused me of being heartless, and insisted upon seeing a doctor at once. Just as she and Nelly were starting, it came on to rain, and she decided to stay at home, and let Nelly go and find another chemist and bring back a thermometer. Nelly came back saying that there was not such a thing in Lewes. Leonard finally went to the Killicks and borrowed one. We took her temperature and found it to be normal; we took it at night and found it to be normal. She then said that although she hadn’t any fever, she was very ill internally. Her symptoms were impossible to describe, but such that she only wished she could die. Nelly, who has been having this for the last fortnight began to get rather hysterical, alternately scolding Lottie and abusing me, and finally the only chance of peace seemed to be to say that we would return to Richmond and have [Dr] Fergusson. Lottie refuses to go to bed, and makes Nelly do most of her work, and altogether I expect we shall be better off at Hogarth.

However, as I say, the children are perfectly well, and no trouble at all. They play in the drawing room most of the morning, and we go for a walk after luncheon, and they seem to be full of their own games and ideas, which fit in extremely well with mine. They are amazingly interesting as well as attractive. Julian of course, knows infinitely more about science and history and geography than I do. He and Leonard had an argument yesterday about what would happen if you put a barometer into deep water. Leonard was very much impressed by his intelligence, and is, I see, getting to be very fond of them. Quentin’s mind is very like mine, I expect. I hear him telling himself stories about Lady Suffolk, and how she will only eat chickens, which she breeds in enormous numbers, and she’s the richest woman in the world and a Peeress in her own right. How they get hold of all their language I don’t know; it seems to me very superior—in fact their minds altogether seem much quicker and more intelligent than ours. Mrs B. must have trained them very well, to do what they are told. Their great delight is to pretend to be dolphins in the bath, but they get out the moment I tell them to seriously, and their table manners are perfect. They seem to have most economical minds. Quentin told me the first night “I think it is an unnecessary expense for you to have bolsters in your beds”, and Julian said “You seem to me to be very extragavant [sic] with your coal.” Quentin would only put a scraping of strawberry jam on his bread, because he said that it was very precious in war time. However, their appetites are very good,—They have just been in to say will I ask you to send them King Solomon’s Mines [H. Rider Haggard], and Quentin’s black book, as he wants to do some writing. You are not to send Adrian’s book as Julian has finished it.

Lord! What a mercy they are to talk to after the servants!

Leonard has gone up to London today, and it makes all the difference having the children to play with, so that I needn’t discuss Lotties health with her. As to your servants, I will find out more when things have quieted down a little. What Nelly said was that she had seen Lil (her niece, I think) who is either leaving or has left a place; and asked her whether she would come to you as nurse. Lil has not been a nurse, but is very fond of children. She said she did not want to live in the country; but perhaps this could be overcome, if you thought she’d do. But Budge sounded more hopeful. She is Nelly’s sister, and has been a general [cook-general] for years. She is now in munition works, but thinks they will soon be dismissed, and then wants a place, and would go as houseparlourmaid. She wants to stay until they have to go, as she is forewoman. But she is a first rate servant according to Nelly, and very nice. It might be worth while to write and explain about your place, so that she could think it over before she heard of anything else. I know she was seven years in her last place before the war. Emily [Vanessa’s current maid] sounds appalling—but in a different way I expect Lottie is just as bad. In fact I am once more seriously considering whether it is worth while to go on like this. This is the third time she has completely spoilt Asheham for us. It was perfect with Mrs Hammond [daily] alone. If she has everything her own way at Richmond she is all right, but even so she is very bad at most of her work, and I do get more and more to detest having servants living in the house. However, I shall see what happens—the difficulty is that Nelly is very good and very nice, and it mayn’t be feasible to run a house with dailies. At the same time, I’m sure it could be worked now, and I always believe that it would be a perfect arrangement if you had them both, as the source of Lottie’s temper is I’m certain that she hasn’t enough to do, and you could start being severe with her, as I ought to have done. This is only a vague idea on my part, of course.

The children are now having a very polite conversation with Mr Gunn. It is said that he has broken off his engagement. Here is a list of the things we are going to do.

Zoo.

Movies.

Tea at the Omega (Quentin says if we do this he needn’t write and thank Roger)

Pantomime.

Russian dancers.

Richmond Park.

Sliding staircase on the Tube.

British Museum.

Tea at Buzzards.

But the thing Julian wants to do almost most of all is to learn the Greek alphabet! So I shall teach him that, and they are also very anxious to write essays and stories for me to judge, so we shall be very literary, and I hope to persuade Quentin to be a writer and not a painter when he grows up.

What an enormous long letter!—and now I must answer Aunt Anny. I daresay its better for you not to see me, but I’m very cross and disappointed—I’d meant to come tomorrow—its another reason for cursing Lottie. Please ask Duncan to write as often as he can and tell me how you are, and describe the ways of the adorable little creature. It is an enormous pleasure to me that she is a daughter. Think what an interest all her ways will be—much more than a boys—though I admit there’s a good deal to be said for the firstborn (by which I mean of course, darling B.).

You’d better destroy this, in case of Emily.

Berg

[]

1001: To Margaret Llewelyn Davies

Tuesday [31 December 1918]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest Margaret,

We save as many of your sweets as we can from Julian and Quentin and enjoy them immensely. The children say they are ‘gorgeous’. Thank you very much indeed, and also Lilian [Harris], and remind her that she is expected to come to luncheon, the first fine day.

Have you heard of my new niece—Vanessa’s daughter—born on Christmas Day? They are both very well, and Vanessa says the baby is already perfectly beautiful, and an adorable character. I haven’t been able to get over, but I can quite believe anything in the way of beauty and gifts in my niece—it seems inevitable. We both very much wanted a daughter this time—the difficulty is what to call her? They incline to Allegra—I prefer Sabina—I dont suppose we shall dare either.

I’m coming up with the children, who are going to stay a week or two, tomorrow. Leonard has gone today in order to correct proofs with his industrious sub-editor [Mrs Manus], but I doubt whether, even between them, the Review will be out on the first.

We had a perfect week here, quite alone, with only a cottage woman to do for us. Directly the servants came Lottie announced, in the middle of the night, that she was dying, and she is in such a panic about her health that we are coming back partly in order to see a doctor. Her temperature is normal; apparently there is nothing the matter; but she keeps Nelly awake every night with her fears, so I think we had better put an end to it.

The children are heavenly creatures, really it depresses me to see how much more intelligent and how much nicer they are than grown ups. I suppose the chief harm to human character comes from taking an interest in politics—but I dont expect you to see the profound truth of that remark.

We paid a man 6d on Saturday to bring us the news of the Elections, and Leonard has been plunged in gloom ever since. Maynard Keynes came over the other day and said that Lloyd George is all in favour of a League of Nations, and it is going to come right in the end, as [President Woodrow] Wilson has been privately assured. Publicly they have to pretend to agree with France and Italy: but Maynard being behind the scenes is almost invariably wrong.

I’ve not read any books, so I cant talk to you about them. As to Saxon, I hope you will persevere, in spite of discouragement. He is in a tepid state far worse than despair, and to rouse him in any way is a blessing—poor man. It seems melancholy that any attempt to improve the ordinary way of falling in love should end disastrously, but I’m afraid his experiment has, at least as far as he is concerned.

Now I must go and fetch the milk.

Please come and see us soon. We shall have the children for a fortnight I think.

Your V.W.

Sussex

[]

Letters 1002-1065 (January-June 1919)

1002: To Vanessa Bell

[2 January 1919]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dearest,

I wired to Lily this morning, and have just had an answer to say she will come as cook. She has been both cook and houseparlourmaid and left because the work was too hard and is Nellys niece. I will write to the other one [Budge Boxall] in the munitions works, but she is not yet looking for a place, and may stay on there.

Children perfectly well. I’ve just had a tooth out so excuse scrawl. I will write again.

Yr B.

I wrote to Lily today and said you wd. give £35 and were only in the country for spring and summer, liberal outings, no waiting very free—

Berg

[]

1003: To Vanessa Bell

6 Jan. 1919

Typewritten

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dear Vanessa,

Virginia has asked me to write this letter for her. She is in bed with a head ache of the old kind. It was brought on by having a tooth out last Thursday. The bleeding would not stop, and we had to have the doctor twice on Thursday night before he succeeded in stopping it. The loss of blood and pain seem to have brought on the headache, and of course she had rather bad nights before the tooth was taken out. It was in no way connected with having the children here. The doctor insists upon her being in bed for at least a week which will mean until Friday. She is rather better the last two days.

The children are extraordinarily good and no trouble at all. They have been very well, and have slept splendidly. Friday and Saturday the servants took them out, and yesterday we went to the South Kensington Museum which they seemed to like. I am taking them to Hampton Court this afternoon, and Maynard is taking them to the Coliseum to-morrow. Wednesday Ka will probably take them out, and Thursday Mabel.

Both Nelly and I wrote to Budge [Boxall] yesterday, and Nelly seems to think that there is a good chance of her coming to you, now that Lily is coming.

Leonard

[in Virginia’s handwriting]

This is only a line to say that my headache wasn’t caused in the least by the children—They have been angelic and I’m only very cross that I cant go out with them. Would you send all the money they’ve got, except coppers. I’m really better today—Let me know how you are—

[in Leonard’s handwriting]

I enclose Boxall’s letter which probably ought to be answered by you.

Berg

[]

1004: To Vanessa Bell

14 Jan. 1919

Typewritten

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dear Vanessa,

I am writing for V. She is better than she was, but it is rather a slow process and there are always ups and downs. Yesterday she was rather tired again, but to-day that has gone. She will not get up until Thursday, and will then take it very quietly for a bit. She has been very sensible. The doctor will not let her have the children back next week, as he thinks she ought to be very quiet still. We are very sorry not to be able to have them again, but perhaps they might come later on in the spring?

Your letter was a great entertainment to her, and she would like another with news of yourself and the servant problem. We have heard nothing from Lil, nor has Nelly. It is thought she is ashamed of herself. Nelly heard from Budge: she is on the point of marriage, otherwise it is though [sic] she might have come to you, but she has several times before been on the point of marriage and shied off at the last moment (once actually on her wedding day), so that she may do it again.

Leonard

[in Virginia’s handwriting]

Your letter was a great delight. Do tell me if you’ve got a nurse and any domestic details. I dont like Claudia—pompous and aristocratic—I like Susan—Suzannah suggests an old Negress on a Savannah—Thank Roger for writing—I enjoyed it very much.

Berg

[]

1005: To Saxon Sydney-Turner

Tuesday [21 January 1919]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

My dear Saxon,

This is not the first instalment of my projected work on friendship, as my head is aching slightly (only very slightly—nothing to count). But I shall want all my faculties to deal with Clive, shall we say, whose letters I’ve been reading this morning. I’d no notion what numbers he wrote at one time. So careful, literary, affectionate—full of compliments. But as I say, I won’t go into all that now, tempting though it is, and much as it would delight me to trace the ascent or descent of his taste from me to his present flame—but I, at any rate, was the one he learnt to write upon. Then there’s Walter Lamb, got by accident into the same box, but without any of Clive’s saving qualities, and nothing to recommend him at all, poor wretch, that I can see. Saxon’s account of hearing Parsifal for the first time has an inimitable charm,—not that he would altogether see where it lies—but I do. And there’s a letter in French from him too, and a scrap of Greek. But as I say, I am not writing a letter; what I am writing is an invitation to dine on Sunday night—come before dinner if you can. Alix and James [Strachey] may be here for dinner or not, and Leonard may be out till dinner or not; anyhow I shall be here, and if I’ve had a long letter from No. 37 to go upon, we might enlarge with infinite subtlety and abandon in converse over the fire. Would you bring Antigone? (by Sophocles).

Sussex

[]

1006: To Vanessa Bell

Wednesday [22 January 1919]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dearest,

Domestic affairs

Anny Boyce came to see the servants yesterday, so I had her up to see me. She would like to come to you as h. parlourmaid if you can wait for her. The difficulty is that she doesn’t know how long it will be. Her present people may want her to stay till the end of June.

She is paid by the week, so she might go at any moment.

The people are Americans and are waiting to get a house in America. The man has gone to get one, and will be back in 6 weeks; so they may go then but its quite likely that they’ll stay on anyhow till the end of June.

Anny has a friend, who is cook with her, and they want to be together; and she would also like to come to you. Anny said that she has several friends and could perhaps find two who would go to you until she and the cook are free. I arranged that she should try to find two, and let me know directly she is free. Meanwhile I said I would ask you whether you would wait for them. Anny B. is one of Nelly’s oldest friends, and seemed very nice; Nelly also knows the cook who is said to be very nice. She is married and has a child of 10, but the child is away. Anny told Nelly that she thought she would like to go to you, and would certainly take the place if you wanted her. I enlarged upon the freedom and pleasure of it. She seemed rather independent, and not much like a servant. She is 27.

So would you write and say what you want. I heard from Mrs Geal, but she knows of no one. This is my first day of writing, and I’m limited to one hours, so I musn’t enlarge too much. I wish you’d write, or aged Duncan would write, and say how you are. I’m better, though my affairs gave me rather a headache again, and I had to stay in bed for two days. I’m going out today I hope, and I think I’ve quite recovered, though I mean to have the discretion of an elephant. Please imitate me; but I live like a sultana among pillows and fowls and you are a lean old drudge and mother of millions. I’ve such a mass of things to say that I dont know where to begin. First I want a sketch of Sidonia, Griselda, Leslie, Vashti [Angelica]; a line on an envelope wd. be better than nothing. Then I meant to write a long account of J and Q [Julian and Quentin]. I was immensely impressed. Moreover I have now read part of your riddle; yes, I made several discoveries about you. Then I suppose you’ve heard all about Norton and Alix? I had the story from her. I never heard such a farce. Copulation every 10 days in order to free his suppressed instincts! I rather think she’ll marry him in the end. She asked my advice—but nobody ever takes my advice. I told her on no account to copulate from a sense of duty, but to advise him to invest his capital either in a new theatre or picture gallery or string quartet and his instincts would be liberated spontaneously. Norton is the pure flower of Cambridge isn’t he? But I can’t go into it. And then I saw Fredegond [Shove], who is writing to you, so I wont spoil her story of Aunt Anny [Ritchie] and Cordelia [Fisher] and Ivy Tennyson (who was Pretious). Aunt Anny, on hearing that your daughter was beautiful, wrote to Ivy in an ecstasy saying that the lovely little girl had brought you and Clive together, and all the Fishers now know for a fact that it is undoubtedly the child of Clive, though having heard of your admirers they had once suspected—However, F[redegond]’s account of Cordelia was so repulsive, and the Fisher atmosphere is so infinitely penetrating and degrading that I had to tell her to stop. Aren’t I a good Ape to get gossip even when I can’t go to London? And then you tell me that I’m only 5th on the list!

Yr B.

Berg

[]

1007: To Vanessa Bell

Friday [24 January 1919]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dearest,

I am appalled at your crises. I suppose it means that you have to be nursemaid and get no food or looking after from that wretched couple E. J. [Emily and Jenny]. I have written to Budge, whose name is H. Boxall, 23 North Street, Farncombe, Surrey.

Nelly thinks there’s not much chance of her coming, as she’s still at her [munitions] works; but I’ve asked her to write straight to you.

I’m sure I could get you temporary people in London, if these fail. Liz has written to say that the reason why Lil didn’t go to you was merely that she found she could make so much more money by going as temporary. I’m afraid you’re very worried too about the Baby, as I know how anxious they are when small. However, J. and Q. do you credit.

I suppose you’ve had my letter about Annie Boyce, and will let me know. I’m confronted this morning by a demand for a rise from N. and L: or they’ll go! I’m inclined to say go to the Devil—Also we’re warned by Hoper that he will probably want Asheham after Sept.—so I don’t know what we shall do. Are you going to get your nurse back? I’m really better. Do send a line and say how you both are. and let me do anything I can. I shall be able to go to London next week, I expect.

In haste

VW.

Berg

[]

1008: To Vanessa Bell

Saturday night [25 January 1919]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dearest,

To my great surprise, I have just had a visit from Budge [Boxall], who started off on getting my letter in order to explain the situation. She cannot come herself, but she has two friends who want a place together, as cook and h. parlourmaid, at once, and permanently, and think yours would suit them. They are 22 and 23, have been in a place together before, and according to Budge are perfectly respectable and very good workers. They have always been in the country, and like children. Budge promised to tell them definitely on Monday morning whether you would take them, so I have taken it upon myself to say that you will, and also that you will have them as soon as they wish to come. Of course I have only her word to go upon, but they have been working under her in the factory, and she says they are very good characters, and were in service before the war, at a school in Sunningdale.

She is going to tell them to write straight to you, so you will hear from them on Tuesday, I expect. Their names are Marks and Osgood (I think.) I said that you would want characters, and she said you could get them both from their former mistress, and from the manager at the works. She has told them all about your place, and they liked the idea of it. She had told them that you would give them wages from £25—and she said she thought they would be content if the cook had £25, the other £27, with a rise if satisfactory. She thought £35 was much too much at their age. I couldn’t quite make out whether they wanted to leave and go to you at once, or wait a week; the factory is closing in a week or 10 days anyhow, and as they can leave with an hours notice, they might want to come on straight. However I have said it would be perfectly all right if they came at once.

I hope to goodness something will come of this; I think they must mean it seriously, or Budge wouldn’t have come all the way up to see me about it. I hope you wont think me very precipitate in engaging them, but if I didn’t say something definite, I think they might slip away.

Yr B.

Berg

[]

1009: To Vanessa Bell

Sunday [26 January 1919]

[Hogarth House, Richmond]

Dearest

I have just had another talk with Budge who is going back.

She says Beatrice Marks is the name of the h. parlourmaid, and Alice Osgood is the cook, 22, and 23 or 4, are their ages. They have been in places together for some years, and she has known them and their families all her life, and they are very respectable. She is sure that they will take the place, as it is just what they want.

I scrawl this, as you may like further details. They will write tomorrow without fail. They would either come at once or wait a week she thinks as you like.

Yr B.

Berg

[]

1010: To Lady Robert Cecil

Sunday [26 January? 1919]

Hogarth House, Richmond

My dear Nelly,

I wrote you a very long letter the other day, sitting in my window looking at the downs, and comparing them very favourably with the view from your window—but I never sent it. This was not modesty but having my nephews to stay, and a niece born to me,—and after all, the whole purpose of the letter was to fish for an invitation to come to tea with you again. You can’t count last time, owing to your concealing your position on the [Chelsea] embankment. Perhaps, though, you’re in Paris, or even Washington. Even so, you could answer a letter.

I am reading through the whole of George Eliot, in order to sum her up, once and for all, upon her anniversary, which happily is still months ahead. So far, I have only made way with her life, which is a book of the greatest fascination, and I can see already that no one else has ever known her as I know her. However, I always think this whatever I read—don’t you? I think she is a highly feminine and attractive character—most impulsive and ill-balanced (Mrs Prothero once told me that she—George Eliot that is—had a child by a Professor in Edinburgh—she knew it for a fact—indeed the child is a well known Professor somewhere else—) and I only wish she had lived nowadays, and so been saved all that nonsense. I mean, being so serious, and digging up fossils, and all the rest of it. Perhaps, too, she would have written, not exactly better, but less facetiously. It was an unfortunate thing to be the first woman of the age. But she comes very well out of it so far, better anyhow than Herbert Spencer, and George Frederick Watts,—but I haven’t begun her novels.

Are you ever going to write something for us to print? That was what I meant to write about, and not George Eliot, and here I have finished my paper and dare not begin a new sheet. What I want you to write is an account of your childhood. Don’t you think that opens up infinite possibilities? You need not be intimate or indiscreet. Think of the description of the garden and the house, and so on. Please do.

We are just bringing out some little books.

Yours aff.
V.W.

Hatfield

[]

1011: To Vanessa Bell

[29 January 1919]

Postcard

[Hogarth House, Richmond]

Karin has not got diptheria. It came from her ears, and is better.

James has got influenza. Ka has narrowly escaped bronchitis.

Peter Studd is dead.

I have put on 2 ½ lbs:

Julian Huxley is engaged to Juliette (?)

V.W.

Berg

[]

1012: To Lytton Strachey

Thursday [30 January 1919]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Desolated, but acquiescent. Will you ask Carrington whether she is going to produce her wood-cuts—if so, when; and will you see that she does it.

V.W.

Frances Hooper

[]

1013: To Vanessa Bell

[late January 1919]

[Hogarth House, Richmond]

Dearest,

Will you give me your opinion as to which of these papers to have, if either, for our book [Kew Gardens]. Could you let me know as soon as possible, as I have kept them waiting. Also would you send them back before Sunday, as I want to show them to Eliot.

I’m appalled at your disasters, which I learn from Duncan’s letter. Thank him very much for writing, and I say I should be grateful for further news. also about Budge’s friends.

I’m in a hurry now, but I will write later.

B.

Berg

[]

1014: To Vanessa Bell

Saturday [1 February 1919]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dearest,

I’m writing before getting an answer to my telegram, as if I dont I shall miss the post. Nelly herself suggested going to you, and we can manage quite well for a week or 10 days with Lottie, as we have done before.

I’ve made vain attempts to get a temporary this morning. I telephoned to Mrs Hunt, and Nelly went to the registry here, but there seems no one to be had. I’ve just heard from Faith [Henderson] that she can hear of no one either.

But if Nelly is with you for a week, I daresay I could find one meanwhile. She seems to think she could get one at Brighton or Eastbourne by going herself. Any how its quite impossible for you to go on like this. My other suggestion, which is Leonards also, is this. If, after Nelly’s been with you for 10 days, you can’t get anyone and the baby’s better, why don’t you, Duncan, and the baby go over to Asheham, where Mrs Geall could do for you; and surely Mrs B: and the children could manage with the cook at Charleston. Mrs Geall is rather a good cook, and a very nice woman. You could stay as long as you wanted. There is plenty of coal, and Mrs Hammond, Mrs Attfield, and the Woolers all able to come in by the day if wanted. I would go down a day or two beforehand, as I’ve been meaning to, and see that everything was warm and ready for you; and order in supplies. Do think of this. Or is there any chance that you and the baby would come here? Nelly and Lottie would love helping to look after it, Fergusson is round the corner, and far the best dr. I’ve ever had, and we could promise you a certain amount of comfort anyhow. The room is there empty; and if Duncan came to London at the same time the more he was here the better.

I suppose it all depends how the baby is. Of course you could interview Anny Boyce and others for yourself if you were here, which would be more satisfactory.

I can throw no light upon Budge and her doings. She was so positive to me that I thought there could be no doubt this time. According to her, the girls actually asked her to get them the place. But its no good going into that. Anny Boyce is the name; Coombe Brook, Coombe Lane, Kingston Hill, Surrey. I am writing to her to ask her to let me know if she knows of any temporaries whom I could see; she said she knew a good many girls around here. I feel very strongly that it is perfect madness for you to be embroiled in all this when you’re just out of bed; but there’s no good saying that. I hope to goodness the baby is better—but my God, what a time you’ve had!

Nelly’s been extraordinarily nice, and says she would do anything to help you, so do make any use of her you can. I’ve just raised their wages, and they’re both overflowing with good will.

Yr B.

I am quite well again, and went to London without being tired yesterday. I only got your letter this morning, or I could have gone to Mrs Lucas.

Berg

[]

1015: To Vanessa Bell

[3 February 1919]

1917 Club, 4 Gerrard Street, W.I.

Dearest,

I have got a temporary h. parlourmaid who will come on Wednesday.

Her name is Phoebe Crane, and she wants £1 a week, and her railway fares.

Can you manage that some one should meet her at Glynde on Wednesday at 12.8 She seemed amiable, though rather foolish looking. I saw 3 characters; all said she was perfectly honest, clean, sober, and two said she was very obliging—the third that she would not go to Church. Anyhow I suppose she will do for a time. though the expense seems fearful. Abbey charged 12/6 also for his fee; She said she liked the country; I told her she would have no waiting. She was anxious not to have to look after children. I am seeing Liz tomorrow, and may find out some more about Budge and her doings from her. You must have 2 proper people, and I shall go on till I get them. Do think of coming to Hogarth.

V.W.

She said she could not possibly find her way up, so I promised some one wd. be at Glynde. Age about 35 prominent brown eyes: one front tooth missing.

Berg

[]

1016: To Katherine Arnold-Forster

5th Feb. [1919]

Hogarth House, Richmond

Dearest Ka,

I should have written to you before, but being limited to one hour’s writing a day, and having to use that to polish off an old gentleman [George Meredith] whose life I’ve promised to write for the Times, I put off good Bruin Cox. I hope she’s in no need of having her life written. Is the brute better? bathing, walking, shouldering her way unperturbed through the thickest of the gorse bushes? However to be ill at the Lizard seems to me better than to be well here. You can’t conceive what existence is like without trains or tubes, a heavy snow falling, no coal in the cellar, a leak in the roof which has already filled every possible receptacle, and probably no electric light tomorrow. We in Richmond can still get to Waterloo; but Hampstead is entirely cut off. Leonard’s staff of course live upon the northern heights, and hardly get to the office at all, so the poor man has to go up himself, and here I sit waiting, and God knows, what with the snow and the fog, when he’ll be back. Then the experts say that the working classes have behaved with such incredible stupidity that the Government will beat them; and this strike is only the beginning of others far worse to follow. They say we are in for such a year as has never been known. Sensible people like you go and live in Cornwall. I wish you’d go to Gurnards Head and see if there’s a cottage there to let, as I’ve been told. We are faced with the appalling prospect of having to give up Asheham. It’s wanted for the farm probably; there’s still a ray of hope, but I’m afraid not much. If we have to go, we’re rather inclined to pitch somewhere by the sea, though Sydney and Dawks [Waterlow] have found us a house near Oare, where they’re collecting a colony round them—MacCarthy’s, Pophams [Hugh and Brynhild],—but not the Wolves—not if I know it. There are lodgings at Zennor, I believe, kept by cultivated ladies, who advertise in one of Leonard’s sheets, which I’ve always meant to try.

I’m quite well again, though slightly restricted in my jaunts to London, so I haven’t a great deal of gossip. I suppose, though, you’ve heard that Alix thinks of taking a large house in Gordon Sqre and running it on the Brunswick system, with James for an idol in the best pair of rooms, and poor old Harry Norton up at the top. Poor old Harry has dropped into one of his queer states of mind, and wishes either to marry her, or have the rights of marriage, but she seems still set with the ferocity of a vulture—it quite alarms me—upon her usual victim [James Strachey]. Thats a fine piece of gossip isn’t it?

Have you heard of the catastrophes at Charleston? I cant go into them in any detail, since they would fill volumes. But imagine a country doctor ordering some medicine for the baby which made it ill by day and by night—Nessa commands him to stop—he refuses—he wont say what it is—the gamp has to obey him—child loses more and more pounds—Duncan goes over to Brighton and interviews Saxon’s father about the quality of Nessa’s milk—without result—Noel telegraphed for—lady doctor arrives secretly—finds the doctor is ordering some form of poison—Mrs Brereton thinks it her duty to inform the Dr of his rival’s presence—scenes, explosions, dismissal—triumph of Nessa and the lady doctor and partial recovery of the Baby. Just as this was over, the servants took to drink or worse, and had to be got rid of; frantic efforts of course to get others; none to be had; telegrams sent, interviews arranged, cook discovered, fails at the last moment—whole thing begins over again; more cooks discovered; just about to start when their father falls dead in the street, upon which both Nessa and I rush about in a fury, with the result that we each engage cooks without telling the other, and one has to be dismissed at enormous expense and terrific cost of energy. You cant think what a lot of time this has all taken up, or how sick I am of beginning my letters, “Jane Beale, I am writing for my sister—” For one thing I detest that style of sentence, and then the bold abrupt handwriting is what I can’t compass.

Thank God! here is my husband back. We have just had an enormous tea over the fire of hot toast and honey, and things look a little brighter. It is possible that he has done a masterly deal and bought a satire off Mr [H. G.] Wells, which will appear in the In’ [International] Review, and brighten it up for the degenerates who cant fix their minds steadily upon Poland. But the strikes are bad as ever, and the snow worse, and we cling desperately to the thought of April when we’ve been asked by the Arnold-Forsters to stay at Aldbourne. Our only engagement is on April fools day when Leonard is addressing the Ethical Society upon the Rights of Democracy.

He wants me to thank you very much for the subscription, and would have written, but his labours have been severe, and he considers me “considerably better, but still in need of care.” “I hope that Will will read the Jan and Feb numbers of the I.R. and let me have any criticisms. Love to Ka”.

Yrs V.W.

Mark Arnold-Forster

[]

1017: To Vanessa Bell

Saturday [8 February 1919]

[Hogarth House, Richmond]

Dearest

I got your letter last night. Faith rang up and said both her women had fallen through. So I telegraphed to Phoebe Crane this morning, to ask her to go to you this evening and telephoned at the same time to the Registry. They said she was disengaged yesterday, and thought she could certainly go, but might be out for the day.

I’ve had no wire from her, and its now 6.30, so I suppose she was out (I sent her a reply paid) I left orders (I had to be out) that Nelly was to wire to you; but apparently she hasn’t done so.

I expect I shall hear from Crane on Monday. Anyhow I will wire then and say whats happening, and try to provide some one on Monday. I didn’t mean that I didn’t think much of Crane; she seemed rather nice, and wrote me a very polite letter. Also, Emily’s character wasn’t Abbey’s fault as they said they knew nothing, but gave me the woman’s name she’s worked for; whom we saw—I’ve seen 3 characters of Crane—and all good. The strike cuts us off from everywhere except Waterloo, so I couldn’t go to Mrs Lucas, who’s not on the telephone.

I’m fearfully sorry not to have got Crane to go today, I’ll write again—very hurried to get the post now.

VW.

Berg

[]

1018: To Vanessa Bell

Sunday [9 February 1919]

[Hogarth House, Richmond]

Dearest,

Things were in such a muddle yesterday that I’m afraid I wrote rather an incoherent letter. The difficulty was that having waited for an answer to the telegram it became too late to telegraph to you—I would have arranged that Nelly was to catch the 5.20 anyhow, but she had a bad cold and was very anxious not to go till Monday. Also it seemed absurd to send her late on Saturday if Crane were coming on Monday. She has shown some signs too of getting into one of her usual states—thinking that you would want her to stay over the week and that she could not resist you—so I was alarmed lest she might in the end refuse—as Leonard thought and still thinks likely—to go at all. However, I’ve just spoken to her, and she is quite decided to go tomorrow if Crane fails. Her cold is much better and she appears very cheerful. I’m now writing to Crane, and telling her to ring me up tomorrow morning, so as to allow time for wiring to you. I’m fearfully sorry that you’ve had no one this week end, but anyhow you will have one or the other tomorrow—before you get this, I suppose.

Faith was anxious for me to explain that though she got into touch with two possibilities, both failed. I dont think she much wants to send Flossy, as there seem to be difficulties with the other servant. If I have a week, however, I’m sure I could get someone, should Crane fail. Nelly heard of someone from the Registry here, who sounded promising; and if the strike is over, it will be easy to go to places in London. All last week we were practically cut off—we could get to Waterloo, but the buses are so crammed in London that it means walking everywhere.

Mr Abbey, by the way, was emphatic that C. is a most respectable woman; and to do him justice I can’t remember that either Trissie or I enquired much as to Emily’s character in our anxiety to get someone that day. Crane’s expression did not seem to me intelligent, though amiable, and temporaries get a battered look—that was all I meant.

We are now faced with a shattered boiler, which has to be replaced, and will take some days, so we may possibly come to Asheham this week—as the prospect of no kitchen fire is depressing in this weather.

I’m afraid its almost certain we shall be turned out of Asheham. But if we should come to Asheham, and Nelly is with you, would you like to have Lottie as well, for a few days? But this can wait. She’d probably prefer being with you at Charleston to being alone at Asheham, and Mrs Geall does all right for us. The ramifications of the servant question are such that there’s no time for gossip—even if I’d seen anyone, but of course no one could get here. Alix is taking a house in Gordon Sqre. “so that I can live with James”, she told us quite openly. It is to be on the Brunswick system. But I daresay its fallen through; it may represent the poor woman’s death agony. In death she may become the bride of Norton, a terrible bridal it will be. I feel convinced myself that it’ll be all right about Nelly. Lottie was rather upset last week, which made the difficulty.

Yr B.

Berg

[]

1019: To Vanessa Bell

Monday [10 February 1919]

[Hogarth House, Richmond]

Dearest,

Here is Nelly at last. She was perfectly ready to come, as I thought; and only wishes me to ask you not to try and persuade her to stay longer than next Monday; I’ve said you certainly won’t.

Crane is ill. I only heard this morning. I’m going to Mrs Lucas, and hope to get some one in a few days. If there were a chance of a permanent, I should take it. Nelly will explain how Budge’s friend’s father died, and all else.

If you want to alter plans in any way, let me know as early as you can. Letters take a fearful time. I suppose I’d better send anyone off at once, if I find one.

I don’t think Faith’s much good—so I shouldn’t count on getting Flossie

Yr B.

Berg

[]

1020: To Vanessa Bell

Wednesday [12 February 1919]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dearest,

I have just been rung up by Abbey to say that Crane is recovered and ready to go to you tomorrow. I have told her to catch the 5.20, and that you will send to meet her at Berwick. I suggested that she should wait till Monday, but he says she is quite all right, and wants to take a place at once, so I had to decide at once.

If you’d like Nelly to stay till Saturday we’re quite ready that she should, and she might help to settle Crane in; but I must confess that we should be rather glad to have her back then. Leonard is getting rather restive, and it would be a relief if I could count on getting her on Saturday. I went to Mrs Lucas, who was hopeless, and said she hadn’t had a h. p. for weeks, even for London. Then I went to Mrs Stuarts agency and got the names of two, but of course neither has answered. I have also been to the Registry here, but the one Nelly heard of had been taken. There were various possibilities, however; there were 2 friends, cook and h. p. wanting to go together; also an h. p. with 5 years of character wanting the country; Would you tell me what you’d like me to do supposing I hear of someone, or two permanents or one permanent, in the next few days—or supposing I do get answers? I shant tell any of the registries that I’m suited until I hear from you. Abbey says they have no one else in prospect at all. Faith seems to have worked the West End without success. They say the only chance is to be there at the moment, and take someone straight off. Still, now theres a breathing space, something permanent might turn up.

They all ask either 18/6 or 20/-

I hope to hear how you are, but I suppose owing to the strikes, all the posts seem erratic—and I think I’d better not count on your getting this in time, but send you a wire.

{We had a visit from the two Cockatoo’s [Clive&Mary] yesterday, in their brightest plumage. Did you realise that Mary thinks of taking a house in Richmond a kind of villa or lodge, so she said, implying perhaps that Jack [Hutchinson] is to be confined to Hammersmith while she and the yellow bird perch here. They were most agreeable, and I explained about Gertler, and she pretended never to have heard about it, or at any rate to have dismissed it on the very first hearing. So now we are all amicable, and she is coming to tea with me.}

I haven’t much gossip, as we have been so cut off. But I shall now put my bag on my back and pick up crumbs for you in London. O dear, when shall I ever see you, and my adorable Niece? Paula is a name of character, and so is Susanna; and I see one must consider Bell as part of the colour scheme, though, if she marries a man called Tristram or McCawney it will be sad to have sacrificed Sidonia, Esther, Vashti and the others. I like a name that has the look of a clear green wave; there’s distinct emerald in Sidonia, just as there’s the splash of the sea in Vanessa; and a chandelier or lustre in Miriam, with all its eyes. By the way, Leonard wants you to call her Fuchsia; that is his favourite name, and he long ago decided to call his daughter that. I wonder if you’ve told Nelly about Asheham. I meant to tell you not to—but it doesn’t really matter.

Yr B.

Let me know as soon as you can about the servants, so as not to miss a chance. By the way, I’ve had another letter from Crane, explaining why she couldn’t go, and very polite, so I think she must be quite decent.

Berg. {Excluded passage restored from Virginia Woolf Miscellany. Number 8. Summer 1977.}

[]

1021: To Vanessa Bell

Sunday [16 February 1919]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dearest,

Nelly has come back in the highest spirits having enjoyed herself immensely. In fact I see that I ought to have made a condition that you shouldn’t seduce her by your charms. I fully expect a week of the most odious comparisons between you and us—and I daresay she’ll end by giving notice—or at anyrate make herself and Lottie miserable by wondering whether they wouldn’t be happier with you. Anyhow, you need have no fear that she won’t be ready to go to you next time. She makes out that you don’t like Crane, or that Crane won’t do any thing outside her work. If Crane is intolerable, I believe I could get you some one here. The Registry seems the most reputable of all I’ve seen, and being so near I can bombard her, and have people sent round directly. So let me know. The things I paid were £1.10. for the children’s boots; £1. to Crane, for the week when she was engaged and put off; and 12/6 fee to Abbeys for engaging her. Together they come to £3.2.6. Let me know if I can do anything about the Nurse. From Nelly’s account you don’t have a moment to yourself, which I’m sure is the most exhausting life under the sun.

Duncan gave us a delicious meal at Verreys—a most distinguished place. I never saw a more remarkable figure than that adorable man—dressed in a nonconformist minister’s coat; but under that an astonishing mixture of red waistcoats and jerseys, all so loose that they had to be hitched together by a woollen belt, and braces looping down somewhere quite useless. He is more and more like a white owl perched upon a branch and blinking at the light, and shuffling his soft furry feet in the snow—a wonderful creature, you must admit, though how he ever gets through life—but as a matter of fact he gets through it better than any of us. Did I tell you how Sickert is a great painter? In fact he’s now my ideal painter; I should like to possess his works, for the purpose of describing them.

Duncan will have stripped London bare of gossip. I cant think of any—save that Clive and I had a long and intimate conversation chiefly about my writings at Verreys, while Mary paid a visit to Hutch [St John Hutchinson] in a home; and I thought him delightful and got some compliments, and some raps on the snout; and then Mary appeared, and I asked him which of us he liked best; and she was extremely modest and sympathetic, and we walked all through Soho in a state of semi-intoxication, recalling the past, and chattering like a cage full of parrokeets. I’m afraid I’ve quarrelled with Katherine Mansfield, and Mirrlees; which makes me think that these young women with all their charm are as brittle as barley sugar. Saxon has not that drawback anyhow. He is persistent and loyal but rather in the manner of an undertaker; at least he makes me slightly dismal, especially when he insists upon my inviting him and Barbara to dinner. They’re coming tonight—B. gets 2 hours off from feeding the Baby; she already has the voice, on the telephone, of the Madonna. There’s an indescribable goodness about it. Old Mother Bell never went in much for that; no, her maternity is of the tigress kind—splendid, devouring, unscrupulous. Murry has been made Editor of the Athenaeum.

Yr B.

The Snowdrops are lovely; I daresay I shall come to Asheham in a week or so, and might then see you. How near you may we settle—and is there any house possible?

Berg

[]

1022: To Vanessa Bell

Tuesday [18 February 1919]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dearest,

I’m afraid it sounds as if Crane had done little or nothing to solve the difficulty. But its the absence of a nurse that distresses me. Wouldn’t it be as well for me to get into touch with [Dr] Moralt or Noel, and shan’t I go to some registry or institute devoted to Nurses? Nothing could be easier for me.

Do let me try if you are still without a prospect—or interview and pursue any possibility.

I believe, too, I could replace Crane by a spryer bird if you liked. The worst is the charge these Registries now make—Mrs Stuart asks £1. for anyone.

I had great compunctions about having Nelly back, and so had she about coming. She has offered to go down whenever we can spare her. My difficulty, as you can probably guess, is that I don’t much like upsetting Leonard, and of course it is rather upsetting—not that Lottie didn’t manage perfectly this time, but she isn’t dependable, and may at any moment rush into one of her tempers.

You’ve made a complete conquest of Nelly; “such a taking way with her”, she says; and we’re the nicest pair of ladies she’s ever known. The drawback though to devoted domestics is the expense. I find our books have jumped to £5 a week—for no perceptible reason.

We thus spend our entire income and more on house keeping; and there seems no reason for it. According to Nelly we have about twice as much to eat as you do—indeed her account of your meagre meals desolated me; but I suppose La B. [Mrs Brereton] (do tell me all her eccentricities) is trying to economise.

Nelly, by the way, formed a very high opinion of Jenny, and thought her highly moral clean and with the makings of a good cook.

But I’m only writing to offer my services about the nurse: they are seriously intended. I’m now very well, and as we take our temperatures on the least pretence I don’t think we shall get the flu this time. I hope Duncan is better; and say how you and Susanna are. She has hair like mine, Nelly says. I’m longing to examine her points.

Alix is coming to tea, and I will extract some gossip and let you have it. I rather expect some dramatic development; and suspect that she may wish to confide in me. I think there must have been a crisis with James. He is alone at Tidmarsh, and will be away for some time. She has taken the Gordon Sq house and is as sepulchral as a toad in a hole.

Yr B.

Berg

[]

1023: To Vanessa Bell

Monday [24 February 1919]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dearest,

Nelly showed me your letter to her this morning, and it led to considerable talk. Indeed, ever since she returned she’s been thinking she ought to have stayed with you, as I knew she would. Some days ago I suggested that she should go back to you, until you got a nurse. However, Lottie then said she felt too lonely by herself here, and the work was too hard. They have been quarrelling together the whole week about it.

Nelly laid the whole thing before me this morning. She feels that she ought to go to you because you want her so much and she likes you so much; but if so Lottie must come too, and as this would be unfair to us, they would have to leave us and go to you permanently. They dont know whether they want to do this—in short, its the old story over again. I have taken up the position that I refuse either to persuade them to stay or to persuade them to go.

Mean while, Budge’s young man never turned up on the wedding day and it is thought he has gone for ever. Budge is in a great taking, so that it wouldn’t be wise to approach her now, but I suppose later she’ll take a place. Anny Boyce has written to me to say that she knows of no temporary people at the moment. Leonard saw Mrs [J. C.] Squire yesterday, who says that Mrs Hunt has several temp. nurses on her books, but they ask 25/ a week, which Mrs Squire can’t afford. Shant I try and see what can be done? The position with N. and L. is so obscure that I don’t in the least know what to make of it. When your letter came with all its thanks and compliments Nelly felt that she must make up her mind to go to you—but then, next minute she turns round and wants me to say that I find her indispensable. However, as they couldn’t go for a month, I suppose, its not much help to you at present; and I see you say that you are getting very tired. I’m sure its a desperate thing to attempt both feeding and nursing—All those ounces are sucked off you, though I’m very glad they go to Susanna—still—What a hellish business it all is!

We are coming to Asheham on Friday till Monday. I’ll come over for the day anyhow one of the days—We might then decide on some plan.

But I’m pretty sure nurses can be got easier than other maids.

I’ve collected a good deal of gossip, but domestic details swallow up my juice like sand. Chiefly for your benefit I went to a concert and a tea party yesterday, and sat between Sir Valentine Chirrol, Katie [Cromer], and Sir Henry Newbolt. I walked with Sir Henry to the concert, and with Katie back again.

Then there’s the house to describe to you. But the pen falters. It faces the Stuffed Beasts. Inside they have a complete collection of autotypes of the Dutch school—old women in white bonnets—Rembrandt heads—all chocolate brown in gilt frames. This is on the staircase. The drawing room has gilt mirrors, triangular shaped, several important oil sea scapes, and heads of horses, to the shoulder, in water colour on little easels. There are photographs of soldiers and babies on every prominence. Sir Henry smelt me very suspiciously at first. He has the appearance of a grey weasel, tapering to a point at both ends.

“I never listen to music, but I think my own thoughts”, he said. “I see things. I find it very difficult to write poetry without hearing music—yes, Mrs Woolf, probably something will come of this—something almost always does come of a concert—”

“Surely you ought to keep a quartet”, I said—which I thought a very pretty compliment; and I see I could shine in South Kensington, which I don’t believe either you or Duncan could do. They have a simplicity which is very engaging—they dont hunch up in corners, like Murry, and say nothing. Bruce and Elena [Richmond] are infinitely polite. And yet, I wonder how far one could go—I feel like a rabbit, who’s really a hare, on a lawn with other rabbits, who are really rabbits. Or is this my conceit? Anyhow, Sir Valentine and Katie are full of doubts about the future.

“For myself, I’m a fatalist”, said Katie. “We may be shot at any moment—any how we shall all be shot together.” “But why?” I asked. “Who’s going to shoot you?” “O the Jews—the Russian Jews,” she replied. “Yes, said Sir Val; Nobody can accuse me of being a pacifist, but after 4 years of war the people are not the same people they were. We shall never see 1914 again: They’re strung up—they’re unreasonable—they want higher wages—and, as Lady Cromer says, there are the Jews, the Russian Jews. There are Jews in every town—colonies of them. They will supply the motive power, and—once the shooting begins—well, I’m a fatalist too, like Lady Cromer.” I almost proclaimed myself a Russian Jew, but I’m keeping this for the next concert. And tonight I dine with Ottoline—God knows why she’s sent for me. We dine in a hotel in Pall Mall. I could go to a Registry on Thursday if you let me know.

Yr B.

Murrys address is, 2 Portland Villas, East Heath Rd. Hampstead. I think you’d better not say anything to Nelly about my writing, if you should be writing to her—not that it much matters. Only I want to keep out of it. I think its useless for either you or me to say anything.

Berg

[]

1024: To Vanessa Bell

Thursday [27 February 1919]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dearest,

To revert for one moment to the domestic business—I didn’t in the least wish to hint that you had influenced Nelly unfairly—I was only a little bewildered as to what had happened. Apparently nothing whatever—At least she’s now back again where she was.

I’m only writing to say that I very much want to see you and the small white owl (wasn’t that a good phrase of mine about Duncan?) but I find that Leonard thinks the walk too far; and therefore would it be possible to take me a bed for Tuesday night at Bo Peep?

Let me have a line at Asheham to say the name of the farmer and proper address and I will write to him. Dont attempt putting me up.

I should come over to lunch on Tuesday.

You may be surprised to hear that I want to see Owlina [Angelica] almost as much as you—she hasn’t of course your demonstrative ways, or flood of eloquence, but I’m told her silence is profoundly mysterious, and she looks at one so as to melt the marrow. Besides I want to set on foot a scheme of mine which I may tell you is to confuse her mind from the first as to her maternity; she is going to think me something more than an Aunt—not quite a father perhaps, but with a hand (to put it delicately) in her birth. I warn you I shall drop hints at every opportunity. I have a great feeling for my nephews too. You have promised to send them here again, remember.

Gossip is what you want, though; and I liked my little compliment, though it comes much easier to me to write letters than to find Cranes. Lord! Lord! what a lot we could say about servants still! An inexhaustible subject! Why, this very morning your picture of St Ives bay fell off the wall onto Lotties head and she went off into a dead faint, and was only recovered by making me and Leonard both feel her bump.

My dinner with Ottoline was a frigid success. The poor woman has broken out into eruptions which she tries to make dramatic by pasting pieces of black plaster on them—but they exude at the edges. It’s a terrific business whipping her into life now. One has to bow and scrape and do all sorts of antics, and implore her to tell one the history of her life from the beginning before she will get up steam at all. She fishes for compliments worse than I do—I mean without that airy certainty which is so adorable in me that there is no limit to one’s store and one has merely to shake the tree for them to fall thick as apple blossom in May. She shakes the tree—oh yes,—However, I did my best; and when she said that I dressed so beautifully that I made her feel older and uglier than ever, I said, “My dear Ottoline, like the Lombardy poplar you have only to stand up naked to put us all to shame!” She liked that. But still she is fundamentally suspicious of us all, I’m afraid, and goes ravening like a dog about Bloomsbury. She insisted upon walking from the Strand to Gordon Square in a bitter wind merely to see your wretched cockatoo [Clive] and get a little of the strong wine of the male, when she felt me flagging. She now walks exactly as Queen Alexandra is said to do; and her mind vapours off about friendship and love and literature—“I could never love anyone who does not care for literature—that is my cross—my refuge, Virginia—when people are cruel—and they are so cruel sometimes—And I suffer so terribly—my back gives me agonies—my feet are swollen with chillblains, and I am always, always tired. What would I not give to be able to work as you do—to create—to be an artist—” imagine crossing Holborn with this dribbling out, as painfully as two old witches on crutches.

Of course, her character has an element of the superb; there’s no denying it. She has swooped down upon Rose Allatini, the authoress of despised and Rejected, had her to tea that afternoon, and sucked from her the history of her illicit amour, so that at last Rosa Allatini put up her hands, turned a deathly white and said “I’m afraid I’m about to faint—I’ve eaten nothing all day—” upon which Ott: burst a bag of bath buns which she happened to have by her and fed her with them until she was recovered. But Allatini won’t do—she is a disagreeable creature. On the other hand, the wife of Lord Henry’s agent in Westmorland is a “wonderful, sympathetic, very literary and most cultivated woman” married to a husband who’s sole interest lies in tapping drain pipes; and Ott: is going to bring her to see me; and hopes I will give her advice about her novel, which is full of exquisite touches, but terribly, terribly sad.

Now all this seems to me to be a cut above the Barbara’s, and in particular the Faiths, who sit in Hampstead doing nothing but pick little holes in all our characters like so many magpies. I don’t see any point in being a magpie if you haven’t got a brain. Still this doesn’t apply to our Barbara, who is nicer than ever; and really Ottoline hit her off rather exactly as the image of a respectable barmaid; pulling handles behind a counter, as fresh as a rose. She still frisks into the room, but she is fundamentally sedate.

I can’t think why I’m writing you this enormous letter. By the way, Henry Lamb is on our tracks, without success so far, and has sent a message to Ott: through Anrep, to say that he does not mean to renew his acquaintance with her, or with any of his old friends—why he excepts us, I dont know.

I rather like  | Griselda—light and fantastic.
| Nerissa
| Lesley—but I must stop having worn my pen to a tremulous thread of wire. Let me know about Bo Peep, as soon as you can.

Yr B.

Berg

[]

1025: To Clive Bell

[5? March 1919]

[Hogarth House, Richmond]

My dear Clive,

I’ve sent off your money to Bruce R[ichmond] and here is the half crown over.

I shall be delighted to dine after the concert, and rub off a little of Shelley House, though it has an unspeakable fascination, as you’ll see.

Yours V.W.

Quentin Bell

[]

1026: To Vanessa Bell

[11 March 1919]

Postcard

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Do you by any chance want to let Charleston for April and May? The Bruce Richmonds want to know.

If so, would you send me a line at once, saying rent; but I don’t suppose you do.

V.W.

We’ve now been given notice by Hoper, and he can’t let us The Farm so do enquire for houses if you ever have a chance. How is Griselda, Theresa, Bridget [Angelica]?

Berg

[]

1027: To Robert Mayor

March 11th 1919

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, S.W.

Dear Mr Mayor,

I wonder if there is any chance that you are wishing to let the cottage at Firle, unfurnished, at any time?

We have just heard that we must leave Asheham at the end of September, and we are looking for some place in the neighbourhood. If there is a chance of your wishing to give up Firle it would be very good of you if you would let me know.

Yours sincerely,
Virginia Woolf

Executors of Andreas Mayor

[]

1028: To Clive Bell

Friday [14 March 1919]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

My dear Clive,

The Carbis Bay address is,

Miss Nicholson,
Gwêl Martin,
Carbis Bay.

I’m not sure about the accent on the e, but I don’t suppose it is essential—I should write at once, and possibly name Mr and Mrs Woolf, if you want rooms soon as she is apt to be taken. We were just discussing the question of a subscription to the Press when your card came. I think something of the kind must be devised. The difficulty is whether people wont want some security as to the nature of the bargain—names of writers who have promised—and when they do promise they don’t always fulfil. This is a hit at Mary, who also refuses to dine with me. Still we had Mr and Mrs Bruce Richmond to dinner last night, which was a greater feat than having Mary. He apologised profusely for the politics in the [Times Literary] Supt.—but no other books are coming out. However I meant to insinuate in the proper place higher up the page the request that Mr Clive Bell should do what Mary won’t do, write for the Press—no room for compliments is left me.

V.W.

Quentin Bell

[]

1029: To Vanessa Bell

Sunday [23 March 1919]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dearest,

I was on the point of wiring to you to call your child Angelica. Helen’s beautiful, and so’s Vanessa, but then there’s the difficulty of young Nessa and old Nessa, and Nelly seems to me for ever appropriate to Boxall; whereas Angelica has liquidity and music, a hint of green in it, and memories of no one except [Angelica] Kaufmann, who was no doubt a charming character. Can’t you still write in Angelica on the Registry Card? I have a feeling that unless people are registered they are all like Aunt Minna and Emphie Case, and Pensa Filly—playing at real names.

You don’t say how you are, which I think you might have done; for I scarcely like to ask for fear of being called Aunt Mary again. I am much tempted to come and stay, but in the first place I am now inseparable from my typewriter. I was on the point of taking my novel [Night and Day] to Gerald when I discovered that about half was illegible; my typewriting is not my strong point; I am picking out the worst bits and doing them again, and I’ve promised to lunch with him at the Savoy on Friday—

Then, though you won’t see the strength of this, I dont much like leaving Leonard with Lottie. She is all right so far, and Lil is excellent in every way, but Lotties temper shows signs of being unstable, and probably Leonard would dismiss her if I went away; anyhow I should feel slightly guilty. But don’t breathe a word of this to Nelly. The vagaries of domestics are quite unintelligible; however so long as my extraordinarily sweet nature is in the house to keep the peace it will be all right.

Couldn’t I transfer my invitation till you’ve got your nurse, and Nelly is back here again?

I believe the [Adrian] Stephen’s go down to Asheham tomorrow—damn their souls! and they stay a fortnight at least, and I don’t much like the thought of those great pillar like legs in my bed; and all that breezy good heartedness, and immense munching, and public spirit about the house. We almost let it to the Richmonds, but I think thats fallen through for the present. I’m rather in despair about getting a house. I’ve written to several agents; most of them don’t even answer; one did, but said that there was nothing to be had anywhere for £50. Meanwhile we’re greatly tempted to take [D. H.] Lawrences cottages at Zennor. He had two on the Cliff with a superb view and a garden for £27—and of course Cornwall is almost irresistible; so I’ve written to find out, and we rather think, if we take them, of moving all our furniture and books down there from Asheham, and taking a tiny cottage in Firle or thereabouts as a week end place. But I fully expect to find that they’re already taken. Katherine [Murry] says its the most divine place in the world—3½ miles from St Ives, so its sure to be taken, and I suppose we shall be on the Streets. Yes, and of course Adrian and Karin will step into some old farm near you, which Karin will proceed to decorate with her needle, which is her rage—she does her own designs too—and every evening you’ll have a jolly talk about the cistern or the kitchen boiler. You dont know enough about the League of Nations and democracy to keep your end up there, and as for poor dear old Duncan I dont suppose he could keep the League distinct from the boiler for long. Does he realise, by the way, that he is now, in a sort of way, my brother in law, and all that implies?

Our chief amusement now is Murry and the Athenaeum. He is in a state of high exaltation, something like a Prime Minister, for everyone buzzes about asking for appointments, and needless to say, though please dont repeat this, the Stracheys have induced him much against his better judgment, to adopt James as Dramatic critic. They are a masterly race—at least the male Stracheys are, in asking and getting; poor old Gumbo [Marjorie Strachey], on the other hand, has just been dismissed from her school on account of short sight, and seemed to me in the depths of despair. She has no bounce left any longer. She only just manages to live on her pay in a room in Kensington. James, of course, has an allowance from Lady S[trachey]: and by pulling the right wires has now got a comfortable income out of Murry.

Perhaps I am unduly severe upon him though. Has he given up being a doctor, do you know?

It is rather fun about the Athenaeum, as every one is to write what they like, and Mrs [Humphry] Ward is to be exposed, and in time they hope to print imaginative prose by me—Murry has got a man called John Gordon, a very bad painter he says, to do art criticism; but I suggested that he’d much better get Duncan to do the important things at any rate—not that Duncan is exactly fluent in composition, but I don’t see why he and I and you shouldn’t maunder about in picture galleries, and what with his genius and your sublimity and my perfectly amazing gift of writing English we might turn out articles between us. Do consider this.

I dined with the Yellow Cockatoo [Clive] the other night, and he said how you are the greatest decorator of large spaces in England; and we sang a musical duet in your praise, until a prostitute who was dining at the next table suddenly threw her glass on the floor and upset the mustard and walked out, leaving her poor young man to look most uncomfortable. It was a very remarkable scene; and altogether I enjoyed myself very much. But its useless to pretend that I have any real connection with the Bohemian world any longer; I see that its my fate to be sucked under by the Bourgeois and made a sacrifice of to old family friends. I’ve just had a long letter from Meg Ritchie, imploring me to go and see Mrs [Charles] Booth, while there is still time, (though Mrs Booth is perfectly well) and saying that she and Billy and the children are coming to live at Wimbledon, and hope to see a great deal of us. You would be brutal; I am at once touched almost to tears. And then you tell Clive that I’m perhaps the most dangerous, unscrupulous, impossible, undependable character you know!

We had Bruce and Elena to dine the other night. I own that I was slightly moved once more by Elena. It is true that she is very stupid, but then dressed all in black with one jade ornament, and her now white hair, and her almond blossom complexion, and her air of melancholy she is undoubtedly very distinguished; and, though we did not mention the subject, I feel certain that the reason of her sterility and her melancholy is her hopeless passion for Stephen Massingberd which still persists; and that on every anniversary of Margaret’s death she steals down secretly to Gunby and puts white flowers on her grave. Don’t you think its all quite possible? Its a case of one of these hopeless, canine affections of which you and I are, according to Clive, so incapable. Do you ever think of poor old Waller now, except to laugh at him?—and what do I feel, after all, for Walter Headlam, except that one of these days I shall put him into a novel? I wish Duncan would write me a long letter, all about your character, and say what he’s discovered in those labyrinthine catacombs, where the bones are piled so high, and innumerable jackals laugh in the light of the moon.

I suppose, if I could come for a week end, and sent a telegram, it would be all right? Give Nelly my love, and tell her that we are both longing to have her back, but Lil seems to be quite happy.

Yr B.

Berg

[]

1030: To Clive Bell

[29 March 1919]

Postcard

[Hogarth House, Richmond]

Any day next week, which begins on Monday; choose; communicate. Your wishes were observed last night, which was, I thought, particularly charming; and Desmond very affable; but the star of the night was Mrs B[ell]: really, like a bud slipping its sheath; virginal; auroral; but yet with all the sorrows of all the ages. This does not refer to Mrs Brereton or Mrs Briggs, for the matter of that. Choose any day, but let it be before Friday. I am off to secure a charwoman’s character in the back streets.

V.W.

Quentin Bell

[]

1031: To Vanessa Bell

[2 April 1919]

[Hogarth House, Richmond]

Dearest,

“Man and wife seek situation in any place of trust: man with life-long experience as coachman and 10 years as chauffeur: wife a hospital trained nurse; family grown up and out; highest references . .J. Burgess, Orchardleigh, Frome, Somerset.”

They must be with the Duckworths—This is from the Times—today.

The Agency here is

Clare Carlisle
The Green
Richmond.

Yr V.W.

Berg

[]

1032: To Vanessa Bell

Friday [4 April 1919]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dearest,

It’s perfectly all right that you should keep Nelly, as Lil seems willing to stay more or less indefinitely. As she came on a Wednesday, an extra week would bring us to Wednesday 16th. One would have to take her for a full week, so you had better have Nelly till then anyhow. I shall take it for granted that you want this, and tell Lil definitely.

I went to the Registry here today, and was told of a lady nurse asking £40, but would probably take less. I went to see her, but found she was out, but I’m going to see her tomorrow. She is about 37 and seemed nice and had great experience was all the Registry knew: the servant said she had not yet got a place. I dont for a moment suppose she will do, but it might be a good thing if you told me what wages you would give etc. in case the registry sent me round someone. There is also a young girl, now h. p., who wants to become nurse, but has no experience. I’m to hear about her on Tuesday. The lady nurse is Miss Pruden, 1 Gloucester Gardens, Richmond. The registry, Clare Carlisle, the Green, held out hopes, as I suppose they always do. I told her to write straight to you. She said it was much better she should ring me up in case someone came in and wanted to see me at once. So I have told her to do this. They all seem to live in Richmond so that one has a chance of seeing them instead of merely writing; but I see one becomes quite hopeless.

But if any chance appeared on the horizon it would be worth seducing Nelly to stay on a little at Charleston to avoid coming up with the baby.

We have now settled to come to Asheham for Easter—that is on the 17th. If Nelly would stay on till then, I would send Lottie down to you on the 17th till the 22nd, if that hope would keep Nelly pacified.

I should like to hear about the party, which was I suppose, the most brilliant there’s ever been, though the chief jewel shone at Richmond.

I might telephone all this, if only Gordon Sqre were civilized; as it is I must send it to Charleston.

O God! What a horror of desolation your life seems to be—only through domestic troubles, I mean. If adoration, sympathy and all the rest of it are any balm—By the way, Mary rang me up yesterday in great agitation about Eliot, imploring me to say nothing, denying the whole story, and insisting that he only abused Bloomsbury in general, and not me, and that Clive had completely misunderstood!

Yr B.

Berg

[]

1033: To S. S. Koteliansky

April 4th [1919]

Hogarth House, 285 Paradise Road, Richmond

Dear Mr Koteliansky,

We quite understand your feeling, which we rather share ourselves—at least we would generally rather not dine with people. If you would come in after dinner on Sunday we should like it very much. We have Mr and Mrs Eliot coming—perhaps you have met him, or have read his poetry. He wrote a book called Prufrock. If this doesn’t suit you, perhaps you would ring us up and suggest some evening or afternoon. The evenings are generally best, as Leonard is then more likely to be in. We are engaged on Tuesday.

Yours sincerely,
Virginia Woolf

Our number is 496 Richmond.

British Museum

[]

1034: To Vanessa Bell

5 April 1919

Typewritten

The International Review, 10 Adelphi Terrace, London, W.C.2

My dear Vanessa,

I am writing for V. to explain a crisis which has arisen and which will come to you through a letter from her to Nelly. What exactly it all means, we do not know; but the facts are as follows. This morning Lottie came up in a terrific state with the following story: a letter, posted in London, had come addressed outside to her and inside to Lil, saying that she Lil was trying to get Nelly’s place, that Nelly was being made to stay on in Charleston and would not, that as she was not wanted by us she was going to leave Charleston at once and go back home, etc., etc. The letter was not signed. Lil appears to have got into a state, and to have put the letter and envelope into the fire, so that we never saw it. Lottie said that Lil had immediately posted a letter to Nelly, and so we thought we had better write to Nelly at once. Apparently Lil’s letter was not posted. Things have quieted down here, but V. has written to Nelly saying that of course we have always meant her to come back here, and that if she prefers to come on Tuesday, she certainly must do so.

V. got the name of a nurse from a Registry Office here, and is going to see the woman this afternoon.

Yours
Leonard Woolf

[in Virginia’s handwriting]

I am perfectly sure that the letter has nothing to do with Nelly, as she would have written to me herself. I think it possible that my letter to you was opened at Gordon Square and they [Blanche and Jessie] wrote for a joke to upset Lottie.

If Nelly is willing to stay on with you, there’s no reason why she shouldnt; I only wanted to make it clear to her that I have never dreamt of taking Lil in her stead, or that she should stay with you indefinitely.

Berg

[]

1035: To Vanessa Bell

Saturday [5 April 1919]

[Hogarth House, Richmond]

Dearest,

I’ve just sent you a wire about Nelly Feulkner. I went to see Miss Pruden, and saw the lady of the house, Mrs Parry, who told me that she was extremely severe and strict and over 50, and didn’t think she would be any good with a baby. I said that you would really prefer a young girl whom you could teach, upon which she said “I think my housemaid would suit her—she is an extremely nice girl of 27 who wants to be be a nurse, and has already had a good deal to do with children.” So Nelly Faulkner was sent for, and turned out to be a charming, pink faced Scotch girl, with a slight accent, very clean and healthy looking. I told her she would have complete charge of a baby of 3 months. She said this was just what she would like. She had had to do with children—I dont think as nurse but as help—in her last place, and is devoted to them, and would like nothing better than to be taught by you. I asked Mrs Parry about her character. She has only been 5 weeks there, but Mrs P. said she is perfectly honest, clean, and most considerate, and doesn’t mind what she’s asked to do, and that she would never have parted with her except that her husband is getting a valet, and does not like having housemaids. You can get a character for 2½ years from the place before that; she was with a doctor in Scotland. She wants £36 wages. She likes the country very much. Her only anxiety was that you might want her to wear uniform.

She is leaving on Monday, but wants a few days to get things, and would be ready to go to you on Thursday. I said I would wire to you, and you would write to her on Monday. She will then come and see me and hear how to get to you.

If you would rather see her yourself, of course come and stay here. It’s only 5 minutes off—Mrs Parry seemed very nice, and respectable.

Of course, like all the others this may come to nothing, or I may have thought her nicer than she is; but certainly she seemed to me particularly nice—rather humorous and simple, and ready to fit in with ones ways. Also she’s so near that I can keep an eye upon her. If you’ve any directions for me, perhaps you’d better wire them, and I could go and settle with her in person.

Yr B.

I believe Trissie must have sent the anonymous letter—

Berg

[]

1036: To Vanessa Bell

[8 April 1919]

[Hogarth House, Richmond]

Dearest,

I’ve just been round to see N. F. [Nellie Faulkner], as I thought it best to arrange that she should see you here, and find that she has already left 1 Gloucester Gdns and Mrs Parry tells me that she decided not to go as nurse, and also that she wanted to stay in Richmond. It seems hopeless therefore. Three other people have been after her, as parlourmaid and Mrs Parry said it was useless.

I have the address of her rooms, and will try to see her tomorrow, but she was out today.

I don’t suppose its any good though—

Great haste

V.W.

Let me know what you decide as soon as you can about Nelly and coming up.

I’ll write tomorrow.

Berg

[]

1037: To Vanessa Bell

Wednesday [9 April 1919]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dearest,

I enclose a letter from Faulkner. I dont know what your plans are now, but I suppose you will let me know. I am only keeping Lil on by the day, as you seen to think Nelly may come back on Friday or Saturday. If you want to keep N. till Monday do; only let me know, and make it quite clear to her that she is to do what she likes. Lil has turned out to know nothing of cooking; and is unable to do housework, so, as you may suppose, she and Lottie have almost daily quarrels, and I don’t think Lottie will hold out much longer. Of course Nelly’s letter made things much worse, and the usual scenes and warnings have taken place almost daily—

However, I don’t much look forward to having Nelly back, as I can guess what a fuss there’ll be. They are intolerable I think whether one has them or fails to have them—But I’m only grumbling because my whole morning has again been ruined over the question as to who broke the mincing machine—

The Eliots dined here and were overcome by the charms of Walter Lamb! I think that places him in the scale of humanity. They confided to Gumbo [Marjorie Strachey] on the way home that they had never met a more charming and beautiful young man—so witty too. Gumbo was superb, and insisted upon talking about purges and bottoms and the w.c. in the most dramatic way.

Oliver has just rung up to ask to bring Inez to dine here. But I’ve no time for gossip.

I’m very sorry about Faulkner. I thought her exceptionally good. God, what a time you have!

Yr B.

Berg

[]

1038: To Vanessa Bell

Wednesday [16 April 1919]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dearest,

We have settled not to come down for Easter after all, but next week instead. I hope I may see you then and tell you the fascinating story of Lil. I still spend a large part of every morning in going over all these matters with Nelly, but peace is restored. She never ceases to praise you and to boast of her pendant, which I have to admire profusely, though I think it must have been a present from George.

I seem never to have a moment for writing to you, owing partly to domestics and partly to having to get a long article done, and then I’m now in the toils of Gravé [dressmaker] again, and Herbert Fisher came and wasted the whole of Sunday, and then we had Oliver and Inez [Ferguson], and I’m now off to tea with Katherine Murry—But I take it for granted that the Yellow Bird of Bloomsbury [Clive] keeps you aware of all the cackle of life such as it is. Another interruption just as I was writing to you, was Desmond; who stays with the Bretts in Belgrave Square; but they’ve [Desmond and Molly MacCarthy] taken a house at Oare, next the Waterlows, and Molly is now getting in, so I should send her letters there. Herbert was more like poor old Marny [Vaughan] than anyone—pale and ascetic and mild, speaking in a kind of whisper, and never committing himself to any statement. But he has the intolerable Fisher superciliousness; and makes my spine curl—no longer with despair at my own insignificance though. I feel worth ten of him, and in fact we made ourselves rather disagreeable, and abused George Duckworth, and the Cunards and Lady Manners, with whom he seemed to be impressed. And he abused Lytton’s book, with which I rather agreed of course. It’s said that he’s a government spy (Herbert I mean) for he pounces upon the Oliver Stracheys too, and stays for hours, and makes them disclose their views. But Lord! What watery and wobbly minds these politicians have—and always afraid to say what they mean, and such an air of being behind the scenes.

Inez is a pert young professional, by no means of the seductive kind, I should have thought; and ill spaced, indeed rather vulgar looking and splotchy in the face. However, she has more wits than Barbara, and may have floated in on that tide. Oliver was very testy because the [Bernard] Berenson’s won’t endow him so that he needn’t work—O the Stracheys—the Stracheys! If it weren’t for their grace of mind, which you must admit to be considerable, how I should detest them. But I’m inclined to think Marjorie the best at this moment. [E. M.] Forster is back again [from Alexandria]; and I find him very sympathetic.—but all this gossip is to entice you into telling me about that house you said you heard of. We have practically abandoned the idea of Cornwall, owing to the distance. We mean to get something, however possible, near Lewes, and put our things there and hang on until we can get something better; or perhaps Gunn may leave Asheham. Could you tell me whether Mr Stacey [the Charleston farmer] told you, and what his address is, and whereabouts the house is. I would then write to him, and we could arrange to see it when we come.

Angelica is a lovely name; I wish it had been possible to include Moll Flanders though; or Roxana. If ever anyone reminded me of you it is Moll Flanders. But I think you read that work and probably know it by heart; don’t you think its quite superb?

Yr B.

I will tell you the whole story of Elizabeth Asquith’s engagement to [Antoine] Bibesco, and how Hugh Gibson rejected her, and why, and what happened to Mrs Asquith in Bond Street, and whether Bibesco played the Knave, and what Elizabeths real feelings are, and how she sent a love letter through Desmond, with permission to read it, which he did, and what Asquith said when he was told of the engagement, together with various other lewd and diverting details when we meet. Desmond gave us a superb account.

Berg

[]

1039: To Duncan Grant

Thursday [17 April 1919]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

My dear Duncan,

I am sending you this book, which I bought in the year ’5 at Florence, in case it may do for you or Nessa (old Nessa) to draw in. I also want to ask whether it would be possible for either of you to do some coloured papers for Kew Gardens—We have bought 25/- worth off Roger, but they only cover 80 copies, and there are 150: the price seems to me extortionate—at anyrate impossible, so I have told him to do no more. The size is 12 inches across and 9½ the other way. We should want enough for 70 copies. Perhaps you could send me a sample if you would do it, and could do it cheaper than Roger. It ought to be on as stiff and thick paper as possible. We are only waiting now for the covers: and there need be no likeness between one cover and another.

All my gossip was skimmed for Nessa: I went to tea with the Murry’s and the mystery of Eliot was further thickened by hearing how he’d praised me to the skies to them; and now we have a letter asking us to dinner, and I’m determined, in spite of Mary [Hutchinson], to draw the rat from his hole (I beg to remind you that rabies is now prevalent). Murry was very cadaverous, and I told him he would sink the Athenaeum with his bad philosophy, and how bad I thought Lytton: but 3 publishers have already written on the strength of one article to ask to publish his next book, and all the clerks in the office are wild about it. So you see what we may expect—and don’t you think it very odd how exactly all our friends are fitted out by Fate! There’s Sydney governor of the left bank of the Rhine, or practically; poor old Desmond still doing pot boilers, and sending stories about Bears who have swallowed rubber balls to papers for prizes: and me obscure; and Nessa and Duncan with all the bloom on, like great purple plums half hidden beneath their leaves.

By the way, the great story of Vanessa has had another chapter added to it. By two separate people—Fredegond and [Dorothy] Brett—not in collusion, have I been told how she turned Mary off the sofa at Roger’s party—Mary decked like a butterfly in May—and said “Its time you got off that sofa, Mary”. This is thought to symbolise all kinds of things, and is being acted by Fredegond, and will figure in her repertory. Katherine acted it too yesterday. “Its time you got off the sofa Mary”: Vanessa is represented like a tawny old Goddess, all crusted with brine and barnacles shouldering her way out of the sea—But there! How could there be a sofa in the sea, Nessa will ask?

I must take this out; I was so thankful the Stephen’s weren’t a success.

Would you tell me about the house you heard of? We think we might take 2: and always have one let; one in Cornwall, the other in Sussex, and make the rent of both. I have written a very frivolous (but clever) article for Murry, in which you figure under the disguise of Adolphus Blatt. Nessa is Caroline Mew.

Yr V.W.

Duncan Grant

[]

1040: To Vanessa Bell

April 28th [1919]

Asheham House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

Dearest,

If I can come tomorrow or one day soon I will. This, however, is to ask, with a sense of contrition, whether you would pack and send my green wool coat, left in my bedroom. I only brought summer things, and the snow lies thick on the ground.

Has the nurse come?

How is Angelica?

Anyone would be welcome here, I need not say, at any time.

Yr B.

Berg

[]

1041: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

April 29th [1919]

Asheham House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

My dear Ottoline,

Your letter was sent on here, where we have come for a week’s holiday to find snow on the ground, and such wind and rain that we cant face the downs.

We very much want to come to you. But we can’t settle upon any week ends at this moment, owing to the horrible need we are under of finding another house to go to in September. We are being turned out of Asheham—and we are spending Leonard’s spare time in house hunting. You probably want to settle your week ends now; so that I’m afraid we ought to say we can’t come, and ask you to have us later. Or if Leonard finds he can’t get away, might I come alone?—But he would like to come—

We are tempted to take Lawrence’s cottage in Cornwall, but it means a tremendous journey to see it; and the owner refuses to answer letters.

What is happening to you? Are you ever in London—and will you come and dine with me this time, perhaps at the 17 Club—only that is too earnest and right-minded and altogether respectable. I’ve been seeing Katherine and Murry, and find great fascination in both of them, though the difficulty of conversation, especially when the brother and the Rhodesian lady are there, is very great. The Athenaeum seems to have cheered Murry; it is at least a channel for some of his miseries; but I do my best to rout out his philosophy, which will sink the paper to the bottom if it goes on.

The Coles, (the social reforming Cole) dined with us the other night, and he said he had stayed at Garsington; but I couldn’t imagine Margaret Postgate, his wife, at your table; nor Cole himself, though he’s a clever, pugnacious young man. Social reform however is not seductive; I hate always taking sides, dont you?—and being right or wrong, and so ugly into the bargain.

I have been reading Yeats new poems with great pleasure. I think—for the first time—that he really is a poet.

But how much pleasanter it would be to discuss all this wandering through the streets of London together!

Your affate
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

1042: To Vanessa Bell

Sunday [4 May 1919]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest,

Curse this weather. There is at present a white fog and a gale of wind; we’ve had to give up coming. But we shall be here in a fortnight again, and I might then spend a night if convenient.

Would you let me know about the paper [for Kew Garden covers] as soon as you can: how much it would cost, and how long it would take to do, if you are able to do it.

As the notices are sent out, I want to get the books ready as soon as possible; so that if its likely to take more than 10 days, I think I’d better get ordinary coloured paper, dull though it is. I could send you down white paper from London. But perhaps Roger has done his black and blue; in which case I could cover 80 copies in that, and you might finish off the edition, which is only 150, with yours.

What do you think it would cost to build a 6 or 7 roomed house in this neighbourhood? Perhaps Roger would know. Apparently we should have to buy whatever we find, and it might come cheaper, any how in a year or two to build: besides you might design and decorate and plant us near Charleston, but not too near.

Here is a letter from Murry which may amuse you. Do you think that his version of Mary is correct? I think they’re a little hard on her, but they owe her a grudge of some kind. Would you send the letter back.

Gerald has read my novel with the greatest interest, and is delighted to publish it, which is convenient, but rather disappointing, as I should have liked to try the other way.

I’m sending you a loaf and a cake of my making, with the request that you will keep them for a 2nd course at dinner. I never sit down to my spread without a sigh, thinking of you. Still the ducks eggs are delicious; we enjoyed ours immensely. Did you have an explanation with Mabel? How is Nelly settling down?

Yr B.

I wrote a very tactful letter to Adrian, and I will tell you what he says—I don’t think he gets his share of Waller until October. I made it clear that you had not asked me to write, and did not count upon it.

Berg

[]

1043: To Janet Case

Sunday [4 May 1919]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

My dear Janet,

I meant to enclose some words of friendship with the notice which I sent off yesterday but fastened it up and forgot.

I’m not in the least surprised by the way, nor is Leonard, that the Ceylon Editor is not up to what you sent him. We’ve just read the letter about the League of Nations. We don’t see how he could feel your charity either for the Germans or the C.O.’s. Why you should feel humiliated, we can’t conceive; if you’d seen those little timid coffee coloured men you would realise that they are neither advanced nor philanthropic; and at present all their effort is to keep in with the [British] Government in order to get their own reforms pushed through. The late correspondent, who believed in British honour and King George, was much more in their line. But I admit its horrible to be rejected even by the coffee coloured; I was even a little pleased this morning to be accepted by Gerald Duckworth—who doesn’t know a book from a beehive—but Leonard soon put that right. Here he is, in from the garden; and having read the first page of this letter, he says that it does not quite express his opinion. He says that he doesn’t think it quite fair to say that the poor wretches aren’t advanced, but they may feel that as they’re going strong for self government in India and Ceylon and therefore are liable to be called disloyal by foolish people out there they shouldn’t run the risk of being also called disloyal by other silly people from another point of view. When you wrote to Leonard at first this possibility did not strike him, particularly as he hasn’t himself written about European affairs for the paper but always about Ceylon affairs. This I have taken down from his dictation, and used up almost all my paper.

We are in the midst of packing to go home tomorrow; and there is a great shortage of paper; save of printed paper, which seems to be the chief perquisite of Editors. All the cranks and crack brains in Europe send him [Leonard] their sheets, which they seem to have faith in to reform the world—I can’t think why.

We saved up this last week for a holiday, rejecting Easter, and we’ve only had one fine day. We’ve had snow, wind, rain, and at present a thick sea mist, so that the railing which used to please you so much along the field opposite is hidden. Nevertheless, we have enjoyed ourselves immensely; partly because we have no servants; only a woman to clean up.

What are your conditions? I’m not going to propose a visit, so don’t be afraid to confess how comfortable you are. But did you manage to shake off everyone, as you hoped—and did you take Chaucer with you—what have you been doing, Miss Case, in short? I strongly advise Sir Thomas Browne.

By the way, we’ve taken three cottages on the Cliff in Cornwall, between St Ives and the Gurnards head, for £15 a year; which will admit of another cottage somewhere here. But my dear Janet you must come and stay with us. When Violet Dickinson got into her house, she had a clergyman to read a service; I prefer to have mine hallowed by Janet Case. She need merely lie on a sofa and look at the Atlantic, while her pupil puts a few intelligent questions to her—which reminds me that Vanessa was asking whether you’d teach her little boys next autumn. They are outgrowing the Governess.

Your affate
V.W.

Sussex

[]

1044: To Violet Dickinson

[8? May 1919]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

My Violet,

It is very good of you to throw a pound into our jaws, when you know nothing of what you may get out of them.

Mr Eliot is an American of the highest culture, so that his writing is almost unintelligible; Middleton Murry edits the Athenaeum, and is also very obscure. I mean you’ll have to shut your door and give yourself a quiet few days—not for Kew Gardens, though; that is as simple as can be. Roger Fry has done covers for Eliot’s and mine.

But all the same, virtuous and philanthropic as you are and a forgotten benefactor, (I’m hoping one day to write your obituary) I dont see why you dont ask me to tea. I would, of course, bring my own butter and sugar. Katie [Cromer] was quite benevolent in her imperious way the other day when I saw her; Nelly [Cecil] still writes an affectionate letter. I’m not such an outcast as you suppose.

But I see that the only tea party that I shall be asked to is the one with the black icing on the cake and the crystallised violets daintily arranged in the form of a heart.

I saw my new niece, Angelica, the other day; very lovely with vast blue eyes, and long fingers. Nessa presides over the most astonishing ménage; Belgian hares, governesses, children, gardeners, hens, ducks, and painting all the time, till every inch of the house is a different colour. We have just been turned out of Asheham—isn’t it damnable? and have taken 3 cottages near the Gurnards Head, 4 miles from St Ives.

Leonard sends his love; he is an editor.

Yr. V.W.

Berg

[]

1045: To Violet Dickinson

Thursday [15 May 1919]

[Hogarth House, Richmond]

Here is a copy of the [Eliot] poems—very dirty, but I only made it worse by trying to clean it. This is a bribe to make you come and dine with us.

Telephone 496 Richmond.

I very much enjoyed my afternoon in Manchester St.

V.W.

Berg

[]

1046: To Roger Fry

Thursday [15 May 1919]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

My dear Roger,

I find that Mr Osborne, secretary of the I.L.P. [Independent Labour Party], is delivering an address to the Branch of the W.C.G. [Women’s Co-operative Guild] of which, till lately, I was president, on Tuesday, and I must be there, to represent the middle classes, so may I come to you on Monday instead of Tuesday?

I would come to tea—but where? which is your new Studio?—and then perhaps, if you could have me to dinner at your house we could continue our discussion there. But I know you’ll be entertaining Piccasso and Lady Cunard, or something of the kind; for I never heard such outrageous nonsense as you were talking down the telephone yesterday. The comment which the instrument made seemed to me extremely appropriate—I to have deserted you! I to be taken up with new friends! When the truth is that like the wistaria and the lilac I droop in my remote suburb, chaste and unviolated save by the bees of Heaven—

We dined under the apple blossom last night with Ottoline, and though fairly garish in the moonlight, which was not so discreet as it might have been, and showed up the powder like snow on the higher reaches of the Alps, she was extremely charming; her soul seemed to be shedding its husks; she was frank and with Leonard on one side and me on the other kept strictly to the path of truth. She loped along it like a large white hare; and in fact we were convinced of her fundamental integrity. Of course, it is not in the Cambridge style. She spoke of you with enthusiasm. But then as everybody does that, such little tributes as I have to make pass unnoticed. For instance, the other day Murry said “Roger Fry is far the nicest of all your friends”—to which I replied “My dear Murry, have you only just discovered that Roger is not only the most charming but also the most spiritually gifted of mankind? Where we have a rag, he has the whole cloak—” “His sweetness, his largeness, his magnanimity”—went on Murry—“and then the random fire of genius” I interrupted, “The most beautiful house in London” said Murry, “and his portrait of Edith Sitwell I think the best he ever painted”. I interposed, “Of his art I cant speak, but of his temperament, his generosity—” “O if we could all be like Roger!” I wound up, and plunged the whole party into gloom. This is strictly according to fact I assure you, but as Nessa would say, coals to Newcastle.

Yours ever,
V.W.

Sussex

[]

1047: To Vanessa Bell

Sunday [18 May 1919]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dearest,

I am so fuddled with conversation that I can hardly write an articulate letter—but I daresay you won’t notice. All the people have come out of their holes and there is a general swarm. We’ve had Ottoline and Lytton, and Roger, and Logan and Ray and Oliver, and Danes and Armenians—and I dont know who; and we’ve just been lunching with the Webbs. I think your method of seeing people in the country is really better. Yesterday we talked from 1.30 to 7 without stopping. Roger appeared with Pamela and a Russian lady. Roger is a miracle. And I need not expatiate upon his powers, though on a hot afternoon, after talking to Derain and seeing pictures all the morning, his incessant activities surprised me. But you want gossip.

I put my foot into it by asking Logan to meet Ottoline; and then by asking Oliver to dine here with Ray. Logan considers Ottoline the seducer of Bertie; she, of course, longed for a reconciliation scene, in the moonlight, under the appleblossoms; but he refused. We had her alone. We dined in the garden; and she was simple and frank; I assure you this is true. No one will believe it. Anyhow she was trying to be so; like an old snake wriggling out of its skin. For example, she said her hands were red; when I looked, I saw they were not only red but very clumsy, with thick joints into the bargain. But why did she say so unless in a sudden spasm of honesty? And so with the rest. She lamented her quarrels, and praised everybody, and finally went off without her hat, which I have to send after her: very queer she looked on the platform with her short red hair standing on end, wrapped in a Spanish cloak, and striped blue and green like the Cornish sea.

But Oliver and Ray was a worse business altogether. Oliver wanted us to take him to a party at the Squires to meet Inez; indeed it was hinted that I might invite Inez here. Losing my head, however, I asked Ray instead; and though I have only my own senses to go by, I can’t help thinking that the situation between them is now considerably strained. Ray is becoming more and more the public woman—floppy, fat, untidy, clumsy, and making fewer concessions than ever to brilliancy, charm, politeness, wit, art, manners, literature and so forth; full of news upon women’s future of course; but, my God, if thats the future whats the point in it? To make matters worse, two semi-literate and very earnest Danes arrived on the same evening; refused to go to the Squires, and so did Ray; so Oliver went alone; and altogether I think the case of husband and wife who have no love for each other, but still live together is an embittering spectacle. I rather think Ray is becoming tart under the perpetual presence of Inez.

But, for Gods sake, don’t quote me—As I say, I’m so fuddled I can’t write; then there was Logan, who is a very spruce man—He has a collection of the finest prose sentences in a little notebook; and he chanted these aloud, and we had to guess the writers. But his real object in coming was to ask us to print some of his works. Indeed we are now besieged with manuscripts.

But Logan says we shall never make a success on our present system; because no one buys privately printed books but collectors; and they will only buy expensive books; but if we charge 5/ or 10/—we shall have a large sale, and be able to pay writers and painters; so we’ve got to go a round of the bookshops next week carrying our wares.

It sounds a little too American to be altogether to one’s liking; but I suppose we must. Then Lytton came; he’s doing a grand season, with Cunards, Asquiths, and all the rest; completely happy; still, he assures us his soul is untouched; and I think it probably is. The food he says is wonderful; and there is gold and silver plate; but the great ladies are very discontented, and never know whats the right thing to admire next.

Then there was Violet [Dickinson]—she hasn’t turned a hair; her dresses are exactly the same, and all the chains and bangles. She was very charming and asked after you of course innumerable questions; did you get on with Clive, was the baby like you, was Quentin as charming as ever, how was Duncan—but as she never listens, it doesn’t matter what one says; and her jumps are as wild as ever. She had got lots of odds and ends of Japanese embroidery, and coloured papers as usual. But she has great merit I think. We are coming to Asheham about the 27th, I think, for a week—Shall I come for a night? The agents wont even answer, either in Sussex or Dorsetshire, so I daresay its as well we took Tregerthen.

Yr B.

Will you remember to send me the name of the powder that Mary H H[utchinson]. recommends.

Berg

[]

1048: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Wednesday [21 May 1919]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dearest Ottoline,

I had sent off the hat before your letter came. The only hat box we could come by was one of Leonards; I pray that it may have kept the exquisite creation—which gave such distinction to the drawing room that I left it out on purpose—safe. I think the box was stiffer than most.

There’s been such a chaos of conversation these last days that I’ve not sat down to write a letter to anyone. This is very unfortunate for you, as I meant to record the outburst of appreciation which fell from Leonard when you left us. As his praise is written in letters of gold, I rate it very high; but it was to the effect that Ottoline was not only charming, distinguished, rare, and remarkable, but also ‘very nice’—According to him this is the least common gift among my friends; so that I repeat it, and hope you will see how permanent and sterling it is among your other tributes. I always imagine you heaped like an altar every morning with the offerings of your friends. Very well; here is a small brown acorn.

We had our visit from Logan—I think there is a good deal of the priest, it may be of the eunuch, in him. Partly his shaven face perhaps; but then Roger, who came too, is also shaven, without share in the other attributes. I mean, I think, that Logan is celibate; and has had time to bring his virtues to a chaste perfection which one might find a trifle chill. He was infinitely kind, and infinitely agreeable; but I couldn’t help seeing his perfect sentences of English prose served up in a muffin dish, over a bright fire, with the parrot on a perch. He begged us to reprint Elia; and thought it very delightful to extract the flower of Urn Burial, 6 words long, and print it by itself in an exquisite little volume, to carry in the breast pocket, like a scent bottle. He has several of these sentences always on his person, and read them aloud in a high nasal chant, which again suggested the priest, and the eunuch.

Not a word was said of you; though I almost burst out, and shattered his recitations, by demanding what business he had to be such a frost-bitten old prude in real life, while so free and expansive in literature. After 6 hours of Roger’s conversation, however, one’s energy is exhausted. Anyhow, Logan is a wonderfully trim old bird.

I have been going through the calendar, in search of a week end. As far as I can see, June 21st, is the only possible one for me. And no doubt you’ve chosen that for someone who would make me feel completely dumb, dowdy, and derelict. That last sentence is offered in trembling, remembering your strictures upon poor Hopes [Mirrlees] efforts in the way of alliteration. Indeed I scarcely like to read this letter over in case too great signs of what you and Leonard condemn appear—for I shall never have the patience to write it over again.

Lytton lunched here, and we examined his soul under the apple trees, and gave it back to him without serious criticism. His imitations of Winston, Lord Ribblesdale, and Lady Cunard would pay for all Maynards crimes in the matter of worldliness; but the truth is of course, that no one humbugs Lytton for the wink of an eyelid. In fact, I’m ready to risk his soul once a year, on condition he bring us down such rare fruits from the poison tree. He is much struck by the unhappiness of the great; this, I feel, is as it should be. He says they are perpetually bored.

I’ve seen Carrington, and Mr and Mrs Sidney Webb, and Bob Trevelyan, and an Armenian, called Altounyan, who wants us to print his novel. The poor man’s mouth is fixed open, like that of some large fish, in hope of praise; it is positively alarming. Compared with him, I merely flicker a long thin tongue. But the attitude is not graceful; and God knows what we’re to say to his novel; and how can we advise him, as he wishes, to throw up his career, desert his father on the edge of the grave, and devote himself to fiction? It’s a case for Garsington. Shall I send you his address? Would you forward this to the Bishop of Oxford?—or what does one call him? I will leave the envelope for you to fill up. He is said to admire Eliots poetry.

You aff
V.W.

Texas

[]

1049: To Clive Bell

Friday [23 May 1919]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

My dear Clive,

Possibly, I see on looking at a calendar, the usual indisposition of my sex may make me unable to come on Monday. If you’d like to come to tea with me here instead, you’d find me alone; then you might stay to dinner, and meet my husband.

But dates are movable in my case. The only solution seems to be for you to ring me up on Monday morning. I’m sorry to be such a trouble, and so illegible into the bargain, but we are rushing off to wild dissipation—an evening party at the [J. C.] Squires!

Your V.W.

Quentin Bell

[]

1050: To Clive Bell

Monday morning [26 May 1919]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

My dear Clive,

I suppose you did not get the letter I wrote saying that circumstances might make it impossible for me to come today—so they have—damn them. We’d be very glad if you came to dinner, and I shall be alone here all day; I suppose, though, you’ll be back too late for tea. But come or not as you like. There’ll be enough dinner anyhow.

Your V.W.

Quentin Bell

[]

1051: To Lytton Strachey

Monday [26 May 1919]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

I forgot to ask you about the meeting with the Webbs: Saturday, 7th June, appears to be the day, and that is the Saturday before Whit Sunday. As far as I know it does for the Webbs. Will you let me know about you, and then I will write to them.

We go to Asheham tomorrow. Ottoline seems to have caught Picasso [for Garsington] after all. But we shall be away from these gaieties—and Murry wants me to review Belshazzar—his poem—in the Athenaeum. For God’s sake, say you’ll do it instead. I shall try to wriggle out on the ground of my connection, and pecuniary interest. Addison improves a little—if one likes that sort of thing. I mean he’s very much better than Robert Lynd or Jack Squire—O what a party! I may tell you that your illegitimate sister-in-law [Inez] would have been a beacon of light, an oasis of green, in that assembly. “Yes, I give these parties because they’re cheap” said Mrs Squire, and continued in that style on a sofa in a draught and without respite for 3/4 of an hour: the last quarter was occupied by old decayed Cobden Sanderson, wearing a red ribbon round his neck, and a workman’s blue shirt—but not very inspiring all the same. Moreover, Jack Squire himself was more repulsive than words can express, and malignant into the bargain. As for the conduct and appearance of the rest, it was deplorable to conceive oneself of the same shape, more or less—not altogether thank God! Please assure me that we are rather different—some of us at least.

How did Katherine Asquith impress you? I have sheets from Ottoline this morning calling her “statuesque” and lamenting her lack of passion; so that I suppose she failed to respond to pressure—But what’s the use of asking questions, eh?—Since the telephone rings, and Lady Cunard, or Princess Arthur of Connaught requests the pleasure—but no! it’s Mrs Saxton Noble to meet Mr Walter Lamb this time, so you can spare a moment. Clive assures me that he lunches out every day.

“Where?”

“Ah, with beautiful creatures!” Still, if you can’t put a name to them—

Yr. V.W.

Frances Hooper

[]

1052: To Saxon Sydney-Turner

May 30th [1919]

Asheham, Rodmell [Sussex]

My dear Saxon,

I suppose that you may be back again in London by this time—though I hope not. Anyhow, it’s no good looking for a letter from you, and were it not for a deep principle of devotion in me, conquering an extreme disinclination to write, you would never, never, never see my hand again. I’ve no excuse, but I’m perpetually dropping off to sleep, or rather I’m in the state of a dog in front of a large fire. I sit at the window and go off into a drowse. It’s partly the yellow of the field—and the heat—and the pigeons crooning—and the long grass swishing up and down. I thought I’d read so many books, and I’ve scarcely opened one.

So you see this all leads up to a tribute to your virtues—since no one else can make me write a letter, and as I say, I’ve no hopes of an answer. But did you go to the New Forest? Was it nice? Did Mrs Primmer do well for you? Did Barbara come? How is Barbara? What did you do all day? Did you read aloud? Did you go to Fritham, or where? Did you see the ghost of Aunt Minna, or visit her grave? I suppose you took a book and sat in a glade, and pretended to read, and then watched insects or made one of those rare observations which like the flower of aloe, justify 100 years of silence—something very sudden and penetrating and summing it all up. I wish I’d kept a note book labelled ‘Saxon’; a small one would have done, but it would have been very choice. But then one can’t always be thinking of posterity.

We came down last Tuesday, unable to resist the weather any longer. Duncan came over the other night, driven out, so he said, by the prospect of an evening alone with Mrs Brereton, who has got on his nerves. But then the poor woman was abruptly told by Vanessa 10 days ago that her presence in the house was extremely disagreeable to them all. As Vanessa said, there was no denying it and therefore there was no reason for Mrs Brereton to go off in a huff and complain to Roger that she was ill used. “She is a bore, said Nessa; and its a great nuisance having her there at meals; which she might have known, and naturally I thought she did know it”. Anyhow, she does now. But what is one to do with Nessa and Duncan? We all wear clothes; why should they be allowed to go about naked? Thats how it strikes me, but they on the contrary insist that decency and drapery are carried to the utmost limits at Charleston—what with the bath, and Mr and Mrs Pitcher, and Duncan having bought a new grey summer suit. we’re going for a picnic today, as it’s Nessa’s birthday—I’m terrified to think which, but it doesn’t seem to matter much.

And now, Saxon, what is your opinion of Addison’s writings? That is the problem of my life. But owing to my lethargy, I can’t endure to open the Spectator; in a sort of coma I’ve glided through Sir Roger de Coverley, who seems a very pleasant old gentleman, but not the sort who much interests me. The propriety is so fearful, and the kindliness; and his death leaves me—well I’m ashamed to say I began my great task of weeding the terrace, and then Duncan came—however I know its one of the masterpieces of English prose—Can I say, on your authority, that he’s a complete humbug? The worst of it is that he’s not.

I saw Lytton the other day; very agreeable and flitting from house to house, and settling upon the great, as if he were an ordinary house fly; he dines with Lady Cunard, and meets Princess Arthur of Connaught; but his sting is in perfect order, it seemed to me. He is writing a whole volume about Queen Victoria. He says Cambridge is very nice now, though the under-graduates are very stupid, and have never heard of him.

We come back on Tuesday. Ring us up and suggest a night for dinner.

Yr. V.W.

Sussex

[]

1053: To Clive Bell

Friday [30 May 1919]

Asheham, Rodmell [Sussex]

Dearest Clive,

I’d almost forgotten your indiscretion, and some relic of caution or perhaps mere forgetfulness had made me say nothing even to Leonard. It doesn’t seem to me very interesting anyhow.

Here we are basking, drowsing, feeling infinitely wise and stupendously philosophic—though its true that I must now bicycle off to a picnic at Firle. Was the Murrys’ party a success I wonder? and what happened to Ott? I had a letter bidding me not come. “Piccasso party prevented!” Why?

Yr. V.W.

Quentin Bell

[]

1054: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Sunday [1 June? 1919]

Asheham, Rodmell [Sussex]

My dear Ottoline,

I was so glad to find the Picasso party given up, as we were down here; and now have hopes it may take place another time.

Nothing however, no number of Picassos, quite come up to the trees and the rest of it down here. We go back on Tuesday—

I’m so glad the hat survived. So many interruptions take place in the country; now its a murder in the chalk pit—the rag and bone man killed by a Canadian soldier:

Yr V.W.

Texas

[]

1055: To Clive Bell and Vanessa Bell

Wednesday [4 June 1919]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Clive

Would you give this to Nessa? I don’t know whether she’s staying at Gordon Sq., or when she arrives, but I should be very grateful if you could convey it to her somehow as early as you can.

V.W.

Dearest

We came back to find ourselves flooded with orders for Kew. It is sold out, and orders are still coming in for more, so we must reprint at once. We think of having an edition of 300 printed for us; but it is rather difficult to know how to do it. Would you like to undertake the whole thing?—not only woodcuts, but title page and text.

I am going this afternoon to the printer [Richard Madley] you spoke of out of Soho Sqre to ask whether he could print it, in a week if possible.

You would perhaps be able to see him and give him full directions while you are in London.

The alternative is that we should employ Macdermott the printer here. We should have to direct him about the text; as I suppose you wouldn’t be able to come and see him. But in that case could you get some printer of your own to print your woodcuts as you liked, at our expense, and we could get Macdermott to bind them up with the text?

I think personally that it would be better if you could get the Soho man to do the whole book from your instructions; but I don’t know whether you would have time to do this. Also it is very important to get it done quickly.

I don’t think either that we could afford to pay you for supervising the printing, so that you mayn’t think it worth your while. Almost all the orders are from book shops, and we have to give them the trade discount, which means that we shall make very little profit on the second edition. Would you ring me up tomorrow afternoon, as early as you can?

I enclose a cheque for £3, which is your share of the first edition.

Yr B.

Berg

[]

1056: To Vanessa Bell

Friday [6 June 1919]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dearest,

Perhaps Clive has forwarded my letter, but I had better repeat it. There has been a great rush for Kew Gardens and we have sold out the first edition and have orders for a great many more. I wrote to ask whether you would direct the printing of the new edition, which must be got ready at once. After writing to you, I went to Madley, Rogers printer, and asked him for an estimate for 500 copies. We have settled that he is to start printing at once—that is tomorrow. The question is, who is to instruct him? I showed him a copy of our book, and rather to my pleasure, I admit, he said that in his opinion I had been quite right to place the first woodcut where I did, and that he would have done so himself. He also advised us not to change the spacing between Kew Gardens and the first paragraph, as he thought it was right. He thought he could improve the title page; but he said he didn’t know whether the caterpillar woodcut wants moving up or down. Therefore, if it is to be improved, I think someone must advise him. I told him, thinking you were coming, that you would instruct him both about the text and the woodcuts. I suppose Roger or Woolf would be ready to do this, and you would feel safe with them, so I have asked Roger to ring me up, when he comes back, but he hasn’t yet done so.

We had 15 new orders this morning, and several letters asking why copies had not been sent, so we must get Madley to work at once. I suppose, however, you’ve put off coming altogether. I will either get Roger or Wolfe, or leave it entirely to Madley. He hasn’t got our type exactly, but a smaller one, so that there would, he thought, be room to allow a whole page for the caterpillar. Possibly you could mark the position of the print and woodcuts on your copy and send straight to Madley. His address is, Richard Madley, 151 Whitfield Street, Tottenham Court Rd. W. I. As we’re having such a large edition, it would be a good thing to get it done properly according to your ideas.

There’s going to be a review in the Athenaeum, which may sell more copies, I suppose; we have to spend all day binding copies and sending out.

Yr B.

I saw a house in Lewes on Monday and we’ve offered to buy it freehold for £300—very old, small, but rather charming—however some one else is after it and has probably got it.

Berg

[]

1057: To Saxon Sydney-Turner

Wednesday [11 June 1919]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

My dear Saxon,

We will send you one of Roger’s edition when its out. I had the proofs today, and I don’t think they compare well—still, I believe he means to alter them. The printer rang us up in some distress at his orders; to our pleasure. I believe Nessa’s in London today, and will see about it herself.

I don’t mind how thickly I flatter old gentlemen if they will give me peonies—I suppose I might be wandering by, see them over the garden wall, and ask to be allowed to look closer—Would that be a good opening? Or will you take me to tea there, and pretend that I want to buy a house in Mortlake—then accidentally, I might look out of the window, and exclaim Peonies! etc etc. It lends itself to many variations.

I dont know who wrote your quotations: but then that’s the kind of thing I never do know. Why do all quotations look so much better than any whole poems? I could swear that both these were of the highest merit.

I must now rush up to the Alhambra [Diaghilev’s ballet].

Come and dine again.

Yr V.W.

We’ll deduct the copy of K.G. [Kew Gardens] from your deposit, I suppose.

Sussex

[]

1058: To Dora Carrington

Sunday [15 June 1919]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

My dear Carrington,

I saw Lytton yesterday, and got his consent, on your behalf, to the following plan. We are having 500 copies of the Mark on the Wall reprinted with your woodcuts. [E. M.] Forster is going to write about it in the Daily News, and it is thus necessary to get the printing started at once in order to have some copies by the time his review appears. So I’m taking it for granted that you don’t mind, and that you will allow the Pelican Press or any other to print the woodcuts as they think best, and will abide by their decision, since there’s no time for you to direct them how to do it. (Nessa disliked the way we did hers in Kew Gardens—that is why I’m so particular—) We shall give you 25 per-cent of the profits, and in time I hope we may each make a few shillings out of it—which you ought to spend in coming to have tea with me, since the 1917 [Club] atmosphere is not favourable to the subleties and intimacies of refined female intercourse.

We’ve bought a house in Lewes—on the spur of the moment. Its the butt end of an old windmill, so that all the rooms are either completely round or semi-circular.

One of the chief decorations is going to be a large showpiece by Carrington, found in an attic at Asheham; doesn’t that make you blush all over—upset the tea—and scald the cat? But I suppose there’s no cat at Tidmarsh.

What about the hens this year? Have they grown tail feathers? What a sight it was—when we rounded them up and drove them into the river!

Your V.W.

What about your book of woodcuts?

Robert H. Taylor

[]

1059: To Clive Bell

Monday [16 June 1919]

1917 Club [Gerrard St., Soho, W.I.]

Please excuse this sheet—I’m in the Club, cheek by jowl with Marjorie and others. Tomorrow Tuesday would suit me very well. I will be here, 1917 Club, at 3.30. Would you add to your load of obligations Duncan’s hat—said to be waiting me at Gordon Sqre. (the hat he painted for me, I mean). If you could bring it, I should make a more gallant show at Gunters [tea-shop]—God! What solace an ice!—the arguments of the virtuous but alas, so repulsive, hurtle round my head.

Quentin Bell

[]

1060: To Dora Carrington

Wednesday [18 June 1919]

[Hogarth House, Richmond]

My dear Carrington,

Alas—we took the woodcuts [from The Mark on the Wall] to the Pelican press yesterday and they put so many difficulties in the way that we had to consent to print the story without them. The printer said they’d have to be cut down and stereotyped, and he couldn’t answer for their being done in time, and it would cost a good deal. I’m very sorry, as they added greatly to the charm of the work which will look very blank without them.

We’re thinking of getting an office and a secretary—all our time goes in doing up parcels and writing notes—and now we expect another rush of orders for Eliot and Murry. I believe a poor man could make his fortune out of this trade—but combined with editing, reviews and writing novels it’s a little overwhelming.

O dear—my turn at Garsington comes next—a whip to remind me from her Ladyship this morning.

I suppose, indeed insist, that the fruit of Alix’s labour shall be printed by us. Give her my love, and tell her—but there’s no room.

Yr V.W.

O these blots!

Robert H. Taylor

[]

1061: To Vanessa Bell

Wednesday [18 June 1919]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dearest,

Roger is a cussed old devil; he must have gone off and forgotten all about us. We took the law into our own hands, and told Madley to print off, since he said he would have to charge extra for the delay. He will send some copies tomorrow, and I will send you one. But O dear!—he’s gone and cut all the covers crooked, some too large and some too small, and to add to my melancholy troubles I’ve had to pare down the books edges with a pen knife to fit them. But we complained, and perhaps the new lot will be better. All I mean is, a professional printer isn’t necessarily infallible as you seem to think. Did you realise that it was your severity that plunged me into the recklessness of buying a house that day? Something I must do to redress the balance, to give myself value in my eyes, I said; and so I bought a house; the blood will therefore be upon your head.

Did anyone ever suffer as I did? You might have seen my soul shrivelling like a—I cannot remember the image exactly, but its something one does by rubbing a piece of sealing wax and then everything curls up—as if in agony. Not that there was any imagery about it in my case. But the immanent sweetness of my soul formed, as it were, a cream upon the surface. I survived.

Now I suppose I must rapidly deliver myself of gossip. Well, I dropped in on Adrian and Karin the other night, to find them scrubbing their saucepans in the kitchen in rather a surly mood; but having done, they explained that they are now both about to become medical students at University Hospital. They’ve given up philosophy, social reform, law, and all the rest of it; they’re going into practice together as Psycho-analysts.

This wont be of course for 5 years, but they think they stand great chance of success, as man and woman in combination ought to be invincible. I suppose one’ll whisper one’s symptoms to Adrian, and he’ll bellow them to Karin; and then they’ll lay their heads together. Isn’t it a surprising prospect? I see in it another of Karin’s gallant attempts to roll her huge stone up the hill. But she is brighter than ever. Her hat is now of the shape of a Welshwomans hat, only scarlet, then her dress is sage green; and her decorations many-coloured beads; and the whole effect like that of some debauched parrot who has been maltreated by the street boys, but doesn’t know it, or only half suspects it, poor fowl. Still, who am I to talk about matters of taste? who indeed?

My other piece of gossip was from Fredegond so it may be discounted a little, about Alix and James.

James came to Fredegond in an appealing state of fright. He said that Alix was on the point of killing herself. They had quarrelled over something quite unimportant. Alix had lost her temper, said she would no longer live with him, that the strain was intolerable, and dismissed him for ever. He went to fetch Fredegond. Fredegond found her sitting on the edge of her bed, which had not been made, in a room strewn with old food and litter, sobbing. She was completely broken down. She could explain nothing. They got her to Chelsea, where she announced that the breach was final, and the Shoves persuaded her to go abroad. Carrington was sent for. Just before Carrington arrived, James made his way in; there was a reconciliation scene; then, so far as I could gather, the same passions on Alix’s part started again. Finally she was packed off to Tidmarsh, where she still is, writing reams of poetry, alone with Carrington. Fredegond cross-examined James to some extent but without great success. He won’t admit he’s in love; in fact he denies that there’s such a thing as being in love. Meanwhile, as Alix provides food and shelter, I suppose he’ll keep his grip on her, in a muddled kind of way, though she has come to such a pass, according to Fredegond, that either she’ll break down, or succumb entirely and for ever. For my part, I think that if there was a breach, James ought to have done his utmost to widen it. Still how is one to know the truth about anything? For the present James is master of Gordon Square, and is thinking of setting up a gas oven.

We shall be coming down for a week about the 26th or 27th., so I may see you. I’m a little nervous, not only of seeing you, but of showing Leonard the Round House; I’ve rather forgotten what its like. I still remember the features of Mrs Dolphin [Vanessa] though—O dear; I must write a story about it. Kew goes on selling at the rate of about 10 copies a day. We are flooded with manuscripts, and a young man has offered to help us in printing them. I think we shall have to set up a shop.

On Saturday I go to Garsington; God knows why. Eliot is to be there. He and Murry were much abused in the Times for their works, and Murry a good deal depressed.

By the way, would you like to let Charleston to Murry for the months you don’t want it? Katherine is going abroad for a year, and Murry wants to live in the country near Lewes if possible. I said I’d look for a house, but of course there aren’t any.

What a nice long letter! Its affection partly, but also to remind you of the necklace—though I’m not worthy of necklaces, or of hats, and you’ll find in future that I never mention aesthetic subjects, or ask for more than mute toleration. I haven’t yet got the hat; but would you let me know what I owe dear, doddering, divine, Duncan.

I’m sorry that you’re sending Julian to school; he will have his hair cut and wear a collar I suppose, and of course he’ll enjoy it immensely—besides its only a day school. But I see my influence will be required not so much to keep my nephews straight as to crookify them.

Yr B.

Berg

[]

1062: To Roger Fry

Thursday [26 June? 1919]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

My dear Roger,

This is a very small return for all your goodness—but I’m becoming sick of your goodness. You should hear poor old Ottoline be-praising you, with some muddled idea of pleasing the deity I suppose since there’s nothing else to be gained by it. Goldie encouraged her to attempt one more grand scene of reconciliation; I was not optimistic—though if you’d arrange it so that I could attend, behind a curtain or in a chamber pot—I’d have no objection whatever. Please give this your serious consideration. Ott: of course, would be magnificent, merely as a matter of art—

Your V.W.

Sussex

[]

1063: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

27th June [1919]

Asheham, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

Dearest Ottoline,

Philip must be wrong about my heart—that arrow you see is deep driven into me—because here I am, doing what of all things I detest doing, sitting down to write a letter. Letters in general aren’t so bad, but when one has to sum up one’s feelings, to give thanks, to make Ottoline understand how happy she made one, and how the time seemed to lapse, like the Magic Flute, from one air to another—this is what I call, or Clive calls, a problem in art. But, to return to Philip, I must be practically all heart, for at intervals of half an hour since Monday I’ve wondered where you were, how you were, whether the operation was over, how you felt after it, whether you’ve gone back, how hateful the Home must be, what your nurses thought of you, how odious doctors are, matrons in nursing homes even worse, Welbeck Street detestable, Garsington divine, books intolerable within range of a medicine glass—and so on. Doesn’t it seem to prove some rudiment of an organ—not like yours I admit, or Philips [Morrell], or Goldies, or Gertlers, or Lord de la Warr’s, but a literary heart of some capacity? You seem to think that all that’s wanted is a practical heart, but isn’t there some place for the theoretical heart, which is my kind—the heart which imagines what people feel, and takes an interest in it, but never conceives how to do anything. Perhaps you have both, you are, of course, a very gifted woman, but then that’s no merit of yours. But you see, this is a sore point—no heart indeed! I meant to make this a letter of thanks; and its turned to the opposite.

We are down here involved in so many dealings with houses that we may well find ourselves bankrupt; and then the first person I shall come to for refuge will be you, of course. But why, when we’ve just bought a house, should another appear much more desirable,—and how can one resist buying and chance selling?

Anyhow this letter must end with thanks. You would have been wise to secrete yourself in the rack of the third class carriage in which Goldie and I travelled up on Monday. You would have heard much to your advantage.

Your affate
V.W.

Texas

[]

1064: To Vanessa Bell

Sunday [29 June 1919]

[Asheham, Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest,

It looks too bad to come for a picnic, so I’m sending this by Nelly. I might be able to come over for the night on Tuesday—if that suited you.

We have just seen rather a good house at Rodmell, which is being sold on Tuesday. We are going to bid for it and if we get it we shall sell the house in Lewes. Do you think Roger would like to be told about it? If so, we would give him the first offer; some one else is said to want to buy it. As the sale is on Tuesday afternoon in Lewes, I may be too late to catch the train, in which case I’m afraid I shant see you, as we go back on Wednesday.

I believe that Duncan, when he thought of buying the huts, got Powell or someone to bid for him. I should be very grateful if you would send a line by Nelly to say if he thought this a good plan, and whom he employed. There is great competition apparently for the Rodmell house, and we thought of asking Wycherley [Lewes agent] to bid for us—but perhaps it’s better to bid oneself.

Needless to say we should be very glad if you or Duncan or Maynard or the children or anyone would come over anytime—and we’ve plenty of spare rooms. But I’ll try to come on Tuesday—Now it seems clearing up—but its this damned wind that makes sitting out so unpleasant. I must tell you about Garsington—What do I owe for my hat? The necklace broke last night. Could you put 2 strings? It would be angelic of you.

B.

Berg

[]

1065: To Philip Morrell

30th June [1919]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

My dear Philip

What a budget of psychology I might discharge upon you in answer to your letter! If you feel this about me, what don’t I feel about you, and why do I feel it, and what does it prove about both of us—and so on, and so on,—But first, I was very glad to hear of Ottoline. I was amazed at her high, and I suppose aristocratic, bearing in the face of the operation, and forgave the peerage many sins on the spot. I’m very glad its over; please give her my love (for what its worth, of course).

But as to the problem between us, it would be worth investigating; but writing it out takes, I’m afraid too long. Still, if I frighten you, you, invariably, produce in me sensations I’ve not had since I was 18, and dragged by my half brother to a ball, where I knew nobody, couldn’t dance, and as for dress, and hair, and conversation—Perhaps its that you’re so well dressed—a gentleman—a man of the world—accustomed to society? I don’t know. But I’m certain that I contract once more to the condition of a miserable schoolgirl; I become rigid; I say priggish things; I fancy that you smile; I’m certain that I detect a sort of well-bred amusement at the angularities and barbarities of Bloomsbury. And yet, of course, you’re not Mayfair; no, its partly the old complex which the misery of youth stamped on one—the sense of being with people who laugh at the things one cares about. But there’s no time to get it all straight—George Duckworth’s at the bottom of it, in my case, and you don’t know him.

You are partly right and partly wrong about the article. The truth is that Murry asked me to do it, and I refused; then he insisted, and with the greatest labour in the world I began an article, but broke down. Leonard went on with it; and then we cobbled the two parts together hoping that no one would recognise either of us. It’s rather important both for the Hogarth Press and for the Athenaeum that nobody should know this; so please keep the secret. It’s such a mixture of Leonard and me both trying not to give ourselves away that we’re surprised that you should have suspected either of us. I thought of telling you, but had promised not to, and hoped you’d forget. On the whole, its more Leonards work, I think than mine; but I never owned up to Murry that I had to call in help, and would rather he didn’t know.

Leonard’s theory about Daisy Ashford, by the way, is that it is certainly not pure child; but touched up by Daisy at a mature age upon re-reading, and then sent to Barrie, who can thus say truthfully that its none of his doing.

He suspects the same passages that we suspect without suggestion from me, so that I think there must be a reason for it.

We’re feverish with excitement tonight—tomorrow we go in to Lewes to bid for a house that has taken our fancy, so much that we are determined to sell the one I bought the other day. Thirty people it is said, will bid against us—heaven knows where we shan’t land ourselves—and I’m distracted from writing a clear and critical account of this very interesting question—our extreme embarrassment at being in the same room together—which doesn’t prevent me from hoping that you’ll come and see us at Richmond.

Love to Ottoline,

Yours Ever
Virginia Woolf

From my own experience, I think you’d like Philip Woolf. He’s very modest, sensitive, and friendly.

Texas

[]

Letters 1066-1106 (July-December 1919)

1066: To Clive Bell

Tuesday [1 July 1919]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

My dear Clive,

I got your letter here this morning, so I’m not able to go to Molly’s party. But if one night next week you would ask me to some humble restaurant, and then go on to the Ballet I should be enchanted—I’ve never seen Petrouska, and was meaning to go. Could you get me a ticket—7/-I think they are; ordering on the telephone, they put me off with the worst in the house. I think I’m free most nights next week.

We come back to Hogarth tomorrow. Did you hear I’d bought a house in Lewes? Well, the first thing we saw on getting out of the train the other day was the advertisement of another, highly superior, at Rodmell. So we’re off now, in this flood of rain, to bid at an auction; and then we shall sell the other—but the process is so exciting and charming that I rather hope we may go on like this until, I suppose, we’re forced to live in a tower on the top of a hill which will be known as Woolf’s Folly. Still I shall have enough cash about me to pay my dinner and seat: I bid you mark this.

I’m much encouraged by your praise of Addison. I thought it rather good myself—considering all things—

Yr. V.W.

Quentin Bell

[]

1067: To Vanessa Bell

[July 1919]

[Hogarth House, Richmond]

Dear Dolphin,

Here is 3/- for my lunch; I daresay it cost more, but if so, I will allow you to pay it.

If you could send the picture, my gratitude would be unbounded, and I would pay the carriage, or any other expenses.

Let me know what you settled to do about Mr Cholmondeley—Leonard was under him at St Pauls, and says he was very popular and had much the best house there, though L. thought him rather a muscular Xtian. But this must have been ages ago.

Yr B.

Berg

[]

1068: To Vanessa Bell

Thursday [17 July 1919]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dearest,

I wish you’d write and say what happened to Julian at his examination. I’ve a secret hope that he did so abominably in everything that Mr Cholmondeley took you aside afterwards and said “Mrs Bell, I am sorry to have to tell you that your son will never repay education—in fact he’s next door to a natural”. But being my nephew, I see little chance of this. Poor brat! What a melancholy thing—he’ll begin to be ashamed of going on the po in public. It’s melancholy, too, about London, and only getting away for holidays—

We sold the Round House, for £320, so we shan’t lose anything over it; and I believe if we’d risked waiting we could have got £400. There’s not much gossip, I imagine, that you haven’t already had, since you’ve been in touch with Clive who is the fountain and well. I wish you’d explain to me the truth about Lopokhova. Did she run away—and with whom—and why—and where is she? Mrs Hamilton pretended to know for certain that she was ill in a villa in St John’s Wood. But then dear old Molly Hamilton has a tempermental lust for the commonplace. She brought her younger sister [Margot] here the other night, and seldom have I seen such a prodigy; as white as an egg—a large ducks egg; bound about the brow with a fillet of silver; with the manners of a professor and the speech of an elderly and pompous Prime Minister. She writes poems—but no relation of Mrs Hamilton’s could write anything save leading articles. She has another sister who paints stained glass; in fact it is generally understood that genius has once more come to earth; which I cannot allow. Altounyan and his sister [Norah] have been dining here. I’m afraid he is a great bore—Why will people talk so much nonsense about their writing? After having made me read his manuscript, he told me that he didn’t care what I thought of it, but only wished to see how much I was capable of understanding. There’s the cloven hoof of Cambridge in this,—rather like Hom [Meredith] I mean; the honest sort. How I detest them!

The whole of Richmond is already ringing with Anthems, and I was almost thrown into the river this afternoon by a man letting off a Squib under my feet for a joke. I don’t believe anybody wants it, but we have to go through with it I suppose—even the servants are completely cynical.

There is little gossip—except a morsel about Fanny Cornford, which I got from Fredegond. The poor woman has a delusion that she must never be tired, and has now spent 2 years in going from rest cure to rest cure. She refuses to see either her husband or children. The doctors have at last sent her home, but think she may be incurable. Of course its all the result of Mrs Litchfield, and old Joseph [error for Richard]—was he called?—who used to have the chemist calling with the butcher. All Darwins incline that way. The number of one’s undeluded friends is now very small. I spend a good deal of my time at the Royal Academy. It is a very amusing and spirited place. I get an immense deal of pleasure from working out the pictures. But I mustn’t tell you, or you wont read my article. I can’t settle down to write it, though, because I always remember pictures that I haven’t quite worked out, and I have to go back again. The crowd is such that it is often difficult to get a clear view of a picture. I think Cocaine is one of the best, but there is a marine piece which is also very good.

The Bussys are going to set up a private printing press in France and are, naturally, coming to us for advice. Did I tell you of my visit to Bain the bookseller? I went with a bag of our books. “Mrs Woolf, he said, so long as you print things yourself I can guarantee you an immediate sale and high prices; but when you have books printed for you, its a very different matter.” “But you see, Mr Bain” I said, “my taste is very bad.” “Its not a question of taste, Madam,” he replied; “Its the personal touch.” Still, what a mercy it is being rid of one’s taste! It’s not unlike the riddance of God. And I saw the most lovely piece of glass today—all volutes and spirals, gold-sprinkled and iridescent. Monk’s House will be perhaps the ugliest house in Sussex—not plain ugliness, either, but cultured ugliness, which is worse. By the way, when is [E. M.] Forster coming to you? He wants to combine it with a visit to us—but seemed vague as to the date you’d settled. We come down on the 29th—thank God.

I hear you’re having Adrian—not Karin? Don’t dissuade him from being a doctor. Leonard played Bridge there last night and saw something of such girth and grossness on a chair that he cried out in horror: it was Karin’s leg.

Your
B.

Berg

[]

1069: To Janet Case

Wednesday [23 July 1919]

Hogarth House, Richmond

My dear Janet,

I was dreaming about you so vividly last night, that I must write and find out whether this means that you were thinking with kindness of me. I’m afraid not. In my dream you were entertaining a Princess, and you wouldn’t look at me—whereupon I flew into a rage, and turned to Emphie [Janet’s sister] for comfort, and she was immensely grand, and made me feel myself so much in the way that I marched down the garden and out into the road, and left you bowing over the hand of your Princess. What can it all mean?

Anyhow, it is time I heard something about you. I suppose you’ve now made a good many friends in the neighbourhood. Small children come and see you in the evening. There is an old lady who brings her sewing. In the intervals I daresay you read Meredith or somebody. Still this is rather a fancy scene on my part, for I don’t know anything about the Old Cot. Did Leonard tell you how we bought a house in Lewes, and then saw one we liked better at Rodmell, and so bought that, and have now sold the first house, and have only 3 cottages in Cornwall, and Asheham, and the house at Rodmell and Hogarth House to live in? We shall move in September; and then our address will be Monk’s House, Rodmell: rather a good address; and the house is an ancient Monk’s House, with niches for the holy water, and a great fireplace; but the point of it is the garden. I shan’t tell you though, for you must come and sit there on the lawn with me, or stroll in the apple orchard, or pick—there are cherries, plums, pears, figs, together with all the vegetables. This is going to be the pride of our hearts; I warn you; and I see already we talk a great deal too much for our friends.

I spent a weekend at Garsington the other day. Its an unfortunate thing that the habit of lying should so dissolve the soul. What Ottoline feels, why she says what she does say, its no good asking oneself now; and after two days of it, the discomfort is considerably worse than mere boredom. There are, of course, visits by night to one’s bedroom; and then if one can’t come up to the scratch, the poor old creature gets more and more harassed and desperate; her paint runs too, and her powder blows off—I’m afraid the spirit of the Cavendishes won’t see her through.

Katherine Murry is going abroad soon, to San Remo I think. I have tea with her, and she looks very ill, though she says she’s better. She has written several stories, which we think of printing. Everyone is setting up private presses now. In fact I ought to be dressing at this moment in order to be ready for a French couple [the Bussys] who want to set up a press in France. It’s a great bore; I can’t speak a word of French; and how to describe printing when one cant even talk about the weather I don’t know.

Have you read the poems of a man, who is dead, called Gerard Hopkins? I liked them better than any poetry for ever so long; partly because they’re so difficult, but also because instead of writing mere rhythms and sense as most poets do, he makes a very strange jumble; so that what is apparently pure nonsense is at the same time very beautiful, and not nonsense at all. Now this carries out a theory of mine; but the poor man became a Jesuit, and they discouraged him, and he became melancholy and died. I couldn’t explain this without quoting however, and now I must go and wash. But you, my dear Janet, needn’t wash, and so you might write to me, at Asheham. We go there on Tuesday. Please say how you are.

Your affate
V.W.

Sussex

[]

1070: To Vanessa Bell

Tuesday [29 July 1919]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dearest,

Your catastrophes are appalling; still, if you wish me to believe that a hair of your infants heads isn’t worth chicken poxes innumerable—I dont. In fact I spend my nights in envy of you. The terrible thing is that I see Quentin will inspire me with an illicit passion—which he won’t return. He wrote me a most charming letter. Still, I wish you ever had a holiday—poor old dolphin—whose young peep out from every crevice. I daresay somehow or other you may be up for Maynards party today. I was amused to hear from Katherine Murry that Ott: has taken the opportunity to come to town. It’s thought she’s going to force her way in, if uninvited. I hope you’ll be there to face her down.

If Julian’s school doesn’t turn out well, would it be worth while to ask George Young about his plan? He said he wished you would join. They have a tutor, and spend 6 months in London, the rest in the country. He said it worked splendidly, and the boys learnt much more than at school. They wanted others to join. I could get his address. The eldest boy was 15 I think; but there was one younger and 2 little girls.

I ought to be packing at the moment. The agent wrote to us about [farmer] Staceys meadow; but we have already more land than we want. I’m afraid we shall have to give up the Cornish Cottages, much against my will. James and Alix are going there for August, on condition they furnish them with beds. I suppose they’ll go there; but I dont feel sanguine about the beds.

That affair is once more composed, and Alix by taking our cottages, has persuaded James to give up going to Italy. She deserves to win. It’s piteous to see her ladling out silver to him for dinners and operas.

The Bussy’s dined here, and Simon said he thought you the most gifted painter of your set; but then he also said he thought our production of Kew perfect. So you must choose between them. An American publisher has asked to bring it out in America. Forster is coming to us on the 22nd August.

Perhaps we shall meet some time. Do tell me how the parting with Mrs B[rereton]. went off, and what fate the poor woman is going to—not that I feel required to take her on as my printer’s devil.

Yr B.

Berg

[]

1071: To Hope Mirrlees

July 30th [1919]

Asheham House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Hope,

Would it be possible for you to come here from Friday 8th August till Monday?

Please do if you can. Lewes is our station; but I will send directions later.

I can’t promise comfort, since we are done for at present by a village woman; but then theres the downs and books, and—modesty forbids me to go on; but anyhow we shall be very glad to see you. Besides we must discuss the bringing out of your poems.

An early answer would be very kind.

Yours,
Virginia Woolf

Hope Mirrlees

[]

1072: To Violet Dickinson

[11? August 1919]

Asheham, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

My Violet

You were black-hearted not to come to dinner; but perhaps in the winter—

We’ve gone and bought a house down here, with a garden full of cabbages and roses, and we have to move in next week, or the week after. And we still have 3 cottages in Cornwall. Perhaps one of these days you might step out of your motor at our door. Leonard’s passion will be such for his garden that I foresee that even the Hogarth Press may be neglected. We are blossoming out as printers, and manuscripts shower upon us. In fact we think of starting an agent to do the business for us.

We had a picnic with Nessa and her family yesterday. She is coming to London in September to live in a flat and send Julian to school. The governess failed to manage him, and the difficulty of a winter in the country is beyond belief.

If you should be writing a poem, or something very choice in prose, please remember us—which indeed you might do anyway.

Leonard sends his love

Yr Sp.

Berg

[]

1073: To Katherine Arnold-Forster

Aug. 12th [1919]

Asheham, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

Dearest Ka,

It was pleasant and encouraging to see your hand again—though if you think I shall forget you, I can never forget the tea at Buzzard, the ice, the cakes, and the young lady who suddenly rose and began making polite conversation. Now however I must very rapidly put you on the track of our fortunes. You are much behind the times.

We came down last month to look at the Round House; on the way up from the station saw a notice of an old house to sell at Rodmell; went and bought it at auction for £700; sold the Round House for £20 more than we gave for it, and now in 10 days or so Mr Gunn is going to move us in the farm waggons across the Bridge to Monk’s House. That will be our address for ever and ever; Indeed I’ve already marked out our graves in the yard which joins our meadow. But one’s friends can’t be asked to imagine any more houses; so I dont go into the question of Monks House. Meanwhile we have our three cottages in Cornwall inhabited now by Alix and James on condition they leave us a bed or two, which the cynical say they won’t do. The brilliant, if wild, idea has come into my head, that we might arrange to share the three with you and Will. One of them has a tower and great windows. There are 7 rooms in all: and in the best country in all Cornwall to my thinking, between St Ives and Gurnards Head, a mile from Zennor. Rent is £15 a year, £16 with rates. Monk’s House makes it a little difficult to keep them, and yet I should feel desolated to let them go again.

Of course, literature is the only spiritual and humane career. Even painting tends to dumbness, and music turns people erotic, whereas the more you write the nicer you become. Do write the Life of somebody—a vast fat book, running over into the margins with reflections and cogitations of all kinds. Do my dear Bruin—I assure you your style is perfectly fitted to some rich thick compound, infinitely humane and judicious, not of course to be run off in a hurry. But in the long winter evenings you might fill page upon page.

Katherine Murry is, poor woman, very ill; she has been all the winter, and gets no better. Probably she will go to San Remo; but I feel rather dismal about her. You thought her too painted and posed for your more spartan taste I think. But she is all kinds of interesting things underneath, and has a passion for writing, so that we hold religious meetings together praising Shakespeare. I dont much care for Murry’s poems though. As for Sydney [Waterlow] his good opinion is much in his favour; but alas—his literary judgement has always reminded me of an elephant in a tea cup—His blunders are monstrous there as I suppose they are in office. He’s taking Nessa’s flat, at once, I think, until he can get a house, Dawks [Margery Waterlow] remaining for ever interred.

Clive, Duncan, Maynard are all over the place, Nessa presiding over the usual hurly burly, and on Sunday we had Hope Mirrlees, a capricious young woman, but rather an exquisite apparition, scented, powdered, dressing for dinner, and very highly cultivated. My cheeks are burning with the sun; they burn all night. You say you’re going to be in London for a day or two—couldn’t you come here for a night? Saturday 23rd? Sunday? Let me know.

Yr V.W.

Mark Arnold-Forster

[]

1074: To Vanessa Bell

Sunday [17 August 1919]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest,

Here is Quentins present. Would you give it him on his birthday. Wont they come and spend a day with us before they go? We should like it very much—Would they come to lunch, and go back after tea? Of course it would be very nice if you’d come too, but if you can’t, I daresay we could arrange for Nelly to meet them and take them part of the way back. Tuesday and Friday this week don’t do—but any other days.

[E. M.] Forster and Pernel come next week end. We get possession of Monks House tomorrow. I bought 3 pictures!

Yr B.

Berg

[]

1075: To Margaret Llewelyn Davies

Aug. 17th [1919]

Asheham, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

Dearest Margaret,

The difficulty of getting writing paper is such, as you will perhaps see, that it is only upon occasions of great stress that I can manage to write a letter. However, if you send such lovely things, one really must. At first I thought that it was a tribute to Leonard from some native whom he had freed from the British rule: but it seems to have a much odder history. How did it come to Walberswick? Don’t tell me that its the product of one of those little artistic cottages which used to annoy us so—I dont want to credit the artists of Walberswick with any decent feelings. You will gather that I’ve insisted upon taking it for myself—in fact its on the back of my chair as I write.

I wish I had your generous impulses. Then I might give you in return one of the three pictures which I bought at the sale of the Monk’s House furniture the other day. They’re the work of an early Victorian blacksmith, and sold for 4/- the three. For myself, I dont ask anything more of pictures. They are family groups, and he began the heads very large, and hadn’t got room for the hands and legs, so these dwindle off till they’re about the size of sparrows claws, but the effect is superb—the character overwhelming. You must come and see them. Indeed, there’s a very great scope for you at Monks House. A lawn, an orchard, an old granary, and two outhouses. My idea is to sit at my window and have my friends dotted about on the estate. I should like to see you and Beatrice and Sidney [Webb] and Mrs [G. D. H.] Cole and Janet [Case] and Lilian [Harris] and others of a more frivolous variety dissolving and combining in patterns in the distance. But you must really come alone and sit in the middle of the fireplace, with Leonard in one inglenook, and me in the other; its time we had a good gossip. The summer is rather cut up by our move. We actually possess Monks House tomorrow, but we have to wait for the farm carts to take us over, and it may be next week, or the week after.

Last weekend, however, we had a young lady [Hope Mirrlees] who changed her dress every night for dinner—which Leonard and I cooked, the servants being on holiday. Her stockings matched a wreath in her hair; every night they were differently coloured; powder fell about in flakes; and the scent was such we had to sit in the garden. Moreover, she knows Greek and Russian better than I do French; is Jane Harrison’s favourite pupil, and has written a very obscure, indecent, and brilliant poem [Paris], which we are going to print. Its a shame that all this should be possible to the younger generation; still I feel that something must be lacking, don’t you? We had Maynard Keynes to entertain her, since we could offer little in the way of comfort. He is thoroughly disillusioned about Governments and bigwigs, and only goes to the Asquiths because he wins £40 in a weekend, and Margot flings her arms round his neck and sobs. The poor woman had lost £80 at Bridge; so she has her troubles like the rest of us.

We have both finished correcting the proofs of our books; and we both feel (this is a little in the style of the Webbs) so old and conceited and indifferent that neither praise nor blame nor anything seems to matter. I suppose it does, when it comes to the point; I suppose this is only a refinement of vanity. Still, nobodies books seem to matter very much. I’ve got to read the whole of George Eliot, the whole of Hardy, and a good deal of Henry James in order to write articles about them. Its rather humiliating, reading other peoples novels. George Eliot fascinates me. Did your father know her? or was she too much under a cloud? Nobody called on her, so she says; and yet her virtue seems to me excessive—but there’s no room left. Love to Lilian.

Yr. V.W.

Sussex

[]

1076: To Roger Fry

Aug. 17th [1919]

Asheham, Lewes [Sussex]

My dear Roger,

I enjoyed immensely finding my name in your article. Also I thought your translation, what you call a parody, most charming. Why don’t you do some more? Do, and let us print them—or, for I know that prospect doesn’t entice you as much as it ought—let Madley print them. If it didn’t look like soliciting more compliments, I would go on to say how much I enjoy reading your articles. Are you getting on with your book? But when I think of Portsmouth (I am on Christian names terms with him) and the baptismal rite, I see your first duty is to commemorate the Frys.

Shall we ever see you? I hear vaguely that you’re at Cambridge, leading all the old mammies a fair dance I suppose. We are hovering on the verge of our move to Rodmell, so that I don’t know how long we shall be here. Its all a great bore, and very melancholy to give up this place. Nothing will ever be like it; and Gunn is going to have every room painted, damn his soul! I shall haunt his wife and no doubt blast his first born.

Its very nice here this August—I hope you’ll come to Charleston anyhow, and set everyone chattering with your discoveries. I have just bought 3 pictures. The work of an early Victorian blacksmith who painted against the discouragement of his family. I think them all one wants in the way of painting, but Nessa has left me no illusions about taste. And I must say I like knowing that for a fact!

Yr V.W.

Sussex

[]

1077: To Vanessa Bell

Friday [29 August 1919]

Asheham [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest,

Many thanks for the cheque. Leonard quite agrees with you that I shall be merely in the way during the move. I, on the other hand, think myself indispensable. I don’t see how they could manage without me. But I am very grateful for the offer. Perhaps I might come over one day later in my shay, if you have any horse accomodation at Charleston.

The move begins on Monday; we are already strewn with old boxes full of the most interesting letters—yours and Madges [Vaughan] and Walter Lambs, and I see a very tart one from Maynard about my arrangements at Brunswick Square. We shall be in by Wednesday; but I’m afraid I shant be able to ask Lytton to stay, as the servants will be distracted, and I suppose, giving notice. Tell him I’m much disappointed.

When will you come over and see Monks? If you took train to Lewes my shay would meet you and bring you out; and then take you back. I shall be doing a good deal of brush work on the house, but without any false shame.

Every one felt that Mrs Dolphin [Vanessa] was the soul of the party the other night. Morgan said he was going to tell you that he thought you beautiful and charming, but he might be too shy. What struck me most was the farewell—every one feeling a little sentimental about Asheham—old mother Bell hurrying about the Terrace looking for her Badmington set. “Its no good being sentimental on these occasions. Now Leonard, wasn’t there a bit of old carpet—?” Immortal woman!

Yr B

Berg

[]

1078: To Vanessa Bell

Sunday [7 September 1919]

Monk’s House, Rodmell [Sussex]

Dearest,

We are now more or less settled. Of course, my necklace broke the first thing, but I think necklaces always do on getting into a new house.

When do you go to London? I will try and come over one day before; unless you and Duncan or Clive would come here.

I’ve not yet found out about a shay, but there seem to be several. However it is extremely easy to get into Lewes.

There’s great scope for distemper here, and a niche in the wall where I want to stand a statue. My great family piece looks very handsome. We spend all our time picking apples and pears which we sell in the village. It is a great squeeze after Asheham and we have to use the loft as an E. C. [earth closet].

How are the children getting on in Scotland?

Yr B.

We have 2 spare rooms so do come for the night if you can.

Berg

[]

1079: To Vanessa Bell

Tuesday [9 September 1919]

Monk’s House, Rodmell [Sussex]

Dearest,

If I can I will come over to lunch on Friday and spend the afternoon. I shall take the train to Glynde.

We have had one domestic crisis after another (Nelly asked me not to tell you, but she says she told you herself) however, they have now gone to the extreme of good spirits, which I suppose may last a day or two. Otherwise, we begin before breakfast with lamentations, boxes are packed about eleven o’clock, and the general reconciliation takes place at 12 precisely.

Nelly however has been angelic—its only that wild ass Lotty. But I sometimes think domestic life is hardly worth while.

I wish you could have come here. This place has great charms—

Yr B.

Berg

[]

1080: To Leonard Woolf

Thursday afternoon [11 September 1919]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest M[ongoose],

So far everything has gone very well. I had Dean [builder] down to to see the kitchen and he said he was certain that the damp comes from nothing but the tank and the gutters and can easily be stopped. He is coming first thing tomorrow to do it—and it wont take long. A new gutter is going to be put across; the tube from the tank lengthened, and the grating scraped. Mr Verrall did his own jobs, and never had things properly seen to. The servants are laughing and joking in spite of a thick sea mist. I’m going now to look for mushrooms.

The papers came 5 minutes after you’d left. Dedman has been picking pears. Dean said he had never heard of the kitchen or any other room being damp. Nelly is sure that it will now be all right. Dean said the cupboards could all be moved into the kitchen, but I said I would let him know later. I worked very well this morning, and in spite of everything I think this place is divine. It will be a joy to see Master tomorrow. The furry little beasts send their love.

M[andril].

Sussex

[]

1081: To Saxon Sydney-Turner

Sept. 12th [1919]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

My dear Saxon,

It is high time you wrote to me, but I know your perverse and secretive nature too well to expect any such thing. You see the move’s accomplished, but what you can not see is the extreme horror of the whole process. One gets one’s furniture in, but as for living in it—Then the kitchen was flooded the first night; the servants had hysterics; they packed their boxes. Leonard dismissed them both. I pacified them. Peace was restored. The rain came down again. So we went on the first week. Meanwhile to have left Asheham was bad enough. I can’t altogether get over that, though Leonard infinitely prefers this, chiefly on account of the garden, which pours pears and plums and apples and vegetables upon us. I can’t ask you to come and stay; and you certainly would refuse to; because the kitchen is in process of being disembowelled. What I like best is the water meadow onto which our garden opens. You see every down all the way round you. Then there’s a nice walk to a deserted farm in the Telscombe downs, where the rats collect round you, and merely sit and think about you. But one of these days we will take a walk together.

Nessa and Duncan came over yesterday, and I’m bicycling to Charleston today. When its fine like this, I can’t believe its ever going to change, can you? There seems no reason why weather shouldn’t be fine weather. I have almost forgotten how to read; of course, I can spell words out, but I can’t remember how one goes on page after page. The mechanism of the brain is very amazing to my mind; a move like this is utter destruction. Even having a different shaped room to sit in almost destroys me. But I’ve rambled very painfully over the diaries of Wilfrid Blunt, and through some of George Eliot, and a little bit of Sir Thomas Browne, and I see that I want to read some Plato. But this sounds very industrious, which is a complete lie. I dont like aristocrats when they write. I have a great prejudice against Blunt, though he hates the British Empire; but then he reads his poems to Mrs Asquith, and they have parties where they make speeches, and they’re all so rich and distinguished, and their writing is so much admired, and it is so pretty and smart compared with middle class writing. But I have no room to develop this very important argument. All I want is a long letter from you. I don’t even know where you are—Hampstead or Ormond Street. Is there any good music to hear? About this time of the year I become ravenous for music.

Your affate
V.W.

Sussex

[]

1082: To Lytton Strachey

Sunday 14th [September 1919]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

Dearest Lytton,

I wish we had been able to see you; but we were in our agony when you were at Charleston. Things aren’t much better yet, owing to domestic horrors, it now looks as if the kitchen would have to be rebuilt. What can one do with a sweating floor? However, there are charms in this place, though very humble and unromantic compared with Asheham. I like the morning sun in one’s window, though, and the youth of the village nightly play cricket outside the garden wall, which would recommend itself to you.

What are you doing? Polishing Old Victoria? Legends of your high flyings pass across our horizon now and then. I’m not really anxious. Maynard seems much the same as ever only more and more genial, and, superficially, kind! I suppose the danger lies in becoming too kind. I think you’re a little inclined that way already—take the case of Ottoline. It seems to me a dark one. Still, kindness don’t flourish in our corner of Sussex. I spent the day at Charleston yesterday, and came away feeling purged, bruised, scraped and raw, but morally regenerated. I’ve no news whatever to give you. About 10 days ago I had a letter from Nick Bagenal. They seem all right. I rather hope I may get one from Saxon. The effect of a move upon the intellects and morals is utterly destructive. Moreover Leonard has become what I daresay is called garden proud. We can’t resist going out to look at pears, and then the potatoes have to be weighed. I suppose you couldn’t guess what they weigh. We are very charitable too, and when they want sprays for funerals they come and ask us. Altogether, I find it very hard to settle to my book, which is, at this moment, the complete works of George Eliot. But you have never read them. I wish you had, because then perhaps you would explain the whole puzzle. At anyrate you might write me a letter, which is the sole object of this one. I read Wilfrid Blunt (diaries) at breakfast; I don’t like aristocratic writing, do you? I don’t like the Souls; I don’t like George Wyndham; Heaven knows what one does like, though, on the whole, what I like is first going a walk; then having tea; then sitting and imagining all the pleasant things that might happen to one. I should like to be asked to Tidmarsh for a week end in October. But you will be in Spain, perhaps.

Leonard sends his love—in all sincerity.

Yr. V.W.

Frances Hooper

[]

1083: To Clive Bell

Wednesday [24 September 1919]

Monk’s House [Rodmell, Sussex]

My dear Clive,

Will you come on Sunday or Monday for the night? Come over for tea, and seek us at the very bottom of the village street. At this moment Leonard is tortured with eczema, but I hope by then the disease may have gone, and I have to review Hope Mirrlees, which is even worse, as every word will be picked over. It’s all sapphism so far as I’ve got—Jane [Harrison] and herself.

Yr. V.W.

Quentin Bell

[]

1084: To Katherine Arnold-Forster

Thursday [9 October 1919]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

My dear Bruin,

It was charming to hear from you. After many wanderings, your letter dropped into the box as we got home. We did our best to keep the [railway] strike going in our neighbourhood, and doled out potatoes to the signalman at dusk, but it was all very heroic of us. One’s household doesn’t like a strike; the servants’ point of view is that the lower classes should be kept down.

But this is all moonshine compared with your news. Haven’t I always said that I could practically see the shapes of little Bruins attached to your neck? It will be a superb nursery—the old mother bear occasionally rolling over to give her cubs a lick, and everything smelling so nice of milk and straw. But I can’t pretend that I’m not envious. Well, well—I think all good mothers ought to consider me half their child, which is what I really like best.

London is, so they say, in an intellectual ferment. Maynard was speaking last night, but instead of going to hear him, we snuggled over a fire and read our books. I’ve got to write articles without end. I’m very highly thought of—as a reviewer. Did you ever read George Eliot? Whatever one may say about the Victorians, there’s no doubt they had twice our—not exactly brains—perhaps hearts. I don’t know quite what it is; but I’m a good deal impressed.

Turning, however, to the immediate present, I see that Night and Day will be out shortly. Gerald Duckworth lost the last chapter, so I daresay it will be November instead of October. I don’t feel nervous; nobody cares a hang what one writes, and novels are such clumsy and half extinct monsters at the best; but, oh dear, what a bore it will be! All one’s friends thinking they’ve got to say something; old Bob Trevelyan hustling up, and saying, of course, the wrong thing; and when people praise me, I never know how to answer; and if they don’t praise me, that’s not exhilarating either. Leonard is completely callous. His book may be out any day too.

But I hope we shall meet before any of the books are out. I want to discuss Cornwall. I should be very glad if we could make some arrangement, for though Monk’s House has its charms, it has also a great many drawbacks. We shall have to alter it considerably, I’m afraid. Still, I find that a sunny house is incredibly cheering. Asheham was gradually rotting all our books, and I never realised how little one got either sun or air (you see I’m very cleverly making the best of things).

I don’t suppose this will reach you.

Ring me up; it’s my turn to give Bruin an enormous tea.

Yrs. V.W.

Mark Arnold-Forster

[]

1085: To Violet Dickinson

Tuesday [21 October 1919]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

My Violet,

How delightful of you not to want to be reviewed—I’m so pestered by people who do want it.

As a matter of fact, I’d just written to Bruce Richmond to ask him to let me do it. I daresay he won’t, as he knows I’m a friend. But I do want to do it, and I shall be honest, candid, brutal, unpleasant as possible. I’ve always admired your literary gifts, though. (If you’d rather I didn’t review the book, I’ll send it back, of course)

Do come and see us. Would you dine one night—but I’ll write and settle a day later, as this week seems full.

I’m asking Gerald to send you a copy of my new novel; but its sent solely as a token of ancient affection and gratitude and you needn’t mention it. The matter may drop.

L. sends his love. We’re in the middle of taking proofs of a poem [Hope Mirrlees’ Paris] in the very latest style. By the way, would you send me Bob Nichols address? I’m told he might like to send us something.

Yr V.W.

Berg

[]

1086: To Vanessa Bell

Monday [27 October 1919]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dearest,

Of course you always know more about writing than writing than anyone else. I was immensely pleased by your letter, and I think I’d rather please you than anyone, if only because I feel that its all your doing if I have any wits at all. Where should I have been if it hadn’t been for you, when Hyde Park Gate was at its worst? You must admit the Apes were a fair handful in those days. I’m longing to hear what else you think, when you come to the end—if you ever do. I’m a little surprised that it gives you the horrors. When I was writing it, I didn’t think it was much like our particular Hell—but one never knows.

Yours and Clives are the only letters I’ve had, so I suppose most of my friends find it rather tough. But I’m amazingly callous, and I’m quite content with my dear Dolphin’s good opinion—Especially as she says it will take a practical form. Of course, I should like a picture above all things: but, as a matter of fact, I was thinking of asking you to do a small job for me—to paint the Greek vase I brought from Corinth (in 1906). Could you? Its a kind of terra cotta.

How infernal about Budge [Nelly Boxall’s sister]! Its all Bert’s doing apparently; he seems to be most disagreeable; and after advising her to go, turned round and refused to keep the baby. I’m afraid its useless to suggest anything else to her—at least Nelly seems to think so.

Shall I go to the Registry here? I feel, though, that I have a fatal effect upon your domestics.

Shall I come and see you on Friday? I might be able to come to tea or supper. I suppose you weren’t thinking of going to the Russian dancers? I want to, but they’re so expensive.

We’re threatened with a visit from Sydney [Waterlow], who now thinks himself the greatest man in England, and I want to be out.

Ka came here the other day—very model and maternal, and tremendously well pleased with herself. She will go on saying how mad and wild Will is, and I feel he must really be as mild as a Guinea pig—a neurotic Guinea pig. He is painting hard—I wish Ka wasn’t always so damned condescending. She couldn’t write Night and Day if she tried.

Shall I get a notice of the London Group [of painters]? I want to go very much, and perhaps I might write an account of it, but I understand that you’d rather I didn’t. I meant to send you my stories, but I’ve had such a rush of reviews to do, I’ve had no time to copy them.

I’ll ring you up and ask about Friday later.

O how I adore you!

B.

The dedication [to Night and Day] was, you know perfectly well if you weren’t so deceitful, meant every word—in fact there would have been a good many more if I hadn’t been afraid of being thought sentimental; and I meant to write my dear Duncan’s name with yours (in ink) but again said he wd. prefer not. however my sentiments are such

Berg

[]

1087: To Lytton Strachey

Oct. 28th [1919]

Hogarth [House], Richmond

Ah, how delightful to be praised by you! I tell myself that of course you’re always too generous about me, and one ought to discount it, but I can’t bring myself to. I enjoy every word. I don’t suppose there’s anything in the way of praise that means more to me than yours. There are myriads of things I want to ask you; about the male characters for instance. Do they convince? Then was Rodney’s change of heart sufficiently prepared for to be credible? It came into my head on the spur of the moment that he was in love with Cassandra, and afterwards it seemed a little violent. I take your point about the tupping and had meant to introduce a little in that line, but somehow it seemed out of the picture—still, I regret it. Never mind; I’ve an idea for a story where all the characters do nothing else—but they’re all quadrupeds! However, as I’m afflicted with rheumatism, this had better wait, I only wanted to say how happy your letter had made me,—dialogue was what I was after in this book—so I’m very glad you hit on that; I mean it was one of the things—there are so many million others!—but I can’t help thinking it’s the problem, if one is to write novels at all, which is a moot point.

Tell Carrington I went into the question of the roses with some care, and will write to her on the subject. It’s not as simple as it sounds. Was it stated in the book [Night and Day] that Elizabeth Datchet took a first prize for them the year before? She did however and so—but I can’t go into all this at length.

We should like immensely to come on the 8th—and why ask anyone? Don’t for our sakes. We shall be quite content with the two natives.

Your
Virginia

There’s an amusing book just come out—Miss Eden’s letters, Edited by Violet Dickinson.

Frances Hooper

[]

1088: To Clive Bell

Thursday [30 October 1919]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

My dear Clive,

It was a great pleasure to get your letter. I’m sure you’re too enthusiastic; at the same time I dont think its ever been easy to take you in. I think I may enjoy about half your praises; of course, if I gave my mind to it, I could pick any number of holes in Night and Day. For instance—but lots of people are sure to do it for me.

Besides I’ve no time to write this evening, expecting Ka to dine any moment; but I said to myself I must write and thank my brother in law, who after all, always did believe in me, and made a great deal more difference than perhaps he thinks to that exacting and troublesome, but not coldhearted woman Virginia.

Quentin Bell

[]

1089: To Roger Fry

Nov. 2nd [1919]

Hogarth [House], Richmond

My dear Roger,

It was delightful to see your writing. Once you got to France, I looked upon you as lost—inapproachable and certainly not making the approach. So when my book came out (this great event happened 2 weeks ago) I sent it to Dalmeny, not daring to send a large, old fashioned, high minded English novel to Roger in the South of France. If it ever reaches you, please tell me what you think of it; if not, you can think of a tribute of sincere devotion lying upon the hall table in Camden town. O how I want now to write nothing longer than 10 pages for ever! Does Proust come out of it well? Ah, but then he writes French. Please bring him back for me to read.

Perhaps you never will come back though. There is not much to offer you in the way of entertainment. I have my private sources of pleasure of course—an afternoon concert at Shelley House (the St John Hornby’s), a meeting of the Women’s Cooperative Guild, a tea at the 1917 Club. But you never enter entirely into the romance and splendour of middle class life. It may be fancy, but the whole neighbourhood of Fitzroy Square sounds a little dull and hollow, when that enormous vibration—your presence—is removed. You know one can hear it a mile off. I was conscious of this when I went to the private view at Heals the other day. I will say nothing of the pictures which were almost obscured by Jack Hutchinson and cut in slices by Ethel Sands; but the atmosphere seemed to me detestable. Imagine a November fog, and everyone got up to a certain point of eccentricity, and not knowing what to say, and probably feeling nothing, and trailing round in the semi-dusk. I went on to tea with Vanessa; which is always an adventure, even if she spends the whole time with an electrician in the passage. The earth has got into the main at Regents Square: all light therefore cut off. So there we sat with one candle for which I’ve no doubt you could have improvised a candlestick, but we’re not much good at that. Then, Madame Champcommunal came in, and in ten minutes we had arranged to share my Cornish cottages together. Is this rash? I was so struck by her mastery over furniture that I have given it all into her hands. But God knows what she’s like—handsome, unhappy, hard and discontented? Anyhow, we shall never meet, and I have a kind of hunger for someone not Carrington, Barbara, or Alix, so far as looks are concerned at any rate.

Mrs Colefax—this is the first fruits of Night and Day—has intimated through Logan her willingness to receive me; to which I have replied that I have no clothes. It is now her part to provide them; but so far she continues to think the matter over.

I’ve been reading one book you’d like—George Moore, Avowals—partly memories, partly criticism and very amusing though when I said in a review that I felt strong affection for him, the Times went and cut it out. Otherwise, I’m sunk in George Eliot, who was born a hundred years ago—I daresay a very ugly baby. But you see how I’m giving you the feel of England? which I must at once stop doing in order to catch a train, in a drizzle, to go to the London Library.

Do write again. I think you owe it to us.

Yr. V.W.

Sussex

[]

1090: To Violet Dickinson

Tuesday [4 November 1919]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

My Violet,

I’ve just read your Aunt’s letters [Emily Eden] with great joy. I think its one of the best collections for ever so long. But why not more from your own pen? Surely, the style is identical with hers. I was kept happy for hours with them, and only wished they’d go on and on and on. Are there no more? I’ve written a review, but had to keep it so short that I couldn’t say half I wanted to.

Lytton Strachey has just written to me to say that he’s reading them too, and finds them far superior to anything of the present day. He had read some years ago in Lord Clarendon’s life, and always hoped for more. Also, he finds that he’s your cousin—through the Colviles. But this is to ask whether you will dine here next Wednesday, 12th, at 7.30? I think Nessa is coming.

Please do—in your natural coat. Train from Baker St to Hammersmith and there change; or from Baker St to Waterloo; the trains from Waterloo go at all the 8s—7.8—7.18—7.28—etc. every 10 minutes.

Yr V.W.

Berg

[]

1091: To Violet Dickinson

[11 November 1919]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

My Violet,

Nessa has just put me off; and wants me to try and get you to come on Wednesday week, 19th, instead of this Wednesday.

That would suit us equally well; but if it doesn’t suit you, please come next Wednesday as we had arranged; and we will get Nessa another time.

We shall be alone, but all the same, we will try to make up by our pleasure in seeing you—Would you send me a line. Nessa is a d—d old wretch.

Yr V.W.

Berg

[]

1092: To Janet Case

Tuesday [11 November 1919]

[Hogarth House, Richmond]

My dear Janet,

Thank you very much for your letter. I should like to come and see you, but I don’t know when to suggest—this week being full, and next destroyed, I’m afraid, by going away for two nights in the middle—But I expect, as usual, you have too many visitors. I will write later, in case you have a free day.

I rather hope you won’t take the cottage in Suffolk—its an awful way off, though the country has a peculiar charm I think. I detest most of Surrey, but this may be prejudice. The difficulty is, I suppose, to get anything anywhere—unless you follow our plan of buying at sight. We now have to decide whether to buy this house and the next door house or be turned out.

I don’t know anything about Miss Stella Benson—A.B. is, I’m fairly sure, Augustine Birrell—articles about books in the Nation, aren’t they—Violet Dickinson has brought out a book of Miss Eden’s letters which I think very amusing.

Yours aff.
V.W.

Sussex

[]

1093: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

[mid-November 1919]

[Hogarth House, Richmond]

Dearest Ottoline

It was very good of you to write, and a great pleasure to me to think of your liking my book. I hoped you would; but one never knows. I tried to get a little more ‘beauty’ into this one, and risked spoiling the ‘originality’ Indeed, Jack Hutchinson, Mary’s large red husband, says its an old fashioned domestic work, too dull for words. Now I shall quote Lady Ottoline. But O dear—what a lot of work goes into a long solid book!—I feel as if I should never write more than three pages again.

We were staying with Lytton last week, all very charming and domestic in the midst of bitter cold; and he says you’re coming to London, but I begin to doubt that you ever will, and it is at the moment more repulsive than I can remember. People have grown much more numerous and much uglier. Each time the door at the 1917 Club opens, a fresh deformity enters. I sit in a corner and stare in a kind of trance, as though one had fallen to the bottom of some awful pit in a nightmare. And they’re all quite young—the coming generation—which makes it seem worse. In my youth, though crude, we were invariably lovely—and then what passion we threw into existence! Poor Alix sits like a paralysed cat. But I must stop, or I shall forfeit my newly won right to a heart. It was charming of you to write to me.

Your affate.
V.W.

Texas

[]

1094: To Margaret Llewelyn Davies

Sunday [16 November 1919]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dearest Margaret,

I was extremely sorry not to see you yesterday, having braced myself for the deed. I managed to miss my train and spent a long time with Lilian, and enjoyed myself very much. She is an exalted character. Then Emphie [Case] came in, and I cant help feeling that though she’s as brave as can be, this departure is very melancholy. I hope you’ll see your way to make some suggestion about what we all wish. If it was for Janet’s sake, surely she would consider it. She talked of living very simply, which sounded ominous.

I dont really feel much difficulty in bearding you, all the same. You have an atmosphere; no doubt about that; but then all incorruptible and dominating characters have; and they suffer for their insight with one eye by being blind with t’other. I think thats the case with me too. We are imperfect human beings, but that’s no obstacle to friendship, (on my side) in fact rather an incentive. You’ll never like my books, but then shall I ever understand your Guild? Probably not.

As to Night and Day, and our argument, I was pleased to find on the hall table this testimony to my sympathy. I dont know that I agree, or with the other man who says I’m chiefly remarkable for common human wisdom? Massingham in the Nation this week is annoyed and abusive in a way that makes me feel I’ve done some good. Then there’s the man who says I’m Jane Austen (but I’d much rather write about tea parties and snails than be Jane Austen). And a Bishop’s wife detects undoubted Xtianity, and an elderly lady writes to tell me that the love scenes make her ‘jumpy’, but she feels that its, “the forerunner of a new species of book” (very intelligent). You see, its a question of the human heart, and cutting out the rotten parts according to ones convictions. Thats what I want to do, and thats where we differ, and thats why you’ll dislike N. and D; and I shan’t mind much if you do; but I should mind quite enormously if you didn’t like me.

O yes, my dear Margaret, I think we’ve got a great deal in common; and you might ask me to dinner.

Your affate
Virginia

Sussex

[]

1095: To Janet Case

[19 November 1919]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

My dear Janet,

It seems a long way off, but I think Saturday the 6th, tea, is the best for me.

I shall like very much to discuss my [Night and Day] people with you—save that I’m beginning to feel that they’re not mine at all. I’m told so many different things about them. But try thinking of Katharine [Hilbery] as Vanessa, not me; and suppose her concealing a passion for painting and forced to go into society by George [Duckworth]—that was the beginning of her; but as one goes on, all sorts of things happen. Its the conflict that turns the half of her so chilly; but I daresay this was overdone; and then there’s the whole question, which interested me, again too much for the books sake, I daresay, of the things one doesn’t say; what effect does that have? and how far do our feelings take their colour from the dive underground? I mean, what is the reality of any feeling?—and all this is further complicated by the form, which must sit tight, and perhaps in Night and Day, sits too tight; as it was too loose in The Voyage Out. And then there’s the question of things happening, normally, all the time. But Leonard is typewriting at this table; and someone’s coming into dinner, and my niece Angelica who is staying with us has pulled my hair down; so I must stop.

We have not yet bought our house; we’re trying, to fill up time, to sell Hyde Park Gate.

Yr. V.W.

Sussex

[]

1096: To Lady Robert Cecil

[late November 1919]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

My dear Nelly,

We shall like very much to lunch with you next Tuesday.

I dont know what to say about Christianity—perhaps one has it inborn in one. I expect so. I didn’t write on G. E. [George Eliot] in the Times; but in the Suppt, and I was so much struck by her goodness that I hope it wasn’t my article that you thought hard. She is as easy to read as Tit Bits: and it was a surprise to me; and magnificent in many ways.

Your affate.
Virginia Woolf

Hatfield

[]

1097: To Lytton Strachey

Wednesday [26 November 1919]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

An American publisher wants to bring out Night and Day and the Voyage Out—indeed, I can’t resist telling you that I’ve had offers from two—asked to write for an American paper (don’t ask which), asked to write for the London Mercury, invited to meet Miss Elizabeth Asquith, Lady Russell [‘Elizabeth’]; and Miss Constance Miles—Still I’ve not time to go into this with any fulness.

But would you be so angelic as to tell me if any special misprints, obscurities or vulgarities in either occur to you. I have to send the books off on Monday and they say the more alterations the better—because of copyright. I’ve just glanced between the boards and see that the whole thing must be re-written from the beginning—and only 2 day to do it in!

I never wrote a Collins to say how much I enjoyed Tidmarsh, but I did.

Yr. V.W.

If you can send any corrections, could you let me have them by Saturday?

Frances Hooper

[]

1098: To Violet Dickinson

Thursday [27 November 1919]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

My Violet,

What a strange miracle! I was wetting my pen to write to you—the postman knocks—servants out—I go to the door—and there’s your self in person. One of these days, when the feast with the black cake and Violet in white comfits has taken place, I shall collect your notes! Please see to it at once. “To my dearly beloved niece and intimate Sp:—all my papers without exception” What a book! What a book! It makes my mouth water.

What can I have said to make you believe that praise from anyone, of anything, is other than the breath of life in my nostrils? And who would I rather have praise from than Violet? Wasn’t it she who first said that thought afflicted with every conceivable vice, crooked in spirit and deformed in nature, still when it came to writing—It was certainly your doing that I ever survived to write at all; and I suppose nothing I could say would give you an idea of what your praise was one night [in 1902]—I can see it—sitting in a long room at Fritham [New Forest], after a walk on the Common: O how excited I was and what a difference you made to me! But I dont suppose you realise how often I think of it, or how grateful I am—not only for praise, gluttonous though I am. Oh no—for being all you were to us. And Greece—and Thoby. Life has had its wonders—

But I wasn’t writing to tell you how I put you among them. I was writing to ask you about roses. The Times reviewer says that I can’t have roses at Christmas—anyhow not in Lincolnshire. The book is now being published in America, and they want me to alter any mistakes at once. At Kew there are certainly roses at Christmas—the long pink ones. Even on the East Coast wouldn’t it be possible for a careful gardener to have enough to fill a small basket?—thats all I said.

Someone else has written to protest; but I’m anxious to keep them, and intend to go by what you say. Only could you let me know at once.

And if at the same time you would write out your views upon Night and Day I should be enchanted; somehow I thought you didn’t like my writing, and being so modest, I was anxious not to be told so; and thus shot the book at you, and then ran away.

Leonard sends his love, and we hope to have you to dinner again. You have a fur coat, so you’ve no excuse for not setting off to the remotest suburbs in a blizzard.

I saw Katie [Cromer] yesterday at a Concert, in the 5/6 seats, wearing a new blue hat, so she survives still; but I hope to live to see her mount the scaffold—after all the only end for that type of beauty. As for Lady Dorothy Nevill, she made me laugh so with her pigeons, guinea pigs, funguses and the rest that I couldn’t hurt a hair of her head.

Yr, V.W.

Berg

[]

1099: To Clive Bell

27th November 1919

[Hogarth House, Richamond]

My dear Clive,

I hasten to say that the books were sent off the day after your card arrived. Various forms had to be got and filled in, which may have kept them back another day; but you certainly should have received them by now—indeed days ago (they were sent on the 13th)—and we wish you’d make enquiries. The postage was paid at this end.

However, as this has brought me the pleasure of your letter [about Night and Day], how can I complain? Fortunately it arrived on a blue and brilliant morning together with one or two communications of a flattering kind or I should have been outraged. I hope you laid on your colours a little thick. It sounds too good to be true; yet I know you wouldn’t deceive your sister in law. Paris a nest of popinjays, and you the brightest of the lot. That, of course, is quite credible; the translators I have learnt to tolerate. But conceive our English society—literary circles are agitated by the news that Thomas Hardy has invited the Mills Whithams to stay with him. She, you know, was Sylvia Milman; he has just produced his 21st imitation of Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Then Ottoline will soon be with us, but she has ransacked Ireland and finds nothing big enough to stick in the teeth of her comb.

But you ask of Night and Day—and even if you hadn’t asked—Still its nothing compared with you and Lytton—But did two American publishers offer to bring out both your books—suggest that you should write for their magazines—and insist upon publishing your portrait? I suppose so, I’m afraid so. But I’m greatly flattered, and have made terms with Messrs. Doran, and I’m now engaged in trying to get [Bruce] Richmond to let me print my articles over there. It’s said he won’t. The reviews have drawn the Americans I suppose. They’ve praised me highly for the most part, and wrongly too; in fact, as criticism, they’re worthless so far. But the serious sixpennies have still to speak. I couldn’t grasp what Katherine meant but thought she disliked the book and wouldn’t say so, and so muffed her points. Murry, however, tells me that she admires it, but thinks my ‘aloofness’ morally wrong. (She’s practically cured, by the way, and they think will be completely so). But every day I get letters and they all pick out different points, and no two people seem to agree, and Molly Hamilton says one thing and Molly MacCarthy another—and some say the first chapters are the best, and others say the last, and some say its in the tradition, and others say its not, but the great battle, so Murry tells me, is between those who think it unreal and those who think it real. (What do they mean?) The only person who thinks what I think is, oddly enough, James Strachey.

All this ought to make it sell, but Gerald [Duckworth] remarks that that’s out of the question with a 9/- book. Anyhow I’m to meet the Bibesco’s, by command, and the Bishop of Exeter’s wife wants to know if I’m a Christian—she thinks I am; and Squire begs me to contribute to his slop pail of stale tea [the London Mercury]—and as for Ottoline—she’s made the plunge this time, and gone in out of her depth, poor woman. I thought she would.

Still, enough of Night and Day. Unfortunately what with the sympathy of my correspondent and the gigantic importance of my theme, there’s no paper left. And I wanted to tell you about Idialus Odsfish [inexplicable] and heaps of things. I’m in the midst of domestic crisis—both servants leaving; Nessa, however, has surmounted hers, and I see, as at the end of a telescope, a glimpse of an enchanted world, where I turn a handle and hot mutton chops are shot out on a plate—human agencies entirely ignored. This can mean less than nothing to a popinjay.

Gerald Ritchie has gone mad. He races round presenting ladies with melons and abuses his wife. She has had him certified on these grounds. This I had from Molly [MacCarthy] who flaunted in the other day, sleek in sealskins, brave but bankrupt. Desmond expected daily.

Our weekend at Tidmarsh was charming, though a little chastened by the presence of Saxon, who spent 24 hours in looking out trains from Banbury to Bude, and communicating his discoveries at intervals. Barbara was lost at Bath without a Bradshaw, so it’s thought. I leave you to make the necessary connections. O yes—I liked your articles on France: and entirely agreed, so far as I am able. Did I say that a reviewer has just written to express gratitude and admiration. What for? Night and Day, of course.

Yr. V.W.

Quentin Bell

[]

1100: To Lytton Strachey

Sunday [30 November 1919]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Many thanks for the correction; I have put it in; undoubtedly there are hundreds more, but it can’t be helped.

Philip’s address is

Greenmoor Hill Farm
Woodcot
Oxon.

Leonard was there yesterday, and found him fearfully dark and dismal, and apparently breaking down in health into the bargain. No cook, no food, and half his house pulled down.

O no, I shall never reach your heights. Elizabeth Asquith will be at once the beginning and the end; but I’ll write and tell you what passes between us. Gerald Duckworth has entire control of my arrangements [royalties] so I expect nothing. Did you see Massingham’s onslaught in the Nation? I wonder why. But I feel it’s to my credit, whereas when the Bishop of Exeter’s wife says she feels certain I’m a Christian, I’m a good deal depressed. Squire has been put in his place.

I’m in the 2nd vol. of Ethel Smyth. I think she shows up triumphantly, through sheer force of honesty. It’s a pity she can’t write; for I don’t suppose one could read it again. But it fascinates me all the same. I saw her at a concert two days ago—striding up the gangway in coat and skirt and spats and talking at the top of her voice. Near at hand one sees that she’s all wrinkled and fallen in, and eyes running blue on to the cheeks; but she keeps up the figure of the nineties to perfection. Of course the book is the soul of the nineties. Did you ever know Sue Lushington? Much the same type. Then Ethel’s passion for the W. C. (it occurs in every chapter) is of the highest merit.

We’ve got to buy 2 more houses [Hogarth and Suffield]; both servants are leaving; and the Int. Review is coming to an end.

Yr. V.W.

Frances Hooper

[]

1101: To Lady Robert Cecil

[1 December 1919]

Hogarth House, Richmond

My dear Nelly,

Leonard has a touch of malaria, and the doctor forbids him to go out for two or three days. He is very much disappointed at not being able to lunch with you tomorrow, but it is, of course, out of the question. He would particularly like to see you and Lord Robert, and hopes that you may ask him another time.

If it would not be inconvenient to you to have me without him, I will come. But perhaps you wouldn’t mind ringing me up tomorrow morning to say whether you expect me or not.

Our telephone number is 496 Richmond.

Yours affate,
Virginia Woolf

Hatfield

[]

1102: To Violet Dickinson

[1 December 1919]

Postcard

Hogarth House, Richmond

A thousand thanks. I have left the roses in [Night and Day], and shall tell my critics what you say. Nothing could be better—not that I think it matters either way, except that old gentlemen get so angry.

V.W.

Berg

[]

1103: To C. P. Sanger

Tuesday [2? December 1919]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dear Mr Sanger,

It was very good of you to write to me about my book. It is a great pleasure to me that you should like it, for there are few people I would rather please.

I think one’s readers tend to identify one’s characters more than one does oneself. Of course there are touches of Lady Ritchie in Mrs Hilbery; but in writing one gets more and more away from the reality, and Mrs Hilbery became to me quite different from any one in the flesh.

We should very much like to see you and Mrs Sanger. At present we are going through a domestic crisis, but when that is over I hope you will come and dine with us.

Yours very sincerely,
Virginia Woolf

Daphne Sanger

[]

1104: To Molly Maccarthy

Thursday [4 December 1919]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dearest Molly,

I seem to be fated not to be able to come to you. Last week I had a domestic crisis to overcome; this week I thought perfectly safe, and was about to write, when Leonard began his malaria—a mild attack, but it settles on him every night, and I don’t like to go away. This comes of a visit to Oxford.

If Desmond’s back, there would be no point in my visit; but let me postpone it.—Perhaps after Christmas.

You dont, I suppose, want to let your country house? There are two oldish but most desirable ladies [Janet and Emphie Case], seeking everywhere in your neighbourhood—Or Wilson’s folly? But I have asked Margery [Waterlow]; and I dont think that you can hold a finger to Margery in practical affairs.

London is at its worst—a drunk charwoman with child by the pauper lunatic—that’s my feeling, something lewd about it, as well as indecent and detestable. I’ve been meeting your friends, the Bibesco’s: Elizabeth [formerly Asquith] seemed to be an admirable but almost timorous matron. Is this a conceivable account of her? A child is within her, of course. I said all the most impossible things in a very loud voice; abused Lady Glenconner, and then attacked Rupert Brooke: but at my age and with my habits, how conform to the way of the world? Hair pins dropped steadily into my soup plate: I gave them a lick, and put them in again. [Prince Antoine] Bibesco talked about Ruskin and religion. This was at the Cecil’s, and she [Nelly] as deaf as a stone.

Yr V.W.

Mrs Michael MacCarthy

[]

1105: To Vanessa Bell

Wednesday [24 December 1919]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dearest,

Here are some handkerchiefs for Dolphin’s snout. They are really gent’s size, so you might cut them in half.

Do write me an account of Xmas at Seend—do they still have the carols after dinner? You know how every detail consumes me. I’m afraid we shan’t get away on Friday after all. [Dr] Fergusson won’t let me get up so long as I have this little temperature. It’s an infernal nuisance Still it may go down today.

If you come back on Saturday and we’re still here, of course I should much enjoy a visit, but you’ll have the brats I suppose, and no cook as usual.

I hope Gordon Sqre is settled. Adrian and Karin seem very hard up. We hear from the agents that we shall have no difficulty in selling H P G.

Do write

Yr B.

Berg

[]

1106: To J. T. Sheppard

31st Dec. [1919]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Sheppard,

(which you said I might call you—I becoming Virginia—but perhaps I always was).

Do you remember saying that you, Miss Joshua, Mr Doggatt, and Mr Taylor would dine with us on Jan. 7th? Owing to influenza, we shan’t be back till Jan 8th.—Would you arrange to come (the same party) any day after that? Please do. If you cant get them all, come with some, or come alone. I leave it to you—only let me know, which and when.

Yours
Virginia Woolf

King’s

[]

Letters 1107-1160 (January-December 1920)

1107: To Katherine Arnold-Forster

1st Jan. 1920

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

Dearest Ka,

Here we are recovering from our diseases over a superb fire, after a large tea, during a violent storm (the ink’s turned purple of a sudden). These are the pinnacles of human existence (thank God, we’ve got no servants) and I ought to write you a very sublime letter. In fact I did write one, ten minutes ago, looking at the fire. Now it comes to pen and ink of course—and then I’ve got to accept your invitation at once—I mean the one to stay with us. Do come on the 10th. We go back on the 8th. Ring me up and say so. By these means you will avert Bob [Trevelyan] who has returned from Madrid, and threatens to read his last composition aloud. Oh dear—I didn’t even buy the Death of Man; though I asked for it. One can’t ask twice for Bob. That leads me to say how relieved I am that you like Night and Day. I should have thought the worse of you if you hadn’t; but I want to know why you like it. Its foolish of me to ask. I’m already pestered and blinded and bewildered by my friends opinions. They give them with and without being asked and they’re all different; some old creatures have crept from what I supposed to be their graves to hiss at me. My characters seem to exacerbate even the moribund. (I seem to be dropping into Latin—I daresay the sublime letter was to have been in Latin—) On the other hand, my dear Ka, I’ve had my compliments—and when you stay with us you’ll find that the conversation imperceptibly glides towards America. Well, to have done with it—two publishers have proposed publishing both N. and D and the Voyage Out: of course I was very proud, until I met Nessa, and she like the Matterhorn, made me see human glory in the light of the universal: I crept home a good deal abashed, and only managed, under the shelter of Leonard, to fan a subdued glow. Anyhow I may make a little money, which I shan’t here: but I’d like to have Bruin’s opinion of the whole business.

One of the curiosities of the past week has been the resurrection of Jacques at the Ballet—apparently not only in health, but also well disposed; cordial, friendly, sympathetic, charming, so Nessa said. But then Gwen was in childbed, which may explain the lapse of the severer moral sense. I wish he would come back to us. I always had a deep affection for him—until he got talking about red and green and reality. To return (while there’s room) to my works. My George Eliot was more on her legs, I thought, than Sydney. But then if alone one supports the Foreign Office—if the Oranges of Nigeria depend on one—if Lord Hardinge can’t be trusted to sign a telegram, without one—George Eliot, poor woman, hasn’t much of a chance. That, I was informed, was what happened to her. “Overworked, my dear Virginia: still I feel that its a duty for anyone with more or less decent ideas, for any man of parts” etc., here I looked anxious and blushed. The allusion referred elsewhere. I mean I thought of poor Dawks [Sydney’s wife Margery] conscientiously breeding his product among the downs, while poor old Sydney expanded and bubbled in front of our fire. But surely he’s as innocent and amiable as—well, I always come back to the same image of a hollow pig—the kind you blow out through a hole in the tail.

My next work will be on Henry James’ letters, I think—unless someone else has done it for me during the influenza. I shan’t be sorry, since I’m stuck in the Ambassadors.

I hope you have time for reading letters, since this one has run on so far, but still I’ve thousands of things to say—one being that I highly commend you for living in the country. Everything seems a hundred times nicer there. The whole of London is now concentrated into Gordon Square; Vanessa and Adrian: [No.] 46: Alix: the Stracheys. This being so, we’ve gone and bought Hogarth and the house next door [Suffield]. I saw myself being swept into the vortex, and there whirled like a drowning leaf, till I was stuck in the mud and decayed.

Leonard sends his love to you and Will and hopes to see him. We can’t offer him a bed, I’m afraid; but couldn’t he join us at meals?

Yr V.W.

Mark Arnold-Forster

[]

1108: To Vanessa Bell

Friday [2 January 1920]

Monk’s House, Rodmell [Sussex]

Dearest,

I suppose the necklace is bewitched, but it must be a very forcible devil, as the string is jerked apart. I’ll bring it to show you. I chose the handkerchiefs at night, and next morning was amazed at the colours. Did you know that they change? Perhaps you did.

We have had storms, gales, thunder, rain—mud to our knees, every conceivable horror until today when it might be June, except that its freezing.

I feel much better—though attacked with heart disease, you’ll be sorry to hear, the day before we left. I thought I was probably dying, but Fergusson says its only the nerves of the heart go wrong after influenza, and get all right, and he’s given me some medicine, and I’m practically recovered. But I’m afraid I shant get much pity from you; though thats what I’m after. I wonder why anything with one’s heart makes one think one’s dying.

I heard from Margaret Davies that she’s been seeing Kitty Maxse, who asked after us, and said she’d read Night and Day and thought it very bad, the characters bloodless, the writing dull, the love insipid; so Margaret said that Katharine was meant for you, upon which Kitty exclaimed that she couldn’t have guessed it and that she always felt, and apparently still feels, the greatest admiration for you. Why don’t you ask her to dinner? To couple my lacerated feelings, [Sir George] Savage thinks N. and D. one of the great novels of the world. Life is queer—But I see the solution of it is to live down here without servants. Mrs Dedman cooks our food in her cottage and brings it over piping hot; a girl [Elsie] does the house in about 2 hours. I suppose we save £3 a week. The peace is infinite. I dread going back to the complications of Hogarth, but we must on Thursday.

Then Ka is coming to stay with us. Bob T[revelyan]: has reached England, but I don’t suppose France will have made him either younger or handsomer. Give my love to Roger. I hope his influenza is better. When shall you get in to Gordon Sqre.—and when can I invite my guests to ham and roll? Have you a cook? The girl here I believe wants a place in a town; she’s very nice so far; aged 18; has been housemaid—I dont think she can cook. Barbara [Bagenal] tried for Budge [Nelly Boxall’s sister] without success, and seems half paralysed with desperation, poor wretch; so that perhaps I ought to tell her of this girl.

Love to Angelica—I’m delighted to hear that her taste is already infallible.

Yr B.

Berg

[]

1109: To Margaret Llewelyn Davies

[3? January 1920]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

[in Leonard’s handwriting]

Our first 3 days here were a hurricane of wind and rain, but despite that it has, I think, already done V. good. Today is perfect bright sun and still. Your visit did not at all tire V. and she takes Night and Day with philosophic calm. I imagine Kitty Maxse’s unfavourable opinion is a great compliment. It means that the book has at any rate moved on to something beyond Kipling, Sir Henry Newbolt, and possibly Stanley Weyman.

Leonard

[in Virginia’s handwriting]

I think L. is a little hard upon poor old Kitty—I used to hate her friends and her views, so its quite right that she should find mine dull—We always did quarrel about what constitutes ‘blood’ and ‘narrowness’—In fact, we parted, when I went to Fitzroy Sqre, on those grounds—so did Nessa, who knew her much better than I did. Its perfect here; I’d like to come down and find you sitting by the fire. We live in luxury; dinner brought over piping hot from the next cottage by an old woman who has borne 11 children and has the sagacity of the whole world since the Flood in her. Lord! how useless they make one feel! (but this is not true, only put in for the sake of Mary Datchet.) Leonard’s book [Empire and Commerce in Africa] comes out next week—what will the Maxses say to that! How she used to implore Nessa and me not to know people like Leonard!—I’m reading it for the 2nd time—to me it seems superb.

Sussex

[]

1110: To Violet Dickinson

4th Jan 1920

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

My Violet,

(Excuse this paper) I will certainly write to Middleton Murry about Mr Freeman. But I think he would have a much better chance of getting books to review if I could say that he has a subject; I think editors prefer that. Also has he written articles that Murry could look at—in some paper? The Athenaeum ought to suit him; Murry got into trouble at Oxford himself and lived for years on bread and water.

We’re down here recovering from influenza. Leonard prunes apple trees all day with a knife you gave him. But we have to be back on Thursday though its nicer than all London rolled in one here.

I hope you’ll come and see us again. Bring Mr Freeman to dinner, won’t you? Lunch is rather hopeless for Leonard.

Seven hundred copies of your book [Miss Eden’s Letters] seems to me quite good, considering the price; and it ought to go on, considering the value of it. Of course, its too good to be snapped up.

I have to be photographed for America, in order to appear in person when the novels come out. Shall I borrow Beatrice’s [Thynne] pearls? or look as dissolute as I am? I’ve just been told that Kitty Maxse thinks N. and D. the dullest book she’s ever read; but then you know—my opinion of Kitty Maxse—I never succeeded with Kitty. I never put on her clothes right. She gave me an entire outfit, all black, when Thoby died—But you neglected your duties in that line:

Is Crum ever coming to the surface again? not Ella—Walter. I should like immensely to see him.

Yr Sp:

Editions vary I think; Gerald Duckworth must print about 2,000 in one—but it may be different with memoirs.

Berg

[]

1111: To J. T. Sheppard

[Jan. 5th 1920]

Monk’s House [Rodmell, Sussex] (We go to Hogarth House, Richmond, on Thursday)

My dear Sheppard,

The 14th (Wednesday) will suit perfectly, and we look forward with great pleasure. We dine at 7.30. I think your best way is from Waterloo; and when you get to Richmond, ask for Eton Street. Paradise Road runs across the top; our house is the 2nd on the left at the join. Sometimes on a dark night people can’t see the name; but we’re only 5 minutes from the station.

Whatever I said down the telephone to Fredegond, shivering with the influenza, wasn’t to the discredit of Jimmy [Doggart]. I thought him a resolute, defiant young man, which is what I like, when young men are too much in awe of their elders to talk. I very much wanted him to talk, and I hope he will. I liked Miss Joshua when she said in answer to my question ‘What d’you do?’ ‘Wales’. What absurd trifles one does make liking and disliking from!

It gives me immense pleasure that you should like my book—a man who reads Sophocles. If there was a dash of anybody in Rodney, I think it must have been Walter Headlam—not you—Oh no, one of the most fixed obsessions of my life has been that I should never, never, never call you Sheppard—in fact that you disliked me. But let us not trench upon this dangerous ground. And then that you should like anything I’ve written! Perfectly amazing. I daresay I am hard on the men compared with the women. But you see men are at their worst with women—perhaps their best, but certainly their worst. Isn’t that so the other way round too? And then early impressions—but here we begin my autobiography, and that’s a little too long.

I don’t suppose that Jimmy was in awe of us, by the way. Heaven knows with these defiant young men. One knows nothing, which is part of the fascination I suppose; and I feel, too, he might at any moment come out with something to slice one from head to heel. His truth might be terrific. So you see how exciting it is to think that you’re coming to dinner. Leonard’s sympathies of course are with Miss Joshua. Considering what a flare and a glare Gordon Square is, I thought she showed up very well; at her age I should have been quite ridiculous, frantic, hectic, as hard as—well, the thing I have in mind is a wood louse, when it rolls up in a ball. Miss Joshua—I mean she seemed quite natural.

Yours ever,
Virginia Woolf

King’s

[]

1112: To Janet Case

5th Jan. 1920

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

My dear Janet,

Here is Hopkins, whom I said I’d send. Might I have him back in time, since I spent 12/6 upon him and also haven’t yet made him out. But I don’t think you need this caution. Some are very lovely and quite plain; others such a mix of beauty and horror that it takes hours to sort them—for instance the long one on the wreck [The Wreck of the Deutschland]. But how I love—

I have desired to go

Where springs not fail

To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail

And a few lilies blow—

Yes, I should like to have written that myself.

We have recovered from our influenza, though I don’t like influenza; and in the end I thought I had heart disease, but it was only the nerves of the heart; nothing to matter, but incredibly unpleasant as I daresay you know, while it lasted. But thats all right too.

Did you find a house? Did you see the Waterlows? Molly MacCarthy wrote to say that you must come—for quite selfish reasons, of course; to get Emphie to teach Dermot [Molly’s son]. It seems to me that all the virtues and all the humanities can only flourish in a country village. Don’t you think human beings improve very much spaced out with fields between them? And then nature—no, I shall never say how much I adore and respect nature. We crept on to the Downs yesterday and saw the sea over Telscombe, and a Hawk kill a partridge, and a white owl. By the way, there are all sorts of small brightly coloured birds hopping in our hedge and waiting for Janet to turn her eye upon them—which she could do without leaving the drawing room, and to reach the drawing room she need not step up from her bedroom, and the dining room’s adjacent and out of that will be one day the bathroom; and then the garden gate admits to the water meadows, where all nature is to be had in five minutes.

I am reading, not only my husband’s masterpiece, (I think that a masterly and brilliant work) but also a book called the Education of Henry Adams. I find it absorbing so far, but autobiographies always begin well and to my mind never can be dull, so I don’t know if you should at once order it or not. Night and Day continues its chequered career. “The dullest book in the world”, Kitty Maxse. “A great novel—particularly in its psychology”, Sir George Savage: and then this morning I had 2 others equally contradictory; but I don’t know whether I think Kitty Maxse, or Sir George Savage the worse judge of literature (and here are 4 pages from Roger Fry). But of course, I don’t deny that I’m immensely flattered and pleased, and if the post came in without a scratch or a purr I should inflict my malice on Leonard. But he [his book] will be out next week, and then I shall retire. Will there be a little preserve of praise for me in Hampstead—something moderately encouraging for poor denuded Mrs Woolf, when the world’s talking about Mr.? He sends his love.

Yr. V.W.

Sussex

[]

1113: To Roger Fry

6th Jan. 1920

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

My dear Roger,

What a pleasure to think you’re back again [from France]—London no longer altogether dumb. Of course you deserve your jaundice (I hope its better) but I didn’t deserve my influenza. No one has been more faithfully patriotic. It’s been the very devil of a winter, and the worst still to come.

I’m tremendously relieved that you got through my book without disaster. There are some rather swampy places, particularly in the first part, which I had to write for 10 minutes at a time, with only half my brain working. Later I think I got at something interesting—but I want to discuss it with you, if you’ll ask me to come; and I’ve thousands of things that I want your opinion of—You can’t imagine what the critics are like—or rather I suppose you can—but it was a shock to me after all my talk about the English sense of literature to find how little they know or care—what idiotic things they say—the praise if anything worse than the blame.

I was highly flattered to hear that you and Vildrac are translating me. Did you have a copy of the 2nd Edition to do it from? I made some slight changes, I thought for the better. Is it to appear somewhere? I think its a little absurd though that you should spend your time translating me—Won’t you let me look out your old articles in return? Please do. That would be something worth doing.

Of course my heart leaps up, as the poet says, at the thought of Portsmouth. Not that the thought of Portsmouth is long from my mind. O if only one could merge more freely in these miraculous spheres—third class smoking carriages—Brighton Parade—of course that’s not Portsmouth—and so on. But can one get in without bursting the whole thing to pieces? Wouldn’t he suspect me? I managed the other day to set foot in the Rectory here. Old Miss Eve was cutting out calico drawers and said it was all very very sad—her mother’s death at Torquay she meant, and then something about a Princess walking through the drawing room window and the Great Exhibition and the Tottenham Court Road, and Roehampton being so pretty. But this is pale beside Portsmouth. I promise I won’t dish him up raw. He shall be entirely renovated on the outside, tell your sister—only the innards remaining. My dear Roger it must be done—with the Pier and the Porticoes as a background. Why did he choose Weston? and then what about his marriage night—and the evenings—what do they do then? For God’s sake let us spend the spring with Portsmouth!

We come up on Thursday: O if it were only to Weston!

Yr V.W.

Sussex

[]

1114: To Katherine Arnold-Forster

Jan. 25th [1920]

Hogarth House [Richmond]

Dearest Bruin,

We are, as they say, looking forward (on my part not with great confidence) to coming on the 8th—I know we’ve been asked; still I don’t altogether believe in Aldbourne, though Wotten Bassett is now one of the chief features of my life—the yellow room, the pink room, the lawn room. Nessa agreed with me that to give it up when we could all have lived there so happily was a great mistake. She said all you had to do was to give old women porridge and blankets twice a year, and she was prepared to do it herself.

I see you ask us a day earlier, but then Friday is one of the worst of days—Committee breaks into Committee like a melody by Mozart. I am waiting for Leonard to have done digging a flower bed in the back garden. Perhaps I’d better tell you how there’s such a demand for my words that the Voyage Out is being reprinted, and Night and Day is going into a second edition. Now Bruin, you’re a talented censorious beast: would you tell me if there’s anything in Night and Day that I’d better alter—bad sentences—bad grammar—mistakes of names? I wish you would let me know. I see I shall have to re-write them both if I pluck up courage to read them: but I cant possibly read them: I rely on you.

Oh God! such a party at Moll Hamiltons. The cattle market at Lewes was nothing to it for uproar: Moll herself like a frantic cow entangled in a net—plunging and stamping—the poetess [Molly’s sister Margot]—well, when it comes to roaring I’m no match for them: and she followed me down till all I could do was to stand on tiptoe against the wall and shout “I think you’re disgusting”, quite true too; but not at all in my usual vein of suave mendacity.

Yr V.W.

Mark Arnold-Forster

[]

1115: To Saxon Sydney-Turner

Sunday [25th January 1920]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

My dear Saxon,

I wonder if you would once more tell me the number of the Beethoven sonata that Rachel plays in the Voyage Out—I sent the copy I marked to America, and now they’re bringing out a new edition here—I can’t remember what you told me—I say op. 112—It can’t be that. Night and Day is also being reprinted, and I’m putting in your correction of my grammar, and if you have any remarks of any kind to make, they would be gratefully received and promptly attended to—I feel I ought to re-write both from start to finish.

Desmond sent me a letter for you, which I forwarded—I think to implore you to write for him. I hope you will. Indeed, Saxon, I think its your duty to unpack the bonded warehouse of your knowledge. That is Jorrocks [Surtees], though, as Thoby used to say, it might well be Shakespeare.

Well goodbye Saxon—if we meet on t’other side of the grave, I shall be wearing a white rose; so don’t forget. I make assignations with you there, under any tree you like to name, since its out of the question here.

Yr. old spirit
V.W.

Sussex

[]

1116: To R. C. Trevelyan

Jan. 25th [1920]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond

Dear Bob,

You told me the other day of a bad or difficult sentence at the end of Night and Day. There is going to be a new edition; and I should like to correct it if possible. It would be very good of you to send me a line with the page if it’s not too much trouble. I am very grateful for the misprints, and for any other corrections.

I suppose you did not mark any special howlers in the Voyage Out? Gerald Duckworth is reprinting that and wants me to correct it. I remember your saying something should be altered—short of re-writing the whole which I’ve no doubt it wants.

I have got Charlotte Mews book, and I think her very good and interesting and unlike anyone else. I forgot to tell you that I asked twice at the Bomb shop in Charing Cross Road for the Death of Man and was not given it. I must try again, but one can scarcely feel encouraged in the study of modern poetry when this is what always happens. They had the Ajax; and said they would get the other [The Death of Man] in 2 days, and never did. I lost Unwin’s form of course.

Your ever,
Virginia Woolf

Sussex

[]

1117: To R. C. Trevelyan

Friday [30 January 1920]

Hogarth House, Richmond

Dear Bob,

Thank you very much for the correction in N & D. I think you are quite right and I will alter it. I am altering op. 112, to 111 [Beethoven]. The goats certainly are mysterious.—I fancy something must have dropped out; but I dont see what to do with them now—

Leonard happened yesterday to be passing Unwin’s shop, and went in and bought The Death of Man: which I shall now be able to read. It looks very well printed and bound.

I hope you will take to prose—but prose doesn’t, I suppose mean the death of poetry; in which case I shouldn’t begin my sentence I hope, since I like very much ‘Wind’ the only poem I have yet read in the death of Man. Also, if you can keep Desmond supplied you may keep his spirits up. He is already a little burdened, I think, Jack Squire having now left the whole thing to him.

Please remember me to Mrs Trevelyan, whom I dare not call by her Christian name.

Yours
Virginia Woolf

Sussex

[]

1118: To Janet Case

Sunday [1 February 1920]

Hogarth House, Richmond

My dear Janet,

Winchelsea—Cottage Residence. Immediate possession. 2 rec. 4-5 bath, Lav. (h. and c.) etc. etc. £850 freehold.

Reeve and Finn,
Estate Agents,
Rye, Sussex.

The farm I told Lilian about is in our village—Rodmell. You had better, perhaps, write to the owner, Mr Botten, Rodmell Place, Rodmell, Lewes, mentioning us. I was told last summer that he wanted to let half the house, which is said to be easily divided and very up to date; and looks from the outside substantial, old fashioned, with large windows, some view, not much of a garden, a dwelling place, not a farm. Mrs Botten is an invalid—and would want to be downstairs—thats all I remember.

(My quotation is from the Observer today)

God knows when I can come and see you—I feel as if I could never make another engagement as long as I live—what with Ottoline and Eily Darwin and the dressmaker, and staying away, and coming back and going away again, and printing a poem [Paris] and re-writing the Voyage Out—(did I make it plain to you and Margaret who say I’m no novelist, and only write for the parish of Bloomsbury that such is the demand among the lower middle classes for my work that new editions of the V.O. and N. and D. have to be prepared at once?) Still, perhaps, Saturday 14th?

I think you had better make it clear to Mr Botten that you have only heard from us a rumour that he may wish to let—since it came to us indirectly.

Yr V.W.

Sussex

[]

1119: To Janet Case

[8 February 1920]

Aldbourne, Wilts.

My dear Janet,

I find we are having people to dine on Saturday—(I think it was Saturday you asked me to tea) so Leonard says—but you know what Leonard says. Might I come another day the following week?

I can’t write this letter, owing to the abomination of Ka’s pen—which distorts, not merely the letters, but the language—Here we are spending the weekend [with the Arnold-Forsters]—and you can’t think what a letter I would write you if it weren’t for the pen. Wherever I see a house I ask if its to let to the most charming lady I know. Have you heard from Mr Botten?

But oh this pen!

Yr V.W.

Sussex

[]

1120: To Duncan Grant

Wednesday [11 February 1920]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

My dear Duncan,

I know I oughtn’t to accept—at the same time I can’t resist it. Nothing in the world would give me greater joy than a water colour of yours—though I shan’t tell you why, or what I think of your pictures. But I think anyhow you’re sublimely generous. I chose what seemed to me a lovely one, and I had 5 most exciting minutes, when I thought an old fur bearing dowager was after it—and I didn’t know how to buy a picture, never having bought one—and this old woman looked as if she bought them every day of her life. So I dashed up to Mr Clifton and he produced a little red seal out of his waistcoat pocket. But as I say I won’t tell you what I think of your pictures. This is the more vexatious, as I should immensely like to describe them—Its the sort of thing I do rather well—I should begin with the naked Venus and go all the way round, keeping my crescendo for the right place, descending thence in curves and spirals like an alighting swan—But I won’t do it—dont be nervous—my masterpiece shall give way to yours—and when I’ve got 2 of your pictures hanging on the wall, I daresay I shall have the right to indulge in soliloquies. But my dear Duncan—I do feel its wrong to take anything of the kind, only as I say I cant resist it.

What a charmer your mother is! And the noble Colonel Young—I was introduced, and given another 5 minutes I should have been invited to Wilmington, which is the goal of my desire. To see them in the flesh was at once strange and rhapsodic—suppose one saw Miss Elwes and the white dogs—but this might be too much.

Ottoline yesterday was in fine feather about your show. The poor old thing undulated and eulogised till really it was like talking to some poorfowl in delirium—her neck became longer and longer and you know how she always hangs to ‘wonderful’ as if it were a rope dangling in her vacuum—but as Nessa says, this is nonsense—. Poor Tony Birrell was there, said to be underdeveloped, but to me most sympathetic and in fact I wish we’d married. He sat on a low stool eating sugar cakes and laughing—God knows about what—but I saw nothing lamentable in his state. However, we shall meet. This is an endeavour to thank you without allowing myself to describe your pictures.

V.W.

Duncan Grant

[]

1121: To Lady Robert Cecil

[19 February 1920]

Hogarth House, Richmond

My dear Nelly,

Of course it now turns out that we shall be away next Sunday—and the Sunday after—(you see I still hope that you may ask us again)

I regretted every minute of my lunch with the Webbs, which was of the most drastic description, and left one in a state where human life seemed scarcely worth while. Never, never, never do I go there again. I can’t think how two small old people like that manage to destroy everything one likes and believes in. She attacked me for not sending Leonard into Parliament, which according to her wants redeeming so badly that she is sacrificing Sidney for that purpose.

But this [1917] Club’s pens are as bad as the Webbs—scratchy—hard, and as sharp as a pin.

Please ask us again (but I have said this already)

Yrs. V.W.

We are going down to Sussex to plant flowers.

Hatfield

[]

1122: To Lytton Strachey

21st Feb. Saturday [1920]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

As you see, we are already here. The difficulty about coming next Saturday, which is I admit the most attractive prospect that life has to offer, is that we have to attend two auctions, buy 2 army huts, get them carted over here, put into position and transformed into a kitchen if possible by Saturday—As the huts are connected with Colonel Young who is connected with Mrs Grant, who is connected with Duncan whose new studio depends on them, you will see how complicated it is, and how unlikely to end well. Also Leonard is entirely re-making the garden.

But couldn’t we induce Tidmarsh to come to Rodmell? Please convey a warm invitation on our part to Mr Partridge; press Carrington’s hand—stroke your own beard. Beds abound; our cook turns out excellent—and they say there’s a peculiar virtue in spending the 40th birthday between strange sheets: that is if you want to beget sons, and keep your hair. An uncle of mine—but I’ll tell you his story if you’ll come. If you won’t surely we might meet somehow? Leonard suggests that you should stay on and deal with Vic[toria]. here: he very much wishes to see Mr Partridge.

Yr. V.W.

Frances Hooper

[]

1123: To Lady Robert Cecil

[late February 1920]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

My dear Nelly,

May we lunch with you on Sunday the 14th? Unless you stop us, we will come then with great pleasure, at 1.30 I suppose—and what joy it will be to turn t’other way and leave no 41 to scowl upon the river unaffeared!

Please forgive this old sheet, which I have retrieved from a kind of avalanche, the fact being that I’m in the midst of painting my dining room pomegranate colour, and have speckled everything within reach, red and yellow.

Yr affate
V.W.

Hatfield

[]

1124: To Vanessa Bell

Monday [March 1920]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dearest,

Infinitely though I should like to have your picture, I feel compunctions at taking it. Its too much—you must lend it to me and have it back for a show. I think it’s one of the loveliest and I had meant to buy it, but I thought you would certainly tear up the cheque. So let this be arranged—I’ve a passion at this moment for owning pictures, especially yours.

What a mercy Sophie is with you!

Please give her my love, and say that I am greatly relieved to think she is once more in control of the family. I feel much more respectable myself.

Yr B.

Berg

[]

1125: To Violet Dickinson

[29 March 1920]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

My Violet

Here we are for Easter, so that I’m afraid luncheon on Tuesday is impossible—but mightn’t I came later—to tea? when we come back.

Nessa is in Italy, having got old Sophie back, who manages children, lessons, flat, food, everything. She has been with Lady Victoria Herbert, but doesn’t find the great to her liking, I think.

I have never had the courage to get myself photographed—you know you said I’d better conceal my face and pose as the virgin of 20—but Margaret Duck worth has just sent me about 50 old copies of the picture of father and me—would you like one? However, if you know of a photographer I must face him, I suppose.

Now, let me come in to tea one day,—and tell me how Emily Eden goes on.

Your V.W.

Berg

[]

1126: To Vanessa Bell

Good Friday [2 April 1920]

Monk’s House [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest,

I was very glad to get your post card [from Italy], though some passages were obliterated, I suppose by the channel spray.

Here we are with the bells ringing for church—daffodils out—apple trees in blossom—cows mooing—cocks crowing—thrushes chirping—this is to move your compassion. I suppose you’re sitting in a Roman street sucking iced soda through a straw while Duncan, having made friends with the waiter—and there are goats, and large spotted dogs—and nice brown and yellow pots—donkeys—mules—beautiful girls for me—and etc—I wont describe it all, as I daresay you can see it for yourself. Still I do shoot forth a pang of odious envy. England is a little soft and sappy after all. I haven’t much news, as we’ve been here for a week, and our only prospect is a visit from the Sturgeon family tomorrow and the possible advent of Saxon, Nick, and Barbara.

{I went in and saw the yellow bird [Clive] in bed with some complaint (nothing much) before I away, and as I deposited my humble oranges in plain paper, who should trip from her taxi, but the blue one [Mary H.], with plovers’ eggs and orchids of course, all dressed in yellow with purple spots and as daring and devilish as I was muffled and discreet. Still I faced her out and from my moral heights crushed her,-I hope-I doubt it though. Still its better to be doudy on one’s own ground than a failure on hers-and as a matter of fact I was half a street away and may have invented the whole thing. Still, you can imagine-Oh and the yellow bird so prosperous and perky upstairs-strewn with compliments.}

Then I went and had tea with the children; it’s an illusion to think they wanted me—nothing of the kind. Julian was lying on his elbow reading a book, and Quentin carving a bit of firewood—the table strewn with sweets. I could hardly tear them off to tea. Then we played cards, and Angelica came in, and sat on the table as good as gold and pulled Julian’s hair, and said ‘pretty’ and ‘tick-tock’ and was altogether lovely and adorable. They all looked flourishing, and as I say had need of on one, though we chattered away and Quentin said something extraordinarily witty and profound, in my style, but I’ve forgotten what. They had a great story of throwing parcels out of the window, and how the policeman had been in to tell them not to, and they had dropped a letter—a very rude letter—to Quentin’s mistress into the Square and seen it picked up and delivered and she had been very cross to him that morning—though they had got a friend to write it for them. Sophie was in complete charge of every thing, and seemed to make herself responsible not only for the children but for the lift and the carpet and Henry and Charleston and life death immortality in her usual way. I don’t think you need feel any compunction in staying away. I’m asking Clive whether I shan’t put Charleston in the hands of Wycherley [Lewes estate agent]—so far I’ve had no news from Hampton [London agent], and I think W. would be far more likely to produce a tenant.

We had a great splash of people before coming away—dear old Roger and Murry—and a very rich composition of Mrs Clifford, Sydney W[aterlow]. and Goldie—who came in by chance. Mere brilliancy is not in it with richness, ripeness and a touch of rottenness. I assure you you must have an element of decaying South Kensington in your parties—which by the way—light up the horizon for me.

Isn’t it exciting to start a new epoch as you’re doing?—not A. D. I wouldn’t say that, oh on—but an entirely new Pagan Era, with dear old Dolphin in her many coloured multiplicity presiding and ladling out scents and spices from the steaming obscenity—what a sentence! but I’ve been reading Henry James’ letters till my brain rings and swings—do pictures affect you like that? He stayed in your hotel, by the way, and no doubt wore out some rich leather seat with his rotundity. This, however, you skip; and want to know about Mrs Clifford—who was, indeed, all that you’ve ever imagined her to be—wattled all down her neck like some oriental Turkey, and with a mouth opening like an old leather beg, or the private parts of a large cow. Her stories were magnificent—about Ruddy Kiplings wedding—and how [William] Heinemann came too late with a bouquet—and picture Sundays—and how Professor Sylvester suddenly sank on his knees on the black hearth rug and recited his sonnets to her, with Ethel [her daughter] at her breast—and then “yes, a great many young men have come to me in their troubles, for a lone woman who has once been married and considers herself married still, is a great help to young men—and they all know that Lucy Clifford never gives away a secret and never thinks harm of a friend”—upon which we all fell silent and almost sobbed—This was to explain why she wouldn’t write her memoirs. Moreover, she moves about all in black, lurching like a beetle thats lost a front leg, so I suppose I shall have to review her novel [Miss Fingal] after all—her courage and fertility move my heart to tears. Mrs Ward is dead; less notice has been taken of it than you would think. She was escorted by constables to the grave, and old Lucy Clifford was there, too, of course.

It’s too tempting, if you can get me objects to be sent with yours—A small table is what I most want—crockery of any kind—plates—bowls—cups—only I mustn’t spend since we’re plunging wildly—still I cant resist any small thing sanctified by your taste.

The post said they could insure your coat, but couldn’t warrant its reaching you for some time. Nelly hadn’t done it. I’ll let you know if she sends it.

I must now bicycle in to Lewes.

Love to Duncan and Maynard.

Yr B.

We go back on Wednesday.

Please write.

Berg. {Excluded passage restored from Virginia Woolf Miscellany. Number 8. Summer 1977.}

[]

1127: To Vanessa Bell

Sunday, April 11th [1920]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dearest,

Our letters seem to take a long time—my letters—your postcards. Still, I’m very grateful for postcards, though its tantalising to hear only the names of Susan [Lushington] and Mrs Holman Hunt and Packard—I thought Packard was dead too, which makes it the more exciting to hear that she’s in Rome. I daresay you’ll meet Miss Bulley next,—and Jack Nicholls. It’s a little obscene—this scratching up of bones by you and Duncan. G. T. Worsley is dead; 10 minutes before seeing it in the Times I’d been thinking of him. How d’you account for that?

{You’ll be glad to hear that the amorous Parrokeoos are flourishing. They suddenly proposed a visit at Monk’s House - and came to dinner here instead. Why, when they’re together, do they produce such an atmosphere of the Brighton pier? Something brazen and yet sterile; nothing but double asters and lodging house windows and pierrons flourish in it; all my sensibilities have salt dropped on them. I think I feel this more and more, and if you did your duty as a wife, you’d provide another mistress. I think Clive ought to have a change. I’ve nothing against them separately- indeed I thought Mary humane and even pathetic, like a small kitten- But turn this over in your mind.}

We only came back on Wednesday, so that I’ve not much news. James [Strachey] is setting up a theatre. He’s going to start with Rosmersholm [Ibsen], and has offered Leonard a part—which I think he ought to take, and thus change his life, since he’s bent on changing his life. It—the new theatre—is quite a serious affair—its to be the most perfect of all theatres,—and already all the actors are engaged. Meanwhile Alix is setting up a photographic studio, the point of which is that a million candles flash in your face, and thus absolute truth is obtained—no sentimental evasions—what they call facing facts. She told me that she is now very happy. Fredegond, on the other hand, is not happy; at least I expect she is really, but you know what it is to have remorse on the death of a parent. She had a reconciliation with Florence however, shortly before, and is now going through the family papers—masses of letters from Granny [Maria Jackson] to Aubrey de Vere. By the way, I had a letter from Margaret Duckworth the other day, who has also been going through family papers and found about 50 Beresford photographs of father, which she sends me, and says I’m to share them with you, and George [Duckworth] is fearfully busy, and the spring has been so wonderful this year, and she hopes we are all well—So I said you were in Rome with Duncan. Nelly has finished your coat, but has not sent it, and will keep it for you. It is the pride of her life; a very fine foxlike work, picked out with some old buttons of mine. Oh I must tell you how much I admire your picture—I think it one of your finest—such a solid, entirely impersonal, and—I see my command over artistic language is still too poor to let me launch out. What I mean is “starry”; do you understand? Do buy me grey gloves; but I know buying is much harder than it sounds, so don’t think that you must bring me back something—but if you saw a small bright piece of china, cheap but vivid, that’s what I want for Monk’s House. I daresay they do the heads of celebrities in earthenware. I have a sort of feeling that poor Moll MacCarthy is very unhappy; Desmond has asked me to act as dramatic critic, and I’m going to a play tonight for the first time for 15 years; but I don’t suppose Moll is in the least unhappy, only, poor woman, with her ears cut off, more like a squirrel in the dark than ever. Talking of squirrels, we were kept awake till 4 this morning by mice in our bedroom. At last Leonard started to make his bed, and a mouse sprang out from his blankets, whereupon he had a wet dream—you can’t think what his sheets are like this morning. And what can Lotty think of it? You, who know so much about the minds of the lower classes, can perhaps say. When are the children coming back? Its no good pretending that they want to see me: its awful to find that I’m beginning to want to see them, and to want them to want to see me. Thats how it begins, and we all know how it ends. Still, Angelica—then theres Quentin—and I find Julian very interesting—so like a brother with Angelica. “Now I’ll get you a chair, and then you cant drop your silver paper on the floor” so then she pulled his hair, which didn’t prevent him from going on reading; much like the day nursery at H.P.G. [Hyde Park Gate].

Why doesn’t the dissipated old Owl—I shall never forget the sight of him hitching his trousers in the long black overcoat—Duncan, I mean, write to me?

Which Henry James did you read?

Give Duncan my love; in fact kiss him, and then write to your adorable singe,

B.

Berg. {Excluded passage restored from Virginia Woolf Miscellany. Number 8. Summer 1977.}

[]

1128: To Vanessa Bell

April 15th [1920]

Hogarth House [Richmond]

Dearest,

You are well advised not to be in this dreary country. It rains and blows and the sky is black as dirty water. Then our only Duchess is dead—do you see that in the paper? Cousin Adeline, I mean; and never again shall we have a cousin in the dukeries. It will be a great blow to George [Duckworth]. I like to think of his appearance at the funeral, which is at Chenies.

There is a good deal doing in the art world. A show of Negro carvings at the book club—the X group—pictures in Shaftesbury Avenue, and the entire works of Bach played; Beethoven next week. I went to see the carvings and I found them dismal and impressive, but Heaven knows what real feeling I have about anything after hearing Roger discourse. I dimly see that something in their style might be written, and also that if I had one on the mantelpiece I should be a different sort of character—less adorable, as far as I can make out, but somebody you wouldn’t forget in a hurry. But then an unknown young man wrung me by the hand—Hannay he said he was—and Desmond came in with a highly respectable male aristocrat, of whom I could see he was slightly ashamed.—as I should be ashamed if you passed me by when I was walking with Elena Richmond. How much simpler life is for painters! How can I possibly afford not to know South Kensington? You cant think how much this problem puzzles me—the humanity of South Kensington, I mean. You see, to go to the grave with that problem unsolved would be a bitter failure in my eyes. If you see me kick and stir in my death bed, that’ll be it.

Adrian and Karin have sent out cards for a large evening party on the 28th, I think; so you wont be back; and I daresay its a kind of assertion of independence on their part. I shall try to go, but not in the same spirit that I bound up your flight,—still always expecting a romance at the top; whereas, in the case of the Stephen’s, I feel that I’m the romance. Its really very dismal now that you’re away. I didn’t think I should miss you so much. There’s no conversation to [be] had in my style, and I have to have my tea at the 17 Club, and altogether there’s something about Dolphin [Vanessa] and her ménage that can’t be matched. For sheer ridiculous comedy partly, of course, for you’re not altogether in the high classic style—and poor old Duncan, well—there’s a good deal to be said about him. The Athenaeum has ceased to talk about Wyndham Lewis. On the other hand, they’ve adopted Katherine [Mansfield] as their writer of genius, which means, I’m afraid, that poor Mrs Woolf—but we writers are never jealous. Thank Heaven, I say to myself that genius has arisen, though not in my particular headpiece. Whereas, what you painters say is,—but I’d much rather hear about Susan Lushington. Do tell me, not on a postcard, the whole history of your liaison, and what your future relations are to be; and whether she had to swallow scruples to have tea with you; I’m sure she got over them in fine style; what I remember chiefly about her is that she had to move on after 5 minutes because her head piece gave out; then she took to giving high shrieks. Is this still true?

We came in to find Nick [Bagenal] and a young Mr Wright, son of a Dorsetshire clergyman, here the other day. Nick is a fearful surly brute now; like a rheumatic labourer; I can’t conceive any fate I should like less than to be his wife.

By the way, shaking my dirty clothes basket the other morning, a dead mouse dropped out—starved to death. Nelly believes that I brought him home from Monk’s House in my petticoats. Lottie says if she had shaken him out of her petticoats she would have died. This is about all the news there is.

We are sending out Logan’s book, Hopes poem, and printing Morgan’s story, so we’re rather busy, plenty of time though to read letters from Rome.

Yr B.

Berg

[]

1129: To Vanessa Bell

May 1st [1920]

Monk’s House [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest,

Need I say that your letter has entirely changed the face of nature to me? The cock has thrown itself upon the hen, and the bee burst the blossom. We are here for the week end, expecting Desmond, whom we’ve tried to put off, so I suppose he is certain to come. You will be glad to hear that London has been very dismal the whole of April; wet, black, sodden, sinful; Walter Lamb my only adventure, and Clive will tell you all about him. Poor Prince Albert is backward—that is all he had to tell me, save a little gossip about one of the Gerrards, who has married a farmer, and Walter has taken rooms for them at Hounslow—no, that was Miss Saxton Noble, I think.

We dined with Clive the other night; old Lytton was there, and his eyes have turned blue and his beard red and virile; I heard him whispering secrets to Mary, and I think something happened on the Spanish passes though what I don’t guess. If I felt sure that you wouldn’t breathe a word of it to Clive and Mary I’d tell you about Gertler, and his revelations. You remember the little affair 2 years ago, when my character was blackened? Gertler has another another [sic] version which throws all the blackness elsewhere; but I can say no more; and I don’t think I can face a meeting with Gertler which would be necessary to get it all straight. He wishes to clear himself.

Do you want a man and wife at Charleston? A couple here want a place as house keeper and gardener; the man an old sailor; woman seemed respectable; and they only want enough pay to live on.

I’ve heard nothing from Hampton. Ka has had a son [Mark Arnold-Forster]; the doctor couldn’t be got; and she was very bad, but is now better—but this interests you not at all; and yet the mere mention of Susan [Lushington] suffuses me with crimson. The lily of valley from her bosom was a superb touch; but what colour is she? Does it turn a blackish purple, that particular red in age? and her hair? and does she still wear green sequins at night? There was a dreadful party at Adrian’s the other night—entirely composed of different versions of Mrs [Bernard] Berenson and Aunt Lou, in full evening dress, hale and buxom and breezy, but not really answering to those names. Heaven knows who they were; and then Hope [Mirrlees] came in, but the affectations of that young woman! Why, I’ve written novels, I’ve been a beauty, I know Greek, and yet—I thought the difference very marked. She improved later, I’m told. Karin, as I see, has made up her mind to show her spots—if thats the expression—I mean not to go in for art; so there was no nonsense, and Adrian in evening dress, but it is such much better like that; and I am going to tea with her to see the children, and one of these days you will be surprised to find how much nicer Karin is than any one else.

I must now go and paint the house bright yellow. As you’ll never come here, I can give my taste full rein. The curtains at Hogarth are an immense success, and convey the illusion that we are grasshoppers sitting on a vine leaf, which was what I wanted. If neuritis has to do with the nerves, Florence will be fatal to it; at least the climate always drives me to thoughts of suicide; but I hope Paris may be good for it—and I don’t know what it is except that my dentist suffers from it owing to using his arm—But please come home anyhow, and kiss me all over.

What a master of the post card Duncan is!—his style, I mean: I mean himself. Kiss him where the—but I must stop.

Yr B.

Berg

[]

1130: To Lady Robert Cecil

[June 1920]

[Both parts in Virginia’s handwriting]

Hogarth House, Richmond

Your Ladyship:—

The Manager of the Hogarth Press presents his compliments to your Ladyship and humbly thanks you for the favour of yours received and solicits further patronage, which he has the honour to inform you he is shortly bringing out works by E. M. Forster and The Table Talk of Tolstoy containing much likely to interest your ladyship whose literary moral and social interests it will ever be his privilege to serve, to the best of his ability, and taking the liberty of remaining your ladyship’s obliged, obedient, humble servant.

H.P. [Hogarth Press]
per V.W.

Dear Nelly,

You see this is what the wretch writes when I am not there to look after him. To tell you a secret, we don’t altogether think Stories from the O.T. up to the very very highest standards of prose composition—but then, What is one to do? Three poets, one female, which made it worse, have been rejected; its all very well talking of young writers of genius, but my belief is they died out about a year after I was born, and modesty forbids me to draw the inference from that.

When you come to see the Royal Horse Show at Richmond, please come in to tea with us.

Yrs V.W.

Hatfield

[]

1131: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

[June 1920]

Hogarth House, Richmond

Dearest Ottoline,

I am ashamed not to have written before, but I spend most of my time addressing envelopes, and get to hate holding a pen.

I suppose you won’t be coming to London? The difficulty about getting to Garsington is that we spend every week end Leonard can get away at Monk’s House, where we are having to alter the house. Unless we go there, nothing is done. But it was very nice last year when you dined here—Might it not happen again? Or perhaps we might come later? The workmen should be done early in July—they wont, I suppose.

I didn’t see much of you when I came to tea with you, but I remember Tony Birrell with great pleasure. Our society would be much improved by a few half-wits.—Whereas, we all grow cleverer and cleverer. Richmond alone seems to me to keep its purity. Have you discovered anyone new? I still have illusions that people are extremely nice and interesting—but now that Mr Asquith is at 44 Bedford Square, I don’t suppose one will ever meet them.

Your affate
Virginia Woolf

We are bringing out a story by Forster, and a very good thing of Gorkis about Tolstoy, so I hope you will get something worth having next time. Thank you for subscribing.

Texas

[]

1132: To Vanessa Bell

[24 June 1920]

Monk’s House, Rodmell [Sussex]

Dearest,

I rang up to ask whether the servants may apply to you in case of emergency while we’re away. We had to go before the dr. had been to say whether Nelly may travel today. I think its possible he wont let her, in which case it’s conceivably possible that there might be one of the usual panics, which would be calmed if they heard your voice.

But Nelly is practically all right, and has had no panics for 2 days. She seems to be having exactly what we had at Christmas—nothing wrong except a slight temperature. The panel doctor is fearfully strict however, and will neither let her eat nor get up.

I never asked you after your arm the other night—not lack of affection, but scatterness of brain: How is it?

Madge is reviewed in the Times, by John Bailey I think, all lies, very polite, and as dull as ditchwater; poor Richmond rang me up to say that he understood why I would not review it—‘she takes offence very easily I know.’

We’ve been having strawberries for tea, and there’ll be raspberries for dinner—don’t this tempt you down! Besides, I’m asking Saxon over.

I hope Julian’s all right. Tell him he must be well for the Sticklebacks next week.

Yr B

Perhaps I’ll come in to tea on Monday on my way home.

Berg

[]

1133: To Violet Dickinson

[13? July 1920]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

My Violet,

I ought weeks ago to have thanked you for your handsome and encouraging cheque, but I seem to spend my life in addressing envelopes. The Hogarth Press is growing like a beanstalk, and we think we must set up a shop and keep a clerk. The Tolstoy, in spite of being the publisher, seems to me splendid; and we’ve just sold it to America, which of course tempts us to set forth on fresh enterprises. Why has Miss Laura Forster attacked you? I have never seen her, but at one time she took to writing me letters—twenty pages about her relations. She’s an aunt, I think of E. M. Forsters. Are you going to Edit her remains?

Leonard is standing for Parliament with the sole object of annoying Herbert Fisher. Thank goodness, he’s got no chance of getting in.

We’re going down to Rodmell at the end of the month, and there we shall dig and weed until October. Should you be going to Dieppe or spending a week end in a hotel at Brighton, we trust you will look in on us.

Leonard sends his love.

Yr Sp

I was much interested to meet Bowyer Nicols [Nichols] again. He seemed exactly the same.

Berg

[]

1134: To Margaret Llewelyn Davies

[mid-July 1920]

[Hogarth House, Richmond]

Dearest Margaret,

I have read Mrs Layton with the greatest interest. I don’t know how far I’m always biassed in favour of autobiographies, but I enjoyed it all. My only criticism would be that sometimes she writes too like a book. When she is natural she is very good. Now and then she drags in something rather shop-made. I’m keeping it, as Leonard wants to read it, but I’ll send it back next week. You must make her go on, and go into every sort of detail, and try to make her say everything, but of course thats the difficulty. I feel she hushes things up a little. The description of the women sitting in front of the big house is so good—in fact I keep thinking of different scenes.

We have settled to go off to Rodmell next Thursday. Leonard is really tired out with all his work on our books added to the rest of the usual grind, and must get a holiday before he starts the Nation—which I must say I grudge his doing—but Massingham is so pressing that he feels he must.

Are you off? Write and tell us what happens, at the Baths.

Your V.W.

What a disgraceful review of the Child of the Alps [by Madge Vaughan]—unless I’m quite wrong, and read it in the light of her letters. Have you got it?

Sussex

[]

1135: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

18th July [1920]

Hogarth House, Richmond

My Dear Ottoline

It is very good of you to ask us again, and we wish we could come—but if you could see us! Orders are pouring in for Gorky, and there are 200 copies of Morgans story to be stitched, bound and covered. We must get through it all before we go away on the 28th, and there is only next week end—I’m afraid we must spend next Sunday as we are spending this—hot and cross,—almost hoping that there won’t be any more orders tomorrow.

It does seem wretched not to have seen you this summer, and I hear from Lytton that the statues are divinely beautiful. I wonder how you manage to find them. Still, I would rather see you than the statues.

I must now get my scissors and paste and start again upon the Siren [by E. M. Forster]. Did you like her? I can’t judge any of our productions when I’ve done with them; in fact they cease to be literature in an early stage of the process.

Shan’t you ever come up again?

Your affate
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

1136: To Vivienne Eliot

July 20th [1920]

Hogarth House, Richmond

Dear Mrs Eliot,

I am very sorry that you can’t come, and so is my sister. She hopes to meet you in the autumn.

Unfortunately we are going to the country on Thursday, or we should have liked very much to dine with you.

I hope Mr Eliot’s book will have poems in it. I have been wanting to say how much I enjoy his poems—but I never know whether it is better to say so or not.

Yours sincerely,
Virginia Woolf

Houghton Library, Harvard University

[]

1137: To David Garnett

[21 July 1920]

[Hogarth House, Richmond]

Would you send Tchekov’s plays to me at Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes, as we go there tomorrow.

Would you send also a good, cheap, Greek grammar, containing the verbs fully—The sort of thing they have in the lower forms of public schools. I should be very grateful if you could find one. L[eonard]. thinks Rutherford’s grammar, Macmillan, is, or was, the best.

V. Woolf.

Berg

[]

1138: To T. S. Eliot

28th July [1920]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

Dear Mr Eliot,

I have to confess that it was not I who reviewed your poems in the Athenaeum, but my husband. (I don’t think I told Murry this). We felt awkward at reviewing our own publications, and agreed to share the guilt: he reviewed you, and I reviewed Murry. He wants me to say that he would very much like to do your new book [The Sacred Wood], and will ask Murry for it, if you wish it.

I very much look forward to reading it, though with some trepidation, as if my lot as a reviewer would be certainly the heavier afterwards. (I mean this in a highly complimentary sense, but have not time to explain) I read Prufrock the other day again, with great pleasure.

We would like to ask you and Mrs Eliot down here for a week end. The only thing is that the discomfort is so great and arrangements so primitive that I dont think she would find it possible.

Yours sincerely,
Virginia Woolf

[in Leonard’s handwriting]

P. S. and N. B.

I never do review literature or literary criticism except on the rarest occasions as with your Poems. I doubt whether I’m the proper person to do your new book.

Houghton Library, Harvard University

[]

1139: To Roger Fry

Sunday [1 August 1920]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

My dear Roger,

I am cursing myself for having missed seeing you twice. Is there any chance that you’ll come down here?—not just now, because we are cooked for by a cottage woman, but later Nelly will be here and we could manage, if you explained what you want. Our orchard is the very place to sit and talk for hours in—though we haven’t anything like Asheham to show you.

I enjoyed the party [Vanessa’s] very much, chiefly because parties always—well, not always, but sometimes have the effect of making one do what one would in no other circumstances do—for instance, catch Mary Hutch by the neck, and embrace her passionately, with Clive there to explain how it was he fell in love with her. Only its so soon over.

I’m coming up tomorrow to say goodbye to Katherine Murry. She goes away for 2 years. Have you at all come round to her stories? I suppose I’m too jealous to wish you to, yet I’m sure they have merit all the same. It’s awful to be afflicted with jealousy. I think the only thing is to confess it. And its really irrational for there’s room for everyone, unlike love. (This is not clearly expressed.)

I’m just starting Goa le Simple, on your advice—But of course if I don’t like it, I shall stick it out that you know nothing about Literature. If that were true, however, I shouldn’t follow your advice—When’s your book coming out?—I don’t see any chance of being allowed to review it. Leonard says that the Nouvelle Revue [Française] would know all about the Mallarmé copyrights. We should certainly have to get permission before printing 40 of them—But probably it would be much better worth while than anything else we’ve done. Did you like Morgan’s story.

But whats the use of beginning a conversation in a letter, with Lottie in and out all the time too, in a transparent white petticoat up to her knees, and a head like a dahlia in disarray.

Do get perfectly well, and ask me to come again, or better still, come down here.

Yours ever
V.W.

Sussex

[]

1140: To T. S. Eliot

Sunday [8 August 1920]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

We shall be so glad if you and Mrs Eliot will come one weekend in September. Will you suggest one, and I will see whether it does for us.

Leonard says he will review your book, if you will ask Murry to send it to him.

Yours sincerely,
Virginia Woolf

Houghton Library, Harvard University

[]

1141: To Roger Fry

Friday August 13th [1920]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

My Dear Roger,

I think the translations are extremely interesting—also very difficult. The difficulty may be partly that I’ve left my Mallarmé in London, and thus can’t compare them with the French. But I’ve no doubt at all that they’re very good, and give one the same strange feeling as he does. We are inclined to think notes essential, and also that a few pages by you on Mallarmé would make all the difference, and be of the greatest interest.

We are in rather a turmoil about the press—The bookshop idea seems to be too difficult, and we now think of setting up a proper printing plant and doing all the production ourselves—that is with a manager. Of course this may fall through, in which case there will be nothing for it but to bring the Press to an end, as we can’t go on with it as we’ve been doing. Therefore, as you see, we can make no arrangements for doing anything for certain, and you must of course, be free to make any use of the translations you like, without considering us. But if we can bring off our scheme, we should very much like to have them—We shall decide anyhow this winter.

At last—a hot day—What does moss on a roof prove? I see it has some mystic meaning—I have such a prejudice against the Welsh that I’ve never read Caradoc Evans. Must I? I suppose so. I think you’re probably right about Goha [le Simple]; anyhow its a very remarkable book; though I trace in it also all those vices and limitations which are inherent in French literature. What a pinch of snuff it is compared with the Mayor of Casterbridge [Hardy]! very pungent, I grant you but—there! and Nessa says every woman falls in with your views! of course my perversity may be a tribute, wrong way round, to your dominion. I’m reading a lot of French in a highly critical spirit, and wish, as usual, that conversation could continue incessantly towards every point of the compass. So you might write another letter, as a makeshift. Eliot is coming here, a little to our alarm, and wants us to publish something of his, so what with you, Clive, and him we should start well.

Yours ever,
V.W.

[]

1142: To Vanessa Bell

Sunday [15 August 1920]

Monk’s House [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest

I went to see Mrs Hawkins, and find that she drove over to Charleston the other day, and thought the loneliness of the house would cause her to think too much of her dead son, so she has decided to take a place in Surrey. Her teeth are horrible, and from the way in which she spoke about the air raids, and memory coming over her if she sat alone, I’m sure she would soon become frantic. However, she told me that you would easily get a married couple to suit if you wrote to the address I enclose. They are supplying the man who has fits with a couple to take the Hawkins’ place. He will certainly have a fit tomorrow, she said, when the news is broken to him. The scene in the garden was indescribable, as he hurried out to talk to us—upon which 2 bees got into my hair, and with great presence of mind, I put a finger into each ear while Leonard searched my head. Neither of us could therefore answer him—but his conversation continued. The bees swarmed round us—Mrs Hawkins told the story of her sons death and cried a little—and as I say Mr Fears was evidently on the verge of an attack.

But I dont see why you shouldn’t come over all the same: Nelly Cecil, for some extraordinary reason, proposes to come to lunch on Tuesday—Won’t you come too? I wish you would.

I greatly enjoyed my visit. I left my nightgown and my spectacles behind, but Lottie will bring them.

Nelly Boxall seems to think she’s coming on Thursday, so if anyone will come for a night we can house them with ease.

Yr B.

Berg

[]

1143: To Vanessa Bell

Tuesday [24 August 1920]

Monk’s [House, Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest,

Do let us meet in Lewes—I also have to go there—Thursday or Friday—Only, if it’s to be Thursday you must send a card at once. I wish you’d come back and spend the night; but it’s no good asking. Our Zinnia’s are at their best.......

I had one more farewell visit to Katherine [Mansfield] yesterday, as she got ill, and had to put off coming here. Another magazine is being started by Michael Sadler, with pictures; you ought to contributes; I’ve not been asked to; Katherine has. But there’s still hope, as it doesn’t begin till January. Of course I’m going to review her book. Otherwise I didn’t get much gossip.

I hear from Molly [MacCarthy] that Michael [her son] lives with a family on the Loire to learn French, which sounds rather a good idea. Leonard is writing to [H. G.] Wells about the school at Hunstanton—which is in existence, though the master may be dead. We had Nelly Cecil here from 12 to 5, and had to talk incessantly through the ear trumpet, except for one break when I shut her up in a bed room alone with a large po and forgot that the [door] handle only turns from outside—so there she was battering in vain. But she did her duty, which was the important thing. She is losing her faith. As I think its the only thing that keeps her from despair I did my best to revive it—without much success.

Incredible they are—the elderly aristocracy—the shabbiness, dirt, and disorder of the house surrounded her like a deserted battlefield. I can’t think how they manage to affect one so. Kitty Maxse has a house in Kent, and is as lovely as ever. I heard a good deal about Irene Noel, whose husband is Lord Bobs secretary—but let us have ices and sugar cakes and go into all this libidinously.

I think Clive might come for the night.

Duncan I suppose is on the high horse. I shall have to write to him. I should like to be asked again.

Yr B.

We’ve got Carrington and Partridge for the weekend. Dont you think it would be a good thing to bring about a legitimate union?

Thursday would suit me slightly better than Friday, if its the same to you; but in that case you’ll have to write by return without fail, and I think you might come back for the night.

Berg

[]

1143a: To Molly MacCarthy

[late August 1920]

[Monks House, Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest Molly,

As you see I have no paper and yet seek to keep the correspondence going. Are you the Mrs MacCarthy who advertises her house to let in the New Statesman? And have you let it? Then where are you? Partridge and Carrington have been here: Lytton [Strachey] is coming—that’s all my news—[T. S.] Eliot to end with. Mrs Eliot like a coward has refused. She thinks herself not sufficiently intellectual, for as you know my reputation that way is terrifying. Mary Hutch is at Charleston, and she says she hates me—but then I threatened to tell her dreadful stories about Clive.

The other day Lady Robert Cecil drove up in a motor car. And Wells has asked us to stay with him. (I see more things have happened than I thought). But I see that I lack entirely the necessary sequence of thought to make them into a letter worth sending—especially nowadays that letters cost twopence—never mind, the main thing is that you shall answer me, for twice running my breakfast has come up blank, and I’ve had to burrow into a book for comfort and the classics don’t really do at breakfast. Why can’t somebody write a book I want to read? Molly might if she would only take the trouble. Write a novel: then cut out all but the first and last sentences of every page. Wells says he wants to write a novel. Should I like Wells’s? Dear me, this is getting more and more inconsecutive, but it’s out of deference for you, for when you talk at your ease you talk just like that only you say such sharp, bitter, desolating things. Well, why not make them into a book?

I have been over to Charleston and enjoyed myself enormously—still more coming back here in the cool of the evening and talking it over with L[eonard].

It’s immensely to Maynard’s credit how pure of heart he is, editions pullulating like beetles in a cowpat—then going to stay with the Asquiths, during which Lord Ribblesdale, and so on and so on and nothing to show for it—of course they sit on him very tight at Charleston; still if I were Maynard I’m sure I should be something ridiculous. Do send every letter with compliments and asterisks between. I enjoy them so much—Leonard says it’s awful the way I eat out of anybody’s hand. But then, being a proud Jew and, an apostle, acclimatized to the East, it’s so different for him. The Voyage Out is just appearing in a new edition (the second to be exact) but you know you never read a word I wrote, and what you do you detest, so what’s the good of pretending? Then Leonard’s book on co-operation has just gone into the third edition. I went to an Athenaeum lunch the other day and disliked my fellow writers intensely—that’s the way we all talk about editions: and Katherine Murry—and I disagreed completely across the table about Conrad’s new novel, which I call bad and she good so what’s the use of discussing literature when no two people agree?

I have read myself into a kind of cocoon. I daresay a death, a violent death, on the lawn might save me but God knows this dealing with immortals is very cold work, I find; exalted but chilly. Then I go to Lewes and spend hours (but they pass like moments) taking out a book—and all old travels and memoirs of the fifties. Lady Blessington I carried off—but do go on with your memoirs (I jerk to this via Lady Blessington and your mother.)

We’ve taken Partridge to be our partner, secretary, confidante, literary executor, and apprentice. We are gambling our last penny in a publishing venture. God knows why we do such insane things but he (Partridge) has a passion for Leonard, is 26, has some money, and adores intellect.

We are now planning a day at Brighton—and Leonard sends his love and I’ve finished all this paper and I must try to wash and we’ve stuck a Greek statue in our watertank and I can think of little more to say—not that’s worth saying—and you won’t read all this—and it’s pouring hard—and as for Rodmell I could tell you many stories yet, but now give my love to Sydney Margery John and the girl, goodbye dearest Molly, and (how did our aunts end their letters?) something about the children I suppose, and the cook, the weather, worries, every lovingly yours? Was that it?

Then yr
V.W.

Mrs. Michael MacCarthy. Modern Fiction Studies. Vol. 30. Summer 1984.

[]

1144: To Margaret Llewelyn Davies

[6 September 1920]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest Margaret,

I am so fearfully sorry about Rosalind Nash. What a terrible thing to have happened. I’ve often wondered how she was.

I’m afraid you are having a very bad time, and we are both very sorry for it, and not to see you here.

Yours V.W.

Sussex

[]

1145: To Vanessa Bell

Sunday [12 September 1920]

Monk’s House [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest,

I’ll come over one day the week after this—and spend the night, but I can’t be quite sure which. I’ll let you know—perhaps. Tuesday or Wednesday.

I dont think Wells is coming, but L: says he can easily find the address if you can wait till we’re in London. It’s probably in Whittaker.

(Your Nelly has just arrived; and finds us in the greatest mess, Lottie having scalded her arm and so on)

Nelly has been examined at the hospital and they say there’s nothing whatever wrong except her teeth, so she’s going to have them done, and I suppose she may believe it for a time.

Lytton and I went to Kingston yesterday and saw the beautiful Ruth Humphries, now Bigge—to me a little disappointing—but then she was running along the road carrying her baby.

I’ll give you my version of the visit when I come—

We shall go back the week after you—It seems a great pity; and I do hope (as our great Aunts say) that your arm is better. Lytton thought you looked tired. Do my dearest lovely dolphin take care of yourself, and dont start all the rush of London overtired and get ill. All the burdens fall on you, I feel.

My only burden is an approaching visit from Robin and Bobo [Robert and Beatrice Mayor]. Mixed with Eliot I expect it will be pretty bad though.

Love to Duncan

Yr B.

Berg

[]

1146: To T. S. Eliot

15th Sept. [1920]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

Dear Mr Eliot,

We are hoping to see you on Saturday.

If you can catch a morning train the best thing is to take the 11.55 from Victoria to Southease halt. You change at Lewes, and we would send a trap to the halt (a mile off). It arrives 1.28—The best afternoon train is the 3.20 from Victoria; but this does not connect with the halt. It arrives at 4.47 and we would send a trap to Lewes,—if you will let me know which you will come by.

Please bring no clothes: we live in a state of the greatest simplicity.

Yours sincerely,
Virginia Woolf

Houghton Library, Harvard University

[]

1147: To Vanessa Bell

[15? September 1920]

[Monk’s House] Rodmell [Sussex]

A trap, or fly, very shabby, will be at the station on Saturday to meet the 4.47.

I expect Tom will come by that—but he may come by an earlier one, so if he doesn’t appear, will you get in and drive off.

Would you give the enclosed to Blanche [maid]—with many thanks. I forgot it—but I dont think I forgot anything else, which is remarkable.

How I did enjoy myself—thanks to a loving heart, and a head full of maggots. It strikes me that this house is tiny compared with yours, like a nut shell.

Berg

[]

1148: To T. S. Eliot

24th Sept. [1920]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

Dear Mr Eliot,

It is very good of you to send me your poems, though I feel that it is the wrong principle, when I was about to become a genuine purchaser.

I am glad to see that there are several I don’t know. They will probably take me some time to read (as I explained to you) so I write to thank you now. I have been away.

We very much enjoyed having you, and hope you won’t find Richmond too far off to come and see us. We go back next week.

Yours sincerely,
Virginia Woolf

Houghton Library, Harvard University

[]

1149: To Vanessa Bell

Sunday [31 October 1920]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dearest,

Here is £15-6-6. with a thousand thanks.

I suppose you wouldn’t like to dine on Wednesday to meet Nelly Cecil?—no, of course you wouldn’t.

Could I have the table some time, and the bill?

Just off to my concert in my neat nigger brown costume and parrot hat.

Yr B.

I hope Angelica is all right.

I’m getting doubtful whether I shall have time to write the story called Monday or Tuesday—if not, I dont know what to call the book.

Berg

[]

1150: To Janet Case

Nov. 4th [1920]

Hogarth House [Richmond]

My dear Janet,

You see how long I’ve waited to collect gossip for you. Well, last night Lady Robert Cecil stayed here; on Sunday I take tea with Countess [Katherine] Cromer; on Monday I dine with Roger Fry, and on Friday—a very shady party in Chelsea. Doesn’t it look grand? The truth is nothing is like what its written like. I mean, Lady Robert is the most modest and humble of women. I penetrated to her bedroom, and examined her nightclothes—pink muslin with a pink lace cap, and a prayer book by the bed. Indeed, when I thought to give her a second quilt, and dashed into her room at midnight (she cant hear) I think I surprised her on her knees, which gave the house the most unusual flavour, as I crept down again. It’s a great lack—never to have had a religious element; even the servants believe nothing. I try to bring back some belief in Hell at least as I order dinner, thinking it essential to the proper ordering of a household—but what’s the use? All their savings they spend on dancing lessons. I must in a minute cook our dinner for that very reason.

I like Nelly Cecil very much, and hear about the Duke of Devonshire and what’s said at Buckingham Palace about the Prince [of Wales] and his love of married women. The amazing thing is that Nelly harbours a profound reverence not so much for me as for the class to which I belong—the intellectual cream, that is, of Europe. A man called Mark Rutherford, my father, and old Lord Salisbury are her three heroes. Lady Cromer is an old battered beauty wearing such a hat as you see on Bank holiday in the gutter. We talk about the revolution, and how it’s high time that the daughters of Longleat (her father’s house) stepped onto the scaffold. She buys herrings for her dinner, and as we walked along Cromwell Road in the moonlight, she had out her purse and turned the coppers, with which it was bursting, to bring her luck. Seeing an apple stall, where the apples were a penny less than in St John’s Wood, she darted off, and there I left her, cheapening apples, while from her neck swung a dozen large cupboard keys, attached to a bootlace, for as she told me, one can’t trust charwomen. Now all this, though written quickly, is quite true. Oh dear! I’ve been writing an article and getting all my dates wrong, and a furious old gentleman has written to wring my neck. Nover will I write another article.

We are hard at work publishing with a partner called Partridge. Several books will come out in the spring. I don’t know where its going to stop. I fancy next time I see you I shall live over a shop, called Woolf and Partridge, in the Strand. Leonard has been once more dismissed by Mr Rowntree from the International supt., and it was the rumour of that that forced us to deny ourselves your sideboard last summer. Just as we had settled to a self-denying life of virtuous industry, Rowntree changed his mind, but it is still uncertain whether he will stick to it. How damnably inconsiderate employers are! Three hardworking people, two of them women with less than the usual feminine charm, are kept dangling while old Rowntree, I suppose, rolls out infinite slabs of chocolate.

I am reading the Symposium [Plato]—ah, if I could write like that! Poor Goldie Dickinson tries, and that doesn’t encourage me to experiment. Then I finished Sophocles. This I say to show you how your seeds bear fruit after 20 years—anyhow 17—(for one must be accurate). Miss Matthaei was telling Leonard the other day how you taught her, and how inspiring it was—

We are sitting in a brown vapour, hearing fog signals from time to time, while your moon, I suppose, is stuck among the apple trees and Emphie, having grown very weatherwise, foretells a fine day. Is that what happens? Janet meanwhile reads Greek with one hand, while she slices potatoes with the other.

Love from both.
Yr V.W.

Sussex

[]

1151: To Violet Dickinson

Nov. 24th [1920]

Hogarth House, Richmond

My Violet,

Who is Miss Chad?—and why is Gerald marrying her, and is she an heiress, and elderly; or the daughter of a stockbroker, and virginal? I dream of her every night, and Gerald says she has made a good impression at Dalingridge, which seems to me sufficient. I wish you’d call and find out.

When are you coming to dine with us again? Its high time you did. Nelly was charming, but I’m never sure how much one exhausts her with talk.

Yr V.W.

Berg

[]

1152: To T. S. Eliot

Nov 24th [1920]

Hogarth House, Richmond

Dear Mr Eliot,

Would you dine with us next Sunday 28th, 7-30? I think we shall be alone. We have a spare room, and I should like it very much if you would stay the night—we breakfast early.

Leonard wants me to say that he has been reading your book with great pleasure.

Yours sincerely,
Virginia Woolf

Houghton Library, Harvard University

[]

1153: To Molly Maccarthy

[late November 1920]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond

Dearest Molly,

I was on the point of coming to tea with you. But will you dine here next Friday, 7.30—3rd Dec, no evening clothes. Do you know the way up from the station? We were to have been honoured by a visit from Mr Sidney Webb yesterday, and he spent an hour wandering in the dark, and finally went home without finding us—just as I’d primed myself with intellectual talk, too.

Please come

Yrs V.W.

Mrs Michael MacCarthy

[]

1154: To Katherine Arnold-Forster

Nov. 30th [1920]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dearest Bruin,

Miss Hobhouse has sent her MS: which I will read as soon as I can. It looks long—but of course might be the very thing.

There’s no need to tempt us to Cornwall with Marquises: the mere rocks, let alone the Cox, are enough for me.

At the moment we are so overpowered by the Press that we cannot move. But after Xmas, a new arrangement is going to be made, and then we shall be freer.

Of course I will come to the Home. But I never knew people so surgically disposed as you and Will. What an awful bore it must be! I take Will’s point about L. S. Woolf. But mine is that these rare Wolves scarcely scratch the [George] Lloyds and the [Bonar] Laws and get broken themselves in the process. There’s Herbert Fisher for example—a good man, or don at least, become an old tin can for platitudes. But I cannot write my opinions, as I am in a hurry to get tea, and then must review a book, and spend the night talking to Molly MacCarthy, who is now isolated at Oare, and comes up to breathe now and then, but is horribly deaf. Leonard is dining with Clive Bell to meet Mr and Mrs B. Russell.

But, however I may boast, I dont think our entertainments are worth the view from the drawing room window, at which you are now looking, and feeling very sublime, and not in the least envious of anyone. Is that your state of mind? I shall go into it when you are in bed and unable to escape.

Yr V.W.

Mark Arnold-Forster

[]

1155: To Clive Bell

[7 December 1920]

Postcard

[Hogarth House, Richmond]

Leonard will like to dine with you tomorrow. I’m afraid I can’t, as I’m dining with Morgan.

Who is going to read then? Nobody?

V.W.

Quentin Bell

[]

1156: To Katherine Mansfield

Dec. 19th [1920]

Hogarth House, Richmond

My dear Katherine,

I wish you were here to enjoy your triumph—still more that we might talk about your book [Bliss]—For what’s the use of telling you how glad and indeed proud I am? However, I must to please myself send a line to say just that.

Yours ever
V.W.

The Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand

[]

1157: To Vanessa Bell

[21? December 1920]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Our sister-in-law!

How old is she?

Merry Xmas.

A thousand thanks for table.

V.W.

Berg

[]

1158: To Roger Fry

Tuesday [21 December 1920]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

My dear Roger,

This is just to say that the things arrived, but with all the glass smashed. In fact there’s a large gash in one of the designs. (I’m acquitting myself in case you want them back.) The book case is splendid.

We go to Rodmell tomorrow,—and hope to meet you sometime.

I’m in the middle of your book and fascinated. 200 envelopes have been despatched.

Yrs V.W.

Are there any knobs for resting the shelves on?

Sussex

[]

1159: To Desmond MacCarthy

Friday [1920?]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

My dear Desmond,

I just want to add to my telephone conversation (for my own satisfaction—Leonard thinks it funny, foolish, and altogether out of proportion of me) that I did not mean to give the impression that I thought L: merely grumpy and ill-tempered in writing to you as he did. I saw his letter and agreed with it and advised him to send it. I did think it unfair of you (as an editor) to send him worthless books and expect a review at a moments notice. That is still my feeling. Overcome by friendship at the sound of your voice, I did not stick to my guns, as I should have done. Hence this letter, which of course ends with an expression of everlasting affection and admiration for D.M. (the man).

Yrs affect. V.W.

Mrs Michael MacCarthy

[]

1160: To Barbara Bagenal

Dec. 23rd [1920]

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

My dear Barbara

I cannot think why you never write to me. Saxon says you live on the bank of the Severn. Perhaps looking into the water destroys the memory; and you are a wise old witch, much happier than any of us. Well, I hope so.

We have just come down here for Christmas, and the sun on the cabbages is a sight. Indeed, I think this place has great points over Asheham. Do you find that wherever you live is the best place in the world? Is the Severn better than the Wye? Have you a perfect cottage? Do you do all the work yourself? I hope not. But then when are you coming to see us? I must tell you we’ve turned the dining room at Hogarth into our printing room, so we have a proper spare room; fit for a proper matronly woman—Come soon, or the press will have swamped us. I can’t tell you how hard we work. Partridge is immensely energetic, but I regret to say that his hands get very cold, and then, taking a whole box of type, he drops it on the floor. You can imagine the scene—printing to get 8 pages finished—fog—cold—4 in the afternoon—then this disaster. We shall produce about 6 books in the spring.

I spent a night with Saxon not long ago, at Great Ormond Street—I only mean I went in after dinner. I was immensely impressed by his bachelor apparatus. I think he is the most masterly man I know. He has complete control over his tea, his coffee, his chess, his books, his cat (if he has a cat), Mrs Stagg, the full moon—when he takes a walk—and friendship. He sees nobody, and his affections are entirely pure. I sat there like an old dirty clothes basket. Does he give you that feeling? Carrington has been in London; Gordon Square is like nothing so much as the lions house at the Zoo. One goes from cage to cage. All the animals are dangerous, rather suspicious of each other, and full of fascination and mystery. I’m sometimes too timid to go in, and trail along the pavement, looking in at the windows.

Nessa has been painting her rooms flesh colour and orange (that’s my impression.) Angelica has the charm of a beauty, already. She always takes off your hat and tries it on herself. Julian is getting up an intrigue at school—It seems to me very elderly to be writing about children’s gossip; but I can’t think of anything middleaged. What a bore it is that we’re all married—except old Marjorie Strachey who teaches shop assistants, and fell down the stairs at Debenhams the other day and cracked her behind. Noel Olivier is marrying a Welshman called Jones; and will live in Wales; and as I think you’re in the next county, perhaps you’ll meet—Oliver and Ray [Strachey] dined with us the other night—and I must say I think its high time—I will not be so indiscreet as to say what I mean. Only, she becomes more and more like that very handsome cat of yours that I admired so, the day we came to tea and Nick was wounded. With this hint, I leave the subject.

Do you think you would send me a picture postcard of your neighbourhood? My private vision of you is so wildly romantic that it can’t be true. I suppose you do do something besides sit on a high bank under a willow tree braiding your hair while the Severn rushes past in the moonlight? Barbara, who hasn’t time what with scrubbing and washing and attending to Judith to read this long aimless letter, is filled with scorn. But if you wont write to me, how am I to know better?

Your affate
V.W.

Love to Nick; and thank him for his letter, 3 months ago.

I’m going to try liquid manure.

Please write an account of your entire day from dawn to sunset.

Berg

[]

Letters 1161-1179 (January-May 1921)

1161: To Vanessa Bell

Friday [7 Jan 1921]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dearest,

How you must be wanting to hear from me! Perhaps you’re back though.

We came back [from Rodmell] last Saturday. Poor Barbara is up in London, and we went to a party at Bunny’s, and danced,—poor B. didn’t dance. I expect she is very unhappy, and likes being unhappy—but perhaps I am quite wrong. Saxon was there; and it was frightfully dull really, but at any moment it might have become amusing—

By the way, we’re in treaty for a house in Gordon Square, so you may have me for your neighbour after all. Still, we needn’t see each other. Ralph’s just been telling me of a wonderful tea party at Clives—all Spanish, all prostitutes, all musicians, all talking French. Ralph’s father is threatening to commit suicide, and it is thought that he ought to join the firm, in order to prevent him. He is 56 and his wife won’t copulate with him—that seems to be the trouble. By mistake Ralph has left a revolver in the house—which is miles in the country.

Yesterday we lunched with the Webbs; I cant tell you how this excited me, seeing that I got onto terms of humanity with her; but how it will bore you! Besides you don’t believe in other people’s humanity—I wish I didn’t. Here we’ve got Richard Hughes and Don Claudio de la Torre dining with us; a detestable bore, I expect. Hughes an Oxford undergraduate; and wants us to print his works; on the telephone I couldn’t help asking him to dinner. And we’ve never seen either of them—and how shall we know which is which?

Will you ask me to tea when you get back? Well, says Nessa, I daresay I shall have to. A thousand thanks for the table. As we shall be next door you needn’t send it very far—I didn’t think Gwen’s woodcuts up to much, did you? Are you jealous of her? I’m not in the least jealous of Katherine [Mansfield], though every review praises her.

Desmond is coming to stay because they’ve lost their cook—thats all the gossip I can remember.

Yr. B.

Berg

[]

1162: To Vanessa Bell

[January 1921]

H.[ogarth] H.[ouse, Richmond]

Dearest

Many thanks for the cheque—what an amazing surprise!

It’s been impossible to attempt seeing you owing to printing and various horrors—however you seem to have been invisible. Then Old Snow [Margery Snowden]—I’m longing to hear about her.

If I can, I’ll come to tea tomorrow, but don’t wait anyhow. Ah, I’ve lost my heart to an undergraduate [Richard Hughes] myself—aged 18, with a stammer.

I have just kissed Ralph on the nape of the neck—Its these elderly passions that are so dangerous. I’m longing to hear your memoirs.

V.W.

The woodcut came safe—I hope to have a proof of the first one soon—By the way, I have a cold (not bad) in the head—Would you rather I didn’t come for fear of giving it the children?

Berg

[]

1163: To W. J. Turner

Jan. 18 1921

Typewritten

Hogarth House, Richmond, Surrey

Dear Mr Turner,

I shall be glad to do the article on George Eliot, and will let you have it some time next week.

My husband asks me to say that he will do the article on Mill.

Yours sincerely,
Virginia Woolf

George Spater

[]

1164: To Sydney Waterlow

[19 January 1921]

Hogarth House, Richmond

My dear Sydney,

We shall see you on Friday, but I don’t want to let your letter go unanswered. I believe I do understand more than you think. Anyhow, you’ve made it clearer to me than it ever has been before. I think, too, that your explanation is the right one. Where I think you exaggerate (I don’t accuse you of falsity—thats absurd) is in your estimate of your external position. You say people drop you, and don’t want to see you. I don’t agree. Of course I understand that when one feels, as you feel, without a core—it used to be a very familiar feeling to me—then all one’s external relations become febrile and unreal. Only they aren’t to other people. I mean, your existence is to us, for example, a real and very important fact. If I treat you as a joke (and my manners are far too haphazard) thats only a method. Of course, one of the things about you that I like, admire, and find interesting is this sensibility—this introspection—this sense of the importance of things.

I know this seems to you off the point. But you admit that a wider social life would make it possible to rub along. This seems to me easily within your reach. Why not tackle that part of the problem at once? Let’s discuss it when you come. We are branching out a little in that direction, as it happens.

I am not trying to pretend that this touches more than the surface. I feel that your explanation is the true one. The only way to meet that seems to me to be to realise it as you have done. Indeed, I had guessed what you say.

I do, however, return to the aspect which I believe you can’t possibly see as clearly as I do—I mean your own powers, and the effect which, if you believed in them, they could have upon the whole position. No; if I’ve ever accused you of pretending unhappiness it was because your sensibilities and capacities are so obvious to me that I can’t understand how you don’t find pleasure in them.

This is hastily, and I know confusedly written. But I’ve read your letter with a sort of pleasure (that you should trust me sufficiently to write it) and with a good deal of distress. This scribble is only meant to say that I believe I understand, and don’t try to minimise the meaning of it.

Also I’ve a wish to sign myself yours affectionately—is that sentimental?—but perhaps you don’t know how fond I am of my friends.

V.W.

John Waterlow

[]

1165: To Lytton Strachey

Jan 25th [1921]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Ah—but this is what I may have dreamed of, but never hoped for. What could I like better? Only my inordinate vanity whispers might it not be Virginia Woolf in full? Some Victoria Worms or Vincent Woodlouse is certain to say it’s them, and I want all the glory to be mine for ever. But it’s better than a glory and comes on my birthday too.

We look forward to Saturday, and shall we have Vic[toria]?

Dearest Lytton,

Your V.W.

Frances Hooper

[]

1166: To Maynard Keynes

Thursday [3 February 1921]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dear Maynard,

Would you let us have your manuscript in order that we may read what we missed last night? It will be kept private and returned instantly.

We thought it quite magnificent, and I cant say how much I envy you for describing characters in the way you do.

Yours ever
Virginia Woolf

King’s

[]

1167: To Violet Dickinson

[5 February 1921]

[Hogarth House, Richmond]

My Violet

What a pleasure to hear from you—and what queer company you keep!

I think it will be very good for your morals to visit the simplicities and refinements of Richmond.

What about next Thursday, 10th,? 4.30. We should be in, and like it very much.

If you don’t answer, I shall expect you.

Yours Sp:

Berg

[]

1168: To Vanessa Bell

[March? 1921]

[Hogarth House, Richmond]

Dearest

I wonder if you’d like this ticket for the Magic Flute at the Old Vic tomorrow night. I’m threatened with headache and suppose I mustn’t go, damn it. If you cant use it, would you give it to anyone else—Gumbo [Marjorie Strachey], perhaps.

I think you had better not repeat what I said about Norton being frightened of people at Gordon Sqre—I think this was one of the things Bob [Trevelyan] told us in confidence—but he was so muddled I can’t remember.

Yr B.

Berg

[]

1169: To Vanessa Bell

Thursday, March 17th, 1921

The Queen’s Hotel, Manchester

Dearest,

I am reminded of you at every turn in this hotel—How you would love it! in fact, why you and Duncan don’t do a series of hotel scenes I cant conceive. A vast green plush room—pillars—candelabra—silver trays—urns—coffee pots—large British family groups reading newspapers—drinking—the clergy—mothers and daughters—all grey tidy skimpy incredibly respectable—save for one or two hippotamus females basking in corners all stuck about with diamonds—and old gentlemen bursting through their waistcoats—indeed they never stop eating fried fish, tea, and meringues. But I can give you no idea; and then just outside the window are trams, Queen Victoria, the Duke of Wellington, and the man who invented the Spinning Jenny—now who was he?—all black as soot, noble,—pointing at the opposite houses—I say I can’t finish this sentence, and then there’s Mrs Snowden clearly writing to Lily (was that her name?) about airing the curtains.

Last night Leonard made a speech in a chemistry theatre, and I talked to Mrs Unwin about the beauties of Derbyshire, which are indeed surprising, but too melodramatic for your taste. This was at the University, where Watties [Walter Lamb] father is professor, and they’re all somehow like Wattie, provincial, smug, destitute of any character, hopelessly suburban, yet trying to live up to the metropolitan intellect (me, I mean) which they can’t do. Somehow, we have got off the rails for real middleclass intellectual political life. Does that ever strike you? Tonight we’re dining at what they call the Refectory with Professor Weiss and Professor—I forget; and I’ve prepared 2 things to say. The first is “I am Herbert Fisher’s cousin” the 2nd is “I am Leslie Stephen’s daughter.” But supposing nothing whatever happens? And why did you bring me into the world to go through these ordeals?

I spent the morning at the Art gallery. There’s Work by Ford Madox Brown, the Hireling Shepherd by Holman Hunt, Love and death by Watts; and I assure you the number of incidents one can pick out is amazing. If Leonard hadn’t got impatient I could have found grasshoppers copulating in the very background of Holman Hunt. The shepherds hair is done one by one. Then there’s a lamb with 8 separate whiskers. Theres Aunt Susie by Dodd—and Mr Beccles by Aunt Susie, and Nymphs by Waterfield and—God knows what all—Your art is far more of a joke than mine. But dont think that I am unaware how dull this letter is—We spent the afternoon at the Zoo. Imagine (oh God, says poor old Dolphin, how much longer is this going on? Why should I imagine the Manchester Zoo) well, but you must admit it was exciting to find a dromedary and an Indian buffaloe, with ingrowing toe nails, poor beast, in a grotto of pale grey stone, totally forgotten, there being only 2 charwomen about the place, which is the size of Regents Park, and almost entirely given over to the scaffolding of a panorama, and a lake. But how I love these places! The whole expedition is one long rapture of romance—and if I could live in hotel lounges I think I should be—Yes, here are more people come in. Mrs Snowden has settled down beside me after a very tiring day, she says—When you know a waiter by name, in fact shake him by the hand, what does it mean? Its the clergy who do it. However, I will say no more. When I’m old, when Julian and Quentin and Angelica are out in the world, do let us become travelling matrons, and go round the provinces together, in handsome style, having buried our husbands, for I think its best to be a widow (I mean in an hotel—)

Did you hear that Lytton has thrown us over on what must be a pretext about Lady S.?

So Leonard and I are going alone; but there’s more in it than meets the eye. Ralph [Partridge] has a fixed and gloomy look which reminds me of his father the suicidal Colonel. I imagine (but for Gods sake dont shout this about Gordon Square) that there’s been a crisis. Anyhow I hope so. I hope they’re all at daggers drawn. I think Carrington is losing Lytton and spurning poor Ralph—but here is Leonard—I must wash and rehearse my 2 speeches. I am Leslie Stephen’s Cousin—thats what it will be.

Of course my only wish is to know how you are; and that I shant know.

To lecture you is equally useless. But for God’s sake be careful, and go away, and love your dear grey ape. May I come to tea, Monday, perhaps? We go away on Wednesday

Yr B.

We come back tomorrow.

Berg

[]

1170: To S. S. Koteliansky

[March 1921]

[Hogarth House, Richmond]

Dear Mr Koteliansky,

(I wish there were some less formal name I could call you).

Leonard asks me to say that our address will be c/o Mrs Hosking

PONION,
ZENNOR,
St. IVES,
CORNWALL

I hope that is clear.

We are taking our Russian. The aspects seem to me very interesting—that is not to say that I understand them at all.

I shall like very much to read the letters you are sending.

Yours very sincerely,
Virginia Woolf

British Museum

[]

1171: To Vanessa Bell

Sunday [27 March 1921]

Ponion, Zennor, St. Ives

Dearest,

The only small printer we know is MacDermott, Duke Street, Richmond. I think he would probably do your catalogue in time, and much cheaper than you could get it done in London. You would have to instruct him rather carefully about type and so on. He is on the telephone, and would give you an estimate anyhow. We found Madley as expensive as the Pelican. Partridge comes back on Thursday, and will be going down to Richmond. He might superintend MacDermott.

It is pitiable to think that you are bothering about pictures and no doubt losing your umbrella on Haverstock Hill while I am watching two seals barking in the sea at Gurnards Head. This is no poetic licence. There they were, with their beautifully split tails, and dog shaped heads, rolling over and diving like two naked dark brown old gentlemen. Two minutes before a viper started up under my feet. The smell of the gorse which is all in bloom and precisely like a Cornish picture against a purple sea is like—I dont really know what. Then there are deep rivers running down with all those plants that used to grow in Halsetown bog.

We are on the cliff, quite by ourselves, nothing but gorse between us and the sea, and when I have done this letter we are going to take our books and roll up in a hollow over the sea, and there watch the spray and the ships and the bees, peacock butterflies (tell Julian). However I admit its rather windy today. Also Ka may at any moment turn up with Henry Lamb who’s staying with the Kennedy’s, who married Millie Dow’s daughter, and they have a cottage somewhere, as indeed most of the cottages are inhabited by the riff raff of Chelsea.

Ka and Will are the great people of the neighbourhood, with a large solid house [Eagle’s Nest], views from every window, water closets, bath rooms, studios, divine gardens, all scattered with Logan rocks. Ka is a very nice woman, to my mind, and everyone stops and talks to her on the road, and she is already a country lady with a cupboard full of medicines and bandages. Will improves, I think (you see, I don’t like to be too appreciative, knowing your scepticism). He is shedding the Youngs and the Trevelyans a little. He paints pictures of the Campagna in Mrs Westlakes [former owner of Eagle’s Nest] Studio. On the floor he has a photograph: then there are about 6 studies in monochrome of the photograph on different easels—I think probably he’s under the influence of Ruskin: anyhow, they take a lot of time, and he works all day, and I rather believe (but this is malicious gossip) that Henry Lamb has persuaded him that they ought to exhibit at the Royal Academy, which, as Henry says, is only bad because people like him and Will don’t show there. Henry doesn’t see anything in modern French painting. Now if Lytton had been here, we should have had an interesting combination. Ka is very ill at ease about Henry. It is incredible that she ever had an amorous youth. But I assure you she is a broad-bottomed, sensible, maternal woman, and I’ve just borrowed some sanitary towels off her—not that it’s likely I shall give them back. By the way—I got a piece of gossip for you. Olive Heseltine has annulled her marriage with Michael, with a view to his marrying a young woman in an office, the plea being that he is impotent; and Olive has gone to Vienna to feed the starving, having scarcely sixpence a year herself, and will, I doubt not, once more proceed to the quest of Hilton. Then Bunny is engaged ; but this I daresay is known in Gordon Square. I’m going to Treveal this afternoon to look for cowries. Yesterday we went to Bosigran. Doesn’t this make your mouth water? Nobody comes here. There is no agriculture. There are a few hobbled donkeys, but not a thing has been done since we were here. Its the only place to stay at—and there is a cottage to be had on the top of Tregerthen Hill. Now if you had the spunk of a caterpillar you would telegraph to me to buy this for you for ever. Have you heard about Charleston? How is Ann? We shall be back on Thursday.

I am going to send you some butter. They’ve almost given up making cream, owing to having bought separators. Miss Eddy lives next door, Mrs Berriman is at the farm, and our landlady is Mrs Hosken. Ka wants me to lunch with the Millie Dows at Talland—he is dead; but she is very nice, and fears that the associations may be too painful for me. L. met Dr Nicholls yesterday, who said that he should never forget Miss [Stella] Duckworth coming to tell him that we were giving up Talland; and he almost bought the house, and has always been sorry he didn’t.

B.

Berg

[]

1172: To Saxon Sydney-Turner

Bank Holiday [28] March 1921

C/o Mrs Hosking, Ponion, Zennor, St Ives, Cornwall

My dear Saxon,

Why do I always connect you with Zennor? Did we walk over here from Carbis Bay [in 1905]? I rather think you were carried off by Thoby to look for a raven on the cliff—which raven I saw yesterday, and two seals walloping on their backs off the Gurnards Head so near in that I could have swum out to them. Next holiday you must come here. Mrs Hosking is quite adequate, though suffering from the death of her husband, which has affected her eyes, and thus a little irresponsive to my endearments, but speaking—as they all do—a faultless and colourless English. But the country—my dear Saxon. We are between Gurnards Head and Zennor: I see the nose of the Gurnard from my window. We step out into the June sunshine, past mounds of newly sprung gorse, bright yellow and smelling of nuts, over a grey stone wall, so along a cart track scattered with granite to a cliff, beneath which is the sea, of the consistency of innumerable plovers eggs where they turn grey green semi transparent. However when the waves curl over they are more like emeralds, and then the spray at the top is blown back like a mane—an old simile doubtless, but rather a good one. Here we lie roasting, though L. pretends to write an article for the Encyclopaedia upon Cooperation. The truth is we can’t do anything but watch the sea—especially as the seals may bob up, first looking like logs, then like naked old men, with tridents for tails. I’m not sure though that the beauty of the country isn’t its granite hills, and walls, and houses, and not its sea. What do you say? Of course its very pleasant to come upon the sea spread out at the bottom, blue, with purple stains on it, and here a sailing ship, there a red steamer. But last night walking through Zennor the granite was—amazing, is the only thing to say I suppose, half transparent, with the green hill behind it, and the granite road curving up and up. All the village dogs were waiting outside the church, and the strange Cornish singing inside, so unlike the English.

I think a good deal about the Phoenicians and the Druids, and how I was a nice little girl here, and ran along the top of the stone walls, and told Mr Gibbs after tea that I was full to the chin. Do you like yourself as a child? I like myself, before the age of 10, that is—before consciousness sets in. Still I expect I muddle it all up with Cornwall.

Certainly this is the place to come to, as no one has built here since about the year 1840, when everything seems to have been built at the same moment, why, God knows. If you will send me a wire, before Thursday, I will buy you a cottage and 4 acres of moor on the top of Tregerthen Hill. You could probably keep a cow, and sell peat: your firing would be gorse, and the sublimity of your thoughts, reading Greek in the morning, and Latin in the evening would in time to come invest your lodging with radiance.

Unfortunately for my romance, the [Tregerthen] cottages (not yours, but the ones we had) are inhabited—you know the sort of people—tremendous thick boots, blue cloaks, orange ties and squash hats. How I hate them! Ka and Will sit among the rocks in Mrs Westlakes stone mansion, rather windblown, but sublime, observing hail storms miles out to sea, and the descent of the sun; the difficulty being I should think to keep together any identity in such circumstances. However Will retires to an outhouse, and paints, and Ka has a very lively rosy baby, whom I can’t help envying. What illusions, my dear Saxon, one would have if one lived in Cornwall and was eleven months old.

I have just done my Russian lesson, and can read one page of Aksakov in 45 minutes. There were 3 clusters of words which I knew, and these bear me on in hope. Otherwise I have to look out each one, and, what is worse, forget them by the time I reach the end of the sentence. But we say we have broken the back of the language. Then I am reading Candide, and Ethel Smyth’s Streaks of Life [autobiography]. And tomorrow if this sea mist stops (for the sunshine was an illusion which I wished to produce for poetic reasons—it is the first bad day though, and even so we’re going to the top of Bosigran Castle this afternoon) tomorrow we go to St Ives, where I shall buy you a little compass set in serpentine such as I used to give my father very ugly, but perhaps when you’re walking it may save your life. Home on Thursday alas. But we’ve nothing to complain of.

Ring us up and come out and then you shall have your serpentine compass.

Yours, V.W.

Ponion is not the name of the house, but the name of the village, or rather the 3 houses. I think you will like to know this.

Sussex

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1173: To Lytton Strachey

Wednesday [30] March [1921]

Ponion, Zennor, St Ives [Cornwall]

The enclosed card gives you no idea of the place, which is indescribable—far better than the Lizard or the Land’s End, or St Ives, or indeed anywhere. (I have just had to move my chair out of the blazing sun). One walks out of the window on to the cliff. There are 2 seals bathing in the bay. Two adders curling round my ankles. Gorse, cowries, Cliffs, Choughs, Ravens, Cream, solitude, sublimity and all the rest of it. It’s true that Ka is perched on the hill a mile and a half away, with the oddest collection of good little grey men who spend their time scrambling up chimneys and funnels and are hardly articulate in consequence. But there is Henry Lamb for you—not for me. I’ve not seen him. We take our books out and lie in the sun; occasionally I say, why aren’t you here?—but even so, a general benignity pervades us. I like Will better, and have looked through portfolios of greyblue rock-scapes—not of Cornwall; of Italy as it was before the war. I met a man yesterday by appointment to discuss literature—“which is my whole life, Mrs Woolf.” But I can give you no idea—He lives with a half perished dumb wife on a headland in a cottage with Everyman’s Library entire. “I read no moderns. Life is not long enough for anything save the best. Hardy has taught me to look into my heart. I have enjoyed this conversation, Mrs Woolf. It has confirmed me in my own opinions.” This stunted animal was a clerk in the post office, became infected with books, and is now like the oldest kernel of a monkey’s nut in the Gray’s Inn Road. However—why is it that human beings are so terribly pathetic? God knows. Or am I becoming rotten with middle age? I did refrain from asking him to correspond; but left with tears in my eyes—almost. I can’t help thinking that we are hopelessly muddled. Then there was the theosophist, Mr Watt in the cottage which I once hired; and he lives on nuts from Selfridges, and a few vegetables, and has visions, and wears boots with soles like slabs of beef and an orange tie; and then his wife crept out of her hole, all blue, with orange hair, and cryptic ornaments, serpents, you know, swallowing their tails in token of eternity, round her neck. The rain, they said, often comes through the walls on a wet day, so I’m glad I didn’t settle there. But can you explain the human race at all—I mean these queer fragments of it which are so terribly like ourselves, and so like Chimpanzees at the same time, and so lofty and high minded, with their little shelves of classics and clean china and nice check curtains and purity that I can’t see why its all wrong. We tried to imagine you there, snipping their heads off with something very witty.

Well, I shall read Queen Victoria and try to see how its done. I see the New Republic is publishing it, and it’s an incredible gem, and a masterpiece of prose. I quite believe it, though my jealousy is twinged—and I thought I had no vices left in me after this week. I thought I was going to read the whole of Shakespeare and I haven’t; but I come back longing to get my teeth into your book—Is it quite magnificent? And why weren’t you here? And now I must take a last look at the country: which will dissolve me in tears.

Give my love to your mother.

Yr. V.W.

Frances Hooper

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1174: To Lytton Strachey

Sunday April 17th [1921]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Well, I feel I must write to you either in your own style or in Victoria’s. There’s no escaping you after reading the book. Indeed, it is quite magnificent, better as a whole, I should say, than the other. I’ve seldom enjoyed anything more. I suppose the chief marvel is the way you spin the story perfectly straightforwardly, never a line slack, and yet contrive those wonderful little portraits, one after another, each exactly in its place, illuminating, without interruption or fuss or for a moment stopping, it seems, to go on talking simply. The effect is not merely satiric by any means. You seem to have reduced it to the last possible ounce, and yet to have kept all the meat and bone and guts. The great moments seem to me really moving. And the Queen herself comes out somehow surprising, solid and angular, and touching, though not exactly sympathetic. Amazing woman! My only criticism (and I’m not sure of its truth) is that occasionally I think one is a little conscious of being entertained. It’s a little too luxurious reading—I mean, one is willing perhaps to take more pains than you allow. I couldn’t bear to sacrifice any of the amusements (the boy Jones is superb, and there are a million others) but now and again perhaps, where the space is so limited, the jokes are a little on the surface—But I don’t know. I must read it through. The first time one races. Literally I snatched it up, put it down, snatched it up, till it was all done. One of the things I thought particularly magnificent and original was the description of the possessions. It was so massive, and summed it all up, and opened up, I thought, infinite vistas of new forms. But we must talk about it when you come.

Yr. V.W.

Oh, and I must say how I enjoyed your Batesian version of the Queen on the Great Exhibition. “Sir George Grey in tears, and everybody astonished and delighted.”

Frances Hooper

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1175: To Violet Dickinson

[April 1921]

Hogarth House, Richmond

My Violet,

We are fearfully ashamed of ourselves—but somehow the card with your name got overlooked. You have a large balance to your credit—£1.13.6.—of course you ought to have been one of the first to get our list. Here it is. All 3 books are now out. If you want the others, they shall be sent directly we hear, and we will deduct from your deposit.

We are much ashamed of the printing of my one. We were persuaded to let a little printer [McDermott] here try his hand at it, and he has produced an odious object, which leaves black stains wherever it touches. Leonards we did ourselves.

We are selling much better this time, in fact we have beaten all records, which is very encouraging but keeps us on the run. I must now go and boil some glue.

I will tell Lytton that you like his book. He is a little nervous what the old courtiers will say. By the way, he shares my admiration for Miss Eden. Won’t you do another volume? I wish you would. They are the best letters there have been for a long time.

Nelly (my cook) is hoarding a pot of marmalade for you.

Will you come and eat it here? Do.

I hope you are better, and feeling affectionately disposed towards us.

Sp:

Berg

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1176: To Sydney Waterlow

May 3rd [1921]

Hogarth House, Richmond

Dear Sydney,

We were just going to ask you to dine, and now Saxon says you are ill. Of course, he knew nothing more, and this seemed hearsay. But we should like to be informed of the truth.

He came to play the great [chess] tournament with Leonard, and beat him, I am sorry to say, owing to a mistake, I think. Who have you been seeing and what have you been reading? These are the sort of questions that Ottoline used to ask one, and one was expected to say something very high minded. I am reading Miss Romer Wilson’s new novel, which Jack Squire says is the greatest work of genius ever written by a woman (or words to that effect). Naturally one doesn’t like that. And I am hopeless at judging novels. I keep thinking that I should write them better. Now you are saved all these horrible spites and vanities owing to being in the Foreign Office—at least that is my romance about the Foreign Office.

And I have just looked into Eliot on Prose in the Chap book, and am shocked as usual, when I read Eliot, to find how wrong I am, and how right he is. The nuisance is that one must go into the matter: he doesn’t like Sir Thomas Browne, and he does like Poe. I’m sure he’s wrong; and I shall perk up again, but what a shock it is. I think he is a Puritan, as well as an American. Then Wyndham Lewis has been abusing everyone I’m told, in his paper, and Roger and Nessa read him in shops, and won’t buy him—which, as I say, proves that they fear him. But this is all great nonsense—Do write and say how you are.

I can’t remember that I have seen anyone in particular. Clive gave a great party to which all his ladies went in different colours of the rainbow, and were utterly outshone by Vanessa in old lace. The Spanish lady is very stupid, but so incredibly beautiful that one forgives it all: and she orders dinner for 10 when there are only 3 to eat it, and loads of plovers eggs, ices, and salmon are wheeled off to the servants hall; which gives one a great sense of luxury. Also we were in Manchester and I met a Mr and Mrs Weiss who knew you, and asked a great deal about you, and what had become of Alice [Sydney’s first wife].

Yours ever,
Virginia Woolf

John Waterlow

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1177: To Lady Robert Cecil

Monday [9 May 1921]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond

Dear Nelly,

(I never can remember to buy notepaper—so you must forgive this sheet, upon which I ought to be making notes about Mr Coventry Patmore). I hope our books will make you cheerful, but I doubt it. I think you must come and see us. Why not spend another night here on your way to your committee? Its a long time since you came—the day Mrs Asquith’s autobiography came out, do you remember. You would have a proper bedroom; one not shared by the Hogarth press I mean. That is now eating us out of our dining room.

I went to tea with Lady Cromer yesterday—and she doesn’t find things dismal. Then we went to lunch with Mr Herbert Fisher, and he made me despair—of everything. Poor man! Is it inevitable that politics should eat out your inside and leave you but a shell? Perhaps its being in the Cabinet; I felt that if the window was open, poor Herbert would be blown down Victoria Street—yet so good and well meaning.

Now I have to go with Miss Fry to lecture the Women of Richmond upon prison reform—According to her—if this cheers you at all—the criminals are the good people invariably; grandmothers are murdered from the highest motives, she says, generally to shield someone else. And there they are, the murderers, shut up for life, perfect martyrs. The drunkards especially are always most tender hearted and generous. However, I see this is pretty dismal too. Leonard is rather pleased though—no, he’s not; he says everything is as bad as it can be—except that our books are selling.

But do come here.

Yr. aff.
V.W.

Hatfield

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1178: To Vanessa Bell

Friday, May 13th [1921]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dearest,

I feel inclined to quote you some of your own letters about the imbecility and criminality of not taking care of one’s health. Oh, how idiotic I think you! And you won’t take an extra glass of milk for anything I say; or go away for anything the whole world says; its Aunt Mary in the blood. You are very interesting psychologically: in some ways so reasonable; in others—. Well, the family strain must be ineradicable. There’ll be Angelica one of these days saying she will sit up till one; and won’t drink her milk; and will be amused by the young men. For as I write this, waiting for my dinner, in the innocence of Richmond, I can see you bundling off in a taxi to a restaurant to sit chattering with that little man who always had a fly on his head—was his name Maurice? I daresay he’s drunk himself to death. And you wont live long either. Still, never say I didn’t tell you of it—We’ve had the influenza in this house, in the usual form: I mean Lottie suddenly dropping the fish and bursting into tears. Then we put her to bed. Then Nelly has pains in her leg. Then they both go cold up the spine. However, thank God, its now over.

Then I went to tea—solely on your account—with Lady Cromer: all the way to St John’s Wood. They die very beautifully, the aristocracy; there’s that to be said for them. But I stirred my breast for any cinder of romance—I stirred among the cinders, it should be; and found nothing but benevolence and boredom.

The baby we once saw, if you remember, is now a great fat bumpkin, with a little Greek head, only the Greeks didn’t have blubber lips: anyhow his manners were perfect and his thighs so shapely that if I had passions anymore, I should have seized Evelyn by the neck. Far from that, there we sat in a room the identical copy of Kittys [Maxse] drawing room on a larger and more aristocratic scale: chintzes, green paint, white walls, Lady Bath [Lady Cromer’s mother] by Watts; Lady Alice [Thynne, her sister] by Cope; Lord Cromer by Sargent.

I made this profound observation that the aristocracy is hopelessly amateurish. In youth this has a certain charm; in age it is a little banal.

“Now do tell me—whats Vanessa doing?—And I was so interested to hear that your sister in law had taken poor Mary Maggs for her cook—poor girl, I used to visit her before the baby came, and she kept her room so clean … I do so like the Bruce Richmonds—both of them. But how does he manage to get up to the office now?—You know Mr Keynes don’t you?—He wrote that very clever book.”—

I don’t say that she’s not a superb piece of flesh, but why say these things? And she’s too much in the later style of Du Maurier for my mature taste.

You have heard I suppose of George’s [Duckworth] descent upon Gordon Square?—first having tea with Julian and Quentin, then going on to Adrian. He said they were nice jolly boys, you’ll be glad to hear. Adrian said that he is now harmless, a little shabby, quite whiteheaded, and talks to the dog a good deal in baby language—you remember how he used to do it? Adrian thinks him practically witless: for instance when he heard that they were becoming psychoanalysts he said “Oh but does that mean you’ll be able to cure poor Laura?” I daresay you’ve had the account, though. He’d come to see you, so you are in favour—He always calls me “the poor goat”—which I suppose means that I’m permanently mad—never mind—I’m very crusty, because you’ve got the influenza; and I haven’t enjoyed my day at all; and I thought I was going to, and its all your fault. However, I admit I rather admire your pictures. As for Duncan’s new style—did you know he had completely changed?—I see it is of the utmost importance. I rather suspect the influence of Van Goch [sic]. I refer to the technique of Haverstock hill—The agitation of the trees—and the angle of the tea cups. But you won’t follow me. I liked your snow scene best of all. Then I liked one called the Farm by Porter very much; and a landscape by Seabrooke.

But, I said to myself, why leave out poor old Carrington and put in this marmoreal chocolate box nymph?—and behold it was Rogers! I’m in training for the Unknown Show, and rather plume myself, as I got you, Duncan, Roger, Seabrooke, and Ethel Sands right every time. I confused Keith Baynes watercolour with you once. I don’t like Lessore. Not one was sold, at least there were no red tickets, so that I think we must start the tea room gallery. Roger was seeing Champco: [Elspeth Champcommunal]; L is seeing [W. J.] Turner, and I’ve wheedled Bobo [Mayor] out of £200—if we want it, and I see that the udders of our friends are full of gold and only need gentle manipulation. The question is—will anyone keep up their enthusiasm after the first quarter?—when the cups are cracked, and one of the waitresses has been seduced, and somebody has quarrelled with me—which reminds me, Inez loathes me; and I’m universally hated by women, they say, for being such a domineering character, so crafty, dishonest and insinuating. Yet I adore them—all except Inez: Mary and I are respectable enemies.

I must now stop this charming letter; though I’ve just begun to talk about myself. The Daily Mail says that Leonard has written one of the greatest stories of the world [Pearls and Swine]. In consequence we are flooded with orders, and were photographed this morning for the Sphere—as an advertisement merely. My feelings as an artist were ravaged;

Please send if only one line to say how you are.

Its hopeless to impress wisdom on you.

Yr B.

Berg

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1179: To Vanessa Bell

Sunday, May 22nd [1921]

Monk’s House, Rodmell [Sussex]

Dearest,

I was very glad to hear from you, the account of Miss Lloyd delighting me. What a nuisance about Versailles! All my party must be removed from the terrace to a back street. I don’t think your proverbial wisdom meets my arguments about the influenza. But your blood be on your own head: My poor husband has been ill for 10 days with some disease of the inside. However he’s better now, and here we are, like a sensible couple, recuperating.

Haven’t I been wonderfully discreet? Theres Carrington and Ralph [Partridge] gone and got married yesterday and I said nothing about it. Yet I was in the thick of it and gave motherly advice. Poor Carrington is a little uneasy, as indeed I should be in the circumstances, and they’ve left for Italy. She had to break the news to her mother, who endeavoured to explain that there is a certain thing the man does on the first night, by pointing to a bee copulating on a flower—but she broke down—and Carrington couldn’t get her to proceed. “I think that lump on the back is a gentleman bee” was as far as she got.

Then there’s been a tragedy as usual—Michael Davies has been drowned bathing at Oxford—Arthur Davies’ son. How amazing it is the way fate pursues them!—He was extraordinarily nice, I believe—I’ve just had a letter from Madge [Vaughan], asking to come and stay with us at Hogarth, because Lytton dedicated his book to me, which she thinks a work of genius, and therefore there must be so much in common between us, and “I have never been able to reconcile myself to the drabness of my part in life—I am scarcely grey at all. My hair is almost wholly black still” and so on. I’m afraid there’s no way out of it. But I have arranged with Roger that we are going to put her through her paces. “Now Madge, whats all this nonsense about Chastity?” I’m going to begin, and then I shall bring in the loves of the schoolboys.

Still it will be a very harrowing visit—think of all the questions and exclamations.

We had a party the other night to tap Desmond—that is we had him and Molly, made him drink 2 bottles of wine, and then set Miss Green [Leonard’s secretary] to take down his talk in shorthand. It worked perfectly, as he talked for 2 hours, but Miss Green says it is the dullest thing you can imagine to read. Molly has had her hair dyed, not very successfully I think. At least the dye is too much like the yolk of an egg on the top, leaving black beneath. She looks much younger, but rather shady and like someone at the seaside—We didn’t tell Desmond what we were doing, so don’t write and tell him, will you, in one of your strange moods of expansive hilarity. Then Karin gave a great tea party to have the honour of meeting Lady Colefax. I didn’t go, on principle, being rather on the high horse about London society, and daily refusing invitations which other people would give their eyes to accept. A splendid tea was spread, and Colefax never came. Poor old Karin is very open and humble, I must say, and takes this sort of thing like a nice mongrel dog—which you and I wouldn’t stand. Now I have no more news that I can think of—except that Gerald Ritchie is dead and buried, poor man, after rushing about London for six months buying melons and grand pianos and ordering the police to shadow his wife. In short, he was not altogether compos, and everyone is very glad to have him safe at Kensal Green [the London cemetery].

Affection I know you don’t care for; so I will give you none. Art criticism, as you observe, is not my strong point; so I wont tell you what I thought of the Unknown Show. There was a large picture of a tea party in one room. Roger stands out quite unmistakable. Clutton Brock pounced upon him in the Times and made him very miserable.

Now, my lovely Dolphin, with the spangled tail, the sea-blue eyes, and the heart of a fish, please rummage about for the old pen which Duncan saw somewhere or other a few days ago and write and tell me how you have seduced from me my solitary non-admirer—for Eliot never admired me, damn him.

{Is it true that Clive is chased around Paris by both the female cockatoos one outdoing the other in elegance and artifice, and he remains cool as cucumber, talking at the top of his voice about art and civilisation, and drinking enormous bumpers with male companions? Madame Grave [dressmaker] gave me, hints of this. At least I gather that Mary has a ruby coat, all sequins.}

We go back tomorrow, so tell Duncan to address his letter there. And do describe a dinner at a café and how you artists talk. Please do. Just scribble down about pictures and so on. Who are the young artists nowadays?

Your B.

Berg. {Excluded passage restored from Virginia Woolf Miscellany. Number 8. Summer 1977.}

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Letters 1180-1208 (June-December 1921)

1180: To Emma Vaughan

June 2nd [1921]

Hogarth House, Richmond

Dearest Toad,

I should think that everything depends upon the merit of the Count’s pictures [unidentified]. The usual arrangement is, I think, for the owner of the gallery to ask an artist to exhibit, hoping to recoup himself by a commission on the sales. If his work is good, it would be quite easy, I imagine, to get Roger Fry or someone to give him an introduction to one of the usual galleries. There is a new gallery just started in Grafton Street, called the Independent Gallery which is by way of taking modern work. Vanessa knows the owner well; but without any of his pictures to show, it is difficult to see how to make arrangements. If you have them sent over, I’m sure Nessa would look at them and give you her advice. Her address is 50 Gordon Square. I will tell her about it when I see her.

Its ages since we’ve seen you. How are you both; and is it true that Marny’s halo is now visible on dark nights from Kensington to Hammer-smith? I hear from Madge [Vaughan] about her novel [A Child of the Alps].

Your V.W.

Sussex

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1181: To Molly Maccarthy

[20 June 1921]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

My dear Molly,

What a pity it was that I couldn’t see you!—but my head was so fuddled with sleeping draughts that rational conversation was impossible. Are you still unhappy? And why? and won’t you write to me here—and explain everything. We are here for another week and there’s nothing I should like better than a long letter from you.

I am reading the Bride of Lammermoor—by that great man Scott: and Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence, lured on by the portrait of Ottoline which appears from time to time. She has just smashed Lawrence’s head open with a ball of lapis lazuli—but then balls are smashed on every other page—cats—cattle—even the fish and the water lilies are at it all day long. There is no suspense or mystery: water is all semen: I get a little bored, and make out the riddles too easily. Only this puzzles me: what does it mean when a woman does eurythmics in front of a herd of Highland cattle? But I must stop.

Please write.
Your V.W.

Mrs Michael MacCarthy

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1182: To Vanessa Bell

[June 1921]

Monk’s House, Rodmell [Sussex]

Dearest,

Your account of Dodder filled me with delight. I rather expect your letter will have exterminated the beast, as I have never heard a word from her since our Dreadnought affair. I wrote and told her what I thought of her then. But what a pullulating monster she is! I wish you could see her again and trounce her—or that I could. One forgets that these horrors still exist. My only triumph is that the Ritchies are furious with me for Mrs Hilbery; and Hester is writing a life of Aunt Anny to prove she was a shrewd, and silent woman of business. But this is nothing to compare with Madge [Vaughan] and Dodder.

I’m practically all right, and slept without a sleeping draught last night. I wish you’d ever undergo my horrors—bed for a week—no writing for 3 weeks—and milk and all the rest of it. We come back on Monday, and I’ll come to tea one day next week.

My great excitement is that we’re making a beautiful garden room out of a toolhouse with a large windows and a view of the downs—you will never see it, so I will say no more. But do you think we could spout [sell] the Lawrence drawing of Thackeray? Having bought the Porter picture, I’m rather hard up, and yet improvements here are a great seduction. Or did we sell it? I suppose this is the season for Americans.

Do please write another letter. I get immense pleasure out of them.

Of course, I should find Mary considerably more trying than Dorothea. In fact I think you must be a miracle of broad minded magnanimity—I mean what I should dislike would be finding her there as a matter of course, at 46 [Gordon Square]. I would rather find Virginia Woolf. By the way, Eliot was so desolated at not dining that night, and meeting you I suppose, that we must set up another party.

Tell me about Mary’s party. Don’t go on the char a bang. They always upset. Here are a few flowers. The garden is burnt up but we get peas strawberries beans and lettus [sic]. I sit out most of the day reading the Waverley novels which are superb and all last night I dreamt of Julian. We were buying eclaires together.

Yr B.

I’ve been lent Lawrence’s novel about Ottoline [Women in Love]. Shall I ask if you can have it? It’s fearfully long, but Ott: is there to the life, and Pipsy [Philip Morrell] too.

The country is amazingly beautiful. I can’t think why one doesn’t live here.

Berg

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1183: To S. S. Koteliansky

June 25th [1921]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Samuel,

Do you think you would be so very kind as to send me 100 cigarette papers? I did not bring enough, so that if you could send them at once, I should be more than grateful.

I am reading Women in Love. It is much better than the Lost Girl I think, and I wish I had reviewed it in the Times instead of the man who did—for I thought him stupid and unfair. I can’t help thinking that there’s something wrong with Lawrence, which makes him brood over sex, but he is trying to say something, and he is honest, and therefore he is 100 times better than most of us.

I am practically all right, but we are staying till Friday to make sure. Then I hope we shall see you: but you will not find that I have learnt Russian.

Yours ever,
Virginia Woolf

Our house is shut, or I would not bother you about the cigarette papers.

British Museum

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1184: To J. C. Squire

Aug 14th [1921]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

Dear Mr Squire,

In reading your article in todays Observer, which I did with great pleasure, I was interested to find you quoting the lines beginning

He did but float a little way.

Years ago I saw them quoted in a book of letters as if they came from an old poem. Later I found them in one of [James Russell] Lowells poems. I have often wondered how he came to write them—whether he was imitating or perhaps adapting an older poem, as they are not much in his style. I haven’t got his poems down here, but I am pretty sure that the poem they come from is one of his earliest.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

George Lazarus

[]

1185: To J. C. Squire

[August 1921]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

Dear Mr Squire,

To return for the last time to Lowell—I am not a profound student of his works, but the lines quoted seemed to me a great deal above his usual standard,—certainly in the manner of some older writer—though overlaid with the 19th century. What I should like to prove is that he imitated them consciously. He was my Godfather. I dont like to accuse him of plagiarism.

Would it be possible for you to come and spend a week end here? Saturday the 27th would suit us: Leonard agrees that it is a very long time since he has seen you.

I have not been allowed to do any work for the last three months, as I have been ill, and am only just recovering. But one of these days I should like to send you something.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

George Lazarus

[]

1186: To Roger Fry

[Aug. 29th 1921]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

My dear Roger,

KT——KT

That is Leonard’s cryptic message [chess]. Nor have I anything remotely resembling the intellectual to add. I have been plagued with all sorts of minor ailments since we came down, and thus led a dull, dreary, scarcely human life—until last week, when I recovered, and thank God, took to writing again. But why did they invent a nervous system?

Then, having become very ambitious about our garden, we hear that the Squire [J. M. Allison] is going to build a villa overlooking it. He is only a sham Squire too; and altogether the prospect of having Ted Hunter in the orchard is so distressing that we are off to look at a farm in the meadows near Ripe [Sussex]. There’s nothing I enjoy more than looking for houses, and imagining that I am going to find the very thing, so I don’t much mind. But the truth is this bit of the country is becoming picturesque. Old gentlemen sit sketching—I watch them through field glasses. You know how they do it—a grassy road—a few cows—a child in pink—perhaps a goose in the foreground. Now a dead horse has just gone by in a cart. You know my passion for sensation. I try to make Leonard come and look at it—but he won’t—He is writing a review. What he longs to do is to find some excuse for exposing Murry publicly. Every week there is an article in the Nation which sends the blood to his head. Last week it was about you—the architecture pamphlet—too futile, I thought; all about the greatness of Professor Lethaby, which you don’t realise. (Now another horse has gone by—this time a brown one, alive). I think Murry is profoundly perverted: I mean all his criticism, and his fury, and his righteousness, and his deep, manly, honest, sturdy, stammering, stuttering, endeavour to get at the truth seem to be a desire to stick pins—but he doesn’t get them very far into you.

I have been reading Henry James—the Wings of a Dove—for the first time. I have never read his great works; but merely pretended. Certainly this is very remarkable—I am very much impressed. At the same time I am vaguely annoyed by the feeling that—well, that I am in a museum. It is all deserted. Only you and I and Melian Stawell and some wretched little pimpled spectacled undergraduate, and say Gilbert Murray, are to be seen. It is vast and silent and infinitely orderly and profoundly gloomy and every knob shines and so on. But—I am too feeble minded to finish—besides, little though you believe it—they are actually burying the white horse in the field; a man has arrived with two pick axes.

Please write again. It was really delightful to hear from you; I bubble with chatter—I mean I should, if only you were here. Leonard and I spent part of our honeymoon at Vauclure—We went to a village play. We also saw Mistral. I’m trying to impress you—but its not a bit of good—

Yours ever
V.W.

Sussex

[]

1187: To Lytton Strachey

Aug. 29 1921

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

What a devil you are not to write oftener—considering your command of the language.

When are you coming? That is the purpose of this letter. We want to avoid an encounter between you and Jack Squire. Yes: it is quite true; he has been asked.

I’ve seen nobody; I have done nothing. All sorts of plagues descended upon me, very wearisome, but, thank God, suddenly disappeared. I’m now recovered, gained 6 lbs; and we’re off to look at a farmhouse. Ted Hunter is going to build a cottage overlooking the orchard; I believe him to be a partner of Haynes. And one hears Mrs Shanks, over the wall, asking Shanks whether he’d like his cocktail mixed. The worst of it is that the country is lovelier and lovelier. We have put brick edges to the flower beds. We have a garden room. Tell Ralph that every flower that grows blows here. We have pears for breakfast. I have taken out a subscription to Lewes free library, which exactly suits my case. But even there Lytton Strachey predominates. I want to turn an honest penny; and behold, when I come to write about old Mrs Gilbert [unidentified], it runs of its own accord into two semi-colons, dash, note of exclamation, full stop. Do you recognise your style?

I’ve not seen Charleston; but L. has. Mary, Sprott, Duncan, Clive, Maynard (very argumentative), Nessa, refusing like all Stephen women to lie down and drink milk, or go to bed before 2 a.m.; Clive writing an article upon the obscure, which can’t be done without consulting Virginia. Virginia rather testy; says she’s not obscure; Duncan offers to come over—bicycle broken; Mr Botten’s horse drops dead in the field of strangled guts—but this probably belongs to Rodmell news, and is indeed all I can think of—The Literary Supt. by the way, says that Prewett is a poet; perhaps a great one.

So do come, and let us know, and we’ll keep off the Squires and the Shanks.

Yr. V.W.

I am reading Evan Morgan’s novel: “Je suis vaincue,” and she sobbed on his breast, clinging to him. Both were exhausted, the emotions of the soul had overpowered, them, they fell half fainting against the cool grey stone, and there… they leant in the twilight against the protecting buttress of the House of God, the God of Love and of Life.”

Frances Hooper

[]

1188: To J. C. Squire

Aug 30th [1921]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

Dear Mr Squire

We shall be delighted if you will suggest a time—either a week end or two nights in the week—after next week—that is after the 12th.

I think you know how to get here. Indeed I saw you being bowled out not so very long ago, in the meadow. By coming in the morning one can catch the train to Southease.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

George Lazarus

[]

1189: To David Garnett and Francis Birrell

[31 August 1921]

Postcard

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

Please send to the above address

Anthology of Modern Poets by J. C. Squire.

V. Woolf

Berg

[]

1190: To Saxon Sydney-Turner

[Sept. 1 1921]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

My dear Saxon,

I was about to write to you: if I had written, our letters might have crossed. How pervasive and persuasive your style is. That sentence, is, I think, unmistakable Saxon.

I have absolutely no news. My disease seemed to get better, and then got worse—not very bad, but incapacitating, so that I lay in the garden room and watched the cows, and read every book in the Lewes library—which is a very good one—all the old memoirs. However, I’ve now jumped up again, and can walk, and I think it is all done with, which is a mercy.

I enjoyed hearing from you immensely—but I was mystified by your ceaseless progress through the fogs and shades and summer nights and winter darks, which seemed to continue endlessly and bring you nowhere. It was so characteristic. I could see you tapering away in a crepuscular haze towards the North Pole—an exalted figure, bound on some quest—but what?

Did you reach it? Was there nothing there? And then, of course, you turn up still in a fog (this you admit is true) and drink old Brandy at Hull. Oh what a pleasure you are to me! But this is beside the point. If you want a compass, I expect Ka, Eagles Nest, Tregerthen, St Ives, would get you one. They are much scarcer than they used to be: but tell her to go to a shop, almost next to Curnows, the bakers. I dont remember the name.

Next week Lytton comes: and then James and Alix and so on. Won’t you come? Then I would take you on the marshes, where I walk every evening: and now all the ditches are dry, so that I can explore without falling in. As I say, we have a very nice room, looking over to Caburn. There is no news really—but a succession of small excitements. All the Rectors plums were stolen, which he was very proud of; then our eggs disappeared. Do you think the same man took both? Do you think it was one of the school-children? Or do you think that our hens have taken to laying in the long grass as they sometimes do when the old hen goes broody? We have bought Mrs Dedman’s chickens; and also 2 fine geese. Geese live on nothing but grass; yet they are very fine birds; and we are killing one on the Gooses day—24th Sept. I saw Barbara in London: and we discussed names for boys. Which did she choose? Give her my love: and say that Leonard wants to read L’s Victoria. Will she send it back here: I do trust the child hasn’t in some way gnawn the cover. Another letter at your leisure.

Your aff.
V.W.

Sussex

[]

1191: To Janet Case

[Sept. 2nd 1921]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

Dearest Janet,

I am fearfully sorry to hear such bad news of you. I have been thinking of you picking your apples and watering your plants—quite falsely and envying you for I was in bed, and I thought you were up. I think the hot weather must have done for us both. However, my old horrors have given way to the usual cure of lying in bed and seeing no one and not writing a line. But oh how sick I am of wasting time like this! I expect you are much more patient—But I hope you’ll get quite well, and not keep all the china bright and polish all the beautiful chairs and tables—which I never ceased to envy—until you are. I have precious little news to give you—here is L: V. “What is Harry Johnston like?” L. “A very curious person: and Janet’s conjecture is probably correct. He is infinitely better than 99 out of 100 Imperialists, and I think fundamentally must be a very decent man indeed. He is a very sensible man, as he breeds peacocks for the table, somewhere in Sussex. He is of course slightly tainted with Imperialistic fallacy, but he is obviously naturally—an extremely fair-minded man, for instance his letter in the Times a week ago with regard to the Indians in E. Africa. I have only met him once, when I asked an awkward question at a meeting of the Anti Slavery Society and he immediately afterwards came round to me not knowing me at all and entered into an animated conversation with regard to it. He is a small man with a very large round face, and is I believe perpetually dying.”

Leonard adds that he thanks you very much for your review of his book [Stories of the East]; which he liked.

The last people I saw were James and Alix, fresh from Freud—Alix grown gaunt and vigorous—James puny and languid—such is the effect of 10 months psycho-analysis. I read nothing but old memoirs which I take out from the Lewes free library and find entrancing. I am now going for my evening stroll in the water meadows and wish I could turn in at Windmill House.

Love to Emphie. Please let me know how you are.

Yr. V.W.

Sussex

[]

1192: To Vanessa Bell

[September 1921]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest,

I hear from Duncan that you’re expecting Mary [Hutchinson] tomorrow—in which case I think it would really be better if I didn’t come, but came on Monday to dinner instead. Would that suit you? If anything it suits me rather better. I’ll come then unless I hear.

I know I should either sulk or chatter, and then M. wd sulk—besides I’ve got several matters to discuss with you in private (which doesn’t mean anything exciting—only business etc—

Yr B.

Berg

[]

1193: To Clive Bell

Tuesday [13 Sept 1921]

Monk’s House [Rodmell, Sussex]

My dear Clive,

We are very much pleased that you enjoyed seeing us—as we did you. I suppose that ‘atmosphere’ is what one never, never realises for oneself. But alas, we can’t go into the matter on Friday, as we should like, as that is Leonard’s day in London.

Perhaps you would come over one day next week—Monday or Tuesday. Perhaps Mary would come too? I have heard so many versions of our quarrel, that I should like to decide with her which is the one we ought to believe.

I will say nothing to Jack Squire—after reading his little book of poets, I doubt whether there is anything to be said. Still, for the honour of English Literature perhaps I ought to.

Forgive this writing. Age and imbecility and a walk to Rat farm have undone me.

Yr V.W.

Quentin Bell

[]

1194: To Vanessa Bell

[mid-September 1921]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest,

Hester has written as you see. I have no letters—but perhaps you have?—or have you any of father’s?

God knows when I am to see you. Perhaps I might come over and spend a night Thursday or Friday next week? Only I can’t be certain of the day, as I have now taken a turn in the opposite direction and wait for events which never happen—But, of course, they will.

How are you? And is it true (I have it on good authority) that (but I mustn’t be indiscreet) I mean have you forgotten me? Well, I dont mind if you have. So there. You’ll miss my letters though in France. Leonard says you wont. I have a bet on with Lytton about it.

Here is Nelly, so I must stop.

Yr B.

I suppose you wdn’t come for the 24th? When Eliot will be here?

Berg

[]

1195: To Vanessa Bell

[early October 1921]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest Dolph:

We think you had better choose what size you like—Our Tolstoy was Crown 8vo: Kew Gardens was Demy 8vo: Roger is having a square size which is being cut for him. We can really do any size you like.

I should like of course to see you, but the difficulties seem great. The pedals of my bicycle spin round and round without moving the wheels. But if you would let me know any day that suits you (we leave on Thursday) I would drive in and meet you, and drive you to the train again.

Has Duncan let his Fitzroy studio? Would the person like to let to me for our dinners now and then?—I should like the name anyhow.

Please explain to Quentin that the flotilla which he wanted has, of course, gone out of fashion; so I got the nearest thing, but I hear they catch large live—or almost live—fish, so my magnets will be very dull. However, I should like them, if he doesn’t.

The Clergyman is coming to tea—What an excitement!

Yr B.

Berg

[]

1196: To Roger Fry

Oct. 17th 1921

Hogarth House, Richmond

My dear Roger,

Your letter arrived precisely one hour ago, and here I am sitting down to answer it. Whether the answer will be sent is, of course, another matter. Your last—slightly tipsy, very brilliant, sympathetic, inspiring and the best you ever wrote,—sent me flying to the inkpot, but when I read my production and compared it with yours my vanity as an author refused to be pacified. I can’t endure that you should write so well. If you want answers let your letters be like bread poultices: anyhow I tore up what was, I now think, the best letter I ever wrote. Would you like it if I dashed off a little sketch of the eclipse of the moon last night, which entirely surpassed your great oil painting of the Rape of Euridyce—or whatever it is?

You will say that you don’t have eclipses of the moon on the shores of the Mediterranean. Well, its true we have been having the devil of a time—the influenza. Leonard refusing to go to bed; Nelly like a hen run over, but unhurt, by a motor car; Lottie something after the pattern of an intoxicated Jay: the house ringing with laughter and tears. Do other people go on like this, I sometimes wonder, or have we somehow (this includes you, by the way) slipped the coil of civilisation? I mean, we’ve jumped the lines. There you are bathing naked with 50 prostitutes; yesterday we had Goldie [G. Lowes Dickinson] to tea. I do my best to make him jump the rails. He has written a dialogue upon homosexuality which he won’t publish, for fear of the effect upon parents who might send their sons to Kings: and he is writing his autobiography which he won’t publish for the same reason. So you see what dominates English literature is the parents of the young men who might be sent to Kings. But Goldie won’t see this—having a mystic sense, in which I am deficient. He was as merry as a grig, though; and had forgotten whatever it was—the ruin of civilisation I suppose—that used to distress him.

Tonight we go to Weybridge to dine with Mrs Forster and read an address upon article 22 of the Covenant. Wells has asked us to a party. George Booth has asked us to another. Life, as you see, whizzes by with incredible rapidity, and its all I can do to cling to my arm chair in Richmond, and add page upon page to a story which you wont like but will have to say you do. That reminds me of the Nation; of Murry; of Sydney; of a thousand things which I long to say but can’t see how to get in on this sheet of paper. Murry has bred in me a vein of Grub Street spite which I never thought to feel in the flesh. He has brought out a little book of those clay-cold castrated costive comatose poems which he has the impertinence to dedicate to Hardy in terms which suggest that Hardy has adopted him as his spiritual son. Thank God, he is soundly drubbed in the newspapers. But his article on you has drawn his fangs for ever; he has no sting: all one hopes is that he may bite each one of us in turn before he is finally discredited and shuffled off to some 10th rate Parisian Café, where you’ll find him, 20 years hence, laying down the law to the illegitimate children of Alaister Crawley, Wyndham Lewis, and James Joyce. Eliot says that Joyce’s novel [Ulysses] is the greatest work of the age—Lytton says he doesn’t mean to read it. Clive says—well, Clive says that Mary Hutchinson has a dressmaker who would make me look like other people. Clive has cut his hair, drinks wine only once a day, says eggs and sausages is his favourite dish, and comes to Richmond to confess his sins—after which, I suppose, he sins them worse than ever. But he is trying to reform.

Love to Nessa—I don’t write to her on principle. Nor do I read over what I have written to you: but now, send me another.

V.W.

King’s

[]

1197: To Vanessa Bell

Oct 24th, 1921

Hogarth House, Richmond

Dearest,

Well, so you have arrived [at St Tropez]. The vision of large hats against a translucent sea and the white legs of prostitutes is I admit very attractive; oh and the butterflies: how they make my mouth water—the apollos, the white admirals, the Sulphurs, the purple emperors; and Dolphin sitting on a terrace in flowered muslin drinking coffee out of a glass, and first dipping an oblong piece of sugar in the coffee and nibbling the brown bit.

Still I dont see why I should write you a letter about yourself. But tell me—are there great spear shaped bunches of cactus? Oleanders? Perhaps Oleanders are too romantic. I have enough without them.

Ottoline has been in London—in fact she has had another seizure in the grand style, racing up to the Thackeray hotel Bloomsbury, with her troupe, which now consists of Sydney Waterlow, Gertler, Brett and Countess Russell [‘Elizabeth’] in order to catch Charlie Chaplin. Ott: says that Charlie Chaplin is the greatest, most genuine artist who has ever lived. She heard that he was to be at a party given by Wells. She does not know Wells. She telephoned to Wells. She bought herself an early Victorian umbrella; put white feathers in her hair, and dressed herself in a sealing wax green silk crinoline; set off with Gertler, Sydney, Brett and Countess Russell; reached Wells’; demanded Charlie Chaplin;

But he had not come. Whereupon she took up a commanding position in the middle of the room; Her influence is said to have struck people dumb even on the balcony: Countess Russell was sent scavenging to collect notabilities. And the Wells’ utterly disappeared.

She is said to wield her umbrella with astonishing aplomb. Alas!—we were asked, and could not go, and this comes through Koteliansky, who was on the balcony, and was dragged half across the room by Countess Russell; then broke free, which created a very bad impression. At least Ottoline meeting him in the hall, opened her umbrella in his face. It is white silk, with tassels.

Do you know that when the Booths, Macnaghtens, Gore Brownes and Ritchies are alone in the family circle on Sunday night the talk often turns upon poor Vanessa and poor Virginia? What is so remarkable, according to Betty Meinertzhagen, (who came to tea to discuss her approaching suicide—she’s an actress—too large a nose, the managers say; in desperation;) is that the Booths never argue about us or discuss us but merely state the facts, which are accepted with sweetness and resignation. “Clive Bell brought them into touch with people of bad character. It is untrue that Maynard Keynes is a friend of Clive Bell’s. We have the greatest respect for Maynard Keynes. Roger Fry is, of course, a charlatan. You have only to see Vanessa and Virginia now to realise how unhappy they are. Could we have done more for them? No, dearest Dodd, we could not.” It only remains to be said that Dodd goes through severe operations constantly without a murmur, and has dedicated her eldest daughter, who wished to go to Newnham, to the care of old Mrs. [Charles] Booth who is 78, and lives alone at Gracedieu [Manor, Whitwick, Leicestershire]. “The greatest pleasure in my life, she said to Betty, was to amuse my brothers in their holidays.” But George is apt to be sentimental about you, and remembers how lovely you were long ago.

We have just bought a press for £70, and are turning the basement into a printing shop. Ralph comes every day. I walk through the woods of Richmond which are yellow, but the weather is like early May, and think of you: oh and of lots of other things: don’t suppose I’m not completely disillusioned about you, and ready to throw myself into a life where you and Duncan are merely shadows upon doors—feathers—films—I dont know what all.

Laura’s [Stephen] expenses [for her asylum] are now £100 a year above her income. The trustees therefore say that we must somehow make this good. We owe her £2,000. There is however a sinking fund; in which they have invested some of her money every year, with a view to realising a capital sum in the year 1940. They propose that we should either mortgage this, or find £100 a year between us. I am seeing Adrian, who is making investigations, on Friday, and will let you know. The trustees are affable, and do not wish to press us.

If it were not that my hair is falling I think I could still pick your husbands soul out of the flames. At least he dined here on his own asking; was friendly in the extreme; made out that he has given up drinking; advised me to go to Mary’s new dressmaker; and hopes that we shall meet constantly this winter. I’m afraid he uses us as a hair shirt though. A severe intellectual dinner with the Woolves—and then a debauch on the sofa at River House [Mary Hutchinson’s house].

Yr B.

Tell Duncan to write.

Berg

[]

1198: To Alice Clara Forster

Oct. 25th [1921?]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond

Dear Mrs Forster,

We have spent a most delightful evening reading Morgan’s letters, which I return. How vivid and amusing he makes things! They give one an extremely queer and interesting view of his life. It was very good of you to let us see them, and if ever we might read any others, we should be so glad.

I feel we didn’t half thank you for having us that night, owing to the hurry, but we enjoyed it all, and caught our train easily. Thank you, too, for sending the newspaper. The horrid lady at the lecture was so good looking—which seemed to make it worse.

It is good news that Morgan thinks of coming so soon. I find that one misses him a great deal.

Yours Very Sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Berg

[]

1199: To Katharine Stephen

[26? October 1921]

[Hogarth House, Richmond]

My dear Katharine;

I was just writing to ask you to come etc etc.

I shall be very glad to see you on Wednesday; but to be frank, I feel slightly awkward about seeing Dorothea; owing to her attitude to Vanessa. I dont want to exaggerate; but I am sure both you and Dorothea will understand my feeling.

Your affect V.W.

Berg

[]

1200: To Dorothea Stephen

[28? October 1921]

[Hogarth House, Richmond]

My dear Dorothea;

I didn’t mean this Wednesday; I meant next.

Your view that one cannot ask a friend who has put aside the recognised conventions about marriage to one’s house because of outsiders and servants seems to me incomprehensible. You, for example, accept a religion which I and my servants, who are both agnostics, think wrong and indeed pernicious. Am I therefore to forbid you to come here for my servants sake? Yet I am sure you agree with me that religious beliefs are of far greater importance than social conventions. I am quite willing to suppose that all you said to Vanessa was dictated by kindness and good will, though I do not think it struck her quite in the same way. Anyhow my point is different—it is simply that I could not let you come here without saying first that I entirely sympathise with Vanessa’s views and conduct—since, for your own reasons, you have drawn attention to them. If after this you like to come with Katharine, by all means do; and I will risk not only my own morals but my cook’s.

Yours affly. V.W.

Berg

[]

1201: To Roger Fry

Nov. 2nd [1921]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond

My dear Roger,

I feel impelled to write to you, by the fog; (three o’clock and lights lit): by the rain; by the fact that Dr Gardiner’s funeral has just passed the house, with 10 mourning coaches stuffed with chrysanthemums; and a detachment of police and postmen in long black coats. Everyone came to the window and they are even now burying him at East Sheen. Perhaps you didn’t hear, though, how he dropped dead last Saturday on the surgery steps. Richmond rang with it. And then Dorothea and Katharine are coming to tea. Tell Nessa that if she’ll write to me I will send her a dossier of letters passed on the question of her (V’s) morality between Dorothea and me: short, but very fine; ending, alas, with protestations of eternal affection on her side.

I had meant to apologise, however for—well, I think I must have sent you a silly vain egotistical letter: I think you cannot judge how intoxicating words are; how I get run away with: how I plume and preen and can’t sit still on my perch. At least I think I detect a tone of reproof in your letter; perhaps its only some fundamental difference between us: perhaps I ought to be a nicer woman: perhaps I am still inhibited by some strange quality in you—some queer light cast on you by number 46 Gordon Square. I can’t tell: and at this distance it is worse than useless to spin words, as I cannot give them the precise shade of levity mixed with concern which I require. I merely throw this out, in case you have my passion for taking feelings to the window and looking at them. But you have your fun; and I have my Dorothea: and who shall say that I don’t deserve my fate? By the way, I see that you’re all being a great success at the London Group. I see it in newspapers; you are taken seriously; but I feel it in the atmosphere. I think Nessa will boom very shortly. Clive says so too. I’m in touch with that little hop o’my thumb. But I must take Nessa’s opinion on the state of the case. Why drag in Gandarilla by the hair of the head in a letter from Paris asking me to resume more frequent intercourse?—and then there’s a lot about Elizabeth Asquith [Bibesco] and how she interrupted their tête à tête “not that we had anything much to say to each other”—Its all very queer; and to me would be intoxicatingly romantic, were it not that my hair is falling: my dress stained with paint (I am doing stencils all day long): and my temper now too crusty and cranky to be easily set aswim. I have been reading Anatole France too: and Hardy at the same time: I feel a profound distrust of the Gallic genius in literature; so light, so slight, so pointed, and the point always snapping at the least pressure: but oh how delicious—

It pours, it pours, it pours; all the roofs from my window are like policemens waterproofs. Yesterday the Thames overflowed; and one poor old gentleman, being caught asleep on a seat, was marooned in midstream; lost his head; ran up and down like a polar bear at the Zoo, while the crowd collected on the Bridge and hooted.

Please write. I shall never see you. We think of going to Rome in February and staying there.

Yr V.W.

Sussex

[]

1202: To Clive Bell

Tuesday [8 November 1921]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

My dear Clive,

I’m frightfully sorry not to have written before. First I thought you were abroad, then I made sure you were drowned, and finally we were away, marooned from postcards.

But we shall be delighted to come on Friday. Only I must forewarn you, knowing your susceptibilities, that I shall have been tramping the streets; in large boots; shabbier than ever—I’ve had an accident with my only dress. Still, I think you make too much of these things. I rather believe I am commissioned by God to wean you.

I’m glad you warned me about Betsies’ book. I shall now be on my guard if [Bruce] Richmond should propose it.

Yr. V.W.

Quentin Bell

[]

1203: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Nov. 8th [1921]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond

My dear Ottoline,

Alas!—we have people dining here on Saturday night, so that I am afraid it is impossible. Shan’t you ever come to London—or rather, since London is useless, to Richmond? I heard of you at Wells’ party, but I was sitting toasting my toes.

Far from being brilliant, I spent most of the summer in bed or on the verge of it, completely comatose.

But then life is so pleasant when one gets up again.

However, as you insist upon my catching the post, I must stop writing this very moment.

Your affate
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

1204: To Vanessa Bell

Sunday, Nov. 13th 1921

Hogarth House [Richmond]

Dearest,

You say, perhaps untruly, that you wrote your letter on Friday, 5th Nov. (Guy Fawkes day). Well, I got it last night—Saturday, 12th.—I mention this to show how prompt I am. With Duncan in the house, though, I suppose one can’t count upon getting letters posted. Why don’t you turn out his pockets on Fridays? Why don’t he write to me? He reminds me rather of the Lemur ape, who as you know gets all the other apes to feed it because it is too lazy to feed itself, and also too beautiful.

I think your plan about Keats is a very brilliant one. There would be no difficulty about printing some lines on every page; but don’t ask me this sort of question, because I always get the answers wrong. However Leonard corroborates this. By the way, Rogers cover paper was not designed by Carrington; I get it from a little man in Holborn; it is clearly an imitation of the Kew Gardens cover.

But you want to hear about Dorothea [Stephen]. I enclose a copy of the letters. I don’t see that I was indiscreet; and I am sure I triumphed; but only with the mind. She came to tea, of course, with Kate; devoured huge quantities of muffin and cake; and so oppressed me with her moral depravity—her sheer repulsiveness and obtuseness and stodge—that I was practically fainting. Really, she makes one dizzy with dislike. It all came over me at the first sight of her—She said how d’y do in her condescending way, and began to eat like a poor woman at a charity tea, fast, stealthily, every crumb, thanking me with insincere sweetness; but happily Leonard had her. He loathed her. They talked about Ceylon. Meanwhile poor dear old Kate half blind, all blurred and worn and misty, kept eating butter by mistake for bread and putting her cup down on the tea pot, crunched up in her chair, with her hat over her eyes, and those good leather gloves that she always wears, and shoes like some old statues. She told me about Laura; who is the same as ever, and never stops talking, and occasionally says, “I told him to go away” or “Put it down, then”, quite sensibly; but the rest is unintelligible. Then I was accosted by Dorothea. “Virginia, do you like having that book about the Queen [Lytton’s Queen Victoria] dedicated to you? I should. It seems to me a very intimate kind of book. But I do not know that I should like the Brahmans to read it, or the Americans. You see, we can laugh in the right places, because we understand; they would laugh in the wrong, because they do not understand. I should not like that.” Does that bring her back to you?—her odious selfcomplacency; her extreme brutality—I felt as if she had a thick stick as well as a thick leg; and if I did anything unseemly she would kick and beat. She lives in a village; can’t talk a word of the language, which is Candarese; learns sanskrit with a pundit, and intends to expound the fallacies of Buddha. I pretended that I had not heard of her book. Being excessively vain, she was furious. “Then you do not read your Literary Supplement. There was a very long review of me there—by an exceedingly ignorant man. I also had one in the Indian Observer. That was slightly more intelligent.” As she stumped out of the house she drew herself up, pressed her hands to her forehead and muttered some gibberish which she said was the Eastern form of farewell upon leaving a dear friend for some time. “How long will it be?” I asked. “Five years” she replied.—Thank God!

I have got led away in my fervour. There were various other things I had to tell you, but my hands are so cold I can scarcely write. Winter is upon us; fog, frost, every horror. One creeps about the house longing only for bed. Even without a cold, one’s nose drips perpetually. The influenza is rampant, and it is the fossy influenza, in which all one’s teeth drop out. Ralph is very obstinate and crude. He and Leonard argue incessantly; and then appeal to me, and I have been thinking about something else.

Oh but I must tell you! I am getting into mischief. At least I think there is every probability that I shall be in mischief within a day or two. It is all your husband. I told you how I had a second letter from him, regretting our separation—And so we dined at 46 two nights ago, and there was Mary and Maynard and Aldous Huxley; and as I was going Mary took my hand and pressed it and said “I don’t at all like this plan of quarrelling with you. Will you come and see me—will you come next week?—Will you come anytime you like? Please do.” Of course I pressed her hand—it is an exquisite claw and she has a new coral bracelet—and said, “yes”; and I am going. Well?---

Lord! I’ve just remembered another bit of gossip—but this, on your honour as a Dolphin, you must only whisper to the waves of the Mediterranean, if to them. You will see that indiscretion would have very serious results. I should be ostracised—a long word—Ask Roger what it means. You remember our friends the Waterlows. Well, Sydney has been getting more and more intolerable. He goes down to Oare for the week end and complains that the flowers have come up red when they ought to have been blue. He complains of the eggs, and the beds, and the beef, and the pudding. Nothing that Dawks [Margery Waterlow] can do, nothing that she can wear, say, or insinuate, pleases him for a second. Yet her oven is the best in Wiltshire, her Buff Orpingtons [chickens] the admiration of the village, and her brats, though the ugliest, the furthest on for their age, and the healthiest. This went on all the summer—Sydney coming down, grumbling, going away again. At last Dawks could stand it no longer. She determined to separate. She refused to allow him to come. He sat in London and considered what to do. He sent for Desmond. Dawks sent for Molly. After long deliberation and envoys going to and fro—Dawks still refusing to see him—the MacCarthy’s persuaded them to go to Germany for six weeks alone together. They have just returned. No one knows yet what the result is: but why trailing Dawks unter den linden for 6 weeks should reconcile one to spending the rest of one’s days with her, I know not; or for that matter watching Sydney eating sausages in a beer garden.

Molly’s sympathies are all with Dawks. But the animals ought to be in the Zoo—that is my feeling.

Please let none of this get to Gordon Square.

There was another piece of gossip much better than this one, on the tip of my pen; but I’ve entirely lost it, as I wrote. What could it have been? Anyhow I’ve no room—We’ve been asked to Garsington—but that wasn’t it; Lord Tennyson’s second marriage has turned out unhappily, and he finds his chief comfort in marching slowly with Hester [Ritchie] on his arm down the Poets walk at Freshwater; Hester finds it very comforting too—but that wasn’t it; the [Adrian] Stephens are going to the Baltic in their yatcht [sic]; the Woolves are going to Rome; no; I’ve entirely forgotten what it was; and so you shan’t have it until you have written me another letter; which you must post, for letters really aren’t much good unless they are posted, remember. Dear old Saxon has broken our telephone. He rang me up every day for three weeks, without getting on once, with the result that our telephone sometimes rings all night, and when you go to answer it, there is no one there. How like Saxon. Barbara has been at Gordon Square. Poor Bob Trevelyan—poor Bob Trevelyan—Well, if one meets Bessy [his wife] at the 1917 Club on a cold afternoon with her handbag and her great boots and her nice red Dutch nose, and her liberal sympathies—one does fall in love with the Duchess of Marlborough. I did at once. She is taking Bob to the doctor. The alarming thing is that he can’t write. And Norton comes out of his Retreat this week; so I shall retire to mine; and you’ll never hear from me again, and how you’ll survive that I can’t think, though you must admit I’ve wasted a whole morning writing this letter, when I ought to have been stitching Roger’s woodcuts.

Yr B.

Thanks for the cheque; and the photograph. Do send me a sketch of the place—La Tropez.

Berg

[]

1205: To Katherine Arnold-Forster

Dec. 2nd [1921]

Hogarth House, Richmond

Dearest Ka,

Well, I thought it was high time you wrote. But after all there’s not much use in writing once a year, because there are then so many important facts to state that one can’t say anything interesting. There will be no room for my essay upon Mr Percy Lubbock, but I agree he has his merits—only he is the colour of putty and wears spectacles, or did so 20 years ago when I last saw him.

I spent the summer chiefly in bed—Oh what a damned bore! It was all very dull, and dreary and stupid—sleeping draughts and that sort of thing. But I am now arisen, and scribbling away to make up for lost time. Leonard is rushing in an express from Manchester to Durham, from Durham to Newcastle at this moment. Whenever the train stops he gets out and makes a speech on International politics, or the Cooperative Movement. He will drop into my arms at 6 tomorrow morning in a state of coma I imagine, having travelled all night. Then we are in the frenzy of our Xmas publishing season—the first edition of Roger’s woodcuts sold out in 2 days, and another to be printed, folded, stitched and bound instantly. Our partner [Ralph Partridge] sleeps in the house, and lives in the basement, where we have our fine new press. Did I ever tell you about Mrs Manning Sanders, your friend? She sent us a long poem, which seems to have a good deal of merit, and we are going to bring it out this Spring. Do you know her? Its rather exciting and altogether most unexpected.

How your description of the Provencal dancing by night in the public square made me see my old neo-pagans once more! You will think this sarcastic; it is really affectionate. Why doesn’t Gwen [Raverat] ask us to stay? I should like to have a fine set to with her once again before I die. Send my love when you write.

But when am I going to see Bruin’s brindled pelt? For God’s sake don’t let them take you for a seal and shoot you on the beach one of these days. We think we are going to Italy in February: or possibly to Greece. I don’t know, and can’t therefore make any plans. But there can be no doubt I shall be seen coming along your road one of these days. Shall I ever forget Austin Phillips [unidentified]?

Now I have answered and asked and got it all in; but rather untidily I fear. Literature has been left out. There’s nothing interesting, or very improper about it. Just life, my dear Bruin. Leonard told me to say that he had made a note of your letter—whatever that means.

Your V.W.

I liked the photograph very much. He’s an interesting little boy [Ka’s son Mark].

Mark Arnold-Forster

[]

1206: To Violet Dickinson

Dec. 6th [1921]

Hogarth House, Richmond

My Violet,

The Hogarth Press at least has the merit of making you write to me. I’m always afraid that the mongrels will oust your original bantling. Your marmalade awaits you,—but I suppose there’s no chance of seeing you before Xmas. Why not ask me to tea one day? We shall go away for that horrible festival. At this moment all my time is spent in stitching Roger Fry’s woodcuts. We sold our first edition in 2 days, and now have to provide a second in a hurry. Its very encouraging, but I wish we had a capable woman on the premises. (This is a hint that you might become our second devil).

Who admires John Bailey? I dont; and I gather that Lytton Strachey feels quite safe against John’s version of old Victoria. Still poor John is thin; he must be protected; you are his old friend and yet you laugh at him.

I wish you’d disinter my [Walter] Crum (male) for me. He’s worth 20 Johns.

Leonard sends his love and invitation.

Yr VW.

Berg

[]

1207: To Violet Dickinson

[10? December 1921]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

My Violet,

Alas! we’re in the midst, or rather beginning, of a domestic crisis—both maids down with German measles, and no char will come for fear of infection, so Leonard carries the trays and I do the beds. I think anyhow I’d better not come, as at any moment we may break into rashes ourselves. What a d—d bore! Ask me again sometime, and give my love to Walter Crum.

Yr VW.

Berg

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1208: To Barbara Bagenal

Dec. 30th [1921]

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes

My dear Barbara,

I have just stuck your photograph in my book. Many thanks for sending it. Your son is exactly like his father. But one always annoys people by finding likenesses, so I will say no more.

I would send you a photograph in exchange—but mine all got the foggy dew this summer. I don’t know how yours are so good—There is Saxon to the life.

We are just returning to Richmond; where we shall immediately be engrossed in printing. Roger’s woodcuts have gone into 3 editions;—I like to rub this in, to show you how bad a bargain you made when you deserted us for marriage and the hills of Wales and the waters of the Wye. I don’t know what news to send you—for why should you be excited by the immense excitements of this village? Mr [Edward] Shanks has pneumonia; the Squire [Allison] is selling all his land; we hope to buy a field, in which case Leonard will have the finest potatoes in the Kingdom. You must come and see our new garden room.

Saxon has completely vanished from my life. He broke our telephone early in the autumn, which he took amiss, and refuses to ring us up, or pretends that we don’t answer if he does.

However, when he came in person he seemed younger, stronger, sprightlier than ever, after travelling to the heart of Finland, and finding no one to receive him.

Nessa is as usual uncertain what to do—whether to plant the children at Gordon Square and stay on with Duncan in France, or to face family life in London. She seems more than ever contemptuous of England—What a bore it must be to be a painter, and need light and landscape, instead of a fire and a book!

I never thanked you for the wonderful condition you kept the Queen in. She came back considerably more purple and spruce than she went out.

Are you making a fortune? Couldn’t you do a scoop in apple trees—or discover a caustic?—something to make apples grow in December? I say caustic because L. is spraying our trees all day long with it.

Love to Nick and your family.

Your aff. V.W.

I am ashamed to send this letter which got stuck in a book, and has thus lost any interest it may have had. But now I can wish you a happy new year. Jan. 3rd 1922

Berg

[]

Letters 1209-1261 (January-June 1922)

1209: To Vanessa Bell

3rd Jan. [1922]

[Hogarth House, Richmond]

This is the best I can find. They say the needles are as good as can be had; and more money would only be spent on case. This cost 3/- so I owe you 2/-.

No time for more. I’ll write tomorrow.

Berg

[]

1210: To E. M. Forster

21st Jan: 1922

Hogarth House, Richmond

My dear Morgan,

It was a great pleasure to get your letter. I meet Goldie at dinner and I say “I’ve just had a letter from Morgan” “Ah, what wonderful letters he writes!” says Goldie. Clive and Maynard, who are the other guests at table, feel jealous, as I intended they should.

Does this present Bloomsbury with sufficient force? Two days later I was stricken with the influenza, and here I am, a fortnight later, still in bed, though privileged to take a stroll in the sun, for half an hour—after lunch.

But its not going to be sunny today.

Writing is still like heaving bricks over a wall; so you must interpret with your usual sympathy. I should like to growl to you about all this damned lying in bed and doing nothing, and getting up and writing half a page and going to bed again. I’ve wasted 5 whole years (I count) doing it; so you must call me 35—not 40—and expect rather less from me. Not that I haven’t picked up something from my insanities and all the rest. Indeed, I suspect they’ve done instead of religion. But this is a difficult point.

I’ve not much news. Lucas dined here with Topsy Jones, his wife, and brought a play; and I peep between the edges, and see it won’t do. Then Luce dines here tomorrow; and we are to bring out a new edition of his poems—I don’t know him, but feel like his grandmother twice removed. Bob [Trevelyan] dined here—oh—Bob was delicious! He has two white tufts above his ears like rabbit scuts; and his dear old mahogany face is alternately pig like—hungry greedy—growling—and divine. His love for the Duchess[of Marlborough] (this is Gordon Square gossip) has subdued and softened him, and he’s having his arteries vivified in order to write more poetry, and out he pulls, as usual, manuscripts—in fact he was bustling off to see a new publisher. We praised you. (I’m ashamed to put in these little compliments; for you will only say to yourself how Virginia likes praise—but it can’t be helped). As for our other friends, Sydney is attached, in a trailing sort of way, to an Irish man called Sullivan, who is, this time, the authentic voice of God. I’m all for letting things be, and even bowed before Sullivan myself the other night, hypocritically, for I didn’t think well of him—too black and hairy and singular for my taste; but I do want Sydney to settle down.

Every one is reading Proust. I sit silent and hear their reports. It seems to be a tremendous experience, but I’m shivering on the brink, and waiting to be submerged with a horrid sort of notion that I shall go down and down and down and perhaps never come up again.

Otherwise we are where we were.

I’ve now come to the point of this letter—which is this. Leonard and I are going to Italy about March 20th. Would there be any chance of meeting you there? Where? you ask. Well, it might be practically anywhere—Rome, Sicily, Greece (thats not Italy I know)—Anyhow, do think it over, and inform us in time. We should like it very much. I liked your mother very much. But it was rather a tragedy. She had prepared, I should say for some days, a wonderful dinner; and all the family silver was out. The maid (who chased us across Monument Green in the dark crying Mr Woolf! Mr Woolf!) had a new apron on. There was coffee, and a box of dates. Well, all this had to be swallowed in 10 minutes. Perhaps though I am wrong about the silver and the apron. That may be your ordinary style. Please forgive me, if so. What fun it would be to go into the matter with you at this moment—or on the slopes of the Parthenon!

Here is Leonard: here is the Nation. “Too Late in India?” occurs on the front page in the largest letters. Yes, I think it must be you. The neckties and the grammar I seem to recognise. Anyhow I’ve had a good laugh: I wish our Indian correspondent wrote more of the Nation. But I won’t bother you about your writing.

Leonard wishes me to say that he knows no one of any interest in Egypt: (I know the widow of Lord Cromer). He says things are pretty black. He has to write a monthly article in the Contemporary; and he also writes for the Webbs, for the Nation, for the Herald, for the Statesman—in short he is becoming, not rapidly, but what alarms me more, solidly, one of our public men. God knows—he may be Member for 7 universities next month.

So good bye, and write to me again. I am feeling ever so much better since beginning this letter.

Yours ever
Virginia

Berg

[]

1211: To J. T. Sheppard

Jan. 25th [1922]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

My dear Sheppard,

I was in the middle of writing to you, asking, indeed imploring you to get us tickets when I was struck by the influenza, and have only just emerged. We shall be delighted to dine with you at 7. But I dont think 2/- and a great deal of pleasure (I like you much better and for good reasons too than [R. C.] Jebb) is adequate payment. We will fight it out when we meet. Are you positive it is Feb. 10th? Someone said Feb. 1st—but I suppose you know.

Vanessa says she stays in the rooms of a Mrs Bell at Cambridge—Maynard’s Mrs Bell. Could we have a room there too? Would it be an awful bore to engage one with 2 beds for the week end?

I’d like to keep the poem, secretly, if I may. Mr Sheppard has very brilliant gifts, hasn’t he?

Yours ever
Virginia Woolf

King’s

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1212: To Lytton Strachey

Wednesday [1 February 1922]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

The one thing needed, so the doctor says, is a letter from the great master of biography. That would set me on my feet again. So please put down whoever it is—can’t be still Voltaire?—and write a long long overflowing letter.

No news here, except what I collect through Ralph—highly amusing and gratifying I must say. This refers to Maynard. The other news—how you’re a sharper—also gratifies. I guessed that long ago.

Couldn’t you lend me the proofs of your new volume?

That would be something to read. With all your faults—how is it that one enjoys reading you?

V.W.

Frances Hooper

[]

1213: To Lady Robert Cecil

6th Feb [1922]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond

My dear Nelly,

I have been in bed with influenza for 4 weeks, and I think it is high time you wrote to me.

You have been silent so long that I find it very difficult to think of you in any particular place. You may be in Westminster or Geneva or Sussex. Then, what are you doing? You have read the Memoirs of a Midget [Walter de la Mare] and thought them very good. Well, I couldn’t get through them. You have just ordered Elizabeth Bibesco’s stories from the library. I feel inclined to praise them, because all the lily livered journalists are afraid to praise the work of a Princess—even a sham Princess. My brother in law Clive, who drives about in motors with her and drinks cocktails and all the rest, says she is just as clever as any gutter snipe; and a very good hardworking woman.

I wish I ever saw you; but until they make telephones which look into peoples drawing rooms I shall very seldom do that. All the summer I couldn’t sleep, and had to lie in an outhouse at Rodmell reading through the lives of forgotten worthies from the public library.

We are—Mr Partridge and Leonard are—busy printing a new long poem by a short fat poetess [Ruth Manning-Sanders], who came to correct her proofs the other day and stayed for 2 hours and a half, like a baby sucking a coral, discussing her genius. But she was very nice, and very modest. Poetry is not like prose. Clearly these poets feel themselves the mouthpiece of God in a way which I certainly dont.

This, you see, is merely a bait to make you write to me.

I still can’t go out; and my great excitement is to open letters. When Lottie brings up my tray with only the Westminster Gazette on it, and I am reduced to reading Lord Robert upon Winston, which gives me the greatest pleasure—but does Lord Robert really read Dryden, or did you put him up to it?—when this happens, I say, I invariably curse Nelly Cecil. Surely one of her gifts is letter writing?

Your aff.
Virginia

Hatfield

[]

1214: To Lady Robert Cecil

Saturday [11 February 1922]

Hogarth House [Richmond]

My dear Nelly,

It was very nice to get your letter, which confirms me in my belief that you have inherited the letter writing gift, along with your castles, and makes me think twice before I demolish the Nellies and the Castles.

I’m now condemned to lie in bed for 2 or 3 weeks, until my heart gets right, which the influenza has put wrong. So letters are more than ever needed. I can’t say that the disease is good for the brain.

I read two lines, and go off into a trance, quite pleasant, like an animal in a hot house.

I’ve been reading the life of Lord Salisbury. I find it absorbing. What a queer character—I’m reminded, oddly, of my father. And Lady G. writes like twenty able men crushed into one. As hard as a paving stone. I mean this complimentarily. When will the 3rd Vol. come out?

Yr. V.W.

Hatfield

[]

1215: To Lytton Strachey

Saturday 8th? 9th? [11th] Feb. [1922]

Hogarth House [Richmond]

Your correspondence is about the only bright spot in my day so please continue. My lethargy is that of the alligator at the Zoo. And the alligator doesn’t have very clear ideas of Racine. A. B. W. in the Times almost suffocated me by saying that Molière, Don Juan, is tedious twaddle. Surely it is the best of the lot—so I seem to remember. Then that Mule, Alice Meynell, says that Jane Austen is a frump, and that Mr Patmore is equal to Milton and that Tristram Shandy should be read in Prof. Morley’s edition with every 10th page cut out. There can’t be anything left to castrate of Meynell, or I should do it myself. Alligators can’t endure the moderns—Peacock is what I like. You don’t know how good he is—Crotchet Castle—surely nothing survives except the perfection of prose. And you read Miss Sinclair! So shall I perhaps. But I’d rather read Lytton Strachey.

Well, if you do come it will be something to look forward to. Clive is suspended above me, like a Cherub, all bottom and a little flaxen wig. Roger looms in the distance, so let me know which day.

The infirmity of this handwriting is not entirely heart disease: I am reduced to a fountain pen. And you make them work.

Princess B[ibesco] exactly suits my tank. Poinsettias, arum lilies, copulation in tepid water, spume, sperm, semen—that’s my atmosphere. She doesn’t shock me as Katherine [Mansfield] does, all the same.

Yr V.

Frances Hooper

[]

1216: To Violet Dickinson

Sunday [12 February 1922]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

My Violet,

Alas! I have been in bed with influenza for the past 5 weeks, and have to stay there at present as my heart is invalided temporarily. So I shan’t be able to lunch with you; but thats no reason why you shouldn’t come to tea with me. No infection is left; only this damnable organ, always in my case as you know, so warm and loving, jumps by night, and gives me a slight temperature.

Only two days ago Nelly the cook said why doesn’t the tall lady whom we liked so much come and fetch her marmalade? There it is waiting for her!

Leonard sends his love. We have just bought a new press and new type and keep our partner busy in the larder, which has been turned into a printing shop.

Your Sp:

Berg

[]

1217: To Clive Bell

Tuesday [14 February? 1922]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

My dear Clive,

For God’s sake send me some gossip. It’s lacerating to pick up scraps from chance meetings in the London Library. Besides, there are masses of affairs passing through your brain every moment of which you’ve no cause to be ashamed. Here am I, apparently the favourite breeding ground of the influenza germ: but my head remains what it was;—and my heart too.

In short, devote a morning to your poor sister in law, and she will ever pray—for what?

Now what would you most like to happen?

Your V.W.

Quentin Bell

[]

1218: To Vanessa Bell

Monday, Feb. 20th, 1922

Hogarth House [Richmond]

Dearest Dolphin,

Really you are getting too eccentric—to conduct your correspondence by addressing the envelope only and putting Clive’s letters to you inside. I liked Clive’s letter very much, but I should have liked your’s better. And then Clive said nothing against me. Altogether he was perfectly discreet and amiable, save for one queer statement, which amused me very much, but which I’ve sworn not to reveal. There! That’ll make your fins water. Come back and I’ll explain all. But instinct tells me that you want to hear of nothing so much as the state of my health. Did you hear of my heart disease? Did you get your cheque? Did you think it a very small one? My heart is better; I’m still in bed though; and furious, speechless, beyond words indignant with this miserable puling existence which has now lasted over 6 weeks, and doesn’t really pay. I’ve been having visitors this last week; but you know what frauds they are. They come in and sit down and produce a bunch of violets, and then say how nice it is to be in bed, and how they wish they could be in bed, and how well I look—which as you know always makes me furious. It’s something like seeing the rabbits cross the heather in a shooting gallery. Still, I have to amuse you—thats my mission in life—and so I must rake the ashes of memory. I have not seen Roger. Roger rings up and asks himself to dinner. When told that I cant see people at night he heaves a sigh and replies that, alas, every hour of daylight is sacred to art. So he sacrifices my society, which mayn’t be long for this world, to some livid teapot. His blood be on his own head.

I have seen Adrian—perfectly charming, detached from Karin; and really a success in his own way: I’ve seen Lytton: very depressed because that dunderhead Ralph has been trying sharp practices with his publishers and, naturally, failed; Mollie Hamilton; oh and so on—too dull to write out. I had great fun with Elena [Richmond] the other day, however. I think she is quite the nicest human being I have ever met—solid—splendid—sedate—with the body of a matron and the mind of a child and the tastes of a schoolboy; so maternal to me that I fell in love with her at once—Perhaps I always have been in love with her. Well this gigantic mass of purity sat down by my side and I told her the story of George. It is only fair to say that she began it. Do you realise that she still dines with Elsie and Mrs Popham in Bruton Street, and sees Lady Sligo and the ladies Browne, and lunches with George and Margaret [Duckworth]? “I am going to be perfectly frank about your brother—your half brother—and say that I have never liked him. Nor has Bruce [Richmond]. I never did like him even in the old days.” This being so, I couldn’t resist applauding her, and remarking that if she had known all she would have hated him. The queer thing with Elena is that one never knows what penetrates, what slips off. She was shocked at first; but very soon reflected that much more goes on than one realises. I rather think she was alluding to her father and Miss Lülling. Now she’ll tell Bruce, who being a perfect gentleman will probably have to spit in Georges face in the Club. Dont you think this is a noble work for our old age—to let the light in upon the Duckworths—and I daresay George will be driven to shoot himself one day when he’s shooting rabbits.

Until Elena married at the age of 35 she was never allowed to read a book that Mrs Rathbone [her mother] hadn’t read first; and the improper pages were folded over, so that her knowledge of literature is naturally imperfect. She never unfolded the pages: they still remain folded. I think its the right way to bring up girls. Please do it with Angelica. There is nothing like the charm of a perfectly ignorant innocent woman of 40—But then I am in love.

Molly came and talked, as you said, about Michael [MacCarthy]; who is, she says, very unhappy. I sent Julian a present, but got no answer—little devil. However, I told him he neednt write. I wish next time you write, you would enclose Julian: not your dentists bill. I draw the line at menus, washing accounts, and household books.

Moxon is dead. Moxon is—or rather was—Saxon’s father; and he died after long agony, leaving Saxon in control of two households of lively lunatics, one of whom broke its leg; another had violent influenza, and Mrs Moxon was prostrated; so that Saxon, what with the burial, and condolences from public bodies, was never so happy in his life. Adrian met him, come up to buy a suit of blacks. He is probably going to set up house with his mother, and I am more than ever overcome by the supreme justice of fate—who else could have composed the life of Saxon with such mastery? Molly seemed to me rather spry; but she has grown very fat; and has curious lapses, when she looks like a seal at the Zoo.

I hear from Koteliansky that Gertler [his paintings] does not sell very well—and from Violet Dickinson that the Sitwells have been reciting what seemed to her sheer nonsense through megaphones—so Clive and I overlap. I’m afraid the parrokeet is back at his old tricks with the beau monde: I’m seeing him tomorrow:

Shall I ask Mary Hutch. to come and see me? But then I can never hide my po successfully; and one ought to wear a lace cap in bed.

[Dr] Fergusson is coming in a minute, and I’m going to make him let me out. Then I shall get back to my writing; but I’m not a good writer. Violet said “And how is old Nessa looking? ... How is Adrian looking? ... Of course, I think you were quite right about Duncan Grant—he is a great painter … How’s old Sophie? I shall never forget Fritham—and your father taking my cup of coffee. I loved your father.” and so on, without any stops, or listening for a second.

I’m now getting dull, and as you don’t like dulness, I must stop.

We think of going to Sicily on March 20th—but God knows.

Does Duncan every say that he loves me?

Yr B.

Yes, I was rather depressed when you saw me—What it comes to is this: you say “I do think you lead a dull respectable absurd life—lots of money, no children, everything so settled: and conventional. Look at me now—only sixpence a year—lovers—Paris—life—love—art—excitement—God! I must be off”. This leaves me in tears.

Tuesday.

Your own letter just come.

I return Clive, to set your heart at rest, and I should like Norton back to deposit in my catacombs. According to Lytton, he’s worse than ever, sweats profusely under the armpits, and congeals if left silent a moment.

Ott is upon me—perhaps Philip too.

What is one to do? I’m sure I should shine in your society; and for Gods sake make friends with Joyce. I particularly want to know what he’s like.

Also, do you know a Mr or Mrs Manning Sanders? The woman, whose poem we’re printing, came to tea the other day, and jumped at the sound of your name, apparently admiring your works. She haunts Fitzroy Street. Her husband was a painter till he got struck in the legs and now can only write novels. I can’t place her. She has a sister with business in Paris, rather sordid, squalid, and sympathetic—(Mrs M. S. I mean)

Berg

[]

1219: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Feb. 21st [1922]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

My dear Ottoline,

It is most tempting to hear of you in London, and makes me curse my fate more than ever. I’ve been in bed with 2 attacks of influenza for the last 6 weeks, and my heart has gone wrong in consequence. I’m ever so much better, but not yet allowed out.

Of course, if you could come here to tea on Friday—but I expect your days in London are too full for that to be possible. If it is, ring us up. Lytton held out hopes that you were going to settle in London. It always seems to me your duty to do so—If only you saw what a wretched draggled puddle London has become for nice quiet women like myself who want to sit down and talk for 12 hours without stopping you would have pity. There are Mrs Asquiths windows aglow as I pass through Bedford Square; and I feel inclined to throw a dead cat in. Only she would not notice it.

Your affate
V.W.

Texas

[]

1220: To Lytton Strachey

Thursday 23 Feb. 1922

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

I think you must now tell Clive the truth. He is evidently making himself the laughing stock of London, and his accounts get wilder and wilder. I’m not sure he didn’t say he was going to write to Shaw again. I had the whole story without any pressing (indeed the reverse) after he’d been in the room 10 minutes. It is evidently his favourite topic. He says he has shown the letters to several good judges who all agree that Shaw has been driven mad by Clive, which, says Clive, is what I’ve always foretold. “These vegetarians, my dear Virginia, always go at the top. He needs Bullocks blood” and so on and so on. I’m to see him again next week.

Well, what about Byron’s letters?

Yrs V.W.

Clive also said that your behaviour at a party at 46 struck him as extremely queer.

Frances Hooper

[]

1221: To Clive Bell

Saturday [25 February? 1922]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

I am horrified to find that Leonard left you the Henry James’ without my condition attached—that they be left at 41 G.S. [Gordon Square] on Wednesday morning at the latest. They are James’ [Strachey]. I stole them, finding the door open. Last year I stole his George Eliot, in the same way: he was seized in the night with a passion to read Middlemarch; couldn’t find it, accused me and our friendship has never recovered.

Your adroit flattery is I see, driving me to spend the half hour before tea in writing a letter. As you know, it should be the half hour after tea; and that is dedicated to L’s brother [Philip] who is about to sail for India to improve the breed of cattle in the Punjaub [sic]. He is bringing a white mongrel and a hive of bees as parting gifts. I am taking to Apiary. I have asked Desmond to let me review the Beekeepers Vade Mecum. Needless to say, he won’t. Yet my mind is just fit to go in and out of cells and dwell upon the amours of the hive. What a charming book that would make to be sure—and what a charming evening I spent last night with Saxon! I have promised to find him a house here, in which to live with his mother.

V. But what about the lunatics?

S. Um—m. They might of course come too—at least the two old ladies might—but the eldest of them, who is 90 next May, is certified. I am not sure that we should be allowed to keep her. Besides …

V. Is she quite mad?

S. Um—m—She can’t talk so that you can understand. Sometimes she shouts. She did at Christmas. Lady Young, who is getting old herself, and has some complaint, I don’t know exactly what it is—she lives at Eastbourne now—Lady Young forgot to send her anything. This upset her a good deal. She would have had no presents if I hadn’t bought her a box of chocolates …

V. But Saxon, how much money have you got—I mean by your father’s will?—

S. I have a mortgage on a house at Portslade…. Um—I may foreclose. I’d better ask Niemeyer about that…. Peonies.

V. Peonies?

S. Niemeyer has purple peonies in his garden. They come from Copenhagen.

V. Shall you like living with your mother?

S. Um—m-m. I don’t think Thersites is a good character altogether, do you?

V. Shakespeare?

S. Well, I believe there is a play by the Elder Nashe; but I meant Shakespeare.

Here is the mongrel and the hive, I must descend. But for Gods sake remember James: Henry James: no 41: Wednesday.

Yrs V.W.

Quentin Bell

[]

1222: To Violet Dickinson

[27 February 1922]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

My Violet,

What a pleasure to get your too short, but not too sweet, half sheets of notepaper at breakfast. Do make a habit—as some people, pray.

We are now driving into London to see another doctor, as my heart and my temperature still annoy me; and the dr. here, wants to get it settled. I can’t go on lying in bed.

Anyhow, you will have to come and see me if I do. I hope though that we shall get away and be all right

I was wanting to write to Nelly about her sister—but I see I have nothing to say, except that I feel more sorry for her than for most people who lose sisters. Wasn’t Lady Anne her favourite?—But one can never communicate with people in this world, and that is the great tragedy; I’m thinking of your burial feast with the black sugar cake, you see; and how we shall all be so jealous, Lady Horner of Ella Crum, Ella Crum of me, and me of the Chow dog, I daresay. I could go on writing for ever, but fate has cut this paper short—

Yr VW.

Berg

[]

1223: To Molly Maccarthy

[end February 1922]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dearest Molly,

This is one of the finest letters in the world, so for God’s sake dont spill the tea over it, but put it away carefully, for Michael’s 21st birthday, and then sell it and buy a herd of cattle.

(it is going to be a great deal better than that—I am only tuning up; preluding with a few more or less simple chords in the bass.) Ahem!

I can’t possibly answer your question till Leonard comes downstairs. Meanwhile, we will have a little conversation. I can’t think what to say—We have just had tea. Partridge has killed 2 geese, and has given us one of them. Here is the post. A letter from Clive. Elizabeth Bibesco has given him her book. My temperature is 99 pt. 2. Lottie’s womb—no, no, no—it makes me sick. Do you want to know about Miss Stanford’s womb? She keeps the milk shop. Desmond had a story about a piece of beef and a spinster’s womb. That’s what I feel about the milk puddings now. To change the subject—I am reading Byron’s letters—Thank God: here is Leonard.

Yes, by all means.

Next Wednesday.

Only understand that nothing can be provided; not drink, not eggs, or biscuits either.

Bring paper bags.

yrs V.W.

Mrs Michael MacCarthy

[]

1224: To Violet Dickinson

[1 March 1922]

Hogarth House, Richmond

My Violet,

The dr. [Dr Sainsbury] was a very nice man, but rather severe—Wont let me out till next week, and we mustn’t go to Italy in April as we had planned. What a Curse it is! He said that my old intermittent pulse had rather tired my heart, and the influenza has made this worse, and he wants me not to walk up hill until this has got normal. The temp. is influenza going on, but it is so low that it doesn’t matter. Savage of course always made out that an intermittent pulse didn’t matter—

What is a ‘murmur’?—I dont know; but I gather it’s not a thing that matters in the least.

I wish you would give a fuller account of the wedding.

I see I am writing nonsense, but that is the result of talking to a dressmaker.

Please tell me why Pr. Mary married Ld. Lascelles: what is his character; and hers; do they share the same bed; did you believe in the ceremony; I wish you wd. write this out, and we will print it. The question is whether the Royal family can still be taken seriously—my maids were cynical.

Yr V.W.

Berg

[]

1225: To Philippa Strachey

Sunday [5 March 1922]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

My dear Pippa,

Is it true, as I seem to remember, that you once suffered from a temperature that wouldn’t go down?

Part of my disease is that my temp. for the last 2 months has remained fixed at about 99 with a drop below normal at night. The dr. has tried quinine and the usual things without result. Its so little, that it doesn’t matter, but I’m so anxious to finish off this business that if you did know of any remedy I would suggest it to him. It’s nothing to do with my heart, he says, but rather keeps that back.

Forgive me for treating you like the family medicine book, but as you know, your place in my life is not that of the casual friend: no: you live in the medicine cupboard.

What day, now, will you come and see me?

The shadow of my mother-in-law hangs over this week, like that of a bird of prey—a very tattered old eagle, poor woman, but you know how they take things to heart. She has to start life again at the age of 71. Philip [Woolf] is going to the Punjaub. Clara is in New York. Bella in Ceylon. Sylvia has had a miscarriage. Freda—so it goes on—you can imagine how. All our names end in a; but, speaking into the privacy of the medicine cupboard, I have always felt myself somehow exotic. This has to be concealed. Yet I get on with Mrs Woolf. She reads Rasselas [Samuel Johnson, 1759]. Isn’t the world odd?

But how do I dare to dribble like the bathroom tap when you are all haste and energy and snatching moments to read speeches? Ah, but

No: this must cease.

Your affec.
V.W.

But what day will you come?

Strachey Trust

[]

1226: To Violet Dickinson

Thursday [9 March 1922]

Hogarth House, Richmond

My Violet,

(Please excuse what seems to be the last piece of paper in this room)

It fills me with compunction to think that it takes you an hour each way: and then you only get cold buttered bun: but you must count in the pleasure it gives your forlorn intimate. And then you leave gold-sprinkled glass on the mantelpiece. However, this is a letter of business. We want to know whether there is any chance that you would let us print the Miss Eden letters which were not included in your book—What we want is that you should write notes and an introduction. Surely this might be possible? We have never done anything of the kind. Besides, if they are as good as the others, we should sell them. Also we are probably entering into alliance with a real printer, who prints beautifully.

I daresay this suggestion is foolish and wearisome to you. If so, don’t bother to answer.

I should so much enjoy a long and intimate gossip with you; uninterrupted; hot buns;—but as I say, I’m afflicted to imagine that 2 hours are needed to bring you.

There seems some hope that Lottie won’t need an operation, but nothing is yet settled.

Yr V.

(This side of the paper is even dirtier than the other)

Berg

[]

1227: To Vanessa Bell

Wednesday [15 March 1922]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dearest,

It seems to me that circumstances which I don’t control will make it impossible to come up on Friday.

Would you be able to come for certain on Friday? Bobo wants to come; and wants me to let her know tomorrow morning. So have the extreme goodness to ring me up tomorrow as early as you like. Its little use my ringing you up. Nothing happens.

Would you add to your kindness by at once delivering this message to Maynard?

Miss Green is extremely anxious to know whether Maynard thinks that there is any chance of his wanting her for the work on the Manchester Guardian.

She has just rung up about it, and seems to be rather urgent, so I said I would try and get an answer.

She is penniless, toothless, and all the rest of it.

Your B.

I think Julian’s [Bell] letters about the best I have ever read. I shall correspond.

Berg

[]

1228: To Janet Case

March 20th 1922

Hogarth House, Richmond

My dear Janet,

It is quite useless to write letters once a year, because there is too much to say, and so one can’t begin. I shall just have to go on telling you facts, and there’s nothing that bores me more; and this huge sheet depresses my spirits, and I’ve been having influenza since Jan. 6th, and I had it twice over, and it affected my heart, and I had to see a specialist, and he said my heart must be broken of the habit of beating in the wrong rhythm, and that I must go to bed again; and I have a temperature of 99½ every day, and I take short walks, and come in and lie down, and see my friends, and read books and write stories, and don’t feel very ill, but like sympathy and attention, and ladies to write to me, and gentlemen to bring me boxes of chocolates from Bond Street—

(Long pause)

We now begin again:

Lottie Hope my parlourmaid, a Miss Sichel’s foundling, went for a bicycle ride last September and got a pain in her back and thought it was rheumatics, and rubbed it with oil, but it came on worse in November, and worse in January, till she went to her panel doctor who says she must have an operation, and my doctor says she must not do anything of the kind, and so we don’t know what to do, and Heaven help us!—I mean we are quite distracted and talk of nothing but the insides of women, and we can’t go away till she settles, but how is she to settle? As I say, God knows.

Is that enough news for you? No: I must tell you that Leonard is working very hard, writing a book, nursing his wife, advising his maids, digging his garden, and printing books. (Here he is with an apple tree in his hand: and sends love).

I know by instinct that none of this seems to you either interesting or important compared with building your own house in the New Forest. I quite agree theoretically. Nothing could be more exciting. How you keep up even your little pretence of interest in the Woolves I can’t think. You don’t do it very well. I mean I see through you. You wont get to the end of this letter without stopping to think about your doors and cupboards and hat racks. What fun it will be to see all your devices! I hope you’ve made provision for heating the linen cupboard: and then there’s the blue china, which Emphie has left me in her will.

I see a great many people, but I don’t take part in the ordinary Commerce of life, so I can’t put you in touch with the League of Nations or the U.D.C. and the new Liberal party.

Literature still survives. I’ve not read K. Mansfield, and don’t mean to. I read Bliss; and it was so brilliant,—so hard, and so shallow, and so sentimental that I had to rush to the bookcase for something to drink. Shakespeare, Conrad, even Virginia Woolf. But she takes in all the reviewers, and I daresay I’m wrong (don’t be taken in by that display of modesty.) Middleton M[urry]. is a posturing Byronic little man; pale; penetrating: with bad teeth; histrionic; an egoist; not, I think, very honest; but a good journalist, and works like a horse, and writes the poetry a very old hack might write—but this is spiteful. Do not let my views reach the public. People say that we writers are jealous. I’ve left no room to tell you all my compliments—how I’ve been asked to copy out passages from my novels for the Queen’s dolls house; which has a real bath; and a library all bound in morocco; 3 inches high; but Leonard wouldn’t allow—and as I say, I have no space to tell you my compliments—He has a good many too. [H. J.] Massingham says L. is the best writer on the Nation: But what did Massingham say of Night and Day?

So we go on: and the page is filled, just as its getting interesting.

Love to Emphie.
Yr V.W.

Sussex

[]

1229: To Clive Bell

Monday [20 March 1922?]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

I have pitched onto the sofa after a very exhausting, terribly trying performance of the Phoenix—which I hope will turn to hard boiled egg again—and remain so. My mythology is inexact—All I have to say however, is that you’re expected to dine (as well as tea) on Wednesday. Bring your spats and go to Bobo if you like: I refuse to stir. I draw up over the fire after dinner. I read Byron. I write diaries. Still, if Bobo isn’t liquified and Robin fossilised and the fiddlers St Vitused, I daresay it will be pleasant enough. But all I can call to mind at the moment is an empty floor, and gentlemen spitting and [William] Rothenstein advancing with an ingratiating smirk. The fiddlers then begin: bang goes the piano lid: a woman shrieks. This is as good an end to a party as any other. A woman shrieks. Imagine it, if you like, though romantically; we stray out into the garden: it is May, June: there are apple blossoms. Even poor dutch-faced wooden-chopped Isabel (Robin’s sister) looks like a gothic grotesque by moonlight; etc., etc., etc., (This is in imitation of Katherine Mansfield and rather better than the original)

But I am drivelling and dribbling, and can hardly hold my pen and only agitate it in order to convey to my poor old fellow pilgrim that he must bring his spats as I say—and a white tie in a band box on Wednesday;

Do you think my handwriting is that of a child of 10? But then I am so tired, so palpitating, so affectionate and, to put the lid on it, adorable, that it don’t matter how I write.

Yr V.W.

Quentin Bell

[]

1230: To Clive Bell

Sunday [26 March? 1922]

[Hogarth House, Richmond]

My dear Clive,

(No—I have got the P.O.) I compute that I still owe you 7/- I can’t possibly buy a P.O: so here is a cheque: 7+6 = 13—which may have been the cost of my dinner. I paid you 6/- so you see how it works out.

Life—life—life—what was I going to say?

Anyhow I can’t go into that now.

Yrs V.W.

Who d’you think has invited us to spend Easter with him? H. G. Wells!

Quentin Bell

[]

1231: To Violet Dickinson

Thursday [30 March 1922]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

My Violet

(Please excuse notepaper)

We are now waiting for Lottie to go to the hospital, and we have a very voluble char, and everyone is rather distracted, and Partridge has gone to Spain, and we have a great deal of work to do. Countess Tolstoi has written an autobiography which Leonard is translating: Dostoevsky has written 2 new chapters to the Possessed which I am translating.

If all goes well, we may retire to Rodmell next week for a time. I get about more, and don’t feel so shaky, but can’t get rid of this wretched temperature. The downs will cure me; I wish you were over the hill. You see, I don’t wish you actually in my garden, but only over the hill. How you whirl about! and shall you have whirled to Welwyn by the time we’re back?

Your ash tray mutely receives my ashes.

Now write again; and don’t let the dust of Mayfair seal our ancient friendship.

Yr. Sp.

What am I to do with this press cutting?

I do hate to be classed with Mrs Clifford; at the same time, a little praise, being my father’s daughter, pleases.

Berg

[]

1232: To Clive Bell

Sunday [2 April 1922]

[Hogarth House, Richmond]

Yes, if God wills it, come on Wednesday, 4.30. This implies that I may have to put you off, owing to hospitals and charwomen: but I hope not.

My hand is cramped with cold. Saxon and Miss Green [Leonard’s former secretary] are coming to tea—They have false teeth in common. But do you know what Miss Green is coming for—the entire manuscript of an entire novel—mine.

Oh but I can’t write, can’t think, can’t feel: and we dine at 7 with the MacCarthys.

V.W.

Ask me to show you Mr Blodgetts letter—Mr Blodgett of Chigaco [sic].

Quentin Bell

[]

1233: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

April 3rd [1922]

Hogarth House, Richmond

My dear Ottoline,

I need hardly say that we are going down to Rodmell on Friday—My only chance of seeing you is that we might somehow have tea together on Thursday, when I have to be in London. But you, I suppose, are engaged all the time.

I have discovered the secret of perfect health—to have a temperature of 99. I do this, and feel better than I have ever felt in my life. The doctors must have been mistaken when they made the temperature normal. Anyhow I can rush up to London and go to the play without any bad results.

Where have you got to in your astonishing progress—for so I always think of it—? Have you reached some new islands, found new inhabitants, and astonishing flowers and wild beasts? It’s such an age since I was at Garsington, and it never seems to me a house on the ground like other houses, but a caravan, a floating palace—And who lives there now?

But isn’t life awful—the way we never see each other, and only make these occasional remarks!

Your affate
V.W.

Texas

[]

1234: To Mr Blodgett

April 5th 1922

Hogarth House, Richmond

Dear Mr Blodgett,

I am glad to think that the spirit of Chaucer still lives in his descendants and am

Yours faithfully
Virginia Woolf

George Spater

[]

1235: To Clive Bell

April 9th, Sunday [1922]

Monks House, Rodmell [Sussex]

Dearest Clive,

This is a letter purely on business, and therefore bound to be dull, though if you listen attentively the note of suppliancy may not be ungratifying—which is this: after you left the telephone rang. Bobo: “For God’s sake Virginia, come and see Betty. She’s out of all bounds—desperate—if you can’t—well, it’ll be the river this time.” So of course I could: sat in a horrid subterranean cell at the Club on Windsor chairs, parted by table and blotting paper, and laid down the law to poor Betty (who is, I may say, no longer dissolved by suffering but bitter).

“If I could only get a play—a modern comedy—to act—that would be something to live for—No: I couldn’t do Mr Strachey’s tragedy.

“Clive Bell has written a comedy!”

“Clive Bell! But would he let me read it! With his name—a comedy—thats the very thing!—I could get my friends—But would he let me read it?”

All I have promised, on my word of honour, is to lay the matter before you. Would you communicate direct—Bedford Gardens—number in the telephone book—And for Gods sake, send it at once: (I have delayed). My view is that she wouldn’t perhaps act it, but might tide over her predicaments, which are not merely ambitions, but of the heart. Didn’t I leave her at a door in Greek Street where an actor lives, who loves no one? Bobo had two offers for the Street: and Sybil Thorndike sees herself in the girl, so what about the future of the stage?

You don’t care for lambs, so I will say nothing more. You don’t care for [Edward] Shanks, church bells, daffodils, the unpublished novels of Dostoevsky, or cold beef and coffee—which things make my life at present, and so farewell.

Yours
V.W.

My boast:

2 invitations: one to stay with Cecils and meet Ly Gwendolen: the other to spend 5 days at Easter playing Badminton and discussing fiction with H. G. Wells. Yes—this sort of thing does give me pleasure.

Quentin Bell

[]

1236: To David Garnett

April 9th [1922]

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

Dear Bunny,

I see it is necessary to read Mr Joyce, so please send Ulysses to the above address; I’m afraid I shan’t have the courage to sell it.

On the other hand, I do want to part with Astarte, the first privately printed edition. Old Mr Bain told me it was worth about £20—that was before the new edition appeared. Would you sell this for me, and could you give me any notion what I might expect to get? Then I shall be able to buy some more books.

I hope you’ll come and see us one day with your wife.

Yours ever
Virginia Woolf

Berg

[]

1237: To Vanessa Bell

Thursday [13 April 1922]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest,

Yes, I have been and got a box and cut the flowers,—and now must forage for string and paper all for love of you.

Shall I get a letter in reply? Well, the pen is lost. No it isn’t. Duncan had one that night to write his cheque with.

You are wise not to come into the country, unless you are devoured with a passion for work—as I am. I write—read—write—read—from morning to night. For an hour I wet myself on the high road—back to tea—Shakespeare, Joyce—and so on. It is a very exciting life, entirely devoid of human beings. But, as you say, leads to damned dull letters. Well, can’t you send me a little news? Do the cat and dog go out as much as ever?—or are they keeping the fire warm? Never did I read such an outburst of spite as Wyndham Lewis on Clive in the Herald. Why do you artists write like that? We dont. Even poor little squint eyed Murry wouldn’t.

I must write to your husband. Why doesn’t he say a word about his play? I asked him to send it to Betty. He replies with a full account of Lady Aberconway’s party and sends me some chocolates—nothing else. What is Mary up to?

We have got to spend the day at Gale [Chelwood Gate, Sussex] with the Cecils, all very old world; compared with your visit from Nina [Lamb], who according to Clive, wears an umbrella. We are also going to stay with H. G. Wells. Why do we do such things? Just to catch a glimpse of life—it don’t much matter what. All’s milk that comes to my nest, as you would say. Must I for ever invent your sayings, or shall we ever drop into the old familiar gossip? Is the shade of death between us, and is this my valediction to one who played a part in youthful jaunts and jollitries? I must weed my path. Then toast our tea: then Joyce, Shakespeare and so on. Life is too quick;

But still there’s time to kiss Duncan on the neck; select a pen; brew a little ink out of lamp black—you painters use lamp black don’t you?

Should I like Cotman’s pictures?

V.W.

Berg

[]

1238: To T. S. Eliot

Good Friday [14 April 1922]

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

My dear Tom,

Leonard wants me to say that he could not send you any Russian translations at once, but could be certain of sending something by Aug. 15th. He has in mind some interesting Tchekhov letters, which are hitherto untranslated. Koteliansky also writes to say that there are other materials, but his account is vague: Leonard will find out what he means when he sees him. (As you know, Koteliansky is a fanatic about Russian literature, and rather inarticulate). I’m now translating the newly found chapters of the Possessed, but [J. C.] Squire [of the London Mercury] has these under consideration.

As for my own story, I won’t anyhow send you anything now. I’m trying to finish off, and send to the printer, a long story; and though I mean to do this in 3 weeks most likely it will take six. If I can, I will try and write something, less than 5,000 words, by Aug. 15th: I should very much like to be edited by you, but you know how ticklish these things are. When one wants to write, one cant. Anyhow, you will not only have to fix the length—you will have to be sincere, and severe. I can never tell whether I’m good or bad; and I promise that I shall respect you all the more for tearing me up and throwing me into the wastepaper basket. When are we to see your poem [The Waste Land]?—and then I can have a fling at you.

Did I tell you that I have laid out £4 upon Ulysses, and spent an hour or two yesterday cutting the pages. Leonard began to read last night. I mean to, if it goes on raining. And then, you know, your critical reputation will be at stake.

So far I remain 99; in temperature, not age, but I feel astonishingly well.

Yours ever
Virginia Woolf

Houghton Library, Harvard University

[]

1239: To Clive Bell

Good Friday [14 April 1922]

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

Dearest Clive,

This is the sixth letter I have written this evening, my principle being, as you observe, to keep the treat for the last; only by the time one’s ordered the coffee and politely bandied compliments with the aristocracies of birth and intellect—Cecil’s and Wells—(see how proud I am!) and addressed a perhaps too familiar gossip to Tom Eliot, and also dashed off a kind of one syllable, one idea, one page epistle [to Lottie] to the Homeopathic Hospital in Great Ormond Street one has small control of pen, ink, grammar, or manner. Do you like very long sentences that cant be read in a breath? I do. It’s part of my anti-naturalistic bias.

Now Mr Joyce.... yes, I have fallen; to the extent of four pounds too. I have him on the table. His pages are cut. Leonard is already 30 pages deep. I look, and sip, and shudder. But why do I not simply attend to business, which is to thank you for the chocolates—How I relish these old world observances! You shall have a skyblue valentine next 14th of February. Indeed, indeed, you are too good. It sends me back to the old days of Peter Studd and sugar tongs: yes, in the old days there were sugar plums, and little tongses, and now there is Wyndham Lewises and Tonks: Did you read the Herald? What is the psychology of the underworld? What scurvy of the soul are they afflicted with that they must scratch in public? These questions are mere rhetoric, addressed to miles of sodden downs and pouring rain, for I shan’t get an answer; and did I ever wring a word from you about your play? True, I was stirred by the white bosoms of your actresses: Diana, Pamela, Olga, and the rest. I like to stitch a bright page to my sober one of Good Friday bells, and a child’s funeral, now being despatched in the rain. Mr Deadman [Dedman] dug the grave—and oh God!—you said a bitch was on heat for 3 days: its a fortnight. We let ours loose; she was lined in the churchyard by the Vicar’s pomeranian, Jimmy, who had lived chaste for 10 years as the Vicar’s wife told Nelly; “and now he’s lost” she said—“running wild in the Brooks” and indeed they didn’t catch him till eleven that night. The village rings with the scandal, in passion week too.

Yrs V.W.

Quentin Bell

[]

1240: To Vanessa Bell

Sunday [16 April 1922]

Monk’s House [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest,

I hope you won’t mind Nelly coming to you for the night. She has got into a state about her health, and suddenly announces that the journey up and down to see Lottie is too much, so we are arranging for her to stay at Hogarth until we come back. She’ll go there on Tuesday, if you can have her for the night.

We shall probably stay on a week or 10 days, if we can get some one here to do for us. Oh these domestics! What a worry and fidget they are!

I am coming up, I think, on Thursday next to see Lottie. Could you possibly give me lunch, either at the studio or Gordon Square?

I’ll let you know for certain, as other events may interfere. Or shall you be coming to Charleston?

At moments it is divinely lovely here—hot, birds, daffodils, blue sky: generally a moist mop of rain and mud and a cold east wind. Thank God we’re not in Essex with the Wells’, as we should be had I not told a lie.

I should like to see Julian, in order to see what difference school has made. I’ll try and buy him a swimming duck, tell him, with my love.

Yr VW.

Berg

[]

1241: To Clive Bell

Wednesday [26 April 1922]

Monks [House, Rodmell]

Dearest Clive,

Here come this moment some remarks upon Princess Bibesco, not very profound, but in payment of 17/6 which I owed Ray [Strachey] for her damnable sheet.

Well, the hail is hissing like sausages in the fire: I’m packing up. We leave early tomorrow, thank God; after three weeks incessant physical discomfort.

I saw Bobo and Robin [Mayor], and hear that there was a violent scene in the 1917 Club when Betty [Potter] attempted either murder or suicide—I don’t know which. They had a letter to say she was gone for ever. So she has, up to the present moment; but is safe at Bristol. The rhyme or reason I know not—

Writing impossible—the wash must be paid—

Yrs V.W.

Quentin Bell

[]

1242: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

[April 1922]

[Hogarth House, Richmond]

My dear Ottoline,

May we come May 27th? Leonard wants to come, and hopes to come, but says may he leave it open, and let you know later?—if this doesn’t suit you, please say so.

It will be very nice—and I would write more, but have just burnt my 3 fingers, picking up the kettle, so please excuse this horrid mess.

Yr. aff.
V.W.

Texas

[]

1243: To Molly Maccarthy

[early May 1922]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dearest, adorable, darling Moll,

Yes, you shall have the pleasure on Monday, but not on Wednesday because we are going to Roger’s lecture on Wednesday, as you should be doing, too.

But won’t our old friends ask us again?—only I cannot pitch my tune seductively because I am rushing to catch a train, in the rain, and so must refrain.

But remain,
loving, devoted too, to you.
V.W.

After all, poetry’s much easier than they make out.

Mrs Michael MacCarthy

[]

1244: To Roger Fry

Saturday [6 May 1922]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

My dear Roger,

It is so enchanting to get a letter from you, that I’m inclined to write every day—can you tell me the address of your little man who cleans carpets? sells canaries? buys old false teeth?

Here I am sweating out streams of rheumish matter from eyes, mouth, ears, solely in order to attend your lecture. I have the most violent cold in the whole parish. Proust’s fat volume comes in very handy. Last night I started on vol 2 [Jeunes Filles en Fleurs] of him (the novel) and propose to sink myself in it all day. Scott Moncreiff wants me to say a few words in an album of admiration—will you collaborate? If so, I will: not otherwise.

But Proust so titillates my own desire for expression that I can hardly set out the sentence. Oh if I could write like that! I cry. And at the moment such is the astonishing vibration and saturation and intensification that he procures—theres something sexual in it—that I feel I can write like that, and seize my pen and then I can’t write like that. Scarcely anyone so stimulates the nerves of language in me: it becomes an obsession. But I must return to Swann.

They threaten to put a knife to my throat, in which case I shall certainly insist upon your presence at the bedside.

Anyhow, it would be awfully and fearfully nice to see you. But I don’t like to scramble for your time, among the flights and swoops of great ladies who must be screaming and gobbling—for you can’t deny you are a d—d success. Passing down the Strand the other day I saw a most raucous version of your head in the Saturday Review. Being a snob, I stopped, and said to my companion, thats Roger Fry—whom I know.

Do you ever do these silly things? Suppose by any chance I can’t get out on Wednesday, when do you do that lecture in the drawing rooms?

However, I shall.

Ever your
V.W.

Sussex

[]

1245: To Vanessa Bell

[11? May 1922]

[Hogarth House, Richmond]

Dearest,

I’m afraid we shan’t be able to come tomorrow, as my heart has gone rather queer. However I hope to be all right in a day or two.

Perhaps I might come to tea on Friday? if that suited you.

Don’t you think this is the letter of a prize prig?

Yr VW.

Berg

[]

1246: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

May 16 [1922]

Hogarth [House], Richmond

My dear Ottoline,

I am very much afraid that we must ask you to let us come later, and not on the 27th—I’ve been having another attack of influenza, which has again made my heart wrong, and now the dr. insists upon pulling out 2 teeth, to see whether the germs have settled at the roots. This has to take place next week, and they can’t promise that I shan’t get another few days of fever. So it seems useless to think of coming. But please don’t say you will have nothing more to do with me—annoying as these habits are. Perhaps you would ask us later at the end of June, or July.

I no longer much enjoy the height of my temperature, and very much hope to be normal again. Still there is little trust to be put in doctors—as I think you know.

What are you doing? Do you like Fredegond’s poems—and what do you think of Karn? I should very much like to know. Mrs Manning Sanders is a shabby shapeless quite simple woman, who lives in Cornwall. That is all I know. We have met a charming young man called [Gerald] Brenan—a friend of Lytton’s, and I think we shall follow his example and buy a castle in Spain. They only cost £10 a year. Come too; and let us see what England does without us.

Your affate
Virginia Woolf

I do hope that I have not upset your plans—but probably I have.

Texas

[]

1247: To Roger Fry

Wednesday [17 May 1922]

Hogarth House [Richmond]

My dear Roger,

I was frightfully disappointed not to come to your lecture. Faintness overtook me on Sunday, and the dr. who unfortunately happened to come in, assured me that I should faint if I went up to hear you. The sight of my senseless body borne out would I thought so depress the audience that on that account alone I stayed away. I prayed all night that it might be a complete failure. Alas! I hear on all sides that it was a triumphant success. Never was anything so brilliant, so interesting, so subversive, so much appreciated: if I had fainted, no one would have minded. This is what I hear on all sides. You must admit that its pretty damnable. Now, when are you going to do it again, and when am I going to see you?

We have been in a welter of Hogarth Press affairs, and my fingers are like cauliflours [sic] from addressing envelopes. Also I may have to have all my teeth out.

But here I stop—I don’t want to snuff out all chance of ever seeing you again.

If you don’t mean to lecture again, might I read your manuscript? Seriously and honestly, it was the devil’s own luck not to come.

Yours ever
V.W.

Sussex

[]

1248: To Vanessa Bell

Wednesday [17 May 1922]

[Hogarth House, Richmond]

Dearest,

At last here’s the cheque—

Would it be possible for you to have me to tea or after tea, on Friday; then for me to have Oliver [Strachey], who was dining here alone with me, to dine at the Etoile; then to come round either to 50 or 46; then would you come too; would Duncan come too; should we in short have a little party—Only I must let Oliver know, so could you ring me up.

I’ll try to ring you, but can’t ever get on.

Yr B.

L. has to dine at the [Charles] Sangers, wh. thank G—d I got out of.

Berg

[]

1249: To Violet Dickinson

Thursday [18 May 1922]

Hogarth House [Richmond]

My Violet,

I am indeed a wretch not to have answered you before. Your £ note came safely, and has been placed to your credit both in the books of Hogarth and in the books of God. We are becoming rather full blown and important. You will receive a circular to this effect before long. It is our 5th birthday this month, and we have published 19 books.

God knows what is happening to my influenza germs. I cant get rid of this miserable little temperature, and last week it flared up into another attack, and laid my heart flat again. So now they’re going to pull out 2 teeth, and catch the escaping microbes which harbour at the roots, and vaccinate me with them afresh; the doctor thinks this may be the end of it. Well, I hope so. It keeps me hovering between bed and sofa, when I’ve a million things I want to do.

We hope to get to Rodmell for Whitsun. There Leonard is making a new flower bed, pulling down an out house, and building an earth closet. He particularly wants to know where he can buy old paving stones to make a path. could you tell us? A place near here, if possible; because this garden too is being renovated. There’s no end to his activities. All I pray to God is that he don’t get into Parliament.

Lottie (the yellow legged) has had her operation and is recovering at home. We drag on with Chars. She writes me long letters, from friend to friend, not at all in the style of old Sophie.

I’m very sorry about Nelly’s ears. To sit all day and look at the view in complete solitude seems to me dismal. We were much amused by Lady Gwendolen [Cecil] who talked politics without ceasing.

When shall we see you again?

Yr VW.

Berg

[]

1250: To Janet Case

Sunday [21 May 1922]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

My dear Janet,

I am so sorry about the cost of the house. Not to be able to start building at once must be so damnable. There’s Arthur Clough at Burley who pretends to be able to build cottages cheap. Why not let me ask him?—his wife was a Freshfield. Still, these ideas are too vague, I expect. My passion is set on houses, and I’m desolated to think of anyone held up in the pursuit.

If you’re going to be at Hampstead, we must meet. I can’t be sure about Monday, as we are away for the week end [at Tidmarsh], and I rather fancy I’m dining in London that night. Would Tuesday suit you? Of course I would come to you. That is the only chance: we go to Rodmell on Wednesday.

The dr. now thinks that my influenza germs may have collected at the roots of 3 teeth. So I’m having them out, and preparing for the escape of microbes by having 65 million dead ones injected into my arm daily. It sounds to me too vague to be very hopeful—but one must, I suppose, do as they say.

I feel much better again—in fact, it wouldn’t matter at all except for the heart, which seems to object. Why isn’t one made rather more simply? without a heart.

We’ve been sitting in the Park and listening to the Band and having a terrific argument about Shaw. Leonard says we owe a great deal to Shaw. I say that he only influenced the outer fringe of morality. Leonard says that the shop girls wouldn’t be listening to the Band with their young men if it weren’t for Shaw. I say the human heart is touched only by the poets. Leonard says rot, I say damn. Then we go home. Leonard says I’m narrow. I say he’s stunted. But don’t you agree with me that the Edwardians, from 1895 to 1914, made a pretty poor show. By the Edwardians, I mean Shaw, Wells, Galsworthy, the Webbs, Arnold Bennett. We Georgians have our work cut out for us, you see. There’s not a single living writer (English) I respect: so you see, I have to read the Russians: but here I must stop. I just throw this out for you to think about, under the trees. How does one come by one’s morality? Surely by reading the poets. And we’ve got no poets. Does that throw light upon anything? Consider the Webbs—That woman has the impertinence to say that I’m a-moral: the truth being that if Mrs Webb had been a good woman, Mrs Woolf would have been a better. Orphans is what I say we are—we Georgians—but I must stop.

Sussex

[]

1251: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Monday [29? May 1922]

Hogarth House [Richmond]

My dear Ottoline,

I am ashamed not to have written before. I have been rather knocked up by these myriads of germs.

Might we come on the 15th July? We have to visit H. G. Wells—I make a boast of it, but only by way of disguising the horror. I think we must go there on the 1st.

What a week end this has been! When England brings it off [climate], she is really better than Spain—but we are thinking of January and making our plans.

Leonard, of course, what with Parliament, press and life in general, can’t be certain of the 15th, but hopes, if it doesn’t worry you to leave it open for him.

Your affte
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

1252: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

June 1st 1922

Monk’s House, Rodmell, near Lewes, Sussex

My dear Ottoline,

You will think me far more nuisance than I’m worth.

I find that Leonard has to lecture early on Monday 17th July, so might we come on the 8th, instead.

If this suits you, dont bother to write. I can hardly form my letters, owing to the heat, which is splendid, but horrible.

Your aff
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

1253: To Margaret Llewelyn Davies

June 1st [1922]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dearest Margaret,

Why do you want to cut me off one of the things I most look forward to?

Of course I’m coming, however unworthy, and there I shall sit and take notes, in order to make a speech about you at the Guild. I admit, I don’t make a word of sense of Co-operation; but when its a question of honouring the greatness of Margaret Ll. Davies—then no one beats me.

What an awful time you’re having with Lilian [Harris]! I am so sorry, and hope it is now well over. May I come up and see her when we’re back?

We had looked forward to your visit—but come later, and it will be better. Lottie is still rather invalidish.

This heat shakes my hand, and dissipates my sense—So goodbye—and how I shall admire you on Monday—merely as a human being, of course, which is as far as my wits stretch.

Your V.W.

Sussex

[]

1254: To Janet Case

June 1st [1922]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, near Lewes, Sussex

My dear Janet,

I was much disappointed at the upshot of Emphies’ and Leonard’s confabulations, but I agree that, as usual, our elders know best. But I wish you could have come. The drawback, apart from the fatigues of travelling, is that we couldn’t have made you very comfortable, with Lottie invalidish still—But we want to pin you down now for a proper week end in August or September. Please let us settle one, after 14th August: any: now: immediately: take out your calendar and look. Surely we are somehow on the road to the New Forest.

My glimpse of you was only like a peep show—There was Janet under the tree in the garden: then gone. Just, too, as we were approaching the proper heights of unstinted self-praise.

It is blazing here: and here I am in my garden room, overlooking the meadows, waving in the heat. But when I have had my tea, I shall take my walk along the grass path, when among the multitude of my thoughts I shall think of your black tar house.

I’m so cross. Three teeth pulled out that might have lasted a lifetime, and temperature still up. Next they’ll cut out my tonsils, and then I suppose adenoids, and then appendix, and then—what comes next?

However, I must settle down to think about Mr Percy Lubbock and the Craft of Fiction, about which I have to write tomorrow, and every idea has gone under water. They were swarming last week, when I wanted to write a story.

Margaret will have a great triumph, and I shall feel very proud of my sex, and write and tell you all about it.

Yours
V.W.

Sussex

[]

1255: To Katherine Arnold-Forster

June 3rd [1922]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

My dear Bruin,

I left your letter at Richmond, and I can’t for the life of me remember whether you wanted me to answer any particular question. You said you loved me—which is very right and sensible, and also you abused all the Hogarth Press books. But we can’t manufacture genius. There they are, these particoloured creatures, and its God’s fault, not ours. Anyhow Fredegond and Ruth Sanders are the pick of millions of baskets. Consider the stuff we don’t print. A huge manuscript arrived today. Our autumn output will crack Bruin’s brains into splinters—that I promise you.

We are down here for Whitsun; Leonard planting, Lottie recovering, and I taking the dog for walks. The influenza goes on like a very respectable grandfather’s clock. I got it back again 3 weeks ago: then they said there must be germs at the roots of your teeth. So they pulled 3 out; 3 I could ill spare; and so far no result. But then I didn’t expect any. I believe these temperatures are like winds and draughts—no one can say whither they come, or where they go, and they don’t much matter.

I missed Will’s [Arnold-Forster] exhibition to my great disappointment. So far as I saw any, the criticisms seemed to be good, but then the critics are such long ears that there is little use in that. I hope they sold. But as you both seem perfectly happy, and lead lives of pure bliss, and complete sense, what does it matter?

I’m afraid Cornwall is becoming a little too exalted—there is Bertie [Russell] at Penzance, and Roger painting him—the [Manning] Sanders colony at Sennen. However, as you know, nothing will shake my belief that Cornwall is heaven: but don’t wait for me to die to ask me to come and see you. I don’t want to be heard as a strain of music at dusk.

Forgive this scrawl, and see how fond I am of Bruin to write at all, when I’ve been writing all day.

L. sends love.
Yr V.W.

Mark Arnold-Forster

[]

1256: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Whit Monday [5 June 1922]

Monks House, Rodmell [Sussex]

My dear Ottoline,

My handwriting must be on its last legs. I meant 8th July, not 18th.—If 8th suits you, then we will come without further trouble.

We are just in from hearing Margaret Davies address 1600 cooperators in George 4ths pagoda at Brighton—a great success.

The germs still live on, in spite of my sacrifice of 3 teeth.

Forgive the scrawl and the scrap of paper.

Yr V.W.

Texas

[]

1257: To Gerald Brenan

Monday [5 June 1922]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, near Lewes, Sussex

Dear Gerald,

Please tell Ralph with our love, that he is a donkey. Unless indeed more is hidden in his remarks than appears. Why should you get on our nerves at Hogarth and not here? Perhaps he meant that the Woolves are milder (he hopes) in Sussex. However, this is not an analysis, but a repetition of our statement—we expect you next Saturday for the weekend at Richmond.

The difficulty here was domestic—a maid recovering—an old friend threatening—and so on. The pound, as I said, was obviously and rightly our pound—still I’m too hot and muddle headed to argue.

We have been attending the Co-operative Congress at Brighton, perched on prominent seats behind the speakers, and there was the Mayor and Mayoress, and the organ, and addresses, sentiments of universal brotherhood, with illustrations from the animal world, which surprised me—but Miss Davies said it was a well known fact—animals love each other. Anyhow I wept and Leonard corrected proofs surreptitiously.

Oh what a bore about Joyce! just as I was devoting myself to Proust—Now I must put aside Proust—and what I suspect is that Joyce is one of these undelivered geniuses, whom one can’t neglect, or silence their groans, but must help them out, at considerable pains to oneself.

Bring him [Ulysses] on Saturday. And is there anyone in the whole world you would like to meet on Sunday? Merely say and I will wire.

And excuse this dribbling garrulity, which is due to the fact that a little human intercourse would be so acceptable at this moment.

Yours
Virginia Woolf

George Lazarus

[]

1258: To Dora Carrington

Wednesday [7 June 1922]

Monk’s House [Rodmell, Sussex]

My dear Carrington,

I have a pathetic letter this morning from my old Greek teacher, saying that Carrington’s mother has never come. In fact, nobody has come; so is there any chance that Carrington’s mother could be induced to come? The address is, Miss Case, Windmill House, Rowledge, Hants. They are wildly building a black tar house in The New Forest, on the strength of Carrington’s mother—so please produce her.

Now would you tell Gerald that we expect him between tea and dinner on Saturday: then that he might confirm this by a card to Hogarth House, which it should reach on Saturday.

Then your husband must be told that we have had Mr Dobree’s stories sent us. Further, Mr Holt, the agent, has worked himself into such ecstasy over Leonard’s stories, that he is motoring over tomorrow, and will undoubtedly put us in the way of £1000 p.a.

Then—its too hot to write, and really too lovely in this garden room to concentrate the mind, should I have one.

How I wish Gerald had come here, merely to take back a report of the flowers, vegs., lawn, and E.C.

Was Lytton favourably impressed by Murry’s effusion last week?

A little too much Uriah Heep for me—so very ’umble. Aldous in the Herald, however, poses as the simple man of feeling, but as I say, I cannot think, and find, alas, that I have lost 3 fine fangs for nothing: Cant eat my tea, and remain abnormal.

Make a plan to come here this summer.

Yr V.W.

Really, if you could do anything for Miss Case, it would be a charity.

Robert H. Taylor

[]

1259: To Janet Case

Wednesday [7 June 1922]

Monk’s House [Rodmell, Sussex]

My dear Janet,

Well, it was all the greatest success imaginable. First imagine a vast crowd assembled in a gaudy kind of tea caddy all arabesques and horse shoes and chandeliers: but the crowd has nothing rococo about it. No: the coops are sturdy, square headed, and a little drab, considering the weather. Considering Miss Davies too, who, very cool and distinguished looking, chiselled like a Goddess, and yet rather peremptory, enters, precisely at 10, all in grey, but with a dash of kingfisher blue about the bonnet. Cheers, a general standing up, sitting down etc: One of the worthys then says what an honour this is for Miss Davies: what a woman Miss D. is: how she has devoted her life: how she has changed the womens’ lot: how she is known, respected, loved, and now she will speak, and they must remember Miss D. is a lady.

Whereupon up gets Margaret: and says that the honour is not hers, but ours: (so I feel it myself)—women’s in general. At first, she was a little unyielding, and spoke rather statuesquely; but soon this utterly disappeared, and the address, which I do not propose to give verbatim, was superbly spoken—spoken as she might speak up at Hampstead, only with a mastery and fervour, never becoming shrill, and always on the right side of emotion, which took my breath away. The blessed address, which read in type, may sound too general and lofty, as she said it seemed on the contrary very stirring and particular. And far from spreading herself in mild and glorious retrospect, I thought she stood up to the Board and the movement and flicked them very energetically. One man, Leonard said, told another he thought it just what they wanted; and the other man said yes, it was a splendid speech, and the best they had ever heard. Besides, it was vivid and imaginative. And so I listened to every word; and she spoke till eleven exact, and then left off, without any peroration in the offensive sense, but as if, having spoken her mind, she meant to sit down. In short (and I am scribbling to catch post) it was as dignified and masterly as could be: and as a snob, liking birth and education, I thought to myself that I could see how she ruled them by virtue of these qualities, as well as her own particular genius, which came out, Leonard and I agreed, as we ate our lunch, quite unmistakably. Her vitality, her vigour, addressing this innumerable hardheaded drab middle class mass, completely conquered. Then came the Mayor; who chucked the Mayoress under the chin, and we all laughed. Then the Mayoress extracted 3 roses and gave them to Margaret. Then Mr Ray produced a cardboard case and took from it a vermilion gold stamped book, with an illuminated address, which he recited. Her name, he said, will always be remembered among the great. It seemed to me very true and right. Up got Margaret and said with great spirit, and some gratitude, but she was far from obsequious, “Not my name, but the names of Mrs Laurenson, Mrs Reddish etc., etc,” “and now”, she said, handing the gilt and crimson to a lackey, “Let’s to business—the pleasant part of the Conference now begins….” So she drank her water and sprang her bell.

There we left her, controlling perspiring men; and the only other thing I remember is that the Germans were cheered as if they had been our benefactors.

I am sorry to write such a confused scribble, but if I put it off, I should never do it. So you must excuse.

Directly we came here, I was of a mind to wire, and suggest your coming. If I had not been rushed, we could have arranged it; and anyhow, you might have spent the week end, even if the Conference was impossible. I am annoyed to think of it.

I have written to Carrington giving your address, so that she may inform her mother. Whitsun, anyhow, is a close time; but let me know if there is any plan I can further later.

Your V.W.

Sussex

[]

1260: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

June 9th [1922]

Typewritten

Hogarth House, Richmond

My dear Ottoline,

Our correspondence is now so voluminous that I must use the typewriter—with disastrous results, for I cannot think, or spell in print.

We like the Bussys; we should like to meet them; but—we have to confess—we cannot speak French. An awful silence falls. Simon gets cross. He talks French—we answer in English. Somehow this makes both languages unintelligible. So we may ruin the party. So would you prefer it if we came as we said once upon a time, when the correspondence was still young, on the 15th July.

Leonard might have to go that night. But you have only to speak; and, though I should prefer a letter, really and truly you need only write a date on a post card.

Thank you for the dr’s name. I am rather indisposed at present, having lost my three good teeth, to submit to doctors again. The germs dont worry, so long as they keep below 100. If they swarm again I shall have to take steps.

I hear from Morgan this morning that he enjoyed himself with you. And as he never tells a lie this is a very good Collins to have.

[handwritten]

Here I have come to an end of all that can properly be said on a typewriter, and must finish

Your affte
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

1261: To Vanessa Bell

Wednesday [14 June 1922]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Shall I come to tea on Thursday, that is tomorrow? Friday seems doubtful, so this is your only chance. Unless stopped I will come—but don’t put yourself out, as I may even so be prevented.

{Well,—did you hear my attempt on the male cockatoo, Clive? It was carried on, at full pitch, in the street, under the window, at which the female [Mary H.] stood! and with some success. At least I’m to invite him again and there are to be explanations. But I’ll tell you.}

B.

Berg. {Excluded passage restored from Virginia Woolf Miscellany. Number 8. Summer 1977.}

[]

Letters 1262-1295 (July-early-October 1922)

1262: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Tuesday [18 July 1922]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

My dear Ottoline,

I am going to carry out your orders to write a very dull letter—how can it be anything else, considering that I’ve just dropped The Things We Are, half paralysed with disgust and boredom?

If Murry lives next door to you, I assure you the mildew will sprout in every room—Useless to instal hot water. But the subject is worn out, and I shall only drive Philip to another display of philanthropy.

I got into very good society on Oxford platform—Lady Isabel Margesson, Sir Somebody, and Miss Margesson; and they took me, so they said, for Lady Muriel Talbot, but soon discovered their mistake. I don’t like the upper classes; though I like meeting them, for the pleasure of getting free.

Yes, this letter is dull, and will soon be duller. Leonard and I sat up gossiping about Garsington last night; and if Julian had been under the sofa in her blue dress she would have heard nothing to her disadvantage, tell her. Nor would you. How I shall enjoy the combined funeral [inexplicable]! Don’t you think you and I have now proved our fidelity, and ought to break a sixpence in half and wear it on our watch chains?

Anyhow, I enjoyed myself every minute, and go back in thought to the whole weekend, though I have my compunctions that I tired you with talking, in your green room. But was there ever anyone with your invincible spirit? When I write my great Garsington novel, look out for a streak of white lightning, and that will be you. Yes; I must set about it soon, or the market will be spoilt.

No invitations from Lady Colefax or Lady Cunard. So you see, I have fallen out of the nest before I got in.

It was very nice of you to have me and be so good to me.

Your affate
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

1263: To Roger Fry

[28 July 1922]

[Hogarth House, Richmond]

My dear Roger,

My handwriting must be dissolving. THURSDAY was our party—yesterday. But I’ll come to the Commercio [restaurant] on MONDAY 7.30—if you don’t mind no party. I’ll ask Eliot; but doubt his being able. Anyhow it will be very nice seeing you—tho’ I’ve been in your spiritual company, with great satisfaction, going round the Marchands’ that is, reading you aloud. What a critic to be sure!

And what about your lectures?

Frightful haste for post.

Yr V.W.

Sussex

[]

1264: To Dora Carrington

[end July? 1922]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

My dear Carrington—

Oh horror horror! I sent Gerald [Brenan] my copy of the Proust book in June, so I suppose it never reached him, and is now lost for ever, and I’ve not even read it myself. Would you tell him it was sent, with a copy of the Voyage Out, sometime in June, by parcel post, and ask him to make enquiry if possible. He got another book safely, so I took it for granted he had got these.

Roger is the only person likely to have a copy, I think. He was asked by the Nouvelle Revue to distribute them. Jegen, Ujigar, Granada is the address I put on parcels and letters alike.

Give Gerald my love.

Yrs V.W.

George Lazarus

[]

1265: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Tuesday [1 August 1922]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

My dear Ottoline,

You are the most generous of hostesses to send photographs—My own picture has a distorted interest for me.

Here is Murry’s novel [The Things We Are]—I beg to say that the damp spots are not my doing. They come from within. He has a mania for confession. I suppose his instinct is to absolve himself in these bleatings and so get permission for more sins. But I am forgetting that he is by this time your next door neighbour.

I wish you or Philip would send a card to Tom Eliot stating on oath that Julian did say Prufrock through by heart. He refused to believe me.

I have been thinking about the subscription. I find that the few people I have talked to would much prefer to give a lump sum down to Eliot himself, than to subscribe £10 yearly through the [Ezra] Pounds. One may so easily die, and still more easily go bankrupt; and where would poor Tom be then?

We are just off to Rodmell and I shall try to come to some decision, for I want to do something, and I think many people are in my state of mind. I wonder if you agree?

I enjoyed myself so much, and I don’t see why you should talk of fading. Lightning is always lightning, oddly enough.

V.

Texas

[]

1266: To Clive Bell

Saturday [5 August 1922]

Monk’s House, Rodmell [Sussex]

Dearest Clive,

I take it for granted that Duncan never got the book which I also take it for granted you never asked him to get.

I have to go up on Wednesday to see a doctor to decide whether my right lung is diseased as Dr Hamill says it is, and so might go to Gordon Square and forage for myself. But would Gordon Sq. be open? I am in want of something to relieve Ulysses. A card before Wednesday would be in keeping with the charity of your disposition.

Dedman, the gardener, says that there was a great deal of trouble when the [Edward] Shanks’ came back from Germany. In fact, sir, Mrs Shanks did a bolt. But its all kept very quiet. But she did a bolt, sir, thats what she did. Thank God. They say too that Shanks is shortly leaving, but my peace of mind is greatly disturbed by a boy scouts camp beneath the window, and the village fête, for which I must now change. The rector has just made a speech. Guns are going off, Leweses arriving.

We went to the races yesterday, and as I climbed the hill, tell Nessa, a stout man stopped me and said he could not yet oblige me with two wicker arm chairs but hoped to shortly. I said “you are mistaken”. He said “You are Mrs Bell.” I said “In God’s name I’m not,” feeling, tell Nessa, divinely beautiful in every limb at once, but not so quick in the head as usual. How strange it is to be a painter! They scarcely think; feelings come only every other minute. But then they are profound and inexpressible, tell Nessa.

Leonard had a touch of the mumps in the middle of his neck yesterday. I hope everyone else is recovered. I will come over next week.

Your V.W.

Quentin Bell

[]

1267: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Aug. 6th [1922]

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

My dear Ottoline,

I return Aldington’s letter. I should certainly like some copies of the [Eliot] appeal, but I don’t myself believe that many of my friends will find it possible to guarantee £10 a year for ever. On the other hand, practically every one I have spoken to has been ready to give something down. One [Lytton], even, was willing to give £100 down, if it could be given direct to Eliot himself. It seems absurd to let this money be wasted; so do you think it would be a good plan if I tried to collect as much as I could, and we gave it to Eliot in a lump sum, for him to invest, or spend, as he liked? Anyhow, he would be secure of the money, which I don’t think would be the case under Ezra Pound’s scheme.

Or do you think that a plan of this kind would draw people away from subscribing to the other? However, one really knows so few people, willing to give at all, that I don’t think this is a serious objection.

I wonder if you know at all what Tom’s own views are—has he agreed to accept the money, and for what amount will he give up his Bank?

I wish Aldington wouldn’t give out that Tom is ‘very ill’, by the way. There he is going about, dining out, and so on, and I’m sure people will think this a trumped up excuse.

I’ve almost forgotten Murry’s novel—it was writ in dirty water. My impression is that all his characters were embodiments of his own faults and his own entirely sentimental and unreal aspirations. Simplicity and truth were represented by the landlady, and in consequence she was nothing but humbug. However, I have forgotten it, except as a whine in a corner. Now I have some respect for Rebecca West, and I wish you would get to know her, and introduce me. She has written a stout, generous, lively voluminous novel : I have only read 20 pages; there are some 600: but so far I think she is a brave clever woman, and sometimes she writes a few words very nicely.

I must break off, chiefly owing to the Boy Scouts who have camped in our field, and sing to keep their spirits up in the rain—Scout songs, I suppose. They have a Union Jack, and go to church. I wish one liked these things naturally.

Yr affate
V.W.

Do you, by any chance, take in the Dial, an American paper, and keep back numbers?

Texas

[]

1268: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

[10? August 1922]

[Monk’s House] Rodmell [Sussex]

My dear Ottoline,

I have sent the form to Lloyds. I shall be seeing Lytton next week, and, I think, Mary Hutchinson, and hope to squeeze something out of them. Mary offers to distribute forms, so please send me ample.

Of course your germs flourish if you go thinking about the sufferings of Russia and the income of Tom, and I suppose, country house week ends, Aldous Huxleys, Virginia Woolves, and all the rest.

I have written 2 chapters of my Garsington novel, you’ll be glad to hear. Three weeks ago a doctor told me I had consumption: now they say its pneumonia germs in the throat; but I’m perfectly all right.

It is lovely down here, and I read as a weevil, I suppose, eats cheese. Love to Julian.

Your aff
V.W.

Texas

[]

1269: To Vanessa Bell

Thursday, Aug. 10th [1922]

Monk’s House [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest,

I am much distressed to hear of your miserable condition. I would have written, but I gathered from Clive that you were already at Charleston. Leonard says there is nothing such agony as the mumps; they entirely ruined his temper; and as you can’t bite, you fall into the depths of exhaustion. I remember Stella describing them. Please be very careful. No—no one ever sympathises with one’s diseases. They are only an opportunity for describing their own—still this doesn’t apply to Duncan, Roger, and myself, whose hearts are always wrung for you, if for no one else. I often wake in the night and cry aloud Nessa! Nessa! Doesn’t that comfort you? Well, not much, you say.

We think your design lovely—Our only doubts are practical. L. thinks the lettering isn’t plain enough, and the effect is rather too dazzling. Could you make the r of Room into a Capital? And could the lettering be picked out in some colour which would make it bolder?

These considerations may spoil the design though. Here it is, in case you could alter it.

But we could explain better by word of mouth. Let me know when you reach Charleston. I will come over—infection must be over by that time.

I dont think you have missed much pleasure, and certainly no society, by not coming. It has rained every day—thundered and lightened—Mrs Uppington has hid behind the door—Mrs Dedman is accused of stealing 5 face towels—Mrs Shanks has run away with a German—Mr Shanks sits on the banks flirting with a whore—but worse than all, the Boy Scouts are camped under my window, and sing “Here we are” (that one line and no more) about a million times daily. Painters wouldn’t mind; writers are driven crazy. Then you talk of the mumps. By the way, you must be alleviated by the thought that Mary has them. Clive sounded me as to a visit to Wittering—the famous party with Desmond, but I haven’t been asked, whether on account of the mumps or of my female sex I don’t know. I think her [Mary Hutchinson’s] charm pales slightly in the distance. I find it difficult to believe I ever kissed her, or ever shall again. I wonder if the move to 50 is decided on. What a hive, not of bees but of wasps, you will be in the autumn! I met that rakish bitch Margery in the Square—incredibly dirty, dowdy, and raffish. She has been advertising her school at 15 Gordon Sq. as well as 51. Dark rumours have therefore spread abroad. What about subscribing for a toothbrush?—the pupils will contract the itch along with the grammar. I get long letters from Ottoline, deploring the tragedy of life, which is that she only sees me twice a year, and my affections are going to Julian and not to her ‘fading mother.’

I’m afraid I shall have to start a subscription for poor Tom. No one will give to Ezra Pound, lest he should drink it all first; but then no one has any money. I lost my umbrella, and really see no prospect of buying another—Can you?—fifteen shillings is too much nowadays.

I have been employing myself in making coloured papers, with wild success. But that won’t interest you. The important thing is that I think I’ve discovered the perfect ink for our purposes—made for marbling. Now if you designed a pattern for a stencil, and we had it cut (I have found the shop) then I could lay on the colours for ever. Here are a few samples—I have to produce 300 sheets by October.

All our visitors are coming in September. Meanwhile we have Mrs Uppington, shall have Nelly’s niece. I dont like the children of the poor—On the other hand, when I saw Julian [Bell] the other day, with his gun, looking like a grown man, very handsome, in his trousers I was overcome with the emotions of an Aunt. He gave a complete history of the downs to the cook and Mrs Up. “Firle Beacon is the highest of them all. I should say it is the second highest. If you look out of the window you will see where the Newhaven downs etc etc”—all very positive and well informed. It reminded me of Thoby lecturing the nurses.

Would you be so angelic as to look in Clives room for The Heir, by V. Sackville West, and bring it with you? She admires me; therefore I must try to admire her, which, of course, I shan’t find difficult.

Leonard, who is full of sympathy for you, sends you his love, and says it is the 10th anniversary of our wedding day.

V.W.

Berg

[]

1270: To Gerald Brenan

Aug. 12th [1922]

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

Dear Gerald,

Is there any chance that you would come here for the weekend of the 23rd August? We hope you will. I think we saw you flashing through Lewes in a car—and so perhaps you are still in England: but where, I dont know, and must trust to Lytton to forward this.

Yrs
Virginia Woolf

George Lazarus

[]

1271: To Gerald Brenan

Aug. 12th [1922]

Monks House [Rodmell, Sussex]

My dear Gerald,

I have been making a muddle—Leonard says the 23rd weekend is impossible for him, so would you suggest a night that suits you—in the week, perhaps, not weekend—I expect we can arrange whatever suits you—Forgive my stupidity and come and see us.

Yours in haste and illegibility
V.W.

George Lazarus

[]

1272: To Roger Fry

Sunday [13 August 1922]

Monk’s House [Rodmell, Sussex]

My dear Roger,

Would you be so angelic as to send me Mr Whitalls address? It sounds most promising—from our point of view; but there are so many things to explain that we think we had better try to get him to come here and talk it over. Meanwhile, please don’t breathe a word of it, as our present position is perfectly vague.

Are you off again for ever? But didn’t you promise to lecture in London? When you are a success, then you’re such a damned snob that you can’t stand it—that’s my theory. When you’re offered the O.M., as I’ve no doubt you will be, you will retire to Japan for good.

I get frightfully depressed when I read Murry—and the creature pullulates everywhere. I dont think anything can stand up against the power of muddleheaded mediocrity when combined with the manners of the servants hall and the morality of a boarding school for officers widows—or is it a girls school I mean?—any place full of spite and backbiting and gush and highmindedness will do.

However the Press does show some signs of flourishing—We have got a lot of new subscribers lately, and if we could launch out boldly, with you to run a series of modern paintings, then we might let Murry rise to his heights in peace.

I don’t suppose I shall come over: still I think Vanessa Bell might ask me, please tell her.

I’ll send you my book [Jacob’s Room] when its out—but it is too much of an experiment to be a success.

Yours ever
V.W.

What age is Whitall? Comparative youth is rather essential.

Sussex

[]

1273: To Clive Bell

Monday [14 August 1922]

[Monk’s House] Rodmell [Sussex]

Dearest Clive,

Yes, do come over on Thursday—we shall expect you to lunch, about 1, that is, or before. And please discover details about the new buses, as we want to come over one day next week.

The doctor said he could find no tuberculosis, only one lung is different from the other, but not so different as to matter. Apparently it might well mislead a dr. He thought the disease was probably pneumonia germs or influenza, and should disappear of itself if I lead a healthy life, and take quinine, and burn my throat twice a day. These medical details are for Nessa—Leonard meant to write to her. But he would like to come and see her. How is the poor woman?

I wrote to Roger at Charleston. Would you forward it if he is not coming, as I want an answer.

What news have you of the burying of Mother Cornish, and why did she die?

I’m afraid she won’t cut up to the advantage of the MacCarthy’s—though I’d willingly endow Desmond to continue his fight with Murry.

Your V.W.

“Ah yes, poor Shanks had a great deal of trouble for some time with Mrs Shanks. A very flighty young woman—gone with a German they say” so old Hawkesford told us. Leonard said “And I suppose that makes it all the worse” with a broad grin; but this was not well received.

Quentin Bell

[]

1274: To Margaret Llewelyn Davies

[16 August 1922]

Monk’s House, Rodmell [Sussex]

Virginia’s note added at end of a letter from Leonard.

L. has cut me and my gossip down to the merest scrap. Why dont you come and drink at the fountain head? So you think I’ve not read the Princesse de Clèves! What a charming cover, though! I’m in the thick of inventing new covers for our autumn list. Our village is ravaged by the elopement of Mrs Shanks, the poets wife, with a German. L. has to play tennis at the Rectory. He has a record crop of potatoes. We are pickling beans. Mrs Webb has confessed to a niece that she loves L: not V. News bubbles up; must be stopped. Sydney Waterlow is coming on Saturday. His soul is once more troubled. Love to Lilian. V.W.

Sussex

[]

1275: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Aug. 18th [1922]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

My dear Ottoline,

I send back the [Eliot appeal] notice, which I don’t much like—but I think that is immaterial. I have struck out my own name on the Committee. I think it is a mistake to have two out of the three names feminine. It gives an impression that poor Tom is our lap dog: and I can be just as effective anonymously.

I begin, of course, to fear that I shan’t be effective in any capacity.

I am told that most people are as badly off as Tom; and as most people again have to earn their livings, they don’t see why they should bind themselves for ever to earn £10 yearly for some one else.

Still, one can only try; and I propose to scrape together as many small sums as I can, and then, when the time comes, I will either send them direct to you, to add to your collection, or if the givers specially desire it, to Tom himself. I see that a footnote says that sums of £25 and over will be accepted; but I shan’t pay any attention to that. Surely it is better to take the givers that are in the hand (rather grudgingly in the hand) and leave the twentyfivers and over in the bush. Here is another case that has occurred. “I don’t suppose I shall be able to pay my own bill this year, let alone Eliots. But next year I hope to be better off. Could I send my cheque then?” I suppose I have to encourage this unsatisfactory but well meaning friend also. One can always send a cheque to Mr Aldington, I am saying. I don’t much like human nature, do you, in money matters.

Poor Rebecca Wests novel [The Judge] bursts like an over stuffed sausage. She pours it all in; and one is covered with flying particles; indeed I had hastily to tie the judge tight and send it back to Mudies half finished. But this irreticence does not make me think any the worse of her human qualities. I imagine she talks a great deal. Mary Hutchinson met her in a furniture shop and says she looked like a large wet dog, in a waterproof, very shaggy. I cannot write with this debauched pen, but I must stumble along and tell you that I do admire poor old Henry [James], and actually read through the Wings of a Dove last summer, and thought it such an amazing acrobatic feat, partly of his, partly of mine, that I now look upon myself and Henry James as partners in merit. I made it all out. But I felt very ill for some time afterwards. I am now reading Joyce, and my impression, after 200 out of 700 pages, is that the poor young man has only got the dregs of a mind compared even with George Meredith. I mean if you could weigh the meaning on Joyces page it would be about 10 times as light as on Henry James’.

They say it gets a little heavier. It is true that I prepared myself, owing to Tom, for a gigantic effort; and behold the bucket is almost empty.

I tremble as I write. I shall be struck down by the wrath of God. Next I go on to Proust; and then—I think something old.

I hope you are staying in bed. Really it is worth while pampering one’s body; and then it gives one a free ride. So dont bother please to read or write or talk or pour out tea for 55 strange young men.

V.W.

Texas

[]

1276: To Katherine Arnold-Forster

Aug. 23rd 1922

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

Dearest Ka,

What is the sense of coming to London in September? You must know that the Woolves aren’t there then. How could we be? Why should we be?—and then you pretend to expect to see us.

As I have said before, letter writing at these intervals is utterly impossible. Please let the Boer woman send us her book, though we are rather overwhelmed at present. What to do with the Press we don’t know. I have read 4 manuscripts in the past fortnight: Leonard writes 6 or 7 letters daily; and when we go back we have to tackle six books of the highest importance, all promised before Christmas; and authors are as exacting as mothers. But this is not a hit at you. I was thinking of Sydney Waterlow who has been here for the weekend, and wishes his children were bigger. He has mellowed. Oh if you could have seen him bathing in the river Ouse, which could hardly close above his immense soft pink stomach, belching and bellowing like a walrus. As I say, he has improved.

I don’t think Cornwall beats this. I have a garden room which looks across the watermeadows to Mt Caburn. Do you remember it? I shall go and stay with Gwen and Jacques [Raverat] in January, I think. He wrote to me, and revived my ancient affection—you know how faithful hearted I am. Yes: I have got consumption and heart disease—and feel perfectly well. I assure you, Harley Street drs discovered both these diseases. I have ceased to take my temperature, and that is the main thing. Really, it is pneumonia in my throat—the germs copulating too vigorously. Nessa’s house is decimated with mumps; and we can only meet in the open. I was to have been taken to see Mr Hudson this winter by [Dorothy] Brett, who adored him,—I think her sister was in love with him?—no, I have got it wrong. Parts of his books are very good—only others are very bad; isn’t that so? Anyhow, I wish I had seen him.

The Criterion only costs 12/6; so I think you must take it in. Besides it will have a story, I think, by me; and Eliot will develop his critical theories—I suppose, but this is highly and strictly confidential. You don’t know any admirers of his works who would help to give him £300, a year? He has broken down, and has to work all day in a Bank, being penniless, with an invalid wife, and if he could get £300, he would live in a cottage and write. I can’t find anyone rich enough to promise 10 or even 5 pounds a year for ever. But I’m not hinting that you ought to give even sixpence. Times are—what is the expression? hard? bad? stoney?

Charlie and Dora [Sanger] are soon to be our neighbours. Charlie is to me as much of London as a pillar box or a hansom cab: Dora, on the other hand, will romp bareheaded. Then we have dear Morgan Forster coming, as all the old ladies call him.

But I am running on—idiotically, sloppily, and I daresay illegibly. I have been standing talking to Leonard in the orchard which he prunes, and it being past seven on a cloudy night, my hands are stiff as carrots.

Well, but when are we going to see Brox?—Bruin Cox that is? Oh yes, I remember Vernon Lee, in the dining room at Talland House [St Ives], in coat and skirt, much as she is now—but that was 30 years ago. She was a dashing authoress. She gave my father her books, which were in the dining room too. I saw her 10 years later, at Florence, when she fell in love with Nessa; and 2 years ago at the 1917 Club, when she talked so incredibly slowly, and looked so faded and battered and distinguished that I let her be. You see, I am going to write my memoirs. Molly MacCarthy is writing hers, but that is because they are very hard up and now live at Oare, and the winter evenings are so long.

So is this letter.

Leonard would send his love I am sure, but as I say he is pruning the pear trees.

Lady Young is dead and old Mrs [Warre-] Cornish.

Your V.W.

Mark Arnold-Forster

[]

1277: To Lytton Strachey

Aug. 24th 1922

Monks House, Rodmell [Sussex]

Yes 8th to 11th, (but why not a little longer?) will suit us perfectly—so we will consider that fixed.

I don’t know that one can call Sydney Waterlow news. He has been here; he has found God—only Mr Sullivan: he bathed; the Ouse was too shallow; he says Katherine Mansfield, completely recovered, is at Bretts. Mrs Shanks has done a bolt with the son of the poet [Gerhart] Hauptmann. Mr Shanks springs up from behind cornstacks with Boen, daughter of the Clergyman. Mrs Dedman says its 6 of one and half a dozen of the other. Clive has been—with a new poem. The Sangers are coming. So is great Tom Eliot—which brings me, my dear Lytton, to the question—only its no longer a question—to the so creditable fact of your contribution. One hundred pounds did you say? You shall have a receipt. Cheque payable to Richard Aldington or O. Morrell as you prefer. My own contribution, five and sixpence, is given on condition he puts publicly to their proper use the first 200 pages of Ulysses. Never did I read such tosh. As for the first 2 chapters we will let them pass, but the 3rd 4th 5th 6th—merely the scratching of pimples on the body of the bootboy at Claridges. Of course genius may blaze out on page 652 but I have my doubts. And this is what Eliot worships, and there’s Lytton Strachey paying £100 p.a. to Eliot’s upkeep.

Well, we’ve been eating ices at Brighton, too hot to stir—early tea today, and then a loiter through the cornfields. A record crop of pears; green peas for dinner; and after dinner we light the Tortoise stove, which I assure you burns whole books—which do instead of coal, and are ever so much hotter, did you know that?

Yr. V.W.

Love to C:[arrington] to whom I now write with the debauched remnants of the pen with which I have written a story for the Criterion, which (I use too many whiches) which the C. will reject. Alas, alas, it is clouding over.

Frances Hooper

[]

1278: To Dora Carrington

Aug. 24th [1922]

[Monk’s House] Rodmell [Sussex]

My dear Carrington,

Your letter gave me great pleasure. There still seem to be a great many towns in England. Which to settle in, I know not. I rather hoped you would smash up somewhere—never mind—Lytton says it is freezing [in Manorbier, Pembrokeshire]; and here I daresay the air is blood heat. The wind is howling I admit. Leonard has let himself in to play tennis with the Rector’s daughter, who walks out, even on Sundays, with the poet Shanks. That melancholy story rends us asunder. Mrs Dedman is going to say straight out—but I have told Lytton all the gossip.

Actually a spot of rain! How remarkable! But to turn to practical matters—what about a day in the first week of September? Would that suit you and Ralph—say 4th 5th 6th—I don’t think it matters which.

The beds are frightfully rocky this year. Old Sydney committed some outrage on the mattresses. My God! What a sight he looked bathing! like Neptune, if Neptune was a Eunuch—without any hairs, and sky pink—fresh, virginal, soft—I sat on the bank and peered through the rushes, for he asked me not to look.

I want to see you, and this year, I have my fears, will be the last of privacy. I’m sure Allison means to build. He walks about in his leggings with another man, and they take bearings—damn his soul—otherwise the country is more and more and more divine—and I cannot endure the thought of going back. And at my age, my dear Carrington, life I may say melts in the hand. You think a day quite long enough. But I sit down, just arrange my thoughts, peep out of the window, turn over a page, and its bed time! Nothing is accomplished. Moreover, at my age one ought to be doing something violent. We went to Brighton it is true. There I bought a blue silk dress. I open the paper and find Michael Collins dead in a ditch. But what a fool to go shooting—dear me, its all very foolish and perplexing. Was Barbara [Bagenal] firm on her feet? A great many chickens, I daresay. Clean as a pin, I suppose. A little fussy about sheets and boots? Saxon is walking in Northamptonshire—he’s immensely struck by Bagfield Abbey—frescoes—or at least the part of one frescoe,—If he says “Bagfield”—be sure to say you think the frescoes overrated—save that when a man has only one joy, it is hard to deprive him. We will keep any day for discussing the business that you like; and I hope really you have enjoyed yourself.

V.W.

Captain Graves, the poet Graves, wants us to print a poem, with a portrait by Eric Kennington—who is he? The Brimley Johnsons, brother and sister, have been rejected. Miss Mary Butts has never answered. Torrents of rain.

Robert H. Taylor

[]

1279: To Sydney Waterlow

24th Aug. [1922]

Monks House, Rodmell [Sussex]

My dear Sydney,

It was a great pleasure to get your letter, which says exactly what we also felt; and if we are all agreed that we enjoy each other’s society, surely there need be no more talk of illusions and fragments of stale ashes and all the rest of it. Nor, I assure you, does Virginia think Sydney a perfect ass; nor does Virginia mind if Sydney thinks her a complete humbug. So now we can go straight ahead. The horrific pilgrimage has its moments of verdure, even you must admit. Anyhow we had a wonderful day at Brighton, hot, noisy, band, pier, ices, buns, prostitutes, old gentlemen, home over the downs, sunset etc etc.

What a joke that the Murry’s have turned up again! I long to know further developments. I can’t help thinking that Murry is to be the new editor of the Quarterly Review; and is over to prospect. However, no doubt you’ll be feeling warmly in their favour, as I daresay I should too, if I saw them, for you must admit that though you have all the manly virtues, and I all the feminine foibles, we are united by a certain instability, which I prefer to call generosity of temperament, which leads us to extremes of passion and repulsion.

I’ve just heard from Lytton, and feel quite convinced that the whole of Hampstead boiled down, can’t produce so much of the essence of literature as issues without effort from his little finger. But then his letters are masterpieces. And then his mind is sympathetic. I have not space to develop my theme. You must come one day and let me pour forth my views, and utterly demolish yours.

Ever yours
Virginia Woolf

John Waterlow

[]

1280: To Jacques Raverat

Aug. 25th [1922]

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

Dear Jacques,

Anyhow you haven’t forgotten one feature in your old friend’s character—vanity. I enjoyed your praises [of Monday or Tuesday] immensely, and Gwen’s, and felt quite set up for many days. I rather expect abuse for that book. Now you must give me your opinion of my novel which comes out soon—foreigner you may be, but you’re a highly interesting character still.

Shall we really come out sometime next January? Could you find us rooms in your village [near Vence, in France]? We talk perpetually of going abroad, but I want to settle in where one can read and write, and if you were there it would be great fun. Then perhaps we could talk off some of our arrears. I feel a little shy, do you? Not fundamentally, superficially. My impression is that we used to argue a great deal about the way we live. Now we have solved all that. You have a house in France, and we in Richmond. It’s rather nice, shabby, ancient, very solid and incredibly untidy (I’m talking of Hogarth House) but then we print all over the place. One of Ka’s gallant youths—I mean the sort of person Ka used to have about—is our partner. We meet at lunch and tea. We gossip. The poor young man tries to tell us what Lytton Strachey thinks about Proust (he lives with Lytton and has married Carrington). Then I go up to London: walk the streets, on the excuse of buying something—nothing so amazing; drop in to tea at the 1917 Club, where one generally falls into gloom at the extreme insignificance, dowdiness, of the intellectual race—darkies, actresses, cranks, Alix, James—that’s the sort of creature one meets there. Well, I don’t boast. I’m only one of them myself, but inwardly one still feels young and arrogant and frightfully sharp set. I can’t resist boasting still—can you? and trying to talk people down. Still, we have grown a little mellow. Everyone in Gordon Square is now famous.

Clive has taken to high society. I assure you, he’s a raging success, and his bon mots are quoted by lovely but incredibly silly ladies. Really they give parties to meet Clive Bell. Maynard of course scarcely belongs to private life any more, save that he has fallen in love with Lydia Lopokhova, which is, to me, endearing. Nessa and Duncan potter along in extreme obscurity. That is all I can think of at the moment, and I am afraid that it may sound vague and dismal in your ears. The truth is you must write me a proper letter and expose yourself as I hereby expose myself.

I feel that in the great age of the world, before this present puling generation had come along, you and I and that remarkable figure Gwen Darwin [Jacques’ wife] were all congenial spirits. By the way you’ll have to give up calling Woolf Woolf: Leonard, that is his name. I assure you, I couldn’t have married anyone else—But when Ka praises Will the sound is unpleasant in my ears. So I refrain. I have nothing whatever to say against Ka and Will. At first sight he is a mere sandhopper; but later I think he has some sort of spine—indeed, he’s a muscular little man, considering his size. Ka, of course, keeps a medicine chest and doses the village, and gets into a blue dress trimmed with fur for tea, when county motor cars arrive, and she is much in her element. Is this malicious? Slightly, perhaps, but you will understand.

I wish I could discuss the art of writing with you at the present moment. I am ashamed, or perhaps proud, to say how much of my time is spent in thinking, thinking, thinking about literature. It is a dangerous seed to plant in your children. Still, I doubt whether anything else in life is much worth having—so there is the philosophy of an old woman of 40. Do you maintain that one can think about painting? Is Gwen Raverat still so extreme? And what about Lady Darwin [Jacques’ mother-in-law] and dear poor pincushion Eily?

But I am drivelling. Tell me when you write if there are any good French books, and say if you would like me to send you anything from England.

Love to Gwen,

Yours ever,
Virginia Woolf

Sussex

[]

1281: To Clive Bell

[late August 1922]

Monk’s House [Rodmell, Sussex]

Here is a letter from Hawk—pleased I think—which I should like back—together with 2 or 3 pages from you—anything that comes into your head—melanism, if you like. How that pleased me!

Now, of course, I’m forced on to Tom’s Committee, by the Bank; and so shall die bankrupt in the workhouse, aged 80, all for having a good heart, and loving poetry.

V.W.

Quentin Bell

[]

1282: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Aug. 26th [1922]

Monk’s House, Rodmell [Sussex]

My dear Ottoline,

I have written to Mr Aldington to say that he can use my name for the Committee, if he likes, though I still think a male name preferable. Leonard is very doubtful as to the wisdom of the whole scheme, so I can’t thrust him on.

Whenever the forms are ready I should like some to send out.

Your affte
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

1283: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Friday [1 September? 1922]

[Monk’s House] Rodmell [Sussex]

A Post Script

Would you send me some forms [for the Eliot appeal] when you have them as soon as you can.

#

The people I am writing to are these, so that we may not overlap.

Logan Smith,

Roger Fry,

Maynard Keynes,

Lytton,

Clive, Mary Hutchinson,

Vanessa,

Mrs Berenson,

Charlie Sanger,

Hope Mirrlees,

Sydney Waterlow

I can think of no more at the moment.

I leave the rich ladies, like Lady Colefax, Cunard, Ethel Sands, for you or Mr Aldington.

Texas

[]

1284: To Dora Carrington

Saturday [2 September 1922]

Monk’s House [Rodmell, Sussex]

My dear Carrington,

We’ve just had your wire to say you’ll come on Tuesday.

Please come as early as you can, to lunch if possible, as Mrs Woolf, Leonard’s mother is coming on Wednesday morning, and thus we shan’t have much time for seeing you.

This, Leonard says I must explain, cancells his letter.

We both have a great relish for your letters, strangely enough, and I a great admiration for the handwriting.

Your aff
Virginia W.

Key of Hogarth enclosed—my own, so beware of losing it.

Robert H. Taylor

[]

1285: To Katherine Arnold-Forster

Sept 8th [1922]

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

Dearest Bruin

Nothing could have been more welcome than your buns, short of your bodily presence. It was an inspiration on your part. There were the 3 Sangers coming up, underfed and hungry. When I said I had buns from Buzzard [teashop] from Ka (whom they then all remembered with love) their faces changed. Today I shall cram Lytton with them. Also the servants have a friend coming—So you see it was a stroke of genius.

Why choose Christmas? We shall be here then. Cant you ever come, like a decent woman, when London is properly going?

I see I have craftily made out that only guests and servants eat your buns. Leonard and I have our full share, and I feel the pneumonia germs perishing in front of them.

Did you see Sydney at Oare, and did you find him a changed character (once more)?

But, as you say, letters are useless.

I must jump up and rush over to Asheham to pick mushrooms before tea. We went in the other day. The house has been made into a suburban lodging, with draped mantelpieces, silver egg cups on little tables, and gigantic blue and brown vases with ferns in the windows,—dark, dreary, smug, respectable—no traces left of Bruin’s pelt and soft wet paws.

Yours
V.W.

Mark Arnold-Forster

[]

1286: To Vanessa Bell

Tuesday [19 September 1922]

Monk’s House [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest,

If it is fine, we will come on Friday, about 4. If it is not fine we will try to come with Tom and Morgan on Sunday (I’m not sure what time the Sunday buses arrive) for tea. I badly want some gossip with you, but I don’t suppose I shall detach you from all your familiars. We had a day full of interest to me—but I cant go into details, in writing. The real plan, as Brunswick has fallen through temporarily, is that Lytton shall take Suffield—this is quite serious.

I’ve just heard from Barbara, in wild joy, as Nick has got a place in Kent, and thus will see more of you.

She is having a holiday in Wales with Saxon, who has brought an elderly cousin, the mother of 7 children, who shares B’s bed, and prefers washing in cold water.

Julian is a most charming and witty character, and kept us all agog with his views upon life.

Yr B.

Berg

[]

1287: To Barbara Bagenal

[21 September 1922]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

My dear Barbara,

I am very much excited, and moved, and pleased by your letter. Maidstone is a great oyster and typhoid centre—that is all I know—But I shall never write to you now—Unhappiness was the condition I made, and you never fulfilled it. Now you will be rich; keep a motor I daresay. Anyhow, I shall come and inspect into the matter for myself.

Its you who should write letters. Leonard and I shouted with pleasure over yours—and the old gentleman Lytton, and then Saxon taking his chess board out. Are Saxon’s Aunts 7 children also in the bedroom? Why has it been kept so dark? Please tell me whether they are the children of the icthyologist (which means fish something). If so, I have a niche for them in my memory.

Lytton has just gone, and Morgan Forster is just coming, and we go over to Charleston tomorrow, God willing. But oh the weather! One day of fine, then six of wet; rain spitting in the fire; pipes choked; birds found drowned; and my work cut out, merely raising the dahlias from the ground. Chickybiddiensis Bagenalia is doing very well.

You’ll be able to come over and see us from Maidstone. But what will Nick’s work be, and does it lead on, and is it more suitable than what he had? I can’t help regretting Garsington, slightly, on selfish grounds. Going to see Barbara would have been such a boon on Sunday morning.

The Partridges came too, for one night. Carrington rather bitter against the institution of marriage still; but she is going to paint it down.

Tell Saxon with my love, that I am reading the Odyssey. But as Barbara is never quite certain whether it is Early English or Norse, my very profound remarks shall wait. Its no good pluming oneself on scraps of learning with you matrons, however—who are rearing families and feeding hens. Will you be able to take part in the Hogarth Press? Violent crises are now taking place. I am starting a coloured paper manufactory this autumn. I enclose our circular—not for you, but for the Danish matron [Saxon’s aunt], who might spread our fame among the Scand[inavian]s. I’m sure they don’t like to be called Scands; so don’t mention it.

We have entered village life. Leonard plays tennis at the Rectory, and has raised our reputation tremendously by beating them all. We had the poet Shanks to dinner to meet Lytton; but the poet Shanks only talks when drunk, so Lytton has now discovered—unluckily too late. Dora and Charlie and Daphne Sanger have been staying at Southease; Daphne is a stout woman of 16: I thought she was still in the cradle: and I can’t talk with ease before virgins. Then Sydney Waterlow came and bathed in the Ouse, which barely covered his shanks—it would have drowned the poet Shanks completely—unless he had been drunk.

I must pick apples, or raise asters, and as you see I am drivelling like an infant in arms.

Please write again, and tell me about Maidstone—what fun to have to find a house! I’ve just found one, but don’t see how to manage to live in 3 at the same time.

Love to the old Reprobate [Saxon], who might have written to me.

Yr V.W.

Berg

[]

1288: To Janet Case

Sept 23rd [1922]

Monk’s House, Rodmell [Sussex]

My dear Janet,

I was thinking of you and wondering about the house that very morning, before Lottie brought in the breakfast. I am immensely glad that you have £1100 in your pocket. Nor can I imagine any more enviable state than to be building ones own house—black tar and thatch in the heart of the forest [New Forest]—You will be in time to see the leaves falling, and for myself, I like winter there much best. Yes—this is a hint that I’m to be asked.

Here I am sitting in my garden room, with Morgan Forster beside me writing an article for the Nation upon the East—upon this new war, I think: and I have to exercise great discretion in not sneezing or knocking things over. He has been staying with the great Thomas Hardy who is, alas, a very vain, quiet, conventional, uninteresting old gentleman, who complains bitterly that the Spectator cuts him up, and the Westminster Gazette finds him tedious, as if he were a penny a liner living in a garret in Soho. Its all very disillusioning—but perhaps at 82 one rots a little. His great pride is that the county families ask him to tea; and his chief topic of conversation the deaths of his cats—three were run over one the railway line, which is odd, as the railway is at some distance.

Now I will plunge into medical history—only it is so long and various that I must curtail. Only one dr says my right lung is wrong: upon which the other says it is perfectly all right: they compromise now upon pneumonia germs in my throat, which are said to cause slight fever. Last week however, getting wet, I had the flu again—but a slight attack, and I feel none the worse and in my view the whole thing is merely a mix up of influenza with my own remarkable nervous system, which, as everybody tells me, can’t be beaten for extreme eccentricity, but works all right in the long run.

I apologise for this egotism, and might write a better letter if it weren’t for the distinguished author, who is now scratching out every word he has written. Also Grizel, our dog, will sit not on my knee, but at my back; and her scratching, coinciding with Morgans, is enough to drive one frantic.

Love to Emphie. Please tell me how the house goes on. We return next week.

Yr V.W.

Sussex

[]

1289: To T. S. Eliot

Sept 25th 1922

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

Dear Tom,

I hope you will forgive me for what I feel to be an impertinence on my part, but circumstances compel me to risk annoying you.

I think it best to explain to you openly that Ottoline asked me some time ago to join Mr Aldington’s Committee for what they call the Eliot Fellowship Fund. I did not altogether agree with their proposals, particularly as I could not make out that they knew what your views were. But I agreed to join. From what you said on Sunday I gathered that—as I had thought—the scheme was impracticable from your point of view. Today Ottoline has sent me a revised version of the scheme which is still less satisfactory than the first. I feel therefore that I must explain the position to her and must ask you therefore whether I am right in understanding you to say that

1) £500 a year is the least sum that would make it worth your while to leave the Bank.

2) that you do not consider that pledges to pay a yearly contribution are a sufficient security to warrant you in giving up your present work.

If you simply put “Yes” on a postcard I shall take it to mean that I am right on both points.

(Perhaps I may add that Leonard and I entirely agree with you, if these are your views).

Yours ever
Virginia Woolf

Mrs T. S. Eliot

[]

1290: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Sept 25th. 1922

Typewritten

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

Dearest Ottoline,

I wired to you to day to stop sending out the circular because I cant agree to the scheme which is now proposed, and—what is far more important—I find that Tom himself, (who was here yesterday) is not ready to accept the original scheme, let alone this one. He told me definitely that he will not leave the Bank unless he has a sum of £500 a year assured him, by which he means that he must either have a capital sum to bring in £500 or securities for that amount in a bank. He does not think that pledges to contribute so much a year for life are good enough to warrant him in giving up his present position. Anything less than £500 would, he says, throw him into journalism, and he prefers the Bank.

But now I see from the revised circular that we are trying to get only £300 a year for a period of not less than five years, and this depends upon pledges to contribute yearly. In five years time therefore, having given up the Bank, Tom may very likely find himself in serious difficulties. I certainly will not ask people to contribute to such a proposal, even if Tom himself agreed to it—which he certainly does not.

The only thing we can do, so far as I can see, is to ascertain from Tom himself that I have understood him rightly, and then issue another appeal in accordance with his views. I am writing to him therefore by this post and asking him to say whether £500 a year is the least sum that would make it worth his while to leave the bank; and what securities he would think sufficient. When I have his answer I will write at once to you. I will then draft for your approval another scheme, keeping so far as I can to Philip’s wording, which seems to me admirable.

In talk with Tom he said also that a sum down, if no condition were made that he should leave the Bank, would be a great relief, and leave him freer for writing. Therefore it seems to me very important not to limit sums subscribed, and possibly to hint at some such scheme should the original scheme prove impossible.

It is a thousand pities that Pound and Aldington didn’t get Tom to explain his views before they launched the scheme. Let alone the worry to Tom himself—and I’m afraid he takes it all much to heart and feels his position most awkward—the scheme once muddled will be very hard to start again.

Privately I hear that the fate of the Literary Supplement [the Criterion] is very doubtful, so he may not have that to count on; and looking at it all round I think he is perfectly right to take up the line he does. But I will get it in writing before doing anything further.

Please excuse this hard faced typewriter—but my hand has given up making letters clearly.

[handwritten]

If you feel that it is better now to go on with the scheme, and re-arrange it with subscribers later, of course do as you think best—but I should like my name scratched out, as I couldn’t be responsible for it.

Yr affate
V.W.

P.S.

On re-reading this document, I fear that my efforts to be clear and practical may lead you to think me dictatorial and faultfinding with you. I hope you won’t do so, for my only grudge is against Pound and Aldington, who ought I think, to have got things clear at the start. Tom is so reticent about it, and also so much on edge that I’ve no doubt he made it very difficult to find out his wishes. Of course I may have got it all wrong myself—However I will do my best to find out, and will let you know without a moment’s delay.

You have taken such an awful lot of trouble that it seems a shame to make difficulties—but I’m sure you’ll see what I feel about it—and excuse asperities of language.

We are here till Oct 5th.

Ever Your affate
Virginia

Please make any further suggestions that occur to you—I only offer to draft another letter to save you trouble.

Texas

[]

1291: To T. S. Eliot

Monday [25 September 1922]

Monks House [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dear Tom,

Since writing to you this morning I have been in to Lewes, and saw a house to let in rather a charming position. So I went in and found a flat of 4 rooms, the ground floor that is of a large old-fashioned house. It is in that crescent which you pass on the left as you drive out to us, standing back from the road, and quiet. There are 3 good big rooms, and one smaller, with a little kitchen opening out of it, a bathroom with hot and cold water, and a W. C. They ask £75 without rates, which haven’t yet been assessed, but cant be very much, I expect they would take less. It is all new done up and clean. There is a very good garden which would belong to you, except for a flight of steps which the owners of the upper part have the right to cross. There is nothing at the back between you and Newhaven, and it is the best part of Lewes, near the downs, and only 5 minutes walk from the station. I think it would be worth your seeing, if you seriously think of a house in this part.

I enclose the owner’s card. Let me know if you think of coming to look at it before Oct. 3rd, and we would meet you, and give you a bed.

Yours ever
V.W.

Mrs T. S. Eliot

[]

1292: To T. S. Eliot

Saturday, 30 Sept. [1922]

Typewritten

Monks House, Rodmell [Sussex]

My dear Tom,

Of course I understand how difficult your position is, and only regret that I was forced to open the question again, for it must be a torment to you.

I have had a very reasonable letter from Ottoline, and no harm has been done. She will wait until she hears from me again.

Please come and see us, for that will be much better than writing. We go back on Thursday. Will you dine on Sunday, (the 8th, I think.) Dinner is at seven thirty, but come earlier if you will, for we shall be in anyhow.

I am extremely sorry to hear such bad news of your wife. Please give her my sympathy. I can’t imagine any fate more odious. Indeed, you have had a frightful time of it.

Ever yours,
Virginia Woolf

Mrs T. S. Eliot

[]

1293: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Saturday [30 September 1922]

Typewritten

Monks House, Rodmell [Sussex]

Dearest Ottoline,

I have just heard from Tom who writes—“I should like to be able to answer your questions as you ask them, but when I force myself to put my mind on it I know that the whole matter is or has become so very difficult and complicated that I cannot without going into it from top to bottom. I have had to keep my mind off this matter as much as possible and concentrate on what I must do from hour to hour. It has been an incessant strain, knowing that this business was going on, and yet not knowing exactly what was going on; I have been assailed from all sides, and the situation has been made in some quarters very difficult. When no definite offer has been made one cannot let ones imagination run on what one might do in one set of circumstances or another. I find the only way to live at all is to fix my attention on the particular work of the moment. If I may come and see you as soon as you get back to Richmond, I should like to discuss every aspect thoroughly with you, and I think I can make clear why it is so difficult. I am sure however that you will understand my present attitude; so do you mind waiting until I see you? I hope it will not put you into a difficult position.”

So we have asked him to come next week, and I will let you know whatever I can make out from him. But I feel rather hopeless. It seems such a muddle; though I suspect it is all Tom’s own fault, and if only he would have swallowed his shyness at the beginning, something might have been done.

I wonder if you know exactly what has been done? Is a certain sum secure? And on what conditions? I think Aldington gave some facts in a letter to you. I should like to be able to tell Tom exactly how the matter stands so that he may not be in the dark any longer. So could you let me hear before Sunday.

It was very good of you not to curse me for writing as I did. I have met with nothing but rebuffs from my friends, and should be delighted to let the whole matter slide—except that I’m sorry for him. And he says that Mrs Eliot has now been ordered to undergo treatment at some remote place for several months—another expense, I suppose.

Is anything known about the progress of the American fund?

We go back to Richmond on Thursday.

Ever affect
V.W.

Texas

[]

1294: To Vanessa Bell

Tuesday [3 October 1922]

Monks [House, Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest

Here are some photographs—I know you’ll like the parrokeets at their parrokeeting. Will you hand them on to Clive.

I hear you’ve been infected with bugs and even Centipedes. Mrs Uppington cant tear herself away from the fray to clean Hogarth. You lift a piece of brown paper and out crawl creatures that have slept there for 20 years.

Tom was very very sorry not to see you, and wished to be particularly remembered. I’m now involved in a most ticklish business with him and Ottoline about his money. They’ve muddled the whole thing between them, and Tom will be lucky if he gets a 10 pound note. It all comes from having fine feelings; which leads, of course, to complete rupture.

We go back on Thursday. I want to go to a Promenade Concert on Friday. Could we meet? I don’t mean that you’re to give me dinner, but we might go in the same bus or something. But if you ring up on Thursday, we could arrange.

There are several matters I must consult you about immediately.

We’ve sold several [advance] copies of your book of drawings—yesterday one to Sir M[ichael]. Sadleir; so do for God’s sake get on with it.

Here is the finished cover.

Yr B.

Berg

[]

1295: To Roger Fry

Oct. 3rd 1922

Monk’s House, Rodmell [Sussex]

My dear Roger,

Long ago a slab of nougat arrived without any expression of affection attending it. The label was addressed in a curious forcible crabbed unknown hand. Clive says it is you. But you might have written. It was delicious while it lasted, and now is a memory. I suppose you are at St Tropez—perfectly happy, quite forgetful, painting all day—the sun perhaps too hot.

I haven’t much news, except of the usual English kind—weekends; Clive, Mary; Eliot, Morgan; Lytton, the Sangers. We go back to hogarth tomorrow, and have at once to beard a crisis with Ralph, which has been brewing some time. I expect he’ll stay on, however; but possibly we shall combine in some way with Mr Whitall, who is coming to see us. Several books are emerging; and I may point out that we’ve sold several copies of Mallarmé by Roger Fry.

Our Murry is back in London: and Sydney who has sloughed his skin for the 20th time and is now a simple, deep, suffering man of the style of Koteliansky, repudiates him, but wobbles. This is all horrid gossip to send out to your purer skies. I write in the horror of packing—I ought to be rolling stockings into balls. My great adventure is really Proust. Well—what remains to be written after that? I’m only in the first volume, and there are, I suppose, faults to be found, but I am in a state of amazement; as if a miracle were being done before my eyes. How, at last, has someone solidified what has always escaped—and made it too into this beautiful and perfectly enduring substance? One has to put the book down and gasp. The pleasure becomes physical—like sun and wine and grapes and perfect serenity and intense vitality combined. Far otherwise is it with Ulysses; to which I bind myself like a martyr to a stake, and have thank God, now finished—My martyrdom is over. I hope to sell it for £4.10. (I see my language is not as clear as it might be—)

But this is only a flourish to awaken your memory, which is I suppose, dissolved in sunshine. They are building up the churchyard wall here, and Mrs Dedman, has I regret to say, stolen 5 face towels.

Ever your
V.W.

Sussex

[]

Letters 1296-1340 (October-December 1922)

1296: To Gerald Brenan

Oct. 5th 1922

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond

Dear Gerald,

What is happening to you? And also what is happening to your writings? You promised to let me see some of them. But nothing has come my way, and I don’t feel very sure that this letter will ever find you. I’m often sorry that we didn’t see you again. But perhaps this spring we shall be taking a steamer down the coast of Spain. If so, may be look in on you?

We are just starting on our publishing season, going back to Richmond today after two months soaking down here [Rodmell]. I have been nibbling at village society. The Rector, his wife and daughter, tennis, tea parties—and much regret to find that we intellectuals not only have the brains but also the blood of the world. I dont see the point of stupidity and simplicity unless they serve as a counterpane to protect the grosser powers—lust, passion, virility, femininity and muscle. Nothing of the sort; they are anaemic, and spend their time in gossip and vain lamentations for West Kensington.

Lytton was here for a few days, and Carrington and Ralph, after their motor tour, which was frightfully expensive, Lytton said, but opened up the entire pageant of England.

I can’t quite imagine how you spend your day. Scratching out sentences, and reading the classics? Please enlighten me on all this, and, particularly, let us know if there is a chance that you’ll send us something for the Press. I shall send you my new novel, which we shall bring out at the end of the month. I should like criticism, if you can bring yourself to write it.

I am putting off, by writing this letter, the awful moment of dismissing our charwoman. She is a powerful old lady, much like a hippopotamus to look at, full of craft and guile, and may put her head down and gore me to death. So if you hear no more, understand that I have met my fate.

Leonard wishes to be remembered.

Yours ever
Virginia Woolf

George Lazarus

[]

1297: To Clive Bell

[7 October 1922]

Postcard

[Hogarth House, Richmond]

I’ll send the ballad to Nessa to keep tomorrow—as I’m incapable, owing to conversation, of correcting it in time.

By all means publish in America—It makes no difference to us.

V.W.

Quentin Bell

[]

1298: To Lytton Strachey

Oct. 9th [10th?] 1922

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

I breathe more freely now that I have your letter, though I think your praise is extravagant—I can’t believe you really like a work so utterly devoid of so many virtues; but it gives me immense pleasure to dream that you do. Of course you put your infallible finger upon the spot—romanticism. How do I catch it? Not from my father. I think it must have been my Great Aunts. But some of it, I think, comes from the effort of breaking with complete representation. One flies into the air. Next time, I mean to stick closer to facts. There are millions of things I want to get your opinion on—This is merely to heave a sigh of relief that you don’t cast me off, for nobody else’s praise ever gives me quite as much pleasure as yours.

Thursday lunch.

Your loving
Virginia

Frances Hooper

[]

1299: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Oct 10th 1922

Typewritten

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dearest Ottoline,

We saw Tom yesterday, and I think he has now made his position quite clear. He is definitely of opinion that his circumstances are such at present that he could not undertake to leave the Bank unless he had a certain and guaranteed income of not less than £500 a year. By a guaranteed income he means that, if it were subscribed in any way, it would not depend upon a bare promise of people to contribute so much a year, but that the money should be in the form of a trust so that he should be assured of its continuance. We both feel that he is quite right in this, and I am sure you will agree.

It is clear—and he agrees with this—that under these circumstances any circular which asks for less or which does not contain these conditions ought to be stopped. We think that the circular which was proposed in England cannot now go out. Would you let me know whether you will communicate this to Mr Aldington, or would prefer that I did?

Tom suggests that the best way of dealing with the Ezra Pound Committee and the American Committee would be for us to have a circular printed which could be sent to subscribers. In it we should say what I have said above—that the present scheme is impracticable; but I shall add that subscribers are invited to continue their subscriptions without making it a condition that Tom should leave the Bank. He has had very heavy expenses, and an addition to his income would make it, as he owned, possible for him to give more time to writing. I will send you a proof of this circular as soon as it is ready. We could send copies to Mr Aldinton [sic] if he wished to distribute them to the English subscribers. I suppose you do not know who is managing the American fund?

Tom was most anxious that you should know how grateful he is to you, and how much troubled lest you should think him in any way inconsiderate. He says that the plan drifted on without his knowing what was happening. He is very much upset about it—especially at the position he is in of refusing what other people have been at great trouble to get.

But of course, you’ll sympathise with all his miseries without my going into them. I thought it best to write, so as to run no risk of muddle.

Ever Your affate
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

1300: To Clive Bell

[11 Oct 1922]

Postcard

[Hogarth House, Richmond]

Margery Fry is dining here Friday next, 7.30. Will you come and give her a taste of intellectual life?

Yrs. V.W.

Quentin Bell

[]

1301: To Richard Aldington

19 October, 1922

Typewritten

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surry

Dear Mr Aldington,

I am writing to you about the T. S. Eliot Fellowship Fund. Mr Eliot was staying with us the other day in the country and I found in talk with him that he has decided that 1) he will not leave the Bank unless he is guaranteed £500 a year and 2) that he considers that securities at a bank or a capital sum which would bring in £500 are the only safe guarantee. I then received from Lady Ottoline the form which I enclose. As you will see, the proposals which are now made—to get a sum of £300 a year, for not less than five years—are useless in view of what Mr Eliot himself says. I do not myself think, and I find that Lady Ottoline agrees with me, that we have any chance of getting the very large sum of money required. Of course I do not know what success Mr Pound has had in France, or what has happened to the American Committee. Lady Ottoline’s views are that we should either write a new circular or add the following postcript to the one which I enclose:

Postcript.

“Since the scheme in the accompanying circular was prepared it has come to the knowledge of the committee that circumstances have arisen which make it necessary that Mr Eliot should be allowed to use his own discretion as to continuing or relinquishing his present work at the Bank. It is certain however that any addition to his income would not only remove from him considerable anxiety which the expense of illness has brought upon him but would make it possible for him to give more time to writing than he can now do. Under these circumstances the committee propose to continue the scheme in its present form, but without imposing or implying any condition that Mr Eliot should give up his work at the Bank.”

It is a complicated matter to settle in writing. Is there any chance that you would be able to come and see me here, or if you are in London could we arrange to meet?

Tom Eliot was, as you can imagine, very anxious that no one should think him inconsiderate; and greatly worried about the whole thing. He wanted me to communicate with Mr Pound, but I don’t feel I can do so without knowing what your views are first.

Yours sincerely,
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

1302: To David Garnett

Oct: 20th 1922

Hogarth House, Richmond

Dear Bunny

It was extraordinarily nice of you to write to me [about Jacob’s Room]. One has so many doubts about one’s books—about this one in particular I was doubtful whether it did keep together as a whole.

So I am very much relieved by your saying that it does. But how far can one convey character without realism? That is my problem—one of them at least. You’re quite right that I can’t do the realism, though I admire those who can.

Anyhow, I’m extremely pleased to think that you like it—and shall try to get on a step further in the next one, now that I’ve got rid of some of my old clothes. It is supposed to come out on the 27th; Leonard says he put a notice in to say so.

But what about your book? Please remember to keep me a copy.

I’m much excited by the accounts I hear of it—from Vanessa even, and you must admit that it takes a good deal to make her interested in mere literature.

Unlike her, I become more and more absorbed; and wish you and your wife would come out one day and let us go on talking.

Will the [General] Election ruin both our chances of selling? It is a most damnable piece of luck.

I expect you’re rather hard on Tom Eliots poem [The Waste Land].

I have only the sound of it in my ears, when he read it aloud; and have not yet tackled the sense. But I liked the sound.

Ever Yours
Virginia Woolf

Berg

[]

1303: To Roger Fry

Sunday Oct. 22nd 1922

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

My dear Roger,

I am racking my brains to think of some gossip to send you but as I suppose this to mean something spicy—Dora Sanger for example, raping Goldie in Piccadilly, or Ottoline redeeming her soul by some act of unparalleled magnanimity—I wait and wait—sitting over the fire, Lottie chattering about the best way to toast muffins and how the woman next door has had half her toe cut off because of an ingrowing nail; rain, I suppose, falling; and the autumnal church bells beginning as usual, it being now 20 minutes to six, to summon the Christians—an outrage upon my peace which always makes my gorge rise with indignation.

I have been involved in an appalling shindy about poor Tom Eliot’s annuity. Were you asked to subscribe £10 a year towards it? The story is long, and reflects credit upon no one save myself: but the upshot of it is that Tom remains in the Bank, and I am in correspondence with Ezra Pound. A complete muddle, as you may imagine. But Tom’s psychology fascinates and astounds. There he has let us all go on writing and appealing for the past 6 months, and at last steps out and says he will take nothing less than £500 a year—very sensible, but why not say so at first; and why twist and anguish and almost suffocate with humiliation at the mere mention of money? Its on a par with not pump shipping before your wife. Very American, I expect; and the more I see of that race the more I thank God for my British blood, which does at any rate preserve one from wearing 3 waistcoats; enamel buttons on one’s overcoat, and keeping one’s eyes perpetually shut—like Ezra Pound.

Morgan and Herbert Read were dining here last night, and Read, who has been in the Wyndham Lewis pigsty without wallowing in it, had some amazing stories of the brutes. Lewis now paints in a shed behind a curtain—rites are gone through before you enter; but this is all very dull and out of date, and I’m sure Oscar Wilde did it all much better. Morgan was very charming, and we went a walk in Richmond Park together and talked entirely about very very minute domestic details: the cat; the maid; the cousin; and Miss Partridge of Ashstead. He is finishing his novel, and utterly refuses to stay with the Asquiths or dine with Lady Colefax.

Margery was here the other night—your sister I mean, not Marjorie Strachey who ramps in Gordon Square—a menagerie without cages. The animals prowl in and out, and Nessa was laying the law down the other night with some force. If only she could never see any of her friends, she says, life might be tolerable: but there’s Karin, there’s Mary Hutch: there’s the telephone, there’s Kitty Maxse falling over the bannisters and killing herself—ought one to write to Susan Lushington [her sister]? No, one would say the wrong thing. Still it seems a pity that Kitty did kill herself: but of course she was an awful snob. No, one couldn’t go on with people like that. One had to make a break somewhere. Then, of course, in comes Angelica [Bell]; all the beads are upset on the floor; et cetera, et cetera.

I’m sending you novel tomorrow—a little reluctantly. It has some merit, but its too much of an experiment. I am buoyed up, as usual, by the thought that I’m now, at last, going to bring it off—next time. I suppose one goes on thinking this for ever; and so burrowing deeper and deeper into whatever it is that perpetually fascinates. Why don’t you come back and explain it?—you are the only person who ever does; so for God’s sake, get perfectly cured, and moderate your activity. It will accumulate in the cistern, and you can draw it off at leisure. I mean, you’ll paint your masterpiece if you have a rest. But then nothing except painting and writing is really interesting: and as one’s time is limited, how can one sit and smile?

I wish you would consider, seriously, bringing out a series of modern paintings, with introductions, through the Hogarth Press. The Press takes up all my time, and I ought to be translating Kots Russian, instead of running on like the kitchen tap. I think it is now firm on its legs, and might branch out: I think a shop and gallery combined must come next, but this waits for you.

Yrs V.W.

Sussex

[]

1304: To Violet Dickinson

Sunday [29 October 1922]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

My Violet,

Considering you pay handsomely for the books, I don’t see why you should thank us. Yes, Leonard is standing; we are in the midst of an awful rush; and I suppose the Election will kill the books. What a bore L. G. [Lloyd George] didn’t sit on his chair a little longer!

I didn’t send my book to Gerald, as I thought he wouldn’t like it.

I shall come up and have tea one day, when we have done doing up parcels and writing bills—its rather a large undertaking, without help, but great fun.

I go on having a temperature, but my heart seems quite recovered.

Yr V.W.

Leonard sends his love, and hopes to see you. He hasn’t got to go to Manchester to canvass, I’m glad to say, as there is no chance of his getting in against Herbert Fisher.

I’ve heard nothing about Kitty [Maxse], and couldn’t face the memorial service—my black being incomplete. How on earth did it happen?

Berg

[]

1305: To David Garnett

Oct 29 1922

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

My dear Bunny,

I am writing to express the real, yet queer, pleasure which your fox lady [Lady into Fox] has given me.

I was fascinated, and read on as quick as I could, in spite of knowing the end. I think it succeeds completely. The marriage of your own peculiar humour with the Eighteenth Century style is very seductive. But the interesting thing is I think your capacity for incident. Something is always happening; and it is, apparently effortless, and alive, and more like Defoe than any one else.

Do go on, and drop the 18th Century and do it completely off your own bat.

You must have a fund of stories in your head. All we battered old novelists find nothing so hard as perpetual story telling, and there you are doing it as a fountain bubbles.

This is not worth sending you, but unless I write now I shan’t, for we are worried and harassed by the elections and the books.

We want to discuss your letter. Leonard will arrange a meeting if he can.

This is only to thank you for the pleasure, for I don’t often like a book so much.

Yours ever
Virginia Woolf

Berg

[]

1306: To Philip Morrell

29th Oct. 1922

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

My dear Philip

It was extraordinarily nice of you to write to me, and your letter gave me so much pleasure that I am promptly disobeying your command not to inflict one of my disagreeable and sarcastic replies upon you.

I should very much like to think that you are right about Jacob’s Room. Certainly you have picked out the things I most like myself. When I wrote it I thought it was better than my other books. I am now, of course, getting all sorts of opinions, of the most opposite kinds, and can’t quite remember my original view.

I expect to be fearfully sat upon by reviewers, or ignored; and so I shall keep your letter to encourage me. I want to get a great deal further next time, than I have this. And as I was doubtful how far Jacob would convey anything to anybody, I am more than usually glad of your praises. And aren’t you hypocritically pretending to be merely agricultural? But I must not be sarcastic: please rub your eyes and see me sincere and grateful.

Now I am afraid I must bore you with the Eliot fund affairs. I have heard from Aldington who thinks that we had better go on with the fund, and add to the circular the postscript which Ottoline sent me.

I suppose that you have all the forms ready printed at Garsington; and it would be easy to have the postscript (enclosed) added on the blank page, or inserted as a slip—As you have had all the trouble and expense of the original printing, Shall we print a slip at the Hogarth Press, and send it to you—or what? I am telling Aldington that this is being done, and that he should write for forms to you or Ottoline. Aldington also wants to know the address of Ella A. Abbot who has contributed, but sends no address. She is unknown to me.

What a bore this business is! It leaves me no room nor time to talk of anything else. Our summer got so disorganised for various reasons that it was useless to ask you to Rodmell; nor did I think you would come, or I might have risked it—the risk being that you would have found a bed like a board, inefficient service, no bath, arm chair; and a tumult of ill assorted visitors. Perhaps another time we shall be better ordered. Leonard is in the middle of his election, and there is now a ghastly fear that he has some chance of getting in. Herbert Fisher has offended all the schoolteachers, apparently.

Love to Ottoline, and please ask her why it is that I must go to tea with Lady Colefax, and buy white gloves, a new hat, and shoes, instead of dropping into 44 Bedford Square, precisely as I am, dirty, dowdy, and disreputable. Doesn’t the thought sting her conscience and remind her of her duties!

Yours ever
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

1307: To Katherine Arnold-Forster

Oct 29 1922

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dearest Bruin,

It was a great pleasure to get your letter, for I wasn’t at all sure that you would find anything good to say of my offspring. It seems to affect people violently: with delight or disgust. I never know which its going to be; and am quite at sea, as to what I did write. Anyhow, though I expect a good deal of abuse from the reviewers, I rest in the praises of that faithful Cornish thick haired brute. Did you recognise some of your own scenery?

We are chaotic in this house, doing up Dostoevsky [Stavrogin’s Confession], and Jacob in brown paper, writing election addresses, interviewing lady agents, and now I must talk to Miss Mary Butts about her novel—an indecent book, about the Greeks and the Downs.

Is there any chance of seeing Will?

But I must ask you to explain a passage which puzzles both Leonard and me:

“Of course you’re quite right about cruelty—it does really spoil the very best of the writing—but this is so very many degrees further into the heart of the matter.”

I see its very profound; but did I say it? or does it refer to the poor old Criterion? Am I cruel? is Dostoevsky? You must explain. Fame has come to me with her arms full: Lady Colefax has invited me to tea.

Excuse this wretched scrawl: I am rather in a rush.

We have put your pound in store.

Now write me another letter, or come and see me, or send your husband, for whom I cherish an unrequited affection.

Yours
V.W.

Mark Arnold-Forster

[]

1308: To Richard Aldington

Oct. 29th 1922

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dear Mr Aldington,

I have written to the Morrells and told them that you agree that it is best to go on sending out the circulars with the postscript added. They will get the new version ready.

Would you communicate with Mr Pound?

I am sorry that I don’t know who Ella Abbott is—she is not in the telephone book.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

I shall be here till Christmas if you want to settle anything further.

Texas

[]

1309: To C. P. Sanger

30th Oct. 1922

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond

My dear Charlie,

I think a close study of Jacob’s Room, should you ever wish to approach the book again, will reveal many passages which a trained mind would have pinched much closer together: and others where the mistakes are glaring. What about lilacs in April, fountains in Neville’s Court, tulips in August etc etc etc. I am not going to pick them all out for your benefit. What I do feel is that education helps one to be drastic with oneself, instead of sloppy, and as age increases I do more and more believe in thought as an element of fiction. You are quite right, I am sure, in having grave doubts about the form of Jacob’s Room. So have I. It would take too long to explain why I had this time to use it, and what I hope next time to do with it. I am getting the most contradictory opinions daily, and feel quite at sea as to the success or failure of the whole. But as you ought to know, I have a humble respect, not to say veneration, for your judgment, and so if you found good in it, I am immensely encouraged.

It is no joke publishing ones own book, and there is this cursed election on top of it. Otherwise, it would be much nicer to see you and Dora than to write to you. There is now a ghastly chance that Leonard may get in. Herbert Fisher has made himself so unpopular. Directly the fuss is over, I shall try to get you to come and see us.

Ever so many thanks for writing.

Yours ever,
Virginia Woolf

Daphne Sanger

[]

1310: To Dora Sanger

[30 October 1922]

Enclosed with preceding letter

[Hogarth House, Richmond]

My dear Dora,

I ought to have answered your letter before.

But your own views of politeness are, if I may say so, so rudimentary, that I can never behave properly to you.

I hope the Gyles visit will become annual.

Even more than seeing you, I enjoyed your complete rout by that apparently insignificant woman—She has gone up miles in my respect: you have sunk.

Why do you accuse Leonard of indifference to public affairs? Here he is slaving all day to make the world safe for democracy or some trash like that. Its on the cards he will be Woolf M.P. before long, and I may dedicate my life to tea parties on the terrace. What have you and Charlie done compared with this? I have been telling Charlie on the other page that you must come and see us. I suppose you’ll say you haven’t time for frivolity, and make off with my matches again, having first said all the disagreeable things you can think of, because you are upset about the Chinese rice pickers and their famines and earthquakes.

I have had another very mild attack, but nothing to count. I think I am naturally 99.

Yours ever
(with apologies for not writing more seriously)
Virginia Woolf

What about the Californian Bee? Could we borrow a sprout?

Daphne Sanger

[]

1311: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Nov. 1st 1922

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dearest Ottoline

It gives me great pleasure that you should like Jacob. I had many doubts whether it would mean anything to anybody. Its all very well writing the things one enjoys writing—and I did this—but one does want, too, that some people should like it as well. Naturally, I am very glad that you should be one of them. I am rather anxious about it from a base commercial point of view. We have just ordered a second edition of a thousand; and now I look forward to sneers and jeers in all quarters, and a loss of so many pounds—This, as you see, is a hint to you, who receive so many such hints, to be good enough to tell people to spend 7/6 on it. However, if we get through the General Election safely, I daresay it will be all right.

Lady Colefax gave me 10/. That is why I went. She had Paul Valery lecturing, to a room full of feathers and white gloves. Lytton and I sat together and I took a great dislike, you will be glad to hear, to Aldous, another of the captives, in spats and grey trousers.

It was all very full of furs and thick handsome clothes—not an atmosphere I find congenial at the start—but who knows? I shall become domesticated like the rest perhaps. There was Edmund Gosse, George Moore, Arnold Bennett, etc etc. However the French was beautiful: beauty is not the note of our great men.

I have brutally told Aldington to write to you for Eliot forms. I think we must let him and Pound muddle through it as they can. We have done our best, and Tom I suppose may get something out of it. I will despatch forms when they are ready.

But this is really to thank you for your letter—a great pleasure to get.

Ever yours
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

1312: To Katherine Arnold-Forster

Nov 1st [1922]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dearest Ka,

Leonard says he is not quite sure, but thinks you write to Registrar of University, enclose £1.1. and ask to be put on voting list. Many thanks for your emendation, which is very interesting, and I think true (I mean universally speaking.)

I’ve just had a letter from Mrs Robert Lynd, 5 Seaview Terrace, St Ives, apologising humbly for her husband, because the Daily News treats me with contempt in a review. Robert Lynd the Editor, was away. If you see her, please assure her that I don’t mind, and its perfectly all right. (I have written to her; but as they’re so polite, would like it made sure). But I don’t suppose you know them—nor do I.

We have just ordered a second edition of Jacob, thus sacrificing a certain profit for a possible greater; and now the Election looks as if it would kill all books, and we are rather apprehensive. So please persuade Saxon or anyone else to buy it, if you can honestly recommend the investment.

Publishing one’s own books is very nervous work, and we don’t know how this is going. So, besides being incoherent and having to scratch out every other word, I am also blatantly advertising.

No sign of Will; but our chaos here is still too great for rational conversation. L. has to go to Manchester.

Yr V.W.

Mark Arnold-Forster

[]

1313: To Clive Bell

Tuesday [7 November 1922]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dearest Clive,

I assure you with my hand on my heart that the talk about J’s Room did nothing but intrigue and interest me.

I wish I had known Mary earlier. Then I should never have got so encrusted with vanity, or the appearance (for its not much more) of vanity that my good brother in law thinks that unless praise is spread smooth and thick I wilt and pine and crack and craze and finally have to remove to a nursing home.

J. is nothing but an experiment, as I’ve always said; an interesting experiment; and nothing more: unless indeed, being stirred up by a little discussion and criticism, which is the blood of life, I can push on further next time. The direction of that however must wait till I can somehow nail you to the wall, and then proceed to pour out endlessly. As I’ve been having tea with Violet, my wits are dispersed to the five winds. No sense will come.

Perhaps you’re lunching with your Paramour on Thursday?

Yr V.W.

Quentin Bell

[]

1314: To Clive Bell

[7? November 1922]

Postcard

[Hogarth House, Richmond]

Like a donkey, I went off leaving the drawings for your book at Nessa’s, in a roll. Would you take them with you to Tidmarsh, and hand over to Partridge, who will bring them here.

V.W.

Quentin Bell

[]

1315: To Will Arnold-Forster

Nov. 7th [1922]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dear Will,

I wish I had got wind of your state before, for then I would have come with the greatest pleasure. But tomorrow I can’t manage, and you’ll be off, I suppose, on Thursday, to the far superior charms of Tregerthen. Let me know if by any chance you stay on.

I should have made you tell me why Jacob is just the book for you—but the egoism of authoresses is proverbially bad for invalids, so no doubt all’s for the best.

Leonard is off to Liverpool, on a goose’s errand, for the Conservative students break up the meetings and he is only to speak to a few old ladies in a drawing room.

That is my terrible destiny in 30 minutes. Adrian, my brother, is coming to speak to the 12 Co-operators of Richmond, good working women who mind the pot and smack the baby, upon the possibilities of psycho-analysis. Ka will see the joke. You, who probably think me much like other people and my brothers and sisters equally capable of addressing Co-operators will see nothing in it at all.

As I will not remain an invalid much longer, ring me up, and let me arrive with my cheerful good sense and sound labour party politics. I went to a meeting here,—was so appalled by the stuff people talk that I am going to drop my vote in the gutter. How you and Leonard see anything solid where to me it is all phantasies and moonshine, only mudcoloured moonshine, I can’t conceive. Bonar Law seems to me precisely the same as Lloyd George—and so on.

But goodbye.

Yours Virginia Woolf

Mark Arnold-Forster

[]

1316: To Dora Carrington

[8 November 1922]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dearest Carrington,

I would have written yesterday, but had to rush off to the Womens Guild. It is quite untrue that we didn’t enjoy our weekend. As for the great argument anyhow I think it proved that if we have to part it wont be for personal reasons on our side, or on Ralph’s. Certainly we didn’t think that he gave us notice either because he disliked us or was tired of the Press. The difficulties on both sides seem to me purely and simply practical ones—However, I don’t suppose you want to revive the argument—this is only to show that it is just as desirable for Hogarth to be connected with Tidmarsh as for Tidmarsh to be connected with Hogarth. If the Press dies, poor creature, we shall still expect to be invited to stay.

I meant to ask your advice about sending my book to Gerald. I wrote to him 6 weeks ago but had no answer. Ralph says you have sent him a copy, which remind me to repay. Hope Johnstone has some messages from Gerald, he says; and I shall get him to come here.

Please excuse illiteracy; I have had to scribble all day to finish an article and this leaves one very much out of language. Not however, out of affection, which is always very strong for Carringtonia; so you must come and see me, and Leonard joins in this.

Ever VW.

Robert H. Taylor

[]

1317: To Ralph Partridge

Friday [10 November 1922]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

My dear Ralph,

I think I had better explain why you made me so angry this evening by asking me to see that Leonard did not sell the press during the weekend to Constables, and why I was further indignant with you for going on to suggest that we were ready, as you said, to “sell the press to the highest bidder.” I suspect that you didn’t mean either of these remarks seriously.

But I think I may have left you with the impression that I am myself in favour of amalgamation with some big firm in order to increase the publicity of my own books and profits. If you do think this, you are quite wrong; but the fault (being angry) may be mine.

What did make my blood boil was your assumption that Leonard and I are quite ready to be bamboozled with a bargain which would destroy the character of the press for the sake of money or pride or convenience; and that you must protect its rights. After all we have given the press whatever character it may have, and if you’re going to tell me that you care more about it than I do, or know better what’s good for it, I must reply that you’re a donkey. You will retaliate by telling me that I’m another to take your chance remarks seriously. No doubt I am; but I was left with a feeling that you would base some weekend discussions upon the assumption that the Woolves are out to make a good bargain, and that Virginia, consumed with vanity, and blown with ambition, is going to persuade Leonard etc and etc—In short, that the days of an independent Hogarth are doomed.

This was not at all my meaning, I assure you.

Yours ever
Virginia Woolf

Tell Carrington, if she is not sick altogether of these fiery quadrupeds [the Woolfs], that she never did give me the receipt for the toffee; which might sweeten my temper.

Robert H. Taylor

[]

1318: To Clive Bell

[10 November 1922]

Postcard

Hogarth House [Richmond]

Leonard will communicate with you about the Poem. We had already got the information from Bunny. L. will also answer the question about the New Republic. Your card was swept from me, so I can’t remember what it was.

V.W.

Quentin Bell

[]

1319: To Vanessa Bell

Sunday [12 November 1922]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dearest,

Here is 15/- which I consider dirt cheap for the hat. It is thought to be very becoming.

Would you possibly take me one day this week to buy an outfit—or anyhow tell me where the shop is?

Our proposal about the woodcuts is that you and Duncan should receive half profits, and produce as many woodcuts as would make a little book, in time to be published in the spring—

What about calling on Kate [Katharine Stephen?]?

Adrian and Karin are here playing bridge.

Yr B

Please let me know what I owe for the table. Could it be sent? Also what measurement is right for your chair.

Berg

[]

1320: To Lady Robert Cecil

[12 November 1922]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond

Dear Nelly,

I have been trying to buy some notepaper, and so answer your letter, but I have little hope of doing that. For one thing it is Sunday evening. We are back here, and have been for a month, and every day seems wasted in this weather.

I envy you and [Lady] Gwendolen [Cecil] very much. (I would send her my love, but I reflect that my clothes are wholly unsuitable for that.) One of these days, when I have bought a new skirt, I shall ask her to tea. Meanwhile Leonard and I say that though we are committed to keeping a secretary and a printing press going here, there is no reason why you should not come to us. Please consider it. We have a spare room—not comfortable, or very clean, but you could put up with it perhaps, and we should very much enjoy having you. Please consider it and suggest a time. We should like to see your dog too.

Leonard has been meeting Lord Robert. He has seen his constituents, and they seem cordial; but if he does get in (I’m talking of Leonard) I shall divorce him. Unfaithfulness is not with women only. In fact, politics seems worse to me than mistresses. Are those your sentiments? Sidney Webb is safe, so they say ; and if England is governed by Sidney Webb surely the rest of us may fold our hands!

I read the book of Job last night—I dont think God comes well out of it—How I wish you were here to tell me stories of your childhood, and what happened when the man asked how a cob differed from a horse.

I’m sitting on the edge of a party playing Bridge—very cold, dismal, faced with the appalling problem of buying some clothes. Nessa has sold me a hat for 10/6—but who will sell me a skirt, and until I get a skirt, Lady Gwendolen will not come to tea.

Now my dear Nelly, when will [you] come and see us?

Yrs aff.
V.W.

Hatfield

[]

1321: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

13th Nov. 22

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dearest Ottoline:

I am afraid these have taken a long time, but we are rather busy just now. I have kept a few, and shall now begin pestering some of the mild cold ladies I meet at tea parties. But my career is running to an end. I can’t forever appear in the same skirt; already glances of derision are levelled at it; and I foresee that I must retire to the suburbs until May, when I shall buy a new one.

I sometimes think with some horror that you are taking my hint to advertise my book seriously. Please don’t. I didn’t mean that. I think we are safe not to lose on it now, and I have a great dread of becoming a bore to Ottoline, who is not without her troupe of them already.

I met old Mr [Augustine] Birrell the other day, who talked of you affectionately, as I did; but said you were very depressed. I hope this is one of the misunderstandings old men make.

Ever yours
V.W.

I’ll send the forms [Eliot Fund pledges] tomorrow. I see they must be put in a parcel.

Texas

[]

1322: To Philip Morrell

16th Nov. 1922

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dear Philip.

Please excuse me for bothering you with the Eliot fund again; but I know Ottoline is in London.

I’m sending you this pledge of Logan’s to keep; and shall send you any others I get; as they had better be together in one place, I think.

No answer is required.

Even yours
Virginia Woolf

We are much relieved not to have got into Parliament, and yet to have done creditably.

Texas

[]

1323: To Janet Case

Sunday [19 November 1922]

Hogarth House [Richmond]

My dear Janet,

It was very nice of you to read Jacob, and to like some of it. I’m so confused by contradictory opinions, that I can’t remember in the least what it is about. However, I’ve no doubt its very clever!

I am trying to write against a conversation about chess, which is now going forward between Leonard and Oliver Strachey. Then I have to get up and pour out tea. Then we talk about Ray’s failure. I thought she had succeeded marvellously: but she was positive she would get in: the poll completely dismayed her.

We had one terrible night of hope. Mr Strang [Strong] withdrew. All the teachers then came over to Leonard. Thank God, Mr Strang thought better of it, and they returned to him, or we should have been within an ace of getting in.

But this is mere gossip and triviality beside the solid and prodigious fact of your house. I can’t believe it has really happened—Is it coal black? perfect in every way? A view of trees from each window? Forest rides as near you as Eton Street is near me? And all the blue china and cups without handles already unpacked—not a single one of course broken; and Emphie acclaimed by divine right the Despot of Minstead [New Forest], with complete control and knowledge of all domestic arrangements within 5 miles, including births, deaths and marriages, none of which take place without her consent, and it is said she is getting up an anti-staghunt agitation, which meets with gave opposition from old Colonel Lascelles whom I used to know.

I am dribbling; and must stop.

Yr V.W.

Sussex

[]

1324: To Vanessa Bell

Thursday [23 November 1922]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dearest,

I have made so bold as to ask Roger to meet us and you at 46 Gordon Square on Saturday next at 6. p.m. If this is utterly abhorrent to you, say so, beforehand

The thing is that Heinemann has made us rather a tempting proposal about the Press; but it is essential to get Roger and you to give us your opinion about it, as it depends a good deal upon our contributors—especially the artists, whether we ought to reject or accept.

I’ve asked Morgan for Tuesday.

Yr B.

I owe you 5/. I was rather ashamed of myself as usual for chivvying you out of your pictures at 5/. when they are probably worth £5.5.5.

Berg

[]

1325: To R. C. Trevelyan

23rd Nov. 1922

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dear Bob,

It was extremely nice of you to write to me. I think that there is a great deal in all that you say about Jacob’s Room—I mean in your criticisms. Of course, the effort of breaking with strict representation is very unsettling, and many things were not controlled as they should have been. It is true, I expect, that the characters remain shadowy for the most part; but the method was not so much at fault as my ignorance of how to use it psychologically. But this is too difficult to explain in writing—(at this moment at least—and I hope we shall see you). I’m sorry about the obscurity—if you mean that the actual sentences were obscure, and not only the approaches, and transitions, and situations generally. I think there is no excuse for needless difficulty—it is bad writing merely;—I shan’t tolerate it again, I hope.

Anyhow, I am awfully pleased that you liked much of it, and think it a fruitful experiment, for this encourages me to go on, as I wish to do.

I hope you will come here soon, and then, if it didn’t bore you, I should like very much to get you to tell me more of your views. Why don’t you write a poem which brings in and leaves out what you wish? And then we would publish it—but I expect this is a silly remark, for I don’t know enough of your problems as a poet.

I am ashamed to send this letter, because I have not time to write properly, but I was so pleased with yours that I wanted to answer it.

Leonard sends his love, and hopes to see you. Having got through his election, he now has to serve on a jury at the Old Bailey—we’re afraid its the Ilford murder case. He might as well be in Parliament.

Yours ever,
Virginia Woolf

Sussex

[]

1326: To H. G. Wells

26th Nov. [1922]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dear Mr Wells,

Miss [Ethel] Sands has suggested that you might be willing to give us the great pleasure of meeting you. We wondered whether you would come to a very small dinner on Tuesday, 5th December, at 7.45, at my sister’s house, 46 Gordon Square. (I think perhaps you have met her husband, Clive Bell.) Dress, of course, is not necessary.

My husband wishes to be remembered to you.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

University of Illinois

[]

1327: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Nov 30 [1922]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dearest Ottoline,

I have only succeeded in finding that Lady Cunard lives at Carlton House Terrace. I’ll try and get the number from Mary Hutchinson tomorrow. Mary H: is distributing notices, and will do the Jowitts. I will do Maynard and Lytton.

I have become like one of those dreary drudges who always say that they are too busy to breathe. It is a dull and disgraceful state to be in; but for the last week or so, quite true of me, I’m ashamed to say.

That old silly Sybil Colefax never mentioned you on her orange note paper; or perhaps I could have put off my pressing engagement. I’m sorry I didn’t; but one tea party a week is as much as I have the head for. I don’t mean that one requires a real head; but a head that knows where to stop, which for me, trained at Bedford Square, is a perpetual dilemma. What can one say to Mr Percy Lubbock? By no means all one thinks. That is the strain and misery to me. But they are all very nice and kind and Morgan Forster and I simply cannot make out what it is that is wrong. Perhaps it is wrong with Morgan and me. He has been with Elizabeth Bibesco, motoring all night, eating hot lobster, and hearing all her stories of love and sorrow; but, he says, it is no more interesting than old ladies at Weybridge, and costs £10,000 a year.

Please excuse this scrawl.

Your ever
V.W.

Texas

[]

1328: To Maynard Keynes

[3? December 1922]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dear Maynard,

You will be indignant no doubt to receive the enclosed, which is the most muddled appeal ever written. Still I don’t see how you can deny that it meets all your objections; and I’m afraid you’ll have to contribute.

Yours ever
Virginia Woolf

King’s

Printed

ELIOT FELLOWSHIP FUND

It has been known for some time to Mr T. S. Eliot’s friends that the effort of Bank work in which he is at present engaged is injuring his health and must seriously interfere with his creative powers. It is impossible that he should continue to produce good poetry unless he has more leisure than he can now hope to obtain, but his literary work is of too high and original a quality to afford by itself a means of livelihood. For this reason it is proposed to raise a special fellowship fund to enable him to give up his post at the Bank and devote his whole time to literary work. It is estimated that at least £300 a year for a period of not less than 5 years will be required, and it is hoped that many admirers of good literature will be glad to contribute to a fund which has for its aim the preserving of the talent of one of the most original and distinguished writers of our day.

Subscribers are asked to pledge themselves to contribute a sum of £10 a year, or £5 in special cases, for not less than 5 years, and arrangements will, if possible, be made to send to each subscriber a copy of all Mr Eliot’s works as published.

The Committee for England will consist of Lady Ottoline Morrell, Garsington Manor, Oxford; Mrs Leonard Woolf, Hogarth House, Richmond; Mr H. T. J. Norton, Merton House, Cambridge; and Mr Richard Aldington, Malthouse Cottage, Padworth, Reading, who is acting as Treasurer of the fund. Another Committee is also working in collaboration with this Committee, both in France and America. Subscribers are asked to sign both the annexed forms and to return them as soon as possible to any of the Committee.

October 1922

* Donations of £25 and over will also be accepted but annual subscriptions are preferred. In the event of the necessary amount not being raised within 3 months all money received will, if desired, be repaid to the subscribers.

POSTSCRIPT

Since the scheme in the accompanying circular was proposed it has come to the knowledge of the Committee that circumstances have arisen which make it necessary that Mr Eliot should be allowed to use his own discretion as to continuing or relinquishing his present work at the Bank.

It is however certain that any addition to his income would not only remove from him considerable anxiety which the expense of illness has brought upon him but would make it possible for him to give more time to writing than he can now do. Under these circumstances the Committee propose to continue the scheme in its present form without imposing or implying any condition that Mr Eliot should give up his work at the Bank.

[]

1329: To Lytton Strachey

Sunday, Dec. 3rd [1922]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Here at last is the letter you have been so anxiously waiting. It is worth keeping as a specimen of English.

I’m not sure, though, that it leaves you with a leg to stand on. All your objections are met, (if you will read carefully) and so … Cheques payable to me, or Aldington, or Philip.

When are we going to see you again?

Yr V.W.

Berg

[]

1330: To Jacques Raverat

Dec. 10 1922

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

My dear Jacques,

It was very nice to get your letter—to which Gwen’s handwriting adds an unmistakable smack of that lost but unforgotten woman. I’m glad you liked Jacob better than the other novels; one always wishes the last to be best. I’m not blind, though, to its imperfections—indeed it is more an experiment than an achievement. Is your art as chaotic as ours? I feel that for us writers the only chance now is to go out into the desert and peer about, like devoted scapegoats, for some sign of a path. I expect you got through your discoveries sometime earlier. All this, however, we will chatter about endlessly when we meet.

But when? I say the end of March. This depends, for us, upon arrangements with the Nation, for which Leonard has to write a weekly article on foreign politics. Still, we do mean to come, and have promised to take a boat from Marseilles and go on to Spain to stay with a solitary eccentric young man called Bernan, who is trying to learn to write upon a mountain near Granada. Do you know him? Ought we to arrange about rooms? Perhaps Gwen would tell me sometime closer to March. I heard praises of your pictures from Roger Fry the other night. He thinks you are now doing the interesting things—but I don’t know if his praises, or any one’s praises, mean much to you. We are so lonely and separated in our adventures as writers and painters. I never dare praise pictures, though I have my own opinions. Raspail was spelt wrong owing to Duncan and Vanessa, whom I consulted. A letter more or less means nothing to them. Toads are (essentially) insects, I maintain. Women may be worse, or may be better, than men, but surely the opinions of the writer of Jacobs Room on that point, or any other, are not my opinions. This is a very old quarrel though.

I’m glad you are fat; for then you are warm and mellow and generous and creative. I find that unless I weigh 9½ stones I hear voices and see visions and can neither write nor sleep. It is a necessity, I suppose, to part with youth and beauty, but I think there are compensations.

Please write again, if it doesn’t bore you. I enjoyed your letter so much, and imagine your whole existence, no doubt a little wrong, as I walk with my dog, in Richmond Park.

The Hogarth Press is branching out in January with 2 partners. Haven’t you some writing up your sleeve?

Yours ever,
Virginia Woolf

Sussex

[]

1331: To Richard Aldington

19th Dec. 1922

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dear Mr Aldington,

I am quite ready to ask Lady Ottoline to sign a cheque, and I think it would be a very good time to give it, however it is done. But after what Mr Eliot told me, I’m sure he won’t take a penny unless we can assure him that no conditions are attached to it.

If you will let me have a line to say that this is so, I will communicate with Lady Ottoline at once.

He was also refusing, when I saw him, to take money from people who were earning their livings, as he is. Should I be at liberty to give him the names of the donors if he insisted upon knowing?

Yours sincerely,
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

1332: To R. C. Trevelyan

21st Dec. 1922

[Monk’s House, Rodmell]

Dear Bob,

I wonder if you would be so very kind as to lend me Earlham, by Percy Lubbock, which I’m told you have. Logan says it is a masterpiece, and I can’t get it from Mudies [Library]. I enclose stamps, and would promise to return within a fortnight. Address,

Monks House,
Rodmell,
Lewes.

but don’t bother to answer if you haven’t got it. I’m taking your translations down to read. I don’t think you ought to use the word “quire” for “choir”, it suggests to me, as a publisher, 24 sheets post 8vo. I’ve only looked in.

Yours ever,
Virginia Woolf

Sussex

[]

1333: To Richard Aldington

[21? December 1922]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

Dear Mr Aldington,

I think it would be best to send Mr Eliot a cheque for £50 at once, and am writing to Lady Ottoline by this post. I shall meet his objections as best I can—but I’m afraid you are right in thinking that recent events will make him refuse, whatever one may say or do.

However, one can but try.

Yours truly
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

1334: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

[21? December 1922]

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

Dearest Ottoline,

The affairs of the Eliot fund once more! Aldington writes to suggest that we should pay over some money to Tom at once. There is £77 in the Bank.

So do you agree to sending him a cheque for £50 now?

If so, would you sign the enclosed cheque and return it to me? I will then fill it up, and send on to him. I feel rather doubtful that he’ll take it. Still we can but try.

Its a dismal and howling day down here. I suppose you have somehow conjured a party up at Garsington. I sat next a young Mr Sackville at dinner the other night, who talked of you incessantly, with the greatest admiration and gratitude.

Ever yr aff
V.W.

We go back to Hogarth House on the 1st.

Texas

[]

1335: To Vanessa Bell

Dec. 22nd [1922]

Monk’s House [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest,

I searched the curiosity shops of Lewes yesterday, and only found this curious phallic emblem (don’t ask your father in law what that means) reminding me slightly of the bowl which figures in some of your still lives. Anyhow, being glass, it is easily broken. It is meant to hold scent: but why not try it as a candlestick? (failing the other use, which, as I say, don’t investigate at the breakfast table)

I can hardly imagine Cleeve House, with Dolphin captive all day. I suppose the children tide you over, and exhibit you only in those maternal aspects which may well disarm suspicion.

I left you in black despair. Must you really become wandering again? Six months in France—six at Charleston—I shall never see you. But that, as you will remark, is not really the point. Seriously, I think you ought to prevent Maynard before it is too late. I can’t believe that he realises what the effects would be. I can foresee only too well Lydia stout, charming, exacting; Maynard in the Cabinet; 46 the resort of the dukes and prime ministers. M. being a simple man, not analytic as we are, would sink beyond recall long before he realised his state. Then he would awake, to find 3 children, and his life entirely and for ever controlled.

That is how it appears to me, without considering my own grievances. If you dont put your view before him, he will have a case against you when the catastrophe arrives. Moreover, Lydia is far better as a Bohemian unattached, hungry, and expectant, than as a matron with nothing to hope, and all her rights secure.

There’s not much news. Fragments of gossip return to my mind—but I cant help thinking your own pouch is full, and the contents not shared equitably. Lord Esher has forbidden Brett to live with Gertler—not that they ever lived, save in the sense of sharing the same saucepan. So he lodges 2 doors off. We have been elected to that horrid muling puling society which meets on Thursdays—Murry, Sydney, Brett, Gertler, and Koteliansky. The absurd creatures model themselves, I gather, upon the Apostles: first you are looked at; then voted for. Sydney’s wife was blackballed. So it is a very great compliment. But what I say is, if you can’t be clever, isn’t it better to be beautiful? Did I tell you that Sydney has discovered that we are all responsible for the sins of all? It is the new gospel—and accounts for the miserable quality of their conversation. But none of this interests Dolphin. I am still rather stupid in the head, or I should be writing Punch and Judy.

I have laid down the law to Lottie, with the usual result—she is perfectly angelic and as humble as a caterpillar. I think I shall keep her like this, and be a real lady in future. However Nelly tells me she was even worse with Jo-an. Once they had such a scene that Jo-an went to Roger and said either she must leave or Lottie, upon which Roger chose Lottie, according to Nellie. But I don’t think you quite appreciate the difficulties of being a Socialist. Did you know that I’m a Socialist?

Ralph became so sad and so charming and pathetic that I almost relented. But when I think of his remark about Lytton I stiffen my bristles. Its all very distressing, as I feel slightly responsible for that marriage, and so feel that one is hauling up a life belt—leaving Carrington to flounder in the middle of the channel embraced by a cuttlefish. And if it is true that we are all responsible for the sins of all, surely we ought to sink together? What is your opinion? I am constantly surprised by moral doctrines rolled out, most unexpectedly, from your deep seas.

If Julian has got the book I sent, let me have it; as I rather want it. Give him my love, and tell him I insist upon having a letter of thanks, giving me a full account of his views upon English literature. I want to see him.

Now write me a letter of love.

Yr B.

We have just settled with a German firm to reproduce Duncan’s designs for Luce. They are very cheap, and if good, we might start doing pictures. How much does your man charge for photographing pictures? A block wd cost about 10/- we think.

Berg

[]

1336: To Dora Carrington

Xmas Day [1922]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, near Lewes, Sussex

My dear Carrington,

I don’t know which was nicer—your letter, or your sweets—both completely unlike anything else in the habitable globe. I have written so many letters, that you must not expect any flowers from me—Leonard is sending you and Ralph with our love some cooking apples—rather a mangy present; but then the old serpent, I mean,—you know who I mean [Lytton]—often takes an apple with his tapioca.

No: all friendships remain intact. Its a great blessing—but then at our time of life, to break even a ten penny mug over a dispute would be in the highest degree idiotic. Besides, who knows?—something may be rigged up yet. I don’t despair. The Toads may turn out hollow frauds. But I don’t mean to open my mouth again until I have something sensible to say.

[Edward] Shanks is coming to call. That is all our news. He was riding his pony in a gale, looking precisely like a plum pudding; There’s no drink to give him, so we shall stew over the fire as before.

Lottie’s rump is cured. She is now angelicity itself, and made a mouse out of marzipan with a tail of string which she put in my cup at tea—The excitement in the kitchen is still intense. Then we had the rector singing carols in the cabbages for the sake of the blind—altogether, a very Merry Christmas—

It isn’t as if the Hogarth Press were settled down irretrievably. I expect it to grow all over the place, and certainly I shall call upon you, in some capacity.

I wonder whether marriage was much discussed during the weekend—Maynards I mean.

But you must come in January, 1923.

Yr
V.W.

Oh did you hear that I wrote to Thomas Gage? He has accepted a packet of Bromo; suitably inscribed.

Robert H. Taylor

[]

1337: To Gerald Brenan

Christmas Day 1922

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Near Lewes, Sussex

Dear Gerald,

Very stupidly I came away without your letter, though I have been putting off writing till Christmas, hoping to have time and some calmness. It interested me, very much, and now I can’t take it up and answer it as I had meant. But no doubt this is as well. What one wants from a letter is not an answer. So I shall ramble on, until the cook goes off to tea with Mrs Dedman, when I must scramble the eggs.

First however, we certainly hope to come to you about the end of March, or beginning of April. This depends on things that can’t be settled now; so may we leave it, and write definitely later? Apart from talking to you, as we want to do, at leisure, fully, at night, at dawn, about people, books, life, and so on and so on, my eyes are entirely grey with England—nothing but England for 10 years; and you can’t imagine how much of a physical desire it becomes to feed them on colour and crags—something violent and broken and dry—not perpetually sloping and sloppy like the country here. (This is a very wet Christmas day).

I have been thinking a great deal about what you say of writing novels. One must renounce, you say. I can do better than write novels, you say. I don’t altogether understand. I don’t see how to write a book without people in it. Perhaps you mean that one ought not to attempt a ‘view of life’?—one ought to limit oneself to one’s own sensations—at a quartet for instance; one ought to be lyrical, descriptive: but not set people in motion, and attempt to enter them, and give them impact and volume? Ah, but I’m doomed! As a matter of fact, I think that we all are. It is not possible now, and never will be, to say I renounce. Nor would it be a good thing for literature were it possible. This generation must break its neck in order that the next may have smooth going. For I agree with you that nothing is going to be achieved by us. Fragments—paragraphs—a page perhaps: but no more. Joyce to me seems strewn with disaster. I can’t even see, as you see, his triumphs. A gallant approach, that is all that is obvious to me: then the usual smash and splinters (I have only read him, partly, once). The human soul, it seems to me, orientates itself afresh every now and then. It is doing so now. No one can see it whole, therefore. The best of us catch a glimpse of a nose, a shoulder, something turning away, always in movement. Still, it seems better to me to catch this glimpse, than to sit down with Hugh Walpole, Wells, etc. etc. and make large oil paintings of fabulous fleshy monsters complete from top to toe. Of course, being under 30, this does not apply to you. To you, something more complete may be vouchsafed. If so, it will be partly because I, and some others, have made our attempts first. I have wandered from the point. Never mind. I am only scribbling, more to amuse myself than you, who may never read, or understand: for I am doubtful whether people, the best disposed towards each other, are capable of more than an intermittent signal as they forge past—a sentimental metaphor, leading obviously to ships, and night and storm and reefs and rocks, and the obscured, uncompassionate moon. I wish I had your letter for I could then go ahead; without so many jerks.

You said you were very wretched, didn’t you? You described your liver rotting, and how you read all night, about the early fathers; and then walked, and saw the dawn. But were wretched, and tore up all you wrote, and felt you could never, never write—and compared this state of yours with mine, which you imagine to be secure, rooted, benevolent, industrious—you did not say dull—but somehow unattainable, and I daresay, unreal. But you must reflect that I am 40: further, every 10 years, at 20, again at 30, such agony of different sorts possessed me that not content with rambling and reading I did most emphatically attempt to end it all; and should have been often thankful, if by stepping on one flagstone rather than another I could have been annihilated where I stood. I say this partly in vanity that you may not think me insipid; partly as a token (one of those flying signals out of the night and so on) that so we live, all of us who feel and reflect, with recurring cataclysms of horror: starting up in the night in agony: Every ten years brings, I suppose, one of those private orientations which match the vast one which is, to my mind, general now in the race. I mean, life has to be sloughed: has to be faced: to be rejected; then accepted on new terms with rapture. And so on, and so on; till you are 40, when the only problem is how to grasp it tighter and tighter to you, so quick it seems to slip, and so infinitely desirable is it.

As for writing, at 30 I was still writing, reading; tearing up industriously. I had not published a word (save reviews). I despaired. Perhaps at that age one is really most a writer. Then one cannot write, not for lack of skill, but because the object is too near, too vast. I think perhaps it must recede before one can take a pen to it. At any rate, at 20, 30, 40, and I’ve no doubt 50, 60, and 70, that to me is the task; not particularly noble or heroic, as I see it in my own case, for all my inclinations are to write; but the object of adoration to me, when there comes along someone capable of achieving—if only the page or paragraph; for there are no teachers, saints, prophets, good people, but the artists—as you said—But the last sentence is hopelessly unintelligible. Indeed, I am getting to the end of my letter writing capacity. I have many more things to say; but they cower under their coverlets, and nothing remains but to stare at the fire, and finger some book till the ideas freshen within me, or they once more become impartible.

I think, too, there is a great deal of excitement and fun and pure pleasure and brilliance in one’s fellow creatures. I’m not sure that you shouldn’t desert your mountain, take your chance, and adventure with your human faculties—friendships, conversations, relations, the mere daily intercourse. Why do young men hold books up before their eyes so long? French literature falls like a blue tint over the landscape.

But I am not saying what I mean, and had better stop. Only you must write to me again—anything that occurs to you—And what about something for the Hogarth Press?

Leonard adds his wishes to mine for the future.

Yours
Virginia Woolf

P.S.

I add a postscript, which is intended to explain why I say that one must not renounce. I think I mean that beauty, which you say I sometimes achieve, is only got by the failure to get it; by grinding all the flints together; by facing what must be humiliation—the things one can’t do—To aim at beauty deliberately, without this apparently insensate struggle, would result, I think, in little daisies and forget-me-nots—simpering sweetnesses—true love knots—But I agree that one must (we, in our generation must) renounce finally the achievement of the greater beauty: the beauty which comes from completeness, in such books as War and Peace, and Stendhal I suppose, and some of Jane Austen; and Sterne; and I rather suspect in Proust, of whom I have only read one volume. Only now that I have written this, I doubt its truth. Are we not always hoping? and though we fail every time, surely we do not fail so completely as we should have failed if we were not in the beginning, prepared to attack the whole. One must renounce, when the book is finished; but not before it is begun. Excuse me for boring on: you may have said nothing of the kind. I was wondering to myself why it is that though I try sometimes to limit myself to the thing I do well, I am always drawn on and on, by human beings, I think, out of the little circle of safety, on and on, to the whirlpools; when I go under.

George Lazarus

[]

1338: To Vanessa Bell

Wednesday [27 December 1922]

Monk’s House [Rodmell, Sussex]

Here is a sketch for Punch and Judy. It will want a good deal of alteration. However I think you and Duncan had better see what can be done with it.

I have made some of the characters appear in front of the house—but perhaps this can’t be managed. It takes about 10 minutes to read aloud.

It is very dismal here today, except that we had our second turkey. Did I tell you we bought 2, the size of young chickens?

What happened to you? Waits and carols and mistletoe? Were you a success? Did Angelica behave?

I’m involved once more in awful doings with poor Tom. I believe we are sending him £50 for Christmas; but I expect he will refuse it.

We come back on Monday.

Possibly I might look in to tea on Monday. I will if I can.

V.W.

Berg

[]

1339: To V. Sackville-West

Dec. 28th [1922]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond

Dear Mrs Nicolson,

I hope you will not think me very grasping if I complain that ‘Knole’, which you said was being sent to me, has never arrived.

No doubt they got the address wrong. It should be

Hogarth House
Paradise Road
Richmond.

I have been reading some of your poems in the new Georgian book with great pleasure; and so can’t help dunning you in this way in order that I may get more from your last book.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Berg

[]

1340: To R. C. Trevelyan

Dec. 29th 1922

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

Dear Bob,

I return Percy Lubbock [Earlham] with many thanks. I have read every word with great interest, trying to make out why in spite of every appearance to the contrary, and Logan and so on, it seems to me a thoroughly bad book—not a book at all in fact. I really cannot say why. Percy is obviously intelligent, scrupulous, devout, meritorious, well read, a scholar, a gentleman, I daresay a Christian—I could go on adding up his qualities—Moreover his style is by no means despicable. He is never slipshod, sentimental, or trite—indeed he is often subtle and illuminating. What, then, can it be? I suspect something hopelessly prosaic, timid, tepid, in his goal. The spirit of Earlham is undoubtedly the family butler. Everybody is combed and clipped into their nice, portly, respectable waistcoats and flounces—that, to me, is the heart of the mischief—this conspiracy to misrepresent the human soul in the interests of respectability and, I suppose, of the defunct Henry James, until what with the mildew and the mould and the tone and the mellowness and the setting sun—the rooks cawing and so on and so on, nothing approaching bone or blood is left. And why should Percy, who is comparatively young, enter this conspiracy? It makes me long for glaring suburbs, brass bands—Brighton Piers. Oh the smugness of it! Never a venture or an oath or one word more important than another. Still, I exaggerate—but really it is queer, how good it is and how bad, and why; and whether Percy himself is corrupt; or whether—perhaps I am quite wrong from start to finish. I’ve just met him, and felt a little of this in talking to him.

We go back to Richmond on Monday, and hope you and Bessie [Mrs Trevelyan] will come and see us sometime. I want to discuss your Aeschylus with you—I give way about the spelling of quire. Nor should I yield to Logan. If he thinks Earlham a masterpiece, he is not to be trusted about the letter K.

I hope you are writing a poem. I am dipping into Georgian Poetry 1922, and get bored to death with apple trees and acorns. Surely there are more amusing things to talk about than these!

Yours ever
Virginia Woolf

Bertha Ruck and I are now great friends: Tom Gage turned out to be Lytton-Carrington.

Sussex

[]

A Change of Perspective
[The Letters Vol. III: 1923-1928]

“To write a novel in the heart of London is next to an impossibility. I feel as if I were nailing a flag to the top of a mast in a raging gale. What is so perplexing is the change of perspective….”

Virginia Woolf to Vita Sackville-West
2 March 1926

Letters 1341-1373 (January–March 1923)

1341: To V. Sackville-West

3rd Jan. [1923]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dear Mrs Nicolson,

I should never have dared to dun you if I had known the magnificence of the book. Really, I am ashamed, and would like to say that copies of all my books are at your service if you raise a finger—but they look stout and sloppy and shabby. There is nothing I enjoy more than family histories, so I am falling upon Knole the first moment I get.

I am shameless enough to hope that the poems won’t go to the wrong address. I was prepared to sniff at Eddie’s Georgians, and so I did; but not at yours.

I wonder if you would come and dine with us? Say Monday 8th, 7.45.

We don’t dine so much as picnic, as the press has got into the larder and into the dining room, and we never dress.

I would look up a train, and give you directions if you can come, as I hope.

Yours very sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Berg

[]

1342: To Molly MacCarthy

Jan 3rd [1923]

Monks [error for Hogarth] House, Richmond

Dearest Molly,

It was indeed a surprise, a pleasure, and a consolation for all the troubles of life to find your letter waiting here. We are just back from eating our turkey at Rodmell, and it’s quite true what you say—the thighs are gigantic—and then there are pockets of flesh under the armpits. We arrived on top of Mr and Mrs Lucas, of Kings, who had come from Blackheath to see us—a tribute which I can’t imagine paying to anyone at Blackheath—but that’s my damned unsocial nature. I was wanting to ask Michael, Desmond and Rachel here, and then we plunged into the very hell of domestic catastrophe: both servants in bed simultaneously with the German measles, and all the chars of Richmond fleeing from the plague and leaving us to empty the slops. We are still infectious, and I find that only the faithful, like Molly and Roger [Fry], will remain faithful to friendship and run the risk. Tomorrow, however, I dine with Clive [Bell] to meet Goldie. You were going to say something witty and spiteful about Goldie—then you crossed yourself and refrained. But couldn’t you uncross yourself?

Did you write the article on Mrs Inchbald in the Statesman?

Well, we went to tea in Rodmell Rectory and discussed fox-trotting and canker. I read 20 dozen books, but have forgotten them all—except by Gwendolen Cecil who has the style not merely of a man, but of a guardsman. I mean virility fairly sticks to the particles. When do you come back?—and is it to the ghost of old Miss Clough, or to your native Chelsea? This lovely blue sheet will hold no more—so good bye.

V.W.

Mrs Michael MacCarthy

[]

1343: To Hope Mirrlees

[6 January 1923]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

My dear Hope,

I ought to have thanked you ages ago for your letter, which gave me the greatest pleasure. I went away, and meant to write, and found I had left your letter and address here.

I think you are too generous, but I am very pleased to find that your generosity had to overcome the boredom of the first chapters. I wish we could talk the matter over, instead of writing. I don’t feel satisfied that I have brought it off. Writing without the old bannisters, one makes jumps and jerks that are not necessary; but I go on saying that next time I shall achieve it. I suppose one is always buoyed up in this way. Anyhow, I find your praise a great comfort. Sometimes I can’t help feeling that its too much in the air, and that though I can see something ahead, I must leave it to other people to carry out what I see.

Are you writing your book again? I very much want to read it.

I grow more and more dissatisfied with my contemporaries. None of them seems able to carry the thing through—for the most part because they will not or cannot write I think. But this won’t apply to you.

I have chosen the worst hour possible for answering you, and, so I see, convey nothing—nothing. We are half dressed for a fancy dress ball: a cold night; and we have to travel to London. But I have left you too long unanswered and so, without saying any of the things I meant to say, shall send you this.

Shall you be in Paris in March—the end?—or the beginning of April?

We have a plan for going to Spain via the [Jacques and Gwen] Raverats at Vence, and might spend a night, in our speechless British way, in Paris, and see you.

Don’t forget your play for the Hogarth Press. We are taking on a manager, and hope to become more and more professional.

Do write sometime.

“Oh but I can’t write letters—shouldn’t dream of it”. Those were your very words to me in the Charing X Road!

Yours ever,
Virginia Woolf

Mrs T. S. Eliot

[]

1344: To V. Sackville-West

Sunday [7 January 1923]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dear Mrs Nicolson,

It is extraordinarily good of you to send me Hassan, and I am ashamed that you should take this trouble, owing to my laziness, for I have meant to get it for ever so long.

I shall start reading it and testing my theories of modern poetry directly I am in a fit state, but having sat up till three this morning watching other people dance, I am sunk in the depths of stupidity.

I hope you’ll come and look at my great aunt’s photographs of Tennyson and other people some time. My sister has many of them at her house.

Yours very sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Berg

[]

1345: To Y. Sackville-West

[10 January 1923]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dear Mrs Nicolson,

Yes, do come tomorrow, Thursday—it will really suit us better than Monday, if you don’t mind finding us alone, and our maids out.

Will you catch the 7.10 at Sloane Square, which comes straight to Richmond. I will meet you and show you the way, which though short, is difficult to explain.

If I dont hear, I shall expect you then.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Berg

[]

1346: To Dorothy Brett

Friday [12 January 1923]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

My dear Brett,

Yes, I quite agree that a meeting should be made. What about next Wednesday, 4.30? I think that seems my only day, so please manage it.

I wanted to write to you about Katherine, but all I could say seemed futile; but that does not mean that my feeling is. I am glad to find how many of her letters I have, so don’t let us become strangers, and believe how I have thought of your sorrow.

Ever yours
V.W.

University of Cincinnati

[]

1347: To Violet Dickinson

Wednesday [17 January 1923]

Postcard

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

I’m in bed with the flue, so can’t come, alas, on Friday, but hope to one day next week, if that suits you.

VW.

Berg

[]

1348: To Molly MacCarthy

Friday [19 January 1923]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dearest Molly,

I was just taking up my pen when struck down by the usual old temperature, which sinks my head fathoms deep in the mud. Ought one not to find one’s father’s eyes when one sinks fathoms deep [The Tempest, I, ii]? But no such luck.

This is, primarily, in answer to your letter to the Hog. Press. Of course we will bully the old wretch. Perpetual letters? Telegrams? Telephone? What do you advise? He must be coerced. I hate to think that all his words vanish into the cesspool (a horrid figure of speech—but then, I sometimes think we ladies, of the old guard, you and I, that is, the solitary survivors, ought to invigorate our language a little)—I’ve been talking to the younger generation all the afternoon. They are like crude hard green apples: no halo, mildew or blight. Seduced at 15, life has no holes and corners for them. I admire, but deplore. Such an old maid, they make me feel. “And how do you manage not—not—not—to have children?” I ask. “Oh, we read Mary Stopes of course.” Figure to yourself my dear Molly—before taking their virginity, the young men of our time produce marked copies of Stopes! Astonishing! Think of Aunt Gussie!

This is all incoherent drivvle: but then I’m above normal. You want news of that old bubble, now flown over St Paul’s and far away, Nessa’s party. Well, we were all awfully nice: I kept thinking of Shakespeare. We were so mellowly and good fellowly: not any intensity or bitterness, but all serene and melodious. Miss [Ethel] Sands; [Walter] Sickert; Roger [Fry]; then dancing, acting; it’s a great thing to have done with copulation and to be merely a bag of pot pourri. Do you recognise any of your friends in that? Bunny Garnett went away and had a son the very next morning. Everyone was so clever too. They sang. Marjorie Straçhey acted, and her obscenity was really sublime. I want very much to come down. I figure us two, old friends, ladies, straying hand in hand down the glades of Savernake—talking. Harry Norton was at the party: very very old, no teeth: no flesh, no lusts. I felt that he was nothing but a pouch, a sort of puff ball, gone dry—but so amiable it made one weep. How is Mona Wilson? Please write to me, a diary letter: beginning “I was woken by a sunbeam at 8 a.m.” going on through every detail until the schoolmaster calls in the evening.

But I must stop.

Ever Yr.
V.W.

Mrs Michael MacCarthy

[]

1349: To Richard Aldington

21st Jan. 1923

Typewritten

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dear Mr Aldington,

Mr Eliot has been here, and discussed the question of the fund as I think he had already done with you. He asked me various questions which I could not answer and said I would ask you.

—whether it is our intention to give him an annual sum or to make him presents, like this £50, from time to time?
is the collection still going on in England?
how much he could count upon annually from our fund, if it is to be given annually?

I take it for granted that he told you, as he told us in confidence, of his decision to leave the Bank if he could get any reasonable means of living. Therefore of course the answers to these questions are very important to him. Probably it would be simpler if you wrote direct to Mr Eliot—I expect there are other things he wants to know, but I was not well and we could not go into it very thoroughly.

Then, I saw Mr Norton, the other Member of our Committee, who feels very strongly that we ought now to amalgamate with Mr Pound’s committee and asked me to suggest this to you and Lady Ottoline.

If you think it would make matters any easier to talk instead of writing, please suggest any time, either to come here or to meet me in London.

Yours sincerely,
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

1350: To Lady Ottoline Morkell

[21? January 1923]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dearest Ottoline,

I am ashamed not to have written before—I’ve been waiting for Tom to come to a decision—and saw him at last yesterday.

He wants to put the money in the Bank, invest it, and keep it, with his £400 from the dial, to use when he leaves the Bank, which (but this is confidential) he feels now he must do before long. He was extremely grateful, full of hesitating and scruples of course.

I saw Harry [Norton] too. He feels strongly that we ought to amalgamate with the French Committee, and urges us to write to Ezra Pound and get him to take over our fund.

What do you think?

We should very much like to come to Garsington. At this moment I’m in bed again with the usual influenza, and rather fear the dr may insist upon some more drastic measures [removal of her tonsils]—so that I can’t make definite plans. But I look forward to coming; and so does L.

We are turned off the Nation, I suppose, with Massingham—This, too, is doubtful.

I wish I’d kept up with Katherine [Mansfield], as you did—I found it too difficult. But I keep thinking of her now.

Ever your
VW.

Texas

[]

1351: To Violet Dickinson

[23? January 1923]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

My Violet,

You are the most faithful of subscribers. Many thanks for your cheque. Next week we start an all-time Manager [Marjorie Joad], and we become more and more full of works to print. I wish we had something of yours.

Yes, it is very tragic about Katherine [Mansfield]—She wanted to live so much. They thought she was getting better, and had talked of living in England again next summer. One can’t help feeling rather a brute to go on living.

Shall I come to tea someday?—if you don’t insist upon white gloves, which I can no longer scrape together. The Press is in the dining room, in the larder, and soon will be in bed with us.

Jacob [Jacob’s Room] has gone into his second edition, and is going to be translated into French. (This is dreadful boasting). Leonard never wanted to get in—only to annoy Herbert Fisher; and we were both thankful when the results came out.

I go on having a mild temp. They vaccinated a guinea pig with my spittle. It died, but no one knows what of—anyhow not tuberculosis which one idiot of a doctor discovered.

How are you? and your dog?

I like Mrs Nicolson: no nonsense about her.

Yr VW.

Berg

[]

1352: To Richard Aldington

26th Jan. 1923

Typewritten

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dear Mr Aldington,

Many thanks for your letter. I have sent the pass book to the Bank and have asked them to return it to me when made up.

I shall be seeing Mr Norton shortly and will tell him what you say about Mr Pound.

Am I right in thinking that Mr Eliot would object to my mentioning the possibility that he will leave the Bank? I find that when I ask people to subscribe, many of them object that he is staying in the Bank and drawing what many of them consider a good income. They would be much more ready to give, I think, if they knew that he would leave. I would tell them, of course, in confidence.

I do not know Mr Schiff at all. Mrs Hutchinson does I think and I will ask her to ask him to circularise. Also I will press this on Mr Norton. I will do my best, but find people full of objections.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

1353: To Clive Bell

[February 1923?]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dearest Clive,

I have to see my sister on Thursday, and should come round too late for a prolonged and animated conversation: so why shouldn’t you come here on Friday or Saturday: or why shouldn’t I come to tea with you on Tuesday?

Please settle one or t’other.

I can’t face your blasted telephone, which kicks in my ear like an infuriated mule.

Yours
V.W.

Quentin Bell

[]

1354: To Clive Bell

[early February 1923]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dearest Clive,

Yes, please, come to tea on Tuesday.

Streams, not of tears, but of disgusting rheum descend from either eye, and may, I feel, gush from the drums of my ears. I am in bed again, and my cold is a match for any in Bloomsbury. That’s my first boast. Second, of course I’ve read the Cahier Rouge: but am slightly bemused—I’ve read Adolphe: Cahier Rouge: (forgive my crapulous repetition, and its not crapulous I mean either, but some word signifying the numb spasm which vibrates in a head with a cold): but what then is the Journal Intime? My memory is of a young man travelling in England—a diary? Please bring any I haven’t read, but which?

Boast three Scott Moncreiff pesters for a few words—any words from you, Mrs Woolf—it don’t matter if you haven’t read—invent. But, unlike someone [Clive] I could not, unfortunately, touch with a short stick, I refuse. But do you realise who your colleagues are?

Boast four I’ve forgotten. Remind me when you come,—I’d like to remember it.

Who is Simpson? What is she?

That Clive, my dear, adores him [sic]?

As for Tom [Eliot], we had a sitting: costive, agonised, but we were too ill to penetrate. What was said was confidential. And have you read the Criterion? Mary writes a charming grumble on that head this morning.

Yes, I’ve fallen in love with [Marjorie] Joad, and given her my fountain pen to mend.

What else?

Tea Tuesday.

V.W.

Quentin Bell

[]

1355: To Maynard Keynes

12th Feb. 1922 [error for 1923]

Typewritten

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond

Dear Maynard,

May I lay the following facts about Eliot before you? of course in the strictest confidence.

He has now decided to give up the Bank. It is obvious that it is impossible to collect enough money to provide him with anything like a sufficient income. He is anxious therefore to get some permanent job which would bring him in £3 or £400 a year. If possible he would like work in some way connected with literature. Is there any chance that the Nation could give him employment as literary editor, or in any capacity which would bring him in an assured income? I suggested the very vague possibility of such work, and he said it was of all others what he should prefer.

If this is out of the question could you give us any advice or suggestions? He has a degree at Harvard, where he studied philosophy; then went to Paris and Oxford but left without taking a degree. He would prefer not to teach, but would do secretarial or librarian’s work. He is clearly getting into a bad state of health, and the efforts of the Eliot fund are so slow that it is useless to wait, on the chance that that will eventually support him. At present, the fund would pay him £300 a year, perhaps, for three years or so. If he could rely on a small certain income from regular work he would risk giving up the Bank. If it were not for his wifes constant illness he would have left the Bank before now.

His address is,

9 Clarence Gate Gardens, N.W.1.

I told him I was writing to you.

If there is anything you would like to ask me, I am on the telephone, or would come up.

Please excuse this pestering on my part, which is to relieve my own conscience, for I feel we have made a muddle and ought to try and do something sensible if possible.

Yours Ever
Virginia Woolf

[in Virginias handwriting;]

He is, of course, extremely anxious that none of this should be talked about.

Marshall Library, Cambridge

[]

1356: To Ethel Sands

Monday [12 February 1923]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dear Ethel,

Fate seems determined against us. I’m having pneumonia germs injected into me to stop a mild sort of influenza which I go on having, and the doctor insists upon doing this on Thursday which means I shall be shivering and shaking on Friday night and intolerable as a companion. Then Tom Eliot says he can’t possibly come, and really he is so worried that he’s not much good either.

So I feel it would be useless to ask you to come all this way, and can only hope we haven’t upset any of your plans.

Please forgive me, and promise to come another time instead.

Yours very sincerely,
Virginia Woolf

I hope to come on Wednesday.

Wendy Baron

[]

1357: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

[mid-February 1923]

Hogarth House, Richmond

Dearest Ottoline,

This is merely to say that we look forward very much indeed to seeing you and Philip, on Sunday, 18th, about 6; and hope you will stay and dine—and excuse our having no dining room. It will be great fun, and let us postpone till then the eternal Eliot discussion—except could you send or bring some forms. I am making a last attempt before subsiding in despair

We should like ever so much to come to Garsington—May we leave it vague? We are completely unsettled in our plans by this Nation business, and may go abroad almost at once, or not, as things turn out. Their plans change from day to day, and ours with them.

Ever your
VW.

Texas

[]

1358: To Vanessa Bell

[18 February 1923]

[Hogarth House, Richmond]

I forgot to say that Tom is fearfully anxious that no one should know of this scheme, as it might damage him at the Bank if it got known—so please don’t mention at all except to Duncan

Also he wished me to convey his extreme gratitude to you, which he could hardly express.

Philip [Morrell] posts this.

Berg

[]

1359: To Ethel Sands

[21? February 1923]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

My dear Ethel,

I find that Mr Eliot can’t come on Saturday, but would like very much to meet you on Tuesday, 27th. Would that suit you? I hope so. I will send full directions if you will come. It is really as easy as can be even by train.

Did you say I might come and meet Leo Myers one day. If Wednesday, I could come, with pleasure.

Yours very sincerely,
Virginia Woolf

I rather hope that there is a chance of some project for Tom Eliot; otherwise I must try to inveigle Mr Myers—his state is so depressing.

Wendy Baron

[]

1360: To Lytton Strachey

Feb. 23rd 1923

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Private and Confidential

I have to approach you on a delicate matter—to wit, poor Tom [Eliot]. The state of affairs is this; Maynard is trying to get him appointed literary editor of the Nation. He has to meet with great opposition from his fellow directors, who have none of them ever heard of him. His hands would be immensely strengthened, he says, if he could say that Tom is well thought of by writers of the highest importance, like Mr Lytton Strachey; and that in the event of Tom becoming Editor, Mr Lytton S. would contribute. As you are aware, the Eliot fund business has proved a fiasco; and this certainly seems to be the only possible solution of the problem. In fact, the poor man is becoming (in his highly American way, which is tedious and longwinded to a degree) desperate. I think he will be forced to leave the Bank anyhow.

So if you could write me a line giving some sort of promise that you would write, or at least would be more inclined to write for him than another, we should all be very grateful. Only could I have it without delay, as Maynard is polishing off the whole affair in a series of distracted interviews early next week? Perhaps indeed it would be better if you wrote straight to Maynard at Kings.

Please forgive me; still, this is cheaper than contributing the £100 which is your due; your conscience will be placated; and English literature, which we both have so much at heart, resents intensely, so I hear through Mr Gosse, your prolonged indifference to her charms. What way of escape remains?

Yr V.W.

It is said that Maynard is going to pay his contributors highly.

Berg

[]

1361: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

[23? February 1923]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dearest Ottoline,

We were greatly disappointed not to see you,—perhaps you’ll be up again?

At present our plan is to go to Spain about the 15th, which would I’m afraid make it difficult to manage a week end on the 10th—But with the Nation perpetually changing its plans, we really dont know from week to week. I think if you would let us come later it would be much pleasanter. We are rather distracted at the moment. We shall have to find some other job,—not journalism I hope.

Anyhow, we count on coming in May It was a great pleasure seeing Philip [Morrell].

By the way, Mrs Nicolson (Sackville-West) wished to meet you; and was then disappointed.

Yours Ever
Virginia Woolf

I am talking to Quentin at the moment, so forgive this scrawl.

Texas

[]

1362: To Maynard Keynes

24th Feb. [1923]

Typewritten

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond

Dear Maynard,

I obeyed your instructions and did not reveal Miss Royde Smith or any other confidence to Eliot. He was a good deal concerned to think that he had not put before you the following point which had only struck him later: The Bank requires him to give three months notice. As his work is so specialised, he would not like to press them (unless absolutely forced) to relax this in his favour (as I gather they generally do.) Also he feels that he would do better work if he had a holiday first. Thus it seems certain that he would not be able to start in April, and he thought that you ought to know this before making any offer. He had tried to write to you, but being consumed with gratitude and diffidence had failed, and so asked me.

I think you’ll find, if the arrangement can be worked, that Eliot has great influence with the younger writers, and would give the literary side of the Nation much more character than any of the ordinary literary hacks. Anyhow, it is a great relief to me that you have offered him something,—and something much better than he could expect—and I add my gratitude to his.

Yours ever
Virginia Woolf

[in Virginias handwriting:]

I wrote to Lytton giving him an outline of the circumstances; and asked him to write to you.

No answer is required.

Marshall Library, Cambridge

[]

1363: To Richard Aldington

25th Feb [1923]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dear Mr Aldington,

I am sorry I have not answered your letter before. I wrote to Mr Schiff myself, and enclose his reply (which I do not want returned.)

After talking to Mr Eliot I feel more and more that we should aim at finding some congenial post for him, so that he could leave the Bank without waiting until we collect sufficient for him to do so safely. I think our position with would-be subscribers is much stronger if we can say that he means to give up the Bank anyhow. They object (so I have found in two cases at least) to his staying on, with an income which they merely supplement.

But I will send out more forms, and hear from Mr Norton that he is making an effort at Cambridge.

Yours sincerely,
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

1364: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Feb. 28th [1923]

Hogarth House, Richmond

Dearest Ottoline,

I saw Tom yesterday and he was very anxious that I should write to you and ask you not to take any further steps about getting subscriptions to the Fund. He says that he can’t take any more money so long as he is in the Bank, and I dont think there is any prospect of his being able to leave it for some time.

He feels very strongly (as you can imagine) about this, so will you tell your friend that the fund is now closed.

I’ll tell Mr Aldington when he comes back.

Ever Yr VW.

Texas

[]

1365: To Dorothy Brett

March 2nd [1923]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

My dear Brett,

No you didn’t tire me in the least—of course not. It was selfish of me, I felt, to make you talk about Katherine. I have wanted to so much since she died. But it must be very difficult for you. I’ve been looking in my diary and see that I must have written to her sometime in March 1921. From what you say, perhaps she never did get my letter. It makes me sorrier than ever that I did not simply persist—and yet I like to think that she had not, as I thought, taken some dislike to me, or got tired of hearing from me. I had been meeting [John Middleton] Murry, who was just going to join her, and he said she was lonely, and asked me to write. So I wrote at once, a very long letter, saying that she need only send one line, and I would go on regularly writing. It hurt me that she never answered, and then, as I was telling you, those gossips assured me that this was her game, and so on, and so on; until though I wanted to write, I felt that I no longer knew where we stood together; and so waited to see her—as I thought I certainly should.

I have been typing out her letters this morning, and it is terrible to me to think that I sacrificed anything to this odious gossip. She gave me something no one else can. But here I am being selfish again. No one of my friends knew her, except you; and that is why I cant help going on to you.

Whenever you like, please come again, or I’ll come up to you.

Remember the photograph, some day.

Ever yours
V.W.

University of Cincinnati

[]

1366: To Dorothy Brett

[5? March 1923]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

My dear Brett,

It was very good of you to write to me. I’m sure what you say is really true [about Katherine Mansfield]; but then you never wasted your chances as I did mine. Still, I’m sure, as I say: we always did get straight the very moment we met. Of course, don’t dream of sending me a photograph if they are scarce—I have one I took somewhere, in Sussex, but can’t find it. I’m afraid someone’s coming on Saturday: and so don’t think it’s worth your while to come all the way—unless you’re near, which I don’t suppose is likely. But come another day if not that.

This ink is Waterman’s fountain pen ink. Cheap, violet, indelible. (Which sounds as if I were paid to write their advertisements.)

But I didn’t think you looked well: so why make yourself out a stolid carcase? Nonsense. I’m being driven by Kotsky to translate Russian, and have no time to write.

Ever yr
V.W.

University of Cincinnati

[]

1367: To V. Sackville-West

Tuesday [6 March 1923]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dear Mrs Nicolson,

Do you think that you and your husband would dine with us, at my sister’s house, 46 Gordon Sqre, on Thursday, 15th at 7.45?

She would have the [Cameron] photographs, and would very much like to see you.

There would be no party, and please dont dress—

Yours very sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Berg

[]

1368: To S. S. Koteliansky

[9 March 1923]

Postcard

[Hogarth House, Richmond]

I’m greatly interested in the Tolstoi—almost the best we’ve done, I think: and hope to finish it this week.

It’s being typewritten; and I’ll let you know when I have it back, and either come to your fire, or ask you to mine. Then I’ll see whether an article could be made—but Squire is certainly full for April, and, I expect, May.

V.W.

British Library

[]

1369: To Vanessa Bell

Monday [12? March 1923]

Hogarth [House, Richmond.]

I’m sorry I couldn’t write yesterday.

The facts about the paper seem to be as follows:

one ream of paper costs 8/- From this you could make 1000 covers of the size of the stencils you have.

Or for 5/- you could get 500 covers of that size.

We want 300 covers for Read (of the size I gave you)

500 covers for Eliot (size not yet settled). We would commission you to do us 300 for Read; 500 for Eliot, at one penny each cover. (Eliot would be smaller than Read).

We have chosen a cheap paper, and I’m not sure that it will be suitable. I could bring you up samples to look at; but the difference in price is not very great. We should have to order through the Press in order to get wholesale prices.

I dont know whether you’ll think this worth your while.

I should like to come and put the colours on under your direction, as I said.

What did you think of the marbling colours?

Would the firm of Grant and Bell give me an estimate for making a design for a simple wall paper to be stencilled?—something I could carry out myself.

VW.

Berg

[]

1370: To Maynard Keynes

March 13th 1923

Typewritten

Hogarth House, Richmond

Dear Maynard,

Once more I come to bother you, for the last time, I hope, and very unwillingly.

Eliot rang me up last night, (apparently on the verge of collapse, but that is neither here nor there) and explained the present, and very satisfactory, state of affairs. But there still remains the one great obstacle which makes us hesitate to advise him to accept—the question of guarantee. If the paper [Nation] were to fail or you were to dismiss him within the year he would have had no experience to qualify him for another post as journalist, and would have lost his other work. Bruce Richmond [Editor, TLS], whom he consulted, assures me that all journalists would think his an exceptional case, as he is coming straight from the Bank, and has no experience to depend upon in case of disaster. On the Times each man on the staff has now a contract for five years. Do you think it would be impossible to assure him a guarantee for the first two years at any rate? and after that he could be treated in common with the others?

Some security would I think make all the difference to him and his work; and if he had that one could have no possible doubt in urging him to accept.

I know what difficulties you have already overcome, and wouldn’t press you further unless I felt this rather vital.

Yours Ever
Virginia Woolf

[in Virginia’s handwriting:]

I am writing without consulting Eliot.

Marshall Library, Cambridge

[]

1371: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Saturday [17 March 1923]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

My dear Ottoline,

I was in company with a young man yesterday called Sebastian Sprot who said that his great wish was to meet you. He is a friend of Lyttons, a psychologist, and apparently (this was our second meeting) agreeable and intelligent. So, as you guess, I said I would risk annoying you by repeating this, in the hope that perhaps you might ask him to Garsington one day and so gratify his ambition.

His address is Clare College, Cambridge. I really think he is very nice, and very young.

But of course don’t take any notice if it is inconvenient—and no answer is needed.

Ever Yours
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

1372: To Maynard Keynes

Friday [23 March 1923]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dear Maynard

I’m very sorry not to see you today, but I have the typhoid [inoculation] germs strongly.

In justice to Eliot, I think that there were difficulties which made it very hard for him to decide, and he could not give his real reasons for delay. Nevertheless, I can’t help feeling he was not the right person for the job, so on the whole I’m relieved.

It was very good of you to take so much trouble.

Ever yours
V.W.

Marshall Library, Cambridge

[]

1373: To Dorothy Brett

[26 March 1923]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

My dear Brett,

I haven’t tried to see you, as the chaos of affairs has been too great and I’ve had to spend a good deal of time with injections and mild temperatures. We are off to Spain tomorrow till May 1st.

This is merely to say I hope to see you, and think of you in the fragmentary but sincere way one does of people one wants to—oh but this sentence will never come right. I’m packing. You will see what I meant to put. How are you?

Let us meet with time to talk when I get back.

Ever yours,
V.W.

University of Cincinnati

[]

Letters 1374-1382 (April 1923)

1374: To Jacques Raverat

Good Friday [30 March 1923]

Hotel Ingles, Madrid

My dear Jacques,

Domestic uncertainties have prevented me from writing to you—that is to say, the Nation, the newspaper for which Leonard wrote, has been bought by Maynard Keynes, and Leonard first lost his job, which ruined us, and has now been made literary editor, which is almost as bad. It means that we must be back punctually on April 27th, and thus shan’t get to Vence. This is a great disappointment; but next year? It will have to be arranged somehow. Will Gwen be over again? Don’t let her choose August if she is. Meanwhile, I hope you will occasionally send a letter. Only friendship dictates this. Never was there such a pen, and as for Hotels, the spirits of the damned inhabit them. It is a superb country all the same, as we came through yesterday. Still, I was impressed by the South of France—not by the midlands. I felt a kind of levity and frivolity and congeniality upon me with the first sight of Dieppe. How much more enjoyable in some queer way France is than England! But how does one learn the language? I must and will. I want to know how the French think. After the English, they seem so natural, so much akin to all one likes.

Here we have been following the Crucifixion and the Last Supper through the streets, and again I felt entirely sympathetic, which one couldn’t imagine doing in Piccadilly say, or the Earls Court Road—where you and Gwen once lived, if I remember, before you made your grand attack upon Bloomsbury and left us. Is this right? You see I am still reconstructing your past, from fragments, mostly false, I daresay. You were a man of convictions, in which you were confirmed by marrying a Darwin, of all races the most monolithic. I was in Cambridge last month, and there started up, in the Shoves’ drawing room, a military man, of upright bearing and manly spirit, whom I thought to be a friend of Gerald’s youth, quite out of place in literary society—but it was Mr Cornford!! Good Heavens! Last time he was wearing a French peasant’s blouse and a red tie. There is a great deal of mystic religion about. I wish one had the cruelty of youth. I’ve been asked to advise a woman [Brett] as to the souls of the dead—can they come back? As I’m never quite sure which is which—spirit, matter, truth, falsehood and so on—I can’t speak out as roundly as a Darwin should. Or is Gwen not an agnostic?

Are you painting? Will they be shown in London? Are they good? And in what direction are you tending? I wanted to buy a seascape by Matisse the other day, but the price was tremendous.

But this is trivial gossip, and we must go out and dine. I find you easy to write to, however—which I mean as a very great compliment. (You remember how vain I always was).

Now we go on for 10 days to the Englishman’s castle near Granada, and then home to Maynard, to politics, to printing, to whatever life may be said to be. I’ve no room to go into the matter further, alas.

Love to Gwen.

Yrs ever, V.W.

Sussex

[]

1375: To V. Sackville-West

Good Friday [30 March 1923]

Hotel Ingles, Madrid

Dear Mrs Nicolson,

(But I wish you could be induced to call me Virginia). I got your letter as we left Richmond. I am much flattered that the P.E.N. should ask me to become a member.

I would do so with pleasure, except that I don’t know what being a member means. Does it commit one to make speeches, or to come regularly, or to read papers or what? Living so far out, dinners are apt to be difficult, and I cant speak. But we shall be back the first week in May, and if you would then enlighten me I would at once let you know. It was very good of you to propose me, and I shouldn’t be cautious at all if I didn’t remember some reason that made it seem, when I was asked once before, difficult to manage.

We have been tramping round Madrid after the figure of Christ in a purple dressing gown, The Last Supper, The Crucifixion and so on, and are half dazed with noise, but it is all very exciting,—the country as we came through Spain yesterday was incredibly beautiful. Tomorrow we are off to Granada.

Yours very sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Berg

[]

1376: To Vanessa Bell

1st April [1923]

Carmen de los Fosos, Getieralife, Granada, Spain

Dearest,

We arrived here last night, and are staying with the Temples; she being a Miss McLeod, lord of the Scottish Isles, who says she once met you. Anyhow they’re very anxious that you and Roger [Fry] should come here, which I said I would pass on to you at once, and hereby do. It’s an awful long journey—and we still have 2 days on mules and in diligences before we reach Gerald’s [Brenan] house, up in the Sierra Nevada—mountains, I may tell you, always with snow on them. Nevertheless I am determined never to live long in England again. The rapture of getting into warmth and colour and good sense and general congeniality of temper is so great. I was overcome by the beauty of Dieppe—don’t you think we might share a Chateau, so large that we never met? Not to run up against suburbs and old respectable creatures at every step is such a joy. I shall learn French at once.

We had no adventures to speak of. Travelling is very easy. I managed to avoid the Aldous Huxleys who crossed with us. I can’t think it right to look precisely like an illustration to Vogue; and I daresay they thought the same t’other way round about us. Spain is quite different from France, but I leave all that for you. There was a great religious festival at Madrid, and stuffed images of great beauty (emotional, not aesthetic) were parading; and Christ was showered under with confetti. Why not bring the children up Roman Catholics? I think it induces to warmth of heart. Gerald is staying here, and we have been walking in wind and rain through the Generalife gardens, which I visited in 1904 with Adrian. Much has happened since. The Temples are an elderly couple, he racked with malaria, always wrapped in a great coat, and was at Cambridge and knew the Ll. Davies’, and used to be taken to Roger’s studio in Battersea. He jumped at the mention of him. He said he understood he had become very advanced; but himself stuck to Corot. She is a Scottish gentlewoman, clean, discreet, shabby, with blue eyes like poor Marny’s [Margaret Vaughan], but is a woman of character, since her betrothed died exploring Lake Chad, when she was a girl in the Isle of Skye, and was buried (naturally enough) on the spot without a tomb. She at once went to Edinburgh, bought a marble slab, had it engraved, and started for Lake Chad, against the wishes of all her family; deposited it on the very spot and married the governor. Mrs [Margot] Asquith is coming on Tuesday, but we shall be gone.

Leonard and Gerald are at a bull-fight. I am afraid I am not going to be offered any tea. It is a wonderful modern house, with electric saucepans in every room. Mr Temple is an engineer. I regret to say that I had difficulty with the W.C. this morning. Remember, if you come, to screw the handle round and round—otherwise nothing happens.

I ought to be writing an article for the Nation; but the worst of travelling for writers is that it freezes all their functions. To write to a dolphin is all very well—perhaps though Leonard’s terms are rejected. I hope not. I think it might be great fun. Does it strike you that we are all now elderly?—elderly, accomplished, successful, looked up to? It doesn’t reach to Granada however. Murry wrote me a wormish letter, by the way, about the differences between us, and our memories and so on. I tried to imitate you, and replied that our differences are too great to admit of any further communication; so that we had better rely on the past. Poor Tom [Eliot] said he was only capable of creeping into the country. His problem still remains— God knows what we can do about it. Please, however, be as discreet as marble. Mary, I gather, is the [person] they most dread—she wrote me a most affectionate letter about looking at the cliffs of Dover and thinking of her, which is more than I get out of some people I could touch with a short stick.

Did you think Rodmell very inferior to Charleston? I suppose so: but then what a pleasure that was! How the Wolves can live here: how stuffy; how ridiculous their decorations are etc etc. That was what Dolphin said to Duncan when they settled in at night.

Yr B.

The Posts are apparently most prolonged here, so it would be best to write to me at Hotel de Londres, Paris, to say if you’re coming and when. L. has to be back on 27th; we shall get there 25th; and I shall stay on 5 or 6 days. Mrs Temple is of course a cousin of the Vaughans.

Berg

[]

1377: To David Garnett

April 2nd [1923]

Carmen de los Fosos, Generalife, Granada, Spain

Dear Bunny

I enclose a letter from the headmaster’s wife of Rugby. (She was Symondse’s daughter)

I have just written your biography, shortly, but amiably. At the same time, it is very difficult to write to Rugby when one is at Granada. I have told her that if she will buy a book, you will tie the parcel with your own hands.

She is an incredible figure from the Victorian past.

We go to Brenan’s tomorrow.

Yr
Virginia Woolf

Berg

[]

1378: To the P.E.N. Club

April 15th 1923

Murcia, Spain

Dear Madam,

I have just had forwarded to me your letter saying that I have been elected a member of the P.E.N. Club.

As I have been travelling, I did not know that Mrs Nicolson had proposed me, and so could not let her know in time that, much though I should like to be a member, circumstances at present make it impossible.

I regret very much that you should have had the trouble of writing to me, and hope that you will be so good as to express my thanks and regrets to The Committee.

Yours faithfully
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

1379: To V. Sackville-West

April 15th 1923

Murcia, Spain

Dear Mrs Nicolson

The secretary of the P.E.N. club has written to me to say that I have been elected a member. Very regretfully I have had to decline—since I see from the club papers that it is wholly a dining club, and my experience is that I can’t, living at Richmond, belong to dining clubs. I’ve tried two dining clubs, with complete disaster. But I’m very sorry, as I should like to know the members, and see you also.

But this last I hope can be managed in other ways.

I’m sitting in a Café with a band, ten million Spaniards playing dominoes, and old men trying to sell lottery tickets, so forgive this scrawl. We’ve had a splendid time up in the Sierra Nevada, staying with a mad Englishman [Brenan], who does nothing but read French and eat grapes.

There never was such a lovely country.

Yours very sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Berg

[]

1380: To Roger Fry

16th April 1923

Murcia, [Spain]

My dear Roger,

This is an invitation from Brenan—he is very anxious that you should come and stay with him at Yegen—also from the Temples, who want you to stay with them at Granada. Brenan says you are the greatest living critic—But besides that his house is comfortable, and the country strange and amazing, and I kept wondering where you would pitch your camp stool and what you would say. But I shan’t commit myself to descriptions.

It has been the greatest success so far. I am amazed that we should live in England and order dinner every morning and edit the Nation and catch trains when we might roll in bliss every moment of the day and sit and drink coffee on a balcony overlooking lemon trees and orange trees with mountains behind and every sort of colour and shade perpetually changing which I do now: then a delicious lunch off rice and bacon and olive oil and onions and figs and sugar mixed, then off to a place where cypresses and palm trees grow together.

How is your show doing? I’m very anxious for news, but never see papers, and can’t get any more letters. I’ve been reading the life of Cézanne (and Rimbaud and lots of the French whom Gerald has, being disgusted with my own language and in love with theirs). So if you never sell a picture till you’re 70 you will only be like Cézanne—but I hope you are selling.

I’m afraid I shall exactly miss you in Paris. We get to Hotel de Londres on the 22nd, and I shall stay on alone till 28th, but Nessa seemed to think you and she would be certainly later. What a bore! I look forward to Paris with the excitement of a girl of 16, and intend to talk French like a native by the light of nature. I know the words, but can never think how to make them into sentences.

Gerald is very nice; we discuss literature 12 hours every day; unfortunately your praises are sung too often for my taste, but he has an enthusiasm for your criticism—which reminds me I hope you’re getting on with your lectures. And remember the Nation.

Ever yours
V.W.

Temple (Charles) ex-governor of Nigeria, said he used to visit your studio with the [Llewelyn] Davies’—rather a nice man, slightly cranky, always dressed in 2 overcoats; also admiring, but out of date.

Sussex

[]

1381: To Molly MacCarthy

22nd April 1923

Hotel de France, Montauban

Dearest Molly,

I snatch this moment while Leonard is in the W.C., to wish you good morning. I wish you were here. We are travelling home after staying with Brenan on the top of the Sierra Nevada. But how dull travellers’ stories are! I omit all about the adventures with the mule, the vulture, and the wolf. Your imagination can play freely upon them. This is an old French town. One lives very cheap. I should rather like to transfer life here. I don’t want to come back to meat meals, servants, and telephones. But my French is insufficient to carry on human communication, so one dries up in the founts of one’s being and must return.

How are you? When shall I see you? Two days before we left it was sprung on us that Leonard was to be lit. editor of the Nation. (I continue, if I can, in the train). Should this take place, which is not quite certain, he wishes to get hold of your memoirs. Would you consent? Very slight alterations would be needed; and how delightful to humanise the Nation, which is dry and bald as bone, with the Cornish family and its eccentricities!

You must consider this and let me know.

We are now about to enter Paris, in the dark.

There I shall stay a few days and meet Jane Harrison and Hope Mirrlees … [six words omitted], while Leonard returns.

But the train is crowded with these exquisite French ladies—all un-reproachable, elegant and composed, while I feel like a farmyard boy who has lately rolled in the gorse bush.

Ever yrs
V.W.

Mrs Michael MacCarthy

[]

1382: To Leonard Woolf

Tuesday [25 April 1923]

Hotel de Londres, [Paris]

Dearest Mong⁠[oose],

Here I am already in bed at 10.30, and I shall be asleep within the half hour. I’ve had quite a successful though a lonely day. I wrote—found nothing to do to my Nation article, so began Gissing; lunched at a new place; good; 3 courses; bought china and went to the Louvre; took bus to Notre Dame; was there pursued by the Headmaster of Eton and wife and family whom I knew, and had to escape; had tea; again pursued—hid behind a pillar; bought more china; again pursued, hid behind a pot; so home by bus; rung up by Hope [Mirrlees], who wants to treat me to ices at Rumpelmayers tomorrow, and asks me to dine on Thursday; says I shall easily get tickets for the Misanthrope. Now I’ve dined at our usual place—omelette, ham and pots, and spinach; suisse, coffee and cream, then chocolate, very good, at the orchestra café, but the music was such that even I could dream no dreams, so came away, got straight into bed, and finished reading my Gissing book; which brings me to the present moment. You, I suppose, have arrived, and are surrounded by innumerable letters. I’ll now put out the light and fall fast asleep—it being 25 to 11. Goodnight, sweetest tiny mouse.

Wednesday

Here I am on Wednesday morning, having had a very good night, no aspirin—slept till 7.45.

I have written at Gissing, and now I am going to dress and go about my business. It is fine, almost hot. I must go first and get money changed: then to the [Galeries] Lafayette, and then home to meet Hope and have tea. I’m already rather lonely, and home sick. No letter from Nessa, so I shall come certainly on Friday. So far I’ve found my way without difficulty. Just before I came to the Boul. St Germain a drunk taxi driver drove straight onto the pavement into a tree and knocked five people down and bent the tree right over. But I was too late to see it.

I long to hear from you. It was bitterly cold here yesterday; how is your cold? and I wonder how Margery [Joad] has done, and what news there is,—if I’ve many letters—but it’s no use asking questions.

I must now get ready; and kiss my Mong a thousand times.

I am honestly being very good, shall go to bed again tonight and read till 10.30, then sleep: and of course the way to make me want Mong is to be away from him: It is all rather pointless and secondrate away from him.

MANDRILL

Sussex

[]

Letters 1383-1414 (May–July 1923)

1383: To Vanessa Bell

Saturday [28 April 1923]

[Hogarth House, Richmond]

Dearest,

I got your letter in Paris just as I was starting back. Oddly enough, the first person I ran into at Victoria was Duncan, who was dining somewhere, and already an hour late, so I hadn’t much talk. Please stay on at Rodmell as long as you or the children want. We certainly shant be able to come down yet—the Nation keeps us in a rush at present; and all its politics.

I hope I shall see you next week. I didn’t write, as I thought you were touring in the north of France. I had a very amusing time in Paris, and saw a good deal of Hope [Mirrlees] and Jane [Harrison] and met various oddities—among them a humpback painter Maria Blanchard, who said that Vanessa Bell was one of the few women to take art seriously. She didn’t know I was your sister—She is humped in front, not behind, Spanish, almost unintelligible. There were also some friends of Clive’s friends—and a lot of chatter, which I will tell you about but haven’t time now.

We are in a frightful turmoil with our books coming out, and now Maynard wants a special literary supt. in a hurry. Wont you write something? or Duncan? I saw the Poussins at the Louvre—the only pictures I liked: also the Alingtons, who aren’t pictures: she was Hester Lyttelton. They chased me about; till I went into a china shop and hid behind po’s. No good. Hester bobbed up as usual, grown fat and blowsy with ankles like the thick end of asparagus. I’m sorry you don’t like Rodmell nearly as much as Charleston, but it aint my fault. I don’t think the children could spoil anything, as there’s nothing to spoil.

Yr devoted and loving faithful furry dear
B.

Mary wrote me a letter of affection so of course I answered. I always do. Try. We’re dining with Maynard on Tuesday. What about Lydia? I hope to God Maynard has been restrained—a fatal, and irreparable mistake.

Berg

[]

1384: To Clive Bell

[May? 1923]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dearest Clive,

Your paramour rashly whetted my curiosity to see your pamphlet. May I read it? May the Press consider it for publication? If so, may I have it instantly? Anyhow, I want to read it; but it would be even more to my taste to read it as Woolf & Co with a view to our future glory.

Please excuse the scrawl.

V.W.

Quentin Bell

[]

1385: To Vanessa Bell

[early May 1923]

Typewritten

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dearest Dolph,

Here is a cheque for £36. 7. 8. £33. 6. 8. is Wallers money. £1. 1. is Hogarth Press payment for your drawing. The remaining two pounds I should be very grateful if you would lay out for me on a cotton dress, of the greatest charm, not too bright or startling, but cool, exquisite, as long in the leg as possible; and to be sent here as soon as so you can. The rest of the money I should like to buy china with. I want six soup plates; six sweet plates. I leave the choice entirely to you. Of course, plates are always useful, if any money is over.

Don’t bother. If you cant get the dress, would you let me know, as I must get one. Let me know if these items come to more than £2.

Did you read your praises in the New Statesman? best woman painter living, wonderful, lovely and so on. I like you to be praised, chiefly because it seems to prove that I must be a good writer. Oh dear, why does Lydia always come in—and why must she beg me to believe that she thinks seriously every day of her life, as she says? when her brain is a cage of canaries?

The china shop is on the left just before you get to Notre Dame. Please write; take care of yourself; etc etc. Kiss Duncan whom I adore more and more. Do you like him better than I do? I dont believe—but hush.

Your affectionate sister,
Virginia Woolf

A copy of the wood cut was sent as requested to Mr Furst.

Berg

[]

1386: To Janet Case

Friday [4 May 1923]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

My dear Janet,

We came back from Spain last week, and I found your letter. Two days before we started Leonard was offered the Literary Editorship of the Nation: with the result that we find ourselves bombarded with proofs, reviewers, books and turmoil of all kinds, as nothing is ready, no one is experienced, and the old Nation has left a litter of odds and ends behind it.

But this sounds all very trivial compared with your forest trees. I’m not sure that it isn’t, and don’t at all want to see Leonard engulfed in wretched little chatter about new novels. But he is a masterly man: in two days he does what a thoroughly good editor spreads over a week.

I have just seen Harry Davies’ death in the paper. Poor Margaret! How one tragedy follows another! How are you? and Emphie? and the china, and the house? I’ve been freshening up my furniture, and tea cups—in vain imitation of you. Why, with a passion for nice tea cups, am I destined to drink forever out of chipped earthenware? But I have no time to go into this profoundly interesting question, as I must read Miss Dorothy Richardson, having been bribed by very large sums of money to do what of all things I have come to detest—write reviews for the Nation. All I say is commonplace: reading the books is sheer agony: it is warm and seductive; apples are out, and bees are busy, but in order to make large sums of money here I must sit at my books. As a matter of fact, she interests me rather.

So goodbye,—the blessed germs have started again, after leaving me for 4 weeks—I suppose I must have more pneumonia injected, but feel too well to bother. Excuse the handwriting.

Ever yrs
V.W.

Sussex

[]

1387: To John Middleton Murry

May 11th [1923]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

My dear Murry

This is just to say that I am back here again, if you have done with Katherine’s [Mansfield] letters, and would like to send them back. Brett said that you would let me have a photograph of her one of these days. It would be very good of you, and I should prize it very much. The one I had, a snapshot I took at Asheham, is lost, much to my sorrow.

Yours ever
Virginia Woolf

Berg

[]

1388: To Gerald Brenan

Sunday, it may be 12th [13th] of May [1923]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

My dear Gerald,

If I don’t seize this moment, inauspicious as it is, I shan’t write. Every cranny of my day is filled with the most degrading occupations. I think of you as a Saint on a hill top—someone who has withdrawn, and looks down upon us, not condescendingly but with pity. Indeed, all my memories of you are of an extraordinary pleasantness. What do the old ladies at Granada say about you? So sweet a nature, such tact, combined, my dear, with all an Englishman’s dignity, and never in the way, and so considerate, with charming manners too. I can well believe that he will write something very very wonderful one of these days. With all these sentiments I entirely agree.

Please let me know exactly what your allowance comes to. Is it enough for travel? Shall you alter your way of life? Here we are with our noses to the grindstone. The grindstone is made of innumerable books which have to be transubstantiated into precisely the right number of articles, containing the right sentiments, views and facts, in the right number of words at the right moment. This not once, but weekly, every week, every month, every year—till all our precious time is over, and life, which surely has other uses, has poured in cataracts of printers ink, down the main gutter to the Thames. Perhaps the horror will mitigate. I have had only 4 days writing at my novel since I got back. Tomorrow, I say to myself, I shall plunge into the thick of it. But how does one make people talk about everything in the whole of life, so that one’s hair stands on end, in a drawing room? How can one weight and sharpen dialogue till each sentence tears its way like a harpoon and grapples with the shingles at the bottom of the reader’s soul? Did we discuss dialogue at Yegen? I lose myself in metaphors when I begin to write, being dissipated, interrupted,—here is Leonard with the title page of the Feather Bed, a poem in the manner of Browning by Robert Graves. We are printing all day long, Mrs Joad and I, while Leonard goes to his office. No news, except a postcard from Palermo from Carrington. I am sending Valéry’s poem which I got for you in Paris. The Nation with a poor article by Lytton and a poor article by me. This is to fulfil my promise—not to make you think well of me as a writer. Then, I shall send the Proust book, which one day I should like back again.

Did I not say this was an inauspicious moment? The church bells are ringing, through a watery evening atmosphere: I sit by a solid coal fire, and hear vaguely the motor buses accumulating power to return to London stuffed with wet clerks and girls in bright woollen dresses. To your eye, these girls might have something attractive. I wonder whether your manly passions are a help to your writing? I wonder what your father and mother do and say? I shall recoup myself for the extreme coldness, colourlessness, and insipidity of the external world by going to the Italian marionettes tomorrow: by having Tom Eliot to dinner; by dining at the Cock with some brave sprit like—can’t think of anyone at the moment: and with luck, some small adventure will turn up. This I say to lure you here. Beevor Bevan makes his appearance in about 2 weeks time. Let me have your Aunt’s address and a copy shall go to her.

Your
Virginia Woolf

George Lazarus

[]

1389: To Thomas Hardy

17th May 1923

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dear Mr Hardy,

I was once so bold as to write and thank you for your poem upon my father, Leslie Stephen. I have always treasured your reply.

My husband, Leonard Woolf, has just been made Literary Editor of the Nation and Athenaeum, and I am writing to say how proud it would make us if you would send us anything of yours for the paper. It would be impertinent for us to try to tell you how great an honour we should think it. There is, of course, no other writer who could give the paper the distinction that you could give it.

Please excuse me if I bother you in making this request. I cannot help thanking you once more for the profound and increasing pleasure which your writings give me.

Yours sincerely,
Virginia Woolf

Trustees of the Hardy Memorial Collection, Dorset County Museum, Dorchester

[]

1390: To Roger Fry

Saturday 18th May [1923]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

My dear Roger,

I had just come in thinking of you, from the local Heal show, and meaning to write to you, when I found your letter. It was a great pleasure. I’m very pleased that you liked the article [To Spain]. I had been feeling that it wasn’t quite suitable for a first number. Journalism is altogether such a beastly business, but your praise has set me up. One of the things I wanted to tell you was how our apprentice [Marjorie Joad] broke out the other day about your show [Independent Gallery]—how she admired your works, in particular a portrait of Mme M⁠[uter]: and a picture of a vineyard, and wanted to go again; then found that the show was over—So I said that I’d ask you if she might go up to Dalmeny [Avenue, N.7] one day and see some more. I always like it when the young volunteer praises—so don’t be scornful of her ignorance. She was genuinely enthusiastic anyhow.

I try to pity you; indeed, I am much concerned about the damnable intestines; only conceive England at this moment—leaden grey at half past five, so cold one wraps in wool to cross the hall, fires blazing, tents at the dog show blown over, the first class of Pekinese irretrievably mingled with the second to the despair of a thousand hearts: and to cap it all, Murry abroad again—I should say in Fleet Street again—blowing the enclosed nonsense through a megaphone. That bloodless flea to talk about life! that shifty ruffian who can’t keep his hands out of other people’s pockets to prate of honesty! But there is a charm in complete rottenness. Leonard met him in the street, and Murry at once lied so splendidly about his duty to Massingham, and “sticking to the old Nation” (he offered to edit the new) that Leonard couldn’t help loving him.

What gossip is there? That strange figure Eliot dined here last night. I feel that he has taken the veil, or whatever monks do. He is quite calm again. Mrs Eliot has almost died at times in the past month. Tom, though infinitely considerate, is also perfectly detached. His cell, is I’m sure, a very lofty one, but a little chilly. We have the oddest conversations: I can’t help loosing some figure of speech, which Tom pounces upon and utterly destroys. Never mind: I loose another. So we go on. But at my time of life, I begin to resent inhibitions to intercourse; and these poor damned Americans so respect them. But I can’t really hit it off with Lady [Sibyl] Colefax. Can you advise me how to acquire the social manner—neither cold nor hot? When I go to these tea parties, they all seem like people enchanted, and chained to a particular patch of the carpet, which they can’t cross for fear of death—But you know it all of old. What irritates me is to see—anybody, Mrs W. K. Clifford it may be—possessed of a sense which I have not. And I believe—but here you mightn’t agree—that it is one essential for a writer. I think Proust had it.

We’ve been on the edge of violent rows—journalism again. Poor old Desmond thinks that his writers will desert him for higher pay on the Nation. Then of course Bob who is at large—with Donald Tovey swollen to the size of the Prince Consort in Hyde Park—makes it all infinitely worse by turning up at impossible hours, foaming at the mouth, apparently charged to the lips with diplomatic secrets, which set us all by the ears, and are entirely of his own concoction. Really, he is going quite mad! “I think, Morgan [Forster], you ought to go round and see Goldie [Dickinson]. I think Goldie has taken offence—well I may be wrong.” By this time of course, Morgan is flying across Cambridge to see Goldie, whom he finds … [five words omitted] entirely oblivious of all earthly matters. This is not strictly accurate; but substantially so. In spite of Bob’s enormous assiduity, the row with Desmond is now over. But I assure you, the atmosphere is full of coal dust.

Importunate old gentlemen who have been struck daily by ideas on leaving their baths, which they have copied out in the most beautiful, and at the same time illegible, handwriting, dump these manuscripts at the office, and say, what is no doubt true, that they can keep it up for years, once a week, if the Nation will pay £3. 3. a column. And there are governesses, and poetesses, and miserable hacks of all kinds who keep on calling—So do for God’s sake, write us something that we can print.

Two nights ago I went to the Opera with Saxon [Sydney-Turner]; both in attenuated evening dress, for he takes stalls. There was Sir Claude Phillips, Mrs Norman Grosvenor; Mrs Strep; and so on and so on. We had a divine Bach, Phoebus and Pan; towards the end of which, with the lights still low, that old goat Sir Claude, only kept by the tightness of his white waistcoat from gushing entrails all over the carpet, took it into his head to leave. The whole audience saw him move down the gangway. Suddenly he disappeared. There was a sound of coal sacks, bounding and rebounding. Then dead silence. He had fallen down a complete flight of stairs; but is not hurt.

This is my only news of the great world. So cherish it tenderly. Brenan is engaged to be married: I’m afraid to a pretty American girl, who will bore him: Lytton has come back: I’m going to tea with her Ladyship [Ottoline Morrell] on Tuesday: Garsington looms ahead; and as I began by saying, the Richmond dog show ended in irretrievable confusion, owing to the violence of the gale, which is now dissipating itself in the steady rain.

So my dear Roger, don’t go palming yourself off on me as a broken down failure, because such shifts are utterly unworthy: and I now can’t, for very shame, tell you how much I liked—but I know I liked all the wrong things, the colour, the charm, the sentiment, the literary power—your little landscapes at Heals. I think you’ve probably broken through into another partition of your art, in which there may be properties of an entirely different kind—we shall see.

But Lord! lord! what a chatterbox I am!

Yours Ever
V.W.

Sussex

[]

1391: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

21 May [1923]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dearest Ottoline,

You asked us to come to Garsington one weekend early in June—but which, I cannot remember. Might it be one in the middle, or towards the end? Leonard wants very much to come, and his work at the Nation has so muddled his work at the Press that he can’t take a weekend off just yet. We rushed off to Spain chaotically, and I can’t find any letter from you about it. But do let us come some time. What has been happening to you? Shall you be in London? The depression of Bank holiday is too great to allow me to write a letter.

Ever your
Virginia

Texas

[]

1392 To Molly MacCarthy

Whit Monday [21 May 1923]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dearest Molly,

I’m afraid we can’t come next week end, as we’ve arranged to go to Monks—if we go away at all, but what with the Nation and with the Hogarth Press we are at the moment in a state of uncertainty. Might we come later? I should be completely happy in your house.

The question of your Memoirs must be decided. Leonard says if you let him have it, he would cut it up, and make himself responsible for everybodies feelings.

A little comb and brush is all thats needed. You know how Clive conceals his bald patch? Well, that’s how to treat your memoirs. I’m glad Squire is going to print your story, though Squire seems to me the common horse-pond. Forgive this abrupt and what they call—I shan’t remember my own name next—style. When you leave out everything that makes sense, they say you write elliptically.

We’ve just been to see the Polo at Hurlingham, and my wits are gone. How I wish I were the Duke of Peneranda and could play polo! And what d’you think they’re like to talk to?—the D. of Peneranda, the Marquis of Cholmondeley? Imagine their conversation.

Yr V.W.

Mrs Michael MacCarthy

[]

1393: To Dora Carrington

Tuesday [22 May 1923]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dearest Carrington,

Do come, any day you like, if you will let me know first. I’m generally alone, as this d—d Nation keeps Leonard up in London. We go to Rodmell for the week end.—but come back on Monday.

I want to see you—I don’t want to write letters. Gerald tells Leonard that he has just got engaged to an American girl at Granada. Have you heard? Perhaps its a joke.

I can’t think why home comings are so upheaving, generally for the worst. But I’m through mine, and we are now in the usual press chaos.

Love to Ralph and the Serpent [Lytton]

Your
V.W.

The ribbon is entirely to my taste—moreover just like you.

Robert H. Taylor

[]

1394: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

[23? May 1923]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dearest Ottoline,

We will stop the printing and come on the 2nd [Saturday week] if you do not mind Leonard going back on Sunday night, as he is afraid he must. I should like to meet Puffin Asquith—

Yours in great haste, but looking forward to seeing you.

V.W.

Leonard says that if you feel his going will disturb the party, please say so. Otherwise he hopes you will let him come even for the short time.

Texas

[]

1395: To Vanessa Bell

24th May [1923]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dearest,

I have several times written to you in spirit, but interruptions always occur. Really, you only want to know about your family. Quentin came down 2 weeks ago, in a snowstorm; very flourishing—indeed I’ve never seen such superb children as you breed: we walked, and Karin and Ann came to tea, and then Quentin, still remaining very polite, but slightly bored, superintended Ann’s games. He told me that Angelica treats the Stephens as if they were dirt beneath her feet—so does he rather. I tried to get him for Whitsuntide, but he had gone yatchting [sic] with the Stephens. We go to Rodmell this weekend, (and I suppose its no good trying to take him?) and to Garsington next, so I’ve not much chance of seeing him. I wish I could. I make him discuss the Bells. ‘Of course Aunt Dorothy’s the best of them, but shes very nuggety’—‘What d’you mean by nuggety—?” “Oh she’s one of those people you can’t depend upon. Sometimes she’s very unpleasant … But theyre all very dull. In fact we would rather stay in London than go to Seend.” Karin gave me an alarming account of Adrian’s spiritual state. Apparently he has been broken down by the psycho-analysis (mentally) and has now to be put together. In 3 months he may be entirely different, the dr. says; resolute, vivacious, pugnacious, amorous, and manly. I gather that his tragedy—as the dr calls it—is all our doing. He was suppressed as a child. As for Karin, her emotions are being humanised.

Carrington and [Ralph] Partridge turned up yesterday. They are all just back, rather discontented, I thought, and Lytton was being given his Benson medal by some society, and then they all retire to the [Tidmarsh] Mill; and breed chickens. The pink dress, I should have said, arrived last week, just as I thought it lost. It is lovely, and exquisite, and I depend upon it to impress the youth of Oxford—Puffin Asquith that is to say. But at Ottolines. She is frantic, sends express letters, confutes my lies (we tried to put her off) by returning my own promise to go, which was made in March. But I can’t have given you enough money. We must settle. By the way, its a strict rule that you bring me no present from Spain.

Life is rather dull at the moment. We have to spend most of our time printing; and the Nation is rather burdensome. Morgan [Forster] takes up the line that Maynard has no particular end in view; and being an ascetic (he was much pleased by your compliments though) won’t be tempted to write by money. Unfortunately, talking to Lydia [Lopokova], I called Maynard ‘your husband’ I see this is not the thing to do. Poor little parrokeet—there she sits at the window in a pink kimono awaiting him, I suppose. “Maynar liked your article so much Leonar. What a good paper it is! Noā noā, I cant come out to tea. I am awaiting someone!” I suppose she has to read the Nation now. What tragedies these parrokeets go through!—not however your couple [Clive Bell and Mary Hutchinson]. Clive’s just written me a prodigious letter all about his compliments, and his parties, and his ladies, and gentlemen, and Derain, young Oxford men who admire Mrs Woolf so much—for, of course, I am sprinkled with compliments too, and I suppose its all part of the game, but at our time of life it seems a little noisy and splashy don’t you think, (vain as I am). By the way, here’s a compliment for you: only that I went to Heals [London Group Exhibition] and thought your big picture [Charleston interior] very lovely; especially from the end of the room. But its like putting a necklace of daisies round the neck of an elephant, praising you. Brenan is engaged to an American girl: Ld. Carnarvon has left George’s sons £25,000 each. No more news.

Love to Duncan, and Roger.
B.

Berg

[]

1396: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Thursday [31 May 1923?]

[Hogarth House, Richmond]

Dearest Ottoline,

I’m afraid I can’t come on Friday, but I’m much looking forward to Saturday. I shall arrive at Wheatley at 6.44, and find my way up—I remember what to do.

It will be a great pleasure—but there is no time to go into that properly now. Leonard says he is writing to say how sorry he is not to come—his sub-editor is away, and he has all the work to do. She has no teeth, but she is very useful.

Your affec
V.W.

Texas

[]

1397: To T. S. Eliot

[4 June 1923]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

My dear Tom,

I enclose the two stories I told you about. Mrs Dalloway doesn’t seem to me to be complete as she is—but judge for yourself.

Last night, dining in high society [at Garsington], I sat next a young Lord at Oxford who said that Mr Eliot was his favorite poet, and the favorite of all his friends. Why didn’t he republish his poems? Had he written prose? etc etc. Mr Eliot’s poems, he said, amused him more than anybodies, though he found them very difficult. He takes in the Criterion, and is the descendant of Lord Dorset who knew Shakespeare and so on and so on.

Forgive this scrawl. I’m rushing to catch post.

Ever yours
V.W.

Houghton Library, Harvard University

[]

1398: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

7th June [1923]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dearest Ottoline,

This is a very belated letter, but I have been lunching with Lady Colefax, which makes it hard to collect one’s wits for a day or two.

And really it is impossible to convey any sense of the weekend at Garsington—it still overwhelms me, and I can’t conceive what genius is yours to manage as you do to make us all so happy and pleased with ourselves. I think of the thirty seven young men, and you waving your wand among them. Lady Colefax, was very humble about not being asked, and had of course heard all about it—heaven knows how.

Leonard says that he enjoyed himself thoroughly—a very great compliment from him: but I shan’t pay you any compliments, as they are, I expect, rather too common when the post comes in: My post contains one letter from Mary Sheepshanks, who wants to see me!

Yours Ever
V.W.

Texas

[]

1399: To Molly MacCarthy

[7? June 1923]

Hogarth House, Richmond, Surrey

Dearest Molly,

This is no answer, only a plea that you shall write again, and also I must despatch some matters of business. May we come in July? May we meet somewhere in the [Savernake] forest and spend Saturday night and go home on Sunday?

Still to business.

First, where is your article for the Nation? Second, I’ve just had a brilliant and fruitful idea. You must write a book about your mother—letters, anecdotes, memories of Tennyson and Watts, photographs, descriptions—not a respectable life, but merely a general collection. I’ve read Benson in the Mercury; and find him repulsive. Even so, I can imagine what a book might be made. We would bring it out with exquisite illustrations. Please do consider this seriously and let me know. I go on repeating “I was born in wedlock. I’m on dry land” and find the greatest comfort. The book should be begun at once and should be ready to print next spring. I missed Desmond, at Ly Colefax’s, and want to press him on with his articles.

Let’s write again. It is a great joy to see your hand.

Ever
V.W.

Mrs Michael MacCarthy

[]

1400: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

June 19th [1923]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dearest Ottoline,

I have extracted this from Leo Myers. It is a great effort, and leaves one humiliated. Would you give the form to Philip [Morrell], as I think he keeps them.

Thank you very much for the photograph which seems to me highly flattering (not of Goldie, I agree) If there are any of me that would bear enlarging and reproducing I wish you would send me copies—I insist upon paying for them. I’ve said I’ll send one to America to go in advertisements [for Jacob’s Room], and yours come out so much better than the professionals.

I’m so sorry you’re in bed again. The prescription is I am sure rest; and that is replied to by 37 undergraduates and Mrs Lindsay coming in for a moment!

Ever yours
V.W.

I open this to say that I’ve just seen [Hubert] Henderson, the editor of the Nation, who says that Murry never offered to edit the Literary side, only to write. It was from Maynard I got that impression. I think I maligned him therefore to that extent.

Texas

[]

1401: To Richard Aldington

21st June [1923]

Typewritten

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dear Mr Aldington,

I enclose an order for a subscription of Ten pounds from Mr L. H. Myers, as I’m not sure what the procedure is. Lady Ottoline tells me she has sent you the other part of the form.

I hope the [Eliot] fund has made some advance lately.

Yours sincerely,
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

1402: To Sydney Waterlow

Friday [22 June 1923]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dear Sydney,

I want to clear up one point which got wrong in talking to you the other day. I said, I think, that [Middleton] Murry had written offering to be literary editor until one was appointed. I hear from Hubert Henderson that he never saw such a letter, and thinks that there cannot have been one. This merely corrects my inaccuracy, and does not alter what Leonard said—that is, that Maynard said that Murry, apart from offering to write (in truth he did), had previously made a vague offer of help during the difficult time of taking over at the beginning.

No answer is needed.

Yours
Virginia Woolf

John Waterlow

[]

1403: To Richard Aldington

June 24th [1923]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dear Mr Aldington,

This is only a line to say how pleased I am that you should like my book [Jacob’s Room].

I am always surprised when people like what I write, and therefore must thank you for saying so.

I saw Tom the other day. I don’t see what we can do now, yet I feel that money is more wanted than ever. Perhaps it would be a good thing to offer another lump sum to tide over this latest illness [of Mrs Eliot]?

But don’t bother to answer. I will try to find out when I see him next how things are.

Yours sincerely,
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

1404: To Katherine Arnold-Forster

Sunday June 24th [1923]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dearest Ka,

I was very glad to get your letter, but I have absolutely no wish to answer it. There was a day when I liked writing letters—it has gone. Unfortunately the passion for getting them remains.

We shall be here till August: that is the first question answered. So come and see us, and dont retire to the usual surgeon’s home.

“I think the Adelphi is rather good” K.A.F.

“I think the Adelphi is mildly bad” V.W.

“but then I’m always carried away by any vague declaration about life” K.A.F.

“But this is only a declaration that Murry wishes he were alive, but is dead” V.W.

“And your literary editor—does he like the job?”

Parts. Very busy; amused; annoyed; but we get some fun out of it. We are embroiled with some, endeared to others; but I’ll tell you the story by word of mouth.

“No, I dont think I really liked In the Orchard.” K.A.F.

That’s the best news I’ve heard for many a day. It would take too long to explain why, however.

Pots of cream are always acceptable. I don’t like symbolical granite, if thats what you offer me.

There! Every question answered, more or less.

It has turned very hot, and I am feeling very stupid. Barbara has the scarlet fever in hospital; and I have to write and amuse her. What does one say?

Will never turned up, so far as I know. Yes, I wish he would write about the Ruhr, but thats in Hubert’s [Henderson] department. What I long for is a literal account of something like a badger. Now turn your paw to that, facts not fiction.

Leonard’s love to you both; and he much wants the garden article.

Ever yr
V.W.

What did Will think of Duncan’s pictures?

So now you must write again and answer my questions.

Mark Arnold-Forster

[]

1405: To Barbara Bagenal

24th June 1923

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

My dear Barbara,

I should have written to you before, but I have had so many disasters lately from writing letters, that nothing short of death or bankruptcy will in future draw one from me. I hope scarlet fever isn’t about as bad as going bankrupt. I have often thought of you in your hospital, as I take my way about the streets in comparative freedom. Yet I would have changed places with you last Sunday fortnight, when Ottoline completely drew the veils of illusion from me, and left me on Monday morning to face a world from which all heart, charity, kindness and worth had vanished. How she does this, in 10 minutes, between 12 and 1, in the best spare bedroom, with the scent of dried rose leaves about, and a little powder falling on the floor, Heaven knows. Perhaps after 37 undergraduates, mostly the sons of Marquises, one’s physical life is reduced, and one receives impressions merely from her drawl and crawl and smell which might be harmless in the stir of normal sunlight. Only is the sunlight ever normal at Garsington? No, I think even the sky is done up in pale yellow silk, and certainly the cabbages are scented. But this is all great rubbish. We’ve had a desperate afternoon printing, and I’m more in need of the love of my friends than you are. All the 14pt quads have been dissed into the 12 pt boxes! Proof taking has been made impossible; and Eliots poem [The Waste Land] delayed a whole week. I’m sure you’ll see that this is much more worth crying over than the pox and fever and the measles all in one. Do you have horrid old gamps who come and cheer you up? by which I mean tell you stories about their past grandeur, and how they have come down in the world or they wouldn’t be nursing the likes of you—by which they mean that you haven’t got silk chemises. I could write you a whole page of their talk, but refrain.

Here is a quotation from a letter I’ve just had from Roger, in Salamanca. “I was really rather surprised to see Saxon Turner approach the table at Segovia where I was seated with one Trend, a Cambridge musician; he approached the table in perfect style with just a little guttural noise, a sort of burble which expressed everything the moment demanded and sat down and we went about very happily for some days. He became quite talkative. And really what a nice creature he is.” So our poor Saxon is moving among the living. He disappeared in such gloom, owing to your loss, that I’ve since thought of him as a kind of sea gull wailing forlornly round the coast on windy nights. You won’t be lacking though in letters from him. And they will tell you every detail. London is spasmodically gay, that is to say I dine out in humble places and went to the opera one night, and one night to the Italian puppets, and one night to see Nessa, and another to dine with Maynard, and Leonard is frightfully busy. We meet on the stairs oftener than anywhere, and I’m not sure that the glories of the Nation are quite worth so much energy.

Mrs Joad is doing very well—much better, to be honest, than dear Ralph, but then she is a daily worker, enthusiastic, sanguine, and much impressed by small mercies. If only she didn’t scent herself, rather cheaply, I should have nothing to say against her. She is a character so entirely unlike my own that I can’t help gaping in astonishment, as we sit at lunch. Fancy playing tennis in Battersea Park! Fancy having a mother who lives at Harpenden! Fancy eating up all the fat, because it’s good manners! Carrington insisted upon meeting her—I don’t think they received good impressions of each other. How is that couple doing at Tidmarsh? I hear that Ralph [Partridge] is to become a bookbinder: also that he is to write articles, say on the hibernation of toads, on the maternal instinct of weasels, for which he is to be paid £50 guineas an article, if Lytton will co-operate. Of course Lytton won’t, and so we shall soon read “Saturday, with the Buff Orpingtons” by Lytton Strachey: or “Hints on Wireworm,” by the same author. Oh how glad I am I’m not married to Ralph (he’s in love with Mrs [Bonamy] Dobrée!).

Duncan was very severely treated by Simon Bussy in the Nation. Nevertheless he has sold almost every picture, I hear: and they say this will revive poor Roger’s miseries about his own failure; but Roger, of course, is far the nicest human being of any of us, and will as usual be incomparably more generous than one could suspect Christ to be, should Christ return, and take to painting in the style of Cézanne at the age of 56. Clive, who has nothing Christlike about him, has had to give up eating tea, because, when Lady Lewis gave a party the other night and Rosenthal played Chopin, a waistcoat button burst and flew across the room with such impetuosity that the slow movement was entirely spoilt. The humiliation, which would have killed you or me—the room was crowded with the élite of London—only brushed him slightly—he won’t eat bread and butter any more: but his spirits are superb, and he says that life grows steadily more and more enchanting, the fatter one gets. Mr Bernard Shaw almost agreed to review his book for the Nation; and said so on a postcard, but Clive is very touchy about postcards from Bernard Shaw, and has never forgiven Carrington, nor ever will. Lydia has got a new bed: Very tactlessly I asked her if it was a double one. No it isn’t yet, she said; I saw that one must not make jokes about beds … [Thirteen words omitted]. Her respectability is something your gamps would revere. But I find that talk about the Ballet has its limitations. Not indeed that she dances anymore: unfortunately she sometimes writes.

I hope you realise that though I am chattering like a pink and yellow cockatoo (do you remember Mrs Brereton’s poem, Pink and yellow, pink and yellow?) I’m a chastened raven underneath: I mean I am very much concerned at your miseries, which besides being in themselves odious, show a mean malignity on the part of Providence which makes me, for one, a Christian and a believer. If there were not a God, of course you would have gone to Spain with Saxon: as it is, there you are in bed at Maidstone. Our only alleviation of HIS afflictions is to send you our latest, Talks with Tolstoi—a very amazing book, even when it has passed through the [hospital] furnace, which I suppose it must do, before reaching you.

Leonard is still trying to take proofs in the basement. I have cheered myself up by writing to you, so please don’t say that I’ve plunged you into despair, as another invalid [Vivien Eliot] did the other day, when I cheered myself up by writing to her.

Please get well, and come and see me. Barbara Chickybidiensis is one of those singular blooms which one never sees elsewhere, a rare and remarkable specimen. I wish I could write an article for Outdoor Life about you, and get £50. £25 should then be yours.

Love to Nick.

Let me know how you are.

Yr V.W.

Sussex

[]

1406: To Margaret Llewelyn Davies

[27 June 1923]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dearest Margaret,

Leonard says he is writing to you—but wont have time for a day or two, so I will send a page meanwhile—

In the first place, can you help me to a speaker for the Guild on Tuesday 2nd [3rd] July? I make no apologies for bothering you. It is all your fault. Never should I have undertaken this appalling business if it hadn’t been for you—I want a speech on the Strike. We have had nothing but brilliancy and charm the last 3 months—Morgan Forster on India, Bob Trevelyan on China, Mary Sheepshanks on Peru: now we must attend to the horrid facts. Heavens! Its next week! Don’t forget.

This being off my mind, what else is there to say? The truth is, we meet so seldom its no use writing letters. For example, where am I to begin about the Nation? We’ve been so bullied, so lectured, so encouraged and so worried by all our friends that I’m inclined to nail my flag to the mast and go down with the ship. Really, I don’t think it matters a straw what paper one writes for, if one speaks one’s mind. That Leonard could spend his time better, is another question. We must wait, anyhow till the end of the year. But Massingham and his supporters and his principles leave me cold. There he is writing for the New Statesman—

The Webbs [Sidney and Beatrice] are active. We badly want some Davies to balance them. Printing is ferocious. Mrs Joad very willing, but makes awful howlers of course. Ralph is becoming a bookbinder. Two books are sold out this week; and it becomes more and more difficult to manage in one house. Writing and people are also lively.

Perhaps we shall soon see you, which will be better than letter writing. As I grow old I hate the writing of letters more and more, and like getting them better and better.

Last year I saw Harry [Margaret’s brother] for the first and only time in a theatre, and felt as I do for all your family affection and respect. I am sorry—but that you knew without my saying it.

Leonard sends his love

Ever yr
V.W.

Sussex

[]

1407: To Margaret Llewelyn Davies

Thursday [28 June 1923]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dearest Margaret,

It was very good of you to wire, and made me feel very guilty for having bothered you, and in such a disagreeable way. I had had six dreary letters, on Press business and so on, to write, and so, as one always does on those occasions, inflicted another on you. Please forgive me, and let me indulge my own desire to write to you again, since I’m always wanting to write to you, and checking myself.

I rang up Miss Enfield. She thinks she can supply a speaker, but Leonard has now offered his services, so I begged her not to bother. I stupidly mistook the week—hence this hurry.

I ought to explain about the Guild here—I only get a speaker once a month; they have their own speakers, either one of themselves, or someone they get themselves, every week. I’ve not been on the Committee for 4 years, so I can’t resign from it, but I have twice offered to resign my task of getting a monthly speaker, but they voted that they wanted me to go on. They said they liked a change of subjects, and that is why we have travels, as well as education etc. But I shall again suggest giving it up in October, as I dont feel specially fitted, and also the difficulty of keeping up the supply is great.

This is a mere explanation, and I wont launch out upon Hardy and life in general as I should like.

I dont think Frank Rutter has much reputation—nor, in my circles, has William Nicholson: I don’t know anything about Ben. David Garnett wrote a book called Lady into Fox which had a great success. He kept Bees at Charleston, Vanessa’s house. Leo Myers is the son of the man who saw ghosts. But I must stop.

Ever yr
V.W.

Sussex

[]

1408: To David Garnett

[Summer 1923]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dear Bunny,

At last, at last, the Hawthornden has chosen the right book. A thousand congratulations, and please spend the £100 in writing another.

Dont bother to answer.

Yours ever
Virginia Woolf

Berg

[]

1409: To W. J. H. Sprott

[early July 1923]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond

Dear Sebastian

(I hope you don’t mind, and will call me Virginia)

We shall like very much to see you on Tuesday, 10th, and it is quite easy to give you a bed.

Dinner is 7.30; but come earlier if you like. I shall be in.

Yours Ever
Virginia Woolf

King’s

[]

1410: To Barbara Bagenal

Sunday, July 8th [1923]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

My dear Barbara,

I hope this sun is not adding to your torments. But now they will soon be over; and your sympathies enlarged, which is very nice for your friends, so as Nessa would say it’s an ill wind that spills the milk. Perhaps you didn’t know how fond she is of proverbs; but not being of a literary turn, she often tacks one on to another—not that it matters much. If I were you I should write to Ka Arnold Forster, Eagles Nest, Tregerthen, Zennor, St Ives, Cornwall for lodgings. She found us some very good ones with a Miss Hosken (I think) at Zennor: but Ka would know. I would have a mild attack of the fever in order to go to Cornwall for 2 weeks. One cant ever go away with out some such reason. I assure you the Press is worse than 6 children at breast simultaneously. Consider the Sow. She shows no embarrassment. But Leonard and I live apart—he in the basement, I in the printing room. We meet only at meals, often so cross that we can’t speak, and generally dirty. His triumphs always coincide with my disasters. When one’s up, the other’s down. Then you and the sow say that maternity is worse!

I have just finished setting up the whole of Mr Eliots poem [The Waste Land] with my own hands: You see how my hand trembles. Don’t blame your eyes. It is my writing. Roger is back, but has not swum into my life yet: though swimming scarcely expresses his descent—its more like having an aeroplane on the roof. Pamela has started both to have a baby and to make coloured papers. She intends to sell the coloured papers to the Press, and so support the Baby. If the Baby dies, it will be all our fault. Diamond, as the husband is called, can’t even cut his initials on a pane of glass. Roger says he’s completely idle—but that may mean only that he stays in bed till 8.30. Roger, Nessa says, likes to begin sightseeing at dawn, and used to pinch poor Duncan awake every morning at 4. The consequence was that Duncan often fell asleep standing, like a horse, before the pictures in the Prado. This made Roger angrier still. But Saxon suited him exactly.

I went to Tristan the other night; but the love making bored me. When I was your age I thought it the most beautiful thing in the world—or was it only in deference to Saxon? I told many lies in Covent Garden Opera house. My youth was largely spent there. And we used to write the names of operas in books. But I must not write the whole history of my life. I must fish Leonard out of the basement—Think what happened this afternoon! A mouse fell into the servants W.C. Lottie came rushing to Leonard. What was to be done? Like a man of action, without saying a word, he pulled the plug. Had it been a rat, the consequences might have been fatal. The drains wd. have been stopped, I say: Leonard says not. He says—but it is too disgusting. You can imagine what Leonard said, as we were having tea.

Let me know how you are, and forgive this dreadful scribble. Love to Nick.

Yr V.W.

Berg

[]

1411: To Violet Dickinson

[July 1923]

Hogarth. House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

My Violet,

A thousand thanks for your cheque—I’m afraid the Hogarth Press has been raining its fruit on you rather too frequently lately—but take heart—there’s only one more to come this summer—Mr Eliot [The Waste Land], Then we disappear to Sussex, which will be a treat after reviews and books—not but what the Nation is amusing so far.

How are you—and dogs and cats and plants and widows and great ladies, and all the rest of your marvellous caravan.

Ask me to tea in October. Dont forget—And I will bring you your pot of jam.

Leonard’s love.

Yr
Sp⁠[arroy]:

Berg

[]

1412: To V. Sackville-West

[end July 1923]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dear Vita,

We had been hoping we might see you, but every week end, save one, has been sacrificed to the Hogarth Press, which grows daily and hourly more exacting.

Next week we go down to Rodmell. If you should be anywhere near, do come and see us.

I so much enjoy your reviews.

Yours very sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Berg

[]

1413: To Clive Bell

[29 July 1923]

Postcard

[Hogarth House, Richmond]

Your wishes about Poll [Mary Hutchinson] shall be attended to. Have you got my copy of a book of Conrads—Notes on Life and letters? I lent it to Nessa, who denies possession: if you find it, and would either leave it out on Monday or bring it to Charleston, eternal gratitude etc etc.

Quentin Bell

[]

1414: To Jacques Raverat

July 30th 1923

Hogarth House, Richmond

My dear Jacques,

I only got your letter two hours ago, on my English breakfast tray, with its bacon and egg: and I will answer at once. No, no, no. Nothing you said offended me: all delighted me; and I should have written ages ago if I had not always said “I’ll write Jacques a nice long letter”—and so waited for the proper moment, and wrote meanwhile myriads of dreary drudgery. I find I never write to people I like. Jacques and Gwen require a good state of mind: whereas,—now you shall fill in the names of our old friends who can be put off with miserable relics.

We are all packed to go to Sussex tomorrow. This conveys nothing to you who have never seen the Hogarth Press. We travel with a selection of our books packed in hampers. Add to this a dog and a tortoise, bought for 2/- yesterday in the High Street. My husband presides with considerable mastery—poor devil, I make him pay for his unfortunate mistake in being born a Jew by discharging the whole business of life. This induces in me a sense of the transitoriness of existence, and the unreality of matter, which is highly congenial and comfortable. Now what do you think real? Gwen used to have views about that. Gwen was a highly dogmatic woman. Her breed is, alas, quite extinct. I assure you I can knock over the freeest thinker and boldest liver with the brush of a feather—nincompoop though I am, as far as logic goes.

This brings me, rather helter skelter, (but forgive thimble headedness in your old friend)—to the question of the religious revival: which concerns you both a good deal more nearly than you suspect. On my way back from Spain I stayed a week in Paris and there met Hope Mirrlees and Jane Harrison. This gallant old lady, very white, hoary, and sublime in a lace mantilla, took my fancy greatly; partly for her superb high thinking agnostic ways, partly for her appearance. “Alas,” she said, “you and your sister and perhaps Lytton Strachey are the only ones of the younger generation I can respect. You alone carry on the traditions of our day.” This referred to the miserable defection of Fredegond [Shove] (mass; confession; absolution, and the rest of it.) “There are thousands of Darwins” I said, to cheer her up. “Thousands of Darwins!” she shrieked, clasping her mittened hands, and raising her eyes to Heaven. “The Darwins are the blackest traitors of them all! With that name!” she cried, “that inheritance! That magnificent record in the past!” “Surely”, I cried, “our Gwen is secure?” “Our Gwen,” she replied, “goes to Church, (if not mass, still Church) every Sunday of her life. Her marriage, of course, may have weakened her brain. Jacques is, unfortunately, French. A wave of Catholicism has invaded the young Frenchmen. Their children are baptised; their—” Here I stopped her. “Good God”, I said, “I will never speak to them again! Whats more, I’ve just written a flippant, frivolous, atheistic letter to that very household, which will arrive precisely as the Host is elevated; they’ll spit me from their lips, spurn me from their hearts—and, in short, religion has accomplished one more of her miracles, and destroyed a friendship which I’m sure began in our mother’s wombs!” All this eloquence left me dejected as a shovelful of cinders. Next week arrived your letter, which was the greatest relief in the world. Gwen is a militant atheist: the world renews itself: there is solid ground beneath my feet. I at once sent word to dear old Jane, who replied, a little inconsistently, “Thank God”.

But speaking seriously, (and I need not say that the hand of art has slightly embellished the preceding) this religious revival is a glum business. Poor Middleton Murry has had a conversion, which has had an odious Bantam—the Adelphi—which I wish you’d take in and comment upon monthly. I’m too much prejudiced to be fair to him. As literature, it seems to me worthless—(only strong words are out of place): it seems to me mediocre then. The spirit that inspires it, with its unction and hyprocrisy, and God is love, which still leaves room for flea bites, pin pricks, and advertising astuteness, would enrage, were it not that there’s something so mild and wobbly about that too that I can’t waste good wrath. Most of my friends find it deplorable. Ka, the usual exception, rather likes it. But the story of the Murrys, is long and elaborate, and I’m getting so harassed by household affairs that perhaps I’d better stop.

Leonard: Here’s a man from the typewriter shop. Shall we be rash and buy a new one?

Cook: I think I’d better make the pie tomorrow. Monday meat is never trustworthy.

Virginia: I shall have to take my pink dress, if we’re going to stay with Maynard.

Leonard: Well you can’t take your pink dress, because the luggage has gone.

Virginia: Gone? Good God! Gone?

Leonard: I told you twenty times it was going at eleven.

etc. etc. etc.

I knew both the Murrys. Please read Katherine’s works, and tell me your opinion. My theory is that while she possessed the most amazing senses of her generation so that she could actually reproduce this room for instance, with its fly, clock, dog, tortoise if need be, to the life, she was as weak as water, as insipid, and a great deal more commonplace, when she had to use her mind. That is, she can’t put thoughts, or feelings, or subtleties of any kind into her characters, without at once becoming, where she’s serious, hard, and where she’s sympathetic, sentimental. Her first story which we printed, Prelude [1918], was pure observation and therefore exquisite. I could not read her latest. But prejudice may be at work here too. As for the Sitwells, though I paid 3/6 to hear Edith vociferate her poems accompanied by a small and nimble orchestra, through a megaphone, I understood so little that I could not judge. I know Osbert slightly. They take themselves very seriously. They descend from George the IVth. They look like Regency bucks. They have a mother who was in prison. They probably need careful reading, which I have never given them, and thus incline to think them vigorous, but unimportant, acrobats. Literature is in a queer way, however: as I shall explain next letter. By the way, do send me your version of Mrs Litchfield’s remarks on my article. Gerald Brenan’s aunt [Baroness von Roeder] sent him the same unfortunate work, picked out with red lines in ink. She was outraged. (She is 85). She said it was done for notoriety and was only printed because “Mrs Woolf has the dibbs, and would cut Mr Woolf short if he didn’t”. But Mrs L., being Gwens Aunt, is much too refined to say that.

What a letter! What a letter! It is like the interminable monologue of an old village woman standing at her door. Each time you say good day and try to move off, she bethinks her of something fresh and it all begins again. And my hand shakes, so I cant write legibly. I have a queer illness, which consists of a permanent slight fever, which the Dr. diagnosed consumption, but have almost cured now by injecting pneumonia germs in multitudes. This must be my excuse for febrile verbosity. Please write to Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes.

Ever Yrs.
V.W.

Sussex

[]

Letters 1415-1434 (August–December 1923)

1415: To Pernel Strachey

3rd Aug. [1923]

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes, [Sussex]

Dear Pernel,

This is the voice of your old, alas forgotten friend, Virginia—

Will you come here on Sept. 15th, for the week end?

It strikes me that you will then be back from France, where you’re going I hear, and not yet inducted into your lofty seat.

Of course, I have myriads of things to say to you, but your silence, which has now lasted 10 years, 56 days and twenty minutes, rather appals me. Everything I can think of appears trivial against that mighty and impressive wall. Only a tragic death can possibly break it down, or a divorce, or some catastrophe—none of which has happened. I saw Jane [Harrison] and Hope [Mirrlees] in London—thats true; and we talked about death in the boudoir of Lady Arthur Russell’s old house till a University woman, M.D. B.A. D.Sc., I should think, blushed, flushed and faded. Anyhow we got rid of her. Hope’s novel will soon be out, I suppose.

Since I last saw you, we have climbed onto our very low throne (compared with yours, that is to say). You don’t know what I’m talking about? Only the Nation. This means that we wallow around among books and proofs,* like porpoises not so much reading or writing but dipping and snorting and some say losing a good deal of our character for distinction and high mindedness. This naturally brings me to the Adelphi—Murry’s organ—which is full of both and morality too. Come, and let us discuss all these matters in my garden house, which (as I must have told you) overlooks first the flats and then the downs. Do you like descriptions of nature? I have really forgotten what you like; but not in the least how you put me in mind of one of those elegant fawn coloured creatures, who, at the slightest sound, gently tap the ferns with their front feet and gaze ahead of them with large, apprehensive, yet slightly sardonic eyes—Then, somehow, we must get in the pearl buttons and the dusty ears.

I’m waiting for the good woman to bring dinner, so excuse this drivel and dribble—I’ve been trying to read Tennyson, by Harold Nicolson. I threw it onto the floor in disgust. To purify myself I said I will at once write a letter to Pernel. She won’t answer, I said. But then thats why I write, I said. For these mysterious figures who never quite come out of the wood, and carry on such intrigues in the gloom are always the pursued and desired. That, I said, I shall never be myself. For I always say too much—I always rush out and jump in. Its dreadful that one can’t sometimes be Pernel; and not always Virginia. This train of thought is becoming a little depressing—but its due to Harold Nicolson. Of course, he’s due to Lytton; and Lytton is more or less due to you. What these skilful imitators dont realise is that it is absolutely essential, if you are going to

I have just had dinner—ham and eggs and an odious pudding called Canary with a mop of bright red jam on its head,—so I can’t think what I was going to say. Its a sprawling floundering book; then suddenly the poor wretch remembers Lytton and tries to cut a caper. But I am engulphed in the works of Conrad, who is a much better writer than all of us put together, don’t you agree? Will you sacrifice your brother if I sacrifice myself, Clive Bell, Morgan Forster, Tom Eliot, and anyone else I can think of? Why is there much more difference between 1st rate and 2nd rate than between 3rd rate and 2nd rate, or any other rate? As I say, I could go on writing for hours, but must alas, respect your privacy.

Ever yr
V.W.

One word on a post card about the 15th.

* But how wallow, yet on a throne?

Strachey Trust

[]

1416: To Pernel Strachey

August 10th [1923]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

My dear Pernel,

Any words of flattery are, as you know, precious above pearls to me, but still I cannot believe that you would really like me to yield to my impulse which is to write to you daily a letter as long as the Times. “Oh another! Oh defend me! Oh take it away! Take it away! Take it away!” (The last words are uttered with increasing quickness, culminate in a shriek, and have issue in vomiting, convulsions, and death). So I spare you, for the sake of Newnham. Moreover, I’m breaking myself of the habit of profuse and indiscriminate letter writing. I can only write, letters that is, if I don’t read them: once think and I destroy. Several sent off lately on this system (the unthinking one) have had semi-fatal results: poor Mrs Eliot had a relapse; Margaret Davies wired at once; someone else has cooled and hardened; others have fired and irrupted. Letter writing as a game is not safe. And serious letters cease to be possible when 40 has struck, and life is more like trampling at random through a jungle than treading gingerly through tiny thorns and intense thickets, as it was when we were young, and met, I think, in the Quaker’s drawing room. Poor old lady! There she sat in grey alpaca, with her geraniums and cyclamen about her, talking and talking. What was it all about, I wonder?

But I must not begin to reminisce, or I shall have Leonard coming to tell me dinner is getting cold—eggs and ham and junket tonight.

Will you then write and propose a suitable day—not necessarily a week end, if they are occupied. The 7th Sept. wont do; nor yet the 1st; but choose any other and then let me see. I own I am a little vague, having thrown invitations into the air, and they fall to earth, anywhere, as the poet said of an arrow—but what poet? How I long to discuss the matter, or indeed any matter, with you. The 2nd rate question is most enthralling: leads to heat, coldness, fits, too. But I am giving you a violent view of this place, which is everything rural and clerical that a place can be. Has not Leonard just played tennis with the Vicar’s daughter, and are we not roused from our junket by a voice in the road “Are you believers in the Lord?” Twelve young men then stand in a circle and sing Washed in the Blood of the Lamb.

But enough—anon, anon—what does anon mean? But a pox on these questions.

Yrs V.W.

Strachey Trust

[]

1417: To Gerald Brenan

10th Aug. 1923

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes, [Sussex]

My dear Gerald,

It pleases me to think that no apologies are needed—if I don’t write, then I don’t write; if I do, I do. The same applies to Don Geraldo [Brenan]. But like a donkey I left your letter in London, and can only remember two remarks out of the many I meant to attend to upon an auspicious occasion. First I must clear my character—was I not the only sceptic when your engagement was announced? It’s a joke, I said—a mild, Buffon joke. Then I yielded on hearing (which was a mistake) how you had written seriously to the Partridges [Ralph and Carrington]. Never mind. Only don’t use this particular stone in building your temple to the honour of women. The other matter is also, I see, remembered from vanity—your aunt’s strictures [on To Spain]. A week later another friend [Raverat] wrote that his Aunt had sent him out the same article, marked with the same abuse, in the same red ink. So clearly I am poison to Aunts. Tell yours, though, that she is out in her reasoning. Its Mr Woolf who forces Mrs Woolf to write. The Americans now offer her £25 for a short article. Naturally Mr Woolf keeps her at it. Your Aunt will see the sense of this. Whats more, her opinion of me will rise so high that I expect to be asked to dinner. But the truth is that being offered £251 now cannot write a line (this is true of me, physically speaking this moment—pen, ink, paper, all are bad: and I am sitting hunched in a chair with the board which is used for rolling flour upon my knee.)

Buffon’s remarks came out last Saturday. Have they sent you a copy?—or has your Aunt supplied you? I like Buffon. He amuses me, and I envy him his natural running style. But I am afraid of expressing these opinions, since my jocose remarks upon your character seemed to you so beside the mark. Remember, I was writing in the person of a poor old woman, to whom you had been kind: her view was made rosy on purpose. As a fact, my own view, not of you in particular, but of humanity in general, falls and falls. Some base perfidy set me off, and now I can see little good in the race, and would like to convey this in writing. I should like to make odious, mean, lying characters. I should like to make the world so detestable that it seems better to desert it. But, I expect, to do this needs more power than I have at command. What started this misanthropy I cannot now remember—unless it were a visit to Garsington coupled with my view of journalists—their malice, cringing, and emptiness. I have many stories to tell you, but then, (this is my weakness) tolerance keeps breaking in, and I excuse the creatures instead of blighting them.

I have seen Saxon: I have seen the Partridges: I have seen Lytton: and Eliot. Undoubtedly Carrington is happier, even with Ralph entirely on her hands. I thought him a little surly, but I daresay in self-defence—I mean he did not wish us to think he regretted us—nor does he, I daresay. They lead a rural life; many ducks and kittens in and out of the rooms; Lytton visiting the Duke of Marlborough at weekends, and coming back to the Tidmarsh atmosphere and telling his stories—infinitely affable and at ease reminding me of some dragon-fly, which visits dahlias, limes, holly-hock and then poises, quite unconcerned, in the lid of a broken tea-pot. Carrington and Ralph are the broken pot, in this fantasy—you can imagine how brown and robust they look. They’re off to France now, and then, so it’s said, Ralph bends his enormous fists to binding books.

We came down here last week, and here we remain till October, a very happy life, on the whole, though I become rather restless with my desire to write, my desire to read, my desire to talk, and to be alone, and to explore Sussex and find a perfect house, and arrive at some conception of the meaning of all things. Why nature dangles this ancient carrot before me, I do not know. Every book is to me a glass through which I may possibly behold—I don’t know what; and so with people; and so with my solitary walks on the downs, when suddenly I find I am breaking through myriads of white convolvulus, twined about the grass, and then I think there are more flowers here than in Spain…. I will write to Gerald when I get home.

Eliot will come and stay with us. At first I shall find him very pompous and American. Later, rather young and simple. I will send you The Waste Land when it is out—in a week or two. All marked styles are to be avoided, I think, because they limit one. He begins to repeat himself. He creaks: he angles, (if there is such a verb from angular) but I insist, against his many detractors that these are only the impediments of a very good brain. You have heard, I suppose, of Murry’s religious revival. I am tired of him and his works. Again, I wish I could end, as usual, by excusing. Not that I excuse a word of his writing; but the creature himself is a paltry weakling, and I know if I met him I should at once succumb to his feebleness. Shall you change your way of life now you are a man of property? As for your writing: it is now clear that Ralph’s press is given up (so I imagine). Therefore, can’t you deal with us? I am also to say from Leonard (who is playing tennis with the Rector’s daughter while I sit at home with my bitch, Grishka, who is on heat, and all the dogs of the village throw their noses up and whine and snuff and come prowling about the house after dark till it seems like a rustic and impoverished version of Helen of Troy). I am to say that he wishes you to send him any sketch you do.

Well, I am running out of sense. Tonight I shall read the plays of Marlowe; tomorrow I shall walk across the meadows to Lewes and buy a chicken. Does this sketch in great blobs produce any likeness of a character? or what do you get out of these careless, random diluted letters? I can no longer write careful letters. Moreover I am too sleepy with the heat (it is as hot to-day as it was in Alicante) to visualise you, your room, Maria [servant at Yegen], the brassero, the mountains, the little begging children, the pigeons, the mules, the figure of Don Giraldo, in corduroys, with a knotted tie, sitting by a plate of grapes, from which he picks a handful now and then, while he reads—Then he jumps up. Then he goes to the other room. Then he writes. Then he tears up. Then he runs out up the mountain alone making phrases? stories? deciding profound matters of art? or scarcely thinking at all?—God knows. I do not pretend to know much about that young man, whom, at this moment—the church has just struck 6—I see with extreme plainness. Yes, but what is he thinking? How does it feel to be inside him? I am tormented by my own ignorance of his mind. And there is something absurd, and perhaps even insincere, in keeping up this semblance of communication in purple lines upon great white sheets.

I have been reading Tchekov this afternoon, and feeling good Lord why does he mention this? There is a perpetual unexpectedness in his mind, which is, I rather think the interest of him. Perhaps all the Russians have it. It is only in France and England that events seem threaded like beads on a string—for which reason our best stories are so dull. How dull Mérimée is!—Try Carmen—said to be a masterpiece. Please write.

V.W.

George Lazarus

[]

1418: To Vanessa Bell

Friday [17 August 1923]

Monk’s, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest,

What an awful bore—we’ve got Molly Hamilton here for the week end, and as she has to go on Sunday night, I don’t suppose we can bring her over, or come ourselves, much though we should like to. If we did come, we’d come for tea, and bring our food—but I dont think its likely. A very small [birthday] present will come for Quentin. If he doesn’t like it, I want it for myself.

Wont you and Duncan come over?—any day except Wednesday, or Tuesday. I want to read you my play, as soon as possible, as, if it is to be finished, I’d better do it here.

Also, would my nephews come over for lunch and spend the afternoon in water hunting? We are invaded by the dullest of dull people in Shoals—Nick [Bagenal] among them,—I can’t think why. So a little human society would be acceptable. But how is it that M. H. [Mary Hutchinson] is only spending one night? A triumph for Dolphin’s [Vanessa] implacable character, as usual. But discretion forbids me to say more.

I do think its time Roger [Fry] ceased to be in love with you, and to resent my presence. After all I’m your only surviving sister, and knew you long before he did.

Oh my sister in law [Flora] and Mr [George] Sturgeon are now arriving! Nelly and Lottie are back, frenzied (but secretly delighted) at the dirt of the house. Thanks to you, the mattresses are now absolutely perfect, like the best Heal.

I don’t offer you and Duncan beds, as they would be repudiated. But beds there are.

Let me know about the children, if I dont see you? Are you shopping in Lewes on Tuesday?

V.W.

Berg

[]

1419: To Margaret Llewelyn Davies

Aug. 17th [1923]

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

Dearest Margaret,

I can’t tell you how deeply I share your passion for old letters; the ones you sent kept me full of them for a whole day. Of course, Mr Croom Robertson played a great part in our childhood—as a name—for we never saw him: I can remember his death; and how much I was impressed by the feeling that he was somebody extremely great and venerable. But I could go on for pages—I do wish you would collect your brothers and mothers letters—anyhow to let me read them. It seems such a waste to destroy what has—as it certainly does have—this extraordinary power of bringing back a whole group—a whole attitude—more, I mean, than mere facts. I found some from Arthur [Margaret’s brother] to my mother.

I am sitting in our garden room, trying to keep up an intelligent conversation with Molly Hamilton—do you know her?—Bradsfords subeditor—so pardon faults of spelling and taste. However, I can’t help wishing you were here; yes—why don’t you come? and let us discuss everything in the whole world, the past and the future.

The whole world does nothing but shower manuscripts upon us. A lady from the North arrived in a motor laden with stories of passion. She was stone deaf, middle class,—with a kind of sultry character; a husband with yellow moustaches and a dog.

But I am getting into difficulties with my guest.

Please send me any memories of the past—not that I expect you want to do anything but bask.

Leonard’s love.

Ever yr
V.W.

Sussex

[]

1420: To Roger Fry

Friday [24 August 1923]

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

My dear Roger,

I think your little book is a perfect triumph. I don’t deny that in parts the writing might be tightened with advantage, but as a whole it seems to me an amazing production, so subtle, so suggestive, so full of life, and sweeping together every kind of thing in such a way that it is perfectly easy to follow—I couldn’t stop reading it. There’s nothing quite like it that I know, and perhaps you’ve done nothing that so makes me stand in amazement at the sweep and range of your astonishing mind. I know you’ll suspect me of flattery—but this is quite true—ask Clive if it isn’t.

I think you would be very ill advised to leave out anything. The whole is so penetrated with interest of one kind or another that to break would merely be to mutilate. I have marked a very few slips which I have written on a sheet enclosed.

Indeed, I do think the Press is extremely lucky to get this book. You must go on and do more. I want to see you write about literature. I think you have found a genuine and most successful way of giving shape to all sorts of things which normally run off in talk or thinking to oneself. And its odd and surprising to me how completely you have evolved your own language.

Ever yr
V.W.

I’ve just, once again, found Crown in shield’s card. I see he asks for the lectures you are doing for the Press. Am I to make any reply?

Sussex

[]

1421: To Clive Bell

Sept. 11th [1923]

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

Dearest Clive,

You have given me one hour and a half of pure delight—reckoning that it takes half an hour to read your essay and I have just read it for the 3rd time—so in spite of resolving never to write another letter, I must now write and thank you. It is far and away the best (don’t think I merely mean the most complimentary) criticism I have ever read of my own works, and happens to come at an extremely convenient moment to light up the particular maze I am in. I think I could beat up an argument on the question of ‘feeling’ which is observed and feeling which is shared—But to do that you must come over, or invite me to walk across the downs. However, I’m really warmed to the cockles of my heart that you should have so much good to say—for when I thought of you wading through those interminable and faded works I thought one withered laurel was all you could probably pick for my gray hairs—a laurel the size of a leaf of mint. As it is, I begin to write in the morning with a glance in your direction for comfort. But I can’t be ‘beautiful’—the beautiful daughter etc.. That I have struck out: I will try to find a better quotation tomorrow, and send back (unless you and your paramour who wrote me a charming note on a tender theme this morning) will be coming this way. You’ll be amused to hear that when the discussion got upon the Nation at Studland, I vociferated that Clive Bell was the best journalist, possibly critic, of the day; and got the table to agree. But this gives you no sort of pleasure.

We had rather a strenuous time, all sorts of walks and talks; loves and qualities were debated while we raced over Dorsetshire, grilled, baked, moralised among ruins, and saw the very spot [Lulworth Cove] where in 1910 Rupert lay in bed because of Noel [Olivier]. The poet Rylands was there.

I see this ought to be re-written; 10 years ago it would have been. But not now.

Moreover, I shall never explain to you, in words, exactly how, and for what reason, not all of them purely literary or even wholly vain, I like you to like what your affectionate sister in law writes; but perhaps as I approach a subject upon which you say I have no knowledge, I had better be silent. Ha! ha!

V.W.

Quentin Bell

[]

1422: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Monday [24 September 1923]

Typewritten

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes, [Sussex]

Dearest Ottoline,

The typewriter, as you know, is always a sign of the Eliot Fund. I cannot approach it by any other means.

I have heard from [Richard] Aldington who wishes to know whether we think it would be a good thing to declare that the fund is now closed. I have said that I do. Do you? Then, what is to happen next? I propose to ask Tom whether he would like the money handed over now. Aldington says we must communicate with [Ezra] Pound. He has quarrelled with Pound and wants you or me to write. I will do this, if you like—unless you know him, and could make him say what money he has got, and what their plans are.* I have never seen him; and only hate his works.

How are you? what are you doing? and thinking, and have you seen anyone exciting? Instinct tells me that Mr Sprott was not a success—partly because of his name. But he is Lytton’s Sebastian—not mine. I only handed on his request. I hope you’ll like the poet Rylands who said he hoped to be received about now. He is Lyttons Dady—but a very nice young man I thought. What an interesting letter I could write if it weren’t for this appalling machine! Not only does it misspell; it talks nonsense.

We go back to Richmond next Saturday.

Ever yours
V.W.

[in Virginias handwriting:]

* Aldington says, we ought to “obtain from Pound an account of their results and intentions” address: 70 bis Rue Notre Dame des Champs, Paris.

Texas

[]

1423: To George Rylands

Sept 30th [1923]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond

Dear Dadie,

Yes, we are hoping you will come on Saturday, Oct 6th. Is there anybody (within reason) you want to meet? My address is a lie; we are still for 2 hours more, at Rodmell, on the hottest day of the year.

I don’t agree with you about Tom Eliot, and I’m sure I’m right; but this we will argue. I see Desmond has returned to his vomit this week, without bringing up anything that convinces me about Ruskin.

Leonard is quite ready to buy you a press at any moment.

Bring, I need not say, no clothes, except perhaps the cornflour suit.

Yours
Virginia Woolf

George Rylands

[]

1424: To Lytton Strachey

Thursday [4 October 1923]

Postcard

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

I should be very grateful for a line to say whether you advise me to buy the new Congreve.

Does it give more (of importance) than the usual editions: or prove that they are bowdlerized? It is a serious matter to part with £3/3 but I would, in a good cause.

Yr. V.W.

Frances Hooper

[]

1425: To Vanessa Bell

Saturday [6 October? 1923]

[Hogarth House, Richmond]

Dearest

Here is a copy for you [of Freshwater]—perhaps you and Duncan could use the same one?—Could we arrange something with the Stephens on Tuesday night? Leonard is dining with Maynard,—I could either dine with you or with them; and read it to Adrian—Perhaps you’d be bored, so I’d better go to them.

Ring me up and say which. I’m writing to Desmond to suggest his coming here, and Lydia has her copy, so the thing is now on foot. I can get other copies typed.

Yr B.

Berg

[]

1426: To Desmond MacCarthy

Sunday [7 October? 1923]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond

My dear Desmond,

Nessa says that you may consent to stage-manage a skit upon our great aunts, which we want to act for Christmas. If this is true, either I could send you a copy of the MS or perhaps we could contrive a meeting in order to discuss it? There are six parts: Lydia, Adrian, Nessa, are already cast. The rest await your decision.

I gather that Hawk is hovering over a farmyard.

I can’t write a letter, though there are millions of things I want to say. So let me know if anything can be arranged. The idea is to have masses of Cameron photographs, shawls, cameos, peg-top trousers, laurel trees, laureates and all the rest.

By the way, tell Molly [MacCarthy] I won’t appear in the same number of the Nation with her again. Her praises never cease ringing in the oddest quarters—Leonard’s mother, Rylands’ mother, elderly ladies of discretion, burst out in enthusiasm, and say M.M.’s memoirs are by far the best thing yet appeared in the Nation: and the young men too, seem enthusiastic—but all this is not balm and lavender to me.

Are you ever jealous? Of course, it’s only skin deep with me, but I do cry out as the pin goes in—Molly’s praise, that’s to say. How I enjoy the description of the Grand Livre, and Mrs Cornish’s sarcasm about the parrot! Of course, truth beats fiction hollow. One pinch of it scatters cartloads of the most carefully made up romance.

But this is developing into an essay, and may lead much further than I intend.

Logan [Pearsall Smith] was here yesterday, gone a little grey about the gills; Roger is hovering over us; Clive is in Paris; and the [Charles] Sangers are as usual.

So write and say what is to happen.

Your affte
Virginia

Mrs Michael MacCarthy

[]

1427: To David Garnett

[9 October 1923]

Hogarth House, Richmond

Dear Bunny,

Lytton advises me that the Congreve is more for people of wealth than for hungry students like myself, (which of course is a nasty one for the Nonesuchers) so, with a thousand thanks for your offer, I won’t spend my £3/3 on that, but lay it out, I swear, upon other books. There are any number I want; so I’ll look in soon, and see.

Come and dine soon again. I want to hear about your book; not merely to talk about mine.

Ever Yr
Virginia Woolf

Berg

[]

1428: To Molly MacCarthy

Wednesday [10 October 1923?]

[Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond]

Dearest Molly,

I ran out and got you this tiny inadequate token this afternoon. It has “L’Amour nous unit” written upon it—that is exactly what I feel. Please forgive me for being so inconsiderate and vain. I don’t mean it. At heart I am your most constant and affectionate

Virginia

who loves you in spite of all her imperfections.

Sussex

[]

1429: To Richard Aldington

12th Oct. 1923

Typewritten

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond S. W.

Dear Mr Aldington,

I’m afraid I must have explained myself badly. Last year about this time I gave Mr Eliot fifty pounds, having got, as I thought, both your consent and Lady Ottolines. He told me then that he was putting the money in the bank, to keep as long as he could untouched. I’m afraid, from something he said, indirectly, that his wifes illness made it necessary for him to spend it.

The pass-book I sent you has just been made up to date. I saw there is sixty pounds to our credit (more or less) and what I want to decide with you is whether I am to give Mr Eliot a cheque for this amount now, or tell him how the fund stands, and ask him to decide what he wishes done.

Also, could you let me know how much will be paid us yearly so I may explain this too to him. It is a matter of some importance to him, I am sure, to know what he can count on. I agree with you that so long as we are receiving subscriptions—that is for the next three or four years—we may as well keep the fund open. We shall have to sign cheques and so on, and keeping the Fund open means no extra trouble for anyone, so far as I can see.

I didn’t mean that Mr Eliot was giving up journalism for good; only that he hopes to do none for three or four months and write poetry meanwhile.

We are very glad to hear that you liked the article on your book [Exiles and Other Poems], and hope it will lead you to do more.

Yours sincerely,
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

1430: To Vanessa Bell

[mid-October? 1923]

Hogarth House, [Richmond]

Dearest,

On thinking over the play, I rather doubt its worth going on with. It seemed to me, when I read it last night, that its so much of a burlesque, and really rather too thin and flat to be worth getting people together at infinite trouble to act. I could write something much better, if I gave up a little more time to it: and I foresee that the whole affair will be much more of an undertaking than I thought. I dont think this is vanity on my part: more common sense. So I shant take any further steps till I hear from you. I am willing to abide by any decision that you, Duncan, and Adrian, come to together. But I think it ought to be considered carefully before we start.

My own feeling is, as I say, that its not enough of a play to be worth spending time over. And I can swear on my knees that I shan’t care a straw—in fact be rather relieved—if you, Duncan and Adrian agree.

Was I asked to dinner next Monday? If so, I should like to come.

V.W.

Berg

[]

1431: To R. C. Trevelyan

23rd Oct. [1923]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond

My dear Bob,

Leonard thinks that you once told us of a printer who prints poetry much more cheaply than the ordinary printers. If this is so, could you tell us whether you have seen his work, and what his address is? It would be very good of you. We want to go on printing poetry, but the prices are so high, that it becomes almost impossible, (unless we do it ourselves, and time is a great difficulty now).

Please come and see us some day—in a week or two better than now, as our manager is ill, and we have to work hard at the press.

Yours Ever
Virginia Woolf

Sussex

[]

1432: To Jacques Raverat

Nov. 4th 1923

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond

My dear Jacques,

You were saying that you would like a little gossip about Maynard and Lydia. On Sept. 7th we went to stay with them at Studland—a ducal home, in which they fared, rather uneasily I thought, because the dukes servants were in the pantry; and Lydia’s habits, of course, are not ducal. I do not know how far I transgress the bounds of good taste, if I allude (oh it must be in a whisper, only in the presence of Gwen) to—well things called Sanitary Towels—you see blue bundles discreetly hidden beneath lace in the windows of small drapers. When used they should be burnt. Lydia, whose father was porter in a Petersburg hotel, and whose entire life has been spent hopping from foot to foot with the daughters of publicans, did not know this perhaps the most binding of all laws of female life (Ask any Darwin, excepting Mrs Litchfield—they’ll tell you) She put her weeks supply on the grate. The grate was filled with white shavings. Imagine the consequences. There she left them. The cook’s husband, and Duke’s valet, did the room. Soon the Cook herself requested to speak with the lady. There was such a scene, it is said, as shook the rafters,—rage, tears, despair, outrage, horror, retribution, reconciliation: and—if you knew Lydia you’ll see how naturally it follows—lifelong friendship upon a basis of—well, bloody rags. Really, there is a curious feeling about that menage, as well may be with such a foundation. Lydia has the soul of a squirrel: anything nicer you cant conceive: she sits by the hour polishing the sides of her nose with her front paws. But, poor little wretch, trapped in Bloomsbury, what can she do but learn Shakespeare by heart? I assure you its tragic to see her sitting down to King Lear. Nobody can take her seriously: every nice young man kisses her. Then she flies into a rage and says she is like Vanessa, like Virginia, like Alix Sargent Florence [Strachey], or Ka Cox [Arnold-Forster]—a seerious wooman.

Ka Cox dined with us two nights ago. Is malice allowed? Is it deducted from the good marks I have acquired or hope to acquire with the Raverat family? But then you’ve always known the worst of me—my incorrigible mendacity; my leering, sneering, undependable disposition. You take me as I am, and make allowances for the sake of old days. Well, then, Ka is intolerably dull. I am quoting my husband. I am not quite of that opinion myself: but why, I ask, condescend to the Woolfs? Why be so damned matronly? Why always talk about Will [Arnold-Forster]—that parched and pinched little hob goblin, whom I like very much but think an incorrigibly bad painter, as if he were Shelley, Mr Gladstone, Byron and Helen of Troy in one? I dont carry on about Leonard like that, nor yet Gwen about Jacques. What I suspect is that dear old Ka feels the waves of life withdraw, and there, perched high on her rock, makes these frantic efforts to pretend, to make the Woolfs believe that she is still visited by the waters of the great sea.

Indeed, once upon a time, when we all swooned upon her in our love affairs and collapsed in our nervous breakdowns, she was. She was wetted punctually, and shone in her passive way, like some faintly coloured sea anemone, who never budges, never stings, never—but I am getting wrapped up in words.

Anyhow, both Leonard and I lost our tempers. We said nothing. We went to bed in the devil of a gloom. Are we like that? we said. Are we middle aged and content? Do we look like old cabbages? Is life entirely a matter of retrospect and county families and trying to impress people with ringing up men at the foreign office about French conscription of Natives in Africa? No, no, no. Let us change the subject.

Duncan has just been in to tea. I may tell you it is rather a fine November day, but dark by half-past four. Duncan was going on to Twickenham to see his mother to choose some silks for a chair cover—bright sunlight being essential. Its no good. One goes to the window and shows him the church all lit up. Off he wanders murmuring something about getting there by daybreak—Half his buttons seemed to be off; his braces are too long. He has always to be hitching himself together; and odd bits of shirt stick out. Anrep has done a mosaic which is said to be very good; Segonzac has been admiring the London Group; Sickert has surpassed himself; Alix and James Strachey think we should go to war with France. Lytton is buying a house at Hungerford [Ham Spray].

What other news is there? Very little I think of interest, so far as facts go. And to convey feelings is too difficult. I try, but I invariably make enemies. I go to parties, very occasionally, and there get rather random headed, and say too much. I assure you its fatal—but I never can resist the desire for intimacy, or reconcile myself to the fact that all human relations are bound to be unsatisfactory. Are they? I rather expect Jacques, in his thick black beard, surveying the country from his motor car, knows all about it. I still play my game of making up Jacques and Gwen as I walk about London. No doubt I shall be picked off by a motor omnibus in the thick of it. After half an hours acute discomfort, should we settle down to the old relationship, whatever it was? Jacques I think was rather dictatorial; he called us silly women; he said the Oliviers were real: but not most people. Gwen sat on the floor and said something very positive—being, poor woman, a Darwin to the backbone, and Virginia of course, shied and shilly-shallied, and—no, you must write Virginia’s part, because she is oddly enough, the last woman I have any idea of. About coming, to Vence—this must be done somehow, and I aim at Easter, or later, or earlier. But we are tied by the navel string to the Nation; and—what awful, indecent things I keep thinking of this evening!

Please write someday soon; and explain what you think about, as you survey the world. And please think kindly of me. How I depend upon my friends! You wouldn’t believe it, either of you.

Ever yrs
V.W.

Sussex

[]

1433: To Gerald Brenan

Dec. 1st 1923

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes, [Sussex]

My dear Gerald,

I am ashamed to say that I left a long unfinished letter to you behind at Richmond, and now have my doubts that I can accomplish, as I wish and have wished for long, a finished one. I am coming to the age when I sit staring at the fire and saying “I’m so busy: I’m so fearfully hard at work: I’ve not got a word to throw at a dog:” and so I do nothing. Oh, yes, I ought to be reading 4 manuscripts for the Hogarth Press, one by a young Frenchman, another by a paralysed girl, and a third by an astute and bold American [Theodora Bosanquet], who was Henry James’ secretary, and a fourth by a Spaniard.

In the unfinished letter in the drawer of my Roman cabinet I went at some length into several points of disagreement between us. I disagreed entirely and with some heat in your estimate of Conrad: I repeated, with qualifications, my remark that he is a great, though limited, novelist: and then I observed that Vanity Fair is inferior as a work of art to Wuthering Heights: and then I joked at you for taking me seriously when I was writing humorously (but humour never crosses the Channel) for your Aunt. Do you indeed accuse me of writing for money? Do you have the temerity to bid me forsake journalism? And in God’s name, what do you mean by “working working working at my novel”? How does one “work” at one’s novel? Well, scribbling journalism is one way, and lunching with Lady Colefax to meet Hugh Walpole, is another. But do not let us quarrel over these misfits of meaning. Come to England and let us adjust them in hours of endless talk.

I saw Carrington two days ago, and we had a long long consultation, such as you can imagine, about Ralph, among other things. Since your advice, I have tried to be cordial; as to quarrel was none of our wish; indeed I always like him, but Carrington says, he suspects us—you’re evidently right—he suspects all brain workers, who don’t rampage about the purlieus of Soho chasing pretty powdered girls. I quite like seeing him do it: I don’t bear the shadow of a grudge against him; but life is life. Surely that is a Spanish proverb? Interpreted it means, women of 41 can’t be intimate with rowing blues of 28. Carrington was very sincere. She interests me more than he does. And don’t think that your ruse was altogether successful. I suspected—but as you’ll be seeing them, I shall drop this subject, as I don’t want to be quoted, mentioned, or twisted like a figure of wax in front of your 6 eyes.

Now we have a card to say you’re in Morocco, and a picture of camels ploughing sandhills; so that my letter begins to evaporate. There it will be on the table over the braziers in your room among all the littered foolscap, and you’ll never find it. Perhaps as you say, you’ll marry a lady in a veil, and live among the palm trees like a sultan for ever.

That is not the life to make a good writer of you, however. I have a feeling that a street would put a backbone into your sentences, which, if you will excuse the frankness, I think they begin to want. For your story of Mr Unwin, you should live in Birmingham, and have to eat in A.B.C. shops. Or, more boldly, live in Bloomsbury, and hear Clive Bell chattering. You asked me about him and Murry. Clive is a great source of pleasure to me, for one thing because he says outright what I spend my life in concealing. Never was there anyone so petty, conceited, open and good at bottom of heart. I always think of him as a mixture of Pepys and Boswell. Sometimes I imagine him the only one to survive of us all—for 50 years or so after his death. I should be more sure of this if he had not been slightly corrupted by Lytton. When I first knew him, he was perfection: a hunting squire who thought himself a Shelley. But he is always a delight to watch: and no one more annoys and outrages me: and also I am on perfectly friendly terms with him; and he pays my cabs, and stands me “Cold Snacks” at the Café Royal, where the waiter brings him the cold red beef to look at before he cuts it—but I can’t trouble to go on with this account, or get it very like.

Please believe that I could write better if I took a little more time. But letter writing is now a mere tossing of omelettes to me: if they break and squash, can’t be helped. Then, of course, you should know Roger, whose mind, far subtler and more richly stocked than Clives, never ceases for a second to glow, contract, expand, like some wonderful red-tinted sea anemone, which lives in the deepest water and sucks into itself every scrap of living matter within miles. He is close on sixty, and gets, so it seems to me, richer and suppler, richer and suppler—but they say his painting is very bad. As for Murry, I can no longer follow him even with amusement, much less with dislike. Eliot says he has unbuttoned his waistcoat and found his level. One might as well listen to a half starved clerk spouting religious revival on a tub at Hyde Park Corner. But you are right about him. His friend (he has one disciple left, Sydney Waterlow—a kind of spaniel who follows anybody who will beat him) his friend says that in the Adelphi he is purging his sins: and the process is holy to watch, and salutary to us, the unconverted, too. He is one of those Dostoevsky relics. He sees himself pulled asunder by the angels of darkness and light. As a matter of fact—but no: I can’t go on with Murry either.

What about your defence of Joyce? Our press has its mouth wide gaping for prose. Did we tell you that Rylands, a young man at Cambridge, is coming in June to be our partner? So we shall be more capable of undertaking masterpieces. I rather agree that Joyce is underrated: but never did any book [Ulysses] so bore me. But then, as you think criticism is not my line (meant humorously) I will not go on to analyse. I will not send you my next book, which consists of criticism pure and simple. I will work work work—I wish I could laugh in person instead of trying to make my pen laugh. My ink pot is stood upon the hob; and the faint sizzling sound of boiling purple ink is now to be heard. We have been weeding onions in the light of a towering rose pink cloud, which, tugging a little at its anchor, moved very slowly across the sky, and over Mount Caburn, and so away. Indeed, I could spend my whole life describing clouds.

I am now going to read Greek.

Ever yr.
V.W.

For Gods sake, send me your sonnets, and my Proust.

George Lazarus

[]

1434: To Ethel Sands

Tuesday [end 1923?]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dear Ethel,

I wonder whether you could possibly tell me the address of Miss Fass, at whose house concerts are given by the English quartet? She sent me a programme, which I lost, and now I want one to give a friend, and would also like to try and come myself.

It is a shame to trouble you; but she is not on the telephone, and I think you go there. If not, please don’t bother to answer. May I ever come and see you again? I should so much like to.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Wendy Baron

[]

Letters 1435-1457 (January–mid-April 1924)

1435: To George Rylands

[early January 1924]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond

Dear Dadie,

We’ve just come back here, after suffering a good deal in the country. The poems have been returned; and another volume I’ve rejected on my own authority—hopeless drivel. We have now some Russian stories, which perhaps you’d like to see.

Will you be able to come here and stay the night, or weekend on your way to Cambridge?

There is a good deal to discuss. We have some new ideas about domestic arrangements.

Let me know.

Yr affte
V.W.

George Rylands

[]

1436: To Molly MacCarthy

[early January 1924]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dearest Molly,

I am searching for houses in London, in view of a possible move this spring or summer. Is Wellington Square to be had still, and if so, at what rent, and for how long, and are there bedrooms, bathroom etc etc?

I shoot from Maida Vale to Battersea—We are taking in a young man as partner [Rylands], and want to get him and the Press lodged near. The difficulties seem insuperable; so if you could write a line of information,—add a little friendship, so much the happier for me.

Shall you be in London soon?

Did I tell you how immensely I enjoyed the new instalment of your memoirs [in the Nation]? You have sickened me of fiction, which beside fact becomes more and more insipid, vapid, tedious, unprofitable. The least you can do is to find me a house.

Yrs V.W.

Mrs Michael MacCarthy

[]

1437: To V. Sackville-West

Tuesday [8 January 1924]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond

My dear Vita

I’m afraid tomorrow is impossible for me. I’m in the thick of finding and moving houses. But wouldn’t you and Lord Berners dine here on Friday, 18th, 7.30—in the kitchen, without dressing? That would be much nicer than tea. Would you ask him from me?

Your aff
Virginia Woolf

Berg

[]

1438: To Clive Bell

[8 January 1924]

Postcard

[Hogarth House, Richmond]

Can you possibly extend your already wide hospitality to a bed, on Saturday night—so that I needn’t catch the steam train? But don’t, if there’s the least bother.

V.W.

Quentin Bell

[]

1439: To Vanessa Bell

Friday [11 January 1924]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dearest,

I hear that Leonard has told you of my iniquities.

What has now happened is that we have asked Nelly [Boxall] to stay on as [cook] general, which, greatly to our relief, she has agreed to do. I then suggested that I should try to find Lottie a place in Gordon Sqre. She said at once that she would be perfectly happy if she could be with you, either as cook or house maid—anything indeed except nurse. She has the makings of a very good cook I think, and Nelly says she would help her. I dont think her temper is a real objection, as I think it is mostly due to the fact that she and N. get very much on each others nerves alone here, and she would probably be much better in a bigger place. Anyhow, she is ready to do anything in order to be with you, and shes such a nice character that it is a pity she should be lost. She would go at the end of March.

Would you let me know if there is any chance of this, as I said I’d ask you before anyone else.

Will you be in to tea on Monday? I might come then.

Yr B.

Berg

[]

1440: To Clive Bell

Wednesday [23 January 1924]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dearest Clive,

I’m extremely sorry that Leonard’s flue and my flux have prevented me from sitting by your side—or was I not asked? Communication by letter is far from satisfactory.

Old Miss Elwes has just doddered in to borrow books for Major Grant. “But may we keep Pot boilers rather longer? My family find it so fascinating—” but then there’s madness in the family. Dont plume yourself on that. Old Randall [solicitor] on the telephone: “Mr Clive Bell’s note might perhaps be thought a trifle strong”—in short Clive Bell has been haunting the muggy damned damp January day; and here (my one little wizened, enfeebled attempt at a boast) is Lady Colefax (who’s asked herself to tea) asking us to meet the Bibescos. This great authoress sends Leonard a personal copy, dedicated, in a fluent flourishing foolish fist “to the author of the Village and the Jungle, in deepest admiration”—or, translated, will he review Fir and Pine himself, favourably, at length in the Nation. And another lady, nearer home, but I’m too discreet to mention names, suggests that Mr Woolf shall send her novel to so and so, who has expressed fervent admiration for same. I’m not proud of our tribe, are you? This running and inarticulate style is the style natural to a Penkala [fountain pen]: they write of themselves: I’ll give you one.

As for gossip, what? Lord Berners, Vita, Siegfried [Sassoon]: thats my style these last days: and oh dear for a carving knife to scrape the numbskulls a little sharper! Dear Vita has the body and brain of a Greek God; Berners is by all means admirable, and Siegfried the most delightful, and sensitive etc etc etc: but when it comes to sitting tight, 2 feet apart, over the fire from 8 to 11.30—more brain, O God, more brain! So Meredith cries, in a sonnet which in our youth we quoted: and here, to solace myself, I’ve been reading a Maynard-Lytton 1906 correspondence, all about Hobbes and Duncan—oh so far away, and vivid, and bringing back, as charwomen say of hardboiled eggs, which “repeat”. Again vulgarity, its Penkala’s fault—(It’s a red pen, with a real nib; gilt, but virile, none of that smooth mush the fountain pens have. I’ll give you one. Remind me.)

And what else? Logan [Pearsall Smith] came to tea, a little censorious, mildly buggeristical, a young Spaniard having come to Chelsea all the way from his Estancia on the Steppe of Paraguay to translate Trivia. Its the American salt I dont relish, something coarse and briny in the blood. Vita was well laughed at about P.E.N., but the poor girl has lost her way and dont know which light to turn on next. Would I introduce her to the Robert Lynds? “Well, if you’ll introduce me to Lord Lascelles.” “Why dont you contribute to the Queen’s dolls House, Virginia?” “Is there a W.C. in it, Vita?” “You’re a bit hoity toity, Virginia.” Well, I was educated in the old Cambridge School. “Ever heard of Moore?” “George Moore the novelist?” “My dear Vita, we start at different ends”. The poor girl looks divinely lovely, a little tousled, in a velvet jacket. But let us meet, for no more letter writing at my age; only a St Vitus’ dance.

Love from the other invalid Leonard; who says that he was very glad of your note; he had meant to have one; his anger was roused; he didnt think you quite hit the first political point hard enough on the head, so he altered the first part, and made your original note into two. Thats all.

V.W.

Quentin Bell

[]

1441: To Ethel Sands

[end January 1924]

The Hogarth Press, Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

My dear Ethel,

I must implore you to clear up the romances of your own drawing room. Who is Virgilia? What is Shooter’s Hill? Why am I represented in male costume with my head in the stars, accepting worship from a bowed x..d woman? It is obscure; possibly improper. So you see what your plain duty as a hostess is.

How charming Arnold Bennett was! Never again will I say a word against his books. That’s the worst of meeting authors—one is always at their feet.

Yours ever
Virginia Woolf

Wendy Baron

[]

1442: To Logan Pearsall Smith

3rd Feb. 1924

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dear Logan,

It is a great pleasure to me that you should like anything I write, and it was very kind of you to tell me so. I always feel myself such an ignorant chatterbox.

But this is the letter of a grasping publisher (its not your money this time, but your works.) We are very anxious to pounce upon you for a book. Next autumn we shall be starting seriously, with Dadie’s bread and butter to earn, and what we want to know is whether we can count upon you for anything—long, or short—and when?

Dont think us too much of a bore. We want to attract attention, and you would be a feather in our cap to brandish in the face of the public.

I will pursue Nickey to the death.

Yours Ever
Virginia Woolf

Library of Congress

[]

1443: To Margaret Llewelyn Davies

[February 1924]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond

Dearest Margaret,

Your woman [unidentified] is rather interesting—I’ve just had another article of hers sent me, with some remarks on the obscure Miss [Gertrude] Stein—who is a very rich, stout American lady, living in Paris, and buying modern pictures—a friend of Roger Fry’s. I send you your’s back—not that I suppose you want it.

Not this week alas: my whole day goes in stamping this 600 times, and folding 600 pages, and addressing 600 envelopes. It refers to Roger’s new book—we are in an awful rush and muddle. But all will be over next week; and then, I say, not another publishing season till we have the next beautiful young man [Rylands], Ralph’s successor, to help.

But do ask me: don’t let me become, as I fear Miss Tournier has become, one of your suburban admirers.

Yr V.W.

Love from Leonard.

Sussex

[]

1444: To Vanessa Bell

Friday, 22nd Feb. [1924]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dearest,

We should like you to do all the decorations you estimate for, except Leonard’s room. This you estimate at £7. So the cost of the whole would then be I suppose £20.4.

I hope to let you know about the sitting room in a few days, if it would still give you time. Its a question of selling some things here, and I don’t know what they’ll fetch. Needless to say, my aim is to get you and Duncan to paint it for £25. But would your paintings be detachable, or on the wall itself? This is a matter of some importance, as we may be turned out after 10 years, in which case your masterpieces would be destroyed, and I couldn’t sell them to nourish my old age.

Would you start work at once? We shall move in on the 13th.

I’ll come to tea on Monday, if I may—anyhow I shall be at 52 that afternoon—

Yr B.

We have decided to let the studio for £75. Would you tell Douglas Davidson or anyone else? We want to let it by the year.

Berg

[]

1445: To Vanessa Bell

[24 February 1924]

[Hogarth House, Richmond]

Dearest,

We have decided that we should like you and Duncan to paint the sitting room for £25 as you estimate (I’ve no doubt you’re charging only a 20th of the right price.) So would you start as soon as you can.

Have you heard anything from D. Davidson? There are some other people who probably want to take the studio, and are coming to see it tomorrow. But I think we must give him the first choice, if he would let us know at once.

I’ll come in to tea tomorrow.

Yr B.

I’d better give you the measurements of the bookcases: there will have to be two.

Berg

[]

1446: To Theodora Bosanquet

24th Feb. 1924

Typewritten

The Hogarth Press, Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dear Miss Bosanquet,

I have read your articles (which I send back separately—) with great interest. You are right in thinking that the article I had heard of was about Henry James’ methods of work, dictation and so on. But we think your idea of combining the different articles a very good one. Would it be possible to begin by giving your personal memories, which would be of the highest value as there is no account I think of his methods during his later period, and go on with criticism of the novels themselves? About 10,000 words would be as much as we are able to manage. We should issue it as a pamphlet, and would give you 25% of the profits. I think it should make a most interesting little book.

After March 13th our address will be 52, Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

Yours sincerely,
Virginia Woolf

Houghton Library, Harvard University

[]

1447: To Logan Pearsall Smith

Monday [25 February 1924]

Hogarth [House, Richmond]

Dear Logan,

I’m very glad that I goaded you into writing your article, which is worth 25 dozen of that stupid Mr Beresford’s—I wont say how many of mine.

But now that you’ve started your hare you must go after her—You can’t leave her on the mountains—more articles are required—but I rather agree with you that her breed is nobler than our beasts. There is much more to be said, though.

Yours very Sincerely
Virginia Woolf

I am in your debt for ever over Montaigne—altogether a different thing in French.

Library of Congress

[]

1448: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

[February 1924]

Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey

Dearest Ottoline,

I have asked Mr Schiff to let you know if he knows who the American secretary [of the Eliot fund] is:

Ezra Pound’s address is 70 bis, Rue notre Dame des Champs, VI Paris—but where he is I dont know. Vivien [Eliot] would know (I don’t like to ask Tom). I’m seeing her next week, and will send a card.

We are in the midst of confusion here—letting this house to Saxon, measuring rooms, meeting builders, leading an amphibious life between this and 52 Tavistock Sqre, where we move next month, where you’ll have to come and see us for all your malicious insinuations that we say the same thing over and over, and are morally spiritually intellectually and physically inferior to the refined spirits of Garsington. Now why do people who live in the country always give themselves such airs?

I admit, I don’t remember what London life is really like—The Bloomsbury Squares always intoxicate me with their beauty, and there used to be a great lady [Ottoline] once living in Bedford Square who managed to make life seem a little amusing and interesting and adventurous, so I used to think, when I was young and wore a blue dress, and Ottoline was like a Spanish galleon, hung with golden coins, and lovely silkin [sic] sails.

But I’m romancing; and must immediately ring up the Electric Light Company to instal us at once.

I don’t see any chance of any week end till after April 1st—but let us meet some time; and dont become too high and superb and proud and pure and like a poplar tree ever to notice the creeping creatures who race about so aimlessly in the grass.

Ever Yr V.W.

Texas

[]

1449: To Gerald Brenan

March 8th 1924

52 Tavistock Square, London, W.C.1

My dear Gerald,

This will be our address in three days time. So note it down, with a view to many envelopes. But I have to make the most appalling confession: I had read your letter once, your sonnets twice, when Lottie, thinking that—thinking heaven knows what—stuffed them into the fire!—For Gods sake send me a copy. It wasnt vanity only; it was something really venerable in me that was pleased by your praises. And I thought, at a first reading, that as poetry they were very interesting, were worth examining, were remarkable. A copy! a copy!

I can but reiterate and bark like a dog on the banks of a river, because we’re distracted with moving: books on the floor, curtains down, linoleum to be valued—you cant think how these mosquitoes accumulate about one’s head the last day or two. Saxon is coming here. Will Saxon buy our Turkey carpet and the electric light fittings? Ah well, its no use, I cant write.

Here is a letter that was mysteriously returned. And no news of Proust I suppose?

I have heard that Ralph and Carrington are to be seen, Ralph getting tipsy at parties, and Carrington taking him home to bed. This is rumour, and you know more about Tidmarsh than I do.

We count on printing something of yours this summer or autumn.

But good Lord! perhaps we shall see you! Before your letter vanished, I saw something about coming in April.

Now that will be a pleasure to your dusty old friends, who follow your mysterious career, with the greatest zest—often saying for example, Now what d’you think Gerald’s up to? What d’you think Gerald’ll write?—the last person to whom we said this being Bonamy Dobrée.

Excuse bad writing

Ever yr
V.W.

George Lazarus

[]

1450: To Jacques Raverat

March 8th 1924

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Jacques,

This you see [her new address] is the reason why I havent written and cant write now and won’t be able, so far as I can see to cross the channel this year—a new house, to which we move in a few days, which has had to be cleaned, scoured, painted and lighted, all in a hurry, leaving me a mere drudge, without a thought in my head, or, what is much worse, a penny in my purse. I dont therefore see how we can possibly take precedence of your better off friend. Let us creep into a cranny, if we can come. Otherwise assume we can’t.

But thats no reason why our letters should languish. You don’t want to hear about my new house, I know by experience. It has a basement for the Press and a large studio: 2 floors full of solicitors [Messrs Dolman & Pritchard], L. and I on top looking at all the glories of London, which are romantically, sentimentally, incredibly dear to me. The Imperial Hotel, all pink and blue, in Russell Square: St Paneras Church spire, carved from white plaster—do you know it? These are the things I love, better than olive trees and mountains, but not so much as Jacques and Gwen, after all.

You said very tactfully in your last letter, why did Adrian and Karin separate, or rather how did he stand that d—d American all these years? I must say your language is a trifle strong. She is a good, honest woman: and in her place I’d have done the same, and in his too. Incompatible, is what they say: and this they’ve realised for 8 years, and ground their teeth over, while appearing in public the most love-locked of couples. We Stephen’s are difficult, especially as the race tapers out, towards its finish—such cold fingers, so fastidious, so critical, such taste. My madness has saved me; but Adrian is sane—that’s all the light I can throw.

I dare not go on, because my brain is in splinters—and my handwriting like drifts of wreckage. Do you remember Sydney-Turner? a phantom, gliding like a moonbeam through my Thursday evenings, and settling still on one chair for 6 hours on end? He’s coming here with his old mother. I forget whom you like, and whom dislike. Dont you think you might write me your memories of all our friends? There are the Oliviers now, whom I meet about, with their beautiful glass eyes, glazed and fixed and melancholy—Noel always enraptures me—she cries over Rupert’s [Brooke] letters, she tells me; and really, I fall in love with her, being so sentimental, for doing it. Bryn has been divorced—that you know. Poor Hugh, so I’m told, spent his Sundays making wooden beds, for Sherrard to step into on Monday when he’d gone: he was always making things—Ka [Arnold-Forster] is watching the spring, and Will has written a little book which we are printing. Now, why dont you and Gwen write us a pamphlet about art? or life? This is serious. Something profound yet sparkling.

I’ll write again: so do you

Ever
V.W.

Sussex

[]

1451: To V. Sackville-West

Tuesday [11 March 1924]

Hogarth House, Richmond

My dear Vita,

It is extraordinarily kind of you to offer your motor, but all is now in the hands of professionals, and we shall be lifted off bodily on Thursday.

I’m all right again, and very much want to hear your first hand account of Ottoline—but Heaven knows when or how.

But please come and baptise our rooms for us as soon as you can.

Your affectionate dirty illiterate
V.W.

[]

1452: To Violet Dickinson

[13 March 1924]

52 Tavistock Sqre., [W.C.1]

My Violet,

I was just thinking of you, and of your house, and wanting to see you—

We’re on the wing this moment—workmen spit and swear in every room. So this is only a desperate wag of my tail. But come and see your Sp⁠[arroy]: and Leonard, who is one of your most faithful admirers.

Don’t tell me you’re leaving 21 and the Graveyard, looking at which I’ve had so many happy hours.

You must see our printing works in the basement, and do, do, do, as you love me, write me something about Miss Eden for the press.

Yr Sp:

Berg

[]

1453: To V. Sackville-West

Tuesday [18 March 1924]

Postcard

[52 Tavistock Square, London, W.C.1]

We hope to see you tomorrow at 1—but prepare for a complete picnic, among the ruins of books and legs of tables, dirt and dust and only fragments of food.

V.W.

Berg

[]

1454: To Lytton Strachey

March 21st 1924

52 Tavistock Square W.C.1

Dearest Lytton,

I am greatly distressed to hear that you are still plagued by diseases of all kinds—just as I was snatching a few moments to read Books & Characters too. Why do I always fly to your works when the electricians are in the hall, the gasmen in the basement, and the telephone ringing with Tom’s [Eliot] sepulchral voice? It’s a very queer fact, but in moments of crisis, I always turn to you but supply me with another book soon. I open at page 173, and say Oh but I know this by heart; and it will soon be the case with all the pages: and this is no exaggeration; and I daresay no particular praise either; only one of your peculiarities as an author. Another is to beget Nicolsons. But the mixture is not appetising to me, for all the praises of Clive and Desmond, who have drunk too many glasses of his [Harold Nicolson’s] champagne to be trusted. But then Byron seems to me tawdry and melodramatic. And Claire and Trelawny and so and so on—I conceive them like a cave at some Earl’s Court Exhibition—a grotto I mean lined with distorting mirrors and plastered with oyster shells. Do not trouble to unwind this metaphor.

I am jangled and splintered by the move, and only hook together words by the force of affection: Say one word, and I will come down, and talk in a gentle and soothing voice about—well, did you hear how I rushed into Murry’s arms at the Nation dinner the other night? He forced himself upon me. He has rolling and oleaginous eyes. I said we were enemies. He said we were in different camps. He said one must write with one’s instincts. I said one must write with one’s mind. He said Bloomsbury was a tangle of exquisite sensibilities. I said come and see me there. He said no. I said very well. He said I like you. I said come and see me then. He said no. So I got up and flounced out of the room, saying Not for ten years—Undoubtedly, he has been rolling in dung, and smells impure.

We live largely in the basement—The confusion is still confounded—busts of my mother standing upon rolls of carpet, chamber pots stuffed full of book binding tools, and my unfortunate books—oh never let the undertakers pack your books when you move—I haven’t a single volume left whole. In compensation, Nessa and Duncan have painted me a room, where you must come instantly and sit and talk and talk and talk, and never have to catch a taxi, and so by degrees get delivered of that vast mass of communication which I assure you has been hoarding up within me, and so perhaps in you, these ten years. We will sit in the Square and let Dadie [Rylands] play tennis before us. This will be in the summer, with the leaves out, and exquisite ladies—but your taste doesn’t lie that way.

I will write more coherently later.

Ask Carrington to let me hear how you are.

Yr. V.W.

Frances Hooper

[]

1455: To Katherine Arnold-Forster

Saturday [12 April 1924]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Ka,

Its not lack of affection, but the usual interruptions, that make me so long in writing. Really we’ve had the devil of a time—Angelica being knocked over by a motor, and taken to hospital and thought very badly hurt last Sunday. Mercifully, it was a false alarm: nothing serious happened, except the shock; but it was a miserable and indeed utterly abominable time. Young doctors giving the worst possible news to parents without any warrant should be exterminated. But this is all over now. I’m going to see Will’s [Arnold-Forster] show if I die in the attempt! London is incredibly beautiful—not with the soft suburban beauty of Richmond: I find Bloomsbury fierce and scornful and stony hearted, but as I say, so adorably lovely that I look out of my window all day long. Theres St Paneras Church tower: omnibuses; wet pavements; and we lock ourselves in, and Ottoline is heard raging like a winter storm in vain.

We are off on Thursday to Rodmell for 10 days: then back to a furious season of publishing; and if you could snatch Leonard off to Cornwall, away from proofs, and labour party, I should be delighted.

There are a great many of your old friends prowling about—Kennedy among them. Please remember me to him. I have a dream that he is to build me a house in the country, all sunshine and hot water.

The press expands happily in the basement. There young Mr Rylands of Kings, and young Mrs Joad of Hampstead will brew over the books, while we descend now and then—its all a great joke, I must say, though we end in bankruptcy.

When you come, let me know, and the door shall be opened to let old Bruin oar her way in.

Yr V.W.

Mark Arnold-Forster

[]

1456: To Janet Case

[12 April 1924]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Janet,

I have been a disgrace not to write until your daffodils, which were the crown of my new painted room, have had to be thrown away. Its not lack of affection—We’ve been a good deal agitated by an accident to Vanessa’s little girl, who was thought to be very badly hurt in a motor car accident—She and her nurse were knocked down as they walked on the pavement. Happily, nothing was damaged; but for 2 or 3 days the doctors were as gloomy as could be, and poor old Nessa had the very devil of a time. Now Angelica is off to the country.

Olwen Ward Campbell, to answer your questions as I’m in a hurry and cant write sense, and Janet must have her gossip, is a barefoot young woman, daughter of Sir James Ward of Cambridge, who walked in on me and Rupert Brooke at Granchester in 1911 and said she was engaged to another pagan spirit who was fetched from the gooseberry bushes. They were sandy, upright, then—but its 13 or 14 years ago. She must be aged now. They say her book is “not really good.” Does this mean anything? The same man says Joan of Arc is not good either: Francis Birrell says it is good; but, he says, Miss Thorndike is atrocious. Since you read every word of the papers, why ask me for news?

We are off to Rodmell for Easter. I love London. It is far more beautiful than Richmond, and then the mercy of sitting quietly down to read, and not rushing to catch the last train home. L. gets back to lunch from the office. We are both very well, and up to our eyes, like all elderly people, in business. When its not writing, its reading manuscripts, or printing. We have our shop in the basement; then Mr Pritchard the solicitor; then the Woolves on top. People swarm, but we lock the door. We say not at home. This is my doing as well as Leonards. But I do enjoy a good gossip still. My rooms are all vast panels of moonrises and prima donna’s bouquets—the work of Vanessa and Duncan Grant.

Shall you come and see us? I’m ashamed to scribble; but must, or you would still wait for these very valuable and highly pondered remarks of mine.

Ever yr V.W.
Love to Miss Emphie Case [Janet’s sister]

Sussex

[]

1457: To George Rylands

[14 April 1924]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Dadie,

This is no more than a scrawl to say we hope you’ll suggest any time to come when you’re in London—we’re very anxious to show you everything and so on. Have you taken the Torrington Sqre house?

Why am I in such a hurry? Raymond is arriving. Ha-ha!

We can manage meals, so come to one.

Ever yr
V.W.

Did you get a MS poem by a Trinity or Kings man called Thompson, sent for your opinion to Kings about a week ago? Answer this

George Rylands

[]

Letters 1458-1488 (mid-April–July 1924)

1458: To Mrs B. Grant

[17? April 1924]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

My dear Mrs Grant,

I hope you won’t mind my writing one line to say how sorry I am for you, and how glad that I saw Major Grant that time. He was always so charming, and one felt so much at home with him—but this is not to be answered of course. We hope, if you ever feel like it, you will come and see us.

Your affectionate
Virginia Woolf

Leonard wants if he may to send his love to you, and to say how sorry he is.

George Spater

[]

1459: To David Garnett

Sunday [20 April 1924]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

My dear Bunny,

I must thank you for 2 hours of pure delight last night. I like the Man better than the Fox, on the whole—though its clumsier and less accomplished, I think there’s more to it; and how you come by these magnificent, staring, apparently simple ideas, staggers me—But I refuse to own that I’m envious. You make me laugh aloud with the unexpectedness of your touches. Wollop of Wollop Bottom for example. Your humans are a little stiff I think. Also, being crabbed and verdigrinous myself, I should have liked more grimness, and a violent, sad, altogether miserable ending: But the idea is sheer genius—You twitch the world round and give me another side to look at. Excuse this scribble: I’m half asleep with the sun, write 20 more books, at once, I beseech.

Yr V.W.

Berg

[]

1460: To Ethel Sands

April 24th [1924]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex, 52 Tavistock Sqre (after Monday)

My dear Ethel,

I only wish your letters were longer, and contained fuller details of everything. For instance your new hat—you cut me off with a word, and yet I swear I can describe every hat I’ve ever seen you wear—last, the lovely black-white Hoopoe arrangement you wore at Tavistock the other day, when I felt that some airy and elegant bird had alighted. (The hoopoe is a bird)

But of course I’ve not bought a hat, or met a Princess, or had tea with anybody in particular. True, Ottoline threatened to come to tea, but I evaded her, and now we have to choose one of 12 weekends to go to Garsington. But you and I are the old and faithful guardians of Ottoline’s friendship, and if we begin cracking jokes, she will be exposed to the jackels and hyenas, so I refrain. We’ve been here alone for a week, and every leaf has grown six inches under our eyes; but I believe you don’t care for nature. This is said rather artfully to throw you into a paroxysm of rage, as it would me, and so make you write another letter. I have been writing and reading ferociously every day, fearing that I shan’t get the chance in London. You say you hate your friends’ novels, or dread them. I agree entirely. Facts are what I like; but fiction is like praying, nobody should listen; it relieves the soul. I will not ask you to hear my prayers, I swear: but vanity will get the better of me I know. I have to read Riceyman Steps [Arnold Bennett] in order to consolidate a speech which I have to make; and I’m drowned in despair already. Such dishwater! pale thin fluid in which (perhaps, but I doubt it) once a leg of mutton swam. On the other hand, I can’t swallow quick enough Ariel by your friend Maurois. I think he must be your friend. (It is part of my dream of you to imagine you, even now at this moment in some French drawing room with lilacs and polished floor, wood fires and witty Frenchmen) It amuses me infinitely more than all the works of Leo Myers, Percy Lubbock, Arnold Bennett and Virginia Woolf. So now write and defend your friends.

You gave me no address. And I take it that you wish for no answer! Well, it’s quite true I’ve no news to send you.

Yours affect (certainly—it gave me such pleasure)
Virginia

Wendy Baron

[]

1461: To Vanessa Bell

Friday [25 April 1924]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dearest,

I’ve just had a letter from Clive telling me of Angelica’s illness. He says she’s better, but evidently she must have been bad, though I don’t quite gather what happened—he says septic poisoning. I shall go to Charleston tomorrow, and hear more. Oh dear, oh dear, what a wretched time you must have been having; and I do hope to goodness its all going well now. Still Seend [Clive’s parents’ house] must be the devil.

Its been almost too fine to be true here; and nothing has happened, except that Maynard and Lydia came over in their car, obviously unable to face even one whole day alone. “Politics are so interesting” Lydia remarked, but gossiped to me all the time about the Courtaulds and such like. The problem of one’s friends marriages is indeed insoluble. A rare bird would really suit Maynard better, I can’t help thinking. However she caught a frog and was very charming about the crows which she rhymes to Cows, and her armpits, which are called mouseholes in Russian; and I see I should rather like her for a mistress myself. Its age and familiarity that would entirely crush. This is poor gossip, but I feel so miserable (this is really true: its spoilt the day) about Angelica being ill. You get no holiday; however, you can console yourself with the reflection that I’m madly envious of your children, and spent all night dreaming of Angelica, and often treasure up some bright idea for Quentin. An aunts affections must be wasted. Think of our Aunts: even the Quaker [Caroline Emelia Stephen] was no better than a chest of drawers; tho’ I remember your saying you wished on the whole she hadn’t died.

Maynard and Lydia came over again to take me to Brighton, but they were so late, I went off to Lewes instead, and so did not enliven their second day together. Lydia was rather pathetic about going to Paris alone. Maynard’s an odd fish: weighs 13 stone he says, and is somehow respectable.

We go back to Tavistock [Square] on Monday—Well, I hope I shall hear about you—dont bother to write.

This is only a kiss from all your darling singes who adore you.

Love to Mr Bell [Clive’s father].

(for a joke)
Yr B.

Let me know if I can do anything in London—with Julian, or anyone.

Berg

[]

1462: To Vanessa Bell

Sunday [27 April 1924]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dearest,

I found your letter on getting back from Charleston last night, and I must say that Angelica’s teeth have their good side—at least I get the longest letter I’ve had from you this ten years, stuffed with tit bits such as I most relish. Oh how fascinating facts are—the Maggs, the magazine Club, the lamp with deers feet, which I remember, and also the ink pot made from a hoof. So if you have any spare time, please give a literal account, no make up, of every instant of the day. I feel that we’re mere butterflies in the sun; while the Bells remain for ever. The image is not fitting to the moment. Its raining hard. We’ve been to the post, seen the head of Shanks through the window, had tea, and shall soon draw the blinds. All your family appeared yesterday. Duncan was rambling the passages with a rag; most sympathetically—which indeed is his outstanding quality—he brushed me, and put my shoes to dry, as I had bicycled into the middle of a ploughed field, there fallen off, and had clods hanging to my hair: What a spectacle for Clive! But Clive has entirely come round to the Nation, indeed recants all he said, which I think was Leonard’s craft, who took it for granted that Mary was also hostile, whereas Flinders [Mary Hutchinson] wishes to write, and Clive thinks her articles most amusing—Mary [Molly] MacCarthy’s he finds really too thin:

So there you have it in a nut shell. I suspect I shall be in hot water this summer over Mary (Hutch). My attitude will be dignified and unreproachful. How can I talk at my ease, I shall say, when Lord Berners will be repeating it, via Mary via Clive, to Lady Colefax on Tuesday? But such is life, I shall say: the way of the world, I shall say; and I shall keep my friendship unbroken, but unrenewed. What do you think? Then we had tea; Clive at the head, Duncan at the bottom; Duncan as fresh as a bride—I’ve never seen him look handsomer, or appear more freakish (which reminds me, do the Bells suspect a different strain?) Julian was rather Byronic, Quentin winking and stuffing masses of sugar cake which I brought in a fish basket tied up in note paper. After tea we had a gossip, we old ones, over the fire, chiefly about Gumbo [Marjorie Strachey], and some boasting on my and Clive’s part about our articles, but this bored Duncan; poor devils, how you painters must be bored by all our talk about “articles”. It was a windy day, but lots of vegetables out in your garden,—Duncan says the terrace is very like the terrace at Blenheim, except that some of last years cabbages are growing in the middle. Then we went: then Duncan went to Firle with us, and told me all about the funeral, which he has a wonderful gift for acting the clergyman shaking hands, and old Mr Dince the undertaker, and Pippa in black and the urn which is to be taken to Rothiemurchus in a portmanteau—in short you can imagine all that. As we got into Firle, there came by motor, with a veiled lady flashing her eyes at us, and waving—the impassioned Bobo, who thereupon took against ruddy Robin, and no wonder. I saw their miserable tea on the table as I passed—cut bread and butter, and a plate of cress. So home: where I had your letter, cooked 4 sausages, and to bed.

That is all the news I can think of. Ottoline has written asking us to stay, and I must now fabricate some answer; and Tom [Eliot] has written, asking for news of Angelica; he has a good heart; I wish I were in touch with Elena, whose beauty (at a distance) never fails to fascinate: I saw her, Mrs Rathbone, old Lady de Vesci, and Mamy all in a bunch at a concert the other night! What a haul! Mamy has the head of a fish gnawn cabhorse, grey, white lace collar, with some dismal female, called Davies I think, of Kensington Sqre: but I had no talk with any of them. I was with [Raymond] Mortimer. He said to me with some penetration; “There’s a friend of your past” pointing to Mrs Rathbone. She is still chewing her cud; wasn’t Mr Rathbone in love with some body?—bitter straw; canker to her worm; thats her expression, and Elena sitting beside her, monumental, innocent, beneath mounds of fur. Its odd that you and I have never had what you might call a good piece of fur all our lives—never shall have now. Perhaps Angelica will have a good piece of fur (anyhow write a line to Tavistock to say how she is.)

I went to Hammonds, and got the very thing—a piece of matting large enough to cover the whole studio for £2. So thats a good foundation: Then I shall buy a rug; some artificial flowers, which you’ll sell cheap, hang a canvas or two, lent me, by poor stragglers, arrange my books, and so have a superb meeting ground for the most advanced spirits of Bloomsbury. Its odd to be going back there, not to Richmond. I feel as if I were going on with a story which I began in the year 1904: then a little insanity, and so back.

We have Rose Bartholomew for the week end—I wish my name were Bartholomew. She has been mad, squints, and is singularly pure of soul. Nelly has gone back to clean the flat. R. B. is doing for us. [Edward] Shanks is packing his linen, and leaving for ever. Mr Hogg has run away, owing Hammond £40 for furniture, and £4 to the village shop. Our reputation stands immensely high; and really, Rodmell is so lovely that I shan’t buy another house just yet.

We go tomorrow.

Poor darling Dolphin, what a life she has, but all is made up to her by her singe troop, who are as gay as they are lovely, and as chaste as they are proud.

Leonard sends his love, and says do for Gods sake write him an article, or he’ll have to ask Flinders [Mary Hutchinson].

Yr B.

Berg

[]

1463: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

[27 April 1924]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dearest Ottoline,

I was so sorry not to see you. I want someday to show you my painted room—which perhaps you won’t like, though. We had a very agitating time with Vanessa’s little girl, who was run over—but I expect you’ve heard all this.

We would like very much to come, if June, the middle or end, is not too late for you. May is all in a muddle—but let us come like humdrum old people, without the brilliant youth this time—though that was very amusing too.

We go back to London tomorrow.

Your affate
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

1464: To Vanessa Bell

Tuesday [29 April 1924]

52 Tavistock [Square, W.C.1]

Dearest,

I got your telegram [about Angelica] so I hope things are really rather better. Clive has just been, and I showed it him. I couldn’t get pink wincey, altogether pink; so I hope the striped, which was the pinkest, will do.

I’m afraid its quite damnable for you—it struck me I might be a short diversion—however, Clive says he’s going for the week end anyhow.

But make your apes useful if you can. I had a visit from Lytton this morning, very affable and easy, and greatly excited, I think, about his house [Ham Spray], which is being drained, and has a studio for Carrington, a workshop for Ralph, and several gigantic beech trees. Also he seems to think he’s got an idea for a book—The rumour which has been circulating Tavistock Sqre that Carrington is with child is false—It is merely her mother’s cloak. Karin [Stephen] has fled to Italy to escape the house painters; so Lottie lives with us, poisoned by paint and tinned salmon. Leonard lunched with Sydney Waterlow today, ostensibly to discuss the Far East, but they ended heart to heart, discussing Sydney’s change, and our inalterable vileness, which, Sydney says, is shown up in Molly’s articles—supreme works of art, but entirely cut off from the heart—Lord what rubbish! But he is coming to exhibit his entrails further. I shall ask you to meet him. I sent Angelica some beads to make chains of—and have another small box of sewing things which I’ll send tomorrow.

Leonard sends his love, and wishes to do anything for you, whom he adores.

Yr B.

Berg

[]

1465: To Lytton Strachey

[2 May 1924]

52 Tavistock Sqre W.C.

Could you conceivably have us on the Friday [at Tidmarsh], till Sunday, and could you conceivably motor, or convey Leonard, on Sunday afternoon to Sutton [Surrey], where he has to make a speech?

Otherwise, he’s afraid he can’t get out of the speech,—can’t come.

But this may well be impracticable.

I dream at night of your beech trees [at Ham Spray].

Just off to meet Walter Lamb at the Royal Academy private view.

Yr V.W.

L says that he could come and leave on Saturday night.

Strachey Trust

[]

1466: To T. S. Eliot

May 5th 1924

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Tom,

I am greatly flattered that you should wish to have anything of mine for the Criterion, where, apart from your noble terms [£20], I would rather appear than anywhere else. But the novel is getting too interwoven for a chapter broken off to be intelligible; and I swear that I won’t start other critical adventures until I have collected my essays. The only thing I have is the lecture I spoke of, a development of a Nation article, called Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown. This I could let you have; but the drawbacks are that it is elementary and loquacious, being meant for undergraduates; that it is 5,000 words full; and that we are going to print it next autumn (when, is not entirely fixed). If these can be overcome, I will send it you next month. But in six months I hope to have much more time. It was a very good number, I thought; and I am going to make another attempt, after a complete failure, to see what Murry means. He implored me to write no more books like Jacob’s Room—indeed, said that it couldn’t be done; so I look forward to reading your verdict—alas, that I have laid another straw on your back in addition to no coal, no water, and the delights of the country.

I am subterraneously trying to get you and Vivien to come back to London—but the country at Easter was all they say it should be. [Edward] Shanks has gone,—was seen counting his blankets for the last time; so that the blot is removed. The Hoggs have absconded, and Mr Wilkinson of The Challenge has been appointed to a post which needs his constant presence in London. We remain in solitude with the clergy, which is as it should be.

Please begin to set aside your 19½ hours for Rodmell in September, and dont forget your essays; and write another poem; (6 Waste Land ordered yesterday;) and give my love to Vivien, and come and see us soon.

Yr affly
V.W.

Sussex [copy]

[]

1467: To R. C. Trevelyan

May 6th [1924]

The Hogarth Press, 52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Bob,

This is just a line to say how greatly I admired your poem in the New Statesman last week. It seemed to me very beautiful and moving and perfectly done—

I rather think you are abroad. But anyhow this needs no answer.

Do you admire our new yellow paper?

Yours ever,
Virginia Woolf

I hope you’re writing more poems—short ones, soon to be published, I mean.

Sussex

[]

1468: To T. S. Eliot

May 11th 1924

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Tom,

What an enchanting letter you wrote me! I think one of your good resolutions should be to write to me every Sunday night. But to business. I am now furbishing up my lecture, which I have to deliver next Sunday at Cambridge. I will send it you without fail the following week. But the final condition is that you are to suspend judgment till you read it. It wasn’t written for an article, and I doubt that it does for one.

Your oracles and counsels, Virginia, Leonard and Clive are fallible mortals: we, that is L. and I, thought that you referred to Murry and the sneer at Murry in the Criterion, and never, till you wrote, connected the pseudo-Proust with Schiff. Most people will be in our condition, and this ought to exonerate us, and appease Mr Schiff, and so, incidentally, save your bones. I still think it a very good number, though I have not read Murry, lacking that just mind and steadfast purpose which are necessary, because everyone—that is Lytton, Osbert Sitwell, Mary Hutchinson is claiming to be an Ape of God and identifying the rest of the pack.

I send this to Clarence Gate: and hope if you’re there that you’ll come round and dine with us, only let us know first, for our maid is frightened of gentlemen, and prefers not to open the door.

Yours ever
V.W.

Mrs T. S. Eliot

[]

1469: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

[20 May 1924]

52 Tavistock Square, London, W.C.1

Dearest Ottoline

Forgive me for being so slow. We have been away, and I left your letter here. We will come on June 28th with great pleasure, if we have to leave on Sunday night.

I have just met one million undergraduates, and feel it a slight relief not to meet another million at Garsington—though the Oxford one is very different from the Cambridge.

Ever Your
V.W.

Texas

[]

1470: To T. S. Eliot

May 21st 1924

The Hogarth Press, 52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Tom,

Here is the article [Character in Fiction], in rather a dilapidated state. Leonard says “with regard to the Hogarth Press business, would you be good enough to ask the printer to give us an estimate for printing off one thousand copies in sheets including a title page, copy of which we would supply, so that the whole could be bound up in a pamphlet. If the printer could also give us an estimate for printing a plain coloured stiff paper cover and binding up 500 copies, it would also simplify matters, but we would like the two estimates to be kept separate. Perhaps it would be best for him to send the estimates direct to the Hogarth Press. Would he also in giving the estimate inform us of the number of pages it will run to.”

I find that a copy of Waste Land was sent to the Nouvelle Revue, when the book came out [in September 1923], We have sent another, but it might be as well to find out if it has arrived safely, considering our experience with French posts. Perhaps, if you are in communication, you would do this.

Yours ever
Virginia Woolf

Sussex [copy]

[]

1471: To V. Sackville-West

21st May [1924]

52 Tavistock Square, London, W.C.1

My dear Vita,

My letter has just been returned—owing to idiocy I put Sussex instead of Kent. I do hope that I haven’t again bothered you by this idiotic delay.

We are going away again this week end, and I was proposing that perhaps you might ask us later, in July, when we shall be freer. We should like to come, if only for a night.

But I was hoping to see you here, partly for your own sake, partly for the sake of the Hogarth Press, which is very anxious to know if there is any serious chance that you will let it have a book. If so, what and when? Could it be this autumn?

Forgive me for bothering you. We are trying to start young Mr Rylands on his career as a publisher with some good books, and so I am taking the liberty of asking you.

He is very keen, and would do his best, and so would you. But come and see my bare studio in the basement, very nice to sit in this hot weather, with one chair, one table, one bed, one bookcase.

Ever Your
Virginia Woolf

Berg

[]

1472: To T. S. Eliot

Friday [23 May 1924]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Tom,

I am very glad that my paper does not seem to you superficial and flippant, as it did to me on re-reading. I suppose they will send me galley proofs, with a view to corrections. But is there any danger that the Criterion is dying? I hope not.

I’m sending on your doctor’s address to Roger, who seems to have come to grief again. If we try again to get my temperature to normal, I will certainly go to him, but I feel so well, it hardly seems worth while. Many thanks.

Come again, and don’t attract so many of your admirers next time, which we leave it to you to suggest.

Just off to Rodmell, so forgive the scrawl.

Yours ever,
Virginia Woolf

Mrs T. S. Eliot

[]

1473: To Theodora Bosanquet

27 May 1924

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Miss Bosanquet,

I am very much interested to hear that you have done the Henry James article, and look forward greatly to reading it.

As to America we have already had overtures from an American firm [Doubleday, Doran], with regard to the series of pamphlets. We should like to have an opportunity of dealing with the American rights of such pamphlets as we publish in this series. Would you have any objection to our doing so in your case, and we suggest that if we dispose of them we should take an agents fee of 15% of any sum realised, and that you should give us three months in which to try and sell the rights.

If you agree to this, could you send us the manuscript in duplicate. There is no great hurry, as we could not bring it out before the autumn, but if we are to try and dispose of it in America, it would be advisable to give us plenty of time to do so.

I have been away, or I would have written before.

Yours sincerely,
Virginia Woolf

Houghton Library, Harvard University

[]

1474: To Ethel Sands

May 28th 1924

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

My dear Ethel,

It was a great pleasure to get a letter from you and it came one night when Mary Hutchinson and Osbert Sitwell were dining here, and looked very distinguished with its French stamp, and filled me with envy. To be able to understand cookery, to be so much mistress of the graces—fills me with envy. But in a subtle and inexplicable way which I will leave to describe until October next. Really, this room is getting very livable in; and as for the beauty of London at all hours, and its oddity and character and quality and romance, never mention Richmond to me again, to compare with it. Richmond is all very well for Americans—which reminds me that Logan came to tea, very magisterial and judicial; Bob [Trevelyan] haunts our basement with yards and yards of poetry; and we have roused about us all the persistent downtrodden grub that hack in London.

There’s a poor woman who has written a satire upon Christ, with special reference to his relations with John. This she brings in her woollen gloves on a hot afternoon, and foams, literally, disgustingly, foams at the mouth, in her rage and ardour. “Aren’t people interested in Christ? There must be thousands who would buy my work—if only it were printed”. But how are we to print her work; and dear old Bob’s just the same; and so am I; and so is Roger, and so is Logan: all convinced that we must be read and seen and heard. You alone dwell behind a veil of opaque modesty. I’ve been lecturing at Cambridge on your beloved Arnold Bennett, and not a single young man or woman in the place has a good word to say for him! This has left me so scatterbrained and loose lipped—you can’t think how sick one gets of one’s own phrases, and how passionately I long to be transformed into someone marmorial and mute, like Elsie Myers, that I’m ashamed to chatter out letters to you. Clive is in Paris; but has made the acquaintance of a Countess; (this I know, because we have to send her his poems): Mary Hutchinson is now crossing the channel to him. London remains full, however; but rather frightening—so decorative, so vociferative, so smart too. That wouldn’t frighten you as it does me. I slink off into my own haunts, and feel refreshed by Bloomsbury and paralysed by Bond Street. We have very small, very cheap parties. Nothing much to eat, nothing clever said, for I think it time to have done with the pomps and ceremonies, and reduce everything to perfect innocence and ease, what do you think? Won’t you come and lend your distinction to our barbarity?

I was forgetting the great news; Murry’s marriage to Violet le Maistre, an unknown disciple of his; I met him twice, and we skirmished, and were bored and disillusioned, and found each other terribly gone to seed. But I can’t help feeling that you have withdrawn into rarer air where all this chatter is as the chafing of gnats. Please write and describe what you are doing and forgive my scribble.

Yours affect
Virginia Woolf

Wendy Baron

[]

1475: To Margaret Llewelyn Davies

Thursday [29 May 1924]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Margaret,

Is there any chance that you would dine with us next Tuesday, 3rd, at 7.30—needless to say without changing?

I think perhaps Charlie Sanger is coming, and it would be very nice to see you again, now we are really settled in life.

Leonard says “We are going away on Thursday and unless you will come on Tuesday, he won’t be able to see you for at least another fortnight, though in any case he’ll come up and see you when we come back, after Whitsun.”

Don’t make this an excuse though for not dining here: as Leonard is a shifty character, entirely given up to Colonial Office, India Office, Labour party etc etc etc.

Yrs V.W.

Sussex

[]

1476: To Gerald Brenan

Thursday [29 May 1924]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Gerald,

You have vanished into a street without a number. Moreover I cant remember whether you’re with Sedge or Vetch. So this must go via Carrington—only to ask you to step in next Tuesday night anytime after 8, when you’ll find the old Woolves, and old Mr [C. P.] Sanger, and perhaps some young lady.

Do if you can.

Your
Virginia Woolf

George Lazarus

[]

1477: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

[30 May 1924]

Postcard

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

I think the 28th June is the best week end for us, and we’ll do our best to stay 2 nights; its not for want of wishing, only the difficulties of life.

V.W.

Texas

[]

1478: To V. Sackville-West

June 7th [1924]

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes, [Sussex]

My dear Vita,

It is very generous of you to think of giving us any of your work, and we are all very much delighted at the prospect. Is there any chance we could bring it out this autumn? But do whatever suits you, of course.

Here we are for Whitsun—Your friend Mr Shanks has left the village, and we are entirely given up to rusticity, which I prefer.

We want to come and stay very much—there was a rush of week ends on top of each other: now only Garsington, I think, in prospect. Ottoline turned up the other night, dropping powder, and protesting against women who make up.

Yr VW.

Berg

[]

1479: To Jacques Raverat

June 8th 1924

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes, [Sussex]

My dear Jacques,

I have left your last long and delicious letter—between you, you write damned good letters, whichever has the credit, the good Darwin or the bad Frog—in my box at home and so I can’t answer your questions. What were they? Perhaps only a general desire to know if I’d seen Eily lately, or [Ka] Cox, or any of our old flames. I was never in love with Eily. For a time Bernard took my fancy, until I stayed with them, and he talked too much golf—but he writes very well; like Jorrocks, only Englishmen can write like that; so dont you go and try. Will A. F. [Arnold-Forster] had another show, and I never went. Isn’t it awful? Can one ignore the whole of one side of ones friends’ lives, and yet keep on terms of any interest with them? I rather fancy that we’re drifting apart—after all, its incredibly difficult to run down to the Lands End, and when Cox is in London, what with she impressing me with her politics, and I her with my literature, we don’t get much forrader. Two weeks ago I was in Cambridge, lecturing the Heretics upon Modern Fiction. Do you feel kindly towards Cambridge? It was, as Lytton would say, rather ‘hectic’; young men going in for their triposes; flowering trees on the backs; canoes, fellows’ gardens; wading in a slightly unreal beauty; dinners, teas, suppers; a sense, on my part, of extreme age, and tenderness and regret; and so on and so on. We had a good hard headed argument, and I respect the atmosphere, and I’m glad to be out of it. Maynard is very heavy and rather portentous; Maynard is passionately and pathetically in love, because he sees very well that he’s dished if he marries her, and she has him by the snout. You can’t argue solidly when Lydia’s there, and as we set now to the decline, and prefer reason to any amount of high spirits, Lydia’s pranks put us all on edge; and Bloomsbury steals off to its dens, leaving Maynard with Lydia on his knee, a sublime but heartrending spectacle.

Please do not repeat this gossip. Lydia came over here the other day and said “Please Leonard tell me about Mr Ramsay Macdonald. I am seerious—very seerious.” However then she caught a frog and put it in an apple tree; and thats whats so enchanting about her; but can one go through life catching frogs? You should hear Vanessa and Duncan on the subject.

I have had two bloody painful encounters with Middleton Murry; we stuck together at parties like two copulating dogs; but after the first ecstasy, it was boring, disillusioning, flat. The long and short of him is that he’s a coward. First he fawns up to me, then when I attack him he plants his dart and runs away. He says we (Bloomsbury) deny our instincts: but why, after all, does writing badly prove that one is morally good? Answer me that, my dear Jacques: for I have no room to develop my own arguments. Now he’s married a contributor to the Adelphi, and is breeding.

Ottoline—was Ottoline ever a figure of any sort to you? She flaunts about London, not without a certain grandeur, as of a ship with its sails rat-eaten, and its masts mouldy, and green sea serpents on the decks. But no image will convey her mixture of humbleness and splendour and hypocrisy. She was shaking powder onto the floor and saying, “Virginia, why do women make up?”

We go back to London tomorrow. Whom do you wish me to see in particular? Do you remember Justin Brooke? A sister of his lived in our house: Morgan Forster’s novel [A Passage to India] is just out. Do you read him? And what do you think about?

Ever Yrs
V.W.

Why not some day send me the family portraits? children, and all.

Sussex

[]

1480: To V. Sackville-West

[June 1924]

52 Tavistock Sqre, W.C.1

My dear Vita,

A friend, Miss Ll. Davies, has asked me to send you on these papers, about a [Russian] society which she hopes may have your sympathy. It has mine and Leonards, but don’t blame me if it bores you to death.

Ever Yours
Virginia Woolf.

We think you’re first rate on Mr Symons.

Berg

[]

1481: To V. Sackville-West

Sunday [29? June 1924]

52 Tavistock Square, London, W.C.1

My dear Vita,

I think what the Russian society wants is that you should become a member, which either costs you 5/- or nothing or £1-1.—I can’t remember. They are in a struggling state, starting; and names are very important to them.

Weekends have become hopeless for Leonard—all his work is done in them, but if you would have me alone, might I come for a night in the week, rather than week end, before you go abroad? 2nd, 3rd, 4th—I would keep which ever suited you.

We go to Rodmell at the end of July. It is very good news that your story may be ready then or is it a poem?

Oh how I envy you, finishing books straight off.

Yours ever
Virginia Woolf

Berg

[]

1482: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

[early July 1924]

52 Tavistock Sqre, W.C.

Dearest Ottoline;

This is a miserable belated letter to thank you for our 21 hours of enjoyment. However, it was all crammed with a variety of pleasures.

Directly we got back we had to begin drudgery here, as Mrs Joad is ill, and Dadie has arrived [on 2 July], very charming, but with no knowledge, naturally, of how to write a bill.

I tried to remember the true nature of Mary Hutchinson last night, as defined by you and Tom [Eliot], but was bamboozled as usual. I expect. I think it is her lovely grey clothes with pearl buttons, and three red carnations at the breast.

Shall I buy you a house straight off? Leonard sends his love.

Your affate
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

1483: To Violet Dickinson

[July? 1924]

52 Tavistock Sqre, W.C.1

My Violet.

You are a wretched devil to go off without coming to see us. What I want to know now is what about your Great Aunt? Is she coming to birth? When may I read her? This is a matter of very great importance, so please answer. The Press feels that it owes you an undying debt (if thats what its called) for buying it so loyally all these years—In future, you won’t be worried so much. But our last batch is doing rather well—particularly the Rector’s daughter, whose author, being the plainest woman in Europe, is appearing in Vogue.

Did you let Manchester Street [Violet’s house] to the woman?

Shall you ever come and see us again?

Your
V.W.

Berg

[]

1484: To V. Sackville-West

July 6th [1924]

52 Tavistock Square, London, W.C.1

My dear Vita,

I have paralysed my own pen by telling you that you dont write intimate letters—which however you are going to reform in the Dolomites.

But I have only to say that I was enchanted and made envious by my visit—and what can hostess do more?

Knole almost crushed me—for I detest being unable to express anything of what I feel, and certainly couldn’t. Then there was the [Long] Barn, which has led us to think of rebuilding our own cottage.

So you see, I was thoroughly happy and very miserable. In fact, I’m only now beginning to recover my normal spirits. Leonard says that if there is any decent book in he will send it tomorrow. Thank you for letting me come.

Yours Ever
Virginia Woolf

Berg

[]

1485: To Violet Dickinson

17th July, 1924

Typewritten

The Hogarth Press, 52 Tavistock Square, London, W.C.1

My Violet,
(excuse typewriter).

The Press is charmed by your great aunt [Emily Eden]; but thinks her rather too slight and scattered for publishing as a book. We feel that there ought to be a good deal more of you or a longer and more connected series of her letters. It is very tantalising, as the little that there is of each of you is so fascinating.

What we want, not as publishers, but as editor of the Nation to suggest is that you should allow Leonard to make up an article out of the Indian letters for the Nation. I enclose a sample of the sort of thing that he would like to use, if you approved. He wants me to say that he could not give a definite date of publication, as he is very crowded at the moment. But he would very much like to use the enclosed, if you would read it, make any alterations, and send it back. They pay, he says, about five guineas.

We are sending back the MS.

I am being brutally frank as you asked: I think it is a most delightful thing myself; it is only the slightness that makes the difficulty.

Ever Yr Sp⁠[arroy]

Berg

[]

1486: To Marjorie Joad

[20? July 1924]

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Marjorie,

You insist upon my using a typewriter, and see with what result—really, my own hand would be clearer in the end—I’ve been meaning every day to write to you, but we live in a gale of wind and every feather on my head is upright. That is the only description I can give of our life at the moment: Higgs, B. Higgs, is driving us frantic with her cheery conversation; all the psycho-analyst books have been dumped in a fortress the size of Windsor castle in ruins upon the floor; Higgs’ head appears undaunted and garrulous above the battlements; Leonard’s in his shirt sleeves; Dadie has run out to re-fresh his head by a walk round the square; Grizzle [dog] is making darts for peoples legs; the hamper has arrived from Rodmell and I have just counted out a ream of paper and found large hoof marks half way through. Then you think I can write a novel!

We hope to come up and see you one day this week; and we hope to find you up; and ready to go on your holiday, and we hope you’ll never get pneumonia again; but lead the life of a grub burrowing placidly through mounds of manuscript without another thought in your head than the profit and glory of the Hogarth Press. What is love compared with that, what youth, friendship, society, drink, eating, and the delights of fine weather? You are expected to answer in the negative. Do you know what has set me off writing in this incoherent way? Mrs Berta Ruck. I fell into her arms—which are wide and brawny—at Maynard’s party the other night; and a whole room full stood agaze to see the lady novelists embrace. She said Oh if I were Virginia Woolf! I said Oh Berta, if I were you! And for Gods sake, I said, tell me how you do it, and what you get for it, whereupon Berta, rolling her fine eyes about, replied, “Would you believe me Mrs Woolf I abominate my own books more than I can say, and they only bring me in £400 a piece, and I have to write two every year so long as I and my husband and our boys do live, and its almost impossible to find another plot. I took Romeo and Juliet last time; and its going to be Don Quixote next; for there are only ten plots in the world; and Ethel Dell is my only rival; but since the war we dont make what we used to make; and do believe me, Mrs Woolf, I’m a cultivated woman. I read the classics, I know French; and if only I could write a paragraph—one paragraph—like Mr Lytton Strachey, I’d retire tomorrow; but what can you do, Mrs Woolf, when you’ve two darling boys and I want them to have the best of everything—Eton, sports; you should see them Mrs Woolf; for you have written in Jacobs room such a description of the beauty of young manhood” … (here we embraced once more) and with tears in my eyes I swore to come down to a rosy bower on the river, where they live ‘like anybody else’ she said; but I doubt it.

It was great fun at the party, enchanting, lyrical, Shakespeare with not a coarse word; and chaste conversation everywhere; dancing; the Davidsons, three of them, hung with chandeliers and stately as caryatids—(poor Berta was overcome): in a ballet designed by Duncan. Lydia danced; we had a little fine champagne. However, I dont want any more parties for an age, but to live like a caterpillar on a leaf. Mayor is still selling—Boots have just taken twenty; everything is selling a little; and we have a Russian manuscript from Jane Harrison and Hope Mirrlees; another play from Mr Barber; a novel unsolicited; a novel from a lower class sturdy looking man in Putney who came in yesterday, and seemed, on first sight, to have every merit except literary merit—but how can you tell? He may be Keats: one must be sanguine. My partners are inclined to take acid views of these poor old duffers; so that I expand, as you can well imagine, into effusions of optimism.

I met that surly devil Bunny Garnett; and really, his fame has congested him. He is rigid with self importance and arrogantly told me that Mrs Mitchison would go to another and a better publisher, as we didnt take her plays and had missed for the second time the chance of a life. Whereupon I said, Ah but we dont publish Weekend books, do we?; which struck him in the ribs, and he rolled over like a sulky bear. This I never did say except late that morning when in a desperate mood I was thinking over all the things I might have said.

Here’s Leonard. Times book club wants the last twelve copies of Mayor this afternoon. That leaves us without a copy in the house. Others ordered, but dont come till this afternoon. Crisis! Catastrophe!

He sends his love. We will try and come up, but now I must dash into the ruins of Windsor and Higgs and the triumph of Fanny Mayor. She’ll be the death of me.

Your affectionate,
Virginia Woolf

T. H. Marshall

[]

1487: To Barbara Bagenal

25th July 1924

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, London. W.C.

My dear Barbara,

I am desolated to hear of your disease, and write, if only by typewriter, to express my sympathy, and add my curse. For why should the limbs of a nit be tortured? Is it rheumatism? Is it mere distaste (I can’t spell, or keep to grammar, but my hand is so tired with handwriting that I must use this) for life? I have been to a funeral service myself, and every one seems in a falling way, mildewed, cankered, and slightly corrupt.

This always cheers one in bed—to think on the vices and diseases of others. Our Mrs Joad, God damn her, has been away with pneumonia these four weeks, and will take another six before she is back: with the result that we all run about the basement, distracted, henlike, with wisps of string, labels, brown paper, now answering the door—Please come in. Yes I’m the advertising manager. Yes we give you 33½% on numbers over twelve—No; we dont keep Songs of Sunrise (they come to us all day long, the wretched bagmen [booksellers], to ask for books we dont sell) and so on and so on. The Press has suddenly become monstrous, kicking and sprawling. We have a drawer full of manuscripts which the authors deposit and the seediest old bankrupts arrive who won’t go away till Leonard, whose heart is of gold, gives them five pounds, which they lavish on drink, but, as he says, we shall all come to it one of these days. I dwell on these glories to make you regret your marriage.

The news of Bloomsbury reaches you quicker than it does me, I’m sure. You heard rumours no doubt of Maynards great party; and Duncans ballet, and how not a coarse word was said, or indeed thought, by some people. It is coarseness that is the downfall of Bloomsbury. Dora Sanger left our last affair in dudgeon; and was heard to say that she hadn’t felt so ravaged since Charlie—…. but Charlie has spread the rumour, which has reached Mailing long since, that Dora’s dudgeon was the result of drink. That explains much in Dora’s conduct. I found myself looking at Saxon, at this same party, and saying That very distinguished man was once my friend. He has taken on a diplomatic refined twisted up and fastidious air which delights my heart; estranged though we be. It’s all the roof in the best bedroom at Hogarth, which falls and falls and covers all with gravel, so they say. Then the beetles have been very tactless; and Saxon says (but what a faery way he has with him—such things never happened to me) Saxon says a lark has nested in the kitchen boiler; naturally this upsets the cook. The lark soars to the ceiling and rains out its song as she comes down in the morning.

I see a great many people off and on; but only hear this sort of gossip—Lytton is moving [to Ham Spray], Ralph flirts, Carrington is happy today, very unhappy tomorrow; Gerald teaches Lady Colefax’s son Spanish; Leonard has been put on a Government commission; Nessa never enjoyed any party so much as Kate Stephens funeral; we are all off to Sussex on Wednesday, which I have never wanted so much, since London makes one dry, brittle, febrile, and the country makes one sodden, rheumatic, and affectionate.

Please write again, and I will stick spurs to my typewriter; and get well, and come in your car to Rodmell with a melon.

Yr V.W.

Berg

[]

1488: To Roger Fry

July 28th [1924]

52 Tavistock Square, [W.C.1]

My dear Roger,

But I did write to you sheets and sheets, and posted them 10 days ago—and you’ve never got it, and so accuse your old and devoted friend—However, this won’t reach you either, so whats the use of writing? I addressed Savillac, Lot:, or Serillac, Lot: I now find you are Souillac: but the fault was yours—so I’m cleared anyhow.

But there—

Desmond 
Lytton
Leonard
Clive
} pro Shaw 
Roger
Francis Birrell 
R. Mortimer
} Contra

Hedge
|
Virginia
who hasn’t read or seen it [Saint Joan]

But come over to Rodmell.

Yrs
V.W.

Sussex

[]

Letters 1489-1522 (August–December 1924)

1489: To Violet Dickinson

1st August 1924

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

My Violet,

I imagine that A. B. W. is Mr Walkley, the Times Dramatic Critic—in fact I’m certain. But the poor old man seems to have got it all wrong—Mr [Arnold] Bennett has never agreed with me about anything.

Here we are, thank goodness, picking raspberries and clipping the yew. I wish you’d look in some time, and give us a few wrinkles. Leonard has just taken the tremendous step of dismissing one gardener and taking on another, but they’re all robbers and all heavenly to talk to, and we never get our gooseberries, and all the lettuces are let run to seed—Still, its very nice here, all the same. I had the shock of my life last week running in to George and Gerald at Katherine Stephen’s funeral. George cant speak, and totters like an aspen: What has happened? Has he no teeth? And he seems already far gone in senile decay of every sort. Gerald is comparatively spry; but it was a grubby and dingy gathering of old fogies, and when you die, please be burnt to cinders and put on the path without any hanky panky ceremonies. We had crucifixes and choir boys and the most woolly and thin blooded hymns. Nessa disgraced herself by treating it all as an afternoon party.

Come when you’re back and have tea in the basement.

Your
V.W.

After 12 years of marriage, why should I bloom a maiden once more?

Berg

[]

1490: To Dorothy Bussy

[13 August 1924]

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes, [Sussex]

My dear Dorothy,

I’m afraid it is not much use our thinking of the translation, though I am sure it is first rate, and I admire the dialogue greatly. At present we have more work on hand than our present staff can manage, and we feel we had better not launch out into translations—The pamphlet public also imagines, wrongly I daresay, that it can read French literature, in the original. We are trying it with a translation of an aesthetic essay—but, even so, expect to lose.

Well: it is sad how seldom I see you. But you keep your glamour, which is the main thing, and next June we will have a really good tea party, ices, I think, in a shop.

Yours affly
V.W.

Texas

[]

1491: To V. Sackville-West

19th August [1924]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

My dear Vita,

Have you come back, and have you finished your book [Seducers in Ecuador]—when will you let us have it? Here I am, being a nuisance, with all these questions.

I enjoyed your intimate letter from the Dolomites. It gave me a great deal of pain—which is I’ve no doubt the first stage of intimacy—no friends, no heart, only an indifferent head. Never mind: I enjoyed your abuse very much.

How could I think mountains and climbing romantic? Wasn’t I brought up with alpenstocks in my nursery, and a raised map of the Alps, showing every peak my father had climbed? Of course, London and the marshes are the places I like best.

But I will not go on else I should write you a really intimate letter, and then you would dislike me, more, even more, than you do.

But please let me know about the book.

Yr V.W.

Berg

[]

1492: To Pernel Strachey

24th Aug. [1924]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, [Sussex]

My dear Pernel,

I suppose there is no chance of your coming here this summer? It would be very nice to see you again—I can’t bear only meeting on the pavement in horrible dreary dusty surroundings. How I hate funeral services! and can’t feel anything at them—either for Katherine or myself, or any one else. I wish I had seen her again. Never shall I forget her at Newnham, hundreds of years ago, and sitting in that queer grim room with her talking—what a satisfactory and altogether charming human being she was!

Here I am writing in my garden room, which you have never seen, spreading first my left hand and then my right over an oil stove, to dry the excessive damp. In an hours time, perhaps, I shall see Clive appearing over the hill. On the other hand, if it goes on raining, Leonard and I will lunch together off roast (I think) mutton; I shall tell him how I woke up in the night and thought of writing a letter to you; and also of all kinds of catastrophes which may befall us in the coming year. We have now undertaken so many responsibilities—Dadie Rylands, a corncoloured youth, is one of them; and another is Mrs Joad. Both sit in the basement at Tavistock addressing envelopes, and cheered by occasional visits from me. We discuss literature. Mudies send for 20 Rector’s daughter, by Miss Mayor, who may well be a friend of yours. She has the profile of a gorilla and once acted Ophelia—does that convey anything to you? Where ordinary women have hair, she has a brown sea weed—Lytton once had tea with her, and she hated us all, until I wrote to her in praise of her novel, when she whipped round the other way, and now steps the world (it is said) like a stallion in the sun.

I am writing great rubbish—do not blame me; for unless I do write something, Pernel will let the end of her line drop, and me go, for ever. Isn’t that true? Have you a word to urge in defence of your conduct? True, you’re a great swell; at the top of your tree; magnificent, adored; and all the rest of it; but look down, my dear Pernel, into the grass, among the funguses, and see the lesser creatures who there abound. Myself among them.

I saw Hope [Mirrlees] the other day; but I shan’t tell you what I think of her novel [The Counterplot] unless you write to me. I shan’t tell you what I’m reading, writing, thinking, supposing, and inventing about my friends unless you write to me. Or it would be better still to come; but how can I suggest that? Years ago Pernel said she didn’t visit where there weren’t baths kept.

Leonard sends his love.

Yrs aff. V.W.

Strachey Trust

[]

1493: To V. Sackville-West

Aug. 26th [1924]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, [Sussex]

My dear Vita

The position about your story is this: if you could let us have it by Sept. 14th, we should make an effort to bring it out this autumn; if later, it is highly improbable that we could bring it out before early next year. For ourselves, we should prefer to have it this autumn, so if you can do it, without overwork, cursing us, or spoiling the book, let us say Sept. 14th. But of course this is entirely for you to settle. Only might we know which?

Perhaps you will be this way again and will look in, which would be very nice indeed, if you dont mind—but I’ll know you’ll say you dont mind—discomfort, and all the rest of it—etc. We would offer you what Leonard says I must confess to be the most uncomfortable bed in the smallest room in Sussex. There was a young man [Rylands?] here the other Sunday who was saying he wished nothing more than to meet you—And you might have come in.

But really and truly you did say—I cant remember exactly what, but to the effect that I made copy out of all my friends, and cared with the head, not with the heart. As I say, I forget; and so we’ll consider it cancelled.

I haven’t time to inflict on you 20 reams to explain why I am so outraged at being taken for a writer. It is getting darker and darker and we are nursing a wood fire.

Yr Aff
V.W.

Berg

[]

1494: To V. Sackville-West

Sunday [31 August 1924]

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

My dear Vita,

It is very good news about your book. We are now making out a list of our autumn books, and could you tell us what yours will be called; about how long it will be*; and say something to give a notion what it is about, which we could quote.

I’m sorry to be such a bore.

The other thing is, could you come on Saturday 13th, not Sunday 14th, as Leonard has to disappear [to Yorkshire] on Monday at dawn, and therefore wouldn’t see you at all.

I ought to warn you of the inconveniences and discomforts of this house, especially when it rains, but they are too many to begin on. Anyhow, we shall enjoy seeing you.

Yours ever
Virginia Woolf

* whether, in particular, it should be called a story or a novel.

Berg

[]

1495: To T. S. Eliot

3rd Sept. 1924

Typewritten

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes,

My dear Tom,

It is a dreadful pity the Prince of Bores can’t come to keep his reputation on the boil. Who knows? This time next year I may have found someone more princely and more boring, and where will you be then? However … Come by dromedary (this leaves me quite mystified) rather than not at all; and make Vivien come.

The serious answers to questions must now begin. We want your defective compositions as soon as we can have them. We should have them suitably printed, and produce after Christmas. Dont think that this allows you plenty of time; it does not. Send as soon as you have done your preface. I dont like paying fellow authors compliments, because I like there to be one cake of praise which is reserved entirely for me, but visiting Charleston the other day (my sister’s) I there picked up The Sacred Wood and came home and burnt every one of my own leading articles in the Supplement. Why are you the only man who ever says anything interesting about literature? There are we all pouring out gallons of ink weekly, and never a drop of it stays. However, I admire your work too much. It can’t be as good as all that. But your brain seems to work.

Yes I am in the depth of modesty; cant bear my own writing; and wish I had been born with a gift for sewing instead.

But send us your manuscripts. The Criterion is praised on all sides. Clive, Mary etc etc.

Yrs V.W.

Mrs T. S. Eliot

[]

1496: To Jacques Raverat

Sept 4th 1924

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes, [Sussex]

My dear Jacques,

Well, as you say I don’t answer your questions, so I will sit down with your letter before me and take them, one, two, three.

1) Why will Maynard be dished if he marries her [Lydia Lopokova]?

Because she has the nicest nature in the world and a very limited headpiece. She came to tea on Sunday with your brother-in-law Geoffrey, and really I had the hardest time in the world. Her contribution is one shriek, two dances; then silence, like a submissive child, with her hands crossed. At 30 this is pathetic. Soon she will be plaintive. And they say you can only talk to Maynard now in words of one syllable. This he will tire of. She will cry, and the great ladies wont ask her to their parties: you old married people can fill it in at your leisure. (I get this largely from other sources).

2) Why should he marry her? She wants to send her sons to Eton.

3) I agree that Maynard’s fallability endears him to me.

4) What is the real relation between Lytton, Carrington and Mr P⁠[artridge]?

Now that’s asking, as they say (unless I have got it wrong) God knows. I imagine a bed has two pillows though, and—but here again I’m quite ignorant, for at our time of life we ignore each other’s private relations, and find them boring—Partridge is a bit of a bore; but then what muscles! How he cuts wood, breeds hens, and answers the bell! Carrington is worth twice his salt—but he’s a seemly pink firm-fleshed young man, without a doubt. And Lytton of course does not supply everything. I leave this too, to be spelt out.

5) What am I writing? I dont think I shall tell you, because, as you know perfectly well, you don’t care a straw what I write; and, like you and Gwen for the matter of that, I’m terrifically egotistic about my writing, think practically of nothing else, and so, partly from conceit, partly shyness, sensitiveness, what you choose, never mention it, unless someone draws it out with red hot pincers, or like Forster, really takes an interest in my adventures.

(however, I’ve almost finished 2 books)

6) What do I read? On my table are: Yeats poems. Le Bal du Comte d’Orgel: (which I think very interesting); Susanne et le Pacifique: (also interesting); the Adelphi; Chaucer; Lord Willoughby de Broke’s autobiography (sporting); a good many Elizabethan plays which I’m going to write about and—mere daily trash: Joan of Arc [Saint Joan]: I can’t see why people are moved by this: interested, instructed—yes; but I cant squeeze a tear. I like Shaw as a figure: he seems to me lean, lively, destructive and combative. But Lord! leave me on a desert island with his plays, and I’d rather scale monkey puzzles. But this I’ve always suffered from. I dont quite trust myself.

7) What is my husband like?

A Jew: very long nosed and thin; immensely energetic; But why I don’t talk about him is that really you are Anti-Semitic, or used to be, when I was in the sensitive stage of engagement; so that it was then impressed upon me not to mention him. I think this was so. And then Gwen, to take up old scandals, said it was high time at my age, I married, and as I was only 3 years older than she, I was hurt, profoundly, and thought you both condescending, flippant, and oh dear, how the Neo-paganism at that stage of my life annoyed me—Every street in Bloomsbury seems now branded with my miseries, but I was more than a little mad. I will send you a picture of me done for a vulgar paper called Vogue when I get back.

You see, I’m very famous in some circles, rather famous, I mean: Americans want to buy my manuscripts. I should like you to have a high opinion of me in this way, and yet—how interesting one’s own psychology is—won’t talk to you about my writing.

I dont think this is a very nice letter, my dear Jacques, but then you brought it on yourself by asking all those questions; and my style is not good at questions:

By the way, I like your daughter’s poems. I don’t know how much it is their being French. Everything French has a perfection in my eyes. Anyhow I think them very lovely, very enchanting. May I keep them?

And I don’t like my own letters. I don’t like the falsity of the relationship—one has to spray an atmosphere round one; yet I do like yours and seem to be able to pierce through your spray, so may you through mine.

Please write soon again. But could you tell me about your painting now? And isn’t it the nut, core, kernel (as my Quaker aunt used to call it) of your soul! Gwen don’t count compared with your smudges—(excuse what is only literary) does she?

What do you think of Duncan and Vanessa as painters? I should like to know.

Yrs V.W.

Sussex

[]

1497: To V. Sackville-West

Monday [15 September 1924]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, [Sussex]

My dear Vita,

I like the story [Seducers in Ecuador] very very much—in fact, I began reading it after you left, was interrupted by Clive, went out for a walk, thinking of it all the time, and came back and finished it, being full of a particular kind of interest which I daresay has something to do with its being the sort of thing I should like to write myself. I don’t know whether this fact should make you discount my praises, but I’m certain that you have done something much more interesting (to me at least) than you’ve yet done. It is not, of course, altogether thrust through; I think it could be tightened up, and aimed straighter, but there is nothing to spoil it in this. I like its texture—the sense of all the fine things you have dropped in to it, so that it is full of beauty in itself when nothing is happening—nevertheless such interesting things do happen, so suddenly—barely too; and I like its obscurity so that we can play about with it—interpret it different ways, and the beauty and fantasticality of the details—the butterflies and the negress, for instance. This is all quite sincere, though not well expressed.

I am very glad we are going to publish it, and extremely proud and indeed touched, with my childlike dazzled affection for you, that you should dedicate it to me. We sent it to the printers this morning.

Clive came over, and had to be broken the news to; we ate your figs, sat on the mill stones and said—oh things you wouldn’t believe, I daresay.

Leonard is sending Mr. Nicolson a copy of my pamphlet [Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown], in order that the cover may seduce him in to letting us have his Byron; but Byron can be longer or shorter than Mrs Brown—whatever he chooses; so that he lets us have it.

I felt rather spirited up by your story, and wrote a lot—300 words—perhaps, this morning, and have a comfortable feeling that I am going to enjoy reading you again—so I can’t help thinking it must be a good story, for God knows there are very few people I ever feel that about, even the ones I admire. By the way, you must let me have a list of people to send circulars to—as many as you can. And to do this you must come and see me in London for you should have heard Leonard and me sitting over our wood fire last night and saying what we don’t generally say when our guests leave us, about the extreme niceness etc etc and (I’m now shy—and so will cease.)

Yrs Ever V.W.

Berg

[]

1498: To Roger Fry

Sept 22nd [1924]

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes, [Sussex]

My dear Roger,

I have just finished your pamphlet, so I must write off at once and say how it fills me with admiration and stirs up in me, as you alone do, all sorts of bats and tadpoles—ideas, I mean, which have clung to my roof and lodged in my mind, and now I’m all alive with pleasure. At the same time, I’m much annoyed about Clive. The truth is, one forgets Clive so quickly even at his most vivacious, that though I read him in the Nation, he has left no impression on me—except as a mere snap shot of your argument; and I dont think for a moment any reader of yours will confuse the two. It was a  pity Leonard didn’t send it him back; but it has become a joke almost—Clive’s cribbing—here was Maynard yesterday saying the same thing. I wish (not merely from my usual malice) that you would yourself say something to him about it. However, the main point is your article, which is far far beyond his or anybodies reach: which you know is my sincere opinion, and not merely the flattery of a publisher. I’m puzzling, in my weak witted way, over some of your problems: about ‘form’ in literature. I’ve been writing about Percy Lubbock’s book, and trying to make out what I mean by form in fiction. I say it is emotion put into the right relations; and has nothing to do with form as used of painting. But this you must tidy up for me when we meet, which must be soon and often. If you ever go to the mythical post office of Serillac, you will find all my reasons for wishing to see you couched with a fervour of expression which I shall never reach again.

We go back to London about the first. We have been seeing a few people, hearing Nessa grumble about Mary and the Tiltonians, as she calls them, which always amuses me—she is so damned uncompromising—now I lick any hand thats held out, and was very much charmed by Mary, chiefly because she has such pretty legs. Of her head I cant say much, nor of dear Lydia’s either. All the intervals of talk we fill in most desperately full with reading and writing. I’ve almost done my novel [Mrs Dalloway], which I hope to God you’ll like; and sent 800 circulars to the Royal Academy Exhibitors who have bought 4 copies of Duncan.—not wildly encouraging, but better than nothing. And I’m rather alarmed at the productivity of the Hogarth press this autumn—having laid out £800 in the works of Freud, which will sell they say because he has cancer; but I doubt any book selling that isnt by Berta Ruck. You are rather hard on “lady novelists”: or perhaps my corns are tender. This is not to excuse you from writing—so dont think it. The best sellers are gentlemen, like Hugh Walpole, and Compton Mackenzie, of a peculiarly poisonous breed. The Rucks do it to send their sons to Eton, which, though not my ambition in life, is comparatively harmless.

This is dull: but as a matter of fact, a little talk is what I want: you painters I suppose never come to detest the sound of your own voices; as I do mine. I wish I could write anybody elses style for a change. Whereas, of course, one gets more steeped in it as one ages. Would you send back your proof [of The Artist and Psycho-Analysis] at once, and forgive the poor Woolves your devoted admirers

V.W.

Sussex

[]

1499: To Clive Bell

Sunday [28 September 1924]

Monk’s House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest Clive,

I am going to ask what you must not hesitate to refuse—Marjorie Joad has left [Prof. C.E.M.] Joad, (this is supposed to be a secret). She can’t go back to Hampstead, has to look for rooms; has nowhere to stay in London, and is penniless, except for our pay. Could you let her use one of your bedrooms for a few nights while she looks about? She is going up on Thursday. Thus if you can manage it, would you write to her at

Courtlands

South Water

Horsham

Sussex—

She would only want a bedroom, and would be out all day and arrange for herself about meals. Naturally, this mayn’t be possible, and I rely on your saying so. Her having been ill rather complicates things.

I am sunk in the depths of sleep, having Karin, Ann, and Daisy [nurse] on my shoulders, and just back from Bunny [Garnett], Saxon, Barbara, Maynard and Lydia at Charleston.

Love to the yellow Parrokeet [Mary Hutchinson] whose letter I shall answer when circumstances grow more favourable.

I am telling Marjorie Joad that I have asked you, but am extremely doubtful if you can manage it.

Yrs V.W.

Quentin Bell

[]

1500: To Molly MacCarthy

Oct. 2nd [1924]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

Dearest Molly,

I don’t think I can absorb French history at my time of life (I don’t mean you to infer by this that I’m at the funny time). Couldn’t it be French language instead—which I’m pining to speak? F.B. [Francis Birrell] might take an elementary class in grammar first.

We go back—Leonard’s already gone back—on Saturday. I wither on like a last leaf.

Wouldn’t it be possible to meet some time without making the Carlovingians and Charlemagne an excuse? Though I admit there’s a special sweetness in flirting in school. I shall be plunged in publishing affairs at once; we are publishing all Dr Freud, and I glance at the proof and read how Mr A. B. threw a bottle of red ink on to the sheets of his marriage bed to excuse his impotence to the housemaid, but threw it in the wrong place, which unhinged his wife’s mind,—and to this day she pours claret on the dinner table. We could all go on like that for hours; and yet these Germans think it proves something—besides their own gull-like imbecility.

I’m sitting over my fire, and wish for a companion. You should be wafted to me. By the way, I’ve been reading your childhood over again with envy and delight, and even scribbled a wretched review for The Times. I thought I’d better make a breast of it; (clean breast it should be). I did it in a frightful hurry; and missed out all I wanted to put in, and did not convey in the least my envy and delight. Now you will be squirming with horror, like a toad one’s half trodden on in the dark. But I detect in your tone a slight audacity which I take to mean that you have been considerably complimented, and find it rather refreshing. I thought old [A.C.] Benson rather good, considering what a foggy dew the poor man’s mind is.

Shall I be raped, sleeping alone in the house to-night? Rose [Bartholomew], the Char, has just been in to ask, I say, I’m past raping.

We’ve had a spasmodic gay summer—all sorts of odds and ends dropping in—Maynard and Lydia, with roses twisted in her top knot, and Vita Nicolson, more than ever like a Guards officer in bearskin and breeches. Very Elizabethan too. And Clive and Mary and so on and so on.

But I must stop, and thank you once more, my dearest Molly, for writing such a charming—hush! hush! She’s squirming!

V.W.

Mrs Michael MacCarthy

[]

1501: To Jacques Raverat

Oct. 3rd 1924

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

My dear Jacques,

Certainly the painters have a great gift of expression. A highly intelligent account you seem to me to give of the processes of your own mind when I throw Neo Paganism in. In fact I rather think you’ve broached some of the problems of the writer’s too, who are trying to catch and consolidate and consummate (whatever the word is for making literature) those splashes of yours; for the falsity of the past (by which I mean Bennett, Galsworthy and so on) is precisely I think that they adhere to a formal railway line of sentence, for its convenience, never reflecting that people don’t and never did feel or think or dream for a second in that way; but all over the place, in your way.

I’m writing now, partly because I was so much intrigued by your letter, and felt more in touch, partly because this is my last evening of peace. I go back to London tomorrow. Then there’ll be people upon people; and I shall dash in and out, and go to concerts, and make engagements, and regret making engagements. The difficulty of writing letters is, for one thing, that one has to simplify so much, and hasn’t the courage to dwell on the small catastrophes which are of such huge interest to oneself; and thus has to put on a kind of unreal personality; which, when I write to you for example, whom I’ve not seen these 11 years, becomes inevitably jocular. I suppose joviality is a convenient mask; and then, being a writer, masks irk me; I want, in my old age, to have done with all superfluities, and form words precisely on top of the waves of my mind—a formidable undertaking.

About your letter, however; I didn’t mean that private relations bore me: which is indeed an intolerable perversion of my real meaning, who find relations of all kinds more and more engrossing, and (in spite of being made a fool of so often by one’s impulse to surrender everything—dignity and propriety—to intimacy) final, in some way; enduring: gigantic; and beautiful. Indeed, I find all this in my relations with people, and what I can guess of theirs. What I meant was that sexual relations bore me more than they used: am I a prude? Am I feminine? Anyhow for two years past, I have been a spectator of I daresay a dozen affairs of the heart—violent and crucial; and come to the conclusion that love is a disease; a frenzy; an epidemic; oh but how dull, how monotonous, and reducing its young men and women to what abysses of mediocrity! Its true that all my lovers were of the simplest type; and could only flush and fade crudely like sea anemones bathed now blue, now red. Thats what I meant, I think.

Our loves, yours and mine and that granite monolithic Gwens—(until she writes to me, I shall say what I like in abuse of her to her husband) were of a very different kind. But then we were creatures of temperament. No: your admiration of me was not apparent; but then I was alarmed of your big nose, your bright eyes, your talking French, and your having such a quick easy way with you, as if you had solved the problems of life,—gone straight into the middle of the honeycomb without one miss. Yes—thats how I figure you: thats still (vaguely now) the image I have of my dear and adorable Jacques—but I should never have dared call him so to his face. And then, (this is a secret) for some reason, your and Gwen’s engagement, being in love, took on for me a symbolical character; which I even tried to put down in writing. All very absurd I suppose: still you were very much in love, and it had an ecstatic quality. Indeed, you will laugh, but I used to think of you, in a purely literary way, as the two people who represented that passion in my mind: and still, when I think of you, I take out my brush, and paint both of your faces a divine sunset red. How oddly composed are one’s feelings! You would never have guessed, I daresay, that Jacques and Gwen always appear to Virginia in a sunset glow?

As for gossip, I hope to collect some in the great world.

Vanessa is getting a little querulous about Maynard and Lydia, and will have, she says, to turn out. Our Mrs Joad has left her Mr Joad. Our Dadie is a very nice boy. Our Karin Stephen sent me to bed with a violent headache last week, and ruined the last pages of my novel (Oh yes, I’ll write another letter and tell you about my writing—anything you want to know). She descended on us, and God knows I like her; but there’s a deafness of the spirit about her, which exhausts more than dragging a ton of coal upstairs. So hearty she is, good humoured, and right minded. The poor devil interests me for having tried to live with Adrian, and for being inarticulately aware of her own obtuseness. She can’t feel; she cant enjoy; she cant be intimate: she cares for nothing. Yet she has the most perfect apparatus for life in body and head and wealth and freedom. To cure herself she pays £1 daily to a psychoanalyst; and would, she told me, prefer to be entirely destitute could she only feel things, instead of being as she is now non-feeling. But this may convey nothing to you.

However, I’m awfully shy of saying how really and truly I would do a great deal to please you and can only very very dimly murmur a kind of faint sympathy and love.

Yrs
V.W.

I’ve been trying to buy Valéry in London, and am told he is out of print. Can you tell me how I could get his dialogues?

Sussex

[]

1502: To V. Sackville-West

[4 October 1924]

52 Tavistock Sqre, W.C.1

Dear Vita

An elderly lady [Duncan’s aunt Daisy] whose life centres entirely in her yacht has asked me to try and get passengers for her. If she doesnt, the yacht will have to be sold, and the centre of her life will be in ruins. So should you be able to send somebody off—its said to be an extremely good holiday and very comfortable—it would be very good of you.

We are just back; what did I find on the drawing room table, but a letter from which (to justify myself and utterly shame you) I make this quotation:

“Look on it, if you like, as copy,—as I believe you look upon everything, human relationships included. Oh yes, you like people through the brain, rather than through the heart” etc: So there. Come and be forgiven. Seducers in Ecuador looks very pretty, rather like a lady bird. The title however slightly alarms the old gentlemen in Bumpuses [booksellers].

Yrs ever V.W.

Berg

[]

1503: To Dora Carrington

[October 1924?]

52 Tavistock Sqre, W.C.

My dear Carrington

Would you answer these 3 questions:

1. Where do you get your tea, what is it called, and what price?

2. Where do you get the marbled end papers?

3.—I can’t remember what: but when are you coming to see the Loups? I’m having French lessons and have acquired this word.

Yr V.W.

—My books are being disposed of, and I hope to have a little money for binding soon: tell Ralph.

Robert H. Taylor

[]

1504: To Dorothy Bussy

Oct. 10th 1924

52 Tavistock. Square, W.C.1

My dear Dorothy,

I know I am breaking the rule of our friendship in writing to you—as we ought not to speak till next June. But forgive this. What I write to ask is, if there is any chance that Janie would like to translate my book Jacob’s Room into French. The editor of Europe, a monthly magazine, has said that he would like to publish it, if I can get a good translation made. Naturally I thought of Janie. I’m afraid the pay is very small—only a few francs a page; but if she thought it possible, I would find out more. We are just settling in to be very busy.

However, as I say, I must not anticipate June 16th when you are coming to tea with me.

Your aff.
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

1505: To Hugh Walpole

11 Oct 1924

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Mr Walpole,

I am reading your book [The Old Ladies] with great pleasure, and need not say how much it pleases me to have it as a present from you.

With many thanks,

Yours sincerely,
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

1506: To Richard Aldington

[early November 1924]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Mr Aldington,

I’m so glad you can come on Wednesday 13th.

You did not send me the signed promises to pay [for the Eliot Fund]. They would be useful, I think, as the question now is whether to return the money or what to do with it—Tom says he wont keep it. I dont know who the subscribers are.

Yours sincerely,
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

1507: To Richard Aldington

[early November 1924]

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Mr Aldington,

If you are staying in London won’t you dine with us on Wednesday (I agree it is the 12th) at 7.45 instead of lunching? That would be much nicer. But come to lunch if you can’t manage dinner, of course.

I heard from the Bank about Mr Pearsall Smiths ten pounds and gave my consent to his taking it back; but they wanted yours too.

As far as I remember we offered Tom £50, and he left it untouched; but I’ll find out. Difficulties arise at once. Tom wants the money handed on to another deserving case—but which? And will people ever agree? However we will thrash this out when we meet.

Would you let me know about dinner?

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

1508: To V. Sackville-West

Sunday [9 November 1924]

52 Tavistock Sqre, W.C.1

My dear Vita,

You have added to your sins by coming here without telephoning—I was only rambling the streets to get a breath of air—could easily have stayed in, wanted very much to see you. Next time remember, 2621 Museum: if no answer, 3488 Museum: only keep this last secret, as we have our hiding places.

Leonard is giving you official particulars of Seducers, which is being rebound—very good, since not a review of any importance has yet appeared. I hope Raymond Mortimer will do it somewhere. I sent off the circulars. I will sign as many books as Lady Sackville [Vita’s mother] wants. No: I will not forgive you. Wont you be coming up for a day later, and won’t you let me know beforehand?

There are several matters that require going into at length.

What about your long poem?

Yours Ever
Virginia Woolf

I have met Mrs Thomas Hardy, Charlotte Mew, (the greatest living poetess), Siegfried Sassoon, Nancy Cunard, and rather expect in the course of the next ten days, to meet Percy Lubbock, so you see I’m exploring our profession thoroughly.

Berg

[]

1509: To Lytton Strachey

11.11.24.

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

|  | £. | s. | d.  |
To a/c rendered |  | 1 | 7 | 0 |
” 1 West’s Seducers | @ 4/6  |  | 4 | 6 |
” 1 Avvakum | @ 6/0 |  | 6 | 0 |
” 1 Ransom’s Grace  | @ 4/6 |  | 4 | 6 |
” 3 Pamphlets | @ 2/6 |  | 2 | 6 |
” 1 do | @ 3/6 |  | 3 | 6 |
|  | £2  | 14 | 0 | [sic]
to 1 Kenya | @ 15/- net  |  | 15  | 0 |
|  | £3 | 4 | 0 | [sic]

[in V. W.’s handwriting.]

Lytton Strachey Esq.,
Ham Spray House,
Hungerford,
Berks.

Your attention is particularly called to the above account outstanding since May,—causing the devil of a bother in our Books; which won’t balance till you pay; as an Englishman, on Armistice day, we implore.

Signed: 

2 Woolves
1 Dadie
1 Mrs Joad
in love and reverence

Strachey Trust

[]

1510: To Ethel Sands

[November 1924]

52 T[avistock S[quare, W.C.1]

I’m not faithless; only got decoyed last Wednesday into sitting up late talking and so was stupid as an owl and no ornament to a tea party next day; this Thursday, Lady Colefax has seized on these 3 weeks, but if she goes, I will rush to you; and anyhow the Thursday after I shall come without fail, bringing Dadie, if I may.

Bosanquet was despatched today.

Wendy Baron

[]

1511: To Richard Aldington

[mid-November 1924]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Mr Aldington,

Please dont apologise for a second about not coming. I have great sympathy with people who dont keep engagements and live in a rush—it constantly happens to me. But I hope you’ll come one day and see us, not on business, which is dreary enough.

I quite agree with you that it is best to send the donors back their money. The Morrells did not want to take theirs, and two other subscribers were of the same mind—but they all had different people they wanted to give it to: and as this would obviously be the case with most of them, it is much simpler to return it, and let them do as they like.

I cant remember any slips, and feel sure they were not sent to me. So I have written to the Bank for a list of names, which they should have, and will write to each an explanation as soon as I can. I hope it wont be necessary to bother you again.

Yours sincerely,
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

1512: To Harcourt Brace (New York)

Nov. 15th 1924

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Mr Brace,

I was on the point of writing to you when your letter came. I am hoping to send you my book of collected essays, which I am calling “The Common Reader” and a novel, “Mrs Dalloway”, about March. We are bringing them both out in the spring—the essays probably in March, the novel at the end of April. I should prefer the essays to come out before the novel—but, if you wish to publish them, that is a matter which we could arrange later. We were sorry not to see you here last summer, and hope to have the pleasure this year.

Yours sincerely,
Virginia Woolf

Lilly Library, Indiana University

[]

1513: To Molly MacCarthy

Saturday [22nd November 1924]

52 T[avistock] S[quare, W.C.1]

Dearest Molly,

We were visiting the Zoo this afternoon and so missed you—but I intend to miss you, in order that you may go on writing letters. Suppose we live in London till we’re 80, never meet, but correspond: what an interesting situation, and we might meet once, very very old, in the Kings Road by chance.

I don’t in the least agree about your dress: I thought it a mixture of snowdrop and viper: a green viper. Scintillating as the snow, and very effective and chaste; compared with which I felt Dora Sangerish mixed with Melian Stawellish. So don’t go and change it. Don’t be downed by those pert misses, the [Elizabeth] Ponsonby, [Viola] Tree, Diana Manners group, who have shaved themselves to resemble nothing so much as tubes of piping. I was bitterly disappointed in them all, and turned to you in your white dress as some consolation.

As for the Clive-Mary affair, I’ve so often suffered in the same way myself that I advise you, as one matron to another, to let him be. He will say disagreeable things—and you were undoubtedly passionate and indiscreet (so I imagine) and he has a kind of tiresome chivalry about Mary which almost drives Leonard and me mad with irritation—always insisting that we should all be praising her; but it has its good side too, that is to say he is in his way faithful to her; and to you into the bargain; so that if you take no steps and in fact withdraw rather than advance, he will be consoled in a year’s time. However I daresay this wisdom is coals to Newcastle; and my pen is so spindle shanked that I can’t write a line.

But take out your goose quill, and let us correspond.

Yr V.W.

Mrs Michael MacCarthy

[]

1514: To Dorothy Bussy

Nov. 29th 1924

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Dorothy,

I ought to have written before, but there have been various delays. Now the Revue Française have written to me to say they want to publish a translation of Jacob’s Room, and apparently they provide their own translator. So I’m trying to come to terms with them—and I think, myself, Janie is well out of it. Colin (of Europe) talks of doing another of my books; but the pay is so little, that I don’t believe it would be worth Janie’s while—also his plans are vague.

As to the translation of Gide, we should like to see it, but the trouble is that it is hardly possible to make translations from the French pay. Our sort of public reads French, or pretends that it does, and the printing costs leave very little chance of covering expenses.

These dismal affairs being discharged, there remains nothing to be said till June 20th when you are engaged to tea with me at Rumpelmayer’s—Did you know it? I had a visit from Gwen the other day, very tragic I thought, and I half intend to go and see them, in which case I shall sponge a tea off you. Last night Pippa [Strachey] looked in, entirely resembling a nice small dancing bear. She danced once round the room on her hind legs and went off to the ballet. Marjorie [Strachey] continues to develop the soundest and ripest character in Bloomsbury; in short, all Stracheys are doing well. Adrian and Karin are still separate; Leonard and I continue married.

That is all

Yrs V.W.

Texas

[]

1515: To Jacques Raverat

Nov 29th 1924

Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Jacques,

I am much distressed, not figuratively but genuinely, to hear what a horror of a time you have been having. It was tantalising to see old Gwen for such a second, but the best of these Darwins is that they are cut out of the rock, and three taps is enough to convince one how immense is their solidity (to which Gwen has added, I thought, some vein of wisdom, and sweetness of temper which I rather envy her—I like seeing women weather the world so well).

But what am I to do with your copy of the Revue Française? I don’t like to trust it to the post, which has lost me my Proust memorial volume this year. Who is going out to you next? Tell me, and I’ll send it. I hope to read Valéry again. My first reading rather baffled: I felt an odd emptiness, conformity of some kind, triteness, I even go so far as to add, beneath the beauty and brilliancy of the surface. I felt I’d read it before, not so well set out. But I don’t trust myself reading French: lately I’ve had one or two disappointments, expecting more from the manner than I got in the end; so I must read this again. You French are fundamentally so damned logical, and this freezes the soul in one or two of its veins.

What were the questions I had to answer? About the young man in the basement, George Rylands. Alas, he will soon cease to be in the basement, King’s College requiring him to work harder at his dissertation, and so he will be going after Xmas to write upon Diction in Poetry, and so win a fellowship, and live at Cambridge and teach, which they now insist on—rather a nuisance for us. It makes it necessary to reorganise our staff, take in a new partner, engage a new secretary and so on: but I wont bore you with domestic details. Hours and hours of our time go in discussions and interviews. He is a semi-Neo Pagan perhaps. At King’s they are all reminded of Rupert—partly his yellow hair, partly his poetry, which is not so good as Rupert’s. He is a very charming spoilt boy, sprung of the rich who have no money, and so rather dazzled by London and parties, and perhaps he scents himself; but at heart he is uncorrupted, (so I think others disagree) and all young and oldish men, like Eddie Marsh and so on, fall in love with him, and he dines out every night, and treats his lovers abominably. However, if he don’t get his fellowship, he will come back here, if possible. A life at Cambridge teaching seems to me a skeleton life; but then, it has to be.

Once reflection occurred to me, dealing with our Mrs Joad, the other basement dweller—how much nicer young women are than young men. I hope to get a rise out of you. Nicer, I say, humaner, less conceited, more sensitive,—not cleverer. But a man has to be very clever to balance what my dear Jacques I can only call his damned offensive good opinion of himself—of his sex.

Now please tell me about your autobiography, which so whets my curiosity that I must entreat you to let me see it. If I translated it, couldn’t we publish it?

Please write it with a view to this, and let it be the waste paper basket, conduit pipe, cesspool, treasure house, and larder and pantry and drawing and dining bed room of your existence. Write about everything, without order, or care. Being a Frog, you won’t of course: you will organise and compose. Still, let me see it, and get on with it.

It is awful how business runs away with one’s time. Soon I shall have to describe a fresh set of people to you—a man called Angus Davidson, who thinks of coming to us. Then, socially, what about Lady Colefax? Being the most successful, hardest mouthed hostess in London, she retains spots about the size of a sixpenny piece of astonishing sensibility on her person. Having left her umbrella here, I, in malice or sport, proceeded to describe it, glowing and gleaming among my old gamps. Whereupon this hard bitten old hostess of 50 flushed quite red, and said “Mrs Woolf, I know what you think of my umbrella—a cheap, stubby, vulgar umbrella, you think my umbrella: and you think I have a bag like it—a cheap flashy bag covered with bad embroidery”. And it was too true. Only, if she saw it, must there not be depths in Lady Colefax? Think this out, and let me know.

Please write and say how you are.

Yrs V.W.

Sussex

[]

1516: To Violet Dickinson

30th Nov. [1924]

52 Tavistock Square, London, W.C.1

My Violet,

It was charming to get a letter from you, in your well known style—but I didn’t mean you to bother—only to listen to my affectionate chatter. I envy you, going to Brighton. It is the most beautiful town in the whole world. Its chief blot is that once the Fisher family lived there—do you remember Aunt [Mary] Fisher? She was blown against a motor car one day and annihilated [in 1916]. Herbert, on the contrary is safely lodged at New College—Either one goes up in the world or down. The up goers are always detestable—thats one comfort, keep butlers, condescend to me. George [Duckworth] for example, what a loathsome type that is, and Lady Margaret [his wife], gone lame I’m told, and highly religious. Do you think, if we’d taken our opportunity and gone to Devonshire House, we should have married better? Thats a question Nessa and I often ask, sitting so shabby as we do, without a set of furs between us, and the family jewels up the spout.

On Sunday I met an old friend of yours, the valiant [Janet] Case. D’you remember her? She had tea with you once, wearing a pair of new white kid gloves, you said, and spitting slightly, owing to the conformation of her jaw. All her teeth are out now: her hair is bobbed—She has Grave’s disease (which I confuse with a Zebra of that name) and lives in the New Forest—The old age of Greek teachers fills me to the brim with admiration. Having £200 a year, she has built a Cottage, observes nature, has no water laid on, reads Blake, never pines a moment, and comes up—for what d’you think? to see Tchekov at Barnes. Now if I die like that, I shall expect something like a general conflagration in the sky. Then we lunched with Irene Noel yesterday, married to an admirable worthy good simple hearted man who runs—called Baker. Perhaps we shall go to Greece this spring.

I have just finished a novel—all except copying out the last chapter. Shall you like it? Shall I write another book of essays? or a play? or a biography? or a philosophy? I want to do them all instantly, and your advice will be greatly prized. Someday please show me all your letters and let us put our heads together and write a memoir of our own Times. At Brighton you might begin.

Yr VW.

No answer required. Leonard sends his love and best respects.

Berg

[]

1517: To Lady Cecil

[mid-December 1924]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Nelly,

I suppose you would not come here? This is not pure laziness on my part—but, first, I have to be here, in the press, till 4.30, as we are short-handed; second, I want you to see our decorations: third, I’m dining out both Wednesdays, so should have rather a rush from Grosvenor Sqre. But rather than not see you, or if its at all inconvenient, I’ll certainly come. Shall we say this Wednesday 17th?

Only let me know which its to be. No, of course the Nation can’t review its editor’s wife’s books. For the first time in my life, I’m making money out of them.

Yours ever,
V.W.

Hatfield

[]

1518: To Margaret Llewelyn Davies

[22 December 1924]

52 Tavistock Sqre. W.C.

Dearest Margaret,

I am greatly excited to hear of the house, but don’t much expect ever to see it. We have been reorganising our Press, which takes ages. We have now a very steady young man [Angus Davidson], who will let us come and see you sometimes I hope.

This is not even an attempt at a letter: only a line of abuse for your many sins and admiration of your many virtues.

I will come and bring Leonard to the next Russian debauch if you’ll let us know. Rab (the Russian) has been very friendly and given us names from your list.

Please don’t drop your dirty friends, now you’ve a house of your own.

Yrs
V.W.

I’m glad to say L. has given up part of the Nation and will I hope give up more.

Sussex

[]

1519: To Vanessa Bell. From Leonard and Virginia Woolf

25/12/24

Typewritten

Monk’s House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

My dear Vanessa,

You have thrown the most beautiful but dangerous apple of discord into the domestic bliss of Tavistock Square, and V and I wrangle at intervals over who shall have your picture. We both like it so enormously—which I know is no compliment in your austere eyes—and I claim to have it in my room as it was addressed to me. V claims it for the dining room. I hope you will support me particularly as I nearly always support you in discussions. We both feel however that your present is too handsome for Christmas.

We may descend upon you before you get this if the weather keeps to its today’s behaviour.

Yours
Leonard Woolf

[in Virginias handwriting:]

I hope you will take my side in the dispute. I think it is one of the most interesting examples of your art, owing to the entirely new vein disclosed—Angus agrees.

Angus sends love—so does Grizzle. Really you ought not to give us such a superb present.

Berg

[]

1520: To Jacques Raverat

Dec. 26th 1924

Monk’s House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

My dear Jacques,

Do not expect wit or sense in this letter, only the affection of a drugged and torpid mind. Oh an English Christmas! We are not Christians; we are not social; we have no part in the fabric of the world, but all the same, Christmas flattens us out like a steam roller; turkey, pudding, tips, waits, holly, good wishes, presents, sweets; so here we sit, on Boxing day, at Rodmell, over a wood fire, and I can only rouse myself by thinking of you. In particular, I want to know 1. how you are. 2. Whether you are getting on with your autobiography; 3. What you are thinking; 4. what feeling; 5. what imagining, criticising, seeing—do catch that wild woman Gwen and stick a pen in her paw.

All that I predicted about Maynard and Lydia is coming to pass. They dined with us 2 nights ago: and my God! the poor sparrow is already turning into a discreet, silent, serious, motherly, respectable, fowl, with eggs, feathers, cluck cluck clucking all complete. A melancholy sight indeed, and I foresee the day when she dislikes any reference to dancing. Maynard is—But enough of the Keynes’, as they are called in Bloomsbury. “Mr Keynes has very bad taste,” my cook said to me, after the dinner. “Madame laughs, and he is so serious”. Soon Vanessa is escorting her to the divorce court. Once divorced, she will give up dancing. But enough of the Keynes.

Now who shall we pitch on? Casting a shadow over my paper at the present moment, is the fine oriental head of Angus Davidson. He is staying here to know us and be known (he is our partner now) and, despite his brother’s [Douglas] neck, I like him very much; and think him likely to be our salvation—gentle, considerate, cautious, kind, with a mind smooth and sensitive as the thickest cream. Do you know that quality in young well-bred Englishmen? Slightly hesitating, diffident, and unselfconscious. He is working in cross stitch at a design by Duncan for a chair; Leonard is ordering onions from a catalogue. Who should come in, the other day, but our Will [Arnold-Forster]; more stretched, pinched, parchmenty than ever: squeaking with goodness; and as nice as can be, but why will Ka always introduce him in a letter calling attention to the wildness and ferocity of his genius: whereupon one hears a squeak on the stairs and in runs Will. “Little Wully’s by way of being a painter” he said at tea, I urging him, with my notorious lack of consideration, to write books, either about roses, or about the League of Nations, which to tell the truth is far more his line than perpetually worrying the finest crow quills over the Appenines or whatever that eternal picture of his may be. But enough of the Coxes.

Who is there next? Well, only a high aristocrat called Vita Sackville-West, daughter of Lord Sackville, daughter of Knole, wife of Harold Nicolson, and novelist, but her real claim to consideration, is, if I may be so coarse, her legs. Oh they are exquisite—running like slender pillars up into her trunk, which is that of a breastless cuirassier (yet she has 2 children) but all about her is virginal, savage, patrician; and why she writes, which she does with complete competency, and a pen of brass, is a puzzle to me. If I were she, I should merely stride, with 11 Elk hounds, behind me, through my ancestral woods. She descends from Dorset, Buckingham, Sir Philip Sidney, and the whole of English history, which she keeps, stretched in coffins, one after another, from 1300 to the present day, under her dining room floor. But you, poor Frog, care nothing for all this.

Roger Fry is getting a little grumpy. He is not, you see, (or I imagine you see) a born painter, and this impediment seems to obstruct the run of his sympathies, so that he makes no allowances, but judges the imperfect and frail purely as if he were still an impeccable undergraduate, an incorruptible Apostle: whereas for my part I grow more mellow every day.

There!

I think I will leave off with that tribute to myself.

Love from everybody in the room.

Yours aff.
V.W.

It is said that the Adelphi is coming to an end.

We go back to London next Saturday.

Sussex

[]

1521: To V. Sackville-West

Dec. 26th 1924

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, [Sussex]

My dear Vita,

It is sad that you should be determined to undermine my virtue. Never have I been so happy as I was two nights ago, though we had the dullest possible party, (a purely business conversation) Still I sipped my glass, I became more and more genial, more and more condescending, affable and intimate, till the company was suspicious. But really you ought to keep these treats for my visits to you. Home tippling will be my ruin.

We are badly in want of a drop here, in this watery and teetotal house, where the turkey and cold sausages are never finished.

We are sitting over the fire—at 6 o’clock on Xmas Eve, as we were packing to come here, arrived an order from America for 25 Seducers. Off we went to the post in the rain—then I had a sip to warm me. 899 Seducers sold.

A thousand thanks for the bottle—and please come and see us again soon—

Yr V.W.

I hope you are better.

Berg

[]

1522: To Vanessa Bell

Wednesday [31 December 1924]

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

Dearest,

I’m much distressed that our presents came so late. They were sent off on the 23rd—but I see from the papers this happened everywhere. Its never too late to spill milk as you would say. Did Angelica get bricks as well as stencil? I only ask, not to cadge for thanks, but because I had my doubts of the shop sending them both.

We are completely cut off from crossing Southease Bridge, as the river has overflowed and the road is 18 inches under water. Angus had to wade back on coming home from you on Sunday.

If its fine, we shall try to come on Friday, lunch, but God knows: I don’t suppose theres any chance; but on a bicycle perhaps one might swim through.

The state of mud here is indescribable, added to which enormous rats join the family every evening and make conversation difficult.

Angus told you about the American covers—its now likely that the Common Reader will be a larger book than we thought. Can you enlarge your design? I will send you the exact size from London.

Tell Julian I think his paper very remarkable, and oddly enough his arguments are used in a French book I’m reading. His style reminds me very much of Thobys—in fact I was greatly impressed.

Can we make up a party to go to Islington Fair?

Was the Dunciad a success?

I have some ideas for a new one, tell Quentin.

We return on Saturday

Yr VW

Berg

[]

Letters 1523-1544 (January–March 1925)

1523: To David Garnett

Jan 4th 1925

52 Tavistock Square, London, W.C.1

Dear Bunny

I love fossils, and have a passion for Trents Last Case, but I can’t come, much though I should like to be wished the health of by you. I have got horribly late with a book I am trying to finish and even to rub up a few facts about Fielding is beyond me.

Why not try Vita Nicolson? She is now, I think, in London; anyhow Long Barn, Sevenoaks, Weald, Kent, finds her, and she is of ravishing beauty, and commanding presence, which I’m sure is what the Square Club wants: not Fielding, but woman. But many thanks for asking me.

When we’re at Cambridge, we shall look in for tea. Leonard is rather anxious about your fruit trees, put in in this weather.

We came back from Rodmell last night, flooded out.

Yr affec
V.W.

Berg

[]

1524: To Jacques Raverat

Jan 24th 1925

52 Tavistock Sqre., London

My dear Jacques,

As I was eating my muffin in bed this morning in came an exquisite crate from the South of France filled with flowers of every colour and smell, which I frantically tumbled on the bed to see who could have sent them, and there was your card! I assure you it brought the tears to these hardened eyes of mine, that you should have thought of me. And I was just writing to you (a thing I enjoy doing thoroughly, for I write to no one else now) to say that if you’d really like it, I’ll send out the proofs of my novel [Mrs Dalloway], which has just arrived, on condition you don’t bother to write to me about it, or even read it; and don’t mention it to anyone, for fear we should be asked for it, and it wont be out till May. For no other human being in the world would I do this—why, I dont know. But I’m a little morbid about people reading my books.

I was seeing Roger Fry last night, and he said, talking of you, that he thought your work getting more and more interesting, and wanted to see it, and wished me to tell you this, and would like to write to you about it himself, but perhaps he won’t, so I do instead. What he said was that he thought it extraordinary how you had put aside the things likely to lead to success, and gone on your own lines, so that he thought your last work infinitely better than your early. His praise about painting always seems to me the best worth having, not that one agrees with him, but that his honesty is so incorruptible, and his perceptions so fine. Tell me if there is anything more particular I can ask him. When people praise my writing I want to know why. Anyhow he praised your painting very highly.

I’ve been engaged in a great wrangle with an old American called Pearsall Smith on the ethics of writing articles at high rates for fashion papers like Vogue. He says it demeans one. He says one must write only for the Lit. Supplement and the Nation and Robert Bridges and prestige and posterity and to set a high example. I say Bunkum. Ladies’ clothes and aristocrats playing golf don’t affect my style; and they would do his a world of good. Oh these Americans! How they always muddle everything up! What he wants is prestige: what I want, money. Now my dear sharp pointed and Gallic Jacques, please decide between us.

Then I have seen our Ka, in her mother-in-laws grey suit and set of furs, a perfect specimen of solid county life, outwardly; but inwardly, much as usual; that is rather flustered and affectionate, and troubled, it seems to me, about her past; and life’s discrepancies, very wise in her own way, which is not our way. She has no feeling whatever for the arts. This is the greatest barrier of all, I believe. You and I can chatter like a whole parrot house of cockatoos (such is my feeling) because we have the same language at heart: but with Ka, one looks across a wall. Whether what one says reaches her I doubt. But these barriers have their fascination. Only for living with, they’re impossible.

You ask me about Mrs Joad—truth to tell, she is rather a problem. The younger generation, I suppose one ought to say; but I don’t much believe in these distinctions. She is a tall, straight shingled woman of 25. Came to London, School of Economics, read Shaw, thought she ought to live with a man; did; took up with a clever little bounder called Joad; lived with him; married him; found a letter from a woman in a drawer; left him; now has a room of her own, and walks out with various Cambridge young men, who are not entirely devoted to the fashionable foible of loving their own sex. Now comes the point. Being thus, one would have thought emancipated to the verge of dissolution, she won’t let Joad divorce her. Him she wishes to divorce. But why does respect for convention suddenly assert itself here? Anyhow, she is without illusions, and faithful as these young women are; fiery; on her dignity, and quite capable of biting the end of Angus’ [Davidson] nose off, if he should put upon her which God knows, Angus is the last man to do. She quarrelled all day with Dadie (the fair young man Gwen saw in the basement) but has, I think, affection and respect for the old Woolves—the male wolf anyhow.

Have you any views on loving one’s own sex? All the young men are so inclined, and I can’t help finding it mildly foolish; though I have no particular reason. For one thing, all the young men tend to the pretty and ladylike, for some reason, at the moment. They paint and powder, which wasn’t the style in our day at Cambridge. I think it does imply some clingingness—a tiny lap dog, called Sackville West, came to see me the other day (a cousin of my aristocrat and will inherit Knole) and my cook said, Who was the lady in the drawing room? He has a voice like a girls, and a face like a persian cats, all white and serious, with large violet eyes and fluffy cheeks. Well, you can’t respect the amours of a creature like that. Then the ladies, either in self protection, or imitation or genuinely, are given to their sex too. My aristocrat (oh, but I have now 2 or 3, whom I’ll tell you about—they interest me) is violently Sapphic, and contracted such a passion for a woman cousin, that they fled to the Tyrol, or some mountainous retreat together, to be followed in an aeroplane by a brace of husbands. The mothers of girls are said to take it to heart. I can’t take either of these aberrations seriously. To tell you a secret, I want to incite my lady to elope with me next. Then I’ll drop down on you and tell you all about it.

Karin Stephen is giving a party with me; so on the 4th of Feb. think of me with commiseration and affection. For its all my damned sentimental desire to be of use to the afflicted thats to blame. I’ve just been involved in another affair of the kind with the poet Eliot, and Leonard says it is positively disgusting—this trait in me—pure vanity. Now is it? She is imprisoned in a kind of fastness of callousness; cant feel or hate, or enjoy; and has a purely fictitious idea that if only she could see people, in crowds, constantly but never alone, for she dreads intimacy, she would be cheered and made like other people. So once a month there is to be a party—and each party is to be mothered by Karin and one other lady—and each will be a ghastly failure, and she will fling herself on her bed in tears. Halfway through every evening, the vanity of life dawns upon her; and she despairs. It is a curious case, and she suffers, I believe, tortures.

Well, this is all very rambling; merely a gossip and I don’t suppose you realise in the least how the flowers coming from you, on the eve of my birthday too, pleased me. There they are, against my painted walls, great bouquets of yellow and red and pink. They rather remind me of all your quips and cranks, and sitting by the river at the Grange, when you made me smoke one of Sir George’s cigars—and I so much wanted you to admire me, and thought I was a desolate old stick compared with the younger generation. But now we are back at the Neo Pagans; and then there’s a great deal to be said, which I shall continue in a few days.

Let me see your memoirs, and send any scrap of a letter you like to dictate to that dear old creature Gwen.

Yrs. aff. V.W.

Sussex

[]

1525: To Logan Pearsall Smith

[25 January 1925]

Postcard

52 Tavistock Sqre., [W.C.1]

I was too shy yesterday to put to you a question which interests me deeply.

Did you read my article in Vogue—“Indiscretions”; and if so did you think, as an impartial critic, that it was inferior to/or in any way differed from articles that I write for The Nation?

Much depends upon your answer.

Virginia Woolf

Library of Congress

[]

1526: To V. Sackville-West

Tuesday [27 January 1925]

52 Tavistock Square, London, W.C.1

My dear Vita,

I was just writing to ask you to dine, when the devil of influenza and headache returned, and I have had to promise to lead the life of a hermit for a fortnight.

But if you would come and drink a mild tea cup with me on Friday it would be angelic and charitable and very very dull (for you).

I say ¼ to 5 because I have only one maid; she may be out: then you couldn’t get in.

This sort of thing doesn’t strike d—d aristocrats. It’s one of their drawbacks—the others I will recount on Friday.

Ever Yr V.W.

Berg

[]

1527: To Logan Pearsall Smith

Wednesday [28 January 1925]

52 Tavistock Square, London, W.C.1

Dear Logan,

It is very good of you to send me the books, and to bother to make enquiries. It will be a great help to me, as I am completely at sea about Modern American Literature.

I am sorry your visit was so disagreeable to you—one ought to leave a tea party happier not more miserable. But you have the laugh of me. I had planned such a trap for you—I did send one article to Vogue, but it was intended for The Nation, and just about to be printed, when Todd became clamorous, and rather than write specially for her, I snatched it from Leonard, to his fury. And I hoped you would detect signs of Todd and Vogue in every word.

I am in bed with the influenza, (which I hope I did not give you—perhaps that accounts for my disagreeableness the other day) and have been ruminating the whole question of Vogue and Lit. Sup. and Robert Bridges and respectability and Mayfair. On top of my ruminations comes a letter from a young man, who writes for The Lit. Sup., complaining that they have cut a very mildly irreverent story from his last review. That sort of thing does seem to me bad for young writers—perhaps worse than the vulgarity, which is open and shameless, of Vogue. Anyhow, the young would say, Todd lets you write what you like, and its your own fault if you conform to the stays and the petticoats. Then, Duncan says he is perfectly ready to paint covers for her, or ball rooms for Lady Cunard—who doesnt know one picture from another, and has a drawing room filled with the riff raff of London (I hope this does not hurt your feelings) Duncans argument is that if Bloomsbury has real pearls, they can be scattered anywhere without harm.

Perhaps we aren’t quite sure of our pearls—I don’t know. It is all very complicated. One thing emerges however—except for a few stars, whom she pays what they ask, Todd’s prices are exactly the same as The Nation’s.

Forgive this tedious and influenza letter, and do not allow my perversities to prevent you from coming again.

Yours very Sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Library of Congress

[]

1528: To Ethel Sands

Wednesday [28 January 1925]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Ethel,

Leonard is dining out in Chelsea on the 9th; shall I come alone (but what time?) and might Leonard fetch me later, if you don’t mind his not dressing. The 6th we are engaged.

I’ve been in bed with a slight attack of the influenza, and as I have a little temperature still, I suppose I shan’t get to you tomorrow.

What a bore! But don’t you think you might come and see me—Would Sunday be possible? tea? It would be a great treat to see you, and I don’t think there’s the least risk of infection. I often get these temperatures and nobody catches them.

My party weighs me down with horror. Will you be an angel, and merely exert your genius as a hostess. Think only of others—expect no pleasure for yourself—you will be rewarded one of these days, but not on Wednesday 4th.

No wine, no food, nothing. But I count on you.

Yrs affect V.W.

Wendy Baron

[]

1529: To V. Sackville-West

Thursday [29 January 1925]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, London, W.C.1]

My dear Vita,

I ought to take up Rebecca Wests line when you offered her a lift in a Rolls-Royce—but being of a humbler nature, I accept peaches, kummel, everything, with complete gratitude and delight. Leonard and I sat down very critically to your peaches last night, doubting if they could be what they looked. And they were—heavenly, delicious.

I did not really deserve them either, as I got up yesterday, and consider myself quit of the disease. In honesty I have to admit a slight temperature still, in case you think it wiser not to come, but I often get this when I’m well, and never infect anyone, so I hope you will come—tomorrow, a quarter to five. We are making money very comfortably out of Seducers. I am very pleased, not only commercially, but I think it to people’s credit, considering how out of the way it is, in size and price and meaning and everything.

I’m fishing for your poem [The Land]—thats what I’m after. Do you see my line? I’ve been engaged (in fact it gave me the influenza) violently arguing with Logan Pearsall Smith the morality of writing for Vogue and Heinemann, as against the Times Lit. Sup. and the Hogarth Press. Do you write differently for different people? Does Todd pay you immense sums? Does the Editor of the Lit. Sup. cut out your improper stories? Do you feel sanctified by Leonard’s character when you write for him?

All these questions I will ask you tomorrow. I wish I had been able to come to your cousin’s [Eddy S.W.] party—I’ve had very bad luck lately.

(By the way, if you meet Lady Colefax do not say that you are coming here tomorrow, as I have put her off.)

One thing more, and I have done—Mrs Candy’s [Vita’s typist] present address. She said she was moving: and I want her to type some things quickly.

Now with a thousand thanks, dear Mrs Nicolson, for the lovely peaches, which I will not throw at your head,

Your affate
V.W.

We are giving an awful, awful, awful party (I’ll tell you about it) but you and Mr Nicolson must come.

No peaches will avail if you dont.

Berg

[]

1530: To Lytton Strachey

[31 January 1925]

52 Tavistock Sqre

An appalling party is being given by Woolves and Stephens at No 50 Gordon Sqre. on Wednesday next—9.30.

No wine; no food; nothing (except indeed Philip Ritchie).

If you like to come, we shall be enchanted.

I’m in bed with the influenza: but recovering.

Yr. V.W.

A letter would be comforting.

Strachey Trust

[]

1531: To Ethel Sands

Saturday [31 January 1925]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Ethel,

Alas—Monday is no good. To make it worse, I’m afraid I shan’t be able to come on the 9th. I’ve had to retire to bed again, and Leonard, who is a terrible fuss, insists upon my going down to Rodmell, after the horrors of the party are over.

I feel I am behaving in a most tiresome way—all the more so because I mistook your invitation in the first place—thought the maid said ‘Mr or Mrs Woolf’ and so thrust myself singly upon you, when, so she now tells me, you wanted both or neither.

Forgive and forget, and come and see me, and ask both or neither again.

Yrs affect V.W.

Wendy Baron

[]

1532: To R. C. Trevelyan

[January 1925]

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Bob,

We would like to print your poems, [Poems and Tables] and think we ought to keep it a small book, which we could print ourselves. Thus, it would be better to leave out the Prelude to the long poem. I think you said there was another poem, which Desmond is printing [in the New Statesman]. Perhaps you would send us that, when convenient. The poems you left with me would make about the right length for printing ourselves; anything longer would mean waiting a considerable time.

As it is, of course we can’t bind ourselves to have it done by any particular time. But this is only to say that we should like to do it, and details can wait. I cannot write on a typewriter, but I hope enough emerges to make my meaning plain.

Yours ever,
Virginia Woolf

Sussex

[]

1533: To Marjorie Joad

Monday [2 February 1925]

52 Tavistock Sqre, W.C.

My dear Marjorie,

Your letter is a great disappointment to us both. Leonard will write to you, this is merely privately, not from the Press. I’m very worried to think that the work may have been too much for you, and that we, perhaps, could have made things easier than we did. If the doctor advises you not to go on, of course there is nothing else to be said. But we both feel that we shall miss having you much more than you probably realise. I don’t think anybody could have been nicer to us both, and for my own part I feel that I shan’t find anybody I like so much working with. But we must see you, and not settle anything in a hurry.

It would be very good of you if you could send a line, or get someone else to, to say how you are.

I had to retire to bed again on Friday, and am still there and shan’t be able to go to the party after all. Leonard is going to give it for me. I got a violent headache—temperature again, and rather doubt that I shall be up before Wednesday or Thursday and then we shall try to get a few days at Rodmell. Angus seemed to be sickening, but has recovered today. What a world! My only gratification is that I don’t think I can have given you the flu, or you would have started it before.

Rumours of the world reach me, rather obscurely—Vita arrived with an enormous dog on a chain: a pure bred spaniel, which is to have a puppy, for our benefit; but can I live up to a Sackville Hound? Then the police arrived, to say her motor had no lights: then old Mr Pritchard appeared and offered to bail her out. Then at 10 this morning, a strong smell of burning issued from the water closet: Nelly flew into a panic; Leonard went for the fireman: I sat up in bed and advised Nelly to watch the smoke with a bucket of water in case of flames—which she did. Firemen arrived, and said they must take up the stairs. Smoke still issued. At last the man next door owned to having lit a fire in his flue. Leonard lost his temper. Nelly banged my door. The handle flew off. Everyone went out. I found myself locked in: and now, at 4.30, have only just been let out. Its odd how life assumes a melodramatic quality directly one’s ill in bed. I daresay your ceiling will fall in the night. Ring me up if so, and I will offer consolation.

But you must be dying to hear about the servants party. It transpires that Mr Harland [Keynes’s servant] had hired two suits—one for Mrs Harland as Cupid; one for himself as Napoleon—which would have suited him very well. Then “that little word Mister”, as he put it, being omitted on the card, he flew into a rage, took the Cupid and Napoleon back at once, and was seen scowling at the area when the dance was at its height. Nelly was panic struck; happily George, the greengrocer’s boy who is walking out with Daisy was there, and no violence ensued. But you can imagine what a state of frantic excitement Bloomsbury is in today.

I can’t think of any other news. I am reading Mansfield Park, two words at a time. Lady Colefax has invited me to tea. Lord Berners has asked me to dine, and I don’t think anybody else has shown the slightest interest in me.

I ought to be working at those damnable essays [The Common Reader]; but can’t imagine anyone wishing to read them, so why bother?

Besides half my pleasure in writing my books will be gone, now you have taken up with Heinemanns, and will be riding in your coach.

Shall you ask me to come and see you? Don’t be proud, and forget your basement days.

Oh God! how I shall hate not having you to tease, and not having you to boast to, and not having you to look at in your handsome new jersey which was a base imitation of mine. Tears would have visited even your strong eyes could you have heard me read your letter, and how Leonard said he thought you always came out of everything so extraordinarily well, to which I replied Yes. But then she has an extraordinary nice nature. Well, I’ve always said so, said Leonard. This is an accurate verbatim account, and in the highest degree complimentary.

Now I must stop, for my head is not capable of much amusement. Also I must look to see if the house is on fire again. If so, Angus is to fetch the Brigade, Nelly having gone round to 50 to discuss Mr Harlands behaviour with the others.

Please be very careful, and consider whether it would not be a good thing to go down to Rodmell with a friend for a change.

Your affte
V.W.

T. W. Marshall

[]

1534: To Jacques Raverat

Feb: 5th 1925

52 Tavistock Square, [W.C.1]

My dear Jacques,

I was struck down with influenza the very day I wrote to you, and am still in bed. Otherwise, I should have sent off my proofs [of Mrs Dalloway] before, but they were muddled up, and influenza makes me like a wet dish cloth—even to sort them was beyond me. I have left them uncorrected. Much has been re-written. Do a little re-writing on my behalf. Anyhow, don’t cast me from you; and say nothing, or anything, as you like. (It will be sent tomorrow, 6th.)

Being bedridden, my view of the world has had a great thumb put over it. I can’t think how you keep so sharp and clear. I have seen Clive Bell, who gave me another headache; he is a good fellow, however. I was so rash as to tell him he praised his Polly Flinders too much—his pretty Poll—his paramour—his Mary Hutch I mean. (I forget if you are aware of that highly respectable alliance, which is far more lasting and punctiliously observed than any marriage). I said he should not be praising her legs in company, or cracking up her little witticisms, or even repeating the tributes of other gentlemen. But, he said, he did it to show Vanessa that she is a serious human being. He said, just because Mary dresses well, and you and Nessa badly, you think her dull: so I must prove how silly you both are.

Clive is now shaped like a spade and thick as an oak tree. He wears bright blue socks, which he is forever hitching up, and his trousers, for some reason which a man may know, are always above his knees. But how good hearted he is—bunches of grapes arrive for me; and yet I never do anything but bite his nose off when I see him, and laugh at him behind his back. I have an idea you and Gwen hated him. Let me assure you, you were wrong. Not that I claim for him any of the heroic virtues. Being bred a Puritan, (in the main—but I had a French great grandmother to muddle me) I warm my hands at these red-hot-coal men. I often wish I had married a foxhunter. It is partly the desire to share in life somehow, which is denied to us writers. Is it to you painters? Ever since I was a child I have envied people who did things—but even influenza shall not mislead me into egoistical autobiographical revelations—Of course, I long to talk to you about myself, my character, my writings, but am withheld—by what?

Karin’s party came off last night, and I lay in bed and imagined it all very brilliant. Leonard put on his deceased brother-in-law’s (who died in a Bath at Eastbourne) dress clothes, and went off to brew the punch. Hope Mirrlees arrived half an hour early (do you admire her novels?—I can’t get an ounce of joy from them, but we like seeing her and Jane [Harrison] billing and cooing together). Then came 40 young Oxford men, and three very pretty girls; Vanessa, Mary Hutch, Clive and Lytton—Lytton gravitated to the 40 young men, and was heard booming and humming from flower to flower. Vanessa, who had not dressed, sat commandingly on a sofa, talking to a sculptor called Tomlin, and to no one else, for she is beyond the pale now, makes no attempt to conciliate society, and often shocks me by her complete indifference to all my floating loves and jealousies, but with such a life, packed like a cabinet of drawers, Duncan, children, painting, Roger—how can she budge an inch or find a cranny of room for anyone? Clive came in late, having been dining with Mary at her new house in Regent’s Park. She has a ship’s steward to serve at table, and whether for this reason or another provides the most spicy liquors, foods, cocktails and so on—for example an enormous earthenware dish, last time I was there, garnished with every vegetable, in January—peas, greens, mushrooms, potatoes; and in the middle the tenderest cutlets, all brewed in a sweet stinging aphrodisiac sauce. I tell you, I could hardly waddle home, or compose my sentiments. So Clive gets a little warm, and very red about the gills towards midnight.

Then Karin, who felt the approach of disillusionment about eleven, ran down to the kitchen and borrowed the housemaid’s gramophone. The 40 young men began waltzing, and the three lovely girls sat together flirting in corners. Isn’t it an odd thing that Bloomsbury parties are always thus composed—40 young men; all from Oxford too, and three girls, who are admitted on condition that they either dress exquisitely, or are some man’s mistress, or love each other. Much preferring my own sex, as I do, or at any rate, finding the monotony of young mens’ conversation considerable, and resenting the eternal pressure which they put, if you’re a woman, on one string, find the disproportion excessive, and intend to cultivate women’s society entirely in future. Men are all in the light always: with women you swim at once into the silent dusk. But to return. They danced. Leonard got horribly bored. He was set upon by little Eddie Sackville West, who is as appealing as a kitten, a stray, a mangy, unloved kitten; and this poor boy, after pouring forth his woes (all men confide in Leonard—especially such as love their own sex) sat by mistake down on the best tea cups. Being an aristocrat out of his element, he was considerably discomposed. Sweets and jams stuck to his behind, and Leonard had to dust him, and pat him, and finally leave him; trying I believe, to smoke a pipe in full evening dress, and white waistcoat. They work very hard, the aristocracy. Karin was heard to say, between the waltzes, Isn’t this jolly?—On being assured it was, she plucked up heart, and means to give another party, with another hostess, next month.

Really, you have done me good. This is the first time I have cantered out on paper this fortnight. I find a great pleasure in waking all the doves in their dovecots—in stirring my words again. But this I can never explain to a painter, I suppose; how words live in companies, never used, except when one writes.

What about the autobiography? You jeered at me for saying I would print it. But I swear I will. I can see the very book it shall be and if you don’t look out, I shall add to it some of your pictures, with a description of them from my own pen. (This is a threat, because writers can’t write about anything except writing).

So now I must stop, and do a little cross stitch, and I shall dwell upon you, as indeed I have been doing a great deal, lying here—and though you’ll snap my nose off for saying so—with considerable admiration as well as affection.

Yours, V.W.

Sussex

[]

1535: To Gerald Brenan

Thursday [5 February 1925]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

My dear Gerald,

I am ashamed not to have written to thank you for the flowers, but I have been very headachy and stupid as an ox.

How did you know that I have a sentimental passion for the coloured anemones? and these are the first I have seen. It was a stroke of genius on your part, and promises well for your book [on St Teresa], which I hope shortly to read.

We go to Rodmell tomorrow, and I hope to see you when we get back.

Yours
Virginia Woolf

George Lazarus

[]

1536: To Margaret Llewelyn Davies

Feb 9th [1925]

Typewritten

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

Dearest Margaret,

This is a great deal clearer than my handwriting, you must admit, though it spells badly. I left your letter at home, so I know I shall forget to answer some of the questions. However, first; Leonard says he “will be glad to consider any manuscript” you choose to send him; this refers to Mrs Layton. Second, the best time for Mr [William] Nicholson to come and see the decorations alone (in which I much sympathise) is any afternoon between two and three. Later, there is no one to let him in. We are in the basement. Dickens next. I used to think David Copperfield a masterpiece; but having read Hard Times lately, I was disgusted and disappointed. It seemed to me mere sentiment and melodrama, and your boasted zest for life, nothing but rant and rage. No doubt it is a bad one; and I shall try another. If you want a modern with a zest, why not try Proust? He has as much of it as Dickens, and his life is (to me) of a far more interesting kind. Ten volumes however, difficult French; I’ve only read three. I transacted influenza in the drawing room, and if it had not been for one of my old familiar headaches, should have got off lightly. Many thanks for the Favil press notice; I think we shall try them, if they do small jobs, for ordinary printers fail lamentably. But when are you coming to see our works?

Once more we are reorganising—Mrs Joad having finally retired with slight pneumonia; and Miss Bernadette Murphy having taken her place. The difficulty of business is not the work, but the subordinates—witness Lilian. If only they were dumb, wooden, enduring! Leonard went back last night; I return tomorrow. This I shall venture to address, probably wrongly. My mother once lived at Well Walk [Hampstead], in a lovely house. One of these days I hope we may meet, and Monks House is always a little hurt by your indifference.

Yrs V.W.

Sussex

[]

1537: To Marjorie Joad

Sunday [15 February 1925]

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, [W.C.1]

My dear Marjorie, or rather foolish, wild, unpractical woman—why should you torment yourself with thinking you are hated and despised and forgotten—that people slander you, and the Woolves revile you? Is it the effect of lying in bed? One moments thought (as people say) should have told you, what is true—I only got back from Rodmell on Tuesday night; since when, what with a headache and Murphy and the Press, I have scarcely been out, and written only the completely idiotic trash which I have to do for my abominable books. All is forgiven to influenza though. Moreover, I peered in at your gratings in a hail storm on Saturday and fancied rows of blizzard-bitten women recumbent, coughing, spitting, swearing. However, I also figure Marjorie Joad perpetually attended by troops of Knights, who alight from their horses with bouquets. The old Woolves are not acceptable visitors compared with young Knights. You must admit the force of that—even in your craziest, crankiest mood. Both are old; both shabby; moreover, their dog has the mange.

That is what you invalids make no allowance for—the mange; the Murphys. Grizzle has a pink hole in her back; Murphy has mushrooms for fingers. Oh how my back aches with stooping over those infernal trays and tossing ‘u’s into ‘t’ boxes and ‘y’s into ‘j’s. Despair has set in. Leonard has devised a spring list which combines three founts and five different sizes. The Cambridge Press has done it—why not the Hogarth? And Angus (who has a touch of enteric) and Murphy (who has fungus on the finger) are set to help me. You will wish for a complete account of Murphy; you would rather like it to be very very acid (which I can be when I like). The truth is I have only done two days work with her, and except for this brilliant comparison—she is a mushroom—have scarcely a word to throw at the poor dog. All powder, paint, walking sticks whose handles come off in the street, yellow shoes, shingled hair, officers riding up on chargers, scented sonnets dropped into the pillar box—all that kind of thing which we used to know once upon a time in our palmy days is now a thing of the past. We have sunk twenty five degrees in fashion; 100 in looks; mushrooms wear waterproofs and black slippers down at heel. For their other qualities, you must ask Leonard. For my own part, a little beauty is what I crave; anybody can be good; wits I have myself.

There! Very cleverly I end on an agreeable note. But what news is there? Leonard has just written the most intemperate abusive letter to Austin Johnson I ever saw. Austin culminated by asking Angus not to call him a liar to his face. Leonard replies, Your insolence to Mrs Joad and Mr Rylands was enough; this is superfluous. Ask any man woman or dog in Cambridge to explain the Freud prospectus (he is still asking, do we give a reduction, which books are out etc etc). But let us never be troubled by such a surly vindictive lying brute as A.J. again. This is not exaggerated. So if you hear of an elderly corpse floating in the Cam, swollen to a disgusting size, and purple about the gills, that will be your old friend who has taken himself off in a hurry. But no; he will survive to crawl over our corpses yet.

My party was absolutely heavenly. I lay in bed and imagined it. Never shall I go to a party any other way. One is so brilliant; so happy; so beautiful. What really happened was a solid mix of incompatibles. Vanessa Bell behaved disgracefully; science scowled at art; letters meandered. There was Lytton Strachey held down by the widow of a Professor Malthus. His anguish penetrated even to me. Mrs [Naomi] Mitchison fastened herself upon the heir to Knole, who only likes boys; he, too, sobbed aloud. Then Leonard went the rounds with large (but alas, broken) cups, the crockery having given out, full of what would have been punch if they had not forgotten the rum. Roger Fry enjoyed it immensely, because he met a more or less negro lady, one of Corkies friends who had got in by mistake. And so on and so on.

You and I will give a party in the summer, for compatibles only, in the studio. I insist upon a sufficiency of young women. Oh the unnumerable dull young men I know! I forget why I am so cross about this at the moment; but whereever I go, there springs out some young man who writes, and is shameless. Oh for beauty, oh for modesty! Really, they are more interesting now—the modest and chaste, I mean. But you—that hardly applies to you.

[in Virginia’s handwriting:]

There! I have left off upon an agreeable note again: We have just had tea—Leonard has discovered 8 fleas on Grizzle: Bob Trevelyan is done: He [Leonard] has gone down to start Nancy. Lottie is spending Sunday with us; they are making marmalade, and I modelled the head of a dog in pastry for our Plum Tart today. These, you see, are the facts of life; not your vain imaginings.

Let us know when you would like to see us, which you would like to see, how you are, when you emerge, and any other sense or nonsense that comes into your head.

But do not impute base, selfish, dishonourable thoughts to your old, attached, and quite submissive friends,

L. and V. Woolf, Hogarth Press, Tavistock Square,
etc etc etc

T. H. Marshall

[]

1538: To Richard Aldington

16th Feb. [1925]

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Mr Aldington,

I have now heard from Tom [Eliot], who says that he is writing to me, I suppose on this matter, tomorrow. Therefore I will postpone further discussion until I have heard what he says, and will then write to you.

I will only say now that your account of conditions at the Bank is quite new to me. It is entirely different from what we had gathered from Tom or Vivien. She definitely told me, that if it were not for her she thought Tom would be happier in the Bank than as literary editor of the Nation. In talking to us, Tom has always laid great stress upon the extraordinary kindness which the Bank has shown him. This was one of his stock arguments against leaving. And in our last talk on the subject—about a year ago—he said not a word of complaint of his work or his treatment and led us to think that he had been given promotion, and had every reason to be grateful to them. He certainly said that he was thankful he had stayed on at the Bank. The truth is I expect that he takes different views at different times and to different people. He knows that we urged him to accept the Nation and is naturally anxious to justify himself to us. But of course what you say he tells you is very important and makes a great deal of difference. We are in the position of having urged him to leave the bank and to take up journalism; and his arguments against doing both are deeply impressed upon us.

May I say that I dont think you realise the force of what we say of his utter misery over the Nation and his incapacity to take the plunge? He told us then that he was desperate; the offer was good; we urged it; and yet it was effort and misery thrown away. My husband says he would give you his reasons for thinking Tom should not leave the Bank if you liked to see him on Monday or Tuesday at the office. Tom always consults us jointly.

I would not have suggested approaching the Bank directors if it had not been that Lady R⁠[othermere] has already done so, presumably with Tom’s knowledge, and certainly with complete success. Naturally I shall not take such a step off my own bat. Yes: the cottage is another “mere palliative” but every letter I have had from Tom or Vivien lately has reiterated their desire to have a country cottage and his belief that most of their ill health is due to their not having one.

Please dont think it necessary to apologise for differing from me and saying so outright. I feel that we are groping in the dark, and the only chance of seeing light is to say whatever one has in ones head—as I do herewith!

Yours very sincerely,
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

1539: To V. Sackville-West

Tuesday [17 February? 1925]

52 Tavistock Square, London, W.C.1

My dear Vita,

We would like very much to come, but do you think that Lady Gerald would ask us another night?

I’m being bothered by a beast of a headache, and have to keep very quiet and not dine out till I’ve got rid of it—which I hope to do completely next week.

Please thank Lady Gerald, and please come and see us yourself.

Seducers [in Ecuador] still selling.

Yr VW.

Berg

[]

1540: To W. J. H. Sprott

18th Feb [1925]

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Sebastian,

I look forward to reading your novel; but it has not yet come. I’m afraid that it may be some little time before I am able to read it, as I have been having a relapse from influenza and have to be very quiet for a bit.

This also makes it rather doubtful whether we can come to Cambridge as you suggest—much though we should both like to.

We have not yet settled, but we are thinking of going away for a holiday about then. So you must make arrangements independently of us.

I think we could get rooms always if we came.

Many thanks for asking us.

Leonard wants me to add that he was not able to send you the books yesterday, but if he possibly can, will send them later. It is a question of space, as usual.

Yours
Virginia Woolf

King’s

[]

1541: To Gwen Raverat

11th March [1925]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Gwen,

Your and Jacques’ letter came yesterday, and I go about thinking of you both in starts, and almost constantly underneath everything, and I don’t know what to say. The thing that comes over and over is the strange wish I have to go on telling Jacques things. This is for Jacques, I say to myself; I want to write to him about happiness, about Rupert [Brooke], and love. It had become to me a sort of private life, and I believe I told him more than anyone, except Leonard; I become mystical as I grow older and feel an alliance with you and Jacques which is eternal, not interrupted, or hurt by never meeting. Then of course, I have now for you—how can I put it?—I mean the feeling that one must reverence?—is that the word—feel shy of, so tremendous an experience; for I cannot conceive what you have suffered. It seems to me that if we met, one would have to chatter about every sort of little trifle, because there is nothing to be said.

And then, being, as you know, so fundamentally an optimist, I want to make you enjoy life. Forgive me, for writing what comes into my head. I think I feel that I would give a great deal to share with you the daily happiness. But you know that if there is anything I could ever give you, I would give it, but perhaps the only thing to give is to be oneself with people. One could say anything to Jacques. And that will always be the same with you and me. But oh, dearest Gwen, to think of you is making me cry—why should you and Jacques have had to go through this? As I told him, it is your love that has forever been love to me—all those years ago, when you used to come to Fitzroy Square, I was so angry and you were so furious, and Jacques wrote me a sensible manly letter, which I answered, sitting at my table in the window. Perhaps I was frightfully jealous of you both, being at war with the whole world at the moment. Still, the vision has become to me a source of wonder—the vision of your face; which if I were painting I should cover with flames, and put you on a hill top. Then, I don’t think you would believe how it moves me that you and Jacques should have been reading Mrs Dalloway, and liking it. I’m awfully vain I know; and I was on pins and needles about sending it to Jacques; and now I feel exquisitely relieved; not flattered: but one does want that side of one to be acceptable—I was going to have written to Jacques about his children, and about my having none—I mean, these efforts of mine to communicate with people are partly childlessness, and the horror that sometimes overcomes me.

There is very little use in writing this. One feels so ignorant, so trivial, and like a child, just teasing you. But it is only that one keeps thinking of you, with a sort of reverence, and of that adorable man, whom I loved.

Yours,
V.W.

Sussex

[]

1542: To Gwen Raverat

Sunday, March 22nd [1925]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.

Dearest Gwen,

It was a great relief to get your letter. I had been feeling that perhaps I had said something idiotically foolish, to hurt you more. Not that one is hurt by foolish things however. But this is a practical letter. We are going on the 26th to Hotel Cendrillon, Cassis for 10 days. That is all the time we can get off, owing to our books; but if you could come and stay a night, do. I’m afraid you will be in Italy then. I don’t see any chance of going abroad later—we have a new man [Angus Davidson] come to work, and he is anxious about being left alone. But write later, and suggest meeting somehow else.

Yes, I will tell you the whole of my life history one day, but I think it was my affair with Clive and Nessa I was thinking of when I said I envied you and Jacques at Fitzroy square. For some reason that turned more of a knife in me than anything else has ever done.

What about the thing [his autobiography] Jacques was writing? Can I see it? Also, have you a snapshot or any photograph of him?

I go on making things up to tell him; and shall have to go on writing to you I believe.

But not now. Molly MacCarthy has been in, like a dreaming moth to give me a copy of Shakespeare, and now we have to dine with Clive: I’m quite well again, but had to put my head under my wing and sleep for a month.

Write if you would ever care to; for I should like nothing better.

Yours
V.W.

We shall be at Cassis till Monday 6th

Sussex

[]

1543: To Molly MacCarthy

[25 March 1925]

52 Tavistock Square, [W.C.1]

Dearest Moll,

The Eliots address is

9 Clarence Gate Gardens, N.W.1

Write to him, as she is ill.

I think it would be a godsend to them to have a cottage for a time, as they seem in a desperate state of health and misery altogether.

Oh damn you for giving me Shakespeare. Why will the MacCarthys outdo us all in every way?

Off to France tomorrow but back in two weeks, when we may meet at the Club which I hear you’re starting.

Ever your dear old friend

V.W.

Mrs Michael MacCarthy

[]

1544: To W. J. H. Sprott

25th March 1925

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Sebastian,

Your book has interested me very much, but on the whole we dont think we can publish it; though we are extremely sorry not to. My feeling is that you dont get going till rather late—it seems as if your theme interested you, and not the people; so that in spite of the fact that the end gets an emotion which is quite genuine, it is too late to tell; and as a whole the book is not pulled off. I only give you these criticisms as you asked me; honestly, I dont trust myself on other peoples novels, simply because, as I write them myself, I get my eye out. I feel that you ought to stand more on your own feet, and that at present you accept too brilliantly what other people tell you and are afraid of your own observations. But this may well be nonsense. The other point is that the public won’t like the theme or understand it, which of course makes it risky from the publishing point of view. But it will be very interesting to see what you write next, though after this plain speaking we have no right to ask you to let us see it.

Would you send Angus [Davidson] a card to say where you would like the MS sent?

I suppose you are no longer at Cambridge.

Yours
Virginia Woolf

King’s

[]

Letters 1545-1570 (April–July 1925)

1545: To Vanessa Bell

[31 March 1925]

Postcard

[Hotel Cendrillon, Cassis, France]

We sailed into this bay yesterday, and thought of the Dolphin tribe. Perfectly happy here—hot, bright, omelettes, coffee in garden. Roger’s pictures on every side, met Douglas Davidson [Angus’s brother], Penrose and mixed company of overdressed Greeks, L. refused to be introduced, lady novelist [Miss Toogood] still here, also gent [Mr Howard]. Much literary discussion, we sit out and walk Just off to Toulon.

V.W.

Berg

[]

1546: To Vanessa Bell

Friday. April 3rd. [1925]

Hotel Cendrillon, Cassis, [France]

Dearest.

You don’t deserve a letter, whereas Mary [Hutchinson] does. She has just written me 6 bright blue sheets full of gossip. Dolphin never writes, nor is it much consolation to me to be given your love by a stalwart bugger called [Hugh] Anderson last night—indeed, I was a good deal shocked to hear you called Vanessa familiarly by two such chattering long-winded wrynecked dry boned duffers as Tomlin and Anderson. Lord lord for a little charm—an ounce of sympathy! For both of these I have to depend upon the New Zealand novelist Miss Toogood, whose health is positively collapsing under the strain of finishing her novel, which ought to have been out last autumn, and now won’t be till next, though she sees the end in front of her, but can’t drive herself an inch further. Mr Howard has practically finished his, and Miss Betsy Kingsford thinks it one of the most beautifully moving touching books she has ever read—This is about all the news there is—except that Mrs —— from Australia has gone to Toulon to meet her daughter.

I wish to God that the Tomlins, Penroses, and Andersons had never left Bloomsbury. The rooms ring with their bright Bugger-Bloomsbury up to date bragging—all about Vanessa and Clive, and how Duncan looked out of the back window and told Clifford Sharp his taxi was there; and dear good Angus reproved him; but Duncan, being very drunk,—and then Lady Colefax comes in, and how Vanessa and Sybil embraced. Can this be true? Have you really promised to give a party at Argyll House? Oh dolphin, dolphin!

This place has every merit (except the prevalence of that species whom Duncan loves) food delicious; harbour divine, hot; sun; vineyards; olives; etc. etc. Old Gwen writes that she was greatly touched by Duncan’s letter. We shall just miss her; and shall have to start back on Tuesday. We sit out all the morning; go for walks; go to Marseilles and Toulon, which is a lovely town, and altogether are very very happy and good and well disposed to the whole world, though I don’t like hearing Dolphin called Vanessa in the public dining room. Modesty is my sin—after all.

Nobody writes to me, except Mary, and her letter is chiefly a quotation from Anatole France in French, with all the accents—I gather that the Raymonds and the Sebastians and Max Beerbohm, Philip Ritchie and Ly Colefax all continue much as usual, but no-one has penetrated the cave where Dolphin lies couched, like some proud sea monster. We sailed round the coast the other day; we motored where a man had just driven over a precipice; then we had coffee in an Inn, and I bought a cake, and then Miss Toogood came, and told us about the blue gum trees in N. Zealand.

A man called Tissamond says he will send me pictures for 10/- in a portfolio on hire.

Is this a good plan?

Yr B.

Leonard sends his love and kisses

xxx

Berg

[]

1547: To Gwen Raverat

April 8th 1925

52 Tavistock Sqre.

Dearest Gwen,

After all, we had to come back a day earlier than we meant, as the hotel became crowded. But we had snuffed up every moment—it was fine incessantly, and I now see why you and Jacques pitched on the borders of that sea. But I was going, inconsistently, to beg you to live in London. Trust me to find you a house. Then I would flirt with your daughters, and talk the sun out of the sky with you. Paris is a hostile brilliant alien city. Nancy Cunard and Hope Mirrlees and myriads of the ineffective English live there, or rather hop from rock to rock. Here we grow slowly and sedately in our own soil. Coming back last night was like stepping into some grave twilit room, very spacious and quiet, with a few lights and the great misty squares, and everything very mute and muffled, and out at elbows.

I cannot think what I was going to write to Jacques about love. I constantly thought of him at Cassis. I thought of him lying among those terraces and vineyards, where it is all so clear cut, and logical and intense, and it struck me that, from not having seen him all these years, I have no difficulty in thinking him still alive. That is what I should like for myself, that there should be no breach, no submission to death, but merely a break in the talk. I liked that uncompromising reality of him: no sentimentality, and no beating about the bush. This is all very ill written, chopped and jerky, when I should like to write even the racketiest letter to Gwen beautifully, but I went out early this morning to see Nessa’s new house [37 Gordon Square], and saw a woman killed by a motor car. This pitches one at once into a region where there is no certainty and one feels somehow, abject and cowed—exalted. I want so much to understand my own feelings about everything, to unravel and re-christen and not go dreaming my time away. Jacques’ death will probably make you, because it will so intensify everything, a very interesting woman to me. But as I said before, I cannot conceive such an experience, not at your age.

I feel that Jacques was thinking a great deal of Rupert at the end. Rupert was a little mythical to me when he died. He was very rude to Nessa once, and Leonard, I think, rather disliked him; in fact Bloomsbury was against him, and he against them. Meanwhile, I had a private version of him which I stuck to when they all cried him down, and shall preserve somewhere infinitely far away—but how these feelings last, how they come over one, oddly, at unexpected moments—based on my week at Grantchester [in 1911], when he was all that could be kind and interesting and substantial and goodhearted (I choose these words without thinking whether they correspond to what he was to you or anybody). He was, I thought, the ablest of all the young men; I did not then think much of his poetry, which he read aloud on the lawn; but I thought he would be Prime Minister, because he had such a gift with people, and such sanity, and force; I remember a weakly pair of lovers meandering in one day, just engaged, very floppy (A. Y. Campbell and his bride who now writes on Shelley). You know how intense and silly or offhand in a self-conscious kind of way the Cambridge young then were about their loves—Rupert simplified them, and broadened them—humanised them—and then he rode off on a bicycle about a railway strike. Jacques says he thinks Rupert’s poetry was poetry. I must read it again. I had come to think it mere barrel organ music, but this refers to the patriotic poems, and perhaps is unfair: but the early ones were all adjectives and contortions—weren’t they? My idea was that he was to be Member of Parliament and edit the Classics, a very powerful, ambitious man, but not a poet. Still all this is no doubt wholly and completely wrong.

This morning to hearten myself, I read Jacques letter about Mrs Dalloway again. I was afraid and indeed half sure, he wouldn’t like it, as I meant to have asked him to let me dedicate to him. When you have time one day, do tell me why you liked it—or anything about it. This is partly author’s vanity and that consuming interest in one’s own work which is not entirely vanity—partly it springs from my own feeling that to be brought before you and Jacques was a tremendous ordeal, at that time, and the impression it made on you would mean more to me that what other people could say of it. But forgive this importunity, I am off for Easter to Rodmell—a place you’ll have to visit. But when are you coming over? I can’t tell you how that 10 days at Cassis has burnt truly upon my mind’s eye the beauty and our happiness, and you and Jacques. Well, I am interrupted by an author, who rings up and says he or she must deliver a manuscript into my own hands. What about Jacques’ autobiography?

This is a scrap—but only in meaning, for it is too long. I am too harried to write a nice letter, and yet I don’t think you mind whether one writes a nice letter or not, so I shall send it. And I will certainly keep up the habit of garrulity, to which Jacques induced me. I never write a word to anybody nowadays—except for him, I don’t think I wrote a letter in 8 weeks.

Tell me about your children.

Does the little creature [Gwen’s daughter] write more poems?

Yours,
V.W.

Sussex

[]

1548: To Lady Colefax

17th April, 1925

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

The Hogarth Press presents its compliments to Lady Colefax, and much regrets to inform her that after trying, for some hours, to interpret the following word

they are unable to do so, and thus cannot follow out Lady Colefax’s wishes. Directly they are informed what the word is, they will send her whatever it may be. The betting is equally divided between Garnet and James. Mrs Woolf denies having anything to do with either. Mrs Woolf much looks forward to seeing Lady Colefax, and the novel [Mrs Dalloway] will be sent when out—next month.

We have the honour to remain, Lady Colefax’s obliged, obedient, and slightly mystified humble servants,

The Hogarth Press

Michael Colefax

[]

1549: To Lady Colefax

April 20th 1925

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

But the Hogarth Press must point out to her Ladyship that the Hogarth Press never did and never will publish any work by the distinguished writer called Garnett; if they did they would only be too pleased to carry out her ladyship’s commands; as it is they can only regret and apologise and suggest that her Ladyship should apply to Messrs Chatto and Windus who publish Mr Garnetts works.

At the same time, Lady Colefax may like to know that Mrs Woolf has won her bet of two and six. She said it was Garnet not James, and guessing what Lady Colefax means is one of presses most enjoyable occupations, let alone the profit to the successful.

Michael Colefax

[]

1550: To Gwen Raverat

1st May [1925]

52 Tavistock Square, [W.C.1]

My dear Gwen,

It comes into my head to write to you, because I ought to be doing so many other things, and have refused to go to the Private View of the Royal Academy to do them; and now sit down and write to you, instead. I wish you didn’t feel dumb: but, I reflect, you’re a square-tipped painter; (and painters fingers are square); and I always connect this with some impermeability. You all live in the depths of the sea; except indeed Jacques, who was half chatterbox, as I am wholly chatterbox. Even now, I’ve so much to say to you, I can’t begin. I wish you had someone to talk to. I wish I could be in reach of you. I believe somehow we should set up communication. You should paint, and I should walk about talking. Now and again you would take the brush from your lips and make some sagacious remark. That is the devil of these deaths—Thoby’s and Jacques: they leave life duller; and that is what one resents. Not the horror of the moment; but the flatness afterwards. But don’t let it—let us polish off that demon. Indeed, my respect and belief in you is such that I can believe you will be a superb character, after my own heart. For, to tell you the truth, I have so little faith in myself, that I glorify some of my friends. Then you’re younger than I am; and I feel bidden to stand in the relation to you of elder and wiser. Did you ever think of that? Do you remember an evening at the Grange, and the poplar trees, and Margaret talking about Pragmatism? It comes back to me, half visually, the lawn and the poplars. What you say about Mrs Dalloway is exactly what I was after. I had a sort of terror that I had inflicted something on you, sending you that book at that moment. I will look at the scenes you mention. It was a subject that I have kept cooling in my mind until I felt I could touch it without bursting into flame all over. You can’t think what a raging furnace it is still to me—madness and doctors and being forced. But let’s change the subject.

Let me have anything you will of Jacques’. I miss him so queerly. It is that obstinate life of his that would never be submissive that I find myself wanting; his hard, truculent mind. And reading his letters again I find he says I knew very little of him really. Tell me more one of these days. I like making him up as I walk about London—now to buy a cup of coffee, now to take tea with Lady Colefax, who interests me, as you would be interested by a shiny cupboard carved with acanthus leaves, to hold whisky—so hard and shiny and bright is she; and collects all the intellects about her, as a parrot picks up beads, without knowing Lord Balfour from Duncan Grant. Now I want to discuss your view, or Rupert’s view of Bloomsbury but have no time. After all, I always wind up, if six people, with no special start except what their wits give them, can so dominate, there must be some reason in it. And what Rupert never allowed for was that half of them were every bit as lacerated and sceptical and unhappy as he was. Where they seem to me to triumph is in having worked out a view of life which was not by any means corrupt or sinister or merely intellectual; rather ascetic and austere indeed; which still holds, and keeps them dining together, and staying together, after 20 years; and no amount of quarrelling or success, or failure has altered this. Now I do think this rather creditable. But tell me, who is Bloomsbury in your mind? Tell me too what you are painting. I like the poems—but how is she being taught? Does she read? They are like a child singing—very pure and lovely.

Is Ka [Arnold-Forster] vain? And what is Eily [Darwin] like? Eily is on my conscience at the moment.

I am going to Cambridge this weekend, and will write to you—tell you what odds and ends I pick up. And do believe that I wish to understand you; I know, one can’t; but it is a genuine thing in my life—your going on alone.

And you must forgive me for all sorts of follies in my letters, my dear Gwen.

V.W.

Sussex

[]

1551: To Vanessa Bell

Tuesday May 5th [1925]

52 Tavistock Square, London, W.C.1

Dearest,

We went off to Cambridge for the week end, so I thought I should not see you at Cambridge, Newnham rather, where I prosecuted my search for the young and lovely, I met Helen Palmer, an old friend of yours—was Helen Lamb: married a schoolmaster; who died, and will always think of you with gratitude. I couldnt say the same of her brothers. Glyn Philpotts has painted an enormous portrait of Kate in grey, which is said to be very subtle, but unfortunately can’t be seen because of the glass catching the light.

I saw an enchanting paralytic man. Also Maynard, not enchanting, rather cross. On Saturday I go to the Greek play with Lydia [Lopokova] and Berta Ruck. The male parrokeet [Clive] came to tea, very glum indeed—why? Isn’t he taking the female [Mary Hutchinson] abroad? I didn’t like to ask. Lytton est amoureux d’Angus je trouve—c’est bien amusant, mais un peu fatigant—toujours il prend les gens du [Hogarth] Press. Dadie [Rylands] and Douglas [Davidson] came in today, much pleased with their rooms. Lytton has been having flu, but paid us 2 visits, and I hope to make Mary jealous. Desmond [MacCarthy] has been having flu in Venice, but returns today. [Raymond] Mortimer has measles in Paris, and has probably infected Nancy’s [Cunard] flat. This is all the news I can think of, and its very good of me to send it. The Star has a whole column about your decorations of the Common R: and says I try to live up to them by being as revolutionary and nonsensical—a very good advertisement.

All your apes kiss you, and Duncan.

B.

Berg

[]

1552: To G. Lowes Dickinson

[9? May 1925]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Goldie, (if I may call you so)

It was extraordinarily nice of you to write to me, and your letter gave me great pleasure. I was very nervous as to what people like you might think, as I have so little education, and I thought that much of that book was great nonsense. However, if you like it, it gives me great encouragement to go on.

Won’t you ever come and see us, if you are in London?

Yours
Virginia Woolf

Sussex

[]

1553: To Desmond MacCarthy

[17 May 1925]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Desmond,

I’m almost through this morning’s batch, so please send along another as soon as you can. Remember your Empire Review article on Conrad. It is panning out very well I think: what I want now is to get an idea of the whole, so as to make my decisions final.

It amuses me enormously to do, and I warrant you it is going to make a fascinating book. A few more on life are desirable. But send a heap of all kinds.

Yr Affte
V.W.

The dinner was great fun last night, but I find Waley a little demure and discreet, and wish you could have juggled your other invitation and come. Are you at Ottoline’s tonight? I’m not. Mrs Dalloway is being sent to the E.R. [Empire Review].

Mrs Michael MacCarthy

[]

1554: To C. P. Sanger

20th May [1925]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Charlie,

It is extremely good of you to write and tell me what you think of Mrs Dalloway and your views interest me enormously. I expect you are right about the lack of sympathy, but in self-defence I must remark that I think the queerness of the method is partly responsible for your feeling this. I think, at least, that at first go off it is much easier to feel the technical qualities of an experiment than to get any emotion from it. I quite agree with what you say about Tchékhov—but then the Russians start with an enormous advantage over us in having no literature behind them, and after all, a very much simpler society to describe.

But these are excuses, and dont do away with the fact that I feel that there is a great deal of truth in your criticism. Indeed, the reason why I inflict these experiments upon you is that I can’t lie down in peace until I have found some way of liberating my sympathies, instead of giving effect to my analytic brain. But the conditions make it very hard for a novelist to do this now—in England at any rate.

But come and see us, and let us argue the question by word of mouth.

Anyhow, your letter gave me great pleasure, and it was very good of you to write it.

Your affte
Virginia Woolf

Daphne Sanger

[]

1555: To Daphne Sanger

[27 May 1925]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Daphne—I wish you would call me Virginia, or I shall have to call you Miss Sanger—

I am as much surprised as you are that you liked Mrs Dalloway, and also very pleased. I expected you to be bored to death.

I never expect anyone to agree with me in liking the books I like, because I rather want novels to depress me, and I don’t much mind whether I like the people in them or not. So I expect the books I write to be depressing and full of horrid monsters. About omnibuses—I suppose if I write it in full it is because “buses” sounds to me like “booses”, and not “busses”—but I will see to it next time. Next time I will write a book all from the inside outwards, and it will be more depressing than ever, and Mr Sanger will tear his hair.

I think your first letter to an author is a great success, and shall count upon one every time I write a book if it is only a shriek of horror.

But you must come and see us. Are you always at the Opera? I hope to go on Friday.

Yours
Virginia Woolf

Daphne Sanger

[]

1556: To V. Sackville-West

Wednesday [27 May 1925]

52 Tavistock Square, London, W.C.1

My dear Vita,

Hah ha! I thought you wouldn’t like Mrs Dalloway.

On the other hand, I thought you might like The Common Reader, and I’m very glad that you do—all the more that its just been conveyed to me that Logan P. Smith thinks it very disappointing. But oh, how one’s friends bewilder one!—partly, I suppose, the result of bringing out two books at the same time. I’m trying to bury my head in the sand, or play a game of racing my novel against my criticism according to the opinions of my friends. Sometimes Mrs D. gets ahead, sometimes the C. R.—

I will certainly come—towards the end of June? Might we perhaps call in for a bed after a walk? We have got into the habit of going for country outings, and perhaps you could tell us a good walk ending at Long Barn. I was amazed at the beauty of Kent, seeing it the other day from the train. I dont want at the moment to meet anyone. In the past 3 days I’ve met Osbert, Sachy and Edith Sitwell, an American, an Indian, Ottoline, Philip and Julian Morrell, a Gathorne Hardy, Desmond, and am to meet a new poetess called Warner tonight, and the Princess Bibesco has rung her bell and summoned me to her bedside.

Why can’t you write? I cant stop writing. I’m ashamed to think how many stories I’ve written this month, and can hardly bear to keep my fingers off a new novel, but swear I won’t start till August. Do chickens pay? Leonard wants to buy up the late poet Shanks’ cottage at Rodmell and run a chicken farm there.

I suppose theres no chance you would dine with us next Wednesday to meet Morgan Forster, who wants to know you.

No; I dont like Geoffrey Scotts book: I’m sure I’m right, though I’ve not finished it.

Please forgive this disjointed letter. I ought to be washing to dine with Miss Warner, but it does please me enormously that you should like The Common Reader

Yours Ever
Virginia Woolf

Berg

[]

1557: To Saxon Sydney-Turner

May 31st [1925]

52 Tavistock Square, [W.C.1]

My dear Saxon,

I don’t see what I am to do about Ann Whiteside’s demise; the Crombies have long been lost to me; but it was a thoughtful act on your part to forward the letter.

I have been to the Walküre, and to Lords: at both places I looked for you in vain. I saw Hearne make 56, by which time we were so cold, we went home. Walküre completely triumphed, I thought; except for some boredom—I can’t ever enjoy those long arguments in music—when it is obviously mere conversation upon business matters between Wotan and Brunhilde: however, the rest was superb. The fire is terrible: I saw at once that it was made of red silk, and that used to be done quite satisfactorily. Also I missed the ride of the horses. Still, when all is said, we were completely exhausted, and had to go to bed early last night to recover.

I daresay you are out walking somewhere, and we are going to see the Bird Sanctuary this afternoon, which I hear is the one place which birds abhor, as they burn weeds there. But our main object is to get a little air.

Do you think there is any sense in my remarks on Greek in the Common Reader? What about you great grandfather’s memoir? We have a little memoir of Angus’s great great grandmother. Perhaps, joined together, they might make one book.

Leonard is in a great state of fuss about a certain meeting which I dare not name even on a sheet directly to be consumed by the flames. You know what a price all A——s set on secrecy: well, Sir Fred Pollocks secretary rang me up to ask what were the aims and objects of the C——d C——e S——y in order that he might compose Sir Fred’s speech at same. The infamy of this almost made me faint. I shall not be there, but hope to see you in less august surroundings soon.

I saw Barbara’s [Bagenal] child last Sunday, and named her straight off without warning. I never saw such a complete balance between Nick and Barbara. I walked over [to Charleston] from Rodmell, and had the misfortune to lose a good many of my underclothes on the top of the downs. Marjorie [Strachey] was reading an Arabic grammar in the drawing room,—which all seemed very familiar.

I’m glad you got more pleasure from Mrs D than from Js R [Jacob’s Room]. I enjoyed the writing of it much better.

No more news.

Yours
V.W.

Sussex

[]

1558: To Ethel Sands

May 31st [1925]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.

My dear Ethel,

It was a great pleasure to get your letter, not so much for its news, as for making me think that you’re not a heartless siren, who dives into the depths of the sea, and forgets all her human friends, till she rises up again about October the 10th.

You are greatly missed. The hostesses of Chelsea are all singing their loudest, but I miss the peculiar melody of Ethel’s hostessry. Ottoline turned up two nights ago, and I was rather overcome by her ravaged beauty, and desperation, and humility. Not a single party has Julian [Morrell] been asked to, though they put a notice in the Morning Post. The truth is that Julian can’t cut a dash in London; she is a little thick and stumpy countrified, and likes simple talk about dogs better than anything. But Leonard liked her.

I have seen too many people lately, and cant stop writing stories all the time. I admit that writing stories and publishing books are difficult to combine. I get so worried by all the old gentlemen telling me I’m a born critic and not a novelist, and all the young gentlemen telling me I’m a born novelist and not a critic. However, we are making some money this time, which is great fun, and if the Common Reader and Mrs Dalloway keep it up, we are going to build a W.C. and a bathroom at Rodmell, and then you’ll have to come and stay with us.

Clive is away, and it is said that the squares of Bloomsbury are so quiet you can hear a pin drop. It is also said that he was seen in the company of a lady—which is thought not improbable; but does her name begin with an M or a J? That is the question. Nessa says it don’t matter which. But Nessa and Duncan are too august and austere, and as for Roger, his manners are so unaccommodating, indeed he’s grown so surly and incorruptible, biting aristocrats at sight, that I can only have him here with the greatest precautions. He was utterly disillusioned in Paris by meeting the Princesse Marthe, and realising that her blood is blue, he at once perceived that she is also the silliest, foolishest, vulgarest of women, and her friends mere boobies.

Life must be very simple for painters. There’s Sibyl Colefax pining for one real Bloomsbury party—she thinks we eat off the floor and spit into large pots of common bedroom china. Well, I can’t get a single friend of mine to meet her; no painter at any rate; because they know, a thousand miles off, that she is tainted, tarred, corrupt, or whatever they call it. But I like a little high meat—in proof of which, I have to go and see Elizabeth Bibesco who is in a nursing home, having had the organ of her passions removed, so Ottoline says, and I am to be the bait they try her with. Having dropped Philip Ritchie, will she bite at me?

I dont know your address [Auppegard, near Dieppe]. Send me a picture post-card so that I may imagine your house.

Yours affect
V.W.

Wendy Baron

[]

1559: To Lady Colefax

Tuesday [May? 1925]

52 Tavistock Sq., [W.C.1]

My dear Sibyl,

I have actually made out every word of your letter, an author’s vanity, I suppose, lending me a kind of inspiration. I did not expect you to read the masses of me which have been coming out. But your courage and kindness are equal to anything. Perhaps that is why I am far more terrified of you than you are of me. I shake whenever I think I see you far off at a concert.

Leonard hopes to come to your party—if I can get away from a dinner, I do too, but don’t expect anything but shakes and shivers and tremors from your obliged obedient devoted humble servant

Virginia Woolf

Michael Colefax

[]

1560: To Gerald Brenan

[14 June 1925]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Gerald,

It was very good of you to write. But I shan’t answer your criticisms (and I daresay you don’t want me to) because at the moment I can only pit them against other peoples’ criticisms, and cannot make them refer to Mrs Dalloway itself. This is partly, I suppose, that I have just had a long talk with Roger, and he gave me an entirely different view of Mrs D from yours—in fact I think you and he contradict each other on practically every point of importance (the two I now remember being Septimus: to him the most essential part of Mrs D: And this I certainly did mean—that Septimus and Mrs Dalloway should be entirely dependent upon each other—if as you say he “has no function in the book” then of course it is a failure. And fate—no book to him more full of fate). Meanwhile, as I finished it 8 months ago, and am now at work on something different [To the Lighthouse], I feel very far away, and as if I saw you and Roger turning a little wax model this way and that—something that I have, at the moment, very little connection with.

Perhaps it is this lack of criticism, or rather the fact that I affect different people so differently, that makes it so difficult for me to write a good book. I always feel that nobody, except perhaps Morgan Forster, lays hold of the thing I have done: they meet in conflict up in the air; and so I have to create the whole thing afresh for myself each time. Probably all writers now are in the same boat. It is the penalty we pay for breaking with tradition, and the solitude makes the writing more exciting though the being read less so. One ought to sink to the bottom of the sea, probably, and live alone with ones words. But this is not quite sincere, for it is a great stimulus to be discussed and praised and blamed; I shall keep your letter and read it very carefully in a few months time. At the moment, I am letting the different opinions (here are two letters, from highly intelligent people—one [from Lytton] to say that Mrs D herself is a failure, the whole interest centering in Septimus and Rezia—another [from Sanger] imploring me to write more like Tchekhov, and lamenting the fact that I “contemplate the lives of the idle rich”)—I say, I am letting these opinions accumulate, and then, when all is quiet, I shall creep out of my hole, and piece them together.

I’m out of temper and in disgrace tonight, having gone to Ottolines and spent the evening talking to Mrs Anrep, because I like talking to Mrs Anrep, and now Ottoline accuses me of spoiling her evening because I ought to have talked to 20 brilliant young men, who bore me to death; but one can’t rend Ottoline, any more than stab a pillow to the heart—So I must suppress my rage. But Mrs Anrep is worth 20 dozen Philip Ritchies, W. J. Turners, and Kitchins into the bargain; thats my opinion. She has lovely eyes and womanly hands. What odd things one likes people for! But I find I can’t be bothered any longer to like the people I ought to like.

Come and see us when you’re back. And how do you lodge with a Jewess on the Wiltshire downs? Are you getting on? I find it almost impossible to concentrate in this weather: my mind feels like a large balloon, which goes floating away, and though I’ve 2 books in my head, I cannot write more than 20 words a morning. How many words do you write?

Put this letter, where it deserves to be, in Mrs Levey’s earth closet; I would not send it, if I could write a better, but it is not possible, not in this perfectly divine heat. I’m reading Waley’s Japanese novel and David Copperfield.

Yours
V.W.

George Lazarus

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1561: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

[14? June 1925]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Ottoline

Yes, I was acutely conscious that I was in disgrace.

But why? Mayn’t I talk to Mrs Anrep? I never see her, and I find her very sympathetic.

We both feel terrified at what you may expect of us in the way of social behaviour,—nevertheless, it will give us great pleasure to dine with you on Wednesday 24th at 8.15.

Then you must tell me what I said that was unkind. I can’t remember a thing.

But do what you will, invent what you will, expect what you will, exact what you will, never, never, will you quarrel

with
your
devoted
humble
admirer
and
disciple
Virginia
Micawber
Woolf

Texas

[]

1562: To Violet Dickinson

[23 June 1925]

52 Tavistock Square, London, W.C.1

My Violet,

It was very nice to get one of your scraps—which, by the way, I’m going to publish, bound in white, after your demise.

Don’t go on reading my works. Give it up.

I see you’re hopelessly stuck and it is only the dogged courage of your race that eggs you on.

One of these days I hope to see you again; and then we can discuss George [Duckworth], better than on paper.

Your Sp:

L’s love.

Berg

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1563: To Janet Case

[23 June 1925]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Janet,

I am very glad you like the Common Reader. I was rather nervous lest you should curse my impertinence for writing about Greek [On Not Knowing Greek], when you are quite aware of my complete ignorance. I wonder if you think that I said anything to the point about Greek? I am in a state of complete bewilderment, as everyone seems to prefer either Mrs Dalloway to the C.R. or the other way about, and implore me to write only novels or only criticism, and I want to do both.

I look forward to Wednesday, when we communicate via the Manchester Guardian. I can’t think how you write with such authority about every kind of plant, considering you’re a mere Cockney. But I enjoy it very much, and wish it were 2 or 3 inches longer. Are you trustworthy?

I’m sorry about your League of Nations review. The book is selling in quantities, for some reason, and we expect to make our fortunes.

Everybody in London is going to hear Pirandello, and I have actually stumbled through a play in Italian. Everybody is giving parties, and Leonard and I have to dine with Ottoline tomorrow, which makes him melancholy mad. I am beginning to look forward to 2 months at Rodmell, when I shall hope to get a letter from you.

Give my love to Emphie [Janet’s sister], and beg her not to forget me, though I agree that trees are better than people.

That is your philosophy isn’t it?

Yours affte
V.W.

Sussex

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1564: To Ralph Partridge

[29 June 1925]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Ralph,

I could not catch you the other night to ask you to send me a list of your terms for binding books. I want some done—so please send this. Would you ask Lytton to be so good as to tell me what is the best edition of Madame de Sévigné? Also give my love to Carrington and come and see the poor old Wolves some day.

Yours ever
V.W.

Frances Partridge

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1565: To Edward Sackville West

Sunday [5 July 1925]

52 Tavistock Square, London, W.C.1

Dear Mr Sackville West,

We should like it so much if you could dine with us at 7.45 on Tuesday 14th.

Of course, we don’t dress. I have a book of yours The Inheritance, which I read now and then with great pleasure, but will return honestly if you come.

Yours sincreely
Virginia Woolf

Berg

[]

1566: To H. G. Leach

5th July, 1925

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Mr Leach,

I am just finishing a story of about three thousand words, and should be glad for the Forum to have it as you suggest.

Perhaps you would let me know what fee you propose to pay, and I will let you have an answer without delay.

My address, as you will see, is now as above.

Yours sincerely,
Virginia Woolf (Mrs Woolf)

Harvard University Library

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1567: To J. D. Hayward

18th July 1925

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Mr Hayward,

When we saw you at Cambridge you said something about a book—Restoration, I think—which deserved reprinting. We are very anxious to try something of the kind, and I wondered whether you would like to consider doing it. What we should like would be something fairly short, which did not mean a great deal of work, so that the risk for everyone would be small. Forgive me for being so vague and troubling you perhaps unnecessarily.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

King’s

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1568: To George Rylands

Monday [20 July 1925]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Dadie,

Of course it will give me enormous pleasure to have your poem dedicated to me, and Old Woolf himself can find no objection to it. So we shall do it.

But I think you are exaggerating—our kindness, and so on. Didn’t we shut you up in the basement with the passionate Higgs? Aren’t you one of the people we both like best, and don’t we look forward to seeing you eminent, beloved and triumphant? Of course we do, and if I weren’t overcome by that bashful timidity which is a mark of my nature (and one of the reasons why I’m such a nice woman in spite of all you can say to the contrary) I should fling my arms round you and tell you so. Yes; it gives me enormous pleasure.

[Bernadette] Murphy was took ill this morning, and had to be laid on the floor while Angus [Davidson] went for a taxi: Maynard has jumped a pamphlet on us, which has to be printed, reviewed, circulated in one week—10 thousand copies: Ottoline made me dizzy last night with her scent and so you see I am not capable of writing a letter.

I saw you had got your money renewed. I don’t feel the least doubt that you’ll get your fellowship.

So good bye my dear Dadie, and write to us sometimes; on the late Master’s paper, and I’m very much pleased.

Your affte
V.W.

But I think it is a poem full of promise.

George Rylands

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1569: To Philip Morrell

Monday [27 July 1925]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Philip,

You are very ignorant of authors if you think that praise is ever indifferent to them. Your letter [about Mrs Dalloway] gives me great pleasure and encouragement. I get a good deal of abuse, and sometimes feel so bewildered by what people say that I find it difficult to go on. Now, after your letter (which I think you were very kind to write) I shall start again refreshed.

One thing interests me very much—that you should think yourself the dullest man in the book—I wonder what extraordinary complex this springs from? There is not the least foundation in fact for it. First, my idea of you doesn’t in the least correspond with my idea of Hugh Whitbread or Richard Dalloway: secondly, my friends are quite safe from me, because I cant write about people I am in the habit of seeing, anymore than I can describe places until I have practically forgotten them. It’s not humour; its simply the way my mind works.

There were originals for some of the people in Mrs Dalloway: but very far away—people I last saw 10 years ago and even then, did not know well. Those are the people I like to write about.

But I’m so much interested by this revelation of what you think I think of you that perhaps one of these days I shall be tempted to break my rules and try to do you—

But no—I couldn’t.

By the way, I meant Richard Dalloway to be liked. Hugh Whitbread to be hated. You hate them both I gather.

Anyhow many thanks for writing.

Yours Ever
Virginia Woolf

Texas

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1570: To Edward Sackville West

Tuesday [28 July 1925]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Mr Sackville West,

It is disgraceful of me not to have written before—We have been in a turmoil publishing Maynard Keynes’ pamphlet. But the piano arrived safely, and has already given a 2 hour concert, when one of Angus Davidons’s brothers sang, and it was the greatest success.

I hope to give many more concerts of this kind in the autumn, and we shall consider you our patron. All the thanks are on our side.—which reminds me that Chappell must, of course, send me their bill for tuning, if you would be so good as to tell them to come regularly.

The studio makes a very good concert room—but you must remember to come and hear, when you are in London.

Again many thanks,

Yours ever
Virginia Woolf

Is there any chance that your pamphlet will be ready about the end of August?

Don’t bother to answer if there is none; but I hope there may be.

Berg

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Letters 1571-1601 (August–November 1925)

1571: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

[August 1925]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dearest Ottoline,

I’m so sorry about Monday, but we have promised to spend the day at Bexhill with Leonard’s mother, who is only there for a few days, and as we don’t often go would be hurt, I’m afraid, if we put her off.

But you wont miss much—I should be ashamed to set you down to the eternal gooseberries and water which our local lady produces. However, I wish it could have been differently arranged.

Excuse scrawling—the post is just off.

Your
V.W.

I’ve not heard a thing from Vanessa—

Charleston
Firle
is the address: but she may be at Seend.

Texas

[]

1572: To V. Sackville-West

Monday [24 August 1925]

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

My dear Vita,

How nice it would be to get a letter from you!

But then you don’t write letters unasked.

So I will put my plea before you that I’m in bed, and its raining, and Leonard’s in London; Will that do it?

We went to a great birthday and bridal party at Charleston the other day. The noise and heat were such that I could do nothing but fall prostate to the floor in a faint, and have been in bed ever since, with a headache—But not as bad as sciatica, I daresay.

I have a perfectly romantic and no doubt untrue vision of you in my mind—stamping out the hops in a great vat in Kent—stark naked, brown as a satyr, and very beautiful. Don’t tell me this is all illusion. We came away from London so parched and cynical that all we wanted was to sit in the damp and observe insects. Naturally, this being so, telegrams pursued us, and the Morrells would have been on us, Ottoline and Philip, demanding beds, and weaving the whole smoke cloud over us again, had it not been for some valiant lying on my part. One can’t tell the Truth to Ottoline. She found it out,—as indeed a babe in arms could; but showed it. Now dont you, as a born aristocrat (which is said to annoy) call this damned bad manners? I do. So we are under a ban. If I say that I have to meet my mother in law in Bexhill, you ought to believe it. Still—no doubt this bores you.

Otherwise, what has happened, and at what stage did we last meet? At the Morrells, I believe, and broke off wedged in the midst of a terrific argument which someone, a week later, told me seemed to him one of the most exciting he had ever heard. But who? Everything is now obscure.

I am weighed down by innumerable manuscripts. Edith Sitwell; 20 dozen poets; one man on birth control; another on religion in Leeds; and the whole of Gertrude Stein, which I flutter with the tips of my little fingers, but dont open. I think her dodge is to repeat the same word 100 times over in different connections, until at last you feel the force of it.

But please tell me about your poem [The Land]. Are you writing it? Is it very beautiful? I rather think I shall like it: but I am very old fashioned in my poetry, and like reading Crabbe. What I wish is that you would deal seriously with facts. I dont want anymore accurate descriptions of buttercups, and how they’re polished on one side and not on the other. What I want is the habits of earthworms; the diet given in the workhouse: anything exact about a matter of fact—milk, for instance—the hours of cooling, milking etc. From that, proceed to sunsets and transparent leaves and all the rest, which, with my mind rooted upon facts, I shall then embrace with tremendous joy. Do you think there is any truth in this? Now, as you were once a farmer, surely it is all in your head ready. Tennyson, you see, was never a farmer: Crabbe was a parson, which does as well. But I must stop. I shall get up tomorrow; and be quite well next day I hope. How is sciatica?

Your joke made me roar.

Yr VW.

Berg

[]

1573: To V. Sackville-West

Tuesday [1 September 1925]

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

My dear Vita,

How nice it would be to get another letter from you—still better, to see you. I haven’t suggested it since the headache has been an awful nuisance this time, and I have had another week in bed. Now, however, even Leonard admits that I’m better.

My notion is that you may be motoring past and drop in and have tea, dinner, whatever you will, and a little conversation. One day next week? I’m going to be awfully quiet, and don’t dare suggest what I long for—a drive to Amberley [West Sussex]. But when I’m in robust health, as I shall be, could it really be achieved? Ottoline took me motoring one midnight in London; and the effect was stupendous—St Pauls, Tower Bridge, moonlight, river, Ottoline in full dress and paint, white and gaudy as a painted tombstone erect on Tower Bridge in the midst of all the hoppers and bargees coming home drunk on Bank Holiday.

In bed I have been fuming over your assumption that my liking for the poet Crabbe is avowed. I assure you I bought a copy out of my own pocket money before you were weaned. What’s more, I have read Peter Grimes I daresay 6 times in 10 years; “But he has no compassion in his grave”—That is where that comes from. There is also a magnificent description of wind among bulrushes which I will show you if you will come here. But I find to my surprise that Crabbe is almost wholly about people. One test of poetry—do you agree?—is that without saying things, indeed saying the opposite, it conveys things: thus I always think of fens, marshes, shingle, the East Coast, rivers with a few ships, coarse smelling weeds, men in blue jerseys catching crabs, a whole landscape in short, as if I had read it all there: but open Crabbe and there is nothing of the sort. One word of description here and there—that is all. The rest is how Lucy got engaged to Edward Shore. So if your poem [The Land] is as you say all about the woolly aphis, I may come away from it dreaming of the stars and the South Seas. But hurry up, and write it.

Well, you may think my life a complete failure—what with one thing and another. All I say is that if it comes to giving people pleasure (and I’m not here fishing in your stagnant pool for a compliment) I’m sure my printing Mr Palmers poems, as I did this summer, gave him a more intense pleasure than all the Common Readers and Mrs Dalloways I shall ever write gave the rest of the world. And whats the objection to whoring after Todd [Editor of Vogue]? Better whore, I think, than honestly and timidly and coolly and respectably copulate with the Times Lit. Sup.

But you see you must write a long letter.

And don’t go striding above my head in the moonlight, exquisitely beautiful though the vision is.

I must stop: or I would now explain why its all right for me to have visions but you must be exact. I write prose; you poetry. Now poetry being the simpler, cruder, more elementary of the two, furnished also with an adventitious charm, in rhyme and metre, can’t carry beauty as prose can. Very little goes to its head. You will say, define beauty—

But no: I am going to sleep.

Your V.W.

Berg

[]

1574: To Lady Cecil

Sept 1st [1925]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

My dear Nelly,

I’ve copied out your praises, and sent them to Hope Mirrlees, as they will give her such pleasure.

She’s the daughter of a very rich sugar merchant. Her mother was (is, I mean) a Scotch lady—Moncrieff, I think her name was. As a family they are a typical English family, devoted, entirely uncultured, owning motor cars, living in a large house near Cambridge in order to be near Hope when she went to Newnham. She is her own heroine—capricious, exacting, exquisite, very learned, and beautifully dressed. She has a passion for Jane Harrison, the scholar: indeed they practically live together, and go to Paris to learn Russian. Hope knows Russian and Greek like her native tongue.

She took some years to write Madeleine, and it was refused by six or seven publishers. Then she fell into despair; Collins suddenly gave her £50 for it: I was asked to review it, and of course found it an awful burden, and didn’t like the book as much as I should have done, and when my review came out, Hope was very much disappointed: however, we’ve made it up now. That’s about all I know of her—I like her very much, but also find her as indeed I find her writing so full of affectations and precocities, that I lose my temper. But these things are mainly caused by being a spoilt prodigy, and also she has some disease, which is always making her ill. Her brother is a soldier: her sister married to one; and her father gives her motor cars for her birthday. Will you come and meet her when she’s next in London? I imagine that she sees an odd mixture of rich conventional people, and highly sophisticated French poets and scholars. She can never make up her mind which she prefers. She is devoted to her family anyhow.

It was a great pleasure to see you here, and we hope you’ll come again, and spend the night, when we have a bathroom. I have just bought a Greek statue for 2/6.

Yours afft
V.W.

I have written this account of Hope in a hurry, and I daresay not a word of it, save the facts, is true.

Hatfield

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1575: To Janet Case

Tuesday [1 September 1925]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

My dear Janet,

I should have answered you before, but have been rather afflicted with headaches and spending most of my time in bed.

I’m so glad you like the Common Reader. It’s very odd—that and Mrs Dalloway coming out at the same time. Everyone over 40 prefers the C.R: everyone under 40 Mrs D. I find myself torn between the two—my only wish being, as you may remember—to get the maximum of praise for both books. But Mrs D: is at present leading, in praise and sales, (in fact we’re reprinting her) so I’m glad of a good word for C.R.

But dont, I beg of you, father on me that doctrine of yours about the way things are written mattering and not the things: how can you accuse me of believing that? I don’t believe you can possibly separate expression from thought in an imaginative work. The better a thing is expressed, the more completely it is thought. To me, Stevenson is a poor writer, because his thought is poor, and therefore, fidget though he may, his style is obnoxious. And I don’t see how you can enjoy technique apart from the matter—but perhaps I’m misrepresenting you. I don’t see what you mean.

But how difficult criticism is! Not a single word has the same meaning for two people. As for being helped in one’s own work, I have given up all hopes of it. Blame is unpleasant, and praise pleasant, but neither has any bearing on what one is doing—However, as I always maintain, it is the pleasure one has oneself that is the only guide, and that is leading me at present to plan four more books.

Our garden is the envy of Sussex. We have discovered a colchicum, like a little purple tulip, which you plant one week and it comes up the next. Needless to say, this is all Leonard’s doing: he works like a navvy, and also climbs to the top of pear trees like a monkey. Now, wasn’t I right to marry a man like that? I offer my admiration, but am seldom allowed an active part—Really, I don’t believe anything is so lovely as a garden on a hot day. In one’s middle age one says these simple and commonplace things with profound conviction.

Now I’ve got to defend myself from a woman (aged 33) who tells me that I sell my soul by writing criticism, and wishes all my energies devoted forever to writing novels. Oh you readers!

Well, I suppose this is all very egotistical as usual, my books, my garden, my husband. So go and revenge yourself telling me of your books, your garden, your sister.

I don’t believe we shall ever get to the New Forest—it isn’t my fault—it’s Leonards. Once we get into the web at Tavistock Sqre., he has his Labour party,—his Nation, and his great work (which is ever so much more important than any I shall ever write, but then he’s modest, which I never was): and so, though Thomas Hardy has asked us to come and see him (this is a boast) we don’t do it; and I’d rather see Janet, as I hate great men.

However, the penny halfpenny post still remains.

Your aff
V.W.

Sussex

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1576: To Vanessa Bell

Thursday [3 September 1925]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest,

Would you have the great kindness to accept a small commission from me—to wit £1.1.—and do me a design for a chair cushion?

We have got some new dining room chairs, and I find embroidery so soothing to the head that I want to work a cushion while I am here.

The measurements are

(I hope this is plain)

I should like a large mesh, so that I can hope to finish within a lifetime. The chairs are ordinary dark brown.

Design, colour, everything, is left to you—my only desire is that you will be quick, as I want to start.

I am practically recovered. Who do you think descends on us tomorrow—Bruce Richmond [Editor of the TLS] and Elena!

I am frantically trying to look more like a gentleman’s house, but it is impossible.

I shall hope to see you shortly; tell Quentin I shall arrange the walk before he goes.

Yr B.

Berg

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1577: To T. S. Eliot

Sept 3rd [1925]

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

My dear Tom,

I was very glad to see your pencil again—Yes, the country is lovely, and when are you coming to see it? I’ve been spending the last two weeks in bed though—a chill, a headache, and so on, but am practically recovered now, and looking at the evening sky sitting upright. And I wish you were opposite me.

Of course I should think it an honour to figure in your first number (by the way, what’s the name? Criterion Junior—waiting for the demise of Criterion Senior?) but you’ll have to let me know when you want it, and how long, and what is your publication date. I’ve two or three things promised to America during the next months—a story, an article on something like Painting and Writing, and another undecided—but I should have to say soon if you wanted to print here.

I wonder whether you ever cornered the Countess—Is she only a Baroness? and whether she cut up rough, as I suspect. Otherwise, why have you 2 magazines on your shoulders? What a life, to be sure! On the whole, dealing with authors steadily decreases my opinion of the human race. I won’t say who this applies to—not you. Bumpus says we must reprint Waste Land. People worry his life out for copies—so think sometimes, among all your glories and horrors, of that rapacious animal the Hogarth Press.

Really, there are so many things to discuss you’ll have to come here. I can’t begin even in a letter.

Love to Vivien. I’m very glad about the Stoppers. They have changed my life too.

Yrs V.W.

Mrs T. S. Eliot

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1578: To V. Sackville-West

Monday [7 September 1925]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

My dear Vita,

Well, I dont see why you don’t write to me, but perhaps it is my turn, only you are better situated for writing letters than I am. There are two people in your room, whom you can hear talking. There is one dog in my room, and nothing else but books, papers and pillows and glasses of milk and quilts that have fallen off my bed and so on. This has bred in me such a longing to hear what your two people are saying that I must implore you to tell me. Who are they? Elizabeth Bibesco and Geoffrey Scott? John Drinkwater and Rebecca West? The King and Queen? I give it up. Only for me they are brilliant, mysterious, intensely desirable. Tell me who you’ve been seeing; even if I have never heard of them—that will be all the better. I try to invent you for myself, but find I really have only 2 twigs and 3 straws to do it with. I can get the sensation of seeing you—hair, lips, colour, height, even, now and then, the eyes and hands, but I find you going off, to walk in the garden, to play tennis, to dig, to sit smoking and talking, and then I cant invent a thing you say—This proves, what I could write reams about—how little we know anyone, only movements and gestures, nothing connected, continuous, profound. But give me a hint I implore.

It would be better to talk—much better. But I cant talk yet without getting these infernal pains in my head, or astonishingly incongruous dreams. Two dull people come to tea, and I dream of precipices and horrors at night, as if—can they keep horrors and precipices concealed in them, I wonder? Then if you came, I should perhaps dream the other way about—of bumble bees and suet pudding. Read this over, you will see that a compliment is implied.

I’m really better, and only waiting for Leonard to say the word to ask you once more if you can’t come here. “Avowed” should be simple; but has now taken the meaning “protested insincerity”; for me at least, who am, I suppose, grown hoary in sin, and impute meanings to good English words which, I agree, they dont bear. But write to your affectionate villain all the same.

Yr V.W.

What a scrawl! I cannot write at this angle with this pen.

Berg

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1579: To Vanessa Bell

[8 September 1925]

Postcard

[Monk’s House, Rodmell Sussex]

Very well—if you prefer to be an Aunt Mary Fisher or Creeping Jesus I suppose I may offer to pay for wool and canvas?

If so, will you buy both, and transmit.

Creeping Jesus is a good phrase.

No sooner had you gone, than Maynard and Lydia arrived.

VW.

We expect Clive on Friday.

Berg

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1580: To Lytton Strachey

Sept 8th [1925]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

Dearest Lytton,

Do you remember one of Leslie Stephen’s daughters, the younger, I think, called Virginia? She married a chap called Woolf in the Indian, or Ceylon, Civil Service. Well, they write. Indeed she wrote a book, essays and so on; and wants to know if you could help her to correct a misprint or so—that is, if you remember her—a tall girl, she was, rather badly dressed, parted her hair in the middle.

Does this form of address wring your withers? No; But all the same you might tell me what the misprint in the Common Reader was that you snarled out at Leonard once in Gordon Sqre. We hope to reprint, and I’m collecting the more obvious and glaring howlers with which, I’m told, the book pullulates.

I don’t much think we shall see you this summer. But we shan’t be hurt; we shan’t think the better of your taste to hear that you’re at Maynards, but, I repeat, we shall love you all the same—and the beds here are damnably uncomfortable.

I have been spending 10 days there, blasted by dissipation and headache. When I was at my worst, Leonard made me eat an entire cold duck, and, for the first and only time in my life, I was sick! What a hideous and awful experience! And you are sick every Monday, I’m told: after that, we can forgive much.

Find me a house where no one can ever come.

I like talking to you, but to no one else in the whole world.

Your old, rake, and fireside hag,

V.

Strachey Trust

[]

1581: To Vanessa Bell

[September 1925]

Postcard

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

Yes, I’ll come in by the 4.15 and have tea (only who’s going to pay for it?—) I will postpone my visit till the following Sunday, if it suits, as L. thinks the society of C. J. [Creeping Jesus—Vanessa] and her parasites might prove too stimulating

Berg

[]

1582: To V. Sackville-West

Tuesday [15 September 1925]

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

Oh you scandalous ruffian! To come as far as this house and make off! When the Cook came up to me with your letter, and your flowers and your garden, with the story that a lady had stopped a little boy in the village and given him them I was so furious I almost sprang after you in my nightgown. Ten minutes talking wouldn’t have hurt me, and it would have been such fun. As for the garden and the flowers, words fail me: in fact I cant bear writing when I might have been talking. The garden has had a jug of water carefully poured over it. The flowers are in a broken pot. But beware how you give me things—woolwork is my passion. Another present from you, and a tea cosy worked with parrots and tulips will arrive, and what will you do then? No: write to me; or better, come and see me; but I will let Leonard decide. All I insist on is one day before we go back.

Did I write you—I’m afraid I must have—a dismal complaining downtrodden letter? There was no reason for it, only just as one recovers, one always curses—it is a sign of health. Here I am, very comfortable, sitting in the sun in the garden, with your fascinating creation, which reminds me of a Chinese mountain, by my side, and my woolwork, and, as you guess, masses of books. (By the way, why not let me read and criticise your poem? Will you?) This morning the thickest manuscript you ever saw arrived from an inspired grocer’s boy at Islington, who, being inspired, has not had it typed, and says he will give up grocery for literature if we encourage, or even if we dont: but read it, every word, we must: while Miss Somebody, of Nicosia Road Wandsworth writes at the same time to say she divines a human heart in me, and will I tell her how, without insincerity she can so titivate her heroine’s character that it will win popularity with a large number of readers, since she has not a penny in the world, has two or three old mothers to support, and nothing will induce her to give up literature. You must admit that this passion for writing novels in the remoter suburbs is all much to their credit, and worth 20 Mrs Dalloways at least. I’m not fishing for a compliment but you certainly didn’t like Mrs D. when you read her—and small blame to you!

I suppose that spaniel is the dog—may one say bitch?—that I so much respected at Tavistock Square one day.

Leonard says 7 puppies are too many. Leonard is very anxious to get your article. I wish you could explain exactly what they’re doing to the downs at this moment; men, horses, old women—all seem to be creeping and crawling; setting fire to weeds; and indeed by walking to my garden gate and looking over I can see—I long to describe it, but you would be bored, and perhaps one ought to say nothing about these matters, which are so important, but so hopelessly remote from conversation.

Why do you spoil me so with your Chinese mountains?

VW.

Berg

[]

1583: To Roger Fry

Sept. 16th 1925

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex

It must have been a movement, my dear Roger, of that sympathy which in spite of all you can say to the contrary, still unites us that made you write to me, the very same moment, I daresay, that sitting on my lawn I was saying to Leonard, Well, if I wrote to anybody, it would be to Roger (or Crusty, as I call you, to those who, knowing your worth, yet find a certain truth in that description). Now I actually will write to you. Indeed, you would have liked a verbatim report of that conversation on the lawn, for I said you were also about the only person in the world I wished to see. I’ve been spending practically all the time here comatose with headaches. Cant write (with a whole novel in my head too—its damnable) can only read oceans and floods of trash: and would like a good gossip with you better than anything. However, I am much better, and only swear to forego aristocratic society in future; which I’m sure is my undoing. Its being stupid thats so tiring—not being clever: trying to see whats to be said for Lady Colefax, and gently unthreading the intricacies of that corrupt and tangled mass, Ottoline’s soul. Crusty never tries any of these things, so its no good appealing to him for sympathy.

Your discussions on the novel sound fascinating and incredible—incredible here, I mean, where the whole thing would turn into a summer school, and politics and virtue and plain living and ideals and female ugliness and male stalwartness of the most depressing type would inevitably creep in. (By the way, of course we will do Maurois as a pamphlet if we can get hold of him). But then—however, you know my arguments in favour of English literature at any rate, and English eccentricity and quality—of which by the way, you’re a prime specimen yourself, for there’s no one I think of with greater relish than of you, deny it as you may. For example who but you would sit up in the corner of an express train and translate mediaeval French with such vitality? I think they’re very good judging without the originals. Anyhow they have colour and character—how do you do it, in a train or at a table, I can’t conceive. It makes me return to my old charge—that you must write more, and about literature. Let the idea simmer in your brain: one morning you’ll toss it over, a perfect omelette. Think of the long dusky dampish evenings at Dalmeney, with the lumbago on you, and one colour much the same as another: however, I shall be at hand then, and I consider it one of my functions, as they say, to be a gadfly in your flanks. I will have a book out of you for next autumn season.

This reminds me—if you are in Paris, please ferret out some little man who sells printing paper. All the new French reprints are on a yellowish thinnish paper which is said to be immensely cheaper than anything English. We are making an effort to cut down our prices: and they all centre upon paper. We are lying crushed under an immense manuscript of Gertrude Stein’s. I cannot brisk myself up to deal with it—whether her contortions are genuine and fruitful, or only such spasms as we might all go through in sheer impatience at having to deal with English prose. Edith Sitwell says she’s gigantic, (meaning not the flesh but the spirit). For my own part I wish we could skip a generation—skip Edith and Gertrude and Tom and Joyce and Virginia and come out in the open again, when everything has been restarted, and runs full tilt, instead of trickling and teasing in this irritating way. I think its bad for the character too, to live in a bye stream, and have to consort with eccentricities—witness our poor Tom, who is behaving (I can’t go into details—I don’t suppose you need them) more like an infuriated hen, or an old maid who has been kissed by the butler than ever.

When you withdraw into these altitudes of yours, Cassis, I mean heat and light and colour and real sea and real sky and real food instead of the wishywashy watery brash we get here—then you become exalted above gossip. You don’t want human beings. It’s one of your peculiarities. (Do you perceive that I’m writing a character of you?—I must put you into a book one of these days). That is why you painters are, as a rule, such exemplary characters; why calm and well being exhale from you. Certainly this is true of Bell and Grant: I never saw two people humming with heat and happiness like sunflowers on a hot day more than those two. But you have a dash of the dragon fly about you.

As for my gossip I haven’t any—except that I have beat off a most persistent attack on the part of Ott. and Philip, who proposed to stay here, and if not stay, then feed here, at which my spirit sank so low that I furbished up the feeblest lie—about going to Bexhill—and was seen through by Ott: who replied with the dismal frigidity of a funeral horse—so that’s the end of that.

However, I must stop. Not that I haven’t millions of things to say; but you must write another letter. That’s decided.

Give my love to Miss Toogood, the Howards and Miss Robinson: they were at Cassis in April: but I’m sure they’re at Cassis in September. Miss Toogood is an Australian who writes novels: Mr Howard is an archaeologist. Miss Toogood has stuck in the last chapter.

Leonard has not yet read your sonnets, but will.

Yrs ever V.W.

Sussex

[]

1584: To Vanessa Bell

Thursday [17 September 1925]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest Dolph:

A thousand thanks for the various objects which I am fascinated by. However, my disabilities as a needlewoman are such that I shall never do you credit. I can’t tear myself from it and am in the heart of the Rose at the moment. I came back to find a stout budget from Roger, who had been stricken at dawn in a French train with the desire to translate obscure mediaeval French poetry, and had of course reeled off about 10 difficult sonnets into perfect English: also a budget from Saxon who thought I might like to know that he was reading Frontinus’ De Legibus in a Café in Vichy where, he made bold to say, Frontinus had never been read before—And then we claim to be normal human beings! Anyhow Dolphin is the bell wether of the eccentrics—never did I see such a sight as Dolphin in a needlework shop trying to conceal her picture under the counter which promptly fell flat on the floor to the horror of ten spinster women buying post cards.

Tell Clive—this won’t interest you—that a lady in a large blue motor car stopped a small boy in Rodmell village two days ago, and gave him a large bunch of roses, an earthenware pan containing several rocks and small alpine plants, and a letter, telling him to give them to Mrs Woolf with her love, and then drove off—This was our (Clive’s and my) Vita.

Leonard is coming to see you. I am kept very short of pleasures still, but submit, like the sweet hearted innocent I am. Tell Angus: that I’m in daily touch with Doris [Daglish] of Nicosia Road Wandsworth, and find it a clammy proceeding. She perspires—she is without charm.

Tell Duncan I wish to God he would come and see me.

VW.

Berg

[]

1585: To Janet Case

Friday [18 September 1925]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

No, my dear Janet, it can’t be done. I see your kindly wish to praise me; but it won’t do, what you say, in the least. I can assure you, being an expert on these matters, that you can’t get any pleasure—not real pleasure, worth having—from things being pulled off, and technique being clever, and words magical, and all so beautiful—that’s precisely my point about Stevenson. One can always separate his technique from his matter, and the pleasure is so thin that I, for one, can’t read a single thing of his (except some of the poems perhaps) a second time. But try Lamb. I defy you to say of him what you say of Mrs D.—its all perfectly shallow and uninteresting and unreal in matter but its so lovely and clever and dashing and brilliant in style that one cant help reading every word. I assure you, not one of his essays, which are, of course, technically perfect, can be split into two like that. The difference is really rather an interesting and important one I think. I have to lecture a girls school on it—that is, on the right way of reading novels—so that is why I am cheerfully sacrificing Mrs D. to higher objects—your complete rout and reversal—you admit I’ve done it. But you’re extremely kind—I don’t deny that.

I am still a good deal bothered with the infernal headache, so have to think about writing, instead of writing, and find all these problems awfully difficult. What is form? What is character? What is a novel? Think them out for me. The truth is of course that no one for 100 years has given a thought to novels, as they have done to poetry: and now we wake up, suffocated, to find ourselves completely in the dark. But its an interesting age, you’ll admit. Only, for a novelist, confusing. I don’t think you settle the matter by labelling the elderly Victorians and the young Georgians. This all proves that I must come to the spare room and sit up till dawn arguing. Love to Emphie.

Yrs V.W.

Sussex

[]

1586: To Saxon Sydney-Turner

20th Sept [1925]

Monk’s House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

My dear Saxon,

None of your friends has ever shown greater proof of devotion than I, in writing this.

Writing has become a frivolity and a weariness—indeed, for 5 weeks I have lain like a log, chiefly in bed, and when out, unvisited by ideas—except that it is hot (more likely cold) cloudy, likely to blow a gale, and so on.

I am now however moved by your cheque, and that picture of you reading Frontinus at Table d’hôte which you knew I should like, to write, if only one page.

Nothing can be said to have happened—a visit from Clive, very portly and prosperous, a visit from Lydia, who rode a bicycle against Maynard’s wish, and so very rightly fell off and cut her knee, a visit from Angus: but nothing said half so clever, I daresay, as what you said to Wittgenstein—the fame of that interview has gone round the world. How you talked without ceasing, some say in an obscure Austrian dialect, of the soul, and matter, till W. was moved to offer himself to you as bootboy at Hogarth House, in order to hear you still talk. I have always been one of those who maintained that the flowering of the aloe, once in a hundred years, was worth waiting for. I have compared it to snow falling by moonlight. The extreme rarity, I have said, of the loveliest things is part of their charm. And this had reference to you.

But then, too, I have always liked the frozen water and the closed buds. In fact, if I had to write an obituary of any of my friends, for sheer pleasure give me, either yours or Rogers, I don’t know which. This refers to the fact that by the same post as your letter, Roger wrote saying how he was sitting up in a railway carriage as dawn broke over the Pyrenees translating Ronsard. A pair of you! I like to think of the wilderness of France salted with such as you.

Of other news (this must count as news, and I daresay, except when you are shaving you never give yourself a thought—it is in my brain that you chiefly live—a terrible and indeed overwhelming thought, considering how very crack brained I am, and how easily the image may be shivered)—except for news of you and Roger I have little. Bunny I see has brought out a book about a prize fighter and a negress: but—You may interpret that to mean that I have my doubts. You will say I am jealous; hypercritical, ungenerous: I reply, no, I am willing to be pleased, but doubt, I think, his brain power. What I mean is, the train is laid, carefully, conscientiously, for satire: and then, the brain fails, and the train remains—but I mean pattern, design, story, rather, laid as carefully as ever: I am growing old, and want more mustard to my meat.

Talking of the aged, Lytton is said to come this way, to Maynard, I think, tomorrow. I daresay I shall see him, and we shall fall into disagreement, but amicably, about everything under the sun; love, and beauty, and prose, and poetry. Then we shall disintegrate happily in mere gossip, of an entirely frivolous nature: you, for example.

We go back in 10 days or so. What a miracle I am! I have written 4 pages in little over 15 minutes. The bells are ringing for harvest festival; it simply pours, which I can’t help admiring—so my dear Dr Johnson would have behaved if silly donkeys offered him vegetable marrows and purple asters after a summer like this. Leonard has just ridden off to take train to London. Grizzle is asleep in his chair. I think that is probably a rat in the wainscot—I dont know, as you would say, it may be a mouse. Come and see us and don’t forget—I have no room to say what.

Yr V.W.

I wrote this 10 days ago, and it got put away. So now I daresay you’re at Hogarth again. We are in London. (2nd Oct)

Sussex

[]

1587: To Vanessa Bell

Wednesday [23 September 1925]

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

I enclose the only one of L’s signatures I can find.

But if you want his full name, I daresay I could get it.

I am sending you a book by a brother brush by the way, for the sake of the pictures—never return it. The Keynes’ are back, entirely rigged out in Russian shirts, boots, hats etc and are on us this afternoon. Tilton is too near.

If you and Duncan were to come over, of course we should be delighted, but I dont expect you can.

Oh thanks for the Venison—delicious.

Its awful to be going back so soon.

I’ve bought a lot more wools, and work hard, but not hopefully.

Berg

[]

1588: To V. Sackville-West

Wednesday [23 September 1925]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

My dear Vita,

Do keep it up—your belief that I achieve things. I assure you, I have need of all your illusions after 6 weeks of lying in bed, drinking milk, now and then turning over and answering a letter. We go back on Friday; what have I achieved? Nothing. Hardly a word written, masses of complete trash read, you not seen, but what was the good of asking you to come for half an hour, and then being furious to see you go? The blessed headache goes—I catch a cold or argue violently and it comes back. But now it has gone longer than ever before, so if I can resist the delights of chatter, I shall be robust for ever. But what I was going to say was to beg for more illusions. I can assure you, if you’ll make me up, I’ll make you.

The grocer had to go back—What a weight I found him to carry to the post! Inconceivable trash—conceive a boy, after ladling sugar and rice all day, sitting down to copy out in a firm beautiful hand, with large black capitals, 600 pages of moonshine raptures about the violet lids of ladies, and Lord Eustace in a motor car! The Lady at Wandsworth [Doris Daglish] says she must see me; has no money: feels the romance of virginity in her bones: So I’ve told her to write it out of them in her own proper name—Why these cloaks and disguises? The idea had never struck her that her one novel, with ten different names, is all about herself. She thinks the idea bold and fascinating. So do I. There is an odd mixture of desperation and futility about her, but she’ll come, and spend an hour, and oh how I shall squirm at the end of the line! But then, you see, providence has so arranged it that other peoples lives—I’m thinking of yours not hers—are romantic; and so by creating and being created one swims along, never knowing the truth about anything. It is providence after all—that you should have illusions I mean.

This is miserable scribbling, the effervescence of idleness. (I’m waiting for luncheon) but I shall rouse up in London. However, I’m going to live the life of a badger, nocturnal, secretive, no dinings out, or gallivantings, but alone in my burrow at the back. And you will come and see me there—please say you will: if you’re in London, let me know. A little quiet talk in the basement—what fun! And then I’m going this winter to have one great gala night a month: The studio will be candle lit, rows of pink, green, and blue candles, and a long table laid with jugs of chocolate and buns. Everybody will be discharged into this room, unmixed, undressed, unpowdered. You will emerge like a lighthouse, fitful, sudden, remote (Now that is rather like you) This way of seeing people might be gigantically successful, and then your cousin [Eddy] has lent me his piano, and I intend to break up the horror of human intercourse with music. It struck me on my snails walk to the river this afternoon (I have now had tea and lit the fire, unsuccessfully) that the fear and shock and torture of meeting one’s kind come from the conditions—being clasped to each other unmitigatedly, on a sofa—pure, neat, entire (I cant think of the word I want). Now if we could be dispersed a little—could we visit St Pauls, or the Tower or Ken Wood, where the scenery or the noble buildings would intervene between us, then we should sail gradually and calmly into latitudes of intimacy which in drawing rooms are never reached. Do you agree? Every Wednesday I shall take a trip in an omnibus with someone to mitigate the shock of human intercourse.

But I was going to write about Hamlet, which I read last night, but have no time. What a bore! Directly one begins a letter one has to stop. I was going to say, too, something so interesting. But, anyhow, when is your poem coming? Now I feel afraid of having asked for it, as I cannot criticise poetry, only buzz outside like an old intoxicated frantic bee: whereas you go about your business calmly within. How I envy you!

By the way, the great excitement of my life, responsibility, and in a sense burden, because Leonard is furiously jealous, is your garden. The cook shouts “Oh ma’am, a crocus is coming up”. Then “A mouse has nibbled the crocus, ma’am!” I spring up, accuse Leonard; find its a false alarm. But you have complicated my relations for life.

Your
V.W.

Berg

[]

1589: To V. Sackville-West

Sunday [September 1925?]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

My dear Vita,

For a famous novelist, I don’t think you show much acumen in dealing with the awful situation of Friday.

I may state categorically in your own alphabetical system that

(a) neither of the Wolves suspected you for a moment of wishing to put them off

(b) far from being officious, they thought the offer the natural instinct of a generous heart which

(c) they would certainly have accepted if
(1) it had been a fine day
(2) or Mr Woolf had been unable to go by train.

In conclusion I’m afraid you must think (1) me an appalling vile valetudianian [sic], (2) Leonard an awful fuss. But the truth is that (3) headaches can be the devil, so that (4) Mr Woolf gets alarmed, loses his head, accepts offers, (5) Mrs Woolf wakes up better, (6) he repents of dragging Vita out, (7) she rings up, (8) Wolves incline to train, (9) Vita obstinate but (10) succumbs—and there you are.

As to going home, I can’t be sure which day, so come to Tavistock instead (I shall be back Tuesday or Wednesday) and (11) dont put me off and (12) many thanks from us both and (13) much affection from Virginia Woolf who thinks (15) Mrs Nicolson one of the nicest women she (16) has ever met.

Do you think this style is clearer than the other? I’m not sure. Anyhow I cannot write a legible word, tonight, and am ever so much better.

yr V.W.

Berg

[]

1590: To Vanessa Bell

Tuesday [29 September 1925]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest Dolph:

We go on Friday, at cockcrow, so come before then if you can.

Leonard saw Lottie yesterday, and Karin does seem to be very bad—in fact it sounds ghastly, but they hope it may improve—She’s had to give up going to America.

As for Lottie Elle est amoureuse de l’homme qui mène les vaches à Thorpe, et il répond passionement. C’est bien ennuyant, mais que voulez-vous? L’Amour est le tout puissant dieu des mortels, et l’homme, qui s’appelle Claud Crisp, est vraiment beau, et habite, avec sa vielle mère, une petite maison bien commode, dans laquelle le grand docteur, William Gull, naquit il y a plusieurs anneés. This is a deadly secret—even about Sir William Gull.

Give my love to old convolvulus bed [Duncan]—what a perfect image of his voluptuous creamy grace that was to be sure—and then the snakes, no thicker than a whip, but deadly. Roger has fallen over a public shelter at Cassis by night and knocked out all his front teeth.

Sussex is becoming nothing but an annexe to Chelsea—we only missed by the skin of our teeth—whom do you think?—Herbert Fisher!

I’m for the Isles of Stornoway [Outer Hebrides].

B.

Berg

[]

1591: To V. Sackville-West

Tuesday [13 October 1925]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Vita,

But for how long?

For ever?

I am filled with envy and despair. Think of seeing Persia—think of never seeing you again.

The Dr has sent me to bed: all writing forbidden. So this is my swan song. But come and see me.

Yr V.W.

Do let me hear. I hope the tooth is better

Berg

[]

1592: To H. G. Leach

Oct 14th 1925

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Mr Leach,

My husband has told me of his talk with you, and I have now had a letter from the Forum office. It is very good of you to ask me to submit another story for your consideration, but I feel that it would only be a waste of your time. The stories I have at present are much in the same style as The New Dress and are open to the same objections. But if at any time I should write anything which appears more likely to suit you, I shall have great pleasure in submitting it. I much regret that illness prevented me from seeing you.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Houghton Library, Harvard University

[]

1593: To V. Sackville-West

Wednesday [14? October 1925]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

I’m hoping to get Leonard to ask you to come and see me tomorrow. Nessa I think comes Friday. It’s frightfully selfish as I’m too stupid to talk. But I should so like it, if it isn’t difficult for you. I’m much better. I had rather sharp pain for two days, and so feel rather done up, but I’ve slept almost all day for 3 days, not thought or read, and there’s nothing to worry about. I’m very comfortable.

The flowers are quite divine. How good you are to me!

Dont come if its the least bother.

Berg

[]

1594: To V. Sackville-West

[26? October 1925]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Vita—only it ought to be all execration—

I asked you to lend me M.B—Now you give him. Very well—I’ll never ask you for so much as the loan of a boot button again.

Nevertheless, your present was perfectly timed—All Friday [23 October] I was sick without stopping (my own fault—I refused to believe the doctor who said it would stop if I ate a mutton chop—when I did I was cured instantly) but by 6 p.m. I was almost extinct with the horror and then your present came: I ate my chop, revived, and read till I fell asleep. Nothing could have suited better. Indeed, I think he’s very good—so demure, so sprightly.

Only your character remains irretrievably damned.

I agree about the horror of one hours talk—3 would be far less tiring, as half an hours writing is more effort than 2.

Still, at present its all I can get. As for coming to you, I should really like it this is the greatest compliment I can pay and it is very good of you to think of it. Only at present I can’t make the Dr. say when I can get up, when go away, or anything.

So may I leave it? Only you must plan independently.

L. likes your poem, and is printing it. I like it—I’ll tell you why, if you can face another hours torture. You did not tire me: it was enchanting: and next time I would arrange for some silence for you—

My love to Harold. Beg him not to drop me when he becomes an Ambassador.

Yr VW.

I hope I didn’t give you your cold—how bloody the body is

Berg

[]

1595: To Gerald Brenan

[4 November 1925]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Gerald,

I won’t deny that your flowers came at the very nick of time, and are showering above me in such beauty that I can’t keep my eyes off them—but still it pains me to see you so extravagant. Please dont ever give me such splendid things again.

I wish I could ask you to come and see me—when we could go into the question of your character at greater length—but I’m kept very low in the matter of visitors at the moment. Perhaps too, you, very reasonably, hate sick visiting. But next week I hope you’ll come, if I can square the doctors.

Meanwhile, as I say, don’t be so fantastically generous any more.

Yrs V.W.

George Lazarus

[]

1596: To V. Sackville-West

Wednesday [early November? 1925]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Vita

This is the only paper I can find. I cannot remember where we had got to: cruelty? I was cruel, you said. I say, no, not cruel, only being ten years (I suppose—b.1882) older than you, thus in another climate altogether, honesty was so important that all my spies had to be forever watching what came in with a view to imposters. I will explain one day.

I am alone, too. Leonard speaking at a meeting, then going to a party, where a poor widow [Gwen Raverat], whose husband died by inches, throughout his youth, of paralysis, is trying to fan a sort of ghastly flame alive again.

She tells me awful things—But no matter: Don’t lets go into death and disillusionment. Aren’t you one of the nicest and magnanimous of women? I think so. “Esteem” is a damned cold word—(yours for me) Still I accept it, like the humble spaniel I am.

We then come to what?—Not much news here. I wish you were in the chair opposite. Yes, I am actually sitting up, after dinner; and no pain.

Yes, I am very fond of you: but the poor spaniel will have its nose rapped if it says anything more.

I have to write a lecture, for school girls: “how should one read a Book?” and this, by a merciful dispensation, seems to me a matter of dazzling importance and breathless excitement.

But I have been trying to prove to Raymond Mortimer that this is not vanity; No; I am not much impressed by what I do; only intoxicated by what is something like your night, your solitude, in which, as I maintain we writers—oh but I cannot find the image. So come and catch it. Its a question of being alone, in writing.

Yr VW.

Berg

[]

1597: To T. S. Eliot

13th Nov: 1925

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Sir,

I am sending my essay tomorrow, Saturday morning, so that I hope it will reach you in time.

I am sorry to have delayed, but I have been working under difficulties.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Mrs T. S. Eliot

[]

1598: To Janet Vaughan

Sunday [15? November 1925]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Janet,

I hope you won’t mind my writing to you. I have thought so much of you, since Madge’s death. She was such a part of our childhood—I cant describe to you what she was like when she used to stay with us at St Ives, and how we worshipped her. I had a long letter from her last summer, which was full of you, and the pleasure you gave her. She seemed so happy with you. She said then she wanted to come and see us in October, but I have been in bed ever since we got back, and so could not suggest anything. But if you ever liked to come and see me, it would be a great pleasure.

But please don’t answer this. It is really selfish to write—but one can’t help it.

Your affte
Virginia Woolf

Dame Janet Vaughan

[]

1599: To V. Sackville-West

Monday [16 November 1925]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Vita,

Its perfectly enchanting and has lasted me two whole days—your picture: the chauffeur, the secretary your mother the night. There are at least 3 novels in it. Send me some more: If only all novels were that—balls of string for one to pull out endlessly at leisure.

I want you to invent a name by the way which I can use instead of ‘novel’. Thinking it over, I see I cannot, never could, never shall, write a novel. What, then, to call it?

I’ve flashed to the top of Hampstead Heath in a motor car, sat on a bench and seen three fir trees in the fog; flashed back and seen Nancy Cunard, whose father has left her, to be kept perpetually, an entire fox of solid silver. And why dont I see you?

Owing to standing or sitting 3 minutes too long in the Press I am put back into bed—all the blame now falling on the Hogarth Press. But this is nothing very bad—I feel as if a vulture sat on a bough above my head, threatening to descend and peck at my spine, but by blandishments I turn him into a kind red cock.

I am very sorry for you—really—how I should hate Leonard to be in Persia! But then, in all London, you and I alone like being married.

And where’s your poem [The Land]?

Yr VW.

Berg

[]

1600: To Edward Sackville West

[November 1925]

52 Tavistock Square, London, W.C.1

Dear Mr Sackville West

It was very good of you to write.

I am still kept strictly in bed and visitors rationed, but if you should be in London, I hope you will come and see me, only its better to ring up first.

This explains why the piano has remained dumb. I make do with an algraphone, as I can’t get down to my studio.

Your Virginia Woolf.

Are you writing de Quincey?

Berg

[]

1601: To Edward Sackville West

Nov 30th [1925]

52 Tavistock Square, London, W.C.1

Dear Mr Sackville West,

Please send me a line anytime either to me or to Angus Davidson, and the piano will be given up. It has been bad luck that I have not made more use of it; but it was very good of you to lend it.

My plans are very vague at present, but I hope if you are in London there may be a chance of seeing you. The dr. lets me read and write, but is very strict still about the pleasures of society.

Yrs Sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Berg

[]

Letters 1602-1612 (December 25–mid-January 1926)

1602: To V. Sackville-West

Wednesday [9 December 1925]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

My dear Vita,

The dr. says I may go away. Would you like me to come to you for a day or two, if you are alone, before the 20th? I expect this is too late and too difficult; I only suggest it on the off chance, and the understanding that you will say honestly.

Or would after Christmas be better?

I am perfectly well, but they would not say so until last week.

Yours ever,
V.W.

Could you let me have a line, as I have various arrangements to make.

Berg

[]

1603: To V. Sackville-West

Thursday [10 December 1925]

52 Tavistock Sqre, WC

My dear Vita,

That will be enchanting—its awfully good of you.

Would Tuesday afternoon suit you?

Should I stay till Friday or Saturday?

Should Leonard come and fetch me back?

Should you mind if I only brought one dressing gown?

Should I be a nuisance if I had breakfast in bed?

As for your mysteries, I will leave them till I see you, and can investigate at leisure.

But I only put these questions on the understanding that you explain your wishes frankly.

No, I can’t go into the question of Raymond and Syria: but beware—all this romantic travelling soon becomes monstrous absurd. I am jealous.

Yr V.W.

Berg

[]

1604: To V. Sackville-West

Tuesday, Dec. 22nd [1925]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Mrs Nicolson—ah hah!—this is only to say what in the scramble I had not time to say yesterday, that my address is Charleston, Firle, Lewes, till Monday next, and hope for a letter from you. Also that I woke trembling in the night—what at? At the thought that I had been grossly inhospitable about lunch on Sunday. There it was smoking on the table—chicken and apple tart, cream, and coffee: and you, after motoring, spoiling, caring cossetting the Wolf kind for 3 days, sent empty along the pavement. Good God—how the memory of these things bites like serpents in the night! But the bite was assuaged by the pleasures.

I am dashing off to buy a pair of gloves. I am sitting up in bed: I am very very charming; and Vita is a dear old rough coated sheep dog: or alternatively, hung with grapes, pink with pearls, lustrous, candle lit, in the door of a Sevenoaks draper. I’ll ask Nessa whether Saturday or Sunday [at Charleston] and write to Knole. But do not snuff the stinking tallow out of your heart—poor Virginia to wit, and Dog Grizzle (who is scratching under my bed) Now for a Bus down Southampton Row.

Ah, but I like being with Vita.

VW

Berg

[]

1605: To V. Sackville-West

[23 December 1925]

Dictated by Clive

Charleston, Firle, Lewes, [Sussex]

Dearest Vita,

It is the universal wish of the house that you should come, and we hope to see you any time on Saturday morning, to stay to lunch, tea dinner—anything.

I am sorry to say that my dear old friend Crusty Roger [Fry] who has been talking of the Gulf Stream, Rembrandt, instinct, sex in chickens, since Dawn, will not be here. But my sister Fusty Vanessa, whose beauty burns through her rags (dictated by Vanessa) is in great spiritual vigour: oaths and tropes roll and rollick from her lips; she is entirely loveable, cuddlable and delightful. As for my dear (dictated by Virginia) Clive, whose heart is turning to honey, in which the yellow bee blooms, he has provided a stuffed Turkey, lozenged with truffles: he is as ripe as can be; vigorous, virile, virtuous, and now we walk through the clods together talking, first one and then another, of Vita Vita Vita as the new moon rises and the lambs huddle on the downs.

Berg

[]

1606: To Saxon Sydney-Turner

Dec 29th [1925]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Saxon,

Many thanks for the cheque, which I got at Charleston, but could not acknowledge, as my ink gave out, and the house was dry of ink.

We had a very amusing Christmas. Your sweets were appreciated. We drank audit ale. It was very wet—I am glad to be back. I hope you will come and see me. Whats the use of reading my books when you never give tongue to your probably infallible criticism?

Yours
V.W.

Sussex

[]

1607: To V. Sackville-West

Tuesday [5 January 1926]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Yes, my dear Creature, do come tomorrow, as early as possible—I’m threatened with Robert Graves, Mrs R., and Nancy Gottshalk, so come early and we’ll stick stamps or see fish—But I want to know why you were perturbed, and wrote in such a whirl, and what your fire talk was about—oh and crowds of things.

But I’m in a rush—have just taken Grizzle to a vet. in the Grays Inn Rd. and now must dash off—Ah, if you want my love for ever and ever you must break out into spots on your back. And you won’t; for if ever a woman was a lighted candlestick, a glow, an illumination which will cross the desert [to Persia] and leave me—it was Vita: and thats the truth of it: and she has nothing, nor will ever have, in common with dog Grizzle who stands before me, raw, greasy, mudstained—

But, as I say, come early

I can’t form a word

VW.

Berg

[]

1608: To V. Sackville-West

Thursday [7 January 1926]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

This is simply to ask how you are—temperature 101, 102, 103? Feeling very miserable, half asleep, taking a little tea and toast, and then, I daresay, towards evening becoming rather luminous and remote, and irresponsible. All this takes place in a room in the middle of Knole—What takes place in all those galleries and ballrooms, I wonder? And then, what goes on in Vita’s head, lying under her arras somewhere, like a tiny kernel in a vast nut?

Nothing has happened to me: but Leonard is lunching with Tom Eliot, and Nancy (Cunard) who telephoned the moment you left, is coming to tea—oh, and I had an interview with the devastation of all hearts, Stephen Tomlin, who is flying, like Daphne, was it, pursued by his lovers, to a refuge in the outskirts of London, where no one shall follow him, for really he says he is now half crazy: wishing to love, and to give, accepting every invitation, and then finding, what appals him, that people love him in return. I found him rather an interesting object, for one reason in that he resembles me (what other is so attaching?) in this myriad minded innumerable curiosity about others—But, whereas they return his interest, no one returns mine. So he is gone to his retreat. After that—what? I read some of the Tempest, to compare with Defoe. But oh my dear Vita, what a rush of delight and relief it is to read poetry after prose!

So continue your poem: and one day I will explain the torrent of my own emotions about Shakespeare—compared with Defoe. For many years I have not dared to say anything about poetry. These professors hem one down in their hen-coops. What is poetry and so on: their replies to questions have kept me dumb. Shall we write a little book on poetry together? But I must have my luncheon: veal, I think, an orange, and a new kind of cake, made white red and orange; then print: then Nancy. But tell me what you are feeling? Are you aching? And if you were asked, do you like Canute [Vita’s elk-hound], Canute’s wife, or Virginia best, what would you say?

I left a rain coat, a crystal ruler, a diary for the year 1905, a brooch, and a hot water bottle somewhere—Either Long Barn or Charleston—and so contemplate complete nudity by the end of the year.

Yr VW

Berg

[]

1609: To V. Sackville-West

Saturday [9 January 1926]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Isn’t it damned? Here I am in bed with the flu, caught the moment I’d written to you about the delights of fever. Hot and sticky describes it. But what I’m writing about is Tuesday. I hope to be perfectly well, but infection? Shan’t I give it you again? I think you’d better ring up on Tuesday morning. You see, if you came, I should let you in without fail, whatever the risk for you—I do want so much to see you. And it’ll be 5 days by then and so I dont think there can be any risks: its only conscience.

No: I’m not susceptible to the mind: only the body (I think) and Tommie [Stephen Tomlin], tho’ sprightly as an elf, is misshapen as a woodpecker—Whereas Vita—beech trees, waterfalls and cascades of blue black paper—all so cool and fruitful and delicious, especially when one’s got a little temperature. I’m so furious: I was to begin that wretched novel [To the Lighthouse] today, and now bed and tea and toast and the usual insipidity. Oh damn the body.

But it is a great comfort to think of you when I’m not well—I wonder why. Still nicer—better to see you. So I hope for Tuesday.

(I’m not at all bad)

No news of Clive

Yr V.W.

A very nice dumb letter from you this morning. Tell me about the Boy Scouts?

Berg

[]

1610: To V. Sackville-West

Monday [11 January 1926]

52 Tavistock Square, London, W.C.1

I am much better. The Dr. says that I had a rash which may have been German Measles. It went almost at once, and I have had no temp. all day today. She thinks there is no risk of infection now whether it was German Measles or influenza. But if you’ve the least doubt about it, for God’s sake don’t come, for to start the journey with any kind of disease would be madness.

Of course I want you to come: enormously: its only conscience, and you must be extra cautious

Anyhow, I shall be in bed here alone all day tomorrow. If you come, stay as long as you can spare: I feel perfectly well, and I’ll tell you all my views on the entire world: and it would be so nice.

Yr VW.

6 pm. Temp. normal—so thats 24 hours normal now—I think must be all right.

Berg

[]

1611: To V. Sackville-West

Friday [15 January 1926]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Dearest Creature,

I saw Clive yesterday, who says will you and Leonard and I dine with him on Monday at the Ivy? If you cant, (as I fear) come to his rooms as soon as you can—We will come at 10.30, but I suppose I shan’t be allowed to stay late.

Would you write a line (50,000 lines) to me on the matter, and I’ll let him know.

Now, he is a damned good fellow isn’t he? He was as red as a lion and as sweet as honey yesterday, and so raved, with such warmth and emotion, about you, that my heart was touched.* Oddly enough, he bagged one of my phrases for you—said you “glowed”—“a brilliant human being”, “after Mary and Virginia the woman he would miss most”. This brought us to the following petition: that you shall not go back to Persia in the autumn. For it can be proved to cause more pain than pleasure. As a poet you’ll have sucked all that Persia has to give: whats six weeks with Harold to him compared with 4 months without you to us? And so on.

I got up and went out yesterday into the loveliest spectral world, all white, and with one or two lights. Then, round the Square came an eternal procession of funerals (so it seemed) walking, covered with white flowers. Only the burial of a Churchwarden I suppose, but more august than I can say. The Dr says I’m ever so much better than before Christmas. Did I have a thorough rest when I was away? So I said it was Long Barn; Early hours: lack of exciting conversation: Staying with the aristocracy in short. “Ah I see: good food and no mental or physical strain.”

What else is there? I must stop and try to polish oft my lecture [How Should One Read a Book?]; and tomorrow begin the novel, and send my bed back and resume my struggle with the world—Oh and Vita won’t be here next week to adulterate it—you know what I mean—Its a word I can’t find at the moment.

The party went off. Lady [Margot] Oxford was refused admittance by Molly MacCarthy. I like the barbarous incivility and independence of Bloomsbury manners. Mrs Courthauld was also outed. So they kept themselves to themselves; and got tipsy.

Here’s Roger ringing up to ask me to go to the Sargent show: Doris Daglish wanting to see us: “a little work would keep me from using my writing in a degrading way” and so on.

But I’m rather spoilt, and want Vita; and not Roger: and not Doris: and not Mary: and not nobody else.

What time will you come on Monday? dearest Creature?

Now though this has been written, by the glare of the snow, sitting up in bed, in precisely 10 minutes for the cook to post when she goes to buy a dish of meat, it is not a dumb letter. Dogs letters are.

Yr VW.

* He gave me his version of the conversation at Sherclos: [?]

Berg

[]

1612: To V. Sackville-West

Saturday [16 January 1926]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Dearest Creature,

I’m perfectly well again—only made a fuss because I was so damned angry to spoil a day’s writing.

Of course you shall come on Monday—don’t you get through measles?

Call her Vanessa. I’m amused at this advance on her part. Now I’m jealous.

Sales and reviews go on well.

Yr VW.

I do want to see you.

Berg

[]

Letters 1613-1637 (mid-January–mid-May 1926)

1613: To V. Sackville-West

Tuesday, January 26th, 1926

52 Tavistock Sqre, [W.C.1]

Your letter from Trieste came this morning—But why do you think I don’t feel, or that I make phrases? “Lovely phrases” you say which rob things of reality. Just the opposite. Always, always, always I try to say what I feel. Will you then believe that after you went last Tuesday—exactly a week ago—out I went into the slums of Bloomsbury, to find a barrel organ. But it did not make me cheerful. Also I bought the Daily Mail—but the picture is not very helpful. And ever since, nothing important has happened—Somehow its dull and damp. I have been dull; I have missed you. I do miss you. I shall miss you. And if you don’t believe it, your a longeared owl and ass. Lovely phrases?

You were sitting on the floor this time last week, where Grizzle is now. Somehow, as you get further away, I become less able to visualize you; and think of you with backgrounds of camels and pyramids which make me a little shy. Then you will be on board ship: Captains and gold lace: portholes, planks—Then Bombay where I must have had many cousins and uncles. Then Gertrude Bell—Baghdad. But we’ll leave that, and concentrate upon the present. What have I done? Imagine a poor wretch sent back to school. I have been very industrious, no oranges picked off the top of a Christmas tree; no glittering bulbs. For one thing, you must have disorganised my domesticity, so that directly you went, a torrent of duties discharged themselves on top of me: you cant think how many mattresses and blankets new sheets pillowcases, petticoats and dustpans I haven’t had to buy. People say one can run out to Heals and buy a mattress: I tell you it ruins a day; 2 days: 3 days—Every time I get inside a shop all the dust in my soul rises, and how can I write next day? Moreover, somehow my incompetence, and shopkeepers not believing in me, harasses me into a nagging harpy. At last, at last,—but why should I go through it again? I sold 4 mattresses for 16 shillings; and have written I think 20 pages. To tell you the truth, I have been very excited, writing. I have never written so fast [To the Lighthouse]. Give me no illness for a year, 2 years, and I would write 3 novels straight off. It may be illusion, but (here I am rung up: Grizzle barks: settles in again—it is a soft blue evening and the lights are being lit in Southampton Row: I may tell you that when I saw crocuses in the Sqre yesterday, I thought May: Vita.) What was I saying? Oh only that I think I can write now, never before—an illusion which attends me always for 50 pages. But its true I write quick—all in a splash; then feel, thank God, thats over. But one thing—I will not let you make me such an egoist. After all, why don’t we talk about your writing? Why always mine, mine, mine? For this reason, I expect—that after all you’re abundant in so many ways, and I a mere pea tied to a stick.

(Do you see how closely I am writing? That is because I want to say a great many things, yet not to bore you, and I think, if I write very close, Vita won’t see how long this letter is, and she won’t be bored) Have I seen anyone? Yes, a great many people, but by way of business mostly—Oh the grind of the Press has been rather roaring in my ears. So many manuscripts to read, poems to set up, and letters to write, and Doris Daglish to tea—A poor little shifty shabby shuffling housemaid, who ate a hunk of cake, and had the incredible defiance and self confidence which is partly lack of Education; partly what she thinks genius, and I a very respectable vivacious vulgar brain. “But Mrs Woolf, what I want to ask you is—have I in your opinion enough talent to devote my life entirely to literature?” Then it comes out she has an invalid father to keep, and not a halfpenny in the world. Leonard, after an hour of this, advised her, in his most decided voice, to become a Cook. That set her off upon genius and fiction and hope and ambition and sending novels to Tom Eliot and so—and so. Off she went, to Wandsworth; and we are to read her essay on Pope. Raymond I’ve seen: Clive and Mary. Siegfried Sassoon, Dadie and my French widow [Gwen Raverat].

Now Vita’s getting bored in Bombay; but its a bald prosaic place, full of apes and rocks, I think: please tell me; you cant think how, being a clever woman, as we admit, I make every fragment you tell me bloom and blossom in my mind.

As for the people I’ve seen, I’ve fallen in love with none—but thats not exactly my line. Did you guess that? I’m not cold; not a humbug; not weakly; not sentimental. What I am; I want you to tell me. Write, dearest Vita, the letters you make up in the train. I will answer everything.

I’m going to have a little dramatic society—I mean a flashy actress came to see me, who having had her heart blighted, completely, entirely, irretrievably, has most unexpectedly got work, and says will I come and see her behind the scenes—I like the astonishing profusion of these poor creatures—all painted, glittering and unreal; with the minds of penny whistles; all desperate, what with being out of work, or in love: some have illegitimate children; one died on Sunday, and another is ill with typhoid. They think me a grotesque, semi-human gargoyle; screwed up like a devil in a Cathedral; and then we have tea, in some horrid purlieus of Soho, and they think this frightfully exciting—my unscrewing my legs and talking like a book. But it won’t do for long. Its a snobbery of mine to adorn every society except my own.

Now I must finish, for I have to do my lecture for the school at Hayes Common on Saturday. Mary offers to lend me her motor: but no; I wont. I want Vita’s motor; I want to be nicely treated by her; and I shant be.

Couldn’t you write me lots more letters and post them at odd stations as you pass through?

But of course (to return to your letter) I always knew about your standoffishness. Only I said to myself, I insist upon kindness. With this aim in view, I came to Long Barn. Open the top button of your jersey and you will see, nestling inside, a lively squirrel, with the most inquisitive habits, but a dear creature all the same—

Your
Virginia

Are you perfectly well? Tell me.

Berg

[]

1614: To Richard Aldington

Jan 26th 1926

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Mr Aldington,

I am much flattered that you should ask me to write an introduction, but I’m afraid I must refuse. I have so much work on hand that I don’t know when I should find time to do it, and I am entirely ignorant of French 18th century memoirs: in fact I have never read Mme de Stael-Delannay.

Lytton Strachey is in the country, so I am writing him a line. I think if you wrote straight to him it would be best. His address is, Ham Spray House, Hungerford, Berks.

Yours sincerely,
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

1615: To Lytton Strachey

Jan 26th [1926]

52 Tavistock Square W.C.1

Dearest Lytton,

Read the enclosed letter, but don’t blame me for it. I have told Aldington that he may write straight to you. And I don’t want it back—nevertheless you might write to me. I hear of you fascinating rabbits at parties. Also it is said that you are getting up a subscription to give Edmund Gosse gold sleevelinks on his 100th birthday. Poor old Angus has just stopped the rollers with paraffin, and the question, as put by Leonard with some force, is, “Is he a congenital idiot or not.” I say “Congenital certainly.”

I have had chickenpox whooping cough influenza and cowpox. I lead the life of a widow of 90, whose sons all perished in the Indian Mutiny or Crimean war, I forget which. This venerable lady finds her chief consolation in the works of Shakespeare and Lytton Strachey. And Mrs Smith of Cheltenham writes that she loves L.S. for having dedicated Q.V. [Queen Victoria] to V.W. So we are brought together mysteriously. Did you hear that Ottoline is at Chirk Castle having been exposed in every organ, to the Xrays and proved to be full of nothing but stale milk? All her injections for the past 5 yrs. at the hands of Dr Martin of Freiburg, were nothing but that. Milk you know permeates, congeals and sours the most intimate organ.

Do tell Carrington to come and see me.

Yr. V.W.

Frances Hooper

[]

1616: To Richard Aldington

31st Jan [1926]

Typewritten

The Hogarth Press, 52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Mr Aldington,

I happened to meet Lytton Strachey two days ago, and told him about the introduction. I am afraid he is too much bothered with a new book he is trying to start to take on anything else, but no doubt he will write to you himself. I did my best.

I wish I could myself write the introduction you suggest—it is not that I dont want to do it. But after having been ill off and on for four months, and so having to put aside a new novel, I am now just beginning it again, and feel I must work straight ahead, and undertake as little outside that at present as possible. But it was very good of you to ask me, and I should have liked very much to do it, if I had not been in difficulties.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

1617: To V. Sackville-West

Sunday, Jan. 31st 1926

The Hogarth Press, 52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Look, I have stolen a piece of the press notepaper to write on, and it is Sunday morning about half past eleven, and I have written all I am going to write this morning. Now where are you? With Miss Gertrude Bell, I suppose. I suppose you are very happy, seeing things—lovely things. I dont know what Baghdad is like, so I won’t tell you. Miss Bell has a very long nose: she is like an Aberdeen terrier; she is a masterful woman, has everyone under her thumb, and makes you feel a little inefficient. Still, she is extremely kind, and asks so and so to meet you, and you are very grateful to her—Enough of Gertrude Bell; now for Virginia. Shall I write the letter I made up in bed this morning? It was all about myself. I was wondering if I could explain how miserable I have been the past 4 days, and why I have been miserable. Thought about, one can gloss things over, bridge them, explain, excuse. Writing them down, they become more separate and disproportioned and so a little unreal—Only I found I had to write the lecture for the girl’s school, and so had to stop writing To the Lighthouse. That began my misery; all my life seemed to be thwarted instantly: It was all sand and gravel; and yet I said, this is the truth, this guilty misery, and the other an illusion; and then, dearest, people began ringing me up to go to lunch and tea—I was asked to meet a Spaniard in Holloway, a Frenchman in Chelsea, and see an Italian dance in Soho. Why did this make me desperate? I said, I must go and meet Jacques Blanche, because he will tell me about Proust; and also Hilda Trevelyan [Blow] has left me no loophole of escape; but now I must buy a hat. And last week I sold 4 mattresses, and bought the cook new bedroom curtains. Now I must waste a whole afternoon and suffer sheer agony in shops again buying a hat. And then, there being no illusion in my soul, no water under my keel, I had to dine with Dadie [Rylands], and undergo a large vociferous Bloomsbury party—sitting outside, with glass between me and everybody; hearing them laugh; and seeing, as through a telescope, (she looked so remote and washed up on a rock,) poor Edith Sitwell in her brocade dress, sitting silent.

I cant tell you how intense my unhappiness has been, starting up in the night, and clenching my hands, all over going out to dinner, and buying a hat, and meeting Jacques Blanche! And I had to take a sleeping draught. Then, in the middle of these 4 days, I went to hear Tolstois daughter lecture on him and her mother. And Lytton came up and praised my article in the Criterion [On Being Ill] tremendously, which, as we never praise each other’s writing now, did for the moment illumine me: and Desmond came up and praised it, and this did not much please me, for his mind is all torn up sheets of paper now—such a ragbag; and then Countess Tatiana spoke, and I hated us all, for being prosperous and comfortable; and wished to be a working woman, and wished to be able to excuse my life to Tolstoi. Not that it was a good lecture. It was quite dull. But seeing his daughter, a shabby little black old woman, a perfect lady, with his little eyes, excited me; and made the whole world inside my head spin round, and the tears come to my eyes—but this is what always happens to me when the disgusting and foetid story of the Tolstois married life is told me and by their daughter too. And also, in Hill Street, Berkeley Square to an audience which seemed to have cheeks of paté de foie gras and sables on their backs and nothing nothing left of humanity or emotion at all. “The ladies will know what it means to nurse 13 children” said Tatiana: but I felt the ladies did not even know what it is to have monthly periods.

So I went off—with Mary in a taxi, as it happened. And Raymond came to dinner, and wanted me to meet Mrs Craigie, and I said I didn’t want to meet the upper classes: I wanted to meet washerwomen, and shopkeepers. Of course, how was Raymond to know I had been spun round by Tolstoi? I seemed to him merely waspish and plaguy, making excuses, and sneering and laughing at his ladies. And what was at the back of it all was simply my not being able to get away off into my novel; my being pinned down tight to my lecture. I gave this at Hayes Common yesterday.

Do you by any chance remember Kent? After all, I did go down in Mary’s [Hutchinson] motor, with Nessa and Duncan. It struck me then that part of my misery is not having you. Yes, I miss you, I miss you. I dare not expatiate, because you will say I am not stark, and cannot feel the things dumb people feel. You know that is rather rotten rot, my dear Vita. After all, what is a lovely phrase? One that has mopped up as much Truth as it can hold.

But this analysing reminds me of my lecture, which I am infinitely sick of—To explain different kinds of novels to children—to make little anecdotes out of it—that took me more time and trouble than to write 6 Times leaders. But it was all right—60 nice children: a large Georgian country house; immense cedars; angular open minded school mistresses: a drive home in the dark with Nessa and Duncan, who pour out pure gaiety and pleasure in life, not brilliantly or sparklingly, but freely quietly luminously. And as we drove, I kept seeing the streets you drove me through: and thinking about you, and thinking how shy I had been of you; and then, when I rushed you, how you at once stepped out of that focus into another; and what distance shall we be at on Monday the 10th May [Vita’s return]?

Tuesday, Feb. 2nd. Now I must end this. And I haven’t said anything very much, or given you any notion of the terrific high waves, and the infernal deep gulfs, on which I mount and toss in a few days. So does everyone. Up and down we go, violently, incessantly; and I’m half ashamed, now I try to write it, to see what pigmy egotisms are at the root of it, with me anyhow—that I can’t write my novel, must go out to tea, should buy a hat. Oh but there’s Vita too—thats not a pigmy egotism—wanting her.

D’you know—I had a real shock of disappointment this morning? I was certain I had a letter from you—tore it open—found, instead, a letter from a woman [Ethel Pye] who sat opposite me in a blue bus 10 years ago, and wants now to come and do a bust of my head—But the flattery of this made me so angry that I’ve been again cursing—no privacy, always people coming, and no letter from you. Why not? Only a scrap from Dover, and a wild melancholy adorable moan from Trieste.

No photograph either.

Goodbye, dearest shaggy creature.

Yr V.W.

Berg

[]

1618: To V. Sackville-West

Feb. 3rd 1926

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Heres a letter from Cairo, I mean from the shores of Greece [Crete], come this morning, a dumb letter; but I’m getting good at reading them. I did like it. And I wrote to you yesterday, to Baghdad, and see that I must write now to catch the mail, to Teheran; so theres no news—Also, you’ll be so excited, happy, and all that. You’ll have forgotten me, the room, the crane. We cut a very poor show against Teheran. Grizzle is in hospital, with mange; and I’m alone—oh Thank God—Morgan Forster and a wretched Frenchman, who talked without stopping, having this moment gone. How difficult it is to imagine any word of this reaching to you at Teheran! Have you got through safe and well? Are you happy? What do you see when you look over this paper? Rose pink hill, and little tufts of red flowers, I imagine.

I’m too dissipated to write. Morgan has been staying with old Hardy—The film company rings up and says “will you arrange for us to film the great novelist at work? For we hear he can’t live long.” Mrs Hardy came in to tell Morgan this, much distressed, for old Hardy hadn’t been well. Then she says, “Who do you think should write my husbands life?” In order to feel the ground, Morgan says, “Well, Middleton Murry’s a great admirer”—Whereupon Mrs Hardy flames out (to all our joy) “No, no, Mr Forster, We should not like that at all”—in spite of the devotion of that worm, who took his wife to be delivered of a son, to be called Thomas, in Dorchester, but she was delivered, of a daughter, 50 miles away. Murry, by the way has arraigned your poor Virginia, and Virginia’s poor Tom Eliot, and all their works, in the Adelphi, and condemned them to death.

On Friday (but this will have happened weeks ago) we go to Rodmell. Dearest, how nice to have you there, in a month or two. I made £20 unexpectedly yesterday, and vowed to spend it perfecting the water closet on your behalf. But Teheran is exciting me too much. I believe, at this moment, more in Teheran than in Tavistock Square. I see you, somehow in long coat and trousers, like an Abyssinian Empress, stalking over those barren hills. But really what I want to know is how the journey went, the 4 days through the snow, the caravan. Shall you write and tell me? And the affectionate letter—whens that coming?

I am back again in the thick of my novel, and things are crowding into my head: millions of things I might put in—all sorts of incongruities, which I make up walking the streets, gazing into the gas fire. Then I struggle with them, from 10 to 1: then lie on the sofa, and watch the sun behind the chimneys: and think of more things: then set up a page of poetry in the basement, and so up to tea and Morgan Forster. I’ve shirked 2 parties, and another Frenchman, and buying a hat, and going to tea with Hilda Trevelyan: for I really can’t combine all this with keeping my imaginary people going. Not that they are people: what one imagines, in a novel, is a world. Then, when one has imagined this world, suddenly people come in—but I don’t know why one does it, or why it should alleviate the misery of life, and yet not make one exactly happy; for the strain is too great. Oh, to have done it, and be free.

Wandering into the basement, where someone is always walking up and down talking it seems to me, I ran into Bob Trevelyan, who started off about you and Dotty: how he had read a poem of hers: thought you had a real literary gift; liked your Hops article [Nation, 10 October 1925]: and then, of course, he dwindled off on to his own poetry, and how to finish 3 plays and 4 epics, he must retire to Italy. Here the door opens and Mr [Hubert] Waley sends poems by Camilla Doyle for Mrs Woolf to read. Mrs Woolf has 2 long novels to read; and should be at it now, instead of scribbling to Vita, who’s much too happy and excited to attend, and looking divinely beautiful too (I say, what do you wear—the purple dogs hair dress?) So I will end, being exacting by nature, and hating the sort of divided attention which is all I can get now.

But I’m faithful, and loving: and have met no one a patch on you—no one so comforting to be with.

Remember me, is that the phrase?—to Harold.

Yr VW.

Berg

[]

1619: To Edward Sackville West

Saturday [6 February 1926]

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes, [Sussex]

Dear Eddy,

Would you perhaps dine with us on Friday 12th, and invite the party who was to dine at the Ivy round to 52 Tavistock Square after dinner instead?

I suggest this compromise, as I’m already surpassing what I am allowed in the matter of dinners out.

If this is impossible, I’ll try to get round the law. But I think Lytton is dining with us.

Please invite anyone you like

Yours ever
Virginia Woolf

I am very glad you liked my article [On Being Ill]—I was afraid that, writing in bed, and forced to write quickly by the inexorable Tom Eliot I had used too many words.

I’ve found out a little about de Quincey.

We go back to London on Monday

I think you ought to take your piano away as soon as possible—the damp is something awful.

Berg

[]

1620: To Edward Sackville West

Sunday [14 February? 1926]

52 Tavistock Square, London, W.C.1

Dear Eddy

Leonard has measured the piano. The measurements are length—6' 1" breadth at keys—2' 8½" depth from top to where legs begin—1' 6"

Let me know when you want it sent

I’ve been looking at de Quincey, but am in bed at the moment with a chill or something which makes me so heavy-headed that I’ll write later.

I do hope you are better—what a ghastly time you’ve had!

Yr
Virginia Woolf

Berg

[]

1621: To V. Sackville-West

Feb. 17th 1926

52 Tavistock Sqre., [W.C.1]

You are a crafty fox to write an alphabet letter, and so think you have solved the problem of dumbness. Well, I shall write a news letter—Princess Mary has a cold. Oulton Hall has been burnt down with the loss of much valuable plate. Sidney Waterlow has been removed, some say forcibly, to Siam, where it is thought he will impress the natives.

What else has happened in the great world of politics and society? I have been considering the question of snobbery. Eddy very kindly gave me dinner at the Ivy. (D’you remember the Ivy?) Of course I said, driving home, Now I’ll pay the cab. Eddy said nonsense. I said you’re a damned aristocrat, and I will pay the cab. Which I did, and gave him not only my well known lecture upon Russells and Herberts but a new chapter, added for his benefit, called, How no aristocrat can write a book. So we quarrelled over this for a bit, and next day, oddly enough, I had to defend him—against someone who shall be nameless—from the charge of being an arriviste. What motive can he have in coming to Bloomsbury etc? Well, I said, it shows his intelligence. But, they said, with that name and appearance, he can’t be intelligent. Damn you, I said, thats Russells and Herberts the other way round all over again. So it is. And which is worse—Mayfair snobbery, or Bloomsbury? I’ve been awfully worried by elderly relations. Three old gentlemen, round about 60, have discovered that Vanessa is living in sin with Duncan Grant, and that I have written Mrs Dalloway—which equals living in sin. Their method of showing their loathing is to come to call, to ask Vanessa if she ever sells a picture, me if I’ve been in a lunatic asylum lately. Then they intimate how they live in Berkley Sqre or the Athenaeum and dine with—I don’t know whom: and so take themselves off. Would this make you angry? And why philosophically speaking as Koteliansky the Russian used to say, do 20 years in time make this gulf between us?

Then there was Rodmell. Now that was a joy—I cant tell you how lovely,—the water meadows soaking wet, but now and then the sun coming out and stroking the downs. D’you remember how they turn from green to blue, like opals? I don’t think you ever walk. You are always charging at the head of an army—but I walk, nosing along, making up phrases, and I’m ashamed to say how wrapped up I get in my novel. Really, I am a little alarmed at being so absorbed—Why should one engross oneself thus for so many months? and it may well be a mirage—I read it over, and think it is a mirage: but I can scarcely do any thing else. I got up on to the Downs though, where you went plunging in the motor, and then came down to tea, and sat over a wood fire, and read some poetry, and a manuscript, (thinking still of my own novel) then cooked an omelette, some good coffee; and wanted a little drop of wine, with you. (Have you been tipsy often? Do you know it was 4 weeks yesterday that you went?) Yes, I often think of you, instead of my novel; I want to take you over the water meadows in the summer on foot, I have thought of many million things to tell you. Devil that you are, to vanish to Persia and leave me here!—dabbling in wet type, which makes my fingers frozen; and setting up the poems of Mrs Manning Sanders, which the more I set them, the less I like. And, dearest Vita, we are having two waterclosets made, one paid for by Mrs Dalloway, the other by The Common Reader: both dedicated to you.

Then I lunched with Lytton at Kettners. First I was so dazzled by the gilt and the warmth that in my humility I felt ready to abase myself at the feet of all the women and all the waiters; and really humbled at the incredible splendour of life. Halfway through lunch, reason triumphed; I said this is dross; I had a great argument with Lytton—about our methods of writing, about Edmund Gosse, about our friendship; and age and time and death and all the rest of it. I was forgetting Queen Elizabeth—He is writing about her. He says that she wrote to an ambassador “Had I been crested and not cloven you would not have dared to write to me thus.” “Thats style!” I cried. “It refers to the male and female parts” he said. Gosse told him this, adding that of course, it could not be quoted. “You need some excuse for lunching with Gosse,” I said. But Lytton thinks me narrow minded about Gosse. I say I know a mean skunk when I see one, or rather smell one, for its his writing I abominate. And, Vita, answer me this: why are all professors of English literature ashamed of English literature? Walter Raleigh calls Shakespeare “Billy Shaxs”—Blake, “Bill”—a good poem “a bit of all right.” This shocks me. I’ve been reading his letters. But dear old Lytton—he was infinitely charming, and we fitted like gloves, and I was very happy, we nosed about the book shops together, and remarked upon the marvellous extent of our own reading. “What haven’t we read?” said Lytton. “Its a question of life, my dear Lytton” I said, sinking into an arm chair: And so it all began over again.

What bosh letters are, to be sure! I dont think this gives you much idea of what I have done for the last fortnight. There are immense tracts unnamed. I daresay the dumb letters are best. Ethel Sands has just been to tea. We have been sitting over the gas fire; the crane still goes on lifting. She says I am very attractive and asks me to stay with her. (I put that in to make you jealous—) But no, you wont be jealous, not in Persia, where the air is rose-coloured, and this—what you call Gloomsbury—is so infinitely remote and mean. You may have discovered entire new countries in your own soul. Your soul may be highly prominent at the moment. But what I was going to say was that none of this letter is really very true, because I have been a great deal alone, two days, not able to write rather tired (but not ill—very well for the most part); and the rest of the time the usual muddle of thoughts and spasms of feeling. None of this does one ever explain:

But oh yes—I should awfully like to see you.

Yr VW.

Berg

[]

1622: To V. Sackville-West

March 1st, 1926

52 Tavistock Sqre, [W.C.1]

Yes, dearest Towzer, it is all very well about Bloomsbury being a rotten biscuit, and me a weevil, and Persia being a rose and you an Emperor moth—I quite agree: but you are missing the loveliest spring there has ever been in England. We were motored all through Oxfordshire two days ago. Sometimes we got out and looked at a little manor house under a hill. Then we got right up up up on top of the world; and there was an old farm house, and a walled garden; flagged path; turf; a woman walking reading a book. Meanwhile, as I assure you, it was so incredibly lovely—the woods, the hill sides, the river, that, though I was thinking of you all the time motoring too, through the desert, I could not think it was lovelier, or stranger. This spring, I may tell you, is not ordinary; for there is nothing out, no leaves; yet it is as hot as June, but much more delicate and distinguished; and so empty that everything seems august. Russell Sqre.; the plane trees;—I dont know how to describe it: and no doubt my dear Towzer is bored.

The people who took us were Leonards brother and his wife. I promptly fell in love, not with him or her, but with being stock brokers, with never having read a book (except Robert Hitchens) with not having heard of Roger, or Clive, or Duncan, or Lytton. Oh this is life, I kept saying to myself; and what is Bloomsbury, or Long Barn either, but a contortion, a temporary knot; and why do I pity and deride the human race, when its lot is profoundly peaceful and happy? They have nothing to wish for. They are entirely simple and sane. She has her big dog. They turn on the Loud Speaker. When they take a holiday they go to the Spring of the Thames where it is as big as a man’s arm, not big enough for a boat; and they carry their boat till they can put it in, and then they skull all the way down to Marlow. Sometimes, she said the river is level with the banks; and it is perfectly deserted. Then she said to me suddenly, as we were looking down at the wood from her window “Thats where the poet Shelley wrote Islam. He tied his boat to the tree there. My grandfather had a walking stick cut from that tree.” You always run up against poetry in England; and I like this dumb poetry; and I wish I could be like that. She will live to be a hundred; she knows exactly what she enjoys; her life seems to me incredibly happy. She is very plain; but entirely unvexed, unambitious; and I believe, entirely right. Yes; that what I’ve fallen in love with—being a stockbroker.

Tuesday [2 March]

There have been masses of parties. But I cried off, after one at Clives with Lord Berners and Raymond; and one, a very quiet one, at Nessas. I shall never dine out again, I thought, in the middle of drinking Clive’s champagne—because one always says the same things; well, that was the champagne, perhaps. One talks about Sybil [Colefax] and the Sitwells; Chrissie, and Eddie Marsh. Clive would parade a new affair of his. “I’ve been dealt a new hand” he kept saying: “It takes me, I’m glad to say, into the lower walks of society.” Absurd little cockatoo! However there was lots of champagne—slabs of salmon—I don’t know what; and your poor Weevil—if thats to be her new name—was as excited as usual.

But to write a novel in the heart of London is next to an impossibility. I feel as if I were nailing a flag to the top of a mast in a raging gale. What is so perplexing is the change of perspective: here I’m sitting thinking how to manage the passage of ten years, up in the Hebrides: then the telephone rings; then a charming bony pink cheeked Don called Lucas comes to tea: well, am I here, asking him about the Life of Webster, which he’s editing, or in a bedroom up in the Hebrides? I know which I like best—the Hebrides. I should like to be with you in the Hebrides at this moment.

I’ve arranged our French motoring so that we shall be back by May 10th. So please see to it that you land that day. A lovely dumb letter from you came on Saturday, written on board ship. I extract by degrees a great deal from your letters. They might be longer; They might be more loving. But I see your point—life is too exciting. And don’t go tempting and tantalising poor Weevils. Of course, of course, I want to see deserts and Arabias—I worried Leonard for an hour about taking a year off and seeing the world. We will go to Burma, I said: to the South Seas: We have only one life; we are growing old. And he has a passion for the East: so perhaps we shall. I read a bit of your poem the other night—it must be good, I think: one can break off crumbs and suck them. I wonder what you’ll come to, as a writer (go on falling in love and being tipsy, as a woman: I like that in you.) But as a writer? I wish you’d not say ‘profile’ on the first page; its not right there: outline—something English would be better there. Like a rich cake, I can break crumbs off your poem. I imagine it wants a little central transparency: Some sudden intensity: I’m not sure. Send me something you’ve written. What I mean by a sudden intensity may be nonsense, on reflection—But what is the use of reflecting? I’ve sat with my pen in the air these ten minutes, thinking about your poem; but I cannot send it to Persia: Ones thoughts are too transitory—If you were in the arm chair opposite, you could just catch them before they fall.

Another break. Now its the next day. I’m so orderly am I? I wish you could live in my brain for a week. It is washed with the most violent waves of emotion. What about? I dont know. It begins on waking; and I never know which—shall I be happy? Shall I be miserable. I grant, I keep up some mechanical activity with my hands, setting type; ordering dinner. Without this, I should brood ceaselessly. And you think it all fixed and settled. Do we then know nobody?—only our own versions of them, which, as likely as not, are emanations from ourselves.

Again, interrupted. This letter is all breaks and starts. What was I saying? I was sitting over the fire and dreaming.

We’re in the midst of our worst week. It always happens—here are all the books coming out, and our Staff collapses. Last year it was love: we abolished love [Mrs Joad], took an elderly widow instead; and now its measles. One little girl has measles; the other probably mumps—May she go off? So we’re left to deal with the bills, the parcels, the callers—a gentleman who has been in Armenia, wants to write a book, and discourses for an hour about Bishop Gore, Leonard thinking him to mean Ormsby Gore—Hence misunderstandings. Then theres our Viola—thrown from a taxi and bruised her ribs, and must go to Brighton to recoup. Will we correct her proofs? And Lady Oxford has been at them, and scribbled over every margin, “Darling Viola, don’t use the word “naturally” please—I hate it. Don’t call Ribblesdale ‘Rib’. All this is trash—ask Mrs Woolf—” What is the printer to make of it? There must be a revise—So thats held over. And our fortunes tremble. If the books don’t sell, I warn you I shall apply for the place of black Baby at Long Barn. Tomorrow I’m to meet Ottoline and Percy Lubbock: they say he has deserted Lady Sybil, and retires to his own mat weaving at Sevenoaks. Whats the truth?

Thank God we get off to Rodmell on Saturday; and with luck I shall stay an extra day.

Please, dearest, a nice long letter: anything you like. I dont laugh at you. It’s you who laugh at weevils.

Did I tell you how Grizzle is in hospital? No; I concealed it lest you should be anxious: the mange: rainbow stripes have appeared across her back. But they are sanguine on the whole. And Raymond left today [for Persia]. And I envied him: And I want a little spoiling. No: I don’t forget you—

Yr V.W.

Berg

[]

1623: To Lady Sackville

7th March 1926

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Lady Sackville,

It is most good of you to let me know about Vita. I have been wondering all these days whether she had arrived safely, and it is a great relief to have your news. Now I feel we may begin to think of her coming back—It must have been a great strain for you; but now I feel the worst of the journey is over.

Vita told me she was sending me the photograph she had taken for her passport—This has never come. I wonder if you would have the great kindness to send me a card with the photographer’s name, that I may write to him myself? But not, of course, if it is the least trouble to you.

It is very good of you to say that I may come and see you. I should so much like to, if I am in Brighton.

Thank you again for thinking of writing to me.

Yours sincerely,
Virginia Woolf

Berg

[]

1624: To V. Sackville-West

16th March 1926

52 Tavistock Square, London, W.C.1

I have been meaning every day to write something—such millions of things strike me to write to you about—and never did, and now have only scraps and splinters of time, damn it all—We are rather rushed—But, dearest Vita, why not take quinine, and sleep under mosquitoe nets? I could have told you about fever: do tell me if you are all right again (a vain question: time has spun a whole circle since you had fever off the Coast of Baluchistan) Much to my relief, Lady Sackville wrote and told me you had arrived: also she asks me to go and see her, to talk about you, I suppose. “I know you are very fond of Vita”; but I haven’t the courage, without you.

Last Saturday night I found a letter from you in the box: then another: What luck! I thought; then a third; incredible!, I thought; then a fourth: But Vita is having a joke, I thought, profoundly distrusting you—Yet they were all genuine letters. I have spelt them out every word, four times, I daresay. They do yield more on suction; they are very curious in that way. Is it that I am, as Ly Sackville says, very fond of you: are you, like a good writer, a very careful picker of words? (Oh look here: your book of travels. May we have it? Please say yes, for the autumn.) I like your letters I was saying, when overcome by the usual Hogarth Press spasm. And I would write a draft if I could, of my letters; and so tidy them and compact them; and ten years ago I did write drafts, when I was in my letter writing days, but now, never. Indeed, these are the first letters I have written since I was married. As for the mot juste, you are quite wrong. Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words. But on the other hand here am I sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can’t dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it; and in writing (such is my present belief) one has to recapture this, and set this working (which has nothing apparently to do with words) and then, as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, it makes words to fit it: But no doubt I shall think differently next year. Then there’s my character (you see how egotistic I am, for I answer only questions that are about myself) I agree about the lack of jolly vulgarity. But then think how I was brought up! No school; mooning about alone among my father’s books; never any chance to pick up all that goes on in schools—throwing balls; ragging: slang; vulgarity; scenes; jealousies—only rages with my half brothers, and being walked off my legs round the Serpentine by my father. This is an excuse: I am often conscious of the lack of jolly vulgarity but did Proust pass that way? Did you? Can you chaff a table of officers?

Do tell me scraps of the Lorraine’s talk: or what the woman says who has read Oscar Wilde. Then about the expeditions you make to find flowers. I must go and lunch. We have had lunch, off roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. Also a romantic pudding in which you find almonds lodged in cream. It is bitter cold; a black wind is blowing and scraping old newspapers along the street—a sound I connect with March in London.

But I was going to talk about Ottoline: and the ghastliness of that party at Ethels. It was a blizzard, thunder and snow; and Dadie fetched me, and we had to cross London to Chelsea. Well, by the time I got there, my poor old hat (I never bought a new one) was like a cabmans cape: and a piece of fur, hurriedly attached by a safety pin, flapping. And those damned people sitting smug round their urn, their fire, their tea table, thought O Lord, why cant Virginia look more of a lady: which so infuriated me, through vanity I own, and the consciousness of being better than them, with all their pearl necklaces and orange coloured clothes, that I could only arch my back like an infuriated tom cat. As for Ottoline, she is peeling off powder like flakes on a house; yet her skirts are above her knees: I cant describe the mingling of decrepitude and finery: and all the talk had to be brought back to her. There was Percy Lubbock. We were egged on to discuss the passions. He mumbled like an old nurse that he never had such nasty things: whereupon, in the vilest taste, I contradicted him, never thinking of Lady Sybil, and he bubbled and sizzled on his seat with discomfort, and said, please Mrs Woolf leave me alone. And I felt inclined to leave them all alone, for ever and ever, these tea parties, these Ottolines, these mumbling sodomitical old maids (Leigh Ashton was there too.) Talk of the romance, the experience and upset and devastation of Persia! Come with me further and remoter (I doubt that this is English, though it may be the mot juste) to the living, unconcerned, contented, indifferent middle classes of England. I’ve lived in Persia half my life; but never been among the stockbrokers, till this spring. Last week it was Lord Rothschilds agent—that is another brother of Leonards [Philip Woolf],—at Waddesdon. There again I fell in love—But Eddy says this is snobbery: a belief in some glamour which is unreal. They are again, entirely direct, on the top of every object without a single inhibition or hesitation—When my sister in law showed me her hunter (for hunting is the passion of her life) I had the thrill in the thighs which, they say, is the sign of a work of art. Then she was so worn to the bone with living. Seven miles from a village: no servant will stay; weekend parties at the Great House; Princess Mary playing cross word puzzles after lunch, my sister in law stripping her one pair of shoes and skirt to ribbons hunting rabbits in the bushes by way of amusing Princess Mary; two babies; and so on. Well, I felt, nothing that I shall ever do all my life equals a single day of this. But Eddy says he knows about it: it is my snobbery. I like Eddy: I like the sharpness of his spine: his odd indivualities [sic], and angles. But the young are dangerous. They mind so much what one thinks of them. One has to be very careful what one says. That buzzing bluebottle Clive almost involved us in a row: but it is past; and I am dining with Clive tomorrow, to meet some mysterious admirer, for Clive thinks me so vain I must always meet admirers, and drink the usual champagne.

Sure enough—here is Clive ringing up to ask us to lunch to meet Sybil—yes, Sybil’s back: here’s a note to remind you of Sybil. Then I met Rose Macaulay and George Moore (d’you remember scolding me—one of your scoldings—for not meeting writers?) What I say about writers is that they are the salt of the earth (even if to say it I must unsay something of my rapture for the middle classes—the huntresses the stock brokers) With both of these people, Rose and George, one can tell the truth—a great advantage. Never did anyone talk such nonsense as George. “Do not tell me you admire Hardy, Mrs Woolf. My good friend, tell me if he has written a single sentence well? Not one. Is there a single scene in all those novels one remembers?” Whatever I said he poohpoohed; till at last (this was at Mary’s with Jack [Hutchinson] in plum coloured velvet, like a tea cosy) I said “Mr Moore, when one is Mr Moore, that is enough” And we floated off to waterclosets and Paris; and he attacked Conrad and Henry James and Anatole France: but I cant tell you how urbane and sprightly the old poll parrot was; and, (this is what I think using the brain does for one) not a pocket, not a crevice, of pomp, humbug, respectability in him: he was fresh as a daisy.

Devil, you have never sent me your photograph. Angel, you wish to know about Grizzle: she has eczema, and a cough. Sometimes we peer into her throat and Leonard moves a bone.

The publishing season trembles: not a review of us so far. I have done up 19 parcels to China, via Siberia; which as you know, must not weigh over 4 lbs: each; and be open ended. Also, folded a myriad of these leaflets. Also rejected [Doris] Daglish on Pope. Also accepted Mary’s stories. And today began a new writing book, having filled the old, and written close on 40,000 words in 2 months—my record. Birds flap and fluster at my panes; but mostly the common sparrow, the domestic hen. Never mind. In the intervals of being leaden with despair, I am very excited. I say, when do you get back? When shall I stop writing to you? All our plans about holidays are in the fire again; God knows when we shall get off: but I dont want to be poking about in Provence when you’re here.

Yes, dearest Vita: I do miss you; I think of you: I have a million things, not so much to say, as to sink into you.

Tell me how you are and be very careful.

Yr V.W.

Berg

[]

1625: To Clive Bell

[mid-March 1926]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Clive,

I shall be delighted to dine on the 19th; but can’t possibly be well if its Ottoline, or any relation, even by marriage of Ottoline’s, that I’m to meet—so I warn you. 5.30 Thursday would suit us: so shall hope to see you then.

Yrs V.W

Quentin Bell

[]

1626: To V. Sackville-West

29th March 1926

The Hogarth Press, 52 Tavistock Square, London, W.C.1

No letter from you for over a fortnight, but that may be, I suppose, something to do with the Foreign Office. Now you must pretend to be interested in your friend’s fortunes: but it will all seem so remote and silly to you: you have forgotten a paper called The Nation; Leonard was literary editor once: and since Wednesday he is no longer. We have resigned. Thank God. What a mercy—no more going to the office and reading proofs and racking ones brains to think who to get to write. We shall have to make £500 a year; and I shall sell my soul to Todd; but this is the first step to being free, and foreign travel and dawdling about England in a motor car; and we feel 10 years younger, utterly irresponsible, and please, dearest Vita, do make Harold do the same thing. One walks into one’s wifes room, carrying her tray, at 8.30, and says “By the way I’m going to give up the Nation today”—or the Foreign Office, as the case may be! Its over in 10 minutes. Seriously, giving up appointments (this is the 4th time since we married) is the only pleasure in the world. He will be there till October or July as a matter of fact. (So send articles)

I cannot think what it will interest you to be told of, now you are embedded in Persia. I see you always picking little bright red flowers high up on stony mountains. Raymond (give him my love) will be with you now; and so you will have heard all about London—how Clive is in love, and Lady Colefax, and all that. Do you infer from this that Sybil is in love? No, no. She has not been tainted by that passion: she has merely stayed with Coolidge, Esme Howard, Doug [Fairbanks] and Mary [Pickford], Charlie Chaplin, been four thousand miles in a motor car; etc. etc. Does it matter what Sybil does? A coal mine, heaven, its all the same. She pants a little harder—that is all. Then there were Lord Ivor S. Churchill; Roger Fry and Virginia Woolf—and all very brilliant at Clives the other night; and Walter Sickert, Therese Lessore, Leigh Ashton, all very silent at Vanessa’s the other night; and a ghastly party at Rose Macaulays, where in the whirl of meaningless words I thought Mr O’donovan said Holy Ghost, whereas he said “The Whole Coast” and I asking “Where is the Holy Ghost?” got the reply “Where ever the sea is” “Am I mad, I thought, or is this wit?” “The Holy Ghost?” I repeated. “The Whole Coast” he shouted, and so we went on, in an atmosphere so repellent that it became, like the smell of bad cheese, repulsively fascinating: Robert Lynds, Gerald Goulds, Rose Macaulays, all talking shop; and saying Masefield is as good as Chaucer, and the best novel of the year is Shining Domes by Mildred Peake; until Leonard shook all over, picked up what he took to be Mrs Gould’s napkin, discovered it to be her sanitary towel and the foundations of this tenth rate literary respectability (all gentlemen in white waistcoats, ladies shingled, unsuccessfully) shook to its foundations. I kept saying “Vita would love this” Now would you?

Now it is Wednesday. I did get a letter from you—a nice dumb letter. When I went to Italy for the first time I too picked up a clod of earth. A very nice letter. I wish I could write one to match; but for 2 days we have had nothing but talk, interruptions, and the whole blessed thing—Press and Nation—in the frying pan. This is exciting, but harasses the mind. It would bore you to go into it: It is only a question whether we shan’t give up the Press too, cut adrift, and make a bolt. Manuscripts shower; authors never cease coming: Viola’s book again held up—in short the bother and the work have a little overcome us, for the moment—whether we can keep up with it, I mean. But it is also great fun. If you had come in yesterday you would have seen me with the floor all strewn with little squares of paper, like the learned pig, making an index for Viola.

Some items of news: Dadie has not got his fellowship. Hilda Bewicke is a friend of Clives. Arnold Bennett is having a Baby. Ethels [Sands] clothes are lovely—sleeves like pen and ink drawings—all one line. Nessa and Duncan are going to Italy. Princess Victoria has pneumonia. Francis Birrell may be offered Editorship. Had I married Sydney Waterlow I should have gone to Bangkok. A letter from Raymond just come. Much enjoyed. Hot X Buns, etc etc.

Berg

[]

1627: To Clive Bell

[9 April 1926]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Clive,

I will bear M. Renoir in mind. But I should think the higher walks of life were more profitable—Sybil, and so on. She is beaming with good will.

We are cowering over our gas fire, and cursing fate which drives us out to tea with Lotta Leaf. Kitty is rather an exquisite nymph—that is the only consolation. Bank holiday we spent in the Basement, very happily: next day tramping Windsor Park with Gerald Brenan: and there have been the usual number of strays about—HOM for example, brutally despatched by Leonard, without a cup of tea even, just as he was displaying those powers of conversation which used to hold me spell-bound. My only adventure has been connected with nibs. Did I tell you how the Penkala has failed: nobody in the whole world uses it except me: and when I went to get nibs I was told they had all been sold off to a hawker in the Farringdon Road. Off I went, as you can imagine, and beat up and down the Farringdon Road until I found him and bought 2 gross, which will last me, L. says, 6 years. On the way I ran into Mrs Clifford and Turkey—a painful and curious encounter.

We go to Iwerne Minster on Tuesday. It is a great risk. I shall retire upon Dorchester and Tom Hardy if it don’t do. We shall come to Rodmell on or about the 23rd for 10 days or so. Shall you still be at Charleston? I hope so.

I am reading Mrs Sidney Webbs autobiography and find it enthralling. As for Walter Raleigh I find him disgusting.

Leonard sends his love. Kiss Vanessa for me. I wish she would write to me. I can’t write much, as I don’t want to waste my nibs. I dont know about Roger—whether I may kiss him or not. Please ask him.

Yrs V.W

Quentin Bell

[]

1628: To V. Sackville-West

13th April 1926

52 Tavistock Sqre., [W.C.1]

Here is a cheque. See what you might have had if you had stuck to the old firm—cheques for £10 every other day perhaps; and distinction which, rightly has no price. But I’m in a rush, going off to Iwerne Minster today, throwing myself upon life practically naked. This means only that we shall range about Dorset for 5 days and neither read nor write.

I got a letter from you last night, and you say I am to write once more. This is an anticlimax; I had written my farewell. But I want particularly to impress upon you the need of care in travel. Remember your dog Grizzle and your Virginia, waiting you; both rather mangy; but what of that? These shabby mongrels are always the most loving, warm hearted creatures. Grizzle and Virginia will rush down to meet you—they will lick you all over. So then, when you are tempted to folly, tremble on the brink of a precipice, sleep out on the Steppes, and so on (coming through Russia where Raymond hasn’t been you can lie as much as you like) remember how desolated we shall both be should you lose a hair of your head, or scratch one scratch on those lovely pillar like legs. (The Greeks and Hebrews used “pillars” as a metaphor: I now see why often one catches up Greeks and Hebrews in living.) I am rather repentant at having criticised your poem, without really reading it through. I find reading in type script rather hard. Give me the proofs and let me furbish up a proper opinion. But I dont understand—are you still adding? Then when does it come out? I expect I only meant something about descriptive poetry needing a human focus in the middle. Vegetables become rather crushing. I expect though it is there; only a little obscured by detail (and that may be my slovenly reading.) Lets go through it carefully together before you send it to Byard. Byard will smoke his big cigar, and eat his blood red chop. I, doing neither, dont print your poems. How odd it is—the effect geography has in the mind! I write to you differently now you’re coming back. The pathos is melting. I felt it pathetic when you were going away; as if you were sinking below the verge. Now that you are rising, I’m jolly again.

But what news is there to bring you of the outer world? Precious little, of what Sybil Colefax calls news. No dinners, no parties—Everyone away, Sybil, Ethel, Clive, Mary, Vanessa—all in rural retreat. So I have been doing up parcels with Angus: standing at a table with string and paper and hearing scraps of interviews. Advertising touts, with tempting offers: Mr Besherman Editor of Youth; Mr Morrell, the printer. All this goes forward, as I tie, as I tie—(d’you remember “sweeping up leaves,” the refrain in Hardy’s poem?) My mind is all awash with various thoughts; my novel; you; shall you take me for a drive to the sea?; the cinema; and so on; when the door opens and Dadie comes in. Desultory conversation goes forward: for I have to think what I’m doing, and not close the ends of parcels for abroad—perhaps my greatest sin as a packer. At last, I say I want tea. Dadie comes up for 5 minutes. Bell rings. Eddy comes. Telephone rings. Duncan is coming. We all have tea together. Make toast. Room frightfully untidy. Never mind. Eddy is very well and spruce. Duncan like an old bundle, which is coming undone in the middle. He perpetually hitches up his trousers as he talks. We all chatter hard, about music—Eddy explains about 19th Century music and rhetoric—Duncan attacks: but seldom uses the word he means: sometimes has to unbutton his waistcoat while endeavouring: very interesting: we compare movies and operas: I’m writing that for Todd: rather brilliant. All, to me, highly congenial, and even a little exciting, in the spring light; hammers tapping outside; trees shaking green in the Square: suddenly we find its 7 and all jump up.

Oh I’ve no time—I can’t write sense or sound, not to say grammar, with Leonard and Grizzle, and Chappells piano tuner all flourishing about, and saying are you ready, have you Mr Sackville Wests piano? and the general atmosphere of movement and departure. I had wanted to go into the matter of profound natural happiness; as revealed to me yesterday at a family party of an English Banker [Walter Leaf]; where the passion and joy of sons and daughters in their own society struck me almost to tears with self-pity and amazement. Nothing of that sort do we any of us know—profound emotions, which are yet natural and taken for granted, so that nothing inhibits or restrains—How deep these are, and unselfconscious. There is a book called Father and Son [1907], by Gosse, which says that all the coast of England was fringed with little sea anemones and lovely tassels of seaweed and sprays of emerald moss and so on, from the beginning of time till Jan 1858, when, for some reason, hordes of clergy and spinsters in mushroom hats and goggles began collecting, and so scraped and rifled the coast that this accumulation was destroyed for ever—A parable this, of what we have done to the deposits of family happiness. But I’ll flood you with all this when you come. When? And take care.

Also, I will tell you about Anna Karenina, and the predominance of sexual love in 19th Century fiction, and its growing unreality to us who have no real condemnation in our hearts any longer for adultery as such. But Tolstoy hoists all his book on that support. Take it away, say, no it doesn’t offend me that AK. should copulate with Vronsky, and what remains?

Put to yourself that question on the Steppes with the owls hooting and a melancholy wolf slinking behind the everlasting birch trees.

Leonards

Grizzles } love.

Virginias

Yr V.W.

Berg

[]

1629: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

April 14th [1926]

The Talbot Inn, Iwerne Minster, Blandford, [Dorset]

Dearest Ottoline,

We are wandering about Dorsetshire for a few days holiday, or I would have written before. I’m afraid we can’t manage the week ends you suggest, as we are going to France for a little tour, and to Rodmell. Our holiday is all being broken up into short rushes, and I don’t quite know at what times—Perhaps we might come later?

It is so divine down here that I can’t think how we are idiotic enough to live in London. No. You are quite right to decide against balls and streets. We are now going to Shaftesbury: then to Child Okeford—the names are enough to make one happy by themselves. I’m trying to end at Dorchester and see Thomas Hardy but doubt if we shall have time.

Love from us both to you and Philip and Julian

Your
V.W.

Texas

[]

1630: To Vanessa Bell

Friday. April 16th [1926]

The Talbot Inn, Iwerne Minster, Blandford, Dorset

Dearest.

You are a scandal to sisterhood not to have written—Everything in the way of affection is always left to me. The time will come when exhausted nature sleeps. But, you will say, the pen is lost; but, I reply, my stack of pens will only last, with care, 6 years.

Anyhow it is a pouring wet day. Naturally, the weather broke the first morning, and we have only seen the country, which is nevertheless so divine that I could well describe it for pages, under a black cloud, which is not becoming. Now, as I say, it is pouring. Leonard refuses to leave the fire. We have just put our noses out, that is all. It is a perfect Inn—that is the only consolation: hot baths, big fires, good food, always the chance of cream; and yesterday roast chicken. Iwerne Minster is entirely controlled by Mr Ismay, a millionaire, so that rare flowers burst out of every cranny in every cottage; the villagers wear specially knitted red waistcoats, if male; if female, red cloaks. You might well eat off the street. The shops are stocked with commodities—and all this, as I say, in the midst of downs, water meadows, trout streams, ancient bridges, stone houses, of which the most romantic to me is Stepleton House where the great hunter Beckford lived, of whom you know nothing, so I say no more.

We have been twice to Shaftesbury; of which I say no more, because you have not read Jude the Obscure [Hardy]; a town on a hill, with a view, of which I say no more, because if there’s one thing you can’t nohow tolerate it is descriptions and yet as a painter, you do nothing but describe views—so now rationalise your contradictions, eh?

But you’ll like to hear about the Leafs, I know. If there is any doubt anywhere about the perfect roundness and sweetness of English family life, I hereby denounce it. The Leafs are more than you could dream of. Of course Lotta is rather drowsy now; but then she is grown very fat; like a large chest of drawers covered in a black velvet pall. She dozes a little, but only with supreme content. And well she may. There is Walter benevolent as an ape, merry jocund, facetious; and his son Charles, 6 ft. 6. who, I assure you, picked Walter up in his arms, kissed him all over, blessed him, then rushed across the room, swept Kitty off her feet,—the whole atmosphere was so overpowering in its affection and humility that I quarrelled with Leonard all the evening about profound natural happiness: why we haven’t got it; its beauty, and so on; which he said was sentimental; and one would find Lotta an awful bore. All the rooms are hung with Charles Furses—now my recollection is he was a bold, voluptuous painter, with great gusts of red and yellow paint. Not a bit of it (it suddenly got fine here, so we went out, and have now lunched off cold chicken and tongue—this I mention in case you are motoring near, and advise you to stop your car at the Talbot) Charles Furse’s pictures are the most pinched, wintry, effeminate things you can imagine. Lotta in black silk, singing: Lotta in a large straw hat walking; Walter without any legs; but only a dash of acrid green chintz in the room—all the rest anaemic and sentimental to a degree, as you would say.

Not much light was thrown on the Cartwright mystery by Angus.—except that she had taken one of Leonard’s jokes seriously—All he could say was that he had the impression she was dissatisfied. I’m sure he really thought this; but it aint much to go on. Otherwise our conversation was rather inconclusive, and broken short; and we are to have another next week—On principle I believe its wrong to employ one’s friends or be employed by them—It lends such exacerbity to every question. With old Cartwright it just blows over. However, we shall be coming down on Friday next, if Philcox [builder] is willing, and I propose to have a grand opening party at Monks, when the two plugs will be pulled and the hot water turned on in the bath for the first time. Perhaps you will come. Or we will come to you. I suppose, as I heard nothing, that Clive’s electric light has been turned off.

We go back on Sunday, motoring in a bus through Poole to Bournemouth where we lunch and see the town, which will be very exciting—in short I’m all in favour of your plan of taking to the roads. Even in black horror like this one sees an immense number of curious things—nothing so odd as Dolphin though in her Dolphinry—Quentin, Julian, and Angelica to wit. Please give the children their old Aunt’s love. A letter from Noel Vaughan Williams!

V.W.

Berg

[]

1631: To Vanessa Bell

[21 April 1926]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Your letter; with its wildly unjust accusations, just come.

With a loving heart I ask you and Duncan to dine with us at some pot house on Thursday.

You can ring up.

By mentioning the Club vaguely to Gerald [Brenan], I seem to have fulfilled all your wishes: viz: (ask Julian to explain the word) to give pain to the greatest possible number of people. Obviously, he has already done this: What more do you want?

But oh God, the Frys at Rodmell!

I leave Sussex for ever

Of course, nothing is ready at Rodmell [new bathroom], or will be ready; so here we bide.

Berg

[]

1632: To Vanessa Bell

Tuesday [27 April 1926]

52 T[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Dearest

Would it be possible for us to come to you for Thursday 29th for night? bringing Nelly, who would do everything for us. (that has all blown over: she says it was the toothache!)

We should go to Rodmell on Friday. They cant get it cleaned until then. We would bring down a chicken or whatever we should be taking for our dinner, so don’t get in anything extra.

Of course this may be difficult—so please say—so that I may know on Thursday morning.

It would be very nice to see you and Angelica—but perhaps you’ll anyhow come over for a night to Rodmell and enjoy our baths and W Cs—about which I’m feeling grave doubts.

I expect the boys [Julian and Quentin] to tea

Yr V

Berg

[]

1633: To Vanessa Bell

[29 April 1926]

52 Tavistock Square, London, W.C.1

Dearest,

I was just telegraphing to say we could not come, when your letter came. At the last moment, of course, the well fell in at Monks House, and L. had to rush off yesterday to find that we can’t possibly go there till Wednesday. Would you be able to come over and spend the night (if its feasible) on Thursday? That will be the only chance of seeing you, I’m afraid; but I’m afraid it looks unlikely for you. If our plans change again, I’ll let you know. If you’re at Charleston on Wednesday I might call in perhaps for tea: but the future is obscure—The worst of it is that I’m brimming with gossip: Maynard, Lydia, and so on. Maynard is torn between the Provostry of Kings and respectability; and Gordon Sqre and scalliwags. He says he has a very good chance. L. said Lydia was an ideal mistress; I, that you and Duncan couldn’t possibly stay at the [Provost’s] Lodge, owing to no dress clothes—This rather nettled him. I think he means to stand. We’re having a talk with Angus tomorrow I think. Tonight we go to Ralphs and Frances’s bridal party. I shall try to make Carrington drunk.

However, I won’t go on gossiping, or you wont come over. The boys were enchanting. We chattered incessantly. I can’t believe theyre not my younger brothers. Also they laughed at you a great deal. “I have a great respect for old Nessa’s brains” said Julian; “but she doesn’t always use them”—very like Thoby. They caught their train.

V.

Nelly of course quite angelic, and everything once more settled for ever.

Berg

[]

1634: To David Garnett

5th May [1926]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Bunny,

I write from this doomed city and I have great doubts that this will reach you. We had arranged, before this horror [The General Strike], to stay with Dadie at Cambridge on the 21st—God knows what will have happened by then. But let us come later, if its possible. We very much want to.

There has been such confusion here (all helpers in the Press fled) that we couldn’t send you Viola [Tree’s Castles in the Air]; now parcels aren’t taken. But we will send directly it is possible again:

Well—I like snakes: so far as human feelings are left me. After 2 days of worrying and doing nothing, and talking and listening in, one is scarcely a worm, let alone a bird. What happens to you in the country?

Yr VW

Berg

[]

1635: To Vanessa Bell

Wednesday 12th May 1926

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest,

We have just been told as a dead secret that the strike will be settled this afternoon. This comes from Laski, but as nobody tells the truth, it may well be another maresnest. However, everybody agrees that something is happening—either there will be peace today or strike going on for several weeks. It beggars description. Recall the worst days of the war. Nobody can settle to anything—endless conversations go on—rumours fly—petitions to the Prime Minister are got up. The past 3 days Leonard and I have been getting signatures from writers and editors to the Archbishop of Canterburys proposals. That is to say Miss Bulley arrives at 9.30: Gerald Brenan with his bicycle at 11: Ralph Partridge, just out of a railway accident on the Cambridge line, at 11.15. Clive is in and out all day. The telephone rings 8 times in 20 minutes. I have to argue with Jack Squire at Aldershot. Desmond is expected. Francis Birrell begs us to come and see his father [Augustine]—or better still go to the Oval and talk to Hobbs. Desmond arrives fresh from Asquith; has a whisky and soda. Maynard rings up from Cambridge—where he has been driven with Lydia in search of coal—to command us to print the Nation on the Hogarth Press. Leonard refuses twice, though several undergraduates have volunteered to motor up and act as compositors. Leonard is now employed by the Labour party to write articles; I have to take despatches to the House of Commons.

Meanwhile, there are no tubes and no buses and no taxis—except those run by special constables often with fatal results. They charge 3d a ride anywhere; but after going to Westminster by bus, with a policeman on the box, and boards up to protect us from stone throwers (the streets in the West End are perfectly peaceful, as a matter of fact) walking seems preferable. Suddenly Roger and Helen arrive—it is now tea time, carrying a market basket containing chocolate and melons, which nourish and provide drink, in case of bloodshed at Camden town, which is the most riotous part of London. Roger is wilder than ever, but agrees with me in thinking it all unutterably boring and quite unimportant and yet very upsetting—Between telephone calls from Arnold Bennett and Mr Garvin and despairing interviews with Miss Bulley who has been insulted by Edmund Gosse—Roger explains that the Gower Street house is off, as the Bedford agent exacts complete respectability and no subletting except to members, by blood, of one’s own family—which says Roger he can’t guarantee: so he’s now after a house in Bernard Street. He has tried, but failed, to get your show put off; and then to have it broadcast. Well, with 3 weeks, I think its not so bad. (The press by the way carries on dismally—Mrs C⁠[artwright]. arrives on Faith Henderson’s bicycle, red with rust; she, too, red with exercise and fury at strikers. She and Leonard argue. But she is a monument of virtue and motherliness and at intervals I sob on her shoulder—for instance when Bob [Trevelyan] arrives having bicycled from Leith Hill, wanting cold meat at 3.30. and brings two poetic dramas for us to read—But now it is tea time, and Desmond suddenly assumes the rôle of Mussolini—marches off to see Lord Beaverbrook and the Editor of the Morning Post—which he does with great success, while Clive complains bitterly that if only we had got Mary’s car, which we cant have, because Jack has tonsilitis, and refuses to let Mary or the car out of his sight, we might have tackled Winston Churchill himself. Miss Bulley arrives for the 6th time—will not sit down—but would like 20 copies of the [Archbishop’s] letter, which I proceed to type. It is now 7 o’clock, and Roger and Helen put on their boots and decide that it is time to start off for Dalmeny, with their melons, by a back road, to avoid rioters. Walking has almost cured Roger’s disease. At last they go, as Desmond returns. We then argue a little about psycho-analysis and Swinburne, which is some relief—

Soon however, Hubert Henderson rings up to say that this is the gravest moment of the strike, and there is imminent danger of civil war in South Wales. Winston has tear gas bombs in readiness: armoured cars are convoying meat through Piccadilly; all the T.U. leaders in Birmingham have been arrested. The Roneo printers refuse to print L’s article on the Constitution. Will L. come to the office at once? Now it is 7.30 and we have to dine with Eileen Power and Romer Wilson: Desmond has to dine with the Asquiths: Clive is going to stand by in case he can get through to Manchester on the telephone—So we dine with Eileen Power who has heard that there is no hope of a settlement for 3 weeks; and says at intervals “This is the death blow of Trades Unionism in England”—

So we go home at 11, to find Nelly hanging over the stairs to say that a man called Cook and a woman called Brown want us urgently and have been calling at intervals since 8 o’clock. As we talk, the bell rings, and Janet Vaughan appears, who says that Lord Haldane and a friend of hers are bringing out an emergency paper and will we give them our letter and list of names to be printed at once. She has a bicycle outside, and though she has just bicycled from Wandsworth where she has been acting to strikers, she will bicycle with it to Fleet Street (all papers are about the size of foolscap, and mostly typewritten.) While this is being prepared, Brown or Haldane rings up to say it is now too late. At last we go to bed. At 9.30 this morning, as I began by saying, Laski rings up—and so we go on.

Strike settled 1 p.m. This has just been broadcast—as you’ll probably have heard by now. Everyone is in the greatest spirits. Books at once begin to sell—I’ve spent the afternoon in wild discussions with Viola, who is beside herself to get her book floated—We are probably having 24 sandwichmen on Monday. I hope your show is now safe—Work begins tonight. Miners still have to settle terms finally wh. they do on Friday. The Nation is coming out—Maynard is up—In short everybody is jubilant and almost hysterical. You probably think this all nonsense—but the relief after all these days of misery with lights half out, nobody doing anything, and the only news coming at intervals in Nelly’s bedroom from the wireless is terrific. We’re going to have a strike dinner and drink champagne with Clive, the Frys, and other spirits.

Please write.

We shall now be rushed off our feet I hope with orders.

Yr B.

Berg

[]

1636: To Edward Sackville West

Saturday morning [15 May 1926]

The Hogarth Press, 52 Tavistock Square London, W.C.1

Dear Eddy

I am awfully sorry, having just said I would go on Tuesday. Now I am overcome by the feeling that I can’t—the truth is I am all over the place trying to do a difficult thing in my novel [the Time Passes section], also I was chattering horrible nonsense all last night, and feel positive I should wreck your evening. This is not a pose; I would much rather you came and saw me, say tea, on Wednesday; and got somebody else to go to the concert.

Please forgive me; but you will understand the horror that comes over one of ones self and being engaged and making a mess of things.

Yours Ever
Virginia Woolf

I can’t remember your telephone number.

Berg

[]

1637: To Edward Sackville West

Monday [17 May 1926]

52 Tavistock Square, London, W.C.1

Dear Eddy

Yes, do come to tea here on Thursday, 5 o’clock. For a novelist you show a feeble and perverted psychology. Any thing less like my and Leonard’s conversation I can’t imagine. Did Leonard ever persuade me to accept an invitation? “Well, you’re a damned fool if you do.” thats his style:—mine is unprintable, but, in this case, flattering to you.

Your
Virginia Woolf.

It is really (now I come to think of it) extremely good and kind of you to ask me.

Berg

[]

Letters 1638-1658 (mid-May–July 1926)

1638: To V. Sackville-West

Wednesday [19 May 1926]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Yes, yes, yes. Come at once.

Everybody is longing to see you. Grizzle in paroxysms. Lunch here at 1. Friday. Better still come to the basement at 12.30 and have a preliminary talk (must it be about the Polish rebellion?) with me in my studio—then 6 or 7 hours upstairs, (unless you’ll dine with me on Thursday, when I happen to be alone)

Ah-hah! Revolutions—Poland—enquiries—scrapes—what fun it’ll be.

Yr VW.

Grizzle’s mange is better—I know how anxious you must be.

Berg

[]

1639: To Vanessa Bell

May 19th [1926]

52 Tavistock Sqre, [W.C.1]

Dearest,

I have done your commissions so far as posting the letters go—not very arduous so far. You seem almost as maltreated as we are—it is a good deal colder than February, generally raining, and now and then a black fog. One came on as I was starting for your show—so I gave it up, and you must wait for criticism which will I know profoundly interest you. Meanwhile I hear that your still life is greatly admired; I hope, bought. probably you have heard from better sources however. The only papers I have seen say nothing about Adeney and compare Duncan to Fragonard—but this is the spiteful [Evening] Standard man.

We should be grateful if you could have some talk with Angus. I think you could make him see the sort of difficulty that arises better than we could—it is mainly the languor and slowness, I think; I can’t help feeling sometimes that the irregularity of the Press and the strain of its being such a gamble (I suppose we are certain now to have a loss next year) will always be more worrying to him than to most people. And that of course reacts upon us. But we leave it to your tactful nature.

We are having rather a grind at the moment to get Viola [Tree] going again. Twenty four sandwichmen are parading the West End today, and I have just travelled Kensington High Street—which almost made me vomit with hatred of the human race. Innumerable women of incredible mediocrity, drab as ditchwater, wash up and down like dirty papers against Barkers and Derry and Toms. One was actually being sick or fainting in the middle of the street. All our past—George Gerald Marny and Emma—rose about me like the fumes of cabbage. And I had to sit next a man in the tube who picked his ears with a large pin—then stuck it in his coat again. Meanwhile you are in Venice—Rain or no rain, Duncan with a sore throat or not (I hope he’s better—please give him my fondest love)—its better than this.

But to the Keynes’—Maynard has decided not to stand for the Provostry. He says he would always be called the Provost and not Keynes: he would become respectable; he would sink and disappear. Also the more you refuse, the more you are requested. So he is not lost to Bloomsbury. But as everyone agrees that he would almost certainly have failed, the arguments do not convince me. Leonard said he seemed greatly depressed. I have seen nothing of them. On the other hand I sat next Mrs Gilchrist of Cardiff last night at Figaro, and she told me that her husband had not a dram of ambition. Needless to say, she had known Saxon when he was in Eton collars. One could have told that far off to look at her. Also she asked me how many people Covent Garden seats. I said roughly 6,000; but advised her to ask the attendant. And there was Ralph and Frances [Marshall], connubial, furtive; James [Strachey] and Noel, both grey as badgers and sleek as moles (I have just been to the Zoo, and noted these facts accurately.) And Adrian and Karin are inseparable; and are re-arranging the house, beds being now only one wall off—I mean, bedrooms next door. Morgan [Forster] came to tea yesterday; but we argued about novel writing, which I will not fret your ears with—his mother is slowly dispatching him, I think—He is limp and damp and milder than the breath of a cow. Mr Brace came—the American publisher. He says they would most warmly welcome a children’s story illustrated by Mrs Bell. Do for Gods sake bestir yourself. What other news? Mary has rung up to ask me to go and see her rooms, with the “lovely new decorations.” Shall I thrust her through with a few home truths?—I didn’t go—couldn’t face Jack on a sofa recovering from tonsilitis. And she joins the parrokeet in France soon, I gather.

I’m panting to pull up my [bath and lavatory] plugs at Rodmell, and when poor old Angus comes back, I suppose we shall at last get there for 5 days. God knows if we shall motor with Gwen—here’s Hubert Waley—come to discuss his infernal pamphlet—and you are safe at Venice; how happy you are—and you dont want anybody—and you don’t have electric light at half cock, as we do since the strike. But then you never saw armoured cars convoying frozen meat along Oxford Street. I shall have lots of stories to tell you about that.

Love to Angus and D⁠[uncan].

B.

Berg

[]

1640: To V. Sackville-West

Saturday [22 May 1926]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

We will get tickets for some entertainment (I can’t be certain which) on Tuesday, So come, and it will be great fun. You’ll find me here anytime after six. But I’m afraid I chattered too much yesterday, and meaning to let you in, Leonard did, which saddened me.

But to business. You said you were going to finish a book in Persia. Would you let us have it? The point is I don’t want to press you, if you feel, as you may, that Heinemann’s has a right, and is, as maybe too, more profitable. At the same time I dont want these refinements of feeling to lose us a chance which would give a great fillip to our autumn season. So consider.

I did enjoy seeing you, and am wearing your necklace, and my exuberance after all is not my egotism, but your seduction. Is your garden good?

Yr VW.

Excuse this handwriting—we are going to watch cricket at Lords and I must wash.

Berg

[]

1641: To Edward Sackville West

Friday [1926?]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Eddy,

No, it wasnt what I said to Clive at all. This is more like it (as far as I remember) that you had a passion for Wagner, were a fanatic, and thought Lawrence the best living English writer—(which were I think your very words,) all of which I repeated admiringly, and with agreement (not as to the fact, of course, but as to the spirit—my theme being that I liked your enthusiasm) This Clive, I suppose, cooked up at some lunch party, annoyingly, I agree, in the way you say: but I don’t believe he was in the least malicious.

God knows what one is to do. He has a passion for being au fait with all goings on; and a little more.

My only shred of “mature wisdom” is that such things are the penalty one pays for the pleasure of talking freely. I’ve paid it dozens of times. At this moment, doubtless, Philip Ritchie is repeating what Eddy says Virginia says and next week it will come round to me—Such is life in Bloomsbury. But it is not done maliciously: though I agree with you, I can never help being angry at the distortion at the moment I hear of it. All I try now is not to hear it.

As for “drawing you out”, please believe I don’t do such things deliberately, with an object—Its only that I am, as a rule, far more interested in people than they are in me—But it makes me a nuisance, I know: only an innocent nuisance.

And a thousand apologies for thus causing you annoyance when I felt nothing but gratitude and expressed nothing but pleasure in seeing you to Clive, or anybody else

Yr
Virginia Woolf

Berg

[]

1642: To V. Sackville-West

Tuesday [1 June 1926]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

It is all infinitely good of you—what we thought of, for your travels, was to have large, numerous photographs.

At the same time, we are a little conscience (oh damn! I’ve been addressing envelopes all the afternoon, and cannot write a word) I was saying we feel a little guilty about taking you from the prosperous Heinemann. Lets talk it over in cold blood

Now about coming—I could come alone for the night on Friday: weekend impossible, owing to dining out Saturday. Or, Leonard says he could come and would like to come for Saturday night the week following—that is 12th (I mean, we could both come.) But then we were not asked then. So choose which you like. Only let me know. (I mean this next Friday, 4th, I could come:)

You are utterly wrong about Viola. Why read memoirs as if they were poems? Don’t you see her vulgarity is not vulgar, her irreticence is not unashamed: an aroma—she aims at that: life: fact: not the thing we go for—but I cant make you understand: try reading as if you were catching a swarm of bees; not hunting down one dart like dragon fly. Please, please, don’t ask a soul [to Long Barn] ever. Aren’t we suffocated with souls? The Sitwells, and Gertrude Stein tonight.

Yr VW.
Love to Pippin [Vita’s dog]

Sybil [Colefax] writes: “I’m flung into writing to you as I actually dreamed last night that you’d gone to a theatre twice with Dottie—now to be called Dorothy—Wellesley!!!”

Well: what is the interpretation?

Berg

[]

1643: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

[early June 1926]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Ottoline,

I’m going to give up writing letters—I always say, or convey, the exact opposite of what I mean—in my last letter I fished for an invitation—surely you are not blind to my lines? However, this is to say that I shall be delighted to come the last week end which is the 26th if that suits you; and Leonard wants me to say that he would very much like to come, but may he leave it a little longer, as his Nation horrors have to be arranged? If this upsets your plans, of course don’t bother,—and he will settle not to come. I’m afraid we must catch the usual Sunday evening train back.

But anyhow that will be very nice. (I hope you see what simple language I’m using, so that there may be no mistake).

Do you mean you’re settling in Bloomsbury? Will all your glories be revived? Or is it only 3 months again? Is it number 4? Shall I be asked to tea?

Yr V.W.

Texas

[]

1644: To Vanessa Bell

2nd June. 1926

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest,

Bloomsbury is ringing with two great excitements: 1: Julian Morrell is engaged to a son of old Vinogradov: 2: Miss Bulley—the stormy petrel of revolution—is engaged to her Cousin Armitage. You will be delighted to hear that Ottoline and Philip are behaving scandalously: refuse to consent; dislike the young man who is penniless; and ignore the whole affair Julian is behaving with great spirit, and it is said that Garsington presents a scene of unparalleled horror. Needless to say, I am going to stay there. Bulley’s climax is hailed with high joy. People, like Angus and Francis and Duncan, say she has been lumbering after them since 1910: daily growing more vociferous, as her natural charm decreased. But how, high and arid as she is, Armitage has succumbed, I know not. Further, Ottoline has taken, on long lease too, a house in Gower Street—She settles in next autumn. (But I meant to conceal this, as I tremble lest you should at once buy a Palazzo or a Canaletto: really, you’ll be touched to hear, I pine for a cup of tea with you: I am starved; I wake in the night crying your name: I am jealous of Duncan) So you see what we’re gossipping about in Bloomsbury.

We were at a party at Edith Sitwell’s last night, where a good deal of misery was endured. Jews swarmed. It was in honour of Miss Gertrude Stein who was throned on a broken settee (all Ediths furniture is derelict, to make up for which she is stuck about with jewels like a drowned mer-maiden.) This resolute old lady inflicted great damage on all the youth. According to Dadie, she contradicts all you say; insists that she is not only the most intelligible, but also the most popular of living writers; and in particular despises all of English birth. Leonard, being a Jew himself, got on very well with her. But it was an anxious exacerbating affair: Germans were introduced to me; Mr Ackerley; Isaacs; and at last a wizened wiredrawn excruciated little man, whose name, he said, I should never have heard: it was Squire, or Squires: he said he is perhaps the worst living painter, admires you and Duncan hugely, and—that was about all—Of course I said he was only too modest. But what is one to say? He said Duncan as a boy used to be the most garrulous of company; laughed and talked without stopping—(This was in the year 1900). Now, he said, he is completely changed. But he may have been talking of some other Grant. Then I said, by way of a joke, how you had broken your watch, and could never come home any more. So he pointed out how there is a clock at St Marks [Venice]. By this time I was so morose that I flew to the bosom of Todd, and there reposed. I have asked her to write her life, but I gather that there are passages of an inconceivable squalor, (did I tell you how I made Todd tell me of a dressmaker, your Miss Fletcher reducing me to such a state of despair and fury that I was driven to a step which nothing, I thought, could have led me to: I am now going to get 3 10 guinea dresses a year.)

…… [Two lines omitted] ……

Vita is back—that will bore you. Nor do you really want to hear my rhapsodies about Monk’s House, where we were last week. It is not of course by any means ready; but the luxury of water running in torrents, boiling hot, for every purpose is inconceivable. Even Nelly had to admit she can cook perfectly there. But I shall want a great deal of advice, not to say help, from you—The drawing room, for example … Here I check myself, well knowing from the experience of years, how my nose can be rapped. I meant to expostulate with you, by the way; is it really true that you think I have a bad temper? Some of the ravens of Bloomsbury, fowls of darkness, so aver; to which I reply, vain, egotistical, selfish, I may be—but my temper (as my husband will vouch) is angelic.

Then I went to your show. Angus will have told you about the sales: I hope your 4 pictures were £100 each. Bicknell [Director, Leicester Galleries] introduced himself, and said it was all a tremendous success: the first day 4 people were bidding at once for Grants Twickenham: the only question was, who could stick the ticket on first. But you brush all this aside. It is my opinion you want. What I think is this: there is a divinely lovely landscape of yours of Charleston: one of flashing brilliance, of sunlight crystallised, of diamond durability. This I consider your masterpiece. I do not think the big picture of Angelica etc. in the garden quite succeeds. I expect the problem of empty spaces, and how to model them, has rather baffled you. There are flat passages, so that the design is not completely comprehended. Of the smaller works, I think the blue boat by the bridge is my favourite. Indeed, I am amazed, a little alarmed (for as you have the children, the fame by rights belongs to me) by your combination of pure artistic vision and brilliance of imagination. A mistress of the brush—you are now undoubtedly that; but still I think the problems of design on a large scale slightly baffle you. For example the Aunt Julia photograph. It seems to me that when you muffle the singing quality of your tone, and reduce the variety and innumerability of colour (The pigeon breast radiance in which you are so supreme that, before hot pokers, or the asters (?) my mind shivers with joy) to bone, where the frame of the design is prominent, then, now and again, you falter, or somehow flatten. But I was hugely impressed, and kept on saying that your genius as a painter, though rather greater than I like, does still shed a ray on mine. I mean, people will say, What a gifted couple! Well: it would have been nicer had they said: Virginia had all the gifts; dear old Nessa was a domestic character—Alas, alas, they’ll never say that now. As for the meretricious loveliness of Grant, I need say nothing. Twickenham, I see, is what people call genius: I’m not sure I dont prefer the Wilmington landscape. I like the bareness of that: also of Bea [Howe], (whose stories I’m just rejecting, very tenderly and encouragingly) I like its impure colour. I thought [Frederick] Porter’s purple sea scape singularly enchanting: Dear old Roger. Suddenly pirouettes, round and round, in the manner of Duncan. And he sold that one too. No: I will not let you two bitches have the laugh of me any longer. Duncan is gibbering as he used in the year 1900. My dear Duncan, why did Squires make you laugh in the year 1900? I see why you laugh at me for writing about painting; but Squire was no laughing matter last night, I can assure you.

The Press is thinking of talking again, one day soon. Angus is charming; only very sleepy. We are now doing rather well.

Do come back soon. I borrowed a necklace of yours the other day

Yr B

I have paid your bills; I dont think they come to £7 quite. We were very much under-rated; absurdly; so I see no reason why your rates should have gone up half as much as ours.

Berg

[]

1645: To V. Sackville-West

Monday [7 June 1926]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Next Saturday then, God willing. I’d have liked to come on Friday—but, another confession—I’ve had to take to the sofa with some kind of influenza and if a germ remains or a headache or anything nothing will induce me to afflict you, much though I should like to. Shall Leonard ring you up?

Sybil did ask us on 15th: we refused: now, to meet you, I’ve accepted—Lord, how one does treat that woman, and seen privately alone at tea here, she’s so nice: only glittering as a cheap cherry in her own house.

Not much news. Rather cross—Would like a letter. Would like a garden. Would like Vita. Would like 15 puppies with their tails chopped off, 3 doves, and a little conversation. The Sitwells was a ghastly frost. I put it in to make you feel a bumpkin—and it did, and thus confirmed my view that other peoples parties have a mystery and glamour one’s own are without. Are you writing poetry? If so, then tell me what is the difference between that emotion and the prose emotion? What drives you to one and not the other? I am trying to work this out; not for Vogue: so dont snub me. Last night I read some poetry of yours in an anthology and liked it: so let me have your Georgies [The Land] complete. My novel is very very bad: all my worst faults displayed so I daresay its as well I have to drop it for the time. Is Montaigne any good?—the one by the woman whose name I can’t remember. And are you so intensely, completely, happy that one drop more would make you spill? Is this solitude? I’m thinking of retiring to Rodmell too to try.

Yr VW.

Berg

[]

1646: To Molly MacCarthy

Wednesday [9 June 1926]

52 Tavistock Square, [W.C.1]

Dearest Molly,

I still write from bed, where [Dr] Elly [Rendel] keeps me, because I have had a dribbling little temperature and then a damnable what they call nerve exhaustion headache—One’s back seems to be made of a membrane, like a bats wing: this should be stretched tight, in order to deal adequately with the flight of existence; but suddenly it flops, and becomes (I imagine) like a veil (do you remember the veils of our youth?) which has fallen into a cup of tea. So I am lying on the sofa, in my nightgown, picking at a book or two, and dropping them on to the floor. I see nobody partly because I have nothing to say except oh! Shall I ever have anything to say except oh!

Well—anyhow we hope to go to Rodmell on Saturday and there I shall look at downs and swans, and steep my faculties in cabbages and green grass. And then we shall come back; and do let us come and dine with you. Only dinner is not the same as an old crones’ crumpet tea. Please don’t get out of that. And I want very much to see Michael [Molly’s son]—so does Leonard. We have a great affection—inbred—I cant remember the right word for him; and I shall try to get him to dinner before he goes.

One moment: I have a request. Please attend. Leonard has a brother Philip who has a boy aged 4. He wants the boy to go to Eton. He writes to ask if we can tell him anything—who are the best housemasters? Could we write a word of introduction? Do you know anything about Eton now? Could you possibly advise? This is the only boy Woolf in existence and the father would do anything in the world to advance him. So I feel I must take steps, but can only remember old Mr Luxmoore and Hester Alington when she was a carroty girl. Any help would be most gratefully received.

Ever your dear old friend

Virginia

Mrs Michael MacCarthy

[]

1647: To Vanessa Bell

Sunday June 13th [1926]

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

Dearest,

We have been having an influenza epidemic, caused, it is thought, by Lottie [Hope] and the Stephen’s dog, so have come down here for a few days, as it gave me a slight headache. But I’m practically all right again. I suppose there’s no chance of your being at Charleston? If so, I might possibly see you—or even inveigle you over. I did not like to insinuate that your genius with the brush and the pot is badly required: but so it is; and I have purposely left several bare beams in the drawing rooms, should you feel inspired. I will say this: it has the makings of a most peculiar and I think comfortable, charming, characteristic, queer resort; but a paralysis attacks my vision when directed to practical details. What curtains? What chair covers? Would I be allowed some rather garish but vibrating and radiating green and red lustres on the mantelpiece? Showers of glass, shaped like long fingers in a bunch—you know my taste that way. Also I want to buy a ship in a glass bottle: also a mother of pearl and wooden platter. But I will wait for you.

It was Francis [Birrell] who told us about Bulley. Other people agree that it is true—He says he has suspected it this 12 months. Ever since he lunched with Mr Armitage and Bull: and was positive from their enamoured ways; but said nothing, and it is now (he says) public: Armitage is charming, rich, fair haired and a cousin: Bull: is like a rich galleon at last afloat, all her banners streaming, and her caskets (what this may signify I know not) open to the air. I saw Sybil (my dear friend Sibyl Colefax I mean) who had met Ottoline nefariously engaged in trying to bring about an engagement between Julian and the Hon. Richard Smith, son of W. H. Smith [the bookseller], fabulously rich:

…… [Seven lines omitted] ……

Ott, is giving bi-weekly tea parties at 6 [10] Gower Street during the autumn (during 6 autumns, for they have a 6 year lease) one for intimacy, the other society “We will discuss everything in the whole Universe” she says. Really, her style is much like Madges [Vaughan].

Leonard wants me to begin by giving you his best love: to go on, by saying, in sorrow, not anger, that it is a little ungenerous of you, he can’t help thinking, to plant him with a complete imbecile like Ede, and then to complain of Ede’s idiocy. The village cat could have written a better article than Ede. Ede now haunts him and demands more work: but why did you recommend Ede? Ede is your hatching; Ede is your brewing. Ede must now be despatched by you—you know how—“I am sorry to tell you etc etc.” We had the first of our talks with Angus. He gave way on every point, as you said. He thinks he mistook what was wanted, and will try to take up a new attitude. Meanwhile, a man who has been with Arnold for 12 years and has vast experience, wants to come. I expect for the sake of the Press we ought to take him; on the other hand, Angus is so charming, and might develop, and brisk up—anyhow, We are to talk again.

What could account for Duncan’s habits except his genius? Of course Twickenham is a work of genius: all I say is, Duncan has genius: but Duncan has, what is much rarer—sanity. These two together fuse into blocks of solidity; the one shoots into spirals of volatility. I’m much amused you should cast a days thought after my criticism—considering how it was fired off with my feet on the fender in 6 seconds precisely. I see I did not express my enormous admiration of both your gifts: which was even more direct and ardent than usual. No pictures now painted give me so much pleasure.

Vita is now arriving to spend 2 nights alone with me—L. is going back. I say no more; as you are bored by Vita, bored by love, bored by me, and everything to do with me, except Quentin and Angelica; but such has long been my fate, and it is better to meet it open eyed. Still, the June nights are long and warm; the roses flowering; and the garden full of lust and bees, mingling in the asparagus beds. I must go in and tidy up.

V.W.

Berg

[]

1648: To Leonard Woolf

Monday [14 June 1926]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest M.

Very good night. No headache. Just off to Rottingdean with Grizzel in motor, where I shall have tea while Vita calls on Lady Jones. Perhaps I shall buy you a keepsake.

Home certainly tomorrow in time for dinner. Lonely day. Longing to see all hearts

M.

Sussex

[]

1649: To V. Sackville-West

Friday [18 June 1926]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

This is only a scribble to catch the post. Yes, Clive has been here, but no mischief made, though many questions asked.

I’m sorry about your mother: what did the dr. say? and about your despondency. But that may be circumstances, and about Sybil and the bad impression I made, and about the rats and the doves. Ever since you drove off, I’ve been talking—oh, and had one declaration of love; and Wells—but no: I won’t repeat any more great mens compliments (of course, I shall; dozens of times over)

“Among younger writers are Miss Violet Sackville West, whose Grey Wethers, strong in conception and austere in treatment, has moments of almost epic splendour.” (Modern English Fiction by Gerald Bullet) This I happen to light on, and have a thrill of jealousy.

Otherwise, I’m well disposed towards you, and if I should see a chance of coming down for a night say Thursday, should I suggest it? Anyhow write a long account of Sunday: I see Clive’s primed with questions: blurted out, had I read you his letter at Rodmell? So beware: dont blush: dont lead me to think you’ve compromised your virtue among the cedars. Yes, I do write damned well sometimes, but not these last days, when I’ve been slogging through a cursed article, and see my novel [To the Lighthouse] glowing like the Island of the Blessed far far away over dismal wastes, and cant reach land.

Now Lottie is coming for this.

Never talk about my health again.

Did yours culminate in the bloody flux, or whatever its called? Are you feeling better for it?

Aint it odd that in Oct. 1922 you were still Nicolson with a aitch.

Yr VW.

Shall you come through London on Monday?

Anyhow, dine, tea, Friday.

Berg

[]

1650: To Vanessa Bell

Friday [18 June 1926]

52 Tavistock Square, London, W.C.1

Dearest,

I came back, as I am now recovered, but infinitely sensible and refusing Sybils parties.

When shall you be back? You are urgently needed: to start a Club: to get up a book of Aunt Julias [Cameron] photographs, among other things.

No one blames you for anything. Everybody loves you—including Vita, whose motives are suspect however. “So beautiful, so charming” etc.

A great rush of Apostles is taking place, but I have avoided them.

I wish you had bought me linen and china in Paris: but whats the use of wishing? Clive is coming to tea—We dine with Mary tomorrow “You must see my lovely room.” Did you ever get paid?

Oh how delicious for you to see me again! I’m agog with excitement at the thought. And all you think is how lovely Angelica is, how adorable, how delicious Charleston, how happy I am, what a great painter Duncan is, and I too (this is what you think) have every grace and every gift. Thank God I’m not

Virginia Woolf

Fond and frantic love to Marjorie [Strachey], whom I love passing the love of women. Also to Angelica. A letter from Quentin, who wants to attack the Keynes’.

L. went to Lydia’s first night with Maynard, who was so nervous he spoilt the evening.

Berg

[]

1651: To V. Sackville-West

Tuesday [22 June 1926]

Typewritten

[52] Tavistock Square [W.C.1]

Darling Mrs Nicolson,

I think I won’t come on Thursday for this reason; I must get on with writing; you would seduce me completely; I have to spend two nights (I suppose) at Garsington.

But; will you ask us (Leonard for one night, me for two) next week, if you’re coming up and its convenient? which would be even nicer, or week after.

Also will you come on after your play on Thursday and see me alone? I’ve put off Sybil in case you can. Come early on Friday. The typewriter calls you instinctively Darling Mrs Nicolson.

I have been going through the extremes of horror, dining with the Hutchinsons to meet the [Aldous] Huxleys and feeling utterly and infinitely unhappy. I cannot control it because there is no reason for it.

They say that Dorothy Warren is engaged to G. Scott. They say she has had every sort of love.

Wells said … isn’t that exciting? My proposal was homosexual. I said … isn’t that exciting? You think I’m so damned vain I can be trusted to blabber everything—well, it’s true.

Good by, darling Mrs Nicolson. You’ll come on Thursday. Leonard says—only the usual thing, but from him unusual, about liking to see you.

Virginia Woolf
(Mrs Woolf)

Of course, if you want to meet Sibyl and you’ve only to say so. Will you dine with me off radishes alone in the kitchen?

Berg

[]

1652: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

[23? June 1926]

52 Tavistock Squre, [W.C.1]

We will arrive at 6 at Oxford on Saturday. I’m afraid we shall have to catch the 6.17 at Wheatley on Sunday, but I hope this will leave time for Mr Bridges.

Leonard is looking forward to coming—

V.W.

Texas

[]

1653: To Vanessa Bell

[July 1926]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

I forgot to ask you the one thing I wanted last night—have you any Aunt Julia letters? I vividly remember reading some, to mother, I think; but can’t find any here. I’m now writing about her, and it would be a great advantage to have some of her actual words, which I imagine were extremely profuse, to quote. But I daresay they’ve all disappeared. I dont want to have to apply to George [Duckworth] or Bee Cameron, if I can help.

If you have, would you ring up tomorrow morning, and I will come and get them.

If not, dont bother—

I suppose you would find it too dull to dine with me, alone, on Sunday night? L. is going to Roger—

Yr B.

Berg

[]

1654: To Helen McAfee

13th July 1926

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, London, W.C.1

Dear Miss McAfee,

I am sorry for the delay in sending you the essay I spoke of “How should one read a book?” (it is, by the way, really a lecture) but I had an attack of influenza which upset all my plans.

I enclose it herewith, and hope it will be suitable for your purposes.

I should like to see a proof, if possible.

Believe me,

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Yale University

[]

1655: To V. Sackville-West

[15 July 1926]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Mrs Nicolson,

This is only business, not affection—I suppose you’re not coming to see me; so please, as a darling, send me (oh but better far come and bring me—)

(1) Tennyson by H. N⁠[Harold Nicolson].

(2) Venetian Glass Nephew the authoress said severely “Really! Not read any of my books!” Oh what an evening! I expected a ravishing and diaphanous dragonfly, a woman who had spirited away 4 husbands, and wooed from buggery the most obstinate of his adherents: a siren; a green and sweetvoiced nymph—that was what I expected, and came a tiptoe in to the room to find—a solid hunk: a hatchet minded, cadaverous, acid voiced, bareboned, spavined, patriotic nasal, thick legged American. All the evening she declaimed unimpeachable truths; and discussed our sales: hers are 3 times better than mine, naturally; till thank God, she began heaving on her chair and made a move as if to go, gracefully yielded to, but not, I beg you to believe, solicited, on our parts. Figure my woe, on the stairs, when she murmured, “Its the other thing I want. Comes of trying to have children. May I go in there?” So she retired to the W.C., emerged refreshed; sent away her cab, and stayed another hour, hacking us to pieces. But I must read her book.

(3) Tell me if this is a real coronet, or a sham. I’m trying to prove my great Aunts descent from a Neapolitan adventurer and a French Marquis. But I have no time.

Ever, dear Mrs N.

Your devoted
Virginia Woolf.

Sybil is rampant beyond belief.

Berg

[]

1656: To V. Sackville-West

[19? July 1926]

52 Tavistock. Square, W.C.1

You are an angel, but I didn’t mean you to take so much trouble. God knows about the Marquis. Probably the whole thing is different in France—he may have been the son or the nephew of a Marquis (I think that was the legend), and anyhow I suppose I can say, vaguely, ‘aristocratic’, and leave it. I want to prove her base and noble—it fits in with her oddities. I might spend a lifetime over her; but can’t face going to my halfbrother who knows all about the Marquis. Tennyson has not yet come; but will, I make no doubt. I quail before the Venetian nephew. Another meeting with that arid desert [Elinor Wylie] has sickened me. The only curiosity is—how does she do it—Francis Birrell, Aldous Huxley at her feet, and she no better than a stark staring naked maypole? God, again, knows.

About coming—(this letter is in the catalogue style, which reminds me, I’ve not yet read Wellesley, but will, and would, if Desmond hadn’t turned up last night and rambled on for an hour about the character of Shakespeare—he was a smallish man, very nervous, with staring blueish grey eyes, highly excitable—did you know all this? he talked a great deal—Shakespeare: and Desmond and Virginia too.) But to return—About coming—I’m dashing off, you’ll be amused to hear, on my chronic visit to Hardy. I expect I shall be back on Saturday: I shall only stay one day and drink one cup of tea, and be so damned nervous I shall spill it on the floor, and what shall I say? Nothing, but arid nonsense. Yet I feel this is a great occasion. Here am I approaching the immortal fount, touching the sacred hand: he will make all of us, Leonard and me and Grizzle, seem transparent and passing, This old wrinkled dwindled man, who has, Sibyl Colefax says (who, you’ll be surprised to hear knows him intimately) two very little, very bright eyes—Sibyl told him how much she liked The Dynasts. Now what did Hardy think of Sibyl? It is said he does not think. But I’ll tell you all about it when we meet.

So once more, about coming. I dont think there’s much good my coming with your pack of flibbertigibbets (Clive has just stood me a terrific lunch and was sweet and found us an old ripe, but not quite virginal, apple, and I love him, and always shall, but not in the go-to-bed or sofa way) Clive, Mary, Evan Morgan [Lord Tredegar] etc. I should, I make no doubt, shine. Vanity compels me to admit that I should cut a very fine figure, in Todds dress (Thank God, I’m sitting in an old silk petticoat at the moment with a hole in it, and the top part of another dress with a hole in it, and the wind is blowing through me), and I’m reading de Quincey, and Richardson, and again de Quincey—again de Quincey, because I’m in the middle of writing about him [“Impassioned Prose”], and my God Vita, if you happen to know do wire whats the essential difference between prose and poetry—It cracks my poor brain to consider.

As I say, I don’t think I’ll come on Saturday, though I should cut a figure; unless you very particularly wish it: but it suddenly occurs to me, why should I not come and spend Monday night alone with you? Except that I should have to return, literally and soberly, with the lark on Tuesday morning. But that would be fun too. The fact is we all go down to Sussex in a reserved saloon, on Tuesday afternoon, and if it were feasible for you, and you had no lovers friends, mothers, poisoned dogs, or young men proposing to you (though you’re a married woman as you so often and so surprisingly assert) in the house, then I should be divinely happy, and sit on a seat and chatter. Moreover, having done de Quincey by then, I should be care free of prose and poetry: I should have packed the top part of my dress (what is it called?) and the skirt; my books, and papers, and 3 petticoats which I bought yesterday, and now the Cook says they’re not petticoats—she says they’re chemises. I ask you, how is one to know? But I cannot write all that is in my head, for I should fill the entire paper supply. Answer me only with your pen: shall I come on Monday night?—or will you, perhaps, come up on Monday, and let us dine together at a new place where they have a great variety of foods and drinks; and they give you roses, and there are looking glasses which reflect the most astonishingly commonplace scenes—a fat woman gobbling—in such a way that one feels one is dangling among octopuses at the bottom of the sea, peering into caves, and plucking pearls in bunches off the rocks.

Oh Vita, I must stop writing.

Yr VW.

Leonard says he can’t come because of the Press etc—but would like to.

Berg

[]

1657: To V. Sackville-West

Sunday [25 July 1926]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

I think there is a train which arrives at Sevenoaks at 6.4. I will come by this; but for God’s sake stop me, if its not convenient. I feel I have rather muddled things; or you have.

Heres 7/4 for the Venetian nephew [by Elinor Wylie]. Bad, bad woman: I said lend. You go short of twopence in punishment.

V.W.

Berg

[]

1658: To Violet Dickinson

Monday [26 July 1926]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My Violet:

I ought to have written to you before, to thank you for your postal order. We have been in rather a rush, though, bringing out a book of Maynard Keynes’. Unless you order otherwise, you will go on getting these horrid little books from us at intervals. They are the ones we print ourselves, and for some reason your name is down as a subscriber to them. But you’ve only to say if you have had enough.

I am now printing a play by a German Jewess. Happily one cannot read as one prints, or I should never go on with it. And yesterday I should have been seeing Vernon Lee—Do you remember taking us to see her at Florence? She is now stone deaf, and talks a great deal, very very slowly but otherwise is precisely the same—the same coat and skirt, shoes, rings, stockings. Instead of seeing her, we went to Dorchester, and saw Thomas Hardy, who talked a great deal about father, and the Lushingtons. He may well outlive us all. I never saw such a spruce lively old man, but nothing would induce him to talk about his books.

London is a frying pan in the summer, and thank the Lord, we leave tomorrow for two months at Rodmell. This is very exciting because we have just put in a bath and two waterclosets, and have not yet seen it finished. Shall you be passing? Will you look in? I should like you to see the water closet. I think I shall retire there next year, and write innumerable books. Here it is almost hopeless, what with Lady Colefax (I hear Ozzie [Violet’s brother] is motoring with her) and Lady Ottoline. Leonard won’t dine there, with the result that she never stops asking him.

This is not what anyone could call a letter but you must consider it better than nothing—it is written in a chaos of books and things—How I wish you had ever taught me to be tidy! Nice of course I am; but not tidy. Write some time—you have lots of little bits of paper about on which to write

Yr Sp.

Leonard sends his love. The whole family—Nessa Clive, Children; depart together tomorrow.

Berg

[]

Letters 1659-1679 (August–mid. October 1926)

1659: To Elinor Wylie

July 30th [1926]

Monks House, Rodmell., [Sussex]

Dear Mrs Wylie,

I have been staying away, and have only just come back to find your letter and your books waiting for me here.

It was extremely good of you to write. I have a passion for knowing or trying to guess all that was in a writer’s mind, and I shall use your letter as a commentary on your text. I am beginning the Venetian Glass Nephew tonight.

I have put aside the weeks here to read what I want to read—London is too much of a rush; and now with your letter to help me, I shall spend my evenings shelling you out.

With many thanks,

Yours very sincerely,
Virginia Woolf

Yale University

[]

1660: To V. Sackville-West

Sunday [8 August 1926]

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

Yet, it does seem hard, that we should make you spend all the fine weather with your nose to the pen [Passenger to Teheran]. But think of your glory; and our profit, which is becoming a necessary matter, now that your puppy has destroyed, by eating holes, my skirt, ate L’s proofs, and done such damage as could be done to the carpet—But she is an angel of light. Leonard says seriously she makes him believe in God … and this after she has wetted his floor 8 times in one day.

I have sat a great deal on the bank: got completely brown and bitten, feel very well, can walk any distance (what a joy after last summer) and have read, at last, Wellesley on the world. I think it has great merit; but so bound up with faults—cobbled, jerked, patched—what is one to do with it? Too good to destroy: But could she re-write? Some fluency and currency and perspective—thats what it wants: but I needn’t criticise, thank God. Where am I to send it? A passionate Negress has now thrown her book at my head, and wants advice.

But when are you coming our way, to stay in your little cupboard room? I am going into Lewes to buy you what is called toilet articles. Which reminds me, do tell me, what is the name and price of the Spanish wine [Allela], and how could I get it? (I ask this with grave doubt: if you so much as hint at lending me a thimblefull, never darken my door again) But tell me: Our village cider is undrinkable, and I want to buy before L’s enthusiasm for strong drink has cooled.

Sibyl put us off—for the duke of Devonshire I suppose; but was not acutely missed.

Did you have Molly? Did she cry?

Thinking about copulation, I now remember a whole chapter of my past that I forgot, I think, to tell you.

Oh and my spectacles—angel, send them

Yr V.W.

Berg

[]

1661: To Helen McAfee

10th August 1926

Typewritten

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Miss McAfee,

I have corrected the proofs and have cut out six lines on page 11, at the end of a paragraph, which will I hope meet your wishes. The proofs only reached me last night, as I am staying down in the country.

Many thanks for your kind letter. I hope I may have an opportunity of contributing again to the Yale Review.

Yours very sincerely
Virginia Woolf

[in Virginia’s handwriting:] The above address is only temporary.

Yale University

[]

1662: To Saxon Sydney-Turner

Aug 12th [1926]

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes, [Sussex]

My dear Saxon,

Many thanks for the cheque. I hope you didn’t inconvenience yourself to send it.

About the autobiography—do you want it typed now, or will it do if I wait till October? It is put away in a cabinet, but no doubt Angus could find it if asked. I imagine it will be rather expensive, as a typist would probably want extra for the old manuscript.

I hope it may be possible to do something with it.

We are just off to Charleston, hoping to escape a storm—This week the weather has been perfect; and Clarissa brightening up—seduced last night—I should say raped—most impressive.

Yrs V.W.

Sussex

[]

1663: Edward Sackville West

[mid-August 1926]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

Dear Eddy,

I have several times taken up the pen to write to you, but the weather has always made it impossible. Its too fine (its raining now) to do anything except sit on the downs; also, I’m de-humanised. I’ve sunk to the bottom of the world, and I only see the soles of peoples feet passing above. Does the country affect you like this? Not Knole, I imagine. I cant rise to the top at all. It is very happy down here, I assure you. Also, I think incessantly—so it seems. I ponder every word of your letter—about the Partridges, about Bloomsbury, about fiction. The only thing is my thoughts blow away—(No: Colefax did not come. She passed my door, but I averted her. A very tactful letter—that did the trick.) Nobody has been here, except Vita for 10 minutes. I saw the tutors knees—quite enough. She was therefore shaggier and surlier than ever—broke the w.c. too before she left.

There’s not going to be a post—damnation seize my friends for not writing to me. I’m dependent on crumbs falling down to me from life above. (Do you still believe in life by the way? I’m reading Wells’ latest [The World of William Clissold, 1926]—rather thin spread—bread comes through) So, as the post wont come, I shall take my eczematic dog to the top of Asheham hill, to find mushrooms. What I do is to think—I assure you, I think about Partridge and fiction and life and—oh here is the post with a letter from Rose Macaulay. As I was saying, the thing about fiction is—its blown away, that profound thought, which settled the whole hash too. What a nuisance! Please excuse the divagatoriness of this

Yr VW

Berg

[]

1664: To Ethel Sands

Monday Aug 16th [1926]

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes, [Sussex]

Dearest Ethel,

It is very nice of you to ask us, and it is most tempting to come over. The difficulty is that Leonard is so engaged here that I don’t think he will manage it, and I have got to get a book finished, and if I go gallivanting off to you, I certainly shant.

I suppose the middle or end of September is impossible for you, supposing I get finished by then—dash over, if you will have me by myself for a night? (No: I see you say before Sept. 1st; so I imagine it wont do.)

Are you painting? Are you seeing a great many people? London was rather a rush—the consequence of which is that one puts everything aside to do down here. I think you are amazingly wise to put an end to it all in March.

But it will be very nice to get you to come up to tea with me and try to torment you into indiscretions in October.

Yours affect,
V.W.

Wendy Baron

[]

1665: To V. Sackville-West

[19 August 1926]

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

Will you come on Wednesday? to lunch at 1? Leonard will be in London for the day. Would you like me to ask Clive? If so, let me know. Sleep night.

You’ll be even more uncomfortable than usual.

I say, please bring 2 bottles wine (not cider) which I want to buy.

Cant get any.

If Thursday suits you better, come Thursday.

Only let me know. Tommie [Stephen Tomlin] talking:

Yr V.W

I thought you looked tired. I hope you’re not very bothered.

Berg

[]

1666: To V. Sackville-West

Sunday [22 August 1926]

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

Yes—that will be perfect. I think I shall be alone on Wednesday—couldn’t you come early and enjoy a scrambly lunch?

The title [Passenger to Teheran] seems very good—far the best. I’m longing, in spite of having read 3 mss, to read yours—a great testimony to you: I’m compunctious that you should have worked so hard. Seven hours a day My God

Raymonds here. You have been praised almost without stopping:

“There’s no one I should mind finding me out so much as Vita” says Raymond. Then its your standing gorgeous in emeralds: then knowing Persians—and so on—all making you so brilliant I shall be shy for 15 minutes and a ½ precisely at seeing you.

Poor Puppy had a tray of chicken on top of her, so is being washed. You have saved my life by explaining how to buy nightgowns: I have 2: Now, how does one make one’s hair stay firm after washing? and about chemises?

VW.

Damn you for going to Normandy—I have just refused to stay with Ethel Sands, in order to write

But whats one’s writing worth that one should refuse to cross the Channel?—at this moment the thing I long for: Shall we go in Sept.?

Berg

[]

1667: To Margaret Llewelyn Davies

2nd Sept [1926]

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

Dearest Margaret,

No, we’re not in Russia, but here, and its been top hot and nice to answer letters—but just the right weather for reading them—(this is a hint to you—if only people would write letters and not want answers!)

We’ve been dining over the downs with the Keynes’ in their magnificent country house, and I nearly gave him your article; but only handed on your views about the Nation questionnaire. Why d’you read that paper, by the way? I’m surprised and shocked. I don’t agree with you, you’ll be glad to hear. I’d rather confess to Shaw than to any clergy; and the Nation, vile as it is (but Margaret can’t be parted from it) is much more religious than any church. And why not out with one’s beliefs? Why this timid decorous 19th century passion for reticence and dignity? So far they’ve had close on a thousand answers, and Leonard who rashly said he would go through them, begins every meal with a statement who’s winning—God or devil. Devil is ahead today. Its amazing to see the names, but I dare not divulge.

So far, he (Leonard, not devil) has got a good deal more time for writing under the new arrangement, and I hope, when the staffs’ holidays are over, he will get still more. At the moment he’s putting together a book of his articles, under pressure from me and America. Then I think he must have read enough to make a real start, and then I daresay, working 20 hours a day as I shall insist, he will be done in no time. The Hogarth is rather pressing though. Our ‘list’ is becoming longer and longer—why not a pamphlet on wickedness in general by M. Ll. D? I can see your bristles flashing at this distance.

The Keynes’, Lydia and Maynard, are both completely under the sway of the Webbs. Beatrice and Lydia exchange headdresses; (I know you’ll like to hear this) How charming she is, says Lydia: Maynard is deeply impressed by her book [My Apprenticeship 1926]. I said theyd be dropped, when they were no longer useful. But Beatrice still talks of Leonards great charm. Leonard says he has long known, but concealed, her illicit passion for him. Anyhow, the great Keynes—and he gets greater and greater, and buys more and more pictures and builds more and more libraries and bathrooms—is at her feet.

Leonard sends his love, and will write.

Yrs V.W.

Sussex

[]

1668: To Vanessa Bell

[14? September 1926]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

I’m very sorry Quentin was so late. I didn’t realise he was expected at any time, as he suggested dining here. But he’s now off—

I see its impossible for you ever to reach us—what with one thing and another. But I will come to tea soon—if you wish it—and consult you—on my house—but its now too late, almost. Who is now coming here?

Ka [Arnold-Forster]

Yr V.

Berg

[]

1669: To Vanessa Bell

[15? September 1926]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

I told Harrods to send you the stuff, but it strikes me that its really rather absurd, with all your offspring and so on, to take up such a job. Frances Marshall told me of a creature who comes and makes things very well—Wouldn’t it be better if I got her when I go back, and you supervised? Anyhow, its a business proposition: I mean either way we must settle a price. But I expect you will behave like Aunt Fisher

Let me know what you think—I will send you the skirt, if you want to do it and of course, your taste would be very superior. I doubt rather that I shall go to Ethels.

Yes—I heard your malicious description, over the walnuts, of the poor Wolves and Monks—I was hovering just over the centre candle—with my finger like a button hook

Ever, darling Chick, (how did they end letters?)

Berg

[]

1670: To V. Sackville-West

Sept 15th, [1926]

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

They’ve only just sent the second batch of proofs [of Passenger to Teheran] which I have swallowed at a gulp. Yes—I think its awfully good. I kept saying ‘How I should like to know this woman’ and then thinking ‘But I do’, and then ‘No, I dont—not altogether the woman who writes this’ I didn’t know the extent of your subtleties: Here’s a brave attitude—emeralds, staircases, Raymond subjugated—thats familiar enough: but not the sly, brooding thinking evading one. The whole book is full of nooks and corners which I enjoy exploring Sometimes one wants a candle in one’s hand though—Thats my only criticism—you’ve left (I daresay in haste) one or two dangling dim places. Its a delicious method, and one that takes the very skin of your shape, this dallying discursive one. The danger is that one may let the discussions float off a little too high in the air. But in the main I think you’ve hit it off perfectly—the problem being to keep moving (which you do, for I read half the book at a sitting and was drawn on to the last words, which, emphatically are the last words) and yet somehow dally and encircle this and that and enclose them all in the one mesh. As I say, I did not altogether know Towsers resources. Indeed, it is odd that now, having read this, I have picked up a good many things I had missed in private life. What are they, I wonder, the very intimate things, one says in print? There’s a whole family of them. Its the proof, to me, of being a writer, that one expresses them in print only, and you do here; more here than anywhere, I think, unless its in The Land, and Seducers. Its the very subject for you. And how did you do it, so fast and free? I daresay that was the heaven sent way of doing it, and the reason why the whole book has this fresh, unfadedness about it; gives this sense of your being away, travelling, not in any particular geographical country: but travelling far away. Now I see, you’ll be glad to hear, what a great affair going to Persia is: By the way, how my mouth watered over the casual paragraph about a park of dromedaries and racehorses in the Ukraine before the war. Please tell me more.

Leonard is beginning tonight. I say, its very very good of you to have let us have it.

Here I am, having to face my husband this dripping evening, on his return from London with the confession, not that I’ve been seduced, but Grizzle has. I left the door open. Oh my God, how can I face it Then I’ve put my finger out, fallen on my chin and cut it, and wear a bandage.

Must one have a puppy if one copulates with a dog twice ones size and is oneself well over 60?

Puppy well.

Yr VW.

Is the Land out?

Berg

[]

1671: To Vanessa Bell

[16? September 1926]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

My daily letter—

I rather think I shall go to Ethel (if she can have me) on 26th as I’m getting on quicker with my book.

Could you do the dress by then? if you will do it?

If not, would you send the stuff back, and I’ll take it to a Grub in Lewes. But I’d better do it at once. My only skirt is now torn

Ka [Arnold-Forster] not coming, because of Mark [her son]—has grave fears that Will [her husband] is giving up painting for politics has been bathing with Nansen at Geneva.

V.W.

Will you tell Quentin—I would like to come and see him, and we will certainly publish a book together.

Berg

[]

1672: To Ethel Sands

[18 September 1926]

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

Dearest Ethel,

Is the 27th, 28th. too late for you? It seems to be the only time, what with one thing and another. Let me come next year if it is, I want to see you—not Normandy only as you cynically suggest.

We are broiling and baking here—the colour of bricks. It is delicious and extremely lovely—I mean the downs, not our colour. One day you must come and see. I’ve a room the size of a hat box for you. It is rumoured that Sibyl [Colefax] is taking a house next door to Charleston—what fun for all of us

Yours affect
V.W.

Here’s a letter from Vanessa, just as I was sending this. She says you will be in Paris the 27-8th; so don’t bother to answer this. I had meant to write before, but got into a muddle.

Wendy Baron

[]

1673: To Vanessa Bell

Sunday [19 September 1926]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

My own Lamb,

(It is a difficult style to keep up, I agree)

Have it your own way. If its a failure [the dress], you’ll lose your time, I my money, so its equal. If a success, I’ll pay you 30/- which was Grave’s charge, plus bodkins and bones.

I dont suppose I shall go to Ethel then. But its possible I may cross the channel for a day or two on my own account.

Let me know when you want a fitting and I’ll come. Dadie and Vita may possibly be coming, but probably not. Anyhow, I could get Vita to motor me.

As for the Paris idea, I am in your hands entirely. What I want is a cloak or coat or autumn covering of some sort. Also a hat; but you must have my head for this. I shall be only too thankful to shift the whole burden on to you—I shall pay you a modest percentage on your purchases. I had a fit in an Eastbourne hat shop with sheer horror.

I send a skirt which may indicate the length.

I think you ought to ask Molly to stay. She writes in a dismal vein, spends much of her time with the giraffes at the Zoo. As for me, I am practically non-existent with sheer heat and pleasure. You I suppose have a large week end party.

Grizzle has been seduced, so no more, darling, precious.

Berg

[]

1674: To V. Sackville-West

21st Sept. [1926]

Typewritten

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes,

My dear Vita,

(this is typewriter writing) But when are you coming to fetch your things? Please let me know. This week? I shall be alone Thursday 23rd. Next week? Only Mrs Bartholomew to cook. Bed at your service any time. Week after we return.

Hope to bring out book in early Oct. Any names to send cards to? If so please let me have them. What is your lecture about? When? Where? May I come? Will clap. Grizzle seduced again. Typewriter awfully on the spot. No more at present from yours very

Virginia Woolf.
(Mrs Woolf)

The Hon.
Mrs Harold Nicolson
Long Barn
Weald Sevenoaks Kent.

Berg

[]

1675: To Edward Sackville West

22nd Sept. [1926]

Typewritten

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes, [Sussex]

Dear Eddy,

I am ashamed not to write, and then to write on a typewriter. But there is a paper shortage in my house—no note paper I can write on. I have hurt my finger. So please forget and forgive.

(You have never known what it is to be without note paper.)

Yes, I like the painters, but I find their attitude a little agonising. “Poor beetle” thats what they say; and at once I have eight legs, all squirming. It is for this reason; their ascendancy is over all objects of daily use: tea pots, chairs, wall paper; so that when they come, their presence is one long criticism, from the heights. We, who deal in ideas, and are moreover, sensitised to draw out, always more and more, other peoples feelings never inflict this chill. How delightful if one could

I’m going over today [to Charleston] to meet Lytton. Shall I be happy—unhappy? Anyhow, one or the other.

I like people to be unhappy because I like them to have souls. We all have, doubtless, but I like the suffering soul which confesses itself. I distrust this hard, this shiny, this enamelled content. We old creatures are all crusted over with it. Now unhappiness means vapour, atmosphere, interest. I am often unhappy. I was cursing my fate at two this morning, sitting up in bed, wishing to be killed instantly. You will never guess why.

Are you pleased with your novel [The Ruin, 1926]? I think the weeks when it is first out are humiliating. People will talk about it, or they wont talk about it. Which does one want? All that is miserable; and yet a necessity—one goes snuffing round after it.

I cannot write an elegant sentence when a flock of sparrows set on my thoughts directly they fall to the ground and peck them out on the keyboard.

We shall be back soon. I feel entirely dehumanised by the sun now, and wish for fog, snow, rain, humanity.

Yours
Virginia Woolf

Berg

[]

1676: To Vanessa Bell

[end September 1926]

Typewritten

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

I suppose you are off shortly [to France], so this is only to remind you that what I want are:

one autumn coat, black, I should think, but leave to you.

Some simple dress to wear in the evening.

A hat—but this perhaps better wait till you can choose me one in London.

Will you settle rate of percentage?

I dont want to give much for coat or dress I mean the sort of thing you pay at Lafayette.

Tommie [Stephen Tomlin] very charming; incessant talk; Nick and Barbara [BagenalJ turned up. Barbara laden with trousers and books for him, so I left them alone, but apparently it was not necessary.

B.

I should be much obliged if you or Duncan could tell me on a card where I could see some of the historical pictures of Benjamin Haydon? in some restaurant, I think. I have to write about him.

It is said that Condé Nast threatened to reveal Todds private sins, if she sued them, so she is taking £1,000, and does not bring an action.

Berg

[]

1677: To Gerald Brenan

Oct 3rd [1926]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

My dear Gerald,

I was going through the Nation Questionnaire just now and came on your name. This did not remind me of you. I hadn’t forgotten you: but perhaps if I write to you on the spur of the moment I may get an answer. Write to 52 T.S: we go back in a day; though the sun is blazing here, like August, only gentler and lovelier.

Ralph said he had read enough of your novel to perceive a masterpiece. Why aren’t I allowed to read it then? Am I inferior to Ralph? Certainly, in some ways. I dont think I shall ever possess his sexual powers, for one thing, which must be a cause of endless pleasure to him: though a little mystifying, I daresay, to Frances Marshall. Do the sexes differ greatly here? I wish you would explain what this vein in the thigh does to the vision of the world—slip a purple shade over it, or what? Somebody said you live in a hotel with a couple of Colonels, and a maiden lady. You read enormously; and sit at a café flipping sheet after sheet, scribbled over, under a very inferior sheet of blotting paper. When it gets too dark to see you jump up, and take a brisk walk to the castle in the vineyards; dine; very sparely; and read till 2 or 3 in the morning. Sometimes one of the Colonels drops in for a talk—can’t make you out quite, whereas the maiden lady finds you’re sympathetic, and wishes you weren’t so lonely.

Do you like the life of yourself? I’m very idle, sitting over the fire; writing with difficulty in a slippery book, while the dogs (alas we have two) snore and grumble. I finished a novel [To the Lighthouse] 10 days ago: and already regard it, in which my whole life was wound and bound for 7 months, with complete indifference. I want to buy a motor car, thats all, and wander over the Continent, poking into ruined cities, basking, drinking, writing, like you, in cafés, and talking to Colonels and maiden ladies. Come with me—I will drive: you shall buy grapes and bread, and discuss the state of the wine with natives.

People have been dropping in, but so briefly that I have discovered nothing new about the human soul. For instance, Nick, Tommie, Barbara, and the shadow of Saxon. Also the shadow of Lytton, Colefax, and Raymond Mortimer. Shall you come back? What are the books to read? How is one to live wisely? What mixture of art, literature, and society is right? Is there anything to be said about fiction? about Wells’ new novels, about Haydon’s diaries, about Eddy Sackville-Wests novel etc, etc? These questions will all be debated during the coming winter at the Bloomsbury Bar, meeting in Duncan’s studio alternate Fridays. I hereby invite you.

It is pitch dark in the room now, except for a very coarse strong lamp, which blazes my eyes out, and illumines a pot of brilliant red and yellow dahlias. Talking of flowers, I never forget the lilies you gave me last year.

Yrs V.W.

George Lazarus

[]

1678: To V. Sackville-West

Sunday [10 October 1926]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

Darling Mrs Nicolson,

Could you be an entire angel and tell me (for the 50th time) the name and address of the old widow who typewrites [Mrs Candy, Bournemouth]? Lost again, and needed instantly.

Well, did you like Squire? I did: I think the better of him for it, though his manner is always that of a curate, a grocer, a churchwarden, someone sticky with jam and buns at a School treat, however, he admires you; and I’m jealous. Yes: that yellow moon is rising on the horizon—Everyone admiring Vita, talking of Vita. Now there remain the Times Literary Supt. for which I have an unreasoning respect: Nation: New Statesman. All of these are negligible compared with one word of mine or any other casual vivid outspoken human being: but one can’t see it oneself—not the author.

I’ve been walking to the river and back:—But what was I going to say? Oh yes—begin your history of a Kentish village at once. Plan it out roughly on a great sheet: Let each little note branch and blossom in the night, or when you’re walking (the beauty of this subject is that everything will come in—cabbages, moon, church steeple): Occasionally open some old history, or life of some unknown man, but not to read carefully—to dream over. So in a week—no, 3 or 4 days, the whole poem will be foaming and bubbling in your head: and meals seem but a temporary contrivance barring the way—(Not wine; this don’t apply to Spanish wine) How I envy you, with sweet gales of praise coming from London—and this in your head, in your gaiters over your fire.

I say: did I tell you the Bloomsbury Bar was a dead secret? Eddy writes about it. I suppose I forgot, and shall be flayed alive: Can’t be helped.

Are you coming up? Shall I come down for a night sometime? No: your mother.

Jack, Mary and Tom [Eliot] have just been, and Jack [Hutchinson] says we can’t print Raymonds pamphlet: should be prosecuted certainly.

Any more letters of praise?

The green moon is rising

Yr VW.

Eddy says he admires the Land: reminds him of Chaucer.

Berg

[]

1679: To V. Sackville-West

[12? October 1926]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

Mr Barrington Gates (the Nation reviewer) says may he take a whole column for The Land, as in his opinion it is ‘so outstanding’ that it should not be lumped in with others—Sashy, Laura Gottshalk to wit. So there He’s going to have a column.

V.W.

Berg

[]

Letters 1680-1702 (mid October–December 1926)

1680: To Saxon Sydney-Turner

[15? October 1926]

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Saxon,

I think I distinguish “vapid” from “insipid” only by my ear. “Vapid” sounds to me heavy, vacant, blank; “insipid”, trivial, frivolous, chattering (largely because of the three syllables I suppose) A vapid man would be silent; an insipid man would dribble along—as a matter of fact, I suspect Cobden-Sanderson did both. But didnt like to say so.

I suppose the dictionaries might explain. But one writes, I suppose, by ear, not dictionary.

Yrs V.W.

Sussex

[]

1681: To V. Sackville-West

[mid-October 1926]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Next Tuesday (19th) seems the only day I could come down. What about the week after?

Yes, I would like to come to the Tchekov [Three Sisters]. Will you dine here? More reviews? More praise?

VW.

Berg

[]

1682: To V. Sackville-West

Tuesday [19 October 1926]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

God knows which alternative: the telephone and Lady Gerald unnerved me completely.

Answer these questions:

1. How is your cold?

2. Are you dining here on Monday? Could you come early?

3. Are you dining with Colefax on 26th?

4. Could we leave plans till Monday? I’d like to come if you’re alone, sometime.

We cant come this weekend, as we go to Cambridge, damn it. Your Nation reviewer says you are inferior to no living poet.

Look at this, just come [unidentified].

Yr VW.

I dined last night with a great admirer of yours. Oliver Strachey who begs to meet you.

If you haven’t got tickets for Tchekov on Monday, why not put it off, dine here, and I’ll ask him? Or suggest another day.

Berg

[]

1683: To V. Sackville-West

[1 November 1926]

52 Tavistock Square, [W.C.1]

We hope, and expect, you to dine with us on Friday to meet Oliver [Strachey]. Come early and meet Virginia. Then perhaps, God willing, you’ll motor us down; Leonard says he must go Sunday night. May I stay till Monday?

Dazed and mazed with Ozzie’s gossip—fountains, cascades, cataracts—shining through all one steadfast star—Vita: her character, charm, greatness, goodness—Oh my God I cried at last, there’s another woman whose name begins with V in this room He was like an old Badger, pouched and bristling, and we hobnobbed like old Crones over the fire, and forgot and forgave; but raked up endless embers, and burnt our fingers, gossiping—Dotty—Gerry [Wellesley]—Clive—your mother—as you can imagine.

But come, dearest creature,—I will—give you one chaste kiss.

Your
V.W.

Come to tea on Wednesday, do please, to meet Sibyl. I’m having such a week of conversation—mostly about you. Any letters about Persia [Passenger to Teheran]?

Berg

[]

1684: To Helen McAfee

Nov 1st. 1926

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Miss McAfee,

Many thanks for your kind letter and cheque for my essay on Reading. It is very good of you to ask me to send you something more, and I certainly hope to do so in the near future. Meanwhile I enclose an essay by my husband, which I think might suit the Yale Review. It was delivered as a lecture here, and caused a good deal of interest.

Believe me, yours very sincerely,

Virginia Woolf

Yale University

[]

1685: To V. Sackville-West

[2 November 1926]

Postcard

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Then, come to tea tomorrow, Wednesday, theres an angel. At 4 Clive Sibyl Virginia all implore.

No, I’m not asked to Ethels, Heaven consume her. Expect you dinner Friday anyhow, and to take us for week end, and Fanny—but what about Grizzle [dogs]?

VW.

[]

1686: To V. Sackville-West

Tuesday [9 November 1926]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

I think the 4th week end (Saturday 4th) would be best. L. says he would go to his brother, and in view of the other circumstances I think one would be freer, wiser, tipsier, merrier, probably more blastedly melancholy, then than now. Also, one has it to look forward to. Oh dear Desmond and Bea Howe are coming so we shall only meet at the party I suppose. And then you mustn’t talk to me. You’ll be whirled off by Chrissie [Aberconway], torn in pieces by Raymond. But perhaps one word in a corner will be thrown to me.

Did you have a bite of food at last? I hope so, Was it nice? Yes it was. Did the insect lay an egg?

Virginia

Berg

[]

1687: To V. Sackville-West

[19 November 1926]

52 Tavistock Sqre, [W.C.1]

You are a miracle of discretion—one letter in another. I never thought of that. I’ll answer when I see you—the invitation, I mean. Oh dear, Sybil has given me a headache. What a bore I cant write, except to you. I lie in a chair. It isn’t bad: but I tell you, to get your sympathy: to make you protective: to implore you to devise some way by which I can cease this incessant nibbling away of life by people: Sybil, Sir Arthur [Colefax], Dadie—one on top of another. Why do I put it on you? Some psychological necessity I suppose: one of those intimate things in a relationship which one does by instinct. I’m rather a coward about this pain in my back: You would be heroic: But I dont want to live for ever at Rodmell with Mrs Bartholomew [daily help].

She is a woman of the world: Sybil Colefax. To me, an almost unknown type. Every value is different. Friendship, let alone intimacy, is impossible. Yet I respect, even admire. Why did she come, I kept wondering: felt so gauche, and yet utterly indifferent. This is a sign one never speaks the truth to her. She skated over everything, evaded, palliated, compromised; yet is fundamentally kind and good. Its odd for me, who have some gift for intimacy, to be nonplussed entirely.

But you dont see, donkey West, that you’ll be tired of me one of these days (I’m so much older) and so I have to take my little precautions. Thats why I put the emphasis on ‘recording’ rather than feeling. But donkey West knows she has broken down more ramparts than anyone. And isnt there something obscure in you? There’s something that doesn’t vibrate in you: It may be purposely—you dont let it: but I see it with other people, as well as with me: something reserved, muted—God knows what. Still, still, compare this 19th Nov—with last, and you’ll admit there’s a difference. It’s in your writing too, by the bye. The thing I call central transparency—sometimes fails you there too. I will lecture you on this at Long Barn. Oh why does [Robert] Bridges say my essays are poor, and Mr [Goldsworthy Lowes] Dickinson say I’m the finest critic in English literature? I cannot believe that anybody has ever been so mis-rated as I am: and it makes it much harder to go full tilt at fiction or essays: Let them damn my novels, and I’d do essays: damn essays and I’d do novels. This is one of those glib lies one’s pen slips out: of course I shall go on doing precisely what I want. Only with me two inches in the top are so tremendously susceptible. Darling donkey West—will you come at 2.30—to the Press, I think: and then how nice I shall lie on the sofa and be spoilt. But my pain is going already. Was Irene nicer than I am? Do you know this interesting fact. I found myself thinking with intense curiosity about death? Yet if I’m persuaded of anything, it is of mortality—Then why this sense that death is going to be a great excitement?—something positive; active?

Yr VW.

P.S.
The flowers have come, and are adorable, dusky, tortured, passionate like you—And I’ve had lunch and feel ever so much better, and have read my letter, and am ashamed of its egotism, and feel tempted to tear it up, but have no time to write another. And don’t I lecture you nicely Thats what comes of attacking your poor Virginia and dog Grizzle. They bite instantly.

But at the same time they adore: and if you hadn’t the eyes of a newt and the blood of a toad, you’d see it, and not need telling—

Berg

[]

1688: To Violet Dickinson

Sunday [21 November 1926]

52 Tavistock Sqre, WC.1

My Violet,

I hear a rumour, through Vita, that you are out of the Home and back again in your own house. I hope it’s true; because half the horrors of illness cease when one has a book or a dog or a cup of one’s own at hand. I’ve two dogs at the moment, and when I was so ambitious as to have Lady Colefax alone here, of course they disgraced me in every way. Little bits of cork from the bath mat came blowing into the drawing room. I shall never be on her level. I don’t mean only fur coats and pearl necklaces: I mean I can’t rattle it off like a weathercock as she does. But if one were to fall down the area tomorrow (as is likely enough) who would be kinder?

Thank the Lord (if you wish to be grateful) that you’re not a publisher. Instead of writing to you, I should be reading about six manuscripts; all of them not good and not bad; and at the end of each an author white with anxiety, green with envy, to whom I must concoct a letter. So you see one of the reasons for taking up my pen this evening. We have been walking round Regents Park in the rain. As we go we talk rather stiltedly (for an old married couple) about the weather; the Zoo; the coal strike. But every word is in French. This is our law, so that when we meet a French man, we may have no shyness. It appears, however, that one can only say the sort of things very decrepit old people say. George [Duckworth] has sent me a pheasant. I’m told this is quite unknown, and should be hotly resented. Last year he threw in a bunch of radishes and a hatfull of sprouts.

It was great fun seeing Ozzie [Violet’s brother] the other night—did he tell you? He seemed younger than ever, and we said many things about you which would have made you, wizened and shameless though you are, bury your face in the pillow. A gigantic charwoman bore down on me the other day at a concert; with bonnet, boot, and knobbly red knuckles in cotton gloves all complete—. Lady Cromer. I like that way of dressing infinitely better than the other—pearls and powder and no skirts—all the same. Besides, if one is the Venus of Milo, one may as well pretend to be a char.

I’ve lots of things to say, but I’m afraid you will be disgusted and bored and chucking things out of the window in a rage—so I’ll stop. But for God’s sake, get well immediately—and think kindly of your devoted and humble admirer, who always cherishes a secret passion for you,

Sp.

Berg

[]

1689: To V. Sackville-West

Wednesday [1 December 1926]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Very nice to get a letter from you, dear Creature—No, it wasn’t the people yesterday—I had the shivers, due to getting wet through at Rodmell—that was all—I went to bed, took aspirin, hot bottle, quite all right today, only incredibly sleepy. Still I agree—people are the devil—What’s to be done, though, if they march in unasked, like Eddy?

Moreover, you cant talk—lunch at Woking, tea Virginia, Cocktail Raymond, dine Mary, supper Kitchin—There I was warm in bed, and glad to hear it was a ghastly failure. And now you’re off to Brighton heaven help you! I wish you hadn’t that before you, but could drop in and talk—Here I am sitting or rather lying in front of the gas fire in perfect quiet.

I’m sorry about your mother—Here’s Leonard. Six copies of Teheran just sold to Hachettes, so we’ve passed the thousand and he’s sent it, with his polite duty, to her ladyship.

Write again, do. I’m now going to read your story. Send back my essay sometime with any comments.

I’d like to stay 2 nights—but God knows. May I leave it open?

Yr Virginia

Berg

[]

1690: To V. Sackville-West

Friday [3 December 1926]

52 T[avistock] Square, W.C.1]

No—I cant come. I have caught eczema from Grizzle. My hair comes out in tufts. I scratch incessantly. It wouldn’t be safe for you, or, what matters more, the puppies. I shall think of you: let that console us.

That joke being done with—yes, I’ll come reaching Sevenoaks at 5.22.

Its true I’m incredibly dirty; have washed my head—hair is down—skirt spotted, shoes in holes—Pity poor Virginia dragged off this afternoon by Sybil to meet Arnold Bennett who abused me for a column in last nights Standard.

Oh I’m so sick of teaing dining, reading writing and everything, except seeing—well it is you, I admit. Yes it will be nice—yes it will: And shall you be very kind to me?

Please do.

Hows your back?

VW.

Berg

[]

1691: To Violet Dickinson

[5? December 1926]

52 Tavistock Sqre, WC1 [Long Barn, near Sevenoaks, Kent]

My Violet,

I hope you won’t mind my taking up a pen—Vita’s pen—to write to you again, out of affection merely. I like cracking my silly joke with you. I forget where I left off. Had I been attacked by Arnold Bennett, and gone to meet him at Sibyls, and told him to his face, and he to mine, that our books are worthless trash? and then we embraced, and I am to go and see him, and his wife said she has a child called Virginia. Oh but, said Colefax, thats not his wife, only his mistress, and if you go calling her Mrs Bennett you may find yourself in the law Court. So I came down here for the week end, and spent last night describing you to Vita, and how we went to Greece together 20 years ago, and the goats were milked under the window, and I behaved so badly and you behaved so well. There are few people I am fonder of than Violet Dickinson, I said—or have more cause to be grateful to. Ungrateful bitch as I am, I never pass her door without a smile. Then there was Ella Crum, and Beatrice Thynne. So we go on talking while the eleven dogs, some in childbirth, parade the rooms, and the old Butler stumps in and out, to catch scraps of our conversation, she says, at which they laugh in the kitchen.

I wish I could send you something to amuse you or write a poem, with Rhymes to Dickinson, in your praise. A triolet for Violet. A Chicken song for Dickingsong—No. Cant be done. Prose is more my line. So please get well quick, and let us go on corresponding. Vita says may she send you her love.

Yr Sp.

Berg

[]

1692: To Vanessa Bell

[December 1926?]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

I hear from Ka (Eagles Nest, Zennor, St. Ives) that they want a flat for 4 months after Christmas in this neighbourhood. So it might be worth your writing to her. But don’t stay away 4 months [at Cassis] whatever happens.

Hoping to see you

Your old friend
VW.

Berg

[]

1693: To V. Sackville-West

[8 December 1926]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Dearest Vita,

(Now why did I say that?) Yes, Monday, undern 2.30. Please come, and bathe me in serenity again. Yes, I was wholly and entirely happy. If you could have uncored me—you would have seen every nerve running fire—intense, but calm. Then how hard you worked, like a navvy, and I saying to myself all the time, Anyhow this is in Vita’s line.

But why, darling Mrs N., honourable Mrs N. insist upon Knole? To see me ridiculous, the powder falling, the hairpins dropping, and not a word said in private between us? Is it one of your moonlight, romantic, stags barking, old man feeding them from a bucket in the snow, ideas? It shall be considered, anyhow. But Arnold Bennett has sold my books twice as fast as before: 6 sell instead of one. Please be rude to him and then Teheran will leap: it is doing very well: 6 sold to Smiths, one at the door to an old woman with long teeth. Cameron [Victorian Photographs] moving, not fast, but with the dignity of a battleship taking the water. Logan [Pearsall Smith] to tea, very American. Raymond—I eat all my words—very charming, very gay, very simple, very what one calls nice.

But its Vita I adore.

Yr
Virginia

We want puppy back on Jan 1st. I think. Can we?

Berg

[]

1694: To V. Sackville-West

Friday [17 December 1926]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Vita,

Here is your mothers letter, to which I have replied in my well known 18th Century style; no, she has been most helpful and emollient. Cameron has almost paid. Yes, you are coming on Monday undern: yes, I am dining with Dotty. D’you know what happened to day? I was rushing into a shop to buy a velvet coat, when a woman said Any stains to take out? Good God, I said, I have at least 12 on me at the moment—so I bought her ointment, and all my stains are vanished like snow, and I’d been cleaned unavailingly, so life has turned its rosier cheek, and everything seems possible—except indeed, I had a tooth stopped. Now my lip my cheek, my chin are all boils and blisters. When I say to the dentist, why do you do this to me? He replies, But then, Mrs W. your skin is the most sensitive in London, at which I am flattered, but Leonard paints my skin with zinc ointment which I lick and I daresay its poison and I shall be dead—here’s Tom Eliot ringing up, and I’ve been having tea with my nieces, and sewed a frock, and was given green sweets, and lunched with Sybil and met a cousin of yours, and should be dining this moment with Lord Gerald Wellesley, but if he knew I was dining with Dotty, what a row, and Teheran is selling well, and I’ve been through agonies; buying shoes for my mother in law, and sending over a small boy the chocolate cigars or Turkish delight, and reading a little Tristram Shandy and Oh God I’ve bought a chair! My dear Vita, one sits in it and it rises round one like the clouds of summer: and … but, this is mere balderdash, mere chatter, stuff to make you stay sitting on my bed, and what wages d’you pay Horn [Long Barn manservant], and how much d’you give for your blotting paper; and then you get up and go, as I must, to read my book.

Monday, basement, undern.

Yr
Virginia

Have you really made it up with your mother? I hope so. Yes: my mother—I’ve no room.

Berg

[]

1695: To Crosby Gaige

24th Dec 1926

Eagles Nest, Zennor, St Ives, Cornwall

Dear Mr Gaige,

Your letter has been sent on to me here. I am very sorry that I shall not be able to come to tea with you and your wife as you so kindly suggest, but I shall be away until the middle of January. I hope that there may be a chance of seeing you later, when I am back at Tavistock Square.

Yours sincerely,
Virginia Woolf

Lilly Library, Indiana University

[]

1696: To V. Sackville-West

Xmas day [1926]

Eagles Nest, Zennor, St Ives, [Cornwall]

Dearest Creature—

There is an argument going on. I am writing on my knee. We look over the Atlantic. You have never seen the Gurnard’s Head? I should like to see you here—A tame raven taps at the window. We motor over the moors, so cold, like an 18th Century print—skeletons hanging on withered branches—Suddenly one dips into the valley, and finds rhododendrons, and palm trees, and St Michael’s Mount [Marazion] riding out in a blue sea.

But the cold! the cold! I sleep in stockings, vest, a pair of wool drawers (I had to buy in Penzance) a jacket. The bed gets cold on the right if one sleeps on the left. They are kind and good and high minded and free spoken and dressed in tweeds and very public spirited—the people here. They give Christmas trees to the village children. I don’t find much of that festal light, though, which stands in the door of the Sevenoaks fishmonger. I keep saying, But Vita’s spoilt me—spoilt me—spoilt me! Why have you taught me this piercing cry? and then to go to Persia? and leave me?

I have crept into another room, as the argument, about League of Nations breaks on my ears. Here I am with the raven and the little boy.

But what was I going to say? Fond of me? Yes, No, says Vita, a little absent minded, but then she has to give the housemaids brooches, to motor to Brighton. It will be fine, I think, and your mother will relent, and will give you 200 pounds, in a blue envelope.

We went to the Lands End yesterday. We both have colds in the head. Am reading The Constant Nymph with the painful head of a heavy woman in a bog. Have I lost all sense of fiction? Why does this flimsy trash, with one idea to a hundred pages, convince anybody? Why do we pay Miss Kennedy £2000 p.a. (I think of nothing but money) for writing it? Gides memoirs which I read voraciously renew the sense that I can read with pleasure. Otherwise I am only an eye—yes, I observe the sea incessantly very rough, blue and white, today with little tramp steamers pitching, and splashing; and at night they burn the gorse on the moor, and it is exactly like the death of Siegfried: a crimson gauze rising over crags. Oh yes, I should like to see you here—We come back on Tuesday, not Wednesday, and shall I hope, soon see you:

V.W.

Xmas post in: no letter from you. What a disappointment!

Berg

[]

1697: To Angus Davidson

Christmas Day, 1926

Zennor, St Ives, Cornwall

Dear Angus,

I never saw you, except through the window, to thank you for the honey, which is quite delicious and takes me back to the old days, when I climbed Mount Hymettus myself. I gave some on a crumpet, to the poet Eliot, and much sweetened him.

It is bitterly cold; we are motored over the moors to Lands End and other remote places. We look down into the heart of the Atlantic from our bedroom. All my facts about Lighthouses are wrong. We come back on Tuesday. The goose is just coming into the room. I hope you have had a merry Christmas at Rochester. This is divine country—perhaps a little austere.

Yours
V.W.

Angus Davidson

[]

1698: To V. Sackville-West

Wednesday [29 December 1926]

52 Tavistock Square, [W.C.1]

Dearest Creature,

I only got your letter this morning, so I rang up a surly butler, and heard Eddy was ill but Mrs Nicolson was better. I do hope so. Not that Eddy should be ill. Only I hate your having flu—it aint right, or honest. Why did you? How are you? Please say.

Thank God Harold comes back [from Persia, in May], and puts an end to no lunches, motoring, your mother etcetera. I own practically everyone has it—but still its largely your reckless spendthrift life, and please curb it, and influenza’s no joke: One’s heart goes wrong. I say therefore (but I’m in a hurry expecting that mooncalf Philip Morrell) please don’t be rash at Dottys. Let me know if you will lunch here on Monday: what time you come and how long you can stay.

We were so bitter cold at Zennor that we fled. Everyone had colds—coal gave out—endless visitors—my host [Will Arnold-Forster] testy about cigarette ends among his plants—one very lovely drive—awfully difficult to exist at all out of one’s own house; and now, darling Mrs N:—there’s a surprise coming, so read carefully, every word. One thing is I dont think Knole is possible; for this reason: I tore all my clothes on the gorse, and cant get any more, and I couldn’t ask your butler to wait on me, nor is it for the dignity of letters that I should eat behind a screen, so I dont see how I can come to Knole, all in holes, without a pin to my hair or a stocking to my foot. You’d be ashamed; you’d say things you would regret. But read carefully whats coming.

Its this I am going to America.

Now thats exciting isnt it?

But I shant be gone on Monday, so I’ll tell you about it then.

But Vita darling let me hear how you are: please take care: awful awful awful haste

Yr
Virginia

Berg

[]

1699: To Vanessa Bell

Wednesday [29 December 1926]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest,

I found your letter last night. We fled from Zennor a day early, you’ll be glad to hear, unable to stand the perishing cold and Wills slang (Ka was far better than Will) any longer. They did their best, poor people, but the coal gave out, and we all had colds, and Ka had a headache, and endless neighbours called and there was Mervyn Arnold F. staying there, and in short as I say we came home. Nevertheless, Cornwall has redeemed itself for beauty: I motored from end to end; and was overcome, not so much by the moors, though they had fires burning in the cold dawn, but by the valleys. I saw a clergyman called Walke, and a picture of Rogers. Mrs Leake and Colonel Hurst were both worth many journeys to see— But the cold! the cold!

I dont think I can face Julian’s ridicule. I am sure it is scurrilous and in the worst of taste. Never mind. I’ll cook a goose for his gander, tell him. The bother is I’m now in a hideous rush putting the last touches to my novel—what about the cover?—and have lost so much time—it was impossible to hold a pen at Zennor—also the intellects froze—(Leonard says Will is a hypocrite, and we saw all his pictures—vague skimmings of cloud and mountain incredibly tortured and meagre) What I mean is; I dont think I can spend a night out again; but will come over, Wednesday, Thursday or Friday. Shall you be there? We come down on Tuesday. As the train left, Ka hurtled back, put her head in and said “Tell Nessa I’m really very fond of her”. So there. It is one of the most melancholy households you can imagine. It is founded upon pretending they enjoy, what they dont: upon slang, and heartiness, and art, and humanity. Ka is to some extent genuine; Will hollow. At least so I think. I’ve been asked to go to America by a paper. I seriously think of doing it.

Please give Julian a hint that I’m very dangerous when roused: also, I should like to see him.

Yr B

Berg

[]

1700: To Katherine Arnold-Forster

Thursday [30 December 1926]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Bruin,

Here we are safe and sound. I must say it was extraordinarily nice of you and Will to have us—Everything was at our disposal. I can’t think how you manage such comfort and warmth in the howling blizzard: also the two geese; the Cornish cream; my iris and heather to go away with. Of course, the country is none of your doing (but there again, its a question of the motor car too)—that seemed to me even lovelier and stranger—more unlike anything else in the world than ever before. I like your son [Mark] too. What a crusted character he’ll be one of these days! I think he will rule us for our good.

I hope we didn’t break you down completely. However nice people are, to have them staying is a burden—but, then, as we agreed, as we washed our teeth, Ka is a very remarkable and a very nice woman, and we both feel very fond of her, and like to think of her tramping about the moors with the Leakes and the Griggs and all the rest.

You wont read this. It will lie in the hall for days. However, it is merely to thank you, dearest Bruin, for being so kind to us, and to hope you will come to Monks House.

Love to Will
The iris is full out.
Yours V.W.

My green paper weight is the envy of beholders.

Mark Arnold-Forster

[]

1701: To V. Sackville-West

[30 December 1926]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

America—

The [New York Herald] Tribune’s offered me free passages, hotel bills, and £120 to go to New York for a month in the spring and write 4 articles. I’ve said I will if I can arrange times, and not too much work—but I daresay they wont agree—I think it would be rather fun, for a few weeks, and I should see some odd things—dont you agree? Leonard would come.

Monday

Alas—We go to Rodmell early on Tuesday afternoon; but I shall be here (studio) all the morning. Let me know what you want. I’ll keep Monday free anyhow.

Pinker

If you cant send her, couldn’t you come over to Rodmell and stay? I suppose not—with the children on you—Curse it.

Knole

I was partly teasing. I dont mind being dowdy, dirty, shabby, red nosed middle classed and all the rest—its only a question when and how—I do want to see you, I do—I do.

How did Brighton go? Write a long long letter from Sherfield.

Virginia

Just sold 20 Teheran.

Berg

[]

1702: To G. H. Grubb

30 Dec 1926

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Mr Grubb,

I have been asked by an American paper to write some articles in April about American books that are appearing this spring. I should be greatly obliged if you would mention the names of any your firm is publishing which seem to you of special interest, either in biography, fiction or criticism.

I hope I am not presuming on your kindness in asking this, but it would be a great help to me if you would do so.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

Letters 1703-1740 (January–March 1927)

1703: To Vanessa Bell

Sunday [2 January 1927]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

I’ll come to lunch on Thursday God willing—hope there’ll be a chance of seeing Julian. I’m longing to do battle.

Here’s Oliver [Strachey], so no more—I wd. have come for New Year but have to face the horror of getting proofs ready—wh. you painters escape—But my love for you remains hot and strong: yours for me thin and weak.

If another day wd. do better, let me know to Monks House.

Berg

[]

1704: To Edward Sackville West

Sunday [January? 1927]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Eddy,

May we leave Wednesday open? I hope to come, but things are in rather a muddle.

I’m glad, but surprised, that you like Time Passes. I thought that between The Princesse Bassiano and the translator it had got into a hopeless mess, and was too ashamed to read it.

Now I must write to your Aunt Victoria [Lady Sackville] who has written about 20 pages in pencil about her miseries and loves and houses and servants and heart and daughter and secretary and Ethel Smyth and so on.

I saw Desmond. He took very kindly to the idea of Raymond at the N. S.

If you see Raymond do suggest it

Your
Virginia Woolf

Berg

[]

1705: To V. Sackville-West

[4 January 1927]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Came home to find a letter from Harold, begging me to get you to promise to be inoculated—So don’t be a donkey and promise me to do it—or I won’t come to Knole. Its absolutely necessary. Why risk death and typhoid and no Virginia for sake of 10 minutes bother?

Harold writes about us too—wont be jealous he says. Will you send a line to me at Monks House to say you agree (this is serious) also tell me how I write to him—Foreign Office? Just off.

Berg

[]

1706: To Vanessa Bell

Wednesday [5 January 1927]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

It seems perfectly hopeless to come today.

I think I’d better leave it that I’ll come the first fine day for lunch.

I don’t expect Leonard will leave his pruning but sends his love—We’re much disappointed not to see Julian. Ask him to send me his scurrilous lampoon and I’ll reply suitably. No coal, no anthracite, here.

We go on Sunday

V.W.

There was a very good review of Roger’s book in the Manchester Guardian Oliver is in love with you—he says—not with me

Berg

[]

1707: To Violet Dickinson

Saturday [8 January 1927?]

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes, [Sussex]

My Violet,

I am so pleased that the servant who was with you when I was a baby knew my voice—how she managed it, God alone knows. But then you have always had a miraculous tribe of servants—I remember the charming Rose.

We are riding out a tremendous gale down here. The chestnut in the churchyard has fallen on one of Leonards new fruit trees; and one cant poke one’s nose out without having it blown off. I daresay you are worse off with all your trees at Welwyn. George (Sir George Duckworth) says you are not in the least deaf—you are as young as ever he says—thats not true at all of George.

Yes—Julian, Nessas eldest, is a perfect Stephen, weighs 13. 6. and writes poetry—

Yr VW

Berg

[]

1708: To Vanessa Bell

[25 January? 1927]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1)

Dearest,

I was much relieved to get your card. I hope it means that Duncan is now convalescent. Any further news will be gratefully received—we all rang each other up to communicate yesterday—and let me know, theres a good Dolphin, if I can do anything here.

I’m sending the wash, except a dress shirt; as Louie [Angelica’s nurse] has brought more than Angelica’s things; and I daresay its better to send the lot. Leonard has written a stiff letter to Miss Beazley [unidentified] but has had no answer yet.

Of gossip the chief is that Herbert Stephen is engaged to Hermione Cunningham, his cousin, aged 30 I suppose—Well, well: the Stephens as you say, mature late—Then Margaret Duckworth has asked us to lunch—but no: last night at Colefaxes will do me for a week or two—Sir Arthur [Colefax] was my fate: and tho’ I mixed claret and champagne till my head spun, still I could not make rhyme or reason but only boredom unutterable of his doddering, chiefly about the future, past, and present of the Trades Union Movement. Afterwards, Viola [Tree] acted, and I sat hug a mugger in a Sapphists Cosy Corner, with Dotty and Mary.

Theres scarlatina at the Stephen’s school, so Adrian has brought them back. Love to the old Convolvulus [Duncan]: Kiss him on his nose: I adore him.

VW.

Do get a little rest: I thought you were worn to a shred as Mary Fisher wd. say.

Berg

[]

1709: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

27th Jan. [1927]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Ottoline,

If you would very kindly sign these three cheques, I think that would be the last of the [Eliot] fund.

Yr
Virginia Woolf.

Would you send Logans in the envelope I enclose to his banker, and return the other two to me.

Texas

[]

1710: To Ethel Sands

Saturday [29 January 1927]

52 Tavistock Sqre W. C.

Dearest Ethel,

But wont Thursday be a party? It would be so nice to see you without a party, so I suggest either you shall come here next Friday and find me alone, or I shall come some day when you’re alone. I’ve heard from Nessa today that Duncan is able to go for short walks, and is getting on well. There was a muddle about a doctor, and a scare of typhoid but happily this is now all over and she sounds cheerful.

I was at Sibyl’s and hoped for you—no Ethel alas.

Yours affect
Virginia

I’m so sorry you have been so bad—it sounded horrid. Oh what a ghastly weekend I’m just off to—the Sidney Webbs

Wendy Baron

[]

1711: To V. Sackville-West

Monday 31st Jan [1927]

52 Tavistock Sqre [W.C.1]

My dear Honey,

It was nice to get your telegram and letters—write as many as you can. It gives one a fillip. The only good thing thats happened to me is that the moment you left I became involved in a series of telephones, notes, scenes with Clive and Mary, all very emotional which left me so angered, so sordidified, so exacerbated that I could only think of you as being very distant and beautiful and calm. A lighthouse in clean waters. I can’t give details, which would bore you, (happy as you are, old Devil, with Harold in Persia); but I can assure you, you’ll find things as usual in May: Clive giving champagne suppers to Mary. I was amused to think how angry certain charges made against me by Mary would have made you—God, if you’d been here, what fun we should have had.

But the main good was that I’ve been kept on the hop the whole time: so I’ve been restless and scattered; its like taking sleeping draughts: I try my best to put off thinking about you. Then there was the Webbs: how dreamlike things are, how skinned of flesh and blood when one’s thinking of Vita going further and further My word how it blew the night you went—I was launched on a 6 mile walk on a cold common on a rainy morning with Sidney Webb. All my sentences leapt into the middle of the pond without a moment’s reflection. Pausing by a beastly pool of self-conscious beauty—Surrey is detestable—Webb said one must remember what a difference Mahommedanism had made to the negroes in Sierra Leone: whereupon without a second I plunged: made some dreadful howlers, Leonard said. And there was a stunted brown woollen secretary woman at table who said “Might I trouble you for a little drop of water?” her only remark, except to the dog. Incredibly ugly it all was except for Lord Russell husband of Elizabeth, enormous, wearing a crucifix.

Wednesday, Feb. 2nd. No letter from you today or yesterday: I suppose you’re in Moscow. Here its snowy; melting though, and the rain coming through my skylight. I woke in the night, and was very dismal. My sleeping draught (Clive and Mary) is wearing off. Another long interview with Mary yesterday. We were about to fly at each others throats when in walked Eddie [Sackville West]: stayed complacently an hour or so: and only left us time for a hasty explanation. Dear, dear, its an odd story: he’s [Clive] not going away. His sleeper has been cancelled. Her ferocity commands my respect: indeed we made it up: but whether she can hold him, firmly, for ever, I have my doubts. He has made a fool of her all over London—Colefax that is, and Ethel Sands: Colefax came to tea. Why do people laugh at me? she asked. D’you know its a great thing being a eunuch as I am: that is not knowing what’s the right side of a skirt: women confide in one. One pulls a shade over the fury of sex; and then all the veins and marbling, which, between women, are so fascinating, show out. Here in my cave I see lots of things you blazing beauties make invisible by the light of your own glory.

No: I’m not going to America. They write that they are entertaining me at dinners, but not, apparently paying my hotel bills. So the cost would swallow up all my earnings, and I think we can cry off and go to Greece.

12.30. A cable from America, asking me to come later: I suppose they may offer more money, but no, I think I won’t be bribed, unless its tremendous.

Yes, honey, we are buying The Bookshop—at least negotiations are begun; Francis [Birrell] is dining here tonight. He says its the chance of our lives. Leonard is like a hound with his nose to the ground. But weeks and months will pass in conversation. What fun though, dont you think—suppose we did it, and it was a great success, and I had a motor car, and we went bookbuying all over England

I’ve not got a cold in my head, but its like having a cold in the head, sitting here writing to you and everything at sixes and sevens. I feel dissipated and aimless for some reason. I’ve got to read all Morgan’s novels, and so far cant open a book without being interrupted. Then its you being away—I am at the mercy of people, of moods, feel lonely, like something pitiable which can’t make its wants known. How you have demoralised me. I was once a stalwart upstanding woman. Then its not writing novels: this journalism is such a thin draggled straining business, and I keep opening the lid and looking into my mind to see whether some slow fish isn’t rising there—some new book. No: nothing at the moment.

Yes, I like you to write good poetry. My parting lecture was not very coherent. I was trying to get at something about the thing itself before its made into anything: the emotion, the idea. The danger for you with your sense of tradition and all those words—a gift of the Gods though—is that you help this too easily into existence. I dont mean that one ought to strain, to write showily, expressively, or so on: only that one ought to stand outside with one’s hands folded, until the thing has made itself visible: we born writers tend to be ready with our silver spoons too early: I mean I think there are odder, deeper, more angular thoughts in your mind than you have yet let come out. Still, you’ll get the Hawthornden, Oh yes, and I shall be vaguely jealous, proud, and disgusted. I’m going to read the Land through as soon as I get a chance.

Are you perishing with cold at Moscow now? It’s fine again here: I have set up a little type, talked to Angus and Mrs Cartwright, must now finish this, and post it, and try to read a little, and so get control of my fidgets.

Dearest honey, are you well and happy, and did the journey go easily, and is Harold very happy, and do you ever think of the basement and and—a kiss from Pinker: one from me to the insect. I’ll write weekly.

Yr V.

Berg

[]

1712: To Vanessa Bell

Wed. Feb. 2nd [1927]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest,

I’ve just got your letter, asking for news. I expect you have heard by now from Clive that he isn’t coming [to Cassis]. Probably he has told you about it all.

I dont quite know what I had better say, as I am constantly being warned by them both not to say anything: but of course it is all over London—so I will be indiscreet and give you my version: only don’t please get me into trouble—It’s only too likely I’m already embroiled.

Anyhow, the facts are (I’m in a hurry so dont expect great lucidity) that a week ago today Clive rang me up at lunch and said might he come in after dinner as he was desperate. He said he might tell me in some years why, but could say nothing now. We had Vita and W. J. Turner here; but Clive dined, and kept on hinting that he was breaking up his life, going out of England for some months, going to write a book in complete solitude, absolutely without bearings, and so on: at which we had to laugh of course, and finally he got into an aesthetic argument and everyone left. Next day he appeared in my studio with his passport, on his way to get tickets, asking me for your address. He would only say that he was going to Cassis for 3 months then to Paris and then to Charleston till October; however he asked if he might come to tea, and went off again, babbling, half excited, half bewildered as if he were talking in his sleep. Then I saw Vita, who had been at a party at Dotties the night before, and Clive had behaved there in the same way telling everyone—Sibyl, Ethel, Raymond etc—that he was absolutely wretched and was going away till the autumn. Everybody was talking, and wondering if it was Mary or what. So he came to tea, and plunged at once into a long account of his misery, again seeming very excited, yet on the whole rather happy, and high spirited. He said that for three months things had been going wrong between him and Mary, and suddenly, last Wednesday, at a play in a box with several people, he had said to her “I am wretched” whereupon she told him that the truth was she was slightly, but only slightly, in love with some one else. Thereupon he practically went mad—at any rate he said he had not slept for 3 nights, and had decided that life like this was impossible, and he was going to break with her for ever. He gave me a long account of their relationship; the upshot of which was that though passionately in love, he could not settle down with her, and also she made it impossible for him to work. He thought if he left her for 9 months he would forget about her entirely. He was sick he said of the society they lived in, and found it more and more idiotic. I should say that Mary had rung me up before he came to implore me to soothe him, and to say that he grossly exaggerated what had happened. But I could do nothing; as whenever I suggested his waiting or going for a month only he swore that he was in torture, and that his only hope was to be with you and Duncan and work. Of course I agreed about the horrors of incessant Sibyl Chrissie [Aberconway] and Leslie and also thought that he must begin now if he meant to do any long book. However, I didn’t have to give advice, as he had told everybody and made all arrangements. So he went off, and next day we went to the Webbs till Sunday night when I came back to find a note marked urgent, telling me that Mary had been to him in a perfect fury, especially against me, (please don’t tell this ever—be begged me not to repeat it) She said it was a plot of mine against her, and that I wanted to break the relationship. He warned me in case she rang me up in a rage, as she well might. We went to dine with him that night, and he took me aside and said rather sheepishly that after all he was putting off going till March: Mary was suffering too much; and he could not simply thrust her feelings aside—but still he meant to go later, as he had said.

That was all we could say—except that Mary was furious with me, and he could not pacify her. Nothing more was said (aint this like a Defoe novel?) and we dined off cold pheasant and were very impersonal and cheerful. Next day he rang me up to say that Mary wanted to come and see me. She came yesterday when Eddie also arrived, so that we had a long and highly constrained conversation about books—both of us looking at each other like tigresses, for I of course was furious too and thought she had behaved like a cook; as indeed I meant to tell her—At last Eddie went, and after some palaver, she started off and asked me, ironically, if I had tried to pacify Clive as I had promised. I said that he was not pacifiable when I saw him: So then she wanted to know what he had said, finally she gave me her version, which is that she is not in love with anyone, had never said so, had only been rather restless and so on, was devoted to him, was absolutely horrified when she realised how he took her words at the play, was then furious when she heard that he had told people at Dotties party, was still more enraged when he said he was going for 9 months, and finally, when he rang up and said that I agreed he ought to go and called her “a little fool”, her anger became such that she dashed off to see him, and abused me sky-high, and in short so stormed and raged at him that eventually he put the whole thing in her hands and said she was to decide for him what he should do. She of course told him to stay.

Then we went into the case, and she says that she detests the society they keep, longs for him to work, is often at her wits end to get out of parties, and finds him a good deal deteriorated intellectually because of his debauchery. As for its being her influence, she would have none of it. She thought I accused her of being a silly mondaine, who only wanted flirting, and had better be broken with. This was explained away I think and we parted on friendly terms; but God knows what will come of it. She told me that he has plunged back at once into the old Cliveries etc—and was going out every night. But of course she said, if he goes away, as it would be best for him to do, the chances are he would leave me for ever.

So her only choice is I think to keep him here, and to try and control him. Whether she can, I don’t know. I expect he will be relieved for a time at not having to work or go away and then the same thing will happen again. I’ve heard no more of them today; and I expect I shall be trounced by Clive next for saying things to Mary.

So dont for God’s sake get me into further trouble. However, I can’t think there’s any harm in telling you: probably he has written already, and I daresay between us you’ll get your own idea of the case—But I can’t describe to you how odd he’s been.

I don’t think we shall go to America, as the expense seems too great—So you may see us—Love to Duncan.

Yr B.

If Roger or anyone asks you, please dont give my version which is strictly for you and Duncan only. The official version is simply that they quarrelled and have made it up—

Berg

[]

1713: To Violet Dickinson

Thursday [3 February? 1927]

52 Tavistock Sqre, WC1

My Violet.

Yes. Herbert [Stephen] seems to be married. When I last saw his bride [Mary Cunningham] she wore a white pinafore and was being sung hymns to by that clodhopping woman you used to admire, his sister, Dorothea. Some 30 years must be between them. Think of the marriage bed! Like marrying a lobster which has been boiled hard as well as red. My last contact (not nuptial) with the fish was over the Dreadnought, when he fulminated against us, and said my reputation was dragged under the feet of all the blue jackets in the Navy—to which there was no reply on my part.

But enough of Herbert. How are you? On your immensely long legs again? I hope so—I envy you convalescing at Brighton. I think the height and pitch of life is the Brighton pier listening to the Band—Leonard and I regularly go every summer. Now I am wondering whether to spend April in America. I’ve been asked to go and write articles—What do you advise? I might make some money—on the other hand they say the natives are poisonous. In my articles I should have to tell so many lies I should be corrupt for ever.

Leonard sends his love—Please recover instantly and make up your mind to marry on your 70th birthday—

VW.

Berg

[]

1714: To V. Sackville-West

Saturday, 5th Feb 1927

52 Tavistock Sqre, London [W.C.1]

Dearest Honey,

No letter since you were careering through the snow in Westphalia—that is nothing since Monday. I hope this doesn’t mean you have been eaten by brigands, wrecked, torn to pieces. It makes me rather dismal. It gets worse steadily—your being away. All the sleeping draughts and the irritants have worn off, and I’m settling down to wanting you, doggedly, dismally, faithfully—I hope that pleases you. It’s damned unpleasant for me, I can assure you. I had a sort of idea that I’d cheat the devil, and put my head under my wing, and think of nothing. But it wont work—not at all. I want you this Saturday more than last and so it’ll go on.

You are on the Caspian? Its lovely here: an early Spring. You are being tossed up and down on a smelly ship—you and Dotty [Wellesley] and Leigh [Ashton] in his horn glasses—and I sit over the gas in my sordid room. Why cant I write except in sordid rooms? I dont think I could write a word in your room at Long Barn. Furniture that people can sit in implies people, and I want complete solitude—thats at the back of my mind, and so I get sordider and sordider. The Voyage Out was written in comparative splendour [Fitzroy Square]—a maid, carpets, fires; To the Lighthouse was written as you know. So the next book will necessitate a shed. This fits in with my mood at the moment. I have banged my door on parties, dug myself into a dank dismal burrow, where I do nothing but read and write. This is my hybernating season. I read 5 hours yesterday, the same today. Its grim but salutary. Then May will be all festive, wont it? I’m a little nervous about Harold. I’ve suddenly become absorbed in a book about reading novels, and can’t stop making phrases. So thats the book I see when I lift the lid and look in. Its going to be about how to read all fiction as if it were one book one had written oneself. Then you’re damned lustrous face, like the portrait of an ancestress by a great painter on the wall of a gallery with a light blazing on it intervenes. You hang there so fruity, so rich.

Monday 7th Feb

At last! A letter from Moscow this morning. Oh what a blessing! It has taken a whole week to come. Yes: I should have liked it if you had telegraphed: no: I should not have thought you foolish. Lord Bless me! Think of meeting your paramours husband! What did he say? And then the dinner and Lenins body! Please write everything fully when you have time. Now you are nearly at Teheran I make out, motoring across mountains; stopping at some shed I daresay for lunch, sandwiches, wine. You are very excited, all in a whirl, like a flock of birds flying across; Harold will be pacing up and down his room. I think of this journey so that I could write a book about not being a Passenger to Teheran: but its silly to tell you my version, as perhaps you have your own.

Here its pouring; rain coming through the roof; the sordidity too much for me even. I think I shall make some money and buy a carpet. Would one carpet interfere with one’s solitude, d’you think? Or an ash tray? Or an arm chair?

All the harpies descend on me the moment you go: They wait for the body to be exposed defenceless—Sibyl, Ethel, now Ozzie [Dickinson]. Ozzie says “We all thought Vita very depressed at Dotties party”. He tries to make out that its because your mother is jealous of anyone you speak to—thats me, I gather. And “Vita is so good to her mother”. But I’m getting Raymond here to protect me—This is typical of Ozzie in the days when he told me how to behave, who to marry etc.

Could you and Harold go on top of a Tram up to Hampstead on a rainy Saturday afternoon? I kept trying to imagine it. Instantly all the lights went up and the whole tram became golden rosy. Aint it odd how the vision at the Sevenoaks fishmongers has worked itself into my idea of you? We went to see Keatses house, and I invented a story about two little beasts with a passion for muffins (cousins of the insect [Vita] they are) and I went into a shop and bought muffins and a woman said was I Miss Stephen whom she’d known 20 years before—then I went and sat in the room where Keats wrote his odes, and saw the engagement ring he gave Fanny [Brawne], and opened the cupboard in which he kept his books—We’ll go there on a tram: but it’ll be May.

America is off, temporarily at least. I’m afraid I shall have to go later though, and rather wish I’d got it over now in a month with you abroad. I think we shall go to Greece with Roger; theres also an invitation to motor in Spain with Dadie in May—this is much urged on me, but I think there are ‘private reasons’ against it.

Clive has apparently settled down again—Vanessa writes frantic letters saying “Why is Clive utterly miserable and coming here for 3 months”—Then “Why is Clive not coming at all—but gives no reason?” To which I can only echo “Why?”

Tuesday 8th Feb.

Now you’re just arriving I make out—driving into the gates of Teheran. Theres Harold come out to meet you. There you sit as proud as a peacock. Dotty is tactful. Well well, its all very exciting, even here in the studio with the rain coming through. My God, to be with you and the 14 cream coloured ponies, and the young mare, and the lighted window in the fishmongers shop! Still I admit that Harold has some right to this morning. I wish to God I’d asked you to wire. I wish I knew if you had arrived, and were safe, and are well. I trust to Dotty to tell me if you’re not. Thank her for her letter. I’ll write to her.

Did I lead a life of utter idleness while you were here? putting off all disagreeable jobs? I suppose so. Masses of manuscripts are now tumbling on my head; I’m to see the pillmaker of Percy Circus; I’ll send you a box of vegetable pills; then theres the Eliot fund, and Desmond fund, and people all at sixes and sevens. In short I’m very busy about rather dull things; not busy for you; busy for me. And now, did I tell you about Mary’s bloody book? (Its confidential please) She’s at last produced this thrice hardboiled egg and Leonard says its bilge, and he’s going to tell her so. Theres a Press crisis on too—what to do about the future of Angus—another painful interview, for L. thinks he had better go. And then someone’s bidding for Birrell and Garnett and will probably get it; but as Pollard is a fixture and Pollard is a brute, perhaps its as well.

Wednesday

Oh and here’s Clive to say he’s off to France—I say But isnt that rather unexpected? Not a bit says Clive. Then what about Mary? Here he waves his hand as if he had just heard of her but thats all—Another quarrel, I suppose: but whether final or not, Heaven knows.

Sibyls latest A letter from Walter de la Mare to say he’s so sorry he can’t accept Lady Colefax’s invitation to come to tea with me. The first I’d heard of it. And then Sibyl asks me to tell her what she does to make people laugh!

Goodbye dearest honey. Write to me please as much as you can. Yes yes yes I do like you. I am afraid to write the stronger word.

Yr
Virginia

Berg

[]

1715: To Vanessa Bell

Wednesday [9 February 1927]

52 T-[avistock] S[quare, W.C.1]

Well well—in came Clive yesterday and said, casually, he was going to Cassis in a week or so. When I said I was surprised, he poohpoohed it, and said he had always meant to—“But I thought Mary told me you’d given up the notion?” I said. “Mary was probably mistaken about that as about other things” he said. “Of course I didn’t want to go off and leave her in a pucker; but its all settled now.” “Isn’t she very much upset?” I asked. He merely laughed, and turned the conversation to Desmond (who’s ill in Switzerland) as if it were a matter of perfect indifference to him, and Mary an acquaintance only. So perhaps he has broken off finally. He made out that he had always meant this. I suppose after the violent scene a week ago, he cooled again, or there was another quarrel. But perhaps you know more. He’s dining here tonight, but I shan’t hear anything; also the subject now seems to bore him.

We’ve finally refused the American offer, anyhow for this Spring, as they didn’t mean to pay hotel bills apparently. Theyve cabled to ask us to come later, but that wont be yet anyhow—So I think I, at least, shall manage Cassis, whether we go on to Greece or not—It would be about the end of March I suppose. Now that Clive’s going, perhaps we could share the villa with him—It sounds enchanting. London is vile beyond words. I am involved with Chrissie and Sibyls over a subscription for Desmond, Vita is in Persia, I’m getting rather nervous about my novel—altogether I greatly envy you.

Do keep an eye on a French chair, a table, a chest of drawers for me in your wanderings:

I’m very happy that Duncan is better—I cant help loving him in spite of all.

Great hurry—

Yr B

Berg

[]

1716: To Ethel Sands

Wednesday [9 February 1927]

52 Tavistock Square, [W.C.1]

Dearest Ethel,

I had a much happier letter from Vanessa this morning. She says “Duncan has taken great strides in the last few days, and really seems practically well again. He can walk and do all much as usual, and is in very good spirits”. Also she thinks the Grants may be going to Rome, which would be a great relief. I thought you might like to know—being a sympathetic character as you are.

By the way was I very absurd about children last night? I was rather shocked that you should think I didn’t care for Nessa’s. They are such an immense source of pleasure to me. But I see what it is: I’m always angry with myself for not having forced Leonard to take the risk in spite of doctors; he was afraid for me and wouldn’t; but if I’d had rather more self-control no doubt it would have been all right. That’s I suppose, why I don’t talk of Nessa’s children—it’s true I never do—whom I adore. This is only a small contribution to feminine psychology, and don’t I beg dream of answering. I daresay your charming character is to blame for confidences.

I wrote to Sibyl [about the MacCarthy Fund], tactfully, and she’s been ringing up and driving Leonard mad. He says she sounds rather happy and will want careful management—Its always the way about money.

Yr aff
V.W.

Wendy Baron

[]

1717: To V. Sackville-West

Wednesday, Feb. 16th [1927]

52 Tavistock Sqre, [W.C.1]

Anyhow, dearest Honey, you are safe at Teheran. I saw Ozzie who let this pearl fall from his dribbling lips: also your mother has written one of her most gracious letters “Dear Mr and Mrs Woolf, bless you for being so good to my child”, to which I have answered, suitably, I hope, in deep humility. Harold is a happy man and I am an envious woman. Yesterday too I got your letter from Rostov with Leigh dancing, and Miss Jebb swinging from the rack. So now, you’re there; and I like it better than when your going further and further away. Thats all I can say.

Did I say I was leading a solitary life, reading 5 hours a day? My God, what a fool to think it possible! Take yesterday: Sibyl at 4. Consultation about getting money for Desmond. Sybil a little huffy with Chrissy. I try to soothe. Let her run on. Is Mollie extravagant? Are we to pay debts or subscribe for a holiday? Should there be two funds? What about the Eliot fund? Some people won’t pay for Desmond’s debts; others not for his holiday. Enter little Turner, the one like a tipsy rook who dined with us. Sibyl goes. Turner flatters me. You have such an imaginative view of life. I get suspicious. Whats the matter? Do you live with your wife? Well thats what I want to discuss with you. Then it comes out hes in love with a daughter of Mrs Saxton Noble: will I see her and persuade her to become his mistress? Here Lytton rings up. May he dine? Oh all right. Off fish? Oh certainly. Yes, Mr Turner—(but call me Walter) yes Walter I’ll see Cynthia: but you’ll have to marry her. Francis Birrell rings up. Bunins starving in Paris. Can you help to get up a fund to pay his doctor’s bill? Oh yes—certainly—I’ll ask Leonard. Yes, Walter, I’ll see her: but I think you’ll have to marry her. But I want to keep them both. Here Pinker upset the electric lamp: the flat is completely dark. Turner goes. Lytton comes. We sit up talking about Queen Elizabeth, sodomy, love, the Antigone, Othello, when Clive rings up, will you dine to meet Elizabeth Bibesco? No I wont. Will Leonard? No. Will Lytton? No. And so to bed. Next morning Chrissie on the telephone. May I say, Mrs Woolf, I think its a great mistake to let Sibyl have anything to do with the [MacCarthy] fund? Also why subscribe for a holiday? Surely the debts are the important thing. If you will come and lunch…. Then Clive’s brother [Cory Bell]. Look here Virginia about that motor car. If you really want one I should advise etc etc. Then supper at Clives: and so here we are.

I’m afraid I’m being very jerky and dull.

Do you realise how devoted I am to you, all the same? There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you, dearest Honey. Its true, the other night, I did take a glass too much. Its your fault though—that Spanish wine. I got a little tipsy. And then Bobo Mayor is a great seducer in her way. She has gipsy blood in her: she’s rather violent and highly coloured, sinuous too, with a boneless body, and thin hands; all the things I like. So, being a little tipsy about twelve o’clock at night, I let her do it.

She cut my hair off. I’m shingled. That being so—and it’ll look all right in a month or two, the hairdresser says—bound to be a little patchy at first—lets get on to other things. Its off; its in the kitchen bucket: my hairpins have been offered up like crutches in St Andrews, Holborn, at the high altar. Darling Honey, if anything could make me say Vita’s a villain it is that you didn’t tell me, you’ll be happier, wiser, serener, cleverer a thousand times shingled than haired. As for beauty, I looked in the glass a week ago; and I assure you, its an illusion: a mirage: I’m a plain woman; shall be plainer; so a bingling and shingling more or less dont matter: but let us get on to something interesting.

Nothing occurs to me at the moment.

There has been a good deal of talk, one way and another, about the Sackvilles. Oh said Clive, yesterday, I dreamt I was engaged to Vita. What an old nuisance Colefax is, says Roger—There I was talking to Vita Nicolson and beginning to find her so sympathetic, when in butts Colefax. Come and tell me about Alexandria, or something. Vita’s at the bottom of your shingling I know, Vanessa writes in a wild fury. Vita seems to pervade the quarter curiously. I had the pillmaker of Percy Circus to tea: a red fingered woman, clumsy, woollen; obdurate and monosyllabic: but hungry for crumpets. And who should come in but George Duckworth, as fat as a louse, but beady eyed like a rat, and so condescending to us all, I first lost my temper, and then laughed; and he told us one little story to his own glory after another, till I said, they’ll be making you a peer next, which he said they mean to do, at the first opportunity. Suddenly the pill maker collapsed: she must go to the water closet, she said. Was it the crumpets? or George? or if one makes vegetable pills, do they act, inconveniently, at any moment? Such is my life this week.

Please Vita dear dont forget your humble creatures—Pinker and Virginia. Here we are sitting by the gas fire alone. Every morning she jumps on to my bed and kisses me, and I say thats Vita.

But she has worms again. Leonard says, Isn’t it rather remarkable you haven’t had influenza this year? I say thats Vita. Oh and we are having such a to do in the Press. Wells has asked us to do a pamphlet of his: and I ve got an essay out of De la Mare. Our conversation with Angus was a complete misfire. He wont go. He cant see that he need go. Then Birrell’s book shop is sold, I’m afraid;

I must post this, but like lingering over it, though my hand is so cold I cant write, in order to be with you. You shall ruffle my hair in May, Honey: its as short as a partridges rump.

Heres Leonard

Your
Virginia

Berg

[]

1718: To V. Sackville-West

Friday, 18th Feb. 1927

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Sweet Honey,

Nelly has just brought into the Studio where I’m correcting proofs of the Lighthouse your cable “Agree about Doran”. Its not a very intimate message, but it gives me a little thrill of pleasure, and I make you say instead Good morning Virginia. Good morning Vita. Yes I want you more and more. You’ll like to think of me unhappy I know. Well, you can.

Last time I wrote in such a tearing hurry I was ashamed to send it, so now I’m beginning early: but there’ll be endless interruptions. I want to know, particularly, among a crowd of other things, have you talked to Harold about giving up silk stockings and swords and gold lace and humbug and nonsense [diplomacy] and becoming a sensible man? If so, what has he said? Now you will have got over your torrent of talk, and might have a little serious conversation. At a conclave here the other night it was universally agreed that he was a loss to the world as it is: much too good for that everyone said: but then he’s ambitious, some one said. Nonsense, I said.

You are sitting by the Kasran (I dont know what the name is) [Kasvin] Gate, and seeing us all as little bright beads in a plate miles beneath. You see us, and you think we dont see you. I assure you I’m conscious of you all day long, soaring above my head. And am I a bright bead, or a dull bead, in the plate? Or dont I exist?

We’re still talking, you’ll be surprised to hear, about love and sodomy and Bunny’s last book, Vita and Eddy, and Desmond’s fund, shall it be for his debts or his holiday?—with Lytton, Clive, Morgan, Raymond, Mary etc. There we sit in Clive’s smoky room, with the brandy and the tumblers, and Mary wears a black patch on her left cheek and a golden turban. How nice you look shingled! she says. Why dont you do it? I say. But think if I were to look a horror for a whole six weeks! she says. I see thats a serious matter—Then Morgan says he’s worked it out and one spends 3 hours on food, 6 on sleep, 4 on work, 2 on love. Lytton says 10 on love. I say the whole day on love. I say its seeing things through a purple shade. But you’ve never been in love they say.

Monday, Feb 11st

It gets worse you’ll be glad to hear, steadily worse. Todays the day when I should be trotting out to buy you your loaf, and watching for your white legs—not widow Cartwrights—coming down the basement steps. Instead you’re on the heights of Persia, riding an Arab mare I daresay to some deserted garden and picking yellow tulips.

My solace is what?—dining with Ethel Sands to meet Violet Bonham Carter, and laboriously correcting two sets of proofs. My goodness how you’ll dislike that book [To the Lighthouse]! Honestly you will—Oh but you shan’t read it. Its a ghost between us. Whether its good or bad, I know not: I’m dazed, I’m bored, I’m sick to death: I go on crossing out commas and putting in semi-colons in a state of marmoreal despair. I suppose there may be half a paragraph somewhere worth reading: but I doubt it.

I read Cowper: The Task [1785]. Now there’s a man with a dash of white fire in him. It comes so strangely, among such flummery: one line, one phrase. Theres no Cowper in Persia, you’ll say: if there were, read some of the Task. The domestic scenes are lovely: and then this white fire: what I call central transparency. For a long poem of course you need a mould: and lines to fall smooth one after another: but also now and again what saves one is the wave rising solitary; a line about a hare perhaps; something said still with the formal lilt, but completely in his own voice. This seems to me the triumph of style.

Wednesday

Ethel’s party wasn’t bad; I liked Violet Bonham Carter, save that she gets too close, and cranes too near. Philip Ritchie told me I was the chief coquette in London, “allumeuse” Clive corrected him. Then my suspenders came down, dragging with them an old rag of chemise—why didn’t you tell me one must fasten one’s suspenders properly? I can dress now in 5 minutes: just think of that. But always some misery like suspenders clips my wings of glory; and Good God, I must buy a hat.

Well darling: no letter from you since Monday week. I must wait till next Monday, a whole fortnight I suppose. How are you? Any malaria? How’s Dotty? Does she like Persia? My love to her. Oh I’m so solitary, except for Leonard: Clive went this morning. We had an affecting farewell. I think I cried. I feel so fond of him, and then he’s in an odd state God knows whats happening, save that I feel sure Mary is angry with me, and thinks I’m at the bottom of it. Of what, though? God knows.

I think we shall probably go to Greece the end of March and be back the end of April: and then I shall spend May motoring in Spain with Dadie—hah hah!—and June in Italy with Nancy [Cunard]; and July in Rodmell with Pinker; and August in Geneva with Ramsay Macdonald. But there’ll be one night with you at Long Bam. Snore—Snore—Snore.

Your
Virginia

P. To T. has sold 915. What about your story?

Berg

[]

1719: To Vanessa Bell

18th Feb 1927

52 Tavistock Sqre, [W.C.1]

Dearest

I cant help thinking you sound a little dismal. I hope this is only my imagination—You would tell me, wouldn’t you, if anything were worrying, or if I could do anything. Are you bothered about Duncan? I suppose the Grant menage is an awful trial. I cant imagine anything I should like less. On the whole, I think you’d better marry Duncan; divorce Clive, and set up a house in a new name. But your prejudice against marriage is too great.

Your Clive news intrigues me greatly. On your word of honour, you must be indiscreet and inform me of the true situation when he arrives. All I gather from seeing them at supper at 50 [Gordon Square] the other night is that they both seem rather depressed; but there is no outward change in their manner, and the company withdrew and left them alone as usual. I doubt that she will tell me any more, and I can’t ask her here unless she suggests it. I expect you and I shall rank as her enemies in future. I can’t help however—foolish as I may be—rather respecting her: she is unscrupulous, but takes her fences, as they say. She don’t mind what she does. I expect he will be much happier with you.

Yes, I am shingled, or rather bingled. We got slightly merry the other night on Spanish wine, with Bobo [Mayor] and Clive; and she became very insinuating and seductive after dinner and implored me to let her try the effect. So I collapsed, egged on by Clive and Leonard, who seemed both to think that my own style of hair doing couldn’t be worsened—I cant describe the delight when the long coil of cold hair fell off, and my neck was exposed. I think however hideous it makes me look it is worth it. Besides, the front remains the same; it is only that one has a partridges rump behind. It was none of Vita’s doing, I can assure you. She made me swear not to, and says it will utterly ruin my appearance. All the same, though it loses me the love of sister, lover, and niece, I dont regret it. For you, of course, beautiful as you are, it is a different matter. These masterpieces should be left untouched. But then I was always a second rate work, and am now much the worse for wear, so it don’t matter. Its the not having hair pins, and the giving it a brush and a wollop in the morning thats such a delight—Also travelling—think of the mercy in trains and steamers. Perhaps you’ll come to it—shocking though the thought is.

All the London hostesses are engaged in a curious skirmish about Desmond. He is said to be on the verge of a breakdown. Sibyl wants to get up a fund to give him a holiday: Chrissie and I to pay his debts. Happily I have now seceded, after setting them by the ears, and only hear from Chrissie how unreasonable Sibyl is, and from Sibyl how much she fears that Chrissie etc. etc I rather expect that the MacCarthys will be set up for life, and keep a motor in the end; We are much tempted by Cory [Clive’s brother] to buy a second hand Morris or Citroen: the cost is under £200 probably; and he says one need not pay insurance or tax if left at Rodmell, where the shed will be quite enough. It remains then to make £200 by the Lighthouse. At the moment it seems to me inconceivably bad—in which case, it will be a success I daresay, like Bunny’s book, about which Lytton, Raymond and I agree—it is unspeakably bad.

Lytton was up last week, as Carrington has been thrown from a horse and had they thought fractured her pelvis. It turns out to be bruises only, so they have gone back—He has thrown over Philip [Ritchie], I gather, and is on with Roger Senhouse, whom he wants us to be nice to. He is almost imbecile I’m told; but rather attractive perhaps. Also I’m in the thick of another love affair—that tipsy rooks, J. W. Turner. He came to tea and confided: dont spread it beyond D’s area; his wife Delphine is secretary at Claridges Gallery, so you may know her. He wants to have her for friend, and Cynthia Noble, Mrs Saxton Noble’s beautiful and wealthy daughter for mistress. Will I see her and persuade her to take “an imaginative view of life?” That is what he wants. But I dont suppose she’ll consent—She wants a large family and a house in Bayswater. It is a sad sign of middle age being confided in.

Oh we’ve got to dine with the Hendersons now. Tell me all you can.

VW

Give Angelica my humble and obedient love. She’s shingled herself, tell her: and her beauty is famous—I wish she would write to me.

Berg

[]

1720: To Molly MacCarthy

Sunday [20 February 1927]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Dearest Molly,

I’m quite unaware of all the faults you find: telephone, temper, manners, deportment, cleanliness, civility, a good heart, and an open hand. All I know is, you ring up 2 minutes before I leave the house on an errand of mercy, and peremptorily insist that I’m sitting with my hands in my lap before the fender! Chelsea always thinks Bloomsbury both idle and vicious. Whereas it’s Chelsea that goes gallivanting to the south, and picks the roses in January.

What Clive may have said I neither know nor care.

Why don’t you come and see me—not this week, when I shall be at Rodmell, seeing the plumber, but the week after, say tea, 4.30, Tuesday, 1st March. Then we can have at each other and Desmond and Bob [Trevelyan] and all our friends with kettle and tongs.

Yrs. faithful
sorrowing
traduced
old, antiquated
friendly, long suffering
Virginia Micawber Woolf

Sussex

[]

1721: To Dorothy Bussy

22nd Feb. [1927]

[52 Tavistock Square W.C.1]

Dear Dorothy,

You are an indefatigable and kind woman—and no doubt you shall have an ice for your tea in June. I’m much relieved to hear that the translating is good. The translators begged me not to read it in the Revue de Genève as it has been altered. But their version is coming out in a book soon. I’ve sent on your letter, and notes. A thousand thanks. I’m glad the original keeps well; but then I think you read with greater imagination than most.

So goodbye till the 15th. Order your tea early. China or Indian? Gunters or Buzzards?

Yours
V.W.

Texas

[]

1722: To V. Sackville-West

Sunday, Feb 28th 1927

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

Are you well? Are you happy? You wont go and leave poor Virginia again will you, even if she does have her hair cut and looks a fright?

No letters yet for nearly a fortnight. But perhaps one is waiting for me in the wire basket at Tavistock Sqre. We are down here for the weekend, in a flood of wet and wind. The snowdrops are out and the w.c. has broken and Leonard and Percy Bartholomew are stamping about the garden in waterproofs and I’m sitting in the Lodge feeling rather cold. Mrs Bartholomew is more draggly and wispy than ever—she fetches a long breath and goes on talking interminably. Rose wouldn’t cook for us because I had forgotten to write to her. “If you dont think me worth a penny stamp” she kept saying standing at her cottage door. But we pacified her and she cooks far far more than we can eat. English village life seems to me stark raving mad—their feuds, their jealousies, their suspicions—Oh and does it strike you that one’s friendships are long conversations, perpetually broken off, but always about the same thing with the same person? With Lytton I talk about reading; with Clive about love; with Nessa about people; with Roger about art; with Morgan about writing; with Vita—well, what do I talk about with Vita? Sometimes we snore—I must go in and crouch over the fire.

It is rather a good fire: apple tree logs on top, coal underneath: an empty armchair opposite. Oh Vita—if it weren’t for the diplomacy, you might be sitting there now! I wasted two days on headache last week, and couldn’t write—all my own fault for sitting up late talking I suppose; so next week I am going to sit at home and see no one.

My ‘no clothes’ dodge is working admirably. I was rung up yesterday by a woman called Lady Dilke who wanted me to give the Femina Vie Heureuse prize to a Frenchman. So I said I couldnt. And she said you must. So I said I wouldnt and she said I should. So it struck me, well I’ll say I’ve no clothes. At which she paled and withered, and cried off instantly: it was to be at Claridges in May. Also, I think I’ve got out of lunching with her on the same plea. Its true too. Never shall I buy another skirt. Never shall I lunch with Lady Dilke. Never shall I give a prize to a Frenchman. (And by the way, for your information I may add that she said something about giving me the prize and I blushed all over, holding the telephone, with shame and ignominy. This is true. Snobbish? No: instinctive; right.)

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Last page got wet with rain: then I went for a walk: now its Wednesday, and I did find your letter, and Dotties, in the wire cage; and I cheered up considerably. But I want lots more—volumes more. Anything you write, or think.

Look here, Vita, you must wring Harolds neck, if the worst comes to the worst. You have my sanction. A dead diplomat in a dust heap. You shant spend your entire life, or even the March’s and Aprils, of your life being polite in the provinces: pouring out tea: putting on emeralds. No, no, you shant. Insect [Vita] says no. Puppy (she’s on the arm of the chair, sniffing the paper) says no. Virginia says no.

I’m enveloped in Desmond’s affairs. I write endless letters. I engage first Chrissie then Sibyl on the telephone. They are very tactful. They cross examine poor Molly about her debts. Is she extravagant? What can she live on? Clive embroils everybody by bawling across the table. Molly says she hates everyone. Chrissie hates Sibyl. Both despise me. After all its not much different from village life and Rose Bartholomew; but it takes up the devil of a time; and I cant think what I was going to say.

We have told Angus to go: but he wants to stay. So now we are trying to combine him and Mervyn Arnold Forster—a dried up little man, who makes long long jokes. And we’ve bought a machine for putting on stamps, only if you joggle it, it puts on 3 stamps: has triplets, I say (I’ve been doing it all the afternoon) and Mrs C⁠[artwright] is shocked. The press is very busy: all the envelopes are going out. P to T sold (I think) 929. A genius has sent me the most odious copy book, written on both sides in a crabbed hand: but its very good—a tour in Bohemia, by a Welshman. And we have a vast poem, and a huge novel, and a monstrous memoir.

I doubt we shall get to Greece. It takes too long. Italy? Spain? France? Now they want me to go to America ‘this Fall.’ What am I to say? I wish I’d got it over now. But somewhere I must go: and sit outside a cafe and drink wine and eat paté de foie gras and hear a little Latin spoken.

Yes, darling honey, I am a misery without you. So dont, I beg, be foolish walking over mountains. If you break a leg, I break my heart, remember. Puppy says I must run her in the Square.

Write again, as soon as you can.

I did like your letter. And, following your orders (P to T) I read it so as to elicit every grain, and could write an exposition of its meanings and submeanings in 20 volumes.

Yr Virginia

P.S. Wednesday night.

Your letter just come—About Greece—All our plans are hopelessly vague at the moment. Leonard anyhow has to be back in London on the 28th: Could you be earlier? No: I suppose not. Roger probably can’t manage Greece. We’d almost decided on France. Its very tempting—A sublime idea. I’ll consider. I’ll write in a day or two. You see, I’ve promised to go to Vanessa, and that uses a week and we’ve only 4. But a divine thought. Greece. Gangway. Vita.

Yr
Virginia

(Cold fish—ho ho!)

Berg

[]

1723: To Vanessa Bell

[end February 1927]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Here you are—standing shoulder to shoulder with the Hon John Collier.

I’ve just been to your show: great admiration: will write detailed criticism of no great importance perhaps but never mind that in a day or two.

Please write

VW.

Berg

[]

1724: To Julian Bell

[early March 1927]

52 Tavistock Sqre, [W.C.1]

Dear Julian,

We shall be passing through Paris on March 30th, I think, on our way either to Greece or to Sicily. Anyhow, will you dine with us—Clive says we have time between trains. I’ll let you know the exact facts later. But keep yourself free. We shan’t spend the night. But coming back in April, about 27th or so, we shall; and then I hope to see you again for a longer time. Also perhaps Luce will come, and then we can get to the bottom of this business about Webster. Why Webster? God knows.

Nessa says you have a Crow to spill with me about my writing. She is rather muddled and fuddled, but if you have a merry thought to split, please send it at once. I will give it full attention. What are you up to? Writing? Reading? Eating? Drinking? Quentin and I have a rod in pickle for you.

Your affate
Virginia

Quentin Bell

[]

1725: To Vanessa Bell

5th March 1927

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest,

I dont suppose there is anything more to say about the Clive affair. My impression is that he’d like to break, but as you say, chastity is not his line. We have now, at last, settled about our travels. We shall get to Cassis on Thursday 31st, and stay till Wednesday April 6th when we take boat for Sicily. So could you angelically take us two bedrooms or one with two beds, at the Cendrillon for that time? I suppose there are other hotels—in fact I know there are—if the Cendrillon is full: but we leave it to you. I suppose a sitting room is out of the question. However, we shall no doubt plant ourselves largely upon you. In fact I’m getting very morose and disconsolate without you and Angelica; whom I depend on entirely, I find, for congenial conversation: At this moment, in this pouring rain, I could be gossiping with you: much better than sitting here, writing interminable letters to the Eliot fund subscribers, who never answer. Still, theres your blessed art to be considered, I suppose. I’m rather nervous about criticising your pictures: I made such howlers with Rogers. I said I thought he’d improved vastly, whereupon, of course, every picture I praised had been painted 10 years ago. He only sold 3 I think; Porter 4. The point about you is that you are now mistress of the phrase. All your pictures are built up of flying phrases. This is to me a very exciting and congenial stage. They have an air of complete spontaneity. The downs seem to billow; yet the hay cart is perfectly substantial. I daresay your problem will now be to buttress up this lyricism with solidity. I pronounce no opinion on that. I think we are now at the same point: both mistresses of our medium as never before: both therefore confronted with entirely new problems of structure. Of course your colour intrigues me, seduces, and satisfies me exquisitely. I do not suppose that I get to the end of the maze by any means: my susceptibilities are freakish and wayward. At the Flemish show (to explain my weakness) I liked the two Breugels (Icarus: and a storm: I’m not sure of the man’s name) far better than anything. But what could one see? Only troops of clergy and schoolmistresses, four thick, writing crosses and noughts in their catalogues—What d’you think they do it for?—to give their friends? But to return: I should like you to paint a large, large picture; where everything would be brought perfectly firmly together, yet all half flying off the canvas in rapture. I have now said enough—The show was only just open: there was a youth praising Vanessa Bell—“always so interesting” (the defunctive Violet Dickinson writes that “V’s pictures are splendid”) and a more or less idiot boy who had never sent me a card. It is rather a dismal hole, I thought.

Yes, we see the Keynes’ and the Frys. We gave up Greece with Roger, partly as he wanted to go when Helen could come, partly because as L. has to be back on 28th April, we should have rushed it—which seems silly, considering the cost. Next year—God, we’ve had more of these interminable Press conversations with Angus, and the result is that we are asking Mervyn Arnold Forster to come and see us, with a view to his being the Manager. Angus seems to agree that he dislikes managing, and Leonard feels that he hasn’t got the gift: so we are trying to arrange that he shall stay on with Mervyn in some other capacity. He seems very reluctant to go. But as it is, we could never leave the Press for any length of time. He can’t think of things—and either we must give it up, or try some professional. Mervyn is a dry stick: God knows.

Did I tell you of my visit from George [Duckworth]? He and the Percy Circus Pill maker came together. George was swollen, affable, overdressed, beyond belief. He can only mumble and had just fallen flat in Berkley Sqre and strained his back. He had been to see you, but only found an old gentleman and some pictures in the hall. “Ah yes I’ve seen Vanessa’s curtains—I should think so! And do you embroider that kind of thing too? Does poor Leonard wear them out of doors? hah hah. I see you’ve gone in for decoration too! Look as if they’d not taken very long to do!—But perhaps they think them out beforehand.” Then he told us interminable stories to his own glory: how he’s on some commission, and has cheques made out to him for £122,000: “to me, mark you, in my own name: all the taxpayers money!” So I said, “Well George they’ll be making you a K.C.B. next.” “Making me? I should rather think so. Why my name’s been on the list these 12 years” I never saw anyone so completely self-satisfied; so insolent; so prosperous; so condescending. He never stopped chortling and laughing. The pill maker from Percy Circus—a good stolid servant girl—was taken short and retired to the W.C. I wish I liked buggers—Lytton is giving a party at the Ivy on Monday; and I know they’ll be all of that persuasion—Duncan’s all right; so’s Morgan: but the insipidity of the rest passes belief.

Philip [Ritchie] came the other night. Oh Molly’s in a great state—says she must get Desmond abroad: Is there a place called Moursian?

Yr B

I shall be very happy to see you.

Berg

[]

1726: To V. Sackville-West

6th March 1927

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Honey,

It was a treat to open the wire cage and find a long sealed letter from you. Yes of course I can translate your motto: what did I waste my youth on? Latin and Greek. This year you seem to me, imaginatively, more unattainable; more pearled, powdered, white legged, gay, gallant and adventurous than ever. I can’t imagine you in the basement, where old Cartwright scratches her head with her pen, and the floor gets dusty with atoms of brown paper, and Angus yawns over his cigarette, and the bagmen stand dripping wet and Pinker gnaws a bit of string, and the telephone rings, and we hear the thud of Pritchards clerks galloping up and down—etc—etc—etc Why did I launch into this description? It can’t convey anything to you. Still—oh yes—I’m very fond of you, all the same—I lie in bed making up stories about you. Do send me a heap of facts: you know how I love a fact: what you had for dinner: and any scrap of real talk for instance between you and Harold, upon which I can build pinnacles and pagodas, all unreal as you justly remark. No we shan’t manage Greece. Roger wants to go another time: 16 days is all we should have there: and so on and so on. As at present decided, we go to Cassis on the 30th, to Sicily by boat on the 6th, home by Rome, and shall be back the 28th. This is a nice enough trip, but the other would have had one splendid moment—on a gangway. But we should have been hurried and hustled—so I console myself: seen only coasts in the distance: a German traveller would have interrupted: they would have made us play Bridge. Next year with Harold in Whitehall,—why not six weeks, dearest?

8th March I have had a quiet dull week—no parties, except one, which Lytton gave to seduce me into liking a pink boy of his—a new pink boy—called Roger Senhouse. I got slightly tipsy and chattered (at the Ivy): came home and chattered. The pink boy said he must apologise for being so dull, was half asleep, had been up till 6: but its no use: these buggers are always dull. Now why? Do they exhaust their charm in noses and so on? Otherwise I have read a great deal, and done up 20 dozen parcels.

Two strange women have come into my life—one called Ursula Greville, a bad singer, I gather who feels that I could straighten her life, and asks me to come and see her in bed—shall I?—the other, Mrs Leake of the Albany. But no. I want Vita: I want Insect: I want currant bun; twilight—oh and night too if you insist, with the birds singing and the stars rising. How romantic the Sackvilles are to be sure!

You see I couldn’t tell you the central fact of Clive’s affair—Mary forbade. So it lacked structure. But the fragments are there—simply he couldn’t work, found passion unsatisfying, parties dull, remorse gnawed him, he said he must fly, asked my advice: I gave it. Fly, I said, to your book [Civilisation] and your green lamp. But why not here in London? said Mary. If he goes he’ll forget me. It’s you, she said, that want to break it, she said, turning on me with an ashen face and emerald eyes—(Yes, I love passion: and she’s Vénus toute entière a sa proie attachée without a doubt) Damned housemaid I said, flying into one of those rare passions which its said are terrible to see, out of my house, and so on. If I want love, I have it in Persia, I said: I dont want you and your street blown roses. Clive quailed between the two of us; and at length, shuffling and shallying, made off with his tail between his legs to write a history of civilisation at Cassis. So there you are: save for one fact, which has to do with the feminine physiology, and must die with me.

I’m writing about Morgan Forster: I’m writing about Lady Augusta Stanley and Miss Emily Davies; and about street walking; and about novels (in a vulgar rag called The Weekly Dispatch.) None of these, thank God, will you see; and then my hundred’s made: I’m well ahead with the world, and need write no more till the old fish, of whom I’ve told you—he’s Gold, but has moulted several scales—his tails quite bald by the way, and he lost one eye in a fight with a Tench—rises to the top, and I net him. Yes, I’ve thought of an entirely new book: it may be two: Each more entirely new than the other. So my fortune gilds the future for me—if my father didn’t leave me pearls, this was by way of a makeshift.

Gosse still says, only two weeks ago, “Ah Mrs Woolf! doesn’t respect her father”

Darling Honey, what are you writing and saying, feeling, thinking, eating, drinking, even spitting; if it comes to that. Yes, you are solidly lodged in my heart—such as it is: the cold heart of a fish: (by the way, Pinker eats a cod’s head in the Square, is sick under my bed, and I say, beaming, Dearest Vita!) I’m asking Louise to have Pinker for a month. Does this matter?

I’ll catch every possible post. And you will too?

I’ll give you addresses next week.

Yr
Virginia

I left this open, hoping for my letters in the cage. None. Only a long, scented illegible effusion from Ottoline. Curse!

Berg

[]

1727: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Sunday [6 March 1927]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Ottoline,

I wish I could come on Thursday, but Ethel Sands is coming here, so I’m afraid its impossible. I’m so sorry. I should have like to.

Tom Eliot [fund] again—but positively the last time.

There is an odd sum of £2.14.8. left over, which if you agree I propose to add to the cheque for Oliver’s man, and so I have made out a new one.

Could you sign this?

A thousand apologies and thanks

Yr V.W.

Texas

[]

1728: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

[8 March 1927]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Dearest Ottoline,

I am so sorry I made a mistake—I enclose the right cheque.

Also I have heard from Mr Schiff, so would you sign him too.

About £20 now remains without an owner. The man who gave it is said to be dead, and his daughter refuses to take it. What are we to do? But I’ll have one more shot at finding him. Then there will be only one more.

Yes, I expect the stones of Bloomsbury to flower in red and gold when you come [to Gower Street].

Your affec
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

1729: To Quentin Bell

Sunday [13 March 1927]

52 Tavistock Square W.C.1

My dear Quentin,

Would it be agreeable to you if I came down next Saturday? Let me know. I would come in the afternoon: We would take a Bus into the furthest wilds of Berkshire: returning in time for a substantial tea. Then we would look at the Bookshops, also at the Curiosity shops. Meanwhile we would discuss our next masterpiece. The question is how can we give the utmost possible pain to everyone concerned?

Please write me a long letter, with all the scandal and gossip. I am practically the sole inhabitant of Bloomsbury as all our friends have gone abroad. Duncan has not yet found the pen, so he cannot write to me.

What do you think of the state of China? To me it looks a bloody black business, with 6d on the income tax.

Please answer.

Yrs Virginia

Quentin Bell

[]

1730: To V. Sackville-West

Tuesday, March 15 1927

52 Tavistock Sqre, W.C.1

I spent yesterday you’ll be glad to hear because you are an Ogre if ever there was one, in the depths of gloom. The mousetrap filled itself and refilled itself—never a letter from you—none for a fortnight. Even Mrs Cartwright noticed my melancholy and offered me a plain bun. At last, just as hope seemed extinct, and the waters of despair were shut above my head sitting over the gas fire two arrived; full as nuts; delicious; milky, meaty, satisfying every desire of my soul, except darling, for a complete lack of endearments. See how naturally my ‘darling’ drops out. To punish you, I shant call you honey once this letter. So there. Oh yes, Vita, I’m more subtle than you think for [me?]. Read between the lines, donkey West; put on your horn spectacles, and the arid ridges of my prose will be seen to flower like the desert in spring: cyclamens, violets, all a growing, all a blowing.

I shall attend the Hawthornden Prize giving if possible—Should be soon.

This very moment a young man—39 I suppose though—has just left the room with these identical words on his lips. “I say, is V. Sackville West the same person as Mrs Nicolson? I’ve just read “The Land,” Its a masterpiece—a classic—the best poem of our age. I dont know when I enjoyed a book so much. And whats so exciting is that I’m going to teach her little boys at Summerfields.” My face fell—I was furiously jealous. This was Mervyn Arnold-Forster, who may become our partner (you’ll agree he ought to be a publisher—and by God, we’ll get your next poem out of you—see if we dont) He’s doing schoolmaster for a term. Ben and Nigel will catch some of your glory I hope. Really he’s a sensible little creature, dry as a biscuit, with a passion for fields and hedges. I think he’s going to come to us. But say nothing to nobody—dont go blurting Hogarth Press secrets to the Bachtiaris. I shouldn’t take your sterility much to heart, if I were you. One’s mind wants to lie under the leaves and let them rot on top. Solitude is the one thing I want to write about. Lets see how differently we do it. Dotty also wrote. I rather flinch at 15 miles a day for 14 days; but I daresay its all in your stride. I must warn you that if you come back lean as a flail and brown as a berry, with any damage to body or brain, I shall no longer respect you; I shall come back plump as a partridge and red as a rose—a very different matter. I’m going to do nothing but sit in the sun, eat hugely, and watch landscapes. Thats the way I travel. Looking, looking, looking and making up phrases to match clouds. It is the passion of my life. You cant think how dry and gravelly my mind gets when I dont take it to the South where tilings have a dash of red and blue to them, and dont wobble in pale grease as they do here.

Do not buy me a coat. As you know I utterly refuse and abominate presents; and I dont want to spend a penny on clothes this summer. Last summer I spent £12.10: this summer 6½d. I want to buy carpets and beds for Rodmell. I’m that sick of making money I’d rather walk into Argyll House [Sibyl Colefax’s house] naked, than earn another guinea. But if you have bought it, of course I’ll joyfully flaunt in it, in the Haymarket, d’you remember, in the dusk. Sibyls dropped me. Everybody’s gone—no, there’s Eddy coming to tea—We linger like ghosts in a world of incredible beauty I take back my insult to England. I’ve just been buying cigarettes in the Tottenham Court road—rivers of silver, breasted by plumes of gold: omnibus and shops equally beautiful—Why go to Persia when the T. Ct. Rd. is like that? Now Roger wants to go to Greece—too late. We’ve plunged for a week at Cassis, then Sicily, then Rome. About addresses—We shall be at the Hotel cendrillon cassis France, from March 30th to April 6th.* Then by boat to Palmero. But I’m not sure of dates or hotels so you’d better write to Tavistock Sqre. after that and they’ll forward. Do write, any scrap. I shall count on it. I know there’ll be a fortnights break. Damn you Vita, why do you insist upon taking the world by the scruff of its neck and shaking it? Why these great and gallant ways? being so adventurous and athletic and spartan? So we lose a fortnights friendship.

Talking of my subtlety and the disguises it puts on my respect for you,† I tell you this story—a true one—We were asked to a party by Todd. We were dining near by: when we stood at her door, what decided me not to go in? Not Leonards exhortations to come back to bed; but my certainty that Raymond would come up to me, kind and grave, and say, kindly and gravely. You’ve heard of Vita’s accident? To avoid this, I came home.

* No: you cant get this in time to write to Cassis, I suppose
† (hah hah! who said ‘respect’ once?)

Wednesday March 16

Heaven’s be praised! Another letter from you just found in the cage! A very very nice one: all about splinters of my mind. Dearest honey (damn, there its out) dont be glooming about not writing poetry. I like your prose. Eddy’s coming in a moment. Shall I lecture him about his party? I’ll be highly discreet.

All news seems too unreal to send. You can’t be interested in my dinners and teas, nor am I much; nor in Clive’s heart; nor in anything but the depths of the soul, which I’ve no time to fish up. It must all seem incredibly silly and thin. Not my respect though: thats all right, I can assure you. Crush this in your fingers as you walk over the hills, and float on a swollen goat skin. I’m glad Dotty dont pan out well in the East. Bloomsbury’s the right training for Persia. Yes I’m perfectly well: was rather headachy and had a sore throat; and recovered completely; and Lydia Keynes said she’d never seen me look better last night. But then she admires my shingled head. I dont. Its like the hind view of a frightened hen partridge.

My dear, I must stop.

Please Vita as you love me take care of yourself on the Expedition (curse it) Tell Harold he must be careful of you, and not let you go on if you’re tired. What about the Bloody Flux and all the rest of it?

Now darling honey (its out) goodbye

Yr Virginia

[]

1731: To Vanessa Bell

Wednesday [16 March 1927]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

We thought you knew what to do—The same as Mrs Dalloway, I suppose. You have to put Harcourts name and the price—both the same. But perhaps you cd. alter the jacket I sent. I sent their address at once.

383 Madison Avenue
New York.

That is it.

Will you deal with them direct?

A thousand thanks to Duncan for his enchanting effusion. Eddy and I get together and mouth his phrases. As for the chorus of praise wh. is sung in your and D’s honour—I cant abear it. Never could

Will write in a day or two.

Hope to see Q. on Saturday.

V.W.

Berg

[]

1732: To Vanessa Bell

Sunday 20th March 1927

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest,

I dont know how your sense of justice reconciles itself to asking me for 20 pages when you send me one, written on a kind of Bromo too, However; let me see, I have several things to tell you—First, I went down to see Quentin yesterday, he having been impounded the week before for roof climbing I think. We had a walk by the river and a good deal of gossip. He said I was to tell you that he was following in his elder brother’s footsteps—ragging, I gather. He seemed very well, very tall, cropped like a convict, rather bored with school I thought, and wanting to talk about pictures. We had tea and he met several cronies but said he did not want to talk to them. He was going to a Debating Society dinner so ate a comparatively small tea. We went to the movies, and he was very scornful of a great seduction scene in China. We also talked a great deal about our next satire: He was very charming as usual, and if anything older and better informed than I am. We cracked the usual jokes about the Keynes’. We dined there [at 46 Gordon Square] the other night, by the way. Lydia and Harland [servant] between them have consummated the decoration of the drawing room by picking up at a sale some primrose coloured satin curtains, sprinkled with violet wreaths, which hang tight and shiny across the windows and are met by a sky blue carpet of the thickest pile. Your ceiling decorations have been whitewashed; several 18th century candelabras from Maples’ imported and the whole effect is bright and tight and shiny as you could wish. But Maynard is apparently conscience stricken about luxury, and gave us no wine, a poor dinner, and only old broken springed lodging house chairs to sit in. They are off to Tilton; how you must be looking forward to your tennis parties in the summer!

Then a voice on the telephone recalled me 30 years at a leap the other day. Something mincing, powdered, affected, vulgar, effusive, fawning,—who do you think? Ethel Dilke! She wanted me to lunch with her and give a prize to a Frenchman. But I promptly invited her here for a date unknown, and so shall escape—unless you insist upon a rapprochement. Then we dined with the Sangers, and who should be there but an incredibly touzled, long coated woman—blurred—bleared—smudged—muted—like a wingless bluebottle—old Dobbin and her husband. I took strongly against her, though no doubt she is harmless enough. She has taken up furniture decoration, and her finger nails have permanently suffered.

Roger of course changed his mind, as soon as we had taken rooms at Cassis, and would have gone to Greece. This is remitted till next year, when a large party is going for several weeks, you’ll be glad to hear. Duncan has refused, if I am of the party. I bear him no grudge. I submit to all his spites. People say that he is a great genius. Who am I that I should complain?

Then Dick Strachey has got his girl with child and has had to marry her. As for the Hogarth Press, some strange compromise too difficult to explain, has been arrived at. I rather think Mervyn A. F. [Arnold-Forster] will become Manager in the autumn. Mrs Cartwright is decidedly queer, and I hope in time to supplant her by Rachel MacCarthy who is exquisite merry and like a lustre tea pot to look at. The MacCarthys of course being on their beam ends gave us a magnificent dinner of 7 courses the other night. Desmond was in great spirits; is going to Contrexéville to do a cure, and then to Italy in May; The fund is already about £350 I think but he says he intends to regard it merely as a loan. He has prospects of great wealth in the near future.

Do you want me to do anything or bring anything? If so, write. I want to bring a little cadeau to ingratiate myself with Angelica—Is there anything she wants? I count the days till we leave. Society here has become intolerable save for Edith Sitwell who was fascinating the other day—very beautiful and full of astonishing stories about her mothers frauds: how she was made to catch bluebottles as a child and so on: otherwise I pine for the society of Cassis, which seems to me perfect: I rather wish we were spending all our time there—Can we go to Toulon? Can we buy some furniture? some china? Now I must do my Italian lesson on the gramophone—

Yr B.

I am asking Julian to dine with us on our way through Paris. He wrote me a very nice letter about Luce and Webster (the poet—there was a poet called Webster once.)

Berg

[]

1733: To Lytton Strachey

[21 March 1927]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Could you be so angelic as to tell us the name of the hotel in Rome? any other information gratefully received.

I’m afraid I seemed rather brusque—not sympathetic last night—owing to circumstances. I do feel that love is such a horror I would advise anyone to break off. But I see the difficulties. I hope to make the young man’s [Roger Senhouse] acquaintance when we come back.

We have collapsed under typhoid—I verge on 102—is it worth it? I wonder. So goodbye—V.W.

Strachey Trust

[]

1734: To Julian Bell

[23? March 1927]

52 Tavistock Sqre W.C.1

My dear Julian,

Will you meet us next Wednesday at 7.15 outside the door of the Restaurant at the P.L.M. station—Perhaps you know a good place to dine or we could dine there.

I have been entirely miserable with typhoid germs too or I would have written. It seems to me an evil superstition—probably useless.

I dont follow Professor Luce on Webster—but hope to see him some time and get to the bottom of it.

Please offer him my love if he does not think it presumptuous.

I saw Quentin last week. He had been roof climbing, bed wrecking and otherwise enjoying himself. He said he was following his elder brother’s steps.

Have you got your lampoon? Ours is withering in the highest degree, I must warn you. Your

Virginia

Quentin Bell

[]

1735: To V. Sackville-West

March 23rd 1927

52 Tavistock Sqre, [W.C.1]

Dearest Honey,

Are you well? Did you enjoy the [Bakhtiari] walk? Were you drowned, shot, raped, tired? Lord! I’d give a good deal to know. But the silly thing is that I’m writing before you’ve even left Teheran, I suppose. What I pretend to be past is all in the future. Yet to you, reading this, its over. All very confusing, and pray God I may never have to write to you in Persia again.

How you’d laugh to see me stretched out comatose recovering from two days high temperature—all owing to inoculations, and my principles—I know I deserve it. I urged you so lightly into it—how little I pitied you—and now you shall laugh at me. How I wish you’d walk into the room this moment, and laugh as much as you like.

Why do I think of you so incessantly, see you so clearly the moment I’m in the least discomfort? An odd element in our friendship. Like a child, I think if you were here, I should be happy. Talking to Lytton the other night he suddenly asked me to advise him in love—whether to go on, over the precipice, or stop short at the top. Stop, stop! I cried, thinking instantly of you. Now what would happen if I let myself go over? Answer me that. Over what? you’ll say. A precipice marked V.

I had a visit from Edith Sitwell whom I like. I like her appearance—in red cotton, many flounced, though it was blowing a gale. She has hands that shut up in one’s own hands like fans—far more beautiful than mine. She is like a clean hare’s bone that one finds on a moor with emeralds stuck about it. She is infinitely tapering, and distinguished and old maidish and hysterical and sensitive. She told me awful Brontë stories about being cursed by her mother as a child and made to kill blue bottles in a hot room. I like talking to her about her poetry—she flutters about like a sea bird, crying so dismally. But honey, can one make a new friend? Can one begin new intimate relations? Dont mistake me. No precipice in this case—Only I was discussing friendship with Morgan Forster. One cannot follow up human relations any more he said. Theres Dante to read. Solitude—ones soul. He is half a monk. An elderly bugger is always something of a priest. Leonard went down to Sevenoaks with puppy. Louise [Genoux] met him and Leonard was very downcast Puppy didn’t seem to mind going he said. Half laughing I said I’d ring up and ask after her. He took it quite seriously. This shows where you’ve led us in dog worshipping. He thinks she’s hermaphrodite: Lizzy has the flux: puppy still hermetically sealed.

Sunday 27th

The germs are clearing off: so you shan’t laugh any longer. But I’m being as careful as a cat on eggs in terror lest I shouldn’t be able to start on Wednesday—you know what Leonard is. A visit from Eddy, and a talk about promiscuity. He deplores the taste as much as you do. He swears by love himself. I gather he is becoming the other way inclined, or balances between the two. He is wildly romantic, dreams I’m sure, of princesses with violet hair, leaning out of mullioned windows, scribbles endlessly, has boundless belief in himself, and in 20 dozen other people too.

Look here—will you come to Oxford on May 18th, and lecture some undergraduates?, on poetry and fiction, I think. I agreed, at Eddy’s persuasion—the charm of his absurdly serious literary views. As if I—or anyone—did any good by being set up to chatter for an hour about impassioned prose—I’m banging about this way and that like a ship at anchor in a rough sea. Millions of things have to be done before we start. The question of the book shop has started again—we may get it very likely. I’ve had to buy skirts, hats, shoes, boxes, mackintoshes. I find myself in the wrong department. I dream. I saunter. People trample on me—they inflict the most dreadful insults at Marshall and Snelgroves. Its humiliating to be in the Babies Sock Dept, when one wants Ladies handbags. The Dr’s been, and refuses firmly, to give me another dose. So I shall go half oculated: but I stuck up for my principles all the same. I’m in robust health. I get so excited, dreaming of Paestum, Segesta, the Campagna, Palermo, first sight of Sicily and so on. Oh and about the Hawthornden—take it for granted that they are putting off the presentation till you come back. It must be so: or they would have given it already. Your mother writes me long letters on slips of paper with holes through the corners about love and death and you and Ebury Street and money. I answer suitably—rather more 19th than 18th Century now: profuse, romantic. Imagine us prancing and caracolling together; but like a pair of courting butterflies, never coming very close together.

Tuesday [29 March]

Oh damn, Vita—no letter at all. This is the first bag you’ve missed since you’ve been away. And for me the worst, because now I shan’t hear till goodness knows when—what can have happened? Illness? But then you’d have written and said nothing: or I’d have heard. I don’t suppose you’re angry. Then you must have gone on an Expedition, or the bag is late. And I’m off early tomorrow without a word. I assure you, this does sadden me rather. You seem utterly disappeared, at the moment. I’ll write to Cyprus. You seem gone, gone, for ever. But dear honey write to Tavistock Sqre all the same, and forgive this execrably scrawled letter. They will forward.

Are you well? Are you happy?

(No, I don’t for a moment suppose your angry—its the malice of fate, thats all: and I daresay I’ll hear by the ordinary post on Wednesday)

Yr
Virginia

We leave Cassis for Sicily on the 6th by Boat from Marseilles: wander about Sicily for a fortnight: then a week in Rome—Back April 28th.

Berg

[]

1736: To Molly MacCarthy

24th March [1927]

52 Tavistock Square W.C.1

Dearest Molly,

I have been asked to send you the enclosed cheque for £300 which your and Desmond’s friends hope you will both spend on taking a complete holiday abroad for three months.

Nobody wants to be thanked or named or to have any notice taken of this whatsoever, but only that Desmond and you shall get away and have a good rest. As for Desmond’s thought of repaying, that will be thought nothing short of an insult.

I’m afraid I shan’t see you before we go, but I implore you to remember the existence of the inkpot and pen, and let me know what happens to you, whether you fall into a crater, or kiss the Pope’s nose, or whatever it may be.

I am finding great consolation for innumerable typhoid germs in the poetry of Cowper.

I can’t tell you how much affection I haven’t heard expressed for you and Desmond during the last few weeks—to which I’ve added a few lugubrious stanzas of my own.

Your attached
V.W.

Sussex

[]

1737: To Vanessa Bell

Sunday [27 March 1927]

52 T-[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Dont bother about a taxi—we will come by the Bus, as we shan’t bring more than we can carry. I hope not having an evening dress wont cut me off from Cassis society to which I look forward with passion.

Your caryatids have come—and greatly improve my room—The old char is a little surprised. They only just get in.

Roger lectured for 2 hours at the Queens Hall to 2,000 people and was a great success, but I had the typhoid germs strongly and couldnt go. I’ll keep the news of the quarter though, so that you may have some motive for wishing to see me.

No tea, no paints come yet, but I’ll take steps if they dont.

Adrian, Helen and Roger are about to drop in:

I’m very excited already and have just been putting all my clothes on the floor—that is the beginning of packing, I suppose.

Julian is dining with us on Wednesday.

We’ll come up on Thursday I daresay—

Yr B.

We are of course travelling on the same boat as Ethel [Sands], Nan [Hudson], and Raymond [Mortimer].

Berg

[]

1738: To Violet Dickinson

Sunday 27th March [1927]

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, WC1

My Violet,

I am ashamed never to have answered you before, but I am so sick of writing. I shall give it up. It bores me beyond belief. You see I can no longer use a pen. However I should very much like to know how you are. Nelly [Cecil] says she has seen you, and you walk about spit, swear, pick up your skirts and run after donkeys along the sands of Brighton. Lady Sackville watches you through a pair of highly ornamented glasses from her terrace. It sounds to me so unreal that I should be perfectly in my element. Lady S. writes me pages and pages—about secretaries, Ebury Street, Vita, death, life, food, money—in pencil on narrow pages with a hole through them, such as middle class women I think use (I am middle class but I never buy my own beef) to write down how many pounds of beef they must buy. Being ill is rather nice in some ways: it brings one in to touch with oddities. I have been having, not an illness, but an experiment with typhoid germs before going to Italy which has reduced me from spry middle age to senile decay in three hours and a half. They squirt a little sticky juice into one’s arm; next moment one has a temperature of 102 and can’t move, think, read, or laugh. I am only just emerging.

But I thought of many odd people, you and Lady S. and Katie [Cromer] whom I sat next to at a Mozart opera the other night. She has bought a complete charwoman’s outfit, bonnet, boots, shawl and all; but forgotten that nature provided a Greek Goddess for the head piece; there she sat more incongruous than you can think, in the middle of the stalls, and never noticed me. It is a most effective style of course; had there been Lady Diana [Cooper] present in all her pearls she would infallibly have looked like a—the word is improper, I will not use it. Are you back in Manchester Street? We are off on Wednesday to Nessa at Cassis; to Naples, to Sicily to Paestum, to Rome and so home—ruined, but happy. I will try to learn how one writes. I hope you will by then be better than you have ever been in your life.

Leonard’s love Yr VW.

Berg

[]

1739: To Edith Sitwell

Sunday March 27th [1927]

52 Tavistock Sqre, WC1

My dear Edith,

I’m not going to write to you about your poems—I’m going to talk to you about them. They interest me greatly: I dip in and pick up something that makes me spend 20 minutes staring at the fire, inventing theories about you. Are you changing? Then where are you going? And what sort of loveliness are you reaching down from your strange and very high trees? I ask myself question after question; but I warn you, there are many more to come, more intelligent than these, I hope to Heaven, for I am only dipping into you as yet: I’ve been rather wretched ever since I saw you with a temperature caused by typhoid inoculation. This leaves one no vigour of mind, so I dont pretend to read you. I shall, though. Then you will come and talk to me I hope. I will talk to you for hours about your poetry. Did that little grocer Gosse write about you? In a rage, I cancelled his paper: but I wish I had seen what he said—

I did enjoy your visit the other day. I hope you will come often again. It would be a great pleasure. Of course you are a good poet: but I cant think why. The reason may strike me in Sicily.

Yr VW.

By the way, the Hogarth Press wants you to write another pamphlet. Will you?

Berg

[]

1740: To Helen McAfee

29th March 1927

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Miss McAfee

You were so kind as to ask me to send you an occasional article. I have written the enclosed [Street Haunting] which you may perhaps like to have for the Yale Review. If so, I should be much obliged if you would tell me when you propose to publish it so that I may arrange for simultaneous publication over here.

With kind regards,
yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Yale University

[]

Letters 1741-1748 (April 1923)

1741: To V. Sackville-West

Tuesday, 5th April [1927]

Villa Corsica, Cassis, [France]

I was in a towering passion—Clive had a long letter from Harold, I none from you. For some inscrutable reason after 4 days two arrived from you and one from Dotty. This has assuaged my rage, which threatened to make our journey one black and bitter pilgrimage of despair. I was very unhappy.

I am writing, with difficulty, on a balcony in the shade. Everything is divided into brilliant yellow and ink black. Clive is seated at a rickety table writing on huge sheets of foolscap, which he picks out from time to time in red ink. This is The history of Civilisation. He has by him Chamber’s Dictionary of the English Language. We all sit in complete silence. Underneath, on the next balcony, Vanessa and Duncan are painting the loveliest pictures of rolls of bread, oranges, wine bottles. In the garden, which is sprinkled with saucers of daisies, red and white, and pansies, the gardener is hoeing the completely dry earth. There is also the Mediterranean—and some bare bald grey mountains, which I look at, roasting in the sun, and think Vita is climbing over hills like that at this moment. I hope your rubber shoes are doing well. Talk of solitude—I think your analysis highly subtle (oh yes and you’re a clever donkey West: an original donkey: for all your golden voice, which has the world by the ears) It is the last resort of the civilised: our souls are so creased and soured in meaning we can only unfold them when we are alone. So Leonard thinks; and is determined to buy a farm house here and live alone, with me, half the year. It may be our form of religion. But then what becomes of friendship, love, intimacy? Nessa says, suddenly, she has been wondering why one is supposed to attend to people. Other relations seem to her far more important. I say, thats what Vita says in her letter this morning. Heard from Vita? says Clive, pricking up his ears, like a war horse, out at grass—(for he has renounced the world, and puts water in his wine, and looks incredibly pink and fresh) Yes, I say. And off we go, discussing you and Harold and Dottie, whom we gather, (Clive and I that is) is not altogether cut out for the life of a diplomatists friend in Teheran. This may be over subtle, and malicious, on our part. But you know what Clive is, and Virginia too, when they get together.

Then Colonel Teed and Miss Campbell come to lunch—he a retired cavalry officer, she his mistress: both together vine growers, living in a divine 17th Century manor house, set with cypresses, painted, tiled, with tanks of frogs and Roman aqueducts. Miss Campbell was sitting in the dusk listening to the frogs last night when we went there. So there we all sat quite silent; and then the frogs began again; and the Colonel made us come in and drink several different kinds of wine in his great empty room, and we were given bunches of wild tulips, Vita, and why don’t we all live like that, Vita?—and never go back to Bloomsbury any more? You meet a Miss Brown here, and she says her eldest son is 17. Yes. She has three children by the Italian singing master in Genoa. Madame Labrotte was afflicted with a gigantic tumour—had all the doctors of London and Paris to consult—came to Cassis to recuperate and was delivered, at the age of 50, in one quarter of an hour, of a child. That is our atmosphere—slightly detached, from reality—or Argyll House: mute: they are all painters: every street corner has an elderly gentleman on a camp stool; austere; The sink of the bath has to be filled with flannel: Clive does it for me: I stand in a chemise with jugs of cold water, since the pipe is blocked. Our grand extravagance is wine, which the peasants sell, and Clive and Duncan fetch in great baskets, dressed in cotton clothes, with rope slippers: Duncan smuggles brandy in, and so we sit, talking, for hours—now we are off to Sicily, not alas by the Pierre Loti which has sunk or disappeared, but by train, early tomorrow.

I am all the time thinking about poetry and fiction and also of Vita: and the Insect. The best piece of news I have had is that Harold is in travail. Say nothing: his own good sense will deliver him. But then you must persuade Leonard not to embrace the religion of solitude in Provence. In her latest letter your mother says you are thinking of living near me in Bloomsbury. I assume that this is merely your mothers exquisite good manners—Live near me in Provence: we will sit under the cypresses and drink wine, and you shall write poetry—which by the by I’m going to tell the Oxford Undergraduates is a hobbled, shackled tongue tied vehicle now for the voice of the soul, which—did you know it?—now speaks in prose.

Now I’m going to stop; rather tipsy in the head after lunching in the hotel. And oh damn! a familiar sound floats up from the courtyard—I look out and see, at a little table, Julia Strachey, Tommie, and Douglas Davidson! The shades of the prison house descend. I trust we don’t meet Raymond and Ethel in Palermo.

Please darling honey come back safe. We will have a merry summer: one night perhaps at Long Bam: another at Rodmell: We will write some nice pieces of prose and poetry: we will saunter down the Haymarket. We will not dine at Argyll House. We will snore.

1. Virginia is completely spoilt by her shingle.

2. Virginia is completely made by her shingle.

3. Virginia’s shingle is quite unnoticeable.

These are the three schools of thought on this important subject. I have bought a coil of hair, which I attach by a hook. It falls into the soup, and is fished out on a fork.

Are you well?

Virginia

My last letter, thank God.

Berg

[]

1742: To Vanessa Bell

9th April 1927

Hotel de France, Palermo, [Sicily]

Dearest,

Will there be a special allowance for letters written under circumstances of great difficulty? If so, this one must be paid at a rate of 17 inches by 8¾: oil: canvas: still life. We are sitting in our bedroom after dinner. The light is suspended in thick glass some feet above my head. Leonard is dusting the table with his bandanna. I have made an awful mess with various odds and ends accumulated during my travels: several packets of cigarettes for instance have been ground to powder. There are explosions going on in the street and a general buzz and hum which rather entice me to step out into the Square and go to the movies; but we are off to Segesta early tomorrow so we are having a quiet night. However, they are at this moment marching through the Square, playing a band, with lanterns, and some sacred object under a panoply—It is Easter, I suppose—I like the Roman Catholic religion. I say it is an attempt at art; Leonard is outraged—We burst into a service of little girls in white veils this morning which touched me greatly. It seems to me simply the desire to create gone slightly crooked, and no God in it at all. Then there are little boys brandishing palms tied in red ribbon and sugar lambs everywhere—surely rather sympathetic, and to me more attuned than those olive trees which the old gentlemen are for ever painting at street corners in Cassis.

Looking out of the carriage window at Civita Vecchia, whom should we see, sitting side by side on a bench, but D. H. Lawrence and Norman Douglas—unmistakable: Lawrence pierced and penetrated; Douglas hoglike and brindled—They were swept off by train one way and we went on to Rome. I am sure Rome is the city where I shall come to die—a few months before death however, for obviously the country round it is far the loveliest in the world. I dont myself care so much for the melodramatic mountains here, which go the colour of picture postcards at sunset; but outside Rome it is perfection—smooth, suave, flowing, classical, with the sea on one side, hills on the other, a flock of sheep here, and an olive grove. There I shall come to die; and I suggest, as an idea you may consider, the foundation of a colony of the aged—Roger, you, Lytton, I: all sunken cheeked, tottering and urbane, supporting each others steps along Roman roads; I dont mind if one does die at the street corner: you with a beautiful handkerchief over your head (how ashamed you made me feel of my poor partridges rump!) and the rest of us with large sticks in our hands. A death colony will certainly become desirable. However we only had time to see the Coliseum and to eat a vast dish of maccaroni. Then we crossed over to Palermo by night and I shared a cabin with an unknown but by no means romantic Swedish lady who complained that there was no lock on the door, whereupon I poked my head out from the curtains and said in my best French “Madame, we have neither of us any cause for fear” which happily she took in good part. Its odd how much the Scandinavians scrape, scent, gurgle and clean at night considering the results next morning: as hard as a board, and as gray as a scullery pail. She suggested nothing but paring potatoes. Much though I love my own sex, my gorge heaves at the travelling female. We had two with us from Toulon to Mentone, arch and elderly, with handbags packed with face powder and complexions that not all the thyme and mint in England could sweeten—elderly virgins from Cheltenham, playing golf in France; but one feels sure they cant hit the ball—they cant do anything—they spend enough to keep you and me a year on their clothes—they have no reason to exist in this world or the next.

We have run into Cecil Taylor and a young man called Cox (not Fox) here; but happily they are devoted and inseparable. Otherwise I find the clergy and the old ladies very fascinating; I find the architecture divine. Pillars of pale green and pink marble like avenues of birch trees disappearing one behind another: immense distances; vast spaces; people like ants; everything very light, gay and spacious—Why, I ask you, cant we build like that? You cant think how beautiful the human figure looks properly displayed on these staircases. I have seen the mosaics [at Monreale]: there is one of hunting which I liked; but the gilt tends to be tinselly. My taste is naturally so bad that I dont in the least mind exposing it.

Would you write to me at

Hotel Hassler-New York 8 Piazza Trinita dei Monti

Rome, (we shall be there from 22nd to 26th)

Please say

1: What did the oculist say about your eyes? Where could I buy old stuff? rings? china?

2: Which are good places to dine at in Rome? Leonard would like to have kissed you; but was too shy. We get on with my dog Italian and Leonards pure Latin. The people are charming to us.

My love to my nephews, if they are there—I long to be at Julian about his dancing mice—

Yr B

Berg

[]

1743: To Vanessa Bell

14th April [1927]

Hotel de Rome, Syracuse, [Sicily]

Dearest,

This is again written in great difficulties sitting beside the fountain of Arethusa (she was pursued by Alpheus as you know and they now spout together eternally) in a glare of sun and dust with Italians asleep, one singing, a man playing a mandoline; a beggar. But the worse I write, the better you must paint: were it not for a picture, I should not bring myself to write at all. We got here last night, and who should we meet driving from the station, but Osbert Sitwell, who stopped the cab and was very friendly, but he is lodged in a grand hotel outside the town, whereas we lodge in a cheap Italian inn, where no one speaks English, and we get delicious food, and there are only Italian officers and widows, and thank God, no Germans—so I dont suppose we shall see Osbert. There is a courtyard, with two cats in a basket, a waiter varnishing a table and an old woman picking over mattresses: I am rapidly falling in love with Italy. I think it is much more congenial than France—All the men must be womanisers. The old innkeeper cooks an omelette specially for me. I dreamt all night of Duncan and Carrington. She asked him to get her with child, which he did. This was so vivid I woke and asked Leonard if he would think it a compliment should Bea [Howe] ask the same of him. But alas—my dream is gone like smoke; Carrington bears none of Duncan’s children within her, I’m sure. Aint it odd how all the flowers of female youth will die with their buds unopened—Carrington, Alix, Frances,—This is the sort of thing Leonard and I maunder on about as we sit in the ruins.

Last night we explored Syracuse by moonlight. But how am I to describe without boring you, particularly as you won’t have drunk a bottle of wine, and be half tipsy as I was—the bay, the schooners, the blue sky, with the white pillars, like paper, and clouds crossing, and people sauntering, and a man on stilts—no it cant be done. One’s mind is such a hotch potch of different things, always on the bubble—I daresay painters are more concentrated, but less amiable and lovable in their marmoreal chastity than we are—you and Duncan always seem to me, though some appearances are against it, marmoreally chaste—You have cast out so many of the devils that afflict poor creatures like me—Ever since I left Cassis I have thought of you as a bowl of golden water which brims but never overflows. A back hander? Eh? Well, I am being brushed off my seat by an old man who is sweeping the ground.

We have just lunched, and had another bottle of wine. No letters ever get forwarded when one is abroad, except bills and letters about beating carpets—only one from that old lady at Cheltenham, whom Snow has now been to see “such a particularly nice person” Mrs Smith says; and as Mrs Smith also paints, they have much in common. I dont bear my friends ill will, but I think of them all as dead, or far removed behind a painted curtain, which I have no wish to draw aside—I should like to go on travelling from town to town all my life, rambling about ruins and watching schooners come in, and falling in love with Italian girls, who all look like Millais drawings in the Comhill. I should rather like to write; which one cant do; but perhaps it is nicer to imagine books, which I do all day long, until I have to tell them to poor old Leonard—We spend a lot of time on the balcony looking at people in the street. All the horses wear ostrich feathers. Tell Angelica I woke up in the night travelling to Rome and found her matchbox. It came in very handy—I have several secrets to tell her, in great private—I have seen three new witcherinas. They sent her their love. I said she had a beautiful tribe of Elves, and also a crested newt but this is very private.

Did Tommie and Julia confide in you? How anyone can think him attractive, physically, passes me—But I am not a judge of the manly form, I suppose—He reminds me of Georges opera hat—the thing he carried under his arm to make him look diplomatic—and God knows why, here is a letter from George about some book of his, which he wants Leonard to praise. I dont think I shall ever come home. But please, good Dolphin, write to Rome. You have kept your hair. You are beautiful, beloved, chaste: and I am none of these things

V.W.

Berg

[]

1744: To Angus Davidson

14th April, 1927

Hotel de Rome, Syracuse, [Sicily]

My dear Angus,

We are both burnt bright brick red; we are both slightly tipsy; we are almost decided never to come back to England again. It is perfect here. If only God had forgotten to create male Germans and female Germans, I should have no complaint to make. Happily we have pitched on a purely Italian inn—rather humble; W.C.’s fair; no English spoken, and we sit drinking coffee with Italian sailors and officers after dinner. We have been all day (I add, lest you should draw wrong conclusions) among the ruins of the Greek theatre, where they are getting up a play to act next week before the King and Queen; so we saw Medea in a sulphur-coloured wig, and Alcestis, in a bowler and overcoat, shouting their parts. It was rather beautiful. In fact everything is charming; and though we ran straight into Osbert Sitwell on arriving, it seems unlikely that we shall see anyone else. I am getting as unsocial as Nessa. They were all very well at Cassis, extremely happy, and hoping not to see a soul for 6 months. Naturally, Douglas [Angus’ brother], Tommie, Julia and I think Roger, instantly arrived.

I hope the Press is not too gloomy. The widow [Mrs Cartwright] is in Wales I imagine: and I suppose you’ll get a few days off now. Why anyone lives in England I can’t imagine at the moment; but I suppose we will soon recover our sanity, and not take the widow by the neck or create any other disturbance. Leonard sends his love.

Yours
V.W.

I see we’re in for a hot time with Mary [Hutchinson]; but if she treats us as she does, what does she expect? That book [Fugitive Pieces] has been half in and half out of the womb these 9 months.

Angus Davidson

[]

1745: To Vanessa Bell

21st April 1927

Hotel Hassler-New York Piano. Trinita del Monti, Rome

Dearest.

We got here last night, and found your letter, which I read twice, at dinner, once in the Pincio this morning, so let your modesty, which is only sham after all, hide its head. I am always on the look out for some huge revelation lurking in the boscage about life in your letters. Undoubtedly I shall settle here—it surpasses all my expectations: It is a holiday today and all sights are shut so we have done nothing but sit in the gardens and stroll over to St Peters. I dont know why one feels it to be so much superior to other cities—partly the colour I suppose. It is a perfect day; all the flowers are just out, there are great bushes of azalea set in the paths; Judas trees, cypresses, lawns, statues, among which go wandering the Italian nurses in their primrose and pink silks with their veils and laces and instead of being able to read Proust, as I had meant (by the way he is far the greatest modern novelist, and I think it would repay you one of these days if you should take to book reading to look at him) I find myself undulating like a fish in and out of leaves and flowers and swimming round a vast earthenware jar which changes from orange red to leaf green—It is incredibly beautiful—oh and there’s St Peters in the distance; and people sitting on the parapet, all very distinguished, the loveliest women in Europe, with little proud heads;—but you will not attach any sense to all this.

By the way, I ran into two pictures by Breugel at Naples; The blind leading the blind, one was; but I didn’t care for them so much as the London one—Too melodramatic—Then there was a Titian, and some Italians, which we said, loud and bold, as we do when we’re alone, were very good pictures. But then the Roman works of art at Pompeii are profoundly depressing—At first I thought the ruins were merely a deserted mining town, but later I became very much impressed; mostly by the hills outside, but also by the colour of the bricks; one or two skeletons, people dead on the top of their treasure chests; and the general atmosphere of [the] place, which is very strange. In August 76 a.d. the lava came down and covered the whole town—this you may not know, but really it is necessary to remember it, should you talk about Pompeii. At Syracuse we were exploring the quarries when Osbert Sitwell and Adrian Stokes came after us. Otherwise, we have met no one. And we escaped Osbert, who was much excited by a telegram to say that Sashy [Sitwell] has a son.

I’m sure, to return to your letter, that I should make a vile mother. For one thing (though this I try to hide from you) I slightly distrust or suspect the maternal passion. It is obviously immeasurable and unscrupulous. You would fry us all to cinders to give Angelica a days pleasure, without knowing it. You are a mere tool in the hands of passion. Other mothers are much worse, and I’ve no doubt I should be worst of all—Helen Anrep and Faith [Henderson] appal me when they talk of their children: In fact what you feel about marriage I feel about motherhood, except that of the two relations motherhood seems to me the more destructive and limiting. But no doubt I’m merely trying to make out a case for myself: there’s some truth in [it] though; I dont like profound instincts—not in human relationships.

Friday [22 April]

Now we are just off to our days work—St Peters, the Vatican etc. It is again perfect—hot and still. I dont want to go back to the telephone and the omnibus at all. Why not settle here, rather than Cassis? I believe one could be more aloof—At Cassis people would come and stay—Here they could only drop in for half an hour. Unhappily, Wednesday is the Rag market day, and of course we shall be gone. What a bore! I shall go to the antiques instead.

But if we come to live here—and really I think we may, should Mervyn [Arnold-Forster] take on the Press—then I shall go to the Rag market every Wednesday.

I’m afraid this is a dull damp letter, but then traveller’s letters always are. But I have tried to be as annoying as possible—to drop a little salt on Dolphins snout so that she may spout columns of fury into the air: You must write to Tavistock now. First defend your position as mother; next as artist. Why do you say that the chief end of life is one’s work?

B.

Berg

[]

1746: To Lady Cecil

24th April [1927]

Postcard

Rome

This is where we are at the moment. I hope some day we may meet, not at Geneva. We are just coming back, but if I had my way I should live here for ever.

Love from
V.W.

Hatfield

[]

1747: To Vanessa Bell

26 April 1927

Hotel Hassler, Rome

Dearest.

You see how hard I work for my picture—or have I the right to exchange for a decoration, or what is my position exactly? It had better be drawn up accurately to avoid those fierce broils which may well break our sisterhood before its over. For example, the gramophone: a yellow brown object, like Bromo: would you paint that?

I am again writing under difficulties with Leonard catching his 4th flea, on our last morning. We are off early tomorrow, and shall travel straight through and get to London late on Thursday night. Damn it all. The telephone will ring: Raymond will ask if he may come to tea. The only thing that reconciles me to going is that it has set in to rain, and Germans pullulate. Otherwise I only wish to be allowed to stay here—for ever and ever—never to see a soul; to buy a little paper and write a book, as Shelley did, in the Baths of Caractacus [Caracalla]. We went to Nemi yesterday—We rambled over the Campagna on Sunday. I suppose France is all right, and England is all right, but I have never seen anything so beautiful as this is. Figure us sitting in hot sunshine on the doorstep of a Roman ruin in a field with hawk coloured archways against a clear green grape coloured sky, silvery with mountains in the back ground. Then on the other side nothing but the Campagna, blue and green, with an almond coloured farm, with oxen and sheep, and more ruined arches, and blocks of marble fallen on the grass, and immense sword like aloes, and lovers curled up among the broken pots. Nemi perhaps you have seen. We lunched at a restaurant hung above the lake, which is almost round, very deep, with Roman ships sunk in it, and of the colour first of olive trees and then of emeralds. It was rather cloudy so the colour was always changing very slowly, and round the lake was a little path with horses and goats. We went down after lunch and found wild cyclamen and marble lapped by the water. Dear, dear, and then one goes and sits in a basement in Bloomsbury!

As for the works of art, all I can say is that Raphael comes out very much better than I expected. But we had only one morning. Moreover, your tooth and Duncans venom sweetly though it is exuded through a stalk of silver, slightly inhibit my art criticism. (I enclose an article from the Times on Duncan.) Still I get a good deal of pleasure even from the pictures. How did Michael Angelo paint the ceiling? Slung on a board? What do you think of Raphael? and of Michael Angelo? Please tell me.

As I have not seen a human face, and scarcely an English tourist, for they are all German and American, I have no gossip. Tom’s father in law has died at Bexhill and Tom [Eliot] is very busy winding up affairs. Dotty has reached England safely, though she flew over the Persian alps. Mary is said to be in a rage because we dont bring her book out at once. As she wont correct the proofs, and perpetually adds and scratches out, we put the blame on her.

I must stop now—L. has caught his flea—Our only failure is the antique shops: we have beat up and down all the streets in the neighbourhood of Castel Angelo and St Peters without success. I had hoped to bring home all sorts of china; but it cant be helped. The moral is we must come next year. I will try to be more amusing, but I have no wish whatever to see my friends, or to gossip, or to dine with Colefax—

Your B.

Berg

[]

1748: To Vanessa Bell

Sunday, 1st May [1927]

52 Tavistock Sqre, WC1

Dearest,

Damn it all—I’m afraid I shall have to make an end of our agreement and lose my picture. Directly I get back I’m told that Clive is making Raymond etc in Paris roar with accounts of my rhapsodies about Italy—how they were obviously all humbug—how horribly bored we both were etc. etc. God knows what I did say. Of course nothing was said about your reading my letters aloud or showing them, so I suppose I’ve no right to complain. But it makes one so self conscious if one thinks what one writes to you is going to be shown round and made up into stories that I am reduced to silence or mere facts and gossip, which bore me rather. So what am I to do? If its not Clive, it’ll be Roger or Tommie or some one, and these things always get round in about three days and are far more irritating, as you’ll agree, than they’re worth.

We came back to the usual disaster—Nelly [Boxall] has been having an abcess on her kidneys, and was ill in bed. She’s now gone home for a fortnight anyhow, and we are reduced to an old char and in rather a turmoil. People pullulate at every corner: I’ve just had the strength of mind to say not at home to Francis Birrell; but what with the books coming out and the everybody coming back to London I rather envy you at Cassis.

I shall try to get hold of Quentin. We dine out every night—at a restaurant I mean—so he might come with us.

Let me know what you think about the letters. Its a sad business. How it takes me back to the old days! However, I’m more philosophic now.

Yr B.

Berg

[]

Letters 1749-1792 (May–July 1927)

1749: To Helen McAfee

1st May 1927

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Miss McAfee,

I am glad that you like my essay Street Haunting [for the Yale Review]. I will arrange that it is not published in England before the 20th of September.

Would you be so very kind as to let me have two sets of proofs, in good time? There are some passages which I should like to alter.

With many thanks,

yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Yale University

[]

1750: To Vanessa Bell

Sunday 8th May 1927

52 Tavistock Square, [W.C.1]

Dearest,

Well, well. Clive must have a genius for invention. He not only kept them all—Dadie, Raymond, Nancy [Cunard] and some American—on the roar with his account of what Leonard said and what I said, but he made Dadie, who was my informant, so convinced of the truth of it that I had great difficulty in assuring him that the whole tour hadn’t been a complete failure. I should be much interested to know why he does this. There must be some obscure jealousy at work I think. He grudges, not your affection for me, which doesn’t exist, but mine for you—Or he wants to parade his knowledge of our affairs. You are kind but foolish to hand me on his praises, by way of solace. Dont you know that Singe knows flattery now a mile off, and it has no effect on him? But I’m so badly in want of your pictures that I shall risk more indiscretions. Clive, I believe, is the only real danger, and he, I hear, is expected at 50 [Gordon Square] tonight. But warn me next time anyone malicious is in the house, and I’ll change my tone.

I haven’t as much gossip as I might have, as Nelly is still away, so I cant ask people to dinner, and I am in an unsociable mood. A ring came at the bell last night and we refused to budge; at last we peered out of the bathroom window and saw Julia Strachey standing looking up at us: we ducked, and she went away. But Ottoline is at Gower Street; Vita is back; Raymond is back. Vita I have just seen, but only flying through London, rather distracted. Here’s a profound secret (which I expect the whole of London knows) Harold is leaving the Foreign Office. You must admit this is to his credit. He is over 40: has no money of his own; and is throwing up his career just as he’s getting to the top—Apparently diplomatic society is so boring that he cant face even becoming an ambassador. Really, I think its a feather in Bloomsbury’s cap: a goose feather if you like. No doubt he’ll step into something much better; they always do: still, all his relations, Vita says, will be heart broken. She was appreciative, I admit; had passed Cassis on Tuesday in her ship, and thought of you. I could not hold out hopes that you had thought of her.

I sent you two copies of the Lighthouse, one from the Press, and one from me (but I think I forgot to write your name in it.) I hope you’ll write and criticise it. I would like your good opinion, which is more than one can say of most people. Probably the subject was a little unwise: But then one falls in to these things all in a second—I made it up one afternoon in the Square without any premeditation, that I can see—How do you make up pictures? Suddenly all in a second? The bore with a book is that everyone thinks they have to talk to one about it. This will begin next week, I suppose: and they will all say different things, and I shall be very angry and very pleased and all the same, rather bored; because I have 2 other books I want to write; but still I should like your opinion, good or bad, Duncans, Morgan’s, Lyttons: that’s all, I think. Leonard says its my best book; but then I think he has to.

There seems a curse on the Press—We were about to see Mervyn Arnold-Forster and settle the future; and now Ka writes to say he is probably dying. He suddenly became paralysed, and has pneumonia. So what are we to do now? Angus, Leonard says, was cheered by the news, but can we do with Angus? Then our lives have been made a burden by Mary [Hutchinson]. I told you, I think, how furious she was that we were not bringing her book out now. She so rattled poor old Angus that he promised to do it by the end of May. Now begins a series of letters and telegrams. One comes to say “Please wire printer to change boule on page 79 to buhl.” So we wire printer. Next day another wire, “very sorry, please wire printer to change buhl to boule unless you ascertain from authorities that buhl is correct.” I fly upstairs, search through dictionaries; discover that buhl is the German form of boule and is now in use. So we leave it. Next morning comes a long letter marked urgent. She has been to an antiquary in Sussex and he tells her that the most correct form is certainly boule, as that is the original name of the maker, who was French. Still she has her doubts, and will we consult Roger Fry, by whose opinion she will abide? Meanwhile the book is to be held up: Roger is in France; and so on and so on. But I’m not going to renew friendship without an explanation. Doubtless she won’t want to renew friendship: But I’m not going to decorate her table (I dont mean aesthetically—its my mind thats my jewel) when all the time she’s accusing my heart of corruption and my liver of rottenness. Besides, I should like a good scene. Colefax is testy about the Desmond fund, I hear, and so I’m not invited; but the MacCarthys have netted £700 and are, now, it is said, in the depths of gloom, scraping and paring to pay it off. At least this is Molly’s view of it—“What are we to do with all this money? It only means more debts” but Desmond has vanished to the continent, in the highest health and spirits.

What else? Quentin came to lunch. That boy is really a marvel. He drank two full tumblers of strong Spanish wine, where I can only take a wineglass; and it was a hot day; and then he went off to shop, and seemed quite as steady as usual, and came back to tea, and had a long argument with me about poetry and painting. Probably I am almost as spotted with the maternal taint as you are. My pride rises at the sight of him, and I find myself boasting to the char about his height and his age as if I were Aunt Mary. I only wish they didn’t both (Quentin and Julian, I mean) think Bernard Shaw greater than Shakespeare. Quentin sees nothing in poetry. For God’s sake dont tell me you put in by mistake a drop too much of the old Bell in them—I always thought you were playing with gunpowder in that marriage, and you scarcely deserved to come off as well as you did.

I have written to Mr King [doctor] to say that you will take Angelica to see him as soon as you come back. He lives somewhere at the other side of Maida Yale. Burn Wilson’s letter—

London is pretty horrid, for some reason: so flat, so obvious, after Rome. But no more of that. Only to make up for your indiscretion you might tell me what you think of Raphael and Michael Angelo: but not until you’ve told me about the Lighthouse.

Our motor car depends on the sales: so far much better than Dalloway but it may stop all in a second.

What a terrific letter!

By the way, your story of the Moth so fascinates me that I am going to write a story about it. I could think of nothing else but you and the moths for hour’s after reading your letter.

Isn’t it odd?—perhaps you stimulate the literary sense in me as you say I do your painting sense.

God! How you’ll laugh at the painting bits in the Lighthouse!

Yr B.

Berg

[]

1751: To Vanessa Bell

Monday [9 May 1927]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Post Script.

For God’s sake—say nothing to anybody about Harold Nicolson and the Foreign Office—I find it is a dead secret. Dont, above all, breathe a whisper to Clive—whom I’ve just seen.

VW.

Berg

[]

1752: To V. Sackville-West

Monday [9 May 1927]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Dearest donkey West,

Did you understand that when I wrote it was my best book I merely meant because all the pages were empty? A joke, a feeble joke: but then it might get round through Jack Squire, through Hugh Walpole to Gosse: seriously such are your friends.

These things made me shiver like a fish on a hook about 2 a.m. so I am writing.

Then, second: Oxford is May 18th. and I’ve written to take rooms at the Mitre.

And shall I see you before? And where does one buy a black coat? I have to broadcast, and think it should be done in broad cloth.

Yr VW.
Virginia
(I forgot)

Berg

[]

1753: To Clive Bell

Monday night [9 May 1927]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

It suddenly comes over me—you know how these dragons afflict one—that you thought I meant the inscription in Vita’s copy of my book seriously. It was a feeble joke—“my best book” referred to the blank pages of her dummy copy.

Then, secondly; another dragon: affection for Clive: Glad he’s back. Can one say so without being sentimental? Well, perhaps hardly.

V.W.

No answer

Quentin Bell

[]

1754: To V. Sackville-West

Friday [13 May 1927]

52 Tavistock Square, [W.C.1]

Darling Vita,

What a generous woman you are! Your letter has just come, and I must answer it, though in a chaos. (Nelly returning: her doctor; her friends; her diet etc) I was honest though in thinking you wouldn’t care for The Lighthouse: too psychological; too many personal relationships, I think. (This is said not of the dummy copy) The dinner party the best thing I ever wrote: the one thing that I think justifies my faults as a writer: This damned ‘method’. Because I dont think one could have reached those particular emotions in any other way. I was doubtful about Time Passes. It was written in the gloom of the Strike: then I re-wrote it: then I thought it impossible as prose—I thought you could have written it as poetry. I don’t know if I’m like Mrs Ramsay: as my mother died when I was 13 probably it is a child’s view of her: but I have some sentimental delight in thinking that you like her. She has haunted me: but then so did that old wretch my father: Do you think it sentimental? Do you think it irreverent about him? I should like to know. I was more like him than her, I think; and therefore more critical: but he was an adorable man, and somehow, tremendous.

Look here, dearest creature, the young men [at Oxford] have taken us rooms together at the Clarendon before getting my letter: also they want us to dine with them first at 7: so we must get there about 6. I daresay train is simplest. Let me know what suits you. I’m rather bothered about my paper; it mayn’t suit; it may be dull. Ask Harold whether one can say that God does not exist to Oxford undergraduates? As one could to Cambridge. Also would you please, please please send us that story you said you had almost ready? This is most important, as Lord Olivier is not alive enough to support the story series. Couldn’t you bring it with you on Wednesday?

But why do you think me “lonely”. Lovely I understand: not altogether, lonely.

Yes, its an immense relief that you like it; I had been sure you wouldn’t. I have so many more books in my head that I should be unhappy to think the whole progeny was doomed to drive us further asunder. The next will be better than this I think. An old creature writes to say that all my fauna and flora of the Hebrides is totally inaccurate. Dear me! whats to be done about it?

So dearest, train, Wednesday, to arrive for dinner. I rushed into a whore’s shop in Leicester Sqre and bought a coat

Come here any time you like. Tell Harold we want him to come and dine with us, and I see some hope now of getting dinner soon. Will he?

The Story! The story!

VW.
(oh I forgot—
Virginia Woolf)

One needn’t dress for the young men, need one? No.

Berg

[]

1755: To V. Sackville-West

Sunday [15 May 1927]

[52 Tavistock Square, London, W.C.1]

All right, dearest donkey. I will be outside the place where one buys tickets at Paddington at 4.35 on Wednesday, carrying a neat bag, otherwise slightly shabby, but distinguished. Suddenly it strikes me that its all great nonsense your coming—except that I shall enjoy it. The dinner, the paper—what a bore for you! However in the relics of time left us, the scrapings and parings, we may make hay. Herbert Fisher has asked me to stay: Mr. Driberg wants us to lunch. No, I say—How did the Colefaxes go? a little damp, I should guess. D’you know the first time I met her she struck me so hard and bright I compared her to artificial cherries in a servants hat—nor can I ever quite obliterate it.

Yr
Virginia
in haste.

Yes, bring the story: but if you dont want to come say so like a man. Ring up.

Berg

[]

1756: To Vanessa Bell

Sunday 15th May 1927

52 Tavistock Sqre, WC1

Dearest,

No letter from you—But I see how it is—

Scene: after dinner: Nessa sewing: Duncan doing absolutely nothing.

Nessa: (throwing down her work) Christ! There’s the Lighthouse! I’ve only got to page 86 and I see there are 320. Now I cant write to Virginia because she’ll expect me to tell her what I think of it.

Duncan Well, I should just tell her that you think it a masterpiece.

Nessa But she’s sure to find out—They always do. She’ll want to know why I think its a masterpiece

Duncan Well Nessa, I’m afraid I cant help you, because I’ve only read 5 pages so far, and really I dont see much prospect of doing much reading this month, or next month, or indeed before Christmas.

Nessa Oh its all very well for you. But I shall have to say something: And I dont know who in the name of Jupiter all these people are (turns over some pages desperately) I think I shall make a timetable: its the only way: ten pages a day for 20 days is—

Duncan But you’ll never be able to keep up ten pages a day.

Nessa (rather dashed) No—I suppose I shant. Well then, one may as well be hung for a sheep as for a goat—though whats the sense of saying that I never could see: a sheep is almost identical with a goat in some countries; except that one can milk a goat of course. Lord! I shall never forget Violet Dickinson at Athens and the goats milk! But what was I saying when you interrupted me? Oh yes: I shall take the bull by the horns. I shall write to Virginia and say “I think its a masterpiece—” (she takes the inkpot and prepares to write, but finds it full of dead and dying insects). ‘Oh Duncan, what have you done with the inkpot? used it to catch flies in? But thats a beetle! Yes it is. Beetles have 12 legs: flies only 8. D’you mean to say you didn’t know that? Well, I suppose you’re one of those people who think a spider’s an insect: Now if you’d been brought up in Cornwall you’d know that a spiders not an insect; its—no I dont think its a reptile: its something queer. I know. Anyhow, I cant write to Virginia, because the ink is nothing but a mass of beetles or spiders legs—I really dont know what they are: but one man’s meat is another man’s poison; and if you will use the ink pot to catch flies in, then I dont see how even Virginia herself could possibly expect, or even wish me to write to her—(they settle down again to discuss spiders etc etc etc)

Now isn’t this word for word the truth?

Well; I must leave a little room for mere fabrications. Clive has been here: in my opinion utterly distraught. I think, seriously, he’s verging on collapse of some sort. He said his stay at Cassis had been a failure, so far as his book is concerned. He gave me the impression of having lost all his illusions, like a bat in the day time—Yet he sees Mary. Only he calls her Mary Hutchinson rather stiffly. He rambles just as he did before he went away; half apologised for laughing at my letters (you must have told him) and then said he couldn’t sleep at all—and Mia had come in drunk, and he had been put in his place by Robin Mayor; he was off to Seend but I’ve never seen him so disjointed, and twitchy and queer.

We dined with the Keynes’: he almost brought the tears to my eyes (though he gave us not a drop to drink) by his doglike affection for you; it is conveyed I scarcely know how; but I’m convinced he feels at his heart your malicious ways, and yet cant overcome his superstition that you and Duncan are the soul and salt of the world. Vanessa says this—and Vanessa used to do that—All his talk was of you; but in the past. Lydia ripens visibly. She has her little stories and jokes; but is settling into house keeping, and talks, religiously, of the fresh fish she gets at Selfridges, and how, by making eyes at a certain shop man, he pulls the kidneys fresh and bleeding from the sheep (or is it cow?) in her presence. I see in this all the tragedy of the childless, which, no doubt, will corrode her entirely—She’s off to catch butterflies with old Dr Keynes in the Tyrol—Thank God, I’m not.

Otherwise, I’m engulfed in writing a paper on poetry to read to some Oxford undergraduates on Wednesday—Vita comes with me—We stay at an hotel. Let us hope for nightingales, moons, and love—At present its damnably cold, and I cant get over my impression that London is built on a graveyard. Its flat; its grey; its drab. Its walked, too, by the Alixe’s and the Bunnys: who all seem to me phantom and futile. Poor Mervyn Arnold-Forster—yes, he’s dead; almost the most disappointed pinched starved man I’ve ever known; and we’re in a fix what to do now.

Adrian and Karin [Stephen] have patched, she tells me, a working marriage; which means she will visit American asylums 6 months of the year; and the other 6 live here. But her sterling qualities are now uppermost, and I was deeply touched—I dont quite know by what—It came over me sitting with her, dumb, and deaf, and resolute, in front of the open window, watching Alix and [Arthur] Waley march round and round the square together. These things do come over me—Its what makes me so undependable as a friend—Tomorrow I am lunching at Simpsons with Saxon [Sydney-Turner] to meet some Swedes—“not exciting people exactly” he said; so I expect an uproarious time. We are, by the way, taking a first class carriage to see the Eclipse in June. Will you share? It stops in Yorkshire as the sun disappears, for 5 seconds; we all get out and look up; hot coffee is then served and we return to London—Saxon is coming; also the Swedes.

When are you coming back?

Damn Duncan’s show: it was shut; they cant afford, Maynard says, even a cretin to sit there with her knitting; so one finds it shut.

Yr B.

Berg

[]

1757: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Sunday [15 May 1927]

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

Dearest Ottoline

I am so glad you like parts of the Lighthouse—I accept it all gratefully and humbly. I daresay its flattery, but I like it so much that I swallow it all the same. I’m specially pleased that you like Time Passes—It gave me more trouble than all the rest of the book put together, and I was afraid it hadn’t succeeded.

Shall you really be in Gower Street? I can hardly believe it. I look forward to your creation there—people, colour, furniture, china, lights and all the things you create with so singularly and remarkably—more than you can do to anything I write—And that isn’t flattery.

Your affec
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

1758: To Duncan Grant

Monday [16? May 1927]

52 T[avistock]. S[quare, W.C.1].

Dearest Duncan,

Would you be so very kind as to buy Nessa a birthday present with the enclosed? something frivolous and foolish. I couldn’t find anything abroad; and then if I send it to her, she pays for Julians toothbrushes, or the drains; and then your taste is so good. So excuse.

Yrs Virginia

Duncan Grant

[]

1759: To Charles Sanger

17th May 1927

52 Tavistock Sqre W.C.

My dear Charlie,

You are amazing in the way you read your friends books. It is the greatest encouragement. I can’t say how glad I am that you like the Lighthouse. You said Mrs Dalloway lacked humanity; and if this is better in that way, it is a proof that I took your strictures to heart. I confess I sometimes want to cut the whole psychology business altogether; it is so endless, but I get drawn in against my will. Those jumps and jolts you complain of are not at all to my liking. Unfortunately one is doing a very difficult thing with imperfect means: I can never scrape through a book without disaster. But I wont bore you with all this.

Wont you dine with us on Wednesday 25th 7.45? That would be very nice.

Yours ever
Virginia Woolf

Daphne Sanger

[]

1760: To Vanessa Bell

Sunday—22nd May 1927

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

Dearest,

I was so pleased and excited by your letter that I trotted about all day like a puppy with a bone. In fact you entirely destroyed my powers of work: I was always taking it out and reading it again, until I thought perhaps I exaggerated, and ran off to Leonard with it to ask him if he thought you really meant it. Taking into account your well known character, he decided, finally, that you probably did. So then I settled down to complete satisfaction, which no one else’s letters have given me—(here’s one that may recall the character of Dora Sanger to you—I dont want it back)

But what do you think I did know about mother? It can’t have been much—What would Quentin have known of you if you had died when he was 13? I suppose one broods over some germ; but I specially refrained either from reading her letters, or father’s life. He was easier to do, but I was very much afraid you would think me sentimental. I seem to make people think that the Stephen family was one of insane gloom. I thought it was a cheerful enough book. I don’t defend my accuracy, though I think Watts used to buy lapis lazuli, break it up with a small hammer, and keep it under damp cloths. I think, too, the pre-raphaelites thought it more like nature to use garden clay, whenever possible; to serve for colours. Lord Olivier writes that my horticulture and natural history is in every instance wrong: there are no rooks, elms, or dahlias in the Hebrides; my sparrows are wrong; so are my carnations: and it is impossible for women to die of childbirth in the 3rd month—He infers that Prue had had a slip (which is common in the Hebrides) and was 9 months gone. This is the sort of thing that painters know nothing of.

If we weren’t down here for Sunday, I should be seeing Clive: and so might throw light upon the mystery. The position seems odd: he has Mary there; seems in good spirits with her; and then goes about (this is from Eddy) saying that he is wretched; twitching; complaining; maundering on about life being over, and his bolt being shot, as he did before he went away. I think the truth must be that he’s back again where he was, with Mary; she exacerbating and exasperating him; and he now without any prospect of escape. I’m lunching with him on Tuesday, but shan’t see him alone. I think he wants, not exactly to confide, but to talk round and about himself. You’ll be back though. Now, Dolphin, you’ve got to face it and do it. People feel very strongly about you and Duncan—Whats life without those prime jewels of our coronet, people say—the most unlikely people are moved to a bastard kind of poetry on this occasion; people who have never spoken save plain prose before; people like Arthur Waley, Ray Strachey, and Lisa Stillman—A voice on the telephone plunged me into the wildest memories—of St Ives—Gerald—the trapeze on the landing—yesterday. “I am trying to find Cameron photographs of Mama—Can you lend me any negatives?…. I should so much like to see you and Nessa again … Oh in France is she? Vanessa’s always in France! I shall try again in a few weeks time.” Then the whole apparition, which was of the utmost vividness, vanished. But as I was saying, you must face life again. Whats the use of flowering in a nettle bed t’other side of Europe? Ottoline impends; but she never fades—She’s still at Garsington; Philip sits in the Nation chucking Mrs Jones on the chin, and Leonard comes in to find “P.M” [Philip Morrell] marked on all the best books. “Uncle Philip would like these, please, Mr Woolf” says Mrs Jones archly. Leonard says nothing. He says, going out, casually, “Mr Morrell may do a briefer notice of the Aztecs if he likes: but if he writes more than 50 words, I shall cut it.” With the Morrells in London, this snuggling and chucking, to put it euphemistically, may increase; and not wanting a whole clutch of bastards, Ottoline may stay away.

Then I went to Oxford to speak to the youth of both sexes on poetry and fiction. They are young; they are callow; they know nothing about either—They sit on the floor and ask innocent questions about Joyce—They are years behind the Cambridge young, it seemed to me; Quentin and Julian could knock them into mud pies. But they have their charm—There was a man called Martin (I think) an adorer and disciple of Roger’s, who was the most intelligent. We went on to somebodies rooms, and there they sat on the floor, and said what a master they thought Roger Fry; and were Bell and Grant able to make a living by decorations; and was Tom Eliot happy with his wife. They’re oddly under our thumb, at the moment—at least this particular group. Roger, the old wizard, has them all entranced—I pretended to a degree of intimacy which, alas, is not mine, to colour my cheeks for them. Clive, they said, was very good fun; but we always feel Roger Fry’s the real mind. Then there was Vita, very striking; like a willow tree; so dashing, on her long white legs with a crimson bow; but rather awkward, forced indeed to take her stockings down and rub her legs with ointment at dinner, owing to midges—I like this in the aristocracy. I like the legs; I like the bites; I like the complete arrogance and unreality of their minds—for instance buying silk dressing gowns casually for £5 and then lunching off curd cream (a yellow mess) which she picked out of tartlet with a fork, dropping the pastry back into the dish; and then tipping porters a shilling for doing nothing; and then—the whole thing (I cant go into details) is very splendid and voluptuous and absurd. Also she has a heart of gold, and a mind which, if slow, works doggedly; and has its moments of lucidity—But enough—You will never succumb to the charms of any of your sex—What an arid garden the world must be for you! What avenues of stone pavements and iron railings! Greatly though I respect the male mind, and adore Duncan (but, thank God, he’s hermaphrodite, androgynous, like all great artists) I cannot see that they have a glowworm’s worth of charm about them—The scenery of the world takes no lustre from their presence. They add of course immensely to its dignity and safety: but when it comes to a little excitement—! (I see that you will attribute all this to your own charms in which I daresay you’re not far wrong).

How many paintings shall I have? Monks House is in need of some. I think you’ll have to come here for a week end—Well, I daresay you could get off with one night—before July. There are several problems waiting you: I have my own ideas, and my own taste, but its all ineradicably bad. The garden is this year a miracle of order. But that damned Allinson, in concert with Durrant, has changed a farmbuilding into a florid surrey villa in 6 weeks. Marjories book twits us all, practically by name; and compares us with Jos [Wedgwood] and herself, much to our disadvantage. It has rather more merit than the others, but that is chiefly that she has taken over some modern tricks, and the interest of finding the Barley Mow, Fitzroy Street, and the Beanstalk in print keeps one going.

Both Dick and John Strachey have been drowned—according to Lottie. That is to say they stole the Stephen’s boat which had a hole in it and sailed away and have never been heard of since. Lottie says they were washed out to sea. Nellie says they have gone to visit Johns, or Dicks, wife at Harwich. Adrian says nobodies heard anything for ten days but he doesn’t see any particular reason for anxiety. I creep up and peer into the Stephen’s dining room where any afternoon, in full daylight, is to be seen a woman in the last agony of despair, lying on a sofa, burying her face in the pillow, while Adrian broods over her like a vulture, analysing her soul— It is exactly like a picture by John Collier. This is a very very long letter, I would have you observe.

Yr B.

If you could bring me back a few penny cigars such as one buys in Cassis I should be eternally grateful and, what is more, pay you: I got the habit of cigar smoking in Italy and can’t break myself of it.

Berg

[]

1761: To V. Sackville-West

Sunday [22 May 1927]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Yes, honey, do come on Tuesday. Only stay longer than they do, whatever happens. I don’t like seeing you between the legs and over the heads of Logans and Hendersons. I think it would be a tactful thing on your part if you asked L. to come to Long Barn in person. He probably thinks you dont want him etc: being a modest man. A very stormy week end, but infinitely lovely on the marshes. D’you remember the birds that ventrilocute?—They’re swarming—redshanks, I think. And you entertaining Hugh, and Eleanor I Eleanor will say “Might I … Mrs Nicolson?” You’ll take her. “Its my miscarriages” she’ll say coming out. “I’ve had six”. And then, having thought yourself rid of her, she’ll settle in for another two or three hours, and tell you the whole story.

I think the Eclipse affair is all right. But I’ll know for certain on Tuesday.

Many thanks for Leigh’s [Ashton] hat. I feel like a nice puppy; wandering about under a dinner table, and now and then you give it a titbit off your own plate.

Just off to London.

Berg

[]

1762: To Vanessa Bell

25th May 1927

52 Tavistock Sqre, [W.C.1]

Dearest,

I am horrified to find that my letter will probably have missed you at Cassis. Not that it was anything particular in the way of a letter; but I was so much touched, and excited and overcome by yours (I can never believe that you approve of me in any way, strange though it may seem) that I particularly wanted you to get it. I tried to express my thanks. But it was such a rush here, what with going to Oxford and so on, that I put off writing till I got to Rodmell, and then found we had no stamps, and so brought the letter back to London, and now I see that you are leaving Cassis today. I’m afraid I shall have missed you. However, no letter pleased me one tenth as much as yours did. I was, truthfully, unable to write at all that day. Finally, incredulity that you could like the Lighthouse led me to consult Leonard, and when he said he thought you meant what you said, I was in such a happy state, no tea kettle, no cat, not all the contented and happy creatures in the whole world, were a match for me. I’m in a terrible state of pleasure that you should think Mrs Ramsay so like mother. At the same time, it is a psychological mystery why she should be: how a child could know about her; except that she has always haunted me, partly, I suppose, her beauty; and then dying at that moment, I suppose she cut a great figure on one’s mind when it was just awake, and had not any experience of life—Only then one would have suspected that one had made up a sham—an ideal. Probably there is a great deal of you in Mrs Ramsay; though, in fact, I think you and mother are very different in my mind.

Why do I attach so much importance to what you and Duncan think? illiterate, simpletons, as you are? I daresay you are qualified however, much more than many of my literary friends to judge of things as a whole, as works of art—Anyhow, next to your letter, Duncan’s gave me most pleasure; and I’m going to write to him. But then you say that you cant judge of it as a work of art yet. Please think it over and tell me if anything emerges. Duncan’s hit upon the thing I thought best—the dinner party. But you will have had enough of this egotism, poor Dolphin. The talk about it here is practically over. One very soon gets through it, and if it would only sell well, and I could buy a motor car, I should now be content (you’ll be glad to hear) to dismiss it from my mind. In fact; it is rather a distraction from the thing one wants to write now:

I saw Lytton yesterday and asked him about Clive. He was, of course, highly discreet, and would only say that he could see no reason why things should not now settle down again. He said that he thought Clive would find that the habit, after 13 years—of seeing Mary, was too strong to be broken. I lunched with Clive, and he seemed again in the highest spirits, and gave me obscurely to understand that it is at the moment all right between them. He was beset by ladies. Bea [Howe] was coming to tea; Bertha [Penrose] to dinner, but he called her “a little bitch” and said he must find some way of not going to bed with her. Then he gave us (Dadie and me—Lady Violet Bonham Carter had to go—rather a dull lunch, on the whole) a great discourse upon the pains of love, which, he said, were amply made up for by its delights which, he said, I had never known, and never could know. So I denied it, and then Dadie said that Clive was undoubtedly a great lover, and Clive was highly pleased, and seemed to think that he had been very gallant and adventurous and romantic during the last few months, and deserved a medal: so thats all as it should be—He dresses in sky blue flannel, with blue tie and pocket handkerchief and says he has lost a stone and a half.

Yesterday was such an awful day of incessant conversation that my head is still bemused. Clives lunch party; then Faith, Logan, Eddy and Vita to tea; then Lytton in the Square; then dinner at 37 [Gordon Square] with Douglas and Dadie and Cynthia Noble—a dull girl; then they went to [C.H.B.] Kitchins party, but I had the strength to refuse: I am going to entreat your help in leading a nice quiet life, with little excursions to Reading and Hampton Court. This gabble is senseless. Lytton however was affable and urbane and charming though apparently he has gone through tortures at the hands of [Roger] Senhouse. The whole affair is over. He has been in the depths of despair, and is now trying to get on with his book. Dadie and Clive take it very seriously; and say that a week ago he was desperate, and that nothing has hurt him so much for years. Roger refused to bed in the end—I think that was it. But there’ll be another for certain—I don’t see how one can take it as a death blow considering how he revives.

Nobody seems to know when you will be back. We hope for the best, as they say: and if anything could touch your hearts of glass and emerald—for I dont deny they are beautiful hearts in their way—it would be this chatter we all keep up about Nessa and Duncan, whether they’re coming and when they’re coming and what we can do to make them stay with us, and not go for ever to live among the frogs of Cassis.

No, I shirked Helen [Anrep]. She rather smears my mind—she has a trailing foot. We talk too much about people’s characters and I’m afraid her milieu is rather underworld. But this is only a murmur—not a groan. I like people to have a little bone in their heads—something one can argue about. Not politics, but art or something. Faith [Henderson] afflicts me rather in the same way. One cant talk about Saxon and Barbara for ever.

Now with Dolphin I can always put up a hare or two, but this is drivelling, and I ought to be writing an article on Morgan’s novels, which I cannot finish.

But dearest Dolphin, you were a good kind creature to write me such a nice letter

Yr B.

Berg

[]

1762a: To Lord Olivier

25th May 1927

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, London W.C.1

Dear Lord Olivier,

I have been pondering your letter in the solitude of the country and will try to answer some of your charges. One needs light to dress by (which is what my lights in the house were) long before it is dark. Also they light harbour lights very early. This explains too the return of Joseph. It was dusk not dark.

You are I suppose right about swallows. They do not nest in a house. My observation was taken from life; birds used to nest in our drawing room at Asheham; but Leonard now says (after passing my book) that they were house martins. Dahlias I surrender to you. In fact I yield altogether to your horticultural learning.

But I think you are wrong about Prue, and I haste to clear her character of the imputation you put upon it. What about Charlotte Bronte? She died in early pregnancy. Isnt that childbirth? or, as I put it euphemistically ‘connected with childbirth’? What happens is that the patient catches some other illness (this was what Prue did) during the first three months which, had her state been normal, would not have been fatal, but as it was, I think I am right in ascribing death to childbirth. Anyhow, I cant attach much blame to myself for not going into these medical details. If I am led into gardens in my next book I shall ask you what fee you would charge for correcting the proofs. The “y” in my ladies is odd: I think I am so anxious not to end in “s” that I make for any other letter instinctively; I like the “y” sound too. But I am much flattered that anyone should read me with such attention. Many thanks for your letter.

Yours sincerely and apologetically,
Virginia Woolf

Dr. Benedict Richards. Modern Fiction Studies. Vol. 30. Summer 1984.

[]

1763: To Vanessa Bell

Thursday [26 May 1927]

52 Tavistock Square, [W.C.1]

We hope you and Duncan will dine with us—both or singly—whatever night you come back—Thursday next week is our only engagement—Would you let me know if possible.

V.W.

We’ve had an offer for Hyde Pk Gate—they will take it on at £300 or buy for £4,500. What do you think?

Berg

[]

1764: To Roger Fry

May 27th 1927

52 Tavistock Sqre, [W.C.1]

My dear Roger,

Thank you very much for your letter. I am immensely glad that you like the Lighthouse. Now I wish I had dedicated it to you. But when I read it over it seemed to me so bad that I couldn’t face asking you. And then, as it happened, that very day, I met you somewhere,—was so overcome (did you guess it?) by your magnificence, splendour and purity (of intellect, not body) that I went home and was positive it was out of the question—dedicating such a book to such a man. Really therefore the not-dedication is a greater compliment than the dedication would have been—But you shall have a private copy, if you’ll accept it. What I meant was (but would not have said in print) that besides all your surpassing private virtues, you have I think kept me on the right path, so far as writing goes, more than anyone—if the right path it is.

I meant nothing by The Lighthouse. One has to have a central line down the middle of the book to hold the design together. I saw that all sorts of feelings would accrue to this, but I refused to think them out, and trusted that people would make it the deposit for their own emotions—which they have done, one thinking it means one thing another another. I can’t manage Symbolism except in this vague, generalised way. Whether its right or wrong I don’t know, but directly I’m told what a thing means, it becomes hateful to me.

I did not consciously think of Nessa when I was doing Mrs Ramsay. In fact she and my mother seemed to me very different people. But no doubt something of Nessa leaked in. After all, my mother died when I was 13, so that the idea must have been developed somehow. But the whole process of writing remains to me a complete mystery; the only thing I realise is that at last, for some reason, I am beginning to write easily, which may be a sign of decay, of course. I turn to your essays to find out; of course, some one has stolen them, some black-hearted devil. I was just saying to myself now I will read Roger through properly, and you’re nowhere to be found. A starved young man—but I forget who—begged it of me one day—thats all I remember. So you must come back, and let us have an argument in person.

London is rather a grind—nice people and nasty people stuck together in bunches, so that one cant get at them separately but has to bolt them whole. I get a little bothered by the idiocy of most human intercourse,—think I shall retire to Rome. But then there too one would be hooked in to the quarrels and loves of the detestable English. Clive is specially rampant at the moment, rolling in the pigsty after his three months abstinence, and rather a repulsive sight. Its an amazing recantation of all he said 3 months ago, but he’s so outspoken and innocent in his queer way one can’t object. Love is the only God, he says, and art and fame an illusion, which means, I suppose, that he intends to dine out at the Ivy with Mary every night of his life and never write a word. One sees the top of his bald head disappearing into the waves. I don’t think Nessa will be able to fish him out this time.

I’ve been lecturing at Oxford, and ran into a wave of Fry worship that was positively oppressive. The only intelligent young man came up and introduced himself as your friend—had met you in France—his name, I think, was Martin. Anyhow he sang a rhapsody about you, which I could not stop. Really Roger, if you go on like this they’ll be making a Christ of you within a century. You’re becoming a legend to the young. Of course its the only sort of fame worth having—I see that: but I’m a little alarmed at the size and luminosity of your halo. Then the girls rhapsodised about Margery— said Somerville was a different place: plants grow, love grows, learning grows—all due to Margery. Its time I set about the Fry memoir which I have it in my mind (as you Quakers say) to do before I die. Theres not much gossip: Lytton is out of love: Tom Eliot has buried a father in law at Bexhill: Dick and John Strachey are not drowned, but should have been. Marjorie’s book is a pretty dismal affair: Bloomsbury shown up against the radiance of Jos’s [Wedgwood] private parts—thats the plan of it—and how anyone can be such a fool as to think the mind dull compared with the body, Lord knows. I’m sure I live more gallons to the minute walking once round the square than all the stockbrokers in London caught in the act of copulation. As for you—but I’ve flattered you enough—and it isn’t flattery: its sober truth, which makes it worse. Love to Helen.

Yr V.W.

Please tell Helen I had to stay at home and polish off the poem of a poet whose mother wished to see his work printed before she died. But not by us.

Sussex

[]

1765: To V. Sackville-West

Sunday [29 May? 1927]

52 Tavistock Sqre, [W.C.1]

Yes, it did amuse me, the picture of you on your donkey, or was it a mule perhaps?

That damned chill has landed me in a damned headache, so I am staying in bed.

I wish you would come in—I suppose you’re entertaining Eddy instead.

I’m much better today and hope to be all right tomorrow. What a curse it is, to be sure!

I think probably it would be more tactful only to stay one night this time. Perhaps you’ll ask me for 2 later.

The end of this young man’s letter may amuse you—What do you think he means?

You’re the only person I want to see when I have a headache—thats a compliment—But its going off fast.

Write, dear honey, a nice letter to me.

Yr Virginia

Berg

[]

1766: To V. Sackville-West

Wednesday [1 June 1927?]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

I’m hoping to get Leonard to ask you to come and see me tomorrow. Nessa I think comes Friday. Its frightfully selfish, as I’m too stupid to talk. But I should so like it, if it isn’t difficult for you. I’m much better. I had rather sharp pain for two days, and so feel rather done up, but I’ve slept almost all day for 3 days, not thought or read: and there’s nothing to worry about. I’m very comfortable.

The flowers are quite divine How good you are to me! dearest creature. Dont come if its the least bother

Berg

[]

1767: To V. Sackville-West

Sunday [5 June 1927]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Oh I envied Raymond driving off with you through the hop gardens to hear the nightingales—It was a great joy seeing you; and if you would send me one line daily I could go on building you up. I am a great adept at this game. I am lying under a blue and purple forest, the lupins you brought. Enormous trees they look like, and I am a little rabbit running about among the roots. Its odd how being ill even like this splits one up into several different people. Here’s my brain now quite bright, but purely critical. It can read; it can understand; but if I ask it to write a book it merely gasps. How does one write a book? I cant conceive. It’s infinitely modest therefore,—my brain at this moment. Theres Vita, it says, able to write books: Then my body—thats another person. So, my body is a grey mare, trotting along a white road. We go along quite evenly for a time like this …. suddenly she jumps a gate … A … This is my heart missing a beat and making a jump at the next one. I rather like the gray mare jumping, provided she doesn’t do it too often. I have walked round the Square, but I much prefer lying on my chair under the blue and purple forest.

I’ve seen noone, except Nessa, who met Ottoline in Wigmore Street the first day she came back, and had an indecent proposal made her on the telephone by an unknown man—thats London, she said. She is going to wear earrings. I say, Vita, it was good of you to come. And you’ll come on Friday, and you’ll write wont you? You make such a figure in this forest: coming out of a glade; yellow; golden.

The Seafarers Educational Society has bought 2 copies of The Lighthouse. Its an awful thought that the merchant service will be taught navigation by me: or the proper use of foghorns and cylinders. Its a compliment never paid to you poets. I think I deserve it. The Trouble I took with that Lighthouse! Its going to be reprinted so send me any corrections: I’m rather pleased. Not very. But then the only thing I did much want, to tell you a secret, was to be given a medal by Drinkwater. Thats what cuts me to the quick. Whats a Lighthouse if Drinkwater dont approve? Eh?

Virginia

We go on Tuesday

Berg

[]

1768: To Violet Dickinson

Sunday [5 June 1927]

52 Tavistock Sqre., [W.C.1]

My Violet,

I’m so glad that you like some of The Lighthouse. People in The Hebrides are very angry. Is it Cornwall? I’m not as sure as you are.

I’ve been nursing a headache in bed all this week, and now we go to Rodmell, to lie in the sun—so please excuse my illiteracy. I think I should prefer an operation to a headache—

Are you really all right again? At Welwyn? Digging? with Dogs? Leonard sends his love.

Yr VW

Berg

[]

1769: To Gerald Brenan

Whitmonday [6 June 1927]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

My dear Gerald,

I think I appreciate lilies more than the altars do—nevertheless, I dont approve of this lavish generosity of yours. Do I send you venison if you have a cold? At the same time, your lilies are triumphant and resplendent in my big jar. Thank you very much.

I have been very wretched with a pain at the back of my neck all this week—can’t read or think; but we’re going to Rodmell tomorrow where I shall do nothing for a week and recover.

Please come and see me quietly alone when I get back.

Yours ever
Virginia Woolf

George Lazarus

[]

1770: To Clive Bell

[6? June 1927]

52 Tavistock Square W.C.1

Dearest Clive,

I am afraid I can’t come tomorrow. This bloody headache after the flu seems to have settled in again; I’m really desolated, and feel too I have gone as usual and been a killjoy. But I shall now retire to Rodmell for a bit and come back recovered.

Please forgive, and if you can, still cherish some affection for your most vexatious sister in law.

Quentin Bell

[]

1771: To V. Sackville-West

[7 June 1927]

52 Tavistock Sqre, [London, W.C.1]

Health.

Better but not quite right yet—I mean I get the jumping pulse and pain if I do anything: Cant write sense. Will you please be rather strict for a time? Its so easy, with this damned disease, to start a succession of little illnesses, and finally be sent to bed for 6 weeks, as happened last time. I expect to be perfectly well by Sunday, after a few days at Rodmell. All I pray is that you will not encourage me to excitement, even so: and you wont say I’m a molly coddle will you? Life in London is difficult: Ottoline, Clive, and so on. Now this is enough about health. We need not mention it again I hope.

Sofa: Yes. But the difficulty is that few decent sofas can get up our stairs. I sacrificed my old one for that reason.

Hawthornden

Yes: the 16th: Damn Raymond. I’d been planning a party here—all the lights of London to meet you—and only waited to be steadier on my feet to ask you. I’m dining with Clive on the 17th. “to celebrate the success of Fugitive pieces” [Mary Hutchinson’s book].

Long Barn.

I’d like 3 days doing nothing but eat and sleep at Long Barn more than anything. An occasional kiss on waking and between meals.

Rodmell. You’ll come Friday, honey, wont you?

Virginia

Berg

[]

1772: To Molly MacCarthy

Wednesday [8 June 1927?]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Molly,

It is said that you’ve asked us to dine on Sunday. Alas! I’m afraid we shall be off to Rodmell, to get rid of this damned flu, with which I’m still infected.

But why don’t you ever come and see us?

Stiff, and set up with your own importance I suppose.

yr V.W.

Mrs Michael MacCarthy

[]

1773: To Vanessa Bell

Wednesday [8 June? 1927]

Monk’s House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest,

I see there’s a bus which would get us to you about 1.45, so if it is fine on Friday we will come to lunch, and perhaps go rather earlier (but we must have time for a good gossip)

I wish you’d signed your cover—Privately I thought it lovely—so did Lytton—but I was too much dashed by your letter to say so. The lines on the back were a great improvement. Your style is unique; because so truthful; and therefore it upsets one completely. Still I see what you mean.

B.

Berg

[]

1774: To V. Sackville-West

[14 June 1927]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

You see I was reading Challenge and I thought your letter was a challenge “if only you weren’t so elderly and valetudinarian” was what you said in effect “we would be spending the day together” whereupon I wired “come then” to which naturally there was no answer and a good thing too I daresay as I am elderly and valetudinarian,—it’s no good disguising the fact. Not even reading Challenge will alter that. She is very desirable I agree: very. (Eve). Here’s Clive. So London begins. Thursday then.

You won’t think from this that I mean I seriously expected you: it was all a kind of tipsy vision of driving along the downs with you in the dawn. I was very excited all day.

Berg

[]

1775: To Harold Nicolson

Wednesday [15 June 1927]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Harold,

It was more than angelic of you to send me an early copy of your book. It is now half past ten: Leonard is saying we must go to bed; but I must scribble a line in haste to say how absolutely delightful I think it—how I laughed out loud to myself again and again. Yet at the same time it is rather serious—I can’t make out how you combine the advantages of fact and fiction as you do. I am also jealous—I cant help it—that all these things should have happened to you, not to me. And also, for some reason I feel profoundly and mysteriously shy. What this arises from I have not yet discovered: some horror of the past no doubt: but I think it is a great tribute to a book when it makes one fumble in ones own inside. I was so glad to find poor dear Bloomsbury playing its games in its corner—and Sibyl Colefax popping in for one moment. You must write another and another, and for goodness sake, send them to the Wolves.

I hope we shall meet tomorrow. Tell Vita I tried to buy a pair of shoes to dignify the occasion [Vita’s Hawthornden Prize], but my heart failed me.

Yours Ever
Virginia Woolf
(in great haste, but also in great delight)

Berg

[]

1776: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

[June 1927]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Ottoline,

Welcome!!!??? (this is in imitation of Lady Colefax)

It is a great pleasure to think of you again in London, exercising your natural genius, and I at once flock to your standard—but not this Wednesday, as we have people dining here—We shall come next week I hope—if you mean Wednesday will always find you.

I don’t think I can manage this Tuesday, owing to the rush here in the press in the afternoon.

However, its a great excitement and illumination of the perfect dulness which broods over Chelsea swamps in my mind to think of you there.

Excuse this scrawl—I am having to talk as well as write.

Ever yours
V.W.

Texas

[]

1777: To V. Sackville-West

[1927?]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Look here Vita—throw over your man, and we’ll go to Hampton Court and dine on the river together and walk in the garden in the moonlight and come home late and have a bottle of wine and get tipsy, and I’ll tell you all the things I have in my head, millions, myriads—They won’t stir by day, only by dark on the river. Think of that. Throw over your man, I say, and come.

Berg

[]

1778: To Ethel Sands

June 23rd [1927]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Ethel

I have been a wretch not to answer you before, but I have been awfully bothered with headaches and detested the sight of a pen.

What a bad psychologist you are! You know I don’t care a damn for your praise, and think you know nothing about it—that’s your mistake. If you were here this evening (and I’m alone in my drawing room, and wish you were sitting in your arm chair opposite) I should examine you closely into the meaning of all you say, and perhaps dont say about the Lighthouse. It would interest me enormously to know what you mean by ‘a more intense vision of the outer world’. The Lighthouse seemed to me almost too much the inner world. But thats only the beginning. You’ll have to rub up your memories, and stand a lot of questioning. Why, if you object to this, do you know authors?

Yes, Eleanor Brougham has sent her ms. and it lies, with a gigantic coronet and plenty of scent on my table. I will read it, but I feel slight shivers. She has dogged my life at a distance for many years. And I’ve always heard or understood, that she’s a bore. I see you say she’s an old friend of yours. But then you’re so exquisitely composed that no one bores you—thats my belief, not even….

I can’t settle down completely to London after Rome. It was a revelation to me—flowers coming out every moment, ruins, Roman roads, nightingales, the Campagna. I’m going back—certainly I shall never go anywhere else.

I should like extremely to come to you some time. (I think it is extraordinarily nice of you to ask me). Could it be for two nights about the 25th of July? I can’t be quite sure, as one or two things have to be fitted in: but it would be great fun; and I dont suppose, if you dont mind, that Nessa and Duncan would. May I let you know?

I’ve not seen Ottoline or Sibyl, in fact I’ve no news whatever. But Lytton tells me that Ottoline has crammed two Garsingtons into one small house [10 Gower Street], wears pink plush, and is so much of a ruin (without a sunset or nightingale or anything) that one can only drop a wreath and heave a sigh so I suppose I must go round and see.

Yours affect
V.W.

Wendy Baron

[]

1779: To V. Sackville-West

Friday [24 June 1927]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.

Yes, my dear Honey, it was a great pity you didn’t come yesterday. You’d have found me alone. So am I today—and there’s your empty chair. The only solution of the problem is that you should take a flat in London—please consider this: Yes, the Wolves would like to come next week end—I mean Saturday 2nd. Leonard says he must go on Sunday night. Could I stay till Monday? Shall you be alone? If so, I might catch a few minutes talk with you.

Our traveller went to Bumpus, who said they’d brought up 4 copies of Teheran from the cellar, put them in the window, and sold them at once. On this showing, the Land must be selling like melting snow. I think I’m going to see Edith soon—I like her: she’s a character. I dont think you probably realise how hard it is for the natural innovator as she is, to be fair to the natural traditionalist as you are. Its much easier for you to see her good points than for her to see yours. Also, she hates Squire (with some reason—he’s the spit and image of mediocrity) and the Hawthornden tars you, you must admit, with that brush; and then you sell, and she dont—all good reasons why being a Sitwell she should vomit in public: I wish, by the way, you, on your side, would find out what’s up between me and Sibyl. Save for a scold on the telephone I’ve not had a word from her since February. I’m afraid some one’s gossiped. But don’t let her suspect that I’ve noticed—it may be Desmond, of course.

I’m rather in the dumps. I have to put off everything and see nobody and go nowhere or I get a pain in my back or I sneeze or my heart jumps or something; and so I footle my time away when I want to see 150 people and write 26 books. I do write a little, but thats about all. However, I think its better, and I’m saving up for Tuesday.

You’ll come early Tuesday afternoon, wont you and stay late? I wanted to ask you to dine, but Leonard thinks I shall then get excited, and start the Eclipse with a headache—Damn, oh damn!

I should now be at Carmen with Raymond.

Arnold Bennett wrote quite a friendly article about the Lighthouse last night. Why, I wonder? I’ve rejected Miss Brougham. I liked your husband.

Yes. I’ve lots of things to say.

Yr Virginia

Berg

[]

1780: To V. Sackville-West

Monday [4 July 1927]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Yes you are an agile animal—no doubt about it, but as to your gambols being diverting, always, at Ebury Street for example, at 4 o’clock in the morning, I’m not so sure. Bad, wicked beast! To think of sporting with oysters—lethargic glucous lipped oysters, lewd lascivious oysters, stationary cold oysters,—to think of it, I say. Your oyster has been in tears on the telephone … [7 words omitted]—thats all the faith there is in oysters. But what did I come back to? A message from Dadie, and he’s coming in next minute, and I’m alone, and Leonards motoring, and we shall have 2 or 3 hours tête à tête—I and Dadie. Hah Hah! Bad Wicked Beast.

At the same time, there were the mushrooms: the crab: the bed; the log fire: All shall be credited to you. I’m a fair minded woman. You only be a careful dolphin in your gambolling, or you’ll find Virginia’s soft crevices lined with hooks. You’ll admit I’m mysterious—you don’t fathom me yet—Who knows what—but here’s Dadie:

Honey, could you remember to bring my waterproof (rose pink) and my gloves (scarlet) I flung them down in the hall I think. I’ll keep Tuesday, miraculously free, for any purpose you like.

Tray and I fairly hymned and carolled and chanted the praises of Vita and Harold. The Weald of Kent was a mere back cloth for your splendours … This is something very interesting.

Only one reservation I made—about beds in Ebury Street: and lost ear rings.

Yr Virginia

Pale: pastyfaced, muffin minded Shanks, your brother in the Hawthornden, calls me ‘a dishonest writer’—so you see, if you have Edith, I have Shanks.

Berg

[]

1781: To V. Sackville-West

[8? July 1927]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Yes, do come as early as ever you can on Tuesday. I’m now told that I engaged myself to go with Nessa, Duncan and Clive to Hampton Court on Tuesday. If so, you’ll have to come—We’ll dine; we’ll haunt the terrace. For my part, I should prefer solitude. For yours, you’d prefer oysters. Bad Vita, bad wicked Vita. Whats become of your fine gesture about promiscuity? Dadie looked divine last night in a new plum coloured suit. I’m outraged by your mother’s habits—

Still I’ve had 3 hours today of Susie Buchan, thanks to you. She says she knows you—I said why chaperone your daughter? All girls go to bed with young men as soon as look at them. Not a successful remark: she says—oh she says thousands of things.

What a good review [of Some People] Harold had in the Lit Sup: What a bad one your oyster had. But have you committed incest with Eddie? I can well believe it. I can believe anything—the creeping newts, the toads that spawn in the ditch. What would Susie say, or John either, for the matter of that?

A thousand million thanks for the pink coat. I’ve no stamps, so be content.

VW.

I’ve just written, or re-written, a nice little story about Sapphism, for the Americans.

Berg

[]

1782: To V. Sackville-West

Friday [15 July 1927]

52 T[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Dearest Creature,

We have now got our own motor and so will come down in it for lunch on Sunday, if thats all right. But heaven knows what excuse I can make for staying the night. Can you invent one? I’m afraid I shall have to go back with our Mr Harris after tea or dinner. Perhaps I could have a fit on the lawn.

Just off to broadcast; not a bit nervous; more likely to be deadly bored. I know what’ll happen—I shall yawn and say, … [eleven words omitted]. This will be broadcast and ruin the chastity of 12 million homes. Thats what you’ve brought me to.

Goodnight dearest honey, my voice will soon be mingling with the nightingales at Long Barn.

Yr Virginia

Berg

[]

1783: To V. Sackville-West

18th July 1927

52 Tavistock Sqre, W.C.1

My dear Mrs Nicolson,

I cant tell you how I enjoyed myself on Sunday. It was so good of you and your husband to let me come. And what a lovely garden! I cant think how you can ever bear to leave it. But then everything was so delightful. London seemed more commonplace than ever after your delightful Long Barn. And I still have some of your lovely flowers to remind me of the happy time I had with you, and your husband, to whom please give my best thanks and remembrances, and with much love to you both, I am. There, you ramshackle old Corkscrew, is that the kind of thing you like? I suppose so.

What I think will be so nice next time is the porpoise in my bath—steel blue, ice cold, and loving hearted. Some prefer dolphins—I dont. I’ve known one dolphin, the Mediterranean kind, ravage a whole bedfull of oysters. A lewd sort of brute that.

I’ve been motoring all the evening. Rather good at gears now. What else? A sordid scallywag dinner last night; room smelling of cheese, but very bright in the head. I’ve engaged myself to write a book on architecture with a man.

Honey dearest, don’t go to Egypt please. Stay in England. Love Virginia. Take her in your arms.

Three o’clock Thursday.

I may motor down—so there.

Yr Virginia

Berg

[]

1784: To Charles Sanger

July 18th [1927]

52 Tavistock Sqre W.C.

My dear Charlie,

Yes it is very annoying never to see you. But I dont believe its possible in the summer. Let us hope for the autumn. We’ve just bought a motor car, and I hope this will take us to Chelsea.

Daphne has written me a very just and rather severe letter about the inaccuracy of the Lighthouse. But she also flatters me by liking it which pleases me greatly.

My love to Dora.

Your affte
Virginia Woolf

Daphne Sanger

[]

1785: To Daphne Sanger

[18 July 1927]

52 Tavistock Sqre W.C.

Dear Daphne,

It was very nice of you to write to me about To the Lighthouse. I am very glad that you enjoyed it, as I did not much expect you would. I also like your reason for liking it—that it is ‘an organic whole’. That is what I wanted it to be. I don’t myself much mind about peoples’ ages and topography—not, that is to say, in a book like mine where the writer is trying to do something else. I should mind in Jane Austen, because I think she leads you to expect that kind of accuracy. Still I will try next time to be either quite inaccurate or quite accurate.

I am very sorry we didn’t see you this summer. I hate the summer in London as one sees all the people one doesn’t want to see. But I suppose you are happy down in Somerset, except that I remember you much prefer towns.

Thank you again for your letter.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Daphne Sanger

[]

1786: To Susan Buchan

July 19th [1927]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Susie,

It was very good of you to send me Huntingtower, but I was so indiscreet as to leave it on the table and it was at once seized by someone who was going on a journey and has not been returned. This seems to me a great compliment to the author, but not at all pleasing to me. I hope to get it back next week, and then I shall at once read it, but I dont like not to thank you for so long.

Please dont become entirely political and thus have to drop me once and for all. I hope next autumn you will come again, or let me come and see you.

I am sure you will be glad to hear that Sibyl Colefax is coming to tea on Tuesday. This is a great relief to me.

It was so nice of you to send me the book.

Yours very sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Lady Tweedsmuir

[]

1787: To Helen McAfee

19th July 1927

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, WC1

Dear Miss McAfee

I am so sorry that you had the trouble of cabling to me. I have been delayed by illness, but I hope I have been able to improve the essay [Street Haunting] a little. I shall be very grateful for the double set of proofs which you are good enough to promise.

I am very much pleased that you should like To the Lighthouse. It is very difficult to judge ones own work; but I certainly enjoyed writing it more than any other of my novels.

Please accept my apologies for the delay, and believe me

yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Yale University

[]

1788: To Ethel Sands

Friday 22 July [1927]

52 Tavistock Sqre, W.C.

Dearest Ethel,

I’m sorry I’ve been so long about writing, but I couldn’t be sure about days. I will come on Wednesday 27th if that suits you. The boat arrives some time in the afternoon I think. May I stay till Saturday? I am very much excited at the thought of coming. You won’t mind talking for 24 hours on end, I hope? It will be mostly about motor cars. I can think of nothing else. I have driven from the Embankment to the Marble Arch and only knocked one boy very gently off his bicycle. But I would rather have a gift for motoring than anything.

Nessa and Duncan sound very happy. It will be alarming to be alone among so many painters. They are so mute and highminded compared with us poor creatures. I am leading a very impure life at the moment—what with motoring and Sibyl who is having a reconciliation with me, and so on. But it will be great fun seeing you, and I must say I think it is very nice of you to ask me.

Yours aff
Virginia

Wendy Baron

[]

1789: To Vanessa Bell

Saturday, July 23rd [1927]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Dearest,

I have written to Ethel, which I suppose I should have done before—I’m coming on Wednesday—a little alarmed, as I foresee you and Duncan will be occupied all day, and I shall have to do my tricks with Ethel (now don’t leave this lying about). I shall be rather glad however, to see you—partly as a relief from Ottoline, Colefax and such like. But my whole life is spent motoring with Harris. Not that I’ve had as many lessons as I should like. I’m now competent to drive alone in the country, he says. I think it is a very exciting employment, and he says (but this may be flattery) that I’m well above the average. We both have the same fault—you and I—we keep too much to the left. But my gear changing is very good.

We went to Tommies wedding [to Julia Strachey] at St Paneras Church yesterday, a prosaic affair, though the service always fills my eyes with tears. Also the grotesqueness is so great. The Strachey women were of inconceivable drabness on one side, Aunt Loo having also an aroma of hypocrisy about her which makes me vomit; on the other side sat the Judge in frock coat and top hat, like a shop walker. He got locked into his pew, and could not get out, except at the last moment, to sign the register. He mistook the hinge for the door handle. Julia was highly self possessed, and then Angus was glowering behind us. I daresay he takes it to heart, though I repeat for the 1000th time; I cannot see the physical charm of that little woodpecker man. They dined with us afterwards. I handed on your curse, just before the ceremony—Nessa’s curse on marriage, it is called; and has been known to strike a Bride dead on the altar steps.

Vita has had a letter from Clive telling her the good news that he is now completely happy: life is treating him well; he has nothing left to wish for. I think that Parrokeet is one of the vainest and silliest of fowls: if he can make us think that he goes to bed with Valerie, thats all he wants—I believe half his misery has been outraged vanity. Now he’s Don Juan again, nothing matters. But I very much doubt that he is Don Juan. I hear he’s gone to Charleston. I also hear that Fred [Harris] can’t get off till 4 on Saturday, so Leonard won’t be able to meet us. Fred will stay the night, and motor us to Charleston next day. Then you will see me take the wheel and return—It is an awesome sight.

But all this will be told you when we go to our rooms to write letters. How fascinating the whole thing will be! Duncan reading—“the kettled lips of graves”—the ladies sewing; but poor Billy [Virginia] isn’t one thing or the other, not a man nor a woman, so whats he to do? run up the ladies skirts. Nan terrifies me. Ethel makes me silly. But the food will be nice, and Nessa will kiss me.

B.

Helen [Anrep] is going to Romney for the summer—We dined there with the [George] Kennedys—too many handkerchiefs in the pot for my taste, which may be hypercritical, of course—One has a sense of ashes in the soup. One of her legs—supposing she were a fly and had 6—has come off. But it was all very nice. Then we had Bob [Trevelyan].—but I’ve no room.

Berg

[]

1790: To Edward Sackville West

Saturday [23 July 1927]

52 Tavistock Sqre, WC

Dear Eddy,

I’m afraid Wednesday won’t do, as I’m going to Dieppe that day.

Could you come to tea on Tuesday? Thats the last chance of seeing you. Sibyl will be here, but you would alleviate the situation for both of us, and then she’d go, to some Duke in a hurry, and we could gossip on.

We had Tommie and Julia to celebrate their wedding last night: it was at St Paneras at 2.—the most dismal ceremony.

Your
Virginia Woolf

Berg

[]

1791: To V. Sackville-West

Sunday [24 July 1927]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Dearest Creature,

(by the way, why is it that you always come into my presence in letters simply and solely not even My dear Virginia, whereas I always invent some lovely lovely phrase?) how nice it is of me to be writing to you, when you’re not writing to me. No, you’re not. You’re talking to Dottie. By God, at 3 this morning I’ll ring you up. Noodles [butler], or whatever his name is, will catch you in the act. You will summon all the blood of all the Sackvilles:—

But listen. I bought the stockings with lisle thread heels—you’re quite right. They have existed it seems these 30 years. Queen Victoria wore them. And I bought a mixture which is applied with a sponge to shoes. They have ripened in the night to a patchy nut-brown. But tell me—when a shoes inwardly sound, yet outwardly corrupt, what can one do? It goes against my conscience to throw them after a bride or otherwise destroy. (We went to Tommie’s wedding at St Paneras Church: hence the metaphor, or whatever it may be.) But listen: now what am I to do about powder? Ethel will take it ill if I don’t powder my nose. Once you gave me some which didn’t smell; but I dont know what it was: I bought some which permeates every pore, and I daren’t stink like that: I loathe scents, (except on you, when they are merely the ripeness of the apricot) Tell me quickly what to get and where. I will rise to powder, but not to rouge. So thats finished.

I forget what has happened since I let you out in the moonlight, to go whoring in Mayfair. I was very happy at Kew. Very, very.

Leonard says he will spend Thursday nights in London. Wouldn’t Thursday be the day you come back from Brighton? and sleep at Rodmell? But this wont be till the 12th, so you must come before.

You’ll be glad to hear I’ve sold 4000 of the L⁠[ighthouse]: in America in a month: so they think I shall sell 8000 before the end of the year. And I shall make £800: (that is with luck.)

I’ve got to go and see Ottoline now, which is the most incredible effort. To step from Pinker asleep in the big chair to all those satins and jade greens and little yellow books with tassels hanging out of them!

I say, you won’t be in London on Tuesday I suppose?

My love to Dottie

Virginia

Berg

[]

1792: To Janet Case

July 24th [1927]

52 Tavistock Sqre, [W.C.1]

My dear Janet,

It was very nice of you to listen in and to hear us so clearly. One is shut up in a soundproof room, with a red light over the door, and a notice to say that if one rustles one’s manuscript thousands will be deafened. All this makes one rather bored and dismal, but I’m glad it got through to the New Forest all right.

We are just moving, I to France for a few days and Leonard to Rodmell. We have bought a motor car (this is the cut of the Lighthouse) and I have been wobbling round and round Windmill Hill, every day, trying to avoid dogs and children.

But when we’re expert perhaps we shall call on you one day. Everything seems to be within ones reach of a sudden.

Leonard’s love.

Yours
V.W.

Sussex

[]

Letters 1793-1818 (August–early-October 1927)

1793: To Ethel Sands

Aug 1st 1927

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, [Sussex]

Dearest Ethel,

I was covered with shame and remorse when I found that you had sent Loomes [butler] all the way into Dieppe with my bag. It was angelic of you and very skilful of him and idiotic of me. Will you please express my gratitude and thanks! And then, in mid-channel, I found myself grasping your copy of Maurois’ Disraeli, which I will send back. I don’t know how I purloined it without knowing.

But I feel that I came away so laden with all sorts of things that one more or less don’t much matter. There’s the Seine that day, and Jumiège, and the house, and the sea, and Dieppe and the furniture shop, and then the food, and the clothes, and the flowers and the furniture, and in the middle, so exquisite, such a type to my mind of civilisation and rightness, Nan and Ethel—Ethel and Nan—which way ought it to be? Here I stop short, seeing the prospect of disaster before me. I shall be comparing you to birds of paradise or sea-horses or something and you will each write me a separate letter of acute disgust (I found a declaration from Philip—how exciting!—how nice, at my age to have a little love—but what am I to do?) You see, at least 300 pages could be written about my three days. But in one word, I was astonishingly happy, and I can’t get over your being so good to me.

The transition from you to us was highly abrupt. I had forgotton to order beer for the Chauffeur. I scraped together some cold lemon coloured cheese. They did not get here till after nine, and what dinner we had was eaten in such chaos as you can’t conceive. Next day we went to Charleston and Clive was so damp and dismal and shrunken that I hadn’t the heart to plant any darts in his flanks, nor he in mine. The sacred subject was not mentioned. But it will be—he is coming to tea. Then we played dressmakers with Angelica, then we compared our cars, then we drove home, then we knocked a bit off the car getting it into the shed, then Nessa came round in her car, then we hoped sudden death would befall the Keynes, then we said some very nice things about you, and now it is pouring wet, and I must go and see what that poor gaping imbecile my charwoman is doing about dinner.

A thousand thanks again. I was so happy.

Your affect
Virginia

Wendy Baron

[]

1794: To Nan Hudson

1st August 1927

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, [Sussex]

My dear Nan,

It is rather an awful undertaking writing to a woman who fills me with such awe and envy (no, I’m not really afraid of you at the moment) and also makes me talk about Greek heads and Chalcedony. But gratitude and I suppose greed drive me to it. You can’t imagine how delightful it was being with you and Ethel; the only drawback is that I should soon be spoilt for the extreme simplicity of home life. As it is, even after 3 days with you, I find the tapioca pudding almost incredible. It comes up in a slab like glue, not hot, not cold, very sticky, yellowish, sweet. Then there’s the suet pudding and the pastry. What do they do with things over here? Poor woman [Rose Bartholomew], she is very plaintive, has several children, no larder, poisoned gums, so I suppose one must face it But Leonard thinks me grown rather pernickety in my absence. We talk a great deal about you and the dog and the garden. Our only piece of luck is that two swarms of bees settled in the orchard and we caught one of them and hope to have some honey next summer. Now would you come to Tavistock Sqre and eat my own honey off plain bread? I shall ask you. One can but try these things. You can be as haughty as you like. I shall continue to be humble. Why are writers so much less well equipped for life than painters? Why is my writing table all of a mess (do buy me the next writing table the furniture man has, and a chest of drawers, and I will bless you for ever and I am rather rich at the moment) and why does my spaniel jump onto the chairs when she is dripping from a swim in the river? The answer is that instead of controlling life as you and Ethel do, we writers merely contemplate it. I make up little pictures of Auppegard. I think of the Seine that day at lunch; of the windows of your house. And now I must answer M. Blanche and pretend that I have already read his six volumes. What I have done is to begin a new book on fiction, all in a rush, thanks to feeling so spry and fresh. But I mustn’t go on chattering or you will say to Ethel “What a bore the woman is!” when the poor creature is only trying to thank you for being so good to her, for it was astonishingly nice of you to let me come.

Yours affect
Virginia Woolf

Wendy Baron

[]

1795: To V. Sackville-West

Wednesday [3 August 1927]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Yes, darling creature, your letter was handed me just as we left Auppegard, and caused me, I suppose, to forget my box, so that the exquisite butler had to motor into Dieppe after us. Yes, darling, it was a nice letter. Sauqueville aint a very grand place, all the same. I looked for traces of you. Did your ancestors own a saw mill? Thats what they do now, and not a specially fine leg among them. But I’ll tell you all about it when you come. When? Choose your day and night—your 2 days and nights even better—whenever suits you. All I impress upon you is that until next Wednesday, when Nelly returns, we are living on potted meat and sardines: only Mrs Bartholomew to do, and she in the last stages of decrepitude. I really advise you to wait. Then Leonard goes up on Thursday 11th and comes back on Friday. I shall be alone Thursday night. Could you stay two nights? I dont want to seem as if I had you in secret, though its infinitely more to my taste, exploring about in the recesses secretly. Write me a tactful letter, making out a good case for whatever it is: and let it be as long as you can. (Your stay and your letter) No one else is coming.

Ethel’s was great fun—eating and drinking, motoring, and chattering. Oh the heavenly food! I said to myself I shall grow so fat Vita won’t like me. Still I ate and ate. Nan is the discovery of the two. Nan is a sterling dignified upright character, with more sound and fury in her than Ethel. Yes, I like Ethel (I read that aloud, the praise that is, at lunch and it had a great success: Ethel blushed, so did Nan, who likes Ethel praised better than anything) but Ethel’s a little fine ladyish, pernickety, acid, occasionally. She longs for society. Nan for solitude.

Tell me about your poem.

My God, how you would have laughed yesterday! Off for our first drive in the Singer: the bloody thing wouldn’t start. The accelerator died like a duck—starter jammed. All the village came to watch—Leonard almost sobbed with rage. At last we had to bicycle in and fetch a man from Lewes. He said it was the magnetos—would you have known that? Should we have known? Another attempt today, we are bitter and sullen and determined. We think of nothing else. Leonard will shoot himself if it dont start again.

Come down, dearest Creature

Yr Virginia

Berg

[]

1796: To V. Sackville-West

Friday [5 August 1927]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

Yes its odd, as you say, how the crowded night is succeeded by the empty day. The only consolation at the moment is that Leonard has gone up for the day this week not night so our intercourse would have been limited. All the same, here I am alone, shivering, crouching over the fire; and we might have talked about English prose.

I’ve seen too many people, and talked too much, and I’ve no time now to write this out 6 times over, as I had meant. Yes; that sticks in my throat; that I bubble. I’m going to polish and preen in future.

Dont, dearest, think you must pay me compliments. I’ve a very low opinion of my writing at the moment. This comes of correcting proofs [of Street Haunting]: its all bounce and jerk; I want to spin a thread like a spider.

Where did you meet Lord Gage? Shall you marry him? Clive hinted that he knew, and I knew, about a night in the oyster bed yesterday; but we were both very discreet.

Oh Lord! Stock brokers [Herbert Woolf] tomorrow. I wish I could see no one till October—excepting someone whose name has a V. in it—which may mean Vanessa, mayn’t it.

Be sure to come Thursday, as early as you can. You must come, even if Leonard dont spend the night away.

And write again before that, honey, do. When’s your book out? Not in September so that I could review it for America?

Any news from Foreign Office?

I’ve been reading Katherine Mansfield with a mixture of sentiment and horror. What odd friends I’ve had—you and she—

Your
Virginia

Berg

[]

1797: To V. Sackville-West

Sunday [7 August 1927]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Musha—i—dj abah—dal—imam—

Which being interpreted means, Darling—West—what—a—donkey—you—are—all my letters in future are going to be addressed to Pippin [dog], since it is clear you cant read them. “Something wrong I feel by your letter.”—What do you mean? It was the nicest, lovingest, tenderest letter in the world: a little rasped at not seeing you perhaps, but after all thats to your taste isnt it? Or did you, with the marvellous intuition of the poet, discover what I have tried to keep concealed from you? that I am loved, by a man [Philip Morrell]; a man with an aquiline nose, a nice property, a wife of title, and furniture to suit. The proposal was made the day before I left, and I have a letter now confirming it. What do you wish me to do? I was so overcome I blushed like a girl of 15. It was seeing me in my black hat and cloak that did it, he said; and then Colefax came in, and we were caught.

So, you see, nights and days must be devoted wholeheartedly, not just as you might tickle a trout with the tip of your finger, to keeping me servile. You must lay yourself out to enchant me every second.

Yes, Thursday, dearest: but earlier than 5 please, make it 4. Then Leonard will see you (and he wants to) and we’ll motor him to Lewes.

Do you want to lunch at Charleston on Friday? Say yes or no. I’ve made no promises.

One thing—no two things—more—First, unutterable villain about powder: did I ask you to give me a box? No. And its not the first time I have had to complain either. True, I spilt most of it on Ethels floor—but never do I ask you anything again, except this very instant, when I ask, could you bring your camera and do 3 or 4 snapshots (me paying 2/6 each) which could be printed (me paying 6d each) and sent to M. Blanche, who is writing an article called An Hour with Virginia Woolf, and wants to substantiate his statements by a large untouched portrait. If so I should be infinitely grateful; and for the last time.

I think its a very good plan to have some straightforward work like Aphra to keep one’s machinery engaged: because then the other part of one’s brain can take a rest and form little nuggets of gold, drops of pearl: your solitude. Will it be dedicated to me? Or to Dotty? Or to a certain lecherous oyster?

By the way, Miss Valerie Taylor has taken up her lodging in Clive’s flat, so thats that, to put it poetically: all the same Clive still looks a little moped, and eats baked bread called Vita bread to keep his figure at its present level.

So 4 on Thursday, dearest—Mishka—na—y—ralt—ta—vera. You wont miss the significance of that will you?

Virginia

Stay Friday if you can—I shall be alone till 7.
Why has your friend Hugh Walpole set Ellen Glasgow upon me, and who is Ellen Glasgow?
Bring Pippin.

Berg

[]

1798: To V. Sackville-West

[10 August 1927?]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

all right. Come then: be enchanting: This is only to say your d—d wine merchant hasn’t sent our wine, so would you let me buy off you a bottle of Alletta? [Alella]

BUY I say. BUY

Your
Virginia

Dont be later than 4 please, or I’ll have to go into Lewes without you.

Berg

[]

1799: To Helen McAfee

17th August 1927

Typewritten

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Miss McAfee

Many thanks for sending me the double set of proofs. I have returned one, with a few very slight corrections which will not affect the length. I have let the title stand as you altered it. I agree with you in thinking it an improvement.

With many thanks,

yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Yale University

[]

1800: To Saxon Sydney-Turner

Sunday Aug 21st [1927]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

My dear Saxon,

I am sorry to hear that you are back again, as I should like to have gone on getting particulars about your Finnish journeys. You left off at a highly romantic moment, just as you entered a very old church in company with a Princess. The Sacristan was about to show you a holy chalice—This reminds me—as you will see why—to ask you if you have and would lend me the Mysteries of Udolpho [1794] by Mrs Radcliffe. I am in urgent need of it. Naturally the London Library thinks it may have it in a month or so. I am writing about Romance—a silly thing to do; but then Leonard and Dadie have started a series, and my summer is being ruined by the need of writing a book for it on fiction; which I hate more and more, and become more and more incapable of reading, let alone criticising: But what am I to do? Leonard will take no excuse; and then there’s Dadie, as pink as a daisy and as proud as a wood-lion. Where does one read of wood lions?

I am keeping a copy of a book called Jakobs RUM [Swedish edition] to give you; and here are some comments on it, which leave me cold.

A good way of writing a letter would be always to begin the next sentence with the last word of the one before. Thus, cold—It is very cold; it is devilish cold; it is also blowing a hurricane and yesterday rained an atlantic ocean. (I cant remember what the word that goes with rain on a large scale is.) Our motor car which is the joy of our lives, has to turn back, on the road to Bodiam, just as we are passing through Mr Bottomleys village, the Dickers. We can stand it no longer. So you see, though I meant to write you a description of Bodiam, in your own style which is the envy of my heart, I can’t. There’s no news in the whole of Sussex. We drive over to Charleston and find Nessa has driven somewhere else. Clive to protect himself is going to learn to drive; because we talk of nothing but gears and cylinders.

I am reading a new classic every night. But what is happening to you? and to Barbara [Bagenal] and to Barbara’s child and to Mrs Stagg and to your uncle the ichthyologist? This is the group, you see, in which I compose you. Then there’s your great grandfather’s life. Do you agree that one never thinks of Saxon or Barbara singly, but always as the centre of a nest of other objects? This fact has never been observed by the novelists—but my word, what a set of dunderheads and duffers they are! Even Scott has passages of an incredible imbecility. Trollope has gone up in my estimation however. But then, as its all a question of mood, and of what one’s just read, or whom one’s just seen, whats the good of criticism? And, anyhow, vile as they are, the novelists outdo the critics. You probably have no notion what the criticism of fiction amounts to—you, who have passed your entire life on the highest peaks of Parnassus where only a few asphodels grow in the snow. Grow and Snow ought not to be there; but there they are.

Please forgive the incoherency of this letter, which does injustice to my affection, and send me Udolpho if you have it.

Yrs V.W.

Sussex

[]

1801: To V. Sackville-West

Monday, 22nd Aug. [1927]

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

Yes, dear Creature—but what was I saying ‘Yes’ for? I forget. Pinker has been sick, and an apple tree blown down. But none of this was what I had in mind, as I came across the lawn in a hurricane to my lodge. (Its used for storing potatoes now.) I was going to say you needn’t have bothered about the photographs—which I return; and I dont much like the looks of Virginia Woolf myself: for Blanche has written his article and used an old photograph of me at 19—which is just as well. Dear, dear, I suppose you wouldn’t accept a p.o. for 3/7 if I sent it? It would only be handed me 6 months later in a 3rd Class railway carriage between Orpington and Sevenoaks. No: though I dont think snaps are gratifying, they are salutary: so I wish you’d give me one of you. I’ve only the incredibly noble and highminded Hawthornden prize winner, the loved of Gosse (who’s dying it seems) and praised of Squire. Mightn’t I have a blowsy scallywag once in a way? or are you too vain? Yes, you are. Another scene comes to mind—at Knole this time, and Vita tearing up a snap (Nelly’s word) which made her look like Bill Sykes she said. But then you are like Bill Sykes I said. I’m not, Vita said, flushing crimson and stamping her foot.

Now, shameless that I am, having said I would never ask again, I ask again. Only a loan this time. The Mysteries of Udolpho by Mrs Radcliffe. I think you may have them. After all Long Barn combines the luxury of etc. with the refinement of etc. Then, 2nd, would you lend me whichever is in your opinion the most romantic novel of Mrs Behn’s. The truth is I’m stuck in Romance; am battered back by the hellish storms outside and do nothing but fabricate theories for my dull, dreary, long winded asinine book on fiction; and I cant get a single thing I want from the London Library.

Now, honey, if you’ve time on your hands why not turn it to the advantage of the Hogarth Press? You have to write a paper for the Oxford young men: make it a pamphlet for us. Please do.

I like your energy. I love your legs. I long to see you. Leonard says ‘Will Vita motor me in, and fetch me back on Friday?” “The way we treat Vita!’ I say. “Yes, but I can’t help it” says L: I say, it is going rather far. But if you could be here by 4 on Thursday, with Udolpho and Behn, we should be very grateful

Yr
Virginia

I hope Nigel [Vita’s younger son] is all right. Give him my love.

Berg

[]

1802: To T. S. Eliot

24th August 1927

Typewritten

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

My dear Tom,

I’m glad to think that we now have another subject in common—motor cars. Did Leonard tell you how our entire life is spent driving, cleaning, dodging in and out of a shed, measuring miles on maps, planning expeditions, going expeditions, being beaten back by the rain, eating sandwiches on high roads, cursing cows, sheep, bicyclists, and when we are at rest talking of nothing but cars and petrol? Ours is a Singer.

But the business of this letter must be put through. Will you come and stay for the week end of the 24th September? It is some way off; it is the last before we leave; we shall be alone; for all these reasons we think you must come. Needless to say, a car will meet you and take you.

What on earth makes you think I was at Pontigny? I’ve never even been asked, and I understand that an invitation is necessary. No; I was far better employed—living in luxury and purity of spirit with your compatriots Miss Sands and Miss Hudson near Dieppe. For the cooking alone I would sell my soul twice over. Then there was M. Jacques Blanche. On the table lay the Adelphi and the New Criterion.

Keynes is at Firle. We will take you over there. They have the highest opinion of you—Heaven knows why. I thought your poem rather a nice one, myself. But I dont like these authors’ civilities.

Ottoline was devoted to me; I made a very good impression that Sunday you rang up and were so short with her; but I undid it that same night by writing a letter in which I compared her to a Dolphin shedding its scales. Philip came round and told me she said I didnt understand her mystic side. [Richard] Aldington I know nothing about, so must let that thrust of yours remain unmet; but I think he belongs to the Murry world, where dog eats dog.

But we will go at length into all these matters when we meet.

No policeman has yet called. Why should he? Are you taking a house?

Yours affly
Virginia

Houghton Library, Harvard University

[]

1803: To Saxon Sydney-Turner

29th Aug. 1927

Monk’s House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

My dear Saxon,

I am much chastened and humiliated by finding the 4 volumes of Mrs Radcliffe on my plate,—a lovely edition—when I only asked you for a loan. However, it is most opportune, and I am most grateful. But you should not be so extravagant. You will have a pauper’s burial, I make no doubt. But if I survive I shall be among the grateful at your graveside. I think, as far as I have got, that Mrs Radcliffe is a remarkably good writer. I can’t see why she is a mere laughing stock at all. She writes like a lady (and the ladies of England knew how to write, anyhow until 1850, when a rot set in) and she has a beautiful sense of landscape. So far, which is the end of vol. one, I have met nothing to raise a laugh, except a hole in the drawing-room floor where the family papers seem to be kept. But why not? I expect Jane Austen went too far the other way; and I’m not sure I shan’t lead a Radcliffe relief party: but it remains to finish Udolpho, of which I see little chance so long as I am interrupted by the visits of friends in motor cars.

I have to scratch out every other word, my hand trembles so, partly with heat, partly with rage. I have just been over to Asheham to look for mushrooms, and find a railway with little trucks being built in the field, and a great chalk pit dug out in the hollow behind. There is an engine at work, and I can only suppose that they are starting some damnable lime works, and killing all my ghosts. I doubt whether this country will be possible much longer.

I hope Barbara [Bagenal] and Judith [her daughter] are now recovered. Give her, Barbara I mean, my love.

It is the first hot day we have had, and I shall spend the evening reading Udolpho. Many thanks: but remember the pauper’s grave, and Stagg and me weeping in rusty crape.

Yours
V.W.

Sussex

[]

1804: To Vanessa Bell

[end August 1927]

[Monk’s House], Rodmell, [Sussex]

Dearest,

We have already accepted the Keynes’ for dinner on Friday. What we suggest is that we should come to tea with you, go on to them, and then, if possible, induce them to come round after dinner for the fire works—if that suits you—I don’t suppose they want much inducement. Has Lydia got full use of her legs?—after not being thought about so long. My great toe is quite numb. However these frivolities are ill timed, as I have an awful confession to make—really something ghastly: Either Nelly has thrown away the [embroidery] design you lent me, or the puppy has eaten it. It disappeared completely yesterday, after I had been working at it the night before, What am I to do to express my apologies? I had traced it exactly onto the canvas. Could you re-paint it if I brought this? [Raymond] Mortimer admired it so much that I half suspect him. I will write you a story in return, but then you dont think much of stories.

I wrote the Tiltoniad in such a hurry that I think a good many indiscretions, not to say indecencies, may have crept in. Also it is very vulgar. I think it would be better to keep it for the Bells alone; unless you go through it and blue pencil it, for which you have my permission.

I am stained with blue all over. For Gods sake take up the making of wall papers. I’m sick of the long monotony of distemper, besides which, when dry it is totally different from what one expects.

No: Ka [Arnold-Forster] is still to come—She asked herself, having been dreaming of Rupert [Brooke]. Why can’t she ever wake up from the year 1911? There she sticks with Rupert copulating in Berlin and Dudley Ward and Gwen and Jacques [Raverat]. Pah!

Mortie [Raymond Mortimer] was as fresh as a lark, and as chirpy as a sparrow, as lively as a trout, and as—in short highly agreeable company: but then tastes differ, and when you tell me you’re having Saxon and Barbara for a week or two, also Hope Bagenal, I turn up my nose.

Are you going to stay with Ethel at Dieppe?

Yr B

Dont let Quentin come this week: as we’re having Vita and going out; but next I hope.

Berg

[]

1805: To V. Sackville-West

Friday, Sept 2nd [1927]

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

Dearest Mrs N:

Well its all settled. Lady G. Wellesley has bought me. She paid £25 thousand down and the rest on mortgage, so I’m her’s for life. I have the use of the Rolls Royce and wine to taste.

Speaking sober prose, however, I wont belong to the two of you, or to the one of you, if the two of us belong to the one. In short, if Dotty’s yours, I’m not. A profound truth is involved which I leave you to discover. It is too hot to argue: and I’m too depressed.

It aint so much that I’m a bad writer though that I am, as that I’m a sold soul. The body to Lady G. W: the soul to Mrs Van Doren. Here am I bound hand and foot to write an article on the works of a man called Hemingway. There are 3 more to follow. For this I shall be paid £120. Not a penny more do I earn as long as I live; so help me God. Rather would I go without shoes, stockings, facepowder, love; be ashamed of me if you like; tell me to my face you cant be seen in the street with me; may my stairs rot, and my pictures fall to the ground, and rats devour my carpet and linen; may the thistle sow itself in my drawing room, and the barley grow where my pillow used to be—write for the Americans again, write for money again, I will not.

I’m in a temper. How I longed to write the first page of The Moths [The Waves] this morning! And after this I’m tied to Romance and Psychology—as if I knew anything about that: now I do know one or two facts about moths: and they must keep.

Then I’m quite alone. Leonard went up after all; but I don’t suppose you could have come. And next Thursday—will you come then? I’ll promise to be sweet as honey, soft as silk. Let me know.

If anything comes of the Wellesley-Monro marriage, the fruits belong to me, not to you. After all, the idea was mine: you only did the menial work. Anyhow, it was a triumph, if not for the art of poetry, at least for the life of Dotty. Monro will cease chewing the relics of his dinner: he will fall in love with her; and so she is happily launched on a career of exaltations, renunciations, explanations, tergiversations: This is what some people call life. I dont. How cross I am! The only cheerful event was walking with Pinker through a field of clouded yellows this afternoon. The Clouded Yellow [butterfly] has played more part in my life than almost any other body or thing. Then Pinker swam in a dew pond. And now, dearest, I must wash, and catch the 3 penny bus into Lewes, and meet Leonard, and drive out to dine with the Keynes. Lydia will sing “My ear rings, my ear rings:” old Mr. Sheppard of King’s will act the part of a Regency Buck; we shall sit out under the downs. Nessa will come across with holes in her stockings—Quentin will come across with a hole in his trousers. I shall think, “How Shakespeare would have loved us!” for this sort of thing, the gramophone playing Mozart, the stars, the heat, the combination of shabbiness and splendour (we are a very good looking family) always starts my tears. How many phrases I shall make,—which will die like falling stars, all that my article on Mr Hemingway may be written and earn me £120 pounds. So good night

Virginia Woolf

Berg

[]

1806: To Ethel Sands

2nd Sept [1927]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, [Sussex]

Dearest Ethel,

Here (or will be) is your Disraeli [by André Maurois] which I have enjoyed very much, though I think you say you didn’t. But then I envy Frenchmen their French so much that it casts a glamour, I suppose.

I heard from Leigh Ashton the other day that both he and you are looking for a working desk for me. It is most angelic of you. But I’m afraid—unless you should have already found one—that I must put it off till next summer. My room is so damp—dark sweats break out on the walls and ooze up underneath one’s feet—that I think I must have what they call a damp course put in before I buy anything nice. But next summer when I am dry and have two water closets and a bathroom I shall consider that I’ve done my duty by the decencies, and rush to M. Benoni. It was very good of you to remember it, and to inspire Leigh Ashton.

We still do nothing but talk about motors. Most afternoons you would see Leonard and me hauling the Singer in and out of the cowshed, or greasing, or cleaning, or running it backwards up a bank, because the engine’s jammed. But its a heavenly invention—We motor all over Sussex—to Bodiam, Herstmonceux and so on, and have motor picnics, and compare our engines, and deride the Keynes’—who have a Morris Cowley, secondhand. You can imagine Nessa’s derision. But my engine runs sweeter than hers—tell her so, please, with my love, next time you see her. I hope you are enjoying yourselves. You must be. Merely to eat at Auppegard is enough. I hope your chauffeur caught lots of trout and that the white pinkish eyed dog is well, and that Nan isn’t lumping us all together with the Colefaxes and the Morrells. Please assure her I’m different. Vita came over the other day, very garish, in bright autumn tints: oranges; violets; not—the tints—very nice, but I forebore to say “Ethel thinks you dress disgracefully”. So tactful am I.

Then Clive is still talking about love: and he still says Virginia knows nothing about love, and then I say what about Philip Morrell?—and so on. Love to Nan.

Yrs V.W.

Wendy Baron

[]

1807: To Lytton Strachey

3rd Sept. 1927

Monk’s House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

Dearest Lytton,

A rumour has reached me via Nessa and Raymond that you aren’t well. I hope this may be untrue; but if true, please bestir yourself and get well instantly. If you can’t sleep, try Audit ale; very effective, with no evil consequences, and any fellow of any college, of whom you must know millions, can get it for you. I was going to recommend the Mysteries of Udolpho; they send one into a mooney trance which is very refreshing; but also Mrs Radcliffe has her moments of inspiration. Her landscapes are sublime. I adore soft music at evening, and indeed I think Jane Austen might have done worse than take a leaf from Radcliffe’s book. This you may put down, with other notorious faults, to my unfortunate romanticism—I can’t help it. What’s more, I don’t want to help it. I have come to a time of life when I can help nothing.

This was, in fact, what I was saying to Sheppard last night, at Tilton, when we picked the bones of Maynard’s grouse of which there were three to eleven people. This stinginess is a constant source of delight to Nessa—her eyes gleamed as the bones went round. We had a brilliant entertainment afterwards in the new Loggia, with a rustic audience. Sheppard half naked, tightly swathed in red silk, shingled as to his head, with coloured garters, was Miss T. [Todd?] to perfection: Maynard was crapulous and obscene beyond words, lifting his left leg and singing a song about Women. Lydia was Queen Victoria dancing to a bust of Albert. What did the yokels make of it? I wish you had been there—which reminds me, there was a good deal of talk about you at dinner, some for you, I, of course, against; some saying you had a good influence, Sheppard and I sticking it out it was wholly vile. I said, if you drop a little salt on a snail it foams. Lytton was the salt: Sheppard the foam. He said this summed up, admirably and completely, his entire life, which has been a failure. That round faced innocent [Cecil] Taylor was there, and seemed to take it all very seriously.

All the rest of the news is motor car gossip. We flash through Sussex almost daily; drop in after dinner; visit ruins; muse, by retired moats, of which Sussex is full; surprise Colonels—it is a perfect invention. What we did without it passes comprehension. Most of the Victorian horror seems explicable by the fact that they walked, or sat behind stout sweating horses.

Do you know the story of L.E.L.?—the poetess, who committed suicide, as some say; but others feel sure was murdered? Your blue stocking Hampstead friend, Enfield, has written a life of her which we are to publish. If only every good spectacled Don and schoolgirl did not think themselves Lytton Strachey and proceed to put it into practice! But I have made this complaint not for the first, nor the second, nor the last time. For God’s sake, come out with Betsy [Elizabeth and Essex, 1928] and make them all skip. It’s better in French: I have just read Disraeli by Maurois.

They are starting a cement works at Asheham. A railway line runs round the field, and the down behind is nothing but chalk. Isn’t it damnable? What is to become of us? Are we to migrate to the South of France? or Rome? or where?

Raymond was here last week end, very polished and agreeable; and I daresay it’s supercilious to refer to the end of his nose, or his clothes, or his modernity which seems to me miraculous, as if he had already been to a lunch party which has not yet been given. Still,—Still, he’s very intelligent, which as the old Serpent [Lytton] used to say—in his fiery days when he branded so many of us for ever—is the only thing that matters. And Roger was here with a new theory about Lord Salisbury’s foreign policy which drove Leonard almost frantic. He has taken up meteorology, and is off to Vichy with Ha!! (if that’s how you spell her)

Morgan is coming here next week, and Dadie some time; but I hope I shall see you if you are at Charleston. I should like you to see me driving along the Eastbourne road at 50 miles an hour.

Leonard sends his love.

Yr V.W.

Frances Hooper

[]

1808: To Vanessa Bell

Tuesday [6 September 1927]

Postcard

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

We shall be ready to go on picnic tomorrow if fine between 2 and 3, if you like to come: but can’t go Thursday or Friday.

V.W.

We shd. be much pleased if you and family would come to tea anyhow

Berg

[]

1809: To Vanessa Bell

Friday [9 September 1927]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

Leonard is away, so I can’t answer for our coming for certain on Sunday; humanly speaking we will—and bring as you so kindly suggest, Saxon, Barbara, Sibyl Colefax, who’s taking Firle Place for 6 years: also, perhaps, one of the Oliviers, and Morgan.

But I dont see whats the use of my wasting vocables on you, since the only upshot is confusion irreparable.

Think of my post card, with its explicit directions not to come after 3 if it was fine, but to come before 5 if it was wet—and what a mess you made of it.

Hoping to see you Sunday

Your old familia
Wolf

Berg

[]

1810: To V. Sackville-West

Sunday [11 September 1927]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

Here, enclosed, you will find a type written document—not intimate, but precise. It would be quite a good idea, I think; but for God’s sake don’t let Dottie think of it, except from the point of view of her own amusement.

I think of nothing but Laughton Place. Leonard is enthusiastic. We have written to ask if we can buy—and are ready to pawn our shoe laces to raise funds. Of course they’ll say they won’t, or will ask too much. But suppose they did! My word!—there would be an entire barn given up to Vita: and the garden: and the moat: and scraping off wall papers and so on—one’s life would vanish into Laughton like smoke. But we shant hear till Tuesday, I suppose.

Morgan is here; we’re going to Charleston for a birthday party. So I am hurried.

I say, I was ashamed and furious to have put you to all that trouble. I had a vision you would rush to meet Harold, skid, be killed—all my fault. Never a hitch with the motor except when you’re here.

I dreamt all night that you were going back to Teheran by air. How I raged, and woke to hear the rain.

Yr V.W.
Virginia Woolf

Berg

[]

1811: To Harold Nicolson

Tuesday [13 September 1927]

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

Dear Harold,

Yes, the flattery was delicious, exquisite, charming and certainly would have been effective, had I not already written to the Tribune and said I would do your book: But I’m rather nervous. You say its out on Sept 16th: you dont mean October, I suppose? If it is Sept: I am afraid they may have done it already. However they are proving so incompetent, that I’m taking the law into my own hands, and will do it unless they positively forbid. I’m afraid though that I shall have to mush you up with Harriet Martineau and some general reflections, as it is to be a general review, a commentary or whatever they call it. I am so bothered with these articles that I dont think its worth it, even for the money. One polishes off Hemingway and without a second’s pause plunges into Shelley: and I find it difficult to get up indignation about Harriet, or even to care whether she spells her name with two ts.

Anyhow,—this is genuine, because I’m not, at the moment, asking you for anything, though no doubt I soon shall—I shall be very happy to write about a real book, (I mean Some People) instead of these Stuffed Americans.

Love to Vita: whom I shall soon cease to love, tell her. Clive’s rhapsodies about her go too far. I am dragged round and round the garden at Charleston listening to her praises. Not a quality, he says, is lacking:

Yours Ever
Virginia

Leonard says if Vita would send him an itinerary he would motor us over to you, if we were asked.

Berg

[]

1812: To V. Sackville-West

Thursday [15 September 1927]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Thanks for Dottie’s letter. It sounds as if Heaven had brought us together. But I daresay some fatal flaw will develop. We would like to come over for an hour or two either Sunday or Monday about 2.30, I suppose—But this is doubtful, so dont alter your long country walk, or whatever it is.

Laughton [Place] has become a possibility—its frightfully exciting—but I wish poor Philip Ritchie wouldn’t die. I wasn’t very nice to him: anyhow its a pity—dear, dear. So be very careful, and dont get ill, or be smashed somehow—Please, dearest.

Also, could you lend me Mrs [Olwen Ward] Campbells Shelley? Could you send it? I’ll be sure to return it. But perhaps you haven’t got it.

Shall you come next Thursday? I shall be alone.

Yr Virginia

Any Foreign Office news yet? No: I suppose not. Many thanks for itinerary If we don’t come, we’ll write to Dotty

Berg

[]

1813: To V. Sackville-West

Wednesday [21 September 1927]

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

The M.S. has just come. So sorry I forgot it.

I shall be in London on Friday till 4—no chance of seeing you, I suppose—If so, write to 52 Tavistock Sqre.

Very hurried, so I cant write. And rather melancholy. This I’ll explain when we meet, if you are kind.

Yr Virginia

Do let me know any news from the F.O. Is your cold gone?

Berg

[]

1814: To V. Sackville-West

Sunday [25 September 1927]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Look here, I want to be told,

(1) how you are, truthfully.

(2) any news from Foreign Office?

Hows Ben? Anybody else got it [flu]? My God, I do think you deserve death and disaster for coming to London in that flood after a temperature of 104! But tell me truly how you are.

Then (this is all dull business, written in a rush going off with Dadie to Charleston, and still rather melancholy and cross, and unable to get anything finished) then, about Thursday. Can you come? Let me know as soon as you can. Leonard I think wants me to go up to London with him, but if you can come, I’d much rather—yes much rather—see you. Only, again, there’ll be no cook: no food, except of Bartholomew’s cooking. If you’re feeling ill, dont take risks.

But I own I’d like to see you. Then I’d tell you about my melancholy and a thousand other things Its the last chance of a night before London’s chastity begins.

Let me hear on all these points, especially your health and coming here, at once.

Yr Virginia

Berg

[]

1815: To Vanessa Bell

Thursday, Sept. 29th [1927]

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

Dearest,

How good, how faithful, how tender, how devoted I am, to sit down to write to you. And I’ve given up hope of reward. And Heaven knows if you’re alive. You were last heard of at Crawley. All the children were popping their heads (Angelica’s is lovelier than Judith’s [Bagenal]) out of the window to look for you. You may still be marooned at Crawley, or dead, or at Gordon Square: mystery shrouds you, (and by the way, it occurs to me that you are, fundamentally, mysterious) Still I write.

I have a little favour to ask of you, it is true. Could I, if necessity obliges, lodge at 37 [Gordon Square] from Monday or Tuesday to Thursday next week? I should only want a bed, and cook my own breakfast: I’ve had to let Nelly go home to a wedding, and we can’t get in to 52 [Tavistock Square] till Thursday. Should the conditions have become intolerable, as they threaten, I think I shall depart, leaving Leonard, who means to stay in spite of everything.

But this is only a bolt hole in case of emergency. And I daresay you are occupied at 37. So dont bother to upset anything.

I had an odd interview, entirely unexpected, with Clive, when we came to get Leonards hat and you were at Crawley. He suddenly became moved, indeed emotional—as I expect he did to you—and told me, as I’ve no doubt he told you—how he has found a new love. In case mine may be a different version, I will repeat. Before leaving London he said, he met an entrancing girl, less than half his age, witty, beautiful, sought after—He had an instant success; but could not believe that she was serious. Many obstacles prevented their meeting, and extreme secrecy was essential, as she is closely supervised. However, beyond belief, they had four days together last month of entrancing happiness. Incredible though it sounds she has declared herself passionately in love with him. Their jaunt succeeded completely. Though he dare not trust himself, and does his best to control himself, he now believes that the feeling may be permanent on her part. If so, his happiness will be incredible. He is living in the wildest state of excitement—He has letters and telegrams from her incessantly. He was going to lunch with her yesterday, and on Monday when he comes back, the drama will begin. He swore that he could not on any account give her name, for reasons which affect her, not him. He says that they can only meet at long intervals, as she is much occupied, and often, I gathered, away. But he hopes that it will mean that he sees more of his old friends than for some time past. Not a word about Mary. Leonard came in or I think—we were both by this time in such a state of emotion—he would have told me who she is.

I guess Valerie Taylor, though he talked of her with the appearance of indifference. She is young etc: also her acting makes her often away: also she has some liaison with some man which might make secrecy necessary. However, you may know all, in which case, please tell me:

There is a sense here of complete disruption, finality and misery—It is pouring hard and blowing a gale. I have had a visit of two hours from old Mr Hawkesford [Rector of Rodmell] which pleased me, and he said we could now get £2,000 for Monks House: in which case I think I shall sell, and buy a villa on the Coast of Italy.

Love to Ethel and Nan, provided you are not settled down more or less permanently at Crawley. We were amused, indeed pleased, at least Leonard was, to hear you had both failed at your [driving] exam.

Let me know about 37.

and write
and kiss Duncan
Yr B.

Berg

[]

1816: To Julian Bell

[September 1927]

Typewritten

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex?]

My dear Julian

Could you possibly show your good heart by bringing me back fifty voltigeur cigars? in a box.

One declares them, and they make no fuss. But dont bother if in hurry and torment unutterable.
I will repay.

But I expect this is too late.

I am as you see inventing an entirely new style, but what about yours? Come and dine on your way through.

Aunt Virginia Woolf

Berg

[]

1817: To Vanessa Bell

Wednesday [5 October 1927]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest

It was angelic of you to wire, and I’m most grateful. I should certainly have gone to 37 had it continued to pour, as what with a broken pump and Mrs Bartholomew life was hardly worth living. But it suddenly became warm and sunny, and so has remained. In fact since Sunday we have had the best weather this year—quite astonishing—I hope you have too.

Your letter has just come. No. I never said a word to Nelly [Boxall] about Fred, nor did Leonard. But Leonard thought she suspected something, and supposed Fred had given her a hint. If you like, I’ll tell her not to say anything: but I’ll wait till I see you.

I saw Vita who is positive it isn’t Valerie Taylor [whom Clive loved]. Valerie had been staying with her, and had talked of Clive with apparent indifference: and discussed a washing bill and so on. The mystery will be solved soon I suppose: except that the lady seems to be out of London a good deal. We went for a drive yesterday, came back through Brighton, and getting out to eat a bun ran straight into Mary and Barbara! Mary was friendly in the extreme, and said they had been on the point of coming over to see us with Leslie Jowitt. We had tea together and were all as amiable as possible. She [Mary] looks, I think, a little wrinkled and arid, and seemed anxious for news. She asked if we had had a very exciting summer, upon which I said “Nothing to what the autumn’s going to be!” and could only get out of it rather lamely, on being cross examined, by supposing that there might be an eruption, or the animals might break from the Zoo. However, all passed off; and she kissed her hand to me on parting, which, remembering I hadn’t seen her since our set to was a little queer.

As for Clive, I give him up. Among other things that day he said, as I thought, that of course you were sharing the money, which meant that he was not really much richer: in fact I understood that you had already got your share. I think if nothing happens this time Bloomsbury must present a round robin. Its outrageous if it all goes on some new parrokeet. I dont suppose you’ll get this letter, by the way. Ring up and suggest your coming or our coming, theres a good Dolph. Leonard will discuss the proofs—he is going into it.

Yr VW.

I’m so sorry about Duncan—I hope he is all right again.

Berg

[]

1818: To Julian Bell

[October 1927?]

[Monk’s House], Rodmell, [Sussex]

My dear Julian,

I submit the enclosed card with its reference to Fred [Harris?] for your arbitration. As I read it, I understood that both Fred and I were implicated in the same astonishing conduct. I think you will agree that the construction is such that it will bear almost any interpretation.

I also enclose a letter which you may give your mother, but I should like it back—It asks certain questions about you and Quentin which I have had, alas, to answer in the negative.

Yr
Virginia

Berg

[]

Letters 1819-1843 (October–December 1927)

1819: To V. Sackville-West

Thursday [6 October 1927]

Tavistock Square, [W.C.1]

It strikes me—but I may be wrong—that you may be up tomorrow, dining with Sibyl, dining with Clive, God knows.

But if you would like to see me—I say if—I can be in, alone, tomorrow (which is Friday I think) undern, or tea, or after tea. Only in that case ring me up before 10, or I shall be in the basement.

It would be heavenly delicious to see you: but I hardly expect it.

I’m frightfully excited: I will tell you why. Just back: Pinker has messed copiously in the hall.

I hope lunch was good at the Metropole [Hotel, Brighton] on Tuesday.

I had such a brilliant and agitating tea party in Brighton on Tuesday [with Mary Hutchinson].

Berg

[]

1820: To V. Sackville-West

9th Oct. [1927]

52 Tavistock Sqre. [W.C.1]

Look, dearest what a lovely page this is, and think how, were it not for the screen and the [Mary] Campbell, it might all be filled to the brim with lovemaking unbelievable: indiscretions incredible: instead of which, nothing shall be said but what a Campbell behind the screen might hear. Really, its worse than being bound in morocco by Lytton, and read by all the tarts of the moment. Which reminds me, do you know a man of that persuasion called Cecil Beaton—who wants to photograph me, and Osbert will comment upon the portrait in a catalogue; and shall I go and be done? I say no: I say I am living perpetually in Sussex. I say, judging from your style and manner (this is what I say to Cecil Beaton) you are a Mere Catamite. Clive who came in yesterday, dropping with sleep after what I understood was an orgy, confirmed this. Why was he dropping with sleep? Oh, he said, after they’d all gone, he got into bed, but couldn’t shut his eyes. Being in a close costive contrary mood I did not egg him on. So he went to Paris, and will be back next week, and then I’m to dine with him. Aint it romantic—this visionary and aetherial presence brooding diaphanous over Gordon Square, like a silver spangled cloud? What are we to call her? Clive bursts into Nessa who’s solidly carving mutton for the children and rambles about, romanticising about Life, London, Autumn fires being but a man of 46 at his prime. Only in August I was thinking he would string himself from a lamppost. But Vita, my dear, please not a word to anyone about Clive’s money and Nessa: that would be fatal, and no doubt he has honourable intentions and will make a rich woman of her next quarter day. She seems perfectly serene.

Here occurs a terrific gulf. Millions of things I want to say can’t be said. You know why. You know for what a price—walking the lanes with Campbell, you sold my love letters. Very well. So we will skip all that and move on to Mrs Wells, and death, and the funeral at Golder’s Green, to which I’m going tomorrow, if I can scrape together a sufficiency of clothes. Wells wrote Leonard the oddest post card. I wont say that it was a picture post card, with a view of Easton Church, but practically that; and just a line to say “my wife died last night; or we had hoped to ask you and Mrs Woolf down for a week end.” I’m going to the funeral to see whats done with the bodies of unbelievers. What fun! How I love ceremonies, and odd collocations (is that allowable?) of the human kind!

Yesterday morning I was in despair: You know that bloody book which Dadie and Leonard extort, drop by drop, from my breast? Fiction, or some title to that effect [Phases of Fiction]. I couldn’t screw a word from me; and at last dropped my head in my hands: dipped my pen in the ink, and wrote these words, as if automatically, on a clean sheet: Orlando: A Biography. No sooner had I done this than my body was flooded with rapture and my brain with ideas. I wrote rapidly till 12. Then I did an hour to Romance. So every morning I am going to write fiction (my own fiction) till 12; and Romance till 1. But listen; suppose Orlando turns out to be Vita; and its all about you and the lusts of your flesh and the lure of your mind (heart you have none, who go gallivanting down the lanes with Campbell)—suppose there’s the kind of shimmer of reality which sometimes attaches to my people, as the lustre on an oyster shell (and that recalls another Mary) suppose, I say, that Sibyl next October says “Theres Virginia gone and written a book about Vita” and Ozzie [Dickinson] chaws with his great chaps and Byard [of Heinemann] guffaws, Shall you mind? Say yes, or No: Your excellence as a subject arises largely from your noble birth. (But whats 400 years of nobility, all the same?) and the opportunity thus given for florid descriptive passages in great abundance. Also, I admit, I should like to untwine and twist again some very odd, incongruous strands in you: going at length into the question of Campbell; and also, as I told you, it sprung upon me how I could revolutionise biography in a night: and so if agreeable to you I would like to toss this up in the air and see what happens. Yet, of course, I may not write another line.

You will come on Wednesday undern? You will write, now, this instant, a nice humble letter of duty and devotion to me.

I am reading Knole and The Sackvilles. Dear me; you know a lot: you have a rich dusky attic of a mind. O yes, I want very much to see you.

Yr V.W.
 (thats because of Campbell)

Berg

[]

1821: To V. Sackville-West

Friday, Oct. 13th [14th 1927]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

“Well thank God Vita aint coming” I said, putting the telegram down with a snort.

“And why do you say that?” asked Leonard, looking up from his pocket handkerchief. To which I had no answer ready: but the true one was: Because my nose is red.

The poor Wolves have been having colds in the head. Mine I caught in a dentists waiting room: but thats neither here nor there. The point is the incident symbolises our friendship. Now think carefully what I mean by that. There’s a dying hue over it: it shows the hectic dolphin colours of decay. Never do I leave you without thinking, its for the last time. And the truth is, we gain as much as we lose by this. Since I am always certain you’ll be off and on with another next Thursday week (you say so yourself, bad creature, at the end of your last letter, which is where the viper carries its sting) since all our intercourse is tinged with this melancholy on my part and desire to be white nosed and so keep you half an instant longer, perhaps, as I say we gain in intensity what we lack in the sober comfortable virtues of a prolonged and safe and respectable and chaste and cold blooded friendship.

I am writing at great speed. For the third time I begin a sentence, The truth is I’m so engulfed in Orlando I can think of nothing else. It has ousted romance, psychology and the rest of that odious book completely. Tomorrow I begin the chapter which describes Violet [Trefusis] and you meeting on the ice. The whole thing has to be gone into thoroughly. I am swarming with ideas. Do give me some inkling what sort of quarrels you had. Also, for what particular quality did she first choose you? Look here: I must come down and see you, if only to choose some pictures. I want one of a young Sackville (male) temp. James 1st: another of a young Sackville (female) temp. George 3rd. Please lend yourself to my schemes—It will be a little book, about 30,000 words at most, and at my present rate which is feverish (I think of nothing but you all day long, in different guises, and Violet and the ice and Elizabeth and George the 3rd) I shall have done it by Christmas. That’s to say, if we dont go to Russia: Do you want me to go to Russia? We’ve been asked to go there, free, by the Government, to celebrate the anniversary of Revolution for one month. Dont you think one should take the chance, buy furs, and risk the cold? Tell me what you think. I must settle by Tuesday.

Orlando will be a little book, with pictures and a map or two. I make it up in bed at night, as I walk the streets, everywhere. I want to see you in the lamplight, in your emeralds. In fact, I have never more wanted to see you than I do now—just to sit and look at you, and get you to talk, and then rapidly and secretly, correct certain doubtful points. About your teeth now and your temper. Is it true you grind your teeth at night? Is it true you love giving pain? What and when was your moment of greatest disillusionment? And then you say there’s a squalid reason, the flux I suppose, and you cant come! Still my nose was red, so I forgive you.

This is written 500 words to the minute with Leonard looking suspicious in the arm chair, Pinker snoring and Nelly [Boxall] playing fox trots on the gramophone upstairs.

I’m to see Dotty alone, at night, next week. But then she bought me—paid £20,000 down. About Laughton [Place]. How you upset me! But the place is bewitched. Seen with you adorable: with Leonard utterly detestable, so that the very thought depresses me.

Sixty pounds just received from America for my little Sapphist story of which the Editor has not seen the point, though he’s been looking for it in the Adirondacks.

Please tell me beforehand when you will come, and for how long: unless the dolphin has died meanwhile and its colours are those of death and decomposition. If you’ve given yourself to Campbell, I’ll have no more to do with you, and so it shall be written, plainly, for all the world to read in Orlando. Tell me if you will come and when: because I’m already rather harassed by decayed actresses, Treasury Officials and so on.

Dearest Mrs Nicolson, Goodnight

V. (for Vita)
W. (for Campbell)

Berg

[]

1822: To V. Sackville-West

[15 October 1927]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Oh how damned! I’d been hoping for London, unreasonably.

Yes, I shall be free all Tuesday; come as early as you can.

I am so unhappy.

Will the people there be an awful bore? Shall you hate it? Does Harold? You won’t go for long will you?

Yr
Virginia

Berg

[]

1823: To Julian Bell

16th Oct. 1927

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Julian,

I was very glad to get your poems. As I have often told you, I consider that any wits you may find in your head (for writing I mean) come solely from me; so I think I have a right to see your works. I may be partial of course; but I like these poems very much. I will try to tell you what I think good and bad in them. In the first place I think you have sometimes some very nice and original lines which express what you have seen yourself; for instance; “in rain bright air”; “The lantern closes, leaves an instants dark, Then lights the brown beads on the pear trees bark.” “Or the draught moved curtain scrapes the edge of the windowsill”

I like the freedom from any hackneyed or conventional phrasing. It makes one feel that you have looked at the thing until you have, by looking at it, found the words which express it yourself, without thinking what other people would expect you to say. I think this is probably the right way to begin. But of course you will have to learn to express yourself more fluently. I do not mean by that only that you will have to get greater command of words and use more of them. I think you will have to learn to leave out details, even though they are good in themselves, so as to give a more generalised view. Some of the poems are very difficult to read because they pile up so many separate facts that one cannot put them together. The Moths avoids this fault, and gives one a much more complete idea therefore of your emotion. I think I like it best, but that is partly because I like the subject so much. Of course I understand that you are not trying to write about moods so much as about your feelings as a naturalist. But I think both Jefferies and Hudson succeed because they are very careful what they observe; I mean they do not make a catalogue of things, but choose this that and the other. I admit that in poetry you get greater intensity than in prose, and have the right to be more jerky and disconnected. But I think you carry this right a little far. These are the chief criticisms I have to make; too much detail; too jerky; not sufficiently seen as a whole. On the other side; vividness; truthfulness, and often some striking observation. Wouldn’t it be a good thing to write more prose so as to get more freedom of expression? But as I began by saying, I like these poems very much, and think you should certainly continue to write them. I will always give you good advice. I will keep them till I see you, (which I hope will be soon); and not show them. Leonard opened the envelope by mistake, but did not read them.

I should be very much excited to hear about Cambridge any time you would write and tell me a little gossip. Kiss [J. T.] Sheppard on the top of his head from me.

Your affectionate
Aunt Virginia

Quentin Bell

[]

1824: To V. Sackville-West

Friday [21 October? 1927]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

I had a slight suspicion/contrition after telephoning to you that it was awkward for you to have us on Sunday—anyhow for me to stay the night—servants, plans, family, anything (I only mean I’m not afraid of your not wanting me; only of what one calls circumstances.) So please say honestly. There’s no reason on earth for walking this Sunday. My questions about your past can wait till you’re in London. I should hate forever to be for an instant a burden to you. And you would never offend your devoted poor mole whatever you said or did. except by letting her bore you.

So if there’s any reason against, Ring up. If we dont hear we shall come between 4 and 5.

Berg

[]

1825: To V. Sackville-West

Sunday [23 October 1927]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Dearest Creature,

I’m afraid you are feeling lonely tonight. I wish I were with you. Harold is a very nice man, and I’m glad I know him.

Would Wednesday, Thursday suit you for me to come, suppose Friday was difficult? But I’m not sure. What used you and Lord Lascelles to talk about?

Am I to buy a moleskin coat?

Are you well?

Yr
Virginia

I’ve sold Orlando in America.

Berg

[]

1826: To V. Sackville-West

[30 October 1927]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

1. Should I hire a wig for you? or can you make up?

2. D’you think Valerie Taylor would do for the Russian Princess, if disguised?

3. Many thanks for pleasant week end.

4. Let me know what time Wednesday.

5. Have you been eating mushrooms?

6.7.8.9.10. What a nice creature I am.

11. and 12. Will this letter go into the cupboard?

13. Bring photograph of Orlando.

14. dined with 14 stockbrokers last night

Berg

[]

1827: To V. Sackville-West

Friday [4 November? 1927]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Shall I see Orlando next week?

Say yes.

But when?

Let me know in good time.

Was Orlando presented at Court?

Poor Virginia
in a d—d
hurry

Berg

[]

1828: To V. Sackville-West

Sunday [6 November 1927]

52 T.[avistock] S[quare, W.C.1]

If you haven’t already got the man to do the photographs [at Knole], would you wait a little—The characters are sprouting up rather differently than I expected: and the pictures maynt fit (but the 2 Orlando’s certainly will) Also, Nessa and Duncan suggest that they would take photographs of group and dress them up, which would be rather exciting, and lends itself to many new ideas. But if taken, all right.

I shall be alone here to dinner on Thursday. Why not come then—if you’re coming—and let us have a lark? Come in the afternoon or any time

Thanks a million times for Book [Aphra Behn] which I see is Booming.

Goodnight.

Berg

[]

1829: To V. Sackville-West

Friday night [11 November 1927]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Dearest Creature,

You make me feel such a brute—and I didn’t mean to be. One can’t regulate the tone of one’s voice, I suppose; for nothing I said could in substance make you wretched for even half a second—only that you cant help attracting the flounderers—Nor you can; and its not your fault, or only partly. And I’m half, or 10th part, jealous, when I see you with the Valeries and the Marys: so you can discount that.

And thats all there is to it as far as I’m concerned. I’m happy to think you do care: for often I seem old, fretful, querulous, difficult (tho’ charming) and begin to doubt.

But enough of these megrims.

You’ll lunch here at one sharp on Monday wont you: bringing your curls and clothes. Nessa wants to photograph you at 2, that is if she thinks the Lenare too bad. I’m not sure.

Then, we might have some fun.

Clive’s just been in. No, its only old friendship—nothing more.

I’m just going to sleep in my Heal Bed; and you’re listening to Genesis in Sheffield—Good God.

Love, my dear honey

Yr Virginia

Berg

[]

1830: To Helen McAfee

14th Nov. 1927

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square WC 1

Dear Miss McAfee

I ought to have thanked you long ago for your cheque for my article Street Haunting, and for the copies of the Yale Magazine which reached me safely.

I shall be delighted to send you something more later.

I am afraid I put rather a higher price on my stories than on my articles that is to say I would ask £30 instead of £20; and I daresay this is more than the Yale Review would be able to give.

But if I do another article I shall be very glad to let you know about it in good time as you suggest.

With many thanks,

yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf
(Mrs Woolf)

Yale University

[]

1831: To V. Sackville-West

Wednesday night [16 November 1927]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Why no letter? I want to write one, but have no time—you have. This is to say, come to dinner on Monday with me alone. Please do. Lunch is a bore; and I dont think I can cheat the Press of an afternoon—the Xmas cards and things are beginning—And dinner means longer—for you can come early. And I ought to be dining with Sibyl.

So say you’ll come—I’ve a heap of things to ask you about: your first party etc—But Orlando’s bad and wont be out, if at all, till the Autumn. Come Monday then—and write a long long loving loving letter

V.

Tell me about Oxford [Vita’s lecture on Modern Poets].

Berg

[]

1832: To E. M. Forster

16th Nov. [1927]

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, [W.C.1]

Dear Morgan,

I’m not particularly inspired to repartee by your letter. But I reply:—You say “Each sentence leads to … a casket of which the key has unfortunately been mislaid, and until you can find your bunch I shall cease to hunt very anxiously for my own”

Very well—but then I’m not writing a book about fiction. If I were, I think I should hunt a little. As a reviewer, which is all I am, it seems to me within my province to point out that both bunches are lost.

I agree that Tolstoi “vitalises the guillotine” etc. But by means of art I think; admitting that I cant define the word.

No; Percy Lubbock [The Craft of Fiction, 1921] doesn’t “altogether satisfy” me. But then I dont agree with you that he’s a critic of genius. An able and painstaking pedant I should call him; who doesnt know what art is; so, though his method of judging novels as works of art interests me, his judgments dont.

V.

[in Virginia’s handwriting:]

The above is official and impersonal. Unofficially and personally I’m afraid I’ve hurt or annoyed you (perhaps I imagine it) I didn’t mean to. The article was cut down to fit The Nation, and the weight all fell in the same place. But I’m awfully sorry if I was annoying.

Berg

[]

1833: To V. Sackville-West

[18 November 1927]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

But I let you know about being alone on Monday the very moment I could—What a d—d bore.

Lunch is unromantic: still, better than nothing; so I shall expect you to turn up here at 5 to 1 on Monday and we’ll lunch out or here and sacrifice the afternoon—to love, not the Press, if Vita stands for love which I doubt. Then I’ll settle with you about everything and coming and French—Raymond and Kitty West are on me—

Virginia

Berg

[]

1834: To Clive Bell

Saturday night [19 November? 1927]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Dearest Clive

I’ve just finished your manuscript which indeed I couldn’t stop reading. I think it most brilliant, witty and suggestive—I’m sure its the best thing you’ve done—not a doubt of it. One or two suggestions perhaps I could make; but nothing of the least importance. You must go on with it. I want to have another look at it, as I’ve galloped through it, and then we must meet and talk about it. It seems to me, at first go off, full of really new and original things, and what a mercy to read anything so reasoned and written throughout.

But you must leave out your compliment to me. Yes: I’ve no doubt of its goodness—none whatever.

This is written hastily to thrust into Lottie’s hand as she goes out.

Yrs
V.W.

I thought I’d just tell you how good I think it.

Quentin Bell

[]

1835: E. M. Forster

21st Nov. [1927]

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Morgan,

I’m so glad I was not annoying—only wrong. (I dont think I’m as wrong as Arnold Bennett in the Standard, all the same.) But where we differ is I think plain from your letter. Both bunches have been lost, you say, “and yet we persist in reading fiction.” But I don’t. Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them. They seem to me wrong from start to finish—my own included. And I suppose I wanted you to say something to explain to me why I feel this. Naturally you didn’t, because you dont feel it. Youve lost your bunch; but still you go on. And I dont want to go on, either writing them or reading them. This only proves I think that I am not a novelist and should not criticise them either. As for your book [Aspects of the Novel]—its perfect I think, better than anything I could ever write; (I mean this) only it doesnt light up my own particular boggle. Never mind. It is delightful and brilliant beyond words.

I hope we shall come up for a night, and shall ask Julian to arrange about seeing you.

No; I dont care for his play either.

Yr
Virginia

Berg

[]

1836: To Julian Bell

Tuesday [22 November 1927]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Julian,

I was very glad to get your play. I dont think I like it as much as the other things you’ve shown me. I dont think its exactly dull; but I think its awkward and there’s not as much observation of character in it as there was in your devilish brilliant attack on me. This means that the jokes are rather obvious. You don’t make your people real enough to rouse interest: Still I did laugh. I have never written a play so I don’t know much about it. But I think you have to be frightfully careful not to sprawl about; but to hit every bird through the head. (This sporting metaphor may be wrong). Here you whack about rather at random, and so the birds fly away. I hope you will go on, and write and write and write—every sort of thing. I rather hope it wont be a novel. Anything is better than a novel. Try an autobiography. Try sporting sketches. Try ‘a day of my life’. Write long letters and send them to me.

I rather think we may come down for a night [to Cambridge] some time before the 7th. Could you get us a bedroom? I want to see you and Morgan also, who says he likes you very much. That is a tremendous compliment from Morgan. I would rather have it than a Gold Medal at a dog show as Nessa would say.

I’m going with her to see Quentin [at school] tomorrow. He is very hungry, so I’m taking him some scraps of bread, bones etc. I dont see why you envy him. Think of being a painter, my God!, when you might be a writer! Its a pleasant lazy life, I daresay, humming and hawing over one’s paper; but then so’s a cows.

I’ll bring your manuscripts if I come; or keep them if I dont.

I admit you made me laugh; and I liked some of your dialogue. If I criticise your writings, I shall tell you exactly what I think: on condition you don’t mind when I blame, and don’t think me being kind if I praise.

Your old Aunt
V.

Quentin Bell

[]

1837: To V. Sackville-West

Tuesday [22 November 1927]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

I’m awfully anxious to hear that everything has gone well. What an odious beginning to your day, I thought, at 9 this morning; and poor Ben waiting for the doctor. It was brown fog here. Write, if you aren’t tired out.

The poor little Mole [Virginia] died half an hour after you left: came up to snuggle: found no warmth; and so heaved once, and sighed, and was dead. Would you like the pelt kept for you? It was all very warm and cosy so long as you were here—odd that, driven and hunted as you are, you should yet be to me like a sunny patch on a hot bank. God—I’m angry that your time should be frittered and tittered like this. Nothing is more fidgetting and exasperating; and why should it be you, of all people? Because if I were to have the training of you, you might sit down and write a nice poem. However, you will: throw Harold to the sharks this summer—drown Lady Sackville; immure the boys: all crimes against relatives will be forgiven after this flagellation: Here am I cursing God because I have to go to Reading tomorrow and so cut short my morning’s work. You see, when, as with us, the mind’s bent one way, its physical and moral torture to unbend. The mere reeds in the river bed can take this turn or that—the Mary’s the Valerys the Dotties: what hurts them is concentration: But then they dont write poems; I’d forgotten Genesis. They dont even write novels (as bad as mine are.) At this point, Dottie rang up to ask us to an oyster supper after the Sitwells: had to confess I was already engaged to Clive, at which she sniffed rather.

I find Leonard’s going to a brother on Sunday; so perhaps I could come down on Saturday night as you suggest. But it might be nicer to put it off till you come back. I dont suppose I could do both—And you might (and I shouldn’t blame you) like an evening alone. Let me know any time before Saturday. Anyhow you’ll come as early as you can on Sunday. Would you bring Gorboduc, or whatever its called. Did you hear Hugh Walpole? And what are you doing at this moment? Leonard is lecturing, and I’m—you’ll be surprised to hear—reading 3 manuscripts and a book to review—Clever, aint I, to be able to write to you at the same moment.

Yes, it was very nice when you came in unexpected yesterday. Clive sent me a huge box of chocolates—Am I six years old? But they’re rather good. And I think I shall want a photograph of Orlando in the East: Settle which ever way you like best about Saturday. I could certainly come later.

I say I do hope everything is all right, and you’re not anxious—He’s a very nice boy, Ben, jealous though I am of your nice boys.

Yr Virginia

Let me tell you, Philip Morrell is again to the fore.

Berg

[]

1838: To Clive Bell

[November 1927]

52 Tavistock Square W.C.1

Dearest Clive,

I am very sorry for my outburst which as I realised at the time was foolish and excessive. My excuse is that I was rather hurt at the moment that you should accuse me of insincerity when I had been really moved and stirred by your book [Civilisation] and had tried to say so. Also I am enough of a prig and conceited enough to attach some value to my judgments of books and dont like it to be assumed that though I may lie about everything else, I lie about them (except indeed when they’re by Topsy.)

As I daresay you saw, fate has been belabouring me almost incessantly on that very spot these past ten days. This morning on my breakfast table I found a novel from a friend of Goldies [Dickinson]: on my tea table, a manuscript from the sister of an officer in the Flying Corps. I shall have to read both: to write to both. But if you crown these occasions with boxes of chocolates, Heaven knows I shall indulge again.

But seriously; forgive your irascible sister once more: I hate to think that I annoyed you when I would much rather please you (but not by insincerity—no). And show your forgiveness by sending me the second part, as I show mine by eating your chocolates—which are delicious.

Virginia

Quentin Bell

[]

1839: To S. S. Koteliansky

27th Nov. [1927]

52 Tavistock Square W.C.1

Dear Kot,

I have always meant to say that I am not at all cross with you—Why should I be?—and that I am very pleased to hear that you liked The Lighthouse.

This needs no answer of course.

Yours ever
Virginia Woolf

Leonard says could you look in at the Nation office on Tuesday afternoon, as he wants to ask you about something?

British Library

[]

1840: To V. Sackville-West

Monday [5 December 1927]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

The photographs are perfect, and the two Orlando’s fit like a glove. I think we must get Lord Lascelles done next, and then—?

Oh what a tantaliser Friday night was—always a shoulder between us; damn Raymond, damn everybody. And I feel rather loving at this moment. Two poor moles born—died instantly.

Shall I come Saturday for the night?—seems the only chance. Let me know.

A thousand very interesting and instructive things to say. I went into the country and got a stiff neck yesterday with the stockbrokers [Herbert Woolf]—We had 5 hours such talk you can’t imagine: in damp drizzly woods for the most part—My passion for stockbrokers is dead.

Remember Gorboduc.

Remember Virginia.

Forget everybody else.

Should you say, if I rang you up to ask, that you were fond of me?

If I saw you would you kiss me? If I were in bed would you—

I’m rather excited about Orlando tonight: have been lying by the fire and making up the last chapter.

Yr
Virginia

Berg

[]

1841: To Philippa Strachey

Tuesday [13 December 1927]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Pippa,

What am I to tell this good woman about your Uncles, or Cousins’, poems? Would you object to my sending her a copy of the one I quote? If so could you send me the right version? at your leisure, if you ever have any.

Also can you inform me about Miss Goddard, and her missionary colleges? Ought one to support her? Also, can’t we come and see you some time and your mother? Or is she not well enough? Please give her my love; and answer all this only at your convenience.

Yours ever
V.W.

Would you return the letter some time.

Strachey Trust

[]

1842: To V. Sackville-West

[21 December 1927]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Directly you had gone, a faint smell, Orlando’s, led me to look under a book and there they were: but not Vita. No. And where was Vita last night, and what did she do there? And is tickling a game for ladies or for housemaids? (This might be a passage from Orlando—so now you need have no doubt that it is the wittiest and most profound book in the world: the very spit and image of you into the Bargain.) I write Bargain with a big B because I have been buying presents, and feel degraded in consequence—but I bought 2 yards of pearls at Whitworths, or is it Woolworths, for 6d to wear tonight. Shan’t I look nice? Heres 12/6. I like writing cheques, it makes me feel more like other women. I bought a spring of mistletoe, too, as Dadie is dining here.

Oh and I must go and dress now, and have the most important conversation in the whole history of the Hogarth Press. Don’t give away my newspaper plan.

And let me know when we’re to meet.

Yr poor dear
V.

Berg

[]

1843: To Lady Cecil

28 Dec [1927]

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes, [Sussex]

My dear Nelly,

I was sitting next a charming nephew of yours the other night, which has emboldened me to write to you. Vanessa had also sat next to him at dinner, and also thought him very charming, and they had talked about you. So then Nessa and I began to talk about you, and said many things which should have made you blush, being a modest woman. We talked about your nice room at St Johns Wood, and how we used to dine with you—how lovely we thought you. It is said by Lord David that you are lovelier than ever and even more charming. How clever of you to make the younger generation take this view of you! Indeed, I have always thought you a very clever woman. So you see I am writing to you to offer you our compliments and thanks—rather late in the day, I admit. Still I think you must have been a very charming woman to ask us to dinner when all my clothes always fall off, if they were ever properly speaking on, and Nessa says she never opened her lips.

I want to come over one day in my motor car to see you. Perhaps one day next summer we might exchange visits. Did you know I have a motor car? It breaks down on the coldest part of the road, and Leonard gets out and we think we shall have to walk 5 miles home; happily it recovers miraculously and here we are, sitting over the fire.

I am trying to write about Lord Chesterfield and de Quincey. But the moment I start writing, I think I should like to write a story. Then I begin a story: then I think about de Quincey. Then I ought to read some horrid manuscripts for the Press. I have a nephew, Nessa’s son, who does nothing but write plays, though he is said to be an undergraduate at Kings. So I must read his plays.

I dined with Arnold Bennett the other night. Do you know him? He is a kind old walrus, who suddenly shuts his eyes like a dead fish and waits three minutes before he can finish his sentence. He makes enormous sums of money; but has horrible dinners; slabs of fish: huge potatoes; everything half cold; and then he took me to look at his bed. I should say that I had led to this by talking about comfort. All his furniture is very solid, but not comfortable; and uglier than you can even begin to imagine. So was his bed. He says that great artists need all the comfort they can get. But is he a great artist? I detest all novels, so I cant say.

What do you read? Thats the sort of question Mrs Sidney Webb asks me. But it is all Lord David’s fault—

Leonard wants me to send you his respects.

Your aff:
Virginia Woolf

Hatfield

[]

Letters 1844-1874 (January–March 1928)

1844: To V. Sackville-West

[7? January 1928]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Creature,

I’m frightfully sorry about your father. Lord! What a time you have of it: I do hope he is better: and for God’s sake dont catch it yourself. Please, darling creature, be careful.

I’d like to come for a night, if I could. The horror is I’m let in for a rush of work this week,—all my own fault. But I’ll write later if I may. This is only a scrawl.

Damn Rebecca—who doesn’t know a turnip from an umbrella, nor a poem from a potato if it comes to that—what right has she to pontificate about the Land? Let me see it.

No—the prize [Femina Vie Heureuse] is still to give—that was last years: so you may laugh: but I think not.

A marvellous letter and present from your mother.

Please send me a line to say how you are and your father, and about seeing me and about life, love, literature.

Love Virginia (imperative)

Love Virginia (absolute)

Love? Virginia? (interrogative)

Mine was the 1st.

V Woolf

Berg

[]

1845: To V. Sackville-West

Tuesday [10 January 1928?]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

I hear they never told you about the dog [Pinker]—imbeciles.

I’ll bring it to Long Barn on Saturday—dear me how nice! But don’t please spoil it all by getting the flu. That I couldn’t bear. So all depends on your being well: if not, we don’t meet till May. And I’ve a million million things to say, and one or two to do.

Dearest be careful. I’ll look out a train—afternoon: and stay till Sunday afternoon. Oh what a pleasure ahead.

Virginia

Berg

[]

1846: To Clive Bell

Saturday 21st Jan [1928]

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

Dearest Clive,

Here we are at Rodmell. It is decidedly damp.

The clergyman [Hawkesford, Rector of Rodmell] as you know is dead, and his widow has commanded a seven foot grave in order that she may lie beside him when her time comes.

The only substantial advantage of a week end, or the tail end of a week end, in the country is that by no human means can the voice of Ka call me across to the telephone; to hear her uneasily playing with the eternal theme of Lady Colefax and Veda (as she calls her) “I suppose you’re entirely taken up with great people now” etc etc.

No, thank God, 50 miles of Sussex and Surrey, under water too to make them more impermeable, lie between us.

But the voice of my brother in law penetrates the Moravian forests (my Geography is rusty, but romantic) amazingly clear.

“Now tell us the news, Virginia”. The news is I’ve seen Snow: seen Lytton; seen Hope; Oliver; Ottoline:—of which would you like an account?

To me the most fascinating is of course the pale and withered but still tremulous harebell Snow: so caustic still; so facetious. D’you remember the way she rolls ones’ sayings into little pats of butter, so that nothing, nothing can be stated and left? But now an unalterable pathos pervades even the pats of butter. She tells me of tea parties at Cheltenham when the Miss Hattersley Smiths, who were almost, but not quite, up to Wimbledon standard, condescend, since they are past 50; and their game is over; but their huge muscular arms remain and their prodigious but fallen pride. Well, all this Snow tells sadly, for her pride is over too; she comes into the Thackeray hotel, and people think “There’s an elderly woman!” And what has she made of her life? she asks me. But I beg and implore her to tell me more, infinitely more, about the Hattersley Smiths: and their fallen pride.

Lytton now—dear old Lytton—well, he was in very melodious humour returned to his [Roger] Senhouse, his Partridge, his book, at peace with the world. Moreover, he is buoyed up by the gigantic vanity of authors. And there they sit, the Stracheys, at their peep show: a peep show I may tell you is a frog or insect or a piece of grass pressed between glass: I had one once: and you put it in a cardboard box; and there it is, quite complete. I mean by this, he detests Hardy: and also, doesn’t talk quite as much about my books as about his own. Noll [Oliver Strachey] is chubby, flirtatious; Hope [Mirrlees], too well up in the Romantics for my taste; but a woman of wit none the less, and passable, even now, in a darkish room; whereas Ottoline, in her taffeta dress, with a pink plush rosette at the breast always slipping down, was a trifle garish. Pipsy [Philip Morrell] plays Bridge every night at the club, or he goes to sleep. Middle life!—my God! So she’s out hawking the streets of Bloomsbury by night, and has, as you can guess, already befouled a good many twigs here.

I suppose you’ve heard that Harold has had to come back as Lord Sackville is worse. Vita sounds very miserable, but Dottie, last night (Sunday) said he was better.

We are back again. And here’s your letter about Wagenseil. I will send a copy of Monday or Tuesday, but Wagenseil has been pestering us for some time—asking for my books and offering his own and never paying—so I haven’t much hopes. Mrs Dalloway is coming out in Germany soon—so is the Lighthouse I think.

Now begins my life of labour again: Dottie, Ethel, Ka, Roger, Jane Harrison, M. Jean Aubry, Mr and Mrs Southorn—but no Clive—And so in my world the lights are dim.

Tom [Eliot] has become an Anglo-Catholic.

Yrs V.W.

Quentin Bell

[]

1847: To V. Sackville-West

Sunday night [22 January 1928]

52 T[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

I’ve been thinking of you all the time, dear Honey. Now Dottie rings up to say your father’s better. I am so happy to think you may be less wretched tonight. You can’t think how I mind your being unhappy—it spoils everything. You must be a heavenly comfort to him.

I could come any afternoon—for an hour; but I dont suppose you’ll be able to see anyone for some time. This is only by way of goodnight, and to say that should you ever want to see me, I am your entirely devoted but helpless and useless creature.

V.

Berg

[]

1848: To V. Sackville-West

Thursday [26 January 1928]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

What a disappointment not to see you yesterday—I was in bed alone. But I do hope your father’s not worse—I suppose there’s no chance of seeing you? Let me know if there is. Would you thank Harold for his letter which I will answer, and am ashamed not to have answered.

I’m going to keep quiet so as to get back to Orlando as soon as I can.

Love.
Yr Virginia

A letter would be nice. I’ve been reading the Land—so good, I think, some lines.

Berg

[]

1849: To V. Sackvill-Weest

Friday [27 January 1928]

Tavistock Square, [W.C.1]

Dearest Honey,

This is only to send my love, which you have always by you, and to say I’m keeping Wednesday free, should there be the remotest chance of your coming. But I’m afraid not.

I get news through Dotty. I wish, I wish I could do anything, but the only thing I can do is to be your loving creature Virginia, which I am.

Berg

[]

1850: To V. Sackville-West

Sunday [29 January 1928]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Darling honey,

This is only to send you my love.—You dont know how much I care for you.

Yrs
Virginia

Dont dream of writing—I hear from Dottie.

Joanne Trautmann

[]

1851: To Harold Nicolson

Sunday [29 January 1928]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Harold,

Would you let me know if there were anything you think I could do for Vita? I’m afraid there isn’t, but if there were, nothing would give me greater happiness, as you know, and I am perfectly free.

I’m so glad I knew Lord Sackville enough to feel his great charm and sweetness. I loved seeing him and Vita together.

With deep affection

Yours
Virginia

This of course is not to be answered unless I could be of use.

Berg

[]

1852: To Vanessa Bell

Saturday [Sunday], 29th Jan. [1928]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Dearest,

Your letter was extremely welcome, and devoured at once by poor dear Singe, who is, or was rather, in bed with a headache; so his services to you are not worth much. I’m much better and hope to begin my usual life again on Monday. Meanwhile, only Echoes of the great world have reached me—no—I remember—I’ve seen Snow [Margery Snowden] since you left, and Ottoline and Lytton. But dont expect any very brilliant reports, though Snow impressed me profoundly. A withered harebell, lightly dancing on its stem—such she is. So shrunk and worn and secluded. Her age seems to weigh on her; she is about to be 50. I doubt that she is very happy. What d’you think? Ought she to have married a drawing master? I can’t remember. But she has her remarkable quality still—everything is slightly tart. And I utterly distrust my own insight into character. It is infantile.

Lytton by the way said you were the one person who had completely understood his case and sympathised with him last summer. “It was terrific.” So I said yes—those glacier torrents, sea green and immobile on the mountain top for so many years, are now the fountains of spring—In other words we puzzled our heads to account for your astonishing powers of sympathy. She has every gift, damn her, I said at last—Lytton agreed. He is once more a-simmer. Senhouse is kind, sweet, good, divine—I am to ask him to dinner. Lytton says he likes his old friends to like his new ones, but is afraid we are cruel about Roger. Can one know one’s friends friends, d’you think? My poor dear Vita is now very miserable: Lord Sackville has just died. The passion of her life is Knole, I think, and now this will belong to an uncle with a detestable American wife, and I suppose Vita will feel outcast—Also she was very fond of her father, who was a disappointed man, never able to marry Mrs Rubens: who is now also desolate: Old Lady Sackville sits at Brighton being intolerable, and likely to live 100 years.

Lord, Lord—I have heard from Clive, chiefly about the legs of the German ladies, which are thinner than he expected. I quite agree that his head is turned; and I rather dread the weeks with him here, and you away. Lytton says he [Clive] has mismanaged the Mary affair and had he been wise would have told Mary he had no wish to go to bed with her, in which case Mary would have reverted to him. He thinks her very lonely and anxious to come back—She rang up and asked us to tea, but I was in bed and Leonard couldnt: since then I hear she’s lunching with Ethel, and completely silent. I daresay I shall see her; but that only means putting my fingers in the fire—However, it amuses you.

We have been in great ups and downs at the Press. A brilliant American lady appeared from the blue: also a rich young or youngish man. She wanted to be manager and he partner. So we engaged her, and then she said a better job had turned up; so we gave the post to old Cartwright; and now the American wants to come to us; but alas, old Cartwright is engaged, though nobly self effacing; and we can’t let her efface herself, so she stays and the American goes, and we don’t know whether to take the rich youngish man or not. Where on earth does dear old Angus get his versions of Cartwright from? If only she would give us notice!—but no. She wallops round the basement, more energetic than ever; but I doubt her competence; and expect her at any moment to foam at the mouth or fire at the head.

You will be sorry, but not surprised, to hear that Leonard passed his [driving] test at Brighton without any difficulty first shot. I never thought he would. We almost collided with a bus, and then ran into a culdesac unexpectedly.

I see you and Duncan are now completely, absolutely, and eternally happy. This gives me a certain amount of pain, I admit. It must be a divine joy to sit in one’s own vineyard in the sun. I think I shall run out for a week or two—Life is too dismal here. There’s Ka coming to tea today with Mark. Theres poor Vita wretched. There’s a general murk and damp everywhere. (But dont be alarmed—I shan’t come really; and I’m really quite happy; sitting over the fire; and I shall even enjoy being bored by Ka, I daresay.) Yes: trouble has already begun with Helen [Anrep]. We asked Roger to dinner to play chess: he rang up and said did we mean Helen to come too? I had already asked Elizabeth Bibesco, so had to say no. The party fell through, as I got a headache; but L. went to Rogers, and said relations between him and Helen were strained. I shall now ask her to tea. That will make things worse.

Have you got your clothes? God, God, how I miss you! There’s nobody to chatter with—And I miss Angelica; whom I find essential to my pleasure. And I miss Duncan, whom I adore; and I miss dropping into tea; and I miss the whole atmosphere of ragamuffin delight—But it is useless to complain: Dog and Dolphin [Duncan and Vanessa] are lost to me lost to me. So write, and long long letters.

Yr B—

Berg

[]

1853: To V. Sackville-West

Tuesday [31 January 1928]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

My darling

Any time you come you know it will be more than happiness to see you. I’ve no engagements, and if I had any would put them off. But consider, honey—wouldn’t you let me come down to you instead, and you stay quiet in bed and let me chatter to you about life in the tropics or any such subject, and you should cut my hair and lots of little moles would be born. You must be so tired now—so terribly tired after this strain. And I’m at your beck and call as you know.

Or perhaps, with your invincible modesty, you dont know.

But I do adore you—every part of you from heel to hair. Never will you shake me off, try as you may. Lord—how I wish we were so constituted that we could help each other. But there you are, quite alone, and I cant do anything.

But if being loved by Virginia is any good, she does do that; and always will, and please believe it—And rest, and be careful and dont write letters.

Yr
Virginia

Berg

[]

1854: To Clive Bell

31st Jan 1928

52 Tavistock Square, [W.C.1]

Dearest Clive,

A London letter in these circumstances, is rather difficult. There’s poor dear Vita very miserable about Lord Sackville—in fact it seems a bad business altogether. Added to this—your poor sister-in-law has been a-bed all last week with the headache. Only rumours of the great world have reached me, many, by the way, from Dottie on the telephone. Is she to drive down to Knole and take away Olive [Rubens] by force? What can we do to prevent Lady Sackville from making a scene at the funeral? How can we prevent Vita from going there? Aren’t funerals awful? Dont people dream of them for years afterwards? Will I read her poem and tell her what I think of it?—As you see, nothing very much to the point. I heard from Vita this morning that she is going back to Long Barn today, and then I suppose Harold will return [to Berlin]. Whether this makes any difference to your plans, I dont know.

Your letter was very cheering. A little sanity, a little pleasure is what I want. Sibyl came to tea yesterday, now I come to think of it. And she stayed till past seven, and we advanced some inches in that perilous undertaking which is called human intercourse: a nice, good, discerning woman, I think her. And she is adopting Roger’s lectures, I gather. Christa [Aberconway] (so she says) has the meanness to say that she can’t afford to have lectures in her house because of the housemaids time dusting up afterwards. “Now two charwomen clear up after my parties the very same night” says Sibyl. She and Christa aren’t exactly sympathetic I gather. Ka? d’you want to hear about Ka? Well, she and Will are dining with Mr Alfred Lyttleton next week. Thats nice, aint it? Oh and the Princess Libby-Bebby [Elizabeth Bibesco] is very vocal on the telephone and had a wet dream about us the other night—which was so delightful, she says. A cloud, no bigger than a man’s hand is on the horizon with the Frys. We ask Roger to dinner “Do you mean Helen to come too?” he asks, “No, I dont” I reply. But I am taking the nettle by the root; I am having Helen to see me alone; only then Roger says “Do you mean me to come too?” and I again say “No I dont” so that the maze seems to lead to nowhere.

Will you take me to the Maze [Hampton Court] this summer? We were once lost there, years ago, I daresay with Dobbin [Mary] Creighton.

I was asked to go and see Mary [Hutchinson], but being bedded, had to refuse. She was lunching with Ethel the other day though, and so is recovered I suppose.

All these little snippets are hardly worth sending; Happily, for we are all profoundly egotistic both at bottom and at top, my head is now recovered enough to let me begin writing a few feeble fancies in the morning; and as you know, this habit has much of the irrational intoxication for me that certain other habits not connected with the pen, have for you. Otherwise I should die of envy to think of your life.

By God—I mean never to spend February, March, April in London again. Rome, Munich, Moscow—anywhere anywhere out of this damp, dull, dripping dustpan. With Clive away its like a cage where they’ve forgotten to give the poor bird its groundsel. She has corns on her toes: she hops: she moults. But I am re-entering the arena. I lunch with Sibyl to meet Noel Coward. I am reading Michelet. Does it strike you that history is one of the most fantastic concoctions of the human brain? That it bears the remotest likeness to the truth seems to me unthinkable. Consider the character of Louis 14th. Incredible! And those wars—unthinkable. Ought it not all to be re-written instantly? Yet he fascinates me. And what about Lytton’s articles? I can’t get into the skip of them. But they enchant the fashionables; and I have every reason to suppose that his Elizabeth [and Essex] is a masterpiece. I have every reason to suppose that my own judgement is vitiated. I have been writing to Max Beerbohm—now that’s a good sentence to leave off with.

Love to Raymond, and please, please, write.

Yr V.

You will write a very very nice letter to Vita, wont you? I hear from Harold that she is very wretched. It was a ghastly affair, his getting better and then worse, and she feels she has lost Knole too. So tell her you love her, as you do.

Quentin Bell

[]

1855: To V. Sackville-West

Friday [3 February 1928]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Yes, darling honey, I shall be in all Monday evening, and shall expect you any time after five. And will you stay and dine with me alone? Please do if you can. That would be nice.

Don’t mind being as miserable as you like with me—I have a great turn that way myself—

A thousand useless but quite genuine loves descend upon you at this moment—which is I know very very horrid, my poor dear honey.

Berg

[]

1856: To Clive Bell

Tuesday. Feb 7th [1928]
(your wedding day)

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Dearest Clive,

Yes, we shall be delighted to dine on Sunday.

Yes, I am recovered.

Yes—oh yes—you’ll be seeing Desmond, and Michael [MacCarthy] and Bob: and Desmond is starting a new paper, and Bob has £10,000 a year and is called Phillips.

And I’ve been talking for two hours to Tom Eliot about God: and so no more, till we meet, except thank you for your exhilarating and enchanting letters.

and so farewell
V.

Quentin Bell

[]

1857: To V. Sackville-West

Thursday [9 February 1928]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

I shall arrive at Sevenoaks at 1.12 tomorrow—that seems the only train—and stay till 6.30 so I’m afraid you’ll have to give me not only a bun for my tea but a bone for my lunch. Ring up if for any reason this don’t suit. But I’m longing to see you, and we could sit out in the sun; anyhow talk, talk, talk, and by the way I’m now called Bosman’s Potto, not V.W. by arrangement—A finer name, don’t you think? more resonant.

Have you slept? Have you dreamt?

How are you?

Yr B.P.

Berg

[]

1858: To Vanessa Bell

Saturday, 11th Feb. [1928]

52 Tavistock Sqre, [W.C.1]

Dearest

Your letters rather depress me—my vanity I mean. They are so expressive. yet you only dip your paw in the ink, and scarcely know one word from another. How is it? We literary gents, Clive and I, never get your effects at all. Clive has just rung up, and we are to dine with him tomorrow and lunch on Tuesday to meet Bobo [Beatrice Mayor], so you see my deluge has begun. I haven’t seen Mary; but I daresay she will try something now he [Clive] is back again.

I am quite recovered, which shows how sensible I am, and I rather wish I had an excuse to leave this ghastly dreary place, where a blizzard rages so that Nelly thinks there are burglars in the roof at night. A man was standing by a van this morning when the wind blew the doors open with such violence that he was struck on the head by an iron bar and carried off insensible. Bits of hoarding go whirling about perpetually; and Pinker has the lice, which means that she is soaked in methylated spirits and must not go near the fire—I have to beat her off all the time I write—so excuse slight irrelevancies and otherwise; I can think of only some few pieces of gossip. Helen [Anrep] came to tea, and we agreed that it is always better to ask husbands and wives separately. Also she says she isn’t silent from fear; but from awe of you and me, and she enjoys her Bloomsbury Evenings thoroughly. I think there is a good deal of truth in what you say about her—She is intelligent and tart and rather a sharp tongued harlot. Wasn’t it clever of me to come to terms? Of course she flatters; but then, one can forgive that, though her flattery of you runs to the outrageous. Roger says she is even more in love with you than he is—what a complicated and indecent association the three of you make together! Do you have Helen one way and Roger t’other? Well well, I never suspected you of that. This reminds me, for reasons unknown to you, of Vita, whom I saw yesterday. Complete chaos has reigned ever since the funeral. Often I was rung up twice at night by Dottie with some absurd question about Lady Sackville. That old wretch has done her best to upset everything, has insulted Vita, made off with Marie Antoinette’s diamond necklace, won’t answer lawyers letters, and holds up the whole will—But Vita has twenty dogs, some with lice, others pregnant, and seems more or less composed. She chose the drawing with the hair; the others, though beautiful and very young, dont, I’m sorry to say, seem to her like. You’ve let me in to sit to Roger by the way. He says he can make a perfect likeness and yours are poets dreams. Now I should have thought you took a sufficiently prosaic view of me: Caustic, severe.

Bob Trevelyan has come in for £10,000 a year on his mothers death, and is almost frantic with worry. His miserliness, great as it was when he had £800, has to be vast to cope with £10,000. And Julian [Bob’s son] gets £100 down, as a legacy: this, Charlie Sanger says, is more than Bob can stand—So he’s off to Italy, and good Bessy [Bob’s wife] is staying to settle the affair—which won’t bring any good to anyone I suppose.

Desmond has been given £6,000 by Oliver Brett to start a monthly magazine with. How bored you would be to hear all us authors chattering about it!—not that it will ever come out; but if it did come out it would be the most brilliant, the most advanced the best paid paper in the world—Also it would make Desmonds fortune, so he says. But I say it won’t come out: now Raymond is back too, so we shall hear about the Quarterly, I daresay. We are dining with Ka next week, and should have seen a good deal more of her and Mark, she says, if Vanessa had not forgotten to pay the telephone bill: so that they have been cut off. They are now on again: Will is having a show; so is Roger; and I must go to both, which is hard on a quiet sedentary creature—buffeting about Bond Street looking at pictures by daylight is hardly in my line.

Then I have had a most shameful and distressing interview with poor dear Tom Eliot, who may be called dead to us all from this day forward. He has become an Anglo-Catholic, believes in God and immortality, and goes to church. I was really shocked. A corpse would seem to me more credible than he is. I mean, there’s something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in God. But will Angelica be one too?

Talk of the Devil! The telephone rang at this point—There’s Mary asking us to lunch tomorrow! If not lunch then tea! Anyhow do let us meet soon! So there!

One thing I’m determined—no more Februarys and March’s in London for me. It is detestable beyond words this year; and one might be sitting among tulips [in Cassis] in the sun with lizards licking ones boots and Miss Campbell talking to the frogs. As arranged now, we leave London on March 28th. get to Cassis in 5 or 6 days: stay there a week; and then amble back again: This will be too early for you to come, I’m afraid: but you might try. We went in floods and gales to Staines the other day: but it was more discipline than pleasure.

Tell Angelica I saw Clinker yesterday—She is most charming: very gay; skittish, elegant, and provocative—She sent Angelica her best love, and looks forward to being hers in the summer. So do I, tell her—I miss her inconceivably; and have six witcherinas sitting on my shoulder at this moment a-whispering love songs about Angelica. May I ride the donkey? Is it called Topsy or Duncan?

Love to all the Creatures

Yr B.

We are lunching with Mary!

We think your cover a great success—one of the best—Dottie has still to see it—

Berg

[]

1859: To Edward Sackville-West

Sunday, Feb. 12th [1928]

52 Tavistock Sqre., [W.C.1]

My dear Eddy,

It is shameful of me not to have answered your letter, when I was so much pleased to get it. But a series of impediments—going to bed for a week, expecting to see you perhaps and Sloth and age—have prevented me from writing.

I have just been down to Long Barn. Vita seems better, and has answered about three hundred letters [about her father], but I’m afraid it is a dismal affair for her; and your aunts [Lady Sackville] behaviour could only be tolerated in an Elizabethan play. That she may take a dagger to her own throat or drink broken glass is rather my hope, I admit. What an odd race you are!

I am greatly charmed by your old German ladies. But how do you account for the size of their posts? In trying to construct their lives, I cant get this right, unless we suppose that the post is a fabrication: in which case they become pathetic and slightly crazy. Do you remember whom I’m talking about?—the two old ladies you talk to in The Pension.

Does this indicate that your novel is to be packed with observations? I am at the moment disinclined for fiction of all kinds. But then I was forced to read all Meredith in a week. I did get through three of them; and feel like an old sheep which has torn off half its fleece, in a hedge. But it may have grown again by the time your novel is out, and then the old sheep will read it with her horn spectacles on.

Bloomsbury has been so quiet on the whole with Clive away; Nessa and Duncan are so quiet always that when they go, it isn’t the noise that is less, but the substance. We become more flashy and meretricious. We have all been laughing maliciously at Bob Trevelyan whose mother has died and left him £10,000 a year and a vast house at Stratford on Avon.

He has had £800 so far, and been the most miserly of men. Often his wife wont let him have a second help. They never burn coal, but only some compound of vegetable produce which is home made and so on. I think they have one of Charlie Sangers second hand bees to make ginger beer with into the bargain. And now he has £10,000 a year. What is he to do? Kill the bee, buy coal, and eat six helpings? But he will die. Besides it goes against the grain. He is almost frantic with the effort

And Desmond has been given £6000 (what a rich letter this is!) to start a monthly magazine with. It is to be incredibly brilliant and to come out punctually the 1st of every month. He says his fortune is made: but I shan’t subscribe till it is in my hands. There was once a paper called the New Quarterly. This died so thin, at the wrong time of year too, it made one cry to see it: and this was to make Desmond’s fortune—before you were born.

I’ve been lunching with Mary Hutch: and am dining with Clive.

Dont draw any inferences: there are none, I’m told, to draw.

But do write again in your verdant ink.

Raymond I’m told is back at dawn.

And so the snake its skin renews (Shelley)

Your
Virginia

Berg

[]

1860: To Harold Nicolson

Feb 19th 1928

52 Tavistock Sqre, WC.1

My dear Harold,

You have probably long ago forgotten a delightful letter you wrote me. But I have not, and have at last found a copy of the Lighthouse and sent it to the Embassy in case your Editor still wants it. The Germans are apt to be very effusive and very ineffective about translating and writing, but I think Mrs Dalloway will soon appear in German, and any notice is likely to be to my good.

I’m delighted—this is the kind of way literary people talk—that Some People is triumphing in America, and Vita tells me your offers are of so fabulous a kind that you blush to think of them. You will soon be asked to write for Desmonds new paper, which comes out in May, and then for Miss Todd’s new paper, which also comes out in May. A great deal of caballing is going on with Todd, Raymond and Francis. Do you know that rather alarming woman?—she reminds me of an extinct monster pushing through the mud: in my direction. We are all also a good deal amused, if that is not impertinent, by the Foreign Office affair, and asking if Tyrrell goes to France, will you come back here? I hope so.

There are masses of books for you to write, and directly I am allowed a copy, going to read Nicolson’s Biography.

I saw Vita a day or two ago. She seemed to me ever so much better, and working hard, which I’m delighted by. I am sure it is the mainstay of life—an old fashioned view, but none the less true. Then of course we are also discussing Raymond [Mortimer] and Valerie [Taylor]; and Clive is making the whole quarter ring with his descriptions of the Legs of German women. But you’ll have heard all this.

Leonards love

Yours
Virginia

Berg

[]

1861: To Philip Morrell

Sunday [19 February? 1928]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Philip,

You’ve put me in a quandary—that is I shall probably lose all such respect as you may have felt for me, if I confess: that for some reason probably discreditable to my adult intelligence; I had much rather you came here, and much rather write to Gower Street, than have tea in a shop and address letters to your Club.

Now you’ll have no respect left over. Never mind: I cant be bothered to go into reasons: but only blurt out impulses. After all, Leonard is not a frightening man, and if Ottoline has her severities, I dont pay any attention to them—Nor should you. So having made a clean breast, I break off, before further damning myself: and leave you either to curse me in silence or say whatever you choose.

The influenza still clouds my faculties, so excuse illiteracy; and brevity.

Your
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

1862: To V. Sackville-West

Monday [20 February 1928]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Would Friday be too late for you?—if I came then and spent the night? I’ve had to go to bed with a sore throat and a little temperature, but shall be cured tomorrow and in robust health (in every sense of the word) on Friday: so do try to manage it—

And couldn’t you send me one of your new poems? Please do. And how are you?

And do you love me?

Yr

So cross: I was just finishing Orlando.

Berg

[]

1863: To V. Sackville-West

Tuesday [21 February 1928]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Dearest Honey;

Here is Bosman’s Potto and the Pinche Marmoset, and some other of Virginias animals—which will you keep for her till Friday.

Lord! how I look forward already to seeing you again!

Wednesday’s Bob Trevelyan: a dull green.

Thursdays Miss Dudley’s pill factory [in Percy Circus]: a worthy but unattractive duffle grey.

Fridays Vita: orange and rose, tipped with amethyst—

Please see to it that its a fine day, that there’s a bun for tea, a porpoise in the fishmongers: and darling, write me something—a little poem: prose if nothing else, and we’ll sit and talk and talk: or walk. Only be well and glad to see me: or Noodles [butler] will have to wipe me up.

Love a thousand times.

V

Berg

[]

1864: To Vanessa Bell

Tuesday 21st Feb. [1928]

52 T.[avistock] S[quare, W.C.1]

Dearest,

I take your snub very unkindly. I wrote to you a long loving letter, and then you answer my husband. You don’t deserve another word, but as I am temporarily unable to write my book, owing to a slight attack of the flu, I will give you the relics of my mind. It is a very slight attack, only a bad throat and a little temperature and I am up today, in fact have only been one day in bed, and hope to be recovered tomorrow—when I ought to be lunching with Colefax—but I shant. By the way, we dined with Ka the other night, and there I saw a letter to you from Colefax. Are you intriguing with her? Oh God! Ka was beyond belief worthy, scraped, dismal, patronising oppressive. Not so much Ka herself; but her surroundings. Scores of tired damp muddy people called Campbell or Dent or something came in afterwards. And in some miraculous way she has completely altered your rooms—partly the lights, which are very bright; partly the spirit; and then the talk is all of respectable peers and politics; something like the Sangers with a dash of art. Will’s pictures were praised skyhigh. “What wonderful blues you give us! Mr Arnold-Forster. It makes one feel oneself in the Alps.” Then Will is very offhand and manly: but as vain as a peacock, and somehow lets fall that they are all sold, some to the Cecils. “Spiffing that” Meanwhile, the wretched Mark is heard sobbing upstairs.

Then we lunched with Mary—For an hour it is very nice, as the food is delicious, and I like Jack’s stories for precisely 60 minutes. But when the clock strikes two, the Princess turns into a rat—is that the story of Cinderella?—perhaps not—and one can’t think of another word to say. Leonard yawns. But I admired the adroitness with which Mary discovered that Clive was back, and found out about his doings in Berlin. She was rather depressed perhaps, and very affectionate. We had some banter about her quarrel with me. And I said she had bitten me over the left breast and left a blue stain like an Asp (see Antony and Cleopatra, by Shakespeare) and she said she had only bitten me once, and then not really hard. I don’t think Clive shows any disposition to go back to her. I see him constantly, but not so far alone, except at the play the other night, but then he was so excited by the presence of the Beau Monde that he was incapable of intimacy. He took me to a play about a school boy who falls in love with the masters wife. It is strange how sentimental one becomes about the young—Clive and I both cried—not at the same places, but both at the thought of love and youth. Why is Julian depressed? Do you think he is in love? I should like to go and see him, but I dont suppose he would confide in me. I have just found his plays, so I shall write to him; and I think we may go up for a night to see Dadie act, but the thought of Cambridge is slightly abhorrent. Its amazing weather here at the moment; everything coming out.

Have you heard all the Todd cabals? She came to tea here to discuss her new quarterly with Clive and us. It is to be Vogue, only quarterly She is very anxious that you should do caricatures for her, and is writing to you. There is no sign that she means to give any power to Raymond or Francis [Birrell], or to take their advice. I gather that she is putting up most of the money herself, and intends to be in complete control with [Madge] Garland under her—This will be rather a blow to them; but she is a truculent determined old Brute, fatter and more snouted than ever very disillusioned and commercial and without ideals: so I think she will take her own way.

It seems to me that everybody is going to Cassis at the same moment. Won’t it be rather a bore? I can’t believe your amazing stories of the Male and Female parts of the Renault. Do the French sexualise their engines? The Singer I know for a fact to be hermaphrodite, like the poet Cowper.

I’m afraid this letter is tedious in the extreme. I am rather muddle-headed. But I assure you there is nothing beyond a very slight flu the  matter with me. (I put this in remembering how even the cold hearted like you exaggerate peoples ills when they are abroad.) I am rather depressed, however, that I can’t write, because my head is easily affected as you know, and I have only just time to finish Orlando before we go abroad. So please write me a long and loving letter: if Duncan would too, all the better; since I cherish for him a withered, unspoken adoration, such as I imagine Aunt Daisy has for a Cavalry officer in Calcutta—As for Angelica, my sentimentality overcomes me beyond belief, and when I saw a little girl in the street just now I almost burst into tears. Not that she was a patch on Angelica. Angelica has spoilt me for other children. Mark [Arnold-Forster] says I am the one of the nicest people he knows—the others being Mr Nevinson and Mrs Swanwick—but even so what a dried up little twig he is compared with her! I think she must have an extremely queer imagination: her sensibility is rather like mine—What higher praise can I give her? But in beauty she transcends my highest moments. Is she learning anything? What about God?

Yr B

Berg

[]

1865: To Julian Bell

Sunday [26 February 1928]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Julian,

I have been meaning to write and confess to you that I have found your plays. I apologise most profoundly for wrongly accusing you. They had laid themselves beneath a vast and hideous deposit which one could only touch with a broomstick. It fell at last. Shall I send them, or wait for you to fetch them?

Why have you sent me no more writings? Dont tell me you have given up writing. What else is there worth doing? Politics? Pooh! Beagling? Pish! Conversation? Tosh! Write some poetry and send it me at once.

I dont know, and cant imagine, what you’re up to at Cambridge. Here we are printing a great many books, and taking on a new staff, buying a typewriter, and talking as usual masses of nonsense.

We are motoring to Cassis through France at the end of March.

The old umbrella [the Singer] is absolutely sublime, and lives at Richmond, and we take her for a 60 mile spin on Sundays.

Nessa sends me astonishingly indecent details about the Renault. It cant go, she says, because its hermaphrodite. So it is being mated with a Citroen, and they hope for the best. Meanwhile, Duncan turns the screws the wrong ways and mechanics have to be wired for from Marseilles to turn them the right way.

I am reading Michelets History of France—God knows why. I find it fascinating, but wholly fictitious. Do you think any history is even faintly true?

Now I must read the History [After the Deluge] which Leonard is writing.

Please come and see us directly you set foot in London—There are lots of things I want to talk about.

Your affectionate
Aunt Virginia

Quentin Bell

[]

1866: To Vanessa Bell

Sunday, 26th Feb. [1928]

52 Tavistock Sqre, [W.C.1]

Dearest.

This is a brief Business letter. Will you please take us rooms at the Teeds from April 2nd to April 9th as you suggest as many rooms as possible, and any meals they can supply. This seems now settled—We shall start on the 26th I think. I suppose if by any chance we could stay on a few days, something could be arranged. But I’m afraid its not likely.

I saw Nan [Hudson], and I think she may stay longer—and I believe the Roy Campbells are going to settle at Cassis—in fact I see you’re already a Colony. I had an interesting talk with Clive, but haven’t time to report it—except that he told me he could never go back to Mary as she had treated him so badly, and he has now discovered that all her views on art and literature were taken from him: He can now see no advantage in her, and her friends and ways are not nearly so congenial to him as ours are.

But we’ve got Roger coming in; and we are dining with Clive, so I must stop.

Moreover you owe me a letter, I think—but I wont be a grudging curmugeon and will write soon.

Yr B.

Do keep a look out for any nice objects—chairs or pots—or chests of drawers—that I could buy if you don’t want them. I hope to do some chaffering

Berg

[]

1867: To Vanessa Bell

March 5th 1928

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest,

I don’t know whose turn it is to write—I expect yours; but your picture gets so much praise from the Cognoscenti that I am feeling mercenary towards you. Also affectionate—Also desperate—and a thousand other things. About our rooms—Clive changes his plans daily—now he’s going to Madrid, now to Cassis at once, now not at all. Perhaps he is more stable in his letters to you. So I dont see how to combine with him, and shall throw myself on your hands. Do the best for us you can—it’ll only be a week alas, unless I can wangle something.

I’m rather void of interesting gossip, I’m afraid, as I’m being as careful as a cat walking on eggs, and have refused Colefax and now Clive (to meet Lord Berners), my head not being quite established. We are going to Rodmell for three or four days, and there I shall finish Orlando, I hope.

I think I told you something of my last talk with Clive. He seems now completely disillusioned, and says that his feeling for Mary was founded on a misunderstanding of her real nature—or rather intellect, which he had thought subtle, exquisite, witty and original, and now finds merely a slavish copy of himself. Dont you think it odd that he never guessed in 13 years what we could see in ten seconds? She is now returning to her attack on Bloomsbury—that is, she asked Leonard to dinner, and wants to come to tea. But, seriously, something must be done to control Clive. We see him every other day almost—not that we mind that—and every kind of supper and drink is lavished upon us: but when he meets a virgin, as he did the other night here (her name was Jenkins and she comes from Newnham) his behaviour is such that one wonders whether he’s crazed or about to be so. He sat beside her on the sofa talking about her youth and his age (this is now his mania—that he’s middleaged, and he goes to a beauty specialist about his hair, which is not growing however) and paying her compliments and talking about Princesses and Prime Ministers and finally asked her to dinner—whether seriously or not I dont know. When you come back I think you must quieten him. Also he never keeps off his own happiness or unhappiness, as the case may be. Raymond caterwauled like the most lamentable housetop cat. I suppose his affair [with Valerie Taylor] is on the rocks. He has never been so unhappy he says—the pair of them answered each other across the room like a couple of nightingales—moulting nightingales. Then they say how happy I am; and how happy you are. I daresay you can imagine it at Cassis, and thank your stars the seas are between us.

Still, talking of the seas, whats the use of them if Barbara can swim? A week of Barbara [Bagenal] seems to me to outweigh 6 weeks of Ka, Colefax, and the rest—I can hardly picture it. One evening broke my spirit for 8 weeks, 7 days and .. And who should ring up this very moment but Nick [Bagenal]? In the extravagant hospitality of our hearts we agreed to let him come in for one hour after dinner—upon which he discloses the horrid fact that Saxon is attached to him—Still one hour after dinner isn’t a whole week—Then you’ve Nan: so solitude seems to me to have its drawbacks. I suppose though, the car is now in perfect order—So is ours—You’ll be amused to hear that I’m at last having French lessons. What will surprise you is that my volubility is extreme, and my teachers say I talk so well that I dont really need lessons. I suppose this is flattery—I’m afraid so—Still its wonderful how much easier it is to talk to some one professional. Occasionally I use phrases which have been out of use for a century or so. But once the blood is up one flurries along somehow: genders, or no genders.

Angus seems gloomy and determined, and so far has not got a place. He hangs on to the hope of Agnews, but Roger doesn’t seem sanguine; and I must say (this is not through my husband) his lethargy takes the life out of one, absolutely. I had a small job which might have been worth £20—to write a description of some pictures of Hardy’s county—but he was so pessimistic and so languid, I gave it up. We have Miss Belcher now—a brisk girl, who says very tart things, but is already Mrs C’s right hand.

Roger is a good deal run after I gather by Astors, Stoops, and so on. I haven’t seen him, but Leonard dined there, and was given rhubarb fool made with Mary’s hair oil (by mistake.) But this was a mere bagatelle—The couple seem invincible and triumphant. Molly [MacCarthy] came to tea yesterday—a fair grind, I must say. I got on by saying she must ask me 3 questions, and then I ask her another 3. So I elicited an account of copulating with Clive on a hard bed on a cold night at Asheham; and how she flared up next morning and went home. Desmond never much enjoyed copulation. As for Philip M⁠[orrell], he never got that far—(I saw Ott. by the way, and find her fascinating: old, erratic, random, ribald; very shabby and dressed up in relics of plush at least 10 years old.) An odd thing about the MacCarthy menage is that Michael is so violently jealous of Rachel that they cant be in the house together. He flies into rages, for no reason, as Rachel is perfectly good humoured, and it is thought to be sexual, as he threw an iron bar at [her] when he was two.

I saw Peter [F. L.] Lucas the other day, who says that Julian is charming and intelligent, but frightfully lazy—Peters standards are impossible though, and so long as Julian dont start telling the truth, I shouldn’t worry. Love to Angelica. None to Duncan, because he’s vile, heartless, and not worth having as a brother-in-love. So tell him. I saw his mother too; all her beauty recovered, and Pippa and Gumbo [Strachey], who excel in the sterling qualities of the English woman rather than that. Heres Nick. So goodbye, and write Dolphin, do

B

Would you like me to print you some [writing] paper like this?

Berg

[]

1868: To V. Sackville-West

Tuesday [6 March 1928]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Honey,

Why do you write a letter on Wednesday and I only get it on Monday? Might be Persia over again: I’m afraid you’re not very happy—you sound unhappy. Whats to be done about Berlin and the Ambassadors Coach with the purple footman on the box? Dottie will no doubt speak her mind to Harold. My mind is at your service if you can use it. And Potto has a large warm heart, but then he can’t write and its Virginia who writes.

And I ought to be dining with Clive to meet Lord Berners, and all owing to you I’m sitting over the gas fire instead. Its this damned Orlando—I want to finish it, and I cant finish it; and then I wake in the night so excited and have to take a sleeping draught and so spend my day moping. But we are going to Rodmell for three or four days and there—please God—you’ll be finished off; and I shall come back refreshed. I rather think, too, its an addled egg: too hasty, too splash-dashery, and all over the place.  But I shall put it in a drawer till May. Why lecture the Danes on poetry when you might give Virginia (who is worth all Copenhagen) a practical demonstration in the art of love? No: we start on the 25th: and so shall miss you completely.

I do miss you. There’s no fishmonger and porpoise in my life without you. All’s a grind over cobbles. Sibyl, Clive, Stockbrokers, Ottoline, Molly, The Press—such is my round, with Dotty hovering on the outskirts and Lady Margaret [Duckworth]. Shall I lunch with her, and be condescended to by George? I think not. So what is there left? The art of literature. But I don’t think I have anything of profound importance to say about that. Lucas was so smug on the telephone that I refused to give him my article: and I’ve refused to write for the Evening Standard on the 9th year of marriage: and I’ve refused to write for the Encyclopaedia and on the other hand, I think I shall write a little article on Queen Elizabeth’s nose for Eve.

At Ottoline’s I met James Stephens; a little barrel organ monkey man, loquacious as a —— oh I cant think at the moment what is loquacious except my gas fire. He said Yeats spent 20 years writing Leda [and the Swan]; and used to say it over and over, till the weight of every word was right: sometimes he would take one out, and then next year put it in again.

For Gods sake, translate Rilke: only be sure of your rights; and that there’s no other in English—I read some (prose) in French; and thought it good up to a point; subtle, melodious; but not quite getting over the obstacle. His poetry may be better; probably, from what they say, it is. Yes, certainly do it. Did you know that I talk French very well? That is with great fluency, some inaccuracy, and a good many words not in use since Saint-Simon? This is the report of my French teacher. I have lessons. It is the greatest fun. Now a youngish woman; then an old man; then again a very seductive elderly Bohemian; who tells me she ‘loves Englishwomen’. From each I get a different story. I am thinking of learning Italian, Spanish, and Russian, not for the languages, but for the life histories of the professors. I only want you to know this fact: that I do talk French: because you will never hear me; and then I get a little more even with you in real-womanliness—All real women talk French, and powder their noses.

By the way, do you think I know you? Intimately? A question that I shall ask myself tomorrow morning—You are driving down to Knole [in Orlando], and as you go, you exhibit the most profound and secret side of your character.

Eddy writes a very very testy letter about Herr Wagenseil. Never have I met anyone so frankly peevish. It can’t be the aristocracy—I mean some obscure self-assertiveness bred (very mistakenly) by thinking oneself superior—because Orlando hasn’t a touch of it. He should marry Miss Spender Clay. I met her and she seemed intelligent, and amiable, and very pretty, but to marry Eddy seems to me wearing a hair shirt for life. Raymond is ‘the most unhappy man in the world”—or so he said the other night: but I asked for no details.

Goodnight now. I am so sleepy with chloral simmering in my spine that I can’t write, nor yet stop writing—I feel like a moth, with heavy scarlet eyes and a soft cape of down—a moth about to settle in a sweet, bush—Would it were—ah but thats improper.

Please darling, creature, be happier—Or at any rate tell me the truth about yourself

My love to Harold. His book [Biography] is doing very well, and we’re very pleased altogether. Would he like reviews sent him?

Yr Virginia

Potto

Berg

[]

1869: To Pernel Strachey

8th March 1928

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Pernel,

I am a wretch, never answering, never doing anything. But the influenza has unmanned me; and what is worse—for I don’t much mind that—got me so behindhand with a wretched silly thing [Orlando] I have to finish this summer—or I shant be paid if I dont—that I have had to put off coming in May. I am coming in October instead. So may I transfer your invitation till then?

But that doesn’t mean that I want to transfer seeing you. But how is it to be managed? We are going to France on the 25th, motoring. And you’re going to Egypt and Syria and Meccah, I make no doubt—somewhere romantic in a select distinguished way. For—but I must not take up your time which is so valuable and your attention which is so magisterial—by writing an entire and truthful life of you, as I should like to do. Did you know that has been my ambition always? Ever since I discovered about your dusty ears and pearl buttons. Dusty Ears it will be called—a pendant to Dusty Answer. Perhaps it will be the most popular book of its time, like that. I think I should like it better; but then this is professional jealousy.

I saw Pippa and Marjorie the other night, and both gave me the liveliest joy; such integrity, such humanity—but there! You must go back to your labours, while I, thank God, can sit over my gas fire and imagine the first chapter of Dusty Ears: a Biography.

But for God’s sake, come and see me—I’m on the telephone.

Yrs V.W.

Strachey Trust

[]

1870: To V. Sackville-West

12th March 1928

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Honey,

But why haven’t you got my letter—sheets and sheets?—written directly I had yours. I had one from you this morning, written on the 8th. True, it was sent to Rodmell; but why 4 days from Berlin? Another tribute to the efficiency of the British Embassy, I imagine.

We went down for 3 days hot sunshine at Rodmell, and were beat upon and caged up by the worst frost and gale and snowstorm since Christmas—after a week of June weather. So parched and frozen was I, I couldn’t write a word of Orlando, and have brought him back, like an old man of the sea, to finish here. And the Americans must have the first chapter by May 1st! All your fault. I could write another 3 volumes—easily, easily. Appendixes blossom in my head. Then there’s the Index, and the bibliography. Oh Vita Vita, how you have brought my life to ruin, and wasted the fair taper in a sea of grease!

I lunched with—yes, you know who [Sibyl Colefax]: and she wants me by the way to call her Bloody Poll in future—at least so the last orange hieroglyph reads—and there I met a little gnome called Knoblock and we stood in Sibyls window half an hour saying this sort of thing:

V. “Oh she’s enchanting:

K. “Enchanting? Thats not strong enough, Mrs Woolf. Great. Vitas a great woman.

V: Yes. Great. But so adorable; not merely great.

K. Adorable, I admit. But her character—thats whats so unsurpassable. I’ve known her since she was a lovely girl, very shy, her hands and feet running away from her, in yellow, at her first party. And the more I know the more I find to admire.

V. Admire? No Mr, Knoblock, thats not strong enough. Love.

K. Yes. Love it is. and so on and so on.

Meanwhile, in between this fulsome rhapsody, I fell in love with Noel Coward, and he’s coming to tea. You cant have all the love in Chelsea—Potto must have some: Noel Coward must have some. I played a funny trick. I had no hat. Bought one for 7/11¾ if at a shop in Oxford Street: green felt: the wrong coloured ribbon: all a flop like a pancake in midair. Even I thought I looked odd. But I wanted to see what happens among real women if one of them looks like a pancake in mid air. In came the dashing vermeil-tinctured red-stopper-bottle-looking Mrs Edwin Montagu. She started. She positively deplored me. Then hid a smile. Looked again. Thought Ah what a tragedy! Liked me even as she pitied. Overheard my flirting. Was puzzled. Finally conquered. You see, women cant hold out against this kind of flagrant disavowal of all womanliness. They open their arms as to a flayed bird in a blast: whereas, the Mary’s of this world, with every feather in place, are pecked, stoned, often die, every feather stained with blood—at the bottom of the cage.

Couldn’t you make it the 21st instead of the 28th, honey? Do. I hear from Vanessa that motoring in France is no joke: She’s just gone bang into a bus and smashed her Renault; so think of me in my Singer, and you not back to see the last of me. Did I tell you how well I speak French? Madame, you must have French blood in you! “Yes Sir, my Great Grandmother was a French Marquise”—ah, but I think I told you of the exquisite joy this gives me before. And you’ll never hear me—thats whats so tantalising for you: the great grand daughter of the French Marquise.

I told them to send your books. I will write to Harold, whose letter enchants me, but shows a guilty conscience. He is ashamed of being an Ambassador. I am ashamed that any friend of mine should be married to a man who may be an Ambassador. Better be a footman—no, no, this must be written to Harold himself. Leonard is indignant that Harold should think he wrote the article about the F.O. in the Nation. It was [Hubert] Henderson probably. Leonard has written nothing; has been meeting Bernstorf at Clives: Clive being ubiquitous and really I think, March-hare-mad: one hears his drumming through the Squares at night.

Darling, are you happy or unhappy? Writing? Loving? Please send me a long letter, on big paper, because Potto likes that best. Look [squiggly design] thats Potto: this is

Virginia

I have been flying: but no room to tell you how I just missed death.

I will kiss Bottome if I may see her story.

Berg

[]

1871: To Vanessa Bell

Tuesday [13 March] 1928

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

This is not a letter only an urgent request: could you lend us your Michelin guide and send it off at once? It is out of print, and we cant get a copy, which is said to be essential. We will bring it—of course, with us. Horrified at your accident.

Clive says we can have the other 2 rooms at Fontcreuse as he will be alone.

Berg

[]

1872: To V. Sackville-West

[14 March 1928]

Postcard

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

See whether you can read this—it will remind you of Kent. An orange fog here, the King of the Afghans very miserable and Dottie coming to tea.

Love, V.

Berg

[]

1873: To V. Sackville-West

[20? March 1928]

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest, Mrs Nicolson,

O what a curse these translators are! Tell your Bosom friend Mrs Voigt Something or other that all I can say is that I have received a cheque from, and signed a contract with, the Insel Verlag which is I understand the Fischer Verlag by which they are to produce Mrs Dalloway this autumn and The Lighthouse later. But all communications must be through Curtis Brown.

Our address will be from the 2nd and till the 9th

La Bruyère [error for La Bergère], Cassis, Bouche du Rhone, France.

[in Virginias handwriting:]

There! Thats business like aint it? The worst of business is it dries the finer faculties, and I now find it very hard to continue. Potto has gone out for a walk with Pinker so I cant get him to help.

[typewritten]

ORLANDO IS FINISHED!!!

[in Virginias handwriting:]

Did you feel a sort of tug, as if your neck was being broken on Saturday last [17 March] at 5 minutes to one? That was when he died—or rather stopped talking, with three little dots … Now every word will have to be re-written, and I see no chance of finishing it by September—It is all over the place, incoherent, intolerable, impossible—And I am sick of it. The question now is, will my feelings for you be changed? I’ve lived in you all these months—coming out, what are you really like? Do you exist? Have I made you up?

But I dont want to write another word for months—not a letter even—Do you ever feel words have gone dry and dull in your mind? Your mind like a sponge in the dust? You squeeze it and nothing comes? In October my mind was dripping: That is the only life.

Last night at 12 Clive rang me up. He was quarrelsome drunk. Dotty  rang me up. She was merry drunk—They were in the same room. Also there were Christa, Raymond and an unknown man. Here in my room at  12 o’clock were Roger and his mistress: the Arnold Forsters.

But we were sober.

That sort of instant communication of two rooms fascinates me—you  put down the telephone, and the whole Atlantic; very dark is between you: having been so near you could see into the lights of the billiard room.

I have been reading Hazlitt For 5 minutes my mind runs on the same rails that the book runs on. I can only think in the same curves. Could you tell me where I began to read Hazlitt and where I left off? Are you a critic? Now Vita, sit down and think about yourself.

Sibyl says,

“Yes, I just saw Vita for a moment before she left”

She didnt. did she?

Is it because she tells these lies that one is never intimate with her?

I have just listened in—in Nelly’s bedroom—to the Prince of Wales speaking about merchant seamen. In the middle Leonard came in, with Pinker. Again, this was very odd: the dinner, the cheering, the Prince stumbling along like an old stiff cart horse: and Pinker scratching my legs at the same time.

Bottome! Bottome! If she don’t come quick I shall miss her.

My French teacher is of your persuasion. She is now irritated with me, for some obscure reason—Still, my accent is admirable—(this I shall repeat and repeat, because it is one of my secret shames—like not being able to do my hair, or powder—

God Vita what a dull letter! The truth is, I’m talking to Leonard about Sir Thomas Browne; and about buying a rug; and am incredibly sick of my own words.

Darling Creature, send me a long lovely letter to Cassis.

I am rather depressed.

Orlando so bad.

Cant write.

Can Love but then Vita’s away.

Shant see her for ever so long.

But continue please to think me charming and write to me.

Virginia

Berg

[]

1874: To Vanessa Bell

20th March [1928]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest,

Many thanks for all your good kind acts. I will do anything here you want done—as I meant to say before, and now there is no time for you to ask me: except for sanitary towels, which I will bring in masses. Oughtn’t we some day to be coming to the time of life? Gumbo [Strachey] has already they say. But you and I hang on; so does Molly: a sign doubtless of a rich temper. Ask Nan what her state is. Doubtless never had a time at all.

I am on tip toe to see you and the house. I shall be very envious I suppose: you will have lovely pots and dishes and chairs. One day I must spend rummaging for things, as we might easily take a few tables and beds home on top of the Singer.

Already everything is rather chaotic, and people pullulate: Ka and Roger dining here tonight, which he says is my devilry; but I owned up to Ka in asking him—And then Will comes in, which is, Roger says, so cruel an infliction that if it weren’t for love of me he couldn’t come. And Helen is coming in, and Morgan, and after that thank God, I shall have no more people. I rather wish Cassis were only to be you and Duncan. Not that I have a word against Clive or Nan [Hudson]: but you know what one gets with talk talk—and never has Clive been in such a state of loquacity. I haven’t seen so much of him since the year 10. Bobo [Mayor] seems mildly to rule him, but he is, as you will see, very wild and queer, and has run amok in the Beau Monde again, and carries drunk guardsmen to bed from great houses in Grosvenor Square—You’ll hear the story, so I say no more. But not a word of Mary.

Angus has some hopes of Agnew who has offered to see him: Also your old friend the man I call Benwick—but thats not his name—is leaving Lefevre; so he may try there. I shall be glad to be quit of it all. It is not agreeable, his going, and Mrs Cartwright putting her best foot forward so vigorously one has one’s nose cut off every time one speaks.

We had a Bloomsbury meeting on Sunday at Clives, and did our best, but agreed that it was useless without you—We tried to make you speak, and invented your opinion of Queen Victoria’s letters: but no. Dolphin is inimitable, and life is dust and ashes without her. Then everyone longs for Duncan’s society. But it is thought that you don’t particularly long for us. I hope you will have your settlement with Clive. I can’t see how he can have his daimler and his supper parties and not increase your money. I see that London is very complicated. But wouldn’t Cassis for ever be rather monotonous? I should die—if you left for ever—But thats a mere bagatelle I agree. I cant help thinking that Lord Gage is only a threat. Still its all very gloomy and unsettling. But I can’t understand the money difficulty—judging from Clives own state.

Ka says she is doing her best to let 37. I think she is well placed for that sort of thing: she moves among the dull and the rich who talk of houses perpetually. George and Margaret [Duckworth] asked us to lunch—but we did not face it. Mrs Dominic Spring Rice has run away with Mr Micheson, and Mr and Mrs Francis Meynell have parted: all this means nothing to me, or to you, I daresay: but I am scribbling in haste, and so am very dull. I must dress, or wash, thats the truth; and Roger will be crusty, and Ka suburban, and Will intolerable. What an evening, and why did I contrive it?

The Michelin map has come; I meant the Guide: but we have now borrowed one.

This will be my last letter. We think of coming home through Tarascon, Leonard says: couldn’t you go back with us and meet us somewhere else?

But I will get him to send you a line about our route before we start. It is still rather unsettled.

Do try and meet us somewhere.

Yr B.

Berg

[]

Letters 1875-1910 (end-March–mid-July 1928)

1875: To Vanessa Bell

Sunday. 25th March [1928]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest,

We are perching here before starting tomorrow. We are just off to test the car by driving to Rye; everybody is full of gloomy prognostications, and says we shall break down. If we are both killed simultaneously, please remember that I leave you all my possessions, in land, house, gold silver, stocks, jewels, books, carpets: Pinker is to go to Clive; who will I know, cherish her for my sake.

Really I am waiting for Leonard to come in from the garden with Percy and tell me our route, which is now finally settled. But they have got talking about the cesspool which is full up, and must be emptied on to the vegetable beds with a bucket. Perhaps you might meet us somewhere, if the old char’s bonnet [Vanessa’s Renault] is once more on its legs.

Did I tell you about Noel Coward? He is in search of culture, and thinks Bloomsbury a kind of place of pilgrimage. Will you come and meet him? He is a miracle, a prodigy. He can sing, dance, write plays, act, compose, and I daresay paint—He rescued his whole family who kept boarding houses in Surbiton, and they are now affluent, but on the verge of bankruptcy, because he spends so much on cocktails. If he could only become like Bloomsbury he thinks he might be saved. But I wont ask you to meet him, unless you swear to come back by the 14th May at latest. You can’t neglect Angelica’s education: like this—my most promising niece:

Here’s Leonard: here’s the list.

On Friday 30th sleep at Lyon.

Sat—31st sleep at Montelimar

Sun. 1st. sleep at Aix

Our route will be,

Tournus
Lyon.
Vienne.
Valence
Montelimar
Orange.
Carpentras.
Cavaillon.
Orgon.
Aix
Cassis.

But this is at the mercy of the Gods of course.

I am very excited, partly at the thought of seeing you again. I am like a sea anemone which has had to keep all its tentacles curled up, and when its put in water (i.e. Dolphin) they come out and wave and tumble and are of an exquisite and incredible beauty: but Lord! Dolphin bites: or she squirts acid: Dolphin cant be depended on for more than 2 seconds—Dolphins a heartless brute, but nothing to Duncan, whose heart is made of purest emerald—hard, precious, beautiful, unmelting—We had, I thought, a slightly painful parting with Angus, (who seems to think he’s coming to Cassis) They have been doing the accounts; and sometimes they discover debts and sometimes windfalls. All is complicated by the exact date; that is, whether Angus shares or not. He is hopeful, however, about Agnew [art-gallery], which is a mercy. Never never will I have another young man as partner.

Are you drawing for Todd? She is like a slug with a bleeding gash for a mouth—She paints badly. The whole of London does nothing but talk about bringing out magazines:

Have you done some pictures?

Do you love me?

Does Angelica?

Here’s the Singer.

I could only get 1/8 towels: but I find them absorbent sufficiently

V.W.

Berg

[]

1876: To V. Sackville-West

31st March 1928

Orange, [France]

Dearest Honey,

Are you back? At Long Barn? Happy? With the dogs? Comfortable? Well?

I can’t remember how one writes. Nothing but a heart of gold would make me try to write now—perched on a hard chair in a bare bedroom in a bad inn—Perhaps there will be bugs in the bed. But all the other inns have been divine. Even here, I have drunk a bottle of wine for dinner, and the world goes gently up and down in my head. Suppose one had wine every day, at every meal—what an enchanted world! I forget the bugs and the rain as it is: I think of Vita at Long Barn: all fire and legs and beautiful plunging ways like a young horse.

No accidents so far; and every day we drive quicker, and shall be at Cassis tomorrow. This is the way to live, I can assure you. Driving all day; an hour or two for lunch: a few churches perhaps to be seen; one’s inn at night: wine, dinner; bed; off again—gradually it gets Southern, and we take off our jerseys and I have had to buy a silk one. One drops in upon people playing dominoes in cafés: or one stops on a mountain, and I sit on a stone, and L. tries to discover why the umbrella leaks at the nose.

But these travellers letters are too dull; and I’ve lost all touch with language; am a revolving brute, merely; a creature who sits 8 hours a day looking out of the window.

But we must do this together one day, Vita, my dear: unless you are, as I think all my friends are, a myth, something I dreamt.

I buy a new book at each town, and read it in bed—I’m extremely well. I’ve not seen a paper or had a letter for a week. So it is a nice proof of my affection that I find my mind settling on you, like a butterfly on a hot stone.

The day before I left I read in the Times that I had won the most insignificant and ridiculous of prizes—but I have heard nothing more; so it may be untrue. I dont mind—you will laugh either way.

We shall be back on the 17th.

I will write from Cassis: This is merely the bubble of affection, which is stupid and inarticulate, but risen from Potto’s heart. Tell me if you are fond of me; and about your mother—pray God she don’t come to Knole—and have you written anything? Tell me everything. My mind is like a deep irreflecting river in which facts are slowly turned. I’m not allowed to drive. All the fruit trees are out. Pink, red, white. But it is pouring here.

Yr
Virginia

Berg

[]

1877: To Quentin Bell

5th April 1928

Fontcreuse, Cassis, B du R., [France]

My dear Quentin,

I think you are rather a mangy beast to put me off with a postcard after all these months. Still, if you now write me a letter, very indiscreet, affectionate, interesting and full of reflections upon life—but also describe your German family in detail—then I will forgive you.

We arrived here before our time, owing to the impetuous and fiery nature of the Singer, which went quicker and quicker, so that we were almost run away with through France. Everybody here was, and is, doing something odd. Clive has just given away a pair of sky blue pyjamas to a young lady: Duncan dances to the gramophone; the little girls collect frogs; Leonard collects spiders for the frogs; Nessa lets the frogs loose. Miss Campbell breeds innumerable chickens. Colonel Teed gives me sips of wine. We are thinking of buying a house here: I could go on in this style for ever, but it is not very interesting, I daresay. The frogs—the garden is full of them, all amorous, all vociferous, and none satisfied—make consecutive thought, such as you and I like, impossible, otherwise I would tell you about the state of England.

Roger is fast crumbling, like a lump of sugar in hot milk; that is to say, he remembers nothing and invents everything. Sometimes his pocket handkerchief has eleven knots in it by nightfall; and he and Helen sit on the edge of the bed till the small hours untying them and trying to remember which is which. But his decline is beautiful as the sunset, and it is certain that he will be alive when you and Julian are old, old men, prodding each other in the back with umbrellas. Julian is the very spit and image of a German Professor: with a bag on his back, spectacles, straw hat; very huge; amiable and apparently innocent, but if you observe his teeth, of which he has a great many, you will see that they are pointed and turn inwards—a sure sign of a sarcastic and biting disposition.

Every night we sit round the lamp in Nessa’s studio, while the moths batter at the window, and Nessa tries to cut their heads off with a pair of very large scissors. She says Moths dont mind this, but soon grow new heads, or tails, as the case may be. Whenever Clive becomes inspired, about Proust or the French Revolution, and is about to say something which has never been said before, an old male frog, who has been bitterly disappointed, and would kill himself if he knew the way, barks. Thus Clive’s words are never heard, and the truth is lost—which is a great pity, but after all, why should not frogs have their will now and then? Answer me that. I am so set upon, chiefly by Julian, for asking questions which have no answer, at least in this hemisphere, that I scarcely dare say How are you? or How do you think that Colonel Teed proposed to Miss Campbell, because showers of things are instantly thrown at me. We discuss everything in the world. Cassis is becoming as notorious as Bloomsbury. Characters of the strangest sort abound. We motor back again to Dieppe on Monday.

I haven’t yet asked you a single question; but I have told you the reason. I entirely depend on you for protection in the Bell family which is ferocious beyond words. Judith [Barbara Bagenal’s daughter] is here, and has a bottom of common sense, as Dr Johnson said: but you dont know why he said it, or what happened, being only a painter, poor boy: we were discussing this at lunch today, and saying you would be ignorant always. Probably you are extremely happy: and I shall hope to see vast allegorical works, upsetting all theories and establishing a new form, when you come home. I will take you to the United Service Museum in Whitehall to see the Duke of Wellington’s top hat. So please write me a long long letter. As there are no frogs in Germany you wont be able to have that excuse for being as dull and prosy and disconnected as your afflicted Aunt.

Please consider our summer libel.

Yr V.W.

Quentin Bell

[]

1878: To Angus Davidson

Saturday [7 April 1928]

Fontcreuse, Cassis, [France]

My dear Angus,

I am very sorry to hear that you have been ill. I believe it is a most painful disease, and fills one with melancholy. Morgan Forster has just been having it. Poor Cartwright must feel hereby doubly widowed, now you are gone. I shall go through the stages of your departure every year with her, just as I’ve finished the typhoid. But that is only one of the reasons which makes me very sorry you are going. I doubt that I shall ever do up a parcel again, and as my gift in that line is astounding, it seems a thousand pities.

Everyone here is as odd as usual—Julian has actually made himself sick laughing at Duncan and me. Our eccentricities seem to flower in the South, and the frogs keep talking incessantly. We went to Toulon with Nan Hudson, and should have gone to Marseilles today, but it is pouring. The Singer runs so fast on French roads that we got here early. It is undoubtedly what one will do in Heaven—motoring all day, and eating vast meals, and drinking red wine and liqueurs. But don’t tell your mother this. I suppose you are at Bath today. Clive has just given away his best silk sky blue pyjamas to a young lady who is of fascinating beauty, and he dines out most nights with the aristocracy of Cassis.

Leonard has almost done the accounts and thinks we should each get £70 profit—which is more than I expected after Mary.

I hope you are really recovered. What about Agnew? Have you heard anything?

Yours ever,
Virginia Woolf

Angus Davidson

[]

1879: To Violet Dickinson

[7? April 1928]

Fontcreuse, Cassis, B du R., France

My Violet,

Here we are sitting in the sun in a vineyard miles from prizes and novels thank God.

But it was very nice of you to make your tail wag in my direction; and Leonard and I send our love.

Nessa is down the road in her new villa, painting hard, and I shall take the liberty of sending her love. Angelica’s, Clive’s, Duncan’s and Julian’s too.

Julian is 6ft two and very charming.

Yrs V.W.

Marquess of Bath

[]

1880: To Gwen Raverat

7th April [1928]

Fontcreuse, Cassis, B. du R., France

My dear Gwen,

I wish I could have gone to see your pictures, but we left England the day after the show began, and I suppose it will be over when we come back—about the 20th. I should have liked to see them, not from artistic reasons, but to make up my idea of your character. I have no illusions about my artistic criticism. It is all literary. Were you pleased with the show? I have a kind of idea that we may meet one day this summer. It is an almost impossible achievement. Human beings are so terrified of each other. If I rang your bell I should feel certain you did not want to see me, as I walked up stairs—I should feel I am committing an intrusion. All the same, I think I shall.

We motored from Dieppe to Cassis—absolute heaven, I think it. Everything looks odd and new, coming along the road to it gradually. I’m half inclined to buy a bam here in a vineyard. The sun and the hills put my dear London rather in the shade—and then one does exactly what one likes here.

What are you up to?

Yours,
V.W.

Sussex

[]

1881: To V. Sackville-West

Wednesday, April 11th 1928

Auriliac, [France]

We are on our way back, and have been up in the mountains, snowed upon, punctured 3 times, changing wheels in snowstorms in pitch darkness on the edge of precipices and have come 130 miles today so I’m very sleepy—but extremely well—and rather tipsy. This is to say will you come as soon as you can and bring Pinker—let me know to Tavistock Sqre. We expect to get there on Monday night. No engagements so far—all days, all meals at your service. Yes—you have survived the death of Orlando: but as I must re-write him entirely, he’s only suspended, not dead.

Yes I do want to see you—Yes I’m very fond of you—Yes-yes yes. Potto is here

Goodnight—
Virginia

Potto [squiggly design] there!

Its all great fun—We must, must, do this together.

Berg

[]

1882: To Hope Mirrlees [from Leonard and Virginia]

[17 April 1928]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Hope,

We are both so distressed to see the news of Jane’s death. We only got back from France last night and had looked forward to coming to see her again. We know what it must be to you.

If there’s anything at all which I could do for you these next few days, will you let me know?

Yours
Leonard Woolf

Anyhow, what a comfort for you to have been all you were to her.

Love V.

Mrs T. S. Eliot

[]

1883: To V. Sackville-West

Tuesday [17 April 1928]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Would you bring a bookplate or something with your Arms on it—very important—also the photograph of the man at Worthing: Did you get Shelmerdine photographed? I’m being pestered to send all these things to America at once, and see that every word will have to be re-written.

Come punctually at 4 with Pinker, or Leonard will be gone. May I come to the broadcasting with you? And aint it wretched you care for me no longer: I always said you were a promiscuous brute—Is it a Mary again; or a Jenny this time or a Polly? Eh?

The truth shall be dug out of you at all costs.

Am I to be wearing my heart out for a woman who goes with any girl from an Inn!

Yr Virginia
Woolf

Potto

Berg

[]

1884: To Vanessa Bell

19th April. 1928

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Dearest

Here we are back again after the most adventurous cold journey you can imagine. Once we were marooned on the top of a mountain pass in the snow. Once a runaway horse missed us by two inches. Innumerable nails stuck in our tyres.—But to business. Would you let your rooms, or 3 of them, to some friends of Vita’s [Frederick and Margaret Voigt], poor but respectable, for £2.10. a week for a month from next week or the 1st of May? Details are a little vague as they are in Germany, but if you would state your terms and leave me a little latitude I expect I could arrange something. I said I thought you would want £3.3. I think they only want a bedroom, sitting room and kitchen.

Now I will just run over my first day here, not to excite your envy, for really I wonder why one lives the way one does when one might the way one doesn’t—in the tower at Fontcreuse, for example, seeing the tip of Dolphin’s tail once a week (For I should be strictly independent) But to return: the telephone rings as I have my bath: Leonards mother: will we go there: an hour or two at Orlando, which is wretched, and must be entirely re-written in one month; then out across a churchyard to look for a garage; and accosted by two drab wandering women, distraught, sobbing, one Hope, who cried that Jane was just dead and would we come to the funeral: never have I seen anyone so mad, wild, frantic: and we kissed among the tombs: (Cromwell’s daughter is buried there, as perhaps you know—anyhow Duncan would) so to the office; and there’s Raymond: just been flying; may he come to tea; theres a Jew called Namier; so home; Lydia and Maynard: will we come to dinner; telephone; Vita; may she come to tea next day; and so to bed. The net result is that we’re just off to Jane’s funeral at Finchley and dine with the Keynes’s tonight. I think Duncan might fitly and gracefully write to Hope.

Private

I found an odd letter from Clive waiting me here. He apologises for having been angry with me, but says that he found I had been making merry at his expense, and that he couldn’t help bursting out, though he should have been angry not with me but with the person who repeated my sayings. What can he mean? Did you repeat anything? I shouldn’t blame you; but on the whole I suspect he read some of my letters to you, the day we went to Toulon. Lord, Lord! He says I ought to remember how unhappy he has been. But when will the days of his widowhood be over? Oughtn’t he to remember how mad I have been? And hasn’t he forgotten the blue parrokeet [Mary Hutchinson] entirely? And is this love? And would you or I forget Duncan or Leonard in six months? And whats the truth of life?—for I am convinced it is lodged with you.

I came to a million conclusions about you and Duncan during my stay: Happily for you I left with about 20 thousand questions unasked. The few I managed to get spoken were mere midge bites—I should like to write a book about Duncan. Are you the only person who is really acquainted with him? intimately profoundly? I daresay.

But now I must rake out my black clothes and be off, in this bitter cold. Write please instantly; and I will answer. I have a thousand very interesting things to say. No news of Angus—Adrian away. His dog has torn Alices lip open and she had to go to the hospital and threatens to have the law on Adrian. And there’s Will Arnold Forster inviting himself to dinner.

Yr B.

Please tell me if you can throw light on Clive.

Berg

[]

1885: To Clive Bell

21st April [1928]

52 Tavistock Sqre, [W.C.1]

Dearest Clive,

I own I don’t like being smacked in public—it makes us both slightly ridiculous; and I cant for the life of me think what I did this time to deserve it. I shouldn’t mind owning [up] if I’d made merry at your expense—its a way you have too, you’ll allow—but the occasion escapes me. I sometimes wonder what itch this smacking gratifies—why I’m so often the victim. Psychologically, I’d like to understand it. And if I ought to remember that you’ve been unhappy, so ought you to remember that I’ve been mad. These slaps and snubs—unexpected as they are—annoy me more than they should. But enough—

Life, if life its to be called, has been breaking in. That is to say I’ve dined with the Keynes’, been to Jane Harrison’s funeral; had Vita to dinner; Raymond to tea; Elly [Dr Elinor Rendel] to pull wax out of my ears, written some pages, and have to see the Crolys, Dadie, Angus, Stella Benson, God knows who else, in the near future. Meanwhile its as bitter as sin and as dark as a coalhole. Julian turned up to eat the remains of our dinner the other night, and caught the last train to Cambridge.

Of gossip the chief is that Vita has had a terrific culminating and final scene with Lady Sackville in a solicitor’s office, with witnesses to take down all insults—The woman seems utterly mad, called her liar thief and harlot, cut her pearl necklace in half, and pocketed the twelve best stones, and then announced that she would consider her dead henceforward and stop every penny of her allowance. Vita swears she is going to earn her own living by her pen. Dottie is selling Sherfield and buying a place at Groombridge, chiefly remarkable for the gigantic rocks in the garden, which have taken Vita’s romantic fancy. But you’ll hear all this in detail—and a thousand other titbits—from Raymond, who is flowing, scintillating, brilliant.

Oh and Fredegond has been taken for a Roman Catholic—and Lydia [Keynes] is a woman of parts.

Yr V.W.

Quentin Bell

[]

1886: To V. Sackville-West

Friday [27 April 1928]

From Monk’s House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

I rang you up just now, to find you were gone nutting in the woods with Mary Campbell, or Mary Carmichael, or Mary Seton, but not me—damn you—to say:

I’ve forgotten the right name and address of Mrs Goldsmith [Margaret Voigt]. She rang up and said she was staying possibly with you. Would you tell her that the rooms [37 Gordon Square] will be ready on Monday, and the keys will be here any time on Monday morning. Tell her this, but dont tell her how violently I disliked her for talking of ‘Vita’ on the telephone: how vulgar, pushing, crude, coarse, American, I thought her voice—This is one of the effects of jealousy. I can’t say how I detest hearing some one call you ‘Vita’ in American on the telephone at 8 in the morning

Second

I wanted to ask if it would be convenient should we call in on Sunday on our way back; at Long Barn. It has now become essential to have a photograph of Orlando in country clothes in a wood, to end with. If you have films and a camera I thought Leonard might take you. We should come about 2 or 3 or earlier: not later, so dont stay in. Would you wire if this won’t do: like an angel. And we won’t come if your house is flooded with people. And I dont want to meet that voice inside a woman. Not hearing, we shall understand it suits.

V.W.

A thousand thanks for translations [Rilke]: life exciting: hectic: old friends, turning up: Dadie—dadie—dadie Hah!

Berg

[]

1887: To Vanessa Bell

Sunday April 29th [1928]

Monk’s House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest,

The letting of the rooms seems to be accomplished. Old Uppington arrived in the Press with your letter and will have the rooms ready on Monday. A hard American voice [Voigt] roused me at 8 in the morning with a torrent of enquiries. (I put this in to show how much I have done for you; and thus what a claim I have to your kindness)

We are down here for the weekend. It is suddenly full summer; everything is out; the garden blazing with lilac, apple, pear blossom and every flower you can imagine; and the country is far far far away better than Cassis. Really, the downs are astonishing at this moment. (Here I cut out a long rhapsody, just as I suppressed a very brilliant and profound account of Chartres, because of Duncan’s viper tongue) But in 5 years we shall be driven out—theres no doubt of it. I went for a walk to the river this evening and found a race course on the flats by the halt, with stables and a stand run up in cheap wood. It seems inconceivable, but the man who has bought Southease farm is starting a pony race course, and they’re said to [be] going to make a side line from the halt to Southease. And they say they’re going to build 30 cottages at Asheham. Undoubtedly, this country is doomed; but where to go next, I dont know. I wish Cassis hadn’t an English colony attached, and weren’t so hilly. Wont you migrate to a little terrain somewhere between Tarascon and Uzés, which seemed infinitely lovely, and entirely French, and one had asparagus and truffles, which is my favourite food, for about sixpence? Thats my notion of bliss.

I’ve written to ask Clive for an explanation, but I dont suppose he’ll give one. I feel pretty sure, from the definite way in which he said he had been told I had laughed at him; that he had really read it. So I think it would be safer to lock up letters. His anger began, (and he could have seen no one, and had no letters himself) directly after we went to Toulon. I’ve no doubt I did write something about him—but I cant remember what.

Please send the photograph of Angelica [as Sasha in Orlando] as soon as you can. Harcourt Brace is badgering my life out to get the whole book and pictures during May.

London has become, largely owing to the heat, rather attractive. I have had one or two odd encounters—one as we were crossing Piccadilly at night to go to the play. Someone plucked at my shoulder and I saw to my amazement Katherine Fursel “I was just thinking of Madge” I said, which happened to be true. “I wasn’t” she said. “I was thinking of a woman policeman with whom I’m to spend the night.” She is going to come and see us—She is much the same—strapping, tailor made, a little pinched and weather-beaten; and it must be 20 years since I saw her. She is a masterly woman, I gather, an official, and spending the night with a policewoman only meant supervising morality, I am sure. Then I was rung up by Marjorie S⁠[trachey]. in a great state of emotion. “May Boris and I come and see you at once?” she asked. I, understanding by this that she had eloped with Anrep and wished for my blessing agreed enthusiastically. But she turned up with Doris—Enfield it was: a worthy and highly intelligent woman; but not what I wanted. Then we had a most curious wizened monkeylike woman, Stella Benson, to dine. As you are now a library subscriber, perhaps you can tell me about her books. She was second for my prize; and she took it very seriously; but I had to admit that I had never been so sneered at in my life as for getting it. Why does almost every bodies intelligence stop short beneath the chin? One finds somebody intelligent, amusing, educated, and then Hey Presto (as you would say) they take the Femina prize for the voice of God, and become no better than a suburban lodging house keepers scullery maid. But she has seen rivers in Manchuria freeze from side to side in ten minutes, and is of two minds whether to leave her husband or not.

I think I have secured an interesting piece of gossip for you—which I will tell you when you come back. You must be back on the 30th. I am rapidly drying—Angelica has become essential to me. An awful kind of spurious maternal feeling has taken possession of me—which reminds me, don’t let Julian become too like his father in twitching persisting uneasiness—he takes his poems a little too much to heart; as Clive does his derision at the hands of the great Stephen family. What a mass of vanity that man is! (now dont leave this lying about) I’m seriously rather concerned about his future; when you’re not there especially. He is so exacting and pertinacious, and yet to have him with young women, as he insists, is almost intolerable; to Leonard indeed quite so. I rather hope he and Raymond will knock about Europe for a time. Could one tell him not to talk so much about himself? Thats what gets him laughed at—this perpetual description of his own ecstasies and agonies: after all this bedding or not bedding becomes a little dull; when one’s out of it: as I am; and Vita is; and Dottie is; and various other people.

I dont advise you to motor back the way we came, unless it is hot. Leonard caught a violent cold and I went completely deaf in one ear. The ground is strewn with nails. When I was deaf I thought only Angelica will be kind to me. I shall retire and trouble my friends no more—Happily Elly came and by blowing trumpet like through a tube shook out a piece of wax and suddenly I heard the gas fire roaring and was cured. Apparently I did it with my ear stoppers.

Angus is seeing Agnews today, and I think they must mean to offer him something. The Press has revived astonishingly with Cartwright only; Leonard gains a good half hour every morning. On Monday Kennedy comes; Belcher has not been pert, but is apt to be flustered and to need looking after at her accounts. I know you like these details of the basement world.

Are you going to Germany? I hope not. I’m jealous of Roger being with you. I must go to the London show; but wild donkeys and tigers shall not make me commit my views to writing—with Duncans flickering adders tongue a-playing round my verbiage. Nevertheless, kiss that adorable man from me. I often wonder how we should have done married.

B

Berg

[]

1888: To Julian Bell

May 2nd [1928]

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Sqre., [W.C.1]

My dear Julian,

I have been in the devil of a hurry, and am still, owing to my dog show prize [the Femina], and to having to finish an extremely foolish book [Orlando] all of a sudden. So I have not written. However here are my remarks for what they are worth. I still think much as I did about the poems you showed me last summer. I like them. I think they show great promise—I mean power of observation, and of putting your facts down accurately. But I still think you need to get a broader view of nature as a whole before you can make your observations into poetry. They dont make poems yet; only lists of things one after another. This applies most to the natural history poems. I think you want some mood to give them unity and driving force.

But this doesnt apply to the later ones—more especially to the Ode to Jefferies. I think this is much more coherent and pulled through. There you have given one emotion which subdues the details instead of leaving them separate and unjoined. I like this very much. I hope you will try to give more emotion and less observation; or rather to combine them more. I think you want to write a great deal still so as to get things to run quickly in words. But I quite agree that one must begin by being a pettifogging character, with a note book, trying to get the colour of the sunset right, at the beginning. Please send some more. I think you are beginning to creep out of your shell; and it is a very grave question whether you are a duck, or a swan, or it may be some odious reptile. I hear you have done a good review for Leonard. I shall be greatly amused to read it in print.

Now I must go to the Institut Français to be given forty pounds by Hugh Walpole and make a speech of thanks. My god! Is it worth it? Echo answers no.

I think we shall come up [to Cambridge] soon, and descend on you for lunch.

Yours affectionate and loving (but what on earth is the distinction?) Aunt Virginia

Quentin Bell

[]

1889: To Hugh Walpole

4th May [1928]

52 Tavistock Square, WC1

Dear Mr Walpole,

It is extremely nice of you to write when you have already been put to so much trouble on my account. I wanted to thank you at the time, and should have liked to start an argument had it been feasible but when I turned and saw the audience I was overcome with horror, could think of nothing to say, and so fled. But I do thank you very sincerely. Apart from the very generous things you said, and seem always to be saying in print, about me, I was immensely interested by your theories.

I suppose you would not be able to dine with us next Friday, 11th, at 7.45 without dressing. I hope it would be less gloomy than South Kensington and we should enjoy it very much if you could come.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

1890: To V. Sackville-West

Friday [4 May 1928]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Orlando,

I think I must tell Eddy about you [and Orlando]. What do you say? He is so passionate about Knole and Sackvilles. I feel it awkward to spring the whole thing without warning—Would he keep it secret? Let me know what you think—I am seeing him on Tuesday. I’ll tell him myself, if at all.

I hear Mrs Nicolson and Mrs Woolf gave some offence on Wednesday by coming to the prize dressed as if for a funeral. Still it was my funeral. Hugh has now written me an eloquent letter of affection and regret—says he was stunned. He must be a man of the tenderest heart, and so I’ve told him.

Life flows on—Oh Lord what a lot of people I’ve seen.

And you’re alone listening to the Nightingales damn you—with Mary [Campbell]—

Yr
Virginia

Berg

[]

1891: To Quentin Bell

May 6th [1928]

52 Tavistock Sqre, WC1

My dear Quentin,

Your letter has been rather a surprise to me; because, if you can write as well as all that, with such abandonment to devilry and ribaldry,—for I dont believe a word of what you say—how in Gods name can you be content to remain a painter? Surely you must see the infinite superiority of the language to the paint? Think how many things are impossible in paint; giving pain to the Keynes’, making fun of one’s aunts, telling libidinous stories, making mischief—these are only a few of the advantages; against which a painter has nothing to show: for all his merits are also a writers. Throw up your career, for God’s sake.

Here we are back again, after a most exciting journey in the Singer, which is now pronounced as the French pronounce monkeys, across France. Often we were suspended on a precipice with the crows ogling us. Often only a hairs breadth was between the left wide wheel and a drop of some 80,000 feet. But we came through, and are, as I say, here; which is London: very hot; all ablooming; have just been to St Albans for a drive; come back; Roger rings up; he and Helen will come in after dinner, which will consist of a cold chicken, but no wine.

Here you have the very latest information from the metropolis of the world.

I was fascinated and appalled by the story of your adventures—That a nephew of mine! I cried, between tears and laughter—Should one be proud of you or the very opposite—climbing the Monument naked, and sleeping with a professor of divinity, who is, unfortunately, but its the way in Germany, of the female sex—such is your way of life, and I tell it at many a merry party, half crying, half laughing.

I wish though you would come home. I want to visit the Museums with you and to consult you on many points. I dreamt of you all last night, but I shant tell you what we were doing, for fear it should shock you.

Julian is a very odd sort of phenomenon—about the size of a moderate Indian rhinoceros; said to be good tempered—I doubt it. He’s a clever reptile, and is writing—there, that’s what you should do.

I have had no news from your blessed mother for a fortnight, except about letting her rooms to an American. Of course Duncan went and let them to another American; of course Mrs Uppington went off with the keys; of course I was blamed for everything—of course—of course.

I am scribbling away to finish my nonsense book. Have I your permission to mention you in the Preface? Because I’ve done it.

Now sit down and write to me, dearest Quentin, a long long letter. I assure you, without flattery, and we know each other too well for that, you write the best letters of anyone I know.

And do come back because of our Libel.

Yr loving V.W.

Quentin Bell

[]

1892: To V. Sackville-West

Sunday [6 May 1928]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Hugh Walpole is dining here on Friday.

Will you come?

Please do.

And let me know at once (as I must get someone)—or as soon as you can.

VW
Virginia
in haste

And when shall I see you? If you like to telephone, I shall be here before 10?

P.S.
IF—you are driving Clive back on Monday—but dont—come both of you and lunch here.

Let me know

And Harold

Why do I like Harold so much?

Does Harold like me?

These remarks are all strictly Private

Berg

[]

1893: To Vanessa Bell

May 9th [1928]

52 Tavistock Square, [W.C.1]

Dearest,

It is a proof of affection how quick I answer your letters. Indeed I am getting very wizend [sic] and dry without you. We are overcome with your horrors—Gordon Sqre I mean—My practical suggestion is that you should take Gwen’s [Raverat] house which is nice, cheap, and can be let without difficulty. She seems settled to go and live in Grantchester. Has nothing yet been done about your money?—with considerable skill I contrived to get Mrs Goldsmith, Dick Wood and Mrs Uppington, together, and Dick Wood is now in residence. I’ve just rung up to ask how many rooms they’re using, but no answer; so I will write to her—she’s American too and always out—and let you know.

London of course teems with gossip—Ottoline (no doubt you’ve heard) has almost died. She has necrosis of the jaw, had two operations; agonies of pain, 7 teeth out without gas; and is still very ill—also much disfigured—I saw Philip who was distracted and pessimistic—in fact hinted at cancer. But they say she will recover. Then there’s Eddie back and as prickly as a hedgehog. Old Lady Sackville is bringing a case against his father, which will mean that all their characters will be blackened in the Law Courts—Already she has scattered it broadcast that Harold’s a bugger, and Vita a sapphist. This upsets Eddy considerably; but he was rather nice, queer, acid, prickly; and immensely sorry for himself. Rogers back—We had a sham Bloomsbury evening with Molly and Desmond at Rogers; with Molly entirely sunk into a lump of white jelly—I have never seen her so gloomy. After an argument lasting 2 hours, she said she hadn’t heard a word the whole evening—Lord, Lord! And I was given my prize by Hugh Walpole in a South Kensington drawing room full of elderly fur bearing women, among whom the loveliest and sprightliest was Ethel Dilke. I was made to speak; which I did with dead and melancholy composure. I told them my great grandmother was a Frenchwoman—then I was given a very strong smelling purse with a cheque for £40—but I think it aint worth it. I still scratch a good deal at nights to get rid of the feel. Of course George [Duckworth] writes to congratulate me; and says he met Sir Somebody at dinner, who had heard of me—or the prize; but he has had all his teeth out—so has Gerald—and he and Margaret are feeling very stiff in the back. Florence B. may amuse you. I maintain that I live wholly at Rodmell.

I suppose you’ve heard that Angus has not got Agnew’s job. and I gather that he’s not going to Cassis—He seems very cheerful, and smart; and the Press is 50 years younger without him. Kennedy says he is going to put up a shelf, as he knows a man who sells wood wholesale, and he is very fond of putting up shelves. He is a nice, simple-minded boy, delighted to escape home life, I gather. But as Leonard and I were saying, Julian seems a different order of creature altogether. These young people—I’ve just been to tea with Miss Jenkins—might have come off chocolate boxes—What happens when they take to life, I cant conceive. Or are Julian and Quentin prodigies of brain and character? Julian has written a very good review of a French history for Leonard, in about 2 days. And I had a really brilliant letter from Quentin, in which he says, “I am I believe one of nature’s puritans, which is surprising considering my beloved parents isn’t it?” Fancy our writing like that about father to the Quaker!

As for Clive; I feel rather embarrassed. He’ll be back on Sunday, and there will, I am sure, be some sort of explanation—Shall I accuse him of reading my letters? He wrote to me again, saying that he has an inferiority complex which leads him to fly into passions with me: but he is now radiantly happy, thanks to you and Duncan and Angelica, and wishes never to leave Cassis. What do you advise me to do? Mary seemed very wistful, yet frigid, on the telephone, scouting for news of Cassis; yet refusing to dine with us. I saw Lytton, by the way, who thinks she misses Bloomsbury considerably, but is settling down—how he knows not. He has sold Elizabeth it is said for £6,000 to an American newspaper, and was just off, mysteriously, to Provence. No doubt he will settle on you like the rest of us. I entirely sympathise with your brilliant and caustic remarks about Raymond—to have a week of him would make me take to sack cloth and ashes, wear wool next the skin, put peas in my boots—anything anything to be out of fashion, out of date obsolete. I had an amusing account from Eddy of the final rupture with Valery [Taylor] which took place at Long Barn, just before he started. They reached a point where they couldn’t speak to each other, so Vita was sent from room to room with notes, each sobbing loudly the whole time. It is now completely over, Eddy says: and both are much relieved.

But the real weakness of Cassis as a place of residence is not the landscape nor the Crowthers: it is the liability to Raymond—and the Wolves I would say, if I were modest—To be exposed without any protection to Barbara and Raymond seems to me an infliction only to be visited on the damned. But I think you are damned. Theres Barbara, condemned by you to have three children and decorate her house; and now—all thanks to you and Duncan—the poor woman has moved into a caravan, where she sits all day on the ladder, shelling peas. Somehow she thinks this is in the Bloomsbury manner. She has just sent me a message through Saxon that she thinks me a pig: perhaps she has heard what I think of her. And a pig’s nothing to that.

Now this is a fine collection of gossip—and deserves a return. Then I’ll tell you, perhaps, what I think of your pictures. We had a private view of Roger’s latest—but is it true he has fallen into despair and is giving up painting altogether? Clive says so. Karin’s back; all askew; and thinks she will live half in America in future. They have given Alice £5 and hope to have settled the bite. The dog is at this moment on our stairs—very dirty, but kind hearted.

A thousand thanks for the photographs [of Angelica]—which havent yet come, but will I expect be perfect. O dear I wish you were here and I could talk to you, instead of going to Armide in the gallery—Nobody is like you—I dry into middle aged desiccatry without you.

B

(you’ll never understand that word)

The Singer has been garaged in Judd Street for 17/6, which includes cleaning—But I don’t know how much one will use it—We went to St Albans last Sunday—and I think of going to Cambridge for the day and shall sponge on Julian for lunch.

Berg

[]

1894: To Vanessa Bell

Saturday May 12th [1928]

52 Tavistock Sqre., [W.C.1]

Dearest,

You will be sickening of the sight of the Wolves purple ink—I have at last caught Mrs Goldsmith [Voigt] who says that two rooms will be empty after Friday and you could send Angelica there at any time—She has got a flat and could leave after the 18th I gather if you like—She seems only anxious to fulfil your slightest wish. Would it be any use your communicating with Morgan [Forster] who is staying with [Charles] Mauron at Mas Blanc Tarascon (but you will know the address) and comes back I think at the end of May: He might be able to escort Angelica. It seems absurd that you should have to make two journeys. Perhaps Angus has written to you. He talked vaguely of a job at Newcastle—temporary—Raymond has just sprung up to say that his time at Cassis was divine, in spite of the weather: whereas Dolphin says that she dont mind how hard it rains so long as Raymond aint there—such is the diversity of human opinion in this world.

The photographs [of Angelica for Orlando] are most lovely, and I cannot thank you sufficiently for the pains you have been at, I think with a little re-arrangement one or two might do: a trifle young, thats all, but I’m showing them to Vita, who doesn’t want to be accused of raping the under age. My God—I shall rape Angelica one of these days: she is the jasper of jocundity, of all your brood: a per se. Do you remember the poem that comes from, and how in the old days in the dawn of Bloomsbury, Saxon used to say it?

I’ve been in very odd society—partly owing to the Prize giving, which was of a horror indescribable; and after it, out crept from various corners old derelicts like Elizabeth Robins, and Beatrice Harraden, and a woman called Tupman. E. Robins fascinated me by describing the extreme beauty combined with viciousness of mother. She looked like a saint and then said something so witty one was shocked—She combined complete sanctity with complete woman of the worldliness; and was extremely reserved. She used to come to Miss Robin’s flat in Bayswater on hot summer evenings carrying jellies in pots—Then, in order to get her to write her memoirs, I had to go to tea yesterday with Lady Horner. That also was fascinating, though a little hard work—She is grown very old, but has all the airs of a great beauty, and got gossipey about Burne Jones, who was obviously her lover; but the Mackails wouldn’t let it appear, and so though they read through 15 volumes of the most intimate letters, which I looked at, and saw “my darling” over and over again, this was completely ignored; and a respectable family man evolved, which, says Lady Horner, who should know, Burne Jones was not. Most of her sons were killed in the war, and she is a little obliterated by sorrows, but has great charm, and would have wandered on for hours about the horrors of county family life in the Soties, and how she was never allowed to move a pot, and every old rook or owl ever shot by a Horner had to be kept in one corner for ever, but unfortunately Cecily, a perfect dull glass-eyed beauty who married Lambton, Nelly Cecils brother, came in, hot from the races; and I fled. The whole house billows and undulates with Burne Jones’es—incredibly shiny and slick: but dull as a mosaic in a railway station waiting room—So I thought—All briars and flowing mantles—O and then I went to your show and spent an hour making some extremely interesting theories: which I will condense into one paean of admiration for your Three Women and Duncans Tree: (but why in God’s name do they call it that?) I had forgotten the extreme brilliancy and flow and wit and ardour of these works—I am greatly tempted to write “Variations on a Picture by Vanessa Bell” for Desmonds paper—I should run the three women and the pot of flowers on a chair into one phantasmagoria. I think you are a most remarkable painter. But I maintain you are into the bargain, a satirist, a conveyer of impressions about human life: a short story writer of great wit and able to bring off a situation in a way that rouses my envy. I wonder if I could write the Three Women in prose. Would Roger let me have it here for a week or so? I think Lessore is very good: but I am tremendously impressed, most of all, by your and Duncans epic greatness and now I have made myself sufficiently ridiculous in the eyes of two cold blooded creatures who only draw me out to pour salt on my horns and see a little blob of foam (which causes intense pain to the snail) form on the tips:

Desmond told me that he had had two letters, by the same post, one from Bobo [Mayor] who is in Paris with Clive, saying that he is in roaring spirits; the other from Clive saying that his life is over, and he is tired of the sun. Don’t you think it possible that Bobo is the Leicestershire lady—and the whole concoction is mere camouflage to salve his vanity? Anyhow, he will be back tomorrow, and I shall be I suppose, made to pay for my remarks one way or t’other.

We had a most curious evening last night with Lydia and Hugh Walpole. Lydia, Leonard says, has now been perfectly trained, and is invaluable. She does her trick; then goes under the table, and leaves before eleven—But Hugh stayed on till 12.30—pouring out his sorrows, which are that he can never sell less than 20,000 copies of his books, but nobody of any intelligence can bear them. It cuts him to the heart when his chauffeur praises them—He has 10 letters every day from enthusiastic Americans. But Bloomsbury sees that he is a fake, and he now sees it too. It all comes from being the son of a Bishop and so taught to tell lies from his infancy. He gave us a long analysis of his soul and his lies and his popularity which was very amusing—considering I’d only met him at the prize giving. But Lord! I must stop.

John Strachey has gone mad and been taken to an asylum. Adrian and Karin dashed their new car into a motor lorry and smashed it (but the driver was drunk): Alice says she will have the Law on them; and won’t cash their cheque—thats all the Bloomsbury gossip at present: its bitter cold again. Roger seems to be staying on. Helens mother is ill—

Yr B

Berg

[]

1895: To Vanessa Bell

Saturday May 25th [1928]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

Dearest,

Business:

(1) We have sold Hyde Park Gate for £4925—I hope you’ll think this all right. Somebody of Halseys has been after it for some weeks. They suddenly agreed to give this,—which we had beat them up to; and so we accepted. Leonard thinks we ought to get rather more from the money invested than from the rent; and we have no agents fees to pay, and shant pay Halsey for collecting either.

(2) I will put a notice of the La Bergère in the Nation and bruit it abroad among the snobs; who think Cassis next to Bloomsbury—I dont see why Bunny or Colefax or Hope, or someone of that ilk shouldn’t take it.

(3) I shall try to seduce Angelica.

(2B) but wouldn’t it be a good thing to advertise it in a French paper?

I saw Angus for a moment. He seemed to feel that the highest and greenest of laurels had descended upon him; and so it has—But how you can be so splendidly generous I cant conceive, to whom such company—not that he’s not charming in every way—but such a damn flop, such an empty suit of clothes—I get the feeling I used to have with Adrian, of utter lackadaisicalness, which plunges me into the mirk of ten November fogs. Still, as I say, he has every virtue; and don’t please leave this on the studio table—but I see I began this sentence “to whom such company” and so I must hastily finish it, would be somnolent in the extreme—What astonishing good hearts at core you and Duncan have! I was vastly amused by the Strachey panic; Carrington is said by Eddy to be perhaps the most tortuous, evil, and dishonest of all the people he knows—And I used to think her honest as a haystack!

We are in rather a turmoil about Rodmell. They’ve started a race course down at the Halt, which wouldn’t so much matter; but now Alinson has bought our terrace, and threatens to build. This was done by some hanky panky with the agent behind our backs, and the owner, whose son was killed last year and has a very high opinion of us because we wrote him such a nice letter, is now much ashamed, and says he will talk Alinson out of it. But I doubt it. So Leonard is inclined to sell and go. But then I shall never see you again: What do you advise? I see from advertisements one can get the most ravishing old houses with gardens and orchards in Dorset, Suffolk or Norfolk for a mere song. Would you consider moving, for if so, I would willingly spend more time in the country, London being almost intolerable, what with Colefaxes, etc: and we might settle, of course not too near, in houses which would be our own for ever, and the apples of our eyes. They’re selling all Cuckmere I see, and Laughton, so I cant help thinking Sussex is doomed. But give us your opinion.

I had a long rambling very indirect talk with Clive, who kept making allusions to my having told someone I saw too much of him, but wouldn’t come to facts; and was rather apologetic; and also affectionate. But he says he cant help these outbursts, which date back to old horrors in the past; and as I am also scarred and riddled with complexes about you and him, and being derided and insulted and sacrificed and betrayed, I don’t see how we can hope for a plain straightforward relationship. In fact, having kissed each other passionately, we met two days later and quarrelled—or rather he sneered and I became sarcastic—about my seeing Hugh Walpole. So it will go on till the daisies grow over us. But he told me he is much more settled and content; and talked of Mary as if she were under the earth for ever. I have had no dealings with her, nor shall, unless she makes the move.

I am feeling extremely barren and dry without you—Angelica will be a small shower of rain; but not enough—What happens when you leave me too long is that I go gadding wherever I’m asked and finally end in a rage of misery against my kind—I saw nothing but celebrities last week; Rebecca West at Todds; Maurois and Arnold Bennett at Colefaxes, and had Rose Macaulay to dine alone. Rebecca was much the most interesting, though as hard as nails, very distrustful, and no beauty. She is a cross between a charwoman and a gipsy, but as tenacious as a terrier, with flashing eyes, very shabby, rather dirty nails, immense vitality, bad taste, suspicion of intellectuals, and great intelligence. She gave me the true history of Isadora Duncan’s life—(I sent you the life, by the way, which is rather valuable, as the libraries are banning it). Rebecca has knocked about with all the mongrels of Europe. She talks openly of her son [Anthony], who has got consumption: They say she is a hardened liar, but I rather liked her—The [Dorothy] Todd ménage is incredibly louche: Todd in sponge bag trousers; Garland in pearls and silk; both rather raddled and on their beam ends. Maurois was disappointing, but then Sibyl makes everyone stony, and breaks up talk with a hammer—good, deserving, industrious, kindhearted woman as she is. Rose Macaulay was a great disappointment—Some houses have gone too far to be repaired—she is one. If we had rescued her before she was 30—but she is now 45—has lived with the riff raff of South Kensington culture for 15 years; become a successful lady novelist, and is rather jealous, spiteful, and uneasy about Bloomsbury; can talk of nothing but reviews, yet being the daughter of a Cambridge Don, knows she shouldn’t; and has her tail between her legs. She made me determined not to allow Angelica, whatever happens, to become a novelist. All this fame that writers get is obviously the devil; I am not so nice as I was, but I am nicer than Rose Macaulay—also she is a spindle shanked withered virgin: I never felt anyone so utterly devoid of the sexual parts. Raymond gave one of his parties that night, and as Leonard was dining with Clive, I was alone with Rose; and as Raymond is really a male Colefax just out of the shell of course he insisted that Rose and I should come,—which flung me into a temper—Why do these young men all run to vulgarity, snobbery, shoddery, Toddery? However, Vita came in on her way to Raymonds, and I rubbed Rose off on her, and I saw them up Raymonds staircase, and heard him chopping the air like a woodpecker and ran off home. This was very brilliant on my part, as I picked out the soul of the party on a pin.

Leonard says you’ll never get through this letter. He says I am to say he will do anything he can about 37, but it is rather difficult, without seeing the letters. But send him any business you want done. James [Strachey] told me he has his house from the same people, and they never trouble him; yet he sublets every floor. Our Square gardener says the Bedford estate tries to tyrannise over everyone, even the old woman who sells papers; but if you stand up, they turn tail. Oh dear, how nice to see you again:

B.

Berg

[]

1896: To Duncan Grant

[27? May 1928]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest Duncan,

Would you be an angel and buy me a small birthday present for Nessa? I enclose a cheque—(I am extremely rich—) as I dont think my taste is as good as yours and you might know some object—hat, bag, pot, anything—that she wants. I am rather distracted by the need of changing into respectability after missing Mr Snaiths poetry to give tea to the editor of a paper which pays so well that I have to see him—Such is life. But all the more essential then is it that you and Nessa should come back and compose us into sanity.

Ott: by the way was enchanted by a letter you wrote her—“Dear, dear Duncan—one knows what it costs him to write—and he wrote me such a charming kind, wonderful letter…” She keeps it by her side, with a kind of chamber pot beneath. Teeth are drawn daily, but she seems in the best of spirits and reads nothing but Shakespeare. “Suddenly Margots head peers round the corner, with her lips like that (pointing to cherry on the walnut cake) and a hat like that (pointing to a walnut on the cake). Money is all she talks about—There is a certain beauty in illness—one is alone—one reads—one thinks—one sees only the people one likes seeing”—Now its a very odd thing how spirited the old thing is, how beautiful, with her jaw in a nosebag like an old horse, and yet so idiotic. One cant stand very much of it.

You had better make Nessa get a present for herself—now I come to think of it.

Ott. told me she knew for a fact, name and all, that Ethel [Sands] loved a man; he loved Ethel; Nan came between. Ethels conscience pricked her. I wouldn’t have let it prick me! said Ottoline with a kind of neigh. Indeed, I thought—talking of pricks—but one couldn’t say that aloud to her.

I must give over, and work as I said.

A thousand loves. Angelica is adorable, very distinguished, debonaire, aloof, intimate, erratic, passionate, reserved, lovely like her Aunt—(you thought I was going to say father)

Duncan Grant

[]

1897: To V. Sackville-West

Sunday [27 May 1928]
(the finest day of the year)

Monk’s House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

This is to say that we expect Harold to dine on Wednesday, 7.45: and Vita to come in afterwards, and to bring the photographs of Orlando in breeches. And are you making an appointment to be penetrated on Friday? And I’m alone Friday night.

I will briefly sketch 3 moods of horror: Raymond’s lunch party—pretty desperate; Sibyls tea party; then Rose to dinner—incredibly disillusioning and terrifying—for I think I shall be like that and I thought her awful; so cheap peevish and petty; and then you come in and say she’s to go to Raymonds: and I think what a damned snob Raymond is—how I detest his hair and his clothes—so when you call in the morning I’m furious, not with you, with Raymond: and so, when it comes to going to his party I say I’m tired when I’m really furious—and these are my moods, only very much more violent: and I cant bear seeing people any more; except that I should like to see you—And its divine here, but the field is sold, and we’ve seen the Byng Stampers who are very contrite and the races begin in the meadows tomorrow, and we go up by motor at dawn on Tuesday, with the mist on the ground and you asleep.

V.

Berg

[]

1898: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

May 30th [1928]

52 Tavistock Square, [W.C. 1]

Dearest Ottoline,

How difficult it is to write to you! I have thought about it ever so many times—that is I have thought of you and wanted to tell you how sorry I was about your illness and how fond of you. But its just these words one can’t say. I think perhaps if one had never written a word one would then be able to say what one meant. I dread so getting tangled in a mass of words that when I want most to write, I dont. So you must write all my affection for me; and make it very strong and also the real odd, recurring discomfort it is to me to think of you in pain. How horrible it is that this should have happened to you. I have this silly romantic but impossible to avoid sense of your beauty; and then to combine this with the idea of you in pain—but you’ll say I dont really know you. But enough, you must allow, to be very anxious if I could do anything for you, to do it. We brought some books, but Philip said you already had them.

I like Max [Beerbohm] in Desmonds new magazine [Life and Letters]—so neat and exact;—I ran into Desmond in Kingsway this evening, coming back from Leonards hairdresser. For here we are rather dusty and bedraggled in the midst of hairdressers, omnibuses and so on, after Whitsun at Rodmell, where I walked on the downs. Very foolishly we’ve come back to see people like Mr Leach and Miss McAfee—Americans: I dont know them, but they will come here one hot afternoon and sit and sit and ask me who are the most promising young English writers—which I’m sure I dont know. I’ve been meeting them all—Rebecca West, Arnold Bennett, Rose Macaulay. Rebecca is the most interesting to me. I liked her vitality and inquisitiveness and hardness—or so I thought it, but we never got within 20 miles of each other, and I dont suppose we shall ever meet again. She spoke of you with great affection—in spite of her hardness.

This needs no answer of any sort. It is only the most stiff dry absurd inadequate way of sending my love to you, and do please get well soon and let me come and see you

Your
Virginia

Leonard wants me to send his love too.

Texas

[]

1899: To V. Sackville-West

Friday [1 June 1928]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

The low opinion I have of Sinclair Lewis’s books is confirmed. Your life is merely the Daily Mirror in action—I’ve seen that caravan a dozen times—and you might be dining here alone with me this minute.

Very well—I will be at the place at the time punctually on Monday. Will you dine here, and go out, or sit in, as you like afterwards—I being alone again? A chop will be ordered for you.

If Harold would dine on Wednesday next, probably he would meet Tom Eliot—if he would send me a word by you.

Yr
Virginia

Love to Dottie, whom I hope some day to see. Please find me a house, not in Cornwall; Wales, or the Hebrides. Eddy says he is sending me a book of his own poems.

Berg

[]

1900: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

[2? June 1928]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Ottoline

I never meant you to bother to answer—but it was delightful all the same, and a very great pleasure. Yes, there are masses of things I should like to talk about, if it didn’t tire you. Might I come one afternoon—any except Monday or Saturday—next week? Tomorrow I’m afraid is hopeless.

Leonard, with his love again, says he always thought you would be “very brave”—so did everyone: because of course you are.

Yr
Virginia W.

Texas

[]

1901: To Quentin Bell

Derby Day. June 5th 1928

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Quentin,

It is all very well for you to tell me to write to you at Poste Restante “there”, when you dont say where there is. You will be there for a week you say. Maybe Jericho or the South Seas for anything I know. I will try to get your address from Clive, if I see him; but he is as hard to be seen as a mackerel in the sea, with the goings and comings that are now the way in London in May, Everybody is running as hard as they can.

The Derby has just been won by a complete outsider. So I have lost half a crown. It is extremely hot and we are having strawberry ice for dinner. Charlie Sanger is dining with us and Hubert Henderson. There will be a great deal of political discussion, and I shall look out of the window and wish you were there to say something flippant, foolish, but a little interesting. Then I am going to have tea with Ottoline, half of whose jaw has been cut away; and this will be awful, for I dont know what to say; your mother would put the matter in a nutshell; but being a writer, so many words are possible that one is almost bound to say the wrong ones. Also she is incurably romantic. Do you remember crying at the sight of her at Wissett?

But to return. You ask for news of old Bloomsbury. Very little of old B. is left. What with Roger away and Nessa and Duncan away, B. scarcely exists. I never go into Gordon Square, because I hate to see places when the people I visit there are away from them. Such is my immense sentimentality. Angelica came back last week, but she is very dignified and aloof, and has I think taken her lodging with Louie in Cadogan Mews until Nessa comes back. She seemed quite on her own and not to wish for anything. Secure in the possession of beauty that will be her tack through life.

I have finished my bad joke—that is the last book I have written in which you occur in the preface. It should be written again; but it wont be. Unless indeed when I am old I get like Mr [George] Moore and re-write everything. What reason is there to think that one knows better at seventy though? I think it is a proof of a weak imagination. The Press is very vigorous at the moment. Young Mr Kennedy is here and old Mother Cartwright, and middle aged Miss Belcher. I have been working so hard that I have seen none of them very often. I peep in on my way up to tea, and say something cheerful. The Old Umbrella [the Singer] is stabled round the corner. We went to Rodmell in her and go to the New Forest on Saturday. But a dreadful tragedy is about to happen. They are building over the field at Rodmell. I feel sure we shall have to go. And then what will happen? I shall never see you again. I shall never be able to make wrote [sic] words for our books. What is to be done? I am in despair, and the garden is at its most perfect too—the orchard shorn, flowers everywhere, the fruit all growing. Its that damnable man Allinson, who is the advertiser of The Times and has every vice a man can have. He builds to sell; and leaves his horrid mess wherever he goes. Even a dog knows better.

I have just read the preceding page and doubt that I shall send it. The truth is I cannot write on a typewriter; I make enemies whenever I do; ladies are insulted; gentle men furious: old friendships are broke off. But then as you cant read my hand writing—one must risk it. Its very odd how it rigidifies the mind; as if ones hands were half numb. This is the reason why instead of being ablaze with brilliance, wit, profundity, news, of every kind, it is flat as a charwomans back. One cant correct, thats it. Also it pecks one along like a hen.

Julian says he is so hard at work no one must visit him even for a moment. He may well be expelled from Kings through sheer laziness. Meanwhile he has time to fire off a play or two. Its as clear as the sun that he will never hang a man or do anything useful. Nessa tries to make him into a barrister; I egg him on to waste his time in every way. Whats examinations, degrees, fellowships and the rest compared with a happy lazy life? He has written a very good review of a French history for the Nation. But I darent go to Cambridge to see.

Leonard is full of Chinese. They come and ask him perfectly idiotic questions like Shall I write a dissertation upon the Cooperative Movement for Pekin? However, the Americans are worse. Two are coming to see me this week. So ugly, so dusty, so dull, so long winded—I would pay you ten and six to do it for me. Or a machine. All they want to know is who in your opinion is the most promising young writer? Then they go and ask someone else.

[in Virginias handwriting:]

P.S.

I forgot to post this and its now June 15th and I must send it to Munich.

Nessa comes back tomorrow, so old B⁠[loomsbury] will resume its outworn skin forlorn—and I will write and tell you about it. Julian’s back, as spry as a race horse, and hopes he has passed but is doubtful.

So write quick again and give your address. All news of Roger and Helen thankfully received.

Yrs
Virginia

Quentin Bell

[]

1902: To Vanessa Bell

Thursday June 7th [1928]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Dearest

Angelica is very well and happy. I’ve just been round and found her Louie and Grace eating strawberries for lunch. Angelica said I was to give you her love, and to say that she is happy and good and doesn’t know if she likes Cassis or London best. When she arrived she was at first very distant with me, and called Duncan Mr Grant: however she suddenly flung her arms round me at which I was much touched. Her manners are so scrupulously polite that I had great difficulty in discovering if she wanted to come to tea with me or not. At last, with many formalities it was arranged that she should spend the week end with Louie, and come to tea here tomorrow. I rather think she may run in to Sibyl Colefax, but no doubt her manners will triumph again—She is looking very well, and has some mysterious joke she wants to play on Grace, and also we are all to go and fetch Clinker in the car—but thats a secret of yours apparently.

I am supposing that you have reached Paris safely. Now you will have the Frys, and a myriad things to do; and my letters will I know be stuffed into an old bag with a hole in it and pulled out at lunch and read half aloud, but mostly skipped and probably lost. Life has been rather vocal: too many people, as usual, all in a bunch. Ottoline yesterday. She looks extremely well though swaddled in bandages; and seemed in great spirits, for one thing because so many ruined friendships have been now repaired in moments of emotion. Lawrence has made it up. But his letters are wildly phallic and philosophical; and mad, and I dont see much point in renewing that. All germs are devils which attack us because we lower our selfishness, and women can only live in the imaginations of men, and Ottoline lived once in his, and so on—what dammed but conceited nonsense it all is; but it seems he is dying, and is I suppose a genius and so on. And Tom [Eliot] is in a great taking, with Vivien as mad as a hare, but not confined, and they give parties, where she suddenly accuses him of being in love with Ottoline (and me, but this Ott: threw in as a sop) and Tom drinks, and Vivien suddenly says when talk dies down “You’re the bloodiest snob I ever knew”—so I have refused to dine there.

Clive is coming to tea today, but he is so much engaged that I’ve not seen much of him. They say he is much quieter and happier and scarcely talks of himself—Mary is never seen or heard of. Lord! how glad I shall be to stop writing and gossip instead—I dont think you can ever go away again. Angelica really prefers London: I think I shall die of another 4 months absence. Its not only your kindness I miss; its your discipline. I get more and more disillusioned and random; often say the wrong things and have let my hair grow and wear it in a kind of sponge bag—Quentin implores me to write to him; but sends no address; Julian says he has had no letters from you, me, or Clive (except 4 words) for weeks. He has written a play—but not a very good one. He says are we coming to see him?

When shall you be back? Is there any use in asking? I’m frightfully envious of your antiquities, but had no time to buy anything in our dash, and have had out of pity for my friends to buy a sofa, very expensive, but soft instead. Charlie Sanger dined here last night, and Oliver brought his Inez, at their own request, for it wouldn’t have been mine, amiable as the woman is; but I couldnt get her name right and called her sometimes Ferguson—sometimes Strachey. I have quarrelled with many people because of my bad manners; calling them wrong names by mistake, so you must take me to your arms and cover me with kisses—

Yr B

Berg

[]

1903: To Vanessa Bell

Sunday [10 June 1928]

Hewer’s Orchard, Minstead, Lyndhurst, Hants.

Yes, our garage will take your car—

Angelica very well and almost as charming as —— We have the same sense of reality

Staying with Janet and Emphie [Case]—lids on all the po’s—

Most charming, refined sprightly; and very glad to see you—(I mean I shall be)—but the post goes

VW

Berg

[]

1904: To Janet Case

Wednesday [13 June 1928]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Janet,

We came back safely in time for lunch, but to such a shower of horrors—I mean Americans and others—that I couldn’t write; only envy you and Emphie the New Forest.

Also how difficult to thank you sufficiently for all your goodness, kindness, hot bottles, cream, salmon, old furniture, clean linen, comfort, conversation—I could go on for ever. Leonard and I have been saying at intervals it was one of the few week ends we enjoyed; you and Emphie are some of the only people we envy etc etc. I think instead of garden notes, (which must in time exhaust even your garden) you should write notes on how to live, for the Manchester [Guardian].

We called in at Winchester and saw Jane Austen’s tomb.

Here is the letter to the woman I wont see.

Love and a thousand more thanks from Pinker, Leonard and Virginia

The rhododendrons are very lovely and the moss green and—oh but I mustn’t begin over again.

Sussex

[]

1905: To V. Sackville-West

Sunday [17 June 1928]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Dearest Creature,

I forgot to say—or did I forget?—that we must have 2 copies, on glossy paper of the Lord Lascelles picture. Could you order another to be done and sent me with all possible haste when you go to get it tomorrow?

Oh heavens what a bore Orlando is—worse in his death than in his life: I think: I’m so tired of him.

One tomorrow

V.W.

Berg

[]

1906: To Edward Sackville West

Sunday June 24th [1928]

52 Tavistock Sqre, [W.C.1]

Dear Eddy

I am a disgraceful wretch never to have answered your letter—and it was one I enjoyed immensely, with its complete illumination of the Arnold-Forster household [at Zennor, Cornwall]. I dropped a cigarette into a flower bed once and it had the same effect as your breaking the child’s chair.

I have been blind and deaf: nothing but proofs do I see; and the entire worthlessness of my own words. I have been correcting for 6 hours daily, and must now write my name 800 times over.

Pen and ink and my own words disgust me.

London is dusty and dowdy and rowdy and drab. I daresay you are at Knole again, out of the winds and whirlpools which so incessantly and tiresomely blow and boil about me here. Endless people drop in for an hour’s talk. All their colours are rubbed after my weeks in London; and I am critical and bored and irritable.

I see that your book [Mandrake Over the Water-Carrier] is out, and I hope you feel that it is a good—what is the word? I can’t think—I mean a blow in the face: an effort; something struck off and done with. I hope to hear all about it when it has been read by your friends. This weekend I suppose they are all devouring it. And one day I shall read it too.

And now I must go and correct proofs again.

Why does one write these books after all? The drudgery, the misery, the grind, are forgotten everytime; and one launches another, and it seems sheer joy and buoyancy.

Yours Ever
Virginia

Berg

[]

1907: To Helen McAfee

June 29th 1928

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Miss McAfee,

I have just seen Desmond MacCarthy and have been arranging with him for a short story and an article called Dr Burneys Evening party—partly true, partly fictitious. This would appear in the December number. I could if you liked send you this for your Christmas number.

But I wonder if you would think me very grasping if I asked what fee the Yale Review is able to pay for stories and articles? I ask because I have now made an arrangement with Curtis Brown for articles in various American papers. As I don’t write many, I want of course to place my work as profitably as I can—but I shall of course quite understand if the Yale Review is not able to offer more than the twenty pounds which I think it paid me before.

I hope you enjoyed your stay here. We so much enjoyed seeing you. And I am so sorry that the rush of engagements at this season made it impossible for us to see you again. I hope you may come over again when we are not quite so busy.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Yale University

[]

1908: To Hugh Walpole

1st July 1928

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes, [Sussex]

My dear Hugh,

Yes, I’ve had your letter and it was a great pleasure to get it. Its so seldom one gets an unsolicited letter which needn’t have been written and they’re the only ones worth getting.

I’m sorry there are so many decayed ladies in the north, but I admire your energy in opening bazaars for them—as I gather you do from my Morning Post. What a lot of speaking and writing you manage! (this is said admiringly, not critically)

I am as dry as a bone and as barren as a burnt moor (or whatever is the barrenest thing) having written 60,000 words in 5 months. This is my record as a writer—and I am rather alarmed by it. But its only a joke, and a bad one, I fear.

Now I’m trying to fan up some interest in other people’s writings and have subscribed to the Times Book Club. But I’ve no time for reading—indeed, I must confess that I began to write to you 10 days ago, and was so often interrupted that the letter turned a pale yellow, and I was ashamed to go on with it.

We are now at Rodmell for the week end, and have only had one visitor; so I have read Percy Lubbock on Miss Cholmondeley which seems to me the writing of a butler about his missus—a first rate butler of course. And I have a novel given me by Maurice Baring called Comfortless Love (I think) Shall I enjoy that or hate it?

And early tomorrow back we go again to be interrupted endlessly. Authoresses who want me to re-write their novels, mad poets, old ladies from Sweden—so we go on: but I hope you are more composed, and will finish your book and enjoy it tremendously. As nobody can possibly tell me whether one’s writing is bad or good, the only certain value is one’s own pleasure. I am sure of that.

I hope we shall see you again. Let us know when.

Yours
Virginia Woolf

I had no stamp at Rodmell so this is another day late.

Texas

[]

1909: To Lady Colefax

Monday [July 1928?]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Sibyl,

Its angelic of you, but owing to the cursed habits of landowners, we’ve got to go down to Lewes on the 18th and bid for as much of the Downs as we can afford to save them from the citymen’s bungalows, and shan’t be back for dinner. And we shall be bankrupt. I envy you Tuscany.

V.

Michael Colefax

[]

1910: To Donald Brace

16th July 1928

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Mr Brace,

It is extremely kind of you to write to me so generously about Orlando. I am specially glad to have your good opinion, as the book was written very much as a joke, and I did not know how far it had succeeded. I hope for both our sakes that it will be a success; but I am always perfectly confident that you on your part do all that can be done to make it one.

With many thanks,

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Columbia

[]

Letters 1911-1925 (July–September 1928)

1911: To V. Sackville-West

Wednesday, July 25th [1928]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

As a matter of fact, Sunday will suit us better than Monday—so come then—shall expect you to tea (or water).

Only I am sorry that you won’t find your new bed here, or the new mat: your room is even more disintegrated than usual, and Nelly’s away; so cooking is only ham and tongue, but there’s the garden of course, all a blowing: and the orchard to sit in—which you haven’t got—not with pears and apples everywhere: and you haven’t got a large yellow tin bath on the lawn, or a view, or a loving heart—come to think of it. For Promiscuous you are, and thats all there is to be said of you. Look in the Index to Orlando—after Pippin and see what comes next—Promiscuity passim.

I am in soaring health and spirits after one day here and have sat looking at cows for 3 hours instead of chasing round London buying scraps of meat and coming home to find Clive, Miss Jenkins, Sibyl: etc. But Edith Sitwell is waving her hand—the loveliest in London—at me: says I’m the only person she wants to know. Now how do you read “know”: it has 2 senses.

But all that is shut off for 2 months.

And now I’m going to saunter down to the river with Pinker and Leonard will throw a stick in: Look here; no wine has yet come, so if you want some bring some.

Berg

[]

1912: To V. Sackville-West

[7? August 1928]

Monk’s House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

This seems to be the only piece of notepaper left in this house. Very angry and sorry that Eddy should see you—and not I.

But will come for day any time before you go—if you’d like it. Only communicate your will. But I expect life is too horribly crowded. I think theres a chance of a week in France.

V.

And let me have your address so that I may write long impassioned letters: because 11th Oct. sees the end of our romance.

Berg

[]

1913: To Saxon Sydney-Turner

Aug 12th 1928

Monk’s House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

My dear Saxon,

I gather from your postcard that I am a source of disappointment to you, but you would mitigate your severity if you knew how much I hate and detest writing letters. Every year I write fewer, and every year I enjoy reading them more—so that the magnanimous among my friends now write to me without being answered—a hint: observe. I have left it so long that I doubt now if you are in the arms of Kohlus, who has shrunk, poor woman, since our day, or in the comparative chastity of Great James Street, and I have forgotten your number, since Gerald Brenan has one too; and they cant be the same.

Rodmell village is in a state of eruption and affliction—Mrs Malthouse was stung under her spectacles by a wasp and has died; Mrs Allinson has been burnt on her yatcht [sic]; and Mrs Grigs has died of the gangrene in the legs.

Meanwhile Leonard and I have bought a field, including a view of Asheham cement works. Over at Charleston they are busy bottling wine and shutting the door in the face of Lord Gage on the grounds that they won’t have callers in the country, not even landlords. Julian [Bell] and Janie Bussy have been over to luncheon, it being a very fine day but with the wind in the West which is said to be a sign of rain. On Friday we are going to Bodiam in a fleet of motor cars; and on Sunday it is Quentin’s birthday and on Tuesday Leonard will drive me up to London, and I shall go to the London Library and ask for the Maxims and Characters of Fulke Greville—not the F.G. but his descendant who occurs in connection with Miss Burney’s father’s marriage and playing the harpsichord. Nothing pleases me more than to ferret out perfectly useless enquiries into the lives of completely valueless people; I see it might well usurp all other affections and employments, and is anyhow a refuge for old age, because employed at the British Museum one will scarcely notice deafness, blindness, the spring, the nightingale, or other infirmities or changes of season. Eddy Sackville West has been staying here, and we got talking (a propos of Clive) of refuges in old age; veils and disguises: such is the origin of this thought.

I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time. So I’m reading—but I’ve no room to go into that.

It is, so far, very fine and nice here, and we are making all sorts of ambitious schemes for terraces, gazebos, ponds, water lilies, fountains, carp, goldfish, statues of naked ladies, and figureheads of battleships reflected in shadowy lakes. This was how Sir Walter Scott came to a bad end—and no one reads the Waverley Novels now except

Virginia Woolf

Sussex

[]

1914: To Pernel Strachey

[mid-August 1928]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, [Sussex]

My dear Pernel,

It is disgraceful of me not to have answered—indeed I can think of no excuse, but natural depravity.

We shall like very much to stay with you on October 20th, but I am afraid it will have to be for the night only, and please make no preparations—no parties. I should like solitary gossip for hours. Leonard is going to a Cambridge meeting after dinner on Saturday, and I pray that you too will either go to Church or put your legs up on the sofa—anything rather than attend my paper, which is already beginning to shadow even the downs with its dulness; and is only remarkable for being the last I shall ever read in this hemisphere or the next.

I saw Janie Bussy the other day among apple trees and sheep—what an odd setting for her—and she said you said Miss Jenkins said my party was a ghastly affair and Clive was a Bloody Bounder. What language the young use to be sure—the blueeyes fairhaired young! I went to tea with her, and she gave me virgin cakes (white sugar I mean) and cream, and then she spits venom thus!

I daresay it was a bit thick. Can one by the way be a bit thick in a paper at Newnham? What do you allow? How can you undertake education at all? And what d’you mean by it? Answer please.

Yr V.W.

Strachey Trust

[]

1915: To Hugh Walpole

Aug 20th [1928]

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

My dear Hugh,

You always say I needn’t answer—and so I never do. Thats one, not at all the only, pleasure of getting a letter from you. Now, as I ought to be reading a vast pile of I’m afraid meritorious manuscripts, I make this an occasion to write.

Yes, we’re very well; very wet, have been plunging through the water meadows looking for mushrooms. Leonard and I together found precisely 3: the man in the next field filled an entire bag. And I have a rubber boat that you blow up like an airball. I sit in this and paddle down the tide till 23 swans circle round me with wings out spread. You see, I’m boasting, by way of putting up a fight against your Cornish adventures. Secretly, all the romance in my heart is stirred by Cornwall. People say it is spoilt. I still think to catch a mackerel in a Cornish bay the greatest excitement under the moon. And then you tantalise me with talk of some unhappy love affair. Why not send me full details—barring names? I cant see why people set such store by chastity. I’m not sure though that they do, any longer. My nephews were here yesterday, Vanessa’s boys, and the things they say, and the lives they lead, while still remaining as innocent as new laid eggs, make me suspect that the figure of Chastity has somehow shifted since our day. And we’ve had Sibyl Colefax down here, and Vita;—not that I connect them, particularly, with Chastity. Sibyl rather moves my pity, mistakenly, no doubt. What a life—to be harrying plumbers and paper hangers in London for 10 per cent (cant make the proper sign) commission. Oh to have a country cottage she sighed; which she could have, surely, if she dismissed her chauffeur and sold her Rolls Royce, but then of course thats precisely what she cant do.

I’m glad you are writing about Scott, if only to keep me in countenance, who have just bought the Waverley novels in 25 large volumes, and am thought a sentimental mug—or is it muff?—by my friends in consequence. They say its because he was read aloud by my father when we were children—not altogether, I think. Yes, I shall read your book—only dont expect enlightened criticism from me. I am rather now in the state of the cows who are munching the grass off our field—sleepy, contented, not much aware of goodness or badness. But I shall read it. And must now, alas, begin turning over that awful pile which represents at least three hearts ambitions—and the hearts of clerks in Paisley dont attract me.

Yrs V.W.

Texas

[]

1916: To Ethel Sands

22 Aug 1928

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dearest Ethel,

You and Nan are much, much, much too good. What is more, your goodness seems inspired by some magical sympathy for my distresses. I had just been saying to Leonard that I must give up all hope of a desk, for I had asked a beautiful young man to design one for me, and he has disappeared for ever, God knows where, when your letter drops from the skies and the desk is actually there! It seems too good to be true. But I must, I implore, I command you to let me pay for it, out of the vast cheques which your compatriots send me. Indeed I wouldn’t have asked you to look for one otherwise. So please, dearest Ethel and Nan, tell me what I owe you, and accept my eternal gratitude for what is far the hardest part of buying desks—finding a desk to buy. If you would send it to Newhaven I would meet the boat, unless its too big to get inside my Singer saloon. In that case, I would get the carrier. Only send me a line to say when and which and I pray it may come soon. What angels you are!

Here we are enjoying rain at the moment, after weeks and weeks of the loveliest weather—painters weather, so full of changes and lights. We buzz about the country in our cars, and abuse the Keynese’s; Clive is autumnal this year, I’m afraid, and seems to have lost his Leicestershire lady; but I think its time, when ones hair is half off to give up these violences. And he is very nice with his boys with whom I flirt. So we go on discussing everything endlessly, as usual; and this week end there is a great party at the Keynes’ which will be fed off two second hand grouse—the kind people don’t want to stew—so Nessa says. Bobo Mayor is going to have a play acted by Lydia—Lydia is said to be childish, foolish, dull and boring, and Clive had to tell her so.

I now remember, in the midst of this gossip which I am ashamed to send to your much higher moral and mental atmosphere, that I have another request to make. Can you advise me where I could spend a perfect week in France at the end of September? Not too far; but somewhere half way down, warm, beautiful, with a good inn, lovely country, and perhaps a ruin or a church—I don’t mind much. But I want a weeks perfect happiness, drinking, before settling in for the winter—and if Leonard won’t come, which I see he won’t, for his blessed dog is going to have puppies, I shall get Vita to come. And perhaps if it suited you we might look in on you for a night on our way back: and some gossiping.

Am I on good terms with Jacques Blanche? I feel somehow that I’m not. By the way, your praises are sung by the Sitwells all over London.

Leonard has just come in and wishes me to send you both his love; we are taking Pinker for a little gentle exercise—she is what they call “heavy”—up to the post, so I must stop. A thousand thanks.

Yours
Virginia

Wendy Baron

[]

1917: To Ethel Sands

Aug 20th [1928]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Ethel,

Well well—there’s no arguing with you and Miss Hudson. I submit—in fact I lie flat at your feet in homage for ever. Its possible I may retaliate by working you a plush tea cosy which you would have to use, or I should be hurt, but I’ll try not to. What angels you are! What an excitement unpacking [the desk] will be—and then the joy of clearing up this awful mess—letters, cigarettes, reels of cotton, photographs of our late rector, old envelopes—all now scattered on top of me. Leonard says the way to send it is Mrs Woolf, Monks House, Rodmell, near Newhaven, to be called for at Newhaven. That saves the extra journey by train.

Many thanks for the suggestions. I will look at the map. Nessa thought Brantôme a perfect place—is it too far? I daresay. And Auxerre is a name of great romance.

I can’t write to you—thats one of the ill effects of giving presents—because every sentence bursts into thanks and praise, which is against the natural tendency of my temperament. Its as if you had to put a carnation in the middle of every picture. So I cant tell you about the party where Lydia cried—but must end—

A million thanks and love to Nan and Ethel.

Yr V.W

Wendy Baron

[]

1918: To V. Sackville-West

30th Aug 1928

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

How do you live the life you do? Sixty people to dinner [in Berlin]. One for three days entirely dissipates my soul, and sends it floating, like duckweed, down a dirty river. I am very hot. I have been mowing the lawn. It looks now like a calm sea through which several large ships have passed leaving wakes behind them. Then I ate two plums which make my hands sticky. For many days I have been so disjected by society that writing has been only a dream—something another woman did once. What has caused this irruption I scarcely know—largely your friend Radclyffe Hall (she is now docked of her Miss owing to her proclivities) they banned her book; and so Leonard and Morgan Forster began to get up a protest, and soon we were telephoning and interviewing and collecting signatures—not yours, for your proclivities are too well known. In the midst of this, Morgan goes to see Radclyffe in her tower in Kensington, with her love [Lady Troubridge]: and Radclyffe scolds him like a fishwife, and says that she wont have any letter written about her book unless it mentions the fact that it is a work of artistic merit—even genius. And no one has read her book; or can read it: and now we have to explain this to all the great signed names—Arnold Bennett and so on. So our ardour in the cause of freedom of speech gradually cools, and instead of offering to reprint the masterpiece, we are already beginning to wish it unwritten.

I am observing with interest the fluctuations of my own feelings about France. Leonard says he can’t come. Like an angel he says but of course go with Vita. Then he somehow conveys without a word the fact of his intolerable loneliness without me—upon which I give it all up; and then suddenly think, what an unwholesome sentimental state this is! I will go. And then visualise myself saying goodbye to him and cant face it; and then visualise a rock in a valley with Vita in an Inn: and must go. So it goes on. Meanwhile Ethel Sands advises us to go to Auxerre, Vézelay, Autun, Semur, Saulieu (Hotel de la Poste has wonderful food) and we are to stay at least two nights with her and Nan. I think I must manage to come. But it will be the greatest proof of devotion. And Leonard may make it impossible—Can you put up with these vacillations:? Anyhow I shall see you before anything need be done.

I am very happy and not very happy. Do you like these states of mind to take precedence of all else in letters? I am happy because it is the loveliest August; downs so brown and grey, and the meadows so—I forget what. On the other hand, I have to work all day—it seems—grinding out a few notes like those a blunt knife makes on a whetstone, at novels and novels. I read Proust, Henry James, Dostoevsky; my happiness is wedged like (but I am using too many metaphors) in between these granite blocks (and now that they are granite blocks I can compare my happiness to samphire, a small pink plant I picked as a child in Cornwall).

Why need you be so timid and pride-blown, both at once, over writing your novel? What does donkey West mean about her ambition and failure? Why should you fail at this prosy art, when you can please Jack Squire with poetry? (Thats a nasty one) I am entirely of your opinion that Heaven has made us and not we ourselves. I accept no responsibility for anything I write or do. I like your fecundity. And; surely, for the last ten years almost, you have cut back and pruned and root dug—What is it one should do to fig trees?—with the result that you write sometimes too much like a racehorse who has been trained till his tail is like a mouses tail and his ribs are like a raised map of the Alps. Please write your novel, and then you will enter into the unreal world, where Virginia lives—and poor woman, can’t now live anywhere else.

I’ve not seen Dottie: but then I said very incautiously that I would like to buy some bricks off her, and that one mustn’t say to a woman with ten thousand a year. For then she sighs to herself “Virginia only thinks of my possessions” Is this true psychology? At any rate it is true that Pinker is breeding. She has at least six inside her, and the lice and a bad paw, all of which occupy our time incessantly. “Are you sure lice don’t travel—is this a louse—what are nits—” such is our talk; and we had a play by Bobo Mayor; made poor Lydia who acted in such despair that instead of spending the week end with Lloyd-George, she spent it with the Spinaches [unidentified]. We didn’t clap loud enough: but then we were sitting in the rain.

Yes, I think I must come to France, and I dont think Leonard will miss me one scrap.

Yr

Berg

[]

1919: To Vanessa Bell

Sunday [2 September 1928]

Typewritten

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

Perhaps you would like some account of our conversation [with Leonard’s mother], last night, which I will give you in a very hurried way, as I am waiting to join my mother in law; but cannot write anything else.

First we discussed the enormous size of Julian. “It is many years since I have seen your sister. I did not remember that she was a very tall woman. Perhaps Mr Bell is very tall?” V. “No Mr Bell is not very tall.” “Then perhaps the men in your family are very tall?” “Some of them are; but the women in my mothers family are not very tall.” Mrs W. You are very tall. V. I am not taller than my sister. Mrs. W. It is many years since I have seen your sister. Is her little girl very tall? V. No; she is very small. Leonard. I should say she is very big. Mrs W. Sometimes children take after one parent; sometimes they take after another. This is such pretty country. It has been a wonderful summer. I sit out on my balcony all day long. At first they put me in a room without a balcony. In fact it was not at all a nice room. It was over the kitchen. I heard the servants going to bed at night. Then I heard them getting up in the morning. So I went to the proprietor—but of course he is not the same man that was there five years ago. He was a very nice man. Indeed Flora tells me people came from all over the world to stay there on account of his cooking. But he married a clever woman with a little money of her own. So they bought a little place in Somerset. They keep chickens I believe. She was the very woman to make a thing like that succeed. And what do you think they gave for the house? I made enquiries because I sometimes feel so tired of hotel life that I think I will buy a little house in the country of my own. Then I could have my furniture from the warehouse. I have had my furniture stored in a warehouse for fifteen years now. I have one lot stored at Paddington, and another at Staines. What do you think I spend every year on having my furniture stored? Leonard. Fifty pounds. V. A hundred. Mrs W. No. It comes to thirty two pounds every year. So I have now spent—how much have I spent now Leonard, on having the furniture stored? Leonard. Well over five hundred pounds. Mrs W. I daresay it is not worth more than one hundred at most. It is what we bought when we first married. We gave fifteen hundred pounds for that furniture. It was the very best we could buy. We bought it at Gillows. We had a mahogany sideboard, inlaid. We had a chandelier; but it was the trouble of my life, that chandelier, for every part had to be unscrewed to clean it. V. But probably you could get at least five hundred if you sold your furniture tomorrow. Mrs W. No Virginia, I should get nothing. And then I have sentiment. It was made by Gillows. It is not old furniture. It is very shabby too. My dear husband bought it when we first married. I should not like to part with it now. I have sentiment when perhaps it would be better not to have sentiment…. But I have also a complete set of the songs of Schubert. When I married my first husband we went for our marriage tour in Germany. My brother in law—that is my first husbands brother, no relation of Leonard of course, said he would give me what I liked to ask for my wedding present. So I said I would like the songs of Schubert. I used to sing in those days. But when one has a family, one soon gives it up; so I put the books away and then the other day Sylvia said to me how she would like to sing the songs of Schubert so I went to the warehouse and I had them taken out—and what do you think it cost me to have the furniture unstacked? V. Fifteen shillings. Leonard. One pound. Mrs W. No. it cost me six pounds—merely to have the furniture unstacked. So I said to the man, “But the things are not worth more than thirty five shillings.” And he said “Madam it would be the same if they were worth five hundred pounds.” (We played the gramophone) “What is that?” Leonard. Scheherazade. Mrs W. No. I have never heard of him. It is too sad. When one has had a lot of trouble in ones life one does not like sad music. Yes I have been very lucky in small things, Virginia, and very unlucky in big things. Did I tell you about my purse on the tram at Folkestone? No? I was staying with Charlotte. We make it a rule when we stay away together that one pays one day and the other the next day. So when we went on the tram I said it was my turn to pay and I took out my purse and I paid what ever the sum was—perhaps it was twopence perhaps more threepence—it does not matter. But now you know when one is staying in a hotel one does not know what to do—whether to leave ones money in ones room, or to take it with one. Well I had fourteen pounds in my purse; and I thought as I did not know the people at the hotel—they have changed since I was there last, which was twentyfive years ago—I would take my money with me. We went into a shop to have tea and behold! my purse was gone! Charlotte said I must have left it in the hotel. I said I knew I had it when I paid the tram. But I would not make a fuss, in order not to upset her. Still I thought how dreadful—it was fourteen pounds—a very large sum. But I said nothing so as not to upset Charlotte—she is always so kind—quiet, but very kind. So we had our tea, and I said nothing; but after tea we walked about; and then we went to get on a tram; and what do you think? It was the same tram we had come on. And we went on top. And we sat where we had sat. And Charlotte took her umbrella. And Charlotte poked under a piece of wood. And Charlotte said I think I feel something under this piece of wood. And it was the purse! Now what do you think of that? There was my fourteen pounds.”

We played the gramophone for some time now; and suddenly in the middle of a song by Schubert, Mrs W. said Do you see that cat? It is a lovely black kitten with white paws in the fire. I do not know how it is, but I am always seeing faces. I see faces everywhere. V. That proves that you ought to write poetry. Mrs W. My dear Virginia, I could not dream of doing such a thing. If I were as clever as you are, I would love to write. I would love to write the beautiful things that have happened to me in my life; but not the sad ones; and I have had many sad ones. But one person has one gift; another another. And my gift has been doing things domestically bringing up my children. V. Well you have brought up eight. Mrs W. I have brought up ten [nine]. And they are all good men and women. They have all good characters. Len is a splendid man. He should have gone to the Bar. He has such a clear brain in so many directions. His father thought the world of Len. Have you read Radclyffe Hall’s book? I have got it from Harrods. She was a friend of Bellas. They went to Mrs Coles school together and she used to come to our house sometimes—a regular society girl. Bella never liked her; but Bella did not dislike her. And now she has written this book. Of course I cannot say all that I would like to say if we were alone together. I may be foolish, but I cannot speak to you and Len as if Len were not there. But I would like very much to talk to you alone about it.” (After some encouragement however she went on)—“It is a dreadful pity I think that such a book should have been published. I do not mean for the ordinary reasons. What I mean is there are many unmarried women living alone. And now it is very hard on them that such a book should have been written. That is what I think. And you may think me very foolish—I am seventy six—but until I read this book I did not know that such things went on at all. I do not think they do. I have never heard of such things. When I was at school there was nothing like that. I was at boarding school for two years and I never heard of such a thing. Once a girl was dispelled; but I never knew what she was dispelled for. It may have been for something unpleasant; but it may have been for nothing of the kind. And when I married my first husband—he was such a charming man, a Dutchman,—I assure you I knew no more about marriage than Flo’s baby does. So it shows that we did not do such things at my boarding school. Leonard. We did at my boarding school. It was the most corrupt place I have ever been in. And you let me go there when I was twelve without knowing a thing. Mrs W. But I had given you good principles, Len. Len. You had given me no principles at all. Mrs W. Oh Len how can you say that, when you know what [a] splendid man your father was! And when your father died I said to myself that though I could not be to you what he was, I would do my utmost to bring you up good men and women; and sometimes, do you know Virginia, I would take a large basket of their socks to bed with me so that I might start mending them directly I woke in the morning. But I said that I did not mind any sacrifice to bring them up as their father would have wished. He was such a splendid man. But I think much of Miss Radclyffe Halls book is very beautiful. There is the old horse—that is wonderful—when she has to shoot the old horse after every vet. has been to see it; but it has grown to be so old they can do nothing. It is too old for them to do anything. And so she shoots the horse herself. That is beautiful. And William is a splendid character. He is the old groom. All that about the old horse and the old groom is very beautiful. But the rest of the book I did not care for. Still of course she is wonderfully clever; and I daresay there are not two people in the hotel at Bexhill who have ever heard of her. Of course when Mr Sturgeon bought his house at Bexhill it was not the same neighbourhood as it is now. His house was built by a Frenchwoman. In an old house like this you have so many cupboards. Do you use citronella oil for wasps stings? Some people dislike the smell. I hear there was a poor woman here who died of a wasp sting. And did I tell you the dreadful fright Babs had when the girl put the burning log back in the basket and the chair was burnt to ashes underneath the childrens nursery? And then you know they went to Somerset in the caravan: and the nurse—she came from Bexhill—Babs got her from a newspaper—she said it was the dream of her life to go in a caravan; and they were driving down I cant tell you exactly where, and Phil said—for they were all packed together in the caravan—Phil said, “I will move that box to make room for you;” and she said straight out “I will make room for you myself;” and she hailed a lorry which happened to be passing; and she jumped on to the lorry; and she was off. It was like a scene at the pictures, Phil said. And when she was gone Babs put her hand to her neck and you know that very pretty locket that her aunt gave her that she was so fond of? Well it was gone. And they cannot be sure the girl took it of course, but did you ever hear such a thing? She hailed the lorry and she was gone. So we will go to bed and I will lend you that book to read tonight if you like Virginia. For you are so clever….

Berg

[]

1920: To George Rylands

Sunday 2nd Sept [1928]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

My dear Dadie,

You said you might come to the Wolves in September. Could you manage the weekend of the 15th? I think I’m going away on the 22nd, so come before that.

I suppose you are writing a novel and a poem and carrying on a vast complication of affairs.

I go on plodding with my poor nose to the grindstone. So please come and be charming to your poor drudge.

We have bought a field, and have all sorts of plans for planting and building.

Now I must go and entertain my mother in law.

Your aff
V.W.

George Rylands

[]

1921: To Ethel Sands

4th Sept 1928

Monks House, Rodmell. Lewes, [Sussex]

Dearest Ethel and Nan

I was sitting in the garden this blazing hot day trying to read a manuscript when a battered old woman carrying a satchel of shiny books appeared, and asked me if I believed in God, because if I did I must buy her books, and if I did not, still more must I buy her books. So we began to argue about God and the soul, and she tried to convert me, and I tried to find out why she had left off being a governess and walked about converting people—in fact we were hard at it, and Leonard only throwing twigs at me from the cherry tree which he was scraping of ivy when in the very nick of time a man appeared with a case for Mrs Woolf from Newhaven. Out I ran; down Leonard came from his tree—the old woman with her books was swept aside, and I shall never know now anything more about her—for off we ran to the stable, Leonard with a big hammer, I with a small one, and began knocking and pulling and drawing out straw and paper and sometimes I cried out “I see it! I see it!” when an edge of the desk appeared, and at last there it was on the stable floor! But I must tell you it is not an ordinary desk, not such a desk as you might buy in London or Edinburgh or see in anybodies house when you go to lunch; this desk is a sympathetic one, full of character, trusty, discreet, very, reserved: more like Nan than Ottoline; like Nan rather than Sibyl Colefax; not in the least like Philip Morrell; honourable and discreet, and if I may say so, not American (though there are some Americans—I love to be quite precise—there are two Americans I love; of the same sex too; I leave you to guess which) nor English even, but French at its heart, so that—I don’t know where it came from, nor what its age is, but I think all the writers I most admire, and the people I like most—not the smart or the worldly, but the comfortable and those who enjoy eating and drinking—have sat under its shade (for it was a tree) or on its branches, if they were birds; in which case they were the birds I like, not starlings who are dirty, nor robins who are fierce, but nightingales, thrushes, wrens, and little owls. You see how it makes one enjoy the sound of ones own voice, which is the greatest pleasure in the world!

Years ago I wrote letters, when I was young and, though Clive won’t have it, passionate, but for years now I have only written notes—“So sorry my dear Sibyl, but I cant come to tea”—but now I shall write letters, long long amorous letters. And it is also full of drawers, in which I shall hide the answers, the amorous answers; I have just counted them. There are 14 drawers. And I have twice shut the lid to look at it closed, and to admire the inlaid star. And what is so charming about it is that it does not force me to feel young, or to mind the hole in my stockings, as some desks would; and if it is trusty and discreet it is also distinguished and slightly scented and veined with romance, so that if it had eyes they would be red-brown like Ethel’s, and it has something of her mothy ways, and her secret flights in her thick cape among the flowers in the garden. In short you see it combines the two women most aptly Nan and Ethel—Ethel and Nan, But you will be saying we regret the days when Virginia had only a deal table to write at, and so could never finish more than a single page. You will be wishing you had trod on your generosity as Nan treads on her slugs. If it is as fine on your side of the sea as on ours you will be wanting to stroll round the garden, or to feed the dog or to pour out the tea for M. Blanche and his nephew. And still I go on writing, writing, for really it is so delightful to sit at your desk and think of you and write to you that I cant make up my mind to have done with it and say thank you and go in to dinner as I should. By the way, miraculously too, it fits my window to an inch; and it travelled unbroken. So thank you once more and finally, you’ll be pleased to hear, thank you.   V.

Wendy Baron

[]

1922: To V. Sackville-West

Saturday, Sept 8th 1928

Monks House, Rodmell, Sussex

Concentrate your mind upon this, and give me your answer. Suppose we start (you and I and Potto) on Saturday 22nd. Sleep in Paris. Get to saulieu on Monday. Spend 2 nights, if we like more: go on to Auxerre, Semur, Vézelay; all within a stone’s throw: and get back here on Sunday 30th. Would that suit you? Brantôme seems too far. Shall I take you a ticket to Saulieu? Do you want to go 2nd or 1st (I insist on 1st on the boat) If first is much more comfortable, first is advisable. Not otherwise; because first class travellers are always old fat testy and smell of eau de cologne, which makes me sick. As a guarantee of my good faith in coming, I went to a travellers agency and found out about trains and they will get us tickets, if given notice—So, as I began by saying—and Lord knows I hate this business of being so precise—let me know. I confess I am in a state of violent excitement already. You see, dearest Creature, being now in the pink and prime of health, I could sit up all night: we might go to moonlight ruins, café’s, dances, plays, junketings: converse for ever; sleep only while the moon covers herself for an instant with a thin veil; and by day traipse the vineyards. I am burnt chocolate brown. The sun blazes: but there—you are shuddering under quilts in a damned Teutonic fog [in Potsdam], and I’ll say no more.

But I have a thousand things to say, and as usual am in a flying rush, Pinka having had four puppies yesterday so that I have to go and buy Lactol or something in Lewes. They are 2 male 2 female; and she is a model of all the maternal vices—absorbed, devoted, zealous, cowish, But I was going to say that I like your Tolstoy very much. I think it is your best criticism, so far as I’ve seen. And as I always take credit for your good writing, I’m pleased with myself. I think you have got nearer the old Sphinx than any of the other anniversarists—who abound; but blither. The question you should have pushed home—had there been room—is precisely the one you raise, what made his realism which might have been photographic, not at all; but on the contrary, moving and exciting and all the rest of it. Some dodge there must have been; some very queer arrangement—I dont know what—of perspective. But I like you when you write such interesting things—and I have a great deal to say—if only the puppies could be fed without my going to Lewes—about your novel. I thought out, indeed, a long and it seemed then very profound essay upon writing novels, and how one can know if they are only foam and, gush or not, on the downs the other evening: I cant remember it now! l believe that the main thing in beginning a novel is to feel, not that you can write it, but that it exists on the far side of a gulf, which words can’t cross: that its to be pulled through only in a breathless anguish. Now when I sit down to an article, I have a net of words which will come down on the idea certainly in an hour or so. But a novel, as I say, to be good should seem, before one writes it, something unwriteable: but only visible; so that for nine months one lives in despair, and only when one has forgotten what one meant, does the book seem tolerable. I assure you, all my novels were first rate before they were written. If I felt I could write them easily (forgive the holes in this paper—it is torn from the handcuff book) then I should know they were plausible and ephemeral—as indeed Mr Swinnerton says they are.

As for Radclyffe Hall, I agree: but what is one to do? She drew up a letter of her own, protesting her innocence and decency, which she asked us to sign, and would have no other sent out. So nothing could be done, except indeed one rather comic little letter written by Morgan Forster, which he asked me to sign: and now it appears that I, the mouthpiece of Sapphism, write letters from the Reform Club! Nothing else can be done. Except that Desmond is writing an article—but, as Dottie says, whats the use of Desmond writing an article?

We saw Dottie yesterday, and she must sprinkle herself with some anti-aphrodisiac powder which gets into the male nostrils, for never have I seen Leonard in such a rage—yet she was much as usual to me: Nothing in particular, running about her [Penns-in-the] rocks. We drove home at 40 miles an hour—he was so furious with her vanity, conceit, egotism, vulgarity; ill breeding, violent temper, etc.

Now I must go.

But write please dearest; and encourage me to come with you; which is a venture; for suppose you’re bored?

Yr

Berg

[]

1923: To Miss Harper

14th Sept 1928

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1 [Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

Dear Miss Harper,

Many thanks for sending me the translation of my story. Slaters Pins have no Points. I agree with you in thinking that “Les épingles de chez Slater n’ont pas de pointes” would be better than the title she has given it. Still better would be “Les Epingles de Slater n’ont pas de pointes” but I do not know if the French of that is accurate.

The story otherwise reads well, but I have no copy of the original here (I am in the country) and so cannot check it. I agree that it is extremely difficult to give the feeling of modern English prose in French—indeed your plan of printing the original with the translation would certainly be the most satisfactory.

I think it would be best to say the “Serpentine” simply—unless that would be too difficult for the French reader. It is not a river; it is more of the nature of a lake.

With many thanks

yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

1924: To V. Sackville-West

Sunday [16 September 1928]

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1 [Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

Dear Mrs N.

I have written for two first class tickets and cabin on boat for Monday Sept. 24th. Tickets to Saulieu via Paris. I am also writing to the Hotel recommended by Ethel at Saulieu to keep us two rooms for two nights.

Why dont you sleep here on Sunday night and leave your car in our stable? This would be much better, as if you dont, I may be unable to get off. As it is, what clothes do you expect me to take? None, I hope. [in Virginia’s handwriting to end:] A fur coat? I cant come up on Tuesday I’m afraid—shall be up on Friday; but if there is anything to settle, I can telephone; only let me know when I could find you.

Isn’t England nice compared with Germany? Look at my downs: even your weald.

Pinka and puppies very well. You could choose yours if you came here.

I am melancholy and excited in turn. You see, I would not have married Leonard had I not preferred living with him to saying good bye to him. But at the same time, the Roman ruins in Auxerre excite my interest. Also the stained glass.

(This is what I call my fun)

and I’m very hurried going to a birthday

party with Potto at Charleston and cursing

Desmond—Oh there’s a lot to talk to you about: Orlando: Radclyffe Hall: etc.

I am getting a fish basket for Potto.

Shall you be bored with me?

As an experiment this journey interests me enormously.

Berg

[]

1925: To Helen McAfee

23rd Sept. 1928

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1 [Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

Dear Miss McAfee,

I should have written before but I have not been sure if I could get the article on Dr Burneys party ready for Oct. 1st as you suggest. I have been so busy that unfortunately I find that this is impossible. I should be able to let you have it early in November and go without seeing a proof if that suits you. I may, on getting to work, find it better to change the subject; but it would be an article of the same kind that I suggested to you. Unless I hear from you to the contrary, I will send you an article about the second week in November. It will appear here in December.

I am sorry to say that we have had to decide not to accept Mr Croly’s invitation to America this time—my husbands engagements make it impossible. Otherwise we should have looked forward to seeing you.

Yours very sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Yale University

[]

Letters 1926-1935 (end-September–early-October 1928)

1926: To Leonard Woolf

9.30 Monday [24 September 1928]

Cafe Lutetia, [Rue de Sevres], Paris

Dearest,

Here we are taking a cup of coffee after dinner. A band is playing inside but alas I can only just hear it. We had a cold but calm voyage—except that the poor mots [marmots] sobbed for Dadyka the whole way and so did Mandrill. Lord, how I adore you, and how little you do! I believe you’re glad to be quit of us! and to read all the evening without having beasts all over you.

I don’t think a cabin is worth 37/-. It is very stuffy and smelly, and one is more comfortable in the smoking-room, certainly on a calm day when even the old women aren’t sick. We dined fairly but cheaply at a modest restaurant, and then of course completely lost our way, and found ourselves after walking for ½ an hour back in the Bd. Raspail. Vita’s French is very competent, and having asked the way of a tobacconist, and appealing to a policeman, we are now within an arm’s throw of the hotel. We are going back to bed at once, as we must get up at 6. I must say the first day has been completely ruined by parting with you. Vita is very kind and sympathetic and says she understands my affection.

Love to the Poos [Pinker’s puppies]. I have bought a French novel and this is the fly leaf.

The Dieppe boat gets to Newhaven at 4.30

V.

[in Vitas handwriting:]

Dear Leonard,

It is exactly ¼ to 10—and Virginia is now going to be made to go to bed.

V.

[in Virginia’s handwriting:]

Vita says she is delighted to have Pinker and the Poos for as long as we like—

Sussex

[]

1927: To Leonard Woolf

Tuesday [25 September 1928]

Saulieu, [France]

Dearest Mongoose, darling Mongoose,

I am writing in a field overlooking Burgundy; 4.30: very hot and fine. It rained in Paris last night; but as usual completely cleared about 8 this morning. We got up at six and arrived at one, and then we had the vastest most delicious meal I have ever eaten. It is the usual small French inn, with farmers lunching; but as I say we began with pate of duck, went on to trout, gnocchi, stuffed chicken and spinach made with cream and then sour cream and a delicious cake and then pears ad lib; as the marmots say. Then it is the annual fair in Saulieu, and we walked about looking at roundabouts and paying twopence for a chance to win a live pigeon in a lottery. I am now getting melancholy for you, and thinking that perhaps the downs are more beautiful than Burgundy. What is odd is that there is no sign of vintage. We passed through vineyards this morning, and I saw some few black bunches hanging, but here there is nothing. It seems purely French, only two naval Englishmen at lunch, and some French motorists. Then—here it got so cold that we had to come back to the hotel. I am going to sit and read I think till dinner and then there are fireworks at the fair. You will be dining at Charleston, and I hope I may get some report of Lytton. I think we must come to France with the car, doing about 30 miles a day and seeing the small towns—it certainly has great advantages, not being in a hurry and walking about looking at the country.

Vita and I have not quarrelled, but then as we have been moving incessantly we have not had much chance. She has a permit from the Foreign office which got us through the customs unopened: otherwise, we have travelled fairly economically, though as she never asked the price of the rooms here, I daresay we shall be rooked. She says that Sydney Waterlow has been appointed to Abyssinia (where Marjorie was once, I understand) and her mother has now taken to writing to anyone—her bookseller, or dressmaker, asking them to give her ‘a tile for the roof of friendship’ This is a method of asking for money for her new house and she has collected £400, but now decided not to build it, but to keep the money of course. I dont think I could stand more than a week away from you, as there are so many things to say to you, which I cant say to Vita—though she is most sympathetic and more intelligent than you think. At least we can discuss books for hours—perhaps I do most of the talking. Rather to my horror, Dotty is sending me here a new poem of hers to read, inspired by Rocks. On Vita’s advice she is going to publish the Welsh Miner.

Lord! I do hope you’ll be careful motoring tonight!—and that you eat and sleep and dont give away all your affection to the poos. Poor Mandril does adore your every hair of your little body and hereby puts in a claim for an hour of antelope kissing the moment she gets back.

I forgot the timetable and my writing paper—nothing much else. This is a horrid, dull scrappy scratchy letter but all letters of real affection are dull. Do you think we are extremely intimate? I do; because, why should I, a born dandy as I am, write so carelessly—Have you done Dorothy Osborne? Please write very long letters. You might send me a newspaper too.

Mandrill. Dusky Darky Marmot esquire.

Love to Nelly [Boxall].

Sussex

[]

1928: To Leonard Woolf

Wednesday [26 September 1928]

Hotel de la Poste, Saulieu, [France]

Dearest,

We have decided that we had better get back on Monday afternoon instead of Tuesday, as Vita finds that the boat train gets up too late on Tuesday for her broadcasting: The alternative is to come by the night boat, which arrives at 4 a.m. However this is too uncomfortable: also I want to see you: so we shall arrive on Monday and I could go up to London with you on Tuesday for the day—so please arrange this then I shouldn’t have to think of you motoring alone. I hope you’ll be glad to see me a day earlier. I am writing this to post it on our way out; but I’ll write later—not that I daresay you read my letters; so long are they and so dull. But I have a lot to tell you about the circus last night.

Another fine day: a perfect night, and delicious food. I hope to get a letter tomorrow at Avallon.

Please settle to go up on Tuesday with me.

V.M.

We suggest dining with Ethel on Sunday night. Going straight through from Auxerre.

Sussex

[]

1929: To Vanessa Bell

[27 September 1928]

Postcard

[Saulieu, France]

We are just leaving for Avallon, after eating the most perfect dinners and seeing a great circus with lions but no [grape] vines. We shall dine at Auppegard on Sunday, and hope to see you.

Berg

[]

1930: To Leonard Woolf

Thursday [27 September 1928]

Avallon, [France]

Dearest M,

I am sitting in an avenue after lunch while Vita tries to hire a motor to take us to Vézelay. I am rather melancholy because there is no letter from you, and Vita had two from Harold. But there is a post at 3, so we shall wait for that in hopes. We came from Saulieu this morning, and shall go straight on, so as to have two nights at Vézelay which looks more interesting, though Avallon is a very charming old place, and I am in the 7th Heaven (or would be if you had written) as I have bought a little dressing table for 650 f: how much is that, darling M? As you’re not here to tell me, I am completely at sea; and Vita not much better. We have just had rather a terrific encounter with Valerie Taylor and Mr and Mrs John Balderston who suddenly clapped me on the shoulder and of course I didnt recognise Valerie, and of course she had asked Vita to go abroad this very week with her and of course Vita hadn’t written so there were endless explanations. They are motoring to the south, happily, in a Citroen which breaks down every 10 miles, so we shan’t meet again I hope. But I rather think Mr Balderston is a playwright. Did I tell you I took the mots to a circus at Saulieu, where there was a gipsy girl on a ladder with a python bound about her head, and 8 lionesses and cubs in a green tent about as big as your greenhouse. The man was going to “dompt” them, with a stick—he was what he called a dompteur but I was too frightened to wait—also from the gimcrack arrangements I thought the whole boiling would be eating the marmots, so we withdrew. The fair was very very lovely—all lights and confetti and people firing guns at rabbits: if you hit one you had the choice of a bottle of wine or a live pigeon.

The Emperor’s cook is, as far as being the Emperor’s cook is concerned, rather a fraud—he was the scullion of the cook at the Kaiserhof: but the food was astonishing, only came again and again the same, as nobody except ourselves spends more than a night there. All the evening motors drove into the yard as we did, and they were off early. Here there is a sublime view; and tower, churches, old houses, palisseries and antiquaries ad lib, as the mots say, but if we dont motor, we shall catch the 3.30 to Vézelay Sermi [Sermizelles] something. God I shall be glad to see you again, am rather fidgeted not to have heard. You will meet me at Newhaven on Monday I hope. Then we’ll have a day in London on Tuesday. My room last night was 40 fr. and lunch and dinner are about 30 f. so you can calculate—which is more than I can do what I spend. So far we have not had to use any English notes.

It is a work of extreme difficulty, writing this letter, as it is rather hot, dusty, a little cloudy, and I have to hold the paper, which I have just bought with 4 envelopes on the edge of my knee. A fine mongrel dog is looking at me, yellow, with a short tail. The donkey population is large and in the highest degree monotonous. I think we are insufferably stupid not to have a house here. Probably we could get a perfect country house for about £20, and the country is superb—very large, rolling, wooded, watered, solitary; and then these delicious towns, with their shops and their restaurants. If I am left a widow I shall live here. But am I left a widow? That is what I ask. It is still only 2.15 so I cant go to the post, and Vita has disappeared—swallowed by Valerie I imagine.

Here is Vita and Valerie—Vita has hired a motor and we are going to drive straight to Vézelay—spend 2 nights there—one at Auxerre, then Dieppe Sunday night and Mongoose, Poos and Pinker on Monday thank God tho’ I admit I’m enjoying life, but not at all as much as with you, sweetest heart.

Yr Mandrill

Sussex

[]

1931: To Leonard Woolf

27 September 1928

Telegram

Avallon, [France]

No letters anxious wire Hotel de la Poste Vézelay

Sussex

[]

1932: To Leonard Woolf

Friday 28th Sept [1928]

Hotel de la Poste, Vézelay, Yonne, [France]

Dearest Mon,

I am afraid I must have seemed to you more than usually foolish to telegraph, but there were no letters at Avallon, and as we were coming here, without sleeping, I couldn’t hear till Saturday at Auxerre. I wonder what happened? Vita heard from Harold, who wrote on Tuesday, by the first post; and we waited for the second and none came from you. I hope you didn’t have to go into Lewes. But I admit I was ready to bother you any amount to be put out of my misery. Your answer came at 8.30 this morning. Mercifully it did, for its a pouring wet day: here we are cooped up in our bedrooms in a clean but primitive, cheap, but well cooking little inn, with Vézelay as black as London in November.

We had a lovely evening yesterday though, and saw the church—a magnificent great church, but too clean, on top of a steep hill, like an Italian hill, with the whole of France beneath, and even two or three little vineyards. Then in the night there was a violent thunder storm; we all crouched in our beds in fear; and this morning the weather seems utterly destroyed. As we have no raincoats we daren’t go out; nor should we see anything. So I am going to write to Tom [Eliot] and Saxon [Sydney-Turner] and to Florence Bishop, and perhaps review Julian Hawthorne, who turns out to be rather amusing in a dry way.

I am extremely well, by the way: Vita is a perfect old hen, always running about with hot water bottles, and an amazingly competent traveller, as she talks apparently perfect French. I don’t think we shall quarrel—indeed, I feel more established, now that we pay little attention to the others moods; not that she has many. The truth is she is an extremely nice, kind nature; but what I like, as a companion, is her memories of the past. She tells me stories of the departed world—Mrs Keppel, King Edward, how she stayed with the Rothschilds at Chantilly and they ran over a big dog in a motor car and wouldn’t stop because they were late for their polo. Then I tell her the life story of Saxon. Then I cross-examine her scientifically; and ask her what she thinks happens if a motor car in which one is travelling at 50 miles an hour is struck by lightning. She has been told that owing to its rubber tires it is a perfect non-conductor. Then we discuss her lectures on modern English poetry—which by the way, she is ready to let us have for a pamphlet if we like. She thinks Lady Sackville may write me either a violent or a seducing letter about Orlando—may ask me to go and see her, and abuse Vita.

I wonder if Quentin finished the gramophone and what you think of it. I left my address here and may get your letter this evening, more likely tomorrow morning. Vézelay is 12 miles from Avallon, 8, I think from Sermizelles: and thus we are dependent upon motor buses which come twice a day for letters.

I wonder if Lytton was heckled [at Charleston]; whether you have “gathered” as you would say, being such a little prig—no daddies not a prig—we adore dadanko do-do—we want to talk with him; and kiss the poos. Have they really begun to play the violin, daddie? Are you fonder of them than of the marmoteski?—Now stop mots; go under the table. I cant hear myself speak for their chatter. How they sobbed when there was no letter from Dinkay at Avallon! Shall you be glad to see us all again? Remember I am coming by the Monday boat, not Tuesday: but if you have to go to London I suppose I could get a bus. Lord! how I adore you! and you only think of me as a bagfull of itching monkeys, and ship me to the Indies with indifference!

I think we shall have a very happy and exciting autumn, in spite of the complete failure of Orlando. It is clearing slightly—we may visit the museum.

Yrs Mandrill
D.D.

Sussex

[]

1933: To Ethel Sands

Friday [5 October 1928]

52 Tavistock Square, [W.C.1]

Dearest Ethel,

This is a belated attempt to thank you and Nan for being so kind and good to us and sending your car all that way and giving us such a delicious dinner. I had been boasting to Vita of your house and of your food. Happily I had said not enough.

I came home to find an astonishing letter from Lady Sackville asking me to give her a small sum towards her new house. Have you also heard? Vita says she has already got £400 and doesn’t mean to build one.

But perhaps this is a secret. Anyhow I hope you will soon come here and let us gossip over the gas fire.

Yours aff
V.W.

Wendy Baron

[]

1934: To V. Sackville-West

Sunday [7 October 1928]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Dearest Creature,

It was a very very nice letter you wrote by the light of the stars at midnight. Always write then, for your heart requires moonlight to deliquesce it. And mine is fried in gaslight, as it is only nine o’clock and I must go to bed at eleven. And so I shant say anything: not a word of the balm to my anguish for I am always anguished—that you were to me. How watched you! How I felt—now what was it like! Well, somewhere I have seen a little ball kept bubbling up and down on the spray of a fountain: the fountain is you; the ball me. It is a sensation I get only from you. It is physically stimulating, restful at the same time I feel suppled and anointed now and then, here, in Tavistock Square, hour after hour passes, in rasping chatter. Oh I ve seen so many people: talked so much, and woken up shot through the heart in the night by a sense of doom and frustration—I must see Clive, Mary, Dadie, Tom Eliot: cant escape: and why, and why?

But what I was about to say was, I have found my spectacles. Leonard says will you dose Pinka for worms. I cant decide what to say to your mother. Oh and if you’re coming on Wednesday, let me know in good time.

I am horribly nervous about Thursday—honestly I am—as Lydia would say. And why were you so bad in the summer and never told me? Your father, I suppose, and that damned old witch [Lady Sackville]—

V.

Berg

[]

1935: To Harold Nicolson

7th Oct 1928

52 Tavistock Sqre, W.C.

My dear Harold

I meant to write you a letter of thanks from Auxerre (Vita pronounces the X but you oughtn’t to) then I didnt; and again at Rodmell; still I didnt; now at Tavistock I will—though Clive will be bursting in and as it is precisely a fortnight since we met we shall have the whole world to discuss.

But I was going to thank you for having married Vita; and so produced this charming and indeed inimitable mixture—But I wont describe her. I’ve written quite enough about her and got it all wrong too. (Yes—I’m very nervous about Thursday and Orlando—I’m sending you a copy; but be silent; I shant expect either thanks or praise).

Anyhow we had a perfect week, and I never laughed so much in my life, or talked so much. It went like a flash—Vita was an angel to me—looked out trains, paid tips, spoke perfect French, indulged me in every humour, was perpetually sweet tempered, endlessly entertaining, looked lovely; showed at every turn the most generous and magnanimous nature, even when there was only an old jug in the W.C. and she had lost her keys—in short, it was the greatest fun. Only I wish she were not so humble. It is perfect nonsense that she should think so lowly of her gifts and works. I cant persuade her that the nimbleness of Raymond, shall we say, the brilliance of Clive, and the incorrigible vanity of Virginia are all qualities we should be better without. I wish she would take up her poem again. I wish that old she-devil (if you will excuse me for calling her so) would cease to poison the air of this sphere, and retire above or below, I dont mind which. I speak with some feeling, because I have just had a long letter from her—Lady Sackville I mean—somehow meretricious and unpleasant, though friendly on the surface, asking for a copy of Orlando and “a small cheque or postal order” for her house. What am I to do? If she hadn’t written as she did to Vita, I would have stumped up £5 with pleasure: as it is, I feel hostile: I feel she is base and odious: I want to wring her neck.

I’m glad you are soon coming back. This is purely unselfish: I mean it is simply that I think Vita is not happy without you—She settles in at Long Barn, and has only Valerie [Taylor] who will talk about love incessantly, and Miss le Bosquet who will probably soon mention the same subject. No answer of course needed to this—

Yr ever
Virginia

Berg

[]

Letters 1936-1977 (early-October–December 1928)

1936: To Margaret Llewelyn Davies

Sunday Oct 7th [1928]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Margaret,

We are only just back and in a state of great chaos, so we shant attempt to come up this Sunday. But perhaps next week end—Saturday afternoon?—would that suit?

I agree it is shocking the length of time that passes—but I put it down to your habits, not mine. About the lecture on Tolstoi no no NO Haven’t I let myself in to go to Newnham and Girton [Cambridge] this month? And I am determined that these shall be my swan songs. I can’t bear lecturing; it takes ages; and I do it vilely; and though I would do it for you, if for any human being—no, I can’t. I can only advise Morgan Forster who lectures like an angel. Also, why do people want lectures? I wouldn’t go, not if I were paid, to hear one.

Well, will you ring up sometime and settle a tea party. I’ve been in Burgundy to see the vintage, and never saw a vine; but I am convinced that we must all live in France.

Yes, Orlando is about to appear—but I dont believe in Margaret reading what I write. I’d much rather she didn’t.

So goodbye till Saturday

Yrs V.W.

Could you lend me a copy of your Aunt’s life, for my lecture—we’ll fetch it.

Sussex

[]

1937: To Helen McAfee

7th Oct. 1928

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Miss McAfee,

I am so sorry you had the trouble of cabling. I am still more sorry to say that I dont see how I can possibly post the manuscript by October 25th. I have come back to find all sorts of things waiting to be done before I can start my Burney article. I think therefore I must hope that you will let me send it later and give up the idea of publishing it here in December. I will aim at sending it you early in December and if you will let me know when you will publish it, I will arrange about publication here. I am sorry to have been so changeable.

Yours very truly
Virginia Woolf

Yale University

[]

1938: To V. Sackville-West

Friday [12 October 1928]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

What an immense relief! I was half sick with fright till your telegram came. It struck me suddenly with horror that you’d be hurt or angry, and I didn’t dare open the post: Now let who will bark or bite; Angel that you are—But I’m rather rushed: and wont write, except this line. Sales much better. Enthusiasm in the Birmingham Post [Mail]. Knole is discovered. They hint at you.

But look here—give me cold and considered criticism some time:

We shall turn up about 11.30 or so—on Sunday—not lunch—in fact only 5 minutes, but you’re coming on Tuesday

Berg

[]

1939: To V. Sackville-West

Monday [15 October 1928]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Here is your mother [on Orlando]—milder than I expected. But Heaven knows what she means.

I shan’t answer. Perhaps you’d bring it back to add to my collection.

Might I beg some Saviour’s flannel or rabbit ear—? only a few sprays, if you have any, and it aint too much bother.

Tomorrow then

V.

Berg

[]

1940: To Helen McAfee

15th Oct. 1928

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Miss McAfee,

I am so sorry that you had again the trouble of cabling to me. I hope by this time you have had my letter. I am afraid that I cannot commit myself to write the article for any definite date. I have had to postpone it here too. I cannot at present get the time that I need for reading the books I want to read for it; nor do I feel sure when I shall be more at leisure.

Thus I fear I must leave it that I will let you know as soon as I can be certain. But I am extremely sorry that my half promise led you in any way to alter your plans. I am afraid that I must have been more optimistic than I had a right to be.

Believe me,

yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Yale University

[]

1941: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Oct 15 [1928]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Ottoline

Well but what is the criticism? It is all very well being heavenly, charitable, and seductive, but I’m sure you have an asp up your sleeve which will take one bite—But when? My whole life is ravaged by having to go twice to Cambridge and speak. When that is over, next week, some time, then I hope for a cup of tea and a little poison.

However, I admit I was made very happy by your liking Orlando—At the same time, I’m reading Katherine Mansfields letters and feel desolated by them. What a waste!—and how wretched it is—her poverty, her illness—I didn’t realise how gifted she was either. And now never to—but you will know all I mean. I never knew that she had been so intimate with you.

Are you better? Really better?

I have Philip’s umbrella.

Many many thanks

Yr
Virginia

Texas

[]

1942: To Vanessa Bell

[16? October 1928]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Dolphin—blue nosed Dolphin—

it is entirely your fault, and Clives and Louies and Angelicas—They said you were coming Saturday last, Monday this, Tuesday today, and now you say Thursday. So I thought I should miss you if I wrote or sent Orlando. But of course I pant for your opinion—the only one that has a grain of sense in it—you can’t think what a fool’s paradise I live in at the moment. But let us meet on Thursday in Gods name—here or at 37—I saw Angelica—She came to tea—cold almost gone—seemed in the highest spirits—fascinating—lovely—we had a most amusing tea—but she adores Leonard—This annoys me.

Lord! London is lovely; but the hubbub intolerable—Whatever you may say; I’m taking a site near Brantôme—cant endure even Sussex—We went to Rodmell for 2 hours—in come Hayward and a prostitute—Now I’m off to Sibyl to meet Noel Coward, with whom I am slightly in love—Why?

But with you I am deeply passionately, unrequitedly in love—

B.

and thank goodness your beauty is ruined, for my incestuous feeling may then be cooled—yet it has survived a century of indifference.

I left a silk handkerchief given me by Nelly at the Londres [Hotel, Paris] I suppose they haven’t got it?

Berg

[]

1943: To Hugh Walpole

2ISt Oct [1928]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Hugh,

I am ashamed—letters come from you that are charitable and charming and full of things I like: and I swallowed them down—never say thank you. But this may be a compliment—feeling sure that you wont take it ill, for as it seems to me I have been perpetually doing necessary or dull things, and could never find a moment to be merely loquacious.

I am very glad that being in Orlando’s preface did not annoy you. It is very good indeed of you to be so generous about it. I am deep in your debt, deeper and deeper.

But what I am now writing to ask is, could you dine with us on Tuesday 6th Nov—7.45 without dressing, as before? This will have to go north and then back to London, as I don’t know your address. But I hope you may manage it.

Yours ever,
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

1944: To V. Sackville-West

Monday [22 October 1928]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

I’m so sorry old Squire annoyed you. But I dont think he ought to. And as for being angry with him—no, no, no. It was my fault largely—I had a hit at him, which was silly.

The sales are good—A very nice letter from Eddy.

Yr V.

A thousand thanks for the rabbits ears. The only thing I should mind about Squire is this—that it would make you or Harold think less well of me or Orlando—But it wont, will it?

Arnold Bennett will be far worse than Squire—so be prepared.

P.M.

We’ve got to reprint—

Berg

[]

1945: To Edward Sackville West

Oct. 22nd 1928

52 Tavistock Sqre., [W.C.1]

My dear Eddy,

I am immensely relieved that you like Orlando. I was rather worrying to think you probably wouldn’t—and it is extremely nice of you to write. I think I agree about The Lighthouse—in fact I’m sure I do. It is for the moment the fashion to tell me Orlando is better. But The Lighthouse interested me more and troubled me more—and I enjoyed writing this more—and it rushed off like a rocket, which is not to say how brilliant it is, only how quick it went. Tell me, someday, with your wonted precision and destruction—qualities I so much value, (what I call your taking a line—) what offends you, and where I’ve bungled, and if its like Vita and if its like Knole etc. Oh yes, I’m overjoyed that you like it. A bitter letter from your Aunt at Brighton, has put a touch of quinine in my cup. She says its a cruel book; but then I never sent her a cheque or postal order, as she asked, for her roof tree. I have been waiting for the American copies to come to send you what you so rightly demanded—a three guinea copy.

But they never came. At last, 4 weeks late, one miserable specimen, on pale green paper bound like a widows hymn book, has arrived. I dont think you can wish for this; so I’ll wait for the white paper ones, and send you what I trust may be less cadaverous. The Americans have surpassed themselves, in pretention, fuss, and incompetence.

This is only an Orlando letter. I wont embark on life and love, both of course teeming in Bloomsbury—Raymond silhouetted this evening in a white shirt doing his hair as I went by in the dark and the rain. And Clive fresh from Paris, and Duncan and Nessa back, and I lunching with Colefax to meet Noel Coward.

When shall I see another wad of diary? And did you enjoy the Tcheko-Slovakians? And are you writing? Of course you are, but what, and in what frame of mind? And reading? And thinking? What?

Any time you write, let it be a long letter full of a sort of tangle of everything, which I can browse upon, over my gas fire … making you up in Berlin—

Yr loving
Virginia

Berg

[]

1946: To Julian Bell

Thursday Oct 25th 1928

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, [W.C.1]

My dear Julian,

I hope to turn up about five tomorrow, Friday, either with Vita, or without Vita—as she catches her train, or doesn’t. And look forward to another tea.

But now to the poems. I think the first nature poems still suffer to some extent from your old disease of crowded detail, so thick one cant see the whole.

Of men and cities gathered in a war

is to me an agreeable change from

And on black boughs in gold green foliage drops, etc

and the following lines. I think I see signs that you are changing your method, however, and I shall assume that you are now trying to conglomerate words, like mosaic chips, together. Very well. But this method which is vivid and stark and has many advantages over fluent melody, asks extreme exactness, and more attention than you seem ready to give to sound. For example:

Down winding narrow valleys seep unseen

Trickles that slowly creep, to feed their depth

All those ees, seep, unseen, creep, feed, are ugly, I think, rather than descriptive. But I think that you carry out your idea very successfully sometimes. Still Life is one of the best and it is a very interesting attempt, very pictorial, and I like the unpoeticallity (that is not the way to spell it) of the subject. I think that

Cool, heavy, porous, brown and white

is a very good line. It does what your very crowded, heaped, lines dont do. It is written at a little distance from the object. The variations on a Nursery Rhyme and an old Song are charming, but not very serious. The ones I like best and think most interesting are the Experiments in Association at the end. I like Ecbatana best. That seems to me to do its job very well—to transpose so that one gets the idea more vividly, more truly, than by actual transcription. Is that your idea? I think you might do more in that line with advantage. I like the odd combination of incongruous emotions, and the flickering angularity of it.

I am writing at a disadvantage with interruptions from Mrs Cartwright and Leonard. Clive’s book [Civilisation] is coming out and doing very well.

I shall be seeing Desmond on Tusday, or Teusday, or Tuesday, and will ask him what in Gods name he is doing with your things. But he is worse than a sieve, a drain, a wastepaper basket, and amiable into the bargain, so that one gets nothing done, as with a crusty character. Nothing but smiles and promises.

If you want to make money to buy desks, I strongly advise you to write a political article and send it to Hubert Henderson at the Nation. I dont say he would take it straight off, but I think they are on the look out for some young politician, and might take an article now and then, which is much better paid than poetry. Also, I know your reviews were well thought of. Of course dont be too violent. Why not write something about politics at Cambridge? give an idea what the young are saying at the Union, or in private.

But we will talk of this tomorrow. Write more poems. I think they are very interesting.

Your affectionate and obedient
Virginia

[in Virginia’s handwriting:]

This spelling is the spelling of a Portable Underwood not mine.

Quentin Bell

[]

1947: To V. Sackville-West

Thursday [25 October 1928]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

I think I must go by the 3 from Kings Cross, as I have promised to talk to Julian about his poetry—and you know what poets are—and this is the only train early enough.

But obviously its absurd for you to spoil Sibyls lunch party. She would foam with rage. So if I dont see you at Kings X at 3. I shall expect you to turn up at Kings: The porter will show you Julian’s rooms. And Julian is agog to see you. Damn Sibyl and her lunch parties. Damn Girton and speeches.

Talking of idiotic reviews, your’s in the Lit. Sup today was the limit—some poor wretch who had mugged up a little history and wanted to show off.

Rebecca West has come out strong about Orlando.

But we can talk about all this in the watches of the night at the Lion.

V.

Berg

[]

1948: To Pernel Strachey

[25 October 1928]

52 Tavistock Sqre., [W.C.1]

My dear Pernel,

Julian said he would ‘love’ it if you asked him to tea—indeed it would be a kind act, and he is very talkative and merry.

A thousand thanks for our entertainment, and I now remember with pleasure (this is the outcome [?] of the disease I spoke of) the kind things Miss Strachey said of me—which I do little deserve.

Yrs aff
V.W.

You will I hope look in at Christmas.

And now you must pull yourself together, entertain the [Gilbert?] Murrays and bury Jane.

Strachey Trust

[]

1949: To Enid Bagnold

28 Oct 1928

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Lady Jones,

I came in from dining out the other night and found so cryptic a postscript from Claridges on my table with only an illegible initial to it abusing Jack Squire that I felt that the voice of God was speaking, and very likely Jack Squire was being roasted that instant. Next day your letter came, and I see with pleasure that it was Lady Jones and not God. Lady Jones writes, I think, better than the deity. I must say it was the most amusing and pleasing letter that I have yet had about Orlando, for, not only does it say what is to me very flattering, but says it so sharply and distinctly, and describes the situation at North End House so clearly and brilliantly that I cant help thinking how well I must write, if Lady Jones can like it. And I begin wanting to know about Mrs Elliot and who she was, and why she died in the bed at North End House; and whether the ghost of Burne Jones walks there: in fact all sorts of questions rise in me.

But I won’t ask them, for indeed I am as stupid as an owl, and only write to thank you very much for your letter. How very nice it was of you to write it, and I think to myself with wonder, could she really have liked Orlando as much as that? And the wind howls over the downs, and thin windows shake.

Yours,
Virginia Woolf

Enid Bagnold

[]

1950: To Hugh Walpole

Sunday [28 October 1928]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.

Dear Hugh,

A certain article on a Certain new book faces me. Dare I add certain letters to your O-? Can I take to myself so much praise? I know I’ve no right to it, and yet I admit that I have wrapped myself round it, and refuse to be robbed of it. I wear it like an ermine fleece to protect me from the blast. But (except for Squire) they have been rather nice—the blast, I mean; only not so nice as you. How so rapid and various, and generally gifted and busy and successful a man can yet be so generous on such a large scale, I cant conceive. Seriously, I am more than grateful, and very proud into the bargain. Dont you, after all, share my passion for Waverley?—and lots of other things.

But I was writing about lunch on Tuesday—it is settled that it is Tuesday, I hear. I am trying to put someone off. If he is put off, as I hope to hear tomorrow, may I come, all the same, 1.30, Tuesday Oct 30th? I will let you know for certain. But tell me if you have changed your plans. Otherwise dont bother to write.

Again, please be thanked by yours ever

Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

1951: To Lady Cecil

Oct 28th [1928]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Nelly,

It was very charming of you to write, and I assure you with my hand on my heart, if that is the correct position, that my motives in dragging you so impudently into my preface (Violet [Dickinson] says she doesn’t like keeping such low company at all) were honourable affection, gratitude, esteem: Ought I to have asked your permission?

Why is Orlando difficult? It was a joke, I thought. Perhaps a bad one. I don’t know. But I enjoyed writing it, and I should enjoy still more answering any questions about it, if put in person. I wont trust to the ink pot or the telephone. No, we must meet.

I had hoped somehow this summer that this would be accomplished. I still hope it, now that winter is here. Or shall I write a book about you next? What fun that would be! But writing about you won’t do in place of seeing you. I am going to see your nephew next week, I think, Lord David. We shall talk about you. I shall tell him stories of the Grove End Road, and how you wore a particular white dress, and we used to sit in a window and there were branches across it, and you had a cat that ate the skin of turbot, and you were perfectly enchanting.

“But”, he will say “she is still”. Then he will tell me what you’re like now. But just to anger him, I shall say that Nellie Cecil 20 years ago was better better far than any other Nelly. Think of us discussing you over my gas fire next Wednesday.

Ever affly
Virginia

And what have you been reading lately? And what is your opinion of —— Everything in the whole world?

Hatfield

[]

1952: To C. P. Sanger

[October 1928]

52 Tavistock Square, WC1

My dear Charlie,

It is very good of you to write—especially when I had taken such liberties with your venerated name (which I do seriously venerate). Orlando was meant as a joke; and I daresay it gives a view of life which is not at all my own—if it gives a view of life at all. But I was having a holiday, and I am very glad that it amused you, when I am sure you are always seeing thousands of things which are not amusing. I feel somehow that I ought to apologise to people like yourself for scribbling these books. They sometimes seem to me to have no bearing upon anything that is really happening.

But I won’t apologise any more; and hope some day we may see you.

I’m so glad about Gavelkind.

Yr affate
Virginia Woolf

Daphne Sanger

[]

1953: To Dora Sanger

Tuesday [October 1928]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Dora,

How nice of you to write—how delightful of you to like Orlando! I am so glad you do, because I remember you were made melancholy by the Lighthouse.

I hope Charlie didn’t mind my using his name—it was a great support to me—and we were so sorry to be away when he came. I hope we may see you both soon.

Yours ever
Virginia Woolf

Daphne Sanger

[]

1954: To Quentin Bell

1st Nov. 1928

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Quentin,

I quite agree that it is a dereliction on your part not to have written—Didnt I give you for nothing a nine shilling book [Orlando]? Not a word of thanks. Not a bark of criticism even. So this hidous [sic] typing of mine is an unsolicited act of purest mercy dropping from the azure on the coal black head etc of a nephew who don’t deserve it. It is true you wrote a few lines once upon a time. If you could do without typing, many’s the letter you’d get. But it means sitting high, on a chair, at a table, with cold hands, away from the fire. And then you’d never believe what a sterilising fracturing bone-cracking backaching effect on the style the typewriter has. No, for you dont know, being only a painter, what style is; what words are: nor mind more breaking the back of a sentence than snapping a flea.

I have been twice to Cambridge and given two lectures and seen Julian all in plus fours, brown, hairy, country-gentlemanly pouring out tea to his friends. He is a little shy, but very quick and hospitable. The grate is blocked with tin covers. He is however by no means as confident of immortality and happiness as we were at his age. The truth is there’s no one to beat down in argument. They talk love where we talked God. I think our age though ossified was of the two the more sublime. But Julian has still many years before him. Only Cambridge will never be to him what it was, even to me. Oh the sound of Grace coming through Adrian’s windows in Nevilles court [Trinity College] in the summer when we were young! But no more. You will laugh.

But what are you doing? I hear you are being attached to various studios. Yes. But life? How many old men, young girls, youths in blouses, have you seduced? What are you doing at this moment? Please be wildly indiscreet. And then I will be. At this moment our thoughts centre upon Sapphism—we have to uphold the morality of that Well of all that’s stagnant and lukewarm and neither one thing or the other; The Well of Loneliness. I’m just off to a tea party to discuss our evidence. Leonard and Nessa say I mustn’t go into the box, because I should cast a shadow over Bloomsbury. Forgetting where I was I should speak the truth. All London, they say is agog with this. Most of our friends are trying to evade the witness box; for reasons you may guess. But they generally put it down to the weak heart of a father, or a cousin who is about to have twins.

Are you reading? No. Painting? Yes, all day. Roger is away, Clive gives parties at which each guest has a whole partridge, so that the waste of partridges legs is something heartbreaking. Legs upon legs are piled all around. Enough, they say, to keep the crossing sweepers of Bloomsbury in affluence till March. Now dearest Quentin write please, and I will answer by return. I have been madly busy; fingers worn to the bone. People to see every day. Americans, Germans. Never a moment worth throwing to a dog till now. But write me a long long loving letter.

Yrs Virginia

Quentin Bell

[]

1955: To Hugh Walpole

Sunday [4 November 1928]

52 Tavistock Sqre, W.C.1

My dear Hugh,

I didn’t have a chance of putting your point to the [Well of Loneliness] meeting, which went on interminably and I had to leave in the middle. But what I am really writing to say, or to ask is, is there any chance of our having that book about the historical novel from you? Can you possibly give us a date? Am I being too persistent? If so, say so. It is only that we very much want it.

Yours ever
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

1956: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

[early November 1928]

52 Tavistock Sqre, [W.C.1]

Dearest Ottoline

Would Thursday next about 5 suit you? If it does, dont bother to answer. Cambridge is over, but the Well of Loneliness is in full swing. I have to appear in favour of it, and have already wasted hours reading it and talking about it, but I hope to be free on Thursday. The dulness of the book is such that any indecency may lurk there—one simply can’t keep one’s eyes on the page—

Yr V.

Texas

[]

1957: To Julian Bell

[early November? 1928]

52 Tavistock Sqre., [W.C.1]

My dear Julian,

I saw Desmond yesterday who thinks very well of your poems and essay and hopes to do something with them (I dont know what this means). I think you had better write and ask him yourself.

Congratulations on your speech and on being on the right side for once.

Yr Virginia

Quentin Bell

[]

1958: To V. Sackville-West

Monday [12 November 1928]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Friday suits perfectly (only say what time—3.30 in studio, unless I hear to the contrary)

Providentially, I had just put off Sibyl.

Lord! What a curmudgeon you must think me!—you write as if you were a dog that had been hunting. But you’re not a bad dog; you’re a good dog; you needn’t go under the table. How could you not be with Harold?

I shall be alone here, I think, on Thursday night, but I suppose you have to go back after seeing Harold off.

I hope you get your rooms [in London]. I want to be given lobsters and crumpets there, as Clive used to give them, 20 years ago

V

in hurry, but lovesomely all the same.

Berg

[]

1959: To Vanessa Bell

[15 November? 1928]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Dolphin;

Leonard and I were going to give you a moleskin coat for Christmas. But it seems silly to wait. So I’m sending you a small cheque, with the request that you will go at once and get it, and so save further colds. Stagg and Russells is the shop in Leicester Sqre—where I got mine, and it is the delight of my life.

So dearest Dolphin go at once.

B.

[in Leonard’s handwriting:]

Personally, if you do not carry out your wishes in this respect with your usual Stoicism, (I know you wont want to, but Stoics always do what they dont want to do, when it is their duty) I shall never speak to you again. So be a Stoic.

Leonard

[in Virginia’s handwriting:]

We were so exhausted by George and Florence [Bishop] that we couldn’t come in, but hope to see you soon and give full details.

Berg

[]

1960: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Friday [16 November 1928]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Ottoline

I can’t come today, but could tomorrow, Saturday, about 5 if that suited you. I didn’t come last week being in a rage with the world—Lady Cunard etc etc. and so shut myself up.

How do you manage not to hate everyone?

But I don’t hate you—its this chatter-chatter:

Yr
Virginia

Texas

[]

1961: To V. Sackville-West

Monday [19 November 1928]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Dearest,

Here’s a letter from Eddy, and a draft of an answer to your Uncle.

I should be greatly obliged if you would give me your opinion and any suggestions etc. I don’t know if I ought to mention you, but I did think that you had thanked Lord Sackville—however, I ought to have done it—I’m very sorry: and yet, how could I have put him in the preface, or your father? Surely it wd. have been out of keeping

When shall I see you? Would you send the letters back.

V.

Berg

[]

1962: To Edward Sackville West

21st Nov. [1928]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C. 1

My dear Eddy,

All right. I have written a humble letter of apology to your father and sent him a copy of the Edition de luxe.

Mr S.W. was, (if anybody) Sydney Waterlow. How could it have been you?

Lord, Lord, why does one write books!

Yr Virginia

Berg

[]

1963: To V. Sackville-West

22nd Nov. [1928]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Would you, if its convenient, bring the puppy on Tuesday and then we might arrange to meet later—after your broadcasting. And, then all Wednesday I’m free—(for you: no one else, damn their souls) And (do you like sentences that begin with And?) we are going to have another biscuit tea party at Nessa’s on Tuesday; so flee from Ethels which will be far too refined, and come to us. We had Hugh [Walpole] last Tuesday and he was much liked. That is the correct phrase for Hugh.

I’ve written Eddy one short sharp bark—what a housemaids mind he has, always thinking one ‘means’ him. And I’ve written a smooth silky letter to your Uncle. But I dont believe he minded—not if he’s a man of sense, and not a niminy piminy housemaid. And tomorrow I have to go to Bow Street and stand surety for £40 for Jonathan Cape. And then to Rodmell for Saturday night; back on Sunday. Youre my Towser, not Molly’s [MacCarthy] Towser: Why go to tea with her?

Berg

[]

1964: To Quentin Bell

22nd Nov 1928

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Quentin,

This is going to be written in such a hand that even you—even you—can read it. Because it is perishing cold and damp, and to sit at my typewriter is to become a polar bear rapidly drifting to destruction upon a block of ice. Even to please you I will not become a desolate she-bear.

I was much interested by your letter. I think we were arguing about sex. You have discovered you are sexless. Good God, how merciful! I am sure Bloomsbury is dull to extinction all because it will assume that life lives solely in those parts.

Up at Cambridge the young men all gossip, Julian says, and no one argues. No one tries to create or to destroy. We went up for Lydia’s dance, and the Keynes’es surpassed themselves in sharing one partridge among 70 guests—that is, they never paid Nessa and Duncan a penny; but it is all for the glory of art of course. Julian stands in the middle of the room like a church in the Strand. People pass under his arms.

I have been most frightfully busy doing silly things like writing to a gentleman in Peckham who wishes to know what authority I have for making dahlias flower in the reign of Charles the Second. And I have been to tea with 2 dozen, or perhaps even a gross of old ladies who want to know if my nephew Quentin is as clever as his Aunt. I raise my eyebrows. We will go and call on Ottoline together. She will pull your head down on her pillow. But as a relic—as something swept up on the beach after the defeat of the Spanish Armada she is admirable.

Nessa and I have been giving some little parties. We talk about life and eat biscuits till 2 a.m. Clive is very gloomy and thanks God for death. What is the use of life he says when one has a bald patch the size of a half crown on the top of ones’ head? No virgin can love one again. Then we all look at Clives bald patch and he turns crusty and abuses us in French. But dont tell him; he would have out his rifle and murder me—all because of a virgin and bald patch on the top of his head.

Lytton’s book is out tomorrow, and shops in the Strand are plastered with advertisements. I am not going to read it, because in that way I shall wear a glory round my head. There goes a woman what aint read Essex and Elizabeth the street urchins will say and the rumour will reverberate down Lambs Conduit Street.

I hear you are coming back to decorate Crichton Stuarts rooms—Is that all he expects you to do? Pardon me if I am too romantic. Come and see me—no, dont if you are in a hurry. We might see life together—that is go to the London Museum in a taxi: then have an ice at Gunters and so home to 37 to discuss life with dear old Roger, but he’s away still.

Write an answer, and admit that my old crones hand—I am very old and talk in a husky whisper about my pains in my joints—is as clear as day.

Your loving
Aunt V.

Quentin Bell

[]

1965: To Daphne Sanger

Thursday [November? 1928]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C. 1

Dear Daphne,

It was extremely nice of you to write. I am so glad you like Orlando in spite of its being so untrue. However I agree with you that truth is not very important in that particular book. I’m afraid I never thought about going on a donkey to Broussa. By that time I was not bothering my head at all to be accurate. Of course I am fond of the Country—don’t you remember how shocked I was by you and your father at Rodmell? But it was very clever of you to see this in Orlando: I meant it to be there.

Thank you again for troubling to write.

Yours
Virginia Woolf

Daphne Sanger

[]

1966: To V. Sackville-West

Sunday [2 December 1928]

52 T[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

So you are just back [from Oxford] I suppose, it being after dinner, and I had mine alone. What a good letter you wrote me! Do you know I think about your writing with interest? All your feet seem to be coming down on it now, not only the foreleg. Very few people interest me as writers; but I think I shall read your next poem with care.

And I like the way you stand up resolute in the full flood of Tom’s [Eliot] and Reads: a British Grenadier. I forget what I was going to say now—something frightfully exciting, something that hit me between forehead and hair this afternoon: about Chaucer, it may have been. I am scraping the slime off, the Cunards, the respectability of it all, reading Troilus, by Chaucer. Thank God I still have the remnants of a mind to grate upon: I’ve not read a thing, except as a bird flies through a bush, since Rodmell. But I forget what I was going to say. I’m coming on Thursday, just as the lamps are being lit in Sevenoaks, so that I can see you in the fishmongers in a red jersey holding a paper bag, rather heavy and damp. Full of smelts. And then we turn up the lights in your room, and I get into my chair and you—ah well—too soon over, thats the worst of it. And I make it sooner over by my terrific sense (aged 46—thats what it does) of the flight of time, so that these moments are seen by me flying, flying; almost too distinct to be bearable. I discovered that in Burgundy; and could not invent any way of dimming my own eyes, which are, sometimes, too bright, aren’t they? Couldn’t we drop something into time to make it thick and dull? Lord—but I must go round to Nessa instead of gossiping here: must brush my hair; and Clive will say now Virginia tell us all the news. And the news is we are coming to Berlin on the 15th January; but that I will talk about on Thursday: but lets arrange it properly on Thursday: there must be one perfectly empty compartment about Vita’s poetry.

Coming down with all her feet at once—thats what I like in a writer. Desmond shuffles, and I’m a jumper: never mind, I’ll think it over and tell you.

Lord! what a pleasure you are to me

Yr
Potto

Berg

[]

1967: To Roger Fry

4th Dec [1928]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Roger,

I have been going through the fog in a kind of ecstasy today—with a luminous nose, perhaps—because of your letter [about Orlando]. Nothing has given me so much pleasure, as, for reasons I will tell Helen one day (when we’re alone) I venerate and admire you to the point of worship: Lord! you dont know what a lot I owe you!—About details you may be wrong, but I agree entirely with what you say about the end. I got tired and headachy and couldn’t bring it off all in one fling, as I should have done, and so had to write it over, and it got hard, where it should have been all a rush and left in the air. But all the rest was great fun. I’m vaguely in treaty with a French professor who wants to translate it, but Mauron would be much better of course.

But this is only a scrawl to thank you—not that I ever do thank you, or express a thousandth part of the devotion I have for you—but that’s Helen’s fault—devil take the woman!

Yours affly
Virginia

I had seen your pamphlet and enjoyed your part—and entirely agree.

Sussex

[]

1968: To Edward Sackville West

9th Dec. 1928

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

My dear Eddy

What can I have said that makes you think I “wish to quarrel with you”, and ‘take things so seriously’? I can’t conceive, though my habit of writing letters in a hurry is disastrous. I was afraid you were taking things seriously; but I hope, at any rate as far as your father is concerned, that you exaggerated—Anyhow here is his letter—perhaps merely polite, but I hope not, as I should be very sorry to annoy him—still more, you. If you had told me of Mr S.W. before, I would have altered it in the 2nd Edition; but it was too late. If there’s another chance I will do it—so now I hope I have given no more signs of being annoyed or wishing to quarrel—but I’m terrified of letter writing: worse than writing books; all one’s meanings get wrong; for which reason—and again I’m in a hurry—I’ll end with the end of this page,

With love
Yr Virginia

Berg

[]

1969: To V. Sackville-West

Friday night [14 December 1928]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Dearest Creature,

I was very much upset to think you had been angry (as you said)) that I didn’t go to the bloody womans trial—(and yet I rather like you to be angry) Idiotically, I thought they would wire to you; and I rang up as early as I could this morning to ask you to lunch: and you’d gone—And then you were angry. And then I was wretched. And I waited all the afternoon for you. And I had lunch for you. And now you’re off in the bitter black night with female unknown; fresh, or stale and scented rather, from the arms, to put it euphemistically, of Mary—God! What a succession of flea bites and bug bites the life of a respectable hard working woman is!

And now Leonard has cut up rough about my having Elena to tea on Tuesday if I lunch out and dine with people. So I won’t ask Elena; and then again you’ll be angry. But the truth is I’ve been rather headachy with rather a cold (both very mild) but, then, my life is all these easements and dodges, not to my liking at all—but there—there—enough said on that point

The gist of the matter is that you’ll turn up at 1.5 punctual on Tuesday and we’ll lunch somewhere; and you shall take a carving knife to me if you like.

And we’ll perhaps get to the bottom of this wretched affair—human friendship.

I rather wanted to see Elena too.

And I’ll tell you about Max Beerbohm.

Poor Potto—with a cold, crying, because Vita’s angry.

V.

Berg

[]

1970: To Angus Davidson

Dec 22nd [1928]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.

My dear Angus,

A thousand thanks, though it is very wrong of you—for the honey, it lent a great lustre to our tea last night—I am, as they say, a very bear where honey is concerned.

We are sending you a small slice of Orlando, which I always feel owed a great deal to you, and I hope it may come in handy for something or other.

There is poor old Cartwright toiling away (3.30 on Saturday) to find out how she can have spent 5/- more in coin and received 2/6 more in stamps (it may be the other way round) than she should. Nothing I can say is in the least help.

Well—our blessing for the new year, and may you soon be sitting in authority at the National Gallery.

Leonard sends his love.

Yrs V.W.

Angus Davidson

[]

1971: To Lytton Strachey

Xmas day [1928]

52 T[avistock] Sqre, [W.C.1]

It was the greatest relief, getting your letter, dearest Lytton. I was so afraid I had said only commonplace things. One can’t say the things that matter—and it all seemed rather unreal.

She was very real to me,—oddly so, seeing how little I saw her; and I keep thinking of her. She used to descend upon me sometimes in Fitzroy Square and talk about you.

Love and blessings Virginia

Strachey Trust

[]

1972: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Boxing Day [26 December 1928]

52 T.[avistock] Sqre, [W.C.1]

Dearest Ottoline

What a wizard of an enchantress you are!—The difference between the two being that a wizard is wily and the other merely delightful—You cursed all present giving and then send me round the one thing I coveted (you had one on your table) so late at night that nothing could be done in retaliation. What an odd inspiration on your part! So much did I like your green smooth knife that I stopped in Oxford Street (buying a 3/6. present for Vivien Eliot) and looked if I could find one: naturally not. Heaven knows where you find things; even tinsel and silver braid are all dipped in fairy light.

But this shall always cut all my books.

And I cant think of anything to send you—and we go away tomorrow and shall be more or less away till the end of January: but then I shall come, I hope.

But do keep as happy as enchanting and lovely—

V.

Texas

[]

1973: To Vanessa Bell

Thursday [27 December 1928]

[Monk’s House], Rodmell, [Sussex]

Dearest Dolphin:

You are a bad beast—to hang my ears so magnificently Really they take my breath away and confer on me the lustre of a doomed Empress. I shall be shot and my body thrown into the Volga (river in Russia) if I wear them—A good riddance, you will say. But it was an astonishing inspiration, as I had only my red rings and specially coveted a pair of white ones. Being your choice, too, as Marny would say, makes them Quite Perfect—But if you shower ear rings, how will you educate Angelica? Bad wicked blue-nosed Dolphin—If you want to change your gloves and shoes by the way, Lafayette will do it.

I was enraptured by the account of Seend which is in its way masterly. The accounts in the dining room, the Keys—the lavatory: all my skill never produces that effect—We had a cloistered Christmas, in some ways: no posts; and the mercy of no proper keeping up; but we saw a good many odds and ends—Koteliansky, Roger, Gumbo, Gerald—Roger is the only civilised man I have ever met, and I continue to think him the plume in our cap; the vindication, asseveration—and all the rest of it—If Bloomsbury had produced only Roger, it would be on a par with Athens at its prime (little though this will convey to you) We dined with him, and came away—fed to the lips, but impressed almost to tears by his charm.

I gather that Pippa and Gumbo [Strachey sisters] don’t hit it off. She said rather sourly that she didn’t propose to live with Pippa. They will have about £200 each—but I daresay you’ve heard all this from Lytton.

We came here this evening and I am at present in the exalted state of the newly veiled nun. None of my friends and relations counts a straw. A large fire; books: peace; nobody to talk to—But [George] Kennedy arrives at 9.30 tomorrow, and stays the night, so there we shall be again tongue wagging. Still I am vastly excited about the building: and will you have my chairs and things begun when I come back? I forward a letter from Dottie which I hope means that she has plunged.

I saw Ottoline and fell deeper and deeper into those sea green waters, till indeed the ancient carp, Philip to wit, turned up at Tavistock late at night with a jade paper knife, which I promptly broke.

B.

It strikes me with horror in the night that Angelica is the last child in the family. For Gods sake, consider how she can be stunted.

Berg

[]

1974: To Hugh Walpole

29 Dec [1928]

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes, [Sussex]

My dear Hugh,

Here we are rather chilly but on the whole happy and it becomes possible to write a letter. No sooner have I said this than Mrs Bartholomew the village char appears and says the King refuses nourishment and Mrs Woolf has been mentioned on the wireless. Leonard has a bet about the King—£1 that he dies before Jan 1st— so our excitement is great. Poor man—I cant help feeling that everyone wants him to die, merely to see black horses and plumes in Piccadilly. And in 10 minutes Mr Kennedy will be here, the gifted but almost inarticulate architect, to advise about adding a room to the cottage. This room will be called Orlando, and one window will be dedicated to St Hugh. It is financed by Orlando; and without St Hugh, should I have sold ten copies? But this reminds me of the—well I wont mention names since doubtless they are friends of yours: people of blameless character, good fathers, devoted husbands, who talk about royalties and sales; which in Bloomsbury, as you used to think, we dont. (This sentence is grossly ungrammatical, but the char is running in and out with blankets. She has been left £320 by an aunt; and has bought a set of false teeth and wireless: hence our news of the King. But she has broken into the current of my mind, and how to continue I know not—) We shall go back next week, and then go on a family tour to Germany. Vita has promised to show us night life in Berlin; my sister and Duncan Grant have it on their conscience that German galleries should be visited. Leonard wants to hear every opera ever written. I shall go to a thing called the Planetarium (or some such name) where you see the stars as they are—so imagine us at our different occupations, meeting to drink at intervals, coffee, beer, all wrapped in rugs and bearskins for it is said you can’t shock the Germans by uncouthness—and then we all come home again and start life afresh in February.

Shall you be in London? If so, come and dine.

(Here another interruption: old Moore [Almanac] has a picture of sentries at the palace and a deaths head in January.) Here’s the architect too.

Yrs V.W.

Texas

[]

1975: To Nan Hudson

Saturday [29 December 1928]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, [Sussex]

My dear Nan,

Of course the choice of poems was deliberate, and shows I think that in spite of your hedgehog character I have crept between the spines. Do you agree?

How on earth you continue to send me the exact presents I want—gloves, from Ethel—a penwiper from you; and also to get them, the penwiper at least, embossed into the bargain—Heaven knows! It is a gift which goes with truffles, home craft, cookery, charm—all the inscrutable things which I associate with you.

Here we are in the depths of the country—heavenly after London: no telephone, nothing but a large fire and Pinker drowsing in an arm chair.

Your desk is the joy of my life. Will you give my love, thanks, blessing to Ethel, whose letter has just come, and hand on to her this cheque, which I was writing that second, and say that I shall be in Germany on the 18th but Francis Birrell thought they might lunch earlier—but it dont matter. And I hope to see you both before we go.

Yr
Virginia

Wendy Baron

[]

1976: To V. Sackville-West

29th Dec. 1928

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, [Sussex]

That wretched Potto is all slung with yellow beads. He rolled himself round in them, and can’t be dislodged—short of cutting off his front paws, which I know you wouldn’t like. But may I say, once and for all, presents are not allowed: its written all over the cage. It spoils their tempers—They suffer for it in the long run—This once will be forgiven: but never never again—The night you were snared, that winter, at Long Barn [18 December 1925], you slipped out Lord Steyne’s paper knife, and I had then to make the terms plain: with this knife you will gash our hearts I said and the same applies to beads.

But I forget what I was about to say. We are sitting by the fire. Pinker snores like an old cook with a bad leg. Like a cook with white leg (wasn’t that the joke at Gordon Square?) Leonard is furious, because a lamp I gave him to heat the motor wont screw up or down. He shakes it; he curses. Long long ago I should have thrown it to the ground. But the pertinacity of the Jewish race, to which we owe so much—Xtianity, among the rest (I had meant to write out a list, but Lord!—how ignorant I am) will not suffer him to give over; he is as a terrier worrying a very large rat which has him by the nose.

You never write to me, and your image has receded till it is like the thinnest shadow of the old moon: but just as Vita was about to vanish, a thin silver edge appeared, and you now hang like a sickle over my life again: thats why I am writing to you, hurry scurry, for Nelly’ll be in with our gammon and eggs in a minute, instead of reading M: Maurois for an article, which, Mrs Nick, will be printed in England France and America, simultaneously—Why do I boast? Nothing impresses you. The truth is I boast because I’m modest. The sales of Orlando went very nicely till the end. Now they’ll stop. Did you like my champagne party? I was so proud of it. But I thought it made my dear Dadie red-nosed coarse and quarrelsome: Vita sails over champagne like a racing cutter: all sails, all flags, all bowing and curtseying. But then Vita has the blood of the Sackvilles in her, which is made of—which reminds me: Eddy. His blood is not his strong point. It’s his damned aristocratic thin-blooded, bubbly prickly weakly temper that annoys one; so would you hand on to him, tactfully, (for I cant be bothered to write another letter and be snubbed for it) that we can’t meet [Kurt] Wagenseil? Charming, virtuous, accomplished as Wagenseil is, it is to avoid Wagenseil that we come to Berlin—Yes Vita: we come to Berlin. It is still true; that moon increases. (Honestly, if I look out of the window, I see a moon among the apple trees: and there is an owl on my two big trees. God! We had the architect yesterday and the builder and I spent two hours in the attics, and we’re planning rooms for me, rooms for Leonard; and a cabinet de toilette for Vita. The luxury etc. combined with the refinement etc. of Long Barn.) How are you? By the way (but this’ll need a new sheet, and theyre double bed sheets, there, fit for Long Barn on a summer’s night a June night with Ethel Smyths nightingales whistling in the syringas by the swimming pool) by the way, Julian, my nephew, came out with a great burst of enthusiasm for The Land the other night. He said its frightfully good, he thinks; one of the best modern poems; the sort of poetry he likes; so solid; and she knows it all; and she has a sense of words; and she’s honest; and thank God she doesn’t imitate Tom Eliot; and I think her a real poet; one of the few now writing; and don’t let her write like Tom Eliot; let her write like The Land again—all of which was so genuine and fervent I blushed and said well why don’t you write and tell her? and he blushed and said he couldnt write to Vita (he calls you Vita very naturally, which rather pleases me)

Nelly is stumbling with the eggs in the kitchen, so I will hastily say that I have finished Troilus and Cressida (by Chaucer) and see now that long poems are the only things I want to read—Next Spenser; then Daniel; then Drayton, and so on, down one long long road after another, to Cowper, whom I suspect of hidden divinities unnumbered, to Crabbe; and then?—Well Vita, you must be ready to lead me by the hand into daylight. It is perfectly true that I cannot read War and Peace now with any gusto or enchantment; yet 20 years ago, lying in bed one summer, I was enthralled and floated through week after week; and have lived in the recollection and called Tolstoi the greatest of novelists ever since. Not a patch on Chaucer! So what’s to be done? What? What?

Virginia

P.S.

It is now Wednesday the 3rd of January 1929: and I find this rather incoherent letter still lying about: Shall I send it? Tolstoi has risen again.

Vita’s moon is full. But its true that the image of ones loves forever changes: and gradually (you know how I like noticing physical symptoms) from being a sight, becomes a sense—a heaviness betwixt the 3rd and 4th rib; a physical oppression: These are the signs writers should watch for. Love is so physical; and so’s reading—the exercise of the wits.

I do hope the spleens and the chills have left you. Both are—I was going to say prevalent here; but no: I am light headed at the moment; why, heaven knows. I have been walking alone down a valley to Rat Farm, if that means anything to you: and the quiet and the cold and the loveliness—one hare, the weald washed away to vapour—the downs blue green; the stacks, like cakes cut in half—I say all this so excited me; and my own life suddenly became so impressive to me, not as usual shooting meteor like through the sky, but solitary and still that, as I say—well how is the sentence to end?, figure to yourself that sentence, like the shooting star, extinct in an abyss, a dome, of blue; the colour of night: which, if dearest Vita you can follow, is now my condition: as I sit waiting for dinner, over the logs.

[Audrey] Le Boski writes to say how much she misses you. And then you pretend the woman is all typewriter within! all wires and ribbon, for writing your business letters on. No—Next month she will be flinging herself on your hearthrug. A tap at the window. Bosqi will be there—you see it all, dont you? And then a hurried removal.

I have not the face to write another double bedded sheet.

Do you really love me? Much? passionately not reasonably?

We go back tomorrow.

V.

Berg

[]

1977: To V. Sackville-West

31st Dec. [1928]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

Please be an angel and let me have one line on receipt of this to say how you are. I’ve just got your letter, sent on, and feel rather bothered as you say casually you’ve had a sort of influenza—You know how one worries about people abroad. So do, dearest, let me know any fact—ridiculous as it may seem to you; and if you are perfectly recovered. Gastric influenza was it? I’ve just seen someone afflicted thus: but hope you are not the same:

I wrote a long long letter two nights ago, and then found I had no address; but I will send it; It is rather dismal here—the weather. Snow and rain and cold, and we crouch over the single fire, and read and read. Lord I wish I were less fond of you! I hate being anxious: I hate being away. And why were you so splenetic? Haint you got Harold? So what do Potto and Virginia matter?

We go back to Tavistock on Thursday so write there. A long, long letter please. I hope you valued my self restraint in sitting still and not seeing you out of the door the other night.

The beads: yes; I like the beads: But no no—I wont be given things. In the very long letter I wrote all this is explained.

This is a very short letter; asking only for an answer, to say how you are.

If I dont hear, I shant sleep; then I shall get a headache; then I shant be able to come to Berlin:

So you see Love, love: and its the last day of the year by the way.

P

Berg

[]

A Reflection of the Other Person
[The Letters Vol. IV: 1929-1931]

‘It is an interesting question—what one tries to do, in writing a letter—partly of course to give back a reflection of the other person.’

Virginia Woolf to Gerald Brenan
4 October 1929

Letters 1978-2006 (January–February 1929)

1978: To V. Sackville-West

6th Jan. [1929]

37 Gordon Square, W.C.1

Owing to a mistake by me or you or Vanessa or all we do not want the rooms [in Berlin] as we are taking others. Could you possibly cancel them. We are extremely sorry for any inconvenience we may have caused you and must bear any expense incurred.

[in Leonard’s handwriting:]

This has been written under dictation by Virginia who now refuses to sign. We are very sorry for the trouble but do you think you can cancel the rooms?

Leonard
Virginia Woolf
Duncan Grant
Roger Fry who does not know what it is all about but signs obediently.
Quentin Bell
Vanessa Bell

Berg

[]

1979: To V. Sackville-West

January 1929]

Telegram

London

Letter cancelled reserve two rooms from 17th three more from 18th. Woolf

Berg

[]

1980: To V. Sackville-West

Tuesday 8th January 1928 [1929]

52 Tavistock Sqre, WC1.

I hope you have got the wire, and taken the rooms. You will think Im a little crazed. The truth is when I said to Vanessa Vita is taking us rooms, it rose in my mind that you meant in a pension, and the picture which then presented itself of us all sitting round a plant eating cold beef was so dismal that we instantly signed a round robin and sent it off. Next day, on reconsideration, I conceived of rooms in a hotel, and it seemed likely that they would be chosen with tact and insight, so, meeting Nessa over a very late breakfast,—I think Clive was pouring out his history to her—I re-settled the affair and wired.

Leonard and I shall arrive on the 17th, travelling by sea, by the Hook, your way. The others are going by Brunswick to look at a ceiling, and will arrive on the 18th.

We shall have one whole week, leaving on the 24th—but I dont think of that. What I think of is arriving and seeing Vita black and scarlet under a lamp with a dog on a string. As the train draws up the dog will run the wrong way round a pillar: Vita will thus be in difficulties; will bite her under lip, and so stride through a crowd of dumpling shaped greasy grey women to meet us.

What station it will be I will tell you later. Vita will say Hullo Virginia! Leonard will stoop and pat the dog. He will compare her with Pinker, and if you are tactful you will say “But Pinker’s a much better colour, Leonard” and then we shall all feel happy.

I am as usual writing quicker than the clock ticks. I have been talking about V. Sackville West to a man called Wells—who is succeeding Crosby Gaige as publisher of pale green priceless editions. The desire of his heart is to publish a book by V. Sackville West. He read a copy of Seducers on the liner, and the title page was torn off. Being enchanted he went to the Librarian, who said “I’ll look up the author’s name in my catalogue” and then said “By Virginia Woolf.” I had to disengage myself from his compliments. I said I would try to coax another Seducers, another Land out of you.

But why am I writing so fast? I am in a mixed mood, flying before the fury of my own devils. They have started a pumping machine in the hotel basement which shakes my studio: 25 minutes pumping like the tread of a rhythmical Elephant; then 25 minutes silence. I try ear stoppers; I try patience; finally I am trying psychology. If, I say to myself, you can imagine that the pumping is the sound of Times clock made audible, which for all your life will measure the day into spaces of 25 minutes, you will take the sound into your bloodstream, where it will become noiseless as the beat of the heart. All is habit. So far I have not triumphed. There! it begins again.

And I am once more, though so ill-fitted for the part, a go-between Clive and Mary. His disillusion, like that of a dinner table after a party, so depressed me that I volunteered help. So Mary dines with me tomorrow. So I shall be clawed between the two. And so nothing will come of it. Whats more, when I ran into Nessa’s this morning there he was in spats and fur coat sitting over the fire. He had been seeing a lady off at Victoria, and staying with Dick Wyndham and seeing Dottie: and “Lifes whizzing so fast” he said, “I dont know if I’m awake or asleep”. This is the one day I got into a fury with it all; and said “I will stand this no longer,” and made off—to Greenwich by myself. What an adventure! How your bandits and skeletons pale beside it! Think—I had lunch in a shop. Think—I sat on the pier and saw the ships bowling up. Women were walking on deck. Dogs looking out of portholes. The Captain on The Bridge. Never was anything so romantic and lovely. And then I wandered about the hospital, and saw Nelsons coat that he wore at Trafalgar, and his white stockings, and almost wept. What a day it was! How I shall remember it to the end of my life. Lets go there together.

I have written myself out of breath—30,000 words in 8 weeks; and now want to dive and steep myself in other peoples books. I want to wash off all my own ideas. So I have been reading and reading, and making up a new little book for the Hogarth Press (if it survives) on six novels. A good idea, d’you think? Picking six novels from the mass, and saying everything there is to be said about the whole of literature in perhaps 150 pages. I’ve been reading Balzac, and Tolstoy. Practically every scene in Anna Karenina is branded on me, though I’ve not read it for 15 years. That is the origin of all our discontent. After that of course we had to break away. It wasn’t Wells, or Galsworthy or any of our mediocre wishy washy realists: it was Tolstoy. How could we go on with sex and realism after that? How could they go on with poetic plays after Shakespeare? It is one brain, after all, literature; and it wants change and relief. The text book writers cut it up all wrong (the telephone: Leonards mother: is sending us a cake—) and where was I? Literature is all one brain.

It suddenly strikes me, this will be my last letter to you. Wont it? That is rather exciting. But not your last to me. All our plans are run through by the Editor of The Nation. We only get 5 days now, and go to some obscure Inn as far away as we can find in Dorsetshire perhaps, and perhaps end up on Thomas Hardy’s doorstep. France is put off till June perhaps.

Will you be walking in soon? Won’t that be exciting? Nothing compared with my brigands and so on, Vita will say. Never mind—she shall say what she likes, and be as condescending as she chooses provided she is kind to that poor Weevil, Virginia, and dog Grizzle who sends her love.

Orlando has now sold 13000 copies in America: thats the last time I mention him.

The [Berlin] station will be Friederichstrasse.

Berg

[]

1981: To V. Sackville-West

[9? January 1929]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

[first page missing]

… formula, which I’m a little sick of, for another love affair: but still, he [Clive] said, taking my arm and walking me round the Square—I in my blue pinafore—still I want you to speak to Mary [Hutchinson].

I do nothing but try, vainly, to finish off a year’s journalism in a week. If I can earn £400, by flights into the lives of Miss Burney and Miss Jewsbury, then I can pitch every book away, and sink back in my chair and give myself to the wings of the Moths [The Waves]. But I doubt it. There are dates to look up. One can’t simply invent the whole of Chelsea and King George the 3rd and Johnson, and Mrs Thrale I suppose. Yet after all, thats the way to write; and if I had time to prove it, the truth of one’s sensations is not in the fact, but in the reverberation. When I have read three lines, I re-make them entirely, if they’re prose, and not poetry; and it is this which is the truth. (Has Harold [Nicolson] read Lytton?)

So my dearest, we shall soon meet again—pray the Lord not round an aspidistra in a Boarding House. We are coming in our shabbiest clothes; my mother in law has given me a coat like the pelt a sheep wears when its been on a high mountain alone for weeks—an old sheep.

With tact, we shall spend a good deal of time alone together. And you’ll be loving and kind to Potto wont you? And kind to Virginia? And you’ll say that you love her in so many words, won’t you, not leaving her to infer that she’s on a par with the … oh damn you, you never told me Harold’s word.

A certain gloom lies over London. I am glad to be flying.

Virginia

Berg

[]

1982: To V. Sackville-West

Friday [11 January 1929]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

I wrote in such a hurry the other night that I expect I failed to explain that Leonard and I arrive at the Friederichstrasse station on Thursday at 5.21. and shall go to the Prinz Albrecht [Hotel] if we dont see you. Could you possibly let us have a line to say what street it is on, as its not marked in the Baedeker.

I see that one out of every 15 people has influenza in Berlin, so I’m arranging to catch it on the last day and stay on.

Lord! What unhappy letters you do write from Berlin!

V.

Let me know if you want anything brought.

Berg

[]

1983: To Philip Gosse

11th Jan. 1929

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Sir,

I should be delighted to send you any letters from Sir Edmund Gosse to my father, if I could find them. Unfortunately my father destroyed almost all his letters and it is only by chance, in most cases, that a few remain. I should be so sorry that there were none to him in your life of your father that I will look carefully through any papers I have. As I am just going abroad for a fortnight, I am afraid I must wait till I come back to do this.

I will let you know as soon as I can.

Believe me

yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Cambridge University Library

[]

1984: To William Rothenstein

14th Jan 1929

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Mr Rothenstein,

Please forgive me for being so long in answering your letter. It was extremely good of you to send me the drawings, which I have looked at with great interest. I had seen them years ago. I am not capable of any opinion about drawing—I never venture to give one—but I have the ordinary persons love of a likeness and desire to be reminded by portraits of real people and I have been greatly interested and pleased to find in your pictures a trace of my father and mother. They are more worn and sad than I remembered them; but no doubt this is accounted for by the fact of my father’s illness. I admit that I think, perhaps with the partiality of a daughter, that my mother was more beautiful than you show her; but I am very glad to have these records of them, and must thank you very sincerely for sending them.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

[in Virginia’s handwriting:]

Please excuse the typewriter but it is better than my handwriting.

Houghton Library, Harvard University

[]

1985: To Helen McAfee

14th Jan. 1929

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Miss McAfee,

I am afraid that there is no chance of my being able to send you the article on Dr Burney by the tenth of February. I am only now beginning to work at it, and as I have other work to do at the same time I shall certainly not have finished it by then. Also I think it will be a good deal longer than I supposed. Would it not be as well to give up the idea, and I will find a home for it elsewhere?

Thank you so much for sending me the press cutting about Orlando. It was very good of you to write so kindly, and I am delighted to think that you enjoyed the book.

With kind regards from myself and my husband.

Yours very sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Yale University

[]

1986: To V. Sackville-West

Sunday [27 January 1929]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Well, here I am in bed. I had to be hauled out of my berth at Harwich—a mixture of the somnifeine [Somnifène], flu, and headache—apparently. Quite drugged. But I’m better. Only of course the dr. makes me stay in bed and do nothing. I wish it had happened in Berlin. I wish I could see you. Do write. I’m much better today. Berlin was quite worth it anyhow.

Love,
Virginia

The doctor just been—says its the flue and I shall be able to get up on Tuesday.

VW

Berg

[]

1987: To V. Sackville-West

Monday [28 January 1929]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

How nice to get your letter this morning—a great treat. I’m afraid I wrote you rather a dazed one yesterday. That blessed sea sick drug of Nessa’s somehow went wrong and I had to be hauled along like a sack, but thats all right now, and so’s the flue, and I’ve only got the usual headache which is better today.

I daresay I shall get up tomorrow. I’m being rather strictly looked after though by Leonard and Ellie Rendel (the dr.) and so can only write these scraps. I keep thinking of you and long—oh Lord how I long—that you would open the door and come in. I’ve seen no one, so you need have no fears. I do nothing but sleep. Pinker [spaniel] lies on the chair by the fire. Leonard comes in with a proof or the paper, Nelly brings me lemonade. I read the Times and drop it. I see you with extreme distinction—Well anyhow it was worth the week with you. I think of the tower and the lights and the waves and the shell room at Sans Souci and you, and you—Next week is Feb. 1st. so there’s really not long to wait. But Lord! what a horror Berlin and diplomacy are! I’d no idea till I’d seen it. And I shiver at the thought of our behaviour about that lunch. You and Harold were such angels. My love to him. Write.

V.

(Here’s Leonard so I must stop)

Berg

[]

1988: To V. Sackville-West

Tuesday [29 January 1929]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Dearest Creature,

Here is another selfish invalids bulletin, but I like to write to you, and you won’t mind it all being about myself.

I am really better today, only still kept in bed. It is merely the usual headache which is now making me rather achy and shivery but passing off. And the dr has just been and says I shall get on the sofa tomorrow and may see someone on Thursday. Who would you like to see she says, and I think at once of—well, it aint Mary [Hutchinson] or Christa: though I daresay to tease you I shall have Mary, and as I shall be in my nightgown—But no. I am very faithful. Its odd how I want you when I’m ill. I think everything would be warm and happy if Vita came in. And Vita’s having tea with the American Ambassadors wife, I suppose: very smart and haughty. How you frightened me that night on the pavement! Potto still talks of it.

Its so odd to have gone straight from all that movement, and big houses, and street signs and wine and Vita to lying alone in bed up here without any interest. I’ve looked out of the window and see that Tavistock Sqre is very small and distinguished. L. is at the office. Nelly out. So I’m alone. Pinker was sent up. She has worms and is very fat. I’ve got some rather nice photographs of Virginia; but can’t send them at the moment. I will tomorrow if I can. Please write, long long letters, all about yourself and if you like me. That is what I want. I dont really read anything with interest except your letters.

I’ve no ink up here, and this is becoming illegible. Lord! how I should like to see you!

Virginia

Berg

[]

1989: To V. Sackville-West

Wednesday [30 January 1929]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Another 5 minutes conversation, all about myself as usual. Do you mind? Are you bored? You’re the only person I write to.

I’m down on the sofa in the drawing room this evening. The Knole sofa—very comfortable. I cant be bothered to find a pen so you must put up with pencil. These headaches are very odd. This time last week we were at Sans Souci—now I cant imagine walking across the Square. What d’you think happens? Leonard and the dr. says its my rackety life in Berlin. But why this change in 10 seconds? I’m really better, only rather cross that it takes so long. And that I cant see you. If you were to sit by me now I should be so happy. Brilliant ideas come into my head—scenes—solutions—but are extinguished. How does one write? I read half a page about Austin Dobson and then drowse for an hour. Leonard brings in huge beef steaks. I say I’m afraid I shall be very strictly kept under for a time. No parties—no romances. But that suits you very well, you wretch. You want Potto and Virginia kept in their kennel—write dearest please anything that comes into your head—the more the better. I have no pain today but am only like a damp duster.

Love V.

Berg

[]

1990: To V. Sackville-West

Thursday [31 January 1929]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

I shall now have my little treat of writing to Vita, I say to myself.

I wish I’d heard from you, but perhaps I shall. No I am not to see anybody—not Mary [Hutchinson] even. Dr Rendel can’t imagine why I want to see Mary, (her cousin). There is such a thing as womanly charm I reply. Anyhow it aint allowed. I console myself by thinking that they wouldnt allow you either. I have been rather giddy, and have to keep lying down. It is something to do with the spirit level in my ears. There is a kind of mouse which turns for ever, because its ears have no spirit level. Would you like to see Potto turning for ever? Everything is put down to Berlin. I am never to walk round a gallery or sit up drinking again. All my adventures are to be lying down—which will suit, in some ways. Really I am rather better, and make up a book to be called The Moths [The Waves] hour after hour.

And what about Vita? poor poor Vita lying like a beautiful cat in a cage—and not a plain cage either, but a cage like the Albert Memorial. Lord! how the ugliness of Berlin remains with me!

We travelled back with the Rev. Herbert Dunnico a labour MP, who had lunched with Kuhlman and with Schubert and told L. all about it and abused the Duchess of Atholl: theres the dear old Labour party atmosphere all over again I thought; and rejoiced that I was not labour and not anything: this is what makes one serene—these secret thoughts. Thats all my news—rather faded: and Kessler is a bastard of the Kaiser’s they say. Nelly [Boxall] is my only link with real life. I could tell you all about the party at the Harlands when George got drunk. They insisted that he should sleep in my bed and Nelly refused. George is Lotties young man, but Lottie doesnt mean anything serious; she’s 38 after all. And Nelly has taken away the latch key she gave her and wont see her till she gives George up. After all she cant have it both ways. I tells her. But thats enough.

I am now going to sleep, with Pinker in L’s chair, looking very stately

Love from us both.

And write dearest, if you have time, any scrap—

Virginia

Berg

[]

1991: To V. Sackville-West

Friday [1 February 1929]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

It was very refreshing to get your letter this morning—among such dreary ones. I have read it several times. Of course we would go to Long Barn like a shot—you know. The dr. says though that I must be in bed another week anyhow and then be very quiet—oh this being very quiet!—so that I dont suppose we could get away till the middle of Feb, and then you’d soon be back.

But if London becomes intolerable I shall take you at your word. At the moment I’m so lethargic I dont think of anything but walking down to the sofa or up to bed. They give me stiff doses of bromide. Its rather nice. Ones head feels grown to the pillow. One floats like a log. I wake to write to you. The sight of you on [the] street at Berlin is my last record of humanity. There were two Germans in the carriage—fat, greasy, the woman with broken nails. The man peeled an orange for her. She squeezed his hand. It was repulsive. Perhaps in time one might come to think this complete unadornment beautiful—morally—after many many years. You deserve Rapallo and I envy you. Heat—sun—anyhow clear air. Its lead and yellow here day after day. Oh how I liked your letter! There’s nothing to be anxious about in me. The dr says its simply exhaustion and must take time, but theres nothing wrong. She has a silver stethescope and tells me every day that there is nothing wrong with my heart. What I can’t understand is why, if theyre right about Berlin, I felt quite well there, only shivery that day at Sans Souci. However—I’m much better. Its a great refuge to think I could fly to Long Barn—How you cured me when I was ill before [June 1927]! Potto would be happy. I shall be in robust health by the time you’re back—27 days now.

Write as often as you can—I do like your letters.

V.

Berg

[]

1992: To Julian Bell

[3? February 1929]

52 T.S. [W.C.1]

My dear Julian,

Many happy returns! To think that you are 21! And I carried you round the room in my arms once.

We send you a small cheque to buy a book or a bird or a chocolate cake—whatever you like—with our blessing.

The trapesing in Berlin was terrific. Nessa poisoned me with a seasick-draught. I sank into coma and am still in bed.

Are you writing poems? I should like to see them some day.

Write me a long long letter.

Yr loving Virginia

Quentin Bell

[]

1993: To V. Sackville-West

Monday [4 February 1929]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Dearest—What a time your letters take to come! One posted Thursday comes this morning—to my great delight. You can’t think what a difference it makes when they bring in a blue envelope. I’m still in bed—thats to say I stay in bed till after tea and then come down in my nightgown and lie on the sofa till after dinner, (as I’m doing now). I’m better, however—not so limp. And no pain for two days and no sleeping draughts, only Bromide. I’ve had this sort of thing before, especially after flue, slight though that was and it always takes some time to go off—Also the sea sick draught, which was veronal, made me more susceptible. But of course the dr and Leonard say its all the Berlin racketing (I daresay it was) on the top of the others. So I’m still prevented from seeing anyone—which may please you. You are still the only face I have in my minds eye. Therefore my letters are of an unthinkable dullness. Viola Tree and Roger [Fry] and Lytton [Strachey] and Tom Eliot ring up and I think of their sailing about somewhere miles overhead, as if I were a fish at the bottom of the seas. Other people’s lives become so decorative when one takes no part in them. I admit I rather like this solitude. Ones mind fills up like a sponge. I think of you. To own up, I rather like thinking of you shining at Embassies. I like to think of you all lit up among Nuncios and footmen. Its a weakness of mine. Part of your glamour, I suppose. On the other hand, Berlin glamour seems only that of Woolworths and Lyons Corner House—its immeasurable mediocrity still affects me. And you to be held under that arc lamp! Arent you a creature of the dusk? Very well. We will watch the moon rise together very soon at Long Barn. Bosquet rang up this morning to ask if we were coming—as I think I said I dont see any immediate prospect, but it refreshes me to think we could go at any moment. I imagine I’m to go on like this till the end of the week and then sit up a bit and take little drives.

When shall I begin The Moths [The Waves]? Thats what I want to know. Theres that damned book on fiction [Phases of Fiction]—it still wants 10,000 more words—and such nonsense! and I darent leave it in the lurch again and write another Orlando—A woman writes that she has to stop and kiss the page when she reads O:—Your race I imagine. The percentage of Lesbians is rising in the States, all because of you. And did you yield to the red haired woman? Please be explicit and honest. I shall be so lively when I get over this that I shall run amok at the least provocation. L’s mother is worse, and has the nurse that nursed Lord Carnock. They talk of you and the boys. Lawrences poems have been seized in ms by the police in the post. Jack Hutch. and L are going to work some protest—nothing will be safe—not this letter.

Let me have your address at Rapallo. I’m glad youre going tho’ I dont like you to be further away. And send any scrap—a picture postcard even—

This is the longest letter I have written, and I’m not a bit tired. If I liked I could fill my pen and write in ink, but I’m abandoned to luxury. Thats all my news. Nothing is the matter, says the dr (to end medically as usual) except exhaustion—and she has made me breathe and stop breathing and say 99 till I am sick of it.

Yr.
Virginia

Berg

[]

1994: To Vanessa Bell

Thursday [7 February 1929]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Dearest

I have been enjoying your letter extremely. This is only to say that there’s no reason whatever to think it was your drug that did me harm—Elly says I may have had slight flue—but anyhow all the blame is put on Berlin and this would have happened anyhow, though possibly not in such a sudden way.

It was very odd, waking at Harwich in a state of apparent intoxication. Also, I took less than the proper dose, and it was from the same bottle you had taken.

I’m much better and am spending the day on the sofa today, and not in bed. I intend to begin work on Monday.

Elly is rather severe, and I’ve only seen Helen, who is thought less exciting than Mary.

The only gossip therefore is rather remote: I daresay you’ve heard that Angus has not got the Nat. Gall. It has gone to an unknown man. Miss Ritchie has been to ask L. to help—Angus she says, is now sunk into complete apathy, wont try for any job, and says he means to write plays with her—[six words omitted].

Then Partridge is said to be going back to Carrington (Helen). Lady Carnarvon is dead, after a lifetime of work among the Albanians. Nelly has had a complete break with Lottie and seized her latch key so that Lottie cant come here. The police have seized Lawrences poems in manuscript in the post—so this letter even may be taken and Jack Hutch, and Leonard are getting up a protest.

This is all the news.

It has been rather desperate being in bed a fortnight with this cursed disease, but Berlin was great fun in many ways—humans and pictures. Never again though. Even what I see of London from the window has an incredible distinction. Lord! how nice to see you again! So do ring up, when your back. I haven’t seen Angelica, but hear from Nelly that she’s in great health and spirits. She was taking complete control of everyone.

B.

Berg

[]

1995: To V. Sackville-West

Thursday, Feb. 7th [1929]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

There! does this ink convince you that I’m better!

A lovely letter from you just came. But I am telling you the truth. I’m not keeping anything back—only its rather difficult to explain. You see it was very odd—I went to bed at Harwich rather cold and tired but apparently all right, took less than the usual dose of a seasick draught that Nessa had taken the week before—and woke up next morning completely drugged. Leonard had to drag me across to [from] the boat. My legs staggered and my head reeled. I slept in the train all the way to London; again he had to drag me into a cab. I went to bed. Shivered, ached, slept, had a little temperature; the doctor came next day and said I was certainly under the influence of some drug, and possibly influenza; but there was nothing in the dose to account for it: and therefore she thought I must be otherwise exhausted, but it would pass off. However, though the drug did pass off, and the temperature, I remained in what they call a state of nervous exhaustion—thats to say all the usual symptoms—pain, and heart jumpy, and my back achy, and so on. What I call a first rate headache. This, as you know, doesn’t go at once; and what happens is one day one’s better and one day worse. But on the whole I get more hours every day without any headache or heart or anything and today I’ve been on the sofa almost all day.

I cant yet talk much without this blessed old pulse beginning to rear like a kicking horse, but on the other hand my head is much less bothering—I read almost a whole manuscript carefully yesterday. These are the dull and sordid details—not much to send to Rapallo. But don’t, for goodness sake, think I’m trying to spare you. I should tell you instantly if I felt bad.

No, I didnt feel tired in Berlin—I’d had three weeks rest before and felt very well. Thats the odd thing—but anyhow, if it was Berlin, you and your motor car made it infinitely less tiring than it would have been. I believe its partly that awful airlessness. But now lets talk of something else.

Lord, I’m glad to address this to Rapallo. The thought of you in Berlin makes me irritable. Now you’ll have sea, and hills, and old women with hooked noses and maccaroni and olives—which is what I like to think of you against—wild, tossing, like a young mare; not that intolerable South Kensington and diplomacy—which is only South Kensington in extremis. Yes, I dare say it. Didn’t I know Austen and Esme when I was young? I gave your message to Leonard. But he doesn’t correct proofs if its that that you hate him for—hate Harold and Hubert, not Leonard.

A slumber doth my spirit seal. I have no earthly fears. Various people ring up and I dont see them. I hear that Valery [Valerie Taylor] is desperate because she was such a success in The Seagull—this proves that she can only act one character, her own. This came to me from my only visitor—not Mary—Helen Anrep—I like her because she’s a true blood Bohemian: seduced, deserted, unfaithful, completely unusual and devoted to Roger.

Otherwise no news. Leonards mother is very bad and he has to go there. He is a perfect angel—only more to the point than most angels—He sits on the edge of the bed and considers my symptoms like a judge. He brings home huge pineapples: he moves the gramophone into my room and plays until he thinks I’m excited. In short, I should have shot myself long ago in one of these illnesses if it hadn’t been for him. As it is, I hope to go into the Square next week: but as I say this sort of thing takes time; it must be let to wander about one’s body like a policeman trying bolts; and theres no doubt I get many more times of complete comfort now. Ask Harold with my love in what book I should find Lady Bessboroughs letters? Life of Lord Somebody [Granville]—I cant remember who.

And give my humble duty to Max B. if you see him. And my love to Edith. And write cards to me. And be happy. And come back soon. And love Potto and Virginia. How I dreamt of your mother last night! How I love you.

Virginia

Berg

[]

1996: To Dorothy Bussy

Feb. 10th 1929

52 Tavistock Sqre., W.C.1

Dear Dorothy,

I was very pleased to get your letter—it was charming of you to write. I have been in bed for over a fortnight with some sort of flu that has a disastrous effect upon the nervous system. Elly has been giving me stiff tumblers of bromide. And your letter gleamed through my drowsiness like the fin of a silver fish. In fact I pulled it out and read it several times. But I wish I could have got more into my sketch of your mother. When I came to write (and it had to be scribbled in a great rush) I found the image of her somehow so important, so predominating in my mind—I was surprised, considering how little I had seen of her.

Yes, you are an arch-flatterer. Its done with an air of intense conviction on top of immense erudition and insight which is irresistible. I do hope our annual teas aren’t doomed: you must come to London, if for them only. I would throw in 2 ices and a cocktail. Tell Janie I’m so glad she has begun to take liberties with me and the Sphinx [Leonard?]—high time she did. And excuse this handwriting. I am up, but write lying down.

Love, yrs aff
Virginia

Texas

[]

1997: To Hugh Walpole

10th Feb. 1929

52 Tavistock Sqre., W.C.1

My dear Hugh,

You see how literally I obey your license not to answer letters. It is only selfishness that now drives me to the pen—I am in bed recovering from a week in Berlin, a little flue, what they call nervous exhaustion, vast draughts of bromide and other sleeping mixtures: have been in bed two weeks; shall only be allowed to creep round the Square this week; see visitors one by one and for a single hour only—you know the kind of thing—nervous people dropping their bags and saying its time they caught a train: all of which, slovenly though it is, leads up to the climax that I should like a letter from you.

What is diabetes like? I could write reams upon the effects on the nervous system of influenza. Another person’s disease would be great fun. And another person’s mind. And a flat in Piccadilly looking bang at the white bust of Queen Victoria—that pleased me so much. The raying paths of the park; and the Queen plump in the centre—or have I made this up? When you have had breakfast, do you look to see if the Royal Standard is broken at the palace? You see I am imagining your life, as I have at the moment none of my own—only imaginations drawn from books: (I am reading Beau Brummell’s life, Constable’s life, a life of Trollope, and seven manuscript novels). I am trying to think where you are lunching; and dining; and then how you will be about 2 am saying something frightfully exciting to a young man in a corner. Up to that moment your life has been (to me) quite extraordinarily active; kindly, prosperous, and successful. I mean you’ve had 15 letters from admirers; 70 small cheques; one big one; requests for help; you have pushed aside the letters, and dipped your pen—you have then ridden white horses at a smart trot up to houses in the midst of trees where ladies are on the lawn—this is part of your 18th Century novel; And so on.

By the way, I’m going to read Hugh Walpole’s novels; Shall I begin with the one I’ve just been writing—about the white horse trotting up to the lawn? I didn’t tell you that I rang you up for 10 minutes one night—through the agency of Fielding, Sibyl’s maid who had your number, asking you to dine, asking you to come in to a party; and all the answer I got was a gigantic pop, like the cork being drawn from a champagne bottle in an empty room. Thats what happens at 99 [90] Piccadilly when you’re not there.

Berlin was very exhausting; very large; very cold; lots of music: Count Kessler; Count Kühlmann, and Vita in black trying to be a diplomats wife with Harold to pull the strings. A pathetic sight, I thought.

No, I didn’t much care for [Lytton Strachey’s] Elizabeth and Essex—thats not the sort of imagination he has—he becomes all purple and gold, like the cheaper effects at the Pantomime: style to match; dum-dum-dum. Its odd how bad it is compared with the others (but no doubt I’m up a tree of my own and see this wrong.)

Yr
Virginia

Texas

[]

1998: To V. Sackville-West

Tuesday, 12th Feb. [1929]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

You have been an angel—letters every day and today a letter from Le Boski with your new address. Is it deep snow? Is it freezing? Is it fine? And are you tramping the hills? Questions I ask by the gas fire.

I am being kept very quiet today and so am rather grumpy. All my own fault. I insisted upon writing a little yesterday and so brought on the headache—or rather—for thats what it feels like,—tempted the rat to gnaw the nerves in my spine—fourth knob from the top. You must expect grumpy gloomy letters. Getting well is infinitely worse than being ill.

I have been out. I have twice walked round the square leaning on L’s arm—very cold and ugly it was, and a cat had chosen to die on the path. Then I undress and lie on the sofa.

Today I have lain on the sofa—not dressed, and feel now much brighter clearer and less inclined to curse God for having made such a crazy apparatus as my nervous system. Is it worth it? I was asking this morning. In addition, the bath had frozen; no hot bath; the pipes downstairs had burst. Plumbers were knocking about in the walls. Then I ate a beefsteak and a pancake; L. wrapped me up warm; and I am very cheerful again. Its awfully difficult to say how long its going to take though. I agree it was the flu; but I think I was foolish also in Berlin—you dont realise what a valetudinarian life mine is, usually, so that what’s nothing to anybody else is rackety to poor Potto. Never mind. I shall be in robust health by the 4th. But cant you look in for a bite on the 2nd? And I’m awfully tempted by the notion of a few days at Long Barn—as Le Boski insists.

But enough of these egotistical and invalidish woes. Dotty [Wellesley] came yesterday and L. said she was in an admirable temper, serene and kind. I didn’t see her. I’ve seen Mary once—a little strained I thought; but then I think she may feel “I am 40, or this light is unbecoming”—I was too lazy to get up and arrange it. She was very ‘nice,’ as they say; I do like her;—in the way that I like her for making me think of pirates, sinister and swart, spearing fish remorselessly from the prow of a little boat. She is so intent on her game; and I see her watching the water and then casting her spear—Also she is decorative, and hunts, like a beast of prey, whatever it may be—a jewel, a toy: she had been to [the] Caledonian market and speared a hunting horn made of glass. She was dining with a young man, alone; incautiously, she told me his name, and I knew him, and she didn’t, which discomposed her—huntress that she is. But how fascinating sincerity between women is—how terrifically exciting! She has been victimised by your red haired photographer by the way. She sat to her and was sent in a bill for £5—but she is a crafty devil, Mary.

Thats all my news. Vanessa is back and comes round and sits here, so I dont bother to see the enchantresses of London. We talk nursery talk. She wants me to buy a villa near her [at Cassis]—Shall I? London, society, talk, shops seem at this moment a waste of life. But then Vita? These illnesses are such a bore—4 weeks clean out of my life: when shall I write The Moths? I’m telling the doctor that its, as you say, due to suppressed randiness. Thats true. But also, its suppressed imagination. To write criticism is now like keeping my hand clenched, so much do I want to stretch and write fiction. And to see Vita. That would make me well. Seriously it would.

[squiggly design]
Potto and Virginia

I do hope you are happy, and want to know every detail—and send me a picture postcard please. Love to Harold.

Berg

[]

1999: To Clive Bell

[12 February 1929]

Postcard

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

How nice it would be to get a letter from Clive. I am in bed, have been, and perhaps shall be: the effect of Berlin.

And no Clive to come to tea.

V.

Quentin Bell

[]

2000: To Katherine Arnold-Forster

Feb. 13th ’29

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Ka,

I was stung with remorse seeing your handwriting today—to think I have never answered you! Being so vain too, your letter gave me exquisite pleasure. I never thought you would much like Orlando—and it is a great pleasure that Bruin whom I love and admire so much (for all sorts of qualities) should have turned over the work of such a scatterbrained and unsatisfactory character as I am (compared with Bruin) and smelt it and pawed it and growled quite melodiously over it. I was going to thank you for the bag of scent—thyme, lavender? What is it? all the little flowers that grow on the rocks perhaps. I was going to write a long letter from Monks House, where we were, but then we went on a German tour with Nessa and Duncan and Quentin and I suppose Berlin, which is the ugliest of cities, did me in somehow, for I arrived at Harwich at 6am on 25th January in a state of intoxication—legs going one way—head another—and was put to bed here where I still am. Its said to be a touch of the flu, and Nessas seasick drug, and the usual amazingly ineffective state of what is called my nervous system. Elly is very strict, and I am lying in my drawing room, thinking over my past, but not allowed to write books or even see the human race—except for a moment. Nessa comes round and we gossip. But this is passing off, and I hope to be able to take part in life next week perhaps. If Bruin was round the corner, she should come in and have a spoonful of honey.

I liked your account of Mark. Why must he go to school in Geneva? Why must he learn French? Oh dear—why is life arranged with such crass stupidity? I mean I should like Mark to learn to read and then grow up with badgers and ravens—or remain the elf he was: you see I dont like the finished article. What a bore for you, too; not to have him. Angelica insists upon going to school. Julian and Quentin are exactly at the stage I was when I first knew you and Rupert and the Oliviers— exacting, charming, combative. Does that describe me and you and the others 20 years ago?

I saw about the badger in the Manchester Guardian. It suggested Ka very powerfully—scuttling along, on its sturdy paws with its small round behind. A young Kennedy is now working for us in the Press and I hear a great deal about Cornwall.

Yes, Ka, I am very pleased you liked Orlando. And write again.

V.

Mark Arnold-Forster

[]

2001: To Nan Hudson

[mid-February 1929]

52 Tavistock Sq. [W.C.1]

My dear Nan,

I am so sorry not to have seen you—is there still a chance? I’ve been in bed since we got back from Berlin; and still only drowse over the fire. Nevertheless I am constantly thanking you and Ethel—for ear stoppers, the joy of my life; for the desk; for your cookery book. We are going to have one of your dishes tonight: orange loaf. Last night it was Chocolate Cream. Bless Miss Hudson!

Nessa thinks you’re just going [to Paris]—if so, love and farewell.

And I hope we shall meet soon.

Yr
Virginia

Wendy Baron

[]

2002: To V. Sackville-West

Friday Feb. 15th [1929]

52 T[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

This must be sent to Berlin I suppose—alas! alas! Poor Vita fast in her cage again after her sniff of olive trees. She may be frozen, though, crossing the Alps.

Was it really true—about the mimosa and being warm after dinner [at Rapallo]?

Talk of icicles! You can see icicles 50 feet long—from the top story to the ground—in Tavistock Square.

As London has no provision for cold, we are in desperate states, all of us: most have no baths, no water closets, and some no gas fires, as the pipes are frozen. Our watercloset is our glory—the plug still pulls. No bath, though. Whats happened is that nature, having read a certain description of a frost (see O—o) was so taken by it that she determined to do it better. Needless to say she does it infinitely worse: Not a flounder or an old woman to be seen at London Bridge. I wish I knew that you had crossed the Alps safely.

My letters have been awful—I know dreary invalidish egotism. Please forgive it. Its no good trying to get out in this cold, so I’m back on the sofa again, but dont much mind. I shall be in robust health by March 4th. Meanwhile I read vast masses of MSS. They plague my life out, these unhappy women and men, to read their mss myself and tell them how they cd. be improved.

I saw Lytton yesterday and he told me about Lady Bessborgh—it is Lord Granville—the first one. How I adore Lytton!—except for his supercilious ways, which are on top: but rather baffling if one’s rather used up in the head. Also the spectre of Queen Eth stands between us. With the sensibility of an author he knows what I dont deny; and wont ask me; so we keep to trifles. Otherwise I see nobody but Nessa except that I’m to see Christa [McLaren]. I dont want to see anyone much—(there was a woman I once saw in a fish shop, by some glass bowls—what was her name? Nicols, I think—well I’d rather like to see her again.)

Raymond is said to return today with Lady Diana. Clive is marooned in Paris with the prettiest girl in the movie world [Joan Firminger]; and has been completely happy for 3 weeks—but it wont last. A man called Dick Wyndham has come into our lives—he has the girls sister [Enid] in tow.

I see now why old women read novels—why Mudie [lending-library] flourishes—The meaning of British fiction has been revealed to me. Its a sort of pap-slop—something made digestible and sweet for invalids. (I live on codliver oil, now, and the taste clings to the crevices of my throat for hours). Novels glide me over the afternoon. In the evening I read Beau Brummell. I must now go back to “A woman of 40”. And write the poor wretch a letter to say nothing can make this saleable though its wrung from her entrails and gives away every bitterness and sorrow of her life. She is half educated, deserted and lives on 15/- a week with a child.

Dottie [Wellesley] writes that her loneliness is a disease—she is hated of God and men.

I say how nice to see you

V.

Berg

[]

2003: To Quentin Bell

17th Feb. 1929

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Claudian,

(I am going to call you this, in order to give you another start in life.) I was very glad of your letter. Here I am still half in bed—I mean by that not that my legs are on a chair and my head on a bed but that I am on a sofa undressed (and by that I mean … but there will be no end to it if I have to explain all I mean.) Also I must write the hand of a MYOPIC ELEPHANT if you are to understand. Now it is a curious fact that to write a feigned hand falsifies the character. I feel simpler and saner and more like Helen [Anrep] and Lorna and Dorothy when I write like this. When I write like this I feel vicious and dishonest and untrustworthy and full of delightful qualities. So you will never know me at my best. But eno’, eno’—(as they say in Shakespeare).

The news is all a little erratic, as I am only allowed carefully chosen visitors, warranted not to excite, bite, kick, kiss, or anything else that makes life hectic and splendid—old Helen; (but I like her) and so on. Raymond [Mortimer] has just rung up to say he’s back: and America’s a ghastly country, of stunted development. Neither man nor woman has reached the age of puberty. They talk very slowly all day long and never listen. Also he made no money because he could never get a word in edgewise. Duncan’s show is on, but all I’ve heard of it is an idiotic, a senile, an incredibly vapid review in the Nation by Sickert. That was Maynards choice. (Maynard has the flu;) The great Tavistock news is that we have bought a Sun Singer (coffee and chocolate coloured) and sold the old umbrella. This is a rash and daring experiment. The Sun Singer rolls off its lid and becomes open; rolls it on and becomes shut. We think we shall have it both ways; but we may be had.

Last night at 8.30 Nelly [Boxall] came in frantic to say that the basement was flooded and all our books under water. What is more she was within an inch of the truth. Imagine the idiocy of turning a tap full on with a frozen pipe! This is what the char did. Then she sobbed. Leonard baled with chamber pots and buckets. Our loss is well over—I forget what—call it £100. Coming upstairs, all the lights went out, and to consummate what was consummate already the drawing room door handle came off leaving me imprisoned inside and unable to gratify any desire of nature or affection until they could force the lock.

The scene from my window is a feeble copy of the frost scene in Orlando—icicles, dead cats, frozen bread and butter on the leads, a bird or two—but it is hoped that nature, seeing I can do it better—where’s the old bum-boat woman?—will desist, and the use of the W.C. will be restored to us. Ours is almost unique of its kind—people ring up and say may they pay half a crown to any charity for the right to sit.

God! I had not meant to run on at this rate; but this big hand and the pleasure of writing to so CONGENIAL a CORRESPONDENT has—or have—seduced me. Please write again, and let us go at some length into the question of your new character. Quentin was an adorable creature and I’m sorry he’s been sloughed (sluffed) like the gold and orange skin of the rare Mexican tsee-tsee snake. Why not be him and Claudian on alternate days? Claudian is a secretive marble-faced steady eyed deliberate villain. That is what his name indicates.

Not a word from Julian. It is thought that the frost took him one night and he is being used as a scratching post for cattle—but you know how these stories get about.

Your loving
Aunt
V.

Quentin Bell

[]

2004: To Elizabeth Robins

17th Feb. [1929]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Miss Robins,

I think that Mrs W. Arnold-Forster, who lives at Eagles Nest, Zennor, St Ives would know all about possible rooms or inns. She found us very-good rooms a year or so ago. I have told her that you will write to her. I am sure she would be happy to do anything she could for you.

I am so sorry that I cant at the moment make any engagements. I have been ill and am still in bed. But might I write and suggest a time—I hope soon—when I could see you? I am so much interested in your suggestion.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

2005: To V. Sackville-West

Tuesday, Feb. 19th [1929]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Well, where are you? No letter since Saturday; and you may be in the snow among the wolves. Perhaps I shall hear tomorrow from Berlin, from your cage, the ornamental cage. But this time fortnight you’ll be poking for the snowdrops at Long Barn.

And I have been for a little walk in Marchmont Street and bought a kettle (2/3) and some cars, (so they call carnations) and am now not dressed but sitting up like a woman of the world, over a little gas fire, for our pipes are choked. So you may infer that I am looking up; and shall be in rude health by the time rude health is needed. I wrote two pages yesterday; dull ones, but pages, with sentences and paragraphs; only about the Burneys, who attract me less than The Moths, though.

Dotty is coming in I believe this evening. Raymond has been chattering on the telephone. Not a man or woman in the States has reached the age of puberty he says; and what is worse, he has made no money. Then Christabel has been and given me a brooch with a wolfs head on it—and you know how I hate presents. However she gave me what I adore—a long and detailed account of Zita Yungman’s father, mother, and marriage; which led to a vast panorama of the Sitwells, in Italy, Zita saying “And I’ll have a tray in my room”, the bath not locking, Lady Ida [the Sitwells’ mother], Stephen Tennant with his old nurse—what I call, perhaps foolishly ‘real life.’

You think reading Sterne is real life. I am sometimes pleased to think that I read English literature when I was young; I like to think of myself tapping at my father’s study door, saying very loud and clear “Can I have another volume, father? I’ve finished this one”. Then he would be very pleased and say “Gracious child, how you gobble!” (There’s Miss [Hilda] Matheson ringing up to say they want to broadcast the frost and thaw in Orl—do tomorrow—Do I mind? No. Thats all right—) and get up and take down, it may have been the 6th or 7th volume of Gibbons complete works, or Speddings Bacon, or Cowper’s Letters.” “But my dear, if its worth reading, its worth reading twice” he would say. I have a great devotion for him—what a disinterested man, how high minded, how tender to me, and fierce and intolerable—But I am maundering. And I cannot remember how many syllables disinterested has got. (here’s a young man called Darwin—almost broke in on me in my nightgown—an undergraduate. Never mind, he’s been told to go.)

Blanche has written a long, very sugary, very acid, article on O——O; with so many hits [hints?] and double meanings one cant see the wood for the trees: something very arch about two birds flying together to France and alighting at Dieppe last autumn.

We’ve just been sent the American edition of Twelve Days—very dazzling and improper looking.

This time fortnight, I shall only have to ring up Weald 14 to hear a snuffle snuffling like a spaniel nosing about, with a wet muzzle and feathered paws.

But Lord! you may be among the cataracts frozen; write, anyhow, one line.

Virginia

Berg

[]

2006: To V. Sackville-West

Saturday Feb 23rd [1929]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.

I am glad that you have escaped the wolves, though it would have been a romantic death for you and might have suggested a second volume to O—o. Is your new novel to be all about Potto? He thinks so. He is willing to help you in anyway he can. His past is full of adventure, he says; moreover the Bosnian’s were great people in their way, Sackvilles after a kind.

This time next week—but I wont harp on it, for then you’ll think of Harold on the platform.

About Monday—anytime you name will suit me, but I shan’t be alone for dinner, and I should like to see you alone, anyhow for a little. So let me know.

I have just seen the dr. I hope for the last time, and have had the usual lecture about resting and never being tired and never sitting up and never seeing too many people and never catching any single illness so long as I live.

I’ve been down to the Studio and done a mild morning’s work on Miss Jewsbury. So this illness is over, and next week I shall be risen like the morning star. Lord! how glad I am to use my wits again!

In order to steal a march on you, I had Elena Richmond to tea yesterday; but no. I can make no impression on that woman. She is frozen, like a chicken left in the snow. With a pick axe one might hack out something. There is charm; she still holds her head like an Empress; but she nods and proses, and Raymond [Mortimer] came in and we were only conversational, not amorous. She livened, though, when you were mentioned. Not for years had she met anyone she liked so much. I bequeath her to you. She’s dead to me; a casket of which I’ve lost the key.

But this is not altogether the case with Mary, Dotty, or Christabel—all of whom I find myself in touch with, though Dotty is set about with thorns, hard and pointed, 6 inches long. How you are not torn to pieces by her, God knows. She wrote to me and said—ah hah! Would you really mind if I replied in the same style, or perhaps a trifle warmer? Have you any of those feelings left that the nightingales and the splash of frogs on water sometimes call out in me, on hot May nights, at Long Barn, as I told you when we ate duck on the Funkel tower [Funkturm] (you know what I mean?) Have you any love for me? or only the appreciation which one member of the PEN has for another?

A novel that I refused to publish has been seized by the police: a vulgar book, but nothing in it to raise a hair. Whats to be done with morality in England? If Harold would do a man’s work there, instead of a flunkey’s in Berlin—but hush, hush. “My Harold!” Isnt that what you’d say? Miss Storm Jameson says that Virginia Woolf is either a fallen angel or a changeling: she has no roots in common soil. They had to broadcast the thaw too, the other night; for it is thawing; and on the whole we are rather less comfortable than before, as the drip is everywhere, and gas has failed. No baths again.

Clive comes back tomorrow, but is again off, and doesn’t mind who knows that he has been bowled over by a movie star. Its like an old dandy fixing false whiskers—this mania to be the master of some chit. Mary is very much upset, and thinks I ought to control him. Will you? Say, I mean, that he’s being ridiculous? For even Julian and Quentin think he goes too far. Its a bore, ones father’s being laughed at.

Never mind anything though but come back to me and Potto. I dont see why I shouldnt have a day or two of convalescence at Long Barn—will you ask me?—although I shall be quite robust by then.

Virginia [squiggly design]

Berg

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Letters 2007-2035 (March–May 1929)

2007: To J. D. Hayward

[4 March 1929]

52 Tavistock Square, [W.C.1]

Dear Mr Hayward,

It was very good of you to write to me about my article—I never know whether these things are supposed to be secret or not—Anyhow, as you have guessed I am delighted to claim your praise, which is very welcome. I daresay one could have found out more about Miss Jewsbury; I had only one volume of her letters to go upon. I could not read more than one of the novels, and I expect that some old gentleman who has read all mid-Victorian memoirs will blast my theories completely. Her relation with Mrs Carlyle was interesting, and I had to be discreet.

Yours sincerely,
Virginia Woolf

King’s

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2008: To Dorothy Brett

March 8th 1929

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Brett,

I remember perfectly—Richmond [Hogarth House], Katharine, Garsington, Ottoline, tin trumpet with the ribbons—everything. Things seem to have changed prodigiously since you left—I dont quite know how.

Well, Murry’s married again, thats one thing, I know not whom, and Sydney is, or was—for he’s come back ill—an Ambassador. Kot I saw on Christmas day washing up dinner in Acacia Road.—He’s the same—precisely. We went and sat in his very small bare room—it was Katherine’s—at the top of the house, and he gave me some Russian cigarettes, made by himself. He almost crushed my hand; he abused Murry; he spoke with enormous sincerity, staring at one out of his rather bloodshot eyes—just the same—It is a great pleasure to think of him there, but I never see him. Garsington is sold and Ottoline lives in Gower Street: as for Fredegond, she has become a Roman Catholic; and I never see her, either; she lives near Cambridge, and is said to be very happy, cleaning furniture most of the time. The house is very very clean; and she never comes to London.

I don’t see how I am to convey to you any facts of interest about myself. The address conveys nothing to you. We have a publishing business and a press in the basement and keep three clerks. Also we have a cottage in Sussex. You will have to come back—you cant imagine anything about us at that distance. Life is too complicated to be cut up in little dice and sent across the Atlantic for you to piece together. Yes I should like to see your pictures and to hear your Indian songs.

Do you live quite alone? I imagine porcupines opening the door with their quills. I wish you didn’t make me imagine the mountains so furiously. I want to see them before I die. How long does it take to get there? Write again some day. I liked getting your letter; I was ill in bed and read it over and over; but I have put off writing so long that you will have left New York, and will never get this. Tell me how you spend your day, accurately, minutely. But I’m very glad you like the Lighthouse. Would Katharine? I wonder.

Yours Ever
Virginia

University of Cincinnati

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2009: To David Garnett

March 11th [1929]

52 Tavistock Square, [W.C.1]

Dear Bunny,

How angelic of you to write—one doesn’t expect to be thanked for an anonymous article in The Lit Supt. This one was written in sheer idleness—you know my passion for pulling down all the memories in the house and lying on the floor surrounded by them. I was rather worried by the 72 volumes (or so) of Carlyle letters, and rather pleased to be so accurate in getting the bits together. I can’t help thinking that ‘transitions’ arrange themselves almost automatically with facts to deal with: fiction leads one a much worse dance. Your old George Moore conveyed his appreciation, much to my surprise. I’ve met him once or twice lately and been amused to watch him switching off the head of every possible daisy in the neighbourhood—I think you alone survived last time. Otherwise it was “poor dear Henry James—deplorable, deplorable—” and so on. I find him, on these occasions quite fascinating. But I dont go with you all the way down the long smooth white undulating road of the novels.

As for Orlando (my egotism leads me back to the second page of your letter) God knows—I wrote it in such a tearing hurry that anything, horror or sublimity, may be there for all I know. You see, I can’t correct, and I can’t re-read; and I hate everything directly it is in cold print, and avoid it as I would last Sundays roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. So I shall never be a complete writer, as you are. These things should be said by word of mouth. It is years, (accurately, like my article on Jane [Carlyle]) since we met; and I never know how to lay salt on your tail. But I proved my affection to my own satisfaction the other night by getting really very worried by hearing of Rays illness. What an infliction it is to be fond of ones friends! How I hate being anxious! But I shall hear about her from Nessa.

Love to you both and do come and see us.

Yours ever
Virginia

Berg

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2010: To Katherine Arnold-Forster

March 11th [1929]

52 Tavistock Sqre., W.C.1

Dearest Ka,

Well, I am recovered entirely owing to your Cornish cream, (but dont tell Mrs Manning Sanders so—I am in the country getting well, I have just told her).

It was an amazing proof of the steadymindedness and goodheartedness of Bruin that she could think of cream when the poor beast must be run off her feet with voters and bishops.

I hope to leave the country while the Election is on but shan’t we see you before that?

Yr
Virginia

Mark Arnold-Forster

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2011: To Vanessa Bell

[March? 1929]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

1) Would you tell Grace [Germany, maid] not to bother her friend about the dress as I see I shan’t have time to get stuff or anything, so I shall risk going to the party undressed.

2) I only sent one earring. I will send round the other.

to Bell. Decorator.

3) Have you got one of those tile tables? If so what price? or could you make one?

4) Could you make me 2 bouquets of artificial flowers for my green glass vases against the winter: and please quote best terms.

5. Could you estimate for painted dinner table.

6. Could you tell me what I owe for crockery?

Obedly
V. Woolf

Berg

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2012: To Quentin Bell

20th March 1929

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C. 1

Dearest Quentin-Claudian

Look, I sit down the very minute I have yours to hand, not knowing even if I write to two of you or one. But then I am so pleased to get your letter—I like so much any scrap of offal that comes your way. So I must implore you to write at length. You know my appetite for facts. Nothing is too small, remote, large, or obscene. I am so bothered by writing about the obscene. At this moment I ought to correct an article in a symposium of pundits upon that subject. If modern books are made pure, we shall read the classics I said; and then what happens? But all this is trivial worthless waste of time. It is fine. The buds are not visible but all the air is like a thin elastic veil, gently pressing on ones face. A blue veil it should be. Through this I see everything a little distorted. Beauty shines on two dogs doing what two women must not do. Thats a fact—Pinker got enmeshed with a fox terrier this very afternoon. Can you blame them? Beuty (spelt right) is everywhere. As for Clive, the canary with the shade off sings not more lustily. I hear his voice a mile off. What happened to him in Paris? What is his Poppet like? That I should ask you this! But anyhow she seems to have oiled his creaking feathers, and it is all to the good so long as it lasts. Julian is already caught in the Apostles web. Ever since I have known them, they have spent their spare time spinning and intriguing, Lytton loves it. They think they can turn Maynard out; but they have thought this for twenty five years; whats more, talked of it. But Julian still thinks “This is the most tremendous thing that has ever happened!” Nessa is settling her life with a decision and ruthless rapidity that take the breath away. One day she has let [no. 37] Gordon Square; another sent Angelica to school; another hired a vast studio that smells like a stable in Fitzroy Street. We went and smelt it. Horses are better than cows says Leonard. I say Oh its the wax model of Queen Victoria (a sculptor has it) that smells so. But she is not going to take it. They will all be off to Cassis soon. Could I not spend a week with you in Paris?—a week of dreams on the banks of the Seine. A little furniture buying. A few pictures. Sitting smoking in cafés. Conversations with my dear Quentin. What delight! However whats delightful is always wrong. I want to write a serious book. I am all awash with too many words. I write nothing but criticism. Now if one writes imaginative works one has to stop talking. How is your painting? And what about life? I am going wandering through the elastic veil now to the London Library. That is an excuse for thinking about a book which I shall call the Moths [The Waves] I think—an entirely new kind of book. But it will never be so good as it is now in my mind unwritten.

We have got a new car. Please write now this instant wherever you may be whatever comes into your head.

Yr loving
Virginia

Quentin Bell

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2013: To Hugh Walpole

31st March [1929]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Hugh,

I got your message all right, and I was very sorry not to see you and for that reason. We are going away [to Monks] for a few days, but if you could come to tea on Tuesday 9th, I should be alone, and it would be a great pleasure to see you, about 4.30.

Yours
Virginia Woolf

Texas

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2014: To Hugh Walpole

Friday [5 April 1929]

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

Dear Hugh,

Would it be possible for you to dine on Tuesday, (7.45) or to come to tea on Monday? Owing to what is said to be my mistake, I find I had arranged to go to Kew with Vita on Tuesday and shouldn’t be back till six. I’m very sorry; but please arrange, somehow, something. Would you ring up or send a line anytime. I shall be in London on Sunday night after 7.

Your affate
Virginia Woolf

Forgive me my confusions.

Texas

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2015: To V. Sackville-West

5th April [1929]

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

“Not many women possess such great versatility as the Hon. V. Sackville-West … she has also the rare gift of enjoying solitude …” There you are—staring at me; not very congenial; rather frightening Potto; but awfully superb and tidy. I must show it to Nelly when she comes to clear away the tea.

All this kind of thing is done at the command of Nelly—did you know that?

In God’s name: yes: I have several sentences addressed to you with that beginning:

I.G.N. Come on Tuesday; to the basement, not a wink later than 3:

I.G.N: Do not bring Francis—a dear old rattle headed bore.

IGN. Do not bring Dottie: This I feel strongly about. Twice lately she has utterly ruined my serenity with you; and I wont have it. Choose between us. Dottie if your taste inclines that way by all means; but not the two of us in one cocktail.

But listen. Hugh Walpole was coming; and I’ve put him off, and said I’m going to Kew with you. I mayn’t be able to go to Kew, though, because I have had a dose or two of Chloral; and L. thinks it is walking that makes me sleep badly; I dont; never mind: we can sit and talk.

I cant be sure about dinner; I had to ask Hugh. Will you come? Only he mayn’t come. Settle what you like when you come. Only don’t be late this time.

Leonard’s been having the rheumatism too. Its bitter, bitter. We missed the fine days—still the garden, the terrace, the view, even black and white in shower and wind make me wish—I’m not sure what—to write poetry; perhaps, and not an essay upon fiction.

Do you want a flat in Gordon Sqre [Vanessa’s] very cheap?

Do you love me?

If you give me so much as a tuppenny mug from Woolworths, I never speak to you again. I told Nessa the story of our passion in a chemists shop the other day. But do you really like going to bed with women she said—taking her change. “And how d’you do it?” and so she bought her pills to take abroad, talking as loud as a parrot.

A mongoose has just run into the bathroom. Nelly is terrified.

Virginia

We come up on Sunday night

Berg

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2016: To Vanessa Bell

Tuesday 7th April 1929

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Dolph.

This is a business letter. Vita turned up today at Monks, and is very excited about 37 [Gordon Square], which I told her about. Could you send her all details to Long Barn? Harold has written to say he is sending an ultimatum to the Foreign Office—if they wont let him live in London he’s going to—I dont know what—I don’t suppose he’ll do anything. But probably they will want rooms in London.

She has a passion for your drawing room; wants to live there;

We are just back from Rodmell; doing the journey, you’ll be glad to hear in record time, not over two hours; (not under—how exact I am!) It was perishing cold and divinely lovely; but life in my lodge even in a blanket, is impossible. Philcox came out and drew a sketch of two rooms in a jiffy: so I wait result; and tremble with excitement.

Business again:

Could you let me have your account, if convenient: including 6 plates, one large green bowl; one bunch of decorative flowers; one small lampshade: do: lamp for diningroom. I am trying to clear off my affairs.

Could you tell me how I could make lavender blue? That inconceivable donkey, Daggett, has re-painted the mantelpiece; and dotted it with sea-green. But if I go to a colour shop, should I ask for oil paint?—and is lavender blue a mixture? of what? Perhaps you remember the colour of the blue dots; a tender blue, like the blue of a chalk hill blue, or the sea at a distance, with chalk cliffs in the foreground.

Thanks to you I have now to plunge into society. You have thrown me on the streets. Sibyl is on me. I must dine with her and buy silk stockings They cost at least 14/6. Unless I can wear two old pairs: all your doing: and then there’s Hugh Walpole tomorrow. I am aging rapidly and require a contemplative life with young things in the distance. I am going to write to Quentin—Claudian, I should say; whose letters are the best I know. How he can run that gift off into the eternal monotony of paint I know not. I daresay you are all as happy as grigs.

Leonard can’t get off his jury; and there was a great excitement at Rodmell when a mongoose was seen running up the stairs as we sat at lunch. It belongs to a village woman. Owing to a Labour meeting held in the drawing room, it discovered the hot cupboard, where it now lives.

I had something of the utmost importance to say; but cant remember what.

B.

Berg

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2017: To Oscar Lewis

[9 April 1929]

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Mr Lewis,

Many thanks for your letter. I have made a few slight alterations in the article and enclose it herewith.

I shall be much interested to see the book. We are printers ourselves, and have printed some of my stories with our own hands.

With best wishes,
yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf
(Mrs Woolf)

Columbia University

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2018: To Vanessa Bell

12th April 1929

52 Tavistock Sqre., [W.C.1]

Dearest Dolphin

This is not a letter because I don’t think I shall have any time to finish it. Mere greed for cigars makes me fill my pen, which is one of the chief horrors of a writer’s life (you know I have a cheap steel pen, bought years ago, and when I can get no more nibs—they are sold in Farringdon Market,—I have to stop writing) But Julian will be gone already. The Keynes’es are back, have been heard, but not seen. People still seem to be away, and it is bitter; indeed it snowed yesterday; and I was just thinking that I was coming home to tea about Christmas time this afternoon, it was so black and so many lamps were lit when I picked up a primrose on the pavement outside Eddie Marshes’ flat in Grays Inn. This is my desolate state, to range about London with Pinker instead of having tea with you.

I believe I’ve found Angus [Davidson] a job—to be secretary to Hugh Walpole. Its only 4 months of the year; but its only 2 hours in the morning, and £4 a week. Anyhow, Hugh was to see him but I’ve not heard from Angus, and no doubt that old Bus horse (Angus) will be too cautious. Hugh requires someone not thin in the face, not supercilious. He must be over a certain age so as to avoid scandal, and discreet, because Hugh confides everything. If suitable, Hugh said, much more might come of it.

I had 3 hours talk alone with him, largely about the state of his soul, which is very dicky—because he can’t help liking to be a success; but then nobody, like Vanessa, ever reads him; so what’s the good of it? Yet perhaps, as he is only 45 and 3 months, he may yet reform. His father died over the tea pot the other night and was so heavy they had to coffin him in his arm chair. His daughter went out to answer the front door bell to a young curate and came back to find the Bishop holding a piece of bread and butter, dead. The worst of it is, the Bishop hasn’t left a penny, so Hugh has his family to support; in fact he now has 12 people, mostly singers, I gathered, to support; none of them related. There is something of the Curate in him.

But I daresay I must think of something else to tell you. Raymond was here to tea yesterday, and a young lady from France who leads the men all a dance and translates Norman Douglas, who wears a buglass;—the better to pee and to prance—I dont know why I’ve made up this rhyme; it is a tribute to the romantic power of Dolph and Dog across the sea. Raymond and Mlle.-so chattered we were halfdead.

By the way Mrs Mansfield is groaning; I hear, under the burden of Morgan [E. M. Forster], Raymond (who’s staying with him) and another gent coming tonight. I daresay Mrs M. will die in the basement.

I’ve not heard anything from Mr Drown, nor yet from Mr Peck. What Raymond said about Clive I daren’t repeat for fear of eavesdroppers.

Cabin this instantly.

But you will have left the key in the glass which holds, or once held your small hogshair brushes on the verandah.

Have you settled anything about Grace’s future? I ask with a reason which I must at present conceal.

I am asked to meet Mary at Sibyls, but have refused. If you want an amusing book of memoirs, rather randy and rollicky, I advise The retrospections of Dorothea Herbert—She lived in Ireland at the end of the 18th Century, and talks as you might of the Chamber pot and how the gentlemen laughed when they saw the stream trickle through the door.

No news of Roger, but I saw his door open this afternoon when I came back with Pinker, having seen the primrose on the pavement.

I cant tell you how bitter and autumnal it is; not a leaf out; many indeed have gone in. And the snow falls in my heart too, slow soft flakes, salt tasting with tears. Why? Ah hah! Dolphin being a beast covered with brine who never shed a tear don’t know the meaning of this pleasure. And Duncan, whom I adore, is cased in oil silk from the assault of all elements. The two of you swim seal like through the waves. However I adore you both, and must now go up to my dinner; poor poor Singe. Does Angelica ever ask after me? I’m sending her a little present if I can get it across the water.

Please write fully and freely and frequently.

Yr B.

Berg

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2019: To V. Sackville-West

Friday 18th [19] April [1929]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Dearest Creature,

I do hope that Ben is all right. Would you send me a line to say?

I found a letter from Harold here, uneasy about his future [in diplomacy], I’m glad to say, but cautious.

Lord, I did enjoy myself! You make me feel like a baby having drunk sweet milk. My room is full of flowers, and the pump is a mere hum all owing to you. Now I must prepare for the ardours of the evening.

Do you love Potto?

Yr V.

Berg

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2020: To Vanessa Bell

April 24th 1929

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

Dearest Dolphin,

I am overwhelmed, indeed touched to the point of tears by your generosity. Vilest of vile animals to have such a scheme to spring on me! All the blue sorts of Dolphins are devils. But, on consideration, through my tears, I consulted Leonard; and what he says is that if you gave me the things, then we could never ask you to do us furniture again. And he is going to ask you to make him two tables—and there are other things I want. This being so, he says it would be best for everybody if I paid you what he thinks a very low price, and I think much too low: that is £25 for your share. As you would certainly charge a proper client like Dotty much more, I shall still think the chairs etc. almost a gift. I may tell you I get pleasure of at least three sorts every day: comfort; aesthetic; snob. Everyone who comes throws up their hands—says where do you get these lovely things? And I feel my gorges swell—for of course I don’t deny that in aesthetics, about chairs and covers, I am so wholly snobbish I am ashamed.

There is a great deal to tell you; and the light is fading. It is a very cold day—not a single hot day yet—and here we are marooned. We came down without a hitch last night—this morning, going into Lewes, the car stuck on a hill. By dint of shoving, we reached Martins [garage], where they found that our clutch was burnt out, owing to mal-adjustment, and it will take two or three days to mend. So we must go up tomorrow by train—a profound sorrow to Leonard. He thinks of buying a second car to keep in case of emergency. Now I daresay your Citroen is a perfect angel. Julian came in, very late,—we had expected him to dine—but Fred caught him and they got talking. He has got thinner, I thought; there was a lot to be said about cars, also about Apostles. He is growing like a crab—I mean he is only half covered with shell: he is very queer; one finds him noticing, and feeling, and taking up what last year was imperceptible to him. We argued about poetry as usual, and he said he has written a long essay on poetry, which he is sending us. The Bell sociability is so odd, mixed with the Stephen integrity. I daresay he’ll give you a lot of trouble before he’s done—he is too charming and violent and gifted altogether: and in love with you, into the bargain. It is very exciting—the extreme potency of your Brats; they might have been nincompoops—instead of bubbling and boiling and frizzling like so many pans of sausages on the fire. (I am just about to cook an omelette) I am so lost without any young life that I meditate plunging into Ann—only what would happen?

Then theres the superb story of Angus [Davidson]. Would you believe it—he havered and hesitated to such an extent that Hugh thought he didn’t want it, and has engaged a Captain? Now of course Angus is in an awful fuss; came round to see Leonard; says that both his other jobs have fallen through, and he never meant to hesitate—all he said was that of course Hugh’s job wouldn’t do for a permanency, and he might wish to get something else.

I did my best to impress upon him that it would lead to anything—for so it would—but his caution is such that he mumbles like a slobbering mastiff, and so will lose every chance that ever offers. Anyhow I shall never stir a finger for him again. This was worth at least £800 a year for life. On top of this, Miss [Alice] Ritchie came to Leonard to beg him to tell Angus she can’t dedicate her life to writing plays with him—so Leonard had a confidential walk in the Square; and Angus hummed and hawed, and says he’s now heard of something at Agnew’s. He is incredible—the truth is he enjoys a life at large, and thinks his old mother ought to support him, solely for the shape of his nose. Also he thinks that he can write; he thinks that he can correct what Alice Ritchie puts wrong—which he does, she says, very neatly in purple ink; and drives her mad.

Then, Lord Alfred Douglas threatens Leonard and The Nation with a libel action, because of an article Leonard wrote. So we may be in court again. Leonard is going to defend himself. As Lord A. is mad, nobody knows if he means it or not; Maynard didn’t want his letter published,—Lord A’s letter—but it is now going to be published, so that he cant have any excuse to say that The Nation is afraid.

There is so much to say that I am dribbling along, in the dark. Whats the use of ever leaving London? It pelts—it whistles. All London is coming to life. Tomorrow I lunch with Sibyl to meet the Nicolsons; which I do to get out of dining. About 37 [Gordon Square]—we think you should certainly stick to the Premium, as it is part of the rent. I will hand on the other facts. The truth is, Harold doesn’t know his own mind; but is very uneasy, I gather, about diplomacy altogether; still, as he hasnt a penny and now has to support his mother, the plunge is rather stiff.

Christabel asked us to the Opera—she is coming to life. On the other hand, Mrs Clifford is dead, and I’ve just written a wreath like letter to Ethel [her daughter, Lady Dilke]. She is buried today, and I can’t go.

We had Braithewaite to dinner—and Miss Lyn Lloyd Irvine—a pretty young intellectual, undebauched, to whom we talked of every subject—sodomy, and copulation; and at any moment, though he roared like a bull, I thought Richard was going to burst into tears. The modern way of being widowed is alarming—He took his old mother to Venice and to cheer him up, she came out with the most astonishing indecencies, carnous or uncarnous. “There ought to be rubber women” she said, when women are cold. Also she told him how much blood shed there was in marriage—this after complete reticence for 35 years. He mixed her water with wine, she being a teetotaller. What I find alarming is the sudden way of saying “Oh my future won’t bear thinking on—” then roaring with laughter.

And we had William Plomer who is going to be a great novelist to dine—fresh from Japan.—a very spruce and yet imaginative young man, born of parents in Pinner. I think I shal’ have to ask him here and bring him to Charleston to meet you. But what a mix up we are!—I pretending to be an Aunt and then a contemporary—I never know which. He says that they dont talk with much freedom in Pinner.

My great excitement is—I neednt say—building. Philcox will build two rooms for £320—whereas [George] Kennedy said it would be £450 for one. And he will do them by August—which is doubtful—So I’m ferreting my brains to think of doors and windows—handles and cupboards. They’re to be built on next the Kitchen where the pears are—of brick, I think, painted white. Please make suggestions.

Here is dinner. I am devastated by the dull torpor of this letter. I let it go too long, and so I had too much to say, and could not put in any amusing or interesting things. So you must answer at once, in order that I may write at once; for letters are ruined by facts.

Lord! another must be added. I dont know about coming. I shall try to come, say the first fortnight in June; but L. rather inclines to motor out towards Perpignan—and not come to Cassis. But I dont think I can go without Dolphinery till August; even if I have my husband. Tell Jean I hope to come anyhow myself about then. Write quick.

B.

Berg

[]

2021: To Roger Fry

April 24th [1929]

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

My dear Roger,

I am so distressed to hear from Nessa that you’re ill again. This is only a line of enquiry. Perhaps the woman [Helen] Anrep might write and say how you are. Lord!—what an awful time you have of it! And I had hoped you were shaking off some of these diseases.

I wonder if you will be back soon. I pass your door and look in—it often seems to be open, but doubtless only to admit the whores of Bloomsbury, whom I’m sure congregate in that congenial atmosphere. I wish I were whoring—that is to say dining with you. It makes my blood run cold to think how seldom we meet in a world which may go smash the day after tomorrow. Yet I see Sibyl and Angus and the hinder parts of Bob Trevelyan almost daily. London is, as you will gather, very busy, and as usual I get hooked in when I want to be left out. We have escaped down here, where the solitude is divine, but the cold so rasping that I have no skin left on my nose. We are seeing about building a room,—I wish I could tap your intelligence. You will have to come and stay with us, and then perhaps we shall get a little said of the myriads of things that must be settled one of these days. I should like incessant conversation for the next ten years, only getting up to relieve nature and sometimes look at a book. I should be reading one now on the war, a German diary, so horrible that I cant read it, and then I think I must, since such things happened. It is a trick my Puritan blood plays me—otherwise I read a book by Vlaminck which Clive recommends—only Clive’s poor old wits seemed to me so devastated, last time we met, by his Poppets all a fluttering round and about that I can’t believe him any longer. I daresay Nessa is pulling him through in the Sanatorium at Cassis.—wonderful woman! What we all owe to her!

The Election is beginning to reverberate, or whatever the word is for the expulsion of wind. Lies, lies, lies, whatever paper you open; and the local lady has just stuffed a handful of pamphlets in at the window. Also Leonard is in for a libel action. Lord Alfred Douglas threatens one because of his article in the Nation. I daresay it wont come to anything. But do come home and pull us all out of these imbroglios; and do please recover. Love from us both—

Yr
Virginia

Sussex

[]

2022: To Ethel Sands

April 24th 1929

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes, [Sussex]

Dearest Ethel,

It was delightful to get your letter—ages, ages, ages ago. You were stuck on a mud-bank, and it was very hot and rather ugly—nevertheless you loved everybody as usual, and had made friends with a donkey boy. You were very exquisitely dressed, and you thought with charity of all your friends, not having even a laugh for Sibyl [Colefax], who stuck on a very much larger mud bank, I may tell you—but then she went in a private yacht, and saw many things that no European of her sex, which is female, has ever seen before. There! You see how malicious you make me—who am as sweet as honey by nature. It all comes of being Ethel; its the natural reaction: Nan and I discussed all this: “But Ethel never thinks a bad thought of anyone—she never has,” Nan says—which explains Virginia.

I’m sorry to write such nonsense; I’m dozing over a wood fire, very sleepy after a walk by the river, in a raging wind, with Leonard and Pinker (the spaniel). We came down last night to see after our property and build a room, and there I saw your desk, and it is responsible for this. I daresay you would like news—but that again leads me to Sibyl. Aren’t I lunching with her tomorrow to meet—of course—the Nicolsons; and we shall have to dress up, Vita and I, and behave like ladies, in the Kings Road, instead of toasting buns over my gas-fire. Thats one of Sibyl’s lapses—to ask friends to cross London to meet. But enough of Colefaxiana.

I have been leading rather a recluse life—perfectly well, but determined never to spend a day in bed again. Heaven knows what happened in Berlin—it was a very odd affair; Count Kessler, pictures, operas, vast distances, icy cold, Vita in snowboots at one end, Eddy, Nessa and Duncan and I all far away at the other. It was hideous, and highly respectable in the midst of all its vice—we went to the Opera most nights, and even Leonard pined for the diamonds of Lady Londonderry (is that right?)—so hairy and hearty and beery and cheery and like Bessie [Mrs R. C.] Trevelyan eating muffins in black kid gloves were they. Naturally I was ill.

Now I cannot begin another page, (but I see I shall,) as I have nothing to say—and I ought to be reading somebody’s manuscript which I have lugged down here and never looked at.

By the way, I had ten pages from [Jacques-Emile] Blanche the other day, (I thanked him for an amusing spiteful article he wrote on me) and I gather he is ready to be more than a friend; and will paint my picture; and would like to give me the last half dozen books he has written. But I cant answer; indeed I cant even get through his letter, so by this time our relations (always of the purest) are no doubt again strained.

Perhaps you will write to me—I hope so. But I can’t conceive where you are at this moment—What wouldn’t I give to see you, and to surprise you in some astonishing revelation! You may be just taking down-your hair in a tent under a eucalyptus tree, the moon being obscured temporarily by a huge moth. Ah! You are a moth, I remember: red eyed, with a brown hood.

Goodbye
Yr V.

Wendy Baron

[]

2023: To Vanessa Bell

Sunday 28th April 1929

52 Tavistock Sqre., [W.C.1]

Dearest

Here at last are the cheques; I hope correct, and I have added the £2 you wrote about on the postcard.

I have left no time to write, as we have Mauron and Morgan [Forster] upon us. Roger has more than surpassed himself, according to Morgan. He has gone down to Helen in the country leaving everything in complete chaos. Mauron is entirely unprovided for—Morgan and Mary are getting up a lecture at 37 [Gordon Square] on Wednesday; no preparations have been made at Oxford; Margery Fry [Roger’s sister] has disappeared—the poor man is thinking of returning to France in despair. So we have had to ask him in, and instead of writing that long letter full of gossip I must fly.

I know I had a million things to say. I lunched with Sibyl—I sat between Sir P. Sassoon—an underbred Whitechapel Jew, and Harold [Nicolson]. About 37—they want to leave it till the beginning of June, as Harold thinks his fate will be decided by the election, but naturally doubt that you can agree. Also; do you mean that you want the premium paid in one lump sum, or yearly? This last would suit them better if they took it. I doubt that these lunch parties are worthwhile. I had to dash into a shop and buy a bright red coat in a hurry, and gloves, and shoes; and then one only has ten minutes rational talk with Max Beerbohm, who is infinitely weary and discreet, and needs softly purring to get anything out of before we’re interrupted. For the rest it was dull; and I could see Vita more happily over my own gas with a bun on a toasting fork.

I dashed into [Augustus] John’s pictures afterwards, and there was so shocked that I came out again. You can’t conceive—if I’m to be trusted—the vulgarity, banality, coarseness and commonplaceness of those works, all costing over £400 and sold in the first hour. Angelica with a gallipot would do better already. There I met old Dora shuffling along like a half heeled sheep; has she adenoids? or why does she click at the back of her nose? She said that Daphne is no more unhappy in Vienna than in London. We are dining with the Keynes’es; and I am taking Judy to Baa Baa Black Sheep, since I can’t go on entirely neglecting them, and I gather noone ever does them a good turn: but this may be servants gossip. Lottie has again violently quarrelled with Nelly over the grocer’s boy, left her in the lurch, and gone pillion riding into the country. And Alice, looking out of the top floor window saw a one horse van draw up, out got a man with a key and unlocked a car that was standing there and was about to steal a bag when Alice screeched stop thief so loud that the milkman joined in the chase, the man dropped his key and bolted in the one horse van—infinitely to the excitement of everyone.

This is all the servants gossip. I am seeing Christabel [McLaren], and Mary, and I believe we are taking the bull by the udders as you would say and having Faith to dinner. But whats the point of all this when I want to be talking to you instead? I daresay we shall be ruined in the libel action, if [Lord Alfred] Douglas goes on with it, in which case I shall retire to my wood at Cassis. Here it is bitter cold, ink black, and no different from January save for six daffodils and two leaves.

But I doubt if what I write makes sense. What can Roger be about? He was talking of Mauron in January, and now not a notice has been sent out, or a thing done. I’ve not heard from him, but was supposed, according to Morgan, to be organising a lecture. I will write again in a day or two. but so may Dolphin—

B.

Berg

[]

2024: To William Plomer

[April ?1929]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Mr Plomer,

I must thank you for the lovely dish which Leonard says you brought back from Japan for us. It is extremely pretty, and I wonder what it is—I think it must be an old piece, from the lovely quality of the colour. You could not have given me anything more to my liking as I have a deep, though uneducated passion for china.

Thank you so much.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

2025: To Clive Bell

2nd May 1929

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Shall I finish this letter? I doubt it, but I will begin it anyhow, with a new lizard-green fountain pen, a slippery sort of pen, golden, laxative, loose-tongued. But shall I end it? Did I not sit down in this very chair, yesterday at 6.30, when I should have been at 37 listening to M. Mauron on Mallarmé; and what happened then? The telephone rang; an acrid angular voice; agony and despair: Can I come round after dinner? No, Dottie, you can’t, I said, because we are dining with the Keynes’. To cut the matter short—too short, for I never set pen to paper, round she came there and hen; and Heaven forgive me if I dont think Vita’s choice of friends—of old friends to whom one must be loyal—a little crude. What d’you think? Check skirt, leather belt; loosely knotted tie. And then her Gerry had been down for the week end. “Too awful, too awful, Virginia. And he gave me back the brooch I’d left on my dressing table the day I went. What a day! What life is! How one suffers! And Vita is I suppose the most popular poet in England!” This is Dottie, in agony: and then I got a trifle bored, and yawned three times, and she saw it, and said she must go and didn’t. And then Leonard came from the lecture, where he had met Roger (just back from a new doctor, who says his thickened artery in the thigh is the cause of all his trouble—not a doubt of it; but nothing can be done); and Aldous [Huxley], very charming; and Logan; and Molly [MacCarthy], mute on a sofa; and Mary [Hutchinson]; and I forget who else, as the servants say. But Bea [Howe] has a cold owing to staying in a Devonshire house which was a mortuary; and Christa [McLaren] had some other good reason; and Virginia had to take her niece Judy—a good nice child, full of brains, but not, alas, one of our sirens; she won’t sing any songs, but her competence will no doubt serve instead—to the Coliseum, which, you know, begins soon after two, and does not end till 5.30: so Virginia did not go.

But all the same we’ve done our duty by Mauron, had him here for three hours—for as you so justly surmised, the whole weight of that rather obese and almost blind Frenchman was dumped without the least affectation even of interest on the backs of Bloomsbury by the dear old rapscalliony Roger, who had harassed us these three months, as you may remember, to do for Mauron whatever a human being can do for another. He went down to his Helen, merely posting to Mauron a letter beginning Darling Helen, I shall arrive at 2.30, and sending darling Helen a letter, so he says, a letter of full instructions about behaviour in England addressed to Mauron.

This perhaps gives you the hang of our situation. For the rest I am engaged in various enterprises which I would like to describe in detail if you were in the chair opposite, instead of Pinka, who has a newspaper under her, as she is violently on heat, yet must be exercised, and if you consider that there are ten fox terriers in the Square, all belonging to old, and mostly maiden, ladies, you can forgive the gusto with which, when I’ve written this, I must take her out.

But as you’re not there, how can I begin? Life, as we all know, is made up of trifles. What amuses me, when I hear it in Tom’s [Eliot] voice on the telephone, mayn’t amuse you. Indeed it should not; it is tragic and sordid in the extreme. “Vivien’s [his wife’s] legs”—“Legs, did you say?” Yes, both legs, but especially the left. “But what’s the matter with it?” “She cant get a slipper on this week. Last week she was just able to come downstairs. So of course we have had to give up the Strachey’s flat.” “My God, Tom, have you seen a doctor?” “We have already had ten doctors.” “And what do they say?” (here we settled in for an hour or two, I on the edge of a broken chair too)—Well the long and short of it all is that Vivien is now recumbent for ever; swollen, horizontal—for one can’t get any footrest that fits her; 15 cousins from America call daily; what in short is the pleasure to be had from life if you’ve married Vivien and have only father Darcy to fall back on? Ask of the frogs, ask of the nightingales which are even now singing to the lilies in the tank. How you play upon my vices! How violently you make me envy you! Don’t you know I like my friends to be unhappy?—at least to be wet and cold if I’m wet and cold, and there you go and talk of sitting in the shade when we are cooped up under a perpetual umbrella—God’s cotton umbrella which is nasty and slate-coloured and cheap and indescribably dowdy. Three leaves are out in the Square, where I must now take Pinka to make water; I am wearing a waterproof apron and a tweed skirt; and then you go and talk of the asparagus and the lizards. How can you have so entirely forgotten one of my most marked, though less pleasant, features! Envy; hatred.

Yes, I saw Harold, and Vita; and Harold squirms a little, like a gold fish hooked by a bent pin. He cant get off, and he cant get on. Ramsay [MacDonald] he thinks may re-call him. Meanwhile I can abuse him for a time-serving flunkey—This was at Sibyls, and as I write, here is another card, asking me to two more luncheons, though she is at the moment marooned at some ducal house in Dorsetshire. And we dined with the Keynes; because, as you may have heard, my husband is now party to a libel action. He wont apologise, and so Lord Alfred is instructing his solicitor to issue a writ. He is also suing the Nation, and Maynard is a little inclined to think that Leonard needn’t have been so outspoken. However, no tears are shed, and though the one decanter was not entirely full, we had a fine dish of asparagus, and chicken, and an ice, much damaged by some cheap cherry brandy, however, and clouded by the presence of Harland [manservant]. “Harland’s been in bed with the Broncks”, said Lydia, “and Mrs Harland”; here she tapped her head with Harland proffering the lettuce. “She’s odd there: and I have carbuncles on my bosom.” They have all been vaccinated, owing to Maynard reading that 50 schoolchildren have a mild form of small pox in Ham. He is hand in glove with Lloyd George; issuing a pamphlet, interviewing city magnates. Cecil Taylor was there, whom I confuse with some other man always; and we discussed Peter and Topsy; who will never come together again, Cecil says; Topsy is living in Pembroke Gardens; and Desmond [MacCarthy] is giving 8 lectures on Byron this week, in fact four are already given, so thats accomplished. And Julian [Bell], Maynard says, is undoubtedly the most important undergraduate at Kings, and may even get a Fellowship, and Maynard seems highly impressed by him altogether, and his poetry—Julian by the way says he tackled Maynard about Wittgenstein but was worsted; however, we shall hear the story tomorrow, when he’s bringing Playfair to lunch—why I don’t know; but I shall try to get him in a corner and discuss the Apostles.

And then—as you perceive from the growing incoherence of this letter I am in some difficulty with the fountain pen. Yes I saw Christabel and gave her your message. But, as she very justly says, if Clive had any affection for you and me, he wouldn’t be gallivanting to Saigon. She had been entertaining 40 horticulturists at lunch, and was a good deal perplexed about a matter of conscience. That is to say, she was kissed last June on the top of a Welsh hill by Canon Bowlby. Canon Bowlby, as Nessa will tell you, has just been acquitted of improperly behaving to schoolgirls in a train. Now what is my duty?, says Christa. Ought I to have given evidence of his behaviour to me? because not a soul in England will believe these wretched little girls. Well, that very night, Philip Heard (a bugger you may know) was dining here, and he said—this you will admit was a coincidence—that a very intimate friend of his had just consulted him about a Canon—Bowlby? I shrieked. Yes Bowlby, he said, who is certain to be convicted one of these days for tickling little girls in the streets of Chichester. So Christabel need not give her evidence: but I think Christabel would have liked to. But Christabel is very lovely, seductive and enchanting.

Tell Nessa that—no, its useless beginning another page. I must stop. I must face the dogs in the square. I must read Sachy’s new book. I must write to Tom. I must listen in to Vita. What I want to do is to make you dissatisfied with Cassis. But I shant. So write me a long letter.

V.

Quentin Bell

[]

2026: To Vanessa Bell

Sunday 5th May 1929

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

Dearest Dolphin.

Now attend to the following plans: We have just had out the map of France and the calendar. Would it be possible for me to come on the 3rd or 4th of June for a week or ten days? As at present arranged, Leonard will motor, probably with Julian, on the 11th. to Perigueux, where it is proposed that I should join him on the 13th or 14th. What is suggested is that you and Duncan should consider making a short tour with us; going on for a day or two with us into desirable places, and then bringing Julian back with you. Please consider the plan, which can be modified of course to suit you. But I think I shall certainly come to Fontcreuse then, so could you speak to Jean, paying her all my compliments. I shall bring some writing I expect, and thus be off your hands in the early morning; but I can do this perfectly in my bedroom, so she mustn’t bother about the tower, or any other sitting room. I rather hope, I confess, that I shall be alone—I mean, that you wont have other visitors. But Leonard says that Roger, whom he saw at the Mauron lecture, means to go to Cassis very soon. I must admit I am rather excited at the thought of seeing you.

Here we are for the weekend—what a divine relief after London! Next year, with my new room, I shall certainly come here much oftener—if you were at Charleston, I should spend the summer months—what are called so. It pours and blows and not a flower scarcely is out; but still it is infinitely to be preferred to the telephone and the pump and Dottie dropping in, and Colefax ringing up. Even Christabel I could spare; the truth is with age one becomes crusty and solitary, save for a few crones who humour one’s crotchets. However, you being away I do my best to frisk. How could I go to Lucy’s [Clifford] funeral, seeing that I was here? All that remains of her in my mind is a cows black blubbering cunt: why that image persists I know not. Nor have I heard from Ethel. My letter was not from the heart; it rang, as they say, hollow.

Julian came to lunch, without Playfair, I’m glad to say and we had a long and animated discussion: about Clive and Quentin, whose state he finds very deplorable: because he says—but dont in God’s name let this lie about—Clive is an elderly roué whose mind has gone grey and bald; but Quentin ought to know better—I gather the talk of love had rather bored him. He is very mature—one talks to him as to one’s equal. He is in the thick of the Apostles of course, but what is so charming is that he mixes their bleak integrity with a general good will; and the most violent enthusiasms. We got into a long argument about poetry and then he drove me, at the risk of my life, to Berwick market to buy coffee and then to the London library—I thought we were smashed again and again, as the car is very stiff still, and he hasn’t quite got the hang of it and doesn’t know one street from another. He is coming up on Wednesday again, ostensibly to see Topsy [Lucas] who writes him moaning letters he says, very miserable and out of her element alone in London; but his real motive is to run off his 500 miles. I hope he will stay the night and come to a small literary party,—only Blunden and I think Plomer and Eddy [Sackville West] and perhaps Roger [Fry].

But I haven’t seen Roger. He went at once on landing to a new doctor, who knows exactly what is wrong—a thickening of one small artery—and says it is not serious and can be cured. This I had from Helen on the telephone, Roger having that instant left to take Mauron, I think, to Oxford. So he is at last shouldering his burden, or Morgan would have perished.

I dont myself see the phenomenal charm of Mauron—he’s a heavy blind man, something like Kot, if you remember him, more Teutonic than French, very nice and slow and genuine, but not, to me, wildly exciting in the intellect or body. But then we only had three hours; in which I was the only conversationalist, my French coming in and out like the worms on the lawn last night. As we were going to bed, Leonard called me to see a marvel of nature, which it was, some ten million worms red and wet like rubber tubes writhing in all directions. It was precisely my idea of the floor of Hell—they made the grass heave and billow—you wouldn’t believe it—wherever the torch lit, there were worms. I shall dream of them, I said to Leonard, and sure enough I dreamt all night of you and Hugh Walpole.

Which brings me—you see how the mind of a writer works—no nonsense about reason or order or logicality,—to Angus [Davidson]. I am sure your diagnosis is right—he is inwardly convinced of his greatness, and nothing will rouse him; ……. [three lines omitted] …. being I suppose, inwardly aware that his own mind is empty as a silk hat—which brings me—I dont see why—to Rothenstein, who in the most creepy crawly oblique and underhanded way has approached me, through a friend of Tom Eliots, and then through Tom, to sit. Tom says he makes one look so noble, and loves it. I say, not for all the opals of Peru. Rothenstein is said to blame it on to the intolerable conceit of Bloomsbury. We are not popular—there can be no doubt.

There are two pieces of furniture I must buy, so do mark them down—one a poudreuse, not necessarily in good condition; the other a sideboard, or cupboard for the dining room here. I am immersed in questions of floors, windows and paint; and have a wild hope that work may start and the rooms be done by August. If only Kennedy and Durrant between them hadn’t wasted 3 months and £15! But it was all our fault, I suppose.

I will give Vita your messages. All depends on the General Election. I think.—Harolds chance of coming to London I mean.

By the way, Julian was elected unanimously to the Cranium, and poor [name omitted] heavily blackballed. Write. Write.

B.

Lord Alfred says he is going to bring a libel action against us; but so far nothing has happened. However, I am in trouble in America for saying that Henry James didn’t write English.

Berg

[]

2027: To Molly MacCarthy

Friday [10 May 1929]

52 Tavistock Square, [W.C.1]

Dearest Molly,

Are we never to meet again until we are old and wasted? I heard you were at Maurice’s [Baring] lecture, when I couldn’t go. But I am going to Argyll House [Colefax] on Monday, at 5, and could I come back to you afterwards for a short gossip?

I hope that may be possible—and then I have to return to Argyll House to dine; but a respite in your company would be a great relief.

Anyhow, if this doesn’t do, suggest something else please.

Your old attached but forgotten friend
Virginia

Mrs Michael MacCarthy

[]

2028: To Quentin Bell

May 11th 1929

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Quentin—oh, but youre Claudian. Well then Claudian

How you have seduced me by the charm of your language! I have thrown on to the floor the last page of my most hated book [Phases of Fiction]—it is dry as a captains biscuit—there is no food even for the weevil in it—and turned to this succulent sheet. For now thank God I need not say what I think of fiction and Proust and the future and the new orientation of the human soul, as Leonard and Dadie insist—never were such taskmasters; now I can throw myself onto the back of life and grasping hard to the mane fly away and away. Where? How could I write when you were at Cassis and every page was left in the drawing room to be read by Clive Vanessa Angelica Duncan Sabine Miss Campbell and Colonel Teed? You have a very elementary notion of the principles which should guide epistolary correspondence; though letter-writing on a typewriter is a mongrel, a mule; a sterile thing, compared with the handwritten letter. I say only what the typewriter likes to say. But I might have said things even so that I should not wish the whole population of Cassis to read. You admit your trousers have holes in them. Why at Lewes station you had to be covered with a potato sack in order to save the blushes of the young women who sell violets. But what was I going to say that is indiscreet? Only that I wish Clive would progress beyond love where he has been stationed these many years to the next point in the human pilgrimage. One cant kick ones heels there too long. One becomes an impediment. At your age a little talk and hubble-bubble of the kind does very well. One would not wish to cut you off from the society of your sex and mine. But take warning; dont outstay your welcome there.—I mean don’t let people say Oh he thinks of nothing but love; oh he’s off on that old subject again. Why do I say this? Something Christabel MacClaren said about Clive and Miss—I dont know the name of the enchantress any more. I saw Julian twice last week. He is a most marked and peculiar figure; so bulky, but so agile. We had an odd conglomeration—Roger and Helen and Mauron and Mr Plomer and Mr Blunden, the nature poet, and Miss Jenkins, who teaches; and they all talked of every sort of thing; Julian vociferating at the top of his voice—Whats pure poetry? Whats assocation? Whats abstract? Whats concrete—half in French too; while little Miss Jenkins who is the size and shape of a mouse, piped up in the best Strachey voice—Lord how that persists!—its echoes will be heard when Pauls Cathedral is tumbling stone from stone; she piped up (forgive this typewritten incoherency) “But what am I to do if a young man asks me to go to France without saying if he includes copulation?” She said, what seemed odd, that it is now the convention that no young woman can demand a statement of intentions beforehand. She said that Bloomsbury has muddied the pure pool of convention and the young know not one hand from another, nor which is land nor which water.

Last night we had a terrific revivication; the resurrection day was nothing to it. Old Sydney Waterlow who dandled you as a babe, turned up from Abyssinia, which has nothing to do with dulcimers, he says; there he had a breakdown and is back again, ruminating, questing, like some gigantic hog which smells truffles miles and miles away. It is now Spengler. But then, my dear, you were too young to know him; so what does it convey to you, this reference of mine to a tortured soul? He was impotent for years; and Clive heard his miracle, how he found a woman in Piccadilly and brought it off there and then—and Moore converted him and Bertie [Russell] fathered him and I refused him and Leonard dished him; and still he quests like a hog for the Truth. So we all did once; save for myself; who was always distracted by some other flippancy.

Roger is growing a little older. One sometimes catches his nose in repose. Helen has flown to Paris, so I hear, to see her mother who is said to be dying; so you may be gallanting your Helen about Paris. Look here, I shall be coming through about the fifth of June or so; and might catch a glimpse of you, perhaps. But I’ll let you know.

What other news is there? A great activity pervades London at the moment. Maynard has produced a pamphlet which is to turn the scale at the elections. He and Lydia are greying and weathering and so becoming more congenial. And Monks House is about to be rebuilt, so that you will have a room to sit in and will have to come and stay. An ecclesiastical ornament in stone has been found in my field which proves …

[remainder handwritten] here I was interrupted by lunch and am now away from my typewriter and so must stop. Leonard is probably going to drive Julian in the Sunshade [the new car] half way to Cassis.

Mauron and Roger last night confuted Leonard and Oliver and proved beyond a doubt the non-existence of everything but an Idea. So there.

Write; at once
yr loving
Virginia

Quentin Bell

[]

2029: To Hugh Walpole

14th May 1929

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Hugh,

I would willingly write in your copy of Orlando if it did not commit me to telling a lie. For the truth is that I did not give it you—and how should I ever have had the face to bind my books in red morocco? No, I am not the giver—I am the given. It is you that bought Orlando and bound Orlando. All that is left for me to do is to thank you, once more, for your generosity to my little paperbound book.

Yours ever
Virginia Woolf

The King’s School, Canterbury

[]

2030: To V. Sackville-West

Wednesday [15 May 1929?]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Oh curse, curse. Head has been slightly bothering and being a molly coddle I think I won’t dine out tomorrow (I have to be out tonight) But I shall be here, in the basement, all the morning, or from 3.30 onwards, and have put off Lytton and Ottoline, so come any time. And then you’ll go and dine with someone else, and I shall be furious: well, it can’t be helped.

Come; I say, and let us sit by the gas and talk.

If you cant come, wd. you ring up. If you can, dont bother. I shall expect you.

Berg

[]

2031: To Vanessa Bell

Saturday May 18 1929

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

Dearest,

I think Leonard has given up the idea of motoring, as it seems too difficult; and as at present arranged we shall both come for a week to Fontcreuse about June 4th—that is if the Teeds can have us. I’m not quite sure about dates but will let you know. It hardly seems worthwhile for Leonard to bring the car when he has such a short time. Julian was doubtful whether his springs would survive the French roads and therefore rather wanted a lift, but no doubt he will manage. He meant, he said, to leave the day after the Apostle dinner. I dont think he’s exactly dangerous as a driver, but his springs and gears were very stiff, and he was not quite used to the new car the day he drove me. He came in last week after dinner, and was a great blessing—launching out into aesthetics in French with Mauron, discussing nature poetry with Blunden and sitting at the feet of Miss Jenkins, who is only the size of a fine grey mouse. He found her very attractive he said. I must say I think he does you great credit. If he had a little more cut and fashion to his face, he would be in every way desirable. As it is, he may get thin, and he has mentally and morally all the qualities anyone can want. He is very bitter about Clive, and had written a paragraph in a review for the Granta saying something about “Mr Clive Bell who mixes aesthetics and love affairs” signed Julian Bell; but the Editor had wisely cut it out.

I have just had a long letter from Clive—rather distressing I think and deplorable, all about another mystery which is making life too exciting, but he cant tell me what—as if I didn’t know all I ever want to know; but one doesn’t want to know, no more than if Lotties in love with the Cowman or the green grocer. Even Christabel says she cant answer Clive’s letters; and I think everyone is getting to feel that he’s becoming dull and boring. Lord! what a week you must have had! To go to Cassis and to suffer that! Better almost remain in Gordon Sqre. There at anyrate you can’t be talked to for a week entire. Roger and I feel some scruple about coming. However, its a scruple we seem to be getting over—at least I gather that Roger is starting almost at once. I think he may stay a night here on his way—in fact, he should be here now, for Whitsun, but rather basely we said we must have two days solitude after the racket of London (which I’ll come to before long—all the gossip is coming, though I’m very cold, sitting in my lodge, looking at the rooks building—but that you dont want to hear about—Whats Rooks to me, or me to Rookeries you say, quoting Shakespeare, as your way is) Clive, as I say, is under a cloud in London. I think, as Leonard and I are perpetually saying, that something ought to be done about it, in self-protection. Think how he will make the downs resound this summer. But I’ve done all I can do—which was to put a word of warning in a letter to Quentin against philandering, saying take Clive as an example, and see how he bores people; which I daresay will lie about in the hotel de Londres and bring my head to the block.

In duty to you I went off to Chelsea the other day, first to Mauron’s lecture at Argyll House. Then to sit with the MacCarthys, then back to dine at Argyll House, then home to bed with Waley. What an afternoon—the lecture rather stiff to a mixed crowd of fashion and riff raff, poor Faith [Henderson] there without a chin, and then Mrs Maclagan and other very highly furred women; and the French Embassy and little Read and so on—As for Molly [MacCarthy]—do we all look like old women now, sitting by the open window, sadly reminiscing and sighing and getting up with difficulty? I was taken aback, to think she is 6 months younger than I am; and I feel as young as a flea. Her sorrows seem many. I washed my hands under a photograph of Philip Ritchie. Desmond [MacCarthy] came in from lecturing at Cambridge, without any teeth, or only single ones here and there, and began undressing in the drawing room, as he was dining with Lady Lovelace at 8—which it was then 10 to. But I find them congenial—and there were Rachel and Dermod—she has been acting and he has just bought a skeleton—“Thats where our money goes to,” Molly said; “one’s children must have skeletons, and skeletons are dreadfully expensive.” I find them more congenial than good kind simple worldly Sibyl; who had George Moore but there was Sir Arthur [Colefax] too, whose conversation, though full of substance, lacks atmosphere. George Moore sat on his chair like an old baby with a bib; however we had a little literary talk, and paid each other compliments, and now he has given me a book. But the thing you’ll like to hear about is the resurrection of Sydney Waterlow. He came in the other night, having made it up with Leonard.—But I dont know that there’s anything to say. He remains, like the pyramids, untouched. First he started abusing us all—at least lamenting the complete failure of our generation in every way; and said he was now cynical, sceptical, and independent. No one influences me any more, he said, blowing out his cheeks, and then suddenly began booming and bellowing in the old way about Spenglers masterpieces (neither you or Duncan have ever read them) and how his life was completely changed by them, and he sees, or thinks he sees, the meaning of everything. He hopes to become Ambassador at Athens (but this is a profound secret—don’t go telling it to the Cruthers) and we are dining with him at his Club next week. He would like to talk about his change of view.

And then I saw Hugh Walpole (all this is for you; and then neither you nor Duncan really care a battered fig for me—its a question of being magnets and being steel, if you understand, but I’m getting colder and colder) Hugh came to tea. His version of Angus [Davidson] was very funny.

Angus was so lackadaisical and so qualifying and so uncertain if he could get up on time and so certain that he was about to get another job that Hugh, who liked him, thought that he was clearly unwilling to take the place, and so gave it away to a Major in the army. He says it is clear that Angus has some reason for not wishing to take any place which works sub-consciously. I said he thinks he is the Racine of our time, to which Hugh agreed. I’m afraid Hugh wont altogether do—unless you can make him. He’s own brother under the skin—it’s a nice pink skin though—of Rose Macaulay and the late Lucy Clifford. I mean he will talk about reviews and sales and dingy dirty literary shop, and drags me in, who am naturally so pure. Then (I’m now over the fire indoors) the telephone rang, and who should it be but Sir George Duckworth. It was lunchtime, but he kept me a good 20 minutes, first asking me to lunch to meet some literary bores, French people, who had heard of Leonard and of me; and then going on and on and on. “Wheres dear old Nessa? In France? But who’s she living with? Clive d’you say? And her boy? Which boy? The painter? Is he a good painter? Well its too soon to tell, I suppose. How I should like to run over and stay with her! I’ve just had my last tooth out; and they’ve put in what they call a transformation—temporary of course—to last three months. Meanwhile my teeth fall out when I talk; when I eat; when I telephone. Margaret [his wife] and I want to come and see you. We’re hoping to settle in Connaught Square—” At last, at last I dropped the telephone; he puffs and blows like a sea-horse, I daresay all his teeth were on the floor at the end.

We’re here, as I’ve said; divinely lovely the country, and we’ve been picking blue bells in Laughton woods. Then we dropped in (Leonards incorrigible love of paying calls in the country) at Charleston and saw Raymond and Frankie, who say they are uproariously happy and content, but seemed glad of an interruption; so we go to tea tomorrow. Such is life here—and no sooner had we turned into the village last night, than Widow Hawkesford stopped us—but I like the widows of Vicars, carrying wreaths for their husbands tombs; and on the table here was a card from Nelly Cecil who had called yesterday, and wants us to lunch. I’m not sure how long Sussex will be tolerable; but then I’m wriggling with rage. Philcox now says he cant get my rooms done by August—so I shant get them till Christmas—a whole (this is the last page) year wasted, owing to Kennedy and Durrant; and my chief pleasure in life knocked on the head. All the same I shall buy a table, a side board a cupboard, a chair, and a complete set of crockery at Aubagne.

I say—how you’ve spoilt me for the ordinary run of brats! Poor dumpy good clever Judith (Stephen). I thought I must have a little childish wit; missing Angelica as I do; but one might as well have old Ray to tea. Lord, I wish I didn’t miss you and your brood as much as I do: for never a thought do they give me.

Leonard now says, with his love, that we shall come on June 5th for a week and hope to find you alone.

The Singer is said now to be perfect.

There’s lots more gossip but I haven’t the face to write any more; besides you haven’t read all this, and poor dear Duncan cant make head or tail of it.

B

No news from Drown about the drawing. Am I to do anything?

Berg

[]

2032: To Lady Cecil

[18? May 1929]

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

My dear Nelly,

Why did you choose the day before we came? Our old woman gave me your card with great excitement, but I should have been better pleased to see you. Alas, we cant come over this time as we have people about. But couldn’t we arrange a meeting for August?—or perhaps you’ll be in London and will come to tea? But not till the middle of June as I go to France now to stay with Vanessa.

August I think we must arrange.

And are you writing your life?

Yours affly
Virginia

Hatfield

[]

2033: To V. Sackville-West

Tuesday [21 May 1929]

[Monk’s House,] Rodmell, [Sussex]

Lord what a donkey!

Lord what a donkey!

Lord, what a donkey!

I said, I can’t ask you for the night as Roger will, or may, be here. But come to lunch and I’ll get Raymond and Francis. All right, says Vita—and these were her last words, spoken as it were at the crack of doom, I’ll come to lunch. Whereupon I order suet pudding for lunch. Rather hot, says Nelly; yes, I say, but its Mrs. Nicolson’s favourite pudding. There is the suet turned out of its basin: where’s Vita? We walk up the street. Has she been cut in two by a char-a-banc do you think? says Nelly. Anyhow the suet wont keep. Pinker is sick. They say when a dog is sick it means some one’s in agony, says Nelly. I had an Aunt that dreamt of a dog being sick and her husband fell from a ladder next morning.

So we ate the suet. And then in I go to Lewes, all trembling with the char a bancs a cutting you in half, and you say as cool as cucumber—

But here are the young men, walked over to see Vita—

Look here: no nonsense: lunch Thursday 1 o’clock sharp.

Please dont go and be a donkey again. These calamities bring the white hairs to my head.

V.

Berg

[]

2034: To Vanessa Bell

Tuesday May 28th [1929]

52 Tavistock Square, [W.C.1]

Dearest,

I have not heard from you, so I don’t know if you expect us on the 5th but we shall come, unless we hear to the contrary. They have taken off your train, and we reach Marseilles at about 7—am—an unearthly hour. So we shall take the train out or a car, and you may expect to see us in the course of the morning. Let me know if you want me to bring you anything.

By the way did Angelica get a pen?

I suppose one need only bring thin clothes. It is roasting hot here.

I will keep all news till we meet, as they say.

Leonards mother has again fallen down, and we have got to go off to Worthing to see her.

Lord—how nice to see a dolphin again!

B.

Dont on any account come and meet us.

Berg

[]

2035: To Clive Bell

May 30th 1929

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Clive,

I am sorry to have been a bad correspondent, but the summer is icumen in—Every bee is abuzz. Also I hope to see you, and impart all my news by word of mouth. Alas, though, they have taken off the good train; and we shall arrive in Paris at 4 on Tuesday next, and leave again at about 7.30. Can you suggest any way of meeting—bearing in mind that we must cross Paris, convey luggage, and probably shall be late? Try to devise a plan and let me know. If Quentin could come, so much the better.

But these bees, you will say, that are abuzz. Oh Sibyl, Christabel, the Keynes, Sydney Waterlow, Desmond; and the election, which is today; and we are just off to Worthing to tend the aged, Leonards mother, who has broken her arm again; and the decay of the aged is so unspeakable that I cannot think of it. And then we are going to Rodmell for the night and hope to take Raymond and Frankie over to Eastbourne to hear Election results. (Maynard, by the way, bets that the Liberals will have 190 seats.) We have seen a good deal of the Charleston playwrights; Raymond has become the country gentleman, and will never, never touch a pavement again. All London goes there regularly. The place will have to be fumigated. They are in high spirits, and have almost finished a play, which clearly will be the success of the age: and then they’ll—they swear they will bury themselves in the country, even so.

I see a good deal of Vita; less than usual of Dotty, but then my voice on the telephone the other night was not, she said, cordial. Vita broadcasts; Vita lectures; Vita writes novels and poetry and reviews; her spaniel had 5 puppies (all well, you’ll be relieved to hear) yesterday morning. Harold looks for great things from a Labour government; so does Sydney. Oh Lord, what a great gull Sydney is! as pompous, as insecure, as portly as ever; yet at a touch—and we give him many—he wobbles. Desmond looks rather like a man in a high wind whose hair is on end, tie flying, and teeth falling out. But he maintains his cheerful character, all the same. Lytton I have not seen—and here’s Leonard come to hurry me off, to Worthing, to the aged, to the ugly. How I hate it—ugliness and age: but that doesn’t apply to you, so please arrange a meeting and inform me in time.

yr V

Quentin Bell

[]

Letters 2036-2078 (June–September 1929)

2036: To Margaret Llewelyn Davies

6th May [error for 6 June 1929]

Fontcreuse, Cassis, Bouches du Rhone, [France]

Dearest Margaret,

I got your letters and the papers just as we were starting—I didn’t like to risk bringing them here, but I will read them as soon as we get back, in about ten days or so. I’m rather doubtful about doing a preface—I’m too much of a picturesque amateur—and I daresay none would be needed. But we can see about this later. Life is very pleasant here, in an old French villa in a vineyard. A retired Indian colonel [Teed] lives here with a mysterious but sensible lady [Jean Campbell]—not his wife (she remains in India;) and ekes out his pension by making wine. Nessa’s villa [La Bergère] is five minutes off, and Leonard and I live up here, on a verandah, and go to her for meals—a delicious life, with a great deal of wine, cheap cigars, conversation, and the society of curious derelict English people, who have no money and live like lizards in crannies, sometimes keeping a few fowls or breeding spaniels. Of course the mistral started blowing as we arrived, but it is baking hot, and I am hourly becoming more and more inclined to buy a small lodge, with two rooms, in a wood. I’ve just finished reading Rosalind Murrays novel; and can’t see why people want to have all the facts of life put out in sensible English. One goes on reading—in fact its very good, and well bred and interesting and creditable and real: but when I’ve done, I can’t see what the point of facts about life in books is. But then I’m thwarted and perverse. It doesn’t give me any of the things I go to literature for. Am I quite wrong? I dont want stories; and I dont want reality, and I dont want to think this is precisely what would happen to the son of a shopkeeper if he went to Oxford and married Gilbert Murray’s daughter.

The night before the Election Maynard Keynes rang up and said the Liberals were sure of 190 seats. What a crow for you and Leonard! Even I, coldblooded as I am, feel some excitement. But do you think they’ll do anything? Thats what I always want—instant and violent changes.

Of course Vita is half a peasant: her mother was the daughter of a Spanish station master and a dancer—illegitimate. This is one of the things I like in her. But no room for more.

yr V

Sussex

[]

2037: To Elizabeth Robins

[16 June 1929]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Miss Robins,

Some time ago you were good enough to say that you would come and see us to discuss some plans—I hope for a book. Anyhow this is to say that it would be a great pleasure to us to see you. Would you suggest any time; best a Monday or a Thursday, next week? I have left this a long time, but we have been moving about, and I still hope you may find it possible.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

2038: To Hugh Walpole

June 16th 1929

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Private

My dear Hugh,

I hope you won’t mind my writing to ask you to remember Angus Davidson should you have any opening or hear of one. I met him the other day and he seems convinced not only that he missed your job by his own idiocy but that it was the very one he would have liked and would still like should it be possible. No doubt the possibility is gone, but I said I would write, encroaching upon your notorious good nature. He seems depressed and willing and ready to understand that his methods of accepting offers are not the right ones. Of course this needs not a line of answer. I wouldn’t write, if I didn’t feel that there is a good deal to be said for him as a secretary after all.

We are just back from the South of France, where we lay in a blaze of heat, and I find it very difficult to attack London again. Shall you be coming through? Let us know if you are, any time before August.

Yours ever
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

2039: To Hugh Walpole

[19 June 1929]

Postcard

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Do come to tea on Wednesday 26th 4.30.

No anger [about Angus Davidson] on our part only sorrow. Shall expect you unless we hear.

V.W.

Texas

[]

2040: To Vanessa Bell

Tuesday 24th [25] June [1929]

52 Tavistock Square, London W.C.1

Dearest Dolphin,

Many thanks for the covers. I’m afraid we are reduced to having the printed one—I mean the one you re-arranged. The practical difficulties of the new are seen to be too great. One cant lock up type in that border, therefore each cover would have to be printed twice, or you would have to make a fresh design for each. So it seems simpler, though to my thinking duller, to use the re-arrangement. Anyhow that is infinitely better than it was. I’m annoyed; as this is my permanent edition; and if you were on the spot we could devise something. But there’s the usual difficulty about time. I will send the size of the new cover as soon as it is settled—I mean the one called a Room of one’s own for the youth of Cambridge in October. I like the new cover very much.

This business has killed all desire in me to write a letter, and I am also hurrying off to lunch. I’ve seen a good many people, but in a crowded and confused way. I will write tomorrow to Jean [Campbell]—having just refused to go to Long Barn with Clive in his daimler. I dont think there’s much chance that Harold will get a job in London. I’ve told Vita about the Penroses. We caught our train—it began to pour in Paris. Here it is roasting hot.

B.

I almost wrote you, by the way, ten pages of adoration and deification of motherhood—but refrained, thinking you wd think it sentimental. Now if you sometime kissed me voluntarily perhaps I wd. not be afraid.

I’m seeing Hugh in order to discuss possible plan for Angus—arent I angelic!

Berg

[]

2041: To Clive Bell

[late June 1929]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Clive,

Yes, we shall be in London and would like to sup with you on Sunday. 8. (I suppose). And I shall be happy to dine with you on Thursday July 11th—And I wish I could come tomorrow; but I have an assignation with Christabel, and a Labour party party.

I long to hear all the news.

yr V

Quentin Bell

[]

2042: To Vanessa Bell

Saturday June 30 [1929]

52 Tavistock Square, [W.C.1]

Dearest Dolph:

At any moment I shall have to stop and let in Saxon, but if I dont begin to write, God knows when I shall. Such is London life. Take this afternoon for instance. I thought I would go and see the Sickerts. Naturally they were shut. Turning to go to the National Gallery, I ran slap into Saxon, who therefore is coming at 5; I went to the National Gallery; saw Clives back going up the stairs; decided that all contemplation was impossible; and so made do with the bust of our grandfather—a portentous object, and other cadavers in the National Portrait Gallery.

There is a mint of things to tell you. Before I am engulfed, let me first ask if you have got a receipt from the Pottery man at Aubagne. They wont deliver it unless we produce it; and he never sent us any—perhaps it came after we left; and no doubt you destroyed it. So help us all. Yes—there is Saxon.

But no—it was nobody. Never mind, he’ll be here in a minute.

Life has been very interrupted. Theres Christabel—Clive—Vita—now Roger’s back. You never write to me, so how do I know what you want to hear about? Politics? Theres William Jowitt [see p. 70, note 3] then. Indeed—another door bell. Yes, Saxon.

It is now 6.30 and Saxon has gone to meet Barbara who is going with him to Paris tomorrow to meet the children. There’s only one person in the world I want to see and that is Angelica, so I am glad to hear that she will soon be in this island (for of course England is an island). William Jowitt is what I was going to talk about. London rings with his infamy. We went to a Labour Party party the other night, held in cold weather in the vast Friends house in Euston Road. Well it was a deplorable enough night, as far as nights go—so much sweat, so much energy, so much deformity, so little of the illusive and transitory beauty which I love. I mean, there they stand up and crow—young women in short red flannel knicker bockers—young men in sweaters. However, suddenly a voluminous green woman bore down and said Vanessa? I said no. So she said Virginia? We used to know each other—I was Molly Bell. And now you’re in the Cabinet I said, referring to Charles who is there, wearing a vast carnation: And isn’t it splendid to feel that the future is with us! she said. And then I made off, crossing a windy court yard, with fish swimming in a shallow fountain. One was caught by a young man. And I ran into Dora Sanger and into Alice Russell, and into an obliterated female called Low; and suddenly a stout fashionable couple closed upon me, and after a painful hesitation, grasped my hand. These were the Jowitts, universally cut, abused, fallen among strangers, and embracing the Wolves as friends and comforters. Leslie [Jowitt] told me an astonishing story: Even in well appointed houses there are black beetles she said. And I had German measles. One night the telephone rang. I answered it. I saw the beetles coming. You know how they come—First they hesitate; then they begin running. “The Prime Minister has offered me the Attorney Generalship” said William on the telephone. “Shall I accept?” Now what could one do with beetles coming nearer and nearer? So I shrieked yes—I assure you, they were round my ankles. So that you see is the true story. And her face was wrapped in a towel because she had German measles.

And now I must wash and go off to dine with Roger. I daresay you know more about Roger than I do. Leonard says he is going to do a cure now; but he has only been 3 days in London,—one he spent going to Bristol, another he spends going to Aberdeen, and then he’s off.

No doubt you will find me in precious hot water when you come back—Clive, yes, I’ve wrought upon Christa’s feelings and Clive is going to be spoken to. In fact, Christa entirely agrees. She dined alone with him; and he had a letter from Paris, and did nothing but finger it and say Have you ever been jealous? Have you ever been in Love? This is from a girl of twenty. I assure you I have never been so happy in my life, until Christa felt like an old gramophone record. Everybody feels the same, she said. It may be, she said that he takes drugs. He leaves the room very often. But I said That’s all nonsense. What he wants is that some lovely and witty, young married woman should say to him nobody is impressed by these loves of yours. In fact, we are all bored. Cant you take a pull on yourself and write a history of French literature—or something?

This is what Christa is going to do. She buried her face in her hand, and I think, murmured a few broken prayers.

But I must finish this.

I will bless you for ever if you will see about my windows. I have caused great consternation by alluding to my villa in France—not that people mind my going, but it shakes their belief in London.

Oh there’s Angus. I think that man passes belief. I saw Hugh, who promises to see him in the autumn. I tell this to Angus, and he begins sighing and heaving and says he thinks Hugh is absolutely incomprehensible. He has been offered a tutoring job at Le Touquet; but boggles at it, because it may mean buying new clothes…. [19 words omitted] … How can you explain him?—no malice, but a mere trickle of invertebrate vapidity—a positive danger on the road.

Well, dolphin, do write; and come soon. Meanwhile I hope for Angelica—adorable sprite—I dont think you like her half as much as—no, its Judith I really adore. Poor hobgob.

Yr B.

Remind me to tell you an amusing story of the Keynes, and Charleston.

Berg

[]

2043: To Donald Brace

30 June 1929

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Mr Brace,

Many thanks for your letter and what you say about A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN. I return the agreement signed. I have only made one alteration, cutting out the words “and Canada”. The Press now has an agent in Canada and as we have asked others of our authors to reserve their Canadian rights, I rather feel that I ought to do the same myself.

I have had an enquiry from the BOOKMAN about the serial rights for America and I have referred them to you, as you were good enough to say that you would deal with them. I should, of course, be glad if you could dispose of the serial rights before you publish.

With kind regards
yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

[]

2044: To Enid Bagnold

Sunday [early July 1929]

52 Tavistock Sqre., W.C.1

Dear Lady Jones,

(I had hoped we had cut off our titles, but submit)

There is nothing I should like better than your grand footmen’s party—but I don’t see any chance of being in London on the 25th. We’re trying to avoid London this summer, and stick to Rodmell. If you saw what a turmoil we live in here, how all our lives are frittered on politics, authors, lawsuits, etc you’d agree it is the only thing to do. So dont tempt me. But later I hope you will, and then I (I dont speak for Leonard who is away) will willingly succumb. Many thanks anyhow.

Yrs ever
Virginia Woolf

Enid Bagnold

[]

2045: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

[2 July 1929]

Postcard

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

I should like to come, rather late, about 5, on Friday 12th. It is a long time since I saw you—

yr Virginia

Texas

[]

2046: To Vanessa Bell

July 6th Saturday [1929]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest,

It seems as if I were reverting to the habits of our ancestors in writing long daily letters. I daresay Aunt Mary, whom you much resemble, spent £100 a year on penny stamps, which would have paid for the keep of a butler. I am really writing to finish off the story of Clive, so far as it goes. I had a long, long quiet reasonable talk with him. Not a word was said about Christabel, but I think the poor woman has undoubtedly done some good. At anyrate, he was rather apologetic; and talked much more reasonably, and seemed cheerful, and quiet. He laid his case before me—he says the time has come, or will in October, when he must take action. Either he must marry Susie, and live with her in France; or he must give up the attempt to find anyone, and continue detached in London. We debated the merits of both states very reasonably. Of course there is a good deal to be said, one realises, for a fling at happiness with Susie. He says she suits him very well, is in love with him, though he is not with her. He thinks they could make out a very happy life, for some years; and this is his last chance, and in no other way can he settle down and work. On the other hand, she might desert him, or he might get bored. Also she is penniless, and after five years he might find he had lost his old friends, and was stranded with an uneducated and poverty stricken and aging model in Dordogne. Again, if he decides to stay in London, he would be safer, financially; he would keep in touch with Bloomsbury; he might run against some paragon. All this he seemed to realise very clearly,—the dangers and the merits. All will be laid before you, or has been already. I could only advise him to wait, and point out the obvious risks, considering Susies youth, and lack of book learning. What is the truth about her? That is what I dont gather. He makes her out a sensible peasant girl, who has good wits, great charm, and general competence. If so, well, perhaps it is best—only in the back of my mind I feel that she is a figment and will pass like the rest of them. Anyhow, for the time, Clive seemed clearsighted, and under no illusion, and anxious to consider everybody and weigh all reasons.

At this point I went over to Charleston, and who did I see sitting with Dadie and old [Augustine] Birrell on the terrace? Mary [Hutchinson]! in grey and rose. Mercifully we hadn’t asked Clive down, as we had half meant. We had no private talk. The clatter of tongues was prodigious; but I cant go into the full story of the Keynes’ yet—Perhaps I will tomorrow. Here’s your letter. I am very glad about the windows [of La Boudarde]. A thousand thanks. We have a vague hope of dashing over in October to furnish. Please get Elise to clean. I feel that one will soon need a refuge out of England. Sussex is becoming a talking house. Lord Gage had been to Charleston and they showed him into the bathroom, thinking he was the plumber. But he showed no surprise and asked them all to lunch and threatened to call on us, but happily thinks he has not been asked. I found an enchanting letter from Angelica—really exquisite—how Saxon did not grunt, and talked, and she has been out with Judith [Bagenal] to look at a pony, and will I give Mrs Cart Wright her love and tell her (not personly) not to mourn so much. I am going to get her for a day next week—without Judith.

Both Raymond and Francis thought Clive—to return to him, (and he has just sent in a note to say we must spend next Sunday with him as London Sundays are too oppressive)—they thought Clive much less personal and excited; so poor Christa is vindicated. I believe after he got over the first shock, it really gave him something to think about, and if he had a series of shocks he might come to his senses. I am dining there with Christa and Bea [Howe]—Lord Lord how I shall like seeing you! Would you like us to motor you and A⁠[ngelica]. to The School?

B.

Berg

[]

2047: To Clive Bell

[Sunday 7 July 1929]

Monk’s House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest Clive,

About a variety of small matters.—

1) Vita is going to be in London next Thursday. I was bold enough to say that I thought you wouldn’t mind if she looked in after dinner; but she is dining out, so would come late, if at all.

2) If I see Mary [Hutchinson] as is likely in the next week or so, do you wish me to say anything or nothing of your plans—about which she may well ask?

3) Entranced by the fine, or moderately fine weekend we think of coming here again on Saturday. Couldn’t you come too? I warn you that the house is in the builder’s hands, but we could provide a bed and plain food and could go over and see the Charlestonians and crack some jokes. And you would be driven in the Singer both ways.

So consider it and let me know when we meet. We are just off to see old Birrell.

yr Virginia

(age has come upon me and I can no longer sign my name)

Quentin Bell

[]

2048: To V. Sackville-West

[9 July 1929]

52 Tavistock Square, London, W.C.1

Darling, we are so unhappy about Pippin. We both send our best love—Leonard is very sad.

V.

Nigel Nicolson (copy)

[]

2049: To Vanessa Bell

Thursday [11 July 1929]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Dearest

This is strictly on business, (to my great grief, for I have a million things to say)

(1) We expect you Duncan and either or both boys to dine on Wednesday (having put off a brilliant party on this account)

(2) We have a spare room, Nelly [Boxall] being away. Would you like it?

(3) Will Quentin dine with us on Monday? Clive says he will be in London. (7.30 about)

(4) We will take you and Angelica to Chelmsford on Thursday.

(5) I am furious that I was frustrated about Angelica. I had arranged that she was to come for the day: then Louie decided to go down to Norfolk; and when I suggested another day, Barbara [Bagenal] objected that they were busy with a bazaar and seemed to take it amiss that I should suggest a day away from her. Never mind. I hope to see A. later

This is all. How I loathe facts!

Your devoted Singe

Berg

[]

2050: To V. Sackville-West

Friday [12 July 1929]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Yes, we would like very much to dine on Sunday if its all right for you—Clive, Leonard and Virginia. We will aim at 7.30, but don’t on any account wait.

And only a cold mouthful,—and a kiss. And heavens be blasted, something has occurred which makes the night a blank—(I wont say what) I mean a waste. So it would be better to fix August 7th say. Any day as soon as you are back; any night.

V.

Berg

[]

2051: To Augustine Birrell

July 17th 1929

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Mr Birrell,

I am more than glad that I plucked up courage at Charleston and tried to tell you how much I admire and enjoy your essays. Here they are in this splendid edition, and I have spent the evening foraging among them with a new delight now that they are mine and given me by you. I wish there were more I hadn’t read. But I am going to re-read them, and then to put them where they belong—next my Hours in a Library. It was very very good of you. Indeed I am almost precipitated by your goodness into the rashness of writing an essay upon Mr Birrell—making an attempt to find how [sic] what is the particular thing you do so much better than anybody else. That will be a pleasant occupation,—And then there is one other demand I must make on you—to dock me of Woolf and leave Virginia only.

And may I call myself not only admiringly and gratefully but also your affectionate Virginia, as my father’s daughter would like to?

George Rylands

[]

2052: To: Donald Brace

4th August 1929

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Mr Brace,

I enclose a copy of the revised proofs of A room of Ones Own, up to page 64. I have made some alterations, and I think it would be best to print from these if you can.

With kind regards,
yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

[]

2053: To William Plomer

8th Aug 1929

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Mr Plomer,

Could you come here for the week end of the 17th Aug.? We should like it so much if you could. This is only a cottage, so please bring no clothes, and we shall be alone.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

2054: To V. Sackville-West

Monday [12 August 1929]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest Creature,

I dont think I shall be able to come this week—I’ve had to retire to bed with the usual old pain, not very bad and the price of the value I set on your honesty. Lord! What a relief that was! But I doubt that I shall be very energetic this week; so I’ll say the week after, and will let you know.

Meanwhile will you send at least a line to say what happened about Hilda—I particularly want to know the situation with respect to Janet, as I have anyhow to write to her. And please make Hilda see that it was all your donkeyism. I am lying in my garden room between open windows—, odd that I felt quite well when I saw you. And I wish I could see you now.

I feel very happy about Virginia and Potto and dear old Vita; yes, I do, and would say so more eloquently if I werent in bed.

V.

Berg

[]

2055: To Vanessa Bell

Monday [12 August 1929]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest

I have slight symptoms of headache, so do you think you and Roger would come to tea on Wednesday not Tuesday, and could we have the picnic on Friday instead of Wednesday. If we dont hear we shall understand that this is all right and much look forward to seeing you. Of course I am being more careful than is necessary

Yr B.

Berg

[]

2056: To V. Sackville-West

Aug 15th [1929]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest Creature

I am quite well again, and spent the morning writing. It wasn’t you; as you were only the tailend—I had been badgered by people in London, and then this writing of four articles, all pressed as tight as hay in a stack (an image that comes you see from [Vita’s] The Land)—that was what did it—not that it was bad. These headaches leave one like sand which a wave has uncovered—I believe they have a mystic purpose. Indeed, I’m not sure that there isnt some religious cause at the back of them—I see my own worthlessness and failure so clearly; and lie gazing into the depths of the misery of human life; and then one gets up and everything begins again and its all covered over.

And now I see Geoffrey Scott is dead, at my age—no a year younger. Do you mind? Does it bring back the hot afternoon when the Salvation Army called, and the mews where he almost strangled you when you were late, and the scene on the downs? I didn’t like him; at least I didn’t trust him for some obscure reason. I met him at Mrs Ross’s over 20 years ago. Lord! Mary Hutchinson was there. But I took up my pen to say that I hope, if you see Hilda, you will make her understand, not merely superficially, that Janet Vaughan was as blameless as anybody could be—mere joking and affectionate at that,—I mean I shouldn’t have minded to hear what she said of me; and to show how casual and lightly meant it was, she never even gave me a hint that Hilda could seriously entertain those passions. It was merely Oh how amusing it would be if Hilda could fall in love—and then nothing more, but what I took seriously—that the plan had been made many weeks or months.

When shall I come? I dont know. But what about next week—towards the end, say Friday, when I shall have written the last word of these excruciating little biographies. And what about a treat motoring to some place and spending a night in an Inn, first having dined?

I got out of all my engagements except Plomer, who comes for Sunday.

Leonard and Percy [gardener] are measuring the tank with a vast tape. I must go and see what its all about. Returning to Geoffrey, after all you gave him what was his phrase—rest and freedom? I remember he said something I was saying.

And then to be dead in New York—

Yr V.

And what about your back? Write and say.

Berg

[]

2057: To V. Sackville-West

Sunday 18th Aug. [1929]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

I am very much distressed about your back. I wish you would answer, if only in pencil on a card, these questions. 1. Have you seen a doctor? 2. What does he say? 3. Are you better? Surely it has never been anything like as bad as this. Have you got rheumatism in it? Is it very painful? Leonard says that the male principle [sic] of fern seed which paralyses the nerves of the stomach is miraculous—It cured Pinker’s rheumatism in a moment, though meant to cure her worms. No, it would have been no good my coming, but when will it be any good, my coming? Leonard and Plomer are playing bowls on the terrace, and we are going to dine at Charleston and send rockets up into the sky—Quentins birthday party. So you see I am recovered, and have, more or less, finished my articles. The last was Dorothy Wordsworth, and if the written word could cure rheumatism, I think her’s might—like a dock leaf laid to a sting; yet rather astringent too. Have you ever read her diaries, the early ones, with the nightingale singing at Alfoxden [Somerset], and Coleridge coming in swollen eyed—to eat a mutton chop? Wordsworth made his head ache, thinking of an epithet for cuckoo. I like them very much; but I cant say I enjoy writing about them, nine pages close pressed. How can one get it all in? Plomer is a nice young man, rather prim and tight outwardly, concealing a good deal I think; though I’m completely bored by speculating as to poets’ merits. Nobody is better than anybody else—I like people—I dont bother my head about their works. All this measuring is a futile affair, and it doesn’t matter who writes what. But this is my grey and grizzled wisdom—at his age I wanted to be myself. And then,—here is a great storm of rain. I am obsessed at nights with the idea of my own worthlessness, and if it were only to turn a light on to save my life I think I would not do it. These are the last footprints of a headache I suppose. Do you ever feel that?—like an old weed in a stream. What do you feel, lying in bed? I daresay you are visited by sublime thoughts—I saw Raymond yesterday who is off travelling for two months, and seemed vaguely aware of some change in Harold’s life. And we hastily exchanged the last news of Vita in Lewes High Street, buying wines.

I shall be in London on Tuesday, and in the drawingroom at eleven o’clock; if you liked to ring me up. But I don’t suppose you can ring me up, and so its no use my ringing you up either.

Here’s a thing about Geoffrey Scott by Desmond.—no I cant find it.

Anyhow, my dear Creature, let me know truthfully and exactly how you are. Potto kisses you and says he could rub your back and cure it by licking.

Virginia

Berg

[]

2058: To Vanessa Bell

[20? August 1929]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Dolphin;

Here is the bill that has just come for Boudard [La Boudarde, Cassis]. I expect it is all right, but perhaps you wouldn’t mind just looking at it and sending it back. It doesn’t include the ceiling and the other window which you wrote about, apparently. I cant remember what he said the cost would be. My sideboard apparently was put on a ship that is going by way of Algiers and Antwerp, but will arrive in time. Would you tell Quentin that I expect him to lunch on Friday at one; but, as I haven’t heard from Miss [Lyn] Irvine I expect she’s away, and so he mustn’t put off Karin [Stephen] on her account. And finally would you tell Julian that thanks to his oil the car broke all records coming up this morning.

I’m in London, and a damned place it is.

And when shall I see you?

B.

I forgot to say that I thought your cover most attractive—but what a stir you’ll cause by the hands of the clock at that precise hour! People will say—but theres no room I have just bought 4 goldfish and 2 carp.

Berg

[]

2059: To Quentin Bell

Wednesday [21 August 1929]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

My dear Quentin,

We have to go to Dottie’s on Friday and intend taking you too. So be warned. I think we might pick some interesting observations out of it—anyhow, we have to go, and you might tell Nessa we hope she’ll arrange to come too.

Lunch here at 1.

Virginia

We will leave you at Charleston coming back.

Quentin Bell

[]

2060: To Oscar Lewis

Aug. 22nd 1929

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Mr Lewis,

I see from your letter of May 4th that you were sending me sheets for signing of my essay Street Haunting about June 1st. I have never received them, nor have I received the check for 125 dollars which you said you were sending on receipt of my corrected copy. As this was sent to you some time before the end of May I am afraid that something must have gone wrong.

I should be much obliged if you would let me know whether you received the article safely, and whether you have also sent the sheets and check as arranged; as I ought to make enquiries if they have been misdirected. I see from your letter that you say you hoped to bring out the essay at an early date.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf
(Mrs Woolf)

Columbia University

[]

2061: To V. Sackville-West

Saturday [24 August 1929]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Might I come on Wednesday for the night?—could you let me know?

I think there’s a train from Lewes to Sevenoaks—for there’s no question of your being able to meet me—but I’ve no time at the moment to look it out. The Vorn [Janet Vaughan], as you call her, is arriving. And I’ve no time to write a letter, much as your’s deserved an answer. And how are you? The best sleeping draught is audit ale at bedtime: any fellow of a college will get it, and if you don’t like it, I will drink it.

A thousand different varieties of love are rained upon you, like the showers from a gigantic watering pot by Virginia and Bosman.

Berg

[]

2062: To Frederick Bason

Aug. 25th [1929]

Typewritten

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Mr Bason,

Many thanks for your interesting letter. I have told the Hogarth Press to send you a copy of their catalogue. “To the Lighthouse” is a novel, and I think you would find it at any library, such as Mudies.

I enclose an autograph, to save you the trouble of sending Orlando.

With best wishes,
Yours sincerely,
Virginia Woolf

J. Howard Woolmer

[]

2063: To Hugh Walpole

25th Aug. 29

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

My dear Hugh,

My conscience has been twinging me all August and part of July for not having answered your letter. But it was a tribute to you—I was so harassed and badgered that the idea of writing a letter, not a note, not a cheque, not a postcard, not a telegram, but a letter of sympathy and affection was abhorrent. Really you are right, and London is the devil—eats away all ones time and character, nibbles at one’s friendships and leaves nothing but an old biscuit,—you know what one finds in a cupboard when the mice have been at it—of one’s soul. Now I am settling into some sort of sanity. And I have bought a right to put windows in a farmhouse in a vineyard in Provence so solitude is assured and I am safeguarded: and I daresay I shall never go there.

When I was young I liked writing letters. Now I cannot remember how one does it. It is a fine hot day, and I am sitting in my garden room which has a fine view of the downs and marshes and an oblique view of Leonard’s fish pond, in which it is our passion to observe the gold fish. There should be four, and one carp; but it is the rarest event to see them all together—and yet I can assure you that so to see them matters more to us both than all that is said at the Hague. We are going off tomorrow to a pond at Slindon where goldfish are so thick in the water that the village children ladle them out in their caps for passers by.

Why then am I reading La Fontaine with obdurate passion? I mean, why is human life made up of such incongruous things, and why are all one’s events so perfectly irrational that a good biographer would be forced to ignore them entirely?

Here the church bells begin ringing and I am plunged as usual into anger and confusion—I hate to be disturbed; I hate the arrogance and monopoly of Christianity (and I’m writing to the son of a Bishop too!) but then I love the old women doddering along in their black bonnets, and the thought of all the years, and all the processions; and how buried there are their ancestors for centuries—I must explain that our garden abuts on the churchyard, and when we are looking at our beehives, they are often burying someone on the other side of the wall. Where shall you be buried, and shall you have a tombstone over you or none, and what do you feel about posterity, and have you any desire to be thought of in your grave—which questions bring me by a path which you will discern beneath the brambles—to your works: to your play; to the novel which I’m to be allowed to read. But you dont say when its coming out. Is it this one that you are rushing up to Cumberland to write? Please send me, what I’m sure there must be—a picture postcard of Hugh Walpoles house; or anyhow a view of the valley where he lives. I have a childish wish to consolidate my friends and embed them in their own tables and chairs, and imagine what kind of objects they see when they are alone. Of course it is quite true that I know nothing about human character, and to be frank, care less; but I have a cosmogony, nevertheless,—indeed all the more; and it is of the highest importance that I should be able to make you exist there, somehow, tangibly, visibly; recognisable to me, though not perhaps to yourself. Now your gift as a novelist—I was going to write an essay upon you, but I shan’t, because you wont let me read your works.

Aren’t you singularly vain, for a man of your reputation? I should have thought, selling ten million copies in a month, you would have long ago disregarded Virginia—perhaps you have—Perhaps it is only your sublime urbanity, and the quality which I most adore and that is man-of-the-worldliness, that lets her think that you care what she says.

Ought I to read Mr Priestley’s book [The Good Companions]? by the way—From the reviews, chiefly by Jack Squire, I am sure that I should hate it—but I suspect that I may be wrong, and if you say so I will send a card to the Times bookclub at once. What I am suspicious of is this manufactured breeze—what they call humanity—But you know my foibles in that respect—what I hate is having it done by electric fans and other machinery for making one sunburnt and rosy and jolly and cheery—but I may wrong him—he may be the real thing, not manufactured.

Leonard says he stayed in the very hotel you are in twenty years ago. It was raining then; but he ate salmon and cream and strawberries, all off the same plate, and it is raining now.

What a letter!

Let us know when you are passing through again; I expect to be in London in October. Angus Davidson you’ll be glad to hear, is provided for—has a quiet job looking after pictures which will suit him very well.

Your affte
Virginia

Texas

[]

2064: To V. Sackville-West

[27 August 1929]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

Well then, I think I had better come next Tuesday, instead of tomorrow, for the simple reason that if I come tomorrow you will certainly drive the car and risk your back again. Admit that my psychology is correct. And then, as to see me is the light of your life, you will have to be extra careful all this week, because if you aren’t well enough to drive me, then I dont come on Tuesday. All this is very well reasoned; but I admit I am rather disappointed—all the more that I have now no excuse for not correcting my articles—I shall do that tomorrow instead of coming to you.

I am sending a wire, as letters seem to take longer than an airship takes to go round the world travelling to Sevenoaks.

Janet Vorn [Vaughan] was here; and if I had to choose her or Hilda to love, it would be her. I explained the situation, which was all right; and she had seen Hilda, and nothing had been said or hinted. Also, Hilda never mentioned Vita, which she thought odd. So that, one way or another, your donkeyism has had good results.

I am half asleep in my lodge, which seems to harbour the sun. I saw Dotty the other day, and she quoted passages from a letter I wrote to you—do you read her my letters? No, I dont suppose you do—only snatches, so dont be afraid that I am going to ring you up and make another explosion.

Thank God I’m not a rich woman and dont live at Penns—well, you cant read her that anyhow! I mean, it seems so cumbrous and unnecessary—4 men mowing the lawn; things all settled round one like sticks in a stream.

Oh but heres Leonard and I must go to Lewes. Love from us both and write and be careful

V.

Berg

[]

2065: To V. Sackville-West

Sunday Sept 1st 1929

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

My train arrives at Tunbridge Wells at 5.48. I wasn’t serious in saying that I was afraid of Bosquet driving me—so shall expect her—not you. If there is any difficulty, wire, and I will go to Sevenoaks and take a cab.

Damn Harold. And why should you attach any importance to the criticism of a diplomat?

Have you got your proofs? I will read them—I had only one look at the type script here. No, I dont mind Dotties 4 gardeners; what I mind is the sense of stagnation, or rather ineffective agitation, among all that solidity. Now Vita could run 20 gardens and 10 houses with order and animation. But I cant now remember the impression that came over me, violent though it was, at Penns. Dotty seemed like a bit of wood that has floated into the midst of wrecked cupboards, kitchen tables, persian pots, great danes, priceless china, and they all knock and dash and wash about pompously. Put Vita there, and everything would at once take over and sail to the Antipodes under flying colours.

I am entertaining Miss L. Lloyd Irvine as I write, and throwing out sweeping views on chastity, fiction, and human life.

Are you really One better? asks these questions, and no answer comes.

I’m also, besides talking and writing, reading Mrs Meynell’s life. And getting together a picnic basket to lunch in the beech woods beyond Lewes.

We must wait to make plans until we see how your back is.

P [squiggly design]

She [Dotty] has just sent me her poems for an honest opinion.

Berg

[]

2066: To Dorothy Bussy

Sept 1st [1929]

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes, [Sussex]

My dear Dorothy,

I am not certain whose fault it was that we never met—except when you cut me in the street. But it was a lamentable fact, and must never happen again. However, I doubt that meeting in London is any good. It became more and more like a fried fish shop, and all my intercourse with my kind was merely barbarous. But what I want to suggest is that we might meet in France—where I suppose you to be. I’m having windows put in a small peasants hut in a wood near Cassis—I hope to be there off and on. Couldn’t we postpone our tea till January?—and it would then be better than a tea; it would be wine and ices in blazing sun.

With the wisdom of a serpent, to which kind you belong, you have never attempted a regular life with your kind in London. Withdrawing as you do to some hole of your own, you avoid our miseries and irritations. And then you cut me—And I did try to make another attempt, and you never came—one night at Pippas. That reminds me, I told a Lady Gerald Wellesley, a rich woman, about Pippa’s flat—She wants something in Bloomsbury; and I hope it is still to be had.

I am writing under great difficulties—that is I am entertaining week end visitors. Do you ever let yourself in for that particular effort? One keeps looking to see if they are enjoying themselves. They aren’t. Well then what can one do? Suggest a picnic! But the mutton is almost ready. Never mind—we will eat it at dinner. So that is what is happening this very instant in Sussex—we are going to boil some eggs and go off to a wood and sit on the roots of beech trees among pine needles and ants in a high wind and eat hardboiled eggs—dont you wish you were with us? Well, I rather do.

This letter, I must add, in case the fact has escaped you, is one of affection; pure and simple, and does not need an answer; but would like one. Love to Janie [Dorothy’s daughter].

yr aff
Virginia

Texas

[]

2067: To V. Sackville-West

Sunday [15 September 1929]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

A thousand congratulations from us both.

I daresay these are the happiest days of your life.

No, alas, I go to London on Friday not Thursday.

Yes, very pleased about Kings Daughter.

Thank Goodness, no more dealing with Lady S.

Yes I’ve signed my name 600 times.

Yes, I’ve read Hugh.

Why need he say all his characters are dead, when its true?

How business like this letter is!

And looks like a sonnet.

Your red hat is here.

Berg

[]

2068: To V. Sackville-West

Tuesday [17 September 1929]

[Monks House, Rodmell, Sussex]

What a long and unexpected letter! a great treat. Also Pinka’s comb. Many fleas have already been analysed out. for it is searching and peculiar. Many thanks; Leonard’s and Pinka’s.

What can I say about Hugh?—and I’ve got to write to him [about Hans Frost]. The truth is its a day dream, unreal, all spangles, like a Christmas tree, and to me rather exhilarating for that reason—all shivers to violet powder. I expect all his books are gloried dreams of Hugh; Hugh a great man, Hugh a sinner, Hugh a lover, Hugh prodigiously wicked and so on—never a glimpse of any reality; and thats the trick—thats the glamour and the illusion and the spangle: thats why he sells, and why nothing is left but a little dent. I’ve only read 30 pages of Rebecca, but I think really she is another pair of shoes. I agree that the convention is tight and affected and occasionally foppish beyond endurance, but then it is a convention and she does it deliberately, and it helps her to manufacture some pretty little China ornaments for the mantelpiece. One could read some of it again, but Hugh never, never.

But what I want to know is as much as you think it discreet to say about Beaverbrook and Harolds job—what is it? What is the pay?—my word, I think you are lucky to have brushed the bloom off diplomacy and then off to another flower while the sun still shines—What a stallion, what a young blood mare you are, to fling your head, kicking your heels.

And when shall we meet? I’m a little dismal. Another of these cursed headaches. How I get them I can’t imagine—Whether its writing, reading, walking, or seeing people. Anyhow its not been bad at all—only it makes Leonard gloomy, and tightens my ropes—I mustn’t walk, or do anything but sit and drink milk—you know the old story.

I am rather considering staying on here alone or possibly having a week by some hot sea.

I wonder if I shall: I wonder if you’d be free: I wonder if perhaps we might have 3 days or so together. It would be, if at all, about the 5th of October.

But I’m ever so much better today, and now must write to Hugh. Do let me know about Beaverbrook and all the rest.

Potto and Virginia

I have it in my mind to go to Lyme Regis.

Berg

[]

2069: To Hugh Walpole

Sept 18th 1929

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

My dear Hugh,

This is awful—how long I take to answer you, and this time it isn’t only a letter but a book, and a book I’ve enjoyed and read through so quick there was no holding me. We had visitors and I had an article to write and books to read, and then I sat reading on and on and on, pretending that I would only read one more chapter and then stop; and then arguing that as there were only 5 more chapters I might as well finish. Ask Leonard—he is a witness. How do you do it? What is your lure? Well, I’m not going to puzzle my head (though I see several very interesting questions rising). I had much rather some day soon meet and talk. I made all sorts of notes in my mind as I went along. There’s a magnificent passage on friendship. There are odd peeps of all sorts of queer vistas. There’s a general radiancy and Christmas tree lustre that I find adorable. Of course, I dont think its my world. I feel rather like the wife of a Pre-Raphaelite painter who has blundered in among Rubens and Matisse and Cocktails and Champagne and sits in a simple grey dress looking very odd and causing some alarm to her hostess. Poor woman! She is a little out of place I agree, but enjoys herself hugely and trots off home to tell her husband, in their rather austere flat, all about it. Many many thanks; I did enjoy myself hugely she says.

I dont know when I shall see you to put my questions—I have an idea that I shall go off and bask in the sun by the sea somewhere before settling in for the winter. I have been talking too much, and I want to let the dust settle.

But let us know when you are up. Oh and many thanks too for the pictures which are pasted into Hans, for all the world as if Hans were Hugh: which he isn’t of course. And do tell me—but these questions must wait; and the wives of Pre-Raphaelite painters, with their hair combed back dont go chattering on like this—

yr aff
Virginia

Texas

[]

2070: To Desmond MacCarthy

19th Sept 1929

Typewritten

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes, [Sussex]

My dear Desmond,

I am a wretch not to have answered your letter before—but then you write so beautifully on a typewriter with a secretary. I am going to write on a typewriter too, but it always mis-spells, and often causes grave offence. Ones style is apt to be abrupt. I have lost many friends this way. Irene among them.

Thanks for the cheque. I will write you a better article one day. I have had to send the American articles to the Nation as they all hang together—four figures living at the same time—but I have others in my mind. Only I want to write a story.

About your lady painter—I have heard of her; she has been painting all sorts of people. But as I have severely refused Will Rothenstein and a man called Blumfield on the ground that I have an antipathy to sitting still, a morbid aversion, I dont see how I can agree to her. Rothenstein is rather huffy as it is. Also I doubt that I shall be in London. Oh I see you say she would come down here—but I dont think I could manage that—anyhow by this time she will have gone and forgotten all about it. Yes I wish I came sometimes into sight of you: it is odd to have a purely aural relationship—to hear your voice addressing the British public [on B.B.C. radio]. I long to get up and interrupt. I got so far as to hear that you were sitting on a seat at Arundel, waiting for the Hutchinsons; and I sent my love to that precarious point—But I daresay Mary never gave it. I have seen too many people—Sussex is rather too available—I groan when I come in from my walk to find Herbert Fisher on the lawn. Peter [F. L.] Lucas is here at the moment—I dont groan at all to find him. He is everything that is delightful, and I am going to take him off to the river across my meadow now. And we shall talk about you. Last night we were singing the praises of Desmonds Sunday Times Articles. And I made a vow that I would print them in a book. Dont let them all vanish down the sink—they are much too good. Dont tinker at them. Let me print them as they stand. Please think this over, and resign yourself to my hands.

We are here till October when we all scatter like a covey of partridges—Clive to Spain, Angelica to school, Julian to Cambridge, Quentin to Paris, Vanessa to a studio in Fitzroy St—I have a wild desire to rush over to France and furnish my peasants hut—I told you I had three rooms in a wood didnt I, near Cassis?—and live on coffee and maccaroni and sit in the sun and drink quantities of Colonel Teed’s cheap white wine; but I suppose I shant Do let us go there together one day—what fun it would be!

The despatch case, the swollen wallet which you said would suit you, is coming—inscribed D.M. 22 Wellington Square—is that right?

No I cant write letters on a typewriter.

Love. Yours affectionately
Virginia

Mrs Michael MacCarthy

[]

2071: To Molly MacCarthy

22nd Sept. [1929]

Typewritten

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dearest Molly,

Please forgive this machine—I have lost the use of my fingers. I will join you in throwing bats at Bob. He worries you; I can bear that; but he wanders off to the Press, suffocates them with boredom (Mrs Cartwright is at the time of life too) and lays not the tiniest egg in the long run. Never mind; we will kill Bob; that’s one mercy settled; and drag the bloodstained pages from his coat tails. I will have them; alive or dead.

I am dehumanised by the sun. It is like being in a Cathedral all day long. I wish it would stop and let me get back to my usual way of life. One feels so pure, so good, so high: and that is not really being happy. I should like to read, but then one feels, what a pity to read, in this weather. Finally we are going to Charleston to meet Lytton; who has torn himself from his bevy for a moment. I envy you, talking to Giraffes. Do, if you want an occupation, write letters to me, supposing me to be in Australia. I assure you, this book would be fascinating; probably filmed; your fortune made.

If you had ten thousand pounds, what would you do? I am glad Rachel is at the bookshop. I shall order something very difficult at once. A six-and-sevenpence-halfpenny French novel, at 33¹/₃% discount, allowing for fall of franc.

Please write again.

We shall be back soon—unless we decide to take the veil, as the weather indicates. Oh, Lord! As I was tapping this out, we caught our mongrel in the act with the neighbours’ bull terrier.

Yes, I am revolving schemes. What is wanted is shabby, decent, prolonged, varied, easy to come by talk; not dancing. I have an idea.

Yours very sincerely (this is the best one can do on a typewriter)

Virginia Woolf

Mrs Michael MacCarthy

[]

2072: To Edward Sackville West

Sept. 23rd 1929

Monks House, [Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex]

My dear Eddy

I am ashamed not to have answered your letter before—particularly as I liked getting it. Laziness; work, heat, visitors—those are my only excuses. No, I dont put the blame on us, for drifting apart as you call it. Its entirely life’s fault—London seemed to me intolerable last summer—nothing but telephone bells and faces in endless succession—and everybody jerking wires and making me jump up like a jack-in-the-box, when I wanted to be ten miles deep under the sea. I’ve come to doubt whether London is possible—It seems to destroy all sensitiveness of perception—one person might as well be another. You as usual, manage better—but then, let alone your own red lineation (I mean gift for ruling a red line), you have Knole imposed on you, which is a considerable weight.

Yes, I agree that we ought to have done Brothers and Sisters. It was annoying—mere slackness, I suppose. But I’d rather have done Eliot’s poems and even Katherine Mansfield’s Prelude—There’s something bleached about Miss Compton Burnett: like hair which has never had any colour in it.

Here I am, regretfully letting the last days slip through my fingers. I suppose one must go back and begin again: “Hullo Sibyl is that you. No I’m afraid I cant come to lunch” etc etc.

I hope you are coming back triumphant and effective and will rule your red lines with the greatest decision over all of us.

I cant go into the history of Bloomsbury—I must go into dinner instead.

Yours ever
Virginia Woolf

Berg

[]

2073: To V. Sackville-West

Thursday [26 September 1929]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

No, I didn’t mean I was ill—only an ordinary headache, and I’m perfectly all right again.

We are going up to London; but alas, we get back too late to call in on you. And there doesn’t seem to be any free time left here—. Theres Tilton and Charleston this weekend, and then the Labour Party at Brighton to which we are going, and then Leonard must go back. So Harold must come and see us in London if he will. I had meant to stay on here and write and write, but the men are fuming to begin building, and so I dont expect I shall stay beyond the 7th or 8th, and then return very grudgingly to Tavistock and answer the telephone as usual. Lyme Regis, I’m told is completely spoilt—anyhow, I couldn’t write in an Inn.

I’m reading an Oxford undergraduate ms novel, and his hero says “Do you know these lines from The Land, the finest poem, by far the finest of our living poets—” but for all that, we shan’t publish him.

I have only one passion in life—cooking. I have just bought a superb oil stove. I can cook anything. I am free for ever of cooks. I cooked veal cutlets and cake today. I assure you it is better than writing these more than idiotic books.

I shall be alone, anyhow Friday and Saturday next week, if you’d come for the night, but I suppose you cant manage very well, with Harold. £1500 [after tax] is not a great sum, certainly; and damn your mother for making more bother. Well, God knows when we shall meet. You’ll be off to Barcelona, and I shall be off to Cassis. (Mrs Bartholomew here interrupted with an account of Colchester …) and now I must write [five lines heavily crossed out by Vita]

V.

Berg

[]

2074: To Daphne Sanger

26th Sept. [1929]

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes, [Sussex]

Dear Daphne,

What an amazing story! I wonder if the rather seedy looking man who came up from the basement and said you were all away one night last summer was one of the servants. He looked a little queer, we thought. I am very sorry about your father’s gold watch and the silver—the books dont so much matter, and I am making bold to replace mine by sending you those which have just come out in a small edition. They can be hidden away and take up much less room than the old ones.

It is so nice down here,—but you wouldn’t think so—that I want to stay on and on, at least as long as the weather is fine and the water in the well lasts.

But when we come back I hope you will come and tell us all about the servants—I suspect that your mother was trying to reclaim a criminal, and therefore she has only got what she deserved and what one might have expected. Please give both of them (your father and mother not the criminals) my love.

yrs
V.W.

Daphne Sanger

[]

2075: To V. Sackville-West

[30 September 1929]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

No, no, no, I meant Dottie, not H. M. (about going to Barcelona) and the reference was to your late travels and it was only a joke and Potto made it and said hah hah to show it was a joke and only Donkeys bray. Just off to sit for hours at Brighton, Lord.

V.

Berg

[]

2076: To Leonard Woolf

Friday morning [4 October 1929]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

Much relieved to get your card. I have had a very good night. Pinka gave no trouble but has been running round your study whining. Vita wired that she wants to come on Tuesday—so thats off. A letter from Mrs [Beatrice] Webb asking me to dinner. I opened a letter from Powell, enclosed, thinking there might be some news. It looks very fine, so far.

Do you think you would like to change your mind, vast as it is, and come down on Saturday afternoon after all? I find that I can get all my things that I want into the small bag, so I shall go in by bus. I should be here till 12.45 anyhow. So if you think of coming, send me a wire.

If I dont hear I shall catch the 12.54 bus. Now that you have got up safely I dont feel so nervous. The petrol lid came this morning. I am sending it, in case you come.

A bag of bulbs has come, addressed to me, from Winchester: I’m giving it to Percy [Bartholomew].

I think thats all—Love from every animal. Come along marmots and do your jublimmails.

Sussex

[]

2077: To Leonard Woolf

Friday evening [4 October 1929]

Monks [House, Rodmell, Sussex]

This has just come by the second post. I’ve written to Maynard to say that you’re in London, but that you will wire if you are coming down. I dont see any reason why you should, even if you do come, as it would be much nicer to be alone, and there is no reason to think Desmond is coming, I trust. This is the first I’ve heard of it.

I’m sending this on the chance it reaches you first post. We’ve had a very nice peaceful day—dull but fine. Pinka very good and sits with me.

A letter from Sibyl [Colefax]; a letter from Daphne Sanger; a letter from Saxon [Sydney-Turner]—10 pages of gibberish.

I am extremely well, the garden is heavenly, all we want is Mongoose [Leonard].

Lovely Bird
goodbye.

I had an awful shock—happily after getting your card. An unknown motorist was burnt to death yesterday afternoon between Chailey and Haywards Heath—you must have passed about the time. This makes me nervous—but I suppose unreasonably.

Sussex

[]

2078: To Gerald Brenan

Oct 4th 1929

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

My dear Gerald,

I have just taken out your letter and re-read it. Probably you have forgotten that you wrote to me on the 11th July; and it is now the 4th of October. And I am not in a good mood for writing, being dirty—you know how physical states affect one—and lazy—so that I cant get up and wash; and lonely, Leonard is in London. But it is for this last reason that I write, because it is the last night for some months, perhaps, that I shall be lonely. Tomorrow I shall go back to London, and there already awaits me a string of inevitable experiences—what is called “seeing people”. You don’t know what that means—it means one can’t get out of it. It means that Miss Winter has asked us to ask Mr Robinson Jeffers to tea because he is only in London for a week and will then return to a cave in California and write immortal poetry for ever. Mr Jeffers is a genius so one must see him. Then Hugh Walpole is passing through London; Hugh is not a genius, and its precisely because of that sad deficiency, which so many of us share by the way, that he must be ‘seen’. It torments him, his lack of genius, when, if only (so he says) the Bishop his father had had an ounce more spunk in him he, Hugh might have been something Titanic. Feel my biceps, he is always saying; and there’s something so curious in his state, that again one must say I shall be in on Thursday at 4.

And then there’s that automaton Colefax your friend. Do you remember a curious autumnal tea party, with Logan and Clive and God knows who else, and how she forgot your name, and kept saying ‘Mr—I can’t remember who you are!’ Happily time makes all these past scenes unspeakably beautiful—if one remembered the truth, life would no doubt be unbearable. And theres the Sidney Webbs—they have to be seen. I wont go on. I only want you to realise how little control I have over my life; yours you say (July 11th) is all that it should be. To counteract it I have bought a hut at Cassis, in a vineyard. There I shall imagine that I see Africa and hear nightingales and so attain to something of a prophetic strain, now lacking.

For, Lord, Lord, how much one lacks—how fumbling and inexpert one is—never yet to have learnt the hang of life—to have peeled that particular orange. As I said I am out of the mood for writing, and write because I shall never do it once I am “seeing”: this being so, I shake these brief notes onto the page, like—what can I think of—only lice—instead of distilling the few simple and sweet and deep and limpid remarks which one would like to send to Spain in a letter. Suppose one could really communicate, how exciting it would be! Here I have covered one entire blue page and said nothing. One can at most hope to suggest something. Suppose you are in the mood, when this letter comes, and read it in precisely the right light, by your Brazier in your big room, then by some accident there may be roused in you some understanding of what I, sitting over my log fire in Monks House, am, or feel, or think. It all seems infinitely chancy and infinitely humbugging—so many asseverations which are empty, and tricks of speech; and yet this is the art to which we devote our lives. Perhaps that is only true of writers—then one tries to imagine oneself in contact, in sympathy; one tries vainly to put off this interminable—what is the word I want?—something between maze and catacomb—of the flesh. And all one achieves is a grimace. And so one is driven to write books—you see I’m shaking down unripe olives (if you like that better than lice.)

You say you can’t finish your book because you have no method, but see points, here and there, with no connecting line. And that is precisely my state at the moment, beginning another book [The Waves]; What do all the books I have written avail me? Nothing. Is it the curse of our age or what? The will o’ the wisp moves on, and I see the lights (when I lie in bed at night, or sit over the fire) as bright as stars, and cant reach them. I daresay its the continuity of daily life, something believable and habitual that we lack. I give it up. Not writing books I mean; only understanding my own psychology as a writer. I thought I had anyhow learnt to write quickly: now its a hundred words in a morning, and scratchy and in [hand-]⁠writing, like a child of ten. And one never knows after all these years how to end, how to go on: one never sees more than a page ahead; why then does one make any pretensions to be a writer? Why not pin together one’s scattered sheets—I daresay one would be wise to.

I heard from Saxon yesterday from Madrid, where, as far as I can see, all Bloomsbury is now conglomerated,—Barbara [Bagenal], Ralph [Partridge], Frances [Marshall] and Mrs Sickert. And Saxon goes on looking out trains and finding some hotels better than others, and this is the only fetching thing—being shown over the W.C’s of a large hotel in building at Ciudad Rodrigo. I think it was late at night too, when the electric light was flashing in the W.C. basin, and an old man, on the scaffolding kept laughing. Saxon could not think what at.

I have just sent a postcard to the Times Book Club asking for God by Middleton Murry. I would here launch into a dissertation upon literature, but I dare not begin another page when I am not only without the illusion that I am speaking the truth, but my pen has run out of ink.

However, you are not missing much. And if it should occur to you one night to attempt this curious effort at communicating what Gerald Brenan thinks on his mountain top, then I will first read it through very quickly, at breakfast, and come upon it a little later, and read it again and try to amplify your hieroglyphs—It is an interesting question—what one tries to do, in writing a letter—partly of course to give back a reflection of the other person. Writing to Lytton or Leonard I am quite different from writing to you. And now my log, shaped like an elephants foot, has fallen over, and I must pick up the tongs—goodnight.

V.W.

George Lazarus

[]

Letters 2079-2119 (October–December 1929)

2079: To Helen McAfee

4th Oct. 1929

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Miss McAfee,

Thank you so much for your cable. I had meant to write to you before, but I have been very busy. I am hoping not to write any articles for a little time, but to write fiction instead. But I shall probably write some more critical or biographical studies after Christmas,—I have not yet thought of them in any detail. Of course it would make a great difference if as you suggest The Yale Review were able to increase the fee to 200 dollars, but, if I may be frank, I find that I can dispose of my longer articles for a good deal more than that; and as I write journalism in order to earn a living, I have to accept the best offer. Would the fee you mention be paid for an article of say 3,000 words? There is also the difficulty that the Yale Review is a quarterly,—it means that the English editors are held up for so long. If at your leisure you would let me know what are the dates on which you have to have manuscript, it would be easier for me to make arrangements. I should like to write for you if I can possibly manage it. Please accept my best thanks for suggesting it so kindly.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Yale University

[]

2080: To Oscar Lewis

8th Oct. 1929

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Mr Lewis,

I have to acknowledge with thanks the receipt of your cheque for £25. 13.4 as first payment on the 250 dollars due for the right to reprint my essay Street Haunting.

I note that you are sending the sheets for my signature in due course, and I will sign and return as quickly as possible.

With best wishes
Yours sincerely
V. Woolf
(Mrs Woolf)

Columbia University

[]

2081: To V. Sackville-West

Friday [11 October 1929]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

If Miss Bosqui [Bosquet] liked to answer these letters, just come, I would give her my copy of the London Mercury Book—gladly, and a million thanks.

If she wrote very kindly and said (to the Lady) that Knole was intended [in Orlando]—and the climate changes in sympathy with the age—and gave her my kind regards—And then to the boy of 16, perhaps she could say that ‘Elizabethan’ is probably inaccurate; but intentional; and that the grammar is colloquial: and give him my kind regards—Oh Lord! I cannot write any more letters about Orlando or anything else—so if she could—but dont let her bother—I daresay she has enough to do—

You will come on Thursday afternoon wont you? and then after dinner.

Nelly [Boxall], being told it was Mr and Mrs Nicolson, insisted upon giving up her day and her love and her play and all. Such is the radiance and glamour.

Is this a dry letter?

V.

Berg

[]

2082: To Donald Brace

21st Oct 1929

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Mr Brace,

Many thanks for your letter. I shall be very much interested to see your edition of my little book [A Room of One’s Own]. I hope it will go well—I am sure it will not be your fault if it doesn’t.

It is very good of you to have troubled about the serialisation. But I am sure that it was not possible, given the difficulty of separating the chapters, and the short time before publication.

I am sending a photograph [by Lenare] that was taken a few months ago. It is considerably later than the one you have, and we are using it over here.

With kind regards,
yours sincerely,
Virginia Woolf

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

[]

2083: To V. Sackville-West

[22 October 1929]

[The Hogarth Press, Bloomsbury, W.C.1]

There! if you want coronets, you can have them.

Yes I would very much like to see you on Wednesday, but I cant manage a matinée—for one thing I always snore; then we’re very brisk at the Press, and my services are in demand—how I like it! doing up parcels, please remember open ends, Mrs Woolf, with bagmen coming in and out and saying Well good bye all when they leave; and we all say good bye. And then I’m given a cup of pale lemon tea, and asked to choose what biscuit I like; and we all sit on the edge of stools and crack jokes.

But couldn’t you come to tea? Please do. or anytime. I shall be in.

Yes, I’m delighted you read my little book [A Room of One’s Own], as you call it, dear Mrs Nick: but although you dont perceive it, there is much reflection and some erudition in it: the butterfly begins by being a loathsome legless grub. Or dont you find it convincing?

King’s D⁠[aughter], is selling well; as I know, doing them up by sixes and 12’s for the youth of Oxford and Cambridge.

Peter Lucas writes that he ‘fell to Vita’—and what did you do?

Such a rush, but shall see you tomorrow

V.

Berg

[]

2084: To V. Sackville-West

Sunday [27 October 1929]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Please attend—

Leonard says he’s going to dine out on Thursday. Could we dine somewhere after your [broad]⁠casting, and either sit and drink or go to a play?

Let me know, would you, like an angel, and dont read into these brief words any adders tails or viper’s gall. They are plain sense. I’ve been walking in Epping Forest. I think evening is more translucent and vibrating, or whatever the word is than afternoon—But dont hesitate to choose what you want.

V.

Berg

[]

2085: To Ethel Sands

Monday [28 October 1929]

52 Tavistock Sqre, [W.C.1]

Dearest Ethel,

What a pleasure to hear your voice! Nessa and Duncan assured me last night that you were in the highlands, Nan [Hudson] in the South of France, and I felt as if the nightingale had broken its promise. Yes, you must come to tea—Friday week, 8th. 4.30. Would that do? I’ll try to get Nessa—She has just settled into a vast studio—the same door as the old one—I forget if its 6 or 8 Fitzroy Street. Next door, in the house which is vast, to Duncan, all very comfortable.

But my ‘book’ isn’t a book [A Room of One’s Own]—its only talks to girls, lectures I gave last autumn, and not for the adult and exquisite like Ethel—Excuse my illiteracy—I cant form words.

Yrs
Virginia

Wendy Baron

[]

2086: To V. Sackville-West

Monday [28 October 1929]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Friday suits perfectly (only say what time—3.30 in Studio, unless I hear to the contrary). Providentially I had just put off Sibyl.

Lord! what a curmudgeon you must think me!—You write as if you were a dog that had been hunting. But you’re not a bad dog. You’re a good dog; you needn’t go under the table. How could you not be with Harold?

I shall be alone here, I think, on Thursday night, but I suppose you have to go back after seeing Harold off.

I hope you get your rooms. I want to be given lobster and crumpets there, as Clive used to give them, 20 years ago.

V.

in hurry, but love somebody all the same.

Nigel Nicolson (copy)

[]

2087: To Edward Marsh

28th Oct 1929

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Mr Marsh,

Of course I shall be delighted to help your young Frenchman if I can. (Oddly enough, another, whether delightful or not I dont know, has just written to ask me the same question.) T. S. Eliot wrote something in the Nouvelle Revue Française under the heading of Le Roman Anglais Contemporain, about three years ago, but I’m not sure of the exact date [May 1927]. E. M. Forster wrote an article in the Criterion, either at the end of 1925 or beginning if 1926 I think [April 1926]; Clive Bell wrote an article in the Dial I suppose five years ago [December 1924]; and M. Maurois wrote an introduction to the French Translation of Mrs Dalloway which came out last spring. There is also an article by Edwin Muir published in Transition, (Hogarth Press). This I think writes at some length of Mrs Dalloway. I hope some of these may be helpful; but as far as I remember they are not in agreement.

I’m so glad you liked my papers in the Nation. One of these days we want to approach you about a book for the Hogarth Press—would there be any chance of one? on any subject?

Yours very sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Berg

[]

2088: To V. Sackville-West

Tuesday [29 October 1929]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Here are some remarks upon Orlando and Viola that may amuse you—but will you bring them back, as I must answer the donkeys—nice good donkeys.

I have got into a muddle; (only having to buy a dress) and shan’t be in till 4 on Friday: so, will you come and wait in the Studio if I’m out (I’ll try to be earlier).

V.

Berg

[]

2089: To Hugh Walpole

Thursday [31 October 1929]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

My dear Hugh,

It is very nice that you are back. Could you come to tea on Friday 8th at 4.30? If you can, dont bother to write.

Yes, my book [A Room…], but I dont count it a ‘book’ is doing nicely—the expensive edition already sold out.

I’m furnishing my French [Cassis] house, but haven’t yet been there. I’m told it is a paradise on Earth.

Yr aff
V.W.

Texas

[]

2090: To V. Sackville-West

Sunday [3 November 1929]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Just come back from Rodmell.

Yes, I shall by good luck be alone for dinner on Thursday. Please let us dine somewhere and do something, or nothing. May I write later about the afternoon? I cant be sure if I can be here till late; but I’ll try.

I thought your voice, saying Virginia Woolf, was a trumpet call, moving me to tears; but I daresay you were suppressing laughter. Its an odd feeling, hearing oneself praised to 50 million old ladies in Surbiton by one with whom one has watched the dawn and heard the nightingale. I am at the moment groping to express these different levels of emotion—no, I’m too stupid after motoring even to get one word right. Isn’t it surprising—your praise at once sells 100 of my book—not a copy of Svevo. Also, until this autumn, nothing the B.B.C. could say made an ounce of difference. So you will have me at your skirts for ever. Is your cold better? Are you fond of me?

Virginia
[squiggly design]

Berg

[]

2091: To Clive Bell

Sunday 3rd Nov [1929]

52 Tavistock Square W.C.[1]

Dearest Clive,

This is not a letter but merely a request that you should transact for me two, I fear, troublesome pieces of business.

(1) Could you place this cheque (£5) with your bookseller to my account and say that I shall write and order books from time to time?

(2) Could you subscribe to Les Nouvelles Littéraires for me (cheque also enclosed). Quentin promised, but Quentin is faithless, and as I have been on the verge of writing a letter to them for 2 years I must seize the chance. Nessa says you are coming back soon [from Paris]; and I may tell you, as perhaps the truest compliment that you have ever received, that I wrote, spontaneous, not for publication, in my diary the other night [11 October] “I miss Clive”—But there is no reason to think that Clive misses Virginia. Anyhow, I will keep whatever news there may be for a possible hour between tea and dinner.

And please accept my thanks.

Virginia

Quentin Bell

[]

2092: To Harcourt, Brace

3rd Nov 1929

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Madam [Margaret Cuff],

I have to acknowledge with thanks the receipt of your cheque for 475 dollars in payment of advance upon A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN.

I should be obliged if you would tell Mr Brace how much I like the appearance of the book.

Yours very truly,
Virginia Woolf
(Mrs Woolf)

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

[]

2093: To V. Sackville-West

Tuesday [5 November 1929]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Creature,

Look here: attend:

I’ve got to see my mother in law Thursday, but shall be back by 6.30. Will you come then, and then we’ll dine somewhere under red lights with foaming glasses, unless you’d prefer dinner with Nessa: She wants us anyhow to go in afterwards. Some crones are coming. But just as you like.

6.30 anyhow here.

Love from Potto-V.

Berg

[]

2094: To G. L. Dickinson

Nov. 6th [1929]

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Goldie,

It was very good of you to write. I cant tell you how pleased I am that you like my little book [A Room …]—seeing that I nourish a deep if inarticulate respect and affection for you. I’m so glad you thought it good tempered—my blood is apt to boil on this one subject as yours does about natives, or war; and I didnt want it to. I wanted to encourage the young women—they seem to get fearfully depressed—and also to induce discussion. There are numbers of things that might be said, and that arent said. The double soul is one of them; and also education—I dont believe, though I’m a complete outsider, that its right for either sex as it is. But I’m certainly outstaying my welcome here. I was among your listeners the other night and would have liked (this hardly ever happens to me—I mean with lectures in general) that you had gone on. And I laughed aloud.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Sussex

[]

2095: To Theodora Bosanquet

Nov 7th [1929]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Miss Bosanquet,

One would need to be a very queer author not to be delighted by so kind a letter as yours. I am particularly glad that my little book [A Room…] should interest intelligent readers; I wanted to be readable and good tempered for the sake of the young women, and was afraid that my serious intention had suffered in the process. So it is very encouraging to find that you were interested.

Many thanks for your letter.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Houghton Library, Harvard University

[]

2096: To V. Sackville-West

Friday [8 November 1929]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

I forgot to say that Faith Henderson, wife of the Editor of The Nation rang up to ask if I thought she might ring you up to ask some question about a school. I said I thought you wouldn’t mind—so if she does, don’t curse her but

V.

Berg

[]

2097: To V. Sackville-West

Wednesday [13 November 1929]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Dearest Creature,

I am really awfully bothered about you, though George was reassuring on the telephone that evening. Thank Goodness, you’ve got into a room with a fire—I dont mind if its a room with a double bed and someone else in it, as long as you are warm. Mercy! to think of you with a cold, a temperature of 102 in your primeval barn. But may I observe that even if it isn’t pneumonia and isn’t influenza, and isn’t rhematic [sic] fever, appendicitis and jaundice, still it is absolutely necessary to spend the next week in a room with a fire; without roystering along passages, or into gardens. The telephone can wait. All I ask is as many brief but veracious cards as possible: stating temperature; whether in bed; when getting up. Now remember how lavish I was of every detail, of my shiver and shake, for 3 weeks last winter; and dont deny that you were on the whole, though bored, glad of it. Any small fact will please me; and then I needn’t bother George, whose telephone style though warm is inexpressive. “Mrs Nicolsons love. She says no need for worry with her love is sitting over fire”. (I hope you were lying in bed.)

I was late ringing up, because Julian [Bell] was here. We discussed poetry. And I said who in your opinion are the best living poets? He replied at once Vita and [Edmund] Blunden. Well thats what I call a genuine rouser—what I’d give my eyes for—the enthusiasm and generosity of youth; and Julian is a most taking boy, and said to be the best of his time at Kings. And thats what he says with a beautiful modest but glowing voice (having some sentiment about you personally) of Vita—Also he much admires Kings Daughter; and said when I told him Harolds view—What does Harold know about poetry?

Yesterday I was in mischief—in the arms of Osbert [Sitwell], and very fat they are too; on the carpet of Mrs Courtauld, and that is as thick and resilient as Osberts arms. Lord! what a party? I flirted and I flirted—with Christabel [McLaren], with Mary [Hutchinson], with Ottoline [Morrell]; but this last was a long and cadaverous embrace which almost drew me under. Figure us, entwined beneath Cezannes which she had the audacity to praise all the time we were indulging in those labyrinthine antics which is called being intimate with Ottoline; I succumb: I lie; I flatter; I accept flattery; I stretch and sleek, and all the time she is watchful and vengeful and mendacious and unhappy and ready to break every rib in my body if it were worth her while. In truth, she’s a nice woman, eaten with amorosity and vanity, an old volcanoe, all grey cinders and scarcely a green plant, let alone a shank left. And this is human intercourse, this is human friendship so I kept saying to myself while I flattered and fawned.

But I wouldn’t have gone at all had I known you were ill. Its painful how entwined I am with your aches and pains: and as I am honestly and truly incapable of standing strain—really I cant—so for Gods sake be careful; dont catch cold; do completely cure this one; dont give me another panic; I assure you I shall be ill if you do. And you wouldn’t like me to be ill.

I hope, oh I hope, you are now comfortable and quiet and warm and loving your

Potto and V.

Berg

[]

2098: To V. Sackville-West

Friday [15 November 1929]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Dearest,

I’m so glad you’re better—very glad.

I had an odd episode with Dotty about it—but I’ve no time to tell you.

Yes I’m dining with Sibyl [Colefax] on Monday, but I dont think its worth coming for that, as it wd. only tantalise, and Tuesday is an awful rush. Later in the week wd. be better; and there’s not much sense anyhow in rushing up in this weather. Lord how vile!

And I must rush out to dinner.

Three ‘rushes’ in 6 lines—so rushed am I—people arriving—missing my bus—reading the ms of that d—d lecture wh. I’ve got to finish tomorrow (Maurons)

I rather doubt that we shall go to Rodmell—too grim.

V.

Berg

[]

2099: To V. Sackville-West

Tuesday [19 November 1929]

52 T[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

What a bore you cant come! I’m so sorry about the sinus—I dont know whether its the same thing as an antrum—I hope not—anyhow I know theyre damnably painful. But it would be madness to come—The weather is unspeakable—a pane on my roof has been blown out. Everyone seems to be ill. Going to the garage yesterday the man said to me, “I’ve been ill for a fortnight; my wife has been ill for a fortnight; our little boy died of double pneumonia last night; and the dog has distemper.” This he repeated three times, always winding up solemnly and the dog has distemper as if it were the most important of the lot. But there was the child dead in the cottage.

No, I never saw your message about the book, so I’m sending you my grand edition—but dont give it away; exact at least—it is sold out, and therefore daily growing in value. The novel of the 90ties sounds fascinating beyond description—Leonard says he would like to discuss the size with you later. But God knows when we shall meet. Dottie has asked us to come to Penns on Sunday, but I don’t much expect that we shall. By the way, that woman, your friend Dottie, gave me the fright of my life about you and I’ve not got over it yet (but dont say anything to her). She sounds, from Sibyls account, in a highly agitated state. We discussed it last night—Lord Berners suggested that she should be “lunged” like a horse round her socks; I said he must be the ostler; I would crack a whip. Sibyls parties are improving—I rather enjoyed it—and flirted outrageously with Mary and Mary’s Barbara.

Lord! I’ve got so many things to tell you—but the most interesting is secret. All I can say is that I expect my life to change completely about Jan 1st—Events seem to succeed each other as they say in the papers with bewildering variety. I shall be glad when my broadcasting and my speaking at Mauron’s lecture are both over. And, your Hilda—my God what friends you have!—has not proved exactly helpful—but there—I daren’t say more for fear Hilda should be persuading you to take your medicine. If I had Hilda, I should not want medicine; but then of course you will say I am jealous. No. Its only that our taste differs. She affects me as a strong purge, as a hair shirt, as a foggy day, as a cold in the head—which last indeed I believe I am now developing (but its sure to be nerves) so if you listen in, you’ll probably hear sneeze, cough, choke. But as, what with Hilda and the B.B.C, my poor little article has been completely ruined (but dont whisper a word of this) I’m not altogether looking forward to 9.20 tomorrow night. Also I am billed at 9.15—Oh dear oh dear what a tumult of things one does one doesnt want to do! At the moment, though I’m triumphant; I have put off Eddy [Sackville West] I have put off Mr and Mrs Bagenal [Nick and Barbara]. I have put off Professor Hornell, on the ground of a previous engagement and am slipping round to tea with Nessa.

I’ve just read your letter again and I see you say that you may be coming up at the end of the week. If so, I’m having a morning off on Friday, and we might lunch somewhere. But I think soberly, not in the manner of Dottie, it would be madness to come.

V.

Berg

[]

2100: To T. S. Eliot

Sunday [24 November 1929]

52 T.S. [W.C.1]

My dear Tom,

I was in the devil of a temper, if that is what you mean (by my terrifying worse than Dr [John] Donne). At the last moment the BBC condemned Dorothy Wordsworth and made me castrate Brummell—never again. But perhaps you refer to my treatment of B.B. Was I very harsh? These horrid little articles cramp one so the features always become rigid—too this, or too that.

I suppose you won’t come in—and Vivien [Mrs Eliot] if she would—next Friday night, any time after 9 p.m. My Cambridge nephew [Julian Bell] is coming; and you know his opinion of T.S.E. I keep his respect by asserting that I’m by way of seeing you. And the truth is I never do. My love to Vivien.

yr aff
V.W.

Mrs T. S. Eliot

[]

2101: To George Rylands

Sunday [24 November 1929]

Monk’s House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

My dear Dadie,

Just a line to say how much I enjoyed your poem in The Nation. I thought it really came off—and was lovely.

No answer needed.

Your
Virginia

George Rylands

[]

2102: To V. Sackville-West

[26? November 1929]

52 Tavistock Sqre, [W.C.1]

It strikes me it would be much nicer if you would lunch here on Thursday, at 1. And then we could sit a little, and then go to Harold’s rooms or whatever you want.

Here is a letter which concerns you. Who is Angela [unidentified]?

Yr V

[]

2103: To C. P. Sanger

Wednesday [27 November 1929]

52 Tavistock Sqre, [W.C.1]

My dear Charlie,

We were so distressed to hear from Roger [Fry] of your illness that I cant help writing to send you Leonards and my best love. We think of you with such affection—I know you never believe me when I say it—and it is horrible to think that you are ill. Perhaps when you are better you will let me come and see you: That will be a great pleasure to look forward to. But now you must do nothing but get better. All your friends are thinking of you and wishing they could do anything to show their affection for you—It would really rather please you I think to hear the sort of thing that we are all saying.

But now I shall stop, and only send our love dear Charlie,

Your affectionate
Virginia

Daphne Sanger

[]

2104: To Daphne Sanger

[27 November 1929]

52 Tavistock Sqre, W.C.1

My dear Daphne,

I am so distressed to hear of your father’s illness. It was only last night that Roger Fry told me. I dont want to be a bother—but if you could send me a line on a card to say how he is I should be immensely grateful. And please if there were anything I could do, will you let me know? We both send our love to you and your mother.

Your affate
Virginia Woolf

Daphne Sanger

[]

2105: To David Garnett

[28 November 1929]

52 Tavistock Sqre., [W.C.1]

Dear Bunny,

Do you remember that we said we were coming to lunch on Saturday? It now proves to be impossible; what with one thing and another; but would it suit you and Ray [Rachel Garnett] if we aimed at lunch on Saturday 14th December? It would be a great pleasure to see you all.

Your affate
Virginia

Berg

[]

2106: To Hugh Walpole

[early December 1929]

52 Tavistock Square, [W.C.1]

My dear Hugh,

No alas, the 6th wont do because I’m going away. What about your coming to tea on Friday 13th? That seems the most feasible. Anyhow I will keep that, and will try to be alone. But why “for ever”? I’d rather jump off Waterloo Bridge than spend 50 years (which is your prospect of life I daresay) in the USA.

Friday, 13th, 4.30

Virginia

Texas

[]

2107: To V. Sackville-West

Tuesday [3 December 1929]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

This is just to say, dearest Mrs Nick, we do hope you weren’t fearfully bothered going up to Knole today. Potto thought of you. So did I too—a great storm came on, at about the very moment, on Southampton Row, orange and vermilion, and I thought Knole must have looked very tremendous.

No news—only my affection; and shall see you Monday lunch.

Oh by the way, was I very beastly to you, both the last times, about your friends and so on—From something Nessa said about something you said at Penns I think I must have rammed it in too devilish hard—it is my way when roused; but I’m only so roused once in a blue moon, and only then by the dearly loved and iniquitous. But if I was brutal, then do forgive and excuse. Please Vita, do forgive.

Potto and Virginia

How is the Sinus?

Berg

[]

2108: To William Plomer

[4 December 1929]

Postcard.

52 Tavistock Sqre, W.C.1

Will you dine here next Wednesday, 11th at 7.45—Lytton Strachey is coming.

Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

2109: To C. P. Sanger

Thursday 5th Dec. [1929]

52 Tavistock Sqre, W.C.1

My dear Charlie,

Your letter is the best news we have had for a long time. Of course you must do exactly as the doctors say, and see no-one, otherwise you would have us all round you. We were at Rodmell until today, but remembering your opinion of English country I wont describe it. But we have built on two dry rooms, where we shall hope to see you.

Nessa and Julian were made very happy by the good news of you last night—We dined at Charleston, in a gale of wind. Julian is evidently inheriting our attachment to Mr Sanger and is such a nice young man that I envy you his esteem.

It is very very nice to think of you at least out of bed sometimes and we both send our best love.

Your affate
Virginia

Daphne Sanger

[]

2110: To V. Sackville-West

Friday [6 December 1929]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Lunch here, Monday one.

An intolerable bore—we’re engaged in a lawsuit with the hotel and waste all our time with lawyers, but I don’t think it comes on till Friday.

So hope for Monday afternoon free, for anything:

V.

Berg

[]

2111: To Hugh Walpole

Saturday [7 December 1929]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Hugh,

A catastrophe has happened. We are in for a lawsuit with the Imperial Hotel, which is driving us crazy with a Jazz band; and I’m suddenly told that the case will be tried on Friday next. That is the day you were coming to tea. Whats to be done? I dont imagine that I shall get away till late. Is any other time or day possible for you? Let me know, and I’ll try to arrange. This is a perfect curse, and has wasted all my time—and I’m particularly angry that the devils, having made my evenings intolerable, should now destroy my last sight of you [before he went to America].

Your
Virginia

Texas

[]

2112: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

[December 1929]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Dearest Ottoline,

I’ve no doubt (from his book) that Lord D’Abernon is charming; but I’d rather be in a humbler state with you. Would Monday 16th 5.30 do? All my life is now upset by a lawsuit against a Jazz band in an hotel, and I may have to put you off and visit the eternal lawyers: but if not, and if I don’t hear, will come then.

Yr
Virginia

Texas

[]

2113: To Vanessa Bell

[9? December 1929]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Please may I engage the big tray with the figure

£5.5

The red tray

£2.2

And the small round purple tray (which Leonard wants to buy)

£1.5

Whom do we pay?

When can we have?

Theres no need for you to come on Wednesday to Islington unless you like—as you could see the chairs anytime—only I think I must go then. I’ll wait till you ring up on Wed. morning perhaps

V.

Berg

[]

2114: To V. Sackville-West

[10 December 1929]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

I dont think it will be worth your while to come tomorrow, because I’m going to Islington buying furniture with Nessa, and shant be back I suppose till six anyhow.—if then: Thursday I’ve got to go down to Rodmell, but shall be back by 5 I think—only does that leave time? If so, I shall be here and happy if you could come. Friday is the Lawcourts all day. And my mother in laws hotel [in Worthing] was struck by lightning but she escaped. Such is life.

Well I may see you Thursday evening perhaps—in haste

V.

The Cooling Show is open after all in Bond Street.

Berg

[]

2115: To David Garnett

10th Dec. [1929]

52 Tavistock Sqre., [W.C.1]

My dear Bunny,

I dont see any chance of coming now till after Christmas. We are engaged in a lawsuit. It is against the Imperial Hotel and their infernal band—so may be a nuisance, and begins on Friday.

But (to return to your letter) d’you mean to say your silken phrases are dug for and sweated out? I thought you dipped your brush and drew your stroke. And as for me, I write everything except Orlando 4 times over, and should write it 6 times; and after a morning of grunting and groaning have 200 words to show: and those as crazy as broken china.

These are sober facts; and then we, who live in the same age, and sometimes meet in the flesh, have these mistaken ideas about each other: What then is the worth of criticism?

I didn’t like Hemingway. I dont much care for Graves—

But here I must stop, hoping we shall meet this new year.

Yours
Virginia

Berg

[]

2116: To V. Sackville-West

Sunday [15 December 1929]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Sorry to have been so long answering—rather whirled about. Yes, we shall be delighted to dine on Thursday before Keynes, if invitation is still open. But if for any reason its difficult, lets dine at some pot-house and celebrate your scallawag baptism in audit ale and Cheshire cheese.

Very nice to see Mrs Nick again.

Love from Pot.
Yr V.

What time dinner?
Perhaps I shall see you first.

Berg

[]

2117: To Helen McAfee

16th Dec. 1929

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Miss McAfee,

I am so sorry to have delayed so long in answering your letter. I should like very much to send you something for your summer number; but I dont feel that I can at the moment deal with the subject that you suggest—How should one know a person? It is of course, very interesting; but I cant see it as an article at the moment. I will bear it in mind if I may.

I have been making various arrangements over here for articles, and perhaps one of them might suit you. I am vaguely thinking of some studies of Elizabethan characters and also of short stories. I dont like to bind myself, as I find it far best to write as the mood comes. Would it suit you if I promised to send something—either literary article, essay, or short story—for your summer number? I shall of course quite understand if you cant allow me so much latitude. I will at any rate put aside something to send you, and I note that you would have to have it by May 10th.

Many thanks for sending the Yale Review. I was much interested by Miss Sackville Wests article.

With kind regards

yours very sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Yale University

[]

2118: To Vanessa Bell

Monday 30th Dec 29

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest Dolphin;

What should we find at the gate, coming back to tea on Saturday in the rain, but a seedy grey Rolls-Royce; with the detestable Edgar [chauffeur], and the Keynes’. I dont see that ones friends have any right to mutilate one’s life in this way. There I was forced to rake the cinders of Bloomsbury gossip with Lydia—it was an insult—a murderous act and one has no remedy. They had a bag of crumpets, which Maynard steeped in butter and made Lydia toast. Its this kind of tallow grease grossness in him that one dislikes. But of course I admit they were amiable in the extreme. But then, curse them, we have to lunch at Tilton tomorrow. Leonard and I argued for an hour this morning—he says we are snobs and exaggerate; he says (but this is confidential) Clive in his present state is worse: and so on. However I must stick to facts.

(1) Could we come to tea on Saturday? because we are going up on Sunday morning. If this is impossible, perhaps we could come in on Sunday early and go on—but there will be rush and confusion and chaos—Let me know.

(2) Dont bring the trays. I will keep them in London now till I come down again. Could you put them where I can get them?

(3) We shall be delighted for you to have a Pither. No doubt Philcox [builder] could take it off and dispatch it.*

(4) Here, at last, is the cheque for the chair. Please go and buy it at once. As I said, Maples seems to me as adequate, for the secondhand, as my Islington shop at the moment.

(5) Yes: we will keep the 18th against every temptation—afternoon, I suppose.

(6) Do let me see the letters. I think Julian would be the right person to say if they are interesting impersonally. Perhaps one might add others—to Leonard (he has some long ones) and to Lytton. I dont think I had better write anything, if we should print them, because they seemed to me, the other night purely and entirely Cambridge: Lytton and Clive would be much better. Anyhow the cost of printing wouldn’t be much. But we must go into the matter.

There—I think thats all the business transacted, and there is really no more to say—except that, should you be seeing Roger, you might remark that we haven’t any rooms ready [at Monk’s House]—which is the fact. He asked if he could come; and I never wrote.

What I want to do is to go to Boudard for April and May: to Italy for June: then to come here. I feel more and more inhibited and irritated by London life: I feel its meshes closing in—Goldie, Ottoline, [Richard] Braithwaite, a beautiful and brilliant young woman of his,—perhaps Peter [F. L. Lucas]—all have to be seen next week: and what’s the point? Here one can sit on the fender and read. Even I can write an occasional sentence about a Moth, (oh curse you for having invented them.) All the processes of life, even in pelting rain, are pleasurable. One has no Nelly—no Lottie—no Mrs Mansfield. Domestic life transacts itself with perfect simplicity. Directly I go back I am badgered and worried; a thousand sucking vampires attach themselves to my ribs, and if I snatch up Milton once in a blue moon, its about all the reading for pleasure, I ever do. And that reminds me, who is Mrs Grants [Duncan’s mother] Constance Llewellyn? I have a mad letter from a so-called woman, in which she says that she has 4 children, no money, and has been 14 weeks in a nursing home. Will I therefore write and advise her how to bring up her eldest girl, Hermione, who longs to write but is not clever, because they know Mrs Grant whom they love, with whom they stay, whom I am said to know. Is she a lunatic? a paying guest, or what?

Well; if I stayed longer here I should flood you out with letters. The brooches slightly conveyed the chill and fervour of your eyes to me—I daresay they were ugly: but Queen Anne is said to have worn them (only by Mr. Goode)

I want to live at least 2 months in France and see the anemones open and hear some 24 nightingales and go gliding in and out of the bays—but even though we have shed The Nation (I had the divine pleasure of telling Maynard that it cant be worse under Harold than under Hubert) the press remains; and L. has taken against Cassis; so I shall never see my house, except perhaps for one week. However I will lay all this at your feet, whenever, God knows, we meet. I sent Angelica some toffee. I rather suspect Quinney [sweet-shop] never sent it.

B.

I suppose you are seeing Italian pictures—how odd—suddenly reading a completely new Shakespeare, Milton and I dont know who. You will be dazed—think of Roger.

* Let me know, as he is coming here, and I could give instructions.

Berg

[]

2119: To Ethel Sands

31st Dec. 1929

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

Dearest Ethel,

It is the standard that you set—you and Nan—the dove grey gloves, the pâté de foie gras—that’s what makes you as slippery as an avalanche or an eel or an iceberg when it comes to finding what represents your idiosyncracy on a wet day in Brighton. There was a shining shelly box which took my taste, but then my taste is bad, and it was altogether too Brightonesque and lodging house when I put it beside the gloves and considered you. What would do for Ethel and Nan? I demanded; Well Nan is having some youthful poems sent her, because she is an austere woman, rapt to the heart of nature; but Ethel? Something dark, glistening, exotic, mothy, luxurious, soft, rich, rare. The only thing that in any degree combines these qualities is, so far as I can see, the sperm of the sturgeon. So this is going to you, but if you loathe it, send it back, for there is a glutton in Gordon Square [Clive Bell or Keynes] who lives on it. What I should like would be to think of Ethel sitting all alone in her glass green room, spooning caviare with the bowl of a silver spoon onto brown bread and butter. But she shant, if she doesn’t want to.

Love from us both to you and Nan for 1930.

Yrs
Virginia

The gloves are divine—But what party will ever be their equal—I mean, that I’m asked to? The foie gras is waiting till I get home.

Wendy Baron

[]

Letters 2120-2145 (January-February 1930)

2120: To Edward Sackville West

1st Jan 1930

Monks House, Rodmell, [Lewes, Sussex]

My dear Eddy

I approach you as a supplicant—that is a bore. The cousin, of whom I spoke to you, Virginia Isham, has written from Berlin to ask if I can give her any introductions or otherwise help her to get a job either in the theatre or films. She has gone out with a friend on the chance of getting some acting; failing that, she would teach, and is teaching a waiter, so as to earn enough to live on. I scarcely know her; but she seems nice; English; determined to break from her family with which I sympathise; penniless and adventurous. But she is not beautiful, and I know nothing of her gift as an actress. She appeared in the Seagull at Oxford and was said to be good, and has acted in repertory companies in the provinces. Her brother Gyles acted Shakespeare at Oxford. She is also musical. Is this all too vague? Would an introduction to some of your friends be possible? Or could you give her any tips likely to be useful about approaching managers and film stars? It would be more than angelic if you could. I sympathise so much with her wish to break with the father and mother and their stodginess that I egged her on, and feel slightly responsible. Her address is

Pension Rath
Berlin W. 50
Marburger Strasse 5

or write any comments or advice to me.

We come back next week. I feel neither sociable nor humane towards the race;—almost decided to vegetate here in solitude for ever. The Keynes’ intervened, and there was the whole of yesterday gone bang. Lord how furious I was.—lunching respectably and discussing one’s friends: yet they were both very very very nice.

Well anyhow I hope I shall see you, and get my new year ruled with red indelible ink—absolutely straight, without a blot—you know what I mean, I apologise for being a bore.

Ever yr
Virginia

Berg

[]

2121: To Dorothy Tyler

1st Jan. 1929 [1930]

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Miss Tyler,

It is very good of you to write and tell me that you like my book A room of ones Own. It was the product of a highly unscientific mind, and I am therefore glad that you still find something true in it.

My knowledge of Greek history is small; but I suppose that writing poetry was, in one island and for a certain group of women, the habit at a certain period, and that Sappho was not a unique writer but supported by many other poetesses. That I think until the late eighteenth century was never the case in England. Why Sappho and the others were allowed to write, I do not of course presume to say. Historians perhaps might help. With thanks.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Library of Congress

[]

2122: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Thursday, 2nd Jan. [1930]

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes, [Sussex]

Dearest Ottoline

I meant to answer your letter in London—it was a very nice one; but O Lord you’re mistaken if you think I enjoy what you call “being surrounded by admirers”. What it means is that I am pinned down in my drawing room when I want to be wandering the streets to talk to some earnest American, or summoned to the bedside of Lady Cunard where all I get out of it is the wonder of her golden silk stockings. Surely, in our time something better than this ‘seeing’ people might be contrived. But you will have forgotten the sentence that roused this cry of rage in me. Here in the country one loses a little the old match box feeling—the rubbed and scratched match box feeling. But I am nearly driven to set up my house in a pine wood in France.

This leads, inconsistently, to saying that if you, who are so much more modest than you should be, still think it nice to see and be seen, will you come in on Wednesday night (8th I think) after dinner—when you’ll see Goldie Dickinson, a young man called Sprott, another called something else, and the semblance—because I certainly shant be myself—of your irascible but faithful

Virginia

We only skip about in old clothes as you know. However I like to see you in your splendour.

Texas

[]

2123: To William Plomer

2nd Jan 1930

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

My dear William,

As we left Tavistock Sqre before Christmas your presents arrived. Mine seemed to me inscrutable and fascinating. What is it? besides being an object of beauty? Leonard also wants me to thank you for the very good picture, which he is very glad to have. It will be an important picture in the Hogarth Press Gallery. Many thanks from us both.

But this is to ask, as well as to thank—and say will you come in on Wednesday (8th) next after dinner, when we have one or two queer people, and we want to put an idea for a book to you.

We go back on Sunday.

Yours ever
Virginia Woolf

I want you to tell me the name of the French man at your party. I didnt catch it.

Texas

[]

2124: To E. M. Forster

Jan 3rd 1930

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

My dear Morgan,

Many thanks for your letter. I think the only thing to do is to leave it entirely to Stock [French publishers]—they are very critical and have turned down several translators, and so far seem to give Mauron the preference over others. I never caught the Frenchman’s name—somebody in the city, a friend of William Plomers. His point was, having been to a lecture of Maurons, that he talked bad French, had a bad accent, and was not on the strength of the lecture, intelligent. The other frogs were some of Clive’s friends in Paris who remarked how well Mrs Dalloway was translated compared with the Passage, which they professed to find very bad: but who they were I dont know. Raymond’s [Mortimer] evidence was of the same kind. Why, I wonder, this hostility to Mauron in Paris? Is it disinterested criticism, or is there some motive behind? I shall tell Stock that I have no views, and will abide by them. From their letter to me, I didn’t realise that they had already commissioned Mauron.

Talking of Professors, d’you know one who would like to follow Blunden in Japan?

But there are many more interesting things to talk about than Professors. I must leave it to you, as a man of honour, to suggest a night when the Indians are gone. We’ve got a nice room for you here now—it will be nice when the plaster has ceased to drip and the windows to sweat which they do by nature, the builder says, for 3 months now. You must come in February.

And—being my best critic, as I think,—how glad I am you liked A room! I was awfully afraid you wouldn’t.

Love from us both
yr Virginia

and excuse the effusions of ink.

Sussex

[]

2125: To Virginia Isham

3rd Jan 1930

52 Tavistock Square, London, W.C.1 [Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

Dear Virginia,

I should be indignant if I had to call you Miss Isham. I wish we could have met before you left and discussed Berlin. I am very much interested—I wrote to Eddy Sackville West and asked him to send you any information or introductions so I hope he will. He lived in Berlin for about a year and knew a good many actors and film actors I think. But I daresay by this time you will have had some adventures and discovered everything yourself. It seemed to me the ugliest town in the world but thats all the more reason why they should have good theatres. We spent most of our time [in January 1929] at the opera, but it was in the middle of the great frost, and life was difficult.

Let me know if Eddy doesn’t write. I think I could get hold of somebody from the Nicolsons.

I’ve not heard of Valerie Taylor for ages. Best wishes,

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Northamptonshire Record Office

[]

2126: To Ethel Sands

Sunday [12 January 1930?]

52 T[avistock] S[quare, W.C.1]

Dearest Ethel,

Lytton, of course, has not answered, but all the same I don’t think I’ll come: the thing is I am dining out—or having tea or some intolerable horror out of the past here so often next week that I am cross and distracted and should only be a blot on your table. And I like to be a radiance, as you know. So may I come another time, or you come to me here? How do you keep your suavity and adorability, seeing all the people you see I can’t think.

My tongue dies, my heart crackles: but my love for you remains.

Yrs
Virginia

Wendy Baron

[]

2127: To Clive Bell

Sunday Jan 18th [19]30

52 Tavistock Sqre., [W.C.1]

“I feel a qualm” said Lytton, as we came downstairs the other night. “I shall miss him” “So shall I” I replied. “And we never said good bye,” “Shall we go back?” “No, we cant.” “Perhaps he wont go after all [to Paris]” said Lytton. This is an authentic report of what was said by two old friends on your green carpet the other night. And of course, we didn’t go back; and of course you did go. But as I cant very well leave off at this point at the top of the page I will make you eat your words about my never writing—disinterestedly too, in the service of truth, for God knows, I shant get an answer. I will just tell you the course of my life (dont complain of the writing—unless I dash it off before lunch, I never shall.)

Well, it was a fine spring day yesterday, and having failed to get the book I wanted at the London Library (where Mr Cox has at last forgiven me my lack of baptism owing to Leonard’s very generous subscription) we drove to Chelsea, to visit Charlie [Sanger], and take a walk in Battersea Park. But who can that seedy battered figure be, swinging along over the Bridge and talking aloud, under a vast black sombrero, with his bulging old ulster caught in by a strap? Can Francis [Birrell] really look like that from behind? He can. So we halted, and took him on board for he was going walking in Battersea Park too. It belonged to Lord Bolingbroke, he said, and there is a certain distinction I always think—some relics of the 18th Century. Pope lived here. Also there is a jackdaw. We have an aviary. I perceived that Battersea Park is one of the possessions which people in Chelsea secretly pride themselves upon: which was confirmed by the two ravens and the three owls (Look in the corner there—there’s another owl in the corner) which Francis led us to look at, having modestly promised only one jackdaw. But to cut this short—Dora [Sanger], having appointed me to come to Oakley Street at 3.30, had of course left it to poor dumpy desolate and crumpet complexioned Daphne [their daughter] to explain that Charlie lies some two miles north in Princes Gardens; so there we went. Footmen in maroon. Pile carpets in terra cotta. A lift. A bedroom like the back bedroom in a South Kensington second class hotel, and there was Charlie in bed—wizened, Arabian—I mean with starting blue eyes, tanned red cheeks, and intermittent teeth: he looked uncommonly ghoulish, and spider fingered and like some gnome which sits on a lamp and grins and then disappears in green flame. The decay of our friends is a miserable topic: he could only play with mathematics of blood pressure, in a fitful and exhausted way; unable to grasp some curious fact about the proportion to be observed between age, normality, and morbidity. Yet he has lost none of his tenacity—only some of his teeth. The future, I’m afraid, is rather hazardous. They say he must treat his profession [the law] as a hobby. I suggested that this was all to the good, considering the obscurer passages of Dante, the number of months that Virgil spent in Ancona, and other problems that remain to be investigated: but of course one must place in the scale—and she is not improved by misfortune, and stumps clumsily from room to room—poor Dora; and life at 58 Oakley Street.

Anyhow, off we went; and hearing a battering and booming in our basement, discovered Julian, who had been ejected by the painters, all crockery floor space and table space being needed for the preparations for the party. But he was in high feather, Miss Allanah Harper having asked him for a poem. Time was when Miss Allanah could have sent a thrill through my spine by asking me for a poem—now I grumble for she misspells, misprints, and does not pay a penny. Also Julian had signed on at Lincolns Inn, that moment, and altogether promises to do us all infinite credit, if he does bash in half a dozen cars or so meantime. But now, having prepared our dress, which consisted—and the point is not made vainly as you will perceive if you read on—in my case of a pair of hare’s ears, and a pair of hare’s paws (you remember the March hare) we went round to Fitzroy Street. Roger [as the White Knight] had taken the place by storm. The children crowded round him like the piper. He was a masterpiece, having called out all the resource and ingenuity of Woolworths stores. Candles, mousetraps, tweezers, frying pans, scales—I know not what all—dangled from him by brass chains, infinite in number; his legs were bound in cricket pads; he wore chain armour on his breast; his cheeks flowered in green whiskers, and the surface of the body where visible was covered in white yeager [Jaeger] tights. Encouraged by the extravaganza I turned lightly on my heels (a hare, you remember and mad at that) and tapped Dotty on the nose. Whether she was tipsy already or merely sour by nature, God knows; anyhow she flared up like a costermonger; damned my eyes; and this not in play; and swore I had wiped all the powder from her face. The worst of it was, that having recovered her temper she went by natural precipitation, into the opposite extreme of facetious and persistent amorosity, with the result that I spent the evening with her at my side—petulant, peevish, disconnected, incapable of a sensible, sober, let alone intelligent remark—all was high flown, rhapsodical and pert.

Enough, enough, I have vented my spleen where I dare hope it will be understood. In every other way the party was a complete success—hams disappearing—Angus [Davidson] assiduous and more than gentlemanly; Barbara [Bagenal] owing to her disguise negligible; and Angelica ravishing, flirtatious, commanding and seductive. Vanessa presided unperturbed—and going home Leonard, wearing a green baize apron and a pair of chisels as the Carpenter came in conflict with the police on behalf of a drunken prostitute, who, being insulted by three tipsy men, answered them back in their own coin. “Why dont you go for the men who began it? My name’s Woolf, and I can take my oath the woman’s not to blame. She called them bugger; but they called her whore”—and so on—holding his apron and chisel in one hand; upon which Lydia suddenly appeared out of the crowd; and by hook or by crook the affair subsided and we went home to bed.

Such is life. It is another fine spring day; and if it were not that I’m afflicted with Gumbo (you remember how we held her under, without success, off Swanage, 20 years ago?) I should be tempted to go roaming. As it is, I must on the contrary fix my mind upon some definite but not to me romantic spot. Has she had Josh?—has she not had Josh?—well, either way it dont matter that I can see: how sick she would have made you last night, in the housemaids flannel jacket and a false nose, like a turkeys wattle! Tomorrow I go to Puss in Boots with Angelica; on Tuesday dine with Ethel to meet Ruby that was Peto; on Wednesday I hope Lytton comes to tea; on Thursday I introduce Quentin to Colefax: on Friday, praise Heaven, I go to Rodmell; and if the postman, on his motor cycle, were to stop in the dark, just as I’m lighting the lamp after tea, with a letter from Paris, how happy I should be. Its not likely though; nor that you will ever read through this long ill considered and ill written letter, whose warmth of impulse must be its excuse. “I miss Clive”—that from Lytton and Virginia spontaneous and uncalled for, does seem to me, vain as I am, a bit of a tribute.

yr Virginia

Quentin Bell

[]

2128: To Desmond MacCarthy

Monday [27 January 1930]

52 Tavistock Square, [W.C.1]

My dear Desmond,

It was a great delight to read your article. I never thought you would like that book—and perhaps you didn’t: but anyway you managed to write a most charming article, which gave me a great and unexpected pleasure. (Apart from that, you must let me collect your articles. This is no joke.)

By the way, did you refer to Lawrence? The novelist marked by an initial? He was not in my upper mind; but no doubt was in the lower.

Ever so many thanks and I pray we may meet when Lord Buckmaster no longer asks me if I knew the late Lord Tennyson.

Yrs affect.
Virginia

Love to Molly, I’m going to start an old-fashioned correspondence with her, if she is willing, on quarto sheets, all about the soul, the heart and the emotions.

Mrs Michael MacCarthy

[]

2129: To Ethel Smyth

30 Jan. 1930

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Miss Smyth,

If you only knew how often I have wanted to write to you—and only didn’t for fear of boring you—to thank you for your books and articles and to ask you about my great grandfather Pattle who shot up out of a barrel, as you say, in the Indian ocean—then you wouldn’t apologise. There is nothing I should like better than to see you—and you might like me. Who knows? Thursdays my husband, whom you would like, is here—but as you only come sometimes, please say which day suits you and we will keep it.

I am very glad you liked my little book [A Room …]. It was rather a wild venture, but if you think there is something in it, I am satisfied.

Yours sincerely and with as much admiration as you will accept,

Virginia Woolf

Berg

[]

2130: To William Plomer

Friday [31 January? 1930]

52 Tavistock Sqre., [W.C.1]

Dear William,

Its very good of the Oxford Society to ask me—but nothing will induce me to open my mouth in public so long as I live. I loathe lectures—to hear or to give—and how any rational person can think otherwise God knows. Can you put this politely, without mitigating the truth?

We have won our case [against the Imperial Hotel Company], did we tell you?—they want to settle it and pay expenses and screw all windows: a triumph—

Yrs
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

2131: To Sibyl Colefax

[3? February 1930]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Sibyl,

The wretched Wolves cant think how to express their sorrow at your illness. At all times unmannerly, they are at their worst when they wish to show their affection. Are there any books that we could send? Leonard would like to give you a primula, grown from seed in his glasshouse. But these are nothing compared with the flu, which is only to be met by complete quiescence—no luncheon, tea or dinner. Do not allow Jacques Blanche inside the house.

I saw Sir Arthur [Colefax] at Burlington House on Tuesday, but was too conscious of the distinction of the lady in the chair [Edith Sitwell] to go up and ask after you. Lord! there were a lot of people, and many who had vowed never to meet again meeting there. How does one refuse the M. of Londonderry? Aren’t I rising in the scale! It’s true only so far as the party to which every plumber’s wife in London is asked, but still—its rising. And I am plunged into the arms of Ethel Smyth. I feel them already hugging tight. It is a breathless rapture. And Vanessa has a show tomorrow; and all B——y is much excited. And we’re asked to sell this house and must find another. Lady Frances Balfour should have asked her kitchenmaid’s advice before she took to the pen. However, she amuses me, with her ill-bred aristocratic manners. Do you know her? But of course you do, and could tell me the whole story if I had you here to tea: which I shall hope for next week. Please be careful.

Yrs V.

Michael Colefax

[]

2132: To Ethel Smyth

Tuesday [4 February 1930]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Dame Ethel Smyth (I’m afraid I miscalled you before)

Alas, we are going down to the country early on Friday. But if you would name any day next week, I would keep it free. I’m sending you a book of pictures by a great Aunt of mine, in which I quote your opinion of my great grandfather [Pattle]. But this is no return whatever for the immense pleasure I have had from your books (I dare not say music, because though willing, I am ignorant) in which my husband agrees with me.

Virginia Woolf

Berg

[]

2133: To Clive Bell

6th Feb 1930

52 Tavistock Sqre., [W.C.1]

Dearest Clive,

I wrote you a very long letter [2127]—4 pages I think—so long a letter I’ve not written this 10 years—the week you went, to record a pleasing tribute paid to you after your party by Lytton and myself going downstairs: “We shall miss him” we said, and half turned back to tell you so. It contained also, besides affection and some gossip, various indiscretions about Dotty, with whom I happened to be in a temper. This I sent to the Hotel de Londres [Paris]; now Nessa says you never went there. There then it remains, mouldering in a wire cage, but unless Dotty passes and peeps, like Pippa, it dont much matter.

And now Eddy [Sackville West] will have whipped the cream off the gossip of Bloomsbury. Eddy will be arriving this moment, very trim, in spite of his night journey. As for your request about Brian Howard, I’m quite ready to encourage, but dont see that I shall have the opportunity. As you know, Dotty refused to publish him, for which I dont altogether blame her, seeing that his poems are steeped in Tom [Eliot]—a scent that sticks like the skunk or the musk and one can’t smell any other. All the same, I thought they had merit.

Tom by the way writes today that he is just moving to a house, from a flat,—the 5th move in 6 months; which means I suppose that the worm in Vivien turns and turns, and not a nice worm at that. Then of course we discuss the new paper—the Antidote it’s to be. Last week, I could have sworn it was accomplished—Roger had the £12,000 jingling in his pocket and was appointing Editors, calling board meetings, arranging for little men in the Boulevards to cry it by night. At dinner yesterday however, all this had sunk to a whisper. I doubt that he has more than a promise from some tipsy Lord. And also he is gravely disturbed by Raymond’s suggestion to print on shiny paper. You know where shiny paper leads—to fashion, rank and Mayfair. So I doubt—but anyhow Leonard is quit of the Nation next week, and the amiable Blunden succeeds to the office stool and Mrs Jones’s somewhat ample favours.

The great world is not much with us. Sibyl has been raving, she says, with influenza, and the quick wits among us invent her sayings—indeed say they dont need much inventing. Christabel [McLaren] gave a party—did not ask me—on the other hand, Lady Londonderry gave a party and did ask me—at which my heart leapt up, as you can imagine, until I discovered that it was to meet 500 Colonial dentists and to hear Mr [Alfred] Noyes read his own poetry aloud. Not a distinguished gathering. Angelica has knocked two pieces off her front teeth. It doesn’t show so much as might be,—and Julian goes booming about, like a gigantic dor-beetle. (When I was a child they always hit the wire netting when we were playing cricket—but the sound means nothing to you.) I dined with Ethel [Sands], and was plucked by the hair from a tender and intimate—yes we were really growing intimate, after 30 years—tête à tête with Desmond to be asked “And did you ever know Lord Tennyson? Mrs Woolf?” by an aged enlightened Liberal peer, called Buckmaster; who then recited, word for word, in tones of awful dignity (while I toyed with an ice, and you know how I love ices, and how good Ethel’s are—but the poor woman’s gone soft and sleepy like a pear in which even the wasps are sodden) No Coward Soul is mine [Emily Brontë]. The point of the story is that he has offered to give Julian every sort of introduction. And then we had snatches from the Ring and the Book [Robert Browning]. Ruby Peto Lindsay was there, and is said to be his mistress—Buckmaster’s I mean: but time has blurred her fine features for fine they were, in the gaslight in Fitzroy Street when the century was no older than two or three.

Duncan gave a little lunch party to Lytton, Nessa and me, on the day of her private view (I doubt if that is grammar) at the Gargoyle. Old Lytton sprinkled the Antidote with tepid sprays; and Duncan became inextricably involved telling a story about a—about a—oh I cant remember, if indeed I ever knew what Duncan’s story was about, and so we went on, until the afternoon light was waning, and Duncan and I walked to Bond Street, and were so elated by every incident,—for one thing the discovery of Blake’s house, for another an old man playing a violin said “Good bye to you,” that we found ourselves inside one of the smartest shops in Bond Street asking the price of rings. Well they cost £120, and I had been ready to give £5.10. So on, and with considerable dignity, to the Show; and there was that woman (and she’s a good mother I grant you) Faith [Henderson]; but when she opens her mouth there should be a curtain before it, as before the doors of great cathedrals; things must pass in and out; but the vision of the altar with the red coral stripes, surely that should be concealed.

I am droning on, writing nonsense. Nessa sold 5 pictures I think the first day—needless to say not to Mrs Grenfell, Lydia, or Dotty; who all stood in a group discussing how the man p—d in front of Vera Bowen’s house—its an old story and a dirty, but anything to save buying pictures. Lydia by the way has fallen and cut her lip skating.

I’m afraid Charlie Sanger is very bad; but Heaven knows—the news comes through Roger, through Dora.

And now I’m going to dine with Nessa, while Leonard dines with the Cranium.

Yes, I miss Clive.

Virginia

Quentin Bell

[]

2134: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

8 Feb. 1930

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dearest Ottoline

(Armada is a very good name too). We are down here, freezing and withered in the east wind. But its very beautiful too, all covered with snow, pink and violet. I shall be back in a day or two, but life has heaped up so many muddles next week that I am rather in difficulties. The week after? A Tuesday or Wednesday between 5 and 6? And alone or with your Lady, whom I met years ago, as you like. Send a card if you wish—I’m so unhappy about Charlie. We got a desperate account as we came here, only from a maid—

Yr VW

Texas

[]

2135: To Dora Sanger

Sunday [9 February 1930]

52 Tavistock Sqre., [W.C.1]

My dear Dora,

I hope you won’t mind my writing to you—it is only to gratify my own feelings. I have been thinking again and again at Rodmell of you and Charlie and wishing I could tell you how much your and his friendship has been to me. It began years ago, after my brother died, and all this time I have felt him there, with his extraordinary goodness and understanding. I don’t suppose he ever knew how grateful one was. And yet—it is no exaggeration—one will need him and miss him all one’s life. Your letter to Leonard makes me very angry with myself. How can I have been such a fool as to spoil those days with “merciless chaff”? It must have been some idiotic mood—probably nervousness—on my part. I do hope you will forgive me and believe in the sincerity of my affection.

We both send our love to you and Daphne. I hope she will think of us as friends (though so old) and come and see us sometimes.

Yours ever
Virginia Woolf

Of course, don’t answer.

Daphne Sanger

[]

2136: To Ethel Smyth

Tuesday [11 February 1930]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear dame Ethel Smyth.

If you knew how many lies I told all Sunday and yesterday about not having a temperature in order not to put you off, and then was caught out, and then said very likely you wouldn’t catch it, and was then forced to ring up and explain, you wouldn’t accuse me of telling lies—anyhow to you—I was never so truthful in my life. It did seem rather monstrous to let you come here and get the influenza at your first encounter: But what about Friday 4.30? I expect to be all right then; or Monday 4.30? I’ll keep both till I hear.

And I have a request. I went to get Impressions that Remain today, and found only vol 2. which I have read from end to end lying in front of the fire with my dog. But I cant leave you half in half—Could you LEND me vol 1? It would be an angelic charity—if you dont hate doing up parcels. What a fascinating book! How did you learn to write like that?

Yours very sincerely
Virginia Woolf

My husband is up again but says he is stupid as an owl.

Berg

[]

2137: To V. Sackville-West

Tuesday [11 February 1930]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Oh damn, I came back from Rodmell with the flu and am in bed so I’m afraid I cant dine on Thursday. I suppose you wouldn’t come to tea tomorrow?—only if I’m normal though—(Leonard’s had it too). But you shant run any risk. Perhaps you would ring up. It would be very nice to see you.

Yr
Virginia

Berg

[]

2138: To Ethel Smyth

13th Feb 1930

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Dame Ethel Smyth,

But this generosity is absolutely unheard of and wrong. I said LEND and instantly two volumes [of Impressions that Remain] are shot at my feet. Well, if you will write my name in them, I can’t ask more or resist. Of course I read them the year they came out, with rapture, and bought the red Edition later, which my sister Vanessa, who has only read 3 books in her life, stole, leaving me only the second volume. I think I could stand an examination in all your aunts, uncles, horses and dogs. I am now re-reading, with the additional delight of being the possessor, though I fear by unfair means. It is one of my favourite works, and I have even gone so far as to say so in print. Yes, I think your mother adorable. So was mine.

What a relief to my mind that you are shabby! Then I needn’t mend the hole in my solitary dress, as I had fully intended.

I am still in bed, and suppose should have had, in honesty, to put you off tomorrow, owing to a temperature; so Monday will be perfect.

Really I cant thank you enough for the books, to which I am now going to return

Yr grateful
Virginia Woolf

Berg

[]

2139: To V. Sackville-West

Thursday [13 February 1930]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Look, Potto has written you this cheque. Its the only possible, and most painless way. Have you got it? (I mean influenza). I shall be alone to tea tomorrow, wh. is Friday, and, if you liked to come, wd. not ask anybody. Perhaps you’d ring up. But for the Lord’s sake dont bother about it.—I mean, I can get somebody else—not as nice though.

V.

Berg

[]

2140: To Ethel Smyth

14th Feb. [1930]

52 Tavistock Sqre, [W.C.1]

Dear Dame Ethel Smyth.

You will hate the sight of my handwriting. Honesty, which I loathe more and more, compels me to say that I am still in bed with a temperature, and the dr. says I am not to see anyone till I’m normal, and thinks there is no chance of this by Monday.

I’m so disheartened I dont know what to suggest. May I let you know when I’m well on the chance that you can come? There is nothing I should like more than to see you; it is infuriating to have got ill at this moment—All I can do is to read you and wish to goodness you had written 10 volumes not 2.

Well, I shall try for a later day next week, and please don’t forget your promise in the meantime

Yrs sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Berg

[]

2141: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

[mid-February 1930]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Dearest Ottoline,

What a nice letter! I’m going to add Hispaniola to Armada. One of these days I shall write about you—what fun it would be—with the yellow silk sails all rent by shot, and the golden Eagles spread on the masts: but this is only a joke—I’m in bed with influenza and want to read your memoirs: and like making up stories about you. The wilder and stranger the better.

But I am writing to ask could you give me the name and address of the man I met at your house in the summer who was connected with preserving downs? I am horrified to find that the Brighton Council propose to make a road through the loveliest part, behind us, and through our meadow, for no reason except to provide work and the sheer devilry of their hearts. This will mean villas, shops and ruin like Peacehaven. If I write my fingers off, I want to stop it; but can only think of him, and how he said there was some Committee or Council—I cant remember what. His name on a postcard is all I want—unless in your bounty you can think of something else. It is still one of the loveliest places in the world, and then they want to have a coast road and omnibuses—oh the damnable stupidity of the English middle class!

Did you go to Charlie’s [Sanger] funeral? I feel very unhappy about him—what you say is quite true—there was a great beauty about him, and I only wish one had made oneself see him more. Idiotic things prevent one—But I did go just before he died.

Yr
Virginia

Texas

[]

2142: To Clive Bell

Feb 16th 1930

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Clive,

What I should like would be a long long letter of affection and gossip. I have been in bed a week with influenza, and [Dr] Elly [Rendel] proposes to keep me on the sofa another week. You realise therefore my state of mind: and you sit naked in the sun!

I’m strongly tempted to fly to my pinewood at Cassis. If so, we may meet. London is too cold, too crowded, too full of funerals and influenzas.

I am reading Byron—well, there’s a lot to be said about Byron—Maurois does not understand him, but has the merit of making me think that I do.

Enough though: this is only a plea for a letter.

And hiss in Eddy’s ears the words Virginia Isham.

yr
Virginia

Quentin Bell

[]

2143: To Ethel Smyth

Monday [17 February 1930]

52 Tavistock Sqre., [W.C.1]

My dear Dame Ethel

Once more….

I suggest this very next Thursday for the following reasons—

The temperature is now only a small one (I’ve often had them and they dont matter).

I am not infectious.

You wont mind if I wear an old dressing gown.

You will excuse my stupidity and put it down to influenza.

If you dont come then, we may go away, and never meet for years.

Also, I can telephone on Thursday a.m. if anything terrible happens.

So I shall expect you on Thursday 4.30. Is this explicit?

Of course I want your book. I think I missed that, though everything else, as I believe, of yours is known to me. You are, as I hope to explain a highly interesting portent to us old hacks—

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Berg

[]

2144: To Julian Bell

17th Feb. 1930

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Julian,

1…. Would you be so good as to take two tickets for the Marlowe (same as you get for Nessa) for Saturday night.

2… Would you be so good as to take two bedrooms at the Bull, same as Nessas, for Saturday and Sunday nights.

3… Would you be so good as to take out a subscription for me to the Venture and send me the first number. I will repay.

There! Even you, poor brat, cant pretend that this is illegible or obscure in intention. As for the spelling, it is so perfect that it may present some difficulty to those who … but enough.

I am sitting over the fire with influenza and would like to read your works. Lord! How precocious you are—flourishing in all the public prints at your age, when I, at the same, modestly cowered anonymous in the review columns of the Times!

Nessa’s show is a great success. Leonard is fabricating the new paper [Antidote] tonight. Mr Empson came to see us. A raucous youth, but I think rather impressive and as red as a turkey, which I like. I am reading Childe Harold. If Byron had lived to my age he would have been a great novelist. As it is, he is the worst poet.

Now Julian do go and see about the rooms and tickets and dont have us fobbed off with a dog kennel this time.

Your loving
Aunt Virginia

Quentin Bell

[]

2145: To Quentin Bell

17th Feb. 1930

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Sq., [W.C.1]

My dear Quentin,

I have been having influenza, and being in bed, could not write to you, because I could not type, and so the most amazing letter in the world (which it would have been) remains unwritten. My brain was packed with close folded ideas like the backs of flamingoes when they fly south at sunset. They are now all gone—a few grey draggled geese remain, their wing feathers trailed and mud stained, and their poor old voices scrannel sharp and grating—that’s the effect of typing; every sentence has its back broke, and its beak awry. Nevertheless, as I want nothing so much as another letter from you, I must eke it out.

I am sitting over the fire with masses of virgin—what d’you think I’m going to say?—typescript by my side; novels six foot thick to be read instantly or I shall be knived by cadaverous men at Bournemouth whose life depends on my verdict; and amorous typists. They write because they cant have their nights to their liking. This is hard on me. They write to revenge themselves upon the young man at the fish shop, or the young woman in red at the flower shop. So what news have I? Helen’s [Anrep] been here; Roger’s been here; and Nessa; and Vita; and just before I fell ill, your Miss Watson. She is a nice girl—yes, I liked her. She stood fire from Roger very well. He was at his most sweeping and searching, raking her with terrific questions and denunciations. There was Julian’s Mr Empson too—a black and red sort of rook, very truculent, and refreshing. None of your etiolated, sophisticated, damp, spotted, you know what I mean—Tonight theres a grand meeting, which I cant attend, of the new paper promoters, at Rogers. How young and ardent we all are at our age, flinging guineas on the waves and believing in the rule of reason and the might of art and the downfall of our enemies! But Raymond says the paper must be shiny; Roger says shine means shoddy; shine means Mayfair. Well, you can fancy how the argument goes and the tempers fly and the old friends are excoriated. I meant to go to Heals to see your picture, but was ill that moment; however if its there next week I shall try. Nessa has had a great success and members of the aristocracy rend their gloves asunder competing for her pictures. My foreword has roused Mr Rory Mahoney as his name suggests to fury. He says I am indecent, and must be suppressed. Never mind, Sickert has asked me to foreword his show; and I’m now asked to lecture on Art at the Royal Academy! only on Zoffany it is true, from the social aspect, still its the R.A., and I am very much set up to think how a writer can be of use in your sublime silent fish-world. Still, I shan’t. No; I can’t. I can only write gibberish—oh you cant think what gibberish my next book will be. I fancy you tactfully apologising and tapping your forehead when you hear people say, Is that your Aunt?

I have a wild plan to go to Cassis next week to recover. If so, we might meet in the Gare de Lyons, and coming back recovered I should spend two or three days at the [Hotel de] Londres and then we would sit in the spring light quizzing and fizzing—what fun, oh what fun. And why does one never do, instantly, the things one thinks of?

I am now drifting to the region of questions. What did you have for breakfast? Where did you dine last night and so on? And are you in love? And are you happy? And do you sometimes write a poem? And have you had your hair cut? And have you met anybody of such beauty your eyes dance, as the waves danced, no it was the stars; when Shakespeare’s woman—Lord lord I’ve forgotten all I ever knew—was born?

Well here I will stop; It is five oclock on a fine evening, and if I were a painter I should take my colours to the window and do a brilliant little panel of the clouds over the hotel; how I should like bowling them round and filling them in with a fiery white and bluish grey.

Well dearest Quentin write me a nice long letter please.

Your poor dear old dotty
Aunt V.

Quentin Bell

[]

Letters 2146-2171 (February–April 1930)

2146: To Ethel Smyth

24 Feb. [1930]

52 Tavistock Square, [W.C.1]

I liked your extravagant telegram immensely and the book came and your letter. Shall I get another letter? Not unless I write one, perhaps. The truth is that I went out, inspirited by your visit, for a walk on Saturday and went into the question of church decoration at Hampstead garden suburb, and so, not unnaturally, had to retire to bed again, where I am. But this time it is what they call nerve exhaustion and not a temperature—if that conveys anything to you.

It is incredible stupidity and drowsiness. If I drop my book I don’t pick it up—This explains why, except for 2 or 3 paragraphs, I have read none of the Prisoner. But one of these paragraphs was so interesting that I thought I must have written it myself. This is the highest compliment I can pay any writer:

And that reminds me—you threatened to read my books—Please don’t. I feel without doubt and without sorrow, but serenely and certainly that you won’t like them; and that this is not one atom to your discredit or mine. It is merely a matter of blue eyes or brown. Let us bury my pen, and never mention it. Yours is interesting, and so we can discuss it.

Very oddly and indeed as if sent by providence, George Duckworth my old half brother turned up the day after you came—which he has not done these 10 years—and told me that a cousin has left him a miniature of old Pattle surrounded by wife and daughters done in France. He is going to send me a photograph, which I will send you.

I do hope you dont think me a valetudinarian? All this bed sounds rather suspicious: You see how I cherish your good opinion.

I felt guilty letting you come up, as I found out by chance, merely to see me—But for me it was worth it—well.

Yr
Virginia

Berg

[]

2147: To Janet Case

Monday [24 February 1930]

52 T.S. [W.C.1]

My dear Janet,

The flowers came out and are only today shrivelled—all this time they have been wide open and exquisite—lovelier than all the flowers in shops.

I’m normal, but still in bed, because this horrid little temperature has given me the usual headache. But its going; and we hope to get to Rodmell on Friday. Leonard of course, spent 3 hours in bed, and has worked hard ever since.

What a dull letter to send in return for the flowers. I much prefer having a temperature.

I’ve been having Ethel Smyth to see me—she sat for 4 hours, talking hard—great fun. But you must come and let us have a gossip. Ever so many thanks.

yr Virginia

Sussex

[]

2148: To Ethel Smyth

27th Feb. [1930]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Well if I did what I want, I should ring up whatever your number is and ask you to come tomorrow. But—oh damn these medical details!—this influenza has a special poison for what is called the nervous system; and mine being a second hand one, used by my father and his father to dictate dispatches and write books with—how I wish they had hunted and fished instead!—I have to treat it like a pampered pug dog, and lie still directly my head aches. That is what I am doing; and on Saturday we shall go to Rodmell where I shall lie still out of doors, and then creep along the water meadows, and then perhaps read a novel, and not write a word, except this kind of word, and not see a soul except Leonard and Mrs Thompsett, who cooks the chicken, for a week perhaps: when suddenly I shall be cured and dash about the house inventing pleasures—of which the first will be to ring up Ethel Smyth and ask her to come instantly to tea. Will she come? I dont think the cure this time will take more than a week. I’m taking prodigious care. You’re at the bottom of all the spoonfulls of codliver oil and malt that I gulp down. But you see, I dont dare ask you tomorrow. Lord! what a bore! To think that my father’s philosophy and the Dictionary of National Biography cost me this! I never see those 68 black books without cursing them for all the jaunts they’ve lost me.

I too feel that the book—not that book—our book—is open, and at once snatched away. I want to talk and talk and talk—About music; about love; about Countess Russell. Dont you think you might indulge me this once and tell me what she said thats so interesting? Yes. I think you are a kind woman, besides being such a …. etc etc. Those two happy dodges of yours come in useful on occasion, dot dot, dot—et cetera. I will write your character in that style one of these days. Years ago, 3 or 4 at least, when I first met Maurice Baring he made my heart jump by saying “You must come and meet Ethel Smyth.” but nothing came of it and I was, as you say, too ‘delicate’ to press. What a fool one is. Here is Leonard, come back from his committee—yes, yes, you showed your discrimination by what you say of him. But I cant write the history of my marriage on what remains of this paper, so good bye, and my address is

Monks House
Rodmell Lewes.
Sussex

Should you give me the great pleasure of a letter

Our love

Yr
Virginia

Berg

[]

2149: To Saxon Sydney-Turner

27th Feb. [1930]

52 Tavistock Sqre., [W.C.1]

My dear Saxon,

This influenza has been rather a bore, and twice I have had to go back to bed. Indeed I still write from the sofa, and thus you must excuse the malformation of my hand. It’s not mere senility as you might suppose.

I made a shot at the novels you want—because I am not sure which of the 3 are your old friends. If I did wrong, the Press will change.

We hope to go to Rodmell on Saturday for, roughly, a week; and I will leave your great grandfather in the Press, in case you want to call for him. I rather regret that some chapters anyhow should remain unpublished. There is a good deal that interests me, and I still laugh over a story of a bull and an umbrella.

What is your opinion of Ethel Smyth?—her music, I mean? She has descended upon me like a wolf on the fold in purple and gold, terrifically strident and enthusiastic—I like her—she is as shabby as a washerwoman and shouts and sings—but the question of her music crops up—I don’t mean that she cares what I think, being apparently indomitable in her own view, but one day you must tell me the truth about it. Anyhow, as a writer she is astonishingly efficient—takes every fence.

I’m sorry that Barbara [Bagenal] has been ill—The truth is that February ought to be torn from the calendar and thrown away—a vile, ill-conditioned, altogether unnecessary month. I daresay, if we only knew, it got there on false pretences—a mistake of the Pope’s. I hope we shall meet some time, but I’m told you dine out every night covered with gold braid. That’s the worst of middle age—one’s friends become so distinguished.

Love
Virginia

Sussex

[]

2150: To Donald Brace

28th Feb 1930

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Mr Brace,

Many thanks for your letter. I am glad that you are satisfied with the sales of A Room of One’s Own. It has done a good deal better here than in America. We have sold between 10 and 11 thousand, and generally of course, our sales are much less than yours. But I am not surprised, as I think the subject is more interesting to us than to you.

Please excuse my hand—I am in bed with influenza at the moment.

Kind regards,
yours sincerely,
Virginia Woolf

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

[]

2151: To Ethel Smyth

Saturday [1 March 1930]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

What a wonder you are—of instancy.

Here is the paper.

I’m dumbfoundered by Lady [?] R. If ever hate and scorn were written on a woman’s face I read them on her’s. But then I’m not a novelist: and I’m awfully glad to be mistook; because she is a novelist and commands my deep respect.

We are just off.

Yr
Virginia

I am venturing to take the Prison but will take care and return intact. I think (but I am not capable of much thought) that the words as you have done them ought to make a magnificent poem and I greatly envy you…. etc etc.

Berg

[]

2152: To V. Sackville-West

Tuesday [4 March 1930]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Leonard has just decided to stay till Saturday, so I dont think there’s much use in asking you. I hope you didn’t put anything off. He was to have gone on Thursday.—Well, I shall see you next week.

I think I shall come up with him on Saturday. I’m feeling—this is Keatsy? However, I’m feeling less like an old clothes bag.

But Lord! I wish Lawrence hadn’t died—younger? than I am; makes me feel in the way, though I never read him for pleasure. Still—and then the damnable hypocrisy of the papers.

Love

Let me know when you’ll come, or every instant will be ravaged by the rapacity of Ethel Smyth

Virginia

I do hope you didn’t upset any plans with a view to coming.

Berg

[]

2153: To V. Sackville-West

Friday [7 March 1930]

Monk’s House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

A thousand congratulations from L and V on your finish. I shall read it over the week end. Lord! What an excitement! And Lord! again I pray that the chicken horror may be stamped in the egg. It is an outrage upon my view—which I saw when I sat among the currants or sank among the cushions.

I will ring up.

V.

Berg

[]

2154: To Ethel Smyth

March 10th [1930]

52 Tavistock Sqre., [W.C.1]

I was annoyed to be down in my studio when you rang up; and I feel some guilt that you should have rung up. I ought to have written—a dozen times. But you said I neednt, and I like best writing letters in my head. One was about the Lighthouse. Lord! how glad I am you like it,—honestly I never thought you would: and then about your Broadcast. The gardener’s wife stopped me in the road and gave me an account of it, and my sales jumped up. Then another was to be an autobiography, beginning “I was 48 last January, and have never suffered from indigestion in my life;” and another was about my mother and Lady Lewis (I can’t write a word, because I am talking to Leonard). That pleased me, your reference to Helen and the old man;—how intelligent you are, to quote the very quotation I had in mind about her! I met Lady Lewis once, and after taking a good look at me, she said “H-m, you’re all very well my dear, but you’re not a patch on your mother.” I seldom meet any one who knew her without having this tribute paid me.—But as I began by saying, I never wrote these letters; They flamed up, looking at the logs at Rodmell.

I am, soberly and truly, again in robust health, but will leave health to settle this week and despatch a few dreary jobs, such as finding a new house. And then next week—Will you suggest a time? Will you really come and begin again?—for I feel that we were torn asunder, just as we were opening our mouths to say something of the greatest importance.

A line, anytime; and I will keep the day—

Yr
Virginia

Berg

[]

2155: To Virginia Isham

10 March [1930]

52 Tavistock Sqre., W.C.1

Dear Virginia,

I have just received this from Eddy Sackville West. I am afraid it is too late to be any use but send it on the chance.

I hope you have had a good time.

Yours
Virginia Woolf

I believe that Herr Mendelssohn is a person of great influence in the theatres and films.

Northamptonshire Record Office

[]

2156: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Friday [14 March 1930]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Ottoline,

I am a wretch not to have answered you, we have been away, and come back recovered. But I am in rather a rush next week house hunting (we may be turned out of this). Could I come the week after—any day I think, except Monday, between tea and dinner, if you’d let me know.

I spend my time peering into cupboards and basements.

Yr
Virginia

Texas

[]

2157: To Ethel Smyth

15th March
Sunday March 17th [16, 1930]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

As you say, and apparently mean, that you don’t want me to write a letter, I, of course, begin to wish to—a wish I seldom feel now. But I have this reason—I want to know if it would conceivably suit you to come to tea next Tuesday, or next Thursday. These are the drawbacks—on Tuesday there will be a young man—very clever, kind, nice and all that—who would be thrilled to the marrow by meeting you. On Thursday if you came at 4.30 or 5, you would, I think, escape everything but some relics of the scent of Lady Colefax, who is running in and out: after which we should be alone. A line to say which if either (and these are the only chances next week) is all I ask. The week after—but thats too far ahead.

Where can I begin all the things that might be said. My mother? Your Niece? The hermaphrodite? Being vain, I will broach the subject of beauty—just for a moment—and burst out in ecstasy at your defence of me as a very ugly writer—which is what I am—but an honest one, driven like a gasping whale to the surface in a snort—such is the effort and anguish to me of finding a phrase (that is saying what I mean)—and then they say I write beautifully! How could I write beautifully when I am always trying to say something that has not been said, and should be said for the first time, exactly. So I relinquish beauty, and leave it as a legacy to the next generation. My part has been to increase their stock in trade, perhaps. But to leave this fascinating subject—Yes I would like to know all about your niece. Why briefly? Haven’t you got a ream of paper which you might just as well fill, sitting over your fire (what sort of fire?) in your room (what sort of room?) alone? For what other purpose than to write letters to me brim full of amusement and excitement were you gifted with a pen like a streak of hounds in full scent? And the more odds and ends you stuff in the better I like it, for I have a habit of making you up in bed at night. Lets imagine Ethel Smyth, I say to myself. We will begin with the servant bringing in the breakfast etc etc. Marriage—yes?—What about marriage? I married Leonard Woolf in 1912, I think, and almost immediately was ill for 3 years. Nevertheless we have nothing to complain of. Youth—I will give you scenes from my youth one day. But I cant take another blue slip now, so must trust that you will continue shooting letters into pillar boxes with a fling of your wrist—better still, that you may come and see me—

I am hoping not to have to leave this house after all.

Yr
Virginia

Berg

[]

2158: To Ethel Smyth

Sunday [30 March 1930]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

What I have to offer this week (but for God’s sake—no I am not religious—dont come up on purpose) are Wednesday 4. alone: Thursday 4.30 not alone, but with Leonard and a very good gifted enthusiastic Cambridge don [F. L. Lucas] who would rejoice to see you.

I’m ashamed to let my week run to tatters like this. I’m feeling like a trout in midstream. I’m trying to dispatch a chapter, or a passage, in a book: my head is bedded in it; meanwhile the telephone rings and my friends stream past. But dont take this illegible and inarticulate phrasing to mean that you are a weed or a waterfly or whatever signifies the bother of people who fritter and nudge and must come and wont be put off. No—however, since you have, so you say, and I incline to believe you, a profound and penetrating insight into character, I shan’t bother with explanations.

And what is the apple on the bough?

Yr
Virginia

Berg

[]

2159: To Hugh Walpole

30th March [1930]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Hugh,

No, not two letters from America—one; and that was clearly impossible to answer, as you were never spending a night anywhere in particular. I hope anyhow the gold is running out of your boots. Well, we had our lawsuit, and we won it, and then the hotel wanted to buy this house, and so I ran about Bloomsbury prying into basements, and always discovering a clergyman with a young lady having a meal; also a poor old solitary, drying her underclothes and they all apologised for being so untidy at the moment. Then the hotel didn’t buy; then I got influenza; then I turned over like a slug and slept the month of February out. Meanwhile Leonard left the Nation; and we are now supporting ourselves entirely by the Hogarth Press, which when I remember how we bought £5 worth of type and knelt on the drawing room floor ten years ago setting up little stories and running out of quads.—(the broad space with which one fills up lines) makes my breast burst with pride. Leonard is succeeded by Blunden, and has no more office hours to keep or authors to pacify, thank God.

I dont think we shall go to France just yet; but perhaps drive down to Cornwall, selling books—Vita’s among them. (I’m very glad you are in favour of it, and hope your view will prevail. We still wait Miss—Somebodies decision). And then I think we shall dash to Italy for ten days or so, but this again depends upon bookselling. But we shan’t be away anywhere for long, so please try to hit us off when you are whizzing through again. I will write to the New Forest for a slab of honey upon which to feed your romance. Even if you dont give me your book, I shall read it. But not until I have written my own. My mind hardens itself and regrets all others. I cant write and read at the same time. Hence my deplorable ignorance of modern fiction—I’ve read scarcely any Lawrence; no Mr Ford Madox Ford, and so on. But I shall read Rogue Herries once my horrible little penance is over—for I must say writing books becomes more and more like entering a nunnery. I cant dine out; I cant go to the play. But all the same I shall read Rogue Herries I repeat. Of course I can read any amount of the dead and biographies and poems. But if I read Rogue Herries I shall write Rogue Herries; and I shall then puzzle Mr Arnold Bennett. But here I am at the end of the 2nd page: you cant complain I’ve not written a letter.

yr aff
V.W.

All the reviewers seem universally enthusiastic. Are you pleased?

Texas

[]

2160: To Ethel Smyth

[1 April 1930]

Postcard

52 T[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Delighted you will come Thursday—No, I think I must take a walk—and let my ideas settle on Wednesday—too much talk. But my appetite for letters is measureless to man.

V.W.

Berg

[]

2161: To Hugh Walpole

April 5th 1930

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

My dear Hugh,

That was awfully good of you to send me the book [Rogue Herries], I shall put it aside until I have any wits to spend upon the works of others. I hope this won’t be long.

Then there are two questions, of a plaguey kind, that I wanted to ask you—trading upon the beaming and benevolent face which meets me, even in sculpture, in the Bookman. But dont answer if, as is likely, you have nothing to say.

(1) We have a large drawing of Thackeray (inherited by my father) done by Samuel Lawrence at the order of George Smith, as a present to Thackeray’s daughters when he was going lecturing in America. This we want to sell. Now is there any millionaire of your acquaintance who would like to buy it? We used to dispose of Thackeray relics to Pierpoint [sic] Morgan, who is now dead, and it strikes me there may be someone who specialises in Thackeray since. If so, a word from you would greatly help.

(2) I have just had a cable from my American publishers saying that someone wants to make a play of Orlando; and he offers me half profits (also £100 down on the option.) Is this the usual offer?—or ought one to hold out for more? Any advice would be welcome.

Well, now I have bothered you enough.

I rather think we shall be here most of April. It is showery and damp, but heavens how nice to see things growing and be out of the reach of the telephone! No news of Vita’s novel and the Book Society yet. They take their time, I must say, and until we hear, we cant settle our plans finally. Thanks again—apologies again.

yr
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

2162: To Ethel Smyth

Sunday [6 April 1930]

52 T[avistock] S[quare, W.C.1]

Good God, Ethel, I daresay you’re perfectly right. I daresay I’m a d——d intellectual. I know nothing about myself. And you coming in with your rapidity and insight probably see whats what in a flash. The party wasn’t my choice—I warned you.

But I think I see what you mean.—The [F. L.] Lucases. I’ve struggled and rebelled against them all my life, but their integrity always makes me their slave. Much though I hate Cambridge, and bitterly though I’ve suffered from it, I still respect it. I suppose that even without education, as I am, I am naturally of that narrow, ascetic, puritanical breed—oh what a bore; and its too late now. It cant be helped.

You’d be amused to see how I fret and worry when I am suddenly made aware of my own character. For months I forget all about it, and then someone says But you’re the most appalling liar I’ve ever met, and I rush to the glass (this sheet is a glass) as if I’d been told my dress was upside down, or my nose bleeding. As I told you, I am not a good psychologist.

The sort of thing I like is when you twist up a note out of a cover in the train—Thats life, I say. And I am only a spectator. I happened the other day to read an old article of my own, and I said “Good God, what a prig that woman must be!” I think I must go to some more parties—perhaps they would help. Only I hate dressing and coming into rooms.

Well good night—I’m just back in a flurry from Rodmell and found your note.

Virginia

Berg

[]

2163: To Vanessa Bell

[April 1930]

Typewritten

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

I am taking up the question of the Thackeray drawing; but how am I to get into your studio? Could you send me the key of your room as soon as possible, so that I may get the photographer to come. I am going to offer it first to the Pierpoint [sic] library asking £500 unless you think we could ask more. Cartwright starts on May 6th so I want to hear from the Pierpoints first, and thus must hurry. Mary, Barbara and Jeremy had all been over to Rodmell on Saturday. Lord, lord.

Berg

[]

2164: To Vanessa Bell

Friday [11 April 1930]

52 T[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Would you be so angelic as to post this? It is to say that I live entirely in the country. I dont think we shall be down till Tuesday or Wednesday, owing to the vicissitudes of the Press. Ethel [Sands] and Nan [Hudson] invited themselves to Rodmell on Easter Sunday; so I suppose that is the fatal date. Duncan has most obligingly undertaken the photograph [of the Thackeray drawing]. Raymond is coming to dinner, so I must I suppose wash. He is foaming with enthusiasm over your Dotty decorations, and says she is as mild as milk now.

I should be with Ottoline at the moment.

We spent yesterday going over greenhouses at Waddesdon.

This is all my news.

B.

There is no doubt but that Ethel Smyth is mad; and determined to know you also. I sat with her for 2 hours at the B.B.C. the other night—hearing her life history in a loud voice.

Berg

[]

2165: To Hugh Walpole

April 15th [1930]

Typewritten

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes, [Sussex] (we go there tomorrow)

My dear Hugh,

Many thanks for your great kindness. (I use a typewriter because I am trying to be businesslike, and shall have to write figures clearly).

I have sent particulars of our [Thackeray] picture to Miss Green, mentioning you. Old [Pierpont] Morgan bought the Vanity Fair MS. so this seems appropriate. We are asking £500, and I have a photograph which I could send if you wished it. But I will wait to hear from Miss Green—it is only that if she fails to buy, then some friend of yours might be willing. Anyhow a thousand thanks. We have had this drawing knocking about for years, and at last wish to be rid of it. I am being sent a contract by my American playwright [of Orlando. See Letter 2161] and will then if you dont mind ask your advice on details.

Now thats all the cursed business.

I think we shall be away a fortnight now and then back anyhow for the first part of May.

The Book Society has juggled about its dates so that we have had to alter our plans according. Now the book [The Edwardians] comes out on May 29th I think.

So we shall hope to see you in May which has a poetic and romantic ring about it, as should be dear to your heart.

The typewriter is not an expressive instrument is it?

Yours affectionately
V.W.

Texas

[]

2166: To Helen McAfee

15th April 1930

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, London, W.C.1

Dear Miss McAfee,

I have cabled to you today to apply to the Bookman for an article of mine on Augustine Birrell, as I gather from your cable that you are counting on some thing from me for your summer number. I sent them this article some time ago and as I have not heard from them, I should much prefer you to have it. I believe they meant to print it, but they have kept it so long that I do not think they can object to your having it.

I was just going to write to you on my own account. I have been held up by an attack of influenza, and all my time is still used on a novel that I am trying to finish this summer. Thus I have not written any story or article since the autumn, and cannot yet say when I shall be free. The Birrell article is thus the only piece I have at present in a state ready for publication.

Would you let me know as soon as you can when you intend to publish it? It is to appear here in Life and Letters [July 1930] and I must arrange with Mr McCarthy.

I am sorry not to have done the Lady Clifford; but I am sure you will understand how difficult it is to stop one piece of work and turn aside to another. In future, I shall avoid making any promises, for novels always take more time than one expects!

With kind regards,

yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Yale University

[]

2167: To William Wyamar Vaughan

April 18th 1930

52 Tavistock Square, London W.C.1

My dear Will,

I am afraid that I am interrupting a holiday, and that I have no right to address you personally. But I am asked by my brother-in-law, Philip Woolf, if I could help him about putting his little boy’s name down for Rugby. The child is 3, and his father particularly wants him to go to Rugby if possible, and naturally to the best house. Would you be so very kind to give me any advice about this that I could hand on? I should be extremely grateful to you, and so would they. The little boy is the only son.

I heard from Janet from America the other day. It is a great pleasure to get to know her again, after knowing her as a child at Giggleswick—a time I always remember with great affection.

Your affate
Virginia Woolf

John Vaughan

[]

2168: To Ethel Smyth

22nd April [1930]

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

Many congratulations. This refers to your publisher.

Oddly enough—I did precisely the same thing—that is wrote you a long letter and tore it up, owing I think to its egotism. Lord, how furious it makes me to think of the reams you destroyed! Please fish the ashes up and re-write them. You can’t bore me; if thats what you were thinking.

I have just re-lit the fire, in order to be able to write this. And I may tell you that I cooked lunch today and made a loaf of really expert bread. We have our young widow [Mrs Thompsett] half the day—and she goes and leaves us; This is very nearly the ideal life I think; but we have our crosses; I mean people drop in. They are divine people, with whom everything is possible (and how can you suppose that you and your nakedness could shock?—if you heard us—no I’m ashamed even to sketch our bi-sexual conversations. You must revise your estimate of our society radically) Everything is possible I was saying; but I want silence. Today for the first time, I have seen nobody, and my book, a very flickering flame at the moment, begins to draw. I dont know if music needs a shelter round it. Writing is so damnably susceptible to atmosphere. If I could sit here for three months alone, saying the same things, doing the same things, day by day—then perhaps a few pages would be solidly written in the end. As it is, I shall go back to London, and shiver it all to bits. What one wants for writing is habit; I am like one of Leonards fish (we have a pond) which is off at the shadow of a leaf—but I’m egotistical again, and no doubt shall have to burn this. No I cant be bothered to burn it.

I will try to keep May 24th if that is the day—I have left your letter in the house, and it is too cold to go and get it. (This house, you understand, contains two outer rooms, in which I live; it contains a large room where we sit and eat, play the gramophone, prop our feet up on the side of the fire, and read endless books). But then I may have to go travelling our new books in the West. We have no traveller this year, and are going to try it ourselves, in the car. It may be that week; it may be the one before. Bath, Exeter, Penzance, Lands End.

Well, what are you doing? I suppose Rottingdean is over; and you are back at Woking, carrying on the mysterious existence which I make up sometimes, in spite of the truth of your saying that I know less about human nature than anyone you ever met. (In the egotistical letter by the way I told you not to read The Common Reader—mostly school girls articles, done obediently to celebrate the great dead, for the Times; and so very submissive and long winded. They had to cover 4 columns.)

Are you writing? How does one write music? And whom do you see, and what do you say when you see them? Perhaps at Rottingdean you saw Lady Jones [Enid Bagnold]. I like to think so.

You see, our society is one of the freest I have ever met—to return to that. Even with little Don Lucas (whom I love and respect, but his asceticism as you know is icy and glittering) I would discuss, and have discussed, the most intimate details of sexual life. He and his wife [Topsy] are separated.

I had my lovely niece [Angelica] here yesterday, and my sister, who is erratically, after the way of middleaged women, even lovelier: also Clive Bell; and Duncan Grant; and we talked for 3 hours without a break.

Well, I cant get warm enough to hold the pen in such a way that one word is written differently from another—I shall go and get Leonard—no, he is planting hollyhocks: I shall get my dog then and go for a brisk walk on the marshes, returning at 7.30 sharp when my enchanting widow will dish up two grilled herrings. Our dinner will cost us 7d.

Yes you ought to be here now and see the bust of Venus against the pear tree (I have verified the tree by looking out of the window)

I dont want to come back to London in the least. Oh and I have 15 letters to write, and at least 3 foot of Ms. to read and two worrying, tiresome, authors, whose fate, they say, depends on me, to knock on the head.

Naturally therefore I warble on, unnecessarily to Dame Ethel Smyth; who won’t read all this, being in a hurricane today, putting in trumpets, cello’s and a trombone or two in the bass. She thumps it out on her piano; and is only roused to life by her dog; does she ever eat her dinner, or is it always cold?

VW.

Berg

[]

2169: To V. Sackville-West

Friday [25 April 1930]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

“I dont think I can stand, even the Nicolsons, on happiness for three quarters of an hour” I said at 8.15.

“Well, we can always shut them off” said Leonard. At 9 I leapt to my feet and cried out,

“By God, I call that first rate!” having listened to every word.

This is (for a wonder) literally true. How on earth have you mastered the art of being subtle, profound, humorous, arch, coy, satirical, affectionate, intimate, profane, colloquial, solemn, sensible, poetical and a dear old shaggy sheep dog—on the wireless? We thought it a triumph: Harold’s too.

And shall you be in London on Monday? I think I shall—and free for tea or dinner. We might go somewhere. But let me know to 52 T.S. and I’ll wire if, as is possible, I stay here, walking the downs and biting my nails.

Oh Lord if I could finish this book!

V.

Just off to Tunbridge Wells to travel books; and might look in on Long Barn; but shan’t I suppose.

Berg

[]

2170: To Ethel Smyth

Monday [28 April 1930]

52 Tavistock Sqre, [W.C.1]

I have just got back and found your letters. I am sure you are perfectly right to be angry with what I said in my letter. I dont remember exactly what it was, but I expect it was the sort of banter which (as Vita or any of my friends would tell you) I always scribble in letters. (I wasn’t thinking of Dodo,—it was something you said on the telephone to your maid; and I dont understand why my wishing you to see my pear tree annoys you—you wish me to see your daffodils) But I dont excuse myself.

I am oddly (since I am the victim) glad that you should be disillusioned—I hate illusions. So no more.

Berg

[]

2171: To Helen McAfee

29th April 1930

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Miss McAfee,

I just send a line to say that I have received your cable offering 250 dollars for the article on Mr Birrell on condition that it does not appear here before July 1st.

I will accept the offer and see that the article does not appear until the time stated.

With thanks,

yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Yale University

[]

Letters 2172-2213 (May–July 1930)

2172: To V. Sackville-West

Thursday [1 May 1930]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

The Wolves are much ashamed of themselves, but it is a question of the pregnant dog [Pinker]. We dont think she will be welcome in hotels. Could she therefore spend the week with you?—but only if no one is upset. And if so, we could send her by any train convenient or by Ethel (Sands) on Saturday. And fetch her on Saturday or Sunday following. My head spins: ears ache: Ethel (Smyth) just gone.

Virginia

Potto did that

Berg

[]

2173: To V. Sackville-West

May 5th [1930]

Castle Hotel, Taunton, [Somerset]

Yes, you are to dine with us, not tea, 8, or as early as you can, on Monday. Clive, I think and Lyn [Lloyd Irvine].

So far, a very good journey. Lord how lovely the Marlborough downs are! Why put up with Kent and Sussex? Then Bath: quite magnificent. Every street like Pope or Dryden: and everywhere Burke stayed or Sir Walter Scott, Wordsworth and Fanny Burney. I can’t see why it isnt more famous than Cambridge and Oxford together. We went on to Bristol, and saw your Mr Cleverdon; who bought 10 of the limited edition [of The Edwardians] and wd. have liked more. We have made about £10 today, though the booksellers are for the most part rude, ignorant, and out for lunch or tea or something. Then we went to Wells, saw Glastonbury in the rain; and it is still raining hard at Taunton.

Also I adore the life of hotels.—Endless grey haired single ladies with friends, all with wedding rings, and I daresay dead husbands; and they begin at breakfast “O dear, Minny says the footman and the housemaid started scarlet fever the very day dear Micky was going back to school”—so that I feel England is incredibly prosperous; eats enormous plates of porridge and bacon; and how they talk. The age of England becomes almost too much. Not a new house; and bits of a ruin even in the lounge, here—Tomorrow we go to Exeter or Truro. So no more. I’m so sleepy.

Yr.
Virginia

Ethel has made me a decration [sic] of violent but platonic love.

Berg

[]

2174: To Ethel Smyth

Tuesday, perhaps 6th May [1930]

Truro, [Cornwall]

Well we have reached here safely, and found your letter, but we did not bring the dog, from cowardice. Excuse irrelevance, illspelling, psychological flaws. I’m so sleepy. We have been driving all day from Taunton over Dartmoor in a storm, and selling books where we saw a shop, but its disheartening business. No one reads, no one wants books, the booksellers say, and they keep us hanging about. But Lord what a lovely country this is—England, I mean; and ever so much older than I thought. I want to live on Marlborough Down, most. Here we are under your Bensons Cathedral, and my Hugh Walpoles Cathedral. But how I yawn! The evenings are the worst—nowhere to sit; or a room full of old, suspicious widow ladies, whispering to each other. Not an Inn from London here is without its six or seven. And once they were married, and once they had children. And my head spins wondering what they’re doing in Truro tonight: but then they get up and go. Yes, I’m too sleepy to go into psychology. But you see; I make up stories; thats my downfall; imagine situations, and forget that the person concerned is flesh and blood, like myself, with feelings. I am therefore very treacherous. But enough of myself.

By the way, I heard the Wreckers years ago, from the pit, in some theatre. Tomorrow we go to Penzance; visit my old home, St Ives; and then back, by way of Salisbury and Rodmell. What a spin! Its a kind of dream—one glides from town to town, up hills, by rivers; always the same old ladies at night.

Virginia

Berg

[]

2175: To Vanessa Bell

Wednesday [7 May 1930]

St. Ives, [Cornwall]

We are lunching at Hamlyns off cream and splits, which you may remember. It is a perfect day—Everything has gone well, so far, except that we cant induce the shops to buy much. We came over Sedgemoor and Dartmoor and saw the prisoners working with warders [at Princetown Prison]: today we went into the Arnold-Forsters garden [Zennor], they being away, and were glad to find it very inferior.

Bath is a magnificent city—far better than Oxford and Cambridge. The consistency of the architecture is amazing; which is true even of the people playing the viola in the pump room—all pure 18th Century. We went to a concert. Of course no letter from you, but several pages from E⁠[thel] S⁠[myth]: of mitigated madness—I have written kindly and calmly, and hope for the best. Should you be able to do me any service, so much the better; but I see you despise me for my predicament and will only keep out of one yourself.

The old ladies of England are a perpetual joy. They swarm in every hotel, knitting, writing letters, widows mostly. But, warned by E. S., I have made no friends. Now we are off to Bodmin. I’m sending you some cream, for old sakes sake. The harbour is still incredibly beautiful. Lanhams there and Curnow. You must bring Angelica soon.

B.

Berg

[]

2176: To V. Sackville-West

Thursday 8? May [1930]

Kings Arms Hotel, Launceston, [Cornwall]

Look—isnt this nice. As I was saying the antiquity of England is inconceivable. What is to be done about it? It must go on—(I’m waiting for the clergyman to leave the w.c. vacant.) Have you ever conceived the antiquity of England in a thousand years?—Every Inn we stay at has been an inn since the time of Arthur or Alfred. Here we have come down in the world—bells dont ring; hot water cold; but still a great air of the 18th Century in the coffee room, where we sit before a huge fire, with the clergy and the travellers in biscuits. Our sales have diminished steadily. The booksellers are often very rude and L. almost loses his temper. They are all violently against the Book Society and say it is ruining them. Then they won’t listen when we say The Edwardians is next months book. They say it is all a wash out and favouritism. Whats odd is that in Cornwall they live entirely by selling Cornish novels; one small shop yesterday had sold 2,000 by an unknown (to me) man called Garstin. We had a superb drive from Penzance over the moor to Zennor, all the gorse blazing against a pure blue sea, to St Ives; where I saw my Lighthouse, and the gate of my home, through tears—thinking how my mother died at my age; or next year to it—Also we drove over Bodmin moor, solitary completely, with an occasional ancient cross. And now (if only the wc. were vacant) we are off to Sherborne, Yeovil, Salisbury.

V.

We shall meet at dinner on Monday. My cheeks are the colour of old golf shoes; red brown with touches of pure crimson on the nose.

We have to come back on Sunday to see [Count Harry] Kessler—damn him.

Berg

[]

2177: To William Wyamar Vaughan

10th May 1930

Monks House, Lewes, Sussex

My dear Will,

This is just to thank you for your letter. It was very good of you, and I have told my brother-in-law what you say.

We are just back from a tour in a car through the West. We called in at Clifton and I wondered where it was that you lived.

With love from us both.

your affte
Virginia Woolf

John Vaughan

[]

2178: To Dorothy Brett

May 10th 1930

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, [Sussex]

My dear Brett,

I am sorry to be such a bad correspondent. The older I grow, the more I hate writing letters, or rather, I still like writing letters, but hate writing notes, and have to write 20 dozen (so it seems) every day. But I like getting letters, so it was very nice of you to write.

It is monstrous that Lawrence should have died. I never spoke to him, and only saw him twice—once, swinging a spirit lamp in a shop at St Ives, and once, two or three years ago when our train stopped outside Rome in the early morning and there was Lawrence talking to Norman Douglas on the other platform.

The papers have been hypocritical beyond belief: I almost blazed into print in a rage; first abusing her [Frieda Lawrence] and then slobbering over him. I dont suppose it matters—And I couldn’t write because I have never read any of his books, or more than half of two of them. I hate preaching—and I can’t read contemporaries; and I dont want to read novels, whoever writes them.

We have just driven from London to Penzance, selling our books as we went; and got here last night, very cold, but—though you wont believe it, much astonished by the beauty of England: for instance, Bodmin Moor. Will your eye be quite out for English beauty? Are your scales so much huger? What I envy is your warmth, and being able to sit in the sun and talk. Here it pours, and half one’s faculties are for ever furled up useless.

I have been seeing Ottoline, who talks a great deal and very affectionately of Lawrence. They made it up I think when she was ill last year, and he began writing to her again. Aldous Huxley is over here, buzzing about his letters; and I hear that [J. M.] Murry has gone to be with Freda—you can imagine the sort of buzz and hum all this sets up. And Kot [S. S. Koteliansky] has come out of his hole and goes to tea with Ottoline which must be good for what remains of her soul.

I am very glad you liked A Room. It was rather popularised for the young and should have had more in it. But I wanted them to swallow certain ideas with a view to setting their brains to work. I get letters from every quarter revealing the horrors still of family life. I wonder how much was spent on your Education, compared with your brothers’—twopence halfpenny I daresay. However you seem to have triumphed; you have your Indians, and they finance Life and Letters.

Sydney Waterlow was here this summer; uneasily protesting his perfect happiness. Every sentence began “And are you still” doing so and so, from which we gathered that we are hopeless stick in the muds and failures, and that leads me to suppose that poor old Sydney is not quite so secure as he makes himself out. But he was amiable in the extreme.

yr
Virginia Woolf

Robert H. Taylor

[]

2179: To Ethel Smyth

Wednesday May 13th [14th 1930]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Lord how difficult it is to write a letter! You painters and musicians dont know the horror of pens that dry up and no blotting paper.

Also, what with you and Vanessa, I feel rather like a mouse pinned out on a board for dissection. I’m so odd, and I’m so limited, and I’m so different from the ordinary human being—so you say. I have a strong suspicion that I’m the simplest of you all, and that its my extreme transparency that baffles you too otherwise gifted women. I dont think I ever feel anything but the most ordinary emotions; but there—I wont begin cutting about the poor mouse, who is distracted enough without that. Shall I or shall I not go to the Opera—Parsifal—with Hugh Walpole? Shall I or shall I not go to a cocktail party at Raymond Mortimers? Shall I or shall I not read the three long MSS. on my table—or go on reading Hazlitt for an article that has to be begun tomorrow, or take Pinka for a walk—but then she will have puppies on the pavement—or do nothing—nothing at all? Those are my predicaments. Yet we only came back on Sunday; and it is only Wednesday; and already I am spun over with doubts and impaled with thorns. Would you and Vanessa know how to burst through, free and unscathed? I suppose so. Well, I wont begin on you and Vanessa, or I should draw some of those fancy pictures for which I am so famous—(a joke—if I had any red ink, I would write my jokes in it, so that even certain musicians—ahem!)

I dont see why Miss E. Williamson shouldn’t come and dine with us. Why not? I dont see why she should be shy. I dont see how you can play your music because I haven’t got a piano. I feel at the moment a helpless babe on the shore of life, turning over pebbles. You and Vanessa must really see to the whole affair. I forgot to say—there is no sequence in these remarks—that my life is further complicated by six letters daily from people telling me which is my best book; and it is always different. Then I puzzle over that. And you, E.S., say the opposite. And I have to write so many very polite lies—being myself I think the truthfullest of people. Did I once say I lied? Well, that was a joke. I cant pass a lie, no more than—Camel a needle. Leonard’s printing. Pinka’s snoring. Shall I go to the opera, shall I go to the cocktail party? So the ocean tosses its pebbles, and I turn them over, naked, a child, and no one helps me. There’s Ethel at Woking among her pear—no daffodil trees; with her bacon mouldering on the piano. Dear me! I’ve gone and done it again! By the way, why do you take so much interest in your own character? Or dont you? Why are you so fiercely and savagely aware of what is to me a transient and fitful flame?

V.

Berg

[]

2180: To Julian Bell

13th May [1930]

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Julian,

Have you got Toms poems and Adamastor? If not, I will send them; but I have forgotten so long, and been so much distracted by driving to Cornwall and back, that I daresay you have already bought them. Tell me in that case another book you want—for as you may remember, I owe you a birthday present; and it is now mid May, whereas, in the language of the poets, you were a February fair child.

Are you coming to dine one night? Bring Miss Sutar [Helen Soutar] if you will. Bring anyone. There are many things to be said—about Adamastor, I rather doubt that he’s much better than a Byronic rhetorician; but people so much want a poet with guts that they cling to him like men in a storm. Poor old Desmond for instance. Toms hard boiled egg is hard boiled I admit; all this damnable Mary and Mother and God. Still he can write, oh yes, you may sniff. But he can. I’m told Peters poems are out; shall I get them? Thank Heaven, I feel no more responsibilities as a critic. Nobody knows one from t’other. I’ve not read your poems in the Cambridge book yet [Cambridge Poetry 1929]; but that is because I so much reverence poetry that, though I cant judge it, I never read it till I can read and read, and let it sink and sink, till it reaches the bottom, and then rises again, like the dead, after seven days, and then I shall tell you, when I’ve let it sink for seven days, and it has risen like the dead, what I think.

The Singer went gallantly, because she was as dirty as a coal hole, Martins said; plugs were foul; engine a mere mass of carbon; yet she went to Penzance and back without a hitch.

Your loving
Aunt Virginia

Quentin Bell

[]

2181: To Quentin Bell

14th May 1930

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, London, W.C.1

Dearest Quentin,

What a delight to get your letter—and what, into the bargain, a miracle. For I had been dreaming of you, that very night, and you had been so brilliant, so charming in my dream that I woke saying Naturally he will never write to me: whereupon I looked at my letters, and there was yours. This happens, oddly enough to be true. Whether it is also true that you are charming and brilliant, is as Nessa would say, another pair of shoes. But let us be quit of that sinister woman, with her unparalleled truth speaking and say you are—very very charming—very very brilliant. You will have your father with you I suppose, and have sucked the egg of all its yolk. If he cant tell you the London news, who can? Its true I went to a cocktail party yesterday at Raymonds, and I could describe that. But it was given to pay off debts, and the debtors came flocking, nodding, ogling, mostly old women with purple noses; Ottoline was almost the freshest and fairest. No. There were also Barbara Hutchinson, with a head like the stopper of a Chinese scent bottle; one blob of crimson. And Mary had another head one blob of emerald green. This must be the latest fashion, because Barbara told me she was dressed up to the eyes, and couldn’t face society undressed. Honestly I doubt that I think the career of a dressed girl sitting on a stool and waiting offers altogether satisfactory. It used to be the usual lot; now it seems somehow antique. And there were crowds of young men of a certain cast; and a German [Hamann] who does lifemasks, putting one straw up your nose and another down your throat. I shant be done; because to be exactly recorded has no longer any virtue in my eyes. But I am to be done on the floor of the National Gallery as Clio to Clive’s Bacchus by Anrep.

We have just been lunching with Peter Lucas and heard some news of Julian. Peter rather fears that Miss Helen [Soutar] has taken his mind off the poets and he wont cut such a good figure in the exam, as he should. They are inseparable and are asked out together, and interlock on every occasion. I thought her so like some warm blooded thick coated brown eyed sharp clawed marsupial in the Zoo that I cant attach any precise human value. Thats the worst of writing—images, often of the most grotesque, oust the sober truth. There are masses of things to say, but I dont think you would read them if I said them. Why were you on the downs when I came to tea at Charleston? Because we never meet now, and so I cant know exactly anymore what the shape of your mind is; no; perhaps you are elongated, tortuous and cloven, where I think of you still voluminous as a coal sack.

An old woman of seventy one [Ethel Smyth] has fallen in love with me. It is at once hideous and horrid and melancholy-sad. It is like being caught by a giant crab. She has just wired to ask me to meet her. Please let me have your advice. Now I am going off to tea with Nessa. Please write again dearest Quentin; to your old doddering devoted Aunt.

Quentin Bell

[]

2182: To V. Sackville-West

[20 May 1930]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

About 2,000 sold, not counting Book Club, very good. I think the other questions are answered.

L. says he told you he cdn’t put on the sash, for what reason I forget.

Well, we shall meet on Friday.

Endless rings, notes, expresses, and other communications from E.S.

She says you say you have sold 170,000 of Edwardians already.

Berg

[]

2183: To Ethel Smyth

Monday [26 May 1930]

52 Tavistock Sqre. WC1

Look—I have taken a new nib.

If only I weren’t a writer, perhaps I could thank you and praise you and admire you perfectly simply and expressively and say in one word what I felt about the Concert yesterday. As it is, an image forms in my mind; a quickset briar hedge, innumerably intricate and spiky and thorned; in the centre burns a rose. Miraculously, the rose is you; flushed pink, wearing pearls. The thorn hedge is the music; and I have to break my way through violins, flutes, cymbals, voices to this red burning centre. Now I admit that this has nothing to do with musical criticism. It is only what I feel as I sat on my silver winged (was it winged?) chair on the slippery floor yesterday. I am enthralled that you, the dominant and superb, should have this tremor and vibration of fire round you—violins flickering, flutes purring; (the image is of a winter hedge)—that you should be able to create this world from your centre. Perhaps I was not thinking of the music but of all the loves and ages you have been through. Lord—what a complexity the soul is! But I wont scratch all the skin off my fingers trying to expound. But my dear Ethel it was frightfully good of you to let me come—dear me yes—what a generous woman you are—and how I adore your generosity and the vehemence with which you scatter the floor with hairpins and fumble in your placket for a spectacle case and embrace the Governor of Cyprus and enfold us all in the spontaneity and ruthlessness of your career.

Thats what I call living; thats the quality I would give my eyes to possess. Of course, in my furtive and sidelong way (being like a flat fish with eyes not in the usual place) I had read a good deal of this years ago in your books, and now I begin to read it and other oddities and revelations too in your music. It will take a long time not merely because I am musically so feeble, but because all my faculties are so industriously bringing in news of so many Ethels at the same moment. There I sit a mere target for impressions and try to catch each one as it flies and find its gold or its white or its blue ring for it. I only offer this explanation of my dumbness and fatuity yesterday. I couldn’t say ‘I like that best’ or ‘that’ because I was sorting out, in a rapid elementary way, a myriad arrows: But perhaps you saw, with your hawk’s glance, to the bottom of my silence.

Now Ethel, please do something for me really generous; and let me contribute my share to the entertainment: Please do. I had a ticket (which I lost) and tea, a very good tea, and I want to write a cheque to give to the gentleman like an enraged frog playing cymbals in the background. He wants a new tie—it is all gone shiny on the left hand side. Please convey this to him with my blessing.

Well: my cook [Nelly] has been stricken in the kidneys: I’m waiting for the doctor; I may have to take her to the hospital—A dismal sort of morning. But I recur to the rose among the briars, like an old gypsy woman in a damp ditch warming her hands at the fire. And then we have to give 3 Scandinavians lunch at a restaurant.

Theres the doctor. No: a false alarm.

Nevertheless, I must bring this to an end and grapple with the problems of normal and natural human life.

By the way, Pinka has had 6 puppies, all black, in my arm chair at Rodmell.

I wrote to ask M⁠[aurice]. Baring to dine, with Eliz [Williamson]: no answer: I sent it to the Chelsea address. What am I to do? O Ethel please tell me, what am I to do?

Virginia

Berg

[]

2184: To Ethel Smyth

Thursday [29 May 1930]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Merely a post card:

Dont keep Wednesday—because I can’t be sure at all—everything is very vague. We’re going to Rodmell tomorrow, back Saturday, and away again for Whitsun.

I am, to tell the truth, rather harassed by all this business of cooks and hospitals and cant command my time: or sense; or pen. But I will write later.

Virginia

Tell Elizabeth not to expect much dinner on Monday; she must have an egg with her tea. But all the same she must come.

Berg

[]

2185: To Angelica Bell

Monday [2 June 1930]

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, London, W.C.1

Darling Angelica,

What a treat to get your letter! Mummy gave it me, as we were having tea together. Mummy was making a beautiful white silk petticoat. How I wish I could sew like you and Mummy—but its too late I suppose for you to teach me now. When you come and stay at Rodmell will you give me lessons? Pinka sat on one of the puppies so there are only five—four daughters and one son—all coal black, except for three white paws, one white tail, and four white cheeks. We are going to call one Sheba. The son will be called Othello.

I went to Hamlet the other night. I will take you there when you are in London; or any other play you choose. Hamlet is very exciting. I met Ottoline there, and her hair has gone the colour of Pinka’s coat, bright red. But this is a secret between us.

Oh dear how I wish you would run in now and then we could have some pranks with the sugar. Old Miss Pritchard is doddering about on the roof—what can she be doing up there? Nelly is in hospital. I have a new cook [Mrs Taupin]. And she is making me a new pudding for lunch so I must go and eat it.

Love from Pinka, Sheba, Othello, Leonardo

Jinny

AND PLEASE WRITE AGAIN.

Angelica Garnett

[]

2186: To Oscar Lewis

3rd June 1930

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Mr Lewis,

I have today sent off the signed sheets in three parcels. I hope they will reach you safely. I much look forward to seeing the finished book.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf (Mrs Woolf)

Columbia University

[]

2187: To Clive Bell

[5 June 1930]

Postcard

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

This is just to remind you of the Empire. I’m so scarified with domestic horrors—operations—kidneys—cooks—Nelly in hospital—dinners without any food—that I cant write: but with love to Francis [Birrell].

Quentin Bell

[]

2188: To Vanessa Bell

Saturday 7th June [1930]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest Dolphin

That old woman [Mrs Taupin] must be doddering, I think—She came and told me she had lost the key and Mansfield and I poked about and found it—so if its lost, I think it must be in the street. Never mind.

We’ve settled that the best plan is to pay her a week’s wages and start another system, which I think will work better, (but I’m so bored with it all, I wont go into details) So I’ve written to her to say that we shant want her again, as the dr. says Nelly cant come before September and I’ve had to engage somebody else.

I’ve told her that Duncan will give her 15/- and the cheque is made out to him. Poor old creature—I think she’s really on her last legs and would certainly drop dead if we kept her at it. I still maintain however that she has flashes of cookery worthy of genius. I expect gentle housework is all she is fit for now. If you could persuade her not to come and see me, I should be grateful. I’ll look for the keys and send them if she hasn’t been able to get in: supposing—as is necessary—that theyre there. Lord—thats over, thank God.

We wish to goodness you had sent us Maynards letter. After I left you the other evening I ran into Lydia. She was coming along Francis Street, and I waved with my usual cordiality. She bore on like a figure of stone, and I thought I must be mistaken, or she meant to cut me—However she stopped and addressed me like a mute—without a smile—about Wollaston’s death and the awful shock to Maynard, and the disgraceful habits of the young. Somehow I felt that most of it referred to you and Duncan; but no doubt we shall be told the full story by them both, over and over and over. What a lively summer is brewing! What a lark! How I do love quarrels and disagreements—talking of which Leonard and I both agreed with you about the Frys. The acerbity is very marked. Thats a comfort. I’m afraid you and Duncan are very happy though, and Eddys party was a great success. But I doubt that Helen’s [Anrep] house can be as nice as this. To see nobody for 4 days is the pinnacle of human happiness. Even though I have to write about working women all the morning—which is as if you had to sew canopies round chamber pots for Faith Henderson—I manage to get a good deal of pleasure one way and another. And there are no servants in the house Thank God; and nobody coming over to call (but this doesnt refer to you and Duncan)

I hope we may meet in London. But now you’re such a success one has to catch you, of course, on the hop.

B.

Would you assure Taupin that I’m very sorry to part with her,—and its only because I must have some one who can stay 3 months.

Berg

[]

2189: To Quentin Bell

June 8th [1930]

Typewritten

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

My dear Quentin,

I was just sitting down to strike the keys when fate plunged me into utter disorder. The kidneys. The cook. Yes, Nelly had an operation. I drove through London in an ambulance, half the glass is black so that you see life passing like a sepulchral procession. Then I saw doctors and sisters of mercy; and brothers and Aunts. Enough. I can’t write when I must be planning dinner. How any woman with a family ever put pen to paper I cannot fathom. Always the bell rings and the baker calls. Then Nessa produced an old French lady [Taupin], reputed to be a cook. So she was in the year ’70. But she had bad toes; no memory; had lost her husband in 1870 and so—I dont follow the argument—lost all the keys of the flat. And now I must go home and get another.

The incoherency of this is nothing to what it would have been a week ago. We are now at Rodmell for Whitsun, and the Austrians are gliding over our heads like gulls. Yes, this is a fact. They have tents on the downs and prove that one can fly up and down Asheham Hill without an engine. As I never doubted it myself, I take little stock of it. Tomorrow there is a village festival—our cook dances on the lawn—they act Midsummer Nights Dream and I am to guess the weight of a cake. All the receipts go to the church spire. And Pinka has five black pups—the sixth she sat on, conveniently, for to tell the truth five black bitches in my room are enough. Julian is coming to Charleston with a troupe next week. And they shot the senior tutor of Kings last week—Mr Potts did, as Lydia says must happen, when young men have no morals and wear coloured socks. There is a great row brewing between the Keynes’ and the painters—Nessa will have told you. It is about their hanging themselves and not the young next the old masters in their show. Roger has resigned; and Maynard has disgraced himself once and for all. How I adore my friends to do that—and then they come over and confide in us; what fun it will be; Nessa thinks they will not dare draw water from the well. She thinks their friendship is what she calls a cruche cassée. Vita’s book is such a best seller that Leonard and I are hauling in money like pilchards from a net. We sell about 800 every day. The Edwardians it is called. But you wont have read it, or heard of it.

Are you at Cassis? Basking, I suppose, and sipping vermouth at M. Somebodies, while the waves dont break, and the sardine boats come in at midnight. Has Col. Teed’s nose put out a branch? I always think with a fine spring that might happen. But enough. I am cooking dinner.

Please write dearest Quentin and describe your life from the inside. Yes descend to the cellar, turn on the electric light and rejoice me with the sight of your veins and membranes all displayed. Dear me—to think that I must type all this and so never say a thing I want to say. The snap-snap of the typewriter frightens me as the snap of a turtle frightens fish. So good bye.

Your loving
aunt Virginia

Quentin Bell

[]

2190: To Molly MacCarthy

Sunday [8 June 1930]

Monk’s House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest Molly,

Yes, of course, I entirely agree with you about the collected works. There should be a contract: Leonard should put it in business form, with dates for delivery of MS: fines upon failure; everything as solemn and awful as it can be. Then we ought to issue circulars, with photographs; to get the B.B.C to send addresses; to attend carefully to print, type, binding; which should be gay and alluring yet dignified. But of course the prime consideration is the MS: to get them I shall act the part of a gadfly, always disagreeable whenever seen; and you must be the domestic leech, sticking to his brow at breakfast, lunch and tea. Then when he is exhausted and pallid, you must snatch the sheets and post straight to me. I shall have printers in readiness, and the deed will be done, in one night. Six volumes on the table in six weeks. After this, nothing remains but to bask in fame and gold. The Americans are only converted by bound books. It will feather your nest in your old age. Guineas will go on dropping from the blue without a word more written. Of course, Desmond will loathe us both—You must expect to wear widow’s weeds for a year; and I shall have my fingers dropped like a toad. But I don’t care a jot. It must be done, in the grand style. I’m really feeling triumphant to get that book—which will be marblely masterly and stacked with delights—for the Press, and though I say it boastfully, I think after the Edwardians, (2 thousand in a month) we can manage a best seller as well as Heinemann, and with far greater distinction. I suppose I wouldn’t help by taking a volume or two of the files down here in August?

But we can cabal about all this on Wednesday. Do you realise that Sydney Waterlow is back [from Addis Ababa], and says it is his right to come to Memoir Club meetings; and then there’s Mary [Hutchinson], at sight of whom Clive will bolt like a peppered Spaniel—altogether middle age is a trying time for these reunions, what with the ambassador [Waterlow], and the wrecks of your old lovers [Clive]. I leave it all to your tact—I’m worse than hopeless. I still wake in the night and bite the blanket through in spasms at the thought of the horrid things I’ve done. Do you? Awful things—worse than murder and rape.

I write surrounded by barking spaniels—Leonard and the old lady next door are forever lifting them up to judge their sex and points. Why is decency in complete abeyance with dogs?

Love
V.

Mrs Michael MacCarthy

[]

2191: To V. Sackville-West

Thursday [12 June 1930]

[52. Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

If you are coming up let me know, before every instant is snatched by Ethel. We might do something nice—not buy food, this time.

Sales today ‘close on 300’.

Let me know (as I was saying—but I’m dazed with reading mss. They flood us, all owing to Edians.) One poor woman thinks she completes your picture: about 6 foot remain to be read.—Poor dear Potto too with the mange on his nose—so let me know, as I was saying.

V.

Berg

[]

2192: To Ernest Rhys

June 12th 1930

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Mr Rhys,

It is very good of you to write to me so kindly about Orlando. If you knew how many letters I get pointing out the mistakes in that book, you would understand that your appreciation is very valuable.

I am also grateful that you should ask me to write an introduction to Middlemarch. But I have already written at length about George Eliot, and much though I admire her, I do not feel that I can begin again on that subject.

Please accept my thanks, and believe me,

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

British Library

[]

2193: To Katherine Arnold-Forster

Sunday, June 21st [22 1930]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

My dear Ka,

Yes, I agree, it is tragic about time and space. I no longer try to make them go my way. We came back from Cornwall and there was our cook ill in bed. Well, after 10 days or so, she had her kidneys out in a hospital. And first we had one char, and then another, and then by a series of coincidences so miraculous I cant describe them a born lady arrived in a car, with a son at Kings, and became our cook general—God knows why—and does every mortal thing, so that at last I can ask somebody to dinner again—and now you are in Cornwall.

Every boy in England seems to have measles. I hope Mark is all right again. We liked your house in your absence. The old lady, though alarmed, was very friendly, and offered pots of tea and bread and butter at once. We had a wonderful drive over the moor which I still think the loveliest in the world. But Bodmin Moor is sublime too—and Sedgemoor.

Well goodbye, and let us meet sometime.

yr V.W.

Mark Arnold-Forster

[]

2194: To Ethel Smyth

Sunday, 22nd June [1930]

[52. Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

O Lord, I have been such a wretch—never to write even a card to thank you for the white flowers. You must have stripped your garden; and then found two huge boxes; and then borne them through Woking on a bicycle; and then up here in a taxi—and I receive all this with only a nod—dear, dear. And it is only on Friday that they were withered. But I buried my nose (why do you like that long proboscis?) 10 times daily in their deliciousness. And thus I was upborne through heaven knows what boredoms. Yes, so I am now saying thank you.

1 send back Elizabeths [Williamson] very remarkable letter. What a terse and muscular mind she has! What a force she presses into her matter of fact statements; and it is this muscular mind that believes in God. I shall try to see her, alone if I can; and try to rake her mind with my erratic harrow; for she must be sown thick with all sorts of seeds—I cant finish this image; I see her mind; and I see my mind; but I’m so hot, so sleepy. I must leave it there. I began this at Rodmell, where we had a Scottish Ministers daughter in distress [Lyn Irvine]: should she take this job, or that? The angelic Leonard wrote a dispatch to her father in Aberdeen, while I sat mooning over my book, furious to be interrupted; and the 5 black puppies bit my toes. But it is an impossible book—my book. No I don’t much like Enid; maybe for knowing the sequel, that she married Jones and has a villa. And I did not mean, though I must have said, that Leonard served 7 years for his wife. He saw me it is true; and thought me an odd fish; and went off next day to Ceylon, with a vague romance about us both [Virginia and Vanessa]! And I heard stories of him; how his hand trembled and he had bit his thumb through in a rage; and Lytton said he was like Swift and would murder his wife; and someone else said Woolf had married a black woman. That was my romance—Woolf in a jungle. And then I set up house alone with a brother [Adrian], and Nessa married, and I was rather adventurous, for those days; that is we were sexually very free—Elizabeth owes her emancipation and mathematics partly to us—but I was always sexually cowardly, and never walked over Mountains with Counts as you did, nor plucked all the flowers of life in a bunch as you did. My terror of real life has always kept me in a nunnery. And much of this talking and adventuring in London alone, and sitting up to all hours with young men, and saying whatever came first, was rather petty, as you were not petty: at least narrow; circumscribed; and leading to endless ramifications of intrigue. We had violent rows—oh yes, I used to rush through London in such rages, and stormed Hampstead heights at night in white or purple fury. And then I married, and then my brains went up in a shower of fireworks. As an experience, madness is terrific I can assure you, and not to be sniffed at; and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about. It shoots out of one everything shaped, final, not in mere driblets, as sanity does. And the six months—not three—that I lay in bed taught me a good deal about what is called oneself. Indeed I was almost crippled when I came back to the world, unable to move a foot in terror, after that discipline. Think—not one moment’s freedom from doctor discipline—perfectly strange—conventional men; ‘you shant read this’ and ‘you shant write a word’ and ‘you shall lie still and drink milk’—for six months.

But enough. I must do whatever it is. This is really a letter to thank you for the vast cardboard boxes. How they must have banged about in your third class railway carriage.

Virginia

Berg

[]

2195: To Margaret Llewelyn Davies

Wednesday [25 June 1930]

Typewritten

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Dearest Margaret,

Here is the photograph. I suppose we could get it back if we wanted it. Leonard has not yet read the papers, but will. We are rushed at present by the huge success of Edwardians—it sells and sells. I think there is some truth in what you say—it was not intended seriously I imagine.

I heard no more of the widow lady; but have had another strange adventure to tell you when we meet. A cook [Mrs Walters] who is a lady; a coop; has a flat; a car; and insists upon acting as our daily general. Why?

Yours hastily
Virginia

Sussex

[]

2196: To Ethel Smyth

Thursday [26 June 1930]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Oh this is such a bore—I’ve got rather knocked up—been out too much at night Leonard says—and have the usual headache—a pain that is in the back of my neck. So I’ve had to take to dressing gown and sofa and can’t work. I shall be all right in a day or two: in fact I am better today; but it is a stealthy disease and pounces out if I give it a chance. So I shan’t attempt your concert: and I shant attempt answering your letters. But do please write—I do like reading your letters; and will one of these days accumulate an answer. And tell me what the young man said about my life that was so interesting to Eliz: And dont for goodness sake think that when I call my mind a harrow, it is in a good sense: no: I’m not her match at all, in mind. About religion; isn’t it sixth sense? I dont assert; I only lack. But here I must stop.

Lord—how I hate not being able to write! All the point of life gone. But enough.

V.

I am sorry about the Concert

Tell me about it.

Berg

[]

2197: To Helen Anrep

June 27th [1930]

52 Tavistock Sqre., [W.C.1]

My dear Helen,

It was a great pleasure to get your letter and to think of you and Roger [Fry] thoroughly wretched. As a rule, you are too happy; I like the balance to be redressed; and so I like to think of you sitting in a damp crypt with British spinsters to every meal. As for Roger, his spirit being what it is, I cant seriously suppose him unhappy, with his ten fingers and two legs. I’m glad they are healed. Then he must devote his life to friendship; now that his legs are healed.

London is awfully hot. At the same time, it is rather exciting and intricate, and like an aquarium, with that great crab, Ethel, pertinaciously gripping our toes, and Mary Hutchinson scuttling around, and poor dear Angus vagulating like some pale anemone in a cranny. I went to their show, and liked, spontaneously, without looking for a name, Rogers pictures. Can it be that artists go on ripening? I really think it looks like it. Angus was full of languor and bitterness. These quarrels he says upset him dreadfully; he was smoking cigarettes and reading French novels; but is a perfect gentleman all the same. I do not wish to say a word against him—only to say that I liked Rogers pictures. Maynard is back; Lydia fairly cuts me in the street, but deposits intolerable Russians upon me; so we are all agog for a summer of vituperation and discord—how jolly!

Your old Taupin is admirable and angelic for 3 days; on the 4th she arrives speechless and gaping; huddles in a chair; cant remember if she’s bought a fish; has lost all the keys; feels her toes, and has to be bundled off in a taxi. So I leave her for you and Duncan. But then a real adventure dropped from the skies—I cant go into details—but we have an American lady whose sole ambition is to be cook general to the Wolves. Her car waits outside. Her son, at Kings, fetches my groceries. She tosses off every sort of luxury and mends my stockings—all for love, it is said; and a passion for Leonards books on Co-operation. You must come and dine.

I’m swamped with manuscripts. The success of the Edwardians has encouraged every old typewriter in Surbiton—they are all dishing up society fiction. Lord! why does one run one’s head into such a panjandrum—which isn’t the word, but I’m too hot to think what is. Love to my dear Roger; and tell him how much I liked his pictures and want to see him.

yr V.W.

Sussex

[]

2198: To Clive Bell

June 30th [1930]

Postcard

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

No, on the whole I think London is more entrancing [than Paris], Very hot. Very gay: very—everything desirable; but for the lack of one person whom I cant touch with any stick.

Quentin Bell

[]

2199: To Ethel Smyth

Tuesday July 1st [1930]

52 T[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Leonard will give you a ruthless and truthful answer—that I’m quite well and we’ll come—thats what I expect since its true. But this is only to say that I must have misled you about this particular headache. There are 3 stages: pain; numb; visionary; and this stopped at pain, and only a little pain at that. And its gone; and I’ve been working, for me very hard. To continue medical details, though I think them rather sordid, it is 10 years since I was seeing faces, and 5 since I was lying like a stone statue, dumb to the rose—(no it should be blind, but I write in a hurry) In fact, I am now very much stronger than ever since I was a small child, in proof of which, I had a perpetual temperature, after influenza, for some years: this has gone; and a heart that was always leaping 5-barred gates; this is now steady as a cab-horse; and I dont get influenza nearly so regularly every winter. I am (by the way) greatly intrigued by your oblique and I suppose delicate reference to “the tiresome epoch in women’s lives” for I had not yet begun to think about it, seeing what the month, to put it delicately, brings; nor has Nessa, who is 20 years older and so should precede me through these mystic rites. Are you right in your dates? And what does it feel like? Or are all your medical observations, as I suspect, founded upon the case of Pan [Ethel’s sheepdog]—who is not really a case in point. “There now” as you say “I won’t refer to the subject again”—unless you, being so terrifically psychologically minded like the analysis (oh I cant spell) of sensations.

I am very glad about Beecham (Lady Cunard has asked us to dine) and hope you prodded him between the joints: and wish I had heard the 4tet. Here is Leonard with my Will. Who is to witness it? Do you want a legacy? And now I must write to 70 almost congenital idiots who ask me among other things to write novels with them about plots which seem to them (and they are Oxford dons too I gather) so suitable. The flowers still flower: What a good heart, it suddenly occurs to me, speaking humanly as far I am able—you have—to care about my headaches.

Yr V.

Berg

[]

2200: To V. Sackville-West

[4 July 1930]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Yes—lunch, one, on Monday.

We have passed the 20,000—

I mean The Edwardians.

Just off to Rodmell after a champagne supper last night at Woking.

Berg

[]

2201: To Ethel Smyth

Sunday, perhaps 6th July [1930]

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

I say Ethel—what a party! What a triumph! I can only assure you that when I saw all those hands stretched over the gate I felt I was being shut out from Paradise. I daresay it went on for hours after we left in the garden, under the roses. It was a superb affair, rolling and warbling from melody to melody like some divine quartet—no, octet. First the meeting; then the golf; then the returning; then the supper, and all interwoven with so many extraneous melodies, to me so fascinating; Lady Balfour, Mrs Lyttleton and then the champagne and then—oh millions of other things which I noticed at the time, but had hardly leisure to taste, and now single out and brood over lights upon your life and character; sudden glimpses of buried truths which I had suspected dimly before. Lord! how I liked you! How I rejoiced in your existence! We are still talking it over, and saying “Do you remember the other night at Ethels—or Did you notice how …” and so on. By the way, Leonard was more overcome than I’ve known him by any party these 10 years. He was so warmhearted in his praise of you that nothing on earth (so slow and sure and everlasting is he) will now change his affection. Also he said he had seldom met anybody he liked better at first go off than Joyce Wethered—he said he could have gone on talking to her for hours. He said he thought she had one of the nicest characters anybody could have—and so we go on. Now I must do a little very dreary work—boiling 2 articles in to one and spreading one in to 3: that makes my years income; but I can assure you it is hardly earned. I have to wrench my head to the left when it’s looking to the right.

52 Tavistock Sqre.

Home again, and found your letter. I say, who were the people who fell in love with Leonard? I rather like people doing that—yes; why shouldn’t I come and be bored? I would like to—(now I dont suppose I say that I mean it once in a blue moon). But of course, what nobody, except you I daresay sees, is the difficulty of keeping one’s atmosphere unbroken. If I could only live in my protected shell another 2 months, surrounded by the usual, I could finish this exquisitely irritating book [The Waves]. If I stay away, even between Sackvilles adulterous sheets, I break the membrane, and the fluid escapes—a disgusting image, drawn I think from the memory of Vanessa’s miscarriage. All the same, I shall come, for a night, and let the membrane break if it will. What a lark! I was tremendously interested (here we are off on the party again, which is already classical, like the Jane Austen Box Hill party [Emma]) by meeting Mrs Lyttelton. How she figured in my youth! though I dont think I ever saw her—she was one of Kitty Maxses stock instances of charm and interest, and as Kitty Maxse, my mothers greatest friend’s daughter, served us as foster mother in the ways of the world when we were left orphans in a sea of halfbrothers, her words were held by us more than inspired. She was always talking of D.D [Edith Lyttelton]. And then, what an extraordinary charmer I thought Lady Balfour—only I was tipsy. And heres Maurice sending me his book and asking us to lunch—And here’s a smart young man, called Beaton, notorious as a gate crasher at smart parties, asking me to be photographed: Shall I? He does Edith Sitwell in her tomb.

But I am rambling and running in this heat, and must go and disinter the remains of our gammon. But why (to return to the party) this rancour against the soup? I thought it was a high bred, blue blooded soup—thick with the ichor of turtles, I thought. Was Elizabeth’s [Williamson] golf so bad? Her figure was so exquisite—like the Greek Goddess at the Louvre that I forgot about sending the ball into a hole—I am no professional golfer you understand.

VW

Berg

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2202: To V. Sackville-West

[8 July 1930]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Lord! What a go! £5,000 at least I imagine.

And I’m sitting here so dolefully, trying to read Jimmy Sheehan, when I want to be at the movie.

Look—wd. this do for Lady C? If so wd. you post it—but please dont if there is any doubt—and ask Harold if you are hesitating.

Berg

[]

2203: To Ethel Smyth

Friday [11 July 1930]

52 Tavistock Sqre. [W.C.1]

But that—ringing up on the spur of the moment—is precisely the method that does suit me, moody as I am. Also to arrange for Leonard and the car, is, in our much too organised life (interviews are always taking place with paper merchants, and a quavering old lady has just doddered in with a huge portfolio of what I know to be sketches of seaside resorts)—that is far harder than ringing up on the spur. What I will do, I hope next week, is to say there is a train that gets to Woking about 4: I will have tea and dinner with you; we will talk—how heavenly—then I will catch say the 9.40 to Wloo and be home for eleven o’clock bed. You will say, But I have to lunch with Beecham—then I will say what about Friday—I cant at the moment lose a morning, ridiculous as it seems—I am trying to get back, after a horrid burst of journalism, to fiction, and things are going so badly, that if I stop, I fall off my rock again—The truth is I dont know how to write this book—I might, given another 10 years of trying. No it is an impossible book—something that flashed upon me at Rodmell 3 years ago, as I was finishing The Lighthouse. And it will end in failure, the worst failure of them all. Why then make the attempt? For I could reel off books now that would do all right, and yet must beat my head against something that can’t possibly do at all. But thats enough—only to explain the train home—

No, my gloves, if I may say it now they are dead, were among the world’s beauties, a present from a lady [Ethel Sands] who buys at the best shop in Paris—the only shop—which she always knows. All the winter they have eked out the shabbiness of my stockings.—Cant be helped—I must have dropped them on the golf course—but that party deserves a ring dropped into the sea. No I won’t lunch with M.B⁠[aring]: nor dine with Lady Cunard; and I refused the Hutchinsons last night, and a picnic today—Each of these conquests over my gadding spirit is a tribute to you. But you’re not, as I so futilely call myself, a novelist: things don’t happen for you at parties; where I might pick up a crumb perhaps; suppose you were to hear some rare instrument; and then could not go, because of a horrible headache? Here is MBs letter and the false gloves.

I will ring up about the day—perhaps Tuesday next? What about that?

VW

Berg

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2204: To Ethel Smyth

Wednesday [16 July 1930]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

O Lord—do all my letters to you begin O Lord?—O Lord again, that was a nice day Ethel. How I enjoyed it and the diversity of my sensations, as we went from solitude to society; and then back; and the wine, and the cluck, and the fire—oh and everything; always excepting some twinges of compunction (they came on worse after I had left you) at my own egotistic loquacity. I can assure you I dont romanticise quite so freely about myself as a rule—It was only that you pressed some nerve, and then up started in profusion the usual chaos of pictures of myself—some true, others imaginary; more were true than false, I think, but I ought not to have been so profuse. Next time it shall be the other story—yours. But in your benignity and perspicacity—its odd how the image of the soaring aeroplane seeing to the bottom persists—you can penetrate my stumbling and fitful ways: my childish chatter. Yes—for that reason, that you see through, yet kindly, for you are, I believe, one of the kindest of women, one of the best balanced, with that maternal quality which of all others I need and adore—what was I saying?—for that reason I chatter faster and freer to you than to other people. But I wont next time. And you won’t think the worse of me, will you? You see, I am, I dont deny it, very excitable. And going home, as the wine went out and a cold sheen appeared on the roofs of Surbiton, I thought, My God what an egoist I am; and that was the only twangling wire in the whole composition. I was home by eleven; and slept; and still feel very, extraordinarily well. And I wont therefore accuse Leonard of always castrating my joys.

I dont like [J. C.] Squire, but am doubtless jaundiced by my sense of his pervading mediocrity and thick thumbedness. It seems to me a hot, sentimental, blundering poem; thick handed, as usual. But I have no trust any more in my critical judgments, for every year I live I become more dyed in my own juice; and I cant help it; but I cant any longer present a virginal mind to other peoples work, as you, who dont stew in ink, can do.

Well, this should be re-written, to comb out the tangles, but I’m writing in a hurry. We have to dine out (undressed) and I have to write to Hugh Walpole and so on; and yet I like writing to you, who are so good to me, and let me sit chattering, and keep so immensely wise and good all the time. Now do you think those epithets are right?

I’ll send back the coat tomorrow.

Yr V.

Berg

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2205: To Hugh Walpole

Wednesday 16th July [1930]

52 T.S. [W.C.1]

My dear Hugh,

Oh yes—the Press is flourishing, more than ever, what with Vita going into Edition after Edition. She has now made £5,000 too out of the American book Clubs.

I envy you, on the strength of your flying picture of German life: Einstein etc. But I always hope other people’s lives aren’t so wildly exciting as they seem. Another touch, and I should jump from my orbit in a vain endeavour to be you. I’ve been only Mrs Woolf of 52 T.S. all the summer, seeing Ethel Smyth, Vita, Christabel, Lytton and so on. I wish I could think of anything to make you envious. I like printing in my basement best, almost: no, I like drinking champagne and getting wildly excited. I like driving off to Rodmell on a hot Friday evening and having cold ham, and sitting on my terrace and smoking a cigar with an owl or two.

But you only want a post card: so here I stop. Dear dear, I cant write sense.

Yr
Virginia

Texas

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2206: To V. Sackville-West

Friday [18 July 1930]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Are you by any chance coming to tea with me on Monday? I’ll keep it free on the chance. (But let me know)

Leonard wants me to say that he can possibly let you have 50 1st Edn. Edwardians if you still want them. About 21,600 now sold: still going strong.

How I dreamt of your mother last night. And it struck me, the other night, that Harold is one of the best hearted of people—Why did this so overcome me in a flash like a lizard creeping out of a chink? I dont know.

V.

Berg

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2207: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Friday [18 July 1930]

52 Tavistock Square. [W.C.1]

Dearest Ottoline,

It was very good of you to suggest taking me to Comus. It shows the optimism which your parties breed that I thought I would go—when I had people here to tea and have to spend tomorrow at Cambridge—Everything seemed possible, as I sat in your drawing room, but alas, outside it, not. I did enjoy myself, and thought Lady Hartington charming.

Thank you so much

Your
Virginia

Texas

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2208: To V. Sackville-West

Thursday [24 July 1930]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

It suddenly occurs to me—would you like me to come down tomorrow, Friday, for the night? But—

(1) Are you alone?

(2) Would it be in anyway inconvenient?

I should have to go early on Saturday.

Could you ring up?

A party has been put off, and it seems a good chance if it suited you.

Berg

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2209: To Ethel Smyth

Thursday [24 July 1930]

52 T[avistock] S[quare, W.C.1]

Well, your cardboard boxes delivered by architects fairly make me gasp—the flowers, the scissors, the string, the telephone, and finally my room like a bower in a garden, all shades of pink, yellow lilac nodding together in great pale bunches. How is it done? I have garden, flowers, boxes, string—but the combination—No I cant envisage it. So I go on, sniffing and looking, and wondering—its like the edge of some sunset over a flat beach—my room at this moment. And they haven’t dropped a petal. But I must confess that last night I woke in a stew, I forget about what—on the brink of perdition, and dosed myself with chloral, and in consequence have a head like wood. I cant frame sentences at all. Tomorrow the dose will have worn off and I’ll write a better letter. (It was only half a dose, now I come to think of it and I make this confession out of deference to you.) I’ll tell you about that article next time

V.

Berg

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2210: To Margaret Llewelyn Davies

25th July 1930

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Sq., [W.C.1]

Dearest Margaret,

I have been a long time answering your letter, but I have had an awful rush of work, trying to finish some articles which have to be sent to America and as usual finding them a much tougher job than I expected.

This explains why I have not yet gone through your suggestions about my Guild paper. I am taking them to Rodmell, where we go on Tuesday, and hope in the quiet there to see what can be done to alter the paper as you and Lilian think desirable. I am much relieved that you like it in the main. Of course I was aware of great difficulties. And in spite of your kindness, I admit that I feel grave doubts whether the thing ought to be published as an introduction. I think it might be better for the book to stand on its own feet, or to have only a formal note of explanation. But I have not read my paper since I wrote it, and I will go through it again with Leonard. I have a strong feeling against introductions—and this one is full of difficulties. But I will see.

Meanwhile an American editor, to whom I had promised an article, has read it; and wants to publish it in September as an article—or rather as fiction. What I want to know is whether you would object to my doing this, if I suppressed all real names, did not mention you or Lilian, and made it my personal view of congresses in general? I should put a note to say that it was based on some impressions received at a meeting of the Womens Guild and was intended as an introduction to a book by working women. The Americans, the editor said, are completely in the dark about co-operation and Guilds and it would be read as literature simply. It has to be sent off on Tuesday, and thus I have no time to make the alterations in detail which you suggest. Can you trust me to make the thing blameless? I dont suppose any Guildswoman is likely to read the Yale Review. Leonard says that this would make no difference to our publishing it in England. Would you send me a card to say if you have any objection?

Anyhow, I am awfully glad that you liked it—I felt it very imperfect. I dont think, by the way, that your swans, as you say, only provoked “a literary reaction” in me—or perhaps I include a good deal more in literature than you would. My difficulty always was the political attitude to human beings—that some were always right, others always wrong. I did hate that. And do still. But as you say one gets more sensible. Love from us both. Yes of course I will send the final form of the letter for you to see, if we decide to keep it.

[in Virginias handwriting:]

Excuse the typing; but I think it is on the whole more legible than my handwriting.

yr Virginia

Sussex

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2211: To Ethel Smyth

Saturday [26 July 1930]

Long Barn, Weald, Sevenoaks, [Kent]

Well here I am lying in Vita’s adulterous sheets. I know I left a sentence unfinished in my drugged letter [Letter 2209], but cant remember what. It was a letter of thanks, wasn’t it, for cardboard boxes; and then, with a graceful transition I hastened on to my own works. But aint it time that Ethel talked of her works? Yes, it is. Vita and I were talking about you last night. I sketched a fancy picture of a third class smoker from Woking to Waterloo. Theres Ethel between 2 city gents. (Vita is putting bath salts in my bath and talking agreeably—hence my intermittent pulse in narrative) Well, Ethel who has been all that a woman should be, reading the Daily Telegraph, is suddenly brought to bed of a phrase—a passage for flutes in the middle bass: what do the old city gents say? And does she write it, there and then? on an old envelope? Anyhow, what Vita and I said is, Thats true happiness, writing phrases in smokers—Life holds nothing better. Ethel, we said, is the most enviable of women: Now, my train

V.

Berg

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2212: To Margaret Llewelyn Davies

Sunday [27 July 1930]

Typewritten

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Dearest Margaret,

Leonard has given on another page his oath that it will be quite all right about America—we are always printing there first and it makes no difference. I feel it was my fault—I had promised to write an article and I never did and when the editor [of the Yale Review] came down on me for it I excused myself by saying that I had been writing an introduction which would not do for them. This put their backs up and they demanded to see it, and now of course out of perversity say it is the very thing. I have scrapped all names and otherwise abolished traces of the book and have sent it off. But I always write things twice over, and let the Americans, who are in a hurry, have the first version. No doubt when I get to Rodmell I shall want to rewrite a good deal of this, so that it wont be the same thing. I have only glanced hastily at your notes, and it may be quite easy—if they dont involve a change of view entirely—to put them in. I’ve always meant to ask what the writers of the letters feel about a book? Did they write with a view to publication? Do they want their things to appear in print? Are they all alive? What was their motive in writing? It was stupid of me not to find out before I began.

We are off on Tuesday—oh dear how nice it will be to get away from London, but we shall be up weekly or fortnightly, and perhaps could meet you one day.

I agree about Vitas natural powers; the trouble is she writes with incredible ease and fills up any odd space of time by dashing off a book. This [The Edwardians] was done I think to wile away a few months leisure, and she has made about six thousand pounds!

Yr
Virginia

Sussex

[]

2213: To Helen McAfee

27th July 1930

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Miss McAfee,

I enclose the corrected copy of the paper. I think your suggestion of a title is very good and have adopted it. I have also put a note as you see, and have made various alterations which will I hope make it quite plain to your readers. But if any further alterations occur to you, would you very kindly note them in pencil on the proofs and I will add them when I make final corrections. As you see, I have altered the last words.

I cannot find my copy of the article on Reading which you want to reprint. My memory of it is that I thought there were a good many alterations needed—if they should be too many I might of course be unable to let you have it, as my time is very full. But I will let you know as soon as I get the copy which you say you are sending.

On reading your letter again, I am not sure if you are going to send me proofs of the Womens Guild paper. If not, I will send you any alterations that may occur for you to add yourself.

We were so glad to see you the other day.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Yale University

[]

Letters 2214-2246 (August–September 1930)

2214: To V. Sackville-West

[30 July 1930]

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

This is merely to say that L. will be at the harbour at 10 on Saturday, unless we hear to the contrary; and will bring you back here.

Also I left a sponge [at Long Barn]. (I think—a small one)

Also could I have Ediths [Sitwell] poems.

Thats all for the moment.

V.

Berg

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2215: To Ethel Smyth

Saturday Aug. 2nd [1930]

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

Well it is extremely difficult to write letters here. One goes off, I find, into a kind of swoon; becomes languid as an alligator with only its nostrils above water. London keeps one braced; take away the tension and ones mind opens like a flower, or an old glove, in water. Also I have been to Worthing to see my mother in law. Also I have been tidying the house. One thing I did thanks to you—I re-read my Burney article, which is a thing I never do (I have never read any of my books a second time, except when they were re-printed, I shudder past them on the shelf as if they might bite me) anyhow, I read this article again, thanks to you, and rather liked it. The truth is though, these articles, all architecture, a kind of cabinet work, fitting parts together, making one paragraph balance another; are such hard labour in the doing that one cant read them without remembering the drudgery. One starts full tilt; one sees a scene in a flash; but the working out is almost (with me) unbelievably laborious. However, when I read it, I got more pleasure and less sense of backbreaking effort than usual—thanks to you again. Some of it needs emphasising though—some of it is too condensed. And I have just written another.

But this letter written drowsily with a man hammering in the village and a dog barking next door is to ask you to remember when you write to tell me fully and explicitly what that rather sordid and absurd trait (these mayn’t be the epithets) is which you say has come to light in you lately and must be extirpated. I am really curious about this. You see, being an inexpert psychologist any help I can be given is very important to the health and stability of our friendship. Now, if I had alluded to a trait in me, you would have divined it at once, infallibly; and I cant and that worries me. So be full and garrulous and tremendously documented and illustrated, remembering my groping moles eyes.

Except for the dogs next door and the man hammering we are very quiet and content. I suppose my mind will cease to expand in a day or two, and contract; and take up the staff of life and trudge on. I went very sleepily to Worthing and sat in a little match box bedroom with my mother in law, aged 80, and as spry as an old tramp. It is the most exhausting expedition I know: all facts, all personalities, all compliments, all personal relations and family news. And I forget which Woolf is which—And we are given cakes out of tins from her cupboard. She had been visited by Colonel Carrington Smyth, very musical, and supposed therefore to be related to you. How I hated marrying a Jew—how I hated their nasal voices, and their oriental jewellery, and their noses and their wattles—what a snob I was: for they have immense vitality, and I think I like that quality best of all. They cant die—they exist on a handful of rice and a thimble of water—their flesh dries on their bones but still they pullulate, copulate, and amass (a Mrs Pinto, fabulously wealthy came in) millions of money.

Vita and Harold and the boys were to have breakfasted here today, going to Newhaven, on a tour to Italy; but the boat went before its time, and I did not see them, or I should perhaps have heard about your letter. I’m sure nothing you could say would annoy, or embitter her—she is the most entirely magnanimous minded of women—without a vanity in her; for which I admire her immensely; and it is not that she is insensitive—merely that she is made that way. And she was telling me, in her perfectly sincere fashion, that she doesn’t care a scrap for The Edwardians—prefers not to think of it, though she likes the money to flaunt in that greedy old peasant woman’s face, Lady Sackville [Vita’s mother], I mean. I was rather relieved they had to catch the boat. My mind, this floating glove, or lily or whatever I called it, wants to drift off into some obscure pool, and be shaded by weeds. I dont want to talk or laugh or make engagements even with Vita. But I do want to hear about the Prison, and how you go on: it must be blazing up like a furnace now; and I daresay you see everything a little fiery (thats the way its spelt) and distorted. Even Pan, even Virginia. What a triumph when it is done! How you will taste bread and tea again and look at the grass for the first time this summer! But do remember, if you can put your mind to it, about that sordid and absurd trait.

Virginia

(1) I have just been asked to write an introduction to a book partly by you; and refused. How could I introduce you and the Bishop of London?

(2) What is your cure for sleeplessness? Mine is walking on the downs—but then you and Elizabeth [Williamson] dont know what walking is, without a small white [golf] ball.

Berg

[]

2216: To William Plomer

Aug 6th 1930

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

Dear William,

I meant to answer your letter before—but London is an intolerable place for that. The worst of it is, that I like getting letters more and more, and hate writing them. Yes, I have been in Greece [in 1906]; I have been in an hotel in Athens and seen the Acropolis as you describe. There were bugs everywhere. Once I sat up all night, reading the Christian Monitor in a drawing room to escape them, and was given a 4th Century pot by the hotel keeper (which holds spills)

Love from us both,

and remember us to Mr Butts.

Your
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

2217: To V. Sackville-West

9th August 1930

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Yes, it must be dull, travelling without Virginia—nobody to say Brusque?—oh no Harold would know the word for rough, and so would the boys; but then I daresay at Porto Fino, what with the vineyards and the olive trees, the mediterranean and the old crumbling cliff—(where Elsie Carnarvon, the friend of my youth lived) you’ve forgotten me, and Potto, and how we crossed the Channel, and how I wept as the white cliffs disappeared.

You should be arriving about now, I daresay, I hope so. Yes, I still hope not to open the paper and read “Titled victims of motor smash”—and then to find you crashed down a precipice—in which case it would be incumbent on me to commit suicide like Colonel Green of the Cottesmore hunt.

Life is so adorably pleasing at the moment, I dont know where to begin. I’ve just come in from a walk with Pinka across the fields, with 5 mushrooms in my hat. True it drizzles; and there is a cloud over Asheham, but I dont care; I feel so happy with poor dear Nelly away, and no rows, and no tears, and all my time free; and now Mrs. Walters hints that she wants to come permanently. Lord, what am I to do? Please, as an English lady, tell me.

Yesterday, as I was dishing up my dinner, 2 chops, broiled in gravy with green peas, there was a tap at the door; Leonard said, ‘Curse these pedlars selling notepaper’ and there was Lord Gage, with a plan of the downs under his arm. He had come to tell us about preserving the Newhaven down; and we gave him some wine, and he talked about you, and made us cry with laughing. When he lunched with Lord Curzon the footman dropped methylated spirits on his hair and it blazed up. Lord Curzon had to put it out with a napkin. He was very shy—indeed, fascinate him though we do, in our sordid confusion, eating chops at 7, with a puppy howling, he is very frightened of us. Then I was in London—saw Raymond at the London Library. Why does he fill my throat with dust, and make me arch and clever and uneasy, and why is he so natty, modish, outwardly—why does no moss no verdure no shadow no sympathy no romance grow under his footsteps (for me) when he’s everything good, kind, clever and tenderhearted? Is it all the effect of his nose—and why should noses have such a devastating effect? Ethel says mine makes her weep at night. Ethel however is over head and ears in work at this moment and only sends me frantic and flying sparks from her anvil. She promises a full blast next week. D’you think it can be all nonsense?—The Prison? If so, isn’t nature odd, keeping an old woman in a state of positive frenzy for weeks, if its all nonsense, what she writes. I daresay I am just the same, with my Moths and waves. I wander over the downs, declaiming and making up and altogether working myself into a frenzy too: and whats the good of it?

The Edwardians is still selling very well. That being so, with the dead season in full career, I dont see any reason why we shouldnt sell 25,000; and what the sales will be in America—heaven help us—the imagination boggles, as they say.

Now I am going over to tea at Charleston. How fuliginous Nessa was the other day over Raymond and Francis! She had them for Bank holiday: they yapped like fox terriers, all about nothing, she said. And Clive was so cross with her; so she came over here, as monumental as a Sphinx and sat down and ruminated.

Dotty has sent her poem—Leonard is, for him, rather impressed—says its good of its kind—I think (I’ve not read it) she deserves some credit for keeping her head up, and writing about cats and rocks this time instead of the birth of man.

Shall you be glad to see me—Breakfast Aug. 25th

Yr
V [squiggly design]

Berg

[]

2218: To Ethel Smyth

15th Aug. 1930

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

As it is a pouring wet afternoon, I will write a few disjected observations, like offerings to a magpie. (These birds make their nests of straw, hair-combings, and other things that have been thrown away.) Ethels great grandmother on the paternal side was a Magpie.

(1) Why dont you come down for the night? This is a sensible observation. Why not be our first dine and sleep guest [of the summer]? There is a train which gets you here about 4.30; met by Leonard: another takes you back about 9.30 or 2.30 next day. So that you wd. be home for tea again. I’m a little vague about dates; but I suggest, tentatively, Thursday 21 st, or Friday 22nd. Please answer, and put this on a firm footing. We could talk the whole morning.

(2) As a psychologist I am myopic rather than obtuse. I see the circumference and the outline not the detail. You and Nessa say I am so frightfully stupid because I dont see that fly on the floor: but I see the walls, the pictures and the Venus against the pear tree, so that the position and surroundings of the fly are accurately known to me. Say that you are a fly: what you actually do and say I may misinterpret; but your standing in the world being known to me, I never get you out of perspective as a whole. Therefore act and speak as frantically as you like; having (while I lay on the sofa that first afternoon) sketched your ambit—your wall, statue and pear tree, no minor agitation in the foreground will upset me. You see I like your circumference.

(3) Hence if I were ill I should be quite as ready to come to you as to Vita, though for entirely different reasons. When I was ill, 4 years ago, and had to spend 3 months in bed, she took me to Long Barn: there I lay in Swansdown and recovered. The sense of peace dwells thus, about her—those are some of my associations. But loving lights, pillows, and all luxury as I do, aesthetically largely, and often merely spectacularly, for I never acquire possessions myself, you, if I were ill, would be as soothing; no, not that; perhaps supporting would be the better word. Sanity is what I want. A robust sense of fact. Well, wouldn’t you give me that? Haven’t you—anyhow to my sense, warred with the world sufficiently to have made intervals of peace?

The object of this remark is I think to prove that I am diverse enough to want Vita and Ethel and Leonard and Vanessa and oh some other people too. But jealousy is not a very bad fault is it? I am often jealous of other people’s gifts. Only to think I want the swansdown only is not an accurate picture of my mind.

(4) Then Perversion.

Yes, I am afraid I do agree with you in thinking it silly. But I suspect we are wrong. I suspect the ramrod and gunpowder of our East Indian grandfathers here influences us. I think we are being provincial and petty. When I go to what we call a *Buggery Poke party, I feel as if I had strayed into the male urinal; a wet, smelly, trivial kind of place. I fought with Eddy Sackville over this; I often fight with my friends. How silly, how pretty you sodomites are I said; whereat he flared up and accused me of having a red-nosed grandfather. For myself, why did I tell you that I had only once felt physical feeling for a man when he felt nothing for me? I suppose in some opium trance of inaccuracy. No—had I felt physical feeling for him, then, no doubt, we should have married, or had a shot at something. But my feelings were all of the spiritual, intellectual, emotional kind. And when 2 or 3 times in all, I felt physically for a man, then he was so obtuse, gallant, foxhunting and dull that I—diverse as I am—could only wheel round and gallop the other way. Perhaps this shows why Clive, who had his reasons, always called me a fish. Vita also calls me fish. And I reply (I think often while holding their hands, and getting exquisite pleasure from contact with either male or female body) ‘But what I want of you is illusion—to make the world dance.’ More than that, I cannot get my sense of unity and coherency and all that makes me wish to write the Lighthouse etc. unless I am perpetually stimulated. Its no good sitting in a garden with a book; or collecting facts. There must be this fanning and drumming—of course I get it tremendously from Leonard—but differently—Lord Lord how many things I want—how many different flowers I visit—and often I plunge into London, between tea and dinner, and walk and walk, reviving my fires, in the city, in some wretched slum, where I peep in at the doors of public houses. Where people mistake, as I think, is in perpetually narrowing and naming these immensely composite and wide flung passions—driving stakes through them, herding them between screens. But how do you define “Perversity.”? What is the line between friendship and perversion?

Well, enough—especially as I read in your last letter that you dont want remarks about character. And I’ve no doubt these are all wrong; but I’m treating you as a woman whose paternal Grandmother was a magpie.

V.

See how incredibly stupid I am: I do not in the least know the answer to your question “Am I a dog with a poor appetite?” Please tell me what it means. And what did Vanessa say one day to my face? Oh dear, oh dear. And who is Leo Piddington [unidentified]? Thrice oh dear! And now for tea.

* There is a Farm here called Muggery Poke.

Berg

[]

2219: To Helen McAfee

17th Aug. 1930

Typewritten

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Miss McAfee,

I return the pages [of Memories of a Working Women’s Guild] you sent for my corrections herewith. I quite agree to your alterations, and I see the point about [the] letter quoted on page 22. Yes, I think there is something rather fine in the very stiff words the woman uses. I have altered the comment in order to bring this out, as I agree that the meaning might not be taken without a little emphasis. I hope it is enough—one does not want to nudge the reader too much.

I am afraid this paper has given you a lot of trouble, but I hope that with these alterations the readers of the Yale Review will be able to read without difficulty.

Many thanks.

Yours very sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Yale University

[]

2220: To Helen McAfee

17th August 1930

Typewritten

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Miss MacAfee,

I hope you will not mind my writing to you about the cable which I have had from the Yale Press, as they say they have heard from you about my “forthcoming book on Womens Cooperative Guild” and want to see advance proofs. I should be very grateful if you could tell them that the book consists of working womens letters with an introduction by me. It is not, of course, a book on the Womens Guild. Would you say that I should be glad to let them see the advance proofs, but that Harcourt Brace, who do all my books, might wish to do this, and I should have to give them the first offer.

I hope this is not asking too much of you. I hope I am not wrong in supposing that you have some connection with the Yale Press which makes it easy for you to communicate with them.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Yale University

[]

2221: To V. Sackville-West

Aug. 19th [1930]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

I dont suppose this will reach you. Its only to say Yes of course, do come: shall expect you and the boys and the novel and the tragedy: and if Harold would look in when he passes so much the better

I’m off to Charleston on a breezy evening to eat grouse and send fireworks up by the pond. Isn’t that English? Take care, crossing the Alps: dont fall over—Love from us.

Let me have a line by the way: and order your breakfast for the 30th.

Berg

[]

2222: To Ethel Smyth

Tuesday [19 August 1930]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

(1) “I dont suppose I am really very fond of anyone”

I woke up in the night and said “But I am the most passionate of women. Take away my affections and I should be like sea weed out of water; like the shell of a crab, like a husk. All my entrails, light, marrow, juice, pulp would be gone. I should be blown into the first puddle and drown. Take away my love for my friends and my burning and pressing sense of the importance and lovability and curiosity of human life and I should be nothing but a membrane, a fibre, uncoloured, lifeless to be thrown away like any other excreta. Then what did I mean when I said to Ethel “I dont suppose I am really very fond of anyone”?”

(2) It is true that I only want to show off to women. Women alone stir my imagination—there I agree with you:

(3) how I enjoy your account of your talk! My word, how well you report! And what nice friends you have—what a credit to the race a talk like that is! And your sister’s letter—now, you’d be surprised to know all I divine from a letter like that—what a light it throws from another angle. Perhaps my angle is (owing to my trade) an odd one. Certainly, I often get glimpses, as it were through the laurels in the kitchen shrubbery, which I dont get marching up to the front door.

So—I now come to the point—might I one day read some of your letters? Your diary? Remember what a lot has to be packed in. And remember—not I confess that you seem in any danger of forgetting this elemental fact—what a crazy piece of work I am—like a cracked looking glass in a fair. Only, as I write this, it strikes me that as usual I am romancing, led on irresistibly by the lure of some phrase; and that in fact Virginia is so simple, so simple, so simple: just give her things to play with, like a child. But enough. I am now going to look out your trains. (Should this need correction, Leonard will supply it).

        Victoria 3.15 arr. Lewes. 4.32.

I suggest (unless you dislike mornings in other people’s houses) that you should catch the 5.32 p.m. arr. Victoria 6.52 on Saturday.

But this can be arranged. I deserve a whole days holiday—I shall have finished a chapter (so-called) in my novel (again so-called for trade purposes)

    But—look here: you say you are rather a wreck: you feel jagged, worn, fagged, have pains in your neck. May I point out that to add a railway journey, a visit, talk (for we must find time to say a word or two—it cant be all reading the newspaper and patting the dog) will be a strain. And seriously, I should be very very much annoyed if I made you spend even half a day in bed, or on a sofa. Next week would suit us—Dont let yourself be rushed. Of course, Friday would be very nice otherwise.

Yr V

Berg

[]

2223: To George Rylands

[27th August 1930]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

My dear Dadie,

Any chance that you would come down for a night before October? I dont know where you are, but hope Kings may find you. We shall be here, anyhow till 25th of Sept. or so. We are having short visits from our most desirable friends, as we are happily provided only with a daily. O dear this should be re-written, to convey the real meaning: our happiness is being without a cook; not in having short visits. But its so hot I pour with sweat—the ink is pale with it. And it is the loveliest time here. So come soon.

This hot afternoon I have begun Rosamund Lehmann: and read it with pleasure so far, which is so rare, novels being so abominable, that I think it must be good.

Have you written poetry? Please do. My old jaws can mumble nothing else.

yr V.W.

George Rylands

[]

2224: To Ethel Smyth

Thursday, 28th Aug. [1930]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

Now talk of affection—what can be a greater proof than that I sit up (I was slumbering) and write in answer to your questions

1. No I cant tackle Christopher St. John—I never read a word of hers.

2. No. Elizabeths [Williamson] defamatory letter is not included—I wish it were.

3. What question in particular was it about the Waves that delicacy forbade? I think—but what’s the use of thinking when I must correct Hazlitt and cant call an idea my own—they flaunt and fly like the shadows over the downs, yet the downs are like couchant lions today, yellow, unstained—I think then that my difficulty is that I am writing to a rhythm and not to a plot. Does this convey anything? And thus though the rhythmical is more natural to me than the narrative, it is completely opposed to the tradition of fiction and I am casting about all the time for some rope to throw to the reader. This is rough and ready; but not wilfully inaccurate.

Oh yes, I did enjoy your visit immensely. I was—if I’m allowed to say so—revived and fertilised. I’m floated over this dismal week of journalism and snipping and sitting; Proofs and signatures. But dont exaggerate my gifts or merits. I’m naturally vain but almost equally naturally fastidious: I mean, I adore being liked; but when I see how generous free and fierce you are, I feel (I think this is true) but I’m not worth it. But this theme will be developed later. I’m going to crawl to the post. Why wasn’t it hot like this the day you came?

Do write please; do send me the love story. If I’m inarticulate at the moment it is that the tide of the brain in me is so capricious I cant make it flow at all some days; not when I have to go to London, to arrange a dinner party, and to see about circumventing those intolerable hedgings that the Cooperative movement dictate. Sand and shingles though I am, they crackle and blaze with genuine affection—oh yes they do—for you. Only I must one day explain how oddly my visual sense kept tricking me that night. Ethels 18: Ethels 30: Ethels someone, noble and austere, I’ve never known—all this as you sat in the light of the single candle and logs fire. And thus pulped, my emotions became like so many strange guests: as if chapter after chapter of your life, panel after panel of your psychology were opening and shutting in the twilight. But why try to explain?

I will write when I am rather more peaceful, and the silk knickerbockers dont stick to the sides of my legs.

Oh yes—no—I’ve no time to go into that, or the other. So goodbye.

Berg

[]

2225: To Vanessa Bell

Friday [29 August 1930]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

I cant conceive what the bill is for—sheer robbery I expect. I had two bills and paid them last December, and thought it was long ago settled. Unless you or Duncan can throw some light, I dont know what to do—It seems hopeless to check it. What a folly!

Here’s a letter from George [Duckworth]—still unanswered. We should like to come to tea on Sunday very much—Its too hot for anything but the garden, and the bees and flies swarm and the Keynes’es are just arriving for tea and we had Vita and the boys for breakfast and Worthing [Mrs Woolf] looms. So I should like a sight of Dolphin and some of my creatures to restore my balance.

B.

Berg

[]

2226: To Ethel Smyth

Monday [1 September 1930]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell,

Your telegram just come. Yes, I am much better. I am lying in the downstairs room today. I was showing some people [the Keyneses] round the garden on Friday and suddenly fainted. (It was awfully hot) Leonard carried me in here and then I fainted again—How odd being unconscious and coming to is! But it went off by degrees, and now there is nothing wrong but my old bother of a jumping heart—stops and jump, like a mulish pony. Its nothing wrong—with the heart I mean—only nerves. And that is better too. Dear me, what an angel L. has been. He almost makes me cry. I am lying in my room looking at the apple tree. I say, how I like your letter! How I shd. like to see you! What a pleasure if you walked in! Next best please send the lovers story and any other paper, and write.

I expect I shall be kept lying down most of this week; I had a plan to come up on Thursday and dine with you. I suppose thats impossible. I shall listen in. Do you think I’m jealous and ungenerous about other writers, or people? You see I read your letters very carefully. I can’t do much yet in the way of long stretches. I say (this is repetition) what a pleasure to think of you—yes, I shd. like you when I’m ill. By the way, I never thanked you for the book. I will read it.

V.

Berg

[]

2227: To V. Sackville-West

Monday [1 September 1930]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

Your poor Virginia is in bed—I fainted in the garden the day you came, and was rather a long time getting right—Leonard carried me into the sitting room. How odd lying on the floor unconscious is.

However it went off, and I’m now in my dressing gown. Its only my jumping heart that remains—only nerves; and the heat.

But look here—I was going to London with L. on Thursday. I doubt if I shall be able to. Would there be a chance that you could come here for lunch and stay the night? I dont suppose so. But it wd. be nice if you could; and would palliate my anxiety about his driving. I daresay I shall be all right then. Anyhow I want to see you—

I did think you so nice t’other morning. What a delicious pleasure you are to me.

I shall listen in to you this evening—

V.

Berg

[]

2228: To V. Sackville-West

Wednesday [3 September 1930]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

I have just with great reluctance wired to postpone your coming. Oh damn—It seems to have been some mild form of heatstroke and though I’m ever so much better, the usual headache is threatening and Leonard…. I think it would be silly to drag you here when perhaps I couldn’t talk much. If I’m quiet now it’ll go off.

What we suggest is that you would come on Tuesday (as early as you can) and spend the night and take us to Sissinghurst next day. I shall be in robust health by then. Please do this, or suggest another time—I do want to see you. And write me a full account of Gods own row with that Vampire. I fully expected it; and hope it is final. Yes; my heart is hard for her. But not for you.

No—it was nothing to do with you—my tumble into the rose bush—It was sitting talking politics with the Keynes’ and then showing them the hot house.

I say, I hope I haven’t upset any of your plans.

V. and P.

Berg

[]

2229: To Ethel Smyth

Wednesday [3 September 1930]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

Your telegram just come. I will cut all singing of praises and thanks (though they’ve never been more genuine)—for you will in future take that for said (I mean how tremendously I enjoy seeing you, and how I thank you and shall to my dying day now once more remote for that terrific and superb effort yesterday). But to business. Now this is said; or not said. You did me nothing but good; that is honest truth; but, I’ve been a little bothered today with the rat gnawing pain—which almost invariably comes after my heart has settled—Its very slight; but I have put off Vita who was coming tomorrow; and dont feel that I can at the moment persuade L. to make promises about Friday—You know what I’d like—but I dont feel, after my demands on L., that I can—you will finish the sentence. Only again the pain is slight, and may well be gone tomorrow. One cant tell.

Shall we leave it then that if I am perfectly recovered I will wire tomorrow afternoon to Coign. If I dont wire understand that I’m lying low. But dont understand that its anything but extreme precaution. And I’ll trust you to fill in all that I wish—how invigorating, oh and more, it is to me to see you. I cant tell you Ethel, how I adored you for that dash here—for 2 hours only—how it kindled and enraptured me to have you by me. Irreligious as I am (to your eyes) I have a devout belief in the human soul—when I meet what can be called such emphatically; and your power of soul completely daunts me. Thats an odd phrase—but I cant stop—post going—to make a better, and will write anyhow tomorrow. No, no, no, the pain is always hanging about after any spill; you kept it off. I say, I shall listen in; and hear the shouts and the music.

V.

Berg

[]

2230: To Ethel Smyth

Thursday [4 September 1930]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

This is what I should like:

to see you come in to the room at 3 on Sunday afternoon, and to talk and drowse perhaps in the garden, till 7—(but the last hour to be left vague)

This is what I should like, I say; brutally stated, without considering your plans (L. is out and I cant get hold of your letter) or convenience. So state equally brutally. Of course its only Thursday and I dont know what fate intends. No plans therefore. Only tastes and wishes. The pain has gone; but the next stage is complete drowsiness. I cant think how I ever walked to the fishpond—seems like an expedition to the Pole; yet I did this yesterday. I read one line and go into a trance like smoke. Slept the whole afternoon. I’m like an alligator, nostrils only visible, and a kind keeper gives me bananas. Ethels one of my kind keepers. I was awake in the night; suddenly terrified and laid hold of you, like a log. One day I’ll write the history of my spine: I think I can feel every knob: and my whole body feels like a web spread on the knobs, and twitchy and sagging and then sinking into delicious rest. But I wont go on at the moment. Here’s L. ‘Please stop writing’

At 8 we open our wireless. I lie here facing the door. L. in the big chair. Pinka asleep. I shall clap.

Blessings on you Ethel for all your goodness. No, Vita cant come anyhow before Tuesday, I’ve read—with vast looming intervals—50 pages of Ly. Russell [‘Elizabeth’]—enchanting—I laugh aloud

V.

I do want the lover’s story.

Berg

[]

2231: To Ethel Smyth

Friday [5 September 1930]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

Of course you must go to Mount M … for the weekend—no possible doubt about it. I am touched, too, by her letter. Well, we listened in. ‘How like she is to her music’ L. said: a great compliment: for he sees you vividly and warmly. I thought the Anacreontic Ode very exciting—even buzzed as it was across England. And the other, the songs, very satisfying (like a complete demonstration of something). Lord, how they knocked out Berners! How robust, and at the same time piercing. But no more words. I’m really better—less numbness in the back; and no pain; and here I shall lie all day (I’ve moved the other way round so that I can have the door open and see the hot pokers) I’m not even seeing Nessa today. I shall lie and dip into Elizabeth R⁠[ussell]: who makes me shout with laughter. Some of her sayings are absolutely tophole: as good as Dickens. About the gent, not having shaved for instance. I shall sleep most of the afternoon, wh. I should not do if Ethel were in the garden. And I think I shall be up on Monday: I mean dress and go to the tool house. But with this cat and mouse illness, pouncing and dropping, one can’t tell. I felt quite recovered the afternoon you came.

But go to Mt M: promise: the woman (I forget her name) has too much real feeling to be treated with any levity—I mean it is a serious thing, her affection

V.

Berg

[]

2232: To S. M. Ellis

6th Sept 1930

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Mr Ellis,

Please excuse the delay in answering—I have been ill. We shall like very much, of course, to consider your book on Henry Kingsley. If it is ready, will you send it straight here? I am afraid I shall not be in London before the beginning of October.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

2233: To V. Sackville-West

Sunday [7 September 1930]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Yes, dearest creature, that will be great fun, if you will come on Tuesday, and dont let it be very late after lunch. This disease has taken rather a lot of shaking off—dear old Ethel Smy: descended in the middle—but I’ve been for a little walk today and done what passes for writing—I mean correcting a damnable article on Hazlitt. (We never went to Maidstone, after all)—so I shall be practically recovered on Tuesday and it will be a tremendous jolt and jostle and excitement, but of the same salutary kind, to have you to talk to. What a bore—a fortnight’s hole knocked in the summer.

I dont pity that old termagant—ought one to?—your mother I mean. Now if the sun stroke descended on her head and left you £5,000 a year the richer I should think all the better of God. Why choose me and Potto, who have nothing to leave? It often strikes me that Heaven is a blundering affair—clumsy past belief.

I am lying in my downstairs room, looking out at the apples. Leonard—what an angel he has been, carrying me in here, fetching chamber pots, running about with trays and medicine—Leonard is grafting or pruning—which is it?—perhaps neither—and then goes to dine with the Keynes, where Maynard will read a memoir of his dead life, and Molly will I’m sure get huffed and ruffed about something. She should have stayed with us.

What about your novel [All Passion Spent] and your poems? I ask in no idle curiosity; I look upon you now as the Woolf breadwinner, since it’s more and more certain that my novel wont win us even a penny bun.

Yr.
V.

Berg

[]

2234: To Ethel Smyth

Thursday [n September 1930]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

But Ethel why should I not have letters if I’m not well,—if I’m 300 miles away? Its just then I do want them—every day, all day. Never see a pillar box without dropping a letter in. I miss them when they dont come—letters about everything—think when you’re out, or at the dr’s, that’ll do for Virginia; or if you see a sunset or a butcher’s boy or a shop full of cabbages, write and tell me. Writing letters comes as easy to you as rolling down a board does to a marble. But I’m impedimented, owing to—Oh but I’m not going to analyse my disabilities as a writer.

I am better, but, to be truthful, a little feeble still and apt to lie down and sleep. It takes some time to get back one’s bodily vigour. My mind seems recovered—no headache, no heart leaping. But it’s as if one had been in bed for a month with influenza—no, not really as bad as that—I exaggerate. But I dont yet look at a hill with any desire to climb. Leonard gently led me to the river his afternoon; and I go for drives; and I come in and lie down. And this morning I sat in the tool house and held my pen, but only sketched two shadowy sentences, and then came in and slept. However, I must re-construct my world before I can write about it—writing is a only a final and momentary flash—and I did begin that mysterious process so that I find myself fabricating a scene or two as I lie somnolent. And no doubt tomorrow I shall write 3 sentences; the next day it may be six. So one slips back into the process; and I feel certain now I shant have another tumble. Anyhow, the last one was nothing to do with you. I got (it happens every time) a spurt of ideas, and tried sitting up and working. Unless the sight of you causes ideas (and it well may) I dont see that you’re to blame; but Lord, how I cursed fate that Friday, lying alone, a chair by my side, apples winking in the garden, and no Ethel.

This is—you will perceive—no letter; but only the swing of the pump handle to turn you on. Please Ethel, dont think you ought, for reasons of the highest morality, never to see me or write to me again. I should miss you. Oh yes I should. Now what should I miss? Well, I’m going to lie down when I’ve handed this to the postman, and I’ll think of what I should miss. Tell me all you do—in spite of my inaccuracy, every fact is valuable to me: time of getting up, bath, breakfast: scraps of talk, stray ideas, what you wear, read, eat; if you dream; what the aurist [ear-doctor] looks like; does he wear a bow tie; do you walk; where?; have you a sitting room; how furnished; wine for dinner?; Mrs Woodhouse; and think about—what?—and feel—what? and what does your future look like?; also, your past. In short please Ethel, think, I shant be working or walking for another week seriously; and gape like a baby cuckoo for Ethels words. What a generous woman she is!

V.

Berg

[]

2235: To Mrs Wilson

12th Sept. 1930

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Mrs Wilson,

I must ask you to forgive me my delay in answering your letter, and thanking you for it—it gave me great pleasure—and also in thanking for the white heather. The white heather must have been picked in adverse circumstances—no sooner did I put it in a vase then I fell down in a faint and have been in bed until yesterday. But I have now recovered, and might I suppose have died, so that I will consider it lucky all the same.

I am delighted that you have a new room and that I am the cause of so much discomfort. It is most encouraging to hear that there is one woman who is not going to write—since I published my little book I have been afraid that the writers would far outnumber the readers. But I shall now think with great pleasure that you are using your room to read in, and so shall hope to be counted once more among your far away benefactors.

Yours sincerely,
Virginia Woolf

Sussex

[]

2236: To Margaret Llewelyn Davies

14th Sept. 1930

Typewritten

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dearest Margaret,

(forgive typing)—I have at last gone through the Letter and your suggestions, and enclose it for your inspection. I have made some alterations, but I’m afraid by no means all. We both feel, for Leonard agrees, that if I made all the alterations you suggest, the point of view would be so much altered that it would no longer give my own meaning. And as the only merit of the letter is that it gives a particular persons impression we feel that it would be foolish to publish a modified version. One would simply fall between two stools.

On the other hand we both think that you are very likely in the right, and that to publish my version would give pain and be misunderstood—and that of course is the last thing we want. Of this we think you and Lilian are the only judges, and therefore we suggest that you should look through the paper again and decide whether you think it can be printed with the alterations I have made. Honestly, I shall not mind in the very least (in fact in some ways I shall be rather relieved) if you say no. I have had my doubts from the first. Then, if you feel that it wont do, we suggest that we should send the papers to Barbara Stephen, unless you can think of anyone better, and ask her to write an introduction. We feel that there must be some introduction, other than a plain statement of facts, if the book is to make any appeal to the general public. I have always liked what Barbara Stephen has written, and I think that she would approach the subject from a much easier angle than mine.—I mean because she knows the thing from the inside and her account would therefore not be so dependent upon personal impressions. The difficulty with impressions is that if you once start altering from the best of motives everything gets blurred and out of proportion.

Its vile weather here, but we have our new sitting room and a roaring log fire and so are very snug. Leonards garden has really been a miracle—vast white lilies, and such a blaze of dahlias that even today one feels lit up. But other peoples gardens are an awful bore I know. Lydia wont buy the necklace—Keynes, Lopokova, I mean. I asked her, and she said she buys all her jewels at Woolworths for half a crown. Maynard has become a Protectionist, which horrified me so that I promptly fainted. Now I am going to take Leonard and Pinka for a short walk in the wet. Excuse spelling. Much love

[in Virginias handwriting:]

No, it was true. Vita has made between 5 and 6 thousand by the Eds.—mostly in America, and has bought a Castle.

V.W.

Sussex

[]

2237: To Ethel Smyth

Sept., perhaps 16th or 17th anyhow Monday [15] 1930

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Yes, Ethel dear, I did read your diary;

„ „ „ „ „ „ Burning of Boats.

(You see my economical use of words) I should have to write a dozen blue pages, 24 in all, if I expressed anything like my ideas on both; and as I have only 20 minutes, (my dinner is cooking) I hold off, for the moment. I can tell you though, that I’m building up one of the oddest, most air hung pageants of you and your life; indeed this friendship (if I do not annoy you by my exaggeration [sic] phrasing) is one of the strangest aesthetic experiences I have ever had; many people wd. say Lord how I hate your bookishness!—but you, who are so comprehensive (I feel great freedom, even after your angry letter, with you) will understand my use of aesthetic: then ‘air-hung’: you see, I evolve you and your life and your friends and your whole tremendous intricacy backwards, from letters and diaries; since we were so ill advised as to live many years without contact. Dear me, how badly this is written. Do you know, I shall never compass the plain narrative style that is your glory? And that brings me to:—

(1): We want to know if you will let us publish the speech to the girls about Lambert, music etc? We have a series, day to day pamphlets. Please Ethel let it be about 10,000 words long; and do do it: let it be like a race; all your swiftness, fertility and long lean stride crossing any country you like. Years ago I suggested this to L: and he said “But she wont even write a review for the Nation!” So we gave it up. So we did not meet. So 5 or 6 years passed. What were the 2 important things? Please communicate fully. Oh yes I’ve enjoyed your letters: I lay in bed this morning fabricating the figure of your brother and sister. I am furnishing your house. Now I want a few theories, emotions, analysis of my character, of your character: there’s the wardrobe; I want now to hear your voice.

I am better (you dont ask, but I daresay you wont think me a valetudinarian for alluding to health): but rather knocked up—I dont know why—and in fact I’m all right. Only if it comes to walking or writing for more than half an hour, I feel Lord, where’s the place where I can lie back and put my feet up. You wd. be amused if you knew how crafty I am in dandling my body through these convalescences—how I alternate one thing and another. Yet sometimes I feel—no, no, I will not go into that. Tomorrow I’m going to London with L. and shall sit upstairs while he dictates to the clerks: and so back here, and sleep downstairs, for we’ve changed your bedroom into a sitting room, and I sleep and dress in full view of the garden; and having to change certain monthly articles t’other day, found the benign face of the gardener on me. Write, Ethel dear.

Yr V.

Berg

[]

2238: To Ethel Smyth

Sept. 19th 1930

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

I am rather like a bottle turned upside down when no water comes out. That is, I’ve so much to say, and seem never to get the time and the place all together. I answer your letters in my head, and the answers spread over miles of paper; then when I see this small sheet, I cant begin. To economise, and avoid transitions, I will ring round separate statements, one, two three. (But its tantalising to think what letters I could write, if, as I say I could merely print off my mind upon a sheet of blue paper about the size of the terrace, where Leonard is now instructing Percy on, perhaps, cabbages) But I want to catch the post.

(1) Hour: I say certainly, it can be legitimately two syllables; Leonard says, No: that is only done by the illiterate in writing, but can be done in music without offence.

(2) Coming back late from London the other night I was told by a very battered charwoman about to have a baby (“what will be will be, ma’am, and as its seven years since the last I cant complain) that a Miss Hodge had called, which translated means Dodge, I suppose; and as I cant hit on her address, would you either send it, or somehow convey to her my gratitude and regret—that she should have come, that I should have been out—for really it was most cordial and kind of her to journey over that wet day, and I feel respectful and curious and interested and then grateful without knowing more than that Hodge is Dodge—O and she gave you a Kimono, and your house. So would you say what you can see that I mean?

(3) The Essay [on Lambert]: did I casually let fly 10,000 words? What a fountain of inaccuracy I am—perhaps its you, though, that are the hammer of fact. What I meant was that, if you were speaking, as is most usual, for an hour, and were doomed to it, then that—however many words—would be precisely what we should make a pamphlet of; and as I cant conceive that you are ever vapid, tedious, or anything but swift as lightning and ripe as a nut, I must print it—that was what I meant; but did not mean Ethel dear, that you were to go and make yourself take on a job you dislike, or write a single word not from the pressure of your own necessity. No, no. Let it be, and if one of these days something shoots into your head that you would like to publish, remember that the Press is a paying, a respectable, an eager, and devoted servant, who would immensely enjoy having your name to flaunt abroad. Ethel Smyth—published by L and V Woolf at the Hogarth Press. It is only a seed; the sort of thing one lets fall. No, I should hate to drive you into a lecture room, and innumerable legs.

(4) Of course, of course, of course, I should like to have you sitting by me if I were ill. Short of red ink or gold letters, how am I to make you understand that? That Friday when I was alone in bed, I could hardly keep myself from cursing Leonard for being so positive, against you, or any visitor. It seemed to me as I lay looking at the apples through the open door that you would heighten and establish and make everything right and cheerful and sound for me. If Ethel were here, then, instead of dangling my hand in all these books and papers, I said, I should hold her white cuff (of which I have a vivid memory) and she, who knows exactly how to settle the race and excitability of my mind, would tell me—oh what sort of wardrobe she has in her bedroom; And how did you get your Cook? I should say. Then at a certain moment Ethel would open her eyes, which are (here I was visited by an extremely vivid picture of your almost childish smile) so blue and laugh: and I should feel so set up, that I should lose whatever the pain happened to be—I think in my spine—no perhaps in my head—and toss life like a pancake; and then I should say, now Ethel, I am not going to talk, but you are going to tell me exactly what happened last August twelvemonth, so that I can build up that particular gap in my knowledge etc etc. I can’t conceive that you would ever tire me; no; or agitate me; or harass me; but only make me feel like a good child, nestling its head into a perfectly fresh pillow.

But today is a great day, because I cant help thinking that with any luck I can say that this illness is now done with. Anyhow, I got up this morning, actually wished to put on my clothes, actually walked in the rain with energy to the tool house, and wrote, not in gusts, and jets, and bursts, like a runner just touching the goal, but with decision and composure for over an hour. Now if this lasts, and I feel some indescribable solidity as if I had rammed enough strength into my body to withstand all ordinary demands (Lord, how conscious I am, over conscious, of the exact poise of my health) if this lasts a few months, then I can reel off a good deal of the Waves: indeed I might conceivably finish it. So I am going to say no more about my health; I consider, from today, that this illness is done with.

But I feel, at the same time, that you are vaguely unhappy; I talk of myself, of my being languid, and prostrate, and you meanwhile have pipes poked down your ears; are clogged with fibrous mushrooms; have indigestion; and are (perhaps) more than this, a little exhausted, unhappy, and have recourse to your death philosophy, which I respect and to some extent understand; but I do dislike the thought that you in Bath and alone have to spend any minute of the day in melancholy. The trouble is, I’m so at sea with other people’s feelings that I very often appear egotistical and unsympathetic because I’m afraid to discharge my sympathy when it is out of place and therefore offensive. That is I think a true note upon my own psychology. And I have many other notes, but look, I have written so much and at such a pace that the words scarcely cover the ideas—these are horrid splits,—and the writing is only an attempt to encircle a few signs. Do you ever show my letters? Do you ever quote them? Do what you like, but I rather hope not, because I am never able to write at leisure; (I’m trying to finish a good many things) and then I cannot be expressive (these interruptions are because of a double rainbow on the terrace—L. has dashed in from the rain to show me) As a professional hack, I detest making shots at sentences, and to you—anyhow for some time—I never do anything else—So send them in a proof that I repose on your understanding as Nelson on Trafalgar Sqre. But now that I am quite well, you shall write in any mood—about the wardrobe or the character; about the cruising widows (what a gift you have as a writer—how I enjoy your letters) or the finer parts of the soul.

So for the moment I pause.

V.

Berg

[]

2239: To Ethel Smyth

Monday 21st [22] Sept. [1930]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Well Ethel, I am vastly in your debt for your letters, which I carry out, like a dog its bone, to read in the Tool house. But my answers are never written—Oh I see too many people. All our diners and sleepers are flocking upon us like swallows on the wires. And my mind being unstable, one pebble is enough to send it rocking in waves to the shore. And stability is what I need. But I have said this; and can now only deliver a few paragraphs:

(1) Mrs Woodhouse. Would you convey to her, if she did ask us, and it was not only your frantic and rapturous anticipation that she would ask us, our grateful thanks: because it was very kind in her; and would you say how much I hope to meet her, and perhaps one day to come—one day soon I hope—to Nether [Lyppiat] whats its name—I love other people to have those houses, mats, tables chairs, pictures, china and tapestry over the 4 post bed, with lavender in the chamber pots and biscuits in a box shd. one wake hungry in the night: other people I like to have them, not myself.

(2) Would you like to read an Essay on Virginia Woolf just come? or shall I send it back next mail? I ask, because, bat-blind as I am, I dont know if you like this sort of thing—None of my other friends would. And it may be vanity that prompts, or intuition. I dont know.

(3) We are throwing our hats up—no great exaggeration—about your essay. Morgan Forster (E. M. Forster the novelist, whose books once influenced mine, and are very good, I think, though impeded, shrivelled and immature) said “Lord! I should think you would like an essay by Ethel Smyth! She should write pamphlets—my word (he said) how good her thing in the train was—how I laughed—what a born writer” and then, by a natural transition, passed to Lady Russell, and said (he’s the quietest, but most inflexible of men) “No; I dont like her. I think she is unkind and selfish. But she has a wonderful way of making one wish to be nice to her”—and nothing I could say would change his inflexible opinion “I dont like her”—but then he was very young when he knew her; and she was rude to the old mother whose sister, son, daughter and husband he is. They share a Surrey house; and live like mice in a nest.

This is a tiny sheet, because I have I daresay six very serious letters to write, one to a dying man—oh dear—a boy of 26, with wealth and an old house, and all to come—and others to Cooks and publishers. Tomorrow I’m going to London in order to—but the story is so long and complex that I must leave it: but if Miss Rivett-Carnac offered to be your general, and do entire work of flat, what would you say? Thats the question—what am I to say?

And its raining, Ethel, sweeping in filaments of mist across my marshes; but Ethel, all the same I walked to the top of the down this afternoon, and surveyed Sussex, and then tore my skirt my knickers and some tender parts not mentioned even between ladies on a barbed wire fence. Do you know, if I could sit still all the morning I could write straight ahead now—if I were you, and could drive one hour into another, I could finish the Waves in one blast—as it is I wake filled with a tremulous yet steady rapture, carry my pitcher full of lucid and deep water across the garden, and am forced to spill it all by—some one coming—Never mind. And write to me.

V.

Berg

[]

2240: To V. Sackville-West

Monday [22 September 1930]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Doran is a vulgar brute to be sure, and about as inaccurate as he can be. But it was ravished from me by Morgan Forster, whose friend, the blind Frenchman [Charles Mauron], is translating Orlando, and wants a paragraph for the French papers about you.

So many people, one way and another. I can hardly settle to anything, and think on the whole Tavistock Sqre is a hermitage compared with Rodmell. Morgan F. says “Will you ask me to meet Vita?” I say yes.—so be ready.

I go up for the day tomorrow, to interview cooks. Only they’re not cooks, but ladies of semi-royal birth (I mean Rivett-Carnac; but you know nothing of the aristocracy of India): and she wants £1 a week; also the Miss Ibbotsons. But how does one know the points of cooks from their faces?

And when shall I see you?

etc. etc. etc.

Please write and say you still, in spite of Ethel, feel for me a respectful regard.

V.

Oh and thanks for the Shelley pictures: I’m sentimental about them.

Berg

[]

2241: To Dorothy Bussy

Tuesday [23 September 1930]

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes, [Sussex]

Dear Dorothy,

This valiant attempt must be crowned with success at all costs. What about Thursday, the day after tomorrow? Friday, Saturday and Sunday are all, I think hopeless (owing to hordes of relations) but Thursday would suit perfectly—at 4. So do contrive it with Elly. I’ll get Leonard to write full directions tomorrow. We’re up for the day and in a rush—pen wont mark—but you must come.

V.W.

Texas

[]

2242: To Violet Dickinson

27th Sept. [1930]

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes, [Sussex]

My Violet,

Yes certainly we will send you, straight from The Press On Being Ill, and The Art of Dying (a cheerful pair) The working women’s book is held up and wont I think be out till the Spring—which seems at the moment very far off.

We are shivering over a log fire; but on Wednesday, you’ll be amused to hear, Nessa is giving a luncheon party to Sir George Duckworth and his son [Henry]. He says he is about to die.

What did I ever give you? I cant remember, and your hand is so impressionistic that I cant read.

Leonards love—

Sp:

Berg

[]

2243: To Hugh Walpole

27th Sept 1930

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes, [Sussex]

My dear Hugh,

I see you are making speeches and unveiling tablets all over England, so I suppose you have returned [from France and Spain]. And though I hate writing letters more and more—finish the sentence to your own credit. My fingers are too cold. But we are sitting in a room with probably the finest view in Sussex: marsh, down, church and pear tree. Last Sunday Morgan Forster was here and we skulked behind the churchyard wall and watched the Bishop arrive to bless the spire (to which I contributed ro: and also bought, in its behalf a bottle of bathsalts, and six cakes of variegated soap at a Bazaar). Morgan was moth like and evanescent, abjuring fiction, but—what is the opposite word?—cant remember—anyhow writing criticism for Cambridge—a chilly fate. We come back on Saturday, and settle in to pack up parcels of new books. All are worthy—all will fail. I see our nice heap of gold from the Edwardians melting in the sun. We have discovered a good novelist, homosexual, a waiter, I think, in Cardiff; but he wont help—his rags will further diminish our hoard. I think we shall travel then again along the East Coast this time—I want to see the Wash, and the Humber, and King’s Lynn, and the moors where the wild duck come.

Then we shall be in London again, and then—but this is far far off—I’ve heard of a yacht that one can charter, and visit all the Isles of Greece.

By the way, my American publisher writes that Mr Hugh Walpole says that Mrs Woolf’s novel is finished. This is so wildly fantastic a statement that I consider it equivalent to an offer to finish it yourself. The last words, written this morning with fearful labour were—“Listen,” she said, “Look”. Now go on. What a good game that would be. In 12 months I have written 29,000 words.

I hear also that you met Dadie [George Rylands] somewhere—So romantic is my view of friends in absence that I at once leap to the conclusion that it was down a back street in a wine shop in Seville. But I’ve no room to sketch my vision of what happened there.

Leonard sends his kind respects.

yr V.W.

Texas

[]

2244: To Ethel Smyth

Sept. 28th [1930]

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

But, Ethel dear, I have left your letter in the tool house, and it is too cold to go and fetch it, as you’ll agree, so I can’t be exactly precise about dates. All I know for certain is that we go back next Saturday 4th; then I shall have a week entirely devoted to seeing servants, who will all come at the most inconvenient hours. You say you are passing through about the 10th?; I say will you fix whatever hour suits you then; either to come to 52, or—no I think it had better be 52. I expect to be in full command of my life by then. What other subject had I in mind to write about? Lesbianism? Thats your theme; I await illumination anxiously. Being alone in Bath and turning yellow and having your teeth scraped and writing in a hotel lounge with old widows cruising has my intense sympathy: why is it that such forced maroonings are so violently detestable? I remember once being stuck for 10 days in Brighton and almost dashing my head out against the pillar boxes; and have hated Hove ever since, even going with you.

Your strictures on my weakness in wasting these last days that will never never come again, talking, when my entire year, almost, wastes in talk, are apparently justified, but actually, if you were in my shoes, what could you do? I’m lounging after tea—the fertile hour, the hour for hatching and planning and imaginatively surmounting all obstacles in The Waves—when there’s a tap at the window, and there’s Jack Hutchinson and Barbara; there’s Mary Hutchinson; theres Lord Gage—the local nobleman who drops in to see how eccentric intellectuals can be, and is not disappointed; or worse, I get a letter, imploring me, because she’s going away for a year to see Madame Bussy, who was Strachey, and is about to return to France; or from Ka Arnold-Forster who’s motoring to Cornwall, and wants lunch—what can I do thus trapped and implored, but say O all right, come in; you’ve ruined 10 pages of my book; I shall never catch that mood again; but by all means sit down while I boil the kettle, make toast, and show you the goldfish. Worst, superlatively worst, my mother in law has settled at Worthing. Occupation she has none. Her youth passed in childbirth. Now nothing can make the innumerable days tolerable but frequent teaparties and conglomerations of children and long tables covered with little cakes, which she adores, and presents on birthdays, and remembering anniversaries; so that if she says can she come over on Friday, as Harold, Bella and Tom are staying with her and want to see Monks House, what can I do, but race off to Lewes, buy pink, red, and yellow cakes, cakes striped with sugar bars and dotted with chocolate spots, return just in time to collect chairs, light fire; and then—here they are, dressed, like all Jews, as if for high tea in a hotel lounge, never mixing with the country, talking nasally, talking incessantly, but requiring at intervals the assurance that I think it really jolly to have them. “I am so terribly sensitive Virginia” my mother in law says pensively, refusing honey, but sending me into the kitchen to find strawberry jam; and then, like a perfectly aimless airball, off she drifts into long long anecdotes about Mrs Luard; girls who looks [sic] 14, and Mrs Watson’s cook having a a baby which died—oh no it was Mrs Watson’s cook who died—all this goes on till 7: when she says her head aches: I say, I will go off then, and show Bella, Tom and Harold the church. And leave me all alone? she says. Tears well up. Down I sit. Off we go again about Herberts temper and her own tremendous sorrows, virtues, courage and endurance in raising 9 Jews, all of whom, with the single exception of Leonard, might well have been drowned without the world wagging one ounce the worse.

There! Thats a long sentence: and an ill natured. But when you say why do I see people? I say Ethel as a believer in the Christian religion has brought about this state of affairs, and believes that crucifixion is good for the soul.

Ah, but now they are gone, and I wrote this morning; and then took one of Leonards large white pocket handkerchiefs and climbed Asheham hill and lost a green glove and found 10 mushrooms, which I shall eat in bed tomorrow, with bacon, toast and hot coffee. I shall get a letter from Ethel. I shall moon slowly dressing; shall loiter talking, shall hear about the funeral of our [Rodmell] epileptic, Tom Fears, who dropped dead after dinner on Thursday; shall smell a red rose; shall gently surge across the lawn (I move as if I carried a basket of eggs on my head) light a cigarette, take my writing board on my knee; and let myself down, like a diver, very cautiously into the last sentence I wrote yesterday. Then perhaps after 20 minutes, or it may be more, I shall see a light in the depths of the sea, and stealthily approach—for one’s sentences are only an approximation, a net one flings over some sea pearl which may vanish; and if one brings it up it wont be anything like what it was when I saw it, under the sea. Now these are the great excitements of life. Once I would have written all this twice over; but now I can’t; it has to go, with its blood on its head. I have 3 whole days of solitude still—Monday, Thursday and Friday. The others are packed with this damnable disease of seeing people. Please tell me what psychological necessity makes people wish to “go and see” so-and so? I never do. Do they resent obscurely, the effort that L. and I make to be alone? that I make to write? And Lesbianism, to return to that?

V.

I warn you, this is an egotistical letter, which says nothing about my really complete sympathy for you, and your rheumatism, diarrhoea, and ears.

Berg

[]

2245: To V. Sackville-West

Wednesday [1 October 1930]

Typewritten

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

We think it would be fun to go and see the Barretts of Wimpole Street on Monday. Would you come and dine with us first, and come to tea before that. And would Boski be such an angel as to telephone for tickets? Perhaps there are none—anyhow she is in command of wits and telephone—more than I am. Off to lunch with Sir George [Duckworth] and shall refer delicately to our past.

V.

Berg

[]

2246: To Ethel Smyth

Friday Oct. 3rd [1930]

Typewritten

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

This is merely a formal acknowledgement of your MS just come. We will be remorseless and plain spoken.

Here is Ursula Greville to put you in a rage, in case you have escaped her. Very good for the liver—to be put in a rage.

Just lost my watch in the meadows, but found (to put me up in your esteem) a white knife with four blades.

My God—if leaving your letter about will make servants go, I shall have it broadcast. My whole endeavour now is to be rid of the most faithful and enraging of her kind. (Yes, no servant will ever leave me. In 48 years I have had three.)

Lunched with Lady Margaret my half sister in law and Sir George and have been given Patties picture as reward. You shall have it. I will write about plans when I can get my head above these vast whirlpools of departure.

V.

[in Virginias handwriting:]

No, I dont think you are convincing on the subject of Lesbianism

Berg

[]

Letters 2247-2299 (October–December 1930)

2247: To Ethel Smyth

Sunday [5 October 1930]

52 Tavistock Sqre. [W.C.1]

Yes Ethel dear dinner next Sunday will be delightful (I’m not talking of the food, which may be harum scarum, odds and ends, cooked by me)—at 7.30—But come when you like—only tell me what time suits.

We shall probably go on an East County tour soon afterwards, but thats not fixed.

Am I to vote for the Opera merger? a post card, with a stamp, has been sent me; as if Sir Thomas [Beecham] means business: I’ll put on 1½ if by so doing I can ensure a perfect performance of the Wreckers [Ethel’s opera].

Lord what a shindy and a gloom London is! I’m dismal all through and have taken L. to walk in Regents Park and look at the pinched Cockneys and the dying flowers instead of roaming the downs and putting up a hare.

So no more.

V.

P.S. Monday [6 October 1930]
I forgot to post this scrawl; so add, in answer to yours of this morning, I was speaking personally, no doubt frivolously (what a pity there aren’t accents to convey tone of voice [[image]] and so on, to mean I’m laughing, I’m ironical, I’m glum as the grave—) about your being unconvincing on the subject of Lesbianism. I was referring to what you said, (but I’ve locked your letters at Rodmell) about the shape of my nose not going, to your taste, with that particular vice. Well but then, to another, my shaped nose may be a perfect monstrosity without that addition. But I was laughing, and no doubt misquote. Anyhow I hardly ever think half a thought about these matters—if Eddy [Sackville West] chooses to plunge his poker in an ant heap or a woman or the next young man he meets in Bond St. its all the same to me. No room to develop this subject seriously.

Now to write seriously about the essay [on Constant Lambert] which seems to me so perfect for its end that I’m not sure how far it would suit another. I mean, the girls, the school, the cropped heads. The legs are so completely visualised and assimilated as in all first rate lectures—that to switch off to another audience seems impossible without injury. But L. has not read, and I must read again.

Lord its good!

V.

Berg

[]

2248: To Viscountess Rhondda

7th Oct. 1930

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, London, W.C.1

Dear Lady Rhondda,

Many thanks for your letter. I am afraid that luncheon is a very difficult time for me, but would it be possible for you to come to tea with us either Monday October 20th or Thursday 30th, at 4.30?

We should so much like to see you, and should be much interested to hear the other side of Ethel Smyth’s story.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

2249: To Ethel Smyth

Wednesday [8 October 1930]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

I’m awfully pleased—thats a great relief about Elizabeth [Williamson]. They can be, I know, an awful bore,—glands. In spite of the Pattle blood, some of my cousins have them. But Lor! (as you would say) what punishment can be inflicted on Harley Street for these entirely false verdicts—and all the agony they give. Once [in February 1922] (having a temperature) I was told that my right lung was diseased; then that my heart was inflamed, and L. and I walked away prepared (so the man said) for death in a fortnight. Give E. my love, and congratulations in spite of the soot, and hope to meet.

Lor! (as you would say) the egotism of the male! Two completely solid hours of Eddy [Sackville West] this afternoon, and every second a complaint about his stomach. Every other aspect of the world barred. My time wasted and all I could do was to suppose the ant heap was on him.

But about Sunday. Isn’t there a train that wd. allow you comfortably to get here say 5.30? then we could stretch our legs a little before the cold pale ham and the argument with L.

Anyhow I shall be in, should this suit.

In a hurry, or I would write at length about Rivett Carnac, my new general and the domestic comedy, which is at present exercising all my diplomacy and temper. Lor (as you would say) what a go domestics are! And nothing I can do will prevent their loving me! hah hah—a tribute that, which in spite of haste and disgusting handwriting I can’t deny myself.

But to what quality in me do you attribute it?

Yr V.

Berg

[]

2250: To V. Sackville-West

[8 October 1930]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Dearest,

would you be a great angel and send me, on loan the Ladies of Llangollen—if that is their name? I cant find anything to do for Mrs Van Doren, and this might suit, and stingily I dont want to buy and dont want to use my Times subscription and much prefer to worry you. That is my principle in life.

Such a visit from Eddy—all peeve and grieve and now I’m sick and trembling because Nelly is about to descend upon me in the flesh. Good lord, why are these things so much worse than operations for cancer? And shall we meet some day?

Your V.

Berg

[]

2251: To Ethel Smyth

Thursday [9 October 1930]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Look here—dont be later than 5.30 because I may have to go out at 9 to say goodbye to Vanessa etc who have suddenly decided with no tact to fly to France. So no more, till we meet.

Love to Eliz—I’m much relieved about the glands.

So no more.

Berg

[]

2252: To Margaret Llewelyn Davies

Oct. 10th 1930

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Sq., [W.C.1]

Dearest Margaret,

I am a wretch not to have written before but—there have been endless interruptions, and now of course our head clerk [Miss Belcher] is ill, in the height of getting books out, and Leonard has to take on her work as well as his own. So I havent faced him with your questions about publication—partly indeed because I know he thinks the Press will be very glad indeed to do the book quite apart from my introduction (which is only a flourish.) But he will tell you about facts—date of publication and so on. I am very pleased that Mrs Barton on the whole approves—at the same time I’m amused at the importance attached to the size of the Guilders. Vanity seems to be the same in all classes. But I swear that Mrs Barton shall say exactly what she thinks of the appearance of me and my friends and I wont think her unsympathetic. Indeed I wish she would—what fun to hand her a packet of our letters and let her introduce it! What rather appals me (I’m writing in a hurry, and cant spell, and dont please take my words altogether literally) is the terrific conventionality of the workers. Thats why—if you want explanations—I dont think they will be poets or novelists for another hundred years or so. If they cant face the fact that Lilian [Harris] smokes a pipe and reads detective novels, and cant be told that they weigh on an average 12 stone—which is largely because they scrub so hard and have so many children—and are shocked by the word “impure” how can you say that they fade “reality”?, (I never know what ‘reality’ means: but Lilian smoking a pipe to me is real, and Lilian merely coffee coloured and discreet is not nearly so real). What depresses me is that the workers seem to have taken on all the middle class respectabilities which we—at any rate if we are any good at writing or painting—have faced and thrown out. Or am I quite wrong? And how do you explain away these eccentricities on the part of your swans? It interests me very much. For you see, it is that to my thinking that now makes the chief barrier between us. One has to be “sympathetic” and polite and therefore one is uneasy and insincere. And why, with such a chance to get rid of conventionalities, do they cling to them? However, I must stop. And we must meet and go into the question by word of mouth—if you want me to make them sylphs I will.

Yours
Virginia

By the way, I have had a cable from the Yale Press who want to see the book for America.

Sussex

[]

2253: To V. Sackville-West

Wednesday [15 October 1930]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Yes, do come to dinner on Monday. I’ll see if I can get tickets [for Private Lives by Noel Coward] tomorrow. Rivett Carnac will cook.

I want to take 2 days complete holiday on Tuesday and Wednesday and packed with pleasure, in the open air, anywhere. Could you come? And where could we go? Lord, how happy you must be cutting Nettles.

Yes, I heard about Lily—it would have served Eddy right had you been killed. But I dont want him served right, peevish though he is. I can imagine his complaints, Vita dead—and now I cant have my roast apples as I like them.

Osbert [Sitwell] has sent a book for you (I think) I’ll keep it till Monday. At Rodmell on Friday, thank God. Come as early as you can; and let me know about Tuesday and Wednesday—

Vita’s first letter at Sisshurst

Berg

[]

2254: To Ethel Smyth

Thursday, 16th Oct [1930]

52 Tavistock Square, [W.C.1]

Well, Ethel dear, I daresay its all right about ‘masterpieces’—I accept your definition a thing done as well as it is possible to do it—only I think somehow one ought to discriminate between ‘things’. [King] Lear for example and Trilby⁠[?]. Its not a question of roast beef v. omelette. One must find some other metaphor, or is this a simile, or even an analogy—(I’m infinitely stupid this morning and cant write fiction miserable to relate). One must I mean indicate that one ‘thing’ is colossal and the other tiny. That being understood I bow my head and pass on—No, not instantly. I think these discriminations rather more important than you do; I think if one ignores them by habit one becomes woolly headed; one chokes people off. And enthusiasm (as Nurse Cavell said) is not enough. No, nor discrimination either. It is the rare and blessed combination that I find truly imaginative—and I grant that having been born within the Polar region of Cambridge I tend by education not instinct to frigidify. Enough, enough.

Rivett: an admirable cook. Light handed, adept, adventurous; but this is on the strength of six meals. Whether being a lady born, she can scrub and sweep without collapse I rather doubt. Today is the first day of trial, because so far the country widow [Annie] has been helping. Anyhow, there are no dark pockets of discontent; everything is above board and plain sailing. The question of Rivett or Carnac is still hedged; but I’ve hardly been alone with her, and so say ‘Miss’ and then stop. Now Nelly looms; and how to deal with the devoted servant, whose mind is riddled with jealousy, suspicion, and poverty—thats my horror. One cant be ruthless; they are so weakly and devoid of all support, and one sees their poor fluttering lives as one talks,—its the dependence and defencelessness that queers the pitch, and take the sting from their violently infuriating unreason—yet leave one hopeless, helpless—have I ever felt such wild misery as when talking to servants?—partly caused by rage at our general ineptitude—we the governors—at having laden ourselves with such a burden, at having let grow on our shoulders such a cancer, such a growth, such a disease as the poor are. Again, enough.

Monday or (or is it ‘and’?—see, how seldom I look at my own works) Tuesday. If one put comparatives for all your superlatives, you’re a very good critic—that is, have singled out the phrase I liked (the pigeon) and the stories I liked; and lighted with your aeroplane eye upon the generally acclaimed successes—that is Mark on the Wall and Kew. You are perfectly right about Green and blue and the heron one [Monday or Tuesday]: thats mainly why I won’t reprint. They are mere tangles of words; balls of string that the kitten or Pan [Ethel’s dog] has played with. One of these days I will write out some phases of my writer’s life; and expound what I now merely say in short—After being ill and suffering every form and variety of nightmare and extravagant intensity of perception—for I used to make up poems, stories, profound and to me inspired phrases all day long as I lay in bed, and thus sketched, I think, all that I now, by the light of reason, try to put into prose (I thought of the Lighthouse then, and Kew and others, not in substance, but in idea)—after all this, when I came to, I was so tremblingly afraid of my own insanity that I wrote Night and Day [1919] mainly to prove to my own satisfaction that I could keep entirely off that dangerous ground. I wrote it, lying in bed, allowed to write only for one half hour a day. And I made myself copy from plaster casts, partly to tranquillise, partly to learn anatomy. Bad as the book is, it composed my mind, and I think taught me certain elements of composition which I should not have had the patience to learn had I been in full flush of health always. These little pieces in Monday or (and) Tuesday were written by way of diversion; they were the treats I allowed myself when I had done my exercise in the conventional style. I shall never forget the day I wrote The Mark on the Wall—all in a flash, as if flying, after being kept stone breaking for months. The Unwritten Novel was the great discovery, however. That—again in one second—showed me how I could embody all my deposit of experience in a shape that fitted it—not that I have ever reached that end; but anyhow I saw, branching out of the tunnel I made, when I discovered that method of approach, Jacobs Room [1922], Mrs Dalloway [1925] etc—How I trembled with excitement; and then Leonard came in, and I drank my milk, and concealed my excitement, and wrote I suppose another page of that interminable Night and Day (which some say is my best book). All this I will tell you one day—here I suppress my natural inclination to say, if dear Ethel you have the least wish to hear anymore on a subject that cant be of the least interest to you. And, I add, Green and Blue and the heron were the wild outbursts of freedom, inarticulate, ridiculous, unprintable mere outcries.

My word—what a bore—here’s Leonard to say that some agent has made an offer for this house, and he, Leonard, thinks we ought to consider it seriously, for we’ve only the fag end of a lease to run—which means that I must rout up and look at houses again, I suppose.

In the immediate future however we go to Rodmell, Friday to Sunday; then to the East Coast, travelling our books, on Thursday. And as the devil will have it, I have somehow injured the usual nerve in my spine and am rather done up for the moment—cant even open the Waves; dare not think of the next sentence. But I did grind a bit, last week, and can’t therefore do more than grumble to you if I have now to knock about like an aimless fish, for a week. But the light in the sky certainly depends upon my own little taper—the green goes out of the leaf—I am rather below the level of the woman one meets in omnibuses. I shall lounge about for a day or two, and slowly—oh its nothing to grumble about.

Please write a nice long letter. And hows the d i a r r h oe a ? Thats the way its spelt. I’m told its the very devil of discomfort. Ah hah! How much you suffer that I dont! Isn’t that a comforting reflection? But I dont actually wish you to suffer.

Yr V.

Your rose has come out and is a perfect marvel, like a red globe in the window.

Berg

[]

2255: To V. Sackville-West

[17 October 1930]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Look here I’m not getting tickets for Noel Coward [Private Lives] because

(1) I forgot

(2) I’ve been rather headachy and want to be dull.

(3) I dont think we shd. have got any.

(4) We suggest going next week, if you will.

(5) We expect you to dinner after Broadcasting.

Berg

[]

2256: To David Garnett

[18 October 1930]

52 Tavistock Sqre., W.C.1

Dear Bunny,

Could you in your very great kindness tell me which is the right Inn to stay at at Kings Lynn [Norfolk]? I’m told that there are two—one good, the other bad. We are going there travelling our books up the East Coast, and any information will be gratefully accepted.

Your aff.
Virginia

Berg

[]

2257: To Katherine Arnold-Forster

Saturday 18th Oct [1930]

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

Dear Ka,

In spite of your prohibition, the flowers were really too lovely not to be thanked for. They were burning blue yesterday when we left—Leonard is envious, the emotion you gardeners most like to rouse. It was odd to open the paper and read that Mrs Brooke was dead, after your letter. I remember her sitting on the step at Talland House with Rupert or, perhaps Dick; her face covered with wrinkles—thats what struck me as a child—Lord, what years ago. We are here for one merciful week end and then go travelling our books up the East Coast. Miss Rivett-Carnac is now my cook—but how far born ladies can abide scrubbing remains to be seen. Its rather an odd situation. The end of the paper, so goodbye and thanks.

V.

Mark Arnold-Forster

[]

2258: To Ethel Smyth

Friday [24 October 1930]

52 Tavistock Square, [W.C.1]

Yes I am better—that is I have done two mornings work—one hour each, and rather indifferent work; but its a beginning.

Being a creature of moods, and not now in the mood for Belgrave Sqre and music, may I ring you up on Tuesday and settle the matter—according to the Tuesday mood?

How are you? Anyhow a clear still day, and I rather envy you, seeing many men and cities.

V.

And I never thanked you for the rose, but that goes without saying.

Berg

[]

2259: To Ethel Smyth

Sunday [26 October 1930]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Yes, Ethel dear, disgracefully gushing as your letter was, I enjoyed it all the same. You almost tempt me to gush, but then I shouldn’t do it with the speed and abandonment and lavishness and generosity with which you (having been up all night too, and locked in a WC. and rescued by a young man stark naked—Lord what fun) achieve these incomprehensible pinnacles. I daresay I shall catch the hang of it one of these days—but you must allow for the fact that many kinds of writing are forbidden the professional writer—a sad fact, but a fact.

No, no. I didn’t quite mean that about the ‘astounding’ concert going—I didnt mean that you implied that there was nothing wrong. Or rather I meant two things at the same moment. I thought, Now she’s saying she coddles herself; or she’s saying, what a fool she is, what an ungrateful wife, to run these risks for the sake of an evenings pleasure. For years people, like Ottoline for instance, who have mysterious and chronic diseases, used to say to me, and do still, if I plead a ‘headache’, Oh if I could only take as much care as you do; and then the other set say, “God’s teeth Virginia you deserve to be ill when you’ve been told a thousand times not to do this and then do it.” Both flashed to my mind simultaneously—this is only for your instruction should the same thing happen again. Its a sore point—I’ve been too often beaten there—about being too careful, about not being careful enough.

(1) Rivett has many merits and I like her; but she’s too refined for hard housework. I think it will only be a temporary liaison; but it has worked well, personally; and is much more to my liking, though rather a strain, as she will buy dogs biscuits full of weevils and then I have to remonstrate, and the hares blood makes her squeamish—then the regular domestic: Nelly’s pistol will be at my head next week, I fear.

(2) Nothing further has been heard from the agent who wants to buy us out. I hope he thinks better of it. We shall never be so congenially lodged again, and I would stay, even if the Duke fleeces us: but I’m afraid we shall be ejected in 1934, to make room for hotels.

(3) I cant make plans: I cant settle whether to accept or reject invitations. Its a failing of mine. To be asked is a form of mild torture. But I’ll let you know on Tuesday

V.

(4) Health. Really I think its over this time, and with luck I shall be in what for me is full swing next week. The trouble is, its a difficult book.

Berg

[]

2260: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Sunday [26 October 1930?]

52 Tavistock Sq., [W.C.1]

Dearest Ottoline,

Yes we are back. I’m not sure about being able to come tomorrow—in fact (though you wont accuse me of modesty) it is much much nicer not to meet admirers: much much nicer to see you alone. But if I can I will.

Your
Virginia

Texas

[]

2261: To V. Sackville-West

Monday [27 October 1930]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Hilda is dining here next Monday—will you come on with her, and dine, and perhaps crack a joke with me, while they discuss BBC.

Then we might arrange Cowards play.

And are you still——(Can you finish that sentence?)

V.

This letter has just come.

Berg

[]

2262: To Vanessa Bell

[27? October 1930]

52 Tavistock Sqre., [W.C.1]

Dearest Dolphin,

Yes I quite agree that it was time you wrote to me—its your duty, being so idiotic as to go to your Mediterranean blue [Cassis]. Thats what makes letter writing a necessity, and I cant write, never again probably, my career’s at an end, I leave it all to Julian, because my steel nibs cant be had any more, they’ve given up making them, and there’s only this slippery slidy detestable gold nib, which I cant think with. Probably this is the last letter I shall ever write. I feel a little like Clive, trying to give you a brisk and breezy account of the Beau Monde. Well, everyone is buzzing about—we dined with Raymond; and there was [Arthur] Waley—waly waly up the Bank and waly waly down the Brae. And we had cold pineapple chunks, prepared by a char—all rather pared down and abstemious, which I prefer to high cock a dandy, but there’s too much talk of money and America, and shares going down. When Dolphin [Vanessa] loses £100 she merely casts a damn and its over: Raymond forever nibbles and scratches and is full of pimples, poor man. Also Hyslop was there, and went into a back room and fetched out a document—literally 60 pages of foolscap, typed: so many baskets of loam; so many tons of bricks; so many gallons of nails—all made out to a T for the Nicolsons house, with provisions for treasure trove, ancient tiles, and rights of way, underlined in red, so naturally the total was £1600 instead of £800, and there’s what they call a hitch; in fact some embarrassment. He was a month making out this document, and is worn and pernickety and takes it amiss, seeing that the Nicolsons make about £800 weekly that they wont run this up instantly. So Vita, who merely wanted to be rid of the boys in the Christmas holidays now has them on her till Easter. And Eddy’s mad cook—did you hear—went down to Long Barn one evening, and if it hadn’t been for the bootboy thinking her queer and sending for the secretary who sent for the doctor who came by a miracle and tapped her on her thigh and found there a revolver loaded in 6 chambers Vita would have been shot at her writing table—whereas now Eddys cook is lodged in Maidstone Asylum and Eddy is lodged at Long Barn, because, he says, its all Vita’s fault that he has had to part with his cook—also she was to have shot Eddy later that night, it turns out, so that Eddy is said (but dont spread this abroad) to be more intolerably peevish than ever. Further, I had Lady Rhondda to tea, and she has made old Ethel eat her words, from the root up, about St John Ervine and Christopher St John—but I dont think I ever told you all that story, about Ethel and the girls school at Bath and how she libelled Lady Rhondda, who wrote to me, who came to tea and is a great hacked hewn woman like Ray and once swam for ten minutes, it is said, under water, when The Lusitania sank, and then she saved herself and her father who subsequently died from shock, leaving his Alice [Margaret] £20,000 a year, which she spends on Time and Tide, which is a newspaper; and thats about all.

Then I had Dotty here; who will only say “I adore Vanessa—I love Vanessa—I want Vanessa”—this sort of thing I find so boring; and yet with your fame mounting and your beauty still alas not sunk behind the hill—whats to be done? Suffer, and clasp the serpent to my breast I suppose. And I am growing my hair; but its a secret; and theres a way of avoiding hair pins; which is also a secret; and it’s all due to Angelica who says I’m so ugly; and I’m so ugly—and so old that noone knows if I have hair or haven’t hair. To return—I’ve only ten minutes to dinner.

Well, Rivett is an odd fish: I think rather a nice woman; rather like Sylvia Milman, only more subdued; somebody I think failed her; she is saddened; refined; can cook very well, but cant scrub; so though I daresay she would last a lifetime, its too much strain on the whole; also she has heard of a job in a hostel; on the whole I think she’d better stay her month and then go—and then—well, now Annie wants to come permanently; and next week Nelly is on me. Lord knows what to do; but I say I shall be firm and explicit, and temporise till Xmas, and then install Anny forever. You cant think how nice it is—The house empty at 9—simplicity, reason, taste and logic in the ascendant, after all those broils. Rivett has some humour too; and we save about £1-10 a week—(oh these d—d pens—wont mark—) on groceries alone. What with one thing and another, I was so distracted last week I almost came to France—not to you but to Beaune. I thought there one might be silent. But now you have Slavs and Teeds and Tryons and Frys—so where is solitude—where is silence? Nowhere. About the furniture I am pleased that Boudard [Virginia’s cottage at Cassis] is unsold, as I am less foolish than was thought; and also I might get it—say at Christmas. I think thus it wd. be best to keep anything that Roger dont want—Keep any chairs that cd. be useful to you, and the beds, in case we could use them later. Is the settee any use to you? Of course, if they’re in the way, give them to any of your mouldy quayside aquaintance—the man who crawled, for instance—or Teed. I doubt that they would be worth the carriage.

Now having had dinner I will wind up. Owing to the incessant drudgery at the Press (this must be ended—its becoming too much, even if one makes £2,000—Leonard is at it all day and I have endless novels to read) owing to Dotty’s anthology etc. we couldnt go to the East coast, so did not see Angelica; no news of Julian. Everyone is in a stir about Wyndham Lewis and his Bloomsbury Black Book in which every sod and every Saph is to be pilloried; the publisher won’t print, so we have offered, as a gesture, which is thought by some flippant. And on Wednesday the Jews assemble and pour 80 chocolates in the form of sovereigns into the lap of the Mother Woolf who is 80; and there will be a cheque among them for that sum; and Sibyl Colefax comes to dinner. And when shall you be back?

B.

Berg

[]

2263: To Quentin Bell

28th Oct. [1930]

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Sq., [W.C.1]

Dearest Quentin,

You see how obediently I answer your letter at once. For all your illiteracy and difficulty with the pen—your letter might be written by a large wild cat that had fallen with all its paws into a well—you yet contrive to make me see you and your miraculous companions. Now if Wyndham Lewis instead of writing a Bloomsbury Black Book in which every sinner of either school is to be pilloried were to write what is the truth—that we are merely wild, odd, innocent, artless, eccentric and industrious beyond words, there would be some sting to it. But to represent us as he does one seething mass of correlated villainy is so beside the point (I cant remember any of the right words—but I have been writing for two hours and they have flown) that it glances from the back. No, not from Eddy and Harold, and Raymond. They are all providing escapes for themselves, it is said; they propose to live abroad. That is what we are talking of at the moment. Today I am going to a party at the Austrian Embassy to hear a Viennese string quartet with Ethel Smyth. She will be in an old rabbit fur coat and thick boots; I feebler but dowdier. There will be princes and dukes. Tea and cakes. Women and violins. Ethel will almost certainly commit some rape. That is why I go, to tell the truth, for God knows I cant listen to quratets at Austiran embassies. (There you see how this typewriter seplls.)

It has been the finest October on record. The gravel pits at Warlingham [Surrey] where we went on Sunday are precisely like Cezanne pictures—why go to the South of France where the wind blows and the mosquitoes bite, then? What I most envy is Rome. Oh to be Quentin and going to Rome! But my dear child, do you know that in half a century there will be methods of circumventing these divisions of Aunt and Nephew? By attaching a small valve something like a leech to the back of your neck I shall tap all your sensations; the present system is a mere anachronism; that I should be here and you there and nothing between us but a blue sheet (of paper I mean).

I have not heard of Julian but I see his book is advertised and no doubt he will be celebrated by the time you are back. But then you are not jealous. John Strachey has just sent me an invitation to a show of his pictures—but I thought he was a novelist. Shall I go? Is he a good painter? I thought again that he was like me—subject to visions. You know what I mean. I thought he spent many months incarcerated.

Oh I wish Nessa hadnt told me that silly story about the moths! I spend day after day writing and scratching out. Then Mr Kahan who is like a moth without any wings, a poor little deformity of a Jew, comes at six and stays till eight, saying, among other things, that he is a virgin; and so are all the young men now he says. But are all young men without legs I say. In Hampstead yes, he says.

Does this bring about you the old savour of Bloomsbury? Please dearest Quentin write me a full account of Rome. I shall be there in the spring. We will sit in the Boboli gardens together and eat dinner on the Pincio. I may have got it wrong; but the fact remains that you will burn all your boats when you see Rome; dont let them take you to Florence. Logan [Pearsall Smith] lives at Florence; also Bob Trevelyan; by the way Luce is in London, but so furtive and queer, he wont come out, save to lunch with Bob; think of coming from Burma and then lunching with Bob. Ottoline is on the ramp; but I cant go—not to meet Italian novelists, because when she says they admire me, it means they are cretinous, verminous and lecherous. If you were here we would go together.

This is a long letter; written in three minutes to catch the post; because I must now do up parcels; with Miss Belsher. All our books are coming out and my mother in law is eighty tomorrow. We are going to an Earls Court hotel with a bag of eighty chocolates; these will pour into her lap; she will then find they are gold. She will weep. I shall make a speech. There will be twenty five Jews all in tail coats.

Love to all the oddities.

Virginia

Quentin Bell

[]

2264: To V. Sackville-West

30th Oct. [1930]

52. T.[avistock] S:[quare, W.C.1]

Yes, but why dont you write to me and say so—this refers to the last sentence in your letter. If you never say so, of course a black crust forms; try another intimate letter, like the one from The Pyrenees, theres a good Towser.

Highly alarming reports have reached me of what you said in The Schoolmistress—why you wanted to lash out like that and take away my character as woman and as writer I cant conceive. Now your only escape is to send me the very words, but I suspect worse. O you old serpent; how you coil in your basket of fig leaves! (I have made so many enemies lately by writing letters in a hurry that I make a point of saying that I am not altogether serious: still, I should like The Schoolmistress: please bring her.)

But how am I ever to see you, apart from Hilda? Is an afternoon alone never possible? Not since Rodmell and then only for two minutes have we been alone in a room together—let alone the other place. I do hate these little slabs of meeting jammed in tight between other engagements. Potto positively loathes them—but I suppose nothing else is possible till you live in London, and as long as the sun is warm and the autumn leaves fluttering to the ground you wont come. Lord, to think how I spent the afternoon: buying ham in Fortnum and Masons, because Sibyl dines with us tonight. And you were in the field, I daresay.

Yes Ethel has pretty well done the trick—a triumph you must admit, for a woman of 73 She took me to a party at the Austrian Embassy, she in sweater and mouldy fur coat; I almost smart by comparison. And in the slow movement she said “This is like the movement of ones bowels”—at which the attache’s sitting by us, jumped.

I wish that Dotty weren’t convinced that the sign of a great poet is the inability to do anything practical. Leonards life has been made a burden to him, and I was in a rage (but kept it under) hearing Dotty dramatise her own incompetence And waste God knows how much of his time: He had to shoot her out and do the rest himself. And its said to be a bad book into the bargain.

Now let us arrange a private meeting, dearest Creature: I have a mint of things to say: and dear me, how depressed I am about my book; and then you go and say in The Schoolmistress that V.W. is in your opinion an overrated writer! How true.

V.

Berg

[]

2265: To Ethel Smyth

30th Oct 1930

52 Tavistock Square. [W.C.1]

Well, I’m glad you caught your train. The guard said to me “She’ll drop dead if she tries”—and I’m pleased that you did run, did not drop dead, and did catch the train. It seems to me marvellously gallant and efficient and sensible, as befits the daughter of an officer, and a good omen for the Prison. Its odd how little scenes like that suddenly illumine wherever one may be—Waterloo station. I could swear a ring of light surrounded you me and the guard for one tenth of a second.

Well it was rather a glum, deliberate, middleaged assembly last night [Mrs Woolf’s birthday party]—all, oh my word, so much like cuts off one long yard of cake—slice after slice; no beauty, no eccentricity. We stood about in the private room, with bunches of chrysanthemums tied up in orange sashes, and lots of carnations, incredibly unreal, in silver vases. And there were telegrams, cables from Sweden—this was a great prize—and then parcels kept on coming in. And there we all stood about in very inferior evening dress, as was specially requested (not the inferiority—the dress) touching our hair with our hands. At 10 I was discussing with Mrs Harold, who is the black sheep, a divorcée and grown very stout, and the best bridge player in Maidenhead, floods at Staines; at 10.15 I was comparing Harrods and the Army and Navy stores with Mrs Edgar—who has always lived in Putney, and had a bad miscarriage several years ago, since when she has run the Stock Exchange Sweep stakes, and has an alsatian hound which she has painted in oils, “but he has not really that fierce look in his eyes” she says; and then at 10.30 the green baize tables were opened and we played a game called Pink Nines and I, being third won a prize of a plum pudding; and Leonard being Booby won a spotted tie; and at 11 we all went into supper (does this bore you) and I sat at the table of honour with my mother in law—there were four tables, some less honourable than the others—and cups of soup were handed, anchovy sandwiches and cold sausage rolls. And then Herbert, the eldest son, rose and drank to “Our mother, the most marvellous mother, mother in law and friend” and my mother in law thanked us, “The most perfect, loving and (she could not remember a third epithet) h.m.m of children” and what I liked was that though she was all tremors and quivers she ended, like a child, “And now lets finish our sausage rolls”—this spontaneous bubbling childishness—witness her passion for chocolate creams and sugar cakes—being her charm for me. Indeed, in spite of the glumness, grimness, and oh the intolerable middle class timidity respectability and lack of accent distinction adventure dash, daring colour—I cant describe to you the low level of all these childless people, with their uniformity of cars, dogs, country houses and gardens,—in spite of my damned snobbishness about them, I always feel slightly warmed and overcome by the entire absence of pretence, and the goodness, and the rightness—if it is right so to people the world—of the vast family to which as Herbert said, I have the honour to belong.

By the way, what are the arguments against suicide? You know what a flibberti-gibbet I am: well there suddenly comes in a thunder clap a sense of the complete uselessness of my life. Its like suddenly running one’s head against a wall at the end of a blind alley. Now what are the arguments against that sense—‘Oh it would be better to end it”? I need not say that I have no sort of intention of taking any steps: I simply want to know—as you are so masterly and triumphant—catching your train and not running too fast—what are the arguments against it?

V.

Berg

[]

2266: To Molly MacCarthy

Sunday [October? 1930]

52 Tavistock Square, [W.C.1]

Dearest Molly,

I have spent a perfectly happy evening reading your book, and now alas, it’s done and I must dash off one line to thank you. How I enjoyed it! It’s all so new and fresh and incredible. I galloped through Fitzgerald to the end: the bear, the fight, the fiend [?], the rope breaking. You are an amazing woman to dig out these characters, with all the facts and all the fun—so solid and so amusing at the same time. Please write some more and so enchant more Sunday evenings.

Yours in haste and admiration
Virginia

Mrs Michael MacCarthy

[]

2267: To Vanessa Bell

Sunday Nov 2nd [1930]

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

You are probably glutted by this time with letters from me, and your aspersions on my habits are thrust down your throat.

I’m sitting here in a howling wilderness—rain, wind, not a glimpse of sky, fog over the water meadows—any moment I expect the elms to be blown down, and in an hour we take the road and drive to London which is said to be in a thick fog. So what with falling trees, collisions and so on, this may well be the last time I hold the pen. I hope you are sitting in the sun; though I doubt it. As for Roger, tarpaulins and stakes will be needed to hold him down. I’m glad I didn’t plunge off to Beaune, and sit in a public Inn; one can only just exist with all the comforts of civilisation. The unruliness of nature now passes belief. Honestly, I think the car will be blown back. It is a hurricane. If only Miss Younghusband who is now going to church could be lifted bodily to the top of the church spire and there stick, an example to church goers!

But you want gossip. Oh it is an incessant conversation—not so bad as it will be, for the bad weather always intensifies the life of Bloomsbury: we went to a party at James’s [Strachey] to celebrate Saxon’s 50th birthday, and [Albert] Einstein spoke in German through a hole in the wall. Tommy was there, grown round as a snowball, in the last lap of destitution, and Carrington and Lytton. Next day I had a long tête à tête with Carrington, who is slightly shrivelled and to my mind disappointed, but then my mind is utterly untrustworthy. I judge these things by the way people blow their noses. Anyhow she was affectionate in the extreme, and we are to invite ourselves to Ham Spray. She said that Lytton often regrets that he does not see more of his old friends, and prefers us to his new friends, but how difficult it is to meet, and then we are all so busy, but the people he cares most for are Vanessa and Virginia. You would know to an ounce how much to believe, how much to be touched, inspired, sympathetic and moved by compassion (for I think Geralds desertion is rather bitter, and Lytton is going to be in London, and [Ralph] Partridge never leaves the British Museum) by all this. Anyhow, she was very shabby; small; in her usual stupid petticoat and jacket, and said she spends most of her time with Mrs [Dorelia] John.

Then Lytton came to dinner to meet Lady Colefax. I spent 17/6 on a jar of pâté de foie gras; and Rivett really cooked admirably (she is erratic and has failures but on the whole I like her erraticity better than complete humdrum) and Sibyl has transformed herself into a harried, downright woman of business, sticking her fork in the pot; and has lost almost all her glitter and suavity. Even her voice has changed. She is now of the family of Champcommunal and other money makers. She is at her office from 9.30 to 7: has had to give up entertaining, and on the whole is improved, though rather tragic. After all, she is 55, I daresay, and has practised society for 35 years; and now to become a hardhearted shopkeeper,—she is very successful too, decorating houses from top to bottom and standing on ladders and fixing sinks—must be a grind. She too has shrunk and faded. Lytton was smooth as silk and sweet as honey. You were praised. I think probably you do now represent the only island that keeps afloat. Everyone else seems at the moment money grubbing and precarious. And then there is old Ethel, who took me to one of the very smartest of parties in Belgrave Square, and unpeeled herself of sweater, jersey and mothy moleskin before all the flunkeys, knocking her pasteboard hat to right and left and finally producing from a cardboard box fastened at the edge by paper fasteners a pair of black leather shoes, which she put on, because she said “The truth is I’m a damned snob, and like to be smart.” She also said, “Isn’t this slow movement sublime—natural and heavy and irresistible like the movement of one’s own bowels.” All the dapper little diplomats blushed. She is half crazed about a memoir of HB. which she writes all day and all night, and has just sent me to criticise. Such is my life; and we go back—the storm is if anything worse, and the mist is now sulphur coloured—to Hilda Matheson and Vita to discuss the future of the BBC. on Monday; dine with Hope Tuesday; Wednesday I fear Nelly will come; Thursday Tom Eliot; Friday tea with Ott:—and no Dolphin, no Fitzroy, no buns and toast, no Angelica, no rational converse. Even dear old Duncan seems to me sometimes to speak a more inspired tongue than these articulates.

My household plans are now vague again, as Annie thinks she cant come for a year, because of her child; and Rivett goes in a fortnight—but there doesnt seem to be much difficulty; and the living out system I’m sure emerges triumphantly. Or does one grow hermitatious? To be alone in the house is now my greatest pleasure. Even a mouse annoys me—And I can cook a simple dish very well. But Dolphin would not annoy me—oh dear no.

B.

I’ve only had one picture postcard from Clive—

Berg

[]

2268: To Ethel Smyth

Sunday 2nd Nov. [1930]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Yes. I think even allowing for Woolf coldness, that it is a perfect little memoir—humorous, tender intimate at the same time reserved, presenting HB [Henry Brewster], not as a black silhouette pinned to a sheet but as a coloured and rounded being moving of his own free will in the open air. Its extraordinary how you have got such space and movement into so small a compass.

Being a Woolf, of course I make one or two reservations—that there is perhaps a little too much of justification, as if you felt called upon to defend HB. (but then I suppose his obscurity necessitated this); and a little too much Maurice Baring, or rather, for MB. is admirable, too little Ethel. (Its just conceivable, but this I advance with great hesitation that the juxtaposition of H.B. on M.B. and M.B. on HB. is a little too close—has a little the effect of a duologue of admiration—but I dont feel certain and only make this remark sketchily) And certainly I should have liked more of HB’s own letters, because however delicate and discriminating the testimony of friends nothing describes character like a letter. (But then, there is to be a long one, left out in my copy.)

But these reservations advanced, and I am the first to understand your wish to be compressed and unegotistical, I dont see that it could be better, or more vivid, or more complete. How I enjoyed your hit at Gosse—perfect; and the freedom and sweep of all your gestures, combined with their directness and precision—never a word wasted, no diffusity, and yet all so easy as if you had reams of paper to write on and chose only to use ten pages. This is an effect I can never attain, and the proof of mastery.

Only I do wish, all the more, for a whole book; for Ethel in all her force entire to her prey attached.

A violent gale here, the smoke blowing down the chimneys, and if we escape death by falling trees on the road up this afternoon, so much the better. My reflections on suicide I leave to a later date.

V.

Of course Heinemann will take it—even Evans isnt such a thick skull as to refuse that.

Back at 52 and find your letter. By all means come tomorrow 5.30. I shall be in, though probably not alone—

Berg

[]

2269: To T. S. Eliot

Nov. 2nd. [1930]

Typewritten

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Yes, my dear Tom, come to tea on Thursday next, at four thirty, and you will find your ancient and attached Wolves very glad to see you. No, I’m not generally held to be ambiguous by the clients of the Hogarth Press—I give much pain and receive much abuse. But then Mr Eliot is not a candidate for publication—far from it; and I cant (no false modesty intended) suspect him of any very great concern about Mrs Woolf’s opinion; and Mrs Woolf would have to dig among the roots of what it pleases her to call her mind were she to give it; and she is lazy; and catch Mr Eliot committing himself about Mrs Woolf in the same circumstances. But my smoke screen isnt made of doubts of you, but doubts of myself rather, and of the whole business of criticising prose or poetry. Perhaps in talk—but then we never meet. Not for a whole year I think—except visions in streets which though inspiring arent substantial. Such is life. But one of these days we may somehow contrive to say something in spite of the smoke—who knows? And anyhow I have the honour to sign myself with sincerity your devoted and humble admirer

Virginia

Ella Strong Denison Library, Scripps College, Claremont, California

[]

2270: To Vanessa Bell

Tuesday Nov. 4th [1930]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Clive has asked me to write you a short account of his misfortunes—not to be taken too seriously he says, however annoying. About a fortnight ago he woke up to find he could hardly see out of one eye. However he didn’t think much of it and went on travelling, until, as it did not get better, he decided he had better come home and see an oculist. This he did yesterday, and the oculist says that it is due to some inflammation behind the eye, caused by some germ. He is going to see Freeman who will test his blood and try to discover what the germ is. Possibly it is the same germ that caused his eczema and if so they will be able to cure it quickly, but it may take some weeks to discover. Meanwhile he is forbidden to read or write and has to wear black spectacles. He dined here last night and seemed otherwise very well and in high spirits. He has engaged a reader who comes for two hours in the afternoon and he says everybody is being very nice and coming to see him. They dont think there is any danger for his eyes—it is only a question of getting at the germ—it is apparently the same thing Alix had. He takes it with great composure and said you were on no account to worry or change your plans. I think Joan [Firminger] is in London. Grace [Germany] is doing for him. I expect we shall see a good deal of him and I will let you know what Freeman says.

This is merely a bulletin

Yr B

Berg

[]

2271: To Ethel Smyth

Wednesday [5 November 1930]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Well, didn’t I say so?

A thousand congratulations; but no more, because I’m expecting company, distracted, and so I was t’other day, distracted, not bored—Vita, Hilda Matheson and Clive dining.

Keep in the warm; be careful, and a thousand congratulations mixed with some regrets

V.

Berg

[]

2272: To V. Sackville-West

Thursday [6 November 1930]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Dearest Creature,

I was so much touched by your staying up to dine with me last night—Potto and I were so happy. And Lord!—how can you be jealous! Looking at one picture and then at the other—no I wont go into that business. And of course I’m rather glad that you can be jealous, even of that old sea-monster encrusted with barnacles [Ethel Smyth]; I had felt slightly in the shade—like a toad under a plantain; owing to your husband and so on. and all your lustre and activity, general splendour; however, now there’s an end, with a soft wet warm kiss from Poor Potto.

Here’s Clive rung up to say that his mistress [Joan Firminger] has been flung against a lampost in a car smash, delivered at his flat at 2.am. all cuts and blood, and is now in bed, at her flat, for 3 weeks. So he’s more at a loss than ever, and we have to dine with him. But I count on Tuesday or Wednesday next week.

V.

And Tom Eliot is bringing his wife [Vivien]—raving mad, seeing insults if I say China or India or do you like more water?

Curse oh curse.

I am sending you as a tribute of affection, a wretched little book, another old essay, meant for America only; so hide it. and say nothing; but it is a tribute of love.

Berg

[]

2273: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

[6 November 1930]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Ottoline,

If I came in tomorrow, Friday, at about 5.30, would there be a chance of seeing you? I should so much like to. I’ve been away so much this summer that I’ve seen nobody, and now I suppose you are going: But dont bother, if you are busy. I shall hope to see you in the autumn.

Your affat
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

2274: To Vanessa Bell

Nov. 8th [1930]

52 Tavistock Square, [W.C.1]

Dearest Dolphin,

About this business of the furniture [at La Boudarde, Cassis]: I’m surprised to hear how much there is; I expect I could use it all at Rodmell, as I have two rooms now to furnish; so would you get an estimate for sending the whole lot by sea.

At the same time, I wish you would take anything you want, as a gift; I dont want to sell it, and as I feel I have put upon the Teeds, wouldn’t Jean [Campbell] let me give her the sheets, if she wants them? I give you full authority to close with the removers, as its clear that nothing will be done if its left till after you go. I’ve not heard from you about Oreste; I’m hoping you made him climb down. If he insists that the 2nd item on the bill was also Convenu [agreed], I think you had better give way, if by so doing we are quit of him. But otherwise its obviously an imposture. (I think it was 300 francs)

As for Clive’s affairs, I suppose you have heard that the very day after his return Joan was in a motor accident, and they rang him up at 2 am to say she was all cut about, and he got the Stephens’ [Adrian and Karin] and doctor, and she was brought to 50 [Gordon Square] and sewn up, and taken off next morning to her own flat, where she will be in bed more or less for 3 weeks, but not they think permanently disfigured. This was coming back from a Bonfire night [5 November] party at Dick Wyndhams, and it is thought that the young man who drove into a lamp post was drunk.

It is very unfortunate, as Clive is therefore left more to his own devices—and Lord! to tell the truth a dinner at Clives with Cory and Raymond [Mortimer] is not the height of joy to me. But one feels rather a brute not to go. He’s in great fettle, as a matter of fact, with every sort of lady and gent, swarming to his help—Christabel [McLaren], etc. and I hope in a short time his engagements will be so many that we have no conscience about him—Its odd how difficult he makes easy and natural talk very often: its all pirouetting and boasting, and I boast and pirouette, and then I fall into despair, where Leonard is to begin with. His eyes seems a long business though; they’re taking X rays, but so far without result. I should be terrified; he seems amazingly cheerful. You were a bold woman to marry into the Bells: the mixture is pretty thick, so I thought listening to Clive and Cory. And the new lighting system reduces one to a coma—light pours from white spittoons everywhere—no escape—I feel like a Rabbit looking at a Cobra.

Your Christmas sounds appalling—its their rough gritty good sense I think—; the only consolation I can offer is that on the whole I’d rather compound for one week a year than suffer as I do about 35 afternoon teas, and visits to Worthing [Leonard’s mother] and birthday parties. Last week we had a terrific one—the 80th birthday; 18 Jews in an Earls Court Hotel, 80 sovereigns presented, bad champagne, card games, speeches, sausage rolls; but the horror was such that it reached a point of magnificence and was over by 12.30. Only now there are Bella [Leonard’s sister] and Tom [Southorn] to be invited—

Why didn’t we marry into interesting families? Why did we choose—well, what did we choose? I mean, not husbands, but families?

As you say, I’ve got no news. Yet I’ve seen so many people I could fill 8 pages: but its only chatter. My most horrid experience was a visit from Tom Eliot. This had been arranged for weeks. At the last moment he rang up to say that Vivien wanted to come too, and would we pretend that we had asked her. This sounded ominous, but was nothing to the reality. She is insane. She suspects every word one says. “Do you keep bees?” I asked, handing her the honey. “Hornets” she replied. “Where?” I asked. “Under the bed.” Thats the style, and one has to go on talking, and Tom tries, I suppose, to cover it up with longwinded and facetious stories. And she smells; and she throws cheap powder over the bread; and she opens his letters, suspects me of being his mistress, so far as we could gather; and finally said that I had made a signal which meant that they were to go. So they did go, in about half an hour, and now he writes that he wants to come and see me alone, to explain I suppose; but I expect Vivien will appear too. I went to Ottolines yesterday, and must unsay my abuse, as there I found Yeats, whom I think (naturally, wrongly) our only living poet—perhaps a great poet: anyhow a good poet; and there was also [Walter] de la Mare, who is very odd, very charming, rather daft, but at the same time surprisingly on the spot. Being now almost incapable of discretion I said all the wrong things about poetry and we had a long discourse—very amusing to me: as I can’t think why they dont write poetry about interesting things any longer. Yeats admitted it—but then, as he believes in the unconscious soul, in fairies, in magic, and has a complete system of philosophy and psychology—it was not easy altogether to understand: at the same time, I agreed with many of his views; and he also is surprisingly sensible. He has grown tremendously thick, and is rather magnificent looking; in fact seeing how seldom one meets interesting people (with Dolphin away) this was a great success. It is old Ottolines function, undoubtedly. She has the atmosphere for that, though she now has a black trumpet hung to her side for she is rapidly growing deaf. All the time we talked in the drawing room I heard Pipsy [Philip Morrell] talking to a lady in the dining room—Could it be Mrs Jones?

Also we had a terrific visitation from Hugh Walpole. If you want a book from the Times, get Cakes and Ale by Somerset Maugham. All London is ringing with it. For there poor Hugh is most cruelly and maliciously at the same time unmistakably and amusingly caricatured [as Alroy Kear]. He was sitting on his bed with only one sock on when he opened it. There he sat with only one sock on till 11 next morning reading it. Also, we gathered in tears. He almost wept in front of Hilda Matheson, Vita and Clive, in telling us. And he couldnt stop. Whenever we changed the conversation he went back. “There are things in it that nobody knows but Willie and myself” he said. “There are little things that make me shudder. And that man has been my dearest friend for 20 years. And now I’m the laughing stock of London. And he writes to say he didn’t mean it for me.” “Oh but he undoubtedly did that” said Vita cheerfully. “And he might have been jugged” said Hugh. “You dont know the kind of life that Willie has led. I do. I could put him in a book. But then I call it a dastardly thing to do.” And so on, round and round, round and round, like a dog with a tin on its tail, till it was half past 12. Then he said it was all in the strictest confidence, and he had told no one else. But of course, Clive met Christabel next night, and Christabel had met Hugh that afternoon—and had been ever so much more tactful than Vita.

I’ve written to Nelly; and had one line from her, merely acknowledging the cheque, but then she went off to her doctor [Alan McGlashan], and now he has written to say that there must have been a misunderstanding and that she is perfectly well able to come back to our place. So we have now written to him. We have given him a hint—I think it might have been stronger—and hope that he may mitigate Nelly somewhat, but I see we’re in for a visit and a tempest of rage next week—cant be helped. Meanwhile Rivett has improved—anyhow the present system is so much better I cant think how we ever stood the other.

Heavens what a letter! And none from you.

B.

Of course if you were likely to spend 4 or 5 months annually at Cassis, it might be worth while to keep some of the things, as in that case for love of you, I should probably go to Boudard; but I dont suppose you can tell, and even if you could, L. so much dislikes Cassis, or prefers other parts, that I daresay I shouldn’t manage it.

Berg

[]

2275: To Vanessa Bell

Monday [9 November 1930]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

I wrote to you last night at Cassis, so you won’t get it. But there was not much of importance.

Clive is still being Xrayed and no result has been reached. Unluckily, the second night after his return Joan was rather badly cut about the face in a motor accident and will be more or less in bed for 3 weeks at her flat. So I’m sure your company will come in very useful. Of course, everyone is swarming round him at the moment, but I daresay he has a good many dull times. He is now coming round here to dinner with Fanny Marshall, so I’ve time for no more and all my news, such as it was, went to Cassis.

I told you by the way to give Jean [Campbell] the sheets, whose existence I’d forgotten, if she wants them. But we can talk. I cant make any sense of Oreste’s claims. I remember perfectly your letters and the two separate lots of work, and you said the whole wd. come to £30 which was about what it did. I think he’s simply swindling, on the chance one doesn’t keep cheques; and he sends no receipts. But this too will keep.

Lord, how nice it will be to see you again. I’ll arrange with Clive about Thursday evening. I’ve told Grace. I heard from Quentin today on board ship and in high spirits. No news of Julian or Angelica.

Yr B.

Berg

[]

2276: To Ethel Smyth

Friday [14 November 1930]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

I’m awfully sorry to hear from Mary that you’re in bed—I dont like your being ill. No, thats the truth. But perhaps by Sunday you’ll be recovered. She said you were to avoid draughts. So please, when a draught comes round the door, think of Virginia. This is only a brief spider line—we’re just off to Rodmell. There I shall read the letters—sitting out I daresay, in the fish garden, if its like this. I’m better—I put this in, only from duty, feeling myself a robust woman compared with you: a day’s idleness will cure me; and then splash into the Waves again.

Well, anyhow, you must feel you’ve earned your illness, which is sometimes a gratification; and got your way with life triumphantly, so that the colour of the sky, as seen from your bed (what do you see? leaves, branches, creepers?) must wear a certain glory, like—oh I have only the tail of an image in my head—cant catch it—must let it go—must throw my nightgown into my bag, avoiding 24 sanitary towels, which from charity to a bankrupt woman, I had to buy; “And my brother” she said “has £100,000; and here am I hawking these towels round to ladies who are kinder to me than my own mothers son” Here she produced the two swollen blue packets, in the middle of the Press, and the clerks who were blushing and giggling finally subsided and had to help me to find 5/- Well Ethel dear this is all great nonsense, and I wish dear Ethel I could see you—

VW.

Berg

[]

2277: To Ethel Smyth

Friday [14 November 1930]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Not a letter; a scribble over the fire, waiting for dinner, which my dear Ethel will consist of roast chicken and some masterpiece of Annys, all fluff and cream; something you know with jelly sunk to the centre in it.

I will now tell you about my parties (you say its a case of eating 6 meringues and being sick). Now thats unjust; thats the rasp of whooping cough; thats whats worse to me, untrue. Think of this: my 1st party was by command to Ottolines; and it was a shabby between the lights party, which is a compromise, for one can slip in without even putting on those black shoes which you carry about to propitiate the British aristocracy in a cardboard box mended with safety pins—no paper fasteners. In this twilight all the Italian furniture and pomegranates are faded to rose and amber, and now and then she flings a handful of cedar shavings upon the fire; dips her hand in a basket and brings up skeins like the entrails of flying fish, coloured wools, all tangled: these she drops again. And on one side of the fire sat the poet Yeats on the other the poet de la Mare—and what were they doing when I came in? Tossing between them higher and higher a dream of Napoleon with ruby eyes. And over my head it went—for what do I know of the inner meaning of dreams, I whose life is almost entirely founded on dreams (yes, I will come to the suicide dream one of these days) I mean I know nothing of the spiritual significance of ruby eyes, or a book with concentric rings of black, purple and orange. But Yeats said, as it might be a man identifying a rather rare grass, that is the third state of the soul in contemplation (or words to that effect—it will not surprise you if I got them wrong). And then? Did I like Milton? Yes. And then—De la Mare does not like Milton. And then—dreams and dreams, and then stories of Irish life in brogue; and then the soul’s attitude to art; and then (here I was touched, you I daresay not—) then, as the talk got more and more rapt, refined and erratic, I saw Ottoline stoop her hand to what seemed a coal scuttle and apply it to her ear: An ordinary black ear trumpet it was, ungilt unfunelled, and the apparition of this bare and ghastly object had somehow a sepulchral effect—and I cried out, in the midst of all the poetry. Heavens Ottoline, are you deaf? And she replied with a sort of noble negligence which struck me very much “Yes, yes, quite deaf—” and then lifted the trumpet and listened. Does that touch you? Well it did me, and I saw in a flash all I admire her for; and think what people overlook, in the briarwood bramble of her obvious tortuousness and hypocrisy.

Well thats the meringue; then the next. Did you know old Parry, who wrote a March, which in some circles supplanted Mendelssohn? Of course you did; and he had two daughters; and one was Gwen and the other was Dolly. The sound of their violins used to float across Kensington Square, and sometimes as a child I worshipped their bright eyes, feline ways, laughter and so on; and there she was, Gwen, at dinner, the wife, I suspected indeed widow, of Plunket Greene. All her colour had faded; her face was pouched; and still she had something arch and flamboyant; but in addition an action of the neck such as I have only seen in a rather absurd fantastic bird—reaching, pecking, sidling, retreating advancing and making sidelong dashes, as at an imaginary seed. What is she after? I asked myself, and then saw her, still dangling and darting, slip an odious shiny manual into our hostesses hand. And out it came: they were both perverts—I mean converts—I mean lately born into the Roman Catholic church—And that was what I had felt in her—even while she ate her pheasant.

Now I have eaten my chicken—in the most straightforward way in the world. I am smoking my cigar and L. is clipping gramophone needles. I wish Ethel—she shall finish the sentence to her own advantage. Yes, I think HB⁠[Henry Brewster], had a mind with a very fine close texture. This comes into my head from dipping into extracts: a fine pattern, full sprigs and thorns, like the background in an Italian picture. But I hold off reading him till my brain clears tomorrow. In love of you, I did not take chloral at 4.30 this morning—but lay wide eyed; and rather doubt if chloral isn’t the less drugging of the two.

One more meringue, or little maccaroon rather, prevising that you’re in bed, and have time for all this chatter.

You know Colefax? Now often you have said to me, Fool that you are to darken their doors and drink their vermouth—And I have always answered, with my inimitable niavity [sic], Peace Peace—Well (thats one of your tricks of style—a convenient stepping stone). Well, a year ago Colefax lost all her money; gave it to a son to invest, and he chose America, and every penny vanished—all her provision for age and retirement; simultaneously, Sir Arthur lost his hearing, his practice, his £20,000 pa: and there they were with a beggarly thousand in whats to provide all London with vermouth. She said, I will not be beaten; and promptly turned house-decorator; ran up a sign in Ebury Street, sold her Rolls Royce, and is now, literally, at work, in sinks, behind desks, running her finger along wainscots and whipping out yard measures from 9.30 to 7. So I said, Come and dine, and she came; and there was an ordinary pâté; and there was I jumping up to fetch the chicken and L.; running round with cheap French wine: and there and then, she took her fork and plunged it into the truffle; and all to match. All ease, hunger, shabbiness, tiredness even; no red on her nails, and merely lying in an armchair gossiping and telling stories of this sale and that millionaire, from the professional working class standard, as might be any woman behind a counter.

Enough.

V.

Berg

[]

2278: To Ethel Smyth

Sunday [16 November 1930]

Typewritten

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

Well, I have read them—very good indeed—very subtle, very various, very finely shaded. Here is my tabulation:

31st May 97:* I agree (this means to the part scored by you)

30th July 1900.* I agree. I also like the last paragraph. “Now I am going to bed etc” to the end. It gives a touch of daily life, and theres very little daily life for the most part.

8th March 1901. This is the letter I should print whole if you have room. In fact, I should shorten others to print it whole. It gives a general map of his psychology which to me at least, explains much otherwise evasive. Nor should I edit and omit personalities. After all, the story is told in Imps; which disposes of the intimacy bogey, and a whole letter seems to me to have far more persuasive effect than one dotted, even if the dots leave out nothing of importance. One feels one has all the facts at ones disposal.

22nd May 1907.* I agree (I suppose Ottoline must be suppressed?)

7th Jan. 1902. I agree. I like the Annamites very much.

6th Oct. 1902.* For some reason, possibly wrong, I dont much like this. It seems a little out of tune, and nobody remembers John Oliver Hobbes, and it reads fadedly, rather—out of date.

3d [5] April 04. I agree. I think the description of bad thought and good thought very true—very good.

7th Sept. 1904.* I agree. Again I suppose Vernon cant be printed.

22nd March 05.* Yes, quite good, but his [Brewster’s] literary criticism is not so interesting here as some other remarks, for which I would omit this, if its a case of wanting room.

1st March 08. I agree.

About the snippets—yes, thats very good—that gives many facets in a bunch. My word, though I should like to have all the letters at length. There is so much fineness; and continuity of thought and individuality—I mean to cut out bits is only to show one bud, one thorn, one leaf, of a very complex pattern. And he is a quiet and evasive writer who does things by shades so that the interest is diffused, and not in spots and splashes that can be cut out. But I dont see that it could be better done than you suggest. (This letter, I admit, could be better done, a great deal, but I must type for clearness, and the voice of the typewriter snips my mind to bits. And its not a clear mind owing to distractions; but I’d better write now before I begin London again where the distractions will be worse.)

Let me know if I can explain anything more clearly or fully. And say how you are. I will keep the letters till you instruct me. I’m all agog to read the finished version of the memoir.

Berg

[]

2279: To V. Sackville-West

Sunday 16th or 15? [16] Nov. [1930]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Well, that is a nice good poem. Yes, I like it. I like its suavity and ease; and its calm; and its timelessness and shade; and its air of rings widening widening till they imperceptibly touch the bank. Thats what I like best in your work. And the sense that you have shed all the meretricious horrors of life and have taken to the waters; fishlike, absolved. Oh so much better than bothering about human relations, and dining out, and buying white satin shoes to dine with Lady Rhondda. Lord yes—you infected me last night with nostalgia for the lake and the farm cart; “tilted stupidly”; and the returning horses; and the old men.

I think it is a very harmonious and complete poem; and very stately and urbane. And after all this I come to the point—

* These letters were not printed in The Prison. Ed.

Sunday Nov. 24th [23]

(I find this beginning, crumpled up; unlike you, I send it. But then how I tower above you in the intimacies of life—) the point was, I suppose that you should let us print it. Will you? Here, faithfully, is a cheque for £1-6.1.

Ethel met me with a quarto sheet, on which were written things to ask Virginia: 1. 2. 3—and so on to 20. Without stopping she went on till 5: and her veins were swollen on her forehead.

To give you a sample: 1. Suicide. 2. About Nelly. 3. What is Vita writing. 4. Relations with Ottoline. 5. 6. 7 8—all Brewster and the memoir. But she is a game old Bird and I respect her to the point of idolatry.

Alas and alas—Friday is no good. Leonard has promised to address a village meeting at Rodmell. I forgot. Any chance the week after? All days I think free.

And when shall I meet you.

O you were a nice good Vita—

Berg

[]

2280: To V. Sackville-West

[19 November 1930]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

This is pure business.

Would Friday night be possible, for you, I mean could I come, if I could come? I’m not altogether sure—but want, oh yes, do want, to see you.

I wrote a letter, or began it, about the poem [Sissinghurst]—to me a very good one—was interrupted—Oh curse theres the bell—there’s Plomer—so will write another—Oh yes I liked it—the poem.

Sorry for the scrawl.

Are you lunching with H. on Friday?

Yr V.

Berg

[]

2281: To Ethel Sands

[November 1930]

52 T.S. [W.C.1]

Dearest Ethel,

Yes, do come and gossip—what about next Wednesday, 4.30, when I shall be alone?

Might I be asked to dine another night later—if this is not asking too much—That week has become a rubbish heap of horrors.

Of course I am going to see your pictures [at the Warren Gallery], but I’m so perpetually snubbed by painters that I creep into galleries and never venture a word.

Yours
Virginia

I’m so furious at being in Beaton’s Book—I was never asked—never sat—never saw the horrid worm—and there I am seized for ever.

Wendy Baron

[]

2282: To Ethel Smyth

Saturday 29th Nov. 1930

52 Tavistock Sqre., [W.C.1]

Ethel dear, I have been a wretch not to write, but I have been out of the mood (not at all for reading letters though) trying to spread my mind in calm to get this bothersome chapter [of The Waves] right, and for ever called off to fit in quite impossible engagements. In this mood, I cant sit down and answer—but there’s no need to go into these explanations I daresay if I didn’t write for 6 months, all you’d say would be well—

One cant keep a clear head in London. There’s my poor brother in law suddenly struck blind of one eye while travelling with a mistress in Italy. The oculist says it may be a serious matter—anyhow he cant read, upon which his rational life depends. Whereupon his old mistress Mary Hutchinson, says “Cant I read to you?” and comes and pitches her tent in his room; and has now summoned me, as I suppose to go into the whole question of their relationship this afternoon. You cant think what an odd tangle of emotions this sets tingling. She used to be so jealous of me; I am now her confidante; Clive used to be so passionate, and now says he wants nothing but peace; then Vanessa, strangest of women, who never could tolerate Mary cordially, now, whether in cynicism or earnest I dont know, suggests that I should suggest that Mary should take Clive out to Zurich where the greatest oculist in Europe lives, and so launch upon another decade of passion, or rather embroilment. For by this time of course, Mary has developed a love affair, it is said with a Royal Prince or a negro chauffeur—(somebody either way entirely beyond our sphere) which puts all her feelings for Clive into the shade. Yet, she says, if going to bed with him once a fortnight would be any use, I could safely offer that. And I, who am bat-blind and mole-deaf to all these questions, have to decide what effect once a fortnight if combined with the Royal duke would be likely to have on Clive’s stability. Happily, all people want is to talk about themselves; advice giving is a mere farce.

Yes I think you’re entirely ruthless—if it comes to that. I have noticed more small things, ways of eating and sitting (I get things through odd channels, thats all) which have built up by this time a very decisive portrait, than you imagine. I daresay I know as much about you as you about me. Anyhow I dont think you exaggerate lopsidedly; I mean, one day you may be as rapid and enthusiastic as—(oh a hawk must do) and the next deadly shrewd, caustic, rational, severe—the daughter of the General in short. She sometimes shocks me—the daughter of the metaphysician.

No, I dont think that L. or I ‘snarl’—we analyse each other’s idiosyncrasies—(you will like that phrase) in the light of psycho-analysis walking round the square. My reports, however, are apt to twist up into balls what is really amicable, serious, disinterested, and almost wholly affectionate. It’s true that Leonard sees my faults.

A man wrote to the Observer last week to ask for some method of keeping letters written to the edge. No doubt there will be 20 dozen replies—which I’ll send you.

My letter, I now hear, has created consternation in the Times office—a principle is involved—half the Times in favour of printing, half not. So far the half not have prevailed. But they are still fighting—my letter about Beatons book I mean

These remarks about Clive are I need not say highly confidential.

Berg

[]

2283: To V. Sackville-West

Wednesday [3 December 1930]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Is there no chance that we could have a happy day one day next week, and go to the Mint or the Tower or The Zoo or eat muffins in a shop? Answer.

Or do you want to drop me? Answer.

Do you bequeath me to Ethel? Answer.

Have you no power of the pen left? Are you merely the mouthpiece of English poetry speaking at ancestral dinner parties, along with Milton, Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott? Write a letter instantly. I could have dined with Lady Astor last night if it comes to that. I dined with Ethel Sands—oh dear, so many things to say and no chance to say them in. The truth of it is I suppose, that you live largely in the Tower at Sissinghurst and sometimes descend to talk to the Old Bulls. A man fell from his Tower last week—was killed. Dont lean on the bastions. I wrote to Dotty, in trembling, and got no answer, so tremble all the more. And can you tell me anything about a Hart Davies who is with Heinemann?

V.

Berg

[]

2284: To Anon

10th Dec. 1930

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Madam,

As one of the guilty parties I bow down to your strictures upon the printing of On Being Ill. I agree that the colour is uneven, the letters not always clear, the spacing inaccurate, and the word ‘campion’ should read ‘companion’.

All I have to urge in excuse is that printing is a hobby carried on in the basement of a London house; that as amateurs all instruction in the art was denied us; that we have picked up what we know for ourselves; and that we practise printing in the intervals of lives that are otherwise engaged. In spite of all this, I believe that you can already sell your copy for more than the guinea you gave, as the edition is largely over subscribed, so that though we have not satisfied your taste, we hope that we have not robbed your purse.

Yours, with apologies,
Virginia Woolf

Washington State University, Humanities Library

[]

2285: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Friday [12 December 1930]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Ottoline

How extraordinarily nice of you to write! It is a surprise to find these little articles liked—especially by you. I was impressed by Christina—but what nonsense these lives of her are!

Life has become such a cascade that I dont see how to come round at the moment—its this abominable Christmas and going away—but I will ring up if I may, and anyhow shall be back in the New Year and shall hope for a quiet evening gossiping over the fire then. Once more we are looking at houses, in the expectation of being turned out.

Your
Virginia

Texas

[]

2286: To Ethel Sands

Sunday [14 December 1930?]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Ethel,

How can you divine my tastes so exactly—what’s more, add to them your own exquisity? And, moreover, if you knew how I hate shopping, and for weeks have been saying I must buy a tie, and making shift with an old Julian handkerchief from sheer cowardice!—So I’m immensely grateful, could I daresay face a Chelsea lunch without blushing. Life is such a rush—but I hope in spite of that you’ll include us in it—I don’t know why—but I spend all my time seeing people, and never anyone I want.

Yours V.W.

Wendy Baron

[]

2287: To Alan McGlashan

15 Dec 1930

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Dr McGlashan,

I must apologise for the delay in sending you this little book [On Being Ill]. The edition was a small one and was sold out, so that I am now sending an out of series copy which has, I fear, no value from a book collectors point of view, but I hope you will accept it with my thanks all the same.

There is no reason why the same title should not be used again for your poems, which I shall hope to read when they come out.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Please dont bother to acknowledge this.

Alan McGlashan

[]

2288: To Ethel Sands

Sunday [21? December 1930]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Ethel,

The little book [On Being Ill] is coming to you as an inadequate Christmas present, with my love. At the moment I can’t lay hands on a copy, but shall have one in a day or two. You must excuse the printing—and the waiting too.

Let me know when you’re back. And then we’ll have our cold bone and a long talk in which, I swear Virginia shan’t be mentioned, and Ethel shall.

I looked down on your head the other night at the play—rather a stiff play too.

Yrs Virginia

Wendy Baron

[]

2289: To Edmund Blunden

[December 1930]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, [Sussex]

Dear Mr Blunden,

Many thanks for sending me the little book on Christina Rossetti, which I shall like to read. I felt some hesitation in writing of a poet, with you as editor, but am very glad if you liked the article.

We are trying to enjoy the country, in spite of fog, and the horror of new houses, with which they are spoiling these downs, to my great rage.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

2290: To V. Sackville-West

Wednesday [24 December 1930]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

Dotty wires that you’re not going to Penns for Friday but next week, and wants us to come then. So will you say which day. Such a bore—have had to take to my bed with bad throat and temperature. So anyhow Friday I suppose couldn’t have done. And no books. If you have any memoir or other book fit for one completely imbecile it would be a charity to send it. Any chance of seeing you here? That would be nice. Long letter would be nice too.

V.

Nigel Nicolson (copy)

[]

2291: To Vanessa Bell

Xmas day [1930]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest Dolphin

I rang you up on Tuesday, but you were out. It was only to say that we sent you a black coat; and that if you hate, it, or it doesn’t fit, you can change it. I thought it might come in useful in the evening; anyhow keep you warm in the country.

I have had to retire to bed which is rather annoying. I got a bad throat and made it worse I suppose coming down and so had a temperature and spent yesterday in bed. However it is only a little over 99 today so I expect I shall be up and about tomorrow. I have just had my lunch off a fish (but we shall have turkey tomorrow) L. is lunching with the Keynes, to taste Mrs Harland, Lydia says, for the last time. I gather that there is a good deal of business about the future of The Nation to be discussed—of course in strict confidence—as if anybody cared what happened to that dead dog except that it should be buried. I had a queer adventure by the way, the day I got your coat at Marshall and Snelgroves. I was given £6 to buy Xmas presents; I put my bag under my moleskin, and turned, for one moment, to try on your coat. Then I thought I ought not to leave the bag, so turned to get it—and behold—in that second a thief had snatched it! There was then a great hue and cry, and a detective appeared, and they said a woman in brown fur had been seen; but of course they could not catch her; so there I was, penniless, without key, spectacles, cigarette case or handkerchief. Marshall’s refused to lend me a penny as they said I was not on their books; but the detective gave me 10/- of his own. Later that night the bag was found, thrown in a drain; and marvellously, though the £6 were gone, the thief had left my spectacles, keys, and one old earring. I had just bought two for a present. So didn’t do as badly as I might.

I was sad to part with Rivett [Carnac], who is really very nice, and might be very good with training. She aked me to get her another job if I could among my friends; as she enjoys so much being with people like us. I rather dread Nelly—but this I have said before. It is very fine and spring like here, but I haven’t yet had my nose out of doors. I am in bed in my top room with a fine log fire, and new bookcases—all very snug. Duncan’s table is arriving on Saturday, and will be only just in time as the accumulation of parcels and papers is terrific. Two telegrams have already come from Dotty—but as I shant be able to go tomorrow, we have got out of our lunch till next week. Perhaps you will come with us.

Roger [Fry] dined with us, and Lord! how bitter he is! Now I laugh at my friends, but not with a black tongue. First he abused Vita; then Ethel Smyth; then Maynard; then of course complained of his poverty and the neglect of his art—but not as of old with tolerant grumps: bitterly, savagely, with morosity. We think his mésalliance is souring him and Helen [Anrep] to wit. Have you noticed it? I found myself in the unusual position of standing up for Edith Sitwell, Maynard, Vita, Ethel and so on—and how do you psychologically speaking, account for his morbid desire to be thought poor? He told me I could quite well afford to lose—which is true; but that he was so bankrupt that to spend £30 on a new gramophone was impossible—and his mothers death had been a complete fiasco.

This is all my news and very doddery and dull I fear; but perhaps Christmas at Seend is even dodderier. When are you coming?

I want to discuss with you the propriety of my now making a small annual allowance to Angelica. I think she ought to have a little money to throw away on clothes etc. Dont you think I might? We were always too poor. Please consider this.

J. Lehmann is coming to see us. Do ask Julian what he thinks of him from a practical point of view.

B.

Berg

[]

2292: To Ethel Smyth

Christmas day 1930

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

It was very nice getting your letter this morning Ethel dear.

But this is only a scrawl, because I’m in bed. That cold I had when you came has been burrowing about, and coming here made it worse—Hence a temperature; hence bed in my top room; where I lie, before a great log fire. And the temp. only rather over 99 this afternoon; and my alarum clock cough (like yours I imagine) whirrs only now and then. And my throat is less red and raw. Still I’m blasted if I ever take special care of myself for 10 days with a view to finishing a book if this is what happens. There’s the poor old Waves on the shelf; and I cant do a thing. And I’d just got the swing, I thought, of the end. Never mind; I’m quite happy in many ways; and hope for turkey and wine tomorrow. Any letters instead of sole and milk pudding will be gratefully received. But they take such an age coming, I shall be well by the time you get this. Yes, I wish I’d got your book; it would be the very thing. I dip into Q Victoria’s letters; but mostly lie and look at the fire. L is as usual a perfect angel; he carried my bed up, wraps his own silk dressing gown round me, and cooks dinner and prunes his trees, and does every single thing just when I thought he wd. have a fortnights holiday: what a curse I am to him, to be sure!

Its turned balmy and fine, and I can see the rooks in the Churchyard trees, and the downs all pink and yellow if I look over my head.

So no more at the moment. I am not in the least bad—only its annoying—at the moment—worse though to be you correcting your drunken copyist.

Love V.

I will write properly again.

Berg

[]

2293: To V. Sackville-West

Saturday [27 December 1930]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

It seems to be my usual influenza—cough practically gone, but this idiotic little temperature goes on. So I’m staying in bed.

Yes, do for Heavens sake drop in any time, and take your luck if there’s any food—How nice to see you. I expect I shall be all right by Monday. (Possibly the Keynes’s come on Monday—otherwise we’re alone and shall be here till Tuesday week.)

I’m raging at not finishing The Waves here as I hoped—otherwise bed is not a bad place.

Sorry about your mother, at least about you, and going to Brighton, and Christmas and mud and decorations.

Let me know when you’ll come—I dont suppose we shall get to Dotty

Love from Pot,

Who’s rather

Hot.

V.

Berg

[]

2294: To Ethel Smyth

Saturday 27th [December 1930]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Book [Streaks of Life] come this morning, perfectly correct, and very welcome. How clever you are to get it here!

Still in bed; throat cured, cough much better, but temp. still goes on its silly way—never over 100, never under 99. I suppose it is the same influenza I had last Feb:—that celebrated occasion when you came to see me; and I must make up my mind, what with being careful about headaches and so on, to give up the time here to nothing but mooning and lazing. I expect the temp. will be normal in a day or two—its only the, what are called after effects that have to be swept up. I try to philosophise and suppose that my mind will store itself and that I shall pour out the last chapter [of The Waves] all the fuller for this break.

As you see from this egotism, one’s mind gets choked and not a fish rises. It pours and blows. The char’s baby is ill. I keep very snug in bed in the top room. L. prunes in a leather coat. I have lots of Christmas cards and bits of paper on top of me. Of course I snatched the [marked] red ink passages in Streaks at once, with delight. I wish I hadnt read it already, but shall try again. I read about the Stars, and try to imagine what is meant by space bending back. Eliz [Williamson]: must take me to her telescope. Thats about all my news.

I was sad to part with Rivett—she got nicer and nicer and the relief of being on a footing, socially, I find immense. No huffs, no feelings. And she liked us and wanted to stay and so I feel indisposed for poor old Nelly and her kidneys. Whats your next job? You say you’ve done this for the time. I imagine something blowing through your hair off the shingles at Cromer—never been there but imagine shingles and cobbles, wind bitten evergreens. And I’m allowed no wine till I’m normal! So write. Love to Eliz; and please excuse this awful drivvle and the egotistic soliloquy. Heres L: Who sends his love

V.

I will send you (if you like) On Being Ill—another copy turned up. This is my erratic Xmas present.

Berg

[]

2295: To Vanessa Bell

Monday [29 December 1930]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest Dolphin

The necklace is exquisite—like the inside of white grapes—and as my consumption of necklaces is huge, will come in most useful as well as ornamental. Leonard is so enamoured of his caddy that he is making it into a tobacco tin for London. Also, I am finding Angelica’s blotter of immediate use—for one thing, I never have any blotting paper, and as I am writing in bed it is essential to have a hard block. In fact all the presents were entirely on the spot and much in contrast to the hideosities my poor old mother in law sent—for instance a vast sham brass fish slice.

I am hoping to get up today and receive the Keynes’s. I have gone on having a slight temp: not over 100, but over 99, so I suppose it has been the same influenza I had last year. But I’m almost normal today and am going now to dress.

Nothing much therefore has happened—in fact nothing. The Keynes’s go back tomorrow, so you will miss them. There is a lot of Nation gossip and Harland [Keynes’s servants] gossip—they’re leaving to better themselves with a rich prostitute in Mayfair. I shall hear it all again this afternoon.

Duncan’s table has come and is so lovely in the drawing room I can’t have it up here, and thus shall have to buy another. Jean [Campbell] writes about the furniture, which should come by sea [from Cassis], she says; and wont take the sheets without paying.

It pours and pours.

I must say the necklace is lovely—so much that I have it on the table to look at. I shall wear it this afternoon

Any visits wd. be much appreciated; I expect we shall come anyhow on New Years day, but shall be here in solitude till 6th. so hope to see you soon

V.

I’m so furious—I had meant to finish your intolerable Moths [Waves] here, and of course havent been able to write a line—all your fault.

Berg

[]

2296: To Ethel Smyth

Monday 29th Dec [1930]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Your wire has just come. Look here—dont spend all your fortune in wiring—L. wd. at once tell you if I were worse. But I’m better—much. In fact I’m going to put on stockings and dress when I’ve had lunch. The temp. is almost normal this morning—it has been between 99 and 100 until today, but now I think this is the end. I feel much better; dont sleep all the time; have no headache; cough almost gone; eat everything, and hope for a drop of wine tonight. I shant try to write—Waves I mean—for a few days, as these things hang about; but I dont feel as done up as I did last time, and can keep so quiet here that I shall have no temptation to exceed. Its a bore of course, but I’m beginning to plan a walk; and to plan what my next sentence will be, and to think with rapture of roast mutton.

You see the higher faculties aren’t playing up—One gets muffled in one room. All the same, last night I read practically all Streaks again with the highest relish. Its the very book I want—as good as watching Joyce Wethered play golf—I found I cd. read it almost as if new—a great tribute to your English and vigour, which hoards enough heat to warm one a second time. Lord what fun it is!—Any letters, any documents will be welcome. So if you’ve nothing to do—wh. is unlikely—do that. I’m ashamed of this invertebrate jerkiness. The muscles in one hand are highly susceptible—cant form a word after 6 days in bed; but it comes back. Now the sun is actually in the left hand corner of the room and making the Church tower a silvery yellow, and the pear trees bright green. And my lunch is coming—how nice! Are you buffeting against the gale? What are you doing? And what wild spate is rushing through the giant chambers (reference to your size in hats) of your brain?

V.

Berg

[]

2297: To Saxon Sydney-Turner

30th Dec. 1930

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

My dear Saxon,

It is a long long time since I saw you—your birthday party was the last occasion. Here I am marooned in bed with what appears to be influenza. A country cottage is a chill place to come to late on a December night with a bad cold. So I took to my bed and have lain by the fire for 5 days, but I’m practically normal today, so shall put on a dressing gown and become a rational being again.

I suppose in these 5 days you would have read Plato through. What a pity it is that we cant pool our reading!—I mean, if I could attach a little sucker to the back of your neck and drink through it without any effort, all your knowledge, I should be able to die content. I dont suppose, as things are, I shall ever read Plato through, or Theocritus, or Thucydides: and then I suspect you of having spent Christmas reading some entirely obscure, rather late and imperfect, but absorbingly interesting and very indecent, satire by an Alexandrian—why not? But I shall never know.

I heard of you making the Baboons howl at the Zoo with Roger. How much does it cost to become what you are—I dont mean in spirit—I mean a Fellow of the Society, so that one can go on Sundays? I want to make Leonard a member. Now that we’re all so old, I daresay one can afford it, and what a refuge for extreme old age, to sit with the baboons!

Maynard and Lydia came over in their Rolls Royce yesterday; Nessa and the children—but Julian is likely to become a fellow of King’s they say—came to Charleston yesterday. I am reading Defoe’s Tour of England—the sort of book one can read all day, turning the pages as a sheep eats grass. I go on and on. In his day, a new house was a most creditable and welcome sight—that is what strikes me—whereas, whenever I go out here I find some horrid little red bug on the downs, and feel more rage than about almost anything.

As you can see, I’ve no news. Gerald Brenan seemed at one moment to be hovering over us with his wife [Gamel Woolsey], but we did not manage to meet. Have you met? Why do you think one comes to the country at Christmas? The gale is battering at the windows. Why do you think one makes up these romantic stories about owls and clear sunny days, when the owls are dead and the sun sunk? Please write a long long fascinating letter full of reflections upon life.

Leonard’s love—
yr V.W.

Sussex

[]

2298: To Ethel Smyth

Last day of old year [31 December 1930]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

This can only be a line as the postman may be here any minute. Therefore the usual egotism; up; been for a walk as far as the Post office; a little wobbly; temp. stays about 99, but thats of no account.

I’ve read the paper (Prison) with the usual admiration at your dexterities and audacities. I think there’s one fault of grammar somewhere I forget: anyhow I’ve no big envelope so will keep it a day or two. I’m going to stay almost entirely speechless till we go back—no more exertion than ordering dinner—and as I cdn’t swear to be speechless if you were in the room I’m going to forego that extravagant offer.

So you must write instead

V.

Happy New Year 1931

Berg

[]

2299: To William Plomer

31st Dec. 1930

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

Dear William,

We were very sorry to miss you, but we came here two days before Christmas, and, developing influenza, I had to take to my bed instantly but am now up.

We are very much interested to hear of your visit to Simpson—how astonishing that he should be mixed up with Mrs Wilson whom I remember vaguely through a wild letter she wrote me, enclosing a bag of lavender and a bunch of heather. She also gave me some particulars of her life—I cant remember what, except that nothing would induce her to write, for which I commended her. But how the Wilsons and the Simpsons have come together, with all other details, we must wait till we see you to hear. We’re very glad you liked the Greyhound. I still think his first purely sodomitic novel was the best.

We go back about the 6th and shall be in London all January, except for occasional weekends, so let us know when you can come and dine.

I doubt that the country is possible at this time of year—one cant walk far, it rains incessantly; night sets in about 3 pm. But then London is a racket of people, so perhaps the only salvation is a Greek island.

Our best wishes for a happy year.

Yours
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

Letters 2300-2353 (January–April 1931)

2300: To V. Sackville-West

1st Jan 1931

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

Here, in the first place, is a letter from a lady whose aunt translated Mrs Barclay, for which reason the niece wants—what a nice compliment!—to translate you. L. says you deal with these bugs yourself.

The Books have been a godsend—for some reason, the London Library took to sending me third volumes only, and I was in despair. Anderson seems to me extremely good—puts a line round herself completely, as Katherine Mansfield used to wish to do, when she bought a tailor made coat.

Are you staying at Penns [Dorothy Wellesley’s house]? I dont know what to say about coming—I’m much better, but go on with the usual little temperature, and thus have to keep warm and so on. It may vanish—one never knows. I fume a good deal—There’s is my wretched last chapter—should have been poured out in a rush and done with. I’ve written 2 sentences, and dont see when I shall manage more. For this reason the whole burden of the Spring season rests on you. Make a note of this. A charming young man, John Lehmann, brother of Rosamund, wants to become our manager, and perhaps buy a share later. If he turns out possible—I rather suspect charming young men who write poetry—this may solve our difficulties. He is coming to see us in a day or two. Anyhow our spring season must be worked. Easdale, the 17 year old poetess, wants us to bring Dotty to see her act a play in a shed in the garden. Ethel, marooned at Cromer, has just sent me all her love letters—I mean Brewster’s letters, and keeps up a daily fire which I sometimes dont read all at once. It is very difficult to be intimate with such a blazing egotist—the flames shrivel one up. You’ll be glad to hear. And at the moment I want coolness and calm; and old oxen, and merely to sit with Vita and be told that Milton did not come to the dinner. I suppose you cant come over from Penns? Anyhow I’ll write again—my word, I could have spared this influenza—any other time but this. You dont know anyone who wants Rivett-Camac I suppose? I parted from her with sorrow, and she has no job; and I return to Nelly without enthusiasm; but must go through 3 months I suppose. Write me a nice letter.

Your VW.

Sissinghurst Thursday, is announced.

Love to D.

V.

Berg

[]

2301: To V. Sackville-West

Friday [2 January 1931]

[Monks House, Rodmell, Sussex]

A brilliant idea—wont you and Dotty come over tomorrow? (I think L. has written this) We go back on Wednesday, but shall be so cumbered with things that L. says we must go home straight. I seem stuck at 99, which is nothing: so am taking up the burden of life—chiefly Ethel. An idol is not necessarily what one wishes in the home. Have you finished correcting Sissinghurst Thursday?

VW.

Just off for a walk on the downs Oh how heavenly!

Berg

[]

2302: To Ethel Smyth

Friday Jan 2nd [1931]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

O a thousand congratulations. Well, you’ve got the greater part of your wishes this year already I imagine. I’m very grateful for HB. in whom I’m dipping with great curiosity, and have many questions to ask. But not now. I’m off for my first walk—my ½ hour round, in this blazing sun. I remain 99 but don’t suppose it matters. And if I get out I have a much better headpiece

Love and thanks and congratulations
V.

Berg

[]

2303: To Julian Bell

Friday [2 January 1931]

Typewritten

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

My dear Julian,

I meant to get you a book for a Christmas present but as I dont know what you want I send you a cheque instead, which can be spent on anything—dogs, drink, what you like.

Your father cut me off so short yesterday that I dont know what arrangements were arrived at—possibly Dotty and Vita are coming tomorrow, but I doubt it. Anyhow we must meet and go into the question at length—I mean about the nature and character of poetry etc etc.

Virginia

Quentin Bell

[]

2304: To Clive Bell

Saturday [3 January 1931]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest Clive,

Have you by any chance got Madame du Deffand Letters to H. Walpole, (Mrs Toynbee) vol I? The London Library of course have only sent 3rd vol, and I should be greatly obliged by the loan. I’m in bed with some feverish distemper and read all day—Hoping to see you.

yr V.

Don’t send—bring with you, or we could fetch.

Quentin Bell

[]

2305: To Lyn Lloyd Irvine

4th Jan [1931]

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

Dear Lyn,

As you see, we’re down here. We came for Christmas, and come back on Wednesday. I spent Christmas in bed with influenza,—am still stupid and sleepy beyond words. May we take our chance of coming on Saturday for tea? I’ve not faced my engagements yet, and dont know what we mayn’t find waiting us. But we shd. like to come if we can—provided I’m capable of intelligent conversation, which seems doubtful.

Our best wishes, as they say, for 1931. I’m dipping into Madame du Deffand (your edition) and shall be interested to hear what you make of her. My theory of letterwriting is now complete: but no room to explain it.

Yrs V.W.

Sussex

[]

2306: To Ethel Smyth

5th Jan 1931

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

I swear I will go through the article [On Being Ill] and find the bad grammar this evening; I daresay all my own inaccuracy. Well (as you would say) my letter writing faculty has dried up. This bloody temperature stays a little over 99, and I daresay when we come to London I shall see a doctor—no thats no use—I shall get a febrifuge. We come up on Wednesday, I expect the germ can’t be ousted here, as, though I can keep one room hot, the others are like cold baths, whatever one does. No doubt a dry house and a large gas fire will do the trick. No: spittoon never needed. Meanwhile I feel vaguely ashiver, and vaguely dull, and vaguely hot, and then want to sleep, and try to write a sentence to keep the Waves on the simmer, but cant get up the right pressure. However its an Italian day—there should be cypresses against the sky and lizards in the crannies, and Leonard is going to take me for a drive. So there’s no great damage to cry over—except my fortnight wasted.

Whats the use of beginning to ask or answer questions? None. A bottle turned upside down represents my state of mind. Theres the Brewster letters—theres the Wreckers—theres the question of repeating compliments. As for this last, I’ve come to the conclusion, in my 99’s, that no: theyre not good for me. I dont like them. I mean I do; but dont want them—they tingle and quiver and leave me displeased. So I’m going to be austere, and you shall never again repeat what people say (with certain exceptions) You, now, flourish on praise; its part of your strange psychology—I believe you need it: why it upsets me. I cant at this moment decide—Mrs Woodhouse on my nose for instance. And was HB. a man of wealth? Did he ever do anything, by way of profession? What did his father and mother do? Why did he live in Rome? I feel him, though so near in some ways, in a vacuum in these respects. I’ve finished the letters—awfully (to use my childish slang) intriguing, I must wait, for I’m going to catch the sun. It is so warm, so blue, one could fancy it was early on a June morning, the downs on the other side of the marsh have that soft burning, yet dim look of a very early summer morning.

Love
V.

Berg

[]

2307: To Quentin Bell

5th Jan. 1931

Typewritten

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes, [Sussex]

Dearest Quentin,

I am tired of waiting for a letter, though I can take my oath that it is your turn, not mine. However since it is the Christian season, and charity prevails, I write, and enclose this small douceur, as no doubt you can spend it to better advantage in Italy than I here.

Now for news, as your father would say—well, very little. On Christmas eve I took to my bed with influenza and thus was spared a visit to Dotty, a visit to Tilton, a visit to Miss Easedale, the poetess of the Goat who lives at Sevenoaks. (To explain, I may say that she is 16, and imagines herself spiritually in touch with Miss Chutneygrove—a virgin, who keeps, not for their milk, he goats) But in solitude news dies out. Only profound thoughts survive, and those you quite rightly interdict. However, getting better, I saw the Keynes’s, Lydia slightly depressed by her comparative failure to tempt the British public with slabs of Paradise Lost recited by half naked young men in American cloth. It was a depressing exhibition, unless you are of the persuasion. Which? Well, in a fascist country I darent say. And that I’m not.

Last night we dined at Charleston off a fine brace of pheasants shot by the Colonel [Cory Bell]. Everybody was there—Clive, Julian, Duncan, Angelica, Vanessa. And we had a bottle of audit, and got very merry. We sang old catches—three blind mice, white sand and grey sand, Angelica conducting with a rod of iron, so that I was suppressed most of the time, oh and Clinker had the mange, and lay by my side, while Leonard sang Lay by my side a bunch of purple heather. Duncan is as mellifluous as ever, but how he can spend three months alone with his Russian who by all accounts is sheep headed, bird witted, and not nice into the bargain, we in Bloomsbury cant imagine. Or do you think each of us in proportion to our virtue requires some such outlet? Then Duncan’s virtue must be very great. But hush—this is not to be said above a whisper. Poor old Clive is to be found reading in black spectacles. He goes to Zurich next week, alone, to a nursing home, I gather, for two months; and is very solid and sensible about it—more than I should be, to whom the thought of eyes failing would bring misery unending. This is where the Bell blood shows itself—so I doubt not did Cory stand with his feet in the water for five years in a trench. Julian is spurting and whizzing ideas. I look over his shoulder and see rows of books—territories conquered. He is going to write poetry, history, criticism; he is going to read. He is going to immure himself at Cambridge with all the books of all the ages. Before one can be a poet, he says, one must stand on a pinnacle made by the convergence of philosophy, history and art and survey the world. But in the interval of erecting this gigantic pile—and I believe he means it and will do it and will bring lasting credit on your name—meanwhile he scribbles an ode or two, and takes Helen [Soutar] for drives in the fog. But Nessa says Helen is not to be Mrs Bell—only as it were the prelude to the footsteps of that dove-toed woman.

There—I have scratched together lots of little bits of news. Now tell me about your pictures and about the Roman world. Have you been outside along the Roman roads? have you seen Nemi? Have you seen the galleon? And have you dined on the hill? Oh dear—if I were there! It was spring when we came [April 1927], and I used to sit in the gardens at the top of the steps and merely palpitate, like a frog, sucking in and out my flanks with sheer joy. Isn’t it infinitely beyond any other town—Munich, Berlin, London, Paris?

I shall come in May. You will find me a nice room. We will drink a glass together. And you will beckon to some shabby slouching figure and say Heres my Aunt.

Old Ethel Smyth has sent me all her love letters written from Rome in the 90ties when it was thought daring in the highest for a woman of 40 to share occasionally a flat with a widower of 45. She is a game old cock—we go home tomorrow, and there write me a letter.

But of course if I must type write I can hardly make sense—all cogency, fluency, and intimacy is lost. Goodbye.

[in Virginias handwriting:]

In my own hand, what a tender, brilliant, subtle and penetrating letter I could write!

Virginia

Quentin Bell

[]

2308: To Harcourt, Brace

7th Jan 1931

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Miss Cuff,

Many thanks for the cheque for 784 dollars in accordance with your statement of October 25th.

Yours very truly
Virginia Woolf (Mrs Woolf)

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

[]

2309: To V. Sackville-West

Thursday [8 January 1931]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

We only got back yesterday.—what about Monday or Tuesday? Let me know which and when. Rather bothered with headache after this d—d little temp: but shall be in full health then. L. says you [Sissinghurst] are advertised in The Times tomorrow. O Lord London is a horror! back 24 hours and 24 visitors telephones and general scrimmage.

But how nice to see you in peace

Let me know in time so as to ward off people.

V.

Berg

[]

2310: To V. Sackville-West

Sunday [11 January 1931]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

I rang up to ask when you cd. come, but was told Mrs N. was in London. Alas—Tuesday is now full, (Dotty etc.) and I shd. like to see you without a crowd. What about Monday, tomorrow? tea? or earlier.

Perhaps you’d ring up.

Wednesday is no good. But there are other days: let it be soon.

V.

Berg

[]

2311: To Edmund Blunden

Jan. 14th [1931]

52 Tavistock Sqre. [W.C.1]

Dear Mr Blunden,

No, I had not seen the translation; and am delighted with the improved version, which I think I shall let stand. Many thanks for sending it. And, if, by the way, it was you who reviewed Julian Bell [Winter Movement] in the Times [TLS, 8 January] (he is my nephew) this is to say that he was very grateful.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

2312: To V. Sackville-West

[January 1931]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Here’s a card for our [Hogarth Press] display, but I don’t advise you to come.

Will you come to tea on Monday? But dont let Eddy know, or Ethel. On the other hand, let me know—and come, because I want a little quiet pleasure.

V.

And Bring Poem [Sissinghurst]. Lehmann engaged.

Berg

[]

2313: To Clive Bell

Jan. 19th 1931

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Clive,

Well, I’m full of sympathy for your state [of his eyes]—how entirely damnable. The only consolation I can offer is that you’re not at any rate what I have been at various stages of my career—both shut up and mad. But perhaps a few illusions would be welcome. Therefore I will hastily tell you about life in Tavistock Square—how we have almost settled to take John Lehmann, if his guardian can be persuaded that the Press is worth a thousand pounds—how Leonard has been summonsed for a fifth time in 3 years to sit on a jury—how old Miss Pritchard [solicitor’s sister] says this proves the Under Sheriff has a down on him—how Lydia has just been in to tea and says that the master of Mrs Harland’s mistress is a cousin of Florry Grenfell’s—As you can imagine this seems to Lydia a fact of some importance—and the husband of Mrs Harland’s mistress who is Florry Grenfell’s cousin has a flat at Hove—so that the Harlands will be over at Tilton in their new car. But the most illusory part of Lydia’s visit was that she proposes to set a scene in Orlando to music and to dance to it behind a microphone at Savoy Hill [B.B.C.]—Will I therefore rearrange the words to suit music to be written by Constant Lambert? Also Maynard’s secretary is dying of large white bubbles in the blood. This Maynard highly resents as they are at the moment without a cook.

So we go on. I am scarcely brought nearer to sanity by a long most amusing letter from Quentin, telling how he killed a dog with a hammer on the Apulian road in order to gratify a humanitarian American lady, a friend of Shaws, who tried to buy chloroform at a chemist but was refused. Roger and Helen were pretty crusty together the other night, as Helen heard a wheeze in their gramophone, which Roger could not hear. Tomorrow is Angelica’s party, where I hope to pick up a little gossip. Lyn is finding life hard—and poor Miss Belsher, our manager, has broken her engagement, and so cant get the accounts right. Such is life. I will depend on Nessa for news of you.

V.

Quentin Bell

[]

2314: To Ethel Smyth

Saturday 24th [January 1931]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

No, I cant answer riddles by letter—besides I’m naturally obtuse, as you guess. Put the question to me in a plain manner on Wednesday and you shall have, after due deliberation, a plain answer. About the speech—I dont think I shall print mine, as it stands, because as you doubtless perceived, with your supernatural apprehensiveness, it was clotted up, clogged, partly owing to the rush I was in—no time to comb out—partly because, the very last morning in my bath I had a sudden influx of ideas, which I want to develop later, perhaps in a small book, about the size of a Room— But this must wait—Lord—if only I could finish the Waves!

Your speech, meanwhile was divine and entirely expressive—Leonard says about the best of its kind he ever heard, and done he says with supreme skill, wh. I interpret to mean that you liquidated your whole personality in speaking and threw in something never yet written by being yourself there in the flesh—Anyhow, we must print your speech, by itself entire. But this I leave for discussion. I’m a little dashed—no not that—its too fine a day for that—but disappointed to find that the infernal though enjoyable racket of Wednesday has—after buoying me up for 24 hours so that I felt like a stallion in a field, capable of any enjoyment or effort (excuse the image) let me down again on Thursday night into the usual headache. I’ve not written, oh dear, for 3 days, but hope to start afresh on Monday. I suspect this little temperature (I’ve just taken it after a fortnight) 99 pt. 4 gives one a fillip, and then a drop—but its, as I say, a very fine day. We’ve been on the down and seen a magpie.

And now I’m back in London, and have, with incredible virtue refused an invitation to the play tonight—God what an effort, what virtue!

Well, anon, anon. (These are lifted from your style)

Virginia

Berg

[]

2315: To Clive Bell

Jan 25th 1931

52 Tavistock Sqre., [W.C.1]

Dearest Clive,

Well now, as you would say, whats the news? Whereupon your poor battered untidy sister-in-law, does what is called by the ready-writers, cudgelling her brains. There’s Tom [Eliot] on the phone—by no means a trivial event, because as you are aware, the state of Vivienne’s bowel is not a matter to be despatched in a moment—he wants us to meet a New Zealander who admires Leonard, was an intimate of the Empress Eugénie, and is hand in glove with the Pope. Is this Tom’s wit? Goodness knows. Eddy has been taken short with the quinsy at his sisters house [Lady Romilly]—the malicious (I’m not one, nor you either) say that since he fell over a rock at Penns and failed to sprain his ankle he has been peeved with the world, and the quinsy, in Mount Street, was his means of redress. This comes through Vita who is incapable of malice, you’ll agree. Dotty, on the other hand, at Angelica’s party the other night, sizzled and sputtered like a herring on a fork, exposed to the torture of her books failure, her marriage’s failure, and various other failures which, do what she will, turn her £10,000 a year to grit and shingle between the teeth—or should it be in the hair? However I respect her for this: we were sitting talking of life and its miseries—how the Nation won’t review one, and the Spectator calls one Lady Dorothy, thus insinuating one’s an aristocrat and cant write poetry, when I noticed a vast hole on her forefinger. I mean her ring was without a stone. Good God Dotty, I said—you’ve lost your ring. Now this she took with perfect calm—it was a ruby too worth between 6 and 700 pounds. Lord, dont bother—dont make any fuss, she said; and only after the party, agreed to ask Nessa, who of course had picked it up, thinking it was out of a cracker and put it on the mantelpiece. Its a pity one must admire one’s friends. Then I met a limping little creature called Geoffrey Whitworth, who asked after you. Then I met Miss Scott who’s building the Shakespeare theatre. Then I met incredibly old Katie Lewis—all of them at a party, given by the young women of England, to meet Ethel Smyth and Virginia Woolf. But you dont care about that kind of thing, instinct warns me. Your sons want muzzling—theres Quentin killed a dog with a hammer, and Julian killed a don with a review. A poor old creature called Thornley wrote a book: Julian reviewed it with such tremendous severity and truth that the Editor has had to resign, and the don to retire. The spirit of Sir Leslie [Stephen] is undoubtedly abroad again—all this speaking the truth, I mean.

Well, I shall write again and hope for news from Nessa in a day or two.

V.

Quentin Bell

[]

2316: To V. Sackville-West

Monday [26 January 1931]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Could you come to tea on Thursday next 4.30? Lehmann wants to discuss some suggestions about your poem, wh. he thinks “superb”.

Could you come early and take us to Persian show first?

Could you then lavish some kindness on me?

Let me know

V.

Berg

[]

2317: To William Plomer

26 Jan 1931

52 Tavistock Sqre., W.C.1

Dear William,

I think I once told you how I dont write letters and now I have gone and proved that fact—also, the more you write to me the silenter and the happier I become. Your book was the very thing—I’ve been stewing over the fire with the relics of this damned influenza, and I read nothing but the Welsh Squires all one day. I have certain connections among them—the Vaughans are my cousins, and was therefore much amused to trace their oddities to the source. What a picture it gives me of a little crazy society, flourishing all by itself! Thanks very much. Here is a cutting about Hampson or Simpson that may interest you. I think there must be something queer—I mean of the illegitimate bar sinister kind—behind the swimming mistress, but perhaps you know.

Let us hear when you’re in London again.

Yours ever,
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

2318: To Clive Bell

Wednesday 28th Jan. [1931]

52 Tavistock Sqre., [W.C.1]

Dearest Clive,

Only time for a short gossip. I daresay you’ve heard all my news too—about the Nation amalgamating, as they call it, with the Statesman; and its not very interesting anyhow. Thats what we’re talking about, however, if you want to know. And I’ve been hoarding this precious secret for 5 weeks—Sharpe, you see, is dead drunk—went to America and broke out again; and the Nation is dead, not drunk, but sober; and so they thought poor little [Edmund] Blunden was to be made an Oxford fellow, which he aint; anyhow they thought they could pension off Mrs Jones, and make a fresh start. The telephone rings perpetually: Kingsley Martin—d’you remember meeting him here in the days of the Strike [1926]?—is to be Editor; and the new paper, perhaps re-christened, is to come out late in February. Frankie [Birrell] and Raymond [Mortimer] are again like gulls on a rock clamouring for work; and I think Frankie is to be retained as film critic, but Raymond, being disagreeable in his views to Mr Ellis Roberts, who is anglo-catholic and literary editor, is alarmed. I cant doubt though that they’ll all fall on their feet and things go on much the same as before. Its amazing that at our age, after all our disillusionments, we can still prick up our ears, neigh, and gallop wildly about the field believing that the time has come for a new paper, better than any that has ever been before.

Young Mr Lehmann is now installed in the back room behind the W.C. at a small table with a plant which Leonard has given him on the window sill. Far from tending the Press and slipping the burden from our shoulders, we are of course rushed into all sorts of fresh projects, and I shall think myself lucky if I see the shores of France once in ten years—what with all the cursed realistic novels I have to read, and Blanche Knopf coming to tea tomorrow, because she’s the wife of a publisher [Alfred A. Knopf]. I met Aldous Huxley last night at a concert—more of a windmill and a scarecrow, more highbrow, purblind and pallid and spavined than ever; but all the same, sympathetic to me, so I asked him to dinner, with his wife, whom I mix up with Ottoline’s governess, wrongly. Tonight Lord Passfield [Sidney Webb] dines with us to discuss Kenya, and Kingsley Martin comes in afterwards—his table manners are deplorable—harking back to the days when meat was dear and two vegs. a luxury—to discuss the New Statesman. It blows a black and bitter wind, Pinka is said to be trembling on the verge of heat; the tobacconists young woman is bringing her black cocker round at 7 to see if he could be mated with a red—not bitch, but what she calls “lady dog”—that’s about all; and I wish my poor brother-in-law were round the corner for a little rational conversation.

No more now: I’m afraid this is very disconnected, but I have to rush upstairs and get tea for Ethel Smyth.

V.

Quentin Bell

[]

2319: To Molly MacCarthy

30th Jan. [1931]

52 Tavistock Sqre., [W.C.1]

Dearest Molly,

I was so annoyed yesterday only to catch a disturbed glimpse of you, among all those motor cars, when I wanted a little peaceful conversation. And now Vita says you’ve gone to live in Wiltshire. I hope this is an exaggeration—why should you live in Wiltshire, unless Wilson has given you her folly for life, on condition that you write some more stories of Fitzgerald—which is the only reason that will satisfy me. Do go on, and write the whole history of Ireland; but surely for that you will need the British Museum, and then might drop in for a cup of tea.

I’ve had a long and no doubt exquisitely written letter from Logan about the collected works, but to my demand, when will you let us have the first volume, he returns no answer. We have just taken on this last week a young poet, John Lehmann, brother of Dusty Answer, to be eventually our partner, and the Press therefore far from dying or resting on its oars, is now in midstream and must be fed with Desmond’s books. I held them out to Lehmann as a bait. So let me know when you can, if anything can be announced. Two volumes of Portraits to begin with would be admirable: and they must be illustrated.

There were too many people at the [Persian] Exhibition for my taste—I occasionally caught sight of a small blue spark between old women’s bodies which I took to be a manuscript—that’s about all. That is more or less what happens in London; so perhaps you are wise to retire to Wiltshire, but Sussex is a mere swamp, and the devils are putting up electric posts in the middle of our view. Clive writes dismal letters from Zurich, where he is being treated for his eyes, and asks me to ask his friends to write to him: so do if you can, the address is,

Schwesternhaus vom Roten Kreuz, Zurich 7

Now I must return to my daily task, which is to read manuscripts—masses and masses of manuscripts, with their authors screaming like gulls for an answer. If they were only worse, or only better—as it is, I have to plough on, hoping always that something will turn up.

yrs
V.

Mrs Michael MacCarthy

[]

2320: To Ethel Smyth

[1 February 1931]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

A declaration

Just to clear myself from being called a valetudinarian by Dame Ethel Smyth: (as she may incline to after a talk on the telephone)—this is to testify that I only saw the dr. by accident, she having come to look at Ls. ears; that I scouted her suggestion of tuberculous trouble with ribald laughter; that I refused to see a specialist; that I only take my temp. under coercion: that in short I attach no importance to the matter whatsoever and only (I think this is true) mentioned health on the telephone because dame Ethel started the subject herself—So help me God.

V.W.

If I dont come tomorrow it will simply be that I think it more sensible, on aesthetic grounds, to listen to only one musical masterpiece on the same day—Nevertheless, I may look in for a time, if I dont interrupt.

V.

Berg

[]

2321: To George Rylands

Sunday [1 February 1931]

52 Tavistock Square, [W.C.1]

Dear Dadie,

We shall be delighted to come (D.V.) on Saturday February 14th.

Would you add to your goodness by taking two bedrooms at the Bull [Cambridge] for that night? We shall return on Sunday—to read and read and read worthless MSS.

No, John terrifies me far too much for laughter at present.

Your V

George Rylands

[]

2322: To Margaret Llewelyn Davies

Sunday. Feb 1st [1931]

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Margaret,

I have been meaning to write and thank you for your letter, but have been rather somnolent owing to the usual curse of influenza. Of course, of course, the introduction was a gift (though as a matter of fact I was handsomely paid by the Yale Review.) But about royalities—I’m afraid they wont amount to more than a pound or two, but whatever they do amount to, (my share I mean,) please let me hand that over to you to spend on any thing acceptable to the Guild. They must want money for something or other, and I should only feel I was paying my due for the immense interest their letters gave me. But that can wait. Leonard has explained to you the reason of this most irritating delay. Ones clerks ought to be made of bone and rubber—not the human heart. It is devastating in an office. Children are bad enough, but broken engagements, divorces and so on are the very devil, as we used to find when we had Mrs Joad. I’m very anxious to see that the book looks attractive—has a good bright binding of some sort. I’m writing to tell my American publishers, Harcourt Brace, about it.

By the way, when I came to read the proofs, I rather came round to your view that I made too much of the literary side of my interest; its partly a habit, through writing reviews for so many years. I tried to change the tone of some of the sentences, to suggest a more human outlook, and also, I brought in a few cigarettes in Lilians ash tray—do they matter? A little blue cloud of smoke seemed to me aesthetically desirable at that point. But the corrections were as usual done in a rush, and when I get my final proofs I will look at it carefully again. Perhaps we may meet and have a final revision. But lord, the rush of London—I sometimes long for nothing but Rodmell, even in this damp. This is the result, of not seeing you, but seeing without stopping overdressed American publishers wives [Mrs Knopf] with their eyelids picked out, so that one pencil of hair remains in the middle of the forehead. Have you ever seen that effect? It is one of perpetual surprise, and to me unpleasing.

Love to Lilian.

Virginia

Sussex

[]

2323: To Vanessa Bell

Tuesday [3 February? 1931]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Here is the cheque for the table. Dirt cheap, I consider.

Would you take a commission to make tiles for the upstairs room at Monks House?

I dont know if you expect me tomorrow or not—late, about 5.30—Shall have had tea.

Cant ring up because you’ll be engaged with Ethels nephew—no not nephew [unidentified]. But perhaps you’ll let me hear.

Berg

[]

2324: To Gwen Raverat

3rd Feb. 1931

52 Tavistock Sqre., W.C.1

My dear Gwen,

What an age since we met!—I dont even know your address, so must send this to the Keynes’s. This is only a dull business letter, to ask if you think that anything could now be done—since Mrs Brooke is dead—about Rupert’s letters. I came across a copy of some of those to you and Jacques, that you sent me and I rather think you said at the time that they must wait till Mrs Brooke was dead. It seems more and more idiotic that Eddy Marsh should be allowed to parade his hairdresser’s block. Let me know if you think anything can be done. A vile and repulsive book about him by a man called, I think, Maurice Brown, an American, was sent to us the other day. But we refused to touch it—not the beautiful Brown who wrote to me 2 or 3 years ago, but another, an actor, I think.

I suppose you’re never in London, and I suppose you’re always busy, so I send this instead of meeting.

Is your new house nice, and the children—and painting—and Cambridge—and life altogether?

Yours ever,
Virginia

Sussex

[]

2325: To Ethel Smyth

Friday [6 February 1931]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

No we dont go this week, unless Sunday is fine, and we go for the day. But I rather hope Sunday won’t be fine—I want to do nothing but write.

I’m rather ashamed—but have no time to explain—of my egotistic soliloquy—God knows what set me off—on what was true and what fiction. But I entirely trust to your perceptiveness.

And if only I’d not fired off like this, I had meant to enquire into ever so many questions about your sensations, what d’you feel at going to Edinburgh; and so on; all lost now in my flood of egotism: And I’m so sleepy, I cant write; 6 hours talk on end last night.

Are you very very very tired? Not ill? Not about to collapse I hope?

I will keep Tuesday night—either here or in Br Sqre. So no more, (but you can write to me all the same.)

E⁠[thel]. (at Courthauld Concert) O Virginia, how ill you’re looking!

M⁠[ary Hutchinson], (yesterday) O Virginia I havent seen you look so well for years!

Berg

[]

2326: To Clive Bell

7th Feb. 1931

52 Tavistock. Sqre., [W.C.1]

Dearest Clive,

It suddenly strikes me on writing the date, that this is the 24th Anniversary of your wedding day—so next year we shall all be giving you silver shaving pots. What is the anniversary of my wedding day, I cant remember. Anyhow, this is a topic—anniversaries—I tend to avoid, in favour of gossip. For instance—you’ve doubtless heard all and more—how awkward—one cant go on grammatically—that—than—is to be known about Peter [Lucas] and his lady. Nessa will have told you about the affray outside the bedroom door. Besides it only comes through Helen [Anrep], a dirty—I mean no offence—filter. My week has been, let me see, Eddy scratching like a dog on a mat, at a concert, scratching, pimply, queasy, querulous to a degree, as they say, all because he inherits Knole and cant write a play. Then he swears his novel, Simpson, is a masterpiece, and when I say, ‘Isn’t that enough?’ he rounds on me and tells me I know nothing of life. The truth is I cant take Buggerage seriously—now if it were a wench, a girl even out of a haberdasher’s shop in Shepherds Market, I should be the first to pull a long face; but when it’s Jimmy who’s gone off with Tommie, irreverence seizes me, and if it were not that by turning to hide my smile I run into Koteliansky that fervid Jew (this was at a concert) I should have turned to hide my smile.

Then to dine with Raymond where the talk was all about the Nation; about Mr [name omitted] who’s got himself photographed in a state of more than copulation, and left it on a table and been blackmailed; about Rouse, the blazing car murderer and how he should be let off; about the Nation, and again the Nation and again the Nation, until I said to myself, Is it female perversity, or do these young men think too much about money? Ask Clive, I said to myself, for anyhow, no one can accuse him of buggery. Then Christabel [McLaren]; who had asked me to a play which begins at 6 and ends at 11.30—an American play, where the actors speak their private thoughts, and their private thoughts are nonsense; and this nonsense lasts 7 hours; so I didn’t go, knowing what the private thoughts of Americans are by instinct. Christabel asked tenderly, repeatedly, lowering and raising her lovely eyes, after you. There’s no such sure road to popularity, I may tell you, as to go to Zürich, and I’m thinking of coming myself. Elly [Rendel] tells me I have a bug in my body; but it wouldn’t be for the sake of the bug that I should come to Zürich. What I want is that people should talk of me with affection. And tonight we meet Aldous and Maria [Huxley]; and I think thats all, save a waste, a pother, a litter of people you wouldn’t touch with a short stick. Molly has gone to Wilson’s Folly—a castle built by Mona Wilson in a farmyard at Oare—to write 6 talks about life for the benefit of the incurable in hospitals. The first is devoted to the lunacy of Mary Lamb—such is our life, and Lord, I could relish an evening with my brother in law.

V.

Quentin Bell

[]

2327: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Sunday [15 February 1931]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Ottoline,

I’m so sorry not to have written before. Like everybody, I’ve been having influenza, and though I’m alright again, I have had endless bores to see, who have been heaping up. Would one day, not this week, but the week after, suit you—the usual time between tea and dinner? Any day I think, except Monday.

Just back from the Fairy Queen at Cambridge and 48 hours conversation.

Yr
Virginia

Texas

[]

2328: To Ethel Smyth

[16 February 1931]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Its so difficult to write, because,—well, after finishing a book, the mind bobs like a cork on the sea—I hate the feeling; I had forgotten the horror. I am irritable and melancholy and I doubt not, if you were here, egotistic. All the same, I have sympathy enough to think of the wind whistling through Edinburgh and you standing at a desk 6 hours a day; and the Prison emerging I hope; here an arch, there a column.

No; you can’t want letters when you’re waving your hands over that chaos.

I am glad to think of the wig [Ethel’s] anyhow. My word, its so bitter, so broken, so desolate here, all fractured, all inanimate; The Huxleys (Aldous) are dining here, and I cant summon my spirit to wait on my guests. What a vast inane—I mean, I’m fluttering like a leaf in a gale in some corridor or antechamber, outside life, outside the room; all because I’ve finished a book. And one must wash now.

But how are you? And are you verging on triumph or despair? Years and years ago we dined together and drank champagne. Yesterday I was at Cambridge hearing the Fairy Queen, oh and talking 10 hours at a stretch, and hearing that Don Peter [F. L. Lucas] has fallen in love with a married woman and come to blows with her husband outside the bedroom door. (I must see if the soda water and whisky have come). I have been driven like a yellow cat by a pack of dogs. Thats my state—friends, business, people ringing up. MSS. to read. I should like to see somebody sane, wearing white cuffs, somebody frightfully intent on whats said. Thats a quality of yours—attentiveness: you respect facts, if I said its 6; you wd. confirm this by looking at your watch. I daresay you’re too tired to read any more. So I’ll stop, because I feel these disturbances acutely—how many worlds we live in, and the incongruity of things, and why should this little wail (but there’s affection in it and desire to see you) ever reach you, storm bound as you are, standing at a desk 6 hours a day, bidding the broken columns and the blue flowers arise, all orderly. I say, you must remember all your feelings and tell me. I shall soak drowsily and one day wake with a start and say thats what Ethel felt in February? And how are you? Any cold? Very tired?

Love
V.

Berg

[]

2329: To Clive Bell

16th Feb. 1931

52 Tavistock Sqre., W.C.1

Dearest Clive,

I return your Valentine, but what a farce! Cold and gloom and sleet; no lovemaking in prospect; every nose nipped—my oldest friend, Sibyl Roskill, burnt to death; three corpses on the road going to Cambridge, three more in a field coming back from Rodmell—all the same we remain brisk, and have just been at Cambridge for the weekend.

I enjoyed myself more than I expected. The opera was to my taste: Dadie [Rylands] very charming: Richard [Braithwaite] full of argument about the universe: Julian full of violence and spirit and has written 70,000 words about Pope merely by way of preface: also there was a young Mrs Roger Clark whom I took for Helen Soutar [Julian’s friend] and addressed accordingly; and old Bogey Harris, highly preserved, in a corner—God knows why; and Alex and James [Strachey], and Morgan [Forster] and two South African lady doctors—in short Cambridge in its February festal mood, with the snow falling and a bell tolling for I don’t know whom. From the little private gossip I had with Dadie I gather that Peter’s [Lucas] affair is cooling off on her side; at least she won’t do anything extreme; and so he looks round for another, so Dadie says; but Dadie is always apt to take a sardonic view of Peter in every capacity, why I dont know. Old Lytton is on the sofa in slippers, and we had an old time gossip about Madame du Deffand which I find consoling, though I suspect that Lytton would rather be romancing with Mr Peter Morris [the painter] than with me.

Eddy’s book [Simpson] is out and, I gather, a great success. Arnold Bennett, who has been dying but is now recovered, whispered over the telephone that it must be declared a masterpiece—for my part, its too much like an Arnold Bennett to inflame me—the first chapters that is—later I’m told—an albino appears, and mystic taps on moth-eaten tapestries—Nessa however thinks well of it. Our Cardiff waiter, Simpson, is also booming; and Leonard (forgive the disconnection, but I’m too cold to write) has just been to the Nation for the last time, to sign a copy book bound in full morocco which is being presented to Harold Wright by the Staff on his demise. Maynard has influenza; so has Desmond. Tonight Raymond and the Huxleys dine with us. Aldous is bringing out a play and supervising Freda Lawrence—that is, trying to persuade her not to make love to the waiter, and not to buy a Rolls Royce, and not to sell all Lawrence’s MSS. twice over to every publisher in London. The pressure of Lawrence being removed, she has sprung up like a cactus hedge, and all is prickly and precarious.

This is a sad jumbled letter, but if I dont send it I doubt that I shall think of anything more to the point. The truth is that February is justly called killjoy and fillgrave; moreover, we are having electric fires installed—hence the racket is continuous, and one steps across the drawing room on a plank.

V.

Quentin Bell

[]

2330: To Clive Bell

21st Feb. 1931

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest Clive,

I hear rumours that you are soon to be out of your prison [the Zurich eye hospital], and also that you can see a great deal better—both I hope are true. But perhaps there is still time for a letter. We are down here to see some electricians about putting in electric light; but of course they haven’t come. No: but they have defaced the country with bare black poles at intervals, so I suppose they have done their best. Probably we shall be burnt down—as my oldest friend was there the other night, Sibyl Dilke. She married a man called Roskill, and had long gone out of my life; but we took walks in Kensington Gardens together, 35 years ago; and now she is black as a cinder. Aldous and Maria dined with us, and Raymond and Lyn [Lloyd Irvine] and our John [Lehmann]. Our John is panning out well, in his doghole behind the W.C. Lytton says the Lehmann’s are middle class—you can tell it by their eyes, and their ancles [sic]—I forget which, nor do I know if there should be a c or a k in ankles. He—John—touches on a very odd world: the Barry Pains, A. A. Milnes, Mrs Hammersleys (she, too, had the top of her house burnt off the other night, but escaped). I gather they knew all the minor lights of 1900; and Lisa Lehmann who wrote drawing room melodies was an Aunt.

Aldous astounds me—his energy, his modernity. Is it that he can’t see anything that he has to see so much? Not content with touring Europe with Sullivan to ask all great men of all countries what they think of God, science, the soul, the future and so on, he spends his week in London visiting docks, where with Maria’s help he can just distinguish a tusk from a frozen bullock: and now is off on a tour of the Black Country, to visit works, to go down mines: and then to Moscow, and then America. I am very envious in my heart. I should like to die with a complete map of the world in my head. But shall I ever see a naked savage? I doubt it. Your son Julian, who dropped in yesterday, says the sight of Duncan is odder far than any savage. I think by the way from what I gathered at Cambridge that he has a very good chance of a fellowship—how odd that is too. I mean, how time passes, and how the young improve upon us, for none of us were ever made fellows, and remained charming and amorous and adventurous like Julian into the bargain.

Arnold Bennett lies, it is said, like the picture of a dying fox in Uncle Remus, staring straight at the ceiling and beating the air with his front paws as he tries to say “I met him in 1906”. After an hour’s effort he cornes out with this momentous fact; but will live they say to write another fifty novels.

I have finished my book [The Waves]—yes—but it is a failure. Too difficult: too jerky: too inchoate altogether. But what’s the point of writing if one doesn’t make a fool of oneself? Anyhow I am left high and dry and can turn my mind to other people’s books. Will Rothenstein has brought out his memoirs, in which Vanessa, Stella and Virginia Stephen figure, most inaccurately, all in black, like Watts paintings, having tea in the basement, very beautiful, but shy, and only responding with freedom to Phil Burne-Jones and Arthur Studd. Also there is my grandmother, a violent old lady rapping the floor with a stick and descending to scold Will for his iniquitous portrait of her beautiful daughter, the stepmother [mother] of Mrs Bell and Mrs Woolf, who are now so well known. Do you think that all memoirs are as mendacious as this—Every fact I mean, all on one side? Lytton’s little book of biographies is coming out, and he wants to call it Lives in Aspic, but Carrington and Pippa forbid. And I am turning to Don Juan [Byron] and Aurora Leigh [Elizabeth Barrett Browning], together with all those vile memoirs, for which as you know, I have such a gluttonous appetite. Coles journey to France was a bitter disappointment however. I had promised to do it for the first number of the New Statesman and Nation, but had to cry off and do an article, in the form of a letter to you instead. Raymond and Francis have both got jobs on it and both seem once more in high feather.

On Tuesday I go to a party at Lady Rosebery’s. You may well ask why: but it is to celebrate the first performance [in Edinburgh] of that old maniac Ethel Smyth’s masterpiece [The Prison]. She has cajoled Lady R. into giving a supper, at which fashion and art are to join hands. And Lady R. says Clive Bell is on her list, and he must come. So we may meet in Berkeley Sqre on Tuesday night at a gilt table with champagne leaning out of buckets.

And now, having seen a man catch a fish in the Ouse and the hunt in red coats since I wrote the first page, I must stop; and congratulate Roger on his show. My word—the picture of Nessa—Your wife by the way stayed at Tommies [Stephen Tomlin] party till 7 am and was universally acknowledged the beauty of the evening. Not that you’d think so from Roger’s picture.

V.

Quentin Bell

[]

2331: To Roger Fry

Saturday 21st Feb. [1931]

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

My dear Roger,

I was very late in getting to your show owing to various horrors, but none the less I am going to lay my tribute at your feet. How fascinating it is! I felt all the elements of an absorbing novel laid before me. I could trace so many adventures and discoveries in your pictures, apart from their beauty as pictures—and some seemed to me surprising in their beauty—but then as you know I’m a partial and imperfect judge of that. What intrigued me and moved me to deep admiration was the perpetual adventure of your mind from one end of the room to the other. How you have managed to carry on this warfare, always striding ahead, never giving up or lying down and becoming inert and torpid and commonplace like other people, I cant imagine. That is what one realises from seeing the show as a whole, and as I say I found it enthralling to follow after you and try to see how you get from point to point. My only complaint is that there aren’t more portraits—the Carpenter I thought magnificent—what a character monger you are! And I wish you had asked me to write a preface, but then it would have run to 6 volumes of small print.

My word, what a character you are!

And finally—could you and Helen Anrep dine next Thursday?

We never meet, but I intend to make a despairing effort.

Yrs ever V.W.

Sussex

[]

2332: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

[25 February 1931]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Ottoline,

I was so sorry to put you off this evening; but Ethel Smyth insisted upon dragging me to her concert and then to an extraordinary party at Lady Rosebery’s, so I could not sleep. So I am as heavy as an owl, and should be a load upon you. It was an incredible evening. But if you would let me come another day, I would refuse all parties.

Yr
Virginia

I do hope I did not put you out. I thought my head might clear up: instead it grew more and more cloudy.

Texas

[]

2333: To Vanessa Bell

1st March [1931]

52 T.[avistock]S.[quare, W.C.1]

As I find I can easily contribute £30 this year to Angelica’s clothes or whatever you like I send £15, and shall send the other £15 on September 1st. which is by my reckoning 6 months ahead.

Berg

[]

2334: To Ethel Smyth

Monday [9 March 1931]

Typewritten

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Well Ethel wheres your chapter on Vanity? Surely I might have that—we are never to meet again, I agree. But you have a pen—you have a purpose. Mine is gone utterly. Didnt I say I wanted solitude? What have I got? Oh Lady Oxford, Ottoline, all Leonards family dining, two or three parties, interviews with agents, with authors, the man come about the electric light, about the bell that dont ring—heres Roger, heres Clive, heres Miss Pearn with a project, and Mr Simpson again. But no discourse from Ethel on Vanity. I sit under a pall of snow and think I could write one myself—the vanity of wishing to be left alone. In six years perhaps I may actually have three days to think in. Never mind. Write me your sane and sensible reflections on vanity.

Virginia

Berg

[]

2335: To Ethel Smyth

11th March 1931

52 Tavistock Sqre. [W.C.1]

I feel, no doubt wrongly, simply from your voice and what you say mysteriously about ‘discipline’ that I have annoyed?—no, not annoyed, but perhaps hurt you? Well, I’m so blind and deaf psychologically, that I have to put these, to most people certainties, as questions, and now, because I’m blind and deaf. I’m going to lay before you the reason of the misunderstanding, if there is one. I expect you to ridicule me, but I dont mind being ridiculed, if you understand me, as there is always the chance that you will understand.

It was the party. I dont know when I have suffered more; and yet why did I suffer? and what did I suffer? Humiliation: that I had been dragged to that awful Exhibition of insincerity and inanity against my will (I used to be dragged by my half-brothers against my will—hence perhaps some latent sense of outrage) Then, that you liked the party—you who are uncompromising, truthful, vehement. “Ethel likes this sort of thing” I said, disillusion filled me: all belief fell off me. “And she has planned this, and worse still, subjected me to it. Gulfs separate us.” And I felt betrayed—I who have spoken to you so freely of all my weaknesses—I to whom this chatter and clatter on top of any art, music, pictures, which I dont understand,—is an abomination. Oh then, the elderly butlers, peers, champagne and sugared cakes! It seemed to me that you wantonly inflicted this indignity upon me for no reason, and that I was pinioned there and betrayed and made to smile at our damnation—I who was reeling and shocked, as I see now, (to excuse myself,) by my own struggle with The Waves—who had vainly perhaps but honestly tried to understand you, H.B. the Prison: there I was mocking and mowing, and you forced me to it and you didn’t mind it. I went home therefore more jangled and dazed and out of touch with reality than I have been for years. I could not sleep. I took chloral. I spent the next day in a state of horror and disillusion. When you rang me up you seemed to guess at none of all this, and I felt that I could never approach you so as to touch you again. (And without exaggeration you dont know how I have honoured and respected you—come, oddly, to depend upon your sanity) So then I put off [Sibyl] Colefax and Ottoline and resolved to be quit of the posturing and insincerity and being hauled about and made to exhibit myself for ever.

This no doubt seems to you wantonly exaggerated to excuse a fit of temper. But it is not. I see of course that it is morbid, that it is through this even to me inexplicable susceptibility to some impressions suddenly that I approach madness and that end of a drainpipe with a gibbering old man. But this is me; and you cant know me and merely brush this aside and disregard it as a fit of temper. I dont attempt to rationalise; but I can now, after 2 weeks, see how selfish, cold, and indeed brutal I may have seemed to you, when in fact I felt more strongly about you and therefore about your betrayal of me to wolves and vultures than ever before. Excuse this; and continue whatever your scheme may be. I dont suppose I shall understand your explanation, if you give one, or you mine. But I venture it, trusting in your sanity as I do: and because of what I call my respect for you.

V.

Berg

[]

2336: To V. Sackville-West

Thursday [12 March 1931]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Curse Clive! What a tatler he is! I was sworn by Nessa to tell no one of her parties, and he tells everyone. Oh I had meant to ask you to dine. And now Clive has. You see its a question of room—one cant tell people she’s in every week. But you—Oh yes—you You’re all right.

I am jealous of Elena Richmond. Did she say she loved me? Years ago, pared down, with her head held high, she was divine. Since then, her poor dear wits have sunk in the oil and gone out. But still I love her.

Oh and I’ve talked so much—so much too much—and I have to go to Lady Cunards: and then Lord David [Cecil] and then George Duckworth and then—and then.

Honey, tell me when you’re coming I want to sink into your arms and feel the festival and the firelight. (This is a line from an old description of you I’ve just read [in Orlando].) Write.

V.

Love to Harold.

Berg

[]

2337: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Friday [13 March 1931?]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Ottoline

I can’t come today, but could tomorrow, Saturday, about 5 if that suited you. I didn’t come last week being in a rage with the world—Lady Cunard etc etc. and so shut myself up.

How do you manage not to hate everyone?

But I don’t hate you—its this chatter-chatter.

Yrs Virginia

Texas

[]

2338: To George Rylands

Friday 13th March [1931]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Dadie,

Of course I would have written, instantly, to thank you for all the million delights—I enjoyed myself hugely [at Cambridge]—but I have been told that no one writes a Collins now—indeed they dont. I never have even a postcard written to me—So not wishing to be out of date, I curbed my natural impulse, and bit my tongue. Thats just as well, seeing that I can hardly form my letters anymore.

‘Yes,’ said Leonard, as we got into the car to drive home, ‘thats the best weekend we’ve spent for ever so long.’

‘And how fond I am of Dadie!’ I said.

‘You’ve always had a tenderness for Dadie’ said Leonard. And then, as if to rebuke my effusion, the ballracing burst and we limped back at 20 miles an hour, in danger of losing a wheel.

V.

George Rylands

[]

2339: To Ethel Smyth

22nd March 1931

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

Vanessa says she has chosen Thursday next for the supper party.—What time I dont know, nor what company. But I hand on the message as I was bid.

I thought I should feel in the mood for letter writing between tea and dinner, after a walk over the downs. But I have wasted the time reading a manuscript—the slow sickliness of which, falling on me drop by drop, has completely extinguished my love of words. And I have at least six more to read. When you analyse my moods, make allowance for the pervasion of bad fiction or do I mean perversion?

I dont think—though I’ve left your letter in London—you made out your case against me as a critic. After all, you never liked my books till you liked me: then if I’m too tolerant of Vita’s fiction because I know her, why do I rate her poetry (as you say) too low, since I know her? And again, I’m only criticising the early letters of HB. which you yourself admit were the product of isolated and petrified days. As for your letters in T and T and New Statesman—no: I think you would carry more conviction if you let the Turners turn in silence. Any answer, any explanation, any refutation weakens one’s case—so I feel, and so I act; but I may be wrong. You say you dont read criticism, and then you reply to it—on general grounds I admit, but any acknowledgement of what you despise seems a tribute to the despicable. There! there’s my perversity for you again; and I daresay as you always point out, whats well enough for a writer, doesn’t apply to a musician.

I have been dipping, down here, into a life of Alice Meynell—the lady who wore Jaeger, didn’t you say, in her bath, and one of her letters remarks that she went to Ethel Smyth’s new opera, which was a great success, and then to a brilliant party at Mrs Hunter’s. I at once long to be there—with magnificent inconsistency. O you asked about my party—I’ve no room, or I wd. repeat a little talk which oddly proved the violence and incomprehensibility of my moods. I had given a young man a horrid shock, it seems—and he, being rational, read into it all kinds of profound emotions on my part—all I had felt was a violent sweep of anger at being made to talk at luncheon when I wanted, with a passion no one can understand, to eat my mutton in silence. And then my party was spoilt rather, by various queer discomforts at what people said. I’m being bored to death by my London articles—pure brilliant description—six of them—and not a thought for fear of clouding the brilliancy: and I have had to go all over the Thames, port of London, in a launch, with the Persian Ambassador—but that I liked—I dont like facts, though.

V.

Berg

[]

2340: To Helen McAfee

25th March 1931

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Miss McAfee,

Many thanks for your cable about my article on Mrs Browning. I have now arranged that it shall appear here [in TLS] after July 1st. I will therefore send you the copy so as to reach you by May 10th which I think you told me was the date necessary for your summer number. I have not quite finished it, but think that it will run to about 4000 words. I hope this will be all right. It is really a study of Aurora Leigh, which I read by chance with great interest for the first time the other day.

We are starting next week fora little motor tour in France, but shall be back early in May. Is there any chance that you will be coming over this summer?

With kind regards from us both,

Yours very sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Yale University

[]

2341: To Ethel Smyth

Sunday [29 March 1931]

52 Tavistock Sqre. [W.C.1]

Just back from the [Sidney] Webbs; and left rather in a fluster, though I enjoyed it—hence can’t write a letter. I dont remember saying I wanted a violent letter—though its true I was feeling violent—any letter: you know my tastes. Why did I feel violent, after the [Rosebery] party? It would be amusing to see how far you can make out, with your insight, the various states of mind which led me, on coming home, to say to L:—“If you weren’t here, I should kill myself—so much do I suffer.” (I flatter myself you guessed nothing). I wonder how jealous I should be if you preferred Vanessa to me? Or what I should feel? I wonder what new light was thrown on my personality, and why it was disgusting? I wonder how the group, as a group, if it seemed to you a group, struck you?

I wonder—but whats the use of wondering? because I dont see how I’m to get an answer. I’ve got to get in House of Commons and Lords before Thursday, and various people; so that I dont see at the moment any prospect of a quiet time for talk—only for talk perpetually cut up by people opening the door. But should the hubbub clear, I’ll telephone on the chance.

Yr V.

Berg

[]

2342: To Ethel Smyth

1st April (fools day) [1931]

52 Tavistock Sqre. [W.C.1]

Well Ethel you are a clever woman, a novelist wasted if ever there was one, and I could write pages in praise of your gifts if I could write at all. But that delightful art I shall not attempt till I sail out of this flotsam and jetsam of misery—ordering groceries I mean, tearing up bills, and trying to find lost manuscripts—into the green haven where I live, solitary, praise be to the Lord, in my sitting room, looking over the marsh. Among odds and ends stuck behind boxes I find these letters which I think you wanted sent. The woman Holtby doesn’t altogether attract me on paper, but I take your word for it she is not quite so indiscriminate as she seems.

Where’s the bill for the Wig? Write me long letters. In the country—they unfurl like flowers in water. The worst of my suffering is that its half the scratching of an eczematic dog. Little things people say; nods and hints: these stick in my pelt; and not the arrows always of destiny. No: what you give me is protection, so far as I am capable of it. I look at you and (being blind to most things except violent impressions) think if Ethel can be so downright and plainspoken and on the spot, I need not fear instant dismemberment by wild horses. Its the child crying for the nurses hand in the dark. You do it by being so uninhibited: so magnificently unself-conscious. This is what people pay £20 a sitting to get from Psycho-analysts—liberation from their own egotism. Never mind now—here’s Vita coming like a ship in full sail. I think you’re right—we all cry for nurses hand.

V.

Let me know what happens, or has happened, to Mrs Hunter [Ethel’s sister] or Elizabeth [Williamson].

Berg

[]

2343: To Ethel Smyth

7th April [1931]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Your letter just come, with a great bundle, from London. We go back—didn’t I explain our plans?—on Thursday. But Ethel dear, are you really ill? Why does the dr: prescribe bed for your ears? I am (in spite of the ossified and rigid heart to which you allude) anxious to know the truth; and more annoyed than you, the woman who takes me for a snake, would think likely. Why, didn’t I lie awake last night calming myself out of some momentary fear by inventing your reasons for not being afraid?—And I wrote you a long letter by the way, which was all on the theme of the absurd and irrational happiness of our lives—yes, even poor Leonard, whose breast I pierce daily with hot steel, is divinely happy here; we giggle and joke, and go and poke at roots and plan beds of nasturtium; and altogether, life is a childish happy affair—no reason for happiness, dear me no: and therefore one never talks of it, I suppose: but only of the other state which can be made to sound reasonable. “I’m the happiest woman in England” I said to Leonard yesterday, for no reason, except that we had hot rolls for breakfast and the cat had eaten the chicken. But also the most egotistical—no I think, with all due respect, Ethel’s that. Lord, Ethel, did you think I was ever so blind as to say that you, of all people, had conquered egotism? It is only that you ride it so magnificently that one doesn’t care if its egotism or altruism—its your uncautiousness I envy; not your selflessness.

Forgive this drivvle. I’ve been a long walk, have had Nessa Clive and Angelica to tea, and the loudspeaker is pouring forth Wagner from Paris. His rhythm destroys my rhythm; yes, thats a true observation. All writing is nothing but putting words on the backs of rhythm. If they fall off the rhythm one’s done—But write I must this evening, because all tomorrow I must be toiling to finish an article on Gosse, whom I hope to hit off smartly, without malice, but without much love either—for he was a crafty, worldly, prim, astute little beast—tomorrow. I’ve written and written—so many articles—8 to be exact. Five on London; one on Mrs Browning; one on Lockhart; one on Gosse; and all have to be sand papered, made to fit, smoothed, pressed, curled, and sent off before we go. We go on the 16th—and dear me, how glad I shall be to wake up in France and not write. Think of being free from 10 to one to sit and look out of the window!

But when shall I see you? You’ll be surprised to hear that I’m in a mood when I should like to hear the particular accent you put on Vir-gin-ia! Shall I come down to Woking one day? Shall we go on with our disquisition? I like this feeling that we are in the middle of a tremendous argument—no, discussion: its not ‘seeing’ Ethel; its going on with what we were saying last week—About the Prison—about women’s disabilities; about HB; about death; garters,—Oh and Lord I was forgetting The Wig. Here is a cheque: fill it up: I trust you not to increase the sum; not to pay for an extra fine Lombard wig instead of dog’s hair British, which I expect yours to be. I know all about wigs: the best are plucked from the centre mesh of the hair of Italian peasants: the worst come from China—the cheap coarse wigs you see in the pit of provincial theatres, or in Whitechapel on Sundays. Yours, I should say, is a middle class wig; plucked very likely in Croydon from a butcher’s daughter. So pay it, please; And that reminds me of your terrific family doings—what a set you are to be sure! I envy you your family temperament—so rich, so fruity, so high blooded, and fox hunting. Mrs H⁠[unter]. rigid as she is—she always looks to me to move all in a piece as Sir Thomas Browne said the elephants did—is superbly sympathetic as a discredited and ruined woman. And whats happening to Elizabeth [Williamson]? What farm? Anything better than Connaught Sqre. I should imagine. I return all letters instantly—what a woman of business and character—what a soldiers daughter I’m becoming! Dr Gordon I dont understand, but credit her with good intentions. All right; I’ll widen my mind and see if it cant embrace the urgent necessity and rightness of your proceedings re women in orchestras etc. I never said you were obsessed; all I ever said was that I hate all forms of principle. Whats the good of saying This is true, when nothing is true, except that some sounds are nicer than others and some shapes? No views are true. This is said, you’ll see, to annoy a valiant woman turning to a lobster in bed. Do you grow whiskers to match?—those long jointed whiskers that the Cornish lobsters used to have, and I to break off, in the kitchen, as a child? I hope so—six on each side of your nose, bright red and very bristly like a cavalry officer’s moustache.

Thank God, Wagner has stopped murmuring among the forest leaves, and I’m my own mistress again; but dare not start another page, in this finicky little hand (I’m writing with the only pen, a gold one, slippery and false and fickle as Edmund Gosse—) so must stop; though I’ve millions of things to say—warmhearted, passionate things, things that bubble and squeak; and bleed red blood. By the way, why do you say and think I’m heartless? Why, Ethel, why? when I’m only anxious to know how you are, and to—there’s no room to say what.

V.

No big envelopes, so the soldiers daughter (thats me) must wait, reluctantly and impatiently, till tomorrow; for this most important, indeed urgent letter, must catch the 11.10 sharp.

Berg

[]

2344: To Beatrice Webb

8th April 1931

Typewritten

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes, [Sussex]

Dear Mrs Webb,

I would have written before, but waited for Leonard to have read your chapter of autobiography, and have been vainly trying to go into Lewes and send it back by registered post.

We are both agreed that it is extremely interesting, and that it would be a great pity to cut any of the diary. We feel that the reality that the diary gives is better than any more general account could be. I was extremely interested and amused throughout, and this is a good test, as few people can know less about Trade Unions than I do. We only wish you could write it straight off, as your next book, so much do we want to see how your story with its most interesting commentary develops.

We enjoyed our Sunday with you and Mr Webb so much. I wanted to tell you, but was too shy, how much I was pleased by your views upon the possible justification of suicide. Having made the attempt myself [in 1913], from the best of motives as I thought—not to be a burden on my husband—the conventional accusation of cowardice and sin has always rather rankled. So I was glad of what you said.

I hope to send the MS. and the Russian diary, which is very interesting, tomorrow, when we go back to London.

Yours very sincerely,
Virginia Woolf

The British Library of Political Science, University of London

[]

2345: To V. Sackville-West

Thursday [9 April 1931]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Just a line, as my aunts used to say; we’re back here till Thursday, and shall I see you, and if so when? Because the telephone rings and rings and my days are nibbled from me by rats—Eddy for one. Lord, how lovely today was; how hateful this blasted black town is! All I can do is to hop up and down on my perch like a parrot till Thursday; but to see you would be to me what—is it sugar or hemp or worms?—would be to a parrot.

Did I tell you that I heard from Bruce Richmond that Percy Lubbocks life is a burden to him because of his Sibyl’s fandangoes—cant sit and write without a thump on the ceiling from Sibyl, who wants a hot water bottle or an air cushion. No more work in this world from Percy: and thats your doing. I’ve written so many articles and so bad—Gosse the last, about whom I’ve been candid and caustic. Lord what a letter to Robbie Ross. Did you read it? How cold cautious and clammy—like the writhing of a fat worm, red, shiny—disgusting: yet Harold likes him—Gosse, I mean.

Yr V.

Berg

[]

2346: To Ethel Smyth

April 9th 1931

52 Tavistock Sqre., [W.C.1]

Well Ethel dear, I suppose I must fulfil my duty as a general’s daughter and go and find a big envelope for your letter (surely, though, E⁠[lizabeth Williamson]’s: letter, in a thick envelope was returned?) What a bore it must be, really being a general’s daughter, and always getting envelopes, catching trains, answering letters and all the rest!

No particular news has accumulated since I wrote—on my knee, with a gold pen. It was a divine day yesterday—O how happy we were!—mildly sauntering down to the river, and protecting Pinka’s chastity, now in bloom, from Botten’s yellow cur. And then again, how happy I was to finish Gosse (provisionally) this morning—the last of the lot: but unhappy to pack and come home and find, among a welter of trash no letter from a lady that lies in bed at Bath. No she dont: she drives in a car to stay with friends. She drinks champagne with retired guards officers. She sees the Severn—what was your brilliant phrase—like a mad King’s white hair?—No—thats mine. And I have never seen the Severn.

Do you really like Vanessa much better than you like me? We argue about it. She thinks its on the cards, because she thinks you and she have, what is called, ‘much in common’ And I have not that faculty. Please wire by return.

I’m glad you dislike Osbert’s book: so do I. All foliage and no filberts. I’m alone tonight—hence this erratic style. I’m rather used up in the brain—hence this style. Writing articles is like tying one’s brain up in neat brown paper parcels. O to fly free in fiction once more!—and then I shall cry, O to tie parcels once more!—Such is life—a see-saw—a switch back. Once I get moralising I’m as good as you any day. Three people have rung up in 2 hours, and I have made 2 engagements. If I could linger out my days in the fields, sometimes driving through a country town and buying a pocket knife at the ironmongers, my moods would flatten out in one long roll of calm. Should you like me, all calm? On Thursday we go to France for 2 weeks, motoring, and then here for what remains of the summer—And shall I see you? What shall you be doing? Writing music? Have you lit on a theme? What response have your T and T [Time and Tide] articles had? Is the bone now gnawed? Well Ethel dear this is only by way of good night—last Post, I suppose they call it in military circles, like yours. About your whiskers and your wig—do tell me. And—whats the ending you so much like—lots—no tons of love. Well then, tons of love. (I dont like your style in endings—but cant be helped)

V.

From a French article Le Style de V. Woolf dans Mrs Dalloway.

La ponctuation ne lui est pas, comme à la plupart des écrivains, un moyen d’éviter d’essoufler son lecteur, elle ne lui est jamais un moyen de faire passer un laideur, une gaucherie, elle lui est moins encore un artifice pour parer à une faiblesse de pensée ou d’impression, elle n’est jamais un signe négatif, elle est un signe positif, et les signes de ponctuation sont à la phrase de V. Woolf ce que les gestes sont à la parole, ils la presisent, l’enrichissent.

So there.

Berg

[]

2347: To Quentin Bell

11th April 1931

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Quentin,

I wrote you a most brilliant letter—perhaps the most brilliant I have ever written—full of scandal, confidences, self reproach, remorse, revelation, together with character sketches of Lady Oxford, Ethel Smyth, President Wilson and others; but, being unable to find your address, never sent it, have now lost it, and must—since its the only way of drawing you, prince of letter writers as I think of you, write another. Also, my letter contained full instructions for meeting me in Italy. I was to arrive in May. Now, curse the Hogarth Press, curse literature, curse Lehmann, curse life—I shall get no further than France, where we go on Thursday. But only for one beggarly fortnight; so write here. And Nessa starts for Italy. Oh I could shoot her dead for having my holiday. Still, they say France is very lovely—La Rochelle, Brantôme, I dont know where. We are taking the Singer; and by way of trial, drove to Kew today, got as far as the Euston Road, broke down, collected the police, had to send for an ambulance, and were towed to the garage, where a piece of hair, coiled into innumerable interlineations, was removed from the auto-vac. That was all. But no Kew. Well, dearest Quentin, what about your life? I hear vaguely of Americans.

I was ravished by the story of the dead dog; I long for more. But you will want our news. Julian, Helen [Soutar], Barbara [Hutchinson] and so on. I gave the young couple—Julian and Barbara—a little dinner. Dear old Julian looked like a man taken from digging out a badger—all earth and clouts; Barbara as clean and cut as a Shepherdess; but they got on very well, and if I have to choose a niece, I choose half of Barbara rather than twenty six dozen Helens. I met [Edward] Playfair the other day; and he implored me to use all my influence—but aunts have no influence with their nephews I said—to detach Helen; because they say she makes their lives one long labour and toil. There she is, cant be got rid of; worse still, when alone Julian says My God what a lovely siren Helen is, and gives a catalogue of her virtues, then of her beauties, then of her favours, which they say, lasts three hours; and is only psychologically interesting as a proof of what the heart can do. He has her this moment in Tommies [Stephen Tomlin] cottage. On this lovely spring evening, they are hearing lambs bleat together. And one can only be young once; and love not so many times. Take warning.

I have had to work absolutely like a devil for two months. I have finished the worst novel in the language [The Waves]; I have written ten articles. The writing I like; its the winding up of the affair I detest—cutting out, putting in, commas and so on. Duncan is in the same state, finishing 28 pictures for his show, after which he leaves the country. And Clive leaves the country. Peter Lucas was here yesterday, but timed his visit with Pernel Strachey so that, as they sat each other out, I heard only hints of his sorrows; but Alan is behaving like a young man in Byron a hundred years ago. Happily Peter has the muse for his wife; and is writing an epic about Ariadne [1932]. When we write so seldom there are too many facts to be got in. I hate facts. I do not know how to arrange them.

I am taking Leonard to a modern comedy, by Maugham. Aldous has had a great success with his play. He bids fair to be the great man in succession to Arnold Bennett. Bennett is dead, and I had the pleasure of being almost the last to talk to him before he drank a glass of water swarming with typhoid germs. ‘Then’ he said, as he got up to go, ‘men will say one morning ‘He’s dead’. I, thinking this referred to his works, said ‘Oh you mean your books?’ ‘No no no—myself’. So we parted, and though his books are dead as mutton, he had a relish for life—wore waistcoats of incredible beauty—so I’m sorry because I myself dont want to drink typhoid from a tumbler yet.

Are you writing? Now thats your gift. The brush is merely the tail end of you. Angelica is a whirlwind of beauty and destruction. She sweeps all before her—we are dead leaves and old tin cans when she comes our way. I rather think she’ll marry the Prince of Wales. Lord David is not engaged to Rachel, and I doubt that he’s a man [to] have mistresses. No more room.

Virginia

Quentin Bell

[]

2348: To Vanessa Bell

Sunday [12 April 1931]

52 Tavistock Sqre., [W.C.1]

Dear Dolphin;

Many thanks for the cheque—father’s books do remarkably well, I think, considering it will be his centenary next year.

Life has been full of telephones—Eddy the first moment we arrived; then Pernel [Strachey] and Peter [Lucas] in person, simultaneously, so that I couldn’t gossip with Pernel, nor hear from Peter the secret of his love, which obviously pressed, as the Greeks say, like a great ox on his tongue. I shall be glad to get off on Thursday, though if we shall ever move beyond Dieppe seems doubtful. Both yesterday and today we tried to get to Kew, and yesterday broke down in Judd Street and had to be towed home, and today in Paddington. It’s said to be a piece of dirt in the auto-vac:; and they hauled out a thing like a large burr, but apparently there is more to come. Pinka’s hair it looks like.

I am enclosing a cheque for £20, as a contribution to Angelica’s Cornish tour, which will be more costly than you think: also I find I am absurdly rich through American articles, and the Press accounts L. says are very satisfactory. Next year I hope to be penniless; when we pay John and can leave all to him.

If I get through my corrections of that awful dull bad book The Waves, or Moths, in May I think I may take a little flight in June; but I suppose you’ll be no longer in Rome then—The heart of my desire; and if L. wont come, I dont suppose I shall.

We shall be back on the 2nd—Saturday. So if you are in London let us dine together.

If you’ll let me have your addresses I will write.

We shall have tea at Monks House on Thursday, but I dont suppose you will want to come over. But do if you can. 4 o’clock. And as I say, I suspect we shall stop permanently outside Newhaven.

V.

Would you let me know when I can get your and Duncans new chair stuffs?

Berg

[]

2349: To Jonathan Cape

April 12th 1931

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Mr Cape,

I am much interested to hear that you think of reprinting some of Miss Thackerays novels. have a great admiration for the early ones, and would like, if I could, to write an introduction to one of them. Could you tell me when it would be necessary to have the manuscript?—I am very much engaged at present, and should have to fit it in. Also, might I assume that I am free to publish the introduction simultaneously in America?

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Jonathan Cape Ltd

[]

2350: To Hugh Walpole

Sunday April 12th 1931

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Hugh,

—forgive this typing, but my hand staggers like a drunken washerwoman after writing innumerable articles, so that is in kindness to you—We are just back from Rodmell, and just off, motoring, to France. But I was very glad to get your letter. And I dont suppose we shall be away more than two or three weeks; so please come for your usual tea—why not dinner—in May. Lord, though, how hopeless seeing people in May is. If we had any sense we should all live in Cumberland.

The girl poet [Joan Easdale] is my discovery—she sent me piles of dirty copy books written in a scrawl without any spelling; but I was taken aback to find, as I thought some real merit. How far it will go, I dont feel sure. It may be a kind of infantile phosphorescence; and she is a country flapper, living in Kent, and might be from behind a counter. Very odd. I’m glad you’re recommending them. The Waves is done; but a failure; however I enjoyed it; and have some others brewing, which is all I ask of life. Yes, Arnold’s death was queer. I never knew him, as you did, I suppose, but had two hours tête à tête at a party just before he drank the fatal tumbler; and we abused each other as usual, and as usual I liked him; and was bored; and yet found him impressive, as a presence. You must explain his character to me. I implore you, dont be buried by the Bishop of Wakefield. We went home and drew up instruction for silent dispersal in a field. Look how my type is running, so good bye.

Yrs ever
V.W.

Texas

[]

2351: To Jonathan Cape

14th April 1931

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Mr Cape,

I am afraid that I could not possibly write the introduction within six weeks. I am just going abroad for a holiday, and when I come back I expect to be very busy for some time. I thought from what you said that the books were not to be published for some months. As it is, I am sure that it would be better for you to get somebody else to write the introduction; as it would be a great pity that the publication should be delayed.

I shall hope to write about the books when they are published, and I much look forward to seeing them. Many thanks for the suggestion.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Jonathan Cape Ltd

[]

2352: To Ethel Smyth

Wednesday April 15th 1931

52 T[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Well Ethel dear, no greater proof could there be of my devotion than that I should atttempt at the present moment to write a letter and copy out, with complete accuracy, a list of addresses. However it will be one of my joys to go to the Post and find a packet from you. I shall study your character with a care and space that I have never yet given it, over my bottle of wine after the days adventures, Anything may result. You will be under the scrutiny of an idle traveller, removed from life—oh thank God, removed from life. I am putting in a frigidaire, having walls distempered, sending mattresses to be re-made, cleaning covers, directing electricians—I—who am a soldiers daughter only with the effort of an elephant blowing soap bubbles. The articles swarm round me. My head is a hive of words that wont settle. I scratch and correct. Enraged, and idiotic editors go on demanding Gosse at once, Browning instantly. Of course, as you know, I put money far above friendship; and shall despatch this all by tomorrow. Then I have to buy shoes, and my shop suddenly declares the human foot has broadened, and no longer make my fitting. Why is it broadened? An open air life they say. I have also been listening to two love lorn young men: they caterwaul—with an egotism that, if I were a feminist, would throw great light on the history of the sexes—such complete self absorption: such entire belief that a woman has nothing to do but listen. Then Murry—the one vile man I have ever known—has written a book about D. H. Lawrence, making out that he is Judas and Lawrence, Christ. What do you think? You who know the characters in question? These I say are some of the little pellets that sting my hide at the moment and make me think of a table before an Inn at La Rochelle where all the boats have green and purple sails as a heaven scarcely to be reached. Its cold though: and our car broke down twice going to Kew. O but think of new hills, and French towns, and rolls, and views, and the sea, and buying old looking glasses, and wandering out with L. to see a church, or buy a glass of wine—and then we’re going to visit Montaigne’s house, for which I have a veneration. I will try to collect myself and write a vinous amorous line from some Inn.

Meanwhile, please dont let yourself succumb to the incubus of Bath vapour and cruising widders. What can Mary Hunter mean? Those bobbing spirits who defy life and always float in triumph are the wonder of my days. I had a great aunt once—but enough. There’s Gosse got to catch the post: and I’ve written the last sentence I daresay 10 times and cant get the hang of it. One more shot, and so goodbye Ethel dear, and do write fully frankly freely; for I shall be so pleased to see the thick white envelope among the W’s in the wire cage.

Yr V.

No, I cant ‘do’ the Ladies [of Llangollen]. They’ve done themselves too perfectly for anything to be written. That does happen: besides, never so long as I live do I write another little article.

You never said you were going to Lyppiatt: how could I know?

Just off to France.

Berg

[]

2353: To V. Sackville-West

Wednesday [15 April 1931]

Typewritten

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Dearest Creature, I am in the devil of a hurry, so only enclose—lord how lovely my typing is—our list of addresses; and mind and send long letters to meet me in foreign parts. I cant lay too much stress on the delight of finding them. It will make me cautious about hens and old women, typhoid, over eating, lorries, revolutions. And do you be fearfully cautious about your bronchial tubes—they easily turn to a chronic wheeze; to general decay; to rheums and pleurisies, I assure you, Dont cast if you still have a pain. O Ive been so worried, imagining cancer and other trifles these two days. You know, I must have a heart—its the only explanation. So good bye, and make the nightingales sing for me in May—about the 10th.

How happy to see you again we shall be.

V. & P⁠[otto]

Eddy [Sackville West] was almost suicidal yesterday. What is to be done?

Joame Trautmann

[]

Letters 2354-2367 (April 1931)

2354: To Ethel Smyth

Monday 20th April 1931

Hotel de France et d’Angleterre, La Rochelle, [France]

Well Ethel dear, I will sit down at once and attempt to write, though Heaven knows its hard enough; before going out to see the town. O for a little warmth and colour! Bitter cold and rain; with a few hours of dazzling sun: then a grey cover over the sky again. This is our only plaint—and that I didn’t bring a fur coat. Otherwise all has been very successful: 2 punctures; one mended in hailstorm; and I helped by scraping a hole in the road. Here we are, arrived last night, late. It looks like Bologna,—arches I mean: roofs made of red flower pots; a lilac in full flower; roman remains in the garden below the window. A very nice hotel, the floor shining; a toothless old servant in black; a hint of imagination in the sauces: the south beginning to warm and tumble: I mean one can imagine heat—everything’s made for heat; but still all grey as a goose’s back. I love tripping even in the rain down road after road; all with their avenues; and old women sitting under umbrellas minding two sheep. And we saw the Plantagenet tombs at Fontevrault yesterday, lying red and blue in a superb scraped abbey—the tombs like the Sitwells.

But enough guide book. I’m reading Lawrence, Sons and Lovers, for the first time; and so ponder your question about contemporaries. [J. M.] Murry, that bald necked blood dripping vulture, kept me off Lawrence with his obscene objurgations. Now I realise with regret that a man of genius wrote in my time and I never read him. Yes, but genius obscured and distorted I think: the fact about contemporaries (I write hand to mouth) is that they’re doing the same thing on another railway line: one resents their distracting one, flashing past, the wrong way—something like that: from timidity, partly, one keeps ones eyes on one’s own road. Stella Benson I dont read because what I did read seemed to me all quivering—saccharine with sentimentality; brittle with the kind of wit that means sentiment freezing: But I’ll try again: I’ll think about jealousy. Its true that death makes judgment easier. My Gosse wont be out for some weeks—has to appear in America. I think it comes out in the Fortnightly. Browning In July. Your letters just been brought in by L. I’ve looked hastily—not yet read. No, I never got the letter about Lyppiatt. O the sun at last! I shall read the 3 letters carefully at lunch—gulped them down—you’re all right I hope—O the sun! the red flower pots shining—the lilac—So we go out, and I shall post this: Aren’t I a soldiers daughter:

Please write fully to Brantome

V

This is the paper on which I take notes for my critical works. In the margin I note p. 241. Here I note that I’m on the whole attracted to E.S.

Lord what an illegible hand! The Gosse gold pen which I detest.

Berg

[]

2355: To Ethel Smyth

[21 April 1931]

Postcard

Marennes, [France]

Leonard has been eating oysters here just off the sea. Sun at last. Cold. Go to Brantome day after tomorrow. A lovely marsh land. No accidents. Lunch off pate and cheese in the marsh. Old walls, cows, women, all lovely and solitary.

V.

Berg

[]

2356: To V. Sackville-West

Tuesday [21 April 1931]

Postcard

Marennes, [France]

Here we are, safe, hot at last: L. has just eaten a dozen oysters fresh from the sea in your honour. What a good book Sons and Lovers is! All well. How are you?

Love V.W.

Lyn Dunbar

[]

2357: To Ethel Smyth

[22 April 1931]

Postcards

Chastillon [Castillon, France]

1.

Just dined off eels, artichokes and wine—slightly tipsy. Tomorrow we go to see Montaignes Tower; Lord how nice: how far from Woking. Will write from Brantome.

V.

2.

And a lovely river; and poplars; and vineyards, and the most divine country I’ve ever seen This is a rural Inn, on the banks of Dordogne: commercial travellers; picking oranges. Not seen an Englishman yet—

V.

Berg

[]

2358: To Ethel Smyth

23rd April [1931]

Postcard

Bergerac, [France]

Oh so tipsy after drinking a bottle of Montizillac—delicious—and eating paté de foie gras—and visiting Montaignes tower—a bare, ragged room, with 3 windows, on top, and his old saddle, a chair and table, and steps, room and chapel below and chair, dear me how I shd. like this life to go on for ever

Berg

[]

2359: To V. Sackville-West

23 rd April [1931]

Postcard

Bergerac, [France]

At the end, where I have, with trembling fingers after a whole bottle of Monbazillac, drawn an arrow, Montaigne wrote his essays. There we went this morning: a divine country all round—vineyards, oxen, spring. We must come again together. O so drunk; and have eaten a whole paté de foie gras.

V.

Jane Lancellotti

[]

2360: To V. Sackville-West

24th April [1931]

Hotel Moderne, Brantôme, [France]

Well I got your letter last night—your rather melancholy letter. And it was so lovely here—a fine evening, a stone bridge, a river going in circles like the lash of a whip; a boy fishing, a man cutting down a poplar tree: And a whole colony of gipsies nested in a rock. But this is the most coherent sentence I shall write, as I’m occupying a table in the dining room, and next me is a fat Frenchman, rather like Bogy Harris, munching great hunks of roll. It has recovered, the weather, which for 3 days was appalling; and everybody is sitting in the street, and swarming. No; its clouding over again. Anyhow we have had no accidents, save punctures. France is entirely empty and we drive a whole morning under avenues and meet perhaps two oxen and an old woman sitting on a bank with sheep attached to her umbrella by a piece of string. Yesterday was the best of all. We went to Montaigne—a hill in the middle of vineyards, where the Tower still stands; and the very door, room, stairs, and windows where, in which—grammar gone—Montaigne wrote his essays: also his saddle and a view precisely the same he saw. Does this excite you? (in spite of grammar: but the French don’t eat breakfast without noise).

I see why one is so happy here: no visitors. No being in at 5 to see Sibyl; to see Eddy; to dine out. Thats the horror of our lives. I intend to stop it; I cant get back into that squirrel cage again. Here, in spite of packing, motoring, sight-seeing, I’ve actually read two or three books in peace; from start to finish—a thing incredible in London. Now for the summer, I intend a weekly expedition with Vita; and no ‘seeing’ at all. Can it be done? I am sure the root of your melancholy lies in the disordered odds and ends—one thing starts—its broken—this exhausts and exacerbates more than anything. Now I’ve no room to discuss Sons and Lovers—what a good book, my word: I must read him all: Murry so disgusted me, I never faced him. We shall be back at Dieppe today week—

V.

Berg

[]

2361: To Vanessa Bell

April 24 [1931]

Brantôme, [France]

Dearest,

I have just got your letter from Okehampton [Devon], and write, at once though I dont feel sure that you will ever get it. We have had no serious adventures, though two punctures in hail storms; and several nuts and bolts flown off, and pebbles got into the works. Still the car has been very considerate. But God—what weather to start with! Icy cold, storms of rain, clouds so black we could not see beyond our noses. Suddenly it got brilliantly fine; and then again storms; then again fine; but not really hot till yesterday. La Rochelle in fine weather would be lovely; though Ethel’s green sails turned out to be fishing nets. Marenne is I think more lovely; and Chastillon [Castillon] most lovely of all. Here we adventured off the road to a small village on the Dordogne, where we had the best food for about 3/- and drove off to Montaigne’s house, which excited me immensely. His tower is still standing, in the loveliest vineyards, high up, and we wandered all over the gardens with some very humorous dogs at our leisure. Then we went to Bergerac for lunch and gorged upon pâté; and wine and sauces and eggs and in consequence I nearly bought 6 old chairs, and several looking glasses, but as they weren’t as good as might be and very expensive just reframed. We got here last night. It is lovely—as you remember; and we have the Inn to ourselves. The people say they remember you and two Mr Gores—but I doubt it. It is cold again, but fine. They say this weather is unknown, and it was hot as summer 2 weeks ago. Why we dont live in France I cant conceive—in fact we have a plot to uproot you from Cassis, leave it to Clive, and settle hereabouts. It is a perfect country, and, no tourists. In fact, we’ve not seen an Englishman or woman since we left.

It is market day and all the old peasant women are tramping in with kids in their arms and chickens in baskets. I hope St Ives will still move your rather stony heart. But the Times, just in, says it still rains in England. Lord—I dont in the least want to go back, and be again tormented by Sibyl, Hugh Walpole etc. Here one feels perfectly free and casual and can sit and read or consider the world by the hour. Once in London all is hurry, scurry. I am thinking out a plan for the amendment of my life. One could easily settle down—write books here. How I envy you Rome! This is duller than ditchwater—this letter—but I’ve no gossip—only letters from Ethel Smyth, and [McKnight] Kauffer and Koteliansky, who all accuse me of being unwilling to see them. Why is the male so happy?—counting Ethel a male? Please write again. And then I will. Love to the Brats. I wonder what Angelica will think of St Ives. I dreamt last night that you’d had a child by Hilton Young.

V.

Berg

[]

2362: To Quentin Bell

24th April 1931

Hotel Moderne. Brantôme, [France]

It’s all very well, dearest Claudian, telling me to write instantly, but I have only my natural hand available, which you can’t read. Also, it thunders and lightens, and the old half wit grandmother of the proprietor turns to me for confidence. Rassurez-vous, Madame, I say from time to time, those whom the Gods love die young. She thinks this a great joke. Yes, we are on tour—naturally: naturally there hasn’t been such a spring since the Dordogne overflowed its banks in 1846. Nevertheless, in spite of hail, lightning, punctures, steering wheel on the point of breaking, we are enjoying life and eat pates absolutely mellow and yellow with liver. It’s a disgusting taste which I expect we share with the dogs, but for once I like to feel wholly and rabidly canine. But I mustn’t use long words or you won’t be able to read. My hand is stiff with cold. I write at a café table. We have an hour to dinner. Tomorrow we go to Angouleme, and so home—oh dear—to Bloomsbury rampant—opera and ballet and disappointed lovers, and lovers that feed on vapours. I’ve had lots of confidences lately—a tribute to my grey hair; and Clive has become a misogynist, a tribute to Mary [Hutchinson]. Barbara says she will stay at Monks House this summer—I must scrape poor Julian free from his Great Barnacle. Why don’t we live here—far lovelier, lovelier far, than Cassis—plains, heights, poplars, vineyards, of a subtlety and distinction like a moth’s wing compared with the shell of a lobster. Write to me.

V.

Quentin Bell

[]

2363: To Ethel Smyth

April 24th, perhaps. 1931, certainly

Brantôme, [France]

What an angel I am! Every day, whatever the pressure of hunger and thirst, in lightning and rain, I’ve stopped at some mean shop and bought a card for a musician. And now, I may tell you, I’m stiff with a violent scramble along the banks of the Dronne (I think) which are blue, yellow, and suddenly purple; with bluebells, cowslips and gentians; when the lightning flashed, the thunder rolled, and we took shelter in a ruined arch; waited; started; waited; started; at last fled, under a sky like a blue banner bellying down, among white poplar trees. When we reached the cemetery L. who has only one thick suit, ran; I, puffing like a grampus, got involved with some cadaverous mourners, carrying tin wreaths—what a livid and sinister and sulphurous scene!—and then, crossing the old Bridge, again the lightning flashed, and I thought, Really now, Ethel believes in God, does she? How very very queer! And here I sit in my socks and slippers, at the café table, waiting dinner. I cant describe: I hate the gradualness which is necessary to carry conviction or I would fill this entire sheet with the amazing loveliness of France: vineyards: poplars; rivers; then of Montaigne’s tower. My word Ethel, the very door he opened is there: the steps, worn into deep waves, up to the tower: the 3 windows: writing table, chair, view, vine, dogs, everything precisely as it was—when?—I cant remember. Also 4 ancient saddles.

There—thats all the guide book you shall have. As I spin along the roads I remodel my life. What is wrong, what is detestable, what shall be altered, this very moment—is ‘seeing’ and being seen. Now I ask you, why should I go back to 52 T.S: and there be jerked daily by the telephone; never have a space in wh. to read; gulp my books; curtail my walks, fritter away there, perhaps the last summer evenings, at the beck and call of Colefax Kauffer, Koteliansky, Mioux, and a thousand others, who buzz even now: and blacken my sugar? No. A vast vista of intense and peaceful work stretches before me—a whole book on English lit; some stories: biographies: this is as I spin. I got your letters here: love the violent breath of the Bath hotel; but shall get no more till Monday. What are you writing for the Statesman?—a hard, heartless sheet? What music is beginning to trumpet and whistle—or how does your work begin—mine in phrases—yours in bars, tunes? I apologise for the extreme disjectedness—oh this pen—of the blue sheet; but the white wont be any better. We start early for Angouleme, though, so unless I post earlier still, you will say, looking out at your dripping creeper, Adieu spanish ladies—meaning that you cant abear the thought of one who, stuffed with yellow mellow pâté, cant spare a word for a soldiers daughter in Woking. I daresay Lady Balfour is dropping in before dinner to tell you something very warm, like a bird on its nest. I should find her talk infinitely delightful; but cant write it all out for you in this thunderstorm. So you will settle my life for me, wont you: its all a question of buying a waterproof and thick shoes and being downright and upspoken.

Leonard and I have been discussing God and Ethel; with the not unexpected result that Ethel survives and God—no—God we say, God is merely a—a what?—our English is going—is miazma a word? Lord how you’d laugh at my voluble sanguine French—half Madame de Sevigne; half schoolgirl English: but I cant resist branching out, and then, too late, realise my predicament cut off, alone.

V.

Dinner thank God, so I can stop writing; and they think of putting a little green wood on the stove.

Berg

[]

2364: To Vanessa Bell

27th April 1931

Postcard

Chateau du Loir, [France]

I hope you’re having better weather than we are. It is violent April weather. However, we are enjoying ourselves, eating I think most delicious food: and often tipsy. No adventures. Car as good as the Baby. Let me have your address. This is a small inn on a river.

Berg

[]

2365: To V. Sackville-West

April 27th [1931]

Postcard

[Chinon, France]

Very glad to get your letter here. O dear what a bore about B.M. etc: I will write tomorrow. We stood on this pinnacle and heard Joan’s clock strike. Almost enough castles here for you. Divine food. Weather violent—rain, hail, sun gale, in turns. Back Friday.

V.

Jane Carr

[]

2366: To Ethel Smyth

[28 April 1931]

Postcard

[Chinon, France]

Have found your letter, very welcome but too short; and lunched magnificently and heard the same clock Joan heard. Very wet and cold with bursts of splendour.

V.W.

Berg

[]

2367: To V. Sackville-West

28th April 1931

Hotel du Paradis, Dreux, [France]

Yes, I like that way of beginning your letters—Please keep to it in future. E.S. has no such beginning—and last night I dreamt she was dead; but have just had 6 pages from her.

Here we are, safe, ever so cold, shivering and shaking with cold. Can it be like this in England? Even when the sun is out, it is still bitter. We have violent storms of hail, thunder and lightning. I cant remember a more blasted fortnight—though its lovely too: amazing green, blue, purple, poplars like young birds feathers—Still the hotels at night are getting rather a trial. No central heating: or the machine failed. We sit under the one light, wrapped in a rug, as now: try to read; get into bed about 9: and then theres a movie next door—tonight a wedding. They’ve been dancing since 5—skinny young women in silks, readymade, skimpy: pale young men in grey trousers: vast stout mothers: and little boys and girls in black velvet suits and patent leather shoes. I peeked in and was fascinated; but L. wdn’t let me stay, though I saw the whole of French provincial life exposed before me. A young man suddenly stood up alone and sang. Lord—but the noise they make!

I’m sorry about your mother, and feel vaguely guilty, but anything would have fired her off in her morbid and thwarted state; I dont think its me particularly. I’m glad you stood out. And anyhow you needn’t go there weekly—but I see the discomfort, what with her being your mother (odd though it seems) and so on.

Lord—Lord—again—this time about Harold and Parliament. I admire the way he takes his fences—thats what I should have done had I been Harold—been rash, foolish, perverse, incalculable—like a large bouncing cod in a pail of water. I think he’ll get in: but a member’s wife isnt nearly so much of a wedding cake as an Ambassadors, I imagine. Now if I’d married Hilton Young—

We go to Caudebec tomorrow: cross by night boat on Thursday: London Saturday evening.

And when shall I see you?

This 4t night (is that the way to spell it?) seems at least 4 4t nights: I’ve thought over all the books I shall live to write, spinning down endless roads: and you’re going to be a farmer are you?

This pen is vile.

V.

Berg

[]

Letters 2368-2406 (May–July 1931)

2368: To Ethel Smyth

Friday May 1st [1931]

Typewritten

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

Here we are—we crossed yesterday afternoon, having, as you foretold, run into our first fine day. It is entirely divine here. But naturally after sitting in a cold bedroom at Brantome, and having forgotten my fur coat, I contracted a sore throat, which is now running from my nose and eyes in a streaming cold, so I am stupid as a bat. Also my good English steel pen is lost, and the gold one intolerable. So I pick out these few words with infinite pain. Odd how ones fingers lose the tip of writing.

Hence, my many observations upon your profound and interesting remarks re society, re health, must wait. All I will whisper, or rather croak now is, that thanks to L. I have devised steps by which I think society will be considerably modified this summer. Not that that cuts off certain military musicians. But again, I must wait, since all my letters remain unanswered. As to seeing a doctor who will cure my headaches, no, Ethel No. And whats more you will seriously upset L, if you suggest it. We spent I daresay a hundred pounds when it meant selling my few rings and necklaces to pay them,* without any more result than that if I get a pain, go to bed, and eat meat it goes. No other cure has ever been found—and the disease—well, all the nerves meet in the spine: its simple enough. No complicated mysteries about my headaches. Not like your fybroid ears, which Im delighted to think now hear the nightingales. I say, it will be nice seeing nobody, except one or two people. Crossing yesterday, we ran into the wife of my old lover Sidney Waterlow. She told us how she had claimed precedence from Lady Clifford on the passes of Himalaya—that would have been my fate. So good bye. I’ll write when I am less sore in the throat boiled in the eyes and red of the nose.

V.

[in Virginias handwriting:]

* Sir G. Savage. Sir M. Craig. Sir M. Wright. T. Hyslop. etc. etc.

Berg

[]

2369: To Jonathan Cape

May 1st 1931

Typewritten

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Mr Cape,

I am sorry to have delayed so long answering your letter, but we only got back from abroad late last night.

On the whole, even though you are so kind as to suggest delaying publication, I dont think that I can undertake to write an introduction to one of Miss Thackeray’s books. For one thing, I dont like making engagements so far ahead, but the real reason is that I should much prefer to write a longer and more general article upon her books. I find these short introductions very difficult to do, and unsatisfactory from the writer’s point of view. But I much appreciate your kindness in asking me to do it, and hope that my delay has not inconvenienced you.

Yours sincerely
V. Woolf

Jonathan Cape Ltd

[]

2370: To Ethel Smyth

[9 May 1931]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Oh dear, I had meant to buy that book, had the address lying on my table—and now of course I am ashamed—Please send me the bill. I know its something like 3/7¾; it was the getting the order that was insuperable. A vast amount of business has accumulated—

1) L. says—for some good reason I dont know what—that we cant go to Bradfield that day. So here is the paper returned.

2) Here is the handkerchief found in the W.C. and therefore attributed to you.

3) About being “misunderstood” (but I thought that was the title of a novel)

‘God’ I said to Leonard, after you had gone “Whats clear to me is that Ethel, with all her shrewdness, will never, never understand me.”

“But I’m the only person who does” said L: “You and Shakespeare” I said—on top of which comes your letter, saying the very same thing only t’other way round, of V-W., Montaigne, and H B [Henry Brewster]. I think its perfectly true too, though whether its to be accounted for as you suggest by my being a don’s daughter from Cambridge, and you a General’s daughter from Aldershot, I dont know. Whats odd is that we are both understood (I will agree that this is an unfortunate term) by poets. Which suggests, but I’ve no time to follow this up,—that all inwoven, complex, hidden, and curious people—which we both are—are abraded by human contacts—feel shut up, enclosed, petrified by meeting (in Tavistock Sqre say) but take down Montaigne, take down Shakespeare, and at once flow, flower, expand and are at rest—Only you, being so damned practical, for ever seek for understanding; and I, in whom Cambridge has bred a large measure of unalloyed melancholy, never look for it now: sit and look at Ethel, raging, with resignation; and never say half whats in my mind.

Yes—your article was a good deal better than Turners; that I agree; but now, read Laura Riding’s protest on the next page, and see whether you dont get the feeling that here’s a shallow egotistical cock crowing creature, to bother what people say of her. And The Cause suffers: I mean, I feel, what will people say of the vanity of women? But then I dont believe in causes. And she’s a writer, not a musician: all the same, read Laura Riding (in Time and Tide)

No: handkerchief has been sent to the wash.

Berg

[]

2371: To Jonathan Cape

9 May, 1931

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Mr Cape,

I am afraid that you misunderstood my letter. What I meant was that I definitely could not write an introduction. If I write at all, it must be a general and critical article such as I would not wish to appear as an introduction to one of Miss Thackeray’s books.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Jonathan Cape Ltd

[]

2372: To Ethel Smyth

12th May [1931]

Typewritten

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

No Ethel, dear, no; I didnt make my meaning plain. I wasnt alluding to any particular instance of misunderstanding, so much as to the general impossibility, which over comes me sometimes, of any understanding between two people. This instance—your behaviour about critics and your music—doesnt seem to me of importance. That is, if I give my mind seriously to it for five minutes—a thing I seldom do—I can imagine, by imagining you as a whole,—with all your outriders and trembling thickets of personality, exactly why you do it; and sympathise; and admire; and feel the oddest mixture of admiration and pity and championship such as I used to feel for a white tailless cat of ours which we forgot to have castrated. This superb brute used to spend his nights fighting; and at last got so many wounds that they wouldnt heal; and he had to be put out of life by a vet. And I respected him; and I respect you. Only I think you dont altogether realise how, to the casual onlooker you seem exaggerated—how it strikes an outsider. I think sometimes you let the poison ferment. Never mind. I can’t altogether lay hands on my meaning. The other thing anyhow interests me much more—the impossibility of one person understanding another. Oh, and when I write to you, I put it off till the end of the day when my careful typed letters to publishers and so on are done with and I write with a flick of the pen, leaving things to be understood. Hence my unintelligible remark about ‘not believing in causes.’ This, as I see, now, reverts to Murrys life of Lawrence [Son of Woman]; the whole doctrine of preaching, of causes; of converting; teaching etc which has been working vaguely in my mind and penetrating into my Waves; so that I let it fly, casually, in my letter, without a word to explain it. I think what I mean is that all teaching at the present moment seems to me a blasphemy; this hooked itself on to your cause; and so obliquely, to Laura Riding, whom I despise for writing perpetually to explain her own cause when reviewers say what is true—that she is a damned bad poet. There! Not very well put I admit; but hurried.

What is the misery that weighs you down so that you can’t write? Talking of miseries, I went in with L. to see the furniture and found Mrs H. sitting at her desk (about to be sold) as pink and cool as a rose; very kindly. Would we go everywhere? I felt much disconcerted. I felt how awful for her to be selling at her age—and me to be lounging round. But she carried herself like a general on a battlefield; there was a fat critical, censorious daughter in an arm chair; Mrs H. was superb; as if it were a nuisance, shutting up ones houses, selling every stitch, but not a thing to cry over. If one must squander twenty million this is the way to do it. We may look in this afternoon, partly from curiosity, and buy a looking glass.

About Friday—lord, thats our black hole [social] day. Begins at three; goes on till seven. And I choke with a tickle in my throat and cant talk. I dont see any use in your coming on top of Mrs Hueffer, Mr Plomer, Hugh Walpole, et cetera. Wednesday I’m in; also perhaps Thursday; Saturday we go for a walk (not away) I dont know what to suggest, therefore; but leave you to make your own terms; and shall be happy to stroke the head of the indomitable and uncastrated cat. By the way excuse typing; I’m so sick of my utterly disgraceful pen—

[in Virginia’s handwriting:]

Look—it wont make a single letter right. When I’ve time, I’m going to the city to look through a wholesale pen seller—surely there must be one pen, somewhere—one heart for me to share (it sounds like an old song)

V.

Berg

[]

2373: To Vanessa Bell

14th May [1931]

52 Tavistock Sqre., [W.C.1]

Dearest Dolphin

I would have written before, but I somehow thought you said that you were going to camp outside Rome, and would send me your address. Here are some letters from Angelica, who seems to be in the highest spirits. I’ve sent her a bathing dress, but I gather her summer coat has gone wrong. Shall I do anything about it? We shall go and see her as soon as she lets us know that it is allowed.

London is at the moment rather enchanting, chiefly because most people think we are still away. Also, though thundery, it is really warm—Lord, the cold of France!—I wore all my winter things—they said it was La Lune Russe—whatever that may be. I’m sorry it has moved on to Rome, which doesn’t sound so dazzlingly romantic in your account as I thought it—but then we had a perfect May week. And I rather think the days of cheap travel are for ever over—the prices in France seemed considerably higher than the English: no old furniture that I could find at possible sums. And in one’s age one begins to dislike hotels.

Yes; Mrs Hunt is dead, knocked down by a motor van in High St. Kensington; had her arm cut off; is now buried in St Pauls. But I kept to myself and did not go. Among the living I have seen Desmond, whose collected works it is said we are to print; slightly worried about Michael [Desmond’s son], who has bought 400 goats, and finds them more sympathetic than sheep, but at the same time more active, so that he spends his time chasing them, and recovering them from Leopards; and so wants to sell them and start life afresh. Also Rachel [Desmond’s daughter] is not much of a hand at managing life—which may refer to Lord David [Cecil]. He calls her very childish. Then I saw Cory [Bell], and came to the conclusion that you were a bold woman to marry into the Bells: they materialise everything, and with such good sense there seems no escape. He told me that the young need discipline and his son and daughter dont seem to get it. And O what an encounter I had on the Channel boat; a squat sallow lynx eyed woman—Dawks [Mrs Sydney] Waterlow, returning with 3 of the ugliest children ever misbegotten from Sofia. And so we’ve got to go and stay with them at Oare. Then, domestically speaking, Adrian has dismissed his cook—at a moments notice; and Mrs Goldsmith has written to tell me that old Uppington has had all her savings stolen and can’t get any work. Can I help? I say you (V.B.) will. The truth is, I think, that Alice and her Tony have gone off with £50; as he is in difficulties, but I dont see how I’m to intervene. They say now in the underworld that it was Tony and Alice that lost Lotty [Hope] her place with the Harrisons—God knows.

Thats not very interesting I fear, but you know what life is—one thing and then another: Hugh Walpole tomorrow, and Mrs Violet Hunt-Hueffer. There is another great literary scandal on foot, about a book that caricatures Somerset Maugham this time; and Hugh, like the Galahad he is, has intervened to stop it. Desmond says he is a perfect ass; but I shall hear his story tomorrow. Old Ethel adores you beyond any chance of quarrel: she says your life is too full for her. Its one of her points that she takes facts to heart; and I have snipped her back considerably by saying that I’ve got too much work at the moment to see anyone. But she came yesterday, and was melancholy beyond words; old, battered, depressed; because (though she wont explain) I rather think the Opera has refused The Wreckers, owing to the failure of The Prison. Anyhow she says she has seldom found life harder, and wakes at 3 am., when she has to wet, in such despair that she cries aloud Courage, courage! and prays to God, who has deserted her. I’ve promised her a champagne dinner at Boulestin’s, but even that is not of much avail.

I cant conceive why [Winifred] Holtby wrote to you. I tremble to think what a character you would have given me: she then applied to L: so I saw her myself, and find her a Yorkshire farmer’s daughter, rather uncouth, and shapeless, and Heaven knows what sort of lies I didn’t tell her—Chiefly about you, for whose work she has a great admiration.

Who is David Bomberg? He has asked me to sit, but only if I admire modern painting. So I said I loathed sitting and thus hope to escape.

London, as I began by saying, is rather amusing at the moment (though its deplorable to have no dolphinry) and I go to the gallery at the Opera, and to Aldous’s play [The World of Light], and to the movies—there’s a very good French one—and sometimes merely saunter and meander through the streets, looking about me. Its English country that’s such a pin cushion after France: all these little fields and houses. I think one ought to live 6 months in London and 6 at Brantôme or Castillon. John Lehmann shows signs of melancholia—otherwise all is well As his father went mad, I’m rather apprehensive. Please write, and then you’ll get further sheets.

B

I will hand on to L. your remarks about the wine. And all shall be attended to.

Berg

[]

2374: To Ethel Smyth

18th May 1931

52 Tavistock Sqre. [W.C.1]

It occurs to me, at L’s suggestion, that I probably misled you about the writing table, on the telephone. I did buy a writing table; but not the one your sister was writing at. That, which I coveted, went for £37—to whom I dont know, too much for me: and the £6.10 one was the high immense rosewood desk-cabinet in the drawing room, a far less distinguished object, but exactly right to impose order on the obliquities and diversities of my studio. It stands over me at the moment like a policeman. Behold your envelope, just come. The soldiers daughter must have been in a bad way when she wrote Woking. But I somehow infer, atmospherically, that your sulphur and rotten eggs are lightening. I think Wednesday, 4, will be all right. I dont see why not, at this moment, if its true you are in London anyhow.

Isnt it odd—I saw my new pen, (which is not all I could wish,) and said, now of course I can write a full and expressive letter; that is my perpetual illusion. I never can. I am always interrupted: My page is never filled; just serves to throw odds and ends into. But the illusion persists that this time I am going to write a long, entirely satisfactory letter. Perhaps letter writing is a thing one does in youth. Yes: I was rather flown with wine last time you came. I had a brief season of thinking, well anyhow these pages, (of the Waves) are brimfull. I’ve only to seal them up: send them to Mrs Jarrett (a village girl who had a baby through falling downstairs with a typewriter, she said) the things done. But yesterday was vile beyond words. Couldn’t stagger along over the burning pebbles at all. In fact, I cant help thinking that this book contains the dreariest of all my patches. And pity me for this: the tickling throat has taken away all pleasure in smoking. Not a single cigarette have I enjoyed these seven days.

The Black hole was as well as can be expected. That is to say, L. and I looked at each other, about 6.30 (it had begun at 3 sharp) and signalled, thank the Lord only another hour of it left! Whether this is the right mood in which to see the human face divine I dont know. Now, about Causes. Of course, and of course, I’m not such a pacifist as to deny that practical evils must be put to the sword: I admit fighting to the death for votes, wages, peace, and so on: what I can’t abide is the man who wishes to convert other men’s minds; that tampering with beliefs seems to me impertinent, insolent, corrupt beyond measure. I never pass through Hyde Park without cursing separately every God inventor there. This is partly because; unbaptised as we were, our religious friends, some cousins in particular, the daughters of Fitzjames, rasped and agonised us as children by perpetual attempts at conversion. As they were ugly women, who sweated, I conceived a greater hatred for them than ever for anyone. And even now, when no one tries, I still draw in and shiver at the suspicion—he’s got a finger in my mind. I will try to read Tobit one of these days but the repulsion of the early book, whatever it was, still poisons my mind. And I cant read when I’m writing; everything flies off at such an odd angle (This is another pen: no: no: I must revolutionise my life—a new pen: no smoking)

Now this is not in the least the letter I meant to write: but the illusion of the perfect letter still hovers. A Mrs Stack to see you “Who is Mrs Stack?” “A lady who wishes to talk about your book” “To hell with Mrs Stack.” L. comes in. “I’ve an estimate to show you”. This is life: and I adore it

V.

Berg

[]

2375: To Vanessa Bell

23rd May [1931]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest Dolphin,

I have only just got your letter, and here I am answering it at once. First, business: will you get yourself a birthday, I was going to say wedding present, with the enclosed cheque—something entirely useless, I recommend, not combinations or umbrella; (2) if you should see an old looking glass or frame in my taste, which is bad—say a shell between 2 mermaids—gilt, would you get it? I’ve no glasses here; but then I expect the prices are ruinous—I’d go up to £5—And also the bringing back impossible, and also I daresay there are as good to be had in London. I enclose a review of your show, to which I cant go, partly because I’m here for Whitsun, partly because all your shows are rendered impossible to me by Angus who drops round, gently disparaging, and I feel myself sucked under like a lily by a dead fish—a thing that often happens, specially in Scotland.

I’ve had to retire to bed for 2 days with a headache, but am now practically recovered. This was not due to my Jolly, but to Ethel Smyth, whom I think, seriously, to be deranged in the head. We’d spent the morning trapesing round the Chelsea flower show, a very remarkable sight, banks and banks of flowers, all colours, under a livid awning, for it was perishing cold, and all the county families parading with their noses red against the lilies,—a fascinating but rather exhausting performance, and then Ethel appeared, stamping like a dragoon with a wallet full of documents. For 3 hours she nailed me to my chair while she rehearsed the story of her iniquitous treatment by Adrian Boult. I cant (you’ll be glad to hear) go into it all, but she seems to have gone into the green room, after he’d been conducting a Bach Mass for 6 hours, and insisted that he should do the Prison at the BBC; whereafter, according to her, he grossly insulted her, in the presence of the finest artists in Europe, and finally after a screaming and scratching which rung through The Queen’s Hall, ordered her out of the room. She then went through, with the minuteness and ingenuity of a maniac, the whole history of her persecution for the past 50 years; brought out old letters and documents and read them aloud, beat on my chair with her fists; made me listen, and answer, and agree at every moment; and finally I had to shout that I had such a headache that unless she stopped talking I should burst into flames and be combusted. One is perfectly powerless. She raves and rants; yet has a demoniac shrewdness, so that there’s no escape. “You’ve got to listen to me—You’ve got to listen” she kept saying and indeed the whole of 52 rang with her vociferations. And its all fabricated, contorted, twisted with red hot egotism; and she’s now launched on a campaign which means bullying every conductor and worrying every publisher, and rich man or woman, as well as unfortunate friends, until she gets that hopeless farrago of birds and last posts played and all HB’s rubbish printed again. I dont feel I can even face her unless 2 keepers are present with red hot pokers—at the same time, considering her age, I suppose she’s a marvel—I see her merits as a writer—but undoubtedly sex and egotism have brewed some bitter insanity.

Meanwhile, Mrs [Mary] Hunter has gone smash, owes about £10,000, has pledged her pictures to Duveen, and then sold them to pay an overdraft—in short, she has had to sell all her possessions. You remember the house stuffed with furniture? Well, I went to the sale, for a joke, and before I had been there ten minutes had bought a vast writing desk for £6.10, and bid for several chairs, cupboards and carpets, in a state of complete irresponsibility. Mercifully I for the most part failed to get my lots, but Hugh Walpole was landed with 2 dessert services and all the bed linen for £40. It was a sordid scene—old Jews clutching hold of pen trays and shaking pots in case they might be cracked. I found myself wedged against a semi-familiar looking lady who said she did not wish to bid against me. After a time I seemed to suspect that she was Lady Rothenstein, as indeed she was, but highly respectable, even sanctimonious, all black, at which I wondered, but saw that she was presented at Court the following night, and behold this cutting about the Queen and the Veteran. What a humbug Will [Rothenstein] is with his lecture about the evils of aristocracy—and then dressing Alice like a plumber’s widow and sending her to Buckingham Palace.

Then we had Violet Hunt-Hueffer (it appears she’s a married woman in certain streets in Berlin, where she signed a document; but not otherwise) and had a lewd and lascivious talk about her statements as to Ruskins private parts and so on. It is all based upon things she heard gentlemen saying to her mother as she was going up to bed at the age of 8. These she has since reflected upon and drawn her own conclusions—erratic, slightly; and I ought to be going through the revised version at this moment, instead of scribbling to you. Its hot, ink black: now its pouring; now blue as a rooks egg: very odd weather; The only advantage over November is that its hot. Lytton and Raymond (to go on gossiping) dined with us—Lytton, as one always says, very charming: Raymond with every virtue except charm. Lytton’s book [Portraits in Miniature] is out—I think its far better than Elizabeth [and Essex], indeed rather masterly in technique, and the essays read much better together than separate. Also, I think he’s combed out his rhetoric somewhat in respect for us. He had seen Julian and Helen he said, and deplores the Cambridge infection, as I do—but whats to be done? He’s bound to get a Fellowship, and there Helen will sit forever, talking, Lytton said, minute provincialities about exams; and Cambridge parties.

Percy [Bartholomew] has got appendicitis, so we have a day gardener from Glynde and it is said our flowers wont be as good as usual. Nevertheless, our garage and our new rooms are very remarkable: the frigidaire is installed, but not working which matters the less as nature is seeing to it; and we have electric light everywhere. I dont see what further improvements can be made—Our way of life here—cooking messes, cutting fresh asparagus from the earth seems to me almost divine (quite if there were a Dolphin in the pond with the fish) and I dont (you’ll be sorry to hear) really envy you Rome, as I want to write, which needs a table, and then—Lord—how violently our taste in friends opposes itself! Thus you can go to Rome and there meet Jimmy Sheehan [Vincent Sheean]—to me the dullest of good Americans—and Peter Morris, who is explained by your brilliant analysis, as the cousin of a duke without a skin—I cannot imagine. Far rather would I stay in Surbiton and consort with Ida Milman and Emma Vaughan. Those are my sentiments—not, I suppose yours. I suppose Jimmy, Peter and Angus have some mystic charm as I see that Vita has none in your eyes. I suppose its something to do with the illusion of sex: the male sex illudes you; the female me: Thus I see the male in its reality; you the female. Or how do you account for it? About books and pictures our taste is respectable; about people, so crazy I wouldn’t trust a dead leaf to cross a pond in it. But I daresay it is a matter of no importance, as long as you needn’t sit in the Pincio with Vita, nor I with Peter. I’m amused by the way to find that Vita has been told the story of Eddy and Jimmy by a friend under strictest secrecy, and she much deplores it, not so much for Eddy as for Knole, for Eddy swears he will never marry owing to J⁠[immy]; thus the house will go to a cousin who will sell it in building lots, all because of a wretched American who talks through his nose! Had it been an actress, or a duke, I gather they wouldn’t so much have minded; but I daresay its all for the best—that Knole should be cut up into villas, I mean.

Now I must really stop. (Its due, my garrulity, to my taking a holiday). Lytton said Maynard had asked him to write an introduction to Duncan’s show, which very naturally he refused, thinking Duncan in no need of introductions. Angelica, who writes like the Ladies Complete letter writer in imitation, I suppose, of some other girl, with sudden flashes of pure folly in her own manner, wants us to go down next Sunday. I shall try to, if it doesn’t interfere with your seeing her. But I dont suppose you’ll be back much before August.

[Walter] Sickert has some (to me) very witty pictures on show; and Varda is said to be also very good, by Raymond. We go back on Thursday, and shall be in the thick of publishing Vita’s book. So please write and write and write good Dolphin.

B.

Berg

[]

2376: To V. Sackville-West

Sunday [24 May 1931]

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

Dearest Creature,

We’ve decided not to come on Tuesday, as I’ve been in bed with a headache for two days, and though much better today, the Expedition [to Penns-in-the-Rocks] and talk with Easedales would probably bring it back. What a curse. I suppose you wouldn’t come here on Tuesday—lunch? instead. We have a room if you’d stay the night.

I had such an awful doing with Ethel on Wednesday. That woman’s egotism is scarcely credible, and she is now in full flood with a new grievance gainst Boult and the BBC. I’m sure its all her heated invention, but it took 2½ hours to hammer into me on Wednesday, at the end of which I felt like a stoat nailed to a barn door.

Not without foreboding did I say that I preferred Vita to Ethel when I’m ill. And this is the second time she’s come between us, and I feel powerless in her hands. If she stays with you, keep off the Prison and Boult and the BBC like fire—if its possible—or you’ll be burnt to cinders too. And I’ve wasted 4 days when I wanted to write. And I’ve spent them partly reading Princess Daisy of Pless, speculating upon her real character and life and longing for a full account from you—who appear in a footnote as a distinguished author. What a chance the British aristocracy had and lost—I mean if they’d only grafted brains on to those splendid bodies and wholesome minds—for I cant help liking her, in her wild idiocy, and her frankness “7 days late—can it be a child—” seems to me the highest human quality, if it werent combined with a housemaids sensibility and the sentimentality of a Surbiton cook. Could Bloomsbury be grafted on to Mayfair: but no: we’re too ugly and they’re too stupid. And so the world goes to rack and ruin. I see Harold is standing

V.

Berg

[]

2377: To V. Sackville-West

Sunday [24 May 1931]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

This is to say—what I’ve written also to Long Barn—that we must put off coming on Tuesday, as I’ve been in bed with a headache and afraid to risk another by an expedition. What a bore. If you could come here on Tuesday—lunch one—or stay the night—what a pleasure.

I’m practically all right—only keeping quiet.

V.

Berg

[]

2378: To V. Sackville-West

Wednesday 27th May [1931]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Yes, dearest Creature, come to dinner on Monday do—8, I suppose, after [broad]⁠casting. I pity you today, roasting in the hot fire of Ethel’s egotism—though I cant lay all the blame of my headache on her entirely, poor old woman. Its partly this silly little temperature, no doubt, and partly that we spent that morning brushing in a crowd round Chelsea flower show—where, by the way we bought a little minute cedar tree, 50 years old; and I want now to find a very small breed of nightingale to sing on its branches. Find me some at Sissinghurst.

I’m quite recovered and have been sauntering over the downs alone—Lord—why go back to London? They look so lovely this evening, from my garden room, with the low barns that always make me think of Greek Temples. And we’ve been to a village wedding and seen the bridal party perched on kitchen chairs driven off in a great blue wagon, drawn by colossal farm horses with ribbons in their tails, and little pyramids of bells on their foreheads. What an odd mixture English country life is of squalor and magnificence! I should like to read The Land [Vita’s poem, 1926] tonight, but haven’t got a copy here.

So instead, if my frigidaire is working, I shall eat frozen gooseberries and cold asparagus fresh cut, and perhaps a bottle of Spanish wine white with frost—but of course, though they hammer all day, it wont be working. Leonard says we have sold over 4,000 copies of A.P.S. [All Passion Spent] before publication. Its a great day today for the press—I dont envy you the usual rotten eggs and sticky sweets of reviewers, all the same.

Monday 8. (or before): now note: I dont mean breakfast—

V.

Perhaps Ethel is sleeping with you tonight?

Berg

[]

2379: To V. Sackville-West

[28 May 1931]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

I didn’t make it clear just now on the telephone (I think) that we had been engaged to go to the Opera for three weeks or so—it was my idiocy that I forgot: only I don’t wish you to think that we put you off, for a superior engagement. No. No. Thats all. Monday, then.

V.

Berg

[]

2380: To Vanessa Bell

June 1st [1931]

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, [W.C.1]

What an angel I am to write, seeing youve never written in answer to my long last—but good hearted as I am, I write to say we spent yesterday with Angelica [at Langford Grove School]; who was in high spirits; in blue; in a new coat; we went off to a field to picnic; but owing to my sense of duty we took Judith [Bagenal] too. They were very amusing—both brought gloves. Angelica a pair of furred ones. Judith brought only one, because as she pointed out, one only brings gloves to show that one has gloves, so that one is enough; and then if one loses it one can bring the other. Angelica saw the sense of this, but of course left both of hers in the car. Then she refused to touch tongue, but devoured tomatoes raw; and lettuce and liqueur chocolates and a whole box of pineapple chunks. Then we went down to the sea, and she caught a furry bear caterpillar and put it in her hat. Then we stole up behind an old gentleman who was sketching. We also found a lamb being led by a boy on a string, and she stroked its ears. We then went to tea at the Blue Lion where you stay, because she said there is a dear old lady who knows all about her and gives one hot buttered toast. It was a broiling hot day. We had a good deal of conversation at tea. They were both extremely pathetic (to me) about their being so bad at arithmetic that they would never be able to to go to Cambridge as Mrs [Elizabeth] Curtis [Headmistress] would say they could not pass the entrance. Angelica said that she had been able to do decimals, but they had put her so low in the class she was not now allowed to learn any sums. They spoke with great sadness about this. She said Quentin had never written to her, and she is so devoted to him that she cannot bear his being so long away. I said he had gone to Cassis. She said Thank goodness, then he will come back at last; but he may have grown very thin, or very fat. She said you were coming back in a week to Paris. We are all to come to what they call Parrots day. She sang us some drinking songs in a rollicking voice. Also some Mozart. She blacked all her face by accident and I had to wipe her, then she went to the looking glass and said how dreadful she looked. Of course she looked like a fantastic blue butterfly beside a tidy cob. Not but what Judith is not a sensible child with a very sad view of life and her responsibilities. She always knew the right road and Angelica never did. This rather depressed Angelica. Then we went back to school and A. asked me not to come and see Beetle, as it would make her shy. Beetle has fallen off a desk and torn her ligaments, so that she has to lie on a chair in the garden. A. tied up the few remaining cherries with gold string from the sweets and took them to Beetle. Then she implored me to come and see Mrs Curtis, which I did not want to do, but A. was so pressing that I yielded, and we went off to the drawing room but Mrs C. was at a service. So I went over the school with A. and saw all the bedrooms and photographs of army officers and a new dress which A. admired very much. As you see I have fallen in love with her, but think her mother very heartless, gallivanting in Rome and never casting a thought my way. Then we left them, they were going to be read aloud to and do hymn practise. It was on the whole very fine and a great success but how pathetic children are to be sure; full of the wildest feelings I could see, and adumbrations of the future and jealousies and torments, though I think very happy there. Judith said the worst of school is one is never alone, but A. seemed to like this. So no more. Though had you written I would have told you some very interesting pieces of news and one that bodes no good to us all this summer. So there.

B.

Berg

[]

2381: To Margaret Llewelyn Davies

June 1st [1931]

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, [W.C.1]

Dearest Margaret,

We were so sorry about last Sunday, especially for the reason. I wish you werent always called upon to take part in these catastrophes, though I daresay its natural enough that they should call upon you. No, we cant manage this Sunday anyhow; and I’m afraid not next, but we must try again. We get tempted into going to Rodmell when we can, and Sunday is the only day L. can leave the press, which has now published what we hope to be another best seller [All Passion Spent] by Vita Nicolson. I like it a great deal better than the Edwardians.

I have just read through the letters, and feel greatly relieved. I somehow thought many of the women would dislike my butting in, and ask what business I had. They seem very generous on the contrary, and I am delighted they are so appreciative. But as a matter of fact I agree with your sister in law. I doubt that I was the right person to make people interested in the womens stories, because if one is a writer by profession, one cant help being one. It would be far worse to pretend not to be. And I think, as your sister in law says, that gets between and makes a distraction from what is the point of the book. However it cant be helped—old age makes one feel one cant change ones spots; much though I should like to. I’ve had a letter from the American Yale Press who asked to see the proofs, but they say they cant publish it. “Since there is no organization in the U.S. like the Working Womens Guild, the letters prove to deal with matters rather far from the experience and interests of possible readers here”. I thought the Coop. movement flourished in America—perhaps theres no Guild. I have had some very enthusiastic comments on the book from very unlikely people—young intellectuals, who had never heard of working women or guilds or cooperation. They thought the letters amazing. I wish we could have had more.

We stayed at a good Inn [Talbot Inn] in Dorset at a place called Iwerne Minster—lovely country, near Shaftesbury, and a model village run by Mr Ismay. I could find the address if you want it. This was about 4 years ago—cooking good, and all clean and quiet, as far as I remember.

[in Virginia’s handwriting:]

L. wants to read the letters and so I am keeping them, but will send them in a day or two.

V.

Sussex

[]

2382: To Vanessa Bell

Saturday 6th June [1931]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

I wrote to you in Rome, about our visit to Angelica, but I dont suppose you will get it—and it was only to say she was in fine feather, and we at any rate enjoyed ourselves greatly. Its odd, considering her parentage, how very little she resembles the Bells: or Bagenals for the matter of that. To me this is most sympathetic.

It is a fine day, and in a short time Jack and Mary [Hutchinson] will be upon us. Judge my horror! Mary rang up and said they were taking Southease [a house near Rodmell] for the summer, and were coming down to see it, and might she spend the night. Mercifully, she rang up a second time to say Southease had fallen through, but they were set upon getting a house near Lewes and were coming to see agents. I doubt that they will find anything. I couldn’t bear to meet Mary in full finery and fashion on the downs. Other news, is chiefly to the discredit of English surgeons. Perhaps you’ve heard how Rosamond Lehmann, who is going to have a baby was seized with pains. A specialist was sent for and said that the conception had taken place in a wrong part; and she would certainly die if not operated upon instantly. So they operated, and found everything perfectly normal, but it is thought that the shock will certainly bring on a miscarriage. The same day Alix [Strachey] was seized with pains. Elly [Rendel] said she thought it was not appendicitis, but the specialist said it was, and must be operated upon instantly. So they cut Alix open and found that there was nothing whatever the matter with her. John L⁠[ehmann]. is in a nursing home having 4 wisdom teeth extracted—I make no doubt they’ll pull out the wrong ones. I’ve seen various oddments—Peter Lucas one day and Alan and Sheilah [Clutton-Brock] the day after. Peter seems as merry as a grig; and Alan and Shelah did nothing but squabble about a parrot—I’d rather marry Peter than Alan who looks wild weak mad and vindictive. I tried to calm them by suggesting that they should own a dog in common. Yes, I think you’re right about Ethel. The sad thing is that she had some gift, but now it’s utterly distorted. She is now raving against my having headaches and says theyre all liver, and could be cured by Calomel. Also she’s spending all her savings on having The Prison done at her expense. Heavens how nice to see you and Duncan—if Duncan—again. But why in God’s name does Ott: open his show? Maynard’s doing I imagine. It will need some courage to go, as the whole of art and fashion will be there. I thought you’d catch me a clout on the snout for my present; but next year I shall be coming to you for half crowns I warn you. Its only our bumper crop. L. says he has paid a bill from Cooks, for your wine, but could not take any other steps as he doesn’t know the name of Teed’s agent.

Berg

[]

2383: To Clive Bell

9th June [1931]

Postcard

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Yes I’ve no doubt France is very nice, but then you don’t see Ottoline leading a pug dog down Oxford Street.

V.

And Waller is engaged to marry a girl of 22.

Quentin Bell

[]

2384: To V. Sackville-West

Thursday [11 June 1931]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

(1) Would you like me to come down on Tuesday for night, to Sissingt, (or Long Bam) I shall be alone.

(2) We have sold 6500 of Passion. Sales very good. We are today considering printing a new edition. Lord! What fun! Orders come in like pilchards in a net.

Ethel yesterday much subdued. Had you said anything I wonder? Let me know about Tuesday.

V.

Berg

[]

2385: To Ethel Smyth

Friday [12 June 1931]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

No, I haven’t got a moment, or a thought, because I’ve been working for me, very hard at this bloody book—3 hours this morning, and 2 from 5 to 7. this evening (the publisher [Leonard] yesterday says he must have it, God save his soul, by the end of the month) All I therefore can attempt to say is that yes, certainly, in one word, ALL cards flat on table and faces up. Thats my disposition; nothing else is any use at all. But of course you may not feel so disposed, which alters the case.

I’m trying to make no engagements, except one to go to Vita, next week; because I find myself hopelessly behind hand, and dont see how I’m to be ready with my MS. in just over a fortnight. (And Lord how bad it is)—unless I work between 5 and 7 every day if I can: but I’ll write later.

Cards on table please without waiting.

Saturday: forgot to post: flowers just come—exquisite—fresh—scented—amorous—glad about Prison.

Berg

[]

2386: To Ethel Smyth

[15 June 1931]

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Sq. [W.C.1]

No—its the Fortnightly, here. So I send it, to save you 2/6 which it aint worth. Will D.D [Edith Lyttelton]. let me have it back some time, and will you, correctly, inform her of the rectification sent by Evan Charteris, as I feel is Gosses due, not that it alters my opinion one straw. No, it isnt ‘work’—I wish it were, my five hours only the deadliest of drudgery, copying, cutting out, putting in, re-reading and so finally sending to the typist; who then leaves out and puts in on her own account, so that has to be altered too, twice, for America and here; a dismal business, but not worse than picking up stitches in knitting—which neither you nor I know nothing of. So by next week I shall be ready for all cards. One of my most vivid memories is of Toveys boredom. We crossed a small bridge at Eton together—the Cloisters, the MacCarthys wedding; and he was facetious about prodding the arch of the bridge with an umbrella; also foamed at the corner of the lips; also irresistibly reminded me, to look at, of cold fowl, such as comes up at Sunday supper covered with a thick white paste. His own music struck me stiff with horror; but I accept all you say about his playing of Bach, and shall go to hear him. There was also a Miss Weisse, wasnt there? And he sets Bob Trevelyan’s unreadable plays to unplayable music, an economical arrangement on the part of Providence. So no more.

V.

What about the Prison?

Berg

[]

2387: To William Plomer

Wednesday [17 June 1931]

Postcard.

52 Tavistock Sqre., [W.C.1]

Could you come in tomorrow, Thursday night—about 9? Lady G. Wellesley is coming and would like very much to meet you.

V.W.

Texas

[]

2388: To Ethel Smyth

[19th June 1931]

Typewritten

52 T[avistock] S[quare, W.C.1]

Very well, I’ll keep Nov 11th and be prepared for a party at Lady Londonderrys—for which I shall buy a new dress, all spangles. So for Gods sake dont let me down and go off to a pot house alone with a crony. I count upon splendour in Park Lane.

This is however by way of thanking you for the sweet smell of my drawing room, all white with Simkins—is it? Probably not. I seldom hit off a name. But any pink by any name would not smell sweeter than yours. Now I must throw all my MSS into my bag and go off to Rodmell there to continue this everlasting scratching and copying. And it seems to get slower and slower and the 1st of July rushes nearer and nearer. Why does this happen every time; and every time I say it shall not happen again. I bought one of D⁠[uncan]⁠s pictures.

V.

Berg

[]

2389: To V. Sackville-West

Friday [19 June 1931]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

After waiting 3 weeks, the books arrived today. I suppose an instance of thought transmission—your exquisite French must have crossed the Channel and stirred them to activity without words. But I am keeping the French letter for future use. O Lord how I enjoyed myself—what a fine brand of calomel you keep.

Sales going on uninterrupted: at a nursing home yesterday I was told how one patient recommended AP.S to another ‘because its so exquisite, and also the very book for you, since you’re looking for a house” The psychology of the reader is obscure.

Dotty dined here last night, in the oddest jumble of a party, hastily run up to induce her (but dont say this) to continue the series [Hogarth Living Poets]: I’m afraid it wasn’t very effective.

Monday, 3.30

V.W.

Berg

[]

2390: To Ethel Smyth

Monday [22 June 1931]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Well if you dont want to see the great grand daughter of the Barrel man, why do you suggest flowers on Wednesday at 5? God knows—to copy your military language what you’re at—with your champagne at 2.15 and knocking your cards off the table and damning Virginia because that bald and blameless man Maurice Baring does not write about her—The psychological current at Woking seems to me in my simplicity criss-cross to say the least of it.

However: I shall be in anyhow at 4.30 on Wednesday: tea; if you wish to come, on your way some where else: I’m having a holiday, thank God for a few days having outpaced my typist, for the moment. But you baffle and surprise me so that the formation of the simplest words becomes a problem.

V.W.

And the table will be there for the cards.

Berg

[]

2391: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Friday [26 June 1931]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Ottoline,

Yes it would be very nice to see you again. (By the way, did your ears blush, or whatever the phrase is, at lunch yesterday, when Goldie and I sang hymns in your praise?)

Could you come in on Wednesday (July 1st) night, any time about 9?—We shall be in, and one, possibly 2, others. That would be very nice; and I hope to come if not on Thursday, another time if I may.

The Saturday night man is most curious—ravaged, exhausted, has been a bootboy, a waiter, also in prison—but so shy its difficult to catch him. Next time he’s in London I will try to get him here with you, if you can.

But this we can talk of on Wednesday

Yr V.W.

Texas

[]

2392: To Jane Bussy

Friday [26 June 1931]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Dear Janie,

I cant alas come on Wednesday, as I have to go to a concert and hear a poetess [Joan Easdale] sing; her own works, which makes it even more formidable. But perhaps another time—?

Also, if I sent you, with my love, Orlando in English and French could you tell me if Orlando by [Charles] Mauron has any relation to Orlando by Woolf?—I’ve heard conflicting reports—not that it much matters. Only 2 passages need be compared and those short ones.

Yours
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

2393: To Ethel Smyth

Saturday [27 June 1931]

Typewritten

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Yes, I’ve read it twice and think it a very felicitous and persuasive article in your best style (one or two corrections I’ve made—my uncles name for one) My only literary criticism is that it might be improved by greater compression. Its a little diffuse I think. Your nail is a good nail and a shining one—that there should be no musical criticism in daily papers but it might be knocked in a little harder. Owing to the pleasing variety and circum-vagulation of your mind one gets a little doubtful about the nature of the nail and what your remedy is. But then on no account would I give up the man’s face like apples and a banana or other Smythian pleasantries (except ‘critic and cricket’ which savours to me too much of after dinner speaking) so your indirectness is justified and delightful and full of ripeness and richness. But considering the obtuseness of the public and the many hares they’ll hunt might it not be a good thing to give the article some simple hammer stroke of a title—A plea for the Abolition of Musical criticism—something like that, but better and shorter. Of course you lay yourself open to one charge I think—that if youre criticised by the papers its your own fault for sending them press tickets; just as I should be told, if I didn’ want to be reviewed, why then send out review copies? Marie Corelli never did. And was never reviewed.

Otherwise I think its very true and convincing, your points, even to me purblind and distorted as I am. What I think you dont realise, perhaps, is that (no doubt owing to my own vanity which imputes vanity to others) you seem in talk to attach such enormous importance to praise to recognition, when on your own showing the best judges (Walter etc) know your worth; when critics are vile; when youve enough to live on; when you spend months of ecstacy (see the Prison and your letters) in the act of composition. What I should like would be, in another article, a purely objective statement of the exact disabilities (not being allowed to play in orchestras etc which women suffer in music.) Also, though you make out a good case, the critics, damn them, cant be so destructive or why are the classics the classics; and why is this so, even in the case of Wagner, so often during their life time? Somehow the big apples come to the top of the basket, and generally before the composer is under the sod. But of course I realise that the musician’s apple lies longest at the bottom and has the hardest struggle to rise—thats clear. And then I detest people dwelling on their own injuries—its so infinitely sterile. And then I think the creative thing to do would be to furbish up some orchestra and run the things on your own. This I did—oh yes, in a modest way, when the publishers told me to write what they liked. I said No. I’ll publish myself and write what I like. Which I did, and for many years, owing to lack of organisation travellers etc. lost much money thereby. Yes there I am blowing my own trumpet. But its a harsh raw noise—ones own trumpet. If I were you I’d train typists and street singers rather than go on whipping these gentrys hard and horny behinds. You will say however that I know nothing, feel nothing and understand less than nothing. So be it. I realise why I am so essential to you—precisely my quality of scratching post, what the granite pillar in the Cornish field gives the roughhaired, burr-tangled Cornish pig—thats you. An uncastrated pig into the bargain; a wild boar, a savage sow, and my fate in life is to stand there, a granite pillar, and be scraped by Ethel’s hoary hide. Yes, because not another soul in Woking but lies under you like sweet lavender; there you roll and trample and bellow. I’m the only friend you have who is thoroughly and disgustingly upright and blind and deaf and dumb. Now isnt that a psychological discovery of the first water? But I cant be here till 5 or so on Wednesday owing to my infernal fate—to listen to a poetess singing her own songs to music written by a brother at some blasted hall. I’ve seen Barretts; rather feeble I thought; and have written (to come out next week) an ‘essay’ on Mrs Browning. But perhaps we may meet, if youll arrange it—one scrape more, one more grind of your infuriated hide and rasping tusks. What you call euphemistically ‘putting cards on the table;’ when its more like rending a rib open with a knife.

—hah hah. V,

[in Virginias handwriting:]

(written in a hurry, but I’m always now in a hurry so I send it as it is, with all its faults on its face)

Berg

[]

2394: To Vanessa Bell

Sunday [28 June 1931]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Would you convey to Angus that I will offer £40 for the chairs, which I think is about fair—I do this through you, (and will send you the cheque when my money is paid in*) as I find him so depressing he’ll probably dissuade me.

Perhaps I might come to tea on Tuesday?—God knows.

B.

* this maynt be for 3 weeks.

Berg

[]

2395: To Jane Bussy

Sunday [28 June? 1931]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

My dear Janie,

I must say it is amazingly good of you to have ploughed through so much of the translation [of Orlando], and I accept your word as gospel truth. [Charles] Mauron is much blown upon in certain quarters and I was told that any competent French scholar would see through him. As you’re more than competent, I’m greatly relieved by your report, and shall bruit it abroad. Is there any book or books of mine, or Shakespeare’s Hardy’s Scotts, that I can give you, in token of gratitude? Or a puppy, or a fantail pigeon, or a piebald mouse? Ask and it shall be yours.

God knows I wish I could come to your basement on Tuesday: all this week I must be chained to mine. I have positively to finish my latest, which is of indescribable horror, so that to try and get it right at the last moment is like washing a black baby white, or stitching a 4th leg to a lamb born with only 2 and ½. But the week after, please God, I shall be free and at yr service.

V.

Robert H. Taylor

[]

2396: To Ethel Smyth

June 29th [1931]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

I have read your letter twice and shall read it again. I am very glad that you have written with such frankness. I dont think there is much for me to say but, as I suppose from your tone that you want to come here on Wednesday I just want very briefly to say that I think you are completely justified in your conclusion that “such a person ought not to be thus loved.” But I dont think that I’ve ever made out that I possessed qualities which entitled me to your love. I have from the first insisted on my faults—blindness, selfishness etc. So that if you have now discovered that I have not an ounce of perception etc. it is not that I tried to delude you. And I think I’ve always said that you exaggerated my merits as a writer.

But please believe that I am very glad of the frankness with which you have written.

Of course I could go on to justify and excuse myself, but I dont feel that there’s any good in it.

V.

Berg

[]

2397: To Sibyl Colefax

[June? 1931]

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, [W.C.1]

My dear Lady Colefax

Wasn’t I clever to avoid the seductions of your voice? I sat in my bath an hour but it was worth it. If you want to rend the domestic veil, here you are. If I dine with you, I shan’t sleep; if I don’t sleep, I cant write. You say this dont matter a straw. I quite agree with you. But my next year’s income depends on sending a book to America in August. It aint half done, owing to dining out. So theres no more to be said. Your mercenary soul (didn’t you throw me over for half a crown the other night?) will understand. Ever your obedient and now extremely clean

Virginia Woolf

Michael Colefax

[]

2398: To Vanessa Bell

Wednesday [1 July? 1931]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Will you dine here with me tomorrow? I shall be alone, and perhaps you would like to bring your pencil and do a sketch. Anyhow you must come, as I’ve got your picture, which is the apple of my eye. I dont know how to hang it. Ethel Sands was in great admiration of it.—but all gossip when we meet.

8 or earlier.

B

Berg

[]

2399: To Helen McAfee

July 2nd 1931

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Miss McAfee,

Many thanks for the cheque for 250 dollars for my essay on Aurora Leigh. I must also thank you for the very useful list of errata—I am ashamed that so many got past me in the typescript. I had already found some of the worst myself, but too late to send them on to you. They have been corrected in the English version, and I am very grateful for the help.

The Barretts of Wimpole Street goes along here, apparently without any slackening. I myself was rather disappointed, though amused by the astonishing story—which is not an exaggeration. But they might have made it hit harder I thought. However the Barretts themselves are furious, threatening libel actions as it is.

Many thanks for enquiring about another essay. I fear that my mind, over which I have little control, is leading me away from contemporary life in the direction of the Elizabethans. I want to explore there a little, and may at last go into the Lady Clifford Diaries which have been on my shelves for more than a year. But if anything likely to interest the Yale Review occurs to me I shall of course be very glad to suggest it to you.

Believe me, yours sincerely.

Virginia Woolf

Yale University

[]

2400: To Ethel Smyth

Saturday [4 July 1931]

Typewritten

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Let me put it like this.

As I think I told you, I had promised to have the Waves done by July 1st—last Wednesday. I discovered however that I must make one very difficult and radical change before I could let it go. I calculated that by giving up Monday Tuesday and Wednesday to writing, and not merely to writing out to concentration of a very complete kind I might be able to do it (But I have not).

On Monday morning your letter arrived. At the same time I was told something in confidence about a friends life that moved and upset me very much; at the same time I was asked to consider a plan that needs considerable thought and it may be action. I confess that your letter with its multitudinous embroidery of a personal grievance seemed (quite apart from its damaging references to my character and conduct) to make a huge and at the moment unwarrantable demand on my sympathy. I had the sense afterwards to reflect that such demands upon the sympathy and attention of your friends are inevitable. One must remember your temperament, your struggles, your difficulties, your loneliness, your unhappiness, and the peculiar strain which as a musician you have to undergo. It is quite natural, as I see, that a chance joke gets upon your nerves and rouses you to a sense of intolerable hardship. I dont blame you; I see it must be so; I see that it is the penalty that life exacts.

But it does I think put great difficulties in the way of intercourse. And I dont think that they are the difficulties that you speak of. Scenes and rages and moments of misunderstanding are a bore and a pity and take up time and harass ones mind; but they pass and one forgets them. What does not pass, and is not forgotten is the feeling that one is prevented from intimacy. Your extreme susceptibility to criticism and your vast (if entirely natural) need of sympathy inevitably make one feel that one cannot be at ones ease, and free, and careless with you as with other people; that one cannot expect the same intuition and understanding from a woman who is naturally and rightly as absorbed as you are in your own past and present and future. One therefore feels that one is limiting oneself, being simpler, cruder and less communicative than is natural. The same thing has happened to me twice before—once with my father whom I adored. But then, he had had a very hard life with his deafness, my mother’s death, and his sense of being, as a philosopher, a failure. Thus he demanded and needed perpetual sympathy and was apt to fly into violent rages and despairs in what we thought a most unreasonable way if anyone spoke a careless word about his work, or his life. Hence by degrees one felt that one had always to pick and choose what one said to him and never dared tell him the small events that interested us, for he might at any moment fly off with ‘Oh but think what my life has been, what my sufferings are, what I have been going through since your mother died.’ And I think this queered the pitch and made us much more formal and cautious with him than was right. And it happened again with a woman who was in love with me, and used to write me reams about not understanding her life and her misunderstood virtues (for she thought herself the greatest psychologist in England) [Ethel herself] and so we parted.

Now to brush all this aside—this quarrel—and say “O but I’m so devoted to you; lets kiss and be friends,” seems to me childish. Yet as I say I dont see how you can help yourself. When the Wreckers is done you naturally need much more sympathy than I do when the Waves is published. And one is sure to laugh and be casual about it. (Also I dont think you realise how much you emphasise, from good motives I’m sure, the difficulties of the musician; your own struggle; the horror of the critics—I believe I could pass an examination in whats been said and written about you and by you since you were six years old—but here again, you reiterate partly because of your championship of the under dog—but its a nail that has gone through my head) Therefore there will be other quarrels. And what is worse I shall be feeling; well, surely she might see that one has other difficulties, other struggles, other interests—Of course I see that this is not so with your old friends, like Mrs [Violet] Woodhouse or Lady Betty [Balfour], but how can it help being so with you who were seventy, and I who was 48 when we first met? I’m sure this is crudely put, for I’m hurried; but perhaps you’ll see how it puzzles me. I dont care for unreal friendships; and if one thing emerges from these letters it is the extreme unreality of a relationship which leads to all these words.

P.S.

I forgot to say that I underlined in blue your remark about the Interim passage in the Waves by mistake. It didnt in the least annoy me. It interested me very much, and I meant to ask you what you meant. I should like to know.

No Leonard does not think you a ‘tame tiger’, but another animal, less dignified, but more sonorous.

[in Virginia’s handwriting:]

Monday 4.30 would suit me better than Wednesday if its the same to you.

V.

Berg

[]

2401: To Ethel Smyth

Tuesday [7 July 1931]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Well Ethel dear, I’m very glad that the poor cat—oh no I mean the happy the hirsute, the erect, the brindling and bristling cat—in fact the hedgehog, has gone to bed happy—though I dont approve of a woman who has pawned her last hairpin to produce what she considers—hum-ha—one must be very careful in future—no jokes, no allusions to certain foibles—I’m sorry I was going to say before my evil devil led me astray, that you should express letters so that they cost 7d. instead of one. But then I like getting things at irregular hours, with the emphasis of the unexpected in them—lying stamped on hall tables when I come in, hot, dreary, from moving one pillar in the Waves half an inch to the right, having moved it yesterday three quarters of an inch to the left. Its not the writing of the Waves, that takes the time, but the architecture: and its not right yet, and God knows if my eyes not out, and I’m only moving round in a circle. But this explains perhaps certain absences of mind, and cannon bolts down the telephone—Lord! how I like the thud of my abuse upon your hide. I think I shall make a practise of it “Ethel, d’you know you’re a damned Harlot.—a hoary harpy—or an eldritch shriek of egotism—a hail storm of inconsecutive and inconsequent conceit—Thats all” And I shall ring off. I forgot what I started out to say. Never mind—this is just a pelt at your hide.

V.

A furious old gentleman in Manchester, coeval with the Brownings has attacked me for what he’s pleased to call iconoclasm. I’m replying, in my well-known style, something spicy about orgasm making a rhyme.

Berg

[]

2402: To Allanah Harper, Editor of Echanges

7th July 1931

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Madam,

I understand from the Hogarth Press that M. Mauron gave you authority to publish an extract from Orlando in Echanges. But, as a matter of fact, that authority can only be given by Stock, who publish the translation of Orlando, and to whom any money due should be paid. I am therefore returning the cheque for £5 which you sent me, as it is clear that I have no right to it.

Yours faithfully
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

2403: To V. Sackville-West

Wednesday [8 July 1931]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

I’ve told Ethel that you have long promised to take me for a treat—say to the Blackwall tunnel—on Monday next, thus gracefully avoiding a visit to Lady Lewis’s to hear Tovey play Bach. So please confirm this or some part of it.

Then, years, no weeks ago I met Maurice Baring who wished me to exculpate Gosse from writing that letter to Ross, with Harold. And here’s a letter from Evan Charteris to prove it. All of which is out of date and forgotten now; but never mind.

And oh Lord these senile old women with their perverted passions—here’s Lady Oxford on me—bringing Ebth Princess of Bibesco to tea, demanding my picture and—O Lord again—that my next book shall be dedicated to her. What Poppy or Mandragora—no, its keep away I’m thinking of—the room still ringing with Ethel on the phone. So to bed. And whats bed without—? And when—? And what—?

V.

Berg

[]

2404: To Ethel Smyth

Sunday [12 July 1931]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

What G. Lowes Dickinson said was (not to me but to Leonard) that he had been reading, first I think, The Prison: with great interest, and great admiration: He had then gone on to Law and Anarchy which he found also most sympathetic; he admired the writing, found the ideas akin to his own; and so went on to read a third, in French; and was increased in his admiration. Leonard said that HB was doing much what G.L.D. does, or attempts; but G.L.D. said No, HB. was doing something of his own, and something which interested him (G. L. D) very greatly. GLD. is a writer, as you may know, of Platonic dialogues, about law society the soul, duty, love, work etc: and a very charming man, and the fine flower of Cambridge culture—How he got at HB. I dont know: anyhow he seems to have put up a good fight against whatever objections L. made, and to have been discriminating, detailed and impressed. There—I dont suppose I’ve given GLD. his words verbatim; but you can gather the gist. And I think this a great compliment, because, like the rest of his tribe, GLD is very fastidious, instructed and only says what, on deep consideration with complete regard for the truth, he thinks. How unlike us, Miss Beale and Miss Buss.

I dont suppose I shall be able to come tomorrow, greatly though I should like to hear the cold chicken [Donald Tovey] play Bach. Life is too much with us, late and soon, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers, (another quotation) Once this bloody book is done, I shall fling my hands in the air, and be quit for ever of writing sentences. Lord what a happy life—never to write again. At the moment the thought of not writing fills me with delirious joy, too far and fair to be true.

Whats the use, if a book is fundamentally unreadable, like the Waves, of correcting commas?

So you can judge the mood in which I scribble these hasty lines, hoping to find you in the Pink as they leave me—Some evenings I write all quotations.

Yr Virginia

Berg

[]

2405: To Elizabeth Robins

16th July [1931]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Miss Robins,

We shall be delighted to look at the verses, if you will send them here. I wish that they were by you! A vague dream remains in my mind that you once said you would write your memoirs and let me see them—but perhaps it was only a dream.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

2406: To Ethel Smyth

Sunday [19 July 1931]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

Well Ethel, Leonard has read it—The Waves—and likes it, and I’m so relieved I’m like a girl with an engagement ring. Its true he thinks very few people will survive the first 100 pages. And I must now see if I cant simplify and clarify a little on his hints; but he doubts that I can. Anyhow thats over: and I’m, as I say, as light as a trout, with sheer irresponsible relief, and feel now I can spend a whole hour putting sweet peas in water and needn’t hurry down to my commas and semi-colons in a state of torpor, distrust, and somnolent sordidity. Here’s an eldritch screech of egotism if you like. But my word—think of getting that MS. out of the house on Tuesday perhaps, and no proofs for a fortnight. A very stormy week end: elm trees almost down, and flowers broken by rutting cats howling all night in the wind. They made their marriage bed in the sweet williams, and their progeny will be pied, I imagine. And I’m buying a boat and taking to the sea. Why should all physical delight rest with you—why shouldn’t I stretch my muscles in a gale and haul down sheets and anchors and fly before the North East to the Pole?

Berg

[]

Letters 2407-2450 (July–October 1931)

2407: To V. Sackville-West

Wednesday [22 July 1931]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Lord! was there ever a woman I knew called Vita? And was she ever fond of a woman called—Well my life’s a running sore, and I write only to say are you dining with me on Monday? If not, when am I seeing you? And will you tell me, so that I mayn’t be ravished to Woking. But my life’s one pustulence and pestilence—I cant tell you—Only, are you dining with me on Monday? or what? And are you fond of me, or what? D’you know what I bought today and what it bodes?—and what a change is impending? No: ’cos you dont care, heartless daughter of the stationmaster at Barcelona.

Berg

[]

2408: To Dorothy Bussy

Wednesday [22 July 1931]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Dorothy,

This is ghastly—I mean the flight of time and no tea party. But the truth is that the man I hate most in the world, your nephew Tomlin, has me by the hair: I waste afternoon after afternoon perched in his ratridden and draught-riddled studio: cant escape. If I do, all the bonds of friendship are (he says, and I wish it were true) torn asunder. I mean, I have to sit daily for his bust, and Nessa’s portrait. What I suggest is that you should come, tomorrow, 4.30. to tea there, 8 Percy Street, off the Tott. Court Road; where you’d find too I think, that immortal old harridan Ethel Smyth. Next week seems altogether hopeless, and we go away on Thursday.

So what’s to be done?

Yours
Virginia

Forgive this scrawl. My fingers tremble with rage. Day after day thrown into the pit, and all for a woman’s face, or whatever Swift, if it was Swift, said. You see how sitting disintegrates every faculty.

Texas

[]

2409: To Vanessa Bell

Thursday [23 July 1931]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

I’m afraid I cant manage to come tomorrow because I’ve got into such a muddle that I must take a day off in order to deal with horrors.

But I want to lay this question before your wisdom. Do you really think it is worth while for me to go on sitting [to Tomlin]? I’m quite prepared, as I said, to sit until we go away, but I have a feeling that the bust won’t conceivably be finished by then, and that the question of further sittings in the autumn will arise. Now that I’ve tried it for four days I see that it would be sheer idiocy on my part to pretend that I can do this. I dont believe sitting regularly is possible in London, leading the lives we lead, and simply involves both painters and sitters in endless difficulties and a general rush and scramble and chaos and horror. This being so, it seems rather a waste of all our time to go on, even these next few days, which are very full for both you and me. However, as I say I’m ready to come on Monday (we go to the Waterlows on Saturday) if you think on sober consideration that it is worth it. Of course the bust may be on the brink of completion—I only write because I dont want to waste all our time if it should be a waste; I mean if further sittings in the autumn should be necessary.

Here are the measurements of the fireplace. Please understand that I’ve commissioned this and charge me not pauper’s prices but those that befit mature and well grounded citizens. We bought a camera today, in the wildest fashion, and now they say my Kodak can be made perfect for 5/—Would you accept it—? I’m sure its incurable, so there’s not much virtue in the offer.

B

Berg

[]

2410: To Ethel Smyth

Thursday [23 July 1931]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Ethel, C.BE,—I felt very compunctious and rumpaxtious and grom-boolious into the bargain. When I saw you go off, dripping, into the furnace this afternoon—Also red roaring rackety tackety rampagious at the thought of that multi faced Austrian [unidentified] making off with your nest egg, your very small bantam egg, laid with such prodigious labour too, and by such a magnificent dawn fiery cock—I should say hen—How d’you like my new vocabulary? I’m so delighted to be relieved of the Mrs [Alice] Meynell claustrophobia—no word not cut on Miltons tombstone to be used ever again, and all that hard boiled aridity—when my veins run liquid language, and red hot rum. By the way, owing not to you, but to those thridoled and thrummed, danderhopscottery [all these words sic] painters, slap-dander them, we missed our appointment with the Loud speaker man—he has a tip for making every fiddle squeak divinely even at Rodmell—we rushed with violent impetuosity into a camera shop instead and bought a superb Zeiss camera, costing £20, and said to be unrivalled in the portrayal of the human—if mine can be said to be human—face. So I shall send you a whole series of Virginia, and you will say very properly curse the woman for a quick silver mine of vanity—Those will be your very words, and justified too: but also it shall record the noble features of the dripping cat, the uncastrated cat, the fighting indomitable cat, who began this letter by being a cock, then became a hen, and is all the time a Dame of the British Empire

Shame! Shame! on her!

V.

Berg

[]

2411: To V. Sackville-West

[25 July 1931]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Yes, come at 5.30 to sign and return at 7.30 to dine. (That is a poem—a lyric I think) But poetry is far from my thoughts. I have to break a sad piece of news to you.

Potto is dead.

For about a month (you have not been for a month and I date his decline from your last visit) I have watched him failing. First his coat lost lustre; then he refused biscuits; finally gravy. When I asked him what ailed him he sighed, but made no answer. The other day coming unexpectedly into the room, I found him wiping away a tear. He still maintained unbroken silence. Last night it was clear that the end was coming. I sat with him holding his paw in mine and felt the pulse grow feebler. At 7.45 he breathed deeply. I leant over him. I just caught and was able to distinguish the following words—“Tell Mrs Nick that I love her…. She has forgotten me. But I forgive her and …. (here he cd. hardly speak) die … of … a …. broken …. heart!” He then expired.

And so shall I very soon. Just off to spend Sunday with the Waterlows [at Oare, Wiltshire] Oh my God—my Potto.

And Mrs Nick has deserted us.

V.

Oh no I dont suppose we shall dine alone; because L. must see you—must, must, must.

Berg

[]

2412: To Ethel Smyth

Tuesday [28 July 1931]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

A miracle happened.

I turned over all my papers; was in despair; found only a rough first draft; sat down to re-write; gave a sweep of my hand; looked up; there was the carbon copy before me. The mystery remains, about the original; but I sent off the carbons; so saved my sanity. But it’s bad, alas—

Yr V.

Berg

[]

2413: To Ethel Smyth

[30 July 1931]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

No, no—I wasn’t alone—I wasn’t meaning to dine here, but at Boulestins. L. was here. It suddenly occurred to me that we might have our ceremonial dinner—but it was too late to arrange and as L. pointed out, it was an absurd idea, on my part, considering I had left a thousand things to do. I’m sorry I disturbed you with the suggestion, a mere phantasy born of the delicious relief of having done with sitting [to Tomlin] I spent the evening in virtuous preparation for flight today [to Monk’s House].

Berg

[]

2414: To V. Sackville-West

Thursday [30 July 1931]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Poor poor angelic creature—I’m desolated to think of you racked [with lumbago]; not moving, in bed, full of crumbs, with perhaps a book or a glass or your pocket handkerchief out of reach, and Louise [Genoux] banging about next door. Potto’s last wish by the way was that I should send you a jar of caviare to be eaten in his memory—so take it thus, eat. slowly. with tears.

Here’s my half brother on pigs (the 3rd copy he’s sent me).

Life’s a bad business—all hurry and riot and sitting for my bust against my will. I think of you as I sit aching with my eyes blazed out of me in a top light. Not as bad as the lumbago, I say to myself. But almost.

I hear A.P.S. [All Passion Spent] has beaten the Edwardians, and now if its a play, will run on and on. Oh and out of the profits—did I tell you?—I’ve bought a boat and a camera. Such are the blessings you shower. Yes—any day we shall have a spare room: so let me know. Or I will come over. Just off

V.

Berg

[]

2415: To Ethel Smyth

Sunday [2 August 1931]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

But I dont see any possibility of meeting you on the pier. Some sort of meeting, at a station perhaps, could have been arranged for Tuesday had it not been fixed—and Lord Lord why do I hate these necessary formalities so violently?—that we should spend Tuesday at Worthing, in a hotel bedroom, with lots of sugar cakes and almond paste taken from a cupboard. My mother in law—poor old lady—yes, I know all that: she’s been ill; is alone with a maid; hates all other old ladies; sends me large pots of cream by way of a bribe. I’ve been out in my boat though, and had one walk on the downs;—and so can’t I suppose complain. And tonight we develop our first photographs. But I came in from my walk to find 5 people calling. All very very nice; but after those sittings, not to see, not to be seen, is all I ask.

Well goodbye.

If you should have time to write, of course you know an address where letters are welcome. Pen is hopeless.

Berg

[]

2416: To Sibyl Colefax

[4? August 1931]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest Sibyl,

Yes let me know if you’re anywhere near—but what’s the use of coming here? My view’s entirely ruined—galvanised iron sheds, [Asheham] cement works, bungalows. God save us all. Better be in London.

Yrs. V.

Michael Colefax

[]

2417: To V. Sackville-West

Tuesday [4 August 1931]

Monks House, [Rodmell,

Oh dear what a bore, and more, it is that you are still so bad. Are you taking any steps about it—seeing an osteopath, or a surgeon, or having treatment? These sort of questions are a nuisance, I know; but it seems such a wearisome long time, to lie in pain on ones back, occasionally shifting to one elbow. But I suppose Harold and Dotty are on the look out, and it remains for me merely to curse.

I have been slightly knocked up with headache (liver I suppose; a dose of calomel is what I want) and therefore cant suggest at the moment coming; but I’m much better today, and shall be cured by Thursday completely. Let me know if you’d like me to come. We would drive over.

London became the usual treadmill. I dont see much point in London in July without Vita, and Potto expiring. But you’re right—he’s not dead. I brought him here—put him on the terrace—he stirred yesterday—today he’s nibbled on orris root which I happened to have by me.

And its roasting hot. This I hope may filter down your spine and dissolve the knot.

There’s a million things to say, and I have little control of what passes for my pen. What about Mary [Hutchinson]? I had not heard. Nessa seems to think Clive’s eyes rather bad, but so wrapt in mystery, because he wont say whats wrong if indeed he knows, that she cant tell how bad they are. I’m going on the river in my boat and out to sea—no lily ponds for me. We take photographs which develop in a slope of mist undulating from one end of the film to another. Sibyl has invited herself to stay: George and Margaret themselves to lunch: and Ethel whirls round me like a circulating thunderstorm, so far mercifully averted from this actual roof. Leonard somehow has conveyed to her that he does not like her.

Yes yes; I am still unfortunately attached to the woman I never see; the vision in the fishmongers shop. I was thinking of that scene the other night, and wondering if there was a porpoise in a tank, or whether that was merely an emanation of you—When is your play being done? Are you writing it? Is your fortune made? What about Harold and Mosley? But dont write if it hurts. I will write. A spare room is always ready for you

V.

Berg

[]

2418: To V. Sackville-West

Saturday [8 August 1931]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

Well, I’m hugely pleased to hear that you’re up, even if you look like a corkscrew. But please dont do it again. Dont think the antiquity of Sissinghurst requires a mistress like an old fire tongs. Please get your muscle replaced. Go to a doctor. Yes: I know how this annoys you on the lips of Dotty and Harold, but not on my lips, which you love. I cured myself with only one day in bed. And I thought I should be there 3. But I find, after 25 years, that to be still, flat, silent, dark, instantly, is a perfect cure, and might have saved me years, had I done it ages ago. And then I should have written more books. But I rather doubt that one wants more books (witness Hugh, whose new book is being given me by the author in a day or two) But what I was saying was Yes, yes, for Gods sake come. Come on Wednesday not Tuesday, as early as you can, and stay the night—the chaste night—We have a mint of things to say to you—about Eddy for one thing, who says if we will pay his fare he will come to England [from Germany], stay here, and sign his books. Then theres a French duchess—I always talk to you about duchesses—who insults me on the telephone. Clermont-Tonnerre. But I’ve warded her off for the time. As for Katherine [Mansfield], I think you’ve got it very nearly right. We did not ever coalesce; but I was fascinated, and she respectful, only I thought her cheap, and she thought me priggish; and yet we were both compelled to meet simply in order to talk about writing. This we did by the hour. Only then she came out with a swarm of little stories, and I was jealous, no doubt; because they were so praised; but gave up reading them not on that account, but because of their cheap sharp sentimentality, which was all the worse, I thought, because she had, as you say, the zest and the resonance—I mean she could permeate one with her quality; and if one felt this cheap scent in it, it reeked in ones nostrils. But I must read her some day. Also, she was for ever pursued by her dying; and had to press on through stages that should have taken years in ten minutes—so that our relationship became unreal also. And there was Murry squirming and oozing a sort of thick motor oil in the background—dinners with them were about the most unpleasnt exhibitions, humanly speaking, I’ve ever been to. But the fact remains—I mean, that she had a quality I adored, and needed; I think her sharpness and reality—her having knocked about with prostitutes and so on, whereas I had always been respectable—was the thing I wanted then. I dream of her often—now thats an odd reflection—how one’s relation with a person seems to be continued after death in dreams, and with some odd reality too.

But why be ashamed of wanting a garden and poets? Whats there to be proud of in Fleet Street, and daily papers.

I assure you—only the post is going and I have no time to think what it is that I assure you of—that one walk here fills my poor old head with a sense of such natural happiness as I never get a whole summer in London. And you, being a poet—O how I wish I were!—you being a poet have no use for the odds and ends, the husks, the fragments, the general confusion and vibration which I can make myself believe I find in London. If I were you, I would lie on a bank all day and make one phrase—for Virginia.

Potto is distinctly better.

V.

Berg

[]

2419: To Ethel Smyth

Monday 10th August [1931]

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

Oh yes, my dear Ethel, I did notice that there were no white envelopes on my plate with your rapid masterly hand—but I said to myself, with a sigh, she is otherwise engaged. Why should she think of me? This beautifully modest beginning to the day has been of great service to me spiritually. For the rest—let me see: headache; bed; (too much of my mother in laws cream affecting the liver is it?—the spleen?) up: boating; down tide at a rush; meeting 22 embattled swans; necks stretched hissing; towing boat home;—one or two walks; some callers; photography; developing at night in a cavern hung with red calico—hence many films spoilt; but some are tremendously ugly and very like;—I am jotting these facts down to soothe my own agitation; now that I have read, two minutes ago, my first batch of proofs: so dont be too hard on me. No, I swear its worse being a writer than an operatician; anyhow you can say its love, or the tenor has a cough; or the conductor, having copulated 10 times in one night with the soprano is not up, now, to the scratch. Whereas faced by cold print which can neither cough nor copulate, what excuse is there for the Waves? That is what I ask myself this cold rainy morning, sitting out here in the Lodge, with the lively prospect of people to tea. And from the lilies and lavender of Woking will come no answer. What a farce letter writing is to be sure! Why do we want letters? All I say is false. I mean, so much has to be left out that what remains is like the finger print in salt of some huge pachydermatous quadruped which no private house could contain. My brain is rather on the hop; I rip and skip: haven’t settled, as I should, to read all Donne, all Sidney, all a writer you’ve never heard of called Lord Brooke. When I’ve had my last proof I pray God that I may recover my balance; and settle in and wrap myself in philosophy against the winter and all its blows.

Well, you say we shan’t meet? Why, if you’re at Rottingdean dont you—but hush! I feel myself on the verge of one of those obtusenesses which my psychological blindness so often produces. I know so little what people feel, want, are: For example, are you enjoying life? Are you happy? What is your opinion of the Wreckers? And Virginia; and Leonard; and life as a whole? Also is the Duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre a friend of yours? Because I dont wish her to be a friend of mine. So please Ethel write and explain everything.

V.

Berg

[]

2420: To Ethel Smyth

Sunday [16 August 1931]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

That all seems to me perfectly straightforward and clear—the Synopsis I mean. I dont see that even I, who boggle at plots, could get this one wrong. Of course, as you say, its the bones of a mammoth merely—but I dont find any essential, say a rib or a spine missing. Only the brain; which will be there when the orchestra starts the first bar.

I see you ask for a definite answer about the 21st-24th. If thats so, I think it had better be alas, utterly impossible: for these reasons: on Friday I go to London for the day (you dont believe it, but I always go up when L goes, about every 10 days). On Saturday we may have our partner, Lehmann, whom we have to take to Charleston on Sunday. On Monday my mother in law comes to lunch and stays, I suppose, till 6 or 7. It is possible, but that I cant know yet, that Lehmann cant come: he’s abroad. There remains London, Lunch on Friday. But I daresay thats no good to you: anyhow Lunch is a horrid meal—I offer it vaguely, desperately. You, who are so expert at organisation, can decide whats possible, what impossible—I give it up.

I sent on your letter to Lady Craik—it seemed to me a brilliant portrait of Virginia Woolf, a lady I respect, but do not like; and have nothing much to do with. And then one says one ‘knows’ people! That austere priestess, who only wants one human being, is half of one,—a recluse—a fanatic—thats the woman you think it worth coming to see! Thats the woman you do see. But my dear Ethel, why not sit at Maurice Baring’s window and look at the marine view, or the noble and immaculate downs?—why trouble to touch such a frigidified frump—Lord! I exclaim again (not for the first time) what a farce friendship is! But I’m delighted that this version should be current, because the more people think V.W. a statue, chill, cold, immaculate, inapproachable,—a hermit who only sees her own set—the more free I myself am to be myself. And then I need not see Lady Craik. I’ve not had my boat out all this week—But I’ve taken some photographs and am now coiled in a desperate grapple with the last pages of that wearysome book: I shall finish tomorrow; but must then go through all the corrections again, copy into a second proof, and finally get a revision of one chapter gone wrong. So excuse, pity, and lend the shade of your august umbrella to this unfortunate. I gather your life as an artist is now all triumph and jubilee. But then you feel sure of the Wreckers—a thing I’ve never felt with my work. And why does one do them, these works? That’s a question I put myself as I reach page 327. or shall do when I reach it tomorrow morning.

And if friendship is futile, and letters futile, and art futile, what remains? Well for me at the moment a walk on the downs. So goodbye and let me know about plans.

V.

Berg

[]

2421: To Ethel Smyth

Tuesday [18 August 1931]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Another suggestion.

My mother in law is not coming on Monday. How would it be if you came here on Monday? instead of lunching in London—which would be a rush, and full of interruptions. L. says there is a bus which leaves Brighton at 2.35. passes Rottingdean somewhere about 5 to 3; and reaches Rodmell at 20 to 4. We could have a quiet tea and talk in the garden here, till you want to catch your train at Lewes. If this is not possible, we will stick to the lunch in London: in which case will you arrive at 52 at 1.

Let me know which: remembering that I leave here on Friday before the morning post.

You must verify the arrival of the Bus at Rotting⁠[dean]: But it passes through Rodmell anyhow

Berg

[]

2422: To V. Sackville-West

Thursday [20 August 1931]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex:]

Gosh yes—very natty and sporty she looks to be sure—just your style Mine is the very opposite—But to speak seriously, God knows you’re right, and I shant come, and you’ll find another, and forget me, and make excuses when we meet, and I shall be driven to the rough Coast of the Wreckers [Ethel]: Anyhow, you must, as they say, make your plans without considering me.

I dont think there’s the ghost of a chance of my coming. (I’ve reconnoitred, and so it seems but no doubt I exaggerate my own importance)

But—I want answers:

(1) have you seen the osteopath?

(2) What did he say?

(3) Are you smoking?

(4) How’s your jumping heart?

Finally, please put up in a penny envelope and send Harold’s pamphlet. As I’m always being cross-examined, and put to the block.

And its a gale and a hurricane—the trees are being torn up by their roots—and we’re off to Charleston to drink champagne. No doubt this is my last letter. Sibyl came, Ethels coming: Shall I see you? before you elope?

Eddy’s not coming Thank God.

Berg

[]

2423: To V. Sackville-West

Sunday [30 August 1931]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Well, you old wretch, what a skin flint you are with your letters. Here’s poor Virginia in bed, and Potto too. The headaches wont let me out of their clutches (curse this intolerable gold pen—) so I am taking a week in bed. Then I shall be in robust health. But I’ve promised to keep in a state of lethargy the next week. What about the week after?—I should think the 5th September week? Couldn’t we meet one day about the middle? We might come to Sht.—too many S’s in that word [Sissinghurst]—and go to the Easdales. Let me know—and dont be so stingy with your words—take example by Hugh [Walpole]—I feel like a tea cup—I mean I feel very small, broken, lying under a tap—a tap that never stops—a lukewarm tap, a tap that one cant hold in, stop, take count of—And you sit under it too, I suppose; and what we poor tea cups are to say to Hugh, except that he’d better send for the plumber, I dont know.

What books are there, not by Hugh? I feel as if the whole of English literature were submerged by Hugh. All is wet, dripping; not a frog can find as much as a dry leaf to sit on.

Eddy’s [Sackville West] coming—oh yes—if we’ll pay half his fare [from Germany] and [Count Harry] Kessler the other. How like him! Mercifully, I’ve put off all other visitors for the time being; but had a stormy visit from Ethel, and she dragged me to the top of the downs in a hurricane, talking about God and the Wreckers. Which is which? I dont know. The truth is, desire, gone mouldy, is not a sweet smell; venerable though the vessel of lust may be. I respect her—yes—I’ve said that before: but dont like the smell of old lust. So you’ve found someone [Evelyn Irons] sweet and pure to sit with under live Oleanders by the Bay of Biscay is it? But you’ll never find anyone you like as much as me; because I’m so clever, so good, so pure—so extremely interesting. There! I’m now going to shut my eyes and think about my being so interesting. L. says Kessler’s misprint will increase the value of the books. Did you see high praise of Sissingt (the poem) in the Manchester Guardian? Will Harold be Lord Sh? Is the New Party—no, I wont go on. Please write a long long letter, because I’m in bed; and if you have a copy of Harold’s latest LEND it me. I cant remember the name. Talks I mean. And the Pamphlet. Find—well, just say, in so many thousand words, why you love me.

V.

Berg

[]

2424: To Ethel Smyth

Sunday [30 August 1931]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

The photographs are now being printed. I’ll put them in, if L. has done them. The negatives look good. I cant write, because I’m in bed: and shall be for a few days (headache) hence gold pen; hence general imbecility. The parcel came safe. Wonderful woman! I’ve got a lot to say about God, but won’t attempt it at the moment And I expect you’ve no time to write. Otherwise letters would be acceptable.

Curse this pen.

V.

Berg

[]

2425: To Vanessa Bell

Wednesday [2 September 1931]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

September cheque enclosed.

Nelly Cecil has written to ask if we can go there before Sept. 17th—bringing Sonia—who is I suppose a form of Angelica. What am I to say? Or she suggests coming here, but I think it would be better to go there [Chelwood Gate]. Let me know.

B.

The stuff has come and the covers are being made.

Berg

[]

2426: To Ethel Smyth

Wednesday 2nd Sept [1931]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Well, here are the prints. What d’you think of them? I think one of them magnificent, but wont say which, as you may hate them all. Why did you tear up the Wreckers letter? I’ve often told you, letters are a way of penetrating for those who are, like me, blind into the dark damp deeps of your soul. No, the headache isnt the period—how you love periods, w.c’s, excrement of all sorts—it interests me—I’m going into that in my life of you—not the period but God. I was struck with a brilliant idea; wrote and wrote; he smashed his fist on my head. Lord, I said, I will write. Then he altogether took from me the power of adding word to word. So I went to bed. A head like wood, instead of one like fire—thats your God. What he likes is to take away, to destroy, to give pain for pleasure—L. says if I’ll stay in bed till Monday God will let me alone for another 6 months. But no: bed, with Ivanhoe and Hugh Walpole [Judith Paris] for my companions, bed with God for my protector, is intolerable. I’m up, but dont dare go to the Lodge and write. That little inspiration therefore is doomed. I shall never catch it again. And it rains and what is life without writing?

I was highly amused, and maliciously pleased by your letter, saying how you had never seen me in such good condition—no social, sober, cheerful and healthy (I mean spiritually, not bodily). Lord Ethel—that day you came I was so bothered, so irritated in a rage about everything (unreasonably as it turned out) that I almost put you off; thought I could never sit an afternoon of talk out; had a mind, on top of the down to explain and excuse; almost write to ask pardon for having given you such a wretched time. And you saw nothing! Then you talk of your insight—then you wonder that I dont ‘want’ more than 2 people—Here we sit in dark tunnels, tapping on the wall—Thats friendship—thats communication. But do tell me why that visit was so momentous—I thought you must be bored, disillusioned, and caustic though restrained. But of course (forgive this leap) you have Style. Never a postcard without it. Its the flight and droop of the sentence; where the accent falls, the full stop. Ah, how beautifully you wing your way from phrase to phrase! When one feels something remote, separate, pure, thats style. And, I think, almost the only permanent quality, the one that survives, that satisfies. And now why was that visit momentous?

V.

Berg

[]

2427: To Lyn Irvine

Sept 2nd [1931]

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

Dear Lyn,

Its disgraceful of me not to have written before. My excuse is that I’ve been in bed—too many proofs to correct, too much talking, too many headaches. But I’m recovered.

The 26th will suit us very well. If you’ll let me know your trains or buses later, I expect we could arrange something with the car. I dont for a moment think it will be fine. My boat lies swamped in the garden, and I’ve only used her twice. But she is great fun—one blows her up like an airball and she can be used also for a bed. But most days I stump across the fields in heavy boots—Lord what a summer! But like you we spend hours in violent political argument.

Yours
Virginia Woolf

I hope this will reach you, but I daresay you’ve left Norfolk by now.

Sussex (copy)

[]

2428: To Ethel Smyth

Friday [4 September 1931]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Very glad you like one of the pictures. I think I know which—If you want it reproduced, let us know, and we will get a special print done.

No no no—you cant ride off like that—thinking yourself such a fine psychologist—Your words (here’s your letter before me) are: “face so smooth and hard-fleshed, so un-harried, such condition—dearest V. I was glad to see this and to feel your spirit is in similar condition" when my spirit was torn, rasped, distracted. A fig for your psychology, I say!

Yr V.

No: you’re a completely befogged and besotted owl—One came into the orchard yesterday and let L. catch him. He—a she—was brought to me, and I said instantly “Thats Ethel” The creature looks wise I admit, and doubtless thinks itself omniscient.

Berg

[]

2429: To Ethel Smyth

Sunday [6 September 1931]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Well, well, Ethel dear, have it your own way. Be a miracle of psychological acuteness if you will, only why, if you saw all that you say you saw, you didn’t catch the early train but stayed on to dinner I cant think—Unless indeed, as I expect, the fascination of the new born babe detained you—I think I know what the infant is, and shall wait its development with silent expectation. As for your brilliant medical diagnosis—that headache is caused by inspiration—why then did I have two fairly complete attacks earlier in the month when inspiration was miles away—if inspiration it was, Or do headaches indicate the distant approach of that delightful state?—Anyhow, inspiration has gone, and I doubt that it will ever occur again—a mercy to be thankful for.

But here I come to a serious statement—I mean one I intend to abide by—never again to mention the subject of my health to you. If I’m stricken by cancer, typhoid or hydrophobia, you will no doubt be notified on a postcard by Leonard. And this leads to a request, which I’ve meant to make this many a day,—please in future dont speak of my health to me, or say if I’m looking well, or ill, or tell me what other people say. In short, from today (Sunday 6th Sept) I want to ignore the whole subject of my health with you, for very good reasons which I needn’t go into: and hope for your co-operation.

What an amiable donkey that woman Holtby is! Why doesn’t she send the biography straight to me? I told her not to consult my friends; after all I’m the chief authority—you I’m sure, know nothing of the facts—who taught me Greek and so on—Please tell her—or shall I?—to let me have the chapter and I’ll make all corrections. Why she should impute such delicacy to me I cant imagine. Short of being pilloried by that bloody bounder Beaton I dont mind what people write about my ‘life’—indeed should be immensely amused and interested by their interpretation. And she is far too kind, gentle, and well meaning to hurt a hair on the hinder leg of a fly.

Well, its not very cheerful here. Floods and tempests: Downs gone out like wet paper. And my poor brother in law Clive Bell steadily getting blinder. All the oculists—even the Swiss—seem helpless, and one doesn’t dare even to show sympathy, though to see him trying to see this and then that and giving it up as a bad job is enough to wring even my abnormally unsympathetic heart. And his love [Mary Hutchinson] (the old one) has had a bad operation, but is recovering; and shall one try, as she hints, to help a reconciliation? If he’s to be blind—my God, Ethel, when his only (non-sensual) pleasures are looking at pictures and reading 6 hours a day—whats one to say of the divine providence that inflicts this on him with at least 20 years of life before him? Its for you Christians to solve these little problems.

Let me see Holtby: and what shall I do about the photograph?

Yr V.

Berg

[]

2430: To V. Sackville-West

Monday [7 September 193 r]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Could we come to lunch at Long Barn on Tuesday 15th about one?—and go on to Easedales afterwards?

(how you must hate this phrase—Could we come—)

We feel that we ought to advise Dotty and suggest that she should come too.

I’ve had a divine week of doing nothing and seeing no one, and am now deep in Lady [Anne] Clifford. Headaches cured I think. Dont let Ethel drag you to the top of the Tower; and be discreet—if as I think you are lunching with her.

No: Harold never sent his pamphlet. John [Lehmann] is here, very nice, pink, fresh, enthusiastic, and I must take him to the river.

I should very much like to see you, alone, before you go off—where, with whom? O Lord, shall I ever see you again when you’ve been off?

And what about the winter?

Dont let Ethel break your back again, with telling you the story of the Wreckers, from the beginning, as you climb the Tower.

Let me know about Tuesday lunch.

It’s actually hot today

V.

If you have the Ellen Terry Shaw letters would you LEND them to me?

Berg

[]

2431: To Ethel Smyth

Tuesday [8 September 1931]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

L. says much the best thing would be for you to send the negative to the printer who is making the reproduction. So here it is. Will you let us have it back when done with?

No, I didn’t mean you were “never to tell me I think you look well”—but Lord! its hopeless to make you see what I did mean so I give it up, from this day forwards. But I too have a child growing in me, and this incident is the sort of thing it battens on—so all’s for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

[Winifred] Holtby’s written me a long list of enquiries—I’m sorry she bothered you. Haste for post

V.

Berg

[]

2432: To V. Sackville-West

[10 September 1931]

Monks House [Rodmell, Sussex]

Yes much against my will, L. insisted upon sending an advance copy [of The Waves] to the Book Society. But what did Hugh say? Damned it utterly I suppose from your silence on this head. Please tell me. You know how I mind even the workhouse cats view, vain as I am. But I’m not as vain as Ethel, by God.

We shall meet on Tuesday for a few flurried moments.

And did Hugh think it hopeless? (Potto asks this)

V.

Berg

[]

2433: To Vanessa Bell

Thursday [10 September 1931]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

Yes I’m glad to find you have some relics of common sense still knocking about in your distracted head. I dont know what to say about the tiles—I’m getting attached to them, but think perhaps the proportions are wrong. What did Duncan think? He was found looking at them. We can settle when we meet. Will you bring the children to tea on Sunday, and will as many grown up come as like, and play bowls? We’re off to London tomorrow. I’ve arranged with George.

God!—what a crowd we live in! even I, who dont let friends sleep, if I can help it. I hope Goldie [Lowes Dickinson] and John [Lehmann] are gone. I’m seriously thinking of buying a house in Dorset or Cumberland—theyre going to build endless villas here. And then retire, and never speak, except to you and Angelica ever again.

But I shall expect you to Sunday tea. Haste

B.

Berg

[]

2434: To John Lehmann

Friday [11 September 1931]

52 Tavistock Square, [W.C.1]

Dear John,

Lord! To think you are reading The Waves! Now I shall be immensely interested to have your opinion—brutally and frankly—so please write it down for me. At present it seems to me a complete failure. And please don’t tell anyone you’ve read it, because I’m already pestered with demands for copies, Hugh Walpole apparently having said that it’s out.

By the way, are you nervous about your book? What d’you feel about critics? I meant to ask you about all that; but was swept aside by the tide of life at Rodmell. We enjoyed having you enormously, though in such a tempest of kittens and photographs. Some of them (the photographs) are good; not your portrait though. I’ll send them.

I’m waiting for L. to finish the eternal conversation with Miss B. (whose language has been purity itself) and then, thank God, we’re off.

Yours,
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

2435: To V. Sackville-West

Tuesday [15 September 1931]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

Oh my God Vita, how fearfully depressed I was getting your wire. I think you’d have been touched. Was it sinus that gave you a throat [tonsillitis]? I rather suspect the damp there—the sweat of ages in those bricks. I say, cd. you possibly let me know instantly on a card how you are? And how are we ever to meet now?

I dont know when The Waves will come out. If there’s a General Election L. says it must be put off till November—otherwise October I suppose. But you know I honestly think it a complete failure—only a very interesting (to me) experiment. And why one should spend 18 months writing what wont interest any one, God knows. I’m astonished at the oddity of one’s own psychology as a writer.

I’m greatly relieved that you think J⁠[udith]. Paris damned. I found it so bad, so hatefully and completely bad, that I had persuaded myself that it was in fact a work of genius; I being now blind of both eyes to all the true merits of fiction. Now however that you, whose eyes are wide and bright, agree, I feel once more some return of confidence—I mean that it is absolutely bad. Not that that makes it any the easier to write to him [Hugh Walpole]—as I must, O Lord; for he knows I’ve read it.

Now, as you see I am scribbling, all trembling with hurry, because that accursed car is at the door, and we must be off to the Easedales—

But I’ve had tonsilitis—doesn’t that make one immune? Not that you’d wish to see me today

Please say what your temp. is and how you are.

Please Vita do this. I’m a devil for imagining disaster

Yr V.

Berg

[]

2436: To V. Sackville-West

Wednesday [16 September 1931]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

This is just by way of a kind enquiry—not that I shall get an answer. Tonsilitis is a very painful disease, as I remember it, and one’s throat is spotted with white spots—isn’t that it? And to lie in bed today—what a crime—on the part of God, I mean, for what you’ve done to deserve it I dont know, poor creature. And it would have been such fun, lunching with you—I daresay we should have had mushrooms on toast—and then going to the Easdales. You cant imagine anything more what one expected—a lavish hospitable sloppy mother—a great spread for tea—a small old tumble-down house in an orchard. The son writes music in one room. Joan writes poetry in another. They have meals whereever it takes their fancy—sometimes in the kitchen, sometimes in the bedroom. As it turned out Mrs E. is the sister of a bad painter called Adeney—thats where the art comes from, and was in some dubious relation to an old prophet called Hale White who lived at Groombridge. She had a drawer of his letters which she wanted me to take off and read. She had endless odds and ends of old stuff and bead mats and early Victorian umbrellas—Joan is the mystery—She looks like a chocolate box flapper, talks like one, about how lovely the lilies are, and the sunset, and the dog, and the cat, and yet produces those strange poems. I daresay she’s hypnotised by the man servant, a half wit, who does all the housework and was dressed in seedy black I think for your benefit. They were terribly disappointed that you didn’t come, and had laid in five cakes and some biscuits, all for you, made by the seedy man. When they gave a birthday party he implored them not to bother about lamps, as he would fill the garden with glow worms. He went out with a huge basket into the woods and returned with two—which did their best, but what are two glow worms in a whole garden, Mrs Woolf, Mrs Easedale asked me,

—here I was called out to play bowls, and now continue next day over the fire, the rain pouring of course; and I dont so much pity you in bed. (But I hope you’re up) There’s nothing more to say about the Easedales, except that a young musician there confirmed me that Ethel has infinite competence and not a note of music in her. So think of me, who hate opera sitting under 5 hours of Wreckers [on 14 October] with her beside me, I suppose. Another row, I make no doubt.

What about your French tour [with Evelyn Irons]? Dotty said something, but I was immorally discreet, and said nothing—discreet without reason I expect. O I’m in such a rage—a serious rage that caught me by the throat and constricted my heart—They’ve sold the Down above the village, and its all to go in plots, and two bungalows are already being run up, and its all ruined for ever and ever. What are we to do? I would sell instantly: but dont tell L. this. I dont see any point in living here in a suburb of Brighton. I dont suppose there is any pleasure in my life like walking alone in the country: no, I’m not exaggerating. And then to see the downs spoilt—by an infernal labour candidate—his blasted villa will be there for all time—My God, Vita, I wish one hadn’t picked this age to live in: I hate my kind. And you’ve fallen to the blandishments of Benn. I’m sorry, selfishly for the press; and his oiliness made me wish him none but the ignominious tribes of Walpoles and Storm Jamesons—not you—in his gizzard. Another line, please, to say how you are. Tomorrow George and Margaret [Duckworth] come over—God knows why, and she’s so lame she cant get up stairs, and he so fat he lies where he falls, like a sheep, and will fall. Dotty was as nice as could be, showing her grounds surrounded by dappled spotted, brindled dogs. That reminds me—have you a photograph of Henry? I ask for a special reason, connected with a little escapade [Flush] by means of wh. I hope to stem the ruin we shall suffer from the failure of The Waves.

This is the worst publishing season on record. No bookseller dares buy. So I’m glad Passion is spent.

Berg

[]

2437: To John Lehmann

Sept 17th [1931]

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

Dear John,

I’m most grateful to you for your letter. It made me happy all yesterday. I had become firmly convinced that the Waves was a failure, in the sense that it wouldn’t convey anything to anybody. And now you’ve been so perceptive, and gone so much further and deeper in understanding my drift than I thought possible that I’m immensely relieved.

Not that I expect many such readers. And I’m rather dismayed to hear we’ve printed 7,000: for I’m sure 3,000 will feed all appetities; and then the other 4 will sit round me like decaying corpses for ever in the Studio (I cleared up the table—for you, not the corpses). I agree that it’s very difficult—bristling with horrors, though I’ve never worked so hard as I did here, to smooth them out. But it was, I think, a difficult attempt—I wanted to eliminate all detail; all fact; and analysis; and my self; and yet not be frigid and rhetorical; and not monotonous (which I am) and to keep the swiftness of prose and yet strike one or two sparks, and not write poetical, but purebred prose, and keep the elements of character; and yet that there should be many characters, and only one; and also an infinity, a background behind—well, I admit I was biting off too much.

But enough, as the poets say. If I live another 50 years I think I shall put this method to some use, but as in 50 years I shall be under the pond, with the gold fish swimming over me, I daresay these vast ambitions are a little foolish, and will ruin the press. That reminds me—I think your idea of a Letter most brilliant—To a Young Poet? because I’m seething with immature and ill considered and wild and annoying ideas about prose and poetry. So lend me your name—(and let me sketch a character of you by way of frontispiece)—and then I’ll pour forth all I can think of about you young, and we old, and novels—how damned they are—and poetry, how dead. But I must take a look into the subject, and you must reply, ‘To an old novelist’—I must read Auden, whom I’ve not read, and Spender (his novel I swear I will tackle tonight). The whole subject is crying out for letters—flocks, volleys, of them, from every side. Why not get Spender and Auden and Day Lewis to join in? But you must go to Miss Belsher, and I must go to my luncheon.

This is only a scribble to say how grateful I am for your letter.

Yr
Virginia Woolf

John Lehmann

[]

2438: To Ethel Smyth

Friday [18th September 1931]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

I admit I’ve been a wretch about writing, but O how I hate writing and the futility of all human intercourse has never seemed to me greater and these feeble little efforts to patch up whats called understanding—how idiotic. And, these being my views on the universe, letters from all sides accumulate, and as I look at them unanswered, I put off writing again and again. What is there to be said in writing? Except facts. That is, many thanks for the oculists proper name—Clive is in Venice, and I shant see him till mid-October, I suppose: and will then try tactfully to tell him of this man. Only he’s as sensitive as can be about his eyes—poor man. I imagine you living in a storm and hurricane—rather exciting and overwhelming I imagine—and so unlike anything thats ever happened in my life. Here we go on eternally ‘seeing’ and being seen. At this moment I write at a gallop, expecting my seducing half brother and his wife [George and Margaret Duckworth]—why they drive 30 miles to see us I cant imagine. And the drawing room’s all of a litter, and we sit down 7 to tea, and there’s not enough tea spoons, and we shall talk about his prize pigs; and Margaret will wonder how George ever put up with such half sisters so long.

I shall slip into a back seat somewhere one of these nights—not the first night—at Covent Garden and absorb silently. The gallery’s what I like where one needn’t dress. No; Waves postponed; anyhow till 8th perhaps longer. Dont read it. Dont lets indulge in these high flown remarks about genius; lets settle down in silence to think ourselves very small beer indeed—which is what I am. And here’s George.

V.

Berg

[]

2439: To V. Sackville-West

Wednesday [30 September 1931]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

Shall you be [broad]⁠casting on Monday and will you come and see me?—or are you off with Dotty somewhere? I haven’t the remotest idea.

We come back—Lord knows why we do these things—tomorrow, for L. to broadcast, and I must now tear up ten dozen letters (not from you) and all the rest of it. Lord, how I hate the thought of London, except that I like seeing some people—Who? not Eddy, by the way.

V.

Please give Dotty my love—I was sorry about her—her mother. O yes—I understand about yours [Lady Sackville].

Berg

[]

2440: To John Lehmann

Wednesday [30 September 1931]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dear John,

I am a wretch not to have thanked you for your book [A Garden Revisited], which will not only stand on my shelf as you suggest but lie beneath the scrutiny of my aged eyes. I want to read it with some attention, and also Auden [Poems, 1930], and Day Lewis [From Feathers to Iron]—I dont suppose there’s anything for me to say about modern poetry, but I daresay I shall plunge, at your bidding. We must talk about it. I dont know what your difficulties are. Why should poetry be dead? etc. etc. But I wont run on, because then I shall spurt out my wild theories, and I’ve had not a moment to read for days and days. Everybody in the whole world has been here—the Easedales in cartloads etc. etc. And now I should be packing. And then we go back. And then there’ll be all the books fluttering about us; alas: its going to be a bad season I’m afraid.

But I want to go into the question of poetry all the same. I’m stuck in Spender’s novel, by the way.

Yrs ever
V.W.

John Lehmann

[]

2441: To Ethel Smyth

Thursday [1 October 1931]

52 T.[avistock S.[quare, W.C.1]

Well, here we are back again, but I confess in a vile temper, complete confusion and rage at leaving Rodmell this fine day. O we had so many people last week end—unknown, undesired, unattractive—why I can’t think. And now, as L. has to broadcast every Thursday night, here we are in this grime, in this chaos (I’ve not unpacked) in this sordidity and squalor, and I’ve only to put my nose out of doors to run into a friend—no, an acquaintance, who wants me to write an article—as if I wanted to write articles—for this cursed paper by Wednesday. Being so irretrievably humane I half said I would—And to put all this against my downs and marsh and slipping home, alone, and lighting a wood fire, and hearing an owl or two in the elm tree.

By the way; was the Wreckers good, on Thursday? I only caught the roar at the end [of the broadcast], as our local Colonel of course made electric light that evening, and all your singers and choruses sounded like bees in a swarm. Indeed I shut off in a fury. But I suppose they’ll now do it in May with all the court there in their diamonds. I shall slip into a back seat if I possibly can on the 14th. But then I’m in such a rage. So I go on raging; but if you could see the litter in this room—all the letters I’ve not answered—the MSs. I’ve not read, and the grime, after Rodmell—I repeat, why does one waste the few fine October Evenings that remain in going off at 7.30 to Savoy Hill to listen to L broadcasting about democracy. Do I believe in the future of the human race? Do I care if it perishes or survives? And there’s Colefax—I mean I see peeping out of the slag heap one of her invitations, unanswered. Please forgive these groans. Its time to be off to broadcast now. And I suppose you sit triumphant answering letters by the score, and receiving laurel wreaths, harps made of chrysanthemums, or whatever great and successful composers like Ethel

No room V.

Berg

[]

2442: To Ethel Smyth

Saturday [3 October 1931]

Typewritten

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Ah my dear Ethel, how you would have laughed yesterday—its on these occasions I most vividly recall you, when theres something ridiculous in my situation, for as I said I’m making a new image of you, bearing a fresh child; and she—the new Ethel is a sardonic, brutal, truculent, savage, an irredeemable lover of reality in its least flattering guise—but shes not finished yet, my new Ethel—but how you would have laughed I thought. I was drawing in after a violent helter skelter day, assuming some control of my faculties, about six; then the door opens. Then push in, shuffling past Nelly who did her best to bar their way, three small shabby dowdy, speechless figures; one, an old apelike man; two young women with shiny noses, cheap shoes, and unkempt hands. Holding out an envelope the man approached and there I found myself addressed by a poet I hardly know called Blunden and asked to receive Mademoiselle Rousel, who is writing about my books. They stood round shuffling in silence uneasy guilty as I read. Thus assaulted what could I do but say Sit down. What can I do? What do you want of me? Dead silence. More shuffling, The grey monkey old man then made a very much impeded speech to the effect that he is an elementary school teacher in Kent, but directly descended from the author of Ralph Roister Doister, the first English comedy, who as I doubtless knew was called Udall, as he was. Upon which I bowed. “And therefore with this blood in our veins, he said, we tend to try as a family not very successfully, far from it, to write. My daughter here, she writes, stories for children, as yet unpublished. Yes, Mr Udall, I said. And what can I do? And this young lady, Mademoiselle—she lets me call her Susanne, pointing to the other silent sweating damsel, who had not yet broken silence but wrung her red hands almost incessantly, she is a guest of ours, for my sister, who—for were all a bit eccentric—runs a boarding house in the old mansion where Sir Harry Vane was born she—Susanne she lets me call her—stays with my sister,—that is my sister, who’s eccentric like the rest of us, desires to encourage what I may call reciprocity among the young of different nations. How it strikes you, Mrs Woolf, I dont know; but as an elementary school teacher, (Ive tried to write but failed, owing I may flatter myself to the fact that my ideas arent other peoples)—I say Mrs Woolf, we need reciprocity to understand the viewpoint of other races. So Susanne as she lets me call her is staying with us—that is with my sister. And so Mr Blunden, who was taught by my sister—she used to keep a school—he told us, very kindly being interested in Susanne, to call on you—since the young lady who’s at the Sorbonne has been studying—which book?—oh Mrs Dalloway—and wants to ask you—now Susanne, what are the questions you want to ask Mrs Woolf?”

“Ive forgotten, Madame; said Susanne, wringing her red bald hands. “I dont rightly know now what I want to ask you—except—can you tell me perhaps, do you differ in your views from other people? And what—could you tell me quite simply—what is your—its a hard word to pronounce—pheel—o—so—phy—That is could I ask you to explain as Mr Blunden has so kindly introduced us what why that is you have written your books?” Here she broke down twisting her shabby shoes like an eel on the mat. “That is, said Mr Udall, she wants to ask you madam, if you had any reform to advocate in writing these books, which I understand attempt rather a different viewpoint from our English classics. Now I in my plays had an end in view: I am by nature a reformer Madam, though through circumstances I am an elementary school teacher in Kent. Now if you could very kindly put into a simple form what was your intention in writing let me see the Walk to the Light house—thats I think what this young lady would like to ask you.”

“Our students said Susanne, do not know English well; but would gladly know madame, have you any meaning in what you write, could I tell them simply, I should be so very grateful, but alas, I am so upset at coming into your presence, that what I was asked to say, I cannot now remember, I do not speak well. I do not explain myself. It is a thesis I am writing upon English fiction; and Mr Blunden says you have written English fiction—with a philosophy—which reminds me, here broke in the small apelike man, to ask, could you help me with your advice about my daughter here, Amy (pointing to the other silent shiny girl who had so far made no remark whatsoever) She’s turned twenty; and a hard worker, Mrs Woolf, I may say; if shy. But she too is set upon writing—for so we all are in our family, being the descendants of Nicholas Udall who wrote our first English comedy—which you might have seen acted three years ago by the students at Highgate college—And we cant, having a boy coming on, let her write, save she makes a living. Thats what we’d like to ask you to tell us—could Amy—thats my daughter—make a living and still have her mornings free for writing? And could she in your opinion do so in some circle that involved the society of educated literary people, since I hear society is now so important in a literary career. Thats what we want to ask you; and also, Susanne here would like to know so as to put it before the students at the Sorbonne, have you any special meaning when you write your books?

I assure you, so we went on from six to seven thirty.

[in Virginias handwriting:]

Sunday.

I dont know why I’ve scribbled all this—however, let it be. About Wednesday, I think 4.30 would be safer than 4, as I have to go out. Lord! do you really read my letters to your friends—to Elizabeth [Williamson], whom I dont know? Well, in future they shall be of a primness, of an exemplary decorum suited to the company you keep. Every t crossed, every i dotted.

V.

Berg

[]

2443: To William Plomer

Sunday [4 October 1931]

52 Tavistock Sqre., [W.C.1]

Dear William,

We are back, and should like it so much if you could dine with us on Thursday 15th, at the odd hour of 8.15, but Leonard is broadcasting. An admirer of Sado, Bonamy Dobrée is coming—I don’t know if you like meeting admirers. You seem to have many, judging from reviews.

Yours
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

2444: To V. Sackville-West

Thursday [8 October 1931]

52 T.[avistock] S[quare, W.C.1]

Why do I only get a letter from you today, Thursday, which was written on Monday? God knows. Yes, do come on Monday, afternoon, let me know what time—I’ve a mint of things to say, but I cant remember any of them at the moment. Just off to buy a large house in Bedford Square—I’m sending The Waves, but I dont much think you’ll like it. Please congratulate Harold warmly upon the Book page in Action—especially the novel reviews. First copy just come in. Let me know about Monday. Dont talk of Ravenna—it makes me ill to think of it.

V.

We go down to Rodmell, thank the Lord, tomorrow till Sunday night. O to escape from people! And the ceiling in my studio has fallen and I’ve nowhere to sit and all Freud’s works were ruined and—and—and—….

Or, what about lunch on Monday, 1.

Berg

[]

2445: To Vanessa Bell

8th Oct. [1931]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

As I consider you entirely responsible for this unfortunate book, here is a copy. But you needn’t read it.

Berg

[]

2446: To Ethel Smyth

Thursday [8 October 1931]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

My word, what a kind woman you are to send a wire at that hour of the morning! Well, well—I shall want your whole and considered opinion some time. This is only a scrawl, as I’m off to bed, but must thank you, having been much cheered by your impetuous and extravagant ways—(I hope this comes out of the saved bacon rashers)

V.

We go to Rodmell thank God, tomorrow till Sunday

Berg

[]

2447: To Vanessa Bell

Friday [9 October 1931]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

I wrote a post card to ask you and Duncan and Julian or anybody to dine at Monks House on Saturday at 7, but I rather think it was lost so I repeat this and hope it may manage to get sent. But we live in such chaos owing to the ceiling falling down, John putting his hand through a window etc etc that I doubt it. And now we’re just off to Rodmell. Hopeing [sic] to see you

B

Berg

[]

2448: To Ethel Smyth

Sunday [11 October 1931]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

No, no my dear Ethel, it was only a jaded phrase of mine—‘tell me what you think” I almost crossed it out, but was too hurried and bothered. Dont for goodness sake add this to your other worries. We’ll talk quietly one day perhaps—in six months or so: not now. I’m perfectly content. We had 2 days of complete happiness at Rodmell—O so lovely and so calm; and have just come back to letters innumerable and endless interruptions.

So no more—

V.

Berg

[]

2449: To Ethel Smyth

[13 October 1931]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Oh but I didn’t mean I didn’t want your criticism (Of course I do.) Only that I thought you were worrying yourself when you had a million distractions to give it. Oh yes, any criticism—every criticism. I’m tremendously interested.

How odd this is—so far most of the low-brow reviewers (whose sense I respect) find the Waves perfectly simple: and it is selling beyond all my other books! Now why?

But I shall see you in the distance tomorrow. This is only a scrawl—

V.

I dont for a moment suppose that I shall be able to say anything whatever about the Wreckers—not for some time anyhow. I’m incredibly ignorant and slow about music. Your wig I shall enjoy.

Berg

[]

2450: To John Hayward

Oct 13th 1931

52 Tavistock Sqre. [W.C.1]

Dear Mr Hayward,

I’m sure you dont know how glad I am that you should like The Waves. Though I was immensely interested, I admit, in writing it I came to feel that it would never mean anything to anybody. Also I found it a very difficult book to write. So I am delighted that my halfpenny means something to you, and thank you for saying so.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Mrs Henry A. Dewenter

[]

Letters 2451-2500 (October–December 1931)

2451: To Vanessa Bell

Thursday [15 October 1931]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Dearest dearest Dolphin,

O what a mercy that you should like that book! I cant tell you, (this is literal truth) what it meant to me getting your letter this morning.

Nobody except Leonard matters to me as you matter, and nothing would ever make up for it if you didn’t like what I did. So its an amazing relief—I always feel I’m writing more for you than for anybody: only I cant express this, as I’m rushing off, and have been interrupted by Peter [F. L. Lucas] coming. Never mind—I couldn’t say if I’d the whole day how happy you make me.

And Lord—what I owe to you!

But I cant write more now, and only send this as an inarticulate thanksgiving and shall write again tomorrow—

You didnt think it sentimental, did you, about Thoby? I had him so much in my mind,—I have a dumb rage still at his not being with us always.

Dearest Dolphin, how I adore you, whether you like what I write or not

B.

I’m frightfully interested about your picture.

Berg

[]

2452: To Vanessa Bell

Sunday [18 October 1931]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

This is merely to ask whether there’s any chance that Clive wants a cook? Lottie [Hope] is again out of a place, through no fault of hers she swears, and is quartered upon us. So I said I’d ask you.

London pullulates with people, and is incredibly horrible at the moment.

Thats all. One day perhaps we may meet, but not I daresay for many months.

B.

Berg

[]

2453: To Margaret Llewelyn Davies

Sunday 18th Oct. [1931]

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, [W.C.1]

Dearest Margaret,

How very nice to see your hand again—especially since you can write legibly, which is more than I can. Yes we are back; but so hurried and busied at the moment with the Press and L’s broadcasting which leads to endless letters that he says he doesnt yet see a chance of making a plan to come up to Well Walk [Hampstead]. But we shall take our chance and ring you up. We’ve had the usual catastrophes in the thick of business—a ceiling falling, our young man, Lehmann, cutting his hand badly, one clerk going, and so on. Now theres the election, and then we shall have to rouse up the book selling business again which is bound to flag, though doing well at the moment. Did you see a very good review of L’s book by Laski in the Statesman? I must say I feel rather triumphant that he has come through with that book in spite of all his other occupations: and now there are seven more volumes to be written. I cant conceive how you politicians can go on being political. All the summer we had nothing but political arguments with Maynard and others; and I finally felt it so completely silly, futile, petty, personal and unreal—all this about money—that I retired to my room and read poetry in a rage. Well, I know you dont agree; but if everyone read poetry then there’d be no politics; no crisis; none of this place hunting and party spite. All they do is to abuse each other. This shows you how little I grasp the true meaning of events. Lilian [Harris] must instruct me. I suppose you dont know of anyone who wants a cook—Lottie, our old servant, that wild but in some ways admirable character, is out of a place and Mrs Hunt [domestic agency] says she wont take servants, as there are no places. So I am trying to enquire, incredible though this seems.

I must say my grammar has gone to blazes—so I must stop. I like Mrs Burman’s letter [about Life As We Have Known It] which I enclose. Well we must meet and have a good argument. Love to Lilian. I do hope her illnesses are better and long for news of the Harris family—a constant source of joy to me, especially if I wake at night.

Yrs V

Sussex

[]

2454: To George Duckworth

18th October [1931]

52 Tavistock Square W.C.1

My dear George,

I am delighted you find the Waves plain sailing and common sense. I shall quote your opinion I daresay in an advertisement. Yes, the plague of half wits from America is already considerable, and one cant even be pleased with their compliments, since they are clearly incapable of adding 2 to 2.

I’m so sorry they sent off your copies before I had signed them. I would send another, as a tribute of respect and affection, but I dont think one house can possibly want 3 copies of a book.

Why are statues being erected to you in the Abbey and all the villages of England [inexplicable]? I’m not in the least surprised—I only want to know which of your many virtues have been at last discovered by the public? Well, I shall go to the Abbey and find out. We are back in London I am sorry to say, and in the chaos of publishing and general election.

Many thanks from

Your affectionate
GOAT

Henry Duckworth

[]

2455: To Ethel Smyth

19th Oct [1931]

52 T.[avistock]S.[quare, W.C.1]

Oh yes; I have several times thought I was going to sit down and write a long long letter on a vast white sheet about the Wreckers; but then the bell rings, or something interrupts. Moreover, I dont suppose my views are anywhere close enough to sense about music to count. Isn’t it odd though that all yesterday, running about London, in tubes and so on, I was singing the 2nd act—How you’d have laughed, at the mess I was making: but what a good tune; and I wanted it to flare into flower again: But, as the late Mrs Pankhurst was it, used to say, ‘enough’. I’ll describe the Wreckers to you someday by word of mouth. I’ve very little to offer by way of ‘seeing’ time this week, God help me: We go to Rodmell on Friday; and on Thursday I have an old friend, dejected, down trodden, and faithful, from Cheltenham—but she’ll have spent her confidences by 5.15 or 5.30—so if you’d come then, anyhow we could carry on a general conversation. She—a Miss Snowden—has one of those provincial illusions about you and the glamour of your life, so that to see you in the tailor made and tie would give her a whole chapter to talk about during the long winter nights when they sit—she and her 2 sisters—mournfully thinking what life to Ethel Smyth must be—O dear I hadn’t meant to take another page, which I shant have time to finish, as we’re going to the Courtauld concert, I dont know why.

No, I rather think the Waves are striking a rock, and wont roll many more guineas to shore. But I’m so thankful to be free of them, I dont mind if I never hear a word of them again. Yes, I should like to discuss them with you, however; for a flashing moment, having some dread of your insight. Nessa is enthusiastic, which pleases me immensely—and unexpectedly. And—as I say, I must wash, being all covered with curious ink stains: So—I shall expect you about 5.15, is it, on Thursday. And I must go at 7 to hear L. broadcast.

His book’s out—the work of 10 years; and a masterpiece, so the learned say, and I think its probably true.

V.

Isnt L. a modest man, never to have told you about it? Yes, and I married him. Here he is.

Berg

[]

2456: To Virginia Isham

Oct 22nd [1931]

52 Tavistock Sqre., W.C.1

Dear Virginia,

I would like to go to the play in St Bartholomews and will try, but we are rather in a rush with publishing at the moment. I saw a long and enthusiastic review of it.

How are you getting on? I wonder what happened at Berlin. I hope we may meet again some time.

Yours ever
Virginia

Northamptonshire Record Office

[]

2457: To Ethel Smyth

Sunday night [25 October 1931]

Typewritten

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Forgive this typing, but I’m in such a rush, coming back to find a mass of week end rubbish, that unless I write in type you couldnt read my scrawl. No, I dont see any chance of Wednesday or of any day this week, God help me. I’m awfully tempted by Maurice [Baring] and supper and rehearsal, but as I’m going out Tuesday night, and Thursday night (my mother in laws birthday feast) and we have people here Friday night, let alone I dont know how many odds and ends and one day at Cambridge electioneering—Leonard will say, damn you not Wednesday night too. And I’m out to tea, or have people here Wednesday. And though you were angelic to the Cheltenham lady [Margery Snowden], still its a waste, always shouting across three heads. So we must wait for calmer times, if they ever come.

About the Waves—your letter I mean, which Ive only read once, but will again. I think you have said exactly what I expected you to say, with your usual vigour. Thats the effect I thought it would have on you, only I’m surprised that it makes so much impression. Different as we are—O lord how different—didn’t I feel that at the Wreckers—I’m amazed that we can even see so far eye to eye as that this book should have any power to make you read it. (I write clutching at words) But of course you dont solve what for me remains a troublesome problem at the moment—since every one must write me their views or speak them—I mean, what The Waves is. Here, by this same post I get a letter from Lowes Dickinson—the man who liked the Prison so much; “Your book is a poem and I think a great poem (and then he goes on about how its the summing up of all my books.) And then he says “For there is throbbing under it the mystery which all the poets and philosophers have felt” and by this I understand he finds precisely what you dont: I mean a morality, a principle.* Well, but then the next letter I open, from a very fine critic, says all sorts of nice things but … oh oh oh how he hates Percival and all I write about death—more than anything in any of my books—and then here’s another, from a writer I also much respect who says “When I am wretched I shall always turn to Bernards soliloquy for comfort and encouragement.” and theres another who says the very opposite—how its damnably depressing, those last words. And here I sit buffeted from one to the other; and cant think how to make them all fit—what the thing is itself, finally and absolutely. But enough, and indeed seeing the rubbish I write, too much. And in fact I feel that I am a thousand miles removed†

Rodmell was unspeakably lovely; but my fury about the building on the downs makes me wake at night in an agony. Think—a house one sees miles off breaking that sweep for ever and ever.

[in Virginia’s handwriting:]

* “it deals with what is perpetual and universal” these are the words—

† from the thing itself.

Ive lots of letters from Hugh, but always signed Hugh only. I enclose one in case it will do.

[in Virginias handwriting:]

Just found another earlier Hugh.

Berg

[]

2458: To George Duckworth

25th October [1931]

52 Tavistock Square W.C.1

My dear George,

I have torn up your cheque, as this third copy was meant as a gift.

If Sophie is with you please give her my love and thank her for a most charming letter.

Your affectionate
GOAT

Henry Duckworth

[]

2459: To V. Sackville-West

[27 October 1931]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Yes, do come on Monday. Lunch? I shall be alone. One. Leonard will be in for tea and dinner. So choose which suits and let me know. Yes, I was pleased with Ben’s [see Letter 2465] tribute—how enchanting the young are—and sent him a copy—how different his feelings from his mothers. What she said was “Stunted. The woman who wrote that book was fed on gin.” And then Dotty rang up, and Vita and Dotty both said “Stunted”— How I love that story, better than any—though its true I’m said, by a Cambridge don [G. Lowes Dickinson], to be the greatest living poet; which I repeat not so much from vanity as from the noble desire to annoy another poet—one I could touch with a stick about as long as from here to Sevenoaks—but Lor’ bless you, she don’t mind—Thats the worst of Vita—she has no vanity. Mine is at the moment fed largely by the letters of lunaetics [sic]. And Lord—we’re almost certainly taking a great house in Gordon Sqre. [No. 47] where we shall live for ever: and all my time will now go in tying up our books with string for the move. Still hoping to see you before that.

Yr.
Stunt

Probably you will never see me again but we’re just off in the fog to Cambridge to take voters to the poll in the fens.

Berg

[]

2460: To G. L. Dickinson

Oct. 27th 1931

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Goldie,

How extraordinarily nice of you to write to me—I cant tell you what pleasure your letter gave me. What you say you felt about the Waves is exactly what I wanted to convey. Many people say that it is hopelessly sad—but I didnt mean that. I did want somehow to make out if only for my own satisfaction a reason for things. That of course is putting it more definitely than I have a right to, for my reasons are only general conceptions, that strike me as I walk about London and then I try to fit my little figures in. But I did mean that in some vague way we are the same person, and not separate people. The six characters were supposed to be one. I’m getting old myself—I shall be fifty next year; and I come to feel more and more how difficult it is to collect oneself into one Virginia; even though the special Virginia in whose body I live for the moment is violently susceptible to all sorts of separate feelings. Therefore I wanted to give the sense of continuity, instead of which most people say, no you’ve given the sense of flowing and passing away and that nothing matters. Yet I feel things matter quite immensely. What the significance is, heaven knows I cant guess; but there is significance—that I feel overwhelmingly. Perhaps for me, with my limitations,—I mean lack of reasoning power and so on—all I can do is to make an artistic whole; and leave it at that. But then I’m annoyed to be told that I am nothing but a stringer together of words and words and words. I begin to doubt beautiful words. How one longs sometimes to have done something in the world—So you see how it comforts me to think that anyhow you had me in mind on the river bank. Then the world I live in—for I dont see how to live in any other—seems at any rate to have that justification. So thank you again—very very sincerely—for writing.

We started off for Cambridge this morning meaning to take voters to the poll in the suburbs, but North London was black as pitch and we had to grope our way home. Now we are going round to James’s [Strachey] to hear Election results read out, and I shall try to make myself believe in that reality; and then fail; and try again; and fail again. I dont thank people for their books unless I like them,—but I quiet my conscience by never giving them mine. That reminds me—I told old Ethel Smyth, on Leonard’s authority, that you had liked Brewsters Prison. She now writes to ask if she may say that Mr Lowes Dickinson admired it in a preface she’s writing to a concert she’s giving of a setting she’s made to The Prison. I dont suppose you’d mind; and as she dotes upon HB. and found your words of the highest comfort, perhaps you’ll let me assure her so. But this needs no answer.

Yours always
Virginia Woolf

Sussex

[]

2461: To Ethel Sands

Oct. 28th [1931]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Dearest Ethel,

Alas, its my mother in laws 81st birthday party tomorrow night, and I dont think I can manage tea first. I wish I could. But on Wednesday next I shall be here for tea, only Ethel Smyth may come,—but if you’ll risk it, it will be charming. I can, as you know, stand any amount of praise without flinching. You cut me the other night at a concert by the way.

And would you be so angelic as to tell me in confidence who is Antonia White, and must I see her? She says she is a friend of Logans—and I must answer her—[nine words omitted] I’m sure you must know of her.

Yours
Virginia

Wendy Baron

[]

2462: To Ethel Smyth

[29? October 1931]

Postcard

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Is it possibly this?—

“This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognised by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.” G. B. Shaw. Preface to Man and Superman.

Berg

[]

2463: To Harcourt, Brace

31 October 1931

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Sirs,

I have to acknowledge cheque for $950 being advance account of royalties on THE WAVES.

Yours faithfully,
Virginia Woolf

Harcourt Brace Jovanovick

[]

2464: To Ethel Smyth

Sunday [1 November 1931]

Typewritten

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Just the usual hasty typed line to say:

I had a letter from G. Lowes Dickinson about quoting him on the Prison. He had some qualifications to make. Now I’ve lost his letter. I think thus it might be as well if you wrote him a line, enclosing your statement—not that he’ll object, I’m sure; but this would make it all safe. His address is, G. Lowes Dickinson Kings College Cambridge.

As I said on the telephone, I shall be in on Wednesday 4.30; but Ethel Sands, a Chelsea hostess, exquisite and amiable and elderly, has asked to come then; also Lord David Cecil, young and mild; both would be enchanted to see you; but I cant guarantee that theyll go early—Lrd. D. is rather a stayer. And Thursday a girl is coming to talk about her novel—Ive promised to give her a solitary talk—she’s gifted, wrote Dusty Answer; and is in some despair about her work. Monday I’m out to tea—no, I’m not, but Nessa comes first and then Vita and possibly an unknown youth who wants to write poetry—No; Ive been rather knocked up—(excuse this hasty mention of a forbidden subject) and put off our party on Friday so I didnt ask Elizabeth but will when I can. Time as you see is not my strong point at the moment. But this will blow over—is always the afterblast of a book out—people remember one and come and come and come.

I’m amused at your trap—catch me looking up quotations so innocently again [see Letter 2462]. Also amused at your insinuation that thats what youre after, and I’m not—losing the egotistic self I mean. That never struck me certainly as your prevailing characteristic—a complete lack of interest in your own doings. And I shouldnt like you if you were entirely altruistic and swept on the current of others lives—what rot it all is, to be sure, this perverted pagan Christianity that you try to palm off on me! Its no use trying to have it both ways; thats your downfall; egotism again; you want to be in Heaven and on earth, one foot in either, and so sure of salvation. I cant now remember what I said, I suppose in a fury of haste, about the Waves; I cant have said that I had any opinion about it. That’s whats entirely washed out of one by the vociferations of readers, reviewers and friends. I have ceased indeed to believe that there is such a book—merely that somehow I have stirred up a dust dance which makes my friends bonnet ribbons and whiskers fly this way and that east north south and west, and prevents me from getting on with what I’m doing now. But the dust dance soon dies down. Oh and I’m taking a new house, and shall have all the glory of a move in January; oh the type the tables, the books—pity me, though you despise.

V.

Berg

[]

2465: To Benedict Nicolson

Nov. 1st [1931]

52 Tavistock Sqre., [W.C.1]

My dear Ben,

What a charming letter you wrote me! Take care, or I shall send you all my books. I shall be very much interested to know, if you get to the end of The Waves, what you think. The end is always apt to come to grief, because one gets so sick of writing. Also, do you find it very gloomy?—Some people say it is very happy, others, so sad they cant have it in the room. And Vita says its so bad that only a small dog that had been fed on gin could have written it. This pleases me greatly.

I’m so glad you dont like being a soldier [in the Eton O.T.C.]. Are you able to do any painting and do you know a nephew of mine called Henry Duckworth—I’m told he’s very stupid—the stupidest boy at Eton. My love to Nigel [Ben’s brother]:

Yours ever
Virginia Woolf

Benedict Nicolson

[]

2466: To Ethel Smyth

Sunday [8 November 1931]

52 T[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Very well, I’ll come on Wednesday to the seat wherever it is. And then on to the supper, if I may go early, for L. swears he wont sit up after 12 waiting me. Lord no—he wont come to supper for any body: and I ask, what can be the miraculous joy of eating quails and drinking champagne after hearing one’s most solemn music played under the beautiful but oh so stupid eyes of Lady Diana [Cooper]: and Duffs little gentlemanly ones? “I ask what age are you? Answer 3.” (not 73, at all) Still I’ve no doubt we shall all enjoy it enormously. Will you thank M. Baring for me—I dont remember his address—miles away in Chelsea—O Lord—and if I fail through sheer devilry, not of my own seeking dont blame me.

V.

Berg

[]

2467: To Hugh Walpole

Sunday [8 November 1931]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

My dear Hugh,

And I’d been meaning to write to you, but unlike you I never, never do what I mean to. How do you get the time? Here am I wedged in between two piles of MS—each it seems to me six foot high—all novels—most commendable alas—That’s my excuse. But we are here, Rodmell, for the moment, both well, and enjoying a fine spring day with the advantage of autumn thrown in—gold leaves, ploughed fields, the downs incredibly lovely.

Well—I’m very much interested about unreality and the Waves—we must discuss it. I mean why do you think The Waves unreal, and why was that the very word I was using of Judith Paris [Walpole’s novel]—“These people aren’t real to me”—though I do think, and you wont believe it, it has all kinds of qualities I admire and envy. But unreality does take the colour out of a book of course; at the same time, I dont see that it’s a final judgment on either of us. You’re real to some—I to others. Who’s to decide what reality is? Not dear old Harold, anyhow, whom I’ve not heard, but if as you say, he sweeps us all into separate schools one hostile to the other, then he’s utterly and damnably wrong, and to teach the public that’s the way to read us is a crime and a scandal, and accounts for the imbecility which makes all criticism worthless. Lord—how tired I am of being caged with Aldous, Joyce and Lawrence! Can’t we exchange cages for a lark? How horrified all the professors would be! Yes, greatly to my surprise The Waves is selling better than any of my novels, which pleases me, and E. M. Forster says it moves him more than any of them, which pleases me still more. Otherwise, opinions good and bad, seem to me increasingly futile and beside the mark.

I’m reading Middlemarch with even greater pleasure than I remembered: and Ford M. Ford’s memoirs—fascinating, and even endearing; but I long to know the truth about him—the truth which I’m sure you know, as you know the truth about all these great figures. I wish, to please me, you’d write your own memoirs—why not? The truth and nothing but the truth.

Anyhow come and see us; for we must discuss Reality and Ford M. Ford at length. Why is he no longer the same name as he was 20 years ago when I met him—and her—at the Protheros?

Yours V.W.

Texas

[]

2468: To George Rylands

12th Nov. 1931

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Yes, dearest Dadie, it was my intention to extract a letter from you. I regret to say that I was not purely disinterested in sending you The Waves. I wanted, and still want, your opinion. For I was turning over the Adelphi, and read backwards a very subtle and erudite article, signed to my surprise (whats brought you there?) Rylands. Can it be my Rylands I said, the one with whom (and here my mind spurted off to the old days with Miss Kipps and the paste pot …) anyhow, to cut the matter short, I began at the beginning and found your brief mention of the Waves—hence the desire to get a letter out of you—criticism I mean.

So far I’ve had practically none, in public (dear Hugh finds it all most unreal and unsatisfactory) and you raise all sorts of interesting questions about poetry and prose: which I long to go into. What sort of emotion does it produce: are the characters still characters: how far has one lost by losing touch with reality—and so on.

But as you’re teaching Keats, I mustn’t run on,—and indeed a dozen MSS wait me—one about a woman, called Virginia too, who trained an Orang Outang from birth upwards, with the result that she raped him, he strangled her, and going into the garden, found one single cabbage which he planted on her dead breast. Now is this real, I ask you. Echo answers, I no longer know.

Perhaps though you’ll come and see me one of these days and go into the matter of orang outangs, Shepherd etc.

Volumes pour hourly, daily, into the Press: and there dear John, whom I love, sits like Prince Consort on the Albert Memorial, which seems to imply that I’m Queen Victoria. But I’m not, am I? Again, this perpetual note of interrogation.

Running out to water Pinka I dashed straight into Raymond, with his Lido tie on. But you know its better to be teaching Keats in the mud flats [Cambridge] than doing many of the things we in B—y [Bloomsbury] do: for example, last night, sweating with horror, I listened to the Prison, set to music—if cat calls, early birds and last posts can be called music—and Lord the defunct butlers and ladies maids who sang—by Ethel Smyth. When Maurice Baring emerged, bald as a coot, and leering for all the world like George 4th—and asked me to sup, I vomited there and then on the red carpet. But I was going to say I much prefer your way of life with all its manifest disadvantages to Lido ties, last posts, and having the Princesse di Bassiano, escorted by Tom Eliot, to tea.

Now dearest Dadie, you must write me a long letter about the future of the English novel.

Lord what a repulsive remark to end with!

Yr V.W.

I have not said how immensely pleased I am that you do like The Waves.

George Rylands

[]

2469: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

[mid-November 1931]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

[second page only survives]

… Thanks for the second letter about the house [47 Gordon Square]. After keeping us on tenterhooks and making me visit every agent in Bloomsbury for 6 months, the Duke, Bedford, suddenly announces that he’s not going to pull us down for 7 years: but will double our rent and make us paint the bricks. So here we stay.

Yes, I went to Bolsover once—in my remote past, when we were lent houses by old Lady Carnarvon. I remember that and Hardwick and Haddon Hall.

Texas

[]

2470: To Hugh Walpole

Sunday 15th Nov. ’31

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

My dear Hugh,

Alas, I’m made to stay in bed at present and keep quiet. So what’s the use of thinking I can discuss reality with you? But I shall be all right in a week or 10 days. Only I can’t make any engagements for certain, don’t want you to bind yourself to tea when I might put you off. So may I write on the chance and ask you to come later?

How long are you in London? I hope some time.

My mind teems with arguments.

Yrs
Virginia

Middlemarch finished: now Dizzy: then Trollope—but which?

Fitzpark Museum, Keswick, Cumbria

[]

2471: To Ethel Smyth

[16 November 1931]

Typewritten

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

As far as I know at the moment I shall be in on Wednesday; but dont for gods sake make any engagement on that footing because anybody may insist upon coming then—I cant manage to keep my days apart at the moment—and how could we talk about the Prison in the presence of some American duchess—such as make my life a burden to me? My head is stupid with letter writing and therefore no more at the moment, but hope to write later. I’m much better, but you inspire me with such healthy dread of being caught malingering (is that the word? military I think, so youll know) that I skate off the subject as soon as I can. A very good thing. I hate that sort of talk myself. And all talk at the moment. Ten to talk tother night—whats the use of talk, I go on saying, and go on talking. A lovely and solitary—that is with L—walk today over Hampstead Heath; trees like chandeliers in holland bags with mist; dogs copulating. L. is buying a mixture called Keepaway to be smeared on the hinder parts of Pinka next week—thats what I’m trying for the American aristocracy. Think what a cost it is to telegraph Princesse di Bassiano, Madame de Clermont Tonnerre etc instead of plain Smyth.

So enough.
V.

[in Virginia’s handwriting:]

I will let you know for certain later about Wednesday

Berg

[]

2472: To Ethel Smyth

Tuesday [17 November 1931]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

By some miracle, all the duchesses have retired to Rome, so I shall be alone tomorrow, if you like to come up instead of sitting in the basement; and shall expect you at 4.30.

V.

Please hand the enclosed with my love to the very stout lady who sang [The Prison] on the top left hand corner the other night.

Quite recovered, so no need to mention health.

Berg

[]

2473: To Ethel Smyth

Saturday, Nov? [21 November 1931]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

It came over me, directly I had delivered that appalling bunch of cuttings to the care of Miss Walton [unidentified] that I had forgotten the H⁠[enry]. B⁠[rewster]. letters. I daresay this was a nudge from the sub-conscious, which is said to nudge—I mean, I dont want to give them up till I’ve read them. Cant you give me till New Years Day? I’m promising myself—I’m always talking to Virginia the 6 year old and saying “If you’ll be good and do—so and so, you shall have so and so—” and I’ve promised her a whole 4t night here at Xmas, without a single MS. to read or duchess to pacify, or anything but sitting over a log fire and reading what she likes. So do wait to drop dead of a stroke in the street till Jan. 2nd or 3rd.—when I’ll give them to your executors, and buy a laurel wreath, and go to Woking in time for the disposal of the corpse. (The wireless is chanting Western European folk songs as I write—like a gale in the shrouds—Highland songs, the man says sung by women while they shrink cloth. Lord how I d like to write that kind of thing myself—but I wouldn’t wail so—why do folk wail, always? Never a tune, always up and down, like a cats tail gliding over the kitchen floor. Do you like folk songs? To my thinking they’re the ruin of all modern music—just as [J. M.] Synge and Yeats ruined themselves with keening Celtic dirges. And then to set our dish in the oven: and then for a wholly blessed evening over the fire. By the way, I’ve asked Eth [Williamson] to dine on Monday, and hope she can—very good funny poetical political nephew [Julian Bell], who’s never met anyone but earnest girls in tweeds at Cambridge—to meet that stargazer. (Now they’re singing the Earl of Moray; but still keening, though its a question of love, halters, dagger, in the snow, all bloody, as far as I can make out) One day I want to come down to Woking and Coign [Ethel’s house] that is: lunch with Dame E: walk with her on just such a lovely thrush-egg milk-soft day as this to Triggs Lock (my word how silken and sensitive like a race horse skin the sea at Brighton was this evening, with a dozen ripples, such as one draws across a silk sheet, and two black fishing boats, almost drawing tears from my eyes. Save for a strong smell of stinking fish which reserved my sanity)—I say, we will go to Triggs Lock on such an afternoon: home to tea; I to catch the dinner train home. Really that would suit better with my mood than any hour over the fire. I want air, movement, and to see things changing—now a horse, now a tree, perhaps an old man in a comforter taking an airing—not any longer to survey the inside of my own head, even when kindled into fiery electric bulbs by Ethel. (Now they’re singing Jacobite ballads—rather better; more like a frothing horse and less like a cats tail).

But its a quarter to 7. at which hour I light my oven, and put in my chicken brew; and a divine blood red soup, made of beetroot, onions, carrots and I think a dash of some spirit: after which we end with two gigantic Bath buns, made by the widow of a man who was called Booth, and dying he left her nothing but the receipt for buns, on which she’s made a fortune; and serves one herself, aged 102, with ringlets to her shoulders, like hollow barley sugar. Now its Helen Fair—Beyond Compare O What lovely words—and now Mr Middleton on pruning, whom we cut off, and so I must stop and to my oven.

Well Ethel this is a long letter—the longest far I’ve written this six weeks, and all in ten minutes too, so its thick as a bun with howlers, solecisms, and no true expression, I daresay, of my affection and admiration for the valiant uncastrated cat with the unhealed wound.

O I spent the morning so agreeably talking about spaniels to the lady next door—and Mrs Ebbs the clergyman’s wife has given notice she means to ask me to tea; though I’m, she hears, so dreadfully shy, very likely I shan’t have the courage to come. But I shall. Thats the society I long for—Mrs Ebbs and Miss Dixey who breeds lemon coloured cockers. She said to me, “Mrs Woolf, I’ve planted this bed with yellow and white roses, because my yellow and white bitch is buried there; and that one with red and orange roses, because thats the grave of the red bitch. Its a mistake to have so much sentiment, aint it? But I’m like that” etc. etc

V.

Berg

[]

2474: To George Rylands

Nov. 22nd [1931]

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

Dearest Dadie,

I should have thanked you for your letter before, but London is such a parrot house, with all the fowls pecking and screeching at the same moment that I waited for a quiet day here. By the way, if King’s were to offer me a room in a quadrangle, with fellowship attached on condition I teach nothing I will accept—(the woman next door breeds cockers, who bark—thats whats determined me to become a Fellow of King’s.)

Why I’m so grateful for your letter is not merely for the sake of the intelligence and discrimination of the praise (vain as I am) but because I’m full of ideas for further books, but they all develop from The Waves. Now if the Waves had seemed to you a barren and frigid experiment—merely Virginia hanging to a trapeze by her toe nails—then I should have felt, Why go on?, and as I can’t go back, even so far as Mrs Dalloway and The Lighthouse, I should have come to an awkward pass, and have probably taken a vow of silence for ever. Thats why your encouragement is a draught of champagne in the desert and the caravan bells ring and the dogs bark and I mount—or shall in a few months—my next camel. Not that I mean to begin another of these appalling adventures yet awhile.

When are you coming up? I never know, and so can never suggest a dinner or some way of meeting. I leave it to you to drop a postcard in the press and say. Did you like the look of your poems? And are you writing more and criticism? Now (though you’ll suspect the origin of my praise to be author’s vanity—which it is not) I think you have a real gift for what I call poetry and what I call criticism; and wish you would throw Keats at the wooden heads of your jackasses and sit in a garret and write, write, write.

But on this point you have little respect I know for the opinion of old women like me: though why Peter Q. and Shephard [J. T. Sheppard] should seem to you in this respect venerable and virile guides, and me a flibberti-gibbet, God knows. And there’s a hair in the pen: and a flea, alas, in L’s right trouser, so no more.

V.

That copy of The Waves I sent you was the last—this is a boast—of the first edition: I snatched it from John’s maw: so if you keep it very carefully in brown paper ten years or so it may be worth 10/4½. This is advice to you as a book collector.

George Rylands

[]

2475: To Ethel Smyth

Wednesday [2 December 1931]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

I’ve been in bed for a week, but am up today and much better—Still I’ve promised not to see anyone, so cant call you up as I should wish. Yes, I entirely agree with you about L’s book [After the Deluge]—and hope you’ll infect your old Tories at Woking with the desire to read it. Here’s a book you lent me ages ago. We’re off to Rodmell I hope on Friday and please write me letters and I shall be all right (D.V.) when I come back

V.

Berg

[]

2476: To Ethel Smyth

Sunday [6 December 1931]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Yes, Ethel dear, I am quite aware of the warm and generous cat who goes to Ringwood on the spur of the moment. Indeed its that Ethel I clasp to my breast at present. I admit that I’ve been rather depressed, considerably sunk between the sea, with these incessant headaches; and when I’ve been tempted to say what is the good of it all?—I’ve remembered with gratitude how often you’ve told me—how openly and generously—that I’m one of your—what shall I say?—objects—necessities? I mean, if I ceased to exist, Ethel would feel her glass of champagne less sparkling. There—you’ve done me a lot of good, though I seldom say so—I’ve had to agree with L. that I shall spend the weeks till Christmas in an invalid state—no writing, no going to parties or plays, but taking a walk and coming back and lying on the sofa. Every time I do more the pain comes back; but it certainly ceases when thus given in to, and so give in I must. But by Christmas I think I shall be in full fettle again. I’m going to read science—as the least like to my own ideas—which I beat down; and yet how they swarm! I’ve 3 books in my head at the moment. I’m going to read Wells and Huxley, and a man called Heard; and perhaps you’ll find me a nicer, quieter, less remote and arrogant and moody character, when scientific. Elizabeth [Williamson] we both liked immensely; and she was so intelligent—I doubt that L. would throw her from her perch. Well—I’m not going to write long letters. Yes, Ethel dear, I find the thought of you very comforting.

V.

Back from Rodmell. Very lovely in gusts.

Berg

[]

2477: To V. Sackville-West

Sunday [6 December 1931]

52 Tavistock Sqre, [W.C.1]

Oh that was very nice, getting your letter. I had a nightmare that you’d discovered say Enid Jones or someone altogether nicer than I am. And now you say you love me—what a relief. I’m better, but O dear, I spent all last week in bed—curse these headaches, all due to Waves, the stunt book; and now have promised to remain invalidish till we go away at Christmas: no writing, no going to parties, lying down, taking a short walk; it seems the only way to stop the usual pain—not that its been bad only forever coming back. And what I want is to see you—But when? I mean, when would it suit you? Here I am all day. I’m dining alone next Wednesday (9th, I think) and if you cd. come, we’d dine quietly (L. wd. allow you, tho’ no one else) Let me know soon if you can. But dont bother. I mean tell me a day you’re up. Roses come: are being planted under my lodge window. Are you really fond of me?

V

Dont put yourself out to come, if as probable, youre in an awful rush

I’m afraid I must put off Pennshurst till Christmas

Berg

[]

2478: To William Plomer

Sunday [6 December 1931]

52 Tavistock Sqre., [W.C.1]

Dear William,

I should like nothing better than to come to your party, but I’m afraid its not likely. I go on getting bad headaches, and the only cure, as I’ve found from long experience, is to lead a hermits life without pleasure or excitement. I’m afraid I must follow this rule till Christmas. But I shall remind Leonard and Vita, and I’m very sorry for myself, remembering how greatly I enjoyed the other party in the bloodstained house. Perhaps you’ll let me come when the house is warmed.

Yours
Virginia

If its Canning Place, where you live, then I used to learn Greek at no. 6 from Clara Pater, sister of Walter; no bloodstains there: all blue china, Persian cats, and Morris wallpapers: but thats ages ago.

Texas

[]

2479: To Ethel Smyth

Tuesday [8 December 1931]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Well anyhow next Wednesday if not this. I think probably I should do better to ward you off till I’m recovered: but if I wake very rigorous tomorrow I’ll ring up before 11 on the chance you’re free. My blessings for letter—So sleepy I cant write

Berg

[]

2480: To Hugh Walpole

[December 1931?]

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Hugh,

I’ve had this by me for weeks.

Why should I know about Hugh Walpole’s beds?

I told you we were getting mixed in the public mind and so it is.

Very nice to have seen you, excuse typing.

Virginia

(no answer needed unless at will.) And dont return the German.

Texas

[]

2481: To Lytton Strachey

10 Dec [1931]

52 Tavistock Sqre., [W.C.1]

“I arise from dreams of thee”—that’s why I write. I have just woken from a dream in which I was at a play, in the pit and suddenly you, who were sitting across a gangway in a row in front, turned and looked at me, and we both went into fits of laughter. What the play was, what we laughed at, I’ve no notion, but we were both very young (no, for you had your beard) and at the age when we used to write to each other. Why are these dreams more vivid than real life?—Anyhow while it hangs about me, I can’t help writing to the bearded serpent, especially as Clive tells me you are off to Malaya for months and the chances are we shan’t meet till Gordon Sqre. is full of tulips and [Arthur] Waley is playing tennis with Alix [Strachey] in white flannels.

I’m recumbent, lazy, content, reading book after book. And what are you doing? Reading Shakespeare I hope and occasionally making a note very neatly in a very beautiful book. By the way I read As you like it the other day and was almost sending you a wire to ask what is the truth about Jacques—What is it? His last speech reads so very odd.

This is all my news, as I see no one, not Ottoline, not Charlie Chaplin—no one but Clive who runs in to see me between a lunch party that ends at 5 and a dinner party that begins at 8.30 and goes on till the sparrows are rising in flocks from the Embankment. Lord—how I’d like to lead his life.

Well this is only a dream letter and needs no answer, unless you can tell me what we laughed at; but when you’re in London with the tulips and Waley’s white flannels, please come and see your old and attached friend

Virginia

Strachey Trust

[]

2482: To Ethel Smyth

Saturday [12 December 1931]

52 Tavistock Sqre. [W.C.1]

I fell asleep like a sucking pig after dinner and so cant catch the post. This is only what they call a line to say that on the contrary, I wasn’t at all tired but I think refreshed by your visit. Its a fact that to listen to conversation when the converser is as discreet well balanced and racy as Dame Ethel cheers and invigorates. I liked Ethel very much on Wednesday. I think she has a tender and understanding nature, in spite of appearances. I’m really better, only mustn’t, as Leonard says, think of writing so for another 10 days: when I say now I’ll begin to think of a book, he puts a shade over me just as I used to shut up my canary.

What a blessing to have a critical string to my mind. I dont feel I could write another novel under a year. But to collect my thoughts on Sir Walter Scott is to use a quiet sober string that wont twang me awake—Forgive these metaphors, this egotism, this breathless abruptness. Nelly is going to buy my dinner and post this, and I daren’t be found writing by L when he comes up from the Press.

He’s much excited about the Cole question and is going to get his facts correct—rather wishing I think to force you to say to the widow, “D’you know, Nell, your husband was a murderer?” It would be a lark—as a conversational opening.

So no more

Yr V.

What about the Village?

Berg

[]

2483: To Ralph Partridge

12th Dec. [1931]

52 Tavistock Sqre., [W.C.1]

Dear Ralph,

Could you by any chance advise me as to how to get Niger goat skins?—I want two to make a writing case. My old merchant has disappeared. But dont bother if you’re no longer in touch with the trade and forgive me for being a nuisance.

I hope you and Frances [Marshall] will come and dine after Christmas—oh no, you’ll be in Spain I suppose. I wish I were.

Yours ever
Virginia

Robert H. Taylor

[]

2484: To Dora Carrington

Tuesday [15 December 1931]

52 Tavistock Sqre., [W.C.1]

Dearest Carrington,

We’re so unhappy to hear that Lytton is ill. We didnt know it. If you or Ralph could ever let us have a card to say how he is we should be more than grateful.

Our best love. If there was anything I could do you would let me know wouldn’t you—

Yours
Virginia

I’m so sorry I bothered Ralph. Please thank him for his letter.

Robert H. Taylor

[]

2485: To William Plomer

Dec 16th [1931]

52 Tavistock Sqre., [W.C.1]

Dear William,

It’s not ingratitude that has prevented me from thanking you for the book merely laziness. I can’t write letters, as you know. But my love of reading books, specially books on Scandinavian literature, grows;—how queer and crabbed their names are: and I’ve never heard of them or read them.

Alas, your party was last night, and I’m sure it was a gigantic success, and I wasn’t there. But I hope I shall see you after Christmas when I shall come back from a fortnight at Monks House quite recovered.

Yours
Virginia

Leonard had hoped and meant to come to the party, but was caught here, and was very much disappointed—which is seldom true of him and parties, but is this time.

Texas

[]

2486: To Ethel Smyth

[19 December 1931]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

This is only again ‘just a line’ to catch the early post so that you may get it this evening. L. S. is about the same. The next days are the critical ones—fear of perforation. But there’s nothing to be done. Nessa comes back tomorrow, and I shall know on Monday if its any use our going for the night on Tuesday. I suspect Nessa has told them not to ask me, unless she sees they really are in need of an outsider. They—all the relations—sitting there waiting find it a relief to drive over to Hungerford—and anything one can do, as you will realise, is to me a relief. After all, I dont suppose I care for anyone more than for Lytton. (after my Jew) He’s in all my past—my youth. But never mind. Its my form of tenderness, that—well, I wont go on. I feel your form, dearest E—oh yes—sitting by me so strong—so quiet. Yes. Its the being used up, after these attacks of headache—thats the nuisance now. Its always so—a general complete influenza drowse. But fresh air at Rodmell will cure that in no time

Will write tomorrow.

Yr V.

Berg

[]

2487: To Ethel Smyth

Sunday [20 December 1931]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Here is the questionnaire duly answered. I must say it doesn’t reflect well upon the Woking posts. But something like it happened here with some MSS—since arrived, and said to be due to Christmas.

No change in L.S—except that the drs. now incline to call it ulceration of the colon, and not typhoid. He is very ill, but they say not hopelessly. I rather expect we shall go after Christmas, but shant know till tomorrow. If not, we shall go to Rodmell on Tuesday. I’m better, and think if I can get fresh air and not too much talking I shall be well again and able to write next week perhaps. (Excuse egotism: you draw it on yourself)

O what a dull letter? Why did I ever think I could write? Ah, but you can write letters, and I hope the horror of Christmas will be starred for me by frequent white envelopes. And I will reply, anyhow egotistically.

I’m going to get up and dress tomorrow after breakfast.

So with that proud boast

Goodnight
V.

Berg

[]

2488: To Julian Bell

Monday [21? December 1931]

Typewritten

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

My dear Julian,

I have vainly tried to write to you many times to ask if you’d like me to give you the new Nonesuch [Press] edition of Dryden for Christmas. They have done the two first volumes, and I would give you the lot as they come out if you liked. Only I don’t know if its a good edition, or if you already have one. Sometimes the Nonesuch are execrable to all true scholars I’m told; but let me know, and if you don’t want that, think of something you do want. I expect and hope that we shall meet shortly.

Your loving
Aunt Virginia

Quentin Bell

[]

2489: To Ethel Smyth

Tuesday Evening [22 December 1931]

Postcard

Lewes, [Sussex]

Bad news of L. S. today, and I’m not sure what we shall do—will let you know. Just arrived here, warm through owing to your wonderful warmer. I’ll write tomorrow—

V.

Berg

[]

2490: To Vanessa Bell

Wednesday [23 December 1931]

Monks [House, Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest,

I have just heard from Quentin. I will ring you up tomorrow at 9.30 on the chance of catching you. I should be glad of any news you could send [about Lytton]—as I dont suppose the caretaker can tell me much. I find I only gave Angelica 10/- when I thought it was £1—so will you give her this

B.

490 Lewes will always find us—its next door and they will send round.

Berg

[]

2491: To Ethel Smyth

Wednesday [23 December 1931]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

A new specialist [John Ryle, a surgeon] saw L. S. yesterday and thinks badly of him—I only had this on the telephone this morning. I think they are afraid that the poison is affecting his heart. We are staying here, but shall go to Hungerford if they want us. I suppose the next 2 or 3 days must decide.

Well, I dont know what to say: in fact I couldn’t say anything. I seem to have lived about 20 years in the past week—so much we have shared—so many states of mind; such intimacy. I find myself now talking to him whatever I read or think. But no: I wont think of it: and he may still live.

Your heat box saved my life yesterday. It kept me hot all the drive, and it was a very long one, and we got here late. Wonderful woman to have such a thing! I’ve had (you asked for details) a little pain again—naturally; but am better today, and have 3 weeks good rest behind me.

A letter from Miss [Mary] Dodge about the Waves—how odd!—and odd that you should have met Gwen Raverat—a tragic figure—now L. is going to drive me into Lewes. Anyhow I have a husband—no, I will not open any vein of feeling. I still believe that if one can stir about briskly, even buying sausage and turkey, its the best course for Lytton. I’m sure you understand all this

V.

Berg

[]

2492: To Ethel Smyth

Thursday [24 December 1931]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

L. S. seems unchanged. I suppose he is just holding his own, and there is still a chance. Especially as they can give him more food now that theyre certain its not typhoid. Very lovely here. I’m going to Brighton now with L. so no more—oh and I feel better and hope for a letter and will write a longer letter soon—I’m reading science—

V.

Berg

[]

2493: To Ethel Smyth

Christmas Day [25 December 1931]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

Your Wednesday letter just come. I hope you’ve had a scrap from me before this. Last night they thought he [Lytton Strachey] was dying: but Nessa has rung up to say he is a shade better this morning. It may mean nothing, or it may be the turn. But he is conscious again, and has taken milk after 24 hours taking nothing. I cant be positive about plans,—I mean we should go at any moment if they wanted us—but I expect now we shall stay here till Monday anyhow, as Nessa is going over from her home at Seend:—in fact I doubt that we should go, even next week, for more than a night; and I would wire if we did. So write here with certainty.

Its difficult to settle down, to read, write or think. But I’m better in spite of all. The air is so fresh, and I’ve been a walk with L. over the marsh, and we feel unreasonably cheerful again.

But one’s mind seems to freeze and you get the effects in these spasmodic scraps. I’ve not tried yet to write, but dip into The Sciences of Life, (Wells) and Goethe and various poems—and then there’s the old woman in the cottage aged 91, who cant see, or move; and we give her 10/- and she says we are her best friends but she wishes to die—and then there’s the cesspool to be emptied, and there’s the greenhouse full of carnations, and Maynard Keynes, and Lydia giving us Christmas dinner, and so on and so on.

Goodbye for the moment

V.

Berg

[]

2494: To Ethel Sands

Christmas day [1931]

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

Dearest Ethel,

How extraordinarily nice of you to have sent me this lovely book!—Its one I’ve always meant to read, and never have: and now it stands in my new bookcase. How odd that Lytton gave me the letters from Portugal, in much the same edition! Nessa has just rung up to say that he is a shade better—they thought he could not live through the night. This may mean nothing, or it may mean the turn. As you can imagine, we’re not able to think of much else at the moment—but when we’re back, do come and see me—(I’ve been so stupid in the head, I didn’t ask you) and tell me if there is any book of my own or anybody elses I could give you.

What a lovely binding—how discreet, so distinguished and like you—the Italian letters have!

Yrs
Virginia

Wendy Baron

[]

2495: To Ethel Smyth

Sunday 27th [December 1931]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

The latest news of L. S. is that he’s rather better if anything, and though the dr. wont say that this is lasting, I cant help feeling that 48 hours of improvement must mean something solid. They now again think its typhoid, and are having fresh examinations—What seems clear is that Lytton himself is making a fight, and not sinking into unconsciousness, as they feared. All this keeps one oddly numb in the head—though I’m much less anxious One feels there’s the telephone at 5—what’s the news—Even at 12 in the morning. But for the first time today I feel a wish to write and have no pain, and so hope that with luck I may glide into words tomorrow. I’ve been a muddy walk to the river. Your letter and Elizs came this morning. Tomorrow the frost of posts will be over, and newspapers, etc. In some ways a pity—there’s a certain luxury in being isolated. As you see I can’t write. I’ll let you know if we decide to go to Hungerford. But anyhow not till the end of the week, I should think. Nessa comes on Tuesday. All the Stracheys are consumed with family love: 7 of them are sitting in an Inn and there are, as you may suppose, complications with the different varieties of wives, and which are amusing at a distance but harrowing in the house itself. Glad of letters as long as possible.

Yr V.

Berg

[]

2496: To Ethel Smyth

[28 December 1931]

Telegram

[Rodmell, Sussex]

Please say how you are. Lytton rather better

Virginia

Berg

[]

2497: To V. Sackville-West

Dec. 29th [1931]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Well, dearest Mrs Nick; there was once a woman called Virginia, and she had a small hairy animal called Potto. Does this bring anything back to mind? The sound of your lovely balmy voice coming across the marshes last night advising me to read Lady somebodies Book—as I shall—stirred the embers of desire. Oh we’ve had such a wretched Christmas—telephones, wires, ready to start for Hungerford at any moment. Though you dont care for Lytton, you’ll understand my feeling. Why is one thus attached to people? On Christmas Eve we thought he was dying. He is still very ill,—but now, apparently, its going on, up and down,—a thing called ulcerated colon.

And naturally my head which is not screwed right, began its infernal aching. Lord—I’d sell it cheap at auction. Why shouldnt Hugh [Walpole] buy and bequeath me his diabetes? Thats only a matter of not eating sugar, whereas here I am, since Nov. 25th, abstaining altogether from love, frolic, excitement, Vita, ink. Not a word have I written; and I’ve 4 books all surging in my head, and shall be 50 next month, and how am I ever to write them? And does it matter if I dont? Why not give up writing and lavish my days in joy? I’m reading, reading; and have rambled down to the river; its this cursed being fond of my friends thats my downfall. Old Ethel is sick or fevered or somehow stricken—with Lady Balfour by her side, and a [hand] writing like 6 paralysed frogs hopping. But she’s better. And how happy the sound of your voice made me, coming over the fields, and lighting up the fish mongers window as it did this time how many years ago? Potto cant count after 5—so whats the good asking.

As for seeing you, whats the chance? You did say something about coming to your mother with the boys. But by this time doubtless she’s cut you out of her will again, and may have—who knows—ordered a pound of chocolate creams to be sent to me. I may go up to London on Saturday for the day—L. has to do some broadcasting nonsense—otherwise I shall be here till Sunday week I hope, unless the Stracheys want us at Hungerford. Poor people! Nessa says they all sit round an Inn, waiting for doctors, and all devoted, and all quarrelling, and no one knowing what to do next. And this has gone on since the first of Deer, or longer—so, should they wish it, we will go, and play chess, or take a walk or something. But I daresay not.

And what about Penshurst or Sissingt? I’m so behindhand—I was going to write about Sidney, and cant get back into the mood. Dotty, John says, is furious that we’ve not printed her poem for the New Year. I’m sorry, but I couldn’t finish the last page, and we didn’t know she wanted it by then—but never mind—I sometimes think, privately, that Dotty would do well to endow the bedridden with her £200 and leave poetry alone.

But Vita, on the other hand, should write a long long poem for Virginia; and before she does that she should sit down and write ever so long and intimate a letter to Virginia. Now do try again, Vita; your first attempt in The Dolomites is among my most cherished possessions

I wish I liked Desmond’s book [Portraits, 1931] as much as I like him—too much in the style of [Edmund] Gosse: oh such flimsy criticism, not of people, but of books. But no more.

Yr V.

Berg

[]

2498: To Ethel Smyth

Tuesday, 29th Dec [1931]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Well, Ethel dear, I was very glad to get your staggering whisky letter this morning, and to be in touch with you for a moment, even so. I dont gather what your illness is—a chill? influenza? rheumatism? fever?—Was it the after effect of that ghastly game of golf when the pain made you laugh? Any details will be gladly received, for I like to realise as you know, small facts. Whats your temperature, for instance—can you eat; can you read, have you pain, what pain, where?—but you mustn’t articulate. I know the screw it means, extruding thought into actual words when one’s ill. A great gulf lies between mind and words.

Lytton is if anything better. But its puzzling. On Sunday they say its typhoid; then get another specialist yesterday, who says positively thats out of the question, but it may be paratyphoid, is probably ulcerated colon, and if so, is an illness that must go on being serious, with ups and downs for weeks. The last man, however, said he had ‘a good fighting chance’, which is far more than they said last week, and all the doctors are amazed by his strength. Its the good Anglo-Indian blood; I always feel a toughness and sanity in Lytton, for all his look of weakness. Also he is determined to live. This being so, they think it better we should put off coming, as they are still all there—5 or 6 brothers and sisters sitting devoted playing cross word puzzles in the Inn. They will want friends later I imagine, and I’m selfishly glad not to go this week, being rather liable to get pain if I make an effort. I woke up with rather a bout of it yesterday morning, so put off my writing. But it cleared off, and I’m very comfortable today, only shall take another few days of entire sloth by way of precaution. Also there is no great reason why I should write.

No, I dont think you’re right about my caring for ‘so few’. What would you have said had you seen me when I got no answer to my telegram to Woking? For some reason, none came till 7, though I wired at 3. By 6 o’clock I imagined you unconscious, so that the telegram hadn’t been opened. By 6.30 I was in such a fidget I could not sit and read up here with L. I imagined telegraph boys knocks—went to the door—no one; imagined telephoning—but if she’s unconscious whats the good? Mary would tell one nothing—And so on. At last to quiet myself, I went down to fidget with the dinner in the kitchen, and then unmistakably heard a feeble tap on the window, and there was the idiot boy, come to the wrong door, in a howling wind. I had him in and gave him all my spare coppers as thanksgiving. No, I think you grossly underrate the strength of my feelings—so strong they are—such caverns of gloom and horror open round me I daren’t look in—and also their number. Do you know how I cared for Katherine Mansfield, for Charlie Sanger—to mention friends only? No, you dont. But then, for months on first knowing you, I said to myself here’s one of these talkers. They dont know what feeling is, happily for them. Because everyone I most honour is silent—Nessa, Lytton, Leonard, Maynard: all silent; and so I have trained myself to silence; induced to it also by the terror I have of my own unlimited capacity for feeling—when Lytton seemed to be dying—well yes: I cant go into that, even now. But to my surprise, as time went on, I found that you are perhaps the only person I know who shows feeling and feels. Still I cant imagine talking about my love for people, as you do. Is it training? Is it the perpetual fear I have of the unknown force that lurks just under the floor? I never cease to feel that I must step very lightly on top of that volcano. No Ethel, there’s a mint of things about me, I say egotistically, you’ve no notion of; the strength of my feelings is only one. So get well, and sit down to your A.B.C. again. It was angelic of Lady B⁠[alfour]. to write. Now I believe she would see how fond of you I am, being simpler, more sensible than some wild cats, uncastrated and entire, that I know of.

Its bitter cold, all white snow over [Mount] Caburn one moment, iron black the next, and I’m sitting over the fire in my upstairs room, which you slept in; with lots of books, oh and unanswered letters. Everybodies taken to writing to me about The Waves. After 3 months they’ve just been able to get to the end, and write in triumph to say so.

About Gwen Raverat—(I trust you’re in a state when gossip may amuse—leave the pages lying in your blankets and now and then lazily read a line—thats what I do in your state, and find it wiles away the time to lunch)—well, Gwen is one of my oldest friends, George Darwins daughter, all Cambridge, all Darwin solidity, integrity, force and sense—What must she do, but take to art. This she did with a scientific thoroughness that used to make us jeer. But somehow she persevered, went to France, met—no this was at Cambridge—a French boy, Jacques R; fell violently in love; forced him, we used to think, to give up his lighter and more lascivious loves, to marry her. What a passion her love was! I came in for some flashes of jealousy—not of me—of another woman: and was blinded—never saw such crude what they call elemental passion unscrupulous, tyrannic, pure—before or since. And then she married him: they both painted; she like a Darwin, by science, force, sense; and he rather gifted but lyrical, and exact and very French. And then he began to stumble; the doctors said his spine was affected: Through 10 years I suppose he slowly stiffened, till the paralysis reached his hands, which had to be tied to the paint brushes; and Gwen lifted him, rubbed him, drove him in a pony cart over the hills at Vence, to paint; and so he was finally tortured to death, watching it come, with rage, with obscenity—he wrote me page after page, and she at last wrote for him—of despair, of defiance—They were incredibly brave; and yet it was unspeakably sordid, for he couldn’t die, and was jealous, and sexually tormented, and abused her, and loved her, and she suffered, as I imagine, more than seemed humanly possible, till at last she almost killed him, with one dose of morphia after another—the doctors saying she mustn’t, and she defying them. After he died, 7 years ago, she came back to England, with the two children; and used to say to me, her unhappiness was such that she ought not to see me. She became set, frozen, like an old log dried out of all sensation, save for the children. And then she fell in love again: and the man married somebody else. And somehow I got her a job on Time and Tide; and she stumps about, to me still frozen, formidable—I cant get over her past; but if you see her as a living and normal woman, probably its true. And I avoid seeing her, because I know of her past; and I feel that she wishes to avoid that, and so lunches with Lady Rhondda.

Good bye V.

If you wish me not to have another headache, you will get well instantly.

Berg

[]

2499: To Vanessa Bell

Wednesday [30 December 1931]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Could you—including Angelica, Julian Clive Quentin, anybody else, come here to tea on Thursday? The bother is that the Keynes’ who were coming on Friday now want to come Thursday.

So you would meet them, but we hope you will for old sakes sake. Well its marvellous about Lytton, considering last week and I cant help feeling optimistic.

B.

Berg

[]

2500: To Pernel Strachey

30th Dec 1931

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes, [Sussex]

My dear Pernel,

I cant help hoping, from what Nessa says this morning, that Lytton must be better; and that now we may all think of the future—which I shouldn’t like to do at all if Lytton weren’t in it. What a Christmas you had—and we too, for although the Stracheys and Stephen’s may fight like cat and dog I cant help thinking we are of one flesh when it comes to a pinch.

Are you staying on at the Bear [Inn, Hungerford]?

Well, I shall occupy the next ten minutes before lunch in gossiping, in case you have a spare moment and feel as I do overcome with sloth, self-indulgence, the desire never never to be anxious about anybody again. But now I come to consider, there’s precious little in the way of news. This house, which you justly despised if you remember for having no bath, is now luxurious to the point of electric fires in the bedrooms. Yes, you foresee the day when you’ll be asked to stay and won’t be able to think of an excuse. Shall I have Betty Jenkins to meet you? After all, your pain is little compared with the lifelong joy it would be to her. She’s written a second novel, a variation on the theme of Strachey—you’re Kathy Winter this time—but a theme so frail, so far, so impeccably well bred I can’t recognise even the way you have of putting the accent all wrong, say on the word ‘donkey’.

Then I saw another of your admirers in London—Alice Ritchie—that formidable and to me slightly repulsive—no only acutely unhappy like a beast that gets its paw in a trap—figure: she is now an orphan, regretting her mother not her father; and when I said “But didn’t he leave you say £50 a year?”, she said, “Not a penny”. “How then will you live?” I asked; whereupon she laughed, like a brown bear at the Zoo: all her means consist in the MS. of a novel which she alternately writes and burns; burns and writes. Now imagine yourself aged 30, in a small room, with a broken gas fire, sardines in a box, the sofa broken, facing life,—well would you call it life, my dear Pernel? Add to that a head which can fit no hat, feet which are impossible to cover, and a nature that suspects insults. But I have little skill in psychology; she may be a fairy (internally) aglow with rapture. But do you think it likely?

As for Ethel Smyth, whom you must meet, she has boiled over with a kind of effervescence of force—playing the trombone, golf, conducting, walking, riding, singing, loving, all at the same moment, so that she has, or had, a temperature of 104—and is nursed by a single maid with Lady Betty at the bedside. I hear the vaguest strangest rumours of Mrs Sidgwick. Amalgamation between her and Ethel seems to me difficult. Mrs Sidgwick sits with Gerald Balfour all day seeking evidence about ghosts. There’s a hybrid called Piddinghoe, or some such name, who sits with them. Innumerable ghosts file before them, but always Gerald and Mrs Sidgwick say “There’s no evidence” and Pid. pipes up, “None whatever”. So the ghosts file out, and the three come up very late for lunch, and then mumble their food, Ethel says, so that its dark before they’ve masticated the celery: and then more ghosts. But there’s a daughter, Kathleen, who’s at Newnham, and says that Newnham is precisely and actually not an inch more nor an ell less, than Heaven. At that Mrs Sidgwick opens one eye, (the other being fixed on ghosts) and says “Ah”—as if she remembered Newnham; but Ethel doubts that she does. I say I’m like the Balfour, silent, submarine, profound, whereas the Smyths are foam and flurry on the surface. So we argue. So she takes the poker and flings it at me—and may it hit you when you come.

We are at your service at any moment of day or night, Leonard and I, so there is no need to say more.

Here is my roast veal.

Yrs Virginia

Strachey Trust

[]

The Sickle Side of the Moon
[The Letters Vol. V: 1932-1935]

“When a person’s thick to the lips in finishing a book … its no use pretending that they have bodies and souls so far as the rest of the world is concerned. They turn the sickle side of the moon to [the] world: the globe to the other.”

Virginia Woolf to Ethel Smyth
9 February 1935

Letters 2501-2572 (January-April 1932)

2501: To Ethel Smyth

[1 January 1932]

Postcard

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

Lytton still better Hope to write tomorrow or possibly ring up about 1 from London

V.W.

Berg

[]

2502: To Ethel Smyth

Monday [4 January 1932]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

No time to write, owing to the exigencies of the post and the need of catching this moment of sun. But very glad of your letters; and will return Elth and send the number of the invaluable flask. It strikes me—did you pluck the leather from your own heart—was it your bottle? And did you catch cold for want of it? Never was there such a pelican. Eh on Dickens exactly hits my view: but I’ll enlarge later—the maid wading through the long grass is a masterpiece that has always stuck in my mind. And I want to develop the theory that I am really like Dickens myself, had it not been for the nerve in my spine—I mean endlessly prolific—I have now 5 books in my mind and given another set of nerves cd. write day in day out! London was rather a scrimmage: but I’m better I’m sure; and can write lines in my head. And dont please die, lying down like an Indian, and saying ‘death’; for really I find your atmosphere full of ozone; a necessary element; since in my set they never praise me and never love me, openly; and I admit there are times when silence chills and the other thing fires. So dont die I repeat, in a hurry as I say. Lytton rather better. I saw Oliver, the brother, in London, who was majestic with the 18th century good sense and intelligible integrity of all the Stracheys; with passionate family love well battened down. Like the Balfours. Its going to be a long fight for Lytton. He remains reasonable, calm, will even argue about truth and beauty and thus vindicates the race of scholars

Goodbye
V.

Berg

[]

2503: To V. Sackville-West

6th Jan. [1932]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Yes dearest Creature I cant deny that I have a sort of dying ember in my heart for you—what they call affection, and if it dies it will be because you suffocate it with the no doubt satisfactory but to me rather too substanial [sic] figure of Jones—of whom I’m rather jealous, and so call her Jones all short.

Here was I at Rodmell and you with her—but I cant really think Enid with all her seductions can be as nice, or as interesting, or as much of a lark as—someone I could touch with a stick at this moment. So this is to ask if you’ll come and see me on Monday next—(because you said [you] wanted to see me and it was only modesty if you didn’t ask, so in future I shall ask you, without thinking you’d rather be with Jones)—and if so what time? I expect I’m alone for lunch, and in for tea and dinner—since we only go back on Sunday and the worlds slow toil, or whatever the phrase is,—torture toil and treason—will not have corrupted me by then. Yes, I am very very fond of you, and whats more I was very much touched, almost to the point of tears by Harold’s farewell in Action.—So honest, so straightforward, and like a small boy taking a caning. I hope he didn’t really mind, but I expect he did, more than he lets on. On the other hand I thought Mosley’s farewell oily, bragging, crafty, pompous, insincere and flamboyant.

I wish you and Harold could live on sober literature—poems and biographies—and let him become, incidentally, minister for foreign affairs, as he would. Really I believe, if you would curb your ancestral sumptuosity which I love—George [butler] and Champagne, bath salts and kidneys for supper with mushrooms at midnight and the walls of Long Barn reeling and the voice of twenty budgerigars peeling (didnt I always say I was a poet?—thats a rhyme) I say, if you’d draw in your ancestral horns I believe you need neither of you lap out of Beaverbrooks dish and send your sons to Eton all the same. Anyhow I’m glad you showed Rothermere the door. But since you’ve married an explosive, heaven knows where he wont effulge in crimson and gold next. I was sent a notice of 5 Gordon Square to look at—is it a nice house? Rather noisy I suppose.

Yes, I knew you’d feel unhappy as I did about Lytton. I should mind it to the end of my days if he died but they think he may get through now—Like all Stracheys he has a fund of Anglo Indian tenacity, besides which he remains perfectly calm, collected and cheerful and likes to argue about truth and beauty—you must admit that this is admirable—while about 20 Stracheys are collected in The Inn [at Hungerford], with varieties of mistresses, who all quarrel, as you may suppose. No, I wish one’s friends were immortal—I’m greatly at their mercy—and then you go flaunting off with the widow Jones—I always endow dull stodgy commonplace women with widowhoods. I’m sending this—which is not what you may call an interesting, rather an affectionate letter, to Long Barn, somehow wishing to evade Penns. What on earth is wrong with Dotty? She now refuses to answer L’s [Leonard’s] letters, couched though they are in the most conciliatory terms.

Its a torrent and a gale, and I’m sitting over the fire reading Lady Curzon with enthusiasm—empty headed as I suppose she is: but what an adorable aristocrat. I like Aunts to collect foxes teeth for necklaces.

So let me know, honey, about Monday.

V.

We’ve just been put on the telephone—385 Lewes—but this is dead secret. I wish you’d ring me up for fun.

Berg

[]

2504: To Ethel Smyth

Wednesday [6 January 1932]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

Here are E’s letters. My word are you travelling today? But this kind of remark is no pleasure in a letter, and I’ve written so many as its useless walking, that I cant go on even to you. I’m better though—oh yes: I wrote this morning: a vast plate of saddle of mutton did the trick: I’ll tell you the story some time. Is it any good for your pain—plain roast meat in masses?

Well Lytton is improving, and we go back [to London] on Sunday I think and I hope this blasted season of misery is more or less over.

V.

Berg

[]

2505: To Ethel Smyth

Wednesday [13 January 1932]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

The news is very bad about Lytton tonight, though not quite hopeless. We’re going to Hungerford early tomorrow, as they think it may be some help—I shall come back on Friday—perhaps late tomorrow.

I’m much better so there’s not the least risk for me.

Take care of yourself

V.

Berg

[]

2506: To Vanessa Bell

Thursday [14 January 1932]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

We’re just back from Hamspray, so I thought you might like to hear. Lytton is better again, though they thought he was dying on Sunday. In fact the Dr. said it was hopeless, but he suddenly got better—like last time [December, 1931]. He’s now fearfully weak, but not actually losing strength. They’ve got a new specialist [Sir Arthur Hurst] who thinks the disease is running its course, but cant say how long it will be. Nobody has ever seen a case like it and nothing goes as they expect. We took Pippa out and had tea with Carrington Ralph and Frances at Hamspray. They all seem worn down, but inclined to be hopeful again. Except for the general feeling that nobody knows what may happen. Lytton is conscious and determined to do all he can, and they said he liked our coming. His temp. went down to 99 this afternoon.

Perhaps you’ve heard from James [Strachey].

We shall be here this week end

B.

Berg

[]

2507: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Friday [15 January 1932]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Dearest Ottoline,

Yes, I feel hopeless about ever seeing you—partly I’ve been away and retired from life into obscurity—then Lytton’s illness. We were at Hungerford yesterday, and saw them all. He is desperately ill, but they think there is some hope—he recovered again, when they thought him dying on Sunday. Pippa [Strachey] is with him all the time, and says he is wonderfully composed and does all he can to help. But what an awful time they’re having—and nobody seems to know how long the illness lasts, and what course it takes.

I wish I could come next Friday, but I think we go to Rodmell, and perhaps to Hungerford again.

Might I come one day the week after? I should so much like to. London is a handfull—here I’m interrupted and made to write nonsense by William Plomer.

Love Virginia

Texas

[]

2508: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

[mid-January 1932]

52 Tavistock Sqre, [W.C.1]

Dearest Ottoline,

I would love to come in one day next week, perhaps Thursday or Friday, at my usual time, between the lights, if it suited you. But I cant be quite sure of days at the moment, because if the Stracheys should want us to go down again we would of course. One feels numbed and desperate—yet perhaps theres still hope. The doctors say everything is sound in Lytton—if only the illness would slacken.

Yes, I was very glad you liked the Waves. I’m very proud if you do like what I write—It was much beyond me, and I failed of course. I didn’t mean real people, only ghosts—but perhaps real people have ghosts. I wanted too to say how sorry I was about your brother. But, as usual, I was afraid of hurting you if I wrote: O dear what a fool one is!

yr V

Texas

[]

2509: To Dora Carrington

Monday, 18th Jan. [1932]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Dearest Carrington,

Please, please dont bother to write if we send Lytton a few flowers—its such a pleasure to the old Wolves, but not if it adds to your burdens. Not but what I love getting a letter from you, if only for the sake of the hand [writing]—my ideal in the way of hands.

I wrote to Julia immediately asking her to come, but have had no answer. Perhaps she’s away, or perhaps, being a Strachey, and as astute as an eel, she’s got wind of my intentions and wont come near me. I shall try again in a day or two. I wish I could understand the psychology of Julia. Think of writing a whole book and then swallowing it back into the womb!—what a disgusting metaphor—the result of 3 hours talk with Ethel Smyth. Now its a queer thing, but all old women of high distinction and advanced views seldom talk of anything but the period and the W.C. How do you account for it? I rather think its the final effort at complete emancipation—like a chicken getting rid of egg shell.

We had two South Africans to dinner last night—one William Plomer, the other Alice Ritchie, both novelists, and they discussed Mrs Kapp; who is Yvonne Cloud, and lives, with Benita Yaeger under Morgan’s [Forster] bath, which leaks, as you might expect—hence a vast novel by Cloud, all about sapphism, so dull, so improper,—do you meet with those figures—Benita and Kapp?—I expect so: and now William Plomer is living in sin, as I suppose with Tony Butts and they’re giving a party to which Miss Susan Glaspell is going and Walter Sickert. But I’m too old for parties. Once they were so exciting my head reeled. Now—though you wouldn’t think it—I can only see through everybody to the truth. Raymonds Letter—which the Bagmen [book-travellers] call Mortimers French Letter—booms and booms. Nessa and Duncan are enraged at the mere mention. Lord I’m glad I’m not a painter—their taste is so pure; theres no getting round them.

Oh how I envy you Ham Spray! Really it is the loveliest place in England. I can hardly bear to think of my poor spotted downs after yours. The trees—the downs—yours I mean. I want very much to come again. Forgive this prattle, dearest Carrington.

V

Robert H. Taylor

[]

2510: To Dora Carrington

Thursday [21 January 1932]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Darling Carrington,

We are all thanking you for what you gave Lytton. Please Carrington, think of this, and let us bless you for it.

This is our great comfort now—the happiness you gave him—and he told me so.

Virginia

[in Leonard’s handwriting:]

I think you know that I feel the same.

Leonard

Robert H. Taylor

[]

2511: To Philippa Strachey

Thursday night [21 January 1932]

Postcard

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Darling Pippa,

I sit thinking of Lytton and Thoby and how Lytton came to me when Thoby died and I feel more than ever your sister now, darling Pippa, if you will let me. You know how we loved him.

Virginia

Strachey Trust

[]

2512: To Pernel Strachey

Friday [22 January 1932]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Pernel,

Here are a few flowers for you and Pippa with our love.

We are going to Rodmell this afternoon, but shall be back on Sunday at tea time: I shall ring up to hear how Pippa is.

Yr Virginia

If theres any chance you would like to see me, leave a message—I would come any time.

Strachey Trust

[]

2513: To Ethel Smyth

[26 January 1932]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Well, I didn’t write, but was grateful for your note and rest secure on your understanding my silence and all the rest. As you may suppose, I’ve been rather involved in the usual miseries of this sort of occasion—Lord, how people suffer, and how human beings torture each other unnecessarily—But I cant go into this now: and its all over,—not the tortures, no, but after this week, I suppose we shall be again as usual. I’ve had to see a good many people, one way and another.

How are you? Well, dont bother to write if you’re as I’m so often, in the dumps: but I should like to hear that you’re not stiffening or sickening or anything horrid

V.

Berg

[]

2514: To Donald Brace

27th Jan 1932

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Mr Brace,

I am afraid that there is no chance that I can let you have the second volume of the Common Reader to bring out this spring. I have now gone through the material, and I find that there is more work to do upon it than I expected. I think I could make a more complete book of it also by adding one or two fresh articles, and as these would not have beeen printed before they might be an added attraction. But this will take time; and I see that I must postpone until the autumn. I am very sorry if this should make any difficulty for you; but I hope I prepared you for it in my last letter. I will of course let you know directly I can be certain of dates. I thought my sister’s jacket very attractive.

I believe I never told you how much I liked your edition of the Waves. It has done much better than I expected, and I hope it still sells a little.

With kind regards, yours sincerely,
Virginia Woolf

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

[]

2515: To Ethel Smyth 52.

Jan. 29th 1932

Tavistock Sqre. [W.C.1]

No, we’re not at Rodmell, and I cant say I ever wish to go there again. Factories are rising on the river bank [at Ashham]—cement works—huge, vast, about as big as the Albert Hall. And the woman next door keeps spaniels that bark all the morning. I’d much rather stay here, or in Whitechapel, or in any suburban slum where theres no down and marsh to be murdered inch by inch by these damnable buggers. Only I generally like buggers; I cant think of a word to fit them—thats all. My walks ruined for ever.

Otherwise I have little or nothing to say. The poor dear Stracheys are so miserable and so reasonable—we have them to dinner, and I try to crack jokes; and then nothing happens, and I feel age and gloom and sterility and resentment settling over them, for Lytton was their pride and their joy; and they’re all aging and most of them growing poorer, and then violence and jealousy sprang up, even before Lytton died, so that there were scenes upon scenes; and the Stracheys fled, leaving the house to these unhappy mistresses, and desolated wives to quarrel in. But I cant explain: anyhow its been a tragic and sordid week, and here’s Oliver [Strachey], the brother you met, coming in a minute to dine—What am I to joke about tonight? I’ve been walking across Hyde Park in the dusk; a desert of wide eternity it looked to be sure, with all the trees dark as cinders, a negro sitting on a seat alone, and a woman opening a packet of sanitary towels, on an arm chair by Park Lane, and avenues stretching on and on, till I thought I should walk for ever and never reach humanity again But I did—Marble Arch that is to say—I daresay I get an infinity of pleasure from the intensity of my own emotions. But I cant write without thinking of Lytton—never mind: I won’t go into that. I liked hearing you shout—I mean your letter. I’m glad that you’re buffeting about as usual.

Lord! I must go and wash.

V.

Berg

[]

2516: To Gwen Raverat

Sunday [31 January 1932]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Gwen,

I ought to have written before, but I’ve been in a rush. Yes do come—not this week; but what about next—Tuesday or Wednesday, 4.30—(I think they’re the 9th and 10th) Let me know if one of those would do; and come here if you will.

Your Virginia

I’m sure you understand what Lytton’s death means to us.

Sussex

[]

2517: To Dora Carrington

Sunday [31 January 1932]

52 Tavistock Sqre., [W.C.1]

Carrington dearest, I hope you dont mind my writing to you sometimes—it is such a comfort because there is nobody to talk to about Lytton who knew him as you did—and of course dont answer. One hates so the feeling that things begin again here in London without him. I find I cant write without suddenly thinking Oh but Lytton wont read this, and it takes all the point out of it. I always put away things in my mind to say to Lytton. And what it must be for you—I wish some time I could see you and tell you about the time, after Thoby’s [Stephen] death, before you knew him, when I used to see him. But I could never give him what you did. I used to laugh at him for having grown so mellow and good tempered (you know how I loved laughing at him) and he said, “Oh but you know, it is rather wonderful—Ham Spray and all that—and its all Carrington’s doing.” This is no help to you now, but it is for us. Before he knew you, he was so depressed and restless—and all that changed when you had Tidmarsh.

Tell Julia that she’s still got to come and see us, and bring her book. Please do the pictures for it. I know Lytton would have liked that.

Yes of course I’ll write about him some day, but it must be for you, only.

And some time I want to come to Ham Spray again (if this is not being like [Sibyl] Colefax). How lovely it was that night—I shall never forget it. Pippa dined here the other night—she seemed well; but very broken, I thought.

Well, Carrington, I must stop and please forgive me for droning on—but you are the person who understands best about Lytton.

Virginia

Leonard sends his love. 

Robert H. Taylor

[]

2518: To Ralph Partridge

Sunday [31 January 1932]

52 Tavistock Square, [W.C.1]

Dearest Ralph,

I hope you wont mind my writing—I didn’t like to write before. But as time goes on the loss of Lytton seems to get harder and harder to bear, and if this is so for me, what must it be for you? My only comfort is to think that you and Carrington gave him all those last years—I am sure of greater happiness than he had ever known. I shall always bless you for this and love you for what you were to him.

I dont know if you’re in London, and would ever come and see us. Perhaps you and Frances [Marshall] would dine one night?

But dont bother to answer—this is only to send you our love.

Your affate
Virginia

Robert H. Taylor

[]

2519: To Ethel Smyth

Tuesday [2 February 1932]

52 T.[avistock S[quare, W.C.1]

No, as I expected, I cant come tonight. There’s a farewell dinner to Clive [Bell], who’s returning to Rome tomorrow to prosecute an affair with a rich American—rather halfheartedly I think, but what would you?—Turned 50 as he is. So I’ve given your ticket to a musical clerk in the office, which I grudge her, as I should like to hear you, with your gift for solidifying the connection between you and the audience—May I read it? In return I’ll copy out an old memoir that tumbled out of a box when I was looking for something else that I wrote ten years ago about our doings with George Duckworth when we were so to speak virgins. It might amuse you: but it needs copying—such a mess its in.

Yes, I liked seeing you—you didn’t ask me—but I tell you on the chance you have my passion for being assured of small facts like this. I daresay I’m even vainer than you are—

V.

Berg

[]

2520: To Julian Bell

3 Feb [1932]

Typewritten

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

My dear Julian,

I have made enquiries about the Nonesuch Dryden, but they are not such as encourage me—the answers I mean—to buy it. Clive says Summers is an obscene knave; even old Desmond [MacCarthy] has nosed out some misprints, which considering the state of Desmond’s brain, shows that the text must be a pullulating mass of maggots. So I have bought you some books instead—God knows if you want them; but here they are (or the post will bring them). First Drydens Miscellany which I am told is interesting as a light on his taste; then the other mans miscellany—whose name escapes me is it Dodsley—the famous one, in which I think the Elegy was first collected; and it is a great test of taste to see if you can spot which poem is by whom. Then a small shabby [George] Crabbe—but it has a charm for me who worship him, as you know, illegitimately but with passion. You share my taste that way I think and with more reason, since you tell the truth and I never could. Then theres a little book of the kind of mild rustic melody I also like—Then some modern French but I’m in a tearing hurry—John rampant—must go to tea with Ottoline—so only add that Birrell and Garnett will change any book for any other if you have it already.

Many happy returns of the day—and to think it was tomorrow 24 years I saw you first in your native vice, and took the measure of your skull! Shall we see you soon?

Virginia

[handwritten]

John seems to think you have Crabbe—if so, let me have him, as I want one.

Quentin Bell

[]

2521: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Thursday [4 February 1932]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Ottoline,

Many thanks for Mrs Cameron’s address. I would like to see her again some time and will write. You bamboozled me into dreadful boasting I’m afraid—I never meant that my own writing is aristocratic, only my attitude to writing in general—but I daresay thats boasting too: I mean I dont think I could go about scribbling in papers: thats all it amounts to: or admire the [J. C.] Squires and the [J. B.] Priestleys. I put my boasting down to the fumes of your aristocracy, overpowering me yesterday.

I liked talking about Lytton to you—so many things come to my mind I want to say to him. Carrington has written again—She says Lytton left a diary of a tour he took in France last summer, and it is a very happy one; and that is some comfort to her—poor Carrington.

Leonard is out, and I dont know whether he could come on the 19th—I know he would like to. May we, as they say, leave it open?

I’ll send the Waves; and dont buy [Samuel Johnson’s] the Lives of the Poets until I’ve seen if I can find you a copy.

And do—as I meant to insist—finish your Memoirs, and confound your enemies and let me read it.

V.

Texas

[]

2522: To Ethel Smyth

Friday [5 February 1932]

Typewritten

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

I think I dislike them both equally—so clumsy—Where musical criticism sideslips—where musical criticism derails—I think it a mistake to be colloquial, vernacular, unless you hit it off exactly. Why not, simply and dully, Some fallacies of m. c. ‘Failings and fallacies of the Musical Critic.’ ‘Where Musical Criticism is at fault—’ no I certainly dont like where musical criticism derails. I leave it at that. Skids is better. But I think to drop smartness best of all. About next week—I’m rushed by person after person (and then you call me a hermit!) Every day Im out or have someone here. Wednesday would be best; if you came latish—say 5.45 or 6. Gwen Raverat has asked out of the blue to come that day, after a years absence. She comes to see me alone, I expect, to talk of her difficulties, I suspect; but that should be over by 5.45, and it would be a first rate tonic for her poor woman to meet you; so I wish youd come and talk to her. Really, there is a sympathy between you, I believe—shes everything thats brave and angular and honest and downright—a far better character than mine. But not so appealing to the lower senses, perhaps.

We are off to Rodmell this afternoon not that I see much point in it. I shall walk out and find another acre of my view spoilt for ever. And the dogs bark, and then I cant work, and I’ve masses upon masses of work to do, after my six weeks holiday. I admit I think it a very good thing, this working. Ive been toiling over Donnes poetry all the morning—with antlike assiduity; for the Common Reader. Are you working? I hope so. Sing me the Jacobite song one of these days.

V.

Berg

[]

2523: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Feb 8th [1932]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Ottoline,

I am very glad to have the photograph of Lytton—how exactly it brings him back! I wonder if you can get other copies. Pippa was asking for photographs the other day. (But she’s gone abroad now).

Alas—Friday the 19th is the day we go to Rodmell; otherwise Leonard would have liked very much to meet the bull dog man—perhaps he’ll come again: and you’ll ask Leonard.

Yes, that was what I was thinking too the other day—I mean that now Lytton is dead how comforting it is to be with you who loved him. We must always hoard the memory of him up together—that will be something real—otherwise, running about London and finding everything going on, I am aghast at the futility of life—Lytton gone, and nobody minding. But with you, who loved him, some reality comes back. So you must let me come sometimes. How can you complain of your own failure? I’ve been writing about Donne all the morning and wondering what use it is. And then people who read and exist beautifully and generously like you, seem to me so enviable: and then you complain—and I throw up my hands in amazement. So little do we understand each other!

yr V

Texas

[]

2524: To Ethel Sands

11th Feb. [1932]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Ethel,

Of course I would make an exception for Nan and Ethel, if only they wouldn’t ask me for Friday 26th! Thats the day we go to Rodmell in the afternoon, and that particular day we have to start early and go by Tunbridge Wells to travel our books—so I don’t see how I can. But I would have liked to meet Nan, Hugh [Walpole] and David [Cecil]: and many thanks for asking me.

Anyhow you’ll come this next Thursday.

Yours aff
V.W.

Wendy Baron

[]

2525: To Hugh Walpole

Feb 11th [1932]

52 Tavistock Sqre, [W.C.1]

My dear Hugh,

Yes I’m quite recovered again and immersed in the usual business—manuscripts—and Mr Simpson who sits near me sighing O Providene like a gnome: Miss Belcher has been telling me about the horrors of life in Hilldrop Crescent. John Lehmann—how exciting it would be to be 23 [24] and in love! But I cant go into all that.

I’m delighted by your account of Prince George among the books—He seems to me to keep up the George 3rd tradition and I love him for it. Really it would be awful, catastrophic, if the royal family took to art. However, as you say these matters must be gone into over a pot of honey. If I’m meeting you at Ethel’s we can settle dates. And please remind me to ask you to give me fully and confidentially the true story of Mr Thring and the society of authors, for reasons I can’t give now, being tipsy with having just bought a divine screen by Duncan Grant.

So hoping to meet

Yr V.W.

Texas

[]

2526: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Sunday [14 February 1932]

52 Tavistock Square, [W.C.1]

Dearest Ottoline,

It is more than good of you to send me the photographs. I suppose the one with Yeats was taken last summer. How tremendously vivid Lytton becomes in them—one can hear him speak. I’m sure Pippa [Strachey] would like them. We’ve been looking through his old letters, but cant find the ones we want, of course, What wouldnt one give for another hour—so much was not said. But I know that’s foolish.

But you need never doubt his affection for you. Apart from the whole atmosphere, which was the right setting for some of his emotions—Garsington I mean, and Bedford Sqre—I know he had a peculiar feeling for you yourself. But you know this too. I saw Mary—she’s terribly bereft, I think: after the break with Clive she depended most on Lytton.

I’ve got Richard Braithwaite (Cambridge) and Lord David, I think, on Wednesday—if you would come in any time about 5 it would be very nice—but I dont suppose you can. But try.

Forgive this scrawl—foolish but affectionate.

yr Virginia

Texas

[]

2527: To Jonathan Cape

14th Feb 1932

Typewritten

The Hogarth Press, 52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Mr Cape,

Many thanks for your letter and the suggestion that I should write an introduction to one of Jane Austen’s books. I am sorry to refuse again, but the truth is I do not care about writing introductions—to me a very difficult proceeding—and in this case I have already said all that I am able to say. But please accept my sincere thanks for the suggestion.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Jonathan Cape Ltd

[]

2528: To William Plomer

Wednesday [17 February 1932]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear William,

Could you come in tomorrow, Thursday, night, anytime after 9? We’ve got Derric Leon coming, the novelist who’s written a novel in about 10 vols: which I find fascinating. Here’s a scrap of his hand, for you to diagnose—I’m so half-conscious I can’t write. Remind me to give you a card from a Japanese.

yr
V.W.

Texas

[]

2529: To Helen McAfee

Feb. 19th 1932

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Miss McAfee,

Many thanks for your letters and for returning the article. I am afraid that I cannot make any suggestions for articles at the moment, as I am already committed to other work which will keep me busy for some time to come. The suggestion you make about an article upon Queen Elizabeth is of course attractive; but I fear that I could not undertake it. My knowledge of English history is rudimentary in the extreme, and to write anything of interest about Elizabeth one would have to make a far more serious study of the time than I have leisure for.

It was very good of you to pass on my request for a copy of one of the Yale Shakespeares—I have been sent a delightful volume, and have sent on the information to the friend—a Fellow of Kings [George Rylands]—who first spoke to me about it. But they have not told me what I owe. I hope they will remedy this omission—or I should not have asked for the volume.

Believe me, yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Yale University

[]

2530: To Margaret Llewelyn Davies

19th Feb [1932]

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, [W.C.1]

Dearest Margaret,

I have been in an awful rush or I would have answered your letter before. The book [unidentified] sounds most interesting—the sort of thing I like best. The difficulty at the moment is that I dont think I could manage to come up and see her in the morning; I am as usual very much behind hand with some essays I am doing, and have to give up the mornings to work. Would it be possible for your friend to send her MS. to me here, and I would read it as soon as I can? That would save time, and I suppose she is anxious to get it published as soon as possible. As you know, there are often unfortunately obstacles which make it impossible to publish books that one likes—but from your account this one certainly sounds promising. So please let me see it. I am so glad she liked our little book.

We have been living in rather a whirl—an idiotic Polish Count has got himself into prison for writing silly indecent poems and Leonard is getting him out, which takes incessant interviews, calls from other poets in sandals and plush trousers—how can the young be so silly and egotistical. Shelley is at the bottom of it—but they write in the style of Mrs Hemans save for indecency. Then we have been rather involved with the poor Stracheys—as you can imagine there is a mass of things to be read and talked over. But someday we must meet—I shall hope to visit the Russian—if an afternoon is ever possible. Love to Lilian—I do hope her eyes are better.

Yrs Virginia

Sussex

[]

2531: To William Plomer

Friday [19 February 1932]

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear William,

Here is the post card—will you let me have it back with your instructions as to what I’m to say—if anything.

I am still shivering with alternate emotions of anger, laughter, and utter boredom from the Count [Potocki] last night. What an incredible combination—the count and Mr [Derrick] Leon!

Please be a man of kindness and send me your graphological diagnosis—

I think it must be called that—of Leons hand writing, with any comments upon the Count that occur to you.

We must have another party without the Count—one evening will last me a lifetime with the count.

Yours ever—but always now on the type writer I’m so afraid of your discoveries—

Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

2532: To William Plomer

Monday [22 February 1932]

52 Tavistock Sqre, [W.C.1]

Dear William,

I’m so sorry, but we’re already dining out on the 1st and 3rd March—this is bad luck, and I hope you will ask us another night later, as we should so much like to come.

There’s not much to await in my letter to a young poet. I find one can hardly broach the subject in 4,000 words; and then some space has to go in the amenities of letter writing. But who is your man?—a don called something like Leaven? I’ve not read him, but have submitted to cross examination from, perhaps, his wife. The truth about the modern poets seems to me to be that they have all the virtues, and none of the gifts—but then I’m hopelessly wrong about poetry, like most prose writers.

Yours
V.W.

Texas

[]

2533: To Ethel Smyth

Tuesday [23 February 1932]

52 T.[avistock S.[quare, W.C.1]

Lord Ethel, what a silent grub I’ve been—but I cant describe the rush last week, and the complications. Did I tell you about the Polish Count, and his invocation to the male organ—for which he’s in prison and L. is trying to get him out, for which reason I’ve not had time to buy suspenders: my stockings sag down; nor nibs: I’ve none left to write with—nor boots—oh nothing, and all because of the Polish Counts male organ sticking in the Mount of Venus.

What can I suggest at the moment? Wait a day and I’ll see. Thursday is my last sitting, praise God: Friday we have [Sibyl] Colefax and [Hugh] Walpole. Saturday—thats the only chance: but thats threatened at the moment. But as I say, wait a day and let me collect my wits. Also I may have to rush down to Ham Spray (the Stracheys). Where there is every sort of misery at the moment, that I cant go into. I repeat, wait till tomorrow: I can always telephone. And I’m moody and broody, but my star is inclined to you; Its not that mood thats wrong. Yes I liked Maurice B.

V.

Berg

[]

2534: To Ethel Smyth

Friday [26 February 1932]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

I’ve only got 3 minutes—Colefax and Hugh have just gone: I’ve swallowed dinner: I’ve got to dress and go to L’s mother’s party—good God! My mind is dizzy with talk. I cant settle any plans at the moment. This is only, though you wouldn’t think it, the voice of affection. I will write or ring up tomorrow. Apologies for this incoherence. And yesterday was awful: I ended the evening in black despair—

V.

Berg

[]

2535: To Ethel Smyth

Sunday [28 February 1932]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

No dearest Ethel, you cant feel more of a wretch than I do. Perhaps you never said you felt a wretch—I impute my own miseries to you. Lord, lord, what time wasted in talk last week—talk, talk, talk, and all save perhaps 2 hours and 10 minutes utter waste. When the 10 Jews sat round me silently at my mother in laws, tears gathered behind my eyes, at the futility of life: imagine eating birthday cake with silent Jews at 11. pm:

But this is to say what if I came to you for the night on Thursday next—that is the 3rd? Can you have me? I think I can manage it. But every day till Thursday is useless—I mean if you want an hour alone, theres always somebody coming, except I hope to God on Tuesday when I must sit down to the pile of MSS. which has heaped itself up. If I cant read between 5 and 7 thats what happens—a pile.

Consider Thursday next, and let me know. I could catch a train about 5.30 or 6, and be down for dinner and come up next morning in time to go to Rodmell. So then we could stretch our legs out and talk alone, uninterrupted from about 7. pm to about 4. am. But now you’ll be engaged.

Yr V.

Berg

[]

2536: To George Rylands

Sunday [28 February 1932]

52 Tavistock Square, [W.C.1]

Dearest Dadie,

Of course we’re coming to Hamlet [at Cambridge]. Could you get us tickets for the Saturday night performance—March 12th that is; and I command you to send me the bill. I’m longing, without exaggeration, to see it.

I’ve been sent a volume of the Yale Shakespeare you told me of—I wish the type wasn’t American, that’s all. They have also sent this prospectus—you see they have an interleaved edition too.

Yes, I want to see you too. Life seems awfully empty without Lytton.

Your
Virginia

George Rylands

[]

2537: To Hugh Walpole

Sunday 28th Feb [1932]

52 Tavistock Square, [W.C.1]

Dear Hugh,

Yes of course I should think it a great honour if you dedicated your Scott book to me. Indeed I woke at 3 this morning and said what was the nice thing that happened last night?—and remembered your letter—Here is Mr Edwin Muir accusing me of a perverted passion for Scott—well, I admit it: and I want very much to see what you say about this infirmity of ours—when will it be out? What are you saying—lots of things I hope. And do you really want another copy of the Waves? If so, you’ve only got to hold up the little finger of your left hand and I will send one. (I have a sensibility about sending people my books: they’ll have to say they like them: so I dont, unless asked)

I was rather cross at Sibyl’s [Colefax] coming. She seemed to create an atmosphere of amiable insincerity instantly—not but what I like her. Its only—what? I wonder if you felt what we felt. And I wanted to explain my violence about Morgan. I’m sure I’m wrong, at least I think it highly likely. I suspected him of wrapping up tame little reputable platitudes in words of twenty five syllables, and thus posing, and thus undermining the health of English letters, as Mrs Ward did and others: with their damnable pretence of fine writing: and so threw the book out of the window half read. But I explode so easily against fiction that I have hardly any trust in my own vehemence. Anyhow, dont dismiss me as an etiolated, decadent, enervated, emasculated, priggish blood-waterish ‘ighbrow: as Arnold Bennett used to say. Yes: I think a letter to Trollope would be first chop. (I’m now trying to acquire a red-blood style) I think the Small House at Allington perhaps the most perfect of English novels along with Jane Austen—I cant explain now why.

Also, what I couldn’t say before Sibyl—and how does she insist upon being spelt?—I am much concerned about your health. May I visit you in the Nursing Home: or will you be able to come and take a cup of tea only before you go? Let me know if there’s an afternoon free.

And I’m fearfully pleased to think of Virginia Woolf upon your dedication page.

Yrs affate
Virginia

Leonard wants me to say that he thinks he may hit on a better idea for a letter than A. T. [Anthony Trollope]. He will write himself.

Texas

[]

2538: To Dora Carrington

[28? February 1932]

52 Tavistock Sqre., [W.C.1]

Carrington dearest—that is very good of you, to send me the photograph. I have only some small ones Ottoline gave me. This is extraordinarily good I think. I didnt mean that I doubted that Lytton knew we cared—because I always felt that however seldom we met, our feeling was so deep it couldn’t change: no—I only feel now desperate sometimes that one let time slip and didn’t see him. For instance last winter—But I was ill all November. And I used to think he was so happy with other people, and so—but you know all this: one always feels it: and I had come to think that we had so many years together still, and we should see more and more of each other. I’m wondering if one day I may see some of his letters. I begin to think I would write something perhaps of my feeling about him for you—how we used to talk when we were young.

This is only to thank you: Ralph was very good and kind and tender the other day.

Yr loving
Virginia

Julia [Strachey] has just sent her story.

Robert H. Taylor

[]

2539: To Ethel Smyth

[29 February 1932]

Postcard

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

The wireless people are:—

E. M. G. Gramophone.

11 Grape Street

Shaftesbury Avenue

I think Eddy has one of their gramophones, which are far the best; and now we have added the wireless, also the best. Mention Mr Woolf if you like.

V.W.

Berg

[]

2540: To Clive Bell

29th Feb. 32

52 Tavistock Square, [W.C.1]

Well, dearest Clive, this is very generous of me, because I dont much think I shall get an answer. But look at the date—leap years day—certain rights are mine. Also I’m encouraged by the fact that since our generation’s letters cant be published, this can be a wild scribble between the lights. (Its cold, cold, damnably cold in London): and thats a great relief to me, because we’re all so famous now. You would think that this was leading to a boast, wouldn’t you? And so it is. Didnt I get a letter this morning from the Master of Trinity in person asking me to be Clark Lecturer next year—Yes I did: but I shant do it—think of writing six lectures, and standing on a platform at my time of life. I shall only tell as many people as I can in a casual sort of way, and pass on to something else. Indeed, as Desmond was once a Clark lecturer, the honour is not overwhelming, even to a vain woman like myself—Lord!—what stuff he does write—now about Lytton—like an old spaniel dribbling down its chops. He made no use of your article, which I copied, and sent him and thought very well of.

I could tell you a mint of literary gossip—if it weren’t so repulsive—having just seen Hugh: chiefly about the Book Society and how but this is a profound secret,—Hugh has: ahem. Well then the indecent novel by Mrs Gerald Brenan has come our way, and from half a sniff I dont see much to it—trembling like an aspen, she says that men co-co-copulate with women. Thats a fact. Did you know it? On the other hand Julia Tomlin [Strachey] has delivered a very cute, clever, indeed rather remarkable acidulated story, which we shall publish. In the social line, Harold and Vita are going to America, lecturing [in early 1933]; I met Anrep last night at the Camargo [ballet] and was introduced to his daughter and mistress—which reminds me that Roger is said to be making heavy weather with his cargo of Russians, and Nessa predicts what we all secretly desire. The old chief [Maynard Keynes] and Lydia dined here, and the talk was all very amiable, and about the past, and how he met Barbara Hiles and did more than meet her 50 years ago. They’re doing Hamlet at Cambridge and we are going up to haunt that windy tomb—how I shall shiver and shake, and avoid talking to Peter who’s novel lies by me, but I cant abear Peter’s novels. Why cant he be coupled with Webster, or Jonson or some other text that wants correcting, for ever and ever, in sickness or in health amen? And on Monday we attend the law courts. Did you ever hear of a Count Potocki? Well he went and wrote a poem about Penis in the mount of Venus; and O what luck to sit and fuck: and Come and Hunt in Pegg’s Cunt: for which he was given 6 months imprisonment, and we’ve had to employ Jack Hutchinson to get him out. Such is English life at the moment. Write, please, and tell me about Rome. Write fully and give my love wherever its desired.

Virginia

Quentin Bell

[]

2541: To Ethel Smyth

Wednesday [2 March 1932]

52 T.[avistock S.]quare. W.C.1]

I hope to catch the 5.38 tomorrow [to Woking], and will come up by the 6.15 bus: arriving as far as I can see at 6.30. I shall bring no clothes, and a hot water bottle.

So no more till then. Remember, I never drink wine at home; and am more than glad to get up for breakfast.

Berg

[]

2542: To Dora Carrington

2nd March [1932]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

I loved those little pictures, darling Carrington. How it seizes upon one, the longing for Lytton, when one sees them. But then how happy he looks—that is one comfort—and then again I thank you. We would always have come to Ham Spray: it was only the feeling we had that that belonged to another side of Lytton’s life: I dont mean that you didn’t want us, but that it was simpler for him to come here. But heavens—how I wish we had brushed aside all that, and come and stayed: or made him come here oftener. Of course one gets involved in things, and there is always the press, and Leonards different things—how worthless it seems now compared with one hour of being with Lytton. Yes, I think it does get harder—I cant describe to you the sense I have of wanting to tell Lytton something. I never read a book even with the same pleasure now. He was part of all I did—I have dream after dream about him and the oddest sense of seeing him coming in the street.

Oh but Carrington we have to live and be ourselves—and I feel it is more for you to live than for any one; because he loved you so, and loved your oddities and the way you have of being yourself. I cant explain it; but it seems to me that as long as you are there, something we loved in Lytton, something of the best part of his life still goes on. But goodness knows, blind as I am, I know all day long, whatever I’m doing, what you’re suffering. And no one can help you.

I’ve read Julia’s story. I think it astonishingly good. We shall publish it I hope: but will you try to keep her at it—and will you do pictures? I’m sure thats what would make it a success—Couldn’t there be woodcuts in the text? It seems to me full of scenes that want illustrations. Its extraordinarily complete and sharp and individual—I had no notion it would be so good. But I feel she may tear it up at any moment—She’s so queer: so secret, and suppressed.

Goodbye, darling Carrington

your old attached friend
Virginia

Robert H. Taylor

[]

2543: To Ethel Smyth

Friday afternoon. 2.10 p.m. [4 March 1932]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Look dearest Ethel, I am sitting down at once to express my sense of gratitude—never have I enjoyed a chaste night more [at Woking]. Please live 50 years at least; for now I’ve formed this limpet childish attachment it cant but be a part of my simple anatomy for ever—wanting Ethel—I say, live, live, and let me fasten myself upon you, and fill my veins with charity and champagne. Of course you’ll go and spoil all my plots about Trinity—talking over the fire to Lady B. I shall meet ghosts of your irreticence in the courts of Cambridge—never mind I forgive you the sin before you’ve committed it; and you cant say I didn’t warn you, can you? all Woking in the 3rd class carriage is witness to that. Did you see the woman’s face when you vociferated about sitting in the lavatory?

Well—here’s an interruption: I’m only scribbling, without I fear that exemplary economy of adjectives that you so rightly admire, before I once more draw the strip [sic] of my case and plunge off with L. to the wilds.

But these are the moments which one should give thanks for—when one feels cheered and warmed, and thinks that it was Ethel who created that happiness; so live another 50 years; and dont please be put off by terrible irregularities—my spasms of one emotion after another—those spikes I drive into my fingers. Heavens how I admired your practical sense: typical of so much: the taxi; the dr: the pincers: the splinter out: mushrooms and champagne.

V.

And let me know the cost of the taxi.

Berg

[]

2544: To Ethel Smyth

Sunday [6 March 1932]

Typewritten

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

1 … L. says just what I said about Peter Davies—hes a very good, exclusive publisher, who would give great attention to a book like yours, which is out of the common run. Therefore he advises you strongly to go to him. He gets up his books extremely well into the bargain.

2 … The Counts trial. Weve no news of this; nor do we know who is trying it. But the thing to do would be to look in the law list in the paper tomorrow. It is an appeal case, and the defendant is Count Potocki de Montalk.

Just back from Rodmell.

V.

Oh the chocolate came and is absolutely delicious. What a good thing I made that joke!

Berg

[]

2545: To Dora Carrington

Tuesday [8 March 1932]

52 Tavistock Sqre., [W.C.1]

Carrington dearest—We have a day off on Thursday—day after tomorrow. We want to come down and discuss Julia’s book and see you. Might we? Would you give us lunch?—then we’d come back in time for dinner, like last time. This would be a great treat for us—perhaps I might wander up the down, and look at some of Lyttons books. Anyhow, if we may, we will come about lunch time. With our love

yr Virginia

Robert H. Taylor

[]

2546: To Ethel Smyth

[8 March 1932]

Typewritten

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

No dearest Ethel I dont think Friday can be managed, since L. is out; and I have to sit [to Vanessa]. But the EMG would let you hear a later model than ours: [handwritten] and L. says a much better one.

We go down to Hamspray on Thursday and may I suppose stay the night; but hope to be back late. No; its not the [Master’s] Lodge I’m staying at—its only with the Fellow of Kings [George Rylands], or rather at an Inn. And then we shall travel our books on the east coast for a day or two—back Tuesday or Wednesday—oh lor, how Id like to stay here and write—too many people, too many people. Mrs Keppel tomorrow. Eddie [Sackville West] just gone—enthusiastic and affectionate about you; in which I joined, about Coign too and the comfort of staying there

V.

[handwritten:]

and he abused The Waves, and I abused Simpson

P.T.O.

L. says he could be in by 6.30 on Friday and would be pleased to play you Beethoven Opus. 31 No 3 if you could come punctual.

Berg

[]

2547: To Elizabeth Bowen

8th March [1932]

52 Tavistock Sqre., W.C.1

Dear Mrs Cameron,

Yes of course I was hoping I might see you again. This Thursday unfortunately I have to go away; but would Wednesday or Friday next week suit you at 4.30? (I think they’re the 16th and 18th). If you could send me a card I should be grateful.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

2548: To Dora Carrington

Thursday night [10 March 1932]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Carrington dearest, we are just back [from Ham Spray] and had our dinner, and I cant help scribbling one line to thank you—oh just for being yourself. You cant think how close Lytton comes when you’re there: you keep him for me more than anyone. So go on, dearest, devilish though it is for you; because you do what no one else can do. I’m so lonely sometimes without him, so old and futile and merely dried up, and then with you I feel come over me—its so odd—what I was when Lytton was there.

And then its so lovely—the rooms, the carpets, the trees outside, every little object. How do you do it? I felt consoled walking under the trees.

And look what ugly paper this is! When am I going to have the drawings and the book plate?

D’you know there was a coin, silver, Italian or French, in the little box? I must send it back. So good night dearest Carrington, from your attached old friend who would do anything if she could.

Robert H. Taylor

[]

2549: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Friday [11 March 1932]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Dearest Ottoline,

This is just to tell you that Carrington died this morning. We were there yesterday and talked and she seemed quiet and very gentle. That is all I know now, but I wanted you to know.

My love
Virginia

Texas

[]

2550: To Ralph Partridge

Saturday [12 March 1932]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Dearest Ralph,

This is just to give you our addresses: tonight (Saturday) the Bull, Cambridge. On Sunday after lunch we go to Norwich, and spend the night. Address. Post Restante. Monday night, at Rogers. Rodwell. Tuesday 52 Tavistock Square.

Let us know if we can help in any way, and all our love.

Virginia

Robert H. Taylor

[]

2551: To Helen McAfee

12th March 1932

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Miss McAfee,

You were so kind as to ask me to send you an article for your June number. I have just heard from Harcourt Brace that they are not publishing the enclosed essay for some months. We shall publish it over here in early June. But if it suited you, perhaps you would like it for the June number. Harcourt Brace are bringing it out as a booklet later.

Would you be so very kind as to cable your decision, as I have not much time in which to arrange for American publication?

Believe me,
yours sincerely
[no signature]

Yale University

[]

2552: To Julian Bell

[14? March 1932]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Julian,

I hope you are all right again. We missed you greatly, Norman Angell was rather fun.

I saw Dadie [Rylands] yesterday and he praised your Pope highly. He seemed to think it full of ideas and orginality and wanted you to go on with it. I hope you’ll let me see it.

I dont think it much matters not getting the fellowship—I expect I am foolish—but still I dont like Fellows, as fellows. Much better write on your own.

Anyhow come and see us soon

Virginia

Friday

I have just got this back from Cambridge—address not known—God knows why—so am sending it via Nessa

Quentin Bell

[]

2553: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Tuesday [15 March 1932]

[52 Tavistock Square., W.C.1]

Dearest Ottoline,

I’ve been away till this evening or I would have written. Yes, of course it was suicide, but at first I didn’t like to say so, as they were anxious to get the verdict that it was an accident. She had borrowed a gun from Brian Guinness, and shot herself early on Friday morning. She died in 3 or 4 hours. Ralph arrived while she was still conscious. She told him it was an accident—that she had been shooting at a rabbit and had slipped. But she had already tried once before when Lytton was dying. That was why we went down—the only chance seemed to be to give her some interruption. But I felt, as we sat talking about Lytton in Lytton’s room that afternoon, that she could not go on much longer. She said she had failed with everything except with Lytton—she was very gentle and affectionate. I could only tell her how much we all needed her—indeed, she kept so much of Lytton that her death makes his loss more complete. But she had suffered so terribly and could not believe that there was anything to come in life. I feel that he would have hated it—Pippa came back last night on hearing of it. Carrington made every preparation and rang up Ralph after we had gone to say that she felt more cheerful. But it was terrible leaving her alone that night, without anybody in the house.

yrs
Virginia

Texas

[]

2554: To George Rylands

15th March [1932]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Dadie,

We decided to go to Kings Lynn, so had to start early, so missed seeing you,—alas. But perhaps you’ll be round here next week and will let us know. It was a charming dinner—how fascinating it is to meet complete strangers—and I’m dumbfoundered [sic] at your brilliance as a producer [of Hamlet]. Talking of brilliance—d’you know Trinity has asked me to be Clark lecturer! Isn’t that a compliment for an illitertrate (who cant spell) of my sex? But no—I leave all that to you. And that reminds me—what about your dialogues—and shall we have the honour of printing them?

Yr Virginia

George Rylands

[]

2555: To Ethel Smyth

[17 March 1932]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

No I think its really a pity for you to come tomorrow unless you’re absolutely on the doorstep, because its so tantalising that running in and out, and feeling one cant start anything, and Miss [Elizabeth] Bowen stammers and blushes.

But do as you like—only there’s also your cold, and you’ll get late and so on and so on: and die on my hands. O what a rush—dining out

V.

Berg

[]

2556: To V. Sackville-West

Thursday [17 March 1932]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Dearest Creature,

I dont think I ever thanked you for the dogs—may I keep it and perhaps use it in my story?

I’ve been rather submerged in tragedy—Carrington killed herself the day after we were there. I dont think anything could have stopped it—still.—

But what I say now is, I’m going to the Old Vic on Monday night to see Duncan’s ballet. Will you come! I believe its ravishing.

Let me know. We are here this week end: Oh and I’ve been seeing such divine country, untouched, unspoilt, unknown—where I mean to retire, on the wolds, by the sea, with great clumps of cypresses planted by Coke of Norfolk. But enough. Will you come too?

V.

Berg

[]

2557: To V. Sackville-West

[19? March 1932]

52 [Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Come on as early as you can on Monday: The Old Vic is in the Waterloo Road, Donkey, and not Hammersmith; and there won’t be a dress in the house. I dont know what time it begins.

V.

O and dont let Ethel know we’re going, or she’ll come too.

Berg

[]

2558: To Harmon H. Goldstone

19th March 1932

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Mr Goldstone,

I have only just received your letter; and I am afraid therefore, as you say that your essay has to be finished by the 1st of April that I am too late to be of any help to you. But I will answer your questions as far as I can—I do not think however, as you can guess, that a writer is able to say much about his life or work.

I have not studied Dr Freud or any psychoanalyst—indeed I think I have never read any of their books; my knowledge is merely from superficial talk. Therefore any use of their methods must be instinctive. As far as I remember, the character of Septimus in Mrs Dalloway was invented to complete the character of Mrs Dalloway; I could not otherwise convey my whole meaning about her. I have never written a line of verse. But the decision to write prose and not verse was made without any deliberation. So far as I know, my methods are my own; and not consciously at any rate derived from any other writer. No ‘life’ of me has been written; the only facts are to be found in the books of reference that you name. The name “Bloomsbury Group” is merely a journalistic phrase which has no meaning that I am aware of. I may have printed a few newspaper reviews of novels in the Times literary supplement between 1905 and 1908 but nothing else. The titles of the two stories published by the Hogarth Press [in 1917] are The Two Jews, by my husband; and The Mark on the Wall by myself.

I am afraid that this is all the light I can throw on the questions you ask; and may I request that you will consider this letter as private? I should of course be much interested to read your essay; and with best wishes for your success.

Believe me,
yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Berg

[]

2559: To William Plomer

Sunday [20 March 1932]

52 Tavistock Sqre, W.C.

Dear William,

It is very good of your friend, (of course I remember him) to have verified M. Delattre for me. He sounds highly respectable. His book has now arrived. I can’t say I find it lively reading, but then its difficult to see one self as a mummy in a museum: even a highly respectable museum. Never mind: you’ll join me soon.

I’m sorry M. Janin is disappearing—the people one likes always do. And I wanted, among other things, to ask him about coffee, for which I have a passion. I must wait. Will you convey my thanks and regrets.

Please suggest a night at Monks House—Early September would be best.

Leonard says Cambodia is doing well: I’m so glad; and rather suspect that your fortune is made. And how did you know Rosamund [Lehmann]? Where? why? This letter must stop.

V.W.

Texas

[]

2560: To Ethel Smyth

Monday [21 March 1932]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Dearest Ethel,

I was, and am, very sorry you couldnt, no wouldn’t come today. But I expect you were right—Anyhow Leonard has a violent cold, and you’d have caught it. Perhaps, for this reason, I shall put off the people—the Stracheys again—tomorrow; but I dont know.

Anyhow I’ve accepted M.B.’s [Maurice Baring] invitation to tea on Easter Monday [at Rottingdean], and shall see you then, which will be nice—oh yes, nicer than seeing you here, where I feel hemmed in and depressed and haunted by poor Carrington. That last visit and talking to her in Lyttons room and saying goodbye in the evening in the garden and thinking of her going back into the house alone: and then waking and fetching her letters and shooting herself—how they come back and back. Not that I could have done anything; but when we were talking, perhaps I could have said more in praise of life—I wonder. Only I couldn’t lie to her—But I think I’ve told you all this. She held to it, even to her husband as she died that it was an accident—how strange the human mind is—considering she’d done it once already, or tried to. But she won her point—I mean, they [the Coroner] brought it in an accident, and its said all the servants and so on suspect nothing, which saves him, poor man some little added misery. But heaven knows now what he can do; or his unfortunate mistress—This is all very dismal, and if you came I should only infect you. I’m taking Vita to the Old Vic. Oh and we think of flying to Greece for a month; please please rake up all your advice, and memories, and let me have the benefit.

I’m scribbling with Leonard sneezing, and the effect is of a hen pecking up here one grain, there another—MB has sent me his book, and I’ve snatched up his praise of your singing, which is all to my mind I mean what I would say myself, on the strength of half one of Schuberts songs that morning. Arent you happy to have that gift as well as the others? I’ve now got a huge book on V.W.: [Delattre] but cant read it, because I hate my own face in the looking glass.

Well then write to Rodmell. and dont altogether forget—as she deserves—your Virginia—And I never told you all about Cromer on Sunday evening and the moors, and the sea, and heaps of lovely things I saw.

Berg

[]

2561: To George Rylands

Wednesday [23 March 1932]

52 Tavistock Sq, [W.C.1]

No: Dearest Dadie, you mistook me, as I wrote carelessly. I refused the Clark lectureship—I was only boasting that they’d offered it me. How could I mug up 6 lectures when I know nothing of the subject? So I said to the Master that I was profoundly touched and gratified, which I am: but incapable: which I am.

Why this modesty about life? Arent you one of those enviable people who have it both ways? Books 6 months, life 6 months: so dont dally, but write the dialogues instantly. We think of going to Greece in April. Any advice to offer? What’s the best way of going? Expenses? Inns? above all, are there Bugs? There used to be, 25 years ago; but people say they no longer bite. Thats my chief recollection of Corinth—bugs to right, bugs to left.

We are just off to Monks House. If you shd ever see any fellow of Trinity, please, emphasise my gratitude. It was extraordinarily nice and generous and open minded of them; and I wish I could have done it. And let us see you.

Yr Virginia

George Rylands

[]

2562: To Ethel Smyth

April fools day [1932]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Well my dear Ethel, since you will only write me postcards about facts I suppose I must take my pen and stir your embers. Lord if you knew how difficult I find it to write! There’s always someone here between tea and post—oh such heaps of people, yesterday the Keynes’s, today my nephew and his lady, tomorrow Brighton and the labour party. So I forget what I was going to say. Something about Greece. By God, what a sport or trump or card you are—I’m trying to snatch the sort of slang your Captain Grant would use at Newmarket—you know how I love that style—to care about your friends’ journeys far more than they care! Its an amazing magnifying glass you carry under your hat. But I was saying we shall go to Greece via Venice; and fly back; and want to hire a car in Athens.

None of this is very real to me at the moment because I’m raked and rasped and altogether out of spirits—those buildings. My view is ruined for ever. They’ve now put up 3 iron sheds, literally the size of St Pauls and Westminster Abbey on the down which overlooks my marsh. Hence the entire flat is commanded by these glaring monstrosities and all my walks that side, not only the downs ruined: and the view from the terrace: the view I always swore was eternal and incorruptible. Its like losing £200 a year for life—worse. And wherever I walk this monstrous abortion intrudes itself. This is what they call civilisation—and its to produce cement, of which England has already more than she can use: so they’ll smash, in a year or two, and there the horror will be for ever. This has swept me on to a second page, which I cannot fill even at my pace which is 100 miles an hour, as the post is about to go and my nephew to come.

We go back on Sunday night, and perhaps somehow I shall get my week straight and somehow see you and somehow finish my articles which bore me to a kind of dancing agony at the futility of all criticism, and mine more than all—such childs play. Such caper cutting about folly they are. (The 2nd Common Reader this is) And then I must buy shoes and gloves and a jersey and some bug powder, and nightgowns and hats and—this is the prelude to all the joys of travel. Are you in fact going to Greece too? With whom? Why? Where?

I’ve invented the skeleton of another novel: but it must wait, buried, at least a year.

This egotism must cease: but I hope its poked your ashes and caused a fan among them so that you’ll seize your pen, and plunge it deep, and cross page after page at your nursery table—the one that comes in Imps, that masterpiece. What a good book it is I will have a little marble square let in to your writing table to say so, in case you wrote it there. Where did you write it. And were you ever in love? and whats your notion of life?

V.

and why do you go to Torquay, and with whom; and who is the person you like best, and why, and what was the compliment to your beauty, and was Maurice ever in love with you and did you go to bed with more than one man?

Berg

[]

2563: To V. Sackville-West

Friday 1st April [1932]
April fools day: and I was had completely by Leonard

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

Listen, long ears.

An American dealer has written to me to say that a Collector wants to buy the MS of Orlando. For my part I think it would be a very good thing if you sold it now—you might get a hundred or two; and it seems to me far better to sell now, when the dollar is worth whatever it is worth, than to keep it mouldering at Long Barn: and it will moulder still more at Sisst. What I should like would be that you should start your library on the proceeds. So let me know. I will write another book and give you the MS. instead—about turning into a rusty, clotted, hairy faithful blue-eyed sheepdog.

Are you coming up on Monday, and if so are you coming my way? We return Sunday night—I was going to say damn: but my happiness here is almost entirely ruined. You can’t think what horrors—vast galvanised iron sheds, 3 of them, about the size of the Albert Hall, aren’t rising right in the middle of my marsh. The terrace is irretrievably ruined. What is the point of staying on here? I’ve been walking on the downs, but everywhere one comes on the horror, and it works a sore on one’s mind. It makes me rage and wake in a hellish misery at dawn. I daresay this kind of outrage is among the real sorrows of life.

So I want comforting.

V.

We go to Greece on the 14th I think, flying one way. Its only £5 more than train, and 2 days quicker. I say—we hope you will dine too on Thursday next with Harold. Kingsley Martin is coming. Apart from the pleasure of your society, I think the effect would be all to the good.

Berg

[]

2564: To Ethel Smyth

Monday [4 April 1932]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

I doubt if I made my meaning clear on the telephone:

The dr. says that as last time I was done [inoculated] my temp. was 102 next day this may happen again and therfore advises no engagements. I think probably this was an accident and there’ll be no after effects whatever. So choose: if Wednesday is much more convenient for you come then to tea: and risk being put off. Or if its indifferent, come tomorrow (Tuesday) and be certain. Unless I hear, I shall expect you tomorrow (Tuesday) 4.30.

V.

Berg

[]

2565: To Ethel Smyth

Wednesday [6 April 1932]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Well it would have been no good your coming here tonight. Its not been nearly as bad as last time, but I’m as drowsy as a bear—even a little temp. completely dulls my mind. I’m now crawling off to bed, and shall wake tomorrow. And no dinner—only fish and toast, so I hope you’ve dined on quails and champagne

Will write later

V.

Berg

[]

2566: To S. S. Koteliansky

9th April 1932

[52 Tavistock Sqre, W.C.1]

Dear Kot,

It was very good of you to write, and I cant help answering though you tell me not to. Yes, what you say is true. Lytton’s death is very hard to bear. But all the more one needs the friends that are left, and I am grateful to you for saying that you think of me with affection. Do you remember giving me a wooden box once when we came to see you? I have it now before me, and often think of you—We are now going abroad till May, but if you should ever care to come and see us please understand that it would be a pleasure to us both to see you again.

And again, thank you for your letter.

Your affate
Virginia Woolf

British Library

[]

2567: To V. Sackville-West

Sunday Night [10 April 1932]

52 T[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

This was found under your chair tother night and is therefore supposed to be your’s Please, please write to me—if addressed here it will be forwarded: I mean they will: I mean you must write every week, or whenever you think of me, or see the moon in a huddle, or hear a dog howling or tread on grass. I’ve refused the £5,000 for Orlando, on your behalf—What a donkey! This would have built you a library to last for ever. Yes I’m taking the 2 saddles for you and Ethel; one’s a mans; for thats, as I understand, to be your relation.

Shall we ever meet again?

This time next week I shall be floating past the lights of Dalmatia—looking out of my porthole window I shall see—no, this is too cruel; since all you’ll see is the BB.C: Siepman’s earnest and perspiring forehead, Langham Place, omnibusses and so on. But Lord! I’ve got to do a mint of things before I go: Sybil, Nan Hudson, and so on

So goodnight and Potto’s love.

V.

Berg

[]

2568: To Ethel Smyth

Sunday [10 April 1932]

Typewritten

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

I return Millgate [unidentified]

The name is:—

London and National Society for Women’s Service.

We shall certainly go to Giolmann first thing. We are having our letters addressed to Poste Restante, Athens. If we change, we shall inform the Hogarth Press. So at any time they will give you our whereabouts. As I have another inoculation on Tuesday and have to go down to Rodmell for the day and buy every sort of minute object I write this now; but shall try to write before we start if only a line. And hope for letters.

V.

Berg

[]

2569: To Helen McAfee

April 10th 1932

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Miss McAfee,

Many thanks for your kind letter. I am so glad that you liked the article. Since I sent it you we have decided to go to Greece for a months holiday and shall start on the 15th April. I expect to be back about May 15 th; I am afraid from what you say therefore that I shall not be here when the proofs arrive. If you would send them to me addressed Poste Restante, Athens, I think I should probably get them safely. But of course there is always some risk of missing letters when one is travelling. If I do not let you have them back in time would you therefore be so very kind as to correct them for me? I have noted only one error so far of importance—Gerald for Gerard Hopkins, but I fear there may be others.

With our kind regards
yours very sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Yale University

[]

2570: To Vanessa Bell

Monday, April 11th 1932

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Dearest,

It was a great indeed divine pleasure hearing from you—which I did this morning. Lord knows, though, if I can finish this—Nan Hudson has just gone—Sibyl Colefax is about to come. It is a windy rainy evening turned 6 o’clock. And tomorrow we start at dawn to deposit Pinka at Rodmell, and then I’m inocculated, and we leave for Greece on Friday. Not by air though. That turned out a fraud. They only fly one to Paris, and pick one up again at Brindisi; so we go to Venice, and sail down the Dalmatian coast, and so reach Athens about Tuesday. We start with Roger and Ha- Helen [Anrep], whose ticket I offered to pay towards, has some mystic objection. I see its all likely to end in bugs, quarrels, playing chess, disputing about expeditions and so and on and so on—but I shall feel this all makes bones for your pot: that is still the cauldron in which my life is brewed

Barbara [Bagenal] takes the cake. Never never can there have been a woman so sealed from birth to all the subtleties sensibilities and harmonies of civilised life. To dump her mumpish brat [Judith] on you at the last moment seems the last straw. Couldnt this be tactfully conveyed her, by Duncan say, on a card? Of course its a form of morbid love for you—thus to inflict these scars. Any contact is some sort of ecstasy to her—But after this, dont despise me for Ethel Smyth and the rest. Nan [Hudson] has been humbly rhapsodising about your genius for art—a subject that leaves me cold. But she says you are one of the 3 people she loves. The third is a dog. Would you believe it, she has altered all her plans because her summer bull dog might have been left with an unsympathetic servant; was about to start for Cannes, and is going as it is to live at Dieppe alone with him for a fortnight. She told me a long story about a Swiss who copulates with cows. I take this to mean that she has relations with Peter [the bull-dog]. I dont blame her, save that he’s old, blind and smells. Then she said people take her for a Sapphist. By dint of praising incontinence as an aid to landscape painting I almost brought her to admit that she has, once or twice, on a pale May night, embraced Ethel [Sands] in a coppice. But she flitted off to a party—I like her though, and feel that there is brick beneath the—is it called rubble?—which I doubt with Ethel.

I’ve been seeing the usual sort of people—that, is the Keynes’ at Rodmell, and Ethel [Smyth] and Vita and Harold. We went over to Sissinghurst which is now a complete 15th Century Castle, with moat, drawbridge, seneschal, greyhound, ghost, bowling green and I daresay buried treasure. Its rather a lovely rose-red though. Then we had tea with Maurice Baring at Rottingdean—2 dirty footmen to hand anchovy sandwiches, which I loathe and so had to put in my bag. When asked for a match by Baring I handed him my sandwich. Ethel Smyth was there, straddled like a major in front of the fire. Then I saw James and Alix; James rather dried up and stratified I thought: Alix flowing with a queer phosphorescent beauty. Old Mrs S. Florence has just proved in 10 vols, that colour is the same as sound: the question is who will publish it? James is Lyttons executor, and has found masses of poems and plays, mostly unfinished, also box upon box of letters. We advised him to have the letters typed and circulated among us. He says Lytton said very unpleasant things about us all. But as we all do that, I dont see that it matters. Ott [Morrell] and Roger Senhouse neednt be included, if it hurts their feelings. Our letters aren’t there—it was an earlier series. James says that Lytton meant to write one more book on George Washington; and then retire, probably abroad, and write violently, proclaiming his sodomy, and cutting adrift from society. I must say I doubt it.

By the way, did Angelica get a pound from me? I dont want thanks—only to know if it reached her. If not, I’ll send another. I may have missed you at Fitzroy Street. Lottie [maid] has heard from Clive, and apparently starts cleaning on Friday. I’m in despair about Rodmell. Theyve now run up 3 incredibly vast galvanised sheds at the foot of Asheham, which completely ruins our view, and the rumour is that they are building 60 workmen’s cottages. I suspect our part is doomed, and we had better go now—at least if we could sell the house. But perhaps we shall be more sure this summer: still its bound to be destroyed, though Maynard says the factory will go bankrupt. Thank God, theres Colefax ringing up for the 18th time to say she cant come. But the incoherence of this letter and the fact that the hand is less legible than print are due to the imminency that brooded over me. The weather is incredibly vile: rain, snow, hail, gales, fog all at once.

Now to business. We shall call at Poste Restante Athens for letters. I imagine Athens will be our headquarters. We shall be in Greece about a fortnight—from April 19th to May 14th: and stay perhaps in Italy on the way back and be home on 4th. So please write write write. If you write direct send to Poste Restante Athens: but the Press here will always forward. Nor need I remind you of the excitement of any letter in foreign parts. Please ask Duncan to write. As for that wretched false hearted Pixy [Angelica] I hardly expect a letter from her. No doubt Judith [Bagenal] is tenderer-hearted. I shall alter my will accordingly. No one has died. Florence Burke has written. Her husband has broken his knee cap. [Walter] Sickerts show is said by Nan to be very bad. Lady Diana is appearing in The Miracle. What is Julian doing about his fellowship? Write, write write, good Dolphin; and I will remember you to your blue brothers in the Aegean. Leonard sends love.

B.

Berg

[]

2571: To William Plomer

12th April [1932]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear William,

I like Miss Bowes Lyons’ poems very much. They’re handmade not shop made—a great relief, I find, after the general run. I like the Hare especially—its so spare and angular and individual. No wonder she prefers doing this to writing novels. I hope she’ll write some more and let us see them. Sometimes as you know we can print very small books ourselves. I’m sending them back tomorrow.

We are off to Greece on Friday as I think Leonard has told you. Many congratulations on the Book Society choice—at last a good one. So we can forgive Hugh [Walpole] some of his other sins.

I suppose, by the way, I didn’t leave a blue silk spectacle case at your house the night we dined there? I’m afraid not—but there’s just a chance.

Yours
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

2572: To Ethel Smyth

Thursday [14 April 1932]

Typewritten

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Such an infernal rush. Still have to get a macintosh. Well, this is merely by way of goodbye. I’ll speak to Giolmann in high terms of you. We’ll try to do Meteora if any hope exists. They say motoring is very difficult. We’re taking—L. is going to study—your book. 3 legged tour. We shall float down the Adriatic and in that peace I hope to write to you perhaps—Last typhoid more unpleasant than first—the wrong way round. Here are some cuttings. Theres Virginia in the year 1911. I’m glad you beat Elgar. No, I dont want to be in large letters anywhere. I think this is sincere. Mrs [Miss] Craig gives me distinct pain. And what a donkey—think of taking my fun deadly serious. I can see your rooms, and envy you rather. Itll pour on the Parthenon and as you say what can I see in Greece—purblind worm that I am? The one serious delight is to be beyond the telephone—no need to ‘see’ anyone for four weeks. This is a cry—because every day in this rush someone has sat me down for two hours talk—no escaping ones kind, much though I love and respect them. Even now—someones waiting. So good bye not for so very long and I shall pounce on letters from Bath.

Virginia

Berg

[]

Letters 2573-2585 (April-May 1932)

2573: To Vanessa Bell

19th April [19132

[On board the Lloyd Triestino s.s. Tevere]

Well here we are floating past the Greek islands. Not a ripple on the sea, so hot one can sit naked on deck—an occasional fowl settles on the masts—Roger comes running to say thats Corcyra [Corfu] which it isnt—a Greek gentleman corrects him—asked his name he says he is Christ son of Christ. There is also Mr Hutchinson, the archaeologist, who plays chess. But we are in the first class, and all this seething life surrounds the Frys in the Second. I have withdrawn to our palatial writing room, where there are only bald headed merchants. The truth is it is impossible to do anything at sea. We were to reach Athens this evening, but rocks have fallen and blocked the Gulf of Corinth so we have to go round, and shant arrive till 6 tomorrow morning—rather a bore, as there is a limit to ones love of sea life. We have a cinema in the evening: tray upon tray of ham sandwiches; beef tea half hourly; and an occasional melancholy waltz. So far, the Frys and the Wolves have been as sweet as nuts and soft as silk, and I daresay we haven’t stopped talking, completely, for half an hour. There was dinner in Paris, at a little place where Roger took his wife 36 years ago: and then a night and half day at Venice. Roger oozes knowledge, but kindly warmly like an aromatic—what? Shower bath, it’ll have to be, as my wits are dazed. We only had time for 3 churches and part of the Academia—and Florias Ha—[Margery Fry]—(I’ve once called her so, by mistake) dressed like an elderly yak in a white pelt constrained by a girdle, is admirable in bearing the brunt of aesthetic criticism. I’ve heard her even contradict Roger about Bellini, and she always has a feeling about a sky or a pillar or the use of bald heads in design which turns the blade off the poor ignorant Wolves. I did however, attack Titian and Leonard says he made a point about a diagonal—anyhow, it doesnt matter, as Roger is urbanity itself, and realised from the first that one must let pass Venice and concentrate upon Greece.

We drove round Brindisi yesterday, in search of a dome that Roger had seen from the boat, but we only found the railway station and one locked church. This was a diversion however, as Leonard had beaten Roger twice at chess, and I gather there was some feeling,—what Roger does is to take his Queen back, and then says—which is exasperating,—he cant play well when Leonard is so slow. But this is the only rub. We talk, talk, talk. Sometimes Ha and I (but I must call her Margery) pace the deck discussing Herbert Fisher, or Pamela, I think she suspects me of being an intellectual and moral and social snob; so I do my best to climb off my perch and roll on the floor; and sometimes she likes me; and then she’s fearfully humble. When I say “but Ha—I mean Margery—you know all about politics” she says “My dear Virginia, when will you get that silly illusion out of your head? I’m merely good at bluff. That’s how I take people in.”—I think she was probably a good deal chastened by Rogers infatuation with Bloomsbury, and suspects me of being in conspiracy against her, But Lord lord—I know nothing about anyone; and merely advance my antennae and generally get snubbed—yesterday I lost my spectacles, (but had packed them): this morning I came down to breakfast holding my sponge bag, and have once wandered, in my night gown, into the barbers shop. This is what comes of dreaming of Duncan all night. Why dream of Duncan? He never dreams of me, nor thinks of me either; nor writes to me into the bargain. Yet my lust for love remains undiminished by the Greek islands. We are just in time for Easter in Athens. Christ the son of Christ—how Roger picks up dusky jews at every turn, and Ha too. We shall have a following like a bitch on heat—says we must spend the 1st of May night in the churches and the streets: all lights but one go out. That is the Easter rite, and more beautiful he says than any other. Roger has a special box of canvases; Ha is also going to sketch. We think of going to Crete. Roger thinks of meeting Helen [Anrep] at Venice. What thoughts are in your head? Well this, though a terrible letter from a born writer—which you cant deny I am—not a good one but a born one—that’s the sort of thing Roger and I argue about—is long, and adoring and full of the most tender if unexpressed—but aren’t the tenderest feelings precisely those—emotions. This is whats called ‘crossing’ a letter. Please, please write, Poste Restante, Athens Greece.

I could have described the scenery but I know of old how you hate that.

B.

Leonard is still playing chess. No—here he is—has beaten Roger again. Lord!

Berg

[]

2574: To Ethel Smyth

April 20th Wednesday [1932]

Hotel Majestic, Athens

Well, you’ll have to put up with an illegible scrawl. We’re just arrived; the gulf [Corinth canal] was blocked with rocks, and so we came round spending another night. So far all has been easy and warm and airy, and successful. One night at Venice then on down the Adriatic with Venizelos on board, passing the islands all day yesterday, comfort, air, quiet, sitting on deck reading Wells, Shakespeare and a screaming gull called Middleton Murry. Roger and his sister went 2nd; hes coagulated various greeks and Jews—its their way—Rogers and M’s I mean; so have a thousand pieces of good advice. Its blazing white in Athens, with donkeys sagging on either side with black tulips and red anemones. We’re now changing into thin clothes and going up to the Acropolis. Your letter arrived very welcome; and pleasant to think of Bath and Ethel at her window a Much Muckle. We go to Giolmann [travel-agent], who met the boat, tomorrow. I will speak of you, or show your book—I doubt if we shall manage Meteora. The Frys incline to Crete, said to be the loveliest land in all Greece. First we must knock down Greek art—Roger thinks poorly of it. I still hold up the Temples; and shall argue tonight—never were such chatterers; oh and we learn Greek, and count out money, and Venice was divine, oaring about from church to church in the evening and the islands, elephant grey with rose red stains, and the ships passing at night, and a lighthouse suddenly opening as we sat at a movie with Venizelos. There—thats all—L’s going to the post—and this is only like a wag of Pan’s rudimentary tail. I think we shall stay here some days.

V.

Berg

[]

2575: To V. Sackville-West

April 24th [1932]

[Hotel Majestic] Athens

Well, you haven’t written to me, not one word, not one post card, so perhaps Sissigt. is blotted out—the Tower fell, crushing the daughter of the Sackvilles to pink pulp—a very fitting end for a woman who forgets old but humble, humble but old, friends. Its Sunday at Athens; we’ve been lunching, not too well, and looking for 2 hours at Byzantine relics—because its a sultry wet day; and now we’re off to Hymettus, and yesterday we went on a ship to Aegina, and saw the loveliest temple, and an island all carved in terraces with olives and wild flowers, and the sea running into the bays (it was pouring wet, I must admit, and we were herded with 50 American archaeologists) Still it is a beautiful island, and I padded to the hill top, picking wild irises and unknown yellow stars, and little purple, violet, blue, white, pearl flowers, all about as big as the stone on your ring no bigger. And we went to Daphnis, and wandered in olive woods, and to Sunium, the Temple on a cliff, which cliff is soft with flowers, all again no bigger than pearls or topazes. Margery Fry is a maniacal botanist, and squats—she’s the size of a Russian bear—on the rocks digging with a penknife. And we saw the Greek shepherds huts in a wood near Marathon, and a lovely dark olive, red lipped, pink shawled girl wandering and spinning thread from a lump of wool from her own flock of sheep. There! Thats to make you feel envious. (I see you’ve got foot and mouth disease in Kent.)

Our drawbacks—these you’ll want to know—are bitter winds, stormy grey skies, and vast helpings of soft sweet pudding. Also Roger has the piles—cant walk, also Margery suffers, like all spinsters aged 63 [60] from unrequited loves 20 years ago for Englishmen who were killed in the war. But this means that she is full of the most obsolete and erudite information about archaeology; has everything an invalid can want in a huge wooden box, and makes arrowroot for those who like arrowroot the last thing at night. Tomorrow, if the rain stops, we’re off for 3 nights in the Peloponese. (cant spell) and then back here, and then, I think to Crete, and then, I suppose home. But I dont want Tavistock Sqre at the moment: I like the life here—you should see the donkeys, with paniers full of anemones; and the Square, all ablaze with flowers, and the Acropolis. Have I described our afternoon on The Acropolis—when a storm rushed up from the Aegean, black as arrows, and the blue was as blue as hard china, and the storm and the blue fell upon each other and 10 million German tourists rushed across the temple precisely like suppliants in their grey and purple mackintoshes—no I haven’t described the Acropolis—You may thank your stars I know my place as a prose writer and leave all that to someone who, about this time 4 years since, won from Jack Squire, a silver beaker to drink her pop from. There! Thats my revenge for your not thinking of me. Ethel thinks of me. The first thing I got here from Giolmann the tourist agent was a sheet from Woking bidding him buy a man’s saddle 2nd hand for her to ride on this autumn “as I’m growing stiff and rather past middle life now”. I picture you and Ethel jogging up Hymettus together on a second hand man’s saddle. By the way, who is a sandy middle aged red faced ex-diplomat, married to an Italian wife, who was minister in Norway and talks at top of his voice about Austen, Bill Bentinck, Lascelles, Billy Tyrrell and so on? He almost got to you, but caught me listening and drew his horns in. He was travelling on the boat from Venice. Lord, how wearisome diplomatic talk is—d’you know Bill Bentinck—etc etc—you are well out of it. But it is not well that you shd. forget me. Please write. Roger is angelic, and exudes knowledge of the most sympathetic kind.

L sends his love—but is catching a flea—

V.

Berg

[]

2576: To Ethel Smyth

April 26th [1932]

Postcard

Nauplia, [Greece]

Here we are safe, very cold, very hot, driving all day, seeing Corinth Mycenae, on to Epidauros now, breakfasting on a quay, red and blue boats mountains, sun, incredibly lovely; Giolmann [travel-agent] superb.

V.

Berg

[]

2577: To Quentin Bell

May 1st 1932

Delphi, [Greece]

Dearest Quentin,

It was a great joy to get your letter at Athens, and it served very well to cheer us all up that night. Not that we want cheering particularly—save that some part of Roger’s inside is coming through, so that he cant sit or stand—but this makes little difference. Its merely a question of going behind a hedge now and then with a buttonhook. There is often not a soul in sight for 20 miles. The roads are incredible—mere tracks between pits. We motor from dawn to dusk. Now we are at Delphi, with a torrent rushing down the street, 6 vultures, or golden eagles soaring above us, and whole sheep roasting over woodfires on poles because it is for some reason Easter Sunday. All the Greeks are therefore singing wild incantations and marching about with candles and corpses on biers. We have put Greek art in its place—rather lower than it was: on the other hand, their architecture is better than it was reputed. But the Byzantines are the real swells. (This is a quotation from Roger). Roger is a fair shower bath of erudition—Not a flower escapes him. And if it did, Margery would catch it. Between them every bird beast and stone is accounted for. We talk almost incessantly, and yesterday had the great joy of smelling a dead horse in a field. No sooner smelt than 12—no—15 vultures descended from the azure and proceeded to pick it. They have long blue bald necks like snakes. Sometimes a tortoise crosses the road—sometimes a lizard.

But we travel from Athens to Corinth and so to Nauplia without any human intercourse. I will not describe the scenery, as I know you cannot read more than one word in ten of what I write, and that one is probably wrong. This is a pity as the scenery is marvellous, miraculous, stupendous—save for the olive groves however, it is not very plastic, and Rogers paintings suffer he says from this deficiency. But he never puts his nose out without hanging himself round with easels, canvases and paint boxes. Margery also paints. But even so, they talk. They never stop talking. They talk Greek, on a system, so that tonight we were almost landed with two black kids and a pail full of sour milk, owing to a misunderstanding between Margery and a shepherd. I can only write now because Leonard is playing Chess with Roger, and Roger has just had his Queen back.

Tomorrow we are motoring to a monastery [Hosios Loukas] along a road that is almost always impassable—one either falls off the ruts or into the pits—But R has persuaded the chauffer [sic] that it is perfectly easy. So pray for us, and at the same time forgive the dulness of this letter, and its illegibility. We shall be back in about a fortnight—shall hope to see you—if that is Mary Butts hasn’t butted you. I cant go into this as there’s no room.

Roger is now hopelessly beaten. The Greeks are playing bagpipes and serenading the bleeding body of Christ in a very sensual minor key. So goodbye—

Virginia

Quentin Bell

[]

2578: To Vanessa Bell

Monday, May 2nd [1932]

Delphi, [Greece]

Well its almost impossible to write because of the heat, and being half asleep after lunch but I must admit you deserve some thanks for writing such a masterpiece on the human species. I read it (carefully selected extracts only) at lunch: and as the doleful tale of Stracheys Partridges Tommies [Stephen Tomlin] and Wogan curled its length the house—we were lunching in Athens—rocked with laughter. Still it seems to me certain your final trial was not Ralph, but Mary (Hutchinson) She told me she meant to go to the Huxleys. As you observe, since its France she’ll be bound to come and see you—and Clive—and Duncan. And there’ll be the devil to pay. Pray God you write and tell me about it.

Here we are in Delphi, all well except for Roger’s inside falling out and my skin peeling in great sores. The wind and sun, the bitter cold and violent heat, the driving all day along rocky or pitted roads, make one feel like a parboiled cactus. All the same, it is so far a great success—I mean from our point of view. No quarrels, no accidents,—in fact, we live in considerable comfort, and have a car to drive in, instead of pottering about in trains and flies as we used. The Inns are now clean as new pins—not a bug, or even a flea to be seen; no corpses on the wall, and the food about as good as English—too many olives and sardines for me; but Leonard and Roger love them and plunge into octopuses and lizards,—I mean they eat them, fried—oily lengths like old rubber tires cut into squares. There’s not an English man or woman to be seen; our only society is our own, and some peasants, but as Roger learnt Greek out of the wrong book, most of our talk gets wrong, and when I correct with pure Classical Greek—as my way is—the only result is that we are supposed to have bought 2 kids. No, I haven’t probed Margery: old age brings its sad wisdoms—I see one cant eviscerate the elderly unless one wishes to have decomposing carcases hung round one’s neck. There is the less need, however, as she has told us all about her emasculated life, with the old Frys—how her father dismissed her lover, and her mother never let her laugh at any story a man told lest it should be thought fast. The dulness of her youth and the 6 sisters was she says worse than a convent. At the age of 97 Lady Fry, having shut them all up in so many band boxes pouring out tea and watering flowers owned that her policy had been a mistake. But it was then too late—Margery has missed having a child, and has to paint and botanise and watch birds and philanthropise for ever instead. I daresay it would be better if she married Roger as you suggest. They hum and buzz like two boiling pots. I’ve never heard people, after the age of 6, talk so incessantly. Whats more, there’s not a word of it what you and I might call foolish: its all about facts, and information and at the most trying moments when Roger’s inside is falling down, and Margery must make water instantly or perish, one has only to mention Themistocles and the battle of Platea for them both to become like youth at its spring. The amount they know about art, history, archaeology, biology, stones, sticks, birds, flowers is in fact a constant reproof to me. Margery caught me smiling the other day at my own thoughts and said no Fry had ever done that. “No” said Roger, “we have no power of dissociation.” which is why of course they’re such bad painters—they never simmer for a second. R. has done about 20 pictures under incredible difficulties, but for some reason oil paint wont dry here so they’ll all be smudged. As for his amiability and indeed docility its astonishing as he cant walk and cant sit our doings have to be very mild—This is a great mercy—most of the day they paint and we sit about under the trees. I admit we’ve done most of the museums, but far from thoroughly. The great discovery is that the Greeks were far inferior to the Byzantines. So we search out obscure mosaics and mosques and neglect all we used to see with Violet Dickinson Lord what ages ago that seems!

I spare you the truth—which is that Greece is far and away the loveliest country now left—quite unspoilt—in fact, uncivilised. I spare you all account of Delphi and Nauplia. The day before we came here they found the body of Cochrane, whats her name Ilberts son, on a tree in the cliff opposite. He fell over and broke his back, and—here I was called off, and now we are back (May 4th Wednesday) in Athens after driving 13 hours yesterday. He broke his back on a tree, and they found his skeleton with a watch between the ribs.

It is blazing hot and gets steadily hotter. I wear my thinnest dress and a vast shady hat, and still its too hot to sit in the sun. This letter is so dull and disjected that I think I ought to stop, and try to dam my stockings and mend my suspenders: still I cant resist a little dessiccated gossip, if you’ve not anyone on you at the moment, no Tommies or Ralphs. But I’m always in danger of running on about the beauty of Greece which is far better than I remembered—in fact, we can’t have seen it at all. Nothing is spoilt—its as wild as a pole cat—every inch is a different flower—mostly minute and like sparks of emerald and so on: Margery grubs in the earth like a grizzly bear to get roots to send home to the stone deaf Agnes whenever she’s not fixing a hawk or vulture with her glance or arguing or doing any one of the things the Frys do. But she’s as sweet as milk and pathetic—about her lost life, and no children but only endless university honours. But as I was saying its the beauty—if ever I had a turn towards Sapphism it would be revived by the carts of young peasant women in lemon red and blue handkerchiefs, and the donkeys and the kids and the general fecundity and bareness: and the sea; and the cypresses. (This sentence reads wrong: but I leave it to you to disentangle.) We’ve just been to the Post office and found no letter from you but one, of the most enchanting nature from Angelica [Bell], who seems to sum up all the gifts as well as graces. Are you rid of Judith [Bagenal] at last? Isnt she like a very round hard boiled egg?

Yesterday we had a fine sample of Fry tenacity—Roger had heard of a monastery [Hosios Loukas] with mosaics near Delphi—the driver pointed out that it would add 3 hours to our 10 hour journey, also climbing a mountain at midday on mules. Roger found a shorter way. But, the man said the road is impassable. Not a bit of it said Roger. So it was planned; and we got up at 5 ready to start. At the last moment news came that a car had rolled over the precipice owing to the bad road, and the driver absolutely refused to go. So we compromised and went the long way and rode up the hill in the heat of midday and the mosaics were very inferior and the Monks were very annoying, and we didn’t get back to Athens till 8.30 at night, having broken a spring, punctured a tire, and run over a serpent. But we saw an eagle. And Roger said it was only by these experiments that one could get real insight into the people—However he’s in the best of tempers: and though we were almost speechless with dust we had a very good dinner and so to bed.

We start back on Monday I think, and shall be home it is thought on the 15th or 16. when the greatest indeed the only pleasure will be to see Dolphin [Vanessa]. I cant think why we dont live in Greece. Its very cheap. The exchange is now in our favour. There has been a financial crisis and we get I dont know how many shillings for our pound. The people are far the most sympathetic I’ve ever seen. Nobody jeers, or sneers. Everybody smiles. There are no beggars, practically. The peasants all come up across the fields and talk. We can’t understand a word and the conflict between Roger’s book and Leonards often makes it impossible for us to get a drop to drink, because they cant agree what is the word for wine.

But it is now nearly 12, and I must stop. The Frys suggest that we should make a final dash to Olympia, and if so we shall go on Friday for 2 nights. They stay on another week.

So farewell.

B.

Leonard sends love. The Frys are painting the Parthenon Ethel Smyth writes that she has met a man who is an enthusiastic admirer of your painting. She says would you therefore decorate a ballet she is writing. She doesnt think you’ll answer her. But the truth is the Camargo wont accept her ballet. However now I’ve asked you. And the man’s wife “raved about a portrait by Vanessa”.

I didnt mean that I wanted thanks for the [Angelica’s] pound: only I thought I’d lost it: however I’m very glad of A’s letter. What a born writer!

Berg

[]

2579: To Ethel Smyth

Wednesday May 4th 1932 A.D.

[Hotel Majestic, Athens]

There, whats wrong with that date? Whats Einstein got to do with it? For your further information I will add 11.35 on a blazing hot morning. I’m sitting on my bed with my ink pot on the po-cupboard, a large boil on my chin, result of wind and sun, a sore throat, result of cold and dust, but almost perfectly happy all the same. Why did you never tell me that Greece was beautiful? Why did you never mention the sea and the hills and the valleys and the flowers? Am I the only person who has eyes in my head? I solemnly inform you, Ethel, that Greece is the most beautiful country in the whole world; May is the most beautiful season in the whole year; Greece and May together—! There were the nightingales for example singing in the cypresses where we sat beside the stream: and I filled my lap with scarlet anemones; Yes, but you want facts; Baedeker. Well then, we went from Athens to Corinth; town being rebuilt after earthquake; gulf [canal] stopped owing to heavy fall of rock; six donkeys engaged in carting fall away; will take 6 months or year: all traffic meanwhile held up: Delphi cut off; oranges unobtainable in hotel: from Corinth (all this in a great open car of Giolmann’s perfectly driven over roads like coagulated craters by enchanting driver) to Mycenae: my word, magnificent. Bees booming in the Tomb of Agamemnon. (What is the line about “his helmet made a hive for bees”) tea at Belle Helene; among the plains, with frogs barking: so to Nauplia in the evenings; oh and then next day up the most nerve racking pass, shooting like an arrow along a razor with caverns of rock in abysses a million feet deep under one’s left eye, and donkeys emerging round the corners to Mitrovitza; so to Mistra; Byzantine church magnificent; peasants delightful; coffee in a peasants room; so to Athens again; all the time the heat increasing and the wind, and the flowering trees visibly opening and making tassels of violet and white and crimson (dont ask me to document these facts) against a sky of flawless blue. Then a day at Athens, which was good Friday according to their barbarian reckoning, but Lord, Ethel, how infinitely I prefer their barbarian reckonings to your protestant orthodoxy! At night, in the still heat, we stood on the balcony and saw the procession go by, singing in a minor key, some, to me, impressive and solemn dirge round a bier; and the clergy with beards and long hair and stiff catafalque like robes sang, and I can assure you all that is in me of stunted and deformed religion flowered under this hot sensuality, so thick, so yellow, so waxen; and I thought of the lights of the herring fleet at sea; everyone holding a yellow taper along the street and all the lights coming out in the windows. Why, we almost wept, we pagans.

So on to Delphi; another vast journey; and saw a stork lodged on the head of the stone lion which marks the battle is it of Cheronea, where the Greeks, as you know, were beaten for all time, and Leonard read an account of it in the Greek, for my husband is a most cultivated man—so’s Roger; and Roger, whom I meant you to rise at, with his rather cautious admiration of the Greek statues in the museums, is far and away the best admirer of life and art I’ve ever travelled with; so humane; so sympathetic, so indomitable: though, unfortunately, part of his inside is hanging down, and another part is screwed up, so that he cant ride or walk, and our adventures therefore have to be circumscribed: still as I was saying he never boggles at a terrific expedition like ours yesterday and has nosed out all the Byzantine Churches and Greek Temples (which he thinks sublime: its only the museum statues of muscular boys and cowlike women that remind him of the Royal Academy) and can feel his way along a pillar or a carving or a mosaic with a sensibility and vigour that make one think of a prodigiously fertile spider, where we are ants, hard, shiny, devoid of all filament whatsoever. This faculty of his is a constant marvel to me, and I buttonhole him and say, as at Aegina, “Now Roger tell me why?” and then he quivers his eyes and says how the things a matter of inches—its life, its individuality: thus it differs from Sunium built 6 inches t’other way, as an Arab from a carthorse. Meanwhile Margery his sister has her glass on a bird. An Eagle! I cry. Nonsense. A vulture. She says, or it may be a bee eater. Then Roger shouts, Oh come and look at this! My word thats swell—very swell—and we all gaze up, (This scene takes place at Daphnis in the Byzantine Church) at some annunciation or Crucifixion: and I steal away to the marble door and see the olives and the pines baring their heads and letting the sun and shade darken and illumine them and think how theyre like waves on the grey hill side. But Baedeker. So we reached … [last page missing],

Berg

[]

2580: To Julian Bell

May 5th [1932]

Postcard

Athens

We have seen vultures, buzzard, eagles, bee eaters, blue thrushes, temples, ruins, statues, Athens, Sparta, Corinth—and are just off to a monastery. So goodbye.

Virginia

Quentin Bell

[]

2581: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

May 7th [1932]

Postcard

Athens

Love from Leonard and Virginia. This is where we are, not much like Gower Street. Roger raves about the Byzantines.

Virginia

Texas

[]

2582: To V. Sackville-West

May 8th [1932]

[Hotel Majestic] Athens

Well I have just got your letter, and it was very nice to get your letter though I cant help feeling, being as you know a very polyp for emotion, that you’re somehow rather saddened worried, bothered—why? Why is life so complicated at the moment? Money? Dotty [Dorothy Wellesley]? Writing? God knows. Its no use asking questions at this distance, nor indeed much use writing letters, since we start back tomorrow—

But I will just have my little fling, since your letter was such a nice one, like a beautiful Borzoi, Queen Alexandra’s favourite dog, writing with an eagles quill. Did you ever see a Borzoi write a poem? A sextet? Well, if you haven’t you’ve missed one of life’s most seductive sights. At Sandringham I’m told they were at it all night long—But to return. I was going to tell you how we’ve been off in a car jolting and jumping to Nauplia, Mycenae, Corinth, Mistra, Delphi and so on. And there were bees in Agamemnon’s tomb, and I thought of you—such a booming they made in a stone hollow like a vast beehive. Sea was round us at Nauplia—the waves lapped my balcony and I looked down into the hearts of fish. And then we crossed an appalling pass, winding round and round, every sweep higher, and one wheel or the other perpetually balancing over a precipice 3,000 feet of sheer rock beneath. How I trembled! Then suddenly swooping round a corner to come upon a flock of goats or another car, and to have to back, with the hind wheels brushing the tops of pine trees. But we got through safely and so to Delphi, where an Englishmans skeleton, the son of my oldest friend [Margaret Ilbert], had been found, dangling from a tree in a gorge, with a gold watch between the ribs. There I bathed my feet in the Castalian spring [Delphi]; and all the rocks were covered with pale purple campanula—but whats the use of talking of flowers to an Englishwoman? You buy them in bunches: here they toss them at our heads. I’ve never seen so many—at Aegina yesterday the whole hill was red with rock roses, and yellow sea poppies, one of which I picked for you—here are its decaying petals. The sea gets in everywhere—you come to the top of a hill and there’s the sea beneath. And snow mountains beyond, and bays as they were when Eve—no it should be Persephone—bathed there. Not a bungalow, not a kennel, not a tea shop. Pure sea water on pure sand is almost the loveliest thing in the world—you know how many times I’ve said so, and brought in old women with baskets. So yesterday we plunged into the sea and swam about in the Aegean, with sea urchins and anemones, all transmuted, waving red and yellow beneath our feet. Then the hills—they aren’t green, but marble, always with flying veils of purple and blue. But I wont run up a bill for words (I’m writing in a rush, about to go out for the last time in Athens) We must at all costs come here next year. Do you mean you would have come this? I never thought it possible, what with Eton and so on. But next year is already marked for Crete—damn America. Seriously, its a folly to waste one’s prime acquiring gold when there’s this perfectly wild and yet very civilised and entirely beautiful place without an Englishman or woman in it to be lived in. And when shall I see you? Before I see Ethel? Please say yes. We stay a day or two at Rodmell.

Yes it was so strange coming back here again I hardly knew where I was; or when it was. There was my own ghost coming down from the Acropolis, aged 23: and how I pitied her! Well: let me know if you’re up and forgive scrawling scribbles

V.

Berg

[]

2583: To John Lehmann

May 8th [1932]

[Hotel Majestic] Athens

My dear John,

I have written to you several times (in imagination) a full account of our travels with a masterly description of Byzantine and Greek art (Roger is all for Byzantine) but I’m afraid you never got it. The truth is its almost impossible to put pen to paper. Here am I balanced on the edge of a hotel bed with Marjorie and Roger popping in and out to suggest excursions, and Leonard ranging the sponge bags with a view to packing.

I’m afraid you’ve had the devil of a time with Belsher away, and the door standing open to bores of every feather. I’ve often thought of you with sympathy when one wheel of the car has been trembling over a precipice 2,000 feet deep, and vultures wheeling round our heads as if settling which to begin on. This refers to the road into the Peloponnesus.

Then we went to Delphi, to Nauplia, to Mycenae—its all in the letter I never wrote. I can assure you Greece is more beautiful than 20 dozen Cambridges all in May week. It blazes with heat too, and there are no bugs, no inconveniences—the peasants are far nicer than the company we keep in London—its true we can’t understand a word they say. In short I’m setting on foot a plan to remove the Hogarth Press to Crete.

Roger is the greatest fun—as mild as milk, and if you’ve ever seen milk that is also quicksilver you’ll know what I mean. He disposes of whole museums with one brush of his tail. He plays chess when the dust is sweeping the pawns from the board. He writes articles with one hand, and carries on violent arguments with the other. It has been far the best holiday we’ve had for years, and I feel duly grateful to you, for sitting in your doghole so stalwartly meanwhile. Excuse scribble.

Love from us both.
Virginia

John Lehmann

[]

2584: To Pamela Diamand

Wednesday [11 May 1932]

Postcard

Trieste, [Italy]

The Wolves have missed the Frys greatly. Otherwise a comfortable dull journey: rain yesterday and cold. Threw most of our lunch to beggars in memory of you. V. is being taught chess. Love from both. O to stay in Venice!

Leonard and Virginia

Pamela Diamand

[]

2585: To V. Sackville-West

Friday [13 May 1932]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Your letter just come. Yes we’re back—came last night—safe and sound and in robust health save for a sore throat which is the result of dust, and heat. Think of that—dust and heat! What a dream it seems now! I assure you the beauty was unbelieveable.

Are you [broad] casting on Monday? Shall I see you? We go back on Sunday so as to grapple with I daresay 10 miles of MSS

Let me know—because there’s one person in England I do rather want to see—at least Potto does—is it Ethel?

V.

I’m so sleepy after 3 days train I cant write.

Berg

[]

Letters 2586-2615 (May-July 1932)

2586: To Ethel Smyth

Thursday [19 May 1932]

52 T[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

1 Very well then, lets put it off till another time.

Friday is all taken up with a dreary business talk so I shouldn’t be in a good mood—Anyhow I’m in a vile one,—the transition from freedom and Greece to endless conversation in London makes me itch all over. I daresay I shall settle down to civilisation in the course of a week or two.

2 I dont know if to be glad or sorry about M. H. [Mary Hunter?]

3 And I cant go into our particular crises as they involve co-respondents, business, money, and so on.

4 And now I’ve got to go up and wash and change and sit in my arm chair and talk, and dine out and talk and go to a party and talk. Yes, my voice is the voice of one in perfect health and bad temper. Boils gone—superficially that is—inwardly no.

Berg

[]

2587: To V. Sackville-West

Sunday [22 May 1932]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

This is just to say Are you coming to the [Chelsea] flower show? We are going on Tuesday afternoon; so do lunch with us and go with us and dry your pen for the moment. As posts seem to be so much worse in Kent than in Greece would you ring up.

Lunch 1.

V.

Berg

[]

2588: To Mrs Franks

23rd May 1932

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Mrs Franks [unidentified],

I am needless to say greatly interested by your letter telling me that you have a letter from my father which gives a description of my mother. And what you say is quite true—I have read many accounts of my mother—she died when I was 13—but what my father said about her would be of peculiar interest to my sister and myself. Thus if you would be so very kind as to let me have the letter I should be most grateful and would return it to you safely. Although as I say I was only a child when she died, I have a very vivid memory of her.

It is extremely kind of you to have thought of this. Please accept my best thanks.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Columbia University

[]

2589: To Vanessa Bell

Tuesday [24 May 1932]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

The Wolves are giving you a Frigidaire with their love for your birthday. Would you ring up tomorrow morning and say when you can see the man about installing it. It is already ordered so protest is useless.

Virginia
Leonard

Berg

[]

2590: To V. Sackville-West

Wednesday [25 May 1932]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Dearest Creature,

Are you coming up on Monday? If so are you coming to see me—lunch, tea, dinner, what? The flower show was a mass of cold mud and blazing blossom and petrified faces. Oh the country gentlemen of England and their riddled, raddled, foxhunting wives! Theres only one person I want to see, and she has no burning wish for anything but a rose red tower and a view of hop gardens and oasts. Who can it be? Its said she has written a poem and has a mother, a cow, and a moat. I’m so illiterate—I’ve seen so many people—life offers so many problems and there’s a hair in my pen. So let me know about Monday.

V.

Would you like to give [the manuscript of] Orlando to the Bodleian? Aren’t I vain?

Berg

[]

2591: To Edward Sackville West

Wednesday [25 May 1932]

52 T[avistock] S[quare, W.C.1]

Dear Eddy,

Many thanks for your characteristic letter. I’m sorry you think I didn’t “put it at all well” the other night—Still more sorry that I ever tried to ‘put it’ at all. (By the way, I did it entirely off my own bat—Duncan had nothing to do with it). As for what you call the “cheapness” of my remarks about “behaving like a gentleman” I never said anything of the kind. I urged you to behave like a British nobleman, an intentionally half-humorous remark and no doubt in your eyes a vulgar one. To urge either you or Duncan to behave like a gentleman is too silly even for me.

Anyhow I’ve had my lesson and wont interfere in your affairs again—that I promise you.

Yours
Virginia Woolf

Berg

[]

2592: To Ethel Smyth

Thursday [26 May 1932]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Well Ethel dear this is very sad—that you’re not with me at this moment but hitting some ball about on a cold grey lawn. Do you dress in white?—Do you wear a little straw hat with a blue ribbon, and a blouse fastened by a dragon fly in turquoises? Those are my ancient views of lawn tennis seen over a paling in Cornwall 30 years ago. But enough of these recollections. Were you here, in the arm chair opposite, we wouldn’t recollect: we would—how d’you call it?—present. So you were very wrong-headed not to come. Yet I dont blame you. I cant tell you how down in the mud and the brambles I’ve been—nearer one of those climaxes of despair that I used to have than any time these 6 years—Lord knows why. Oh how I suffer! and whats worse, for nothing, no reason thats respectable. Only coming back from Greece here to the incessant rubbing and rasping; and then one thing going bad on my hands after another—here’s one friend in a divorce case, another fallen in love; and an odious quarrel fastened on me; and the whole Press upset and in process of death or birth, heaven knows which—these I suppose were reasons why I answered you so grumpily: and was incapable of any vision of hope. This evening is the first evening, nearly, I’ve had to myself; and slowly I’m renewing my soul. I’m reading over the fire. Can it be possible I shall one day wish to write again—Can there be peace and hope on t’other side of this blazing cauldron? I repeat—how one suffers: and why? No doubt you have a reason when you suffer. I wouldn’t live last week again for £33.10/- and 6d.

This is only by way of apology: I doubt that even you, who so well know even me, can understand why I’m such a damnable whirled dead leaf blown by in an invisible sandstorm. Let us hope for a day next week—God knows.

V.

Berg

[]

2593: To Ethel Smyth

[29 May 1932]

Typewritten

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

What about dining with me on Thursday—next 2nd I shall be alone. But cant manage Tuesday afternoon. Dinner 7.30. Let me know; but dont bother, as I’ll arrange another day if this is a difficult one.

V.

Oh thank you for your understanding letter—just back from Rodmell—its so spoilt, my marsh, I can hardly bear to walk there.

[handwritten] forgot to post this

Berg

[]

2594: To Mrs Franks

4th June 1932

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Mrs Franks [unidentified],

I return herewith my father’s letter. I have read it, and my sister also has read it, with very great interest. Although as you say, it does not describe my mother directly, it gives a sense of their life at the time which is very vivid and brings him before us as only a letter can.

I must thank you again very sincerely for the kindness which led you to send it me.

It has struck me that as you are interested in Thackeray relics you might like this photograph of the drawing of him by Samuel Lawrence which was, I think, given by George Smith, the publisher, to Thackeray’s daughters when he went to America. The original drawing is in our possession. I am therefore sending you a copy.

Believe me
yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Columbia University

[]

2595: To Kingsley Martin

5th June 1932

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Mr Kingsley Martin,

Leonard tells me that you asked him if I would consider writing the World of Books page in the New Statesman for a few weeks.

It is very good of you to suggest it, and I have been thinking it over. But I have come to the conclusion, not for the first time, that it would be a mistake for me to try. I used to write regularly for the Times Lit Sup; but I was very glad when I could give it up. For one thing I am not an expert journalist—that is, it takes me three or four mornings to write an article that most people do in one. Then books one wants to write about dont appear every week, so that one has to write about boring books out of ones line. And then I feel the worry of being up to time a great burden. So for these reasons I have decided not to bind myself to regular journalism again. But I am very grateful to you for having given me the chance.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

George Spater

[]

2596: To Ethel Smyth

[9 June 1932]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

No, I dont see how I can manage Wednesday unless it suits you to come late—We’ve another Hogarth Press discussion—God damn it—that afternoon. And this afternoon 7 to tea—all at 6s and 7s too—and I’m too dazed to write.

Elith last night very refreshing

V.

Berg

[]

2597: To J. D. Hayward

June 9th 1932

Copy of a Testimonial
Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

I have known Mr Hayward’s work as an author and journalist for a considerable time. Ever since he used to write for The Nation when my husband was Editor.

I have always thought highly of it and followed it with interest.

Virginia Woolf

King’s

[]

2598: To Edward Sackville West

14th June [1932]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

My dear Eddy,

I was much touched to hear from Vita that you wanted to come and see me again. I was very sorry we quarrelled. My only wish was to make it up between you and Duncan, but no doubt I was clumsy in the way I did it. And certainly your letter broke off all relations quite emphatically—as I read it. But there is no need to go into this—quarrels are very foolish things.

At the moment it is rather difficult to suggest a meeting. I’m only allowed by the dr to do a little work on condition I see practically no one. Sometimes we’re here—sometimes at Monks House. If you should be down there would you either write or ring up—Lewes 385—I dont want you to make a journey in vain, and I find it difficult at present to settle plans beforehand.

But it will be a great pleasure to see you, whenever it is, and to begin again a friendship which I enjoyed greatly. May it never lapse again!

yr affate V.W.

Berg

[]

2599: To Ethel Smyth

Saturday, and Sunday [18 and 19 June 1932]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

Yes Ethel, I was deeply touched by thinking of your picking pinks for me—I thought the time of pinks was over—emotionally, I mean; and I remembered the day you brought them in cardboard boxes, two years ago, and you said this marked the honeymoon and would soon be over. Isnt it odd what romance certain scenes hold for one—you this hot evening in your garden, picking pinks. Its the thought of the evening, and me coming in at the door, and shelling peas with you and the pinks smelling, and then a little dinner in the fading light Please if ever I come again, dont meet me—I meant to tell you this—but let me find you among your things—you cant think what a shock of emotion it gives me—seeing people among their things—I’ve lots such scenes in my head; the whole of life presented—the other persons life—for 10 seconds; and then it goes; and comes again; so next time dont meet me.

By the by, how amused, yet outraged I was crossing the road the other night, by your violent rejection of my arm. ‘No succouring’ What an old applewoman you are underneath—all Whitechapel is under your blue ascot frock—yes—is it the cursing gambling Indian sires;—How did you brew this violence? In another moment you would have felled me to the ground with your fist. Weren’t you like a woman sitting squat on a public house steps, with a little clay pipe and a basket of matches No thats not quite it and I’m writing in the devil of a hurry: must stop.

Monday

Your letter: Oh Tuesday and Wednesday is Ottoline and going out. I could be in late on Tuesday 6.30: but is that worth it? What about a real conversation on Wednesday week, wh. I promise to keep free if I possibly can?

Let me know

V.

Berg

[]

2600: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Wednesday evening [22 June 1932]

52 T[avistock] S[quare, W.C.1]

Oh dear, oh dear—no sooner had your letter come than the telephone rings—Tom [Eliot]. May he come and see us. ‘Oh yes, do’. ‘But Vivienne [his wife] wants me to say may she come too—to tea, to dinner, this week, next week?’ Evidently she was at his elbow—So its hopeless. I cant face it. We put them off till the week after the week after next. The ether, the whistle, the dog—its too sinister and sordid and depressing. How did you live through it. One must simply let him drown, wrapped in swathes of dirty seaweed. If she weren’t so malodorous and tousled it would be more tolerable—No, nothing could make me see them again together. This is only a cry from the heart in answer to yours.

Now I must change and go and dine with Margery Fry off cheese, at the other end of London, and tomorrow dine with Mary [Hutchinson] and go to the Zoo; and on Monday have Mirsky and his prostitute, and on Tuesday dine with Americans, and on Wednesday have old Ethel Smyth—thats what London is, a perpetual catcall and cry. But this didnt apply to our old crony tea, which was delicious and healing to my heart. Oh yes, you must sell all you possess, even the yellow pearls, and go to Greece. How you would love it—stretching in the sand among the asphodel. I believe we both had Greek grandmothers, and this cage in Bloomsbury with the poets and their prostitutes is only an interlude. But heavens, I must change.

I wasted an hour very happily this afternoon looking for a [Fanny] Burney for you in an old bookshop—I almost bought Shakespeare, Byron, and the works of [William] Hayley instead. But no doubt Burney will turn up in time. Dont get one just yet anyhow.

Love from us both V.

Texas

[]

2601: To Rosamond Lehmann

[end-June 1932]

52 Tavistock Square, [W.C.1]

My dear Rosamund,

It was melancholy indeed that you didn’t come up the other day, but just as well, because I was stupid as an owl; but do come properly another time and let me know: is dinner any good? Are you always catching the last train? That is my impression of you, flying across London to the shades of Oxfordshire—oh how nice! Still, we’ve just been swimming Pinka in the Serpentine, and it was incredibly lovely—every housemaid a dab of pure colour. Why cant the summer last forever? and housemaids be for ever blue and yellow.

No: I was slightly shocked at my own verbosity the other night. Nessa and I get off upon our old days and chatter like magpies, elderly white magpies; when its you—the humming birds—is Miss Morris [unidentified] a humming bird?—who ought to be singing to us.

I hope and think things are settled with John to all our advantage. We must meet, you and I, and have a talk soon.

Yr Virginia

Now I’ve forgotten how you spell Rosamond let alone Phillips.

King’s

[]

2602: To Ethel Smyth

Tuesday [28 June 1932]

52 Tavistock Square, [W.C.1]

Look here, it is much too hot to think of making a special journey to London tomorrow. Put it off until there’s a breeze. Its silly to come panting—exhausted here—we shall transact no business and I shall feel guilty. Choose another day and I’ll keep it.

I had meant, if time had been willing which it wasnt (2 Russians, [Mirsky] Vita, and a stark honest sad Strachey woman [Alix] all on top of each other yesterday) to explain my idiotic or rather childish refrain “Do you like me better than—?”

This is not to be taken seriously. It is only a relic of childish days when I used to pull Nessa’s amethyst beads. Say, please say you love me best: and then she’d shake her head; and then I’d go over her friends and relations, like beads; and so on. This habit comes over me still with you and Vita: and its not to be taken as a serious demand that you should soberly search your affections. Far from it.

Now I must wash and change and go and dine with Katherine Furse, whom I’ve not seen since Charles died, or thereabouts—How I dread the moment when the door opens and I have to go in. I assure you I’m almost sick with fright at this moment—To you this would mean nothing—I mean you wouldn’t feel afraid.

V.

Berg

[]

2603: To V. Sackville-West

Friday [1 July 1932]

52 Tavistock Square, [W.C.1]

Your friend from America, or rather your friend Pearnie, is coming to see me about The Pictorial World. What I want to know is how much did you say they paid you: because, though naturally much inferior, I still think, being so much older and sadder, I ought to be paid the same—if that is, I’m paid anything: which I doubt.

What about The Miracle? Thursday next week would suit me best—indeed, it seems, God help me, the only day. Let me know and dont entirely throw off one who loves you.

Did you go West as you said? To Cornwall? And buy another castle; or is it only Avebury Manor House [Wiltshire] this time?

Why must one see so many people? Today a child of 2, my Godchild, daughter of Rupert Brooke’s old love; and streams fell from her woollen drawers. So they did from mine once when I was bridesmaid, at her age. But I like that better than luscious and intense Russians—better than Colefax among her pots.—though I respect her too. L. brought 3 chairs. Someone was highly praising a book called Noble Godavary. I must read it.

V.

Berg

[]

2604: To Ethel Smyth

July 1st [1932]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

All right, I will pick out the letters and you can fetch them any time on Sunday morning. I let them go grudgingly, though I admit I have no cause on the face of it to be aggrieved. You’ve given me time and enough; and I’ve read enough to begin to get the feeling that I want to sink down alone, for a month, with the letters round me and absorb them and all their circumference. What I grudge is that a month is out of the question; and its out of the question largely owing to my own complete incapacity to rule my own time. Talk of dress, my dear Ethel—thats a mere flea bite: that I can settle and dismiss in a second: its the plague of people that really worries me: if you could lay that cloud of stinging gnats, or tell me how, I should be eternally grateful. Every day its the same—somebody insists upon being seen; has a claim; will be hurt if I dont. Three letters to this effect already last night and this morning. The days loom ahead of me. Each with its “seeing’ its being at home and sitting here and talking, its arranging visits and dinners—and the end is I cant read what I want or write; and the people I do want to see—wonderful that the faculty should still exist—I see only in a crush: and some I never see at all. But still they go on: 4 to tea today: and its never over; each week, like a wheel, brings up a fresh crop. There! Thats my wail. How would you deal with a lady [Noel Richards] who’s called her baby Virginia after me, and must bring it to tea; and then—no, I cant recount the lot. Think out a method, please. And forgive the usual exacerbated egotism.

V.

I couldn’t resist peeping into the letters again: how fascinating: I feel the tug of innumerable psychological filaments, which I believe, obtuse as I am, I could unravel and knit up in a remarkable picture—but whats the use of dreaming? I’ve 20 MSS to read for violent blood thirsty authors.

Berg

[]

2605: To Vanessa Bell

Thursday [7 July 1932]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

I find we’ve made such a mass of money this year—we’ve just done our half yearly accounts—that I’m sending you a very small crumb, as I’ve nothing whatever to buy with it. So this is nothing to do with Angelica; its Dolphin’s solely. So be a good beast and say no more about it. Lord—what a party it was last night!

B.

Berg

[]

2606: To V. Sackville-West

Thursday [7 July 1932]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

I’ve just asked Stella Benson to dine, so I wont come on Tuesday; but many thanks. And for the book [Noble Godavary] which I shall read: at the moment I’m in bed, having been faint (it was so d—d noisy and hot) at a party at the Ivy last night and convoyed home by Clive the oddest scene: but not a pleasant place to faint in. Oh if there were no more parties except with sheep dogs who just give paws. How I envy you the Lake [at Sissinghurst]: London is intolerable; but I hope we go to Rodmell for Sunday tomorrow where I shall sit in the garden. Oh dear yes—and theres heaps of things I want to talk to you about. Did you think there was any sense in my letter—anything true about poetry? I shall be much interested to read Harold: what about Hugh’s letter?

But I’m half asleep.

Monday then, as early as you can.

V.

I never rejected Godavary? Ethel says its magnificent

Berg

[]

2607: To Mrs Thomas Hardy

July 11th [1932]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.[1]

Dear Mrs Hardy

I was very much disappointed not to come to your lunch the other day. I had been dining out the night before and fainted, owing to the heat, so that it seemed unwise to go out again next day. Indeed I stayed in bed. But I am quite well again now, and hope very much I may see you later.

I have always wanted to tell you how greatly I enjoyed your life of Mr Hardy. It gave a wonderful picture of him. My husband and I have never forgotten the day we spent with you. With kind regards from us both

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Frederick B. Adams Jr.

[]

2608: To Ethel Smyth

Tuesday [12 July 1932]

Typewritten

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Oh my dear Ethel I’m not quite such a fool as you think me (this refers to your long kind entirely mistaken letter) That is if the problem were what you state—a question of “aspirants for interviews” then Ive solved it long ago. I never never never see them.—or people who ask to come because they like my books, or schoolmasters, or bringers of Mss—or societies that want me to speak. I merely type in two minutes—Ive just done it three times—“Mrs Woolf is sorry, but her engagements” and Miss Belsher of the Hogarth Press signs it; and theres an end. Indeed if I saw people who want to consult me I should deserve your laughter and pity and contempt.

But its not them—what I find impossible to solve is the problem of personal friends, and the friends of personal friends. All these cases, for instance, are waiting solution at the moment; R; a very old friend; ill; in a home; will I go and see him; Nellie Cecil; stone deaf; will I come over to Gale and see her (She was divine to me twenty years ago;) my mother in law—at Worthing; when am I coming?: Mrs Hardy, widow of Thomas, will I lunch; her husband was an old friend of my fathers; Katharine Furse, will I dine anytime before August 1st; to meet her dear friend, Mary Follett; Dorothy Bussy, Lyttons sister; will I see her to discuss Lyttons letters—etc etc. All these people I like; some have been good to me years ago when I was a gawky tongue tied impossible girl; how can I say to them “Owing to the ever increasing MSS a publisher has to read … I am forced to set apart definite afternoons … The next available day is …” It’s impossible. And its not my vanity and weakness as you make out; its simply the way of human beings—look at yourself. There you are saying do come and meet Mrs Woodhouse; do lunch with Mary Dodge; do come over to Maurice [Baring] at Rottingdean; do arrange to see Ronald Storrs. And why you think I’m foolish and ridiculous to dine at the Ivy on a hot night with people I’ve known twenty years, and not foolish, but wise and adorable to dine with you at Coign in order to meet Barings and Storrs whom Ive known ten minutes and dont care a straw for—I cant imagine. However I never expected sympathy for that unlucky faint; and shouldnt have told you myself. But as you see the problem isnt the problem you imagine.—thats all I want to make clear to you. Not to claim sympathy.

Many thanks all the same. I’ll keep your form and use it on your friend Lady Oxford who’s just rung up. But not on Nelly Cecil nor Stracheys nor my poor old 82 year old mother in law.

I say, what do you mean by calling the Benson Bronte first rate; fifth I should say, if that. This reads hot. But then I am.

Virginia.

Berg

[]

2609: To Ethel Smyth

Thursday [14 July 1932]

Typewritten

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Well I’m sorry if you think I wrote with undue vehemence or unfairly. But I think I have reason to feel exacerbated—not only in my vanity—that you, who protest you like me, should still think, after two years, that I’m capable of wasting time and strength on ‘admirers’, on what you call ‘aspirants for interviews’ and then complain I dont get time for work—I do feel nettled—whether from vanity or not I dont know—to think of you and Miss Dodge sitting in judgment on me and writing to quote your own words “I do rather doubt whether you have the department of character which is necessary (to refuse aspirants to interviews.) And the reasons are (1) you are kind and want to gratify these people. (2) You are flattered at their wanting so desperately to consult you. (3) There is a magpie element in you.”

All this time youve been thinking I’m that sort of person—thats how I spend my time, in a rose coloured tea gown, signing autographs. I’m so vain of having prestige, which, as you remark, any fraud or fifteenth rate person may have, that I cant resist gratifying it; and then complain and then faint; and then am surprised when the austere Ethel is ‘coldly angry’. As for your discovery that I “like going out”, whereas the unsociable Ethel [handwritten] the unsociable Ethel who sees more people, stays in more houses, and enjoys it more than anyone I know [typewritten:] prefers complete solitude, I think I had better follow your advice “Since thy servant may not speak and live, let it be left at that”.

Let us agree that it was I who thrust myself upon the Barings and the Dodges in my insane and insatiable desire for flattery. Seriously, I dont blame you, or Katharine Furse or myself, for the amiable impulse which prompts one to say ‘Oh do come and meet my friends—’ I never meant to imply that I did. All I say is that these adorable impulses are the devil—because one cant deal with them coldly with printed forms—they rouse one’s feelings: one sees that it is goodness and kindness that prompts it. [handwritten] I admit that I’m so made that I get one of the most intense pleasures in life from “seeing people”—Dodge and Barings that is, not Scarboroughs and Huges [?] [typewritten:] And hence my difficulty; hence my fainting.

But, to exonerate myself, here are two of the letters that I get most days—and heres the answer I invariably send. Now no more. The whole thing is insoluble. As you say.

V.

[handwritten]

By the way, it strikes me that the last “aspirant for an interview” to whom, unwisely as I come to think, an interview was granted was—who d’you suppose—Ethel Smyth! Do you know that lady? If so, tell her with my love, not only has she blasted my belief in the possibility of friendships but whats more next time she talks of loving me, knowing me, wishing to see me, I shall understand that she refers to a lady in a rose coloured tea gown, with a lap dog, a fountain pen, and a habit of writing her name with a flourish across what she calls photos of a celebrated authoress.

Berg

[]

2610: To Harmon H. Goldstone

20th July 1932

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Mr Goldstone,

I am much interested to hear that you think of developing your essay into a book on my writings. Of course I shall be delighted to give you any help that I can; though I may add that I have found that it is generally much better for the author who is being criticised to stand as far apart from the book as possible; and for the writer to judge as impersonally as possible. But if there are any questions of fact that I can settle, I will willingly do so.

Unfortunately, I shall not be in London at all before October. If, however, you liked to send me your outline to the above address it would be forwarded; and I would give you any help that I can. M. Delattre has just published a book upon me in French; I do not know if you would find this useful. The title is Le Roman Psychologique de V.W. Librairie J. Vrin.

Believe me, yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Berg

[]

2611: To Elizabeth Bowen

July 22nd [1932]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Mrs Cameron,

It is very good of you to send me your novel, which I am keeping, as a treat, for next week, when I get into the country and forget for a time the masses of manuscript that I ought to be reading. What a relief it will be to find a real book after all this rubbish, and I hope you will carry out your idea of a diary of books, not events—I mean not tea parties but Milton and so on.

With thanks, yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

2612: To Helen McAfee

July 25th 1932

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Miss McAfee,

I should have thanked you before for the cheque for my letter to a young poet. Many thanks and also for the copies of the Yale Review. I was told the other day by a very critical Englishman that in his opinion the Yale Review is the best of all American magazines, Certainly this number seems to me—if I am not prejudiced in its favour—full of good things, and I hope it will continue to flourish in spite of the general depression. Our papers struggle along with difficulty.

We are just off to Sussex for two months but shall be up and down in order to see to the Hogarth Press.

With kind regards from us both
yours very sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Yale University

[]

2613: To Lady Cecil

Monday [25 July 1932]

52 Tavistock Square, [W.C.1]

Dear Nelly,

Well you may call me a liar, but you cant deny I have a lovely heart—to sit down when I should be packing and answer you, instantly.

I daresay E. F. Benson [Charlotte Bronte] was all right—its only I detest the collocation (is that the word?) of that tubby ruddy fleshy little Clubman with Charlotte. Its impure. Its like cats marrying dogs—against the right order of things. Let him stick to Dodo. I cant follow the Bronte enthusiasts. A lunatic, living I think near Hatfield, has sent me a book proving that Branwell [Brontë] wrote Wuthering Heights—the work (her work that is,) she says, of years. One of Benson’s points was that Charlotte had no feeling of any kind for the other sex; but was entirely decimated (is that a word?) by passion for one of those obscure old frumps—Hussey, [Ellen] Nussey—what was her name? Yet I can remember, or think I can, old George Smith preening himself—hundreds of years ago—when my mother said—oh this is millions of years ago, I may well have invented it—“I am sure Charlotte was in love with you Mr Smith”.

You see, I’m becoming senile, and can only think of the drawing room at Hyde Park Gate when, as I say, I should be packing. By this you may know that we’re off to Rodmell tomorrow. Its all very well to ask my sister to bring me, to Gale, but how do I know that you wont be at Geneva? You mostly are. Whenever I ring you up the Butler says her Ladyship has just started for Geneva. I’m afraid its no use writing this letter any longer: I must pack.

About the Bookseller—was his name Glaisher? Did he put his head in a gas oven? Thats the trade gossip. He died owing us £1.10.6 I think. To lay dust upon his ghost I’m sending you the Letter to a poet: poor Lady Cecil! Thats what comes of writing to authors and telling them they’re hardhearted abandoned liars—coals of fire, by every post. But you needn’t refer to it. If you should write a letter ignoring the coal of fire it would naturally be welcome.

V.W.

The Marquess of Salisbury (Cecil Papers)

[]

2614: To Ethel Smyth

[28 July 1932]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

I’m sorry to have been so long in writing, but this is the very first evening I’ve had to myself since I saw you. But I’ve been thinking over what you say, and the whole position. And what I want to make clear at once is that I dont think that the actual cause of the quarrel is of any importance. I entirely accept your statement that you did not mean to hurt me by what you said—indeed I am sure nothing was further from your mind. But that doesn’t do away with the fact which I admit seems to me much more serious—that these misunderstandings between us do happen—one last summer, one this. And as you say that you never quarrel with your friends, and as I certainly never quarrel with mine, the fact does seem to point to some incompatibility between us. But that again would not so much matter to me at least, though it is of course a very unfortunate fact. What I do find harassing and unnerving and odious to an extent that I dont think you realise is the resulting ‘scene’. I think I told you last summer how I loathed it. Last week after our letters I was in dread that the same thing might happen again. I purposely told you that I could only see you for an hour and a half; and I did my best to avoid the subject. I think you will admit that it was entirely owing to you that it was discussed at all. And to me the memory of that discussion is one of such horror—it makes me feel so degraded—so humiliated—as I used to feel, after a scene with Nelly—that—well, I dont see how I’m to see anyone easily, or write, or speak freely to anyone who may insist upon a scene like that again. At the same time I quite understand that you may be perfectly right to wish to clear things up in talk—that its not your fault if you are violent as you say you are—that I am, quite probably, unnecessarily disgusted and sickened (not only by you—by myself also) when such scenes take place. But, given our obvious tendency to misunderstand each other more than we misunderstand other people, and given the fact that such scenes are not particularly hateful to you, or that you feel them to be necessary, I admit that the future does seem to me full of difficulty.

But please dont think that in saying this I blame you. I dont. I have the highest admiration for you. besides affection. But it is useless to conceal what I know to be my own peculiarities: or the very great effect they have on me. Last night for instance I dreamt through the whole of that scene again and woke with a horror of you and a horror of myself. But I expect you will understand the position without further description—all I want to make clear is that the difficulty for me lies there, and not in the misunderstanding which I have no doubt was fantastic, as you say.

V.

Berg

[]

2615: To John Lehmann

July 31st [1932]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dear John,

I am a wretch not to have answered your very interesting letter before. But London was an unholy racket, what with Americans, manuscripts, the Common Reader—oh the dulness of that book—and so on. Now it is pouring, and the Vicars wife is dead, and I must see, in spite of the bells tolling and the trees dripping if I can defend myself (I’m rather annoyed by the way that we’ve succumbed to [nine words omitted] Quennel: but Leonard thought we must have him if anyone: I’d much rather be answered and tom up and thrown in the waste paper basket by you or [Cecil] Day Lewis: but it cant be helped.)

Now for your points: of course dressing up may have some advantages; but not more than gin and bitter or evening dress or any other stimulant. Besides it becomes a habit, and freezes the elderly, like Wyndham Lewis, into ridiculous posings and posturing. But its not a matter of great importance. I admit your next point—that is that my quotations aren’t good illustrations: but as usual, I couldn’t find the ones I wanted when I was writing; and was too lazy to look. Anyhow my impression is that I could convince you by quotations: I do feel that the young poet is rather crudely jerked between realism and beauty, to put it roughly. I think he is all to be praised for attempting to swallow Mrs Gape; but he ought to assimilate her. What it seems to me is that he doesnt sufficiently believe in her: doesnt dig himself in deep enough; wakes up in the middle; his imagination goes off the boil; he doesnt reach the unconscious automated state—hence the spasmodic, jerky, self conscious effect of his realistic language. But I may be transferring to him some of the ill effects of my own struggles the other way round—writes poetry in prose. Tom Eliot I think succeeds; but then he is much more violent; and I think by being violent, limits himself so that he only attacks a minute province of his imagination; whereas you younger and happier spirits should, partly owing to him, have a greater range and be able to devise a less steep precipitous technique. But this is mere guesswork of course. As for publishing, I dont see your point that it is salutory because it wipes clean the slate: I think, on the contrary, it engraves the slate, what with reviewers and publicity. And if, as is quite likely, the best poems are written before 30, they wont spoil with keeping.

But the fact is I’m not at all satisfied with the Letter, and would like to tear up, or entirely re-write. It is a bad form for criticism, because it seems to invite archness and playfulness, and when one has done being playful the times up and there’s no room for more. However the B.B.C have caught on to the idea and want to have a series of letters to unknown Listeners in the autumn. I suggested Stephen Spender to an Uncle about Everything. But they’re so inconceivably timid they wont ask any but old duffers—for instance Maurice Baring on being late for dinner.

It is now Bank Holiday [1 August], and has stopped raining, and here is your second letter. But I never meant you to read Orlando: only to sell it. The green copy was worth £10 I think in America before the smash. Please sell it and buy—I dont know what. I nibble at Flush, but must correct my proofs [of The Common Reader]: anyhow, I feel the point is rather gone, as I meant it for a joke with Lytton, and a skit on him. But I’ll see. I do hope you’re better. Is it colitis? Thats what Dotty [Dorothy Wellesley] has: and I wouldnt like to share a disease with her. But please recover entirely—I know once having 40 million pneumonia bugs daily how they eat one’s heart out.

Leonard wants me to thank you for your letter.

V.W.

You see, from enclosed, that you have a double at Eastbourne [unidentified] What am I to say?

Texas

[]

Letters 2616-2639 (August-September 1932)

2616: To Ethel Smyth

Sunday 7th and Monday 8th August [1932]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

I was just about to write to you when I heard of Goldie Dickinson’s death. I hadnt even heard he was ill. This has rather spun me round into another mood. I had known him off and on, for ever so many years; and become much more intimate lately—the same sort of intimacy I had with Lytton and some others; though of course not nearly so close as with Lytton. Still—he was the most charming of men—the most spiritual.—Isnt it odd how the curtain seems about to fall sometimes? What with Lyttons death, Carrington’s death, now Goldie’s death—all people who have gone in and out of my life these past twenty years.—But no more.

I only wanted to explain how I cant at the moment pick up what I was going to say—cant get back into the mood. The main thing was I think that though I quite accept what you say—that you can control yourself, that there’ll be no more scenes—still I’m left doubting—isnt it rather a cribbed and confined sort of friendship when one has to be controlled and on one’s best behaviour? Doesn’t the need point, as I said, to some queer, no, not queer, natural,—incompatibility between us? I dont see that this is to be wondered at, after all. We are both extreme in character. And then we met late in life, and then, as you say, I dont know your friends nor you mine, so that the natural background is missing. But what is important is that I suspect that your violences are part of your virtues—and so are my exaggerations and obtusenesses part of mine. If we have to control ourselves and to control ourselves so much more than we need with other friends, aren’t we diminishing our own peculiar light? You see, I dont understand the system on which your mind works, by nature. When you say for example that you’re going to write something about me and publish parts of my letters—I am flabbergasted. I swear I couldn’t do such a thing where you’re concerned to save my life. Yet to you it seems natural—right—amusing—a joke? I dont know what. I mean, I dont blame: I don’t praise: I simply dont understand. I give this as an instance as the sort of thing that happens between two people as different as we are; and how bewildering it is. I’m not attempting to sum up, nor coming to a conclusion. I make these rough notes for your information, and solely because I feel the value of the thing itself—our relationship. Obtuse and variable as I am, I still think, seriously nothing more important than relationships—that they should be sound, free from hypocrisies, fluencies, palaver—

Well: as Mrs Pankhurst used to say; so conveniently making an end of one topic and going on to another. Its very hot here: I am correcting proofs [of The Common Reader]: we have a good many visitors one way or another. Though none yet, praise be the Lord, sleeping in the house. Tomorrow is our London day. And then my mother in law comes over. And then and then—I’ve got a mass of things I want to write, but cant get down to them till I’ve done the sheer, unutterable drudgery of proof correcting—in this case more than ever dreary: for I quote Donne: and they misquote; and I have to look up Donne, and Sidney, and Spenser—oh how I hate facts: but still more, misquoting facts.

No: I thought Elizabeth [Williamson] looking particularly well; but then it was the evening and we were chattering. Anyhow, looks dont count much either way. My brother is yatching [sic]; and his lady wants to break with him; and Nessa thinks she ought to tell him so. That is what is happening in Sussex at the moment. And the Labour party is meeting in the drawing room tonight, and I must politely greet the man who built the bungalow. And now for more proofs. I ought to write this scrawl again; but leave it to you to decipher, not only the hand, but the meaning.

V.

Berg

[]

2617: To Roger Fry

Sunday [7 August 1932]

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

My dear Roger,

We want just to send one line—there was nobody like Goldie and I know what his death must mean to you. How I hate my friends dying! Please live to be a thousand. You cant think what you mean to us all.

Love from us both
your Virginia

Of course, no answer.

Sussex

[]

2618: To Alice Ritchie

Aug 8th [1932]

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes, [Sussex]

Dear Alice,

I think you said that you might be willing to come down here for a night in August. Will you suggest one? We should very much like to see you, if you don’t mind a very small bedroom. But my view is spoilt for ever—did I tell you? Vast iron sheds for cement, ruining the entire valley.

How is the novel? Are you in process of jumping from the window, as I advised?

Yours
Virginia Woolf

Mrs Ian Parsons

[]

2619: To V. Sackville-West

Aug. 9th? [1932]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Well, dear Mrs Nicolson, when are you coming over—for I dont count meeting you in Lewes high Street buying wines.

Oh how hot it is! I’ve been mooning on the downs with Pinka—in spite of houses, still its the loveliest country in the world, with the corn ripening, and yellow butterflies and—I forget how the sentence ends. I daresay you’ve got enough scenes stored in your great forehead to finish all my sentences. Yesterday we were in London—the devil; tomorrow my mother in law: Saturday poor distracted Siepmann. By the way, how good your husband is in the N.S. I entirely agreed with his BBC. article [unidentified]: still more with his Yeats Brown, which fizzled up and made melted butter of all the other mild eulogists. Max [Beerbohm] for example. The divine delight of a really good review is that one has read the book: now I needn’t bother myself with Yeats Brown ever again. But while your husband slices the heads off the daisies I wish his wife (not to be too euphemistic, thats you) would write me, for me only, a long long, solid solid, tough, tight trenchant poem—say about a wagon; or a bull—the one who ranges your sheds for ever unsatisfied. Do please. I cant bear the patter of meritorious prose any more—so thin—such gruel and water. Its not a food for the mature—only for pink babies like dear old Hugh. That reminds me: I’ve not answered him, at Sark; nor Ethel—Oh my God Ethel! I should think I had had 6 reams of notepaper crossed, underlined, red pencilled, starred, since you made your famous remark about my being faint. I’m getting at my wits end. Happily its very cheap, her notepaper, and I really believe she gets a kind of mild continuous orgasm from this flux. And that reminds me, who is Mrs Ralph Ivers, or Dorothy Easton, of Sevenoaks—who has sent me a story, rather, indeed, very, good, to whom Sackville West has been “so kind”—who is she, and why does she write me a drivelling letter about her small boy and her motor car—and I think call me Virginia. The wonders of authors will never cease: I’ve had such a packet of letters lately, one from a Sodomite who has discovered his perversion all owing to that bad book The Waves and therefore says I must find him a job or he will cut his throat on my doorstep.

Well, I think, delightful as this letter is, I must go and put my pie in the oven; then we have ice cream to follow—you know we have a frigidaire—with fresh raspberries. Then we turn on the loud speaker—Bach tonight—then I watch my baby owls learning to fly on the Church tower—then I read Lord Kilbracken—what a good book—then I think what about bed—on which note, as I chastely put it, I end. But when are you coming? Sibyls [Colefax] pending, so do be beforehand.

V.

Berg

[]

2620: To Ethel Smyth

Sunday 14th August [1932]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Well Ethel dear be a kind Christian woman and write me a friendly letter and dont be a sleek tabby but my old uncastrated wild cat. Here am I in bed after falling in a faint among the roses on Thursday evening precisely as I fell 2 years ago [29 August 1930]. Really it wasn’t my fault this time. We had L’s mother and brother to lunch—it was that very hot day—we sat out in the garden: The old lady was ravishing—almost brought tears to my eyes—gave me an old pair of pearl ear rings of hers; and then, as I say, I dropped down: but it wasn’t as bad as last time, except for being muddled in the head, I’m all right today and shall get up for luncheon. L. rang up our dr. in London who says its clearly nothing but the heat, and if I stay quiet for a day or two I shall be all right. So thats all the medical details.

I’ve been thinking meanwhile that I probably wrote with undue acerbity about your intended letter and article. I didn’t catch your meaning—I thought it was to be about me, seriously: I mean one of your brilliant and searching streaks of memory: and, you being a born writer, I thought you’d put in a great deal more than I’d like people to see. I’m rather nervously pernickety about personalities, as I get so much heckled by journalists for Bloomsbury Highbrowism and so forth. But if its about Lady B. Maurice Baring. Eth, Pan and so on, why not go ahead? and leave me out? I should enjoy that—them in and me out—quite immensely. You’d do it brilliantly and they wouldn’t mind: its only one of my perversities—dislike of personal appearances: you will understand. If I didn’t figure as a novelist I shouldn’t mind.

Well—(how I bless [Emmeline] Pankhurst for that convenience of style) I am seriously contemplating getting up and finding stockings and dress cast to the winds on Thursday. It was so odd, lying in the grass, and seeing the flowers dance above my head. I’m reading masses of pigsticking books; and how Edgar Wallace dictated 70,000 words in a week end: and I’d like to read one of Ethels most violent, disruptive, abruptive, fuliginious, catastrophic, panoramic, I cant think of any other adjectives—effusions. It is deliciously shady and cool. My room is nothing but door window and garden. Tomorrow I shall be up and correcting proofs.

V.

Monday

Forgot to post this. Up: recovered; correcting proofs.

Berg

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2621: To Alice Ritchie

14th August [1932]

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Alice,

I’m so sorry not to have answered: like many people I toppled over into a flower bed in a faint that hot day and have been in bed. Could you possibly come on Monday 22nd? The other days you give are difficult as Leonard has to go to London this week, and the next week, alas, we have to go to Essex. But if Monday doesn’t do, make other suggestions: only not the 20th, not the 25th.

Bring the novel and finish it up here in my room.

Yours
Virginia Woolf

Mrs Ian Parsons

[]

2622: To Harmon H. Goldstone

16th August 1932

Typewritten

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Mr Goldstone,

I must apologise for my delay. I left your address in London, and did not like to return your Outline to the hotel address [in Paris]. Also I have been laid up, owing to the heat, and fear that my comments on your Outline will be of a very scrappy kind. But such as they are I will make them.

It is very difficult to give an impartial opinion of a book devoted to ones own work; but the Outline seems to me to suggest some very interesting questions; and I should certainly read it with great pleasure if it were about somebody else. I am a little doubtful as to your reference to “VW’s own statement of the problem of aspect.” I dont know exactly to what it refers; but I should like to enter a caution against anything that I have said as a critic being taken as evidence of my own views, or of my aims. I am much of Hardys opinion that a novel is an impression not an argument. The book is written without a theory; later, a theory may be made, but I doubt if it has much bearing on the work.*

The Bloomsbury Period. I do not want to impose my own views, but I feel that Bloomsbury is a word that stands for very little. The Bloomsbury group is largely a creation of the journalists. To dwell upon Bloomsbury as an influence is liable to lead to judgments that, as far as I know have no basis in fact.

I may say that I have never read Bergson and have only a very amateurish knowledge of Freud and the psychoanalysts; I have made no study of them.

Money and a Room of ones own. Some writers have taken my statements literally in a Room of Ones Own, and have inferred that I myself was left £500 by an aunt; and worked as a journalist etc. It is perhaps thus worth saying that this is purely fictitious. I have had an independent income ever since I was of age; and have never had to write for money or to pursue any profession.

Education and early reading. Partly from reasons of health I was never at any school or college. My father allowed me to read any book in his library when I was a girl; and it was a large library.

With regard to the translations—I scarcely like to claim that I ‘translated’ the Russian books credited to me. I merely revised the English of a version made by S. Koteliansky.

Since writing to you, I see that Miss Dorothy Richardson, the novelist, is engaged upon a study of my books, which should be interesting.

I enclose the Outline, and must thank you for letting me see it. I am sorry not to be more helpful; but as I think I have already said, I am sure you will write better if you are fettered as little as possible by the views of the author.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

* Virginia wrote against this paragraph Not for quotation.

Berg

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2623: To Sir Henry Newbolt

16th August 1932

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Sir Henry,

I have entirely forgotten writing to you!—but as you say that there is nothing discreditable in the letter I am delighted that you should print it, and am much flattered that you should have taken the trouble to keep it.

I am delighted quite apart from that, to think that you have written your memoirs and much look forward to reading them.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

George Spater

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2624: To Hugh Walpole

Aug 17th [1932]

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

My dear Hugh,

I am a wretch—I know it. But the more I love getting letters, the more I hate writing them. And I’ve had the excuse of being laid low with a heat stroke. Have you ever fallen down among your dahlias as if felled by the Lord Almighty? Its an odd experience—interesting, acute, unpleasant. I am all right again—only making this serve as an excuse. And you wont be in Sark any longer. Henry’s love affair will be over, or, as they call it, consummated. But where you may be now—whether in the Isle of Man, or Bucharest, or Timbuctoo or merely Piccadilly—heaven knows. How I envy you your mobility! I’m contemplating a voyage to Ireland—where I’ve never been—in September: but thats all; and no doubt that wont come off; the garden, the owls, Leonard’s flowers, my room—out on the terrace, where there’s nothing between me and Caburn—these are all too nice: but they cant mean anything to you: when I say ‘terrace’ and ‘garden room’ you see something—that I’m sure—but something plunged in the splendour of your own romance.

Vita and Harold were here on Sunday, very flourishing, with the boys [Ben and Nigel]: overflowing into every corner of life—Vita’s book has been made into a play, at Croydon (Passion Spent I mean)—forgive this telegraphic style—its not particularly modern—though Harold would say so—its only heat, laze—economy of effort. And Vita said Hugh’s Scott is out with a dedication to you! Damn the man—why haven’t I got it? I cried. Calm yourself, she replied: its only out to the Trade. What excites me even more is the rumour in some paper that you’re publishing your Memoirs, If thats so, tell me the exact moment and I’ll wire to Bumpus [bookseller]. Now if I were you, I would add that to my days work—autobiography for 30 minutes daily; please do write a colossal book—sweep every crumb in to it—the days work: and everybody, what you eat, read, think, love, hate, laugh at,—all: considering your mobility and your versatility, and how many loves and hates you have—what a book! what a book! I cry, green with envy. Please, by the way of instalment tell me the true story of James Agate. When I read the Review I said, in my hardened way, now what infamy is at the back of that? Aren’t these reptiles shortsighted? a child in arms could have seen that the whole thing was spawned by some livid and lurid serpent in the pit of his soul—not by any love, as he pretended, for the art of fiction—are we all incurably corrupt? with which I must end.

V.W.

Texas

[]

2625: To Ethel Smyth

Aug 18th [1932]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Yes it was very nice to get your letter Ethel, your uncastrated letter and I laughed heartlessly over the lunch party, and Lady Rayleighs heels in the air. My Cambridge friends insist that Mr Sidgwick is a miracle of intellect still—only inclined to be silent. But my brain is all dust and ashes and I shant get a spark with a poker today. Lord how hot it is here—the downs fizzling across the marsh: the village sunk in portentous silence. I’m much better but dont do more than creep from my bedroom to my lodge, holding a parasol to placate L. who follows me like a dog—About the faint—I wish I could gratify your morbid curiosity, but one packs about 10 lives into these moments—I could write 3 volumes—how odd it is to break through the usual suddenly and so violently. It wasn’t in the afternoon; but after dinner, sitting on the terrace, in the cool. I was looking at Caburn and thinking how the night of a hot day differs from cool nights—thinking about all that was cool and quiet—the white owl crossing the meadow when suddenly my heart leapt; stopped; ran away, like a four in hand. I cant stop it, I said. Lord, now its in my head. This pounding must must must break something. So I said “I’m going to faint” and slid down and lay flat on the grass at L’s feet. He dashed into the house and came back with the ice tray of the frigidaire, which he put under my neck. And then I thought of everything under the sun: he says it lasted 30 minutes. Then the pounding lessened; and he helped me up; and I felt very faint—trees; flowers, stretching, fading: and I thought I could never get to the house—really that was painful, walking and fainting, but I did; and flopped on the bed; and said to L. with my usual sense, Would it be a good thing to use the Po? Certainly he said and I used it: and began shaking and he said can you take your temperature? But I couldnt hold the tube in my lips; however, I did later, and instead of being very high as the dr. expected, it was very low: and gradually I became sleepy and comfortable, only afraid to move, as if all my limbs were separate, and so fell asleep and woke, drowsy, sleepy, content—and thats all. L. rang up the dr. who is seeing a specialist who knows about heat fainting and will inform us. But there’s no need. There is nothing whatever wrong with me. I’ve always had what they call an intermittent pulse, and this—so a heart dr told me—tires the heart and makes it sensitive to strain, but the heart is perfectly sound, strong, and loving as you know. And this pulse too is infinitely better now than it was 10 years ago. Are these facts enough?

I’m seeing Lydia and will ask her about the Ballet. She is rather touchy now about her dancing and apt to say she must retire; but sometimes is overcome, like an old warhorse, by the sound of music and goes back. What Vanessa’s up to, I dont know: but I’m sure she’ll do the scenery if its decided on, since she likes that sort of job; and I’ve just made myself a life member of Sadlers Wells; and everybody seems in favour of new ballets and modern decoration. I say, my father used to go to lectures by Professor Smyth in order to see him burst into tears at the mention of Marie Antoinette.

V.

Berg

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2626: To Lady Cecil

Aug 18th 1932

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

My dear Nelly,

What a charming woman you are! (I forget what this refers to—it is merely a general observation that sprang to Nessa’s and my lips when we were talking about you the other day) Yes of course we will come over or up, as you call it, but may we leave the day at the moment doubtful? I’ve been celebrating the heat by tumbling in a faint among Leonard’s dahlias, and the doctor says I am to stay quiet in a shady room at present. As I dont want to fall down among your dahlias, may we leave it till the sun has gone back into the clouds?

I was greatly interested by the quotation you sent me from Hale Wright about my mother. I never knew that he was a friend of my father’s: why he gave her the photograph I cant imagine. But oddly enough I’ve been thinking about him lately. Among our authors is a girl of 17 who writes poetry. Her name is Easdale, and she and her mother—who’s name was Adeney—came over the other day; and the mother who’s an incredible goose and chatterbox but simple-minded and rather touchingly idiotic, informed me, as we were wandering round the garden, that the reason why she had left her husband was that he was so jealous of her friendship with Mark Rutherford. “But of course he was merely a friend and guide to me” she said. “I have heaps of his letters in a box at home. And then he married a woman I detested [Dorothy Vernon]. Why are men so jealous, Mrs Woolf? It was the greatest thing in my life—my friendship with that good man.. Yet your father left me, Joan, because of it.” “Yes it was dreadfully sad” said Joan—who has the face of a cherub on a chocolate box. “These sort of things dont happen nowadays” said Mrs Easdale—“not among you young people”. And so they went on chattering. I rather think she’s sending me his letters. Did you ever hear of her? She is now not notably attractive, either in body or mind, except that one loves complete geese, being so sensible oneself.

I liked the boy who thinks I know about school life. I seem to be a well known authority upon Eton and Roedean. A cutting has just come which says that ignorant as Mrs W. is about everything else, she is an admitted expert on girls schools—nobody knows them so intimately. And I’ve only had the tip of my nose in one once, taking Nessa’s child there. Aren’t reviewers—well, well, its a hot day, and I’m to keep cool. So I won’t launch out; and I remember too, how we used to review books together, 100 years ago, for that long faced old lantern jawed man, who kept Charlotte Brontes socks in a glass case in his drawing room.

Now, Lady Cecil, (this is meant to mark a change of tone, from the gossiping to the hortatory) whatever you do, write your Memoirs, bringing in all that romantic past; please do: I loathe novels; nobody will write poetry: here am I told to keep quiet: write your memoirs and send them to me instantly.

Yr Virginia W.

Marquess of Salisbury (Cecil Papers)

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2627: To Ethel Smyth

Sunday 21st Aug. [1932]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Ah-hah-the heat wave has broken and we are all cool again. This happened quite suddenly here—a cold, sinister yellow wind rushed through the garden about 2: as if a lid had been opened and air escaped from a cauldron. Our thermometer fell I dont know how many degrees: then rose; then fell with a thud. So we went to Lewes after tea and bought our weekly groceries and after that walked on the down above Lewes, and everybody was walking out too, like prisoners escaped—dogs bounding, horses galloping, wind blowing—everything released—how queer it looked: and I saw one old vagabond sitting under a furse bush, making a cushion of flowers’ heads, either by way of thanksgiving, or a wreath for his wife, as you like it. All the little red blue and purple down flowers were strewn round him. We had thunder at night of course, but not very tremendous, only enough to spoil the Promenade [Concert] to which we were listening. Odd—there was a crack of lightning over Caburn, and instantly Mozart went zigzag too. Modern life is a very complicated affair—why not some sudden revelation of the meaning of everything, one night?—I think it might happen.

Are you, in a more humble way, appearing at Queen’s Hall? I must make a note to listen—As you gather, I’m much the better for this relief, and cant pretend to any kind of illness now, though L. insists upon treating me like the Princess who feels a pea through 6 mattresses. I think these fainting fits are much more alarming to the onlookers than to oneself. He wanted, against my wish, to have our London dr, Elly Rendel, Lyttons niece, down the other day: but she said that would be useless, and I refused to have the local man who tinkers one as a plumber would a very fine watch. The specialist is I think away. Anyhow its passed off now. And the only interesting symptom—my spine swollen and burning and tender at the 3rd knob from the top—no doctor can account for. Its nerve exhaustion they say; and dont know what it means. My tongue is so pure Leonard is green with envy: all my ills come from the lump of nerves in my spine, which are tied to my heart. But enough of health. I’ve done my proofs in spite of the heat, and am lolling and languishing in a luxury of indolence.

The Keynes’s came over; and she was most anxious that you should realise that she cant dance in your ballet [Fête Galante] simply because it stirs such wild jealousy in the hearts of other dancers if she does. She’s in the awkward position of being the patroness, and has to take great care to share out the work equally, as they’re all starving and she rich. They hadn’t heard your music yet, but were highly appreciative of you, in your capacity of uncastrated cat. Maynard was much impressed; and thought your military descent must account for the dominating masterful energy with which you vanquished even those who agree with you. This is a great compliment from Maynard, who rules all Cambridge and has the whole of Kings in his pocket. Was your father a good general by the way?—did he ever kill a man—the father of the uncastrated cat? Are you, as I hope, going on with your cesspool, Lady Balfour, M Baring, pot-pourri—if thats what they’re called? [Female Pipings in Eden] Please do, just to show there’s no ill feeling. With all of them in, I’m just as well left out. And my feeling against these personal appearances is really no fake; my publicity is already too much for me—not that I’m modest: not at all. But limelight is bad for me: the light in which I work best is twilight. And I’m threatened with 3 more books upon me: Holtby has induced another publisher to print her follies: [Dorothy] Richardson is producing another; and a man from America [Harmon H. Goldstone] a third. All this means to me a kind of fuss and falsity and talking about my husband, mother, father, and dog which I loathe. But I should love to read you on other people.

My brother is still enamoured and deluded and is getting up a weekly Club, for the purpose of meeting his very dull lady [Dora Chapman]. I am subscribing 2/6 for this reason. We have to go Essex next week to spend the night with him, and I hope to go round by way of Canterbury, as a spree. But happily I’m not in Adrian’s inner confidence, and so shall talk about boats and dogs and so on, not love and death.

What good letters you write—always: but specially to convalescents—I’ve written this one in 10 minutes: 3 days ago it would have taken 60. So I’m cured

V.

Berg

[]

2627a: To V. Sackville-West

Wednesday, [24 August, 1932]

Monk’s House [Rodmell, Sussex]

I would have written before, but I have been over-run with humanity. Yes, thats a lovely poem. I like it very much. How I enjoy the soft sailing sweep of your words, coming down inexorably, like my white owl, upon the very thing. I wish you would write an infinite number of still lives—I’m insatiable for facts about the teasle, the field vole, the stag beetle, the runt, the teg, the—in short every animal—as you do it; just as I love the very words and boots of Lord Kilbracken.—“male, arrogant, alone”—I liked that; contemplative lidless eye—that also. I’m only in doubt about the last line. The Bull I saw knew he was going to die. Perhaps the ascent to sublimity and generality is too steep after the small creepers and crawlers, or that may be only my prosaic eye. Lord, how I envy you poets! What’s the use of anything else? Please go on, sauntering in gaiters and looking over walls into byres [cow sheds]—if thats the word.

I’m off to Essex early in the morning to visit my brother. No bulls there—only flats and boats and mud and hearty discomfort. As usual, the other day I was ashamed, of my mollycoddling; you’d never consent to such a thing; the fact is, it’s my one heroism, letting people think me a coddle, in order to soothe Leonards old maid fussiness. And that reminds me, oughtn’t you to be equally unselfish? Harold mumbled to me that you had been giddy; and its the duty of the wife to be, as I am, submissive in the extreme about giddiness, or whatever it is. No more room, or I would pitch you a very melancholy story about my jealousy of all your new loves.

V.

And when am I going to see you? because you know you love now several people, women I mean, physically I mean, better, oftener, more carnally than me.

Virginia Woolf Miscellany. Number 43. Summer 1994.

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2628: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

6th Sept. [1932]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest Ottoline,

I wish I could write you as nice a letter as you wrote me, but I have been out walking on the Downs, with a black spaniel who will chase sheep—hence my hand with which I tried to hold him in, shakes like an aspen. But you must try to decipher—only it wont be worth while.

Do you think people (I’m thinking of Lytton and [Hugh] Walpole) do write letters to be published? I’m as vain as a cockatoo myself; but I dont think I do that. Because when one is writing a letter, the whole point is to rush ahead; and anything may come out of the spout of the tea pot. Now, if I thought, Ottoline will put this letter in a box, I should at once apply the tip of my finger to the end of the spout. When one was very young perhaps one did: perhaps one believed in immortality. I think Lytton’s letters were freer as he got older and rid of this illusion: hence they’re not printable; but James is bringing out a little book of his essays this autumn. Only scraps, but there’s an essay on letter writing, which, considering he was about 22 seems to me amazing—not as thought but as cabinet making—putting little bits of wood side by side in their right places. That is why one gets so sick of essay writing. I feel sticky all over when I’ve done, measuring, fitting, and using glue. (The dog has not only made my hand shake; but upset all the letters in my head).

I cant say we have had a quiet summer, because Sussex is really only an extension of Oxford Street, and as we are on the way side, anybody drops in. And I long for a house in a wood, approached by a two mile drive, with deep lakes at frequent intervals. People stay so long in the country. And I never have enough butter, or the milk has gone sour, or the cat has eaten the only fish. What you must have suffered at Garsington! I believe London on the whole is more retired. We went off about July 26th—did you come and knock after that? I wish I’d been there.

I had meant to discuss Tom and Vivienne Haigh Eliot with you; but its now an old subject and stale, and perhaps you have seen him or her: I hope the separation is complete and final, as it promised to be when I last had news. Poor V. was running amok all over London. Did she come to you? He is coming here one of these days—I mustn’t say which, or where he is, for fear V. should put on her crazy old hat and follow after.

Francis Birrell has been very ill—a tumour on his brain—but mercifully the operation is over and said to be successful. Why is one so fond of one’s friends? Partly egotism, I suppose. I felt that if Francis died I should be 50 years older. So please dont get ill, or let Philip [Morrell] get ill, not that I have the least affection for either of you—why should I?—haven’t you always been very good to me?—(So I’m putting you in my next book) but dont get ill because I dont want to die myself; and thats what happens when other people die.

Yes, I wasted most of my youth on Greek plays. I used to be able to read Aeschylus in a kind of hop skip and jump way: and the other day I thought I’d try Sophocles again: but found all the words withdrawn like clouds into the sky. Still I always feel—but no, the dog has put it beyond my power to go on, and I have to wash, and write to Ethel Smith—she’s back, fuming and foaming and furious from the Hebrides—and drive over to Charleston to dine with Nessa and Duncan. Its a lovely pale yellow, pale blue, red, purple evening, with all the corn in stacks, like cakes, and the swallows, and the apples,—apples hanging are the most beautiful of fruits; so forgive this scrawl, which is not to be put into a box, but burnt in the Dukes garden, where I daresay you are sitting. How are the memoirs getting on?

V.

Texas

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2629: To Ethel Smyth

7th Sept 1932

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Yes I am a wretch never to write letters, but considered carefully, this is a compliment, because if I felt I had to write it would mean that you were one of those horrid old bores who expect answers (oh there’s such a pile of them on my table.) Your adventures fill me with horror—of course everybody changes when they get to Brighton: even I know that, and do it by light of instinct. But then I should have cracked the guard over the head with [Ronald] Storr’s thick umbrella—and so solved the question of leaving it in London: because I should have killed the guard and broken the umbrella. I like to think of myself doing these violent acts. While the mild and timid Ethel sips a cup of tea in a restaurant. You seem to be as busy as a girl in her first season—going about conducting. Does it mean—if so you wont admit it—that fame, no not fame—mere vulgar success, has at last crowned your bald head? (Metaphorically, you are bald; according to Ethel’s version of Ethel, not a single laurel leaf has ever grown there; and like the Pelican she has plucked out all her feathers on her breast for champagne drinking chicken eating relations; so she is not only bald on the head, but bare on the breast—what a repulsive object, when one comes to think of it, So let us change the subject)

I’ve been asked to write in the Times about my father for his Centenary. Shall I or shall I not? I cant resist trying because he was such a very remarkable figure: but you wont see it: indeed I cant make it visible, in only 1500 words, so I shall give up, I think; but at the moment my head is full of him. One thing you would have liked—his extreme sincerity; also unless I’m partial, he was beautiful in the distinguished way a race horse, even an ugly race horse, is beautiful—And he had such a fling with his hands and feet. Also he was a great climber. Also he was completely unworldly. Also he begot me: but then you prefer Vanessa.

I have been doing a lot of odds and ends—seeing anybody who chooses to knock at the window. The other day in walked the T. S. Eliots—he’s the poet, and she, poor raddled distressing woman, takes drugs. On a wild wet day she dresses in white satin, and exudes ether from a dirty pocket handkerchief. Also she has whims and fancies all the time—some amorous, some pornographic. Meanwhile he sits there, as trim as a bank clerk, making exact, but rather laboured conversation—for instance about his motor car. But as you’ve never seen him or read him this means less than nothing to you. Isnt it odd that you read Maurice Baring and not Tom Eliot? Where’s your rudimentary sense of English literature Ethel? I would give all MBs copious cool works for one of Toms least and most brittle phrases. So there. Never tell me we are twin souls, cast out of one mould, of identically the same plaster again.

Oh I’m so fascinated by the Empress and her mother. Did the E. ever talk to you about Mérimée? about Stendhal? To think that she knew them both, and that you knew her! If you’ve one duty, this side of the grave, it is to go on memorialising—not me; but all these disappearing Kings and Queens. Then there have been any number of odd adventures at the Hogarth Press: unrepeatable now: then I’ve been racing [at Brighton] and lost 12/6: then I want to buy a house in Essex: then Colefax was coming and put me off, and now puts me on, and I wont be put on and off, all because of Prince Somebody, and so tell her on the telephone; then—but Lord its 7 and I’ve forgotten to put our pot in the oven. I must rush in. This is only a wild scribble of unmitigated affection.

V.

Berg

[]

2630: To Lady Cecil

8th Sept [1932]

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

My dear Nelly,

At last I have succeeded in cornering my sister—I met her in a wool shop today in Lewes—and arranged that if it suits you may we come over next Wednesday, which is I think 14th, to tea—that is about 4.30 if the cars dont break down—Leonard, Vanessa and I? But of course you will have gone to Geneva, or the Butler (I insist upon a butler) will say so. Couldn’t you let Geneva rule itself for once in a way? or change your butler? It is a howling storm in this part of Sussex, and we had meant to spend tomorrow on a picnic at Canterbury.

Well, what do you think of your nephew marrying I was going to say my niece—but she isnt that—Rachel MacCarthy I mean. Anyhow she’s in the 7th Heaven, and it will be very good for David, whom I think a most charming young man, so kind to old women like me. I dined with him the other night and took all the asparagus by mistake. A less refined nature would have given him back a dozen sticks—I ate them all—Which reminds me—years ago you told me to read Stella Benson. And I loathed her—And you were quite right. She is a nice woman—bleached like a skull and long suffering with a husband in China, which he deserves, and long may he stay there. On the other hand I like her very much, and am going, after 20 years to begin to read the books you read. And do you know Cornelia Sorabji? because I am to meet her. I have masses to say but no paper.

So goodbye V.

By the way, it is my father’s Centenary in Novr. and the Times want me to write an article about him—but I dont think I can. Anyhow, do tell me what you thought of him. Was he very alarming? charming? eccentric? rude? or what?

Marquess of Salisbury (Cecil Papers)

[]

2631: To V. Sackville-West

Friday [9 September 1932]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

I meant to ask—and forgot—if you would lend me the [Lenare] phogh which I gave you (of myself) because that devil [Winifred] Holtby wants one for her book in a hurry, and this might do. They’d return it. Could you bring it—but doubtless now, with your other attachment, its down the coal hole. Oh alas.

Never mind come on

Monday and

all

shall

be

forgot

and

forgave.

I dont suppose therell be time to look in

V.

Berg

[]

2632: To Ethel Smyth

Sunday [11 September 1932]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

Yes I’m a mole—Look at my week—today Nessa and the children: tomorrow Vita comes and will stay over Tuesday afternoon: Wednesday I’ve got to go over and see deaf Nelly Cecil—it might be London. I dont think, knowing my own moodiness, I can talk to you with happiness in the intervals of this hubbub.—no I dont think it would be worth your while. But later? in London? here? I’m racing to catch the post so leave this question standing. And I cant think of what’s in my head: and the dog barks; and Pinka stole the ham: can one eat a ham licked by a dog? is it hydrophobic? You were right about Lehmann’s mouth by the way—quite right.

And so farewell

V.

Berg

[]

2633: To William Plomer

Sunday Sept 11th [1932]

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

Dear William,

We shall like it very much if you would come for the week end next Saturday—17th that is: I rather think Charles Siepman of the B.B.C is coming—d’you know him?

I’m quite recovered—fainting is such an odd experience its almost worth it. But all experiences will wait till you come: we’ve a lot we want to talk about.

They’ve built cement works and spoilt the view—damn them—There’s a train that gets in about 4.30 I think. Let us know if you’ll catch it or which.

V.W.

Texas

[]

2634: To Hugh Walpole

Sept 12th [1932]

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

My dear Hugh,

I’ve been roaming about in various places, but passing through London last week I looked in at the Press, and there lying on the table was the Scott—my Scott—from you. Really my dear Hugh you are much too generous—this is said soberly as a fact, but also with warmth. What have I done to deserve such goodness? I dont conceive (this refers not only to your Scott, but to ever so many other things—your letter the other day for instance) I carried off my Scott and have been browsing partly in him, partly in you. As you know the complete works of Sir Walter, in a fine large copy, in which my father used to read him to us, are lined up on my shelves. I don’t know him accurately and minutely as you do, but only in a warm, scattered, amourous way. Now you have put an edge on my love, and if it weren’t that I must read MSS—how they flock!—I should plunge—you urge me almost beyond endurance to plunge once more—yes, I say to myself, I shall read the Monastery again and then I shall go back to [The Heart of] Midlothian. I cant read the Bride [of Lammermoor], because I know it almost by heart: also the Antiquary (I think those two, as a whole, are my favourites). Well—to inspire a harassed hack to this wish to kick up her heels—what greater proof could there be of your powers of persuasion and illumination? My only complaint is that you pay too much attention to the arid gulls who cant open their beaks wide enough to swallow Sir Walter. One of the things I want to write about one day is the Shakespearean talk in Scott: the dialogues: surely that is the last appearance in England of the blank verse of Falstaff and so on! We have lost the art of the poetic speech—

But I didn’t mean to begin on this, only to thank you. I wish my ink would flush red to show my gratitude, instead of which it runs as black as Styx. And I hope, without wishing to be intrusive, that life has been treating you better, as you, of all people deserve—that things maynt turn out as bad as they seemed [his diabetes].

We go back in October—and that reminds me, a swarm of wild Italian bees, that sting everybody within a mile, have made 30 lbs of wild Italian honey—some of which will be on the tea table, so come soon and eat it.

Your affate
Virginia

Texas

[]

2635: To Lady Cecil

Tuesday [13 September 1932]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Nelly,

I am so sorry that you aren’t well. Otherwise we might have been sitting over the fire at this moment, which I should have enjoyed. Please suggest another day, or let me come and see you.

It is extremely bleak and cold at this moment in London—if thats any consolation to you for being in bed. I hope you are writing your memoirs, and that you’ll send them to me to read.

I saw David and Rachel the other day—they talked and talked—ever so happy, like two birds on a bough.

Yr aff
V.W.

The Marquess of Salisbury (Cecil Papers)

[]

2636: To Ethel Smyth

Thursday [15 September 1932]

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

I have the Hell of a weekend—two people staying here, one at his own invitation in order to disburden his soul—a shallow vessel, but full of storms, so he says. Therefore, whats the good of your putting yourself on a train? God knows. We go up to London on Tuesday—after that?—but we shall be back for good on the 1st: however, as you know, I’m incapable of making a plan. The general’s daughter must buckle to and do that, if its to be done.

Oh I’m so flea-bitten!—no, its harvesters, the result of the most divinely lovely walk through stubble this afternoon. I found the loneliest of valleys with silver sheep clustering on the sides, hares leaping from my foot, and, great horses slowly dragging wagons like shaggy sea monsters—but corn was dripping instead of sea weed—Oh how happy, content calm sunned amorous peaceful I was—in a biblical frame of mind. My word, when one shuts off the villas, this land is I think the fairest far in all Arabia. The Mérimée book is 2 quarto vols: Letters to Csse de Montijo: I get it from the London Library: he is a smooth sharp clear minded man, with an edge to him; and I accumulate, reading largely, little hints about that life time which I let into my general view rather happily. And I like thus gradually—letters begin in 1846 or so—approaching your Empress [Eugénie]. She’s still unmarried. What she she [sic] think of her mother?

Yr V.

Berg

[]

2637: To Frances Marshall

Sept 15th [1932]

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

My dear Fanny,

I dont believe I have any right to this familiar speech, but I hope you dont mind—

Here is the second letter from your friend—I thought you might like to see it as you so much enjoyed the other. I answered him at considerable length and gave him a great deal of good advice—among other things I told him that every second young man and woman in Newcastle-on-Tyne was either a bugger or a sapphist—you see with what result. Heaven help me I’ve not yet answered the lady with swollen eyes whose son wont have his house treated as an hotel—nor can I face it. Why dont you set up a bureau in Bloomsbury for the treatment of such cases? I assure you the Hogarth Press has a waiting list a yard long.

It is an incredibly lovely evening and I wish you and Ralph were here to beat us soundly at bowls. Instead we have just visited an old woman [Mrs Grey, Rodmell] who made me feel a hump on her back and said it was full of water. But we should very much like to come to Ham Spray sometime whether you beat us or not.

I cant help wondering whether possibly Ralph could not do something with Carrington’s letters—I mean if they give a daily account of Lytton and Ham Spray it would be such a boon to us all. And if I could help in any way you know how gladly I would. But perhaps its impossible. But dont you think something might be done? Anyhow beg him to finish the Greville. And please come and see us when you’re in London—we go back in October.

Love to Ralph from us both
Yr V.W.

Frances Partridge

[]

2638: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Sept 16th [1932]

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

Dearest Ottoline,

I hear that you wanted Riley’s address—I wish I knew it, but when I looked for him in July he was gone—And I owe him several shillings: and want more books bound.

But what I wanted to ask is Have you got Fanny Burney’s diary? I find there are two editions—the old one [1842] and Austin Dobsons [1904], much the fullest—but I expect though not so elegant to look at. I’ve found copies of both in the old shop here, and want to send you one (if you’d like it) but dont know which you’d prefer. Let me have a line to say.

So David [Cecil] is to marry Rachel [MacCarthy]—well, thats a blessing fallen out of the sky. I feel Desmond is now secure, with Salisburys behind him. And the other day we had a sudden apparition—Tom and Vivienne [Eliot]. She became increasingly distraught as the afternoon wore on, changing her mind every second, and flying from one extreme to the other. Poor Tom—anyhow he escapes tomorrow.

Its incredibly beautiful here at the moment, in spite of the devils who plant red boxes on the top of the downs. I sit down in a hollow and look and look—one becomes an opium eater in ones eye—merely sitting and looking at cornfields, blue wagons and sheep is enough. But I like human beings too—this is a compliment—though you wouldn’t guess it—to you.

yr
V.W.

Texas

[]

2639: To Ethel Smyth

Wednesday [28 September 1932]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

Here’s the synopsis. I see it should include everything in the whole world—how fascinating to have a little theme like that that includes the whole world. But I cant, at the moment, pretend to deal with it or you or Pan or anything, owing to the curse that is on me of packing, tearing up, finding lost MSS (a woman has sent me her whole life and I think I’ve lost it) and trying vainly to write the 30 letters I ought to have written in the past 10 days. So excuse—Yes I enjoyed the other day. Which day? Why? Ah I cant say.

V.

Berg

[]

Letters 2640-2687 (October-December 1932)

2640: To Ethel Smyth

Thursday [6 October 1932]

52 T[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Well Ethel dear, I enjoyed your letter immensely—about Ly Betty [Balfour] and the hidden picture. Yes—thats your line—writing letters to amuse me. I’m sorry Nelly [Boxall] gave you an exaggerated report—I’ve been so worried by furious authoresses ringing up. I told her to pitch my illness rather high—But I’m better—only if I walk or get over hot or merry—now Holtby’s book, just glanced at made me roar with laughter—that set my pulse off—if I laugh too much I get whatever it is—deranged action—systolic something—its nothing serious at all. I lie down between tea and dinner, and take cabs; and thank the Lord, must avoid hot rooms and parties. But I write every morning, and I’m enjoying my writing [Flush], word by word, hugely. How you’ll hate it!

The dr’s coming to have a thorough tap, listen, look tomorrow afternoon. I dont know what time: and she’ll find nothing wrong. So I cant be sure when I can see you: but L. says you’re ringing up, or he is.

Heres the 7/-

Well, Ly B⁠[alfour]. may be right about my cousin Herbert. All I can say is that he denounced me, as a writer, at a lunch party: next said Nessa had put herself beyond the pale; wrote me an angry letter about the Dreadnought “vulgar playing tricks on the King’s ships—for God’s sake keep your name out of it” damn my name—his name he meant—he was so proud of it—and I say V. Woolf is every bit as good: but I admit he adored his poor stuffed beast sisters—they all do that—thats one of the things I most dislike in them: so I was tempted to bury him, but didnt.

Yr V.

Berg

[]

2641: To Ethel Sands

Friday [7 October? 1932]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Ethel

Why am I a bad woman?—and if I am, why ask me to dinner? However, I will come with pleasure, good or bad, on the 12th. 8.30.

I didn’t send you Cecil on disarmament, or Strong on Yeats because (between ourselves) they seem to me d——d dull.

Yrs
Virginia

Wendy Baron

[]

2642: To Stephen Spender

9th Oct [1932]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Mr Spender,

We are only just back as we went up to the Labour Conference at Leicester, but I hope you may be still in London.

Would you dine with us on Tuesday (nth) at 8? Dont change of course—I expect we shall be alone.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

2643: To Ethel Smyth

Monday [10 October 1932]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

In the horrid rush this evening I forgot my only message—to say how immensely I enjoyed The Waterfall. I thought it read even better (but this is usual) in print than typing; and how suavely and subtly and yet with what a leap and a dash you skirted the subject and slipped over—No, I cant, with my brownpaper mind, give the effect. I rather regret the Empress [Eugénie]—if she were to be 30,000 words equalling the Waterfall. What a loss. Also my bill for the books.

V.

Berg

[]

2644: To V. Sackville-West

Wednesday [12 October 1932]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

I’ve just bought the 6,000th copy of Family History—6000 sold before publication—my God! And my fingers are red and whealed with doing up parcels for 3 dys incessantly. Miss Belsher ill—orders pouring in—we all working till 7.30—thought we were just finished—then a last batch of orders discovered hidden in a drawer another hours work—clerks panting—telephones ringing carriers arriving—parcels just finished in time to catch the vans—Oh Lord what it is to publish a best seller—when shall I be able to hold a pen again? But its been great fun—and a very good excuse for not going to Arlington Street [Hugh Walpole?] today.

Yes, I’ll come to Sissinghurst. But when will you come here—all covered with gold as you are? You must sign my 6 thousandth copy—so sleepy I cant write and a red forefinger, and a cut, too, from tearing open cardboard with a knife—so goodnight—I’ll write later

V.

What fun it all is to be sure—selling 6,000.

Berg

[]

2645: To V. Sackville-West

Tuesday 18th [October 1932]

52 Tavistock Square, [W.C.1]

Yes dearest Creature—that was very nice of you. Pinka and I sat erect, blushing, as our praises poured forth from the trumpet. I think you gave me too much—I hope the three you suppressed weren’t listening too. But anyhow, you soothed my vanity—there are people who say I’m vain—did you know it?—like cream poured onto the sore nose of a feverish—I shall say cat—having just had tea with two cats. (Nessa brought up the Charleston cat; as we drank tea it split into two—one of those miracles that do happen in peoples studios) Anyhow you said what I most wanted—not that I’m an enchanting gossip, but that my standard is high. I loathe being called enchanting. Did you see Priestly on Harold you and me? I thought if I were a cat I should not split so much into two as into one glutinous stream of unadulterated disgust. You would have been still nicer if you had told me you were in London, and come here. I prefer you, bodily, to you vocally.

Oh I was in such a rage of jealousy the other night, thinking you had been in love with Hilda that summer you went to the Alps together! Because you said you werent. Now were you? Did you do the act under the Dolomites? Why I should mind this, when its all over—that tour—I dont know. But I do. D’yu remember coming to confession, or rather justification, in my lodge? And you weren’t guilty then were you? You swore you werent. Anyhow my Elizabeth [Bowen] comes to see me, alone, tomorrow. I rather think, as I told you, that her emotions sway in a certain way. (thats an elegiac) I’m reading her novel to find out. Whats so interesting is when one uncovers an emotion that the person themselves, I should say herself, doesn’t suspect. And its a sort of duty dont you think—revealing peoples true selves to themselves? I dont like these sleeping princesses. Talking of the upper classes, I went to the David-Rachel wedding. To see Lady Salisbury with Desmond was entirely worth 5/6 white gloves. And Molly with Ld. Salisbury:

So when are you coming to see me!

V.

Berg

[]

2646: To Jonathan Cape

Oct 18th 1932

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Mr Cape,

Many thanks for your letter suggesting that you should reprint my introduction to a volume of Gissings Selections for a fee of five guineas.

I shall be very glad to give you permission; and I would suggest that you should print from the version just issued in the second series of my Common Reader. I have altered it to a certain extent. I do not think that I could alter it any further. I have not read By the Ionian Sea [1901]; but I imagine that the introduction is sufficiently general to serve as it stands.

Yours sincerely
V. Woolf (Mrs Woolf)

Jonathan Cape Ltd

[]

2647: To Ethel Smyth

Friday [21 October 1932]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

I wish I were at the Opera with you—cant be helped. It was my fault for going to the motor show before a dinner party. I’ve been drowsy all day—have read perhaps 2 pages. No I dont think your Benson—as we are—is up to much. Perhaps its my head. I want to hear about Camargo I want—many things. I think I shall either stay quiet or go off for a country drive tomorrow. I want—oh yes—do criticise The C. R: that I should like. I’ve met about a dozen people who burst into praise of the Waterfall—clever young men, old women and so on.

Please please please write more—also write the Empress. I could write a book about your memoirs. Surely, if you sat over the fire o’nights, after music, you could drop out some more, like pearls—pearls that have got into one’s underclothes. Oh I’m so sleepy. Thank you for coming.

V.

Berg

[]

2648: To Ethel Smyth

10.20 [21 October 1932]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

I’ve just had a most confused and agitated telephone from Nessa, who says that Maynard tonight tells her that the Ballet must be postponed. He has written to you, but she thinks you wont get it, owing to some mistake of his secretarys till tomorrow late—and therefore doesn’t suppose you’ll want to come up to Ly Dianas [Cooper] tomorrow; and so wont expect you. (She was dining out and rang me up, and asked me to tell you—which I do in some confusion, as people are dining here—and talking.) All I mean is, I suppose if you’re not coming to Diana, you wont come to the Gilbert and Sullivan.

Forgive this confused scrawl. I could come on Monday if that suits you better

V.

Berg

[]

2649: To H. A. L. Fisher

23 rd Oct. 32

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Herbert,

It is very nice of you to ask us. Weekends are rather difficult, but might I come for the night of Tuesday November 22nd? I’m afraid Leonard wont be able to get away for the night, but if you dont mind having me alone, I should like it very much.

Your affate
Virginia Woolf

Bodleian Library, Oxford

[]

2650: To Ethel Smyth

Wednesday [26 October 1932]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

No, I dont think tomorrow is worthwhile. I’ve been summoned to attend Herbert Stephen’s funeral—God knows why, but I suppose I must go, dried up old haddock, that he was. Thats a.m: Then we dine out, 7.30: then go to Adrians halfcrown Club—damn it all. Without undue flattery, I’d rather talk to the uncastrated cat. But I should be dry as Herbert by tea time. But come Thursday next week—I’m longing to go to the Gilbert and Sullivan too. And theres my mother in laws annual birthday. But—remark how emphatically every sentence begins—I will write to you, and listen in to you God willing. I met Eth Wn [Williamson] last night—I thought her ‘looking’ extremely well—but it was so hot we were all lobster colour. Talking of which, the specialist after 3 months cogitation pronounces my faint due to ‘heat exhaustion’ and wants to see me at 71 Harley Street. Not if I know it

So goodnight
V.

Berg

[]

2651: To Hugh Walpole

Oct 26. 32

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Hugh,

I have signed the petition with pleasure, leaving a discreet place for some body to sign in front of me. I’ve no alterations to suggest, and am giving it to Leonard, to get his signature, Of course there are any number of people who might be got to sign, but I suspect it is best to depend on a few. I hope the poor woman gets something out of it—I’m told amazing stories of the state A. B. left his various variety of dependents in. Poor man! and last time I met him, just before his death, he seemed the image of prosperity stability and longevity. I am longing to hear, naturally, about the vicar and the wife and the W.C. and trust you to come and tell me next time you’re in London.

No, I’ve not read Miss Holtby: Prof Delattre (in French) almost did for me; I suppose Winifred has merely added another kind of tombstone. She is the daughter of a Yorkshire farmer and learnt to read, I’m told, while minding the pigs—hence her passion for me. I’m so glad you are slashing about at your book—how I love tearing things up—it gives one such a sense of power. But, if I ever do read a novel again—d’you know I read 600 mss a year now—I shall read Herries.

Yr aff V.W.

Texas

[]

2652: To Logan Pearsall Smith

Oct. 31st [1932]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Logan,

I am sorry not to have written before, but I have been very busy—our clerks always fall ill at the critical moment—and indeed all I have to say is that for my part I was not conscious that we are ‘enemies’ as you suggest. My memory is probably as bad as yours, and I have no recollection of not answering your suggestion that you should come and see me. I am very sorry if I was so forgetful—it was not intentional. Nor do I remember giving you a ‘frosty answer’—I mean a purposely frosty answer. I think it possible, though, as we live in a world of gossip, that some rumour had reached me that you were not favourably disposed to Bloomsbury—why should you be?—and I felt that there would be a certain discomfort in meeting, at least on my side. This is the only explanation that occurs to me of our not meeting oftener, and of course I regret it as much as you do.

Yours very sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Frederick B. Adams Jr.

[]

2653: To Ethel Smyth

Tuesday [1 November 1932]

52 T.[avistock S.[quare, W.C.1]

But you told me you could not manage Thursday PM. and so I said I would go to a party [Mary Hutchinson’s], 5, at Sadlers Wells to which I’m entreated to bring you. But the devil is that having had a long day yesterday I got a mild faintishness last night—L. made me see the dr. today, who says its only that I’ve tired my heart—nothing wrong with it. This usual intermittent pulse in a different form—and recommends quiet. So I’m altogether vague about my doings on Thursday, tho’ I’m practically all right today. Perhaps if you rang up Thursday? And wd you come to Sadlers Wells? I promised to bring you if I’m able.

V.

Berg

[]

2654: To Ethel Smyth

Wednesday [2 November 1932]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

I dont think there’s much chance that I shall be able to go to Sadlers Wells tomorrow. I’m rather done up today. I think I shall stay absolutely quiet tomorrow—if possible I want to go to Schnabel; but I dont expect I shall be able to see you, or anyone, if thats so, in the afternoon. This is only to save you bother, or the possible change of plan. There’s nothing really the matter, only these attacks, even slight ones, leave one very drowsy and inert, by the fire. I am to drink digitalis—as I used to do years ago. Well I hope your concert is coming off well this afternoon.

V.

A scrawl to catch country post

Berg

[]

2655: To William Rothenstein

Nov 2nd 1932

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Sir William,

It is very good of you to write to me about my book [Common Reader], I always feel apologetic about publishing my own criticism, because I dont know that there is much excuse for adding to books about other books, unless one has something like knowledge to impart. And that I haven’t. But I do claim to be a lover of reading, and it is a great reward and encouragement to me if I can send a little shock across to you who care so much for the other art. Why there aren’t more critics, or better, of painting, I cant make out. It must be easier, with a picture in front of you—but there too I am very ignorant.

Thank you so much for writing.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Houghton Library, Harvard University

[]

2656: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Thursday [3 November 1932]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Ottoline,

I wonder if you could possibly come here tomorrow at 5.30 instead of my coming to you?

I’ve had rather a rush lately what with one thing and another, with the result that I have upset what is called the rhythm of my heart—a thing I’ve always had more or less, and of no importance; but it tends to make me get faint; and I dont want to get faint in your drawing room. I shall be all right in a week or two, if I’m quiet, the dr says, so if its the least bother to you to come here, let me know, and I’ll come later. But it would be very nice to see you, and if you could bring me your D.H.L. memoir, that would interest me immensely. I’ve finished his letters: no, I’m not enthusiastic: I dont think its the real thing, though of course he was so hounded by those brutes the army and public that one’s entire sympathy is with him. But what a thin, exaggerated affair it is to be sure! and all on the same string.

V.W.

If I dont hear I shall expect you at 5.30.

Texas

[]

2657: To Kingsley Martin

[4th November 1932]

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Mr Kingsley Martin,

I am so sorry to return this book again. I’ve no doubt it is charming, and it was very nice of you to think of sending it me. But I have developed such a repugnance to the thought of writing a review, that I dont think I shall ever write one again. If I ever feel inclined, of course I will let you know, in case you have a book you would send me. But as things are, I feel it is wasting your time to let you send me books—kind though it is of you. Also of course the 1500 or 2,000 word limit, necessary as it is in the New Statesman, is a very great drawback—if one has anything to say about a book, one wants, I find, more like three or four thousand words to say it in.

I am sending back the book today therefore.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

George Spater

[]

2658: To Logan Pearsall Smith

[6 November 1932]

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Sq. [W.C.1]

Dear Logan,

Do not be alarmed, to quote your own words, by the thought that I am preferring an olive branch. And excuse the typewriter, but my hand is getting too illegible for prolonged use. Confined to my sofa at the moment—how apposite your reference to a heart specialist was!—I have been pondering your letter, certain aspects of which interested me greatly; so that I cant resist writing, though I fear longwindedly, but then I’m rather knocked up.

I agree with you that one can admire a set or group and at the same time indulge a malicious desire to laugh at it. Am I not just as guilty as you are? Only of course I laugh at Chelsea whereas you laugh at Bloomsbury. And I feel great admiration and respect for Chelsea as you do for Bloomsbury—indeed I can’t see any reason for you to prefer Bloomsbury, as you intimate that you do—but then, alas, so much of what you say is ironical. And I too have always thought and I have often said (to quote you again) to the great annoyance of people like Lady Desborough and Mrs [Alice] Keppell (you know what great ladies are) sometimes sneer at Chelsea—that in my opinion it is full of delightful people and brilliant gatherings. How could it not be? I need only mention, besides yourself, Desmond, Maurice Baring, Ethel Sands, Bob and Hilda Trevelyan, Mr Connolly, Mrs Hammersley, and then theres Sibyl Colefax round the corner. How can you, even out of politeness, put us in Bloomsbury above you? I’m sure you dont. Its only your fun. But much though I admire Chelsea, I freely admit that I have mocked at you all because mockery is ‘my favourite pastime,’ just as it is yours. And I may have made up a story or two about you into the bargain.

Up to this point then there is not much difference between us. Now comes the interesting distinction. I have known Chelsea for many years. For many years they have asked me to tea and dinner and I have asked them to tea and dinner. And then I discovered that they were laughing at me and my friends behind my back; and they discovered that I was laughing at them and their friends behind their backs. So I gave up asking them; and I gave up accepting their invitations. This is not due to having a good heart—it is simply that such intercourse seemed to me dull, barren, fruitless, uninteresting.

Now what I find so interesting is that you, who are, as far as I can make out, in the same case as I am, will yet take the trouble to write to me and say “perhaps we are enemies? … I seem to recollect that I received but a frosty answer the last time I suggested coming to see you. Or was it perhaps no answer at all?”—you will write like this implying—but again, in dealing with so ironical a mind how careful one must be not to exaggerate—still such words do seem to me to imply that you would actually like to come and see me. Yes, I turn to your first letter, and there you say in so many words ‘I often regret that I never see you’. Now is this true, or is it ironical? And how can you like seeing me, if you laugh at me and my friends behind my back?

Those are some of the questions that I ponder as I lie here. And, thus pondering, it seems to me possible that you are right—at least to this extent. That is, why should not Chelsea and Bloomsbury meet and laugh at each other to their faces and quite genuinely enjoy themselves? It seems to me worth trying. Then again, you say ‘critics resent criticism, and mockers being mocked’ But do they, if it’s done face to face? Surely both sides might benefit greatly if it were done in that way.

I am ashamed to see that I have written all this without making, or quoting, a single aphorism. And how delightful your little galaxy of them from—is it Fulke Greville?—is at the end of your letter! I have racked my brains to think of one to end with; but am relieved to have it on your authority that ‘no woman (except George Eliot) was ever mistress of this delicate art’. So be it, I will leave aphorisms to your sex. With regard to the pin-prick—“with this little pin-prick to end my letter”—to quote you again—my trouble is that either through age or habit I have become almost impervious to pin-pricks. If you weren’t (this is only going to be a very small sheet) you will have to prick a good deal harder. And I promise, if you will come and see me, that I’ll rummage in my dressing table for a few pins of my own. I’m sure you dont intend to claim pin-pricking as an exclusively masculine art.

There, to quote you once more, we must leave it, Come and laugh at me and my work and my friends to my face, and I’ll do the same by you. No doubt we shall both profit. I am not allowed at present to do much entertaining, but in two or three weeks I shall be delighted to see you on the terms stated, I fear rather diffusely, above.

Yours very sincerely
Virginia Woolf

[handwritten]

In reading this over, I see that the molehill has become a mountain—but then the molehill was raised by you.

Frederick B. Adams Jr.

[]

2659: To H. A. L. Fisher

7th Nov. 32

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Herbert,

I am so sorry but I am afraid I must put off coming to you [at Oxford] on the 22nd. We’ve been having rather an exhausting autumn, with the result that I have somehow strained my heart. It is nothing of the least importance and will soon be cured with quiet, but the doctor refuses to let me do anything at all tiring during the next few weeks, and has knocked off all staying away. I had very much looked forward to seeing you again. I hope if you are in London, and not too busy, you will suggest a visit here. Please make my apologies to Lettice [his wife]. It was so nice of you both to ask me.

Your affate
Virginia Woolf

Bodleian Library, Oxford

[]

2660: To Vita Sackville-West

[8? November 1932]

52 T[avistock] S[quare, W.C.1]

Well, my faithless sheep dog,—yes, you’ll be turned into a very old collie if you dont look out, blind of one eye, and afflicted with mange on the rump—why dont you come and see me? Poor Virginia can’t come to you. She—that is, I suppose, I—had another, very slight though, fainting; and Elly Rendel brought her misanthropic stethoscope, and says the systolic action of my heart—what used to be called my intermittent pulse—is too wild; and thats why I faint; and I must be quieter, and drink digitalis, and there’s nothing whatever wrong with my heart! And I mustn’t go into hot rooms, like Sibyls. So I doubt if I can come to Sst. [Sissinghurst] at the moment—not that its a very hot room—the bedroom might be though—For which reason I ask again (I’m in such a rush) when could you come and see me? I’m divinely happy, because I wrote all the morning—Oh how you’ll hate my new novel, and how it amuses me!—and then I go for a walk, or drive, and then I come back to tea, carrying one muffin which I eat, with honey, and then I lie on the sofa, and—who d’you think came and talked to me t’other night? Three guesses. All wrong. It was Violet Trefusis—your Violet. Lord what fun! I quite see now why you were so enamoured—then: she’s a little too full, now, overblown rather; but what seduction! What a voice—lisping, faltering, what warmth, suppleness, and in her way—its not mine—I’m a good deal more refined—but thats not altogether an advantage—how lovely, like a squirrel among buck hares—a red squirrel among brown nuts. We glanced and winked through the leaves; and called each other punctiliously Mrs Trefusis and Mrs Woolf—and she asked me to give her the Common R. which I did, and said smiling, By the way, are you an Honourable, too?” No, no, she smiled, taking my point, you, to wit. And she’s written to ask me to go and stay with her in France, and says how much she enjoyed meeting me: and Leonard: and we positively must come for a whole week soon. Also Mrs Keppel loves me, and is giving a dinner partly [sic] solely for me in January. How I enjoyed myself! To be loved by Mrs Keppel, who loved, it is said—quite a different pair of shoes [Edward VII].

Well, what I was going to say, but have no time, is that I dont altogether agree with you (on the wireless) about Lawrence. No, I think you exaggerate. Genius, I admit: but not first rate genius. No. And such a cad to Ottoline. My word, what a cheap little bounder he was, taking her money, books, food, lodging and then writing that book. And the other night they broadcast a poem, writer unknown; and L and I listened in; and we said who’s that? some modern, quite 2nd rate, but trying to be first rate—pretentious—not genuine. Behold, Lawrence again, so they say. I admit the genius, in Sons and Lovers: but thats the sum and pinnacle of it all (I’ve not read anymore) the rest is all a dilution, a flood, a mix up of inspiration, and prophecy—which I loathe—Oh yes, a genius, but not first rate. So there.

And come and see me

V.

Berg

[]

2661: To Ethel Smyth

Tuesday [8 November 1932]

52 Tavistock Sq. [W.C.1] Bulletin

It was a bore the dr. coming this afternoon. L. didnt want me to see anyone, as we’re trying to go to the first part at any rate of Schnabel tonight. I shall leave if its too hot. The dr. quite pleased—says my blood pressure is normal, better than last time; and tho’ my pulse is still too fast—d’you like these details?—there’s nothing wrong with the heart—only strain: and probably that is mere nerve exhaustion; and is instead of a headache. The present theory, so brilliant are drs, is that if I have my usual headache, thats nerve exhaustion; so my little temperature; so my racing pulse—all nerve exhaustion. And what is nerve exhaustion? I ask. Ah, that we cannot say.

Anyhow I needn’t see a dr. for a fortnight; am to lie down; between tea and dinner, but can write as much as I like and read all day and talk a certain amount.

Heavens what an egotistic medical scrawl! Now I’m going to dine and drive to the Q. Hall.

Well then one day next week? between tea and dinner?

V.

I enjoyed Miss S’s jokes immensely [unexplained]. L. threw away the last L. Mercury, before I’d read you. Cd. you lend me a copy? Have you begun the Empress?

[]

2662: To Hugh Walpole

9th Nov. [1932]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Hugh,

Yes do come, Tuesday 4.30. That will be very nice—you wont mind if I lie on a sofa between tea and dinner? I’ve been fainting in hot rooms, and the dr. says I’ve been what they call—I cant remember—upsetting the systolic something? intermittent pulse?—something to do with the hearts action; but nothing serious, only requires rest.

What terrific people you and Vita are—bursting out on the stage! I think I could hardly face the excitement of seeing bodies to ones ideas—What is your play? One of your books or an original venture? There again I long to become a playwright. But we will discuss this on Tuesday—also the clergyman’s wifes W.C, also James Agate, also—we’ve got millions of things to discuss.

V.W.

Texas

[]

2663: To V. Sackville-West

Thursday [10 November 1932]

[52] Tavistock [Square, W.C.1]

Yes, my kind clever colly—come to lunch on Tuesday next here at 1. I’m told not to lunch or dine in hot restaurants—anyhow, here is much nicer, and you can stay on a bit later and talk. Then I’ll tell you all about Violet [Trefusis], It was her novel that brought her—I think she’s been rather silly about it—but we’ll tell you, if you’ll keep it secret.

Publishers mustn’t gossip. Yes, I see now, in a flash, a chapter in your past I never saw. Frightfully queer. She wasn’t what I expected—but no time to say more now.

I’ve seen Elly [Rendel] again and had all kinds of tappings and listenings, and she says there’s nothing wrong with my heart, but this usual old intermittent pulse that I’ve had since I was a baby has gone a step too far—hence my faintings in the heat, at the Ivy etc: and that I must lie down and rest and not get excited and not walk too far and not talk too much and not go out to parties: but I can write all the morning; and talk all the evening; and read all night. So I’m very happy. And my draught of digitalis is rapidly slowing up my pulse;—its already better

So there—is that the kind of detail you like? Oh how nice to see you again! You’re the only person I ever ask to come here—if person you can be called

V.

Berg

[]

2664: To Margaret Llewelyn Davies

10th Nov. [1932]

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, [W.C.1]

Dearest Margaret,

Yes it was an age since we heard from you; and we missed every time we were in London together. Do let us meet when your back. You must ring and settle a good time. What a miserable thing about Lilians [Harris] eyes—I cant conceive any affliction I could less well endure; and sure she never says a word or does a thing but whats sensible, wise, discreet, virtuous, and everything it ought to be. But then I’ve long nourished a secret passion for Lilian, and tried, vainly, I admit, to imitate her qualities. Thats what comes of being Berties cousin—I suppose—a natural fund of unending goodness, which is not so much credit to her, because if ones Bertie’s cousin it comes by nature. Such is my theory at least. You see, it leaves me free to be a monster because I’m not Berties cousin. (I rather think Lilian is not either—I mean the man who’s connected with Mary, the man who lives at Las Palmas [unidentified].

We came back from the Labour Conference at Leicester—did we tell you we’d been there?—theres a lot to say about it—I sat in the gallery—Leonard down on the floor among the delegates—he was sent by Lewes—but this must keep.

Then of course our head clerk [Miss Belsher] fell ill on the day of publication; we all had to work like mad doing up 6000 copies of Vitas new book, Family History, to get them out in time; at the last moment Miss Cashin [clerk] casually opened a drawer, and found a whole bundle of orders that had been stuffed away and forgotten. So we had to set to again—with the last van waiting in the street. It rather reminded me of some of your scampers with politics—the things I never understood—deputations to the Prime Minister and so on.

After this I was rather done up—I had been rather faint in the heat wave, and the dr. tells me I have slightly upset my usual old heart. So that I must lie down, but only after tea. Its nothing to speak of. Janet Case is coming here today—indeed I must go and toast her muffin now. L. is in the Press or he would send all kinds of messages to you both. But let us know when youd like to see us. [Winifred] Holtby is a farmer’s daughter and I’m told her book is bad—, vain though I am, I cannot read about myself, and my parents and my education—all lies too.

So goodbye. Love to Lilian.

V.

[handwritten]

I have, of course, forgotten the main thing I wanted to say. Do you remember showing me a letter from W. Bagehot to your aunt, about women being servants, or something like that? I am re-writing a speech I made to some young professional women, and want to quote it. May I? Have you got it? I’ll ask you when we meet.

Sussex

[]

2665: To Ethel Smyth

[13 November 1932]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

The Book [The Common Reader] should have been posted on Friday, or Saturday. I left it in the Press on Friday and told them to send it Oh Ethel! Ethel! Where is your taste, your judgment—I ask in all solemnity (I’m rocking with laughter)—“The Austens are of your very best”—do you really think so? Well, the article may be a masterpiece—I thought it feeble in the extreme, and said to L. ‘heres someone trying my tricks in the Times—” No, of course I didn’t write it. Surely—“But the little things must hold out their little things to one another”—my dearest Ethel, do you really think I write like that? and is that what you think my ‘very best”—‘the frame provided by a great artist’—“but I could quote half the article”—I thought it the feeblest little poke that ever was. And its my best! I’ve just got the Austen letters—I was so much irritated by that article that I thought I must see if there wasn’t a good deal more in them than he or she made out.

My very best!!!!!!!!

Really—I quite understand—I should be just as much out about music. And I’m better and we’re back, but I’m going to be very quiet

Berg

[]

2666: To Clive Bell

Tuesday [15 November 1932]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Clive,

I did meet Rebecca a year or two ago at Todds’ board, but I’d very much like to meet her again at yours. Only might it be tea, not lunch? I find lunch now impossibly comatose; whereas by tea time, I brisk up. Still this may be the very opposite case with you. So let me know if tea will suit or not. Lottie [Hope, maid] could, I suppose, say yes or no. 22nd Nov: Tuesday. 4.30. or 5.

By the way, Rebecca is said to be doing a cure abroad. But as she is making excuses for being 9 months and ten days late with a manuscript this may well be what my old nurse called a tarradiddle. What d’you think that word comes from? And, by the way, Elly says if I get faint again I must give up all parties, even tea: but I dont for a moment think I shall get faint again.

Yr Virginia

Quentin Bell

[]

2667: To Ethel Smyth

Sunday 20th November [1932]

52 T[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

I know I have been a wretch, as usual, not to write before, if only to indulge you in your mad Jane Austen mood, which amuses me immensely. Why on earth should you mind coming a howler once in a way about that article? As I said, I should be far more howling if I wrote to you about your music. Its only your d——d rashness thats at fault—and as you know I rather admire that quality in you—if you’d been a Professor’s daughter, you would have said, casually, “By the way did you write an article in the TLS? I didn’t think it one of your best, but…” and so have been safe either way. As you’r a general’s daughter you jumped straight in; and really came an awful cropper; which I prefer; Because one knows where one is. As a matter of fact two people, Hugh Walpole and Vita, both said, off their own bats, “Did you read an article imitating you in the T.L.S?” And they both went on to say how for 3 lines they had thought it might be me, and then thought well, she must have been very ill to write like that, and then decided that I hadn’t written it. But then they both spend such wits as they have in writing. What I thought about the article—and I read it again, after your letter—was that the man or woman was so much engaged in imitating, first me, then someone else—for it went on differently—that he or she had never got away from the looking glass at all, and therefore had quite forgotten to say anything about Jane Austen. This being so, I bought Jane Austen, and find as I suspected that the man or woman is entirely flatly and absolutely wrong, and that the Austen letters are so important and interesting that I fear I shall have to write about them one of these days myself. And, again Ethel dear, you’re entirely wrong—whatever “Bloomsbury” may think of JA., she is not by any means one of my favourites. I’d give all she ever wrote for half what the Brontes wrote—if my reason did not compel me to see that she is a magnificent artist. What I shall proceed to find out, from her letters, when I’ve time, is why she failed to be much better than she was. Something to do with sex, I expect; the letters are full of hints already that she suppressed half of her in her novels—Now why? But I’ve only read 30 pages: I’ve no time—ever so many MSS to read.

I had to spend 2 days last week in bed with this jumping heart—not bad though: only the dr. happened to come, and said that if I didn’t stay quiet I should have to stop my mornings work, which I really cannot endure: so I put off everything; didnt even go round to Nessa, and now am much better again and writing furiously. That is why I can’t write letters. I’ve written nearly 2,000 words (oh how you’ll hate them!—since the T.L.S. is my very best—ah hah—you shant hear the last of that!—how you’ll hate them!) But the effect of writing 2,000 words is that my hand staggers like a drunk crow in the evening; and I still have 20 letters I ought to write—They shall go to the typewriter though—I’ve entirely lost count of your movements. I cant keep my own plans in my head, let alone other peoples—so I must send this—and the L. Mercury article—ah hah! I wont tell you what I thought of it—to Coign, in the pious hope that you may resurrect there one of these days. Or here. But God knows when. I am honestly and soberly trying to be as quiet and dull and recumbent as I can. The dr. says I ought to have been much worse than I was, the other day, seeing that I sat up till one thirty howling with laughter and rage at L’s polish Count—the man who wrote the water closet rhymes, and turns out to be an appalling bore, dressed in flowing purple, with hair down his shoulders, conviction that he is King of Poland; and the accent and manners of a Cockney stable boy.

V.

Berg

[]

2668: To Dora Sanger

Nov. 20th [1932]

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Dora,

(I must apologise for typing, but my hand is so illegible that I write out of kindness to you in type).

It was very nice to hear from you again. I wish we could have arranged a meeting. But at present I am doing my best to obey my doctor and see hardly anyone and only for a short time. So I hope you will suggest another visit later when I shall be all right and we need not hurry. As a matter of fact I am already much better—it is an old bother, that I have had before after influenza, and I am taking care more by way of precaution than anything—it can be such a bore, and means lying down for weeks. Many thanks for telling me about Mrs Gray. I think Goldie told me about her last year—I will certainly remember and suggest it to my doctor if I dont get right as soon as I should. But I found last time it was only a question of rest—they say theres nothing wrong.

I hope this means that you are much better than you were. I suppose you arent much in London now; and I dont know what Daphne is doing. It seems an age since we saw either of you. Please give her my love, and Leonards—we often think of you. And it would be nice to see you in the flesh some day also.

Yours affectionate
Virginia Woolf

Daphne Sanger

[]

2669: To Duncan Grant

Thursday [24 November 1932]

52 T[avistock] S[quare, W.C.1]

Dearest Duncan,

I must seize my pen, though I am reeling with excitement, to tell you that we have just unrolled your carpet and it is perfectly magnificent. (I seldom underline a word, but on this occasion I must). It seems to me a triumphant and superb work of art, and produces in me the sensation of being a tropical fish afloat in warm waves over submerged forests of emerald and ruby. You may well ask what sort of forest that is—I reply it is the sort of fish I am. As you know, it is the dream of my life to be a tropical fish swimming in a submerged forest; and now this is permanently gratified—with what effects upon my morals, my art, my religion, my politics, my whole attitude to reality, God only knows. For the moment I feel kindly disposed even towards Eddy [Sackville West] himself (whose last letter is a masterpiece—I must show it you) and further, I feel perfectly sure that I am not paying you a penny or even a halfpenny for all this subdued yet gorgeous riot (the forest that is)—you have made me a tropical fish gratis and for nothing—so that no expression of mine can really convey adequately my gratitude, which must remain as a lump of entire emerald (I said it would get into my style—thank God, my article on Sir Leslie is finished) until death us parts. I’ve just had a paean of praise of the room from Ott: Everyone seemed enthusiastic. I hope some cash will result.

Now I am going to swim in my forest.

V.W.

Duncan Grant Estate

[]

2670: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

[25? November 1932]

52 Tavistock Sqre, [W.C.1]

Dearest Ottoline,

Its very good of you to send round another lot of Lytton’s letters. I get a queer feeling I’m hearing him talk in the next room—the talk I always want to go on with. I wonder how many talks I’ve had with him—sometimes I think I never talked so much to anyone, except Leonard. I daresay that was why one saw less of him lately—we had said so much. And then, of course, life is so exacting—one cant fit it all in. The last time we were to go to Ham Spray I was tired and put it off. I expect this must happen, when one has known one’s friends for 20 years; and it doesnt mean one drifts or parts; only that the main things have been said—And yet, now I have a million things to tell him, and never shall. I rather think your silence was of this kind too; and then your link was so burning hot at one moment—mine never was so intricate and triangular—; and when Henry went fizz, Lytton must have been affected. And then Carrington—after Lytton died James [Strachey] told me, what I guessed, that she had been jealous of Lytton’s old friends; and that was one of her sorrows, when he was dead, that she had kept us from him. Indeed she said so to me herself: but as she was so precarious herself in her hold on him, and depended so completely, one cant blame her. And then there was Roger Senhouse, who bored me so much that I could never cultivate him, as Lytton wanted. All this was much the same with you I expect: that is how one loses hold on people. My only regret is that Lytton himself was beginning to feel again the young men and Carrington were not after all his old friends; and so we were about to meet again, much more often—and then he died.

No, I wasn’t in the least tired by your visit—not at all: rather the other way. My heart is a very good judge of character and I only faint when Polish Counts [Potocki] with long hair come here. That reminds me—you must come to a quite ghastly party that Nessa and I are giving on Wednesday. Its a purely commercial (dont whisper it) affair, to induce the rich to buy furniture, and so employ a swarm of poor scarecrows who are languishing in Fitzroy Street. You are NOT to buy, but you (and Philip [Morrell]) are to come: and what you’re to do is to sacrifice yourself once more to the cause of these delightful people who always treat you so well and swim through the rooms trailing glory in your wake and entertain Margot [Asquith], Lord Sud⁠[e]⁠ley, Lord anybody—as you know how. I look forward with horror and despair, but perhaps we may have a crack in a corner. Anyhow come again here soon. The mercy of having my heart wrong is that it entirely cures me of headache so thus I can write 3 hours daily instead of 1½. Mrs Carswell wants me to puff the new edition of her D.H.L. Not if I know it!

yr VW

Texas

[]

2671: To Logan Pearsall Smith

27th. Nov. 1932

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Logan,

I am a wretch not to have thanked you before for your letter and the tract. I have read it with great amusement, and only wish it were longer. Leonard has now read it too—we have over 600 MSS to read yearly now, which accounts for our extreme slowness; and it strikes him that you perhaps might add an introduction? and let us print it. But no doubt you wont want to do this. But perhaps if you will come and see us one day—on the terms agreed on—we might discuss it. It is certainly edifying in the extreme; and the portrait is delightful.

Yes I agree about Chelsea. I dont like the mix up of letters and coronets. But I’m afraid there are a good many coronets in Bloomsbury now—the peerage seems to have taken us up—but as long as we dont become peers ourselves, I find the peerage intoxicatingly beautiful—the old English peerage I mean—not the rich peerage, nor—I was going to say the American peerage—would that have been a pin prick? or an aphorism?

Yours very sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Frederick B. Adams Jr.

[]

2672: To Ethel Smyth

Tuesday [29 November 1932]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

This is not a letter, so dont be alarmed; only to say I have a letter from the publisher of the Austen letters saying they had been told I wrote the T.L.S. article—hoped I hadn’t—are much relieved to find the “culprit is E M. Forster”. Lord—I never guessed it could be him. Well, you were right in thinking it by a man who can write; though I dont think he did more than a few simple tricks this time. The letters are to me fascinating—for what they dont say largely. But dont say anything about EMF: he’d be hurt if he heard I’d been declaiming: its all Hugh Walpoles gossip I imagine: he disliked the article so much. Are you coming to Nessa’s tea party show tomorrow? I’m going: I’m much better: havent been out for 14 nights but this tea party will be the dreariest thing conceivable—Margot [Oxford] etc: convened to buy; and they wont buy; and they’ll drink, and no doubt steal. No more. I’m ever so much better

V.

Berg

[]

2673: To H. A. L. Fisher

29th Nov. 1932

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Herbert,

I am greatly pleased that you liked my article, and it was very good of you to say so. I was reluctant to write it, but Vanessa and Adrian wanted me to—and I did it in the fear that I should make a complete failure of it.

Yes, I too remember Hyde Park gate very well, and your coming—and mother saying you had won a fellowship and asking her what that was.

Yrs affate
Virginia Woolf

Bodleian Library, Oxford

[]

2674: To Elizabeth Bowen

Nov. 30th [1932]

52 Tavistock Sqre., [W.C.1]

Dear Miss Bowen,

I am very much better and think there is no doubt that I shall be quite well on Thursday if you would come then at 5. (and wouldn’t mind perhaps finding me in a dressing gown.)

The bother is that these headaches sometimes come back suddenly and then I’m not able to talk. But if so, I would ring you up at the address you gave,—and I dont think its likely as I’ve lain here for 6 days in perfect obedience.

But please say if you’d rather wait till there’s no chance of being put off—I expect you are very busy.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

If I dont hear I shall expect you.

Texas

[]

2675: To Dorothy Bussy

[end-November 1932?]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Dorothy,

This is my annual invitation to tea on the 15th June: and also to ask if you take in paying guests? A friend (male) [unidentified] of Francis Birrell’s wants to convalesce near Mentone, where he is at the moment, and suggested possibly you would take him, which was jumped at. I suppose he wants to come soon, and I dont think he needs any special care.

But if you would be so angelic as to inform me, or Francis Birrell, 70 Elm Park Road, S.W., whether there is any chance of this, all particulars would be sent you.

I got into the clutches of your niece Ellie [Rendel] earlier in the autumn, and have spent many weeks in bed, wishing you would walk in—No such luck! But remember June 15th.

Yours affate.
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

2676: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Friday [2 December 1932]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

I’m involved, owing to that awful party with Mary [Hutchinson], with Morgan [Forster] (no, he wasn’t the party) with Rebecca West and I don’t think I can keep off Logan. You won’t want to mix again with these nice but rather too numerous people—and then Lady Oxford,—says she must have a picture of me next Lord Rosebery in her book—So come if you will alone if you will, the next week. That’s the worst of parties—people—but I’m much better in spite and thought your distinguished black, or was it purple? a merciful relief in that parrot house of screeching chocolate boxes—Why is the current fashion of bald heads and tight hips so depressing? I didn’t like Mary’s version of a lady jockey at all.

Nessa and I went to Brixton today to see our old family cook and she said, sitting in her bedsitting room, This is better than any party—which indeed it was.

Texas

[]

2677: To Logan Pearsall Smith

4th Dec. 1932

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Logan,

I am afraid that, as this week is very full, it will have to be the week after. Perhaps tea, 4.30, on Thursday 15th will suit you.

I am quite ready to ‘love’ as you suggest; the idea of fighting originated with you, I fancy. At least I seem to remember a remark of yours to the effect that we must have quarrelled because I had not asked you to tea. Let it be ‘love’ by all means.

And of course, though I am unable to invent aphorisms, I try to understand those of others, and I take the meaning of your latest and loveliest—“If you are losing your leisure, look out!—it may be you are losing your soul” to be that these letters waste a great deal of time; and that it is extremely good of you to lose still more leisure, and imperil your soul still further by coming all this way to tea. I do so profoundly agree.

Therefore do not trouble to answer. We shall look forward to seeing you on Thursday the 15th unless I hear to the contrary.

Yours very sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Frederick B. Adams Jr.

[]

2678: To Elizabeth Bowen

Wednesday [7 December 1932]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Miss Bowen,

I’m so sorry, I’m afraid I shant be able to see you tomorrow. I’ve got knocked up and am being made to stay in bed and see nobody. Is there any chance that you would come another day?—Early next week I am sure I shall be all right again. I am so disappointed, and I hope this wont upset your plans.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

2679: To Ethel Smyth

Sunday [11 December 1932]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Here are the cuttings back—very impressive, and I hope operative. I’ll send the Book as soon as I can. I laughed aloud over you: unalloyed: at the others I laughed, but with a private comment that the authors would not have enjoyed. Vita of course is always such gold, pure, to the heart, that I love her at her most innocent. And I’ve not read them all: but it seems to be a field for posturing—this of infantile anecdotage: very illuminating. Just back from Rodmell—why we went, God knows. It was merely exposing myself to a thousand steel knives, and such a roaring in the trees by night that I thought of God and Ethel.

Nessa says she is sending me a letter of yours, so thats all right—I went to Dido and Aeneas [Purcell] at the Wells and thought it absolutely and entirely satisfying: so come away before the English opera. My taste is very limited. I cant judge music any more than someone else can judge articles in the T.L.S.

Berg

[]

2680: To Theodora Bosanquet

11th Dec 1932

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Miss Bosanquet,

I should have thought that there could be no doubt that the National Portrait Gallery ought to have a picture of Katherine Mansfield. I have never seen the picture you mention (nor indeed any picture), but I should be ready to help to secure it if in the opinion of people who knew her it is a good likeness. Of course there is always something in a picture that a photograph cannot give.

I see you say that there is to be a private view of the portrait some time in January and perhaps I shall be able to come and see it. At any rate I am certainly in favour of buying a picture of Katherine Mansfield for the National Portrait Gallery.

Yours very sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Houghton Library, Harvard University

[]

2681: To Vanessa Bell

[12 December? 1932]

52 T[avistock] S[quare, W.C.1]

Heres the cheque for 61.15.7. I think its ridiculously little—I think its absurd, for example, to charge only £5.5. for the desk—which means that you’re charging nothing for painting or designing. However I send the cheque; and think we had better discuss the details. I suppose there’s more furniture to come in. You’ve not used up to £100 anyhow. I cant help thinking too that some of the things might sell. But we’d better discuss it by word of mouth. Does fender mean the fire stool? Lots of the things I want at Rodmell.

But we must meet

B.

Also I dont think you and D⁠[uncan]. can have charged anything for your carpet designs. Why not?

Berg

[]

2682: To Ethel Smyth

Sunday [18 December 1932]

52 T[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

This is the usual scrawl, pending time to write at length (Thank God—off to Rodmell on Tuesday) And only to say, dont take any steps whatever, even imaginary, as yet about the MS of Room—I’m dealing cautiously with it and want to consult Pippa Strachey privately first. By a miracle, I’ve found all the pages. Also, dont take my word about the Womens Service Society. I’m so inaccurate. They wrote to the Times though about a month ago; and if you want any information, the address is Miss P. Strachey Women’s Service House 29 Marsham Street Westminster. They’d be enchanted naturally to hear from you: but all their plans are subtle, secret and full of diplomatic guile

We’ve been seeing a flamingo in Richmond Park—How much I prefer seeing flamingoes to seeing Mr. Pearsall Smith!

Your name is spelt with a y. So write to Monks House

V.

Berg

[]

2683: To Ethel Smyth

22nd Dec. 1932

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

(When it gets near the end of the year, I always remember, and write the date in full)

As I wrote 20, no more and no less, letters two days ago, you can’t complain that I didn’t write to you. My hand staggered like a tipsy crow. The waits have just done singing: L. has given them 2/6—but I cant say I caught the music of old England, though I listened—which reminds me, is Vernon Lee’s book on music good? Ought I to order it? I like her trailing clouds of sub fulgent ink—why cant she write tighter though?—thats what trips me up—like falling over one’s train, coming upstairs, after dinner, No, I didn’t read Eddy—Yes, I did read the article in TLS (not by me, for a wonder) on L.S. [Leslie Stephen] Quite good I thought, in its surface way: but then they’d no space. It is ironical that my father thought nothing of his criticism, and secretly believed himself a great philosopher. No one mentions the philosophy; all the criticism.

Have I answered all your questions? I’m reading Jane Austen [Letters] in this heavenly solitude over the log fire: and whether its my luxurious state, anyhow I find her steadily improve. I think her little fame at the end brisked her up—good Lord, she died at 42: the best to come. Have you read them? No. L. has turned on the wireless, and a gent, is talking about International measures.—curse him.

I am taking a few days holiday: I have cut off the book [The Pargiters] which you will unreservedly hate. And its very dull—taking a holiday, very pointless; I look at the cows and watch one lick its ear—a thing I’ve not done (watch a cow lick its ear) since I started the book you’ll hate. But its a good thing to turn off the lights and look at the world now and then. How odd that the world goes on just the same whether I look at it or not! Do you find that when you’re writing—the world goes out, except the precise part of it you want for your writing, which becomes indeed indecently clear. I’m reading 20 books at once—masses of books—and feel like a walrus taking to the sea—so vast, so calm, so indifferent, with the whole Atlantic to wallow in—but that’s an illusion because the Keynes’s will be over: then the Gages; then the Bells: and the poor Walrus will climb on to its rock and bark—How is your cold? What are you working at? Oh do tell me all about your suffrage life one of these days.

V.

Berg

[]

2684: To Vanessa Bell

Dec 23rd [1932]

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

Dearest Dolphin

I cannot think of any news—my last contact with civilised life was with Barbara and Saxon and Judith. Naturally the admirable Barbara made it an excuse to sit down with me for 1 hour and ½ before Saxon came—being as she said and I can believe, tired of trailing round shops. I bear her no ill will; though Angelica and I had a mint of things to say. Angelica is becoming a woman of great taste and discernment. We were just discussing Mrs Gaskell and Thackeray and I was finding her exactly of my way of thinking when, as I say, in pushed that lamentable troupe, and for the rest of the time we talked of canning fruit and bottling eggs and I generally got the impression of grime and grasp and drudge and extinction—not altogether alleviated by poor dear Saxon, who could not think where they were to dine. I said the Ivy. Finally they trapesed off to some dismal pot house in Fitzroy Street. Barbara was sleeping with Mrs Sickert: the bassoon is laid between them. But bassoons when touched by Barbara merely rattle like tin cans—I told her fruit always goes bad in tins: tins, she said, cost ½ each when bought by the dozen gross. Angelica disgraced herself—Lord, what a time is coming for us, now that the last of the Brats is of an age to whisper comments into ones ears!

All this is deadly dull. Were you very dull with Raymond [Mortimer]—a trashy, meretricious dulness; mine was dulness pure and simple. It is blazing hot here: the flowers are out; the bees threaten to swarm; L. and Percy spend the day pruning. Mr Robinson has bought the farm down, and is going to farm it, so I shall have no excuse to buy another house as I had intended. Asheham Cement is now all smoke by day and light by night and will soon go smash. The Wolves went to Brighton and bought you 4 red buttons—which anyhow dont take much room and may come in on some stitchery of yours. As my small and unregarded present I enclose this very dull cheque: I want to pay the cocktail bill entire: now, dont lash your tail: otherwise you should have had a gramophone or an evening dress: this is less and need not be mentioned. Send bill for upholstery. Needless to say, Duncans stuff is not to be had for a fortnight. The Turkey has come. I’m afraid poor old Ethel has met with a final reverse about her ballet—

B.

By the way, the screen would be magnificent here—I cant bear the old curtains much longer.

We sent Julian [Bell] 2 books—Tom, and Aldous: let me know if they dont come. Our new Perkins [Hogarth Press clerk] always puts Essex instead of Sussex, so letters go wrong. But my God, how heavenly to see nobody! But the Keynes’ will be on us. And when is your party? (that I should enjoy—but doubtless you cant ask me, quarrelsome as I am)

Berg

[]

2685: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Boxing Day [1932]

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

Dearest Ottoline,

It was very good indeed of you to send me three such lovely scarves; but very rash. Three beautiful gifts—how many lashes wont they earn you? Lady Ottolilia Morrett—look out for that flamboyant female in my next book. At present, just to take you in, I’m very grateful. The Keynes’s came over to lunch yesterday: I was at the lowest gasp even of my dishevellment, I rushed in, pinned a scarf to my neck—and lo and behold—a thrill ran through the company. They said they couldnt think where my beauty and the lovely scent came from. So a thousand (provisional) thanks.

I’m reading the new edition of Carswells D.H.L. book: hence these reflections. It is a miserable scratchy edgy raw ill conditioned book: God knows why I ever told her it was interesting—save as an exhibition of what sour love and malice and ill breeding mixed can do. Why cant she speak out if she wants to? Thats what is so malodorous—her hints and nods and becks: and then the servile and supine adoration: as of a mangy—it must be—bitch. But I’ve read so many books since we came, this one is happily buried under.

It has been balm to the heart, escaping London, and the 25 people I saw the last week, till my brain was like a 20 times exposed film—Logan’s horrid nose obliterating all. I dont like Logan: he’s coarse and rank and would, if he were a fish, stink, to put it plainly. But dont tell Ethel, whom I’m afraid I may have offended about Logan already. Anyhow here there are barns and marshes. I startled a great swan sleeping on the river bank this afternoon—no doubt about it, nature is incredible—flocks of little birds, grey green downs—my little river silver—and the hay stacks like half eaten cakes. And now the firs and books. A thousand (provisional) thanks. Are you better?

V.W.

Texas

[]

2686: To Ethel Smyth

Dec. 28th or thereabouts [1932]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

All right Ethel Smyth; I’ll answer your questions if you’ll send me them and Eddy’s story. But first, answer me these: 1. Why are you so insistent about Eddy’s story? Did he ask you to show it me? (2) If I tell you what I think of it, are you going to repeat my words to him? Now these are two questions that you must answer with that rough British honesty that befits a general’s daughter.

I am actually writing the very day I get your letter—a proof of the divine peace of Monks House. Nobody but the postman can possibly interrupt me between today and tomorrow. Therefore I am sunk deep in books. Oh yes, I write in the morning—just a little joke [Flush] to boil my years pot: but from 4.30 to 11.30 I read, Ethel. Isn’t that gorgeous? And not only those damned flimsy MSS: no: books: printed, solid, entire: D’you know I get such a passion for reading sometimes its like the other passion—writing—only the wrong side of the carpet. Heaven knows what either amounts to. My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery—always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? Whats this passion for? You, who love questions, answer me that. No—nobody can. And then this passion, which has been so well advised, lands me tonight in a book like the reek of stale cabbage and cheap face powder—a book called The Story of San Michele by [Axel] Munthe [1929]. Now dont say its your favourite work. A book more porous with humbug, reeking more suddenly with insincerity, I’ve never read. I’m at page 50. I rather suspect you of knowing him. My mother in law loves him—his d——d sentimental book, she being the mother of 9 children, and used to dam their socks on waking in the time of her calamity. And I’m reading Stella Benson: with pleasure, and—oh so many books—doesn’t it break your heart almost to think of me, with this passion, always consumed with the desire to read, chopped, chafed, bugged, battered by the voices, the hands, the faces, the bodily presence of those who are pleased to call themselves my friends? Its like knocking a bluebottle off its lump of sugar perpetually. I am in an exaggerative mood. I should qualify all this with a thin red line signifying ‘exaggeration’—but God knows if Ethel Smyth—I think of calling you so in future—cant read Virginia by this time, let her eyes fall into a well and there drown.

You sound a little raucous—your cold I suppose: and I hope its gone; and I hope you’re writing music; and I hope you’re thinking of me; and thinking how you will tell me all about Mrs Pankhurst and the suffrage. Why did you militate? I am turning over that other little book [The Pargiters] in my mind; and want to know a few facts.

And tomorrow my dear Vita sails, and I shant see her till April.

Yes, that saddens me: it takes away a lamp and a glow, and a shady leaf and an illuminated hall from my existence.

But enough, as old Lady Ponsonby used to say when she threw the soup tureen at Queen Victoria. And do you remember Lady Radnor, a vast stout woman, who had you to lunch in Venice, so she says; and did she sing well; and what was the truth of her—her memoirs are mostly lies, but only because a pen is to her what a tassel is to a blind Arabian mare on Tuesday morning in the desert. Guess what I mean—surely I must mean something?

Oh its so lovely on the downs now—a dewpond like a silver plate in the hollow; and all the hills, not distinct as in summer, but vast, smooth, shaven, serene; and I lie on the ground and look; and then the bells tinkle, and then the horses plough; and then, forgetting all the days to come and days past and this day and tomorrow,—well, you know the mood; only I incorporate better with earth than you do, because I’m—well I’m not nearly as fine a figure as you are. You resist: you rebut; you insist—I lie back on the wind and lend myself—I was going to say to the waves: but you never could abear that book. Do you say ‘abear?’ So goodnight

V.

Berg

[]

2687: To Hugh Walpole

28th Dec [1932]

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

My dear Hugh,

I can assure you that I liked your present better than any—better than the peach fed Virginian ham even, for literature, if you wont think me too high brow, is something—not I suppose if you are starving on a desert island—I was going to say that literature—but I become too self conscious to go on—is more than ham. Well, anyhow, this book of yours is to me, anyhow, more than ham, first because I love finding myself quoted and called mysterious on the first page—considering I’m wallowing in ham and grilled turkey—and then because as you know, of all literature (yes, I think this is more or less true) I love autobiography most.

In fact I sometimes think only autobiography is literature—novels are what we peel off, and come at last to the core, which is only you or me. And I think this little book—why so small?—peels off all the things I dont like in fiction and leaves the thing I do like—you. Seriously, soberly (I’m staggering from a walk alone, starting a swan, a heron, fieldfare and so on) I do think this is a very charming and attractive book: I think Henry James is entirely delightful;—why dont you give us the whole of him and Mrs [Lucy] Clifford and all their fascinating shades:—and the hat delighted me, and Cumberland, and [Arnold] Bennett. Do go on. Do make a quatuorology of it. I think it your duty when Herries is finished to do Hugh. But anyhow this instalment is delightful—as a beginning. Only think what it might lead to—what a volume for me to read. Think of me, dying as you so kindly suggested of heart failure over a teapot and crying with my last breath, He never wrote his autobiography! Wouldn’t that wring your heart? (curse this pen—its like an old spade held in the hand of a rheumatic sexton—I’m so cold).

One word more: what about Livingstone? Derrick Leon’s novel? did you read it? with what result? But you’re off to the Indies: and about to write your autog. Thank God.

Love from us both V.

Texas

[]

Letters 2688-2733 (January-April 1933)

2688: To Ethel Smyth

1st Jan. 1933

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Here is Vita’s address—it will, she says, always find her.

c/o W. COLSTON LEIGH.

521 Fifth Avenue New York

Here, enclosed, is the paper of questions. But the fact that I myself would not have said this or that, only means that whats right in one sentence is wrong in another. I dislike the expressions separately—in their context, bathed in Morgans very peculiar sensibility they may be all right—I’m not Morgan. Thats one of the puzzles of letters—how an atmosphere—person—taste—pose—can transform the good into the bad.

I have also read Eddy’s story [in Little Innocents]. It seems to me competent and charming and effective and well told—its a good anecdote too—but I could not by any possibility bring myself to call it a ‘little masterpiece’. The effect, on me, is far too slight and fugitive. I shall have forgotten it tomorrow. A masterpiece is I think something said once and for all, stated, finished, so that its there complete in the mind, if only at the back. This remains, for me, on the surface.

But as you see, I emphasise the ‘for me’. Its quite true, and I’ve said it before—I cannot feel any certainty in my own judgment of living writers. I’m too twisted and distorted by my own preoccupation. I mean I know this is, for me, good or bad: but of the dead I know (heaven forgive me!) This is good or bad: Probably you’re much closer the mark than I am with living writers. I daresay both Eddy and Maurice [Baring] are far better than I think. Its M’s superficiality that distresses me—compare him with Turgenev now thats a masterpiece maker, now and then, in M’s own line too: but M. B seems to me to go out like candleshine before it. Never mind—I daresay you see more of the whole than I do. I rather jib at giving criticism of the living for this reason. And I’m now (I think this is true) almost indifferent to criticism of myself.—Since we’re all living. I dont think you’re either right or wrong about The Waves: no two people think alike about it. And, for anything I know, I may be better as a critic as you say than as a novelist. Its too late to change anyhow; and I follow my mood in that as in other things—which reminds me, I’m off to London to go to a ‘party’! must see some people after 10 days solitude; then shall come back to books: then rush to society. Which is better? which do I need most? God knows, I cant say—a common predicament of mine all my life. But instead of developing this interesting theme, I must stop or the post will go and you want Vitas address—Yes, its odd how strongly I miss her—miss her presence in the green fields of Kent, even without seeing her there. I’m afraid she hated going when it came to it—said she loathed leaving Long Barn. Well good day—its New Years day too

V.

Berg

[]

2689: To Elizabeth Bowen

3rd Jan 1933

52 Tavistock Sqre. [Monks House, Rodmell]

Dear Elizabeth,

What a dangerous friend you are! One says casually I like shortbread—and behold shortbread arrives. Now had I said I like young elephants, would the same thing have happened? I suspect so. The only way to neutralise the poison is to cancel it with something you dont want, here’s a book therefore. But be warned—I often make tea caddies in magenta plush—that will be your fate on the next occasion. I embroider them with forget-me-nots in gold.

As a matter of fact, nothing could have come in more handy. I rushed up here last night to go to a party and found the cupboard entirely bare. There was a parcel. Opening it in a disillusioned way, expecting some MS of a novel, lo and behold, there was shortbread. So I fell on it and having the digestion of an ostrich made a splendid meal all solid—but Heavens what delicious rich ripe shortbread! Being ill should have been my fate—not at all—I dressed up as Queen Victoria on her wedding night and fell into the arms of the Prince Consort. The effect upon the royal line has yet to be discovered. But it will be laid to your door.

Excuse this scrawl. We are just off again, and I am still spinning with last night’s debauch. And this pen is in the last stage of disintegration. How did the tea party with Logan go off? Mine [on 15 December] was the dampest and dreariest of wet—no merely moist—fire works. Not being an Irish fox, you see, I can’t get at the ripe grapes. I cannot re-write this letter, so the mixed metaphors must remain.

Yr VW

Texas

[]

2690: To Virginia Isham

4th Jan 1933

Typewritten

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Virginia,

Your letter has been sent on here. I shant be back in London, I’m afraid, until the 15th. And then you will be gone. But if you were in London on the 17 which is Tuesday and could come in any time after nine thirty, we shall be at home (at 52 Tavistock Sq.) and it would be very nice to see you and discuss the Waves. Oddly enough I met somebody who wants to film it the other night.

Would Giles come in too? I dont know his address. And we shall be unchanged—I mean in clothes.

Yours ever
Virginia Woolf

[handwrittenJ

by this I mean that we dont dress.

Northamptonshire Record Office

[]

2691: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

[early January 1933]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Dearest Ottoline,

Oh dear, Tuesday and Thursday are my only free days, as we now go away on Friday, but what about Wednesday 11th?—that I will keep for ever, if I survive Ethel Smyth. Lord!—what a plague of locusts the woman is!—fine, vigorous insects, whom I respect and admire, but they leave me bent and broken. I look forward with hope to Wednesday 11th—in spite of her.

V.

Texas

[]

2692: To Ethel Smyth

Friday Jan: 6th [1933]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

No my dear Ethel, I shant be able to come up on the 9th or 10th, because—I forget if I told you—we have bought a brand new and very expensive car [a Lanchester]. This has been promised us weekly since Dec 10th. As now arranged it will be delivered here on the 14th. We must have one spin. It is the apple of L’s eye. It is on the fluid flywheel system. It will cruise—how I love technical words—at 50 miles an hour. Unless I can persuade him to dash me up to London for the night—but no: that one night of mine was the limit. He grudges every moment not spent here. The buds are opening. It is like May: the moon is like June, and the blackbirds tune—so I shant be there. But I shall listen in next time—dear me, its all very badly arranged. And I agree with you—the wireless is a humbug—a mere travesty and distortionment—I get more pain from it than pleasure. What with the Germans cutting in, and the voice of your friend God Almighty—growling and grumbling. That reminds me—why do you think Vernon Lees views on the war detestable? What would you say to mine? And what are yours? So you’ll have to write another letter, willy nilly. But I still wish I could see you conducting and hear the tunes you think I might like. I suspect that we shall be forced to come back on the 15th. Needless to say Miss Belsher has influenza; her fur coat has been stolen from the Press—in short we embroil ourselves again in the buzzing of gnats instead of floating sublimely between Heaven and the hills—as at this present moment—Why, I can assure you, the loveliness of the sight makes even my tough heart tremble—the marshes, the clouds, the birds and June. But human life is also valuable. I met the mistress of a headmaster in Lewes high St—a hare faced pale eyed woman and felt my ardours revive

Your letter just come. Yes I’m much better and no more digitalis.

Berg

[]

2693: To Vanessa Bell

Friday [6 January 1933]

Postcard

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

We may inflict ourselves on you for tea tomorrow, which is, you wont know, Saturday. But its so freezing all our pipes are frozen here, and the LeFevre [Gallery] have sent me things that dont belong to me and not the things that do, But I will tell you all when we meet.

B.

The carpet [by Duncan Grant] has come }

The glass is up } both are beyond all dreams.

Berg

[]

2694: To V. Sackville-West

7th Jan 1933

Monks House, Rodtnell, [Sussex]

Well, dearest Creature, it is a lovely spring evening. The thrushes are singing—no, not singing but chattering in the tree—you know the squawk they make. Leonard is pruning the fig tree; it is just upon five o’clock and so soft and fine and pink that we can hardly settle in. Yet I swear this is only Jan: the 7th: and L. picked me a snowdrop this morning.

This prelude is intended to make you jealous, as you observe. For next to Ethel Smyth, you’re jealous of the English fields, at this moment—so I diagnose your case. O Lord that I could see you, as you are—sitting on a tight plush seat in a car, I imagine, with views of the Middle West—an unattractive land, largely sprinkled with old tin kettles—racing across vast slabs of plate glass. For you are now travelling across America; the negroes are spitting in the carriage next door; and after 25 more hours, the train will stop at a town like Peacehaven, only 75 times larger, called Balmoralville [invented], where you will get out, and after a brief snack off clams and iced pear drops with the Mayor, who is called, I should think Cyrus K. Hinks—but thats a detail I leave to you, you will go to a large baptist Hall, and deliver a lecture on Rimbaud. Oddly enough I’m doing the very same thing myself, only in another part of America—see enclosed [missing]—thats why I’m so startlingly accurate.

I was seized with gloom when you left—ask Ethel. Isn’t it odd what tricks affection—to leave it at that—plays? I dont see you for six weeks sometimes; yet the moment I know you’re not there to be seen, all the fishmongers shops in the world go dark. I always think of you as a pink shop with a porpoise in a tank. Now there are no porpoises. No, Sissinghurst is grey; Sevenoaks a drab coloured puce. Here I sit at Rodmell, with a whole patch of my internal globe extinct. Yes—thats a compliment for you.

I didn’t expect to see you on Christmas day. We slumped through the mud with the Keynes’s.

What other news is there? Heaven be praised, I have seen no one. I read; I walk; I put dinner in the oven; I sleep. And next week we go back—dear me—to London; where Miss Belsher has influenza and her fur coat, valued at £30—was stolen off the peg outside the W.C. door she says by an unemployed consumptive man a friend of Miss Scott Johnsons As you will deduce, Miss Belsher and Miss S. J. are not on the best of terms. And Hugh Walpole is coming to dinner. And Violet Trefusis sent me a vast nodding bunch of lilac; to which I replied—as you would have me. No, I’m not spending the New Year between her and M- de Polignac. I wave the banner of chastity and cry upward. Then theres Ethel (Sands) then there’s Nan Hudson, then theres Raymond, then there’s Rosamond Lehmann, Roger Fry and myself all sitting on the studio floor [Vanessa’s] and eating ham and chicken. Ah, says Nan, this is the sort of life I really love. Then, my good woman, why dont you lead it? I say, being in a truculent mood just now, snipping the wigs off these elderly heads, as I daresay you’ve observed. This was at Angelica’s party—this brilliant wit, these flashing epigrams. By the way, are you lecturing on me at Albertvilleapolis Pa [invented]? If so, do send me your notes. Please do. And let them say something of love, and Horne the butler [at Long Barn]. Let them slip in one word to say Vita loves Virginia better than the whole world wrapped in a nutshell. Better than all those ardent but anaemic herring grillers with whom—Lord love her soul!—she consorts. Because Virginia is so clever, so good; and Virginia—this is a fact, not merely an idle boast—Virginia has been asked to write for the London Mercury by Jack Squire. What he says is, Will I send him a story and he’ll see if it’ll do. Oh my God—how I envy you, slipping off your skin and adventuring through fields where the flamingoes rise in flocks and the old black women stand at the doors, a baby at each breast! Thats what I adore and honour and cherish the Nicolsons for—sloughing their skins, every spring in a heap of drab scales and plunging naked into nothingness. Yes; you are a venturous woman, and make me envious. Please, for Gods sake, dont catch the flu, or the pneumonia—both I see rampant in New York. Dont do a thing that can diminish your splendour in my eyes, Come back soon, before I start, as I intend, for the East.

I’m told that Bunny Garnett’s book on Pocahontas is very good. Is it? Please tell me. I can read nothing but my own novel [The Pargiters], which is just as well, because nobody else will ever get through it.

Shall you now clear a space among the spittoons and write to me?

Describe everything, down to the lace on womens nightgowns. Then add a terse but compendious statement why I love Virginia next best to my husband and sons.

And take great care of yourself.

Berg

[]

2695: To Virginia Isham

8th Jan [1933]

Typewritten

Monks Home, Rodmell, Lewes, [Sussex]

Dear Virginia,

I am so sorry you cant come on Tuesday. Do let me know when you are in London again and suggest a visit. I think we shall be there till Easter. Of course I should be delighted if you could make anything of the Waves on the wireless. I’m afraid you will find it very difficult to get it taken, unless you know somebody there who would be interested. Let me know if I can do anything to help. Yes of course be Susan if you like her; and I should be delighted if Gyles [Isham] would be Bernard. We must meet and discuss it—I am rather in the dark as to what you think could be done. The only other suggestion was from a man called Wogan Phillips—the husband of Rosamond Lehmann, who wanted to make a film of it. But I dont think this will come to anything. Also, your idea is quite different, for I suppose a film would be all dumbshow. However please consider that you have my permission and blessing for whatever they are worth. It would interest me immensely to see what you could do with it.

I wonder what you’re acting at Oxford? If I come there I shall drop in and see. The Fishers did ask me to stay last term; I’m rather terrified of going. And I never thanked you for the tickets for Schnitzlers play. We enjoyed it greatly—I dont think its a good play, but it was a very interesting experiment. I dont think you can do thinking as well as speaking on the stage—or not like that.

So let me know if theres a chance of meeting.

Yours ever
Virginia Woolf

Northamptonshire Record Office

[]

2696: To T. S. Eliot

15th Jan 1933

Typewritten

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

My dear Tom,

I am shocked to see that your letter is dated 20th Nov. 1932. Here it is 1933. And you are now on the Santa Fe Railway. But why? Where are you off to? Anyhow in Feb. you are starting English 26, a course limited to 15 students. But why? I cant imagine any possible answer, so I must leave this among the unsolved riddles.

Here we are rather damp, and to speak plainly, Leonard has the itch. That is, we went to a fancy dress party at Vanessas; and he had the temerity to dress up as an English gentleman of the old school in hired clothes. I say it served him right; the itch was in the stock. Naturally, it would be. I should tell this story to your Americans. But thats the sad part of our story. The other and brighter side is that we have bought a new Lanchester—with a fluid fly wheel. It came after two months delay, last night. We drive up this afternoon. I wish we had the English professor with us.

Your letter told me all I can absorb of life at Harvard. The Cabots and the Sedwicks and the Wolcotts and the soap. And the sponge shaped like a brick. London is much as usual, or was when I left it on Dec. 20th. Ottoline was giving her parties; but I dont go because of Mr Stephens. Ottoline alone is much better than Ottoline mixed. If you are going to talk about Bloomsbury—if they gave you the 250 dollars—I should say this. Woburn Square is falling down falling down. London University is rising. I saw Mary Hutch. Jack [Hutchinson] has been defending Compton Mackenzie. Roger [Fry] is off to Tangier because a gentleman of Tangier wants to know whether his grandmother’s ceiling is painted by Tiepolo or not—a fact which Roger alone can certify. And of course we go on reading MSS; and of course they are mostly about a man called Eliot; or in the manner of a man called Eliot—how I detest that man called Eliot! Eliot for breakfast Eliot for dinner—thank God Eliot is at Harvard. But why? Come back soon; and write again, to your old humble servant Virginia.

Ella Strong Denison Library, Scripps College, Claremont, California

[]

2696a: To Winifred Holtby

[15 January 1933]

52 Tavistock Sqre, [W.C.1]

Dear Miss Holtby

I’m so sorry you cant come on Tuesday evening—Monday and Wednesday are both full, so will you come and see my husband on Tuesday afternoon as you had arranged. Thank you for asking me to lunch (and I’m sure it would be a very rich and substantial meal) but lunch is a difficult time for me to manage. Could you come to tea instead—Thursday 26th, 4:30 would suit me, and if it is all right, don’t bother to answer.

I have finished Virginia Woolf. I enjoyed it very much. Of course I suspect a good many things happened to her, by way of life, that she concealed successfully, but it seems to me, speaking as an outsider, that you have made an extremely interesting story out of her books, and I only wish, for all our sakes, that they had as much virtue in them as you make out. She was always full of excitement, I think, when she was writing them, but as she never read them after they were written, she can’t say much about them now. What an idiotic thing—to give Mrs Dalloway one father in The Voyage Out, and another in Mrs Dalloway! That comes of working from memory.

But though I was ashamed of her carelessness, I felt that you suggested so many extremely interesting points of view that I long to write a book on V.W. myself; still more, to write another novel by V.W. herself. Not a word offended me: though had I known that my random remarks about my mother’s family were to appear in print, I should have been more careful—not that I mind being rather sketchy about relations—but they do.

Now I think you ought to plunge and do a big life of somebody dead. The horror of writing about the living must be very wearing. But this living is quite content.

Excuse this scrawl—we’ve been motoring up from Sussex in a new car in the rain and I am half asleep.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Humberside Leisure Services Department, Hull, Humberside. Modern Fiction Studies. Vol. 30. Summer 1984.

[]

2697: To Ethel Smyth

Thursday [19 January 1933]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Well Ethel dear I’m awfully sorry, and yet rather glad too. I like people to die with dignity standing up, as Mary did. And I’m not such a fool as to deny the strength of affections—the strongest perhaps the MOST secret—stealing out in dreams, or coming, like yours for her, when you say you dont feel it. But isn’t it a mercy she is quit of dying standing after all these months? I had that impression of her very deeply—the last time I saw her was the day before her sale, when she was sitting at her table (about to be sold) and didn’t know me, but received me, of course, like a Queen, and then suddenly smiled and said “Oh Mrs Woolf! Do sit down. Such a pleasure to see you.”—Well, I call that, the day before one’s sale a very fine attitude. She was as smart as could be—with a new hat, I should say, beautifully placed, costing at least £10.10. and the chairs and tables all ticketed round her. Oddly enough I passed her house today. But no more, and live to be 100 at least please

V.

Berg

[]

2698: To V. Sackville-West

Jan 24th 1933

52 Tavistock Square, [W.C.1]

Yes, dearest Creature, I did write to you [letter 2694] but I called you Nicolson, and did not say forward; so you may not have got it. As it was the very most passionate letter I ever wrote, and the loveliest and wittiest what a pity. (This is trusting you never got it.)

You wrote to me from the high seas. How like you—to have waves 80 miles high, and to stand on the Bridge with the Captain [of the Bremen].

Now the point of you is that everything is like you—thats very profound. Here it is freezing, sneezing. You knew we had June last month—well, all the roses will be burnt by frost. Leonard is always talking about his buds. And the pipes are frozen here, and when I’ve had my bath Nelly [Boxall] and I have to bale it down the w.c. filling a pail with a tumbler. Heaven be praised, the w.c. is not yet frozen; but tomorrow the pipes will burst. I tell you all this to bring you in touch with England. I daresay you’re eating clams on a skyscraper at this moment—5:30 on Tuesday evening, the time you should be with me. And we wasted our last evening. I raging against Eddy [Sackville West], you very honourably upholding him. Did you ever discuss it with him? I’ve not seen him since; nor ever shall, I daresay, for I cant maneuvre my friends tempers.

They’re all dying, my friends—only Mrs Hunter, I mean, and George Moore and Alan Parsons—none of them my friends, but the air is full of funerals, and old Ethel is in the highest glee.

She was here, pounding the arm of the chair the other night, and I said Wont you be late for Mrs Hunter? Dont care if I am said Ethel. At last I packed her off, and Mrs. Hunter died 10 minutes after she got there. I’m rather pleased; she was such a time dying, and yet, if one has to die—as they say—I like her drinking champagne on yellow satin as well as anyway. I am writing all the morning: and I like writing; but you wont much care for it. Never mind. Oh and tonight theyre dancing Orlando on the ice, and I shant be there. Its a remarkable fact—the whole British peerage says they descend from the Courtiers I invented, and still have the snow boots which they wore on the frost which I invented too. Its all true, every word of it.

They charge 30/- a ticket, and I would willingly have gone and hired skates if you’d have come. But now my porpoise no longer crowns the fishmongers shop—thats a quotation from the Scholar-Gypsey.

Dotty (excuse this leaping and jumping—I have to dine out) has given up the Poets Series—I’m afraid she’s grumpy, but oh dear, I cant smooth out all her grumps and glooms. She should be mated with a stallion and pour her humours down that sink, And the Press badly wants a filip of some sort. Shall you have your new novel ready for October?—its about America; and it has a storm at Sea. We’ve had an American—head of Macmillans—here today. Thats my boast. Oh I must boast, for I cant bear to think of all you’re doing and seeing, and I not there, and I not there! Please, please, write down every scrap for me; you know how not a tassel on a table or a stain on a mat comes amiss. And how I miss you! You wouldn’t believe it. I want coloured windows, red towers, moats and swans, and one old Bull walking up and down an empty stable: you, in short. But you dont want me. You are enchanting, chiefly with the glamour of your title and the glow of your pearls, all the Coons in Canada. Tell me that too: about the white soft women and their blazing eyes. I wish I couldn’t see them so clearly couched on glittering frosty grass with the daughter of The Sackvilles.

Now I must dress. We are dining in Addison Road with the Laskis. Who is Mrs Laski? What shall I say to her? And the pipes are frozen. Hail and Farewell—that was the one book of G.M’s I admired wholly. Write to me—write.

V.

Its today—and we dined with the Laskis and I didn’t like her, or Mr Saxon or Harper [unidentified], or the dinner or the drinks and I’m so cold, and the pipes are still frozen.

Berg

[]

2699: To Ethel Smyth

Friday [27 January 1933]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Well, dame Ethel, I’ve only got 5 minutes before we start. Lord the cold! But the new car is sealed like a Pulman—I feel ever so rich, conservative, patriotic, religious and humbuggish when I drive in it. and I enjoy this new Virginia immensely. She’s one of the nicest people I know, and would love a party at Lady Roseberys above everything.

I thought your letter in the D.T. very good. Did they cut it? Anyhow it was given the front row of the stalls, as it deserved. When is the F.G. [Fete Galante] to be given? Not till June?

As you were abusing old G M [George Moore] he died. I rather regret him. I liked his incorruptible conscience in art, combined with the corruption of all the rest. And—oh I’m so cold—but I shall bring back your warmer—I cant remember to boil it—I’ve not the right temperament for your boiler—and I went into a great shop and bought a coat and a leather jacket so that I’m rigged up and look like Nansen discovering the Pole. Well, one day you’ll see me discovering Coign [Ethel’s house at Woking].

Yr V.

L’s mother is still very ill, but at 83 she entirely refuses to die, and so they say, will persist in living

Berg

[]

2700: To Donald Brace

27th Jan 1933

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Mr Brace,

It was very kind of you to tell me about the sales of the Common Reader with you. I think we have sold almost exactly the same number here. We feel quite satisfied, as the sale of that kind of book is very limited, and no books are doing well over here. I hope to send you a short and simple little book [Flush] soon—that is if my husband thinks it successful. It is by way of a joke. And then I want to get to work on a longer novel.

I hope things are doing well, or better, with you. The slump seems to be telling on our publishing more now than before.

With best wishes,
yours sincerely,
Virginia Woolf

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

[]

2701: To George Rylands

29th January 1933

52 Tavistock Square, [W.C.1]

Dearest Dadie,

It is angelic of you to ask us, but alas, we can’t manage the 18th weekend, and days in the week are impossible for L. But we propose coming up [to Cambridge] book selling one day this term. May we let you know? But aren’t you ever in London, also? Please, please, come and dine. There’s a mass of things we want to talk about—to wit, your book, the dialogues I mean, and all sorts of other things. Don’t tell me you’re secretly married to the Head of Girton, like the rest of your friends. L. says our books won’t be ready in time to advertise in the programme.

Love from your attached, if elderly, friends,

Virginia
and
Leonard

We have a new car, shaped like a fish, green on bottom, silver on top.

George Rylands

[]

2702: To Ethel Smyth

[10 February 1933]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

No I cant come today—we’re going early, to travel books on the way [to Sussex].

Sorry I was so glum. Its nothing but the truth. I’m in a cursed mood and cant bear the human face—so put off coming here, I advise you, as long as possible. Perhaps by the end of the week I shall be thawed—God knows.

V.

I shall listen in.

Berg

[]

2703: To V. Sackville-West

(Valentines day but no valentine)
Feb. 14th [1933]

52 Tavistock Sqre., [W.C.1]

Yes—yes, it was very nice indeed to get your letter “I am just about to dine with the President”—these were the last words of the last chapter. I see you’ve learnt how to end chapters—rather as if I wrote And now darling Vita, the Prince of Wales being outside in his new streamline car, I’m off to dine with King George—except that nobody, not even a blue snob like myself, could whip up much excitement over that—but do continue your story. What new dress? What did the President say?—and what did you drink?

Now two things have to be said at once before Ethel, who’s been lunching at the German Embassy comes in—but I’m afraid I was so huffy on the telephone that she won’t. First: I’ve given, in a generous moment, the MS of A Room of O. O. to the Women’s service Club. They want me to sell it for them in America—its to stave off their bankruptcy. If you do in truth speak well of Virginia in Pineappopolis [invented], do you think any of the collectors there would buy it? Or what collectors are there? This is a mere question—if it comes your way, ask: but dont conceivably bother.

I’ve gone and lost the name of the man who wanted to buy Orlando But they say no one buys anything now in the USA.

2nd. We have our new car. Isn’t it pathetic, the trust of human nature, to think that you’ll be interested in that—with Niagara churning at your door and the wolves howling and the Indians chasing each other with tomahawks up and down snow mountains? Call on Brett if you’re in Mexico and give her a kiss from me. She’s stone deaf, and carries a trumpet wreathed in ribbons but was kissable once on a time. Here the Lawrence lice still propagate. Murry on Carswell on Lawrence—a disgusting pullulation—Finally, Frieda [Lawrence] is going to speak in public herself. No I dont think I can ever look at Lawrence again—they’ve cheapened him so. Think if I died, and left as my only friends, Logan and that little pimp [Cyril] Connolly: But you won’t agree. And I am interrupted.

I was going to say our car has come—silver and green, fluid fly wheel, Tickford hood—Lanchester 18—well what more could you want? It glides with the smoothness of eel, with the speed of a swift, and the—isn’t this a good blurb?—the power of a tigress when that tigress has just been reft of her young in and out up and down Piccadilly, Bond Street. The worst of it is we cant live up to it. I’ve had to buy a new coat. But whats the good? Theres my hat. Thats all wrong—thats a Singer saloon hat.

Lord, I wish you’d come back. Tell me this is your last long voyage—you may take short ones with me when la mer est brusque—which reminds me, I’m learning Italian. Yes, as soon as I can stop writing to you—and I like dribbling on, for then I see a porpoise in a shop window at Christmas and pearls and a pink coat—a jersey was it?—anyhow you wore gaiters, and it was the sight of the gaiters—dont tell this to your audience—that inspired Orlando [on 18 December 1925]—the gaiters and what lies beyond—well: when I can stop I shall learn Andare to go. Its damned irregular. And my teacher is called Bianca, and she teaches me for love, and she’s the mistress of Mr Stoop—did you know Big Bertha? She went off in an apoplexy and now Bianca has inherited the pearls. And I dined with Mary [Hutchinson] and she told me all about Charlie James the man milliner who was dropped by Heaven into her hands just as she was sighing one day to Todd—Oh what I want is a young man to devote his life to dressing me. This Charlie does in Ryder Street—Her new dress is like that cold dish at Fortnums all white with black dice, or like Christabel’s hall, or like anything that’s symmetrical, diabolical and geometrically perfect. So geometrical is Charlie James that if a stitch is crooked, Vita, the whole dress is torn to shreds: which Mary bears without wincing though she has to dine with Diana [Cooper], which seeing Charlie comes to Albert Road with a white cat (in rubber) as a gift. This is my smartest piece of gossip. It wont interest you; but then I should get it all wrong if I told you about the primulas and the perifoneums, and how the peach has put out 3 inches of bud since we were last in Sussex—last week end that is. Its a very fine cold bright spring day here, and my being is troubled with all those vague desires which—oh I think—yes I know—yes it is—Ethel. Oh my God on the contrary it was Leonards new suit I think

So farewell.

No, there’s no news. Have you seen Tom Eliot? Are you worn to a bone? How’s Harold? Which of you is the favourite? Do send me some cuttings describing you. What sort of looking place is Virginia? And the Blacks? Lady Cunards house was burnt—by Nancy some say. Raymond is much as usual. Clive has gone to Jamaica Dont ask if he’s alone; or if not with whom. Roger’s gone to Tangier; Vanessa to Charleston—London is so silent one sometimes hears a man blow his nose in Kensington High Street—which reminds me, this house may be pulled down next year; and we may flit this very March, to Gordon Square: so it may be you’ll never see me again sitting surrounded by my pictures. I’ll tell you. The D of Bedford has refused us once more; just as I had been with a measuring tape round 15 rooms, 3 wcs and 2 bathrooms—God damn the dukes—David Cecil came here with Rachel—very happy, thats enough; how one thing leads to another.

So love and farewell.

V.

Vado, vai va andiamo, andate vanno. Is that right? Scott Johnson going [from the Hogarth Press]; poor depressed woman, not much as a manager though a heart of gold.

Love to Sibyl Colefax when you meet her at White House

Berg

[]

2704: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Tuesday Feb 14th [1933]

52 Tavistock Sqre., W.C.

Dearest Ottoline,

I’m so sorry to hear through that old wild cat Ethel Smyth, that you’re ill again and going into a home. What a bad time of it you’ve had this winter! Will they cure you? I do hope so. I should have written but lapsed into complete lethargy and assumed that every one was in the same state—with the exception of Ethel Smyth of course, whose conduct is that of a very large moth in a room with a lamp. I write this expecting her any moment—She’s been lunching with the German ambassador and had hoped to lunch with you. I tried to shunt her on to Molly [MacCarthy], and hope she didn’t reach you in person.

Well this is only by way of meeting you in the street and waving and passing on. You mustn’t bother to write. I wish I had anything amusing to send you. English literature, though I can read the least scrawl of any old char so long as its not fiction—which alas it generally is—seems at its worst and weakest at the moment. I wish I could read in the Times Lit Sup Lady Ottoline Morrell’s memoirs in 5 vols will be out on Tuesday next. Then I should sit on a campstool with a thermos flask and a bag of oranges outside Bumpus [bookshop] all night. Have you done the Garsington Chapter? Murry’s last spurt of oil and venom and other filth seemed to me his foulest. What does Frieda say of it all? I heard you were in your red cloak divinely beautiful in the Courtyard of the Brit. Museum the other day with a short stout lady who turned out to be Frieda—I see Frieda finally is to lecture on Lawrence after which I think the government should declare partridge shooting ends. Does it?

I am trying to learn Italian, and trying to write, and trying to believe that (I cant think how this sentence was going to end)—here I was interrupted by a surveyor. In two weeks we shall know if they’re going to pull this house down. I’ve been househunting too; but the Duke [of Bedford] always says at the last moment I wont have vans at the door, and off we go again.

VW

Texas

[]

2705: To Vanessa Bell

Sunday [19 February 1933]

52 Tavistock Sqre, [W.C.1]

Well dearest Dolphin—not that you deserve to be called so, considering your hardness to a tender request of mine the other night. Still you dont mind me so much in writing as in fact. The truth is, I suspect, you dont read. What with one thing and another I daresay you haven’t what you call opened a book this six weeks. But I’m so bored with Italian irregular verbs—and then I have such a passion for you—Yes, its rather a case of Ethel Smyth and me over again. Once more she’s gone off in a dudgeon, because she says I’m so cold. But in fact I almost died last Friday. Its like being a snail and having your brain cracked by a thrush—hammer, hammer, hammer; and she pulls her chair up to an inch of my nose, and she’s getting deaf as a post—and there I had to sit for 2 hours and more. I gather she’s going to be diddled again by the Camargo [Ballet]; but I cant make head or tail of it.

We’ve seen a great many old friends for some reason—Desmond, Morgan [Forster] and so on. I call it the homing of the rooks: we’re all settling on the trees. But the Rook Desmond was in great spirits, chiefly I think because he was about to prevent the Rachel David marriage—that is he thought it hopeless—and had arranged with Cynthia Asquith to tell David to go—but at the last moment he was too lazy to settle the matter, and so didn’t tell Cynthia; and so one night he came in late and there was David engaged to Rachel. But the wedding cost him over £250. Rachel had to go to the dentist; they all lost their heads and bought too many new clothes: then there was a lunch party with sandwiches on the sideboard and champagne: and so Desmond has never been quite so poor in his life as he is at the moment: Morgan also was in high feather, because he’s never enjoyed anything so much as writing Goldie’s life. Therefore I propose to die next year, and you must oblige the year after. And we’ve been asked to a party at Lady Astor’s to meet the Prince of Wales. I do hope they haven’t asked all Bloomsbury, because then I cant mention it.

It is a wet winter day—no, its dry, but the snow is so thick on my skylight it might be rain. Oh dear when shall I see you? Never. Because I suppose we must go to Rodmell on Friday. I wanted to go to Angelica with you. Can it be arranged? I suppose not. Such is life. Then you’ll retire for another fortnight, and so we go on. But you dont mind. I mean nothing to you, as Ethel says, Except what Pinka [dog] means. Poor old lady—she has the rheumatism at the base of the spine, and cant sit down, or stand up. and naturally therefore accuses me of being a fish, since I can swim. And on Tuesday we go to tea with Harry and Ba: but I shant tell you about it unless you answer this. I’m dropped by the [Ethel] Sands’—but on the whole, as it would mean buying part at least of a new dress, I bear up, and shall ask Nan [Hudson] to tea, and so plant a fiery feather in Ethel’s flank. Nelly is in a huff with Leonard about getting breakfast punctual. Lottie is installed of course; the Bedford Estate never cease surveying this house, but so far we haven’t heard anything; and I cant think of much else to say, except that I’m passionately in love with a woman who treats me like an old glove in the gutter—oh and I’ve got to be photomatoned tomorrow—and I washed my head, and my hair is in my eyes, and Nessa never writes to me, or thinks of me—Lord Lord, what a farce life is, a passing of phantoms, a crowing of cocks—we ought to be at Cambridge at this moment—so there are some mercies remaining

Please kiss Quentin, as you wont kiss me.

B.

Berg

[]

2706: To Vanessa Bell

[23 February 1933]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Yes. delighted to dine with you (this is because you’ll never come to us) on Friday wh. is tomorrow at 7.30 about. No I think I did very well out of the show, and only wish I’d got my screen. Curse Duncan for letting it go.

Addio carissima sorella mia

Berg

[]

2707: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Feb. 23rd [1933]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Ottoline,

Yes do say when you’re back—Come round in the owling time or let me come. I recovered, down at Rodmell—the dr seems to think I needn’t faint ever again, unless I’m rash. And I am writing, but a dull book this time, I think. Never mind—it keeps me bubbling like a very small but cheerful black kettle. Flush is only by way of a joke. I was so tired after the Waves, that I lay in the garden and read the Browning love letters, and the figure of their dog made me laugh so I couldn’t resist making him a Life. I wanted to play a joke on Lytton—it was to parody him. But then it grew too long, and I dont think its up to much now. But this is all very egotistical.

I was talking about you twice yesterday—once to Bianca Weiss who teaches me Italian—and says she taught you; Bianca she called herself, and was, and is, somehow attached to the Stoops: second, I talked to Duncan about you. And really I dont think you would have been ashamed. No I think you should have been behind the door. What we admired, we said, was your outrageous passion for—is it life? art? Anyhow we said that woman is a great liver:—and think how seldom talkers talk to one’s advantage! No, I wouldn’t like to overhear my friends on me. Please finish Garsington [her memoirs]; and let yourself flow, and dont tidy up stragglers. You cant think what a joy to me your unpruned dew wet moon lit phrases are—and then that fishing foxhunting Duke [of Portland] thinks he can take a carving knife and cut off the thorns!

yr VW

Texas

[]

2708: To Mrs Norman Grosvenor

25th Feb 1933

52 Tavistock Square, WC.1

Dear Mrs Grosvenor,

It is delightful of you to write to me, and I’m so glad that you call me Virginia! I always remember my father taking me to dine with you. I think it was the first time I dined out in evening dress, and I was very shy. I could still tell you what we talked about. My father I think had a special affection for you, and I know it was a great pleasure to him to see you in those years when he was very lonely. I’m so glad you liked what I wrote about him in The Times [on 28 November 1932]. I found it very difficult to say anything and feared it was not much like him. And I am so glad too that you like my Common reader articles—it seems rather foolish to write articles about books sometimes—but at anyrate I shall remember that you like them.

Please give my love to Susie and thank you again for writing.

Your affate
Virginia Woolf

Lady Tweedsmuir

[]

2709: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Monday [27? February 1933]

52 T[avistock] S[quare. W.C.1]

Dearest Ottoline,

Wonderful woman—to have gone to Woolworth and retrieved these machines! A thousand thanks. I’m sitting as neat as a coot at this moment, Leonard having mastered the principle. No, no, I had no intention of letting any Italian curl or frizz me, only in the desert of Bianca (who’s a good woman, but shouldn’t stay so long or depart from Italian grammar,) I let my fancy play with hair. I never seriously dream of being tidy, and for Gods sake remain as you are, and let us hold hands, in unity, untidy. It was my fault, muddying the waters with Bianca, and I’ve no more intention of falling into the Brett snare than of being curled by the Queen’s hairdresser. As a matter of fact, Brett is the vaguest dream to me—I scarcely see her in colours at all; and she will fade completely—except that I like to think of your insect with the long nose.

Please come again soon and mount on your pinions.

I’ve been listening to Jelly playing Bach in the [Westminster] Abbey; but the crowd was too great, and the violin took in gulps of air.

yrs V

Shall I send you ear-stoppers? I always use them.

Texas

[]

2710: To Vanessa Bell

28 Feb: [1933]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

Enclosed cheque for Angelica.

Hope to see you some time, but you must let us know.

L. has a bad cold from the wetting in the snow. Tommie came in last night, and I’m taking him to the Cranium—if indeed we go—I rather dread so much inspissated male virtue—not altogether my line, Quentin must kiss me. I went to the Stoops today—what a queer little Dutch weather clock couple they are—He showed me all the pictures from top to bottom—Lord knows I can’t say the right things. Bianca [Weiss] sways the footmen with complete composure. I rather like her—with her hat off, she’s rather a figure. But its an endless circle of Chelsea magnates—she lunches out daily. Last night I saw Ethel [Sands] and Nan at a distance—at a distance Ethel was cordiality itself, but no invitations. I shant tell you any more news, or you wont come and see me

B.

Berg

[]

2711: To Ethel Smyth

1st March [1933]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Yes, after you left the other night I was certain that you had decided never to see me again. Perhaps I’m right. After all, there are tides in the affairs of men—an ebb and a flow: why should not the tide of Ethel recede, there, from the hall, that night, in the gaslamps, with the taxis drifting by, and the ruby light from the restaurant cloaking it—our friendship—in flowing purple? Why do these moments, all draped and aparelled, overwhelm me so completely? and then recede? To witness tonight, when again perhaps I think Ethel was not so completely damned towards me—I mean the crack was not so complete—as I thought. And so, instead of dreaming in my chair I write almost as dreamily. Lord I’ve forgotten everything, everybody A chrysalis must feel as I do. You know how their tails twitch—well mine just does that tonight. It is the cold, the spring. Oh we were caught in a storm on Friday and came back to London, with our windows thick in ice and a car loomed up; we almost crashed—rather beautiful it was, crossing the river.

But this is all very remote. Do you die as I do and lie in the grave and then rise and see people like ghosts? And all my friends are dead—Gwendolen Cecil, one of my first: and then I never went to lunch when she asked me. You know, life is too multitudinous: I feel I’ve been living ever since there was a crocodile in the Nile.

To come down to this very instant, what are you doing? Bath? And what about Mrs Jones and the letters.

Oh but you’re angry with me—won’t write—I got the most startling conviction of that in the hall—

Well, well, anyhow I send you my blessing in whatever world you may be. I suppose a very vigorous world—unlike mine.

Dont write unless you want to.

V.

I’m making a shot at your address.

Berg

[]

2712: To Jonathan Cape

3rd March 1933

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Mr Cape,

I am sorry to hear that Mr Gissing objects to my introduction. I have a vague recollection that he wrote to me when the introduction first appeared and said that I had exaggerated his father’s lack of education—or something of the kind. But I did not gather that he objected to the article as a whole; and he certainly did not ask me to alter it or suppress it. Nor did he write to me when I reprinted it in the Common Reader a few months ago.

From what you say I gather that his objections must be much stronger than I realised. And until I see what they are I cant of course say whether I can answer them or not, Certainly I meant no disrespect to his father—and I dont think that any impartial person who read my article would think so. If he should write to the papers, I will see what steps I can take and let you know.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Jonathan Cape Ltd.

[]

2713: To Lady Cecil

March 4th [1933]

52 Tavistock Square [Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

My dear Nelly,

I have been thinking so much about you and Guendolen. Do you remember asking me to meet her hundreds of years ago at Grove End Road? We sat on the sofa in the window with the trees outside. What an exquisite and enchanting human being she was! And she was just as lovely, a few years ago when I met her somewhere. It was a peculiar charm, so gentle, and yet so acute. I wish I had seen more of her—one always wishes that.

But this is only a line to say how sorry I am. She always talked so much about you—years ago I mean when she was quite a girl—about staying with you; about your goodness to her.

Dont bother to write.

As a matter of fact, though I say Tavistock Square, we’re at Monks House this weekend. And I say its the first spring evening—one can walk up and down the garden path after tea—thats my definition of spring.

Please let me come and see you some day.

yr aff
V.W.

Marquess of Salisbury (Cecil Papers)

[]

2714: To Ethel Smyth

March 12th [1933]

52 T[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

You are such a kind hearted woman that my little defalcations in not writing, dont matter Nor do I bear you a grudge for having left a stout umbrella here. Rose Macaulay left gloves and a brooch. I am feeling content at the moment—At twelve today we started for Ivinghoe Beacon; and I had an hours walk in some silent green beech woods; and a great fox got up; and there was not a sound in all the world. Its a lovely valley, open, very classical. The way the trees grow, in groups, makes me think of Virgil. And so home, with even the Bye Pass Road glorified in the spring, which is hot enough to have peeled the skin off my nose. Lord, how lovely England is! if one could take a carving knife and cut off the villas. I’m practising a surgical eye, which shaves landscapes till they are as they were in Chaucer’s day. I allow only 300 year old houses, mules, and waggons. Its not so difficult, if you make a habit of it.

I am too sleepy and too contented to write a better letter. I cant tell you about my Princess even—a stolid idol looking woman—Patricia Ramsay—who could only move this way and that: unjoin ted, like a vast doll. Poor woman! She let me tease her about being royal for an hour. “We are all very shy” she said; “but the others are small. I’m an elephant”—but she hadn’t the protruding eyes, as I told her.

I am trying to write and trying to read and trying to keep a steady head among parties. Lady Rhondda has cropped up again. I liked her book—an honest woman, I should say; but not subtle. Oh dear me, how can I write this letter? I’m burning all over—I’m sleepy: and yet, here I swear it shall go to the City on the 7 hills. Tell me about Lawrence. I never meant to say a sweeping thing about him—indeed I’m sure of his ‘genius’; what I distrust is the platform; I hate the “I’m right” pose in art. But Lord, I’ve read so little; and his fame is a muddy river, trampled by oxen and pigs. Ottoline ended, I think, by finding Mrs D.H.L. a lump—but then there’s an old sore; as with most of O’s friends. She writes me vast letters on violet scented paper, contorted, but to me pathetic, like the flight of owls on a hot day—so unsteady, topheavy, furtive, ill judging, but in their way beautifully balanced

Yes I will write again, more fully?

Yr V

Berg

[]

2715: To Frederick B. Adams

14th March 1933

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Mr Adams,

You have no reason at all to apologise for your charming letter which gave me great pleasure.

I am very glad to think that you share my sympathy for Flush. The idea came to me that he deserved a biography last summer when I was reading the Browning letters. But in fact very little is known about him, and I have had to invent a good deal. I hope however that I have thrown some light upon his character.—the more I know him, the more affection I feel for him. The dog who acted his part here was black—but there can be no doubt that Flush was red.

I do not know what to say about selling the MS. I had not thought of it—indeed I have never sold any of my MSS. I do not know what it is worth. Perhaps the best plan therefore would be if you would say what you would give—I dont know how else to settle it. I think the book is about 30,000 words in length. I write my books in paper covered volumes, and re-write them a good deal in typescript. But the manuscript is of course the foundation for the final version; and I have only one manuscript. Harcourt Brace will publish the book, probably this summer.

I must also thank you for your appreciation of my other books—I am very glad that you like them.

I think my father, Leslie Stephen, must have known some of your family in America.

Believe me,
yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Frederick B. Adams Jr.

[]

2716: To Ethel Smyth

Thursday [16 March 1933]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Yes a first rate article—very supple—sonorous and shooting its shafts this side and that till the old brute is fairly lit up. Very good indeed I think. I envy you your use of the vernacular—so free—springy: and certain words—‘wrath—’ in that connection give me a little rasp of pleasure: wrath is perfect; anger, wrong. And I kept saying what word’ll she use there (I’m writing in a rush and cant remember how the sentence went) Oh yes very good indeed, the airiness and solidity mixed: I like corners to figures: your Brahms one might stub one’s toe against.

I should leave out ‘the heart’ in the last sentence; seems to me the rhythm is more direct, and strong—(as its a high note this is important) unencumbered.

So sorry I’m too sleepy to write, but I’ve had a long day

V.

Berg

[]

2717: To V. Sackville-West

March 18th 1933

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Well, do you remember me? I wrote you a very long and passionate letter the other day, but stuck it in my case, forgot it, left it, and found it so out of date—it was all about earthquakes and banks failing—that I can’t send it. How difficult it is to write, with all the spring birds singing and the garden full of blue and white crocuses—We’ve been walking on the downs at Falmer. The woods there are like Greek horses manes—d’you know the look? brushed, red, brisk—oh so lovely at this moment. I only wish I were a poet, so that I could describe a team of brown horses ploughing red brown earth, and a grove of trees reflected in a great pond there is there under the church, with two swans swimming: you must write it for me.

To turn to Americans—your horror, the publisher, is coming alas. There’s no sense in it, since I’ve no plans to share with Houghton Mifflin; still if come he must, he must come. Anyhow I owe you that at least—I’ll ask Sibyl [Colefax] to meet him—after your all too noble efforts about my MS. I never meant you to trouble to write—only to suggest a name. Anyhow it is obviously hopeless at the moment. Oddly enough an American Adams wants to buy the MS. of Flush—that foolish witless joke with which I solaced myself when I was all a gasp having done The Waves. (You remember that very bad book?)

I saw Sibyl the other day; and she had seen Harold, and Harold had said you are a roaring raging success; which, I said, dont matter a straw with Vita. She’ll shake her coat, and the grease and the oil will run down her. A great compliment to you. Shall you net anything after all—with the dollar collapsed?—There’ll be the experience, as they call it—all those virgins you’ve ravished—teas you’ve eaten, shrines you’ve visited, fat old women you’ve intoxicated. I liked the maid’s letter—but what a very cultured woman to have had darning one’s stockings!

You know Sibyl is naturally, congenitally, an American. She can hardly tolerate the lowness of London houses, the age of the earth, any longer. But I doubt that worldliness pays—I never saw anyone so suspicious. I cut one of my silly jokes, and she takes umbrage, like a dog—I mean, you know how huffy dogs look if you laugh at them. So do women of the world. Oh but I’m going that way myself. Who is my latest friend? A Princess of the Blood royal—poor stuck Patricia [Ramsay], as large, impassive unjointed as a doll made all of china. D’you know I had to talk to her for an hour, and asked her all sorts of questions about being Royal and why she hadn’t married the King of Spain. She balanced herself like a vast idol, slowly sweeping her eyes round the room—this was at a party given by the Queen’s secretary in Duncans studio. And I was asked to meet the Prince of W.—but I think, in my effort to keep up with your triumph, I told you that before. No, I said, I wont.

Please Vita darling come back soon. We shall be off in the car to Italy if you dont—we want to try the fluid fly wheel on the Alps. Please come snuffing up my stairs soon, just the same, in your red jersey. Please wear your pearls. Please bring Sarah [dog]. And then ask me to Sissingt. Lord, how you’ll love your first night there and sun rise seen from the pink Tower! Write to me.

V.

I think Italian is frightfully difficult—to speak. Bianca is not your Bianca; but Weiss.

Berg

[]

2718: To V. Sackville-West

March 21st [1933]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Oh dear I forgot to post this again—too many people—my dear Dadie [Rylands] for 2 hours made me all in a rush, you’ll like to hear.

Your nice letter all about Burlington Barbie has just come. How we roared! And the psychologist on your passions—I could have told that without going into a trance in the W.C.

But here is my business: about the MS [of A Room …]. I dont know what Pippa Strachey has done. I’ll ask her and write and let you know. Sybil, in her great kindness, went to an expert, about the MS of Flush; and the expert says that that ms. is worth £1,000—I doubt it. But I’ll write as soon as I hear.

Also: can you give us any private information about a woman called Ivy (I think) Davison? She’s said to be an old friend of yours, wants a job, and may be coming to see us about the Press. Please excuse all this bother. Your friend Scaife [of Houghton Mifflin], hell take him, is coming.

So farewell and write soon

V.

Berg

[]

2719: To the Vice-Chancellor, University of Manchester

26th March 1933

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Vice Chancellor,

I need not say how deeply I am honoured by the proposal of the University of Manchester to confer upon me the degree of Doctor of Letters.

I very much regret that I feel myself unable to accept the proposed honour. But, as I have always been opposed to the acceptance of honours, whether civic or academic, by writers, I feel that I should be acting with great inconsistency if I accepted any such honour myself. I am sure that you will understand my point of view.

But I am of course deeply grateful to the Council and Senate for desiring to confer upon me a degree, and to yourself for the kindness with which you have written to me.

Believe me,
yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf
(Mrs Woolf)

University of Manchester

[]

2720: To Shena, Lady Simon

26th March 1933

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Lady Simon,

It is extremely kind of you to ask us to stay with you, and nothing would have given us greater pleasure. But, as I have just written to the Vice Chancellor [of Manchester University] I feel that I cannot accept the University’s offer to give me a degree because I have always been opposed to honours of all kinds, for writers, and thus feel that I cannot consistently accept one for myself.

I am sure you will understand my point of view, and will believe that I am, all the same, extremely grateful to those who wished to honour me in this way.

One of my chief reasons for regret in refusing is that I shall lose the chance of making your acquaintance. But I hope that this need only be postponed. If you should at any time be in London it would give us great pleasure to see you here. Meanwhile, may I thank you very sincerely for your kindness and generosity?

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Sussex

[]

2721: To Ethel Smyth

Sunday [26 March 1933]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.i)

Well my dear Ethel, this cant even be a spider crawl, because, oh I have written so many letters (one to refuse such an honour as you think one ought to accept—but then you’re a base honour corrupted woman—going up to ‘honour’ women, when the only honour is blue blank air, no more and no less—whats the point of this honour worship? Mumbo Jumbo!) Yes; I’m really only answering your competent fact demanding fingers—about Mrs Braithwaite. Privately, confidentially, I thought it a flimsy flopsy ill written sprawly niggly piece of work—wanted to be shot through a rifle in one bullet—Anyhow, we have stopped that series, at the moment as I said; and the only suggestion that occurs to L. is that she should print it in Cambridge as a pamphlet. That is how it would reach the right quarter. If dissolved in the sea of London nobody would notice it. Moreover 9000 words is an impossible length for any magazine: Desmond MacCarthy would not look at it—he’s the only one who prints at length [in Life and Letters]. A pamphlet is far more effective—but she ought to shorten, to tighten. And its so damned provincial in tone—another argument in favour of a small printer at Cambridge. But for Gods sake dont hand on a word of this: I wrote a polite version to her. She’s married an old friend of mine.

I say what weather! And I’m in such a hurly burly—Lady Rhondda drags me to Hampstead tonight—then there’s—oh well, there’s the Prince and the Princess [Ramsay]—you shant boast of David [The Prince of Wales] without rousing my little frog chorus, but what a bore, after all, royalty turning Bohemian is—if it werent for the lark once in a way. If you will write, I’ll try to.

V.

Berg

[]

2722: To Ethel Smyth

Thursday 30th March 1933

52 Tavistock Square, [W.C.1]

But I cant possibly write a full account of my life—here I am just in from taking my mother in law round Richmond Park—She has shrunk to the size of a shrew mouse, after her illness, but is still indomitable, and was married 67 years ago tomorrow. After that, now in fact, I must wash, being inkstained mud stained, and dress, which means changing even stockings, and go off in a hansom cab or taxi this wild blowing night to Pall Mall to dine at a Club with an old friend [Saxon Sydney-Turner] who should know better than to ask Americans to meet me—And when asked to choose the dinner I was too shy to say only Pate de foie gras, champagne, mushrooms and chocolate ice, or welsh rarebit. So now about Monday or Tuesday. I’ve got to spend Tuesday at Bedford, book selling, so thats no good. On Monday I have an Italian lesson (at Hugo’s) till 5.30: but shall be back here by 6. Would you like to come say at 6.5? by which time I shall have taken my hat off and lit the fire? If so let me know and come.

Lord Lord, why cant I what is called seize life by the forelock and ride it like a race horse? Why must I eat through a vast incoherent dinner now this instant? Why is it cold, why am I fated to wear silk stockings for the American friends of a friend who is the dumbest man in the world? Why must Leonard put on a dinner jacket and a black tie? I liked old [Lady] Rhondda—but she must have had a fright as a child—nothing else explains her humming and hawing—her indecision, her incapacity; but a nice woman, all the same.

So goodbye

V.

Berg

[]

2723: To V. Sackville-West

April 1st 1933 (fools day)

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

I had a very nice letter from you the other morning, written from top of a mountain, where all the streams run backwards. I deserved it, because while you were seeing the streams, I was seeing Mr Scaife [of Houghton Mifflin]. No I dont think I altogether like Mr Scaife. He’s a blotchy looking toad like man, who tells stories about his dog’s tricks. However he seemed consumed with admiration for you and Harold, and didn’t stay long. He seemed to have an idea that I should write a life of my father. Good God!

This is the month in which you’ll come back. That will be very nice I admit. You’ll find any number of flowers out—There were 7 days like June, and by looking steadily even in Tavistock Square, one could see little green frills coming out of black iron boughs. This is a fact. Now its blowing a white wind over the downs,—d’you remember how white the fields get about this time? We’ve been walking over the downs, and then we came in and turned on the loud speaker, heard Cambridge beat Oxford—the boat race. I lost 6d. to Leonard. And the night before we dined at a Club and met 2 diplomats, Called Atherton, Americans, who said they more or less knew you. Lord! I’m glad Harold left the Embassy, or whatever you call it. Quite nice, both of them, but like tin, biscuit tin, empty, shiny. Yet no positive fault to be found. I mean they both seemed very nice people, only you gave a tap—that is I said something very intelligent, and the poor man, who was sleek as a trout, merely brushed his eyes over me, as if I, your most lovable Virginia and Potto, were pebbles at the bottom of a river. How I wish any illusion would abide! After meeting Princess Patricia [Ramsay], I cant any longer pretend, even at midnight when I dream of things I should like to do, that I wish to overhear the Royal family at dinner. Very little therefore remains.

I am going to be painted, stark naked, by a woman called Ethel Walker who says I am the image of Lilith. She has a rough raddled charm, is something like Phil May to look at, has 3 fox terriers, one blind of the right eye, and lives, eats, sleeps, drinks I should say in one room overlooking the river. Swans float practically in at the window. Vast lorries full of tin cans go by—to Rat Island—d’you remember seeing the tins when we went to the docks [in March 1931]? She is 73—that is the only thing against her; and has lived a regular herring griller’s life, which as you know, I love. And I have been to dine with Lady Rhondda, because I liked so much her story of how she swam under water when the Lusitania sank [in 1915]. Why do none of these adventures ever happen to me? But dont take the hint and let them happen to you. No please let this be your last adventure. You cant, as you say, go much further away. Keep a globe in your room at Sisst: and ink your tracks, and then when anyone says anything, you can say But theres nothing I haven’t seen: which is true; and then settle on your estates, and preserve the woods, and ride a white horse, and breed dogs, and have me to stay, and write poetry.

We have just passed our publishing season, but nothing has sold violently well. Do you ever read a book on the train? If so, get Livingstons, our monster novel.

Why do they say Italian’s easy? Bianca [Weiss] tears her hair because I get my subjunctives wrong and then there are those damned possessive pronouns. Now I must put our dinner to cook; oh why dont you swoop down the road, and draw up at the gate, with a great washing basket full of figs, as you once did, when your mother loved me, and sent me a bottle of vermouth!

So goodbye—
V.

Do do please write us another book as soon as ever you can.

Berg

[]

2724: To Ethel Smyth

5th April 1933

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

No time to write—no time. And no brain. I dont think Friday would be worth it—Ottoline is coming at 5.30. and as she’s very deaf, poor woman, and I haven’t seen her since before Christmas, I’ve said I will be alone. But we dont go to Rodmell till Thursday week. Why not perhaps one day next week? And we’re only there a week; and shall come here between and only be 3 weeks in Italy.—So there are many chances of eliciting whatever it may be. What I call a winkle talk. Now d’you see why?

I’ve just bought a bath, and now Lord O: is coming, and I have a lesson. I leave Lord: O. to your imagination.

I will try to write, but the Italian craze, and so on steal what remains of time—and yesterday we were at Bedford and St. Neots and I’m so sleepy today—so sleepy, so hot, so dreamy so full of emotion that I shall never never be able to express

V.

Typewritten

I will ask L. about the typing, but its really only a question of buying a new ribbon. Tell her; its a shame not; its a dodge they will try to be cheap; but its a damned shame.

Berg

[]

2725: To Ethel Smyth

Sunday [9 April 1933]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

No Ethel dear, I’m afraid I must put you off till we come back. That is, I’ve been headachy and L. has now become so testy saying I shall spoil the time at Rodmell that I’m going to be quiet these next 3 days. I daresay he’s right. Its been rather a rush—and whats the point of seeing you and not being able to respond? But we come back on 27th and shall have a fortnight before Italy: so come then, quietly and properly. I’ll write again. I’m in fact and sincerely, in spite of irreligion sorry about your sister. Lord what sorrows there are in the world

Please live to 108

Yr
Virginia

Berg

[]

2726: To Hugh Walpole

Saturday April 15th [1933]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

My dear Hugh,

It was a great pleasure to hear from you—I’ve heard of you, rather vaguely, from Clive Bell who followed your steps in Jamaica, was always hearing of you, and never seeing you. He says its the one place to live in—but then he had I gather the young, of the other sex, naked, in the cabin—so he says: I begin to throw salt on all these elderly fakes.

Anyhow, I cant find much fault with England at the moment. Its hot, its blue, its green, the flowers are breaking through, about 3 inches a night, the fish are swimming and I have just had the strength of mind to refuse to dine with a rich banker in Lewes. Thus it is inconsistent to say that we’re off to Italy for 3 weeks; but then Leonard has bought a new car, with a fluid fly wheel, so we must run it over the Alps. But shant we meet some day soon? Are you rooting in Keswick? No, you must flower at tea in Tavistock Sqre. I’ve a new carpet to show you.

Oh yes, quote as much as you like of Orlando—I shall be proud. I’m going to read the last Herries, whatever you may say to the contrary. I shall like our own times—its some deficiency of mine that I cant like fiction with a historical date to it. But what I really want is your autobiography, and that must be in 15 not 4 vols. Flush is only a joke—done by way of a lark when I had finished the Waves: but its too long—got out of hand—and not worth the trouble.

I entirely agree about Mr Roberts. But he’s convinced himself that the laboured dull idiotic satire is a work of genius. Livingstone’s sells more or less: the Press should have made it sell, they praised unanimously, and we still have hopes.

This is merely a croak, like the noise the rooks are making: now I must learn my Italian irregular verbs.

V.W.

Texas

[]

2727: To V. Sackville-West

Wednesday [19 April 1933]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

I say this is exciting!

You’re back—Thank the Lord my porpoise is in the fishmonger’s again! But when shall I see her? We are here (Lewes 385) till Sunday afternoon. Then London for 10 days: then Italy. Could you ring up—dont tell me you’ve changed your voice too—and suggest any time, which I’ll keep even if it means murder.

Ah but you’ve missed the spring of one thousand years, all gone now. But we sat and roasted—brown as berries—lovelier than any desert sewn with roses and Brett into the bargain

Now you must attend to your world. Lord how I envy you the pink tower after all America

V.

Love and congratulations from us both to Harold.

Berg

[]

2728: To Ethel Smyth

Wednesday 19th April 1933

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

This is not a letter, only a scrawl, we’re off to Brighton about the car. I’m quite recovered; but I’ve been lying at the bottom of the pool till now; not speaking, reading or writing except when forced. Now its all gone (the headache) thank the Lord. London was the devil before Easter—always is like water rushing down a drain. We come back on Sunday. I dont mean to be swept off my feet again this six months:

What a spring! Yes—what a time, merely sitting in the garden and watching. I heard from Vita last night that she will be back on the 21st—oh but you dont mean to see her, as she’ll remind you of the dead, the lost Virginia. I’m amused to be dead—one of those ghosts that people talk of respectfully: rather a dignified position: you can’t speak ill of the dead. And the dead dont write letters, but they do read them, at least Ethel’s. Yes, I intend to be a dead in future; the dead have so many rights; and what a joy you snubbed Delius, and that the sister said the same here [unexplained.]. Is it usual for village children to copulate in school? Do ask Ly Betty. Thats what they do here; and the chief village gossip, a lady, sits at her cottage window and observes them through an opera glass. But no time for more

V

Berg

[]

2729: To Vanessa Bell

[24 April 1933]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

Just a line to say wont you seriously consider coming to Siena: starting May 5th back 26th: as my guest? (if you’re not too d——d proud)

Please do

B

Berg

[]

2730: To Frederick B. Adams

24th April 1933

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Mr Adams,

Many thanks for your letter. Of course you have not ‘insulted’ me; and I will be perfectly frank with you. As I am as vague as you are about MSS I asked a friend of mine, Lady Colefax, to find out from an expert in MSS what sort of sum the Flush MS would be worth. To my great surprise, he answered, One thousand pounds. This seems to me I admit an absurdly high price. But as the discrepancy is so great between the two I feel myself that it would be better not to attempt to bridge it, but to let the matter rest. But of course if you have any suggestions to make, please dont hesitate to make them.

Anyhow it is a great pleasure to me that you take such an interest in Flush—I only hope you won’t be disappointed by the life when it comes out—some time in autumn. May I, though from such a distance, offer my best wishes for your and your wife’s happiness?

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Frederick B. Adams Jr.

[]

2731: To V. Sackville-West

Tuesday [25 April 1933]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Well, Victoria West, here’s your horrid little post card.

What I say is come and dine then next Friday? Can you? Only I should like to see you alone also—Could you come early? Would another time suit better?

I rang you up, all for the sound of your lovely dim voice, like a bird piping through a hawthorn hedge; but heard only buzz buzz buzz. Ring me up, dearest Porpoise West, and say when.

Lord how nice to see the shops pink again!

V.

Berg

[]

2732: To Roger Fry

[end April 1933]

[First page missing]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

…… predicament, not that I had any lovers, or that if I had they would have suffered from ringworm round the waist.

I met your sister, Margery, the other night—in fact she saved what would have been a most appalling party—dear old Saxon, having grown grey and portly, had taken it into his head to give dinner parties at his Club, not to you and me and Margery, but to the dreariest of dull diplomats, middle aged couples in full evening dress—the lady indeed so bare backed—its the fashion—that had there been a flea on her person, well, one could have caught it. Needless to say, there was not a flea. How women manage to be so exposed, and so clean, and so composed, I cant imagine. Fancy yourself dining out in Pall Mall bare backed. I hope Margery isn’t off to the China seas, but she seemed set on it: its the Fry blood: they cant resist natives; I suppose she is going to give them the bible in some form or other.

And you have become a professor, which is of course another form of the same disease. How will you carry out your duties without disgrace?

The latest news in the art world is that Mr Glyn Philpotts has been asked to remove his picture from the R.A. because it represents Satan joining two lovers with his hoof, and might give rise to unpleasant ideas. Nessa and Duncan are, as you may have heard, rising rapidly in the social world; so much so, that having entertained Princess Patricia [Ramsay], they now dine out, even in Lewes high street, with Lord Edward Gleichen. It all arose from a portrait of Queen Mary on a plate, but where will it end? You, as professor, Nessa as Lady Colefax—

But I must bring this horrid flight to a close. Is Helen back? Anyhow, as she’s blackhearted and flint brained, as nothing but bile circulates in her veins, as far as I’m concerned, I shant hear from her: which does nothing to cool my regard.

We shall cross the Alps to Siena, and look round at one or two little places, but only for 3 weeks.

Let me know if there’s any chance of meeting you.

Yrs
Virginia

Oh yes I got a lovely long letter from you; and told Leonard what you said about your book.

Sussex

[]

2733: To Ethel Smyth

Tuesday May 2nd [1933]

52 Tavistock Sqre. [W.C.1]

I’m sending the letters back today—in the cases, which only need a tug to open and shut—because, God help me, I’m sunk to the lips in people, shopping and so on, and cant rescue a single moment before we go. I wonder if goings worth it—these days are such a panjandrum of misery—people, people, people.

I dont think the typing so bad—I’ve seen worse. Still I think she should buy a new ribbon, and rather thicker paper. Only for a carbon, thin paper is needed, they say.

If you want to go on. I shd. think Jones as good as anyone; and will certainly share her bill—gladly.

If you write, which please do, address to the Press, and they’ll forward. Its only 3 weeks after all. Oh to be out of all this! Yes, I feel like a bird who sees the cage door about to open.

So no more at the moment. We start early on Friday, shall lunch at Monks House, and cross that night, so as to start across France early on Saturday morning

V.

A nice note from Bruno Walter
Here is the cheque .32.

Berg

[]

Letters 2734-2739 (May 1933)

2734: To Vanessa Bell

16th May [1933]

Postcard

Siena, [Italy]

I’m going to try to write you a long letter tonight, but you dont deserve it, dumb deceptive Dolphin. Not a word from you. how foolish you are to prefer Tott. Court Rd. to nightingales, orange flowers, strawberries; I’m just off to buy a farm in the hills [at Fabbria]. This is where we must live.

V.

Berg

[]

2735: To Elizabeth Bowen

May 16th [1933]

Siena, [Italy]

Dear Elizabeth,

You see where I am, so I cant come to tea today in Markham Square. But we shall be back in a fortnight, so do ask me again, or come to Tavistock Sqre.

I’m so sleepy I cant write—otherwise I should insult Oxford and Ireland, for I can assure you—not that I’ve ever been to Ireland, and my relations with Oxford are formal in the extreme—they cant touch the hem of the dress of this country. I’ve always been here before in trains—you cant think what a difference it makes driving, or being driven. We stop or go on; and have our lunch under cypresses, with nightingales singing and frogs barking, and climb to the top of hills where no one has ever been before. They are charming people—the peasants, I mean: very melancholy, longing for conversation, offering one wine, or 6 dead fish—I’ve only 10 words of Italian, but I fire them all perpetually; and so we get led into all kinds of queer places. Today it was a monastery [Monte Oliveto]; where—but no—I will spare you the rest of this letter, because my head is swimming with sleep and wine, but you must pawn your grandfather’s gold plate watch or whatever it is, and come next May. Now I must pack, for we are off to Lucca, Parma Piacenza and so home.

Yrs
Virginia Woolf

I had a letter from Tom Eliot today, apparently very happy in his way, in America, but about to come back, poor man.

Texas

[]

2736: To Dorothy Bussy

May 16 [1933]

Siena, [Italy]

My dear Dorothy,

I’m afraid it looks as if we should not reach Mentone till too late to get to you on Sunday. We are coming back by an unknown road, and cant be sure of our times. So dont expect us—but it was charming to get that hour with you and I still carry my lemon with me.

Anyhow we shall meet soon, for our annual tea.

Italy is incredibly lovely—every tree flowering, every bird singing, with the result that I am half tipsy tonight and cant write.

Ever yr
Virginia.

Texas

[]

2737: To Vanessa Bell

Wednesday May 17th [1933]

Lucca, [Italy]

Dearest Dolphin

I have tried several times to write to you, but it is almost impossible, owing to every sort of noise, and then I’m so sleepy after a bottle of chianti; and as a matter of fact there is only description of natural objects and works of art to offer you. And you dont write. Post after post comes; none from Dolphin. So far we have had no accidents, but some moments of agony when the fluid wheel has stuck, or the gear gone wrong. And we have been all through France, and as far as Siena; indeed only 50 miles short of Rome. Undoubtedly Tuscany beyond Siena is the most beautiful of all lands anywhere—it is, at the moment, every inch of it laden with flowers: then there are nightingales: but it is the hills,—no, I will not describe for your annoyance, what is to me the loveliest, the most sympathetic, and I may say Virgilian of countries; for its years since we read Virgil together and you very properly told me not to write a word about landscape or art either.

And the peasants are infinitely the nicest of our kind—oh how much preferable to the Sands, the Smyths, the Logans! My Italian lands me in all kinds of wayside conversations, as we generally lunch under olives, beside streams with frogs barking. Why didn’t you come? I should have thought the pictures very good at Siena—and then I like the old maids one meets: but the truth is this is only a discovery—we must come and settle at Fabbria [in Tuscany], a little farm we found, for ever and ever. There is no news. We called in at the Bussy’s as we passed, and found Janie and Dorothy, perfectly equipped, neat and bright as pins, sipping coffee; I dont care, I must admit for that view, or hill—but then the whole Riviera seems to me Raymonds [Mortimer] country—a pink pyjama country—however they seemed very friendly and want us to sleep the night going back; but I doubt it. Simon [Bussy] appeared, more of an organ monkey than ever, and theyre all about to start for Gordon Square. Why should I be snubbed for asking to be shown the Studio? Sure enough, I was—He said “Not today. Perhaps next time.” Considering everything I cant see why I should be snubbed—simpleton as I am. We’ve seen a great many pictures—San Gimignano today, and yesterday we went to a place where I shall be buried, if bones can walk—that is, Monte Oliveto; oh oh oh—Cypresses, square tanks, oxen, and not big bony hills, little velvety hills—and the monastery: and as hot as August. But I wont deny that we’ve had some very cold days, and some violent tempests, one at Volterra for example—all because a peasant woman whose vines were perishing, came in and offered 2 candles to the Madonna for rain—which promptly came. Now its thundery again, and we’ve been walking all over Lucca, trying to find an antiquity shop, but the only one there was has gone. Its a most busy town, full of different markets; and the building—but as I said, I wont commit any faux pas on that head.

I suppose London is rocketing like a Catherine Wheel with various splendours—Rumours reach me from Ethel and so on—I hear she came to see you, but you could only talk of her dogs private parts—We now start home, rather slowly, and shall be back on the 27th I think—at Rodmell. The car is miraculous—not a bump comes through—and in France, of course it reaches unparallelled speed;

Shall you be glad to see me? Oh but you never realised I had gone—yet to me it seems years and years and as if I had seen all the countries of the earth spread before me. This is certainly the only way to see Italy.

Are my book cases done?

I’m very excited about them. Do write good Dolphin: the Press will forward. Is it true you’ve been summoned to tea with the Queen?

Yr B.

Berg

[]

2738: To Ethel Smyth

May 18th [1933]

Lerici, [Italy]

Yes I have meant to write, again and again, but again and again I have fallen fast asleep. Moreover, whats the use of writing? Here am I sitting, by an open window, by a balcony, by the bay in which Shelley was drowned, wasn’t he, 113 years ago, on a hot day like this—which indeed I might describe, but how describe the hills, the tall pink yellow white houses, and the in fact, not fiction, purple brown sea, not rolling in waves, as I made my sea [in The Waves], but now and again giving a little shiver, like that which runs through a field of corn, or the back of a race horse! No, my good general’s daughter, Italy beats me—Tuscany above all, which is incomparably the finest and purest of Italy, where I’ve been sitting, these 5 or 6 days, on hills like songs, like poems, thought of all in one flash and for ever, you would say by God, but then you’re a general’s daughter. I’m burnt like a grilled bone, and for the most part a little tipsy; and now we’re starting home, over the Apennines tomorrow, to Parma, to Piacenza, so to Avignon, which leads to Dieppe, to Monks House, and so once more to the 52nd house in Tavistock Sqre.

Well, what are you doing?—inducing a large penis into a small hole? And I suppose rehearsing masses and comic operas, tippling, browbeating, and leading the forces of womanhood, massed, against ignorance and corruption? I dont like Fascist Italy at all—but hist!—there’s the black shirt under the window—so no more.

Addio.
V.

Mrs Shelley and Mary Williams walked up and down the balcony of the house next door [Casa Magni] waiting while Shelleys body rolled round with pearls—it is the best death bed place I’ve ever seen—

Berg

[]

2739: To V. Sackville-West

May 20th [1933]

Spotorno, Italy

This is a strictly business like (only I happen to be tipsy, having drunk more than my half bottle tonight)

1) Would it suit you if we came over to lunch (about 1.30) on Sunday, 28th to fetch Pinka?—not I mean to see you, but to fetch Pinka. Would you send a card to Monks House, which I daresay we shall reach on Friday, to say if yes, if no.

2) Oh God I forgot in London the thing I swore I’d ask you. You know Lyn Irvine? Well she’s on the rocks, as its called—as shrunk as a wrung rag—no money—love, I think lost; not a penny to pay for her wretched herring. So I said I’d ask you if she could find any possible opening for articles of any kind in America. She knows all about Eng. lit. But tell me this—only do remember—if I see you. I forgot.

Yes. I am half dazed with travelling, so many cities have I seen, and smelt: now its the waves breaking, and the scent of stocks in the garden—and there is very likely a nightingale, and frogs. But all this you know—and you’ve heard froggier frogs in the Rockies. Everything I say in future will be thus diminished. Oh Lord I should like to see you without 20 thousand interruptions. We’re so brown cheeked red nosed and altogether dusty shaggy shabby—what a state my clothes are in—even I rather hesitate to wear them—for we lunch in the fields, under olives off ham, and its my duty to wash up, which affects my clothes—so how are we to lunch at Sisst. which is so fashionable? And why did Cynthia M die? And how are you? Writing? Poems?

I’m tipsy

V.

We crossed the Apennines today.

Berg

[]

Letters 2740-2767 (June-July 1933)

2740: To Ethel Smyth

[31 May 1933]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

I forgot Whitsuntide—We’re off to Monks tomorrow—But now Nessa rings up and says you put her off on account of cold. Very sorry you’ve caught one, but imagine it sent by the Gods to remind you in your glory of your flesh. How like your God—that very interfering old Anglo-Indian buffer. But hope to meet in this world soon.

Virginia

What about the MS? I shall have time on my hands at Monks.

Berg

[]

2741: To V. Sackville-West

Thursday [1 June 1933]

52, Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Oh dear I was so touched to find your letter here—it was such a nice good hearted letter—that I had meant to give expression to my emotions: but Lord!—what a vain hope. I meant to write a long letter. And this one was to have asked, why is it that I sometimes leave the N.-s [Nicolsons] almost in tears? Not for pity: no: but I do like human life on a large warm adventurous scale—dogs—flowers—boys—building. So that the tears, denied elsewhere,—not altogether rise but gather in the heart. But how I raged at your mother! You see, when one’s 18, words, news, revelations about ones parents have an immeasurable force; and that she should have taken it on herself to say them—but I am packing and cant finish. It seemed to me so dastardly, so immoral: so fiendishly inhuman.

But we’re just off, and this is to say why dont you come to Monks? on your way to or from that old Vipress [Vita’s mother]?

Ring up, if you can, as I may have to go to Worthing.

V.

Berg

[]

2742: To Lady Cecil

Whitsunday [4 June 1933]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

My dear Nelly,

I was trailing along a dusty path in the Loders garden yesterday when suddenly out of a glade came a woman I thought to be you. So I ran after her—she was walking very fast. And when I got close to her I thought No it isn’t her, and if I speak to her she’ll look at me with horror and surprise. And so she vanished. Was it you? Oh how hot it was! I was trying to find my mother in law, aged 84 who is as spry as a weasel, and had motored over from Worthing by way of a pleasant expedition and we had tea with 500 other old ladies in the stable, where the Loders keep heads of deer and swords. I dont care for that sort of garden—too many glades and rhododendrons and masses of fir trees. Did you like it?—if it was you—if not, did your ghost like it?

We are just back from Italy. We motored across to Siena and back. Almost the loveliest place of all was Lerici, where the Shelleys lived, on the edge of the sea. Now we go back to London and someday I hope we may meet, not like ghosts—

Yr VW

The Marquess of Salisbury (Cecil papers)

[]

2743: To Ethel Smyth

Tuesday 6th June. [1933]

Typewritten

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

It is far too hot to give any sensible coherent criticism of your paper; so please take what follows as provisional merely—notes merely; but I had better write at once after reading, or my mind will blur.

Yes, I think its well worth saying—well worth printing. I think much of it very convincing, interesting, forcible. I mean by ‘much of it’ all the impersonal objective part. I mean the facts about education. I think they could not be better, more musically, more persuasively, put. And no one I expect has any notion of them. I am sure they are valuable in the extreme.

I hesitate to go on to criticism; because as you will guess what I criticise is what you say to be necessary—that is the autobiography. I hate it. I dont think it adds any thing to what you have said. I think the personal details immensely diminish the power of the rest. Because one feels—but I wont go on; for I am aware that I may be prejudiced. I hate any writer to talk about himself; anonymity I adore. And this may be an obsession. I blush, I fidget, I turn hot and cold. I want to pull the curtain over this indecency.

My other objection—to have done with them—is to the Unknown Champion and the Statistics. This is largely on aesthetic grounds. I dont think you realise how nauseating press cuttings are—how nobody can read them, served up cold; or if they do, the whole effect of the writing, as a rounded and designed building, is frittered away and teased—Look how Miss [Winifred] Holtby breaks up the design. And those horrid little private letters—I call them ‘horrid’ because coming in the middle of your long rolling breakers, for which you have such a gift, they affect me with sea sickness. And the dates and the facts—nobody can keep them in mind; it is like the chatter of the parrot house at the Zoo to me. Couldn’t you sum the whole thing up, first by saying “See the Burning of Boats;” then a note to the effect that you have private letters which show another side—if you feel that you must give details of your personal lot? I know you have good reasons for feeling that you must; I repeat, my dislike of the personal in argument, may be fantastic. And soberly, I think you weaken your case by bringing in VW. I have ventured to put a couple of brackets to show how she could be omitted with advantage, Oh a little mutual admiration society! a nest of friends, people will say.

Now for a few minor points that struck my critical ear; I do not like the title [Female Pipings in Eden] It seems to me facetious when you mean to be serious. And its diffuse.

page 3 … angelicness but reasonableness—a jingle to me; and a mouthful; why not something like ‘it is not owing to inherent goodness of heart, but to reason” This is a very small point.

page 4 … differently to—should be from—to my ear. This happens again somewhere.

page 7—I hate your (?!) No no—Never put two different exclamation marks together while I am within one hundred miles.

General criticism; Too diffuse, [handwritten:] (On the other hand, you get a swing and a richness by taking your easy large stride as you do.) [typewritten:] I think you want to leave out tempting digressions—Bayliss for instance. And I think you are on thin ice when you speak of the Gang—one feels you mean the word in a bad sense; and so father it on to other people when its you who call them a gang. It seems to me you must say straight out, this is an abominable set of humbugs, or words to that effect; not “I call them a gang because other people do.” It’s like ringing the bell and running away, to slip in a very damning indictment and then to gloss it over. Here I may be wrong. Its the heat. But I felt this as I read.

Well then, what it comes to is that I should like it more muscular; drained of water; shorter; terser, less—well, you know what I mean when I talk of the eldritch shriek.

Finally I like immensely the imaginative and tranquil end; the suggestive end; the Pacific and the Hebrides [p. 53 of Pipings]. Thats what I call persuasion. In fact I think, even though I’m dripping with heat—oh I had to go round a summer garden with my mother in law, admiring rhododendrons with 500 old Sussex country ladies—with heat, I was saying I think that there are the bones and flesh and sinew of a very important statement in this; yet feel that they have not taken on perfect shape; bones flesh sinew in one body. Yet I feel reluctant to make this remark, because as I say, my whole bent is away and away and ever so far away from Ethel Smyth, Lilian Bayliss, Virginia Woolf. I hate personal snippets more and more. And the mention of T is so potent—such a drug, such a deep violet stain—that one in a page is enough to colour a chapter. Enough. I will send this off with the MS now as we have to go into Lewes. But please take literally my caution—these are the roughest, most off hand jerks; no doubt, if I read it again I shall see it in much truer perspective. Now I must stop.

Yours
V.

Berg

[]

2744: To Ethel Smyth

Wednesday [7 June 1933]

52 T[avistock] S[quare, W.C.1]

Yes, I have just heard it (I forget the name) and like it very much. Yes, its quite true—after 4 or 5 times of hearing, an impression begins to come through. I accept this one of your points. And I am therefore made to reflect once more that I was almost certainly patchy, imperfect, too black, too white in my remarks on your article. I’m rather worried to hear, as I thought, on the telephone that you intend altering so much as a word, solely on my outburst. Please consult Lady B. or Miss Steel, or some other person: because I read hastily, and have a horror of inflicting a crude judgment upon what I have not thoroughly grasped.

I purposely said nothing about seeing you tomorrow—if that was your suggestion—I’ve left your letter at Rodmell and cant be sure—because I think it would be positively suicidal for you to take train or even walk a pavement in this heat—That was why I said nothing. But come, if you can, when it is healthier weather. I’m rather glad to be back—too many moves. Now I hope to settle in and write and write and write.

Let me know about coming when its cooler.

V.

I wont inflict musical, as well as literary, criticism on you. Only that I liked it very much.

Berg

[]

2745: To V. Sackville-West

Thursday [8 June 1933]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Would you dine with me alone upon my honour, on Monday next MONDAY 12th—anytime you like. It is only that I shall be alone. Otherwise, I dont think its worth anyone’s while to come to London. Could you angelically ring the telephone?

No, no no—I never boast of American publishers—Scaife? Gods truth I dont—I’ve not fallen to that degraded state.

A Princess perhaps—not a publisher

Forgive scrawl

Potto is the writer

V.

Berg

[]

2746: To Ethel Smyth

Thursday June 8th 1933

Typewritten

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

No I dont think I put my point effectively; I did not mean that I dislike facts and dates; What I did mean was—oh dear how silly to try and explain—but my conscience is tender about writing—I meant, give all the facts and all the dates; the more the better; but let them be about other people, not E.S. My own longing in reading your article is to escape the individual; and to be told simply, plainly, objectively in 1880 there was not a single woman in an orchestra; there was not a single teacher to teach women harmony; the expense of going to Berlin was 165 pound ten; eight women were educated partly by 1891; in 1902 [Henry] Wood took five violinists women into his orchestra; the number increased, and is now—(here a table) … and so on, all the way through. But to be told My opera was not played because—My mass was only played once, Elgars 17 times—to have to listen to anecdotes, hearsay, verbal anecdotes about how some unknown Austrian said that some unnamed conductor ought to be very proud of ES makes me feel, and will I think make any moderately intelligent moderately sensitive man or woman feel—Oh the womans got a grievance about herself; Shes unable to think of any one else. Now I know that this is deliberate on your part therefore I think you should try to see how very possible it is that your policy is wrong. Leonard to whom I recited passages said exactly the same. I dont believe anyone whose hands have lately been dipped in ink can judge this sort of thng—to give an instance; I was wound to a pitch of fury the other day by a reviewers attacks upon a friend of mine to do a thing I have never yet done—to write to the papers a long letter. ‘Yes’ said L. when I showed it to him; but itll do more harm than good; its all about yourself. When a fortnight later in cold blood I read it, there was ‘I’ as large, and ugly as could be; thanks to God, I didn’t send it. You will say Oh but I must cite my case because there is no other. But my dear Ethel your case is that there are a thousand others. Leave your own case out of it; theirs will be far far stronger. Enough, I only say this because—well, I didnt write ‘A room’ without considerable feeling even you will admit; I’m not cool on the subject. And I forced myself to keep my own figure fictitious; legendary. If I had said, Look here am I uneducated, because my brothers used all the family funds which is the fact—Well theyd have said; she has an axe to grind; and no one would have taken me seriously, though I agree I should have had many more of the wrong kind of reader; who will read you and go away and rejoice in the personalities, not because they are lively and easy reading; but because they prove once more how vain, how personal, so they will say, rubbing their hands with glee, women always are; I can hear them as I write. One thing more; and silence for ever; Nancy girls to me seems in bad taste. Why? I dont know.

V

Berg

[]

2747: To Lady Cecil

Thursday [8 June 1933]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Nelly,

Yes, I always said you were the best of letter writers—But that’s no excuse for running away from old friends down glades. It must have been you—unless a very fine fir tree was Violet [Dickinson], I somehow missed her; and the azalea may of course have been your brother. Anyhow, I’m glad it was you, because, here I am, palpitating from having miscalled, unrecognised, inextricably mixed and introduced wrongly two people I’ve known these 30 years at a private view today.

If you mean tea next Tuesday I will come with pleasure: at 5: but dont buy a sandwich or butter any bread, because, here at the Press, in order to shorten the anguish of the afternoon we have tea earlier and earlier. I will come all the same with great pleasure, if it is next Tuesday you mean, in London.

Yes, George is always sending me hints how to cook Broad Beans: by Sir G. Duckworth or elegies on his wifes prize pig. What a man!

Yrs V.W

The Marquess of Salisbury (Cecil Papers)

[]

2748: To Daphne Sanger

11th June 1933

Private

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Daphne,

I enclose £1.1 for your Carlyle House fund. I feel much more sympathy with Mrs Carlyle than with Mr, anyhow where the house is concerned. I believe if your circular put more stress on her, you would wring more money from our purses. But anyhow I hope you’ll get it—and also that some time we may meet.

Yours
Virginia Woolf

James Lees-Milne

[]

2749: To Vanessa Bell

Monday [12 June 1933]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Clive has just rung up, and says that the Ott: lunch has been decided on, and that I am to take steps. What steps he didn’t seem to know—in fact he was altogether vague.

Could you let me have instructions? I dont know Anreps address, the date, what I’m to do about writing to Ott: in fact nothing. Lord—what a bore poor old Quentin having whooping cough! I intend writing him a long letter. Shall you be there on Saturday? We’re coming down on Friday.

Its the Apostle night, and Adrian [Stephen] is dining with me.

B.

Berg

[]

2750: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Friday [16 June 1933]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Ottoline,

Yes I confess—in my heart I entirely agree with you. But I hope you realise how it was—I mean the friends were so excited and happy about it, and felt a glow of affection, and therefore I was persuaded to come round to you with the proposal. It was very genuine—dont think it merely pushing and advertising and done from love of publicity. I assure you it was not. I was so touched myself by their feeling—otherwise I would have taken no part in it. However, finally I have to admit that I think you are right, and so will say no more.

Yes, a quiet, cool, dusky tea one of these days without people buzzing about—that’s much more to my liking.

Just off to Rodmell for the weekend, so excuse this scrawl. Boris [Anrep] was here when your letter came, so I told him. He was so sure you would agree that he was disappointed—but is writing to you.

Yr V W

Texas

[]

2751: To Lydia Keynes

[16 June 1933]

Postcard

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

No, no, no—I cannot face another conversation with B.A. [Boris Anrep]—nor he with me—at the moment. We’re sick to death of talking to each other—but united in love of L——a. [Lydia]

V.W.

King’s

[]

2752: To V. Sackville-West

Monday [19 June 1933]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

What luck! Yes we are free dinner on Wednesday. But couldn’t you come at 6 all the same, in order to have the rare pleasure of seeing me alone? which I admit I should like.

Could you possibly ring or let me have a card in order that I may be in and alone at 6. Otherwise dinner 7.30

V.

Berg

[]

2646: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Tuesday [20 June 1933]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Ottoline,

Would Sunday 5.30 suit you? We shall be here, and that would be very nice, but if you’re tired or would rather I could come round to you.

Yes I do thank my stars that there’s not to be a [Ottoline] lunch at the Savoy with ices, melons, cigars and speeches. What a raving nightmare—still the will was better than the deed.

Old Ethel has just rung me up in a rhapsody about Ly O. [Ottoline] whom she describes all in pink cartwheels and pearls—a siren.

I’m so hot I cant articulate or determine what cartwheels are.

yrs V.W.

Texas

[]

2754: To Elizabeth Bowen

Wednesday [21 June 1933]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Dear Elizabeth,

I would like to come if I can on Monday, but it wouldn’t be till after 5. If I’m prevented (I’ve made a muddle of my engagements) I’ll ring up. Yes, I want very much to come to Ireland. But at present I must try to stick to what I am doing. Siena was debauching enough—another holiday would entirely ruin me. Still—one of these days, without a doubt.

Ottoline refused her luncheon—very rightly, and much to my relief.

Yrs VW

Texas

[]

2755: To V. Sackville-West

[23? June 1933]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Potto’s love and 10/—to buy him shoes with: and a peasant womans hat. (But not not not if theres a pressure or a rush or a difficulty) Lord how happy I was to see you! I forget what I wanted to say—what am I to do about Ethel perhaps? I met Valery Taylor yesterday wheres Vita? she said and here’s the richest young man in Europe come to dine on peas and bacon in order to pass the Camels eye!

So I must wash.

A thousand blessings.

V. and P.

Berg

[]

2756: To Molly MacCarthy

June 23rd [1933]

52 Tavistock Sqre, [W.C.1]

Dearest Molly,

We shall be delighted to dine on Tuesday 11th July at 8. Then it is agreed that you are to read further memoirs—and make them kinder to your old friends—and if Desmond is to talk, and the rest of us are to sit round, happy.

This handwriting, I may point out, is only achieved by having a simple mind and a loving heart. You put it under a microscope and the truth of that will leap to light.

Oh dear how devastating tea parties are! Did you go on to several others? I failed and collapsed in a heap on my doorstep.

Yrs Virginia

Mrs Michael MacCarthy

[]

2757: To Ethel Smyth

Sunday [25 June 1933]

52 T[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

I’m sorry to have been so bad about writing—at least I think I’ve never answered your last letter—but London life has been at its worst. And I suppose you’re annoyed with me—I’m sure with every reason. I gather you think I was cold the other day when you came: but then you came at 4.30 when I had said 5.30—praying for one hour between Ottoline Anrep Bernard Shaw etc: in which to write a letter I was ordered to write to the New S. etc etc: however thats over. I was dazed with talk. Second: I gather you think me inconsistent. I preach anonymity to you and then have my portrait in mosaics in the Nat. Gall. Yes: but my stipulation was that I was to be Clio: not V.W. Its not my fault if Anrep from motives of his own gives all the names to the papers.

But no more. This is all very petty and trivial. And I daresay you’ve forgotten by this time if I was cold or warm. And I’ve forgotten whether you mention yourself or not in your article. Nothing at the moment seems to me to matter one straw. But then I spent 8 hours yesterday at a school treat in a drizzle; listening to children piping, poor little creatures, by the hour: with a mistress hid under a hedge to prompt them. And tomorrow, and tomorrow and tomorrow—I forget Shakespeare: I forget everything

Yr V.

Berg

[]

2758: To Alice Ritchie

25th June [1933]

52 T[avistock] S[quare, W.C.1]

Dear Alice,

I was so sorry you couldn’t come, but we shall be here I suppose, till the end of July; so perhaps we shall see you. Let me know. I’m rather glad to hear that your book is worrying the life out of you. I expect this means that it reads like print and is as deep as the sea. In that case it probably does seem like toothache to you. I write and write with extreme volubility but little success; never mind, if I enjoy myself that is all (being old, disillusioned) that I ask.

We were passing your door yesterday—if your door is at Maldon. We dined at the Kings Head, after spending perhaps the most tiring day of our lives—listening to a school reciting plays and playing pianos from 12 to 7.30. I rather like that country, in a damp mist.

Yours
Virginia Woolf

I left this lying in my writing case; and send it to show how punctually I answer letters.

Mrs Ian Parsons

[]

2759: To Shena, Lady Simon

8th July 1933

52 Tavistock Sqre, W.C.1

Dear Lady Simon,

I would have written to thank you for sending the letters before, but London has been rather a rush. I read them with great interest and irritation. They are of course the germ of Margaret B’s article. I cant say I like them. They seem to me peevish and niggling and ungenerous—Nobody can deny that the man at college has a better time than the woman, but she should have the wits to see why that is, instead of grumbling like a charwoman (this remark is for you only!) at authorities.

It was delightful seeing you, and I hope next time you are in London you will let us know. There are a thousand things to discuss, about the future and education; but I am always, if not silenced, rather impeded by my ignorance of facts. Things are so different for a writer, with anyhow a small capital to go on.

I return the letters. Yours sincerely

Virginia Woolf

Sussex

[]

2760: To Dorothy Brett

8th July [1933]

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Brettt, [sic]

(forgive the typewriter which has already converted your name into another—but my hand is grown cursed and crabbed) I am a wretch to have delayed writing—but if you live so far away a month or more can’t make any difference. I was delighted to get your letter and to breathe for a moment the very brilliant queer air in which you live [New Mexico]. No, there’s no reason why you should come back to London—here we are, sweating, grimy, full of conferences, ices, parties, and people all lounging back and saying that they can’t think how Nancy Cunard can like niggers—etc etc; you can imagine it. But if I’m sincere, then of course I love London and couldnt live with your splendours, not for ever. One of these days I shall pounce or sweep through them and knock at your door as Vita did. She’s back, entirely delighted with America, your part that is; not the other. I’m glad you liked her and she you.

I dont know how to fill this page without filling thirty. Theres so much going on and yet it would be useless to begin; Desmond, Ottoline—yesterday Julian had a son—Nessa, Duncan—well, what you must do is to come back some day and put up with us. Dont say Bloomsbury in a tone of scorn; for that I will not stand. No, not from Sydney Waterlow even, whose pomp of circumstance surpasses belief.

I looked into your book and shut it; I can’t get hold of Lawrence; I like and I dislike; and always feel its a puzzle that I must sit down to one of these days, honestly; to read him through. But at present when there’s so much coloured dust about his horizon I leave him there. We saw his grave at Vence—what a fate for a man who loved beauty—a kind of plum pudding it seemed to me, raised by the local mason. I never see Freda, or Murry, or Sullivan; I never knew any of them to count; never spoke to Lawrence or Freda. But anyhow it was very nice of you to give me the book; and I think you get through, as painters do so often, the hide of words with your sincerity, [handwritten] Thats why I open and shut and see bright visions; whether I like them or not.

So I’ve rattled off a page. I’m afraid incoherent and dull; but I’m in a hurry. Do if you will write again. Yesterday I heard from Kot [S. S. Koteliansky].

Yours
Virginia

University of Cincinnati

[]

2761: To S. S. Koteliansky

Monday 10th July 1933

52 Tavistock Sqre, [W.C.1]

Dear Kot,

Do you think I might read the story first? I dont remember it. But I dont want you to send it if you are in a hurry, because though I would like to write a preface to a translation of yours, I feel very doubtful if I can. In the first place, I dont think I have anything interesting to say,—it is a long time since I have read Dostoievsky: and in the second I am writing a book and find it very difficult to stop and turn to other work. But if you would send the story I would read it and let you know as soon as I could.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

British Library

[]

2762: To Ethel Smyth

Tuesday July 11th [1933]

52 Tavistock Sqre. [W.C.1]

Yes I have been a brute about writing, but then as you never take offence, so you say, I dont care. And I cant take a pen up in completely stiff fingers. What I write now to say is that, unexpectedly, Wednesday tomorrow is free; 4.30. Would you like to come then? All other days this week hopeless; next week there might be another: but its useless asking you when there’s Dr. and Mrs Feisl, or Dorothy Bussy: so I cant promise many free days; quite free days. I’m told you rang up about the Letters—just as I was reading them; but I sent them, agreeing that it would be best if I could to have them in one block at Rodmell in August. Already some clearer idea of HB emerges—doubtless not the real one—one I make up. But its certainly coming clearer in the typing.

I’m glad the sun is shaded—I feel very spry and well in the cool, and hope I shant lapse into gloom. But if I do I shall make no bones of it and put you off—if that is you can come, which is not at all likely Dont bother There’ll be another day. And all I have to say in my head will keep Lord, I must go and wash and dine with the entirely deaf and therefore rather querulous Molly MacCarthy. Have you finished Pankhurst? I was talking to Rebecca West about her. She’s been writing on her too, for some omnibus book: said she was a portent. But R’s husband [Harry Andrews] is such dead, though excellent, mutton that I couldn’t ask as much as I wanted and Rebecca turned formal society, polite

V.

You might angelically, ring up

Berg

[]

2763: To Elizabeth Bowen

Monday [17 July 1933]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Dear Elizabeth,

I was so sorry I couldnt come today, but a friend whose child has just had an operation wanted to see me, and that meant going in the opposite direction from Chelsea.

But perhaps you’ll be up next week, and perhaps that would be possible? We are here till the 26th I think.

Any more news of Vivienne [Eliot]?

Yrs VW

Texas

[]

2764: To V. Sackville-West

Thursday [20 July 1933]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

That was the finest breakfast I’ve had this many a year. They must have grown in a water meadow and been breathed on by cows. (Mushrooms for breakfast, this refers to)

Oh dear how nice it was seeing you the other night! I’m sorry your mother got so largely into the papers, but never mind. And glad Nigel’s better. Please give him my love I wonder if there’s any Hogarth Book he’d like? Please say if so.

And come to lunch please. Ring up to say if you’d like to. But I don’t want to be a Bore.

V

Now must wash and dine with the Hutchinsons and settle what on Earth or Heaven to do with Vivienne. Mary says, put her in a convent. And I told Virginia Isham to write to you.

Berg

[]

2765: To Elizabeth Bowen

Thursday [20 July 1933]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Dear Elizabeth,

I was so sorry about your cold, which is gone now, I hope.

About Monday or Tuesday—the flat will be shut up so dont telephone: my maid is going to Southsea, and we to Rodmell. Tuesday is no good; I have an engaged couple to see. Monday I may not be back till late. Might I leave it that I’ll ring up on Monday morning if I can come—otherwise dont expect me, or put anything off. I’m so sorry, but perhaps there’ll be another chance before you go and we go.

Yes, Vivienne [Eliot] seems to have gone crazy poor woman. Tom however is back and safe, but I dare not write down the story as I dont know if its public yet. But I daresay you can guess. Vivienne is in bed and removed from the telephone I hope now.

Yrs
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

2766: To Vanessa Bell

Wednesday [26 July? 1933]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Raymond says he’s written a long letter to Clive so there’s nothing for me to add.

It seems much better than we thought from R’s letter, but I gather that F. [Francis Birrell] saw some ordinary doctor who gave a most alarming account. However, you’ll have heard.

Here I am sitting among dust sheets, and there of course is the telephone ringing.

I’m longing for Love which I dont get: so write and say if you can come over.

B.

Berg

[]

2767: To Quentin Bell

Wednesday [26 July 1933]

Typewritten

52 T[avistock] S[quare, W.C.1]

Dearest Quentin,

I’m very sorry to hear that youre in bed. Please recover instantly, as I want you to come and meet Miss Elizabeth Read, a virgin, living with a large dog, rhapsodical, slim—about eighteen; now lodged in an Inn—but for the past six months at Quentins, in the village. I enclose a letter from our dear Cousin James. Never did I see a more dumpish, foolish, chattering ugly man; his trousers stained; his pockets done up with string, bolt eyed, shock headed, with a lolling swollen tongue like a mad dogs. He is a confounded bore and I gave him your address.

Yesterday I went to see the Burne Joneses; no I dont like them; save as remnants of Nessas and my youth—floating lilies; things that have gone down the stream of time; which image is more just than you would think; for every picture has one white face looking down, and another looking up out of water. The suavity, the sinuosity, the way the private parts are merely clouded—it’s all a romantic dream, which makes me think of tea at Hyde Park Gate. Oh I’m dripping with heat. Last night we dined with Julia Tomlin, and met Peter Quennell; Dorothy Bussy and Wogan (who asked a great deal after you,) who may spell his other name with two l’s or one—I dont know. As youre notoriously indiscreet and Charleston, Nessa says, a warren of literary gents, I will not give you my candid opinion of anybody, but I prefer Wogan to Quennel; on the other hand, Q. has more knives in his brain. And I met a Mlle Chaunèse, and before I knew what was up, she had whipped out a note book and was taking my opinion of Joyce, Lawrence, life, death and the chances of an immortal soul. Then I lost my temper; and told her if she printed a word—shes an interviewer—I’d shoot her dead. This created an incident.

Talking of death and bullets, have you heard that Mrs Eliot is on the war path, said to have a carving knife with which first to skin Tom; then Ottoline; finally me? For she says Ott and I are Tom’s mistresses; now as I never had a favour from that man its rather hard to give my life on the pavement.

I’m sending you a book of short stories; one—by [James] Joyce—seems to me very good. The others Ive not read. But please tell me what you think, as I must thank for it. We dined with Jack and Mary [Hutchinson]; Mary is to me ravishing; in chalk white with a yellow turban, like an Arab horse, or a pierrot. And we met two Frogs—Masson and another [Simon Bussy], and went to the Zoo. And now I’m dining with Vita. But I wish I were sitting by my own fish pond with my own nephew writing indecent and vulgar lives of the living. Shall we revive our stories?

I hope to see you soon.

Virginia

Quentin Bell

[]

Letters 2768-2800 (August-September 1933)

2768: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Sunday [30 July 1933?]

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

Dearest Ottoline,

I was so disappointed not to come but we were off that day—I hope they gave you my message. I should have liked to see you again and meant to persuade you to lend me your memoirs—Perhaps I shall have better luck in the autumn—I hope so. Otherwise I am thankful to be out of the bubble bubble—London, which you love.

yr
Virginia

Texas

[]

2769: To Ethel Smyth

July 31st 1933

Monks House, Rodmell

I seize this moment, having put out a cake and honey and the kettle on the stove, to write: but the Keynes’s will be here in a moment and wont go, God bless them and all my friends, till dinner. And then I shall be so talk weary. So now—here’s the tip of my little finger or the end of my tail offered to your jaw. You see you’re a great lioness and I’m only a dun coloured mouldy mouse. You know how cameleon I am in my changes—leopard one day, all violet spots; mouse today. I’ve been seeing Nessa (whose boy is ill, but better now: whooping cough: pleurisy and so on—owing to coughing with such violence he seems to have torn his side—he’s Quentin; the dreamy charming slow one—but thats too long a sentence) I’m so sorry—yes, really—about your sister—cold as I am, even you sometimes say, I think you’re fond of your sister dont you? I hate people being unhappy: because I want all my life now to be hot, burning with happiness. But I’ve no time to go into that—Anyhow I hope she doesnt have pain. I hope too that your Mrs Pankhurst is done, and done triumphantly. Am I to read it—here they are—

Tuesday

Yes here they were the Keynes’s and they stayed till after 8 and the dinner was burnt, but they were very very charming. Maynard prancing all over the world and saying outrageous things, and he and L. quarrelled—Even I was drawn in—about the state of Europe in 50 years: imagine quarelling about Free Trade and Fascism—still we did, and were very fond of each other too—Lydia is now going on the stage, as Rosalind or Ophelia: though she speaks English like a parrokeet:

Well, this is so distracted and disjointed for I’m off now to buy our weeks supplies in Lewes—that I’m ashamed to send it.

What are you doing about Scotland? The Hebrides? How often I dream of the Hebrides! How I long to be walking on some solitary distant shore, with a gull or two, sandhills and a rising moon or setting sun—I dont much mind which: there is a little ship in the bay, one white cottage in the distance, and there am I walking alone by myself—but only in my dreams. Here I walk on the hot downs; but then I see some villa and my gorge rises. And Lord Ethel, there’s all my relations in law at Worthing, oh how they turn me sick—coming over in their boots and furs, and talking talking—readymade reach me down chatter—hearts of gold, eyes brimming with sympathy—you’d like them: so do I: in the abstract. But this is my recurring summer malady—Worthing.

Now heres L. So write to me

V.

Berg

[]

2770: To V. Sackville-West

Thursday [3 August 1933]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

I’m delighted to hear that the old termagant your mother has turned against you again—Much better dig holes in the flower beds than sit poked in her pigstye.

1.) I’ve answered Carswell.

2.) Leonard says, will you send the poems here. Are they finished? What a triumph! And are they dedicated to B.M? (You see how spiteful I am).

3.) We would like to come over if we can on the 19th—the only thing is that we’ve got to go up to London and down to Essex one day. D’you want to know?

I’m rather repentant about fastening Virginia Isham and her playery on you. I dont know her, much: only as a child oppressed by a family: and she has grown into a thick but competent young woman, determined to break loose. Anyhow, its a great feather in her cap, if you let her act in flood lights at Sht [Sissinghurst]. And again you show the goodness of your heart.

Yes I do enjoy being here. L. and Percy are talking under the window about fruit and gramophones and racing and clipping hedges. On and on they go—like old gaffers in gaiters. But all the Wolfery is at Worthing; and Ethel coming over, and the Easdales. And Nan’s [Hudson] dogs dead and will we therefore go to Auppegard to console her. And I would like to see Vita.

V.

Berg

[]

2771: To Ethel Smyth

Saturday [5 August 1933]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

This is not a letter only a deliquescent scrawl. At Worthing [Leonard’s Mother] yesterday—oh the heat.

Yes I like it very much indeed. First part first rate. One sentence—about the dawn in the hotel—I should like to crib for myself. The second part not so exciting; but curious: watered a little by E. P.’s still style. But thats interesting too. A fascinating work. I’ll suggest criticisms later. Let me know the exact time of your coming—I’m harassed by possible visitors. Yes, P is very good—

Berg

[]

2772: To Ethel Smyth

Monday Bank holiday (7 August 1933]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

The letters [Henry Brewster’s] came safe this morning, and I shall indulge myself tomorrow in reading them; in beginning anyhow. The heat—oh the heat!—The meadow is like a yellow blanket, burnt up; all the sweet peas dead. Of course, the Pankhurst paper is by far the most convincing suffrage argument there can be—it proved to my entire satisfaction the truth of my attack upon Pipings. Here one is persuaded unconsciously, profoundly from the roots, instead of having one’s face smacked by an aggressive charwoman (excuse the metaphor: impute it to the heat) What a remarkable story to be sure—E. P. The four children at the end. Its the end I doubt slightly—the E. P. speaking in person—But I’ll read again—when I’ve time.

It strikes me, to change the subject, that you dont make any allowance, when you twit me for moods and unsociability, for the incessant nibble nibble of my time in London. July was like being a biscuit in the middle of rats. And here its rather a bite—yesterday people; today people; well well: this is only to excuse my acerbity in London. We go to London on Friday next: so dont choose that day and then upbraid me. But come: you’ll find me very very nice, and full of admiration—all the more that E.P. proves the justice of my criticism of Pipings—how I hate that little penny whistle title! And what about Maurice [Baring] coming with you?

Yes or no? He wrote to me.

V.

Berg

[]

2773: To V. Sackville-West

Wednesday [9 August 1933]

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

(1) Bumpus (Wilson) wants to exhibit an MS of mine and suggests Orlando.

I dont particularly myself wish to be shown up in a glass case along of Priestly and Hugh [Walpole]; so if you like to refuse to lend, please do. But I had to tell him to ask your permission. No, I dont want to be in a glass case at all.

2) What time on 19th is Virginia’s play? We would like to come very much, and want to engage seats; and which play is it? So I hear you’re off to the Hebrides with Ethel—part of the journey to be in an aeroplane. Well, tastes differ; but I’m not altogether sure that I agree in wishing to fly and fly and fly with Ethel. Dear me, whats the use of joking? She’s coming here on Sunday—Oh and we’ve had the Easdales for 3 hours solid, no 4; as they missed the train; and then all yesterday a positive dangerous woman lunatic from Chicago. Never again do I answer the telephone in person. Please send a line on a card: also where are your poems?

And how is Nigel?

V

Berg

[]

2774: To Ethel Smyth

Wednesday [9 August 1933]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

L. says he has settled everything with MB. Will you come on Sunday afternoon? L. will call for you at Rottingdean at ¼ to 4.

This will be understood unless you write to the contrary

V

Berg

[]

2775: To Ethel Smyth

Monday [14 August 1933]

[Monk’s House], Rodmell, [Sussex]

Oh dear what a bore! Had it been Wedy perhaps I could have seen you. However, can’t be helped. I went out on Saty: found people here; had to talk, got another bad head; so whats the use of risking it again? Five minutes I would like; but find the idea bothers L. and it wouldn’t be much good. I had been wishing to see the uncastrated cat: am indeed, very fond of that animal. Please tell L. what MSS you can leave. I’ve not attempted the 2nd version of Pipings: nor read through Mrs P: [Pankhurst] again, so cant give an opinion. Tell L. when you must have them back or the opinion. Also HB [Brewster]—not read—Please write from Shetlands—how I envy you—a land unseen by me. And send one picture postcard of the shore where my Lighthouse was.

Yes. I feel a distinct and odd sensation at the thought of you—can it be affection? Can it be love?

V.

Berg

[]

2776: To Ethel Smyth

Tuesday [15 August 1933]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

My own feeling for what it is worth would be in favour of cutting the Pankhurst down.

I believe you could give the essence, fortified, in 30,000. But this means as I know a deadly grind. And I’m sure its all right as it is—only I think there is still vapour adhering—things that could be sat upon and pressed tight.

I venture this however only because you may want another view: its not a trusty one; I only read once, and that for pleasure. If you like to send it back, I wd. read quickly again: But I doubt if this will reach you in time

Better today—sitting up.

Berg

[]

2777: To Quentin Bell

Tuesday [15 August 1933]

Typewritten

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest Quentin,

Here are the books; but I must explain; the one I admired, perhaps wrongly—but I leave that to you—is Ordinary Families; the other, Night in May no Frost she calls it, […..21 words omitted…..] She is a friend of Logan’s, a Chelsea pensioner, and I daresay worthless; but the erudite say she is full of suppressed ardour, virtue, and it’s her own story. So let me have it back. I am dashing off for a day’s ride, before the car is decarbonised. We are going to Rye, to eat at the Mermaid [Inn], and drink a cup of tea to the very small ghost of Julian [Bell]; because last time I was at Rye [in 1907]—ask Nessa—Julian was the size of the swallow in the drawing room; featherless; mute; think of it, And Henry James lent us his room; and said Saxon [Sydney-Turner] was a little packet of filth. This is a fragment from my memoirs. I hope you are better. Please get well, because I want you to come here and meet Miss Read.

Virginia

Quentin Bell

[]

2778: To V. Sackville-West

Wednesday [16 August 1933]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Poor Virginia has been in bed; and thought how nice it would be to see Vita!: and is now up and says How nice it would be to see Vita! And L says (this is a terrific complement) “I should like to see Vita.” What about coming one day next week for the night? Could it be?

And who’s Lady Roehampton in the Edwardians? Please tell me. I read The E’s all in a gulp with pleasure in bed; very well done I think: also Ordinary Families (thanks to Harold) very good: I thought. Yes, an interesting mind.

But can you come?

If so, Ill write a long long letter. This is only Potto’s scrawl

V.

Ethel came and I staved her off.

Sorry Virginias [Isham] play is off.

Berg

[]

2779: To John U. Nef

16th Aug. 33

Monks House, Rodmell, [Lewes, Sussex]

Dear Mr Nef

I must apologise for my delay in thanking you for the delightful present that you have sent me, but I have been laid up in bed ever since it came. Even so, I have been dipping into it, and find it full of interest, and of facts of course entirely unknown to me. As a writer of fiction I find books of facts the most delightful relief, and I am enjoying your coal much more than all the MSS about the human heart which I should be reading. Many thanks for sending it to me.

Please remember us both to your wife and thank her for her letter. We both much liked seeing you here.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

My husband wants me to say how much he thanks you for sending him the book which he will read with great interest.

The University of Chicago Library

[]

2780: To Helen McAfee

17th August 193 3

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Miss McAfee,

I enclose an article on Oliver Goldsmith in case you should like to use it in the Yale Review. It will appear over here in the Times Literary Supplement but I could arrange publication to suit you if you would let me know. I should be very grateful for an early reply. Very stupidly, I have forgotten your dates for copy.

I hope things are going better in America now—we hear, naturally, many different views. At any rate I see that the Yale Review flourishes, which is a good sign, and means I hope that you are well also.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf
(Mrs Woolf)

Yale University

[]

2783: To V. Sackville-West

Sunday [20 August 1933]

Monks House, Rodmell, near Lewes, Sussex

Yes dearest Creature, that will be very nice: I mean Tuesday 29th. for the night—in a sense.

I was interrupted by the irruption of the Kingsley Martins—not to me an appetising couple. No: I dont want to see another soul: with one exception.

Now can I slip round and take a walk leaving them to Leonard; having provided the bleak Mrs M. [Martin] with a cushion? Can I?

V.

I see Ly Sacklle is again in the dock

Berg

[]

2782: To S. S. Koteliansky

Aug 21st 1933

Typewritten

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

My dear Kot,

I am sending back the Dostoevsky with this letter. I think it is an extremely interesting document. But I do not think that I can write an introduction, because in order to say anything of interest about these notes one would have to go deeply into the question of novel writing and into the whole question of Dostoevsky’s psychology as a writer. I do not feel that I know enough about him. He is such an extraordinary case as a writer that I should feel it silly to hazard guesses about him; I should want to think a great deal about it. And I feel I should say nothing interesting in the end, because the problems it raises are very difficult ones.

Indeed I do not see why an introduction is needed. Anyone who reads this will be already a Dostoevsky enthusiast; and would, as I myself should, resent intervention. I would like it published as it stands, with Brodskys introduction but nothing more. I dont much believe in attracting attention by using a well known name—that is only a draw to snobs; and irritates other people.

This is my feeling at any rate. So I am sending it back. I hope I have not kept it too long. I wanted to read it through carefully in peace. And I wish I could be more helpful.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

British Library

[]

2783: To Ethel Smyth

22nd August [1933]

Monk’s House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

No, my dear Ethel, Your psychology is much at fault. If I hadn’t a heart of gold under the skin of a shark I should never write to you again, after your comments upon my poor little note. Thats the trouble with the daughters of generals—either things are black, or they’re white; either theyre sobs or they’re ‘shouts—’ whereas, I always glide from semi-tone to semitone; and you never hear the difference between one and another. Thats why you dont understand a word I write, either in MS. or print; for its long been plain to me that you dont. Oh no: Dickens is your favourite author; after him Mr. Priestly. Ah hah! (There is an element of very profound truth in this) But I’ve forgotten now the lecture I meant to write upon your letters. One incident I do however remember. When you came that afternoon, I jumped out of bed and stood outside the drawing room door. I was about to go in. Then I thought, not of you, but of Leonard. Unravel this riddle, as you float above the [Hebridean] islands.

Yes I am much better; I am up. I am about; I have refused to see my mother in law, my sister in law, my brother in law, the Keynes’s, and the Gages! I have had three entire days alone—three pure and rounded pearls. But then, last Sunday, just as I was writing my hymn to solitude out here in my garden room, with the rooks circling and the cows munching, there’s a face at the window: the editor of the New Statesman [Kingsley Martin] and his wife come to spend the afternoon. So the pearl dissolved; and tasted like a tabloid of quinnine as I swallowed it. What criminals, to waste a pearl; they dont know what they do. However, I write all the morning, which is perhaps all that one should dare to ask.

I wish I knew the geography of the British Isles. I dont at once visualise Hebrides, Skye, and the rest. I only see a black blot in mid air which is you, astride an aeroplane; firmly grasping a rail, keenly envisaging the seascape; and completely master of your feet and faculties. I daresay you drop down upon a British fortress and drink rum with the officers. Do they think you a jolly good fellow? Are you always moving on? Do you ever think?—read?—or are you dazed, as I am in the car, when we drive, and drive and drive, and my mind is a long peaceful smudge? I’m reading a vast number of books—when I’m not getting tea for the Editor of the New Statesman. Turgenev: Shakespeare’s life, and huge masses of MSS. Do you know the difference between the Quarto’s and the folios? I never did, till last night. Think of having spent a scholars life, correcting misprints! And the garden is—oh but why, when you came, didnt you look at the garden? My plan was to tap on the window: then you’d have come in—for 5 minutes. Why I said that 5 minutes was no good, was based on your own remark—that seeing me with other people there was more torment than pleasure. Lord, what a wild psychologist you are—how random, how violent: but then thats part of being an uncastrated cat, and a generals daughter—which I like: so I dont complain; only marvel admire, and shout with laughter over your letter. Please write another.

V.

Berg

[]

2784: To Hugh Walpole

Aug, 23rd [1933]

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

My dear Hugh,

I was thinking too—Why the devil hasnt Hugh written to me all this time, or come to see me for the matter of that? I’m sorry the reason was such an unhappy one. One’s friends ought never to get ill—never to have operations: But they do. I have a theory however—after a bad year, one has a good one. Last year all my friends seemed to die.

Now that is very exciting and good of you—to be sending me Vanessa. I want to read it very much. For one thing it will be about my own age, not my Grandfather’s. And then, being in a gloom the other night, I took down your Apple Trees [1932] and enjoyed it so much, more the second reading even than the first, that I invented a theory to the effect that you being a born romantic, and I not being one, what I like is when you turn your rich lanthorn upon facts, because then they become rimmed and haloed with light but still remains facts in the centre. So I want you to go on writing your memories. It struck me today on my walk, that I like Scott’s diaries better than all but three or four of his novels for this reason. And Vanessa—to end the argument—will have more fact in it than the others; what fun, if I’m there in the flesh!—or my name’s there.

Its such an age since we met that I cant tell you any news—the voyage to Siena over the Alps is an old story now: so’s Flush. No, I dont think it anywhere near a masterpiece. And my opinion of the Book Society has sunk 10 degrees now that theyve taken it. By the way, I couldn’t face signing 300 copies as Mr Bott kindly suggested. Ought I to? But I wont and cant.

Well, this sheet of paper seems to hint that I must go and play bowls with Leonard. But there is room to beg that you will soon write again, if you’re not too bothered. What a generous man you are to be sure!

Yrs aff VW

When you write, be sure you put plain and large, Virginia Woolf on the envelope, or they open it in the Press d——n them.

Texas

[]

2785: To V. Sackville-West

Wednesday [30 August 1933]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

Just to say that I’ve been talking to Raymond, and I’m glad to say things aren’t nearly as bad as it seemed. Francis [Birrell] has been to an expert, who says the growth is small, and he thinks on the outside of the brain. He is going to have the operation next week, but they think he ought to recover completely, though it is of course serious. He’s up and about at present only with two paralysed fingers. This I write in haste, thinking you’d like to hear.

Oh it was very nice seeing you, and what a noodle not to stay! as soon as you went, your paramour Mary [Hutchinson] rang up and wanted to come. But no: I’m here. London loathsome

V.

Berg

[]

2786: To Quentin Bell

[30 August 1933]

Typewritten

[Monks House, Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest Quentin,

Perhaps you could kindly advise me whether I ought to send Miss Lorna Wilkinson, whom you will see is an artist, some cast off clothes? Or do you think her father is a fraud—a have yer, as Lottie [Hope] calls it; as I rather suspect?

Oh what a day was yesterday! The Hon. and Rev. Campbell-Douglas-Douglas-Campbell-Douglas at Ten AM: who said nudity amused him; indecency delighted him; but brutality shocks him; so he walked out of the Movies where his hostess an old lady of Ringmer [Sussex] had taken him with an 18 year old virgin. At Two, Willie Robson. Why Willie I asked; after the German Emperor? No; a mistake of my mothers that has haunted and almost ruined my life. “But will you call me Willie?” On condition I am Virginia for ever, I said being rather flown with the heat. Whereupon the barking of a thousand dogs announced the advent of Vita; and at the same moment Mr Neil Lyons, to beg a spray of bay, because an Italian Lady at Brighton had told him how to pickle herrings in a jar with Bay. But that plant is laurel, I said; and therefore almost instantly fatal. Wait, and I’ll fetch Mrs Nicolson who is putting away her car, and is an expert on bays. So I fetched Vita; who said the laurel was a Portugese Juniper; and then flushed red, and whispered to me that Neil Lyons is the lover of the daughter of her sister in laws old flame, Sir Edward Morgan, also the very spit and image of Harolds brother [2nd Lord Carnock], save that Harolds brother weighs twenty stone and is three foot ten; whereas Neil Lyons weighs sixteen stone and is four foot eight. Then Mr Lyons said, Could we oblige him with a spray of hazel, because he suspects himself of power as a water diviner. Not water I should have thought; but let it pass. He is claret coloured and barrel bodied. So it went from lunacy to lunacy, till the moon rose and the dogs bayed.

Oh my dear Quentin, that I were a seal lying on a slab of ice in the Hebrides, save that if I were Ethel Smyth would bawl me Brahms in such tones, so she says, that the male seal gives over copulating and dives into the deep. So Orpheus you remember charmed the trees. And just as I was writing this, the telephone rings and theres Mary Hutchinson wants to come tomorrow with Jeremy and Barbara [her children]—Heaven be praised, we shall be in London. Such is life. Kiss your mother and tell her that in spite of everything I adore her. There is a world of meaning in that which she alone will understand.

V.

[handwritten]

Return Wilkinson at your leisure.

Quentin Bell

[]

2787: To Francis Birrell

Sunday Sept 3rd [1933]

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

My dear Francis,

I was just about to write and ask if you would come and stay here, and now I hear that you are to have an operation. What a damned bore for you! We are both miserable to think of it, and wish we could have it for you, or at anyrate, come and see you. A word whispered to Raymond or anyone would always fetch a couple of old wolves to your bedside—but I hope you wont be there long. Please not—there are a million things we want to talk about. And last time [on 5 July] it was such a hubbub—d’you remember: Sashie, Georgia, Brennans and all the rest of them in Helen’s [Anrep] bedroom: and Mrs [Peter] Quennell, for whom I have the feeling of a rabbit towards a snake, bending all in black but not I think very agreeably—over the washstand. Why do I always envisage Roger’s parties in Helen’s bedroom? What they call the pathetic fallacy? Ruskin is that? God knows.

I’ve been reading a stuck up humbug called Faber on Newman with fury. How my gorge rises at the new generation of virtuous young men, (but I suspect Faber of being bald) who have learnt all their tricks from Lytton, and then accuse him of not loving mankind! Lytton had more love in his little finger than that castrated cat in the whole of his mangy stringy partless gutless tailless body.

That reminds me, rather circumlocuitously, that Tom Eliot’s coming here, having first taken every precaution, short of growing a beard, to prevent Vivien following him. I suppose you heard how that man of genius shook off his wife? It was a most interesting process, to one who loves the smell of the rubbish heap as I do, to watch. She sat in her flat under a crowned effigy—that is Toms photo by Elliot Fry, and a wreath of daisies—saying that he was drowned: whereas he was editing the Criterion round the corner. But I dont wonder that he daren’t face her—nor could I. The question is, will he drop Xtianity with his wife, as one might empty the fishbones after the herring. (I’m cooking dinner, so forgive the image). I’ll write and tell you.

We are going over to Tilton, to be converted by Maynard to what I suspect of being a form of Fascism. My brain soon flags: and I leave it to Leonard, while Lydia sits mumbling the part of Olivia in 12th night which she is to act at the old Vic.

Well, this is only a drivel, from your attached and ancient friend. Leonard sends his love from the top of an apple tree; and we both want to hear that you’re all right and will come and see us. I cant tell you how everyone goes on asking for news of you.

Yrs affly VW

And this needs no answer.

Raymond Mortimer

[]

2788: To Ethel Smyth

Wednesday [6 September 1933]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, near Lewes, Sussex

Oh but we’re here, thank God, for another month—till Oct, anyhow. Not that there are many empty days, even here: but that as you point out, is the fault of my passion for the aristocracy. My hand shakes so with pulling a dog, not mine, away from sheep I cant write. And I’ve lost your envelope. But I much admire your Shetland Isles psychology and long to go there, to acquire a touch of it. Oh if I could only control my fingers!

Possibly we go to Bath and Bristol next week, travelling books [later cancelled]. But I’ll let you know; if you will write.

What a descriptive writer was lost when you took up the piano. I sat, for 10 minutes, looking at the Orkneys: or was it the Hebrides? Did you fly? Did you buy a picture post card? You see, the dog was very big and young, and when he saw a sheep he ran; and I had to tug. Thats why all I have to say about Shakespeare is so very elliptical. Still, I’m sure you agree. How’s Woking? Hows Kathleen? For Gods sake tell me about the maidenhead removal—what a lark!

Shall we go and be done together? Side by side in Bond Street?

V.

Rebecca [West] has written on Pankhurst [in The Post-Victorians]; not so much flesh on the bones as yours; and Vera Brittain has written a book which kept me out of bed till I’d read it. Why?

Berg

[]

2789: To Ethel Smyth

Sunday. [10 September 1933]

Typewritten

Monks House [Rodmell, Sussex]

Yes a very interesting letter—a good imaginative reasonable interesting mind, Elizabeths [Williamson].

More than can be said for me at the moment—Tom Eliot for twenty four hours solid talk yesterday; Rosamund Lehmann and husband now coming to lunch; Oliver Strachey tea. Lady Colefax I have refused. Lydia makes me write about 12th Night. Must go to London to Old Vic. Must write journalism. Must see friends. Have therefore decided from today on to give up all other writing in order to see that theres beef for lunch and cake for tea. I have just burnt my MS. Sure you’ll approve. Am going to spend all my money on clothes, face powder—Mary Hutch, and Jack also came yesterday—She says she’ll introduce me to Elizabeth Arden beauty parlour. Fingers to be red. Toes to be silver. Face to be lifted; nose to be filled with wax. I am doing this at your bidding. Oh but my lodge is full of smoke from my burning novel so can not see to write more.

V—who gave up literature at the command of her friends.

Berg

[]

2790: To Vanessa Bell

Tuesday [12 September 1933]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, near Lewes, Sussex

Angelica and Eve seemed to think they would like to spend a night here. But A. seemed to think that Friday and Saturday were impossible, and Eve goes on Sunday. So that seems to leave Thursday only.

I’m afraid I’ve left this rather late (but we’ve been out all day travelling books) but could you bring them to tea on Thursday, and we would bring them back early on Friday afternoon?

Of course it might be simpler if A. could come later alone; only she wanted, I think to come with Eve. About A’s birthday present—I dont know what she wants; but I think I’ll give her some small present on Saturday; and then perhaps you and she would choose a dress, or whatever she wants in London before she goes back.

Lord! what streams of people we all have—worse than London: so that I never see you for quiet and reasonable talk.

I think you’ll have time to send a card about Thursday.

Yr B

Berg

[]

2791: To Vanessa Bell

[13 September 1933]

Postcard

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

P.S.

Or if A. and E. [Angelica and Eve] cant spend the night would they come to a birthday dinner at Shelleys either Thursday or Friday.

Excuse haste

Berg

[]

2792: To Ethel Smyth

Thursday [14 September 1933]

Typewritten

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

Excuse the typing but my hand is perished with cold. Saturday wouldnt do for me either; nieces birthday party. Sunday I can be here; if youd let me know time; but I gather its awkward for you; so what about later? We shall stay on till 3rd or 4th Oct. Next week end is impossible; but after next week end I dont intend to have any more visitors. No; it wasnt your comments on the Waves; it was the insistence of my friends that I should be always at their beck and call that made me resign literature. Two come tonight; and then again on Tuesday; Wednesday we go up to Lydias play; then my horror is that I must write an article on it; all because my friends love me; and again must see Keynes etc. But as I say after next week I shall be freer; so choose which. And let me know. Excuse illiteracy; whistling wind and dead leaves whirling.

V.

Berg

[]

2793: To V. Sackville-West

15th Sept [1933]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, near Lewes, Sussex

Dearest Creature,

I am a wretch never to have written—not that you care But there has been such a rain of visitors on my head that I couldn’t escape. Next week is hopeless—Lord, I have to see Ethel, the Lucas’s—Peter [F. L. Lucas], whom Harold so rightly chastises, and a new unknown wife: then go to London to see 12th night, because Lydia is acting; then Morgan Forster: but after the 23rd Heaven be praised, there’ll be no one that I know of.

Could we come then? I’m longing to see the Ellen Terry house. Will you thank, rather late in the day, Miss Craig or St John, for offering lunch? I’m going to join their society, I mean nothing more than subscribe to The Barn, as soon as I can summon resolution to write a letter or a cheque.

Yes its very lovely here. Angelica and Eve are shooting bows and arrows on the lawn. Two Comma butterflies have been copulating on the cabbages—but there!—you never collected butterflies, so a comma more or less

My word, what a nice woman you are! Thats the very words I said, on reading your letter to Leonard. Moreover, they confirmed my own saying. He was rather in a stew, and thought we were making demands on your honour, integrity, friendship, magnanimity and so on. I said, Oh but Vita is like that. Then your letter comes to confirm it. It was a noble act though, tossing 1000 guineas into the duckpond, or cesspool, for to tell the truth, I dont like [Rupert] Hart Davies in the flesh, nor [Jonathan] Cape [publishers] in the spirit.

Yes, I’d like to see you again, We stay on till Oct. 6th or so; therefore we may meet. Suggest any day: and I will too.

V.

Berg

[]

2794: To Vanessa Bell

[mid-September 1933]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, near Lewes, Sussex

I’ve just had this from Raymond which I send in case you’ve not heard [about Birrell]

Well dinner on Wednesday unless it strikes you that there is something unutterably repulsive about us before that.

B.

Berg

[]

2795: To Quentin Bell

Tuesday [19 September 1933]

Typewritten

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest Quentin,

The man has answered—Lorna [Wilkinson] is dressed up in my old clothes and all is well in the worst of all possible worlds. The reason why Ethel Smyth is so repulsive, tell Nessa, is her table manners. She oozes; she chortles; and she half blew her rather red nose on her table napkin. Then she poured the cream—oh the blackberries were divine—into her beer; and I had rather dine with a dog. But you can tell people they are murderers; you can not tell them that they eat like hogs. That is wisdom. She was however full—after dinner—of vigorous charm; she walked four miles; she sang Brahms; the sheep looked up and were not fed. And we packed her off before midnight.

Now the [F. L.] Lucases are coming; and then we go to London; and then—well, have you read the mornings paper on Lydia? The D.T. is scathing. My god; what shall I say? I think the only possible line to take is how very exciting it is to see Shakespr mauled; of course one might make play with the idea that the Elizabethans were just as unintelligible; and throw in a hint about opposites being the same thing as equalities—if you take my meaning. Either the worst, or the best—that sort of remark. Well. Pity me. Yesterday we went and bought yew trees. I heard from Frankie [Birrell] this morning who says he has £4000 of radium in his head; but is as lively as ever. Thats all the news, except that I cant remember Mrs L’s name; and am making a shot at Priscilla.

V.

Quentin Bell

[]

2796: To Frances Partridge

Sunday [24 September 1933]

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Frances,

We have put off our journey to the west for the time—out of sheer laziness. Otherwise we fully meant to descend upon you [at Ham Spray]. We should very much like to come later in the autumn, if you will have us. No, I had not heard of Oliver’s [Strachey] new love, let alone seen her. But he was here the other day, and I thought I felt a change in him. Now several people have told me about her, and I gather that she’s no beauty in any way. Isn’t it rather hard lines on Ray?—however, I’m always in the dark about peoples loves, so I let Oliver be.

Now I must go off to meet Ethel Smyth—think of me talking at the top of my voice and listening at the top of my ears for the next 6 hours—thats why I snatch my last coherent moment to write this.

Our love to Ralph [Partridge], and hoping to see you.

Yrs Virginia

Frances Partridge

[]

2797: To Helen McAfee

27th Sept. 1933

Typewritten

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Miss McAfee,

Many thanks for your courtesy in cabling to me. Of course I quite understand that Goldsmith is not a subject likely to be of particular interest in America. Your suggestion of an essay upon the modern essayist is interesting, but my time is rather taken up at present. I have promised to do an essay on Turgenev’s novels for the Times; and shall try to do that this autumn. But again, I expect that Turgenev is a little remote from your public. In England—or rather in the Literary supplement—we have a habit of reviving old writers from time to time with no particular reason; hence Goldsmith and Turgenev. But if I should think of anything more topical later I will certainly let you know. With many thanks and remembrances from us both,

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

P.S. Unless I hear from you that you would like to see the Turgenev, I will take it for granted that it would not interest you.

Yale University

[]

2798: To Vanessa Bell

[29 September 1933]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, near Lewes, Sussex

Yes, we shall be delighted to dine tomorrow Saturday. But we stay on another week so we may hope to meet later. I’m amazed at the cheapness of the book case [for Monk’s House?]. I thought it would be more. I’ve added a pittance for your share in design. If you object, I’ll never ask you to do a job again.

Here’s the first, premature review of Flush.

B.

Berg

[]

2799: To V. Sackville-West

Saturday [30 September 1933]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Would it be possible for you to have us to lunch next Thursday, which is, I think, Oct 5th—say about one? Then we could go and see Ellen Terry or not, as turns out convenient: but I’d rather see you than any remains: That’s a nice compliment. If you know what a riot of human kind we’ve had here—Eleven last Sunday; not all to stay thank God, but to talk, and to tea and so on. However they were all, I admit, charming; however I dont want anymore talking; however, thats impossible, because we go back to London But I’ve just faced Sibyl [Colefax] and told her not to come. All this proves—all those howevers—how fond I must be of you. We’ve made another pond too. At first the water slanted up one way and down another. And now where can I buy pots, Italian, and a statue? Thats my contribution to the garden.

I’ve a mint of things to say but I cant remember a single one. How did Passion go at Croydon? Did you enjoy it? Can I see it? Is it coming to London?

And we dined with Mary [Hutchinson], and her Jeremy wants to meet your Ben, so I said I would hand on the message.

Mary makes love to me—yes: other people dont. I daresay at this very minute you’re couched with some herring griller in the straw God damn you. A stack here caught fire last week. And the beagles came over today, and my mushroom field was destroyed by them. D’you know, I’ve had mushrooms every morning. Good; and blackberries, also good. And then we have to go back to Tavistock and Miss West [H. Press] and poetry—Yes I shall read your book, through: and I’ll send you Flush, but its only a silly little joke: this is not modesty, nor vanity but sense. Ethel was here the other day: 6 hours: 6 hours really hard work. Let me know about Thursday

V.

Berg

[]

2800: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

[7 October 1933]

Typewritten

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

Dearest Ottoline,

How angelic of you to write—and devilish of me not to answer! Oh how I hated writing that tough little article! Poor dear Lydia asked me to do it—she attached great value to her acting—she wants to be an actress—and the whole thing was a dismal farce, and she is out of the Cherry Orchard in consequence. But never will I write about a friend again. They may wear the stones out on their knees before I go through that agony.

I am writing in a hurry and therefore type to spare your eyes. We stayed on here to go to the Labour party [conference] at Hastings, where I sat rather half witted and heard things that I did not understand. But I always enjoy it. And there were ships going by outside, while the tub thumping went on inside; and the old Webbs sitting like idols on the platform and Phil Baker and Irene—do you remember her?

I’ve just had a letter from Brett. Yes. I think you are right. Something odious oozes through—a kind of thick, impure scent. She says Kot [Koteliansky] is furious with her, for her book; also that she is coming over, and means to see me. But I feel, no, that woman is impure. Now is this your suggestion; or does her letter with its egotism and uneasiness convey some profound truth to me? I do not know.

We are in the middle of packing to come back. I rather dread London. I feel less and less able to control my life and I go on saying yet it is the only life I shall ever have. Why waste it? However, it wont be a waste if you’ll come one evening or let me come in the gloaming. I like the October evenings in London. It has been almost beyond belief beautiful here—I walk and walk by the river on the downs in a dream, like a bee, or a red admiral, quivering on brambles, on haystacks; and shut out the cement works and the villas. Even they melted in the yellow light have their glory. But no more. I must pack.

yr Virginia

[handwritten]

You have made a complete conquest of old Ethel. All her love is transferred to you.

Texas

[]

Letters 2801-2841 (October-December 1933)

2801: To David Garnett

Sunday [8 October 1933]

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Sq., [W.C.1]

My dear Bunny,

You were more than generous and wholly delightful about Flush and Virginia last week; and I had meant to write and thank you before, but not being altogether a dog, as you justly observe, had no time to go to the London Library and prove that I’m not so inaccurate as you think. No. I am rather proud of my facts. About license, for instance; surely I made plain that I was referring to nature, not the post office? license natural to his age—well, I ask you, what has that license got to do with the Encyclopaedia? or the Post Office, or six and eightpence? Natures license, sometimes called lust. About the working mans cottage; I agree it looks a farm in the picture; but Mr Orion Horne calls it a working mans cottage; and he saw it; and was not a picturesque artist. Painters at that date always enlarge houses out of consideration for their owners. Such is my view as a biographer (and oh lord how does any one pretend to be a biographer?) As for asphalt, I admit I have my doubts; but I suspect that the Prince Regent liked asphalt—asphalt seems to me implied by the [Brighton] Pavilion. But how could you let slip the horrid anachronism which stares at you, bright red, on page I dont know what? There were no pillar boxes in the year 1846. They were invented by Anthony Trollope about 1852. Dont expose me. If you do, my sales will prick like a bubble. Old gentlemen will die in fury. I could go on, but will stop, having I hope partly vindicated my claim to truth speaking. Yes, the last paragraph as originally written was simply Queen Victoria dying all over again—Flush remembered his entire past in Lyttons best manner; but I cut it out, when he was not there to see the joke. But what a good critic you are—lots of things you said I think of in the watches of the night; they stick like burs; whereas the others, save Desmond’s, run off my coat like water.

Yours affectionate old English springer spaniel
Virginia

(Im in such a hurry I cant write sense; but are you in Endsleigh Gardens; will you come and see us; where is Miss Edwards; and how is Francis? [Birrell]

David Garnett

[]

2802: To V. Sackville-West

Tuesday [10 October 1933]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Yes of course it is understood: you come 4.30. Thursday. Yr sister in law [Gwen St Aubyn] after tea; you both bite supper and stay on a little (Julian’s coming and wants to see you)

Perhaps we might go to Woolworths or have some other startling adventure. St. [Sissinghurst] cured my head—a miracle.

But I’ve been listening to Hugh [Walpole] for 3 hours so am not mistress of my wits he’s a dear rosy old bumble bee, and as mild as a shorn Lamb about Vanessa

So 4.30 Thursday.

V.

Berg

[]

2803: To Ethel Smyth

Thursday [12 October 1933]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

No I cant manage Monday. There’s been a muddle, and I find I have to write and finish an article on Turgenev by Thursday, so that I must try to work between tea and dinner—and dont suppose even so I shall finish it. I’m sorry about your sister— I had not seen it. Also I’m rather worried about Quentin—the dr. seems to think now that it is tuberculosis, and he will have to go to Switzerland. So I’m in no good mood for conversation (I dont mean that Q’s really bad: only its a worry for Nessa) No of course I dont mind your not being able to cope with Flush.

So no more at the moment. I’m trying vainly to steer my way through people to considered criticism of art—hopeless! Here’s Desmond MacCarthy.

V.

Berg

[]

2804: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Thursday [12 October 1933?]

52 Tavistock Sqre, [W.C.1]

Dearest Ottoline,

Yes we are just back. It would be very nice to come and see you. If Thursday next week would suit, I would come in after tea, about 5.30—and dont bother to write.

Shall you be here all the winter? That will lend a bustle to London—but I am determined to say nothing nice about you.

your Virginia

Texas

[]

2805: To Gladys Mulock

Oct 13th [1933]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Gladys,

Thank you so much for your letter. I am delighted that my little book on Flush amused you. Yes, they are much alike, Mrs Browning and her dog.

I need hardly say that I remember you and Hilary very well indeed; didnt we all go fishing at St Ives once?—As one grows older, these memories become more vivid.

Thank you again for writing.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

George Spater

[]

2806: To Quentin Bell

Saturday [14 October 1933]

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Sq. [W.C.1]

Dearest Quentin,

I saw Julian and hear that though dilapidated and tied up with string, and skidding and skadding you reached home safe. No sooner had you gone, than Hugh Walpole burst in; much elated and also discomposed. He had been to the next door house by mistake; a lady with purple hair and carmine lips answered him. No I am not Mrs Woolf she said—indeed it was obvious what her trade was—not mine; and when Hugh said he must go; Oh no she said, just come in all the same. This was very upsetting Hugh said; his tastes being what they are. He looks down nightly upon the heads of prostitutes in Piccadilly; and never knows more of them than that. With rare tact I said nothing about Vanessa—the book. Then, let me see, Desmond came. Partly because Molly is ill and he wanted to escape; partly to discuss an article he is writing upon Bloomsbury. He is going to tell the true story of that long since dead phantom, with names and facts. No, he would not eat he said—we were lunching; and then he pulled the pie to him and devoured it all.

Then we went to Hendon to fetch the car; there was Vita when we came back; and soon her sister in law [Gwen St Aubyn] came, whose head has been fractured in a motor car accident, but so neatly that the skull keeps together; and she never knew it; but must now do nothing but feed chickens for months till it grows together. So we gave her a lesson in printing, which is good for setting the skull, so they say. I suppose if she were to jump it might rise like the top of an egg. Then Lyn [Lloyd Irvine] came in the evening; and Julian and Lintott and a mysterious woman speaking with a foreign accent, who makes ties. Who is she? I could not catch.

Lyn after one week on Everyman has sent in her resignation; her conscience—she is the daughter of a Scotch minister—will not stand the lies of Yeats Brown. So now she is on the streets again. She thinks of putting an advertisement in the agony column; spinster of 32 etc. Last night we went to the Cherry Orchard—oh and Lydia came in to see us; and says she is now happier; but they were both in the depths of gloom; and they liked my article on her. So thats all right. We dont think on the whole the Cherry Orchard can be acted by the English. Even the dog is English. I think it ought to be rewritten in sea gulls language like [J.M.] Synge. But they acted very well, but I doubt if it is as great a play as I thought it when I was young. Our Miss Walton [Hogarth Press] waited an hour and a half to see it, and was delighted. Now Kingsley Martin has just rung up to ask L. to go and talk about Hitler. He thinks there is going to be a world revolution. L. thinks he is optimistic and emotional. I dont like his table manners. Have you got Jimmy Sheehans novel? He has sent it to me, but I expect Duncan has it.

Love to your mother. We shall be down on Friday.

Virginia

Quentin Bell

[]

2807: To Ethel Smyth

Tuesday [17 October 1933]

52 T[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Sorry I didn’t write before, but I couldn’t make any arrangements.

Last week was beyond belief—L. got the flu, people swarmed, I had to finish my article [Turgenev] by Thursday. We went to Rodmell a good deal battered on Saturday and have only just got back. I think of giving up London altogether, only, as theyve now started an engine [a pump] which roars all over the marsh at Rodmell, thats no good. I seldom get from 5 to 7 (my time for making up novels) without chatter, chatter, chatter.

So I shall give up novel writing. As for letter writing—no—I cant write to you. I know its absurd, but every time I think “This will be shown to someone—” Yes, thats what you said—I re read your letter. What you call “Killingly funny letters” you always show; all my letters are thus parched at birth. I daresay yours is the right method—full of free publicity—but I’m the very opposite—Lord how opposite! You see, I couldnt show a letter of yours to any one, niece or nephew. Well—cant be helped. And I come back to 25 letters, all to be answered. Will I write about William Morris, will I sit, will I see, will I stay—By God, I wont. And I’ve now lost Time and Tide so I dont know where to send my subscription to. However, L. is recovered, so thats all right; but Nessa is taking Q to Switzerland by air, so thats rather dismal.

So good night.

V.

Berg

[]

2808: To Lady Colefax

Sunday [22? October 1933]

52 Tavistock Sq. [JF.C.1]

Dearest Sibyl,

You are an angel of a woman to write me such an enchanting letter (and the joy of it is that one of your letters can be read 12 times before grasping the full beauty). I’m so glad that you liked Flush. I think it shows great discrimination in you because it was all a matter of hints and shades, and practically no one has seen what I was after, and I was elated to Heaven to think that you among the faithful firmly stood—or whatever Milton said. I cannot collect my wits, because I have to make a dinner do for 4 when it was ordered for 2. And its Sunday and the shops are shut. Why do people ring up at the last moment? But do come yourself, and let us be alone, and ask me to dinner later in the month of Nov. if you will. 29th is a day of entire misery—a dinner of 21 Wolves to celebrate an 85th birthday.

Forgive scrawl, and accept humble homage. What a good critic you are.

V.

Michael Colefax

[]

2809: To Ethel Smyth

[25 October 1933]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

I could be in tomorrow for a few moments about 6.—if you want to come, as you say. But I feel—I may be wrong, that a meeting at this moment will simply mean raking up Vita, Elizabeth [Williamson], my faults (secretiveness) yours, (bullying)—so we shall go on—and this what you call cutting out an item—this to me at the moment excruciating personal cross examination. And at the moment I am extremely worried, not about your letter, or mine, or anything of that sort. Only a muddle. It’ll blow over, in a day or two: meanwhile I admit I’m on edge, and can only read in your letter (just come) the desire to heap abuse on me or rather find fault with my character—quite justly, I’m sure. Only I should put it that we are hopelessly and incorrigibly different, not right or wrong. So choose for yourself. But I admit I’m on edge and loathe these bickerings—these personalities

Berg

[]

2810: To the Editor of the New Statesman

[October 1933]

Sir,

Everybody will sympathise with Mr St John Ervine in his courageous protest last week at the Institute of Journalists against the methods of publicity employed by a certain section of the press. The instances he gave were harrowing enough; Lady Ellerman’s account of what she suffered at the hands of photographers when her husband died is still fresh in our minds; and most of us can supplement such stories with cases of a less extreme kind which have come under our own observation. Engaged couples of the upper classes complain that the telephone never ceases to ring until they have agreed to be photographed; the click of the camera is heard behind the altar rails during the marriage service; and at the other end of the social scale a village woman is besieged in her cottage by reporters and photographers because the rumour has reached Fleet Street that the wife of a gardener has received a legacy. The tale is endless.

But are we not ourselves to blame? Open the dailies and the weeklies. Among the pictures of Atlantic flyers and murderers you will find portraits of well-known people, and by no means all of them are public people, but private people, musicians, writers, painters, artists of all kinds. Their homes are photographed, their families, their gardens, their studios, their bedrooms and their writing tables. Interviews appear; their opinions on every sort of subject are broadcast. How, then, can we blame the press if it takes advantage of this disposition on the part of well-known people, and infers that on the whole publicity is desired?

Yet this is by no means always the case. If you ask these “celebrities” why they have consented to make their faces or their houses or their views public property they will reply, for the most part, that they have done so unwillingly, but that unless they consent they will be branded as prigs, curmudgeons or cranks. Often, they will add, the request is made by friends whom it is difficult to refuse, or by struggling journalists in urgent need of the few guineas that the interview or the portrait will procure them. In short, a mild form of blackmail is applied, and out of weariness or good nature they succumb. Few are so simple or so modest as to suppose that any compliment is implied, and nobody nowadays believes that a publicity which is so widespread and indiscriminate has any pecuniary or prestige value for the victim.

Surely now the time has come when it is not enough to protest and to sympathise and to succumb. What is needed is a Society, with funds, with an office and some high-sounding title—Society for the Protection of Privacy or the like—to which those who honestly abominate such practices could belong. It is unnecessary to point out how sublime and authoritative sentiments that sound merely priggish when they are spoken by private people appear when issued with the sanction of an institute. A badge might be worn. A pledge might be administered. Members of the literary profession, for example, might take an oath not to allow any photograph, drawing or caricature of themselves to appear in the papers with [sic] their consent; not to give interviews; not to give autographs; not to attend public dinners; not to speak in public; not to see unknown admirers provided with letters of introduction from friends—and so, and so on. The form of the oath could be varied according to the profession. Any surplus funds could be applied to the abolition of steel traps or to the protection of wild animals. Your readers doubtless will be able to amplify and improve these suggestions. But until some society of the sort is founded and supported we have no right to complain if the press assumes that publicity is sweet, and snaps us while we are being born, married and lowered into the grave. As a pledge of good faith, may I add that I am willing to take the above oath myself, and to contribute not less than five guineas annually to any society that will rid us of these pests?

Virginia Woolf

New Statesman, 28 October 1933

[]

2811: To Ethel Smyth

Sunday [29 October 1933]

52 T[avistock] S[quare, W.C.1]

First fruits of the N.S. letter.

Friday morning:

Telephone: “Kingsley Martin here. Would you and Virginia dine on Thursday or Friday next to meet Low?

L: Sorry. We’re engaged.

K.M. Oh. Then would you dine Wednesday or Thursday the following week, to meet Low?

L: I must ask Virginia—She’s out.

(Virginia; By God I wont dine any day of the year with Kingsley Martin.)

K.M. Will you ring up when Virginia comes in and tell me what day you will dine then?

So we ring off, for the moment. And I’ve had the supreme joy of telling two persistent friends that owing to my letter I cant sign their books, or send them my phiz [physiognomy]. And orders are issued to the Press. And the bombardment goes on. and I’m having my last list set up and it’ll be slipped into envelopes, and I rather think I’m in bad odour with Maynard Keynes, and not altogether popular with my fellow authors.

Tonight I slip on a magnificent dress of purple velvet and old lace and dine with 22 Jews and Jewesses to celebrate my mother in laws 84th birthday. And we shall play Bridge. And it’ll be as hot as the monkey house. And tomorrow I shall have a headache and shan’t be able to write. And then I shall sit and think of Ethel and wish she would commute herself into the wind of God and blow through my life, chastening but reviving. Psychologically speaking, as a Russian friend of mine says, I believe unconsciousness, and complete anonymity to be the only conditions—dear me what a sentence—but then I’m so hurried—in which I can write. Not to be aware of oneself. And all these people insist that one must be aware of oneself. Thats why I wont see my friends. A woman has written an essay in German on me—would you read it?

V

Berg

[]

2812: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Tuesday [31 October 1933]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Ottoline,

I suppose tomorrow, Wednesday is no good for you?

As things have turned out, I think I shall be alone, after tea. We have to go down to Sussex on Thursday partly to see Francis Birrell at Brighton partly to drive Vanessa and Quentin to Croydon, whence they fly to Switzerland. He’s been ill all the summer, with some persistent form of pleurisy, and the dr says he must have 3 months in Switzerland.

But I shall be back on Monday, and I daresay the Wednesday or Thursday of that week—8th or 9th—would be free. Perhaps the blessed Milly [maid] would ring up. And do settle some time, so that the stage mayn’t be quite empty. I would like to hear about your letter, and Lytton, and the Garsington chapter and everything.

I do nothing but read Borrow, when I’m not dining with 22 Jews to celebrate my mother in laws 84th birthday.

yrs VW

Texas

[]

2813: To V. Sackville-West

Wednesday 1st Nov. [1933]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

“I saw Vita lunching at the Café Royal today” said Tack Hutchinson last night

Oh such a pang of rage shot through me! All through dinner, and the supper, which ended with champagne and iced cake at 12.30, I was going back and foraging in my mind for the seed in my pillow: (you know what I mean: the pea under the mattress) and that was it. And I couldn’t say “who was with her?” And it burnt a hole in my mind, that you should have been lunching at the Cafe Royal and not come to see me.

How pleased you’ll be! You did it on purpose I daresay. But who were you with? You knew I should get wind of it—yes and it was a woman you were lunching with, and there was I, sitting alone and and and….. I break off my writing, which is all dish water, to make this heated exclamation:

In fact we’ve been having the devil of [a] time, what with one thing and another. Quentin’s going to Switzerland. Nessa’s flying with him to Geneva. We’re motoring them to Croydon at 6 on Friday morning: then go to Brighton to see Francis [Birrell], who can only haul himself round a table, hanging on to Desmond and a male nurse. Then back on Monday.

And when shall I see you? Dearest Creature, do write and tell me who you were lunching with at the Cafe Royal—and I sitting alone over the fire!

I’ve had your book [Collected Poems] in my hands—and very stately it is, like a slab of ivory engraved with steel; but I didn’t read it, because you are giving it me.

Oh the Cafe Royal! When Jack said that—not to me, but to the company, you could have seen my hand tremble; and then we all went on talking, and the Rothschild’s came in, and a fat man called [Harold?] Shearman, and the candles were lit, and I chose mine, a green one, and it was the first to die, which means they say that out of the 8 or 9 people there, I shall be the first to wear a winding sheet. But you’ll be lunching at the Cafe Royal!

Y V.

Couldnt we lunch together or dine? When? Where? Not Thursday 9th.

Berg

[]

2814: To Ethel Smyth

1st Nov. [1933]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Well, as the door-bell doesn’t ring at the moment, I’ve finished H.B.—some parts indeed I read twice, owing to beginning and being interrupted. Yes. Yes. Yes. That means they’re extremely good, judging them as I should a book taken from the Times Book Club. Very witty, easy, well written, full of sparks and faces and shrewdness. I see what I miss—intimacy—is the result of his now coming to life, after being a toad in an oak all those years. I get a little tired of the lunches and dinners and Pasolinis and Contessa this and that. But as I say, I see the reason; and if you send me more—how far do they go?—no doubt that dining out and dissipation will vanish. Thats why, I expect, I dont quite come to grips with him. Rather as if he were always in evening dress—white waistcoat and so on. I cant feel the grain he’s made of—cant get the full impression on to the slab of my mind, as I do when I’ve immersed myself in letters—generally. But of course this may be the result of some pane of glass between us. Too different? I want more—now what is it?—just saying things as they come into one’s head. I cant catch him off his guard. But thats, it may be, because he writes so well. And that, of course, adds to the sparkle and the fun, and the gliding in and out and the quips and cranks which are all very pleasing to me. Yes, I’d like to read the whole series through, and yours in between. Now I get the grain of you printed on the whole of my person.

Ottoline has not come, so I am alone—But stupid and sleepy because last night we sat up till one at the Hutchinsons to celebrate Barbara’s engagement to Victor Rothschild, the Jew, the richest young man in England. And they burnt 23 candles round a cake, and we each chose one, and mine—a green one—died first, so they say I shall be the first to leave the room and go out in to what it pleases you to call Heaven. How I’d like to see what you see when I say Heaven!

About the privacy campaign—that stupid, but entirely well meaning, but muddled but incredibly bat eyed, mole snouted, dark, grouting and grovelling in the mine of Fleet Street, man, Kingsley Martin, seemed, from a remark of his to L., to think I was annoyed at not being caricatured; assured L. that [David] Low did wish it, and there was still space; so that I finally wrote him a private letter which may open his eyes: but theyre so small, so sealed to everything but his own messy little trade in leading articles, that I doubt it—Anyhow, I said, The reason I wont dine with you is because you have that little guttersnipe Low with a pencil at your table—if table it can be called, I added; for the K M’s live in a high airy brainy room at Hampstead, where there’s nuts on a check table cloth and autotypes from Albert Durer on a mud coloured wall.

That reminds me—here’s L. come in so I must hurry—I’m sending you a paper, written by an exiled Jewess, on me, to read at your leisure; for she offered to pay a translator. And I said, knowing it to be all rot, Ethel will read it. So you will wont you, and tell me if I’m to say she is the only person, short of you, who has yet discovered the meaning of The Waves.

I think Miss Dodge must be all awry with rheumatics, to interfere so unnecessarily, cut out 50 lines, and delay it again 2 days. What a mania for discretion she must be possessed of! I seriously wish to read that book [Female Pipings …].

Tell me next time you write who to send my cheque to. I’ve lost the notice giving the names of peeresses. I mean the Smyth fantasia festival.

Nessa flies to Geneva with Quentin on Friday and we shall take her to Croydon about 6 in the morning: then visit Francis Birrell at Brighton—a poor good fellow, son of Augustine, who’s had a lump cut out of his brain, is paralysed, but likes to see friends for an hour. Lord how we all age and fall! Last night, Desmond MacCarthy said, drinking his champagne, ‘Yes Virginia, we are hasting to the grave.” So I went and bought a new hair brush this afternoon—to stay away with. You see, L. didnt come, I’ve had 30 minutes to myself.

V.

What do I owe you for Jones [typing]?

Berg

[]

2815: To V. Sackville-West

[8 November 1933]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Yes, very nice indeed—dinner on the 13th. Would you prefer dinner here with L. or alone out?

Let me know. Appalling rush. Oh and two such unbelievable days—Nessa flying to Geneva and back and lost in fog over Paris. 2 hours late. Oh my God—how I hate caring for people!

V.

Berg

[]

2816: To Ethel Smyth

Wednesday [8 November 1933]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

No, tomorrow will be a bad day for me, and ends with 7.30 dinner out. This evening 2½ hours of Ottoline, very lovely, black and white—Yes, I accept your quotation about her. and shall be interested to hear of future developments. But oh how sleepy 2½ hours continuous talk leaves me So I divided this page in two. Oh I’ve been in such a twitter—Nessa flying to Geneva and back and circling Paris in an aeroplane in a fog. Here was I sitting forced to make sensible remarks to [Shena] Lady Simon about education of women—waiting for a telephone. None came. Then the wrong one. Very well I said there’s been a crash—went on making sensible remarks about Newnham [College] and its future. Now this was all very silly I admit. Well I’m ashamed to send this. I’m sorry about the books delay. And I’m sure you’d better send more of H B to the typist, I want to see how he develops; but still maintain Ethel should come in between. So good night

V.

Berg

[]

2817: To Benedict Nicolson

Friday [Thursday] 9th Nov 1933

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Ben,

I heard from your mother that you very kindly asked me to tea with you when I stay with the Fishers. Could I come this Saturday, 11th, that is day after tomorrow? Leonard and I are driving through Oxford to stay at Ipsden and could be with you for about 4. But very likely this wont suit. I thought I’d ask, as I should so much like to see you, and rather doubt being able to manage it when I stay with the Fishers [on 30 November].

Could you send me a line? I wonder how you like Oxford, if you’ve met Jeremy Hutchinson, and lots of other things.

Yours ever
Virginia Woolf

Vanessa Nicolson

[]

2818: To Quentin Bell

Friday 10th Nov [1933]

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Sq. W.C.1

Dearest Quentin,

Well it has been a very agitating week, waiting for aeroplanes to settle. Nessa seems to have flown round Paris in the fog—and then she mounted into the sun, and then she suddenly saw the Channel beneath her, and Heaven on top and earth below—oh how I envy her, but never never I hope will she fly again. But she says our ancestral mountains [the Alps] rather appeal to her—she begins to feel what father felt—noble, solitary, severe. I must come and see them. Do tell me what you think of them. I daresay they change in the dawn and sunset; and one gets to think them more beautiful than any earth scape.

But to return to human life—last night we had a memoir club meeting at the Gourmet. Naturally, Roger didn’t come, having a cold; and Molly forgot to bring her manuscript; so we simply had dinner. Morgan stood it—and for some reason the wine went to our heads, and in the middle of dinner the babble was like all the cormorants, cockatoos and tigers in a tunnel roaring. Your father you see must get his roar above Leonard’s; Morgan pipes; I jerk and jibber; and at last had to kiss Duncan in an access of emotion. Then we went back to Clives: but poor dear Molly cant hear a word, and so Duncan and I talked one to each of her ears, and I couldnt say what the general din was about.

Then Julian came to tea, and made such a wonderful picture of a Miss Raine who was once the wife of Sykes Davis but is now penniless, living with a communist, and he said, six foot two, and noble as Boadicea, so that we must give her a job at the Press. And then she comes, and she’s the size of a robin and has the mind of a lovely snowball. How can she run the press? But this is strictly confidential, please; Dear old Julian is half seas over what with writing iooo words daily on Good; and running his museum, for which they need sixty screens of atrocities. They sit there at bare tables typing. Suddenly some one says Isn’t it awful—the New Statesman won’t take our advertisement? And Julian fires off a furious letter to Kingsley Martin; whereupon the lady—Mrs [Maurice] Dobb—remarks, Oh but what I meant was, the New Statesman wont give us an advertisement. From this you may judge the measure of their sanity, Its like giving a party to all London and no cake coming and the butter having gone rancid.

Also Ottoline came to tea, like a weeping willow strung with pearls. She now wears globular moons at her ears—false. But on the other hand she is now all truth, humanity and loving kindness. Nessa and Roger say she bamboozles me. Oh how I wish you were here to take my side. Angelica has just rung up to say I’m to meet her at the dentist at four; Of course I have to go—so will all mankind all her life. I’m sending you the papers. We went to Brighton and had tea with old Mr Birrell, who said, Now theres a chap called Clive; and theres Vanessa and Virginia but who are you? So one has to say I am the wife of Leonard Woolf, and the daughter of Leslie Stephen. Then he remembers exactly what father said in the year 1880. Francis has half his head shaved and looks like a Chinese Idol; Any letter from you will be welcome. But dont bother. Are there any books you want? If so you have only to speak.

Yrs Virginia

Quentin Bell

[]

2819: To Helen McAfee

13th Nov. 1933

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Miss McAfee,

I enclose the proof of my article on Turgenev. You will see that I have made one or two corrections. I hope this may reach you in time for them to be made. I have made them on the proof, but for the sake of clearness, I typed the chief alterations on a separate sheet.

Many thanks for your letter. I am so glad you liked the article. I was greatly impressed by Turgenev, reading him again after many years, and hope that I may lead some of the younger generation to look at him again.

I have left the French to you, as you suggest. The names are given as Mrs Garnett writes them.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Yale University

[]

2820: To David Cecil

Nov 15th [1933]

52 Tavistock Square, [W.C.1]

Dear David,

Thank you very much for sending me your Scott. I waited to write until I had time to read it. And last night I sat down and read it at a gulp with great enjoyment. I think you make all the points I should have tried to make, and in proportion (which is so difficult) and with great economy. All I could have added would have been something about the dialogue and its relationship—I think the last in fiction of which that can be said—to the drama. But I should never have had the patience to go through the Elizabethans and trace what I mean. I wonder whether you will convert any of the intelligent. Let us flatter ourselves that it needs real intelligence to see the point of Scott against the tide—much more than to see the point of [Gerard Manley] Hopkins with it. I shall read one of my favourites—I only read 4 or 5—at Christmas, thanks to you, and when you next come to tea—but let it be before that—I’ll try to find something more intelligent to say about your essay. But I liked it very much, and then lay back in my chair and read it, at ease, instead of bristling all over, as I do when reading in irritation, and jotting down notes with a pencil. There are two misprints: sentitive and romatic (a nice new word) which pleases me greatly, because people say I can’t spot them. (Flush swarms with them). And if I find 2, I think there must be 20. I can’t remember where you live so send this to W.n. [Wellington] Square.

Our love to Rachel.

Yours ever
Virginia Woolf

David Cecil

[]

2821: To Quentin Bell

Saturday 18th Nov. [1933]

Typewritten

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest Quentin,

Here we are spending a wet dull weeping week end in the country. Weve been walking in the marsh and are all over mud, and we saw two swans, and Pinka flopped in and set them flying. I was very glad of your letter—what a gift for pen and ink you have to be sure. Only now youve sold a picture straight off, you wont give up the brush I fear. I’m told your picture is a lovely one, and I want to go and see it; but Nessa comes round after lunch and paints me. Then it grows dark. We pull the curtains. I’ve not yet seen the Sickerts.

All my life since I wrote has been a welter of people. Last Sunday we stayed with Rosamond and Wogan [Philipps] in the weeping woods. They’ve a very nice great big red house with stone passages—unfortunately, to my taste, decorated by Banting in the modern style. And then they throw a few steel chairs about and aluminium tables—in that case I prefer the old mahogany. The truth is Wogan is only a scampering terrier brained painter, and should not decorate; but a very nice gossip and I like Rosamund a good deal better than John. Not so much ego in her composition. She’s heavy with child. Oh how we gossiped—Wogan told us such stories of the Partridges, and how poor Fanny [Frances] rang him twice in one day to drive 30 miles to Hamspray. ‘Ralph’s killing himself. Come at once’. So off he went, and then old Ralph emerged like a great baboon from some bushes. But its over now—Ralph appears stark naked with a cup of tea in his hand by your bed at eight in the morning. I think Lytton’s ghost would give a little shiver. It’s Lytton played by bumpkins—Lytton acted in the kitchen. So we gossiped, And a man called Harrod of Oxford came and said Oxford is going Communist and Buchmanist—to me all as unreal as gingerbread lions or bonfires—Oxford, I mean. They will talk through their noses and look so spry. Oh dear I’ve got to stay with the Fishers the week after. I’ll tell you all about your cousins.

Then all last week was spent running Jacqueline Stiven to earth. Did you see a passage in last weeks New Statesman called A dinner party [A Dinner]? Well, it was taken from a Room of One’s Own [p. 27], and sent in by a school girl [“aged 14”] who swore she wrote it. And Bunny believed her. Then everybody wired and wrote to say it was a hoax. And we thought it must be Logan, because of the name Stiven; and they were having Bunny on for his absurd enthusiasms. So then we all began telephoning—and it was found that Bunny has a niece who knew J. Stiven at Miss Cox’s [School] and I had to ring up her mother, and her mother was almost in a fit—said she’d disgraced the family name. And the girl said she had written it herself. And Kingsley Martin was furious. And Bunny as slow as a steam roller with a man carrying a red flag in front. And Leonard suspicious. But thats all over now.

I wonder if you’ve met Mrs Bottome, Nessa’s friend, who is a friend of Vita’s—a lady who, being married to a Forbes, sticks to Bottome heroically as her pen name. Dear me—I should never have had the courage to be Virginia Bottome. Or have you preferred, as I should, to lie by yourself sublimely? I used to think it rather sublime, being shut up but then I was not as firm in the wits as you are. I had Ottoline to tea, and now she’s sent me more memoirs. Oh and she sent her love. Her memoirs are full of appalling revelations—of course she lies, but not entirely. And how she was torn by Bertie, Lytton, Henry Lamb, Lawrence. Since Helen of Troy I dont think any woman can have launched so many ships. I wish I could lend them to you, to reveal old Bloomsbury at its height; but I dare not. Human nature is an odd mixture—isn’t it—Now take Roger. But I leave you to follow up the reflection as I must go and make tea. Its a great pleasure to hear from you, since you write such good letters, but dont if it bores you. I’ll send some papers.

I’m afraid this is very random gossip, but I send it faut de mieux as Clive would say. Julian is coming up tomorrow about a job at the BBC; and we’re having him washed and shaved.

Yrs Virginia

Quentin Bell

[]

2822: To Ethel Smyth

Sunday morning [19 November 1933]

Monks House. [Rodmell, Sussex]

Yes, I like it much better so, with the letter ‘I’ comparatively muted. I’m very glad I made myself a nuisance, because I’m sure its much more persuasive and far carrying this way than the other. I should still like it condensed, pressed, hammered hard; but thats doubtless incompatible with propaganda, people must have things written in chalk and large and repeated over and over again. And I’m sure I’m speaking only as a puritan, the narrow browed and red nosed descendant of the regicide, Venn, when I say I should still prefer the information in the appendix omitted. But I’m glad that Mr Holland doesnt show his brazen face in the text. And I think its very good tempered, and urbane, and, if a little diffuse, still genial, undeniable, and full of truth, and facts. What facts!

How good the others [chapters in Female Pipings …] are! Thats no doubt why I hum and haw over the first—they seem much more together; profound, and harmonious. But then they dont preach; they expound. There you gallop over turf as springy as a race horse—I’m thinking of Pankhurst and HB, which I’ve just re-read; and kept thinking how fresh, how full, how wise they are. There you seem to dip your pen into a deeper, richer pot: no vinegar, no sand. I wish, vainly, you’d write more biographies, like the south wind blowing through the grass. I assure you, you have a thousand natural gifts that way which we hacks have long lost. Do consider this should the time ever come when, having lunched with Lady Astor, and had tea off gold plate with Princess Louise (how I adore that side of you) you pull off your smart clothes and sit down at Coign at the hideous table into which you once knocked nails.

I am writing in a divided mind—that is I should be packing, writing to Ottoline and Quentin, and at the same time making up my mind about an MS. And it pours

V.

I’ll send the book back, but let me have my copy.

Berg

[]

2823: To Ethel Smyth

Tuesday [21 November 1933]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

I’ll send the book [Female Pipings in Eden] back today, if I can get the time to pack it. But I’m in a rush, and so shall be for the rest of the week, which is therefore hopeless. I’m amused and delighted to find (in Pipings—odious name) that you attribute Orlando to V. Sackville West. Thats what I’m aiming at—and dont let that enthusiastic and amiable ass Holtby go and write another letter criticising the critics! Surely the horror she produced in T. and T. about the Prison was enough for ever. (This refers to an enclosure, just showing up under a mountain of letters, from which I infer, perhaps unjustly, that the amiable goose—nobody but a goose could have such eyes and nose—has other plans of the kind in her head about the festival. However, perhaps she’s meaning something else.) I was enchanted by your courtly grace to HRH. I shall copy it when I’m asked to St James’s by Pss Patricia—not that I am asked, but long to know how much cream you drank out of the golden cup. and whether you said as you so often do, Now show me the Klav pulling up your new skirt to adjust the stays, which as you maintain give your figure that monumental majesty which we all admire—Colefax is coming to tea, and I must write to Ottoline, who’s—but no, I cant go into that now

V.

I put Surrey because they mistake a solitary Woking for Worthing

Berg

[]

2824: To V. Sackville-West

22nd Nov. [1933]

52 T[avistock] S[quare, W.C.1]

Oh faithless—why has everybody got a book and not I? Didnt I give you Flush and Orlando? Arent I a critic too—arent I a woman? Dont you care what I say? Am I nothing to you, physically morally or intellectually? Ethel’s got one; so has, I daresay, Sibyl, Ottoline, Dotty, Lord Berners and Logan Pearsall Smith. Look here, Vita, you may be putting off humanity and rising, like the day star, a dog—but do let your last act, in the guise of humanity, be to pack a book, called V. Sackville West Collected Poems and sign it for me. Then let the hair grow between your toes and catch the running hare and the sleeping partridge as much as ever you like. Anyhow, I wont read a single thing you wrote, or think of you, except as a mangy ill bred cur, with no tail—a dog of all dogs the most worthless, one that bites a widow in a lane. So there.

Sibyl came yesterday and said Lord B. is marrying V. Trefusis, whom you once knew, because they both like poached eggs.

I feel inclined that way myself, in revenge on you. No, I couldn’t marry one or t’other. Sibyl is like a signboard that has hung in the rain and sun since the King (George 3rd) was on the throne; and cant even curse poor woman. Her mind flickers like an arc lamp. Oh such a lot of odds and ends she said, but no odd had an end or end an odd—when shall I see you? Oh but that isnt an end is it—what was once a grove of flowering trees, and nymphs walking among them through the daffodils. And I’m dining with Mary [Hutchinson], ostensibly to meet Michael Arlen, but who knows what goes on behind the curtains? Eh?

V.

Do you know a woman called Phyllis Bottome?

And another called Jean Cadell?

Berg

[]

2825: To V. Sackville-West

Sunday [26 November 1933]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Yes dearest Creature—that will be very nice, tea on Dec 15th: but let it be as early as possible: its the devil of a long way off.

And the book came. And I’ve read one or two of the new ones. And I liked them yes—I liked the one to Enid Bagnold; and I think I see how you may develop differently. You’re an odd mixture as a poet. I like you for being ‘out-moded’ and not caring a damn: thats why you’re free to change; free and lusty. I make up poems, something in the manner of Don Juan, that you might write. But I’ve only (yes I think I see some very interesting things in your poems) looked between the pages here and there. If you will come Early on the 15th I will tell you more. Did you like Selincourt today? L. says they are ‘doing well’—your poems.

I liked Jean Cadell—sandy as a cat, and very nervous. She was making a speech, and I sat by her at lunch.

I gather that thats his Lordships [Lord Berners] joke—the engagement I mean, and rather agree with L. who says that ostlers and barmaids would have better manners.

Old Ethel complains no one notices her book [Female Pipings…]—its not for lack of trumpeting. And I’m flirting with Ottoline—and who is taking Dial for love of you?

Oh dear me, I wish I could read behind some of the poems!

V.

We will come over from Monks and print. Thats a good idea.

Berg

[]

2826: To Quentin Bell

Sunday 26th Nov [1933]

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Sq. [W.C.1]

Dearest Quentin,

I read your letter with great pleasure in Time and Tide; it seemed to me put with masterly brevity; most true. But I am no politician—how do you come by that queer instinct? I had such a party the other night at Mary’s—she bet me I wouldn’t go, to meet Michael Arlen, who wrote The Green Hat. So I did go; and there he was, and a mort of other notables; including Elizabeth Princess Bibesco, all in flamingo feathers which parted to give view to her own brown down, (how coarse this is; but true). M.A. is a rubber faced little sweaty Armenian monkey, full of protestations, as if I’d just whipped him on the behind for writing the Green Hat. He never stopped apologising, said he only did it to make money, and made fifty thousand pounds; and so married a Greek wife, who was there, silent as an image and stupid, they said, as a mummy; but rather in the style of the Venus of Milo all the same. “She’s very silent”, he said to me, “but a perfect lady”. He is not a perfect gentleman. But then he has made fifty thousand pounds, and is now going to write a book for highbrows. Barbara and Victor [Rothschild] were also there;—well, I wont be indiscreet, but between you and me, that’s a marriage bound for the rocks. Victor would make me shoot him in ten minutes. He’s a Jew; that I rather like but—no, I wont be indiscreet. He had come in the other morning carrying a cardboard box big enough to hold a top hat; and said to B. “Here’s a little present”. She, thinking it was a muff or a pair of shoes, never cut the string till he’d gone; when out there fell box upon box of pure red rubies—crowns made of rubies, bracelets, rings, breastplates, festoons—all ruby; all red as the morning star and bright as dawn. Jack said the whole room was lit up. They are worth £300,000 pounds. So they can’t insure them and they have to be taken to the Bank in a steel lined case and kept there. An old Rothschild bought them 100 years ago for his wife; but she kept them under her bed; I am making Barbara dine here in them next week; and am having the police staff in the Square enlarged. But no—not for all the rubies in the mines of Africa—no, Quentin; no. But I’m discreet.

Then I’m involved with your friend Sickert. I went to his show, and was so much impressed that Nessa made me write to him; and he said “Do me the favour to write about my pictures and say you like them”. “I have always been a literary painter, thank goodness, like all the decent painters. Do be the first to say so” he says. I rather think of trying. Nessa is going to take me to tea with him. Do you think one could treat his paintings like novels? I went to Agnews yesterday and Mr Colin [Agnew] had them all brought down, and lined a room; and he asked me to write a book on them. What do you think of Sickert’s painting? I gather Roger is rather down on it; so is Clive. It seems to me all that painting ought to be. Am I wrong? if so, why? Are the Alps looking fine? Are there eagles?

So goodbye, Virginia

Quentin Bell

[]

2827: To Ethel Smyth

Sunday [3 December 1933]

Monks House [Rodmell, Sussex]

Well, Ethel, Rebecca [West] exclaims with rapture at the thought of meeting the famous woman she calls rather oddly to my ears, Dr. Smyth, on Thursday next at 4.30. So please be punctual and come in your most genial and Bacchic mood, for R. rather raises my hackles, being so insecure herself, and I always, as you know, feel the wind before it blows. A tribute to my own sympathetic nature with which I’m sure you’ll agree.

Oh my God, what a lot I’ve talked the last few days! [at Oxford]—150 boys with some literary tendency (concealed) shook my hand at New College each led like a victim to the altar, by my old bald white priestly cousin Herbert Fisher. We stood in a long gallery, and so it went on till midnight, and I ran out of small talk, and could only think of bargain sales in Selfridges basement to talk about. Why, I ask you as the daughter of a general, why is human society organised on lines which inflict acute agony on the giver and receiver? Why must I stand 3 hours saying Are you first or third year? Are you a cousin of Tom Robertson or his son? Have you read Edith Sitwell—when my lips are parched with thirst and there’s an East wind blowing down the corridor? Mrs Fisher is an old hen-wife, by which I mean that she’s so nobly (because they’re underpaid and must entertain) cheeseparing that they dont allow eggs for breakfast, and I’m so constituted that I loathe salt fish. But there was a certain monastic dignity about the cloisters in moonlight (not that I like colleges) and the young are cool faced and pinked lipped, if only I could have lain on cushions and shied roses at them—instead of standing in a draught handing penny buns. No I dont like institutes where dressing bells ring for dining, and praying bells ring for prayers, and all hours have their duties, which one pretends to observe, but with a lie in ones heart—so that even my kind old cousin, who once loved cricket, I think, is now as hollow as a corn husk. But as you would say

—Well—

Pipings seems to be having a very fine press, which means sales, I hope. So do be punctual on Thursday at 4.30.

V

Berg

[]

2828: To Quentin Bell

Sunday 3rd Dec [1933]

Typewritten

Monk’s House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest Quentin,

I was much amused to hear of Mr Malcolm Sargent and his sheets—he wrote to the papers saying that he is in the best of health and tempers and proposes to emerge strong as a lion to control the orchestra. Now I thought him a very bad conductor. And you lead me to infer his temper’s vile.

I like getting these rounded views of contemporary life. I’ve seen a good deal of life, so called, since I wrote, I spent a night with the Fishers at the Wardens Lodgings—rather an impressive 14th century house, part tithe barn, but then came the eighteenth century and cut up the barn into bedrooms with panels; and modern youth flourishes, discreetly, decorously, all over the house. 1 should think there were one hundred promising undergraduates in after dinner; and I shook hands with all; and tried to think what to say, but oh dear what a farce! One might as well go to a school treat and hand out penny buns. There was the great Isaiah Berlin, a Portugese Jew by the look of him, Oxford’s leading light; a communist, I think, a fire eater—but at Herbert’s everyone minces and mouths and you wouldn’t guess to talk to them that they had a spark or a spunk. Herbert is all that is refined and stately; he looks much like Adrian [Stephen]; but office has smoothed out all corrugosities. He told me story after story about the Cabinet of 1916. To him that was what a Christmas tree is to a child, and the poor old moth still haunts those extinct, but once radiant, candles. He adores Lloyd George; he sniffs at Bloomsbury. “No I cannot see much to be said for Mr Eliot; no music”. He thinks Winston Churchill a very good painter. He deplores the present state of everything. But he does his bit like a Bishop. And he was very kind to me, and we cracked a little about Madge and Will and George and Uncle Halford— the dead, or practically dead. And there was one lovely girl, I think called Lynd, daughter of Robert, who boards with the Fishers; having been, I gather—but may be wrong—turned out of Somerville for being caught fully dressed talking about the gold standard with a young man. Why are officials so noble but so chilly? As for Lettice [Mrs Fisher], she is an old henwife, cheese paring, wispy, all brawn and muscle; no flesh; no humour; but again as kind as they make them—which, if you leave out imagination, humour, music, humanity—doesn’t go the whole length. And the beds were hard.

Then we had old Tom Eliot to tea, and sat over the fire and gossiped. He was primed with Clive’s brandy, for he had been lunching till tea time on old brandy with Clive, Rebecca West and Lady Colefax. So he was bemused and mellow; and only wanted the W.C. For as he said, he had been drinking since one thirty. What a phantasma one’s friends lives are! Tom is writing a pageant [The Rock] to be acted at Sadlers Wells in the spring on London; in order to collect one quarter of a million to build forty six churches in the suburbs. “Why” asked Leonard. And Tom merely chuckled. I rather think his God is dwindling. But he likes clerical society, and was going to call on the Vicar of Clerkenwell. Dear me, I wish you would come back soon, and then we could go into all these matters together.

Roger and Helen also dined with us. Looked at in a half light Helen reminds me of a red rose just falling on a June night. Dont you think she has a kind of foull (should read ‘full’) blown beauty? And one or two rain drops might be added. But she was very kind and not too thorny that night. Roger never stops lecturing. So very tactfully we said What is the use of criticism? And he said I think—but its all in his Cambridge lecture—criticism is useless, save as it—but here I lost count, being very sleepy that night. Have you seen his lecture? “Well”, he said to me, “you wouldn’t find any literature in my paintings—this referred to my essay on Sickert. “What should I find?” I asked. Happily he was stumping down the stairs. So you see old Bloomsbury still crackles under the pot. We have a memoir meeting next week; and I have Ethel Smyth and Rebecca West to tea to discuss the life of Mrs Pankhurst. In strict confidence, Ethel used to love Emmeline—they shared a bed.

Its a howling gale here.

Virginia

Quentin Bell

[]

2829: To Logan Pearsall Smith

5th Dec. 1933

52 Tavistock Sqre. W.C.[1]

Dear Logan,

Many thanks for your letter. I have been away, or I would have written sooner.

I am much honoured that the Pronounciating [sic] Committee of the BBC should have considered inviting me to join them and of course I should be delighted—if the duties are as light as you say. But I think I ought to draw your attention to the fact that my education was extremely defective; I have no special knowledge of words or their pronunciation, and frequently find myself at fault in pronouncing biblical or classical names. Whether therefore I should be of the least use on the Committee I am doubtful. But I leave myself in your hands and thank you at any rate for the suggestion.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Frederick B. Adams Jr.

[]

2830: To Stephen Spender

10th Dec [1933]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Stephen,

Could you dine with us on Tuesday 19th at 8?—without changing of course. I hope you may be able to.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

2831: To David Garnett

Sunday [10 December 1933]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Bunny,

Well if you persist in being generous, I cant refuse to take the books [unidentified], which make a very magnificent row. Whats more, I read them. And if anyone could induce me to write about Shakespeare, it would be you: perhaps I will one day; but apart from wanting to write something quite different at the moment (entirely different from Shakespeare) I have a kind of feeling that unless one is possessed of the truth, or is a garrulous old busybody, from America, one ought to hold one’s tongue. So I will: I mean I wont. Send it to Logan is what I mean, and take my blessing. I’m incapable of writing sense at the moment because one of our friends, an intolerable windbag, but golden hearted, is just ringing the bell. But I think you are very generous to your old friends.

Cant I send you a book in exchange?

Here he is

yr affate
V

Berg

[]

2832: To Ethel Smyth

Tuesday [12 December 1933]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Here’s the cutting. Yes, I see its very gratifying and I’ve no doubt you are always right about everything.

In fact I thought you perfectly adorable last night and wanted to fling my arms round you, or prostrate myself at your tufted-crow feet; but refrained. Rebecca’s [West] an odd mix up, isn’t she; like some prehistoric aboreal animal to look at, but an electric mind. No, I had to go to my poor old mother in law; aged 85, going to Epsom and back, back to Epsom and back, with a daughter, to a specialist, husband (daughters) furious; we arrive at 5; choc. cake; “oh my dear V. how you’ve cheered me after my dreadful day with George—” So there I was, eating choc. cake some of which I conveyed secretly into my pocket, and not listening in But then, as you always say family comes before art, like God and King George—

V

Berg

[]

2833: To Quentin Bell

Tuesday 12th Dec [1933]

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Sq. [W.C.1]

Dearest Quentin,

If you were here today—a very foggy cold day—I should say to you, My dear Quentin, if you will take me, I will come. What to? you may ask. To which I reply, number three Belgrave Square. Who the devil lives there? you would say. And in one word I should reply; a cocktail party given by the Hutchinsons to anticipate their daughter’s marriage to the richest Jew in Europe [Victor Rothschild]. Oysters and champagne cup. But as youre not here, and its foggy, and its gloomy, and I’ve no clothes, and cant be bothered to rush out and buy gloves, hat, and shoes, all for a Jew, I sit in my underground vault, with the fog thick on the skylight, writing—oh dear how happy I am not to go! We had the young couple the other night; and they brought a brown bag; and out of this they lifted rubies—rubies set in diamonds. And we all crowned ourselves with the Rothschild rubies; worth £300,000. Well? Nessa and Duncan came in, and said they made just as good in Regent Street. But the diamonds were nice; like spiders webs—immortal spiders webs; spiders webs made in the valleys of the moon. But Nessa will tell you she didn’t like the flavour of the Jew. Like raw pork, she said. Surely rather an unkind saying? Barbara I like; I think she’s flying her little flag gamely; but she’ll founder they say; in six months, she’ll be looking out of the window, and seeing a trim, spare Englishman, and sighing, Oh if I were back in my native fields. Thats Nessa again.

Yesterday I had Ethel Smyth—who adores you, and says you’re the image of what she’s sought in man all her life, and would marry you, given a dog’s chance—and Rebecca West to tea. It was a screaming howling party. Old Ethel meanders so. And she’s so deaf. And she’s so violent. But she is, to give her her due, very shrewd. And she has battered about the world like a buccaneer, and so when Leonard claps his hand on her mouth, she sits silent, for a second. Rebecca is the oddest woman; like an arboreal animal grasping a tree, and showing all her teeth, as if another animal were about to seize her young. This may be the result of having a son out of wedlock. However, she is tenacious and masterful and very good company, having also battered about in the stinking underworld of hack writers—people like Priestley, [Robert] Lynd, [J.C.] Squire, and others so covered with mud one cant name them even.

They discussed Mrs Pankhurst, and how she smelt when hunger striking; apparently, if you dont drink you smell horribly after three days.

Leonard is at this moment closeted with Lyn [Lloyd] Irvine who wants to start a new paper (keep this to yourself) written entirely by herself; and printed on a cyclo style [Monologue]. This is a last effort on her part to speak the truth and make a living. Its to come out fortnightly, and give her views on politics, art, letters, life. Would you do a drawing—but she cant pay, and I daresay the first number will only beget three more; and then it will die. Life and Letters is dying. They all die.

We went to Orpheus [Gluck]—the loveliest opera ever written—at Sadlers Wells; and there was a congeries of old fogies—Ottoline hawking and mousing; Stephen Spender, being hawked and moused; Helen [Anrep], the Russian children; Oliver [Strachey] and a hard featured lady who inspires him with rapture; also a young woman called Lynd, whom I think you might like.

Good bye now, as I am not being very amusing, but then all the time I am feeling, ought I to go to Belgrave Square?

Whats happening to Malcolm Sargent and his sheets? And the Alps your grandfather climbed?

Virginia

[handwritten]

I suppose you read Roger’s inaugural [Cambridge] lecture. I wonder what you thought of it.

Quentin Bell

[]

2834: To V. Sackville-West

Wednesday [13 December 1933]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Just to say that you are coming on Friday not later than 4.30—aren’t you? and you do still remember me, with affection, in spite of never writing. But then if your hands have turned to paws.

I’ve a mint of things to talk to you about. What fun to see you at the bottom of the stairs, like a fishmongers shop again. Wasn’t it about this time of year we saw the porpoise [in December 1925]? You wore a pink shirt and pearls. Lord how I remember it!

V.

Please sign this for me—I want to send her a guinea [unidentified].

Berg

[]

2835: To Ethel Smyth

Tuesday 19th Dec [1933]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Here, after a long interval, is the name and address of the Times Supt. reviewer—G. C. Williams: 16 Aubrey Walk W.8.

So I hope you’ll write him a nice kind letter. And oh Lord how I wish M. Baring wouldn’t write nice kind letters about you to the N. S. Why drag in these faded testimonials, as if you were a 10th rate and meretorious hack in need of advertisement? How furious I should be if my friends wrote like that about me!—but well intentioned no doubt.

No, we did not go to Rodmell this week end, but must go on Thursday, and see this howling horror through. Again I ask, why is humanity bent on self-torture? I ascribe it chiefly to your religion. Have you read Eliot? I ask, because in the watches of the night I was thinking of the differences between generations: I was thinking how you admire Robert Peckham (by M.B.) [Maurice Baring, 1930] and I hate it, no, not hate; but merely feel that a spider has walked across a garden pond; and then how you hate Eliot; so what happens in the brain of man. What standard is there, and why these diversities. But I must wash

V.

Berg

[]

2836: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

19th Dec. [1933]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.

Dearest Ottoline,

Now we are off, and I haven’t seen you, but what was the use of asking you on top of Ethel Smyth, Rebecca West, Vita Nicolson and so on?—which reminds me that Vita wants to see you, and also reminds me that Rebecca was fascinating—ungainly, awkward, powerful, arborial, like some sloth or mandrill; but oh what a joy to grapple with her hairy arms! I mean she was very upstanding and outspoken, and we discussed religion, sex, literature and other problems, violently, in a roar, to catch Ethel’s ear, for 3 hours. This is to corroborate my view, and in oppostion to yours—but who knows? The human soul is deaf, and next time she may bite my fingers to the bone. Did you know Stella Benson? I’m sorry for her death—I think one of these days she might have written something I liked—And I wanted to see her, apart from the dull little man who never left her alone a moment.

Now as I say we are going, why I cant think, to Rodmell, where life will be a flight from the cold to the fire; but perhaps we shall see the downs sometimes. And I cant go on with this scribble, because, owing entirely to you, Stephen Spender is dining here, and I must wash. Mark my words—the whole evening will be spent in talking of Stephen Spender, and when the stars are in the sky, I shall stumble to bed wondering by what alchemy you refine these rough youths to gold. So no more.

yrs V

Texas

[]

2837: To Quentin Bell

21st Dec 1933

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Sq. [W.C.1]

Dearest Quentin,

This is a black foggy Christmas week; and the human race is distracted and unlovable. That is, I spent yesterday in Oxford Street buying things like gloves and stockings. A drought is imminent; Rodmell has long ceased to wash; and it is said that Communion is no longer possible, owing to the congealed state of the holy blood. We go down today and I shall think of you when the owl comes out of the ivy bush and the bells toll. It was thus that we ushered out the old clergyman’s soul, if you remember. Stephen Spender and Miss [Sighle] Lynd—I cant name her, for being Irish her parents have christened her some faery Celtic name—dined here last night. She is dusky, twilit, silent, secretive. He on the other hand talks incessantly and will pan out in years to come a prodigious bore. But he’s a nice poetic youth; big nosed, bright eyed, like a giant thrush. The worst of being a poet is one must be a genius; and so he cant talk long without bringing in the abilities and disabilities of great poets; Yeats has praised him; I see being young is hellish. One wants to cut a figure. He is writing about Henry James and has tea alone with Ottoline and is married to a Sergeant in the Guards. They have set up a new quarter in Maida Vale; I propose to call them the Lilies of the Valley. Theres William Plomer, with his policeman; then Stephen, then [Wystan] Auden and Joe Ackerly, all lodged in Maida Vale, and wearing different coloured Lilies.

Their great sorrow at the moment is Siegfried Sassoon’s defection; he’s gone and married a woman, and says—Rosamond showed me his letter—that he has never till now known what love meant. It is the saving of life he says; and this greatly worries the Lilies of the Valley, among whom is Morgan of course, who loves a crippled bootmaker; why this passion for the porter, the policeman and the bootmaker? Well, we must go into the matter when you come back. Angelica is once more in town; and the place is therefore humming. I suppose in two years there will be a series of bullets flying and knives gashing—for Gods sake dont let her marry a policeman.

Clive gave a party for me to meet Sickert the other night and was at his best; he primed us with wine and turkey; cigars and brandy; in consequence we all kissed each other, and I am committed to write and write and write about Sickert’s books—he says they are not pictures. I think Christmas must be better in the Alps than in England. Here is a small present from your poor old doddering Aunt.

Virginia

Quentin Bell

[]

2838: To Helen McAfee

Dec. 21st 1933

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Miss McAfee,

Many thanks for the cheque for the Turgenev article. It is very good of you to trouble about the corrections; owing to Christmas posts the Yale Review has not yet reached me, but as we are just going away, I write now. It is always full of good things, and a great contrast to the usual magazine, either on our side or on yours.

With best wishes for the New Year

Yours very sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Yale University

[]

2839: To Hugh Walpole

27th Dec [1933]

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

My dear Hugh,

Why didn’t you come to tea anyhow?—I wish you had; and even if you hadn’t found me there’s the lady next door, who’s taken to playing Bach so that I think she must be rising in her profession. Even in my comparatively respectable room, you’d have found a mixed company, perhaps to your liking; only I’m not sure whether you, who like everybody, dont for that very reason hate old Ethel Smyth; and loathe Rebecca West—thats my last odd collection. It went very well, though: they bawled about religion and Mrs Pankhurst. Rebecca has a vigorous mind—and I think you do like her. And one day you’d have found me caparisoned in £300,000 worth of rubies, belonging to the Rothschilds. This is by way of asserting myself, rather tamely, against the unparallelled (no—l’s wrong as usual) splendours of your progress. Oh but, though I wasn’t at Bridgewater House myself, Vanessa was, mine, not yours, and she’s become a roaring Tory, instead of a red radical, all because of Mary’s heaving bosom blue with sequins, white with diamonds. The majesty of the sight, the way she stooped her neck here and then there, overcame my sister and Duncan, who stood in the gallery, completely. But you shook hands. No, we cant keep pace with you. And I was at Oxford, but not to speak on the English novel. My lips refuse to open in public—and you say yours positively enjoy it! And now you’re off to Nassau and Jamaica as easily as I trip up the village to post. Yes please bring me a sponge. There’s no water in Rodmell, and I must spend a week in London washing. Mrs Marsh, the horse breeder, has to lodge in Lewes, all for the sake of a hot bath. The Rector never washes, so the drought leaves him as it found him. He has married Miss Young-husband—did I tell you?—with his wife still green in the grave. Hence many wont call on her—not that they liked the first wife, but its a question of right feeling.

I’ve had a sad disappointment—Leons second novel—you remember the Livingstone man—might be a stillborn bantling dropped out of Mrs Humphry Ward. We cant publish it. But this is secret. What a bore! Are you spouting ink like a whale? I am: too profusely. But they cant say of Hugh and Virginia that they’re Mrs Ward’s miscarriages: we are our own begetters anyhow. Vita and the boys came to recover from the mad bad old woman at Roedean [Lady Sackville]; and Lydia and Maynard: Lydia wants to act but cant: and I’m going to see Bergner, and I wish you’d write to me from the lovely South; and go on with your autobiography, for you’re living at the rate of 10,000 words a day: and I must stop this drivel,

with love from us both,
V.

I forgot the one thing I meant to say—we’re driving North in the spring—may we call at Brackenburn?

Texas

[]

2840: To Katherine Arnold-Forster

27th Dec [1933]

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Ka,

The gingerbread came in the very nick of time to save my reputation when we had 8 people to tea on Christmas Day. And there’s still some left, in spite of Maynard. I hate it, generally, but this I like, and Leonard adores. Of course Cornwall explains it. I must get the address in Penzance—what an angel you were to send it. Also a large jar of cream arrived: but not, we thought, Cornish. No address on it, so I shall thank you for that too.

I’ve been walking over the downs, and cant help thinking that of their kind you cant beat them, specially in winter.

In the spring we are going to Ireland and the Hebrides because it seems wrong to see Greece and not the British Isles. But I dont see why Cornwall shouldn’t be the next place to Ireland if you’re there still. (I mean in Cornwall: too dazed to write)

Give my love to Mark: only he’ll be so large now he wont remember the Wolves and the raven. L. is chopping wood, and we shall have more gingerbread with our dinner.

Yrs Virginia

I hope you and Will are going to find a job for Julian—make him speak and drive his car through hostile crowds.

Mark Arnold-Forster

[]

2841: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

31st Dec. [1933]

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

Dearest Ottoline,

You are a wonderful woman—for many reasons; but specially for sending a present—a lovely original wild and yet useful present—which arrived on Christmas day. I love being ‘remembered’ as they say; and I hung it on a chair, when the Keynes’s lunched here, and boasted, how you had given it me. What a snob I am aren’t I! But I cant help it. It was a very nice Christmas, as it happened; I had my shawl, and the turkey was large enough and we had cream, and lots of coloured fruits, and sat and gorged—Maynard Lydia Leonard and I. No, Nessa and Clive were doing penance at the old Bells; and so the moment has not yet come for that remark of mine, about you, over the log fire. But I intend to make it on Sunday, and I shall whisper to myself what you say I may whisper [unexplained]. Dear me, how I like people to be fond of me—how deeply emotional or perhaps sentimental I am. Perhaps in another age, one would never have thought of the word sentimental, and then life would have been simpler. But do lets go on whispering under our breath, so that Bertie and Tom cant hear us.

This morning I had a remarkable letter, for the first time, from Vivienne Haigh Eliot. Happily she doesn’t ask me to do anything. She merely says that Tom refuses to come back to her, and that it is a great tragedy—so I suppose I can agree and say no more. She has made Leonard her executor, but writes sensibly—rather severely, and with some dignity poor woman, believing, she says, that I respect marriage.

And Vita came with her sons, one Eton, one Oxford, which explains why she has to spin those sleepwalking servant girl novels. I told her you would like to see her. I remain always very fond of her—this I say because on the surface, she’s rather red and black and gaudy, I know: and very slow; and very, compared to us, primitive: but she is incapable of insincerity or pose, and digs and digs, and waters, and walks her dogs, and reads her poets, and falls in love with every pretty woman, just like a man, and is to my mind genuinely aristocratic; but I cant swear that she wont bore you: certainly she’ll fall in love with you. But do let her come down from her rose-red tower where she sits with thousands of pigeons cooing over her head.

I’m so cold in the fingers that I cant write, or I would tell you all about Rebecca, Stephen and the rest. R’s great point is her tenacious and muscular mind, and all her difficulty comes from the wheals and scars left by the hoofmarks of Wells. Thats why I prefer her to the niminy piminies—the Stephens [Spenders] and the Williams [Plomers], whose minds are refrigerators, and souls blank paper—But Stephen was charming that night, and curbed his egotistic mania.

I’m sending you a little book, Montesqueou (cant spell it) though you will have it, but its small and can be stood in a corner—(or let me give you another)—I was reading it the day Julian was born [in 1908], and have a sentimental feeling for a special page. And that was before I met you.

So goodnight—and tomorrow is 1934, so be well, and happy and come and see me.

yrs Virginia

Texas

[]

Letters 2842-2882 (January-April 1934)

2842: To Ethel Smyth

Thursday [4 January 1934]

Monks House. [Rodmell, Sussex]

Many congratulations on terrific ovation last night. I expect you’re too overwhelmed, with that and other things to have time to read and write letters—And we’ve just had news that one of L’s sisters is dying. So no more.

V.

Coming to the lunch on the 18th.

Berg

[]

2843: To V. Sackville-West

4th January 1934

Monk’s House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Yes, I listen (but not to the Prison) Please then take a ticket for me for 18th. 7/6. I’ll pay: and the food will be horrid—slabs, watery. But I don’t come back till the 14th.

Then of course you go away. Suggest a night for dinner off your own bat. No engagements so far. And L’s sister, one I didn’t know, but with two small children, is dying today. And my mother-in-law has quarrelled with the husband: son-in-law. What a life in many ways: but are you fond of me?

Who do you think I met galloping on the downs in the gloaming? Your Enid [Bagnold]. And she’s coming to tea tomorrow. Shall I fall in love with her?

V.

Come early and lets talk over the fire.

Berg

[]

2844: To Vanessa Bell

Friday [5 January 1934]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

We have just heard that Leonards sister died yesterday. He has to go to the funeral on Sunday in London, so could you come on Monday instead. I think I shall go up, though not to the funeral. I shall expect you on Monday unless I hear.

V.

Berg

[]

2845: To Quentin Bell

10th Jan. 1934

Monk’s House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest Quentin,

It is so cold that I cant go to my outhouse; and as my typewriter is there, I must write in my hand—which you can’t read. But there isnt much to say—we are all rusticating very domestically—Charleston, Tilton, Rodmell. It is true that one of Leonard’s sisters died last week, and we went up for the funeral. Jewesses are buried without much hope of immortality: at Balls Pond, it is a very severe service, Leonard said. I did not go, as women are happily not allowed. Her husband killed her by neglect, and there are great feelings about it—hatred, bitterness, and a mean sordid desire on his part to cadge money to educate the children—It was all very interesting, as the Jews dress up in black, wear top hats, and look exactly like Hebrew prophets. My brothers in law sat round, cursing, and entirely righteous and hopeless.

For the rest, Lady Jones [Enid Bagnold] came to tea. She is an old flame of Desmond’s; about 40, with 6 children, and they live at Rottingdean in Burne Jones’s house, filled with decayed angels and partless boys. I’m going to see her tomorrow. Julian came over, not partless by any means. He seems to be be firing squibs in all directions, and is coming to town, like Dick Whittington, to find his fortune. Perhaps he will shed Lettice [Ramsay] and acquire a rosy milkman: I hope not: the lower orders should love each other.

Ethel Smyth, who has a passion for you, has been deafening us every evening on the wireless with her caterwauling. At last, she burst into one flame, and had a gigantic party to eat sausages at midnight. And on Tuesday [Thursday] I have to go to a lunch party in her honour. And then I hope the Smyth festival is over. Has it reached Switzerland? Or are the mountains pure?

Are you writing your history of Monaco? Do send it to the Hogarth Press. We badly want a good book. I could illustrate it. Angelica and Eve walked over the downs from Charleston; how the young do grow to be sure! Ann and Judith weigh 10.8 each.

So goodbye Virginia

Quentin Bell

[]

2846: To Ethel Smyth

Thursday [11 January 1934]

Monks House [Rodmell, Sussex]

Yes, I know I ought to have written, but I’ve been living in such a different world. Leonard’s sister you see—no you’ve forgotten all that, very naturally, in your general helter skelter—died, poor woman; literally was killed by her husband; and I went up to see my mother in law; and really it would have drawn tears from a stone—poor old woman, aged 84, she’d sat up 2 nights with the dying and the husband [George Walker], a cheap American ruffian, with whom she’d quarrelled violently: there they sat side by side and the daughter died between them; and my mother in law, said “She asked so little of life”—an extraordinarily good epitaph: “And why am I left alive?”—and then there was the funeral and all the Jews came to Tavistock Sqre and sat round like prophets in their black clothes and top hats denouncing unrighteousness. But I cant tell the whole story: and you living in a blaze of glory. How odd that two such different versions of life should go on at the same time.

But if it was an ‘agony’ to you, this celebration, as you say, and I can well believe, why the devil didn’t you wring their necks and say I wont have it? Or do you like some parts and not others?

No no no, we shall never see eye to eye about Keats and Shelley and Vita and Christina [Rossetti] and whats common and whats fine—but it doesnt matter a straw that I can see, since no doubt the God in whom you trust likes diversity among his creatures and is no doubt roaring with laughter both at you and at me. We come back on Sunday I think—In haste and illegibility

V.

Berg

[]

2847: To Donald Brace

13th Jan 1934

Typwritten

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Mr Brace,

It is very good indeed of you to have troubled to make enquiries about selling the MS of A Room of Ones Own. I am sure you are right, and that it would be better to try to sell it here. Now and again booksellers ask me for manuscripts.

I am very glad that Flush seems to be doing well with you. I had no notion it would be so popular; and as usual, owe you thanks for the trouble you take with my books.

We are just returning to London after a long Christmas here. With best wishes from us both,

yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

P.S. Your second letter has come. I am refusing Mr Potters invitation [unidentified], kind as it is, and flattering But I do not feel that I can lecture, whatever the invitation.

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

[]

2848: To Lyn Irvine

Wednesday [17 January 1934]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Lyn,

I don’t quite know what to say about your suggestion. I am willing, if you wish it to review David Cecil’s book [Early Victorian Novelists] for you, and of course I don’t want to be paid. But I can’t help feeling that the people who subscribe to the Monologue want you to write yourself, or the young who have something they want to say. If they find me writing, they’ll suspect that I’m there for advertisement purposes, not because I have anything I want to say about Victorian novels (which I havent) And I think they’ll feel a little defrauded. At least thats what I should feel if I bought the Monologue on the strength of the prospectus and found say Rebecca West or E. M. Forster, writing reviews.

But let me know what you think. If you want it I am ready, as I say.

We’re just back from Rodmell

Yours
Virginia Woolf

Sussex

[]

2849: To Ethel Smyth

Sunday [21 January 1934]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

I’m sorry I couldn’t write yesterday, but we were at Cambridge all day. These are my engagements:

Monday 22nd Rose Macaulay and friend to tea

Tuesday 23 rd Kept for Vanessa and Angelica.

Wed. 24th I’m dining out and want to rest my lips (I’m rather afflicted with a little temperature) beforehand.

Thursday 25th No good for you: an American I think here. (No thats Tuesday next)

Friday 26th We go to Rodmell.

I know you dont care for mixed interviews, but Lord knows how I’m to sweep a clear space—I’m rather of your opinion that private conversations are the only fruitful, but how is one to give up every day to a separate person? Even the organising energy of the generals daughter couldn’t run life on that magnificent scale. But choose what you like and I’ll do my best, about Bruno Walter I’m longing to go to his rehearsal and so is L.

No, I’ve never read anything by C. St John unless she edited Ellen Terry’s letters to GBS. which I thought admirable: on the other hand I didnt like the Ellen Terry life edited perhaps by her—but I may be thinking of Edith Craig; and so am at sea. What to suggest for a crossgrained Catholic I cant think. Surely the Lovats and Barings and that ilk provide for all their own feather? Yes, she [Christopher] haunts Vita. Oh it was lovely in the country yesterday—and today the Square is like a cage in hell, the railings just visible in yellow fog.

V.

Berg

[]

2850: To Quentin Bell

24th Jan [1934]

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Sq, [W.C.1]

Dearest Quentin,

I have now got back to my typewriter, so I can write to you again with some hope that you may be able to read me. Only it is now a ghastly yellow fog so that I can hardly see. Miss Belsher took two hours to get to the press this morning; and Pinka was lost in the vast abyss of the square, Now everybody is coming back to town—Nessa, Julian, Clive, Duncan; old Roger is lecturing; but I did not go; nor have I yet seen the Academy pictures. But Nessa will tell you all that. Here we have had an odd scatter of human beings—Rose Macaulay like a mummified cat; a friend of hers who brought a dog; Vita; and a vast lunch party given to Ethel Smyth. I had to sit next her; there were about 300 people and blazing lights. Sir Thomas Beecham made a speech and brought the house down by saying that he had visited Ethel Smyth in her confinement; “I do not mean what you think” he said; but the roars of laughter continued. (She was in prison as a suffragist.) That was the style. And Ethel got up and said that Sir Thomas conducted—she did not say misconducted—again a roar of laughter. I drank a good deal and got mildly tipsy as was necessary in order to laugh. When I am seventy five, dearest Quentin, please restrain your kind feelings and do not give me a lunch party at the Grosvenor hotel.

Last night I dined with Mary Hutchinson and heard a good deal of vague gossip about Barbara and Victor. They live at the Palace in Newmarket, a vast Rothschild house with ever so many servants and nothing for Barbara to do. Clive has seen them already quarelling at the Savoy. But then Clive, like a true friend, rather wants them to quarrel. Julian says Victor is very tetchy at the Society [The Apostles]. Julian wears a new blue jumper and looks much thinner. As for Angelica I took her shopping yesterday and we bought a green dress, only as I had forgotten my purse it was rather difficult; but then I remembered my grandfathers [James Stephen] nose and gave myself such airs they let me go off with three pound ten worth. Then we had tea with Nessa; there was Roger, Leonard, Pinka and Duncan. Helen [Anrep] has the flu; and that oaf her son has the congenital idiotcy. I wish Roger could scrape his back of all Russian barnacles. I am writing about sodomy at the moment [The Pargiters] and wish I could discuss the matter with you; how far can one say openly what is the relation of a woman and a sod? In French, yes; but in Mr Galsworthys English, no.

How I should like to see you. Do you feel better? Do you go out at all? But dont trouble to write; I will babble on. I hope you get the newspapers. Leonard is caballing with the Labour party as usual. They think Mosley is getting supporters. If so, I shall emigrate. I have to dine with Colefax tonight to meet Noel Coward whose works I despise but they say hes very good to his old mother. And Sybil wont take no, even in the fog. So good bye.

Virginia

Quentin Bell

[]

2851: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

[end January 1934]

52 Tavistock Sqre, [W.C.1]

Dearest Ottoline,

Yes I am back—came up and went to that appalling cheap tawdry lunch that Ethel enjoyed so. Really she is like a child with a sugar mouse. Why, as you say, she should enjoy licking pink sweets I cant say. But I’m glad she discharged her energies on you. But next week I shant be able to escape some hours of her: and then there’s Ethel Sands and Tom and so on: so it must be the week after if one day would suit you. Monday or Tuesday 5th or 6th? 5.30?

I am in a hurry and illegible

yrs Virginia

Texas

[]

2852: To Lady Cecil

Monday [5 February? 1934]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Nelly,

How very nice to hear from you! I often think of you too. I wish we could come to lunch, but here I am in bed—first a little influenza; which then gives me a headache, so that I am stupid as—who shall we say? Reginald Smith’s horse. If we can, we shall go down to Rodmell on Saturday for a few days change. But we shall then come back here, and why shouldnt you come to tea here soon? That would be a treat, and I deserve it, you’ve never been here these 10 years, I think. Do let us break this long silence, which the sweetness of our natures, as you say, imposes on us. Never do I get a scrap from you but what I say that woman is the best letter writer I know. And then she won’t write. I would have sent you the Brownings dog [Flush], but was rather ashamed of my joke.

Excuse this scrawl, and thank you for asking us, which we should have liked—what grammar!—to accept had it been possible.

Yr aff V.W.

The Marquess of Salisbury, Cecil Papers

[]

2853: To Ethel Sands

Tuesday [6 February 1934]

42 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Ethel,

Its very nice of you to ask me to lunch, and I would if I could, but I cant wake up till the lights are lit. I dont suppose you want a fuddled dormouse at your exquisite table. But do come here if you will. On Tuesday next week we have Tom Eliot and an American lady to tea—no, I see you say Wednesday or Thursday. Wednesday I shall be in and alone at 4.30. Thursday I’m trying to summon up courage to go to Sibyls. So come Wednesday if you will (but I shan’t have anyone to meet you, I think unless you insist).

Yrs
Virginia

Wendy Baron

[]

2854: To Ethel Smyth

Thursday [8 February 1934]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

I’m sorry to have been so remiss, but I am still in bed, and have seen nobody, except Vanessa, nor done more than scrawl a note or two. I’m better, but the little temperature I suppose was some influenza germ, which always works its way into my head and doesn’t easily move. If I’m all right we shall go to Rodmell for 2 or 3 days this weekend, and I hope come back cured.

So I’ve no news whatever, and not much faculty of speech. Why accuse me of bringing this on by love of Society? Since we came back I went (1) Ethel Smyth lunch: (2) dine with Colefax. (3) tête à tête dinner with Mary Hutchinson—thats all. Or do you mean that I’m to cease human intercourse altogether? Or am I only to see Queen Mary?—like a celebrated composer whose Mass is shortly to be played before that unhappy woman? I dont go eating sausages and drinking beer with Ly Cunard and M. Baring—Or am I only to see Ethel Smyth on those rare occasions when she’s not gallivanting round London to lunch parties given in her honour! What a humbug and a hypocrite you are! But I’ve written 130,000 words of my book in 10 months, so say, think, write, do what you like—uncastrated, Christian cat

V.

No word from Bruno W⁠[alter].

Berg

[]

2855: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Thursday [8 February 1934]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Ottoline,

I should have had to put you off anyhow, alas. I caught a slight influenza (the result of Ethel’s lunch I think) and this led as usual to the old headache. So I’ve been in bed these 10 days, and am still too stupid to talk. But we shall go off for a few days to Rodmell on Saturday, and then, I shall be all right and hope you will be back and come and see me, and we can go into every corner and cranny of the universe.

How I wish people would write books I like to read! For instance, Ottoline’s memoirs. If I had them, in 6 volumes, by me, I should spend the day in a haze of rapture. As it is I dip into old letters: how tremendously potent they are—any handful of scraps—Charlie Sanger coming to dinner, Goldie all comma’s upside down—a line from Lytton—dinner to meet [Roger] Senhouse, a charming boy, at the Ivy—and then I try Lord Berners; and so on. (I mean his Memoirs) but cant face the great at the moment.

yrs V.

Texas

[]

2855: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Monday [12 February 1934]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Ottoline,

How angelic of you to send those flowers! They are still burning bright beside me. For I am still in bed, and this blessed disease, even when one is normal, seems to leave a paving stone on top of one’s head. All ideas are crushed flat as worms. I hope we shall get away at the end of the week: and I shall come back more amusing, and shall then inflict myself on you. Meanwhile I lie like a torpid alligator and look at your flowers.

yr affate V.W.

Texas

[]

2857: To Quentin Bell

15th Feb [1934]

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Sq, W.C.1

Dearest Quentin,

I have been very remiss not to write before—I think I am in debt to you for a lovely letter with the picture of a horrid old man in snow boots. Can that be my elegant and handsome nephew? And who is in love with him? All the nurses? And Malcolm Sargent? I daresay. But there must be veils between Aunt and nephew; you see how chastely I observe them. The fact is I have been mewed up in my room for a fortnight, owing to a debauch of society. I got a chill; a violent headache; the blinds were drawn and there I lay. Only Nessa visited me in my confinement. However now I’m about again—in token of which yesterday I had a visit from old Ethel Sands, my first touch with society; and why does one ever need human life? as you once said so truly. Poor old thing, she has rather lost her elegance; has grown a little pouched and dim. But then she lunches out every day of her life and was so fed with food at the Eshers that she could not break a piece of bread and butter with me. When I asked her why she did it, she said that once a year she makes a new friend. But this year she has drawn blank. Now if you must go to three hundred lunch parties and then draw blank, I hardly think it worth while.

I dined with Colefax and met Noel Coward; and he called me Darling, and gave me his glass to drink out of. These are dramatic manners. I find them rather congenial. Anyhow theres no beating about the bush, as Nessa would say, rather coarsely. Then he played his new opera on Sybils grand piano and sang like a tipsy crow—quite without self consciousness. It is about Brighton in the time of the Regency—you can imagine. I am to go and see him in his retreat. He makes about twenty thousand a year, but has several decayed uncles and aunts to keep; and they will dine with him, he says, coming out of Surbiton, and harking back to his poverty stricken days. So he has to combine them with the half naked nymphs who sing his parts, which is difficult.

There is a terrible amount of politics about at the moment. You are nearer Vienna than I am—but everybody says here this is the beginning of the end. We are to have Mosley within five years. I suppose you and Julian will be in for it. What Angelica will live to see boggles me. But after all there are many advantages today over yesterday—one can write to a nephew in a manner that my Aunt Mary [Fisher] could not. Julian is caballing as usual. He darts in, like a very nimble elephant, and seizes books on Manchuria and then departs to his room in Taviton Street. Roger is gone. Clive in Paris. I missed the memoir club owing to my disease; but it sounded rather good.

I have just refused to sit for my portrait for the Nat. Portrait Gallery; dont you agree I am right? They send a wretched boy to draw one in one sitting; then they keep the drawing in a cellar, and when I’ve been dead ten years they have it out and say Does anyone want to know what Mrs Woolf looked like? No, say all the others. Then its torn up. So why should I defile a whole day by sitting?

What did you think of Lyns organ [Monologue]? The second number is out and I will send it you. I don’t think she’ll be able to keep it up fortnightly. I thought the beginning was amusing. But she has not enough laid down in her cellar I suspect. Only she has worked herself up into such a rage about the world that she cant keep still.

Our house is now in great disorder; they say we must put in an iron pillar to shore up the ceiling because of the weight of our books. Do come back soon, and I will give you the Dictionary of Nat. Biography; which will lighten our burden.

What are you painting? Violet snows? Eddy Sackville has broken his leg in three places skiing; Raymond [Mortimer] his wrist, skiing. And John Lehmann is back in England and is sending us a book of poems. But I dont suppose we shall meet. Rosamond [Lehmann] has a daughter. And the [Cyril] Connollys gave a cocktail party to meet their lemurs to which I did not go.

That is all my news

Virginia

Quentin Bell

[]

2858: To V. Sackville-West

18th Feb. [1934]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Yes it certainly sounds very nice, your castle. But you will have left it by now. You will be at Marrakesh, with the Princess Royal and Lord Harewood—this piece of news stares me in the face in Sundays paper. Also the King of Belgium has been found killed. Thats all the news in London today.

I’ve been laid up on the sofa in my dressing gown almost ever since you left—what a bore! I hope I didnt infect you that day in the car: the usual little chill; then the usual damned headache. But I think it has cleared off now, and I actually wrote a few lines this morning. So I’ve seen nobody, not even Ethel, which is really rather nice—almost as good as a rose-red castle at Portofino. And I’ve dipped into ten thousand books. That reminds me—I told L., who shouted for joy, to find out about the dark island, and he says he’s written to you. We both shouted for joy. Our list was looking very lean and dry—now nature’s plenty has descended on it. What a blessing! Pinka is snoring by the fire: there is a thick fog; I ought to be reading an unreadable clever manuscript, which one cant reject or accept; and L. is with his aged mother. Tomorrow life begins again—Ottoline and Ethel, and I think a beautiful lady called Sibyl Cholmondeley Shall I like her?

By the way, do you remember our reckoning of last summers weeks in the car? Well, there was only one month; because you went to Italy, just as we came back. This came into my head the other night. And as soon as you come back, then, I shall go away. Dear me, what a dull letter! But I’ve got nothing to say, short of writing the history of 3 weeks in the drawing room, and so end, with Pinka’s best love, and Potto’s too. My love to Harold: I wish I ever saw him—I saw his photograph yesterday.

V

Berg

[]

2859: To Ethel Smyth

Monday [26 February 1934]

52 T[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

No “I’ll tell this” to copy your style at its sweetest, when I get a letter from you, beating your breast, and going into all the usual attitudes, “how have I wasted my affection—what a serpent Virginia is—what a genius, what an Undine—” then I harden harder, and colden cooler, for I think Ethel Smyths the most attitudinising unreal woman I’ve ever known—living in a mid Victorian dentists waiting room of emotional falsity—likes beating up quarrels for the sake of dramatising herself, enjoys publicity and titles from universities and Kings, surrounded by flatterers, a swallower of falsehoods, why should I stand this manhandling, this brawling this bullying, this malusage? When I’ve friends that respect me and love me and treat me honestly generously and according to the fair light of day? Why pray why cowtow to the bragging of a Brigadier Generals daughter? Why?

V.

Berg

[]

2860: To George Rylands

2nd March [1934]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Dadie,

There is nothing I would not do for love of you. But—

(1) I have just emerged from three weeks complete inertia (headache; sofa: silence)

(2) I had at once to dash off 4 horrid little articles demanded by friends and importunate editors.

(3) Only this morning did I begin to tackle a vast mountainous, and wholly worthless novel:

Therefore I feel I’ve not a word to throw at a dog; and cannot for the life of me think of Cleopatra.

If inspiration should visit me—but its useless; I know she wont.

So forgive me once more. Did you see the old Wolves footprints in your room the other day [at Cambridge]?

Hoping to see you, and a thousand thanks for asking.

Yr ever devoted
V.

George Rylands

[]

2861: To Logan Pearsall Smith

Sunday [4 March 1934]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Logan,

I am, I admit, relieved to hear that the BBC Comtee. has been put off. In fact I had it in mind to write to you and say that, if no steps had been taken, I would like to withdraw. I more and more doubt that I should do my duty and attend. Therefore, if the scheme is revived, would you—accepting my best thanks for the suggestion—suppress me and invite some one else to take my place? I have never sat on a Comtee. in my life, and feel it is too late to begin.

I am sorry, we cannot come to your party, as we go down to Sussex on Friday.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Frederick B. Adams Jr.

[]

2862: To V. Sackville-West

5th March [1934]

52 Tavistock Square, [W.C.1]

Yes, I am ever so much better. It was only the usual little temperature, which makes the headache hang about. But I am back in my room again, writing. And it wasn’t half as bad as it sometimes is.

Oh Lord though we are in a chaos! Your damned cousin, the Duke [of Bedford]—if he is your cousin disown him—has insisted that we must entirely decorate the house; and every book has to be moved, every piece of type; and here we are, for the next 3 weeks, camped among rolled up carpets and tables on end. Damn all dukes! £270 to spend; and then they pull the house down.

However the fog is over, the King of the B’s [Belgians] buried—heaven be praised Ethel’s mass has been played—but it was a joke to see her sitting in her triangular hat by the Queen’s side in the Royal Box, among all the court. Afterwards she gave a tea party at Lyon’s—a more sordid 6d. affair you cant imagine; marble slabbed tables, thick bread and butter, and the populace munching their cream buns. There was Emerald Cunard, Diana, Ly Lovat all eating thick bread and butter, but a little out of their harmony: and Ethel bellowing, as red as the sun, entirely triumphant, and self satisfied. That mule faced harridan of yours—this’ll make you angry, but there’s no accounting for tastes, Christopher St John was there.

And I’m flirting with a rather charming [Lady Cholmondeley?]—oh dear me, this wont make you jealous, sipping roses at Fez. No, we may go to Ireland and the Hebrides, not to Provence, just this minute. I’m afraid it wont be hot yet in Provence. I cant write sense or passion or reason or rhyme—L: will go taking down books and dumping them on the floor. What myriads we’ve got! And never dusted.

Please write some time to

Potto and V.

Berg

[]

2863: To Quentin Bell

March 8th 1934

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Sq, [W.C.1]

Dearest Quentin,

I am as usual delighted and shocked by your letter. How you carry on in the High Alps, to be sure—I thought the pure snows had their tempering effect on human passions—but what you tell me of the clergy on the Alp brings a flush even to the cheek of Mont Blanc. And I am not a mountain. No, but I’m hardly distinguishable from an old sack of onions at the moment. That damnable Duke of Bedford is making us entirely redecorate the whole house—from top to bottom; bricks, walls, windows, cellars, cupboards—all have to be painted; rehung; with the result that here I am marooned in a space the size of a rather large tabby cat, books to right of me, pictures to left of me, and not a drop to drink. It is hell—and hell lasting as long as Mr Ridge the builder chooses. We dine on scraps on our knees. Leonard has ardent politicians, five of them at this moment, encamped on the bottoms of cupboards while clouds of dust rise; and our food tastes of plaster; and our noses stink of oil paint. Oh for a whiff of your air, contaminated as it is by the clergy!

Yesterday was a great occasion—Nessa’s private view; she will tell you her part in it; mine is that I was caught by several quite unknown admirers, of hers and yours, who said Oh how lovely, oh that bridge—oh that flower, until I had no tongue to praise with left. Old Jack Hutch; bought one for the Contemp; Art; but it turned out already to belong to Duncan. So he cut up crusty, and Jack crusty flushes like a boiling beetroot; it is terrifying. George Booth said he had bought a picture by you, and he liked it very much; and asked after you with all the passion of his old love for Nessa—It occurs to me, are you George Booth’s son? I hope so, for then there’s capital in the family. He owns a line of ships.

Also there was Lydias Dolls house, which was a triumphant success, much to our surprise. Dear Old Maynard was—this is exactly true—streaming tears; and I kissed him in the stalls between the acts; really, she was a marvel, not only a light leaf in the wind, but edged, profound, and her English was exactly what Ibsen meant—it gave the right aroma. So shes in the 7th Heaven and runs about kissing and crying. Whether it means business I dont know.

Then I was sitting brushing the dust off the bread and butter when Nelly said a very old man called Seeker was at the door. I thought she meant a carpenter; but it was old Walter Sickert, come to thank me for my article on him. Up he stumped, in a green peaked cap; and said I had written the only criticism worth having in all his life. That means, it praises him to the skies. He is rather sunk, like a cracked canvas; but he sang a few bawdy songs over his cake, and smoked a cigar. He is bitter though against all Rogers and Clives I imagine; says they dont know a picture from a triangle; here he kissed my hand and said, “Whereas you—youre an angel.” Thats what comes of laying it on with skill and thickness, my dear Quentin. However he’s 74 and not long for this side of the grave I daresay, so his vanity and weariness must be excused.

Then we had a crazy party in a Lyons tea shop, where half the aristocracy in England sat on hard chairs, drank tea like vinegar and ate rancid butter. This was old Ethel Smyths celebration after the passion of her Mass. “I hate religion” I roared into her deaf ears; and there was lovely Lady Lovat, a Catholic, repining on the next chair. Ethel was in tearing spirits, fresh from the side of the Queen. What a sight they made in the Royal Box together! You are still her paragon. “What a boy!” she keeps on saying. “Were I only sixty years younger—”

Julian is rather bothered about his fellowship which will be out next week. He thinks he may get a job at the BBC. He is writing poetry too, and editing Pope and asking about jobs in China. I’ve just got a card for Julian Trevelyans show—but I dislike his looks so much I shant go. He should be on the Mappin Terrace at the Zoo. And hes not an honest dog-ape like Bob—theres something shifty about him. What do you think? Its true I’ve never spoken to him. I suppose you’ll be back in a jiffy—are you flying? I shall have a lot to say to you. Yes, Saint Simon was Lyttons great gun—he made me buy him when you were in the cradle. Its sublime, I thought but theres no room to go into all that now, and I must go up and see what colour theyre painting the dining room, and if the five politicians have gone.

If you have time, write and tell me the rest of the story of Miss A and the curate. It made me laugh—but what were the legs in plus fours doing? Your art is too discreet.

Virginia

Quentin Bell

[]

2864: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Wednesday [14 March 1934]

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

Dearest Ottoline,

I was about to thank you for your more than heavenly letter when I was struck down by a violent feverish cold—partly because Ethel would come here, all ablowing, all aflowing; and so I didn’t write but dreamt of you in bed instead, and your rose-red curtains and your pearls and black velvet. Oh what a bore these little upsets are—not in themselves—I dont mind sneezing and choking—but how I hate not writing! How I hate being again thrown back on my haunches! then all my thoughts whirl round and round: I read Pascal: no: I try Bernard Shaw: no: finally I think of Ottoline, and her red gold curtains conducting a divine symphony in which even the sea lions and cormorants are dulcet as sirens (the reference is to Charles Morgan and E.S.) and wake recovered.

Did I leave a shabby old unbrella in your hall? Well, perhaps you’ll bring it one day soon. We shall go back tomorrow to camp out among the painters, puttyers, brick-layers and so on.

Excuse this red nosed sheet.

yrs V

I couldn’t come up on Monday, or I would have come to you.

Texas

[]

2865: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

[16 March 1934]

Postcard.

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

I’ll try to come on Monday if I’m not too horribly dirty. I’d like to. But what nonsense—I’ve met Lady O. [Oxford] scores of times—and we always have the same conversation you’ll see. Just back to the full horrors of kitchen being painted.

V.

Texas

[]

2866: To Elizabeth Bowen

26th March [1934]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Elizabeth,

I was hoping to see you, but there seems no chance before Easter. We’ve been in a horrid state, having the house entirely decorated with us in it. No room to sit and so on.

I wanted to ask you about our Irish tour. Here is our scheme—typed. Would you be so angelic as to make any suggestions—this is only a rough scheme. And could we spend a night with you? Probably not. And are there any books to read?

We go down to Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes, on Wednesday for 10 days, then back here, then Ireland on the 28th—how heavenly! Any ideas that come to you, would be gratefully received.

I hope your book is racing ahead. I’ll ring up, but I suppose you’ll be out.

yours V. W.

Texas

[]

2867: To Ethel Smyth

Thursday 29th March [1934]

Monks House. [Rodmell, Sussex]

I have been very remiss—all my letters begin with this, though I dont really feel it, denying as I do all ties, all responsibilities.

Do you know—no you dont—I have gone through almost the most disagreeable six weeks of my life, and I’m so happy, so free today. Well this was what happened; only it sounds a little absurd after this preamble. Nelly [Boxall], the cook, the cook we’ve had 18 years, has been worrying me the past 12 months or so, and gradually I was coming convinced we must part—d’you remember she had her kidneys out, and the dr. appealed to me to take her back, which I did against my judgment? Well, she’s been lapsing again into her old tempers and glooms, and I could not decide what to do. In the intervals she was angelic and an admirable cook—and then 6 weeks ago today, when I was ill, there was a row over an electric oven, which we wanted to try; and she wouldn’t. And suddenly I felt this is the end; if I let her stay she will grow on us and wither and decay. But I could not face a month with her under notice, so I laid down a scheme to which I kept for 6 weeks, until I almost died of it—that is I kept serenely but severely at a distance; and again and again she tried to break me down; she cajoled and apologised, and half suspected what was up, but not quite. And we had the whole house decorated—floors up, books down, every room a muddle, and agony, and she was determined not to let a word escape her; and so we went on till this Tuesday when I sent for her to the drawing room and told her plainly that I could stand the strain no longer and she must go. And all Tuesday and yesterday we lived in a storm of abuse and apology, and hysterics and appeals and maniacal threats, she entirely refusing to go, and refusing my notice and the cheque—a handsome one—stuffing it back in my pocket, following me about the house, till I was driven in the cold wind to spend yesterday morning parading Oxford Street, as my study is once more in the builders hands.

Well, we had arranged to drive off here at 2.30: and then came the final battle, the final appeal and abuse and tears, and she refused to shake hands with L. and so we left her, grasping a wet cloth at the sink and glaring at us, and off we went, and she still says she will not go. “No, no, no, I will not leave you” I heard her vociferate, to which I said, Ah but you must, and so we slammed the door.

Why does this scene, this long drawn out struggle with a poor drudge demoralise one more than any love or anger scene with ones own kind? I felt such a weight on me all those weeks thinking of how I must dismiss her that sometimes I could hardly sit in my chair. Honestly, I have hardly sat down seriously to a book. Once the moment came, my horror vanished and I didnt mind the abuse and the tears; indeed I saw so deep into her poor muddled terrified but completely self seeking mind that I felt a thousand times reassured. And now its over, and that aching tooth removed for ev[[text missing]] I suppose this reads very absurd, but you dont know how she [[text missing]] these years, or how difficult it was, considering her virtu[[text missing]] determination to stay for ever, to make the effor[[text missing]] of my stony-hearted silence. In the mid [[text missing]] was intolerably sordid—every [[text missing]] afternoon for ten days d[[text missing]] awful ingratiating [[text missing]] make you a cup of tea—you look so tired” and so on—in the midst of this, Elizabeth [Williamson] came. I took her round to a room I borrowed at the Stracheys. I thought her a most stalwart and upstanding woman (please dont copy this and send it to her) full of character and interest. I shall try to see her again,—oh dear how nice the summer will be without Nelly! I shall only get a daily; I shall be free; I shall dine at the Zoo; I shall make no attachments ever again: oh how cool and quiet I feel this morning; we chuckle and chatter like a pair of pigeons.

I saw Vita who had seen you, and you saw the adored sister in law I hear [Gwen St Aubyn]. I broached the subject of C. St. J [St John]: but V. would have none of it. I expect in her absorption with G. she was blind,—blinder than usual. No, I did not admire St J’s article on the Mass: I thought it very skimming and surface interesting only, not criticism, only enthusiasm. But what is the worth of my opinion? On this, nothing. We plan—oh I feel so free, I repeat—a visit to Ireland at the end of the month; and one to Scotland in June, but only short tours. This is a scrabbled dull letter, but the emotions of the last 2 days have made scrambled eggs of my wits; I sit in my lodge and look, like a child of 3, at a bird; at a flower; at a butterfly. There was a butterfly, in spite of the raging wind.

V.

Oh I’ve said nothing about your ears and your liver—excuse this outburst of egotism: next time I’ll be less absorbed.

Berg

[]

2868: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

[4 April 1934]

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

Dearest Ottoline,

I think Ethel’s account [A three-legged Tour in Greece, 1927] was exaggerated, as is usually the case with that old sea dog—she likes to pick up the waves and the mountains. Also, she did it on the cheap and did not hire Ghiolmann’s car, as we did. If you do it on our system, which worked out fairly cheaply, but then we were 4, and the exchange was in our favour, there are no tramps and no climbs and no starvation. He makes out a tour, gives you an estimate, supplies a driver who talks French, and nothing could be easier. The only necessity is to buy one’s own lunch, on occasion, which is easy, and to provide blue spectacles and plenty of veils and cold cream, for the glare can be terrific and the wind—our car was open-tearing. But on the other hand the air is more exhilarating than any I have tasted; one feels young, buoyant, vigorous: and sleeps directly one’s head touches the pillow.

We could not manage the long tour, which goes down to Olympia. But we went to Delphi, as you must; and to Aegina—but thats only a days expedition, and lovely beyond words, from Athens. And we went to the Byzantine churches, and Mistra,—coming back from Delphi, and Sunium—but we had only 3 weeks in Greece; otherwise I should have insisted upon an island or two. The food in the Inns was always decent; not a bug in the beds; and the Athenian restaurant, Abemas, (I think) excellent. One can always get yagourt (how does one spell it?)—that sour milk which is so delicious, and wild strawberries. I dont think you need prepare for any worse hardship than you’d find in Italy, and the beauty, the colour of the sea and the earth, is unspeakable: marble as we know it is mere clay compared with the marble on a hill there. O how I envy you! We shall be dreaming and romancing in the mists of Ireland, and spend a night with Elizabeth Bowen.

yr V.

Texas

[]

2869: To Elizabeth Bowen

5th April [1934]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, [Sussex]

Dear Elizabeth,

Many thanks for your letter. It was very helpful, and we have altered some of our plans accordingly.

We are coming back to London on Tuesday next: I suppose there is no chance that you could come in on the 18th after dinner? Tom Eliot and Maynard Keynes are dining with us—thats why I cant ask you to dinner: but they would like to see you—and so should we. If that doesnt suit, would you come to tea on Thursday 19th? Then we could put further questions to you. We shall be in London till we start, so suggest another day—I cant remember when you come to London. In fact I can hardly write sense, owing to the fact that it is the first hot day and I have been walking on the downs, and found a whole bank of violets—will there be violets in Ireland? I am very much excited to think of going there at last, and seeing your house.

Yours
Virginia Woolf

Yes, I’ve often heard of Stephen Gwynn, somehow through the O’Briens, and I rather think he wrote to me, I’ll get his book.

Texas

[]

2870: To Julian Bell

5 April 1934

Postcard

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

For Heavens sake tell me where does “Die like a rose in aromatic pain” come from? Pope? And what is the right quotation? And where are your poems.

VW

Quentin Bell

[]

2871: To Ethel Smyth

Thursday [5 April 1934]

Monks House. [Rodmell, Sussex]

I was lying in bed this morning and saying to myself, “the remarkable thing about Ethel is her stupendous self-satisfaction” when in came your letter to confirm this profound psychological observation. How delighted I was!

“But as regards moral integrity … I am not sure whether you and I have the same sensitiveness of conscience. Its not a question of whether scrupulosity in such matters is a weakness or a virtue. Its a question of fibre. Thats all. Moral fibre.”

“Magnificent!’ I cried aloud.

And then this beaming with sensitiveness and righteousness old tom cat goes on about having “pulled off 2 against the grain jobs that nobody else (save the entirely admirable E S) would take on”—surely no one, even in Woking, crowded as it is with city men, can have such an enraptured, childlike admiration for themselves, I cried. And off you went again about not quoting my letters when you discovered that I was “not built on the same lines” as you—but whoever was built in such an orbicular rotundity like the sun in a fog of red hot complacency as Ethel? I asked myself. No, I shall never be able to ask her to come and see me again, I sighed reading on, the sentence that followed about your “rather morbid scrupulousness, as some people would judge it.” And when I read that final, if oblique, pat by Ethel on Ethel’s own back, I could not help thinking of a man called Pecksniff [in Martin Chuzzlewit],—he used to have just that way with him. Seriously, Ethel Pecksniff, with your fine moral fibre, and your perhaps morbid scrupulousness, what are you hinting at? What infamous crime has Vita committed, that she cant speak to me of, coarse of fibre as I am? I understand, I need hardly say, that people like Vita and myself must offend you, with your fine fibre, and all the rest of it, a dozen times a day—its been too good of you to put up with us—still I wish you would say plainly, and simply, if youre not too sensitive, what charge you level at her so cryptically, stopping to pat your own back in between whiles? I’m going to see her, I hope, and I should like to know. What has she done?

Berg

[]

2872: To Ethel Smyth

Sunday [8 April 1934]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

This is the letter that roused my anger. I thought, and I think you’ll agree that it was natural that I should think, from your language, that C. St John had revealed something extremely discreditable to Vita. And I said, if that is so, Ethel ought either to tell me outright what it was, or to say nothing about it. These dark hints you were so stunned that you couldn’t write—yet did hint—put my back up. And now, as far as I can make out from your second letter, C’s horrid revelations amount to no more than what Vita told me herself. Hence my irritation when your second letter plumed yourself, as I thought, on your scrupulosity.

We only come up late on Tuesday, And then I shall be faced with domestic horrors. The Nelly [Boxall] affair I’m afraid is not solved yet. But I’ve no time or room for more. But do read your own words carefully and consider if I was so absurd to be annoyed.

Berg

[]

2873: To Logan Pearsall Smith

Tuesday [April? 1934]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Logan

I gave your letter to Leonard, and I think he has answered you. I’m glad you are collecting your essays [Trivia], though sorry that they are going to Constable. If by any chance you want to reprint How Little Logan Found Jesus, I shall be proud to publish it—indeed I will print it with my own hands, if only to carry on the work of conversion and find a shorter way to Heaven myself.

Yours very sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Frederick B. Adams Jr.

[]

2874: To Vanessa Bell

Thursday [12 April 1934]

Monks [House, Rodmell, Sussex]

Many thanks, good Dolphin, for your information. I have written to Mabel, also to Ha, to find out about her cooking. We rather incline now to have a sleeper in, as the room is there, and it is probably cheaper. But I will see Mabel, as it would certainly be an advantage to have some one used to our habits. Nelly continues to bombard me, through her sister, and I foresee that she’ll insist on another interview. Our final day was an incredible misery. Nothing would make me go through it again. I wonder if you’ve heard of it from Lottie [Hope].

We go up on Tuesday next. Is there any chance of seeing you apart from the general mob? Maynard has rung up and I gather that there’s been a muddle about the reading [Memoir Club]. I suppose you couldn’t bring Angelica to tea on Monday? We go to Ireland for a fortnight at the end of the month, so I shan’t see you for an age. Not that you mind.

However you were very considerate about the Harknesses— that I will say. Lord, what a mercy it is to feel I’ve not poor old Nelly brooding over me!—Except that she will of course insist on more rows.

Yr B.

What about my picture? Shall I write and tell them to deliver it? The post has just sent this.

Berg

[]

2875: To V. Sackville-West

Friday 13th [April 1934]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Yes, I must really write to you, because I want to know what is happening. But that said, I’ve nothing to say. Thats because you’re in love with another, damn you! Aren’t I a nice nature, though, like a flight of green birds alighting now and then? I had meant, God knows, to apologise for being so d—d dull, so obtuse, drowsy and dreary that night at Kings Bench. I said to myself, no wonder Vita no longer loves you, because you bore her and if there’s one thing love wont stand, its boredom. The truth was Ottoline and Nelly between them—oh what a scene I had—never will I let a servant stay 18 years again—had ground me to a kind of gray dust. That reminds me—your amethyst is on the mantelpiece beneath the stone that came from Persepolis—the 3 curls of the Emperor’s head, I always think it is

Shall you be in London this week? Shall you come and see me? I only ask: even a dog can do that.

My God what a rampant rough rowdy dowdy bore old Ethel is! All about you and C St J. I lost my temper, (in writing) whereupon she went to Lady Balfour, who says Ethel is an angel; Lord B. is called in to confirm this;—she cant let a thing be; she’s the most ingrained egotist ever I knew. But dont embroil me with her further.

The week after next we go to Ireland, driving all across by land, and then leaping the Channel, and staying with Eli Bowen, and so up to the wildest islands, where the seals bark and the old women croon over corpses of drowned men, dont they. And there I may be windswept in to the sea. But what would Vita care. “No”, she’d say, we had Petulaneum Ridentis in that bed last year: we’ll try the Scrofulotum Penneum there this.” So she’d bury me under, wouldnt she, Vita? And yet how clever, how charming I am!

V.

Berg

[]

2876: To Shena, Lady Simon

13th April [1934]

52 Tavistock Square, [W.C.1]

My dear Shena,

I wish we could manage Wednesday or Thursday, but I’m afraid both those days are already rather impossibly full. We are just starting for a tour in Ireland, and I have, for some reason, left a mass of things to do.

But would you let us know when you’re in London again? We shall be back about May 7th. Wont you and your husband come and dine with us one night? Perhaps you will bear this in mind, and suggest a day. Then, besides education, of which I know nothing, we might discuss the Fishers. Was your remark about daughters and the doting prompted by your tour of Greece? I am very anxious to hear.

Yrs
Virginia Woolf

Sussex

[]

2877: To Ethel Smyth

Monday [16 April 1934]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Yes, I expect Lady B. [Balfour] is perfectly right and that introspection is a bad habit. And the longer I live the less likely it seems that one person can possibly understand another. So let us leave it at that.

No, Wednesday is useless, as I am seeing Tom Eliot, whose poetry you think silly nonsense, and I think real poetry—another instance of the difference above alluded to.

I think the Nelly affair is dispatched, and I am trying another experiment; but my mind which has been chiefly occupied today and yesterday in talking to servants refuses to function. I’m delighted that you saw old Sue Lush: the Gushington we called her when we were children—and I’ve hardly seen her since, Thank God the workmen have just laid the carpets, and I’m going to Sadlers Wells [Macbeth], and must dress, so please pray dear as you would say, God be with you

V.

Berg

[]

2878: To Ethel Smyth

Thursday [19 April 1934]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

No, I cannot manage it—I’ve got into a rush and into a whirl, and nothings done, and so dont come. But do come when we’re back—early in May. But I’ve no sort or hint of ‘scunner’—(what an odd word) against E.S. What d’you take me for? I recognise differences—always have—but I dont let them separate; in fact, so contrary are human souls, they serve to ally. I dont require a repetition of V.W—not at all: what I want is a contradiction; and so, though I’m too hurried to elaborate, if you will take the trouble to, you’ll find a meaning in this I hope to your liking. No I’ve put off everyone tomorrow and Saturday—Lady Colefax among them. Every sort of dreary dull business has accumulated. This is always the prelude even to crossing the Irish Channel. I’ll write from the Coast. Lord how I long to be out on a rock in mid sea! I had a violent argument about religion etc. with Tom Eliot. He’s of your persuasion. So please write, contrary though we are

V.

Berg

[]

2879: To R. C. Trevelyan

20th April [1934]

52 Tavistock Square, London W.C.1

Dear Bob,

I have read your stories, and with great enjoyment. Perhaps I liked the unchristened one on Love best. I think they are full of interesting and subtle things and beautifully smooth and finished. My only doubt—which rises I know from my novelists prejudice—is about the dialogue form. I am always rather bothered by it. If you bring in people, then I want to know quantities of things about them, and here, of course, as you use them, they are kept severely to the rails. Thence, perhaps, what I used to feel with Goldies’ [Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson] dialogues—something too restricted, too formed. Yet I feel, as I say, the interest, the subtlety of the thought, and the melody of the whole expression. So I am puzzled to see what form there is, save Dialogue, to carry the idea—no doubt, as a novelist, I am bothered by these restrictions more than I should be.

I’m always wanting you (but this is another theme) to break through into a less formed, more natural medium. I wish you could dismiss the dead, who inevitably silence so much and deal with Monday and Tuesday—I mean the thing that is actually in your eyes at the moment. A dialogue between the different parts of yourself perhaps, now, at the moment.

But I liked reading these Dialogues—no St Francis is not that—I’m writing rather hurriedly—very much. I think there is a great deal in them. And if one went into the question of form, it would take a volume to express what I mean. But this is a tribute to the stories, for they make me think of so many things. Suppose you had told me the colour of Miranda’s eyes and hair—what would that have suggested? And so on. Excuse this scrawl—we are just off to tour in Ireland.

Yours
V.W.

Sussex

[]

2880: To Donald Brace

20th April 1934

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Mr Brace,

Many thanks for your letter. I am afraid that there is no chance of my having anything ready for you to include in your autumn list. I have still a great deal of work to do on my new book, and do not expect to have it ready for another year. But I will of course let you know in good time, and will send a description as soon as possible. At the moment, I have not even chosen a name.

I am glad Flush still sells—we have done very well with it here, much better than I thought likely. And I am very pleased with what you have done for it in America.

We are just off for a fortnights holiday motoring in Ireland.

With best wishes from us both

yours sincerely,
Virginia Woolf

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

[]

2881: To Helen McAfee

22nd April 1934

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

Dear Miss McAfee,

I enclose an article on the pictures of Walter Sickert, RA. It will be published over here either this summer or autumn; if you would like to have it for the Yale Review I could arrange dates to suit. But of course it may not be of interest to your readers. I dont know how far Sickerts pictures are known in America.

Would you think me mercenary if I asked what fee the Yale Review now pays for articles?

We are just off for a motor tour in Ireland but letters will be sent on.

With kind regards yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

If it is too long, the part about poetry could be cut.

Yale University

[]

2882: To Vanessa Bell

Wednesday [25 April 1934]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, near Lewes, Sussex

I asked Marsh to deliver the cup, which I hope will reach you.

Please write, addressed to 52. They will forward, What did the Dr. say about Quentin? We’re just off, and so far it is fine, but why seek the Irish channel?

I enclose a letter which may amuse you—servants psychology. I shant answer. So farewell good Dolph: and dont forget your poor dear Singe. I’ll write from Ireland.

B.

Leonard is having asparagus, if any, sent you.

Berg

[]

Letters 2883-2889 (April-May 1934)

2883: To Ethel Smyth

Friday 27th April 1934

Fishguard Bay Hotel, Goodwick, Pembrokeshire.

The sea is mounting, and a gale is blowing, so perhaps, with luck, I shall never set eyes on England again, but rise, about 2 this morning, and fulfil your hopes—I mean, see God.

We’ve driven all across Wales today in storms and sudden blasts of sunlight when all the sheep and the gorse blazed white and yellow. The finest thing in England is Salisbury plain, or was, till your cursed army peppered it with huts and bugle calls. How the druids must hate the Colonels! But I’m too dazed to write that chapter of English history. We are sitting in the hotel lounge, with a couple of sporting gentry, who read out from the Times about cricket. I try to read Proust, Then the—the wife—exclaims “But isnt it very odd to try a steeplechaser flat racing?” which he caps with some marvellous ‘put’—is that the way you spell it. Lord how I wish I could be them! Their faces have a perfect integrity, a perfect suitability, that seems to me to prove that the world is what they say, and all our alarms are mere flurry. How calm, how right, how deeply rooted they are! Surely they know—oh everything. But they will talk, so I can’t write. The lady has just said aloud and cheerfully that she has strained her inside and must see a doctor. Now, I couldn’t say that aloud in the lounge. Well, at midnight we cross, and then stay with Eth Bowen at Kildorrery and then go to Galway and then to Arran, and then to Dublin.

She is going to have a whiskey and soda. They have rung the bell. Now I couldn’t do that in the lounge of a hotel. No, I quite agree with you, I have missed the bull’s eye, and hit only half the rim, the white. “Can I have a small whiskey and soda please?” Yes, thats the way to say it. Well Ethel, this very interesting letter must cease. I cant read Proust though. What do you think of Proust? I’m reading Sodome et Gomorrhe—heres the small whiskey and soda—now how well they drink it! She is knitting. “One and six for that tiny spot!” So it goes on. I dont think society is quite so omnipresent as P. [Proust] makes out. But you have lived with duchesses, so tell me.

V.

Berg

[]

2884: To Quentin Bell

Friday April 27th [1934]

Fishguard Bay Hotel, Goodwicky Pembrokeshire

Dearest Quentin,

You will I know be sorry to hear that this is the last time I shall write to you; all points to death by drowning in the Irish channel. It is pouring and howling. I can see the boat rocking even in the harbour. We are waiting for dinner. Pinka—did I tell you we brought Pinka, with a towel, soap and comb—is with the ship’s cook on board. There are several hairy Irish watching me—the Welsh talk a kind of moaning—but the time for moaning will be from midnight to 8. It is now hard on seven.

Well, to say my last words—we had a good deal of rain and storm crossing England, and saw Stonehenge in a wild mist; then we passed within a stone’s throw of Seend, and I kissed my hand to the Bells, and their inkpot made out of hunters’ hooves. All the same, 6 miles off is the finest country in England. Wales is full of sheep, and salmon rivers. Oh dear, how I envy you, sleeping on dry land. What shall I say to the conger eels? when they nose me at dawn—and its not as if I were Tom Eliot and believed in God. You cant read my writing so its no use taking another page on which to sum up my faith.

Farewell. V.

The A.A. man has just been in, and says it will be very rough.

Kiss Nessa for me for the last time and Angelica and Clinka [dog].

Quentin Bell

[]

2885: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Sunday [29 April 1934]

Bowens Court, Kildorrery, Co. Cork

Dearest Ottoline,

This is where I am, for the moment, so alas I shant be within range of Gower Street before you go. It is a lovely melancholy land and Elizabeth’s house is exactly what I imagined, but I cant describe, because of the pen, and breakfast, after wh. we start for the Arran Islands. Love and please tell me about Greece.

V.

Texas

[]

2886: To Elizabeth Bowen

1st May [1934]

Eccles Hotel, Glengarriff Co. Cork

Dear Elizabeth,

Here we are, because it was too beautiful to move. In fact, your island is too seductive, and we have already been asking about houses, whether one can get them easily,—and one can: so expect us as your neighbours in future. But this is largely your doing, as you made us so happy that night and we enjoyed the wishing well, the ducks, the spinning wheel, the plaster, the beds—no I cant make a full catalogue: moreover, what is complicating this letter is that Bostocks has come into being at Eccles Hotel. Everybody talks to everybody and we have struck a fascinating dying lady and a most upright German judge. Excuse this hand—the pens at Bostocks wont write, because talk is so much better.

Yrs V.W.

Remember the Lives of the Bowens.

We are cutting out Galway, because we cant move on, and it strikes me I have never thanked you.

Love from us both.
VW.

Texas

[]

2887: To Vanessa Bell

Thursday May 4th [3rd 1934]

Glenbeith, Kerry

We only got the Times yesterday and read about George. Well, there’s nothing much to be said at this distance, in the wilds of Kerry. Poor old creature—I wonder what happened and why he was at Freshwater. But I must wait till I see you, unless you’ve had the charity to write. Did you go to the funeral? I’ve just with great labour composed a letter to Margaret [his widow]. Now suppose this had happened 30 years ago, it would have seemed very odd to take it so calmly. As a matter of fact I feel more affection for him now than I did 10 years ago. In fact I think he had a sort of half insane quality—I cant quite make out what—about family and food and so on. But your memoir so flooded me with horror that I cant be pure minded on the subject. I hope to goodness somebody went to the service—I wish I had been able to.

But here we are a great deal further and wilder than if in Italy or Greece. We only see Irish papers, now and then; there are no towns, only an occasional small fishing village and as we changed our plans, all our letters have gone wrong. It was mere chance we found a copy of the Times lying about.

We have had a most garrulous time. We never stop talking. The Irish are the most gifted of people in that line. After dinner the innkeeper comes in and sits down and talks till bedtime, perfect English, much more amusing than any London society, and if its not the innkeeper, as it was last night, then the other guests, if there are any. They all make bosom friends at once, and we’re already committed practically, to buy a house at Glengariff. Its a mixture of Italy Greece and Cornwall: I suppose too romantic in parts; but extremely subtle, greys, browns, yellows, an occasional donkey, absolutely deserted, not a house ever to be seen, no gentry, everybody lamenting, because nobody comes any more, and the gentry have all fled. I daresay it would be too depressing to live in, but after Sussex I find it heavenly, and so far we have only had one bad day. We spent a night with the Bowens, where, to our horror we found the Connollys—a less appetising pair I have never seen out of the Zoo, and the apes are considerably preferable to Cyril. She has the face of a golliwog and they brought the reek of Chelsea with them. However Elizabeth was very nice, and her husband [Alan Cameron], though stout and garrulous, was better than rumour reported. It is an 18th Century house, but the remarkable thing about Ireland is that (here Mrs Fitzgerald the landlady broke in for another outburst of conversation: she has given me a receipt for a perfect Onion soup) There is no architecture of any kind: all the villages are hideous; built entirely of slate in the year 1850: so Elizabeths home was merely a great stone box, but full of Italian mantelpieces and decayed 18th Century furniture, and carpets all in holes—however they insisted upon keeping up a ramshackle kind of state, dressing for dinner and so on.—Lord! this is all very dull, but garrulity has seized upon me too. Now I must copy out the onion soup, and then we pack and go on to a place called Adare, and so to Dublin and we shall be back on Wednesday.

How is my dear Dolphin? I feel that I have been away a hundred years and dipped in the depths of the sea and anything may have happened.

Leonard says Laura is the one we could have spared.

So goodbye and let me know when we can meet.

B.

Berg

[]

2888: To Vanessa Bell

Friday 6th [4th] May [1934]

Dunraven Arms Hotel, Adare, [Ireland]

Your letter has just reached me. Well well, I pray to God you may have written an account of the [Duckworth] funeral which I shall find at Dublin:

But this letter, written in a hurry as we’re just off, is on business.

Dont you think that it would be much more sensible to let me give you £100 to buy a new car? It seems to me silly to have the old one mended, if it won’t be really good. I trust to you to be honest on the matter. What I suggest is that you and Duncan should let me give this as a joint birthday present. I am much better off than I expected, owing to Flush, and it would be a great pleasure to think of you attending family funerals in style.

I’m in a rush, as we are just starting in pouring rain for Galway.

But I trust to your common sense and hope you will order the car at once.

B.

Berg

[]

2889: To Katherine Arnold-Forster

May 8th [1934]

Hotel Russell, Dublin

Dearest Ka,

Your letter followed me to the wilds of Galway, It is a lovely country, but very melancholy, except that people never stop talking. Now we’re in Dublin and still talking—this time to the Aran Islanders who are here making a film. But I cant write with this pen.

Yes, I remember the speech to the man, and my father did say those words, my mother pinned a medal to the man’s coat. Can the old doctor have been Dr Nicholls, can he be still alive? He was very handsome once.

We are now off to see some pictures, and more talk. It is a wonderful island, only why be so very selfconscious? But I cant go into that, and must stop. Love to Mark. Is he about to go to Cambridge? How terribly time flies.

Why dont you write your life? and let the Hogarth Press publish it?

Yr V.W.

Mark Arnold-Forster

[]

Letters 2890-2914 (May-July 1934)

2890: To V. Sackville-West

Thursday [10 May 1934]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Yes we’re just back—arrived from Stratford on Avon last night. Oh we’ve seen such a lot of queer places; and Elizabeth [Bowen] and I clasped hands over the wishing well in her garden—where the poor come and hang rosaries and broken cups—and wished—well, what d’you think we wished? (I must say plainly and frankly, my one wish is to make you jealous.)

So do come on Monday, 4.30, and we’ll do whatever the season dictates. But please conceal the fact from Ethel, because I want her to think I’m still in Galway. I wish you’d settle her goose; I get strangulated heart cries about you,—dot, dot, dot, indicating revelations of unspeakable horror. Yes, you ought to go to Stratford, the home of all your tribe. I was tremendously impressed. Poor old George [Duckworth]—no, I’m not seriously sorry, only selfishly, that my past is now further away and the grave I suppose nearer. Also Margaret whom I respect dimly, must be very lonesome—they made such a billing and cooing pair; last time I saw them together the tears came to my eyes.

V.

Berg

[]

2891: To Ethel Smyth

Wednesday [16 May 1934]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

This d——d influenza (though temp. not over 101) has landed me in bed and sofa and complete despair about human life. Oh Lor! To think how I had planned to write and write! And to go to Fidelio! Well it cant be helped. We’re off to Rodmell tomorrow for Whitsun. But how does one ever regain those moral heights when it seems right to look down on one’s fellows, and take pen in hand and lay down the law? I’m so humble you wouldn’t know me.

V

Berg

[]

2892: To Elizabeth Bowen

Wednesday [16 May 1934]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Elizabeth,

I rang you up today on the chance that you were in London and would come and see me—I’m recovering from influenza which struck me the day we got back—but I heard nothing but a buzz, and so suppose you weren’t there. I wanted to tell you of our adventures, and how we met a charming Mr and Mrs Rowlands [at Waterville] who said they were old family friends of yours, but knew you only by reputation, as what they called ‘extremely clever’. And then we went to Galway and saw the Aran Islands and picked the gentians and were almost blown off the cliff—altogether it was a wonderful time, and we never stopped talking, but it became also very melancholy. However you must come and let us tell you.

Tomorrow we hope to get off to Rodmell for Whitsun. I’m almost recovered, but oh dear, what a bore to start influenza again when I want to write a million words at once and finish with it.

Many thanks for sending the book—the Times book I mean—you didnt send yours.

Yrs VW

I was enraged to see that they gave the £40 to Gibbons; still now you and Rosamund can join in blaming her. Who is she? What is this book? And so you cant buy your carpet.

Excuse this illegible scrawl which I have now made all one blot, the result of writing lying down with what is called a fountain pen.

Texas

[]

2893: To Elizabeth Bowen

May 20th [1934]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Elizabeth,

Yes, do come on Friday 25th, 4.30. The Rowlands—he was a terrific Greek god, but only bodily, not his face or mind—were friends of your Uncle Mervyn; he’d been at Trinity with him he said. Now I come to think of it, I remember Stella Gibbons writing a poem we liked, and so asked her to send us some to print; I cant help thinking you and Rosamond had a better claim That reminds me, I feel guilty about Last September; or perhaps stupid. I thought you were lending me the copy the young man stole. I never meant you to give me one. But I shall be very glad to have it. You must let me give you—I dont know what.

The dr said that influenza takes 40 hours to develop; so I caught mine at Worcester or Holyhead not Ireland. Its gone, and I’m all right, but it leaves one like a watch that doesn’t tick. Never have I felt stupider, but I daresay thats good for the soul. And it does’t much matter as one can sit under the laburnums and watch a white horse munching in the marsh. Please thank your husband—we thought it was very nice of him to have us.

Yrs V.W.

Texas

[]

2894: To Ethel Smyth

Monday [21 May 1934]

Monk’s House, Rodmell near Lewes, Sussex

Yes, I liked your letter very much; but how can you ever write with a fountain pen? This is fountain pen, now writing. Disgusting, slippery, false, yet convenient. Its such a hell of a day—Bank holiday. A mist like a white mare’s tail, only uglier, over the marshes, and when I tried to walk there, I found 3 men in yatchting [sic] caps with towels under their arms: grocers they looked like, poor wretches pretending to enjoy the white hail, Lord how it stung! So I came back lit the fire; and read Proust, which is of course so magnificent that I cant write myself within its arc; that’s true; for years I’ve put off finishing it; but now, thinking I may, and indeed so they say must die one of these years, I’ve returned, and let my own scribble do what it likes. Lord what a hopeless bad book mine will be! [The Years] I tried to start it going; but its verbose, foolish, all about hollow reeds. At lunch I told L: who said anyhow one could burn it. And then I lit the fire and read Mrs Wharton; Memoirs and she knew Mrs Hunter [Ethel’s sister], and probably you. Please tell me sometime what you thought of her. Theres the shell of a distinguished mind; I like the way she places colour in her sentences, but I vaguely surmise that there’s something you hated and loathed in her. Is there?

But surely a mildly displaced spine is nothing serious? My old half brother, just dead and buried—you must ask Nessa to tell the story of the funeral—lived 66 years with one, and ate and drank till, poor boy, his heart ceased suddenly in a friends house; but I’m sorry if it means Elizabeth [Williamson] whom I much like and respect and hope to see, is ill.

Talk of my obstinacy and folly in not liking my letters to be quoted! I wrote one, casually, to an unknown but accredited American the other day, hinting at a mild literary scandal. She replies that she gave it to a friend of hers who is publishing it in The Atlantic Monthly! So thats why I write Private or should, in future.

Well Ethel what are you tossing and turning on the point of your horns?

V.

Berg

[]

2895: To Logan Pearsall Smith

23rd May [1934]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Logan,

It is very good of you and your [B.B.C.] Committee to think of asking me again. I wish I could join, because I should so much enjoy meeting the people whom you are asking. But I feel, as I said before, that I should be of no use, and should only take a place that somebody else would fill much better. So I must refuse; but please accept my thanks for thinking of it. I’ve been away for Whitsun, or I would have written before.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Frederick B. Adams Jr.

[]

2896: To Jane Bussy

Thursday [24 May 1934]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Janie,

We’ve just come back from Ireland, and then I had the flu, or I would have asked before this about your father. Now I hear he is getting better, and I’m very glad. What I’m writing to ask is, do you think you could conceivably undertake the task of coming and talking French with me? I mean this as a serious business proposal, of course, and if you consider it, you must tell me what would be the right charge.

The thing is I suddenly discovered, what I have long suspected, that I cant speak a word of French. I read it, but then thats nothing. Also it may be hopeless—our education, ages ago as it was, never ran to grammar.

Let me know if this seems to you possible, And if you cant, can you suggest someone? Lessons at irregular intervals, of an hour you know—that was my idea. And anyhow we hope to see you.

Yours
Virginia

I have just caught my finger in the door so cant write.

Please give my love to your mother.

Texas

[]

2897: To Ethel Smyth

Sunday [27 May 1934]

52 T[avistock] S[quare, W.C.1]

Well the devil has got me again. We came up on Tuesday—and on Friday the old 101 business started—the dr says a germ still in my throat. Almost normal today but to stay in bed—oh dear—that book! And I had just begun again, and am now reduced to Aldous Huxley. Please write. I think your letters the best I get—so there.

V.

I do sympathise about rheumatism

Berg

[]

2898: To Grace Higgens

29th May 1934

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Grace,

Mrs Bell had just told me that you are actually married. So we want to send our best wishes and congratulations. Will you buy yourself a present with the enclosed, which comes with our love, and we hope to see you at Rodmell.

Yrs
Virginia Woolf

Mrs G. Higgens

[]

2899: To Ethel Smyth

Thursday [31 May 1934]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

I feel real compunction, Ethel dear, that through me you should sit down dead beat to write. Please dont. It was only the fever that extorted that cry for letters. Write when you’re full of words and leisure. I have the sympathy of the old hack for anyone who lifts a pen when their brain is as a dryed yellow sandy sponge, and all that falls is dry yellow sand. I know it—the sensation. Not that your scrawl this morning was of that nature at all.

The fever has gone, and I am left serene, and even begin to feel the stream running and lifting the reeds again. Excuse these metaphors—they come in flocks when I am recumbent—I cant shoo them off: thousands and thousands make themselves in my brain—I suppose the result of not using my brain. The dr. came, 6 hours late of course; had submitted the swab of my throat to a specialist, he finds it swarming with a bacillus called viridans, or green; advises inoculations; “But have you ever known influenza or any other disease cured that way?” I asked; to which she, being Lytton Stracheys niece and an honest woman, said No. One case of eczema was all in her experience. “But I havent got eczema” I said. So we agreed to leave the throat uninoculated—which inoculation is a damnably expensive business—for 3 weeks, and see. The truth is doctors know absolutely nothing, but as theyre paid to advise, have to oblige. I feel much better anyhow. Its very hot today isnt it? Do you sit among the pinks and write your article? And do the pinks, those very sweet white ones, make you think how you brought them up here one summer? and said this was the bloom stage of our friendship which would soon be over? I like your honest mind. That reminds me—see how flighty I am—there’s a perfect trumpet if you’re getting one: a deaf woman [Molly MacCarthy], to whom to talk to used to be hell—a lovely sentence that—is now as susceptible to my voice without its raising itself, as the fern is to the spring breeze. Go and see T. Eliots The Rock at Sadlers Wells and tell me what you think. I would write more, but my fingers seem rather slippery. How can anyone read this page?

V.

I’m going out today: the dr: advises all possible fresh air

Berg

[]

2900: To Vanessa Bell

Wednesday [6 June 1934]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

God! What an utter curse! It seems to me that Mrs Curtis might have kept Angelica, and let her have it there, since there must be arrangements at school. However, I suppose there was some reason against it. Also Quentin might be lodged at Tilton?—but I suppose this also was considered. I believe I’ve had it—didn’t that odious doctor at Welwyn swear I had? But you haven’t. As I say, one can only curse God and the school system. Do let me know anything that happens; I expect nothing will, but I’m optimistic.

I’m alone here today, as L. has gone up to a meeting in London, and I wish Dolphin were sitting with me. I’ve not yet been to any of the operas, but we have tickets for Friday and with luck I may persuade L. to go tomorrow.

My only news is domestic—Annie is getting married to a man called Penfold, which is a damned bore; but she says she must take her chance of settling, though she doesnt seem to know much about him, except that he painted her cottage and breeds rabbits. So we shall probably have an empty cottage and want a cook—I had vague thoughts of Grace [Higgens]: but I suppose it would be too difficult.

Quentin came to tea yesterday. He looks amazingly well and large, and we had a good gossip, like old crones. Certainly he is a most charming brat, and I daresay will do us all credit. He hopes to wangle a ticket for the opera out of Clive; I suppose you’ve put off your troops of Stracheys. I’m keeping clear of all hospitality but no doubt if I go tomorrow I shall land myself with some undesirables. Anyhow I shall look out for you on Friday. We shall come back on Sunday.

B

Berg

[]

2901: To Elizabeth Bowen

June 8th 1934

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

Dear Elizabeth,

My conscience afflicts me for two reasons:—

1) After you had gone that day, I felt livery, took my temperature, found it was over 101, and went to bed for a week with influenza. Did I give it you? I do hope not. But the dr. says it was highly infectious.

2) I never thanked the giver of the Emily Dickinson that I thrust on you. Was her name and address on the letter inside, or the publishers’ name? I must write, I suppose; and all traces seem to have vanished. So if you could send a card with this on it, would you.

We came down here to recover, and now I’m all right, and we go back on Sunday I think.

Your
VW

I didn’t read Last September, because I was in such a state of crass stupidity, but I shall when I get back.

Texas

[]

2902: To Elizabeth Bowen

Monday [11 June 1934]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Elizabeth,

Many thanks for sending the letter. As she’s been so tactful, not giving addresses, and writing her name illegibly I think it may lapse.

Of course I am pleased and honoured that Lady Cynthia [Asquith] should want to quote from Mrs Dalloway. If its only a few lines, there is no difficulty: if its a passage, or a page, then the Hogarth Press says will Heinemann write and ask them: as they ask whatever it is—10/6 perhaps—that Heinemann in the same circumstances asks them. This is the way publishers behave, and I’m in their hands.

Another thing: did I forget to tell you that we have a friend, Lyn Irvine, who produces what she calls The Monologue? A little typewritten paper. She asked me to ask you if you would consent to send her something. I said I would; now she writes again to ask: so I ask: will you: in case she is too shy to ask. She doesnt pay I think. But she is clever, uncompromising and all that. I’m so grilled that I cannot give you more details.

Yes, how nice it must be, to lie under a tree, having knocked down Lettice Fisher.

Yr. VW

Texas

[]

2903: To Ethel Smyth

Sunday [17 June 1934]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.x]

No, I cant manage tomorrow. Somebody here. And I suspect you’ll be wise for once and sit among your white pinks in the garden. I lie like an alligator basking. Only alligators bethink them of the lotus and the loves of other alligators in this weather; while I think, on the contrary, of slabs of green ice, and green eyed bears, and white birds, and wish I were able to waddle off my ledge into the sea. But I managed to add one staggering nonsensical page to the 700 odd this morning, so I am quite happy; in my grilling.

Why is Mrs Cameron [Elizabeth Bowen?] so touchy? I cant myself feel that even if the aspersions you make were of my dearest I should resent them. An odd trait in human nature: throw it down the WC. if you can spare the water—and think no more of it.

V.

Do you want it back?

Berg

[]

2904: To Ethel Smyth

Tuesday [19 June 1934]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Well that was, what they call, a sweet thought of yours; to come in from the roasting grill and find all white, all cool, all as fresh as a laundry. Your Simkins—but this may be the result of sympathy and association—always smell sweeter to me than Oxford Street Barrow Simkins

No, tomorrow I have to be out, and praise the Lord, the sun is down, and theres a puddle in the mews at the back. And on Friday I must go, heaven help me, to Worthing. My mother in law, having for the past 5 years, carried on an elderly flirtation with an old man called Legge, who stood her Burgundy and took her on the pier, is now once more desolated, because the old man is naturally dying; which she cant do.

Yes, I liked the tiger story; I thought Stenson was fishy myself—picking up strangers and jumping after hats

V.

Heres the horrors—papers I mean.

Berg

[]

2905: To Ethel Smyth

Thursday [28 June 1934]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

I am amused, but also rather contrite. I forgot that you cant see the situation at the other end of the telephone. There I was at 4.30 still talking to a charming friend [Desmond MacCarthy] who had asked himself to lunch. Lord love me, will he stay to dinner, I was asking?—and we had people dining—shall I get no respite from talk till one a.m.?—when the telephone rang, and I seized the occasion providentially offered to say, severely, with an eye on him, “No I cant see you. I’m going out.” He took the hint and went—you rushed to Staggs and bought lipstick. Such is the power of the human voice. Well my opinion of my own histrionic powers has gone up—so thats all to the good. But let me pay for the lipstick—indeed I think I owe you an umbrella; such a heavenly relief it was to get 2 hours solitude before the diners arrived—much like being given an umbrella in a storm. What about H.Bs [Brewster] letters, that reminds me? Dont I owe you some part of Mrs Jones [typist]? When shall I be alone, and see you—? God knows

V

Berg

[]

2906: To V. Sackville-West

2nd July [1934]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Yes I saw Ben [Nicolson] across the room the other night, and wished and wished I could get at him; but the crowd was too great. What a shindy a party is! I think that one will last me till next July. I’m quite all right—only Elly [Rendel] made me send a swab of my throat to a doctor, who says it is full of germs, and wants to inoculate me, which I wont do: so have kept rather quiet, and so far have had no more flu (as he said I should) I lay it on rather to Ethel, as you divine. Poor old struggler! Now she writes to say she has to pay £2,000 to the Treasury, and is therefore ruined: something about income tax apparently, but I rather suspect exaggerated, like the rest.

I expect L. has already written you a business letter, so that all that is left me is to say that far from thinking you a grasping Jew we always point to you as the one, or the most, perfectly disinterested and incorruptible and mild and modest and magnanimous of all our crew. All I feel sometimes in the grey watches of the night is that we are fleecing you; and you have to pull the feathers from your breast to feed the young on our account. The young, Ben, I mean—oh I’m so hot—cant write—looked to me adorable the other night—worth sitting on a felt chair between Sibyl and Jack Hutch, to see, and so I daresay L. ought to pay you one thousand down all to keep him at Balliol.

Here is Osbert [Sitwell] ringing up to ask me to lunch. No I wont. Vita never rings me up; but then she’s sitting among the pigeons at the top of the pink tower watching the moon rise between the hop poles—(now, isn’t that worth all that Dotty [Dorothy Wellesley] ever wrote and Squire ever praised; so spontaneous, universal, and full of deep feeling). But I wish I ever saw her—Vita I mean; only when she’s not on the Tower with the moon in her eyes, she’s elsewhere with oh dear me—you see how that sentence must end … I had hoped to see Harold—only Raymond came.

V.

Berg

[]

2907: To Ethel Smyth

Monday [2 July 1934]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

I’m seriously much down cast by thinking you have to meet this appalling muddle [her tax demand]. How can it have happened? Still, I cant help guessing they wont exact anything like that amount—not from a Dame, doctor, KCB. and so on, surely. But what a hell of a bore to have to think of it even—and I’m enough of a flibbertigibbet to have panics in the middle of the night about money.—Do you?—When, goodness knows, I’ve now no need.

Yes, I admit the folly of never seeing you. Not that I had any notion you were going to turn into a brown cocoon so soon (a rhyme—how lucky—like seeing 3 magpies to rhyme unwittingly). And my summer is merely a passive one—here I sit, trying to write, and what drops into my bucket drops. It was Desmond the other day when you rang up. And I seem to be giving offence to my friends by my behaviour. Colefax writes that she is furious. Cant believe that its not a personal insult that I wont roast myself and fry myself talking to her and Noel Coward. Lord—what dusty souls these women get! On the whole—here comes a whopping whale of a compliment, so make ready—I prefer Ethel with all her faults. Yes, really; I think you are worth 4 of Cunard, 6 of Colefax, and 10 of Lady Diana [Cooper]. No, I forget, you have a rapture for her blue eyes and pink bones—to me a little frosty and like the Union Jack on a wedding cake. There used to be one in the hall at Buszard’s [tea-shop]

For the first time almost in my life I am honestly, without exaggeration, appalled by the Germans. Cant get over it. How can you or anyone explain last week end! Their faces! Hitler! Think of that hung before us as the ideal of human life! Sometimes I feel that we are all pent up in the stalls at a bull fight—I go out into the Strand and read the placards, Buses passing. Nobody caring. Well as you would say, Basta. Let me know what happens about the money.

V.

Did I tell you, we have to appear before magistrates on Thursday at Reigate. L. accused of dangerous driving—no, inconsiderate driving

Berg

[]

2908: To Helen McAfee

July 3rd 1934

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Miss McAfee,

I must apologise for not having answered your letter before. But it came when I was having rather a troublesome time with influenza, and I put away the MS of the Sickert article to consider in better circumstances.

I have now looked at it; and I think that it will be possible to meet your wishes—I think I can put in a paragraph about Max Beerbohm’s Caricatures without interfering too much with the run of the argument. Happily, the dialogue form gives one room for such diversions.

I am arranging with the magazine here that it shall not come out before October. I will try to send it you in the revised form sometime at the beginning of August. I hope this will suit your dates, but if you want to have it by a fixed date will you let me know?

I quite realise of course that Mr Sickert’s pictures are not as familiar with you as with us; he is getting very old and is in very bad circumstances, and this rather led me to write about him, although I have no qualification as an art critic; save admiration for his work.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Yale University

[]

2909: To Ethel Smyth

[5 July 1934]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

Well you are without exception the most crossgrained, green eyed, cantankerous, grudging, exacting cat or cassowary I’ve ever met! Theres Desmond to lunch—Why not Desmond to lunch? I’ve met Desmond once in 6 months—on 8th April to be precise in a crowd of 10 people: and I’ve known him 30 years: and by Gods truth, I wont have my meetings or partings altered or dictated by a hair or handsaw by a woman who has spent all her days lunching and dining with Ponsonbys Barings Lovats and Coopers—a little set, if you like, though coroneted. O damn your insolence.

In hurry and heat.

Berg

[]

2910: To Stephen Spender

July 10th [1934]

52 Tavistock Square, [W.C.1]

Dear Stephen,

It was very nice of you to write to me. I love getting letters, but I hate answering them, at least when I’ve let them, as generally happens, lie about and become mouldy and reproachful. So I’m writing on the nail.

I’m so happy that you read the Lighthouse with pleasure, when there are so many other books you might be reading. Some people say it is the best I wrote—others say the Waves: I never know: do you—I mean about your own books? It used to worry and puzzle me—this diversity of opinion: no I’m becoming resigned to the fact that one cant get any settled opinion, and its rather a relief, for then one can go ahead on one’s own; and merely stop and enjoy the praise if one gets it.

Who was your tutors wife, I wonder? I wish there were some means of circulating the people who are as beautiful and charming as that—As it is, they remain on one shelf, and we on another. I never thought Oxford bred mothers and children—only very distinguished elderly men: but I’m still under the influence as you see, of my party at the Fishers.

I’m very glad to hear that you are writing a long poem [Vienna]. Yes, of course I agree that poetry makes statements; and perhaps the most important; but aren’t there some shades of being that it cant state? And aren’t these just as valuable, or whatever the term is, as any other? I am writing with prejudice, I admit, for I spent last week describing the state of reading poetry together, and I dont think you could say that in poetry.

So with an infinite number of feelings: or such is my feeling. Then I go on to say that prose, as written, is only half fledged; and has a future, and should grow—but thats my private prejudice, and no doubt rises, not from conviction, but because I am in some way stunted. Its all very complex and immensely interesting. I should like to write four lines at a time, describing the same feeling, as a musician does; because it always seems to me that things are going on at so many different levels simultaneously! shall like anytime to read your poem; I want to read nothing but poetry.

The rock [T. S. Eliot] disappointed me. I couldn’t go and see it, having caught the influenza in Ireland; and in reading, without seeing, perhaps one got the horror of that cheap farce and Cockney dialogue and dogmatism too full in the face. Roger Fry, though, went and came out in a rage. But I thought even the choruses tainted; and rather like an old ship swaying in the same track as the Waste Land—a repetition, I mean. But I cant be sure that I wasn’t unfairly influenced by my anti-religious bias. He seems to me to be petrifying into a priest—poor old Tom.

What about politics? Even I am shocked by the last week in Germany into taking part: but that only means reading the newspapers. Do write again, should you have time.

Greetings from Leonard
Yrs VW

Texas

[]

2911: To Jane Bussy

[11 July 1934]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Voila, chère Janie, le brouillon que vous avez commandé. Après l’avoir lu, je pense que peutetre il sera mieux de ne pas l’envoyer. Cette image de Pelepant et la sylphe n’est pas tout à fait réussie: c’est un peu—peut on dire ‘rosse’?

J’avais l’intention de vous aborder au Square hier soir, mais le sommeil m’a vaincu, et j’ai eu le plaisir en dormant de vous revoir, et de vous entendre dire que vous m’aimez, et que je sais très bien la différence entre les imparfaits et les parfaits—ce qui m’a tellement ravie que je me suis eveillée et hélas—c’était un reve.

A Vendredi, quatre heures.

Texas

[]

2912: To Shena, Lady Simon

July 15th [1934]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Shena,

I didn’t at all mean the other night to churn up the foundations of your life! On the contrary what I was feeling, as usual,—was envy of other people’s experiences—of your and your husband’s Manchester education, and so on,—and the desire to combine them with mine. It was modesty that made you think your life was criticised. I become more and more impatient with all these barriers and limitations—so if you will bring Manchester to London, we will send the artists to Manchester, and may I be one of them. It would be a great advantage to know how a university works, or a mill. One gets so dyed in one’s own brand of being.

But it is too hot to put this plainly, and I’m only apologising for what must have been a high handed speech. (I’ve forgotten what I said)

It was very nice of you to come to dinner anyhow—and that reminds me, that the dinner itself is on my conscience still. After 18 years I at last got rid of an affectionate tyrant [Nelly Boxall], and your dinner was the first cooks [Mabel] new attempt—But if you will come again, perhaps she will have improved.

Yrs
Virginia Woolf

Sussex

[]

2913: To R. C. Trevelyan

18th July [1934]

52 Tavistock Square, [W.C.1]

Dear Bob,

I’ve been a long time writing about your poem, which delighted me; but the summer in London is distracting. I am very glad I let you off, partly at least, writing the Epistola ad V. W; I don’t think it is only because you say so kind a word about me that I find it so sympathetic; of course use the quotation—which gives my meaning fairly. Though of course had I been writing more explicity I should have tried to convey my respect and admiration for the dead, as well as my slight distrust of their dominion over us.

It seems to me that here you have invented or brought into being a method which allows you to be at once personal and poetic. I think the presence of a human being at the end of your poem is an admirable device—because like all good letter writers you feel a little of the other’s influence, which breaks up the formality, to me very happily. In particular I like the country part—and the angler watching his “bright line”. As for the argument, I daresay my plea for adventurous prose is not disinterested: had I been able to write poetry no doubt I should have been content to leave the other alone. Anyhow, in reading this I see quite plainly what poetry can do and prose can’t. So the envy is not all on your side.

A thunderstorm has just broken over Tavistock Square and I am writing in a lurid yellow light, not very connectedly I’m afraid.

Yours,
V.W.

Trinity College, Cambridge

[]

2914: To Jane Bussy

[24 July 1934]

52 Tavistock Square, [W.C.1]

My dear Janie,

I must explain that after I had asked you to teach me old Bob Trevelyan came to tea and said he has a friend called Bonamy, a Frenchman, who rides on a horse and teaches French. His charge, Bob said, is always 7/6 an hour, and therefore yours is blacklegging which cant be allowed. So I send a cheque for the proper sum, and even then, considering how you over-ran your hour, and did exercises out of school, I’m probably skimping you.

Talking of the more imponderable element in our lessons (dear me, I’ve got to wash and dress so I cant furbish up this sentence properly) talking I mean of the pleasures of friendship and human propinquity, so impressed was I by your charm—no, thats not the word either: well, lay charm like a lustre over silver or gold, which is character—do you see that quality in your glass?—in short I was so delighted, interested, and impressed by my teacher that I wrote to her mother [Dorothy Bussy] (thank the Lord I neednt put this ramification into French—I think it savours of St Simon, plus Proust, with just a pinch of Mrs [Edith] Wharton)—I say so, and ask her to tea to express it in so many words, whereupon the clock struck 12: it was a rainy night; Leonard who posts the letters said it was too late to go; so I tore the letter to fragments. When I telephoned in the same connection next day she was midway between one house and the other, so I never saw her to tell her in so many words my opinion of her daughter’s charm.

Yes in short, I did very much enjoy the human element my dear Janie, and if you ask Nessa, she will tell you how I sat on the edge of a chair and said Look here, Janie is far and away the best of the younger generation—‘So I’ve always said” she replied, sticking a pin in her mouth; and the conversation then took a turn so flamingly in your praise that had you long ears, with long fur, like a donkeys, nothing could have put out the fire. So there. How would you put that proverb into the French of M. [André] Maurois? By the way he never answered, and thus I fear my likening him to a lark in the sky didnt go down.

V.W.

Texas

[]

Letters 2915-2937 (August-September 1934)

2915: To Ethel Smyth

Sunday [29 July 1934]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

You would get longer livelier and more frequent letters from me, if it weren’t for the Christian religion. How that bell tolling at the end of the garden, dum dum, dum dum, annoys me! Why is Christianity so insistent and so sad? Thats you see, why I dont write page after page: because I lay it down to you, this bell ringing religion; and say to myself, ‘She cant have her cake and eat it too.’ We got here on Thursday, all Friday was spent at Worthing; today, like a butterfly whose wings have been crinkled up to a frazzle, (American) I begin to shake them out, and plane through the air. I’ve not read so many hours for how many months. Sometimes I think heaven must be one continuous unexhausted reading. Its a disembodied trance-like intense rapture that used to sieze me as a girl, and comes back now and again down here, with a violence that lays me low. Did I say I was flying? How then can I be low? Because, my dear Ethel, the state of reading consists in the complete elimination of the ego; and its the ego that erects itself like another part of the body I dont dare to name.

Yes I will, I suppose, I must I know, get Maurices “Dulwich Lady;” but oh dear me, I dont want to. I never can submit myself to his silvery bald fingers (as a writer I mean) with any gusto. He’s too white waistcoated, urbane, and in the old Etonian style for my rough palate. I cant get a thrill or a jar or any kind of acceleration out of him, any more than I can out of my dear infrequently met but always welcome Desmond MacCarthy—No, they’re both what the fashion writers call ‘immaculate’ But I’ll try once more in deference to you. But then, since the heart has got into your brain, about Maurice, I dont think you a safe guide in those groves, those scented garden paths, down which he for ever leads some noble crinoline. I am scurrying and hurrying to write this letter, and cover this virgin page, before L: who is reading a vast history of all histories—the sort of book Mr Casaubon tried to write in Middlemarch—finally shuts the page, and says Bed, whereupon Pinka jumps down from her chair, and we go in procession through the garden to my room: where I lie, and look through the apple leaves, at the clouds that hide the stars.

I hear from Nessa by the way that for some sudden inscrutable reason, Bayliss is doing Fête Galante. Gallant old bus horse (this refers to Bayliss, not Smyth) She’s a fine figure of a woman—Yes, but I forget where this was leading me. Let me see, I wrote 2 hours this morning, walked by the river and saw a porpoise; then up on the downs by a solitary farm with a fierce chained dog, and so home, and read Timon of Athens. Flaubert; and a modern novel.

Now here is Leonard and I must hastily close; isnt this a gallant effort—only 6 inches left to fill, and the whole letter, brimfull of cogent political argument, love, divinity, literary criticism with some domestic comment thrown in, has wasted precisely 10 minutes of my valuable day. Can you write as quick as this?

Oh how I loathe religion. I was reading the life of an 18th Century Parson Venn. “Mercifully” he says “she swallowed a pin; which led her to thoughts of death; and instead of burning her wings at Assemblies, routs, card parties, she became a shining light.” Mercifully she swallowed a pin! How can you belong to such a canting creed?

V.

Berg

[]

2916: To Ethel Smyth

Wednesday [8 August 1934]

[Monk’s House,] Rodmell, [Sussex]

No no, my dear Ethel, you cant possibly get across, I mean get away, with that book of Maurices, No comparison with Mérimée—Oh my God that such a suggestion should have lodged in your otherwise generally clear keen, sagacious head. What a flurry love sets up—what a dust—what, in short, to speak plainly, a vacuum. Carmen! Oh dear! Dulwich! Oh my God! Why Carmen, which I read 2 weeks ago by chance, is like an oak tree; this is a piece of chewed string. Every word in Carmen has the thickness of a giants thigh: this is thin as a blade of green that a butterfly makes wobble. There the shade is ink black; here thin as weak tea. There the sun is blue; here a watered wisp. Its a conjuring trick of a hack. “Behold—my hat! Look well—now there’s a rabbit. Now—still keep your eyes on me—behold its gone” Thats all it is—a book without roots; veracity, shade or sun. A parasol of a book—an empty white waistcoat. And that you of all people, with your incorruptible British sense, that you should turn to water and praise this brash*—well, I cant finish this sentence to my liking (having only 5 minutes this time) so must throw it at your unrepentant, uncastrated head, and there leave it of course, its all very pretty and all that.

Then as to Xtianity and egotism. How you religious caterpillars (quotation from [John] Webster) make my gorge rise! ‘We’ that is Ethel and Elizabeth, having saved our souls, and purged our grossness, faintly and vaguely perceived in you, Virginia, signs of grace—or are they only spots on the sun;? So you say, gazing at me through your sanctimonious spyglasses. Making a corner in virtue; serving it up in pill boxes. Why, I’ve less egotism in my whole body, Ethel, than some one who likes her music to be played, in her little swollen fingers. Swollen with egotism, thats what you are—gout d’you call it? Ask your doctor next time to purge you of egotism. Lord! How I detest these savers up of merit, these gorged caterpillars; my Jew has more religion in one toe nail—more human love, in one hair.

V

No time for more. Alas and alas

V.

* Brash = babies diarrhoea. Ask Lady B. [Balfour] if it doesnt.

Berg

[]

2917: To Mrs Easdale

8th Aug. [1934]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Near Lewes, Sussex

Dear Mrs Easdale,

You must be accustomed by this time to not being thanked or answered.

But this is a particularly blatant case of ingratitude seeing that I am now sitting under a miraculous glow of your flowers. They have a particular fascination for me—rather like shells, only brighter and odder. How do you get them? I never see them anywhere. Your last years bunch was still in the room—but now they have made room for these. It is very good of you, though far too generous.

We liked so much seeing Joan [Easdale] the other day in London, only I felt guilty that she missed her train.

With best thanks and remembrances from us both.

Yrs sincerely
Virginia Woolf

University of London

[]

2918: To Ethel Smyth

15 Aug. 34

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

1. FLURRY

2. QUOTATION

3. GROSSNESS.

I hope thats plain—thats what comes of writing 5 minute letters. And this must be perhaps a 2½ minute letter, as I must go and fetch the gammon from the public house.

Religion.

Of course I agree in rating courage and un-egotism among the prime human virtues.

But what warrant have you for assuming that they are more commonly found among those who believe in God than in those who dont? None, I should say. At least thats not my experience. Thats what makes me speak of your ‘sanctimonious spy-glasses’. assuming that you have the virtue, by reason of your God.

Vita.

Now there you rather stamp on my corns. What right have you to accuse her, as I think you do, of lack of integrity, weakness and so on? Of course you may have personal reasons for feeling less kindly disposed towards her. But I feel that you ought not to say the other thing as positively as you do without giving proof. If I say my maids a thief, I add “she stole 2/6 to my certain knowledge.” As a matter of fact, Vita was here last week, and as far as I can judge, she’s not capable of stealing (metaphor, you’ll observe) one ½d. She quoted, from memory, a letter from C. which made me see the other point of view—what a d——d ass, and a braying hysterical ass at that, C. is. But I dont, on the strength of that letter, inform C’s friends that C. is lacking in virtue honour truth. No, no no, I think you’re entirely wrong about Vita. As for Dulwich [Maurice Baring], read the dénouement—I mean the chapter about the journalist publishing her life—and ask yourself if anything of such palpable meretricious falsity could be used in that place save in a tenth rate book. Duncan is with me.

V.

Berg

[]

2919: To Shena, Lady Simon

15th Aug [1934]

Monks House, Rodmell, Near Lewes, Sussex

My dear Shena,

We are down here, and shant be back in London till the beginning of October. So would it be possible for us to come later? No, weekends are rather difficult, so that if a night in the middle of the week were possible, it would suit us better. I say ‘us’, but if Leonard couldn’t come, and he is always rather rushed in the autumn, might I perhaps come alone? It is very nice of you to ask us. I wonder if we are still educatable?

Yours
Virginia Woolf

Of course I want to see a works.

Sussex

[]

2920: To Dorothy Bussy

Aug 22nd [1934]

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes, [Sussex]

My dear Dorothy,

I have been looking everywhere for your letter but cannot find it. And as you were somewhere in the country, this will never reach you, unless some good genius forwards it. It is only to say that we too were very much disappointed—it mustn’t happen again—there was your tea waiting and you never came. The truth is the summer is a damnable time in London. The autumn is much better. What about a crumpet in October? Your adorable daughter [Jane] said you might be still in England.

Yes, I think she is a ravishing creature, to me much the most alive and interesting of the younger generation, so French and so English—so cultivated and so fierce. But I am not going to write a character of a daughter to a mother.

Anyhow I enjoyed my lessons greatly, and shall have some more I hope.

Yrs
VW

Texas

[]

2921: To Ethel Smyth

Friday [24 August 1934]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

No we were up in London all day yesterday—had only just got back when you telephoned.

Can you come tomorrow, which is Saturday, at 5?

I’m afraid we shan’t be alone—there’s a young man, [William] Plomer, who writes novels and has reviewed Dulwich, and a girl [Lyn Irvine] who wants to write novels. But they’ll play bowls, and we can sit in the garden and talk, while pretending to watch. This is the best day, so do come then if you can.

No, I can’t understand, seriously, your feeling about Dulwich. If you’d likened it to something say by Edmund Gosse or Andrew Lang, I would have been delighted to praise it—for of course it has its merits—on those terms. But to drag in Stendhal and Carmen! Dear me, how we differ.

But that is no news. And I’ll forgive you for having made me order Victoria the Widow, because of one or 2 stories, though there again—dear me, how can you roll out your big guns over that entirely false and feeble and twittering performance.

Tomorrow we will fight

V.

Young Plomer and Lyn Irvine will be excited to see you and hear you, even in the distance.

Berg

[]

2922: To Robert T. Oliver

24th Aug. 1934

Typewritten
Private

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Mr Oliver,

Many thanks for your letter about my book Orlando. I am much interested in your interpretation, but I know you will understand me if I say that I am unable to add any comments of my own. This is partly because I have not read the book since I wrote it, and much is therefore forgotten. But also I think that the author can scarcely state his meaning except in the words which he has used in his book. Interpretation must be left to the reader. This applies also to my relation to literature—I have expressed this as well as I can in my books of criticism. I fear therefore that I can be of little help to you.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Edward A. Hungerford

[]

2923: To Ethel Smyth

Monday [27 August 1934]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

I would have loved to come over to Wootton Manor, my passion for seeing other peoples houses is inextinguishable—but was too shy to suggest it; for these reasons (I have just analysed them)

1) You would have told her to admire my books. She wouldn’t. That wd. have made me shy,

2) You would have said I was good looking, She would have suppressed a start at my plainness—Shy again.

Yes, these enthusiastic women—like Ethel—make it almost impossible for very vain, very shy women, like Virginia ever to meet their, Ethel’s, friends.

You were very nice, and very remarkable, to the young the other day; but Lord! dont count them among my ‘clan’; rather among my clientele—both being almost bankrupt, struggling like flies in saucers; rather desperate; but not among the petit clan. If you go on using that phrase, I shall fire off a revolver at your head about Barings Balfours and Ponsonbys. As a student of human nature, isnt it odd what a rise you can always get, out of anyone, by telling them they live in a ‘petit clan’—If I were dead, still my heart would beat, would beat and blossom in red, at the tread, of that over my feet.

Maynard. He certainly threw off that remark about Ethel being a national monument, and she’s only got to tell the tax collector so; but I suspect it was one of his imaginative flights—He has an exaggerated optimism, where he admires, which is one of his endearing qualities. But of course I’ll ask his advice, if you would like it He knew, of course, all about feluccas [?] (no, thats not the word)

We drove to Brighton to buy worms today—worms for the marmozet; left in the greenhouse, they had died. Oh those downs! How you hurt me! Are they Wilmington downs? Well, there was a horrid little villa, without a garden, we could have had there; and I’ve always regretted it, but common-sense tells me, it is better to be here. Only how fierce and perennial the love of country is! I remember walking by the Long Man—if thats what you mean

V.

P.S. Wednesday

But, joking apart, I am quite sure that if the worst should happen, or the Treasury demands payment [for Ethel’s taxes], a letter to the papers, signed Maurice Baring, or Lord Balfour or both—with Beecham thrown in—would solve the question in 2 weeks. And also I’m sure that this is the fitting way to solve it. In fact thats obvious to the meanest capacity. So please I beg of you devote yourself to memoir writing for posterity and dont trump up dust and ashes for Peter Davies [publisher]. This I consider your most sacred duty. Ask Lady Balfour if she doesn’t agree.

Berg

[]

2924: To Vanessa Bell

Friday [31 August 1934]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

Here’s this—

Wolves are on me so I cant write—and I suppose its hopeless ever to think of seeing you here.

Berg

[]

2925: To Vanessa Bell

Wednesday [5 September 1934]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

We had a vague hope that we might get over to you on Monday (though I expect you are happier alone, for a change) but of course Karin Ann and Judith arrived, the yatcht [sic] having broken down at Newhaven. It was like having a swarm of locusts in the house. Everything disappeared. We’ve been living in a torrent of people—in fact I’m thinking next year of hiring a villa in—God knows where. There are too many Ethels, Lyons’, [Kingsley] Martins, mothers in law, Keynes’, and so on—but this doesnt apply to the rare blue Dolphin—in Sussex. And here is Mrs Jones’ Hugh [… 3 words omitted…] asking to come. And tomorrow we go to London: so is there any chance that you and Duncan could come to tea either Saturday or Sunday? You might let me have a card. I think we shall be alone.

I’m very glad you are starting Angelica on an allowance, as it is much more amusing. And I dont see why I shouldnt do what I like with my own money. By the way, I thought the cover very lovely, so we’re raising the price on the strength of it. Ann and Judith had walked from Colchester to Cowes, lost their purse, and borrowed from lorry drivers on the way. But this seemed not to matter—We had to visit them in the Atalanta, which almost made me sick. Even in harbour. Their food is kept in a tin and smells, and the wc. is next it, and Adrian had hurt his leg in a gale, and they all wear black trousers. I hope Duncan is now all right—but how we any of us survive the country doctor God knows. I’m afraid you’ve had an awful time.

Yr B

Berg

[]

2926: To V. Sackville-West

Thursday [6 September 1934]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

That was an angelic thought of yours’—mushrooms for breakfast. I had them with bacon, and thought, how very good and kind Vita is even if she didnt pick them, she must have said, Find string paper, and forked out 9d stamps—all things that only very nice people, about to turn into sheep dogs, do.

By the way, after you had gone that night, I found a nice dinner put away in a corner of the frigidaire.

But theres not much point in saying that now. We’re up for the day—London tastes of stale face powder and petrol. But I verified a fact for my book. I am so proud of having one fact that is quite true that I think I shall print it in italics.

That reminds me, owing to the rapacity of our travellers, I’ve only today got them to give me an advance copy of the dark island (why lower case?) So I shall take it back tonight

I thought the woman who acts the Edwardians looked so divinely and completely to my taste that I almost made an excuse to come to Birmingham.

Are you going to Birmingham?

Are you coming to Rodmell—theres a new bedroom for you.

Oh I have seen so many and so many and so many dull nice good people—chiefly relations. My brother’s new yatcht, 15 tons, was blown into Newhaven—his 2 daughters who man it had walked from Colchester to Cowes, lost their purse, borrowed money from men in lorries. How I like the youngest of all the generations! But I must break off in the full flood of inspiration—the marmoset who travels with us, has wetted.

V.

And I want to see Harold; and I’m so glad you hated Dulwich ([Maurice] Barings Bastard) and I’ve been washing up lunch—how servants preserve either sanity or sobriety if thats nine 10ths of their lives—greasy ham—God knows.

Potto.

Did I tell you my notion of heaven? All mushrooms,—did I tell you I’d had Ethel down? did I tell you I’m sick of all people called St John? And did I tell you, my God Vita, as you love me, or loved me, write to me.

Potto.

Berg

[]

2927: To George Rylands

Sunday [9 September 1934]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Near Lewes, Sussex

Dearest Dadie,

The difficulty about the weekend is that we have Ann and Judith, Adrian’s children, here. So could you possibly come for Thursday night (13th)? That would be very nice. Or, if you can’t, Leonard says he would fetch you over for dinner Sunday or Saturday and return you, if that’s possible, to Tilton. Only the children will be here.

But we want very much to see you.

Your
V.W.

George Rylands

[]

2928: To Julian Bell

Sunday [9 September 1934]

Monk’s House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

My dear Julian,

I enclose the MS. [his poems] Do you mean to publish them separately? I rather doubt that. But then I’m not a student of the time. I think they would do very well in an appendix to your Pope: with an introduction. I’m afraid we dont go to London next Thursday, or at all that week.

Here’s Nessa and Clive and the children for tea, while you are being murdered in Hyde Park.

I’ve heard nothing about Roger yet. Dadie [Rylands] is coming here I hope. I have been on the Stephen’s yatcht which broke down in a gale. Ann and Judith come next week—and I hope we shall meet on the birthday. What an amusing and indiscreet letter I would write if you could read! things not to be whispered on the typewriter.

V

Quentin Bell

[]

2929: To Ethel Smyth

11th Sept. 1934

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

That was very nice of you—to send me the Simpkins [dianthus], and it still smelt sweet.

But we’ve had an awful blow—Roger Fry’s death—You’ll have seen—It is terrible for Nessa. We took her up to London yesterday and shall probably go up on Thursday again for the service—music only I think. He was to me the most heavenly of men—so I know you’ll understand my dumb mood.—so rich so infinitely gifted—and oh how we’ve talked and talked—for 20 years now.

V.

Berg

[]

2930: To Vanessa Bell

Wednesday [12 September 1934]

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes, [Sussex]

Could you possibly get the paint box for me to give Angelica?

If you’ve no time, dont bother. I’ll give her a tip instead.

I’ve just heard from Pamela that she wants to see us before the funeral. So I’m asking her to come at 2 tomorrow. She’s writing to you. We shant get up till lunch time, or about 12.30 I shall be at the flat till we go to Golders Green.

B.

Berg

[]

2931: To Margaret Llewelyn Davies

Sunday [16 Sept 1934]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Near Lewes, Sussex

Dearest Margaret,

It was very nice of you to write—we knew you would understand. It has been a wonderful friendship, and I know we ought to be thankful to have had it. But it is very hard when one’s friends die.

We are staying down here till the end of the month. But we shall hope to see you as soon as we get back. Have you been staying in London? It has been a lovely summer—the garden so full of fruit we cant eat it all. Leonard is now picking apples: and we have our two giant nieces, Adrian’s children, staying with us. They walked all the way from Colchester to Southampton last week, sleeping under hedges and borrowing money from lorry drivers when they lost their own. Here they are! one [Ann aged 18] is 6 ft: and means to be a doctor—the other [Judith aged 16] 5 ft 10 and means to be a Civil Servant.

It will be very nice to see you and Lilian [Harris] again.

Love from us both.
Yr Virginia

Sussex

[]

2932: To Vanessa Bell

Wednesday [19 September 1934]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

I forgot to ask you—what do I owe you for Angelica’s paint box? Will you let me know.

I was sorry we were out when Julian came yesterday. Do come if ever you would—but I daresay you’d rather be alone for a bit. Today we have a man called Graham about his book, which is an awful bore: tomorrow we have to go to Worthing for the last time thank God. Then I hope we shall be alone

Only as you know this doesn’t apply to you. What did Geoffrey Keynes say about Duncan?

So I hope to see you some time

B.

Isnt it extraordinary—Mrs Woolf’s niece fell and broke her leg last week she seemed to get all right—but then suddenly died. Do take care of yourself

Berg

[]

2933: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Friday Sept 21st [1934]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dearest Ottoline,

Yes, we are all very sad, as I know you will understand. Roger was so much part of our lives—I dont know anybody who gave more and life seems very dull and thin without him. How I wish you had gone on knowing him—but of course that’s useless. He died suddenly, as I expect you have heard. His heart went wrong, and I cant help thinking the doctors completely mismanaged it. But there is this comfort that they found afterwards he was in such a worn out state that he could not have lived long, and might have died at any moment.

We went up for the service, which was very beautiful and nothing but music, and then came back here. I think we shall stay, if we can, another fortnight. It is very lovely up in the downs, where I walk for miles, and never meet anyone but a shepherd.

Yes, I read and write, and we have had a good many people one way and another—the old Buccaneer [Ethel Smyth] among them, much to the surprise and amusement of William Plomer, who happened to be here. He thought her handwriting the worst he had ever seen! I’m sorry about your throat—the only blessing is that you can shut the door on Ethel. But dont shut it on me. I feel stupid and depressed and dull. I hate my friends dying. Roger was so full of his lectures and his plans, and now its all over. But its far worse for Vanessa than anyone. So goodbye for the moment, and excuse this winter fly scrawl. I spent yesterday at Worthing with my old mother in law, aged 86, and as gay as a Robin. Oh these old Jewesses! And do get well.

V

Texas

[]

2934: To V. Sackville-West

Sunday [23 September 1934]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

It was very nice of you, dearest Creature, to understand how much I should mind about Roger. Its been a horrid time—Nessa was here and rang up and was told he was dead. It was an awful shock. They had thought he was getting better.

I wish you had known him. He was so extraordinarily alive—I still find myself thinking I shall tell him something. And we all lived so much together. Dear me, why must one’s friends die? But its far worse for Nessa than for anybody. That I find very difficult to think of in the future. We always saw him with her it was such a complete intimacy—hers and his. We are staying here till the 5th, I hope. Might we come and lunch next Friday, which I think is the 28th? We are travelling our books at T. Wells; and could call in. But will you let me know if it suits?

No, to be honest as you require, I dont like the Island as well as the others. I cant get Shirin and Venn to come alive. You give me the impression of writing too much in the personal zone, as if you couldnt get far enough off to convey the outside aspect; so that I dont follow her feelings, or gather why she did this or that. But this may be my fault though. I offer it with diffidence, because I suspect that my knowledge of the real people has queered the pitch for me; and no doubt I’m subcutaneously jealous. I liked the still life very much—not Mrs Jolly [a landlady] much—but the island, and the sea; the poetry; but then I always say you are a poet: witness my favourite Sissinghurst, (which Desmond was enthusiastic about the other day by the way). The truth is, I dont grasp the people. And that, I suppose, one must do, in a novel.

It’ll be very nice if we may come on Friday. I am very dull and rather dismal.

Yr V.

I’m delighted that Lady S. has been so well inspired, for a change; and now expect with some confidence that Long Barn will be made over to me, as a token of gratitude and love, by B M.

Berg

[]

2935: To Ethel Smyth

Monday. 24th Sept [1934]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, near Lewes, Sussex.

Yes. I know I ought to have written before; but also you dont want me to write when I’m in a silent mood; and I’ve been in a silent mood.

All the same, I ought to have written, if only to explain that you mistook, no doubt through my own obscurity, the suggestion about the Income Tax. What I meant was, should you have to pay it, a letter say from Maurice Baring, to the papers, saying “Ethel Smyth has to pay—: well we want to pay it for her—” would bring whatevers’ needed in 10 days. That was what I meant to say. And I’m sure its true. So dont let a little affair of a few hundreds stand between you and the immortal page: dont kow tow to mortality.

Here’s your letter come, and I’m glad to see that ‘you’ve been delving in immortality—Lady Ponsonby to wit. Theres a violent wind, and all my letters have been dispersed; so I cant refer to the document. I think we shall stay here, save for a day in London, till the 1st week in October, or the 2nd week. And I’m going over to see Vita one day; and my niece is dining here off grouse, and my nephew too; and last week we had 2 more nieces, and such an odd lot of ragamuffins. And I have been thinking about the deaths of my friends. I have been thinking at a great rate—that is with profuse visibility. Do you find that is one of the effects of a shock—that pictures come up and up and up, without bidding or much control? I could almost see Roger yesterday in the room at Charleston. Nessa sits surrounded by her children doing needlework—dear, dear! So I break off. And Maynard is building a theatre, he’s so rich, and so enterprising. And I have a vast load of MSS. to read: and go on driving at that interminable book, which has the vitality of a snake—I cant end it.

V.

Berg

[]

2936: To George Rylands

Sept 27th [1934]

Monks House, Rodmell, Near Lewes, Sussex

Dearest Dadie,

I don’t know that I had anything very definite in mind about dialogue—only a few random generalisations. My feeling, as a novelist, is that when you make a character speak directly you’re in a different state of mind from that in which you describe him indirectly: more ‘possessed’, less self conscious, more random, and rather excited by the sense of his character and your audience. I think the great Victorians, Scott (no—he wasn’t a Vn.) but Dickens, Trollope, to some extent Hardy all had this sense of an audience and created their characters mainly through dialogue. Then I think the novelist became aware of something that can’t be said by the character himself; and also lost the sense of an audience. (I’ve a vague feeling that the play persisted in the novelist’s mind, long after it was dead—but this may be fantastic: only as you say novelists are fantastic.) Middlemarch I should say is the transition novel: Mr Brooke done directly by dialogue: Dorothea indirectly. Hence its great interest—the first modern novel. Henry James of course receded further and further from the spoken word, and finally I think only used dialogue when he wanted a very high light.

This is all rather incoherent, and also, as is the case with all theories, too definite. At the same time I do feel in the great Victorian characters, Gamp, Micawber, Becky Sharp, Edie Ochiltree, an abandonment, richness, surprise, as well as a redundancy, tediousness and superficiality which makes them different from the post Middlemarch characters. Perhaps we must now put our toes to the ground again and get back to the spoken word, only from a different angle; to gain richness, and surprise.

I wish you’d look one day and see if there is any sense in this. Also, I wish you’d read the hated Antiquary and see whether you can’t discover the last relics of Shakespeare’s soliloquies in some of the old peasants speeches.

However, I must stop. It was enchanting to see you again—do let it become a habit—like gambling. And in God’s name, why do you call your simple humble straight-forward if mentally muddled old friend Virginia “strange”? R.S.V.P.

Leonard is feeding Mitzy on a grasshopper he caught on an apple tree at this moment or he would send love.

George Rylands

[]

2937: To Pamela Diamand

[end September 1934]

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

Dear Pamela,

It was very good of you to write to me. No, I dont think I ever realised that I could mean much to Roger—perhaps that was because he meant so much to himself. He was always the giver—no one excited and stirred me as he did.

So I am very grateful to you, because I have felt since his death how little one gave him—how much I wished I had told him what he meant to me. So thank you again. I am very happy to think he even likened me to your mother. Last time he dined with us, in July, he told me his marriage would have been perfect, but for her illness. I always felt this, though I never knew her.

We go back to London next week. Do come and see us, if it is ever in your way. And remember me to your husband.

Yours affely
Virginia Woolf

Sussex (typescript copy)

[]

Letters 2938-2970 (October-December 1934)

2938: To Vanessa Bell

Monday [8 October 1934]

Postcard

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

I’ve had a notice sent me to to say that Fanny Prothero’s furniture is to be sold at 24 Bedford Sqre: and it includes some Aunt Julia photographs. Its on view tomorrow till 4: the sale is Wednesday at 12. I think I shall go and look. For some extraordinary reason the Royal Historical Society thinks I might like to buy them. Perhaps I might.

V.

Berg

[]

2939: To Ethel Smyth

Friday [12 October 1934]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

As this will show, we are back again—since Sunday, indeed. And you’re at Torquay, rousing sparks in the orchestra, so I read; fanning them to flames and infusing even the old man with the drum, (d’you remember him) with amorosity. I hope you condoled with the Major, the right one, about his wife’s death [inexplicable]. I’ve been to Bromley and walked home across the Park. I’m too sleepy to tell you why I went to Bromley. But I like the London suburbs in autumn and their immense poetry. And I like Hyde Park fading into night, only the flowers burning in a few pale facades. I love overhearing scraps of talk by the Serpentine in the dusk; and thinking of my own youth, and wondering how far we live in other peoples and then buying half a pound of tea, and so on and so on. (You see how sleepy I am.).

I think Gwen [St Aubyn] is almost an—whats the word? [8 words omitted] I think the sutures of the skull haven’t joined up; and Vitas hot wind puffs too incessantly We lunched with them: she never sits at ease; Gwen: like a scissors. Have you read the book ‘their’ book. If so, let me have your opinion. I shant give you mine. I’m pestered with visitors: Colefax persistently pecking like a parrot with corns on her toes. No, no, no, I say: it only makes the pecking frantic. Oh dear, is this worth putting in the train to Woking? And you wont be there. You’re carousing with the Major; Lord how I should like to peep round the palms and look. You’re having a gin and bitters with the widower at this moment—and I not there, but here, but here.

V.

Berg

[]

2940: To Ethel Smyth

Monday [22 October 1934]

52 Tavistock Sqre, [W.C.1]

This is the only paper I have with holes in it—and I got it at Heffers [bookshop], Cambridge. But its rather small for an author who flows as you do.

I’m so sleepy I cant even fill this little square, and have only 5½ minutes.

1. Yes, if Maurice [Baring] asks me I’ll go if I can but I cant possibly write myself.

2. I asked Joyce, but the one impossible night: I’ll try again:

3. Colefax says why cant I ‘refresh’ her: seeing how hard she works—thats her line:

4. What were 4 and 5 and 6? I forget.

Vita has rather bad reviews in London: The grateful provinces adore the aristocracy. I’ve no strong feeling either way about Gwen: no, I dont think I have any jealousy; only rather a melancholy that V. should invest [her] with superlatives. But I always say, thats the wont of love: and you cant blame the diseased. I’ve 20 dozen letters to answer, and it is sheer indolence that makes me scribble here.

I’m glad you are launched on the sea of words—and that reminds me the quotation I liked comes at the end of the intron to the 2nd vol of I.

“For I hold that the permanent quality….” down to,

afraid of growing old.

V.

Berg

[]

2941: To Rosamond Lehmann

Tuesday [23 October 1934]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Rosamond,

Oh dear me, alas, no, we’ve got hung up with people here both Saturday and Sunday. What a curse! But will you let us drop in some other day, and give us lunch or tea? We would like to come very much: and Mizzy [marmoset] thanks you, and so does Pinka. Remember to tell me when your play is coming on, so that I may sit in the front row of the stalls

The whole room reeks of Ottoline. Leonard has just got up from his chair, saying “I will not sit in this stinking cat house”—but she was all that a lovely leopard should be—and has left me so dazed I cant write sense.

Yr aff VW

King’s

[]

2942: To Ethel Sands

24th Oct. [1934]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Ethel,

I am so distressed to hear from Vanessa of your accident. What a terrible bore to be laid flat in an hotel!—and it was time too you made your appearance in London, and cheered us all up.

I’m afraid the books I’m sending aren’t a very bright lot, but they may do to throw at Nan’s [Hudson] head in a moment of exasperation. Crime at Christmas is by a very rich young man who used to work with Philip Ritchie, until he took to the Stock Exchange, and discovered a gift for detective stories. Perhaps you know him. Then there’s Vita—about whom, which I mean, I wont express an opinion, but long to hear yours; and Illyria Lady, by an unknown woman who seems to live at Geneva, and appears very smart and witty in her photograph—in fact I thought she was amusing in her book. As for old Virginia on Sickert, which I add, only from affection, not because I’m vain of it, that was written at command of the old tyrant himself, who says no one appreciates him, and has the bailiffs in the basement. No doubt, now I’ve done his will, he’ll commit me to the flames,—that’s what artists are—ungrateful, exacting, morbid, impossible. But I like his pictures. Well this is only by way of a call: dont of course bother to answer: but if Nan would send a line on a card to say how you are, then she would prove her heart of gold—which I’ve always said it was.

London is rather dismal at the moment, and in the devil’s own uproar. Rosamund Lehmann is dining here, and her play has been accepted, and Stephen Spender is also coming, and his Epic is appearing, and Ottoline is giving a tea party, and I have no white gloves, and Sibyl is rampant, and Ethel Smyth has arthritis, and Clive almost had a bullet through Benita’s head, as they stood in her bedroom in Madrid, and it would be very nice to see Ethel and Nan quietly.

V.W.

Wendy Baron

[]

2943: To Ethel Smyth

[25 October 1934]

Postcard

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

Well you horror—not to know your own works: for some obscure reason you print a preface to the 2nd vol. cheap edition, of Imps, put a note—this preface is also included in Streaks of Life—and the quote occurs on page VIII of the 2nd vol of Imps: Cheap Edition: and is dated 1923. Not a methodical way of composing books, I declare. I dont suppose it occurs in the old edition: but why the 2nd vol, of red edn God knows.

Berg

[]

2944: To Stephen Spender

Monday [29 October 1934]

52 Tavistock Square, London W.C.1

Dear Stephen,

I’m very glad indeed to have your book [Vienna], which I found last night on getting back from Rodmell. So I havent read it yet; and I shall read it at least 10 times before I know anything about it. I get slower and slower, reading poetry. But I’ll write to you and say what I think—or still better, perhaps you’ll come and we will talk about it. Thank you very much.

I liked talking to Yeats, but Lord!—what a grind those [Ottoline] parties are! And after an hour’s hard work, the occult appeared—an illuminated coat hanger, a child’s hand, and a message about an unborn baby in Greek—at which I gasped, like a dying alligator, and Ottoline supplied a Mr Pudney a poet.

No I dont think I could review poetry: for one thing I’m so slow at reading it: and then one always hurts one’s friends’ feelings: and finally, d’you really think there’s any use in writing about contemporaries? Isnt it inevitable that one should Grigsonise? (I mean get into a groove, and write out the malice of one’s miserable heart). And how can one know the truth?

But I’m pleased you think me capable—my own criticism always seems to me hand to mouth, done for centenaries and so on: and I’ve never sat down and thought, as I should, and mean to one of these days.

Yes, it was a great pleasure—seeing you and Rosamond and William [Plomer]. I dont exactly fathom the silent and inscrutable Prof. Read.

Yrs V.W.

Texas

[]

2945: To V. Sackville-West

Tuesday [30 October 1934]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Yes, I’ll lunch with you on Thursday 8th at Cafe Royal with pleasure. What time? Where meet? How nice: what fun: and then where go?

As for “forgotten’—Lor lovaduk—the Vet said, when I showed him Potto’s mangy tail “Has this animal suffered in his affections, ma’am?” Whereupon such a wail went up: and the name Nick, Mrs Nick resounded: and all the dogs barked and cats wailed. Forgotten, indeed!

I rather hope to come to your lecture this Thursday; but shall in all likelihood be prevented—such a helter skelter, London. Still if you see a mangy woman, and a tailless, in a corner, as you declaim to the shade of Lord Northcliffe on The Loves of The Elizabethans—wave a kiss.

V.

I’ve been seeing Yeats; and Yeats said, “Mrs Woolf, I’ve been writing about The Waves!” Hah. Yes. Hah.

I forgot: here’s a little feeble joke to add to your collection.

Sickert: he’s an old bankrupt and implored me to say a word about him: but words, words, words, What are words?

Berg

[]

2946: To Ethel Smyth

Thursday [1 November 1934]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

In answer to your question about the publisher, L. says he thinks you should ask £200 in advance of Royalty: 15 p.c. on first 2,000 copies sold: 20 pc. on the others:

I hope that is what you wanted to know; but a voice on the telephone is a leaf in the breeze. I sat up so late last night talking to Aldous Huxley a most witty and cosmopolitan minded man that I’m in a state which cant be called either one or other—And Vita is lecturing at 5.30: but I cannot go. for one thing I cant listen; and then—and then—oh all those people. But she is giving me lunch one of these days—herself complained that we never met, or saw each other alone, which touched me, so I’m going to suffer a lunch out—loathe it though I do.

Aldous fired me to read Italian Latin Greek to travel, to see—its true he’s blind of one eye, which accounts I think for his erudition—If I had only one eye I should cease to flaunt and flare (I’ve been walking up Kingsway merely to gaze my fill) and should (so I say) learn my letters. And you’ve done it all—thats what I like about you, looked and lusted, and tasted, and learnt, and lolled in a quarry—surely that quarry in the Aldershot region ought to have its tablet “Here Ethel Smyth, dismounted from her bicycle, and lost her virginity.” I’ll see to it. A chaste circle of blue china. Think of the tourists coming to peer. Do you give me leave? How are you getting on with the memoirs? I’ll read or not read just as you like. Did I tell you I met Yeats, at Ottolines? And he said (this is my vanity) “I’m writing about The Waves; which …” Now I took that for a compliment, on the lips of our greatest living poet.

V.

Berg

[]

2947: To Donald Brace

2nd Nov. 1934

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Mr Brace,

Many thanks for your letter. I think that Miss West [Hogarth Press] only sent you the proofs of my essay on Walter Sickert as a formality. I myself had no thought that you would wish to publish it as a pamphlet. I am sure it would not have any success in America. As a matter of fact, we only published it here separately because old Mr Sickert, who has fallen on bad times financially, was very anxious, in the first place that something should be written about his work, and then that it should be published as soon as possible. Otherwise I should have waited to include it in a collection of essays. With us too the pamphlet is a very difficult matter. But I dont suppose that I shall have enough essays for a book for some time to come. Please dismiss the idea of publishing it in America.

With regard to the novel [The Years], I am in rather a perplexity. I have finished it—that is to say I have written what appears to be about 200,000 words; but my feeling is that it will have to be considerably shortened and re-written. I have put it away, so as to come fresh to it; and shall not begin work for another month. And I am quite in the dark as to the amount of revision that will be needed; or the time I shall take. I dont expect to have it ready before next autumn. But I will give you full warning. And it is always on the cards that I shall tear it up; but naturally I hope not.

I am sorry we shall not see you this autumn; but hope we shall have that pleasure in the spring.

With our kind regards,
yours sincerely,
Virginia Woolf

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

[]

2948: To R. A. Scott-James

5th Nov. 1934

Typewritten

The Hogarth Press, 52 Tavistock Square, London W.C.1

Dear Mr Scott-James,

Many thanks for asking me to review poetry for the London Mercury. It is very good of you but I am afraid that I must refuse. I have come to feel a greater and greater reluctance to write reviews, and seldom do it now. Also in this case as I know both Stephen Spender and Mr Blunden, I should find it very difficult.

But what you say about the scarcity of real criticism of poetry and the absence of any standard of judgment has interested me very much. It applies equally to fiction I think. It seems to me that it might be interesting to discuss the question of contemporary criticism generally, and to try to discover why reviewing is so bad, and how it could be improved. But it would be very difficult. However, I would like to see if I can make anything of it; and should I succeed I will send you the result in case it would interest you.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

2949: To Ethel Smyth

Tuesday [6 November 1934]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

I dont quite follow your question; if you mean that Longman want to do your new vol. why not ask them what you were going to ask the other publisher? That is £200 advance: 15 p.c. on first 2000; 20 p.c. afterwards? That seems reasonable—But as I say I dont quite follow: you say “Longman rather suggests that I should bring it out as one vol…” Does this mean that Longman has suggested taking the book, which Chapman and Hall (I think) had asked you to name a price for? Anyhow, Leonard agrees, that, the above, seems to cover the case: but why has Longman chipped in? I gathered he had let the matter slide: hence C. and Hall.

I long to hear your impressions of Pss. Mary. I’m told she is muttonfaced, mutton-minded, and sheep-natured: that she slightly repels; and has only one remark ‘Good luck’.—to those who win races. So what did she say to you? And how did she endure the musical harmonies? It is said (I’ve been seeing a courtier) that H.M. the Queen [Mary] is so constituted that Beethoven causes her acute indigestion. And what about the leg, and the book? And what about life in general? I’ve worn the napp off my mind trying to concentrate on your question: so no more; and there is no more paper to write on

V.

You’ll be amused to hear that Colefax has forced me to see her here: and begs me to remember how she suffers and be kind—Lord! Lord! But poor woman, she sounds and no doubt is distracted

Berg

[]

2950: To Ethel Smyth

Sunday [11 November 1934]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Tuesday 5 seems the only day of those named.

Its true Colefax threatens to come at 6 (wh. means 6.30 or 7) but I expect she’ll cut me. So come 5 if you can with MSS. and we’ll discuss everything then. By the way, its no use addressing to Rodmell, as they only send letters back when we’re not there for good.

V.

In a tearing rush: have to cook dinner and go out. Lots of mushrooms. I picked’em this morning in the marshes.

Berg

[]

2951: To Hope Mirrlees

[13 November 1934]

52 Tavistock Square, London W.C.1

Dear Hope,

Will you come and look in on us any time about 9.30 next Monday, 19th? We have Tom Eliot and a young man called Kitchin who writes detective stories. And bring Marie, I mean the dachshund, to introduce a human note.

And dont dress. And … here I am interrupted by that old Brigadier, Ethel Smyth.

Yours
Virginia W.

Mrs T. S. Eliot

[]

2952: To Ethel Smyth

Sunday, [18 November 1934]

Typewritten

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare. W.C.1]

(Excuse typing; my hand is illegible today)

Well, Ive read them; and have’nt very many criticisms to make. Of course, obviously, you have a little difficulty at first in getting off the ground. You swoop about a little too vaguely and variously perhaps; but—no, I dont think that could be helped, as you have the awkward join to make. And I think once under way you spin along admirably. I think theres no doubt youve got the whole thing going, and in full train, and the people alive and kicking and your own voice sounding out in its well known emphatic way. What I think you should do is to avoid chops and changes; to give each subject as long and straight a run as you can—skilfully pretending that life allows one a good long look, say at Mrs Benson before bouncing off to Royalty or whatever it may be. Avoid discursiveness, I should say; but otherwise keep on as you’re going. I think youve swept in a hundred little sparks of brightness already. Points of style that strike me are; I dont care for your so persistent use of ‘one’ for ‘I’. Its too wobbly for my taste. See page 7. Then page 50; I dont myself like the Beard joke, which reminds me of family tea; not so good in the public world. Then I’m more seriously doubtful about the wisdom of such long extracts from letters. They tend to be facetious. Yet in parts they are most effective like a haul of live water, with crabs and sand in it, out of the real sea. I think H.B.s letters come off very well, though. I believe these scraps of him will whet the public appetite for more. But do be careful about letters; for one thing they break up the narrative so abruptly that to use them without good reason is a danger.

Then what about libel? Have you considered for example the Bensons? Page 29a. that joke about ‘a bachelor and no saint’ might (I dont know the old buffer) make him crusty. But this is only remembering Christabel [Aberconway].

Well, I doubt that Ive much of point to say. I read swimmingly and dashingly after the first. And I think it is a gallant start; and now youre in full cry. So go ahead. Aim I should say at continuity, avoid tempting bye paths—I say this, and then half wish to unsay it. Because the longer I live the less I think one person can amend the ways of another; and the more I believe that the soul of writing only issues when the person is open and at full pressure; and at full pressure she must let fall some small inconveniences and oddities. Thats in fact why I never show my own MSS to any one; and only let L. read them when theyre hard and fast finished.

I’m sending the MSS tomorrow, but will post this now, so as to stop your imperious maw.

V.

[handwritten]:

Elizabeth [Williamson] most fascinating, like an old 18th Century miniature, the other night—and an astronomer as well.

Berg

[]

2953: To Susan Buchan

19th Nov 34

52 Tavistock Square, London W.C.1

My dear Susie,

It is very nice of you to send me your MS: and it sounds extremely interesting. I’m afraid it may be a little time before we can read it, because at the moment we have a great many manuscripts, and the only way is to read them in turn.

Yes, of course, if ever I find myself in your region I shall certainly try and see you—not only your view and your garden. I too hear of you from Elizabeth Cameron, and wish we ever met.

Your affate
Virginia Woolf

I also heard a wonderful account of Holyrood [Edinburgh] from Enid Jones!

Lady Tweedsmuir

[]

2954: To V. Sackville-West

Tuesday [20 November 1934]

52 T[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

No, no no—on no account. Nothing would induce me myself to do it, or Leonard either. It was merely that the people at the Show wanted it, so I was deputed to ask—which I did reluctantly: and I said, if I know Vita, she’ll say damn your eyes—and very properly.

It seems to me an iniquity; the idea of standing to be milked by any red handed oaf—no. So let’s forget and forgive. You see, though, how if they put it, and say so and so’s doing it, then we feel—but no more. And dont for a moment think of coming and doing anything here; that would be simply a silly waste of time, (except kiss me)

Yr in haste V.

And the idea of signing copies sent to you is quite absurd, L says.

Berg

[]

2955: To Victoria O’Campo

Tuesday [27 November 1934]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Madame Okampo,

You are too generous. And I must compare you to a butterfly if you send me these gorgeous purple butterflies [orchids]. I opened the box and thought “this is what a garden in South America looks like!” I am sitting in their shade at the moment, and must thank you a thousand times. On the contrary, it is I who should have apologised for asking questions. It is a bad habit, sprung of terror and delight. But if you will come and see us here I will not ask questions; I will make one sensible remark after another. Would Tuesday Dec 4th at 4.30 suit you? And would you mind finding us alone, at the top of a grimy solicitors office?

It would be a great pleasure if you would come.

With thanks again, and more apologies,

Yrs sincerely
Virginia Woolf.

Victoria O’Campo

[]

2956: To Victoria O’Campo

Thursday [29 November 1934]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Madame Okampo,

Would you come to tea on Saturday or Sunday at 4.30 instead of Tuesday? Either day would suit us, if you would be so kind as to say which. And then that would not interfere with Paris.

It was very good of you to treat my questions so generously. But I am scribbling: I have to go out, so I will leave it—I mean my thanks and interest—unexpressed and ask you to believe in them.

I will read the book again: many thanks.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Victoria O’Campo

[]

2957: To Victoria O’Campo

Wednesday [5 December 1934]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Victoria,

Yes, you wrote a very nice, I wont say flattering, but impetuous letter. I agree about hunger: and agree that we are mostly satiated, or so famished that we have no appetite. How interested I am in your language [Spanish], which has a gaping mouth but no words—a very different thing from English. But I’m so befuddled, talking to different people this afternoon, that I am not saying anything to the point: but what I must explain is that we go away on Friday for the week end: shall be back on Monday. Therefore the only chance is, could you dine with us on Tuesday, 11th at 8? Then we have a nice quiet boy dining [William Plomer], who was for years on a farm in South Africa; we could sit and talk: I mean, there would be no impediments as we would brush aside formalities. And you should not dress, but come without a hat. There would be Leonard, myself, the boy and you.

Otherwise, my only free time is tea on Monday: but teas are sometimes interrupted. Therefore if you can dine on Tuesday please do: and would you let me know, and forgive this scrappy scrawl written under the glow of the red roses. Ah, but I’ve no room to describe them, or brain either.

Yr Virginia Woolf.

Victoria O’Campo

[]

2958: To Hugh Walpole

5th Dec [1934]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Hugh,

Well, that was a pleasure—to hear from you. I felt as if you had sunk beneath the rim of the world. (Isn’t there a poem, in which sails sink down—no suns—thats what I’m thinking of) Its true I sometimes read that you’re acting David Copperfield at Hollywood—but then that seems to me over the rim of the world. Hurry up and come to tea, and tell me all about it.

I have often thought that you were sent into the world (partly at least) to see things on my behalf. An extra pair of eyes. I’m sure that is one at least of your functions. What I’m seeing for you, at this moment, is the Baroness Okampo, the Sibyl Colefax of Argentina, and a M. Gillet, a [French] journalist. And our marmozet is curled round Leonard’s neck. She (the Bss) is a generous woman who sheds orchids as easily as buttercups. And we are about to dine off a pheasant.

London is still all garlanded, but the Duke and Dss are—well, what d’you think theyre’ doing? You see I’ve so many things to say that like a bottle of fine old port turned upside down I can say none of them, and this affectionate whisper wont carry, I cant believe, to Hollywood. I’ve seen a good many of your friends—Plomer, Ottoline, Sibyl et cet:—and they all hope—well, as I say—come to tea. And dont sink behind the setting sun for so long again: the poem says the sun rises from his wet bed: so must you.

Love from us both
Yr Virginia

Texas

[]

2959: To Victoria O’Campo

Friday [7 December 1934]

52 Tavistock Sq, [W.C.1]

Dear Victoria,

No this is too much—as the old Queen used to say: I mean your flowers. Please dont do it again: please accept my (what she would have called) heartfelt thanks; but hereafter let me go ungiven. I am a graceless woman, who prefers, after one gift (and you have given me orchids and roses) to go ungiven. Thats what comes of having Scotch clergy in my blood—a detestable race. I am, as usual, writing in a whirlwind. The Charwoman’s baby has measles. I have to cook the dinner—at our cottage. So come on Tuesday to dinner at 8: because, even if the young man, who will be excited to meet you, because he lived in your country, alone with his flocks—if he’s there and falls in love with you, still we can talk separately. And I like the late evening best, and here I’m never alone for certain at tea. So at 8 on Tuesday: without dress.

Excuse this scrawl.

I’m taking your MS to the country.

Yrs V.W.

Victoria O’Campo

[]

2960: To Ethel Smyth

Sunday [9 December 1934]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

I return, with apologies the article. I used to know L.H. years ago. a mild spectacled youth. Its a little mild and spectacled, but well meaning—his article. Why is all writing about music and most about painting such geese’s cackle? Not that its as bad as fiction reviewing. What else! Oh the name of the book [Ethel’s]. We are both in favour of “As time went on—” The other seems to us clumsy. It has the advantage of recalling the other book of course.

Couldnt you compromise—then:—

Title page

As time went
on a sequel to
Impressions that Remained.

having only As time went on, on the back.

I’ve been rather up to my nose and over my eyes this last week—foreign visitors sent by friends—why do friends do this dastardly act, for which there is no remedy, short of hurting feelings?—and on top of that, Roger Fry’s family have asked me to write a life of him: What am I to say? There are masses of private papers, letters, etc: I’ve refused to write a whole big life; but promised to read through the papers and see if I can do something lesser and slighter. But oh dear what a time it’ll all take—what difficulties there’ll be! So be patient with the poor donkey Virginia. Madame Okampo the South American visitor was a great friend of Anna de Noailles

Berg

[]

2961: To Victoria O’Campo

Sunday [9 December 1934]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

Dear Victoria,

How very badly I must have expressed myself—if you think, through my hurried and illegible handwriting that I dislike your roses. Dear me! I adore them. Its only the lavishness and splendour of your gifts that sometimes makes the great great grandfather in me put on spectacles and take snuff. Nor did I mean (another blow to my pride as a writer) that it was Tuesdays dinner I had to cook. No. Yesterdays. In the country. We were at our cottage. But someone came,—I had no time to read; only cook.

So Tuesday at 8.

Yrs Virginia Woolf

By the way, after all, I am alone tomorrow, Monday, at 6—should you come in: but I expect as indeed must be the case, you are torn into a thousand flying tatters—going away.

Victoria O’Campo

[]

2962: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Sunday [16 December 1934]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Dearest Ottoline,

I would love to come on Thursday if I can. But we go on Friday, and I have the usual hubble bubble to settle before that.

Shant I see you again? Before you start for India? What a romantic sentence—How I shall rig up pictures of you.

But I hope to see you in the flesh if I can escape—oh such a press of bores—3 just this minute gone—on Thursday.

V.

Texas

[]

2963: To Ethel Smyth

Monday 17th Dec [1934]

Typewritten

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Excuse typing, but Ive been writing all the morning and my hand is shaky.

To begin with, I’m a little doubtful whether I ought to give any opinion, so glibly, on these fragments; because one gets the whole book out of proportion; and I’m not at all sure that I’m saying anything to the point. But on reading again, I still feel here’s a high light; theres a dark spot; but what makes the fabric in between? I think it may be that youre writing for your ‘petit clan’ and therefore they fill in whats not so clear to us outsiders. I mean, you lay so much emphasis upon Lady P’s. ‘violence’. You give several instances of it. Then you say ‘the very greatest of great ladies’—I cant make the connection. Ive got her fixed in my mind as one of those sublime tyrants who stick at nothing; how can I combine this with great ladyhood? I read on; but find no anecdotes or analysis to confirm this statement. So with her intelligence. She read French literature you say; but again, all the emphasis is laid upon her short way with impostors. I cant fit in a keen critical intelligent reflective mind. Then her astonishing kindness; here, if you consult your MS, you will see that you yourself give it up. One cant touch on this side of her you say or words to that effect. And then quote what I have the impertinence to think a very feeble shop soiled specimen of dear Maggies unarticulate admiration of her mothers good heart. (How watery she is compared with your vigour). Thats the gist of what I feel. Its a most vigorous and spirited portrait; but only of an outline. You’ll say you cant give more in the space. That may be true. But I do feel that you have rubbed in one side to the exclusion of what must have been another side, or indeed several sides, if Lady P. was, as Ive always heard, the very remarkable woman she was. Here I must qualify though. For I dont share your natural admiration for sheer violence. A little of that pulling up of stakes and scene making goes a long way with me. So many of the well bred and well fed have it. Yet I do admire it; and admire and welcome your picture of this indomitable heathen woman. What about quoting a few letters from her? They often shed a whole cuttle fish bag of suggestion, even when theyre not in themselves remarkable. You see I want shades and half lights. But dont mistake me; I think its very brilliant as far as it goes. And I repeat—my own view is so partial, I dont much trust it.

As for the little joke about Sickert, I’m really ashamed now to explain it. Also its faded. I cant remember my own motives. But as you sat talking that night, about your lunch, Maurice Diana, etc.—I was thinking of my own relations with Roger. And then you said something that made me feel you had no notion what a man he was—how he lived—youd never read a word of him. And to me, he is among the finest of critics; and I kept saying to myself, Why does Ethel prefer the Barings and the Coopers of this world? Why is she so anti-Bohemian? And I then said; because shes herself; and thats whats delightful and unique about her. Still, the little voice of the little clan kept chirping; and at last I maliciously thought, Well I’ll test her. Ill give her my Sickert. Ill watch her face. She’ll dislike the very thought of that old buffoon—yet he’s to me the greatest English painter living. But that wont count for anything with Ethel—compared with her Empresses and her Lady Ps. Besides, Ethel once said sharply, I detest being given presents. So I’ll rub it in; and say Heres a Christmas present for you. And then having lit the train I shall watch for the explosion.

But it was all very minute and wire drawn; merely what one thinks when someone else is talking—[handwritten]: in fun; by way of playing a tune on the bass.

I like trying to play tunes while people are talking—with a view to the whole symphony

Yr V.

I’m sending back the MS separately tomorrow.

Berg

[]

2964: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Tuesday [18 December 1934]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Ottoline,

Angelica, Nessa’s daughter, is coming to tea with me on Thursday. You and Yeats are her two twin passions. Could I possibly bring her round, after tea? Or would this in any way, (as it so easily may) be a bore for you? She would be content to sit in a corner and look on. If this is all right, dont answer, and we’ll creep in at 5.30, but dont hesitate please if theres too many already. She is at the age of great passions for poetry and people and acts Yeats at school, and once saw you, to her eternal marvel.

yrs VW.

Texas

[]

2965: To V. Sackville-West

[19 December 1934]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Nessa wants me to say that she has her Orlando plates done: would you like to go to her Studio, 8 Fitzroy Street and look at them? If so, would you let her know.

They have to be sent off soon. And perhaps, if you do, you’ll come and see me. But I daresay you’re in your Pink Tower. I wish I were, The 2 Ethel’s on me. One of them has scalded her toes; the other has water on the knee. But no more.

Potto

I am in love with Victoria Okampo

Berg

[]

2966: To Victoria O’Campo

Dec 22nd 34

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, [Sussex]

Dear Victoria,

I told you how very bad I was at writing letters, and now you will believe me, as it is a fortnight since you wrote. But London has been such a confused chaos: a friend very ill [Francis Birrell], and so on and so on. Yesterday we came down here, and the first thing I did was to read your [Aldous] Huxley—the other. I’m so glad you write criticisms not fiction. And I’m sure it is good criticism—clear and sharp, cut with a knife, not pitchforked with a rusty old hedge machine. (I see one going across the meadow)

I like Aldous’s mind immensely: not his imagination. I mean, when he says “I Aldous…” I’m with him: what I dont like is “I Rampion—” or whatever the mans’ name may be. But you’ve said all this and much more to my liking. I hope you will go on to Dante, and then to Victoria Okampo. Very few women yet have written truthful autobiographies. It is my favourite form of reading (I mean when I’m incapable of Shakespeare, and one often is) What are you doing in Paris? I have no notion: I did run up a ramshackle South America for you, when I saw you, but what does one do from 10 to 4 in Paris? Whom does one see? And where does one walk? And—but I cant ask all the questions I want answered. Here we are grey and damp and very English: little boys sing carols on the lawn: carts are stumping about the flooded meadows full of turnips: it is a small grey curving landscape—mine: out of the window. I still have a dream of your America. I hope you will write a whole book of criticism and send me, if you will find the time, now and then a letter.

Yes, our evening, our Turkey evening, was much damaged. London’s fault.

V.W

Your letter from Madrid has this moment come. And yesterday I sent your MSS to 15 Av de la Bourdonnais. I hope they will send them on. I will write again.

Victoria O’Campo

[]

2967: To Vanessa Bell

Sunday [23 December 1934]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Here is a tribute to Angelica from Ottoline. If you read it carefully you will see that she wants A. to write to her: which I think she must do. After all, it would fill up the time after Christmas lunch; and Ott: leaves for Judea, like the Cameron, at 2.30 the day after or so. I’m sending a fulsome reply on my own.

Here we are—very fine at the moment, but the shade of Christmas has fallen. Why do Marion and Wells Coates send me a Christmas Card? Why does Katherine Furse? Why does Miss Porter? Well, I hope you’re all enjoying yourselves. Love to Cory. I’m just getting in to the new garden room. Where’s the bill for the carpet? O where?

Berg

[]

2968: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Sunday 23rd [December 1934]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest Ottoline,

What an angel you are! I couldn’t help sending on your letter to Nessa—it will please her so. Isn’t Angelica a lovely sylph, at the moment? And full of extreme sensibility; also rather mocking and mischievous; but its the boundless enthusiasm of that age that moves one. You should have heard her talking about Lady Ottoline—so wonderful to look at—and Mr Yeats. “Oh how I shall boast about it at school.” “But what did he say Angelica?” “Oh I dont know—it was just wonderful—seeing them all.” And of course it almost brought the tears to her Aunt’s eyes—(hard old sinner though I am) to see you dragging about chairs for those miserable cripples, and putting this straight and that: and to think how often you’ve done that for all of us, all these years: and there I was, bringing Angelica to share in your bounty. I’d long meant to write to that black faced man, whom I called Scott James, but his name was Ellis Roberts, about Stella Benson. It was on my mind I’d never sent him a few letters from her; and there I settled it all, and heard about her. So I was very grateful, once more: but there wasn’t a moment to talk our owls’ talk. Of course old Yeats is a magnificent old poet, and I like watching his smoky then fiery eyes.

Peter [F.L.] Lucas—did you know him?—an academic poet; pure Cambridge; clean as a breadknife and as sharp;—he happened to come to tea, and jumped with jealousy when I said I was going to see you—whom he’d only seen once—and Yeats, whom he’d never seen. So I said I’d ring up and ask if he could come. This thrilled him to his immaculate marrow—he lives in the very heart of Kings—and it will put a little live blood in him. So you see you’ve stirred up a great deal of gratitude and devotion—and here’s a book come by this post, unexpectedly: but I mustn’t start another page; dear me, what a born giver you are: and thats the quality I humbly adore.

yrs VW

Texas

[]

2969: To Victoria O’Campo

28th Dec 34

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Victoria,

I have been too stupid for words: I addressed the MSS to Paris; and then wrote to the Recidencea de Senoritas at Madrid, not to the address I found at the end of your letter. Please forgive my incapacity, and I trust the MSS: have been safely sent on. But it was very careless of me, and its what comes of being practical.

This is not a letter, only an apology, written in a howling gale and a blowing rainstorm, so that I cant go out to my garden house, where I should be able to think what I’m writing. I’m talking while I write. I’m talking to Leonard who is mending an electric lamp, and the marmoset crosses from him to me, always with the same look, as if the world were a question. But this is no news to send to Madrid; unless indeed the marmoset were suddenly to come out with the answer.

The Lawrence has come—a magnificent looking book, though I cant read a word of it, and I shall be proud to see A Room look like that. I think the Room is the best to begin on: then perhaps, if you want another, Orlando or The Lighthouse. I heard from your Agent this morning; and oddly enough by the same post got a copy of Mrs Dalloway in a Spanish translation. (Catalan I think) so dont do that. I’ve never read any of them since I wrote them, and they look to me like faces seen in my childhood—those remote books, about which I felt so passionately, as I wrote them. I have been sitting and reading, walking and dreaming, pouring out tea for the Keynes’s; and writing a book (again with passion) But this does not mean that I have forgotten you: or your orchids and roses: only what are you doing in Madrid? Does it rain there? I only know it in fine weather.

Salutations. V.W.

Victoria O’Campo

[]

2970: To V. Sackville-West

29th Dec. 34

Monk’s House, Rodmell, near Lewes, Sussex

Potto said he was drawing you a picture—3 robin red breasts against the moon—but its still unfinished. (Did you know that he has taken up art, to cure his heart? Neglect broke it. I told you didnt I, what the Vet. said) Are you coming this way to see the old termagant? I allude to your mother. If so, wont you dine or sleep or lunch or something? We have a very fine Peach fed Virginia [ham] in cut; another over the fire. I had such a lovely divine lonely walk this afternoon, to a ruined farm up behind Tarring Neville How I long to live there—a mile from any road, down behind. Coming back I saw 3 great black cormorants on the river. And I’ve got a new garden room, in which I’m going to sleep o’summer nights.

It was very nice and kind of your husband to dine with us. I like him very much. We told Everybody on Xmas day (thats the Keynes’s) about Lindbergh. So one lives on one’s friends.

A HAPPY NEW Year. (Potto wrote that.)

—V.

I have had to stop Victoria Okampo from sending me orchids. I opened the letter to say this, in the hope of annoying you.

Berg

[]

Letters 2971-3014 (January-April 1935)

2971: To Elizabeth Bowen

6th Jan [1934[!]]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Elizabeth,

I’m so glad you’re back, but I’m afraid I shant be in London till after the 14th. Let me know if you’re coming up again.

I’m much tempted by the idea of your fortnight in America. I expect that thats the solution, only is it very expensive? No, the dollar is now shrunk isn’t it—I must find out, and make a push next year.

I had a hard night’s work at the Fishers [in Oxford], due to their excessive kindness. I dont think I said more than three words to anyone, but then I said them to about 150 undergraduates. I never realised which of them Mr Berlin was, but had to piece him together from descriptions afterwards. Rosamond Phillips [Lehmann] was talking of him. Wont you bring him to dinner one night?

I’m glad you’re starting a book; that is when you have answered your letters. By the way, Rose, old Rose, Rose Macaulay rang up and asked, among other things, for news of you, which I invented on the spur of the moment, so dont be surprised if she takes a rosy view of your career.

I’m listening [on radio] with one ear to a profound, but to me cacophonous work by Ethel Smyth—so excuse the scrawl.

Yrs
V.W.

Texas

[]

2972: To H. A. L. Fisher

6th Jan. 35

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Near Lewes, Sussex

My dear Herbert,

It is extremely good of the English association to ask me to speak. I wish I could. But I have come to the conclusion that lecturing is not my line, and have given up making the attempt—even in the most flattering circumstances, like these. So I am afraid that I must refuse. But will you thank Mr Nowell Smith on my behalf? It is very good of them.

Now I am going to be shameless and make a request of you. If you have finished your great book, wont you consider writing something of an autobiographical kind for the Hogarth Press? I know you dont want to write about politics, but how fascinating it would be if you would write down something of earlier days—the family—and so on? At least I throw it out as a suggestion; in case you ever have a spare moment.

Your affectionate
Virginia Woolf

Bodleian Library, Oxford

[]

2973: To Ethel Smyth

Tuesday 9th [8] Jan. 1935

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

It is so cold I cant stretch out far enough from the fire to get a blameless sheet. I think this one has been sat on by the marmozet. I admit I’ve been silent—oh but what a compliment to you that is! Every day I polish off a crop of nettles; never do I get any letter (except from Woking) of pure affection. All the rest implore, command, badger, worry. Here’s Lady Rhondda, heres a man who wants a puff, a woman who wants a preface; and that d——d ass Elizabeth Bibesco—So we go round and round the prickly pear: only Ethel remains unredeemed, a very flagstaff of British oak. Its an age since I unloaded my breast. In the first place did I tell you about the death of that dear bright little—no rather heroic—Francis Birrell? He had cancer of the brain, and I had to go and sit with him 2 or 3 times after he knew he was dying; might linger paralysed, or die mad. And did he show it? No, in spite of being an atheist, there he lay cracking his little jokes, with his face paralysed. But what, my dear Ethel, do you think it all means? What would you have said to a friend—25 years I’ve known him—dying at 45, full of love of life,—just beginning to live? And we both knew he was dying: and what was there to say about it? Nothing. I feel like a dead blue sea after all these deaths—cant feel any more.

So to the Sitwells. One night before coming here I met Osbert, who said Hows Ethel Smyth? Do ask her when you see her,—did my father propose to her? Because thats the family story. So I ask you. Did he? And was that why he married the woman who went to prison, (hereby breeding O. and Edith and Sashy [Sacheverell]—nor I think to the ultimate glory of the British tongue, fond as I am of parts of them.)

At the same time how happy we are here! Cooking dinner; and walking oh what miles I’ve walked, right into remote valleys; with a thorn tree, and a shell. I always think the ice has only melted off the downs a year or two ago—the primeval ice—green ice, smooth ice

Its true, we had a childrens’ party and I judged the clothes. All the mothers gazed, and I felt like—who’s the man in the bible—? Which by the way, I have bought and am reading. And Renan. And the New Testament; so dont call me heathen in future. I’m pained, rather, to use my grandmother’s language, about Vita and Gwen. I had a moments talk with Harold, and he hinted, and I hinted: the upshot of it being he thinks V. has grown very slack. So I said, ‘she sits in her red tower and—dreams’. Upon which he cocked his eyebrow and said ‘Thats precisely it. She refuses to see anyone but’—Now this has taken me 7 mins. ¾ to write. And all the MSS. remain unread. And the log is blazing. And I shall sleep sound. And write in my new garden hut which looks over the marsh:—did I tell you? So raise your voice and thank me for this now 10 minute letter; and hook the ink to you and reply.

Yr V.

Berg

[]

2974: To Mrs Easdale

8th Jan 1935

Typewritten

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Near Lewes, Sussex

Dear Mrs Easdale,

I am delighted to hear that you have written your autobiography. I hope I had some share in suggesting it. And it is very good news that Constable is going to publish it.

My own feeling is that it is far better not to have any preface by another hand. When some years ago Bernard Shaw was ready to write a preface to a book of my husbands, we refused; because if a book is worth publishing, it is much better that it should stand on its own feet. I am always put off myself by being ‘introduced’ to a writer. And again, a well known name means that the introduction gets all the attention and not the book. I’m sure your book doesnt want anyone to praise it. It is good news too that they are anxious to do work by your son. I always like the way they get up their books.

We are down here, almost rained out, and with damp everywhere; but all the same the downs are at their best, without trees or leaves, and we hate the thought of London.

Remember us to Joan [her daughter]; I have it on my mind that she asked me about a room in Bloomsbury. I haven’t heard of one; but the whole place seems thick with house agents boards. I will write if I hear of anything going.

I hope the book will be out this spring.

Yours very sincerely
Virginia Woolf

University of London

[]

2975: To Dorothy Brewster

15th Jan. 1935

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Miss Brewster,

Some time ago I received a copy of Modern Fiction. I do not know whether I owe it to your courtesy; but may I take this opportunity of thanking you for the very sympathetic article which I find you have written on my own work? Many thanks.

Believe me, yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Columbia University

[]

2976: To Hugh Walpole

Sunday [20 January 1935]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Hugh,

I was talking to William Plomer the other night, and about you, and all sorts of things were said you would have blushed for shame to hear: but one thing was distressing: he said you had been very ill. How are you? This is what I am writing to ask. I would really like to know, if you can tell me without bother. I hope anyhow you are now up and about. And if you’re not off to Hollywood, may we meet.

I wrote to you, to that fabulous address just before Christmas. Then I hear you flew across America on a stretcher. Then I hear you had Mrs Galsworthy to tea: there are intriguing points in your narrative, but much lies hid between.

I cant write I’m so cold. This is the party at which I talked to William [Plomer], to which I would have asked you: it was a childrens’ party. And I daresay you’d have been the making of it.

We are just back from a cursed cold but lovely week end; hence my chapped hands, frayed wits, but enduring affection.

Yrs V.W.

Texas

[]

2977: To Victoria O’Campo

22nd Jan 35

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Victoria,

I have just telegraphed in answer to your telegram. I am horrified to think that my extreme distaste for letter writing has made you for a moment suspect me of coldness,—I assure you I am not addicted to the vice of taking offence. And why should I take offence with you? But please bear in mind I have no secretary; I deal with the dull letters first, and put away the interesting ones until I have time. And for a fortnight now I have been unable to write a word, because I had to teach actors and then rehearse and then act a play I wrote. Its true it was only for friends—but oh the time it all took! This is the first day I’ve been free of an evening. So please forgive. And do remember in future that I am capable of infinite silence, but incapable, I hope and believe, of taking offence—if you did, I should at once wire to you and put the case under your nose in so many words. But enough of this. I am so sorry to have seemed for a moment inconsiderate when in fact you were so generous in writing the letter to me. I mean the pages you sent me. I dont usually like appearing as a private person in print, but on this occasion I can find no fault, and like what you say very much and thank you for it. When will the book be out?

I have been living a chattering agitated life since we got back from Sussex. I have done no writing to speak of. I have stood for hours in a studio, repeating my own words [Freshwater], It was to amuse my sisters children. Now I am settling in again. And you are about to voyage to the land of great butterflies and vast fields [Argentina]: which I still make up from your flying words. What a strange broken life we live—what phantoms! But do not let me drift into the bog. Tell me what you are doing: whom you see: what the country looks like, also the town: also your room, your house, down to the food and the cats and dogs and what time you spend on this and that. And please never never think me cold, because I do not write. But I get so tired of writing.

Yr V.W.

I have not got your address in Buenos Aires. Please tell me where I am to write to.

Victoria O’Campo

[]

2978: To Ethel Smyth

Wednesday [23 January 1935]

52 T[avistock] S[quare, W.C.1]

Well, how harr you? Castrated, no entire, wild cat? Gnawing the stump of your pen still? How well I remember the taste of pen holders—But this is a mere parenthesis. I forget where we left off. And I have 3½ mins: before settling down to read the Bible. Why did you never tell me what a magnificent book it is! And the Testament? and the Psalms! Every half hour I get a wire from Paris asking me if I’ve quarrelled with a beaming South American [O’Campo] because I dont write. Poor woman—she hasn’t much idea of my gift for silence yet. And has rooked me of 2/6 on wires.

I agree with you entirely about death from Cancer: I forget how you said it: something about having a chance to die standing up. That is a very true remark, and sometimes you say a thing that I had it in mind to say. But why ain’t I to come when you, if you, die? Why? Aren’t I capable of comfort? No—a mere reed, floating along a sugary stream, in your view. And so you dont want to see me. Also; why do you always compound ‘intelligence’ with destructive criticism? Roger [Fry], who was the most intelligent of my friends was profusely, ridiculously, perpetually creative: couldnt see 2 matches without making them into a boat. That was the secret of his charm and genius. Its some grit thats got into your eye from meeting Peter Lucas here—a prig and a pedant if ever there was one: but a sweet prig: and anyhow he’s the only one. And you’re always protesting and self-conscious and with your hackles pricked about critics. But enough as Lady Ponsonby used to say. What a convenience it is to make your friends speak for me! Oh I’ve been in such a howling duststorm—to sit alone and read the Bible is like drawing into a sunny submarine hollow between deep waves.

Adieu VW

Berg

[]

2979: To Rupert Hart-Davis

24th Jan 1935

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Mr Hart-Davis,

Many thanks for sending me the notes on the novel. I cannot remember anything about them; and as it seems to me that they are very disjointed and not of much interest, I do not wish them to be republished in book form. I am sorry to appear disobliging, but I cannot think that they would add to the value of your book.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Rupert Hart-Davis

[]

2980: To Susan Buchan

30th Jan 35

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Susie,

I’m afraid I have kept your funeral March even longer than I threatened. But there was a great rush of MSS. Now we have both read it, and think it extremely interesting. We should like very much to be able to publish it, but it seems to us that it is rather too slight as it stands. Do you think anything could be done to make more of a book of it? Could you print some of the letters in full? And what about portraits? If you think it would be possible to do something of this sort, and would let us know, Leonard would write you a business letter—which this does not pretend to be! But I found the story fascinating.

Yours ever
Virginia Woolf

Lady Tweedsmuir

[]

2981: To Vanessa Bell

Wednesday [6 February 1935]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Yes of course—we are delighted; and it seems a very small sum. Let us know if there’s any difficulty, as we could easily send more.

Theyve never sent me a bill by the way for [Duncans] carpet.

I suppose you wouldnt like to dine alone with me tomorrow night——L. is at the Cranium [dining-club],

B.

We bought 3 pictures yesterday!

Berg

[]

2982: To R. C. Trevelyan

7th Feb 1935

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Bob,

I dont know what your politics are, or whether you have any sympathy with the enclosed. As you see I, as well as Donald Tovey, and other of your friends, am on the Committee (for the first and I hope last time in my life). So they asked me to ask you; which I do: the money is wanted to hire the Show and pay for the Hall here. But if you dont want to be bothered, I shall understand, and hope you wont bear me a grudge for asking.

Yours ever
Virginia Woolf

Sussex

[]

2983: To Clive Bell

Thursday [7 February 1935]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Clive,

Here I am pestering you: but you will see the reason and please bear me no grudge. And could you ask Cory [Clive’s brother] if you should see him. This is the way my life is spent—torturing my friends in the cause of freedom which is truth, truth which is moonshine—where does the moon shine for ever? In India.

I am imbecile after 2 hours of Ralph Wright. How many wives has he?

Yrs V.W.

Quentin Bell

[]

2984: To Ethel Smyth

9th Feb: [1935]

Monks House, Rodmell [Sussex]

When a person’s thick to the lips in finishing a book, (like you) its no use pretending that they have bodies and souls so far as the rest of the world is concerned. They turn the sickle side of the moon to [the] world: the globe to the other. This profound psychological truth I’ve so often proved, and now respect in you, so dont write. One of these days our moons shall shine broad in each others’ faces—when I come to Woking.

I forget where we left off. Oh you praised Colefax; and now I have to see her. But the trouble is that a woman whose soul has been eaten away by the world, has no surface one can cut into. So I cant settle my wretched little quarrel: it drags on. She muling and puling. If it had been the uncastrated cat, one spring, one claw,—all’s over.

Joyce dined the other night—what a nice woman—the soul of pan, in a woman’s body: sheepdog Pan, not God. She has a queer Cockney accent. Why? Next week I have to see the sister [Margery] Fry about the Roger book—oh dear, she’s accumulated so many papers; and what am I to do? I cant get rid of my own burden before August: what a labour writing is: re-writing; making one sentence do the work of a page: thats what I call hard work.

This is all very disjected; but you’ll only have scraps of the day, and threads of a mind. And I have to write to all my friends, that is the political and the rich, to ask for money to fight Fascism. And its withering cold; even I couldn’t walk. And the logs green; and I must put the chicken in the oven—

So I kiss the top of your head and farewell

V.

What a comfort to think that nothing I could say or do would make you think better or worse of me.

Berg

[]

2985: To Ethel Smyth

Friday [15 February 1935]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Look here, it suddenly struck me in the night, please dont breathe a word, even to Elizabeth [Williamson], about the Frys or the biography. You wont, I know. Only I saw her (the sister) and the position is delicate and difficult, and things get repeated and distorted, as you know, and she might easily round on me. In fact, she was far more tolerant and sympathetic and well informed than I’d given her credit for.

I sent my cheque to Ly. Ravensdale. And here, to my surprise, is a letter from Vita asking to see me.

All right. I had meant to come on Sunday, of course, chiefly with a view to tapping that bottle of champagne before its empty: but now you shall drink it to the health of the book How do you manage to write as you do? I can only wish I had a vine press (what you press grapes with) so that I could squeeze my innumerable watery pages into one liqueur glass Oh the grind!

V.

I’m sorry old Vernon is dead. I had hoped rather to see her. But she was far sunk in age, I suppose.

Berg

[]

2986: To V. Sackville-West

Friday [15 February 1935]

52 Tavistock Square, [W.C.1]

Yes, any day, anytime. You have only to suggest which and when. I’m longing for an adventure, dearest Creature. But would like to stipulate for at least 48½ minutes alone with you. Not to say or do anything in particular. Mere affection—to the memory of the porpoise in the pink window.

I’ve been so buried under with dust and rubbish. But now here’s the spring.

Look at this—did I ever encourage Mr Nicolson to leave his publisher and go to mine? I cant remember it, but am very glad to accept the credit.

My mind is filled with dreams of romantic meetings. D’you remember once sitting at Kew in a purple storm?

On the contrary, we thought you had been very nice and generous to us. How unlike most of our authors! I’m sorry Mr whatshisname is doing Joan too. But never mind. I think I could tell you all about her Voices by the way. And have you heard the bells at Chillon (is it?)—a rusty clock that still strikes, and she heard?

So let me know, and love me better and better, and put another rung on the ladder and let me climb up. Did I tell you about my new love?

Yr. V.

Berg

[]

2987: To Ethel Smyth

[19? February 1935]

52 Tavistock Square, [W.C.1]

Yes, I’ll come if I can, on the 3rd. but I cant be dead sure; and oh Lord how I hate afternoon concerts! But as I say, if I can, from love of you, I’ll come. Only we may be away Let me know times and meetings, drink the champagne—no I daresay its drunk already. So here’s my blessing on the new baby. And when will it be seen in its long white draperies, taking the air in Hyde Park?

V.

Berg

[]

2988: To Clive Bell

19th Feb 1935

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Clive,

Mr Bluit of the Fascist Exhibition has been to see me about a letter that you have written to the Committee. He seems to think that you are annoyed (in part at least) by a phrase that you quote as coming from me—“Virginia Woolf, who invited me, in a covering letter, to “strike a blow for freedom.” The phrase certainly seems to me a silly one, but I dont think I used it. I didnt keep a copy, naturally; but as far as I can remember what I said was “a blow for freedom which is truth, for truth which is moonshine, and where does the moon shine for ever?” which was a quotation from Freshwater and meant to be humorous. Mr Bluit seems to think that you are going to publish your letter. If so, will you leave out the quotation from me, because as you use it, nobody could see that it was meant for a joke. And it wasnt meant for publication anyhow.

Excuse this typing, but my hand is illegible,

Yrs V.W.

Quentin Bell

[]

2989: To Alfred Harcourt

20th Feb 1935

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Mr Harcourt,

Many thanks for your letter. We only mentioned my book [The Years] in our spring list by way of advertisement. I dont think there is any chance that it will be ready before the autumn—if then. And of course I will give you due warning. I hope that it will be published, like my other books, simultaneously here and with you.

I am so glad that Harold Nicolson is bringing you his new book [Dwight Morrow]. I am sure it will be of the greatest interest. He has an enthusiastic public here, and from what he has told me about this book, I expect it will be of particular interest in America.

I am sorry that we shall not see Mr Brace this spring—but Florida sounds a better holiday resort than England at the moment.

With our kind regards
Yours sincerely,
Virginia Woolf

Many thanks for sending me the reviews of Flush.

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

[]

2990: To Ethel Smyth

Monday [25 February 1935]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

I should say: the only possible sentence is “if I did not shrink from even the semblance”. The other, with ‘incurring’ seems to us both—ahem—damned nonsense. So there—flat.

I’m sorry you have castrated the hermaphrodite; but you cant be too sure, the public being what it is. No I cant manage Thursday But I think Sunday is free—so I’ll go if I can to the concert. Let me know what time. I should pocket my afternoon prejudice. Only its not at the moment altogether free from—I forget, what—but some horror; Sunday Pm I mean.

So let me know the time, and the ticket—and forgive incoherent haste—so much to do so little done

VW.

Berg

[]

2991: To Victoria O’Campo

Feb 26th [1935]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Victoria,

Your magnificent book has come. How tempting it is—I cant read a word of it, and yet every other word is almost one I know. I must wait for the French edition—or shall I begin to learn Spanish? By this time you are among the butterflies, and I am still in London in the room which you describe except for an occasional weekend here and there in the country. All very tame and about the size of a molehill outwardly. But then London is full of people I know, and their souls are generally pouring out lava—flame: I mean they talk a great deal, and not always gossip. You are now—doing what? An elderly Colonel has been talking to me about the difficulty of starting a village Club. I imagine you hear the wind bending a million acres of pampas grass. I dont know what is happening about A Room of One’s own [Spanish edition]. I will ask. How disconnected this all is! But then I cant yet rig up a picture of you. I think of you playing tennis on board ship with a dark gentleman something like the King of Spain. Let me know the truth, one of these days: and send me a very exact picture of your house; and accept my salutation and thanks for the tantalising Book.

Yrs VW.

Victoria O’Campo

[]

2992: To Quentin Bell

27th Feb 1935

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Quentin,

Here is our Christmas present and it would have been sent long long ago, when the snow was on the ground and the holly on the bough, but for your own illiteracy. I can’t remember to write to you when I’m in touch with a typewriter; and you cant read me when I’m in touch with a pen. I am longing for news of you. Please write a full and indiscreet account of your amorous adventures—la vie amoureuse de Quentin; or I shall be forced to invent one, with coloured pictures. Nessa says you are hobnobbing with the wise the great and the fair. How I envy you.

There are plenty of mouse coloured virtues here, but nothing shining. However we see a good many odds and ends. Last week we had an amazing interview with Hugh Walpole; who has shrunk to an old pantaloon, because when he was acting Micawber at Hollywood his right hand was struck with arthritis. He was only rescued from the grave and from agony unspeakable by a bottle of quack medicine called Cleano administered by his chauffeur. Such and so great is it to be a romantic novelist with a taste for ones own sex in the lower orders.

I am having tea with Nessa today; Clive will come in; we shall discuss the Anti Fascist Exhibition; and Clive’s last letter—a very violent one, which poor Ralph Wright took much to heart. But as you see I cant go into this as you’re so distant. It reads like nonsense instead of rather profound political wisdom. L. has today finished a book called Quack Quack.

Ethel Smyth, your lover, has been rooked 1600 pounds by the Income Tax authorities—all for telling the truth. She is more harum scarum, rag tag hobbledehoy than ever; but always collects her fifteen wits to ask after you. That reminds me—what about the History of Monaco? You know what I mean—the great and exciting narrative. Please write it and let me see it. And dont do the donkey work for any one else. Because if one collects facts, they are ones own; and cant be used by a second hand. This I tell you because I myself have a passion for truth.

Have you seen any of the Cambridge gamblers? They will come with the swallow—old palsied Shepp and dear Dadie [Rylands], whom Duncan wdnt ask to our [Freshwater] party. I wish you had been there to see Nessa and Angelica and Duncan and the marmoset wetting on Leonards arm. A great deal of pain was given to many of our friends by that party; so all went well, as you can imagine. Julian is to be seen stealing through the square at night with a woman. I wave my hand and pass on. Either they change or my eyes fail me. He seems to be writing three books at once; and comes round now and then to tear his hair—so that he’s bald. Cory [Bell] came to see me yesterday. We had a fascinating talk about Peggy and Michael and the army in India; I dont think he’s altogether a happy man. He walks two hours on the downs alone with the dogs every morning. We think of coming to Italy in May. Where shall you be? And how is Janie [Bussy]?—that divine woman, whose French has landed me in an amour with a Brazilian beauty [O’Campo]. Oh and M. Gillet. He came—for hours. We talked of Janie, in the language of Madame du Deffand talking to Saint Simon. But theres no room, or could run on, and must now wash, and face facts! the rain and the mud and the glow in the sky is Quentin. So please write a full life of him.

Yr V.

And my love to Dorothy of course.

Quentin Bell

[]

2993: To R. C. Trevelyan

Feb 27th 1953

52 Tavistock Square, [W.C.1]

My dear Bob,

Many thanks for writing so fully. Of course, I quite understand and in many ways agree with your views. The difficulty is that one hears such different accounts from different people, and at the time I was asked to join, some months ago, Mr Blackett, and Mr [Ralph] Wright and others seemed very convincing. But I’m not a politician, and have too little first hand grasp of these things to join in any movement really.

From what I hear, I think it doubtful that they [will] get enough money to hold the Exhibition. Many people hold off because they think it absurd not to expose the other tyrannies at the same time. What a horror it all is!

But this is only to thank you for your letter. And I hope you will let us know if you are in London and come and see us—not to discuss politics, but happier subjects. I was hearing of you at Florence from my enormous niece, Ann [Stephen].

Yours ever
Virginia Woolf

Sussex

[]

2994: To Hugh Walpole

2nd April [March? 1935]

Monks House, Rodmell, Near Lewes, Sussex

My dear Hugh,

No, you’re quite wrong. I mean, that wasn’t what I said to Leonard. What I said was, By God! Here’s dear old Hugh! not who the devil is Hugh? That’s what comes of being a romantic novelist—you will invent things that dont fit with fact. You’re altogether at sea in the world of reality. There my footing is firm; and what I said was, “Now there’s a man I’d like to see. But how? when?” Because I said, I want to hear all about Hugh at Hollywood. Has he shot a man? Has he raped a woman? But here I checked myself, remembering that I’m not a romantic novelist.

We come back on Sunday, tomorrow. I’ll drop you a line in case you’re free before the 9th. I dont know, being vague in the head, to what horrors we’re committed. We’ve been having the devil of a time with the Press. But that’ll keep. A young man, called Christopher Isherwood, admires you and is grateful to you and wants to meet you. So I’ll try and bring you together.

This is only a hasty scrawl—hand much worse than yours—to put you right about what I did say or didn’t say.

Yours
VW

Texas

[]

2995: To V. Sackville-West

Thursday [7 March 1935]

52 Tavistock Sqre., [W.C.1]

Telegram just come. Tea, say at 5, will do just as well, if it’s honestly not a bore having us.

It suddenly came over us, in Holborn, that we would like to see you, once more.

But if this is at all awkward, (tea on Sunday,) would you ring up Lewes 385 where we go tomorrow night, late.

And do you love me?

No.

Berg

[]

2996: To Hugh Walpole

7.3.35

From Leonard Woolf handwritten by Virginia

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Hugh,

I am going to ask you something which as a publisher I have never asked before of anyone, and only on the understanding that you wont do it if you feel the slightest degree averse. I am told that you think very well of Isherwood’s novel. If you do, would you possibly let us have a line or two which we could quote over your name? It would be extraordinarily good of you if you would.

I hope you admire my new secretaries* writing: she is very expensive.

Yours
Leonard Woolf

[in Leonard’s handwriting]

*She does not know grammar

Texas

[]

2997: To Vanessa Bell

March 11th [1935]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

I entirely forgot that it was so late in the month. I thought it was still February in fact.

Lord—we drove 40 miles last night back from Sissinghurst in a driving snowstorm and bitter gale, and I thought we should perish. And you would then have shed one tear (perhaps) But it [was] a lovely sight.

Berg

[]

2998: To Ethel Smyth

Tuesday [12 March 1935]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Yes, of course I will read Ly Ponsonby if you will send her me.

Now: attend.

1) I want to have a drawing of you.

2) There is a Miss Preece, much admired by Roger and Vanessa.

3) She is poor.

4) She longs to draw you.

5) She is shy.

6) She lives at Cookham.

7) Will you sit?

If she did a passable drawing, I want to try and get it published in Time and Tide. Could you go to Cookham? I think one sitting would be enough. She’s afraid of failing in a strange studio. But I said; through Vanessa, that to drag to Cm. seemed extortionate. Let me have a line.

She—Preece—is in a twitter.

Why has Shelley no heart? I dont mind being in his boat.

We went to Sisst [Sissinghurst] in a snowstorm on Sunday. Saw Gwen and Vita—Yes—yes.

No time for more.

VW.

Berg

[]

2999: To Vanessa Bell

Thursday [14 March 1935]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Here is my due for the unequalled entertainment; give Duncan the extra in part payment of cabs etc.

Would you like me to come in to tea, or after, tomorrow? We shall be away this Sunday—thats why I presume. But let me know

B.

Berg

[]

3000: To Ethel Smyth

March 14th [1935]

52 Tavistock Squre [W.C.1]

Yes, Ethel dear, I think its improved out of all knowledge.— how, I dont quite know, or whether I’m reading in a more cordial mood and was too stingy before: Anyhow you seem to me to have deepened and shaded it so that its a mass, not an outline, and the qualities melt together instead of being separate, disconnected, and thus unintelligible prominences as I thought them before. And it has, (the supreme excellence in this kind of writing), suggestiveness; so that the sentence runs on, I mean breeds meaning, after it is finished. I should now rest content that you’ve raised, not a monument, but a ghost; not a ghost but a presence. In fact I congratulate you, and whats more to the point, feel I know her so well I wish I’d known her better. My only cavils are 3 little trifles: (marked in the margin) 119, why ‘they’?: 122. should be ‘from’; not to; and, 135: neglect: is this the right tense, after the past ‘endangered’? It sounds to me wrong; but I’m no grammarian. Dear me, if I could write about Roger like that! Isnt it odd, this is sincere, but your swing and ease sometimes affect me like Joyce [Wethered] playing a ball. I can feel the bat (thinking of cricket) melt into the ball, both become one. And I’m an old trained writer, and cant do it.

No news from Miss Preece. Of course you shan’t plod to Cookham, if thats what she insists: we will convey you. I once tried to arrange a series with T and T: of her things, and Roger muddled it; and she is on my conscience rather—a very gifted (they say) extremely odd woman, who is being quite soberly, done to death by a business father, who wont allow her a penny, or a day off. So she’s now at her wits ends. But that doesn’t excuse her for not writing: I’ll let you know when I hear. And by God, remembering the Tomlin horror, I cant conceive a worse than this; but she needs at most 2 sittings.

I dont follow your flight about the heartlessness of Shakespeare. Do you lump him with the frog footed Shelley and Virginia Woolf—the web footed; your grammar leaves me doubtful. However, Shelley is good enough company for me, much though I prefer Shre.

I heard [Donald] Toveys quartet last night, and liked it. Right or wrong?

Let me know about the ray of sunshine, or whatever you call it; I mean the possible hope about the Tax. In haste

V.

Berg

[]

3001: To Ethel Smyth

Tuesday [19 March 1935]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

No, Wednesday is hopeless. I’m condemned to go to a meeting: did I tell you about my Anti Fascist fiasco? And Elizabeth Bibesco’s rudeness? I forget—And Wickham Steed? Anyhow, tomorrow a French novelist Malraux is going to unite us all at Hampstead. And there I must talk my broken French in honour of liberty.

V.

Berg

[]

3002: To Ethel Smyth

Monday [25 March 1935]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Yes, we were at Monks House—oh the sun and the bees = the flowers and the trees!—I’ve read the letters and destroyed. Of course I dont altogether see eye to eye with you, as I said. I mean, love seems to me to queer all pitches. But given your relations with Vita—and the St John complication—I daresay you’re right to shoot this sad and severe dart. Whether it’ll do any good to the person herself [Gwen St Aubyn], I doubt; whether any writing or speaking can; but I daresay it will clear the air between you, which is in itself a good, of course. I shall be much interested to hear if she answers, and what. You wont—but this I needn’t stress, because I know you wouldnt—say or write anything to bring me in: because I wouldnt like Vita to hear a word about my feelings except through me. And I’m not by any means clear what I do feel—Its all such a silly mess—I rather think the [Violet] Trefusis affair was the same sort of smudge too. dear me—I didnt take to Trefusis either, and loves the devil, as I said

Nessa tells me that Preece cant face Smyth: in that case she’s a silly ass, and there’s no more to be done about it, for which I thank the Lord, and I daresay you do too.

Written in haste as usual.

V.

Berg

[]

3003: To Ethel Smyth

Wednesday [27 March 1935]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Yes, thats all very interesting. I suppose I couldn’t see V’s and G’s letters? Psychologically, they would interest me; but no doubt it wouldn’t be fair. I hope the Treasury is turning like the worm it is. And here I am, scribbling—such d—d dull letters—involved in such boring politics that my brain turns, worms, and burns. What did you think of Stanford? C.V:? I’m reading his life.

Berg

[]

3004: To V. Sackville-West

Friday [29 March 1953]

52 T[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Lord what a nuisance about old Ethel!

I’m afraid I cant throw much light on it because I dont understand it myself.

She came here about a week ago and talked in much the same way that she has written to you. As far as I could make out, she had come to the conclusion that her relations with you were on a false footing, and she didn’t like taking presents from you without explaining. But why she had suddenly come to this conclusion I couldn’t make out. I did my best to persuade her not to write, but of course she wouldn’t listen. I think she has got into a thorough turmoil over her income tax etc. and anything may start her off. I’ve had the most violent letters from her simply because of some silly joke of mine, and Elizabeth W. [Williamson] and Maurice Baring both told me she’s always doing it to them too. The only comfort is I dont think people believe any of it. Certainly, I’ve heard no echoes; if any should reach me, I will let fly at her. Or would you like me to write to her? I dont expect to see her until after Easter. But to do her justice, I dont think she would ever abuse one to enemies or acquaintances, only to old friends, whom one hopes can be trusted to discount it. But its always worrying I know. Tell me what you’d like me to do.

We go abroad in May—did you ever drive from Naples to Rome? Can you give us any information? Love from Mitzi [Marmoset].

V.

Berg

[]

3005: To Vanessa Bell

Monday [1 April 1935]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Vita writes that she is sending her motor car to Rome, leaving England on April 19th

“Sooner than let it go empty I would offer anybody a seat in it for a very small proportion of the expense…. It is a comfortable car, wh. wd. take 2 or 3 passengers and all necessary luggage.” She thinks you might like it. So I scrawl this out, marmozet ridden and bitten as I am.

B.

Let me know at once if its any use, as she’s going to Greece. Perhaps some of your cronies

Berg

[]

3006: To Philippa Strachey

Tuesday [2 April 1935]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Dearest Pippa,

I dont expect the following is any use to you, but I said I would ask in case you thought of going South.

Vita Nicolson’s car is leaving England on April 19th. She would offer anybody a seat in it for a very small proportion of the expense. It would take 2 or 3 passengers and luggage—and is a comfortable Humber Saloon. It is going to Rome, driven by her Chauffeur, and would pass through Roquebrune, I suppose, as it goes via the French riviera. She’s leaving for Greece on Thursday, so if you should have any thought of it, let me know as soon as you can. But I don’t suppose its likely.

Yr Virginia

Sussex [typewritten copy]

[]

3007: To Quentin Bell

3rd April [1935]

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Sq, [W.C.1]

Dearest Quentin,

I was very glad to get your letter, and as you are such a stingy beast, only writing when written to, I must take up my typewriter. By the way, I have just bought a picture of yours—a collage, as you call it. I think it is very lovely; it reminds me of an old pavement that peacocks walk on among ladies in old silk. From this description you will of course recognise the one I mean; pink and blue; a little battered, as if the mosaic had been rubbed. But the feet were beautiful; and they went to passionate meetings, hundreds of years ago over those tiles. I am hanging it on the W.C. door. Your private view was as usual my abomination; all the dandies and the epicures tasting and twitting; Clive; in blue; Benita [Jaeger] in black; Duncan in pale grey with patched boots; all the fawn coloured and the ecstatic. I hope they did more than ecstasise. Cash is whats wanted at the moment. So I had to go again in my humble serge and I think in short you have a great gift with the scissors and chalks; but you will only jeer at my criticism. I dont think I like writing on a typewriter. It breaks up sentences, and imposes a technique of its own. Is it the same thing with brushes—does the hog scrape and the camel swish? What a business art is to be sure; why in Gods name do we all bow under it like spavined mules?

As for news I have seen a mint of curiosities; your old friend Jeremy Hutch⁠[inson]. last night; rather a taking youth, who’s coming to stay. He has built himself a bungalow at Chichester to be away from the pride and glory of Albert Road. Barbara [Rothschild, née Hutchinson] was presented at Court last week, wearing all the rubies. So many and so heavy they had to fix a panel to her side of white satin on which to wear them. But she said it was a great fraud. The King and Queen are rooms away; you no longer touch them; and the telephone broke down, and there wasnt a car to be had; and they handed thick ham sandwiches and slices of plum cake to all the Duchesses. She says she is a democrat for life.

I had a meeting with M. Malraux; and trotted out fragments of Janie’s [Bussy] French; he is as voluble as a fountain in June; but cant understand or speak English. All the second rate literary gents were there; and he wanted them to form a centre of culture and stem the tide of tyrrany. Whereupon a little horror called Louis Golding spoke about his own spotted soul for twenty minutes; Amabel translated sections of it into sound middle class French; and I gave one gulp—I hate anchovy sandwiches—I had to hide it in my bag—and fled. So this is my last dabble in politics. Lord Ivor [Churchill] tells me the other Fascist Exhibition has been proved a Communist plot; and I’m to have my five pounds back. But I forgot if I told you.

Ann has got a scholarship. Isnt she an odd upstanding unmitigated Stephen? We took her to Bengal Lancers, about a handful of Englishmen ruling eighty million natives; and she was simply bored. She said such things dont seem to her even funny. You imagine the old Colonel gashing his arm on a wild boars tusks and saying A mere scratch—for the honour of the Regiment. Now I shed a tear; thats what comes of being one generation nearer to Uncle Fitzy [Sir James Fitzjames Stephen].

Nessa is flourishing about, talking of driving in Vita’s car to Rome. That is all my doing. But though the idea seems good, I doubt if it can be worked as Vita is off to Greece, and she means to pick you up by the way and they will have to haggle on the telephone about terms. We think of flying to Rome by way of Holland. I think to wander on a flat field among tulips would be very soothing after these incessant politics. Leonard says we shall shortly be poisoned by the Germans; not only you and Julian, which I dont so much mind, as your young; but even myself! Yes, as I walk down Oxford Street I shall see a yellow fume, and sink down some gutter; and the tide of Teutons will roll on and on—engulphing what was once Bloomsbury but will be, I suppose, a Platz with a statue of The Leader. Bloomsbury is having a very bad press at the moment; so please take up your hammer and chisel and sculpt a great flaming Goddess to put them all to shame. Excuse this random letter; which I write waiting for the bell to ring.

We go to Angelica’s last [school] concert tomorrow. Thank the lord its the last. But then Judith [Bagenal] wants us to go to her play. Julian is walking with a woman—which? Does it matter? Now dont repeat this or I shall have my neck wrung, when all I mean is kindness sweetness and truth. I hope to meet you in Rome in May. We will sit in the Forum we will sport in the Boboli—unless as I rather think thats in Florence.

Love to everybody; and please write.

Virginia

Quentin Bell

[]

3008: To Ethel Smyth

Thursday [11 April 1935]

52. T[avistock] S[quare, W.C.]

No, dont keep Monday or Tuesday for me. I’ve been rather knocked up all this week with the usual headache, and it would be ruining my peach (thats you) to mumble it, half torpid, as I am. But we only go to Rodmell for Easter; and are back directly the holiday abates, So come, if you will then: when I shall be fresh and brisk and we can go into all the doors and corridors and banqueting halls your letters open. Yes—how we differ! I suspect your incurable optimism has always landed you in believing more than can be established. And why you want affirmation in books is that at heart you dont believe as much as you say—is that possible? and…. thats why you’re unfair on Vita: first Bengal Lights, then London fog. I liked E’s [Elizabeth Williamson] testimony to the Waves; but I dont believe (this is the truth) I mind much if you care or dont care for it, or any of them. Its not at all that I doubt your good taste. But always at the back of my mind I’m sure you would never like my books if you hadnt met me. Our minds are too entirely and integrally different: which is why we get on; and though I dont want you particularly to like my books: I do like Eth to like them.

What a bore relations—Ponsonby’s—are! Why show it? Oh I’m so sleepy! So dumb—so glad to sit quiet—Did I tell you all my politics have gone phut for ever! What a satire on the practical! I earned a headache simply because their heads dont ache.

V.

We dont go abroad till May 1st

Berg

[]

3009: To Angus Davidson

April 11th [1935]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Angus,

Here is the poem. I’m afraid there’s not much hope of inducing Tommy [Stephen Tomlin] to produce enough to print, so that it had better be in your safe keeping. Should any more ever be written, then perhaps we could have this again.

Your state must be one of complete happiness. I wont threaten to come and disturb it, though I always feel that I am the original owner of Cornwall, and everyone else is a newcomer—But you will excuse this peculiarity. We are going to Italy, through Holland, through Germany in a car in a short time; so perhaps we shall never meet again; but I hope so.

Leonard sends his love. He is sitting with a marmozet on his neck.

Yrs Virginia

Angus Davidson

[]

3010: To Violet Dickinson

[18 April 1935]

52 Tavistock Sqre., [W.C.1]

Look what came this morning! Tear it up, and even if you’re not the Miss Dickinson who was so kind to the lady at St Johns [College, Oxford] when she was a new girl (and I’ve just written to say on the contrary you’re entirely different) dont altogether forget your old attached Sp: (to whom you were very kind when she was an insufferable hobbledehoy.)

We’re just off motoring to Rome to meet Nessa who’s there educating her daughter to go on the Stage (she’s a lovely creature) and as we go through Germany, and as Leonards nose is so long and hooked, we rather suspect that we shall be flayed alive; but if not, I hope some day we may meet again.

How are you?

V.

Leonard wishes to be remembered to you.

Berg

[]

3011: To Susan Buchan

25th April [1935]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Susie,

I’m sorry to be so long in writing, but I’ve been waiting for other people to settle their plans and they wont—everybody seems to have dashed off abroad. They are having an opera festival at Glynde⁠[bourne], which is 3 miles from Rodmell, all June, and as we’ve asked various people to stay I think it would be safer if I asked if I might come in July instead of June. Would the 2nd, which is Tuesday, or the 4th, Thursday suit you? Please dont bother to ask ‘interesting people’ as you suggest—it would be so nice to see you and your family quietly. Elizabeth Bowen often talks of them. Let me know some time about dates.

We are driving through Germany to Rome, so perhaps we shall be in trouble with the Nazis. But I hope not.

Your affate
Virginia Woolf

Lady Tweedsmuir

[]

3012: To Ethel Smyth

Friday [26 April 1935]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

I did, though you wont believe it, want to see you today, and had written to say so; but found L. was so agitated that I obediently tore up my letter. The fact is I rather spoilt our Easter and feel guilty—(I mean not being able to knock about but lying on a chair) and cant face spoiling Holland, Germany, Italy too. But as usual, he exaggerates. Yes. I will give you our address, for even though I always read your letters carefully, never do I so gloat and glimmer as when, waiting behind the bars in Poste Restantes, there they are, under letter W. But 52 T.S. Hogarth Press, is always best: they have the latest chops and changes. Oh so many dreary little miseries to dispatch—German Embassy today to get a letter out of Prince Bismarck, since our Jewishness is said to be a danger—(not seriously) We have one week in Rome, back June 1st. thus missing George and Mary— Piccadilly with its silver hatchets looks rather nice—Now I must put off Colefax and Miss [Lyn] Irvine. But I must see my mother in law, who is rapidly going blind. The dr. says the only chance she has is to remain ‘perfectly cheerful’—What are doctors made of?

Hugh Walpole wrote to me today from Greece; so did Vita. But Vita never says a word that couldnt be heard by all Oxford Circus.—at least to me. I will write again. This is only an apology for L’s outburst. But you will understand my difficulty—I mean my guilt—I mean how I cant risk his unhappy wrinkles. Cant spell or write.

V.

When does Beecham [and Pharaoh] come out? Can I have a copy before I go?

Berg

[]

3013: To Vanessa Bell

Sunday 28th April 1935

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

I was very glad to get your letter, and hope you are now safe in Rome. How clever of me to plan that tour! I wonder if you’ve seen Vita and Gwen and Hugh and Harold—but I daresay with your usual badger skill you’ve escaped. We set off on Wednesday, and I am beginning to make lists of underclothes and things—but God knows, I hate buying suspenders. I wish Angelica would do it all for me. Also it is perishing cold here, black as a raven, and wet as a sealion. Are you hot? Are the hydrangeas blooming, and the nursemaids sunning themselves in—whatever the gardens are called [Borghese]. London is all a fuzz with silver poles and paper crowns and festoons; but as I say, black as the pit, and not a ray of sun. Julian and Alix [Strachey] dined here last night, James having a cold. We couldn’t have much gossip, as we got into a political argument which lasted all night. But Julian said [Lord] Gage had been over, and asked, not Julian, but Playfair to tea: where he met the Keynes’s. We had the Wigrams over, as we had shamelessly asked them about Jews in Germany. And now we’re for ever committed to know them. She has an idiot child, and he, though a nice honest Englishman is all paralysed. Hence her extreme discontent. And she is not a sympathetic beauty—rather like an old daisy, And then to my horror, Kingsley Martin arrived and wasted the one fine day, talking incessantly about that damned dull paper [New Statesman] and his own health—He is suffering from egomania, and the egg is bad—which is a joke. But I am writing rather in a hurry, so you must excuse your poor Singe. I have managed to put off till June, Ethel, Sibyl, Lyn, Hugh, and so there isn’t much news. I asked Duncan to dinner, but it is said he is still away, and I’m afraid I shant see him. Your cat is very well. I enclose these cuttings to show what is up in the art world.

I gather that Julian is having a prickly time with Ha [Margery Fry] over Mallarmé: I’ve not heard a word from her. I am longing not so much to see you, as to sit in the sun and see a bird on a bough. Still, if you will kiss me I will simulate emotion. Will you give us your address, and write to (paper enclosed). Please write often.

Prince Bismarck of the foreign office sent for Leonard and gave him a letter recommending the Germans to treat us with respect. They say we might be glad of it should we find an anti Jewish riot on, but there’s not much risk of that. Tell Quentin he is a devil never to have written to me. We arrive in Rome on 16th, afternoon. I’ll write cards on the way. So God bless you and kiss my niece and nephew.

B.

[paper enclosed]

If you write on 4th

address to Poste Restante Amsterdam

… on 11th Poste Restante Verona

… on 12th P. R. Bologna

Berg

[]

3014: To Margaret Llewelyn Davies

Sunday 28th April [1935]

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, [W.C.1]

Dearest Margaret,

We were so glad to get a word from you. We hadnt tried to see you as we heard from your charming nephew Richard who dined with us the other night that you were knocked up. Now we hope you and Lillian [Harris] are settled in and enjoying this abominable spring. You cant think how hideous London is at the moment, all blue and black with wreaths and festoons of yellow paper shivering in the rain. We are just off, on Wednesday, on a grand expedition through Holland, Germany and Italy to Rome; driving our car. Whether we shall ever get to Rome, Heaven knows. We have got a letter from Prince Bismarck in our pockets, as people say we might be unpopular as we are Jews. But I dont think there’s much danger, and it will be the greatest fun—at Rome Nessa is having her daughter taught to speak Italian; We shall be a week there, and then drive back through France. Then may we come and see you and have a good gossip in the old style. You remember how we used to talk at Cliffords Inn. I hope you have a garden and a tree to sit under.

Leonard has just finished his book, called Quack Quack which will be out in June. I expect it will get him into hot water with all classes, as it is a very spirited attack upon human nature as it is at present. I think you’ll enjoy it. Then he is going to return to the Deluge. But at the moment I cant think of books and writing or politics either, as we are in the midst of getting ready, and it will be such a mercy to be quit of politics and books for a month. We liked your nephew Richard so much. He is lodging with the Stephens round the corner and I hope we may see more of him. I suppose you have a great many neighbours—Trevelyans and so on. I dont think one is ever alone in the country, what with motor cars. But this isnt what I meant to say—for I hope you will let us come some time; but not till you and Lilian are rested.

Love from us both Yr V

Sussex

[]

Letters 3015-3025 (May 1935)

3015: To Vanessa Bell

May 7th [1935]

Hotel des Pays-Bas, Utrecht, Holland

Here we are in the middle of Holland. So far it has been perfect—blazing sun, until today no accidents, except killing one hen, but it was the hen’s fault. It is extremely difficult driving however, as the streets are very narrow, and there are millions of cyclists—like flocks of swallows, and innumerable racing cars. Even Cousin Thea would cycle if she were a dutchwoman. We have been to Amsterdam, Dordrecht, Zutphen and Haarlem. Its all next door—I mean towns are only across 6 fields. The great point about it is the beauty of the architecture; and the awnings, which are all colours, and the canals, and the tulips, and flowering trees, weeping their reflections into the water—can such a thing be said? I’m so cold, and my face burns like a flayed herring. I can hardly write sense. We are so burnt it is hardly nice to dine with an English clergyman. The only Englishman we have seen by the way. I’ve also seen some of the best Rembrandts in the world; and Vermeers, but you wont want descriptions. But I dont see how to avoid them, as we are cut off from civilisation completely. I’ve just got 3 letters—one from Ka [Arnold-Forster], to ask me to visit her in a nursing home, one from Violet Dickinson, to ask me to tea, one from David Cecil who wants to have tea with us—Thank God, none of these things can be done at Utrecht. What a blessing the Channel is, in intercepting ones friends once in a way.

By the way, as I was leaving, Saxon [Sydney-Turner] rang up to ask our opinion of Judith [Bagenal], as Barbara [her mother] wanted to know. Happily Leonard answered, and made a gallant effort. But how can you say that the lot of the friends of parents is either easy or honest? This paper makes calligraphy impossible. Its like writing on a biscuit. Tomorrow we start for Germany: but I dont think we shall be interned, owing to Mitzi [the marmoset]. We are received everywhere like film stars, generally there is a crowd of 20 round the car when we stop. All the children come running; old ladies are sent for: they always end by offering to show us the way or do anything for us—such is their love of Apes (please consider this). I’ll write from Verona. I expect we shall go to Hasslers, but I’ll let you know. Please write to me as often as you can.

Its very expensive here, and I think we have spent more in one week than in 3 elsewhere, and there is not much human beauty, but every virtue—cleanliness, honesty and so on: bad coffee; delicious biscuits: the cows wear brown holland coats; and its amazingly lovely—the streets and the water and the marshes and the barges and the…… but I will stop this sentence, for the plain fact I cant form my letters only I must say you ought to paint the tulip fields and the hyacinth fields all laid out flat with about 20 miles of water in and out, 18 sheep, 6 windmills, sun setting, moon rising. So goodbye. I agree about Vitas transformation. Harold says its the Change of life—I say its love—

B

Berg

[]

3016: To Ethel Smyth

8th May [1935]

Roermond, Holland

I doubt that any remarks of mine about B and P have any value, as I’ve been half asleep in the evenings—and read it in between great gulps of somnolence—So this is only an impression: that is, I dont care as much for the Beecham as for some of your characters, the reason being, I think, that you hold your hand from those incisions that cut deep, because the fish is alive that youre skinning. Thus I feel you skirmish round and toss balls in the air, and dont settle down and pull up your sleeves—but thats the inevitable drawback with a living subject. And its very lively and spirited—what I miss is the innards. But I’ve only read it once, and in gulps as I say. The Pharaohs seemed to me to strike more boldly and, directly and I enjoyed the desert and the little snatches of travellers figures seen against the hotel lounge greatly. There you seem to swing out free and come down hard. The B. as I say had for me rather the air of skating and flaunting where, with my passion for fact, I wanted “then Sir T: [Thomas Beecham] unlaced his boots and went to bed with her.”

I found the same slipperiness overcame me when I wrote about Sickert—But I’ll read again and no doubt revise.

Oh we’re having such a time—sliding from one town to another—figure to yourself Shakespeare’s England still lived in, with Canals and whole banks of red tulips, yellow laburnum, showering down: but very crowded, too many people, too little country, now and again a long low shore with a windmill. Here we are on the verge of Germany—we cross the frontier tomorrow

V.

Berg

[]

3017: To Katherine Arnold-Forster

8th May [1935]

Roermond, Holland

My dear Ka,

Your letter has just reached me—this is the last town in Holland, and tomorrow we cross into Germany and drive down to Rome, so I’m afraid there’s not much chance of seeing you. We shan’t be back till the 1st of June. I hope it doesn’t mean that you’re having an operation or something: but the address sounds suspicious. Let me know if you’re in London in June. What a woman you are for these nursing homes—but I hope its not much. Bruins ought to keep to the hills and the rocks: not Weymouth St. W.1.

About Gwen [Raverat] and The Land—it doesn’t rest with us—we only had the right to include it with the other poems. Heinemann publishes it; but the simplest thing would be for Gwen to write straight to Vita—Sissinghurst Castle, Kent. I rather think there was an illustrated edition, but I’m not sure.

I’m writing in a room full of old Dutch officers, listening to the loud speaker, so cant spell or think. But we are enjoying ourselves immensely—oh what a mercy to be out of reach of London: and Holland is full of cows, and canals and houses that were built 500 years ago and are precisely the same with old ladies combing their cats in the window. Did I tell you we travel with a marmozet of Leonard’s! Crowds collect to gaze at it at every stopping place—we hope even Hitler will soften to us.

How odd to see your hand! Only the day before I had been thinking of you with intensity and affection (cant spell) and meant to take up my pen.

Please get well. Love from L

Yr VW

Mark Arnold-Forster

[]

3018: To Stephen Spender

12th May [1935]

Innsbruck, [Austria]

Dear Stephen,

Your book arrived just as we were making ready to start on our travels. (We’ve been cruising about in Holland and Germany and are about to cross into Italy and come to rest in Rome) so we didn’t read it, but we will when we get back. It was very nice of you to send it, and especially as I cant remember saying anything about Henry James. There’s lots to say though; and I expect you’ve said many things I’ve never thought of. He loomed up in my young days almost to the obstruction of his works.

I’m writing in a hotel lounge, half asleep after 10 hours motoring. There is also a great deal to say about Germany. But again sleep forbids. We almost met Hitler face to face.

I’ll try to remember what I thought about Vienna: but d’you think criticism is any use? If so, why? I mean of the living, by the living?

We shall be back in June. Leonard sends his love. He drives with the marmozet on his neck. And all the children cried Hail! as we passed.

Yrs V.W

Texas

[]

3019: To Vanessa Bell

13th May [1935]

Verona, [Italy]

We have just arrived, and found your letter. Would you be so angelic as to take 2 single rooms for us at The Albergo d’Inghilterra [Rome] from the 16th for one week. That seems best on the whole—If one of the rooms could have a bath, we are prepared to pay 20 lira a day extra If you cant get them, would you get them somewhere else, and leave a note at the Inghilterra, saying where. We will come round to you some time late in the afternoon. I’ll keep my news till then. In fact I’m so sleepy with driving over the Brenner and so drunk with a bottle of wine I cant write.

I hope you’ve got your passports. Please make out a list of all to be done and seen in a week. Its been grilling hot coming across Germany, till the last day, when it rained, and its raining here at Verona.

It will be a great treat to see you, but dont bother about us, as we shall have plenty to see.

No—I cant speak any more Italian but I can still read.

B.

P.S.

I forgot to say that old Ethel did force her way in before we left in high feather because she has got let off £600 [income tax], owing to the pressure put on the Treasury by her rich friends. This however is not enough—In the night it struck her that she might as well ask to be quit of another £200 on the plea that she is going to produce the Ballet. Which is the ewe lamb of her eye with you. She was therefore stumping off to the Treasury where I gather they’re so cowed and coerced they drop £50 every time they see her to be rid of her.

I didnt see Duncan, as he was staying with Bunny [Garnett], but I heard him on the telephone and he sounded composed and serene and all in his right mind. And I didnt see the Jubilee, as we were in Dordrecht, but hope to see some movies—unless the King was killed, or the Queen dropped in a fit at the altar—as may have happened. Now I must stop, but please excuse this random and rapid rate, (the Dilkes couldnt have said that) at which I write, in the cold.

B.

Berg

[]

3020: To Vanessa Bell

[14 May 1935]

Postcard

Modena, [Italy]

We will call in before dinner on Thursday and hope you will all dine with us.

V.

Berg

[]

3021: To Clive Bell

May 15th [1935]

Postcard

Siena, [Italy]

It was on the spot now marked by a cross that Clive Bell quarrelled with his sister in law in Sept. 1908. I dropped memory’s tear there today under the orange blossom

V.W.

Quentin Bell

[]

3022: To Clive Bell

16th May [1935]

Postcard

Perugia, [Italy]

Do you remember Perugia, Mugliston, and the lady who fell out of the train?

Here we are.

V.W

Quentin Bell

[]

3023: To Ethel Smyth

19th May [1935]

Rome

But its impossible to write letters, travelling. I cant collect any force—all is splintered—or theyre playing pianos or bells are ringing and L. is making out roads on a map. This is the only town I love—as you love [King] George and Mary. Patriotism? My word, it seems a lodging house virtue here. Think Ethel, of the [Borghese] Garden, all a blowing, of the sun on the domes—of the Forum, and then you go grubbing in your back garden for geranium roots. However, I admit I like hearing about our Kings and Queens driving down Piccadilly—here one would blow off the end of the pipe like a bubble. Its so irresponsible—sitting in cafes, watching lovely, but Lord how soulless, women, with white cheeks and a dab of rouge: and then a vast old beggar, praying; thats when my niece takes me to the Church. But you will be tired of these unlinked melodies. Last night at the Café Angelica was reading a library book. Couldnt stop. And I said, thats a bad habit, reading, at meals. And then she showed me the picture of the 6 Miss Smyths with their donkey, and we read the page together, where you say you’re afraid of being with child. “This is so exciting I cant stop” she said—thats the way you corrupt youth—

Of course, I was bitterly disappointed that you took Maurices £900. Isnt that odd? I wanted to think of you romantically insurgent, refusing; its then that one likes to make what is called a vicarious sacrifice: but I see that common sense says no. I only record my disappointment as a psychological phenomenon. Nessa has got B and P [Beecham and Pharaoh]: and will give, in a day or two, a far sounder judgment than mine: I reserve mine for London—Reading is a kind of rhapsody here—I snatch a page to match it with the mood—I cant collect all my little knives and probes. I’m reading Stendhal and a profuse woman called Mitchison. We are going to drive off into the country buying pottery and then home I suppose. But heavens! The relief of being quit of seeing people! Nessa lives a completely detached but entirely satisfactory hand to mouth life, with son and daughter, old woman to wash up, dipping into an occasional Salon, lunching off cold ham—which I must now go and eat. Oh and I had a little Birthday honour offered me!

V.

Berg

[]

3024: To Victoria O’Campo

May 28th [1935]

Moulins, France

Dear Victoria,

I got your letter in Pisa, (we are driving home from Rome where we’ve been staying with my sister) and hastily write, in this hotel bedroom by a vile light, to say we cant think why you havent heard from the Hogarth Press about A Room [of One’s Own]. Leonard says they wrote long ago to Madrid. But he’ll look into it when we go back next week. I need’nt say that I shall be delighted if you find you can do it. The Press will write again.

We’ve been in Holland, Germany and Italy, and seen ever so many different civilisations; in fact my brain is so crowded I want to subside into a coma, like a spinning top and cease spinning.

Alas, though, I’ve used all my holiday this year, and shant get as far as South America. Another time? Yes, I hope so. I’m still imagining vast yellow butterflies and your room and the flowers. And I’ve forgotten the address! But rather than wait to get it in London I will send this illegibile scrawl to the English Minister [in Buenos Aires] and trust to him to forward.

And dont forget me either.

Yrs V.W.

Victoria O’Campo

[]

3025: To Ethel Smyth

[2 June 1935]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

I’m sorry I’ve been so incommunicative, but I can only write letters when my mind is full of bubble and foam; when I’m not aware of the niceties of the English language. You dont know the bother it is, using for one purpose what I’m perpetually using for another. Could you sit down and improvise a dance at the piano after tea to please your friends? And now, home here, I shall drink no more wine—now we’re landed, and are strewn with bills, letters, manuscripts, dark men from the East who must see Leonard—etc etc. I cant count the number of flies settled on this dead horse.

And talking of death, the first thing that happened as we drew up at Monks House was meeting poor old Pinka’s dead body. She had a fit and died the day before we came, and here was Percy [Bartholomew] burying her in her basket and we were both very unhappy—This you’ll call sentimental—perhaps—but then a dog somehow represents—no I cant think of the word—the private side of life—the play side.

Did I tell you in my drunken bout that I was offered a red ribbon, and to be one of the 18 or so ladies and gentlemen calling themselves Companions of Honour, and to walk into the room behind you, the Dames? I said No thanks; I dont believe in Honours, though Ethel Smyth, I said, does. Was I right?—Would you like to see me wearing a red ribbon and walking behind you? Oh what d——d nonsense it all is!

I see your point about MB and the £900: but cant you see mine about wishing to have a friend who was a perfect stark rock of incorruptible severity? Cant you see how I shuddered when that dream was dashed? Have you no romance in you. Yes, I think 800 copies very good; so does L: it means 2 or 3000 in the long run. Oh we saw the loveliest places in the world, driving home by the coast—between Rome and Civita Vecchia: pines, sands, sea and low hills, all whispering together in perfect solitude.

So farewell

V

I wrote this last night, Sunday, but forgot to post—Here’s your card. No I cant manage—I wish I could—tea today; and our gramophone wireless I mean, has been smashed in spring cleaning. So what a bore—neither ES. in spirit nor in flesh. But soon I hope.

Berg

[]

Letters 3026-3066 (June-September 1935)

3026: To V. Sackville-West

Wednesday [5 June 1935]

52 Tavistock Sqre, [W.C.1]

Yes, we’re just back, but going down to Monks for Whitsun. And I got your letter, with pleasure, but didn’t think I could hit you off, flying about as you were. And we’ve been through Germany, Holland Austria, Italy—And we came back to find Pinka dead. Isnt it a miserable thing—Leonard is so unhappy. But the marmoset went to Italy and is well.

By the way, Gwen Raverat wants to illustrate The Land. I told her to write to you.

V.

Back here on Tuesday.

Berg

[]

3027: To Ethel Smyth

Thursday [6 June 1935]

52 T[avistock] S.[quare. W.C.1]

Another large blue sheet, as you like them; but God knows why I thus embark, except that I’m waiting for L: who has a man called Pannikar with him—an Indian, a Knight, a very important man. Our house is a mere meeting place for the winds of heaven: last night they blew the most detestable Polish Count, who said—but no: that man, whining and cringing, made me so physically sick (he’s the one who was in prison for writing about Venus and Penis, and L. paid £20 and so on) well, I’m so sick with the vanity of the human race, and their pertinacity, that when Rebecca West asks me to lunch—how can I write novels, with these secretaries needing instant replies?—I say violently No. (I’m waiting to go out with L.)

What I meant to say was

1) Dont bring the roses—no the pinks though the faraway smell on the stairs that far away summer brings tears to my eyes, and d’you remember how you’d packed them in ferns?—because we go after dinner through the summer rain to Rodmell tonight for Whitsun: back next Tuesday late at night after The Magic Flute:

2) The man who was talking to L. when you rang up yesterday was Ralph Brewster; and he stayed on and on, showing his photographs, I was so hungry. Then I said at lunch, very cross, perhaps he’s HB’s grandson? L. said Not likely. But he was. He has a factotum, on Mount Athos. I gather from your letter its another case of Venus and Penis—the Factotum.

3) A very good review of B. and P. in Man Guardian. I wish Nessa had finished the Book. You must lend me a copy. I want to read at leisure. Her leisure, with books, is so prodigious: it reminds me always of the gestation and copulation of elephants. “No, I cant say I’ve read more than one sentence … but when I read, I read” And thats true. It’ll take her six months. So lend me another.

4) How can I cure my violent moods? I wish you’d tell me. Oh such despairs, and wooden hearted long droughts when the heart of an oak in which a toad sits imprisoned has more sap and green than my heart: and then d’you know walking last evening, in a rage, through Regents Park alone, I became so flooded with ecstasy: part no doubt caused by the blue and red mounds of flowers burning a wet radiance through the green grey haze: and I assure you I made up pages of stories I shall never write. And then that d——d Count. But the truth is I am in the cavernous recesses (excuse this language) because Roger is dead (I never minded any death of a friend half so much: its like coming into a room and expecting all the violins and trumpets and hearing a mouse squeak) And Nessa is staying abroad till October: and Vita, I foretell, is dead and buried for 3 years to come. So forgive moods—incurable moods—here is L: and Pannikar has gone.

Yr V.

Berg

[]

3028: To Elizabeth Bowen

Friday [7? June 1935]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, [Sussex]

Dear Elizabeth,

I wish I had known you were going to Dieppe. You might have looked in on us. But wont you come down for a night before you go to Ireland? Its very nice here, sitting in the garden, and we’re alone, and have no servants, in the house, so I cant promise much comfort, but there’s a bed in a shed and so on. Do come. I’m afraid we shant manage another holiday in Ireland this year.

By the way, your publisher sent me what they call a proof copy of your book the other day, but I put it away to wait till I was free, and now if you’re going to send me a real copy, I shall wait for that. But I begin to think I know nothing about fiction—I’m so muddled by reading a mass of manuscripts. But I shall, all the same, read yours.

Yrs
V.W.

I’m so glad you’ve got the house in Regents Park. I often walk by the lake, and think how nice it must be to live by it.

Texas

[]

3029: To V. Sackville-West

Sunday [9 June 1935]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Thats very nice of you, about giving L. a dog. But at the moment I think he feels too melancholy. I will let you know later—he must have another. Pinka’s death was a mystery. We left her in perfect health with Percy, and she was in the highest spirits for the first fortnight. Suddenly she had three fits; they got the vet. who said he didn’t know what it was: but she grew weaker and weaker, wouldn’t eat, and died the night before we came. The woman dog breeder here says she never saw a case like it in an old dog (Pinka was only 8) and so we’re quite in the dark. The vet. at one moment called it meningitis.

No, I wish we could come, but we go back at midnight on Tuesday, after The Magic Flute at Glynde⁠[bourne], and I dont suppose you want to be knocked up off the Pink Tower at dawn. Dear me, what a lovely day it is!

V.

Berg

[]

3030: To Ethel Smyth

[19 June 1935]

Typewritten

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Excuse typing—I’m in such a rush. Here they are, and think theyre very good and seem sincere not forced out drop by drop like most reviews. When shall I have time to read B and P. God knows. Or to write, or to read? The white pinks are exquisite cool as ices, and fresh as the songs of robins—or should it be wrens? Ive not read or answered the german lady [unidentified]; and must do both before I throw it over to your waste paper. Its only worth that, so I guess. I will write to the most kind and charming Lady B. [Balfour]

V.

Vita lunches on Monday

Berg

[]

3031: To Vanessa Bell

21st June [1935]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Well at last I got a letter from you—which I started to answer—the very same day, but I was interrupted. No, of course I wont show the letters to anybody—they’re safely stowed away in the Studio; and I’ll consider what you say about Helen’s [Anrep] possibly seeing them some time. Mrs Jebb hasn’t yet sent any more; but I dont suppose I shall begin to read them till August, as I must try to finish this long weary dreary book, which wont be done till the middle of August I daresay. I know once I start on Roger I shall get so absorbed I shant be able to write fiction. I’ve just let myself in for rather an awful, and I daresay unnecessary undertaking—to go down to Bristol and open a show of Rogers pictures next month [12 July]. Ha [Margery Fry] rang me up, and as she was very considerate and said I mustn’t do it, but of course it would make the Exhibition known etc; I felt I must. It only means speaking for 15 minutes, and we shall go on to Weymouth for a treat. I gather it has been got up entirely by the Frys—have you heard about it? Helen dined with me the other night, but said nothing about it. Then Ha rather alarmed me by saying that she has been collecting a great number of documents, and, as I thought, rather took it for granted that I was going to produce a large book—at least, she seems to be putting it all in my hands, instead of getting the Maurons, Wedds etc to write. However, I may be mistaken—I’m going to see her. You’ll probably have heard from Julian that the Mallarmé has broken down for the moment, as the Cambridge Press wont do it without a large subsidy. But Julian’s off to Dublin, and I’ve not seen him again.

London is swarming, as you can imagine. I dont think you deserve gossip, as you maintain this regal seclusion—but my heart is too good to be silent; and thank God, here we are, mercifully alone (though we should be having Pippa, let alone James [Strachey] and Margery [Fry] to stay) There was the Apostles dinner on Tuesday—made memorable by the astonishing apparition of Norton, in the highest spirits, quite recovered, nobody knows how or why. But he seemed to have forgotten 20 years of insanity, went back to James’s and stayed cracking jokes till 3. am.

Old Sir Fred, however was the hero of the night, as he has been 70 years an Apostle. He will be 90 in a few days, and George Trevelyan made a most eloquent eulogy on him, after which he was led away. But he seemed practically intact. There was a very short speech about Roger, and the dinner was not very exciting, Leonard said, as very few people came. Maynard had the flu, and instead therefore of dining with us at Lady Rhondda’s, we had to take Lydia alone, and she seemed, I thought, greatly in the dumps about life and death and everything, and said she felt very sad. I expect this will please you. I think time drags on her, and she cant learn The Master Builder for ever. I was amused by the party,—Lady Rhondda in white trousers, Miss [Theodora] Bosanquet in black, and some oddities, among them a Mr Hay, an art teacher, and a Miss Stanhope, an aristocrat, who found life in drawingrooms so intolerable that she took to journalism, and is now a stout capable, bobtailed advertising manager. But I didnt listen much; Leonard says if I had I should have been bored. Then—oh dear me—there’s Ralph Brewster who’s been living in Mount Athos and says the monks the hens the dogs are all sodomites, he’s H.B’s grandson and has written a book; but sodomy is rather dull in the lump: we’ve asked him to cut it down; then there’s Viola Tree, who arrived carrying two family bibles wrapped in blue plush which contain all Alans notes on life: a mixture of quotations, invitations, scraps from the Daily Mirror, fragments from Sappho and Homer, letters about buying dogs—complete chaos, but she says, showing beyond a doubt what a beautiful nature and brilliant mind he had “though a bit narrow till I married him” She expects us to edit this rubbish heap. Then old Tom [Eliot] came to dinner, and was so easy and charming, in his rather obscure way, that I (Good Lord—can I take another sheet—when you never read what I write?—and the marmoset is just about to wet on my shoulder—we’re buying another dog—probably go to Chichester tomorrow to see one) well: I almost kissed him; and he made me go into a long hyena shriek by describing how John Hayward, the paralysed man, gave a party to [Herbert] Read, your man, Ludo, and the two stout German girls. Thinking to Egager them (I’m having lessons from Janie, but have refused to go to the Paris Conference today) he went to Gamages and bought some sugar which let out small fish on being dropped into coffee; some fireworks, and some chocolates which he thought were filled with sawdust, but were in fact filled with soap. The German girls love chocolates and ate greedily. Suddenly they began to foam at the mouth with soap, and set on Tom and almost tore his collar off. After that the evening was such a failure that he forgot about the fireworks till they were going, when he exploded them on the doorstep. He is having a great success with his religious play at Canterbury—success is very good for people. I wish I were successful. But I gather, from dining with Clive, that you’re all the rage now, and people say you’re the best painter of your time, which seems to me a silly and rather exacerbating remark—if one wants to be a success oneself—Still I think its time to produce a book on you all the same, and wish you would seriously consider it.

This is the first fine day we’ve had since we came back—literally this is true. Rain and wind, thunder and lightning; all fuss and waterproofs in the streets. And you are so hot you cant peel an onion. No, you misunderstand me about maternity. (Annie Thompsett [Rodmell helper] had a son last night) I adore all mothers and babies, but detest the child being covered with maternal spit (the foam one sees on hedges) after the age of 10. Thats what queers the pitch, and makes Aunts detest their nephews. But up till 10—there I am with you. By the way, Janie can talk of nothing but Quentin: says theyre all in love with him; he’s so wise, so learned, so modest, reads books at a stretch and understands them; has tact, charm, sympathy—in fact she says, all Roquebrune says Where’s Quentin? We must consult Quentin, whether its a question of love, or politics, or art, or cookery; alas, I had to agree: I admire Quentin greatly myself. Now I cant take another page. Next week we’re dining with the [David] Cecils and with Rebecca West: Leonard then dines with Raymond [Mortimer] and I go for my penance to the Buchans: but not a word will I tell you, not a word—unless you write to me. I’m not going to hope to see you before October. I dont say ‘wish’—I say ‘hope’. Life has taught me these lessons.

B

Berg

[]

3032: To Victoria O’Campo

21st June 1935

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, [Sussex]

My dear Victoria,

What a chapter of accidents! But of course I want you to do A Room of One’s Own. I wrote from France the other day to say so, but sent it to the British Minister at Uraguay [Argentina], not having your address. Now the manager of the Press went and did the same thing: so that probably you never got the letters, and before that they wrote to Madrid. By this time I hope you will have heard from them, and that the matter is settled.

What reason could I possibly have for not wishing you to do it? No: I shall be honoured and delighted. I want to write a sequel to it, denouncing Fascism: but must finish my novel first, and then I’ve been asked to write something about Roger Fry, the critic. So my time is full. But I want to write an article or two—Heaven knows about what. May I send you one—should I? But only if you promise to refuse it. You tempt us greatly with your South America. We try to plan a journey to America next spring—but that depends on so many things: the office, time, books—and so on. Tell me about the butterflies and your riven asunder soul—these ‘nostalgies’—that is what I mean by a “riven asunder”. At last it is fine here, but how it has rained and snowed! And London is very full—buzzing with people, and I wish you were driving about in your slim white car. Then we go back again: I only get time to write at weekends.

Yr Virginia.

Victoria O’Campo

[]

3033: To Lady Tweedsmuir

June 21st [1935]

Typewritten

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, [Sussex]

My dear Susie,

That sounds very exciting—I mean about the necromancer; and I much look forward though with fear.

I’m afraid I must be back on the 3rd though. I’ll come some time on the afternoon of the 2nd. I’ll look out a train and let you know.

You must be having a rush—please put me off if it becomes intolerable.

And excuse my incompetent typing—not a patch on yours.

Yr affate
V.W.

Lady Tweedsmuir

[]

3034: To Vanessa Bell

Sunday 23rd June [1935]

52 Tavistock Sqre. [W.C.1]

I’ve just got back from Rodmell and found the packet of Rogers letters. But Mrs Jebb sent them through the post and they were so badly done up that the parcel was practically open—I’m afraid some packets may have dropped out. Have you a list so that you can check them? These are the ones that have come:—in order of date.

1

packet

1922

1

”

1924

1

”

1925

1

”

1926

1

”

1927

1

”

1928

1

”

1929

1

”

1930

1

—

1931

1

—

1932

1

—

1933

1

—

1934

The only thing that makes me doubtful is the gap between 1922 and 1924.

Let me know as soon as you can, and I’ll go to the Post office if there’s any missing.

Anyhow she was a perfect idiot not to tie it up properly.

Roasting hot for a wonder.

Do write

B.

Berg

[]

3035: To Geoffrey Tillotson

June 24th 1935

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Mr Tillotson,

Many thanks for sending me a copy of your book. I suppose the printing is not strictly professional, but I like it all the better for that, and think it harmonises very well with the poem.

With best wishes for the success of your press.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Kathleen Tillotson

[]

3036: To Theodora Bosanquet

June 25th [1935]

52 Tavistock Sq. [W.C.1]

Dear Miss Bosanquet,

I’ve been looking to see if I could find one of the older copies of Jacobs Room [1922], which I like better than the little edition [1929], to send you. But the only one I have is in such a state of moth and dust that I think I had better send the other. I would have gone on to say how very nice it is of you to want to have it, but that I am just in the middle of Miss Martineau. She has started for America, and I’m so anxious to see what becomes of her—you have so aroused my curiosity about that queer old bird—that I cant tear myself away and must at once go back. But this is your own fault, and you’ll agree that to have overcome one author’s vanity is a great triumph for another author.

Yours very sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Houghton Library, Harvard University

[]

3037: To Stephen Spender

25th June 1935

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Stephen,

I’ve read your book—in fact I’ve read it twice—and I wish we could discuss it. I think it most interesting especially the first part on Henry James. I think you’ve got hold of something very hard and genuine, which nobody else, as far as I know, has seen. I suspect you are quite right about his development, and it puts him in a new light.

I think of course that you see him too much from the 1935 angle—that is you have to re-arrange him rather forcibly at times to make him fit in with your scheme. But what a mercy not to have the usual floating film—the film that floats on the top of the mind. Ought you not, perhaps, to argue your case a little more drastically? Now and then I slipped about rather not knowing what your definitions might mean. But that is not very material.

The last part of the book, about the living writers and Lawrence, seems to me more doubtful. I think it reads a little scrappy. But I am not a good judge, as you deal with contemporaries who seem to me much less important than they seem to you. But that again is the effect of the 1935 angle; if youre writing from a point of view in time then things have value for you which is their value to you now—not to me, who am then. (I’m writing in a hurry, and anyhow cant write out criticism except in a hurry; its so complex that I should want reams and months and have only this hot afternoon)

It seems to me that artists can only help one if they dont try to. Again, living writers are to me like people singing in the next room—too loud, too near; and for some reason I am so exacerbated by their being flat or sharp; as if I were singing my own song, and they put me out. Hence my unfairness to Lawrence; but how can you put him with the very great? How can you call him a great psychologist? To me hes like an express train running through a tunnel—one shriek, sparks, smoke and gone. As for sitting down to think him out—as for reading him again (and I’ve read very little)—no. Of course I feel the ‘genius’; the power of vision. But how distorted and of the surface. (Excuse this). Then of course I cant feel that William [Plomer] and [Laurens] Van der Post and [Ezra] Pound and Tom [Eliot] are of the calibre you make them out. Never mind. I think it is very penetrating and acute and new and honest. Also very generous, and imaginative. I hope you’ll go on and do some more.

This will lead me back to Vienna [Spender’s poem], about which I expect I feel something confused; as that youve not got the elements yet rightly mixed; that your desire to teach and help is always bringing you up to the top when you should be down in the depths. That hints at the reason why I feel it jerked broken incomplete. The transitions from poetry to prose are not natural yet. But I’m sure its vigorous and on the lines of something big, which is more than most of them are. Here again my hatred of preaching pops out and barks. I dont think you can get your words to come till youre almost unconscious; and unconsciousness only comes when youve been beaten and broken and gone through every sort of grinding mill. But then for your generation the call to action in words is so much more strident than it was for mine. But I’ll have another look; and see if I cant get something more coherent. But is there any good in criticising poetry unless one can criticise the words—and only a poet, practising, can do that. I’ve not read Auden’s play; but I am reading Toms. I dont like Christianity though i.e. Church of England.

Love from us both and write if you will. It is very hot and very crowded in London and we see more people than is good for the soul. No room to tell you about Germany.

Yours
V.W.

And why say ‘Bloomsbury’ when you mean Clive Bell or Roger Fry. Out of sheer malice you’ll lead me to talk of ‘Maida Vale’, meaning school-masters.

Texas

[]

3038: To V. Sackville-West

[27 June 1935]

Postcard

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

How are you? What is happening? I hope its not you who are ill?—and that its over? and that I shall see you some time:

Heres Mitz.

Lorraine Helms

[]

3039: To Ethel Smyth

July 2nd [1935]

52 Tavistock Sqre. [W.C.1]

I’m so sorry to have been so incommunicative, but I dont suppose it matters a straw, at our mature and sublimely tolerant age. I’ve been let in for ever so many unnecessary external distracting affairs. Why have I promised to go and stay with the Buchan’s tonight? A wave of old sentimentality: I used to know her as a girl: then I go to Bristol to open a show of Rogers pictures: this was another wave. I dont think rightly speaking, I should have done—and theyre still to do—either.

1) Have you heard from Vita? Thats more to the point. About Gwens “terribly serious operation?” Vita put me off, and wrote this explanation. What will happen if Gwen dies? Have you any news?

2) Did you send a young man in blue to leave pinks at the door last week, with a mysterious card in a feigned hand, saying “these broken petals from an ex-Stormy Petrel”—enclosing a piece of sponge and a yard measure and a bill from a Gloucester coal merchant? I used to call somebody “Stormy Petrel”—was it you? I dont think so.

We’ve bought a dog who is at once passionately in love with Leonard. Its a curious case of hopeless erotic mania—precisely like a human passion. Then, I’ve been toiling and toiling; because the Frys cluster round, and I swear I wont glance at biography till I’m quit of fiction. Dear me—I must go and see if I’ve a clean nightgown and pack.

Please answer, if on a card, about the blue young man and the pinks.

I doubt that your [Ralph] Brewster is a very clear judge of character. He seems to me to jangle, like a bell wire after the bell’s rung—something very unstable—And, my nephew says, a well known homosexual, but liked, and thought honest by his contemporaries. As for Mr Peploe—well, our Miss West [Hogarth Press] says there cant be two opinions as to what he is!

V.

Berg

[]

3040: To Vanessa Bell

July 3rd [1935]

52 Tavistock Sq. [W.C.1]

I am slightly puzzled by your letter, as you say that the 1922 packet got separated: but that is among the Jebb lot: it is 1923 that is missing. Then you put at the end “did the letters I gave you include 1 packet for 1923? and perhaps one for 1922?” But it is the 1923 that is missing: all the others are there. So I take it you have got the 1923. I had to tell the Jebbs, as the Post office wanted details—that was before your letter came. Jebb rang me up in a great state, and said that what had happened was that the Customs had opened the parcel to see that there was nothing dutiable—the size would make them suspicious. They are always doing this to the foreign office bag much to their fury. But why the F.O. shouldn’t have done up the parcel before sending it on. God knows. Obviously it had been opened on purpose: the string was quite loose, and one end opened—It was a miracle that nothing was lost—I’ve told the Jebbs that I think you didn’t include the missing packet: let me know.

I’m just back from staying with the Buchans or Tweedsmuirs as they are now called. At first I thought it was going to be a complete frost—Susie awaited me in a typical shabby but large country house drawing room, alone, with a dog. She has grown very ample, and carries a faint flavour of Lushingtons. But by degrees we got warmer; and there was a dinner party,—the Camerons, Isaiah Berlin, an Oxford undergraduate, a son, a daughter, and the daughter of Mamie—if you remember Mamie. Happily John was in London being given a dinner, or seeing the King, and it wasn’t so bad. They’re rather out at elbows, and have holes in the carpet and only one family W.C. I twitted Susie about her grandeur, and had the usual undergraduate Oxford talk, and argued with Isaiah, who is a very clever, much too clever, like Maynard in his youth, don: a violent Jew. So the shades fell, and I had forgotten my loofah, and felt endlessly old; talking about the Lyulph Stanleys [of Alderley] and the [Marquess of] Sligos with Susie, and then about films and modern poetry with the boy, who is a simple, and rather shaggy,—And all today we spent driving about the Cotswolds, which were about as beautiful, or is it my eyes are going?—as the Campagna? Really the country was astonishing, and all the villages made of yellow stone, and not a new house anywhere. We went 40 miles to see a necromancer—that is a retired East Indian planter who lives in a mediaeval farm [Snowshill] which he has filled with old clothes, bicycles, mummies, alligators, Italian altars—not, I thought, very interesting, and I think rather a fraud, as he pretended to have no watch, and so I lost my train, and only got back at 8.30. to find Leonard dining with Raymond and no letter from you. But the drive was very lovely. You see I’m trying to tempt you back—England is now and then the most poetic of all countries. Why. I wonder? It almost brought tears to my eyes, sitting beside Susie who went cooing on about our youth; and asked a great deal after you, and wants you to do a jacket for her book—one on some historical character that we’re publishing. So will you? I’m so sleepy I can hardly write. I’m getting very queer and crusty without you. Do come back in August; however I see your point about family life. I had such a dose of Woolves at Rodmell the other day—all family gossip: it feels like wet ducks padding about one’s head. That reminds me—Judith Bagenal suddenly appeared the other evening, and said Mrs Curtis and another girl were in the basement, come to fetch Angelica’s present—So we had to have them up to unpack it. And I thought she would never go: she quacks; I dont think I could stand her for long; she trails so, and enthuses so: and nothing would make her go. She was laden with bits of stuff for their play, to which she invited us. And she raved about A: and said she must be a great actress: but so she goes on about everything. However, in default of A:, Judith had a certain hard crude charm I thought—youth is certainly a great appetiser:

Julian came in 2 nights ago, and was also very charming and full of sense and character. I got the impression he hadn’t much enjoyed Dublin: Moya I gather, is a little too Irish, and does the Ottoline of Dublin too much for him. But he had been driving about with Janie, and I wish to God she didn’t look so like an old French postmistress with a bristly chin. Otherwise I wish she would marry him. Not that he thinks of it I imagine. Clive is dining here to meet Odette Keun, next week; and I’ve fallen in love with a charming Marchesa Origo, Sybil Scotts daughter—who has an Italian farm near Siena. I think you’d like her. and she’s asked us to stay. But then Leo Myers is in love with her, and he looks like a duke of a sort, so well got up, so what chance have I? We dined with the Cecils who are a piping pair of love birds, but no young, and met her and him there. And Mary’s [Hutchinson] back from Vienna, where Barbaras been having an operation, and Vita is in a great taking because Gwen has to have a very serious operation—thats all my news.

Yes, do buy me any brooch, necklace, pin, or ring; I lost 2 brooches coming back; up to £5 I will go—any trifles. And please love me—I’m such a darling—and getting very wild without you

B

We have just got a new dog—black and white—and it is passionately in love with L.

Berg

[]

3041: To Lady Tweedsmuir

Thursday [4 July 1935]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Susie,

Here I am on a hot dusty windy day, plodding along Holborn (this refers to an hour ago) to Gamages to buy worms for a marmozet, while I try to describe to Leonard what it was like yesterday looking over the Cotswolds. I can hardly get my bearings, after that miraculous expedition, and you have the satisfaction of knowing that you ruined a page of fiction this morning. But anyhow for me, it was well worth it. I enjoyed myself immensely, and send you my inarticulate thanks.

I hope you will come one of these days before you are an entire Royalty to discuss advertising with the Hogarth Press. Leonard thinks your idea very interesting—I mean about the reminders.

Thank you again

Yrs aff
Virginia Woolf

I am sending a little pamphlet to your son, because he pleased me so much by saying that he liked it. I wish I had seen more of your son and your daughter. I wanted to discuss the young with her.

We’re just off to see what Stephen Tennant has done to Monk’s House. Bath salts—scents everywhere I expect, if not Stephen himself.

Lady Tweedsmuir

[]

3042: To Ethel Smyth

Sunday [7 July 1935]

52 T[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Well, thats a relief about Vita and Gwen—I was picturing all kinds of horrors—I hope needlessly.

I cant manage tomorrow (if that is you were able to come) but dont, in this heat—no hurry, I imagine—a post wd. bring the MS.) Tomorrow I must keep all my wits for an appalling infliction—Odette Keun—who must see L: must dine here. And after Oxford my weekend was spent with my head on a pillow. But after Bristol (which is, God help me) on Friday I hope for some free spacious days like those of Q. Elizabeth was it? Freedom slowly broadening down. As Woking depends on the car, the car on L: L. on freedom from blacks and coffee colour and Odettes—his book [Quack, Quack] is bringing in the usual crop—how can I say to Lady B [Balfour] as I should like—yes we’ll come at once? I always think of her as the most reasonable persuasive and sweethearted of women—but this is not for her ears, only a sheet for you: like a bed of pinks in this swelter. You see I cant form my letters: but if you can, do.

V.

I am greatly relieved to hear that you sent the pinks—(but why disguise your hand) Years ago a girl in some sort of fix haunted us, and I called her The Stormy Petrel. Now I thought she’s turned up again, and will be on me, after this douceur. And I cant remember who it was or why I so christened her. Imagine therefore my relief—call yourself in future uncastrated cat.

Berg

[]

3043: To T. S. Eliot

Sunday [7 July 1935]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

My dear Tom,

It is extraordinarily nice of you to give me your book, and I wish I could thank you as you should be thanked. I am sure, soberly speaking, that it is a very remarkable work, and will put all my critical faculties to the stretch. I have only had time, though, in this world of interruption to read it once, and so, though I am sure, as I say, I will keep any further remarks, should I venture to make them, until you come and stay with us. And that reminds me—where have I been staying? With the great novelist (of the school of Scott) who is now Governor of Canada [Buchan]. Forgive this boast, but in sober truth, I am not nearly so proud of that as I am of my copy of your play, and beg you to believe me with all my faults thick upon my head still your admiring and attached old friend.

Virginia W.
(as you call her)

No: we enjoyed having you immensely the other night. This refers to your circular.

Mrs T. S. Eliot

[]

3044: To V. Sackville-West

[10? July 1935]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

I’m so glad that the operation [Gwen’s] isn’t to be as bad as you thought. And it would be very nice and refreshing to see you. But it must be before the 25th: as thats the day we go to Rodmell. So let it be the 24th if you can. Would you send a line sometime?

Oh dear, I’ve got to go to Bristol and make a speech about Roger Frys pictures! Why must one do these things? Excuse the holes in the sheet. We’ve got a black and white dog—a perfect lady. But I’m so hot; and I would like to see you; and I’m so badgered by Ethel—so no more.

A man came and asked me to be President of the PEN: and I said, Try Mrs Nicolson: at which they jumped. Forgive my malice.

Berg

[]

3045: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Saturday [13 July 1935]

Postcard

[Stratford-on-Avon]

You see this is where I am. I had to come to Bristol to open a show of Roger’s pictures. Back on Monday and will hope to see you next week, and write. Oh the heat of Somerset today!

Texas

[]

3046: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Sunday [14 July 1935]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Ottoline

This week seems to be a perfect hurly burly; but still I wonder if you would come in without of course dressing, on Friday night, anytime about 9.30? Edith Sitwell is dining here, and anyhow it would be very nice to see you, in the comparative cool—the day’s too hot to broach all we want to talk about. But I’ll tell you all I know—not much—about Dotty [Wellesley], and describe my downfall in the matter of Charles Morgan: but there’ll still be India.

I can’t describe the horror of Bristol on Friday—200 stout burgesses, crammed and dripping, and having to talk about art after losing my way in the most hideous of all towns—but its too hot. But we cooled down at Lechlade, and saw Kelmscotft] today—why dont we all live in a silver grey manor house, and sit on the Thames banks, and watch the moon rise, as I did last night—it was incredibly lovely—like a rose petal in the sky.

yrs VW

Texas

[]

3047: To Vanessa Bell

17th July [1935]

52 Tavistock Sqre. [W.C.1]

I was just sitting down to write to you last night when Julian came in to say that he has got the Chinese professorship. You will have heard from him already. He seemed very excited, though also rather alarmed at the prospect. I wish it weren’t for so long—though he says he can come back after a year. Still I suppose its a great chance, and means that he will easily get something in England afterwards. Leonard thinks it an extraordinarily interesting job as it will mean being in the thick of Chinese politics, and Julian also felt this—what it means Chinese politics, I dont know, nor I suppose do you We had a long talk, and he was very charming and said that he felt it was time he made a complete break. In the middle, Mrs Pirrie rang up, but he said she wasn’t as much upset as he expected. Of course he’s got a mass of things to do and was going to see the Board again, in order to find out more details. Well, its all very upsetting: I shall see him on Friday, and try to find out more. He was still vague about the house and the pay. We urged him to find out all about the climate and conditions—he’s going to see Tawney who has been there; and also Margery [Fry]

This is the most exciting news naturally. Otherwise I was going to tell you about the horrors of going to Bristol to open Roger’s show. Really the Frys—in the first place, it was broiling hot; then we lost our way and only got there just in time. Then there was a large audience, all of the most stodgy and respectable; then they kept an electric fan going so that I could hardly make myself heard—then I felt in my bones that neither Margery nor Pamela [Diamand] much liked what I said. In short it was all rather an absurd waste of time and energy, I felt—though I thought Roger’s pictures, as far as I could see them in the crowd, a good deal better than I expected. Margery never wrote and thanked me—and in fact I feel that the Frys view of Roger is completely different from ours, and I’m in rather a puzzle to know what to do about seeing Margery before I go. I’m sure she’ll disapprove of anything I write. Yet I feel she means to hold me to it. Julian agrees—thinks her almost crazed on the subject, and advises me to keep clear of her: but how am I to? Anyhow, I feel sure she didn’t like my innocent and highly eulogistic speech for some reason.

I’ve now been through both parcels of your letters, and I find that you had put a 1923 packet among the letters you gave me. Also there are 2 1922 packets. As the 1923 was the missing one, I suppose now nothing was lost—no thanks to the Foreign Office though: (I’ve just heard from the Post Office that they have searched in vain)

I hear Quentin is back [from Rome]—he was dining with Kapp last night, Julian said. Both he and Julian, I hope, are coming on Friday to help us with Edith Sitwell and Ottoline; such is my penance; but I hope the last before we go to Rodmell next Thursday. Lord what a mercy to be there, out of this racket and uproar! Clive is giving a farewell dinner on Sunday; we gave him an appalling one to meet Wells’s old mistress, Odette Keun, one of the most raddle faced bitter tongued women I’ve ever met. And I must say Clive was good natured in the extreme. Gerald Brenan and his wife came in—a dried up pair, I thought, and Gerald apologising for his book [Jack Robinson 1933], for which apologies are useless. That same night Frances Marshall [Partridge], dining with the Bussys, was taken with child and removed on a stretcher: a boy [Lytton Burgo], all well, as I daresay you’ve heard.

This is a very dull letter, but its been so hot, and I’ve talked such a lot the past 2 days, my wits are roasting: twice I dreamt I was kissing Angelica passionately, across a hedge, from which I can only deduce that incest and sapphism embrace in one breast. But neither the one nor the other come within a thousand miles of me when seeing Susie Buchan or Ethel Smyth—both of whom came here yesterday. Adrian is said by Julian to be openly and outrageously in love with Mrs [Henry] Lintott so that people laugh at her car in front of his sitting room window, in which, the room I mean, there’s no light, owing to the bedroom being at the back. How I wish I could see you, even across a hedge! But I must wait till September. I wish old Julian werent going: he’s such an angel; but still, its done him a lot of good, I see; Simpson was rejected—How are your Queen Mary paintings? I met Kauffer at the Hutches. [Hutchinsons] and he said that they were such asses, the architects, asking him to do Britannia with a shield, that he thought he should refuse. But I hope you’re all right. Now please write. We go to Monks House on the 25th.

B.

I have been asked to be President of the P E. N Club in succession to Wells: this is about the greatest insult that could be offered a writer, or a human being.

Berg

[]

3048: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Wednesday [17 July 1935]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Ottoline,

I’m so sorry you’ve been ill, and had to retire to Clifton. I wonder if you saw the dancing nuns—thats my impression: Nuns dancing in a convent: one looks down from a terrace: rather like birds doing some ceremony.

I would have given you the Roger if I’d thought you would like it. But I think speaking in public always makes one tell lies and puts a throttle round ones throat. I didn’t get anything out naturally; and it was so hot, and such a plum pudding crowd. I hated the whole thing.

We shan’t go away just yet, so I hope we may owl again. But please dont hang too many of us round your neck. Kot [Koteliansky] came here the other day, just the same, the same schemes and curses. Murry came in for a sound shower. I’ve not read Shakespeare, and I cant. Why let that smell pervade him even for a moment? But I read Murry on Murry because carrion has its fascination, like eating high game. I’m so sleepy I’m writing nonsense. Old Ethel has been making the telephone rattle—How are we to provide for her now her book’s done? You see how I pile things on to you—If you dont take care, you shall have Mrs Grosvenor and my half brother [Gerald Duckworth] and old [Sir] Harry Stephen and Elizabeth Robins. E.R. however is a bird of a very different feather, something like a humming bird stuffed.

We go to Rachel and David [Cecil] for the weekend, where I hope to meet Desmond. So no more.

V.
nodding over the fire

Texas

[]

3049: To Helen McAfee

18th July 1935

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Miss McAfee,

Thank you so much for your charming letter and for the suggestions it contains.

I had at the back of my mind an article that I hoped to write for your autumn number [Yale Review], but I never got time, and that, I am afraid, is the reason why I must not accept the tempting invitation to write an open letter—even a short one. I have promised to finish a book by August, and it is now past the middle of July, and the book is still on my hands. I am therefore refusing to let myself break off into any other activity until I have done with it. In fact, I have written no articles since November—but I hope to be freer in the autumn, and then perhaps you will let me send you something.

We have not yet escaped, as you see; but hope to get into the country next week. Meanwhile, it is refreshing to think that somebody else is enjoying Jane Austen in peace. Here, as far as I can make out, nobody reads anything but the newspaper.

With our best regards,
yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Yale University

[]

3050: To Ethel Smyth

Sunday [21 July 1935]

52 Tavistock Square, [W.C.1]

Dossier.

(1) Yes. I think I recognise the pink rimmed handkerchief as one I bought to assuage hay fever in Marlborough, going to Bristol. But keep it. The memory is detestable.

(2) Ottoline says you are entirely adorable, and seduced Hope Mirrlees from the holy Ghost. What a press you’re having!

(3) Read the enclosed—fulsome praise I hope—at your leisure, and tell me if I must answer.

V

Berg

[]

3051: To Logan Pearsall Smith

21st July 1935

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Logan,

Thank you very much for sending me the little tract which I shall, of course, put on my shelves in the hope, as you suggest, that I may profit by it.

With regard to the essay [unidentified], charming as it is I am afraid that it would be no use for us to attempt to publish it. The public appetite for separate essays seems to be exhausted, so far as we are concerned, and we have had to bring our essay series to an end. And even if we tried the experiment of beginning another series with your essay, the fact that you are so soon going to include it in your book of essays would, we fear, be a fatal drawback. Our autumn list is already made up, and we could not bring it out therefore till next year, by which time, I gather, your book would be almost ready.

Therefore I am reluctantly returning it, but we are very grateful to you for giving us the opportunity.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Frederick B. Adams Jr.

[]

3052: To Elizabeth Bowen

Monday [22 July 1935]

Postcard

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Many thanks for taking so much trouble. I’ve told my brother in law [Clive] what you say. We go away on Thursday but could you come in on Wednesday, any time after 9.30? Do if you can. Rosamund’s brother John [Lehmann] is coming and Lytton’s sister Dorothy [Bussy]. Many congratulations—what fun to take a house.

V.W.

Texas

[]

3053: To V. Sackville-West

Saturday [27 July 1935]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

I wrote you a long and loving letter, and left it on my table in London unstamped, so it wont go. It was only to say we couldn’t come in on our way yesterday—but perhaps you’ll ask us over, which would be simpler, when we’re here: or come in yourself. Do you still visit your mother? We visit L’s mother, at Worthing, and its a dismal grinding visit, as the poor old creature is rapidly growing blind, yet is so strong she may reach 100;—But this scribble is only to say I hope you won’t have a devilish time in London, and wish I were there to go on a jaunt, to Kew.

I saw Ottoline the other night and heard about the visit to Yeats, which should set Dotty up there 15 years, and I hope will plume her feathers for her, and make her sing like a nightingale. Not that it alters my own opinion one jot.

I’ve got such a mass of writing and reading to do down here and can only sit on the terrace and look at a swarm of bees, and read Captain Marryat. I’ve seen too many humans, and would like a long dose of donkeys. So come and see us; or let us come to you, and, as I say, please get through all these horrors and come out at the end still caring for the poor Potto without a tail. Oh Ethel!

The royal garden party etc—but no room or time for more.

V.

Berg

[]

3054: To Vanessa Bell

Monday [29 July 1935]

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

Well, this is very nice, that Dolphin should be in town again, though I’m afraid not so nice for the poor brute itself. I was beginning to write to you when the whole [Joan] Easdale family broke in, and we had to spend the afternoon with them. Stephen Tennant who’s lodging at Piddinghoe, has already been round this morning—what can be done about people?—(I dont mean the Bells). However, what I was going to say was: if you want your tea set, it is in the Bathroom at 52; still packed in the box they sent it in, and I hope unhurt—If you want it, and Mabel’s not there, they have a Key in the Press. The other china is here. Also: have you got a copy of Rogers Transformations? a small one? I cant find mine, so could you lend me one? If not, I can easily get it from the Library. I’m afraid Ha is going to be rather difficult—but I’ll keep that till we meet.

Let me know when and where.

B.

Berg

[]

3055: To John Lehmann

1st August [1935]

Monk’s House, Rodmell,

Dear John,

It is difficult for me to say if you’re right or wrong. Its very interesting anyhow. But I’ve not read The Waves since I wrote it, and I’m now doing something so different that I can’t get back into the mood. Of course, my attempt was to get that kind of effect, by those means—metaphors, rhythm, repetitions, as you say. But in actually writing one’s mind, as you know, gets into a trance, and the different images seem to come unconsciously. It is very interesting to me, though, to see how deliberate it looks to a critic. Of course most of the work is done before one writes and the concentration of writing makes one forget what the general effect is. But I’m very pleased it strikes you like that—as a whole.

But if you print it, as I hope you will, leave out Shakespeare, because I don’t think anyone in their senses can have mentioned him in that connection. (I almost put a capital H, and that is rather my feeling).

The village is playing stoolball, and I must go and sit on the grass and watch.

Yours
V.W.

Texas

[]

3056: To Ethel Smyth

Saturday [10 August 1935]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Well my dear Ethel, how delightful this silence is—how fertile, how satisfying: I’d just made up my mind never to break it by a single word when I looked up and caught the shine of the coachman’s hat in your portrait [photograph], which so titillated my wish to know what the devil the uncastrated cat is doing at the moment—there seems to be only one obvious employment for such an animal—that I take up my pen, as they say. Since coming here I have poured out tea for 15 self-invited guests: I have been to London; I have read a dozen MSS. of tepid trash and then you call me lazy! Then you say I forget old friends!—ranking yourself apparently with the fairy who bent over my cradle and whispered music in my ear. Well, aint it odd, how, a mere four year old like you—for it is now precisely four years since you caught me a cuff over the head for telling you—I forget what, but I remember falling flat on the drawing room floor—aint it odd how free and easy we are together: and what pains over your heart is like a breeze over corn in mine. Now any critic, anyone trained in the art of letters at Cambridge, like your friend Peter Lucas, could tell from that last sentence, with its recurring rhythm, and visual emblem—why dont they make me Prof. of English—I’d teach em—would know from that sentence that I’ve just come in from a long hot walk over the downs and sat by myself in a cornfield. If ever you come this way, I’ll take you to Muggery Poke. There we’ll seal our love on a floor where the nettles push among the cow droppings. It was deserted 50 years ago, and I go there every Saturday to muse upon my youth—

Did I tell you—no—I never boast—I’m one of the most modest people, come to think of it, there’s ever been—that Wells having retired from the PEN Club they asked me to suceed him? Upon which I flicked my hand, as a greek woman flicks a bug off her childs head. Conceive the damned insolence! Ten dinners a year, and I to sit at the head of this puling company of back scratchers and administer balm. I thought of you. Why? In what connection? Ah-hah, thats my secret.

Vita wrote today and asked me to go to St. [Sissinghurst], where Gwen is lying in bed with 2 nurses I gather; and it was a very nice affectionate letter. Have you heard?

Now L. calls me to bowls

So no more V.

Berg

[]

3057: To Jane Bussy

Saturday [10 August 1935]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

But, my dear Janie, this is too silly. Even I can count, there are six black marks in my diary, every one of which stood for Janie. And I think its damned cheek on your part to rate our interviews [French lessons] at a mere 5/bob. However, have it your own way: I only stick to my point—since it affects accuracy—that there were 6 lessons, not 4.

I have been trying all this week to continue a diary in French: but life flies so fast, and French verbs—dear me, I shall never forget saying beut instead of boit in front of Clive of all people—life, that is my mother in law, the Keynses, Stephen Tennant etc, flies so fast, and I’ve got to finish a book of 150,000 words all in a jiffy, that I cant get on with the diary. Never mind, I will tell it you when we meet.

It is roasting hot here, and incredibly beautiful at the moment—orange fields, yellow grasses, and a green running river with a schooner on it. I stopped to admire the view, and what d’you think happened? A fox got up at my feet! But then you dont care about animals.

I wish I had a library of French books within reach. I should like to lie in a deck chair and absorb French with my feet. They say now one can see with ones back. But its too hot to read a vast work called My Life and my Love, by the widow of a headmaster which has just been sent us.

Love to any Stracheys who may be doing crossword puzzles at the moment.

V.W.

Texas

[]

3058: To Vanessa Bell

[21 August 1935]

Postcard

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Margery [Fry] only arrives rather late on Friday afternoon and goes early on Saturday, so I dont [sic] there will be much chance of coming over.

But I’ll tell her of the invitation.

(Written in the car.)

[]

3059: To Vanessa Bell

Sunday [25 August 1935]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

Julian suggested a meeting before he goes.

Would you and he dine here on Tuesday—or if you’d prefer it—should we dine with you?

We have to go to Sissinghurst but should be back by 8. But dont do either if a bother. We shall be out to lunch and tea on Tuesday.

Would you send a line.

Berg

[]

3060: To Ethel Smyth

Tuesday [3 September 1935]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

I have lost your letter in the general chaos of MSS. and dont know what day you said you were coming. So let me know possible dates. I remember all the soul of the letter, about the dog and Vita; its only the facts.

I went to Sisst: and Vita was so seductive in her sailors trousers, and we had 15 minutes alone—the first this year—and I’m sorry you dismiss her. G. [Gwen] was there, like a drowning cat; wet, white, and Harold—Red, robust.

V.

I’ve been up in London all day, and so cant write

Berg

[]

3061: To Margaret Llewelyn Davies

6th Sept [1935]

Typewritten

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, [Sussex]

Dearest Margaret,

We were just about to write to you to suggest a visit—would next Friday, 13th, suit you? We would turn up about four [at Dorking]. If that is all right for you, dont bother to write. I’m so sorry you havent been well—dont hesitate to put us off, if it should seem a burden, as I know visitors can seem. Our telephone number is Lewes 385.

You may be amused by the enclosed letter and article which I’ve just had sent me by Mrs Leavis. I dont know her, but am told that she and her husband represent all that is highest and dryest at Cambridge. So I rather feel from reading her article; but I suppose she means well, and I’m glad that she should feel sympathetic in her high and dry way to our book. I wish we could produce another. Could we? It didnt do so badly. I dont want Scrutiny or the letter again.

So it will be very nice to see you, and we shall turn up in our car on the Friday, unless stopped. Love from us both.

Yours
V.W.

Sussex

[]

3062: To Mrs Easdale

13th Sept [1935]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Near Lewes, Sussex

Dear Mrs Easdale,

It is extremely good of you to have sent me your book, and I write at once, as I am afraid it will be a week or two before I can sit down in peace to read it. But of course I have looked to see the quotation from the diary that you told me about. It gives a most glowing account of eating crumpets at Monk’s House, and is more than kind. But I admit that it makes me a little shy. I cant feel that Mr and Mrs Woolf are quite so exciting when they come to tea as you make out, but I dont want to shake your generous illusion. (And I have just had a dip in, and couldn’t stop though I tried, reading the account of ‘my first corpse’, and the large linen sheet upon which your grandfather blew his nose. Compared with the book I ought to have been reading, all about Jowett and Oxford, how delightful yours is!)

I’m afraid it looks as if we shouldn’t get a day off to come to Kent this autumn. We are both trying to get a good deal of work done before we go back, and have to deal with a good many interruptions here. But if we can, I will write and suggest it. I am much excited by the thought of more flowers—they last year in year out here.

Thank you again for the book. I shall keep it till I have done my duty by manuscripts; meanwhile I shall watch for reviews, and feel sure of its success.

Yrs sincerely
Virginia Woolf

University of London

[]

3063: To Ethel Smyth

Wednesday 18th [September 1935]

Monk’s House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

I have a terrible but I hope fugitive confession to make: I read your chapter; put it away, and now can’t find it. L. is out at the moment, and may have it in his keeping. But please get it retyped at my expense. I am furious, with myself, for this slovenliness. My only excuse is that we have the floor littered with MSS: and I’m going through all the Fry papers, and am rather dazed. And no doubt it will turn up. But please God you have a copy, which your man can do again—at my expense. Hence I cant answer your question about the paragraph at the moment. My impression of the whole was that it was an excellent fragment, by itself; and very vivid. Only I think I had read it before? I seem to remember the incident of your hearing the Mass and not knowing what it was. But perhaps you showed me this with the Ponsonby Chapter? Anyhow, it reads very fresh and free; yes, no doubt about it. (Oh dear, oh dear—that I should add to the losses and worries.—but its the first time) About Miss Gordon. I have had a thick dossier from her. But I cant possibly read the MS yet: I have to read our Press books in rotation, and shant get through to hers for a time. The season of books is on me. I’ll let you know my opinion when I have one.

Meanwhile, as I say, I am facing my 3 large boxes of Fry, in the vain hope that I may make some way in them before London begins. And there’s a whole room full more, I believe. But its fascinating work; save that handwriting strains the eyes, and I have to read every note with a view to some light or hint. So excuse me for scrawling: you’ll have to make even more than the usual allowances for me till I’m through this thick hedge

V.

Berg

[]

3064: To Lady Tweedsmuir

20th Sept [1935]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Near Lewes, Sussex

My dear Susie,

We are bringing out your book about 8th Oct. Yes, of course we will send an advance copy to Miss Garvin. Would you like us to send it to you, so that you could put a note in it? Or if you sent us a note, we could put it in. Or we could send it without. One line on a card to the Hogarth Press, and they will do whatever you wish. But please use your secretary. I’m sure you must be worn to bits. I cant say its been altogether balmy down here the last few days—all our fruit and most of our hedges are blown down; but I’ve just picked a hat full of mushrooms in the marsh so I cant complain. Yes I hope we shall see you before you go.

Yrs ever
V.W.

Lady Tweedsmuir

[]

3065: To Donald Brace

29th Sept. 1935

Typewritten

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Mr Brace,

With regard to my novel—it is taking me longer than I expected; but I hope that it may be ready by Christmas. I have decided to call it “The Years”, but I should much prefer not to give any description of it until I have read it through, as you are so good as to say that this is not essential. I have still a good deal to do in the way of revision; and it is still much too long. And in these circumstances I find it difficult to give an intelligible account of it.

We had a very interesting and varied trip, through Holland, Germany, Italy and France in the spring. But that now seems a long time ago, and we are preparing to go back to London next week for the winter.

I hope you are well, and that affairs in America are prospering.

Yours sincerely,
Virginia Woolf

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

[]

3066: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Oct 4th [1935]

Monks House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

Dearest Ottoline,

I am a wretch never to have written—I liked getting your letter so much. But we have been trapesing off to Brighton to listen to the vociferations of the Labour party, and then dashing up to London—in short, thinking you didn’t hold by your pound of flesh I never wrote. Now we are just about to come back. It is a flooded and stormy world here, with the marsh overflowing and gigantic storms coming over the hills; but all very lovely as usual. I wish public affairs wouldn’t jerk their ugly heads up. When even I cant sleep at night for thinking of politics, things must be in a fine mess. All our friends and neighbours talk politics, politics.

Tom Eliot was here the other weekend, very mellow, charming and humane. I no longer feel a crashing vulgarian, an upstart illiterate in his presence—after 20 years thats something. I’m beginning to read a huge collection of Roger’s letters that Margery has deposited with me. On and on and on I go, but whether anything can be done with them I’m not sure, and it will take me six months, only to read the letters at this rate. I skimmed Elizabeth’s book in a rush: I must read it again. I thought it a little tight and hard, but very good—much the best of hers I’ve read.

Now Leonard has turned on the wireless to listen to the news, and so I am flicked out of the world I like into the other. I wish one were allowed to live only in one world, but thats asking too much. But I hope you’ll let me come owling round in the dusk one of these evenings. I heard a brilliant account of your losing a dog on a Common from Ethel. (We are now hearing about the war, so I cant write sense). Aren’t I right though to make her take to her pen, not her harp?

yrs VW.

Texas

[]

Letters 3067-3091 (October-December 1935)

3067: To Lyn Newman

Oct 6th [1935]

52 Tavistock Square, [W.C.1]

Dear Lyn,

We have just got back to London after rather a distracted summer. At least it ended with the Labour party at Brighton and began with Germany and Italy. Did we tell you how the marmoset saved us from Hitler?

We’re so glad that you are going to have a baby, and hope to see you both this autumn. Where is Comberton? I’ve no notion. Grantchester I know and Madingley, but thats all. Leonard is in a great rush with politics as you can imagine, and we are both at the moment regretting Monk’s House, which we left almost flooded, but very lovely in its ruined way. The storm turned half of every tree deep brown.

Well, we shall hope for news of you, and shall turn up when we’re travelling our books if we may. Now by the way, I have a niece at Newnham: a very charming niece, Ann Stephen.

Leonard sends his love and congratulations

Yrs
Virginia Woolf

Sussex

[]

3068: To Ethel Smyth

Tuesday [8 October 1935]

52 T.[avistock] Sqre. [W.C.1]

I have a thousand apologies to make—but no MS.! We had a comb out through every jungle before leaving Monks House, and found nothing. What is most likely is that I stuffed it between the leaves of a huge MS. novel I was reading and rejecting, and that it was sent back to some infuriated author who kept it in revenge. At the same time I lost a letter I had to answer—containing not mere praise but 3 pocket handkerchiefs. You must tell me faithfully what the bill for retyping is. I’m getting so casual and submerged in things—all these Fry papers—I lose something daily. The theory is that I’m so careful of the Fry letters, all my care is spent.—thats what I say. I heard from Vera Brittain, a heart broken letter poor woman. And I’m told (not by her) that what killed poor Winifred was first an African germ, which they thought was cured; then Vera B’s father jumped into the Thames and drowned himself; Vera and W. spent several days searching for the body; found it; Vera broke down thereupon; Winifred was sent to look after the children; suddenly the germ revived; she was too exhausted to struggle, and so died; but this comes only second hand.

I hope to keep freer next week than this: Athos is out; R.B. has written fairly mildly in answer to a sound drubbing by L: all the bookshops praise the set up; and first sales not bad—I mean advance sales, but we must wait. I had to send the Ladies of Ll: back to the hermaphrodite. I cant repeat my reasons on this slip; but perhaps, she’ll tell you. I thought it quite well done in its way.

V

Remember the Bill

Berg

[]

3069: To Julian Bell

14th Oct 1935

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, [W.C.1]

Dearest Julian,

Nessa says it is possible to write to you, which for some reason I had thought doubtful. Now the great thing is to make a beginning, and then to trust that you will answer. So I lead off—only I’m told one must be careful. Well, we had a great family meeting the other night and Nessa read your journey letter aloud and it was we all said a very good letter; only rather melancholy. You were on board ship, and it had been very hot in the Red Sea. Then she had a cable to say youd arrived. Now I suppose you are teaching the Chinks about Mrs Gaskell—which seems an odd thing to do. Oh dear how I wish television were now installed and I could switch on and see you, instead of tap tapping, which curtails my ideas and castrates my style. But then, I take it, you cant read the only hand that gives me any currency.

As for news—well, after you left we had old Tom [Eliot] to stay the week end; he was urbanity itself, and we had a good deal of old crones talk about people like Middleton Murry, Wyndham Lewis and so on. He’s determined to write plays about modern life in verse, and rather crusty when reviewers say he’s an old fogy. In fact I think he feels that hes only just beginning to write what he wants. Whether hes on the turn, religiously speaking, I’m not sure. He had an early cup of tea on Sunday and went to Communion. It was a wet morning too, and when I came down to get breakfast there he was dew sprinkled, saying that he had met three old women in the churchyard and one of them said, as he passed, “Yes, there she was lying in bed with a still born child by her side”. A nice way of beginning Sunday. We dined with the Keynses, and Maynard commissioned him to write a play for the new theatre.

Then we went to the Brighton conference, which was better than any play. To hear first old Lansbury a true Christian, but with an eye, I thought to the gallery—I mean the [Brighton] Dome, not Heaven; and then [Ernest] Bevin like a snake whos swallowed a toad, denouncing him, crushing him ‘Some people like to go hawking their consciences about” he said—while poor Lansbury squirmed behind him; this was as good as any play—not that Ive seen one. But I wont write politics; They are now all in a stir about the election, said to come off in November.

I am beginning to work at Rogers letters, and have by the way had a scrawl from Ha to say that the Mallarmé is all off, owing to the monstrous behaviour of the Mallarmé people in Paris. I gather theyve refused to have any further dealings; but on what grounds I dont know. Doubtless she’ll tell you. Rogers letters are fascinating; an awful mix; the family ones very stiff; the travel ones rather dull; but always some flash of interest; and some to Basil Williams extremely amusing. But I cant think how to deal with it—or whether to deal with it. I wish you were here to discuss the whole thing. Did you write anything [about Fry]? I hope so. One might write a whole long book; I rather suspect its a case either of a long book or a short essay. But I must go on reading. Your C.O. book has come for L. to review. I thought Adrian very good—the only one Ive looked at.

Last night we dined with Clive; present, Nessa, Duncan and Sally [dog]. We discussed criticism; and at what point the critical faculty dies. I think mine is just able to deal with poetry this year; but will be dead next year. So hurry up and write some.

We are all well in health, and spry in spirit; but rather miss you, and I wish Q. wasnt going up to the potteries, however I rather suspect we shall make a push and come to China.

I must now go and see an importunate and unfortunate Gerwoman who thinks I can help her with facts about Women under Democracy—little she knows—what you do about your poor old Virginia.

Quentin Bell

[]

3070: To Ethel Smyth

Monday [21 October 1935]

52 Tavistock Sqre. [W.C.1]

I’ve now got completely muddled;—you will not be surprised to hear, and can only say will you let me know when you appear at the Old Bailey in order that I may be there. I must if I possibly can. So send me a line that I mayn’t be closeted here with some inescapable grub. I sat next Elizabeth [Williamson] at a concert the other night, and she told me that you were off somewhere in the country with Mrs Wodehouse. (Please convey her my respectful homage. Ought we to buy the Scarlatti records?) Elizabeth looked—but I’m no judge of ‘looks’,—very well, and we had a little back chat over our seats. It was Bach, and the flute didn’t carry round the corner—is that a legitimate criticism? I’m too shy of you to venture many such you’ll admit.

I’ve had a poetess reading her works aloud [Easdale]; I’ve had a French socialist declaiming against Fascism [Walter]; I’ve had a German Jewess [Gruber]—no, I cant go into all the vociferations and gesticulations that are our lot in Tavistock Sqre.—but you’ll admit that it is difficult to wedge in even an hours reading of old letters (Rogers) and a morning at my own script, and taking Sally round the square;—she wont make water except in Leonards presence, which has introduced an additional complication: Such is love! Venus toute entiere—etc.

But for Gods sake, let me come to the Old Bailey

V.

“Gerald Balfour—surely the handsomest man I’ve ever seen” I’ve just read this in an old letter of Rogers.

Berg

[]

3071: To Ethel Smyth

Thursday [24 October 1935]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

I’m very sorry you’re not well enough to come, and very sorry too about the death of that nice man. But Lady Simon stayed here talking about politics till 6.45. and I daresay you’d have been bored. (She’s a rather nice woman though, something to do with Newnham, something to do with Manchester, and a great admirer of a Room of Ones Own—hence her visit—hence her demand that I must write a sequel)

Well, I must leave the future to you. This is a stupid page, but I cant strike any romantic line of thought. At the moment L. is telephoning to a lady who insists that she must see Miss Virginia Woolf—do you mean Mrs says Leonard; upon which she cries off into the night. Now what did she want to see me for, and then get my name wrong? I am about to attempt to read the Life of Bishop Gore; I am about to decide whether I can possibly refuse my old mother in laws birthday party, and go to tea instead. Can I? She is blind as a bat, and croons with dismal persistency over all the anniversaries of all the deaths, which conglomerate this month. What about the Van Dams, and your ballet? What about the Hermaphrodite? [Mary Gordon] She’s writing a sequel to Orlando. What about Gwen and V [Vita]? I’ve never a word from V. which rather hurts me, save that I know what is to be has to be. And whats the good of complaining? I am rather ravaged and harassed by Fry relations and friends: and can only hug my freedom, and refuse to commit myself to any work till my book is on the Atlantic waves. I read The Temple last night: George Herbert. Why cant I believe too? only I think my own beliefs so much more exciting. Yet Gore, they say, was a good man. But I cant get into the romantic vein tonight.

V.

Athos [Brewster] has had quite good reviews. L. says it is selling “quite fairly well.”

A cheap edition of the 2nd Common Reader has just come out. Shall I give you a copy to give your friend?

Berg

[]

3072: To Julian Bell

Oct 25th 1935

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, [W.C.1]

Dearest Julian,

Nessa says you get a letter if its sent on a Friday. (I wrote you one the other day, but lost it; if I find it I’ll put it—[later] I put it in) Your letters are read aloud and seem to us very good indeed, only they take so long to come that when we read them you are already in another part of the world. I heard of you yesterday though from old Mrs Woolf, who says you visited Bella and she thought you a most charming young man. I gather that you were tactful in the extreme; at least, my mother in law was delighted that according to you I am very fond of her. That was a master stroke—I am, in a way; but how did you know it?

Then Leonard heard from Tyrrell, whom you had also charmed. And now you are in your official residence on the banks of the Yangste. Its useless to ask what youre doing at this moment much though I want to know. Here at this moment it is a bright cool October evening; Miss West [Hogarth Press] has twice run in to say the Sunday Times wants to know can we get someone to introduce Mr Day Lewis when he speaks at their Book show; and I have had to ring up Morgan [Forster]; and have just got him to promise to be chairman. Leonard is having tea with him in Brunswick Square to meet Mr Kidd because Janie [Bussy] brought M. Walter round here, imploring us intellectuals to stand by the French anti-fascists. And now Charles Mauron wants us to go to a conference in Paris. And then there will be the general Election. But I gather that politics are best avoided; and in any case my views are likely to be inaccurate and perhaps partial—all politics be damned.

I am beginning to read Rogers letters, and wish to goodness you were here to consult. It seems to me either one must write a long book; or a short essay. There are masses of documents; and still more to come when Margery returns next week. The bother is he writes a dull letter for the most part, and then theres a flash of great fun. And his love letters are prolific; he must have had a love every new year; and most of them are foreigners. So I am plodding away, when the light fails, and I can no longer write my long dull novel, And now the Stracheys want me to write about Lytton. By the way your C.O. book was reviewed at length in the New Statesman today and also in the Times. It seems to be taken very seriously and much praised. I looked at Adrians thing and thought it very good. Humanly speaking we are all as busy as bees—Nessa painting, Duncan painting, Clive dining out, Leonard as usual balancing twenty balls on top of his toes. As for youth and beauty, I have seen Rose Macaulay and Elizabeth Bowen; and Morgan and Joe Ackerley. But they are all past their prime. I wish—but whats the use of wishing?—that you and Angelica and Quentin and Ann [Stephen] were all round the corner. Tomorrow perhaps we shall go to Cambridge for the day and call on Ann. Today as I was walking along the Strand I saw up “Public entrance” and so went into the Law Courts, and heard the Judges in the Appeal court try a case about land at Enfield—not very exciting, but fun to hear. I’m glad on the whole youre not a lawyer. Jack Hutchinson fell down in a fit the other day, said to be through over eating; but thats malicious. Anyhow hes all right again. I am reading old plays; do you find that your mind works oddly, about poetry? I can read it for an hour with rapture but without understanding a word. And the first of my senses to wake is the colour sense. Did you manage to write anything about Roger? Do when you can—not that I shall begin to write before the spring at earliest. I heard from Margery that the Mallarmé has fallen through owing to the malice of the family. No doubt shes told you. I think they objected to her terms. Peter Lucas writes to the Times; Lyn [Newman] has a son. Peter has the dons way of being clever about politics—about Shaw and Abyssinia. Are there any books youd like? I see Empsom has written another on some critical theory; but I shant read it. We are all very well. Nessa seems quite gay; and the other night at a concert she had painted her cheeks; but for sentimental reasons I dont like it. Would you? Certainly she looked very lovely. Clive is giving a lunch party to me and Christabel [Abecconway] and Desmond next week; and is shooting I think at Seend this Sunday. I will write these scraps often. But you mustnt expect much sense or polish or wit or fancy if I type, because the typewriter always pecks my poor brain to pieces. But you see how much we wish you were here my dearest Julian.

Quentin Bell

[]

3073: To Philippa Strachey

25th Oct 1935

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

With Mrs Woolf’s compliments, in order that Miss Strachey may buy something at the Bazaar, as she wont accept her stamps.

(And many thanks. The pamphlets just what I want to read)

Sussex (typed copy)

[]

3074: To Herman Ould

25th Oct 1935

Typewritten

42 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Mr Ould,

I am in receipt of your letter of the 25th inst.

I have had no communication from Mr Ellis Roberts and I do not know therefore why he has informed you, as you say, that I have “agreed to join the P.E.N.”

For reasons with which I need not trouble you I am unable to join the Club, and it is therefore impossible for me to sign the resolution which you have so kindly forwarded to me.

I need not say how much I appreciate the kindness of the Committee in making the suggestion.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf (Mrs Woolf)

Texas

[]

3075: To Victoria O’Campo

Tuesday Oct 29th 1935

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Dear Victoria,

A week ago—no, I’m afraid it is more than a week ago—two mysterious foreign ladies arrived in the hall just as I was saying goodbye for 5 years to an old friend who has been jumped up to the ridiculous and exalted station of Governor of Canada (his wife I mean) [Tweedsmuirs]: and they pressed into my hand a large parcel, murmured some musical but unintelligible remarks about “giving it into your own hands” and vanished. It took me at least ten minutes to realise that this was your present of South American butterflies. What could have been more fantastically inappropriate! It was a chilly October evening, and the road was up, and there was a row of little red lights to mark the ditch: and then these butterflies! And people were dining with us, and I had no time for anything but to take off my dress, and come down to the sitting room, and stand the butterflies on a chair: and at intervals all through the evening (we had E. M. Forster and a B.B.C. official [Ackerley] dining with us) I looked over their heads at the butterflies and thought of the difference between two worlds. I must say it was an extraordinarily imaginative thought on your part. I cant, in spite of my puritan ancestor, disapprove and regret it. So what I have done is to hang the butterflies over his portrait on the stairs, in the mystic hope that somehow they may persuade each other of the error of their ways. The butterflies, so far, are having much the best of it.

But will you thank the veiled and mysterious ladies, and explain how it was that I was so flabbergasted and inexpressive, and did not show them any hospitality, as I should like to have done? As I say, they vanished, and there was no card, or anything, to which I could send my thanks.

I wrote you a long letter in August, about the PEN and Buenos Aires: to say they had invited me, and offered to pay my expenses. But I cant talk about literature; thats not my line; so I cant accept their generosity, which, without any proof to go on, I connect with you. All the same, one of these days I shall come. Only you can’t think how fast we are tied to England, even to 52 Tavistock Sqre, by the Hogarth Press: by politics (now its the General Election) by the necessity I am under of finishing a corpulent and most obstinate novel: I think I’ve finished it, and then it springs back in my face, like a bramble, all prickles, and I have to begin again, cutting and pruning. As I say I wrote all this in a letter in August, but was interrupted; saw it lying about; got sick of it and so threw it away. But you wont want letters, written in this scrawl, which is partly due to a pen with a split nose.

Perhaps someday you will write. How remote and sunk in time and space you seem, over there, in the vast—what d’you call them—those immense blue grey lands with the wild cattle and the pampas grass and the butterflies? Every time I go out of my door I make up another picture of South America: and no doubt you’d be surprised if you could see yourself in your house as I arrange it. It is always grilling hot, and there is a moth alighted in a silver flower. And this too in broad daylight. I must hurry to lunch. So goodbye.

Yrs gratefully
Virginia Woolf

Victoria O’Campo

[]

3076: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

3rd Nov [1935]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Ottoline,

I wish I could come, but I’m afraid I cant on Tuesday. I have promised to be in to see a dull little man, and I dont suppose he’ll go in time. But may I come another day, evening rather, when you’re alone, if you’re not too busy? We are just back from Rodmell, where we had Labour Party meetings in the schoolroom—not a chance of getting in of course.

Give the great poet [Yeats] my humble duty, and thank you for asking me.

yrs Virginia

Texas

[]

3077: To Mrs Easdale

7th Nov. [1935]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Mrs Easdale,

It is most good of you to send the flowers again—it makes me feel guilty, putting you to all this trouble every autumn. At the same time I am very glad when they do come, because they always look as if they were in the south in the sun. At the moment it is drenching wet and a fog: so they have their work cut out for them. Thank you very much—and I should include the box they came in as part of the present, since it is so distinguished looking: I’m very glad of the Honesty too, but this we can get at Rodmell, so dont dream of sending any. We are going down there next week end, or before, but only to take voters to the Poll.

Please accept my annual and very sincere thanks. I hope your book is doing well—but I suppose its too soon to know.

Yrs very sincerely
Virginia Woolf

University of London

[]

3078: To Ethel Smyth

[9 November 1935]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

But why am I in your bad books? What have I done thats wrong? Or do you scold me on principle like the nurse in Punch. Go and tell Charles he mustn’t. Here I’ve been merely dealing with the usual pack of cards—people, people:—one by the way rammed on me by Ethel Sands—was a niece of Hindenburg, and said you used to come to her mothers who helped you with an opera: this woman is marmoreal and monolithic, and precisely like a statue in a street: well, here I sit dealing with these for ever falling cards: reading Fry papers; toiling away at fiction, going to Labour party meetings at Rodmell—and my word, the little Quakers in the village schoolroom lit by one oil lamp, (and they mostly smelt,) brought the blood to my head—a natural easy hoarse orator—making metaphors—and whats been my crime towards you? Merely existing? Merely breathing the November air? Oh what a tyrannous heart you have to grudge me a gulp of fog! You’d have laughed to see me leading our 5 clerks at a gallop across the Sqre. and mounting a bed, so as to cheer the ducal couple—just in time—past they came—and she tossed me a kiss. So there. More than you do

V.

Berg

[]

3079: To V. Sackville-West

Sunday [10 November 1935]

52 T[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Yes, the 28th lunch would suit perfectly, and be a great treat.

I wish we could lunch alone; but lunching out is rather a noisy bore, so lets lunch here, with L. and Mitzi, and then perhaps you needn’t hurry off at once?

I heard you were in France, so didn’t write: then that you were canvassing in Leicester. Perhaps that was only an excuse to get out of the horror of the Sunday Times show: which has been wasting my time, but then so has the Election. On Thursday I have to walk Brighton pier for 4 hours while Leonard takes voters to the Poll. I think I shall call on Lady Sackville and ask for a cup of tea. Then I should drop dead foaming at the mouth, poisoned. All the placards would say, Lady Novelist poisoned by Peeress; and the sale of my books would bound up—but I must not continue this harrowing story as its dinner time. I must take the pot from the oven. What about Joan of Arc? Thats a book I shall like; a long, true, passionate yet absolutely matter of fact book, about joo pages, with pictures

So the 28th at one.

Only you’ll be late

And wear yr pearls

for Bosman Potto’s sake

V.

Berg

[]

3080: To Ethel Smyth

Wednesday [13 November 1935]

52 T.[avistock]S.[quare, W.C.1]

Oh my God! What a fraud! Here’s the one thing I wanted—to go to Kings Bench tomorrow and this intolerable election has put a spoke in my otherwise so rapid rolling wheel. I must go with L. to Brighton—he says, (and this I feel you’ll understand) “I should be dull without you.” Now isn’t that a compliment? And there I shall be, knocking in and out of the Pavilion, up and down the Pier instead of seeing the magnificent sight of Ethel confronting British Justice.

Ottoline has just gone. I feel like an old Pander handing bouquets from lover to lover: She says youre a trump: a great card; a magnificent Englishwoman; one of Shakespeares—I forget what—whores I daresay. And how you kept ’em all in a roar the other day; and put some red blood into that lily livered man. I went to his play last night, and came away as if I’d been rolling in the ash bin; and somehow filled my mouth with the bones of a decaying cat thrown there by a workhouse drab. But I’m dazed with talk, and were it not for my sense of being unfairly treated by the Laws—all other days I could have gone—should spare you this scrawl.

Well: back on Monday. Let me know all about it; and for Heaven’s sake keep yourself alive and brisk in a world which needs sanity and substance and not the puling of green sick American eunuchs: though I love him in my own spasmodic fashion.

Ottoline says your her ideal of a great and noble nature—(these are very nearly her exact words: I’m too sleepy either to lie or to write)

V.

Berg

[]

3081: To Ethel Smyth

Saturday [16 November 1935]

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

I was very glad of the telegram,—glad you’ve scotched that viper, though I dont suppose it’ll do you any good—the majesty of the Law. Do you get your articles back? or had he sold them and forgotten where? Anyhow, I cursed my lot; not merely that I missed the sight (one day last week I walked in and sat through a dull case for the sake of the sight) but it was almost what they call a wash out my coming to Patcham, and blessing the insurance agent who was running the Labour candidate with my smile. L had to drive voters for 3 hours in a downpour, so I toiled back to Rodmell; had to stand in the rain waiting for buses, took two and a half hours coming back, and so spent yesterday with a headache. But its exciting, too getting these odd glimpses of people I never meet nor you neither: and very good for my conceit and ignorance to have to pass the time of day with Mr Fean the postman, and Hancock the Quaker. Poor wretch! After slaving for a month, 7 meetings daily and so on, he’s 10,000 votes behind Loder. Harold’s in—how astonishing! What a tribute to a good heart and the upper class manner! I admire his gameness. Out of the diplomacy into the frying pan: and so to make an omelette. Vita wrote me a dear loving kind letter asking to come to lunch and saying she had 5 years of talk to have with me about her book [Saint Joan of Arc]. I know—since youre so steadfast—you never said a word to her of any complaint of mine. I’m frying sausages for dinner as I write; and have just turned them delicately with the holder of this pen, having left the spoon in the kitchen. Then we dine off chicken and oatcake: L. makes a brew of coffee; and so to bed or rather to read a whole wall of Manuscripts. Yes, I was sorry not to see you too in that becoming light

V.

No, my criticism of the Murder [in the Cathedral] was a violent flare, not to be taken as serious criticism. Though violent flares are always good evidence. The truth is it acts far less well than reads: cant manage the human body: only a soliloquy

Berg

[]

3082: To Angelica Bell

Sunday Nov. 18th [17th, 1935]

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, [W.C.1] (but we’re really at Monks House for the moment.)

Darling dearest Pix;

Here we are, in a down pour; frogs weather; but I was so delighted to get your deceitful letter that I try to dry my webbed claws, having become to all purposes a toad, and write. Again once again you took me in. “Beale Cunningham as I live!” I howled, seeing your envelope on my plate. How do you know precisely how to take me in with her writing?—And then it turns into you. And then the very next day comes her book; which is all about keeping goldfish in Paris; and falling in love with Jews; and it begins well; but swells into such a mish-mash of words, about love and Jews and how to train vines over pergolas and wear silk pyjamas—In fact I think she must be mad; and I ought to write and tell her so. If you should meet a dumpy but washy woman, who loved a Jew in the Palais Royal, drop a pebble down her back and tell her to empty her ink pot into the Seine and never write another word, with my love.

We came down here on Thursday for the Election. Leonard had to drive voters to the Poll—not parrot—would that it had been—for three hours in a downpour. And after all our Mr Hancock was ten thousand votes behind Mr Loder. However I will not send politics to the Asses house, for thats what he lives on. I imagine you coming down to breakfast, lifting the cover off your plate and finding nothing but AntiFascist hay, chopped very fine; with a few old herring bones. However this is not strictly according to fact; for from what you say I think you have a good eye for a witch.

Oh I liked your visit to the black sea [inexplicable].

I was oh so happy to read a little common sense in your letter about sunsets and witches. The woman who thought you such a good actress was Elizabeth Bowen; whos a very good writer in her way; and moves about the world and sees all sorts of actors and actresses; and she said she could see you had the real gift. We went to see Tom Eliot’s play [Murder in the Cathedral] the other night. I think what is wanted is for some actress to make plays in which people are like ourselves only heightened; what is so bad is the complete break between the acting, the words and the scenery. Thus you lose all feeling of harmony. Why dont you make a play all in one? Thus it is much better to read plays than to see them. I am almost dazed with writing my book; and think it would be better acted. I shall make the end into a play for you to act. Some of it is good; most of it is bad. It is too long. And I have to write about Roger. At least Nessa wants me to; and Margery Fry has given me masses of letters; and all his diaries; how he dined out or went to Paris. Do you think it is possible to write a life of anyone? I doubt it; because people are all over the place. Here are you, for instance, walking in the Tuileries; and buying necklaces; and seeing the sunset; and writing to me; now which is you? Eh? I will give Mummy all your messages; only some of them are scratched out on the envelope. I like dinner better than tea; but when one has to see people one doesnt know, tea is over quicker.

Ive been seeing E.M. Delafield, who writes the Provincial Lady; she is called Dashwood really; Elizabeth Dashwood; and lives in an old house like a character in Jane Austen; whom she adores. But she has to scribble and scribble to pay for it and her children.

I’m dining with your admirer Raymond [Mortimer] tomorrow; to meet Aldous Huxley; oh you dont like Raymond;—Tom is bringing an American [Emily Hale] to tea; and I had a long visit from Ottoline. I was late; and found her curled in my chair like a viper reading a book. We had a vipers talk; fascinating; about her life when she was a Duke’s sister and wore a great hat and sat on the box seat of his four in hand and went to Ascot. That was thirty years ago. She took the Duke of Portland, her brother, to tea with [J. T.] Sheppard at Kings; and Maynard was there and Lydia. The Duke said, ‘Who was that Don, who married the dancing girl?’ He’d never heard of Maynard. So Ottoline said, “Hes Maynard Keynes. Very well known.” And the Duke said, “Maynard? Any relation of the Miss Maynard who married Lord Warwick?” So you see Bloomsbury is still very very obscure.

Sally has just run in to send her love to you; but the truth is shes so passionately in love with Leonard that she cant stay in my garden room, and has just galloped off in the pouring wet because she thinks Leonard is taking flowers out of the greenhouse. And heres Leonard; and he sends his love. We want to come to Fontainebleau after Christmas. What are your plans?

Ginny

[handwritten]

I think I shall call my book “The Years”. Do you think it a good name? Mummy is going to do a jacket full of Donkeys Ears.

Angelica Garnett

[]

3083: To Stephen Spender

Tuesday [19 November 1935]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Stephen,

I’m sorry I’ve been so long answering; but the Election muddled everything.

Could you dine here on Monday 25th at 8? I hope so: then we can discuss the interesting case of the Murder in the Cl. I rather suspect it is human nature that floors him: when its in the flesh.

I’ll try to get Rosamond [Lehmann].

Yrs V.W.

Texas

[]

3084: To Ethel Smyth

Tuesday [26 November 1935]

52 T[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.i)

Haven’t I been good in respecting the furies of literary composition? Silence has dropped its mantle between us; and thats the greatest homage I can pay you. As a matter of fact though I did write, and was interrupted, and so sickened of the faded sheet, and thereupon invented this theory to justify myself, and became so enamoured of my image of the mantle of silence that I inhibited my own pen. What a thing it is to be a writer—to be so suggestible by one’s own words that all ones instincts lie flat at their command, like sheep under a cloud: a fact which I think I’ve observed on the marshes at Rodmell. But no one respects my furies of composition: I swear to finish this incredibly tough old serpent [The Years]—a serpent without any of the charm of the Nile, only with all the toughness of what is evil and perennial—by Christmas; and to make this out of the question all my friends give letters of introduction to all their friends; I cant get rid of them—Cards, deeply black edged, are handed in. Will I see so and so? No, I say: whereupon the door is thrust open, and there are M. and Mm Gillet,…. on top of Tom Eliot, who was just saying how much he admired you, and why had I never asked you to meet him, and his dull impeccable Bostonian lady.

So my book decays upon me like the body of the albatross. Next week by the way I have to break all my rules and lunch with Clive to meet the lady he calls gloriously Mme de Polignac, and I call Winnie Singer. Shall I like?—shall I, shant I? God knows why I should be introduced to anyone—Then Vita came; and you’ll be amused to hear that though my love of her character, so modest so magnanimous, remains unimpaired, I cant really forgive her for growing so large: with such tomato cheeks and thick black moustache—Surely that wasn’t necessary: and the devil is that it shuts up her eyes that were the beaming beauty I first loved her for, and altogether reduces her (to look at) to the semblance of any fox hunting turnip stalking country lady. You’d never think she could turn a phrase; only whip a dog; but she remains, as I say, to me always modesty and gentleness no longer incarnate, but as it were hovering above her, in a nimbus. She seemed gloomy about Gwen; but our communications on that head are formal.

So goodbye. But wont you praise me for respecting the cloak of silence?

V.

Now I am going to Romeo and Juliet. Do you think he could love Juliet so soon after Rosalind? Doesnt Shakespeare spoil his psychology on account of the play?

Berg

[]

3085: To Julian Bell

1st Dec 1935

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, [W.C.1]

Dearest Julian,

Your letter about Roger came the other day, and I was very glad to get it, though you say that some of the pages flew in to the China seas. I wish you could rethink them—I thought it full of interesting and what is more, suggestive things. I wished there were more childhood stories; because Ive not got any that give that side of him. Also I’m very glad to have what you say of his work; perhaps some time you could go on with it. Any odds and ends about him come in useful. And you give the feeling of him extremely well I think. I am now reading the letters to Helen [Anrep], and get more and more involved in his mind and character, for though he is a bad letter writer mostly, to her he was extremely free and easy and self analytic. What to do with it all, I dont even try to think yet—theres so much to read. But I shall stodge on, and trust for some flash of illumination. Old Mrs Bridges, widow of Robert, sent for me to talk about Roger; but she hadnt much to say, and was chiefly anxious I think to plaster over the quarrel about Rogers portrait of the old man. She said however that once when R. was grown up, Robert stayed with him at Failand; and wanted to play bowls on a Sunday. Roger hummed and hawed, and at last went off to ask Sir Edward’s permission; which was only given grudgingly. So you see how our ancestors lived. Gerard Hopkins she said used to come, very seldom though, because he had to celebrate mass daily.

Oh Lord—how I hate these parsons! We went to Toms play, the Murder, last week; and I had almost to carry Leonard out, shrieking. What was odd was how much better it reads than acts; the tightness, chillness, deadness and general worship of the decay and skeleton made one near sickness. The truth is when he has live bodies on the stage his words thin out, and no rhetoric will save them. Then we met Stephen Spender, who also was green at the gills with dislike, and came on to dinner one night; and told us how he has quarrelled with your friend John [Lehmann]. He wrote a story and put John in; then he sent the proofs to John, who was furious; whereupon Stephen stopped the story from appearing and rewrote it; but Johns vanity—for such I suppose it to be—was outraged; and they are on tiger-cat terms; in fact, broken off entirely. Stephen is off to Portugal with Isherwood and a friend; two friends I think; of the lower orders and the male sex.

Who else have I seen likely to amuse you? Janet Vaughan; just had another baby; a girl; very nice; rather beautiful; will write us a book, we hope, on medicine; a little touchy about her husband; but has a good job at Wormwood Scrubs. Sally Graves; niece of Robert, Oxford; 22; a Yorkshire tyke, clumsy; touseled headed, nice, will also write us a book. But sometimes I long for the Hogarth Press to end—then my task of reading novels would be over. And I wish L. would get on with his [After the] Deluge.

3d Dec. I see Id better make this a diary letter; as I never get time to write for more than a minute or two. I try to read Roger in the lapses of finishing my book; but it won’t finish; its like some snake thats been half run over but always pops its head up. Ive just come on this in one of Rogers letters from Charleston 1926:—youd all been to dine with the Keyneses, and Lydia would talk, “I felt hardly able to play up and relapsed into talk with Julian and Quentin who accompanied us. Julian’s very beautiful, and very charming and extremely intelligent. Hes got much of Clive but is a more serious character with bigger ambitions and altogether more to him. I’ve been teaching him chess and hes got on with astonishing rapidity so that I have to reduce my handicap every day.” I like compliments myself; and so hand this on. There are others equally good; but be discreet; for he says very sharp things about Clive. In fact his irritation with Clive seems to become almost an obsession—about his bagging Rogers ideas; his lack of understanding of art; his reverting to the Bell type and so on. I must ask Nessa.

Friday 6th Dec. Heres your letter this morning! a great pleasure. Do please go on writing—any scrap; then we shant turn into stiff old boots. If you dont mind these scraps, I’ll send them as they accumulate. And we wont try to make sentences that will seem to the Chinese models of what we ought to write, English prose.

We had such a meeting at Adrian’s last night to form a group to encourage the French; Nessa will tell you what for. I was dumb with helpless wonder at the competence of the political; and his loquacity. There was dear old Peter [Lucas] and Aldous and Auden; besides a mass of vociferous nonentities, chiefly journalists and scrubby men with rough hair—you know the sort. Anyhow L. is doomed to another Committee; much may it profit the world. Peter’s in a fuss because no one reviews his two latest efforts; and then the N.S., that is [G. W.] Stonier, comes out with what I thought the most immoral review I almost ever read; unfair; untrue; written with a squint and a bitter poison; to which Peter, like an ass, thought good to reply, and only to say ‘What a great poet am I’. Better leave others to say it. He’s parching and tanning; red as a herring; and one that has no roe. (See Romeo and Juliet)—to which we went two nights ago; and how it curled up Tom’s Cathedral, and dropped it down the W.C.! Do you appreciate Shakespeare? I think you used not to. To me he becomes, so miraculous, I felt, sitting there—not that Romeos one of the best—like the crowd who watch a rope go up into the air with a heavy basket on top. A thing one cant account for. Still acting it they spoil the poetry.

I’m glad, to return to your letter, that you are platonically in love. Thats one of the best ways—and if you ever have a moment, fire off to me some crude, rude, brief remarks on the book of mine you are going to read to the pupils. I get no criticism; and feel now and then it would help me. One only gets mere slobber or mere abuse. Neither are of the least help. L. has written a blurb for your poems; which I’ll enclose.

Last night I met Margery Fry; she took a part in the debate; and made L. furious, by her reasonable but meddlesome ways. Then she cornered me and said she has a vast mass of Roger’s papers; which I must come to tea to carry off. All his letters to the first Helen I gather; and masses more of all his old papers; reviews &c. Lord! I wish you were here; I should make you do some of the reading; or we might consult. As it is I go on making extracts which is laborious, but may help you or another should there ever be a wish for a full life. His letters to Helen (Anrep) are far the most like him Ive yet struck.

I hope you wont follow Dadies [Rylands] example; I see in the paper hes been made [Cambridge] University lecturer in English for three years. But why teach English? As you say, all one can do is to herd books into groups, and then these submissive young, who are far too frightened and callow to have a bone in their backs, swallow it down; and tie it up; and thus we get English literature into ABC; one, two, three; and lose all sense of what its about. Thats why Auden, Spender and Day Lewis are bound together in a holy trinity—nobody reads with open eyes. All are mere catalogue makers; and thats what comes of teaching in a Chinese university. I make no doubt though that they scoop up pailsfull of what is worth having from seeing you walk about the fields with your glasses in your hands, and no nonsense about being a learned man. In fact, as the ambassador of reason and love, I can quite see you wearing a halo, bright winged, with eyes—dear me, I had thought of such a nice phrase for you, as the Chinese, of both sexes see you—and now its lunch time; and I must rush up.

P.M. We have just been to the Chinese show; about which I dont expect you want information; and there met Jack Hutch; and Monty Shearman; Jack grown pale and thin, speaking comparatively; and very cordial; but plagued by Mrs [Vivien] Eliot who has taken to the stage. She wears a black shirt, believes in Mussolini, and accosts Tom just as hes about to lecture on the Future of Poetry before a devout and cultured audience. Such are the chief events in the world of letters. Nobodies written a book you could touch with a barge pole, as far as I know. We are all well—Duncan and Nessa and Helen [Anrep] dined here last night; Helen I like better and better. Nessa begins to grumble about Christmas at Seend; Cory [Bell] has sent me a brace of pheasants. Adrian found a burglar in his bath, and put him in a taxi and sent him to the hospital. I enclose my speech on Roger; but its purely formal and not at all satisfactory; one always lies when one speaks in public; still in case you might like it, I send it. So good bye for the moment dearest Julian but let us continue this spasmodic chirp, as it is a way of converse. Love from L.

V.

Quentin Bell

[]

3086: To Clive Bell

Wednesday [4 December 1935]

Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Clive,

I didn’t know that I was still capable of blushing. However, when I read your letter that old accomplishment of mine, said to be connected with vanity, said to be one of my ancient foibles, came alive: and I had a happy morning. How absurd! but once in a way how delightful!

So you see you could ask me a much greater favour than to come to lunch to meet the Princess [de Polignac]—who must I think be Ethel’s old flame—and I shall come with pleasure on the 12th Dec. at 1.30. Havent I always said that Clive—but no: I wont write out my affectionate praises lest you should think, what isnt true, that I’m sitting with my paws dangling and my nose twitching asking for more. And oh I’m so dusty in the throat and dumpy in the head after 3 mortal hours of Tom Eliot x rich American snob lady [Emily Hale], x Stephen Spender x M. et Madame Gillet over for the Chinese show and a rapid rifling of the flowers of old Bloomsbury; so forgive this scrap, and read into it some ancient kisses.

Yrs Virginia

Quentin Bell

[]

3087: To Ethel Smith

Thursday [5 December 1935]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

But what can have happened? L. posted that letter [No. 3084] with his own hands about 6 I shd. say 2 nights ago—just before you rang up. I’m slightly anxious, remembering that it was rash and hasty and said some wild things—thinking I may have sent it to the wrong person. So let me have a card; if you would. No doubt only the beginning of the Christmas curse: crowded posts.

V.

Berg

[]

3088: To Julian Bell

17th Dec 1935

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, [W.C.1]

Dearest Julian,

I must begin another snatch of diary letter, or I shall never get started again. I hope youre making an effort in spite of Platonism and the Chinese version of it to do the same. By the way give your lover, if she’s my lover, my love. Thats a Chinese box of a sentence for you! And by rights I should be lunching with Margery to meet the head of the Chinese in London—whats his name I dont know; over here to do the Show. But I’ve compromised; and am going to tea now, to go over Rogers papers, with her.

This week end Quentin was up; and we had a crack on Sunday at Nessas. I was glad to find that we could still argue with some heat the question of palmistry. Aldous Huxley asked me to have my hand told by his friend—Maria’s rather—Lotte Wolff; so I did; with the result that some things she got hopelessly wrong; others she guessed amazingly right. And for two hours poured forth a flood of connected and intense discourse. Leonard said it was all humbug; disgusting humbug; Clive said That’s not the scientific spirit; you must try things. Nessa was on L’s side. I kept my distance, having the idea that after all some kind of communion is possible between beings, that cant be accounted for; or what about my dive into them in fiction? But why marks on the hand? Why should deaths and other events indent the palm of the hand? Anyhow, old Quentin, who has a sagacious clear sure footed mind like a handy little Scotch pony—but he’s grown very fat—put us through our paces admirably. I was glad to argue again; how I miss Roger on Sundays for then there was always a substance, not mere froth in the talk. Yes I wish Roger were here more and more. So hurry up and come back.

Thursday 19 th.

I went to Margery and ferreted among her dusty papers. She hadnt done much to get them ready—in particular I dont think shes found the Roger-Goldie letters; only a mass of quite illegible Goldie. She told me she thinks she settled with Chatto and Windus to bring out the Mallarmé—on very bad terms; what, I dont know. Shes not a model of simple sense, which is I believe always so with the truly administrative mind. Because they make others do the facts; but no doubt she could marshall an army over an Alpine pass as soon as say Jack Jones.

Last night I dined with Ethel Sands to meet an incredible collection of petrified culture-bugs—Eric Maclagans, Leigh Ashtons, and Bruce Richmonds. Its dressing up and being ladies and gentlemen that finally slows down the blood; so that all the knowledge, all the cleverness in the world—and Eric Maclagan told me many facts, as we pecked our fish, about Shakespeare which I dont know and only half believe—none of this survives dressing up and being respectable. Take my warning to heart. Leigh Ashton told me he wanted to have your job; must go to China; but as he’s swollen to the size of a muffin in water I doubt that he ever leaves his Museum.

Leonard fetched me on a cold foggy night all agog, having just heard of Hoares resignation. What is to come next? But what is to come will have come by the time you get this, You can imagine the hubbub here among those who go into details. Tomorrow we go to Rodmell for Christmas, in which silence I hope to finish my book and perhaps write you a less jumped and jerked letter. The truth is, I never sit down in London but what someone doesnt ring up or come in. Morgan has had to have the same operation—for prostate—that Goldie had. But hes having it in the best way—that is in two gos. We’re going to ask this afternoon; it was done—the first part—this morning. He put it off for four years thinking that it impairs the mind—but there seems no truth in this, and I think it might freshen him up; and make him write something. But hes oddly despondent always.

Friday. Ackerley has just rung up to say that Morgan is going on very well; and there ought to be no danger. And as we’re hurrying off, on a fine frosty morning and all my packings still to do, I’d better stop. I had tea with Nessa yesterday and the bell rang and rang; Popkins, Clive, Benita [Jaeger]; all for Duncan though, who complicated matters by hanging OUT on a placard; though he was in. Nessa and I stole a few moments from the hubbub and agreed we wanted no dressed society; which entirely destroys our work next day. Shes still got her huge canvas there with its face to the wall. And Seend [Wiltshire] looms; and everythings much as it always is, come Christmas. We’re sending you a book wh Leonard says is very good and fully documented on Robespierre [by R. Renier]. It wont come till the new year though; or later; And to think of you on the banks of the yellow river enjoying life—So good bye dearest Julian; I’ll try to write more coherently next time. Love from us both.

Virginia

You may be amused to hear that I’ve just had a request from Virginia Isham, on behalf of a repertory Company to bring my troupe down to a barn at Chesham Bois and act Freshwater or will I let them—professional actors—do it themselves? I had to say Mr Craig is in China, and it cant be done without him.

Quentin Bill

[]

3089: To Virginia Isham

Dec 17th [1935]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Virginia,

I am greatly flattered that you should wish to do Freshwater; and so is the Caste (no, I didn’t act; only prompted, which was very necessary) But the caste is partly in China, and partly in Paris—that is Julian and Angelica; and even if they were here, I’m afraid its so purely a family joke, that though you and Mary [Fisher] might see the point, I dont think anyone else would. Also, its a mere Christmas scrap, and not actable in a serious sense. But if I ever do write a play, and I always want to, I shall certainly submit it to you. What fun it would be!

Are you ever in London, and would you suggest a time for coming here? Vanessa wants me to say how much she would like to see you. Angelica aged just 17, wants to go on the stage, and any advice you could give would be much appreciated.

I hope Mary’s humourous Virgin was a success.

Yrs V.W.

Northamptonshire Record Office

[]

3090: To V. Sackville-West

Christmas day [1935]

Monk’s House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

I am greatly touched by the calendar because I cant think how you remember these things, seeing you have now 105 presents to give—and then a calendar on top. Isnt it odd how much more one sees in a photograph than in real life? I never noticed the pillars before. I’m deep in Roger Fry and trying to master his aesthetics. What he says is if you cut off your practical senses, the aesthetic then work: so now I’m not warding off [Vita’s] Alsatians, I can see the door.

But this letter is in fact to ask if you and Harold wont come to lunch one day next week? Leonard wants to talk politics; and I, in my humbler sphere, would like to see you both. Could you? Both, or separate; or with the boys. Only let me know so that I may put a fowl in the pot. And also I must know whats the secret about Byron that Harold wont tell? Some one has sent me a book with a very good article of Harolds in it; and there he lets slip this amazing fact.

Its a gale here, and I’ve been walking in the marshes and put up two great cormorant. Now at Sissinghurst you only have small blue fancy birds [budgerigars]—because its a castle: thats my little dig. I daresay you might net a Sturgeon in the lake, but then you’d have to give it to the King. Oh how heavenly it is to hear nothing but the wind! In London, there’d be dear old Ethels scrannel shriek.

Telephone number is 385 Lewes.

Yr. V.

Berg

[]

3091: To V. Sackville-West

Dec 31st 1935

Monks House, [Rodmell, Sussex]

Thats where we are—thats why I spoke of getting a fowl: for in London they are common birds. We rang up Harold, and explained. But I dont suppose you’ll want to come over here in these floods; so we must wait till you’re up. I hope you’re not anxious about Gwen [St Aubyn’s illness]? Didn’t you say they would know more in January?

Soon the bells will be ringing and a new year beginning; which is, as you see, a kind of lyric. That reminds me—Brighton Corporation—to whom I applied about Cooking classes—are teaching [Vita’s] The Land this term. So why dont you produce another poem at once?

I want a long poem to read now.

V.
T.O

I’ve been in bed with a cursed headache for 2 days, so forgot to send this—not that its worth sending, except as an expression of faithful devotion on the part of poor dear Bosman. We go up on Sunday I think and hope to see Harold in London.

Jan. 2nd 1936
Happy New Year

Berg

[]

Leave the Letters Till We’re Dead
[The Letters Vol. VI: 1936-1941]

“Lets leave the letters till we’re both dead. Thats my plan. I dont keep or destroy but collect miscellaneous bundles of odds and ends, and let posterity, if there is one, burn or not. Lets forget all about death and all about Posterity.”

Virginia Woolf to Ethel Smyth
17 September 1938

Letters 3092-3117 (January-March 1936)

3092: To Stephen Spender

1st Jan. [1936]

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

Dear Stephen,

I enjoyed your story very much, and would have written before to thank you, only Christmas has been such a hurly burly. If I were to criticise the story, I should say—but I’m sick to death of criticism; so I wont say anything. You must come and dine again and then we will go into the whole matter—prose, poetry, fiction, biography, Henry James and so on.

I hope Bruce Richmond will get you to do the Coleridge, but I’m rather afraid he’ll think some elderly gentleman now drinking tea at the Athenaeum safer—Anyhow, it isn’t till July I think.

Best wishes from us both.

yrs sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

3093: To Ethel Smyth

Sunday [5 January 1936]

Monks House. [Rodmell, Sussex]

Very sorry you’ve been so bad. I hope you’re better. I’ve been in and out of bed all the past week with a d—d headache, so wont attempt to write.

Yr account of G. and V. is full of interest. Yes, I cant understand this leaving the family business. She’s coming to see me in London—so’s Harold, he says.

But we shall stay here as long as we can, and I must say I dont want to be within range of the telephone again.

But no more at the moment. The pain is gone off, but oh the stupidity! And do lie warm and snug and rest on your laurels.

Yr voice was perfect

V.

Berg

[]

3094: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Sunday [5 January 1936]

Monks House, Rodmell [Sussex]

Dearest Ottoline,

What a wretch I am—here I’ve been flaunting in your lovely colours [silk scarves] and brightening the perpetual mud of the landscapes, and never thanked you. But I’ve been in and out of bed with a headache—all through trying to keep a promise to a publisher [The Years]—and so stupid I couldn’t write. But now I’ve gone out, in your colours, and the rain has stopped, and there are floods reflecting an extraordinary tropical purple sky all across the marshes. I’ve never seen them so lovely—like lakes in dreams, with the trees standing round. But what I was going to praise was not the landscape, but you, for the gift with which you fish these silks out of drawers in shops where nobody else ever finds them. I wish I had that gift—it would be so much more satisfactory than dipping into inkpots, and think how radiant to dress as you do (this is a memory of seeing you come in that night at Aldous’s [Huxley]).

I’m sceptical—but don’t say this aloud—about Lotte Wolff. Its true she made some very wonderful shots, but still more wonderful misses. But I’m not a fair test, because I only lent my hand because Maria [Huxley] asked me to, and was much more curious to investigate her than to have her analyse me. And I thought she flattered one too much. All the same she’s got a great scent for a character—only isn’t it merely that and nothing to do with marks on one’s palm, and shouldn’t we all—all that have a nose for character—know as much if we chose and had to make a living by it? But I liked her.

We shall be back at the end of the week I think, and then I must go to the Chinese again—my one visit was as usual ruined by trying to dodge old friends (not you). And I’ve just been reading about the Chinese in some letters of Rogers [Fry]—he did all his off hand art criticism in letters, and I think its sometimes better than the printed—so fertile, so suggestive. But I must stop.

yrs VW.

Texas

[]

3095: To Ethel Smyth

Saturday [11 January 1936]

52 T[avistock] Sqre. [W.C.1]

Yes, Ethel dear, that would be very very kind of you, to lend me the Daudet book. If you could put it in a parcel and send it me, I’ll return it honestly. A French memoir’s my idea of bliss; I can read French when my own English has gone—as God knows it has gone—flat as last Sundays last muffin. D’you know what I’m reading—merely to pacify myself—all Borrow. And very good too. For instance he has just gone up to the top of Snowdon with his daughter in the year 1854 and she says, That plant is Auricula Genesta, Papa: (No, I cant convey the flavour) upon which he bursts into a few strains of Welsh song, and meanwhile they are surrounded by ordinary English tourists. And there was a little booth on top of Snowdon where refreshments were served—But this wont amuse you as much as it amuses me. But Lord, how I wish I could write that particular racy English eccentric East Anglian nonconformist style. It enchants me as Hardy does—another refuge in time of headache—his Trumpet Major [1880]—the worst book in the language—I finished without stopping t’other night—

As you see, we are in London, and I’m keeping myself to myself as they say. A merciful calm spread about the New Year as about the new moon—a space of silver light; and I ride my chariot like the witch with a broomstick in the picture, bidding Sybil Colefax avaunt. Did I tell you how she insulted me, and was found out? No—And nows not the time either. Theres a Madame D’Erlanger who gave a party. But no, I wont spoil the story. I’m amused about Vita—I don’t think she will ever come back, wholly: I think G. [Gwen St Aubyn] answers to something deeper in her than I ever did. Partly the senses. Is your book done and your cold finished? Oh I’m so spineless—but, as for the heart, thats gold.

Yr V.

Excuse these holes: meant to take notes on; cant find a proper page.

Berg

[]

3096: To Elizabeth Bowen

Sunday [12 January 1936?]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

Dear Elizabeth,

Thanks ever so much for sending the flowers which are in a great bunch in front of me. But I wish I could have seen you, lovely as pink and yellow tulips are. I had a little influenza, which landed me in the usual cursed headache, so that I am kept in bed. But I am much better today and able to dip into about 20 different books, a thimblefull at a time between draughts of sleep. This is my usual method of recovery.

I hope to be up and about in a day or two; and would like to see you. Only as these headaches hover about, I cant make fixed dates, and dont like to ask you and then put you off. If you are up, and Thursday were possible, would you ring up? Only I cant be sure, so please do as you like—I mean dont let me interfere with anything you have to do, as I’m uncertain.

And thank you for the great bunch.

Yr VW

Texas

[]

3097: To Ethel Smyth

Monday [13 January 1936]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

Ethel, could I ask of you a very great kindness (but in, God’s name, only if you have time and aren’t tired)—that is to scribble down roughly a translation of the enclosed maundering? As you see, the woman begs me to get it translated by a German scholar—Aldous Huxley who is dabbling in psychology and so on, asked me to let this according to him inspired palmist read my hand: which I did very reluctantly; still more reluctantly paid her 2 guineas (but she’s driven out of Germany—a Jewess) and now find that she wants to include what I suspect is sheer and mere drivel in a book of hands. But only do this if so inclined: I can get some other scholar easily.

Yrs in haste
V

Could I anyhow have it back?

Berg

[]

3098: To Ethel Smyth

Thursday 16th Jan. [1936]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

You are an angel, there’s no doubt about it—this refers to your noble kindness in translating that magic statement [by Charlotte Wolff]. It reads to me a little too like the kind of lecture on the Novels of Virginia Woolf that earnest young men sometimes deliver at Huddersfield. But she’d only read—without knowing it mine—Mrs Dalloway. I gave her two seances though; and I imagine, though she denied it, some information filtered through from the Huxleys—Anyhow its a brave effort to earn 2 guineas, and I suppose she must publish it, and earn more. And when we meet in Heaven—how does your religion envisage Heaven?—I shall pick a stem of asphodel, and put it in your button hole by way of thanks. Please inform me, by return, if asphodel and buttonholes will be recognised there. (I’m dipping into a man called McTaggart, a philosopher: and am surprised to find how interesting mystic Hegelianism is to me) But to come to facts. About your visit: yes please come; only this is my regime at present: I must work from 5 to 6 or thereabouts; the book [The Years] must be sent off in the middle of Feb: and this means you get home so late. And some days I try to go on inserting commas, marrying and separating sentences—oh the drudgery—think of my 130,000 words!—till 7. I wd. arrange tho’ if I knew. Not this week. Anyhow, a gifted sincere and I think rather charming young woman, Marchesa Iris Origo, daughter of Lady Sybil Lubbock (Villa Medici Florence) wants more than anything to meet you. She’s coming on Tuesday 28th. Could you come about 5? If so it would give her enormous pleasure. She’s read your books. And theres another, Rosamond Lehmann, (wrote Dusty Answer) also asks can I bring you together? She’s a beauty in to the bargain.

Yr V

We have accepted Dr Gordon’s second version of the L. of L: L. has read it: I’ve not.

Berg

[]

3099: To E. M. Forster

Sunday, 19th Jan. [1936]

52 Tavistock Sqre. [W.C.1]

My dear Morgan,

I was very glad to hear about you from Leonard, though I’m afraid its an awful bore waiting.

Charles Mauron has just written to ask about you. We missed them when they were over, which I was sorry for, as though I always think him a formidable man—partly because of his eyes not seeing—I admire him, and have a sort of acquaintanceship now through Roger’s [Fry] letters. What an odd pair—Roger and Goldie! Roger always so tactile and prehensile and Goldie up in the air with Goethe. I am still plodding on—reading—but less and less able to see any end.

We have been driving solemnly round Regents Park in the snow with Miss Crabbe. Who is she? Well, she’s our travelling clerk, and Leonard is teaching her to drive. Her great topic is the King; but when I said would you rather he died—for the sake of the excitement? she was shocked, and said she understood from a man in sandals last night in a Bloomsbury café that if he died there would be a bloodless revolution. This you see is the Bloomsbury we dont know. Miss Crabbe found 2 bugs in her tea cups the other day, and really had to break the tea cups and throw them away—Couldn’t drink out of them afterwards.

I am plodding away trying to finish my book; and I gather Aldous has finished one [Eyeless in Gaza], also Rosamond Lehmann [The Weather in the Streets]: but it is yours I shall really enjoy. This is not flattery—partly I’m so sick of fiction (my own too) partly, after reading Edith [Sitwell], St John Ervine and Mr [Geoffrey] Grigson just now in the Sunday Times, I long for someone civilised. What a dirty ink pot they live in! like Miss Crabbe’s tea cups, it ought to be smashed. I am re-binding all my Shakespeares—29 vols—in coloured paper, and think of then reading one of them. But there are so many interruptions, for example, Sibyl Colefax. Hoping to see you soon, and with both our love.

V.W.

Berg

[]

3100: To Ethel Smyth

Thursday [23 January 1936]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Thanks very much for sending, or asking your sister to send, the book: Daudets copy hasn’t come—I’ve just begun, and shall continue till sleep falls. which wont I think be very long. We stood in the Sqre to see the hearse: all London suddenly in an access of loyalty and democracy jumped the Sqre. railings, old greybearded ladies taking them at a flying leap, and though some stalwarts held the gates, the mob was on us, and Leonard who is a democrat was squashed between 5 fat grocers. This shows how enthusiastic Woburn Place was: and it all went by in 2 minutes, the crown glittering blue and white, and the long yellow leopards stretched over the coffin. In fact it was in its way, as they say, rather a magnificent, perfectly simple sight. Then there was a pause: then a vast royal omnibus in which sat an old woman clasping a parrots cage. How English!

But this is drivelling—we go to Canterbury via Rodmell this weekend. L. has to speak to a meeting of young men [The Workers Educational Association]. I shall take a wander in the sacred—d’you call it edifice [cathedral]? Then back here. Then on Tuesday the tea party for the woman who wants to meet you [Iris Origo]: to which Colefax has now invited herself. I make no plans of any kind save that I must stodge on, on, through this incredibly dreary mass of typed sheets: and then there’ll be the proofs! Never again, oh never again. And what about yours! [As Time Went On] And when shall I read them? And do you still wheeze?

V.

I’m so sorry for Ly Balfour.

Berg

[]

3101: To Julian Bell

30th Jan. 1936

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.

Dearest Julian,

I’m so furious—an empty envelope arrived yesterday addressed to me in your handwriting. It was a large envelope, completely ripped open, with a note from the post office to say it had been found so. Nessa says she thinks you were sending me your thing about Roger—if so, God grant that you have kept a copy. But there was no letter for me; and I’m very disappointed, as its such an age I heard from you. I wrote several scraps of diary for but I think lost them at Monks House. This I will send though, even if its a scrap, in order to tell you about the empty envelope. Please be very careful and get some strong paper and cant you seal your letters? For though the officials may have tampered, as they did before, this one was so thin, and so all to bits, that I cant help thinking it was the fault of the paper not of the post.

We have been, as everyone will tell you, deluged in tears and muffled in crape for the past ten days. The British public has had a fit of grief which surpasses all ever known. It was a curious survival of barbarism, emotionalism, heraldry, ecclesiasticism, sheer sentimentality, snobbery, and some feeling for the very commonplace man who was so like ourselves. But it’s over today thank God; the sun is shining; prize fighting has begun again; there’s a splendid murder—a mans body found in a field with five shots in it—and we are all cheering up. We had a completely aquatic Christmas at Rodmell; and I kept my head down so low upon my desk trying to finish my book, that I hardly saw or spoke; in fact laid it at last on a pillow and groaned. Leonard however went the usual round, and now here we are again, involved in the usual uproar of politics, society, Indians, niggers, poets, Ethel Smyth,—from which racket I except Ann, who stumped in looking like a rugger blue the other night, and Christopher Strachey, whom you ought I think to elect to the Society. At least he seemed to me a bubbling Strachey, with all their brains and the Costello guts; who might turn out much to the point, Ann too,—but L. says the Society is doomed, for he’s had the sacred books [minutes] on his table since June and only yesterday did the Archangel [Secretary]—is that his name—write and ask if they were lost.

About the Roger [Fry] book—I am getting on very slowly, in the crannies of other writing (my novel has to go to America in Feb) and have made notes and extracts of all the Helen [Anrep], Vanessa, Goldie letters. Margery said with emphasis that Charles [Mauron] would not let me or anyone read his letters. However he has now written to offer them to me in bulk—so there is another huge dossier waiting I imagine. Lord, how I wish you were here! So many things crop up I would like to discuss with you. But I see it will be a long job, if I do it properly; the letters are crammed with interesting things, one could make a whole and manysided picture—if one chose; if the Frys—etc etc.

The literary world, or rather back kitchen, is amused every Sunday by the violence and vulgarity of Mr Grigson and Edith Sitwell. You dont see the Sunday Times I imagine? Well there they befoul each other weekly—and St John Ervine joins in; its about nothing but themselves as usual. Grigson I gather has pretty well denounced all of us—you included—in some little pamphlet; to which Herbert Palmer takes exception. “Why call Edith an old Jane? Why call Osbert fat? and why lump me with them?” he asks, but then hes a Grigson himself. I think you’re lucky, starting life in China away from all this pother. When you come back, you will start fresh and I hope bring a strong new bristly broom to sweep the stable with. Dadie has asked us to Cambridge to hear his Frogs; Lydia is bringing out her Ibsen; Maynards book is upstairs on Leonards table; Duncans and Nessas pictures are about to go to Glasgow; and Morgan is producing a large volume of essays. So old Bloomsbury is active you’ll agree. Morgan by the way has to wait a month before his second operation. So far he’s very well. Are you writing any poetry? Are you writing any prose? Now I must go up to lunch; and I expect I have left out any news that might be interesting. We’re going to Cambridge for the day to see Ann [Stephen] and deliver the sacred books [Apostles’ Minutes] tomorrow; I’ll try to pick up a few twigs and send them to you in a diary.

In fact this letter is only to ask for news of your empty envelope, and to beg you to buy others and write as soon as you can.

I am told on the very best authority that the new King [Edward VIII] is a cheap second rate little bounder; whose only good points are that he keeps two mistresses and won’t marry and make a home; and that he likes dropping into tea with the wives of miners. But this is from Iris Origo who danced with him several times; those who are more remote say on the contrary he has every virtue though not every grace; and was daily so insulted by the King that when the King died the only thing Edward could do to show his feelings was to have all the clocks put back half an hour.

Love
Virginia

Quentin Bell

[]

3102: To V. Sackville-West

Friday [31 January 1936]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Dearest Creature,

I’m fearfully sorry. You know how I hate that you should have this anxiety. But I do hope it will go well. Give Gwen my love.

No of course you’re not ‘in disgrace’ with me, and never will be. Surely thats as plain as a pikestaff and needs no saying? Chuck me as often as you like, and dont give it a moments thought.—as I should you. And if I can be of any use—or this house—but that goes without saying too

Love from us both.
V.

Berg

[]

3103: To Ethel Smyth

Sunday [2 February 1936]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Could you very angelically send me the name of the man at St Leonards who does your typing? Is he good at corrections: can he be trusted to copy a badly typed script? I’m in such a rush that I must try and feed two of these monsters—Oh such a rush—and it becomes doubtful if I shall get it done [The Years].

Yes you were divine the other night, and it is a side I admit that I adore—Shre [Shakespeare] at his bawdiest, and also subtlest. [Iris] Origo I’m afraid has already gone back.

I hope Ly Sackville will now absolve Vita from any more shockers. Cant write, think, or spell. and still 50,000 words and more to copy.

What about your bantling [As Time Went On]—your dropsical, but not so dropsical as my, bantling [The Years]?

V.

Berg

[]

3104: To Hugh Walpole

8th Feb. [1936]

Monks House [Rodmell, Sussex]

My dear Hugh,

Your portrait with the dog is on my table, and it came at Christmas, and I’ve never thanked you. But as you know, letter writing is one of the gifts which was kept back when fairies stood at my cradle and gave me a dumb but affectionate heart.

How are you? What about your arm? What about your life altogether? Have you invented a new art—is fiction bundled into the waste paper basket—as it deserves? I wish you’d sit down and answer all these questions at some length. Silence seems to have fallen on the press too—you never seem to write articles now. Every now and again there’s a paragraph saying that you’re in New Zealand or in Hollywood; but where you are on this very fine cold morning I can’t imagine.

Theres a raging wind; some of Leonards crocuses are up,—the churchyard is full of snowdrops, and old Mrs Mockford [Rodmell woman] was buried yesterday. This is said to bring back the sense of England. But I ought to add that Lady Sackville is today being strewn on the waves at Brighton, by her own wish—Vita and Harold have hired a steam launch and are at this moment tossing up and down in the Channel. Its all as it should be, I feel: and I hope the poor old wretch who always reviled me has gathered her ashes together and is having a happy time at last. Of all lives that seems the least to be envied. I must stop these funeral reflections however, because I dont want to run on to the King and Mr Kipling, whom I suspect that you knew. How I wish you were in London and would come and gossip about it all!

We still gather together in the intervals of burying our Kings and have a gossip. I saw William last week—very rubicund, save that his mother is dying. Morgan Forster too has been having an operation. But I hope its all over well. And everyone is about to bring out a book—even I. I cant pretend you see to write a coherent and continuous account of life in London, because its neither one nor the other. I should like to be off abroad, but cant till I’ve finished my proofs: and the script is still on my table.

I was tempted to go to South America, but as a speech would have been exacted by the Buenos Aires PEN who offered to pay my fare, I couldn’t face it. Aldous Huxley is going—and there’s another novel (his), about to be published. English literature is at the moment badly in want of good books; and it would do the critics a lot of good to have something to attack—as it is they never cease scratching and pawing each other. But I dont want to squirt our dirty ink—I mean all the squabbles in the Sunday papers—across the Atlantic.

I’m reading David Copperfield for the 6th time with almost complete satisfaction. I’d forgotten how magnificent it is. Whats wrong, I can’t help asking myself? Why wasn’t he the greatest writer in the world? For alas—no, I won’t try to go into my crabbings and diminishings. So enthusiastic am I that I’ve got a new life of him: which makes me dislike him as a human being. Did you know—you who know everything—the story of the actress? He was an actor, I think; very hard; meretricious? Something had shrivelled? And then his velvet suit, and his stupendous genius? But you wont want to be discussing Dickens at the moment.

I too must fling my clothes into a bag and drive up through the villa residences to London.

You meanwhile are sitting with vast blue plains rolling round you: a virgin forest at your back; a marble city [Los Angeles] gleaming at your feet; and people so new, so brave, so beautiful and so utterly uncontaminated by civilization popping in out of booths and theatres with pistols in their hands and aeroplanes soaring over their heads—sometimes you find a bleeding corpse in the street but nobody thinks much of that—Well, I’ve no space to describe Hollywood to you, and so must leave you to your cocktail. When are you coming back?

yrs aff
V.W.

Texas

[]

3105: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Monday [10 February 1936]

52 Tavistock Sqre. [W.C.1]

Dearest Ottoline,

I am a wretch never to have answered, but I know you are one of the few charitable people who don’t expect answers. I got out of seeing Madame Hepp [unidentified], I’m glad to say. What do these prowling hyenas want of one? I could spend all my time answering their idiotic questions. As a matter of fact I’ve been so overwhelmed with all the drudgery of correcting type writing that I’ve had no time for anything. I try to keep my eyes on it for 2 hours in the evening: so that I couldn’t suggest a night for our owling. But if you ever were free about 5.30 it would be very nice to stop correcting the innumerable blunders of this long and dreary book. Perhaps though you keep at home these bitter nights. And endless societies come and meet here—political I mean. So you see how cross grained, ill tempered, and altogether rough coated I am. (This is because I’ve had the whole afternoon wasted by an egotistical author.)

yrs
V.W.

Texas

[]

3106: To Lady Margaret Duckworth

11th Feb. 1936

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

My dear Margaret,

I’ve been away, or I would have written before. I can’t tell you how much I like the photographs. Some of them I remember—others are quite new to me. Thank you very much for sending them. It was so strange how they brought back St Ives again.

I should like very much to come and see you, if you’d let me come some time in March. We are going away a good deal at the present moment but shall be in London then.

Your affate
Virginia Woolf

Vanessa came in just now, and I showed her the photographs. She was as delighted with them as I was, and wants me to ask you if you could possibly let her have the negatives so that she might have more prints taken from them. It would be very good of you. She keeps a family album. Her address is 8 Fitzroy Street, W. We think we have made out all the people.

Henry Duckworth

[]

3107: To Pernel Strachey

23rd Feb. 1936

52 Tavistock Sqre. [W.C.1]

Dear Pernel,

I have painfully typed a letter to you in your other capacity. How nice and grand to have 2 selves and 2 addresses!

But there are all sorts of questions I want to ask; and gossip we must have; so if I’m in Cambridge may the star come to tea and the worm be eaten by the thrush? You see, I have two names also: the worm however is the one I know better than the star.

Just back from a wet weekend, and so dazed at having to drop snowdrops—no they were rarer, out of the greenhouse,—at Sybil Colefax’s widowed mansion that I can’t even do justice to my wormhood. I doubt if we can face the Greek play [The Frogs],—though, not to be modest about it, the Provost of King’s [J. T. Sheppard] did wire and ask us to stay. Thats more than the Provost of Newnham ever does: perhaps now I’m a patron, I shall be asked to lay a brick. You see, the worm idea goes on curling. A worm laying a brick—

What do you make of Ann [Stephen]? We had meant to come and see her, but I got some passing fever, and so didn’t. Isn’t she rather a strapping and stunning Giant Venus?

Love
VW

Strachey Trust

[]

3108: To Elizabeth Bowen

Sunday [23? February 1936]

52 Tavistock Sqre. [W.C.1]

Dear Elizabeth,

I wish we could come and dine. But I’ve been in bed with a cursed headache, and have had to promise not to dine out for a week or two—till March when this dreary long book [The Years] will either be done or dropped into the wastepaper basket. Might we come then? We shall be here till Easter; and we want to come very much.

I’ll ring up and ask you for a cup of tea next time I’m walking round the [Regent’s Park] lake. Or would you drop in here one evening?

I’m sorry about Rose. I hoped that the apology in the Spectator had settled that mans hash—a monstrous affair I think.

Yours
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

3109: To Ethel Smyth

2nd March [1936]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

I’ve just met the uncastrated cat [Ethel] at a concert where they played a long bad quartet, and she said to Arnold Bennett “If this goes on I shall be taken short.” Do you remember this remark? It sounds genuine; and is now in print.*

Well if youre at your Index I’m at my preface—so we go on. This is only the greeting that one cat gives another over the garden wall. Next week I shall make a trip to Weymouth for a treat, if I can. I want to see the shore where I played my joke on the Dreadnought. Horace de Vere Cole, as you may have seen, died yesterday: he was our interpreter. I’m glad you enjoyed my sister: she did you. And now I must turn to my vomit.

And I saw Lady Oxford on private and exciting business. God be with you, as you would say; with me its a mere caterwaul.

V.

* See A.B. letter to his Nephew

Berg

[]

3109a: To Stefan Zweig

9th March 1936

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Herr Zweig

Many thanks for your letter. I shall be very glad to join the Committee that you tell me is preparing to send an address to Dr Freud on his eightieth birthday.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Stefan Zweig Collection, Reed Library, State University College, Fredonia, NY. Modern Fiction Studies. Vol. 30. Summer 1984.

[]

3110: To Ethel Smyth

Tuesday 10th March [1936]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Yes of course—this refers, at some distance, to your question if I want to see your proofs. But when could I? I’m so steeped in my own ink at the moment that I daren’t give an uncoloured opinion of anyone else: indeed have had to stop reading the Press MSS. But the worst pressure wont last beyond the next 2 weeks—pray God. I’ve sent off a large batch to the printer today. So tell me what you want to do. Is Elizabeth going to India? Oh but I want to see her before she goes. Please tell her so: and lets try to manage it.

I dont really get quit of my script till dinner: work from 10 to one: then 5 to 7. if work it can be said to be: anything more dreary cant be conceived. And the book itself disappears; I suspect its bad; but what do I care, once I can write End: and never look at it again. Forgive this egotism. Still more, forgive this dulness. I’ve been seeing no one. My friends die or fall ill. Sybil Colefax is now a widow—poor woman—still wants to come and dine—I read only solid history or Dickens to ease my mind of commas. Love seems a thing I’ve never felt or hope or faith either. Why, I ask does one do this sort of task? and who sets it? Whats the point? A 3 month sitting in a cellar. When the sun sinks I go owling round to Nessa. There we tell old tales by the light of a candle. Harold asks me to meet Lindbergh—no I cant. [Lady] Oxford asks me to meet [Mrs Wallis] Simpson—the new Royal harlot—cant again. I meet Max Beerbohm in the dusk—cant face him … so how shall I ever pluck up my feathers and ruffle them in the old tiger cats [Ethel’s] rosy and lovely phiz [face]? But I should like to read you. I often have a sip of you when I’m feeling faint. Oh and politics go on all day, every day. L. is entirely submerged. I might be the charwoman of a Prime Minister. But we will come out of the tunnel one of these days, in the sun, on the grass—can I believe it?

Yes inky and bitter and old

V.

Ink you know dries bitter like gall.

Berg

[]

3111: To Julian Bell

11th March 1936

Typewritten

52 T[avistock] S[quare, W.C.1]

Dearest Julian,

At last, two days ago, I got your letter written in the train from Pekin. From what you say, I gather that you have not yet sent me your paper on Roger, so that the empty envelope that I told you of must have contained something else. I only write now by way of passing the time, for I’m so pressed with this more than accursed book—its now being sent to the printers;—I have to keep them going; have to re-type, correct, re-write all at the last moment—that my wits are wandering and my eyes are dim. I suspect it is a complete flop; that I’ve tried to do all the things nature never meant me to do; but unless one flies in her face with a large duster there’s nothing for it but to moulder in ones own dung. (Excuse the image.)

We’ve sold about seventy copies of your book; so far that’s not bad; its only had the one Lit. sup. review yet; the weeklies of course take their time with poetry. We’ll send you them as they come out. I calculate it takes from three to four weeks before a book gets into the blood stream. Its always very trying—waiting, in dead silence. But you are I expect screened from those gnat bites in your August Chinese solitude.

Of domestic news there isnt much. Morgan [Forster] had his second operation last week [late February], and they said yesterday that he’s going on very well. Desmond [MacCarthy] has been ill; is ordered to give up parties and cigarettes, which he finds impossible. I saw David and Rachel a few days ago; and they say he cant be kept from dining out—the great ladies of London ring him up every moment. David wants to write about Lytton; David is now writing about Lord Melbourne. And Lyn Newman came to tea. I doubt if she finds marriage with Max what one might call rapturous; they have a farm at Comberton [near Cambridge] but its too big; she has to work in the house; the baby however is nice; and the country would be nice, only they’re under the shadow of an aerodrome.

As you can imagine, we are all under the shadow of Hitler at the moment—even Nessa and Duncan start a conversation by saying, What is your opinion, Leonard, of whats-his-name? They ask intelligent questions about colonies. As for Leonard he works all day, drafting measures for the Labour party; answering that gaby Kingsley Martin, who cant make up his own mind without tapping every other mind within a radius of twenty miles. He always interrupts our one resource against politics which is music. That’s why I curse him.

But to return to Cambridge—Lyn [Newman] says Margaret Braithwaite is coming back to live there; and she hopes to find her congenial female society; otherwise there’s none. Is she congenial? I’ve never met her. Sheppard asked us to the Frogs, but it was such a damp dull week, and I’m so under the scourge of proofs that we couldn’t face it. Then we met Maynard [Keynes] in the street, who says, Lydia is divinely happy, acting Ibsen. Only nobody will pay more than half a crown for a seat, and it takes London six weeks to know if a play’s being acted; by which time its off. We went to Hedda Gabler last night with Nessa, Duncan and Mrs Grant—and oh what a show of peacock feathers and bright butterflies your [Chinese] silks made in the studio! I said I could see Angelica grown old with white hair sitting in the chimney corner sewing at them. Nessa was in the seventh heaven of delight.

We’re all very well; and I think Nessa seems more than usually cheerful. She’s taken her own line in London life; refuses to be a celebrated painter; buys no clothes; sees whom she likes as she likes; and altogether leads an indomitable, sensible and very sublime existence. I won’t go into the Duncan Queen Mary affair as I expect you have it first hand already. And L. will put you wise one of these days when he gets a chink of time about politics. As for Clive [Bell], he’s been to Paris; and then dines out, so that we seldom meet. And when we meet, theres a kind of straining to keep the two dogs from each others throats. Not that I mind a good row; but for all you say about the Apostles, your father is now such a flibbertigibbet one can’t expect him to hit it off with L. who takes it all like doom and destruction. I think Clive got on Roger’s nerves towards the end, and I expect he was hard on him. But it also seems to me pretty clear that Clive did pilfer a good deal without acknowledgement from Roger; and as Roger was half persecution mad—only he was far too sweet and sane to let the disease rip—he minded being pilfered far more than was reasonable. Then Helen was inclined to rub the spot.

As for your Apostles, much though I respect them singly, I begin to think that these Societies do more harm than good, merely by rousing jealousies and vanities. What d’you think? it seems to me the wrong way to live, drawing chalk marks round ones feet, and saying to the Clives etc you can’t come in. However that may be a private whim of my own; nothing would make me take a feather of any dye to stick in my hat.

I wish I knew what your work is really like. Interesting at all? Do you make friends with the Chinks—the students I mean? It all seems like a seraphic scene on a blue china plate to me. Here we never stop facing facts. Every day almost I get rung up to be asked to sign this, subscribe to that…. Society bubbles from society [sic]; and what good they do I don’t know; but I sign and I protest and so on. Poor old Rose Macaulay has been fined £200 for making a mild and I think justifiable remark about Lord de Clifford and his motor car; Lord Hewart is completely down on her; the Spectator in which her article appeared paid £400 besides suppressing an issue and making an apology. So now I’ve signed another paper to protest against the law of Libel. Now I must go and lunch. I hope next time to write a more consecutive letter—this is all jerks and jumps. But much love dearest Julian from us both.

Virginia

[handwritten:] L. has just heard that his brother in law, Southorn, has been made Governor of Gambia. They come home in June.

Quentin Bell

[]

3112: To Ethel Smyth

Thursday [12 March 1936]

Postcard

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

Proofs arrived. Dedication exactly right and to my taste and fills me with pride—When do you want E. [Elizabeth Williamson] to have them? No chance to read yet. or to write.

V.

Berg

[]

3113: To David Cecil

Monday [23 March 1936]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

Dear David,

I wish we could come this weekend—nothing would be nicer—but I’m fated to deliver up a manuscript on the 10th—needless to say it’s not ready; and I must stick at it till its done, and ware not the devils but the angels, behind me. But may we come later?

This is why I never thanked you too for your Jane Austen. I’ve been reading it with great pleasure. I think its very good. For one thing, you pack so much into such a shapely nutshell: and then, besides making clear what one knows already, you set one asking questions (my test of criticism) about what one doesn’t know at all. I now want to begin on Jane Austen again in order to verify and explore. Persuasion I thought last time I read it was my favourite, and I remember wondering what would have happened had she lived say another 10 or 20 years and developed that vein. But I mustn’t run on: you see how much your nutshell holds. And how difficult it must have been to give a new fold to that so often neatly folded—what figure do I want? I’m so sleepy I can’t think; but I’m dreaming of a lovely little toy that used to lie in a workbox: a nut, full of green silk.

How is Desmond [MacCarthy]?

And may we come another time? I had meant to implore you to write on Lytton: for one thing for his sake: for another in order to exercise your pen on the moderns: but have no more room: and thirdly for the sake of the Hogarth Press.

Yrs V.W.

David Cecil

[]

3114: To Elizabeth Robins

24th March [1936]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

Dear Miss Robins,

I don’t know if you remember me, but we met some years ago, and I hope very much that we may meet again. I am writing however because I have had a letter from Maynard Keynes, in which he says “Lydia is extremely anxious for Elizabeth Robins to see the Master Builder … do you think it would be possible to get her to come?” So I said I would write and ask you. Lydia is Madame Lopokova and they are acting 4 of the Ibsen plays at the Criterion. They would give you tickets for any performance you liked to go to. And would you send a line, if you would go, to Mrs J. M. Keynes, 46 Gordon Square, W.C.1. (excuse these blots) and of course don’t acknowledge this letter.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Sussex

[]

3115: To Ethel Smyth

Friday March 27th [1936]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

I ought to have written to you: but then happily ‘ought’ is not all it might be with you. In fact I’ve been in bed 2 days with headache, just at the worst moment. But I meant to say, I told Eth [Williamson] to tell you that I gave her your proofs as I wont touch them till my mind is clear of this incubus. I hope she explained. As she was coming, I thought it foolish even to begin—save for 2 glimpses—one, dedication; one by chance the Lyons party. Has she read it? What does she think? And how did the dust cover settle itself? I believe a plain sheet would be best—but its an indifferent matter anyhow.

London’s becoming rapidly so intolerable I think I shall fly for peace. Tell me what I ought to do about the conglomeration of old family friends who have been making my life a mere spasm this last week? When Mrs Grosvenor says shes old and was my father’s friend—when Miss Elizabeth Robins says she was my mother’s friend—when Gerald Duckworth says he’s very melancholy and was my half brother—must I oh must I run hither and thither and see them all? And then—all within this week—in comes an antiquated Indian cousin, whose son’s I gather rapidly going to the devil. And why do I attract them? I cant unriddle this riddle: but it unravels my days; and makes me plan flight: the truth is I cant resist the telephone, and so spoil my days. Meanwhile, here I am at the last lap [of The Years], and mercifully entirely anaesthetised, and dont know or care if its the worst book or the best. I’m sorry about Edith S’s brother: we live in such a world of horror its odd how a murder seems all in the usual run.

V.

Mrs Grosvenor says she meets you at the doctor, and knew you years ago.

Berg

[]

3116: To Elizabeth Robins

Sunday, 29th March [1936]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

Dear Miss Robins,

(I wish I could cease to be “Virginia Woolf” and become Virginia)

I haven’t been able to see the Keynes’s; so I am only writing for Leonard and myself to say that we shall be delighted, I needn’t say, to come to tea on Tuesday 14th April at 4.30. But you must put us off if as so often happens our visit suddenly becomes a penance. Our address, after the 3rd April, is Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes: and our telephone number there is Lewes 385. We went to the Master Builder last night. No—I didn’t think it right, but I have no reason, except my own vague fancy, for saying so.

It was very good of you to come here the other day. I re-read your essay on Ibsen with great pleasure as soon as you were gone. And I hope you’ll tell me some time, about my mother and father, among other things.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Sussex

[]

3117: To Mrs G. E. Easdale

Monday March 30th [1936]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

Dear Mrs Easdale,

The daffodils came this morning—quite fresh and very lovely. I think I know the valley they came from—I remember picking daffodils there one spring long ago when we had a house at Lyme. Thank you so much for sending them.

I agree about the Cow. Why kill it? Still, what one could do with a swimming cow I dont know. It might have taken to other practises if you had it. I’m trying to finish my proofs, and hope you will like the book, if it should ever come out, which I begin to doubt. But I’m afraid its too long and too ambitious and a failure.

I’m sorry you should say the same of your book, but I dont agree. If you had used proper names, I daresay the public interest would have been excited. They like personalities, not ideas.

Excuse this rambling letter—my eyes are so tired, after reading proofs, and my brain too.

Yours very sincerely
Virginia Woolf

University of London

[]

Letters 3118-3151 (April-July 1936)

3118: To Ethel Smyth

14th April [1936]

Monks House [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest Ethel—oh no, you dont like formal addresses, I remember. And I only intended sympathy. I’m so sorry yes genuinely—about Pan. Yes, I feel your feeling: but dont I pray you go on to infer that you can lightly extinguish, as you hint, that beaming Shakespearian character, whom I love. And indeed need. I refer to E.S.

Oh I’m so becalmed, befogged, utterly vacant and vapid. Lying on 2 chairs: leaving the 2 chairs for bed: and so on. I finished my typescript 5 days late: now hear from America they cant possibly produce before October. Thank God! So I’ve stuffed the proofs—all of which have not yet been sent me—(Easter in Scotland—) away in a cupboard; and shant look at them for 4 weeks. Then I daresay I shall tear the whole thing up. I’ve not even once read it through!

But now I get 4 weeks absolute holiday, and beg of you not to mention that book, or any book except your own, till June 20th.

Thank Heaven, I never looked at your book. Do you know I cant even read the newspapers—cant even form letters. But all this passes off with miraculous speed, so long as I neednt read or write. So, my dear termagant—but tender termagant—please write me long letters wh. I love, and dip into—5 minutes at a time. You cant think what a rush London was—how some of my friends fished for my poor brain with pointed hooks, and tore it, and tortured it—not you. The first day we got here, Sibyl Colefax arrived: the widow: plucky but so arid, so hard, so dust strewn—all the graves have added nothing to her but dry dust. And now theres Elizabeth Robins the actress walking round the garden with L. and being told, no Virginia cant see anyone. A familiar situation: Very cold—very harsh. Very lovely in a flying way this country from my window—No dear Ethel please keep your light burning and be alive and souse yourself in salt and vinegar and battle with all the horrors for the sake of V. who thought by the way you regretted your dedication because you despised her. and is so glad its the other way

V.

Berg

[]

3119: To Ethel Smyth

April 20th [1936]

Monks House [Rodmell, Sussex]

So glad you have better news of Pan—I hope it continues.

No, dont send me the book till it comes out. I’ve had to take to my bed again, rather collapsed into a bad bout of headache—cant shake it off—so have to yield to it, and we shall stay on here indefinitely.

Yes—that was what I meant—we have had to put off The Years anyhow till the autumn; the Americans asked us to. Also, I’ve never once read it through, and shall probably have to cut and revise considerably when I can tackle the proofs. But the printers have only just sent the last lot, so anyhow this summer was out of the question. I’ve completely forgotten what its about at the moment: do nothing but look at a starling in the rain.

Letters much appreciated. But keep your book please till I have something better than a damp piece of blotting paper in my forehead. Then I shall rejoice in it.

V.

Monday [20 April]
So glad of dedication Yes, my belief was genuine—that you had repented

Berg

[]

3120: To Violet Dickinson

21st April [1936]

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

My Violet,

I’m ashamed not to have answered your letter, which was very welcome, before, but it came just as I took to my bed with a violent headache, and I’m only now putting my head out of the blankets and beginning to look round. This was the result of a racket—what with politics, letters, Hogarth Press—life in London is very agitated—before Easter: however, though it still pours and the wind is like a scythe, I’m now so happy in the country I never want to leave it.

Its odd you should mention Sybil Colefax. She came here the other day, and I couldn’t see that she was any different as a widow; but this no doubt is to her credit. Only I dont feel at my ease with people who take the deaths of husbands so heroically. They say its the good result of training in society—stoicism.

Why, in Heavens name, did you burn your memoir of the Stephen family? I find that now we’re grey and old, Nessa and I never meet but we crouch over the fire and tell old stories. Your view would have been fascinating—George, Gerald [Duckworths], Father—Hyde Park Gate. Cant you re-write it and send it me? If you will, you shall have a photograph. (heres one just come, from an American paper—you see, I’m turning black; save for a white patch on top, and look rather like a saucepan lid. But the time for photographs is over)

Holtby I only saw 2 or 3 times—nice enthusiastic woman, but feather pated I thought. I couldn’t help laughing to think what a story she could have told had she known the true Virginia.

Gerald I saw, for the first time these 20 years, the other day. I think he did well in his wife, but her task in keeping that lethargic alligator in being must be heroic. He had been ill. I rather think as you say he has the same affection for the bottle that George had for roast duck and spinach. But this is very uncharitable—also dull and disjointed; but then Leonard has turned on the wireless to listen to the Budget speech, and tells me there’s another 3d on the income tax. I refuse to go into politics—for one thing I cant grasp them; only am always being warned that the end of civilisation is just about to come. I hope Welwyn [Violet’s house] will escape—our garden here wont.

So write your memoirs as a little defence against the flood, and forgive this stammering but affectionate scrawl.

Love from us both—
V.

Berg

[]

3121: To Ethel Smyth

Thursday [23 April 1936]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

About Pan:—

Leonards brother who has a passion for dogs thinks very highly of a doctor who, though a human doctor, X rays dogs and has made great discoveries: diagnosing diseases. If you think it worth trying, write to Harold Woolf Laleham on Thames, Middlesex who would be delighted to give you all information: The point is, no vet uses X rays: but this man treats dogs as if they were humans and puts the vet. on the right lines.

V.

Berg

[]

3122: To T. S. Eliot

Thursday [23? April 1936]

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

My dear Tom,

What a base receiver of treasure I am!—never to have thanked you for your book. But it proves the depth of my trust in your ancient goodness, that I don’t think it matters if I thank you or not. I’ve been cursed with headaches, and so have had to sleep them off. That’s one reason why I didn’t write—the other, the chronic, is that I can’t summon faith enough in my own judgment to criticise your poems to you; either to praise, blame, or discriminate. I’ve been lying in an arm chair in front of the fire with your book open, and such a radiance rises from the words that I can’t get near them. So the first bee of summer feels for the first flower. I expect its what the Lit. Sup. critic would call enchantment, incantation—there must be a critic’s word: but I’m too sleepy to find it—and so must merely testify to the fact: I’m held off from understanding by magic. Now you will have had enough. One of these days I hope to begin to understand again and then I shall cut the book into ribbons with a thousand pocket knives—so I hope. Because I adore this exercise when I’m awake; and want, even now, to go into a thousand questions with you, about your plays in particular. But again, enough.

We are staying down here, and perhaps attempting a cruise in Scotland: but I’m still awfully cursed with headache as these lines show, and when my headaches go, as they are going, sleep rushes in, and I am now going to shut my eyes with affectionate thoughts of Mr Eliot and the Yorkshire terrier and the wild duck in Russell Square,—wish he would come to tea—How pleasant to see Mr Eliot—how very nice that would be (This line was found in the margin of my copy)

Yr affec
V.W.

Mrs T. S. Eliot

[]

3123: To H. H. Beecham

23rd April 1936

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

Dear Mr Beecham,

Your letter has been sent on to me here. It is very good of the English Club to ask me to read a paper to them. I am afraid that I must refuse, because I so much dislike lecturing, but I should be glad if you would thank your Committee on my behalf for their kindness in asking me.

Yours sincerely,
Virginia Woolf

Alan Gill

[]

3124: To Ethel Smyth

Sunday [26 April 1936]

Postcard

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex.

No, no no—dont I beg of you mention my book or my writing to me till I give you leave. I want only to forget entirely about it. And then wake and tear it up I daresay. Until then. Sleep and silence. But I’m better. Fine here today—I’ve been out in the garden. Hope for better news of Pan. And there’s your book lying unread but it will be soon read at this rate. I’m forcing myself to hold back.

V.

Berg

[]

3125: To Katherine Arnold-Forster

May 1st [1936]

Typewritten

Monks House, Rodmell [Sussex]

Dear Ka,

Your very well typed letter was sent on here, where we’ve been spending three or four weeks, I, mostly in bed, trying to cure the usual old head ache. Now I’m up again, and we talk of going for a tour next week in the West—but its all rather vague. Should we come your way may we look in and claim the platter of cream that good bears always keep in the larder. We thought of the Scottish isles; but in this weather, the West is more tempting. I can’t resist the West.

About Rupert’s letters. I’m all in favour of printing them and giving some sort of correction to that impossible sentimental fashion plate of Eddies. If Gwen, Dudley, and you (—what about Noel though?—) all contributed, that should be wiped out. I hadn’t heard of the Bryant scheme; but Morgan [Forster] talked to Leonard about your suggestion that he should write something. From what he said, I dont think there’s much chance that he would do it, even if he were free. I suspect he feels too much outside—temperamentally as well as in fact. But of course I would talk to him, if you liked. But do you think that any writing, save a few dates and facts, that could be supplied by you or Gwen or Dudley, is needed? I rather doubt it. What would be interesting and a real reviver, would be an essay, preferably by one of the younger generation, on his work. He got so much into his letters, judging from the few I have, that they alone would blast Eddy [Marsh] effectively. Is there much to be told that isn’t in them or hasn’t already been said? However we must meet and talk about it. I wish very much that it could be done, for I can’t help feeling that he has been smothered and castrated, and there he is, quite different, and memorable, could we disinter him. Is there any chance you would consider the Hogarth Press—theres nothing we should like better. But this is random and jerky; and I dont type as well as your son [Mark, aged 16].

We go to London tomorrow; then possibly on our drive. I’ve just been sent a collection of old snapshots of St Ives and my mother sitting on the lawn just as she used to sit surrounded by dogs and children and innumerable visitors and the old postman and the fishermen and the Sandreys and the Curnows [Cornish families]—so I feel much in spirit with the old lady who remembered her.

Leonards love; he is glorying in his garden, and thanks from both of us to Will for recommending a rhododendron now flowering on our table.

V

King’s

[]

3126: To Julian Bell

2nd May 1936

Typewritten

Monks House [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest Julian,

I’m afraid I’ve been very bad as usual, or worse than usual, about writing. Only for the past four weeks I’ve been so stupified with headache that I’ve practically not touched a pen. I’ve slept like a hog; and now I’m rather clearer in the head. What a bore it is—I hope you haven’t inherited through your great grandfather, through your grandfather, [Leslie] Stephen I mean, this cursed irritable head piece.

So of gossip I have very little. We’ve been down here vegetating all April; and for the most part wrapped in quilts and furs. The Charlestonians have been in and out; Clive at his most affable, by the way; not a single quarrel between him and L. Dear old Quentin so manly and imperative, so political minded now, one might think him sixty. The Potteries have certainly changed him, I think for the better. Charming he always was; now he’s a responsible very forcible, though with a layer of dreaminess, citizen. Dont hand that on to your pupils as a model of English prose. I feel instinctively that China is a little like a blue pot; love a little flowery; learning a little scented. Old Bloomsy. may have more blood in it than you think.

I get the most astonishing elaborate letters from poet [T.S.] Eliot; who is now the titular head of English-American letters since the death yesterday of Houseman. Did you know him? Do you like his Muse? I dont altogether; why, I cant say. Always too laden with a peculiar scent for my taste. May, death, lads, Shropshire. But they say he was a great scholar, and I can remember when his Manilius [1903] came out Thoby [Virginia’s brother] going about shouting out a sentence of abuse from it. But old Tom has issued all his poems in one vol, which he gives me. But theyre all known to you. Where he fails is when he takes on him to be a burly Englishman, with our gift for character drawing. Not a touch of Dickens or Shakespeare in him. Last night I read Midsummer Nights Dream. Well there you have it—all England, all May in a song or two.

Nessa by the way at last disgorged your Roger; and at last I sent it to be typed before I read it being so bemused with headache. And now Mrs [Alice] Jones says she has a rash or something so cant type it. I am waiting to read it still therefore. But as I cant tackle that job yet, I dare say its as well to put it by. Save for Charles’s [Mauron] letters, I’ve read and extracted the whole lot, and as soon as I’m quit of my book (proofs not looked at—I expect a hopeless failure but never mind) I shall solicit the muse of biography to help. How to do it, having read a great many worthless or merely meaningless lives lately, I dont know.

Leonard was in London at the Labour Party last week, but he tells you his politics so I wont. Its not at all pleasant,—our state; I have never dreamt so often of war. And whats to be done? Its rather like sitting in a sick room, quite helpless. Mr Hancock is not going to stand again, and they want to sell their cursed ugly house. Why did they build it then? And Loder has become a peer, so there will be another election. No, L. says it will be uncontested. I’m reading Murry on Shakespeare; much though I hate him, I think he has a kind of warm suppleness which makes him take certain impressions very subtly. Also I’m reading a life of Labby; also one of De Quincey, but all so drowsily and lazily I dont think I’m a judge of them.

Nessa and Angelica came over to tea the other day—A. very ravishing in a new striped cloak made in Lewes. Her passion for clothes is one of the oddest of our phenomena. Its like a craze for drink; compare Ann [Stephen] in that respect. I dont know how far she will take her acting, but at present she is set on it, but then with all her gifts any one of them may catch the wind and sail her away. Also, marriage; love;—by the way how is that going in China? You see how discreet I am.

Lydia and Maynard [Keynes] propose to spend most of the summer here, cultivating the farm; Lydia burst in on L. the other day asking his opinion about what new play to act. He said try Tchekov; but she wont. So I daresay it’ll be Lady Macbeth. Your friend M. Raine—Madge—is that her name?—has sent us a book. In strict confidence, its not very very good; yet interesting; prose poems; not good enough I’m afraid and difficult to sell of course. But I’ve only glanced through. John has been in and out of the Press, but I gather he’s collecting works for John Lane’s now—New Writing or some such title. I think we shall be here off and on this summer, and Quentin says he means to retire to Charleston, and there’ll be the Opera with all its flock of bright birds. But I wish you were here. Have you made your boat? I shall sail ours if I can get Q. to bring it over. Now I am going to beat L. at bowls, on a fine blowing evening with the children playing with their dolls in the meadow, all the trees in blossom, and some heat in the sun for a wonder. I hope to get a letter from you.

We are thinking of trying your Falmouth [Cornwall] for a fortnight driving down and pottering round. Again I wish you were with us. Love from us both, and I shall write oftener now

V.

Quentin Bell

[]

3127: To Elizabeth Bowen

May 2nd [1936]

Monk’s House, Rodmell [Sussex]

Dear Elizabeth,

I wish we could come and dine either of those nights, but I’m afraid we shall be away. I’ve been spending the last 3 or 4 weeks down here mostly in bed, trying to cure a succession of headaches. Now we’re going for a fortnights driving in the West, and then I shall be in robust health and shall hope to see you.

I shall be in London this next week, but you say you’re going to Ireland.

I told Julia Tomlin by the way that you might possibly let her a room—She’s an independent, secretive character, if you dont know her.

How do you manage to cope with London? I feel less and less capable—but let me know, when you’re back, if you’ll come and see me.

If we’re down here, perhaps you’d come?

Yrs
(very stupid)
VW

Texas

[]

3128: To Victoria Ocampo

May 2nd [1936]

Typewritten

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, England

Dear Victoria,

It was very nice to hear from you, and from such a romantic place, compared with our little suburban country, daily breaking out into a new villa.

I am sorry I’m not coming [to Argentina] this summer; but I’ve been ill all this month, too many people in London, too many political meetings taking place in our house and I havent the strength of mind to resist dining out. Hence nothing but headaches and lying in bed—that’s a familiar way I have of spending my time. But I’m all right again now. I’ve had though (since you ask about it) to put off my book till the autumn; and even then I’m afraid its too ambitious, too dull, too long, too slovenly, for its not my line a very long book—to be worth anyone, reading. However, its taught me much about my own art and limits. Enough, though, of egotism. I hope you are leading a far more adventurous and exciting life. I hope you are making new friends and finding new things to make hum and buzz in South America. Here we live under the shadow of disaster. I’ve never known such a time of foreboding. Even the artists mope and pine and cant get on with their pictures.

I’m so glad you’ve done The Room; I want to write many more books on all kinds of subjects. And are you also writing? Lecturing?

Forgive this rapid and random scribble.

Virginia Woolf

Estate of Victoria Ocampo

[]

3129: To Grace Higgens

[4 May 1936]

Typewritten postcard

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Many thanks for the delicious cake which we both enjoy every day at tea. Could you be so good some time as to write out the recipe, as I cant get any cakes made except yours that I like to eat? We go to London tomorrow.

V. Woolf

Mrs Walter Higgens

[]

3130: To Sibyl Colefax

6th May [1936]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

Dearest Sibyl,

I’m so sorry we are off tomorrow for a fortnight driving in the West (cant face Scotland) so I shant be back till after the 21st. But I would like to come later if I may. Still better I should like to sit with you in the garden [at Rodmell] and watch the cows and then cook our own dinner and talk and talk. London,—Bond Street, Wigmore Street, Holborn—seems to me detestable. Crowded, arid, sordid, unhuman—why do we all go on tapping these pavements?

Love. V.

Michael Colefax

[]

3131: To Ethel Smyth

[8 May 1936]

Telegram

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

Reviews brilliant Am enthralled by book Off to Cornwall

Virginia

Berg

[]

3132: To Vanessa Bell

Monday May 11th [1936]

Becky Falls, Dartmoor [Devon]

Here we are, with the rain pouring, in the lodging where Leonard stayed with Lytton and Moore in the summer of 1912. The old lady says she remembers Lytton very well, as he used to sit in the garden painting, and once stayed here for some weeks with his son. We rather think this may refer to Duncan—if so, will he clear up the matter. There’s no need for secrecy now. But the old lady seems rather doddering.

Its been roasting hot and fine: this is, after we left Weymouth, and came to Lyme Regis [Dorset]. Till then it was sepulchral, like crawling under a grey umbrella; very cold and colourless. This was disappointing, as I rather think Weymouth is the most beautiful seaside town in Europe, combining the grace of Naples with the sobriety of George the Third. Why are all the West country towns precisely as they were in Jane Austens day? Yesterday we had tea in an inn with an Adams fireplace and a ceiling the very image of the one at 44 Bedford Square. We were extravagant and stayed at the best hotel in Lyme, in which the very pots were seasoned with camphor, and Ethel and Nan could scarcely have added another touch. I find the company most refreshing: L. gets into touch with all the robust spinsters by means of their dogs. They begin to snore; this leads to questions about spaniels snoring and then we’re off. Anyhow, I dont see how civilisation can be splitting when theres not an arm chair without its old couple and all so urbane and kind. You see, without my telling you, how dull I am. Dull but content—save that there’s no dolphin [Vanessa] to talk to, and that selfish marine monster wont write. My only letter is from Ethel S [Smyth]: which begins with a quotation from the Mass and goes on to say that Pan [dog] was put to sleep under the laburnum tree after breakfast. I had just sent her a wire to congratulate her on the terrific enthusiasm about her book in all the papers. I think you ought to read it. Considering she writes like an old turkey cock scattering the gravel with its hind legs, the picture of Ponsonbys and Vernon Lees and H.Bs is rather amazing. Showers of gravel fly, but there they are. I shall try to imitate her technique when I write my memoirs. Theres a waterfall here; and it roars louder and louder. Also Mr [John] Galsworthy lived in the next village. I went into his church, but no one remembered him; except the postman. Tomorrow we go to Falmouth. Write good Brute

B

Any news would be welcome. Is D. [Duncan Grant] back? What about the Q. Mary—Christabel? letter to the Times? Eddy Sackville? life in general? We called in at Ringwood, and I showed L. the house, a dismal place, where Thoby galloped round the courtyard—the summer The Rasponis stayed with us.

Berg

[]

3133: To Ethel Smyth

May 11th and 13th [1936]

Becky Falls, Manaton, Dartmoor [Devon] also Budock Vean, Falmouth [Cornwall]

Well Ethel, I finished your book last night at Lyme Regis, and must write under difficulties, in a lodging house sitting room, to say I think its a triumph, and if I go halfway down the road to immortality it will be because my name is on your title page [dedication]. How you do it, God knows—I mean I cant see how its done—how face after face emerges, when there is apparently so little preparation, no humming and hawing, all so inconsecutive and unpremeditated,—all roads winding this way and that—streams running, winds intersecting,—how then do all these people stand and live in their own element with the life of their own time rushing past, as might be fish caught in a net of water: living, breathing and about to shoot on—the whole torrent pouring past, nothing frozen and final as happens with the usual skilled hack? Lady P. [Ponsonby] comes out sharper and clearer than I thought, and shaded too, a masterpiece, I think; but then so does the glimpse of Vernon [Lee]—how you convey her in a phrase—and H.B. [Brewster]—and you yourself preside—if it weren’t truer to say that you encircle, like some rush of air and sun—(for you’re very genial, as well as searching). But I’m not at all (witness this sentence) articulate, after driving all day and putting up at this lodging in the rain above a torrent which comes down from the moors. I think its far the best thing you’ve done since the first immortal volumes (which by the way brought me to your spiritual feet long before I set eyes on your 4 cornered hat). Its partly the volume, and continuity, so that the whole seems larger and richer, even if the details arent more brilliant than they were in the other books. What you must do is to continue. You cant, in justice to posterity and the present, let your great fountain bottle itself up—to tell you the truth, I’m obsessed with the desire that you should paint me: not a thing I often feel; but what a revelation it would be, painful no doubt: but like seeing the true soul, picked out from its defacing shell, its confining and twisting convolutions, by the silver sharp pin, or sword, of Ethel’s genius. Forgive this scrawl—now taken out and finished at this absurd hotel near the detestable town of Falmouth. No need to expatiate on my sympathy about Pan.

V.

Berg

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3134: To V. Sackville-West

May 14th [1936]

Budock Vean, Falmouth [Cornwall]

Dearest Creature,

It was very nice to see your blue envelope in the pigeon hole at Falmouth. I’ve been so cursed with headaches since Easter that I’ve hardly stirred my pen even to address a letter to the torrents of Coign. I wish God had screwed my head to my spine rather better—its such an infernal nuisance, dillying and dallying in bed and out. As for that book [The Years], I’m so thankful not to be able to look at the proofs—anyhow the Americans wanted to put it off, and I should be delighted to tie a stone to it, and drop it into the Atlantic. But I’m ever so much better.

If all the old ladies and gentlemen weren’t pattering and chattering round me—I’m writing to a foxtrot in the Lounge—I should fill at least 30 pages entirely with descriptions of Cornwall. My word—what a country! Why do we ever spend any part of our short lives in Sussex Kent or London? We dribble from bay to bay, and have discovered an entirely lonely virgin country—not a bungalow—only gulls foot prints on sand. Here and there a castle, and an old man fishing in his river with the sea breaking behind ilex groves, and a rim of green hill. Who owns Caerhays Castle? Why dont you? You must come and see it—its far better than the Lands End—We’re just in from Coverack and the Manacles [Lizard peninsula]. However, what I am writing to say is: for goodness sake choose your subject; whichever you will; and let us have it. What a generous and exemplary author you are compared with—but I leave a blank for fear of libel. L. says I’m to tell you we want another volume of poetry. Falmouth has a row of Penguin Edwardians. Do they pay? do they sell? because I was asked to give them Orlando and in my hoity toity way refused. I only want to write poetry about the Atlantic. We get back next week. Any chance of seeing you?

V.

Berg

[]

3135: To Clive Bell

[14 May 1936]

Postcard

[Falmouth, Cornwall]

This (see X) [Kynance Cove, Lizard, Cornwall] is where we quarrelled in the year 1909 or 10.

V.W.

Quentin Bell

[]

3136: To Katherine Arnold-Forster

21st May [1936]

Monks House [Rodmell, Sussex]

The post has just brought us the pipe and the book—more tokens of our demands upon Bruin’s [Ka Arnold-Forster] charity. But what a good kind brute she is—to take us in, keep us so long, treat us so well. It was astonishingly nice of you and Will, we both thought.

Now you’ll be glad to hear I can hardly tolerate the smug suburbanity of Sussex. I think of you at this moment seeing the sun set, and perhaps a raven or a badger. Without exaggeration, I would rather live at Zennor than anywhere in the habitable world. But not at Sennen.

We had a perfect evening at Coverack, and saw the notice of Will’s speech in the Post Office. The only people in the hotel were purple-faced majors from Hong Kong, and rather dishevelled, slightly vinous ladies, who told the stories of their private lives in loud voices, to my delight. One of their husbands had committed suicide. Still they weren’t the sort to go to lectures.

Well, I won’t run on, and cut into your labours. Look on the envelope and see how impressed I was by them. I have added ‘etc’ to J.P. [Justice of the Peace].

It was very nice seeing Bruin padding round her lair so firmly wisely and decorously. How clean and capable she is—as well as all the other things.

Both our loves to you and your husband.

V

Let me know if I can do anything about John Sparrow.

Mark Arnold-Forster

[]

3136a: To Julian Bell

May 21st 1936

Typewritten

Monk’s House, Rodmell, [Lewes, Sussex]

Dearest Julian,

I got your letter yesterday at Salisbury as we came back from our Cornish tour. I can’t help feeling you were a little dismal when you wrote it; I hope now you are not dismal; still it’s a curse, your being so far away, and then I expect the mitigated culture of your university is rather like skimmed milk. That’s what some of the other English professors felt, I know. I expect it will be much better when you ride off into the wilds with your charming student, and I expect in after years the reality will seem much more exciting than it does now. It will make a background. In fact I think you are much to be envied. I wish I had spent three years in China at your age—the difference was, though, that at your age, what with all the family deaths and extreme intensities—father, mother, Stella, Thoby, George, Jack—I felt I had lived through all emotions and only wanted peace and loneliness. All the horrors of life had been pressed in to our eyes so very crude and raw. And then came the burst of splendour, those two years at Gordon Square before Thoby died, a kind of Elizabethan renaissance, much though I disliked the airs that young Cambridge gave itself. I found an old diary which was one violent shriek of rage at Saxon and Lytton [Strachey] sitting there saying nothing, and with no emotional experience, I said. But I mustn’t begin writing my autobiography. How I wish I had known you in those days. Only I should have fallen in love with you, after my fashion, and you would have loved Nessa, because I always thought her so very much more lovable than I was. More autobiography!

I’m rather rattled, coming back here to six hundred pages of proof, to invitations to dine with Margaret Duckworth to meet Sir William Fisher, and cocktails given by Lady Salisbury at Arlington Street to meet David and Rachel. I don’t much want to plunge into London at the moment; what I wish is that we could take a lonely farm on the moor above Zennor [Cornwall]. You can’t think what a place that is. We stayed with the Arnold Forsters, who are a highly commendable, public spirited pair, without much of the charm or succulence of our group, despising the flesh, with very hard beds, very mangy meals, but always rung up by the local committees and always speaking, administering the law, helping the poor, lecturing in remote coves on Peace, giving large teas to unknown struggling down-at-heels intellectuals of a very minor sort—what a snob I am! The fact is I like Bloomsbury much best; but can’t help seeing how valuable and necessary the other sort is, the world being what the world is. Will is rather acid, and paints like a typewriter, line after line, and then whips off to America and preaches. I don’t feel at my ease with him; and Leonard thinks him probably a humbug. He’s very vain that is, and his wife, who loved Rupert Brooke, praises him at every other moment as wives praise husbands they don’t love, by way of excusing their own marriage. You know the sort, and how obvious their commendation sounds and how hollow. Also she loves the County; can’t open her mouth without bringing in some titled Squire, and falls in with all their respectabilities. Still she, again, is a good hearted woman; and a model of all a magistrate should be. But what I liked was the country. We must go there together. There were ravens at Bosigran; I heard them barking, and then they flew round my head. Ka had seen a badger the night before we came. It’s the most lovely and peculiar of all countries I think. We stayed at a very large country house now an hotel [Budock Vean] near Falmouth and dribbled in and out of all those little bays, incredibly lonely and unspoilt, with here an old castle, there a granite cross and the sea always at the end of the lane. Yes, I am going to buy a cottage there, because Sussex is getting far too pretty and suburban. Will you share it with me? We will live there for months at a time roaming the moors, sitting on the top of the cliffs, watching birds.

We had tea with Angus at his horrid little cabin, which he has pitched in the worst possible place, surrounded by tea shops, shanties, bungalows, literary gents; painters. Why, when six miles off he could find ravens and rocks, God knows. But it’s neat as a new pin, and he had Leigh Ashton there and was dipping in a very neat deprecatory way into the life of Edward Lear. He talks of writing a novel. But he has too many china plates to wash and too many little household cares, and too many literary people popping in. But he’s brown as a new laid egg, smooth as one, and content, which after all is something.

I don’t see why you should worry yourself to write a novel. It’s such a long gradual cold handed business. What I wish is that you’d invent some medium that’s half poetry half play half novel. (Three halves, I see; well, you must correct my arithmetic.) I think there ought to be a scrambling together of mediums now. The old are too rigid; but then one must have a terrific technique to explode the old forms and make a new one, to say nothing of a lump of fire in one’s brain, or the new form is merely a pose. Still I don’t see why, with your odd assortment of gifts—philosophy, poetry, politics, and some human interest, you shouldn’t be the one to do it. These other young men always seem to be stuck in some hypnotic trance; partly fear of what other young men will say, partly dread of their own emotions. Now when you’ve been away in China you’ll have much less sensitiveness to current opinion. Your essay on Roger is still waiting at Mrs Joneses to be copied. She has broken out into a rash, she says, and implores me to give her time. So I’ve not yet read it. But that’s as well, as I can’t start Roger yet. I wish I could. I tried a little sketch, but I can’t see my way and must do my proofs first. But I suppose I shall ring Jones up and force her to do it or to disgorge it. Would it do to print as it is? Are you writing more poetry? I hope so—an epic.

We’ve had a merciful holiday from politics this last fortnight; the chief interest is the Budget leakage. L. thinks it is certainly due to Thomas, but we have only the papers to go upon. Tomorrow we go back and shall be swamped with gossip.

I’ve only had letters from Nessa but she complains bitterly of the telephone, of endless interruptions, of Kenneth Clark, of Christabel—all of which I expect she has told you, so I won’t repeat.

The garden is being scourged by a violent east wind and all the apple blossom is laid on the grass. It’s an ugly spring—wind always and very cold wind, and then a burst of sun but no steady warmth, no nightingales, no lyrical feeling but all tempest and disorder. However we had a few perfect days sitting on the rocks, so I mustn’t grumble. As you see, the effort of unpacking is ridding me of any consecuity. L. has taken the car in to Lewes to be overhauled. It went very well on the whole but knocks—a little fact that may not interest you, in China, but you know how these facts interest us in Sussex.

I’m reading Flaubert’s letters, better in some ways than his books; and Holy Living and Dying and Miss Foxes Diaries—the usual jumble, to which I shall add Macaulay’s history. I don’t know how your poems have sold, since we’ve been cut off from the Press; but I don’t think they’d done so badly, remembering what poetry is in the midst of politics. None of the reviews seemed to me worth anything but making spills of.

Now this drivel must go. But I shall write soon, and do you too.

Love V

[In Virginia’s handwriting:]

By way of postscript—Morgan, recovered [from surgery], is being sued for libel by a man called Murdoch because of an article in M’s book of essays: something about Egypt and damming the Nile, and Morgan thinks he’s going to be let in for £1,500. Meanwhile his book has to be withdrawn from circulation.

King’s College, Cambridge. Modern Fiction Studies. Vol. 30. Summer 1984.

[]

3137: To Ethel Smyth

Wednesday [27 May 1936]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Your letter just come Yes of course I’d like to meet Madame de P. quietly (quite selfishly, not on Nessa’s behalf—indeed I dont much believe in the efficacy of that) but I dont see how to suggest anything definite—We go to M. H. [Monk’s House]—for Whitsun; shall stay a week I think. Perhaps longer. I saw the Dr. yesterday who wants me to spend the whole summer in the country and orders me not to work more than 3/4 of hour daily. So God knows how I’m even to do my proofs. I’m all right, so long as I do nothing, And shall probably come up and down.

Vita to lunch today. Very solid, physically and mentally. I dont find any corruption or change: but then my relations have never altered: always affectionate.

Excuse this scrawl.

V.

Berg

[]

3138: To Violet Dickinson

Wednesday [3 June 1936]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

My Violet

But why were you so foolish as to buy a copy of that book? I would gladly have given it you, except that I’ve lost my copy which I could never get through. Poor Miss [Winifred] Holtby, who died immediately after the effort, wrote a much more readable, though wildly inaccurate book, which I have lost too. If only my vanity were flattered! But everybody writes books about everybody else. All the same, I would give £100 in gold to have your book. That might get a nib between the ribs, if you merely set down a few plain facts. 22 Hyde Park Gate, for instance, Why dont you?

We are both alive and Leonard [is] holding a meeting to protest against something at this moment in the next toom; and as they will talk so loud, I cant write sense.

Nellie Cecil came here the other day which I thought extremely nice of her; and we pretty well fixed it that it was your back I saw in a garden 2 years ago, when I was too shy to come up.

But shy and silent as I am, I remain devoted, grateful, humble and

Eternally yr
Sp.

Berg

[]

3139: To Ethel Smyth

Thursday [4 June 1936]

Monks House [Rodmell, Sussex]

I’m awfully sorry not to have written, but I’ve been rather bad again—the result I suppose of those 4 days in London. Sleep this time—seems to have gone: and as you know this leaves me very melancholy and restless by day. Seeing Vita that lunch time [27 May] made me have to take chloral: but I now refuse to touch it. The detail I give you to show I must resist talk: so must not try to see you or Mm de P. [Polignac] If I can lie out all day and drowse then the nights are better. I’m not very happy—partly because I worry L.—so won’t write. But if you ever would write, so much the better:

The Dr. said I must expect ups and downs for at least 2 months more. This is a down; but an up will come. Forgive me for being so egotistic. How are you and yr sister?

Berg

[]

3140: To Ethel Smyth

Saturday [6 June 1936]

M.[onk’s] H.[ouse, Rodmell, Sussex]

Yes, do send on the dog story. We probably go up on Wednesday, so send here, to reach on Tuesday. We will give an honest unprejudiced verdict.

I’m afraid I wrote a wail to you—No—I’m not feeling “at an end” at all. Rather the other way. Heres my brain teeming with books I want to write—Roger, Lytton, Room of ones Own etc etc—and I can only just manage one wretched 3/4 hour proof correcting [The Years]. Thats my plaint. If only I could be free from this recurring nuisance! But its much better. Never trust a letter of mine not to exaggerate thats written after a night lying awake looking at a bottle of chloral and saying no, no, no, you shall not take it. Its odd why sleeplessness, even of a modified kind has this power to frighten me. Its connected I think with those awful other times when I couldn’t control myself. But enough, as Lady P [Ponsonby] (was it?) would say. I’m ever so much better today, and making up unwritten books at a great rate. My folly was I would do all the Fry papers in between times up till Easter: made 3 stout volumes of extracts: which takes thought.

I rather think I shall try a few days in London. I’m longing to see you, to talk, to dine out, to go to operas, ballets, pictures, to walk in Bond Street—but no.

You understand that if I dont ask you to come it is simply that I dare not get another bout and see my poor L. look as if we were both standing on the gallows. He has been most perfectly angelic—but eno’ as Lady P. wd. say

Let me hear about the puppy.

V.

Berg

[]

3141: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Sunday 7th June [1936]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dearest Ottoline,

I’m so sorry I didn’t answer your letter before. We were driving about Cornwall for a time and then going up and down from London here. (I’ve been a good deal plagued with headaches, and the dr won’t let me do any writing—thats why the book was put off). About Ireland—The place not to go to is Waterville: the place where the landlady gave us such a display of Irish charm was Glen Beigh (near Tralee). She was ugly, but so enchanting we sat up till one listening: and kept quite a good semi-country house Inn. We liked Glengarif very much. But we only whisked through. All that coast and the hills behind, seemed to me of unsurpassed loveliness. And I remember a grey stone field full of gentians opposite the Aran Islands. Elizabeth Bowen is not I think in the best part: but with a car, there’s always loveliness, and complete solitude, and bays like Greece, untrodden, round the corner. It’s a melancholy country though: partly poverty, the sense of inferiority, and for some reason the villages are like slices of South Kensington and the White-chapel Road.

I hope we shall meet when you’re back and I’m back. At the moment I cant bring myself to face London. It was like a parrot house and a bear garden—never a moments peace, what with politics, meetings, and the insane traffic of “seeing” people, whom there was no point in seeing. Here it rains, but its lovely in the garden; Leonard’s flowers suddenly light up in the evening. I’m reading all Macaulay with rapture, and 9 volumes of Flaubert’s letters with complete delight—better I think than his novels. Otherwise I am very sleepy, and sit over a log fire and wish I had your memoirs to read. So write some more, please.

yrs VW.

Texas

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3142: To V. Sackville-West

9th June [1936]

Monks House [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest Creature,

They only sent on your book from the Press yesterday, so I’ve not read it, and shant read it till I can get a clear space and a clear mind, when I shall fall upon it like a ravening tiger and if you want my opinion (not that I have much mind to give to opinions at the moment) you shall have it. At present, this is only a humble and grateful heart thanking you for your present. Its a very handsome looking book, anyhow: and Lord, how I envy you—collecting all those facts among the doves in your pink tower. I’ve been rather cursed again with sleeplessness, so we stayed on; and I have hardly put my nose beyond the garden, and so did not ring up 50 Sissinghurst. We go up tomorrow for a time, since there’s so much to see to, for Leonard anyhow, in London. But I hope to come back again soon, and drowse away most of the summer down here. London seems to me a parrot cage—a lion house—all thats roaring, glaring, cursed, and venomous.

But what I wanted to say was about Eddy. I was touched that he should want to make up the quarrel. Of course, I am more than willing. Will you convey this to him, should you see him. (I take it from you that it is a genuine desire: not merely, though this sounds vanity on my part, a snobbishness: I mean its affection, not wish to dine in Bloomsbury.)

Only I shant be back till October. If he would like to come then, I shall be delighted.

I am doing my little 3/4 hour daily at proofs; at this rate, it’ll take me about 6 years.

And is it worth it? Oh Lord! I’ve so many letters to write. Ethel: Mme de Polignac is on the rampage: so are those idiotic societies: André Gide: and Prof. Grierson. Are you writing for his book? I really cant. Thanks again for Joan.

V.

Berg

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3143: To Ethel Smyth

11th June [1936]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

Mainly on business:

(1) Dog Story

But why not send us the story and publish it in G.H. [Good Housekeeping]? If it seems possible to the Press, there’s no drawback in the previous publication. (by ‘possible’ I dont mean anything defamatory)—provided that G.H brings it out this summer, and we keep it till Christmas. And you’d increase yr. profits: and we cd. print the photos of you in the Coachman’s hat. So send it if you think good to.

(2) RM—is Raymond Mortimer this time—on you I mean.

Yes, theres no fixity or standard in taste.

Why cant I relish yr. Beecham? Why you not my Flush? I now sort my public into

1. R. of ones Own: Flush: 2 Common Readers:

2. The novels.

Neither has any validity in the eye of God—of final judgment, I mean. And God doesnt read. I see you universally praised. Listener just in. I’m glad your in a 2nd edition. Wasn’t I scrupulous to let Longman have it! Its a point of honour not to bag Golden Geese.

Back yesterday. Keeping very quiet. Refused all invitations. Gnats swarming—Sit within like light or lantern. (This is my new telegraphic style to save mental strain)

And how are you? And are you fond of me? Reading Joan [of Arc] in a drowse. Why 20 words where 2 are enough? Better: did 3/4 hr proofs today: then lay down. Duck for dinner. Wish you’d write another book instantly

V.

Berg

[]

3144: To Ethel Smyth

Thursday [18 June 1936]

52 Tavistock Sqre. [W.C.1]

Well, my dear,—thats a new form of address. I leave it, queer though it sounds. Here we are, and I have been exercising a control which I can assure you is heroic—like the iron clasp of a statue on a horses reins—by which I mean I have worked every day for one hour without a headache—But its a dismal, suppressed contorted life, and only my own profound self esteem, and the delight of correcting finally 2 pages daily (out of 600) keeps me to it.

And what about your sister? The puppy? The story? Mrs Simpsons pinks? One of these days I’m going to ask you to come and see me between 5.30 and 7. I daren’t suggest it to L. at the moment. So far he has been justified. But my spirit is mounting. And my word, what a treat to read my book of an evening—Flauberts letters and Macaulay. I was saying, I havent read so much since I was a child. As a child d’you remember sitting with ones book on the sofa reading? So I lie on my sofa. And the gnats tap on the pane. No allusion to you. Even so, I’ve not yet read Vita [Saint Joan of Arc]. One’s invalid taste is so pink fleshed and fastidious. I read slowly and roll the words. You see I’ve no news, and not much fluency, and not much play of mind, but if you could see my heart it would be like a gold pincushion glowing with love. The words E… L.S.th [Ethel Smyth] are traced there; can you interpret the meaning? Well, I’m going to lapse again into Macaulay whom I find so engrossing it almost tears me to wake to 1936

V.

Berg

[]

3145: To Ethel Smyth

[23 June 1936]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

I have read it with 

(laughter)

(tears)

(pleasure)

(pain)

complete medley of feelings. So has Leonard. In fact we both read without stopping. But we both felt the same doubt—Could the Hogarth Press deal with it? So we submitted it to our Manager [Miss West], Now she has given her opinion emphatically that the Press would bungle it. She thinks our public would be puzzled: it would not sell; in short, both for your sake and ours advises us against it. Of course, theres no denying that these small books are fearfully tricky to deal with. Therefore we feel that as the Cresset [Press] has made you a firm offer, you ought to close with them. As you see, the judgment is not literary but commercial, and it has more weight because you are a friend. I mean, if it didn’t sell we should feel guilty. But I’m sorry and so’s Leonard. It produced the oddest confusion of feeling in me—partly for psychological reasons: as a revelation of an unknown or little analysed feeling that is. And neither of us were, as you anticipated, shocked: no: not one bit. (I will get them to send it back tomorrow)

Oh the flowers! All mine were dried and yellowed: suddenly in comes your parcel—how touched I was by the thong of grass binding them, and to think of your stooping in that heat—and all my room blossomed and became like a spring meadow. There they still are—my only flowers.

Oh damn the Cresset Press! Still if they can make a good job of a small booklet, they must be brilliant publishers…. I rather suspect though they’ve worked up that particular market, and shall hope to hear its made their fortune. How did the other book [As Time Went On] do? Have you heard? Yes, I should like Colette and Eth’s letter. Did another hour today

V.

Berg

[]

3146: To Ethel Smyth

[25 June 1936]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Heres the Colette and Elizabeth.

I’m almost floored by the extreme dexterity insight and beauty of Colette. How does she do it? No one in all England could do a thing like that. If a copy is ever going I should like to have one—to read it again. and see how its done: or guess. And to think I scarcely know her books! Are they all novels? Is it the great French tradition that lifts her so serenely, and yet with such a flare down, down to what she’s saying? I’m green with envy: (all the same I’ve just done my first batch of proofs: considering my head was mostly like a boiled pudding laced about with red hot nerves this is to my credit as a woman—bad though the book is as a book)

We go down today till Wednesday. So deposit Simpkins [dianthus] on an altar, and sit there in the cool and think of …

But we must meet soon—I do want to hear the authentic voice. (I’ve had a whole week, doing 1 hour daily, and no pain—thats why I’m so cock a hoop. But I cant do a minute over the hour.)

I saw my Dr. [Elinor Rendel] She says in 10 years they’ll be able to cure me completely by injecting hormones. At present she says its too risky. Its all the glands in back of my neck she says—And what about the Cresset and Pan?

V.

Berg

[]

3146a: To Julian Bell

June 28th 1936

Typewritten

Monk’s House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

My dearest Julian,

How vile I have been about writing! But since I wrote last I’ve been horribly plagued by sleeplessness, and the usual old pain—(which Elly now says they will cure in ten years by injecting hormones; only now they don’t know the right mixture;) so she forbade me to do more than an hours proof correcting; and then not touch a pen. I’ve done this with some success,—failing though to induce her to experiment with her hormones; for in fact I’d much rather have a high temperature through the strife of hormones than lie about like a sleepy dormouse. However, as I say, life is slowly returning; and it’s worth while, being a dormouse to revive once more into a helter skelter porpoise, which is I think my true being—some body who skips and turns cart wheels, with Clive, for the amusement and contempt of the wise like you, Quentin and Nessa.

So I read your thing on Roger only very slowly. I think it’s full of ideas; full of sharp insights; and there are a mass of things I would like to pilfer if I write, as I hope next autumn. My criticism is; first that you’ve not mastered the colloquial style, which is the hardest, so that it seemed to me (but my mind was weak) to be discursive, loose knit, and uneasy in its familiarities and conventions. However you could easily pull it together. Prose has to be so tight, if it’s not to smear one with mist. L. has read it and agrees with me on the whole. As Nessa may have told you, we can’t use it as a letter, because it’s too long; also, the letter series has proved a failure, and we have stopped it. What L. suggests is that it should be sent to [R. A.] Scott James [Editor] of the Mercury, who might print it in two parts. Even so, I expect he would ask you to shorten it. I think the ideas were extremely interesting; I must go into them carefully. I wished there were more ‘personality’ but there’s enough to give a hint of his relations with the younger generation. Thank goodness, you’ll be back before I’ve done anything that could be printed; so we can discuss it. Nessa relieved me greatly by saying that you mean to come home in two years—I thought it was three. She will have told you about Leonard’s dealings with the Herald and the Guardian. So far, the M. Guardian has not written; but we may find a letter in London tomorrow. Young Barger said he would speak to the D. Telegraph people; but as L. has already applied to the M.G. we must wait and hear before going on with that. I tell you this, but expect you have heard it already.

We came down for a long week end, and have been roasting in the garden, though now a thunder storm is drenching us. All the roses are out, and it looks very English—very gay, very cushioned, green and white and pink. The pears doing well, the plums promising, and the country looking as if green bath had been showered over it by a benignant water can. Peter and Prudence asked to come, but we missed them; so also the Hutchinsons [St. John and Mary]; and we missed them. Glyndebourne is in full swing, and a medley of culture and fashion mixes in the High Street with Mr Stacey, Mr Hancock and the usual pigs.

Leonard went to the Society [“Apostles”] dinner, and was delighted by Moore—the same sublimity he’s known these thirty years; but depressed by Proctor who was dull and windy; It seems doubtful if the Society will pull through the crisis; whether it isn’t the relic of too high a civilisation to attract the young who must have politics and real life to gnaw.

I am in trouble with the Writers Society—got up by Aldous [Huxley] and Morgan [Forster]; which held a conference in London last week, which I did not attend. There M. [André] Malraux developed violent symptoms of rabid communism; and Raymond, who was present, thinks I must resign on these grounds. As I’ve already said, Societies seem wrong for me, as I do nothing; and with Leonard meeting a dozen times a week and filling the drawing room with Bernal and Miss Gardiner and Ha Aldous we do our bit for liberty. What can I do but Write? Hadn’t I better go on writing—even by the light of the last combustion? And it all ends in private squabbles. M. Walter has quarrelled with M. somebody else; so it goes on. But I assure you, never a day passes but we don’t get asked either to sign a protest, telegraph a message, or join a new group.

Last night Quentin [Bell] dined here, and L. roped him in to do some work for the Fabian Research group—and that I think is very suitable; for he’s young, and full of sturdy convictions. He’s much grown up; very much developed; in fact a young man now; but with one hand in his pots and the other in public life. Also we had tea at Charleston, on Sunday, and found them all very well, and I think once more hopped out of the frying pan on to the cool green pastures of the painters art. How I envy them! There they sit, looking at pinks and yellows, and when Europe blazes all they do is to screw their eyes up and complain of a temporary glare in the foreground. Unfortunately, politics get between me and fiction. I feel I must write something when this book is over—something vaguely political; doubtless worthless, certainly useless.

I have to thank you, by the way, for a lovely bowl; did you know you had given me one? Thank you a thousand times. Nessa had a row of them, and said you would like me to have one—anyhow there it is on my window sill, and when I see, I think of thee. But I do that very often. You’ve heard of Clive’s honour—now what induced him to tie that blob of red ribbon to his tail? Aren’t human beings ridiculous? He made a speech at Oxford in French to air the fact—rather to the undergraduates amazement, according to David Cecil, who heard him. Rachel and David came to tea—she having had a miscarriage owing to an aeroplane threatening to alight on her head. He remains congenial. One of the great ladies has lent him all the Melbourne papers, which he spreads out in the cool air of Rockbourne [Hampshire] and meditates a biography in September. I’m all in favour of biography instead of fiction; and have just set on foot a scheme to print Rupert’s unpublished letters. His old friends and quondam lovers, Geoffrey Keynes, Ka Cox, Noel Olivier and so on, want to vindicate his character from Eddie Marshes castrated version before they die; and asked me to suggest an editor. I though of you; but then you are in China; and so suggested John Sparrow, who has jumped at it—but it’s all in the air. I think the younger generation might sum up Rupert as poet and man better than we can. The letters are numerous, many of them foolish, but then he died so young and was only trying over different tunes on the trumpet. I always think he had the makings of a real scholar, more to him than to Peter [F. L. Lucas] by a long way.

Of literary news there is little. Your friend John appeared the other morning, and wasted an hour or two of L’s day; but was, as they say, very nice. He has written something about Vienna—is I think somebodies correspondent, and has his toe in John Lane’s publishing house; did you see the new book called I think New Writing? Rosamond is about to give birth to her novel; Aldous is brought to bed of his. Neither of them will I read till mine is finally done. Anyhow I can’t read novels, save the incessant MSS. which have been coming faster and thicker than ever. Vita has produced a life of Joan of Arc; a solid, wordy, worthy work, in every way the opposite. of Lytton, of whom my opinion rises the more I read other peoples lives and essays. He had mastered the art of saying what he meant—and in prose how difficult that is! They remain stated finished controlled—even those little biographies of his. Lord, how I wish he’d lived—I sometimes feel that old Bloomsbury though fast dying, is still our bulwark against the tawny flood. So come back and drive your stake in, before we are overwhelmed. Desmond has been ill; has all his teeth out; and says he is going to retire and write a life of Tolstoy. Now I must pack, for we are driving back. But I swear I will write again next week, as I feel much more clear in the head. This letter however is not a signal proof of it. Please write soon; and don’t get stuck on some Burmese peak—and give my love to Luce if you see him.

V

King’s College, Cambridge. Modern Fiction Studies. Vol. 30. Summer 1984.

[]

3147: To V. Sackville-West

Monday 29th June [1936]

Monks House [Rodmell, Sussex]

What a time I’ve been thanking you for your book! [Saint Joan of Arc] But my brain is an engine that only runs 10 minutes at a time. Now I’ve just done it, and if you want my opinion, worthless as I feel it considering the lump of putty where there should be a brain, I think its a solid, strong, satisfactory, most reputable and established work; stone laid to stone; squared, cemented, and all weather tight, roofed in and likely to last these many years. My only criticism is that you’ve been so damned fair that one feels now and then a kind of wrench towards the middle of the road, not quite enough rush and flight to make Jeanne angular: to make her I mean rise up identical above all these facts. I see the difficulties. And I expect this was the better way. Only as there is so little one can know for certain, I wished sometimes you had guessed more freely. Thats all; and no doubt its a perverted and personal criticism. Whats interesting is the whole, however, not the parts. I keep speculating—which is what I enjoy most in all books: not themselves: what they make me think. How I wish you’d write another chapter on superstition: what the French peasant at that time believed. I cant help thinking the general state of mind was so different from ours that voices, saints, came, not through God, but through a common psychology: why was everyone able to write poetry: to carve statues; paint pictures?—then, and not now. So that they believed where we cant. Or rather, our belief is hardly perceptible to us, but will be to those who write our lives in 600 years. Therefore … but I’ve no sense to follow this out. I agree, we do believe, not in God though: not one anyhow. And I cant lay hands satisfactorily on your ‘unity’. Perhaps I mean, belief is almost unconscious. And the living belief now is in human beings. For example, to whisk off a little, how angelically you behave to the Hogarth Press! Generous, humane, honourable. In Jeanne’s time none of those qualities existed. Therefore they heard heavenly voices for no doubt the human vessel is so limited that it can only contain a few exalted detached and impersonal feelings at one time. As a psychologist. Proust is far in advance of Ronsard. My perception or your perception is far finer that any 2 womens in 1456. On the other hand, the Rodmell church bells rouse in me nothing but antipathy to the Xtian religion—more especially as they set Miss Emery’s dogs barking.

But what I meant to say was I think its a massive and wholesome work; and entirely to the credit of the pink tower and the doves, also of the solitary bull. (Oh how I liked that poem—the best you ever wrote—to V.W.) All I could wish is that you hadn’t been haunted by the ghost of Lytton into avoiding all his faults and some of his merits. But then the facts—the swarm of facts. How can anyone lift a pen freely among them!

Yes, you’re an angel about the Press: and, to contradict my own theory of contemporary humanity, not one of our authors ever treats us as kindly as you do. No theyre a pack of lily-livered money haunted mercantile midgets. who take all, and give nothing

Look at this: I did it myself.

[stamped:] Virginia
Woolf
Virginia
Woolf

Berg

[]

3148: To Ethel Smyth

Wednesday [1 July 1936]

52 Tavistock Sqre. [W.C.1]

Back here again.

Yes, I remember Nurse McKechnie well, and with affection, though God knows I could hardly bring myself to see her, so hideous was the time when I last had intercourse. Oh how odd that she should turn up again—there was a fearful row with another nurse [Traill], and poor M. was vanquished, and left my father just before he died, and went to Lady P. [Ponsonby] I think she caused a good deal of rather satiric comment among some of Lady P’s friends (Dickinsons I’m thinking of [Violet and her brother Ozzy]) who said Lady P. spoilt her, petted her, let her give herself airs, and get out of her proper station. She used to tell me about the P’s long before I met them—a nice gentle, sensitive creature, whom my father liked much better than the one who supplanted her. But oh what an unhappy time that was. M. crying in my bedroom, I remember. I heard from Maurice about some pestilential Frenchman he wanted me to see. I hope he’s not as bad as his handwriting makes out.

I am badgered by all kinds of politicians at the moment, and have just written a firm letter to resign my only office, on the ground that my husband does all that for two—or even one dozen. Buzz buzz buzz goes the telephone. But I’m slowly correcting.

V.

Berg

[]

3149: To Ethel Smyth

Friday [3 July 1936]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Only to say I’m sorry about your sister. needless to say.

No, I didn’t mean for a moment that M.B. [Baring] tried to make me see the Frog: only handed on a request, and was highly sympathetic.

Ozzie and Violet Dickinson: they used to laugh about Nurse M. [McKechnie] who was said to give herself airs. I dont think they were more snobbish than most of their generation—only amused.

I will endeavour to bring back the Coachman hat [photograph] next week. But must insist on return.

V.

Yes, I’m better, but still a molly coddle.

Thanks for sending on Colette. Very good of you. Whats her real name—address? Never mind: I’ll thank through Mm de P. [Polignac]

Berg

[]

3150: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

[6 July 1936]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Ottoline,

Fate seems perverse—I have been stricken with what seems violent toothache and have to go to the dentist tomorrow at 4.30. He may keep me, or I may be incapable—but I will come if possible. Only dont wait, and dont put off anything you have to do. I’ll take my chance.

And let me come another time if this is doomed.

yrs
Virginia

Texas

[]

3151: To Ethel Smyth

[8 July 1936]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Well you are a bold woman! This refers to Vita. I shall be eager to hear the result. But d’you think opinions have any power to alter? Anyhow you’ve done your duty by that character. Oh dear, I’m laid up again—had a tooth out. Result, all the old demons out of their lairs. But better again today. And I had thought I was 2 miles outside the wood, and could walk to Wimpole St. and back on my own feet: We go to M.H [Monk’s House] tomorrow till Tuesday And I would like to see you, if only for ½ hour before we return, thank God to MH for the summer. But only if it can be done without adding to your preposterous labours. Think of sitting to Neville L: He’s not the man to do you. As I last knew him, he painted fading landscapes, one moor, one lake, one cow, on silk: but not a terrific sun rising a ball of fire from the ocean bed. Tell me too, if you will, about Rocks and D.W. who has just sent me her poems, with a fanfarronade by Yeats.

Excuse scrawl—on my back, but Lord be praised better tonight. No proofs this week though.

Yr
V.

How’s Maurice [Baring]?

I’ve written and thanked Colette C/o Polignac—very much pleased, I am.

Berg

[]

3151a: To Katharine Furse

July 12th 36.

[Handwritten]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, near Lewes, Sussex.

Dear Katherine,

I wish we could have come & dined, but here we are, & shan’t be back in London till the autumn.

I’m sorry not to see Dr. Cabot again—still more, not to see you. Meeting in London seems hopeless. I keep your Christmas card, thinking I will write & suggest a meeting; even had a card to send you!—& then didnt. I’m very glad that you think of writing your life, & hope my suggestion had some share in turning your mind to it. Should you settle to it, I hope you’ll think of letting the Hogarth Press make you an offer—We should be greatly interested. needless to say. Give my respects to Dr. Cabot,

& thank you for asking us.

Yrs always.
V.W.

Bristol. Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature. Vol. 9, Number 2. Fall 1990.

[]

Letters 3152-3179 (July-October 1936)

3152: To Leonard Woolf

Tuesday [14 July 1936]

Monk’s House [Rodmell, Sussex]

A very good, though very dull day. No headache this morning, brain rather active in fact: but didn’t write—did nothing but lie in bed and read Macaulay. Then there was a telephone, to which I flew, thinking it was you: but it was only a wire from Ethel ‘dont forget Coachman’s hat’—the photograph she means, which I must now send her. Then I lunched—Louie very friendly and attentive—listened to a little dance music—took half an hour’s stroll in the marsh—saw a grass snake—came back—lay in bed—slept over Blunt—had tea, and am now listening to the Mcnaghton 4 tet (daughters of Malcolm) playing Haydn. But they play too slowly.

Percy [Bartholomew, gardener] is mowing the lawn in front, having mown the Croft this morning. So thats all my news. Its not a nice day, though fine; hot and windy with black clouds; and when I’ve posted this I shall take another little stroll. No letters; but my cigars.

The fact is its damned dull without you, dearest M: and if you didn’t come back I should have to take to writing by way of fillip. I cant help thinking I can now—if I dandle my brain a bit and have frequent lie downs.

Could you bring some cream? Thats all I can think of to worry you with. But of course make Mabel [Haskins, cook] get it 1/- worth. Oh how we adore you! how angelic you are to us—I say its sentimental to say this, and that you know it already but the M’s insist, and say a Bird in the bush is worth 2 in the hand. Indeed you cant think how like a widow bird I am, all makes a frozen sound; and how I miss Sally [dog] and Mitz [marmoset] too. But you most, dearest of all Ms. Take care: dont sit up to all hours: dont let the Bore [Kingsley Martin] entirely exhaust you and come back safe tomorrow. Lord how nice to hear you!

M.

I hope you’ll ask Elly about your prophylactic.

Sussex

[]

3153: To Ethel Smyth

Tuesday [14 July 1936]

Monks House [Rodmell, Sussex]

No, I hadn’t forgotten the Coachman [photograph]. But only send it on the understanding you return. Why arent you here this moment? I’m alone. L. gone to London for 2 days. We came on Thursday meaning to go back yesterday, but I was so done up, I decided to make an end of London altogether and try a complete summer here. In fact, the last few days were useless, and I found I’d lost half a stone since Easter; now I’ve had 4 days in bed, and feel the sap in my brain again, and mean to set to work and live like a hermit till I’ve done the proofs—if I dont tear’em up. Its odd—I always swore I’d never try a long book, as I always crack up in the middle of a book; and just was saying to L. well this once I’ve got through, when I smashed. Never again—never another long book for me. Half of this one wants cutting still—and heaven knows how much I oughtn’t to re-write, if its to be presentable. Thats what comes of dashing ahead in a glory and a soaring delight. without forcing oneself to re-read and correct as one goes. Never again. Yet it gave me some superb months of fun, and I daresay there are flashes of virtue in it, amid a waste of trash.

I heard from Elizabeth [Williamson]—a very nice long traveller’s letter [from India]. Please thank her. I’ll write when I’m less of a mush. But tell me: (oh I wish I could see you—even hear you on the telephone): first: about Dottie [Wellesley]. Did she discuss Vita? No, I daresay not. I had a letter—but always the same kind cool calm, and complete modesty which I adore. Says I’ve shown her all the faults in her book [Saint Joan of Arc]. Then: about N. Lytton. Please scribble off a history and a portrait, as you alone can. Lying in bed, I’ve been reading Blunts memoirs, and recalling how my incestuous brother [George Duckworth] was in love with Judith: how she confided that she was in love with Victor: how he was in love with Pamela; and then, why I dont know, she married Neville, who used to come to a Club we had, called the Friday Club, infinitely distinguished and effete. After their marriage, I never saw them, and long to know why he left her: what he did: what she did: and whats up now. So do tell me. And I’ll write, and come and stay in October. But you will come here.

V.

Berg

[]

3154: To Ethel Smyth

Monday 20th July [1936]

Monks House. [Rodmell, Sussex]

Well, Ethel dear, I take my pen instantly as you see to answer your questions.

1 About the publishing: L. says that if you publish [Inordinate(?) Affection] after Oct. 31st you must lose the Xmas trade, because all the shops are stocked and wont buy more. (I’ve just had this applied to me. If I cant do my proofs by Sept: the book must wait till after Xmas—so be it) But surely G.H. [Good Housekeeping] could be made to listen to the argument, and stretch a point in your favour. Tell them the facts, and I’m sure they could squeeze it in now.

2. The sales of Time [As Time Went On] seem to us neither one thing nor the other. I should call them good for that priced book: but then your publicity and repute are such—not a bad review and all out in a flock on the day of publication—would make one dream of 5,000. Still, its astonishing, if our cupboard gave up its skeletons, how small the sales of books are. L. has just been saying how good it is when one of our books sells 600.

So we come to Vita and my letter [No. 3147]. I went into no details—merely said I thought her Joan lacked outline and angularity: was tied down by a myriad of tiny threads of fact; and never thus lifted herself off the ground: but praised V’s fairness, in intention, though told her she sat too firm on the hedge for any picture to emerge. C. St. John I thought very much to the point (though carefully muffled) and should myself have said much the same. Vita entirely agreed—with me, I mean. And then—what other question was there? Oh my health. I won’t boast, but I think my week in bed has done the trick: that is, I’ve worked one hour daily; and without falling flat after it on a sofa. But if I were to tell you the history of the past 3 months—if I were ever proud of myself, it would be that I did not—well, well. I dont want to go into it. You cant think what a legacy insanity leaves behind it—how the spectres come out on a sleepless night. But thats over.

Berg

[]

3155: To Vanessa Bell

Wednesday [22 July 1936]

Monks House [Rodmell, Sussex]

What a stingy wretch you are! No letter, and yet there you are at the hub of the universe, a hum of wings round you. And me forgotten, I suppose.

I don’t think I’ve any special news: nothing to compare with Lady Oxford and Christabel—about whom I pine for information. We lead a very peaceful lonely life, which becomes extremely soothing. I work most of the morning; so does Leonard; and we walk and play bowls and cook dinner. Voices sometimes reach me from the outer world: [Sibyl] Colefax wants to dine; Stephen Tennant wants me to drive in his Victoria with him, talking intimately; and then Nurse McKechnie has turned up, through Ethel—not in person, I’m glad to say, but remembering old days. She wrote to Ethel because of her sketch of Lady Ponsonby. Thats about all. On Sunday, as I daresay you heard, Quentin brought his menagerie over; but it was windy and rather distracting (I hope Angelica’s cold vanished) Janie I thought a trifle gone dry like a cherry hung too long—like all Stracheys: doesn’t she snap a little? But she’s all that she ought to be fundamentally, and as gay as a Jerboa physically. I think thats what[s] odd—the French chic with the Strachey bite. She abused Rosamond’s book—but I’ve not read it; and doubt whether I’m really jealous. Should I be? You see, what a water logged driftwood I am, asking you for literary gossip. On Saturday all the Wolves come—hundreds of them, and then I change my skin, and inhabit an extraordinary world. They talk incessantly. Whats its about God knows. And nothing sticks to them. And at last my mother in law rather likes me. But I lie awake at nights imagining what they do at Bexhill. They never go out without meeting some one from Hong Kong, and if they go over an old house, a door opens, and out comes the owner, who turns out—this is fact not fiction—to be foster mother to Miss Beeton, the granddaughter of the Cook [Isabella Beeton, 1836-65], and Bella’s oldest friend. So they establish what are called links, and it is thought that I’m going too to Bexhill to be introduced to the owner of Dixter, Bellas old friend, and the descendant of Oliver Cromwell. When the Queen [Mary] came there she was put out by the Cromwell relics, and said Oh No. I’m sure those were stolen from Charles The First. No, the Queen’s visit to Miss Beeton’s foster mother was not a success. But why should you be told all this, living as you are on the height, on the thick; of fame pleasure and society? I gather Lady O [Oxford]: entirely succumbed, and so did Christabel [Aberconway] I daresay. Never mind. Here, in our garden, jealousies and strifes, competitions, Queen Maries, all vanities are less than the slug on the Zinnia. The garden is full of Zinnias. The Zinnias are full of slugs. L. goes out at night with a lantern and collects snails, which I hear him cracking—upon which Sally strays, then there’s a stampede—for she’s on heat you must know, only her love for Leonard is more than any carnal lust—if, indeed, as I suspect, she doesn’t love him as carnally as any bitch ever loved any dog; so she only goes to the gate, looks up the road at [H.W.] Nevinsons white terrier and then returns. All the lights are extinguished, and silence reigns.

So you see what a blank my life is—unless I told you all about Honoria Lawrence, mother of Sir Alick of Alenho. But that I cant go into. Its a book—So’s Macaulay. So’s Shakespeare. So’s I’m alone, as L. is in London, and have just listened in to the Children’s hour and the history of Big Ben. And here’s a letter from Katherine Furse asking us to dine to meet Dr Cabot, descendant of the discoverer of America, whose wife is dead, which, Katharine says, has softened him. And I’m glad to hear it, for he was a dry old dog, and told me the Cabots could only marry Lowells. Now they cant, since she’s dead. And I had a visit, long long ago from Tom Eliot, whom I love, or could have loved, had we both been in the prime and not in the sere; how necessary do you think copulation is to friendship? At what point does ‘love’ become sexual? Now I could run on for hours, but as you never read what I write,—does it matter? Writing or non writing is all the same to you. Next time I shall take a sheet of foolscap and make my mark. X. And yet I have a thousand interesting things to say. Tell me what you think of Lady O[Oxford]: of life: of sex: of art: and if Clive’s back [from Paris]: and have you seen any of my friends? I’m forgotten. But happy. And must now cook mushrooms for my dinner.

B.

Berg

[]

3156: To Ethel Smyth

Saturday [25 July 1936]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

Heres the [Alphonse Daudet] letters back. Well, I wish one of these days you’d explain why you relish praise—its psychologically so interesting to me—your need of it. Or am I wrong in thinking that you want it more than most people? I dont think its like my vanity—its different—this desire for reverberation: (not that Daudets letter is a good example of what I mean) It may be that you are an externaliser. I’m thinking out certain problems for my next book [Three Guineas]: thats why this comes pat.

Yes, if you’re at Wotton of course we may contrive to hide behind a hedge and see each other. My head—oh thank whatever Gods there be—remains so firm screwed I’m getting along fast with the disgusting paring and fiddlefaddling which I’ve got to go through with, and am entertaining 4 Wolves to tea. No: psychologically I think you were wrong about my being “happy” when you mentioned time of life. It was I think nervousness at the imminence of that season—which however came and passed, as gently and imperceptibly as a lamb, 2 years ago. So I dont think my headaches are due to that—indeed I cursed the Dr the other day, who always said, as they all say, you’ll be much better then. So why these headaches now? However I admit I earned a far worse dose than I’ve had. Did I tell you of my great political shindy, in the worst too, of my coma, when I was drowsy and painful as a crushed snake? How I was hauled out to Committees and meetings and abused and rooked and at last resigned, and now will never sign a petition or even read a report let alone attend a conference again? Still though I withdraw, Leonard doesn’t. Last winter the bray and the drone of those tortured voices almost sent me crazy—meetings in the next room. And did I ever tell you of the visit late one night of the starving woman? No—one cant, alas, entirely withdraw. But why am I droning on? Because lunch is late

V.

Berg

[]

3156a: To Julian Bell

27th July 1936

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

My dearest Julian,

I’m too lazy to go out to my house [writing (or garden) hut] and find a typewriter. I hope you can read this decayed hand. And will this reach you? Are you in Thibet? A useless question. Here am I in Rodmell; a hot summer evening Mr Botten has just cut his hay, is afraid it’ll rain before he gets it in, and says times are very hard—which is to excuse him for not paying his rent.

Did you hear from Nessa about writing something for the Times? I believe it would be worth while to send them an article on your travels, if you want to turn a penny, but perhaps you don’t.

[… 2 words omitted] is a nice up to date young woman, living in sin, hiring a house to lodge her lover, and taking politics very seriously—What’s the use of marrying, she says, in times like these? As you know, the guns are popping in Spain now; coming nearer and nearer, but since we have left London and turned bucolic, the stress seems lessened. I am charged to give you all sorts of more than friendly messages from Bella Southorn who was here yesterday—on whose not young but on the whole respectable heart you seem to have made a great impression. “What a very charming person your nephew is”—and so on. Now they’re setting out for Gambia, and ask us to stay; not a life I envy, a governors, entertaining and being tactful, and then retiring, with a modest pension and no dignity in England.

Quentin was over—indeed we see a lot of Q: who leads a most independent rambling life—part political, part pottery; and he brought over Eddie, Harry, and Janie—all very charming, but—here was another interruption.

King’s College, Cambridge. Modern Fiction Studies. Vol. 30. Summer 1984.

[]

3156b: To Julian Bell

28th July 1936

Typewritten

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

My dearest Julian,

I don’t know whose turn it is to write, but as I take it you may be in Thibet with a lama and no writing paper—for of course lamas eat paper and then spit—I will try to write, while I wait for Quentin who said he was coming to tea. Leonard is in London; Percy is cutting the hedge; I am alone, on a dull cloudy day, and Mrs Ebbs has just gone up the village street. We’ve been down here three weeks, as London became fairly intolerable—what with Sage Bernal, Amabel, Miss Gardner and Mr Kidd. Telephones hourly; peremptory demands to meet, to sign, to discuss. Finally an abortive conference, to which none of the principals went, thus giving great offence to the French, who had to make do with Amabel, Mr [H. G.] Wells and a sherry party at Rose Macaulays. But what rot it all is! Finally to cut a long and dreary story short, I resigned, and I gather Morgan [Forster] and Aldous [Huxley] are about to do the same—this refers to what was called The International Writers Society for the propagation of truth etc. It’s a stale old story even now—by the time it reaches China it will be mouldy. Still Leonard at this moment is concocting policies with the Labour party; Margery Fry is on the frizzle; and in a moment I shall turn on the wireless and listen to the latest massacres in Spain. Oh my dear Julian, you’re lucky to be feeding your eyes on the rice fields, oh there’s a noise; it’s the old baby; with Q. I must stop and give him tea.

King’s College, Cambridge. Modern Fiction Studies. Vol. 30. Summer 1984.

[]

3157: To Jane Bussy

July 29th [1936]

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

What a good friend you are my dear Janie, to remember that book. It has come at the very nick of time when I’ve nothing to read. And it looks—for I’ve only just cut the pages—full of the most entrancing, wicked, underworld Bohemian life, and just after my taste, though I still can’t think how Colette being what she is, to look at, ever sent me her discourse with that cryptic message. She makes me feel so dowdy. The French always do.

That reminds me—my old mother in law was here with the Governor and Governoress of Gambia [Southorns] the other day. And she’s practically blind. We got talking about France, and she said was there any chance that the delightful lady whom I liked so much, who talked French with me would talk French with her? I said I doubted it! But then Bella (of Gambia) the daughter, asked me privately if I could arrange something in the autumn; could it be possible, d’you think to find a French woman (not another Janie—no) who would, for a fee, go and talk to her (aged 86—but spry as a throstle) in her hotel in Earls Court? Should you think of anyone, let me know.

And come and stay. When? In September? The deuce is I must now work 6 hours daily: yes, I’m plodding along: but its hopeless to think of finishing in time for the autumn: so, when I’ve made this plain to my publishers, I shall feel free to ask you to stay. At present, so unsociable is literature, I plod on with my nose to the page, and say to all tempters and temptresses Avaunt. In another life there’ll be another Virginia who never writes, but always talks and talks and talks and talks to Janie. So happy will that woman be: why must there be this one, who writes? Answer me that problem. You can’t have your cake and eat it too, I suppose. But then painters do. I would like to take another page to discuss this and other matters only I would never have done: there’s Quentin coming to tea: I must boil the kettle: but my dear Janie, what an angel you are to send me this book, over which I shall pore tonight in the rain. And do, while, as our Aunt [Fisher] said, taking plenty yourself, give my love to your mother.

V.

Texas

[]

3158: To Hugh Walpole

1st August [1936]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Hugh,

How very nice to see your rather illegible, but not so illegible as my hand again! I was just looking at a picture of you and your dog. But here we are, I’m sorry to say, until October, so there’s no chance of tea at the moment—unless you are passing our way and will look in? Its much more likely, I’m afraid that you’re off to Hollywood, or Bermuda—but do let us meet before that happens: there’s a mass of things to talk about.

We came down here early, because I knocked up in London—you cant think what a din and a hurly burly London was this spring, what with meetings, politics, societies, all I think of the utmost futility—and had to come down here, and lie in bed for a month; with the result that I have now a vast pile of proofs to correct, and must keep my nose to the grindstone. At the moment however I’m going to wade through the water meadows in a mackintosh.

Love from us both.

yr V.W.

Texas

[]

3159: To Ethel Smyth

[3 August 1936]

M.[onk’s] H.[ouse, Rodmell, Sussex

Oh dear me! I entirely misled you—about L. and politics. He never never made me go to a meeting in my life: Certainly not this summer. No: what I meant was, I was pressed by E M. Forster to be on a Committee [Vigilance]: then they bothered me to take part: endless correspondence: I refused to budge: finally resigned. But it was harassing. A woman called Ellis Williams ran amok. Gide and other famous French abused me. But no: not Leonard. What is true though is that we have Cttees in the next room—his Cttees: I hear them droning. Thats all. And thats inevitable. Thats L’s hobby. and passion. As for M Baring as author, I long to read your article; hope it may open my eyes, which are sealed to the merits of that delightful man as novelist. How you can once more compare him to Stendhal seriously winds me—What common scale can we have in literature? And I tried M B. again the other day, and still blindness prevails.

No more. The 5 Wolves did for me next day; but my mother in law was so delighted and so blind and so touching in her gratitude that I couldnt think my headache ill earned.

No more, once more

V.

Berg

[]

3160: To Ethel Smyth

Aug. 13th [1936]

Monks House [Rodmell, Sussex]

I send back the Baring article; but I’m not going to say what I think of it, for two reasons. First, I should have to write some serious criticism, for which my brain is at the moment unfit (I’m such a prig, I cant bear to write frivolously about books) Second: you’ll be amused to hear, you made the blood come to my head the other day by some remarks of yours in a letter on “Bloomsbury” Now here on the very second page I think you say “important—to use the great Bloomsbury word” and again the blood rushes. To explain would take too long. But I daresay you’ll twig from the following quotation. A young man the other day sent me a book in which he perpetually used “Bloomsbury” as a convenient hold all for everything silly, cheap, indecent, conceited and so on. Upon which I wrote to him: All the people I most respect and admire have been what you call “Bloomsbury”. Thus, though you have every right to despise and dislike them, you cant expect me to agree. Moreover, to use a general term like this, without giving instances and names, so that the people you sneer at can defend themselves, seems to me a cowardly subterfuge, of which you ought to be ashamed. Anyhow, never come and see me, who live in Bloomsbury, again. (Maurice I see talks of Bloomsbury too)

And as you have once more trodden on that toe—I admit all the cheap journalists, ever since Roger and Lytton died, have been jumping on it,—I see red: which colour is not favourable to criticism: an art that should be impersonal; and so I wont tell you what I think of your article, for this second reason too. The first however, is the more important (to use a Bloomsbury word) I’ve read almost all Baring; and to sum up our differences would, as I say, use more time and brain power than are mine.

Lord! how I loathe Wokingism.

Yr V.

Berg

[]

3161: To Vanessa Bell

Friday [14 August 1936]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

Might we come to tea on Thursday next—20th—which is I think Quentin’s birthday—instead of this Sunday?

I’ve been rather headachy, and as we have Graham tomorrow, and Sally Graves coming on Monday, I think I’d better draw in my horns and have a dull Sunday.

Unless stopped, we will come on Thursday; to which needless to say we look forward with great pleasure.

I sink deeper and deeper in Lynn Linton—and am entirely enthralled.

B.

I suppose you wdn’t come over and paint one afternoon?

Berg

[]

3162: To V. Sackville-West

Thursday 20th Aug. [1936]

Monks House [Rodmell, Sussex]

I’ve been meaning to write and send a cheque for The Foundlings. Now L. tells me he has done both. I wish my cheque had been larger. At the moment I’m rather cheese paring, as I’ve earned so little this year. However I’m getting along at last, and I daresay next year I shall have no excuse for stingyness.

But oh Lord the number of letters that come—(not as much to the point as yours) about the imprisoned, the insulted the injured the builders, the putters down—all wanting money from devils.

Here’s a letter from old Ethel. I get one daily. This time she says she has been asking you why I’m enraged about the abuse of Bloomsbury. God knows what a tale she mayn’t have pitched. The truth was she kept on sniping at By [Bloomsbury] for not admiring M. Baring; after which I let fly, all the more because I wanted an excuse to say nothing about her article, a bad one, on that great master of fiction. And now she seems to think I complain of abuse. Not a bit—not a bit—only of young men who insist upon coming to dinner, and then go away and send me articles in which they deride By: but haven’t the courage to name names. So I daresay, as this had just happened, I wrote too strong; and she’ll have got it wrong; but I can trust to you not to let her make mischief between us.

If Bloomsbury could only smell so strong that nobody would come near Tavistock Sqre, I should be oh so happy. I’ve been oh so happy down here. And we’ve only 7 weeks left.

I wish we could come over—perhaps we may later. At the moment I’m coddling, because when I have to talk,—and people will drop in—then my head aches; and my publishers are as you can imagine publishers would be—jerking my chain a little. That reminds me: did I ever tell you what a magnificent subject I think your Spanish one? My mouth waters: I’m green with envy. And yet I’m so placid and water blooded down here, with long spaces lying out, when its fine, in bed, when it rains, that I feel the oncome of such benignity you wouldn’t know me. Also Bertie Russell has sent us an amazingly interesting memoir in 280,000 words, of his family: which I have to read in 2 days, and to which I must return. Tell me about old Ethel. She is impending—next week, she threatens.

V.

Potto’s old and unaltered affection

Berg

[]

3163: To R. A. Scott James

20th Aug 1936

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Mr Scott James,

I’m afraid I cant manage the article as you suggest for October. I was ill and unable to work this spring, and am now so much behindhand that I cant take on anything more at present. Many thanks for asking me; and best wishes for the Magazine.

Yours sincerely
V. Woolf

Texas

[]

3164: To Ethel Smyth

Saturday [22 Agust 1936]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

Yes, I’ve no doubt I wrote too violently (this refers to By. [Bloomsbury]) and if I’d thought a moment I would have held my pen. I entirely agree that being abused is a compliment. And for the most part I dont turn a hair, accepting it for such (tho’ now and then they rile me about Lytton, whom they pelt with broken bottles persistently). The thing that set me off though was the young man [unidentified] who forced himself on me, in the middle of the morning: talked endlessly: then went off and wrote not only a sneer at By but an account of my dog, chair, cactuses, monkey, in one of the cheap papers. “Queen of Bloomsbury”.

What would interest me though wd. be to know how that word, has crystallised in your aloof and independent mind into the symbol of all you despise: as for example: “I have just been told by … Oh we think M. Baring no good at all.”! I said “Do you mean by we Bloomsbury?” He said “Well you can put it like that—if you like.” “Good God what a “clever” place By. must be, I said. Do they believe in God?” And he said “Why? do you? (a snigger) ES. Yes, but then I dont live in By. So know no better.” I dont think I locate my prejudices so accurately. But enough: enough: What I wanted to say—no time though—is that yr. article raised so many questions about the art of writing I can’t dig them up without a pickaxe and patience—Both lacking. So will only ask one simple and material question: why do you write of MB. [Baring] as if he stood in need of recognition, when in fact, as I hear, his sales are large, his reputation great, and his public devoted? I thought the permeation of that protest as if you were special pleading on his behalf, coloured the article rather too strongly. Now I wont say, as I have it on the tip of my tongue, that “recognition”—no I wont say it, more especially as L. is waiting to take this to the post. Abuse By. as much as you like, and I take this second sheet—a proof of health, for I’ve scarcely written a letter—all cards—mostly illegible—to say how you grow on me. Isnt that odd? Absence; thinking of some one—then the real feeling has room to expand. like the sights that one only sees afterwards: Is that peculiar to me, or common to all? Anyhow, lying in bed, or listlessly turning books I could hardly read, over and over again I’ve thought of you; and dwelt on your affection—Lord, how that pleased me, what you said to Dotty [Wellesley]—as if it were a red sun I could see and feel hot through the mist. And what a superb friend you are! telling all those people not to bother me! So many of my friends insist that I ought to do this and that—you, on the contrary accept me, and dont fritter and fuss me. And then how I adore your broad human bottom—how it kindles me to think of you, worried and bothered, yet lunching at a party of 12, and I’m convinced keeping the table in an uproar; and plunging like a blue Italian Dolphin into all the nets of the Sitwells; always battling and battering—and with it all keeping a mushroom sensibility intact. But enough: as—who was it?—would say. What I should like would be that you should come one of these days to Wotton [Sussex], and let us meet calmly and quietly—The packed visit is what gives my brain a screw. Still I’m so much better, I daresay it could stand a screw.

Now what else? Oh if you’ve time some day tell me about Dotty. I’ve always wondered how the Vita affair went with her. My relations were a good deal obscured by Vita—I mean, she left Dotty originally, I think, mostly on my account.

A dull letter this: but its the first I’ve written with any flow these 3 months.

V.

Here is the post: a letter from Colefax inviting herself to dine in August: but so harried, selling her home [Argyll House], one can’t but pity her.

To show theres no black blood between us, restore the remark in the article. Please—This is a serious request. The remark about By word important.

Berg

[]

3165: To Ethel Smyth

Wednesday [26 August 1936]

Monks House [Rodmell, Sussex]

I was horribly sad—this is genuine—and reluctant, when L. wrote you that post card. (It was the result of an argument: I wanted to see you: Nessa and Leonard both argued against me). The fact is, I’d been straining to finish a wad of proofs, and thus brought on another bout. the very day your wire came.

I said, and I think truly, that to see you for a short time would do me nothing but good. But then as they said, suppose it brings on another headache, whats the good of that? Still, I believe I’m right.

But we must leave it. And I know, Ethel dear, that you understand my position without my saying it—how I have to consider the appalling nuisance I am to L: angel that he is.

If I should overcome him, before Sunday, I’ll telephone: but I wont try to over persuade him: Anyhow we’ve made our peace about By. I should never have fired up into a fury if I hadn’t been on the strain. And what was the use of the strain?—for its clearly impossible to be done by mid September: so the book must wait till after Xmas.

I think myself you greatly exaggerate, as far as I am concerned, the effect of Maurice’s religion. I read him purely, as I hope I read everybody. After all, does Dante’s religion make any difference, or Miltons? No I think all convictions, if honestly held as M. holds his, strengthen the brew; what would L’s writing be without his fanaticism? It works itself into the fibre, and one cant exclude it, isolate it, or criticise it. It becomes part and parcel of the whole. No, I should never feel any grudge against Ms. religion in his novels; and indeed, until you laid that emphasis on it I had swallowed it down unconsciously. It is Maurice as an artist, seer, creator, that escapes me. Still, as I’ve long known, I’m always in blinkers about contemporary work. I cannot widen my eyes sufficiently from my own preoccupations; the glare of my own wretched little farthing candle is always in my eyes. I hardly trust my view as reader of novels to the Hogarth Press now. Think how little I appreciate [D. H.] Lawrence;—I give way to you completely. and only register the fact of my blindness. Of course the autobiography [The Puppet Show of Memory] I enjoyed immensely: but thats different: that doesn’t come across my line of vision. I see it as it is. Oh when this book is over (or torn up) I shall do nothing but see my friends. I long for human intercourse. Yes, you’ll have too much of me. And to think I might be seeing you today! Without flattery (trust me) there are few things I should like better, Ethel dear. And perhaps I shall before you go.

V.

Berg

[]

3166: To V. Sackville-West

27th Aug [1936]

Monks House [Rodmell, Sussex]

Bless my soul—how little you know me. Witness: “I had just been thinking how much I wanted to write to you”—and you refrained, because you thought my old fashioned manners wd. make me answer. What in the world should I like more than letters—daily letters, long letters—letters written on the top of the Pink Tower with the swans circling? Lord love you, as Rupert Brooke used to say—no it was Lorlovaduk,—I wont answer. So do pluck a swan, and dip its feather in green ink. Do. do: and dont accuse me of being a frozen fountain if I dont answer.

Oh Ethel! I could not face her, though she was passing our door. Her letters sound as if she was in a furious droning mood, like a gale, all on one note—Every morning I get one. Now she’s battering away about Maurice Baring, with odd shots at Bloomsbury; but Maurice Maurice all the time. The wind may change, but it always blows now. Deafness I daresay. Its the solitude; she cant get rid of her mind in talk: or rather, isn’t checked.

I’m better: but drove myself into another headache trying to finish proofs: failed; so thank God, cant send them in time to print this autumn. But never again will I send a long book straight to the printer without reading the type through. The mess, the repetition, the diffusion, the carelessness were, and still are, inconceivable. At my age, to try these freaks—however, I’m slowly pulling up weeds.

Yes, I think we must come over [to Sissinghurst]. And you will write to counteract Ethel. Excuse scrawl: lying down.

V.

I’m sunk in the Russells. Do tell me about any relations of yours. 1700 pages, but fascinating

Did you ever hear tell of the Amberleys—Bertie Russell’s parents? I’m as bad as Ethel and her Barings. Any old gossip? She’s a fascinating problem—was a Stanley

Berg

[]

3166a: To Julian Bell

Aug. 30th 1936 [on the reverse of the sheet headed 28th July 1936]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

I am sending these three scraps of letters as Nessa says you are now back in your university. I’m dining there tonight—the great play night—and shall ask for a sight of your travel letters. Lord, I wish you were going to be eating one of the innumerable little pale grouse, like last year. You can’t think how we miss you. The bottom of sense and salt is out of our world without that monster at the table. As for news—the Braithwaites were over here last week; he and she. It’s a secret, but financed by Maynard she is to start a theatre in Lewes, and has already found a Lewes society of trades people who act as Shakespeare acted. A nice hard woman—Margaret; not too much refinement as I gather; but plenty of dash and go, and I’m to go over to Brighton if my head piece, much strained by proofs, allows, and hear the provincial theatre gossip.

Old Richard was all Cambridge in one pill. How I love it and respect it and deride it! The antics, the mannerisms, the sublime remoteness from pop guns and alarms. Why should there be another war for forty years he said. I see no signs of it in the Great Court. But the Great Court is a hive of minor conflicts; we had some fine gossip about Peter and Prudence [Lucas], and the Rothschilds and good and reality and what is a candle when not alight. That is what I find so wholesome in the present state of the atmosphere. That is still charged with gunpowder. If you see the Times you will read letter after letter signed by us all. But this I leave to Leonard and also Quentin’s speech here, which was a masterpiece of cogent reason, clear statement and sense, though he dropped his notes on the way. We also had Sally Graves and her young man Chilvers in the air ministry who said that all his office regret Bullock and think him ill treated—the victim of Geddes ill temper. Sally I like and hope to introduce to you. But she is steeped in the bitter waters—politics I mean; can’t look at a flower or hear a tune. Oh how I pity the young—how much they miss; how nice they are; how much material will be blown up by Hitler that might have made nice parties like the one I’m going to tonight.

All the same it’s been nice here; very quiet; L. reading all the morning in the garden; hot now; the corn cut; lovely burnt autumn fields. A kingfisher on the brooks; and only the hum of a plane to remind us now and then of the future. But Clive, who is affability itself, says we grossly exaggerate; so does Maynard who has applied himself to Newton’s papers and feels as I do that we could dally out a life time reading—he Newton, I any old memoir.

Bertie Russell has sent us 2000 pages of his parents memoirs which we are to publish. A fascinating book, if a book; rather a sweeping of old drawers, but very impressive as a picture of aristocratic adventure in the eighties. His father was the first man to break the bonds of society; so was ostracised; and his mother was stoned for sitting on a platform at Bristol with the birth controllists and women suffragists.

Love from us both. And when you can write. Excuse these fragments. I must change for the party; and play a game of bowls first.

Virginia

King’s College, Cambridge. Modern Fiction Studies. Vol. 30. Summer 1984.

[]

3167: To Vanessa Bell

Monday. [31 August 1936]

Monks House [Rodmell, Sussex]

Here is this.

Congratulations to all the actors last night. We thought it the most brilliant of all the performances. If anyone wants to come and play bowls, the garden is open.

B

Berg

[]

3168: To Vanessa Bell

Wednesday [2 September 1936]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

Many thanks for Julians letters which we will return.

Would you like to bring the Bussys [Dorothy and Janie] to tea on Sunday? If so, tell Quentin; and remind him that he’s dining with us tomorrow. I think my head has completely recovered, owing to the party.

About the cheque: I can easily afford it. Should I have to scrap my book, or should it be a complete failure, I would give you warning. But I’ve lots of other ideas for books up my sleeve. All I mean is, I would always give you six months warning if I found I couldn’t manage it. But as I say, my head piece has now revived. so I hope to go on.

B.

If you’ve finished Holman Hunt would you bring it, sometime: no hurry

Berg

[]

3169: To Ethel Smyth

4th Sept. [1936]

Monks House [Rodmell, Sussex]

About Maurice Baring—the article I mean: no of course I wasn’t in a fit state to judge, therefore only hazarded an opinion, I’m sorry you handed it on, in any form, to him. But perhaps you didn’t: I hope not. Of course, too, I recognise, even I, his merits, and probably was sincere, if rather titivated up for an author’s ears in what I wrote to him about C. The thing is, I think he’s a very difficult case: and I should want a great deal of time and patience were I to disengage my true opinion from my flurry of surface feelings. Thats all about MB. But please dont let him think for a moment that I’m hostile. No: not in the least. (And him personally I always particularly like—find him curiously refreshing and sympathetic.) Again, thats all.

Well I lay low, saw nobody and am better again—much better: indeed, when this book is done, I expect a year or two of the highest health: I generally get a spurt on after one of these collapses. Thats what pulls me through—And psychologically they have their advantages—one visits such remote strange places, lying in bed. If I can tho’, I shall plod on this month; and finish, if I can, down here.

Droitwich must be the very hell. I had a halfbrother [George Duckworth] who used to visit it after the London season; when he’d earlier drunk every night too well But thats not your case. A very nice letter from Vita, who asks me to Sht. [Sissinghurst] And if I can I may try a day there. And Joyce is engaged …

It was an effort to think I might have had a good brush with you and did not. No grammar in that sentence. No cohesion in my mind. And are you fond of me? And tell me how you feel, physically.

V.

Berg

[]

3170: To Vanessa Bell

6th Sept. Sunday [1936]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

We were very sorry not to see you, but the rain was terrific, and kept Hugh Jones away, though not the Wolves.

We should be delighted if you would all come on Thursday when Jones is coming (not Mrs) We go to London on Tuesday. I hope Quentins all right. Here is the wicked brats [Angelica] cheque: Why wicked? Because she didn’t help me out with my brother in law the stockbroker [Herbert Woolf] who looks like the figure of the pale horse, and doesn’t even whinny. When Jews are glum the effect is something prodigious. And the cistern leaked, and the frigidaire went wrong, and the meat has gone bad today and had to be buried. And Louies [Everest] child has been bitten by a dog.

Look at this from the Sunday Times. I think they might have mentioned us as they put in George.

B.

Berg

[]

3171: To Dorothy Bussy

11th Sept [1936]

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

My dear Dorothy,

Is there any chance that you could give us a night here before you go—the tea was so transient. Monday 21st is the day that would suit us best. I wish we could ask Simon [Bussy] too—not that I suppose he’d come—but at the moment we have only one spare room—and thats a very small one: and our cuisine is supplied by a daily woman, I warn you. Still if you’d face these disabilities, it would be a delight to both of us to see you again. (I’m supposing you’re not here in October: otherwise we could fix a later day.)

yr aff
VW

Texas

[]

3172: To V. Sackville-West

15th Sept [1936]

Monks House [Rodmell, Sussex]

1. Yes, I should be sorry, very, if Ethel died.

2. Might we come over on the 24th? Sometime in the afternoon? At least, might we plan this, and if necessary, I mean if the cursed headache should descend, put you off?

I’m ever so much better, in fact in robust health six days out of seven. Only the seventh might be the 24th. I’m pulling rather a long face to Ethel though, as I find these strenuous interviews, and she cant help it, the devil. Dont let on, I mean, that I am all right: dont draw too rosy a picture, or I shall be abused, in sheet after sheet, … no, perhaps thats unfair. She’s been extraordinarily considerate, and warm hearted.

3. The Amberleys are ducal. Amberleys father was Lord John Russell, son of a duke of Bedford. And I come across some Lady … Sackville West, his cousin. But Bertie [Russell] is lunching here, and I shall get all the family gossip.

Oh I’ve so many books in my head that I want to write. Every morning, as I turn wearily to my proofs, I think of a new one, and curse the old.

So dont suggest that I should take on your masterpiece [Pepita], fascinating though it sounds.

Let me have a card, if not a letter, about 24th.

V.

How is Sibyl [Colefax]?

She invited herself here that week end; and I lied to her.

Berg

[]

3173: To Ethel Smyth

18th Sept. [1936]

Monks House [Rodmell, Sussex]

Yes, I’ve been a beast not to write, but then thats a compliment to you, for I feel, anyhow Ethel won’t mind. She’ll ponder the obliquities of Virginia with an understanding mind. I’ve had such a burst of health this past 10 days, I didn’t know myself; and used every ounce of it on proofs [The Years], in the wild belief that I might yet finish in time for the autumn. So I didn’t write a single note. Now though marvellously fresh, I’ve used up my fiction vein; cant see a word I’ve written clearly, and so must stop again. (What interrupts more than anything is the pressure of other books I want to write. Thats the curse of my brain: it’s either dry or flood—no medium). But you asked a practical question, which I will put to L. the moment I can catch him. I’m always losing him in the garden. He’s up a tree, or behind a hedge.

I’ve not been to Vita, but plan to go next week, for the afternoon; a plan that can be broken. What else? O The Prelude. Have you read it lately? Do you know, its so good, so succulent, so suggestive, that I have to hoard it, as a child keeps a crumb of cake? And then people say he’s dull! Why have we no great poet? You know thats what would keep us straight: but for our sins we only have a few pipers on hedges like Yeats and Tom Eliot, de la Mare—exquisite frail twittering voices one has to hollow one’s hand to hear, whereas old Wth [Wordsworth] fills the room. Now theyre mending the church. Tap tap tap … it drives me wild, the care of your religion. As irony will have it, my garden room is immediately below the spire.

I read, in a casual way, masses of books. Did I tell you Bertie Russell has sent us, to publish, his fathers and mothers old letters—sweepings of old desks—2,000 pages: so fascinating and tragic, I live almost as much with the Amberleys in the 80ties as here and now. Oh this tap, tap…. And are you better? I can see you floating in a scurf of white brine, unable to sink; but has it unstuck your joints? Last night, being wakeful, I had recourse to Queen Victoria (you, I mean, on the hearthrug) and the immortal lady in the train, who made me laugh aloud in the moonlight. What a gift you have! This is not titivated, nor am I, to you, I think; but genuine. By the way, I was asking myself also, how can Ethel like anything I write? It seems to me, (I am waiting for Leonard) that you cant wholly and truthfully, apart from me as a personality, get anything from those little books. Not if you didn’t know me. When you’ve time one day, tell me honestly about this. It would interest me enormously. Criticism—I honour and respect; but never get, only braying and caterwauling. Whats wrong—whats right.

Here’s L. Yes, he thinks you’re right as far as he can tell. It seems fair. he says.

Oh what a mist is coming over the marsh, and tap tap tap … The Lord must have his house even if V.W. has to pay for it.

Well what a dull distracted letter! But I’m so happy, so well. And you?

V.

Tell me: did you go to Stratford? I thought it almost, perhaps quite, the most moving emotion to be had anywhere—in any place.

Berg

[]

3174: To Elizabeth Robins

20th Sept [1936]

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Miss Robins,

The Hogarth Press have sent me on your letter, and will let you have a copy of the book as soon as it is out. I have been wanting very much to ask if I might come over, or if you would come here. But the summer for various reasons has been very much cut up and distracted, and I have always had to put it off.

Now we are going back again but perhaps you would come and see us in London? Anyhow, we shall be up and down: if I may, I will suggest a time for coming to Brighton on the chance it suits you.

I get to feel so much what you say—that everyone is always interrupting everyone—so that you must say no if it bothers you. Writing is an unsocial occupation; but I respect it in you and very much want to read the results. I read your Ibsen the other day again and enjoyed it immensely. I’ve not read ‘Our Freedom’ but hope it is worth reading.

Yours ever
Virginia Woolf

Sussex

[]

3175: To Stephen Spender

23rd Sept [1936]

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

Dear Stephen,

I was much amused by your post card of the two novelists; and have stuck it in my album.

We are still down here and hope to stay at any rate till the beginning of October, as it is very much nicer here than in London.

I had rather a smash up, largely owing to the uproar of that town, in June, and spent most of July in bed. However, I’m all right now.

Leonard wants me to say that he is very glad that you confirm him to some extent in the great hotel food question. On the whole I think he got the worst of it—but he still holds out. We found Cornish cooking very good this spring. I hope we shall see you when we’re back.

yrs
V.W.

Texas

[]

3176: To V. Sackville-West

Thursday [24 September 1936]

Monks House [Rodmell, Sussex]

Mitzi is perfectly well and sends her love. We didn’t bring her because she had been feeling the cold. so L. said. She confides all symptoms to him. Today she has eaten 40 worms, and turned head over heels. It was a great treat seeing you—and Lord! what a setting! This house seemed like a snailshell afterwards. And, far from being tired, the jaunt set me up. I feel heavenly well, like a horse thats had a holiday out at grass. L. and Percy have been planting your poplars. How you shower, like a goddess, from your cornucopia! Oh Lord I cant write, but am very fond; so’s Potto and lets have many many jaunts.

Send me a card from Skye [Scotland].

Pipe lighter still the joy of my life.

T.O. [turn over]

I came back to find 6 pages from Bob Nichols to say “You are Stevie Smith. No doubt of it. And Yellow Paper is far and away your best book.”

Berg

[]

3177: To Ethel Smyth

Sunday [4 October 1936]

Monks House [Rodmell, Sussex]

Yes, I continue very well, and I hope you do too. I began a letter—cant finish. Showers of letters have descended which I must answer. We go back I think next Sunday Press is becoming exacting. Apple’s being picked. Very fine: have done a good deal of work

V.

Berg

[]

3178: To Violet Dickinson

6th Oct [1936]

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

My Violet,

What a treat—to get a letter from you. Unexpected, unsolicited. I was thinking of you, and even saying aloud that Bowyer Nichols had been in love with you, and wondering if he were alive or dead. This was because of a letter—a cracked crazy letter from Bob Nichols: and so I wish you would finish the story, and tell me if Bowyer was in love with you, and if he is alive: or dead. Better still, sit down this instant and write your memoirs.

Last summer I was walking in the churchyard behind your house [Mortimer Street], and wondering which was your window; the one in the drawingroom where we sat.

Bobby Dugdale, whom I’ve been skipping, certainly ought to be annotated by you, and served up by Leonard; but when I showed him the book, he gave one sniff and returned to his apple trees. Its a bumper crop this year, and even I have been standing in the middle of a tree, with the trug [Sussex garden-basket] beside me.

I’ve been having a holiday from novel writing, and all writing, to ease off those infernal headaches, which kept coming back the moment I tried to correct a proof: now we’re going back to London very vigorous; but there doesn’t seem much point in novels, with the whole world gone crazy.

Yes, Fritham was a school; and the ponies did nibble; and there was a deer killed outside the house. Weren’t you there? with Theodore Ll. Davies, who fell off his horse? Oh dear how long ago it all is, and father’s famous cup of coffee!

Love from us both
Sp.

Berg

[]

3179: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Oct 9th [1936]

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dearest Ottoline,

It was very nice to see your brown ink again. Its an age since we met, as you say. We were in Cornwall; then you were in Ireland; and then in the middle of July we came here. I never knew London more fiendish than last summer. Our room seemed to be the centre of all the howling winds, and distracted and vociferous politicians, till at last I could stand it no longer, and was almost submerged by headache—only mine aren’t headaches, but enraged rats gnawing the nape of my neck. I went to a doctor, at length; but all the comfort I got was that in 20 years, when I’m dead, and dont want a head, they will be able to cure them—its a gland that gets tired, so they say—by injections. At the moment, the cure is too risky, so I had to fall back on old Savage’s prescription—dont write or read or do anything you like doing. This I did all through August, and I’m now perfectly well again. But what a waste and a bore it is!

Now I must set to and correct the proofs of a novel; and start if I can some sort of life of Roger [Fry]. I’ve been going through all the letters, but how to make a life of him I cant conceive. I hope some flash will come: with luck. No, I haven’t read Aldous, or Rosamond, or your friend, the white and voluble slug—Morgan. Have you? Tell me what I must begin upon: if any. I’ve heard as usual contradictory reports, but not much praise.

We’ve been seeing Bertie [Russell]—he suddenly sent us 2000 pages of his parents’ memoirs. We found them absorbing and are going to publish a vast book of them in the spring. So Bertie came here to discuss it, and we went there to his Tower on the downs and made the acquaintance of Peter. I hadn’t seen Bertie for 20 years. What an entrancing mind—but I must leave all this till we meet. We go back next week. And I do hope your headaches are better. But doctors know nothing. I’d far rather have typhoid, appendicitis and influenza than that long drawn misery with all its retinue of despairs and excitements. Perhaps though without our headaches we should be duller. But dont lavish yourself on slugs.

yrs V.

Texas

[]

Letters 3180-3206 (October-December 1936)

3180: To Ethel Smyth

Monday [12 October 1936]

52 Tavistock Square [W.C.1]

Yes, dear Ethel, or Ethel dear, I’m back again. But I must be crazed. I wrote you a long account—a fairly long account—of seeing Vita, and then tore it up, thinking for sure I had written it to you already. And now its stale. But shan’t we some time meet? Why not? I’m having a holiday.

But of course I’m pestered with various things.

Glad Eh. [Williamson] is back: and glad you’re better. and I’ve been seeing all the Wolves, some about to go to Gambia as Governors, and Lord it was hot and noisy and so many different cakes; and now I’m dropping off to sleep. Yes—yes yes. sleep.

Berg

[]

3181: To Ethel Smyth

Thurs: [15th October 1936]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

I rang up last evening and Mary [maid] told me you had fallen and hurt your ankle. The masseur was with you. I’m so sorry, and wont ring up, as I suppose you cant move. Dear, what a bore; and then you’ve rheumatism!—Still what I mean to say is, shant I try to come down [to Woking] and see you one afternoon, or lunch next week—as you mustnt come up—and I could have tea or an hour or two and come home, I shd like it and want to see you.

So let me know.

V.

Perhaps Monday?

Berg

[]

3182: To Ethel Smyth

Saturday [17 October 1936]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Yes, I will come—if you would find it acceptable.

I see there’s a train that gets in at 12.58. Does that hit a bus? Would that reach you in time for lunch?

Then we could talk; then we could be silent; then we could, if you can, walk: if I could be home for dinner.

No champagne needed: no wine at all;

Dear me, yes, how nice (what a niminy piminy little word that is) it’ll be—seeing you again. Excuse my clothes though: I’ve only one dress, and thats full of holes burnt by cigarettes.

V.

Berg

[]

3183: To Ethel Smyth

Tuesday [20th October 1936]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Do you mean London on the 2nd: Liverpool on the 3rd? I hope so: because Monday 2nd would suit: the 3rd I cant manage (mother and brother in law coming). But let me know which. I did enjoy our expedition; sitting in the summer house [at Woking] in the livid storm while you relieved nature—oh and all the rest—Only I rather deplore my egotistic depression—I’m always like a reft mother bear when I’m not writing. And so am already boring my way into Fry papers. But I exaggerate my depression too—tho’ it’s bad, when my head aches, it lifts when it stops. But I dont exaggerate my pleasure, so soon as the 6 months mould had melted, in seeing you—I caught my train and was home almost punctually, a great achievement as we ran it fine: Oh and the champagne! how I liked it. Let me know the day

Berg

[]

3184: To Ethel Smyth

Wednesday [21 October 1936]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Re Umbrella Mystery

I went to Burlington Gardens at 3.20. found umbrella which is no more my umbrella than the planet Jupiter. Went to gallery: walked 4 times round; could not see you. Left my umbrella (as I still think it, tho’ I admit to have found a small rubber ring at top) so am now umbrella-less. I remember I left my umbrella on the ledge of the bookcase in the sitting room; also that I noticed the twin in the hall; therefore was careful to take mine, as I thought. But am now entirely perplexed—for can you have still another cane umbrella—but determined if I go without for ever, not to be landed with that horrid and indeed indecent monstrosity which you left for me: so whats to be done about it? And where were you? I saw Ottoline.

V.

Berg

[]

3185: To Ethel Smyth

Thursday [22 October 1936]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Re Umbrella

This gets worse and worse. I left the monster in the rack with the label round it on which I had written a note to you. Now you say “the monstrosity was gone, and the other there”. Someone must have taken it—and my note. Considering the label was addressed to me this seems pretty cool. But it was such a brute I dont grudge it them. What steps do you wish me to take? Enquiries for it at Burlington Gardens? Further, for curiosities sake, where is your umbrella?

But enough of umbrellas. What can I have said in my hasty note to make you think that my stammered and inadequate description of a very to me exciting experience was all grudge? Of course I meant it. But at the same time, when I come back and find I cant work, depression does seize me; and I thought I had emphasised this, and minimised the sublimity of t’other experience (since of the two depression is the simplest to make other people feel) and thus apologised. But oh dear me, t’other is the real one.

No, I’m not starting any new work; only taking a week by the drawing room fire and ruminating this and that for the future, since I must have a break before reading that vast shuffle of exhausted sentences which I must now mother, alas. And now I think of Roger: now of a Room; now of criticism. But all must wait. More egotism! I’m still torpid like a snake—ah but nothing shall ever again rid me of my moonlit night last August—nothing. That was far more solid than any Room or Roger or Years—I can assure you.

V.

Berg

[]

3186: To Ethel Smyth

Monday [2 November 1936]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Yes I liked it very much—thought it very well Tossed, and a difficult pancake (thats an unsought pun) to turn without breaking. One phrase seemed to me so good. I should have marked it, if I ever marked books. And now I cant find it—about marble—I liked the word ‘marble’ in that context. But thats a detail. Now and again it wobbled but righted itself. No 5th wont do, because we’re going down to Lewes to see the fire works. Always meant to, never have. A gorgeous affair, and we’re joining one of the processions. But I’m sorry. Oh dear, how unhappy you sound in that book, and how very cold and distant other people are. But not me—not altogether.

V.

Umbrella statement enclosed.

Re Umbrella.

You said that I had taken yours.

Would I bring it to B. G? [Burlington Gardens]

You would leave mine in the rack.

Although certain that my U. was my U, I was slightly dashed by your mention of an india rubber band: which I had not known of, but found.

Off I went therefore to BG with my U. Directly I saw the U in the rack I knew it was none of mine.

Therefore I took both upstairs to confront you with them. I could not see you.

So I came down, wrote a statement on the label, left my U. and the false one in the rack, so that you might see for yourself.

You, meanwhile had come down, and seeing only one U—with a cane handle—in the rack, had assumed it was the one I had left for you, and gone off with it. This you sent me by post. I then realised that you had taken a strangers, and therefore returned to the BG. with the stranger: was told a gent. [Mr Cohen] was very angry and had gone to the police; but recovered both my U and the monster. Then I took the monster to Mr Cohen in Fitzroy Sqre. and retained what I had all along known was my own U.

Did you get yours?

And what has happened to Mr Cohen’s?

Berg

[]

3187: To Molly Maccarthy

8th Nov. [1936]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Molly,

What a devil you are! Of course I’m delighted that there should be another meeting—I dont mean that. But why should I read? Its not my turn. I’m almost memoirless. Can’t you persuade yourself or Desmond [MacCarthy] or Maynard [Keynes]? However, since I see you’re in a fix and fury I’ll try to read some brief, rough notes, if I can find any. Only someone else must form the staple joint.

And will you and Desmond dine here first? 7.30 Dec. 1st. We shall expect you.

But if I give tongue this time, I shall remain silent till my 70th birthday, which is not far off. Those are my terms.

In Haste,

yr V.W.

Mrs Michael MacCarthy

[]

3188: To Ethel Smyth

Thursday [12 November 1936]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Of course come to lunch on Saturday if you’re up. The nuisance is, not that we’ve people, but that we’re going out almost at once—say 2.30. But lunch could be at 1. Let me know.

I’m entirely vegetable at the moment After a long walk—all over London—alone; then political discussion; man here; then sleep.

Sorry about the dog.

V.

Glad about the wine.

Berg

[]

3189: To Julian Bell

14th Nov. 1936

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square [W.C.1]

My dearest Julian,

I dreamt of you so vividly last night that I must take my typewriter and write, though its not my turn. No. Its your turn. But then I get news of you from Nessa; and so I wont stand on rights. Why does it become so difficult to write, when one dreams? And lord how charming you were in my dream—you had come back; and we were all sitting in the studio. Soon that will be a fact. And I wish it were one here and now. Because how can I tell you all the news?

Let me see—since we came back we have been on the run and on the talk almost incessantly. I have seen the young poets—Spender and Plomer, and been induced to subscribe to the young poets paper, The Left review. That shows you that politics are still raging faster and fiercer. I’ve even had to write an article for the Daily Worker on the Artist and politics. Aldous [Huxley] is on the rampage with his peace propaganda; and Leonard is trying to convince the labour party that the policy of isolation is now the only one. Berties book convinced him. But then when it comes to making a practical suggestion, which will convince Mr Gillies, Berties book is not much use. However, I leave this out of my letters—that and Spain, which is now the most flaming of all the problems, since no doubt you’d rather hear gossip from me.

George Barnes—d’you know him? He came to tea, for they want us to help them—the BBC that is—to keep in touch with intellect. They’ve asked me to give them a potted version of Spenser. I liked him;—Barnes—but couldn’t remember his private life, save that Ann loves Dadie [Rylands], and is now desolated at being cut off from him. George seemed to me a dour, honest fellow; pausing over his sentences; old fashioned; 19th century; earnest. No mention though of Dadie or Ann. Charles Mauron is now over, on business with the Intellectual libertarians. He will dine with us tomorrow. And by the way I think Rogers and your Mallarmé is a masterpiece. I think Maurons introduction one of the best pieces of criticism I’ve read this blue moon. He’s so clear, so subtle and so witty all in one. I’m sure all the bother has been worth while, for its a fascinating book—and Roger’s case about Mallarmé seems to me proved. I shall read it carefully; now I’ve only dipped. The Times lit sup; praised it highly yesterday. And the translation reads admirably. K. John has been highly intelligent as far as I can judge.

That brings me to the present state of literature; which in my case is to the effect that I’ve cut down my book [The Years] from close on 700 to 420 pages; its pretty bad; but I can’t help it; and though doubtful (genuinely) if its worth publishing, shall publish, on Leonard’s advice. I’m so sick of it I can’t judge. Now I’m free, almost, to tackle Roger, and shall try to get the papers in order.

What are you writing? What are your plans altogether? Quentin told me you mean to stand for Parliament. I dont see how any one can keep out of it as things are. Except Nessa and Duncan all our friends are in it—even Adrian, who deprecates it, but still marched all through the East end the other day with Karin in the anti-fascist procession. As for Quentin he seems to have mastered the art of debate, and much impressed L. the other night when he gave an address to the Rodmell labour party. What a charming, detached, well poised dark horse with a whole bran pie of interesting buried objects in him he is! I like my nephews and nieces. Ann [Stephen] is so strenuous with meetings that she can’t see us any time this term she says; but I hope to get her to stay at Christmas. And Judith [Ann’s younger sister], Bertie Russell says, has a real solid strong philosophical mind.

Monday Charles [Mauron] dined with us last night, and talked about you. He says for Gods sake don’t leave China and come to fight in France—in which I think he is right; but no doubt he has said so already. So I wont go on. I liked him very much. He’s a real humorous vigorous little man, and we talked about Roger and he’s going to let me have all his letters—over a hundred, he says. Today—a dull drizzling day—Lord Cecil is coming to tea, to talk about Spain I think. He too is a nice man—there are many nice men; why are men in the mass so detestable? This morning I got a packet of photographs from Spain all of dead children, killed by bombs—a cheerful present. Privately we keep up our spirits. I take tea with Nessa—my great resource; and old Duncan stumbles over his words and Angelica takes the winds of March with beauty. But lord, what a career—acting. Sally Graves is marrying a dull man called Chilvers; and you should have married her.

Yes—tell me, what your amorous entanglements are? I swear I wont reveal them. What about the Chinese ladies? Are you wanting to come home? What about a book on China? We’re having a bad season; no one buys fiction. L. is getting on with his second volume, and I think of a new book daily. Peter Lucas attacks Tom [Eliot] as usual, but he says for the last time. And Yeats praises Dotty. We are all very well, and look forward to Christmas. And I will write again, and so do you, if you can. A Chinese envelope is a very nice sight, even though your pen is—well, a great black spider. L. has written he says, and we both send our old loves across the many seas.

Virginia

Quentin Bell

[]

3190: To Carlton Wells

19th Nov. 1936

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

My dear Mr Wells,

It is very good of you to send me the copy of my father’s article “The Study of Literature.”

I agree with you in thinking it a very good one. We have often considered whether it would be advisable to reprint some of the articles you mention. We have a box of them, which were not included in his published works. But as he went through them all, when he was deciding which to publish, and rejected them, we have always thought that it was better to respect his own judgment. He may have been too severe; but the fact is that he did not wish them to be reprinted. Nor should I wish to reprint my Times article on him. It was rather a formal piece of work, done rather against my own wish.

But I am glad to think that you are interested in his work, and make it known to your students. Although the sale of such books as his must be small, it continues to be considerable over here, seeing how long ago my father wrote.

With many thanks for your courtesy,

yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

I should of course be delighted to see your bibliography, if you have a spare copy

Carlton Wells

[]

3191: To R. W. Chapman

20th Nov 36

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

Dear Mr Chapman,

Many thanks for sending me the Persuasion chapters. I am very glad to have them.

I have often thought of writing an article on the coarseness of J.A. The people who talk of her as if she were a niminy piminy spinster always annoy me. But I suppose I should annoy them.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Sold at Sotheby’s, July 1978

[]

3192: To Violet Dickinson

24th Nov. [1936]

52 Tavistock Sqre. [W.C.1.]

My Violet,

Yes of course—what are the letters? It sounds most exciting. Do send them—anytime: and we will read them with eagerness. Letters and memoirs are my delight—how much better than novels!

I saw Lord Bob [Cecil] the other day, but not Nelly [his wife]—and he said you were going to stay with him. Isnt he a charming man—and now so mellow and rubicund. And I often think of you and Beatrice—and wish I could send my love to her through the air so as not to embarrass her. She too—what a nice woman—but I mustnt run on.

Looking forward to the letters.
Sp.

Berg

[]

3193: To Quentin Bell

[late-November 1936]

Typewritten

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C..1]

Dearest Quentin,

I forgot to give you this the other day. But I should be very grateful for any criticisms. It is very cramped and limited; but the difficulty is that I suppose one can’t write at any greater length. If you would note any thing that could be said more emphatically, in the margin, I wish you would. And would you send it back, as I haven’t got a copy. I would willingly re-write it, if you could block out a different line of argument.

V.

Quentin Bell

[]

3194: To Ethel Smyth

Sunday [29 November 1936]

52 T[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

1) I was much impressed by Mme de Polignac: thought her reserved, distinguished, not an oyster to open with one flick of the knife. And so handsome.

2) N Boulanger (this is secret) was the one who most interested me: wanted to talk to her: but couldnt:

3) C. St John has written to L. about the book. And he’s told her we must wait to see if the series fails. Its been a very bad year with the Press (dont say so, tho’)

4 But I didnt ‘hate’ V’s book. I thought it good hack work. L. says her St Joan done for us is quite admirable for its purpose.

4) No I cant be in on Tuesday:

5) I’m reading all Gibbon, to see if I’ll do his centenary for the Times—and other jobs: and multitudes and multitudes of people

Oh yes I did enjoy hearing you hold forth—I like your spoken English so much. And your great hat and your great head. Mlle Boulanger seemed to me a thoroughbred. Shabby wh. I like Too much food I thought. And is old Ronald really—well, d’you find him interesting?

No more. In a devils own rush

V.

Berg

[]

3195: To Violet Dickinson

2nd Dec 36

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

My Violet,

This is just and only to acknowledge the great parcel which I found in the hall yesterday. I was in the devils own rush, had only time to snip it open, took out the Peacock—has the bird brought back memories!—and then, expecting the letters of some 18th Century Eden, found my own! Oh dear, oh dear! I’ve only had time for one dip and no reflections, but hope for a quiet country week end and will write then.

Only I ask you, why send back the one thing I ever gave you? The Peacock? As for the letters, how could you have the patience to bind and keep all those childish scribbles? Is she nice, that flyaway girl? I can barely bring myself to look; but will soon.

Dear dear, what can I give you in return?

But I’m so weighed down with various bothers—letters, MSS and so on—tonight that I’ll wait. This is only to say that the parcel came safe and thanks; as usual

Sp.

Berg

[]

3196: To Elizabeth Robins

3rd Dec [1936]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

Dear Miss Robins,

I am afraid tomorrow is impossible—we go down to Monks House directly after luncheon. Then we have a nephew [Quentin] staying and a Labour Party meeting and come back early on Sunday. But we shall be down for 2 or 3 weeks at Christmas. Might we come over then? Or will you suggest another day here—which I would do everything to keep free?

You said you were sending me something to read—I still wait.

yrs
Virginia Woolf

P.S.1 A man who was mending our gramophone said something about a Miss Robinson ringing up—you, I suppose.

P.S.2 I wrote this on Thursday night and forgot to send it. Here are the stamps—because I telephoned.

Sussex

[]

3197: To Violet Dickinson

Dec. 6th [1936]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My Violet,

It was extremely good of you to keep and bind up so much better than they deserved all those scattered fragments of my very disjected and egotistic youth. Do you like that girl? I’m not sure that I do, though I think she had some spirit in her, and certainly was rather ground down harshly by fate. I’m glad Angelica hasn’t to go through all her Aunt did by her age. At points I became filled with such a gust from her tragic past, I couldn’t read on. Letters seem more than anything to keep the past—out it comes, when one opens the box. And so much I’d forgotten.

All I beg of you is dont let anybody else read those letters. Should I ever write my own memoirs there are some scenes and a few sentences I should like to quote: but I don’t suppose a memoir-writing fit will fall on me. As John Bailey must have said, letters aren’t written nowadays: compare these with the 18th Century: what jerks and spasms they come in.

But one thing emerges whole and lucid—how very good you were to me, and how very trying I was—all agog, all aquiver: and so full of storms and rhapsodies. Shall I get the Press to do them up soundly and send them to Burnham Wood?

On dear me, the Silver Peacock perches on my book case, and makes me think I have no right to it. Was it a present from George? [Duckworth]—and now George is underground [d. 1934]. But I’m glad you’re on top; and still holding in your kind yet searching eye the memory of Hyde Park Gate and its family.

I’d altogether forgotten those old drawings.

Well, thank you for everything—if I were to write out all I mean by that, I should need many many pages.

Sp.

Berg

[]

3198: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Dec. 8th [1936]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

Dearest Ottoline,

The young man, John Graham, whom I told you about, would, of course, be overjoyed if you let him come and see you, or to a teaparty: but I in no way committed you. This is only to give you his address:

10 Burgess Hill
Hampstead

He is nice, and modest, not immensely intelligent—a schoolmaster at the moment—wants to write, was a soldier and a champion runner, but has turned literary. Thats I think all. There I leave it, having done my Christian duty by him at least. And please don’t take any sort of trouble—or answer this.

yr V.W.

Texas

[]

3199: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

[10 December 1936]

Postcard

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.]

We will send you a copy of John Graham’s book, but dont trouble to acknowledge—its about his cigarette making in South America.

Many thanks. Yes I agree about the lovers.

V W

This is what we saw in Holland.

Texas

[]

3200: To Elizabeth Robins

Dec. 13th 1936

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

Dear Miss Robins,

Of course we shall be delighted to read your typescript. Please send it as it is, and dont wait to have it done in triplicate. We will read it and give you any advice we can with great pleasure. If you could see the three foot wad of manuscript I have this evening been tumbling through, you would understand that the prospect of reading something by you—something written by a human hand—has its seduction!

We go down to Rodmell next Friday I think and shall be there if we can 2 or 3 weeks; so we hope to come over and see you at Brighton. Then we can discuss the book by word of mouth. The page you have sent interests me very much: and I am, genuinely and sincerely, anxious to read the whole.

Yours
Virginia Woolf

Sussex

[]

3201: To John H. Thompson

[17 December 1936]

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

Dear Mr Thompson,

Many thanks for your letter. I am afraid that I cannot accept your invitation to contribute to Signatures as my book will be out early this spring.

Yours sincerely,
Virginia Woolf

J. Howard Woolmer

[]

3202: To Ethel Smyth

Christmas Eve [1936]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, near Lewes, Sussex.

Well Ethel thats a surprise—shows how purblind I am—I mean I thought you must have hated that stiff cold little lunch—All my fault. I ought never to ask people to lunch, or to lunch out. My brains are so addled by one o’clock after a morning in the basement [Tavistock Square] among my verbiage I neither see nor hear: and felt guilty, since I think you came out of your way. And then you say you “enjoyed” it! No, tea or dinner; as long as lamps are lit, and my illusions cover tea pots with an inch of running water—thats all right. Not the implacable prose of midday—Yes: I’m very sorry about the dog. So’s Leonard. And I’ve little else to say. I’m deep in Gibbon: have to read him, and then write him, and should like then to dash off a whole covey of little articles. Its as cold as an ice house, and as bright as a fairy palace. Which reminds me, for the image is theatrical, did you, or did you not, know Elizabeth Robins? Actress, suffragette? about 70 I guess: a woman with a past, who’s just again, after 20 years, bobbed up: and I think she’s rather a thick scored interesting volume: and I must go to Brighton and dine with her: and would like a few hints beforehand. But I think I asked you this before. She has—how nice and encouraging!—a very high opinion of me.

Again: is it to you I owe a mysterious present—a book about elephants?—It came unheralded; and the writing on the cover might be yours. Only can it be? These odd gifts always come this time of year. But I’m off to see Gibbons grave in a Sussex Churchyard. Do you, like me, when you’re writing about some one, entirely forget all else; and ferret out every token even 30 miles away? Yet 2 weeks ago I never gave him a thought. Now I think and dream and live in the August shade. If only I could write like that too! Or dont you admire him? No telling—you admire M.B. [Baring] of course—my most shadowy writer—his page is like a nice white sheet across which a fly has gently meandered with legs in the ink. This I put in from a wholly Christian wish to annoy. I like making cats roar. Now roar. And also you admire Dottys [Wellesley] poems! Oh my God!

V.

Berg

[]

3203: To Janet Case

Christmas Eve 1936

Monks House, Rodmell [Sussex]

My dear Janet,

I was very glad to get a letter from you, but very sorry to hear that you’re lying on a sofa, ill. I’d not heard of it—following you in the Manchester Guardian I thought you were up and about. I’m so distressed to think of it. But please do get well, because I want to drive over and see you.

Last May we weren’t so very far from you, driving to Cornwall, through Ringwood, only I said to Leonard, Nothing is more hateful than visitors dropping in, also we had to push on: also after a long grind in London—oh so many people—fretful authors—distracted politicians—and a vast wad of proofs of a novel [The Years]—I had the familiar headache and sleeplessness, which dont lead to pleasant habits in callers. So we spent a very vegetable summer, mostly down here, I lying in the garden. Now I’ve done the book, but as I had to cut out 200 pages, with a head like an old dry sponge, its a very bad book, much too long still, and I dont advise you even to look at it. But I’m ashamed of these grumbles, considering how much you’ve had to stand: and still do—as I remember without a grumble at all.

And I’ve been thinking so much of you this past month, that if thought were visible you’d have seen something luminous in the middle of the laurel bush. (is it laurel? I forget.)

Old Violet Dickinson, whom you may remember—the 6ft 2 woman, with a lot of chairs and dogs—suddenly sent me 2 huge volumes of my own old letters, from Hyde Park Gate mostly; and there your name so often occurred, and I could see you coming up to my room at the top of the house and saying You’ve not done any work! However, in spite of that, how very kind to me you were! And what a bore I must have been, besieging you at Windmill Hill [Hampstead], and telling you about my proposals of marriage! I think the young now have easier lives than we had, but then I don’t believe they have such affection as I had, and have, for Janet Case. Nessa’s Angelica, aged 17, told me the other day that she thought we—Nessa and myself—had had much more interesting lives than she has, because she has always had everything she wanted: I wonder if its true. Anyhow she’s a lovely sea-nymph, and going to be an actress.

You see I’m wandering on, sitting over a log fire with Leonard reading history for his book [After the Deluge], and the black and white spaniel [Sally] in its basket beside him. I’m glad to hoick him away from his eternal meetings—Labour party; Fabian Research, Intellectual Liberty, Spanish Medical Aid—oh dear, how they poach on him—what hours he spends with dirty unkempt, ardent, ugly entirely unpractical but no doubt well meaning philanthropists at whom I should throw the coal scuttle after 10 minutes if I were in his place.

Now we have three weeks off, and he prunes his trees, and I read Gibbon, because I’m going to write an essay on him, and ramble over the downs for hours and hours.

How’s Margaret, I wonder? We wanted to go there this summer, but I couldn’t get about much. I liked her house, and in particular a tree outside where she sits—a perfect place we thought, and both of them seemed settled in happily.

Now I must stop and read a huge bundle of manuscripts. Every boy and girl who can buy a fountain pen and a ream of paper instantly writes a novel, ties it up and sends it to us. How I loathe novels! Why shouldn’t you write, not a novel, but your reflections—on your life, or your great Aunts life—anything? Do. and then I shall be happy to read it.

My love—both our love—for L joins in—to you and Emphie.

yr V W

Sussex

[]

3203a: To Julian Bell

Christmas Day 1936

Typewritten

Monk’s House, Rodmell, [Lewes, Sussex]

Dearest Julian,

Nessa says you will have time to get one more letter, as you’re coming home the quick way. So I take up my typewriter—this very hot fine June day. Really, to look at the sky one would think old God was in his heaven, spreading his blue robes and letting flow in one or mild drifts his white beard. And we are off to lunch with the Keynes’s—one twenty sharp, so as not to keep Maynard’s prize turkey waiting. What are you having I wonder in your rickshaw, or pagoda? I must say I’m very glad you decided to give up the three years, for though I don’t want you to load a musket, I should very much like to have you sitting on the terrace again. How nice it’ll be—we have all got to feel as it were a vacancy in our midst. There’s a silence; and I say Where’s the old Ruffian? Clive and Quentin dined here on their way to Seend the other night. And to give him his due when Clive’s in the vein, and no ladies present, nobody can be a merrier grig; and now he’s got the Beefsteak Club behind him, he tells very amusing man-about-town-stories. The range and variety of Q’s knowledge always surprise me; and all so poised, competent and rational. He’s painted our village hall for us to the delight of the natives.

I hardly feel it necessary to dish up for you the usual London round; how I saw Colefax, Madame de Polignac, Ethel Smyth, Tom Eliot, and the Wus—these last were Chinese from Pekin university sent by Margery [Fry]. A charming discreet little woman; a rather dried up frog of a man—a professor of anthropology. I feel the Orientals have been baked out of some blood that we have; all so quiet and stealthy and demure. But we engaged ourselves to stay with them in Pekin next year. Then we dined with George and Ann Barnes and met dear old Dadie. Between ourselves I think a change from the mud flats and mists of the Cam would do him a world of good. He’s getting a little too prim and precise for my taste—not that I don’t love him for I do. But what a life—pecking over that barren farmyard with all the other male hens.

Peter’s last book enraged me; Decline of Romance, or some such title. It was a mere clutter of brilliant unrelated gobbets. Quite unreadable; and inspired with the feeblest tittle tattle of envenomed partisanship—but no more. He has crammed his brain till it’s only fit for passing exams with. Ann I liked; and also George. I got a feeling that she was looking at Dadie affectionately all the time. Sally Graves is marrying next month, much to my disgust. I predict in a year she’ll be tossing her ring into the Thames. I saw Rosamond [Lehmann] too but only at a lunch, and I’ve not read her book. The only book I read is Gibbon, for I’ve promised to write a centenary on him. Yesterday we drove in the bright June sun to Fletching to see his tomb; but as it was Christmas the tomb—you know my passion for the tombs of the great—was obscured by a nativity play.

Ann Stephen is off to Dublin—vainly I suppose; and Adrian is off to Berlin to rescue Ossivitsky. Oh what a babble there’s been about the King—Ottoline and Bob Trevy and I paraded Whitehall the day the abdication was being announced, and felt the pressure of all the Kings of England on our heads; and the glory of the crown. It was partly the light—yellow brown; partly Ott’s faded Stuart splendour; now it’s over and nobody seems a button the worse.

Nessa and Angelica have been as usual lamenting the fate which is now on them—Christmas at Seend; but they are all very well and as busy as ants—A. with her acting; Nessa with her committees. She and Duncan now lead the art world, and have to bear the penalty of greatness. What are you going to write when you come home? I suspect China will give you a very good start in the world of journalism if you want it. So good bye and love dearest Julian.

Virginia

King’s College, Cambridge. Modern Fiction Studies. Vol. 30. Summer 1984.

[]

3204: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Dec. 26th 36

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dearest Ottoline,

What a remarkable woman you are—to send me something I shall really use and like. There it lies on my table or my chair already doing what it can to keep my letters tidy: and it gives an air of magnificence to the room. Didn’t you give one like it to Lytton? I seem to remember seeing him writing here in the garden with a red leather case on his knee, which he said you had given him. You are a great giver. And then, wanting to find a little book for you, my usual old shop proved faithless—for one thing the electric light had failed and I couldn’t see—so in despair I pulled out a mild little 18th Century poet whom I rather like from my own books and sent it. But this is only makeshift: next time I’m in a book shop I shall look again.

Yes I too carry the picture of Whitehall that afternoon in my head—you advancing with feathers, like a Stuart princess in mourning, and the Life Guards, and then old Bob rambling and ruminating. Its odd how England suddenly takes shape—not that I have any patriotic pride—only a visual lust, and a sense of Shakespeare.

You were angelic to let [John] Graham come. There’s not much inside him I’m afraid—we thought he might improve, but I doubt it. His anxiety to know writers touched me—its no longer mine: and now you’ve more than gratified it. No, I’ve not read Nightwood yet, but I have written the name down, and shall read it, as soon as I’ve cleared off a heap of slippery manuscripts, all novels, all mediocre—how I get to hate fiction: but Tom said this was a remarkable book, so I must summon courage and plunge. Novels go so slow, and they drag in so many dull facts; but thats their business—yes, I will read the Woman in White too. Yes—you see I write with your letter in the red case on the arm of my chair—I did read MacKenna, and wondered what sort of man he was. I think a very queer mix: I liked him, but then his slang worried me—but I liked his life. I like scholars. I dont like freshmen as a rule. Ethel, that reminds me, has fallen in love with Dotty—I think (maliciously,) that Dotty’s wine is so good and the beds so soft, she owes her ascendancy to them—if you’re old and luxurious and poor with only one maid and hash for dinner like Yeats and Ethel.

Its very lovely down here: I can still find a primeval down in 10 minutes; but yesterday we spent with Maynard and Lydia [Keynes] and all kissed and danced under the mistletoe.

This is mere maundering over the log fire—our old plum tree [cut down and cut up]: and I must stop.

Yrs V.

Julian Vinogradoff

[]

3205: To Katherine Arnold-Forster

Boxing Day [26 December 1936?]

Monks House, Rodmell [Sussex]

My dear Ka,

We have this moment finished gloating on a delicious dish of fresh Cornish cream—but without a name; so I attach yours. I can’t think there are two such friendly brutes in Cornwall—the rare old English bear is said to be extinct, save for one specimen at Zennor [Ka’s house]. If however it was really sent by that eccentric lady [unidentified], d’you remember—the wife of the man who had read all the Classics—but this happened years ago, and you’ll have forgotten: nor was she his wife, now I come to think of it—but if it was she who sent it to me, then you must give her my thanks—only I suspect and hope that they’re both long dead.

I am rambling on because Duncan and Mrs Grant [his mother] have been here for Boxing Day tea, and stayed so late gossiping about the Pophams, Hugh and six children by 2 wives, who now live next Mrs Grant at Twickenham, that I’m half asleep. Who is Mrs Popham—now? I had a Christmas Card from my god daughter, Noel’s Virginia. How old it makes us, or rather me, feel. And Asheham where we used to sit in the sun is all cement works, but in fact rather fine lit up at night. Needless to say it is pouring wet. Nor did I ever thank you for a letter you wrote: but I could see no chance of coming to Cornwall since, as you know, I am now in the thick of the political world, and seldom get an evening without someone asking me to tell them what is likely to happen in Poland, Abyssinia, or some such area. Excuse this drivel. L. wants me to send his love.

yrs V.W.

Do you know Angus Davidson and Miss Swinshead Smith [unidentified], both of whom live, but not together, at Sennen? Do you want to know them?

Mark Arnold-Forster

[]

3206: To V. Sackville-West

27th Dec [1936]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, near Lewes, Sussex

Well that is a pleasant kindly well meaning dauphin vulgaire—d’you think its the very same that got caught and hung in the fishmongers shop at Sevenoaks [in 1925]? I rather think so. There’s something—what they call ingenuous, a little foolish in its expression, that hints it might well have been netted. And then we stood and looked at it, and it winked at you in your pink jersey and white pearls.

How on Earth did you find it and pack it and send it to come on Christmas day when, as you told me, you have 175 presents to give on that day, not counting dog’s presents, presents to swans and old men who sleep under sacking in the Barn? A miracle.

We will go to a sweet shop when you’re in London; and you shall choose whichever sweet you like, out of a huge jar. Thats something for you to look forward to.

I’ve just been walking on the marsh: a winter sunset; and I was thinking, what do Kingfisher’s do in winter, when lo and behold, one shot out under my feet, skimmed the river, and caused me about as much pleasure as an angel … no … I dont care for angels.

Now I’m sitting over my logs, and should be reading Gibbon. The other day I found to my surprise that this year for the first of many years I’ve not earned a penny: and I must. So that accounts for Gibbon. Only when I read other people’s articles I cant see any cause to write more. Lord, how I hate the weekly papers! Then why write articles? Because I must make 500 pounds.

Ethel’s new dog is dead. The truth is, no dog can stand the strain of living with Ethel. I went down one day and found it on the verge of nervous collapse, simply from listening to her conversation. Never shall I forget a walk all round Worplesdon [Surrey] Golf Club in the rain—she lame, also taken short, not to put a fine point on it, in the pavilion. Well, well—if we all weather as red and roaring, we shant do so badly.

Are you coming up in January? Are we going jaunting? Yes, we’re going to a shop with huge jars of pink yellow and green sweets. You shall have a pound in a paper bag. Excuse poor Potto’s drool: I have just caught him a cuff on his tail and sent him back to Gibbon—a weighty author.

V.W.

Congratulate Harold on the success of his Sibyl fund.

Oh I’ve been seeing Mme de Polignac.

Berg

[]

3206a: To Julian Bell

Dec 30th 36

Typewritten

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dearest Julian,

Your letter came this morning—the one in which you say that you didn’t write because you were hurt that I didn’t like your Roger better. I just send a line, though I doubt if you’ll get it, to say how sorry I am—indeed angry with myself. The truth was I read your paper and wrote my letter when I was in a complete state of daze what with London, proofs, and having headaches; I ought to have kept both for a clearer time; probably I expressed myself very badly and read very imperfectly. But all I want to say is that though I can’t remember what I wrote, I certainly didn’t mean to say anything that could possibly hurt you. Probably my impressions were mixed and incoherent; probably too you broached questions that I dont understand. But it is absurd to go over it at this distance of time—all I write to say is I’m very sorry.

We’re dining at Charleston tomorrow—no more news as I wrote so lately; a hot June day, and we shall be very glad when you’re back. Don’t for Gods sake let us quarrel about writings—yes, my book is coming out; L. says it’s no worse than the others. Maynard and Lydia in great form; he very optimistic as usual; shooting there last Monday;

Love from us both.
Virginia

King’s College, Cambridge. Modern Fiction Studies. Vol. 30. Summer 1984.

[]

Letters 3207-3247 (January-May 1937)

3207: To Dorothy Bussy

Dec. 15th [1936]

52 Tavistock Sqre., W.C.

My dear Dorothy,

I take up my pen to answer the letter you dont want answered—what a mercy!—(thats why I take up my pen). But at any moment the bell will ring and in will come Miss [Inez] Pearn who’s engaged to Stephen Spender; then there’ll be another ring and Tom Eliot will come in, with a thick green muffler round his livid cheeks. This is drawn from life—I met him in Russell Square … I put in these facts to give you a taste of the quality of life at this moment in Bloomsbury.

After dinner, to continue, there’s meeting to discuss Spain at Adrian’s,—an Intellectual Liberty meeting … Shall I go? Its a bitter cold day but fine. Though this scarcely counts as news, the stir of the abdication still agitates our bosoms. Have you seen Mrs Simpson? If so, do tell me—heres Tom—here he came in—

[To Dorothy Bussy contd.]

Monk’s House, Rodmell

Jan 1st 1937

This letter dropped out from some papers just now. I dont think its worth sending, but as its the first day now of the New Year, I will just fill up the break from friendship. What did Tom Eliot say that evening? I cant remember: but I remember meeting Mr Priestley the great novelist at Adrians; and how we glared at each other, and what a dismal drab dowdy affair it all was. And nobody now talks of the abdication. Then we came here; and here we are, Leonard and I, sitting over the fire, on a wild wet night; and in a minute I must go down and put our dinner in the oven. I liked very much hearing from you, and wish letter writing were still a habit.

That reminds me—I saw James at last, and I think he’s given up the idea of writing about Lytton—thinks the letters make it too difficult. I daresay he’s right; but I’m sorry. I wish something could have been printed.

London was the usual scrimmage. I saw too many people—among them, tell Janie, La Princesse de Polignac, née Winnie Singer, but whatever she was born she’s grown into the image of a stately mellow old Tory, and to look at you’d never think she ravished half the virgins in Paris, and used, so Ethel Smyth tells me, to spring upon them with such impetuosity that once a sofa broke. We lunched at Claridges—very grossly and not well (you like to hear about food I know—next year my cooking will be better) and I aired my little forlorn relics of French to a lovely young Polignac niece, and to a remarkable middle class Mlle [Nadia] Boulanger, a musician. That was my top light in the matter of aristocracy. Thats why I boast of it.

This page ought to be all politics, but I cant go into that. And on your rock [Roquebrune], why disturb your peace? However, even for Leonard happily there’s been a lull; and we have another week here, which I shall spend writing about Gibbon: and last night we dined at Charleston, where all was in full swing—Quentin, Angelica, Duncan, Nessa, Clive—and so broody with domestic peace you could almost hear a kettle sing. Then there’s Maynard and Lydia; a very fine turkey, pheasant shooting, many wines and still more comfort. In spite of what they say about Bloomsbury, I continue to like my friends.

By the way, are you Bloomsbury? And what are you doing this wild wet night? I did enjoy seeing you—crusty incorruptible that you are. Now those two epithets dont apply to Sybil Colefax—whose obsequies I attended; which means I was summoned to a farewell tete a tete among all the doomed furniture. There was a sale next day, and she, who is said to have cancer, appeared almost, not entirely, (I spied one crack), indomitable. But I cant go into that, and have indeed wandered on unpardonably. Why do you always make me chatter?—and so egotistically? Well, happy new Year to the Bussys; and please find a warm admiring very French phrase for that formidable woman, your daughter.

yr
VW

Texas

[]

3208: To V. Sackville-West

4th Jan 37

Monk’s House, Rodmell, near Lewes, Sussex

But oh God we’re here and shant be back till next week, so the 7th and 8th are impossible.

But are those your only days [in London]—is your stay merely that? Because we shall be there all the rest of the month. And I had been planning jaunts—and then your bag of sweets. You must come up later—please. Why Clive and not Virginia? Why Mary etc etc etc Sybil etc etc and not Potto?

In great haste and fury
V.

Berg

[]

3209: To Elizabeth Robins

4th Jan. 37

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Miss Robins,

I ought to have written before—I must apologise—somehow Christmas has been full of interruptions.

But may we come over to tea on Friday next 8th? We could get to you about 4\m?\30. If that should suit you, dont bother to write. Then we can discuss the chapters of your book, so I wont begin here.

A niece [Ann Stephen] suddenly arrived on Saturday—but I ought to have said before that we were doubtful if we could come to Henfield. Many thanks for asking us.

Yours
Virginia Woolf

Sussex

[]

3210: To Ethel Smyth

8th Jan. 37

Monks House [Rodmell, Sussex]

I know I have been in every respect save one vile, but that one—the loving heart—remains: otherwise why should I light the fire and spend this moment writing? Partly because I have to go to Brighton in ½ hour to see Miss Robins: for I dont think you want letters. I think you are so battling with books and quotations that all you want is to be left alone.

That has been my state. I’ve spent all the morning, every morning writing; every evening reading. I had to dash through Gibbon and get something evolved before we went back. Thats done, after a fashion:—only after a fashion. The devil of these articles is the fitting in quotations: fitting in a little slice here, another there, like a cabinet maker composing a neat commode.

Is the sun shining at Working? Here there is frost under the hedge, and a sun strong enough to burn one’s cheek the other side. I’ve seen a great many relations: answered their Christmas letters, written very painfully to old servants, and had a little most amiable correspondence with Vita. But I shall miss her in London—I who of all people she wants to see. So there.

Now alas, I must as I began by saying, catch my bus.

Back on Wednesday.

What—? no; no time to ask questions, and I dont suppose you feel inclined to write letters. Did you though make it up with Maurice?

Yr V.

Berg

[]

3211: To V. Sackville-West

Jan. 10th [1937]

Monks House [Rodmell, Sussex]

Yes of course that will be perfect, Jan. 22nd lunch I mean: let us say one o’clock and I will keep the entire afternoon for any purpose.

The widow of Jo: was my first love. a great flame of George’s. I remember sitting opposite her at supper at the Savoy about 1908, between the acts of the Walkyrie and adoring her—so that shows how time passes and now I daresay she’s an old whitehaired respectable—but why are you going to tea with her?

Excuse this the last and only scrap of paper near me.

V.

Oh I’ve been meeting another old lady—Elizabeth Robins, and Octavia Wilberforce.

Berg

[]

3212: To Ethel Smyth

Wednesday [20 January 1937]

52 Tavistock Sqre. [W.C.1.]

I’m so glad that you’re in luck about the dog [Pan VI]. I hope the stars will bless him. Just back to find Miss West desperately ill with influenza pneumonia, also the 2nd in control [Miss Bevan] away with influenza. This means L. is doing all the main work. I have to help with odd jobs so far as I can. Hence I’m rather rattled at the moment—cursing the Press, correcting other people’s proofs. I dont see any chance of being free this week. I think you must let me know when you would naturally be coming up next week, and see which we can fit in. But for God’s sake dont expose yourself to buses and trains while this pest is violent.

Yes, so far as I’m a coherent entity I’m desirous to see you, in fact, in short, as Micawber would say, fond of you. And I’ve rashly undertaken heaven knows how much scribbling of articles, besides Gibbon: and am fingering Fry papers nervously; and feel once more the various horrors and delights of book making. Only how does one square the relatives? How does one euphemise 20 different mistresses? But Roger every day turns out more miraculous. So you see I’m in a pother: but amazingly well. And you? Oh Lord, poor Miss West—its doubtful now if she’ll live—anyhow 3 months away. I suffer.

V.

Berg

[]

3213: To Vanessa Bell

Monday [25 January 1937]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

On wicked wicked! I thought there was to be no present giving. However, I admit the problem of teapots is forever solved. At first I thought it was a kitten in a basket. But it is devilish wrong to shower these extravagances upon a woman whom after all you don’t love. However … its exactly what I want, as one used to say. But this time truly.

Pippa came last night to discuss possible managers. So we couldn’t come round. Have you done your paper? We went to a funeral—Miss Wests: and Christabel [Aberconway] has asked me to lunch.

B.

Berg

[]

3214: To Ethel Smyth

Wednesday [27 January 1937]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

What a dismal world we live in! Miss West is dead of pneumonia, and we’re plunged at the moment in chaos. It means all L’s time is taken managing, and we have to see authors whom she’d have seen. Thats what happens tomorrow. A perfect stranger is coming at 4.30 for a long business talk about her book. I dont think there’s much use anyone else hoping to get a word in. or only sideways in discomfort. So I should prefer another day, but only if you have to come up. Another clerk is ill, and we may have to put off the books (once more) till June. I’m sorry to be so distracted. Lord! we went to the funeral, and there was the poor old crone [Miss Howlett] with whom she’d lived; and other miseries, in pouring rain, and fog; and nothing to be said, for in fact they killed her with their wild idiocy and she was far and away the best of our managers; and now the whole of that dreary business of finding and teaching begins again. But I expect next week will be freer.

Yr V

Excuse this egotism. I’m feeling we’d better shut up shop. What about the new dog and his home—to turn to something saner?

Berg

[]

3215: To Philippa Strachey

2nd Feb: [1937]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

Dear Pippa,

Many thanks for your kindness. Miss Lange is coming as manager, and you have pulled us out of our hole.

We both liked the looks of her very much. And I expect you took a lot of trouble—which is what I expect of you: and we both greatly enjoyed giving you a scrap of meat the other night—so please come again.

Yr
V.W.

Sussex

[]

3216: To Ethel Smyth

10th Feb: [1937]

52 T[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

I forget what our last form of greeting was. I forget if we ever got within the same postal district—But anyhow, thanks in part to my energy in letter writing and interviewing we yesterday installed a new manager, a nice duck faced woman, who was at Longman’s [publishers] and says she used to see you.

So thats arranged. And then the underling [Miss Bevan]—oh dear what a viper’s nest of malodorous feelings Miss Wests death uncovered—gave notice: and she’s also been replaced. And now we hope to bring the books out on March 15th instead of putting them off till June.

Forgive this dull chronicle. One gets so absorbed in one thing after another. Hows the puppy? And the new house? I’m so hard at work with various bits of odds and ends that once more my pen wont write of an evening. Is MB. [Maurice Baring] on the up grade? The writing is what I like: not the reading. I’m reading Shakespeare: I’m reading Gibbon: I’m reading little scraps of Ethel Smyth. And then my poor old mother in law gets blinder. and I get kinder Yes I’m very kind to her—but oh the heat of the room, the sweet sticky cakes. None of this is news, none of this will interest you; and I’m so sleepy I’m half inclined to tear it up. Still by way of a flourish of a paw I send it.

Inarticulately
V.

Berg

[]

3217: To Elizabeth Bowen

Wednesday [10 February 1937]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

Dear Elizabeth,

Its all very annoying—in the first place about dinner on the 16th—that weekend we’re taking Tuesday off at Rodmell to travel our books in Sussex, and Leonard thinks there’s no chance that we shall be back in time for dinner: but if we should get back earlier, might we come in afterwards? and leave it open. At the moment we have a good deal on our hands for the Press, as our manager died suddenly last month, and we have the publishing season on us, and a strange new woman who doesn’t know whats what [Miss Lange]. So we have to help.

Then about the Cocktail on the 4th—that afternoon I’ve promised to go down to Chelsea to see old Ethel Walker who’s done a picture of Vanessa; and can’t cut her, since her parties are solemn feasts. But if I can get away to you, of course I will. However, if you’re free on Friday which is I suppose the 5th, wouldn’t you anyhow come to tea here?—an old crones’ talk over the fire.

Excuse the scrawl; and its all hums and haws.

Yrs VW

Texas

[]

3218: To Edward Sackville-West

14th Feb. [1937]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Eddy,

This is disgraceful—I got your letter I don’t know how long ago, and meant to write, but never did. The fact was that when we got back to London we found the Press ravaged with influenza; Miss West, our manager, died; this led to other complications—some, as usual, of a sordid though psychologically exciting, kind (this refers to Sapphism and jealousy and the state of mind of friends whose hostility is suddenly revealed by death)—and then we had to beat up other managers and clerks: all of which I found distracting. Also, I suspect that my letter writing age is past. I detest putting a new nib in my pen, and in London someone always rings up or comes in. But mercifully for the first time for a month we are down here.

The Labour party met here last night, and if I had the time I would counter your shining youth with a picture of Mr Neil Lyons, the dramatist, Mr Fears, the postman, and Mrs [Louie] Everest the char, discussing not so much the Labour party, as Mrs Simpson and the Archbishop. London is indescribable—so many people, so much chatter. But I cant help a disposition to dance on the bubbles; which I excuse by thinking we shall retire here for good one of these days. Its a misty Sussex day, and very lovely from this top room which looks across to [Mount] Caburn, over the marsh.

I can’t make up my mind to take seats for Glyndebourne in advance, because it seems so expensive. In May I shall rush to the office and find all seats sold. There is Glyndebourne, just behind the mist—I’m reading the Countess Tolstoy’s diaries, and his diaries, and both their public diaries and their private: and wonder what the diary instinct is—since it caused them both infinite anguish. But how the Russians always triumph over us when they take up the pen!

No room for more. VW

Berg

[]

3219: To J. D. Hayward

Feb 15th 1937

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

Dear Mr Hayward,

Of course I remember you, and often read you, and hear of you from Tom Eliot also. I wont send you a proof copy of the Years, as the one we have to send out is very imperfect—one chapter is missing, and my corrections aren’t in it. But I will tell the Press to send you an advance copy. It will be published I suppose on March 15th in America, by Harcourt Brace.

My husband wants to be remembered to you, and we both hope we may see you soon.

Yrs sincerely
Virginia Woolf

King’s

[]

3220: To Ethel Smyth

Wednesday [17 February 1937]

52 T[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

What I meant by my cryptic remark ‘I like writing not reading’: was that I like the writing of my own books, not the reading of them afterwards. Thats not very profound: but it happens to be a fact. And I wondered if you were enjoying the writing stage of Maurice, or had come to the reading stage and were disgusted. Yes—to continue answering your letter: I think your remark that you wont send me Maurice is sound. And I was about, without that, to say that I was going to follow it on my side, and not send you The Years, because I’m certain you wont get through it, and it always seems to me that if one’s given a book by the author one feels committed to 5/8 worth of praise. I hardly give away even my 6 copies for that reason. And that shows what a conscience I have about telling the truth to authors: for at this moment I’m in agony: theres a presentation copy and I can’t thank the author [unidentified] because I can’t praise; yet civility requires.

I met Elizabeth [Williamson] at a picture gallery: and hope one day to see her. And I’ve been working with the usual rash joy, and have got committed to a Broadcast: and so far the new manager is doing well; and I still regret Miss West; and long for a holiday in the sun; and now must try to write that other cursed letter: or can one simply leave it undone? And hows the dog? And … but Lord! I must stop

V.

Berg

[]

3221: To Clive Bell

Thursday [18th February 1937]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

Dearest Clive,

Your card has just come. We left Rodmell yesterday, as Leonard was ill. The doctor yesterday was inclined to think it serious—possibly prostate gland. Today he’s more cheerful, and thinks its probably some kidney infection. He is having an X ray tomorrow. If, as there’s reason to think, its passing off, we shall come back to Rodmell. But of course it depends on how he is. How long are you staying? We should like very much to see you and Janice [Loeb]. Let me have a line here.

yr
Virginia

King’s

[]

3222: To Ethel Smyth

Wednesday [24 February 1937]

52 T[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Yes, Ethel dear, I’d like to see you. But whats the use of seeing you against some intolerable necessary bore—this refers to a French translator who’s wasted one of my rare solitary evenings. Nor must you come, in this dripping cold mutton weather, on purpose. Still put it in your mind and lets attempt it next week or the one after: I’ve been kept on the hop by a most ridiculous but agitating scare—a doctors scare that L. showed signs of diabetes. He was sent to a specialist [Dr Gledham]—I had an hour to walk up and down Harley Street—then a week to wait while tests were worked out: finally yesterday the decision that he is perfectly normal. Oh what torturers these doctors are! Anyhow, now I’m so glad perhaps its been worth while: an extraordinary physical relief, as if someone had been cramping me together and suddenly let go.

I saw Elizabeth [Williamson] one evening, against the highty [sic] elegant profile of Ethel Sands. I like Elizabeth. I like her mind. And Ethel, who’s a connoisseur in these matters, exclaimed “How well she dresses!”—a compliment I’d give my eyes for.

Oh yes—about the BBC. Theyve suddenly taken me up: want me to write them stories, read them poets, and deliver an address in May on Words. This last I’ve agreed to do: at a fee of £20 guineas: which is d—d mangy I told the man, considering that they print it in The Listener too. He said, Ah but do it only once: next time you’ll be able to bargain. So from that I expect you’ll get your £50. He told me, in confidence, that all the well known writers, like ourselves, are now holding out for more. So if you stick your toes in, you’re helping the rest of us. Do tell me what comes of your toes sticking in the rock. Winston [Churchill] asks £300—but doesn’t get it. That little bit of gossip has landed me in a fresh sheet, which I cant fill, since I must cook dinner tonight—this pouring night, and the clerk has just come in to say, Mrs Woolf the rains coming through—on to our new books? I demanded. Well, not yet on to the books: into the Pritchard’s larder; so I must collect all the chamber pots when this is done and stand them in a row, to protect our books.

I’m reading Moliere aloud to myself: by way of tuning up my French accent: and was delivering a great speech of Alceste when the clerk came in with the news of the rain, and then I must switch off to chamber pots, via Ethel Smyth. Youre a parenthesis between Misanthrope and the other thing and I wonder if anyone ever wrote a letter as quick as this. About Dotty [Wellesley]: yes I expect there’s something inside that contorted nut; but not for me. I dont think, after Vita and so on, I shall ever crack it. But I like to hear of your discoveries. I expect a hammer blow, such as you deliver and I dont, is whats needed. But isn’t she, after Yeats’ praise, considerably restored from her old bitterness? I always thought praise would do the trick. Oh here’s a card from Colefax who’s back and must see me in her new house. And I’m in the thick of Fry’s again: and have so many things to write I can’t attend to biography at the moment. You see how fitfully my brain works: 6 months of sterile misery, then a sudden flush, like the rain. And hows the puppy? and the book? and altogether, how does the pulse of life beat at Working?

V.

7 minutes and ½.

Berg

[]

3223: To Ethel Smyth

Monday [1 March 1937]

52 Tavistock Sqre. [W.C.1]

Yes Ethel dear, it’ll be very nice to see you—I dont know why it comes into my mind to shut my book and say this into the air at the moment, except that I’m feeling rasped and raddled, and so, as usual, turn to the sun over the moor. D’you remember walking on the golf course in a storm, and I said this, and you promptly squatted in a pavilion and made water [on 19 October 1936]? How I loathe the publishing of books—especially books that are so bad that the wastepaper basket was their true goal, and so it should have been, save for Leonard. But its not that I mind—what I mind is being hooked and hauled to the surface when my natural dwelling is in the dark at the depths. I cannot write if people talk to me about what I write. Enough, as the convenient ghost of Mrs Pankhurst, or was it Lady P. always says; when I’m in need.

What I would like to say, is how brave I think you. Why do I think so? When? At the dead of last night being sleepless I thought of you with a clap of admiration, exercising the puppy, writing the book—thought of you as a little tossing tug boat might think of a majestic sea going white-spread, fountain-attended dolphin-encircled ship—forging on and on. And I whip and tumble in your foam. Now I believe courage to be the greatest of human virtues, and the only gift we can impart. Do you sometimes think that—oh here’s L. with a manuscript thrust on us by Viola Tree—what was I saying?—that life is of a hardness that still fairly terrifies me. Yet this isn’t my life I’m thinking of: no: of Miss Bevan’s who was in love with Miss West. So I must leave this hanging, inconclusive, a wisp of cloud crossing the sun. I talked for 7 hours to Desmond MacCarthy on Saturday without a stop. Yes, I do like, I could say love, my friends.

Yr V.

Berg

[]

3224: To Ethel Smyth

Sunday [7 March 1937]

52 T[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Yes what a gloomy season to be sure. I liked your thing about Clothild—oh how’s she spelt?—in the Times. You have a gift of words. I’m much interested by your theory that I like you best in absence: also that I dislike your presence because it drags me to the surface. No—there are 2 ways of doing it: the reviewers way I hate; yours I feel on the contrary bracing and invigorating. But then to explain the difference I should have to write several rather involved pages of psychological analysis. I think Proust explains it, but I cant remember where. Something I mean about the soul, how its elements are united differently by different stimulants; shaken together like those scraps of colour in a funnel [kaleidoscope] that we played with as children. But I’ve been sitting by my mother in law’s bedside—she has flu—and feel like a rag just wrung by a washerwoman. Oh how she afflicts me, lying there alone, blind. But she pleased me immensely by saying she loved me best of all her daughters in law.

Now I must stop. No of course I dont want to make you come up in this bitter blast. And everyone seems chirping at me to read their damned works for them. And I want to sink into Proust; and I wish I had a new book by you to read, and I’ll tell you the sad story of Miss Bevan one day—it was our West she loved; and killed. or is so charged by the other lover [Miss Howlett]—and comes to me in tears, but now is gone.

So no more. Hows the Puppy?

V.

Why does everyone bother me about politics? Six letters to sign daily—or nearly so. Do you also have to trump up this meaningless nonsense, sign books, sign letters perpetually?

Berg

[]

3225: To Clive Bell

[12 March 1937]

Postcard

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

I daresay thats all very true: but what concerns me at present isn’t Gibbon but the pheasant. How pleasant, that present, due, as so often too, to you.

V.W.

Quentin Bell

[]

3226: To Ethel Smyth

Wednesday [17 March 1937]

52 T[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

I listened in and enjoyed it: though I was sympathetically distressed to hear your sore throat. By the way, a fruit grower in Kent [Nicholas Bagenal] also listened, the first night, and said your voice alone convinced him of your greatness: all character, all charm, all majesty, he said, were in it.: and he also immensely admired what the voice said. What an unreasonable woman you are! It was your idea—not giving your book [Maurice Baring]: and a good one; because then one don’t exact praise. But lord love me, if you want, unbribed, to write, what more cd. I wish? Only I wdn’t, if I were you, bother with all the stuffing. Present day, the last chapter, has as much as one wants. And its all very bad, but well meant—morally.

I’m so rushed I cant write even my usual scrawl. We’ve been bothered about Julian, Nessa’s boy, wanting to fight in Spain: and have to stop him, which means seeing people—politicians.

But this by the way is confidential.

Yr V.

How are you?

Berg

[]

3227: To Naomi Mitchison

March 20th [1937]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

Dear Naomi Mitchison,

Thank you very much for your letter. I dont think I have read To the Lighthouse since I wrote it, and thus I dont know what I should think of it now. But I am very glad that you like it, and rather surprised—partly because once a book is published it seems to disappear, and that it should still exist is a shock—this time a pleasant one. Perhaps some day you will tell me what you liked in it, or disliked. But London being what it is, one never talks to anybody, and reviewing being what it is, one never gets any criticism. Is that a reason why we dont write better books?—but my husband has just been saying that you have written us a very good book. I shall wait to read it till it comes out. Many thanks again for your letter.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

National Library of Scotland

[]

3228: To Janet Case

March 22nd [1937]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

Dearest Janet,

This is only a line to say that of course we will come and see you. We go to Rodmell on Thursday—What we suggest is that we should drive over, possibly on Thursday 1st April, reach you in the morning, ask Emphie for lunch, and get back that evening. But I will write again or ring up, and settle more exactly from Monks House. And then Emphie could say what time suits you best.

Then we will have a good talk, so I wont write now, being stupid in the head, but in spite of stupidity—so many people in London—please know and understand with what affection I always think of you. How unhappy I was, and how you helped me, and still do, dear Janet, and so we both send our love and shall come and see you. Love to Emphie.

VW

If you want a copy of the Years, you’ve only got to send me word on a card and a copy shall be sent—I didn’t, because owning books is such a bore in a small house.

Sussex

[]

3229: To Shena, Lady Simon

March 27th [1937]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Shena,

It was very nice of you to write, and I would have thanked you before, only I too have been in bed, and couldn’t write.

I’m so glad you enjoyed the Years—impossible though it sounds to me. But then one gets so sick of one’s own books.

As for thinking that I should have exhorted you to go to a marriage service, I can only say last time I went to one I had much ado not to stand up and cry out on the disgusting nature of it. So next time you go, do this—One doesn’t of course, through sheer cowardice. I went, forced to, to a burial service [of Margaret West] the other day, and that seemed if anything worse; because more solemn.

But we’re down here, forgetting all these horrors, and as I’m still rather done up, I wont maunder on.

How is your history of Manchester? I think work at drains is not all narrow or selfish—in fact, how you do it I cant conceive. One of these days I want to come and see.

Yours ever
Virginia Woolf

Sussex

[]

3230: To Stephen Spender

7th April [1937]

52 Tavistock Sqre. [W.C.1]

Dear Stephen,

I never got a letter from you from Valencia, so I didn’t write, or send the book [The Years]. Now I suppose from the card I got the other day that you’re back in London. If you still want a copy I’ll send it you.

I said I’d write about it, but I’ve been so plagued by the usual spate of reviews, even more contradictory than usual—oh why haven’t we got a single decent critic among us?—that I’ve almost forgotten the book. But what I meant I think was to give a picture of society as a whole; give characters from every side; turn them towards society, not private life; exhibit the effect of ceremonies; Keep one toe on the ground by means of dates, facts: envelop the whole in a changing temporal atmosphere; Compose into one vast many-sided group at the end; and then shift the stress from present to future; and show the old fabric insensibly changing without death or violence into the future—suggesting that there is no break, but a continuous development, possibly a recurrence of some pattern; of which of course we actors are ignorant. And the future was gradually to dawn.

Of course I completely failed, partly through illness—I’ve had to leave out one whole section which I could not revise in time for the press—partly through sheer incompetence. The theme was too ambitious. However I enjoyed the writing immensely, though not the revision; and am longing to go on to something else. I expect I muted down the characters too much, in order to shorten and keep their faces towards society; and altogether muffed the proportions: which should have given a round, not a thin line.

Julian is thinking of going to drive a lorry. I wish you could talk to him before he goes; but I daresay you’re busy, and he is all over the place, interviewing Labour party, communists and so on. Your letter came in the nick of time to set him against the CP.—we of course kept your name and confidence intact: it was most interesting.

Excuse this scrawl. I’m in a rush, partly owing to the usual fret and bother of the publishing season, and cant form my letters, let alone my sentences, so must leave you to make what sense you can; and hope we may meet.

Your affate
V.W.

You say your wife would like a copy of the Years. Of course I’ll send her one: but where to? And dont let her say she likes it if she doesnt: I dont give copies, for this reason—people think they must thank. But free criticism is always welcome.

Texas

[]

3231: To Violet Dickinson

Wednesday [7 April 1937]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

My Violet,

How nice to see your little bird’s claw again!

I dont see why you should lavish copies of that book [The Years] on Europe—if I’d thought you wanted one I would have sent you one myself. But it cost me so many headaches I thought it would cause them in those that read it.

Anyhow we shall make enough to go off for a month in France, and heaven knows, what with one horror after another, Leonard at any rate deserves a rest. He’s had to bring out the books—the Amberley papers, which I hope you’ve ordered from the Library—was a great venture—almost off his own bat, as our staff collapsed. And then, at the critical moment, a rash broke out. The clerks started scratching. Bugs! the daughter of the bus driver had caught them at home.

Last week I went over to Lyndhurst [New Forest] to see old Janet Case who is I’m afraid slowly dying; and she asked after Miss Dickinson, who’d been so kind about the duchesses and other things: and said would I remember her to you. So I do. If you’re at Fritham again, perhaps you might call. But she’s on the sofa; very gay, with an old sister; and some disease that kills slowly.

I’m scribbling half asleep. Here’s Leonard in from the House of Commons. Sends his love, must take his spaniel round the Square—hopes some day we may meet—so do I—have just cut a French book with the paper knife.

Sp.

Sussex

[]

3232: To Ethel Smyth

Wednesday [7 April 1937]

52 Tavistock Sqre. [W.C.1.]

Yes. Ring up on Friday. I think it’ll be all right. I had to go to Lyndhurst to see my old Greek teacher who’s dying and asked me to come. Thats what set the pain off again—but its gone very quick this time. What a nice letter from Maurice! I liked it. I was so entirely and honestly convinced that the book was a complete failure that I still feel anaesthetised—cant believe anyone can like it. Its a comfortable numb sensation. Yet I get the usual, or more than the usual letters—from the oddest people—which I should answer at this moment. But I cant write at all.

Here’s Maurice—yes, I do like it—I’ve just read it again The Palsy—would the man cure L. do you think?

Yr V.

Oh I’m cursing the BBC—have to speak on the 29th—haven’t word in my head to fling at a dog and Gibbon [TLS] to finish for the 27th And what about your sack of coals, MB I mean?

Berg

[]

3233: To Janet Case

April 8th [1937]

52 Tavistock Sqre. [W.C.1.]

Dearest Janet,

I know if we had been well mannered we should have written a Collins after our call. Wasn’t it a nice visit? We enjoyed it immensely. Its odd what a charm you and Emphie, the blue china and the old furniture have, and have always had, for me. And where does one thing begin and another end? We had a lovely drive home too, by Winchester, a longer but a much nicer way. And when I got home, there was a letter from Violet Dickinson, who—such things do happen—had been staying at Fritham, which has been bought and improved by one of her, I think titled, friends. So I wrote and gave her your message. She stayed with us at Fritham [in 1902] she said and I drove her to a meet of the stag hounds at Stony X. Would you like her to call in next time?

We came back here last Sunday and went to see Angelica act Ariel in Midsummer Nights Dream up at Islington. It was all very gay and youthful, and she was dappled with brown leaves and wore small horns—was lovely certainly, but whether thats enough I dont know. And Lady Oxford, the old skinflint, doesn’t mean to give me her book—says its out of print—only to scrounge (if thats the word) a free copy of mine. Emphie says you would like one—a very different pair of shoes. I’ll send one tomorrow; I wish it were smaller and less of a dump in the shelf.

Who d’you think just’s been to tea? The great novelist Hugh Walpole—immensely pink and fat and kind; but nourishing a sorrow that his books sell too well, and the intellectuals dont admire. So we all have our roseleaves under the pillow—do I mean peas? He is being paid £200 to describe the Coronation for the Daily Mail, and given a seat. You cant have it both ways—thats what I tell him. This is old wives prattle; but I daresay you wont mind. Dont bother to write I’ll scribble a line now and again if I may. And love to you both from us both.

V

Sussex

[]

3234: To May Sarton

9th April [1937]

52 Tavistock Sqre [W.C.1.]

Dear Miss Sarton,

I must thank you for the flowers, and for the poems, which I have not yet had time to read.

It gives me great pleasure that you should like my books, and I am grateful to you for saying so.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Berg

[]

3235: To Violet Dickinson

Tuesday [13th April 1937]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

My Violet,

I’ve had a note from Janet Case—I’m afraid she’s getting rather feeble. If you ever should be near, she says would you ring up and suggest a visit, but she’s only able to see people for a short time, if they arrange it. Her address is Hewer’s Orchard, Minstead, Lyndhurst, Hants. Telephone: Cadnam 103: So should you be there, give her a ring. She would like a letter anyhow, I’m sure.

Oh the old Pattles! They’re always bursting out of their casks. If you read the Amberley Papers you’ll find them popping up again. And suddenly the other day a faded Pattle relic, aged about 90, wrote to me from Somerset, and said she had the china out of which my grandmother drank at Calcutta—the lovely one who fled from France. And the relict lives with Hugh Lane’s sister—not I trust in sin.

Bugs turned into Nettlerash—after a terrific fuss: L. had visits from the Bus driver and the mother: undid their shirts and petticoats—proved themselves clean as eggs. Such it is to run a press. They said they had eaten mushrooms for the first time in their lives—and never again. Do mushrooms give one nettle rash? Perhaps if ones a bus driver.

So good night.

V.

Sussex

[]

3236: To V. Sackville-West

Thursday [15 April 1937]

52 Tavistock Sqre. [W.C.1.]

Yes, do come to lunch on Monday 1.30.

I’m perfectly recovered. We had the devils own time till Easter; the dr. said L. had diabetes.—which he hasn’t, thank the Lord: then Julian arrived from China, said he was off to Spain to fight: then Bugs broke out in The Press, but proved to be Nettlerash—so that altogether I rightly earned a headache. Old Ethel was furious, because I wouldn’t see her at Rodmell, and says of course its all sham and humbug—what a termagant the woman is. I’m rather glad Dotty supports half of that magnificent oak. But this’ll keep till Monday—I’m in a rush. And what d’you think we’re doing on Monday morning? taking Sally [the Woolfs’ spaniel] to her bridals at Ickenham. But we’ll be back before lunch.

V

Oh I never thanked you for a long nice letter from The Sahara, where you were catching salamanders and eating a sheep roasted whole We’ve just been buying goldfish and daffodils. Did you bring the salamanders home?

Berg

[]

3237: To Shena, Lady Simon

21st April [1937]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

Dear Shena,

I’ve got to Broadcast (very foolishly) on the evening of the 29th, and shall I know have to make my last touches at the last moment—so I dare not spend the afternoon as I should like—talking to you. But wont you be up again soon and suggest another time? I’m so sorry.

yr
Virginia Woolf

Sussex

[]

3238: To Stephen Spender

Sunday [25th April 1937]

Postcard

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

This week seems a hopeless muddle. But could you both come in on Monday 3rd May, any time after 9? The Grave’s are coming. I hope you can, as we go to France after that, and should like very much to see you both.

V

Texas

[]

3239: To Lady Cecil

Wednesday 28th April [1937]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

Dear Nelly,

Oh dear—once again—we shall be in France, or on the way there, on Wednesday. We are flying for 3 weeks holiday to escape the coronation: but we’re very sorry that this means also escaping you. Why do you and Lord Cecil always ask the woman he somewhat brusquely calls “The Old Frump” when she can’t come? But we shall be back at the end of the month. May I come and see you then? Will you ask me?

David and Rachel [Cecil] have just left the room; a blooming sight for my old eyes—so young, so happy. Well, I enjoyed my youth too—especially some evenings on a green sofa in St John’s Wood. D’you remember sitting there?

And its very nice of you to plod through those many years—I mean the printed ones. Will you one day hand me your censures? and I’m proud to think some scenes amused you, who have always been the source of so many delights to me. Do you know what torture I go through tomorrow? Broadcasting. So I deserve my car drive in France: but as I began by saying I wish the Ancient Harridan could have lunched with you on Wednesday, and wrinkled her mouldy chops. So many thanks for asking us.

Yr aff
V.W.

The Marquess of Salisbury (Cecil Papers)

[]

3240: To Stephen Spender

April 30th [1937]

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Sq. [W.C.1.]

Dear Stephen,

Thank you very much for your letter. I’m very glad you liked the Years better than the other books; and that some part of what I meant to convey got through. I know I couldnt get the whole meaning expressed, partly because I left out one section, which was important; also because it was too big for me to encircle. I dont think I agree with you though that all the characters felt the unreality, the invalidity of their experience. Eleanor’s experience though limited partly by sex and the cramp of the Victorian upbringing was meant to be all right; sound and rooted; the others were crippled in one way or another—though I meant Maggie and Sara to be outside that particular prison. I couldnt bring in the Front as you say partly because fighting isnt within my experience, as a woman; partly because I think action generally unreal. Its the thing we do in the dark that is more real; the thing we do because peoples eyes are on us seems to me histrionic, small boyish; However I havent got this expressed, and I daresay difference of sex makes a different view. Which is right? God knows.

But I’m very glad you saw that the tend of the book, its slope to one quarter of the compass and not another, was different from the tend in my other books. Yes, I am very anxious to develop it further; and almost tried a poetry section in this book; wanted to get some chorus; some quite different level. But once the narrative gets going the impetus is very heavy and difficult to interrupt, thats the horror to me of the novel. And in the Years I wanted to catch the general readers attention: perhaps I did this too much. But ever so many thanks for reading it so carefully. I’ve just been abused by the Dean of Durham for irreligion and for saying that wrist watches were invented in 1880.

I’m glad your friend is in better circumstances. You must tell us on Monday.

Julian has been up at Birmingham. I feel that its a mistake his going to Spain, but its no good saying so. I dont suppose he would see my arguments.

Well till Monday.

yr aff
V.W.

Texas

[]

3241: To William Plomer

Friday 30th April [1937]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

Dear William,

Yes, we would like very much to see you. The only time seems to be Monday next after dinner. The Spenders and the Chilvers are coming. We’re off to France next week. I’ve never met Mrs Stephen [Inez Spender]: have you?

Ever since Christmas we have been rather battered and harried—for one thing our manager died, which led to a lot of worry—she was the perfect manager of course.

And I’m afraid you’ve had a bad time too.

What an incredible old ass Hugh is! Think of tagging a title to his quite respectable name! Why? If he had been Walter, I should have understood: because then he would have been in touch with the Wizard of the North [Sir Walter Scott]

But do come on Monday night and let us have a good crack.

If you’re at Brighton you must come over and play bowls.

yr aff.
V.W.

Do not judge my character from this handwriting I beg: I’m in a rush, going off to Sussex in a minute.

Texas

[]

3242: To Violet Dickinson

May 1st 37

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

My Violet,

I wrote and told Janet Case that you might one day communicate. I hope you will; but I’m afraid she’s not going to improve and theyre both [Janet and her sister Emphie] as young as foals.

Here we are, about to leave England for the Coronation. I suppose you’re given a seat in the Abbey. If they gave me one, I would face London and its ribbons and hatchets, and no omnibuses: but they wont give me one. So we’re going driving through France, and whenever we come to an Inn which has paté de foie gras we shall stop. So you see to what we’re reduced—mere gorgers and guzzlers.

And we’ve been walking in the woods this cold day looking in every nest for eggs, because Leonards marmozet has a passion for birds eggs. At last he found one, and sure enough she cracked it and all the juice ran on to Nessa’s new carpet and I put an ashtray underneath to catch the drops. Nessa is having a show next week [at the Lefevre Galleries]; they say either all the world will come, or nobody. And should you be our way, in London, give us a call in June or July: after that, thank God, we shall settle in here.

Excuse this scribble.

Sp:

Sussex

[]

3243: To George Rylands

Sunday [2 May 1937]

Postcard

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Yes; Gibbon [TLS, 24 April 1937] was by your old friend. But I never thought to take in a real historian.

You almost brought the Wolves to tears last night, reading Shakespeare so beautifully.

V

George Rylands

[]

3244: To V. Sackville-West

Monday [3 May 1937]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

But why, didn’t you and Mrs Staples ring up? I should have enjoyed it. No, I didn’t think it was much good: first I had to shorten, then lengthen, and in the end I was bored stiff. It’ll be in the Listener, but all in a muddle I suspect. I would have liked a crack with you, better, still, our jaunt; the sweets in a bag—d’you remember? But Lorlovaduk, as Rupert Brooke used to say, shant I be thankful to be in a Courtyard in France, listening to a nightingale, drinking red wine, while you are curtseying and singing God Save the King. Oh the crush in the Tube this afternoon—there I stood, with my cake for Tom Eliots tea running chocolate down my legs. So farewell but come soon

V

Berg

[]

3245: To Ethel Smyth

Wednesday [5 May 1937]

52 T[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

I’m sorry I’ve been so dumb. But I’ve been forced to write I don’t know how many letters and I cant make myself take up a friendly pen. On Friday we go to France, thank God, for our 3 weeks spin. I don’t at this moment know where—except that we shall try to reach Montaigne’s tower: but any where, any where out of this world. I began this letter; meaning to rush out and buy shoes stockings vest: here’s Desmond MacCarthy—says he must spend the whole afternoon and evening discussing a lecture on my father. My God what do people think one’s time’s made of? Such a rush of things to do that even without him I couldn’t summon any thoughts worth writing. Its the Leslie Stephen lecture, Desmond says. And aren’t you his daughter. But must I write your lecture for you? And so on. Well excuse this gust of temper. I will send a letter I hope from France. and if you should write, they would forward. Hope the book and the dog are doing well. I saw Vita the other day.

V.

Berg

[]

3246: To Vanessa Bell

[6? May 1937]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

I thought the show a great triumph and wish I could express my critical perceptions with any clearness. I rather suspect that An McDougall was right and that you have penetrated to greater depths or heights than ever before.

At anyrate it gave me the greatest pleasure. I wish I could have seen more quietly, but everytime I began to look either the voice of Curtis or the bust of Stern intervened. I did think the one I got a divinely lovely one—but there were several others I coveted, and shall have to go back and look again. “What a very gifted woman your sister is!” as an unknown lady remarked.

Yes, I’m jealous.

B.

What am I to say to Beton?

Berg

[]

3247: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

May 6th [1937]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

Dearest Ottoline,

I’m so pleased and surprised that you liked my talk—it was such a bore doing it—first too long, then too short: finally I felt like an incompetent tailor making trouser legs that didn’t match. But never, mind, if you and Philip [Morrell] liked it. The sad discreet atmosphere of the BBC is very dismal: oh so proper, oh so kindly.

I heard from Tom Eliot you weren’t well—we sang a subdued nightingales duet in your praise the other afternoon—that might have been worth your hearing.

Now, early tomorrow, we fly to France for 3 weeks, to escape all this barrel organ braying. Wont it be nice to sit in a southern market place?—undecorated.

But I do hope you will recover quickly.

Old books: I’ve been reading Gibbon: the Autobiography, the history, with the greatest joy. And his letters.

Excuse this scrawl, and thank you once more, as usual.

yr
V.W.

Here is the article in the Spectator, which I dont want, and Philips article, which I think he wants back. Please thank him. I was much interested: and enjoyed my last nights owling.

V

Walter Turner’s protest may amuse you. Hayward had abused Yeats for exalting Dotty and Turner.

Texas

[]

Letters 3248-3285 (May-July 1937)

3248: To Vanessa Bell

[12 May 1937]

Le Grand Hotel, Souillac [France]

Today is Coronation day, so I suppose it is 12th May; but so far we’ve not had a sign of it—but then we were at Rhocamadour in a cave when it was going on. This is not a letter: only to ask you on my knees to write: if you write on 17th or 18th and address to Poste Restante, Guerét, Creuse, France I should get it. I’m longing to hear about your show: has the Coronation affected it either way: what did Duncan see: or any Royal gossip. Is Angelica back? And family news. In return I cant give much—save reflections on possible death in fog in channel. We stopped in the middle of the night and boats hooted all round: but nothing happened. We are now settled here for a few days—Roger came here I think—a lovely valley with hills not too near the Dordogne running past; a perfect small Inn I think: clean; pâté de foie gras at every meal, coffee and rolls: L. still says, to infuriate me that The White Hart [Hotel, Lewes, Sussex] is better.

The only drawback is wintry cold, thunderstorms, and a cultivated Englishman, who will I know turn out to be Harry Nortons cousin. Why we dont live in France I cant think. The mere silence of the telephone is alone enough: no Colefax: no engagements. And we sat on the river bank last night in a vineyard and saw …no no: I will not run on, as dinner is about to ring. We have a lovely rose pink wine. Why arent you here? But then, you would have to tolerate poor Singe. Theres a most remarkable church; its like Italy in many ways. And we went into a grotto and saw the stalactites dripping. red and green. How many pictures have you sold? What criticism? I’m ashamed of this scribble, redeemed only by pure love.

Please write.
B.

Berg

[]

3249: To Maynard Keynes

17th May 37

Albi [France]

Dear Maynard,

Here we are at Albi; and your biographies, which at last reached me, have been giving me immense pleasure. I dont say that I understand every word, but great economists must surely be the most fascinating of men—or at least you make them so. Perhaps they’re less hackneyed than the literary gents I attempt: anyhow in spite of every temptation to drowse over my Vin Rosé I’ve been lying on my bed engrossed by you. Why don’t you do some more? I wish you would. Whole Lives.

The South is very seductive, in spite of Bank holiday and pouring rain at the moment. We turn back tomorrow. Leonard has recovered from his eczema, tell Lydia; so that her gloomy forecast of a marriage with me is not imminent. I hope you too are recovered—

(1) Why do economists run to bibliophily?

(2) What is the way to bind pamphlets?

But I mustn’t drivel on.

Love from us both.
Yrs V.W.

King’s

[]

3250: To V. Sackville-West

Friday 21st May [1937]

Postcard

[Chateauroux, France]

I think she (on the other side) is rather like you. We’ve just visited the Chateau at Nohant—most romantic. A lovely journey, perfect country, the valley of the Dordogne. I mean to buy a house and live here. Did you enjoy the Coronation? Not a sign of it here.

V.W.

Jean Love

[]

3251: To Janet Case

May 26th [1937]

52 Tavistock Sqre., W.C.1.

Dearest Janet,

I wonder how you are?—but I dont want to trouble you or Emphie to put pen to paper unless you have such a thing as a postcard handy—which I never have.

We have just come back from a drive through France, along the banks of the Dordogne, the loveliest of all rivers; and not a single tourist, and small inns, delicious food, nightingales, a hoopoe, innumerable churches, all as if 200 years ago—but why, you will ask, are travellers letters always dull? That’s a question I’ve never solved.

So I must return to London—not that I have yet entered into life here, save for the telephone, and Desmond MacCarthy whom we found yesterday when we came back sitting waiting. Tomorrow he has to give the Leslie Stephen Lecture at Cambridge on Leslie Stephen—So dusty and hot as we were, with the marmozet chattering with rage—she came with us to France and enchanted crowds wherever we stopped—there we had to sit and hear his lecture. How I loathe lectures—all the same; always so emphatic.

That reminds me—why I dont know—why did you give away the bag, the only bag I ever made you? I would have signed a dozen copies of the Years rather than let a stranger have that clumsy tribute. Isnt it astonishing? The Years is a best seller in America, and Leonard says we shall make enough to buy a new car.

But I want to know how you feel instead of gossiping on so idly. L. is at the Labour party: my actress niece Angelica is dining here: Julian is learning to drive a lorry in order to join the Ambulance Corps. And London is so hot and heavy and floppy with old streamers and banners, and people walking, that even I who love it long for the New Forest.

My love to Emphie, whom I think one of the nicest women I ever met. And to Janet too.

V.

Sussex

[]

3252: To Maynard Keynes

May 28th [1937]

52 Tavistock Sqre. [W.C.1]

My dear Maynard,

We are very much upset to hear of your illness. Nessa wrote and told me when we were abroad. Are they sending you to Jack Hutchinson’s and Ottolines retreat in Wales, I wonder? If so, I have heard many amusing stories about it, and hope you’ll add to them.

I’m waiting for Willie Robson to come to lunch, and then, thank heaven, we’re off for Leonards last week’s holiday to Monks House. France came more than up to the scratch in food—its only one’s own fireside thats lacking. The country is about 300 years behind England in bungalow growth—might be the age of Rousseau. By the way, I got into Nohant and saw the very piano Chopin gave George Sand, and the great ladies [sic] very pens—a fascinating faded house, full of the furniture of her grandmother, and the little theatre where Flaubert and Turgenev acted all set for a scene in the kitchen-quarters.

I’m grateful for the Browning Catalogue: if I dared I would go and bid. The Years is said to be a best seller in America—If I were certain what that meant I would plunge. As it is, no doubt Victor will acquire the lot.

Lydia if very kind will tell us how you go on and if we may write—if gossip from Tavistock Sqre. is allowed. Sally is gravid with at least 4 pups. And so we all send our love—heres Willie—

yr
V.W.

King’s

[]

3253: To Emphie Case

June 3rd [1937]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

My dear Emphie,

It was very good of you to write; and you must be having such a bad time.

But it does sound as though Janet [Case] might be now more comfortable. My father had the same operation. If she can walk about, and look at her trees and birds, it will be an immense advantage.

Here we are, having a few days off, before we go back to London, which is all abuzz with the Opera, the season, the Coronation. How nice to think of you so much more sensibly and humanely employed with your blue china and salt cellars. I forgot to say how much the table at Hewer’s Orchard [Janet’s house] impressed me. It started me improving our kitchen—so if the new china cupboard and coal box are a failure, I shall blame you. I wish you’d walk in and look at them; and then we could have a gossip and say some truthful but flattering things about that very nice and good looking woman your sister. Shall I write to her? I’ll try, in case she likes letters.

Please take care of yourself and accept both our very ancient and tender affection. L. is gardening.

yr
V.W.

Sussex

[]

3254: To Shena, Lady Simon

3rd June [1937]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Shena,

I return your enclosure which has amused me very much, and also shocked me. It seems incredible that there should be all this humming and hawing—about the university question I mean. I should have thought one could ask a plain question in a natural speaking voice without any fear of being squashed. But then, even less than you, do I know Cambridge. I am much tempted to write something off my own bat, whether they ask me to lecture or not—and of course they wont. But no doubt I should have no effect, or a bad one. I never understand what “membership of the University” exactly means. You must enlighten me.

As for the gowns—there we enter a world of such unreality that only a cave dweller can see the wood for the trees. Excuse these mixed metaphors. I’m writing in a hurry. How can human beings have got themselves into such postures!

I hear by the way that Maynard Keynes is better and going to Wales.

yr
V.W.

Sussex

[]

3255: To Saxon Sydney-Turner

5th June [1937]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

My dear Saxon,

Your letter was sent on here. Yes of course I should be delighted to dine to meet anyone you choose—the longer the notice the better. We have been driving about France during the Coronation celebrations, then finished with a week planting flowers here. But we go back tomorrow and shall be in London, save for weekends till the final holiday (that sounds like going to Heaven—but I only mean August.)

Have you ever seen Sarlat, Souillac, the caves with the drawings and Albi? Or are they too Latin for you?

yr
V.

Sussex

[]

3256: To Lydia Keynes

5th June [1937]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

My dear Lydia,

It was very good of you to write, and we are much relieved to hear that Maynard is better. I hope he won’t get stronger mentally as his normal strength in the head is quite enough for me. Now you must at once give him a kiss; from me; then he will at once give you a kiss, which will be from Leonard, and so it will be all fair and above board.

It’s a pity we cant be kissing nose to nose this evening—The Cement works are looking positively sublime in the evening light; it is a quarter to nine, but so hot we cant settle to our books—tell Maynard to read the Memoirs of George Sand by herself in 10 vols:—if he wants a soothing but enthralling bedfellow—and Leonard is engaged in putting his new tortoises to bed in the lily pond. They—we bought 3—are so active we cant keep control of them. I am perpetually being sent up the road in pursuit of the father tortoise—which reminds me that Sally is causing us great anxiety. We were certain she was pregnant, and indeed her marriage took 25 minutes, I mean the after marriage, that is the dovetailing, (I waited behind a wall at the breeders) and we thought she was swollen when we came back. But the swelling did not increase: last night Leonard dosed her for worms; at 3.PM. she voided some yards of tape, and is now virgin to all appearances. What are we to do?

We go to London, alas, tomorrow: my only consolation is that I’m dining with the Hutchinsons [St John and Mary] to meet Lady Diana and Duff Cooper, and hope to pump her about the Duke of Windsor; anyhow I’m such a snob, that I shall enjoy my evening. No room for more. But here is Leonard who confirms the kiss. Love to Maynard.

V.

King’s

[]

3257: To Janet Case

June 12th [1937]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

Dearest Janet,

I heard from Emphie about your operation. I wont bore you by saying how sorry I was: but I hope you’re back again in that nice room now, with the flowers outside; and feeling better.

A little worldly gossip is all I can supply. Would you like to hear about the beautiful Lady Diana—whom I rather think you once taught—Duff Cooper she is now—married to a little puffed up robin redbreast of a man. Why? I cant think, and didn’t like to ask though she was very free and easy and told me all about youth at Belvoir. They had tin baths and large cans painted black with red spots. I said that in middle class households the cans were yellow. She said the nuisance was that her grandfather the old duke was such a democrat that people came into the house at all hours. But her brother [9th Duke] has changed all that. She is more beautiful I think than she was; less painted; more bone and hollow; and wearing a ravishing veil over her hair and a bunch of yellow flowers.

This is my only grand party since we came back from France. We had a time entirely without parties there; only looking at farms and churches and sitting on the banks of the Dordogne eating pate de foie gras—a lovely holiday.

Now in London there’s a lot of telephone ringing: L. has all his politicians at him, and I have old Ethel Smyth who stumps in for what she calls ten minutes. Its really 2 hours; all one long harangue, to which I listen, because she’s stone deaf, and her trumpet doesnt work, but what does that matter, since she has a supreme belief in her own divine genius, and if you get her off on that, and love, and music, and her sheep dog, there’s no need to answer. I’m looking at boxes of Roger Fry’s letters and wondering how anyone writes a real life. An imaginary one wouldn’t so much bother me. But oh, the dates, the quotations!

This gossip is only by way of passing half an hour in your and Emphies company, which I always think preferable to other peoples. So let us come and see you again; and get better. Love to Emphie. The marmozet joins, and Sally.

V.

Sussex

[]

3258: To Mrs G. E. Easdale

13th June 1937

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

Dear Mrs Easdale,

I was amused by Joans article which I return. Five guineas is quite a good sum; though Ive no doubt she worked hard for it. I never see the Adelphi, so I missed the other article. But I hope this means that she is getting work that she enjoys. I’m sure, hard as it is, writing articles is a good training at first; it makes one finish and compress.

We had a very good holiday in France, and missed all the Coronation riot. Do you know the valley of the Dordogne? We were much tempted to buy a farm and settle there; but cant manage it.

I am glad that you are back at Crouch [near Sevenoaks, Kent]; is Joan in London still, and does she find Mr Murrys establishment satisfactory? But I must stop.

Yours sincerely,
Virginia Woolf

University of London

[]

3259: To Ethel Smyth

Tuesday [15 June 1937]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

I wonder how many of my letters to you begin “I am a wretch …” Never answered and should have answered. Once more, I am a wretch. The slips are a great discovery I think: I shall get some broader—so that I could type on them. and see if I cant cut down my labours by half; and thank you. L: is committed to 3 weeks of Dr Alexander, who says he can undoubtedly cure him and make “a new man of him.” L. thinks, after 3 sittings, there’s undoubtedly something in it We had a long drive on Sunday and lunch with his brother after it. Normally he wouldn’t have been able to cut his meat; and as it was, could hold his knife almost steady. But its too early to tell.

And why have you become so excessively tactful in your speech with me? I dont like that particular virtue; perhaps I’m crotchety about it. Anyhow I refuse to be tactful myself; and say crudely and rudely, no I dont care for C. St John’s article. Why do you? Is it good criticism? Is it well written? Not in my eyes. So excuse

V.

Berg

[]

3260: To May Sarton

June 16th [1937]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Miss Sarton,

Its very unfortunate—both this Friday and next Friday I shall be away. Monday 21st is the only day, but dont make a journey on purpose. Probably another Friday if thats your day in London would be free. But if you’re going back, then make it Monday 21st at 4.30.

But why should you have been frightened, considering that I am as tame and mild as a very old giraffe? I admit that the room looking onto the Lake dazzled me; but only as a giraffe might be afraid of the lights.

Please forgive this scrawl with people talking.

Yrs sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Berg

[]

3261: To V. Sackville-West

June 17th [1937]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

Yes, it would be better than nothing—lunch July 1st—one o’clock, so as to spin it out.

Ah hah! (This refers to Curtis Brown). But this business matter must be left for you and L. As for The Alsatians—no: no: What have we spent the last days doing? Rigging up a lying in bed in L’s study [for Sally]; the event comes off this Sunday. Thus we cant go to Rodmell. Dogs enough; if dogs there be. Some say she’s still virgin. George (not an S) certainly wasnt. Have you read her Memoirs? Do: But no more now—

V.

Berg

[]

3262: To William Plomer

Thursday June 17th [1937]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

My dear William,

You see from the above that we’re in London—we dont go to Monks House till the end of July, except for odd week ends. But ask us then; and we shall be delighted.

You say you are up on Wednesdays: if you are free this Wednesday, 23rd that is, would you come in after dinner and help us through a mixed and completely haphazard evening when two unknown ladies said to be of the highest merit, and personal charm, and youth, one a Finn, the other the daughter of a man who edits Woodfords diaries are being sprung upon us by an aged eccentric. Please do. If I had time I would invest the prospect with greater charm to tempt you. As it is I must depend on your good heart. Also, I’ve been meeting Tony Butts and hearing the story of the malignant Mary which I want to discuss with you.

Have you any news of Wogan? So you see to answer these questions and many more you must come. This week end we’re cloistered here, attending the accouchement of Sally [spaniel], which takes place in Leonard’s study.

Wd. you let me have a line.

yr V.W.

Texas

[]

3263: To Margaret Keynes

20th June 1937

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

Dear Margaret,

It was very nice of you to write. It’s so seldom any letter about one’s books gives one pleasure but yours did; for one thing you liked some of the same people (in the book [The Years]) that I liked. Sally, for instance. I expect you’re right about North—only the end had to be screwed up and he had to take more emotion than his share, by way of a finish. I thought it a complete failure when I’d done: it’s a marvel to me that you find it not mere old wives gossip: I was very excited when I wrote it, I remember—only it was too long and I was ill, and I couldn’t pull it together. And oh, what a grind it was, cutting out, and trying to make a whole of it. But now your letter is a consolation.

I wonder if you’ve heard how Maynard is. Lydia only says he is going on well—but what the matter is, we don’t know; or how long it is likely to take.

If you were ever free of an afternoon and would come in and have an old crone’s chat over the tea cups, it would be a great pleasure. But I suspect you’ve no time—London is a bear garden. I often think of an evening in your garden, with the river and Rupert [Brooke], and you said the poplars were like ghosts. It was then I stole your book.

Yours ever,
Virginia Woolf

Your letter went to Rodmell and got stuck, unseen, under a bedroom door, hence the delay.

Sussex

[]

3264: To Janet Case

June 26th [1937]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dearest Janet,

This is by way of continuing our conversation, and needs no answer—unless some day Emphie would write 2 words, to say how you are, on a postcard.

I have had no more experiences in the great world, unless sitting behind the Duchess of Atholl on the platform at the Albert Hall 2 nights ago can count. Oh what a bore those meetings are! We sat for 3 hours behind the Duchess and talked about Spain—I mean we listened; and they talked, but into megaphones, or microphones, so that not a word came singly but in a kind of double division to us behind. However, by hook or crook, really by means of a fat emotional woman in black velvet called Isabel Brown they collected £1500 for the Basque children.

That is the way London carries on. The nicest person I have seen lately has been my own niece, Ann—Adrian’s daughter, the one learning to be a medical student at Newnham, a great big creature, like the figure head of an old sailing ship—shall we say the Aurora Matilda. She turned up with Richard Ll. Davies, and indeed they seem to be inseparable, but that dont mean marriage, as in our day. Is he nice? Is he good enough to marry my niece—should he want to? You see how family proud and exacting age makes me. But I was so pleased to be asked to supper in his lodgings—next week. How one prefers the invitations of the young to all the glories of the world—should they come our way. I’ll write and tell you what Richard’s supper in Brunswick Sqre. is like. It was in Brunswick Sqre. 24 [25] years ago that I became engaged.

Now Leonard can be heard through the open window clipping the yew hedge. Did I tell you we are gradually carving a recumbent peacock—year by year—now his tail, now his neck? But I wonder if you are back in your window looking at your garden and how you feel, and if you are more comfortable as I hope. Now I must go and pick a leaf full of strawberries for our dinner, which will otherwise consist of cold ham. Love to both Janet and Emphie, and I wish you were here to eat it with us.

V.

Sussex

[]

3265: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

June 27th [1937]

Monk’s House, Rodmell [Sussex]

Dearest Ottoline,

That is very bad news—that you’ve been so ill. I hadn’t heard. When you last wrote you said you were going to Tonbridge Wells, only for a rest I hoped. Please dont wave your adieu just yet. I can assure you the world requires the presence of your golden wing, not its vanishing. But now all thats over, I hope; and we can owl for a moment—its as dark as midnight at the moment, with a storm coming up over Caburn.

It was very stormy in France—otherwise perhaps it would have been too perfect. We roamed about in the Dordogne valley—Souillac, Sarlat, Treysac—do you know these little towns, on the river, near Cahors and Perigueux, but almost lost; no tourists; the loveliest farms, old houses that Montaigne’s friends lived in and are now lived in by shoemakers—but I wont describe—England seems like a chocolate box bursting with trippers afterward. As for London, from which we’ve escaped this week end, I cant describe its horror—fascination too, since people are so odd—but how they swarm, and what a din they keep up. If I had any sense I should only see the ones I like, but I lose my head, and in consequence see the ones I dont like.

Anyhow you are spared that. And illness is a very sublime state, if one can read; I’m so glad you liked my little Gibbon; I’m doing Congreve now. If you want sheer joy read him; if you dont want anything so ecstatic, but broad and mellow and satisfactory, try the Memoires of George Sand. 10 little volumes; I’m in the 5th, and find it absorbing: We went to Nohant and saw her Chateau, her pens and desk and bed, all as she left them—the very wallpapers, and the table set for Flaubert and Chopins spinet and the little theatre where they acted, with Maurices [her son] dolls in a cupboard.

I must now pick a dish of raspberries for dinner, and cease to try your eyes. But if Philip [Morrell] some day would send a card to say how you are—no, I daresay he’s too busy. Our love to you. L. is clipping his hedge.

V.W.

Texas

[]

3266: To Ethyl Smyth

28th June [1937]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.]

Just back from Rodmell.

1. Re St John article. You told me it was a masterpiece from the point of view of style, and critical insight. It was thus that I judged it—not as a miraculously tactful statement of a point of view about which I can know nothing. I still maintain that I’m right in what I said from the only view point accessible to me.

2. L. goes every afternoon at 5, when he is free from other work, to Alexander. Thus he sees no chance of discussing him verbally with you—But should you wish him to ask any questions, he would willingly do so. I think theres no longer any doubt but that he’s on the right track with L. He can hold a cup steady in one hand—more than he’s done since 6 yrs. old. Alexander says he is certain of a cure: but wants him to cram in daily visits if possible.

Yes; I’m sorry about William—Our last meeting was on the deck of the Dreadnought in 1910, I think; but I wore a beard. And I’m afraid he took it to heart a good deal—so I’ve heard. So hot—so hot—and dining out; and must wash.

No I dont think 130,000 [Maurice Baring] a word too much—why, how can one enter into a mind in less? And we used to call William The Admiral when he was a Midshipman and made us a boat with a paddle that worked

V.

Berg

[]

3267: To Elinor Castle Nef

Tuesday [6 July 1937]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Mrs Nef,

I have a message for you from my sister—that is, she has 2 or 3 sketches for the Q. Mary picture; and will send them round to the hotel on Thursday, with prices attached. If you want to buy one, do: if not, dont, and send them back to her at 8 Fitzroy Street W.1. Telephone: 5596 Museum.

It was very nice seeing you and Mr Nef yesterday, and your flowers are still alive, and thank you for conveying Lady Colefax across London in yr. vast car.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

University of Chicago Library

[]

3268: To Elinor Castle Nef

[7 July 1937]

Postcard

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My sister also wanted me to tell you, but I forgot, that there is an exhibition [Contemporary British Artists] at Agnews in Bond Street which she thinks might interest you, of pictures by young artists: also old ones; chosen by Duncan Grant and Keith Baynes and herself.

Please forgive this scrawl.

Virginia Woolf

University of Chicago Library

[]

3269: To Janet Case

7th July [1937]

52 Tavistock Squire, W.C.1.

Dearest Janet,

But I never meant you to trouble to answer my letter—it was only by way of conversation—as this is: a gossip, when I would like to be on the chair by your side. By the way, if you ever would like to see me you’ve only to say: a days trip to the New Forest, and five minutes with you, and a sight of Emphie would be the greatest treat to me. And Emphie has only to say so with one word on a card.

Oh high life—thats what you like; and I wish I could provide you with anything higher in that line than Lady Colefax who came to tea yesterday and drove Leonard frantic because he says she’s a damned snob; and there were 2 Americans [the Nefs] here, and until she had placed them, fairly high, rather rich, she wouldn’t be decently polite. But then considering she has climbed from Onslow Gardens to Buckingham Palace—used to have the King to dine, let alone V.W.—how can I object? This little anecdote shows what a stew and a rush London in July is—we shovel them all into a black hole day: I buy a cake; find a pair of silk stockings; and L. comes in for all the world like a real English gentleman with his hand outstretched.

But today I’ve been so happy—rambling through Regents Park; and seeing Hampstead trees at the end of the Adelaide Road and thinking of Janet up at Windmill Hill. D’you know you see Hampstead from Gower Street? And now, six o’clock, what did I promise? To go to the Stracheys in Gordon Square and meet the great painter Matisse over a cocktail. I cant abide celebrities and cocktails. So I say to myself, I would rather write to Janet. Let Matisse go hang. But he’s the great god of the young; only so vain, so respectable, so slow, I’m told, in his wits that the entertainment is a horrid burden. He’s over about a show of his pictures.

Leonard is at the Labour Party. And our maid is out. I wish it were 20 years ago and I could push through the garden gate and see you at the window. Richard [Llewelyn Davies] is a nice boy—he had bought us sardines, and he and Ann [Stephen] cooked a chicken and the asparagus was, by mistake, fried. But I liked them—with their canoe in a bag, about to float down the Rhone. What a life the young lead! No bother about engagement rings. Now dont answer, but let me write again.

Love V.

Sussex

[]

3270: To May Sarton

Thursday [8 July 1937]

Postcard

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

I’m so sorry everything went wrong, but July in London is impossible. However, the Whipsnade book was beyond praise. On the other side are the flowers I picked and was standing in—at Rodmell.

V.W.

Berg

[]

3271: To T. S. Eliot

11th July [1937]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

My dear Tom,

You would have met me at the Kettledrum if it hadn’t been for some of your compatriots—quondam I suppose you call them: do you know the Nefs of Chicago and the Sartons of Boston? Well, dont then.

As for coming here, its high time you did. We suggest Sunday 25th at 4.30, since that seems the only hour to be slipped in between your activities and our going to Rodmell. But, why shouldnt you come there this summer? Or is every week end devoted to the Knights drains? However, come on Sunday 25th and we will have out our engagement books and try to rescue a night from chaos. I didnt mean to make a pun; thats what comes of writing to a poet.

yr aff
VW

Mrs T. S. Eliot

[]

3272: To Margaret Llewelyn Davies

July 11th [1937]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

Dearest Margaret,

Yes, I know it must be very near. I heard from Janet herself only a few days ago—not that she said anything about herself, but Emphie wrote too. I felt when we went to see them, just after Easter, what you say—that one was grateful to them both, for being as they were. And no one, not Leonard even, knows how much I have to thank Janet for.

I will try to write something about her, I dont know how one is to convey her peculiar charm. Still, if you think Emphie would like it, I will see if I can say something.

We are both well—Leonard is going to a dr. [Alexander] whom Bernard Shaw discovered, and is—so we think—becoming cured of his trembling hand. Isn’t that a miracle?

Our love to you both [M.Ll.D. and Lilian Harris]. We would like to come and see you very much—perhaps one day this summer, when we’re at Rodmell.

I suppose there’s nothing at all one can do for Emphie? You would tell me if there were—

yr Virginia

Sussex

[]

3273: To Philippa Strachey

Tuesday [13 July 1937]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

My dear Pippa,

Yes my blood boils. Not a word could I find in any paper—however, I was glad to read your letter in the Spectator. But what a narrow shave!

I wish I could have had the volcano, or geyser or whatever you call it over me at Dorothy’s; but we’ve been so afflicted with Mr Mrs Nef of Chicago, and Miss Sarton of Boston, and Saxons Finns from, I suppose, Finland that by the time Wednesday came, my lips refused to function. But I’d much rather have seen you and Pernel, whom I never see, whom I heard was there, than the Finns and the Yanks and the Swedes. May we meet in a better world—perhaps the library in Marsham Street over a cup of tea.

Yes Miss Douie was very prompt and to the point

Yr
Virginia

By the way, do tell Pernel about Leonards man, Alexander. He swears he can cure asthma, and as last night we dined out and Leonard could drink coffee for the first time since I’ve known him without shaking, its clear he is curing him.

Strachey Trust

[]

3274: To S. S. Koteliansky

Monday [19 July 1937]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

Dear Kot,

I have been away or I would have written before. This is our last week before going away, so it is very crowded. The only time possible for us both seems to be next Sunday 25th at 4.30. Would you come then? I think Tom Eliot, but no one else is coming. Then I could give you your book. But I’ll send it if you cant come. However, I hope we may see you; which would be a pleasure. Yes, isn’t it odd, that the Americans should like the Years?

yrs ever
Virginia Woolf

British Library

[]

3275: To V. Sackville-West

Wednesday [21 July 1937]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.]

Dearest Creature

I wired to you because Julian was killed yesterday in Spain. Nessa likes to have me and so I’m round there most of the time. It is very terrible. You will understand

V.

Leonard says if you could look in between 2.30 and 3 tomorrow he cd discuss the jackets [for Pepita]

Berg

[]

3276: To Ethel Smyth

Thursday [22 July 1937]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

Ethel dear Julian has been killed in Spain. Perhaps you saw this. I am with Nessa as much as possible, and we shall try to get her down to Charleston on Sunday if we can. It is very terrible: you’ll understand.

Yr V.

Berg

[]

3277: To T. S. Eliot

23rd July [1937]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

My dear Tom,

As you may have seen, Julian has been killed in Spain. I am with Vanessa as much as possible, and if she is able, we may go down to Charleston on Sunday. So we must put you off—but I’ll write later and hope to see you. I know you will understand.

yr aff
V.

Mrs T. S. Eliot

[]

3278: To S. S. Koteliansky

23rd July [1937]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

Dear Kot,

As you may have seen, Julian Bell has been killed in Spain. I am with Vanessa as much as possible, and if she is able, we shall try to go down to Sussex on Sunday. So I must put you off. But hope to see you later. I know you will understand this.

yr Virginia

British Library

[]

3279: To Saxon Sydney-Turner

[23 July 1937]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

Dear Saxon,

Would you thank Barbara. Of course we would let her know if she could do anything. Angelica is acting every day till Monday and then we hope to take Nessa down to Charleston and A. would come too. She is a great help to Nessa.

Nessa seems rather better today. She is keeping quiet in bed, as the shock was terrible, but the effect is less today and she has taken food better. I will tell her what Barbara says.

V.

Sussex

[]

3280: To Philip Morrell

Friday [23 July 1937]

52 Tavistock Sqre. [W.C.1.]

My dear Philip,

I was just going to write and thank you for your letter when we got this terrible news about Julian. I’m sitting with Vanessa most of the time, so I wont try to answer now. Only I’m so glad Ottoline is better. I know she’ll understand what this means. Vanessa is still very exhausted and in bed, but rather better today and it is on the whole a relief to her to know at last how it happened. It was in The Times today. Thank you for writing: I am always grateful to you and Ottoline

yr aff
V.W.

Texas

[]

3281: To Margaret Llewelyn Davies

Sunday 25 July [1937]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

Dearest Margaret,

Thank you for your letter. I know you understand. It is so terrible to see what the suffering is; but she is wonderful. I told her you had written. We always think of Theodore and Thoby together, and now there is Julian too.

She has been ill with the shock, and is still in bed, but better, and I spend the day with her, so have no time to write. But would you thank Mrs [Rosalind] Nash for her letter. It was a great pleasure to think you and she liked what I said of Janet [Case].

Love from us both.

yr Virginia

Sussex

[]

3282: To Maynard Keynes

Sunday [25 July 1937]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

Dearest Maynard,

I thought I would tell you that Vanessa liked your letter. It said so beautifully what she had wanted someone to say. So thank you. Its been so terrible—now that she knows how it happened, the worst suspense is over. She’s still in bed, and very weak. The strain ever since he went [to Spain] has been so great. But yesterday she slept without a sleeping draught, and tried to do some embroidery. I think now she only wants to go to Charleston—perhaps on Tuesday. I spend the day with her, and wanted to tell you your letter had been a comfort to us. Love to Lydia: and get well.

Yrs
Virginia

King’s

[]

3283: To Rosamond Lehmann

Sunday [25 July 1937]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

My dear Rosamond,

It was good of you to write. I gave Vanessa your letter, and she liked it and wanted me to thank you.

No, there’s nothing to be said. We’ve been through so much together, but this is the worst, except that she is always more wonderful.

Since she heard how it happened, from the Times, the worst suspense is over. She is better now, but still in bed. The strain before was very great. But if possible we shall go down to Charleston one day this week.

Will you tell Wogan [Philipps, her husband] I minded telling him like that in the street, but couldn’t do anything else—he’ll understand. I think she would like to see him some time. I’m just going round there.

Yes, dear Rosamond, it does help, your understanding.

yr aff
V.W.

She likes to hear anything people say about him.

King’s

[]

3284: To W. A. Robson

26th July [1937]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

Dear Willy,

I wanted to thank you today for your letter, but I couldnt. It was very good of you to write: I showed Vanessa your letter and she liked it, and wanted me to thank you. At the moment the private sorrow is so great one cant get anything clear in one’s mind. He was a great joy to us; her children are like my own. But it had become necessary for him to go; and there is a kind of grandeur in that which somehow now and then consoles one. Only—to see what she has to suffer makes one doubt if anything in the world is worth it.

Excuse this scrawl. Vanessa is still in bed, and everything has been so confused that I have not yet answered letters.

Will you thank Juliette from me, and say that I insist upon being Virginia, unless I am to call you Professor Robson. It was very good of her to write.

yr ever
Virginia Woolf

Sussex

[]

3285: To V. Sackville-West

[26? July 1937]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

Dearest Creature,

I was very glad of your letter. I couldnt write, as I’ve been round with Vanessa all day. It has been an incredible nightmare. We had both been certain he would be killed, and the strain on her is now, perhaps mercifully, making her so exhausted she can only stay in bed. But I think we shall drive her down to Charleston on Thursday.

Lord, why do these things happen? I’m not clear enough in the head to feel anything but varieties of dull anger and despair. He had every sort of gift—above everything vitality and enjoyment. Why must he get set on going to Spain?—But it was useless to argue. And his feelings were so mixed. I mean, interest in war, and conviction, and a longing to be in the thick of things. He was the first of Nessa babies, and I cant describe how close and real and always alive our relation was. As for Nessa—but as I say I’m so stupid what with ordering the char to buy mutton, and generally doing odd jobs I cant think, or as you see write—so forgive this egotism. Shall you come over to M.H. one day? I should like to see you. And dear old Clive,—he is such a pathetic, and always honest, man. cracking his jokes. to try and make us all laugh—wh. I admire

Yr V.

Berg

[]

Letters 3286-3321 (August-October 1937)

3286: To Vanessa Bell

Tuesday [3 August 1937]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

This is only to say that I’m coming over to tea tomorrow, which is Wednesday, unless you stop me—unless that is, you’ve had enough of your singe, who adores you, and cant stay away from you. I find there are all sorts of trains and omnibuses and possible combinations, so that I can trot on my own toes.

Its a hazy hot day here; Leonard has been clipping his yews; I have been maundering over the downs, and trying to write Congreve, and theres not much village news, save that Louie [Everest] went in a boat yesterday for the first time in her life. How, being a mother at 14, she preserves this innocence of all other adventures I dont know. Then her friend, the Welshwoman, Mrs Polock, came to help in the house, and looks like the most sophisticated Bloomsbury Bunny, only more competent. There’s no doubt civilisation is beginning at the bottom, so that we shall all be overtaken, before long. No letters yet, but then thats Bank holiday; and Leonard is glad, because he can write his book, but I like opening a letter, and thinking myself loved. I’ve written to Margery [Fry] to tell her to find more articles, and we’ll bring them when we go up on Tuesday. I wonder if you’ve dipped into Helen’s [Anrep] box. Monks House is like a green cave, no light to eat by in the dining room, so we dine in the kitchen: this comes of the romantic profusion of our Vine, which blocks all the windows. You’d say it was natural to Wolves—this dim leafage; and now I must stop chattering to my darling dolphin and go to the post, and hope for a letter and then play bowls, and then put the kettle on; but all the time adoring my lovely dolphin, and longing to see her.

B.

Berg

[]

3287: To Vanessa Bell

Thursday [5 August 1937]

Monks House [Rodmell, Sussex]

This is only your Singe’s morning kiss, and to enclose these letters. We can discuss Tom’s this afternoon—I mean tomorrow—when I shall turn up for tea.

I rather resented the presence of the spruce Jewess [Janice Loeb] yesterday, though there’s no harm to her, and she only wants a ball of wool to turn her into a kitten. No, you’ll say, she’s not a patch on John Ruskin. We raced them as far as the halt, and Leonard then passed them, in sheer bravado; and I didn’t altogether envy Clive boxed up for a month in that black beetle with that mild mixture. But I suppose there’s no accounting for tastes, and the great thing is to have tastes.

I spent the evening binding my George Sand in Angelica’s papers, which must be exactly what she wore the first time she met Chopin, so its most suitable; and conveys all the romance of Venice in the 30ties whenever I come into the room.

Otherwise the world of Rodmell is peaceful—roasting hot in my Lodge, even with all the windows open, and the Downs are turning the colour of lions opposite. I wish dolphin were by my side, in a bath, bright blue, with her tail curled. But then I’ve been always in love with her since I was a green eyed brat under the nursery table, and so shall remain in my extreme senility.

Leonard has filled the house with oak logs bought off an old man with a waggon—they smelt of the essence of wood; and all the lilies are in the diningroom too; so it goes to the head like wine, and thus excuses poor Singes drivel, which is only by way of a morning kiss—dearest love, how I adore you

B

Berg

[]

3288: To Ethel Smyth

5th Aug [1937]

Monks House [Rodmell, Sussex]

No we only got down here last week end. Nessa was too done up to come before, and we wanted to drive her. And as you may suppose—damn the hair on the pen—I cant collect my wits to write a letter—cant get things into the right focus. So dont expect sympathy or understanding. I expect this sort of thing is fearfully bad for the character; I’m feeling wooden yet enraged. Most afternoons I go over to Charleston, one way or another, which takes most of the time, after the morning I mean, when I try to work. Next week I expect Nessa will begin painting; at the moment, someone coming is a distraction—all one can do.

Is it hot at Woking? Are you at Woking? I seem to have dropped out—cant remember where anyone is at the moment. And that reminds me—an intelligent girl, [Katherine John] writing a life of the Prince Imperial pesters me to meet you. I lent her your masterpiece on the Empress. But shant tell her either to write to you or to ask to see you unless you say she may. And God knows why you should. Is the MB. [Maurice Baring] settled? When will it come out? And what line does he take?

Yr V.

Berg

[]

3289: To T. S. Eliot

7th August [1937]

Typewritten

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

My dear Tom,

I showed Vanessa your letter, as I knew she was anxious to hear. She thanks you very much, and would I am sure like it if you would write to her some time yourself about Julian’s essays. She is at Charleston, Firle, Lewes;—a good deal better, but still weak from the shock; and not able yet to work. She wants us to read the essays, only one of which, the Roger Fry letter, we have seen. Would you therefore tell whoever has them to forward them to me here as soon as convenient? Of course we would publish them ourselves, but we feel rather that it would be better for someone outside the family to do it. But that can wait till we have read them.

Yes, do come down. We shall be here till October save for an occasional day here and there. What week end would suit you? So far the only one engaged is the second in September. Therefore would you come the first week end or the third or late in August? I know Vanessa would very much like to see you, and so should we.

Grilling hot here; Leonard is yew clipping, I am drowsing over a book.

Yours affectionate
Virginia

Mrs T. S. Eliot

[]

3290: To Vanessa Bell

Sunday [8 August 1937]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

This is only a nightjar’s chuckle—that is to say, Could we come and dine with you on Tuesday?—That is to say if we’re bringing Angelica back. Then I could leave some more papers on you—not that I’ve heard from Margery—still there may be some odds and ends; and I long—oh why are you the only person I never see enough of?—to see you again. Yesterday was such a medley—we thought we were free to bask in naked heat, when in stumped Mabel [cook at Tavistock Square], bored with Lewes races, as red as a tomato, as stuffed as a sofa, but she says she eats only cheese and junket, living in lodgings with Mr Sanford at Brighton. It occurred to me that she might do for you, failing the other woman for a fortnight. But this I could settle later. Then, no sooner had I given her some apples, during which I left the door open and Mitz escaped, and L. said Thats the last we shall ever see of her—not a bit of it—there she was on the kitchen table, nibbling a lettuce—Then, I say, as we recovered, a car stopped, out dashed John Graham, in shorts, very personable, but condemned, by nature and fate, to be a schoolmaster at Hampstead. Not but what he has leanings to intellect. I have promised to go and disinter the iron age [camp] with him on Caburn.—Wont you come too! And he stayed, bowling with L. till dinner; and then at last we dined. This is a rigmarole: I ought to be tidying the drawing room, fetching the ice for the butter, and doing my hair, for L. will soon be back from Worthing with a cartload of very old blind ladies, one of whom was a hospital Nurse at Cannes and married his Uncle solely for the sake of his military bearing, for he was a bad lot, and she a complete ambient waxwork—like Traill, only stupider, duller, and more entirely obtuse. Happily Q and A will I hope descend. So thats all my lovely Dolphin: let me know about Tuesday,—if that is you dont want us—wh. may well be—and if I can fetch anything in London for you.

B

If I dont hear, we’ll bring A back and dine on Tuesday If I can I’ll come over tomorrow to tea.

Berg

[]

3291: To Vanessa Bell

[August 1937]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

Yes, I’ll come tomorrow to tea, my own darling creature. You shant be rid of me for long. In fact I cant bear not seeing you. Heres the other lot of [Roger Fry] letters and 2 books that may amuse you. We’ve been bowling and its so late they must go. How have you slept. Bruce Richmond says a man called Lowndes in the office wrote the thing in the Times. Love from us, darling. Oh and Louie wanted to make you a loaf!

Berg

[]

3292: To Vanessa Bell

Thursday [12 August 1937]

Monks House [Rodmell, Sussex]

I’m coming to tea tomorrow, Friday, as then Quentin will be able to drive me back. I wired to Judith [Stephen] to say you couldnt have Adrian, nor we Judith this week end; but would they come next week end. I wonder if you’ve heard from the [Charles] Maurons. I rather hope nobody will come this week end, since it means dolphin standing on her tail, and I think she ought to curl in a basket another week at least. This morning Faber at last sent Julian’s essays. I’ll bring them tomorrow. And Ozzie Dickinson wrote to say old Violet has fallen on a mat, broken her thigh, is in a nursing home, in plaster of Paris, and will I write to her and cheer her up. What human beings are to be sure! How can I cheer up Violet after a 20 years silence? One’s jokes grow old. And he says she may never walk again. And I suppose shes 75 [72] at least. Then I had a cable from America, asking for a story—to which I replied, as you bade me, only if money is paid beforehand; so I wait the result, but expect nothing’ll come of it: and then you will be responsible. But I’m sure you’re right all the same. And a great branch in the churchyard is cracked and hangs over our fruit. L. is at this moment writing to tell Mr Ebbs [Rector of Rodmell] that he must cut it. As its pendant, 100 feet (or so) high, how can a clergyman cut it? But as Mrs. Ebbs told us to mend our wall, they must cut the tree. I wish I were having tea with you: but you wdn’t want me twice running I suppose. My love has always been fuller than your thimble. Heres an enclosure for Angelica. I’ll subscribe for her if she likes. And the silk has come—a lovely evening beach colour, I mean the wet sand on a green evening. If Q. could take away the arm chair on Friday I wd. give it him: only its prodigious: solid however, and stuffed. How are you my loveliest of dolphins? Do you sleep?

B

Ethel Smyth threatens a visit

Berg

[]

3293: To Violet Dickinson

13th Aug. 37

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

My Violet,

I was miserable to hear that you had fallen down and broken your leg. I only heard it two days ago, or I’d have written before. Not that unfortunately a letter will heal it. Still a little conversation would be a pleasure, to me: if I could only remember the names of flowers, and what Leonard is proud of this summer, it would be like one of old Miss Jekyll’s letters, minus the common sense.

We are safe in our garden, and its the most I can do to get Leonard to leave it. Can you make Ozzie walk? Thats the only relic I have left from my father. I still tramp off for 2 hours daily. Only he would have gone a whole day with a tin box of sandwiches, carefully packed by my mother. Is it a sign of age that I find myself thinking of St Ives [Cornwall] every summer?

Where did you spend your childhood? When did you begin to grow? And what did they say when you passed the 6 foot? Am I right in saying that to be 6 ft tall in the Age of Q. Victoria was equivalent to having an illegitimate child?

I wish, now that you’re stretched out, you would scribble me your memoirs—not necessarily for publication, as they say, but as a guarantee of old affection. Ethel Smyth wrote hers at my request: yours would, I swear, be much less egotistical. Please consider it. How you could describe the Duckworths, the Stephens, let alone the Thynnes [Lord Bath’s daughters], and the ancient nobility of England! Do they all flock to your bedside? Coronets and garlands are strewn about you I’m sure. They always filled the hall in Manchester Street. I wish you would do for my lovely niece Angelica what you did for her Aunt. She’s lovelier far, and far quicker witted and more commonsensical than I ever was.

But I mustn’t begin family praises. Dont try to answer. This is only a scrap and a scrawl with both our love:

Sp.

Sussex

[]

3294: To Vanessa Bell

Tuesday [17 August 1937]

Monks House [Rodmell, Sussex]

Quentin has just rung up; so I suppose the great muddle is more or less solved: And this is only by way of Singe’s morning kiss. Helen [Anrep] wrote by the way to say if you dont like the hammock, it is to be given to me. So say you do like the hammock, because one telescope is enough for me. There have been no great adventures to speak of, save that the Bridge was open last night as we came through, in a storm of rain, a sailing ship passing, and all very romantic, and as usual I thought of you. Do you think we have the same pair of eyes, only different spectacles? I rather think I’m more nearly attached to you than sisters should be. Why is it I never stop thinking of you, even when walking in the marsh this afternoon and seeing a great snake like a sea serpent gliding among the grass? You were right about the American magazine: they now say they will take my story if I wire a suitable synopsis—which is a sketch of the plot; so I’ve made up a story about a jeweller and a duchess, and cabled the plot—how he buys her pearls, for £10,000, knowing them to be false—thats not all of it by any means. Do you think, knowing the Americans as you do, that this will fetch them? It means £200 if it does. I’m completely stuck on my war pamphlet [Three Guineas], so I may as well write about Duchesses. I’m always wanting to argue it with Julian—in fact I wrote it as an argument with him. Somehow he stirred me up to argue—I wish I’d got his essays to read—they might give me some ideas. I suppose Charles [Mauron] will discuss them with you; and I shant see you alone for ever so long. unless I creep over tomorrow, but I hardly think you’ll want to see me so soon again. A letter from Tom [Eliot], who wants to come late in September: a letter from a lady who has described me in a French newspaper—“a noble lady with a great shock of white hair”—Lord, are we as old as all that? I feel only about six and a half. And now I must play bowls, be beaten once more, and then have out the scope and see if I can pry into your bedroom. If you notice a dancing light on the water, that’s me. The light kisses your nose, then your eyes, and you cant rub it off; my darling honey how I adore you, and Lord knows I cant say what it means to me to come into the room and find you sitting there. Roger felt just the same. Have you noted any extracts in his letters? I think you must begin at the beginning with old Lady Fry [his mother]. So no more.

B.

I’ll bring them from London next week.

Berg

[]

3295: To Saxon Sydney-Turner

18th Aug. [1937]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

My dear Saxon,

We are going to London on Tuesday and could then send Rosemary [Beresford] her MS.—if you would let me have the address. If however, she is in a hurry, I daresay you could find it if you went to the Press and asked them to take you to the flat. The MS. is in the cupboard (with a ship painted on it) attached to the tall green book case by the fire. Send me a card to say which you prefer.

We’re just walking over to Charleston. I go there most days. I think there’s no doubt that Nessa is physically a good deal better. She is up all day and walks round the garden. This week end the Maurons and Helen Anrep are coming. We are having Eddie Playfair here—he wants to see Quentin and the Maurons. So you’ll get news of her from him. She’s reading Rogers letters and putting his papers in order.

Love from us both
Yrs V.W.

Sussex

[]

3296: To Vanessa Bell

Friday [20 August 1937]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

We didnt come over today because I expect you’re too full of humans as it is. This is only to say we expect Quentin to lunch tomorrow, one, shall we say: and then we could all come over to tea. And then we can make other arrangements. God knows how my relics of 17th French will stand the battery. I shant produce them in your presence anyhow. I’m half dazed at the moment, having wandered into Southease Church, and been fallen upon by the Rev. Thomas, who showed me round the frescoes with a long stick. “See that mark? You’d think it a spider—Not at all. That is the Crown of Thorns. So Mr. Constable of the Courthauld Museum says. All is done by the hand of God here. The electric heating is by Watts of Southwark. And Miss Humphries, a lady artist, has hung 10 water colour drawings, not as you or I would hang them, but as they hang them in the Royal Academy, half an inch off the wall. And that stain is a donkeys ears: for that is a fresco of our Lord on the Cross” Well it may have been: only it looks like a brown rat running in circles. I only escaped as another tourist came.

And a cable further stuns me, from New York, to say they cant make head or tail of my synopsis, so will I write the plot out at length—which means I fear they wont buy. And a letter from Saxon, about Rosemary’s poems, and meeting Sidney Waterlow—but as bare as a bone. And … oh here’s Leonard to play bowls, so whats the use of sending this illegible scribble? None whatever. except that your Singe is never happy away from you, and when he sees a pen snatches it, and cant spell or write or think, what with Southease Church and having to give the Rev. Thomas 10/6 to buy a font with; but must kiss you all the same. How have you got on with the Frogs [the Maurons]? and the Hammock [Helen Anrep] and the Oaf [Igor Anrep]? and does Angelica control the whole boiling with her ineffable charm and her supreme tact?

B.

Berg

[]

3297: To Rosamond Lehmann

Aug 20th [1937]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

My dear Rosamond,

Thank you very much. It was very good of you to write so fully. Archie Cochran and Philip Hart, the dr., rang us up and offered to come down here the other day. We are going to see them in London next week; but I dont suppose they will add anything to your letter.

I showed it to Quentin, and he agrees that it is much better not to tell Vanessa anything about it. We are not telling her that we are seeing them, or that they are in London. I saw Portia Holman from the hospital, a few days after Julian’s death. She gave me rather a different, and perhaps less painful account—I mean it was less detailed, and I repeated this to Vanessa. She was greatly upset by it, though I think after the first shock it was a relief to her to know how it happened. But we dread opening the thing again, and there seems no reason to, since clearly from what you say there is nothing that she ought to hear. If she herself ever asked to see Archie Cochran of course it would be different. She is seeing Portia Holman next week.

We’re very grateful to you for writing. It was good of you. I think one day Nessa would like it if you wrote and told her things you remember about Julian—how he came when your baby was born and so on. She is better, I think, and takes more interest in other things. The Maurons are staying at Charleston this week end. The great thing I think is to help her to get back to family life and painting—as far as one can.

Thank you again, dear Rosamond. You have been a help.

yr aff V.W.

I’m so glad Wogan is not to drive an ambulance again.

King’s

[]

3298: To Hugh Walpole

22nd Aug. 37

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

My dear Hugh,

I gave Vanessa your message, and she wants me to thank you. It was very good of you to write. Julian’s death seems the most complete waste one can imagine. He was everything one could wish for: and now its all over.

I hope we shall see you in the autumn.

Vanessa by the way was saying how good you had been about their picture show.

Yr affate Virginia

Texas

[]

3299: To Vanessa Bell

Monday [23 August 1937]

Monks House [Rodmell, Sussex]

I half sent a message through Angelica to ask if we could dine with you tomorrow, that is Tuesday? May we? We shall be coming back from London, and I’ll bring some more Roger letters; and it would be a great treat to see you. But if you’ve had too many humans, you can prevent us by sending a tactfully phrased wire to Tavistock Sqre.

Oh I’m so furious! Just as we’d cleared off our weekend visits, the telephone rings, and there comes to lunch, late, hungry yet eating with the deliberation and mastication of a Toad, Mr Gillies of the Labour Party. It’s 5.30. He’s still there, masticating. Half a plum cake has gone down crumb by crumb. Mercifully he was ceased [sic] with such a choking fit that I made off to my Lodge to write this. You cant conceive what the mind of a Labour party leader is like—George [Duckworth] is advanced, Saxon [Sydney-Turner] rash, and Barbara [Bagenal] wildly imaginative in comparison. And they scrape their knives on their plates. Never let Angelica marry a Labour leader: on the other hand dont tell Leonard this, for he lives in the delusion that they are good men.

Do you like Helen Anrep better than me? The green goddess, Jealousy alit on my pillow this very dawn and shot this bitter shaft through my heart. I believe you do. Its not so much the private wound I mind—its the deficiency of taste on your part. All the same I admit she has her moss rose charm: and in her breast instead of dew is a heart, I admit. I fell in love—this is to make you jealous—(but it wont) with Marie [Mrs Charles Mauron], whom I kissed as we exchanged roses under the mistletoe. She is a gypsy I’m sure. Once the paint cracks out comes the juice of the grape. Lord how I love writing to you. But I know you never read what I write. Heres Gillies: he’s stopped choking alas: he’s talking about the Labour Party Conference at Bournemouth. You see, theyre old maids wiping their china, gossiping about Sally and the policeman in the scullery. I liked Eddy [Playfair] too. I see I’m a snob. I really prefer Eton and King’s to the elementary school at Glasgow, where Gillies took a prize.

here’s L. so I’ll discuss Eddie tomorrow if you’ll have us

B

G[illies]. is going!!!

Berg

[]

3300: To Vanessa Bell

Thursday [26 August 1937]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

I had hoped to come this afternoon, as Leonard thought of going to see cricket at Eastbourne—you know he goes to one match yearly: but he got too late to start, and is going tomorrow, so I’ll come then instead. Oh dear, what a bore—because tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow there’ll be Janie, and I want to see you without someone to distract you from me: jealousy pure and simple. Angelica’s just rung up. I hope she’ll bring Curtis and Janie [Bussy] to tea on Saturday. and Quentin: for one thing the most enormous cake has arrived, from my mother in law. It is something like the Albert Hall; and has 3 garlands of leaves across it, one green: “As you were” (written in chocolate) one silver—“As you are.” One gold. “As you will be—” Then 1912-1937—Now the old lady thought this all out for herself: and then employed Lyons; and theyve done their best; only there’s not a plum to be seen; which cuts Leonard to the heart. But as the course of our married life has been pure, so should our cake be. This idea I’ve been developing, with a whole gallimaufry of works to embellish it, at tea. What news of Edgar? Percy says he’s so often drunk in Lewes and then gets so quarrelsome, he always keeps clear of him, so had not heard. Dont you think we might send Maynard a Round Robin, all our names protesting in a circle, with the murdered white dog drawn by you in the middle? Our criminal [Rodmell robber] is still at large, and I thought I heard him in the garden last night but was too sleepy to lock my door. The police have arrested two farm hands; simply because they were sleeping in barns. So no doubt I shall be in prison—because if you’re asked suddenly what is your name and what are you doing? you cant say. Louies [Everest] mother was asked her name in a shop the other day, and had to find her husband and ask him. So I shall ask you.

I dont like this very hot day: its extremely ugly. Old Miss Emery [Rodmell] has just been in with a basin of mulberries. An electric coffee maker, from my mother in law, has come; but the coffee, though made in ten seconds, is like very refined dish water; and a table has come from my brother in law, covered with great dragons. If you touch a spring 4 legs shoot out. Oh dear, what a thing real family life is! But I mustnt run on: and this is all dull.

So tomorrow.
B

Berg

[]

3301: To Ethel Smyth

27th Aug. 37

M[onks] H[ouse, Rodmell, Sussex]

Its very good of you to go on writing, and I much appreciate your letters, seeing how little encouragement you get. But the fact is I’m not in a letter writing mood this summer; and also, practically speaking, dont get much time. One way and another, I’ve a good deal on my hands: not I admit that thats a real excuse. However, as one of your old ladies used to say, so be it.

Odd that you should be going to the Roman Wall: thats an old dream of ours. We have it always up our sleeves. Do tell me, is it all we suppose? Can one walk a whole day along a rampart, surveying the border, the romantic borders, with the sheep cropping and the wild white moths? I’m amused at your swingeing of Elizabeth [Williamson]. What a censor of your kind you are! What an assurance you possess. Is it the solid legacy of the ancestral Colonels? God and the Empire? Why attach such value to positive work? Theres Hugh Walpole, delivered of another 200,000 word book. Do you therefore admire? Is there not a merit in contemplation? As for Vita, she’s been stung on the ankle by a wasp and almost died but quite recovered. Asks me to go over, or will come here. No, I’ve heard nothing of Nigel on his Island, but Ben dined one night; very like Vita at the chrysalis stage, as handsome, as indolent, as muffed. But this was long ago. A good many people haunt us; partly to take the load off Nessa. Oh dear—how can one ever make her happy again? Its a perpetual wound, and one cant stop it. Then your old lady says again enough. So MB [Maurice Baring] will be out this autumn. Well, according to our engagement, I’m not to have a copy or to express an opinion. [Dr] Alexander has certainly half-cured, and would whole-cure L: if he had time. So goodbye

V.

Berg

[]

3302: To May Sarton

29th Aug. [1937]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Your letter was sent on. I’m so sorry, I shant be in London again till October, when I suppose you’ll be gone. If you’re with Elizabeth [Bowen], will you tell her I’m sending her, at last, the book I promised. Best wishes for the novel. Excuse this scrawl.

V.W.

Berg

[]

3303: To Vanessa Bell

Tuesday [31 August 1937]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

In wonder if you ever got my Sunday letter [missing]: as I’ve had no receipts to the bills I paid then, I rather suspect the whole lot is stuck on the pillar box. I hope this wont, not that I’ve anything to say—except send this

No: here is the post, and a receipt, so perhaps yours alone stuck.

One of Julians essays came this morning. War and Peace—the letter to Morgan.—I thought there were 2 others: perhaps they weren’t being typed. Anyhow we’ll read this at once.

No L can get the others from Q.

Letters, no news, save village gossip, demands for ladders to clip hedges, and Mr Wicks [Rodmell builder] out to plan Leonards new folly, another pond and a bricked garden. By the way, he said your figs were a far better kind than his own, darker, more passionate. This is an almost incredible admission, you’ll agree.

Perhaps Q and A and Janie will step in from the heights of America, but I doubt it, so I will trust this to the post once more. Any news of A’s jacket?

B.

How I adore you! How astonishingly beautiful you are! No one will ever take the winds of March with beauty as you do. Let me know about the letter as I must make a row.

Berg

[]

3304: To Victoria Ocampo

2nd Sept 1937

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

My dear Victoria,

I ought to have answered your letter before, but you will understand that I could not, for I had just had the news of my nephews death in Spain. He was killed driving an Ambulance near Madrid, and then my sister was ill and I have been with her, and not able to think of other things. He is a terrible loss;—but that you will understand. And I am furious at the waste of his life.

Now however, I will answer your letter. Of course I am honoured and flattered and delighted that your long lecture should have kept people interested, however we divide the honours between us.

I suspect you are one of the people—they are almost unknown in England—who can make a lecture exciting. Is it your Latin blood? I would rather sit in a cellar or watch spiders than listen to an Englishman lecturing. Of course I should like to read it, if you have a copy. I am here, Monk’s House, till October: and thus though I’m told the Orlandos have come, have not seen them yet. As for your passage from Orlando, it reads extremely well: I’m too rough, really with my French to compare it exactly with the English.

Your butterflies—do you remember the evening visit of the 2 mysterious ladies carrying butterflies?—no—I do though—are hung over the door in Tavistock Sqre beside the portrait of my puritanical ancestor who disapproves of presents.

Come if you are in London, in the white chariot [car]. And forgive this late and quite illegible letter. My pen is like a rake this morning.

Yr Virginia Woolf

Estate of Victoria Ocampo

[]

3305: To Vanessa Bell

Wednesday [8 September 1937]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

I’m afraid I shan’t be able to come to tea till Friday when I hope you wont mind once more seeing your poor Singe. Tomorrow damn it all, we have to go to Margaret Davies at Dorking and shall be too late to come round by Charleston. And on Friday there’ll be Clive and [Janice] Loeb I suppose. If I cant come, would you tell Quentin we expect him to dinner at 7. But I shall do my best to come in spite of all drawbacks and disparagements, through sheer wish to see you, my lovely dolphin. That reminds me, we went to Brighton yesterday to look for a fountain for L’s new pond, and there I bought a very nice shawl at Miss Acton’s, she said Angelica, or rather Miss Bell of Firle had just been in and bought a muslin dress. However, we never saw Angelica, only Mrs Bradfield and another earnest worker, who dogged us through the lanes, or twittens as I prefer to call them. And no fountains of course, only a head of Aristotle which rather took my fancy, and a bust of Sir Walter Scott. Ask Q. to bring Julians other essays with him. I thought the letter to Morgan the best thing I’ve ever read of his; very like him, and at last I think I understand his point of view, which I didn’t—about being a soldier I mean. I dont agree: from my point of view; however that may be my fault. But I expect you’re right to send it to Chatto, and I should think they’ll certainly do them. Lord, how I wish I could argue the whole thing with Julian. Will you seriously consider doing a picture of Clive at his table for me? a serious commission? I feel I must get my Bloomsbury gallery started before we’re all old and bald and bleareyed: but dont let Clive think he’s going bald No, he’ll wear his hair to the End. Any news of Adrian? A letter from Saxon about his old lady and the square, and he hears that Adrian is at Charleston recovering there from an illness: I suppose one of his mere romantic flights.

So goodbye my lovely dolphin
B

Berg

[]

3306: To Vanessa Bell

Friday [17 September 1937]

Monks House [Rodmell, Sussex]

I had a letter from Margaret Davies, enclosing a letter from Maurice about Talland House, which I was about to send you, but it seems to be lost. However it was a very dull letter—no Davies can write—all the virtues and all the graces but no gift with the pen. So I have no excuse for writing then, except to say I hope Quentin wasn’t made really bad by that accursed English cooking. It was the cheese I’m sure: it smelt like a skunk, and the old fogies [Sissinghurst servants] must have infected it with their funereal delay. Perhaps I could come over on Monday or perhaps Tuesday would be better, for you will be sated with conversation during the week end. I longed to ask Angus about Mary Butts, but had just not enough wine in my head for the purpose. I hope you may. Vita was much impressed by the improvement in Angelica’s beauty, which she said was purely Russian. It was a mercy not to find her Gwen [St Aubyn] there; and Quentin was completely master of all the intricacies of all the pots and pans. In fact they did me the utmost credit—I should say you, I suppose; but I intend to claim all their virtues in future. Dont do too much, my dolphin darling. But this sounds so much like Aunt Mary I’m ashamed. I’ve just been wet through and almost clapped on the head by thunder on the marsh so excuse—

B.

Berg

[]

3307: To Margaret Llewelyn Davies

Sept. 18th [1937]

Monk’s House, Rodmell [Sussex]

Dearest Margaret,

Thank you very much for sending the extract from Maurice’s letter. I am sending it to Vanessa, who will be interested, as I am. She remembers him coming, which I dont, and says that the first time she ever fell in love it was with your brother Harry, whom she only saw once, as a child, but thought him the most beautiful man she had ever seen. I enclose the photograph of Arthur, taken by George Duckworth, when he and Sylvia were staying at St Ives. Was it on their honeymoon? I remember them very well. If you didn’t mind sending it back, would you some time, as I keep a family album.

Ann and Richard—how things repeat themselves!—should be here this very weekend; but she wrote from Dublin to say she was taking some anatomy course there, and would come and see us in London with him. She is a scholar at Newnham, taking a medical course, and wants to be some sort of public health officer, at Geneva, I think, in order to combine medicine with politics. As for the others, Angelica and Quentin, about whom you ask, here’s a snapshot of them (if I might also have it back) sitting on a bank outside Rome with Vanessa 2 years ago. But its not good of her.

Yes I am snowed under with Roger Fry papers—boxes of letters and articles, but cant make up my mind whether to write anything or not. I think I’ll try, as soon as I’ve read enough: and tear up if it seems, as I expect, hopeless. How can one write the truth about friends whose families are alive? And Roger was the most scornful of untruths of any man. This is all answers to questions—which shows that we ought to see you and Lilian [Harris] oftener. I wish we did. It was very refreshing to see you both again, and going home Leonard and I said how much we had enjoyed it and how glad we were we had come. The garden here is worth a visit—since its Leonards work I can say so at the moment truthfully.

yr V.W.

Leonard will write about the books you ask him about.

Sussex

[]

3308: To V. Sackville-West

Sunday 19th Sept. [1937]

Monks House, Rodmell [Sussex]

Here is the letter that concerns you. Leonard thinks it is the writing of a maniac—but I cant make out if he’s half serious or insulting. Not that it matters.

We did enjoy our afternoon. It was very good and kind of you and Harold to let us overrun you—dont I know how visitors interrupt and bore? But the children were tremendously impressed and amused; and its a great thing to give them a treat, so I’m grateful to you both.

Here it is dripping. I’ve been caught in a thunderstorm on the marsh, but managed to find a cap full of mushrooms. which I shall cook for dinner. Not yet have I had a moment for Pepita. Tomorrow I may: at this moment that old swan necked white lily Angus Davidson is expected; then we go to Lewes to attend the left book Club.

But the trade paper says that Foyles have had to withdraw their first choice—Well’s novel: owing to the uproar among booksellers, so we were well advised to back out.

Yes I envy you Sissinghurst. Isnt that nice—being envied?

I swear I will go to Paris the 2nd week in October to a small new hotel I’m told of. If you’re there, let us meet and discuss the Americans letter. Wouldnt that be fun?

Now to answer Ethel’s latest.

Y V.

Berg

[]

3309: To Ethel Smyth

19th Sept 37

Monks House, Rodmell [Sussex]

Well, are you still tramping the Roman wall? or have you come back South, and if you have come South what are you doing South? I shant be told unless I ask, so, merciful heaven having provided a wet day, so that our visitors have put us off, I’m writing, though I’ve nothing to say. How was it that in such circumstances our ancestors at once wrote such letters as could be printed verbatim? Was it nice to get Horace Walpoles letters? Was it better than reading Hugh Walpoles novels? At Sissinghurst two days ago—we took Quentin and Angelica over—Harold was saying he more or less agrees with you about MB’s novels. But when pressed to explain rather wobbled, so I thought. Gwen wasn’t there—and oh the difference to me, as the poem says. And the whole place was a magnificent proof of our old English aristocratic tradition. When I got back here I was positively ashamed of my middle class origin. It was a wet night and the kitchen was damp and my room all strewn with old clothes. But I recouped my spirits by saying L. and I wouldn’t like to live at Sisst. Vita was perfect in her way and Harold in his. How I adore nice people. What else makes life worth living? Are you a nice woman? What do you think you live for? Of course, if one believed in God, as you do, it would make a very great difference. Tom Eliot is coming here next week end. I shall ask him, if I dare—but to ask him a question is like putting a penny in the slot of the Albert Hall—what he thinks about God. Audens Iceland seemed to me mainly attitudinising, as if he were uneasy at heart, and must talk about himself in order to rid himself of some scabby itch: a kind of public scratching. I dont send this off as a specimen of a very good letter, but as a request for news. If I can I’m going to make a shot at seeing Paris before we settle in. Only its so difficult

V.

You remember the umbrella you stole? Well I’ve just been walking under it through the marshes, and found some mushrooms.

Berg

[]

3310: To Kingsley Martin

19th Sept. 1937

Typewritten

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Kingsley,

The book on Mass Observation certainly sounds as though it ought to be interesting. But I’m afraid I cant do it, because I am full up with other work and dont want to do any journalism at the moment

Many thanks for thinking of sending it to me

Yours
Virginia Woolf

Sussex

[]

3311: To William Plomer

23rd Sept. [1937]

Monks House, Rodmell, Near Lewes, Sussex

Dear William,

I’m sorry to have been so long answering: of course I am flattered to be asked to write an introduction to my father’s book. But I’m afraid I cant; as I’ve nothing to say of any interest either about the 18th Century, or about his book. I cant remember at the moment which it is—lectures, I rather think. I’m glad its alive enough to be worth reprinting.

We’re going to visit an exhibition in Brighton on Thursday next and travel some books. Might we come to tea with you? Its the 30th. Meanwhile Tom Eliot is here this week end. If you’d come over to tea on Sunday we should be delighted. A vast niece of mine [Judith Stephen], aged 18, weighing 13 ½ stones, just about to go to Newnham, will be here: but not Mrs [Elizabeth] Curtis. But leave it open, as they say.

Yes, I remember Rene Janin—if as I think he was the Frenchman who told me a fascinating story about coffee planting one night at Victoria Grove; which reminds me, I met Tony Butts, and discussed Mary’s autobiography. But to go into all this would need another sheet or two, and I’m in a hurry: several squirrels in the basket as you’ll see from my hand: in other words 3 letters to write before playing bowls. So I must hope to see you on Sunday.

Yrs VW.

Texas

[]

3312: To Vanessa Bell

Friday [24 September 1937]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

I didn’t come to tea today,—not that you probably expected me—because Clive rang up about coming here tomorrow: and I gather that he and Janis [Janice Loeb] are with you. So I shouldn’t see you; had I come. But if you could stand it, I hope I will come on Monday; and hope too to find you without visitors. And hope also to be rid of my own. Oh to think of having Tom and Judith in the house for 2 days! Judith suddenly asked to come; so, as we’d put her off before, we agreed: how she’ll mix with Tom, and perhaps William Plomer, and Clive and Janis Lord knows. Here’s the letter from Margaret Ll. Davies. She has sent us a collection of Victorian photographs—some rather fascinating—which if I can I’ll bring. And I’ve had a letter from Maynard, who wants to seduce me to buy rare books, saying he’s coming next week, and hopes to see us. He will still lead an invalid life; but Ruthin’s is an asylum. however they say he can leave know. Thats about all, save for a demand from Chabrun the man who bought my story, to see me, in London next Tuesday; which means I expect he wants to shuffle out of the Jew and the duchess [The Duchess and the Jeweller], as well he may. But I shall be as hard as flint. I’ve just come in from a walk all along the river to Piddinghoe—the river flooding, bright blue, barges going down the tide, and all so divinely beautiful I at last lay on the bank in the rushes and looked at it upside down. Then I wished you were with me, and reflected that no doubt you wouldn’t like it, then I saw a Kingfisher, then I peeped over the wall and saw 3 elderly ladies of the worn Victorian elastic sided boot type meandering round an iron table on which was a plate of raspberries. Oh if I could have heard what they were saying! When do you go to Paris? Vita suggests that I should meet her and Gwen there: but no. For one thing I must finish my pamphlet [Three Guineas], and then, angelic though Vita is, Gwen is very stale milk in that cup o’ tea. Lord how I miss Quentin and Angelica—I cant bear they’re going. Judith wont make up at all. Angelica was so lovely the other night. She looked like an exquisite Jerboa making cigarettes with her front paws. I shall be so jealous when she marries. But this is drivel and you wont read it

Yr one poor deviled B.

Berg

[]

3313: To Elaine Robson

Sunday. September twenty sixth [1937]

Typewritten (in capital letters)

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

My dear Elaine,

I liked your poem and your story very much indeed. I have not seen a rabbit washing his ceiling but yesterday I saw a hare who was making a warm bed for his winter lodging in the marsh. He had just laid down a nice blanket made of thistledown when he saw me and ran away. His bed was quite hot, and I put a mushroom there for him to eat. The marsh is full of mushrooms. I wish you and Daddy and Mummie were all here to pick them and then we would cook them and have them for supper. I also saw a kingfisher. His bed is in the bank of the river but I have never found it. Sally has had a thorn in her paw and we have had to poultice it. At last the thorn came out and her paw is only as big as a penny bun. It was as big as a soup plate. Mitzi had a macaroon for breakfast this morning. When you are in London will you come to tea with us and make a binding for your lovely poem and story. Do you like writing prose or poetry best. This typewriter cannot spell and sometimes uses the wrong type. xxxxxx Uncle Leonard sends his love: Sally has just barked her love also and Mitz bit me in the ear which means she sends you her love too.

Your affectionate Aunt Virginia

Elaine Robson

[]

3314: To Maynard Keynes

Sept 27th [1937]

Monk’s House, Rodmell [Sussex]

My dear Maynard,

Many thanks for the [book-sale] Catalogue. So far I have restrained myself from buying anything, because that would be the first step on the greasy plane to the workhouse. The collector in me is only just beneath the surface: another Catalogue, and the crust will be broken, Monks House sold, Sally sent to the dogs home, and Leonard hawking geraniums in Covent Garden. Excuse these mixed metaphors (if such they be). I’m so sleepy after a weekend including Tom Eliot, and Judith Stephen, William Plomer, Clive and his Janis that my brain is like a broken watch with one Bee inside. Why werent you and Lydia here to support us under the weight of Tom? In fact he was as pliable as an old glove, very ridiculous, charming and affectionate. He asked that his love should be sent you.

We hope to see you soon. If Leonard could speak, but Sally’s ear is laid across his mouth, he would send his usual greetings to your wife. In spite of Sally he kisses his hand to her (Lydia I mean).

Yrs V.W.

King’s

[]

3315: To V. Sackville-West

Oct 1st [1937]

Monks House [Rodmell, Sussex]

We have been so ridden with visitors that I never had a moment to write. In fact I was so touched by your letter that I couldnt. Isnt it odd? Nessa’s saying that to you, I mean, meant something I cant speak of. And I cant tell anyone—but I think you guess—how terrible it is to me, watching her: if I could do anything—sometimes I feel hopeless. But that message gives me something to hold to.

I doubt if I shall get to Paris at all. I want to finish a bothering piece of work in this comparative peace. If I’m there though when you are, perhaps we might scrape a dinner somewhere together. All the same, I doubt that threes company: and dont like, as they say, butting in. However, that too you’ll understand. I thought the other day how comforting it was to see you: for without words you do understand.

Now I’ve left no time or room for Pepita. I read it like a shark swallowing mackerel. I think its far better than Joan, more masterly and controlled. And I think you hold the innumerable threads wonderfully tight and yet easy. My only criticism, a personal deficiency I expect, is that I cannot altogether sympathise with your mother. There’s something antagonistic in her. But no doubt my relations with her queer the pitch. This slightly impairs the psychology of the character, especially towards the end. But thats all. Otherwise nothing but praise, if you care for that.

dining with Clive and his Jewess [Janice Loeb].

V.

I hope I’ve made clear how immensely I enjoyed Pepita: read it without drawing breath.

It must be a bestseller into the bargain.

Berg

[]

3316: To Vanessa Bell

Saturday Oct. 2nd. [1937]

Monks House [Rodmell, Sussex]

Thank you for sending Rees’ letter. I liked it. It gives me the feeling I had when Julian came back from China—also when I read his letter to Day Lewis I think he had to go, and nothing could have stopped him. I wonder what you settled with Bunny about publishing. I talked to Tom, and he agreed about the letter to Day Lewis, and thought it really important that it should be published, because it is different from anything that anyone else has written; and much more serious, we both thought, than any of the Audens and Spenders writings. He thought the letter about Roger [Fry] too confused as it stands, and hoped Charles would either explain it was unfinished, or leave some of it out. I am selfishly rather glad that he feels this, as I’ve always wondered if I wasn’t wrong.

Since you left we have been to Brighton, evaded Ethel Smyth here, had tea with William Plomer, dined with Clive, and have promised to go to Tilton tomorrow. Lydia rang up, and sounded, Leonard thought, rather depressed about Maynard, but we shall hear more tomorrow. Dinner at Charleston last night was rather subdued, but on the whole more to our liking than we expected. Janis subsided, but Clive left her to herself, and we had an amiable old world gossip without much showing off. The dinner included a jugged hare and a very good soup. But without you and Q and A and D. it lacked some splendour.

To my terror I was rung up last night from Paris and leapt to the conclusion, as they say, of some catastrophe. But it was only Chabrun offering fabulous sums for a short story which he wont take. And all it means is another interview, more telegrams: but I shant put pen to paper without a cheque.

Maurice Baring also has descended—or rather appeals for help, which means we must go over. Its a tragic story. [Dr] Alexander, he says, has taken him to pieces so that he can neither sit nor stand, but jerks perpetually, and has a heart that thumps till the bed jumps; which is different from paralysis, but is it any better? Do we think Alexander is killing him? Your friend Lady Lovat is staying there; They are all gathering like the fowls to a feast; so if, as I suppose, we go over, I may revive myself by a sight of her beauty. But its a bore, as I want to work and finish my pamphlet [Three Guineas]. Did I tell you that Basil Williams has got restive and made me send his letters back? So I must set to and do something or all the old fogies will be pestering me.

Now I must play bowls: it is a dull misty day, and I have fallen into a brook and am wet through. Leonard pulled out Mitzis front tooth—the very long curved one—this morning. But I must write a long letter about all that to Angelica.

I got their cards [Angelica’s and Quentin’s] this morning—a great joy.

I feel a lost old crone without you all: you cant think how I depend upon you, and when you’re not there the colour goes out of life, as water from a sponge; and I merely exist, dry, and dusty. This is the exact truth: but not a very beautiful illustration of my complete adoration of you; and longing to sit, even saying nothing, and look at you. Only dont tire yourself (This is old Aunt [Mary] Fisher)

B.

I’ll write about Maynard.

Remember to find out how long the pictures are open.

Berg

[]

3317: To Angelica Bell

Sunday Oct 2nd [3 1937]

Monk’s House, Rodmell [Sussex]

Darling Pixie,

Heres one of the little sheets you like so much and adorn so beautifully. I was very glad to get the picture of George Sand and am sticking it in my self-bound edition. I dont suppose art and society will leave you time for a full account of the exhibition. And to tell the truth, the pressure of Rodmell life is such that I cannot give you all the intimate details of our private affairs that I would—we are even now cleaning off the mud for tea at Tilton. However, Judith [Stephen] sent you, as they say, a million messages. She is a fine giantess with one spotted eye, like an old sheep dog, underneath, I suspect, like the mushroom, all gills and sensibility. Rather I think under the thumb—that is the beauty—of Ann. Thank God you haven’t an elder sister to take the winds of March with beauty, as I had, and so force you to be a modest violet on a shady bank. But you should meet Judith. Tom was miraculous at bowls, dignified, supple, regretted you, and showed up well, Judith thought, beside William Plomer. On the other hand William much admired her. All this is too abbreviated to be of much value, psychologically. In the world of real life, Louie’s [Everest] boy, aged eleven, rode his bicycle bang into his father’s bicycle, and knocked out four front teeth, which nature will not replace. Also crumpled his father’s bicycle. His father said, “Anyhow it didn’t hit his brains”: and teeth, he said, can be replaced. St Denis—there’s no visible connection—has sent me a full prospectus, as if he hoped I should become a play actor. Or is it that I may listen to you? If you should want a lodging next week, remember that 52 Tvis. Squre is at your service till Sunday anyhow; with Mabel to cook. Only warn me. And love me and give me my rights. Now I must face the Keynes’, and to that end must strip and peel and wash. So give what is left of my love to Quentin, Nessa, Duncan, and tell Q. to come and dine. How did old Aunt [Mary] Fisher end [her letters]?

Old Aunt V.

Texas

[]

3318: To Quentin Bell

Sunday [3 October 1937]

Typewritten postcard

Monk’s House [Rodmell, Sussex]

Many thanks for the card. This one will bring in the home note. Very damp and dismal here. I long for full news of pictures etc. and count that you will come over to any meal, hoping against hope for tiles.

Love Virginia

Quentin Bell

[]

3319: To Vanessa Bell

Wednesday. [6 October 1937]

Monks House [Rodmell, Sussex]

I have told Mabel [cook] to be ready for Angelica—and here’s Q. with Richard [Llewelyn Davies] and Ann [Stephen]—(so I cant write—theyre talking). Q says A went off this morning. I’m not very coherent, as they’re arguing about Colonies. Q. arrived at tea, and the young couple are spending the night at Charleston. Very nice both of them, Ann rather fierce and tawny: Richard as smooth as silk. We had tea with the Keynes’s. M. is looking much better—not so white and heavy. But Lydia seemed rather pinched, and said it would take a year before he was right. We talked about diseases mostly for an hour. He is now a medical expert. All London specialists were wrong about him. The only cure for all diseases is at Ruthin’s. He asked a lot about you. Oh what an ugly home theyve made it—new cover, again. Then we had a day at Horsham travelling our books. But as you see I cant collect my wits; the argument about colonies is raging; it is getting late. I’ve got to cook dinner. It’s only in way of a kiss that I send this scribble.

I told Mabel to look after Angelica. I’m sure she’ll be solid and take her duties very seriously. We go up on Sunday. It will be a heavenly joy to see you. I’ll try to write a better letter tomorrow

B

Edgar is talked of with the usual tender respect, so I suppose the incident is closed It seemed more tactful to say nothing.

Berg

[]

3320: To Donald Brace

9th Oct 37

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Mr Brace,

Many thanks for your letter. I am very glad to hear that the sales of The Years have been so good. I suppose now that they must slack off, but I am greatly pleased and surprised, that they have been so high. Many thanks for all the trouble you have taken on my behalf.

I received the copies of the Modern edition of To The Lighthouse safely. I could wish (privately speaking) that the introducer did not think it necessary to drag in my private life. I wish one could keep that out of writing and publishing. But I suppose one cannot complain, and people must make these guesses even if, as in the present case, the guess is wrong.

You will be glad to hear that Maynard Keynes is very much better, though still forced to rest.

It has been a perfect summer in the English style: and so fine even now that we regret going back to London tomorrow.

I hope you have recovered from your American summer.

With our kind regards
yours sincerely,
Virginia Woolf

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

[]

3321: To Elizabeth Bowen

Oct 9th [1937]

Monk’s House, Rodmell [Sussex]

Dear Elizabeth,

I’m so sorry I didn’t write before, as I should have done, to say we wished we could come to you [in Ireland], but it wasn’t possible. I didn’t, as you’ll understand, want to go far from Vanessa this summer. It has been very terrible, but you’ll know that without my saying so.

Now I suppose you are back in London. So shall we be next week, and I hope you’ll come and see me, or let me end one of my Regent Park walks in your house. I’ve just been walking over the downs, and now, like you, must wash my head. Only I wish I had done it and could sit on your steps and dry in the sun. Here it is pitch dark and dripping with mist from the Channel.

Tom Eliot came one week end, and we had tea with William Plomer in his bird cage [in Brighton], and lots of stray people strayed in. But I’ve not done much that I should have done. Have you? Finished your book? entertained a great many starving scribblers? bought the house at Hythe? despatched that goose May Sarton, who sent me a gentian picked by Julian Huxley—and so on. Oh and written in the loose leaf book. Well, I hope you’ll come to tea, and thank you for asking us to stay. Another time I should like to.

Yrs V.W.

Texas

[]

Letters 3322-3344 (October-December 1937)

3322: To Vanessa Bell

Sunday [10 October 1937]

52 Tavistock Sqre. [W.C.1.]

I’m rather vague, owing to Mabels vacancy, as to whether you’re back yet.

There’s a pair of shoes and a skirt belonging to Angelica so I hope she means to come and fetch them. We came up this morning and have spent the usual miserable day unpacking, seeing L’s mother—at least he did. And had to break to her the news of her lovers death. She had a lover in Worthing, a doctor, aged about 66. Also the dachshund belonging to Edgar has swallowed a ball of wool. So he has sat up 7 nights nursing it till the wool has been unwound. The Wolves and their dogs are incredible. I’m longing to hear about Paris. not that I suppose there’s much chance I shall go there; unless I make a dash.

In fact this is only to say I’m longing to see you. So if you should ever want to, send word. Not a single engagement in sight, thank God, so I could come any time.

We hear that Chabrun, my agent, is a suspected character. No hope of pay for my story I’m afraid.

I wonder if you saw the Keynes’s. and if you’re collapsed with picture seeing, and if you get up at 7 every morning and if you’re fond of your adoring B.

Berg

[]

3323: To Ethel Smyth

19th Oct [1937]

52 Tavistock Square. [W.C.1]

Well?—as Mrs Pankhurst used to say. I dont know where you are—Harrogate? Working? or the Roman Wall?

I am in fact seated in the studio at Tavistock Square, surrounded by vast rolls of cardboard, which will soon, I hope, be wrapping the Autumn books—Vita’s Pepita among them. We came back last week. I’ve been trying to clear my room; bought a book case to that intent; painted it elephant grey this moment. What I wished to lead to however, was Maurice [Baring]. I wanted to explain, he wrote to me about [Dr] Alexander: said could we advise him: was A. a quack who was killing him or not? (This was our last week at Rodmell) So L. gave his view, and we offered to go over and talk. Upon which Maurice scrawled a half legible note saying that he must decide for himself: but would love to see me. I felt this was one of an invalids chops and changes—for why ask our advice if he didn’t want it?—and also felt, no, he doesnt want visitors. So did nothing. What I wish you would explain, if its worth it, is that if my going, or L.’s, one or both, would give him an instants pleasure, he’s only to say so. We are there almost every other week end. I’m afraid he’s horribly bad. Enid Jones came over. She sees him it seems; they have a common grudge against Alexander, or rather suspicion; as her boy [Richard] goes to his school—fruitlessly, but immensely expensively.

There! That piece of business discharged, how can I now broach, I mean board, I mean beard, my uncastrated cat? Only an inch of paper and an ocean in my head. I’ve got Ronald Storrs from the Library” there’s an ocean, if you like!—but a little tumbled and tumultuous: I doubt I shall get to the end. There is no criticism though, as I’m not a serious student of Egyptian politics. Need I say that? Dont you know how little my skimp of a brain pan holds? No I never went to Paris: still think of it; but L. cant break loose, and I dont fancy an hotel alone. And your book? And Pan? And is Vaughan Williams a great composer? If so, why does he sound so dull? A very adorable man I gather. And Jacques Blanche? Do you know him? And … and … and …

V.

Berg

[]

3324: To Violet Dickinson

22nd Oct. [1937]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

My Violet,

Well, how are you? Have your legs mended themselves? I couldn’t see from your letter anything wrong with your brain. And it is universally said, wherever people meet together, that your heart is as the purest unfractured gold. I was led to make these foolish remarks by tidying my bookcase: and out fell a very small red book, in which you wrote A Tract for the Sp: fr. V.D. 1905. Now when so much has gone down the sink, see how affectionate I must be, and admiring of your writers gift—not the hand, which is slightly tied up—to have kept that and still read it after 32 years!

But apart from that, I wonder if you are getting about again, and able perhaps to sit in the garden at Welwyn. At this moment I am scribbling in a rush because we’re off, thank God, to our garden, via a Grocer’s shop at Crawley, where Leonard is going to buy a leaden Cupid for his new water garden. He has a passion for ponds: and whenever the grocer has a cupid to sell, we buy it, to stand naked, with a tortoise balanced on the bow.

So far as I remember, your garden, Ozzies garden, has ponds: but in every cranny you have some Himalayan gentian. We shall get to that in time, I daresay. But Lord, how I curse the builders! Bungalows on the very rim of the downs.

It was sad my dear old Janet Case dying: we went to see her, and found her very humorous about it, and old Emphie the sister as gallant as could be. Dont, unless you can write lying down, answer this: which is only a tribute to Anthony Harte. I like his thoughts. You gave it me in the long room at Manchester Street overlooking the graves.

Remember me to your husband, and get well.

Sp.

Sussex

[]

3325: To Ethel Smyth

Tuesday Oct 26th [1937]

52 T. [avistock] S. [quare, W.C.1]

Of course the letters, our letters, crossed. What do you take me for? a parrot afflicted with aphasia that I should ask all the questions you’d just answered over again? Really, Ethel, I begin to think your boasted psychological genius is null; mine gigantic in comparison. Yet according to you its the other way round—No matter, as Mrs Pankhurst, Lady Ponsonby, and Archbishop Benson would have said. I cant remember the questions I had to answer. Oh yes—the book [Maurice Baring]: postponing it to January: were you right? Yes. Leonard is inclined to think you were well advised. A book coming out in Novr: doesn’t have time to sink through impediments before Christmas. As for Pepita, the other question, is it good? Well, whats your standard? Boswell? Rousseau? or merely the current pitter patter? One never knows. I think it’s of its kind whatever that means, admirable: as easy to read as velvet glove to slip into; and very skilful; and compact; and not a schoolboys essay like Joan: great fun; and should certainly sweep the market, break the Bank. The odd thing is, I detest Lady Sackville at the end of it: an insipid, selfish, rather stupid housemaid of amorous propensities jumped up into the Peerage. But Vita says she is adorable. So I’m no doubt wrong. And this hasty estimate is only for your own ears—Did you ever meet her? Oh I get so bored with her extravagances after the first fun! and the vanity and the illiteracy, and the magpie’s claws.

We were on the front at Seaford during the gale. That’s as near as I got to Paris. The waves broke over the car. Vast spouts of white water all along the coast. Why does a smash of water satisfy all one’s religious aspirations? And its all I can do not to throw myself in—a queer animal rhapsody, restrained by L.

No news of Maurice. Alexander told L the other day he thinks him very bad; but then he wont do, A. says, what he’s told. Did the nerve dr. help?

V.

Berg

[]

3326: To Pamela Diamand

Nov 3rd [1937]

52 Tavistock Sq. [W.C.1]

Dear Pamela,

Thanks very much for your letter. If any of your mother’s letters, or about her, should turn up, I shall be very glad to see them.

The more I read of Roger’s papers the more impossible it seems to write a conventional ‘life’ of him: If I do write anything, I shall plunge and forget all relations and their feelings. I’m very glad to feel that you agree about this.

I’ll suggest a visit when we are coming your way.

Yrs
Virginia Woolf

Pamela Diamand

[]

3327: To V. Sackville-West

15 Nov. [1937]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Why ‘once’ Virginia? Why mayn’t I answer your letter? That of course is the way to make me sit down at once and answer it. Why are you a dustbin? And why shouldn’t we go for a jaunt? Why, why, why?

Just because you choose to sit in the mud in Kent and I on the flags of London, thats no reason why love should fade is it? Why the pearls and the porpoise should vanish?

No. I cant see your argument. In January I will take you to the place where we once had a glass of wine in a bow window overlooking the river. Also I’ll take you to The Tower—I’ve just been there, this dripping Sunday; because almost every day I take my walk through the City. I like it better than Kent—Bread Street, Camomile Street, Seething Lane, All Hallows, St Olaves—Then out one comes at The Tower, and there I walk on the terrace by the guns, with the ships coming up or down—which is it? Last week [5 November] we went to Guy Fawkes at Lewes. Lordloveme, why didn’t you come? Tossing torches all up and down the streets: people rigged up as courtiers, gondoliers, old farmers in black Spanish hats. Then we all trooped onto the downs, and burnt the Pope. It was the very image of an Italian picture of Calvary; crowds gazing up: the figure falling

As you say though, Spains burning and Hitler booming. A french politician is dining here: I have to cook the dinner, and cant, as you know, talk what you would call, French. (d’you remember the rough sea on the channel boat? and how skilfully I christened it?)

So no more—But if your pen should again take to twisting, let it.

Because, my dear Vita, whats the use of saying ‘once Virginia’ when I’m alive here and now? So’s Potto if it comes to that

yr faithful old servants
and adorers
P and V

Berg

[]

3328: To Shena, Lady Simon

Thursday [18 November 1937]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

My dear Shena,

Yes I shall be in at 4.30 on Thursday 25th; if you will come then.

I meant to write and thank you for your letter in [the] summer. It was a very nice one. But you said I needn’t, and as you understand yourself, Julian’s death seems to leave one with nothing to say. It was good of you to write as you did.

yr
Virginia Woolf

Sussex

[]

3329: To Ethel Smyth

24th Nov 1937

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

Well, Ethel?

This is the most perfectly dated and expressed letter ever written: as such I leave it and forebear to add so much as a sentiment by way of ending that might spoil its classic symmetry.

Well Ethel?

And it only takes 3 seconds to write,

Well Ethel?

Berg

[]

3330: To Denys Kilham Roberts

27th Nov. 37

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

Dear Mr Kilham Roberts,

Thank you very much for your letter of the 24th. As Mr Forster will have told you, the other letter that you speak of never reached me.

It is extremely good of you on behalf of the publishers to ask me to join the advisory committee which you describe. I have thought the matter over, and regret very much that I cannot accept the invitation. I need not say that I think the idea very interesting, and that I wish it every success.

With thanks again,
yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

3331: To T. S. Eliot

29th Nov. [1937]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

My dear Tom,

The woods decay, the woods decay and fall … And why doesn’t the old Possum (see poem) come to dine?

What about Thursday 9th at 8? And who would, or whom should it be, would you, or he should it be, like to meet?

Anyhow come, before all the vapours have wept their burthen to the ground.

Yr aff
Virginia

Mrs T. S. Eliot

[]

3332: To Ethel Smyth

Friday [3rd December 1937]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

You say I’m not to pay attention to your letter, so I’ll confine myself to the one word which you forbid, dont you? My love I mean: thinking of you and the dog. I’ve been having the flu: and am still on sofa; but hope to get away tomorrow till Tuesday and be cured. Am practically all right today. Does 22nd mean Dec? Yes, of course: (I was dreaming we were still in Novr). Yes, I’ll keep my word as a publisher: and thank you for letter.

V.

Berg

[]

3333: To Helen McAfee

6th Dec. 1937

Typewritten

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Miss McAfee,

Many thanks for your letter. It is very good of you and Governor Cross to invite me to send you something for the Yale Review. Since finishing the Years I have written a good many shorter essays; but I did not think of sending them to you because the subjects seemed unlikely to interest the American public. Here, as you know, we make a habit of celebrating centenaries, and reviewing new editions of old books. As I write chiefly for the Times Literary Supplement, I generally plan articles of this kind some time ahead for them, and have at the moment half promised to do something on [Samuel] Johnson’s prose and something on Borrow. But if an idea struck me that was more topical I would of course suggest it. At the moment however I am afraid I cannot propose anything definite. It is very kind of you to wish it, and I will certainly bear the suggestion in mind.

Many thanks for what you say of the Years. It has met with an extraordinary success in America—much to my surprise and delight. I need not say how glad I am that you found the book interesting. I was a great deal hampered by illness while writing it, and was afraid that the book had suffered in consequence.

My husband and I both send our best wishes for Christmas, which is already on us here. I am writing in a deep frost down in Sussex.

Yours very sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Yale University

[]

3334: To Ethel Smyth

Monday 13th Dec. [1937]

52 Tavistock Sqre. [W.C.1.]

Well I hope things are going as well as may be. Oddly enough, my mother in law was saying yesterday she had heard all about you and Pan from a stock broker called Smith (I think) who lives at Woking and greatly admires you.

But Vita is coming in to dine for a wonder—first time I should think this year—so I must hurry.

What I was going to say was that your gift of an inscribed copy [Maurice Baring] so much touched that flint my heart the other night that I didnt, as I ought, insist that I will only take it from you if you swear that you wont mind, and won’t misinterpret, my silence. The truth is I’ve been so badgered all these years for opinions on books that I cant stumble out another, even if I like it. So I implore my friends not to give me their books, since I must, in the way of business, continue to read so many by force. And how could my opinion of what you say of MB. have any shade of value, coming from one purblind to the subject you’re dealing with? As well ask a deaf donkey to criticise Mozart. And how did the BBC. do your concert: No chance of hearing it, tho’ there again my remarks wd. be worthless. Of course I’m longing to read your book: its only an opinion I cant give. Hilda was here, and gave Leonard a harrowing account of Dotty. I wish I could send my sympathy; but I dont see how, my relations being queered as they are. So goodbye. Perhaps Vita will illumine this. She’s coming to consult about some violent letters her Aunt is writing to the papers—her mother sister—about Pepita.

V.

Berg

[]

3335: To Vanessa Bell

Wednesday [15 December 1937]

52, Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

Will you give me the great pleasure of accepting what is not a Christmas present, but simply your due on the story which I sold entirely owing to you. In fact its considerably less than your due. So do, good Dolphin; and buy a few little extras on the journey with it.

Also: Could you tell me any small thing Angelica wants? As its her birthday as well as Christmas: but I cant think what she wants—bag, stockings, brooch? Lord knows what. Barbara [Bagenal] has just been, with 6 bottles of mint jelly. A severe price to pay for mint jelly. And Lord lovaduk as Rupert [Brooke] used to say, Flossie [cook] has the bronchitis: what are you doing for dinner?

B.

Berg

[]

3336: To T. S. Eliot

Thursday [16 December 1937]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Tom,

What a miracle—to come home and find your letter, after so brilliantly cutting each other in the alley. Still more miraculous that you should think of me and Portland together. I’d just read Morgan’s review, and asked for the loan of his copy. Naturally he’s forgotten. Of course I should cherish a copy—just my line; to the very t.

Looking forward to Tom and Portland on Monday.

Yrs affate
V

Mrs T. S. Eliot

[]

3336a: To Vera Douie

17th Dec. 37

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Miss Douie,

I will bring the books back, or most of them next week. I’m sorry to be so late.

Can you tell me if there is any way in which I can find out what are the endowments of the Cambridge colleges both for men and women at the present time? Also am I right in thinking that Miss J. A. [sic] Clough received no salary when Principal of Newnham? I once said so, but cannot find my authority.

Yrs sincerely,
Virginia Woolf

Fawcett Library, City of London Polytechnic. Modern Fiction Studies. Vol. 30. Summer 1984.

[]

3337: To Duncan Grant

Thursday [Wednesday, 22 December 1937]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Duncan,

Here is a most inadequate cheque [for £35] for what I consider a masterpiece of the purest water. I am as tipsy as a bee with pleasure in it, and have just discovered a ship (not a sheep) in the background to make my pleasure complete.

Yrs
Virginia

with profound homage to your genius, and please express my amazement at her stitching to your mother.

Estate of Duncan Grant

[]

3338: To Maynard Keynes

23rd Dec. [1937]

Monk’s House, Rodmell [Sussex]

Dear Maynard,

Yes. I liked the notice of Julian very much. It is much what I felt—his extreme honesty, and something undeveloped. I think all Stephens are. What would have happened, I wonder, if he had got his Fellowship [at King’s, Cambridge]? But there’s not much use in wondering.

Macaulay I had read, I must admit with great admiration. He has an odd look of Rose. I wish you’d go on and do a whole portrait gallery, reluctant as I am to recognise your gift in that line when it seems obvious that nature gave me none for mathematics. Please consider it. Is portrait writing hard work compared with economics?—however I hope we may go into this by word of mouth. Leonard says, and I agree, that it would be very nice if the Keynes’s came to Christmas lunch. William Plomer may be coming; but if it weren’t too tiring you’d find a turkey

We came yesterday, and hope anyhow to see you some time.

Foot and mouth completely hems us in. Also Sally’s on heat: also reputed pregnant after an hour’s mating.

Love to Lydia.
Yrs aff.
V.W.

King’s

[]

3339: To Angelica Bell

Christmas Day [1937]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex

Darling Pixy,

Since this is the very last hour of your birthday, I must send you Old Aunt’s Best Wishes, though Old Aunt’s handwriting may be illegible. And for God’s sake answer as I’m as solitary as a single sealion bereft of its mate in a cold ocean cave without you. As for Mummy, as she’s forgotten she ever had a sister, creep gingerly on tiptoe, plant a kiss on her parting and sing or rather sigh “A present from Rodmell!”, on which she’ll jump like a cow stung by an adder.

Which reminds me, foot and mouth is still very bad: a fresh case at Black Cap: so we cant walk.

The Keynes’ came to lunch, and we put Maynard to bed on 2 chairs and talked and talked till he worked into such a fury about politics that Lydia called the car and off they drove. Theyve got a new chauffeur; a great mechanical genius, with whom Lydias in love, called Frank, Auntie’s nephew in law, and a great improvement on Edgar. I was as tactful as an eel and said nothing to recall unhappy memories. And then Lady Colefax came to tea—in London. And she was tactful about Helen’s party, which, since she had been closeted with Duncan was, she said, all she could desire. Also HOW BEAUTIFUL HOW PERFECTLY LOVELY your niece is! she said. Beware. Beauty is only skin deep. It is sober worth that tells. And you’ll be asked to North Street. Also she said Jane Clark bought a picture. Also she told us the whole inside story of David and Wally Simpson. It was thrilling. Wally is a perfect Lamb: David a man of genius—but as for the Duke of Kent—Sybil almost cuts him when she meets him. But thats all I’ve room for. So darling Pixy good night, and dream of witches.

VIRGINIA

Please kiss Miss Campbell and Colonel Teed on my behalf.

Texas

[]

3340: To V. Sackville-West

[26? December 1937]

Monks House, Rodmell [Sussex]

Its not due to you that I’m alive today: I’ve eaten the whole pie practically myself!

Heaven above us, what immortal geese must have gone to make it! It was fresh as a dockleaf, pink as mushrooms, pure as first love. (but first love conveys nothing to the hardened and battered—this I put in by way of an aside) It was so divine, I could forgive any treachery. My word what a pie! Tom Eliot was dining with us the night it came. Complete silence reigned. The poet ate; the novelist ate; Even Leonard, who had a chill inside, ate. Nothing of the least importance was said. Where do they come from? Could one send a card and have one at will? It seems incredible. And then Potto’s collar arrived. Out I trotted with Virginia blazoned on my neck. Many people accosted me; others took the view that there was something sacred like a text from the Bible—about a woman with a name on her: others—oh did I tell you I’d been offered an Order?—I forgot—they thought I’d come from Buckingham Palace. A kind of Order of Merit.

But Orlando, pink porpoise, isnt it against our Covenant to do this sort of thing? Dont you remember offering me Thackerays wine cooler or ash tray or something in the days of the fishmonger and how I said: Unhand me Sirrah?

I’m not sure I shant send you a present: take care next time a rather heavy, thick malodorous packed arrives; a little oozy at the corners. The worst of owning Sisst. is that you can only be given liver, calves heads,—things that dont add to the value of the estate. Ethels in ecstasies over her pate. 12,000 copies of Pepita sold.

I’m thinking of buying a fur coat

V.

Berg

[]

3341: To Ethel Smyth

26th Dec. [1937]

Monks House, Rodmell [Sussex]

The book came just as I was coming here: there it is: and here am I, silent, but grateful. I’ll try, if I can find one, to read a novel of MB’s [Baring] again. That’ll be the best return I can make for the generous impulse which prompted the uncastrated cat—to whom, by the way, I listened in the other night, with great enjoyment; partly I admit, of the human quality of the aforesaid quadruped’s very friendly but not necessarily altogether approving voice. I like hearing your voice talking about the Kaiser, and supplying it simultaneously with quite other words. A harmless amusement you’ll allow.

We’re entirely marooned here. Foot and mouth to right of us, to left of us, foot and mouth all round us, so that if we want to step off the road we have to drive 5 miles. A murrain be on all farmers who cut me off my one wildest and purest pleasure! There are the marshes, and I cant walk there. So I cant think, cant read, cant write. However I’ve eaten the whole of one of Vita’s Strasbourg pies. Blessings be on an inside that must be lined with felt and cased with iron. Leonard cant…. A man breaks in from the Cave where Christ was born. (BBC) How repulsive the Xtian religion as conveyed by the Xtian clergyman is—But it has on this occasion the virtue of interrupting this letter. The man is actually on the stone where Christ was born—he is apparently chilly; he is also silly: a poem in its way—so, as Mrs Pankhurst used to say

No More—

V.

Berg

[]

3342: To Vanessa Bell

Tuesday, 28th Dec. [1937]

Monks House [Rodmell, Sussex]

Your letter written on the 22nd only reached me yesterday—which shows what a time it takes. I’m horrified at your journey. Why on earth didnt you take my advice and travel first? However Leonard says its the usual incompetence of the Wayfarers—when we went 3rd it was very comfortable. As a matter of fact it was a perfect summers day on Christmas day, also boxing day. One could have sat out. But all over the rest of England, you’ll be glad to hear, it was black with fog. But thats our only good luck. Foot and mouth broke out at Blackcap just as they were taking down the boards here; so up they went again till the 8th, and we cant walk a step. But we’ve discovered some unparalelled beauties—East Chiltington in its way beats St Remi, to say nothing of Cassis—only 3 miles the other side of Lewes. The Keynes’s came from Christmas lunch, as I told Angelica. It was Maynard’s first outing. He said he had almost recovered from his setback, but could only creep upstairs with great difficulty and lie on chairs. However we talked incessantly till 3 or so, when he suddenly became very excited—almost in tears I thought—about politics and the Labour party and Lydia whisked him off. She was much more cheerful though: and we rang up yesterday and he said it had done him good, and we’re to go there. All the gossip was that Lydia thinks the N. Statesman hopeless; much prefers Night and Day; M. has bought the site for a theatre in Lewes, but wont do more; investments are very bad; sport at Tilton very good; he’s killings his pigs; has rejected Stephen Spenders play, thinks Auden very dirty but a genius; and thats about all. Clive is probably coming down tomorrow, and if Janis [Loeb] is with him, wants to come over. However, I think we shall go up on Thursday to see L’s doctor. His kidney is still rather a nuisance, and he cant garden, so as the 2 weeks are up, we shall see what Rau advises. We’ve also got to see John, about the press, so we shall stay a night, and then I expect settle in here again.

No, I’ve heard nothing of Helen [Anrep], but she was clearly so rattled and dithered and worried, as well she might be, that I thought silence indicated. Colefax, who at last forced herself on me, was all honey about the great party, though of course it had been very crowded, still she had had the joy of seeing Duncan alone, thought Angelica perfectly lovely, and swore that Jane [Clark] had bought a picture. after that she gave us a verbatim, hot from the Kings mouth, account of the Abdication: swore that he and Wally had never been to bed; says Wally is a simple good devoted soul, who implored the King to keep her as his mistress or let her go. “If you do” he said “I shall dog you to the ends of the earth in an aeroplane.” Whenever S. goes abroad they ring her up and she stays with them. Unfortunately they refuse to take her advice—which is to go to South America—and are going to live in Paris, where no one will visit them, because of propriety. I gathered that Sibyl is going to act as liaison officer between them and the implacable Queen Mary, and I’m not at all sure that I’m not going to help David to have recourse to the classics—which, as Sibyl says, might do him a world of good. As for Wally, Leonard wd. feel perfectly at home with her. And so on, all in odds and ends, for 1 hour and 30 minutes.

Thats about all the London gossip that has come my way. Not much of interest I’m afraid. Yes it would be nice to be sitting in a vineyard with the frogs croaking and the yellow butterflies among the olives. The fog is creeping up this evening, and my only letter is a frantic appeal from Ethel Smyth to tell her what I think of her vast new book, all in praise of Maurice Baring—which God help me I cant and wont do. I see from The Times that K. Clark is in hot water about his Georgiones again; and that a subscription is on foot to buy one of Wyndham Lewis’s pictures for the nation. Old Tom [Eliot] actually signs this balderdash. He dined with us, but let on nothing; was in fact as genial and gentle as could be, and has mounted into the oddest world of antique respectability—for example, the Maxses, Leo’s nephew, who’s in the Guards; Algernon Cecil, widower of Gwen God-Osborne: I suppose in order to cultivate society dialogue for his play [Family Reunion].

Mrs Grant [Duncan’s mother] has sent me an exquisite square—the one I saw—infinitely lovely. And if I could find a rule I would measure for my glass. Duncan’s picture arrived just as we left. I maintain its a masterpiece: all the sea in one shell. Thats all the art criticism you’ll get out of me. I’m afraid tho’ the shell is too big for the dining room.

Now good Dolphin, be careful; and warm; and eat and love

poor worm eaten
Singe

Berg

[]

3343: To Mrs Ethel Grant

28th December [1937]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

My dear Mrs Grant,

I cant tell you what a joy—quite undeserved though—your embroidery is to me. It hangs on a chair back at this moment, but no dog cat or human is allowed to sit on it. I dont think though you ought to give such sumptuous presents. Whenever I give Duncan even a twopenny halfpenny doll he bites me severely. And then you and he together produce this! Its exquisitely lovely.

I’m looking for a footrule with which to measure the space for the looking glass. Its going to be in the sitting room here, as I’m so seldom in my bedroom. Can I look forward to it about Easter? And what about the rug? Will you really take a commission for that? The ex-blotter I shall make into a table cover, with glass on top, and you must really come and see us, and it and Duncan’s picture, which came just as we were coming here. A most exciting one.

I hope you were violently dissipated in Paris. Here foot and mouth hems us in, and fog, and every other horror of winter.

I hear from Vanessa that she and Angelica had an awful journey, owing to the Wayfarers’ incompetence, but are enjoying Fontcreuse.

Thank you again.

Yr affate.
Virginia Woolf

Estate of Duncan Grant

[]

3344: To Beatrice Webb

28th Dec. 37

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

My dear Mrs Webb,

We are deep in fog here and it seems rather foolish to suggest a long drive at the moment. I’m afraid January 29th does not suit us. So might we aim at March? Here again we cant ask you to keep a week end free, as our movements are rather uncertain. But if I might write and suggest a night in March rather nearer the time, it would be a great pleasure to us to come: and if it doesn’t suit, perhaps you would suggest another.

I dont suppose that I, at least, should dare to disagree with you, and I am sure that even if Leonard dares, our common feeling is one of profound admiration. But that does not happily, exclude argument.

Yrs sincerely,
Virginia Woolf

Leonard wants me to say that he looks forward to listening to your Broadcast.

Passfield Papers, University of Lonhon

[]

Letters 3345-3401 (January-June 1938)

3345: To John Lehmann

2. 1. 38

52 Tavistock Square, W.V.1.

Dear John,

I was sorry to have to turn you away on Friday, but I was in bed and not allowed to do anything. I shall be in bed for another week, and it is then hoped that I shall be all right.

You said something as you left which made me think that you meant me to consider a proposition which I had not understood you to make before. I may have been completely mistaken, but I thought you meant that you were prepared to come into partnership on your own into the Press, and to put £3,000 into it quite apart from the original arrangement succeeding or not succeeding. I have thought this over, and in principal it is attractive to us. That is to say, if we understood you aright, we should be prepared to consider further with you some such arrangement as the following:—

1. We should sell you a half share in the Press, for the sum of £3,000. Virginia would withdraw so that the other share would be owned by me alone, and the ownership would be a partnership between you and me.

2. You would be managing director with a salary of £500 payable to you before profits are divided in which case I would have a salary of £200 payable before profits are divided. You would undertake to act as managing director for two years at least, to be responsible entirely for the actual management of the office and staff, to attend the office for at least three days every week, except for the months of August and September and two periods of three weeks to be arranged during the rest of the year. I would normally do the work from Monk’s House during August and September in the way in which I have done before, and if I were in England I would do the three weeks, but I would not pledge myself on this point.

3. Each of us would have an absolute veto against the publication of any book.

4. It might be advisable to turn the Press into a private company: in any case the terms of dissolution would have to be carefully considered. It might be possible to combine such an arrangement with a loose attachment to the Gang, in the shape of an advisory Board. I should be willing to consider this favourably, though the working out of it might be difficult.

I shall certainly be in bed here until the end of the week, and could see you almost at any time if you rang up.

Yours
Leonard Woolf

George Spater

[]

3346: To Ethel Smyth

4th Jan. [1938]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

Lord! What an inconsistent woman you are! There’s a letter before me in which you say “Of course I dont want you to say anything about my book [Maurice Baring]. I’m giving it you simply because it pleases me to give it you”—and then when I stick to my side of the bargain you cry off. Never mind: I’ll accept your inconsistency and write some time, not this moment.

I’ve been devilishly anxious. L. was taken ill at Monks House last week. We came up and saw the doctor who first thought it was prostate gland: then disease of the kidney. After an intolerable 5 days—X-rays, specialists etc—theyve put him to bed for a week, on strict diet, and will let us know the final verdict on Saturday—another 4 days. However the X Ray proved that there’s no disease whatever; and the Dr. seems to think that it will pass off and leave nothing: he’s much better already. But I’m a good deal distracted, I mean from reading serious books, or writing reports on them, as there’s all the Press business to convey from the basement up here: and the letters to answer, and the dog to water. If alls well, we hope to get off to Rodmell next week; but that remains to be seen. Anyhow I’m glad to hear about your dog and that, for some mysterious reason, this harassed and ineffective woman [Virginia] (though so far I’ve shown, L. says, great common sense in the emergency) has been a prop to so magnificent a vine as the great Ethel. Yes, I’d very much like Saido some time: not this moment. Ill write again.

V.

Berg

[]

3347: To Harcourt, Brace

5 Jan 1938

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

Dear Sirs,

I have to acknowledge with thanks receipt of cheque for $5160.44 sent to me on Dec 20.

Yours faithfully,
Virginia Woolf

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

[]

3348: To Hugh Walpole

5th Jan 38

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

Dearest Hugh,

I’m so gland you’re going to be in London, and hope you’ll come and see us. For the last week we’ve been having a bad time. Something wrong with one of Leonard’s kidneys: the doctors dont know exactly what, but promise to be more definite in a day or two. So he’s kept in bed, and our plans (we had been going away) uncertain: here, though, for the present.

Shall I like Maugham’s Autobiography? I’m sure I shall. And wish, to cheer me up, you’d add that youre not only reading his but writing yours. I read read read—chiefly French memoirs [Chateaubriand]. Leonard who works works works in spite of a diet of rice pudding for lunch tea and dinner here looks up from his MS. and says you must come and see us, and we both send our love.

Now I must go and cook the rice pudding: maid [Mabel] being at the Movies.

Yr Virginia

Texas

[]

3349: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

9th Jan [1938]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

Dearest Ottoline,

It is shameful that I haven’t answered you or thanked you for the lovely green shell. This has become part of my washing table at Rodmell—a glorified soap dish.

I was beginning to haunt my old shops in search of a book, when Leonard was taken ill—something wrong with his kidneys, and we came back here. We have spent 10 days seeing doctors, he has been X rayed and so on: but they cant say exactly what is wrong yet. Probably we shall know if its nothing or something by the middle of the week. This is a great worry, as you’ll understand: and the doctors spin things out so: one cant at the moment make plans, or I would hope to see you.

Nor have I read the Duke which Tom [Eliot] gave me for a Christmas present. A lovely muslin picture of you. So you must excuse this scrap. I’ll write again, and only send this now to assure you of my ancient affection; for its not worth anything else.

Yr. V.W.

Texas

[]

3350: To Vanessa Bell

Sunday 9th Jan. [1938]

52 Tavistock Square [W.C.1.]

I cant help thinking you owe me a letter—however, I had Angelica’s, to my great content.

I’ve not written partly because I always hoped the doctor would say that L. was cured. However this wretched little bother—some pus or blood in his water—has gone on, so he’s had to stay in bed. He got a temperature at Rodmell, and we came back. That went at once; but the other thing has gone on, and the dr. thinks it may be something wrong either with the kidneys or prostate. The X Ray only showed that one kidney wasn’t working properly. And it may clear off and be nothing. But if it doesn’t stop next week, we shall probably see a specialist. They can examine the bladder apparently and make sure if it is the prostate or not. Even so, of course there’s no reason to think an operation would be necessary. He’s certainly got better since he was in bed, and kept entirely on rice puddings.

But that explains why I’ve no news and write such a d-d dull letter. We’ve been back 10 days and the dr. Rau—who’s a very intelligent man and quite skeptical of all medicine—says he must do every possible test, however inconclusive, so that most of my time is spent waiting for him to come or to telephone, and he generally forgets. Except for Judith, Harry Stephen and Helen [Anrep] I’ve seen no one—Judith buying Duncan chintz’s for the new house, and controlling Karins delirious excitement. It is now theirs. Then old Harry—77 so he says, but exactly the same. Dorothea is lodged in England, and being X rayed, was found to have had consumption, but recovered. James has taken up singing, but remains at Toynbee, a Catholic. Barbara thinks it a good sign that he sings without a collar—he is trying to pull himself together, she says. And Ethel Sands, of course, rings up and asks me to lunch; but I dont go. In fact London is still hibernating. Everyone away; and cold and rain most days, though nothing like the famous climate of the Riviera. My word you do sound cold! 4 inches of snow. I’ve just rung up Clive, in the hope of catching Quentin on his way back from the North, but he hasn’t yet arrived, and may go straight to Charleston. Clive sounds cheerful, and is dining here on Tuesday; when I hope to get more mundane gossip. Hugh Walpole is coming to tea, and I’m to egg him on to buy a lottery ticket. Helen is only just emerging from the exhaustion of the party; which financially was a failure, that is they didn’t get money for the Studio; but she’s off again on the other schemes, chiefly in order to provide an inaudible w.c. for the more refined pupils. And of course Waley and de Zoete were dining, and she had to go and cook dinner. Duncan’s card was a great pleasure: the 2 hearts are shining on the mantelpiece.

I’m afraid I’ve droned on about medical details, but its a comfort to write to you, and I’ve told you all, so there’s no need to worry. In fact, the dr: said this morning it might still clear up completely. But we cant know before Wednesday. I’ll write, at once.

Now do be careful, and come back to your devoted Singe. L. sends his love. He works all day, and is quite unconcerned.

B.

Berg

[]

3351: To V. Sackville-West

10th Jan. [1938]

52 Tavistock Sqre. [W.C.1]

Yes, certainly—19th dine. By all means. But we’ve been having the devils own time. Leonard’s kidney got bad suddenly at Monks House: we came up ten days ago: since then he’s been in bed, and we’ve had X rays, and all the other horrors: the dr. has just rung up to say the last report is favourable. Otherwise, he had suggested L’s going to a nursing home for a complete examination. I hope now this is staved off, and all will be well. But as you see one cant be sure yet of our plans. I think if you didn’t mind keeping the 19th free, I’d better send you a line later this week. They threatened the prostate—but as I say, now it seems over; and if thats so, he’ll be all right by then.

Excuse this ungrammatical and unconnected jibber—they’ve kept us on the tenterhooks, as you may suppose.

Nothing settled about The Press: except that the scheme we told you of is off, and several offers have been made, and only one that seems likely. But we’ll keep that to discuss on the 19th—how nice to see you.

V.

Berg

[]

3352: To Vanessa Bell

Monday 10th [January 1938]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

I’ve just had a letter from you—the first for ever so long. You talk as if you’d never got a long letter I wrote from Rodmell just before we came back. Its quite likely—the posts have been so erratic.

However, this is only to add, as I wrote last night about Leonard, that Rau has just rung up to say the water is perfectly normal for the first time. This is a great relief, as we’d made up our minds that he’d have to go into a nursing home to be examined. Rau said if it stayed normal for 2 days we could consider the whole thing cleared up, though of course it may come back—or it maynt. Anyhow this is better than we had hoped for; and there seems no reason why it shouldnt stay normal now. Otherwise Rau says there’s nothing wrong.

I didnt see Quentin. Clive said he’d gone straight back—nor have I heard of your adventure—in fact I’ve had no news of you whatsoever, except from Angelica. Perhaps letters missed. L. says I’m to tell you he liked your jacket [for Three Guineas] very much—it was whisked off before I saw it. Owing to you, another story [The Shooting Party] has been taken in America, so good dolphin here’s your Commission, and do for God’s sake take first class this time. The cold sound[s] hellish. Here it is like the old underground, sulphur yellow and steamy. I’ve seen no one. I’ll write again, but if you dont hear, dont worry: I mean, Rau keeps one waiting so long that I mayn’t hear in time to tell you before you start. Lord how heavenly to see you again! L sends his love—

B.

I’m glad Charles’ memoir is done. Do bring all the things for me to read. Are you sending them to Chatto [& Windus]?

Berg

[]

3353: To Molly Maccarthy

Thursday [13 January 1938]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C..1.

Dearest Molly,

Your letter has only now arrived. We are both desolated that you should be ill [gall stones]. Leonard is up today for the first time after 2 weeks in bed with kidney trouble—only rice pudding allowed. If he should be all right, we will walk into the hospital sometime tomorrow (Friday) afternoon. But not if its wet. May we leave it open? Only if you have a certain visitor, close with them, and shut us out, for its doubtful.

Lord what a year of incessant catastrophe—but that years over, so lets hope the best for this one.

And let us break up the frost of silence and meet constantly. Come and have pink cake again: soon. We go to Rodmell for one weeks breather on Saturday; the country has been wired off for foot and mouth for 2 months: then back here. Please get well and remember the old Guys, thats the Wolves, who both loll out their red tongues in kissing your hand. Gall dont matter; its what they make ink of. Kidneys I now know all about.

Yr Virginia

Mrs Michael MacCarthy

[]

3354: To V. Sackville-West

Friday 14th [January 1938]

52 Tavistock Sqre. [W.C.1]

To our immense relief the doctor at last says that there’s nothing wrong at the moment with Leonard.

So he’s up and about, and for a month we’re to forget it. Theyre not of course certain what it is after all this time, and say he may have another attack, or not. But oh the torture they put one to waiting for results, and then not knowing what they mean. Science is only half taught and completely untrustworthy.

But the result is that we shall dash down to Monks House tomorrow for a week, so must put off the 19th. But look here—do come up the next week—we shall be back on the 23rd.; and we’ll keep any night you suggest. Only dont tell Sibyl [Colefax], who’s pestering me to dine to meet you and I’ve said we shall be away. There’s a mass of things to discuss with you, let alone the (purely aesthetic) pleasure your presence gives.

I’m so beside myself with relief—its like a flock of air balls tied to my shoulder instead of cannon balls; it was a damnable nightmare—

Potto

We had made up our minds to a nursing home and even heard of one—Roman Catholics in St Johns Wood.

Berg

[]

3355: To Ethel Smyth

Friday. [14 January 1938]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

This is only to let you know that at last the Dr. says L. is entirely normal and can get up and go about as usual. This is a tremendous relief, as they threatened a nursing Home. They wont say that its gone for ever, nor know exactly what it was. But for the present he’s to forget all about it and consider himself cured. So we go off for a week to Rodmell tomorrow. Its been such a torture, waiting at the telephone end all this fortnight that I can only hold my breath and scarcely believe we’re free to walk on the marshes. And foot and mouth is just over.

L. said you rang up and addressed him first as Leonard, then as Virginia.

So goodnight and as usual forgive scrawl, but I’ve had a mass of things to see to.

Hows the Book doing?

V.

and the dog?

Berg

[]

3356: To Vanessa Bell

Friday 14th Jan. [1938]

52 Tavistock Sqre. [London, W.C.1]

This is only to say that the last sample was normal, so L. is now up and about. Its an amazing relief, as you can imagine. We were almost certain he would be sent to a nursing home. Of course Rau cant say anything definite. He thinks the trouble was probably caused by the prostate, and it may come back. But he advises us to do nothing about it for a month, and then see him again. Meanwhile to forget all about it. So we’re off tomorrow to Monks House. I’m afraid we shall just miss you, unless you go to Charleston. I think we shall stay a week. Perhaps you’ll ring up one evening. I long to see you. I’ve been so distracted I’ve practically no news. Molly [MacCarthy] is better: probably wont have an operation. Hugh [Walpole] is ready to subscribe £5 for a picture I think. John Lehmann is probably becoming our partner. Clive dined and was very rubicund. I’ve not seen Quentin.

But I must post this: I got your letter this morning.

Lord once more how I long to see you!

B.

Kiss Angelica at once.

Berg

[]

3357: To Molly Maccarthy

16th Jan [1938]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dearest Molly,

It was so wet and we were both so limp after being kept on tenterhooks for a fortnight by those infernal doctors who threatened nursing homes, and all the horrors, took photographs and couldn’t explain them and so on—science has never been so dangerous as it is at present, I’m sure: but what I meant to say was that we didn’t inflict our old damp limp bodies on you the other day: purely from love of you. But do send a line to say you’re out of the Hospital, and Foss, or whatever his name is, is operating on Ellie’s liver not yours.

We’re only down here for one week, flooded and battered, but so happy not to be in Harley Street we can do nothing but laugh. When may I come and have a gossip? Let it be over a crumpet over the fire. And we will slowly turn old Logan etc. etc. on a spit and watch him melt. Owing to L’s mysterious kidney I’ve not seen a soul, except Sir Hugh Walpole, Sir Harry Stephen and Clive Bell. James, Harry’s only son, nephew of J.K.S. grandnephew of Florence Nightingale, and my cousin, has turned Roman Catholic. I daresay this won’t shock you, but it does me; and as for Harry, he wrinkles like a Baboon—the mandrill’s behind is the very spit and image of his face—and says he’d far rather he [James] were dead. As it is, he’s taken refuge in Toynbee Hall, and is succouring prisoners—I daresay an admirable conclusion, better than the Bar. Clive has grown such a waistcoat that he eats only one meal daily. This is a fact. Nessa and Angelica are at this moment crossing France; Quentin is making pots at Charleston. Lydia and Maynard are lying very low but slightly recovering at Tilton. That’s all my news, so you see I must come to tea and freshen my larder. And what did you think of Ethel Smyth and Mr Baring [Maurice Baring].

Yrs V. W.

Mrs Michael MacCarthy

[]

3358: To Ethel Smyth

Thursday 27 Jan. [1938]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

So sorry I never answered—at least so I suspect. We came back on Sunday and I was at once seized with another influenza: from which I’m practically recovered (tho’ not to the full use of my wits) today. L. you’ll be glad to hear has really improved; and I feel much happier. We have to wait another fortnight for a final report. Its incredible—the cat and mouse of Dr. and patient nowadays. Also Vanessa is back from the South of France, which was under snow, and ravaged by mistral. Thats my temp. chart. And what is yours? In my debased condition I do nothing but read, Chateaubriand: and see no one: hence should you require a picture of the great world, it cant be supplied.

Did the dog make a good week ender? The bitch, isnt it? No: you wont have bitches. Our bitch [Sally], mated for the 2nd time 5 weeks ago, again shows no signs of childbirth, like Princess Juliana; and its laid to L’s charge. Love for him they say, has turned her barren. Now I must fly to Chd. Memoires again; I left Napoleon retreating from Moscow. It seems to me a masterpiece, only a detestable sham Byronic man (C. I mean: not Nap.)

V.

Berg

[]

3359: To Elizabeth Bowen

Wednesday [January 1938?]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

Dear Elizabeth,

That is a great relief to me—please thank your husband [Alan Cameron] for looking up the Terrace [?in connection with Roger Fry]. Now at least I shant get into trouble over that—if the book is ever written. It is a hopeless mess at the moment.

By the way, if you want to look at the stuffs, you can see them at Allan Walton’s—100 Fulham Road, as he will send them to you.

I’ve got my new curtains up. Come again soon and see them.

Yrs
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

3360: To Ethel Smyth

31st Jan 1938

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

What a curse! Thinking I was cured, I went out after I’d written to you, to walk in Regents Park; came back to 101 again; so more bed; still befogged. I think I shall lie low this week, and be recovered next. I’m shutting my door on the world.

I’m glad the dog is so promising. And I saw somewhere that MB [Baring] is a best seller. So lets hope the tide is turning. Well cant write; but can read; letters as well as memoirs; hope to see you soon—

V.

Berg

[]

3360a: To Katharine Furse

31st Jan [1938]

[Handwritten]

52, Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Katharine,

I’m much amused by your letter—your discreet hint that you haven’t read Strode. Nor have I, to tell you the truth. The fact is that he sent me, owing to you, 3 copies of this fat book; I never read them; then about a month ago he wrote & told me to send you one of the 3 copies: I couldn’t face it, but told Leonard’s secretary. And now you think we publish this monster!

I never met Prof. Strode: you asked me to meet him: so thats why I’m inflicted.

Excuse this scrawl—I’m in bed with influenza, & cant think, only want to disclaim “South by Thunder” I should like very much to come & see you soon.

Yrs ever
Virginia Woolf.

Please conceal from Prof Strode the facts given above. I had to invent some lies. Who is he?

Bristol. Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature. Vol. 9, Number 2. Fall 1990.

[]

3361: To Vanessa Bell

[3 February 1938]

52, Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

I was so furious today not to see you properly dearest creature: I was thinking tomorrow is Julian’s birthday and how I saw him in his cradle. You know I’d do anything I could to help you, and its so awful not to be able to: except to adore you as I do.

This doesnt want an answer: its only Singe’s kiss my own darling.

Berg

[]

3362: To Philip Morrell

Feb 3rd [1938]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

My dear Philip,

Of course I am much touched, as well as flattered, that you should write to me—and I would have written before, except that, like you and all the rest of the world, I’m in the grip of influenza. So excuse both handwriting and mind weakness. I cant conceive why you should be afraid of writing when you have such extremely nice things to say. However, I admit I often tear up letters myself: one cant, even at my age, believe that other people want affection or admiration; yet one knows that there’s nothing in the whole world so important. Why is it? Why are we all so tongue tied and spellbound? Why, as you say, do we live three streets off and yet never meet? I think human beings are fundamentally crushed by a sense of their insignificance. You and Ottoline seem to me to have everything: why should you care a bent farthing what I think or feel? Thats the line it takes with me: and to my surprise, apparently with you.

But merely as an author, that curious extension or excrescence on the original V.W—I’m delighted with—first: your liking Jacobs Room [1922]: my own favourite, the only one I can sometimes read a page of without disgust: second, that you should actually have read, still more marvellously have liked, Night and Day [1919]: a book written in half hour laps in bed, and so tedious to remember, and, I have always been told, a complete failure to read. Nothing will make me read it: but owing to your letter, a faint sunset glow surrounds it on the shelf.

I’m so glad Ottoline is better. I always hope you both realise what a part—and an unthanked part—you both played in the old civilisation. But why dont we renew it? Perhaps when I’m up and about you’ll come to tea. Anyhow thank you for your letter, and excuse this feeble answer.

Yrs V.W.

Texas

[]

3363: To V. Sackville-West

Monday 7th Feb [1938]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

Dearest Creature,

I am miserable to hear that you have been so bad. It sounds the most hideous combination of diseases—Are you better? Isn’t it frightfully painful? I, who am an Ostrich, and dont know what indigestion even means, always suspect that gastric inflammation must be the worst torture in the world. And jaundice added. Let me have one line, if you can, to say how you are. Anyhow, it can’t be laid to my door: poisoning you with oysters, or stale cod; more likely. Was it Clives fault? You say your ‘gay season’ which is one night at K.B.W. drinking cocktails with the ephemeral beauties of both sexes isn’t it?

I would have written before, but the moment we got back from Rodmell I developed influenza: got up after a week; then caught it again; and so dribbled on, in my usual way; nothing to matter, only a head like the towel L. uses to wash Sally: damp; dirty; dismal.

Thank Heaven, nothing seems wrong with him; but all depends upon samples of his water: another is to be taken this week. If its innocent, we can forget all about it: if not, they suspect his prostate. Even so, it cant be very. bad: only one would have possibly to consider an operation. But he seems so well, I cant help being sanguine. The doctor [Rau] admits that doctors know nothing.

Do they think your illness will pass off now completely, or shall you have to be very careful? I know nothing about it.

I’ve not seen a soul for 4 weeks, except in the way one does between doctors visits, telephone calls etc. Hugh [Walpole] came one day: his kidneys dont work either, but he looks like the sun in a fog. An old cousin of mine [Harry Stephen], about the sole remaining now Will Vaughan has had his leg off and died in India, was crackling and bubbling at 77 with enthusiasm for Pepita, which is still selling: and we’re taking John Lehmann as partner strictly under Leonard. Sales of Pepita to date, as they say in our trade, over 13,600

What about America?

L. send sympathy: so does Sally: and

Potto

Berg

[]

3364: To T. S. Eliot

Wednesday [9 February 1938]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

The Wolves hope that The O’Possum, who is hereby created King of all Possums, and an Irish Monarch, will come to tea, 4.30, on Tuesday 15th: one Wolf has now recovered, it is hoped, from kidney disease, the other from influenza: recurring; and both would relish a little cheerful talk about ptomaine poisoning and laryngitis,—the Wolf who is holding the pen cant spell tonight or form her letters, but thats nothing to the discredit of her heart, which is true and tender as the poet says the North is: and oh god what a good poem Venus and Adonis is compared with Mr—I forget his name but must now read his MS.

V

Mrs T. S. Eliot

[]

3365: To Ethel Smyth

Friday, 11th Feb. [1938]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

Hurrah! The report today says completely normal. So thats over. No surgeon shall fright me again. They did their best. I’m persuaded I was right, and the whole trouble was neither kidney disease, Brights disease, nor Prostate gland: but simply a blow in the back, as I suggested but I was poohpoohed, from the handle of the car in October. Also, you’ll be amused to hear, and as we’re on medical subjects we may as well be quit of them, I submitted my abnormal temperature to the infallible Berlin Jew [Dr Rau], who at once declared it to be caused by an infection of the sinus: for which they now operate; but never as yet with any success. Result: nothing can be done; which is highly satisfactory. In his opinion this poison also causes my headaches. To be incurable is a great relief. I hear Vita’s been ill with gastric inflammation; my cousin Will Vaughan is dead of a fall at the Taj Mahal: but now that Leonards well I’m as selfish as a hedgehog, and can only sink back in my chair with complete relief; the first time since Dec. 26th.

No time or room or even a pen that can write; so no more. We’re in the thick of taking a partner [Lehmann], who’s about to dine with us, and fill up legal documents. And the dog? And Ethel Smyth? What news?

I send this to catch Saturday post.

V.

Berg

[]

3366: To V. Sackville-West

Valentine’s day [14 February 1938]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

Its the greatest relief—at last, they say L. is perfectly normal. So thats over. I suspect it was a blow he had doing the car—nothing else. My influenza leaves a little tempere: the dr. says a Sinus infected: but nothing anyhow. As for you—Lord how bad you must have been! And the horror—2 nurses! And still one left. Poor wretched sheepdog; all mange and misery. But do say, seriously, is it serious still? Shall you get quite rid?

Now: the only day I lunch out, with Clive, curse him, is the 22nd. Could you make it 21st or 23rd or in fact any other day that week or month? Please do: I cant throw over Clive, as he’s engaged me this 10 days, God Knows why.

And I have a lover [Philip Morrell]. The husband of a lady in high life. Wishes to meet me clandestinely. I put this in to see if I can rouse jealousy: one spark; or does jaundice forbid? And has time sealed the source? Anyhow, I make my bid. How odd, this red flower on a grey tree! (He’s grey: so am I)

Well: tell me how you are: what the dr. says: and arrange another day please, or I shall elope

V.

Berg

[]

3367: To V. Sackville-West

Thursday [17 February 1938]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

Yes of course: the 23rd. or any other day. Wait till you are certain and then send a card. And what food?

When I got your letter I said to L: who was feeding Mitz, Vita is the nicest of all our friends. Why? He said. Whereupon I explained how your modesty as an author is nothing to your fidelity as a friend. Isnt that a nice sentence? Whereupon, he agreed. Then Mitz wetted. Oh Lord—I meant to write a long letter, and here’s the usual scrap: but Londons a tinkling caravan: although Sibyl is weekending in Palermo.

Yes, I’ll tell you about the loves of the aged—how violent they are, and ridiculous, ending in The Reform Club of all places; where they cook beefsteaks.

But you dont say if the disease is going, or how you got it, or whether you love me.

And I’ve a green flame on the horizon: thats the tremor a new love rays up; and not male either: its seen by solitary watchers off Iceland and heralds gigantic Bergs: so mine heralds—

Well, why shouldnt it be Vita on the 23rd?

Now for a pack of dull letters. But that was exact, what I said to L. when he was feeding Mitz—about you minding his illness, and his being well now

V.

Berg

[]

3367a: To T. S. Eliot

[17 February 1938]

Postcard

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

But hollow men, like horses hot at hand,

Make gallant show and promise of their mettle;

But when they should endure the bloody spur,

They fall their crests, and, like deceitful jades,

Sink in the trial.

Julius Caesar. IV. II. 23.

The Huntington Library, California. Modern Fiction Studies. Vol. 30. Summer 1984.

[]

3368: To Lady Ottoline Morrell

Saturday [19 February 1938]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dearest Ottoline,

Yes—thank goodness, after keeping us on the tenterhooks for I don’t know how long, the doctor declares Leonard normal. This is a great relief as you can imagine. I’ve been having influenza, of my own kind, which goes on dragging a miserable little temperature behind it: so we’ve been lying very low. But when you are back, and sunned, and all our germs are dried out—as they may be today—its like an early June morning here—birds singing and blue between the trees—then I hope we shall meet. Its an age since we came owling.

How beneficent of you and Philip to take down my old books again! I cant believe that any human being can get through Night and Day which I wrote chiefly in bed, half an hour at a time. But it taught me a great deal, or so I hoped, like a minute Academy drawing: what to leave out: by putting it all in.

I bought a book for 6d in the Penguins called William by E.H.Young, and, for a wonder, enjoyed it greatly. She knows how to put in, and yet remain readable: so minute and yet so alive. And as its the kind of book I generally dislike, I think she must be a very good novelist, and wonder she’s not far more famous than dear old voluble Hugh, and Wells and so on. Did you once say you knew her? or was it Ethel Mayne?

Now I must put our rice in the oven. Then I shall read Chateaubriand; and fall asleep over the fire. I am surrounded, still, by Roger’s papers, and as soon as I’m normal and collected, shall have to begin to burrow.

And how are your memoirs? The Duke’s [of Portland] had a flash of the 18th Century: otherwise the self complacency seemed omnipotent and overwhelming.

Yr V.W.

Texas

[]

3369: To Ethel Smyth

[24 February 1938]

52 Tavistock Sqre. [W.C.1]

Now there’s so many things to answer, how can I begin?

Montaigne. Yes, one of my favourites, as they say in birthday books, or am I thinking of Lord Beaconsfield? I mean if you intend to die, but dont do it for my sake, give me a last—oh I cant think of the word—a last shower of your brutal gentleness and wisdom—thats much in his line. But dont anticipate the date on my account.

The Years: Yes I thought you might one day come to like it better; but didn’t give it you, so as not to prod a sitting hen. L. always maintains that it is the best but the most difficult of my brew. I loathe it and see a sweat stain, a tear stain, a gash—200 pages cut—on every existing page.

Temperature: Still up and down but next week, being the 4th, I always break the thermometer. Whats the use of being 99 pt 4? What the harm?

Information wanted: Are women allowed to play in orchestras? When was this, allowed, if so: and are they now musically, (as far as training goes) equal with the other sex? I’ve now got to produce, in the usual fury and despair and haste, what should have been a booklet, and has swollen to a book, in which this fact, or fiction, occurs, and I want it to be accurate, but have lost my note, so appeal to you.

Vita still too ill to lunch: has had 2 nurses. Have you any news, via Dotty or Hilda? You see this is a new kind of paper, and not so large as t’other: or I would discourse on Vernon, whose letters I suspect are the best things she wrote—that is from the sample in your MB: a book I mean to read when I’m quit of proofs. And do you know Landouska? She’s asked me to stay.

So thats all for the present moment. But why doubt my love?

V.

Berg

[]

3370: To George Rylands

Sunday [27 February 1938]

52 Tavistock Square [W.C.1.]

Dearest Dadie,

Leonard thinks it almost certain he won’t be able to come, because we’ve taken John as partner and he has to go through all the stock in the first week of March: also is on an Arbitration body which is then sitting. But if we should find a day free might we let you know? And a thousand thanks for remembering the old Wolves who would love to see your Lear (and you).

Your
Virginia

George Rylands

[]

3371: To V. Sackville-West

Tuesday [1 March 1938]

52 Tavistock Sq. [W.C.1]

Damn: I mean, I’m thankful you’re better.

But: Monday the 7th I’ve said I’ll take Angelica to a concert.

Could you conceivably change to Thursday 10th or Friday 11th? When we shall be alone?

If this is impossible, I, but not L. can manage Monday: I mean he could take Angelica. Only do let us arrange something. And how are you? In haste—

V.

Your letter, dated Sunday, only came this Tuesday morning

Berg

[]

3372: To Vanessa Bell

11th March, [1938]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

I never realised, till I bought a calendar yesterday, that it is already 11th of March. So I’m 10 days late [with Angelica’s allowance].

I’m told that Angelica absolutely refuses to go to the Stephen’s [Adrian and Karin] party tomorrow: and I dont suppose I shall dare.

I was going to inflict myself for tea upon you, but have to spend the hours between tea and dinner correcting what is absolutely the worst book I’ve ever written, let alone that I shan’t, when published, have a friend left.

But you wont have missed me.

Shall we come in on Sunday night?

My unfortunate mother in law has just been knocked down and seriously hurt by a maid running out of a bedroom. So we’ve got to go and see her tomorrow; or I hoped to suggest a jaunt

Thats all: except that Singe [Virginia] adores you

B

Berg

[]

3373: To Ethel Smyth

Friday [18 March 1938]

Monks House [Rodmell, Sussex]

We came down yesterday, as we have to go to Oxford on Sunday; and thus even had you been available, I couldn’t hold up a finger. And oh Lord! how difficult, with this riot of horror drumming in at the window to make any engagements. Leonard is in the thick of meetings; the telephone never stops ringing; agitated editors arrive with articles intended to prevent war—though I can do nothing, and scarcely now understand, my mind is all a ruffle and a confusion. But whats the use of passing this on to you, who know it already? So to return to private matters:—Barnes—is that his name?—I’ve only met him on business, and we call each other punctiliously Mr and Mrs: so why Virginia so familiarly? Vita: she dined t’other night; and seemed rather aged, I thought: but still (in spite of Gwen) a perfectly modest and (in spite of Ethel) sincere human being.

Temperature: I feel less hot; less stale; so expect when next taken, to find it normal. Work: What are you doing? Dog: and how’s he shaping? Dogs and daffodils alone retain their sanity. Yes, I’d like to see you again; often indeed think of you; and shall one of these days read MB [Maurice Baring]. Did I tell you, that, all these weeks the pressure of life has been increased by our taking John Lehmann as partner? a bold step; but one that will free Leonard from work; at present, what with interviews and lawyers, work is doubled. And a vast pile of MSS. lies on the floor.

But Ethel dear, in spite of this rigid and rudimentary scrawl, accept the affection of your distracted and inefficient

V.

I was thinking last night of the little book [unidentified] you gave me—And now L’s old mother has been knocked down, seriously hurt, and we have to spend hours trying to cheer her. The Jews can lament: but how they cling to life!

Berg

[]

3374: To Vanessa Bell

Tuesday, [22 March 1938]

Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

I’m slightly worried to think that you’re going to the Stephen Spender play. I found it rather upsetting; and though I dare say its foolish to be upset in that way,—theres a young man killed and of course one thinks of Julian—I cant help wishing you wouldn’t go. I expect this is silly: but I thought I’d say so, so forgive

B.

Berg

[]

3375: To Ethel Smyth

Friday [1 April 1938]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

Found after you had gone; and honestly returned; in gratitude for the kind and inspiriting visit, which I would also return, but shant be asked: so thats that.

But what about celebrating the 80th anniversary together by eating a really good dinner?

Berg

[]

3376: To V. Sackville-West

Tuesday [5 April 1938]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

No, I hadn’t heard a word, and only got your letter late yesterday on coming back from Rodmell. I am miserable to think how bad you’ve been; and going through all that torture of waiting for results. Are they sure they’ve spotted it now? And why lead from Cider? Isn’t it from painting a greenhouse?—But if you have a moment let me have a word. We both sit up like begging dogs, with our paws up, sending our faithful humble sympathy. And how do they de-lead you? And shall you be up again? Kew is very lovely. I remember sitting there once in a livid storm with you [21 July 1927]. This is no more than a mew: I’m incapable of writing, but trust you to divine my intention—yes, it was kind of you to write, and not to make me also wait in suspense, which is loathsome.

I’ve been to the Charterhouse today. Where Col Newcome died saying Adsum; and there he was [his portrait], in a white tie and black cloak at 3 pm. today; we collided.

But forgive my chatter and accept my homage and Pottos love and get well and did you ever read the Zincali: (Borrow) and is The Pepita there (a prostitute gipsy) any relation of yours?

V.

Poor lean wizened brute—your coats what they call “staring” I suppose. 2 stone! Lord!

Berg

[]

3377: To Ling Su-Hua

5th April 1938

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Sue Ling,

I hope you have had the letter I wrote in answer to your first letter. I wrote only a few days after I had yours. Now Vanessa has just sent on your letter of March 3rd. I wish I could help you. I know that you have much more reason to be unhappy than we have even; and therefore how foolish any advice must be. But my only advice—and I have tried to take it myself—is to work. So let us think how you could fix your mind upon something worth doing in itself. I have not read any of your writing, but Julian often wrote to me about it, and meant to show me some of it. He said too that you had lived a most interesting life; indeed, we had discussed—I think in letters—the chance that you would try to write an account of your life in English. That is what I would suggest now. Your English is quite good enough to give the impression you wish to make; and I could change anything difficult to understand.

Will you make a beginning, and put down exactly anything you remember? As no one in England knows you, the book could be more free than usual. Then I would see if it could not be printed. But please think of this: not merely as a distraction, but as a work that would be of great value to other people too. I find autobiographies much better than novels. You ask what books I would advise you to read: I think the English in the 18th Century wrote in the best way for a foreigner to learn from. Do you like letters? There are Cowpers, [Horace] Walpoles; very clear and easy; Scotts novels; (Rob Roy); Jane Austen: then Mrs Gaskells life of Charlotte Brontë: then among modern writers, George Moore’s novels—they are simple written too. I could send you English books, but I do not know if you have them already. But from your letters I see that you write very well; you need not copy others, only find new words by reading quickly. I say nothing about politics. You know from what I said before how strongly the English are on your side but cannot do anything to help. We hear about China from friends here. But perhaps now there will be a change. The worst may be over.

At any rate please remember that I am always glad if you will write and tell me anything about yourself: or politics: and it would be a great pleasure to me to read some of your writing, and criticise it: so think of writing your life, and if you only write a few pages at a time, I could read them and we could discuss it. I wish I could do more. We send you our best sympathy.

Yours
Virginia Woolf

Ling Su-Hua (Mrs Chen)

[]

3378: To Vanessa Bell

Wednesday [6 April 1938]

Postcard

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

As it is Cranium night tomorrow, Thursday, would you and Angelica dine with me; or might I dine, or come in after, with you? I rang up, but no answer; and so write tactfully, so that you can excuse yourselves. But would you ring up.

Berg

[]

3379: To Ling Su-Hua

April 9th 1938

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Sue Ling,

I got your letter written on March 3rd a few days ago, and answered it at once. But stupidly I forgot to send it by airmail—so I write this to tell you that I have written. And the only thing of any interest I had to say was to ask you to write your autobiography, and to say I will gladly read it and give it any correction it needs. Now your other letter (March 24th) has just come, in which you tell me that you have begun to write this. I am so glad. Julian always told me that you had lived a most interesting life: and you say he also wanted you to write it down—simply, as it comes, not bothering about grammar at all. I also asked if you would like me to send you any old English books—18th Century ones perhaps—so that you could learn words. But you will find this in my letter. Let me know if I can do anything to help you in your work. I am certain work is the only way in which one can live at this moment. I will send this now, and hope you will get it soon.

We send our sympathy and shall always wish for news both of you and of your war, and politics.

Yrs
Virginia Woolf

Ling Su-Hua (Mrs Chen)

[]

3380: To Ethel Smyth

Monday [11 April 1938]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Well anyhow you might have sent the train list. After Easter, in the sun, your mood may melt—what with the warm womb stimulant etc. After Easter, I may be asked. After Easter—but I cant continue the list, being in a hurry and only write to say, if you’ve an exact account of the Bournemouth orchestra affair, might I have it; in case I could use it: not that I suppose I can: but has the paper printed it? If its handy and no trouble post it me. And I’ll write a long long letter all about love one of these days. Appropriate aphrodisiacs for your venereal state.

And the dinner? 80th birthday?

Monks House for a week on Thursday.

V.

Berg

[]

3381: To John Lehmann

Friday 22nd April [1938]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

My dear John,

I am ashamed not to have answered your very nice kind and by all means welcome letter before. How can I write suitably now, because I am being badgered by Philip Morrell to write an obituary of Ottoline.

I’m full of sanguininty about the future: and thankful to lift the burden onto your back. Nor can I see myself any reason why we should quarrel; or why we should drink the Toast in cold water. What about a good dinner (not English) at Boulestin or some such place? You are hereby invited to be the guest of Virginia Woolf’s ghost—the Hogarth ghost: who lives let us hope elsewhere. Lets arrange it. We come back on Sunday: and then there’ll be the usual uproar.

Much warmth of feeling in this bitter evening (sitting over the fire) from us both. And Lord! when I die, dont ask anyone to write a few words about me in The Times.

Yrs ever
V. W.

Please thank your mother for the invitation. May we suggest a day later? We should like to come down very much. And I forgot to post this.

John Lehmann

[]

3382: To Ethel Smyth

Saturday 23rd April [1938]

M[onks] H.[ouse, Rodmell, Sussex]

I hope my wire conveyed, inadequately, loves and congratulations. And it admitted my fault—I mean, looking hastily I skipped a week, and though it was next Saturday. At the same time, I dont think, considering the very modified joy with which you received the proposal (see postcards) that I was wrong in assuming that you’d be glad to be quit of the affair: hence your “bitter disappointment” surprised me. Still, if you are disappointed, and would like to celebrate the wrong day, whats to hinder? Oh dear, how mistaken I always seem to be! Only your postcards were very tepid, I assure you.

However, faults or not, here’s my health to you in ink, surely since it was with that liquid that Shakespeare wrote the sonnets; ah but you’ll say Shre had a heart: so have I: only not liquid; compact: congealed; stupid: solid however. Only at this moment rather lacerated by Ottoline’s death: cant help feeling a queer loveliness departed: and much bothered by frantic appeals from Philip, to write about her in the Times—How I hate that!—but must, I suppose.

So once more, forgive: and dear Ethel continue to live and to forgive another 50 years for the sake of your distracted Virginia who will certainly require your living and forgiving as long as she lives.

Berg

[]

3383: To V. Sackville-West

May 3rd [1938]

52 Tavistock Square [W. C. 1]

I was awfully distressed (I wish there were any decent words for this sort of sentiment) to hear you had been attacked again. What the devil is lead poisoning? And when shall you be cured—idiotic questions, but then this letter writing business is such a fraud. And I cant ring you up, for your telephone isn’t attached to the Pink Tower, where I hope you’re thinking of Leonardo not of lead. This is a mere drivel of affection: should you have a card handy write a fact about yourself on it, and dont confuse the most modest and least egotistic of women with that other former lover of mine—who by the way has just rung up to impose a visit with, I gather your [Winnaretta] Polignac in tow. Ethel I mean. I had intended an 80th birthday Boulestin party, and to ask you, but we were at Monks House, and I put it off, to her fury—not that you could have come. But will you face it one of these days?

We think of driving up to The Hebrides, the furthest seas—where the cuckoo calls—whats the quotation Im thinking of?—breaking the silence of the seas—anyhow, thats what we mean to do in June. Oh I’m so sick of this blasted London; its perpetual drab, its drip today, its grey everyday, and all these people. The Press however is now chained to John Lehmann, or will be in October; and I hope (not with great sanguinity though) to be quit of those eternal MSS. Six lie before me at this moment. And we’ve had such a good year and made so much money, and I cant help some pride when I think of the type in the carpet at Hogarth House; and now they say its worth, The Press, £10,000. Much thanks to the noble daughter of all the Sackvilles.

My God, how does one write a Biography? Tell me. I’m fairly distracted with Fry papers. How can one deal with facts—so many and so many and so many? Or ought one, as I incline, to be purely fictitious. And what is a life? And what was Roger? And if one cant say, whats the good of trying? Yet its my favourite reading—short of shall we say Shakespeare and Sackville West: biography. I am reading for the first time a book which I think a very good book—Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees [1714]. Only I must turn to Libby Benedicts Fable on Libby Benedict. As I began by saying this is merely a fish without any bait for news. of you. I was at Ottolines funeral services. I miss her; I mean Gower Street looks to me dumb and dismal. I used to go round between tea and dinner, and now—so dont put the light out which as you remember lit up the porpoise at Sevenoaks. And excuse so very mild a dribble—Its Potto’s fault

V.

Berg

[]

3384: To Margaret Llewelyn Davies

Sunday May 8th [1938]

Typewritten

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dearest Margaret,

Yes it has been a horrid long gap since we were at Hillspur [Dorking, September 1937]. (I’m getting so illegible that I spare you my handwriting.) So much has happened, one way or another, that it seems useless to try to catch up here. And yet what happens is so incessant and so small—one thing then another—that its difficult to say what it amounts to. You ask about Angelica—well, she’s just appeared as a dancer at her Studio theatre; and Nessa rang me up in great excitement because she shows a brilliant gift—dancing a whole Spanish play mostly alone. We shall go and see her tomorrow night. I think this is the only comfort for Vanessa—otherwise, I sometimes feel as you can imagine, that life is very hard for her. She is painting however; they have a school in the Euston Road—she and Duncan—where they teach the young gratuitously.

I went to Ottolines service, Philip’s rather formal but on the whole touching address was read by the actor Speaight who acts Becket in Tom Eliots Murder in the Cathedral—one of Ottolines friends. And now I have the agitating prospect of an interview with Philip to discuss some memorial to her, and to choose one of her shawls. I had grown very fond of her—she was changed; so shabby and humble and humorous; I always saw her alone. The parties were a grind; and she was so deaf.

Ann and Richard brought your niece, and we thought her so distinct and minute and on her own; though she was too shy to talk; and Ann and Richard talk nineteen to the dozen—all about politics, which as you say, are unmentionable. We have at last shifted half the burden of the Press onto a partner—John Lehmann, Rosamond’s brother.

It has become so prosperous—isnt it odd, thinking how it began in the drawing room at Hogarth House. All Leonards time and more of mine than I like to give has lately had to be given to MSS and authors. After October I hope he will be free for his next volume. And if we can steal three weeks in June, we are going to drive through England up to the very tip of Scotland. This year France and Italy seem too red hot; but we long for seals and islands and bays and old country people. And no Press. Leonard is set upon here by the villagers, who have made him a School Manager and he runs the Labour party and the cowman [Hubbard] consults him about divorce—so the garden though flowering in every colour at the moment is not altogether a sanctuary.

Yes—when are we to meet? I did enjoy seeing you and Lilian [Harris]; but I know how exhausting friends visits are. You must let us know when you feel up to it. Its not a very difficult drive from here or from London. Leonard says there are 395 copies of “Life” … left. I wish we could bring out another volume. The young are all on the side of the workers, but naturally know nothing whatever about them. I’m always on the look out for a real Co-op autobiography; L. is in the house planning a [issue of the] Political Quarterly; and I must stop and dish up our lunch.

I wish you would come here—I have a garden room, cheek by jowl with the Church, and with a great elm tree over it.

But no more—

My love to Lilian
Virginia

Sussex

[]

3385: To John Lehmann

Sunday [15 May 1938]

52 Tavistock Square, W. C. 1.

Dear John,

I’m sorry that you and Leonard didnt manage to fix an evening for our dinner. Meanwhile this is only to say, as you asked me about a story [for New Writing], that I’m afraid its impossible, as L. says you have to make up your number early in July. I want to take a holiday in June,—so shouldnt anyhow have time. Many thanks for suggesting it, and excuse this scrawl, the result of driving through Surrey this evening.

Yrs V. W.

John Lehmann

[]

3386: To May Sarton

May 19th [1938]

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W. C. 1.

Dear May Sarton,

This is only a scrawl to say, in answer to your letter, that though they sent me a bound copy of your book, I have still not had time to read it. Every sort of MS. and other demand has been made on me partly through Ottoline’s death and Philips wish to discuss her diaries and so on: and its no good sitting down to read a book seriously with a mind in a whirl.

Also, I have lost all belief in written criticism—anyhow my own. One screws out a few bald statements, is terrified of results and so I become more and more loath to write down what is only a shot in the dark. But if you’re in London later and still want wild and random impressions verbally probably we could arrange it. And as for feeling suspense about my judgment—that seems to me if I may say so absurd in the extreme.

I’m packing to rush down to Sussex; and have to sort out Roger Frys papers to take, so forgive both the typing and the matter.

Yours
Virginia Woolf

Berg

[]

3387: To Viscountess Rhondda

May 24th 38

52 Tavistock Square, W. C. 1.

Dear Lady Rhondda,

Your letter has given me great pleasure all day. I admit I am nervous about 3 Guineas—not about making a fool of myself, but about being a mischievous fool, for the subject is a risky one. But if the extract you read pleased you, then it cant be such an empty gesture as I had come to think it. I wrote it partly to clear my own mind, and partly because I could not write anything else—And though I’m afraid that nothing can have any influence now, anyhow the fact that you liked what you read relieves me of some of my fears. So thank you very much for writing to say so. I wonder if we could really do anything with the outsider idea? I’ve only skimmed the surface of that and many other ideas. But I’m very glad that you call yourself an outsider—the first to take the name! Thank you very much.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

3388: To Angus Davidson

May 26th 38

52 Tavistock Square [W. C. 1]

Dear Angus,

I have just read your life of Edward Lear, and must send a line to say how much I have enjoyed it. I think you have dealt with that very sympathetic and curious man most skilfully and have suggested much more than you say; a great tribute to your art and one most biographers dont deserve. I hope you will go on and provide us with many more such portraits.

Have you heard anything about Ka Arnold-Forster’s death? Its is a great shock—I hadn’t known she was ill. Christopher A-F. wrote to me this morning. He says Will [her husband] is in Canada.

Yours ever
Virginia Woolf

Angus Davidson

[]

3389: To T. S. Eliot

26th May [1938]

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square [W. C. 1]

Dear Tom,

Whichever Woolf it was, it wasnt this Woolf; but now it is this Woolf—which sounds like a passage from the works of the inspired Miss [Gertrude] Stein.

This is only to say in soberer language, that we go away for Whitsun on Wednesday; would therefore suggest tea on Sunday next at 4.30; failing that, tea on Tuesday next at the same hour; the snag then being an Italian woman at five thirty who might cut into our great pleasure in unadulterated conversation. But from your engagements, and their lieu, it looks as if neither day would do; in which case, we must leave it to you. Perceive how I rhyme—how instinctively and in the manner of George Herbert!

I’m longing I needn’t say to hear how the visit to the water closet at Netherhampton went off; if you met Miss Edith Olivier; if she’s as nice as she says she is; if Mr Stephen Tennant (to me an incredible bore) is as she says Oscar Wilde incarnate; and so on and so on. Yes, I murmured ‘I’m Mrs Woolf; at Ottolines funeral; then in a bold loud voice BUT I REPRESENT T. S. ELIOT—the proudest moment of my life; passing, alas, like spring flowers.

Affectionately V. W.

Mrs T. S. Eliot

[]

3390: To Lady Tweedsmuir

Monday [30 May 1938]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

My dear Susie,

I’m afraid village business makes the 9th hopeless. Leonard is a school manager: the Clergyman’s wife [Mrs Ebbs] has fixed the school board meeting for Saturday 10th: so we must stay here: but it depends upon an Archdeacon. I know you have these complications at Elsfield, and know how exacting they are, and how impossible to arrange, or re-arrange. So we must wait till July. I shall be in the Hebrides—Skye I mean—from June 20-25th: I look forward to a silent rock and gannets, but at the same time would like to see you. So please keep July in mind, and suggest a day if you still have one.

Excuse scrawl

Yrs V. W.

Lady Tweedsmuir

[]

3391: To V. Sackville-West

1st June [1938]

52 T[avistock] S.[quare, W. C. 1]

Thats an angel—I mean the gift to the Library. In return you shall have all the autographs you want for all the Princesses in Europe. But what does it mean? autograph collecting? Something sexual, like the dukes Hat [unexplained] I expect.

The book comes out tomorrow. Its only a piece of donkey-drudgery, and as it repeats in still soberer prose, the theme of that very sober prose The Years, which, rightly, you didnt like, I hadn’t meant to send it. But I will, by way of thanks, and you need neither read it nor write and say you have. Both those books are now off my mind, thank God. Why did I feel I must write them? Lord knows.

When you left in your sweeping black car the other night I exclaimed (this is verbatim and would stand in a court of law with my hand on a Bible). I think Vita is the nicest person we know. And L. said yes. So your feeling about our house is very welcome to the old Wolves; and they hope there’ll be as many evenings with Vita in future as the house will hold. Oh dear how grim life can be: and how merciful some moments are—About Ben [Nicolson]—I’m very glad you think he would like to come. That slippery little sandhopper, [name omitted], led me to think, by some insidious report he made, that Ben hadn’t enjoyed it when he did dine here; so, very regretfully, I’d determined not to ask him again. (though in fact I suspected [name omitted] of spite) What is Ben’s address? I’ll remember, and he as mum as a mouse. And he’s so like you I couldnt help liking to have him.

No sign from Edie. There’s a fate against my joining. But I mean to and would like very much to see the marionettes. So prod her from behind. Just off to M. H. where, Lord be praised, we stay a week; then here, then Scotland, Potto’s autograph. He thinks you would like it [squiggly design].

Berg

[]

3392: To Ethel Smyth

1st June. 38

52 Tavistock Square [W. C. 1]

Ethel you’re a trump. A heart of gold under a somewhat charming exterior. They will be overjoyed. And I’ve told them you might add a book or two. If you know which you want to shed, write the titles on a card and send to Miss Douie, Librarian, 29 Marsham St. SW 1. Theyre so cramped they have to choose which to house. I think its almost the only satisfactory deposit for stray guineas, because half the readers are bookless at home, working all day, eager to know anything and everything, and a very nice room, with a fire even, and a chair or two, is provided. So you were as usual, under your exterior, as wise as Goethe, and as good as gold. I’m rather distressed, all the same, at taking your money.

I will send you 3 guineas (the book only I mean) tomorrow. I hadn’t meant to, as it only repeats The Years, with facts to prove it, not fiction; and is a hurried piece of work—though it was hard work collecting the facts—and you wont like it or agree with it. So lets say no more about it.

I am also to thank you for the letter about Scotland. It comes in the nick of time, as there are difficulties about Skye, and we think of confining ourselves to [mainland] Scotland. Your nephew is a very kind good man to have troubled. Will you thank him? or shall I? Another friend [Ka Arnold-Forster] has died suddenly on a Cornish moor. Oh dear me, I cant keep pace with all these deaths. And so count on you to keep on the sunny side of the grave a little longer. We are going to M. H. today, because L. has to inspect the village school. There are too many things to do, on the sunny side, but such is the … I cant finish what I meant to say, because L. says I must pack. And I’ve all Roger’s letters to tie up and take. But I will get a quiet evening at Rodmell and write a long long letter. a love letter, one of the very sweet, the very rare the very few and to you.

V.

Berg

[]

3393: To Sibyl Colefax

2nd June 38

Monk’s House [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest Sibyl,

Late last night we drove down in a storm of wind—but oh how peaceful it was—the garden at midnight even in a roaring gale after London! And here we are for a week, and then dash off for our annual holiday—this year in the Hebrides, if we can manage it. So think of me on a rock the nights you ask me to dine, talking to gannets.

I’m getting so old and so drowsy I hardly ever dine anywhere except at home. I dont think one ought to parade one’s stupidity after dark any longer. But I wish sometimes you’d drop in between the lights, or dine alone, or—but then you’re a firefly or bird of Paradise, whose natural element is the fiery. Am I thinking of a salamander? That’s what comes of writing over a wood fire.

Only its very nice of you to go on asking me: and I wish we could ever be in the same room at the same moment; only, as I say, I’m a bat and you’re a butterfly. And battishness grows on me. I shall nest in your hair. And aren’t bats covered with fleas?

Forgive this babble and do let us meet.

Yrs V. W.

Michael Colefax

[]

3394: To Lady Tweedsmuir

2nd June 38

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

My dear Susie,

How difficult these dates are—here we are for Whitsun, and shan’t I think be in London till the 9th anyhow, and then I expect too late for you. After a week in London, we go to Scotland for a fortnight: back again the beginning of July till August. But what are you doing? I must leave it, and hope, if July is free, you will suggest a day. I hope Canada give you a holiday till August anyhow.

You needn’t apologise for not subscribing to the Library. I ought to apologise rather for adding another letter to the daily heap. I owe all the education I ever had to my father’s library, and so perhaps endow libraries with more divinity than I should. But this one is far more my care than yours—who have all Canada to provide for 170,000 books! the thought staggers me, and makes me doubt if we ought either to buy more books or write them. Who can read 170,000? And who has written them?

I’m longing to be instructed on Canada, and all the rest of your doings since we met, and you were choosing a dress if you remember to match the Viceregal carpet. What is it like being Queen? and will you be relieved if I dont try to curtsey, etc. etc. etc—I’ve too many questions to ask and no room. So I hope we may soon talk instead.

Yr V. W.

Lady Tweedsmuir

[]

3395: To Ethel Smyth

June 7th [1938]

M[onks] H.[ouse, Rodmell, Sussex]

I’m so relieved to find I’m not cut off, as I half expected, from all affection, now you’ve read 3 gs, that I must hastily (we’re going out.) scrawl a line of thanks. I think your criticisms are most interesting. As you’ll have guessed, that was largely the little creatures object: to rouse objections. And I shall be smothered with them, once the pens get to work. Not so good as yours, though.

I There are some single points that occur to me. You say you’re going to speak about (I suppose) the musicians expelled at Bournemouth. I had hoped to use those facts, but I had such a heap—half had to be struck out of the notes in proof. to keep some slimness, and not repeat inordinately. It strikes me though that you would do well to lay your facts before the Council for Civil liberties. L and I both subscribe. L. doubts if it is within their province—I think it should be, and want very much to know what line Ronald Kidd, the secretary, would take. He gets my occasional guinea. Why not submit the story to him before you speak? Cold facts are the only weapon; and if I’m a judge, its a monstrous story: and the hiding of it blatant Hitlerism.

2) I cant generalise about young men and war. I only know that my own nephew had a passion for the art; and a longing—instinctive and irrational—to fight himself. Yet why? And if you can, as in this village, beat up recruits from the farm, on the strength of red coats and pay, surely the instinct must be there, if mitigated in the more sophisticated quarter. But I do suggest that there’s a strong turn against it—witness pacifism growing; only routed by the ‘virile’ conception. And suggest indifference.

3) Patriotism. My dear E … of course I’m ‘patriotic’: that is English, the language, farms, dogs, people: only we must enlarge the imaginative, and take stock of the emotion. And I’m sure I can; because I’m an outsider partly; and can get outside the vested interest better than Leonard even—tho’ a Jew.

4) Notes. Yes that was a question; bottom of the page or end. I decided for end, thinking people might read them, the most meaty part of the book, separately. Gibbon wished to do this, but gave way to friends. Pippa Strachey writes that she’s glad they are at the end. I had a mass more and still have. Yes—very hard work that was

5) Alas, there wont be a 2nd edition in my lifetime. L. printed 15 thousand!—against my judgment.

6. The Times photograph—damn them. They rang up and asked for me. Were given the stock reply. “Mrs W. doesn’t want her photograph published”—whereupon they go to a shop and buy the Lady in the Lit Sup. who gave me a shock. No I dont think she’s a beauty: but her nose looks sharp eno’ to cut hay with. Why shd. I reflect “what a beautiful woman” I am? I’m not, and never think so. (This is true)

Here till Saturday I think, owing to a School Board meeting, and now I must rush

V.

The address is:

Ronald Kidd

National Council for Civil Liberties

320 Regent Street W.1.

I send back your Bournemouth budget

Berg

[]

3396: To Vanessa Bell

Thursday [9 June 1938]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

The picture has just been nailed up—its perfectly lovely—What a great artist you are! Everything complete and entire, firm as marble and ravishing as a rainbow. How I wish I were a painter! Its as good as having a new oil painting. Do consider our plan—I’m sure it might be a howling success. No bill with it. Whom do I pay? And have you brought the chair? Go to Heals. I have an account there. Also get a cover, included. I’ve just heard that Redpaths [upholsterer] mother is very ill, so she’s had to to give up all work.

Q coming to tea and dinner. We shall be back on Saturday, but you wont be there. What about dinner on Monday at 52—you, Duncan and A?

Well your art does give me heavenly joy

B.

Berg

[]

3397: To Viscountess Rhondda

10th June 38

Typewritten

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Lady Rhondda,

I ought to have thanked you before for your letter, and for subscribing to the [Marsham St] Library. I know what a multitude of such demands must be made on you, and was therefore loath to add another. But books have always been so prolific in my life that I can’t help being shocked to think that there are those who go without.

I cant say how pleased I am that you should like Three Guineas. I know much of it is sketchy and wants working out; but I had not time. The guns sound so very close. But if it stirs up thought, that is what I wrote it for. And if someone like yourself feels that there is some scattered truth flying about in it then perhaps it won’t be, as I so often feel writing to be, a mere bonfire of words.

As for patriotism, I expect I have it as strong in me as you. But I dont think its as strong in me as in an old half brother of mine [Sir George Duckworth] who shot and rode and owned several acres. This applies too to what you say of the echoes of pride vanity and combativeness. There they are in us of course; I feel them pricking every moment. But again they have so little encouragement in us; surely, with the great example of what not to be blazing in front of us, we can damp them down before they get a hold. If we emphasise our position as outsiders and come to think it a natural distinction it should be easier for us than for those unfortunate young men who are shot through the sausage machine of Eton—Kings or Christchurch. But I wont drone on.

What you say about the difficulty of running Time and Tide is very interesting. But isnt that too a proof of what I say—I mean, as a woman shut out from so many of the newspaper sanctuaries you have to fight to enter; and thus dont think, as those within naturally do, how to shut others out.

But I only took up my typewriter—to spare your eyes the difficulty of my now dissolute hand—in order to thank you, not to inflict more arguments. But I must repeat, it makes me so happy to think that you, with all your work on hand, have taken the trouble to read my book.

Yours very sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

3398: To Violet Dickinson

June 13th [1938]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

My Violet,

What an Owl you are to buy 3 Gs! I’d have given you one with pleasure had I thought you would have poked your nose that way. As I remember it has a chip off the end of it. Only the village idiot ever writes to me about my books; but there are many villages well supplied; some with male some with female: all idiotic.

I’m much amused that Lord Weymouth is laying down a cellar—is he as beautiful as Katie, or as remarkable as Beatrice? I think Clive meets him at the Club, and no doubt tipped him the wink. Oh dear what an age it is since I saw Beatrice save in print one day, opening a Donkey show or something.

And what about you? Why do you yield to these broken legs? Must you? And how are you? And do you lie in the garden—where the birds used to sing so loud, and I used to be all of a fizz coming down for the afternoon, and walking back along a field path. Only I was also very crazy then so my memories jigger. Not of your infinite kindness though. And Nellie [Cecil]? Well, if you can write, do; and put in all the scraps you can think of. Heres Nessa coming in—we’re bringing out a book of Julian’s letters. Theres not much solid happiness in the world, is there? But we are just going, driving, for a fortnight to Skye—thats a lark.

Yr Sp

Sussex

[]

3399: To Saxon Sydney-Turner

Tuesday [14 June 1938]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

My dear Saxon,

The rumour about the Odyssey isnt quite correct: [Michel] Saint-Denis, who taught Angelica, suggests that I shall help him with a version which he has had in mind for 4 years: a highly stylised version, I gather; and my part will only be to re-English somebody else’s English. But it has gone no further than talk, and I doubt, considering his engagements and my disabilities that it ever will. He wants, of course, to stage it: but has highly original ideas. So far I’ve merely glanced at Samuel Butler. My favourite poem still—the O.

I’m so glad you like 3 Gs. If you would note misprints I would give you a clean copy—for I cant go through that labour again. And it swarms—But we’ve printed so big a first edition I’m afraid the 2nd won’t be needed. Just off to the Hebrides. When we come back, will you dine.

Excuse this potty scrap. Packing: and so on.

Virginia

Sussex

[]

3400: To A. G. Sayers

15 June 1938

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

Dear Sir,

Your letter about my book Three Guineas has given me great pleasure, and I am grateful to you for your generous approval. I am glad that you do not think me guilty of exaggeration. I have only myself experience of one profession, and in dealing with others had to depend upon books and hearsay—hence I might have gone wrong. The book is a mere outline, but I wanted to state the case as briefly as possible, for it seems to me of great importance. And I am very glad of your sympathy. I have made some readers very angry.

With regard to the work of Mr and Mrs Pethick Lawrence, I have the greatest admiration for it, and it was mere chance that I used other quotations and made no mention of them. In fact I did not read Mrs Pethick Lawrence’s book till I had done. But I regret that I said nothing; they deserve all the praise they can have.

Thank you for troubling to write and believe me

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

A. M. Sayers

[]

3401: To Shena, Lady Simon

June 15th 1938

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

My dear Shena,

I must send one line—a very hasty one—to thank you for your letter. I’m much relieved that you like 3 Gs. It got on my nerves, that it would make everyone furious, and no good would come of it. I dont suppose any good will: but its a great pleasure that you enjoy it: and I’m glad I’ve not infuriated Pernel [Strachey]. It was such a grind, collecting and compressing the notes, slipping in facts and keeping up enough of a dance to lead the reader on so that I couldn’t keep my eye on the general aspect, and was much in the dark as to the whole.

But of course you’re an outsider. Much more effectively than I am. I think its the only thing for us to be. I want to explore the idea—and many others—much further, only what I admire in those, like you, who do the things that I talk of. I’m getting a fair bag of the oddest letters: and some angry reviews: but oh I’m so glad to be quit of it for the moment. We go to Skye tomorrow: but back in a fortnight, and packing waits, so forgive this whirlwind hand and scamper of ideas: only I am so glad you liked the book.

Yrs V. W.

The [Marsham St] library to which you contributed so generously write in great joy and gratitude.

Sussex

[]

Letters 3402-3426 (June-July 1938)

3402: To Ethel Smyth

June 16th [1938]

Postcard

Lincoln

We made a good start today—been to Croyland and the Thomas Abbey—all in June weather—on to Corbridge tomorrow. So Friday no good.

PTO. for a rough version of the real Leonard and Virginia.

V.

Berg

[]

3403: To Vanessa Bell

Saturday 18th June. [1938]

The George Inn, Chollerford, Northumberland.

Chollerford, as you probably know, is a Roman Bridge (only one arch left) over the River Tyne, at the bottom of the great wall [Hadrian’s], which separates England from Scotland; and about 30 years ago, Waller took us to see it at Gilsland from Corby. In fact, we’re not very far from Corby. The country from the wall is precisely like the [Roman] Campagna.

Thats all I shall say by way of description.

However, I must rapidly add that we must all leave London at 7 on a fine summer morning: reach Peterborough at 12: then visit Thorney Island and Crowland Abbey. This last is the finest Church in England. It is in the middle of the Fens. And it is exactly like a Church in the Dordogne. Why it is so magnificent I cant say. But we could see all this—and the Fens—and have a through English lunch off fruit salad and cold beef and be back in London in time for Angelica’s show (as we now call it) at 8. So do consider the matter. England is practically undiscovered and incredibly lovely. I will not describe the rose-red Italian Castle that we discovered in the back streets of Gainsborough: out of Siena it has not its match. The grass grows round it; iron railings are of course included; orange peel, paper bags; one old gent. lives in one vast tower. Thats enough…. I hope John [Lehmann] has been submissive. He rang me up late on Wednesday, after L. had gone to the House of Commons, and was rather huffy at being told all was settled with Mrs Nicholls and we couldn’t see him. He said he had travelled post haste from Prague to see Leonard. I said, A misunderstanding. Then we shut off.

I could write at least 16 reams about life in the hotel here. There was an otter hunting party at breakfast this morning: the river runs through the garden. Old ladies of 70 appeared in tweed suits with the pads of otters or foxes mounted in gold pinned to their breasts. Last night I was shut up alone with two spinsters; who after welcoming me very kindly, turned upon each other with such ferocity over patience that the room rang. All reticence was forgotten. Their skirts rose over their long brown legs. And now they’re reading opposite. But the key to their souls is Patience—I cant go into it fully.

B.

Berg

[]

3404: To Lady Cecil

[18 June 1938]

The George Inn, Chollerford, Northumberland

My dear Nelly,

Well you are a nice woman to write such a nice letter, when you might have cut up as rusty as a—now what? old razor blade, shall I say?—indeed many people have over 3 Guineas: so you’re balm and dock leaves and the River Tyne itself—(Which is running past the Inn window: 5 old gentlemen are fishing in it, and a party of 40 adults spent the morning catching an otter in it.) But I was thanking you for being, as usual, so spirited and unexpected and altogether coming out on the right side of things, (which is mine) in spite of every temptation to belong to the other nation. The whole difficulty of writing 3 Guineas was to quote rightly: so you’ve said the very thing I wanted said. One files along full tilt on one’s own sail: then there’s a loathsome lump of fact—some Bishop or Marquess or Mr [Stanley] Baldwin or Whitaker [Almanac]—to be worked in—thats the snag: full stop: curving round them: carrying them along, and then again and again and again…. I thought my wits would turn, merely quoting. But it is only a sketch for a book—a fling of my line (like the old gents on the Tyne) over a boiling and bubbling stream, so full of fish one cant pick and choose.

So—to write plain English—we must meet over a teapot, and discuss the question: I mean the million questions. I wish you would. One brain is only a teaspoon or a thimble; and we ought to combine. But the old ladies are now playing patience, and the rules of the game seem to rouse pugnacity. How, though, can women stick together as men do without money? without Clubs, Claret, otter hounds—only packs of patience at Inn tables, and such very cheap green—no brown—cotton stockings?

We are on our way to Skye; shall be back in a fortnight. The wrinkled hag, as he calls her, wishes to send her kind regards to Lord Cecil, as she calls him. And come and see me, or let me come and see you.

Yrs affly
Virginia W.

The Marquess of Salisbury (Cecil Papers)

[]

3405: To V. Sackville-West

19th June [1938]

George Inn, Chollerford Northumberland

We’re only on our way to Skye—stopping to explore the Roman wall. Have you seen it? Anyhow, its no good describing it—we’ve been lying on the top all this afternoon. Of course I knew you wouldn’t like 3 gs—thats why I wouldn’t, unless you had sent a postcard with a question, have given it you. All the same, I dont quite understand. You say you don’t agree with 50% of it—no, of course you dont. But when you say that you are exasperated by my “misleading arguments”—then I ask, what do you mean? If I said, I dont agree with your conception of Joan of Arc’s character, thats one thing. But if I said, your arguments about her are “misleading” shouldn’t I mean, Vita has cooked the facts in a dishonest way in order to produce an effect which she knows to be untrue? If thats what you mean by “misleading” then we shall have to have the matter out, whether with swords or fisticuffs. And I dont think whichever we use, you will, as you say, knock me down. It may be a silly book, and I dont agree that its a well-written book; but its certainly an honest book: and I took more pains to get up the facts and state them plainly than I ever took with any thing in my life. However, I daresay I’m reading more into “misleading” than’s there. But oh Lord how sick I get of all this talk about ‘lovely prose’ and charm when all I wanted was to state a very intricate case as plainly and readable as I could. There is an otter-hunting party going on in the hotel at this moment, so I cant write, and I’m roasting after 6 hours in the sun. And I want to describe the view from the wall—miles and miles: but won’t as there’s no room. We shall be back in a fortnight. Anyhow (to return to 3gs) I’m delighted I’ve exasperated my dear old sheepdog.

V.

Berg

[]

3406: To Vanessa Bell

25th June [1938]

Flodigarry Hotel, Portree, Isle of Skye

Well, here we are in Skye, and it feels like the South Seas—completely remote, surrounded by sea, people speaking Gaelic, no railways, no London papers, hardly any inhabitants. Believe it or not, it is (in its way, as people say) so far as I can judge on a level with Italy, Greece or Florence. No one in Fitzroy Street will believe this, and descriptions are your abhorrence—further the room is pullulating and popping with Edinburgh tourists, one of whom owns spaniels, like Sally, but “all mine are gun trained, the only thing they wont carry being hares”—so I cant run on, did you wish it. Only—well, in Duncan’s highlands, the colours in a perfectly still deep blue lake of green and purple trees reflected in the middle of the water which was enclosed with green reeds, and yellow flags, and the whole sky and a purple hill—well, enough. One should be a painter. As a writer, I feel the beauty, which is almost entirely colour, very subtle, very changeable, running over my pen, as if you poured a large jug of champagne over a hairpin. I must here tender my congratulations to Duncan upon being a Grant. We’ve driven round the island today, seen Dungevan [sic], encountered the children of the 27th Chieftain, nice red headed brats: the Castle door being open I walked in; they very politely told me the Castle was shut to visitors, but I could see the gardens. Here I found a game-keepers larder with the tails of two wild cats. Eagles are said to abound and often carry off sheep: sheep and Skye Terriers are the only industries; the old women live in round huts exactly the shape of skye terriers; and you can count all the natives on 20 feet: but they are very rapacious in the towns, and its no use trying to buy anything, as the price, even of Sally’s meat, is at least 6 times higher than in our honest land. All the same, the Scotch are great charmers, and sing through their noses like musical tea kettles. The only local gossip I’ve collected for you is about your Mr Hambro’s wife—the one who was drowned in Loch Ness. We met a charming Irish couple in an Inn, who were in touch, through friends, with The Monster. They had seen him. He is like several broken telegraph posts and swims at immense speed. He has no head. He is constantly seen. Well, after Mrs Hambro was drowned, the Insurance Company sent divers after her, as she was wearing 30,000 pounds of pearls on her head. They dived and came to the mouth of a vast cavern, from which hot water poured; and the current was so strong, and the horror they felt so great, they refused to go further, being convinced The Monster lived there, in a hollow under the hill. In short, Mrs Hambro was swallowed. No drowned body is ever recovered and now the natives refuse to boat or to bathe. That is all the local gossip. And I will not describe the colour.

I think John’s [Lehmann] story utterly absurd. Poor old Leonard had been most careful to tell him not to come after 4: had waited in all day; and left all instructions in writing with Mrs Nicholls. John then rings up at 6.30 and makes no apology—in fact complains … however, Leonard is writing to you himself. All I did was to repeat my orders. But he’s as touchy as a very old spinster whose one evening dress has a hole in the behind. It was the way he behaved before. We hoped, and he declared, that life had taught him better. God knows how he’ll settle down, if he’s still so itchy. I’m glad you’ve talked to Clive. I feel he wants to talk, only cant, unless one starts him. Its such a mistake, letting one’self become snowed under. Also I’m glad he approves of the book [Julian Bell]. I quite agree that letters must be redundant—its the way you get the whole feeling of a character, and I only wish there was a complete account—childhood, Cambridge etc: after all, nothings so important as a person like Julian. However, I think there’s enough to give an outline, and nothing seemed to me too private. Yes—writing lives is the devil. I shiver at the thought of Roger. And really mustn’t begin a third sheet. but cant help hoping you may write another letter before we come back. I rushed to the office here: saw your envelope, tore it open, regardless of all questions.

That shows how your poor Singe adores you. Of course both chairs are my present. And a very small one. This is absolutely understood, good Dolphin. If not, then cloaks, stockings and a pearl necklace will descend. The Clarks [Kenneth and Jane] asked us: thank God the party question is solved if one’s in Skye. When shall I see you? We start back on Monday and shall be home on Sunday. but I suppose you’ll be at Charleston.

Very cold here, and all weathers; but, as I say, lovely—

B—

Flora Macdonald lived in this house. The sea is beneath the window. Here came Prince Charlie dressed as a beggar. Possibly Dr Johnson and Boswell—but dont take this for a fact and boast of it

Berg

[]

3407: To J. M. Dent

25th June 38

Flodigarry Hotel, Portree, Isle of Skye

Dear Mr Dent

As you see from the address, I am travelling, and your letter has only now reached me.

I had forgotten that Mr Forster’s article did not mention The Lighthouse. I think Dr Hoare’s article does admirably, and should make a very good introduction; and I hope Dr Hoare will allow it to be used.

With apologies for the delay

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Carol Collins

[]

3408: To Ethel Smyth

26th June. [1938]

Flodigarry Hotel, Skye

Well Ethel this is an heroic effort, writing in a lounge with the Old English sheep dogs,—the hearty hoary old ladies and gents. in tweeds—all a blowing and a puffing round me. So you will excuse the illiteracy. I am under the lee of a military man reading the Times: rain: outside; a divine sea: little islands: some sun; never was such a June; people popping in and out. “Of course my spaniels are all gun trained. They’ll carry anything, except a hare …” But to return: yes, we were 2 days on the wall: lay on top of it the one hot day; and saw the landscape that to me is loveliest in the world; miles and miles of lavender coloured loneliness, with one thread white path: dear me, were I a writer, how I could describe that: the immensity and tragedy and the sense of the Romans, and time, and eternity; and then the wild white hawthorn, and the sheep cropping, and 3 little white headed boys playing in a Roman camp. No I’m not (at this moment) anything but a drab dowdy middle class lady;—“Are you going to … Well, its worth seeing. But the Inn to stay at etc etc …” Yes, I never saw a country more to my liking than the wall: d’you know how suddenly a country expands an airball in ones mind—I mean states a mood completely that was existent but unexpressed, so that at every turn of the road, its like half remembering, and thinking it can’t be coming, but then it does?—a feeling a dream gives? and also that it is oneself—the real Virginia or Ethel, the dormant, the eternal? Now thats enough about the wall; to which I shall return, if I live long enough. One evening we walked from Chollerford to Haughton Castle; oh me! the river running and the old Castle, and the grass path and the people—peasants, wandering along the bank, and talking to us, like something in the time of Elizabeth, so that I felt I was actually in Shakespeare, one of the northern ones. Again, I must stop; as theyre now reading extracts from the papers, just in. “How unlucky about the Kings visit to Paris! All the decorations will have to be removed …” You must grant the English are a rocky race: this spring, the country, is somewhere within; but so impeded. Then we drove through the Highlands, and there was one lake, with trees reflected which I think carried beauty to the extreme point: whether its expressible, that rapture, I doubt: green and purple trees hanging upside down in the middle of a perfectly still lake, and green all round. Do you like descriptions of nature? or do you skip?

I cant at the moment get back to the land of fact; and have forgotten all about 3 gs. except, my vanity reminds me, that it is selling very well, tho’ none of the shops at first would take it. Not a novel, they said, and the public won’t touch anything controversial about women. And I’m getting the oddest letters, which I shall collect, as a valuable contribution to psychology. The reviews—poor devils, I was so hard on reviewers—and theyre so painstaking—they are better on the whole than I expected; more serious, less spiteful, tho’ I’m glad to see that I raised the hackles of that mincing old pedant, that omniscient but altogether meretricious in the sense of lapped in book dust humbug: G. M. Young. Otherwise I’m out of that mood and longing to be off on fiction: which I must curb: for all the Fry papers wait me.

Only another week and we shall be back. But I feel as if I’d been ducked upside down, what with the hoary sheep dogs, the otter hunt, the ruins of Melrose and Dryburgh where I glutted my passion for Scott on his tomb—like chocolate blanc-mange—so appropriately, with the wild syringa growing too, and Haig all covered with red poppies in stuff whose colour had run next him. Now we are driving in this mixture of sun and mist round the island, so the scrawl of this inebriate hand must cease.

I’m longing to hear about the speech; and will subscribe to the Band; and want to hear all about N. Boulanger, who gave me a thrill—seeming, even at a lunch party, a genuine live fish, not a stuffed Inn trout. Whats up with her? And you?

V.

Berg

[]

3409: To Duncan Grant

Monday [27 June 1938]

Postcard

[Isle of Skye, Scotland]

This is the nearest I could get to the Isle of Barra. Skye is often raining, but also fine: hardly embodied; semi-transparent; like living in a jelly fish lit up with green light. Remote as Samoa; deserted: prehistoric. No room for more.

V.

Duncan Grant

[]

3410: To Clive Bell

Monday [27 June 1938]

Postcard

[Isle of Skye, Scotland]

Its a good thing Clive and his sister-in-law didn’t quarrel at this point [Duntulm Castle, Skye], or the mews [gulls] would have picked their bones. Skye is full of mews.

V.

Quentin Bell

[]

3411: To Vanessa Bell

Tuesday 28th about [June 1938]

Park Hotel, Oban, Argyllshire

We are now in Oban, which is, as far as I have seen it, the Ramsgate of the Highlands. Only the Scotch having melancholy in their bones—thats where The Stephen’s, as Julian said, get their black melancholy, turned to madness in some of us by a drop of French blood,—being entirely without frivolity build even bathing sheds of granite let alone hotels. The result is grim; and on every lamp post is a notice, Please do not spit on the pavement. We had a terrific drive yesterday in one of the worst known gales, over the wildest passes. Trees were hurtling; rivers simply cataractuous, but very beautiful, if the rain had stopped; but it didnt. Our petrol gave out; and the oil clogged the engine. But miracles happen, and suddenly an Inn appeared, in a black gorge; and on opening the door, there were 20 tables with cloths laid diamond shape, maids in white aprons, and 7 different cakes; including the best shortbread I’ve ever eaten. We were warmly welcomed by the 20 old fishing men and women—they’re practically sexless, and I’ve often taken one for a dog and vice versa: Some had been fishing in the rain for days and caught one trout. They talk such a brogue I had to invent replies, so off the point that at one moment I was talking about the Queens mother’s death [Lady Strathmore] and they were talking about the rarity of polecats or somesuch topic Then a garage mended the car. off we swept into the desert, and just as night was falling—that is a kind of cadaverous dawn, for the sun neither rises nor sets in the highlands—I saw 2 great deer, bounding from rock to rock Thats all the description you need skip.

I’ve had a wild raving letter from Will Arnold Forster, describing his feeling in an American forest while Ka was being buried. He is now coming back, and must see me at once. Shall I counter him with Pipsey [Morrell]?—the two widowers might cancel out. Will has all the [Hilton] Young phrases; oh dear, how stagey that group was: breezy, elemental, slangy, and manly: at the same time, gulping with profound emotion.

No more letters from you, which casts a gloom over me; for I feel so very highland and garish out of your radius. Today I bought woolen gloves and a waterproof hat—my only purchases, for there’s a scarcity of civilisation you cant credit. Not a turnip grows, nor cabbage: but wild roses, and foxgloves; and though the weather is like a weathercock, one day is always fine for half the time, and then freezing. The food varies. Last night even you would have been tolerably content; simple and indigenous; fish is the trump card, Leonard says—haddock and herring divine, but I dont think fish a good invention any time. Then cakes. Leonard says they are unmatched; I dont like scones for breakfast, or ginger in the cake. Still the more frivolous sugar cakes are very good. And the porridge is a dream. Only I loathe porridge. Theres a good earthy soup—all vegetables unsorted. That I like, and the splendour of sausage, bacon, ham, eggs, grapefruit, oatcake, grilled ham for breakfast—The people are enchanting. Mr Cunningham the baker is sending me 6 tins of his own shortbread. He, wife, and children at Skye were beyond belief nice, and I adore all who live in hotels, but not so much as I adore you. Heres L. so I must explore Oban in the rain. No letter from John about Julian’s book. We had, very tenderly, to reject his novel. I suppose he’s in a huff. Have you settled with him? Back on Sunday. Oh how I long to see you, Angelica and even Highland Duncan.

B.

L. is picking ticks out of Sallys head. but sends love.

Berg

[]

3412: To Margaret Llewelyn Davies

4th July 38

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

Dearest Margaret,

Here we are, back again, having dashed through Scotland, Skye and Kirkby Lonsdale. I suppose you will think us exaggerated, but Kirkby Lonsdale seemed as lovely as any place we saw—I longed to take an old grey house I saw to let on the road. It was a perfect morning, after violent storms, and the moors looked magnificent, and the town so dignified, and an old woman said she remembered your father, and I could hardly bear to drive away. But I mustn’t run on about places we saw, or I shall bore you to death.

There’s so much to say—where am I to begin? If only you were still at Reigate we might call in on Friday; Leonard always stops at Reigate to buy worms for his marmoset. Worms—German worms—are the staple product of Reigate. But now you’ll be home again.

I’ve had a sad letter from poor Will Arnold Forster who is in Canada. Ka died suddenly out on the moor above Zennor—a death anyone might like; but she was younger than I am, and was so devoted to the boy.

Its very good of you to attempt my book [Three Guineas]. I felt it great impertinence to come out with my views on such a subject; but to sit silent and acquiesce in all this idiotic letter signing and vocal pacifism when there’s such an obvious horror in our midst—such tyranny, such Pecksniffism—finally made my blood boil into the usual ink-spray. Yes, I had to choose at random from such a mass of material that I knew I could have quoted better and more to the point. Thats always the difficulty—quoting rightly. And it was this partly that led to verbosity. One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people’s throats—and one always secretes too much jelly. But then I was writing for the very common, very reluctant, very easily bored reader—not for you. As for G. M. Young, I’m glad I roused his rage; if I had not been away, I might have answered. But I see that Time and Tide did it for me; and proved, as I suspected from his bad temper, that he had got his facts wrong, and cooked others. But what’s the use of taking reviews or answers to reviews seriously?

The Co-op; women as usual are magnificent. I had seen the resolution—they beat the Labour Party hollow. I gather that Ann and Richard are to be married—so we shall be cousins in law—a great satisfaction to me, remembering so many childish and grown up days with Arthur and Theodore [Margaret’s brothers]; and you.

Our love to you and Lilian.

Virginia

Sussex

[]

3413: To Vanessa Bell

Thursday [July? 1938]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

Many thanks for the jacket. I think it is one of the best you ever did—quite lovely, and also practical, and so you’ve killed 2 birds with 3 cheques.

Quentin’s coming to tea this afternoon—so’s Maynard and Lydia And here’s Mr Wicks to discuss the new room.

We come up on Sunday—shall we come in after dinner?

B.

Berg

[]

3414: To John Lehmann

[early July 1938]

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square [W.C.1.]

My dear John,

It seems hopeless to arrange a meeting in which we can discuss anything except Press business, and so, as you asked me yesterday again about writing something for New Writing, I think I had better explain in writing.

You said that I’m an adept at getting out of things. And it’s true that I dont at all want to get into things. I loathe having to keep to dates and so many thousand words. Indeed save for writing an occasional article for the Lit. Sup. and two pot boiling stories for America I’ve not written for any editor for years. Thats one reason why I dont commit myself to you.

The other reason is that I find the foreword to New Writing distinctly inhibiting. You say it exists particularly to “further the work of new and young authors”. Well, I’m neither new nor young, alas. But it’s what follows that bothers me—“whose aims are in any way in sympathy with its declared character”. You may have sent some declaration which I’ve missed. If so, let me have it, and I’ll consider it. But my instinct is to fight shy of magazines which have a declared character. Why lay down laws about imaginative writing?

Probably I’m an incorrigible outsider. I always want to write only for the Hogarth Press, and feel if I’m forced to commit myself to anybody else that I’m writing what I dont want to write and its sure to be bad.

But of course I’m very grateful (this is genuine) that you should ask me; and its because you’ve asked me so often that I go into detail, instead of saying as I usually do—and its true, God knows, with the whole of Roger waiting to be dealt with—that I havent the time.

I liked Herr [Martin] Freud; and it was a great comfort that you were there to lubricate his English.

Yours
V.W.

Texas

[]

3415: To Ethel Smyth

Monday 11th July 1938

52 Tavistock Sqre. [W.C.1]

I know I am unpardonable this time. I have it on my conscience like a grain of lead that I ought to have answered some definite question about a definite day—Only the large hearted great minded Ethel will excuse me, when I say that though we’ve been back a week, not a moment has passed without some laceration. Now its a young woman who must talk about her novel [May Sarton]—now Freud’s son [Martin], must be given a meat meal; now one of the Stracheys passing through London—and then oh the letters, all asking different questions, abusive, inquisitive, idiotic intelligent—3gs. has let me in for such a swarm of these gentry: and I devote the time I usually read or talk to dealing with them. Some are heartbreaking though—But to turn to facts, thats why I’ve not answered you. And now dont know where you may be. About the speech—was it a success? Is there a report? And the Orchestra? I never knew how many womens organisations there are till this moment: how poor; how clamorous. But tell me about this one. We shall be here now, in this very divided and tumultuous way—I mean “seeing” people, till the end of the month. So if you’re up next week—but I haven’t the face to propose plans. Nor any hope of a quiet afternoon. Still, still…. I dont think I shall ever write a “controversial” book again—the racket is too distracting.

—Still I would like to toss you a kiss over the heads of my own rain beaten Mrs Simpkins [a dianthus]. All the roses in the garden were like dim lamps burning under grey veils—the mist, the rain, the fog.

V.

Berg

[]

3416: To Benedict Nicolson

Tuesday 12th July [1938]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

We shall be in next Thursday, 14th, if by chance you were free and would come in any time after 9. Dont bother to answer or to change.

Virginia Woolf

Vanessa Nicolson

[]

3417: To Sir William Rothenstein

12th July 38

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

Dear Sir William,

I have been away, or I would have written before. Of course I am ready that you should quote those lines, if you think them worth it. I rather think the sentence should read “Why there arent more critics of painting I cant make out” rather than the other way; but it doesnt matter.

By an odd coincidence I got your letter and a copy of the first volume of your memoirs to read again by the same post. I am trying, at the wish of Margery Fry, to write something about Roger Fry; and I remembered your account of meeting him in Paris. I wonder if you remember more than you say there? If so, I wonder further whether you would come one day and let me talk to you about him—the early visit to Paris is left very vague in his letters. But I daresay you have nothing to add.

In any case I am so glad you are going on, for I enjoyed the first two volumes greatly.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Houghton Library, Harvard University

[]

3418: To Sir William Rothenstein

14th July [1938]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

Dear Sir William,

It would be delightful if you would dine here on Monday next at 8. We shall be alone. I should be much interested to see any letters of Roger’s. I only knew, vaguely, that there had been some coolness, but he never spoke of it to me, and always said that he admired your work.

If this suits you, please dont bother to write. And of course dont change.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Houghton Library, Harvard University

[]

3419: To Ethel Smyth

Friday, 15 July 1938

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

But I did read, not meaning to, being in a rush: and then cdn’t stop—this refers to the [Canterbury] lecture: so you see you’ve slipped the pill into me in the most lubricous way. I laughed aloud. But cant find an envelope so will send tomorrow. Yes, I’m having the most hardworking part of 3 gs now: when someone says Can you explain this? Will you see me and discuss that?—I feel that its part of my intolerable job. I think the sales have struck the rock of rage, and wont go any further. Oh I’ve made some so furious: And then a Quaker or governess makes up by thanking:

I see you say—in a hurried PS. that you might look in on Saturday. tomorrow 6. If so, would you ring up first? I think I shall be in—hope so; but there’s a muddle about going to see E M Forster’s play—I dont think it’ll be necessary, only should you be able to come make sure first—

and once more excuse this palsied hand.

V.

PS.

I must write this more clearly. I hope and think I shall be in tomorrow, about 6 Saturday, but will you ring up should you find you are able to come. There! Thats better.

Berg

[]

3420: To R. C. Trevelyan

July 22nd 38

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

Dear Bob,

(Excuse this typing; which is to spare your eyes my illegible hand)—

I am trying, with great difficulty, to get something written about Roger, and I’ve now come to the time at Beaufort Street. I can find very little about it; and wonder whether you could write a few lines, for me to quote or paraphrase, about your life there. Anything that occurs to you; anything that gives a notion of what he was like then; and of the manner of life…. Do you know what papers he was writing for? And did you see a great many people? However I neednt particularise. Any scrap, the less formal the better, would be a great help; if its not a bother to you. We go away next week, or I would have asked if you could come and talk. We havent met for an age.

Yrs ever
Virginia Woolf

[handwritten:]

“Harris” cuts a great figure in R’s letters home—she seems to have drunk.

Sussex

[]

3421: To V. Sackville-West

22 July [1938]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

Leonard says you have sent a poem, and would like to know what I think of it. Now I would like to read it and normally would fire off an opinion with my usual audacity. But I want to explain: constituted as I am (not as I ought to be) I feel I cant read your poem impartially while your charges against me, as expressed in a letter I have somewhere but won’t quote, remain unsubstantiated. I feel, I mean, that you thought me dishonest in 3 gs: You said something about its being “misleading” and suggested that if only you weren’t incurably clumsy honest and slow witted yourself you could demolish my specious humbug. You could knock me down with your honest old English fists and so on. And then you sicklied me over with praise of charm and wit.

This is only a recollection: but anyhow it reverberates; and being imperfect as I am, I know that I should hear these growlings and mutterings distorting your poem. And with my (though you mayn’t believe it) dogged belief in the absolute necessity of absolute honesty about poetry, I couldn’t say what I thought; because I shouldn’t be capable of pure thinking.

So come to lunch: and we need not, if you dont wish it, discuss either my prose or your poetry. being, as I maintain, quite fond of each other for other reasons. The porpoise and the pearls at the fishmongers for instance.

A rush of an unholy nature here, so I cant comb out this untidy letter. Dotty [Wellesley] rings up to ask us to go to meet Yeats. etc. etc.

Your old humbug
V.

Berg

[]

3422: To V. Sackville-West

Saturday [23 July 1938]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

What on earth can I have said in my [preceding] letter to call forth your telegram? God knows. I scribbled it off in five minutes, never read it through, and can only remember that it was written in a vein of obvious humorous extravagance and in a tearing hurry. However, I’ll try to explain—but what a bore—what a fool I must be. What happened was this.

Leonard showed me a letter from you in which you said you’d like my opinion of your poem if I had time to read it. Now I’ve been in a rush and haven’t had time. It came into my head, as I went downstairs that you have never answered a letter I wrote you from Northumberland [No. 3405] in answer to your letter about 3 gs. And I had a vague memory that you had said something which had slightly irritated me—you know how one gets a whole shower of letters when a book comes out and I was feeling a little harassed—because I thought you meant that I was not quite honest in what I said in 3 gs. And I should mind you to think that very much. I’ve now looked for your letter and this was the phrase: “You are a tantalising writer because at one moment you enchant one with your lovely prose and next moment exasperate one with your misleading arguments…. And far be it from me to Cross swords with you publicly, for I should always lose on points in fencing, though if it comes to fisticuffs I might knock you down. So long as you play the gentleman’s game, with the gentleman’s technique, you win.” That was the phrase that slightly irritated me (whether rightly or wrongly) and I think in my letter from the North I asked you to explain what you meant by it. Well, you never did; and as I came downstairs I thought, “Oh Vita never answered my letter, so I suppose she did mean something. And I cant sit down and read her poem if she thinks me dishonest, or whatever it was that she did think me.” But I was so hurried and took the whole thing so lightly, and had alas such implicit faith in my own power to convey this random hurried vague grievance in writing that I never bothered to see what you had said, and dashed off the letter which must have been a triumph of misrepresentation.

Its a lesson not to write letters For I suppose you’ll say, when you read what I’ve quoted from your own letter, that there’s nothing to cause even a momentary irritation. And I daresay you’re right. I suspect that anything written acquires meanings and both the writers mood and the reader’s mood queer the pitch

So let us leave it.

One reason for writing by the way was that I thought I shouldn’t have a chance of talking when we did meet.

But, as I say, lets leave it: and I apologise, and will never write a letter so carelessly again. And I’ve no grievance whatever; and you need say no more, because I’m quite sure, on re-reading your letter, you didn’t mean that I was dishonest: and thats the only thing I minded. So forgive and forget

V.

Berg

[]

3423: To V. Sackville-West

Monday [25 July 1938]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

No I never got your Skye letter, as we didnt go to Sligachan. So that’s explained—and for the rest lets wait to argue till we meet—if argue we must. (and of course, tho’ I dont agree with your deductions, there are any number of possible, and natural, disagreements)

It was the feeling that you thought me shifty that I minded: but thats cleared up and this is only written, again in a furious rush, to say that its all over, and to explain that we went to Flodigarry [Portree] only—a much nicer place: and hearing nothing I was expectant.

So hope to see you on Wednesday lunch.

V.

Berg

[]

3424: To R. C. Trevelyan

Monday [25 July 1938]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

Dear Bob,

Many thanks for saying you will put down what you can remember [about Roger Fry]—That is just what I want, and you wont mind if I leave things in or out. At the moment I can’t see what scale the book—if it is to be a book—should take. But any thing you remember will be of the greatest help. The letters then are mostly to his mother; and that means a great deal is left out.

We go to Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes tomorrow. Would you write there. We tried to get to Morgan’s pageant [at Dorking]—I heard it was lovely; but another engagement prevented, most tiresomely.

Yours ever
Virginia Woolf

Sussex

[]

3425: To Ling Su-Hua

27th July 1938

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square [W.C.1]

Dear Madame Sue Ling,

I have just seen Christopher Isherwood, who gave me the lovely little box with the two little gifts from you. I need not say that I am much touched that you should have got them for me, and I shall keep them on my table—not as a memory of you, for I have never seen you, but all the same I think of you often. Thank you so much. I heard from him how much they had enjoyed seeing you. But he was only here for a moment, and I did not have time to get much information from him. I hope however that you are going on with your work. I am sending you two little books, one is the [Mrs Gaskell] life of Charlotte Brontë, the other Lambs Essays. I think Lamb wrote very good English prose—but do not bother to read it as an exercise; only for pleasure—The life of Charlotte Brontë will perhaps give you a feeling for the lives of women writers in England in the 19th century—their difficulties, and how she overcame them. And it is a very interesting life in other ways. But I will send other books from time to time, on condition that you do not think you must thank me for them. And certainly you must never think of paying for them. They are so cheap in England. I can buy them for a few pence. Tell me the names of any you think you would like.

We are just going down to Sussex, and I hope to have more time there. London is so crowded. There is a quiet time here politically for the moment. That is to say we are waiting for what Hitler may do next. People are tired of talking about war; but all the same we do nothing but buy arms. The air is full of aeroplanes at the moment.

I hope some day you will write again and tell me how you are getting on with your work. And please remember how glad I shall be to give you any help I can in reading it and correcting any mistakes. But write exactly as you think—that is the only way.

With my love, good bye. Please call me Virginia. I do not like being Mrs Woolf.

Virginia Woolf

Ling Su-Hua (Mrs Chen)

[]

3426: To David Garnett

28th July 38

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

Dear Bunny,

I have signed the paper—is that right?—with pleasure. Here it is. I have never heard of the Wilsons, but thats to my discredit, and it seems a monstrous case. Yes: we keep your offer in mind, like a dock leaf among nettles. That is, London is a hurlyburly: I’m packing to go to Rodmell; smuts descend; telephone rings; pens wont write. Oh and what about Westmoreland? Your cottage in that paradise?

No time for more.

Yr affate old harridan
V.W.

Berg

[]

Letters 3427-3458 (August-October 1938)

3427: To Lady Tweedsmuir

1st Aug 38

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

My dear Susie,

I ought to have thanked you and your husband before this for sending me the books. It was very good of you, and very good of him. Will you thank him from me, and say that as soon as I have despatched certain dreary tasks I’m going to read his Scott first. This is self indulgence because I want to get his advice which of the Waverley novels to re-read. I have them all here, and must cure myself of the habit of reading the same over and over again. And then I shall read Oliver Cromwell. That’ll be to see how biographies are written—I’m finding my own attempt incredibly difficult.

But it was good of both of you on your holiday to remember to send me these books. And I’m so glad to find my name in them.

Now you’ve brought 10 volumes of George Sand on yourself—and a copy I have pasted over with scraps of leather so that its garish. The original binding was tidy but ugly. I rather think I stuck a picture in too. But if you disregard this amateurish bookbinding, you’ll find—at least I did—that she’s a magnificent old woman. Anyhow, do try her when the winter is white and the wolves howling. This Wolf is so hot after walking on the downs, she cant write. But do some day tell me if you like G. S.

Yrs aff V.W.

Sold in April 1978 by Bertram Rota Ltd., London

[]

3428: To Ethel Smyth

Sunday. Aug 7th or 8th [7] 1938

M[onks] H[ouse, Rodmell, Sussex]

Oh you old Cross Patch! What d’you think I’m made of? hands, like a centipedes feet, each holding a pen and one that’ll write, which is more than most will? I’m still 10 down on my 3 guinea letters: earnest requests for enlightenment—now what did you mean by this?—reach me daily. No secretary. Must sometimes walk. Sometimes talk. The great thing to remember about friendship is that it hangs like fruit on a bough, ripening, not rottening, nor falling. However, I break off this meagre twig, only its with a brain sodden with Roger, and apprehensive of more, and more necessary, letters. For if one writes books that incite Headmasters, one must take the consequences. Reply. My dear Sir, In answer to your enquiry …

Roasting hot till today; and old Mrs Woolf comes over and spends 4 hours remembering the coffee cups and overmantels now stored: says she wants to know, would I like, when she dies, either a drawing room chair, or a silver 1870 sugar caster? Which shall it be? Telephone rings: I’m the lady who broadcast your praises in Dublin—Will you see me at 2.30 tomorrow?—thats all I’ll tell you of facts. Vita came. Heavenly good: sound and sweet as an apple. Loves Gwen as much as ever. But to my pleasure would like to see me too.

I’m deep (when I can dive beneath chatter) in art history. I think I’ve mounted a barren nightmare in this book (R.F.) but shall finish the dreary round and then dismount and see what’s the use of it. Odd what a grind biography is. This is my favourite reading: what hard writing. L. has broken his pen too. Foxes bark outside the window at night. Oh and to our dismay, found workmen making a library in the attic—meant it for the Autumn. Hammer hammer all day for 3 weeks. L. has invented a roof verandah. 6 doz: French white wine just arrived. Rain today. I must put on a sou-wester bought in Oban and trudge. How is Crosspatch feeling now? And where shall I send this? What about Roman wall? and the Opera? When? Toscanini? And Henry Wood? I’m avid of all news, and all letters, that dont ask, now what did you mean on p. 172?

Yr
V.

Berg

[]

3429: To Angelica Bell

7th Aug 1938

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dearest Pixie,

I was so glad to get your scrap on top of the circular. And I’ve invented this bold black big hand which the man in the moon can read without glasses.

To fix the mind on facts:—we have arranged in the family to come next Saturday and see the Gammer. So when the moon rises, look for me: there in the magic circle green winged I’ll be. Quentin has just been to tea: practically naked; had to borrow Leonard’s shirt which looked like a handkerchief on a hippopotamus.

We’ve workmen dinging and donging: we are making our library, but it has suddenly given birth to a balcony and a verandah. I can’t explain now. Come and see.

Vita was here for a night—and brought a bottle of her mother’s best wine—which you must help to drink. We had also several Wolves God help us, have to go with them to see Alsatian police dogs rescuing babies at Uckfield [on 15 August]. And to London to see John Lehmann. And its raining. So Goodbye, lovely witch. If you want any cash, let me know.

Virginia Witcherina

Texas

[]

3430: To R. C. Trevelyan

7th Aug 38

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Bob,

Many thanks for your letter. It is exactly what I wanted and freshens up the whole of the Beaufort Street time. I shall certainly hope (if I get on with the book [Roger Fry]) to quote some of it; and only wish there were more. Could you, do you think, give some sketch of Helen—how she struck you to look at, talk to, and so on. I never saw her; and get confused accounts, naturally, from Roger’s sisters.

Indeed, if you had the time, and could put down anything you remember of Roger it would be a great help to me to have it by me. Roger told me at various times a good deal about Helen’s breakdown. There was a mysterious story about a doctor who had poisoned a friend. Was this partly the cause of her first breakdown—2 years after they married? But of course I shan’t need to give details.

We both like the poem on Goldie very much indeed. I found it very moving myself: so simple, and yet enclosing him in real poetry. Will it be printed in your book?—I think I saw that you are bringing out complete—I mean up to the present complete—poems. And this ought to be among them.

Many thanks again: and if you should think of more notes, please let me have them here, where we shall be till October.

Yours ever
Virginia Woolf

Sussex

[]

3431: To Benedict Nicolson

Sunday 7th Aug [1938]

Monk’s House, Rodmell [Sussex]

Dear Ben,

I’ve had a wire from Vita to say that you would read and annotate Roger Fry’s articles. That is extremely good of you: but I have only a selection of them here, and I’m finding them so important at the point I’ve reached that I think I must keep them and anyhow read them myself. But there’s a mass of his lectures, unpublished, and more articles in London. I’m sure that anyone with knowledge of art could make a fascinating book of extracts. Would it interest you to consider doing this? I should have of course to consult his sister, who is his executor. If you’re in London in October before going to America would you come and talk it over? Meanwhile, many thanks for your offer of help.

Yr ever
Virginia Woolf

Vanessa Nicolson

[]

3431a: To V. Sackville-West

Monday 8th Aug [1938]

Monk’s House Rodmell, near Lewes, Sussex

No we never heard your ring, because I suppose of the hammering,—also, come to think of it, we were out. But I got the wire; and have written, very gratefully, to Ben (in London) I dipped into the old articles, and think I must do them myself; for one thing, theyre important for his character, and also so fascinating. But there’s a mass more in London, and what I suggest is that Ben might, when he comes back, perhaps like to dig a book of extracts out of them. But that’s a thing for the future—I see you say he goes to America in September.”

It was very nice of him to offer.

Leonard says he has written about the dog meeting; which has to be combined with his mother in some curious way. I hope it may—so as to shorten my family visit.

Yes, it was nice having you—well thats an ambiguous phrase. Very nice, even in its less pronounced form.

So why not again?

Owing to my astonishing dexterity, the New Zealand Broadcaster (d’you remember the woman who rang up?) was overcome with delicate feelings, couldn’t bring herself to interrupt a family party, and so, thank god, remained at Newhaven.

Harold is about to Broadcast.

Yes; we watched the lightning over the hills.

V.

Virginia Woolf Miscellany. Number 43. Summer 1994.

[]

3431b: To V. Sackville-West

11th Aug. [1938]

Monk’s House Rodmell, near Lewes, Sussex

Honle Vita Sackville-West,

Yes; we will be at the Laundry at 3 precisely on Monday. Angelica is acting Gammer Gurton’s Needle all over the Home Counties at the moment; but if Quentin were available, I’ll hand on the invitation. Gwen seems to me to have such good taste in people that I’ve no objection to seeing dogs with her. Edgar, by the way, Leonards brother, a dog maniac, went to see your dogs perform; and all they did, after much waiting, was to climb into a room and sit down. The crowd was told to keep complete silence. After close on an hour, the dog came down. Nothing else—no rescue, no life saving. Mr Colbourne was in tears. But enough of dogs.

The thing I wanted to say was (oh the hammer hammer—balcony going up today); please do consider very favourably the Hogarth Press request. It would mean a great deal to me personally to have your support. We’re over-weighted with young politico-poets for one thing; and I want a poet who is a poet to adjust the balance. And your name would also mean to the public sanity as well as poetry. And I’d like to have your views. And its very seldom any reading of MSS would be required. And the H.P. is I consider half your bantling. It would never have grown £12,000 of feathers without you. So do please consent.

No, I never heard Harold, being a fitful listener; (just missed you this morning) but I long to hear about the Windsors. Clive’s been meeting the Kents. And Royal gossip is the only bait that lures my old motherinlaw across the long wastes of the afternoon visits—just off to pay one now to her in Uckfield. Oh how hot—and how much nicer to stay here!

Virginia Woolf Miscellany. Number 43. Summer 1994.

[]

3432: To Vanessa Bell

Sunday [14 August 1938]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, near Lewes, Sussex.

As the usual confusion has arisen as to what the final arrangements were, this is to say that the Wolves expect to dine at Charleston on Sunday next not Wednesday. They hope that Quentin, or anyone, will come to tea and bowls any day except Monday or Friday. And we’re very grateful for the lift last night and hope you weren’t exhausted.

By the way, with reference to the Chicago show, and my introduction, it strikes me that it would be possible to use Rogers article on you, and also his article on Duncan, much more effectively than anything I could write. They would only need a little introducing—And this would relieve me of the crime and discomfort of Nepotism (for meaning of this word, consult Quentin)

Berg

[]

3433: To William Plomer

Aug 18th [1938]

Monk’s House, Rodmell Lewes, Sussex

Will you come over to tea this Sunday and bowls; and stay to dinner?

I’ve been enjoying Kilvert greatly.

Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

3434: To Mrs Ethel Grant

20th Aug. [1938]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Mrs Grant,

Duncan brought the mirror; I have painted it with creosote (or something); it has been hung. And I am now sitting under it in a state of such gratified content—not that I can see myself—its not that which gratifies me—that I must write and thank you.

What an extraordinarily clever woman you are! Naturally you have a son of the same cast: and the result is the loveliest looking glass I’ve ever seen. Also it exactly fits the place, which is miraculous. I wish you could see it. There are some yellow begonias; and some fine white dahlias at the edge, to give a dash of colour in the corner. But I wont describe it all to you, since you must know the pattern by heart.

How is the carpet doing? We have 6 workmen in the house making the new room. They say it will be done next week—thats to spur you on, for of course it wont be done.

Please given my love to Duncans adventurous Aunt who goes to Sweden. And please tell me what I owe—in cash I mean: for the other debt is about £1,000,000.

Yrs V.W.

Estate of Duncan Grant

[]

3435: To Ethel Smyth

29th Aug [1938]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, near Lewes, Sussex

I dont know, or indeed care, whose turn it is to break this long silence—last time you wrote from Harrogate: and did I answer, or didn’t I? cant remember what we were talking about. Operas? Workmen? Thats the curse of letter writing—Why should you be agog to hear how the new room’s going on—how L. suddenly invented a balcony and a verandah—how there are sheets everywhere: dust falling—hammer and nails—workmen peeping in at me breakfasting in bed. You will skip all that. As for politics, I feel as if we were all sitting downstairs while someone slowly dies. So why write letters? Nevertheless, here we’ve been to Seaford today to mate Sally, in spite of the politics. She wouldn’t mate. Leonard has gone to fetch her after 2 hours further solicitation. And I’ve been walking; found a dead tortoise on the top of the downs; also several clouded yellows [butterflies]. All the morning I work my brain into a screw over Roger—what did he do in 1904—when did his wife go mad, and how on earth does one explain madness and love in sober prose, with dates attached? I saw Vita and I saw Gwen. Vita has written a long poem [Solitude], L. says very good: I’ve not read it. That I think I told you. And you now—now drop your trumpet, which by the way is upside down, and tell me; about the opera; about the orchestra; about Mary [Ethel’s maid] and Woking and the Balfours. Why is the aristocratic mind invariably middle class when the body is divine? Just finished Lady Fred Cavendish’s diaries: no vigour, no insight, no originality. All as drab and dowdy as Mabels Sunday best (Mabel is our maid of all work.) Explain this to me. And such damned condescension to artists. Yet all else is fine and flowing and thoroughbred—only the mind cluttered with curtains and ferns. I want to settle in and read some entire pure classic to rid me of the infection. But instead I play bowls with fanatic fury like yours for golf. So we approach, you and I, from different points of the compass. Here I cook dinner, so must stop, just, it happens, as a flock of fine feathered ideas perches on my wire. No I dont like Harolds BBC manner, oh and every day I get a packet of abuse or ecstasy. Letters, I mean from that hysterical and illiterate ass the Public.

As I said before I must cook dinner, and wait the return of the Bride [Sally]. I had tea today at Seaford with the bastard son [Philip Hugh-Jones] of Philip Morrell. Did you know that ante-chamber to Ottolines drawing room? Now Ethel, answer.

V.

Berg

[]

3436: To Donald Brace

30th Aug 1938

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Mr Brace,

I have just received the American copies of Three Guineas. I think it looks very attractive, and I hope for both our sakes that your forecast of success may come true. I was afraid it might be too much concerned with English problems to interest American readers.

Thank you also for your letter. It is very encouraging to write for so appreciative a publisher! It is not the first time that I have felt this, but this time I am specially grateful. There are many things in my book that I know may irritate people—yet I felt them to be important, and did not write it merely to annoy. It has roused a good deal of interest here—both anger and approval.

At the moment things are so bad here that one can hardly think of books. But I hope before this reaches you there may be some improvement.

Many thanks again, and kind regards from us both.

Yours sincerely,
Virginia Woolf

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

[]

3437: To Mrs R. C. Trevelyan

31st Aug 38

Typewritten

Monk’s House, Rodmell Lewes, Sussex

Dear Bessie,

Many thanks for your letter about Helen Fry. It is a help, because it bears out the vague feeling that I am getting from her letters. I think the dread of insanity must always have been in the background, and probably made her morbid and afraid of people. It is a terrible story, for at times one gets too so clear a sense of her brilliance and a curious individuality. But of course, if I do get anything written—and the difficulty increases as one goes on—not much in detail can be said of her. But I want an outline, and what you and Bob have told me is very helpful. Thank you so much for writing.

I hope we may see you and Bob when we are back in the autumn.

Yours affectionately
Virginia Woolf

Trinity College, Cambridge

[]

3438: To Ethel Smyth

Sept 2nd [1938]

M.[onks] H.[ouse, Rodmell, Sussex]

About Wednesday 7th—by all means come to Lewes about 4, and L. will meet you—But he can’t take you to Polegate, flowering or not, as there’s a Labour Party meeting here at 7. So would you as you suggest, get Miss Hudson to fetch you. The workmen, though, are in the house—every room occupied, save the dining room: but this may be mitigated by Wed: 4 weeks has now spread to 8. Let me know train. and any details. for which I have at the moment no time owing to the imminence of Post, and the presence of a charming man in a white smock who’s ladders touching my nose.

Yr
V

Berg

[]

3439: To Angelica Bell

5th Sept 38

Monk’s House, Rodmell [Sussex]

Dearest Pixie,

Nessa says that you are now of an age [nearly 20] to manage your own money affairs. I quite agree. So I am writing, as legibly as I can, to suggest that in future I should pay the £100 which I have sent her in the past to spend on you direct to you. She thinks it would suit you better if this were paid quarterly instead of half yearly. So I am sending £25 now, and will send again the first day of every other quarter, trusting you to remind me should I forget. All I have to add is that I hope to be able to do this regularly and lifelong: but as the money has to be earned, I might at some time not be able to make it. I will give you six months notice, if I find I cant manage it. Meanwhile I count on you to spend it to the best advantage, on clothes and other enjoyments, and to let me know (as we agreed) if at any time another dollop would come in handy.

Thats all: and I hope you admire both the clarity of the handwriting and the businesslike style in which the statement is made. An acknowledgment of cheque enclosed herewith will oblige, and I beg to remain without further ceremony, your faithful and obliged humble servant

Witcherina Maxima

Texas

[]

3440: To Sibyl Colefax

Monday [5 September 1938]

Monk’s House [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest Sibyl,

Yes delighted Thursday 8th, but:

(1) View is ruined

(2) No room for chauffeur in house

(3) The smallest possible doghole for you

(4) Village char is cook

Let me know if you are daunted. If not, whether we shall meet a train: if so, which.

Yours in haste (not hate) Virginia

No clothes but nightgowns worn here.

Michael Colefax

[]

3441: To Ethel Smyth

Sunday [11 September 1938]

Monks House [Rodmell, Sussex]

Yes, a very nice letter from that interesting attractively shabby woman. What a sonorous language French is, and how on occasion they know how to roll it out! This is not an occasion when I can attempt the same with my mother tongue; because there’s a swarm of people about.

I dont think that your insight is faultless where L[eonard]. is concerned; but would not in any case analyse other people’s so complicated relations. I think if you were ever a day alone together the mists would disperse. As a matter of fact, the day you came happened to be a distracted day for him—the funeral, then the will, and then, the moment you left, our local candidate [Mr Black] arriving—to early dinner, and a speech; and a meeting in the dining room, which needed whipping together. So he was brooding a dozen things at once. Oh what a dismal little man, a collector of matchboxes, he turned out—this Labour party Champion—like a mouse, which indeed his daughter breeds and sells for 6d a head to the mousebreeder of Seaford. And it is thus that the L.P. counters Hitler. Well, the situation this morning makes everything completely visionary—I cant feel that there’s as much as a mouse involved: yet all the guns may be pulled by that insignificant insect.

How was Maurice [Baring]?

Here, like yourself, I tear up 6 pages of the most acute psychological investigation. I analysed your feeling, and mine, and what I thought as we sat down to tea, and then again as I got up to put the kettle on for your very spruce Chauffeur [Miss Hudson]: and now destroy it all-as—you did. 6 pages, Ethel, … One day we’ll talk them. Not now

V.

Meanwhile, yes, I like laying my furry head on your magnanimous breast.

Oh I’ve had such a drubbing and a scourging from the Cambridge ladies—the professors of Eng. lit: at Cambridge for 3gs. I’m a disgrace to my sex: and a caterpillar on the community. I thought I should raise their hackles—poor old strumpets.

Berg

[]

3442: To R. C. Trevelyan

Sunday 11th Sept 38

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Bob,

Thank you again for your notes. I am very glad of them—especially for the picture of Helen [Fry] which I think is very vivid. It will help to make her real—and I’m encouraged by what you say, to go on. There’s such a mass of documents and letters—the difficulty is to choose whether to speak oneself or let him speak—and how to combine the different voices. But of course its immensely interesting.

Will you thank Bessie [his wife] too for sending me the amusing note of Roger’s early art criticism? It was very good of her.

Morgan [Forster] is spending the weekend. I’m so sorry to hear that Bessie’s eyes have been bothering her. We agree by the way in all liking your Goldie poem—and send our greetings and hopes that we may meet.

Yr ever
V. W.

Sussex

[]

3443: To Ethel Smyth

Sat. 17th Sept. [1938]

M.[onks] H.[ouse, Rodmell, Sussex]

1. We were on the Great Wall about the first week in June this year.

2. The illegible word was FURRY—applied to myself in sympathetic reference to Pan.

3. That was one of my jokes—I mean, pretending I’d written 4 pages and torn them up. I did not such thing. Had I written, I would have sent.

4. Of course you dedicated Time Went On [1936] to me. But why not 2 books—Vita does, to Gwen, and again to Gwen But I agree: its better not.

5. No, of course again, I never dreamt except in some visionary rhapsody of your writing about me. As for publishing a description during my lifetime the thought appals. When Margot [Oxford] asked me to write about my youth, I saw, if I did, I should cease writing altogether. And its the same with being written about. I must be private, secret, as anonymous and submerged as possible in order to write. So never think of it as you dont.

5 [sic]. Lets leave the letters till we’re both dead. Thats my plan. I dont keep or destroy but collect miscellaneous bundles of odds and ends, and let posterity, if there is one, burn or not. Lets forget all about death and all about Posterity.

When do you go? And for long? And I envy you, I, chained to my R F [Roger Fry]. who is, in himself, magnificent.

Yr
V.

Berg

[]

3444: To H. A. L. Fisher

17th Sept 38

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

My dear Herbert,

Of course I shall be delighted to send a copy of Three Guineas to Mr Nowell Smith. It will take a few days, as I havent got one here to sign.

May I come and see you one day quietly? I should so much like to, but am always afraid that you and Lettice are overdone with people. Tell Mary that if she ever wants a meal in London there is always one for her at Tavistock Square—at least after this month.

I hope you are better.

Yr affate
Virginia Woolf

Bodleian Library, Oxford

[]

3445: To Victoria Ocampo

27th Sept 38

52 T[avistock] S[quare, W.C.1]

Dear Victoria,

I am spending the day in London and found your letter. We are now going back to the country—Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex. I dont know whether we shall be up again next week—it depends upon this cursed Hitler. But if I can do anything to help your sister, write to me there. Its been such a turmoil I had no time today for anything. But let us meet if possible and forgive this scrawl. I am just off.

Yr Virginia Woolf

Estate of Victoria Ocampo

[]

3446: To Vanessa Bell

Wednesday, 28th Sept. [1938]

Monks House [Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex]

I was very glad to get your cards. I dont know whether you are at Cassis, or if this will reach you but write on the chance. At the moment we’re waiting to hear the Broadcast of Chamberlains speech in the House this afternoon, so dont know for certain if we’re going to war or not. It looks like it: anyhow you’ll know by the time you get this, so there’s nothing to be said. We were in London yesterday and there everyone took war for granted. They were digging trenches in the parks, loud speakers were telling one to go and be fitted for gas masks, and of course there was the usual buzz and … Here the BBC. announced that Hitler has asked Chamberlain to Munich! Its an immense relief. Leonard has rushed out to tell Percy [Bartholomew, the gardener] and so on. However you’ll have heard this. We think it must mean that there’s going to be a compromise. God knows what. I was saying London was appalling yesterday. Kingsley Martin suddenly rang up the morning before and said the Labour Party wanted L. to come up at once and try to arrange a liaison with the Liberals. So we had to go for the night. Of course it was one of KM’s hysterical outbursts. There were endless meetings, telephones and so on: and nothing done.

We’re staying here for the present. John takes over the Press on Monday. It may of course have to close down, as he moved to Fieldhead—but all’s now in the melting pot. We’ve had innumerable visitors—Noel Olivier, Judith, Clive, Raymond, Janice: no, we’re too near London for peace. Not much gossip, only eternal war talk. Noel very solid badgerly and dependable: my goddaughter [Virginia Richards] a nice little elf. The Charleston atmosphere is metallic and brittle: as for Janice she never commits—not even a nuisance. Raymond I cant cotton to though his virtues are as prominent as his nose. Tomorrow we go to Sissinghurst to discuss politics with Harold.

So you see I regret you immensely: and the loss of you which I meant to use in work, I’ve spent chattering. Please let us know your plans, and if we can help in any direction. We had meant to travel our books in the West, then make a flying visit to S. Remi—Well, it looks even possible again. But our excitement—here’s the carpenter come to talk it over—may be ill founded. I dont suppose you’ll get this: so end.

And count on a letter

B.

Julian’s book is doing unexpectedly well in the shops, L says. considering the crisis

Berg

[]

3447: To Vanessa Bell

1st October. [1938]

Typewritten

Monks House [Rodmell, Sussex]

Your letter has just come. I scrambled off a very hurried letter to you last Wednesday, half thinking you’d be marooned somewhere, and thus not get it. Now still in a hurry and therefore typing to save your old eyes I will continue the narrative. I daresay its an old story now; but no doubt you will excuse repetitions. Never never has there been such a time. Last week end we were at Charleston and very gloomy. Gloom increased on Monday. It was pouring. Then in the morning Kingsley Martin rang up to insist that L. must come to London at once and make a desperate attempt to unite labour and liberals—to do what was not obvious. But he seemed desperate, and so we flung a nightgown into a bag and started. In London it was hectic and gloomy and at the same time despairing and yet cynical and calm. The streets were crowded. People were everywhere talking loudly about war. There were heaps of sandbags in the streets, also men digging trenches, lorries delivering planks, loud speakers slowly driving and solemnly exhorting the citizens of Westminster Go and fit your gas masks. There was a long queue of people waiting outside the Mary Ward settlement to be fitted. L. went off at once to see K.M. I discussed matters with Mabel [their maid]. We agreed that she had better go to Bristol—whether she has or not I dont yet know. Then L came back and said Kingsley was in despair; they had talked for two hours; everybody came into the N. S [New Statesman] office and talked; telephones rang incessantly. They all said war was certain; also that there would be no war. Kingsley came to dinner. He had smudges of black charcoal round his eyes and was more melodramatic and histrionic than ever. Hitler was going to make his speech at 8. We had no wireless, but he said he would ring up the BBC after it was over and find out the truth. Then we sat and discussed the inevitable end of civilisation. He strode up and down the room, hinting that he meant to kill himself. He said the war would last our life time; also we should very likely be beaten. Anyhow Hitler meant to bombard London, probably with no warning; the plan was to drop bombs on London with twenty minutes intervals for forty eight hours. Also he meant to destroy all roads and railways; therefore Rodmell would be about as dangerous as Bloomsbury. Then he broke off; rang up Clark, the news man at The BBC; “Ah—so its hopeless …” Then to us, “Hitler is bawling; the crowds howling like wild beasts.” More conversation of a lugubrious kind. Now I think I’ll ring up Clark again … Ah so it couldnt be worse … To us. No Hitler is more mad than ever … Have some Whiskey Kingsley, said L. Well, it dont much matter either way, said K. At last he went. What are you going to do? I asked. Walk the streets. Its no good—I cant sleep. So we clasped hands, as I understood for the last time.

Next morning Tuesday every one was certain it was war. Everyone, except one poor little boy in a shop who had lost his head and was half crying when I asked for a packet of envelopes (and he may have been in some sort of row) was perfectly calm; and also without hope. It was quite different from 1914. Every one said Probably we shall win but it’ll be just as bad if we do. I went to the London Library to look up some papers about Roger. I sat in the basement with the Times open of the year 1910. An old man was dusting. He went away; then came back and said very kindly, “Theyre telling us to put on our gas masks, Madam” I thought the raid had begun. However, he explained that it was the loudspeaker once more addressing the citizens of Westminster. Then he asked if he could dust under my chair; and said they had laid in a supply of sand bags, but if a bomb dropped there wouldnt be many books left over. After that I walked to the National Gallery, and a voice again urged me to fit my gas mask at once. The Nat Gallery was fuller than usual; a nice old man was lecturing to an attentive crowd on Watteau. I suppose they were all having a last look.

I went home, and found that L. had arranged that the Press was to go on; but the clerks to go away into the country if they liked. Then Miss Hepworth the traveller said the shops were mostly refusing to buy at all, and were mostly going to close. So it seemed we should have to shut down. The clerks wanted to go on, as they had no place in the country; and of course no money. We arranged to pay wages as long as we could—but plans were vague. Mrs Nicholls said she should prefer to lie in the trench that was being dug in the square; Miss Perkins preferred to sit in the stock room, which she had partly prepared with mattresses etc. Then, after lunch, an American editor arrived to ask me to write an article upon Culture in the United States. We agreed however that culture was in danger In fact she said most English authors were either in Suffolk, or starting for America. In Suffolk they were already billeting children from the East end in cottages. Then Rosinsky came; he thought he had a visa for America and was going to try to go at once. Then Mrs Woolf rang up to say she was going to Maidenhead if she could get rooms. Then an express arrived from Victoria Ocampo who had just landed from South America, wished to see me at once, was trying to fly to America and what could she do with a sister who was ill—could we advise a safe retreat? Also Phil Baker and others rang up Leonard. With it all we were rather harassed; what should we need if we were marooned in Rodmell, without petrol, or bicycles? L. took his mackintosh and a thick coat; I Rogers letters to you, and a packet of stamped envelopes. Then we had to say good bye to the press, and I felt rather a coward, as clearly they were nervous although very sensible; and they had no garden. But the Govt; asked all who could to leave London; and there was John [Lehmann] in command. So off we went.

It was pouring terrific torrents; the roads packed; men nailing up shutters in shop windows; sandbags being piled; and a general feeling of flight and hurry. Also it was very dark; and we took about three hours to get back. At ten oclock Mr Perkins knocked and entered with a box of gas bags which he fitted on us. No sooner had he gone. than Mr Jansen came with another box. He said that children were arriving from the East End next morning. Sure enough, next day,—but I wrote to you and told you how we had the news of the Prime Ministers sensational statement—we thought it meant anyhow a pause—well, after that, Mr Perkins came and said the children were coming—9,000 had to be billeted in Sussex; fifty in Rodmell; how many could we put up? We arranged to take two. By that time, the nightmare feeling was becoming more nightmarish; more and more absurd; for no one knew what was happening; and yet everyone was behaving as if the war had begun. Mr Hartman [of Southease] had turned his barn into a hospital and so on. Of course we thought it was ridiculous; yet still they went on broadcasting messages about leaving London; about post cards with stamps being given to refugees who would be deposited safely, but they must not ask where. At any moment the fifty children might arrive. Also the Archbishop would offer up prayers; and at one moment the Pope’s voice was heard … But I will shorten; and skip to Sissinghurst; where we went on Thursday; and heard that the Italian King had saved the situation by threatening to abdicate. Harold had seen the PM grow visibly ten years younger as he read the message which was handed him. It was all over. And I must play bowls. Leonard sends a message to Q[uentin]; in his opinion we have peace without honour for six months.

I’ll write again. Maynard comes tomorrow. Plans vague; but we write here, where we shall probably stay at present. [handwritten:] No time to read this through.

Post going,

B.

Berg

[]

3448: To Ethel Smyth

Oct 3rd [1938]

Monks House [Rodmell, Sussex]

I never tried to write even; I did try to read Sido got halfway; then off we went to London—that was a remarkable experience, but as its all in the papers, why write it out again? We left our clerks, some to take refuge in trenches, others in the Stock Room. I felt very craven to be flying back here—where a man with gas masks awaited us, and another man telling us to be ready to receive two refugees. This is already a stale story, nor have I yet sorted out the various emotions, of which the residue is now anger and shame, on top of sheer cowardly relief. Well, no more of that. And I must begin to read Sido again.

This is to salute you before you retire to the Roman Wall. And what are your feelings?

Here we stay, for another 10 days or so; for I must try to work; and want, if I can, but no doubt I cant, after so many distractions, to take 10 days holiday at S. Remy partly to see Rogers little Mas there: a barn he lived in. But I believe politics will bring L—now, today, a free man—free from the Press that is—to London. And I’ve not the spirit to pack up and go without him. Aint I a craven?

I think I shall now read Troilus and Cressida. Its a roaring, raving evening, apples pelting down, and the marsh like a widow tearing her hair. A Victorian widow in a white veil.

Write a line, do: Oh and I went and saw Gwen and Vita at St: ostensibly for L to see Harold, who was kept in London.

V

Berg

[]

3449: To Vanessa Bell

Monday, October 3rd [1938]

Typewritten

Monks House [Rodmell, Sussex]

Ive just got your second letter, from Cassis. You say you would like gossip about the inner history, so I’ll use my fragment of time before lunch—I’ve been trying to describe the first PIP show without success—to go on with my scrambled and inarticulate story. Everything is still incoherent; but you’ll excuse …

Well, I think I broke off at Sissinghurst last Thursday. We found that Harold had been kept in London, to arrange a counterblast to Chamb[erlain]. with Eden, Churchill etc. He had just rung up Vita and said she was to show us his diary. This was very interesting. They had all been convinced that war was inevitable. The cabinet had tried to control Chamb—the younger members that is. They were certain he was going to sell us. However off he flew [to Godesberg]. When the House met that Wednesday [28 September] they all believed it was to announce war. He spoke very wearily yet precisely, like a business man making a statement. Then they saw the note [from Mussolini] handed him. He lit up, looked ten years younger, made his announcement; whereupon they all went mad, threw hats in the air, rushed about the lobbies shouting. That was all he knew when he wrote. Then Vita showed us the great barn with windows covered with frames that didnt fit and doors half sealed. Thirty people were to sleep there. I forget how many children were to be put up in hop oasts. The farmer [Ozzy Beale] arrived to ask what was now to be done.

Then Gwen St Aubyn arrived from Lewes; she had been taking her daughters school [Frances Holland] from London to Stanmer Park [near Lewes], which Lady Chichester had given over; and sixty girls were already lying in the picture gallery on mattresses, and blackboards were ready for next days lessons. Miracles of organisation had been performed by everyone. The roads, she said were crowded with lorries full of escaping schools. Vita said it was known for certain that London was to be attacked at twenty minutes intervals for twenty four hours with gas and bombs. Also that Mussolini had been stiffened at the last moment by The King of Italy who had said he would abdicate. Hence his pressure upon Hitler; which had turned the tide at the last moment. We came back, half expecting to find our refugees waiting us at Monks House. Mercifully there was no one.

Then next day we all turned rather cynical, and were sure of peace with dishonour. Then the BBC kept on saying that nothing was safe; we were all to go on expecting war; until finally Chamberlain arrived; and we heard him read the terms from Heston; frantic cheers; hysterical cries from old ladies; then the Archbishop praying; then bells pealing; while here at Rodmell a service was hastily got up; our bells made a perfectly infernal din; Mrs Ebbs in vain tried to whip up the villagers to some excitement; but one and all they remained perfectly sure that it was a dirty business; and meant only another war when we should be unable to resist. Of course the country was much calmer than London. Leonard was amazed by the sagacity of the old gaffers. The Postman stayed and talked good sense for about half an hour. The BBC however still announced that all reptiles would be shot at the Zoo; and any tiger that escaped killed at sight. I think they were so proud of their organisation that they wanted to air it, though it began to leak out that the air defence had been found full of holes; and that the carnage would have been immense in London.

Yesterday the Keynes came to tea. Maynard had already summed up the situation in a very good article which he read us; I’ll send you the N.S on Friday in which it appears. His view is that the whole thing was staged by Chamb.; that there was never any fear of war; that he never even consulted Russia; that it was a put up job between him and Hitler; that he would now call a general election; that our business is to fight Chamberlain; that we are sure of peace during our life time; that Hitler wants the Ukraine; that he’ll get it; that Italy will be wiped out; that we shall do a deal with the colonies; that Chamberlain is a mere Birmingham politician; and so on. We all analysed our complexities of shame, and fear; Lydia said Maynard had really been a great deal alarmed; and excited. Of course the truth was that one felt all along that Chamb. had something up his sleeve; only one couldnt say how much. Also the feeling of despair and coming death was very genuine in London, however irrational. I am proud to say that my last words on leaving the Press were “There wont be war” but I was hooted down. I suppose everyone, except Kingsley Martin, chopped and changed. For instance some of the Gordon Square pundits—friends of Maynards—refused to agree to trenches being dug in the square and held out that war was impossible. On the other hand, the whole Royal Society has fled to the country; and Cambridge was so disorganised—all the colleges fitted up as hospitals—that it has had to put off term for some days. If it was all a piece of stage management on Chambs part, he took in a great many authorities. But you’ll have had enough of this; and I expect I am sending, as you would say, coals to Birmingham. Duff Cooper, much to Maynards surprise and admiration, has resigned. There is now going to be a great reaction against the terms; and I’m afraid L. will be drawn in. Already John wants us to go to London to discuss plans for the Press tomorrow. But we mean to stay here at all costs this week. The hubbub is incessant in London; and one simply repeats the same thing, and is exposed to all the bray of all the donkeys.

The weather has completely broken up; we have gales and tremendous pelts of rain. Its been very difficult to settle down to work, even here; I wish I could get to S. Remi, but I feel I ought to work hard here for a week or two, as I’m at rather a critical point. Also we had promised to travel the books in the West—happily we’re free from the Press today; John has taken over. So theres no need to make any fixed plans.

Ann has just rung up to ask if she and Richard may come for the week end. Its death having people to stay but I suppose we must. Now I must go into the house through the rain and the falling apples to lunch. The tweeds have just arrived. I will keep them. And its pelting with rain—marshes all a mist, cows sheltering, aeroplanes still booming; cold mutton and apples for dinner. I’ll add a less frantic line before I send this.

[handwritten:] But I dont think there’s anything to add—except, tell Q., that Mrs Larter, the [Rodmell] schoolmistress, has left the Labour Party and turned Conservative—so she told Louie. The K’s are off to Lydias flat at Cambridge. I’ll write again. Immense relief that youre safe. France must have been in some ways worse than England. Please write here

B

Berg

[]

3450: To Victoria Ocampo

4th Oct [1938]

Postcard

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

I have just had your telegram; and write, in a haste to catch post, to say I shall be in London after 16th and hope to see you. I doubt if I shall be up for more than an hour or two before. Let me know to above address.

V. W.

Estate of Victoria Ocampo

[]

3451: To Jacques-Émile Blanche

5th Oct 38

Monk’s House, Rodmell Lewes, Sussex

Dear Mr Blanche,

I was very glad to get your letters. It is odd to think that for the first time in my life I could not answer letters, because of the state of Europe. We were so angry here in Sussex, and so afraid and so ashamed. But I will not try to describe. I am only explaining how it was that I could not answer.

I have not a copy of the Common Reader here; and cannot remember what I said in my article. No doubt, like most articles, it was too short and too positive. Only I had been told by Madame de Polignac (née Singer) that Proust lived a great deal with them, and took notes of their life, which she used, at his request, to correct. Probably he was often wrong; and of course I can see that his love life is wonderfully truthful. But I think there is less division between classes in France.

Last night we had a meeting, to discuss politics here. The villagers all sat silent. The middle classes talked. Our young writers have a sentimental and emotional love for “the poor”. They know nothing and care nothing— that is snobbishness partly—about the great. Now that Lady Ottoline is dead, perhaps there are no salons where the classes meet.

But I accept your correction, adding once more that these little articles are always like snapshots, too black, too white, too elementary altogether. I look forward to reading your memoirs. I am very dependent upon French memoirs. Having finished Chateaubriand, I am now reading 15 volumes of Madame de Sévigné [1626-96]. Has anyone written a life of her?—a real life?

But I must not begin upon Madame Sévigné or you would have a whole new volume of the Common Reader, solely devoted to her, upon your hands !

Thank you again for writing.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

George Lazarus

[]

3452: To Amabel Williams-Ellis

7 October 1938

Typewritten

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Mrs Williams-Ellis,

We are willing to sign the letter to Dr Benes. My husband has two points: (1) Are you quite certain of the accuracy of the statement that Benes proposed to cede the German-speaking territory to Germany and was overruled by the Allies? (2) The word loutish though accurate reads a little oddly in a document of this kind.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

University of Illinois

[]

3453: To Victoria Ocampo

7th Oct 38

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Victoria,

What bad luck! I had hoped that this [Munich] Peace would mean that you stayed on in London: I’m trying to work, and must stay, save for one day up, till next week. Let me know, in time, the next chance there is of meeting.

Meanwhile: V. Sackville West lives always in the country. Her address is, Sissinghurst Castle, Kent. If you write there, she would tell you about translations. Pepita, I suggest. I will consider the other books you want to hear about—Send me your address. Its useless cramming into this sheet, with this stiff pen, all I want to ask and hear. Your butterflies hang over my front door—always brilliant; wings stretched, flying, like you: but pinned; unlike you.

Yrs
Virginia Woolf

Estate of Victoria Ocampo

[]

3454: To Vanessa Bell

Saturday Oct 8th [1938]

Typewritten

Monks House [Rodmell, Sussex]

Your letter has just come; and I at once answer, moved by flattery partly—for I dont think you like reading my letters; and Im very modest at the moment; also, if I dont start. I shall get swamped; Davies arriving: then London; household supplies—partridges, hare, possible goose—all imperfect. Lord, what a scrimmage—But to facts.

You say you want details. England has now settled down to the usual cat and dog; I mean, I told you so, its your fault no its not; Kettle yourself; pot yourself; or whatever the phrase is. Trenches were dug because if you lie at the bottom of a sloping hole, a shell will burst at either side and miss you. Two workmen were buried alive making them. As for gas masks, many have died through testing them on the exhaust pipes of cars. Govt; has now issued an edict that theyre not to be tried on gas pipes as they dont work. Black boxes are being issued to keep them in against the next war. Some grateful owners have paid the Treasury one guinea apiece. Ours lie on the drawing room table. I did not say the press was fortifying my studio; I said the stock room [Tavistock Square]. This is a firmly built stone lined compartment behind the front room; most suitable, therefore as Miss Perkins [Hogarth clerk] said. Lined with books and mattresses practically impregnable. However as I told you Mr Higham wouldnt issue the key of the square [central garden] to non-residents, so our trenches were useless for Mrs Nicholls [Hogarth manager].

Next Clive Bell. Here I draw attention to a curious psychological incident, which the United brains of Cassis can analyse—if I can get time to explain. We asked Keynses to Sunday tea, and told them to fetch Clive, also invited. Lydia rang up to say “Janice [Loeb] is there; we will not have Janice.” I said, “Settle it yourselves—Ive asked Clive.” They came shamefaced and sheepish. “Clive is not coming.” Have you told him the [that] you wont have Janice? ‘No.’ ‘Then what happened?’ He will not come. I said ‘She will bring him’. ‘No he will not come.’ Sure enough he didnt come. Now what had Lydia really done about it? Anyhow he neither came nor answered; so I’ve not heard about the Beefsteak club. Tilton [Keynes] agreed to take six children [Munich crisis]. I am sending the N.S. Q’s [Quentin] letter has never come; rumour says he used it to wipe the bottom of a goose; but rumour is a strumpet.

Oh the vintage [at Cassis]! Just what my eyes crack to see. The one thing in the world I was born to describe. The one scene I need for my book. But consider my predicament. Owing to one thing and another, bowls, crisis, native sloth, I’m only at 1911 in Roger; I cant increase the appalling muddle of that book by darting off a chapter about S. Remi; I’m flummoxed entirely how to deal with your own letters. I shall be ready in December. Then no vines. Marie has just sent me her novel. No time yet to read it. I wish youd find out when we could go for a week or so to their Inn. If theres a room to write in. If they would have us peacefully. L; says its no use till middle of March owing to Mistral. Is this true? But as I was saying, how am I to write this book? What am I to say about you? Its rather as if you had to paint a portrait using dozens of snapshots in the paint. Either one ought to dash it off freehand, red, green, purple out of ones inner eye; or toil like a fly over a loaf of bread. As it is I’m compromising; and its a muddle; and unreadable; and will have to be used, like the letter, to wipe a gooses rump. But Roger himself is so magnificent, I’m so in love with him; and see dimly such a masterpiece that cant be painted, that on I go. Also, reading his books one after another I realise that he’s the only great critic that ever lived. For instance Cezanne [1927]—a miracle. [Characteristics of] French Art [1932]—another. Why did one only read his little articles? So, as you see, on I go; and grumble; and sweat; and sometimes get so hot in the head I roll in the cabbage bed. Do give me some views; how to deal with love so that we’re not all blushing.

Shall I send you books? I am writing with your letter before me, and thus hop from twig to twig. Theyre bringing out a book on John Cornford next week, practically identical with Julian’s poems, essays etc. Shall I send it? I’ll give L. the addresses. At present, John [Lehmann] is more worry than help; incessant questions; we have to go up for the day on Tuesday; then back for four days; then I think settle in for the winter and work. at 52. We get snatches of divine loneliness here; a day or two; and sanguine as I am I said to L. as we strolled through the mushroom fields, Thank the Lord, we shall be alone; we’ll play bowls; then I shall read Sévigné; then have grilled ham and mushrooms for dinner; then Mozart—and why not stay here for ever and ever, enjoying this immortal rhythm, in which both eye and soul are at rest? So I said, and for once L. said; Youre not such a fool as you seem. We were so sane; so happy; and then, I went in; put the kettle on; ran up stairs looked at the room; almost done; fireplace lovely; wood wrong stained; but still felt floating on the wings of peace. Made tea; got out a new loaf; and honey and was about to call in L. from the ladder on the high tree—where he looked so beautiful my heart stood still with pride that he ever married me; and then…. A face at the window. A voice. May we come in, Virginia? A jersey; trousers; bright red cheeks; glassy blue eyes. [Name omitted]. An interval of sheer horror; of unmitigated despair; my life crashed; my soul broke; my tongue faltered; and there was [her husband].

So we had them both for four hours by the clock. Lodging with Mrs Curtis they had tried to find you; were told by the pistmas (I mean postman) Charleston was empty; so came without the decency of a card or a telephone; planted their dismality on me. Such crude brutality, such denial of all human decency seems to me so unthinkably bestial that after they’d gone—and we had to drive them to Firle—I let fly; and for hours L. and I argued; he thought me too harsh; I thought him deplorably sentimental. But we both agreed that the poor [names omitted] are in the lowest rung of life; water blooded; blowsy; grumpy; servile; their eyes all flies; one drip drip drip of complaint from [her], [her daughter] such a trial; no friends; boys so stupid; cant pass exams; no money; no servants; no friends; and of course none of it said rhymically [sic] like this, with some arch to the back; but all verified and stated in words like hard boiled eggs; so that there I sat staring. L. took [him] round the garden. [He] too giggles. Not a drop of hope or health in them; and so we settled like creeping flies on [a friend] who at least excites [her] bitterness; she has found him a flat in Greenwich; why wont he face the fact that he must live there? Wont have money to go to the Opera. Has the eczema on his hands. Over eating. Yes, [he] moaned—hes terribly greedy. Eats grouse alone. Not a grouse had come their way these ten years. And why should it? And theyd no milk, nor eggs; had picked twenty dead mushrooms by way of gift; and I had to explore Itford Farm in the twilight with [him] to furbish up their miserable larder. But enough. Poor things—its a death to your door; the refrain was always Nessa and Duncan—Angelica and Quentin, as if you had obsessed them and dispossessed them. Tell Angelica that [their daughter] considers her the only friend she has; “But of course Angelica never invites her now….”

Oh God, god, what world is there dispeopled, solitary, sane, where I could merely sit down, take my Bellows [French] dictionary and even write a letter to J. E. Blanche, who complains, like them all that Vanessa Bell was lunching with Miss Sands and they didnt ask him. Ive a letter from Will Rothenstein too, from Herbert Fisher also; and yesterday we had tea with the Keynesa [sic] (you see thats a word that cant be spelt on a typewriter) our friends at Tilton; and L. read them his play; They seemed rather impressed; they think the Group [Theatre] may do it. I thought it rather good too; but who am I? I never get any praise for what I write. [Raymond] Mortimer praises Elizabeth Bowens new novel. But I’m not jealous; too far sunk into fritters, with Ann and Richard [Llewelyn Davies] coming, to feel more than a drowned cat feels when it has been pulled from the ice by a policeman. However we have a grouse for lunch.

Maynard is a great man, I rather think. They had caught three mice in one trap; this excited him to the verge of hysteria. Now thats true greatness; combined as it is with buying a whole flock of sheep; ditto of cows; he had been also dictating a letter to the Times; is overcoming the innumerable actors and actresses who wont act Phedre; they will act Phedre; had also a complete knowledge of Tuberculosis in cows; meanwhile gave permission for Auntie to drive with Edgar [chauffeur] to Lewes to buy stockings; all details are referred to him; yet he remains dominant, calm; intent as a terrier to every word of L’s play; spotted at sight things Id never seen from sheer vacancy; and left me crushed but soaring with hope for a race that breeds men like Maynard. And I kissed him and praised to the skys his Memoir Club paper; by which, most oddly to my thinking, he was really pleased. D’you ever feel such a worm as I almost always feel? Or are you always as beautiful as I thought you the last night at Charleston, when I could hardly breathe for fear of unsettling the magnificent human Camberwell beauty [butterfly, i.e. Vanessa] who was, I suppose, mending socks? Nothing to add at the moment which is pouring; electric light off; storms universal.

[Name omitted] told me Pamela had been almost mad from suspense about Micou being a Roumanian being interned in late crisis; but [her] almost mad means mere common sense.

Write Dolphin; and tell the young Dolphins to follow in your blue wake. Q and A. that is. Old father Dolphin by whom I indicate the real Duncan might one would have thought have turned his brush to a better use for old sakes sake.

And then when I hear Ill once more scribble.

B

Berg

[]

3455: To Elizabeth Bowen

Oct 9th [1938]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Elizabeth,

What a nice woman you are to send your book [The Death of the Heart] to this grudging old grump in a battered garden! By grudging, which I cant spell, I only mean that I’m thanking you before I’ve read it, because I’ve not had time—too many people in Sussex: and also, as you know, I’m incapable of writing criticism. As soon as I get 2 days free, I shall fall on the book, devour it and then—we come back next week—do come and see me, and let us talk about it for hours and hours.

So far the only reviews I’ve seen have been enthusiastic, but meaningless. That is they’ve not told me anything I wanted to know. But anyhow they all praise, and that whatever one may say is warming to the cockles of the heart.

I can hardly see to write, though its midday: the storm is battering me so in my garden room.

Your Virginia

I forgot to post this, and now cant remember your address: [Clarence] gate? or terrace? so must take it up and look in the telephone book tomorrow, on a dash to London.

Texas

[]

3456: To Ethel Smyth

Oct. 13th [1938]

Monks House [Rodmell, Sussex]

Now that was nice of you to write that letter. It came so pat. A damned headache;—too much Roger: nephew and niece staying: a dash to London—in short a headache that knocked the pen out of my hand and left me prone for any fly—angry letters from enraged readers of 3 gs.—bothering demands for sympathy and criticism will I read this and that, sign this and that, and I say all this pricked me as I lay prone: and your letter gave me a lift. “So I havent been an entire and utter failure from start to finish if Ethel likes me”—that was my reaction: I fastened specially on the word “staunch”. Of course I like praise of my books—to me just now so futile, so intolerably airy and off the point; but I like praise of my friendship much better, being in that mood. Years ago, after a long and interrupted friendship, a man, one of my oldest friends, said suddenly I was the most faithful of friends. Never have I forgotten that word, and here underline it against my practise; I was so proud.

Well I cant further expatiate as I’m still stupid. And it drizzles and blows. And I cant moon off to the river and let my head drift on the stream, nor sit in the garden; nor pester myself to read, nor even think of that cursed biography. I’m sorry you’re delaying the [Roman] Wall. It should be a hot still day with the sheep cropping and a little boy playing in the ruins. Also a white thorn tree.

We go back on Sunday but now we have a partner [Lehmann] I dont intend to be fixed in London any more.

So thanking you for your letter and blessing the new book—what a treat to look to!—

V.

We both thought Elizabeth’s [Williamson] letter very fine, and wish to congratulate her. A remarkable letter. May others follow suit!

Berg

[]

3457: To Ling Su-Hua

15th Oct. 1938

Typewritten

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

I am typing this, so as to save your eyes, for my writing is so hard to read. At last I have read the chapter you sent me—I put it off, for one reason and another. Now I write to say that I like it very much. I think it has a great charm. It is also of course difficult for an English person, at first, there is some incoherence, and one does not understand the different wives; who they are; which is speaking. But this becomes clear after a time; and then I feel a charm in the very unlikeness. I find the similes strange and poetical. How far it can be read by the public as it stands, I do not know. That I could only say if you would go on sending me more chapters. Then I should get the whole impression. This is only a fragment. Please go on; write freely; do not mind how directly you translate the Chinese into the English. In fact I would advise you to come as close to the Chinese both in style and in meaning as you can. Give as many natural details of the life, of the house, of the furniture as you like. And always do it as you would were you writing for the Chinese. Then if it were to some extent made easy grammatically by someone English I think it might be possible to keep the Chinese flavour and make it both understandable yet strange for the English.

One of the reasons why I did not read it or write before was that we have been so uneasy in England; we were almost sure of war. Everything was ready, even the gas masks served out, and orders given to house children from London. This atmosphere made it difficult to fix ones mind on books. Now for the time at least that strain is over.

Please forgive me then for having been so long in writing. Next time you send me more chapters—soon I hope—I will write more quickly. We are just going to London. The houses there are still protected many of them with sand bags. But in China I know things are far worse. I find the only relief is to work. And I hope you will go on, writing, for it might be a very interesting book.

Did you get a letter I wrote in August [No. 3425], and a parcel of books? Tell me, for if they came safe I will send more. It is easy to get books cheaply in London. Please never think of paying for them. It is a great pleasure to me to send them. Tell me what you like. It is difficult to know. I am keeping the manuscript you sent. I can read your writing quite easily, so dont bother to type.

Yours with love,
Virginia Woolf

Ling Su-Hua (Mrs Chen)

[]

3458: To Sir William Rothenstein

15th Oct [1938]

Postcard

Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

Many thanks for your card. We are still down here, but I hope to see your pictures when we are back next week.

V. Woolf

Houghton Library, Harvard University

[]

Letters 3459-3474 (October-December 1938)

3459: To Quentin Bell

Tuesday Oct 18th 1938
(I put the date as it may be a piece of news to you)

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square [W.C.1]

Dearest Quentin,

An anonymous post card has just come: The Colonel is engaged—Not Cory, I take it? Then it must mean that Teed has at last consented to make an honest woman of Miss Smith and her seven children; it cant be that Angelica—? No I refuse to dream, even, that a blood niece of mine has married a vine. Wine would be a passport to my heart, its true. Still, the bridegroom seems a little past bearing—a good vintage I admit. When does the marriage take place? In the vineyard? nuptials to be consummated I suppose in the butts—caves, what do they call them.

Well this has rather dashed my sober political style. En revanche as they say, I enclose a cutting from last nights paper. L says no man survives the third stroke. Meanwhile I’m pending a letter to Mary [Hutchinson]—if only I had command of Nessa’s style in these matters. What cant be mended had better be ended, and so on.

Yes, we are back, in the full tide of human existence; of which I will try to send you a brief epitome before lunch. Jack you see has dropped down; and Kingsley Martin is on the telephone. London is strained: sand bags still in situ quo: the scavenger stops me in the Square to say ‘in my opinion maam ther’ll be war in February.’ The pundits are all devising schemes for foreign policy. Kingsley is all for being a third class power in servile isolation; Cole is all for fighting to the last gasp. Its not a nice place, London. We were not hysterical, at the worst; only like a pack of spaniels on the leash, now fawning, now foaming. No; Sally [spaniel] is not pregnant. Mitz [marmoset] almost died of the chill that cold drive home; but is quite well again, tell Angelica …

Here Leonard comes in. John [Lehmann] is upstairs. A board meeting! I made a brilliant pun. But puns apart, John is a little crowing over your rather imperfect index. He says that he had several omissions to fill in; misquotations and false attributions. He also says that the printer who is a personal friend of his, objects at the last moment to printing bugger, fuck, balls and piss. John offered to put initials. The printer holds out for dots only. This matter is still in dispute. Of course they make the objection at the very last moment, with the page proof about to be printed off. And its all John’s fault for employing a friend who’s a notorious prude. We had the same row over one of Plomer’s books. L. is holding out. But the crisis—political—for some reason has meant a fortnights delay. We shant publish now till the 27th—hence any delay is very undesirable. So far Julian’s book has done much better than was expected. All the shops have taken a good deal of interest in it. I dont know what the figures are—but I was told I could say it had been well received by buyers. I suppose the crisis will damp the whole season inevitably. So they all say.

Privately, what gossip is there? Joan Easdale the daughter of the mad woman, Adeney, is engaged to Jim Rendel. I rather think he’s Jill’s brother. Helen Anrep dines here tomorrow. Theres some gloomy business at work in Charlotte Street I gather from Mabel. “Mrs Anrep says she dont want Flossy [maid] any longer. She says the children have to manage for themselves. If I were her I should say the same”—this is the silent Mabel’s report. Helen on the phone sounded pessimistic, over blown, over grown, distracted; Roger’s first proofs had arrived; she was off to correct them with Margery [Roger’s sister]. So I chipped in, and said, Come and dine with us—that is with me, as L. is discussing Labour politics with Dalton. Here she groaned like a sea monster just arisen from the briny. Everyone groans. We had Ann and Richard [Llewelyn Davies] to stay; I like him; I think he has a head piece; as well a—codpiece is suggested; but that not what I meant. I mean I think he has guts as well as charm; is not near so scatterbrained as Ann; who has shot into a beanstalk; is now hideous, now lovely; a leggy colt, whereas Richard is trim and solid and about twenty years more mature. But how I hate week ends! If we could only solve that problem, why dont we all retire to Sussex? The room is finished; but where’s your and Nessa’s bill?

I went to the Tate yesterday; but was harassed by Herbert Read. At the same time I liked the impressionists; why are they so much quicker off the palate than old masters? I can souse myself in them like a puppy in a bath. They’ve got a show together. Oh do tell Nessa to write and tell me how I’m to deal with Roger—here I am, obsessed, and quite futile. Cant stop; yet plunge daily deeper into despair. Writing is far too concentrated to be a human activity. I’ve not seen Clive; but have read his pamphlet—Warmongers. I wont say what I think till you do. L. wont even read; but will say what he thinks without reading. We cant go on our western tour as none of the books are ready for travelling; I cant come to S. Remy because I’m stuck at 1911. Marie [Mauron] has sent me her novel. Oh do give them my love; also do buy me any picture postcards of the place.

And I’m positively longing to see the new pictures by the Dolphin family [Duncan and Bells]. I long to see pictures of vineyards. Are they very good? Shall I … another interruption. A man called Philip Rose wants to know if I’ll help him to write a book on Stevenson; he seems to think I am Stevenson’s grandaughter.

And now it is one; and I have not somehow rivalled Sévigné—no, dearest Q; but I could do better with encouragement; letters; love; sympathy; When do you come back? Rodmell is seething with excitement; there was a great burglary at Northease; a safe was exploded with dynamite; but the ruby necklace was not found.

Write V.

Quentin Bell

[]

3460: To Vanessa Bell

24th Oct [1938]

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Sq[uare, W.C.1.]

Your letter I may tell you very nearly had fatal consequences. I very nearly rushed off to Cassis, so intoxicating were your words; and the sense of heat; and vines; and beauty; and freedom; and silence; and no telephones. You very nearly had me on you; and then what a curse you would have found it! Only the timely revelation of the complete failure of our marriage prevented it. Only just in time to stop me taking my ticket. Its an awful confession—if I werent so hurried I would conceal it; but the fact is we are so unhappy apart that I cant come. Thats the worst failure imaginable—that marriage, as I suddenly for the first time realised walking in the Square, reduces one to damnable servility. Cant be helped. Im going to write a comedy about it. But if I had come your perfect globe would have been smashed; you know how careful I have to be, too, to bait my hook with little minows [sic] and other tit bits to disguise my rapacity for your society with whats acceptable to you. Had I come the hook would have been bare; all this winter you’d have had nothing but the rusty steel to grate your teeth upon. Also, its a good thing that Wolves and Bells should be separated sometimes in order that each may inspissate their identity. Enough. No News of Clive.

London is appalling, but also I admit fascinating—in its meretricious way. Also Exmouth Street Market, with a black corpse of a horse among flowers and cheap glass has its appeal; also Hampton Court where we went yesterday in the balm of a perfect summers day was worth all your black visaged spectacular south. We roamed the park, smelt the flowers, and mooned along the galleries where, thanks Roger, I’m now seeing in chairs pictures tapestries a remote world of inexplicable significance. I think the art of painting is the art for ones old age. I respect it more and more. I adore its severity; its bareness from impurity. All books are now rank with the slimy seaweed of politics; mouldy and mildewed. I wish I could settle to pure fiction; indeed had to rush headlong into a novel [Pointz Hall]; as a relief; but am now back at Roger and the compromise of biography again. That reminds me; please will you and Duncan write something quick about the Borough Polytechnic. Any facts. Who were the artists? What were the subjects? Does the dining room still exist? Can one see it? Do answer this. I’m toiling in a maze; and no one so far has thrown me a single bone of help.

Now to gossip. Jack Hutch, youll be glad to hear was let blood copiously, and has recovered. Mary [Hutchinson] says it was a slight attack. He is at work again. This was imparted to me as I sat talking to [Sibyl] Colefax. You see I get from people what you get from vines. These distorted human characters are to me what the olive tree against the furrowed hill is to you. Colefax is an essential part of the composition; wrinkled I admit. I was led, by a spirit in my feet, (that is Shelley) to denounce her life to her; her snobbery; her falsity; her damned dressed up dinner party society. I will only dine with you, I bellowed, (without you V. B. I become so vehement,) if I may walk out of my own house, as I am, to your door. “Done!” she cried. Today I’m invited to meet Max Beerbohm and Lord Ivor without washing; and will I bring Isherwood on the same terms? What am I to say? Why do I seek to change society, when it means that one has to act on ones words? L. says I can rat.

I’m in a rush; so what news is there? Desmond’s [MacCarthy] mother is dead, of cancer. Then we had tea with Margery yesterday to meet deaf Agnes. But deaf Agnes was involved in a street accident. Margery much upset. At last deaf Agnes very fluttered arrived. Walking with Lady Lawrence in Chelsea, suddenly she saw Lady Lawrence, wall eyed Bob’s wife, flat on the ground, pouring blood with her face cut open and an omnibus advancing. Deaf Agnes was surprised. To cut a long story short—I had to write on a paper all my questions—Lady L. was carried home; Dr Quackenbosh summoned; and a nurse. So we proceeded to discuss Sir Edward’s views on Darwinism; this had to be gingerly done, as she disapproves of any truth told about the Frys. But she was a charming apparition, wild eyed, flying haired, magnanimous; walled still in the 19th century; shouting like a lost sheep in a gale.

Helen Anrep was there—by the way I had a long evening alone with her; and I’m in rather a distress about her. This is highly confidential. She has dismissed Flossie and does all her cooking and cleaning herself, being battered and altogether scatterbrained, because she has an over draught [sic]; In fact she seems in very low water. Oughtnt one to help? Ive no doubt I could lend her or give her something towards the overdraught; on which she’s paying interest. What do you think? But then theres the horror of her toadies and claimants. Is it hopeless to insist that she has a maid? She told me to tell you that owing to Rogers proofs she can’t come to Cassis yet. But she is coming later. Meanwhile of course Preece is preying on her; and the female oaf is utterly intolerable. Analysis which costs £100 is useless; yet she must be analysed so Helen must do the cooking….

Now Rose Macaulay is ringing up; also Stephen Tennant. I tell you this not to impress you; but only to show the meretricious fascination of London. Thank God we’re off for two days on Wednesday to M. H. and to travel our books. Then back to a vast family dinner given by Mrs Woolf; who is aging and decaying so rapidly that the leaves seem to drop in to the tea cups. Everyone loathes the idea; she insists. A dinner at a club. And you in bliss. Ive no room for more.

[handwritten:] Theres a rush at the Press—John all over the place. I cant get time to write, so send this, in default of better. The drop drop of fascinating postcards continues to keep me on edge. What a torturer Q is! I hope to see him. and when shall I see you? But no doubt you prefer Helen Anrep. Why?

B.

L’s play [The Hotel] is being considered by the Group [Theatre, London].

Berg

[]

3461: To Ethel Smyth

Tuesday [25 October 1938]

52 Tavistock Square [W.C.1]

I’m sorry, but we must start at dawn—should the sun rise—tomorrow, and travel our books on the South Coast: ending at nightfall at Monks House. There we stay till Saturday when there’s my mother in laws 89th birthday party—her last I suspect.

I’m glad you saw the [Roman] Wall in a tempest, and Humshaugh [Northumberland] I found afterwards we could have been shown over—I want to hear the story. Oh must I read Enid Bagnold? For my sins, I thought Velvet a fake: but you know what an irregular critic, how independable I am, especially about living fiction,

Berg

[]

3462: To V. Sackville-West

27th Oct [1938]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, near Lewes, Sussex

Yes, Mrs Nicholls [Hogarth Press] has handed me a copy of your book [Solitude]: which I certainly consider my due, with an inscription. I dont believe you care a damn what I think of it. However, I’ll tell you when I’ve read it, if you want to know. Yes, so far as I know, Novr. 17th will suit perfectly: the whole day if you like. If you cant spend the whole day junketing pick out any portion of it: lunch, dinner, tea: all three. We’re down here, thank the Lord, but only momentarily; yesterday we travelled our books in Horsham, where Shelley worshipped: tomorrow its Hastings—who lived there? I cant remember. Anyhow I’ve stolen a walk in hot sun along the river which was brimming blue, a kind of winter summer, trees bare, sky blue: but you’ll have seen all this for yourself. We plan to retire here for ever: in which case I should sink as deep in solitude as even you could wish. As it is, back we go on Saturday to my mother in laws 89th birthday party, and Sybil and Max Beerbohm—But let me know some time about the 17th.

Yr V.

Berg

[]

3462a: To Elizabeth E. Nielsen

28th Oct 38

Typewritten

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Miss Nielsen,

I am so glad that you feel that Three Guineas completes the Years, as you say. It was so meant; but at the moment, after being exposed to the reviewers for four months, I have completely forgotten what I meant. They always muddle one completely with their different versions. So I wont say any more about it now.

I am delighted to hear that you are doing a dissertation upon my father. I dont know that there is any connection between us; but it is a great thing to work at somebody so solid and so outside present discontents. I shall be interested to know what you make of him.

I hope one of these days, when I have finished a book upon Roger Fry, to write another novel. But I leave those things—novels—to settle themselves for themselves. So I cant say if it will “continue the Waves” as you suggest. I have not read Einstein; I should not understand it. But I think we discussed this when you came. And the final question you ask—no, it is not a question—it is a statement; that you are working for a degree, but dont want fame or advertisement—I am quite ready to believe that this is so; and as the world is, all one can hope is that we should be clear about our motives. We cant ignore money yet. I said thirty I suppose because thirty is a definite name for maturity and pamphlets require to be made very plain. I cant remember the context; and am only answering off hand and in haste. Haste is my lot at the moment; so please dont keep this letter as you threaten; for it makes me dislike writing if what is provisional is taken seriously. No, I am sure you “use it for no purpose”—but there are people who publish letters, alas. So I have to add this is private as well as hasty in order to write in the first place and in the second to put so incomplete a note into the post.

With best wishes, and I must say again—having been interrupted—how glad I am that you like Three Guineas, which was meant to stir, not to charm; to suggest; not to conclude—

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

and I must apologise for the typing; if I dont type I cant get through my letters; and as you see I cant hit the right notes.

University Library, California State University, Long Beach. Modern Fiction Studies. Vol. 30. Summer 1984.

[]

3463: To Hugh Walpole

Sunday [30 Oct 1938]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Hugh,

I dont see why you accuse me of nocturnal habits. We were up in Keswick: asked for Sir Hugh: and were told he’s invisible—I suppose in London. Come to tea—or why not come in on Thursday next, 3rd Nov, after dinner—Stephen Spenders dining, hence no room at the table for more? anytime after 9.

Yr Virginia W.

Yes, Leonard is all right. Water pure as—What is pure? too hurried to remember.

Texas

[]

3464: To Vanessa Bell

Nov. 2nd [1938]

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Sq[uare, W.C.1.]

You are a good dolphin to write, and the facts about the Boro. Poly; will come in very useful. Now that we’re on facts let us stick to them. About Helen. I think her overdraft is about £200. So she said the night she dined here. And she promised to find out exactly and tell me; as I think she was then ready to let me lend it her. I heard no more; so wrote and asked and have had no answer. Mabel says Flossie goes twice a week to clean, but last time she went Helen was away. I’ll ring up and see if I can get any facts. but you know how vague she is—didnt know what she was paying, but thought the interest came to £10 yearly. And she certainly seemed weighed down and altogether rather under the weather or water or whatever the phrase is.

About houses—we actually went over one in Endsleigh St [No. 6, Bloomsbury] yesterday, being struck with the dream of buying a large freehold, housing ourselves and the press and having rooms to let. But it was hopeless; all the top rooms cut in two and mere garrets. Our lease lasts till 1941; so unless we can get a freehold, and sublet this we shall have to stay on. But we’re much inclined to your plan of country living with a room here. I suppose you and Clive could move any time. And we shall have the Press to house which complicates matters. But with John in charge, we are, or shall be, free from London; and I agree with you, it grows intolerable. One party lasts me at least a month. The perpetual fizz and fritter is inevitable and if only Sussex werent so accessible, I would willingly domesticate myself there. So I’ll keep my eyes open for large houses that could be let out in rooms. Thats the facts; My Colefax party was perhaps worth going to, as I didnt dress, and sat next Max [Beerbohm], and we talked writers shop. He’s a charmer; rubicund; gay; apparently innocent; but in fact very astute and full of airy fantasies. He invented obituaries, and has an extraordinary gift for telling little stories that he makes up on the spur of the moment. When we went to Hastings the other day an old man stopped me in the street and said. “Have I the honour of addressing Miss Edith Sitwell?” “I’m Mrs Woolf,” I said. He then swept off his hat and said “Not my old friend Leslie Stephen’s daughter?” “Who have I the honour of addressing” I said. “Somebody whose name youve never heard,” he said…. “Coulson Kernahan!” I told Max this; and he instantly told me the whole history of C.K.’s life; how he’d written a book called God and the Ant; sold one million copies; also one called Celebrities I knew—how he visited Lord Roberts “who rose from his chair and looked at me with eyes—were they blue? were they hazel? were they brown? No they were just soldiers eyes” He also wrote a book called Celebrities I did not know. Max Beerholm .. for one… How much was true and how much invented I dont know. But it was very amusing as he told it; but I cant record it. Then there was Somerset Maugham. a grim figure; rat eyed; dead man cheeked, unshaven; a criminal I should have said had I met him in a bus. Very suspicious and tortured. But youve met him. And Lord Ivor [Churchill]; and Lord de la Warr; and Christopher I[sherwood]. who seemed all agog with amusement; but is a shifty quicksilver little slip of a creature—very nimble and rather inscrutable and on his guard. I had no talk with him; but he said he had heard of you and would come and dine. Will you come and meet him?

Oh what a joy to think you’re coming back! I feel like a very old sponge that hears water dripping at the thought. I get so pulverised without you; youre somehow the breath of life; did I say water? Well, as usual I’m mixing my metaphors writing in a hurry, after my mornings work. We have the Spenders to dine tomorrow and Joan Easdale, now Rendel; and Bunny [Garnett] I think. And on Friday we go to Rodmell; and Q. dines—that I shall enjoy—I long to see my nephews and my nieces; but theres a L. P. [Labour Party] meeting; and then theres Guy Fox; and Q. says Clive and Janice [Loeb] are to be down; so doubtless we shall all meet. But whats the point, when you and D. and A. arent there?

Julians book [Julian Bell] comes out on Monday, and we sent the copies as you said. The reviews will begin next week I suppose, I’ll send them. Ive been looking at it, and am sure it was a good thing to print it. He comes out so much of a whole. And the letters are so unself-conscious that nobody could feel them too personal. Also I think it makes something rather important, and not a mere scrap book—I mean though there are so many different people writing, they all fall into line. It is a far more solid book than the John Cornford. Theres been the usual rush and chaos here; Miss Strachan away; ill; John talks and talks … Mrs Lehmann [John’s mother] appeared; the Sunday Times book show on us this week; indeed I had to take to doing up parcels again; and L. worked in the press till eight. But this is only the after effects of that damnable [Munich] crisis, which L. is discussing once more with K. Martin, as I write.

[handwritten:] I sent a New Statesman to enlighten you.

[typewritten:] After tea;

I got on to Helen [Anrep], at last. She never got my letter. She says her overdraft is £150; Ive arranged that I will pay this myself. We can discuss later about subscriptions; but as Ive got the money, I thinks its much simpler for me to do it. The thing is—can you tell me what my commitments are to the Studio school? I thought I promised to guarantee £50 a year for 2 years. Do you think this will be wanted? I told Helen I’d find out from you before saying for certain that I can pay the £150. So could you let me have a line—I should like to pay her as soon as possible. I gather she’s rather anxious to have it settled. I said I was telling you.

Well this is a dull dismal interrupted letter. In between paragraphs I’ve been to Selfridges; ordered a goose; walked across the Park; come home to find John [Lehmann] to tea; and am altogether more in favour of a country life than ever. Lord! wish you were back, and were coming round. Its as bright as June here; no mistral; but I admit we have fires. I’ll write to Angelica to curse her for her absolutely exacerbating, infuriating, intriguing and preposterous system of post cards; ones missing; I cant make it all out; and have scratched a hole in my head worrying to connect the Colonel [Teed] with his private parts.

[handwritten:] Theres an account of Cousin Isabel and Adeline in Benson.

Berg

[]

3465: To Ethel Smyth

Wednesday I think 9th as I saw the Lord Mayors [procession] coach.

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

[9 November 1938]

No I’m not such a fool as you think.

I know a good book when I see one, but I have to see it over and over again before I see it. In fact thats how I know a good book—that I have to see it 4 times at least. This refers to Sido [Colette] which I’ve only read once. And once isn’t enough—except to show me something gleaming, like an iceberg of which the roots are underwater. Its a shape I haven’t grasped. But I’ll send it back. For at the moment I’m driven. I’m working and worried. So whats the use of thinking I can begin again? Can one buy it? I’d like to read it over and piece it together. What a born writer! and how infinitely delightful that is to me, a new combination—always a thrill: and to me the only way of learning myself how to write—a lesson I much need at the moment when biography is still as a frozen field on my pen.

I’ll send it one day very soon.

A rush here, owing to publishing: the crisis has tangled us in a muddle.

Whats the use of sending this scrawl—to my old striped tiger cat, with her growl and her claws and her soft fur? I couldnt go to Londonderry House to hear Nadia [Boulanger], as invited; but heard her on the wireless. Cant bear music mixed with peerage. and a supper at the [French] Embassy.

Oh and thanks for Somerville who cheered me after a fine dust up with one of the dons.

Yr
V

Berg

[]

3466: To Vanessa Bell

Thursday [10 November 1938]

52 T[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

I dont think this will reach before you leave [Cassis]. So its only to wish you a good journey. And I’ll write to Paris. and keep any gossip till then. Your letter only came yesterday. So I told John to keep the books [Julian Bell].

Dont be rash at corners and come home and kiss me but no more till Paris.

Berg

[]

3467: To Duncan Grant

14th Nov. 38

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Duncan,

I was greatly pleased to get a letter from you, and only wish you would take to the pen oftener. Like all painters, your sense of words is plastic, not linear, and I am on the side of the plastic myself. But this is not the time to broach that—only to welcome you back to civilisation; its a bear garden, and I’m entirely of your advice that we should rusticate. That reminds me, Ethel Sands has written to ask,—on behalf of Nan [Hudson]—whether Nan can come over from Aix to visit you. I’ve said she’ll find the nest [Cassis] empty. Yes, Ethel is on the tapis: lunch, tea, dinner etc: but so far I’ve slipped out. And there’s Mary [Hutchinson], and Colefax and Eddie Playfair and Helen Anrep—ever so many buzzing round; like the flies round Nessa’s lamp.

However I will keep all gossip till we meet. Tomorrow we dine with Clive. By the way Adrian says he thinks Janice [Loeb] is tiring of him—so I’ve let slip one piece of gossip. No more. We go to Rodmell on Friday. Do you come to Charleston? London is extremely beautiful at the moment, blue as June, soft as down. Think of my idiocy—I walked from Marble Arch to Horse Guards admiring two divine young men. So beautiful were they I circled round and round to hear what they said. In vain. Like young gods, with small chins, blue eyes, perfect hips and shoulders. Ouida would have adored them. The sky like a Canaletto. By the way there’s a new Rembrandt. But I did not go to Will Rothensteins show, or to his son’s.

I’ve lots to say but this paper cuts it short. Not however my affection, or the desire I have to see you. “You” in this context stands for the two divine women [Vanessa and Angelica] also.

V.

Estate of Duncan Grant

[]

3468: To Shena, Lady Simon

Monday Nov 21st [1938]

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Shena,

Forgive this typing, but my hand is getting worse and worse and worse. Thank you very much for telling me about the Fabian meeting. I’m surprised and delighted that fifty intelligent people should think it worth while to talk about 3 gs. As we were saying the other day, I dont believe anyone reads what one says; they only skim off enough to blow soap bubbles on their own. Still, thats something. I cant myself conceive any position more positive than an outsiders, if one could put it into practise. One cant—thats the difficulty, owing partly to the vileness of one’s own nature and partly to poverty. As for war and capitalism, Leonard says that is the invariable Fabian argument. But who are the capitalists? not women. Every day I’m having that proved to me. But I wont begin all over again … it was very good of you to take my part; and I’m sure you did it much better than I could have done. Because for one thing you do practise what I merely preach. And the people of Manchester however much they may wrap themselves up in gold lace probably know it in their bones—if they have bones. How amusing that the dress charge rankled! Of course it goes very deep; and we shan’t be free to discuss it for at least a century. so I wont bore you at the present moment.

I saw Hugh Walpole the other day, and he was very nice, in spite of his floods of verbiage in writing. People generally are, in themselves.

No, I dont type much better than I handwrite.

Yours Virginia Woolf

Sussex

[]

3469: To Ethel Smyth

Friday [25 November 1938]

52 Tavistock Square [W.C.1]

A bitter, black cold day, and to tell the truth I was feeling very miserable. I was walking down Regent Street, thinking how can I face Leonard, who sent me out to buy myself suspenders, since my stockings came down in the Square; and the horror of shops, especially intimate underwear shops, holds me so fast that I cannot go in. But this grave weakness seemed in the gloom, Ethel, in the spare brown failing November light, still unpricked by the lamps and stars, so profound in my soul, that … well I hadn’t a bone to throw to a dog, or a Bo to say to a goose; when suddenly from a bye street there marched out, ahead of me, you yourself. You were wearing a spongebag suit, and a grey felt hat. You were striding along at first I thought with another woman. So I followed. I did not like to interrupt. And then I thought, well old Ethel wouldn’t mind if I did break in: And old Ethel would put the fear of God in me and the courage of a Cavalry Regiment. And I should buy my suspenders. So overcome with love and reverence for Ethel, and sure that she would solve all my problems, I dashed after you. And oh God it wasn’t you! No, only a stranger. A mild elderly suburban woman.

This sad true story is scribbled down, in all humility. What did I do next? Took a bus home; and here I sit, over the fire, cursing the ghost. Not you. But why wasnt it you? Or did you send a spirit to Regent Street to hearten me to buy suspenders; about 4 this afternoon?

And did you get Sido [Colette] safe?

And have you ever read Chaucer?

V.

Berg

[]

3470: To Margaret Llewelyn Davies

27th Nov 38

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Margaret,

It was very nice—yes theres the silly word again—of you to send me the letters; and to write. We missed seeing you this summer, for though we were in Tunbridge Wells one day, selling books, we didn’t like to break in on you. But we suggest that possibly one day before Christmas we might come down to tea; tell us some suitable days; and then Leonard will shove aside some of his innumerable committees with pleasure. Theres too much to say in a letter. About Vanessa—she is just back from Cassis, where they spent two months, painting hard. Her lovely daughter has decided, to our joy, against the stage, and is becoming a painter. She liked the work; but the life horrified her; cadging parts off managers, waiting about endlessly, and then acting some nonsense. I think Vanessa is better; happily she has much to do; and she is glad that Julian’s book is out. It was what she wanted; though to her the publishing was difficult.

Ann and Richard [Llewelyn Davies] stayed with us for a week end. A charming couple; he much more mature than she is; and she referred to you—“You were quite right about Margaret; I liked her very much”. You see, I had sketched a very remarkable new Aunt for her. And the young are shy of praise, so I thought it a high compliment. They are coming here this week again.

Leonard is working hard at a second vol, of the Deluge; it should be out next autumn. Also he is writing a book on Civilisation for Gollancz, the Left Book Club; and has finished a play [The Hotel]. So having a partner is a success so far. I told you I think that John Lehmann is now half the Hogarth Press. Its odd to think what a business has grown out of the type in the Hogarth House drawing room. There are now seven clerks.

I have read hastily the old letters you sent. I wish they could be kept, a bunch like that creates a whole world. But its difficult to see how and I suppose I must tear them up. I send back your Uncle’s. As for Ottoline, I heard that Philip is writing an account of her; indeed he asked me to contribute, but no—I have enough with Roger Fry—I am toiling, rather hopelessly, among masses of his papers; and hardly see how to make a book out of him; for he was in touch with every kind of idea, and emotion and human being; and left a huge glow, but one that is impossible to make visible in ink. At least, so I begin to feel. But I have a passion for biographies; hence my distress that you should be tearing up old papers.

This morning we walked all over Hampstead Heath. It was like a June day, and Leonard told me he had once walked with you there. And how often I used to go and see Janet [Case] at Windmill Hill! We had meant to drive to Harrow, and sit on Byron’s tomb; but half way a fog came down; and we turned back; and then Hampstead was as clear as glass.

I will get L to finish this page; which I hope will be talked out soon at Dorking [Margaret’s house].

Virginia

Sussex

[]

3471: To R. A. Scott-James

7th Dec 38

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Mr Scott James,

I would have liked to write about the reviewing question. But I dealt with it as far as I am able in Three Guineas; and do not want to repeat what I said there. Nor do I think I have anything fresh to add to it.

But again it is very good of you to ask me to write; and please accept my thanks.

Yours sincerely Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

3472: To Helen Mcafee

Dec 12th 1938

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Miss McAfee,

I have been reading the Yale edition of the Horace Walpole letters with great interest, and was prompted to write a sketch of the characters of Cole and Walpole, whose letters are printed.

Would you care to use it? You were so kind as to say that you would like an article from me sometimes and so I send you a copy of this. I should be glad if you would let me know as soon as you can if you wish to print it, so that I may arrange for publication to suit you over here.

We have been having, as you can imagine, a very agitated time here politically; and I found myself turning to the Yale Walpole by way of a respite. I hope you in America are less distracted. But the politicians are very gloomy on this side as to the future.

With kind regards
yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Yale University

[]

3473: To Duncan Grant

15 Dec. 1938

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

Dearest Duncan,

I enclose cheque for £40. The carpet will be a lifelong joy; will you thank your mother and tell her how much I admire her astonishing skill and her son’s genuis. And its very cheap considering both. I only hesitated because I’ve been rather extravagant, but the Americans in the nick of time have asked for a story.

By the way, how can I get the carpet? Shall I fetch it in the car? Or could it be brought? I would like to try it here up on the landing where nobody sits and theres no furniture before settling on Monks House.

Yr grateful and devoted
V.

Estate of Duncan Grant

[]

3474: To V. Sackville-West

Xmas day 38

Monks House, Rodmell [Sussex]

Well that was a princely thought—the pate, and better than a thought, it practically saved our lives; pipes frozen; electric fires cut off; nothing to eat, or if there were, it couldnt be cooked; and then behold the parcel from Strasbourg! So we dined and then lunched and then dined off that—I can eat it for ever—I could have been content to freeze almost, if I could eat such gooses liver for ever. But what an extravagant Prince you are! How tremendously in the vein of the pink, and the pearls and the fishmongers porpoise this pink cream with the black jewels imbedded is—or was. Oh yes! and then what about Love—to which you so tantalisingly refer? Suppose you write it down, and then I will go into the matter. I can’t (you’ll be glad to hear) now; just in, all snow scattered from walking—the downs rose red and bright blue in the snow: wild duck circling; and now off to Keynes’ Christmas cake and Nessa for dinner.

And my poor old brother in law Jack Hills is dead: and Mitzi died in the night of Christmas Eve. It was very touching—her eyes shut and her face white like a very old womans. Leonard had taken her to sleep in his room, and she climbed onto his foot last thing.

But enough—dont die—

Please,
Yr V.

Leonard says: Thank you for the pate, Merry Christmas. Have you heard from your solicitor about the letter? Love to Harold.

I’ll write a proper letter soon about all sorts of things.

Berg

[]

Letters 3475-3518 (January-June 1939)

3475: To Angelica Bell

Jan 2nd 1939

Monk’s House [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest Pix,

Heres the cheque almost to the Tix.

Nessa might like to see this from old Sophie. But give it back on Wednesday. Also a chamber pot. And Saint Simon. What a lot!

[Elizabeth] Curtis sends her love, by post from Newhaven.

And the Raven says Oh never more cursed bore.

V.

[Added on back of envelope:] You see in today’s paper that I refused the O.M. Leonard has given me the O.F. Guess what it means.

Texas

[]

3476: To Ethel Smyth

9th Jan 1939

Monks House, Rodmell [Sussex]

Its time I know that I scratched a few words; only my brain gives out of an evening, and my hand. I’m trying to “work hard” at Roger; for me, working hard is 3 hours; and thats all. But then I come in and read—oh the packets of old letters that still remain! And then I fall asleep, and when the post comes, and theres nothing from you, it occurs to me, The old devil wont write until I pull the string. So having an evening off, rather feloniously, for we come back on Sunday and then there’ll be no evenings for old letters, I scratch a few words. Its old news about the frozen pipes, frozen w.c.; and no fire; for the grid broke. So thats despatched. I’ve also lost a brother in law, Jack Hills: him you never knew, so I cant go into that. Mitz the marmozet is dead. But you never liked her. I forget what else has come my way. I’m sociably inclined tonight, but there’s 60 miles between us and a gale blowing from the Channel. My mother in law (you asked) has once more bobbed to the top. As she longs to live, at 88, why not? The family begin to treat her as a cricketer doing a record score. All grievances silenced. Can she make 100? I daresay. Vita I’ve not seen, but ate a giant paté sent by her. Fields too wet to walk in. How I should like a talk! My eyes swim with reading. Cant relish Sévigné or Chaucer. Percy [Bartholomew] is talking about frozen roots in the garden. Sally [spaniel] snoring. How’s your book—the one you’re writing for me [What Happened Next]? I must cook dinner—maccaroni cheese with a bacon fry. But, perversely, I long for the Ivy [Restaurant] and champagne. Too many souls and bodies to be satisfied: the Puritan and the Harlot. Mixed marriages result in this mixed Virginia. how were you mixed? So this is a little worm dangled to catch a letter—a long one.

V.

Berg

[]

3477: To Victoria Ocampo

12 Jan 39

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Victoria,

No I am not at the moment in London; but I shall be there next week; and expect to be there, with occasional absences, till the spring when, if theres no war, we shall drive about France. So let me know, from this vague sketch, what chance there is of meeting. Thank you for offering a room in Paris—if I can, I would enjoy coming very much.

About V. Sackville West: she told me she was lecturing in Paris: I dont know when. But your best plan would be to write to her direct: Sissinghurst Castle Kent. I’ll explain to her—only I expect she knows—who you are, what Sur is: then you could meet in Paris. A bientôt.

Virginia Woolf

Estate of Victoria Ocampo

[]

3478: To V. Sackville-West

Friday [13 January 1939]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, near Lewes, Sussex.

A woman, Victoria Okampo, who is the Sybil (Colefax) of Buenos Aires, writes to say she wants to publish something by you in her Quarterly “Sur”. She is in Paris, has heard you are going there to lecture—I presume wants to meet you. I’ve told her to write to you: but that I would explain. She’s immensely rich, amorous; has been the mistress of Cocteau, Mussolini—Hitler for anything I know: came my way through Aldous Huxley; gave me a case of butterflies; and descends from time to time on me, with eyes like the roe of codfish phosphorescent: whats underneath I dont know.

Going back, damn, on Sunday

V. and P[otto].

Berg

[]

3479: To V. Sackville-West

Tuesday 17th Jan. [1939]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

Yes that is Okampo; I think she wanted a poem: also, had wind you were coming.

Marmozet: What about a Bush Baby? but Sally likes being the only one.

Margery Fry: Now I’d never have guessed that! Lovely! no. Humorous yes. But I’ll tell you more when we meet. Not that I’ve anything but good, so far as I know of her. And how did you meet her?

Dinner. The 3rd is a Friday and we go to Rodmell. Could it be the and? Thursday. Either here (when L. would be here) or at a place you will choose (and I pay my fare) if alone. And I mean a restaurant.

The disgusting obscurity of all this needs no excuse to one who knows the turmoil of Tavistock Sqre. on coming back after 3 weeks So goodnight; and watch the stars from your tower and when one dartles, thats me.

V.

Berg

[]

3480: To George Davis

18 January, 1939

Typewritten

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Dear Mr Davis,

Many thanks for your letter. I am glad you like the story. We shall probably be in London during February and will look forward to seeing you then.

I presume that the fee for the story [Lappin and Lapinova] will be the same as before, $600.

Yours sincerely
[unsigned]

Sussex (carbon copy)

[]

3481: To Ethel Smyth

Tuesday 24th Jan. [1939]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

I knew I didn’t deserve a letter, as I never answered the long one—the charming one—the one that jumped and tumbled and wandered in and out of corners that you wrote the other day. But … well you know my habits as a letter writer, so I’ll say no more.

Its no good Madame de Polignac asking me to dinner, because, last time I dined out, I found the moths had eaten a hole in my dress, and I’m not going to buy a new one, it was,—it is,—my only one. But she’s not written—should she ever wish, in sober truth, not in the radiance of your generosity, to see me, why dont you both come to tea? Quiet talk in the twilight suits me best as a human being. I cant arrange things, so leave it, as the cab driver does, to you. Politics are coming much too close. Wretched Austrians to tea—What can one do for them? German lessons? But they cant even teach; Home Office wont allow it. Even I have to write letters, try to be “kind”. Then the police discover 300 cartridges hidden behind the gardeners hut in the Square. And Leonard’s out once more talking—talking—Whats to be done; Oh dear Ethel, why did our parents conceive us so that we saw this particular stretch of time? I have such an immense capacity for sheer pleasure up my sleeve; and shant use it this side of the grave. So I burrow into Roger. And what are you doing? The same, I expect: Anyhow we artists have that anciliary—whats the word?—other world outside the real world I mean. If this is real. I am reading Sévigné; that leads to Michelet; that to Saint Simon; and I see Rabelais at the turn of the corner. We’re going to see the great Freud on Saturday. Tell me, should I like Lady Desborough?

V.

Berg

[]

3482: To Vanessa Bell

Wednesday [25 January 1939]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

Of course you’ve given me what I’d rather have than anything. And you know, darling love, how I thank you.

Berg

[]

3483: To Elizabeth Bowen

Sunday [29 January 1939]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Elizabeth,

No, alas, I dont think Thursday is possible. We are taking 2 or 3 days at Rodmell, for a treat. The Wolves troubles—well, they haven’t been spectacular, like poisoned thumbs: only moth powder in Leonard’s pyjamas! Dont sprinkle Alan’s [Cameron, her husband]. I’ll tell you why, if you’ll come. About the man with the Irish name, I’ve never read him, but am sure he’s nice: only Tuesday next, 31st, is my only free day. Would you come to tea with him, with me, 4.30? Or next week—but then he’s only here, you say, this week. Do let me know.

I’m bemused with acting the part of Cleopatra in a mask last night in Regents Park. The gloves (blue, yours, wool) saved my life. I told you this I hope, but am as you gather, no mistress of my thoughts; things bob up disorderly, if one’s been up, with Tom Eliot as Crippin, till—well, it was only 12.30: but it seemed somehow very very deep in a very long night.

So forgive and tell me if you cant come, when you can.

Oh and dont bother about the stockings.

V.

Texas

[]

3484: To Ann Mcknight Kauffer

31st Jan 39

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Miss Kauffer,

I remember your coming to the Press, and Miss West introducing us. I am glad that you have taken to writing poetry, and that you think it one of the important events of your life. That means that you are going to take it seriously: so you don’t mind if I tell you to put these poems away and write a great many more and re-write them before you try to publish them. I have never written poetry myself, so my advice isn’t much use; but as you have sent me your poems that is what I should advise you to do. I like them: I think you have a feeling that makes you write; but there is a lot of work to do before one can make a poem express one’s feeling completely for other people. So you must go on, and dont care what I say or what anyone says.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Mrs Ann Rendall

[]

3484a: To Elizabeth E. Nielsen

1st Feb 1939

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Miss Nielsen,

Thank you very much for sending me your essay upon my father. I will not attempt to criticise it, for I find it very difficult to read my father’s books critically, as one should in order to have an opinion. But it is interesting to me to have your view of him for that very reason. I feel that I see him as a whole through unfamiliar eyes. I am very glad that he seems to you a figure of such importance. I suspect that it is as a figure that he means most nowadays. He stood for a point of view which I believe to be rare and very valuable. You have not of course dealt with his philosophical books which he himself took much more seriously than his literary criticism. The English Thought in the 18th century is generally felt to be his most important work; but he told me that he was most interested himself in The Science of Ethics. Perhaps you will go on to this side of him. I am too ignorant of philosophy to know where he stands in the eyes of the moderns. But I am sure he is a healthy subject for study; for he was extremely truthful, serious, and aware of the lasting side of life. I write without trying to be intelligent; knowing that you destroy my hasty notes; nor is this worth sending, save as token of gratitude to you for thinking of him and of me so kindly.

We are harassed in England with so many threats of war, and with so much unhappiness, that I find it difficult to dwell in my own work, or in other peoples. Refugees are not easy people to forget, and we have to do what we can for them. But all the more I am glad that you are working in a quieter atmosphere, and send my best wishes for your success.

Excuse both the typing and the haste, and believe me yours sincerely

Virginia Woolf

I send back the essay in case you wish to have it.

University Library, California State University, Long Beach. Modern Fiction Studies. Vol. 30. Summer 1984.

[]

3485: To May Sarton

2nd Feb 39

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square [W.C.1]

Dear May Sarton,

I was glad to get your letter, in spite of the request you make in it; and in spite of the fact that I have no time to answer it. (I am rushing down to the country; and snatch ten minutes off what ought to be my work). About the MS. for the Refugees society. I am sure it is a good society; but my repulsion from societies is great; still greater my hatred of encouraging writers in their idiotic vanity about their own little doings. I tear up my manuscripts when I have any; but in fact I make such wild sketches in hand writing alter so completely on the type writer that a manuscript of mine is mostly nonsense. And I dont like to sell nonsense; nor do I think it would sell; for no sane person could make head or tail of it. Still, I promise that I will rout among my papers and see if there’s some page not too incoherent. If so I’ll do violence to my horror of this groping and send it to the address you give.

I’m glad that youre writing poetry; also that youre teaching it. I have no recollection of hearing from Mrs Swift or that I ever had a book from her. Please apologise for me, if she accuses me of not thanking her, as I fear she well may. But I think you know, among other objectionable characteristics, my hatred of thanking writers for their books. One cant say what one thinks; But its rude—uncivilised; a futile protest against the immense reciprocity required by civilisation. This will help to explain my dumbness about your own poetry; which I will read, and say nothing about. In fact, since we had a partner in the Press, two months ago, I gave myself a license to read no modern writing of any kind for one full year. I have been so steeped in modern manuscripts that I was losing all sense that one differed from another. I am reading Chaucer and hope in a year to have recovered my palate. At the moment Auden reads like Spender; Spender like Auden; and neither mean anything. So if I did read you I should only get another confused note in the general clamour; but I hope this will have sorted itself out by next January. As you can imagine, there are so many other things dinning in one’s mind here—war, politics, and an infinite number of different people. I shall be seeing Elizabeth [Bowen] and a young man called Sean O’Faolain next week; which I shall enjoy; and hope to see you when youre over. I’m ashamed to let this scribble cross the Atlantic; but if I dont, then you will give up your last relic of belief in me, which I have some vague wish to preserve.

There are half a dozen snowdrops out in our garden; and we are now driving through the bitter east wind to see them. Best wishes and thanks and apologies.

yrs
Virginia Woolf

Berg

[]

3486: To Ethel Smyth

Monday 6th Feb. [1939]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, near Lewes, Sussex

Well Ethel dear, how nice to think that you’re as I hope, alive. This lyrical outburst is inspired by the extraordinary June weather; my elm trees, the two I see from my window, are at the moment irradiated with the sun, and about 5000 starlings are netted there: why do I always want to find a phrase for what I see? Its not a net; its rather like the edge of a veil thick with black spots. But as you’re in Woking, you wont be seeing Mount Caburn across the flats, between the branches.

We took 2 extra days off; very sensibly: and have been walking the cliff at Birling Gap. I saw Winnie [Polignac]; she climbed my stairs; panted, gasped and had to consume 2 tabloids. Then recovered; was very gracious; something like an old manor house with the sun in its windows; and I’m glad I saw her privately, not gobbling chickens soaked in cream at Claridges. I like people singly not in glittering chains. Oh and she sent me, of course, handsome presents—Beethovens Cavatina. Should you be in London on Friday about 5.30 come to tea: no, not tea, nothing; but I’ve an old friend [Marjorie Strachey] coming; and you say you like that way of breaking ice. But you wont be in London on Friday.

I’ve been reading David Cecils Melbourne; a very composed well set up biography; I enjoyed it. I’ve not met Etty [Desborough]; I’ve not done any of the things I should have done. As the paper nears its end, I always add, And you? Winnie said you were “very brilliant.” How I adore, among the rest of your gifts, that quite useless delight.

So no more. The starlings, you may like to know, have flown, and the suns sunk

V

Berg

[]

3487: To Elaine Robson

February sixth [1939]

Typewritten (in capital letters)

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

My dear Elaine,

The type writer is going to try and write you a letter to thank you for yours. We are sitting in hot sunshine and can almost hear the snow drops growing. There are several white patches and one or two very small yellow noses. These I think must be young crocuses. We come back to London tomorrow. No we have no new monkey, partly because Sally says she likes being the only animal. Yesterday Leonard saw a kingfisher and I saw an old rook asleep on a stake. It winked at me but it did not move. And I stood and watched it and it seemed to be thinking about something. I could have caught it, but it had a long sharp beak. So I left it. I like your journal very much indeed. It tells me all sorts of interesting things. I hope you write it every day and will let me read it when you have done enough. Please put in some poems. Now we are going to drive over the downs and see if we can find a fox. One was barking at dawn under my window. We are going to sit on the cliff and I wish you and Philip [Elaine’s brother] were coming.

How are the fish?
Virginia, Leonard, Sally

Elaine Robson

[]

3488: To Helen Mcafee

7th Feb 1939

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Miss McAfee,

I return the proofs herewith. I have made scarcely any corrections, and accept your’s I think in every case. I spell ‘draught’ like that; but if ‘draft’ is your way—I wasn’t certain—of course keep it.

I am so glad that you like the paper, which seems very far away from the world of London at the present moment. Bullets, Irish I suppose, have just been found in our Square. But let us hope for better times.

With kind regards,
yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Yale University

[]

3489: To Ethel Smyth

Sunday [12 February 1939]

52 T[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

I dont think this next Wednesday will be any use, as, so far as I can see the week is already chock full and running over. But the unexpected may happen—if not, what about the week after? Oh dear, I sympathise with the toe, more almost than with the head. For if one hurts a toe, one cant walk, and that would be, vagrant rambler that I am, the worse hell of the two—the other being not to think. Witness this fact—just back from a jaunt to Rochester, to see Dickens’s house at Gadshill and stretch our legs. Its as exactly Dickens as David Copperfield—the house, the conservatory, the steps, the underground tunnel and the grove in which he had a chalet—d’you remember he was writing there one summer evening when he felt ill, came into dinner, through the tunnel and died? I wonder if these things affect you as they do me. I’d been reading Great Expectations and wanted to see the Marsh—d’you remember again? Well we saw it all, and lunched in the Bull Inn, where, so they say Queen Victoria slept in the same bed as Dickens and Pickwick. But this chatters away far from your toe, and your cold: and it was a bitter East wind down at Gadshill, and I’ve to go to hear Auden’s play But before putting the chicken in the oven, I snatch this interlude to send—no you object to love—Thats what you call helping you across the road. Lord what a buffet I got the only time I tried that! Lord, again, how glad I shall be to see to the end of my Roger: but am appalled by all the re-writing that remains; swarm with ideas for stories; must batten them under: would like to see you; hope you’re writing hard. Have you ever read Somerset Maugham? And which of Dickens is your favourite?

V.

Berg

[]

3490: To V. Sackville-West

Sunday 19th Feb [1939]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, near Lewes, Sussex.

It is rumoured that a large shaggy sheepDog was lately seen in Piccadilly. On being questioned, it answered to the name of V. Sackville West.

I dont know why it came into my head to tell you this fact; except that I think its time V. Sackville West answered to her name. What happened in Paris? I never heard. Did you meet Ocampo? Did you effect any shall we say intimacy with her? And did the speech electrify The Frogs? And what was it about? I last heard from you as you were about to step on board The Channel steamer in a storm. In fact you wrote in Pencil. So shabby shaggy sheepdog, tell me true. We’re basking in the sun; people always say that—but its true. Leonard is cutting off shoots, or grafting, or tying together—Lord knows what you gardeners do after tea in February. And I should be reading Roger Fry.

Old Ethel has a soft corn which keeps one leg perpetually in boiling water. What about Dotty and Yeats? Did she take him South? According to Ottoline, he cut a gland, in order to inject virility, woke to see Dotty, and died of the rush of virility injected. But this is malicious. I am sorry he is dead. I wish someone would write me a poem. Lord how bad the Auden Isherwood play was: so good in a dull way. But I wont read any new poetry for a year, nor meet new poets. I saw Freud the other day. I have fallen in love with … [dots in original]

So Vita its for you to finish the sentence, and I’ll write no more and go no more a roving, a roving sweet maid.

You have a ladder: on which rung am I?

V.

Back in London tomorrow.

Berg

[]

3491: To George Rylands

Tuesday [21 February 1939]

52. Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Dadie,

It’s angelic of you to ask us. I wish we’d known before. As it is this week is already so packed that there seems no chance of getting a day off. If there is, may I let you know, on the chance that you can have us—but you mustn’t bother.

We had a young pupil of yours here last night—Peter Raleigh: and talked of you with admiration, affection—as usual.

So let us put these sentiments into practice soon. Come and gossip.

Your affectionate
Virginia

George Rylands

[]

3491a: To V. Sackville-West

Sunday [26 February 1939]

52, Tavistock Square W.C.1

Yes of course, that’ll be very nice—dinner March 31st.

If you want to see me alone, come early.

The sheepdog in Piccadilly was my joke—a rumour invented by Potto and whispered in my ear over the fire.

Yes; I agree. About life I mean. Only I object to having snippets nipped off by refugees. We went to Woburn House… they came to tea—And I dont like giving cakes to nice people in rags. Otherwise there’s a good deal of satisfaction—I mean I like Hampton Court in the sun—Chaucer and so on. And Vita. Good gracious—if you think about risks to Harold, motoring is worse I should guess. Very near a smash today. But of course if L. were to fly I should feel the same, and you’d say, My dear Virginia, how very foolish you are. Which I suspect is the truth. But I understand the folly.

Wheres the farm? Shall you farm it?

But in 1940 my years abstinence will be over, and my palate, clean, and my wits sharp; so write your Poem [“The Garden,” 1946].

And Leonardo?

This is Ethels style of letter writing—she has a slip with numbers in it. She was ever so deaf and had one hoof in a padded room made of felt the other day [because of a corn].

A love letter—who from d’you think?—Winnaretta de Polignac. You cant think what nice things she says; and how she asks me to cut the cackle and call her W. among other suggestions. (I thought Winnaretta was a patent Aperient [laxative]) This is to make you jealous.

Virginia Woolf Miscellany. Number 43. Summer 1994.

[]

3492: To Ethel Smyth

Monday [27 February 1939]

[52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1]

I think this [a glove] must be yours, not Madame [Mela] Spira’s

No time for more. But will write a comment on your charming humble letter—as if the Lioness took to eating bread and milk out of a thimble.

Berg

[]

3493: To Elizabeth Bowen

Tuesday [28 February 1939]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Elizabeth,

Oh dear, I’m afraid I shant get off for a walk tomorrow. The rush at the Press has upset my days and muddled me. But I’m sorry; What about next Tuesday? I hope I’ve not upset your day. I did ring at your telephone, but no answer—Mrs Camerons out. So I scrawl.

I’ve a nice letter from someone called something Jones who bought 3 Guineas, I hope for a large sum. Will you thank her, if you see her.

yrs V.W.

No sooner had I written this, than my niece Angelica rang up with this request: (I had told her that you have a lovely house) She says: Would Mrs Cameron lend her house for 3 nights, March 30th, 31st, and April 1st to the Artists Committee for the Spanish Relief. That is they want to hang pictures, and invite the rich to a party and induce them to buy. As you can imagine they find great difficulty in getting the house. And I cant conceive, as I told her, that its a possible suggestion. Nor are they yet decided, as others are in view. But I promised to ask you in this tentative way. And finally must plague you to ring me up, if you would,—oh dear, what a bore I’m being: but as I told her, you’re a very nice woman. I also told her I thought it out of the question. So forgive.

V

Texas

[]

3494: To Elizabeth Bowen

Thursday [2 March 1939]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

Dear Elizabeth,

Thats angelic of you and Alan; but as far as I can make out, my brother has promised his house so there was no need to bother you. If there is any hitch, I’ll tell Angelica to let you know.

Dear me—what a bore. I’ve a wretch of a German (unknown) coming here on Thursday, and I’ve promised to take him on to John Lehmann’s.

So let us arrange something when you’re back; but fix it soon, as we shall vanish before Easter and I want to see you.

Please thank Alan; I think you are amazingly generous.

Yrs (in a rush)
V.

Texas

[]

3495: To Hugh Walpole

5th March 39

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dearest Hugh,

How very nice of you to be reading the Common Reader—By the same post someone wrote and said that the Waves was my best book. Its seldom I get praised for my criticism and my fiction on the same day. One’s always on top, and the other below; so I was very glad of your letter. I agree about Lady Dorothy. If I’d known her, I’m sure I should have liked her. It was a youthful spree on my part; and one’s heartless (but clever) when one’s young.

What a life you lead! Covering (is that the word?—it seems a little (improper) the Pope: hobnobbing with journalists; and laying violets on Keatses tomb with Alfred Noyes. Come back before April 1st or we shan’t be in London, and I long for your gossip.

I havent much news to send from the above address: only the cook’s mother’s baby is an idiot—but must live to be 80: and the rector’s wife wont buy a piano for the school but will paint it; and the Labour candidate is suspected of embezzling party funds. Much the same goes on in Keswick, I suppose.

I should be dining with Sibyl [Colefax] to meet Max [Beerbohm]: but am crouching over the fire instead: a blackbird singing; a bonfire burning, and must now go on with Dickens. Do you read Dickens? I’ve just been to Gadshill in piety.

Yes, if you’ll read them, I would like to write another 6 Common Readers.

Love from us both and excuse handwriting due to cold!

Yrs V.W.

P.S. Rome’s the place I love best in the whole world. I put this in, on the spur of the moment: no room to say why. The Campagna … the Gardens … and then the sheepdogs … the shepherds etc. etc….

Texas

[]

3496: To Charles Douglas

9th March 39

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Mr Douglas,

The poem that you ask about has never been published. It was written by Charles Elton, a lawyer and historian; he made it in his sleep, together with one upon Sharing. These were his only poems. Lytton Strachey used to repeat them, and it was from him that I heard the one I quote. There are several verses, and I hope one day to print them in full.

Many thanks for your kind words about my books. Monday or Tuesday [1921] has been out of print for some time.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Robert H. Taylor

[]

3497: To T. S. Eliot

Tuesday [14 March 1939]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Tom,

No, naturally you cant come the first night of your play. I’d made a muddle.

What about the following Tuesday, that is 28th, dinner, at 8—and no need to change for the old woman of Tavistock Square.

I have just cut the string of Family Reunion, and have gratified myself by reading the inscription—for both I am deeply grateful, and beg to subscribe myself your much obliged, much touched, attached and humble servant, V.W.

Mrs T.S. Eliot

[]

3498: To V. Sackville-West

14th March [1939]

52 T.[avistock] S.[quare, W.C.1]

A Begging Letter

Scene, sitting room after tea. V.W hoping to read Chaucer. Telephone rings.

V. Oh my God why do we live in London? (Tosses Chaucer on the floor)

Angelica. I’m Angelica.

V. I thought you were Sibyl Colefax.

Ang: Well I am, more or less. I want you to ask Vita … I want also to ask you … I want to ask you both …

V. Well, spit it out like a Briton—

Ang. To ask you both, whether, if—oh dear how am I to explain? Its The Village Players. You remember the people I went about with last summer, acting Gammer Gurtons Needle?—

V. A very coarse play I thought it: but none the worse for that.

Ang: And they want to act again this summer. But Theyve no money.

V. Ohhh oh ohhh …

Ang: Now dont cry before you’re hurt. I’m not asking you for money—I’m asking if you and Vita would—would—would—guarantee, suppose they cant pay their expenses, but they probably will—only theyre all as poor as mice—and its very important to keep the company together—and theyre acting old English plays—and Michel St Denis has promised to come and see them—and he might give them jobs in his company—and the villagers love the plays—so would you guarantee them—well whatever you can—and the chances are you wont pay a penny …

Well, thats very good of you: that a great help (I guaranteed £10: in the hope it wont be needed)

And would you ask Vita?”

V. But I hate asking my friends … Vita has a million other bloodsuckers after her. And if I do ask her I shall tell her to be as firm as The Monument and as hard as stone.

Ang. But promise me you will ask her—

V: Oh Angelica—Angelica—

The telephone is cut off. I ask you, according to promise

And now return to Chaucer.

And there’s no reason whatever that you should guarantee a brass farthing

Berg

[]

3499: To V. Sackville-West

16th March [1939]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

Oh dear, you are a generous, golden hearted woman, dog, or whatever it may be. Angelica gave a jump of delight when I told her. She was altogether taken aback: all of a heap. Indeed it was good of you—no, its not Virginia Isham; but I’m handing on the suggestion that they might act at Sissinghurst. I saw them at Midhurst, in a village Hall; and was greatly impressed. They run about with a van, and rig it all up themselves.

Yes, of course, youre coming—thats a nice thought—on the 31st. Come early and see me alone, dearest creature—once in a way. Anyhow, I’ll keep free: unless you want to see Hugh, who threatens, after covering the Pope for the Daily Express in Rome, to come here.

I think it would be amazing fun to do Jane Carlyle. But instead of Leonardo?—And are you sure there’s not a life? I rather think I’ve read one.

What about George Sand? Did you see they’ve just discovered certain, but unprintable proof, that she was a—I mean of the tribe of Sappho?

Everything is explained; Musset, Chopin etc.

Such a rush.

Only meant for thanks.

V.

Berg

[]

3500: To Angelica Bell

[16 March 1939]

Postcard

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

Look, dearest Pix: here’s Vita’s letter. And I see she promises rather more than I thought. Also what about acting at Sissinghurst? I think you should write to her, thanking her, and answering yourself. You might wring more out of her golden heart.

V.

Texas

[]

3501: To Mark Gertler

Tuesday [21 March 1939]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Mr Gertler,

Vanessa told me that she had been talking to you about Roger Fry. I am trying to write something about him, and it would be a great help if you could possibly write what you remember. Or if that is asking too much, would you come and see me and talk about him? I’m very anxious to get your account of the way he struck younger painters.

Would you be free to dine with us on Saturday next at 8? We should so much like it if you would.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Luke Gertler

[]

3502: To Elizabeth Robins

Wednesday 29th March [1939]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Miss Robins,

Your letter has been sent on here. We dont go to Rodmell till next week—but then we shall be down for a week or two. Of course we should much enjoy seeing you, and if we can give you any help, so much the better.

I think we had better ring up and suggest a time later, I’m so sorry you have been ill, and so cant come over, though last time we were down there was no sitting in the garden, which we should like you to see.

Yours
Virginia Woolf

Sussex

[]

3503: To The P.E.N. Club

1st April 1939

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Sir,

Josefa Frankl of Vienna has written to me to say that the English P.E.N. Club has asked her to give them English references, and she writes to ask if I will supply them.

I know nothing of her personally, nor do I know her books. She wrote to me some time ago asking me to find her a lodging in England, which I have tried to do without success. She refers me to Mr and Mrs Kantor, Hotel Vanderbilt, 76-86 Cromwell Road, but I do not know them.

It seemed to me best to put these facts before you.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf
(Mrs Woolf)

Texas

[]

3504: To Angelica Bell

Tuesday [4 April 1939]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dearest Pixie,

Sorry to be late [with Angelica’s allowance]. I forgot the day.

And now all the Birds of Paradise are warbling—Troratrou—so I cant condense my mind. Such a lot of gossip—Tom, Ann and so on. So must hope to meet. And what about your parties? And Vita? Oh curse Mrs Curtis and sink America [her house] to the deeps of Hell, and Kenneth Wood too.

V.

Texas

[]

3505: To Ethel Smyth

14th April [1939]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, near Lewes, Sussex

Yes, I was going to write to you, but then Leonard got influenza: then I got influenza: you know how that horrid little tick of a disease sucks my brain. This is my first attempt at a letter, and its to you, and that shows how deeply I trust you, for you’re the only one of my friends who will take the trouble to read such a scrimp of a hand. (Why have I no pens—and why is my ink brownish? Have flies died in the pot? When I prod, some soft matter emerges). So I’m really asking for a letter from you. Isn’t it odd too how difficult it is to write under this pall? We turn on the wireless and so on. And put off living happily till its settled one way or tother. But its useless going on putting off. And now the war seems put off again for another week. I am reading Nicholas Nickleby. When woken by aeroplanes at night I read Ethel Smyth—Gleams of Memory. So please have your new supply ready soon. For I can almost go on where I open—have to shuffle the pages to find a fresh paragraph. I’m toiling revising re-writing Roger. Friends go on discovering new packets of letters. Its like making a dress thats always having a new arm or leg let in in the skirt. But as drudgery its wholesome. I say Ethel what a happy life you had—in the very cream and marrow of the 19th Century. I had a glimpse too, but not a long look. I say Ethel … well, we shall be back in 10 days and perhaps may meet. Only theyre already pulling down the house next door; the rats are escaping, and the dust settling. How can I do with that uproar?—Find me a garret somewhere. And think of Duff Coopers library! Why have the possessors so much added to them? I will write a long letter if you will answer this and wish it. And are you writing? playing golf? And the dog? And Mary [maid at Coign]?

V.

I open this to say that Maynard Keynes is being cured by your Plesch, whom he says is the greatest genius that ever lived.

Berg

[]

3506: To Ling Su-Hua

17th April 1939

Typewritten

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Sue,

I am so glad to hear that you have at last got my letter safely. I will always send them by air mail in future. I have heard several times from you, and I am keeping your chapters as they come. But I hope you keep copies, so that there may be no risk through the post. It is difficult to know what to advise you to do, except that I am sure you ought to go on writing. The difficulty is as you say about the English. I feel that the whole feeling of the book would be very much spoilt if some English were to put what you write into formal English prose; yet of course as it stands it is difficult for English readers to get at your full meaning. I suppose you could not dictate to an educated English person? Perhaps in that way the sense and the feeling could be combined. But it would depend entirely upon finding someone who could be quick enough to understand and able to express. I must of course leave this to you, as I do not know what opportunities you have. Meanwhile, I think it is best to get together as many chapters as possible; and then to read them all through together. One cannot get a true impression if one reads in little bits. But I have seen enough to be interested and charmed. Publication would of course depend upon many things so that it is useless to think of it—things we cannot control. But please go on, and let us hope that it will become more hopeful for books later. At the moment we are finding it very difficult to continue our publishing for nobody will read anything except politics; and we have had to make plans for taking our press away from London, and of course have to face the prospect, should there be war, of shutting up our publishing house altogether. It is very difficult to go on working under such uncertainty. But I myself feel it is the only possible relief from the perpetual strain. It has become worse here, since Italy also began to steal land [Albania]. We do not know if the American president’s appeal will be heard. If not, there is nothing can prevent war. We are spending Easter in the country; but all the time aeroplanes are crossing the house and every day we hear of some unfortunate refugee who asks for help. I am reading Chaucer and trying to write about our friend Roger Fry. Also Vanessa and her children come over and we play bowls, and try to go on with our painting and gardening as if we were sure of living another ten years. When I go to London I will see if I can find some books to send you. Only I find it so difficult to guess what you would like. Never mind; books are very cheap; and you can always throw them away.

I have not seen Christopher Isherwood as I had hoped but he and Mr Auden like so many people have gone to America. They dont like it, I hear; but at any rate there is more feeling of security there; and they can work better so they say. But I had wanted to hear more about you. It seems millions of miles away—your life, from this. It is full spring here; and our garden has blue, pink, white flowers—and all the hills are deep green; but very small; and our little river is about as big as a large snake; Julian used to wade across it; and sail a tiny boat. On the other hand, people crowd together. We are hardly ever alone even for a day. Would you like this change of proportion? I often envy you, for being in a large wild place with a very old civilisation. I get hints of it in what you write. Do you ever send Vanessa your paintings? Please write whenever you like; and whatever happens please go on with your autobiography; for even though I cannot help yet with it, it will be a great thing to do it thoroughly. I am giving you the advice I try to take myself—that is to work without caring what becomes of it, for the sake of doing something impersonal.

I will send this by air, and let me know if it comes safely. If so, I will go on if you dont mind these very scrappy letters; written in a garden house, after my morning working at my book.

Yours
Virginia Woolf

Ling Su-Hua (Mrs Chen)

[]

3507: To Ethel Smyth

Monday [24 April 1939]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

I’m having the usual after-influenza temperature, which makes me feel incredibly stupid. So I wired to say I wouldn’t come tomorrow.

But if I’m all right I’ll come and risk getting a seat. I thought you might want to give it away. Yes, I gather from the papers The Wreckers has been a tremendous triumph. I’m proud and pleased—its your favourite work of mine. So I’d like anyhow to see it—but whats the use if one’s shivery and all cotton wool in the head?

V.

Berg

[]

3508: To V. Sackville-West

Tuesday [25th April 1939]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Well Sibyl Colefax, this is a queer go. I’m addressing the lady who has an ancestor, and wants to write a book about him. The queer go is that the very same idea flashed into my head about 3 weeks ago—and I put it to Leonard and John at lunch; and it also had flashed in L’s head. But he’s writing to you on the morals of the case; so I won’t; only try, as you say, to get into touch with you—thats the other you, sheepdog Vita.

We came back, damn it, yesterday. And would have suggested coming over to St. [Sissinghurst], only 3 of our days went in my influenza—not Leonards: I have my own influenza; and this makes me hope you didn’t catch his. So the time went, and now we’re back; but hope to be down again, and not so tied to weekends, soon: when The Press accounts—a very dismal matter this year, Pepita the only bright spot,—are clinched, concluded—whats the word? D’you know they’re pulling down the houses next door? We’re shored up; and feel very transitory, like crows in a tree thats being cut down. Dust fills every cranny; and when the hammering begins I shall fly.

I’ve just had a letter from Ben about the Roger Fry papers—Yes, I think it an admirable idea; and will write to him. But Margery Fry, as executor, will have to be consulted. Is Ben under Kenneth Clarke? No I shouldn’t like looking after Royal pictures—thats only my relics of republicanism: I suppose its a great chance, and a lifelong adventure. What fun to be Ben—I long for news of his encounters. And to see you. We’ve been given stalls for a 1st night of Wuthering Heights—a movie. There I shall meet the real Sibyl. Shall you be up soon? Yes, I well remember buying rolls for breakfast at Vezelay [in September 1928].

Hows Gwen?

V.

Berg

[]

3509: To Benedict Nicolson

27th April 39

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Ben,

I am very glad that you are still interested in the Roger Fry papers. I have a great mass of them here, and there are others scattered about. My own feeling is that a very interesting book could be made of them, but of course you could only decide this by going through them. Also, I should have to consult Margery Fry, Rogers executor, to give permission. And she is abroad at the moment.

I will write to her, and then perhaps you would come here and discuss it.

Many congratulations on your appointment [King’s pictures].

Yours
Virginia Woolf

Vanessa Nicolson

[]

3510: To W. S. Lewis

30th April 1939

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Mr Lewis,

I am delighted to think that my article upon Cole and Walpole gave you pleasure. It is a very small return for the pleasure that your great work has given me. I felt indeed some impertinence in writing at all upon such a book, for I am a very casual and unlearned reader, and to express an opinion seemed foolish. But after all, as I reflected, you are doing the work to give pleasure to the foolish as well as the wise, and so I plunged. I heard about it from James Strachey, who told me fascinating stories of your manuscript hunts in England. With his brother, Lytton, who was a Walpole enthusiast, I used often to discuss Horace and his queer character. I only wish he could have read the Du Deffand volumes. I feel sure, though much in the dark, that Horace did not hurt her wantonly; but shall—if we are not all destroyed—enjoy the full story when you print it. And I hope that you will come and see us next time you are in London.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Sussex

[]

3511: To Elizabeth Bowen

[3 May 1939]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

Oh Elizabeth, d’you know what was put out of my head by Clive ringing up, and its been bothering me so much since that I must write it down—thats about Dickens. Not that I want to write about him—good Lord no: but the other day when I had the flu I read Nicholas Nickelby: and my brain teems with what I wish I’d said this evening. We went to Gadshill, and yesterday to Doughty Street—yes my brain teems with the amazement of Dickens, and I’m about to begin Our Mutual Friend, but will say no more, and only scrawl this to rid myself of the absurd impediment which something unsaid leaves behind. So if you’ll come another day we’ll talk about Dickens, and I’ll be Molly Grubious about the house and the old wives croans no more.

So sorry I was grumbling today

V.

Texas

[]

3512: To V. Sackville-West

4th May [1939]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.

No we hadn’t gathered the facts about your Sunday: so as we cant come on Friday (owing to a meeting of the School at Rodmell) may we come on Monday—about 3.30 as near as may be. If this is wrong, ring us up 385 Lewes (for letters aren’t delivered)

Nothing heard, we’ll come.

And then one day you’ll come here; please Mrs Nicolson.

This is added by Potto [squiggly design]

Berg

[]

3513: To Ethel Smyth

Sunday May 14th [1939]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

I have been solacing myself this wet evening by reading Jeremy Taylor, and reflecting upon my lack of what you possess—faith; which lack has led to this letter, by the way; for though he has his great moments—oh dear me yes—he has also his dronings and hummings, like all other preachers; and then I shut the book and write. I wonder how soon you would shut the book?—how much more pervious to preaching your faith makes you than my lack? I dont want an answer to that question. I dont want to invade your privacy, upon which Taylor has a very fine passage. Are you still as you were immersed in the splendid solitude of disease? Can you read, if you cant write? I hope your symptoms dont mean anything lasting I rather count upon your presence on the earth—your effluence, even if I dont come within the actual ray. Thats a compliment for you. I gather youve had a glut of them. When will they do The Wreckers again—oh but I mustnt go asking questions, or you’ll seize your old staggering pen. In fact, your hand is a Greek Goddess compared with mine. Dont you admire the paper though?—I use it only for great occasions—

I dont think I have much to say, and its sheer perversity to write to you when I have a dozen addled eggs of letters—all over a week old—wanting answers. But my head is still in that torpor which comes when the influenza dares—as if my brains had coiled like sleeping adders or gorged crocodiles, save that theyre empty. Thank the Lord, we’re going to get 2 weeks in France—after Whitsun. Oh to drink wine in the sun! Yes, theyve pulled the house down next door, and will begin hammering girders tomorrow. And we think of flitting to another Square if we can be rid of our lease.

Why do I like boring Ethel with all this? Because of her candid smile. When I cant remember how your mouth goes, I can always see your innocent blue eyes. You, Max Beerbohm and Bernard Shaw all have the same eyes—as if you’d just awakened in Heaven—

And heres L. to take my letter—my yellow worthless letter

V.

Berg

[]

3514: To Ethel Smyth

Sunday [21 May 1939]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

I’ve lost your letter in a heap—oh the American professors have started writing about my father now—in a heap of their demands for what they call intimate details: so cant be sure what you said about London. If Tuesday at 5.30 is any good, I shall be in. But dont fash your bones, as the nurses used to say. You said something about influenza, didnt you: but thats gone long since: only this knocking down of houses makes the base of my head more stupid than naturally. Also you said something about Mrs Lascelles and her tragedy. How I long to know—though why? Because I made up a story about it.

We’re going to Brittany for 2 weeks. Never been there. I have made up another story out of the names Paimpol [north coast of Brittany] etc. and the fishing fleet from [Pierre] Loti, Renan, Chateaubriand—oh and above all, Les Rochers. I’m writing about Sévigné—Have you read her? And like a worm under a stone try to lift the weight of Roger. The stone is then firmly stamped down. So I’ve about 6 books in my head. Stella Benson’s Life has been just sent me: a drivelling book, judging from 10 pages: but why choose Ellis Roberts to serve one up in cold dish water?

So end in haste to cook Sunday dinner

V.

Berg

[]

3515: To Vanessa Bell

Monday [29 May 1939]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, near Lewes, Sussex.

This small offering is to be spent simply and solely on Models Duncan and Angelica are witnesses; and if a penny goes on any other subject (to wit, gas bills or boots) they will report; the cheque will be stopped: complete confusion will result. So, good Dolphin Be warned

B.

Berg

[]

3516: To Victoria Ocampo

30th May 1939

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Victoria,

So it always happens! I’m going to France this week, just as you come to England. But I shall be back by about June 16th—either here or in London. Do write to Tavistock Square and let us hope that we can arrange a meeting.

Flying off again! How you range the world!

Yrs
Virginia Woolf

Estate of Victoria Ocampo

[]

3517: To Elizabeth Robins

Sunday [4 June 1939]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Miss Robins,

Yes, of course. I should like nothing better than to read the other book first, and then the R and I book. I rather doubt my own capacity as a critic, but such views as I have I will certainly give you; and how exciting to read the book, and perhaps encounter Oscar Wilde and Widow Green (so we always called her) and perhaps myself peeping round the door. I now remember the occasion. I wasn’t purposely eavesdropping—(not that I should much have hesitated) but was accidentally reading my book and taking a nip of Widow Green behind one of the folding doors. After the Widow had gone. I went to my father and said, “Why does she say that Katherine Symonds is becoming a Roman Catholic?” Upon which he started and said “Good Lord—I never knew you were there!” but was amused all the same. And Katherine (now Dame Furse), didn’t become an RC so my surprise was justified. But I mustn’t write my own memoirs—with a hand sticky from gardening and a pen like a shark’s nose.

We were both very happy to see you and Cousin Octavia here, and hope you’ll come soon again.

I shall be in London about the 16th: so if you would send the exciting book there, it would reach me.

You left these scraps, which I enclose.

Yrs Virginia

Sussex

[]

3518: To Ethel Smyth

[4 June 1939]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, near Lewes, Sussex

Yes, the lady whose name I cant remember but think it was Leontine Lermontov or something of the kind came: and in strictest privacy and most secret confidence, no, I didnt take to her.

She seemed to me underworld, if you know what I mean: I dont mean anything about birth, but something about mind and flesh: She was a little cringing and plausible, and wrote to thank us, which I thought excessive. On the other hand, she was as bright as a new pin and as brisk as a sand hopper. And L. thought she might pan out better in solitude. It was the quality of the flesh I didn’t like: and the clothing and the fawning. So thats all … about Leontine Lermontov. And I am trying to make a bootbag for the journey and looking for nightgowns. These annual jaunts expire one’s wardrobe.

A raging Mistral here: all beauty and joy destroyed. Miss Elizabeth Robins with eyes like pale cinders has just been over. Yes, all letters will reach me in Brittany. A hint to write: for I’m going to bask and shant have a thing to do but think of absent friends, and Madame de Sévigné Lord how I look forward to French food, wine, sun, and yellow houses. Yes, and we pass Combourg where Chateaubriand lived too.

V.

Berg

[]

3518a: To Vanessa Bell

Monday [5 June 1939]

Typewritten

Monk’s House, Rodmell, near Lewes, Sussex

I was all of a heap that you liked my story—the only person in the world whose opinion can heap me. So we might contrive something, as a ballon d’essai. You see I’m already Froggish, and typing because I should be off.

I hope the horrors of Seend didn’t flatten you out. My old mother in law has a heart attack—but we’re going [to France]. The terror of both families is their complete absence of any creativeness—hollow shells; and so one can’t get into touch.

I meant to say, you must spend all the ten Guineas on making masterpieces. I’m sure you’re the only living painter save Duncan who can. Here we’ve been pestered by an incessant mistral which spoils the country, anyhow for walking. It’s harassing, and I have to plant instead of walking. We went to see Miss Robins; spent two hours talking about her book; next day she came with Octavia and changed her mind for two hours. Still she’s rather fascinating with eyes like old goats in caves and says that Oscar Wilde had relations of a very different kind with her. Also remembers Widow Green and father. She is our only visitor; and that’s rather a relief. Now please write. It’ll be sent on.

We’ve had one offer for 52; but they wanted us to decorate. So we refused. But we’ve offered for Meck. Sq. So may well be ruined. Would you tell your friends about the flat and studio. Oh how divine to see you again—it spoils my holiday, being away from you, who are the source of all joy and succulence. And kiss Angelica, and Quentin; whom we shall pass on the road. And love me. And have models. And paint me a picture.

B

King’s College, Cambridge. Modern Fiction Studies. Vol. 30. Summer 1984.

[]

Letters 3519-3549 (June-September 1939)

3519: To John Lehmann

9th June 39

Hostellerie du Dauphin, Vannes [France]

Dear John,

I finished the pamphlet about reviewing. It’ll want some re-writing. Leonard disagrees with some of it: and is going to write a reply attacking. We thought of printing both together, and calling it (as its too hot to think) Reviewing: by Virginia and Leonard Woolf.

Weather almost too fine. London broiling too I suppose. We’ve been sitting among the tombs at Carnac. Lovely towns—rather dull inland. But its great fun so far.

Yrs V.W.

John Lehmann

[]

3520: To Molly Maccarthy

Sunday, 11th June 1939

Hostellerie du Dauphin, Vannes [France]

Dearest Molly,

I began a long letter to you, and then Miss Elizabeth Robins interrupted and the dog walked on it: It was only to ask how you are. This is to ask the same thing. But for God’s sake don’t think you have to answer, unless you wish. I shall hear from Nessa.

The Wolves are on tour as you see, and this is a very nice town, a real aristocrat, like Ottoline or the Duchess of Montrose compared with Lewes and Brighton who are merely Sibyl Colefax and Dora Sanger. However, I won’t tell you anything about the druids and Carnac, or Les Rochers and Madame de Sévigné. You know I’m still midway through her; and was thus enchanted to see the chaise longue and the chamber pot she took to Court—like a soup tureen. But that’s all. Travellers are the greatest bores out, and this one has a spasmodic fountain pen—now blotting, now costive. How I hate them!

Desmond will have told you all about the Memoir Club [30 March]; and how Clive got a bit restive, some old grudge against Roger raising his hackles and making Nessa as marmoreal as a stone. The stonier she, the more hackled he. We were well served for having it sans you, sans Desmond, and sans the Keynes’s—who took it rather ill. So please arrange another, and stay at Monks House, which has been much smoothed since your fall. And read your Paper.

I won’t now go on to say how often I think of you, as that’s an old Fisher Aunt’s phrase, and generally meant a snub following. But I always feel you meet crises such as operations infinitely better than I do. In short, I can’t say how I admire you, and with what affection Leonard and I discussed you walking on the bank of a river last night when the green was so green that an old curé on a bench looked for some reason bright purple. Do you like being discussed? I do. And it’s rare at our age. Yet how do we exist, save on the lips of our friends? So last night, between 6 and 7 you were absolutely incandescent.

Excuse this babble. It’s raining at last and the little Brides—communiquées—are trotting along under gamps [umbrellas].

Let me come and see you as soon as we’re back—10 days time. Oh, we’re leaving Tavistock Sqre for Mecklenburgh.

Love from us both.

Yrs V.W.

Mrs Michael MacCarthy

[]

3521: To Vanessa Bell

Tuesday [13 June 1939]

Concarneau [France]

No letter from you. In spite of the fact that you’re living in the hub of the universe. and I’ve only been meandering from town to town. We spent 5 days at Vannes, also saw Les Rochers, and came on here yesterday. Vannes is a most sympathetic dignified town, with a quay, blue ships, old walls, old women marching about in black velvet robes with white caps, and in short all that one needs. I wont say that L. is satisfied with the cooking. Sometimes we’ve struck very bad inns. The country isn’t exciting, but there are lovely low sandhills and troops of pines and grey farms—also semitransparent green corn standing against the sea. The sea is mostly long lakes. And Auray is a lovely town. How I love reflections in water—fishing boats dripping blue, the green so green it seems to make every other colour either black or purple—is this an illusion? We discussed Mollys [MacCarthy] character walking by a river and the cuckoos were snapping—I cant get my words in hotels—all round. Yes, I dont think England can compare for amenity or space and composition with France. I rather suspect your brother brushes have spoilt the north. They’re to be seen at the street corners. And the English have begun for the first time here. I wrote to Molly. Have you heard of her? I see Francis Acland is dead. Wasn’t Hester Ritchie in love with him? I think we’ve got 37 M. [Mecklenburgh] Sqre. but havent let 52 so please do your best or we shall be ruined. Les Rochers we saw in a livid broiling light, but I was greatly moved—an old farm—chateau made of silver oatcakes. And a shabby distinguished garden, all symmetrical. Not, to my mind, very good churches, but the common buildings are so aristocratic. And the colour everywhere so harmonious—all greys and biscuit whites. Cant form my letters, poor Dolphin. won’t be able to read. Home, Rodmell on Tuesday. I see Simon has a show. Are you engulfed in society? Are you painting from models? Now we explore Quimper.

Love to adorable Duncan and my fiendish niece.

B

We were broiled alive for 6 days—almost too hot to open one’s eyes—now its cold.

Berg

[]

3522: To John H. Simpson

June 15th [1939]

Concarneau, Brittany

Dear Mr Simpson,

We are driving about France—hence the delay in answering.

I dont follow the [publisher] reader’s argument altogether. Why is bugger worse than bitch? Why bog worse than W-C? However there is a special code about these things. I look forward to seeing what the innuendo about candle is, and if I can spot it. But soon these words will have lost their force—a great boon—for I dont like to be held up in writing English, and the taboos inhibit me. This pen is such that I cant write more, but we hope to see you again in London, or in Birmingham.

Yours sincerely,
Virginia Woolf

I’ve just found this letter put away unposted in my bag. Rodmell—June 20th

Library of the University of California, Los Angeles

[]

3523: To Elaine Robson

15th June 1939

Dinan, Brittany

Dear Elaine,

I had a lovely poem, every line except one, rhyming, from you the very day we left for France. And as we have been eating and drinking and walking and climbing up and down cliffs all day since I have not been able to thank you. I liked your poem very much. Could you write one in French? And make it rhyme too? Please try. I wish I were French and English as you are, like an ice that is half strawberry and half lemon. We had to leave Sally alone at Rodmell. She sleeps by herself in Uncle Leonard’s arm chair. We get back on Tuesday at seven in the morning and she will wake up to find us. Will you come to tea soon. I will get another yellow cake if you will. So I must say Good Bye.

Next time I will try

To write a better

and longer letter

But now I must get a

French stamp and post this

To Elaine in London

Without a Rhyme.

Virginia

Elaine Robson

[]

3524: To Vanessa Bell

Sunday June? [18 June 1939]

Bayeux [France]

I got your letter much to my happiness but its not much use trying to write save out of devotion (unrequited) because I’m sitting in a courtyard at an Inn table, with the Feast of St John going on—that is gipsies dancing, old men in black velvet suits with silver buttons, divine youths in mediaeval doublets, girls with lace caps like the Eiffel tower dancing and the usual merrygorounds. They’re celebrating midsummer night—The din is infernal. And I’m half tipsy. We have been in great luck this last week, always striking the right Inn, and the food, though too shelly and fishy for my taste is so succulent that L. has had to succumb. The civilisation is astonishing—everyone polite, virtuous, happy, non-political. Bloomsbury at its best—I mean no logic chopping. And I’m even favourably impressed by the Roman Catholics—they strew the streets with branches and flowers, and we saw an archbishop—a man all clad in white samite under a palanquin of gold and stars—blessing a fishing boat slung with roses today against a lead blue sea. Its certainly a great advantage to have a reason for dressing up. But its so dark I cant see. What a bore to come back to England, except that I shall be happier with you than here. Also Inns are oppresive after 2 weeks. Now theyre lighting a great triangle of Japanese lanterns and we must traipse about the streets.

I’ve no news, save that the Sidney Webbs want to see us, and Eddie Sackville. and Philip Morrell wants me to subscribe to a home for fallen women, to be called The Lady Ottoline home; in which her portrait, whether as example or warning, is to be hung perpetually.

We get to Rodmell on Tuesday and shall come up on Friday I expect. We’ve got 37 M. Sq I suppose rather rashly.

Dear me, this is a dull letter. Please believe that I’m more amusing in the flesh. and give my love to—here’s the procession so I must follow.

Poor dear tipsy B sends love.

Berg

[]

3525: To Ethel Smyth

Sunday, St. Johns Night [18 June 1939]

Bayeux [Normandy]

No we kept clear of St Malo, and went down to Vannes, and round to Carnac, Paimpol etc: and are now here, in the midst of crackers, fireworks, religious processions, and endless merry go rounds. The tobacconist, who says he’s descended from the Bishop of Dublin, but cant remember the name, says they’ll keep it up till 3 a.m. Its midsummer night, rather cold, but Lord how rapturous and civilised and sensuous the French are compared with us, and how it liberates the soul to drink a bottle of good wine daily and sit in the sun, and even the white robed clergy under Palanquins dont offend, but even induce in me regrets for our stony and grim Protestantism—Yes, I went to Les Rochers; also saw Carnac, which is somehow impressive, like an army of old washerwomen emerging from primeval times, each with a sheet on her head. Dear me, what a row the French do make—and no snobbery. And I’m reading Colette, “Duo” [1934]; all about love; and rather too slangy for my vocabulary, but what a born writer! How she walzes through the dictionary. I got your letters, and read them with greed. I dont want to come back to England, but we cross tomorrow. An old man in black velvet with silver buttons is playing a bagpipe such as the Druid shepherds must have played to Iberian goats. And now a youth in medieval scarlet has seized a girl with a tower of white lace in her hair and theyre dancing. Can you imagine Mr Piddinghoe so doing with Mrs Sidgwick—and what the use of logic and chaste Cambridge conversations if one cant do that?

However its growing cold, and I’m sleepy, having been to Caen, having done all sorts of exciting things. What? Well, I wont begin guide book writing at my time of tipsiness. Yes, I agree that The Poets Pub—Dotties and Yeats—is a sophisticated humbug. The French figure at 60 does not lend itself to a jumper—the good lady in front of me is like a cottage loaf; but as tight and tidy as a pin or a mackerel.

Now the lights in our Hotel lanterns are about to be lit, and I must follow St John through the streets

Excuse this scrap and scrawl, which testifies to my devotion and is for that reason to be excused.

V.

Berg

[]

3526: To Beatrice Webb

18th June, 1939

Bayeux [Normandy]

Dear Mrs Webb,

Your letter has just reached me here. We are much disappointed to have missed seeing you in London, and hope you will suggest another visit later. We shall be at Monks House, Rodmell in August and September, and should be delighted if you and Mr Webb would visit us. In October we move to Mecklenburgh Square; and I will send you our new address, later.

It would be a great pleasure to us both to see you again.

Please give our greetings to Mr Webb.

Yours very sincerely,
Virginia Woolf

University of London (Passfield Papers)

[]

3527: To Benedict Nicolson

23rd June [1939]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Ben,

I wrote to Sissinghurst to ask if you would send back my key, but I expect you never got the letter, so I’m writing to St James’s Palace; on chance. Could you send it, as I shall find myself one of these nights locked out. I’m afraid I’ve had to move some of your papers, as I’m starting work again.

Perhaps you would look in some time and then we could see how to arrange things. Also theres a letter waiting for you, but I’m not sure where to send it.

Yours ever
Virginia Woolf

Vanessa Nicolson

[]

3528: To Victoria Ocampo

26th June 39

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Victoria,

I am very sorry that you were annoyed the other day and thought that I didn’t wish to see you.

Its quite true—I was annoyed. Over and over again I’ve refused to be photographed. Twice I had made excuses so as not to sit to Madame Freund. And then you bring her without telling me, and that convinced me that you knew that I didn’t want to sit, and were forcing my hand. As indeed you did. Its difficult to be rude to people in one’s own house. So I was photographed against my will about 40 times over, which annoyed me. But what particularly annoyed me was that I lost all chance of talking to you. That you will agree is a proof that I did want to see you. And there wont be another chance till Heaven knows when. And Heaven knows too what is the point of these photographs. I can’t see it. And I hate it.

Excuse this frankness; but if you’re honest, so am I.

Yours
Virginia Woolf

Estate of Victoria Ocampo

[]

3529: To George Rylands

Monday [26 June 1939]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

High time that the old Wolves refreshed their memories of the Golden Boy. Also the House is coming down and they flitting. So come on Tuesday July 4th at 4.30 and rejoice.

Old Virginia

George Rylands

[]

3530: To Elizabeth Robins

28th June 39

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Miss Robins,

Yes, France was very lovely but its over. And now we’re back here, but I’m afraid nothing has happened yet about the play. Mr Priestley, says that he can’t venture on a new play this season. However, we’ve just heard that the Co-operative Society, of all people, is (or are) starting a theatre, and as Leonard has a great name among co-operators we are going to try them. Or to ask Peacock, the agent, to.

About your book [Both Sides of the Curtain]—you ask what I should say if you sent it me as you finish it. I should say its one of the very few books I should like to read, and that all my faculties, such as they are after struggling with a difficult biography all the morning, are at your service.

So I hope you will send it whole, or bit by bit. Save for weekends, we shall be here till the end of July.

Leonard is out coping with the Labour Party so I wont send his respects, but mine.

Are the [Swiss] mountains doing you good?—as I was taught by my father that they did?

Yours
Virginia Woolf

Sussex

[]

3531: To Ethel Smyth

4th July [1939]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

I think it likely that I owe you a letter. But you see why I didn’t write—as soon as we came back, my poor old mother in law, with whom we’d had tea the day before, fell and broke 2 ribs. Then she was taken to a nursing home, and there lingered; finally died and was buried yesterday. All sorts of family conclaves were held here—Now its over,—

Meanwhile, we’ve taken 37 Mburgh Sqre: and at the moment L. is measuring the book cases with a view to the move, in August.

Are you in Ireland? You said something about it, in the letter I got and read—oh such years ago—in a sunny market place in France.

Well this is only the waggle of a finger tip in your direction, which is uncertain.

Harold [Nicolson], I hear, says there’s to be war on July 12th; which adds to the general mess.

So no more

V.

Berg

[]

3532: To Angelica Bell

4th July [1939]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

I think this [allowance] is due, and overdue.

We called in after the funeral yesterday, but were told by a man that Miss Bell was in her Bath. Now I hope Miss Bell is in her nest. Mary Hutchinson is dining with us so I must wash.

V.

Texas

[]

3533: To Elizabeth Robins

11th July 39

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Miss Robins,

This is just to say that the MS. has arrived safely.

My instinct is to gulp it down entire, once I am free, and then, I hope to talk it over with you as a whole. Of course I’ll scribble criticisms in the margin, if you want them. But of what? Style, grammar, dates? But I dont suppose there’s anything I could say about all that. If there’s anything special, let me know—otherwise I’ll gulp.

Yours
Virginia Woolf

Sussex

[]

3534: To Benedict Nicolson

[13 July 1939]

Postcard

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

We should like very much to come in if we can on Friday and sit on the floor. [See p. 413.]

We went on arguing till 1.30 the other night about an epitaph for Ottoline, so I wish you had come. But anyhow you are dining on the 18th.

V.W.

Vanessa Nicolson

[]

3535: To John Lehmann

Saturday [15 July 1939]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear John,

I enclose a letter from Geoffrey Agnew about a book on Sickert, and have said that the man—I cant read his name—had better get into touch with you.

Its magnificent down here, and I hope with you. My nose is not among the flowers, but on the grindstone. Moses had a very good show—I’m reading it.

Love from us both
V.

Ben N. said that Graham Bell is the best of the young critics,—in case the slimy toad WR [William Rothenstein] refuses, he might be worth considering.

John Lehmann

[]

3536: To Ling Su-Hua

16th July 39

Typewritten

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Sue,

I am afraid that I have been very bad about answering your letters. It is partly that I am a very bad letter writer—after writing all the morning about Roger Fry, I hate the type writer. And then we went to France for a holiday, driving about Brittany; and directly after that my mother in law had an accident; was ill and died. And now we have to turn out of this house, which is crammed with books and papers and type and furniture and go to another. 37 Mecklenburgh Square will be our address in September. So I hope you will write there.

Also it is difficult to think of any news worth sending. One only caps stories of war—and you have enough of your own. Here they say it must come next month. That is what Harold Nicolson who is in Parliament told me two nights ago. By this time one is so numb that it seems impossible to feel anything, save that dull vague gloom. We are getting used, I suppose. But it will be different when it comes. Like you, I find work the best thing; and I have more than I can do. It is dull work—sorting letters, trying to find quotations; trying to fit them together. Roger Fry left such masses of papers; and they are full of interest; but full too of detail. I keep wanting Julian to help me. I am keeping all your chapters together. As I told you, I shant read them till the book is done. And please go on with it, as it might be of such great interest. I am also sorry that I have never sent more books—I began to feel for one thing that books would never reach you. But I will get some cheap ones this week; chancing that you may like them. There again, I dont know what to send, whether new or old, poetry or fiction or biography. But tell me some time what it is that you would like.

Thank you very much for the red and black poster, which I liked. And you say you are sending something else to Vanessa. I am just going to dine with her. That is a great pleasure. And I wish you lived near and could come in. These little meetings are the best things we have at present. We talk about pictures not about war. I am so sorry for all you are having to suffer—but what is the use of saying that, all these miles away? Any time you want to write please do. The letter will be sent on. Next week we go down to Sussex, Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes is the address. Will one be able to work? Will one have to fill the house with refugees? There are aeroplanes always round us; and air raid shelters—but I still believe we shall have peace. And there I will stop. With my love and believe in my sympathy, futile as it seems.

Yours
Virginia Woolf

Ling Su-Hua (Mrs Chen)

[]

3537: To Shena, Lady Simon

20th July [1939]

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Shena,

I’m so sorry, we shall be away. We go on the 25th;—we shall be up again, off and on, because we’re moving house, to 37 Mecklenburgh Sqre in the middle of August.

So you must come there,—but I wish it could have been sooner. And the chaos is already such that I doubt if there’ll ever be a room to sit in.

This is being pulled down.

Yrs
Virginia Woolf

Sussex

[]

3538: To R. C. Trevelyan

21st July 39

52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1

My dear Bob,

I ought to have thanked you long ago for my share in your collected poems. But we were abroad—moving house, and so on.

I’ve been reading them again, at intervals; and I must thank you, not only for giving us the book, but for the poems. I didn’t realise how much I liked them. They come through—so I feel reading them together—more than I’d remembered. Its as though all superfluities had been consumed and whats left is very satisfying. That is a quality I admire very much, and don’t find often among the moderns. And often there’s a special colourless (perhaps I mean unexaggerated, or impersonal) beauty that I find also lasting and possessing—not surprising, but stealing over one. Also, in the Letters especially, I like to trace the character of the writer, the peculiar humour and idiosyncracy of his mind, a quality I find oftener in prose. I’m not getting the right words for liking your poems. Never mind; perhaps one can’t, when poetry is good—it is too complete to break up into reasons. At least I find it so.

But I wanted to thank you, and take this occasion since I’ve just been made angry—tho’ thats too strong a word—by a silly review by Stephen Spender.

Leonard is out, or he would add his thanks too.

Yours ever,
Virginia Woolf

Sussex

[]

3538a: To Katharine Furse

21st July 39

[Handwritten]

52, Tavistock Square, W.C.1

Dear Katharine,

Thats extremely interesting—that you should have written your memoirs: I’m so glad—I saw the letter in the Times & hoped you might be at work. I met with some references to your father, by the way, in Roger Fry’s papers. (I’m writing about R.F.) May I quote?—would you like to see? Its only admiration for him & Horatio Brown in Venice in 1891. It hints at the forbidden topics—I’m glad to think that now we needn’t hush up so much. Are you being open?—anyhow more so that the Horatio Brown Biography.

If Macmillan dont, by any chance, publish, might the Hogarth Press see the book? But of course Macmillans will; What a mine you must have to work in!

I do look forward to it. We are off now to Sussex—Perhaps in the autumn we may meet—

Yours affly
Virginia Woolf

Bristol. Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature. Vol. 9, Number 2. Fall 1990.

[]

3539: To May Sarton

24 July [1939]

Postcard

52 T[avistock] S[quare, W.C.1]

I’m so sorry—we go down tomorrow to the dew pond on the other side of this card. So I’m afraid there’ll be no more evenings at 52 T.S. But I hope you’ll come to 37 Mecklenburgh Sqre.

V.W.

Berg

[]

3540: To May Sarton

July 29th [1939]

Postcard

[Monk’s House,] Rodmell [Sussex]

Thanks very much for the poems, which I shall put into the 1940 cellar safe. On the other side you will find last Christmas. I’m now making a cake.

V.W.

Berg

[]

3541: To Vanessa Bell

Saturday [August/September ? 1939]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

A brother of L’s is coming to tea tomorrow. I tell you, in case you would curse me if you came: but I hope you will come. Especially as the wife admires yr pots and chair covers and would be a possible client for Q.

So wait in hope of a visit from some, any, all

B.

Berg

[]

3541a: To Katharine Furse

4th Aug 39

Monk’s House, Rodmell, near Lewes, Sussex.

Dear Katharine,

I’m so glad you think of doing a book on your father as well; and will send it to the Hogarth Press if you do. They aren’t any longer myself; we took John Lehmann as partner; and I went out. But they’ll be just as much interested as I shall be. And I much look forward to the other book; and hope it’ll come out this autumn.

What a blessing you are telling the truth about your father—I suppose you know the account Sir Charles Holmes gives in his book Self and Partner of the dismemberment of the au[t]obiography underwent in Horatio Brown’s version? He was then a publisher. Can one still print the whole? Or did the old frumps burn it?

My quotation is very short; I enclose it. But as its still to be verified by Basil Williams, to whom the letter was written, you wont say anything about it. Because he’s a crusty old man I’m told; and hasn’t yet given his blessing.

Do come in the autumn; we are moving house; 37 Mecklenburgh Square after August 24th.

Yours affectionate
Virginia Woolf

[Enclosure]

[Virginia Woolf citing a letter of Roger Fry to Basil Williams.]

Venice. 1891.

“Last night we stayed up till the small hours discussing this preposterous paradox started by Symonds in real good faith namely that Botticelli was either a fool with a knack of drawing who didnt understand the least what he was about, or else a puritan satirist who tried to bring the sensuosity of the Renaissance into contempt by his pot-bellied Venuses &c. &c. I tried to convince him but in vain; he is wrong and ought to know it—the worst of it is that defending Botticelli is not at all what I am naturally keen on now but such a theory demanded criticism wh. alas I was not very well able to give. Symonds ended by saying “Of course we are all very thankful to Botticelli for having inspired those pages of Walter Pater” and then he added with what I think was hardly good taste in one so obviously a rival, “That is the worst thing I’ve yet said about Botticelli.”

[Woolf resumes:] Symonds perhaps saw in the young Cambridge art student some one who could still be very easily shocked and was worth shocking for he continued the process at his own flat. “There one evening,” Roger Fry continued, “we had the most extraordinary company I ever met; a long description of Ronald Gower &c follows which ends—“The details of it I would rather tell you than write…. Symonds is the most pornographic person I ever met but not in the least nasty…. he has become most confidential to me over certain passages in his life. He is a curious creature—very dogmatic and overbearing in discussion but with nice humane broad views of life.”

Symonds and Brown, he says elsewhere, were both extremely good to him, and made the whole difference to his stay.

Bristol. Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature. Vol. 9, Number 2. Fall 1990.

[]

3542: To Donald Brace

10th Aug 1939

Typewritten

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Mr Brace,

I have been reading in manuscript a book [Both Sides of the Curtain] which has interested me very much—the memoirs of Elizabeth Robins, who, as I expect you know, was the American actress who made Ibsen famous in England; and is also the author of The Magnetic North [1904].

These memoirs cover the first years of her life in London, (c. 1889-90) and describe her dealings with Beerbohm Tree, Irving; and give in particular a most interesting account of Oscar Wilde. However, the point to my mind is that she has written a fascinating book, apart from having known celebrities. So I told her that I advised her to send it to you; and that I would add a word from myself. But I feel sure that if you read it, you will not need any recommendation from me. I read it with excitement all through.

It is a long book; and she is at work on another volume. But what she has shown me is complete in itself, and could be published as it stands. I know she is anxious for an early decision,—she is well on in the seventies—and any help you could give in this way would be much appreciated.

With kind regards from us both,
yours sincerely,
Virginia Woolf

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

[]

3543: To V. Sackville-West

19th Aug: [1939]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, near Lewes, Sussex

Isn’t it nice sometimes to write a letter one doesn’t have to write? So this is one. I’ve been walking on the marsh and found a swan sitting in a Saxon grave. This made me think of you. Then I came back and read about Leonardo—Kenneth Clark—good I think: this made me also think of you. And in a minute I must cook some macaroni.

We’re half way through our move—have no house at the moment—only boxes in vans. Lord what a mess; in a rage I tore up masses of papers. More and more and more remain. I’ve two nice rooms at the top,—I like them—there you’ll come—one side is chimneys on a hill, I suppose Islington—t’other all green fields and the Foundlings playing. So we’ll sit in the window, and I shall say, which rung Vita—which rung am I on?

I had a visit from Eddie the other day: and really he wrung my heart—like a face tossed up from the bottom of the sea on a beach—one of those bits of wasted white wood sea eaten—a death mask. But whats it all about? Three years of misery. Himself I suppose (being, though sympathetic, uncharitable.) Rebecca West came over—but why so prosperous and fat? and why this dillydallying with the world and the flesh? No, I dont think one makes much headway—she’s too distorted one foot on sea and one on land, as your ancestor sang. I’m in a rage. That devil woman Giselle Freund calmly tells me she’s showing those d—d photographs—and I made it a condition she shouldn’t. Dont you think it damnable?—considering how they [Ocampo and Freund] filched and pilfered and gate crashed—the treacherous vermin. Do give her a piece of your mind if you see her. I loathe being hoisted about on top of a stick for any one to stare at. Shall you send me a book to read soon? Are you tackling the old ancestor—whats his name [Thomas Sackville]? Now I’ve enjoyed writing when I needn’t; thats not to say you’ve enjoyed reading. And which rung are we on—my poor Potto and V?

V.

Inez has left Stephen for Mr Madge a poet.

Berg

[]

3544: To John Lehmann

Saturday [19 August 1939]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear John,

Could you come and stay next week end, that is 26th? Perhaps Morgan will be here—anyhow we hope you can. There is a lot of gossip besides the old H.P.—and more peace here than in the basement. What a turmoil! I hope its settling.

Yrs
V.W.

John Lehmann

[]

3545: To Ethel Smyth

[20 August 1939]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, near Lewes, Sussex

Yes I know, though you have been forbearance itself that I have been the very opposite. Two days ago, perched in the ruins of Tavistock Sqre, I took up the pen: then the man came about the geyser [water-heater] … So to 37 Meck : so here; so back again for the last worst fight of them all on Thursday. Then we shall be installed. And I’ve two nice quiet rooms right at the top only at present they beckon like fields of Paradise across the river of Time—oh and my pen has a hair; so I cant finish the phrase.

In the intervals, we’re down here, grilling in the garden—a forest of dahlias and zinnias; and of a morning I struggle to finish Roger—how to deal with love affairs—thats the particular problem now—then bowls, Leonard beats me; then reading—what? Oh Pascal now. and so to reflections upon theology. Miss Robins came over, remembers you at Hill House; is writing her memoirs on a scale of one year to 500 pages. Its like following an insect across an ordnance map, but very fascinating. What about yours? Then there’s the war—black outs: a man shot in the river where I walk; and the Labour party meeting here. I cant make a song of this, not a consecutive phrase, for I’m too hot. Its only to show you I’ve a loving heart. But that you never doubt. I was amused to hear of Drishane and the dilapidated Edith. No, I never read their [Somerville and Ross] books. one of my vacancies, of which I’ve many, as you know. Did the visit end on a note of harmony? Yes, I think landscape a great support. Who prop in these dull days my mind? Well the downs and the river Ouse, in spite of the man who shot himself and the sheep I found on its back. Can nature be called beneficent? I doubt it. So back to Pascal, and in hopes of your memoirs.

V.

Berg

[]

3546: To Judith Stephen

Aug. 22nd [1939]

Typewritten

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

My dear Judith,

Are you back? The last letter I had from you said that you were sitting half naked in an Inn yard about to plunge into the Pyrenees. Since when no news. The other day I heard that Leslie Humphreys—oh how does he spell it? had been to see over our flat. We’ll let him have it cheap, if it’s not taken already. But the thing I meant to say was that though, as Leonard decrees, we mustn’t ask you to stay, will you ask yourself? And now we’ve a garden room of a sort and can put up two; so will you bring anyone you like—Leslie, if he’s in London; or we could get old Tom [Eliot]; or William [Plomer]. Only not the weekend of 16th Sept. The middle of the week is also possible and less somnolent perhaps.

We are in an ambiguous position, without a house; that is, with two houses, but none to live in; but hope to settle a few chairs on Thursday at 37 Mecklenburgh Square; which is now our town address. But write here. And what’s been happening? Here, as usual, the crisis is pretty thick; but lets leave that out, as its a bore croaking in concert. Rodmell has its suicide, and two escaped prisoners, by way of a private enterprise, and I only just missed the convict, and the man in a canoe who shot himself. Otherwise we have made some new improvements, and bowls are going strong; Quentin and I beat Leonard and Angus Davidson last night. Leonard is simply rampant; not a stroke but hits the jack.

A large Labour Party meeting [at Rodmell] discussed education two nights ago; Louie [Everest] read a paper; even Nessa gave tongue. But I mustn’t drivel on; and there’s so much to say I’m stopped like a bottle held upside down.

So lets try to fix a date, but of course its left entirely and completely to you as the younger generation.

Virginia

Nigel Henderson

[]

3546a: To Katharine Furse

28th Aug 39

Monks House Rodmell Lewes Sussex

My dear Katharine,

I would have written before, but have been up and down, changing house, and now there doesnt seem much point in talking about books!

But what I wanted to say, with reference to my own book on Roger Fry, is that I will naturally leave out the word “pornographic” is his descritpion of your father’s talk—if you seriously wish it. For my part, I admit I’d much rather not. I dont like tampering with sentences, because I feel that’s the beginning of the descent which lands one in Horatio Brown’s bog. Also, in the context, it is so obvious that R.F. was a very unformed priggish boy, immensely admiring your father, but with all his Quaker prejudices thick upon him. He was having a frightful struggle with his parents at the time—they hated art and wanted him to be a scientist. Your father he always spoke of as one of the people who had done most to awaken him. When theres time, will you let me know what you wish. I like your little reference to our schoolroom; how we enjoyed having you! Uncas—d’you reme[m]ber? Let us hope we may meet in the autumn, at 37 Mecklenburgh Square,—if its ever ready, if theres any peace for any of us. I do look forward to your book. Theres no mention of Charles Furse in R.F. letters. But I imagine they were at opposite ends.

Yours affectionately
Virginia Woolf

Bristol. Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature. Vol. 9, Number 2. Fall 1990.

[]

3547: To Ethel Smyth

29th Aug: [1939]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, near Lewes, Sussex

Just listened in to the Prime Minister, from which it seems that there’s another day of peace anyhow.

Oh what a bad Virginia psychologist you are! I leave this hanging in a vacuum, because though it arose from reading your last letter, the connections are broken.

In fact thats the sum of the situation—here we are on a small sunny island—outside wastes of gloom and dark. I peg away at Roger Fry: L. arranges the now complete muddle of a Press, where no one will call to fetch books—all vans commandeered: and a flat entirely blocked with unpacked furniture—again, no vans to send unpackers. So there’s enough, let alone transporting clerks here if war comes to engage all his magnificent powers.

And in between times I read—what? A mixture of Gide, Pascal and the latest biography.

Thoughts of Ethel curl, like flames from an invisible fire, round corners. And now and then I walk off, miles away, into the downs, find a deserted farm wall, and lie among the thistles and the straw.

Thats about all I can put together of our state. Should you ever connect pen and paper, well you might remember me. But all’s so dislocated, I cant hope it—nobody answers letters—everything hangs fire.

V.

We go up to tackle the flat problem [at Mecklenburgh Square] on Thursday.

Berg

[]

3548: To V. Sackville-West

Tuesday 29th Aug. [1939]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, near Lewes, Sussex

Well, there’s another day of peace—I mean we’ve just listened in to the P.M. I suppose Harold came back [from the House of Commons], so you didn’t come [to Rodmell].

I cant help letting hope break in,—the other prospect is too mad.

But I dont think I’m philosophic—rather, numbed. Its so hot and sunny on our little island—L. gardening, playing bowls, cooking our dinner: and outside such a waste of gloom. Of course I’m not in the least patriotic, which may be a help, and not afraid, I mean for my own body. But thats an old body. And all the same I should like another ten years: and I like my friends: and I like the young. That’ll all go forever if—Meanwhile, not a van will come to unpack furniture or remove books at 37: all’s held up: publishing and moving blocked. We go up on Thursday to see whats to be done.

Otherwise come at any time, and indeed, my dearest creature, whatever rung I’m on, the ladder is a great comfort in this kind of intolerable suspension of all reality—something real.

But isn’t it odd?—one cant fold it in any words.

V.

Berg

[]

3549: To V. Sackville-West

[2 September 1939]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

Yes, dearest Creature, come at any moment you like and share our pot. Alone today and what a mercy!

I did like your letter. And if I’m dumb and chill, it doesn’t mean I dont always keep thinking of you—one of the very few constant presences is your’s, and so—well no more. Yes, I sit in a dumb rage, being fought for by these children whom one wants to see making love to each other.

So come: and I’ll write to you, if to no one else, when ever I’ve a moment free.

dearest creature, how I go on seeing you, tormented.

V.

Berg

[]

Letters 3550-3577 (September-December 1939)

3550: To Raymond Mortimer

Thursday [7 September 1939]

Typewritten

37 Mecklenburgh Square [W.C.1]

Dear Raymond,

Many thanks for your letter. I’ve an idea or two at the back of my mind for a possible article—perhaps Gilbert White into whom I’ve plunged by way of a respite, or theres an obscure autobiography that I unearthed in the local library—theres an account of a party at Abbotsford that might be made amusing. Shall I try these first; and if they dont work, then I’ll ask you for Gray, but dont keep him if you want him done. About 1500 words I suppose. Is there any special date you have in mind? I’m horribly rusty, and distracted, so you must be severe and reject.

I’m so glad you think of trying a weekly article on old books. That would be a relief. And it would be fun now and then to re-read a classic. Like you, I’ve been steeped for months in memoirs—but French.

We’re up for the day, unpacking furniture here; but its still uninhabitable. So excuse this relic of paper, and general mess. The war caught us on the move.

I hope we may meet. You won’t be giving up the N.S. will you?

Yours ever

no pen, so I must type, Virginia Woolf

King’s

[]

3551: To V. Sackville-West

8th Sept [1939]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, near Lewes, Sussex

Isn’t it difficult to write letters? D’you feel it? Id like to know what you feel. Every now and then one seems completely cut off. Not in the body. That is, there’s an incessant bother of small arrangements—2 Hogarth Press clerks [Mrs Nicholls and Miss Perkins] to put up; mattresses to buy, curtains to make; the village swarming with pregnant women and cottages without a chair or table to furnish out of scraps from the attic. So why does one feel inert, oppressed with solitude? Partly I suppose that one cant work. At least today I wrote ten sentences of Roger, but each word was like carrying a coal scuttle to the top of the house. Yesterday we were in London—seeing Stephen Spender, seeing John, laying carpets, half listening for the siren. I think I boasted too soon about not being afraid physically Anyhow I was glad when we were out on the road home again.

Oh yes, what you said about Julian was what’s been on my mind all the time. I must be naturally dense. At least, it took his death to make me—oh its no use trying to say how one goes on glooming. Mercifully, Quentin has been rejected by the Territorials—his old tuberculosis; and now has been given a job on the farm by Maynard.

This has been interrupted; and its not worth sending, save as Potto’s kind of scratch at your door. Its broiling hot: I’ve been walking by the river, and came on 6 cygnets paddling in the brooks.

The week ends we have the clerks down; and so have so far escaped the women and children of Bermondsey. Have you?

Yr. V.

13th Sept This got put away: and isnt worth sending save to draw an answer perhaps from you

Berg

[]

3552: To Ethel Smyth

12th or 13th [September 1939]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, near Lewes, Sussex

Well Ethel, I know its quite impossible to write. At the same time I have a great wish to be written to. And I’m not going to tell you all the worries and bothers: the expectant mothers, curtain making, entertaining refugees—for the less we talk of these things and the more we talk of Plato and Shakespeare the better.

But can you read? Isnt it like being knocked on the head? I struggle out to my room, and cant believe I was ever writing a life of Roger Fry, or shall ever finish it. Then I try a story—no go. So to read Greek with a crib. Happily, we have to arrange our horrid London muddle—electricians and movers and clerks: and shall we or shant we try to bring out our books? Its really a mercy to have a bone to gnaw. I didn’t much like London though I admit. So silent, so hot, so brooding. And to think we’ve taken a 10 years lease of that mansion!

I rather suspect you have a method of your own for living out this kind of horror. My only relief is that Quentin is employed safely driving a tractor—rejected by the army. Its hard work talking to clerks. Thats been the only work I’ve done since last week. But you see my little tap already dries up.

I suppose Sussex is off, your visit I mean. We stay here till October anyhow: then I suppose London. Next letter I shall write about Plato and Shakespeare. So if you can move a pen, do try—I dont mean write to me about Racine or Montaigne—but about anything.

Excuse dulness—

Yr V.

Berg

[]

3553: To Ethel Smyth

Tuesday 26th [September 1939]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, near Lewes, Sussex

Yes it was angelic of you to write. And I would have answered—but since Sept 1st this house has been a refugee haunt—always a clerk from the Press, or some fugitive, and God knows, though I’ve no cause to complain, since we escaped 3 East end children, visitors fritter one’s day to shreds. The last went this morning. So until raids begin we shall be alone—save for raids from neighbours. We’re exposed to neighbours. Thank God though I’ve made my head work in the mornings, and so am more or less calm. But no reading. All talk. Some of the clerks turned out magnificent. One a publicans daughter, another a greengrocers, a third a photographers, a fourth a sheer adventuress with a fatherless, I mean Bastard child, for whom all her concern was. Then we dashed to London, decided to go on publishing, brought out all our books yesterday—L’s 2nd volume: a masterly work. Pray God some one will buy it But the confusion in the trade is confounded—no one buys in shops, no bagmen. And so ruin stares us in the face; and I begin to be stingy. I’m seeing Vita tomorrow. Both the boys [Ben and Nigel] are in the army, and Harold in London. I’m sorry—oh dear how sorry, for I know what waiting about means. The garden is (now—6 o’clock) so ravishing I cant keep eye to paper. A great ash tree fell on a sunny evening. L. is now hatching it into fire wood for our winter evening. Plans are unsettled. Here till the 15th anyhow; and dashes up to see if 37 [Mecklenburgh Square] can be made habitable.

Why you old wretch—how I laughed at the love over the garden wall, and yet was jealous. So you see there’s green fire in me if not red. And I’ve taken to article writing too; and would like to see yours. Now I must use my first free evening to do Fry papers.

V.

Berg

[]

3554: To Philippa Woolf

29th Sept 39

Typewritten

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Pip,

I liked your letter so much that I kept writing to answer it until I had a free moment. Ever since the war we’ve been infested with refugees. And you know how they fill the place with odds and ends and how one has to ring up the butcher the baker the candlestick maker at all hours of the day and night. Ours were clerks from the Hogarth Press. At last they’ve gone—so I have a free moment.

I’m purring all over like an old Siamese cat to think that you liked some of my books. I rather suspected that you thought I was a complete fraud and that your mistresses were even greater nincompoops than you otherwise suspected for reading them and wanting to know whether poor Aunt Virginia smokes cigars or has a bald head. In fact most admirers are only fit for the infant school But then you’re sensible; I dont know though that I agree with you. Must a book have a special meaning? Three Guineas was a pamphlet to make people angry and say irritating things. The Waves was written with no wish except to make something solid. But it was much harder to write than the others. I dont much like the Years; but thats not because its about disagreeable people; its because its too long, and too minute and I got sick to death of it; and took Leonards garden scissors and cut out patches and flung them on the bonfire.

I’m glad you liked Douarnenez. It reminded me of Greece because there were trees growing by the sea; and no villas; and quite clean grass. When we were there the trippers hadnt come; in fact we thought it was a deserted island. Did you do any more painting? Or were you a snob, and determined not to look like one of the lady artists in your brilliant sketch? Do go on painting; because when you’re very old you’ll be happy if you do; and if you take to curing foot and mouth, you’ll be left alone with an old sheep somewhere and will infuriate your neighbours by breeding dogs. My neighbours enrage me by breeding Elk Hounds which bark just when I want to write.

What did you think of Brave New World? I much much much prefer War and Peace. But then Aldous Huxley has one blind eye; and he’s stuffed with valuable facts; and has taken up Indian mystics; and all that seems to be a bore. But War and Peace is the greatest novel in the world; and if I’m not bombed I shall read that and Anna Karenina this winter.

Our new flat is a mere stickleback of chairs and tables on end. Will you come and see it soon? We shall try and sleep there in a fortnight. Only Leonard says he’s coming back here, because he likes his fish better than his friends. And everybody quarrels; and if you go out at night, a man sticks a knife in you. They say London is like a dark drain with a few blind fish, and sharks, and only the blind can see. I’ve typed this so as to save your eyes, my hand being all gone to pieces.

Please write again if you’ve ever time. And give my love to all your mistresses too, but more seriously to Cecil, to Marie, and to your father and mother. Would you tell Philip I smoked his Rothschild cigar for about three hours; and enjoyed every single second.

Oh dear, here are some more refugees so I must rush into the house and tidy

Yours affectionate

Sussex (copy)

[]

3555: To Angelica Bell

1st Oct [1939]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dearest Pixy,

Here is the cheque. Now I want to consider the future. I’m afraid its possible that I may have to send you less. Leonard says we shall be a good deal poorer, owing to taxes, not having let 52, the Press not paying etc. But of course we cant tell yet. What I’ll do is to pay you next quarter for certain. Then we’ll reconsider it. Anyhow, even if its less, I’ll always pay something, unless bankrupt: and consider you come first after paying household bills. Only as I said I would give you six months warning I thought I’d better write now. What a damnable curse the war is.

We thought Judith’s man [Leslie Humphreys] rather a bore—nice but dull: and wont be so nice in ten years and duller, and nothing to look at and very middle class Tunbridge Wells, so what does she see? And he makes her schoolgirlish. Oh dear.

V.

Texas

[]

3556: To Ethel Smyth

Monday, 9th Oct [1939]

Monks House, Rodmell [Sussex]

Ahhah! This has never happened before—that I can truthfully say, I am writing out of the goodness of my heart, without being written to. Yet so it is. Cupid I suppose has shot his dart over the garden wall and transfixed your pen. I am jealous, furiously: And have nothing to lure you back with. Am damp and dull. Am working like a nigger. Shall be in London but shant see you. (I leave out the “I’s’ in order to impress you with a sense of importance) There’s a peace in the country which surrounds me as a mouse is surrounded with cheese. Nothing but the sound of my nibbling is to be heard. Reading writing I’m always at it.

As for Ethel Smyth, she’s languishing in the violets and lavenders of lust: I suppose; gratifying the flesh. I may have gone too far. If so, I withdraw. Are you, then, more chastely, finishing your book [What Happened Next]? And when shall I read it? I daresay we both think the same about politics. I am reading Erasmus. I am reading Lewis Carroll. Oh and I saw Vita—One never has a moment to oneself in the country. Yet the country is a vast Cheddar cheese. Oh how it rains and rains! Leonard is storing apples. No, we cant play bowls. And I have to cook a rice dish mixed with herbs for dinner

V.

Berg

[]

3557: To Sibyl Colefax

11 Oct. [1939]

Monk’s House [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest Sibyl,

I too often thought of you, but always with an impassable barrier. House-moving; war. Two days before the war 52 Tavistock started to move to 37 Mecklenburgh. It’s still on the way.

We go up on Friday. How long we stay we don’t know. But perhaps we might meet—Only how can one make engagements? All’s such a distracted muddle.

But if not there, then here.

Oh and thank you for your letter. Yes, I find the copulation of 18th century frogs [Frenchmen] the only reality, anyhow comfort.

Yrs V.W.

Michael Colefax

[]

3558: To A. G. Sayers

11 Oct 39

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Mr Sayers,

I have opened the book; and I like some of the poems very much. Your son seems to get at things for himself; and so, in the midst of our present chaos, I find him refreshing and shall read on—thank you for sending it to me.

Three Guineas did very well, so far as sales went. Whether it made any impression, I don’t know. I doubt that ideas ever do. But at least I haven’t been sent to prison—rather, on the contrary, to Coventry.

Please express my gratitude to your son, and hope that he won’t be darkened by the war. We, as publishers, are hoping that people must read; and so there must be writers. I’m interested to see that he dedicates his book to E. M. Forster, an old friend of mine.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

A. M. Sayers

[]

3559: To Angelica Bell

Monday [16 October 1939]

[37 Mecklenburgh Square, W.C.1]

Dearest Pixie,

You cant think how difficult it is to write a letter in this doomed and devastated but at the same time morbidly fascinating town. Also there’s a dearth of pens and a prevalence, indeed a pullulation of chamber pots. Oh and the books: all over the floor: oh and the pictures: all on their heads. Oh oh oh …

But to business, or I shant earn my living. My hook is baited with so much gossip it might catch a whale: Nessa to wit. I mean we’ve been seeing Will and Ruth Arnold Forster: and went into the question, the painful question, of my legacy. The little devils, keeping Duncan’s picture because he’s bought a chair-cover to match; so gave me Ka’s old garnet necklace: which rained garnets into the soup: broke at once. The filling in of that story, and the story of Ruth, of Rupert’s letter, of George Mallory’s death on Mount Everest would fill oh the whole of the telephone book.

Then we lunched with Mrs Drake to meet Mrs Webb: and she was like a dead leaf spotted with fire—so crinkled so curled but invincible in spite of bladder trouble and cancer by the sheer might of disinterested intelligence. Another vol. required. Her nephew at the War Office says there’ll be a raid tonight: (so this is no doubt my dying word) and the War will be over by Xmas, because its a fact that the German army is already in disruption. Hitler’s last fling will be at our heads tonight and tomorrow.

Then there’s Stephen and John. And their deadly feud, in which L. and I are now involved. I’ll leave that till we meet. Then there’s Tom [Eliot] tomorrow. Colefax threatens also—you dont know what a queer place London is—Here we are running in and out of each other’s houses with torches and gas masks. Black night descends. Rain pours. Vast caterpillars are now excavating trenches in the Square. Shops shut at 5 or so. Many windows remain black all day. The streets are a hurry scurry of people walking. Ambulances abound. Very stout women wear blue trousers. No one ever sits down. The buses are quick but rare. And in short—I’ve just pulled down the black blinds—rats in caves live as we do.

Thats all I can think of. And I hope you’re recovered; and that Charleston remains as sane and sound as ever.

V.

Bobo was very nice, as sleek as a yellow cat, and is coming over. It was the grandest house I’ve been in for years. Maids in caps. Four courses.

Texas

[]

3559a: To Katharine Furse

19th Oct 39

37 Mecklenburgh Square WC 1

Dear Katharine,

Yes, Quote that random remark about the cat and the bag by all means if it comes in useful. Its certainly my opinion.

Well dont lets haggle about pornography. Your feeling against is clearly much stronger than mine for. So I’ll delete. My reason for leaving it in was, among other things, that your father so very evidently was not pornographic; nor did Roger thinks him so. But lets consider it settled. And let us, if only human relations are ever possible again, meet and renew our youth. Here we are perched in a half furnished flat, but off happily to Monks House tomorrow out of this gloom murk and extreme discomfort. Then back; but only for a week or two at a time. Last night unable to sleep I picked Madges Out of the Past out of a clothes basket in which it was tumbled and read about you all as children. Did you like that book? I think some of it very vivid. Now to more struggles with more chests of drawers. Yours affect.

Virginia Woolf

Bristol. Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature. Vol. 9, Number 2. Fall 1990.

[]

3560: To Hugh Walpole

Friday [20 October 1939]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

My dear Hugh,

We were only up 3 days this time, and they were crammed full. And I hunted in vain among my litter of books still unsorted for my father’s MS. But my brother Adrian is sending one, direct to the Red Cross—which MS I dont know. I’ve written the enclosed note, as you wish.

We come up every fortnight—the 30th will be the next time: let me either then or later come to tea, with you alone—for lunch is a horrid unsociable hour: and I want to see your things if I may.

Oh no—I’m not a novelist. Always wanted to name my books afresh. This continues our correspondence. But no time now.

yrs VW

Texas

[]

3561: To Mrs G. E. Easdale

25th Oct 39

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Mrs Easdale,

I never expected flowers this autumn, so they were all the more welcome. Let us hope they will outlast the war. They are making my sitting room very bright at the moment. As usual, they come just as the garden is settling in for the winter. We are spending most of our time down here; when we go up it is to struggle with the miseries of house moving under war conditions. I am afraid this is affecting the reviewers too. But I hope Joan isn’t disappointed. They will come in time; and we are selling more books than we expected.

Thank you once more for the flowers.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

University of London

[]

3562: To Edward Sackville West

25th Oct 39

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

My dear Eddy,

It was nice of you to write to me about the Waves. Its the only one of my books that I can sometimes read with pleasure. Not that I wrote it with pleasure, but in a kind of trance into which I suppose I shall never sink again. And a word of praise from a reader like you almost persuades me that I could get back to that world in spite of the war. As it is, I cling to Roger Fry and facts.

What are you doing?—writing I mean? Did the diary ever take shape? I wish it would. I want some fragmentary but natural voice to break into the artificial bray to which we’re condemned. And I believe its your form, and you could use it.

We’re just back from a visit to London—an incoherent and rather terrifying visit—the flat half furnished, and all our friends jangling like so many strained wires. I would have tried to see you had I known you were up. Could you come down here some time? I rather think we shall stay here mostly: leaving London was rather like drawing the curtains and finding it a fine day. The old man who brings the milk is far better company than Kingsley Martin and that ilk. My only comfort lies in the obvious horror we all feel for war: but then with a solid block of unbaked barbarians in Germany, whats the good of our being comparatively civilised? So I read poor bewildered Gerald Heard and turn from him to Dickens. But I must stop and attend to black out for a Labour party meeting. Thank you for writing.

yrs
V.W.

Berg

[]

3563: To Ethel Smyth

26th Oct. [1939]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, near Lewes, Sussex

As you’ll have gathered from my wire, we came down here, after a ravaging but in its way rather absorbing week in London—So many people to see; and all the time the telephone failing, the oven ceasing to cook, and workmen in to ask “Where d’you want the light in the lavatory?”—The W.C. I always correct them in the interests of democracy. So I left your letter in London, and cant remember what precise question I was expected to answer about your article. Was it whether you were parodying your own style? Well, I think my observation would be that, writing I suppose for your favourite Everyman, you dissipate your forces a little to the distraction of that eccentric individual V.W. I see the attraction—I cant imitate it—of the personal style—“my heads too large for my hat—my puppy … my” this that or the other. And I envy you the abandon with which you can toss all your private—no, I mean personal—trinkets at the readers feet. But it a little blocks the road to the final grasp on the theme. The hat obscures Englands effort. And, absorbed in the humours of the omnibus,—well, I mean one flies off at a tangent; which in a short article, leaves one too little to perch upon. But then, cut out Ethel, and the broth would miss its savoury. So I should advise concentration rather than elimination. I suspect that the amateur author feels the drag of the public more than the old hack: hence this skittishness: hence also this charm. But is that true?—Do you I mean feel when you write that the curtain rises and the stage is lit? and so increase, unintentionally, your gesticulations? Anyhow I enjoyed it: rare in an article: and here return it, with apologies for the random nature of these remarks, which probably miss whatever the mark was you wanted me to aim at. And what does Alba say about the situation?

V.

Berg

[]

3564: To Dorothy Bussy

Nov 5th 39

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

My dear Dorothy,

This being Sunday morning and Tom Eliot and Leonard playing chess over the fire, I’ve just said that I’m going to write letters. So why not to you, specially as there’s no need to write to you, and I ought to be writing oh dear me so many dull letters. I’m going to pretend that its the 18th century, as indeed it is in many ways: and one wrote long long letters to friends in distant parts. Only you must keep up the game your end. And now I cant think how one does it, and my handwriting isn’t what theirs was.

Where did we break off? I believe with Tom Eliot in Tavistock Square. Now T. Sqre is a myth, and 37 Meck Sqre is neither one thing or the other, by which I mean theres a chamber pot in the sitting room, and a bed in the dining room. Still we have spent a week there in mediaeval gloom, which has its glory, for the return of nature, that is darkness and trees instead of taxis bowling to parties has its charms. You see a spark and suddenly an old gent looms up: then he’s gone, and the wind howls and the leaves drop. But I cant go into the war and the rest of it. Is Nice in the war too? I suppose so. And do you sit as we do here on a magic carpet about 6 foot square with a bright lamp and a book?

Yes it was the book, among other things, that brought you to mind—Gides journals. All the intelligentsia is reading them, and out of snobbery I followed, and found you there: and then re-read Si Le Grain ne meurt with amazement at the frankness. Why, if he can say all that, cant I come out with the comparatively modest truth about Roger and his affairs? Yes, I find Gide very bracing and drastic, and a little stringent. So very French: and here we’re so very plumpuddingy. Thats the only word for the wireless … but no, I will not broach politics, unless I can rouse the chess players to tell me some fact you’d like to know.

As for gossip, we’ve seen a good many refugees of sorts—they flock out of London; and the young are very quarrelsome: Stephen Spender and Inez have parted; Rosamond has one foot on sea—Geronwy Rees—t’other on shore—Wogan; a new magazine [Horizon] is being started; publishing is bad but struggles on;—what else? we’re driving to Charleston in this whirling gale to lunch with Nessa. There we shall meet Desmond; and Clive has (well I must take another page, as the chess players wont answer) Clive has had his hair cut, and looks like a very fierce little red bull: Quentin drives a tractor for Maynard; and looks like the rising sun; Angelica undulates over the world like a pearl pink could: and Duncan, well I can only at the moment see Duncan for ever hitching up his trousers which are of blue corduroy and for ever coming down. Also he goes to London to sit on a Committee. Nessa has bought 30 hens, some turned out to be cocks, others half bred pheasants, so the egg question which they were to solve remains I think in the air: she says not. Mrs Grant and Miss Whats her name—Aunt Violet—have gone; to everyone’s relief, theirs too, for its no use waiting any longer for raids which dont come. The other morning I roused the house, because of two wasps in my jampot which I mistook for the warbling.

I’m reading Little Dorrit; I’m reading Erasmus; I’m reading Plato; I’m reading Gide; I’m reading William Rothenstein’s memoirs. So there—Does that make you think the worse or the better of me, for thats the real question I want answered, my appetite for compliments being undiminished. And of course it maynt be a compliment.

So give Janie [her daughter] my love.

V. “I’m writing to Dorothy Bussy”

Tom Eliot. “Please send my love”

V. “Any political gossip?”

Dead silence. I think Toms beat.

So I must end.

If you would write, what a treat.

V.W.

By the way, Leonard and his co-editor Robson, say you wrote a most brilliant review for the Pol Quart.

And please remember me to M. [Simon] Bussy.

George Spater

[]

3565: To Elizabeth Robins

8th Nov. [1939]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Miss Robins,

I was just going to write to you, but I am glad to find from your letter that its useless. What I was going to say was that Faber & Faber were anxious to be allowed to read your MS [Both Sides of the Curtain]. I’m so glad that Heinemann’s are doing it. It shows their sense; the other people—I forget who it was—seem to me stone blind for rejecting it.

With our congratulations,

yours
Virginia Woolf

Sussex

[]

3566: To The New Statesman & Nation

11 November 1939

Sir,

Grateful as I am to Y.Y. for his courteous article on my pamphlet, Reviewing, may I express my regret that in his anxiety to convict me of burying the reviewer alive, he has ignored the resurrection service that followed the obsequies? Had I been, as Y.Y. asserts “contemptuous” of the louse—Dickens’ word, not mine—I should not have devoted several pages to an attempt, however feeble, to preserve him. I am a louse myself, and well aware of it; but if, as I infer from Y.Y.’s eulogy, the rest of my colleagues are gay little crickets chirruping about the house to their own content, the public good and under conditions that would delight a sanitary inspector, I withdraw every word and keep both contempt and pity for myself. In the same issue of The New Statesman & Nation, however, I notice that Mr John Mair begins his review: “What is a reviewer to say when faced with a batch of thoroughly dull novels? The conscientious critics of the national press crowd infinite boredom in a single column, and briefly outline the plots of a dozen books, say ‘brilliant’, and pass on to the next. Another, less responsible school, abandon at once duty and discretion, and, like the beaver biting off his stones …” But I must not crowd all the animals in the Zoo upon your limited space, nor try again to remedy what is, so obviously, a completely satisfactory state of things.

Virginia Woolf

[]

3567: To Mr Sutcliffe

16th Nov 39

Typewritten

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Mr Sutcliffe [unidentified],

Many thanks for your letter and apologies for my delay in answering it. I know of course that I was only able to raise questions in my pamphlet, not to answer them satisfactorily. The whole question of reviewing is extremely complex. To touch on one or two points—I agree that we must have some way of knowing what is published. The T.L.S. supplies this admirably in its shorter notices. I find that I order books from the library from that rather than from reviews. But then I suggested that this should be kept for the reader. The “private conference” was for the benefit of the writer. At present they have no way of discussing their work with competent people. I am aware of this from the number of requests for criticism that come to our office. They also insist (as authors) upon advertisements, which are largely wasted—or again, so it seems. I believe with you that a monthly or quarterly is the only way of keeping criticism alive; but then it seems to mean starvation both for those who write it and for the publishers. All this seems to prove that it is time the problem were discussed and, if possible, without loss of temper. As I expected, my remarks have raised more anger than helpful criticism. I am the more grateful to you for taking the question seriously. There is so much talk of the value of freedom at the moment that it seems a good thing to put it into practice, or at least to try.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Robert H. Taylor

[]

3568: To Vincent Sheean

23rd Nov. 1939

Typewritten

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Mr Sheehan,

I need not say that I sympathise with the aims of the League of American Writers. I am very sorry that I cannot help by sending a manuscript as you suggest; but I seldom keep MSS. and those that I have, as I always re-type, are only a few notes, and thus of no interest.

But my brother and I should be very glad to give a MS of my father’s, Sir Leslie Stephen, if you would care to have it. Should you wish it sent, will you write to my brother, Dr Adrian Stephen, 26 York Gate, Regents Park, London NW 1.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Houghton Library, Harvard University

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3569: To Shena, Lady Simon

30th Nov. [1939]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

My dear Shena,

Yes, as it happens I’m in London next Tuesday. Do come if its not too dark, at 4.30. We are at 37 Mecklenburgh Square. Not far from Kings Cross station—5 minutes down the Grays Inn Road.

3 Gs still making enemies, anyhow. As an Outsider I’ve been attacking my profession [in Reviewing]—all reviewers have their knives in me. This suggests your disagreeable duty—to become Principal of Newnham. No time to explain these remarks, so I must leave them for Tuesday.

Yrs
VW

Sussex

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3570: To Judith Stephen

2nd Dec 39

Typewritten

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

Dear Judith,

I’m glad you’ve been reading Julian’s book—how odd that you didn’t come across it before. No, I suppose not; few people have read it. Its a great muddle I think—so many things he wrote in a hurry or left unfinished. But it’s very like him. And I wish too you’d known him. I don’t think he had worked out a system—in fact he was always changing. This was part of his charm. And he was young for his age, and full with theories and ideas. They make rather a whirlpool of his essay on Roger. It goes round and round, but it’s very vivid, and Julian was a magnificent creature. What would he have done, I wonder? He had such an immense store of life in him, and God knows why he went and threw it away. But I daresay it was better in Spain than in Flanders.

What sort of creed are you coming to? As far as I remember, 21 was a devillish age; so intense; and so violently crabwise—this way, that way, and as you say back as much as forward. But it was amazingly exciting too. Never shall I forget arguing with Thoby [Stephen], Lytton, even old Saxon [Sydney-Turner], hour after hour about good and truth, and one’s personal emotions as we called them.

I was asked to lecture the Cambridge English Soc. too, but really I’ve so often said lectures are damned things; also that no woman should give tongue in Camb. until Camb. has done its duty and made them members of the University—but what’s the use of protesting? With this war on. However I’m more and more convinced that it is our duty to catch Hitler in his home haunts and prod him if even with only the end of an old inky pen.

I saw Adrian and Karin at 37 [Mecklenburgh Square] the other day; we had a turkey; and a gossip. And they thought they had found a tenant. But Karin seemed very dismal, and says she can’t work. That’s an awful state to be in. However, there’s news of a possible family legacy, via Jack Hills, via Stella. (I wish you’d known her too). But if it is a legacy, that’ll be a very timely help in present troubles.

I will note your needs about the house. I think May or June will be the time for looking, as you only wanted a short lease. And if there are houses standing, I daresay one will be haddable. It’s the dear time, though, July, August. Yes, you must get it, and be near enough to us to come over and do your duty by the old.

Here’s Nessa, Duncan and Clive coming for a Sunday tea. Only bread and butter. It’s raining too, and L. has just beat me on the sodden grass at bowls. So you see we keep the flag of culture flying. Write again and tell me about your future, and if it’s settled or come undone. Ann [Judith’s sister] has become to my delight a fertile letter writer. Perhaps we may all meet at Christmas.

VW

Nigel Henderson

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3571: To V. Sackville-West

Dec. 3rd [1939]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, near Lewes, Sussex

That was nice of you—to send me your book. It really touched me. I’ve not read it (and I dont suppose you’d care a damn to know what I thought, if I thought about it considered as a work of art—or would you?)—but I dipped in and read about Saulieu [Burgundy] and the fair and the green glass bottle. The pictures are lovely; but oughtn’t they to be a little sharper? Weren’t they when we saw them that day in the office? (that reminds me: I owe you ½ for cigarettes). I shall keep it by my bed, and when I wake in the night—no, I shant use it as a soporific, but as a sedative: a dose of sanity and sheep dog in this scratching, clawing, and colding universe. The war makes one horribly bad tempered. Against that I set the country: no, I dont think I shall ever live in London again. Yesterday I saw a cormorant and a kingfisher together on the river in a storm and today I’ve been battling against the wind to the top of the downs, where there’s a hollow—a windwarm hollow, as the poet, but which?—says.

One day we were in Tunbridge Wells. travelling books Shall we meet there, before Christmas/

Tomorrow we have to go to London for 2 nights, and I have to give old Ethel lunch. So imagine me shouting while the ear trumpet dangles down her back.

Dear me, I’m so tired of correcting Roger, and its so bad. But then how can one make a life out of Six Cardboard boxes full of tailor’s bills love letters and old picture postcards/

With our deep love and respects

Potto and V.

Oh Eddie [Sackville West] came for a week end and was charming: so brisk and pointed, not a word of complaint—indeed very considerate and kind:

Berg

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3572: To Philippa Strachey

[11 December 1939]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Pippa,

Leonard says you said you would come and spend a weekend. Would you come this next weekend, 16th, or would you come for Christmas—Saturday to Tuesday? Remember, life here is primitive: very; but it would be very nice for us to have you. So if you will brave it do: and let me know: and then I’ll look up trains. They’re not so bad—trains: anyhow one good one still.

Yr aff
Virginia

The Fawcett Library, London

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3573: To Stephen Spender

Dec 16th 39

Typewritten

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Stephen,

Thanks very much for your letter. Leonard says he will answer his share of it himself. For my part, I think its very nice of you to want me to write for Horizon. But as you will understand, New Writing Folios, or whatever the new version is to be called, does make it rather difficult for me. Its not a question of hurting John’s feelings, but as its to be a Hogarth Press venture and as I’m taking a kind of sub-editorial part, I feel I must give them any help I can. The truth is I dont much want to do articles for anybody. As for doing one on “The Young”—well, I’ve already set all the reviewers against me by my pamphlet, and I dont want to set all the young against me too (more than they are necessarily and rightly). Is there any use in contemporaries writing about contemporaries—even if some are older and some younger? I can’t see it; but if you can, come and explain it. That brings me to the point. We shall be up on Monday. Will you come in on Tuesday night, any time after 9.30. The St John Hutchinsons are dining with us, it would be very nice to see you again. I’m sorry your difference with John hasnt been made up. I’ve not seen him for some time to talk to, and so dont know what the state of things is. But it seems a pity.

Yours affectionately
Virginia Woolf

Drew Ponder-Greene

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3574: To Shena, Lady Simon

16th Dec [1939]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

My dear Shena,

I ought to have answered you before. I dont want to put any extra burden on you, but if you would some time write down any views you’ve come to about women and war I’m sure it would be a great help to me. I’ve promised to write something for America, and the view of someone who moves and acts like yourself would prevent me from, what is a great danger now, living in the country—I mean becoming angular and eccentric. Its an appallingly difficult job anyhow. I’m encouraged, (I daresay my author’s vanity is flattered, speaking more honestly) by two letters today, one from a soldier in the trenches who says he’s read Three Guineas and “feels that its true;” and is apparently so “unspeakably bored” that he’ll tackle any more views on the same lines: and another from a middle class provincial lady, who asks distractedly for help, and wants to start an outsiders Society among the women of Yeovil [Somerset]. She’s shocked to find them all in uniform, greedy for honour and office.

And then America—I’ve never been there—How far are our problems theirs? You see, I’m going to sponge upon you, because all your doings, one way and another, have filled your sponge so much fuller than mine. So don’t curse me—not even for scribbling this, half asleep, and ought to be cooking dinner, over a large log fire. It was very good of you to come through all that black the other night and I wish we’d had more time for talk.

Yrs ever
V.W.

Sussex

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3575: To Ethel Smyth

22nd Dec 39

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

No, I never begin a letter Dearest Ethel, as my pen intended. And have been dashing about London so violently, and oh dear correcting MSS. so incessantly, that I never could sit down to write. Allow for the intermittency of the pen, and don’t blame ’em on the heart. Maynard sayd he’s cured by Plesch—are you? The last visit (yours to me) was broken off, if you remember, to visit him—Plesch I mean. Oh and I wanted to throw my cap over the rooster by way of shouting Hurrah to your Finis [of What Happened Next]. Isn’t that a triumph—the last word, no matter what agony and drudgery have gone before. Never have I written it save with tears and sweat. Now when shall I read the whole? and shall I exalt it to the shelf where, to solace and support sleepless nights (I mean starts of terrified about nothing waking when even the stars through the apple trees mock and diminish)—the shelf where I keep Imps? Yes, I expect so. And little though I shall carry across the Styx to justify my life here, that one bright deed shall shine like a medal, or a wound, to show that I, Virginia, kept Ethel at it. For, though you dont humour me much, you must admit that. Thank God, we’re out of London, and in front of a fire, alone, this frosty night Your gibe about Eddy Sackville [West] and his week end fails to score. Did I ask him? No. He leapt at a vague hint and pinned me down. I never “ask” anyone. Sometimes very persistent people I’ve quarrelled with and half made it up with, like Eddy say Lets forget and be friends, But I shall be more sociable once I’m out of the wood, and have a resident maid perhaps, so that I neednt cook dinner and cut long arguments. to boil potatoes and bake pies. Oh yes, the waits are singing [carols], and so I wish you peace, virtue and love me another year or two.

V.

Berg

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3576: To William Plomer

28th Dec 39

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear William,

This is the only sincere letter of thanks I’ve written this Christmas, because your present was the only one that gave (and gives—its by no means finished yet) complete satisfaction: I didn’t know chocolates like that still existed. My Grandfather—an old man with a white head like the shavings people put in fireplaces in summer—used to give us them. So now I look upon you as a kind of re-incarnation of all goodness. It was, we both say, much too good of you. Yes—about the young men. We had them to tea. I thought it pretty sticky myself. John was haughty; Stephen suppliant. Leonard says it was a success, though. All this gossip we must have by word of mouth. We shall be coming up, and I’ll write. This is only thanking you; and wishing you’d spent Christmas here. And what about Kilvert? Vol. 3?

V.W.

Texas

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3577: To Angelica Bell

Sunday 31st Dec [1939]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dearest Pixy,

Here is the £25.

About the future—I’m afraid while the war lasts, I’d better be on the safe side and say I’ll give £60 a year. The thing is I cant at the moment make money in America, and my life of Roger wont I’m afraid pay at all. But the moment the war is over, I’ll reconsider it; and I may have a stroke of luck—in which case you shall benefit.

So forgive me my stinginess and apply at once to me if you’re ever in a fix.

Witcherina Virginia

Texas

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Letters 3578-3603 (January-April 1940)

3578: To Vera Brittain

2nd Jan. 1940

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Vera Brittain,

It was very good of you to send me your book. I waited to thank you until I had read it. And now that I have read it I feel that, thanks to you, I know her much better than I did before. I was puzzled by something about her when we met—I think I only saw her two or three times. I felt that she was oddly uncertain about something important—perhaps you’ll understand. I think I see now what it was. And having never read her books because I felt this, I’m now going to. I am very grateful to you for giving me this fresh insight. Its so seldom that a biography does that, but yours does. More than ever it makes me feel, as I did when I read a book of her letters, that she was only at the beginning of a life that held all sorts of possibilities not for her only but for the rest of us.

Thank you again.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Sussex (copy)

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3579: To Ethel Smyth

16th Jan. [1940]

37 Meck[lenburgh] Sqre. [W.C.1]

I’m sorry I didn’t answer your question, and the second letter has gone round by M.H.: so thats why I’m late.

L. says that though the price of novels is being raised, this so far has made no difference to the author’s royalties. Certainly you ought not to get less: indeed probably authors may in time demand more. So stick to what you had for the last—We’re up for the usual 4 hectic days, and very cold, but not quite so cold as the country.

Are you trying Holtby? Well I said I would—South Riding I mean; and will borrow your copy perhaps one of these days. But, tho’ I wrote Vera [Brittain] a polite letter, I didn’t somehow enjoy or wholly like her Life: too petty and that horrid little reviewer’s gossip; she had a good deal more to her than V.B. saw, and was no more a writer (to my mind) than a barrel organ is a string quartet. But it was a scrambling gasping affectionate book: and W.H deserved a better.

Now Hugh Walpole is on me; so I must—but I break off to say I’m agog for your book.

Back to M.H. on Friday.

V.

Berg

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3580: To Shena, Lady Simon

Jan 22nd [1940]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

My dear Shena,

I’ve had too many distractions to write—people staying here, London and so on. But not too many to read your paper. I find it useful, suggestive, and sound. I agree with most of your arguments. I wish we could meet and discuss them. What the Americans want of me is views on peace. Well, these spring from views on war. So I shall work on from your paper when the time comes. Meanwhile, do cast your mind further that way: about sharing life after the war: about pooling men’s and women’s work: about the possibility, if disarmament comes, of removing men’s disabilities. Can one change sex characteristics? How far is the women’s movement a remarkable experiment in that transformation? Mustn’t our next task be the emancipation of man? How can we alter the crest and the spur of the fighting cock? Thats the one hope in this war: his soberer hues, and the unreality, (so I feel and I think he feels) of glory. No talk of white feathers anyhow; and the dulness comes through the gilt much more than last time. So it looks as if sexes can adapt themselves: and here (thats our work) we can, or the young women can, bring immense influence to bear. So many of the young men, could they get prestige and admiration, would give up glory and develop whats now so stunted—I mean the life of natural happiness.

Excuse this scribble: pipes are bursting; a pool in the kitchen. All I mean is I am very grateful for your thinking; and shall embed what you say in what I may write.

Yr V. W.

Sussex

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3581: To Vanessa Bell

Wednesday [31 January 1940]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

I’ve rung up, but find your telephone is broken. This is only to say weve had to give up going to London, and hope somehow to meet. God knows how.

Our worst day was Monday when the electricity failed and we had to cook on the fire. Yesterday only a hunk of bread remained, but providentially a leg of mutton arrived. I daresay you’re worse off—Ring up when you can.

V.

How did Duncan manage?

We’ve got Q’s starter.

Berg

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3582: To Ethel Smyth

1st Feb 40

Monk’s House, Rodmell, near Lewes, Sussex

Yes, I’d like to look at South Riding, if its no trouble to you to send it on. I think I meant that W.H. [Winifred Holtby] was a barrel organ writer. Vera [Brittain] is a scrambling and enthusing chatterbox, but of course very competent. I’m judging WH. only on her journalism—and she insisted to me that that was all she ever wanted to do—and the book on me, which I felt to be a painstaking effort rather to clear up her own muddles than to get the hang of mine. But I didnt want to be written about (not personally) and so never did more than whip through it with one eye shut. I dont like pulling out all the organ stops and ‘humanising’: I dont like regional novels: those are my prejudices; and I much prefer people who let all that settle down (like Hardy, like Tolstoy) and only write when the sediment is firm and the water clear. Therefore I’m not likely to be fair on W.H. And oh Lord how I loathe that scribbling business: 35 novels to be reviewed for Harpers Bazaar in one morning in a bungalow. So I’m not unprejudiced, but will try to be.

Here we are snow bound. All engagements in a muddle. We tried to go, but the car frozen, the roads impossible. I should be listening to Desire under the Elms this moment. Never was there such a medieval winter. The electricity broke down. We cooked over the fire, remained unwashed, slept in stockings and mufflers. And what about you?

I’m using this frozen pause to confront a long last grind at R.F. Then it’ll be done. but goodness knows when. The [Fry] family has to pass it. Endless objections I foresee. And its not a book, only a piece of cabinet making, and only of interest to R’s friends, for whom I’ve tried to stick together an amalgamation of all his letters. And what a job to do! And its of no interest that I can see, except to his half dozen devotees. Never mind—I’ve learnt a carpenter’s trick or two.

Reading Burke. Reading Gide. and I have to lecture on the moderns to the working classes at Brighton.

V.

Berg

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3583: To Vanessa Bell

Sunday [4 February 1940]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

I’ve just been looking at my birthday present by daylight. Its a lovely picture—what a poet you are in colour—one of these days I must write about you. And I do enjoy having a picture of my dear Quentin. What a pleasure your brats are to me—I long more and more for Julian, whose birthday it is today, and cant help just saying so, though I know you know it. My own darling I do think of you and him so much.

No answer—
B.

Berg

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3584: To Ethel Smyth

7th Feb. [1940]

Monks House [Rodmell, Sussex]

That was a nice long letter, and now the fat book has come. I think (so far) she has a photographic mind, a Royal Academicians mind. Its as bright as paint, but how obvious, how little she’s got beneath the skin. Thats why it rattles on so, I think. One’s never pulled up by a single original idea. She’s seen nothing for the first time, for herself. I feel, as I do when God Save the King strikes up, that I could sing the whole book straight through. But then I’d just finished Little Dorrit. And its not fair perhaps. He rattles along, but how muscular, how positive, and what a ripple of bone and entrail and sinew under that taut surface. But again thats unfair, and I’ve only read 150 pages; and enjoyed them, as one does a film. She’s a ventriloquist, not a creator. Sometimes, of course, she has the very words on her lips. But they dont come from the heart. Well—this is scribbled, by way of a rest from correcting Rogers French—thats scribbled too, no accents, and I daresay the wrong genders; and as my own French is as mouldy as the dining room carpet—the waters oozing from the bricks now,—oh damn this thaw—the howlers will cry aloud, and make poisoned darts in all the furious and vindictive old men. We’ve been entertaining the local gentry—a mild eyed, sheep witted Major [Gardner], who proses on about Singapore and loves rats, which he feeds, and his daughter (painter) and son (bank clerk) and now we have a meeting to debate socialism. I rather at times long for the dry and glittering streets and even old Ethel. A joke that, in bad taste. So, as my written jokes are bad, I will stop—

V.

Berg

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3585: To Ethel Smyth

20th Feb: [1940]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

We lead a distracted life—one week in London, the next here. As you can imagine I leave there what I want here, and t’other way about. But here’s your Laski card. He’s a little drop of brown quicksilver—the cleverest imp that ever was—was Lord Morleys confidant—then, I think, [Arthur] Balfours—no, not Balfour, but some other P. Minister. He’s the great unknown behind politics; consulted, influential, anonymous. I like him; but then he thinks 3 gs. the greatest book since Mill. However, he cant read my novels. L. says he’s an influence rather than a writer. If I can find L—who is fitting up an electric stove, ordered 4 weeks ago, just come with the thaw,—I’ll ask him about the book to read.

London is packed from morning till night; here there’s complete solitude, save for the Bells, and stray callers—a good diversion. Now I’m sending my MS (oh—I must correct the typing all day tomorrow) to Margery Fry, and feel like a small boy showing up an exercise. Whats happened about Nina? I read the scratched out story and was enthralled. What a rackety race you Smyths are—Bankruptcy, Sapphism, hunting, suicide, all in one gulp. How then did you keep so d—d military upright and brass buttoned? Explain. And about your book. Oh I have to lecture at Brighton next week—to the working classes.

V.

Berg

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3586: To Donald Brace

Feb 21st 1940

Typewritten

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Mr Brace,

I think I told you, when we last met, that I was working at a life of Roger Fry. I write to say that I have now finished this, and we hope to publish it over here in the late spring. In about a month’s time I expect to have the proofs, and will send you a copy. It will make a book of between 90 and 100 thousand words I expect.

All our publishing is carried on under great difficulties, as you can understand; but I will not go into that. So far we have not done so badly as we expected. We are living half here, in the country; and half in London. Our new address, 37 Mecklenburgh Square, W.C.1 will always find me.

With kind regards from us both,

yours sincerely,
Virginia Woolf

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

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3587: To Stephen Spender

7th March [1940]

Typewritten

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Stephen,

Yesterday, tidying up, I came upon this envelope of your poems. Ought I to have sent them before? What I expect happened was that you said youd come round and we’d talk. Well, alas, we cant do that. I wish we could. I like some very much; others not—but I cant write criticism, only talk it. So I send them by way of an excuse for asking you to write me a letter. Someone said you were teaching in Devonshire—someone else that theyd seen you in London. How vanished every one is. Here we exist on our little plot of ground, sometimes like solid emerald; at others a damp fungus. Various people buzz about. At this moment we’re off to Brighton where L. lectures on Common sense in Politics. So I must stop.

Not seeing ones friends is very depressing; not knowing what point theyve reached; whether as I hope youre in the middle of a great book. Poetry? Autobiography? Fiction? That brings me back to my demand for a letter—an immense long letter.

Yours ever
Virginia Woolf

I note that Mr Connolly upbraids L and V Woolf for not writing for Horizon. Well, if you like to suggest a subject, I’ll certainly try.

Texas

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3588: To V. Sackville-West

12th March [1940]

Monks House [Rodmell, Sussex]

Oh what a pleasure to get your letter! And how odd!—I was saying to L. I felt that you felt we were out of touch: as for myself, I never feel out of touch with Vita. Thats odd but true. And whats made it happen with you? Politics, religion, patriotism? what are the “various reasons” you, dear old sheep dog, talk of? I long to know, for I’ve divined them thro’ the door.

Here I am in the week of influenza—cant get normal, but hope to be up by the end of the week. A d—d sore throat.

And this is the only scrap of paper I can find

But my dear how nice to get your letter! How its heartened me! And how I long to hear from your own lips whats been worrying you—for you’ll never shake me off—no. not for a moment do I feel ever less attached. Aint it odd? And so I didn’t write but waited—Yes, do, do come. What fun, what joy that’ll be.

Y V.

Berg

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3589: To Vanessa Bell

Friday [15 March 1940]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, near Lewes, Sussex

Your letter has made me so happy. I’ve been so haunted by the fear that you wouldn’t like it. I never wrote a word without thinking of you and Julian and I have so longed to do something that you’d both like. As for thanking me—well, when you’ve given me Julian and Quentin and Angelica—

L. says the typing in the last part is awful and some passages make complete nonsense.

Perhaps you and D will come over.

V.

Berg

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3590: To V. Sackville-West

March 19th [1940]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, near Lewes, Sussex

Dearest,

I have a horrid little fear, as you’ve not written, that I said something idiotic in my letter tother day [No. 3588]. I dashed it off, I was so glad to get yours, with a rising temperature, and perhaps said something that hurt you. God knows What. Do send one line because you know how one worries in bed, and I cant remember what I wrote.

Forgive what is probably the effect of the flu. I’ve got what they call the recurring kind, I suddenly jump up to 102, and so am kept in bed till the end of this week anyhow, and as its the 4th week, one gets rather mopy and broody. However I’m normal today and expect its over. I got a little bronchitis too and wheeze like an old bagpipe. This is to show why I’m being, as I expect, foolish and exacting. It also shows how much I depend on you, and should mind any word that annoyed or hurt you. One line on a card—thats all I ask.

And come soon and lets talk.

V.

Berg

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3591: To Ethel Smyth

19th March [1940]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, near Lewes, Sussex

Ever so many thanks for remembering your decrepit friend. No sooner had I sent you that card than another attack developed and the Dr. now calls it recurring influenza with a touch of bronchitis. So I’ve been in bed again since Friday and stay there till Friday next. Then, if theres no more rise, I’m to get up. And I’m normal today. These disgusting details are only to serve as bait for a letter. Oh dear, this is my 4th week of noncomposity—and I’m so sick of turning over library books and biting a crumb out of Shelley and then going asleep over Havelock Ellis. A letter’s about my length—an Ethel letter. Yes, I dipped into Time Goes On: and wish it had a twin. May you say? Oh but I shall be in full feather long before that. Did you kill poor Longman? (a very bad joke) Well I’m glad you pegged your guineas down first. Just heard that Margery Fry approves of R.F. But there’s any number of corrections: and how, with a brain like old macaroni, can I make them in time for this season? So I suppose its put off till the autumn: if there is to be an autumn. Its a bore—I’d get it all done if it hadn’t been for this cursed germ. And my Lecture put off too. Dont bother to write unless the champagne in yr. blood has begun to fizzle. I’ve ordered Lady Helena Gs book

Berg

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3592: To Hugh Walpole

19th March 40

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

My dear Hugh,

I like some of Roman Fountain very much: I dislike some very much. Oh to disentangle these questions with you by word of mouth—how that would interest me! Its my belief we could do each other a lot of good by word of mouth—honest word of mouth. Meanwhile, I’ve had the sensation of Rome, Strong, and the colour, and the sound of water; and as Rome is the place I adore of all places, I’m humbly thankful. And how good the pulley is—and the smoke is—but here I stop, for I’m in my 4th week of whats called recurrent influenza, bronchitis being added, which means up you get up for 3 days: then the shivers seize you: back to bed: and there I stay this week; but the dr says next week I shall be well.

So excuse—I’m not asking for a draught from Hugh’s well known Elixir—sympathy: but should he have an impulse to write a letter, what I call a real life letter, you know, all about what seem to me so miraculous, facts—well do write it. Only not if its a bore. One day (to return to R.F.) will you show me your treasures: oh for a sight of pictures and rare books! Thats a passion of mine I’ve had to repress. But reading you revives it. I should like to tumble your Cezannes, Renoir, first editions through my aging claws. After Easter, please lets discuss the works of Hugh Walpole. And do write more autobiography.

Yr. V. W.

Texas

[]

3593: To V. Sackville-West

22nd March [1940]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, near Lewes, Sussex

(1) Yes do tell me when the French Broadcast is to be. We’ll listen with all our ears pricked with pride.

(2) Yes, do come any time I think after the 7th. I’ve got if possible to finish off my R. Fry book and send by that date—the only chance is to work every day so I wont ask you till the horrors over.

(3) Yes. All L’s plants are yellow. But he’s making a new rock garden which he longs to show you.

Potto here licks the page in love of you [squiggly design]

Berg

[]

3594: To Vanessa Bell

22nd March [1940]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, near Lewes, Sussex

Here, good Dolphin: I’ve at last found my cheque book under the bed. I’m making it £40, because I include a frame for the picture of Quentin. Aint that grasping? Its dirt cheap I consider, looking at the masterpiece of L. and Sally which will be a source of eternal pleasure.

I hope D. [Duncan] is better and that you’ll come over.

Margery [Fry] wants to come on Wednesday I hope you sent off the chapter [of Roger Fry] to Helen [Anrep], as I must get it back as soon as possible.

V.

I enclose Margery: cd. I have it back

Berg

[]

3595: To Ethel Smyth

27th March [1940]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, near Lewes, Sussex

Well if you have fibrositis in the back, I’ve something more glutinous in the head. Yet what an amusing letter you wrote!—the Brewster one, culminating in the sanitary towels which made me hoot like an owl with ecstacy. The influenza has receded; leaving what dont matter and cant be cured, my old friend an evening rise of temp.—like the trout after the fly. Oh I’m working so hard—8 days to sending in: and Margery Fry has very reasonably spattered me today with some 100 corrections; all to be entered; some to be contrived; and yet her kindness and reasonableness is such that I cant ignore. Yet why is filial love so deucedly persistent? And erratic? I cant even guess what she allows and what she forbids. I’m blind with accent inserting, and to relieve me write to you.

Do, if you’ve time, continue the Nina-Helena saga. D’you know, I liked Helena’s book; was it all humbug? Hasn’t she something rapid and racy and high handed, as well as the Hun and the miser? So I thought. And such a mixup: the spooks: and old Lemon whom I knew; and the aristocratic love of the direct: and the brutality of the aristocrat; and the naivete; and the courage: and I suppose all sorts of horrors, not hidden, but ignored—in herself. However it passed me a whole day in bed amusingly. I heard of them all from the Thynnes, years ago, and like the rebels side, which Beatrice T. carried further.

Well, I’m fixed to my shoemakers board all this week and then—oh glory to be quit of corrections till the proofs come! And to do nothing—and to let my cistern fill—and perhaps see a friend or two, and waste my days in talking till the sun goes down the sky. Why must one ever again life the load on one’s shoulders? Vita says she’s coming—Has Gwen left her? Is V. now Catholic? Can I plunge into all this? You would.

V.

Berg

[]

3596: To Hugh Walpole

28th March [1940]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

But my dear Hugh, I must have said something I didn’t mean at all if you think as you say that “its my excitement which irritates you all”. Your excitement is the quality I like most of all. Every one of my friends has been excited—most of them have had collections. So dont, I beg of you impute to me what may be the incredibly idiotic opinions of other people. No, no, no what I objected to in Roman Fountain wasn’t that—but what it was I’ll only tell you by word of mouth. And perhaps not then. For whats the use? None I suspect when Hugh and Virginia remain at opposite ends of the bloody stick.

I only send this P.S. by way of removing a misunderstanding. Aint I always agog myself? Quivering at the garden this moment.

And mayn’t I one of these days come and look at your lovely things which make my mouth water? Did I ever tell you of my Jane Austen find? Oh and to see Lamb’s Don Quixote, and the Scott MSS.

Never mind answering this rapid scrawl, when I should be copying all the corrections of all the Frys (angelic as they are) into my biography.

The 4th influenza seems to be the last. Thank God its gone.

and so farewell

V.W.

Texas

[]

3597: To Margaret Llewelyn Davies

6th April [1940]

Typewritten

Monk’s House [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest Margaret,

What a time I’ve let your letter go unanswered, and it was such a nice one. But I had five weeks of influenza, and then had to set to and finish off my life of Roger Fry, so as to bring it out if possible this summer. Now thats sent off, so its possible to turn into a human being again. I suppose Leonard told you how we live now—partly here, mostly here, but partly in London. The new flat is in a lovely quiet square, and we’ve set up house as in Tavistock, with our old solicitors [Dollman & Pritchard] as tenants, the press in the basement, and ourselves perched on top. by a stroke of luck we had taken John Lehmann as partner just before the war, so Leonard is quit of most of that burden and can spend his time writing all the morning, digging all the afternoon. If it weren’t for the war, it would be a perfect life. But of course he’s drawn in, and what can one do? As you say, how make peace terms now? Still, he collects other enthusiasts. Will Arnold Forster and so on, and they try to put some brains into that fat timid sheep the labour party. I’m becoming, you’ll be amused to hear, an active member of the Womens Institute, who’ve just asked me to write a play for the villagers to act. And to produce it myself. I should like to if I could. Oh dear how full of doings villages are—and of violent quarrels and of incessant intrigues. The hatred for the parsons wife [Mrs Ebbs] passes belief. We’re thought red hot revolutionaries because the Labour party meets in our dining room.

Ann sometimes writes to me—I think she’s happier living in the hospital in Dublin, but its a great breakup for them—how one pities the young—and I hope Richard may get some job. He was dreaming of going to the Fiji islands at one time. Ann sent me, not Sean’s novel, which she said was a very queer work, but a long letter, which was much to the point I thought, as a private document. But can one write novels about Mrs Smith and Mr Jones if one sits over the fire with ten Greek dictionaries and refuses to see a soul? I liked her so much, and found her so attractive and individual when she came in one night.

What a lot of neighbours you must have—the Trevys [Trevelyans]—yes, I like old Bessie, and adore Bob because he’s the greatest bore in the world, and I like anyone who takes their own line so regardless of other people’s fancies. I’ve been in touch with Ralph Vaughan Williams too—over a poetess; he was as nice as could be in his letters. De Lisle Burns we used to meet, at the 1917 club, and his son is a friend of Judith’s.

I hope you’re now better, and perhaps sitting at the window with the lovely view [near Dorking]. Isn’t the country ever so much nicer than London? Please give Lilian [Harris] my love, and tell her how often I chuckle over the stories she told of her family. Is she really reading old G. M. Young on Gibbon? I cant help feeling that he’s packed his egg—I mean head—too full of facts and its addled. At least I stuck in the Victorian book. But do tell me how he and Mona carry on—and if you’ve any gossip to impart. There are lots of things I want to ask; but must wait till we meet. Heres Leonard back from a school meeting and a fight with the parson’s wife. I stuck all your photographs into a great book and called it Eminent Victorians. Nessa’s children and I gloat over it.

We both send our love to you both; and so often find ourselves talking about you, dearest Margaret.

Yr V. W.

Sussex

[]

3598: To V. Sackville-West

Thursday [18 April 1940]

Monks House, Rodmell [Sussex]

Shall you be coming on Tuesday next as we hope?

I sent a card, but all answers go wrong now.

So let me have a line to Rodmell

O Lord London’s gloomy.

V and P

Berg

[]

3599: To V. Sackville-West

Friday [19 April 1940]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

Yes of course you are to stay the night—2—3—4—5—if you will. Certainly Tuesday night. Shall expect you between tea and dinner: Potto all a quiver on the look out.

Yes—Flaubert—but no time now. Letter just sent on to discuss.

here—London—just off.

V.

Berg

[]

3600: To Ethel Smyth

22nd April [1940]

Monks House, Rodmell [Sussex]

I told you, Ethel dear, I’m perfectly well—whats more I dashed off Roger—so it may come out with luck in June. But its only a book for old Crones so dont set your teeth in it. Now I have to write my lecture [The Leaning Tower], or rather to re-write it—An hour, for 30 typists—well its cost me more trouble than 2 Common Readers. Thats what comes of yielding to the damnable importunity of a wretched little man who lives on tinned tomatoes on top of a hill. My swan song—positively my last public misery.

Now take care, when all your joints have been loosened, how you cross the floor. There’s John Lehmann’s mother stretched senseless—broken thigh—all for a slip on her rug; and my very old venerable cousin Herbert Fisher killed by a Lorry. Please Ethel dear look to the right and left and dont come out behind a Bus.

I’m amused that your brother thinks my Gleichen sketch was intuitive. That is my gift—like it or lump it—No heart you say: how then do I transfer these images to my sensitive paper brain? Because I have a heart. Yes, and its the heart that makes the paper take, as they say. I beg you to consider this theory in the night watches.

I often consider you, when I draw my curtain about dawn and survey the sky. Otherwise how remote the stars would be. If you think of someone when star gazing their horrid little stare is outfaced. So please send me, no publish—for I’ll buy it—your book, so that I may have something to counter the stars with. Two swallows seen today; and a cuckoo calling.

I’m reading Sydney Smith—his life—with only one wish in the world: that I’d married him: Isnt it odd when the rumble tumble of time turns up some entirely lovable man? And did you ever know Clara Novello Davies? I’m reading her too. Not lovable I guess: but tell me.

Yr V

Berg

[]

3601: To Hugh Walpole

Tuesday [23 April 1940]

Monk’s House [Rodmell, Sussex]

My dear—oh curse the hair in the pen—Hugh,

Very well: very nice, tea, 4.30 or so the 30th—don’t be alone, unless you wish to be alone. All I meant was I’m damned unsociable at lunch. And I do want to hold [Lamb’s copy of] D. Quixote in my hands—and I was invited to meet you on Monday at Sibyl’s—Cant. And I dont think to the L. is a novel. Do coin me a word for the next.

Oh I’ve got to lecture—upon you among others—to the Brighton working classes on Saturday. Modern trends they want to hear about.

It costs me agony: how does one lecture! “Hugh Walpole,” I say is an aristocrat. Thats as far as I’ve got—and it lasts one hour.

Aristocrat intellectually, I add. And what comes next? Aldous Huxley I suppose: T. S. Eliot I suppose. Auden. Spender.

Heres Vita, so no more of this drivel.

Yr V. W.

Texas

[]

3602: To V. Sackville-West

Sunday [28 April 1940]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, near Lewes, Sussex

Oh Potto was so glad to huddle upon the Rung again. Yes, it was a great treat having you. In fact, isn’t it a duty, in this frozen time, to meet as often as possible? so that even in the cold night watches, when all the skeletons clank, we may keep each other warm? So, next time, we’re going up by train; so will save petrol; so shall come to Sissinghurst and oh my God—do fix it up with the Sidneys. I dont want to see them: but have a passion to see the house.

Nothing was said about Flaubert. The gold box [with Vita’s saccharine tablets] is safe. Shall I send it registered in a tin?

I lectured for an hour yesterday: 200 betwixt and betweens—you know how they stare and stick and won’t argue. Well thats over. And now I’m going to plunge into proofs, and then into poetry; so you must swim ahead.

Please write the book for me. I assure you its far and away the best, I should say the better, idea—I mean the one most fitting your ins and outs—than any of them.—no cant get it right.

Here I must stop and take tea with Mrs Chavasse, the dr’s widow, in order to discuss the village plays.

Please dearest Vita, come soon again. You’ve got a hoard [of petrol] in your tank.

and you love your

Virginia

Another invitation from Sybil [Colefax].

Berg

[]

3603: To Elizabeth Robins

Sunday [28 April 1940]

Monks House, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Miss Robins,

We couldn’t get to you yesterday—we got kept by the young woman in Wards’ [book] shop. Also I should like to see you when I’m not flustered with trying to lecture. It was extraordinarily nice of you and Octavia [Wilberforce] to come—but it wasn’t meant for the likes of you. You cant think how difficult it is—speaking to the W.E.A.—that must be my excuse.

We shall have to visit the bookshops again—so may we postpone our visit till then?

I enclose the letters about your book. I’m so glad that my opinion has been confirmed. I was certain I was right. And so, shall continue to worry you for a second volume: then for a third: then for a fourth.

We that splendid bunch of carnations—it suddenly struck me—from you? I remember another splendid bunch you once gave me. Anyhow, they are now ablaze in my room, and until I hear that I’m wrong, I shall thank you.

I hope you are really better,

Yrs ever
Virginia Woolf

Washington State University, Humanities Library

[]

Letters 3604-3642 (May-September 1940)

3604: To V. Sackville-West

[early May 1940]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, near Lewes, Sussex

Yes: Saturday 11th.—Probably we must come by train. Will meet you in The Pantiles [Tunbridge Wells], at 1.30.

Leonard makes a stipulation: not to meet the Earl. If its a social function he wont come. (aint that like him?) I’ll bring [saccharine] box. What a dream I had of you! A cow flew over us and crushed your nose—It went black. I had tapioca pudding handy, and applied it. The nose gradually blew out like a toy pig. Whats the interpretation? Horror and guilt both strongly present.

V.

Berg

[]

3605: To V. Sackville-West

Tuesday [7 May 1940]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, near Lewes, Sussex

Forgive me for my wire, and the intolerable nuisance I am. But The Press has suddenly put a pistol at my head; and they cant bring R. F. [Roger Fry] out this summer unless I send final proofs this week. That means I must work every day and cant take an afternoon off. Even so, I think its doubtful—

So, will you forgive? Whats more, can we put it [Penshurst] off to another Saturday? About a fortnight later? Well,—I know its my fault, but the Frys have sent so many last minute corrections, and it means much more re-writing than they know. and I’m so slow and get so muddle headed….

Would you also tell Ben [Nicolson] that I waited for him to ring me up again (at 37) and hoped to arrange something. I do want to see him. Whats his address?

I’ll write and suggest a dinner next time we’re up.

Your wretched drudge—
oh how I want to come on
Saturday!—
V.

Berg

[]

3606: To Rupert Hart-Davis

May 8th [1940]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Mr Hart-Davis,

Many thanks for telling me about the book, which I shall certainly read. Nothing comes more welcome than a book to read in these days. That reminds me, I dont think I ever said how much I liked another book—William sent it me. I’ve forgotten, as usual the name—by an old man, in the manner (with differences) of Jane Austen. Anyhow, I liked it, and hope it reached the public; though I suppose not.

I was so glad to see you again; and hope the war won’t make another meeting too difficult.

Yrs sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Rupert Hart-Davis

[]

3607: To Benedict Nicolson

Sunday 12th May [1940]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Ben,

I just missed you the other day, and didn’t know how to get hold of you.

Will you dine with us at 37 [Mecklenburgh Square] on Thursday 23rd? at 8. We shall be up that week, and it would be very nice to see you in any clothes.

We come up every other week, normally, and any time you’re in our neighbourhood, please come without waiting to be asked.

I wonder how you like your job.

Yr ever
Virginia Woolf

Vanessa Nicolson

[]

3608: To T. S. Eliot

15th May 1940

Typewritten

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

My dear Tom,

No, alas, we’re not coming up till Tuesday: which is the 21st. If by chance we do come up this Friday, 17th, then I’ll ring up on the chance again. Its all on the chance.

I cant help hoping that your Italian venture may be put off. In that case, will you dine with us on Tuesday 21st—at 37—at 8?

This week end is over occupied with Desmond MacCarthy; and old George Moore, the philosopher; or I would have chanced that.

All my spring was decimated by four attacks of influenza; spaced out, they laid waste six weeks; that’s why you didn’t have me pestering you to drop in.

But I did, by heroic efforts, buy the copy of the paper with your poem in it; and I liked it. Dear, how I’d like to discuss poetry with you! And not with the WEA at Brighton. I’m reading Coleridge through; and have a theory that contemporary Pickering editions reveal new aspects; and so am going on to Shelley, 1839. You see how through diabolic shyness I swerve from your poem; isn’t it odd, how difficult it is to talk of writing—I mean one’s own; or t’other persons? Thats not true of Stephen [Spender]; whose latest I don’t like; but can’t say so.

Consider Tuesday 21st dinner; but if I don’t hear I shall conclude you’re off. But if you’re back on 12th June keep the very next day for your old and affect:

Virginia

Mrs T. S. Eliot

[]

3609: To Ethel Smyth

17th May 40.

Monk’s House, Rodmell, near Lewes, Sussex

I’ve not written, for one thing because, till 2 days ago, I was almost blind, entering 3 different Frys comments into the edges of proofs, and altering my own words to admit theirs Now thats done. And I dont suppose its any use, all that labour: we shall have to postpone What does Longman say about your book [What Happened Next]?

Its a good thing to have books to believe in—and any number of little drudgeries: food to order: a village play to rehearse; and old Mrs West and her idiot boy—they took an hour this afternoon. We shant I suppose be killed; but I think of Montaigne, let death find me planting cabbages. A disease has struck our gooseberries. Percy [Bartholomew] is mowing the lawn, and I have just forced myself to answer a lady who wants to know—what, dont matter. Still, in this numb and prosaic state, I should like a letter. Dont you owe me one? Oh about [Winifred] Holtby—yes, the letter I answered was from a Weaver at Hull who knew her by sight. I’ll return [Holtby’s] South Riding. I see its my own limitation: but, I could no more return to the page where I stopped than to last years Tatler: its already an out of date picture paper. I repeat—this is my own obliquity. D’you know what I find?—reading a whole poet is consoling: Coleridge I bought in an old type copy tarnished cover, yellow and soft: and I began, and went on, and skipped the high peaks, and gradually climbed to the top of his pinnacle, by a winding unknown way. So then I bought a Shelley: tea stained, water marked; but also no edited anthology cabinet piece. Him too I’m going to explore in the same sauntering under the bramble way. I find the poets and Ethel Smyth very effective when I wake between the worlds—3 and 4. Well—I’m drivling, and wish only to say I hope we may once more meet. But when I’m in London, youre not. Next week I shall be there—only to get through the Press business

V

And what about Nina [Hollings] and Helena [Gleichen]?

Berg

[]

3610: To Judith Stephen

May 29th [1940]

Typewritten

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

My dear Judith,

Are you through your exams [at Cambridge]? And have you got a first? Old George Moore, the great philosopher, was here last weekend, and said the tripos was then on, I hope by now its off; and is there any chance of seeing you? We shall be in London, 37 Meck. Sq., next Tuesday till Friday; and then back here; where there’s always more or less of a bed, should you ask for it. As you remember, Leonard won’t let me at my age ask you at yours. Its an age, though, since you and Leslie [Humphreys] came—wasn’t it in snow? Or was it the apple-picking day? And dear me—what a lot of disagreeables have happened since! However let us say nothing about that; and rack our brains for a pennyworth of gossip.

I saw old Tom [Eliot] last week, and William [Plomer] too. Old Tom was about to start for Italy, to lecture on contemporary poetry and so persuade Italy to remain neutral. But on the very edge of the boat train he was stopped; and so dined with us. Then we had old [G. E.] Moore, and Desmond MacCarthy. I forget—did you ever read the book that made us all so wise and good: Principia Ethica? That reminds me—what about Bertie? And Ann [Judith’s sister]? Once she wrote to me, but then she lapsed; and so I don’t know what’s happened to Richard [Llewelyn Davies]. Did he get a job? Well I can’t, even I, go on asking questions. And perhaps you’re still up to your eyes in work. Have you—oh here’s another question—settled what you’re going to do, to be? What about America? What about anthropology?

I can’t give you all the gossip of Rodmell, because it would need a ream. We’re acting village plays; written by the gardener’s wife, and the chauffeur’s wife; and acted by the other villagers. Also we’re doing this that and the other about an air-raid shelter. And Leonard is up in London organising the Fabians. And we’ve played ever so many games of bowls, some I win; more I lose. Quentin is still ploughing; and Angelica has gone up north. And Duncan has been painting battleships at Plymouth; and Leonard has finished a book for the Labour Book Club; and the Press is living like a cat on eggs. So you see here’s the end of the page. You must turn up one of these days, for we would like so much to see you.

Your old Aunt,
Virginia

Nigel Henderson

[]

3611: To V. Sackville-West

Sunday 9th June [1940]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, near Lewes, Sussex

Is there any chance that next Friday, 14th, would suit you for a visit to Penshurst? If so, we’d meet you in The Pantiles at 1.30: and lunch somewhere. And I’d bring your golden box—and lord what a treat to see you!—and I believe Penshurst is open to the public every day. Except Monday——or was last year. So need you bother to tackle the Earl?

Let me know, and we’ll come either by car or train.

Our telephone is 385 Lewes.

Potto’s love,
V.

Berg

[]

3612: To Ethel Smyth

9th June 40

Monk’s House, Rodmell, near Lewes, Sussex

I was up last week, but Wednesday was my only free day; and I thought that was earmarked for Lady Balfour, so I didn’t suggest it. Also, it was such a grill that I wouldn’t have let you come anyhow. I’ll write and suggest a Thursday next week, if we come up. But at the moment,—well, at the moment one cant plan for certain. So dont put yourself about: I’ll ring or write nearer the time.

I expect its right to bring out your book; and we incline to do the same. Only Longman has a big staff, and ours is very small. I hope anyhow, for yours. I read myself into a state of immunity. And, as you know, I find your drug very potent. I dont think I was alone for 3 days for one moment; and each brought a little jab of the war—each time the door opened or the telephone rang it was war and war—and “still we danced forward.” D’you remember that quotation? [not traced]

My brain hums with scraps of poetry. Some of them were desperate; others hopeful; and some “plucking the flower while they may”—thats my niece Judith boating on the Lake in Regents Park, having just done her tripos. “We never talk about war at Cambridge” she said. “We leave that to the dons”. Then in came Kingsley Martin and Rose Macaulay, and there we sat in the hot evening, till the stars came out, never lighting a lamp, and gradually Kingsley Martin sucked every drop of lifeblood to feed his great purple vampire body. The searchlights are very lovely over the marsh, and the aeroplanes go over—one, a German, was shot over Caburn, and my windows rattled when they dropped bombs at Forest Row. But its like a Shakespeare song today—so merry, innocent, and very English.

Oh Holmes and my father. No, I dont know of any pamphlet: only that they climbed [mountains] together, and Holmes was a great charmer, and lunched with us. There were éclairs—and he pointed to one, and said “Why éclairs?” A question I’ve never answered: a beautifully urbane, witty, over cultivated American.

All right: dont send me your book; and I won’t send mine. But I will return South Riding [Winifred Holtby].

V.

Berg

[]

3613: To G. B. Shaw

13th June 1940

Typewritten

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Mr Shaw,

It was only last week that I was in London and saw the Roger Fry picture that you sent me.

It is one of his best I think, and to have it from you adds to its beauty. One day I hope you will come and see it hanging in my room. And if ever you had time, and a half sheet of paper, and would write upon it that it was your picture and that you gave it me, my debt of gratitude to you would mount, if possible, higher. But I’m not going to bother you any more.

This is only to thank you for sending it, and to assert the affection which, though suppressed, is always alive in the heart of yours gratefully.

Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

3614: To Ethel Smyth

Sunday. [30 June 1940]

M.[onks] H.[ouse, Rodmell, Sussex]

This is only a letter of thanks for what I am about to receive. The book [What Happened Next] came yesterday, and I’ve only looked at the pictures. As we go up tomorrow for our 5 days of incessant interruption, I shall read no more, if I can resist it, till next weekend, when, please God, we may be alone. At the moment a great God like niece [Judith] is talking to me—about emigrating to America.

I saw the Times Lit Supt review—very cordial for that milk and water paper.

Oh you never looked back as you turned the corner of Meck. Sqre the other night—so you never saw me waving. It was thus that I endeavoured to thank you for coming all that way in the heat.

My gratitude, and indeed love, was lost upon your grey coat and straw hat. What a pity there’s no wave language—for then you would have gone home with the sound of song in your ears.

No more now. Too hot: but there’s the book—Can I resist the temptation? Shall I put it in my bag?

Yr V.

Berg

[]

3615: To Ethel Smyth

9th July [1940]

Typewritten

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes. [Sussex]

My hand has staggered into the stages of illegibility; so put up, for old sakes sake, with this typed gabble.

I did put off reading till this week end, and now only put down flying impressions as they rise—I am talking about your book [What Happened Next]. And you never signed my copy—damn you.

First: no; its not so brilliant as the other; because of course you bagged all the high lights for that; but its richer; more luminous; and to my mind more sequacious.

2…. One always compares ‘I’ reading to ‘I’ writing. On the whole as read, Virginia comes off very badly compared with Ethel, cant think how Ethel ever liked me, such a new moon slip of a life, compared with her full orange harvest glow.

How when shes picked every plum off the tree, can she have fingered my crude little unripe apple?

Those are two rapid and rather devastating impressions. Theyre quite genuine and I think interesting. For what impresses me in this book more than in the others, is your ripeness. In fact I did wish, had I had a pencil, and no scruples about marking margins, to mark down some of your half conscious wisdom. And then it pulls together, the whole drag net of your various trophies; oh how many people youve known; but that I always realised. What I never before did justice to was the humility, which I like better than the brilliancy.

3…. but I wonder how it feels to do it. I mean to be so candid; and convinced that the public will be enthralled. I couldnt do it; but then you can. How? By having some kind of settled conviction? Its a curious light on your psychology; that you can confess so openly, what I should have hidden so carefully. And of course as I see, youre absolutely right. Yes, I get a great deal more of Ethel this way than any other.

4…. “Mum chance” … what a good word; how that expresses your rapid, random, but after all very carefully aimed English. Oh and then finally—but I’m writing against time, so this isnt finally; only a string of perfectly inconsequent exclamations—how rightly and soberly it closes. D’you know for the first time H B comes home to me? That end is so moving. His silence when he knew he had cancer. And yours too; as if the lights lowered and yet one saw everything.

But one thing I must protest; it isn’t the end. Oh no. When youve got all the themes alive and combined you dont end them here. You go on. There must be artistically as well as humanly another volume. Really I cant argue the question; for its as if you had got us all listening; and promised us that we shall have the final harmony. You cant then stop; without breaking faith.

Lord how I envy you, compared with my tethered and literal rubbish-heap grubbing in R. F. [Roger Fry], this complete and free handed and profound revelation.

Heres lunch; and rations to weigh out.

So I’ll send this not as a statement but only as a huddle of little chirps.

V.

Berg

[]

3616: To Angelica Bell

12th July [1940]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex

Dearest Pixy,

What a joy to get your letter! But O Lord—I’m 12 days late in sending this, so your letter struck splinters of fire through my heart. First I lost my cheque book; then I still lost it and Mummy gave me your address, and I lost that. Heres Leonard’s cheque. And please dearest Pix, cash it—I mean send it to the Bank—at once, or the whole structure of our fortune topples.

What with the company we keep and the fire lectures and the Gas lectures, and old Miss Green aged 60 letting herself down out of the Rectory window in shorts to show us how, when we’re on fire, life has left me no time for anything. I jump off my bicycle to find Judith and Leslie jumping off theirs: the engagement is announced; she’s got a ring; they’ve taken the Greens cottage; all August we shall be ringing and raging with the young. As there’s only one young (called Angelica) I want to ring with, I’m a little grumpy. On Monday we go to Lewes to hear Jack Hutchinson try the case of a woman abortionist out of whose cupboard at Brighton dropped a dead girl. Two more were found in a ditch. This is sober truth: you’ll see it in the paper.

On Tuesday I lunch with Lady [Margot] Oxford, who says she’s dying, and wants me to write a eulogy: on Wednesday, my old love Pipsy has asked me to tea. He’s dying too. I throw these hints of gaiety at you to draw another lovely, delicious, tipsy, lyrical and also literary and also—how I liked the description of the white calf—agricultural letter.

As you can’t read a word of this, my hand being palsied, I stop. But will write if written to. And will love even if not. And hereby claim all my rights—at compound interest too. Any facts or emotions I devour. By the way, Louie [Everest] caught us a hare; the cat ate it. No tea, no marg: how do you and Brock badger it out in your Charte hovel?

V.

Texas

[]

3617: To Ethel Smyth

24th July [1940]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, near Lewes, Sussex

I’m here at the moment—here being a place much visited by German raiders. Its odd, rather satisfactory, how soon one gets accustomed, at least to their neighbourhood, and the sound of a bomb or two dropping over Brighton. If they dropped in the garden, doubtless this facade would break; and out would tumble a coward.

I wish I hadn’t let a whole week of incessant human voices—London last week—come between me and your book. However, it survives: and in answer to your question, about sequacious (a word Coleridge uses) it means connected; and I used it to indicate a quality of currency, flowingness, in this book, which, though I didnt find it so crested and high stomached, as some of yours I liked. For so the characters come together, more subtly: thats I think why I grasped H B more firmly this time. He was too quiet and many tinted to survive the abandonment—emphasis of the other books. Here you let him grow. I never agree that one book is “the best”. Unless of course one’s Shakespeare—and how few of us are!—I believe every book is only a fragment; and one may be a brighter or a bigger fragment; but to complete the whole one must read them all. Certainly you got things said in this one that you didn’t in Imp [Impressions That Remained 1919]: and t’other way about. Thats, partly, why I want you to continue. Because you do continue, being, thank God, not a finished precious vase, but a porous receptacle that sags slightly, swells slightly, but goes on soaking up the dew, the rain, the shine, and whatever else falls upon the earth. Isn’t that the point of being Ethel Smyth? Now Vernon Lee, I daresay, completed her shape, and was sun dried and shell like. Well, I mustn’t run on inordinately.

No, I shan’t send you R.F: because, dear Ethel, its no more your book than Maurice Baring was mine. And I don’t like to think of you rubbing your spectacles and screwing up your forehead. No, Let it lapse; and one of these days I’ll write something you’ll take to like a duck: or so I hope.

I cant say what I’m doing next week: alls a vast leap in the dark. So I’ll leave it to the moment and the telephone, as before.

Now its clouding over: is there time for a game of bowls? Thats my passion.

V.

I spoke to the Women’s Institute yesterday about the Dreadnought hoax. And it made them laugh. Dont you think this proves, beyond a doubt, that I have a heart?

Berg

[]

3618: To Mrs Lehmann

24th July 40

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Mrs Lehmann [John’s mother],

Your letter gave me so much pleasure that I must answer it, in spite of the fact that you forbid me. I was so afraid that I hadn’t been able to convey anything of Roger Fry, that it is a great relief to me to find that you, who didn’t know him, feel his great charm. I only hope that there will be more readers like you—anyhow, its a great comfort to have you. I never found any piece of work so difficult.

Its a bad time to bring a book out, and I’m specially sorry on John’s account. Its been so hard on him, beginning his work with the war. All the same, both Leonard and I feel that the partnership is turning out a great success, at any rate from our point of view. Its years since Leonard has had such a free time, and I’m sure, when the war ends, John will make a great success of it.

I do hope you’re better. I was so sorry that you had to have another operation.

Thank you again for writing.

yrs very sincerely
Virginia Woolf

John Lehmann

[]

3619: To Sir William Rothenstein

24th July 1940

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Sir William,

I am anxious to send you back the Roger Fry letters which you were so very kind as to lend me.

But people move about so much now that I want to be sure of sending them to the right address. Would you let me have a line to say where this is?

I ought to have asked your leave to quote from some of your memories. But I took it, I hope rightly, that you would not mind.

Thank you again for letting me have the letters.

Yrs sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Houghton Library, Harvard University

[]

3620: To John Lehmann

29th July 40

37 Mecklenburgh Square, W.C.1.

Dear John,

I handed on your message to Leonard, and we’re both very sorry you couldn’t come to Monk’s House, and that your mother’s ill again: please give her my sympathy. We could have offered you a great variety of air raid alarms, distant bombs, reports by Mrs Bleach who brought a stirrup pump (installed, needless to say in my bedroom) of battles out at sea. Indeed its rather lovely about 2 in the morning to see the lights stalking the Germans over the marshes. But this remains on tap, so you must propose yourself later. And let me know if you want to meet the Major [Gardner] and hear about—what was it?—why the crab walks sideways?

Leonard’s tackling Mrs N [Nicholls, Hogarth Press]. downstairs—showers of confidences and complaints, also children’s letters make the room almost uninhabitable he says; and he’s teaching Miss Griffiths how to mark off [for printing]. I’m quite pleased with the sales of R. F. so far—L. is binding more.

Don’t bother to read it now, but some day I should value your opinion very much. Its no good reading other people’s books when one’s writing one’s own. I hope your Penguin is a fully feathered bird by this time, with a vast throat to swallow all the sprats. I’d like you to print the Leaning Tower, if I can bring myself to revise it, which I loathe. Also, when would you want it—also, what about America? I mean can I print simultaneously there? But at the moment I can’t stop reading Coleridge—thanks to you, I’m lured back into the ancients, and read a William Morris, chants for socialists, with immense pleasure. So I can’t bring myself to do anything I ought to do.

Forgive this long letter,

Yr V. W.

John Lehmann

[]

3621: To J. B. Priestley

2nd Aug 1940

Typewritten

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Mr Priestley,

I shall be glad to join the general committee of the Authors national committee. Many thanks for asking me. Your letter has been following me about, or I would have written before.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Texas

[]

3622: To V. Sackville-West

6th Aug [1940]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, near Lewes, Sussex

Oh yes do come—I’ve been in such a pelt that I couldn’t write before. So now merely suggest, emphatically, Friday 16th … stay the night and its understood that means all Saturday—no evasions about lunch, or someone waiting at Sissinghurst.

Great lorries are carrying sandbags down to the river: guns are being emplaced on the Banks. So do come before its all ablaze. At the moment, the flowers are doing their bit. This jargon from my first aid practice, and the Womens Institute.

Oh dear how nice to see you—and there’s the gold [saccharine] box, only one or two tablets pilfered, on the table.

Louies [Everest] father is being buried in state; so I have to wash up and must now descend to the sink.

V.

I did all the peas; potatoes; and made a pie.

Berg

[]

3623: To Desmond Maccarthy

6th Aug [1940]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dearest Desmond,

Your article made me so happy that I must write and thank you. I was afraid I had made an awful hash of Roger. It was the very deuce to do. So bless you for seeing with your affable but hawklike eye what I was at. I’d just been reading that venomous and malignant little man Herbert Read in the Spectator.

Yr Virginia

I’m afraid your mystic voice must have meant Armistice Day 1942 [unexplained]. Nessa and Duncan, by the way, did supply an account of Roger’s painting, anonymously, in an appendix [to Roger Fry].

Mrs Michael MacCarthy

[]

3624: To Clive Bell

Tuesday [6 August 1940]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dearest Clive,

Your letter gave me very great pleasure. I valued your opinion so much that I didn’t send you a copy so as not to influence you even to the extent of 12/0. But its at your service if you want it. But it isnt only my author’s vanity thats pleased. I’ve been haunted by the fear that I’d not brought out Roger’s qualities. Now that you approve I dont care a snap what anyone says—the only detractor so far is Herbert Read who’s voided all his spite against Roger in the Spectator. What, I wonder, was the cause?

I didn’t myself feel that the first part was dull, nor did I think the break so marked, but one gets so immersed in detail and I was also so fascinated by Roger’s progress, that I felt I couldn’t judge. Of course the great difficulty was not to intervene oneself, and yet not to be colourless. I’ve never done anything so devilishly difficult—Well this is only to thank you for writing. I dont know when a letter gave me (and not my vanity) such satisfaction. And there’s a heap of things I want to talk to you about.

Yr V. W.

Quentin Bell

[]

3625: To V. Sackville-West

12th Aug. [1940]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, near Lewes, Sussex

1. What about Friday 30th?—same condition: Saturday lunch.

2. Leonard must admit that he had this gadget already; but is none the less grateful:

3. Country notes idea enthusiastically accepted: good news already sent to John: who will communicate officially.

4. Why dont we some day meet at Sheffield Park and see Gibbons home? I throw this out as a plan to be considered when you come. So let me know that you do come: and isn’t this a plain direct business like letter.

5. Love. Rather pestered by niece [Judith Stephen] and her young man [Leslie Humphreys]: nice niece; dull young man:

so must stop—

V.

Berg

[]

3626: To R. C. Trevelyan

12th Aug 1940

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Bob,

Your letter gave me very great pleasure. You knew Roger long before I did, and in many ways must have known him better. I was terribly afraid that my portrait of him wouldn’t seem to you a true one. Its a great relief to me that you and Bessy like it. The difficulties, as you say, were immense. Often I almost gave up in despair. I was so hampered by family feelings (though the Frys have been very kind) and then the mass of letters was bewildering. But I’m glad now, if you think its given something of what Roger was, that I went on with it. I’m specially pleased that Julian was interested—Roger would have liked to attract the younger generation.

We’re having—much to our surprise—to print a second edition. I’m sending some of your corrections, but doubt if they’ll be in time. If you could let me have the others, I would keep them, in case there should ever be a 3rd edition. Dear me, how careless to let so many creep in: Margery Fry, Leonard and Vanessa, all read the MS: and I hoped it was unusually accurate.

We would very much like to see you. In the autumn we shall be in London, at 37 Meckg Sqre, every other week, so we could easily arrange it, if you’d let us know when you’re up.

I’m so sorry about Bessy’s eyes. I enjoyed a thing she wrote in the Abinger Chronicle so much.

What are you working at?

Leonard and I send our love—and again it was a pleasure to get your letter.

Yr ever
Virginia Woolf

Sussex

[]

3627: To Benedict Nicolson

13 Aug. 1940

Typewritten

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

Dear Ben,

Just as I began to read your letter, an air raid warning sounded. I’ll put down the reflections that occurred to me, as honestly, if I can, as you put down your reflections on reading my life of Roger Fry while giving air raid alarms at Chatham.

There goes that damned siren, I said to myself, and dipped into your letter. You were making extracts from Roger’s letters as you listened. “Returning slowly through France he stopped in many of the towns and villages….” I began making extracts from your biography. “Returning slowly from Italy with Jeremy Hutchinson, Ben Nicolson reached Venice in May 1935 …”.

Here the raiders came over head. I went and looked at them. Then I returned to your letter. “I am so struck by the fools paradise in which he and his friends lived. He shut himself out from all disagreeable actualities and allowed the spirit of Nazism to grow without taking any steps to check it….” Lord, I thought to myself, Roger shut himself out from disagreeable actualities did he? Roger who faced insanity, death and every sort of disagreeable—what can Ben mean? Are Ben and I facing actualities because we’re listening to bombs dropping on other people? And I went on with Ben Nicolson’s biography. After returning from a delightful tour in Italy, for which his expensive education at Eton and Oxford had well fitted him, he got a job as keeper of the King’s pictures. Well, I thought, Ben was a good deal luckier than Roger. Roger’s people were the very devil; when he was Ben’s age he was earning his living by extension lecturing and odd jobs of reviewing. He had to wait till he was over sixty before he got a Slade professorship. And I went on to think of that very delightful party that you gave in Guildford Street two months before the war. I remembered Isaiah Berlin discussing philosophy—not Spinozas—[G. E.] Moores—with Leonard; Stephen Spender flirting with a young Freud; Cressida Ridley and all the rest of the young talking exactly as we used to talk at Bernard Street. Then I looked at your letter.. “This intensely private world which Roger Fry cultivated could only be communicated to a few people as sensitive and intelligent as himself …” Why then did Ben Nicolson give these parties? Why did he take a job under Kenneth Clark at Windsor? Why didn’t he chuck it all away and go into politics? After all, war was a great deal closer in 1939 than in 1900.

Here the raiders began emitting long trails of smoke. I wondered if a bomb was going to fall on top of me; I wondered if I was facing disagreeable actualities; I wondered what I could have done to stop bombs and disagreeable actualities … Then I dipped into your letter again. “This all sounds as though I wish to say that the artist, the intellectual, has no place in modern society. On the contrary, his mission is now more vital than it has ever been. He will still be shocked by stupidity and untruth but instead of ignoring it he will set out to fight it; instead of retreating into his tower to uphold certain ethical standards his job will be to persuade as many other people as possible to think and behave in the same way—and on his success and failure depends the future of the world.”

Who on earth, I thought, did that job more incessantly and successfully than Roger Fry? Didn’t he spend half his life, not in a tower, but travelling about England addressing masses of people, who’d never looked at a picture and making them see what he saw? And wasn’t that the best way of checking Nazism? Then I opened another letter; as it happened from Sebastian Sprott, lecturer at Nottingham; and I read how he’d once been mooning around the S.Kensington Museum “… then I saw Roger. All was changed. In ten minutes he caused me to enjoy what I was looking at. The objects became vivid and intelligible … There must be many people like me, people with scales on their eyes and wax in their ears … if only someone would come along and remove the scales and dig out the wax. Roger Fry did it …”

Then the raiders passed over. And I thought I cant have given Ben the least notion of what Roger was like. I suppose it was my fault. Or is it partly, and naturally, that he must have a scapegoat? I admit I want one. I loathe sitting here waiting for a bomb to fall; when I want to be writing. If it doesn’t kill me its killing someone else. Where can I lay the blame? On the Sackvilles. On the Dufferins? On Eton and Oxford? They did precious little it seems to me to check Nazism. People like Roger and Goldie Dickinson did an immense deal it seems to me. Well, we differ in our choice of scapegoats.

But what I’d like to know is, suppose we both survive this war, what ought we to do to prevent another? I shall be too old to do anything but write. But will you throw up your job as an art critic and take to politics? And if you stick to art criticism, how will you make it more public and less private than Roger did? About the particular points you raise; I think if you’ll read some of last articles in Transformations [1926] you’ll find that Roger got beyond the very classical and intellectual painters; and did include Rembrandt, Titian and so on. I’ve no doubt you’re right in saying that his attempts at the sort of Berenson connoiseurship were lamentable. I’ve never read BB, so I cant say. I did read Roger’s last Slade lectures however; and was much impressed by the historical knowledge shown there. But of course I’m not an art critic; and have no right to express an opinion.

Well, the hostile aeroplanes have passed over my head now; I suppose they’re dropping bombs over Newhaven and Seaford.

I hope this letter doesn’t sound unkind. Its only because I liked your being honest so much that I’ve tried to be. And of course I know you’re having a much worse time of it at the moment than I am … Another siren has just sounded.

Yours ever
Virginia Woolf

[handwritten:]

I’m not sure, on reading this letter over, that I’m right to send it. It sounds too severe. I’ve been discussing it with Leonard. He says he thinks everybody’s to blame for the present condition of the world, but the difficulty is to see what anyone—or in a particular case Roger Fry—could have done, which would have made the slightest difference to what has happened. Equally, I think you’ll understand I’m not blaming you, and so send it.

Vanessa Nicolson

[]

3628: To Sibyl Colefax

14th Aug [1940]

Monk’s House [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest Sibyl,

What a faithful friend you are—reading your friends’ books, when you have so many friends who write books. I’m delighted that you heard the voice of Roger. I never thought that anything would come through those innumerable cardboard boxes stuffed with bills and love letters. It’s a great consolation to me that it has. I only dip into London now for a few distracted hours—no time to get to Westminster. So you must take us on one of your owling flights over the fields. But we’re almost daily shot at—it’s not what they call a healthy neighbourhood. If you hear that Virginia has disarmed 6 German pilots you wont be in the least surprised, will you?

Yrs V. W.,
with gratitude

Michael Colefax

[]

3629: To W. J. H. Sprott

15th Aug 40

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

My dear Sebastian,

I was so glad to hear from you that you liked my life of Roger. It wasn’t an easy book to write, as you can imagine; there were so many feelings to consider, and such a mass of odds and ends out of which to make a whole. So I’m very glad that it has brought him back to you. Oddly enough, its being successful.

I never meant to be severe on critics, as you say I’ve been: only on the reviewers who ought to grow into critics instead of remaining sprats and minnows. It struck me, going through Roger’s papers, how I wished he had done fewer articles, and more books.

I’m sorry you are so immersed in fat squat little men at Rotary Clubs [in Nottingham]. We are now living a betwixt and between life—half in the midst of our village—which must be typical of all villages—and half, or less than half, at 37 Mecklenburgh Square. Air raids are now twice daily here. Nobody pays them much attention so far.

If life continues in the autumn, wont you come and see us in Mecklenburgh Sqre? We should like very much to see you again: and both send our love.

Yr ever
Virginia Woolf

King’s

[]

3630: To Sir William Rothenstein

15th Aug 40

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Sir William

Many thanks for your letter. I am so glad that you find my life of Roger Fry on the whole a fair portrait. I did my best to make it so; but of course there were great difficulties. I am not sure what phrase of mine led you to think that I asserted “that those of us who did not follow Roger have been left behind.” What I think I said was that when Roger spoke of those who, like Professor Tonks for example, saw nothing in Cézanne, he conveyed the impression that in his opinion they “had receded into the background.” I did not express any opinion of my own, for naturally it would have been worthless. And of course I should not think of giving my opinion as to what had or had not influenced the work of John, Steer, and Sickert. No doubt, as you say, Roger had no influence upon them. But many of the younger artists have told me that Roger’s influence upon their work was very great. That, I think, it was right to state. But I should be incapable of saying—and certainly did not say—whether he did or did not “deter some of the younger men from following their natural bent.” That of course must be left to experts to decide. And I hoped that I had made it plain that I have no such qualification.

I am sorry for the delay in returning your [Fry] letters. They were in London, I found; but I had them sent yesterday, and I hope they have reached you safely.

Thank you again for allowing me to use them.

Yours sincerely
Virginia Woolf

Houghton Library, Harvard University

[]

3631: To Ethel Smyth

16th Aug. [1940]

Monk’s House, Rodmell near Lewes, Sussex

My opinion of you as a critic has gone up almost to fever height. I suppose I wronged you, but I thought, Ethel will never see what I’ve been at. She’ll say this is a dull meticulous book about a dull pedantic man. And then you go and pick up the trail at once—well, at second reading—and follow it with your nose to the ground and pounce upon the heart and centre of the book as though I’d stuck red and green lights at every point.

Of course I dimmed those lights deliberately. That was my intention—to lead my reader on, till without my showing him, he (in this case she) saw. Now Vita didn’t see: but your letter I thought a miracle of discernment. It was an experiment in self suppression; a gamble in R’s power to transmit himself. And so rich and to me alive and various and masterly was he that I was certain he would shine by his own light better than through any painted shade of mine. Lord! how I sweated! But to my amazement, its succeeded. That is, its selling; the public does see Roger plain: in fact we’re printing a second edition—and now a third is to be ordered—Heres an air raid siren….

Then Mrs Ebbs come to borrow my table for a village play. Then my niece Judith and her young man to borrow bread. I’m afraid, in this racket, theres no chance of writing coherent thanks: all the same I was very happy, reading your letter. And amazed once more, at the surprises you hold under your 3 cornered hat. Oh yes, send me your marginalia—please do—and any further comments—about Roger, or about the invisible V—the submerged V. I rather respect her, for going under….

V.

Berg

[]

3632: To R. C. Trevelyan

18th Aug [1940]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Bob,

Many thanks for sending the corrections. I’m sending them, or the most important, for some I think dont matter—off at once. The book is selling extremely well, much to our surprise, and we are having to reprint a third time. I’m very pleased, as I thought nobody would read it at the present moment. And it shows that Roger does come through and excite interest. Of course it would have been much easier, for me, to write a fantasy about him, as Arthur Waley I think suggests, I should have done. But then I dont feel his letters dull; and I wanted him to speak for himself. So many people are interested that I think it was the right way. Anyhow, I felt it was.

I’m glad you’re writing poetry. I like yours better and better whenever I re-read them. I think thats the only test. And I read more and more poetry now. I wish I could read Latin and Greek easily: so as I cant, I shall like to have your translation. How I envy you, being able to do that! Latin always floors me.

Yrs ever
Virginia Woolf

Sussex

[]

3633: To Benedict Nicolson

[24 August 1940]

Draft of Letter 3634, typewritten

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

Dear Ben,

My letter [No. 3627] was also written very hastily; no doubt I misinterpreted what you said, though I didn’t mean to. To be frank, I doubt if I’ve got your meaning in your last letter. But I would like to understand your point of view; and if possible make you understand mine. So I answer, in the hope that the sirens will remain silent.

“My quarrel” you say “is not with art but with Bloomsbury.” What do you mean by Bloomsbury? It is rather as if I should say, My quarrel is not with art but with Mayfair, meaning by Mayfair Ben Nicolson, Vita, Eddie Sackville, the Sitwells, Stephen Tennant and David Cecil. You would feel I meant something vaguely abusive, but you would find it very difficult to say what. Apparently you mean by ‘Bloomsbury’ a set of people who sat on the floor at Bernard Street saying “More and more I understand nothing of humanity in the mass” and were content with that, instead of trying to make humanity in the mass understand and appreciate what you know and say. It was Roger Fry who said “I understand nothing of humanity in the mass.” I did not say that: if you impute that to me, then you must also impute to me his saying “More and more I dread the imprisonment of egotism.” You must make me responsible for teaching elementary school children in the black country how to dress, for setting up the Omega, for decorating the walls of the Boro Polytechnic.

But in fact I am not responsible for anything Roger did or said. My own education and my own point of view were entirely different from his. I never went to school or college. My father spent perhaps £100 on my education. When I was a young woman I tried to share the fruits of that very imperfect education with the working classes by teaching literature at Morley College; by holding a Womens Cooperative Guild meeting weekly; and, politically, by working for the vote. It is true I wrote books and some of those books, like the Common Reader, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas (in which I did my best to destroy Sackvilles and Dufferins) have sold many thousand copies. That is, I did my best to make them reach a far wider circle than a little private circle of exquisite and cultivated people. And to some extent I succeeded. Leonard too is Bloomsbury. He has spent half his life in writing books like International Government, like the Barbarians at the gates, like Empire and Commerce, to prevent the growth of Nazism; and to create a League of Nations. Maynard Keynes is Bloomsbury. He wrote the [Economic] Consequences of the Peace. Lytton Strachey was Bloomsbury. His books had a very large circulation and certainly influenced a wider circle than any small group. Duncan has made a living ever since he was a boy by painting. These are facts about Bloomsbury and they do seem to me to prove that they have done their very best to make humanity in the mass appreciate what they knew and saw.

To return to Roger Fry himself. You say that his “interpretation of art was too sophisticated, too private for the general public.” Yet he could fill the Queens Hall with two thousand listeners from all classes when he lectured. Can Herbert Read do that, or Berenson, or Kenneth Clark?

But you say “You must educate your public. Taste and appreciation can never improve until attitudes of mind are changed …” There I agree with you. I cant answer for what Roger felt. But I do feel myself that I ought to have been able to make not merely thousands of people interested in literature; but millions. Why have I failed to do that? The other day [27 April] I went and lectured to the WEA at Brighton, and felt that it was hopeless for me to tell people who had been taken away from school at the age of 14 that they must read Shakespeare. It is impossible so long as they are educated as they are. Now my own education (alone among books) was a very bad one. Yours too, at Eton and Oxford was I think tho better than mine a bad one. What is the kind of education people ought to have? That it seems to me is the problem we have got to solve. Until we do, we must have people like Roger Fry talking only to thousands instead of to millions. I dont think he was wrong in the way he taught them; but I think it was impossible for them to learn. We must have Mayfair (your group) and Bloomsbury (my group,)—But can the Roger Frys change the education? Isn’t that for politicians?

My own feeling is that Roger Fry did the best he could, given his education, given the society in which he was brought up. (He gave his own views on the artist and society by the way in Vision and Design [1920]). But the best he could was limited by the society. My puzzle is, ought artists now to become politicians? My instinct says no; but I’m not sure that I can justify my instinct. I take refuge in the fact that I’ve received so little from society that I owe it very little. But thats not altogether satisfactory; and anyhow it doesn’t apply to you. I suppose I’m obtuse, but I cant find your answer in your letter, how it is that you are going to change the attitudes of the mass of people by remaining an art critic.

Sussex

[]

3634: To Benedict Nicolson

24th August [1940]

Typewritten

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

Dear Ben,

Thank you very much for writing again. I think its extraordinarily nice of you to write to me, and Vita is quite wrong if she thinks or fears that anything you’ve said has annoyed me. It didn’t in the least. And I hope I didn’t annoy you by what I said. Its very difficult, when one writes letters in a hurry, as I always do, not to make them sound abrupt. I only want to say how much I like your honesty.

I dont think its much good discussing Bloomsbury, because if I couldn’t make you see what I think it means in my book, I certainly can’t in a letter. So I’ll only say that I dont think your quotation from one of Roger’s letters represents what he thought—for there are other quotations that give quite a different view. Nor do I think it represents a point of view common to all his friends. But aren’t you taking what you call ‘Bloomsbury’ much too seriously? I dont think that those people whom I suppose you to mean had the very great gifts that are needed to alter society. What puzzles me is that the people who had infinitely greater gifts than any of us had—I mean Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge and so on—were unable to influence society. They didn’t have anything like the influence they should have had upon 19th century politics. And so we drifted into imperialism and all the other horrors that led to 1914. Would they have had more influence if they had taken an active part in politics? Or would they only have written worse poetry?

I entirely agree with you when you say “You must educate your public. Taste and appreciation can never improve until attitudes of mind are changed.” I felt that very much the other day when I lectured the W.E.A. on poetry at Brighton. It seemed to me useless to tell people who left school at 14 and were earning their livings in shops and factories that they ought to enjoy Shakespeare. But how can we, if we remain artists, give them that education, or change their conditions?

I dont know whether I’m right in thinking from what you say in your letter—“There is no doubt that I shall be more useful in Venice than in Hyde Park”—that you feel it can be done. Does that mean that you feel that you see something in pictures that Roger didn’t, and that by making people see this you can influence them in time to change their attitude without changing their education and conditions by political methods?

I hope you will be able to. It would solve many problems. Anyhow I think you’ve made a good beginning if you hate people who sit on the floor and despise humanity. So if my life of Roger helped to teach you that, it wasn’t altogether wasted.

Here a young man from the War office interrupts; about putting up a pill box in our field. Also there is an air raid on. So excuse this very inadequate letter. Last Sunday we had five raiders almost crashing into the dining room. Then they machine gunned the next village, and apparently went on to Sissinghurst.

Vita says you’ve had an awful time at Chatham.

Yours ever
Virginia Woolf

Vanessa Nicolson

[]

3635: To Dora Sanger

24th Aug [1940]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

It was very nice of you to write about my life of Roger. I’m delighted that it interested you. I daresay I stressed the Quaker influence too much, but it certainly played a very large part in R’s letters. The difficulty was that letters give a partial view; and for so much of his life I had only letters, and the family, who kept letters, predominated.

We so often think of you and Charlie. We are all congregated here, with many air raids.

V. W.

Daphne Sanger

[]

3635a: To Katharine Furse

24th Aug 1940

Monk’s House Rodmell near Lewes Sussex

Dear Katharine,

I’m delighted to hear that your books coming out so soon, and shall get it at once. I’m afraid we’ve both hit upon stormy weather—but can assure you, there need be no fear of reviewers. They’ll pick out your plums and say nothing about you. Your indexer is a treasure; I wish I’d employed her. If it werent for the bombs, which stop book buying insatntly, I’m sure your book will be a success. I’ve got muddled though; is this only the first volume? I hope so. I find biography reading the easiest reading at the moment.

We are well within range of guns here, as I expect you are. Last Sunday the German raiders almost crashed into our dining room, indeed they brushed our elm trees, and a second later machine gunned a cyclist. Every night they swarm over us like angry wasps. But the village gave its fair yesterday; and I was enormously impressed by the English mothers—sitting stolid listening to Twelfth Night (inaudible as it was) while the air raid siren howled; and not a mother or baby paid the least attention to that old ass (I mean Hitler.)

Yours
Virginia Woolf

Shall you get leave to print your fathers autobiography? I do hope so—why not privately anyhow? I will instantly subscribe.

Bristol. Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature. Vol. 9, Number 2. Fall 1990.

[]

3636: To Angelica Bell

Tuesday [27 August 1940]

Monk’s House, Rodmell [Sussex]

Darling Pix,

This letter shows you the esteem in which you are held in Rodmell. I leave it to you to arrange with the Rehearsers. Then you will take a meal here, and examine your naked boys—the embroidery I mean. I’ve picked out private parts bright red. But its a bit of a muddle.

This is to say may we come over and see you and Brock [David Garnett] on Monday next—I think about 3. Then we could have a gossip. The witches are fairly on the ramp. Louie has adopted a 3 day old lamb. I’m now off to a fire [air raid] meeting.

Let me have a card.

V.

Texas

[]

3637: To Ruth Fry

28 Aug 1940

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex

Dear Ruth—yes of course we agreed that surnames were an abomination between us—

Thank you very much for your letter. I neednt tell you what a great relief and satisfaction it is to me that you should like my life of Roger. I know how I should have felt if someone were writing the life of my brother. And I was terribly afraid, as I wrote it, that you would find things that annoyed you, or would disagree with what I said. I did my best to let Roger tell his own life, but of course one cant simply do that. And it was a question, how far to intrude, and how far to suppress, oneself. I’m so glad you noticed the sentence I brought in to show his change toward your mother, and hers to him. I felt it rounded off that long and sometimes very painful relationship. I know there should have been more dates, but so many events had to be telescoped in order to keep the book within bounds that dates often didn’t seem to fit. Also there should have been a bibliography—I admit I shirked it, from laziness partly, partly that to be complete one would have had an almost endless chase through magazines and papers. I don’t suppose he collected a tenth part of his writing.

When the nine children were born was a great puzzle even to Margery. I’m sorry I put you in the wrong house, and where was Roger born?

It sold amazingly well till the first air raid on London, when the sales instantly stopped. Whether they’ll recover I don’t know. But I’ve had so many letters from his friends that I think it’s reached them, and as you say, the reviews have been kinder much than I expected.

Once more, I’m so very glad that you liked it. And thank you for saying so.

I will send back the early picture of Highgate of Roger’s, if I can find a safe way.

Please tell Lady Gibb how glad I am she enjoyed the book.

Yrs Virginia Woolf

Thank you for sending Gerald Heard’s article. I’ve been in London so have not yet had time to read it.

Pamela Diamand

[]

3637a: To Katharine Furse

29th Aug 40

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes Sussex

Dear Katharine,

I’m distressed to find that you take exception to my quoting “pornographic” in my life of Roger Fry. I quoted it because you gave me leave. Ive looked up your letter—26th Oct 39—and this is what you say: “You know I leave you absolutely free to use pornographic or not as you like. You are free anyway but I mean I shall not be hurt if you use it. Do what seems best from Roger Fry’s end.” So I used it, thinking it was best from Roger Fry’s end, and that you wouldnt be hurt. And now you say you do mind! If I’d known that, of course I wouldnt have quoted. Please believe I was taking you [a]t your word; and I’m very sorry if I read more into your word than you meant.

This si written after our third more or less sleepless night; Germans over us from 9.30 till 4 this morning. So I’m too sleepy to answer your letter even though the typewriter as you say runs to chatter. Thats why its such a help in letter writing. All I want is to make clear why I quoted. I’m so sorry youve cut out things, but all the same look forward immesnely to your book. [handwritten]: Mine was not written “easily”—oh dear no—at least 4 times over. But I’m so glad you liked what you read.

Yrs Virginia Woolf

[Bristol]. Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature. Vol. 9, Number 2. Fall 1990.

[]

3638: To V. Sackville-West

Friday [30 August 1940]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, near Lewes, Sussex

I’ve just stopped talking to you. It seems so strange. Its perfectly peaceful here—theyre playing bowls—I’d just put flowers in your room. And there you sit with the bombs falling round you.

What can one say—except that I love you and I’ve got to live through this strange quiet evening thinking of you sitting there alone.

Dearest—let me have a line—let us meet next week. But one can scarcely bear it. Only we must.

Yr loving
V.

You have given me such happiness.

385 Lewes. Ring me up anytime.

Berg

[]

3639: To Benedict Nicolson

2nd Sept [1940]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Ben,

You say ‘next week’—I suppose thats now this week. No, if its this week, we shant be up at all. What I would suggest is, couldn’t you possibly come here for a night? If so, ring up Lewes 385. We should very much enjoy seeing you. We could argue incessantly in between raids. And theres always a bed of sorts. If its the week of the 9th, then we may be up—I’m not sure; but would let you know.

In any case answer my letter at even greater length. I love getting your letters, and thinking out completely smashing replies. Only its easier to talk them, so we must meet.

Excuse this scrawl—to catch post.

I’m so happy you found the life of R. F interesting as well as infuriating. I was very anxious to know what you thought.

Yr ever
V. W.

Vanessa Nicolson

[]

3640: To Mrs G. E. Easdale

3rd Sept 40

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Mrs Easdale,

I thought this year it would be impossible for you to remember the flowers—or if you did, you wouldn’t be able to get them. And then the cardboard box came and there they were! So I shall have one blazing bunch all the winter. Thank you so much. I can only send you plums from our garden,—I dont suppose you want plums. We have a record crop. We live mostly down here; but go up to London—37 Mecklenburgh Sqre—every other week.

Yes, we are humming with Germans here—as we were playing bowls one came low down, and we took it for English till they started firing. For 2 days though we’ve been at peace.

Kent sounds much worse. But I agree—the country is better than London with raids or without. I saw the birth of Joan’s baby in the paper. I’m so glad its over happily. Please congratulate her from us, only we hope she won’t stop writing. And let us believe that some day we shall all meet—babies and all—in peace.

Thank you again for the flowers, and all your trouble.

Yrs sincerely
Virginia Woolf

University of London

[]

3641: To Mrs R. C. Trevelyan

4th Sept 40

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Bessie,

It was delightful of you to write to me about my life of Roger. You have found out exactly what I was trying to do when you compare it to a piece of music. Its odd, for I’m not regularly musical, but I always think of my books as music before I write them. And especially with the life of Roger,—there was such a mass of detail that the only way I could hold it together was by abstracting it into themes. I did try to state them in the first chapter, and then to bring in developments and variations, and then to make them all heard together and end by bringing back the first theme in the last chapter. Just as you say, I am extraordinarily pleased that you felt this. No one else has I think. And I dont wonder, for I was often crushed under the myriad details. It wasn’t only the difficulty of making quotations fit—so many things had to be muted, or only hinted. And there is always a certain constraint, which one doesn’t feel in fiction, a sense of other people looking over one’s shoulder. I cant say how glad I am that you and Bob who both knew Roger so well think it a true portrait of him. Bob went all through his life even though, as so often happens, they met less often towards the end. I understand your being shy with him. I wasn’t exactly shy, but I sometimes felt overpowered, and so uneasy. But nobody—none of my friends—made such a difference to my life as he did. And yet, writing about him, one had to keep that under.

Thank you so much for writing. I hope we may meet some day—we shall be a good deal in London this winter. But everything’s difficult now. I’m so sorry about your eyes. Does it make a difference to your music?

With love from us both.

Yr affectionate
Virginia Woolf

Trinity College, Cambridge

[]

3642: To David Cecil

4th Sept [1940]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear David,

I liked very much getting a letter from my fellow biographer. I would have answered before, but was up in London—air raids: down here—more air raids. (London, by the way, is now 37 Mecklenburgh Square). When I’d finished my book, I thought, David’s book is much better than mine, but then he didn’t have such a difficult task. I doubt that it is possible to write a friend’s life. In fact I came to the conclusion that it isn’t, and only went on because I’d said I would. There’s so much one can’t say, and so much one mustn’t say. Though the Frys were very good, I always felt them in the background. And then the switch over from quotation to narrative. And then the love affairs, and the quarrels with artists, and then the bare patches and the profusions—altogether its not a task I’d undertake again, but I’m immeasurably pleased if you got a vision of him, in spite of everything. I wish you had known him.

Its an age since we met. We’ve left Tavistock for Mecklenburgh, but live mostly down here. And you’re in Shropshire. I hope you don’t get German planes flying over your lawn, as we do. Not that they’ve done us any damage. And I hope you get time for Lord Melbourne, as well as the Oxford lectures. I’m longing for a second volume of Melbourne. Meanwhile I am deep in Coleridge. Have you ever tackled the life of Coleridge? I wish you would. I’ve just discovered the fact that Mrs Coleridge wore a wig—a short dry wig in the morning, like old grass. That explains a lot.

How is Rachel? What’s her baby like? Shall we ever meet in peace?—or in London?

I hope so. And thank you again for writing. Please, if you ever have time, write again. There’s so much to talk about.

Love from us both.

Yrs ever V. W.

David Cecil

[]

Letters 3643-3674 (September-December 1940)

3643: To Violet Dickinson

[8 September 1940]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

My Violet,

(a raid is going on overhead, so dont expect much coherency—) You are an angel to toil through my efforts. This one was a damned effort. I had clouds of Quakers buzzing round me all the time I wrote. However, I was so devoted to him [Roger Fry] that I risked it. Did you ever meet him? I didnt get half his charm into the life—but you cant think what a job it was—Masses of love letters, bills, lectures, and so on, dumped on me—and I’m not a tidy woman by nature. Thank God its finished.

Leonard is out picking apples in the garden in spite of the planes. Do you get them?—oh there’s the All Clear, which means I suppose they’re off to London. I was going to say you ought to come and see our garden, which is the apple of Leonard’s eye. As you can imagine, I never do a hands turn, but walk in the shade of the trees, and cant remember names. I’ve been wandering miles over the downs this afternoon, and must now read Katharine Furse’s life of herself.

I’m so old I could write a life of myself. But I remember too much. You, at Fritham [1902] laughing at our long skirts: and Theodore [Llewelyn] Davies hunting; and you—yes I remember all kinds of scenes with you—at Hyde Park Gate up in my room. One of these days I shall write about them. You were an angel to us,—d’you still wear that chain and the dolphin?—and why d’you think Nessa scorns you? I shall tell her tomorrow when she’s coming over with her lovely daughter. Quentin works on a farm mercifully; and Clive sits up at night watching for Germans in a helmet. Leonard fights fires here. And so one day let us meet, and forgive this awful scrawl.

y. Sp[arroy].

Sussex

[]

3644: To Ethel Smyth

11th Sept. [1940]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, near Lewes, Sussex

I’ve been meaning every day to write to you—that is I stop in the middle of something else and address a remark to you—but the moment never comes. And its not worth 2½ [stamp], I think, sending a thought: except that its quite worth 2½ getting a word from you. Yesterday we were up in London, and there was a crowd at Meck Sqre: a policeman stopped us: we got out—saw that the house just opposite ours across the road had been entirely crushed that night. A direct hit on top. It was nothing but a heap of bricks, smoking still. And we weren’t allowed to go to 37, as a bomb was still in the square unexploded. Our house wasnt touched, but the windows are broken. So there was nothing for it but to come away. Everyone apparently in that house—one of those lovely houses at the side—had sheltered in the basement. All killed I suppose. We go up on Friday to arrange about moving the Press. and to bring back some of our valuables. that is if we’re allowed. But everyone has been evacuated; the press cant work—And then we went and saw Holborn—my word—its like a nightmare. All heaps of glass, water running, a great gap at top of Chancery Lane; my typists office demolished.

I’ve just seen a plane shot down on the hill beside Lewes. We heard firing, ran out, and saw the plane swerve and fall, and then a burst of black smoke. Then the English plane circled and made off. There’s the all clear.

Thats why its so difficult to write a coherent letter. I try to write of a morning. Its odd to feel one’s writing in a vacuum—no-one will read it. I feel the audience has gone. Still, so oddly is one made, I find I must spin my brain even in a vacuum.

But I want to know about you. Vita was coming but at the last moment she rang up. Bombs were dropping round Sissinghurst, and she had to stay, as she drives an ambulance. Rose Macaulay is doing the same in London. I admire that very much. Here we lead a disjointed jumping life. I had a niece staying here; another in a cottage. They collected friends in the airforce and so on. We had a fête: also a village play. The sirens sounded in the middle. All the mothers sat stolid. I also admired that very much. Oh I wanted to say: I’ve always admitted Maurice B[aring]. is a blind spot in me. I’ve no doubt you see whats there, and I dont. This refers to some remark of yours. The sale of Roger has been stopped completely by raids. Never mind: it had 3 weeks good run; and has landed me in endless letters. How people loved and hated him! Are you—doing what? Dear me: its true I should like to see you. You cohere like an orange globe, while the rest of the world scuds and streams.

V.

Post Script. Thursday [12 September]

I forgot to send this, so add a second sheet, by way of justifying my 2½—though there’s nothing to say.

Bomb in Meck Sqre still unexploded, everyone evacuated, but we go up tomorrow on the chance of being let in. For we must nail something over the windows. All our letters are left there and all work at the Press suspended. John Lehmann says we must evacuate the whole thing to the country. Yet the clerks seemed as tough as leather. And I’ve been writing about Coleridge, and never noticed a siren, and I’ve been up on the hill picking blackberries for dinner, and lost a glove that was to have lasted a winter, and suddenly conceived the idea of a new book, and really I think I can weather—I mean weather cock—I mean brain spin—another ten years if Hitler doesn’t drop a splinter into my machine. Churchill cheered me up. Also this great gale thats blowing as it must have blown the other Armada. What touched and indeed raked what I call my heart in London was the grimy old woman at the lodging house at the back, all dirty after the raid, and preparing to sit out another. We, after all, have at least been to Italy and read Shakespeare. They havent: dear me, I’m turning democrat. And then, the passion of my life, that is the City of London—to see London all blasted, that too raked my heart. Have you that feeling for certain alleys and little courts, between Chancery Lane and the City? I walked to the Tower the other day by way of caressing my love of all that. We might be in the Strand, here at night, the raiders make such a noise of traffic—like buses and drays—in the sky. Now and then a bomb drops—but far away—Eastbourne I think. What about Working? What does Mary [Ethel’s maid] think? And Pan [sheepdog]? So you see, my thoughts curl round to you again, and indicate a letter. Werent we lucky to bring out our books when we did? I know I had something else, and very interesting to say: but cant remember, so must send this.

V.

Berg

[]

3645: To William Plomer

15 Sept [1940]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear William,

It was just as well we put you off on Wednesday, wasn’t it? It would have been an airy dinner—the windows are broken. We came up on Tuesday; the ruins were still smoking, a bomb timed to go off in an hour. But it didn’t; and we went up again on Friday to get letters, settle the Press and so on, but the bomb was still unburst in the flower bed, so we had to retire once more. So we stay down here, for the present.

I wish you were out of London. The bombs are getting much too close to one’s friends. What a sight Holborn was, my word! I dont much like driving in London during an air raid, but night must be much worse. Its odd, though, that one cant take it altogether seriously. Its like a very dreary game of hide and seek played by grown ups. Twice while playing bowls raiders have come over and been shot down in full view. One day they hedge-hopped over the tree at the gate. But its over so soon one hasn’t time to think. Not at night though. They circle round like airy omnibuses: I wish they weren’t going to you. We’ve been up and down most of the summer, and had a colony of Judith and her friends here all August. She remembers you—whats more reads and admires your poems. She’s taken up with rather a dull young man from Tonbridge, but is off, as soon as she can get a passage, to America, where she has a scholarship.

If I’d known you were at Worthing I should have put out a feeler for a visit. Is there any chance (Hitler allowing) you would come for a week end? Till our windows are mended, we’re fixed here. Do suggest one, if feasible. Its true we’re very near the coast; but anyhow its a good deal better than London.

I heard you had a job, but thought it was editing the Spectator—what is it? It sounds dreary, unless its a comfort being useful. But I want Kilvert. I take the unfashionable view that Kilvert—oh and Augustus Hare—whose six volumes gave me acute pleasure—are more real than war. Why do people think whats unpleasant is therefore real? There are so many things to talk about: also I have some cheroots, so consider coming, and lets forget invasion. Please send a line to say if you’re all safe.

Love from us both.

Yr
V.W.

Texas

[]

3646: To Ethel Smyth

Sept. 20th [1940]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, near Lewes, Sussex

Your letter came this morning—the letter posted on 17th. I hastily continue my story. We went to London on Friday. Bomb still unexploded. Not allowed in. Off it went next day. Blew out all windows, all ceilings, and smashed all my china—just as we’d got the flat ready!—oh damn. Uninhabitable now apparently—Press has been moved to Letchworth—What remains of it. Sale of Roger of course ruined.

I try to let down a fire proof curtain and go on reading, writing, cooking. Mabel, afraid of invasion here, has left. Its a mercy: for now I’m kept busy. We go up on Tuesday to see what can be done at the flat, and rescue what we can get into the car.

The other day we drove through an air raid. London like a dead city. We took shelter at Wimbledon in a gun emplacement with an East end family whose house had been bombed. There they were as cheerful as grigs with a rug a kettle and a spirit lamp: had been there for 3 nights: wind blowing through gun holes.

Oh dear! I’m worried to think of you with an incendiary next you. Here save at nights its more peaceful—All the talk of invasion. I’m off to lay in supplies—not that, with this gale blowing, it seems imminent. Theyve got guns in front of the garden and all down the river.

This is only a stop gap. I’ll write again.

So do you. Yes, I’m sure the safety curtain—a heavy iron drop over ones own scene—is the only preservative. But I admit it dont always work. Please write

V.

Berg

[]

3647: To Vanessa Bell

Tuesday [24 September 1940]

Monks House [Rodmell, Sussex]

Leonard’s account of what was said on the telephone is of course quite different from yours. He certainly told me that you had asked him to find out the address and had arranged that he should ring you up later. So we cant understand why you should have been surprised.

What I dont understand is why there need have been such a fuss to find a place for them in Sussex. Theyve got their own house at Rodwell, and, if they didn’t want to be in London could easily have gone there. I admit I find it very annoying to have them in the village, but its a great relief that its only for a short time. From what you said I thought they meant to stay indefinitely.

I’m sorry if you thought I was unnecessarily angry. I dont suppose you could possibly have prevented them coming. Once Helen knew about the cottage it was unavoidable.

Berg

[]

3648: To Ethel Smyth

25th Sept. 1940

Monks House [Rodmell, Sussex]

The letter posted on the 22nd reached me on the 24th.

This is only to continue hastily the narrative. Up to Meck. Sq on Friday. Ceilings down, all windows in front broken; but although the mess is terrific—as if were moving in again—there’s less serious damage than we expected. The worst for me is that much of my china and glass is smashed. And Lord—the bore of clearing up again! The Press has been moved to Letchworth. Extra cost to us £150: and we have Meck Sqre rent to pay and Tavistock too. Never mind—Sale of Roger I thought ended for good; but suddenly its started again. this week.

Thats my budget; and I admire your good heart for wishing to know. Oh and Mabel—she was my cook general. The delight of being without a maid in the house is such that I dont mind an hour’s cooking—indeed its a sedative. I’ve been bottling honey. My present grumble is that friends whom I dislike [the Anreps] (unreasonably I admit) are refuging in the village. Why does this annoy me more than the war? Because its an ignoble fret—having them dropping in.

Well, I wish I could see you. A very nice long letter from Arthur Ponsonby about Roger. I’m telling him I live in her youth owing to your brilliant portrait. D’you remember how she cut her nails? Thats what I call portrait painting. This naturally leads to the next vol. of your autobiography. Please clear the schoolroom table and set to. London looked merry and hopeful, wearing her wounds like stars; why do I dramatise London perpetually? When I see a great smash like a crushed match box where an old house stood I wave my hand to London. What I’m finding odd and agreeable and unwonted is the admiration this war creates—for every sort of person: chars, shopkeepers, even much more remarkably, for politicians—Winston at least, and the tweed wearing sterling dull women here, with their grim good sense: organising First aid, putting out bombs for practise, and jumping out of windows to show us how. We burnt an incendiary bomb up on the down last night. It was a lovely tender autumn evening, and the white sputter of the bomb was to me, who never listened to the instructions, rather lovely. I’d almost lost faith in human beings, partly owing to my immersion in the dirty water of artists envies and vanities while I worked at Roger. Now hope revives again.

V.

Berg

[]

3649: To Hugh Walpole

29 Sept 40

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dearest Hugh,

We drove up to Meck Sqre on Tuesday morning and found—well, what you saw. The bomb had fallen that night. I’m glad we weren’t there. Then there were three more time bombs in the square. So for ten days we weren’t allowed into the Square. Then the bombs went off—most of our ceilings fell, and the Press has had to be evacuated to X

I make this mark to show the point at which a bomb shook the window so violently that the pen jumped out of my hand. Theres an air raid going on—I’ve just been out into the garden to have a look. Theres a pop-pop pop up in the sky—then a crash somewhere over towards Newhaven. Now its quieted down though theres one hornet up in the clouds—and I continue: Press has been moved to Letchworth.

Meck: Sqre being uninhabitable, here we stay, but come up every week or so and see more of Bloomsbury destroyed. Monday Nessa’s and Duncan’s studios were burnt out—in [No. 8] Fitzroy Street. A frigidaire and a statue the only survivors.

I’m glad at anyrate you’ve left the flat where I had such a memorable tea. D’you remember the picture falling, and the lurid light on the Park, and Rupert Hart Davis coming in? I saw they’d been very close at hand—the bombs I mean.

No, I’ve no fears for your chastity in the shelter, but wish you were here at the moment; and put out a feeler for another letter, should you be inclined—should this letter reach you. Are you reading, writing? Yes, I hope so.

Love from us both

V.W.

Texas

[]

3650: To Angelica Bell

1st Oct 1940

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dearest Pixy,

I think this is quarter day….. Here comes a pause. There’s so much to say I’m like a bottle turned upside down. The fires—Mecklenburgh Square in ruins—the Anreps. My woolwork. How, where, which? Well, Nessa will have told you about the fires. Nessa and Duncan came to tea yesterday. Oh we had such a row about the Anreps! Think of having that spawn in the village. Cant post a letter without seeing a face like a codfish in embryo. [… 15 words omitted …] Their minds too—how amorphous. Their manners non-existent—save when they hurl a club at that soft bear their mother. Enough.

You see how profoundly I’m in need of you. I think of you almost incessantly. I dream of you. I think Angelica—oh Angelica!—look up and see Ba’s [Anastasia] great gargoyle gutter dripping. So you see, the Anreps have their uses, because they—no I wont finish that sentence; because it would flatter you: to be called a Mozart quintet played by angels on a spinet.

About my woolwork: are you sending it? We had Ben to stay [on 6 September], Nicolson, I mean 7 foot high; a very Guardsman, but a bit stiff in the top knot. What other news? Mostly village gossip. There’s Mrs Chavasse, makes moccassins out of rabbits; Mrs Ebbs—“My passion, Mrs Woolf, is for the stage”: and Miss Emery who gave me a loaf. Leonard then gives her a gallon of apples. Most afternoons I spend appling. D’you know they have all to be stood on their twigs or they rot? And we took the honey. We crushed it in a muslin bag and it dripped pure gold for 48 hours. then I decanted it. We have 30 bottles. Thats the sort of thing Brock [David Garnett] would like to get his snout into. I suppose you sit down to table with a congeries of moles. “What that?” says Brock, looking up. And a large fat grey form—now I must play bowls—shuffles in. A howling wind. A raider shot down at Caburn. A Private in the air force comes to play chess with Leonard. His name is Ken [Sheppard]. He is in love with a dairy maid. He is very beautiful, but proletarian. News! News! Please write. A great whirl of the witcherinas tonight.

V.

Texas

[]

3651: To V. Sackville-West

4th Oct. [1940]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, near Lewes, Sussex

“Oh I’m glad”—those were the very words Leonard spoke when I said Vita says she’ll come. If you could hear what the Wolves usually say when people say theyre coming—.

So do. Wednesday we suggest: and the compact is you stay for Thursday luncheon.

Whats the matter with Ethel? Is it a mood, or anything serious? I cant make out. This morning’s letter again refers to “an exquisite letter from Vita”.

Air raids pretty constant. Two bombs as I ordered dinner, a mile away in the marsh.

Mecklenburgh Sqre. uninhabitable. Two houses destroyed. Ours has no glass or ceilings. Press moved to Letchworth—

But we’ll keep our travellers tales till we meet

Yrs in haste as you see—and Lord what a dirty sheet—
V.

Berg

[]

3652: To J. R. Ackerley

4th Oct [1940]

Monk’s House [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dear Joe,

The Sitwell book has just come. I’ll have a look at it and see what I think its worth. I almost always like memoirs—on the other hand, the Sitwells, as a family, bore me. Leonard says he will do the other book, if you will send it.

Travelling on our line isnt easy, but if you could ever come for a weekend, we should be delighted. Its comparatively quiet—though 2 bombs have just dropped in the marsh and we have fights of course. But they pass over, and in London they remain. I’m amazed at the courage of the Cockneys and wish you and William weren’t among them.

So suggest any time you will.

Yours,
Virginia Woolf

Washington State University, Humanities Library

[]

3653: To Donald Brace

6th Oct 1940

Typewritten

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Mr Brace,

Mr Jack Morgan, of J.P. Morgan and Co, has cabled to a friend of his in London, Lord Bicester, asking him to request me to delete two sentences in my Life of Roger Fry. As he says that they give him and the Morgan family great pain, I have had to agree. Probably he has already applied to you. But I said I would write to you in confirmation. The first sentence is on page 141; beginning “I knew the answer beforehand.” The second is on the middle of page 144 beginning “I always wondered.”

I told him that I thought the book was already in print, and that it would be impossible to make the corrections. Should there be a second edition, perhaps you will bear them in mind. It has already gone into a second edition over here, so that nothing can be done at present. Privately, I think the objection is unreasonable, but of course I did not like to refuse.

Owing to an air raid on Mecklenburgh Square we have had to move the Press to Letchworth. And as our new flat was damaged we are living entirely down here. I need not say that conditions are very unpleasant in England—but we are carrying on, and look forward one of these days to meeting you again.

With best wishes, and apologies for troubling you,

yours sincerely,
Virginia Woolf

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

[]

3654: To Ethel Smyth

Sat. Oct 12th [1940]

Monks House [Rodmell, Sussex]

Ethel dear, please tell me soberly precisely what you mean when you say you have diabetes. What does Dr Plesch say? I know you had some minor form of it. Has it become major? Well, I know there’s insulin. I know people like Hugh Walpole flourish eternally when all riddled with it But I would like the exact facts. I’ve been gathering, partly from your handwriting, that you aren’t as I last saw you—a Rose in June—the day I waved my hand at your valiant back. Lord how I admire you! Leonard showed me a tiny snapshot of you in some paper: and my heart—ah hah!—the organ you dont believe in—gave one of those pleasurable leaps when the blood fills it and a release from non-liking becomes a positive rapture. There she sat, with her little bow tie and her great forehead, my uncastrated cat, challenging the world, yet divinely compassionate of its (so to speak my) infirmities. Thats why I want facts about diabetes.

I cant for the like of me think what I can have said in that 10 minute note [Letter 3648] that deserved copying—I’m not outraged; I’m flattered. Only I wish I knew what flying bird I brought down without knowing—I dont think I’ve ever taken more time than it takes to form a word in writing to you. A proof of our intercommunicativeness. Hasnt it been a queer collocation, the two people who have nothing alike, except—well, I cant go into that. I suppose I told you how I saw you years before I knew you?—coming bustling down the gangway at the Wigmore Hall [in November 1919], in tweeds and spats, a little cocks feather in your felt, and a general look of angry energy, So that I said thats Ethel Smyth!—and felt, being then a mere chit, she belongs to the great achieved public world, where I’m a nonentity. You reminded me of a ptarmigan—those speckled birds with fetlocks.

Did I tell you, I forget, that Nessa’s and Duncans studios have been bombed and burnt out?—about 100 canvases, and all the furniture and so on? Happily they’d both brought most valuables down here. But its odd, being destroyed. Mecklenburgh is now mended, as to glass; but I shant sleep there just yet, only go up and retrieve what’s portable. I wish I didn’t feel myself a coward. Most of my friends are as chirpy as crickets, working at the Treasury, sleeping in basements. When the bombs make our windows rattle I always jump. I dont like sitting of an evening and thinking the drone which is weaving its web above me is about to drop. It doesnt upon us—only on the convent at Newhaven, or some field. And I feel convinced we shall all survive. But thats because I want to …so many Surinam toads (thats Coleridge) breeding in my head.

Vita was here for a night. I always fall into a warm slipper relation with her instantly. Its a satisfactory relationship. Sans Gwen its so simple. Gwen, she says is ‘as a child’ to her; the truth about Gwen is that she’s a complete egotist. Now I dont mind egotism if there’s an ego. If theres not, its boring.

Do I read you rightly when I apprehend that you’re beginning again, where you left off, your memoirs? I hope so. Then I shall have another thread making continuity in our present blankness. Leonard wants me to help apple picking, so I must stop, and take my seat in the heart of a tree, with pale green globes hanging round me.

And what I want is facts about diabetes.

Yr
V.

Berg

[]

3655: To V. Sackville-West

15 Oct. [1940]

Monks House, Rodmell [Sussex]

Lord what an embarrassing situation you created on Monday morning! The postwoman, that virginal and antique woman, brought a wooden box and said, “Please will you examine the goods?” So Leonard opened the box in her presence, and extracted—a po! And it wasn’t a whole po—only the cheek of a po—as the poor woman said. But he swore, blushing like a rose, that it was quite undamaged. And she also blushed; and then we disinterred the whole po, all in bits—the handle, the bottom—Oh what a po it must have been! a double po—a Sackville po! And to think of your packing it and sending it and then that they should have broken it! There it is in the hall—the relics of the po—its heartbreaking. We shall never have one like it—what it would have meant say to Sibyl when she comes!—and then I rummaged further and found cuddled round the po masses and masses of the finest wool. How can you say it wants dyeing? Its a most harmonious mothy colour, and Louie says you’ve sent enough for a jersey for me, and for socks for Leonard. Oh how can we ever thank you sufficiently—the two old Wolves dressed in real sheeps clothing—not ordinary sheep either—Jacobs sheep which came in before the conqueror. Dear me, dear me, we were so exhilarated, what with the postwoman and the po we hardly settled into work all day.

Yes, you are an angel. And had you been criminal about—whatever it was—Doran, all would be forgot and forgive—But you weren’t criminal. Leonard aquits you of all intent: dont we always say, of all our authors Vita is the magnanimous Rose, the peach of perfection? dont we both like you (I put ‘love’ for my word) better every time we see you. And oh dear, the relics of the po in the hall make me laugh every time I cook my dinner, as I must. Its to be baked haddock.

V.

Berg

[]

3656: To T. S. Eliot

17th Oct [1940]

Typewritten

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

My dear Tom,

I was greatly touched to receive your yellow book. According to our compact, I say nothing of the printed matter.

I dont know where to begin—its so long since we met. And so much of London has been destroyed—I daresay youve seen Mecklenburgh, and gathered that we’ve had to move the Press; again, all our windows are out. So we only dip into London for a day.

I’d had it on the tip of my pen to ask you down, would it still be possible? A week end? The middle of a week? August and Sept. were so littered with fragments I couldn’t fix any day. But at the moment, the trains are running; we’re almost always alone. It would be a treat to see you. So consider if you could come.

Here I must skip all the questions I want to ask. Where are you? How are you? And so on. We go up tomorrow for the day to salvage what we can. Fabers was all standing last time. Today we hear that Tavistock is gone.

All I ask then is a card to say you will come; if you cant; then a letter please, with a complete account. But seeings better than writing.

And so with thanks from your very grateful but not very articulate old crone:

Virginia

Mrs T. S. Eliot

[]

3657: To Angelica Bell

Saturday [26 October 1940]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

I cant tell you, my darling—this is the way Aunt [Mary] Fisher’s letters always began—no, My darling child…. I cant tell you what a delight it was to get your and good Brock’s [David Garnett] letters. What would Aunt Mary have said to Brock? Well, she’d have forgiven Brock, but she’d never never never have forgiven you. She was a chaste woman—13 children, 4 miscarriages. But why do I waste paper on Aunt Mary?

Yesterday we heard a whistle of bombs as we played bowls, and down they plumped—4 in a row—in the field at the top. All the mothers in Rodmell at once ran screaming: “The Bus! the Bus!” because the childrens Bus was coming along the road. But God was good; nobody was hurt; and I had the great delight of seeing the smoke and being within an inch of Heaven.

This is a great score over Nessa.

Mummy says she’s found you the most perfect house in the most perfect place—oh far better than Rodmell. So of course I’m wild to take it myself—which indeed we must [sic] store our furniture somewhere, Meck. Sqre. being a mere splinter of glass, the wind blowing in and out of my cupboards and the books all down. As for 52 Tavistock,—well, where I used to dandle you on my knee, there’s Gods sky: and nothing left but one wicker chair and a piece of drugget.

Isnt life a whirligig? But do remember to send me some coloured papers, all the same. Did I tell you about my rug? After an infinity of time, spent, now writing, now reading, my true gift has at last proved to be rug making. I make rugs of all colours: some say they never wear out. But thats no reason why I shouldn’t have your papers. Mummy is altogether flummoxed—danderrydown flummoxed, as she calls it—about your design. Saying this she combed her hair all up the wrong way. It was an awful spectacle. So whats to be done? She says you’ve got it.

There is not very much news: but what there is of it is a mixture. Mabel’s friend, who used to take her to the dogs [races], is dead: so she came back, just as we were hoping we’d got the house to ourselves. But she’s cheered up amazingly. For one thing, the next door house was bombed: she is a stormy petrel, only happy in a gale. Yet she looks like a Doyenne de Comice pear. So I cant find one word to fit her. If you want a stormy petrel who’s a pear, you’ve only to say so.

Judith has arrived in America. The Anreps are gone—I think to the Enfields. If you know Mrs Enfield, and can distinguish her from Margery Strachey, you will echo what I say, which is, I’d be dead in a field, rather than stay with Enfield. You see when I write to you, I’m almost mistress of the other art of poetry. I daresay you’re putting the pot on and wont want to spell out any more. Oh Lord, I’ve forgotten the fish. What shall we have for dinner? The old mutton once more? But it was never much of a joint in its heyday.

Its a tearing gale, and the Witcherinas are floating past in a roaring rhapsody of circumgyration. So I must wing my way round the Bowling Green. I’ve just been to see the [bomb] craters. If you look at the moon through a telescope, thats what they’re like.

Do thank Brock for his most entirely sustaining and yet so light and yet so nourishing letter: and ask him to write another, only one kiss for him though: the rest for me.

Leslie Humphreys is here.

Texas

[]

3658: To Ethel Smyth

14th Nov 1940

Monk’s House, Rodmell, near Lewes, Sussex

If I had an orderly mind (as you have) I should divide this letter into A B C D (as you do) and then treat each subject separately. First, there’s diabetes. Well, I’m thankful. So Plesch was more or less right: anyhow I dont care if its Plesch or its Smellie so long as you’re bounding like an air ball which has slipped out of the old womans grasp (I refer to a childish incident in Kensington Gardens, when this happened, and how I jumped for joy! She stood at the gate with a vast billowing bundle.) Then Hilda. I’m sorry—not personally sorry, generally sorry. I didnt get on with her—she seemed so dried, so official; and I grieve to say my last encounter was a little tart on my side—She asked me to write some damned book for some damned series. It was to be patriotic, at the same time intellectual; also badly paid. And I thought her intolerably imperceptive of what I consider the irreconcilable differences. But publicly I admired: and I’m sorry she was run to death by the poisoned arrows of Dottys egotism. Did you mean, by the way, that Dottys daughter said she had no connection with Dotty? In your letter Dotty and Mrs Matheson became slightly mixed. I see that Gwen has become Countess of something: so may be she’ll remove to St. Michaels Mount. I doubt that Vita ever said definitely she was bored. I think the relationship has spread and slackened, not been ended. Here I skip to “wearing her wounds like stars”. You said I got that from HB. No. no. Its—I think Marvell, or one of the 17th Century poets. [not traced] Which I’m not sure; but its been walloping about in my head these 30 years.

Another bomb in Meck Sqre: did I tell you? All the books down again. Did I tell you we half think of moving the furniture here? We brought down a car load last week. Then, to my infinite delight, they bombed our river. Cascades of water roared over the marsh—All the gulls came and rode the waves at the end of the field. It was, and still is, an island sea, of such indescribable beauty, almost always changing, day and night, sun and rain, that I cant take my eyes off it. Yesterday, thinking to explore, I fell headlong into a six foot hole, and came home dripping like a spaniel, or water rugg (thats Shakespeare). How odd to be swimming in a field! Mercifully I was wearing Leonards old brown trousers. Tomorrow I buy a pair of cords for myself. Its raining—raining … and I’ve been walking, walking. The road to the Bridge was 3 foot in water, and this meant a 2 mile round; but oh dear, how I love this savage medieval water moved, all floating tree trunks and flocks of birds and a man in an old punt, and myself so eliminated of human feature you might take me for a stake walking.

And tell me your opinion of Margot Oxford. For some reason she writes to me passionately daily. She sent for me in London, and told me the story of her sexual organs. Cold, as you can imagine. But do tell me, whats your version of her? You, whose eyes see so much further than mine. She says, will I write a long letter, explaining my beliefs! will I give her a book—she’s now at the Savoy Hotel, sitting up at 3 am. being bombed; but bomb proof; and writing, writing—all in pencil. Tell me what it means.

Your quondam friend, Dr Gordon, has written me about 10 pages of violent abuse of Roger Fry. Again I ask why? She never met him. She says she hates him; and that he’s the spit and image of Russells Viper—a snake whose bite is small but deadly.

Now I must put on our dinner—To do this I must crash through a meeting of farm labourers which Leonard is holding in the hall. They are going to grow co-operative potatoes; each man his strip. Why am I so much shyer of the labourer than of the gentry? I am almost—what d’you call a voracious cheese mite which has gnawed its way into a vast Stilton and is intoxicated with eating—as I am with reading history, and writing fiction [Pointz Hall] and planning—oh such an amusing book on English literature. Only room for exhortation: Write.

V

Berg

[]

3659: To V. Sackville-West

15th Nov. [1940]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, near Lewes, Sussex

I have been trying, for the past ten days, to write to you, but something has always interrupted. Village life without Mabel to cook and fifteen people coming to hear Leonards lecture (on democracy): then buying bits of fish: I say all this chops up my day. But does not diminish my love, nor my gratitude. It is angelic of you to wish me to write another book. At the same time devilish. Havent I 20 books sizzling in my head at the moment? Then you tempt me with old Bess. It is tempting of course. But I doubt if old Bess is my bird. I think she’s neither one thing or the other. I mean Orlando was imagination: Roger fact. But Bess is after all, though much spangled with Elizabethan finery, an historic figure. I should have to grub. And I dont like shoddy history. And there’s already a fat book about her. I think I’ll compromise, and make her a Common Reader. But all my books, including the DNB. are lying on the floor in London. I’ve handed on the other suggestion: Bates and Robinson. For some reason I’ve a prejudice against Bates. Why, I dont know. Also: Why dont you do Bess? another bomb fell on Meck Sqre.

Years ago I went over Hardwick when old Lady Louisa Egerton lived there. She had a face like a horse. She was very good to us. The Carnarvons had lent us Teversal. I was then emerging from madness. And she took us and showed us the house—I remember the windows. There was a motto, wasn’t there, in stone, on the roof? And two very plain Egerton daughters. I havent thought of them for years.

“Tell Virginia I am sending butter …” Leonard gave me this tremendously exciting scrap out of your letter. Lord what a mint of things you’ve given me. Wool. Butter. Bess of Hardwick—to name the most recent additions.

About Hilda [Matheson]—I was sorry; not personally, for somehow I didnt adhere. She seemed made of the wrong substance. But that doesn’t make me blind to her values—Ethel began her letter “Vitas death makes me very unhappy …” What about Dotty? Ethel went on to say that Dottys daughter [Elizabeth] had quarrelled with her. She met her at the funeral. But I dont go by what old Ethel says.

Look. Vita … You must come here instantly. Not to see me. To see the flood. A bomb burst the Banks. We are so lovely—all sea, right up to the gate I’ve never seen anything more visionary lovely than Caburn upside down in the water. Flocks of gulls. Do come at once. Oh and a boat: and haystacks in the flood.

V.

Berg

[]

3660: To Elizabeth Robins

17th Nov 1940

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Miss Robins,

I heard from Octavia [Wilberforce] the other day that you have reached America safely. Now I calculate that you must have had your three weeks in which to recover. So, am I being impertinent and intrusive if I write to ask—are you going on with your book? I know from experience that either one is going on, or has good reasons for not going on. All the same I cant help putting to you the readers case: which is simply, please if you can give us another volume. Most books come to an end and one forgets them. But your book hasn’t come to an end, and I haven’t forgotten it. Thus you have put me into the position of a spider, dangling at the end of a thread, which it cant attach to anything, unless you will help it. I implore you to have pity on Virginia suspended on a thread. And I believe you’ve left lots of people in the same predicament. Well, I wont say any more except that I do beg of you to go on. And if this comes at the wrong moment, please forgive me.

This moment, here in my garden room, happens to be so lovely I can’t keep my eyes on the paper. A bomb burst the river bank: and we are flooded all over the marsh—The sea comes almost to our gate. And the gardener has just called me to come and look at a swan. So you see the bombs so far have been kind to us. I suspect we seem, at a distance, far worse than we seem to ourselves. I hope to see Octavia some day. And end with our affectionate double regards—Leonard’s and mine.

Yr
Virginia Woolf

Sussex

[]

3661: To Dr Octavia Wilberforce

23rd Nov [1940]

Monk’s House, Rodmell [Sussex]

Dear Octavia,

I had already written to Miss Robins—so I return the envelope and the cutting. Many thanks. I never thought to send by air mail. I must take your word for it that it wont enrage her.

I’m sorry the Americans wont take the book, but they seem given over to patriotic orgies, according to a niece of mine [Judith Stephen] at Bryn Mawr.

We are bringing our London things down here, half ruined, I’m afraid by damp. I envy you your dry volumes—my poor old books are like tramps.

Yr
Virginia Woolf

Sussex

[]

3662: To V. Sackville-West

29th Nov [1940]

Monk’s House [Rodmell, Sussex]

I wish I were Queen Victoria: then I could thank you—From the depths of my Broken Widowed heart. Never never Never have we had such a rapturous astounding glorious—no, I cant get the hang of the style. All I can say is that when we discovered the butter in the envelope box we had in the household—Louie that is—to look. Thats a whole pound of butter I said. Saying which I broke off a lump and ate it pure. Then in the glory of my heart I gave all our weeks ration—which is about the size of my thumb nail—to Louie—earned undying gratitude; then sat down and ate bread and butter. It would have been desecration to add jam.

You’ve forgotten what butter tastes like. So I’ll tell you—its something between dew and honey. Lord, Vita!—your broken po, your wool, and then on top your butter!!! Please congratulate the cows from me, and the dairy maid, and I would like to suggest that the calf should be known in future (if its a man) as Leonard if a woman as Virginia.

Think of our lunch tomorrow: Bunny Garnett and Angelica are coming; in the middle of the table I shall put the whole pat. And I shall say: Eat as much as you like and I cant break off this rhapsody, for its a year since I saw a pound, to tell you anything else—I dont think anything else seems important.

Its true all our books are coming from the ruined house tomorrow: all battered and mildewed. Its true I’ve been made treasurer of the Women’s Institute [Rodmell]: also I want to ask you about lantern slides of Persia; and will you come and talk: But this is mere trifling. Bombs fell near me: trifles; a plane shot down in the marsh: trifles: floods damned—no, nothing seems to make a wreath on the pedestal fitting your butter.

They’ve never sent me your book [Country Notes in Wartime] from the Press, damn them.

Here L breaks in: if I’m writing to you, will I add his deepest thanks for the butter

V.

Berg

[]

3663: To Edward Sackville-West

Sunday 1st Dec. [1940]

Typewritten

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

My dear Eddy,

Forgive this typing; but my hands are so cold this bitter morning out in the garden room that I cant move a pen.

Derrick Leon was in a furniture shop in Wigmore Street. He wrote a very good novel, Livingstones, about his life there; but later became a feeble copy of Proust and we couldn’t go on publishing him. He’s a Jew; hardbitten; very competent. He was with Fortnum and Masons; then got tuberculosis; and now writes from some country cottage where he’s recovering. I liked him; he was dark: inscrutable; but I never knew much more about him. My impression was that he’d got lost between two worlds; but might pull through.

I write with the usual air raid going on; distant droning; a bomb now and then. It is confusing as you say. Sometimes the country is so heavenly and reading and writing become so absorbing I’m very happy; then all at sea. Its like living on an island. Rodmell of course pulls us in to various societies; all very simple; I’ve not seen a clever person this six months, save the family over the way [at Charleston]. I daresay its good for one; but oh lord—how bare and barren in many ways.

Our new flat being now a heap of glass and plaster, we have no home in London. Tavistock is hanging in the air too—I see my drawing room panels suspended over the rubble. And Nessa and Duncan are burnt out. So let us keep up this spiderlike conversation from time to time. Ben appeared the other day—an odd sample of the young man cut adrift, Vita too. But she’s firmly anchored and as adorable as ever.

Excuse this scribble. Every twig is about half frost; Caburn hidden; and guns in the distance. Love from us both.

Yours V.W.

Berg

[]

3664: To Ethel Smyth

Dec. 6th 1940

Monks House, Rodmell [Sussex]

If you want to know, Ethel Smyth, Dame, Commander of the British Empire, why I’ve not written before, it is because I’ve had to empty the whole of 37 Meck Sqre into this cottage. Oh I cant go into the dreary details—how we went to London and found mushrooms sprouting on the carpets, pools standing on the chairs, and glass to the right left and then a ceiling fell. So we hired vans. Three days ago they arrived. A deluge. In the middle of unloading beds etc into the farm house where we’ve hired 3 rooms the farmer [Mr Botten] flew into a panic—said we must stop: said he wouldnt allow another handful to be added—suddenly remembered that his attics would catch fire if struck by a bomb; and so cast us out into the flood, and we had to bring half the impedimenta here. So I’m all black and blue with moving. And the house is packed like an emporium. And 4 tons of books came yesterday. And the Printing Press and all the type come tomorrow. This bores me so, I cant even write it. Boredom and distraction and fights with matter, have been hag riding me this fortnight. And lectures in the hall; and 15 people to seat and warm. And the Womens Institute elects me Treasurer. And I have to collect 30 sixpences and pay Mrs Freeth 2/3 for hire of hall.

Now let us talk of something interesting. I was going to say why dont you write a Common Reader review of music? Now consider that. Write your loves and hates for Bach Wagner etc out in plain English. I have an ulterior motive. I want to investigate the influence of music on literature. But there’s not a book on music that gives me a hint—Parry all padding. What about Tovey? Too metaphysical. Ethel is the [last page missing]

[added on top of page:]

Never never keep letters, Ethel. Theyre the devil when it comes to a move.

Berg

[]

3665: To Dr Octavia Wilberforce

17th Dec [1940]

Monk’s House, Rodmell [Sussex]

Dear Octavia,

You know by this time how bad I am at answering letters: I ought to have thanked you before for sending Miss Robins’ book. I’ve put it carefully in the shelf, and shall begin when I’m quit of reading books for an article. It was very good of you to think of it: and lend so valuable a copy.

Oh yes we will eat your cream gratefully and defy the flue—But we have loads of apples. Also Books. So lets make a Barter. And let us know beforehand when you’re coming so that we mayn’t be over the hill somewhere.

Your
Virginia Woolf
so cold she cant
hold a pen.

Sussex

[]

3666: To V. Sackville-West

18th Dec. [1940]

Monks House, Rodmell [Sussex]

Did you really mean me to take you at your word?

Well, I have. Last night, our 21st birthday celebration, after we’d eaten our chocolate cake, Mrs. Chavasse, the President, rose and announced; “Ladies, I have the pleasure of informing you that Mrs. Harold Nicolson, equally well known as Vita Sackville West, has consented to lecture to us on Persia in February!!!”

Loud cheers. General enthusiasm. A vote of thanks was then given to Mrs. Woolf for having secured you.

Lord! dont go and say you wont! You cant think how they beamed and boomed over you. They’ve all heard you on the wireless. Miss Gardner our secretary has The Land by heart. The one passion they all share is for Persia. What about slides? I said you’d illustrate your travels. We will get a lantern if you want one.

Its the 3rd Tuesday in February.

meeting at 2.45.

You lunch here at 1. You sleep here. If you insist you go home after lunch on Wednesday.

But details can wait. Only tell me you’ll come; and accept my—oh accumulated blessings.

You cant think how excited they were—never having been beyond Lewes in their lives. And you—whose voice they know; whose husband’s voice they know—

All 37 Meck’ Sqre has now been dumped here; and we’re in the devil of a hobble and mess.

Yr V.

Berg

[]

3667: To R. C. Trevelyan

19th Dec [1940]

Monk’s House, Rodmell [Sussex]

Dear Bob,

I’ve been so grateful to you the last few nights for giving me something that I enjoy reading. I’m not enough of a scholar to know how close the translation is but I get the sense of being in a civilised world; and its so lovely, and so amusing: so lasting.

Of course once more your own dialogue makes the return to my old plea—that you should give us your prose side. Its not so magnificent as the poetic, I know. But I should like a note book of daily fragmentary comments: books, views, people, all as it comes.

This is a grudging way of thanking you: except that it means I want more.

Much love from us both,

Yr ever
Virginia Woolf

Sussex

[]

3668: To Angelica Bell

21st Dec [1940]

Monk’s House, Rodmell [Sussex]

Dearest Pixie,

I sent off to you yesterday by post from Brighton (we had an ad.lib.) a small present—a coat to wit. A ticket is attached to it. If, as may well be, you want to change it, take the ticket and coat to the second floor of the Galeries Lafayette—the skirt, coat, blouse department—where a tall motherly lady has agreed to change it for you. I also enclose a modest cheque—part present, part—indeed the greater part—payment for the new Leda at whom I’m working. A most ravishing lady.

The gaieties of Rodmell have been incessant.

Oh what about your lecture? It was announced the other night at a 21st birthday assembly. And the population rose and cheered. Can you project your photographs on a lantern?

No time for more.

Virginia

We have a blue short haired kitten. He has just eaten my pen—hence the difficulty in writing.

Texas

[]

3669: To Angelica Bell

Monday [23 December 1940]

Typewritten

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex

Dearest Pix,

Your letter just come. I write in haste, with a trembling paw; so had better type. Did I say, you can change the coat, which I snatched in haste in the dark? If you take it to the Lafayette, there’s a kind old woman who said you could choose any other more desirable object.

I suggest that you come to tea on Saturday next; stay the night; then we can make Mummy ask us all to Sunday lunch; any how, if not, take you over in the car.

Are your pictures adaptable to a lantern? The Institute said they would get a lantern if they were. Oh they were so agog when I told them; one of them acted in Carl Rosa [Opera Company]. However, no time for all this. I’m dashing to Lewes to meet Mummy.

Witcherina varissima but unkissed.

[handwritten:]

The Wolf and the Goat are the joy of my mantlepiece. And old Lady Oxford sent me her legacy—worth £400—what d’you think it is?—Come and see.

Texas

[]

3670: To Ethel Smyth

24th Dec. 1940.

Monks House, Rodmell [Sussex]

I’ve only ten minutes before driving off across the hill to lunch with Rogers mistress, Helen Anrep. I’ve been so badgered, that as you see, my hand trembles. Its partly that damned mess of books and things; I cant make a warm hollow for myself; my mind is churned and frothed; and to write one must be a clear vessel. Never mind; you dont care much; I mean I scribble to you as I scribble in my diary.

I’m awfully proud—thats not the right phrase—that you’ve started again on the autobiography, partly owing to me. I was thinking the other night that there’s never been a womans autobiography. Nothing to compare with Rousseau. Chastity and modesty I suppose have been the reason. Now why shouldnt you be not only the first woman to write an opera, but equally the first to tell the truths about herself? Isnt the great artist the only person to tell the truth? I should like an analysis of your sex life. As Rousseau did his. More introspection. More intimacy. I leave it to you; for as you see I cant make my pen take my ply this cold morning. Margot [Oxford] has gone raving mad. She sent her car 120 miles yesterday here to bring me a bronze bust of Voltaire which she’d left me in her will. Why? I cant conceive. She was to have come herself. Can you explain this sudden rapture?

We’re devilish poor. Lord, what a bill for rent and removal, and no money coming in, and the taxes! I shall have to write and write—till I die—just as we thought we’d saved enough to live, unwriting, till we died! But its a good thing—being buffeted, and not cosseted. How does it affect you? Are you ruined, I mean can you pay your bills out of income? Yes, I will come one day soon. Because I must exchange ideas; and I want to see you in your surroundings. But how?

This is a scribble, but write, and I will try to find a better mood soon.

Yr
V

Berg

[]

3671: To Dr Octavia Wilberforce

Christmas Eve [1940]

[Monk’s House Rodmell, Sussex]

Your cow must be a miracle. It has produced the best cream and the best milk that Leonard and Virginia Woolf have ever eaten.

Best wishes and thanks

Leonard Woolf Virginia Woolf

Sussex

[]

3672: To V. Sackville-West

Boxing day [26 December 1940]

Monks House [Rodmell, Sussex]

If my admiration for you could be increased, it would be by the fact that your divine butter arrived on Christmas morning. Anybody else, I that is, would have sent it any other day. As it was, Leonard and I, economising with a duck this year, had such an orgy of butter eating it was worth ten turkeys. Oh what a gift!

Oh Vita what a Cornucopia of Bounty you are!

A broken po.

A Jacobs fleece

Two pounds of fresh butter.

And I never give you a thing—I wonder why that is. Then I have to add about £2,000 from your books. let alone the meaning of ’em.

Have you got a life of Bess of Hardwick; a life of Lady Clifford;—well, if you have, bring them, on loan, when you come. Another Bounty. Yes, of course we’ll get the Lantern—and would you like me to ask Edith [sic] Jones to lunch? That would save you going, which would be intolerable; and I’d slip out into the garden and leave you. Not that I want to—Lord no. I can talk 24 hours without stopping. I mean to you, not to her. Whats all this about Dotty? Ethel is catastrophic in the extreme. Oh I must tell you, Lady Oxford sent her chauffeur here with her legacy for me—a bronze bust of Voltaire. I think she loves me; please note.

V. and P.

Your book [Country Notes in Wartime] has sold 1862 copies. Very good.

Berg

[]

3673: To Shena, Lady Simon

29th Dec 40

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

Dear Shena,

Leonard gave me a card the other day in which you made me responsible for one of your many generosities. I didn’t deserve it.

But what I want so much to know is what’s been happening to you—a large question.

I cant ask you to come to tea, because the flat is now half ruined by bombs; and all the furniture moved here, and we’ve no roof in London. You must come when you visit your brother in law.

We’re now villagers completely. And its a very odd life. If you come I’ll ask the clergyman’s wife to tea.

But what I should like, if you’ve time, is a line to say how you are.

Yr Virginia Woolf

Sussex

[]

3674: To Dr Octavia Wilberforce

31st Dec [1940]

Monk’s House, Rodmell [Sussex]

Dear Octavia,

I never heard a more absurd “business proposition” as you call it. A month’s milk and cream in return for an unborn and as far as I can tell completely worthless book. I’ve lost all power over words, cant do a thing with them. What we suggest is that if you would send your bounty say Monday and Friday to Lewes we would meet it. And return—well, apples? Thats about the only thing we can return. Of course, milk and cream are at the moment worth tons of apples. We know this, and can only put it on record that we realise it all—your generosity, and the trouble, and the really miraculous gift.

Your quotations, far from enraging, put me up a peg. Of course the Roger Fry was more or less an experiment in self-suppression, as E. R. [Elizabeth Robins] guessed. But I was afraid I’d somehow suppressed him too. It was a touch and go business—either too much colour or too little. But on the whole, I’d rather there were no biographer, than a mix up of the two. I suppose the really expert somehow combine both, rightly.

You cant write long enough letters to this author—but, having been book lugging, up at our hired room, I cant, as you see, make my hand cease to tremble. Now as a doctor, your hand is firm. So you can write. One of Roger’s eccentricities was that he never analysed character, but always art. I daresay the reason for his mastery.

Let me know about the bargain.

Yr V. W.

This sheet of paper came out of our bombed house—thats the dirt on it—bombs.

Sussex

[]

Letters 3675-3701 (January-mid-March 1941)

3675: To Sibyl Colefax

4th Jan 1941

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

Dearest Sibyl,

Of course you’ve only to suggest any Friday. Not, if you’ll take my advice, in January. Our hearts are warm, but oh the cold here! Driving snow; downs white; birds frozen; and my hand a mere claw. But in February? As I say, suggest it; but you know it’s a bare barn, this house,—your blood’s on your own head if you come. But I’ll fry you an egg, and we can crouch over the fire. No Desmond; no Moore. The old Wolves huddle like rooks alone on their tree-top.

My only boast is that Margot [Oxford] has given me a statue.

Yrs Virginia

Michael Colefax

[]

3676: To Dr Octavia Wilberforce

Thursday [9 January 1941]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex

Dear Octavia,

Oh dear—now you’ve telephoned, and I was just about to write. We cant come to the concert, as Leonard lectures, and theres the Blackout and the chairs to see to.

I’m sorry. Think of eating Turkey! and I want to continue the argument—the very one-sided argument; books v. cream. I dont see how you can brave it out. Nothing we both ever to the end write can outweigh your milk and cream at this bitter and barren moment. Besides, having some to spare, I gave Louie a jug; and so the Everest family bless your name, having porridge for breakfast. I’ll keep the boxes. The cartons came unscathed.

Yesterday I had a long long letter from Rachel Dyce Sharp, which I’ll show you when you come. I think the woman’s whirling raving mad—however.

This hand doesn’t shake from book hugging, but from rage. Louie being gone to a funeral, I cooked lunch: and the rice floored me. Thats why I rage, and am now consulting a cookery book. So how am I to write your book?

My father’s been done already. F. W. Maitland.

But I’m too rice-infested to make any sense. So forgive; and I’m so sorry I forgot to answer before.

Yr V. W.

Sussex

[]

3677: To Elaine Robson

10th Jan 1941

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

My dear Elaine [aged about 9],

The Blue Cat, whose name is Peat, has asked me to write you a letter as he has not yet learnt how. Well he has a fine story to tell you. When I—that is Virginia—came into the hall yesterday I saw Peat playing with my glove. Suddenly the glove began to whistle. Then I looked and saw the fingers move. Then I looked again and saw it was a Bat. “Leonard! Leonard!” I shrieked. “The Cat has caught a bat!!” He thought it was a joke, so he didn’t come. He was sawing up wood. Then I got a flower pot and put it over the Bat. But, when Leonard came, the bat was dead. So Peat ate him for his supper. Then we had a great flood, because a bomb burst the river Bank. And we saw all the moles swimming for dear life, only their paws are so short compared with their bodies they didn’t get far. Then three great hares came and sat in the road. Now the flood is gone. All the marsh is frozen, and I can see three black spots which are really three red cows or hares.

Have you had any adventures? I wish you would write and tell me and I will tell Peat. He likes verse better than prose. He and Sally are curled up on the mat to keep each other warm. Only poor Sally is listening for Leonard to come. One of her ears is trembling. Leonard is sawing up wood. When I have written this letter I am going to cook a fish which I bought in Lewes. I went on my bicycle, and the bicycle ran down the hill like a toboggan. If it freezes again we shall skate on the lily pool. Have you skated yet? This is the end of the paper.

Peat made that mark—It is a cat’s kiss. Leonard says he sends his kiss too X. That is it. Mine is this x. So I must use this bit of paper to say goodbye. Give our love to Mummy, Daddy, Philip and the baby.

Your affectionate
Virginia

Sussex (typescript copy)

[]

3678: To Ethel Smyth

12th Jan 41

Monks House, Rodmell [Sussex]

Well, well, how time passes. Did I ever thank you for your offer of a £10 note, which was to turn into a car, and the car was to take me to Woking—etc etc—No, my sudden financial anguish was only due to doing the years accounts with Leonard, Like my father, I can always conjure up bankruptcy. But unlike my father Leonard has no money complex. So we can rub along cutting a servant, cutting clothes; but otherwise not encroaching on capital yet. Oh yes, I can write: I mean I’ve a fizz of ideas. What I dread is bottling them to order. Didn’t we start the Hogarth Press 25 years ago so as to be quit of editors and publishers? Its my nightmare, being in their clutches: but a nightmare, not a sane survey.

I’m interested that you cant write about masturbation. That I understand. What puzzles me is how this reticence co-habits with your ability to talk openly magnificently, freely about—say H.B. I couldn’t do one or the other. But as so much of life is sexual—or so they say—it rather limits autobiography if this is blacked out. It must be, I suspect, for many generations, for women; for its like breaking the hymen—if thats the membrane’s name—a painful operation, and I suppose connected with all sorts of subterranean instincts. I still shiver with shame at the memory of my half brother, standing me on a ledge, aged about 6, and so exploring my private parts. Why should I have felt shame then?

But why should I be writing these sexual speculations now? Every other second I take my eyes off the page to look at the elms outside—burning orange against a deep blue. Then theres the little cross of the Church against the snow. Only the snow is going. Yesterday it was a livid purple. Lord! How quickly the sun sets! Only one red slope now is left on Caburn. But I must add the smoke convoluting out of Asheham Cement Works is a ruffled pink that absolutely defies description—you’ll be glad to hear.

How odd it is being a countrywoman after all these years of being Cockney! For almost the first time in my life I’ve not a bed in London. D’you know what I’m doing tomorrow? Going up to London Bridge. Then I shall walk, all along the Thames, in and out where I used to haunt, so through the Temple, up the Strand and out into Oxford Street, where I shall buy maccaroni and lunch. No. You never shared my passion for that great city. Yet its what, in some odd corner of my dreaming mind, represents Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens. Its my only patriotism: save one vision, in Warwickshire one spring [May 1934] when we were driving back from Ireland and I saw a stallion being led, under the may and the beeches, along a grass ride; and I thought that is England.

Well, dearest Ethel, how damned generous you are, breaking, or ready to break, a golden lump off your hoard, all to buy a visit from me. I happen to be very humble just now. I cant believe in being anyone. So I say with amazement, yet Ethel wants to see me! We shall meet one of these days. By the way, youre coming to stay in the Spring: you will address the Womens Institute (as Vita is doing) then youll sleep here. Never mind Leonard. He is a good man: in his heart he respects my friends. But as for my staying with you, for some occult reason, he cries No no No. I think its a bad thing that we’re so inseparable. But how, in this world of separation, dare one break it? I’m working really rather hard (for me) but whats the good of what I write, I havent the glimpse of an idea. You’ll say, its good for you. So it is, I’ve no doubt. Certainly I should swing like a frantic pendulum otherwise. And now I must 1. make soup. 2. make butter. Tell me how your book is going—for that’s what I want.

V.

If you want to know where I get my (ahem!) charm, read Herbert Fisher’s autobiography. Marie Antoinette loved my ancestor: hence he was exiled; hence the Pattles, the barrel that burst, and finally Virginia.

Berg

[]

3678a: To Margery Fry

14th Jan [1940]

Monk’s House, Rodmell as from Mecklenburgh Square, W.C.1

Dear Margery,

How nice to see your hand again! I shouldn’t bother about that old numbskull MacColl—it must be a last gasp. He’s been writing violent letters against Raymond Mortimer and Clive—of the utmost silliness—in the New Statesman—dragging in Roger, Bloomsbury, Clive’s baldness, coteries, etc. etc. I think apoplexy or senility is the cause.

Will Rothenstein was also spiteful about R. but as usual oily and hypocritical in his last book. The artist is worse than we writers are, I sometimes think. I’m now having my MS [of Roger Fry] typed and want to read it you when done. It takes so long it may be some weeks. So I’ll say no more till the time comes. Vita Nicolson told me that Ben had deposited all the Roger papers at Sissinghurst when war broke out. They’re as safe there as anywhere, I suppose.

We moved to 37 Meck: Sq in August; and go up from time to time but live mostly at Monk’s House.

Do let us meet when you are back. Lord! what a cure, and what a place, and what a world. I’ve been talking about Roger to Morgan and we both said we thought he’d made more difference to civilisation than any of our friends. And the more I read of him the more sure I am of his lasting—when MacColl is an envelope of dry dust.

Yours
V.W.

Pamela Diamand. Modern Fiction Studies. Vol. 30. Summer 1984.

[]

3679: To Philip Hugh-Jones

18th Jan 41

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

Dear Philip,

I am so glad that you enjoyed my life of Roger Fry. I wish you had known him—he was far the most ‘exciting’ person to meet I’ve ever known. He was always bubbling with new ideas and adventures, even when the last one had gone smash, like the Omega. I was glad to be able to rescue one of his blue Omega plates from the ruins of Mecklenburgh Square. We have had to move all our furniture down here, as after a landmine broke all the windows for a second time, our flat became uninhabitable. So we are now without a house in London and live entirely here; with our books and beds boarded out in various rooms in the village.

I’m glad you’re in Edinburgh [to study medicine], and not London, which is a melancholy place now. Last week I walked through the ruins of the Temple. If you come to Sussex I hope you will visit us.

Please remember us both to your mother.

yrs Virginia Woolf

Philip Hugh-Jones

[]

3680: To V. Sackville-West

19th Jan [1941]

Monks House, Rodmell [Sussex]

I must buy some shaded inks—lavenders, pinks violets—to shade my meaning. I see I gave you many wrong meanings, using only black ink. It was a joke—our drifting apart. It was serious, wishing you’d write. It was not true that I disliked Hilda [Matheson]. I only felt—What? Something opaque, pulverising: my fault, as much as hers. And one pang of wild jealousy seized me, inopportunely, dining at Sibyls. No, no, I must buy my coloured inks. As for Irene; yes: a certain discomfort; as if the past rose between us. I was sorry for one of her trophies—a nice young man she met at my house, at once captivated then—I thought—dropped; whereupon he was killed in the war. But no: I must get my coloured inks. She never bedded, only waved flags from her castle tower: and it was a little exacerbating when my brother went off at a gallop. Thats all.

The slide arrived safe. But Miss Gardner (who’s had a story accepted by Horizon and is thus in the 7th Heaven) says we must get a Lantern. The Epi-dia-scope (Greek for looking through and over, I think) wont take slides only photographs. But you haven’t photographs, I suppose? Anyhow its easy to come by the Lantern. As for the Epi-dia-scope, I’ve run mad hunting one down in Lewes for Angelica’s lecture on The Stage tomorrow.

What did you say when Violet T. asked you a leading question? I still remember her, like a fox cub, all scent and seduction coming to 52: and abstracting The Common Reader. Now why did you love her? And did you love Hilda? We must go into all this. I rather think I’ve a new lover, a doctor, a Wilberforce, a cousin—ah! does that make you twitch! Am I still on the 3rd rung from the top? A sudden thaw: a spring day; and crocuses out in a pot.

Potto and V.

My blue envelope I bought from a bombed shop in Chancery Lane, cheap. Lord, what chaos in the Temple! All my lovely squares gone.

Look at Margots ravings—and destroy.

Berg

[]

3681: To the Assistant Editor of Harper’s Bazaar

23 January, 1941

Typewritten (carbon copy)

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Sir,

Your letter of 21 January astonishes me. Three months ago you wrote to me saying that the American office had cabled to you “clamouring for” a story from me. I was not prepared to submit a story unless commissioned and you then wrote to me on October 25th saying that “it would definitely be a commission from America” and “if you can let me have a story for them as soon as possible we would use it ourselves this side in the next issue to press.” You acknowledged receipt of the story on November 4, nearly three months ago. Since that date I have heard nothing from you, my letters remained unanswered, and the story was not used in your next issue. You now write me a letter from which I gather that you propose, without apology, to repudiate your agreement

Yours faithfully
[unsigned]

Sussex

[]

3682: To Dr Octavia Wilberforce

Jan 25th [1941]

Monk’s House [Rodmell, Sussex]

I never thanked you—dear me—for the receipts [recipes] which I have laid in my drawer. As for Riding Hood’s basket, that is our bi-weekly miracle: really twice a week we have a festival at your expense, and Louie has porridge for breakfast.

This damp dismal day its like a sun in the fog. If I cant write, I can eat. As for writing, its a washout.

Should you be our way, look in: but this is only by way of thanks, in a rush and a hurry.

Yr
V. W.

Note the envelope, bombed stock from a lawyer’s office bought cheap in Chancery Lane.

Sussex

[]

3683: To Shena, Lady Simon

25th Jan [1941]

Monk’s House, Rodmell [Sussex]

My dear Shena,

I was so glad to get your letter and write this by way of giving you an excuse—if you want one—to write again.

I had enough imagination to suppose that you’d be in the thick of it. And I rather envy you. It seems a little futile to boil with rage as I do about twice a week—in these marshes. This morning it was the soldiers saying women were turning them out of their jobs. The human race seems to repeat itself insufferably. I should like to know about rates—I’ve a personal interest now, fighting the Foundlings about our wrecked flat—And Leonard says I’m to tell you how much he admired your pamphlet on Education. This is incoherent, but I’m trying to light a fire, this damp day, of green wood.

No, I dont see whats [to] be done about war. Its manliness; and manliness breeds womanliness—both so hateful. I tried to put this to our local labour party: but was scowled at as a prostitute. They said if women had as much money as men, they’d enjoy themselves: and then what about the children? So they have more children; more wars; and so on. This is not a contribution to the problem, only a groan.

I dont see why, if you can ever come south, you shouldnt stay here? only its unlikely I suppose, that you should come south. Consider us, if you dont mind a hard bed, a very small room, and dinner cooked by me. I wont ask Mrs Ebbs [rector’s wife]—I’ve never asked her—I intend some day to ask her—that was how I came to think if you were here I would ask her. We live in the heart of the lower village world, to whom Leonard lectures on potatoes and politics. The gentry dont call.

I’m glad you got a glimpse of Roger Fry. If I could have shirked all the relations, I might have said more—But as it is—no, I dont think one can so disregard human feelings:—a reason not to write biographies,—yet if one waits the impression fades. Herbert Fisher [his Autobiography] rather nettled me. I dont like being exposed as a novelist and told my people are my mother and father, when, being in a novel, they’re not.

It was rather charming, though, his book, in the beginning, but then Lettice [Mrs Fisher] and the Cabinet between them flattened it out. That was true of him too;—

But my fire must now be completely taken in hand: and you see, I’ve given you a very good excuse to write another letter.

Yr
Virginia Woolf

Sussex

[]

3684: To Enid Bagnold

26 Jan [1941]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

Dear Enid,

Vita is coming here on the 18th. I wonder if you would come over to lunch on the 19th (a Wednesday) at one? It would be a great pleasure if you would. She says you have a phaeton and a hunter that jumps gates. We are down here, bombed out of London.

Vita is lecturing the Women’s Institute, so I promised her I’d try and give her a treat next day.

Yrs
Virginia Woolf

Mrs J. L. Manning

[]

3685: To Ethel Smyth

Feb 1st 41

Monks House, Rodmell [Sussex]

I’ve written you ever so many beautiful letters—cigarette letters—you know the kind, when one’s devotion to Ethel rises like a silver smoke, too fine for words. These are the letters I write you, about 3 on a wet windy morning. Unlike Margot, I dont keep a pencil at my head and I forget where we left off—you were going into the snow in snow boots. You had seduced the wife of the woodcutter—and then? I have a far away lover, to match your translator—a doctor, a cousin, a Wilberforce, who lives at Brighton and has—by a miracle—heard of you. If I were in London, I’d ask you to meet. She has a herd of Jersey cows and sends me a pot of cream weekly. Oh theres Margot—I cant fathom her—I get now almost daily a letter written in bed at 3 am in the Savoy. Why at this last lap of time should she fabricate an entirely imaginary passion for me, who am utterly incongruous “You and Frances Horner” she says this morning “are the only women I’ve ever loved”. The rest of womenkind, as I can well imagine, seeing her clothes, she hates, Yet she assures me she never bedded with a lover. And why assure me of anything? Is it that at the end of life she must somehow still collect some mirror? and I, being unused, still reflect whats no longer there? I suppose her lovers, male, are now grizzly old Peers, with whom its no use flirting. Extend your lighthouse Beam over this dark spot and tell me what you see.

You were saying, werent you, you wanted to see Osberts Ankor?—I heard from him tother day—after a lapse of years. He sent me his Aunt’s diaries; in which you occur. Did I tell you?—or was this silver smoke? I think you came into the Taits drawing room, smoking. which shocked Florence Sitwell, who was, perhaps is, a perfect lady. I dont care for Osberts prose: the rhododendrons grow to such a height in it. But it was an amusing book. Also I read with gratitude, Mrs Dugdale—what did she call it? some memoirs, but very light, shapely, and composed. How well people almost always write about themselves!

Did I tell you I’m reading the whole of English literature through? By the time I’ve reached Shakespeare the bombs will be falling. So I’ve arranged a very nice last scene: reading Shakespeare, having forgotten my gas mask, I shall fade far away, and quite forget…. They brought down a raider the other side of Lewes yesterday. I was cycling in to get our butter, but only heard a drone in the clouds. Thank God, as you would say, one’s fathers left one a taste for reading! Instead of thinking, by May we shall be—whatever it may be: I think, only 3 months to read Ben Jonson, Milton, Donne, and all the rest! Today however, to make me quicken my pace, I saw a yellow woodpecker bright green against ruby red willows. Lord! how I started, and then saw coming across the marsh, Leonard, looking like a Saxon Earl, because his old coat was torn and the lining flapped round his gum boots.

I did walk through London the other day—Oh but I told you about the Temple, didnt I, all rubble and white dust?—and how, to put heart into me, I ate Turkey at Buszards [Oxford Street]? I have so seldom gloried in food, all alone. But there must be an end to this drivel, because I must earn 10 guineas reading a vast fat book about Mrs Thrale. I’m in the 16th Century, and its a wrench to jerk to the 18th.

I read and read like a donkey going round and round a well; pray to God, some idea will flash. I leave it to nature. I can no longer control my brain. I am in touch with Enid Jones, who is coming to meet Vita; who is coming to lecture the Institute; and so shall I hope send a message to Maurice Baring.

Now, Ethel dear, you will perhaps very kindly write to me. You see what a long letter this is: also dated. Not a very coherent letter; but Leonards sawing logs under the window; and the marsh is all emerald green again, and the elms barred with rosy clouds, and pale pure blue behind that funny little extinguisher—the Church. For the past 3 weeks I’ve lived like a moth in a towel. Did I tell you I can now make lovely, rich, savoury vegetable soup? Tonight we shall have maccaroni au gratin and my lovers [Wilberforce] cream. But now, in Gods name, I must open this damned industrious American [Clifford], who’s spent 20 years shadowing Mrs Thrale. I would like to ask, quite simply, do you still love me? Remember how I waved that day in Meck Sqre. Do love me.

V.

Berg

[]

3686: To Desmond Maccarthy

2nd Feb [1941]

Typewritten

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

Re article in Sunday Times

No, no, no, my dear Desmond—I really must protest. I never sat on top of a tower! Compare my wretched little £150 education with yours, with Lytton’s, with Leonard’s. Did Eton and Cambridge make no difference to you? Could the Hawk have been so affable and so hawklike without it? Would Lytton have written just as well if he’d spent his youth, as I did mine, mooning among books in a library? I assure you, my tower was a mere toadstool, about six inches high. And when you say “She herself as a writer owes everything to having seen the world from a tower which did not lean” you make me gnash my teeth. If you knew my inadequacy; what shifts and squeaks I’m put to every time I dip my pen! Of course I’m not on the ground with the WEA but I’m about four thousand five hundred and fifty pounds nearer them than you are. So I’m right to say ‘we’ when I talk to them; just as I’m right to say ‘they’ when I look up, as I do with constant envy and admiration, at you.

This is the brief residue of a three hours argument with Leonard. So I thought I’d pop my conclusion in an envelope and send it you.

No chance I suppose of another week end? How nice the last one was—And are you at Ham [Wiltshire]? If so, give Molly my love.

The cold has reduced my hand to such a frozen claw that I type; but the pleasure with which I read you remains warm.

Yr Virginia

Mrs Michael MacCarthy

[]

3687: To Enid Bagnold

Sunday [2 February 1941]

Typewritten

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

Dear Enid,

What a muddle! Vita said how much she’d like to meet you. I said, Then I’ll ask her over … Vita said, Perfect. Not a sign that she’d invited herself to you.

Perhaps we’d better leave it as it is—if you’ll be so angelic as to come here. I know its asking a lot. And its not true that I hate leaving my house—not at all. But this we can discuss when you come. So we expect you at One on the 19th.

If you should ever see Maurice Baring, could you convey my respectful affection?

Why are you North End House in the Telephone; and Elms on your paper?

Yr
Virginia Woolf

Enid Bagnold

[]

3688: To the Editor of Harper’s Bazaar

3 February, 1941

Typewritten (carbon copy)

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex

Dear Sir,

I have to thank you for your letter of 31 January, but there has been no muddle or misunderstanding on my side. I have had no cable, letter, or any other communication either from Mr Davis or Miss McFadden. I had a letter from your office asking me for a story, saying that the American office had cabled to you. As I was engaged on a book at the time. I was not anxious to do it immediately and I replied that I had nothing by me, but had some stories roughly sketched out in my London house and would get them and look at them when I was next in town. I also enquired whether this was a commission, as I was not prepared to write a story except it was commissioned. I then received letters from your office pressing me to get the stories from my London house so that you could send one on the Clipper [air mail] to the U.S.A. as that was the repeated cabled request from your American office and informing me that “it would definitely be a commission from America”. (See your letters of October 14, 20, and 25). I do not see that there is any “muddle” or “misunderstanding” about this, but a perfectly plain, legal contract. At some inconvenience to myself, I went up to town, got the rough sketches, wrote a story from one of them, and sent it to your office. I was told also that the story would be used here by you. The story was acknowledged, but after that I heard nothing from you and my letter remained unanswered. You now inform me that “they do not want” the story, but “are tremendously keen” about something else. I presume that payment will be made for the story commissioned by you—which will bring in foreign exchange as effectively as if it had been printed—and after that I will consider any suggestion which Miss McFadden cares to put before me.

Yours faithfully
[unsigned]

Sussex

[]

3689: To V. Sackville-West

4th Feb. [1941]

Monks House [Rodmell, Sussex]

Oh dearest Vita, what an overflowing Cornucopia you are! How you pet pamper and spoil me! Nothing could have come more pat than your pat. I’d shaken a bottle of milk for an hour; at last a yellow lump appeared: I put it on the kitchen table. The cat ate it—So when the post came, it was like the voice of God in answer to our prayers. What did Staples [Nicolsons’ cook] say when she found it gone? Yes, I’m a butter maker now, and it takes the devil of a time.

Also: what am I wearing at this moment? Jacobs Ram. Louie made me a thick warm jersey. Its saved my life I live in it. And its a lovely colour—The whole county envies me. Dear me, how you rain blessings—Enid, by the way, writes (perhaps slightly aggrieved) that you said you’d lunch with her. So will I come too? I’ve said no. She must come here; and she will. Yes, we’ll get the Lanthorn [for Vita’s lecture].

I’m going to London tomorrow to walk among the ruins. Did I tell you all my books are to bits?—so, if you have Lady Ann Clifford or any other Elizabethan biographer—dear me—I’m asking another favour; but could you bring them?

Its the very devil writing when every book lies at the bottom of a vast hole up at the blacksmiths

Many are utterly ruined.

So goodby till 18th to which I look forward as a drowning sailor to a Spice Island.

V.

Who is the Countess of Gall

Berg

[]

3690: To Ethel Smyth

Saturday [8 February 1941]

Monks House [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest Ethel—of course I minded your distemper with me, but of course I put it down to misery. And now your card makes all safe and sound again: I only scrawl this by way of a hug, which indeed I’d like to give you, loving your warm heart—Leonard says, he has not read Curry: he says he doesnt believe in Federal Union now. He says he’s given all his views on that in his 2/6 book. War for Peace. If you’d like to read it—I think its very masterly—I’ll send it.

Lord! What a horror about the insects WC on Pans nose! Enough to make anyone tart even with a woman who loves you with every fibre of what is in fact a damned good heart. I was out of spirits I admit all day after your letter. And what d’you mean, I ask, by your “you might do a tiny bit of direct work for your living …” Ought I, d’you mean, not to write articles? I agree. The Thrale is nonsense, too, as I have to press it all into 6 pages—damn these editors!

Off to Letchworth and Cambridge next week to see the Press. Oh Lord, what an effort moving in this weather and these conditions. Our line was blown up on Wednesday and it took 3 hours to get back from London Yr inarticulate but adoring

V.

Berg

[]

3691: To Mary Hutchinson

10th Feb. [1941]

Typewritten

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

Mary! Weasel! I’ve been trying to write this letter in hand writing, but my hand is like the cramped claw of an aged fowl: so I turn to the type. Please forgive. An odious habit.

No, I dont think I can write about The English and French. I’ve sat staring at it, but its too vast, too oleaginous. Nothing whatever happens. You see one has to approach ones subject with a little thrill—as if you were opposite and I suddenly gave you a rose. So I’ve told your old Bugger that I wont do that; but if they allow an English subject, a writer, then I’ll do my best. If one could amuse the French—poor people, I would. Salute the man in your basement from me. I read his story in the paper. And to think of you on a battleship!

As you say, wheres one to begin? Yes, Leonard has got a purple hyacinth. And the flood has gone. Then the snow came, and I made green holes in the grass every time I came out here to my Lodge. Now the snow has gone. Life is rapid but eventless. We take tea at Charleston: Clive is digging a trench; Nessa feeding fowls; Duncan painting Christ; Quentin driving a tractor—all as it was in 1917. Tomorrow we go for a jaunt, to Cambridge, taking the Press at Letchworth in our way. And we shall dine with my dear Dadie [Rylands]; and shall I give him your love? Then Elizabeth Bowen comes; then Vita, to address the Womens Institute on Persia; then—why not Mary? But one cant lift a fringe of the future. Thats whats so odd—the blank space in front. Last time I heard from Tom [Eliot], he was domesticating with Hope Mirrlees: spiritually, of course. But save for a gloomy stone dumb visit from Oliver Strachey, I’ve hardly seen a human being out of the roaring whirlpool of village life. Nessa rings up to say that Helen Anrep is being driven out of Sussex by soldiers. What else? Oh I read a great many books, and cook vegetable soup for dinner. Dear me, can you account for the Sitwells? Maliciously I’m amused; but professionally—I must not say what, for fear I shall be hauled into the Law Courts. Margot pelts me with letters written at dawn in pencil. But some-how I feel she’s insatiably, madly, greedy; so I’m not much flattered. I told you how she sent a bust of Voltaire all the way by car?

Thats all the news I can send at the moment, which is a lovely blue and white spring moment; and the snowdrops are out; and the crocuses showing. This is not to describe spring; but to bribe a weasel south. I dreamt all one night about Barbara. And Victor had grown a mere spindle of a man. I must now cycle into Lewes to get our butter. All the time the Prime Minister was speaking I was shaking a bottle; just as he reached the peroration the butter came! Is this a symbol?

Give both our love: to Jack [Mary’s husband]; to Barbara; to Jeremy [her son]; to Jeremys wife; and taking out your little mirror, imagine that I am just about to print a kiss on your nose.

Virginia

Texas

[]

3692: To Philippa Strachey

17th Feb [1941]

Monk’s House, Rodmell [Sussex]

Dear Pippa,

I found your letter here, and am very grateful. It was angelic of you to go into the matter. Alas, Leonard has plumped in favour of it—so I’ve accepted—I neednt say how reluctantly. But I suppose it dont much matter. I can always resign in a huff at a word from you.

What a bore it was that you weren’t at Cambridge! We had a long gossip with Pernel, and felt as if we’d had a hot bath—it was so clean warm and civilised. But we couldnt stay this time. Next time we must see you, which would rejuvenate us. I suppose you cant come south?—no—How d-d this war is!

Yr Virginia

Strachey Trust

[]

3693: To George Rylands

19th Feb [1941]

Monk’s House, Rodmell [Sussex]

Dearest Dadie,

I had meant to thank you before for the extraordinarily happy evening you gave us. It was only that coming back here to find Elizabeth [Bowen], Vita and Lady Jones I couldn’t seize a pen. It remains like an oasis, last Wednesday, not a mirage—in the desert.

I’ve ordered the books you bade me, and thank you for everything and we both send our love.

Yr
Virginia

George Rylands

[]

3694: To Dr Octavia Wilberforce

[23 February 1941]

Monk’s House [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dear Octavia,

You’ve reduced me not to silence quite, but to a kind of splutter—I mean, the cream; the cheese: the milk. I dont see how to begin: and twice a week the debt mounts. And you dont come here so that I could speak by word of mouth. Dear, dear—I’m dumb. But can just say we had a magnificent feast of cheese last night: not had one since September: and seldom any so suave and sweet and yet sour. No I didn’t add sugar. For there was a natural sweetsour in it that was best unmixed.

We too have been turmoiled, not, I expect, for any such good purpose as you. Only going to Cambridge, to Letchworth, and somehow having a run of visitors in the house.

Should you be able to come over, please suggest it. And—have I the face to add—does your cook find any Seville oranges in the Brighton shops? None here. I daresay none anywhere.

But I only want to suggest a visit some time.

Yr
V.W.

Sussex

[]

3695: To Ethel Smyth

1st March [1941]

Monks House [Rodmell, Sussex]

Do you know, I have written you three separate letters, and torn each of them up? This is a fact. Partly, they were d—d dull: partly something always interrupted. Ever since we came back from Cambridge—30 hours in train journeys: £6 on hotel bills, all for Leonard to spend two hours at Letchworth—I’ve been in a fret. People kept turning up. Oh yes—there was Vita, and Enid Jones to lunch. You know, if one’s only got a half daily maid its difficult, getting food together: and the wine had run out; and the duck was all strings and blue sinews. However Enid was as dapper as a dab chick. A brick I think would be the proper word—something a bit gritty and granular; but hard to the foot. Of course she—an old love I fancy—wanted to be alone with Vita; and there I was; and it was pelting wet, the cat had scratched a hole in the chair cover, and a visiting dog had lifted his leg against the table—In short there was an atmosphere of the sordid and squalid. I gave her your message, and she kindled, and said I was to tell you—it was when I got to this point in the other letters that I stopped: it bores me so repeating messages; she said Maurice [Baring] is much better on his Scotch island and she thinks that half his troubles are caused by the Rheumatic air of Rottingdean. Now I have told you that; and added her love, and admiration: but I remember once sending you my love, and you snubbed me.

Then you sent me that 6d book [Curry’s]: which I’ve not read, nor Leonard either. I am at the moment trying, without the least success, to write an article or two for a new Common Reader. I am stuck in Elizabethan plays. I cant move back or forwards. I’ve read too much, but not enough. Thats why I cant break into politics. Do you ever get glued, on a fly paper, as I do, when I’m trying to make myself master of something? I always trust that on the next page I shall free my legs. I have a mystic belief that if one goes on persistently the match box flame will spurt. But oh dear me, it hasnt.

If you want to picture me at the moment then you must strew the floor with mouldy dramatists; and how am I to picture you? Do you feel, as I do, when my head’s not on this impossible grindstone, that this is the worst stage of the war? I do. I was saying to Leonard, we have no future. He says thats what gives him hope. He says the necessity of some catastrophe pricks him up. What I feel is the suspense when nothing actually happens. But I’m cross and irritable from the friction of village life. Isn’t it foolish? But no sooner have I bound myself to my book, and brewed that very rare detachment, than some old lady taps at the door. How is she to grow potatoes or tomatoes? If that were all, I wouldnt mind. But she spends an hour, prodding her stick into the lawn, one thing following another. My theory as to that is that we have to pay the price of detachment by being tethered down. Do doctors widows come to your lawn, just as you’re writing—and then what d’you do?

I cant deal with Margot [Oxford]. Every other day she writes to me. I cant answer. I gather she cruises about the Savoy cadging dinners. When they fail, she writes to me. I’m amused that she said the very same thing to Lady Balfour. Thats what I feel—her words are used already, so they dont fit. Two things I have now got to do: one, to find a flat in Brighton for Roger Fry’s mistress [Helen Anrep]: the other to buy 2 tons of hay for Octavia Wilberforce’s cows. She says theyre so thin you could put a safety pin through them. You see, I’m no good at practical affairs: I’m fished out of my element and lie gasping on the ground. Thats why, I suppose, I cant write to you. But if you wrote to me I should recover the tone of your voice at least. Do tell me, what are you doing? Pan’s lice. Mary [maid]: anything. Excuse this drivel.

V.

Berg

[]

3696: To V. Sackville-West

4th March [1941]

Monks House [Rodmell, Sussex]

Oh dearest Creature—now you’ve topped the whole hill of your benefactions with a firelighter. Po: butter: wool: books: firelighter on top. There you must stop. You cant add anything to fire. You see the poetic fitness of ending there. What a magnificent conception of life you have—O damn the law. Leonard says we cant use your petrol. Another gift. But it appears there’s a Bus. Couldnt we arrange that? I suppose your orchard is beginning to dapple as it did the day I came there. One of the sights I shall see on my death bed.

I suppose you havent any Hay to sell? Octavia Wilberforces cows at Henfield, which give us butter, are starving. So I said I’d ask.

Silence means no.

I’ve been ranging the country this afternoon, asking for hay. Not a blade to be had.

No, I’ve not read Enids play [Lottie Dundas]. Would she lend it me? Is it a masterpiece? or merely a moneymaker? The Anrep flat fell through, damn it.

Oh to think I shall never sit in the cold again. Aint this a pretty pattern for a letter?

Berg

[]

3697: To Dr Octavia Wilberforce

Tuesday [4 March 1941]

Typewritten

Monk’s House [Rodmell, Sussex]

Dear Octavia,

Excuse this typing; which is my method of trying to be exact and practical. Its about the flat. I find that Helen Anrep wants two bed rooms; if possible three; kitchen and bath room; and sitting room. She cant afford more than £50. I imagine this puts it out of the question. Should you hear of anything, then tell me; but on no account trouble. Also, as far as I can make out, the old part of Brighton is what she likes. Whether this is dearer, or cheaper, I dont know. There! That sounds very pat.

And now of course typing dont suit any other kind of letter. So I wont begin on the question of my living portrait. All I say is, I see that no one can be asked to sit. Why should they? Wouldnt it be a kind of torture? It was only a wild flitting dream. I will try to write to Miss Robins. No, no, no, I cannot write on a typewriter; and so must give over and say once more, what a damned generous woman you are. Have you any use for bottled gooseberries? Many pots here if you would take them.

[handwritten:]

All the same, I add in handwriting I think you’re very paintable, as the painters say. Now I wonder why? Something that composes well—Perhaps reticence and power combined: and then theres the garden at Lavington.

Sussex

[]

3698: To T. S. Eliot

8th March [1941]

Typewritten

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

My dear Tom,

“With Mr Eliot’s compliments”—how can I answer that very brief communication? Only I suppose by returning Mrs Woolf’s comps. As you know, profound inhibitions prevent me from saying anything about the poem. Happily, they dont prevent me from thanking you very profoundly for remembering Mrs Woolf.

I have had it on the tip of my typewriter these many weeks to suggest that time is passing; and it would be a great pleasure to fix a point and see you. I suggest 5th of April week end. I do so very tentatively, because I know—havent we just been to Cambridge and back—the horror of trains. But our line is still better than some. Then there’s the lack of civility here. Its a dripping day; the water has come through the kitchen ceiling.

All the same, if you would venture, there’s nothing we should like better. Or the middle of the week, if thats more to your liking.

So much water has flowed under the bridge that I feel at sea; and so conclude.

Yr aff
Virginia

Mrs T. S. Eliot

[]

3699: To Ethel Smyth

10th March [1941]

Monks House [Rodmell, Sussex]

Yes, yes yes, of course I agree with you. This refers to Mr. Currys book, which I’ve just read. But then of course I’m not a politician, and so take one leap to the desirable lands. L’s view would be, I think, that ones got to plod along the road, indeed to make it, before one gets there. But Lord! what a relief to have a vision! and I’m glad you’re beating up an audience in Woking:

What I really write to say though is—how damnable these separations are! Letters, no letters; then letters again. Shall I come down for a night? I could now, on a Wednesday—in April—go back early Thursday.

But I daresay you cant manage. Anyhow youre off to Winnie. But when youre back lets try to bridge this solitude. I would bring my rations. I’m in the dither of trying to contrive spring cleaning. Oh our carpets—I spent 2 hours carpet beating, and still the flakes of our bombed ceiling flock, and drown the books just dusted. I’d no notion, having always a servant, of the horror of dirt—

No: politics at the moment seem more pressing than autobiography. We have the drone of raiders every night, and the village is now fire spotting—chiefly incendiaries away over the hill.

So no more, for I’m off to Lewes about beating carpets, and only write this because, having done curry, I thought, belatedly, to wave a hand of thanks.

V.

Berg

[]

3700: To Elizabeth Robins

March 13th [1941]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

Dear Miss Robins,

I was very sorry to hear from Octavia [Wilberforce] that you had had an accident. Selfishly, I’m afraid it may interfere with the book that I’m looking forward to. But I remember a saying of Henry James—all experiences are of use to a writer. I think he was talking about a nervous breakdown. So may it be worth a broken bone.

I now go on to say that I’ve been cycling into Lewes—not a very interesting remark, save that it connects with Octavia. Has she told you, I wonder—no, I dont suppose she has—of her amazing bi-weekly bounty—cream, milk, sometimes a cheese? Thats what I’ve been fetching. You cant think how it brightens our weekly bill of fare. Also, to fetch her empty basket, she sometimes comes over, and this has been, is, and will be, I hope, a great treat. Is it our drop of blood in common? Anyhow we sit over the fire, as if we’d known each other in the woods at Lavington. Its odd how our lives have run just not meeting but through the same country. Thats the sort of woman I most admire—the reticence, the quiet, the power—Here I can imagine her look of enquiry—why? Well its difficult to say why. Its the variety and the calm partly. As you can imagine, she’s healing the sick by day, and controlling the fires by night.

At this moment theres a flood of yellow flowers in the garden—And the view from my window is like a block of flawed emerald, half green, half blue. And what I wonder are you doing at this moment?

Its amazingly peaceful here, you can almost hear the grass grow; and the rooks are building; you wouldnt think that at 7.30 the planes will be over. Two nights ago they dropped incendiaries, in a row, like street lamps, all along the downs. Two hay stacks caught and made a lovely illumination—but no flesh was hurt. Indeed, every bomb they drop only casts up a crater so far. Its difficult, I find, to write. No audience. No private stimulus, only this outer roar. And in these circumstances, Octavia is very refreshing. Leonard asks me to add his respects to my love, and we both often think of you and the book.

Yrs
V.W.

Sussex

[]

3701: To Ruth Fry

16th March [1941]

Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

Dear Ruth,

Yes, I was very pleased with the reviews of Roger—especially the ones that abused him, for it shows how much bite he still has. But the one I liked best was J. T. Sheppards in the Cambridge Review, for that said that Roger Fry was there and not V.W., which was what I wanted.

You’ve been so good, taking an interest in it, I mean considering me, the author—thank you so much. It still goes on selling; but owing to an idiotic blunder, the Press gave me no time to correct misprints and mistakes. I must apologise; and will put them in, should there be another edition.

We are being a good deal bombed at the moment. Rows of incendiaries fell on the farm two nights ago and burnt haystacks, but so far no one has been hurt.

I suppose Thorpeness [Suffolk] is about as much of a target as we are.

Hoping we shall both escape, and meet some day.

Your affectionate,
Virginia Woolf

Pamela Diamand

[]

Letters 3702-3710 (March 18-28, 1941)

3702: To Leonard Woolf

Tuesday [18? March 1941]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest,

I feel certain that I am going mad again: I feel we cant go through mother of those terrible times. And I shant recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and cant concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I dont think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I cant fight it any longer, I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I cant even write this properly. I cant read. What I want to say is that I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that—everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I cant go on spoiling your life any longer.

I dont think two people could have been happier than we have been.

V.

British Library

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3703: To John Lehmann

20th March [1941]

Typewritten

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

Dear John,

I’ve just read my so called novel [Between the Acts] over; and I really dont think it does. Its much too slight and sketchy. Leonard doesnt agree. So we’ve decided to ask you if you’d mind reading it and give your casting vote? Meanwhile dont take any steps.

I’m sorry to trouble you, but I feel fairly certain it would be a mistake from all points of view to publish it. [handwritten:] But as we both differ about this, your opinion would be a great help.

Yours
Virginia

I hope youre sending the manuscripts—I should like to do them.

British Library

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3704: To Lady Cecil

21st March [1941]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

My dear Nelly,

To begin with business—Leonard’s review came out in the N.S. on the 15th February.

I’m glad that business has caused you to break ten years of silence. When petrol is scarce, one must have recourse to ink—I wish we could come over [to Gale, Chelwood Gate]—but the car only gets as far as Lewes once a week.

I’m so sorry that Lord Robert never sent me his book. I should have liked to read it in my own copy. I read it in Leonard’s, and wished for more. There wasnt, even for me, a non-politician, a word too much about the League, but I wished for more about Grove End Road [London] and the room looking onto the garden, and you. Is this vulgar? I suppose so. I’m greatly flattered that his old opinion of me—a wrinkled hag—has another side to its face. Often when I turn over my old scrap book at night I pause at the Gale page.

I’m glad you liked Leonard’s book [The War for Peace], and gave it to a sceptic. It seemed to me the only kind of thing worth writing now. Do you find you can read the novelists? I cant. Still, I agree that this war’s better than last, and ever so much better than the last 5 years of peace. We’ve been bombed out of London and live entirely here now. Leonard lectures the village on politics. We see Vanessa occasionally—most nights the raiders go over. Last week the haystacks blazed and incendiaries lit up the downs. I cant help wishing the invasion would come. Its this standing about in a dentist’s waiting room that I hate.

Are you at last obediently writing your Memoirs? That would complete Lord Roberts. Leonard sends his duty and I my love.

Yrs
Virginia Woolf

Marquess of Salisbury (Cecil Papers)

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3705: To Lady Tweedsmuir

[21? March 1941]

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

Dear Susie,

How very nice of you to write! I hadnt liked to write to you, but I did want to hear about you. I know how difficult it must be, making a fresh start. But you have a great deal more than most of us to look forward to. Elizabeth [Bowen] told me too of all your war activities. I expect that is a help too. I wanted also to write to you when your mother died. The memory of her goes back so far in my life—I remember ‘dining out’ for the first time in your house, after your father’s death—and I remember him too coming to see us, and admiring him, as a child. Isn’t one of your sons like him? I saw a photograph, and thought so.

We have been completely bombed out of London, and lead a rather vegetable existence here, surrounded by the melancholy relics of our half destroyed furniture. All this afternoon I’ve been trying to arrange some of my father’s old books.

Only now and then do I come to London at present. May I let you know a date later in case we could meet? I’m always rather rushed—thats the worst of it, as we’ve nowhere to stay in town.

Yes, I think thats a very good idea—writing letters from the country to America. I cant say that we’re very peaceful here. Last week there were 50 incendiaries on the farm, and the stacks were burnt. Most days we have a raid—in fact the siren has just gone for the second time today. No one pays it any attention—I wonder if [Elsfield Manor] Oxford is more peaceful? Yes, do write about it. Wasnt Elizabeth’s book good? And thank you for writing to me—I was glad to hear of you after all this time.

Yr affate
Virginia

Lady Tweedsmuir

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3706: To V. Sackville-West

Saturday [22 March 1941]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

Look at this letter [lost], sent to the New Statesman, addressed to ‘Miss Virginia Woolf’.—What a queer thought transference! No, I’m not you. No, I dont keep budgerigars.

Louie’s survive: and she feeds them on scraps—I suppose they’re lower class, humble, birds. If we come over [to Sissinghurst], may I bring her a pair if any survive? Do they die all in an instant? When shall we come? Lord knows—

Berg

[]

3707: To John Lehmann

Sunday [23 March 1941]

Typewritten

Monk’s House, Rodmell, [Sussex]

Dear John,

I have gone through these MSS as far as I can. But my head is very stupid at the moment.

The only ones that are I think worth considering are: Mr Robinson’s poems; and Mr Urquart’s story. Both have distinct merit, I think; though both are border line cases.

Yours ever
[unsigned]

Texas

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3708: To Vanessa Bell

Sunday [23? March 1941]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest,

You cant think how I loved your letter. But I feel that I have gone too for this time to come back again. I am certain now that I am going mad again. It is just as it was the first time, I am always hearing voices, and I know I shant get over it now.

All I want to say is that Leonard has been so astonishingly good, every day, always; I cant imagine that anyone could have done more for me than he has. We have been perfectly happy until the last few weeks, when this horror began. Will you assure him of this? I feel he has so much to do that he will go on, better without me, and you will help him.

I can hardly think clearly any more. If I could I would tell you what you and the children have meant to me. I think you know.

I have fought against it, but I cant any longer.

Virginia

British Library

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3709: To John Lehmann

[27? March 1941]

Typewritten

Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes [Sussex]

Dear John,

I’d decided, before your letter came, that I cant publish that novel as it stands—its too silly and trivial.

What I will do is to revise it, and see if I can pull it together and so publish it in the autumn. If published as it is, it would certainly mean a financial loss; which we dont want. I am sure I am right about this.

I neednt say how sorry I am to have troubled you. The fact is it was written in the intervals of doing Roger with my brain half asleep. And I didnt realise how bad it was till I read it over.

Please forgive me, and believe I’m only doing what is best.

I’m sending back the MSS [for Folios of New Writing] with my notes.

Again, I apologise profoundly.

Yours,
Virginia Woolf

British Library

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3710: To Leonard Woolf

[28 March 1941]

[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]

Dearest,

I want to tell you that you have given me complete happiness. No one could have done more than you have done. Please believe that.

But I know that I shall never get over this: and I am wasting your life. It is this madness. Nothing anyone says can persuade me. You can work, and you will be much better without me. You see I cant write this even, which shows I am right. All I want to say is that until this disease came on we were perfectly happy. It was all due to you. No one could have been so good as you have been, from the very first day till now. Everyone knows that.

V.

You will find Roger’s letters to the Maurons in the writing table drawer in the Lodge. Will you destroy all my papers.

British Library

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MOMENTS
OF
BEING

by
Virginia Woolf

published
1976
by
Harcourt Publishers Ltd

moments of being

Reminiscences:

One.    Two.    Three.    Four.

A Sketch of the Past.

22 Hyde Park Gate.

Old Bloomsbury.

Am I a Snob?

[]

Reminiscences.

Chapter One

Your mother was born in 1879, and as some six years at least must have passed before I knew that she was my sister, I can say nothing of that time. A photograph is the best token there is of her appearance, and the face in this instance shows also much of the character. You see the soft, dreamy and almost melancholy expression of the eyes; and it may not be fanciful to discover some kind of test and rejection in them as though, even then, she considered the thing she saw, and did not always find what she needed in it. But certainly it would be mere fancy to conceive that this was other than unconscious at that age. For the rest, a mother who gazed in her face might feel her heart leap at the endowment already promised her daughter, for she was to have great beauty. And in this case the mother would also feel tender joy within her, and some bright amusement too, for already her daughter promised to be honest and loving; already, as I have heard, she was able to care for the three little creatures who were younger than she was, teaching Thoby his letters, and giving up to him her bottle. I can imagine that she attached great importance to the way in which Thoby sat in his highchair, and appealed to Nurse to have him properly fastened there before he was allowed to eat his porridge. Her mother would smile silently at this.

Our life was ordered with great simplicity and regularity. It seems to divide itself into two large spaces, not crowded with events, but in some way more exquisitely natural than any that follow; for our duties were very plain and cur pleasures absolutely appropriate. Earth gave all the satisfaction we asked. One space was spent indoors, in the drawing room and nursery, and the other in Kensington Gardens. There were a number of little warfares, and sometimes Nessa and Thoby fought with us and sometimes they were our friends. I remember too the great extent and mystery of the dark land under the nursery table, where a continuous romance seemed to go forward, though the time spent there was really so short. Here I met your mother, in a gloom happily encircled by the firelight, and peopled with legs and skirts. We drifted together like ships in an immense ocean and she asked me whether black cats had tails. And I answered that they had not, after a pause in which her question seemed to drop echoing down vast abysses, hitherto silent. In future I suppose there was some consciousness between us that the other held possibilities. But though shot occasionally by stormy passions, when sympathies seemed to waken beyond the reach of circumstances, the great satisfaction was to be had from impersonal things. There were smells and flowers and dead leaves and chestnuts, by which you distinguished the seasons, and each had innumerable associations, and power to flood the brain in a second. There were long summer evenings, with white moths abroad; and bright winter evenings when the fire-wood could be cut into shape. “The others” were not brothers and sister, but beings possessed of knives, or enviable gifts for running or carving; and your mother, partly because she did not seem to hold these views as completely as we did, was the first to disturb me from my contentment. Another influence was even then astir in her, the influence of an affection only to be gratified by people. No hole dug in the gardens however deep, so that it was possible to extract clay of a malleable quality from it, gave her all that she needed. Dolls did not satisfy her. At present, until she was fifteen indeed, she was outwardly sober and austere, the most trustworthy, and always the eldest; sometimes she would lament her “responsibilities”. Other children had their stages, and sudden gifts and failings; she seemed to draw on steadily, as though with her eye on some far object, which attained, she might reveal herself. She was very silent, and the only peculiar tastes which she seemed encouraged to show were those that people called out; she cried when Thoby went to school, and she minded more than the rest when your grandmother declared with some passion and humour, as I think, that she could never trust a single one of us again; had we not gone hunting for a dead cat against her commands? But beneath the serious surface only legitimately broken by such affections, there burnt also the other passion, the passion for art. She drew indeed under the care of a Mr Cook, but talk of art, talk of her own gifts and loves, was unknown to her. What did she think then? For with her long fingers grouping, and her eye considering, she surely painted many pictures without a canvas. Once I saw her scrawl on a black door a great maze of lines, with white chalk. “When I am a famous painter—” she began, and then turned shy and rubbed it out in her capable way. And when she won the prize at her drawing school, she hardly knew, so shy was she, at the recognition of a secret, how to tell me, in order that I might repeat the news at home. “They’ve given me the thing—I don’t know why.” “What thing?” “O they say I’ve won it—the book—the prize you know.” She was awkward as a long-legged colt.

When I try to see her I see more distinctly how our lives are pieces in a pattern and to judge one truly you must consider how this side is squeezed and that indented and a third expanded and none are really isolated, and so I conceive that there were many reasons then to make your mother show herself a little other than she was. We lived in a state of anxious growth; school, reports, professions to be chosen, marriage for the elders, books coming out, bills, health—the future was always too near and too much of a question for any sedate self expression. All these activities, too, charged the air with personal emotions and urged even children, and certainly “the eldest”, to develop one side prematurely. To help, to do something was desirable, not to obtrude diffident wishes, irrelevant and possibly expensive.

So your mother, whose sight seemed in some ways so clear, took it upon her to be what people call ‘practical’ though a generous talent for losing umbrellas and forgetting messages showed that nature sometimes delighted to laugh at the pretence. But the power which was not feigned and was probably recognized by those who trusted her, was what I call variously sagacity, and common sense, and more rightly perhaps, honesty of mind. She might not see all, but she would not see what was not there. Stories, shallow though they seem, and I cannot be sure that to other eyes they will show what they show to mine, float upon the surface and must be made to illustrate this flying narrative. One August night, very much later in date, when your grandmother was dead we walked in the garden at Ringwood. Your grandfather sat indoors alone, and might at any moment call us in to play whist with him as usual; and the light and the cards and the shouting seemed to us that night too crude and close to be tolerable. So we walked in the shade, and when we heard him come to the window and call we stood silent. Then he came out onto the lawn, and peered round him and called us each by name. But still we persisted, and at length he went in and left us to walk alone. But as we knew from the first perhaps, such joy is not for mortals; we wandered without delight, and at last went in and found him impressive, consciously but truly impressive, old, solitary and deserted. “Did you hear me call?” he said, and I was silent, and so was Adrian; your mother hesitated, and then said “Yes”.

But this shows her quality in a tragic light; exposed to the fiercest strain. In earlier years it was most often the characteristic laughable token by which we knew her; “Old Nessa’s honesty” or “The Old Creature is so matter-of-fact” or “She means well”. For sometimes she clung to truth too tenaciously, too simply; and we, flippant or sometimes insolent, persecuted her with horrid titles, ‘Saint’, and so on; for children so soon as they have any wit to direct are apt to use it cruelly. But there were then days of pure enjoyment—I conceive them at St Ives most readily, when your mother trotted about on various businesses, considering the characters and desires of dogs very gravely, skilfully contriving butterfly nets, under your Uncle Waller’s tuition, accepting his law as the divine law, painting in water-colours, and scratching a number of black little squares, after Ruskin’s prescription. She played cricket better for the same reasons, with her straight forward stroke, calculated to meet all emergencies; and began by means of such fidelity and outward simplicity to win respect for herself from those tyrants and demigods who ruled our world; George, Waller, and Madge Symonds.§ She was a happy creature! beginning to feel within her the spring of unsuspected gifts, that the sea was beautiful and might be painted some day, and perhaps once or twice she looked steadily in the glass when no one was by and saw a face that excited her strangely; her being began to have a definite shape, a place in the world—what was it like? But her natural development, in which the artistic gift, so sensitive and yet so vigorous, would have asserted itself, was checked; the effect of death upon those that live is always strange, and often terrible in the havoc it makes with innocent desires.

In this sense your grandmother’s death was disastrous; for you must conceive that she was not only the most beautiful of women as her portraits will tell you, but also one of the most distinct. Her life had been so swift, it was to be so short, that experiences which in most have space to expand themselves and bear leisurely fruit, were all compressed in her; she had married, borne children, and mourned her husband by the time she was twenty-four. For eight years she pondered that active season, and as I guess, formulated then in great part the judgement of life which underlay her future. She had been happy as few people are happy, for she had passed like a princess in a pageant from her supremely beautiful youth to marriage and motherhood, without awakenment. If I read truly, indeed the atmosphere of her home flattered such dreams and cast over the figure of her bridegroom all the golden enchantments of Tennysonian sentiment. But it would need a clearer vision than mine to decide how far her husband, though now so obviously her inferior in all ways, was able then to satisfy noble and genuine passions in his wife. Perhaps she made satisfaction for herself, cloaking his deficiencies in her own superabundance. At any rate when he was dead she determined to consecrate those years as the golden ones; when as she phrased it perhaps, she had not known the sorrow and the crime of the world because she had lived with a man, stainless of his kind, exalted in a world of pure love and beauty. The effect of his death then was doubly tremendous, because it was disillusionment as well as a tragic human loss. She had by nature a keen brain, remorseless of all insincerity and even too much inclined to insist that all feeling has an equivalent in action or is worthless. And now that she had none to worship she worshipped the memory, and looking on the world with clear eyes, was more scornful than was just of its tragedy and stupidity because she had lived in a dream and still cherished a dream. She flung aside her religion, and became, as I have heard, the most positive of disbelievers. She reversed those natural instincts which were so strong in her of happiness and joy in a generous and abundant life, and pressed the bitterest fruit only to her lips. She visited the poor, nursed the dying, and felt herself possessed of the true secret of life at last, which is still obscured from a few, though they too must come to know it, that sorrow is our lot, and at best we can but face it bravely. All these things certainly she would have learnt had her husband lived, but learnt them with wisdom and temperance, delighting, rejoicing in the exercise of her own gifts and in the enjoyment of blessings which, surely, were not singular. But it would be easy to exaggerate the significance of this attitude, for much of its crudeness came, not from native harshness, but from the mutilation which her natural growth had undergone. Slowly, as I believe, she came to exercise her mind, and sadly enough to determine that much of the interest of the world must come in future from the satisfaction of her intellect. She saw many clever people, and read with a desire to establish her own sad faith, the works of disbelievers who spelt God without a capital G. In particular she read some early articles by your grandfather and liked them better than she liked him.

Fate, who is thought by some to arrange human lives to her liking, chose that your grandfather, with his first wife, should live in the same street with your grandmother and further decreed that Minny was to die there, and that your grandmother thus should be thrown into contact with her learned and formidable friend under the conditions which she of all people felt most poignantly. Would any other arrangement of circumstances have so brought about the miracle? For she found one who had equal reasons with herself to believe in the sorrow of life and every incentive to adopt her own stoic philosophy; he also was of the giant breed, no light lover, no superficial optimist. She might go hand in hand with him through the shadows of the Valley—but, of a sudden, her companion became her guide, pointed on, urged her to follow, to hope, to strive once more. She could not so soon throw off what had come to be a habit of suffering almost, and yet his reason was the stronger, his need was the greater. At length with pain and remorse she, courageous as she was, more truly courageous perhaps than her husband, bade herself face the truth and realize in all its aspects the fact that joy was to be endured as well as sorrow. She rose to the heights, wide-eyed and nobly free from all illusion or sentiment, her second love shining pure as starlight; the rosy mists of the first rapture dispelled for ever. Indeed it is notable that she never spoke of her first love; and in treasuring it changed it perhaps to something far fairer than it could have been, had life allowed it to endure. The second marriage was the true though late fulfilment of all that she could be; and, but that it was rather late, rather crowded, and rather anxious, no match was more truly equal, or more ceaselessly valiant. Large words, perhaps, to use of fifteen years! with all their opportunity for smallness, failure, tolerance of mediocrity. But, although there were certain matters which seem to us now decided by her too much in a spirit of compromise, and exacted by him without strict regard for justice or magnanimity, still it is true whether you judge by their work or by themselves that it was a triumphant life, consistently aiming at high things.

These circumstances had taken their part in forming your grandmother’s character; and by the time we, her children, knew her, she was the most prompt, practical and vivid of human beings. It was as though she had made up her mind definitely upon certain great matters and was never after troubled to consider herself at all; but every deed and word had the bright, inexorable, swift stamp of something struck clearly by a mass of hoarded experience. Four children were born to her; there were four others already, older, demanding other care; she taught us, was their companion, and soothed, cheered, inspired, nursed, deceived your grandfather; and any one coming for help found her invincibly upright in her place, with time to give, earnest consideration, and the most practical sympathy. Her relations with people indeed were all through her life remarkable; and after her second marriage this decision, of which I speak, seemed to make her spend herself more freely than ever in the service of others. And as that phrase has a doubtful reputation, and might well lead you to imagine a different woman from the real one, I must explain that her conduct in this matter was singular, and by no means of a piece with the mischievous philanthropy which other women practise so complacently and often with such disastrous results.

Her view of the world had come to be very comprehensive; she seemed to watch, like some wise Fate, the birth, growth, flower and death of innumerable lives all round her, with a constant sense of the mystery that encircled them, not now so sceptical as of old, and [with] a perfectly definite idea of the help that was possible and of use. Her intellectual gifts had always been those that find their closest expression in action; she had great clearness of insight, sound judgement, humour, and a power of grasping very quickly the real nature of someone’s circumstances, and so arranging that the matter, whatever it was, fell into its true proportions at once. Sometimes with her natural impetuosity, she took it on herself to despatch difficulties with a high hand, like some commanding Empress. But most often I think her service, when it was not purely practical, lay in simply helping people by the light of her judgement and experience, to see what they really meant or felt. But any sensible woman may have these qualities, and yet be none of the things that your grandmother was. All her gifts had something swift, decisive, witty even, in their nature; so that there could be no question of dulness or drudgery in her daily work, however lugubrious it seemed of itself. She was sensitive by temperament and impatient of stupidity; and while she was there the whole of that interminable and incongruous procession which is the life of a large family, went merrily; with exquisite humour in its incidents very often, or something grotesque or impressive in its arrangement, perpetually lit up by her keen attention, her amazing sense of the life that is in the weakest or most threadbare situations. She stamped people with characters at once; and at St Ives, or on Sunday afternoons at Hyde Park Gate, the scene was often fit for the stage; boldly acting on her conception she drew out from old General Beadle, or C.B. Clarke, or Jack Hills, or Sidney Lee, such sparks of character as they have never shown to anyone since. All lives directly she crossed them seemed to form themselves into a pattern and while she stayed each move was of the utmost importance. But she was no aesthetic spectator, collecting impressions for her own amusement.

Life rather had taught her that facts, as she interpreted them, were by themselves of supreme importance; it was a matter of anxious moment to her that Lisa Stillman should like her brother-in-law, or that a workman wounded in an accident should find healthy employment. She kept herself marvellously alive to all the changes that went on round her, as though she heard perpetually the ticking of a vast clock and could never forget that some day it would cease for all of us. People of the most diverse kinds came to her when they had reason to rejoice or to weep; she seemed, if anything, a little indiscriminate in her choice of friends; but bores and fools have their moments. And it must be owned that living thus at high pressure she contrived to invest the whole scene with an inimitable bravery as though she saw it properly composed, of fools, clowns and splendid Queens, a vast procession on the march towards death. This intense preoccupation with the event of the moment arose partly no doubt because nature had fitted her to deal victoriously with such matters; but also because she had inborn in her and [had] acquired a deep sense of the futility of all effort, the mystery of life. You may see the two things in her face. ‘Let us make the most of what we have, since we know nothing of the future’ was the motive that urged her to toil so incessantly on behalf of happiness, right doing, love; and the melancholy echoes answered ‘What does it matter? Perhaps there is no future.’ Encompassed as she was by this solemn doubt her most trivial activities had something of grandeur about them; and her presence was large and austere, bringing with it not only joy and life, exquisite fleeting femininities, but the majesty of a nobly composed human being.

Written words of a person who is dead or still alive tend most unfortunately to drape themselves in smooth folds annulling all evidence of life. You will not find in what I say, or again in those sincere but conventional phrases in the life of your grandfather, or in the noble lamentations with which he fills the pages of his autobiography, any semblance of a woman whom you can love. It has often occurred to me to regret that no one ever wrote down her sayings and vivid ways of speech since she had the gift of turning words in a manner peculiar to her, rubbing her hands swiftly, or raising them in gesticulation as she spoke, I can see her, standing by the open door of a railway carriage which was taking Stella and some others to Cambridge, and striking out in a phrase or two pictures of all the people who came past her along the platform, and so she kept them laughing till the train went.

What would one not give to recapture a single phrase even! or the tone of the clear round voice, or the sight of the beautiful figure, so upright and so distinct, in its long shabby cloak, with the head held at a certain angle, a little upwards, so that the eye looked straight out at you. “Come children,” she would say directly she had waved her last fantastic farewell, and one would grasp her umbrella, and another her arm, and one no doubt would stand gaping, and she would call sharply, “Quick, quick”. And so she would pass with her swift step, through the crowds, and into some dingy train or omnibus, where perhaps she would ask the conductor why the company did not give him straw to stand on—“Your feet must be cold”—and hear his story and make her comment, until we were home just in time for lunch. “Don’t keep father waiting.” And at lunch in answer to some languid question, “So those young people are gone? Well, I don’t envy ‘em”, she would have her little story to tell, or perhaps her cryptic phrase which we could not interpret, but knew from the shrugs and “Perhaps” that it bore on one of those romances which they both loved to discuss. The relationship between your grandfather and mother was, as the saying is, perfect, nor would I for a moment dispute that, believing as I do that each of these much tried and by no means easy-going people found in the other the highest and most perfect harmony which their natures could respond to. Beautiful often, even to our eyes, were their gestures, their glances of pure and unutterable delight in each other. But, if I can convey my meaning by the metaphor, the high consonance, the flute voices of two birds in tune, was only reached by rich, rapid scales of discord, and incongruity. After all she was fifteen years the younger, and his age was made emphatic by the keen intellect, always voyaging, as she must have thought, alone in ice-bound seas. Her pride in it was like the pride of one in some lofty mountain peak, visited only by the light of the stars, and the rain of snow; it was enthusiastic, but very humble.

She delighted to transact all those trifling businesses which, as women feel instinctively, are somehow derogatory to the dignity which they like to discover in clever men; and she took it as proud testimony that he came to her ignorant of all depressions and elations but those that high philosophy bred in him. But she never belittled her own works, thinking them, if properly discharged, of equal, though other, importance with her husband’s. Thus in those moments, breathing spaces in the incessant conflict, when each rested secure for a second in the other’s embrace, she knew with just but always delighted pride, that he worshipped in her something as unchallengeably high as the lofty remote peak which she honoured in him. And each sprang rejoicing to do homage to qualities unlike their own—how sweet, released from the agony and loneliness of thought to recognize instantly the real presence of unquestionable human loveliness! as a seafarer wrapt for many days in mist on the fruitless waters lands at dawn upon a sunlit shore, where all nature enfolds him and breathes in his ear rest and assurance. She too whose days were spent in labours often trifling, and often vain, exulted as one clasped suddenly in strong arms and set above it all, silent, still and immortal. She was always the first to reinforce his own impulse towards the most remote and unprofitable tasks; it was on her assurance I think that he began his last long book, The Utilitarians, which would yield no wealth and very little fame, for she undertook that all other matters would prosper meanwhile.

But these are the pinnacles of life, and as time drew on, the struggle grew sharper, and the buoyancy of youth diminished. His health was worn, and the kind of praise which would have encouraged him, delayed unduly, as he complained. And by this time she had expanded so far, into such remote recesses, alleys in St Ives, London slums, and many other more prosperous but no less exacting quarters, that retrenchment was beyond her power. Every day brought her, it seemed, a fresh sprung harvest that must be despatched and would flourish infallibly tomorrow. Each evening she sat at her table, after some laborious afternoon, her hand moving ceaselessly, at the last a little erratically, as she wrote answers, advice, jests, warning, sympathy, her wise brow and deep eyes presiding, so beautiful still, but now so worn, so profoundly experienced that you could hardly call them sad. When she was dead I found a desk shut when we left St Ives with all the letters received that morning freshly laid in it, to be answered perhaps when she got to London. There was a letter from a woman whose daughter had been betrayed and asked for help; a letter from George, from Aunt Mary, from a nurse who was out of work, some bills, some begging letters, and many sheets from a girl who had quarrelled with her parents and must reveal her soul, earnestly, diffusely. “Ah, thank Heaven, there is no post tonight!” she would exclaim, half smiling and half sighing, on Saturday; and even your grandfather would look up from his book, press her hand, and vainly protest, “there must be an end of this, Julia!”

In addition to all her other labours she took it on herself to teach us our lessons, and thus established a very close and rather trying relationship, for she was of a quick temper, and least of all inclined to spare her children. “Your father is a great man.” But in no other way could we have learnt, in the short time we had, so much of her true nature, obscured by none of those graceful figments which interpose themselves generally in the gulf which lies between a middle-aged woman and her children. It might have been better, as it certainly would have tired her less, had she allowed that some of those duties could be discharged for her. But she was impetuous, and also a little imperious; so conscious of her own burning will that she could scarcely believe that there was not something quicker and more effective in her action than in another’s. Thus when your grandfather was ill she would never suffer a nurse to be with him, nor could she believe that a governess would teach us as well as she did. And apart from economy, which always weighed with her, she had come to attach a desperate importance to the saving of time, as though she saw heap themselves all round her, duties and desires, and time to embrace them slipped from her and left her with grasping fingers. She had constantly in mind that comprehensive view of the final proportions of things which I have noticed; for her words were never trivial; but as her strength lessened her respites were fewer; she sank, like an exhausted swimmer, deeper and deeper in the water, and could only at moments descry some restful shore on the horizon to be gained in old age when all this toil was over. But when we exclaim at the extravagant waste of such a life we are inclined no doubt to lose that view of the surrounding parts, the husband and child and home which if you see them as a whole surrounding her, completing her, robs the single life of its arrow-like speed, and its tragic departure. What is noticeable about her, as I am come to think, is not the waste and the futile gallantry, but the niceness, born of sure judgement, with which her effort matched her aim. There was scarcely any superfluity; and it is for this reason that, past as those years are, her mark on them is ineffaceable, as though branded by the naked steel, the sharp, the pure. Living voices in many parts of the world still speak of her as of someone who is actually a fact in life. Whether she came merry, wrathful or in impulsive sympathy, it does not matter; they speak of her as of a thing that happened, recalling, as though all round her grew significant, how she stood and turned and how the bird sang loudly, or a great cloud passed across the sky. Where has she gone? What she said has never ceased. She died when she was forty-eight, and your mother was a child of fifteen. If what I have said of her has any meaning you will believe that her death was the greatest disaster that could happen; it was as though on some brilliant day of spring the racing clouds of a sudden stood still, grew dark, and massed themselves; the wind flagged, and all creatures on the earth moaned or wandered seeking aimlessly. But what figure or variety of figures will do justice to the shapes which since then she has taken in countless lives? The dead, so people say, are forgotten, or they should rather say, that life has for the most part little significance to any of us. But now and again on more occasions than I can number, in bed at night, or in the street, or as I come into the room, there she is; beautiful, emphatic, with her familiar phrase and her laugh; closer than any of the living are, lighting our random lives as with a burning torch, infinitely noble and delightful to her children.

Chapter Two

Her death, on the 5th of May, 1895, began a period of Oriental gloom, for surely there was something in the darkened rooms, the groans, the passionate lamentations that passed the normal limits of sorrow, and hung about the genuine tragedy with folds of Eastern drapery. Your grandfather had in him much of the stuff of a Hebrew prophet; something of the amazing vigour of his youth remained to him, but he no longer spent his strength in climbing mountains or coaching crews; all his devotion for many years had concentrated itself upon his home. And now that against all his expectations, his wife had died before him, he was like one who, by the failure of some stay, reels staggering blindly about the world, and fills it with his woe. But no words of mine can convey what he felt, or even the energy of the visible expression of it, which took place in one scene after another all through that dreadful summer. One room it seemed was always shut, was always disturbed now and then, by some groan or outburst. He had constant interviews with sympathetic women, who went in to see him nervously enough, and came out flushed and tear-stained, confused as people are who have been swept away on the tide of someone else’s emotion, to give their report to Stella. Indeed all her diplomacy was needed to keep him occupied in some way, when his morning’s work was over; and there were dreadful meal-times when, unable to hear what we said, or disdaining its comfort, he gave himself up to the passion which seemed to burn within him, and groaned aloud or protested again and again his wish to die. I do not think that Stella lost consciousness for a single moment during all those months of his immediate need. She would always have some little device to offer him, observing him so closely that she would suddenly beg one of us to speak to him directly, or ask him to walk with us. Sometimes at night she spent a long time alone in his study with him, hearing again and again the bitter story of his loneliness, his love and his remorse. For exhausted and unstrung as he was he came to torment himself piteously with the idea that he had never told his wife how much he had loved her, that she had endured anxiety and suffering by his side in silence.

“I was not as bad as Carlyle, was I?” I have heard him ask. Stella perhaps knew little of Carlyle, but her assurance came over and over again, tired but persistent. There is, no doubt, a strange comfort in making the living hear your confession of wrong done to the dead; not only can they reassure you from their own observation, but they also represent, mysteriously, a power which can be appeased by your confession, and can grant you something approaching a final absolution. For these reasons, then, and also because it was his nature and habit to find ease in the expression of his feelings, he did not scruple to lay before her his sufferings and to demand perpetual attention, and whatever comfort she had to give. But what comfort could she give? From the nature of the case there was little to be done; all depended therefore upon what she was, for suddenly she was placed in the utmost intimacy with a man who as her stepfather and an elderly man of letters she had hitherto regarded only with respect and a formal affection. Stella’s position, until this crisis, had been in some ways peculiar; indeed her character altogether, as one sees it now illuminated afresh by one’s own equality of age, was remarkable; remarkable for what it was, and for its destiny; great issues hung upon her life; but the shortness and almost tremulous quality of the early years make it hard to tell the story with any decision.

She was not clever, she seldom read a book; and this fact had I think an immense influence upon her life, a disproportionate influence, indeed. She exaggerated her own deficiency, and, living in close companionship with her mother, was always contrasting their differences, and imputing to herself an inferiority which led her from the first to live in her mother’s shade. Your grandmother too was, I have said, ruthless in her ways, and quite indifferent, if she saw good, to any amount of personal suffering. It was characteristic of her to feel that her daughter was, as she expressed it, part of herself, and as a slower and less efficient part she did not scruple to treat her with the severity with which she would have treated her own failings, or to offer her up as freely as she would have offered herself. Once before your grandparents’ marriage, when your grandfather remarked to her upon the harshness with which she treated Stella in comparison with the other children who were both boys, she gave the answer I have written.

As a child then, Stella was suppressed, and learned early to look upon her mother as a person of divine power and divine intelligence. But later as Stella grew older and developed her own beauty, her own singular charm and temperament, her mother ceased her harshness, if it were ever rightly called so, and showed only the true cause of it, a peculiar depth and intimacy of feeling. They always kept in the main the relationship which nature perhaps had ordained. Stella was always the beautiful attendant handmaid, feeding her mother’s vivid flame, rejoicing in the service, and making it the central duty of her life. But besides this she began very soon to enjoy the influence of her gifts on others; she was beautiful, more beautiful than her pictures show, for much of her phantom loveliness came from accidents of the moment—the pale luminous complexion, the changing light in the eyes, the movement and ripple of the whole. If your grandmother’s was a head of the finest period of Greek art, Stella’s was Greek too, but it was Greek of a later and more decadent age, making with its softer lines and more languid shape, a closer appeal. But in each case, their beauty was the expression of them. Stella was mutable, modest, but somehow with what is called charm or magic possessed of wonderful distinction, and the power of penetrating deeply into people’s minds. It was not I suppose for what she said, for that was simple enough; but for her ripple of sweetness and laughter over a shape, dimly discerned, as of statuesque marble. She was so gay, so feminine, and at the same time had about her something of the large repose which in her mother, under stress of circumstance, had resolved itself into an enduring melancholy. Stella and her coming out, and her success and her lovers, excited many instincts long dormant in her mother; she liked young men, she enjoyed their confidences, she was intensely amused by the play and intrigue of the thing; only, as she complained, Stella would insist upon going home, long before the night was over, for fear lest she should be tired. That indeed was what, with desperate use of imagery, I have called her marble shape; for all her triumphs were mere frippery on the surface of this constant preoccupation with her mother. It was beautiful, it was almost excessive; for it had something of the morbid nature of an affection between two people too closely allied for the proper amount of reflection to take place between them; what her mother felt passed almost instantly through Stella’s mind; there was no need for the brain to ponder and criticize what the soul knew. Your grandmother would no doubt have liked some brisker resistance, some intellectual opposition, calling out a different sort of care; she may well have felt that the tie was too close to be wholesome, and might hinder Stella from entertaining those natural feelings upon which she set so high a value. Even a short parting was unduly painful; Stella was white as a ghost for days before she went abroad, and broke once into a passion of tears. “What can it matter where we are”, she said, “so long as we are all together?”

Her feeling during the last years became ever more anxious, as she detected signs of failing health in her mother, and could not contrive in any way to give her the rest which of all things she needed. Her silence with her stepfather almost gave way now and then to sharp and open remonstrance; for he never seemed to see, what was so plain to her eye, the innumerable things that his wife did, or how terribly she was worn. Then, in the spring of 1895 Stella was driven abroad, and half-way through the journey she became convinced by sign of handwriting or phrase, that her mother lay ill at home. She appealed to Vanessa, who could only send an answer dictated by her mother. Slight illness had indeed attacked her, but with the strange and ghastly fantasy of one who plays a part to the end, she would insist that the truth should not yet be told. Stella came home with a consciousness like that of some tormented dumb animal, that she had been deceived; and found her mother in bed, with the chill which was to end ten days later, in her death.

The shock to Stella was complete; she began, by sheer pure beauty of character, to do all that she could for everyone; but almost automatically. The future held nothing for her; the present was, I suppose, with a stepfather whom she barely knew, and four children who needed care and could as yet help her little, constantly painful. She was only just twenty-six, and in a moment she had to relinquish not only the chief source of all her life, but also the peculiar ways in which she best enjoyed her gifts. Indeed whoever she had been the position must have been painfully hard, but with her great distrust of her own powers, and her dread of books in particular, her task was terribly painful and almost bewildering. But still, had it not been for this desolation, laying her whole nature bare, and bidding it put forth its powers in entire loneliness, could she ever have shown herself as noble and as true as she was? All that she became in the future was firmly grounded, her own achievement; no one ever again was to serve her for prop; never again, perhaps, did she care for anyone as she had cared for her mother. That, whatever gain is to be set beside it, was the permanent loss.

Directly your grandmother was dead, Stella inherited all the duties that she had discharged; and like some creaking old waggon, pitifully rusted, and yet filled with stirring young creatures, our family once more toiled painfully along the way.

Chapter Three

Your grandmother’s position in the family was such that her death not only removed the central figure from our eyes, but brought about such a shifting of relationships that life for a long time seemed incredibly strange. Your grandfather in his natural but surely unwise desire to do for us all that your grandmother had done, began to teach us our lessons; and gave up half his morning to us; a sacrifice indeed but that did not make his mood the easier. Then George, on the full tide of emotion, insisted upon a closer and more mature friendship with us; Gerald even became for the time serious and sentimental; and round this centre of profound emotion circled a number of friends, suddenly become conscious of a desire to take part in our lives, and of their right to have the depth of their own feelings recognized. Stella herself, almost stunned though she was at the moment, was never driven from her calm attitude of infinite consideration for others, of silence with respect to her own feelings; but this very calmness seemed to suffer, indifferently, a number of trials, and in particular to admit of quite unqualified self-surrender to your grandfather’s needs. Any comfort, whatever its nature, that came to hand, she offered him to stay his anguish; all her day was at his service, she exerted herself as I have said, to find people to visit him, to help her in some of her innumerable minute plans for his welfare. It is easy to see now that where she failed for the time was in proper discrimination. Her own disbelief in herself, and her long season of dependence made her incapable of trusting her own clear instincts in the matter. Her stepfather was the charge bequeathed her by her mother. She gave indiscriminately, conscious that she had not the best of all to give; and your grandfather who would doubtless have understood a clear statement of the position, took all that she offered him failing this as his right. But one of the consequences was that for some time life seemed to us in a chronic state of confusion. We were quite naturally unhappy; feeling a definite need, unbearably keen at moments, which was never to be satisfied. But that was recognizable pain, and the sharp pang grew to be almost welcome in the midst of the sultry and opaque life which was not felt, had nothing real in it, and yet swam about us, and choked us and blinded us. All these tears and groans, reproaches and protestations of affection, high talk of duty and work and living for others, were doubtless what we should feel if we felt properly, and yet we had but a dull sense of gloom which could not honestly be referred to the dead; unfortunately it did not quicken our feeling for the living; but hideous as it was, obscured both living and dead; and for long did unpardonable mischief by substituting for the shape of a true and most vivid mother, nothing better than an unlovable phantom.

That summer, after some hot months in London, we spent in Freshwater; and the heat there in the low bay, brimming as it seemed with soft vapours, and luxuriant with lush plants, mixes, like smoke, with other memories of hot rooms and silence, and an atmosphere all choked with too luxuriant feelings, so that one had at times a physical need of ruthless barbarism and fresh air. Stella herself looked like the white flower of some teeming hot-house, for a change had come over her that seemed terribly symbolical. Never did anyone look so pale. And yet unexpected as it might seem, but still was most natural, the first impulse to set us free came from your grandfather; it came and went again. On a walk perhaps he would suddenly brush aside all our curiously conventional relationships, and show us for a minute an inspiriting vision of free life, bathed in an impersonal light. There were numbers of things to be learnt, books to be read, and success and happiness were to be attained there without disloyalty. Indeed it seemed possible at these moments, to continue the old life but in a more significant way, using as he told us, our sorrow to quicken the feeling that remained. But such exaltations doubtless depended for their endurance upon a closer relationship than age made possible. We were too young, and for sympathy that required less effort, he had to turn to others, whose difference of blood and temperament, made it harder for them to recognize as we did—by glimpses—his most urgent need. Beautiful was he at such moments; simple and eager as a child; and exquisitely alive to all affection; exquisitely tender. We would have helped him then if we could, given him all we had, and felt it little beside his need—but the moment passed.

It was exhilarating at times to peer above our immature world, and fancy that the actual conflict of recognized human beings had already begun for us. In truth the change which declared itself when we were once more settled in London and gone about our tasks, was partly invigorating; for we tried to prove ourselves equal companions for Stella and our lives were much quickened by the chivalrous devotion she roused in us. It was chivalrous because she was too remote for real companionship, so that there was always a kind of chance in one’s offering; perhaps she would not perceive it; perhaps she would kindle rapture by a sudden recognition; her distance made such close moments exquisitely sweet. But alas, no such humble friendship however romantic, could give her the sense that we completely shared her thoughts; the nature of them made it hard for anyone to understand; and her sorrow was very lonely. Perhaps one would come into a room unexpectedly, and surprise her in tears, and, to one’s miserable confusion, she would hide them instantly, and speak ordinary words, as though she did not imagine that one could understand her suffering.

And this, as I think, was the time when your mother first came somewhat tentatively upon the scene, her age being then almost seventeen. Her qualities of honesty and wisdom were precisely those that Stella was then most inclined to appreciate, both because she was often bewildered by the eccentric storms in which your grandfather indulged, ascribed by her too simply to the greatness of his intellect, and also because she found in Vanessa both in nature and in person something like a reflection of her mother. Vanessa too might be treated almost as a confidante, the single person who did not need any kind of sacrifice to be made for her. And Stella felt also, no doubt, that curiously intimate pride which a woman feels when she sees womanly virtues beautifully expressed by another, the torch still worthily carried; and the pride was very tender in this case and mixed with much of a maternal joy. I do not know how far I shall be guilty of over-ingenuity if I discover another, though an unspoken, cause for the growth of natural sympathy with Vanessa. For two or three years now the one suitor who stood out above other suitors and was greatly liked by your grandmother and tolerated by Stella herself was John Waller Hills. He was then a lean, rather threadbare young man, who seemed to force his way by sheer determination and solid integrity; suggesting the figure of some tenacious wire-haired terrier, in whose obstinacy and strength of jaw there seemed, at a time when all the fates were against him, something honourable, which appealed to one’s half humorous sense of sport as even pathetic. He would come, Sunday after Sunday, and sit his hour out, worrying his speech as a terrier a bone; but sticking doggedly to the word, until at last he got it pronounced. His method was the same always. He knew what he wanted, and unless there occurred a sudden bursting of his stout skull and soft illimitable prospects opened on each side, which was incredible, there was little doubt that he would come by it—except indeed in this very instance. For, with so much that everyone could respect, and find admirable in his relations with others, there was yet very little that anyone seemed called on to love at first hand. It was natural to be indebted to him, for faithful services rendered over a score of years, and to requite him by a perpetual seat at the fireside, or a cover laid for him on Sundays, or the title of uncle to some one else’s children. But to disregard all these oblique services, and meet him face to face, as one capable of the supreme gift of all, needed as Stella found, prolonged consideration and repeated rejection. He satisfied so many requirements, but the sum of all he gave did not need love to reward it. After her mother’s death however, Stella became far less exacting, as indeed she lost interest in her fate, and had no contrast to oppose to it; Jack was persistent as ever, almost a natural if secondary part of oneself. No doubt he had a system plainly marked in front of him, arranged on paper in his little room in Ebury Street, and was simply following it out in detail. But that even had a kind of fascination for one so prone now to consider herself merely as the atmosphere that enclosed solid bodies. The long visits, when there were such long pauses, or spasmodic talk of indifferent matters, salmon fishing or Stevenson’s novels, had yet an undeniable glow, a conviction of meaning lying at the base of them, which made them remarkable, and wore, like some dull heat, into her mind. It made her realize herself, turning solid much that floated vague as mist around her as she went about her daily life. But it threatened to be destructive of the compact which she had made with her stepfather, upon which by this time he had come to depend. It was natural then that she should turn instinctively to Vanessa, for many unformulated reasons, and for this obvious one, that Vanessa alone could justify her action if, as it sometimes seemed possible, she consented to marry Jack in the end. And also your mother was sympathetic without words; she had a great respect for Mr Hills, and her respect was warmed and at the same time sanctioned by the knowledge which was common to us all of his devotion. Insensibly, Stella grew to depend upon Jack’s visits, for though she was sad to the point of despair, and physically tired, there was a pale flame in her which leapt at the prospect of an independent life, a life at least which depended upon one person only. For when some months had passed, and the first storm of distress was over, she found that she had completely pledged herself to her stepfather; he expected entire self-surrender on her part, and had decided apparently, and with sufficient reason, that she possessed one of those beautiful feminine natures which are quite without wishes of their own. She had to acquiesce, partly because it was easier to go on as she had begun, and partly because as she could not give him intellectual companionship she must give him the only thing she had. But Jack, with the shrewdness of a businessman who is in love, quickly saw how matters stood, and offered a very refreshing revolt. He considered Stella’s wishes and Stella’s health far more important than those of one whom he treated as an encyclopaedia who should be kept on the shelf, and must be humoured and tolerated in all his irrational desires if he chose to come downstairs. Stella would not have been human if she had not found this change of view a relief to her. Slowly then she admitted the thought of new life, and recognized that it was Jack and Jack only who inspired [it.]

But she had lapsed very far, into a kind of snowy numbness, nor could she waken at the first touch. He proposed to her in March (I think), almost a year after her mother’s death, and she refused him. The thought of the break, the havoc played with delicate webs just beginning to spin themselves across the abyss, may well have deterred her; and, when she came face to face with her love, and tried to yield herself to his passion, his honesty, all his canine qualities glowing with their utmost expressiveness, did she still find something in her left cold and meditative, reflecting, when all should have been consenting? She remembered what she had felt before. But the summer wore on, and she looked with comfort at Vanessa, and there were not wanting authoritative voices who declared that such a sacrifice, for they gave it the definite name, was cowardly and shortsighted too. For in years to come, they argued, her stepfather would draw his best comfort from her home. Jack meanwhile, was persistent, and patient; and she had to confess that she had accumulated a reckoning with him that was serious however she looked at it; he meant a great deal in her life. The summer wore on, nor did anyone, unless it were your mother, suspect the change in Stella’s mind; we depended on her as thoughtless men on some natural power; for it seemed to our judgement obvious enough that there must be someone always discharging the duties that Stella discharged. We had been lent a house at Hindhead, and one afternoon at the end of August, Jack came there, bicycling to some place in the neighbourhood. His visits were so often forced in this way that we suspected nothing more than the usual amount of restraint from his explosive ways, and much information about dogs and bicycles. His opinion on these matters stood very high with us. He stayed to dinner, and that also was characteristic of his method; but after dinner a strange lapse occurred in the usual etiquette. Stella left the room with him, to show him the garden or the moon, and decisively shut the door behind her. We had our business to attend to also, and followed them soon with a lantern, for we were then in the habit of catching moths after dinner. Once or twice we saw them, always hasting round a corner; once or twice we heard her skirts brushing, and once a sound of whispering. But the moon was very bright, and there were no moths; Stella and Jack had gone in, it seemed, and we returned to the drawing room. But father was alone, and he was unusually restless, turning his pages, crossing his legs, and looking again and again at the clock. Then he sent Adrian to bed; then me; then Nessa and Thoby; and still it was only ten, and still Stella and Jack stayed out! There was then a pause, and we sat together in Adrian’s room, cold, melancholy and strangely uncomfortable. Your Uncle Thoby discovered a tramp in the garden, who begged for food and Thoby sent him away with great eloquence, and we felt a little frightened, for it was no ordinary night, and ominous things were happening. Your grandfather was tramping the terrace, up and down, up and down; we were all awake, all expectant; and still nothing happened. At length, someone looking from the window, exclaimed, “Stella and Mr Hills are coming up the path together!” Were their arms locked? Did we know immediately all that we had not dared to guess? At any rate we ran to our rooms, and in a few minutes Stella came up herself, blushing the loveliest rose colour, and told us—how she was very happy.

The news was met, of course, by the usual outburst of clamorous voices which always threatens on such occasions to drown the single true utterance. Families at these moments touch their high, and perhaps also their low, watermarks. Your grandfather, I remember, spoke sharply to one whom he found in tears, for it should make us only happy, he said, that Stella should be happy; true words! But the moment after he was groaning to her that the blow was irreparable. Then George and Gerald, who lavished kisses and did their best to arrange that she and Jack should be left alone together, soon let her see that there would be difficulties if Jack came too much to the house. “It won’t do; men are like that”, she said once, without complaint; and Kitty Maxse, who had the reputation with us of profound knowledge and exquisite sympathy, an irresistible combination, confirmed her no doubt in her sad estimate of mankind. “It won’t do.”

Their engagement then was at the mercy of many forces from the outset; still there were some walks at Hindhead, a week spent together at Corby, and Jack found excuses for dining with us every night in London, and stayed on very late, till George came down and invoked the proprieties, or with some reason, insisted that Stella must rest. One thing seemed to survive all these vexations, and was miraculous to see; the exquisite tremor of life was once more alight in Stella; her eye shone, her pale cheeks glowed constantly with a faint rose. She laughed and had her tender jokes. Sometimes a fear came over her, possessed her; she had had her life; but then there was Jack to reason her out of her alarms, to kiss her, and show her a sane future, with many interests and much substance. She had come to stand by herself, with a painful footing upon real life, and her love now had as little of dependence in it as may be. He, it is true, had more wish to live than she had, but she took and gave with open eyes. It was beautiful; it was, once more, a flight of unfurled wings into the upper air.

But all these difficulties and jealousies resolved themselves shortly into one formidable question; where were they to live after their marriage? Your grandfather had taken it for granted that Stella would not leave him, since she had become indispensable; and in the first flush of their joy both Stella and Jack had agreed that it would be possible to live on at Hyde Park Gate. Then they began to consider rooms, and habits, conveniences and rights, and it soon became obvious that the plan was impossible. And if they started wrong disasters would accumulate. Stella was convinced, for she began to entertain a just idea of her independence as a wife; and George and Gerald agreed also. It is significant however of your grandfather’s temper at the time that he continued to count upon their rash promise as though it were the natural and just arrangement, which did not need further consideration. His awakenment was bound to be painful, and there were many painful words to be said on his side; they had promised and they had deserted him. One night however Stella went up into his study alone, and explained what they felt. What she said, what he answered, I cannot tell; but for some time afterwards he could never hear the marriage spoken of without a profound groan, and the least encouragement would lead him to explain precisely how much he suffered, and how little cause there was for him to rejoice. But Stella was very patient, and just capable now under Jack’s influence of seeing another side to her stepfather’s remarks. There were signs that in years to come she would enjoy a lively and delightful companionship with him. They took a house at the end of the street, for that was the compromise, and in the beginning of April, 1897, they were married.

There had been so much talk of loss, loneliness and change that it was surprising to find that the house went on next day very much as usual. We went to Brighton, and letters began to come from Stella in Florence and from Jack giving promise, stirring as Spring, of happy new intimacies in the future. Indeed it was already a relief that there should be a separate house with a different basis from ours, untinged presumably with our gloom; under these influences that gloom itself seemed to lighten. For your grandfather, left alone with us, found doubtless much to try him in our crudeness and lack of sympathy but there was also great interest in our development, and we began to surprise him with voluntary remarks, bearing on matters of art and literature. Thoby was becoming, he said, ‘a fine fellow’; he discovered that suddenly your mother was grown ‘very handsome’; friendship with us, in short, was the great desire of his life, and Stella’s marriage seemed to clear the way for it. We had our theory too, of the way to manage him, and it was not Stella’s way, but promised well. Thus, when it was time to come back to London we were eager to see Stella again, and had many things to tell her, and much curiosity to see how she would live. But on the very morning of our return a letter came from George saying that Stella was in bed with a chill. When we got back home she was a little worse; almost immediately it seemed we were in the midst of serious illness, nurses, consultations, interviews and whispers. Like a nightmare it came upon us, waking terrible memories, confronting us with a possibility which we could not even believe, and then, like a nightmare, it was gone; Stella was said to be recovered. Indeed she went about a little, came in to tea and lunch with us, and walked out in Kensington Gardens. But she had a relapse, and then another; and the doctors ordered that for a certain time she should stay in her room. But she could see us; and it seemed that although the time was interrupted by terrible fears, to which we got accustomed however, and was never quite secure, our hopes were realized. She was certainly happy; she was less despondent, less modest than ever before, as though Jack had finally convinced her of her worth. That indeed was a service for which one might forgive much, and under the influence of her large presence and repose he lost many of his difficult ways, his emphatic insistence upon the commonplaces of life, and showed himself loyal and kind as he had always been, but more gentle, and far more sensitive of perception than he was of old. He only needed perhaps some such happiness to discard all his angularities, which were partly produced, no doubt, by the need he had been in for so many years of forcing his way through obstacles. All her arrangements prospered; she had her stepfather to tea with her regularly, and marvelled at his good spirits and health, and he was very tender to her when he heard that she was to be a mother. George and Gerald had their interviews alone. And your mother ‘came out’ that summer, and Stella had one of the purest pleasures of her life in gazing on her beauty and speculating on her success. She felt what a mother would have felt, and this was the sort of triumph that she could herself understand to the uttermost; she had attempted it. But once more she fell ill; again, almost in a moment, there was danger, and this time it did not pass away, but pressed on and on, till suddenly we knew that the worst had actually come to pass. Even now it seems incredible.

Chapter Four

It generally happens in seasons of such bewilderment as that in which we now found ourselves, that one person becomes immediately the central figure, as it were the solid figure, and on this occasion it was your mother. Many reasons combined to give her this prominence. She fulfilled the duties which Stella had but lately fulfilled; she had much of the beauty and something of the character which with but little stretch of the imagination we could accept as worthy to carry on the tradition; for in our morbid state, haunted by great ghosts, we insisted that to be like mother, or like Stella, was to achieve the height of human perfection. Vanessa then at the age of eighteen was exalted, in the most tragic way, to a strange position, full of power and responsibility. Everyone turned to her, and she moved, like some young Queen, all weighed down with the pomp of her ceremonial robes, perplexed and mournful and uncertain of her way. The instant need was to comfort, say rather, to be with, Jack. He had lost infinitely more than anyone could calculate; his sorrow seemed to stretch over years to come, withering them, and to cast a bitter light on his past. Never was there so cruel a loss, for it was cruel in the harshest way, in that it somehow seemed to damage him. Like some animal stunned by a blow on the head he went methodically about his work, worn and grim enough to behold, taking an abrupt mechanical interest in substantial facts, the make of a bicycle, or the number of men killed at the battle of Waterloo. But in the evenings he would come and sit with your mother, and loosen this tight tension and burst out what he could speak of his sorrow. Poor inarticulate man! In his dumb way he had worshipped beauty; it had been a long discipline; and he may well have doubted half consciously, whether he could ever achieve such heights again. Stella had been his pinnacle, all through his tenacious youth; he had loved her and her mother with all that he had of love; they had been to him poetry and youth. A very high nature perhaps might have preserved the echo; but Jack was more inclined to set his eye upon the hardship of his loss, unflinchingly, as he would have considered the harm done him by some unscrupulous human enemy. His attitude was courageous indeed, in a dogged way; but there was little of hope in it, and it threatened to cramp his future.

Your mother, as I have said, coming into this inheritance, with all its complications, was bewildered; so many demands were made on her; it was, in a sense, so easy to be what was expected, with such models before her, but also it was so hard to be herself. She was but just eighteen, and when she should have been free and tentative, she was required to be definite and exact. It came to pass then that she acted at first as though she had her lesson by heart but did not attach much meaning to it; to George she would be devoted and submissive; to Gerald affectionate; to her father helpful; to us protective. She was more than anyone, I suppose, left desolate by Stella’s death, bereft of happy intercourse, which had grown daily more intimate, and also she had much responsibility and there was no woman older than herself to share it with her. Strange was her position then; and an affectionate onlooker might well have asked himself anxiously what kind of nature she was able to oppose to it. One glance at her might have reassured him and yet served but to shift his anxiety. She looked so self-contained, and so mature that clearly she would never act foolishly; but also there was so much promise of thought and development in eye and brow, and passionate mouth, that it was certain she would not long stay quiescent. The calm of the moment was as an instinctive shield to cover her wounded senses; but soon they would collect themselves and fall to work upon all these difficult matters so lavishly heaped upon them—and with what result?

She was beautiful, but she had not lived for eighteen years without revealing that she was also strong of brain, agile and determined; she had revealed so much in the nursery, where she would meet Thoby in argument, and press on to the very centre of the matter, whether it were question of art or morality. She was also, on her secret side, sensitive to all beauty of colour and form; but she hid this, because her views did not agree with those current around her, and she feared to give pain. Again, she was as quick to detect insincerity of nature as fallacy of argument, and the one fared as ill with her as the other; for her standard was rigid. But then she was bound to certain people by a kind of instinctive fidelity, which admitted of no question; it was, if anything, too instinctive. Such was the feeling she had for Jack before his marriage, and it was the first thread in her devotion to her mother or to Thoby. If her mother had lived it is easy to imagine how Vanessa, questing about her, like some active dog, would have tried one experiment after another, arguing, painting, making friends, disproving fallacies, much to her mother’s amusement; she would have delighted in her daughter’s spirit and adventures, mourned her lack of practical wisdom, and laughed at her failures, and rejoiced in her sense. But that is one of the things, which though they must have happened, yet, incredible though it seems, never did happen, death making an end of all these exquisite preparations. Instead Vanessa was first baffled by her mother’s death, and the unnatural life which for a time was entailed upon us, and now again, Stella’s death set her among entirely new surroundings.

People who must follow obvious tokens, such as the colour of the eye, the shape of the nose, and love to invent a melodramatic fitness in life, as though it were a sensational novel, acclaimed her now the divinely appointed inheritor of all womanly virtues, and with a certain haziness forgot your grandmother’s sharp features and Stella’s vague ones, and created a model of them for Vanessa to follow, beautiful on the surface, but fatally insipid within. Once again we went through the same expressions of sympathy; we heard again and again that so great a tragedy had never happened; sometimes it appeared almost in the light of a work of art; more often it revealed a shapeless catastrophe, from which there could be no recovery. But happily it was time for us to leave London; we had taken a house at Painswick; and the ghastly mourners, the relations and friends, went back to their own homes.

But for us the tragedy was but just beginning; as in the case of other wounds the pain was drugged at the moment, and made itself felt afterwards when we began to move. There was pain in all our circumstances, or a dull discomfort, a kind of restlessness and aimlessness which was even worse. Misery of this kind tends to concentrate itself upon an object, if it can find one, and there was a figure, unfortunately, who would serve our purpose very well. Your grandfather showed himself strangely brisk, and so soon as we came to think, we fastened our eyes upon him, and found just cause for anger. We remembered how he had tasked Stella’s strength, embittered her few months of joy, and now when he should be penitent, he showed less grief than anyone. On the contrary none was more vigorous, and there were signs at once which woke us to a sort of frenzy, that he was quite prepared to take Vanessa for his next victim. When he was sad, he explained, she should be sad; when he was angry, as he was periodically when she asked him for a cheque, she should weep; instead she stood before him like a stone. A girl who had character would not tolerate such speeches, and when she connected them with other words of the same kind, addressed to the sister lately dead, to her mother even, it was not strange that an uncompromising anger took possession of her. We made him the type of all that we hated in our lives; he was the tyrant of inconceivable selfishness, who had replaced the beauty and merriment of the dead with ugliness and gloom. We were bitter, harsh, and to a great extent, unjust; but even now it seems to me that there was some truth in our complaint; and sufficient reason why both parties should be unable at the time and without fault, to come to a good understanding. If he had been ten years younger, or we older, or had there been a mother or sister to intervene, much pain and anger and loneliness might have been spared. But again, death spoilt what should have been so fair.

There was also another cause to fret us and forbid us from judging clearly. Jack who was spending a terrible summer in London came to us regularly on Sunday. He was tired and morose, and it seemed that his only relief was to spend long hours with your mother or with me in a little summer house in the garden; he talked, when he talked, of Stella and the past; there were silences when no words seemed to have meaning; I remember the shape of a small tree which stood in a little hollow in front of us, and how, as I sat holding Jack’s hand, I came to conceive this tree as the symbol of sorrow, for it was silent, enduring and without fruit. But now and then Jack would say something bitter though restrained, about your grandfather and his behaviour to Stella, and how her death had not saddened him. That was enough to sharpen all our feelings against him; for we had an enthusiastic wish to help Jack, and in truth he seemed the person who best understood our misery. But although I shared these vigils equally at first with Vanessa she, by degrees, began to have more of Jack’s favour and confidence than I did; and directly any such favour is shown it becomes more marked and endures. She was the natural person to be with him, and also, as I have said, she had of old an affection for him, which although immature, was easily the starting point of much quicker and more fervent feelings, and the incentive now was urgent.

Profoundly gloomy as this all was, the intolerable part of it was the feeling of difference of temper and aim revealed day by day, among people who must live together. For Stella had united many things otherwise incompatible. We, (in future this ‘we’ must stand for your mother and me) walked alone when we could, and discussed the state of the different parties, and how they threatened to meet in conflict over her body. So far they did not more than threaten; but a man, or woman, of the world, George, for example or Kitty Maxse, might already foretell the supreme struggle of the future. Decency at present forbade open speech, but no doubt the suspicion was alive, and made itself felt in an unrest and intensity of feeling on George’s part which we saw, but failed as yet to interpret. George indeed had become and was to remain, a very important figure. He had advanced so suddenly into the closest intimacy with us, that it was not strange if in our blindfold state we made rash and credulous judgements about him. He had been once, when we were children, a hero to us; strong and handsome and just; he taught us to hold our bats straight and to tell the truth, and we blushed with delight if he praised. All the world so far as we could tell, applauded him too. Your grandmother showed keen delight in his presence, and, sentimental as children are, we believed that he was like her dead husband, and perhaps we were not wrong. His triumphs over Italian Countesses and watchmakers in the slums, who all revealed to him at once their inmost hearts, were part of our daily legend; and then he would play with us in the back garden, and pretend, for we guessed that it was pretence, that he read our school stories. His affections, his character, his soul, as we understood, were immaculate; and daily achieved that uncomfortable and mysterious victory which virtue, in books, achieves over intellect. Gerald, strange though it may seem, represented intellect in the contest. George was in truth, a stupid, good natured young man, of profuse, voluble affections, which during his mother’s lifetime were kept in check. When she died however, some restraint seemed to burst; he showed himself so sad, so affectionate, so boundlessly unselfish in his plans, that the voices of all women cried aloud in his praise, and men were touched by his modest virtues, at the same time that they were puzzled. What was it that made him so different from other men? Stupid he was, and good natured; but such qualities were not simple; they were modified, confused, distorted, exalted, set swimming in a sea of racing emotions until you were completely at a loss to know where you stood. Nature, we may suppose, had supplied him with abundant animal vigour, but she had neglected to set an efficient brain in control of it. The result was that all the impressions which the good priggish boy took in at school and college remained with him when he was a man; they were not extended, but were liable to be expanded into enormous proportions by violent gusts of passion; and [he] proved more and more incapable of containing them. Thus, under the name of unselfishness he allowed himself to commit acts which a cleverer man would have called tyrannical; and, profoundly believing in the purity of his love, he behaved little better than a brute. How far he wilfully deceived himself, how far he was capable of understanding, what juggleries went on in that obscure mind, is a problem which we at any rate could never solve. But the combination of something like reason and much unlike anything but irrational instinct was for ever confusing us, deceiving us and leading us alternately to trust and suspect him, until his marriage happily made such speculations but an occasional diversion for the intellect. But at the moment his position seemed perfectly accountable; he was the simple domestic creature, of deep feeling, who, from native goodness now that his chief joy was gone, was setting himself to do all he could to be mother and sister and brother to us in one. He spent his holiday with us and was always ready to take your grandfather for a walk, to discuss her difficulties with Vanessa, to arrange little plans for our amusement. Who shall say that there was not some real affection in this? some effort to do what he thought right against his will? But who again can distinguish the good from the bad, the feeling from the sentiment, the truth from the pose? We however were simply credulous, and ready to impose our conventional heroic shape upon the tumult of his character. Virtue it seemed was always victorious. Such were the figures that seemed unnaturally brought together in the great whirlpool; and it did not need the eye of a seer to foretell collision, fracture, and at length a sundering of the parts. Where are we today, indeed, who used to stand so close?

At the end of the summer Jack pressed us very hard to spend a week at Corby; we were to soothe the first shock of his home-coming, or to know something which we could not know else; for when you examine feelings with the intense microscope that sorrow lends, it is amazing how they stretch, like the finest goldbeater’s skin, over immense tracts of substance. And we, poor children that we were, conceived it to be our duty evermore to go searching for these atoms, wherever they might lie sprinkled about the surface, the great mountains and oceans, of the world. It is pitiable to remember the hours we spent in such minute speculations. Either Jack expressed some wish, or we thought we guessed it, and then we must devise the appropriate solace, the tiny, but to us gigantic, inflection this way or that, of the course of events. And so some grain would be saved, or some pin-point closed, and our immense task of piecing together all the torn fragments of his life would progress by the breadth of an atom. Jack himself could not recognize what we were doing for him in its detail; but he certainly had come to realize the mass of our, say rather of Vanessa’s, endeavour. He began to take a regular and unthinking satisfaction in being with her, without I suppose, for I was sometimes jealous, perceiving a single one of the multitude of fine adjustments that composed her presence. But that was proof, like a healthy sleep, that the healing process was well begun. We went to Corby and spent there one of the most acutely miserable weeks of our lives; and perhaps something of our misery came from the suspicion that Jack did not see all our efforts, and the outer world was grossly ignorant of them. Now and again I rebelled in the old way against him, but with an instant sense of treason, when I realized with what silence, as of one possessed of incommunicable knowledge, Vanessa met my plaints.

[written in 1907]

[]

A Sketch of the Past.

Two days ago—Sunday 16th April 1939 to be precise—Nessa said that if I did not start writing my memoirs I should soon be too old. I should be eighty-five, and should have forgotten—witness the unhappy case of Lady Strachey. As it happens that I am sick of writing Roger’s life, perhaps I will spend two or three mornings making a sketch. There are several difficulties. In the first place, the enormous number of things I can remember; in the second, the number of different ways in which memoirs can be written. As a great memoir reader, I know many different ways. But if I begin to go through them and to analyse them and their merits and faults, the mornings—I cannot take more than two or three at most—will be gone. So without stopping to choose my way, in the sure and certain knowledge that it will find itself—or if not it will not matter—I begin: the first memory.

This was of red and purple flowers on a black ground—my mother’s dress; and she was sitting either in a train or in an omnibus, and I was on her lap. I therefore saw the flowers she was wearing very close; and can still see purple and red and blue, I think, against the black; they must have been anemones, I suppose. Perhaps we were going to St Ives; more probably, for from the light it must have been evening, we were coming back to London. But it is more convenient artistically to suppose that we were going to St Ives, for that will lead to my other memory, which also seems to be my first memory, and in fact it is the most important of all my memories. If life has a base that it stands upon, if it is a bowl that one fills and fills and fills—then my bowl without a doubt stands upon this memory. It is of lying half asleep, half awake, in bed in the nursery at St Ives. It is of hearing the waves breaking, one, two, one, two, and sending a splash of water over the beach; and then breaking, one, two, one, two, behind a yellow blind. It is of hearing the blind draw its little acorn across the floor as the wind blew the blind out. It is of lying and hearing this splash and seeing this light, and feeling, it is almost impossible that I should be here; of feeling the purest ecstasy I can conceive.

I could spend hours trying to write that as it should be written, in order to give the feeling which is even at this moment very strong in me. But I should fail (unless I had some wonderful luck); I dare say I should only succeed in having the luck if I had begun by describing Virginia herself.

Here I come to one of the memoir writer’s difficulties—one of the reasons why, though I read so many, so many are failures. They leave out the person to whom things happened. The reason is that it is so difficult to describe any human being. So they say: “This is what happened”; but they do not say what the person was like to whom it happened. And the events mean very little unless we know first to whom they happened. Who was I then? Adeline Virginia Stephen, the second daughter of Leslie and Julia Prinsep Stephen, born on 25th January 1882, descended from a great many people, some famous, others obscure; born into a large connection, born not of rich parents, but of well-to-do parents, born into a very communicative, literate, letter writing, visiting, articulate, late nineteenth century world; so that I could if I liked to take the trouble, write a great deal here not only about my mother and father but about uncles and aunts, cousins and friends. But I do not know how much of this, or what part of this, made me feel what I felt in the nursery at St Ives. I do not know how far I differ from other people. That is another memoir writer’s difficulty. Yet to describe oneself truly one must have some standard of comparison; was I clever, stupid, good looking, ugly, passionate, cold—? Owing partly to the fact that I was never at school, never competed in any way with children of my own age, I have never been able to compare my gifts and defects with other people’s. But of course there was one external reason for the intensity of this first impression: the impression of the waves and the acorn on the blind; the feeling, as I describe it sometimes to myself, of lying in a grape and seeing through a film of semi-transparent yellow—it was due partly to the many months we spent in London. The change of nursery was a great change. And there was the long train journey; and the excitement. I remember the dark; the lights; the stir of the going up to bed.

But to fix my mind upon the nursery—it had a balcony; there was a partition, but it joined the balcony of my father’s and mother’s bedroom. My mother would come out onto her balcony in a white dressing gown. There were passion flowers growing on the wall; they were great starry blossoms, with purple streaks, and large green buds, part empty, part full.

If I were a painter I should paint these first impressions in pale yellow, silver, and green. There was the pale yellow blind; the green sea; and the silver of the passion flowers. I should make a picture that was globular; semi-transparent. I should make a picture of curved petals; of shells; of things that were semi-transparent; I should make curved shapes, showing the light through, but not giving a clear outline. Everything would be large and dim; and what was seen would at the same time be heard; sounds would come through this petal or leaf—sounds indistinguishable from sights. Sound and sight seem to make equal parts of these first impressions. When I think of the early morning in bed I also hear the caw of rooks falling from a great height. The sound seems to fall through an elastic, gummy air; which holds it up; which prevents it from being sharp and distinct. The quality of the air above Talland House seemed to suspend sound, to let it sink down slowly, as if it were caught in a blue gummy veil. The rooks cawing is part of the waves breaking—one, two, one, two—and the splash as the wave drew back and then it gathered again, and I lay there half awake, half asleep, drawing in such ecstasy as I cannot describe.

The next memory—all these colour-and-sound memories hang together at St Ives—was much more robust; it was highly sensual. It was later. It still makes me feel warm; as if everything were ripe; humming; sunny; smelling so many smells at once; and all making a whole that even now makes me stop—as I stopped then going down to the beach; I stopped at the top to look down at the gardens. They were sunk beneath the road. The apples were on a level with one’s head. The gardens gave off a murmur of bees; the apples were red and gold; there were also pink flowers; and grey and silver leaves. The buzz, the croon, the smell, all seemed to press voluptuously against some membrane; not to burst it; but to hum round one such a complete rapture of pleasure that I stopped, smelt; looked. But again I cannot describe that rapture. It was rapture rather than ecstasy.

The strength of these pictures—but sight was always then so much mixed with sound that picture is not the right word—the strength anyhow of these impressions makes me again digress. Those moments—in the nursery, on the road to the beach—can still be more real than the present moment. This I have just tested. For I got up and crossed the garden. Percy was digging the asparagus bed; Louie was shaking a mat in front of the bedroom door. But I was seeing them through the sight I saw here—the nursery and the road to the beach. At times I can go back to St Ives more completely than I can this morning. I can reach a state where I seem to be watching things happen as if I were there. That is, I suppose, that my memory supplies what I had forgotten, so that it seems as if it were happening independently, though I am really making it happen. In certain favourable moods, memories—what one has forgotten—come to the top. Now if this is so, is it not possible—I often wonder—that things we have felt with great intensity have an existence independent of our minds; are in fact still in existence? And if so, will it not be possible, in time, that some device will be invented by which we can tap them? I see it—the past—as an avenue lying behind; a long ribbon of scenes, emotions. There at the end of the avenue still, are the garden and the nursery. Instead of remembering here a scene and there a sound, I shall fit a plug into the wall; and listen in to the past. I shall turn up August 1890. I feel that strong emotion must leave its trace; and it is only a question of discovering how we can get ourselves again attached to it, so that we shall be able to live our lives through from the start.

But the peculiarity of these two strong memories is that each was very simple. I am hardly aware of myself, but only of the sensation. I am only the container of the feeling of ecstasy, of the feeling of rapture. Perhaps this is characteristic of all childhood memories; perhaps it accounts for their strength. Later we add to feelings much that makes them more complex; and therefore less strong; or if not less strong, less isolated, less complete. But instead of analysing this, here is an instance of what I mean—my feeling about the looking-glass in the hall.

There was a small looking-glass in the hall at Talland House. It had, I remember, a ledge with a brush on it. By standing on tiptoe I could see my face in the glass. When I was six or seven perhaps, I got into the habit of looking at my face in the glass. But I only did this if I was sure that I was alone. I was ashamed of it. A strong feeling of guilt seemed naturally attached to it. But why was this so? One obvious reason occurs to me—Vanessa and I were both what was called tomboys; that is, we played cricket, scrambled over rocks, climbed trees, were said not to care for clothes and so on. Perhaps therefore to have been found looking in the glass would have been against our tomboy code. But I think that my feeling of shame went a great deal deeper. I am almost inclined to drag in my grandfather—Sir James, who once smoked a cigar, liked it, and so threw away his cigar and never smoked another. I am almost inclined to think that I inherited a streak of the puritan, of the Clapham Sect. At any rate, the looking-glass shame has lasted all my life, long after the tomboy phase was over. I cannot now powder my nose in public. Everything to do with dress—to be fitted, to come into a room wearing a new dress—still frightens me; at least makes me shy, self-conscious, uncomfortable. “Oh to be able to run, like Julian Morrell, all over the garden in a new dress”, I thought not many years ago at Garsington; when Julian undid a parcel and put on a new dress and scampered round and round like a hare. Yet femininity was very strong in our family. We were famous for our beauty—my mother’s beauty, Stella’s beauty, gave me as early as I can remember, pride and pleasure. What then gave me this feeling of shame, unless it were that I inherited some opposite instinct? My father was spartan, ascetic, puritanical. He had I think no feeling for pictures; no ear for music; no sense of the sound of words. This leads me to think that my—I would say ‘our’ if I knew enough about Vanessa, Thoby and Adrian—but how little we know even about brothers and sisters—this leads me to think that my natural love for beauty was checked by some ancestral dread. Yet this did not prevent me from feeling ecstasies and raptures spontaneously and intensely and without any shame or the least sense of guilt, so long as they were disconnected with my own body. I thus detect another element in the shame which I had in being caught looking at myself in the glass in the hall. I must have been ashamed or afraid of my own body. Another memory, also of the hall, may help to explain this. There was a slab outside the dining room door for standing dishes upon. Once when I was very small Gerald Duckworth lifted me onto this, and as I sat there he began to explore my body. I can remember the feel of his hand going under my clothes; going firmly and steadily lower and lower. I remember how I hoped that he would stop; how I stiffened and wriggled as his hand approached my private parts. But it did not stop. His hand explored my private parts too. I remember resenting, disliking it—what is the word for so dumb and mixed a feeling? It must have been strong, since I still recall it. This seems to show that a feeling about certain parts of the body; how they must not be touched; how it is wrong to allow them to be touched; must be instinctive. It proves that Virginia Stephen was not born on the 25th January 1882, but was born many thousands of years ago; and had from the very first to encounter instincts already acquired by thousands of ancestresses in the past.

And this throws light not merely on my own case, but upon the problem that I touched on the first page; why it is so difficult to give any account of the person to whom things happen. The person is evidently immensely complicated. Witness the incident of the looking-glass. Though I have done my best to explain why I was ashamed of looking at my own face I have only been able to discover some possible reasons; there may be others; I do not suppose that I have got at the truth; yet this is a simple incident; and it happened to me personally; and I have no motive for lying about it. In spite of all this, people write what they call ‘lives’ of other people; that is, they collect a number of events, and leave the person to whom it happened unknown. Let me add a dream; for it may refer to the incident of the looking-glass. I dreamt that I was looking in a glass when a horrible face—the face of an animal—suddenly showed over my shoulder. I cannot be sure if this was a dream, or if it happened. Was I looking in the glass one day when something in the background moved, and seemed to me alive? I cannot be sure. But I have always remembered the other face in the glass, whether it was a dream or a fact, and that it frightened me.

These then are some of my first memories. But of course as an account of my life they are misleading, because the things one does not remember are as important; perhaps they are more important. If I could remember one whole day I should be able to describe, superficially at least, what life was like as a child. Unfortunately, one only remembers what is exceptional. And there seems to be no reason why one thing is exceptional and another not. Why have I forgotten so many things that must have been, one would have thought, more memorable than what I do remember? Why remember the hum of bees in the garden going down to the beach, and forget completely being thrown naked by father into the sea? (Mrs Swanwick says she saw that happen.)

This leads to a digression, which perhaps may explain a little of my own psychology; even of other people’s. Often when I have been writing one of my so-called novels I have been baffled by this same problem; that is, how to describe what I call in my private shorthand “non-being”. Every day includes much more non-being than being. Yesterday for example, Tuesday the 18th of April, was [as] it happened a good day; above the average in “being”. It was fine; I enjoyed writing these first pages; my head was relieved of the pressure of writing about Roger; I walked over Mount Misery and along the river; and save that the tide was out, the country, which I notice very closely always, was coloured and shaded as I like—there were the willows, I remember, all plumy and soft green and purple against the blue. I also read Chaucer with pleasure; and began a book—the memoirs of Madame de la Fayette—which interested me. These separate moments of being were however embedded in many more moments of non-being. I have already forgotten what Leonard and I talked about at lunch; and at tea; although it was a good day the goodness was embedded in a kind of nondescript cotton wool. This is always so. A great part of every day is not lived consciously. One walks, eats, sees things, deals with what has to be done; the broken vacuum cleaner; ordering dinner; writing orders to Mabel; washing; cooking dinner; bookbinding. When it is a bad day the proportion of non-being is much larger. I had a slight temperature last week; almost the whole day was non-being. The real novelist can somehow convey both sorts of being. I think Jane Austen can; and Trollope; perhaps Thackeray and Dickens and Tolstoy. I have never been able to do both. I tried—in Night and Day, and in The Years. But I will leave the literary side alone for the moment.

As a child then, my days, just as they do now, contained a large proportion of this cotton wool, this non-being. Week after week passed at St Ives and nothing made any dint upon me. Then, for no reason that I know about, there was a sudden violent shock; something happened so violently that I have remembered it all my life. I will give a few instances. The first: I was fighting with Thoby on the lawn. We were pommelling each other with our fists. Just as I raised my fist to hit him, I felt: why hurt another person? I dropped my hand instantly, and stood there, and let him beat me. I remember the feeling. It was a feeling of hopeless sadness. It was as if I became aware of something terrible; and of my own powerlessness. I slunk off alone, feeling horribly depressed. The second instance was also in the garden at St Ives. I was looking at the flower bed by the front door; “That is the whole”, I said. I was looking at a plant with a spread of leaves; and it seemed suddenly plain that the flower itself was a part of the earth; that a ring enclosed what was the flower; and that was the real flower; part earth; part flower. It was a thought I put away as being likely to be very useful to me later. The third case was also at St Ives. Some people called Valpy had been staying at St Ives, and had left. We were waiting at dinner one night, when somehow I overheard my father or my mother say that Mr Valpy had killed himself. The next thing I remember is being in the garden at night and walking on the path by the apple tree. It seemed to me that the apple tree was connected with the horror of Mr Valpy’s suicide. I could not pass it. I stood there looking at the grey-green creases of the bark—it was a moonlit night—in a trance of horror. I seemed to be dragged down, hopelessly, into some pit of absolute despair from which I could not escape. My body seemed paralysed.

These are three instances of exceptional moments. I often tell them over, or rather they come to the surface unexpectedly. But now that for the first time I have written them down, I realise something that I have never realised before. Two of these moments ended in a state of despair. The other ended, on the contrary, in a state of satisfaction. When I said about the flower “That is the whole,” I felt that I had made a discovery. I felt that I had put away in my mind something that I should go back [to], to turn over and explore. It strikes me now that this was a profound difference. It was the difference in the first place between despair and satisfaction. This difference I think arose from the fact that I was quite unable to deal with the pain of discovering that people hurt each other; that a man I had seen had killed himself. The sense of horror held me powerless. But in the case of the flower I found a reason; and was thus able to deal with the sensation. I was not powerless. I was conscious—if only at a distance—that I should in time explain it. I do not know if I was older when I saw the flower than I was when I had the other two experiences. I only know that many of these exceptional moments brought with them a peculiar horror and a physical collapse; they seemed dominant; myself passive. This suggests that as one gets older one has a greater power through reason to provide an explanation; and that this explanation blunts the sledge-hammer force of the blow. I think this is true, because though I still have the peculiarity that I receive these sudden shocks, they are now always welcome; after the first surprise, I always feel instantly that they are particularly valuable. And so I go on to suppose that the shock-receiving capacity is what makes me a writer. I hazard the explanation that a shock is at once in my case followed by the desire to explain it. I feel that I have had a blow; but it is not, as I thought as a child, simply a blow from an enemy hidden behind the cotton wool of daily life; it is or will become a revelation of some order; it is a token of some real thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words. It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together. Perhaps this is the strongest pleasure known to me. It is the rapture I get when in writing I seem to be discovering what belongs to what; making a scene come right; making a character come together. From this I reach what I might call a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we—I mean all human beings—are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself. And I see this when I have a shock.

This intuition of mine—it is so instinctive that it seems given to me, not made by me—has certainly given its scale to my life ever since I saw the flower in the bed by the front door at St Ives. If I were painting myself I should have to find some—rod, shall I say—something that would stand for the conception. It proves that one’s life is not confined to one’s body and what one says and does; one is living all the time in relation to certain background rods or conceptions. Mine is that there is a pattern hid behind the cotton wool. And this conception affects me every day. I prove this, now, by spending the morning writing, when I might be walking, running a shop, or learning to do something that will be useful if war comes. I feel that by writing I am doing what is far more necessary than anything else.

All artists I suppose feel something like this. It is one of the obscure elements in life that has never been much discussed. It is left out in almost all biographies and autobiographies, even of artists. Why did Dickens spend his entire life writing stories? What was his conception? I bring in Dickens partly because I am reading Nicholas Nickleby at the moment; also partly because it struck me, on my walk yesterday, that these moments of being of mine were scaffolding in the background; were the invisible and silent part of my life as a child. But in the foreground there were of course people; and these people were very like characters in Dickens. They were caricatures; they were very simple; they were immensely alive. They could be made with three strokes of the pen, if I could do it. Dickens owes his astonishing power to make characters alive to the fact that he saw them as a child sees them; as I saw Mr Wolstenholme; C.B. Clarke, and Mr Gibbs.

I name these three people because they all died when I was a child. Therefore they have never been altered. I see them exactly as I saw them then. Mr Wolstenholme was a very old gentleman who came every summer to stay with us. He was brown; he had a beard and very small eyes in fat cheeks; and he fitted into a brown wicker beehive chair as if it had been his nest. He used to sit in this beehive chair smoking and reading. He had only one characteristic—that when he ate plum tart he spurted the juice through his nose so that it made a purple stain on his grey moustache. This seemed enough to cause us perpetual delight. We called him ‘The Woolly One’. By way of shading him a little I remember that we had to be kind to him because he was not happy at home; that he was very poor, yet once gave Thoby half a crown; that he had a son who was drowned in Australia; and I know too that he was a great mathematician. He never said a word all the time I knew him. But he still seems to me a complete character; and whenever I think of him I begin to laugh.

Mr Gibbs was perhaps less simple. He wore a tie ring; had a bald, benevolent head; was dry; neat; precise; and had folds of skin under his chin. He made father groan—“why can’t you go—why can’t you go?” And he gave Vanessa and myself two ermine skins, with slits down the middle out of which poured endless wealth—streams of silver. I also remember him lying in bed, dying; husky; in a night shirt; and showing us drawings by Retzsch. The character of Mr Gibbs also seems to me complete and amuses me very much.

As for C.B. Clarke, he was an old botanist; and he said to my father “All you young botanists like Osmunda.” He had an aunt aged eighty who went for a walking tour in the New Forest. That is all—that is all I have to say about these three old gentlemen. But how real they were! How we laughed at them! What an immense part they played in our lives!

One more caricature comes into my mind; though pity entered into this one. I am thinking of Justine Nonon. She was immensely old. Little hairs sprouted on her long bony chin. She was a hunchback; and walked like a spider, feeling her way with her long dry fingers from one chair to another. Most of the time she sat in the arm-chair beside the fire. I used to sit on her knee; and her knee jogged up and down; and she sang in a hoarse cracked voice “Ron ron ron—et pion pion pion—” and then her knee gave and I was tumbled onto the floor. She was French; she had been with the Thackerays. She only came to us on visits. She lived by herself at Shepherd’s Bush; and used to bring Adrian a glass jar of honey. I got the notion that she was extremely poor; and it made me uncomfortable that she brought this honey, because I felt she did it by way of making her visit acceptable. She said too: “I have come in my carriage and pair”—which meant the red omnibus. For this too I pitied her; also because she began to wheeze; and the nurses said she would not live much longer; and soon she died. That is all I know about her; but I remember her as if she were a completely real person, with nothing left out, like the three old men.

2nd May … I write the date, because I think that I have discovered a possible form for these notes. That is, to make them include the present—at least enough of the present to serve as platform to stand upon. It would be interesting to make the two people, I now, I then, come out in contrast. And further, this past is much affected by the present moment. What I write today I should not write in a year’s time. But I cannot work this out; it had better be left to chance, as I write by fits and starts by way of a holiday from Roger. I have no energy at the moment to spend upon the horrid labour that it needs to make an orderly and expressed work of art; where one thing follows another and all are swept into a whole. Perhaps one day, relieved from making works of art, I will try to compose this.

But to continue—the three old men and the one old woman are complete, as I was saying, because they died when I was a child. They none of them lived on to be altered as I altered—as others, like the Stillmans or the Lushingtons, lived on and were added to and filled and left finally incomplete. The same thing applies to places. I cannot see Kensington Gardens as I saw it as a child because I saw it only two days ago—on a chill afternoon, all the cherry trees lurid in the cold yellow light of a hail storm. I know that it was very much larger in 1890 when I was seven than it is now. For one thing, it was not connected with Hyde Park. Now I walk from one to the other. We drive in our car; and leave it by the new kiosk. But then there was the Broad Walk, the Round Pond, and the Flower Walk. Then—I will try to get back to then—there were two gates, one opposite Gloucester Road, the other opposite Queen’s Gate. At each gate sat an old woman. The Queen’s Gate old woman was an elongated, emaciated figure with a goat-like face, yellow and pockmarked. She sold nuts and boot-laces, I think. And Kitty Maxse said of her: “Poor things, it’s drink that makes them like that.” She always sat, and wore a shawl and had to me a faint, obliterated, debased likeness to Granny; whose face was elongated too, but she wore a very soft shawl, like tapioca pudding, over her head, and it was fastened by an amethyst brooch set in pearls. The other old woman was round and squat. To her was attached a whole wobbling balloon of air-balls. She held this billowing, always moving, most desirable mass by one string. They glowed in my eyes always red and purple, like the flower my mother wore; and they were always billowing in the air. For a penny, she would detach one from the bellying soft mass, and I would dance away with it. She too wore a shawl and her face was puckered, as the air-balls puckered in the nursery if they survived to be taken home. I think Nurse and Sooney were on speaking terms with her; but I never heard what she said. Anemones, the blue and purple bunches that are now being sold, always bring back that quivering mound of air-balls outside the gate of Kensington Gardens.

Then we went up the Broad Walk. The Broad Walk had a peculiar property—when we took our first walk there after coming back from St Ives, we always abused it; it was not a hill at all, we said. By degrees as the weeks passed the hill became steeper and steeper until by the summer it was a hill again. The swamp—as we called the rather derelict ground behind the Flower Walk—had to Adrian and myself at least the glamour of the past on it. When Nessa and Thoby were very small, that is to say, it had been, they told us, a real swamp; they had found the skeleton of a dog there. And it must have been covered with reeds and full of pools, we thought, for we believed that the dog had been starved and drowned. In our day it had been drained, though it was still muddy. But it had a past always to us. And we compared it, of course, with Halestown bog near St Ives. Halestown bog where the Osmunda grew; and those thick ferns with bulbous roots that had trees marked on them, if you cut them across. I brought some home every autumn to make into pen holders. It was natural always to compare Kensington Gardens with St Ives, always of course to the disadvantage of London. That was one of the pleasures of scrunching the shells with which now and then the Flower Walk was strewn. They had little ribs on them like the shells on the beach. On the other hand the crocodile tree was itself; and is still there—the tree on the Speke Monument path; which has a great root exposed; and the root is polished, partly by the friction of our hands, for we used to scramble over it.

As we walked, to beguile the dulness [of] innumerable winter walks we made up stories, long long stories that were taken up at the same place and added to each in turn. There was the Jim Joe and Harry Hoe story; about three brothers who had herds of animals and adventures—I have forgotten what. But there again, the Jim Joe and Harry Hoe story was a London story; and inferior to the Talland House garden story about Beccage and Hollywinks; spirits of evil who lived on the rubbish heap; and disappeared through a hole in the escallonia hedge—as I remember telling my mother and Mr Lowell. Walks in Kensington Gardens were dull. Non-being made up a great proportion of our time in London. The walks—twice every day in Kensington Gardens—were so monotonous. Speaking for myself, non-being lay thick over those years. Past the thermometer we went—sometimes it was below the little freezing bar but not often save in the great 1894-5 winter when we skated every day; when I dropped my watch and the rough man gave it me; and asked for money; and a kind lady offered three coppers; and he said he would only take silver; and she shook her head and faded away—past the thermometer we went, past the gate-keeper in his green livery and his gold laced hat, up the Flower Walk, round the pond. We sailed boats of course. There was the great day when my Cornish lugger sailed perfectly to the middle of the pond and then with my eyes upon it, amazed, sank suddenly; “Did you see that?” my father cried, coming striding towards me. We had both seen it and both were amazed. To make the wonder complete, many weeks later in the spring, I was walking by the pond and a man in a flat-boat was dredging the pond of duckweed, and to my unspeakable excitement, up he brought my lugger in his dredging net; and I claimed it; and he gave it me, and I ran home with this marvellous story to tell. Then my mother made new sails; and my father rigged it, and I remember seeing him fixing the sails to the yard-arm after dinner; and how interested he became and said, with his little snort, half laughing, something like “Absurd—what fun it is doing this!”

I could collect a great many more floating incidents—scenes in Kensington Gardens; how if we had a penny we went to the white house near the palace and bought sweets-from the smooth-faced, pink-cheeked woman in a grey cotton dress who used then to keep a sweet shop there; how on one day of the week we bought Tit-Bits and read the jokes—I liked the Correspondence best—sitting on the grass, breaking our chocolate into “Frys” as we called them, for a penny slab was divided into four; how we knocked into a lady racing our go-cart round a steep corner, and her sister scolded us violently; how we tied Shag to a railing, and some children told the Park Keeper that we were cruel—but the stories were not then very exciting; though they helped to break up the eternal round of Kensington Gardens.

What then has remained interesting? Again those moments of being. Two I always remember. There was the moment of the puddle in the path; when for no reason I could discover, everything suddenly became unreal; I was suspended; I could not step across the puddle; I tried to touch something … the whole world became unreal. Next, the other moment when the idiot boy sprang up with his hand outstretched mewing, slit-eyed, red-rimmed; and without saying a word, with a sense of the horror in me, I poured into his hand a bag of Russian toffee. But it was not over, for that night in the bath the dumb horror came over me. Again I had that hopeless sadness; that collapse I have described before; as if I were passive under some sledge-hammer blow; exposed to a whole avalanche of meaning that had heaped itself up and discharged itself upon me, unprotected, with nothing to ward it off, so that I huddled up at my end of the bath, motionless. I could not explain it; I said nothing even to Nessa sponging herself at the other end.

Looking back, then, at Kensington Gardens, though I can recover incidents, many more than I have patience to describe, I cannot recover, save by fits and starts, the focus, the proportions of the external world. It seems to me that a child must have a curious focus; it sees an air-ball or a shell with extreme distinctness; I still see the air-balls, blue and purple, and the ribs on the shells; but these points are enclosed in vast empty spaces. How large for instance was the space beneath the nursery table! I see it still as a great black space with the table-cloth hanging down in folds on the outskirts in the distance; and myself roaming about there, and meeting Nessa. “Have black cats got tails?” she asked, and I said “no”, and was proud because she had asked me a question. Then we roamed off again into that vast space. The night nursery was vast too. In winter I would slip in before bed to take a look at the fire. I was very anxious to see that the fire was low, because it frightened me if it burnt after we went to bed. I dreaded that little flickering flame on the walls; but Adrian liked it; and to make a compromise, Nurse folded a towel over the fender; but I could not help opening my eyes, and there often was the flickering flame; and I looked and looked and could not sleep; and in order to have company, said “What did you say, Nessa?” although she was asleep, to wake her and to hear someone’s voice. These were early fears; for later, when Thoby had gone to school, leaving Nessa to take his monkey Jacko to bed with her, no sooner was the door shut than we began story-telling. The story always began thus: “Clémont dear child, said Mrs Dilke,” and it went on to tell wild stories of the Dilke family and Miss Rosalba the governess; how they dug under the floor and discovered sacks of gold; and held great feasts and ate fried eggs “with plenty of frizzling”, for the wealth of the Dilkes in real life compared with our own moderate means impressed us. We noticed how many new clothes Mrs Dilke wore; how seldom my mother bought a new dress.

Many bright colours; many distinct sounds; some human beings, caricatures; comic; several violent moments of being, always including a circle of the scene which they cut out: and all surrounded by a vast space—that is a rough visual description of childhood. This is how I shape it; and how I see myself as a child, roaming about, in that space of time which lasted from 1882 to 1895. A great hall I could liken it to; with windows letting in strange lights; and murmurs and spaces of deep silence. But somehow into that picture must be brought, too, the sense of movement and change. Nothing remained stable long. One must get the feeling of everything approaching and then disappearing, getting large, getting small, passing at different rates of speed past the little creature; one must get the feeling that made her press on, the little creature driven on as she was by growth of her legs and arms, driven without her being able to stop it, or to change it, driven as a plant is driven up out of the earth, up until the stalk grows, the leaf grows, buds swell. That is what is indescribable, that is what makes all images too static, for no sooner has one said this was so, than it was past and altered. How immense must be the force of life which turns a baby, who can just distinguish a great blot of blue and purple on a black background, into the child who thirteen years later can feel all that I felt on May 5th 1895—now almost exactly to a day, forty-four years ago—when my mother died.

This shows that among the innumerable things left out in my sketch I have left out the most important—those instincts, affections, passions, attachments—there is no single word for them, for they changed month by month—which bound me, I suppose, from the first moment of consciousness to other people. If it were true, as I said above, that the things that ceased in childhood, are easy to describe because they are complete, then it should be easy to say what I felt for my mother, who died when I was thirteen. Thus I should be able to see her completely undisturbed by later impressions, as I saw Mr Gibbs and C.B. Clarke. But the theory, though true of them, breaks down completely with her. It breaks down in a curious way, which I will explain, for perhaps it may help to explain why I find it now so curiously difficult to describe both my feeling for her, and her herself.

Until I was in the forties—I could settle the date by seeing when I wrote To the Lighthouse, but am too casual here to bother to do it—the presence of my mother obsessed me. I could hear her voice, see her, imagine what she would do or say as I went about my day’s doings. She was one of the invisible presences who after all play so important a part in every life. This influence, by which I mean the consciousness of other groups impinging upon ourselves; public opinion; what other people say and think; all those magnets which attract us this way to be like that, or repel us the other and make us different from that; has never been analysed in any of those Lives which I so much enjoy reading, or very superficially.

Yet it is by such invisible presences that the “subject of this memoir” is tugged this way and that every day of his life; it is they that keep him in position. Consider what immense forces society brings to play upon each of us, how that society changes from decade to decade; and also from class to class; well, if we cannot analyse these invisible presences, we know very little of the subject of the memoir; and again how futile life-writing becomes. I see myself as a fish in a stream; deflected; held in place; but cannot describe the stream.

To return to the particular instance which should be more definite and more capable of description than for example the influence on me of the Cambridge Apostles, or the influence of the Galsworthy, Bennett, Wells school of fiction, or the influence of the Vote, or of the War—that is, the influence of my mother. It is perfectly true that she obsessed me, in spite of the fact that she died when I was thirteen, until I was forty-four. Then one day walking round Tavistock Square I made up, as I sometimes make up my books, To the Lighthouse; in a great, apparently involuntary, rush. One thing burst into another. Blowing bubbles out of a pipe gives the feeling of the rapid crowd of ideas and scenes which blew out of my mind, so that my lips seemed syllabling of their own accord as I walked. What blew the bubbles? Why then? I have no notion. But I wrote the book very quickly; and when it was written, I ceased to be obsessed by my mother. I no longer hear her voice; I do not see her.

I suppose that I did for myself what psycho-analysts do for their patients. I expressed some very long felt and deeply felt emotion. And in expressing it I explained it and then laid it to rest. But what is the meaning of “explained” it? Why, because I described her and my feeling for her in that book, should my vision of her and my feeling for her become so much dimmer and weaker? Perhaps one of these days I shall hit on the reason; and if so, I will give it, but at the moment I will go on, describing what I can remember, for it may be true that what I remember of her now will weaken still further. (This note is made provisionally, in order to explain in part why it is now so difficult to give any clear description of her.)

Certainly there she was, in the very centre of that great Cathedral space which was childhood; there she was from the very first. My first memory is of her lap; the scratch of some beads on her dress comes back to me as I pressed my cheek against it. Then I see her in her white dressing gown on the balcony; and the passion flower with the purple star on its petals. Her voice is still faintly in my ears—decided, quick; and in particular the little drops with which her laugh ended—three diminishing ahs … “Ah—ah—ah …” I sometimes end a laugh that way myself. And I see her hands, like Adrian’s, with the very individual square-tipped fingers, each finger with a waist to it, and the nail broadening out. (My own are the same size all the way, so that I can slip a ring over my thumb.) She had three rings; a diamond ring, an emerald ring, and an opal ring. My eyes used to fix themselves upon the lights in the opal as it moved across the page of the lesson book when she taught us, and I was glad that she left it to me (I gave it to Leonard). Also I hear the tinkle of her bracelets, made of twisted silver, given her by Mr Lowell, as she went about the house; especially as she came up at night to see if we were asleep, holding a candle shaded; this is a distinct memory, for, like all children, I lay awake sometimes and longed for her to come. Then she told me to think of all the lovely things I could imagine. Rainbows and bells … But besides these minute separate details, how did I first become conscious of what was always there—her astonishing beauty? Perhaps I never became conscious of it; I think I accepted her beauty as the natural quality that a mother—she seemed typical, universal, yet our own in particular—had by virtue of being our mother. It was part of her calling. I do not think that I separated her face from that general being; or from her whole body. Certainly I have a vision of her now, as she came up the path by the lawn at St Ives; slight, shapely—she held herself very straight. I was playing. I stopped, about to speak to her. But she half turned from us, and lowered her eyes. From that indescribably sad gesture I knew that Philips, the man who had been crushed on the line and whom she had been visiting, was dead. It’s over, she seemed to say. I knew, and was awed by the thought of death. At the same time I felt that her gesture as a whole was lovely. Very early, through nurses or casual visitors, I must have known that she was thought very beautiful. But that pride was snobbish, not a pure and private feeling: it was mixed with pride in other people’s admiration. It was related to the more definitely snobbish pride caused in me by the nurses who said one night talking together while we ate our supper: “They’re very well connected..

But apart from her beauty, if the two can be separated, what was she herself like? Very quick; very direct; practical; and amusing, I say at once offhand. She could be sharp, she disliked affectation. “If you put your head on one side like that, you shan’t come to the party,” I remember she said to me as we drew up in a carriage in front of some house. Severe; with a background of knowledge that made her sad. She had her own sorrow waiting behind her to dip into privately. Once when she had set us to write exercises I looked up from mine and watched her reading—the Bible perhaps; and, struck by the gravity of her face, told myself that her first husband had been a clergyman and that she was thinking, as she read what he had read, of him. This was a fable on my part; but it shows that she looked very sad when she was not talking.

But can I get any closer to her without drawing upon all those descriptions and anecdotes which after she was dead imposed themselves upon my view of her? Very quick; very definite; very upright; and behind the active, the sad, the silent. And of course she was central. I suspect the word “central” gets closest to the general feeling I had of living so completely in her atmosphere that one never got far enough away from her to see her as a person. (That is one reason why I see the Gibbses and the Beadles and the Clarkes so much more distinctly.) She was the whole thing; Talland House was full of her; Hyde Park Gate was full of her. I see now, though the sentence is hasty, feeble and inexpressive, why it was that it was impossible for her to leave a very private and particular impression upon a child. She was keeping what I call in my shorthand the panoply of life—that which we all lived in common—in being. I see now that she was living on such an extended surface that she had not time, nor strength, to concentrate, except for a moment if one were ill or in some child’s crisis, upon me, or upon anyone—unless it were Adrian. Him she cherished separately; she called him ‘My Joy’. The later view, the understanding that I now have of her position must have its say; and it shows me that a woman of forty with seven children, some of them needing grown-up attention, and four still in the nursery; and an eighth, Laura, an idiot, yet living with us; and a husband fifteen years her elder, difficult, exacting, dependent on her; I see now that a woman who had to keep all this in being and under control must have been a general presence rather than a particular person to a child of seven or eight. Can I remember ever being alone with her for more than a few minutes? Someone was always interrupting. When I think of her spontaneously she is always in a room full of people; Stella, George and Gerald are there; my father, sitting reading with one leg curled round the other, twisting his lock of hair; “Go and take the crumb out of his beard,” she whispers to me; and off I trot. There are visitors, young men like Jack Hills who is in love with Stella; many young men, Cambridge friends of George’s and Gerald’s; old men, sitting round the tea table talking—father’s friends, Henry James, Symonds, (I see him peering up at me on the broad staircase at St Ives with his drawn yellow face and a tie made of a yellow cord with two plush balls on it); Stella’s friends—the Lushingtons, the Stillmans; I see her at the head of the table underneath the engraving of Beatrice given her by an old governess and painted blue; I hear jokes; laughter; the clatter of voices; I am teased; I say something funny; she laughs; I am pleased; I blush furiously; she observes; someone laughs at Nessa for saying that Ida Milman is her B.F.; Mother says soothingly, tenderly, “Best friend, that means.” I see her going to the town with her basket; and Arthur Davies goes with her; I see her knitting on the hall step while we play cricket; I see her stretching her arms out to Mrs Williams when the bailiffs took possession of their house and the Captain stood at the window bawling and shying jugs, basins, chamber pots onto the gravel—“Come to us, Mrs Williams”; “No, Mrs Stephen,” sobbed Mrs Williams, “I will not leave my husband.”—I see her writing at her table in London and the silver candlesticks, and the high carved chair with the claws and the pink seat; and the three-cornered brass ink pot; I wait in agony peeping surreptitiously behind the blind for her to come down the street, when she has been out late the lamps are lit and I am sure that she has been run over. (Once my father found me peeping; questioned me; and said rather anxiously but reprovingly, “You shouldn’t be so nervous, Jinny.”) And there is my last sight of her; she was dying; I came to kiss her and as I crept out of the room she said: “Hold yourself straight, my little Goat.” … What a jumble of things I can remember, if I let my mind run, about my mother; but they are all of her in company; of her surrounded; of her generalised; dispersed, omnipresent, of her as the creator of that crowded merry world which spun so gaily in the centre of my childhood. It is true that I enclosed that world in another made by my own temperament; it is true that from the beginning I had many adventures outside that world; and often went far from it; and kept much back from it; but there it always was, the common life of the family, very merry, very stirring, crowded with people; and she was the centre; it was herself. This was proved on May 5th 1895. For after that day there was nothing left of it. I leant out of the nursery window the morning she died. It was about six, I suppose. I saw Dr Seton walk away up the street with his head bent and his hands clasped behind his back. I saw the pigeons floating and settling. I got a feeling of calm, sadness, and finality. It was a beautiful blue spring morning, and very still. That brings back the feeling that everything had come to an end.

May 15th 1939. The drudgery of making a coherent life of Roger has once more become intolerable, and so I turn for a few day’s respite to May 1895. The little platform of present time on which I stand is, so far as the weather is concerned, damp and chilly. I look up at my skylight—over the litter of Athenaeum articles, Fry letters—all strewn with the sand that comes from the house that is being pulled down next door—I look up and see, as if reflecting it, a sky the colour of dirty water. And the inner landscape is much of a piece. Last night Mark Gertler dined here and denounced the vulgarity, the inferiority of what he called “literature”; compared with the integrity of painting. “For it always deals with Mr and Mrs Brown,”—he said—with the personal, the trivial, that is; a criticism which has its sting and its chill, like the May sky. Yet if one could give a sense of my mother’s personality one would have to be an artist. It would be as difficult to do that, as it should be done, as to paint a Cézanne.

One of the few things that is certain about her is that she married two very different men. If one looks at her not as a child, of seven or eight, but as a woman now older than she was when she died, there is something to take hold of in that fact. She was not so rubbed out and featureless, not so dominated by the beauty of her own face, as she has since become—and inevitably. For what reality can remain real of a person who died forty-four years ago at the age of forty-nine, without leaving a book, or a picture, or any piece of work—apart from the three children who now survive and the memory of her that remains in their minds? There is the memory; but there is nothing to check that memory by; nothing to bring it to ground with.

There are however these two marriages; and they show that she was capable of falling in love with two very different men; one, to put it in a nutshell, the pink of propriety; the other, the pink of intellectuality. She could span them both. This must serve me by way of foot rule, in trying to measure her character.

The elements of that character, though, are formed in twilight. She was born, I think, in 1848; I think in India; the daughter of Dr Jackson and his half-French wife. Not very much education came her way. An old governess—was she Mademoiselle Rose? did she give her the picture of Beatrice that hung in the dining room at Talland House?—taught her French, which she spoke with a very good accent; and she could play the piano and was musical. I remember that she kept De Quincey’s Opium Eater on her table, one of her favourite books; and for a birthday present she chose all the works of Scott which her father gave her in the first edition—some remain; others are lost. For Scott she had a passion. She had an instinctive, not a trained mind. But her instinct, for books at least, seems to me to have been strong, and I liked it, for she gave a jump, I remember, when reading Hamlet aloud to her I misread ‘sliver’ ‘silver’—she jumped as my father jumped at a false quantity when we read Virgil with him. She was her mother’s favourite daughter of the three; and as her mother was an invalid even as a child she was used to nursing; to waiting on a sick bed. They had a house at Well Walk during the Crimean War; for there was an anecdote about watching the soldiers drill on the Heath. But her beauty at once came to the fore, even as a little girl; for there was another anecdote—how she could never be sent out alone, but must have Mary with her, to protect her from admiring looks: to keep her unconscious of that beauty—and she was, my father said, very little conscious of it. It was due to this beauty, I suspect, that she had that training which was much more important than any she had from governesses—the training of life at Little Holland House. She was a great deal at Little Holland House as a child, partly, I imagine, because she was acceptable to the painters, and the Prinseps—Aunt Sara and Uncle Thoby must have been proud of her.

Little Holland House was her world then. But what was that world like? I think of it as a summer afternoon world. To my thinking Little Holland House is an old white country house, standing in a large garden. Long windows open onto the lawn. Through them comes a stream of ladies in crinolines and little straw hats; they are attended by gentlemen in peg-top trousers and whiskers. The date is round about 1860. It is a hot summer day. Tea tables with great bowls of strawberries and cream are scattered about the lawn. They are “presided over” by some of the six lovely sisters; who do not wear crinolines, but are robed in splendid Venetian draperies; they sit enthroned, and talk with foreign emphatic gestures—my mother too gesticulated, throwing her hands out—to the eminent men (afterwards to be made fun of by Lytton);t rulers of India, statesmen, poets, painters. My mother comes out of the window wearing that striped silk dress buttoned at the throat with a flowing skirt that appears in the photograph. She is of course “a vision” as they used to say; and there she stands, silent, with her plate of strawberries and cream; or perhaps is told to take a party across the garden to Signior’s studio. The sound of music also comes from those long low rooms where the great Watts pictures hang; Joachim playing the violin; also the sound of a voice reading poetry—Uncle Thoby would read his translations from the Persian poets. How easy it is to fill in the picture with set pieces that I have gathered from memoirs—to bring in Tennyson in his wide-awake; Watts in his smock frock; Ellen Terry dressed as a boy; Garibaldi in his red shirt—and Henry Taylor turned from him to my mother—“the face of one fair girl was more to me”—so he says in a poem. But if I turn to my mother, how difficult it is to single her out as she really was; to imagine what she was thinking, to put a single sentence into her mouth! I dream; I make up pictures of a summer’s afternoon.

But the dream is based upon one fact. Once when we were children, my mother took us to Melbury Road; and when we came to the street that had been built on the old garden she gave a little spring forward, clapped her hands, and cried “That was where it was!” as if a fairyland had disappeared. Thus I think it is true that Little Holland House was a summer afternoon world to her. As a fact too I know that she adored her Uncle Thoby. His walking stick, with a hole in the top through which a tassel must have hung, a beautiful eighteenth-century looking cane, always stood at the head of her bed at Hyde Park Gate. She was a hero worshipper, simple, uncritical, enthusiastic. She felt for Uncle Thoby, my father said, much more than she felt for her own father—“old Dr Jackson”; “respectable”; but, for all his good looks and the amazing mane of white hair that stood out like a three-cornered hat round his head, he was a commonplace prosaic old man; boring people with his stories of a famous poison case in Calcutta; excluded from this poetical fairyland; and no doubt out of temper with it. My mother had no romance about him; but she derived from him, I suspect, the practicality, the shrewdness, which were among her qualities.

Little Holland House then was her education. She was taught there to take such part as girls did then in the lives of distinguished men; to pour out tea; to hand them their strawberries and cream; to listen devoutly, reverently to their wisdom; to accept the fact that Watts was the great painter; Tennyson the great poet; and to dance with the Prince of Wales. For the sisters, with the exception of my grandmother who was devout and spiritual, were worldly in the thoroughgoing Victorian way. Aunt Virginia, it is plain, put her own daughters, my mother’s first cousins, through tortures compared with which the boot or the Chinese shoe is negligible, in order to marry one to the Duke of Bedford, the other to Lord Henry Somerset. (That is how we came to be, as the nurses said, so “well connected”.) But here again I am dipping into memoirs, and leaving Julia Jackson, the real person, on one side. The only certainties I can lay hands on in those early years are that two men proposed to her (or to her parents on her behalf); one was Holman Hunt; the other Woolner, a sculptor. Both proposals were made and refused when she was scarcely out of the nursery. I know too that she went once wearing a hat with grey feathers to a river party where Anny Thackeray was; and Nun (that is Aunt Caroline, father’s sister) saw her standing alone; and was amazed that she was not the centre of a bevy of admirers; “Where are they?” she asked Anny Thackeray; who said, “Oh they don’t happen to be here today”—a little scene which makes me suspect that Julia aged seventeen or eighteen was aloof; and shed a certain silence round her by her very beauty.

That little scene is dated; she cannot have been more than eighteen; because she married when she was nineteen. She was in Venice; met Herbert Duckworth; fell head over ears in love with him, he with her, and so they married. That is all I know, perhaps all that anyone now knows, of the most important thing that ever happened to her. How important it was is proved by the fact that when he died four years later she was “as unhappy as it is possible for a human being to be”. That was her own saying; it came to me from Kitty Maxse. “I have been as unhappy and as happy as it is possible for a human being to be.” Kitty remembered it, because though she was very intimate with my mother, this was the only time in all their friendship that she ever spoke of what she had felt for Herbert Duckworth.

What my mother was like when she was as happy as anyone can be, I have no notion. Not a sound or a scene has survived from those four years. They were well off; lived in Bryanston Square; he practised not very seriously at the Bar; (once they went on circuit; and a friend said to him, “I spent the whole morning in Court looking at a beautiful face”—Herbert’s wife); George was born; then Stella; and Gerald was about to be born when Herbert Duckworth died. They were staying with the Vaughans at Upton; he stretched to pick a fig for my mother; an abscess burst; and he died in a few hours. Those are the only facts I know about those four happy years.

If it were possible to know what Herbert himself was like, some ray of light might fall from him upon my mother. But, like all very handsome men who die tragically, he left not so much a character behind him as a legend. Youth and death shed a halo through which it is difficult to see a real face—a face one might see today in the street or here in my studio. To Aunt Mary—my mother’s sister, likely thus to share some of her feelings—he was “Oh darling, a beam of light … like no one I have ever met … When Herbert Duckworth smiled … when Herbert Duckworth came into the room.. here she broke off, shook her head quickly from side to side and screwed her face up, as if he were ineffable; no words could describe him. And in this spasmodic way she gave an echo of what must have been my mother’s feeling; only hers was much deeper, and stronger. He must have been to her the perfect man; heroic; handsome; magnanimous; “the great Achilles, whom we knew”—it seems natural to quote Tennyson—and also genial, lovable, simple, and also her husband; and her children’s father. It was thus natural to her when she was a girl to love the simple, the genial, the normal ordinary type of man, in preference to the queer, the uncouth artistic, the intellectual, whom she had met and who had wished to marry her. Herbert was the perfect type of public school boy and English gentleman, my father said. She chose him; and how completely he satisfied her is proved by the collapse, the complete collapse into which she fell when he died. All her gaiety, all her sociability left her. She was as unhappy as it is possible for anyone to be. There is very little known of the years that were thus stamped. Only that saying, and Stella once told me that she used to lie upon his grave at Orchardleigh. As she was undemonstrative that seems a superlative expression of her grief.

What is known, and is much more remarkable, is that during those eight years spent, so far as she had time over from her children and house, ‘doing good’, nursing, visiting the poor, she lost her faith. This hurt her mother, a deeply religious woman, to whom she was devoted, and thus must have been a genuine conviction; something arrived at as the result of solitary and independent thinking. It proves that there was more in her than simplicity; enthusiasm; romance; and thus makes sense of her two incongruous choices: Herbert and my father. There was a complexity in her; great simplicity and directness combined with a sceptical, a serious spirit. Probably it was that combination that accounted for the great impression she made on people; the positive impression. Her character was sharpened by the mixture of simplicity and scepticism. She was sociable yet severe; very amusing; but very serious; extremely practical but with a depth in her … “She was a mixture of the Madonna and a woman of the world,” is Miss Robins’s description.

The certain fact at any rate is that when at last she was left alone—“Oh the torture of never being left alone!” is a saying of hers, reported I forget by whom, that refers to her widowhood, and the fuss that friends and family made—when she was alone at last in Hyde Park Gate, she began to think out her position; and for this reason perhaps read something my father had written. She liked it (he says in the ‘Mausoleum Book’), when she was not sure that she liked him. It is thus permissible to think of her sitting in the creeper shaded drawing room at Hyde Park Gate in her widow’s dress, alone, when the children had gone to bed, with a copy of the Fortnightly, trying to reason out the case for agnosticism. From that she would go on to think of Leslie Stephen, the gaunt bearded man who lived up the street, married to Minny Thackeray. He was in every way the opposite of Herbert Duckworth; but there was something in his mind that interested her. One evening she called on the Leslie Stephens, [and] found them sitting over the fire together; a happy married pair, with one child in the nursery, and another to be born soon. She sat talking; and then went home, envying them their happiness and comparing it with her own loneliness. Next day Minny died suddenly. And about two years later she married the gaunt bearded widower.

“How did father ask you to marry him?” I once asked her, with my arm slipped in hers as we went down the twisted stairs into the dining room. She gave her little laugh, half surprised, half shocked. She did not answer. He asked her in a letter; and she refused him. Then one night when he had given up all thought of it, and had been dining with her, and asking her advice about a governess for Laura, she followed him to the door and said “I will try to be a good wife to you.”

Perhaps there was pity in her love; certainly there was devout admiration for his mind; and so she spanned the two marriages with the two different men; and emerged from that corridor of the eight silent years to live fifteen years more; to bear four children; and [to] die early on the morning of the 5th of May 1895. George took us down to say goodbye. My father staggered from the bedroom as we came. I stretched out my arms to stop him, but he brushed past me, crying out something I could not catch; distraught. And George led me in to kiss my mother, who had just died.

May 28th 1939. Led by George with towels wrapped round us and given each a drop of brandy in warm milk to drink, we were taken into the bedroom. I think candles were burning; and I think the sun was coming in. At any rate I remember the long looking-glass; with the drawers on either side; and the washstand; and the great bed on which my mother lay. I remember very clearly how even as I was taken to the bedside I noticed that one nurse was sobbing, and a desire to laugh came over me, and I said to myself as I have often done at moments of crisis since, “I feel nothing whatever”. Then I stooped and kissed my mother’s face. It was still warm. She [had] only died a moment before. Then we went upstairs into the day nursery.

Perhaps it was the next evening that Stella took me into the bedroom to kiss mother for the last time. She had been lying on her side before. Now she was lying straight in the middle of her pillows. Her face looked immeasurably distant, hollow and stern. When I kissed her, it was like kissing cold iron. Whenever I touch cold iron the feeling comes back to me—the feeling of my mother’s face, iron cold, and granulated. I started back. Then Stella stroked her cheek, and undid a button on her nightgown. “She always liked to have it like that,” she said. When she came up to the nursery later she said to me, “Forgive me. I saw you were afraid.” She had noticed that I had started. When Stella asked me to forgive her for having given me that shock, I cried—we had been crying off and on all day—and said, “When I see mother, I see a man sitting with her.” Stella looked at me as if I had frightened her. Did I say that in order to attract attention to myself? Or was it true? I cannot be sure, for certainly I had a great wish to draw attention to myself. But certainly it was true that when she said: “Forgive me,” and thus made me visualize my mother, I seemed to see a man sitting bent on the edge of the bed.

“It’s nice that she shouldn’t be alone”, Stella said after a moment’s pause.

Of course the atmosphere of those three or four days before the funeral was so melodramatic, histrionic and unreal that any hallucination was possible. We lived through them in hush, in artificial light. Rooms were shut. People were creeping in and out. People were coming to the door all the time. We were all sitting in the drawing room round father’s chair sobbing. The hall reeked of flowers. They were piled on the hall table. The scent still brings back those days of astonishing intensity. But I have one memory of great beauty. A telegram had been sent to Thoby at Clifton. He was to arrive in the evening at Paddington. George and Stella whispered together in the hall, about who was to go and meet him. To my relief, Stella overcame some objection on George’s part, and said, “But I think it would do her good to go”; and so I was taken in a cab with George and Nessa to meet Thoby at Paddington. It was sunset, and the great glass dome at the end of the station was blazing with light. It was glowing yellow and red and the iron girders made a pattern across it. I walked along the platform gazing with rapture at this magnificent blaze of colour, and the train slowly steamed into the station. It impressed and exalted me. It was so vast and so fiery red. The contrast of that blaze of magnificent light with the shrouded and curtained rooms at Hyde Park Gate was so intense. Also it was partly that my mother’s death unveiled and intensified; made me suddenly develop perceptions, as if a burning glass had been laid over what was shaded and dormant. Of course this quickening was spasmodic. But it was surprising—as if something were becoming visible without any effort. To take another instance—I remember going into Kensington Gardens about that time. It was a hot spring evening, and we lay down—Nessa and I—in the long grass behind the Flower Walk. I had taken The Golden Treasury with me. I opened it and began to read some poem. And instantly and for the first time I understood the poem (which it was I forget). It was as if it became altogether intelligible; I had a feeling of transparency in words when they cease to be words and become so intensified that one seems to experience them; to foretell them as if they developed what one is already feeling. I was so astonished that I tried to explain the feeling. “One seems to understand what it’s about”, I said awkwardly. I suppose Nessa has forgotten; no one could have understood from what I said the queer feeling I had in the hot grass, that poetry was coming true. Nor does that give the feeling. It matches what I have sometimes felt when I write. The pen gets on the scent.

But though I remember so distinctly those two moments—the arch of glass burning at the end of Paddington Station and the poem I read in Kensington Gardens, those two clear moments are almost the only clear moments in the muffled dulness that then closed over us. With mother’s death the merry, various family life which she had held in being shut for ever. In its place a dark cloud settled over us; we seemed to sit all together cooped up, sad, solemn, unreal, under a haze of heavy emotion. It seemed impossible to break through. It was not merely dull; it was unreal. A finger seemed laid on one’s lips.

I see us now, all dressed in unbroken black, George and Gerald in black trousers, Stella with real crape deep on her dress, Nessa and myself with slightly modified crape, my father black from head to foot—even the notepaper was so black bordered that only a little space for writing remained—I see us emerging from Hyde Park Gate on a fine summer afternoon and walking in procession hand in hand, for we were always taking hands—I see us walking—I rather proud of the solemn blackness and the impression it must make—into Kensington Gardens; and how golden the laburnum shone. And then we sat silent under the trees. The silence was stifling. A finger was laid on our lips. One had always to think whether what one was about to say was the right thing to say. It ought to be a help. But how could one help? Father used to sit sunk in gloom. If he could be got to talk—and that was part of our duty—it was about the past. It was about “the old days”. And when he talked, he ended with a groan. He was getting deaf, and his groans were louder than he knew. Indoors he would walk up and down the room, gesticulating, crying that he had never told mother how he loved her. Then Stella would fling her arms round him and protest. Often one would break in upon a scene of this kind. And he would open his arms and call one to him. We were his only hope, his only comfort, he would say. And there kneeling on the floor one would try—perhaps only to cry.

Stella of course bore the brunt. She grew whiter and whiter in her unbroken black dress. She would sit at her table with the black-edged notepaper before her writing, answering letters of sympathy. There was a photograph of mother in front of her; and sometimes she would cry, as she wrote. As the summer wore on, visitors came, sympathetic women, old friends. They were admitted to the back drawing room, where father sat like the Queen in Shakespeare—“here I and sorrow sit”—with the Virginia Creeper hanging a curtain of green over the window, so that the room was like a green cave. We in the front room sat crouched, hearing muffled voices, ready for the visitor to emerge with tears on tear-stained cheeks. The shrouded, cautious, dulled life took the place of all the chatter and laughter of the summer. There were no more parties; no more young men and women laughing. No more flashing visions of white summer dresses and hansoms dashing off to private views and dinner parties, none of that natural life and gaiety which my mother had created. The grown-up world into which I would dash for a moment and pick off some joke or little scene and dash back again upstairs to the nursery was ended. There were none of those snatched moments that were so amusing and for some reason so soothing and y t exciting when one ran downstairs to dinner arm in arm wit., mother; or chose the jewels she was to wear. There was none of that pride when one said something that amused her, or that she thought very remarkable. How excited I used to be when the ‘Hyde Park Gate News’ was laid on her plate on Monday morning, and she liked something I had written! Never shall I forget my extremity of pleasure—it was like being a violin and being played upon—when I found that she had sent a story of mine to Madge Symonds; it was so imaginative, she said; it was about souls flying round and choosing bodies to be born into.

The tragedy of her death was not that it made one, now and then and very intensely, unhappy. It was that it made her unreal; and us solemn, and self-conscious. We were made to act parts that we did not feel; to fumble for words that we did not know. It obscured, it dulled. It made one hypocritical and immeshed in the conventions of sorrow. Many foolish and sentimental ideas came into being. Yet there was a struggle, for soon we revived, and there was a conflict between what we ought to be and what we were. Thoby put this into words. One day before he went back to school, he said: “It’s silly going on like this … sobbing, sitting shrouded, he meant. I was shocked at his heartlessness; yet he was right, I know; and yet how could we escape?

It was Stella who lifted the canopy again. A little light crept in.

June 20th 1939. I was thinking as I crossed the Channel last night of Stella; in a very jerky disconnected way, with people quarrelling outside the door; the boat train arriving; chains clanking; and the steamer giving those sudden stertorous snorts. And as the first morning after a broken night is distracted and broken, instead of beginning Roger again, as I ought, I will write down some of my distracted and disconnected thoughts; to serve, should the time come, for notes.

How many people are there still able to think about Stella on the 20th June 1939? Very few. Jack died last Christmas; George and Gerald a year or two ago; Kitty Maxse and Margaret Massingberd have been dead many years now. Susan Lushington and Lisa Stillman are still alive; but how they live and where, I know not. Perhaps thus I think of her less disconnectedly and more truly than anyone now living, save for Vanessa and Adrian; and perhaps old Sophie Farrell. Of her childhood I know practically nothing. She was the only daughter of the handsome barrister Herbert Duckworth, but as he died when she was three or four, she did not remember him, or those years when her mother was as happy as anyone can be. I think, from stray anecdotes and from what I noticed myself, that when she came to consciousness as a child the unhappy years were at their height. That would account for some qualities in Stella. Her first memories were of a very sad widowed mother, who “went about doing good”—Stella wished to have that on the tombstone—visiting the slums, visiting too the Cancer Hospital in the Brompton Road. Our Quaker Aunt told me that this was her habit; for she said how one case there had “shocked her”. Thus Stella as a child lived in the shade of that widowhood; saw that beautiful crape-veiled figure daily; and perhaps took then the ply that was so marked—that attitude of devotion, almost canine in its touching adoration, to her mother; that passive, suffering affection; and also that complete unquestioning dependence.

They were sun and moon to each other; my mother the positive and definite; Stella the reflecting and satellite. My mother was stern to her. All her devotion was given to George who was like his father; and her care was for Gerald, born posthumously and very delicate. Stella she treated severely; so much so that before their marriage my father ventured a protest. She replied that it might be true; she was hard on Stella because she felt Stella “part of myself”. A pale silent child I imagine her; sensitive; modest; uncomplaining; adoring her mother, thinking only how she could help her, and without any ambition or even character of her own. And yet she had character. Very gentle, very honest, and in some way individual—so she made her own impression on people. Friends, like Kitty Maxse, the brilliant, the sparkling, loved her with a real laughing tenderness for her own sake. Her charm was great; it came partly from this modesty, from this honesty, from this perfectly simple unostentatious unselfishness; it came too from her lack of pose, her lack of snobbery; and from the genuineness, from something that was—could I put my finger on it—perfectly herself, individual. This unnamed quality—the sensitiveness to real things—was queer in the sister of George and Gerald, who were so opaque and conventional; who had so innate a respect for the conventions and respectabilities. By some odd fling in her birth, she had escaped all taint of Duckworth philistinism; she had none of their shrewd middle-class complacency. Instead of their little brown eyes that were so greedy and twinkling, hers were very large and rather a pale blue. They were dreamy, candid eyes. She was without their instinctive worldliness. She was lovely too, in a far vaguer, less perfect way than my mother. She reminded me always of those large white flowers—elder-blossom, cow parsley, that one sees in the fields in June. Perhaps my mother’s laughing nickname—‘Old Cow’—suggests the cow parsley. Or again, a White faint moon in a blue sky suggests her. Or those large white roses that have many petals and are semi-transparent. She had beautiful fair hair, growing in horns over her forehead; and no colour in her face at all. As for teaching—she had perhaps a governess; went to classes; was taught the violin by Arnold Dolmetsch and played in Mrs Marshall’s orchestra. But there was a stoppage in her mind, a gentle impassivity about books and learning. As Jack told me after her death, she thought herself so stupid as to be almost wanting; and said that the rheumatic fever she had as a child had (I remember the word) ‘touched’ her. But again, what was remarkable considering the Duckworth strain—so boorish, so rustic, so philistine—is that however simple she was in brain, she was not, as George’s sister might so well have been, a cheery ordinary English upper middle class girl with rosy cheeks and bright brown eyes. She was herself. She remains quite distinct in my mind. What is odd is that I cannot compare her either in character or face with anyone else. What she would have looked like now in a room full of other people I cannot imagine; or how she would have talked. I have never seen anyone who reminded me of her; and that is true too of my mother. They do not blend in the world of the living at all.

She was nineteen when I was six or seven; and as a girl could not then go about London alone, I used as a small child to be sent with her, as chaperone. Among my earliest memories is the memory of going out with her perhaps to shop, or to pay some call; and, the errand done, she would take me to a shop and give me a glass of milk and biscuits sprinkled with sugar on a marble table. And sometimes we went in hansoms. But she lived, of course, downstairs in the drawing room; pouring out tea; and there were many young men, it seemed when one dashed in for a second, sitting round her. Vaguely we knew that Arthur Studd was in love with her; and Ted Sanderson; and I think Richard Norton; and Jim Stephen. That great figure with the deep voice and the wild eyes would come to the house looking for her, with his madness on him; and would burst into the nursery and spear the bread on his swordstick and at one time we were told to go out by the back door and if we met Jim we were to say that Stella was away.

19th July 1939. I was forced to break off again, and rather suspect that these breaks will be the end of this memoir.

I was thinking about Stella as we crossed the Channel a month ago. I have not given her a thought since. The past only comes back when the present runs so smoothly that it is like the sliding surface of a deep river. Then one sees through the surface to the depths. In those moments I find one of my greatest satisfactions, not that I am thinking of the past; but that it is then that I am living most fully in the present. For the present when backed by the past is a thousand times deeper than the present when it presses so close that you can feel nothing else, when the film on the camera reaches only the eye. But to feel the present sliding over the depths of the past, peace is necessary. The present must be smooth, habitual. For this reason—that it destroys the fullness of life—any break—like that of house moving—causes me extreme distress; it breaks; it shallows; it turns the depth into hard thin splinters. As I say to L⁠[eonard]: “What’s there real about this? Shall we ever live a real life again?” “At Monks House,” he says. So I write this, taking a morning off from the word filing and fitting that my life of Roger means—I write this partly in order to recover my sense of the present by getting the past to shadow this broken surface. Let me then, like a child advancing with bare feet into a cold river, descend again into that stream.

… Jim Stephen was in love with Stella. He was mad then. He was in the exalted stage of his madness. He would dash up in a hansom; leave my father to pay it. The hansom had been driving him about London all day. The man wanted perhaps a sovereign. It was paid. For ‘dear Jim’ was a great favourite. Once, as I say, he dashed up [to] the nursery and speared the bread. Another time, off we went to his room in De Vere Gardens and he painted me on a small bit of wood. He was a great painter for a time. I suppose madness made him believe he was all powerful. Once he came in at breakfast, “Savage has just told me I’m in danger of dying or going mad”, he laughed. And soon he ran naked through Cambridge; was taken to an asylum; and died. This great mad figure with his broad shoulders and very clean cut mouth, and the deep voice and the powerful face—and the very blue eyes—this mad man would recite poetry to us; “The Burial of Sir John Moore”, I remember; and he always brings to mind some tormented bull; and also Achilles—Achilles on his pressed bed lolling roars out a deep applause. He was in love with Stella—incongruously enough. And we had orders to tell him, if we met him in the street, that she was away, staying with the Lushingtons at Pyports. There was a great mystery about love then.

Jim was one of her lovers. The other—that is, the most important—was Jack Hills. It was at St Ives that she refused him; late one night we heard her sobbing through the attic wall. He had gone at once. A refusal in those days was catastrophic. It meant a complete breach. Human relations, at least between the sexes, were carried on as relations between countries are now—with ambassadors, and treaties. The parties concerned met on the great occasion of the proposal. If this were refused, a state of war was declared. That explains why she cried so bitterly. For she had done something of great practical as well as emotional importance. He went off at once—to Norway to fish; later perhaps they met in a completely formal way at parties. Negotiations were kept faintly alive through my mother; an interpreter was necessary. All this procedure gave love its solemnity. Feelings were banked up; silence interposed; there was in every family a code, a religious code, that penetrated, somehow or other, to the children. It was secret; but we guessed.

Thus, when my mother died, Stella was left without any negotiator, for my father did not fill the part. He must have come back—it proves how deep the feeling was to admit such a return—the night before my mother died. It was desperate but not hopeless.

June 8th 1940. I have just found this sheaf of notes, thrown away into my waste-paper basket. I had been tidying up; and had cast all my life of Roger into that large basket, and with it, these sheets too. Now I am correcting the final page proofs of Roger; and it was to refresh myself from that antlike meticulous labour that I determined to look for these pages. Shall I ever finish these notes—let alone make a book from them? The battle is at its crisis; every night the Germans fly over England; it comes closer to this house daily. If we are beaten then—however we solve that problem, and one solution is apparently suicide (so it was decided three nights ago in London among us)—book writing becomes doubtful. But I wish to go on, not to settle down in that dismal puddle.

Jack Hills, I was saying, came back the night before my mother died, which shows that though the negotiations had been broken off, there must have been a connection, or how could he have come that night of great crisis? We were in the back drawing room, and there was the tea tray, for we had a curious habit of drinking tea about nine o’clock. The silver hot water jug which I still possess—but it has a hole in it—had a handle that grew hot. Aunt Mary, summoned from Brighton, picked it up and put it down quickly. “Only Mrs Stephen and Stella can manage that”, said Jack Hills with the queer sad little smile that went with the little joke. And I remember that he said ‘Stella’. And since he was there, that last night, the affair must have been in being—sufficiently so to make it possible for him to be with us in intimacy. That was the 4th May, 1895.

The next thing I remember is the night at Hindhead (August 22nd 1896)—the black and silver night of mysterious voices, the night when father packed us off to bed early; and we heard voices in the garden; and saw Stella and Jack passing; and disappearing; and the tramp came; and Thoby countered him; and Nessa and I sat up in our bedroom waiting; and Stella never came; and at last in the early morning she came and told us that she was engaged; and I whispered, “Did mother know?” and she murmured, “Yes”.

And next morning at breakfast there was excitement and emotion and gloom. Adrian cried; and Jack kissed him; and father said gently but seriously: “We must all be happy, because Stella is happy”—a command which, poor man, he could not himself obey.

But Jack Hills? He had been at Eton with George. He stands in my mind’s picture gallery for a type—and a desirable type; the English country gentleman type, I might call it, by way of running a line round it; and I add, it is a type I have seldom been intimate with; perhaps no one is ever intimate with the country gentleman type; yet for nine years I was intimate with Jack Hills; a reason perhaps why we became so completely separate later; it was impossible to begin again formally after that intimacy. And the country gentleman came to the surface and separated us.

Can I quickly fill in that outline? To begin then, he was the son of a commonplace little round man—Judge Hills—‘Buzzy’ he was called in the family—and like a bluebottle, buzzing, I still remember him; short, jocular, in knickerbockers, giving us Russian toffee up at Corby. Buzzy had once written a sonnet that had been taken for Shakespeare’s, and liked to make little facetious jokes with young ladies—I remember Susan Lushington “didn’t know which way to look”, she said, when he chaffed her about a husband—“I seemed to be sitting on a tripod and looking into the future”, Buzzy said, having archly used the word husband when it should have been father—Buzzy lived chiefly in Egypt, and Mrs Hills—Anna her name was—lived mostly alone at Corby. She was a hard, worldly woman, tightly dressed in black satin in London; up at Corby, a county lady, collecting Chelsea enamel snuff boxes, with ambitions to be the friend of intellectual men. She detested women; she got on very well with Andrew Lang. He stayed there often; and she described a party when the local dentist came in a frock coat—“all the other men looking so picturesque in knickerbockers.” And she said: “I was in mourning for nine people at Easter”; also, looking at horses in the paddock, “That makes the second pair”; also she stressed “under housemaid” to impress us that she had several; and dwelt on the noble descent of the Curwens, to whom they were related; and went weekly to Naworth with a wreath to lay on Christopher Howard’s grave. It was handed in at the carriage; like a picnic basket—the weekly wreath. And I still see her in shiny black satin and feathered Victorian hat bending over the grave in Naworth burial ground; and Susan whispering in agitation “Suppose Lady Carlisle or one of them should come out and catch us!” These recollections spring from that dreary and terrifying week at Corby after Stella’s death in the autumn of 1897. They leased Corby from the Howards; the lion stood with his tail perfectly straight on top of the roof. The river dashed through the grounds; and there I saw Jack catch a salmon; for the first time after those desperate months he looked triumphant; and worn as he [had] come to look, I was struck by his sudden exultation as the line tautened and he held the fish there in the river. We saw it afterwards in the game larder; and Mrs Hills asked: “Has he those little creatures on him?” It was a proof of freshness, I think, if you found lice on a salmon. Tuddenham, the keeper, who stood by us on the bank, said: “He’s hooked him.”

To return to Anna Hills. She hated women. But I doubt that she was sexually ambitious. I think all she wanted was to rule a little court of well brushed, mildly well-known males; in the decorous, snobbish Victorian manner. She was thankful, I remember she told us, that she had no daughters; and it was plain she detested having us two rather gawky girls to stay. “Your hair’s parted awry”, she said, fixing me with her little black eyes. Fortunately she had three sons; and they were sent to Eton and Oxford. She liked the soft sweet voiced Eustace with his drawl, and his pleasant manners, and his gentle ways, far the best. Jack and she were on very distant terms. Thus it was natural that when he was living alone in Ebury Street, very hard up, very hard worked, stammering, and lonely, that he came to my mother for sympathy. They were very intimate. Indeed Kitty Maxse said, discussing my mother and her masterful ways once: “For instance, how could Mrs Hills have liked it—Jack treating your mother as if she were his?” He was, roughly speaking, affectionate, honest, domestic, and a perfect gentleman. He was a real [countryman] too; not a fake; a passionate countryman. He rode very well; he fished very well; and there was too a vein of poetry in him. Once when we met years later he told me he read every book of new poetry that came out; and thought the young poets (then Siegfried Sassoon; Robert Graves; and de la Mare) every bit as good as the old. He read philosophy too; Nettleship, the Oxford philosopher, had been a kind of god to him. “He was like Christ”, I remember his saying, in his emphatic sententious way, as he tried very laboriously to explain Nettleship’s philosophy; he lent us the book; it was at Warboys that I remember him explaining Plato to me and Nessa and Marny Vaughan. Gerald, who sat beneath the window, sneered later: “Well, how did the Sunday prayer meeting go off?” But he was not, compared with my own friends, anything but a simple, primitive-minded man. Unlike them, however—was it for this I liked him, yet could never be altogether at my ease with him?—he was an all-round man; without any gift that dominated, he did a great many different things. He was a Gunner. “I have heard of him standing on one foot, driving three horses”, Ethel Dilke wrote when the engagement was public, “and I’ve no doubt he does other things as well.” He was a good solicitor. Doggedly he worked his way high up into the firm of Roper and Whateley; of Whateley he used to tell many stories: “a disgusting man, but in some ways the ablest man I have ever known. He was a great fisherman—so they say. And I like his fishing books.” Politics came later. He was also very deft with his hands. But as I heard my mother tell my father once, he was ‘nothing out of the way’ intellectually. His appearance was in keeping with this rough sketch. He had beautiful brown eyes, a nose with an obstinate knob at the end of it; curious wrinkles, like a dachshund’s, round his retreating chin. (He was of course very fond of dogs.) He stammered, and his stammer made his very positive statements—“A duck must have water”—all the more positive when at last he got them out. We laughed at him and could imitate him as time went on. He was scrupulously clean; he washed all over ever so many times a day, and was scrupulously well dressed, as a Victorian city solicitor; also as a countryman. The word ‘scrupulous’ suggests itself when I think of Jack Hills. He was scrupulously honest, honourable, in the Eton and Balliol sense, but there was more to his scrupulosity than that. He it was who first spoke to me openly and deliberately about sex—in Fitzroy Square, with the green carpet and the red Chinese curtains. He opened my eyes on purpose, as I think, to the part played by sex in the life of the ordinary man. He shocked me a little, wholesomely. He told me that young men talked incessantly of women; and ‘had’ them incessantly. “But are they—” I hesitated for a word and then ventured “honourable?” He laughed, “of course—of course”, he assured me. Sexual relations had nothing to do with honour. Having women was a mere trifle in a man’s life, he explained, and made not a jot of difference to their honourableness—to their reputation with other men. I was incredibly, but only partially, innocent. I knew nothing about ordinary men’s lives, and thought all men, like my father, loved one woman only, and were ‘dishonourable’ if unchaste, as much as women; yet, at the same time I had known since I was sixteen or so, all about sodomy, through reading Plato. That was Jack’s honesty; and it differed from George’s or Gerald’s. Neither of them would have spoken to any girl as cleanly, humorously, openly, about sex. That quality penetrated to us as children, and he brought too, country life into our distinguished literary, book-loving world. He taught us to sugar trees; he gave us his copy of Morris’s Butterflies and Moths, over which I spent many hours, hunting up our catches among all those pictures of hearts and darts and setaceous Hebrew characters. For I had the post of name finder in our Entomological Society; and was scolded severely by Thoby, I remember, for slackness. At dinner one night Gerald disclosed, with his teasing and treacherous laughter, how we had a store of dying insects in old tooth-powder jars at the bottom of the well. Greatly to our relief instead of scolding and forbidding, mother and, I think, father recognised our mania; and put it on a legal basis; bought us nets and setting boards; and indeed she went with Walter Headlam down to the St Ives public house and bought us rum. How strange a scene—my mother buying rum. She would go round the sugar after we were in bed.

But to return to Jack—when Stella accepted him, we approved, in our republic, which, though rapidly losing shape, was still in being after mother’s death. The marriage would have been, I think, a very happy marriage. It should have borne many children. And still she might have been alive. Certainly he was passionately in love; she at first passively. And it was through that engagement that I had my first vision—so intense, so exciting, so rapturous was it that the word vision applies—my first vision then of love between man and woman. It was to me like a ruby; the love I detected that winter of their engagement, glowing, red, clear, intense. It gave me a conception of love; a standard of love; a sense that nothing in the whole world is so lyrical, so musical, as a young man and a young woman in their first love for each other. I connect it with respectable engagements; unofficial love never gives me the same feeling. “My Love’s like a red, red rose, that’s newly sprang in June”—that was the feeling they gave; the feeling that has always come back, when I hear of ‘an engagement’; not when I hear of ‘an affair’. It derives from Stella and Jack. It springs from the ecstasy I felt, in my covert, behind the folding doors of the Hyde Park Gate drawing room. I sat there, shielded, being half insane with shyness and nervousness; reading Fanny Burney’s diary; and feeling come over me intermittent waves of very strong emotion—rage sometimes; how often I was enraged by father then!—love, or the reflection of love, too. It was bodiless; a light; an ecstasy. But also extraordinarily enduring. Once I came on a letter from him which she had slipped between the blotting paper—a sign of the lack of privacy in which we lived—and read it. “There is nothing sweeter in the whole world than our love”, he wrote. I put the page down, not so much guiltily, at having pried; but in a quiver of ecstasy at the revelation. Still I cannot read words that give me that quiver twice over. If I get a letter that pleases me intensely, I never read it again. Why I wonder? For fear lest it shall dwindle? This colour, this incandescence, was in Stella’s whole body. Her pallor became lit up, her eyes bluer. She had something of moonlight about her that winter, as she went about the house. “There’s never been anything like it in the world”, I said—or something like it—when she found me awake one night. And she laughed, tenderly, very gently, and kissed me and said, “Oh lots of people are in love as we are. You and Nessa will be one day”, she said. Once she told me, “You must expect people to look at you both”.

“Nessa”, she said, “is much more beautiful than I ever was”—at twenty-six she spoke of her beauty as a thing of the past. She told Aunt Mary—I think I read this too, nefariously, in some letter in a blotting book, she could only be neat and tidy now; she was to float us on the life of love; to launch us out on the ordinary woman’s life that promised such treasures. At some party, perhaps Nessa’s first party, a party where she wore white and amethysts perhaps, a party where Desmond remarked her ‘like a Greek slave’, she was certain that George Booth had fallen in love, and feared, tenderly foreboding, yet proudly, and gladly, how the Booths would mind if Nessa rejected him. Had Stella lived, the recollection makes me reflect, how different ‘coming out’ and those Greek slave years and all their drudgery and tyranny and rebellion would have been!

For some reason Stella and Jack’s engagement lasted all the months from July till April. It was a clumsy, cruel, unnecessary trial for them both. Looking back, it seems everything was done without care or consideration, clumsily, wantonly. I conceive that as the months of that long waiting time passed she slowly roused herself out of the numb, frozen state in which mother’s death had left her. At first she found in Jack rest and support; a refuge from all the worries and responsibilities of ‘the family’, relief too from those glooms which father never controlled, and spent on her. Slowly she became more positive, less passive; and asserted Jack’s rights; her desire too for her own house; her own husband; a life, a home of their own. At last the promise, apparently exacted by father, and tacitly accepted, that they were to live on with us after their marriage, an arrangement now incredible but then accepted, became intolerable; and she went up to father one night in his study; and told him so; and there was ‘an explosion’.

As the engagement went on, father became indeed increasingly tyrannical. He didn’t like the name ‘Jack’, I remember his saying; it sounded like the smack of a whip. He was jealous clearly. But in those days nothing was clear. He had his traditional pose; he was the lonely; the deserted; the old unhappy man. In fact he was possessive; hurt; a man jealous of the young man. There was every excuse, he would have said, had he been asked, for his explosions. And as by this time he had entrenched himself away from all truth, in a world which it is almost impossible to describe, for I know no one now who could inhabit such a world-the engagement was incredibly involved, frustrated, and impeded. At last in April 1897 the marriage took place—conventionally, ceremoniously, with bells ringing, and company collected, and silver engraved wedding invitations, at St Mary Abbots. Nessa and I handed flowers to the guests; father marched up the aisle with Stella on his arm.

“He took it for granted that he was to give her away”, George and Gerald grumbled. He ignored the fact that they had any claim. No one would have dared to take that privilege from him. It was somehow typical—his assumption; and his enjoyment of the attitude. They went to Italy; we to Brighton. One fortnight was the length of their honeymoon. And directly she came back she was taken ill. It was appendicitis; she was going to have a baby. And that was mismanaged too; and so, after three months of intermittent illness, she died—at 24 Hyde Park Gate, on July 27th, 1897.

The present. June 19th 1940. As we sat down to lunch two days ago, Monday 17th, John came in, looked white about the gills, his pale eyes paler than usual, and said the French have stopped fighting. Today the dictators dictate their terms to France. Meanwhile, on this very hot morning, with a blue bottle buzzing and a toothless organ grinding and the men calling strawberries in the Square, I sit in my room at 37 M[ecklenburgh] S[quare] and turn to my father.

My father now falls to be described, because it was during the seven years between Stella’s death in 1897 and his death in 1904 that Nessa and I were fully exposed without protection to the full blast of that strange character. Nessa, when Stella died, was just eighteen; I fifteen and a half. In order to explain why I say “exposed”, and why, though the word is not the right one—but I cannot find one that is—I call him a strange character, I should have to be able to inhabit again the outworn shell of my own childish mind and body. I am much nearer his age now than my own then. But do I therefore ‘understand’ him better than I did? Or have I only queered the angle of that immensely important relationship, so that I shall fail to describe it, either from his point of view or my own? I see him now from round the corner; not directly in front of me. Further, just as I rubbed out a good deal of the force of my mother’s memory by writing about her in To the Lighthouse, so I rubbed out much of his memory there too. Yet he too obsessed me for years. Until I wrote it out, I would find my lips moving; I would be arguing with him; raging against him; saying to myself all that I never said to him. How deep they drove themselves into me, the things it was impossible to say aloud. They are still some of them sayable; when Nessa for instance revives the memory of Wednesday and its weekly books, I still feel come over me that old frustrated fury.

But in me, though not in her, rage alternated with love. It was only the other day when I read Freud for the first time, that I discovered that this violently disturbing conflict of love and hate is a common feeling; and is called ambivalence. But before I analyse our relation as father and daughter, I will try to sketch him as I think he must have been, not to me, but to the world at large.

He was a little early Victorian boy, brought up in the intense narrow, evangelical yet political, highly intellectual yet completely unaesthetic, Stephen family, that had one foot in Clapham, the other in Downing Street. Such is the obvious first sentence of his biography. And as it goes on, it is all so obvious that I cannot bring myself to follow it—how he went to Eton and was unhappy; went to Cambridge and was in his element; was not elected an Apostle, was muscular; coached his boat; and Christian; but shed his Christianity—with such anguish, Fred Maitland once hinted to me, that he thought of suicide, and how then, like Pendennis or any other of the Victorian young men of intellect—he was typical of them—took to writing for the papers, went to America; and was, so far as I can see, the very type, or mould, of so many Cambridge intellectuals—like George Trevelyan, like Charlie Sanger, like Goldie Dickinson—whom I knew later. It bores me to write of him, to try to describe him, partly because it is all so familiar; partly because it is a type that for me lacks picturesqueness, oddity, romance. That type is like a steel engraving, without colour, or warmth or body; but with an infinity of precise clear lines. There are no crannies or corners to catch my imagination; nothing dangles a spray at me. It is all contained and complete and already summed up. Of course, I say to myself, I admire them. I go on: I respect them, I say; I admire their honesty, their integrity, their intellect. I have so clear an impression of them on my surface that if I am in the same room with them I feel I know exactly where I am; indeed, if I am in the same room with other types, like Harold Nicolson or Hugh Walpole, I have my Cambridge intellectual yard measure handy; and say silently: How terribly you fall short. How you miss the mark, here and here and here. But at the same time I am seduced; and feel that my measure has been proved faulty. The Harold Nicolsons and the Hugh Walpoles give me colour and warmth; they amuse and stimulate me. But still I do not respect them as I respect George Moore.

But I can add something to my father’s steel engraving—a violent temper. Even as a child Aunt Anny told me, he would work himself into such violent rages that—I forget how she finished the sentence, but I think it had something to do with smashing a flower pot in a greenhouse; and nobody—nobody—could control him, she said. This temper that he could not control, and that, considering his worship of reason, his hatred of gush, of exaggeration, of all superlatives, seems inconsistent. It was due, I suppose, to the fact that he was spoilt as a child; because of his nervous delicacy; and that delicacy excused his extreme irritability. But it was also, I guess, the convention, supported by the great men of the time, Carlyle, Tennyson, that men of genius were naturally uncontrolled. [And genius when my father was a young man was in full flower. A man of genius meant a man who had fits of positive inspiration; “Ah but,” I can remember my father saying of Stevenson, “he was a man of genius.” Those who had genius in the Victorian sense were like the prophets; different, another breed. They dressed differently; wore long hair, great black hats, capes and cloaks. They were invariably “ill to live with”. But it never struck my father, I believe, that there was any harm in being ill to live with. I think he said unconsciously as he worked himself up into one of those violent outbursts: “This is a sign of my genius,” and he called in Carlyle to confirm him, and let himself fly. It was part of the convention that after these outbursts, the man of genius became “touchingly apologetic”; but he took it for granted that his wife or sister would accept his apology, that he was exempt, because of his genius, from the laws of good society. But was he a man of genius? No; that was not alas quite the case. “Only a good second class mind,” he once told me, as we walked around the croquet lawn at Fritham. And he said he might have done well to be a scientist.

This frustrated desire to be a man of genius, and the knowledge that he was in truth not in the first flight—a knowlege which led to a great deal of despondency, and to that self-centredness which in later life at least made him so childishly greedy for compliments, made him brood so disproportionately over his failure and the extent of it and the reasons for it—these arc qualities that break up the fine steel engraving of the typical Cambridge intellectual. He had considerably more idiosyncracy, more character as a man—for I am trying to see him as a man not as a father—than the stock Cambridge type. For men like Lowell and Fred Maitland and Herbert Fisher not only admired him; but felt a protecting humorous love for him; so I judge from his power to breed stories; to create a legend. Fred Maitland for instance told how they marched over the Cornish moors all day and Leslie was silent; “but I felt we had become friends”; and Lytton told me of some Strachey cousin who had watched my father as he sat by the fire swinging his foot, and every time his foot swung it knocked against a fire dog; and every time my father said “Damn”; but not another word. And the Strachey cousin was attracted. Mrs Cornish too, speaking of his great attractiveness to Fred Benson, said: “He did by instinct all the little things that women like.”

He had clearly that—something—which is not this quality or that quality, but all sorts of qualities summed up into what one calls “character”; personality; a way of impressing silence; a way of impressing the word “damn”; so that if one points to his obvious qualities—his honesty, his unworldliness, his lovableness, his perfect sincerity—one is singling out from a whole single qualities which were part of that whole; and the whole was different from the qualities of which it was made. At any rate, I gather from stories, from memories, that Leslie Stephen apart from his books was a figure; a man who if he came into the room changed what was said and felt; and lived a very real life in the minds of men like Walter Headlam or Herbert Fisher; to whom he was a representative man; a man with a standard they often referred to. If a man like Leslie Stephen likes Tristram Shandy, Walter Headlam wrote to someone, then it must be all right. That gives what I mean.

And thus as I dribble on, purposely letting my mind flow, I am introducing a picturesque element into the steel engraving; something that one cannot analyse. Was I not conscious of this as a child? Was it not the origin of the love half of my ambivalent feeling? I too felt his attractiveness. It arose—to name some elements at random—from his simplicity, his integrity, his eccentricity—by which I mean he would say exactly what he thought, however inconvenient; and do what he liked. He had clear, direct feelings. He had certain ruling passions. Off he would stride with his sandwiches for some tremendous walk. Out he would come with some fact, or opinion, no matter who was there. And he had very strong opinions; and he was extremely well informed. What he said was thus most respectfully listened to. He had a godlike, yet childlike, standing in the family. He had an extraordinarily privileged position. I twisted my hair, imitating him. “Father does it,” I told my mother when she objected. “Ah but you can’t do everything father docs,” she said, conveying to me that he was licensed, for he was somehow not bound by the laws of ordinary people.

He was a curious figure thus sitting often dead silent at the head of the family dinner table. Sometimes he was caustic; sometimes to Thoby especially instructive. He would ask what was the cube root of such and such a number; for he always worked out mathematical problems on railway tickets; or told us how to find the “dominical number”—when Easter falls was it? And mother would protest; no mathematics, she would say, at meals. Sometimes with an old friend he would laugh, at a college story I suspect, till the veins swelled on his forehead. Yes, certainly I felt his presence; and had many a shock of acute pleasure when he fixed his very small, very blue eyes upon me and somehow made me feel that we two were in league together. There was something we had in common. “What have you got hold of?” he would say, looking over my shoulder at the book I was reading; and how proud, priggishly, I was, if he gave his little amused surprised snort, when he found me reading some book that no child of my age could understand. I was a snob no doubt, and read partly to make him think me a very clever little brat. And I remember his pleasure, how he stopped writing and got up and was very gentle and pleased, when I came into the study with a book I had done; and asked him for another. Indeed I was often on his side, even when he was exploding. He had come back, I remember, from a Sunday tramp, smelling airy and muddy in his rough suit, and there on the hearthrug was the stout imperturbable Dermod O’Brien, in love with Stella, and asked, out of kindness, to stay to dinner. Again my father strode up and down the drawing room, groaning, swearing. He could say much more than anyone could believe without caring if the victim—stout Dermod—overheard. The genius mood was on him; and must be accepted. Did he mind if it wasn’t? For some reason that night while noting my mother’s half laughing deprecation—she was guilty of impulsive hospitality—I shared his mood not hers. You are right, you are right, I kept repeating, surveying the scene from my station on the raised step. I affirmed my sympathy, felt my likeness. And to top it all, though I never saw him with anything like the clarity that I saw my mother, he was, intermittently, especially when his hair was curled in a thick bob behind his ears, a very striking, indeed a magnificent figure; well dressed in his Hill Brothers’ clothes; a swallow tail coat; very lean and tall and bent, with his beard flowing so that his little scraggy tie scarcely showed. His chin I think retreated; perhaps his mouth, which I never saw, was a little looselipped; but his forehead rose and swelled; his skull was magnificent, with a little dent over the arch of the brain, that he made me feel once; and though his eyes were very small, with hairy eyebrows hanging over them, they were pure bright forget-me-not blue. His hands were beautifully shaped; and he wore a signet ring with his double eagle crest engraved on a pale blue stone. As a trifling sign of his indifference to appearances, he went on wearing the ring when the stone was lost. He must have put on his clothes automatically, to the sound of poetry, I expect; the waistcoat was often unbuttoned; sometimes the fly buttons; and the coat was often grey with tobacco ash. He smoked pipes incessantly as he wrote, but never in the drawing room. There he sat in his own chair, with a little table beside him on which was a lamp and two or three books, and my mother sat behind him at her writing table built into a very dark angle of the room; with Lowell’s snuffers to snuff her candles; and as my father read he kicked his foot up and down, and twisted and untwisted the lock behind his ear. He was always absorbed; often seemed completely unconscious of his surroundings; and lived by rote—that is always at a certain moment would be up and off—upstairs to work, out to walk; every Saturday to visit James Payn; or off to some meeting. And out of doors he strode along, often shaking his head emphatically as he recited poetry, and giving his stick a flourish. He wore a billycock hat always, which sat rather oddly upon that great head with the thick bush of hair flowing out on either side. And I remember him too in very respectable evening dress dining out with my mother; and his black waistcoat had a cord round the edge, and he wore elastic sided boots. “I shall be glad when all this dining out is over, Jinny,” he said to me, standing waiting by the lamp; and I was flattered by his confidence; yet felt that he enjoyed it.

They dined out quite often in those days, and gave dinner parties too. Indeed for all his unconventionality, he accepted the social conventions so much more completely than we do that I wonder how it is that I feel that he was remote from all that. It came quite naturally to him to drive off in a hansom in evening dress; he made no bones about dinner parties of eight or ten; and a hired parlourmaid, and a dinner which had ever so many courses and different wines. I can see him taking a lady downstairs on his arm; and laughing. He cannot have been as severe and melancholy and morose as I make him out. He must have made conversation and told anecdotes, and he had, now I come to think of it, a little card case and went calling, like other Victorian gentlemen of a Sunday afternoon. Undoubtedly I colour my picture too dark, and the Leslie Stephen whom the world saw in the eighties, and in the nineties until my mother died, must have been not merely a Cambridge steel engraving intellectual. He must have been an attractive man at fifty; a man who had four small children, and a beautiful wife; a man who came into the drawing room in evening dress and marched off down to dinner with Mrs Gosse, or Lady Romer, or Mrs Booth, or Lady Lyttleton, just as he presided over London Library meetings and went to the Ad Eundem dinner at Oxford or at Cambridge. There was a Leslie Stephen who played his part normally, without any oddity or outburst, in drawing rooms and dining rooms and committees. Still, I cannot conceive my father in evening dress. I cannot conceive him hearing everything that was said, and making jokes and being, of course, an intellectual man, but still a man of that well to do sociable late Victorian world. I remember my amazement, my envy, when the Booths said their father took them to dances. How astonished I felt when Charles Booth said something humorous about “shepherding my flock” and I realised that Charles Booth took Meg and Imogen to parties. When he and my mother drive off in their hansom which Amy has whistled off the rank, standing out in the street in her cap and apron and giving two shrill blasts till the hansom comes trotting—sometimes two hansoms raced each other and disputed which had come first—when they descend the many steps from the front door to the street, he passes beyond my horizon. I have never met anyone who knew my father in evening dress; I have never met him thus dressed in memoirs even. Yet he had great charm for women, and was often attracted, as I could tell from something gallant and tender in his manner, by the young and lovely. The name of an American, Mrs Grey, comes back to me, and my mother somehow conveying to me that I might tease him, as I extricated crumbs from his beard, about “flirting with pretty ladies”. Those were the words I used; and he looked at me not angry, for I was only acting a parrot; still I remember the sudden shock, then he controlled what might have been a snort; and said something emphatic, as if to show me he would stand no jokes about that. There succeeds to that shock a memory of the immense emphasis with which once, when we were disputing were mother’s eyes large or small: “Your mother’s eyes are the most beautiful in the world.” All the same I like to remember, for it gives humanity to his austere figure, that he was so struck, so normally and masculinely affected by Mrs Langtry’s beauty, that he actually went to the play to see her. Otherwise he never went to a play; never went to picture galleries; had no ear whatsoever for music—when Joachim played at Little Holland House, he asked, when is it going to begin?—the Beethoven or the Mozart being to his ears only “tuning up”. In all his life he never troubled to visit Italy or France. Going abroad meant to him solely going to Switzerland to climb mountains; or going to Switzerland to look at mountains.

Mecklenburgh Square again on a hot summer day, July 1940. Invasion still impends. My book is out; and jaded and distracted I return to this free page.

The sociable father then I never knew. Father as a writer I can get of course in his books; the father who is related to the man’s Leslie Stephen, I suppose. The Leslie whom so many writers and scholars admired, though many thought him cold and sneering; just as many thought him formidable and wild and inapproachable. He is to be found here and there in memoirs. He never spoke a word when Stevenson and Gosse lunched with him, and sat silent with his long cold hands and his fan shaped beard flowing over his breast. When I read his books I get a critical grasp on him; I always read Hours in a Library by way of filling out my ideas, say of Coleridge, if I’m reading Coleridge; and always find something to fill out; to correct; to stiffen my fluid vision. I find not a subtle mind; not an imaginative mind; not a suggestive mind. But a strong mind; a healthy out of door, moor striding mind; an impatient, limited mind; a conventional mind entirely accepting his own standard of what is honest, what is moral, without a shadow of doubt accepting this is a good man; that is a good woman; I get a sense of Leslie Stephen, the muscular agnostic; cheery, hearty; always cracking up sense and manliness; and crying down sentiment and vagueness, yet putting in a dab of sentiment in the right place—“I will say no more … exquisite sensibility … thoroughly masculine … feminine delicacy …”. That shows a very simply constructed view of the world; and the world was, I suppose, more simple then. It was a black and white world compared with ours; obvious things to be destroyed—headed humbug, obvious things to be preserved—headed domestic virtues. I admire (laughingly) that Leslie Stephen; and sometimes lately have envied him. Yet he is not a writer for whom I have a natural taste. Yet just as a dog takes a bite of grass, I take a bite of him medicinally, and there often steals in, not a filial, but a reader’s affection for him; for his courage, his simplicity, for his strength and nonchalance, and neglect of appearances.

Through his books I can get at the writer father still; but when Nessa and I inherited the rule of the house, I knew nothing of the sociable father, and the writer father was much more exacting and pressing than he is now that I find him only in books; and it was the tyrant father—the exacting, the violent, the histrionic, the demonstrative, the self-centred, the self pitying, the deaf, the appealing, the alternately loved and hated father—that dominated me then. It was like being shut up in the same cage with a wild beast. Suppose I, at fifteen, was a nervous, gibbering, little monkey, always spitting or cracking a nut and shying the shells about, and mopping and mowing, and leaping into dark corners and then swinging in rapture across the cage, he was the pacing, dangerous, morose lion; a lion who was sulky and angry and injured; and suddenly ferocious, and then very humble, and then majestic; and then lying dusty and fly pestered in a corner of the cage.

Now I shall try to describe the cage—22 Hyde Park Gate—as it was in July 1897. Two nights ago I lay awake in Mecklenburgh Square going over each of the rooms. I began at the basement; in the servants’ sitting room. It was at the back; very low and very dark; there was an ottoman covered in shiny black American cloth along one wall; and a vast cracked picture of Mr and Mrs Pattle covered the wall above it. I remember a very tall young man with tight trousers strapped over the instep, and white socks. It was relegated to the room because it was so big, so cracked, so bad—compared with the Watts portraits upstairs. One could hardly see it—who was the woman? I cannot see her—or anything else; for the creepers hung down in front of the window, in summer strung with hand-shaped semi-transparent leaves. There was an iron trellis to support them, and outside the little, dust-smelling, patchy square of wall-circled back garden. I remember the wood cupboard in the passage; piled with bundles of fire-wood tied with tarry string; once when I rummaged there for a stick to whittle, two eyes glowed in a corner, and Sophie warned me that a wild cat lived there. Wild cats might have lived there. The basement was a dark insanitary place for seven maids to live in. “It’s like hell,” one of them burst out to my mother as we sat at lessons in the dining room. My mother at once assumed the frozen dignity of the Victorian matron; and said (perhaps): “Leave the room”; and she (unfortunate girl) vanished behind the red plush curtain which, hooped round a semi-circular wire, and anchored by a great gold knob, hid the door that led from the dining room to the pantry.

It was in the dining room, at the long baize covered table, that we did our lessons. My mother’s finger with the opal ring I loved pointed its way across French and Latin Grammars. The dining room had two little windows filled with bottle glass at one end. Built into the alcove was a heavily carved sideboard; on which stood a blue china dumb-waiter; and a biscuit tin shaped like a barrel. The room smelt slightly of wine, cigars, food. It was lit also by a skylight, one pane of which lifted in a wind and made me shiver, lest it should crash on our heads. Round the walls hung Sir Joshua engravings; in the corner on a pedestal of mottled yellow marble stood the bust of the first Sir James—an eyeless, white man. who still presides in the hall of Adrian’s house in Regents Park. It was a very Victorian dining room; with a complete set of chairs carved in oak; high-backed; with red plush panels. At dinner time with all its silver candles, silver dishes, knives and forks and napkins, the dinner table looked very festive. A twisting staircase led to the hall. In the hall lay a dog, beside him a bowl of water with a chunk of yellow sulphur in it. In the hall facing the front door stood a cabinet with blue china; and on it a gold faced clock. In the hall was a three-cornered chair; and a chest in which rugs were kept; and on this chest was a silver salver deep in visiting cards; and a plush glove for smoothing the silk of George’s and Gerald’s top hats; and I also remember nailed over the fire place a long strip of chocolate coloured cardboard on which was written: “What is to be a gentleman? It is to be tender to women, chivalrous to servants …”—what else I cannot remember; though I used to know it by heart. What innocence, what incredible simplicity of mind it showed—to keep this cardboard quotation—from Thackeray I think—perpetually displayed, as if it were a frontispiece to a book—nailed to the wall in the hall of the house.

The two drawing rooms opened out of the hall; the front and the back drawing room. The front, facing the street, was comparatively light; the Watts portrait of father faced the door, a flattered, an idealised picture, up to which father would lead admiring ladies; and pause and contemplate it, with some complacency. But “Lowell said it makes me look like a weasel,” he once said. There was the grand piano upon which Christmas presents were stood; and Stella’s writing table in the window; and the round table in the middle, which, when supplemented by a small folding table which has followed me, unwelcomed, even to Monks House, made the tea table. The tea table, the very hearth and centre of family life, the tea table round which sat innumerable parties; on which, when Sunday came—the tea table’s festival day—pink shell plates were placed, full of brown Sunday buns, full of very thin slices of white and brown bread and butter.

The tea table rather than the dinner table was the centre of Victorian family life—in our family at least. Savages I suppose have some tree, or fire place, round which they congregate; the round table marked that focal, that sacred spot in our house. It was the centre, the heart of the family. It was the centre to which the sons returned from their work in the evening; the hearth whose fire was tended by the mother, pouring out tea. In the same way, the bedroom—the double bedded bedroom on the first floor was the sexual centre; the birth centre, the death centre of the house. It was not a large room; but its walls must be soaked, if walls take pictures and hoard up what is done and said with all that was most intense, of all that makes the most private being, of family life. In that bed four children were begotten; there they were born; there first mother died; then father died, with a picture of mother hanging in front of him. The house mounted in three roomed storeys above that bedroom. Above father’s and mother’s bedroom floor were the three bedrooms of George, Gerald, and Stella; above their bedrooms our night and day nurseries; above that the great study with its high ceiling of yellow stained wood; and the servants’ bedrooms. There were different smells on different landings of that tall dark house. One landing smelt perpetually of candle grease; for on a high cupboard stood all the bedroom candles. On another half landing was the water closet; with all the brass hot water cans standing by a sink. On another half landing was the solitary family bath. (My father all his life washed in a yellow tin bath with flat ears on which the soap stood.) Further up, was a brown filter from which once the drinking water presumably was supplied: in our day it only dripped a little. At that height—it was on the study half landing—carpets and pictures had given out, and the top landing of all was a little pinched and bare. Once when a pipe burst and some young man visitor—Peter Studd?—volunteered help and rushed upstairs with a bucket, he penetrated to the servants’ bedrooms, and my mother, I noted, seemed a little ‘provoked’, a little perhaps ashamed, that he had seen what must have been their rather shabby rooms. My father’s great study—that study had been built on, when the family grew—was a fine big room, very high, three windowed, and entirely booklined. His old rocking chair covered in American cloth was the centre of the room which was the brain of (he house. He had written all his books lying sunk in that deep rocking chair; which swung up and down; for it was so deep that his feet were off the ground. Across it lay his writing board; with the sheets of foolscap always folded down the middle, so that he could make corrections in the margin. And there was his fine steel pen and the curious china inkpot, with a well, lidded, out at the side. All his books were dipped out of that well on the point of Joseph Gillott’s long shanked steel pens. And I remember the little fiat shield that his pen had rubbed smooth and hard on the joint of his forefinger. Minny’s portrait by Watts—a charming shy face—nestling away, not noble, not heroic, but shy and sweet, hung over the fireplace; and in the corner by the window stood a stack of rusty alpenstocks. From the three long window’s one looked out over the roofs of Kensington, to the presiding Church of St Mary Abbots, the church where our conventional marriages were celebrated—and one day standing there father saw an eagle. It was, I thought, like him that he knew it for an eagle at once; and at once verified the fact, from the paper, that it was an eagle that had escaped from the Zoo. He would not make up stories about wild eagles flying over London. The room smelt perpetually of tobacco smoke.

The street below was a cul-de-sac. Our house was near the blank brick wall at the end. Hyde Park Gate, which led nowhere, but made a little sealed loop out of the great high road running from Hammersmith to Piccadilly, was something like a village street. One heard foot steps tapping along the pavement. Most of the people passing bowed to each other as they met. One recognised them approaching. That was Mrs Muir-MacKenzie; handsome, distinguished. That was the pale Miss Redgrave; or that was the red-nosed Miss Redgrave; or that was the ancient Mrs Redgrave, veiled, in widow’s weeds; going out in her bath chair with a Miss Redgrave in attendance—if it was wet she had a glass pane let down so that she looked like a museum specimen preserved under glass. There was also, in a house with a queer flight of angular steps, ‘Her Grace’ as the nurses called her—an old Duchess of Grafton. There was the house of the famous—somehow infamous—Mrs Biddulph Martin, the rich American, whose garden wall bulged out. “Why don’t you make a good job of it?” said George to the workmen who were pointing the wall. They said they could only carry out orders; the wall continued to bulge. Mrs Biddulph Martin was tarnished perhaps by some connection with women’s rights. So too certainly was Mrs Ashton Dilke, our next door neighbour. Indeed a man threw a stone at her at some meeting; and my mother, who had signed an anti-suffrage manifesto, holding that women had enough to do in their own homes without a vote, made kind enquiries through us, of the Dilke’s governess. But Mrs Dilke, save for that eccentricity, was the pink of fashion; a very pretty woman, and so well dressed, that we used to notice her new dress, and to say “Mrs Dilke has far more new clothes than you have” to mother, who never had new clothes, and dressed always, I think, in a very simple sewing woman made black dress. And further up the street was Aunt Minna’s house, where she lived solitary with her perennial parrot and her perennial Italian manservant. He changed; but his name was always Angelo; and he was always small and greasy; and played bagatelle with us in his shirtsleeves in the basement. The house with the locked gate and the many steps in the middle of the street was famous for the ‘big dog’. People called Maude lived there; impecunious, shifty, disreputable people; who could not pay their bills; and thus kept their gate locked and the big dog behind it to frighten duns. As one passed he sprang down the steps barking; and one day knocked me over and bit or bruised my arm. Then the villagers got together and brought a police court case; and Mr Plowden the magistrate was so impressed by my evidence—or rather my state of mind—that he ordered the dog to be destroyed. “But we don’t want him destroyed,” Mrs MacKenzie insisted, “only restrained.” For it was agreed that it wasn’t the poor Maude girls’ fault—the handsome dark girls who lived behind the locked gate, scaring duns, were to be pitied for their disreputable parents’ discreditable imprisoned lives.

Everybody knew everybody, and everything about everybody, in Hyde Park Gate. It was a trial, if you disliked the gradual approach of a familiar face as I did, to see the MacKenzies or the Redgraves coming nearer and nearer until you had to stop or at least smile. The houses were all individual houses; some towering high, like ours; others, like the Redgraves’, long low houses almost country houses; some had strips of garden; others were flush with the street. But they became stereotyped, pillared, and pompous up at the top fronting the main road. Incredible as it now seems, I can remember that one of these pompous houses had a carriage and pair with a coachman and footman who wore powdered wigs, and yellow plush knee breeches and silk stockings. Yet the owners were of no particular importance; and yet nobody thought such magnificence was strange. Perhaps one house out of every six in Hyde Park Gate kept a carriage, or hired one from Hobbs whose livery stable opened its great yard in the middle. For there was only the red bus to take people “into Town,” as father called it, or, if you could afford it, a hansom or four-wheeler from the rank. The underground, a sulphur smelling steam clouded tunnel with trams running, I suppose, rather seldom, was far away—at Kensington High Street, or Gloucester Road. My father and mother always took the red bus, to them a hansom by day was an unknown luxury. My mother did all her immense rounds—shopping, calling, visiting hospitals and work houses—in omnibuses. She was an omnibus expert. She would nip from the red to the blue, from the blue to the yellow, and make them somehow connect and convey her all over London. Sometimes she would come home very tired, owning that she had missed her bus or the bus had been full up, or she had got beyond the radius of her favourite buses. But more often she would have some story to tell of her bus adventures—a talk she had had with the conductor, or how a fellow passenger had said this or that. “She sat weeping,” I remember she said, “and I could only lend her my scent bottle.” My father always climbed on top and smoked his pipe; she I think never did that, but, if she could, chose the corner seat and talked to the conductor. He would tell her his troubles; as the two stubby horses ploughed their way along the streets, those old omnibus horses who lived, it was said, only a year or two, for the pulling up to take in passengers destroyed their constitutions. Once a year about Christmas we saw a brace of pheasants swinging from the driver’s seat—the gift of the Rothschilds.

The streets were full of horses. The streets were littered with little brown piles of steaming horse dung which boys, darting out among the wheels, removed in shovels. The horses kicked and reared and neighed. Often they ran away. Carriages crashed together I remember in High Street; horses went sprawling; they shied; they reared; wheels came off. The street rocked with horses and smelt of horses. The horses were often gleaming, spick and span horses, with rosettes in their ears; the footmen wore cockades in their hats; foam flecked the bright silver harness; coronets and coats of arms were painted on panels and among the sounds of the street—the tap of hoofs, the rush of wheels—one heard a jingling and metallic noise as the harness shook and rattled. But only solitary hansoms, or little high butchers’ carts, or private broughams came clopping down our quiet Hyde Park cul-de-sac—our “backwater,” as father called it.

My room in that very tall house was at the back. When Stella married, Vanessa and I were promoted to separate bed sitting rooms; that marked the fact that we had become, she at eighteen, I a fifteen, young ladies. My room, the old night nursery, was a long narrow room, with two windows; the fireside half was the living half; the washstand half was the sleeping half. It had been ‘done up’ at George’s cost, I rather think; all traces of the night nursery were abolished. In the living half was my wicker chair, and Stella’s writing table made after her design with crossed legs, and stained green and decorated by her with a pattern of brown leaves (at that time staining and enamelling and amateur furniture decorating were much the rage). On it stood open my Greek lexicon; some Greek play or other; many little bottles of ink, pens innumerable; and probably hidden under blotting paper, sheets of foolscap covered with private writing in a hand so small and twisted as to be a family joke.

The sleeping side was dominated by the long Chippendale (imitation) looking glass, given me by George in the hope that I should look into it and learn to do my hair and take general care for my appearance. Between it and the washstand, under the window, was my bed. On summer nights, I would lie with the window open, looking up at the sky, thinking, for I recall a story I wrote then, about the stars and how in Egypt some savage was looking at them; and also listening, Very far off there was a hum of traffic. In the mews one heard the stamp of horses; a clatter of the wheels and buckets. In a bedroom window, one of the Queen’s Gate back windows opposite, I could see Sir Alfred Lyall dressing and undressing. One of the windows was broken; the servants said there lay the wedding feast still untouched; for a bridegroom had failed, or a bride had died. Certainly there was a dusty broken window. Of a summer night I sometimes heard dance music and saw the dancers sitting out on the leads; saw them passing and repassing the window on the stairs. One night I lay awake horrified hearing, as I imagined, an obscene old man gasping and croaking and muttering senile indecencies—it was a cat, I was told afterwards; a cat’s anguished love making. George, on the floor below, kept a store of old electric light bulbs which he shied at cats—pop-pop they would explode against the wall. Often I would lie awake till two or three, waiting for Nessa to come and see me after her party. I would read by the light of a candle, and blow it out as I heard her and Gerald approaching. But Gerald pinched the top of the candle, found the wax soft, and so detected me.

Which should I describe first—the living half of the room, or the sleeping half? They must be described separately; yet they were always running together. How they fought each other; that is, how often I was in a rage in that room; and in despair; and in ecstasy; how I read myself into a trance of perfect bliss; then in came—Adrian, George, Gerald, Jack, my father; how it was there I retreated to when father enraged me; and paced up and down scarlet; and there Madge came one evening; and I could scarcely talk for happiness; and there I droned out those long solitary mornings reading Greek … And it was from that room Gerald fetched me when father died. There I first heard those horrible voices ….

If that room, which is now I think cut into cubicles for the hotel guests—after we left it it became a Guest house—could bring out its ghosts, the business man from Birmingham, the lady from Cheltenham up to see the Royal Academy, would be amused; also pitiful; and perhaps one of them would say what an odd, what an unwholesome life for a girl of fifteen; I suppose they would add: “Such a life is quite impossible nowadays.” And I suppose that, if one of them had read To the Lighthouse, or A Room of One’s Own, or The Common Reader, he or she might say: “This room explains a great deal.”

But of course I was not thinking when I lived in my back room at H[yde] P[ark] G[ate] of Birmingham business men or ladies from Cheltenham. But I was thinking; feeling; living; those two lives that the two halves symbolized with the intensity, the muffled intensity, which a butterfly or moth feels when with its sticky tremulous legs and antennae it pushes out of the chrysalis and emerges and sits quivering beside the broken case for a moment; its wings still creased; its eyes dazzled, incapable of flight.

Anyone, whether fifteen or not, whether sensitive or not, must have felt something very acute, merely from what had happened. My mother’s death had been a latent sorrow—at thirteen one could not master it, envisage it, deal with it. But Stella’s death two years later fell on a different substance; a mind stuff and being stuff that was extraordinarily unprotected, unformed, unshielded, apprehensive, receptive, anticipatory. That must always hold good of minds and bodies at fifteen. But beneath the surface of this particular mind and body lay sunk the other death. Even if I were not fully conscious of what my mother’s death meant, I had been for two years unconsciously absorbing it through Stella’s silent grief; through my father’s demonstrative grief; again through all the things that changed and stopped; the ending of society; of gaiety; the giving up of St Ives; the black clothes; the suppressions; the locked door of her bedroom. All this had toned my mind and made it apprehensive; made it I suppose unnaturally responsive to Stella’s happiness, and the promise it held for her and for us of escape from that gloom; when once more unbelievably—incredibly—as if one had been violently cheated of some promise; more than that, brutally told not to be such a fool as to hope for things; I remember saying to myself after she died: “But this is impossible; things aren’t, can’t be, like this”—the blow, the second blow of death, struck on me; tremulous, filmy eyed as I was, with my wings still creased, sitting there on the edge of my broken chrysalis.

Yesterday (18th August 1940) five German raiders passed so close over Monks House that they brushed the tree at the gate, But being alive today, and having a waste hour on my hands—for I am writing fiction; and cannot write after twelve—I will go on with this loose story.

By the time I had that room, when I was fifteen that is, “us four” as we called ourselves had become separate That was symbolized by our separate rooms. Yet we were not so separate as boys and girls, brothers and sisters, often become when the boys go to public schools and the sisters stay at home. Mother’s and Stella’s deaths, I suppose, united us. We never spoke of them. I can remember how awkwardly Thoby avoided saying “Stella” when a ship called Stella was wrecked. (When Thoby died, Adrian and I agreed that we would go on talking about him, “for there are so many dead people now.”) This silence, we felt, covered something; something that most families had not. But without that bond, mine was from my earliest childhood so close with both Nessa and Thoby that if I describe myself I must describe them.

When Stella died Thoby was seventeen—two years older than I. But long before that I was acutely conscious of him. Even as a little boy he was dominant among us. He could impose himself. He was not clever; he was not a funny talkative child; he was a clumsy awkward little boy, very fat, bursting through his Norfolk jacket. He dominated and led in our world. But even to the grown ups he was rather formidable. Father had to be sent for once or twice: I remember Thoby struggling like a tiger with Gerald. He was large and clumsy. He grew very quickly out of nursery ways. I cannot remember him childish, as Adrian was. But then mother was not so much at her ease with him as with Adrian. Nor he with her. He was not clever; but gifted. And his gifts were natural to him, naturally it came to him to look distinguished; to be silent, to draw. He would take a sheet of paper, hold it at an odd angle and begin easily, naturally, drawing a bird, not where I expected, but at some queer place, so that I could not guess how the bird would become a bird. He was not precocious; but won prizes now and then, yet failed to win a scholarship at Eton. His Latin and Greek were very rough, I think the masters said. But his essays showed great intelligence. Yet it was through him that I first heard about the Greeks. The day after he came back from Evelyns, the first time, he was very shy; and odd; and we went walking up and down the stairs together; and he told me the story of Hector and of Troy. I felt he was too shy to tell it sitting down; and so we kept walking up stairs and then down; and he told me the story rather fitfully, but excitedly. Also he told me stories about the boys at Evelyns. Those stories went on ail through Evelyns, through Clifton, and through Cambridge. I knew all his friends through those stories. He had a great power for liking people, for admiring them. And they amused him; I think I felt that he enjoyed Evelyns; and Clifton, because he liked being on his own, and held his own; and was admired, but was also dominant there too. He held his own, he put up with disagreeables; he was far more philosophic, because more in his element at school than Adrian was. And he exacted his rights. The Pup had to apologise when he put another boy over him as head of the house; he was not going to be passed over. He was not easy to put upon. And yet he had no reason to assert himself; he did not expect to win things; he admired the boys who were good at football; good at Latin; but unenviously. I felt he had taken stock of his own powers; would come into possession of them all in good time; and enjoyed slowly and deliberately without being worried or upset whatever name his way at Clifton. He was tolerant; not critical; not precocious; biding his time, and serenely taking his place. And beneath this reserve, when he was with us, I felt, though he could not say a word ever about his feelings, a dumb affectionateness, a pride in us, and something melancholy too—perhaps the deaths of mother and Stella made him older than his age. And father’s extraordinary demonstrative love for him.

I continue (22nd September 1940) on this wet day—we think of weather now as it affects invasions, as it affects raids, not as weather that we like or dislike privately—I continue, for I am at a twist in my novel, to fill in another page. I was writing about Thoby when I left off. And last night, trying to soothe myself to sleep (for I was in a pucker, as Clive calls it, about the Anreps coming here) I thought about St. Ives. I will write about St Ives, and so fittingly, though indirectly, lead up to Thoby again. St Ives will fill him in.

Father on one of his walking tours, it must have been in 1881, I think—discovered St Ives. He must have stayed there, and seen Talland House to let. He must have seen the town almost as it had been in the sixteenth century, without hotels, or villas; and the Bay as it had been since time began. It was the first year, I think, that the line was made from St Erth to St Ives—before that, St Ives was eight miles from a railway. Munching his sandwiches up at Tregenna perhaps, he must have been impressed, in his silent way, by the beauty of the Bay; and thought: this might do for our summer holiday, and worked out with his usual caution ways and means. I was to be born in the following January; and, though they wished to limit their family, and did what they could to prevent me, he must have known that they were not successful in the steps they took; Adrian was born a year after me (1883)—again, in spite of precautions. It proves the ease and amplitude of those days that a man to whom money was an obsession thought it feasible to take a house on the very toenail, as he called it, of England, so that every summer he would be faced with the expense of moving children, nurses, servants from one end of England to the other. Yet he did it. They rented the house from the Great Western Railway Company. The distance did prove in one way a drawback; for we could only go there in the summer. Our country thus was canalised into two or at most into three months of the year. The other months were spent entirely in London. Yet in retrospect nothing that we had as children made as much difference, was quite so important to us, as our summer in Cornwall. The country was intensified, after the months in London to go away to Cornwall; to have our own house; our own garden; to have the Bay; the sea; the moon; Clodgy; Halestown Bog; Carbis Bay; Lelant; Trevail; Zennor; the Gurnard’s Head; to hear the waves breaking that first night behind the yellow blind; to dig in the sand; to go sailing in a fishing boat; to scrabble over the rocks and see the red and yellow anemones flourishing their antennae; or stuck like blobs of jelly to the rock; to find a small fish flapping in a pool; to pick up cowries; to look over the grammar in the dining room and see the lights changing on the bay; the leaves of the escallonia grey or bright green; to go down to the town and buy a penny box of tintacks or a pocket knife; to prowl about Lanhams—Mrs Lanham wore false curls shaking round her head; the servants said Mr Lanham had married her ‘through an advertisement’; to smell all the fishy smells in the steep little streets; and see the innumerable cats with their fishbones in their mouths; and the women on the raised steps outside their houses pouring pails of dirty water down the gutters; every day to have a great dish of Cornish cream skinned with a yellow skin; and plenty of brown sugar to eat with blackberries … I could fill pages remembering one thing after another. All together made the summer at St Ives the best beginning to life conceivable. When they took Talland House father and mother gave us—me at any rate—what has been perennial, invaluable. Suppose I had only Surrey, or Sussex, or the Isle of Wight to think about when I think of my childhood.

The town was then much as it must have been in the sixteenth century, unknown, unvisited, a scramble of granite houses crusting the slope in the hollow under the Island. It must have been built for shelter; for a few fishermen, when Cornwall was more remote from England than Spain or Africa is now. It was a steep little town. Many houses had a flight of steps, with a railing leading to the door. The walls were thick blocks of granite built to stand the sea storms. They were splashed with a wash the colour of Cornish cream; and their roughness was like the clot of cream. There was nothing mellow about them; no red brick; no soft thatch. The eighteenth century had left no mark upon St Ives, as it has so definitely upon every southern village. It might have been built yesterday; or in the time of the Conqueror. It had no architecture; no arrangement. The market place was a jagged cobbled open place; the Church was on one side; built of granite, ageless, like the houses; the fish market stood beside it. There was no grass in front of it. It stood flush to the market place. There were no carved doors, large windows, no lintels; no moss; no comely professional houses. It was a windy, noisy, fishy, vociferous, narrow-streeted town; the colour of a mussel or a limpet; like a bunch of rough shell fish clustered on a grey wall together.

Our house, Talland House, was just beyond the town, on the hill. For whom the Great Western Railway had built it, I do not know. It must have been in the forties, or fifties; a square house, like a child’s drawing of a house; remarkable only for its flat roof, and the crisscrossed railing that ran round the roof; again, like something a child draws. It stood in a garden that ran downhill; and had formed itself into separate gardens, surrounded by thick escallonia hedges, whose leaves, pressed, gave out a very sweet smell. It had so many angles cut off, and lawns surrounded, that each had a name; there was the coffee garden; the Fountain—a basin with a funnel that dripped, hedged in with damp evergreens; the cricket lawn; the Love Corner, under the greenhouse, where the purple jackmanii grew—where Leo Maxse proposed to Kitty Lushington (I thought I heard Paddy talking to his son, Thoby said, overhearing the proposal). Then there was the kitchen garden; the strawberry beds; the pond where Willy Fisher sailed the little steamers he made with a paddle worked by an elastic band; and the big tree. All these different, cut off places were contained in that one garden of not more than two or three acres. One entered by a large wooden gate, the sound of whose latch clicking was one of the familiar sounds; up the carriage drive one went, under the steep wall of rock, sprinkled with the fleshy leaves of the mesembryanthemums; and then came to the Lookout place, between the clumps of pampas grass. The Lookout place was a grassy mound, that jutted out over the high garden wall. There we were often sent to stand to look out for the fall of the signal. When the signal fell it was time to start for the station to meet the train. It was the train that brought Mr Lowell, Mr Gibbs, the Stillmans, the Lushingtons, the Symondses. But it was a grown-up affair—receiving friends. We never had friends to stay with us. Nor did we want them. “Us four” were completely self-sufficient. Once when a child called Elsie was brought by Mrs Westlake to play with us I “broomed her round the garden”. I remember scuffling her like a drift of dead leaves in front of me.

From the Lookout place one had then, a perfectly open view across the Bay. (Mr Symonds said that the Bay reminded him of the Bay of Naples.) It was a large Bay, many curved, edged with a slip of sand, with green sand hills behind; and the curves flowed in and out to the two black rocks at one end of which stood the black and white tower of the Lighthouse; and at the other end, Hayle river made a blue vein across the sand, and stakes, on which always a gull sat, marked the channel into Hayle Harbour. This great flowing basin of water was always changing in colour; it was deep blue; emerald green; purple and then stormy grey and white crested. There was a great coming and going of ships across the bay. Most usually, it was a Haines steamer, with a red or white band round the funnel, going to Cardiff for coal. In rough weather, sometimes one would wake to find the whole bay full of ships, that had come in overnight for shelter—little tramp steamers mostly, with a dip in the middle. But sometimes a big ship would be anchored there; once a battle ship; once a great sailing ship; once a famous white yacht. Then every morning the clumsy luggers went out, deep sea fishing; and in the evening there was the mackerel fleet, its lights dancing up and down; and the fleet returning, rounding the headland and suddenly dropping their sails. We would stand with mother of the Lookout place watching them.

Every year, about the first week in September, we would cry “The pilchard boats are out!” There they were being hauled down the beach, where they lay one behind another all the rest of the year. Horses were struggling to draw them over the beach. They were anchored near the shore, and looked like long black shoes, for each had a hood for the watchman at one end, and a great coil of net—seines they were called—at the other. The tarring of the pilchard boats was a regular occupation; and made the beach always smell slightly of tar. There they lay week after week, and were still lying when we left in October, waiting for the Huer who sat at his telescope up in the white shelter on Carbis Bay point to sight a shoal. He sat there looking for a purple stain of pilchards to come into the bay and beside him was a great horn of some kind. Year after year the boats lay in the bay. The seines were never shot. The fishermen grumbled that the steam trawlers at Newlyn. (perhaps) had disturbed the pilchards; and driven them out to sea. Once, though, as we sat at lessons we heard the Huer’s cry—a long high clear hoot of sound. Then fishermen rowed out to the boats. We stopped lessons. The seines were shot. A dotted circle of corks floated here and there over the dark net beneath. But the pilchards passed out of the bay that time; and the seines were drawn in again. (It was in 1905, when we four took a lodging at Carbis Bay that the pilchards came. We rowed out early in the morning. The sea spurted and spat and bubbled with silver. A stranger in the next boat shovelled armfuls of that bubbling mass into our boat. “Like some fresh fish for breakfast?” he said—everyone was excited and jubilant; and boat after boat was weighed down to the water line with fish. And we went down to the harbour and saw them packed. I wrote a description of it, and sent it to some paper; which rejected it. But Thoby told Nessa, who told me, that he thought I might be a bit of a genius.) All the years we were at St Ives the pilchards never came into the bay; and the pilchard boats lay there, anchored, waiting; and we used to swim out and hang onto the edge, and see the old man lying in his brown tarpaulin tent, keeping watch. The waiting pilchard boats was [sic] a sight that made father pish and pshaw at table. He had a curious sympathy for the poverty of the fisher people: a respect for fishermen, like his respect for Alpine guides. And mother, of course, got to know them in their houses; and went about, “doing good” as Stella wished to have it said on her tombstone; she visited, helped, and started her nursing society. After her death it became the Julia Prinsep Stephen Nursing Association; Meredith and the Symondses and Stillmans contributed to it; and Ka Arnold-Forster told me not so long ago that it still exists.

Every year, in August, the Regatta took place in the bay. We watched the Judges’ boat take its station, with lines of little flags hung from mast to mast. The St Ives notables went on board. A band played. Wafts of music came across the water. All the little boats came out of the harbour. Then a gun was fired, and the races began. Off went the boats—the luggers, the pleasure boats, the rowing boats; racing round the different courses that were marked by flags round the bay. And while they raced, the swimmers got ready in a line on the Regatta boat for their races. The gun fired; they plunged and we could see the little heads bobbing and the arms flashing and heard the people shouting as one swimmer gained on another. One year our charming curly headed young postman (I remember the brown linen bag in which he carried letters) should have won; but he explained to Amy later “I let the other chap win, because it was his last chance.”

It was a very gay sight, with the flags flying, the guns firing, the boats sailing, and the swimmers plunging or being hauled back on board. A crowd of St Ives people gathered to watch in the Malakoff, that octagonal space at the end of the Terrace which had been built, presumably, in the Crimean War and was the only attempt that the town made at ornament. St Ives had no pleasure pier, no parade, only this angular gravelly patch of ground, set with a few stone seats upon which retired fishermen in their blue jerseys smoked and gossiped. The Regatta day remains in my mind, with its distant music, its little strings of flags, the boats sailing, and the people dotted on the sand, like a French picture.

In those days St Ives, save for ourselves and casual wandering painters, had no summer visitors. Its customs were its own customs; its festivals its own too. There was the August Regatta. Then once in every twelve years or so, old men and women over seventy danced round Knills Monument—a granite steeple in a clearing—and the couple who danced longest were given a shilling? half a crown?—by the Mayor—Dr Nicholls, on that occasion, who wore a long fur trimmed cloak. St Ives had a relic, but a relic in use, of the past—Charlie Pearce, the town crier. Now and again he shuffled along the front swinging a muffin bell and crying “Oyez, Oyez, Oyez.” What he went on to say, I do not know, save that on one occasion, when a visitor at Talland House lost a brooch, she had it cried by Charlie Pearce. He was blind, or nearly; with a long wasted face, grey eyes, like the eyes of a fish that has been boiled, and he wore a battered top hat, a frock coat tightly buttoned round his angular body, and he shuffled oddly from side to side as he went swinging his bell, and crying “Oyez, Oyez, Oyez.” We knew him, as we knew so many of the town characters, through the servants, in particular through Sophie, who had many friends among them. We knew all the tradespeople, who came up the drive to the kitchen door, carrying their parcels—Alice Curnow, with the washing in a great basket; Mrs Adams the fisherwoman, who brought fish in another basket—the lobsters still alive, still blue, hobbling about in the basket. The lobster would beset on the kitchen table, and the great claw would open and shut and pinch one. Can I be remembering a fact when I think I remember a long thick fish wriggling on a hook in the larder, and that Gerald beat it to death with a broom handle?

The kitchen, Sophie’s kitchen, for she was dominant over all the other “denizens of the kitchen”, as we called them in the Hyde Park Gate News, was directly beneath our night nursery. At dinner time we would let down a basket on a string, and dangle it over the kitchen window. If she were in a good temper, the basket would be drawn in, laden with something from the grown-ups’ dinner and pushed swaying out again. If she was in “one of her tempers,” the basket was sharply jerked, the string cut, and we [were] left holding the dangling string. I can remember the sensation of the heavy basket, and of the light string.

Every afternoon we “went for a walk”. Later these walks became a penance. Father must have one of us to go out with him, Mother insisted. Too much obsessed with his health, with his pleasures, she was too willing, as I think now, to sacrifice us to him. It was thus that she left us the legacy of his dependence, which after her death became so harsh an imposition. It would have [been] better for our relationship if she had left him to fend for himself. But for many years she made a fetish of his health; and so—leaving the effect upon us out of the reckoning—she wore herself out and died at forty-nine; while he lived on, and found it very difficult, so healthy was he, to die of cancer at the age of seventy-two. But, though I slip in, still venting an old grievance, that parenthesis, St Ives gave us all the same that “pure delight” which is before my eyes at this very moment. The lemon-coloured leaves on the elm tree; the apples in the orchard; the murmur and rustle of the leaves makes me pause here, and think how many other than human forces are always at work on us. While I write this the light glows; an apple becomes a vivid green; I respond all through me; but how? Then a little owl [chatters] under my window. Again, I respond. Figuratively I could snapshot what I mean by some image; I am a porous vessel afloat on sensation; a sensitive plate exposed to invisible rays; and so on. Or I fumble with some vague idea about a third voice; I speak to Leonard; Leonard speaks to me; we both hear a third voice. Instead of labouring all the morning to analyse what I mean, to discover whether I mean anything real, whether I make up or tell the truth when I see myself taking the breath of these voices in my sails and tacking this way and that through daily life as I yield to them, I note only the existence of this influence; suspect it to be of great importance; cannot find how to check its power on other people—does Louie feel it? Does Percy? Which of the people watching the incendiary bomb extinguished on the hill last night would understand what I mean if they read this?—I erect a finger post here, to mark a vein I will some time try to work out; and return to the surface; that is St Ives.

The regular Sunday walk was to Trick Robin or, as father liked to call it, Tren Crom. From the top, one could see the two seas; St Michael’s Mount on one side; the Lighthouse on the other. Like all Cornish hills, it was scattered with blocks of granite; said some of them to be old tombs and altars; in some, holes were driven, as if for gate posts, Others were piled up rocks. The Loggan rock was on top of Tren Crom; we would set it rocking; and be told that perhaps the hollow in the rough lichened surface was for the victim’s blood. But father, with his severe love of truth, disbelieved it; he said, in his opinion, this was no genuine Loggan rock; but the natural disposition of ordinary rocks. Little paths led up to the hill, between heather and ling; and our knees were pricked by the gorse—the blazing yellow gorse with its sweet nutty smell. Another walk, a short children’s walk, was to Fairyland, as we called that solitary wood, with a broad wall circling it. We walked on the wall, and looked down into a forest of oak trees, and great ferns, higher than our heads. It smelt of oak apples; it was dark, damp, silent, mysterious. A longer, an adventurous walk was to Halestown Bog. Again father corrected us; Helston Bog we called it; the real name was Halestown. In that bog we sprang from hag to hag; and the hags squelched and we plunged up to the knee in the brown bog water. There the Osmunda grew; and the rare maiden-hair fern. Better than these walks, a treat announced perhaps once a fortnight, was an afternoon sailing. We would hire a lugger; the fisherman went with us. But once Thoby was allowed to steer us home. “Show them you can bring her in, my boy,” father said, with his usual trust and pride in Thoby. And Thoby took the fisherman’s place; and steered; flushed and with his blue eyes very blue, and his mouth set, he sat there, bringing us round the point, into harbour, without letting the sail flag. One day the sea was full of pale jelly fish, like lamps, with streaming hair; but they stung you if you touched them. Sometimes lines would be handed us; baited by gobbets cut from fish; and the line thrilled in one’s fingers as the boat tossed and shot through the water; and then—how can I convey the excitement?—there was a little leaping tug; then another; up one hauled; up through the water at length came the white twisting fish; and was slapped on the floor. There it lay flapping this way and that in an inch or two of water.

Once, after we had hung about, tacking, and hauling in gurnard after gurnard, dab after dab, father said to me: “Next time if you are going to fish I shan’t come; I don’t like to see fish caught but you can go if you like.” It was a perfect lesson. It was not a rebuke; not a forbidding; simply a statement of his own feeling, about which I could think and decide for myself. Though my passion for the thrill and the tug had been perhaps the most acute I then knew, his words slowly extinguished it; leaving no grudge, I ceased to wish to catch fish. But from the memory of my own passion I am still able to construct an idea of the sporting passion. It is one of those invaluable seeds, from which, since it is impossible to have every experience fully, one can grow something that represents other people’s experiences. Often one has to make do with seeds; the germs of what might have been, had one’s life been different. I pigeonhole ‘fishing’ thus with other momentary glimpses; like those rapid glances, for example, that I cast into basements when I walk in London streets.

Oak apples, ferns with clusters of seeds on their backs, the regatta, Charlie Pearce, the click of the garden gate, the ants swarming on the hot front door step; buying tintacks; sailing; the smell of Halestown Bog; splits with Cornish cream for tea in the farm house at Trevail; the floor of the sea changing colour at lessons; old Mr Wolstenholme in his beehive chair; the spotted elm leaves on the lawn; the rooks cawing as they passed over the house in the early morning; the escallonia leaves showing their grey undersides: the arc in the air, like the pip of an orange, when the powder magazine at Hayle blew up; the boom of the buoy—these for some reason come uppermost at the moment in my mind thinking of St Ives—an incongruous miscellaneous catalogue, little corks that mark a sunken net.

And to pull that net, leaving its contents unsorted, to shore, by way of making an end where there is no such thing, I add: for two or three years before mother’s death (1892-3-4, that is) ominous hints reached the nursery that the grown ups talked of leaving St Ives. The distance had become a drawback; by that time George and Gerald had work in London. Expense, Thoby’s school, Adrian’s school, became more urgent. And then just opposite the Lookout place a great square oatmeal coloured hotel appeared when we came down in July. My mother said, with her dramatic gestures, that the view was spoilt; that St Ives would be ruined. For all these reasons, then, a house agent’s board appeared one October in our garden; and as it needed repainting, I was allowed to fill in some of the letters—This House to Let—from a pot of paint. The joy of painting mingled with the dread of leaving. But for a summer or two no tenant came. The danger, we hoped, was averted. And then in the spring of 1895 mother died. Father instantly decided that he wished never to see St Ives again. And perhaps a month later Gerald went down alone; settled the sale of our lease to some people called Millie Dow, and St Ives vanished for ever.

I recover then today (October 11th 1940) a mild Autumn day (London battered last night) from these rapid notes only one actual picture of Thoby; steering us round the point without letting the sail flap. I recover the picture of a schoolboy whose jacket was rather tight; whose arms shot out of their sleeves. He looked sulky; grim; his eyes became bluer when he was thus on his mettle; his face flushed a little. He was feeling earlier than most boys, the weight laid on him by father’s pride in him; the burden, the responsibility of being treated as a man.

Why do I shirk the task, not so very hard to a professional—have I not conveyed Roger from one end of life to the other?—like myself, of wafting this boy from the boat to my bed sitting room at Hyde Park Gate? It is because I want to go on thinking about St Ives. I have the excuse that I could, if I went on thinking, recall many other pictures; bring him in again and again. And it is not only an excuse; for always round him, like the dew that collects in beads on a rough coat, there hangs the country; butterflies; birds; muddy roads; muddy boots; horses.

But it is true, I do not want to go into my room at Hyde Park Gale. I shrink from the years 1897-1904, the seven unhappy years. Not many lives were tortured and fretted and made numb with non-being as ours were then. That, in shorthand, was the legacy of those two great unnecessary blunders; those two lashes of the random unheeding, unthinking flail that brutally and pointlessly killed the two people who should have made those years normal and natural, if not ‘happy’.

I am not thinking of mother and of Stella; I am thinking of the damage that their deaths inflicted. I will describe it more carefully later, I will illustrate with a scene or two. That is why I do not wish to bring Thoby out of the boat into my room.

Without those deaths, to hark back to an earlier thought, it is true that he would not have been so genuinely, though dumbly, bound to us. If there is any good (I doubt it) in these mutilations, it is that it sensitises. If to be aware of the insecurity of life, to remember something gone, to feel now and then, overwhelmingly, as I felt for father when he made no claim to it, a passionate fumbling fellowship—if it is a good thing to be aware of all this at fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, by fits and starts—if, if, if—. But was it good? Would it not have been better (if there is any sense in saying good and better when there is no possible judge, no standard) to go on feeling, as at St Ives, the rush and tumble of family life? To be family surrounded; to go on exploring and adventuring privately while all the while the family as a whole continued its prosaic, rumbling progress; would this not have been better than to have had that protection removed; to have been tumbled out of the family shelter; to have had it cracked and gashed; to have become critical and sceptical of the family—? Perhaps to have remained in the family, believing in it, accepting it, as we should, without those two deaths, would have given us greater scope, greater variety, and certainly greater confidence. On the other hand, I can put another question: Did those deaths give us an experience that even if it was numbing, mutilating, yet meant that the Gods (as I used to phrase it) were taking us seriously, and giving us a job which they would not have thought it worthwhile to give—say, the Booths or the Milmans? I had my usual visual way of putting it. I would see (after Thoby’s death) two great grindstones (as I walked round Gordon Square) and myself between them. I would stage a conflict between myself and ‘them’. I would reason that if life were thus made to rear and kick, it was a thing to be ridden; nobody could say ‘they’ had fobbed me off with a weak little feeble slip of the precious matter. So I came to think of life as something of extreme reality. And this of course increased my sense of my own importance. Not in relation to human beings; in relation to the force which had respected me sufficiently to make me feel myself ground between grindstones.

It seems to me therefore that our relation (Thoby’s and mine) was more serious than it would have been without those deaths. The unspoken thought—I have roughly visualised it—was there, in him; in me; when he came into my room at Hyde Park Gate. It was behind our arguments. We were, of course, naturally attracted to each other. Besides his brother’s feeling (and he was protective) he had I think an amused, surprised, questioning attitude to me as an individual. I was a year and a half younger; and a girl. A shell-less little creature, I think he thought me; so sheltered, in my room, compared with him; an ingenuous, eager listener to his school stories; without any experience of my own with which to cap his; but not passive; on the contrary, bubbling, inquisitive, restless, contradicting. We had branched off, after that rambling up and down stairs, to read on our own. He had consumed Shakespeare, somehow or other, by himself. He had possessed himself of it, in his large clumsy way, and our first arguments, since I listened passively to the story of the Greeks on the stairs outside the water closet, outside the candle grease smelling landing, were about Shakespeare. He would sweep down upon me, with his assertion that everything was in Shakespeare. He let the whole mass that he held in his grasp descend in an avalanche on me. I revolted. But how could I oppose all that? Rather feebly; getting red and agitated. Still it was then my genuine feeling that a play was antipathetic to me. How did they begin? With some dull speech a hundred miles from anything interesting. To prove it I opened [Twelfth Night] and read “If music be the food of love, play on …” I was downed that time. And he was ruthless; exasperating; downing me, overwhelming me; with enough passion to make us both heated. So that my opposition cannot have been quite ineffectual. He made me feel his pride, it was like his pride in his friends, in Shakespeare—shuffling off Falstaff, he pointed out, without a sign of sympathy. That large natural inhumanity in Shakespeare delighted him. It was a tree’s way of shedding its leaves. On the other hand, when Desdemona wakes again, he thought possibly Shakespeare was ‘sentimental’. These are the only particular criticisms that I remember, for he was not, as I am, a breaker off of single words, or sentences, not a note taker. He was more casual, rough and ready and comprehensive. And so I did not get from him any minute comments; but felt rather that Shakespeare was to him his other world; the place where he got the measure of the daily world. He took his bearings there; and sized us up from that standard. I felt once that he was half thinking of Falstaff and Hal and Mother Quickly and the rest, in a third class smoker in the underground, when there was some squabble between drunken men; and he sat in the corner, with his pipe in his mouth, looking over the edge of a newspaper; surveying them; unperturbed; equipped; as if placing it all. I felt (not only then) that he knew his own place; and relished his inheritance, I felt he scented the battle; was already, in anticipation, a law maker; proud of his station as a man; ready to play his part among men. Had he been put on, he would have proved most royally. The words Walter Lamb used of him were very fitting.

So we argued; about Shakespeare; about many many things; and often lost our tempers; but were attracted by some common admiration. The spot in Grays’ Inn where, walking home one night, he said to me: “I always wonder what the man in green is thinking”—(where does that come from?) by which I was elated, knowing him to mean that he wanted me to talk—[wanted] my opinion—that flag stone in the dark is still one of my unsubmerged islands. But how reserved we were! Brothers and sisters today talk quite freely together about—oh everything. Sex, sodomy, periods, and so on. We never talked much about ourselves even; I can recall no confidences, no compliments; no kisses; no self analysis between me and him. As for sex, he passed from childhood to boyhood, from boyhood to manhood under our eyes, in our presence, without saying a single word that could have been taken for a sign of what he was feeling. Did other boys fall in love with him? Not he with them, for a certainty. From Clive I learnt later (when talk was about everything) that Lytton’s sodomy was to him one of the stock jokes; one of the Strache’s preposterous, laughable absurdities. Yet beneath that silence—it may be kept cool and sweet, it may be given a depth and seriousness, an emotional power and quality that speech destroys—dwelt as I felt great susceptibility; great sensibility; great pride in us whose photographs were always on his fireplace at Cambridge; and all those desires which would have made him a lover; a husband; a father. His loves were already distinctly sketched though so submerged; was there some dancing mistress, at Cambridge, brought to light by Gerald who found her photograph? And then of course Elena; and then Irene. But again how ceremonious, how formal, his approach to loving women was. How very silent in words; yet how apparent in its tremble and quiver without words. That would have been his private life. Publicly, he would have been, had he been put on, a judge certainly. Mr Justice Stephen he would be today; with several books to his credit; one or two on law; some essays exposing humbugs; perhaps a book on birds, with drawings by himself. By this time, aged sixty, he would have been a distinguished figure; but not prominent; for he was too melancholy, too independent, unconforming, to take any ready made mould. He would have been more of a character than a success, I suppose; had he been put on.

The knelt of those words affects my memory of a time when in fact they were not heard at all. We had no kind of foreboding that he was to die when he was twenty-six and I was twenty-four. That is one of the falsifications—that knell I always find myself hearing and transmitting—that one cannot guard against, save by noting it. Then I never saw him as I see him now, with all his promise ended. Then I thought only of the moment; him there in the room; just back from Clifton; or from Cambridge; dropping in to argue with me. It was, whatever date I give it, an exciting moment; in which we both pushed out from the mists of childhood; and each saw the other emerging; and each felt new qualities, he in himself, me in myself; both in each other. They were days of discovery. Exciting days, whether one called them happy or unhappy; or agitating. Externally I remember the discovery that he looked astonishingly handsome, in his new J. Hills suit of blue serge. That was in October 1899 when he first went to Cambridge. The summer at Warboys I discovered that he smoked a pipe. He never had it out of his mouth. Then term after term I discovered Bell, the Strache, and Sydney-Turner. But I am rushing too far ahead of myself in Hyde Park Gate. I go back then to the year that Stella died—1897.

I could sum it all up in one scene. I always see when I think of the months that followed her death a leafless bush, a skeleton bush, in the dark of a summer’s night. This rather finely drawn many twigged tree stands outside a garden house. Inside I am sitting with Jack Hills. He grips my hand in his. He wrings my hand. He groans: “It tears one asunder …” He gripped my hand to make his agony endurable; as women in childbirth grip a sheet. “But you can’t understand”, he broke off. “Yes I can”, I murmured. Subconsciously, I knew that he meant his sexual desires tore him asunder; I knew that he felt that at the same time as his agony at Stella’s death. Both tortured him. And the tree outside in the August summer half light was giving me, as he groaned, a symbol of his agony; of our sterile agony; was summing it all up. Still the leafless tree is to me the emblem, the symbol, of those summer months.

He came every weekend to the house we had at Painswick. Every night either Vanessa or I wandered off with him alone after dinner. Every day he wrote to one or the other. We bore the brunt of his anguish. He was in agony. “Poor boy, he looks very bad”, Father once muttered audibly. And Jack, overhearing, stammered some awkward sentence to cover up, to prevent him from saying more. He looked anguished; yet dogged; all in coal black. George, Gerald, Jack were all in black from head to toe. The leafless tree and Jack’s hand gripping my wrist; they come back together when I think of that summer.

The leafless tree was behind our ostensible lives for many months. But trees do not remain leafless. They begin to grow little red chill buds. By that image I would convey the misery, the quarrels, the irritations, half covered, then spurting out, the insinuations, which as soon as family life started again began to prove that Stella’s death had not left us more united; as father said; but had left us all ill adjusted; growing painfully into relations that her death had distorted.

Another garden scene—this time at Fritham—comes back to me. George had taken my arm in his. Indoors father was playing his nightly whist with the others. George singled me out, and walked me off round the lawn. I cannot remember any phrase exactly. A sound of mumbling comes back; his pressure on my hand; and then I gathered that very emotionally and ambiguously, with many such words as “Darling old Goat”, “old party”, and so on, he was telling me that people were saying that Vanessa was in love with Jack; it was illegal; their marriage he meant; could I not speak to her; persuade her—It was a blurred night talk; with the usual resonance of emotional chords; and I was flattered; perhaps felt important; and must have promised I would say whatever it was he wanted me to say. What? I do not remember what I said; only her answer, and its bitterness. “So you take their side too.”

Then I realised that she had her side; if that were so, of course I was on her side. Confusedly, I wobbled at once from George’s side to her side. But my vagueness and confusion show that I knew very little of the exact state of things; I had not been called in until George had tried other measures—for one thing as Nessa told me later, he had spoken to father; and he, with that backbone of intellect which would have made him, had we lived to be at ease with him, so dependable in serious relations, had said simply; she must do as she liked; he was not going to interfere. That was what I admire in him; his dignity and sanity in the larger affairs; so often covered up by his irritations and vanities and egotisms.

These scenes, by the way, are not altogether a literary device—a means of summing up and making a knot out of innumerable little threads. Innumerable threads there were; still, if I stopped to disentangle, I could collect a number. But whatever the reason may be, I find that scene making is my natural way of marking the past. A scene always comes to the top; arranged; representative. This confirms me in my instinctive notion—it is irrational; it will not stand argument—that we are sealed vessels afloat upon what it is convenient to call reality; at some moments, without a reason, without an effort, the sealing matter cracks; in floods reality; that is a scene—for they would not survive entire so many ruinous years unless they were made of something permanent; that is a proof of their “reality”. Is this liability of mine to scene receiving the origin of my writing impulse? These are questions about reality, about scenes and their connection with writing to which I have no answer; nor time to put the question carefully. Perhaps if I should revise and rewrite as I intend, I will make the question more exact; and worry out something by way of answer. Obviously I have developed the faculty, because in all the writing I have done (novels, criticism, biography) I almost always have to find a scene; either when I am writing about a person, I must find a representative scene in their lives; or when I am writing about a book, I must find the scene in their poems or novels. Or is this not quite the same faculty?

So that was one of the little red buds or thorns, on the skeleton tree; Vanessa was in love with Jack; Jack was absorbing her selfishly; people were talking; and George and Gerald (to a lesser degree) were getting their hackles up. That is one of the aspects of death that is left out when people talk—-as father talked—of the message or teaching of sorrow. They never mention its unbecoming side; its legacy of bitterness, bad temper; ill adjustment; and what is to me the worst of all—boredom.

(15th November 1940) We never spoke, during those unhappy years, of those scenes, (Scenes, I note, seldom Illustrate my relation with Vanessa; it has been too deep for ‘scenes’.) Thoby, I imagine, never guessed at their existence. He may have had a vague conception that something, as he would have put it, was ‘up’ between Jack and Vanessa. But his general attitude was aloof—was he not a man? Did not men ignore domestic trifles?—and judicial. From his remote station, as schoolboy, as undergraduate, he felt generally speaking that we should accept our lot; if George wanted us to go to parties, why not? If father—who was not, he once told me, a normal specimen of manhood—wished us to walk, we should. Once at Salisbury, when the Fishers were neighbours, Vanessa, detesting them, and in particular Aunt Mary, who had viciously interfered, writing surreptitious letters addressed to Cope’s studio, criticising her behaviour towards George and Jack—when Vanessa refused to visit them, and cut them in the street, Thoby pronounced one of his rare impressive judgements. He said gruffly it was not right to treat Aunt Mary like that.

It thus came about that Nessa and I formed together a close conspiracy. In that world of many men, coming and going, in that big house of innumerable rooms, we formed our private nucleus. I visualise it as a little sensitive centre of acute life; of instantaneous sympathy, in the great echoing shell of Hyde Park Gate. The shell was empty all day. In the evening back they would all come; Adrian from Westminster; Jack from Lincoln’s Inn Fields; Gerald from Dents; George from the Post office or the Treasury, back to the focus, the tea table, where Nessa and I presided. The staple day would be spent (after the morning’s work) together. Together we shaped our own angle, and from it looked out at a world that seemed to both of us much the same. Very soon after Stella’s death we realised that we must make some standing place for ourselves in this baffling, frustrating whirlpool. Every day we did battle for that which was always being snatched from us, or distorted. The most imminent obstacle, the most oppressive stone laid upon our vitality and its struggle to live was of course father. I suppose hardly a day of the week passed without our planning together: was he by any chance to be out, when Kitty Maxse or Katie Thynne came? Must I spend the afternoon walking round Kensington Gardens? Was old Mr Bryce coming to tea? Could we possibly take our friends up to the studio—that is, the day nursery? Could we avoid Brighton at Easter? And so on—day after day we tried to remove the pressure of his tremendous obstacle. And over the whole week brooded the horror, the recurring terror of Wednesday. On that day the weekly books were given him. Early that morning we knew whether they were under or over the danger mark—eleven pounds if I remember right. On a bad Wednesday we ate our lunch in the anticipation of torture. The books were presented directly after lunch. He put on his glasses. Then he read the figures. Then down came his fist on the account book. His veins filled; his face flushed. Then there was an inarticulate roar. Then he shouted … “I am ruined.” Then he beat his breast. Then he went through an extraordinary dramatisation of self pity, horror, anger. Vanessa stood by his side silent. He belaboured her with reproaches, abuses. “Have you no pity for me? There you stand like a block of stone …” and so on. She stood absolutely silent. He flung at her all the phrases about shooting Niagara, about his misery, her extravagance, that came handy. She still remained static. Then another attitude was adopted. With a deep groan he picked up his pen and with ostentatiously trembling hands he wrote out the cheque. Slowly with many groans the pen and the account book were put away. Then he sank into his chair; and sat spectacularly with his head on his breast. And then, tired of this, he would take up a book; read for a time; and then say half plaintively, appealingly (for he did not like me to witness these outbursts): “What are you doing this afternoon, Jinny?” I was speechless. Never have I felt such rage and such frustration. For not a word of what I felt—that unbounded contempt for him and of pity for Nessa—could be expressed.

That, as far as I can describe it, is an unexaggerated account of a bad Wednesday. And bad Wednesdays always hung over us. Even now I can find nothing to say of his behaviour save that it was brutal. If instead of words he had used a whip, the brutality could have been no greater. How can one explain it? His life explains something. He had been indulged, ever since he broke the flower pot and threw it at his mother (whatever the truth of that story, it ran something like that). Delicacy was the excuse then. Later there was the ‘genius’ legend to which I have referred. And first his sister, Carry, then Minny, then my mother, each accepting the legend, and bowing to it, increased the load for the other. But there are additions and qualifications to be made. To begin with, it is notable that these scenes were never indulged in before men. Fred Maitland thus resolutely refused to believe, though tactfully instructed by Carry, that Leslie’s tempers were more than what he called (in his biography) coloured showers of sparks. If Thoby had given him the weekly books, or George, the explosion would have been minimised. Why then had he no shame in thus indulging his rage before women? Partly of course because woman was then (though gilt with an angelic surface) the slave. But that does not explain the histrionic element in these displays; the breast beating, the groaning, the self-dramatisation. His dependence on women helps to explain that. He needed always some woman to act before; to sympathise with him, to console him (“He is one of those men who cannot live without us,” Aunt Mary whispered to me once. “And it is very nice for us that it should be so.” Coming downstairs arm in arm with her, I laid that remark aside for further inspection.) Why did he need them? Because he was conscious of his failure as a philosopher. That failure gnawed at him. But his creed, the attitude, that is to say, adopted by him in his public relations, made him hide the need he had for praise; thus to Fred Maitland and to Herbert Fisher he appeared entirely self deprecating, modest, and ridiculously humble in his opinion of himself. To us he was exacting, greedy, unabashed in his demand for praise. If then, these suppressions and needs are combined, it seems possible that the reason for this brutality to Vanessa was that he had an illicit need for sympathy, released by the woman, stimulated; and her refusal to accept her role, part slave, part angel, exacerbated him; checked the flow that had become necessary of self pity, and stirred in him instincts of which he was unconscious. Yet also ashamed. “You must think me,” he said to me after one of these rages—I think the word he used was “foolish”. I was silent. I did not think him foolish. I thought him brutal.

If someone had said to him simply and straightforwardly: “You are a brute to treat a girl like that …” what would he have said? I cannot imagine that the words would have meant anything to him. The reason for that complete unconsciousness of his own behaviour is to be found in the disparity, so obvious in his books, between the critical and the imaginative power. Give him a thought to analyse, the thought say of Mill or Bentham or Hobbes, and he is (so Maynard told me) a model of acuteness, clarity, and impartiality. Give him a character to explain, and he is (to me) so crude, so elementary, so conventional that a child with a box of chalks could make a more subtle portrait. To explain this one would have to discuss the crippling effect of Cambridge and its one sided education. One would have to follow that by a discussion of the writer’s profession in the nineteenth century and the mutilations of intensive brain work. He never used his hands. And one would have to show how both these influences told upon a nature that was congenitally unaware of music, of art, and puritannically brought up. All this would have to be considered and its effect in intensifying certain sensibilities and reducing others to atrophy.

The fact remains that at the age of sixty-five he was a man in prison, isolated. He had so ignored, or disguised his own feelings that he had no idea of what he was; and no idea of what other people were. Hence the horror and the terror of those violent displays of rage. There was something blind, animal, savage in them. Roger Fry said that civilisation means awareness; he was uncivilised in his extreme unawareness. He did not realise what he did. No one could enlighten him. Yet he suffered. Through the walls of his prison he had moments of realisation.

From it all I gathered one obstinate and enduring conception; that nothing is so much to be dreaded as egotism. Nothing so cruelly hurts the person himself; nothing so wounds those who are forced into contact with it.

But from my present distance of time I see too what we could not then see—the gulf between us that was cut by our difference in age. Two different ages confronted each other in the drawing room at Hyde Park Gate. The Victorian age and the Edwardian age. We were not his children; we were his grandchildren. There should have been a generation between us to cushion the contact. Thus it was that we perceived so keenly, while he raged, that he was somehow ridiculous. We looked at him with eyes that were looking into the future. What we saw was something that is so obvious now to any boy or girl of sixteen or eighteen that it is hardly to be described. But while we looked into the future, we were completely under the power of the past. Explorers and revolutionists, as we both were by nature, we lived under the sway of a society that was about fifty years too old for us. It was this curious fact that made our struggle so bitter and so violent. For the society in which we lived was still the Victorian society. Father himself was a typical Victorian. George and Gerald were consenting and approving Victorians. So that we had two quarrels to wage; two fights to fight; one with them individually; and one with them socially. We were living say in 1910; they were living in i860.

Hyde Park Gate in 1900 was a complete model of Victorian society. If I had the power to lift out of the past a single day as we lived it about 1900, it would give a section of upper middle class Victorian life, like one of those sections with glass covers in which ants and bees are shown going about their tasks. Our day would begin with family breakfast at 8.30. Adrian bolted his, and whichever of us, Vanessa or myself, was down would see him off. Standing at the front door, we would wave a hand till he had disappeared behind the bulging wall of the Martins’ house. This hand waving was a relic left us by Stella—a flutter of the dead hand which lay beneath the surface of family life. Father would eat his breakfast sighing and snorting. If there were no letters, “Everyone has forgotten me”, he would exclaim. A long envelope from Barkers would mean of course a sudden roar. George and Gerald would come later. Vanessa disappeared behind the curtain with its golden anchor. Dinner ordered, she would dash for the red bus to take her to the Academy. If Gerald coincided, he would give her a lift in his daily hansom, the same generally; in summer the cabby wore a red carnation. George, having breakfasted more deliberately, would persuade me sometimes to sit on in the three-cornered chair and would tell me scraps of gossip about last night’s party. Then he would kiss me, button up his frock coat, give his top hat a promise with the velvet glove and trot off, handsome, debonair, in his ribbed socks and very small well polished shoes to the Treasury.

Left alone in the great house, father shut in his study at the top, Lizzie polishing brass stair rods, another maid doing bedrooms, Shag asleep on his mat, while Sophie, I suppose, stood at the back door taking in joints, milk, vegetables from tradespeople in their little carts, I mounted to my room; spread my Liddell and Scott upon the table, and settled down to read Plato, or to make out some scene in Euripides or Sophocles for Clara Pater, or Janet Case.

From ten to one Victorian society did not exert any special pressure upon us. Vanessa, under the eye of Val Prinsep, or Mr Ouless, R.A. or occasionally of the great Sargent himself, made those minute pencil drawings of Greek statues which she brought home and fixed with a spray of odd smelling mixture; or painted a histrionic male model rather like Sir Henry Irving in oils. I read and wrote. For three hours we lived in the world which we still inhabit. For at this moment (November 1940) she is painting at Charleston; and I am writing here in the garden room at Monks House. Nor would our clothes be very different; the skirts a little shorter perhaps. My hair not much untidier then than now; and Vanessa in a blue cotton smock; as no doubt she is at this moment.

Victorian society began to exert its pressure at about half past four. In the first place, we must be in; one certainly, preferably both. For at five father must be given his tea. And we must be tidied and in our places, she at the tea table, I on the sofa, for Mrs Green was coming; or Mrs Humphrey Ward; if no one came, it was still necessary to be there; for father could not give himself his tea in the society of those days.

The pressure of society made itself apparent as soon as the bell rang and Lizzie, also dressed in her afternoon black with a white apron, announced the visitor. For then instantaneously we became young ladies possessed of a certain manner. We both still possess that manner. We learnt it partly from remembering mother’s manner; Stella’s manner, and it was partly imposed upon us by the visitor who came in. For the manner in which a young man—say Ronny Norman—addressed young ladies was a marked manner. The visitors upon that day were, let us suppose, Ronny Norman, Eveline Godley, Elsa Bell and Florence Bishop. We should have first to make conversation. It was not argument, it was not gossip. It was a concoction, a confection; light; ceremonious; and of course unbroken. Silence was a breach of convention. At the right moment, one of us would take father’s trumpet and convey some suitable portion to him. And then, if we could contrive it, the trumpet would be skilfully transferred to Florence Bishop. And our concoction would begin again with Ronny Norman. He would say something about an awfully jolly play; or an awfully jolly picture perhaps. Light remarks about friends were allowed. Elsa Bell, to recall an exact sentence, said in her society way: “My brothers always take off their hats if they meet me in the street,” Light discussion of brothers and their manners followed. At this point father, groaning, would intervene.

[… father would be irritated: Florence Bishop would too and [would] withdraw her unlucky remark—that he looked well; Ronny Norman would ask him if he remembered Mill; he would unbend—for he liked Ronny Norman—and say how he had met Mill with his father in Chelsea. “Oh dear, these old stories …” he would say. Well, the talk had its little steeps and waterfalls—its dangers: but it went something like that: and the whole was enclosed in the Victorian manner. It may have been natural for Ronny Norman, for Eveline Godley, for Miss Bishop. It was not natural for Vanessa or myself. We learned it. We learned it partly from memory: and mother had that manner: it was imposed on us partly by the other side—if Ronny Norman said that, one had to reply in the same style. Nobody ever broke the convention. If you listened, as I did, it was like watching a game. One had to know the rules.]

We both learnt the rules of the game of Victorian society so thoroughly that we have never forgotten them. We still play the game. It is useful. It has also its beauty, for it is founded upon restraint, sympathy, unselfishness—all civilized qualities. It is helpful in making something seemly out of raw odds and ends. Major Gardner, Mrs Chavasse, and Mr Dutton need some solving to make it into a sociable party. But the Victorian manner is perhaps—I am not sure—a disadvantage in writing. When I read my old Literary Supplement articles, I lay the blame for their suavity, their politeness, their sidelong approach, to my tea-table training. I see myself, not reviewing a book, but handing plates of buns to shy young men and asking them: do they take cream and sugar? On the other hand, the surface manner allows one, as I have found, to slip in things that would be inaudible if one marched straight up and spoke out loud.

Society—upper middle class Victorian society—came into being when the lights went up. About seven thirty the pressure of the machine became emphatic. At seven thirty we went upstairs to dress. However cold or foggy, we slipped off our day clothes and stood shivering in front of washing basins. Each basin had its can of hot water. Neck and arms had to be scrubbed, for we had to enter the drawing room at eight with bare arms, low neck, in evening dress. At seven thirty dress and hair overcame paint and Greek grammar. I would stand in front of George’s Chippendale mirror trying to make myself not only tidy, but presentable. On an allowance of fifty pounds it was difficult, even for the skilful, and I had no skill, to be well dressed of an evening. A home dress, made by Jane Bride, could be had for a pound or two; but a party dress, made by Mrs Young, cost fifteen guineas. The home dress therefore might be, as on one night that comes back to mind, made cheaply but eccentrically, of a green fabric, bought at Story’s, the furniture shop. It was not velvet; nor plush; something betwixt and between; and for chairs, presumably, not dresses. Down I came one winter’s evening about 1900 in my green dress; apprehensive, yet, for a new dress excites even the unskilled, elated. All the lights were turned up in the drawing room; and by the blazing fire George sat, in dinner jacket and black tie, cuddling the dachshund, Schuster, on his knee. He at once fixed on me that extraordinarily observant scrutiny with which he always inspected our clothes. He looked me up and down for a moment as if I were a horse brought into the show ring. Then the sullen look came into his eyes; the look which expressed not simply aesthetic disapproval; but something that went deeper. It was the look of moral, of social, disapproval, as if he scented some kind of insurrection, of defiance of his accepted standards. I knew myself condemned from more points of view than I could then analyse. As I stood there I was conscious of fear; of shame; of something like anguish—a feeling, like so many, out of all proportion to its surface cause. He said at last: “Go and tear it up.” He spoke in a curiously tart, rasping, peevish voice; the voice of the enraged male; the voice which expressed his serious displeasure at this infringement of a code that meant more to him than he could admit.

George accepted Victorian society so implicitly that to an archaeologist he would be a fascinating object. Like a fossil he had taken every crease and wrinkle of the conventions of upper middle class society between 1870 and 1900. He was made presumably of precisely the right material. He flowed into the mould without a doubt to mar the pattern. If father had graved on him certain large marks of the age—his belief that women must be pure and men manly; his hatred of strong language—“Damm!” Gerald said once, and up flew his hands in protest; when Rezia Corsini smoked a cigarette after tea, “I won’t have my drawing room turned into a bar parlour!” he exclaimed—still he smoothed out the petty details of the Victorian code with his admirable intellect, with his respect for reason—no one was less snobbish than he, no one cared less for rank or luxury. But if father had the larger lines of the age stamped on him, George filled them in with a crisscross, with a crowquill etching of the most minute details. No more perfect fossil of the Victorian age could exist. And so, while father preserved the framework of 1860, George filled in the framework with all kinds of minutely-teethed saws; and the machine into which our rebellious bodies were inserted in 1900 not only held us tight in its framework, but bit into us with innumerable sharp teeth.

But what material was George made of so that he took the pattern so completely? In the first place, he was almost brainless; in the second he had an abundance of feeling. His physical passions were strong. This mixture was poured into a perfectly adapted physical vessel. He was in a conventional way as handsome as a man could be. He was precisely six foot in height; well proportioned; and, as the old ladies said, well set up in every respect. His eyes were too small and too stupid to light up this great framework. He had over a thousand a year of unearned income. He could supply frock coats, hats, shoes, ties, horses, guns, bicycles, as the occasion required. Thus furnished and equipped society opened its arms wide to him and embraced him. He can never have met with any opposition at Eton, at Cambridge, or in London. He offered none. He had no instinct, no ability to make him stray beyond the circle of the upper middle class world in the evening drawing room. He was never rebuffed or criticised because he never went an inch out of his orbit. Any defiance therefore was unfamiliar to him; and my green dress set ringing in him a thousand alarm bells. It was extreme; it was artistic; it was not what nice people thought nice. Was that the formula, he said to himself, as he saw me come into the room? Did he too feel that it threatened something in himself? Was I somehow casting a shadow in his world; pointing a finger of scorn at him? I do not know. Gerald, I remember, spoke up for me good naturedly. “I don’t agree,” he said. “I like you in that dress.” To my discredit, I never wore it again in George’s presence. I knuckled under to his authority.

It is true that George was thirty-six when I was twenty. And he had [a] thousand pounds [a] year whereas I had fifty. These were good reasons why it was difficult not to submit to whatever he decreed. But there was another element in our relationship. Besides feeling his age and his power, I felt too what I have come to call the outsider’s feeling. I felt as a gipsy or a child feels who stands at the flap of the tent and sees the circus going on inside. I stood in the drawing room at Hyde Park Gate and saw society in full swing. I saw George as an acrobat jumping through hoops. I saw him, perhaps with fear, perhaps with admiration. The patriarchal society of the Victorian age was in full swing in our drawing room. It had of course many different parts. Vanessa and I were not called upon to take part in some of those acts. We were only asked to admire and applaud when our male relations went through the different figures of the intellectual game. They played it with great skill. Most of our male relations were adept at that game. They knew the rules, and attached extraordinary importance to those who won the game. Father for example laid immense stress upon school reports; upon scholarships; triposes and fellowships. The male Fishers went through those hoops to perfection. They won all the prizes, all the honours. What, I asked myself, when I read Herbert Fisher’s autobiography the other day, would Herbert have been without Winchester, New College and the Cabinet? What would have been his shape had he not been stamped and moulded by that great patriarchal machine? Every one of our male relations was shot into that machine at the age of ten and emerged at sixty a Head Master, an Admiral, a Cabinet Minister, or the Warden of a college. It is as impossible to think of them as natural human beings as it is to think of a carthorse galloping wild maned and unshod over the pampas.

George had not been able to enter the intellectual machine. He tried again and again to enter the diplomatic service, but failed. There was however the other machine—the social machine. That he entered; and he learnt the rules of the game so well and played it so assiduously that he emerged at the age of sixty with a Lady Margaret for wife, with a knighthood, with a sinecure of some sort, three sons, and a country house. In ways so indefinite that I cannot name them, I felt, at twenty, that George no less than Herbert Fisher was going through the hoops; doing the required acts. In a thousand ways he made me feel that he believed in society. A belief which is so commonly accepted, as his was by all his friends, had depth, swiftness, inevitability. It impresses even the outsider by the sweep of its current. Sometimes when I hear God Save the King I too feel a current belief but almost directly I consider my own splits asunder and one side of me criticises the other. George never questioned his belief in the old tune that society played. He rose and took his hat off and stood. Not only did he never question his behaviour; he applauded it, enforced it.

These perceptions, however slight and transient they were then, gave my attitude to George a queer twist. I must obey because he had force—age, wealth, tradition—behind him. But even while I obeyed, I marvelled—how could anyone believe what George believed? There was a spectator in me who, even while I squirmed and obeyed, remained observant, note taking for some future revision. The spectacle of George, laying down laws in his leather arm chair so instinctively, so unhesitatingly, fascinated me. Upstairs alone in my room I wrote a sketch of his probable career; which his actual career followed almost to the letter.

But unfortunately, though we could and indeed must, sit passive and applaud the Victorian males when they went through the intellectual hoops, George’s hoops—his social triumphs—needed our help. Here, of course, his motives were—as indeed they always were—mixed. Naturally, at eighteen or so, we had to be brought out. And he naturally, as we had no mother, took her place. What proved unnatural, however, was his insistence that we should go where he wished us to go, and do as he wished us to do. Here the other motive came in; his desire to make us share his views, approve of his beliefs. I cannot even now understand why it was that he attached so much emotion to this desire. No, I puzzle; but I cannot find the true reason. Some crude wish to dominate there was; some jealousy, of Jack no doubt; some desire to carry off the prize; and, as became obvious later, some sexual urge. At any rate this matter of taking us out became an obsession with him. And thus, when the London season began, several times a week we would go upstairs after dinner—after the post had come, the tea had been drunk, and father had gone up to his study—and change into long satin dresses, for which Sally Young would charge fifteen guineas, pull on long white gloves, slip on satin shoes, and snap a row of pearls, of amethysts, round our necks. The cab would be called; and off we would drive along the silver plated streets, for the wood pavements were beaten to silver on a dry summer night, to the house where there was an awning, bright windowed, and perhaps a strip of red carpet, and a little cluster of gaping passers by.

Society exerted its full pressure about eleven o’clock on a June night in 1900. I remember the dazed, elated, frozen feeling as the lights beat on me, going upstairs with George following behind. He held his opera hat always under his arm. He would introduce me with his little bow: “And this is my sister, Virginia.” Can I remember anything further—any words, any human emotions? There, at the Savoy, was Mrs Joseph Chamberlain, the very image of womanly charm. We were going to the opera, The Ring; it was broad daylight, and George, with a lack of tact with which he reproached himself afterwards—he would tot up the night’s successes and failures—had placed her opposite the window; and she was then not quite at her prime. Eddie Marsh sat next me, as I now suppose. That night I called him Richard Marsh; and vaguely connected him with fiction. After a pause, he did his duty by me; “What is your father writing now?” A blank occurs. But I visualise my own efforts to keep up the conversation as the wild flounderings and scrapings of a skater who cannot skate. At the Chamberlains’ I sat next to a chubby spruce boy, perhaps a private secretary. We discussed public speaking. “Our host”, he reminded me, for I had been denouncing the death of oratory, “is generally supposed to be a good speaker.” And then on I plunged, and told him—the words come back—that snobbishness, that money making, deserved imprisonment as well as theft and murder. But I had plunged too deep; the glue stuck to my quivering feet. On the steps of a ball room I can see the romantic figure of Geoffrey Young; blue eyed; bland, immaculate. “But how very good of you to have come”, he replied superciliously; for had I not told him that I hated dancing? Then he left me. At Lady Sligo’s I remember pressing some spruce boy to tell me how life was lived in the peerage; whether Garters were taken seriously. Again silence. At the Lyulph Stanleys’ I stood unclaimed against a door. Up came Elena Rathbone and nailed the coffin of my failure by introducing me to a girl, also partnerless. And soon she discovered, as all my partners discovered, that I could not dance. The humiliation of standing unpartnered returns to me. But at the same time I recall that the good friend who is with me still, upheld me; that sense of the spectacle; the dispassionate separate sense that I am seeing what will be useful later; I could even find the words for the scene as I stood there. At the same time, there was the thrill; and the oddity. For the first time one was in touch with a young man in white waistcoat and gloves; and I too was in white and gloves. If it was unreal, there was a thrill in that unreality. For when at last I came back to my bedroom, it looked small, untidy; and I would ride the waves of these fragmentary feelings—repeat these scraps of talk—say it all over to myself—what I said—what he said—and next morning would still be going over it as I read my Sophocles for Miss Case.

None of this is strange; nor if this had been all would there have been much in these parties to come back to mind. They would have slid off one’s back like so much sparkling water. But there was George. And he made us feel that every party was a test; if a success, then the prize was ours; we had satisfied Lady Sligo; looked lovely; so and so had said I have never seen a lovelier girl and so on. But if it was a failure, then doom was before us; we would fall into the depths of dowdiness; of eccentricity. The importance of the party either way was enormous. But why? This question could not be asked. If, plucking up courage, one of us, opening one of those stiff envelopes with an engraved card on it, should say: “But if I hate going to parties, why should I accept this one?” He would instantly wrinkle his cheek lines; and announce tartly: “You’re too young to pick and choose …” There would be silence. Then changing his mood, opening his arms, he would cry: “Besides, I want you to come. I hate going alone … beloved. Say you will come?” Duty and emotion muddied the stream. And over that turbulent whirlpool the ghosts of mother and Stella presided. How could we do battle with all of them?

By degrees then these parties, these tests, for which one had to prepare so carefully, became ordeals. “Only three weeks till the end of July I would say,” as the cards arrived. But before the three weeks were over there would be coaxing and hinting; and when the night came, a battle, and Vanessa would stalk off, if beaten, to dress herself in the famous black velvet dress, and George, left in the drawing room, would pace up and down; and protest that he could not take her if she looked like that. And yet other girls would give their eyes to be asked—wherever it was. Did he feel, I return to the puzzle, that we criticised his conception? Was it again the sexual jealousy that fermented in his depths? At any rate, he would run through an astonishing range of emotions about these parties. He would upbraid us with selfishness, with narrowness. Caustic phrases would hint at his displeasure. He complained to his circle of dowagers. He invoked their help. And he succeeded, of course, in impressing the outsiders. How could we resist his wishes? Was not George Duckworth wonderful? And anyhow what else did we want? Society in those days was a perfectly competent, perfectly complacent, ruthless machine. A girl had no chance against its fangs. No other desires—say to paint, or to write—could be taken seriously. Even Beatrice Thynne, when I told her I meant to be a writer, said at once: “I’ll ask Alice to invite you to meet Andrew Lang”, and when I boggled, thought me excessively foolish.

The division in our lives was curious. Downstairs there was pure convention; upstairs pure intellect. But there was no connection between them. This was partly, of course, due to father’s deafness, which had cut off his intercourse with the younger generation of writers. Young writers, young painters never came to Hyde Park Gate. When Will Rothenstein somehow drifted into father’s study, he was terror struck. Leslie Stephen opened book after book and pointed silently, trying, apparently, to show him Thackeray drawings. Yet he kept his own intellectual attitude—the old Cambridge attitude—perfectly pure. No one cared less for the conventions. No one was less of a snob. Nobody respected intellect more. Thus I would go from the drawing room, where George was telling one of his little triumphs—“Mrs Willie Grenfell asked me to come for a weekend. And I said on the whole I thought I wouldn’t … She was taken by surprise …”—up to father’s study to fetch a book. I would find him swinging in his rocking chair, pipe in mouth. Slowly he would unwrinkle his forehead and come to ground and realise with a very sweet smile that I stood there. Rising he would go to the shelves, put the book back, and ask me gently, kindly; “What did you make of it?” Perhaps I was reading Boswell; without a doubt, I would be gnawing my way through the eighteenth century. Then, feeling proud and stimulated, and full of love for this unworldly, very distinguished and lonely man, whom I had pleased by coming, I would go back to the drawing room and hear George’s patter. There was no connection. There were deep divisions.

Great figures stood in the background. Meredith, Henry James, Watts, Burne-Jones, Sidgwick, Haldane, Morley. But with them again we had no close connection. My memories of them are strong; but only of figures looming large in the distance. I can still see Symonds, as I saw him from the landing at Talland House. I looked down on his crinkled yellow face; and noted his tie—a yellow cord to which two balls of yellow plush were attached. I remember the roll and rear of Meredith’s voice; pointing to a flower and saying “that damsel in the purple petticoat.” I remember still more clearly the ceremony of our visits to great men. For father and mother were equally respectful of greatness. And the honour and the privilege of our position impressed themselves on us. I remember Meredith dropping slices of lemon into his tea. I remember that Watts had great bowls of whipped cream; and a plate of minced meat. “I kissed him”, said mother, “before he dipped his moustache in the cream.” He wore ruffles at his wrists, and a long grey dressing gown. And we went to Little Holland House always on a Sunday morning. I remember that Lowell had a long knitted purse, constrained by two rings; and that a sixpence always slipped out of the slit. I remember Meredith’s growl; and I remember the hesitations and adumbrations with which Henry James made the drawing room seem rich and dusky. Greatness still seems to me a positive possession; booming; eccentric; set apart; something to which I am led up dutifully by my parents. It is a bodily presence; it has nothing to do with anything said. It exists in certain people. But it never exists now. I cannot remember ever to have felt greatness since I was a child.

[There they were, on the verge of the drawing room, these great men: while, round the tea table, George and Gerald and Jack talked of the Post Office, the publishing office, and the Law Courts. And I, sitting by the table, was quite unable to make any connection. There were so many different worlds: but they were distant from me, I could not make them cohere; nor feel myself in touch with them. And I spent many hours of my youth restlessly comparing them. No doubt the distraction and the differences were of use; as a means of education; as a way of showing one the contraries. For no sooner had I settled down to my Greek than I would be called off to hear George’s case; then from that I would be told to come up to the study to read German; and then the gay world of Kitty Maxse would impinge.]

[written in 1938]

[]

22 Hyde Park Gate.

As I have said, the drawing room at Hyde Park Gate was divided by black folding doors picked out with thin lines of raspberry red. We were still much under the influence of Titian. Mounds of plush, Watts’ portraits, busts shrined in crimson velvet, enriched the gloom of a room naturally dark and thickly shaded in summer by showers of Virginia Creeper.

But it is of the folding doors that I wish to speak. How could family life have been carried on without them? As soon dispense with water-closets or bathrooms as with folding doors in a family of nine men and women, one of whom into the bargain was an idiot. Suddenly there would be a crisis—a servant dismissed, a lover rejected, pass books opened, or poor Miss Tyndall who had lately poisoned her husband by mistake come for consolation. On one side of the door Cousin Adeline, Duchess of Bedford, perhaps would be on her knees—the Duke had died tragically at Woburn; Mrs Dolmetsch would be telling how she had found her husband in bed with the parlour-maid or Lisa Stillman would be sobbing that Walter Headlam had chalked her nose with a billiard cue—“which”, she cried, “is what comes of smoking a pipe before gentlemen”—and my mother had much ado to persuade her that life had still to be faced, and the flower of virginity was still unplucked in spite of a chalk mark on the nose.

Though dark and agitated on one side, the other side of the door, especially on Sunday afternoons, was cheerful enough. There round the oval tea table with its pink china shell full of spice buns would be found old General Beadle, talking of the Indian Mutiny; or Mr Haldane, or Sir Frederick Pollock—talking of all things under the sun; or old C.B. Clarke, whose name is given to three excessively rare Himalayan ferns; and Professor Wolstenholme, capable, if you interrupted him, of spouting two columns of tea not unmixed with sultanas through his nostrils; after which he would relapse into a drowsy ursine torpor, the result of eating opium to which he had been driven by the unkindness of his wife and the untimely death of his son Oliver who was eaten, somewhere off the coast of Coromandel, by a shark. These gentlemen came and came again; and they were often reinforced by Mr Frederick Gibbs, sometime tutor to the prince of Wales, whose imperturbable common sense and fund of information about the colonies in general and Canada in particular were a perpetual irritation to my father who used to wonder whether a brain fever at college in the year 1863 had not something to do with it. These old gentlemen were generally to be found, eating very slowly, staying very late and making themselves agreeable at Christmas-time with curious presents of Indian silver work, and hand bags made from the skin of the ornithorhynchus—as I seem to remember.

The tea table however was also fertilized by a ravishing stream of female beauty—the three Miss Lushingtons, the three Miss Stillmans, and the three Miss Montgomeries—all triplets, all ravishing, but of the nine the paragon for wit, grace, charm and distinction was undoubtedly the lovely Kitty Lushington—now Mrs Leo Maxse. (Their engagement under the jackmanii in the Love Corner at St Ives was my first introduction to the passion of love.) At the time I speak of she was in process of disengaging herself from Lord Morpeth, and had, I suspect, to explain her motives to my mother, a martinet in such matters, for first promising to marry a man and then breaking it off. My mother believed that all men required an infinity of care. She laid all the blame, I feel sure, upon Kitty. At any rate I have a picture of her as she issued from the secret side of the folding doors bearing on her delicate pink cheeks two perfectly formed pear-shaped crystal tears. They neither fell nor in the least dimmed the lustre of her eyes. She at once became the life and soul of the tea table—perhaps Leo Maxse was there—perhaps Ronny Norman—perhaps Esmé Howard—perhaps Arthur Studd, for the gentlemen were not all old, or all professors by any means—and when my father groaned beneath his breath but very audibly, “Oh Gibbs, what a bore you are!” it was Kitty whom my mother instantly threw into the breach. “Kitty wants to tell you how much she loved your lecture”, my mother would cry, and Kitty still with the tears on her cheeks would improvise with the utmost gallantry some compliment or opinion which pacified my father who was extremely sensitive to female charm and largely depended upon female praise. Repenting of his irritation he would press poor Gibbswarmly by the hand and beg him to come soon again—which needless to say, poor Gibbs did.

And then there would come dancing into the room rubbing his hands, wrinkling his forehead, the most remarkable figure, as I sometimes think, that our household contained. I have alluded to a grisly relic of another age which we used to disinter from the nursery wardrobe—Herbert Duckworth’s wig. (Herbert Duckworth had been a barrister.) Herbert Duckworth’s son—George Herbert—was by no means grisly. His hair curled naturally in dark crisp ringlets; he was six foot high; he had been in the Eton Eleven; he was now cramming at Scoones’ in the hope of passing the Foreign Office examination. When Miss Willett of Brighton saw him ‘throwing off his ulster’ in the middle of her drawing room she was moved to write an Ode Comparing George Duckworth to the Hermes of Praxiteles—which Ode my mother kept in her writing table drawer, along with a little Italian medal that George had won for saving a peasant from drowning. Miss Willett was reminded of the Hermes; but if you looked at him closely you noticed that one of his ears was pointed; and the other round; you also noticed that though he had the curls of a God and the ears of a faun he had unmistakably the eyes of a pig. So strange a compound can seldom have existed. And in the days I speak of, God, faun and pig were all in all alive, all in opposition, and in their conflicts producing the most astonishing eruptions.

To begin with the God—well, he was only a plaster cast perhaps of Miss Willett’s Hermes, but I cannot deny that the benign figure of George Duckworth teaching his small half-brothers and sisters by the hour on a strip of coco-nut matting to play forward with a perfectly straight bat had something Christlike about it. He was certainly Christian rather than Pagan in Ids divinity, for it soon became clear that this particular forward stroke to be applied to every ball indifferently, was a symbol of moral rectitude, and that one could neither slog nor bowl a sneak without paltering rather dangerously (as poor Gerald Duckworth used to do) with the ideals of a sportsman and an English gentleman. Then, he would run miles to fetch cushions; he was always shutting doors and opening windows; it was always George who said the tactful thing, and broke bad news, and braved my father’s irritation, and read aloud to us when we had the whooping cough, and remembered the birthdays of aunts, and sent turtle soup to the invalids, and attended funerals, and took children to the pantomime—oh yes, whatever else George might be he was certainly a saint.

But then there was the faun. Now this animal was at once sportive and demonstrative and thus often at variance with the self-sacrificing nature of the God. It was quite a common thing to come into the drawing room and find George on his knees with his arms extended, addressing my mother, who might be adding up the weekly books, in tones of fervent adoration. Perhaps he had been staying with the Chamberlains for the week-end. But he lavished caresses, endearments, enquiries and embraces as if, after forty years in the Australian bush, he had at last returned to the home of his youth and found an aged mother still alive to welcome him. Meanwhile we gathered round—the dinner bell had already rung—awkward, but appreciative. Few families, we felt, could exhibit such a scene as this. Tears rushed to his eyes with equal abandonment. For example when he had a tooth out he flung himself into the cook’s arms in a paroxysm of weeping. When Judith Blunt refused him he sat at the head of the table sobbing loudly, but continuing to eat. He cried when he was vaccinated. He was fond of sending telegrams which began “My darling mother” and went on to say that he would be dining out. (I copied this style of his, I regret to say, with disastrous results on one celebrated occasion. “She is an angel” I wired, on hearing that Flora Russell had accepted him, and signed my nickname ‘Goat’. “She is an aged Goat” was the version that arrived, at Islay, and had something to do, George said, with Flora’s reluctance to ally herself with the Stephen family.) But all this exuberance of emotion was felt to be wholly to George’s credit. It proved not only how deep and warm his feelings were, but how marvellously he had kept the open heart and simple manners of a child.

But when nature refused him two pointed ears and gave him only one she knew, I think, what she was about. In his wildest paroxysms of emotion, when he bellowed with grief, or danced round the room, leaping like a kid, and flung himself on his knees before the Dowager Lady Carnarvon there was always something self conscious, a little uneasy about him, as though he were not quite sure of the effect—as though the sprightly faun had somehow been hobbled together with a timid and conventional old sheep.

It is true that he was abnormally stupid. He passed the simplest examinations with incredible difficulty. For years he was crammed by Mr Scoones; and again and again he failed to pass the Foreign Office examination. He had existed all his fife upon jobs found for him by his friends. His small brown eyes seemed perpetually to be boring into something too hard for them to penetrate. But when one compares them to the eyes of a pig, one is alluding not merely to their stupidity, or to their greed—George, I have been told, had the reputation of being the greediest young man in London ball-rooms—but to something obstinate and pertinacious in their expression as if the pig were grouting for truffles with his snout and would by sheer persistency succeed in unearthing them. Never shall I forget the pertinacity with which he learnt “Love in the Valley” by heart in order to impress Flora Russell; or the determination with which he mastered the first volume of Middlemarch for the same purpose; and how immensely he was relieved when he left the second volume in a train and got my father, whose set was ruined, to declare that in his opinion one volume of Middlemarch was enough. Had his obstinacy been directed solely to self-improvement there would have been no call for us to complain. I myself might even have been of use to him. But it gradually became clear that he was muddling out a scheme, a plan of campaign, a system of life—I scarcely know what to call it—and then we had every reason to feel the earth tremble beneath our feet and the heavens darken. For George Duckworth had become after my mother’s death, for all practical purposes, the head of the family. My father was deaf, eccentric, absorbed in his work, and entirely shut off from the world. The management of affairs fell upon George. It was usually said that he was father and mother, sister and brother in one—and all the old ladies of Kensington and Belgravia added with one accord that Heaven had blessed those poor Stephen girls beyond belief, and it remained for them to prove that they were worthy of such devotion.

But what was George Duckworth thinking and what was there alarming in the sight of him as he sat in the red leather arm-chair after dinner, mechanically stroking the dachshund Schuster, and lugubriously glancing at the pages of George Eliot? Well, he might be thinking about the crest on the post office notepaper, and how nice it would look picked out in red (he was now Austen Chamberlain’s private secretary) or he might be thinking how the Duchess of St Albans had given up using fish knives at dinner; or how Mrs Grenfell had asked him to stay and he had created as he thought a good impression by refusing; at the same time he was revolving in the slow whirlpool of his brain schemes of the utmost thoughtfulness—plans for sending us for treats; for providing us with riding lessons; for finding jobs for some of poor Augusta Croft’s innumerable penniless children. But the alarming thing was that he looked not merely muddled and emotional but obstinate. He looked as if he had made up his mind about something and would refuse to budge an inch. At the time it was extremely difficult to say what he had made up his mind to, but after the lapse of many years I think it may be said brutally and baldly, that George had made up his mind to rise in the social scale. He had a curious inborn reverence for the British aristocracy; the beauty of our great aunts had allied us in the middle of the nineteenth century with, I think I am right in saying, two dukes and quite a number of earls and countesses. They naturally showed no particular wish to remember the connection but George did his best to live up to it. His reverence for the symbols of greatness now that he was attached to a Cabinet Minister had fuller scope. His talk was all of ivory buttons that the coachmen of Cabinet Ministers wear in their coats; of having the entrée at Court; of baronies descending in the female line; of countesses secreting the diamonds of Marie Antoinette in black boxes under their beds. His secret dreams as he sat in the red leather chair stroking Schuster were all of marrying a wife with diamonds, and having a coachman with a button, and having the entrée at Court. But the danger was that his dreams were secret even to himself. Had you told him—and I think Vanessa did once—that he was a snob, he would have burst into tears. What he liked, he explained, was to know ‘nice people’; Lady Jeune was nice; so were Lady Sligo, Lady Carnarvon and Lady Leitrim. Poor Mrs Clifford, on the other hand, was not; nor was old Mr Wolstenholme; of all our old friends, Kitty Maxse, who might have been Lady Morpeth, came nearest to his ideal. It was not a question of birth or wealth; it was—and then if you pressed him further he would seize you in his arms and cry out that he refused to argue with those he loved. “Kiss me, kiss me, you beloved”, he would vociferate; and the argument was drowned in kisses. Everything was drowned in kisses. He lived in the thickest emotional haze, and as his passions increased and his desires became more vehement—he lived, Jack Hills assured me, in complete chastity until his marriage—one felt like an unfortunate minnow shut up in the same tank with an unwieldy and turbulent whale.

Nothing stood in the way of his advancement. He was a bachelor of prepossessing appearance though inclined to fat, aged about thirty years, with an independent income of something over a thousand a year. As private secretary to Austen Chamberlain he was as a matter of course invited to all the great parties of all the great peers. Hostesses had no time to remember, if they had ever known, that the Duckworths had made their money in cotton, or coal, not a hundred years ago, and did not really rank, as George made out, among the ancient families of Somersetshire. For I have it on the best authority that when the original Duckworth acquired Orchardleigh about the year 1810 he filled it with casts from the Greek to which he had attached not merely fig leaves for the Gods but aprons for the Goddesses—much to the amusement of the Lords of Longleat who never forgot that old Duckworth had sold cotton by the yard and probably bought his aprons cheap. George, as I say, could have mounted alone to the highest pinnacles of London society. His mantelpiece was a gallery of invitation cards from every house in London. Why then did he insist upon cumbering himself with a couple of half-sisters who were more than likely to drag him down? It is probably useless to enquire. George’s mind swam and steamed like a cauldron of rich Irish stew. He believed that aristocratic society was possessed of all the virtues and all the graces. He believed that his family had been entrusted to his care. He believed that it was his sacred duty—but when he reached that point his emotions overcame him; he began to sob; he flung himself on his knees; he seized Vanessa in his arms; he implored her in the name of her mother, of her grandmother, by all that was sacred in the female sex and holy in the traditions of our family to accept Lady Arthur Russell’s invitation to dinner, to spend the week-end with the Chamberlains at Highbury.

I cannot conceal my own opinion that Vanessa was to blame; not indeed that she could help herself, but if, I sometimes think, she had been born with one shoulder higher than another, with a limp, with a squint, with a large mole on her left cheek, both our lives would have been changed for the better. As it was, George had a good deal of reason on his side. It was plain that Vanessa in her white satin dress made by Mrs Young, wearing a single flawless amethyst round her neck, and a blue enamel butterfly in her hair—the gifts, of course, of George himself—beautiful, motherless, aged only eighteen, was a touching spectacle, an ornament for any dinner table, a potential peeress, anything might be made of such precious material as she was—outwardly at least; and to be seen hovering round her, providing her with jewels, and Arab horses, and expensive clothes, whispering encouragement, lavishing embraces which were not entirely concealed from the eyes of strangers, redounded to the credit of George himself and invested his figure with a pathos which it would not otherwise have had in the eyes of the dowagers of Mayfair. Unfortunately, what was inside Vanessa did not altogether correspond with what was outside. Underneath the necklaces and the enamel butterflies was one passionate desire—for paint and turpentine, for turpentine and paint. But poor George was no psychologist. His perceptions were obtuse. He never saw within. He was completely at a loss when Vanessa said she did not wish to stay with the Chamberlains at Highbury; and would not dine with Lady Arthur Russell—a rude, tyrannical old woman, with a bloodstained complexion and the manners of a turkey cock. He argued, he wept, he complained to Aunt Mary Fisher, who said that she could not believe her ears. Every battery was turned upon Vanessa. She was told that she was selfish, unwomanly, callous and incredibly ungrateful considering the treasures of affection that had been lavished upon her—the Arab horse she rode and the slabs of bright blue enamel which she wore. Still she persisted. She did not wish to dine with Lady Arthur Russell. As the season wore on, every morning brought its card of invitation for Mr Duckworth and Miss Stephen; and every evening witnessed a battle between them. For the first year or so George, I suppose, was usually the victor. Off they went, in the hansom cab of those days and late at night Vanessa would come into my room complaining that she had been dragged from party to party, where she knew no one, and had been bored to death by the civilities of young men from the Foreign Office and the condescensions of old ladies of title. The more Vanessa resisted, the more George’s natural obstinacy persisted. At last there was a crisis. Lady Arthur Russell was giving a series of select parties on Thursday evenings in South Audley Street. Vanessa had sat through one entire evening without opening her lips. George insisted that she must go next week and make amends, or he said, “Lady Arthur will never ask you to her house again.” They argued until it was getting too late to dress. At last Vanessa, more in desperation than in concession, rushed upstairs, flung on her clothes and announced that she was ready to go. Off they went. What happened in the cab will never be known. But whenever they reached 2 South Audley Street—and they reached it several times in the course of the evening—one or the other was incapable of getting out. George refused to enter with Vanessa in such a passion; and Vanessa refused to enter with George in tears. So the cabman had to be told to drive once more round the Park. Whether they ever managed to alight I do not know.

But next morning as I was sitting spelling out my Greek George came into my room carrying in his hand a small velvet box. He presented me with the jewel it contained—a Jews’ harp made of enamel with a pinkish blob of matter swinging in the centre which I regret to say only fetched a few shillings when I sold it the other day. But his face showed that he had come upon a different errand. His face was sallow and scored with innumerable wrinkles, for his skin was as loose and flexible as a pug dog’s, and he would express his anguish in the most poignant manner by puckering lines, folds, and creases from forehead to chin. His manner was stern. His bearing rigid. If Miss Willett of Brighton could have seen him then she would certainly have compared him to Christ on the cross. After giving me the Jews’ harp he stood before the fire in complete silence. Then, as I expected, he began to tell me his version of the preceding night—wrinkling his forehead more than ever, but speaking with a restraint that was at once bitter and manly. Never, never again, he said, would he ask Vanessa to go out with him. He had seen a look in her eyes which positively frightened him. It should never be said of him that he made her do what she did not wish to do. Here he quivered, but checked himself. Then he went on to say that he had only done what he knew my mother would have wished him to do. His two sisters were the most precious things that remained to him. His home had always meant more to him—more than he could say, and here he became agitated, struggled for composure, and then burst into a statement which was at once dark and extremely lurid. We were driving Gerald from the house, he cried—when a young man was not happy at home—he himself had always been content—but if his sisters—if Vanessa refused to go out with him—if he could not bring his friends to the house—in short, it was clear that the chaste, the immaculate George Duckworth would be forced into the arms of whores. Needless to say he did not put it like that; and I could only conjure up in my virgin consciousness, dimly irradiated by having read the “Symposium” with Miss Case, horrible visions of the vices to which young men were driven whose sisters did not make them happy at home. So we went on talking for an hour or two. The end of it was that he begged me, and I agreed, to go a few nights later to the Dowager Marchioness of Sligo’s ball. I had already been to May Week at Cambridge, and my recollections of gallopading round the room with Hawtrey, or sitting on the stairs and quizzing the dancers with Clive, were such as to make me wonder why Vanessa found dances in London so utterly detestable. A few nights later I discovered for myself. After two hours of standing about in Lady Sligo’s ball-room, of waiting to be introduced to strange young men, of dancing a round with Conrad Russell or with Esmé Howard, of dancing very badly, of being left without a partner, of being told by George that I looked lovely but must hold myself upright, I retired to an ante-room and hoped that a curtain concealed me. For some time it did. At length old Lady Sligo discovered me, judged the situation for herself and being a kind old peeress with a face like a rubicund sow’s carried me off to the dining room, cut me a large slice of iced cake, and left me to devour it by myself in a corner.

On that occasion George was lenient. We left about too o’clock, and on the way home he praised me warmly, and assured me that I only needed practice to be a great social success. A few days later he told me that the Dowager Countess of Carnarvon particularly wished to make my acquaintance, and had invited me to dinner. As we drove across the Park he stroked my hand, and told me how he hoped that I should make friends with Elsie—for so both he and Vanessa had called her for some time at her own request—how I must not be frightened—how though she had been vice-reine of Canada and vice-reine of Ireland she was simplicity itself—always since the death of her husband dressed in black—refused to wear any of her jewels though she had inherited the diamonds of Marie Antoinette—and was the one woman, he said, with a man’s sense of honour. The portrait he drew was of great distinction and bereavement. There would also be present her sister, Mrs Popham of Littlecote, a lady also of distinction and also bereaved, for her husband, Dick Popham of Littlecote, came of an ancient unhappy race, cursed in the reign of Henry the Eighth, since which time the property had never descended from father to son. Sure enough Mary Popham was childless, and Dick Popham was in a lunatic asylum. I felt that I was approaching a house of grandeur and desolation and was not a little impressed. But I could see nothing alarmin’ either in Elsie Carnarvon or in Mrs Popham of Littlecote. They were a couple of spare prim little women, soberly dressed in high black dresses, with grey hair strained off their foreheads, rather prominent blue eyes, and slightly protruding front teeth. We sat down to dinner.

The conversation was mild and kindly—Indeed I soon felt that I could not only reply to their questions—was I fond of painting?—was I fond of reading?—did I help my father in his work?—but could initiate remarks of my own. George had always complained of Vanessa’s silence. I would prove that I could talk. So off I started. Heaven knows what devil prompted me—or why to Lady Carnarvon and Mrs Popham of Littlecote of all people in the world I, a chit of eighteen, should have chosen to discourse upon the need of expressing the emotions! That, I said, was the great lack of modern life. The ancients, I said, discussed everything in common. Had Lady Carnarvon ever read the dialogues of Plato? “We—both men and women—” once launched it was difficult to stop, nor was I sure that my audacity was not holding them spell-bound with admiration. I felt that I was earning George’s gratitude for ever. Suddenly a twitch, a shiver, a convulsion of amazing expressiveness, shook the Countess by my side; her diamonds, of which she wore a chaste selection, flashed in my eyes; and stopping, I saw George Duckworth blushing crimson on the other side of the table. I realised that I had committed some unspeakable impropriety. Lady Carnarvon and Mrs Popham began at once to talk of something entirely different; and directly dinner was over George, pretending to help me on with my cloak, whispered in my ear in a voice of agony, “They’re not used to young women saying anything—.” And then as if to apologize to Lady Carnarvon for my ill breeding, I saw him withdraw with her behind a pillar in the hall, and though Mrs Popham of Littlecote tried to attract my attention to a fine specimen of Moorish metal work which hung on the wall, we both distinctly heard them kiss. But the evening was not over. Lady Carnarvon had taken tickets for the French actors, who were then appearing in some play whose name I have forgotten. We had stalls of course, and filed soberly to our places in the very centre of the crowded theatre. The curtain went up. Snubbed, shy, indignant, and uncomfortable, I paid little attention to the play. But after a time I noticed that Lady Carnarvon on one side of me, and Mrs Popham on the other, were both agitated by the same sort of convulsive twitching which had taken them at dinner. What could be the matter? They were positively squirming in their seats. I looked at the stage. The hero and heroine were pouring forth a flood of voluble French which I could not disentangle. Then they stopped. To my great astonishment the lady leapt over the back of a sofa; the gentleman followed her. Round and round the stage they dashed, the lady shrieking, the man groaning and grunting in pursuit. It was a fine piece of realistic acting. As the pursuit continued, the ladies beside me held to the arms of their stalls with claws of iron. Suddenly, the actress dropped exhausted upon the sofa, and the man with a howl of gratification, loosening his clothes quite visibly, leapt on top of her. The curtain fell. Lady Carnarvon, Mrs Popham of Littlecote and George Duckworth rose simultaneously. Not a word was said. Out we filed. And as our procession made its way down the stalls I saw Arthur Cane leap up in his seat like a jack-in-the-box, amazed and considerably amused that George Duckworth and Lady Carnarvon of all people should have taken a girl of eighteen to see the French actors copulate upon the stage.

The brougham was waiting, and Mrs Popham of Littlecote, without speaking a word or even looking at me, immediately secreted herself inside it. Nor could Lady Carnarvon bring herself to face me. She took my hand, and said in a tremulous voice—her elderly cheeks were flushed with emotion—“I do hope, Miss Stephen, that the evening has not tired you very much.” Then she stepped into the carriage, and the two bereaved ladies returned to Bruton Street. George meanwhile had secured a cab. He was much confused, and yet very angry. I could see that my remarks at dinner upon the dialogues of Plato rankled bitterly in his mind. And he told the cabman to go, not back to Hyde Park Gate as I hoped, but on to Melbury Road.

“It’s quite early still”, he said in his most huffy manner as he sat down. “And I think you want a little practice in how to behave to strangers. It’s not your fault of course, but you have been out much less than most girls of your age.” So it appeared that my education was to be continued, and that I was about to have another lesson in the art of behaviour at the house of Mrs Holman Hunt. She was giving a large evening party. Melbury Road was lined with hansoms, four-wheelers, hired flies, and an occasional carriage drawn by a couple of respectable family horses. “A very dritte crowd”, said George disdainfully as we took our place in the queue. Indeed all our old family friends were gathered together in the Moorish Hall, and directly I came in I recognised the Stillmans, the Lushingtons, the Montgomeries, the Morrises, the Burne-Joneses—Mr Gibbs, Professor Wolstenholme and General Beadle would certainly have been there too had they not all been sleeping for many years beneath the sod. The effect of the Moorish Hall, after Bruton Street, was garish, a little eccentric, and certainly very dowdy. The ladies were intense and untidy; the gentlemen had fine foreheads and short evening trousers, in some cases revealing a pair of bright red Pre-Raphaelite socks. George stepped among them like a Prince in disguise. I soon attached myself to a little covey of Kensington ladies who were being conveyed by Gladys Holman Hunt across the Moorish Hall to the studio. There we found old Holman Hunt himself dressed in a long Jaeger dressing gown, holding forth to a large gathering about the ideas which had inspired him in painting “The Light of the World”, a copy of which stood upon an easel. He sipped cocoa and stroked his flowing beard as he talked, and we sipped cocoa and shifted our shawls—for the room was chilly—as we listened. Occasionally some of us strayed off to examine with reverent murmurs other bright pictures upon other easels, but the tone of die assembly was devout, high-minded, and to me after the tremendous experiences of the evening, soothingly and almost childishly simple. George was never lacking in respect for old men of recognised genius, and he now advanced with his opera hat pressed beneath his arm; drew his feet together, and made a profound bow over Holman Hunt’s hand. Holman Hunt had no notion who he was, or indeed who any of us were; but went on sipping his cocoa, stroking his beard, and explaining what ideas had inspired him in painting “The Light of the World”, until we left.

At last—at last—the evening was over.

I went up to my room, took off my beautiful white satin dress, and unfastened the three pink carnations which had been pinned to my breast by the Jews’ harp. Was it really possible that tomorrow I should open my Greek dictionary and go on spelling out the dialogues of Plato with Miss Case? I felt I knew much more about the dialogues of Plato than Miss Case could ever do. I felt old and experienced and disillusioned and angry, amused and excited, full of mystery, alarm and bewilderment. In a confused whirlpool of sensation I stood slipping off my petticoats, withdrew my long white gloves, and hung my white silk stockings over the back of a chair. Many different things were whirling round in my mind—diamonds and countesses, copulations, the dialogues of Plato, Mad Dick Popham and “The Light of the World”. Ah, how pleasant it would be to stretch out in bed, fall asleep and forget them all!

Sleep had almost come to me. The room was dark. The house silent. Then, creaking stealthily, the door opened; treading gingerly, someone entered. “Who?” I cried. “Don’t be frightened”, George whispered. “And don’t turn on the light, oh beloved. Beloved—” and he flung himself on my bed, and took me in his arms.

Yes, the old ladies of Kensington and Belgravia never knew that George Duckworth was not only father and mother, brother and sister to those poor Stephen girls; he was their lover also.

[written in 1920/21]

[]

Old Bloomsbury.

At Molly’s command I have had to write a memoir of Old Bloomsbury—of Bloomsbury from 1904 to 1914. Naturally I see Bloomsbury only from my own angle—not from yours. For this I must ask you to make allowances. From my angle then, one approaches Bloomsbury through Hyde Park Gate—that little irregular cul-de-sac which lies next to Queen’s Gate and opposite to Kensington Gardens. And we must look for a moment at that very tall house on the left hand side near the bottom which begins by being stucco and ends by being red brick; which is so high and yet—as I can say now that we have sold it—so rickety that it seems as if a very high wind would topple it over.

I was undressing at the top of that house when my last memoir ended, in my bedroom at the back. My white satin dress was on the floor. The faint smell of kid gloves was in the air. My necklace of seed-pearls was tangled with hairpins on the dressing table. I had just come back from a party—from a series of parties indeed, for it was a memorable night in the height of the season of 1903. I had dined with Lady Carnarvon in Bruton Street; I had seen George undoubtedly kiss her among the pillars in the hall; I had talked much too much—about my emotions on hearing music—at dinner; Lady Carnarvon, Mrs Popham, George and myself had then gone to the most indecent French play I have ever seen. We had risen like a flock of partridges at the end of the first act. Mrs Popham’s withered cheeks had burnt crimson. Elsie’s grey locks had streamed in the wind. We had parted, with great embarrassment on their side, on the pavement, and Elsie had said she did hope I wasn’t tired—which meant, I felt, she hoped I wouldn’t lose my virginity or something like that. And then we had gone on—George and I in a hansom together to another party, for George said, to my intense shame, I had talked much too much and I must really learn how to behave—we had gone on to the Holman Hunts, where “The Light of the World” had just come back from its mission to the chief cities of the British Empire, and Mr Edward Clifford, Mrs Russell Harrington, Mrs Freshfield and I know not what distinguished old gentlemen with black ribbons attached to their eyeglasses and elderly ladies with curious vertebrae showing through their real but rather ragged old lace had talked in hushed voices of the master’s art while the master himself sat in a skull cap drinking, in spite of the June night, hot cocoa from a mug.

It was long past midnight that I got into bed and sat reading a page or two of Marius the Epicurean for which I had then a passion. There would be a tap at the door; the light would be turned out and George would fling himself on my bed, cuddling and kissing and otherwise embracing me in order, as he told Dr Savage later, to comfort me for the fatal illness of my father—who was dying three or four storeys lower down of cancer.

But it is the house that I would ask you to imagine for a moment for, though Hyde Park Gate seems now so distant from Bloomsbury, its shadow falls across it. 46 Gordon Square could never have meant what it did had not 22 Hyde Park Gate preceded it. It was a house of innumerable small oddly shaped rooms built to accommodate not one family but three. For besides the three Duckworths and the four Stephens there was also Thackeray’s grand-daughter, a vacant-eyed girl whose idiocy was becoming daily more obvious, who could hardly read, who would throw the scissors into the fire, who was tongue-tied and stammered and yet had to appear at table with the rest of us. To house the lot of us, now a storey would be thrown out on top, now a dining room flung out at bottom. My mother, I believe, sketched what she wanted on a sheet of notepaper to save the architect’s fees. These three families had poured all their possessions into this one house. One never knew when one rummaged in the many dark cupboards and wardrobes whether one would disinter Herbert Duckworth’s barrister’s wig, my father’s clergyman’s collar, or a sheet scribbled over with drawings by Thackeray which we afterwards sold to Pierpont Morgan for a considerable sum. Old letters filled dozens of black tin boxes. One opened them and got a terrific whiff of the past. There were chests of heavy family plate. There were hoards of china and glass. Eleven people aged between eight and sixty lived there, and were waited upon by seven servants, while various old women and lame men did odd jobs with rakes and pails by day.

The house was dark because the street was so narrow that one could see Mrs Redgrave washing her neck in her bedroom across the way; also because my mother who had been brought up in the Watts-Venedan-Little Holland House tradition had covered the furniture in red velvet and painted the woodwork black with thin gold lines upon it. The house was also completely quiet. Save for an occasional hansom or butcher’s cart nothing ever passed the door. One heard footsteps tapping down the street before we saw a top hat or a bonnet; one almost always knew who it was that passed; it might be Sir Arthur Clay; the Muir Mackenzies or the white-nosed Miss or the red-nosed Mrs Redgrave. Here then seventeen or eighteen people lived in small bedrooms with one bathroom and three water-closets between them. Here the four of us were born; here my grandmother died; here my mother died; here my father died; here Stella became engaged to Jack Hills and two doors further down the street after three months of marriage she died too. When I look back upon that house it seems to me so crowded with scenes of family life, grotesque, comic and tragic; with the violent emotions of youth, revolt, despair, intoxicating happiness, immense boredom, with parties of the famous and the dull; with rages again, George and Gerald; with love scenes with Jack Hills; with passionate affection for my father alternating with passionate hatred of him, all tingling and vibrating in an atmosphere of youthful bewilderment and curiosity—that I feel suffocated by the recollection. The place seemed tangled and matted with emotion. I could write the history of every mark and scratch in my room, I wrote later. The walls and the rooms had in sober truth been built to our shape. We had permeated the whole vast fabric—it has since been made into an hotel—with our family history. It seemed as if the house and the family which had lived in it, thrown together as they were by so many deaths, so many emotions, so many traditions, must endure for ever. And then suddenly in one night both vanished.

When I recovered from the illness which was not unnaturally the result of all these emotions and complications, 22 Hyde Park Gate no longer existed. While I had lain in bed at the Dickinsons’ house at Welwyn thinking that the birds were singing Greek choruses and that King Edward was using, the foulest possible language among Ozzie Dickinson’s azaleas, Vanessa had wound up Hyde Park Gate once and for all. She had sold; she had burnt; she had sorted; she had torn up. Sometimes I believe she had actually to get men with hammers to batter down—so wedged into each other had the walls and the cabinets become. But now all the rooms stood empty. Furniture vans had carted off all the different belongings. For not only had the furniture been dispersed. The family which had seemed equally wedged together had broken apart too. George had married Lady Margaret. Gerald had taken a bachelor flat in Berkeley Street. Laura had been finally incarcerated with a doctor in an asylum; Jack Hills had entered on a political career. The four of us were therefore left alone. And Vanessa—looking at a map of London and seeing how far apart they were—had decided that we should leave Kensington and start life afresh in Bloomsbury.

It was thus that 46 Gordon Square came into existence. When one sees it today, Gordon Square is not one of the most romantic of the Bloomsbury squares. It has neither the distinction of Fitzroy Square nor the majesty of Mecklenburgh Square. It is prosperous middle class and thoroughly mid-Victorian. But I can assure you that in October 1904 it was the most beautiful, the most exciting, the most romantic place in the world. To begin with it was astonishing to stand at the drawing room window and look into all those trees; the tree which shoots its branches up into the air and lets them fall in a shower; the tree which glistens after rain like the body of a seal—instead of looking at old Mrs Redgrave washing her neck across the way. The light and the air after the rich red gloom of Hyde Park Gate were a revelation. Things one had never seen in the darkness there—Watts pictures, Dutch cabinets, blue china—shone out for the first time in the drawing room at Gordon Square. After the muffled silence of Hyde Park Gate the roar of traffic was positively alarming. Odd characters, sinister, strange, prowled and slunk past our windows. But what was even more exhilarating was the extraordinary increase of space. At Hyde Park Gate one had only a bedroom in which to read or see one’s friends. Here Vanessa and I each had a sitting room; there was the large double drawing room; and a study on the ground floor. To make it all newer and fresher, the house had been completely done up. Needless to say the Watts-Venetian tradition of red plush and black paint had been reversed; we had entered the Sargent-Furseera; white and green chintzes were everywhere; and instead of Morris wall-papers with their intricate patterns we decorated our walls with washes of plain distemper. We were full of experiments and reforms. We were going to do without table napkins, we were to have [large supplies of] Bromo instead; we were going to paint; to write; to have coffee after dinner instead of tea at nine o’clock. Everything was going to be new; everything was going to be different. Everything was on trial.

We were, it appears, extremely social. For some months in the winter of 1904-05 I kept a diary from which I find that we were for ever lunching and dining out and loitering about the book shops—“Bloomsbury is ever so much more interesting than Kensington”, I wrote—or going to a concert or visiting a picture gallery and coming home to find the drawing room full of the oddest collections of people. “Cousin Henry Prinsep, Miss Millais, Ozzie Dickinson and Victor Marshall all came this afternoon and stayed late, so that we had only just time to rush off to a Mr Rutter’s lecture on Impressionism at the Grafton Gallery … Lady Hylton, V. Dickinson and E. Coltman came to tea. We lunched with the Shaw Stewarts and met an art critic called Nicholls. Sir Hugh seemed nice but there isn’t much in him … I lunched with the Protheroes and met the Bertrand Russells. It was very amusing. Thoby and I dined with the Cecils and went on to the St Loe Stracheys where we knew a great many people … I called for Nessa and Thoby at Mrs Flower’s and we went on to a dance at the Hobhouses’. Nessa was in a state of great misery today waiting for Mr Tonks who came at one to criticise her pictures. He is a man with a cold bony face, prominent eyes and a look of serenity and boredom. Meg Booth and Sir Fred Pollock came to tea …” So it goes on; but among all these short records of parties, of how the chintzes came home and how we went to the Zoo and how we went to Peter Pan, there are a few entries which bear on Bloomsbury. On Thursday March and 1905 Violet Dickinson brought a clergyman’s wife to tea and Sydney-Turner and Strachey came after dinner and we talked till twelve. On Wednesday the 8th of March: “Margaret sent round her new motor car this afternoon and we took Violet to pay a series of calls, but we, of course, forgot our cards. Then I went on to the Waterloo Road and lectured (a class of working men and women) on the Greek Myths, f Home and found Bell, and we talked about the nature of good till almost one!”

On the 16th [of] March Miss Power and Miss Malone dined with us. Sydney-Turner and Gerald came in after dinner—the first of our Thursday evenings. On the 23rd [of] March nine people came to our evening and stayed till one.

A few days later I went to Spain, and the duty which I laid on myself of recording every sight and sound, every wave and hill, sickened me with diary writing so that I stopped—with this last entry: May the 11th—“Our evening: gay Bell, D. MacCarthy and Gerald—who shocked the cultured.”

So my diary ends just as it might have become interesting. Yet I think it is clear even in this brief record in which every sort of doing is piled up higgledy-piggledy that these few meetings of Bloomsbury in its infancy differed from the rest. These are the only occasions when I do not merely say I had met so and so and thought him long-faced like Reginald Smith or pompous like Moorsom, or quite easy to get on with, but nothing much in him, like Sir Hugh Shaw Stewart. I say we talked to Strachey and Sydney-Turner. I add with a note of exclamation that we talked with Bell about the nature of good till one! And I did not use notes of exclamation often—and once more indeed—when I say that I smoked a cigarette with Beatrice Thynne!

These Thursday evening parties were, as far as I am concerned, the germ from which sprang all that has since come to be called-in newspapers, in novels, in Germany, in France—even, I daresay, in Turkey and Timbuktu—by the name of Bloomsbury. They deserve to be recorded and described. Yet how difficult—how impossible. Talk—even the talk which had such tremendous results upon the lives and characters of the two Miss Stephens—even talk of this interest and importance is as elusive as smoke. It flies up the chimney and is gone.

In the first place it is not true to say that when the door opened and with a curious hesitation and self-effacement Turner or Strachey glided in—that they were complete strangers to us. We had met them and Bell, Woolf, Hilton Young and others—in Cambridge at May Week before my father died. But what was of much greater importance, we had heard of them from Thoby. Thoby possessed a great power of romanticizing his friends. Even when he was a little boy at a private school there was always some astonishing fellow, whose amazing character and exploits he would describe hour after hour when he came home for the holidays. These stories had the greatest fascination for me. I thought about Pilkington or Sidney Irwin or the Woolly Bear whom I never saw in the flesh as if they were characters in Shakespeare. I made up stories about them myself. It was a kind of saga that went on year after year. And now just as I had heard of Radcliffe, Stuart, or whoever it might be, I began to hear of Bell, Strachey, Turner, Woolf. We talked of them by the hour, rambling about the country or sitting over the fire in my bedroom.

“There’s an astonishing fellow called Bell”, Thoby would begin directly he came back. “He’s a sort of mixture between Shelley and a sporting country squire.”

At this of course I pricked up my ears and began to ask endless questions. We were walking over a moor somewhere, I remember. I got a fantastic impression that this man Bell was a kind of Sun God—with straw in his hair. He was an [illegible] of innocence and enthusiasm. Bell had never opened a book till he came to Cambridge, Thoby said. Then he suddenly discovered Shelley and Keats and went nearly mad with excitement. He did nothing but spout poetry and write poetry. Yet he was a perfect horseman—a gift which Thoby enormously admired—and kept two or three hunters up at Cambridge.

“And is Bell a great poet?” I asked.

No, Thoby wouldn’t go so far as to say that; but it was quite on the cards that Strachey was. And so we discussed Strachey—or ‘the Strache’, as Thoby called him. Strachey at once became as singular, as fascinating as Bell. But it was in quite a different way. ‘The Strache’ was the essence of culture. In fact I think his culture a little alarmed Thoby. He had French pictures in his rooms. He had a passion for Pope. He was exotic, extreme in every way—Thoby described him—so long, so thin that his thigh was no thicker than Thoby’s arm. Once he burst into Thoby’s rooms, cried out, “Do you hear the music of the spheres?” and fell in a faint. Once in the midst of a dead silence, he piped up—and Thoby could imitate his voice perfectly—“Let’s all write Sonnets to Robertson.” He was a prodigy of wit. Even the tutors and the dons would come and listen to him. “Whatever they give you, Strachey,” Dr Jackson had said when Strachey was in for some examination, “it won’t be good enough.” And then Thoby, leaving me enormously impressed and rather dazed, would switch off to tell me about another astonishing fellow—a man who trembled perpetually all over. He was as eccentric, as remarkable in his way as Bell and Strachey in theirs. He was a Jew. When I asked why he trembled, Thoby somehow made me feel that it was part of his nature—he was so violent, so savage; he so despised the whole human race. “And after all,” Thoby said, “it is a pretty feeble affair, isn’t it?” Nobody was much good after twenty-five, he said. But most people, I gathered, rather rubbed along, and came to terms with things. Woolf did not and Thoby thought it sublime. One night he dreamt he was throttling a man and he dreamt with such violence that when he woke up he had pulled his own thumb out of joint. I was of course inspired with the deepest interest in that violent trembling misanthropic Jew who had already shaken his fist at civilisation and was about to disappear into the tropics so that we should none of us ever see him again. And then perhaps the talk got upon Sydney-Turner. According to Thoby, Sydney-Turner was an absolute prodigy of learning. He had the whole of Greek literature by heart. There was practically nothing in any language that was any good that he had not read. He was very silent and thin and odd. He never came out by day. But late at night if he saw one’s lamp burning he would come and tap at the window like a moth. At about three in the morning he would begin to talk. His talk was then of astonishing brilliance. When later I complained to Thoby that I had met Turner and had not found him brilliant Thoby severely supposed that by brilliance I meant wit; he on the contrary meant truth. Sydney-Turner was the most brilliant talker he knew because he always spoke the truth.

Naturally then, when the bell rang and these astonishing fellows came in, Vanessa and I were in a twitter of excitement. It was late at night; the room was full of smoke; buns, coffee and whisky were strewn about; we were not wearing white satin or seed-pearls; we were not dressed at all. Thoby went to open the door; in came Sydney-Turner; in came Bell; in came Strachey.

They came in hesitatingly, self-effacingly, and folded themselves up quietly [in] the corners of sofas. For a long time they said nothing. None of our old conversational openings seemed to do. Vanessa and Thoby and Clive, if Clive were there—for Clive was always ready to sacrifice himself in the cause of talk—would start different subjects. But they were almost always answered in the negative. “No”, was the most frequent reply. “No, I haven’t seen it”; “No, I haven’t been there.” Or simply, “I don’t know.” The conversation languished in a way that would have been impossible in the drawing room at Hyde Park Gate. Yet the silence was difficult, not dull. It seemed as if the standard of what was worth saying had risen so high that it was better not to break it unworthily. We sat and looked at the ground. Then at last Vanessa, having said perhaps that she had been to some picture show, incautiously used the word “beauty”. At that, one of the young men would lift his head slowly and say, “It depends what you mean by beauty.” At once all our ears were pricked. It was as if the bull had at last been turned into the ring.

The bull might be ‘beauty’, might be ‘good’, might be ‘reality’. Whatever it was, it was some abstract question that now drew out all our forces. Never have I listened so intently to each step and half, step in an argument. Never have I been at such pains to sharpen and launch my own little dart. And then what joy it was when one’s contribution was accepted. No praise has pleased me more than Saxon’s saying—and was not Saxon infallible after all?—that he thought I had argued my case very cleverly. And what strange cases those were! I remember trying to persuade Hawtrey that there is such a thing as atmosphere in literature. Hawtrey challenged me to prove it by pointing out in any book any one word which had this quality apart from its meaning. I went and fetched Diana of the Crossways. The argument, whether it was about atmosphere or the nature of truth, was always tossed into the middle of the party. Now Hawtrey would say something; now Vanessa; now Saxon; now Clive; now Thoby. It filled me with wonder to watch those who were finally left in the argument piling stone upon stone, cautiously, accurately, long after it had completely soared above my sight. But if one could not say anything, one could listen. One had glimpses of something miraculous happening high up in the air. Often we would still be sitting in a circle at two or three in the morning. Still Saxon would be taking his pipe from his mouth as if to speak, and putting it back again without having spoken. At last, rumpling his hair back, he would pronounce very shortly some absolutely final summing up. The marvellous edifice was complete, one could stumble off to bed feeling that something very important had happened. It had been proved that beauty was—or beauty was not—for I have never been quite sure which—part of a picture.

From such discussions Vanessa and I got probably much the same pleasure that undergraduates get when they meet friends of their own for the first time. In the world of the Booths and the Maxses we were not asked to use our brains much. Here we used nothing else. And part of the charm of those Thursday evenings was that they were astonishingly abstract. It was not only that Moore’s book had set us all discussing philosophy, art, religion; it was that the atmosphere—if in spite of Hawtrey I may use that word—was abstract in the extreme. The young men I have named had no ‘manners’ in the Hyde Park Gate sense. They criticised our arguments as severely as their own. They never seemed to notice how we were dressed or if we were nice looking or not. All that tremendous encumbrance of appearance and behaviour which George had piled upon our first years vanished completely. One had no longer to endure that terrible inquisition after a party—and be told, “You looked lovely.” Or, “You did look plain.” Or, “You must really learn to do your hair.” Or, “Do try not to look so bored when you dance.” Or, “You did make a conquest”, or, “You were a failure.” All this seemed to have no meaning or existence in the world of Bell, Strachey, Hawtrey and Sydney-Turner. In that world the only comment as we stretched ourselves after our guests had gone, was, “I must say you made your point rather well”; “I think you were talking rather through your hat.” It was an immense simplification. And for my part it went deeper than this. The atmosphere of Hyde Park Gate had been full of love and marriage. George’s engagement to Flora Russell, Stella’s to Jack Hills, Gerald’s innumerable flirtations were all discussed either in private or openly with the greatest interest. Vanessa was already supposed to have attracted Austen Chamberlain. My Aunt Mary Fisher, poking about as usual in nooks and corners, had discovered that there were six drawings of him in Vanessa’s sketchbook and [had] come to her own conclusions. George rather suspected that Charles Trevelyan was in love with her. But at Gordon Square love was never mentioned. Love had no existence. So lightly was it treated that for years I believed that Desmond had married an old Miss Cornish, aged about sixty, with snow-white hair. One never took the trouble to find out. It seemed incredible that any of these young men should want to marry us or that we should want to marry them. Secretly I felt that marriage was a very low down affair, but that if one practised it, one practised it—it is a serious confession I know—with young men who had been in the Eton Eleven and dressed for dinner. When I looked round the room at 46 I thought—if you will excuse me for saying so—that I had never seen young men so dingy, so lacking in physical splendour as Thoby’s friends. Kitty Maxse who came in once or twice sighed afterwards, “I’ve no doubt they’re very nice but, oh darling, how awful they do look!” Henry James, on seeing Lytton and Saxon at Rye, exclaimed to Mrs Prothero, “Deplorable! Deplorable! How could Vanessa and Virginia have picked up such friends? How could Leslie’s daughters have taken up with young men like that?” But it was precisely this lack of physical splendour, this shabbiness! that was in my eyes a proof of their superiority. More than that, it was, in some obscure way, reassuring; for it meant that things could go on like this, in abstract argument, without dressing for dinner, and never revert to the ways, which I had come to think so distasteful, at Hyde Park Gate.

I was wrong. One afternoon that first summer Vanessa said to Adrian and me and I watched her, stretching her arms above her head with a gesture that was at once reluctant and yielding, in the great looking-glass as she said it—“Of course, I can see that we shall all marry. It’s bound to happen”—and as she said it I could feel a horrible necessity impending over us; a fate would descend and snatch us apart just as we had achieved freedom and happiness. She, I felt, was already aware of some claim, some need which I resented and tried to ignore. A few weeks later indeed Clive proposed to her. “Yes,” said Thoby grimly when I murmured something to him very shyly about Clive’s proposal, “That’s the worst of Thursday evenings!” And her marriage in the beginning of 1907 was in fact the end of them. With that, the first chapter of Old Bloomsbury came to an end. It had been very austere, very exciting, of immense importance. A small concentrated world dwelling inside the much larger and looser world of dances and dinners had come into existence. It had already begun to colour that world and I think colours the much more gregarious Bloomsbury which succeeded it.

But it could not have gone on. Even if Vanessa had not married, even if Thoby had lived, change was inevitable. We could not have gone on discussing the nature of beauty in the abstract for ever. The young men, as we used to call them, were changing from the general to the particular. They had ceased to be Mr Turner, Mr Strachey, Mr Bell. They had become Saxon, Lytton, Clive. Then too one was beginning to criticise, to distinguish, to compare. Those old flamboyant portraits were being revised. One could see that Walter Lamb whom Thoby had compared to a Greek boy playing a flute in a vineyard was in fact rather bald, and rather dull; one could wish that Saxon could be induced either to go or to say something perhaps that was not strictly true; one could even doubt, when Euphrosyne was published, whether as many of the poems in that famous book were sure of immortality as Thoby made out. But there was something else that made for a change though I at least did not know what it was. Perhaps if I read you a passage from another diary which I kept intermittently for a month or two in the year 1909 you will guess what it was. I am describing a tea-party in James Strachey’s rooms at Cambridge.

“His rooms,” I wrote, “though they are lodgings, are discreet and dim. French pastels hang upon the walls and there are cases of old books. The three young men—Norton, Brooke and James Strachey—sat in deep chairs; and gazed with soft intent eyes into the fire. Mr Norton knew that he must talk; he and I talked laboriously. The others were silent. I should like to account for this silence, but time presses and I am puzzled. For the truth is that these young men are evidently respectable; they are not only able but their views seem to me honest and simple. They lack all padding; so that one has convictions to disagree with if one disagrees. Yet we had nothing to say to each other and I was conscious that not only my remarks but my presence was criticised. They wished for the truth and doubted if I could speak it or be it. I thought this courageous of them but unsympathetic. I admired the atmosphere—was it more?—and felt in some respects at ease in it. Yet why should intellect and character be so barren? It seems as if the highest efforts of the most intelligent people produce a negative result; one cannot honestly be anything.”

There is a great change there from what I should have written two or three years earlier. In part, of course, the change was due to circumstances; I lived alone with Adrian now in Fitzroy Square; and we were the most incompatible of people. We drove each other perpetually into frenzies of irritation or into the depths of gloom. We shall went to a great many parties: but the combination of the two worlds which I think was so [illegible] was far more difficult. I could not reconcile the two. True, we still had Thursday evenings as before. But they were always strained and often ended in dismal failure. Adrian stalked off to his room, I to mine, in complete silence. But there was more in it than that. What it was I was not altogether certain. I knew theoretically, from books, much more than I knew practically from life. I knew that there were buggers in Plato’s Greece; I suspected—it was not a question one could just ask Thoby—that there were buggers in Dr Butler’s Trinity [College], Cambridge; but it never occurred to me that there were buggers even now in the Stephens’ sitting room at Gordon Square. It never struck me that the abstractness, the simplicity which had been so great a relief after Hyde Park Gate were largely due to the fact that the majority of the young men who came there were not attracted by young women. I did not realise that love, far from being a thing they never mentioned, was in fact a thing which they seldom ceased to discuss. Now I had begun to be puzzled. Those long sittings, those long silences, those long arguments—they still went on in Fitzroy Square as they had done in Gordon Square. But now I found them of the most perplexing nature. They still excited me much more than any men I met with in the outer world of dinners and dances—and yet I was, dared I say it or think it even?—intolerably bored. Why, I asked, had we nothing to say to each other? Why were the most gifted of people also the most barren? Why were the most stimulating of friendships also the most deadening? Why was it all so negative? Why did these young men make one feel that one could not honestly be anything? The answer to all my questions was, obviously—as you will have guessed—that there was no physical attraction between us.

The society of buggers has many advantages—if you are a woman. It is simple, it is honest, it makes one feel, as I noted, in some respects at one’s ease. But it has this drawback—with buggers one cannot, as nurses say, show off. Something is always suppressed, held down. Yet this showing off, which is not copulating, necessarily, nor altogether being in love, is one of the great delights, one of the chief necessities of life. Only then does all effort cease; one ceases to be honest, one ceases to be clever. One fizzes up into some absurd delightful effervescence of soda water or champagne through which one sees the world tinged with all the colours of the rainbow. It is significant of what I had come to desire that I went straight—on almost the next page of my diary indeed—from the dim and discreet rooms of James Strachey at Cambridge to dine with Lady Ottoline Morrell at Bedford Square. Her rooms, I noted without drawing any inferences, seemed to me instantly full of “lustre and illusion”.

So one changed. But these changes of mine were part of a much bigger change. The headquarters of Bloomsbury have always been in Gordon Square. Now that Vanessa and Clive were married, now that Clive had shocked the Maxses, the Booths, the Cecils, the Protheroes, irretrievably, now that the house was done up once more, now that they were giving little parties with their beautiful brown table linen and their lovely eighteenth-century silver, Bloomsbury rapidly lost the monastic character it had had in Chapter One; the character of Chapter Two was superficially at least to be very different.

Another scene has always lived in my memory—I do not know if I invented it or not—as the best illustration of Bloomsbury Chapter Two. It was a spring evening. Vanessa and I were sitting in the drawing room. The drawing room had greatly changed its character since 1904. The Sargent-Furse age was over. The age of Augustus John was dawning. His “Pyramus” filled one entire wall. The Watts’ portraits of my father and my mother were hung downstairs if they were hung at all. Clive had hidden all the match boxes because their blue and yellow swore with the prevailing colour scheme. At any moment Clive might come in and he and I should begin to argue—amicably, impersonally at first; soon we should be hurling abuse at each other and pacing up and down the room. Vanessa sat silent and did something mysterious with her needle or her scissors. I talked, egotistically, excitedly, about my own affairs no doubt. Suddenly the door opened and the long and sinister figure of Mr Lytton Strachey stood on the threshold. He pointed his finger at a stain on Vanessa’s white dress.

“Semen?” he said.

Can one really say it? I thought and we burst out laughing. With that one word all barriers of reticence and reserve went down. A flood of the sacred fluid seemed to overwhelm us. Sex permeated our conversation. The word bugger was never far from our lips. We dis. cussed copulation with the same excitement and openness that we had discussed the nature of good. It is strange to think how reticent, how reserved we had been and for how long. It seems a marvel now that so late as the year 1908 or 9 Clive had blushed and I had blushed too when I asked him to let me pass to go to the lavatory on the French Express. I never dreamt of asking Vanessa to tell me what happened on her wedding night. Thoby and Adrian would have died rather than discuss the love affairs of undergraduates. When all intellectual questions had been debated so freely, sex was ignored. Now a flood of light poured in upon that department too. We had known everything but we had never talked. Now we talked of nothing else. We listened with rapt interest to the love affairs of the buggers. We followed the ups and downs of their chequered histories; Vanessa sympathetically; I—had I not written in 1905, women are so much more amusing than men—frivolously, laughingly. “Norton tells me”, Vanessa would say, “that James is in utter despair. Rupert has been twice to bed with Hobhouse” and I would cap her stories with some equally thrilling piece of gossip; about a divine undergraduate with a head like a Greek God—but alas his teeth were bad—called George Mallory.

All this had the result that the old sentimental views of marriage in which we were brought up were revolutionized. I should be sorry to tell you how old I was before I saw that there is nothing shocking in a man’s having a mistress, or in a woman’s being one. Perhaps the fidelity of our parents was not the only or inevitably the highest form of married life. Perhaps indeed that fidelity was not so strict as one had supposed. “Of course Kitty Maxse has two or three lovers”, said Clive—Kitty Maxse, the chaste, the exquisite, the devoted! Again, the whole aspect of life was changed.

So there was now nothing that one could not say, nothing that one could not do, at 46 Gordon Square. It was, I think, a great advance in civilisation. It may be true that the loves of buggers are not—at least if one is of the other persuasion—of enthralling interest or paramount importance. But the fact that they can be mentioned openly leads to the fact that no one minds if they are practised privately. Thus many customs and beliefs were revised. Indeed the future of Bloomsbury was to prove that many variations can be played on the theme of sex, and with such happy results that my father himself might have hesitated before he thundered out the one word which he thought fit to apply to a bugger or an adulterer; which was Blackguard!

Here I come to a question which I must leave to some other memoir writer to discuss—that is to say, if we take it for granted that Bloomsbury exists, what are the qualities that admit one to it, what are the qualities that expel one from it? Now at any rate between 1910 and 1914 many new members were admitted. It must have been in 1910 I suppose that Clive one evening rushed upstairs in a state of the highest excitement. He had just had one of the most interesting conversations of his life. It was with Roger Fry. They had been discussing the theory of art for hours. He thought Roger Fry the most interesting person he had met since Cambridge days. So Roger appeared. He appeared, I seem to think, in a large ulster coat, every pocket of which was stuffed with a book, a paint box or something intriguing; special tips which he had bought from a little man in a back street; he had canvases under his arms; his hair flew; his eyes glowed. He had more knowledge and experience than the rest of us put together. [His mind seemed hooked on to life] by an extraordinary number of attachments. We started talking about Marie-Claire. And at once we were all launched into a terrific argument about literature; adjectives? associations? overtones? We had down Milton; we re-read Wordsworth. We had to think the whole thing over again. The old skeleton arguments of primitive Bloomsbury about art and beauty put on flesh and blood. There was always some new idea afoot; always some new picture standing on a chair to be looked at, some new poet fished out from obscurity and stood in the light of day. Odd people wandered through 46; Rothenstein, Sickert, Yeats, Tonks—Tonks who could, I suppose, make Vanessa miserable no more. And sometimes one began to meet a queer faun-like figure, hitching his clothes up, blinking his eyes, stumbling oddly over the long words in his sentences. A year or two before, Adrian and I had been standing in front of a certain gold and black picture in the Louvre when a voice said: “Are you Adrian Stephen? I’m Duncan Grant.” Duncan now began to haunt the purlieus of Bloomsbury. How he lived I do not know. He was penniless. Uncle Trevor indeed said he was mad. He lived in a studio in Fitzroy Square with an old drunken charwoman called Filmer and a clergyman who frightened girls in the street by making faces at them. Duncan was on the best of terms with both. He was rigged out by his friends in clothes which seemed always to be falling to the floor. He borrowed old china from us to paint; and my father’s old trousers to go to parties in. He broke the china and he ruined the trousers by jumping into the Cam to rescue a child who was swept into the river by the rope of Walter Lamb’s barge, the ‘Aholibah’. Our cook Sophie called him “that Mr Grant” and complained that he had been taking things again as if he were a rat in her larder. But she succumbed to his charm. He seemed to be vaguely tossing about in the breeze; but he always alighted exactly where he meant to.

And once at least Morgan flitted through Bloomsbury lodging for a moment in Fitzroy Square on his way even then to catch a train. He carried, I think, the same black bag with the same brass label on it that is now in the hall outside at this moment. I felt as if a butterfly—by preference a pale blue butterfly—had settled on the sofa; if one raised a finger or made a movement the butterfly would be off. He talked of Italy and the Working Men’s College. And I listened—with the deepest curiosity, for he was the only novelist I knew—except Henry James and George Meredith; the only one anyhow who wrote about people like ourselves. But I was too much afraid of raising my hand and making the butterfly fly away to say much. I used to watch him from behind a hedge as he flitted through Gordon Square, erratic, irregular, with his bag, on his way to catch a train.

These, with Maynard—very truculent, I felt, very formidable, like a portrait of Tolstoy as a young man to look at, able to rend any argument that came his way with a blow of his paw, yet concealing, as the novelists say, a kind and even simple heart under that immensely impressive armour of intellect—and Norton; Norton who was the essence of all I meant by Cambridge; so able; so honest; so ugly; so dry; Norton with whom I spent a whole night once talking and with whom I went at dawn to Covent Garden, whom I still see in memory scowling in his pince-nez—yellow and severe against a bank of roses and carnations—these I think “were the chief figures in Bloomsbury before the war.

But here again it becomes necessary to ask—where does Bloomsbury end? What is Bloomsbury? Does it for instance include Bedford Square? Before the war, I think we should most of us have said ‘Yes’. When the history of Bloomsbury is written—and what better subject could there be for Lytton’s next book?—there will have to be a chapter, even if it is only in the appendix, devoted to Ottoline. Her first appearance among us was, I think, in 1908 or 9. I find from my diary that I dined with her on March the 30th 1909—I think for the first time. But a few weeks before this, she had swooped down upon one of my own Thursday evenings with Philip, Augustus John and Dorelia in tow: she had written the next morning to ask me to give her the names and addresses of all “my wonderful friends”. This was followed by an invitation to come to Bedford Square any Thursday about ten o’clock and bring any one I liked. I took Rupert Brooke. Soon we were all swept into that extraordinary whirlpool where such odd sticks and straws were brought momentarily together. There was Augustus John, very sinister in a black stock and a velvet coat; Winston Churchill, very rubicund, all gold lace and medals, on his way to Buckingham Palace; Raymond Asquith crackling with epigrams; Francis Dodd telling me most graphically how he and Aunt Susie had killed bugs: she held the lamp; he a basin of paraffin; bugs crossed the ceiling in an incessant stream. There was Lord Henry Bentinck at one end of the sofa and perhaps Nina Lamb at the other. There was Philip fresh from the House of Commons humming and hawing on the hearth-rug. There was Gilbert Cannan who was said to be in love with Ottoline. There was Bertie Russell, whom she was said to be in love with. Above all, there was Ottoline herself.

“Lady Ottoline”, I wrote in my diary, “is a great lady who has become discontented with her own class and is trying to find what she wants among artists and writers. For this reason, as if they were inspired with something divine, she approaches them in a definite way and they see her as a disembodied spirit escaping from her world into one where she can never take root. She is remarkable to look at if not beautiful. Like most passive people she is very careful and elaborate in her surroundings. She takes the utmost pains to set off her beauty as though it were some rare object picked up in a dusky Florentine back street. It always seems possible that the rich American women who finger her Persian cloak and call it ‘very good’ may go on to finger her face and call it a fine work in the late renaissance style; the brow and eyes magnificent, the chin perhaps restored. The pallor of her cheeks, the way she has of drawing back her head and looking at you blankly gives her the appearance of a marble Medusa. She is curiously passive.” And then I go on to exclaim rather rhapsodically that the whole place was full of “lustre and illusion”.

When indeed one remembers that drawing room full of people, the pale yellows and pinks of the brocades, the Italian chairs, the Persian rugs, the embroideries, the tassels, the scent, the pomegranates, the pugs, the pot-pourri and Ottoline bearing down upon one from afar in her white shawl with the great scarlet flowers on it and sweeping one away out of the large room and the crowd into a little room with her alone, where she plied one with questions that were so intimate and so intense, about life and one’s friends, and made one sign one’s name in a little scented book—it was only last week that I signed my name in another little scented book in Gower Street—I think my excitement may be excused.

Indeed lustre and illusion tinged Bloomsbury during those last years before the war. We were not so austere; we were not so exalted. There were quarrels and intrigues. Ottoline may have been a Medusa; but she was not a passive Medusa. She had a great gift for drawing people under. Even Middleton Murry, it is said, was pulled down by her among the vegetables at Garsington. And by this time we were far from drab. Thursday evenings with their silences and their arguments were a thing of the past. Their place was taken by parties of a very different sort. The Post-Impressionist movement had cast—not its shadow—but its bunch of variegated lights upon us. We bought poinsettias made of scarlet plush; we made dresses of the printed cotton that is specially loved by negroes; we dressed ourselves up as Gauguin pictures and careered round Crosby Hall. Mrs Whitehead was scandalized. She said that Vanessa and I were practically naked. My mother’s ghost was invoked once more—by Violet Dickinson—to deplore the fact that I had taken a house in Brunswick Square and had asked young men to share it. George Duckworth came all the way from Charles Street to beg Vanessa to make me give up the idea and was not comforted perhaps when she replied that after all the Foundling Hospital was handy. Stories began to circulate about parties at which we all undressed in public. Logan Pearsall Smith told Ethel Sands that he knew for a fact that Maynard had copulated with Vanessa on a sofa in the middle of the drawing room. It was a heartless, immoral, cynical society it was said; we were abandoned women and our friends were the most worthless of young men.

Yet in spite of Logan, in spite of Mrs Whitehead, in spite of Vanessa and Maynard and what they did on the sofa at Brunswick Square, Old Bloomsbury still survives. If you seek a proof—look around.

[written in 1921/22]

[]

Am I a Snob?

Molly has very unfairly, I think, laid upon me the burden of providing a memoir tonight. We all forgive Molly everything of course because of her insidious, her devastating charm. But it is unfair. It is not my turn; I am not the oldest of you. I am not the most widely lived or the most richly memoried. Maynard, Desmond, Clive and Leonard all live stirring and active lives; all constantly brush up against the great; all constantly affect the course of history one way or another. It is for them to unlock the doors of their treasure-houses and to set before us those gilt and gleaming objects which repose within. Who am I that I should be asked to read a memoir? A mere scribbler; what’s worse, a mere dabbler in dreams; one who is not fish, flesh, fowl or good red herring. My memoirs, which are always private, and at their best only about proposals of marriage, seductions by half-brothers, encounters with Ottoline and so on, must soon run dry. Nobody now asks me to marry them; for many years nobody has attempted to seduce me. Prime Ministers never consult me. Twice I have been to Hendon, but each time the aeroplane refused to mount into the air. I have visited most of the capitals of Europe, it is true; I can speak a kind of dog French and mongrel Italian; but so ignorant am I, so badly educated, that if you ask me the simplest question—for instance, where is Guatemala?—I am forced to turn the conversation.

Yet Molly has asked me to write a paper. What can it be about? That is the question I asked myself, and it seemed to me, as I sat brooding, that the time has come when we old fogies—we ignorant and private living old fogies—must face this question—what are our memoirs to be about, if the Memoir Club is to go on meeting, and if half the members are people like myself to whom nothing ever happens? Dare I suggest that the time has come when we must interpret Molly’s commands rather liberally, and instead of sweeping the lamp of memory over the adventures and excitement of real life, must turn that beam inwards and describe ourselves?

Am I speaking for myself only when I say that though nothing worth calling an adventure has befallen me since I last occupied this thorny and prominent chair I still seem to myself a subject of inexhaustible and fascinating anxiety?—a volcano in perpetual eruption? Am I alone in my egotism when I say that never does the pale light of dawn filter through the blinds of 52 Tavistock Square but I open my eyes and exclaim, “Good God! Here I am again!”—not always with pleasure, often with pain; sometimes with a spasm of acute disgust—but always, always with interest?

Myself then might be the subject of this paper; but there are drawbacks. It would run to so many volumes—that single subject—that those of us who have hair; those whose hair is still capable of growth—would find it tickling their toes before I had done. I must break off one tiny fragment of this vast subject; I must give one brief glance at one small corner of this universe—which still to me seems as trackless and tiger-haunted as that other upon which is written—where I know not—the word Guatemala; I must, I say, choose one aspect only; and ask one question only; and this is it—Am I a snob?

As I try to answer it, I may perhaps turn up a memory or two; I may perhaps revive certain of your own memories; at any rate, I will try to give you facts; and though of course I shall not tell the whole truth, perhaps I shall tell enough to set you guessing. But in order to answer that question, I must begin by asking—what is a snob? And since I have no skill in analysis—since my education was neglected—I shall take the obvious course of trying to find some object against which I can measure myself: with which to compare myself. Desmond, for instance. Naturally I take Desmond first. Is he a snob?

He ought to be. He was educated at Eton, then went to Cambridge. We all know the old tag about grateful science adoring the aristocracy. But whatever Eton and Cambridge did to encourage snobbery in him, nature did far more. She gave him all the gifts that a grateful aristocracy adores in science; a golden tongue; perfect manners; complete self-possession; boundless curiosity, mixed with sympathy; he can also sit a horse and shoot a pheasant at a pinch. As for poverty, since Desmond has never minded how he dresses, no one else has ever given the matter a thought. So here then, undoubtedly, is my pattern; let me compare my case with his.

We were standing, when I thought this, at a window in the drawing room at Tavistock Square. Desmond had lunched with us; we had spent the afternoon talking; suddenly he remembered that he was dining somewhere. But where? “Now where am I dining?” he said and took out his pocket book. Something distracted his attention for a moment, and I looked over his shoulder. Hastily, furtively, I ran my eye over his engagements. Monday Lady Bessborough 8:30. Tuesday Lady Ancaster 8:30. Wednesday Dora Sanger seven sharp. Thursday Lady Salisbury ten o’clock. Friday lunch Wolves and dine Lord Revelstoke. White waistcoat. White waistcoat was twice underlined. Years later I discovered the reason—he was to meet our king, our late lamented George. Well, he glanced at his engagements; shut the book and made off. Not a word did he say about the peerage. He never brought the conversation round to Revelstoke; white waistcoats were unmentioned. “No,” I said to myself with a keen pang of disappointment as he shut the door, “Desmond, alas, is not a snob.”

I must seek another pattern. Take Maynard now. He too was at Eton and at Cambridge. Since then he has been concerned in so many great affairs that were he to rattle his engagements under our noses we should be fairly deafened with the clink of coronets and dazed with the glitter of diamonds. But are we deafened? Are we dazed? Alas, no. Dominated, I suspect by the iron rod of old Cambridge, dominated too by that moral sense which grows stronger in Maynard the older he gets, that stern desire to preserve our generation in its integrity, and to protect the younger generation from its folly, Maynard never boasts. It is for me to inform you that he lunched today with the Prime Minister. Poor old Baldwin with the tears running down his cheeks marched him up and down—up and down beneath the celebrated pictures of Pitt and Peel. “If only”, he kept on saying, “you would take a seat in the Cabinet, Keynes; or a peerage, Keynes …” It is for me to tell you that story. Maynard never mentioned it. Pigs, plays, pictures—he will talk of them all. But never of Prime Ministers and peerages. Alas and alas—Maynard is not a snob. I am foiled again.

All the same, I have made one discovery. The essence of snobbery is that you wish to impress other people. The snob is a flutter-brained, hare-brained creature so little satisfied with his or her own standing that in order to consolidate it he or she is always flourishing a title or an honour in other people’s faces so that they may believe, and help him to believe what he does not really believe—that he or she is somehow a person of importance.

This is a symptom that I recognise in my own case. Witness this letter. Why is it always on top of all my letters? Because it has a coronet—if I get a letter stamped with a coronet that letter miraculously floats on top. I often ask—why? I know perfectly well that none of my friends will ever be, or ever has been impressed by anything I do to impress them. Yet I do it—here is the letter—on top. This shows, like a rash or a spot, that I have the disease. And I go on to ask when and how did I catch it?

When I was a girl I had certain opportunities for snobbery, because though outwardly an intellectual family, very nobly born in a bookish sense, we had floating fringes in the world of fashion. We had George Duckworth to begin with. But George Duckworth’s snobbery was of so gross and palpable a texture that I could smell it and taste it from afar. I did not like that smell and taste. My temptation reached me in subtler ways—through Kitty Maxse originally, I think—a lady of the most delicate charm, of the most ethereal grace so that the great, whom she introduced, were sprayed and disinfected and robbed of their grossness. Who could call the Marchioness of Bath gross, or her daughters, the Ladies Katherine and Beatrice Thynne? It was unthinkable. Beautiful they were and stately; they dressed disgracefully, but they held themselves superbly. When we dined or lunched with old Lady Bath I sat there shivering with ecstasy—an ecstasy that was wholly snobbish perhaps but made up of different parts—of pleasure, terror, laughter and amazement. There Lady Bath sat at the end of the table on a chair stamped with the coronet and arms of the Thynnes; and on the table beside her on two cushions lay two Waterbury watches. These she consulted from time to time. But why? I do not know. Had time any special significance for her? She seemed to have endless leisure. Often she would nod off to sleep. Then she would wake and look at her watches. She looked at them because she liked looking at them. Her indifference to public opinion intrigued and delighted me. So too did her conversation with her butler Middleton.

A carriage would pass the window.

“Who’s that driving by?” she would say suddenly.

“Lady Suffield, my lady”, Middleton would reply. And Lady Bath would look at her watches. Once I remember the word ‘marl’ cropped up in conversation.

“What’s marl, Middleton?” Lady Bath asked.

“A mixture of earth and carbonate of lime, my lady”, Middleton informed her. Meanwhile Katie had seized a bloody bone from the plate and was feeding the dogs. As I sat there I felt these people don’t care a snap what anyone thinks. Here is human nature in its uncropped, unpruned, natural state. They have a quality which we in Kensington lack. Perhaps I am only finding excuses for myself, but that was the origin of the snobbery which now leads me to put this letter on top of the pack—the aristocrat is freer, more natural, more eccentric than we are. Here I note that my snobbery is not of the intellectual kind. Lady Bath was simple in the extreme. Neither Kade nor Beatrice could spell. Will Rothenstein and Andrew Lang were the brightest lights in their intellectual world. Neither Rothenstein or Andrew Lang impressed me. If you ask me would I rather meet Einstein or the Prince of Wales, I plump for the Prince without hesitation.

I want coronets; but they must be old coronets; coronets that carry land with them and country houses; coronets that breed simplicity, eccentricity, ease; and such confidence in your own state that you can surround your plate with Waterbury watches and feed dogs with bloody bones with your own hands. No sooner have I said this than I am forced to qualify this statement. This letter rises up in witness against me. It has a coronet on top but it is not an old coronet; it is from a lady whose birth is no better—perhaps worse—than my own. Yet when I received this letter I was all in a flutter. I will read it to you.

Dear Virginia,
I am not very young and since ALL my friends are either dead or dying I would much like to see you and ask you a great favour. You will laugh when I tell you what it is but in case you would lunch here alone with me on [the] 12th or 13th, 17th or 18th, I will tell you what it is. No, I won’t. I will wait to know if on any one of these dates you can see your admirer

Margot Oxford

I wrote at once—though I seldom write at once—to say that I was entirely at Lady Oxford’s service. Whatever she asked, I would do. I was not left in doubt very long. Soon came this second letter.

Dear Virginia, I think I should warn you of the favour which I want you to do for me. All my friends are either dying or dead and I am aware that my own time is closing round me. The greatest compliment ever paid me—among few—was when you said I was a good writer. This, coming from you, might have turned my head as you are far the greatest female writer living. When I die, I would like you to write a short notice in The Times to say you admired my writing, and thought that journalists should have made more use of me. I am not at all vain, but I have been hurt by being first employed and then turned down by editors of newspapers. This may seem trivial to you—as indeed it is—but I would like you to give me to the Press. Do not give another thought to this if it bothers you, but praise from you would delight my family when I am dead.

Your ever admiring
Margot Oxford

You could send it to Editor of The Times as Dawson keeps and values all contributions upon those who are dead.

Now I was not, I think, flattered to be the greatest female writer in Lady Oxford’s eyes; but I was flattered to be asked to lunch with her alone. “Of course,” I replied, “I will come and lunch with you alone.” And I was pleased when on the day in question Mabel, our dour cook, came to me, and said, “Lady Oxford has sent her car for you, ma’am.” Obviously she was impressed by me; I was impressed by myself. I rose in my own esteem because I rose in Mabel’s.

When I reached Bedford Square there was a large lunch party; Margot was rigged up in her finery; a ruby cross set with diamonds blazed on her breast; she was curled and crisp like a little Greek horse; tart and darting like an asp or an adder. Philip Morrell was the first to feel her sting. He was foolish and she snubbed him. But then she recovered her temper. She was very brilliant. She rattled off a string of anecdotes about the Duke of Beaufort and the Badminton hunt; how she had got her blue; how she had [heard] about Lady Warwick and the [Prince of Wales?,] about Lady Ripon, Lady Bessborough; L⁠[ord] Balfour and ‘the Souls’. As for age, death and obituary articles, The Times, nothing was said of them. I am sure she had forgotten that such things existed. So had I. I was enthralled. I embraced her warmly in the hall; and the next thing I remember is that I found myself pacing along the Farringdon Road talking aloud to myself, and seeing the butchers’ shops and the trays of penny toys through an air that seemed made of gold dust and champagne.

Now no party of intellectuals has ever sent me flying down the Farringdon Road. I have dined with H.G. Wells to meet Bernard Shaw, Arnold Bennett and Granville Barker and I have only felt like an old washerwoman toiling step by step up a steep and endless staircase.

Thus I seem to have arrived at the conclusion that I am not only a coronet snob; but also a lit up drawing room snob; a social festivity snob. Any group of people if they are well dressed, and socially sparkling and unfamiliar will do the trick; sends up that fountain of gold and diamond dust which I suppose obscures the solid truth. Here is another letter which perhaps will throw more light upon other angles of the problem.

It must have been about twelve years ago, for we were still living in Richmond,| that I received one of those flyaway missives with which we are now all so familiar—a yellow sheet upon which a hand bowls like an intoxicated hoop; and finally curls itself into a scrawl which reads Sibyl Colefax. “It would give me so much pleasure”, it read, “if you would come to tea”—here followed a variety of dates—“to meet Paul Valéry.” Now as I have always met Paul Valéry or his equivalent since I can remember, to be asked out to tea to meet him by a Sibyl Colefax whom I did not know—I had never met her—was no lure to me. If it had been, it was counteracted by another fact about myself to which I have some shyness in alluding; my dress complex; my suspenders complex in particular. I hate being badly dressed; but I hate buying clothes. In particular I hate buying suspenders. It is partly, I think, that in order to buy suspenders you must visit the most private room in the heart of a shop; you must stand in your chemise. Shiny black satin women pry and snigger. Whatever the confession reveals, and I suspect it is something discreditable, I am very shy under the eyes of my own sex when in my chemise. But in those days twelve years ago skirts were short; stockings had to be neat; my suspenders were old; and I could not face buying another pair—let alone hat and coat. So I said, “No, I will not come to tea to meet Paul Valéry.” Invitations then showered; how many tea parties I was asked to I cannot remember; at last the situation became desperate; I was forced to buy suspenders; and I accepted—shall I say the fiftieth—invitation to Argyll House. This time it was to meet Arnold Bennett.

The very night before the party a review of one of my books by Arnold Bennett appeared in the Evening Standard. It was Orlando, I think. He attacked it violently. He said it was a worthless book, which had dashed every hope he might have had of me as a writer. His whole column was devoted to trouncing me. Now though very vain—unlike Lady Oxford—my vanity as a writer is purely snobbish. I expose a large surface of skin to the reviewer but very little flesh and blood. That is, I mind good reviews and bad reviews only because I think my friends think I mind them. But as I know that my friends almost instantly forget reviews, whether good or bad, I too forget them in a few hours. My flesh and blood feelings are not touched. The only criticisms of my books that draw blood are those that are unprinted; those that are private.

Thus as twenty four hours had passed since I read the review, I went into the drawing room at Argyll House far more concerned with my appearance as a woman than with my reputation as a writer. Now I saw Sibyl for the first time and I likened her to a bunch of red cherries on a hard black straw hat. She came forward and led me up to Arnold Bennett as a lamb is led to the butcher.

“Here is Mrs Woolf!” she said with a smile. As a hostess she was gloating. She was thinking, now there will be a scene which will redound to the credit of Argyll House. Other people were there—they too seemed expectant; they all smiled. But Arnold Bennett, I felt, was uncomfortable. He was a kind man; he took his own reviews seriously; here he was shaking hands with a woman whom he had ‘slanged’, as he called it, only the evening before.

“I am sorry, Mrs Woolf,” he began, “that I slanged your book last night …”

He stammered. And I blurted out, quite sincerely, “If I choose to publish books, that’s my own look out. I must take the consequences.”

“Right—right”, he stammered. I think he approved. “I didn’t like your book”, he went on. “I thought it a very bad book …” He stammered again.

“You can’t hate my books more than I hate yours, Mr Bennett”, I said. I don’t know if he altogether approved of that; but we sat down together and talked and got on very well indeed. I was pleased to find in some letters of his that have been published that he commended me for bearing him no grudge; he said that we got on finely.

But that is not my point. My point is that this little scene pleased Sibyl, and was the foundation of what I suppose I must call, subject to qualifications, my intimacy with her. I was instantly promoted from tea to meat. It was lunch to begin with; then when I refused lunch, it was dinner. I went—I went several times. But I found by degrees that I was always asked to meet writers; and I did not want to meet writers; and then that if I had Noel Coward on my left, I always had Sir Arthur on my right. Sir Arthur was very kind; he did his best to entertain me; but why he thought that I was primarily interested in the Dye-stuffs Bill I have never found out. So it was, however. Our talk always drifted that way. At one time I was the second leading authority in England on that measure. But at last, what with Noel Coward on my left and Sir Arthur on my right, I felt I could no longer bring myself to dine with Sibyl. I excused myself. The more I excused myself the more she persisted. Then she suggested that she should come and see me. She came. Again my snobbery asserted itself. I bought iced cakes; tidied up the room; threw away Pinker’s bones, and pulled covers over the holes in the chairs. Soon I realised that her snobbery demanded nothing but a burnt bun; as untidy a room as possible; and if my fingers were covered with ink stains it was all to the good. We struck up an intimacy on those lines. She would exclaim, “Oh how I long to be a writer!” And I would reply, “Oh Sibyl, if only I could be [a] great hostess like you!” Her anecdotes of the great world amused me very much; and I drew lurid if fanciful pictures of my own struggles with English prose. As we became more—shall I call it intimate?—can snobs be intimate?—she would sit on the floor, pull up her skirts, adjust her knickers—she only wears one undergarment, I may tell you; it is of silk—and pour out her grievances. She would complain almost with tears in her eyes—how Osbert Sitwell had laughed at her; how people called her a climber, a lion hunter. How vilely untrue this was … how all she wanted was that Argyll House should be a centre where interesting people could meet interesting people. And yet she was laughed at … abused. Once in the middle of one of these confidences—and they flattered me very much—the telephone rang; and Lady Cunard’s butler asked me to dine with her ladyship—whom I had never met. Sibyl, when I explained the situation, was furious. “I’ve never heard of such insolence!” she exclaimed. Her face was contorted with a look that reminded me of the look on a tigress’s face when someone snatches a bone from its paws. She abused Lady Cunard. Nothing she could say was bad enough for her. She was [a] mere lion hunter; a snob. Again, there was Lady Cholmondeley. She asked me to go and see her. “And who is Lady Cholmondeley?” I asked. Never shall I forget the careful and vindictive way in which she pulled that lady’s character to pieces. She couldn’t understand, I remember she said, anybody being so insolent as to ask another person to dine when they did not know them. She strongly advised me to have nothing to do either with Lady Cunard or Lady Cholmondeley. Yet she had done the very same thing herself. What was the difference between them?

In short there was much to interest me in our intimacy; such as it was. It developed. Soon she suggested a plan which I have never had the courage to make public. It was that there should be fortnightly parties—now at Tavistock Square, now at Argyll House; we were to ask four of our friends; she was to ask four of hers; Bloomsbury and the great world were to mix; she, I rather think, delicately intimated that she would stand the cost. But even I, even at my most intoxicated, saw that this would never do. Once we provided Lytton for her; the party was a deadly failure. Lytton was very good and very patient; but he said to me at leaving, “Please don’t ask me to meet Colefax again.”

We reached a kind of frankness. Time after time she threw me over shamelessly; time after time I found out that her excuse only meant that she had a better engagement elsewhere. For example—here is one of those excuses—she had invited herself for a particular day: it was inconvenient; but I had kept it free.

Dearest Virginia,
I had an unpleasant week of going to my business at 10 instead of 9 and coming back to bed at 6. I thought this would have mended me by Tuesday instead of which I was summoned by a difficult lady to see bedroom curtains in Piccadilly at 5:30 and the interview, prolonged till 6:15, sent me to bed altogether! Now I’ve mended and now you are engaged. Could I come on the 18th or would you come here on the 16th at 6? If not the 18th then the 23rd, if you’ll have me.

Ever your devoted
Sibyl

The day after I met someone who had been at a cocktail party at Madame d’Erlanger’s and had met Sibyl. “Was there any talk of bedroom curtains?” I asked. Apparently there was none.

I used to tax her with it; she scarcely prevaricated. But once when I played the same trick on her—throwing over an engagement, but giving her three weeks’ notice—I got a series of letters which in the violence of their abuse, in the sincerity of their rage—for she imputed to me the vilest motives—I had been seduced by a better engagement—I had been dining, she was sure, with Lady Cunard or Lady Cholmondeley—reached a pitch of eloquence that was really impressive. The light all this threw on her psychology, on my psychology—on the snob psychology generally, was very interesting. Why did we go on seeing each other? I wondered. What was in fact the nature of our relation? Light was to be thrown on it in a startling way.

One morning last February the telephone rang soon after breakfast, and Leonard answered it. I saw his face change as he listened.

“Good God!” he exclaimed. “You don’t say so!” Then he turned to me and said, “Arthur Colefax is dead!”

Harold Nicolson was on the telephone; he had rung up to say that Arthur Colefax had died suddenly the afternoon before; he had only been ill one day; Sibyl, he said, was distracted. Sir Arthur was dead! A clap struck me full in the face. A clap of genuine surprise and sympathy. It was not for Sir Arthur. For him I felt what one feels for an old cabinet that has always stood in the middle of a drawing room. The cabinet had gone—it was surprising—it was sad. But I had never been intimate with the cabinet. For Sibyl my feeling was different—with her I had been—I was intimate. And for her I felt, as I say, a clap of genuine, unadulterated sympathy. No sooner had I felt it than it split into several pieces. I was very sorry; but I was also very curious. What did she feel—what did she really feel about Arthur?

Now when a feeling is thus mixed it is very difficult to put it into words. In proof of this, when it came to writing a letter of sympathy, I boggled. No words that I could find seemed right. I wrote and rewrote; finally I tore up what I had written. We were going down to Monks House for the week-end; I picked three flowers; tied them up with a card on which I wrote ‘For Sibyl. With love from Leonard and Virginia.’ As we passed Argyll House Leonard rang the bell of that now shrouded mansion and gave the flowers into the hand of the weeping Fielding. She at least seemed genuinely heart-broken. That was my solution of the problem.

And it seemed to be amazingly successful. That is, I received a four page letter a few days later, a heart-broken letter—a letter about Arthur and their happiness; about the old days when they had sat on Greek islands in the sun; about the perfection of their marriage; and her present solitude. It read sincerely; it read as if she were telling the truth; and I was a little flattered that she should tell it so openly, so intimately, even so gushingly, to me.

When I heard later that she had written letters very like the one she sent me to people whom she scarcely knew at all, I was not so well pleased. When I heard that she had dined out every night since his death, and read in the papers that Lady Colefax had been at this great party and at that first night, I was baffled. Did she feel less than she made out? Or was she being very brave? Was she so tanned and leathered by society that the only thing she could not face was solitude? It was an interesting problem in the psychology of snobbery.

She wrote to me several times. She told me she was leaving Argyll House. She asked me to come and see the May in flower for the last time; I did not go; then she asked me to come and see the tulips in flower for the last time. We were away, and I did not go. Then when I came back in October, she wrote and said that unless I came on Tuesday the 27th of October I should never see Argyll House again. On the 30th she was leaving for ever. She particularly wanted, she said, to see me alone. I was flattered. I said I would come; and on the morning of Tuesday Fielding rang up to remind me; and to say that her ladyship wanted me to come at 4:45 punctually.

It was a wet and windy evening; leaves swirled along the pavement of the King’s Road; and I had a feeling of chaos and desolation. At 4:45 precisely I rang the bell of Argyll House for the last time. The door was opened not by Fielding but by a seedy man in a brown suit who looked like a bailiff. He was surly.

“You’re too late”, he said, shaking his head and holding the door only half open, as if to stop me.

“But Lady Colefax told me to come at a quarter to five”, I said.

That rather stumped him.

“I don’t know anything about that”, he said. “But you’d better come this way.”

And he led me not into the drawing room but into the pantry. It was odd to find oneself in the pantry of Argyll House—that pantry from which so many succulent dishes had issued. The pantry was full of kitchen tables; and on them were ranged dinner services, bunches of knives and forks, stacks of tumblers and wine glasses—all with tickets on them. Then I realised that the whole place was up for sale; the surly man was the auctioneer’s agent. I stood there looking about me when Fielding hurried in from the kitchen, still in her grey dress and muslin apron, but so flustered and so distracted that I felt she was dressed in sack cloth and ashes. She waved her hands in despair.

“I don’t know where Lady Colefax is”, she moaned. “And I don’t know where to put you. The people are still here. They ought to have gone at four—but still all over the place …”

“I’m so sorry, Fielding”, I said. “This is very sad—“

Tears ran down her cheeks; were in her eyes; she moaned, as she waved her hands and led me in a fluttering, undecided way, first [into] a scullery, then into the dining room. I sat down on one of the brown chairs in that rich festive room. Last time I had sat there Sir Arthur was on my right; Noel Coward was on my left. Now the chairs were ticketed; there were tickets on the glass trees on the mantelpiece; on the chandelier; on the candlesticks. A man in a black overcoat was strolling about the room, picking up now a candlestick, now a cigarette box, as if calculating what they were worth. Then two furtive fashionable ladies came in. One of them held out her hand to me.

“Have you come to see the furniture?” she said to me, in a low tone, as if she were at a funeral. I recognised Ava Bodley—Mrs Ralph Wigram.

“No. I’ve come to see Sibyl”, I said.

I thought I detected a shade of envy in her face; I was a friend; she was a mere sightseer. She strolled off, and began looking at the furniture. Then, as I sat there, trying to fix my mind on Sir Arthur and the kindness which he had always shown me—the door half opened; round the edge peered Sibyl who beckoned, silently, as if she were afraid to show herself in her own dining room. I followed her, and she took me into the drawing room and shut the door.

“Who was that?” she said to me anxiously.

“Mrs Wigram”, I replied. She wrung her hands.

“Oh I hope she didn’t see me”, she murmured. “They ought to have gone at four. But they’re still all over the place.”

The drawing room however was empty; though there were tickets on the chairs and tables. We sank down side by side on the sofa. I used to liken her to a bunch of glossy red cherries on a hard straw hat. But now the cherries were pale. The dye had run. The black brim was soppy with water. She looked old and ill and haggard lines were grooved as if with a chisel on either side of her nose. I felt extremely sorry for her. We were like two survivors clinging to a raft. This was the end of all her parties; we were sitting in the ruins of that magnificent structure which had borne so lately the royal crown on top. I put my bare hand on her bare hand and felt, ‘This is genuine. There can be no mistake about this.’

Then Fielding brought in tea—the kind of tea people have when they are starting on a journey; a few slices of thin bread and butter and three parliament biscuits. Sybil apologized for the tea. “What a horrid tea!” Then she began to talk rather distractedly; she told me about her operation; how the doctors said she ought to take a six months’ holiday. “Am I Greta Garbo?” she said. Then how she had bought a house in North Street; how she was going to stay with the Clarkes … She was always breaking off and saying, “Oh but don’t let’s go into that.” It was as if she wanted to say something, but could not. After all, she had asked me to come to see her alone.

At last I said, “I’m so sorry, Sibyl …”

The tears came to her eyes. “Oh it’s been awful! You can’t think what it’s like”, she began. Then she stopped. The tears did not fall. “You see I’m not a person who can say what they feel”, she said. “I can’t talk. I’ve not talked to anybody. If I did, I couldn’t go on. And I’ve got to go on …” and again she began telling me how she had bought a house in North Street, from a madman; the house was very dirty … Then the door opened and Fielding beckoned.

“Mrs Wigram wants to speak to you, milady”, she said. Sibyl sighed; but she got up and went.

On the whole I admired her very much. I thought, as I sat there, how brave she was. Was she not giving a supper party that very night, here, in the midst of the ruins, in the midst of the chairs and tables that were all up for sale? But here she came back.

“How I loathe that woman!” she exclaimed.

And she told me as she began to eat her bread and butter how Mrs Wigram was a mere climber; the sort of woman who pushed and shoved and she had just played, too, a dirty trick on her. When she heard that Sibyl wanted the house in North Street, she had told the Lyttons, who had bid against her. But she had got the house in spite of them; and very cheap too; for seven hundred pounds less than she expected—“Oh but don’t let’s talk about that”, she broke off. And again I tried to be intimate. I said something rather commonplace and awkward about leaving houses—how much one minded it and so on. Then again tears came into her eyes. “Yes”, she said, looking round her. “I’ve always had a passion for this house. I’ve felt about it as a lover feels …”

Again the door opened.

“Lady Mary Cholmondeley on the telephone, milady”, said Fielding.

“Tell her I’m engaged”, said Sibyl angrily. Fielding went.

“Who can she mean?” Sibyl asked. “I don’t know any Lady Mary Cholmondeley. Can it be … Oh dear,” she sighed getting up, “I must go and see for myself. Fielding’s the bane of my life”, she sighed. “First she cries, then she laughs; and she won’t wear spectacles though she’s as blind as a bat. I must go and see for myself.”

Again she left me. Another illusion had gone, I thought. I had always thought Fielding a treasure—an old servant to whom Sibyl was devoted. But no; first she cried; then she laughed; and she was as blind as a bat. This was another peep into the pantry at Argyll House.

As I sat there waiting I thought of the times I had sat on that sofa—with Sir Arthur; with Arnold Bennett; with George Moore; with old Mr Birrell; with Max Beerbohm. It was in this room that Olga Lynn threw down her music in a rage because people talked; and here that I saw Sibyl glide across the room and lead Lord Balfour, beaming benevolence and distinction, to soothe the angry singer … But Sibyl came back again, and again took up her bread and butter.

“What were we talking about”, she said, “before Fielding interrupted? And what am I to do about Fielding?” she added. “I can’t send her away. She’s been with us all these years. But she’s such an awful … but don’t let’s go into that,” she broke off again.

Again I made an effort to talk more intimately. “I’ve been thinking of all the people I’ve met here”, I said. “Arnold Bennett. George Moore. Max Beerbohm …”

She smiled. I saw that 1 had given her pleasure. “That’s what I like you to say”, she said. “That’s what I’ve wanted—that the people I like should meet the people I like. That’s what I tried to do—” “And that’s what you’ve done”, I said, warming up. I felt very grateful to her, although in fact I had never much enjoyed meeting other writers, still she had kept open house; she had worked very hard; it had been a great achievement in its way. I tried to tell her so.

“I have enjoyed myself in this room so much”, I said. “D’you remember the party when Olga Lynn threw down her music? And then, that time I met Arnold Bennett. And then—Henry James …” I stopped. I had never met Henry James at Argyll House. That was before my time.

“Did you know him?” I said, quite innocently.

“Know Henry James!” Sibyl exclaimed. Her face lit up. It was as if I had touched on a nerve, the wrong nerve, I rather felt. She became the old Sibyl again—the hostess.

“Dear H.J.! I should think I did! I shall never forget”, she began, “how when Wolcott Balestier died in Vienna—he was Rudyard Kipling’s brother-in-law, you know—” Here the door opened again; and again Fielding—Fielding who was as blind as a bat and the curse of Sibyl’s life—peered in.

“The car’s at the door, milady”, she said.

Sibyl turned to me. “I’ve a tiresome engagement in Mount Street”, she said. “I must go. But I’ll give you a lift.”

She got up and we went into the hall. The door was open. The Rolls Royce was waiting at the door behind the gate. This is my farewell, I said to myself, pausing for a moment, and looked, as one looks for the last time, at the Italian pots, at the looking-glasses, all with their tickets on them, that stood in the hall. I wanted to say something to show that I minded leaving Argyll House for the last time. But Sibyl seemed to have forgotten all about it. She looked animated. The colour had come back into the cherries; the straw hat was hard again. “I was just telling you,” she resumed. “When Wolcott Balestier died in Vienna, Henry James came to see me, and he said, ‘Dear Sibyl, there are those two poor women alone with the corpse of that dear young man in Vienna, and I feel that it is my duty—’” By this time we were walking down the flagged pathway to the car.

“Mount Street”, she said to the chauffeur and got in. “H.J. said to me,” she resumed, “‘I feel it is my duty to go to Vienna in case I can be of any assistance to those two bereaved ladies …’,” And the car drove off, and she sat by my side, trying to impress me with the fact that she had known Henry James.

[written in 1936]

[]

FRESHWATER:
a comedy

by
Virginia Woolf

published
1976
by
The Hogarth Press

freshwater: a comedy

Freshwater—1923 Version

Freshwater—1935 Version

Act I.

Act II.

Act III.

[]

[The text follows the 1976 Hogarth Press edition.]

Freshwater—1923 Version

Dramatis Personae

charles henry hay cameron

mrs. julia cameron

g. p. watts

ellen terry

lord tennyson

mr. craig

mary magdalen

A drawing room at Dimbola, hung with photographs; charles cameron, a very old man with long white hair and beard, is sitting with a bath towel round his head, mary magdalen, the housemaid, is engaged in rubbing his hair, which has just been washed, and is of the utmost fineness.

mr. c.
The sixth time in eight months! Whenever we start for India, Julia insists—[Here mary, who is combing, tugs his hair sharply.]—Ah! Ah! Ah!—Julia insists that I must have my head washed. Yet we never do start for India—I sometimes think we never shall start for India. At the last moment something happens—something always happens. And so we stay on and on, living this life of poetry, of photography, of frivolity, and I shall never see the land of my spiritual youth. I shall never learn the true nature of virtue from the fasting philosophers of Baluchistan. I shall never solve the great problem, or answer the Eternal Question. I am a captive in the hands of Circumstance—[mary now tugs his beard.] Ah! Oh! Oh!

mary
Mr. Cameron, dear darling Mr. Cameron, do let me wash your beard. It’s the most beautiful beard in the whole Isle of Wight. Mrs. Cameron will never let you go to India—

[Enter mrs. cameron, a brown-faced gipsylike-looking old woman, wearing a green shawl, fastened by an enormous cameo. She stops dead and raises her hand.]

mrs. c.
What a picture! What a composition! Truth sipping at the fount of inspiration! The soul taking flight from the body! Upward, girl, look upward! Fling your arms round his neck and look upward! [mary and mr. c. assume a pose.] Let your head fall on your breast, Charles. The soul has left its mortal tenement. She wings her way—where are the wings, the angel’s wings, the turkey’s wings, Andrews gave me last Christmas?

mary
They’re packed, ma’am.

mrs. c.
Packed—why packed? Ah—I remember. We start for India at two thirty sharp, [mary goes on combing the beard.] Did you ever hear anything so provoking? I’ve only just time to finish my study of Sir Galahad watching the Holy Grail by moonlight. Cook was posed. The light superb. At the last moment up comes word that Galahad has to take the sheep to Yarmouth. It’s market day. Sheep! Market day! [With great scorn] Where I’m to find another Galahad heaven only knows! [She looks distractedly about the room, out of the window and so on.]

mr. c. [lying back with his eyes shut, while mary washes his beard]
Loose your mind from the affairs of the present. Seek truth where truth lies hidden. Follow the everlasting will o’ the wisp—Magdalen, don’t tug my beard. Cast away your vain fineries. Let us be free like birds of the air. [Growing more and more excited, and speaking in a loud prophetic voice] At two thirty we start for India!

[The door opens as he says this and lord tennyson enters.]

lord t.
So Emily told me. Julia Cameron has ordered the coffins, she said, and at two thirty they start for India.

mrs. c. [advancing upon him and speaking in a sepulchral voice]
Julia Cameron has ordered the coffins but the coffins have not come. It’s that villain Ashwood again. This is the sixth time I have ordered the coffins and the coffins have not come. But without her coffins Julia Cameron will not start for India. For, Alfred [she stands before him, fixing him with her eyes], when we lie dead under the Southern Cross, my head will be raised upon a copy of In Memoriam. Maud lies upon my heart. In my right hand I hold the quill which wrote—under providence—“The Passing of Arthur.” In my left, the slipper which you threw at my head when I asked you to sit for my two hundredth study of Arthur saying farewell to Sir Bedivere. [She casts her eyes up and speaks in a deep ecstatic voice.] All is over, Alfred. All is ready. It is a deep Southern night. Orion glitters in the firmament. The scent of the tulip trees is wafted through the open window. The silence is only broken by the sobs of my faithful friends and the occasional howl of a solitary tiger. And then—what is this? What infamy is this? [She plucks at her wrist, picks something off it, and holds it towards tennyson.] An Ant! A White Ant! They are advancing in hordes from the jungle, Alfred. I hear the crepitation of their myriad feet. They will be upon me before dawn. They will eat the flesh off my bones. Alfred, they will devour Maud!

lord t. [greatly shocked]
God bless my soul! The woman’s right. Devour Maud! It’s too disgusting! It must be stopped. Devour Maud indeed! My darling Maud! [He presses the book beneath his arm.] But what an awful fate! What a hideous prospect! Here are my two honoured old friends, setting sail, in less than three hours, for an unknown land where, whatever else may happen, they can never by any possible chance hear me read Maud again. But [he looks at his watch] what is the time? We have still two hours and twenty minutes. I have read it in less. Let us begin, [lord tennyson sits down by the window which opens into the garden and begins to read aloud.]

I hate the dreadful hollow beneath the little wood,

Its lips in the field above are dabbled with blood-red heath,

The red-ribb’d ledges drip with a silent horror of blood,

And Echo there, whatever is ask’d her, answers “Death.”

mrs. c. [interrupting him]
Alfred, Alfred, I seek Sir Galahad. Where shall I find a Galahad? Is there no gardener, no footman, no pantry boy at Farringford with calves—he must have calves. Hallam alas has grown too stout. A Galahad! A Galahad! [She goes wringing her hands and crying “A Galahad!” out of the room, tennyson goes on reading steadily.]

lord t.

For there in the ghastly pit long since a body was found,

His who had given me life—O father! O God! was it well?—

Mangled, and flatten’d, and crush’d, and dinted into the ground;

There yet lies the rock that fell with him when he fell.

[tennyson becomes absorbed in his reading and does not notice that [illegible], mr. cameron falls asleep and snores gently, tennyson goes on reading. The door opens and ellen terry comes in, dressed in white veils which are wrapped about her arms, head, etc. tennyson reads on to himself in rather a low voice, without noticing her. mr. cameron snores very quietly.]

ellen [looking from one to the other]
O how usual it all is. Nothing ever changes in this house. Somebody’s always asleep. Lord Tennyson is always reading Maud. The cook is always being photographed. The Camerons are always starting for India. I’m always sitting to Signor. I’m Modesty today—Modesty crouching at the feet of Mammon. If it weren’t for Mammon, I should be there still. But Mammon’s big toe is out of drawing. Of course Signor with all his high ideals couldn’t pass that. So I slipped down and escaped. If I only could escape. [She wrings her hands in desperation.] For I never thought when I married Mr. Watts that it was going to be like this. I thought artists were such jolly people—always dressing up and hiring coaches and going for picnics and drinking champagne and eating oysters and kissing each other and—well, behaving like the Rossettis. As it is, Signor can’t eat anything except the gristle of beef minced very fine and passed through the kitchen chopper twice. He drinks a glass of hot water at nine and goes to bed in woolen socks at nine thirty sharp. Instead of kissing me he gives me a white rose every morning. Every morning he says the same thing—“The Utmost for the Highest, Ellen! The Utmost for the Highest!” And so of course I have to sit to him all day long. Everybody says how proud I must be to hang for ever and ever in the Tate Gallery as Modesty crouching beneath the feet of Mammon. But I’m an abandoned wretch, I suppose. I have such awful thoughts. Sometimes I actually want to go upon the stage and be an actress. What would Signor say if he knew? And then, when I’m dressed like this, all in white and crouching there under Mammon’s big toe, it suddenly comes into my head that I should like somebody to fall in love with me. And, what’s much worse—oh, it’s so unspeakable that I can’t think how I’ve the face to go on crouching any longer—somebody has fallen in love with me. At least I think so. It happened like this. Signor and I were picking primroses in Maidens Lane. Suddenly I heard the sound of galloping hoofs, and a horse and rider sprang right over our heads. Luckily, the lane was very deep, or we should have been killed. Luckily, Signor is very deaf and he heard nothing. But I had just time to see a beautiful, sunburnt, whiskered face and to catch this. [She takes out a piece of paper and reads.]

Come into the garden, Nell,

I’m here at the gate alone.

Tuesday, Midday, Craig.

Tuesday! Midday! Craig! It is Tuesday. [She goes up to the mantelpiece and looks at the large ticking clock.] It is just half past eleven. But who’s Craig?

lord t. [bursting out in great agitation]
Colvin has the temerity to say that my lyrics are better than my narrative. Gosse has the audacity to affirm that my narrative is better than my lyrics. That is the kind of criticism I have to endure. That is my daily portion of insult and injustice. If I weren’t the most stoical man in the world, the very skin on my wrists would rise and blossom in purple and red at the innumerable bites of the poisoned bugs and pismires of the Press! [He shoots out his hand and looks at it.] That’s a wonderful hand now. The skin is like a crumpled rose leaf. Young woman [beckoning to ellen], have you ever seen a poet’s skin?—a great poet’s skin? Ah, you should see me in my bath! I have thighs like alabaster.

ellen
It’s a very beautiful skin, Lord Tennyson.

lord t.
And you’re a very beautiful wench. Get on my knee.

ellen
I sometimes think you’re the most sensible of them all, Lord Tennyson.

lord t. [kissing her]
I am sensible to beauty in all its shapes. That is my function as Poet Laureate.

ellen
Tell me, Lord Tennyson, have you—ever picked primroses?

lord t.
Millions and millions of times.

ellen
And did Lady Tennyson ever jump over your head?

lord t.
Jump! Emily jump! She has lain on her sofa for fifty years. She took to it on her honeymoon, and I should be surprised, indeed I should be shocked, if she ever got up again.

ellen
Then I suppose you were never in love. You were never in the devil of a mess. Nobody ever painted you in your chemise. Nobody ever gave you a white rose. Nobody ever threw a note into your hand and galloped away.

lord t.
No: Hallam never galloped. He had a bad seat on horseback. My life has been singularly free from amorous excitement of the kind you describe. Tell me more.

ellen
If you were quite young and you saw somebody you wanted to marry and she was married already to an old, old man, would you throw everything to the winds—your name, your fame, your house, your books, your servants, your wife—and elope with her?

lord t. [in great agitation]
I should! I should!

ellen
Thank you, Lord Tennyson. You’re a very great poet! [She kisses him, slips off his knee and runs out of the room.]

mr. c. [opening his eyes slowly]
Alfred, Alfred!

lord t. [much startled]
I thought you were asleep!

mr. c.
It is when our eyes are shut that we see most!

lord t.
But there is no need to mention it to Emily.

mr. c. [dreamily]
I slept, and had a vision. I thought I was looking into the future. I saw a yellow omnibus advancing down the glades of Farringford. I saw girls with red lips kissing young men without shame. I saw innumerable pictures of innumerable apples. Girls played games. Great men were no longer respected. Purity had fled from the hearth. The double bed had shrunk to a single. Yet as I wandered, lost, bewildered, utterly confounded, through the halls of Alfred Tennyson’s home, I felt my youth return. My eyes cleared, my hair turned black, my powers revived. And [trembling and stretching his arms out] there was a damsel—an exquisite but not altogether ethereal nymph. Her name was Lydia. She was a dancer. She came from Muscovy. She had danced before the Tsar. She snatched me by the waist and whirled me through the currant bushes. Oh Alfred, Alfred, tell me, was it but a dream?

[Enter george frederick watts carrying a palette.]

watts
Where is Ellen? Has anybody seen Ellen? She must have slipped from the room without my noticing it. [Turning to the audience and speaking in rapturous tones] Praise be to the Almighty Architect! The toe of Mammon is now, speaking under Providence, in drawing. Ah, my dear old friends, that toe has meant months of work—months of hard work. I have allowed myself no relaxation. I have sustained my body on the gristle of beef passed through the kitchen chopper twice, and my soul by the repetition of one prayer—The Utmost for the Highest! The Utmost for the Highest. At last my prayer has been heard; my request granted. The toe, the big toe, is now in drawing. [He sits down.]

lord t. [gloomily]
It sometimes seems to me that the toe is not the most important part of the human body, Watts.

watts [starting up]
There speaks the voice of the true artist. You are right, Alfred. You have recalled me from my exaltation; upwards, you point upwards. You remind me that even if I have succeeded, humanly speaking, with the toe, I have not solved the problem of the drapery. That, indeed, is a profoundly difficult problem. For by my treatment of the drapery I wish to express two distinct and utterly contradictory ideas. In the first place it should convey to the onlooker the idea that Modesty is always veiled; in the second, that Modesty is absolutely naked. For a long time I have pondered at a loss. At last I have solved the problem. I am wrapping her form in a fine white substance, which has the appearance of a veil but, if you examine it closely, is seen to consist of innumerable stars. It is, in short, the Milky Way. For in the Mythology of Ancient Egypt the Milky Way was held to symbolise—let me see, what did it symbolise?—[He searches in his pockets and takes out a large book.]

[Enter mrs. cameron with her camera.]

mrs. c.
What is the use of a policeman if he has no calves? There you have the tragedy of my life. That is Julia Margaret Cameron’s message to her age! [She sits down facing the audience.] All my sisters were beautiful, but I had genius [touching her forehead]. They were the brides of men, but I am the bride of Art. I have sought the beautiful in the most unlikely places. I have searched the police force at Freshwater, and not a man have I found with calves worthy of Sir Galahad. But, as I said to the Chief Constable, “Without beauty, constable, what is order? Without life, what is law?” Why should I continue to have my silver protected by a race of men whose legs are aesthetically abhorrent to me? If a burglar came and he were beautiful, I should say to him: Take my fish knives! Take my cruets, my bread baskets and my soup tureens. What you take is nothing to what you give, your calves, your beautiful calves. I have sought beauty in public houses and found her playing the concertina in the street. My cook was a mendicant. I have transformed her into a Queen. My housemaid sold bootlaces at Charing Cross; she is now engaged to the Earl of Dudley. My bootboy stole eggs and was in prison. He now waits at table in the guise of Cupid.

watts [crying out in agony]
Horror! Horror! I have been cruelly misled—utterly deceived. [He reads aloud.] “The Milky Way among the Ancient Egyptians was the universal token of fertility. It symbolised the spawn of fish, the innumerable progeny of the sea, and the harvest of the fields. It typified the fertility of the marriage bed, and its blessings were called down upon brides at the altar.” Horror! Horror! I who have always lived for the Utmost for the Highest have made Modesty symbolise the fertility of fish! My picture is ruined! I must start afresh. It will cost me months of work, but it must be done. It shall never be said that George Frederick Watts painted a single hair that did not tend directly—or indirectly—to the spiritual and moral elevation of the British Public. Where is Ellen? There is not a moment to be lost. The Utmost for the Highest! The Utmost for the Highest!

mr. c.
Where is Ellen, Alfred?

lord t.
Where is Lydia, Charles?

mrs. c.
Who is Lydia?

lord t.
Who is Lydia, what is she that all our swains adore her?

mr. c.
She is a Muscovite. She danced before the Tsar.

mrs. c.
The very person I want! A housemaid who can dance!

watts
I have been visited by a most marvellous inspiration. Why should I not transform Modesty into Maternity? I see no treachery to the British Public in that. Mammon trampling upon Maternity. The sound is certainly excellent; but what about the sense?

lord t.
Take care of the sound and the sense will take care of itself.

watts [fumbling in his pocket and producing several papers]
I must make sure of my facts this time. I have here a letter from Rosalind, Countess of Carlisle, a very noble and high-minded lady whom I am even now painting as Boadicea or Godiva—I forget which—but here it is. She is profoundly interested in the suppression of the sale of spirituous liquors—a movement which has my fullest sympathy; but hitherto, owing partly to the pressure of other subjects, I have not devised any means of treating a glass of hot water allegorically. [He reads.] “Dearest Signor, great painter of all time, brother of Michael Angelo, son of Titian, nephew of Tintoret, you who wear the white flower of a blameless Art, will scarcely credit the fact that the Working Classes of Great Britain spend upon beer in one year a sum sufficient to maintain and equip twenty battleships or two million horse marines.” No; that had never struck me. Never! But there is my picture! Lady Carlisle has given me my picture! Mammon typifies British love of beer. Maternity, two million horse marines. The Milky Way symbolising the spawn of fish and the fertility of the marriage bed may be held, without impropriety, to be highly symbolical of two million horse marines. Thus the picture will serve I hope a very high and holy purpose. I shall call it Mammon trampling upon Maternity, or the Prosperity of the British Empire being endangered—

lord t. [interrupting]
—by the fertility of the Horse Marines.

watts
No, no, no, Alfred. You mistake my meaning entirely. I shall call it Mammon trampling upon Maternity or the Prosperity of the British Empire being endangered by the addiction of the Working Classes to the Consumption of Spirituous Liquors—

lord t. [shrieking and clasping his head]
Oh, oh, oh—twelve s’es in ten lines—twelve s’es in ten lines! The prosssperity of the British—the ssspawn of the Horse Marines—consssumption of ssspirituous fissshes—Oh, oh, oh, I feel faint! [He sinks onto the table.]

mrs. c. [planting her tripod]
“The Passing of Arthur!”

watts [going up to tennyson and patting him on the shoulder]
Cheer up, my dear old friend; cheer up. I will be guided entirely by your wishes. I will call it merely “Mammon trampling upon Maternity.” Unless I mistake—and I have made some very terrible mistakes today—there is not a single letter s in the line.

lord t.
The moan of doves in immemorial elms. The murmuring of innumerable bees. Myriads of rivulets hurrying through the lawns. Forgive my weakness. It is years since I encountered the letter s in such profusion. Hallam eradicates them from the Times with a penknife every morning. Even so, the Siege of Sevastopol was almost the death of me. If I had not been engaged in writing Maud at the time, I doubt that I could have survived. Living at Farringford there is constant danger from flocks of geese. So I carry a copy of my own works wherever I go and fortify myself by repeating the mellow ouzel fluting on the lawn, the moan of doves in immemorial elms. Maud, Maud, Maud, they are crying and calling. Maud, Maud, Maud. [He sits down by the window and begins to read.]

mrs. c. [fluttering her fingers]
“Inspiration—or the poet’s dream.” Look at the outline of the nose against the ivy! Look at the hair tumbling like Atlantic billows on a stormy night! And the eyes—look up, Alfred, look up—they are like pools of living light in which thoughts play like dolphins among groves of coral. The legs are a trifle short, but legs, thank God, can always be covered. [She covers his legs with an embroidered table cloth.] Charles, rouse yourself. Signor, lean against the window frame. Cook! Louisa! Mary Magdalen! James! Lord Tennyson is about to read Maud.

[The servants come trooping in, cook dressed as Guenevere; james as Cupid. They form a tableau round lord tennyson at the window.]

mrs. c. [to the audience]
“Alfred, Lord Tennyson reading Maud to Julia Margaret Cameron for the last time.”

lord t.

Come into the garden, Nell,

[The clock begins striking twelve as he reads.]

I am here at the gate alone;

And the woodbine spices are wafted abroad,

And the musk of the rose is blown.

She is coming, my own, my dear;

Were it ever so airy a tread,

My heart would hear her and beat,

Were it earth in an earthy bed;

My dust would hear her and beat,

Had I lain for a century dead;

Would start and tremble under her feet,

And blossom in purple and red.

mrs. c. [in great excitement, pointing at the window]
Sir Galahad!

all
Sir Galahad?

mrs. c.
There among the raspberry canes—kissing; no, being kissed. Wait, young man. Wait! [She dashes out of the room.]

mr. c.
I slept, and had a vision in my sleep. I saw a yellow omnibus advancing down the glade. I saw Lydia among the raspberry canes.

watts
Your music, Alfred, has tuned my mind to its highest pitch, and I now feel inspired to approach the most awful problems of my art in a spirit of devout devotion. But where is Ellen? I must find Ellen. Where is Ellen?

[Enter mrs. cameron with ellen terry, who is dressed as a young man.]

mrs. c.
I have found him at last. Sir Galahad!

[Everybody stares, watts, tennyson and mr. cameron rise to their feet.]

lord t.
Nell!

mr. c.
Lydia!

watts
Ellen! Oh, Modesty, Modesty. [He sinks down covering his face with his hand.]

mrs. c.
Why, it’s Ellen Terry dressed up as a man. How becoming trousers are, to be sure! I have never, never, seen anything so exquisite as Ellen in the arms of a youth among the raspberry canes.

watts [starting up]
In the arms of a youth! In trousers in the arms of a youth! My wife in trousers in the arms of a youth! Unmaidenly! Unchaste! Impure! Out of my sight! Out of my life!

[Enter mr. craig.]

craig
And into my arms. Come along, Nell. It’s time we were off. You can’t keep a horse tied up at the gate all day in this weather.

mr. c.
I slept, and had a vision in my sleep. I thought I saw a motor omnibus advancing down the glades of Farringford. What colour is your horse, young Sir?

craig
A strawberry roan.

mr. c.
Then my dream has come—more or less—true. The omnibus was yellow.

watts
Miserable girl—if girl I still can call you. I could have forgiven you much but not this. Had you gone to meet him as a maiden, in a veil, or dressed in white, it would have been different. But trousers—no—check trousers; no. Go then. Vanish with your paramour to lead a life of corruption.

craig
Hang it all, Sir. I have a large house in Gordon Square.

watts
Go then to Gordon Square. Found a society in which the sanctity of the marriage vow is no longer respected, where veils are rent and trousers, check trousers—

ellen
O, I was forgetting. [She pulls a long veil out of her pocket.] Here’s your veil. I intend to wear trousers in future. I never could understand the sense of wearing veils in a climate like this.

watts
Unhappy maiden. You have no ideals. No imagination. No religion. No sense of the symbolical in art. The veil which you cast asunder symbolises purity, modesty, chastity—

lord t.
—and the fertility of fish. Don’t forget that, Watts.

ellen [to craig]
I don’t understand a word they’re saying. But then I never did. Can’t we escape to some place where people talk sense?

watts
Go to Bloomsbury. In that polluted atmosphere spread your doctrines, propagate your race, wear your trousers. But there will come a day [he raises his eyes and clasps his hands] when the voice of purity, of conscience, of highmindedness, of nobility, and truth, will again be heard in the land.

mr. c. [gazing in front of him as if at a vision]
The reference is to Middleton Murry and the Adelphi. All expectations have been surpassed. You are urgently advised to secure advertising space without delay. Highmindedness pays.

watts
Thank God for that! It was not so in my day. To this Middleton Murry, then, I bequeath my mantle. [He flourishes the veil.] As for you [turning upon ellen and mr. craig] guilty, unbridled, unhallowed couple, fly!

[The door opens, and undertakers carry in two coffins which they put down in the middle of the room.]

mrs. c.
They have come. They have come!

mr. c.
At last, at last! We start for India, [mr. and mrs. cameron clasp hands and stand by the coffins.]

mr. and mrs. c.
We start for India. We go to seek a land less corrupted by hypocrisy, where nature prevails. A land where the sun always shines. Where philosophers speak the truth. Where men are naked. Where women are beautiful. Where damsels dance among the currant bushes—It is time—It is time. We go; we go.

ellen and mr. craig
And we go too. We go to a land—

ellen
Oh I’ve had enough of this style of talking! The fact is we’re going to Bloomsbury—number forty-six Gordon Square, W.C. 1. There won’t be no veils there! Not if I know it!

mr. c. [walking slowly out of the room with his hands stretched before him]
Lydia—Lydia—I come—I come!

mrs. c. [running back into the room]
Wait, wait. I have left my camera behind. [She takes it and holds it towards ellen terry.] It is my wedding gift, Ellen. Take my lens. I bequeath it to my descendents. See that it is always slightly out of focus. Farewell! Farewell!

[Exeunt mr. and mrs. cameron and ellen and craig. A noise of shouting is heard, which dies away and grows again. Excited servants rush in.]

servants
It is the Queen, my Lord! She has driven over from Balmoral to see you.

[her majesty queen victoria is wheeled in in an arm chair.]

watts [falling on his knees at her feet]
The Utmost for the Highest!

lord t. [to the audience, very grimly]
The comedy is over.

[lord tennyson falls on his knees. Several gramophones play “God Save the Queen,” and the curtain falls.]

CURTAIN

[]

Freshwater—1935 Version

Act I.

A studio. mrs. cameron washing mr. cameron’s head. ellen terry on the model’s throne posing to watts for Modesty at the feet of Mammon.

mrs. c.
Sit still, Charles! Sit still! Soap in your eyes? Nonsense. Water down your back? Tush! Surely you can put up with a little discomfort in the cause of art!

mr. c.
The sixth time in eight months! The sixth time in eight months! Whenever we start for India Julia washes my head. And yet we never do start for India. I sometimes think we never shall start for India.

mrs. c.
Nonsense, Charles. Control yourself, Charles. Remember what Alfred Tennyson said of you: A philosopher with his beard dipped in moonlight. A chimney-sweep with his beard dipped in soot.

mr. c.
Ah, if we could but go to India. There is no washing in India. There beards are white, for the moon for ever shines, on youth, on truth, in India. And here we dally, frittering away our miserable lives in the withered grasp of—

[mrs. c. washes vigorously.]

watts [looking round]
Courage, my old friend. Courage. The Utmost for the Highest, Cameron. Always remember that, [to ellen] Don’t move, Ellen. Keep yourself perfectly still. I am struggling with the great toe of Mammon. I have been struggling for six months. It is still out of drawing. But I say to myself, The Utmost for the Highest. Keep perfectly still.

[Enter tennyson.]

tenn.
The son of man has nowhere to lay his head!

mr. c.
Washing day at Farringford too, Alfred?

tenn.
Twenty earnest youths from Clerkenwell are in the shrubbery; six American professors are in the summer house; the bathroom is occupied by the Ladies Poetry Circle from Ohio. The son of man has nowhere to lay his head.

mr. c.
Loose your mind from the affairs of the present. Seek truth where truth lies hidden. Follow the everlasting will o’ the wisp. Oh don’t tug my beard! [mrs. c. releases him.] Heaven be praised! At two thirty we start for India, [mr. c. walks away to the window.]

tenn.
Upon my word! You don’t say you’re really going?

mrs. c. [wringing out her sponge]
Yes, Alfred. At two thirty we start for India—that’s to say if the coffins have come. [mrs. c. gives the sponge to mary.] Take my sponge, girl; now go and see if the coffins have come.

mary
If the coffins have come! Why, it’s the Earl of Dudley who’s come. He’s waiting for me in the kitchen. He’s not much to look at but he’s a deal sight better than coffins any day.

mrs. c.
We can’t start for India without our coffins. For the eighth time I have ordered the coffins, and for the eighth time the coffins have not come. But without her coffin Julia Cameron will not start for India. Think, Alfred. When we lie dead under the Southern Cross my head will be pillowed upon your immortal poem In Memoriam. Maud will lie upon my heart. Look—Orion glitters in the southern sky. The scent of tulip-trees is wafted through the open window. The silence is only broken by the sobs of my husband and the occasional howl of a solitary tiger. And then what is this—what infamy do I perceive? An ant, Alfred, a white ant. They are advancing in hordes from the jungle. Alfred, they are devouring Maud!

tenn.
God bless my soul! Devouring Maud? The white ants! My ewe lamb! That’s true. You can’t go to India without your coffins. And how am I going to read Maud to you when you’re in India? Still—what’s the time? Twelve fifteen? I’ve read it in less. Let’s begin.

I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood,

Its lips in the field above are dabbled with blood-red heath,

The red-ribb’d ledges drip with a silent horror of blood,

And Echo there, whatever is ask’d her, answers “Death.”

For there in the ghastly pit long since a body was found,

His who had given me life—O father! O God!—

mrs. c.
That’s the very attitude I want! Sit still, Alfred. Don’t blink your eyes. Charles, you’re sitting on my lens. Get up.

[mrs. c. fixes her tripod, tennyson goes on reading Maud.]

ellen [stretching her arms]
Oh, Signor, can’t I get down? I am so stiff.

watts
Stiff, Ellen? Why you’ve only kept that pose for four hours this morning.

ellen
Only four hours! It seems like centuries. Anyhow I’m awfully stiff. And I would so like to go for a bathe. It’s a lovely morning. The bees on the thorn, [ellen clambers down off the model’s throne and stretches herself.]

watts
You have given four hours to the service of art, Ellen, and are already tired. I have given seventy-seven years to the service of art and I am not tired yet.

ellen
O Lor’!

watts
If you must use that vulgar expression, Ellen, please sound the final d.

ellen [standing beside tennyson]
Oh Lord, Lord, Lord!

tenn.
I am not yet a Lord, damsel; but who knows? That may lie on the lap of the Queen. Meanwhile, sit on my lap.

[ellen sits on tennyson’s knee.]

mrs. c.
Another picture! A better picture! Poetry in the person of Alfred Tennyson adoring the Muse.

ellen
But I’m Modesty, Mrs. Cameron; Signor said so. I’m Modesty crouching at the feet of Mammon, at least I was ten minutes ago.

mrs. c.
Yes. But now you’re the Muse. But the Muse must have wings, [mrs. c. rummages frantically in a chest. She flings out various garments on the floor.] Towels, sheets, pyjamas, trousers, dressing gowns, braces—braces but no wings. Trousers but no wings. What a satire upon modern life! Braces but no wings! [mrs. c. goes to the door and shouts:] Wings! Wings! Wings! What d’you say, Mary. There are no wings? Then kill the turkey! [mrs. c. shuffles among the clothes. She exits.]

tenn. [to ellen]
You’re a very beautiful wench, Ellen!

ellen
And you’re a very great poet, Mr. Tennyson.

tenn.
Did you ever see a poet’s skin? [He pulls up his sleeve and shows her his arm.]

ellen
Like a crumpled rose leaf!

tenn.
Ah, but you should see me in my bath! I have thighs like alabaster!

ellen
I sometimes think, Mr. Tennyson, that you are the most sensible of them all.

tenn. [kissing her]
I am sensible to beauty in all its forms. That is my function as Poet Laureate.

ellen
Tell me, Mr. Tennyson, have you ever picked primroses in a lane?

tenn.
Scores of times.

ellen
And did Lady Tennyson ever jump over your head on a horse?

tenn.
Emily jump? Emily jump? She has lain on her sofa for fifty years and I should be surprised, nay I should be shocked, if she ever got up again.

ellen
Then I suppose you were never in love. Nobody ever jumped over your head and dropped a white rose into your hand and galloped away?

tenn.
Hallam never galloped. He had a bad seat on horseback. My life has been singularly free from amorous excitement of the kind you describe. Tell me more.

ellen
Well you see, Mr. Tennyson, I was walking in a lane the other day picking primroses when—

mrs. c. [re-entering]
Here’s the turkey wings.

ellen
Oh, Mrs. Cameron, have you killed the turkey? And I was so fond of that bird.

mrs. c.
The turkey is happy, Ellen. The turkey has become part and parcel of my immortal art. Now, Ellen. Mount this chair. Throw your arms out. Look upwards. Alfred, you too—look up!

tenn.
To Nell!

watts
I do not altogether approve of the composition of this piece, Julia.

mrs. c.
The Utmost for the Highest, Signor. Now, keep perfectly still. Only for fifteen minutes.

mr. c. [looking at the marmoset]
Life is a dream.

tenn.
Rather a wet one, Charles.

mr. c.
All things that have substance seem to me unreal. What are these? [He picks up the braces.] Braces. Fetters that bind us to the wheel of life. What are these? [He picks up the trousers.] Trousers. Fig leaves that conceal the truth. What is truth? Moonshine. Where does the moon shine for ever? India. Come, my marmoset, let us go to India. Let us go to India, the land of our dreams. [He walks to the window. A whistle sounds in the garden.]

ellen
I come! I come! [She jumps down and rushes out of the room.]

mrs. c.
She’s spoilt my picture!

tenn.
My picture too.

mrs. c.
The girl’s mad. The girl’s gone clean out of her wits. What can she want to go bathing for when she might be sitting to me?

tenn. [opens Maud and begins reading]
Well:

Come into the garden, Maud,

For the black bat, night, has flown,

Come into the garden, Maud,

I am here at the gate alone—

watts
Alfred, tell me. Is your poetry based on fact?

tenn.
Certainly it is. I never describe a daisy without putting it under the microscope first. Listen.

For her feet have touch’d the meadows

And left the daisies rosy.

Why did I say “rosy”? Because it is a fact—

mr. c.
I thought I saw something which many people would call a fact pass the window just now. A fact in trousers; a fact in side whiskers; a handsome fact, as facts go. A young man, in fact.

mrs. c.
A young man! Just what I want. A young man with noble thighs, ambrosial locks and eyes of gold. [She goes to the window and calls out:] Young man! Young man! I want you to come and sit to me for Sir Isumbras at the Ford. [She exits. A donkey brays. She comes back into the room.] That’s not a man. That’s a donkey. Still, to the true artist, one fact is much the same as another. A fact is a fact; art is art; a donkey’s a donkey. [She looks out of the window.] Stand still, donkey; think, Ass, you are carrying St. Christopher upon your back. Look up, Ass. Cast your eyes to Heaven. Stand absolutely still. There! I say to the Ass, look up. And the Ass looks down. The donkey is eating thistles on the lawn!

tenn.
Yes. There was a damned ass praising Browning the other day. Browning, I tell you. But I ask you, could Browning have written:

The moan of doves in immemorial elms,

The murmuring of innumerable bees.

Or this, perhaps the loveliest line in the language—The mellow ouzel fluting on the lawn? [The donkey brays.] Donkeys at Dimbola! Geese at Farringford! The son of man has nowhere to lay his head!

[watts slowly advances into the middle.]

watts
Praise be to the Almighty Architect—under Providence, the toe of Mammon is now, humanly speaking, in drawing. Yes, in drawing. [He turns to them in ecstasy.] Ah, my dear friends and fellow workers in the cause of truth which is beauty, beauty which is truth, after months of work, months of hard work, the great toe of Mammon is now in drawing. I have prayed and I have worked; I have worked and I have prayed; and humanly speaking, under Providence, the toe of Mammon is now in drawing.

tenn.
It sometimes seems to me, Watts, that the toe is not the most important part of the human body.

watts [starting up and seizing his palette again]
There speaks the voice of the true artist! You are right, Alfred. You have recalled me from my momentary exaltation. You remind me that even if I have succeeded, humanly speaking, with the great toe, I have not solved the problem of the drapery. [He goes to the picture and takes a mahlstick.] That indeed is a profoundly difficult problem. For by my treatment of the drapery I wish to express two important but utterly contradictory ideas. In the first place I wish to convey to the onlooker the idea that Modesty is always veiled; in the second that Modesty is absolutely naked. For a long time I have pondered at a loss. At last I have attempted a solution. I am wrapping her in a fine white substance which has the appearance of a veil; but if you examine it closely it is seen to consist of innumerable stars. It is in short the Milky Way. You ask me why? I will tell you. For if you consult the mythology of the ancient Egyptians, you will find that the Milky Way was held to symbolise—let me see, what did it symbolise—[He opens his book.]

mrs. c.
Let me see. Time’s getting on. Now let me think. What shall I want on the voyage?

mr. c.
Faith, hope and charity.

mrs. c.
Yes and the poems of Sir Henry Taylor; and plenty of camphor. And photographs to give to the sailors.

tenn.
And a dozen or two of port.

watts
Horror! Horror! I have been most cruelly deceived! Listen: [He reads.] “The Milky Way among the ancients was the universal token of fertility. It symbolised the spawn of fish, the innumerable progeny of the sea, and the fertility of the marriage bed.” Horror! Oh Horror! I who have always lived for the Utmost for the Highest have made Modesty symbolise the fertility of fish!

mr. c.
My poor old friend. Fish. Fish. Fish.

curtain

Act II.

The Needles, ellen terry and john craig are sitting in bathing dresses on the Needles.

john
Well, here we are!

nell
Oh, how lovely it is to sit on a rock in the middle of the sea!

john
In the middle of the sea?

nell
Yes, it’s a sea. Are you the young man who jumped over the lane on a red horse?

john
I am. Are you the young woman who was picking primroses in the lane?

nell
I am.

john
[Lor’] what a lark!

nell
Oh you mustn’t let Signor hear you say that—or if you do, please pronounce the final d.

john
D— be damned! Who’s Signor?

nell
Who’s Signor? Oh he’s the modern Titian.

john
Titian?

nell
Yes. Titian. Titian. Titian.

john
Sneezing? I hope you haven’t caught cold!

nell
No. I feel heavenly. As warm as a toast—sitting in the sun here. You can’t think how cold it is sitting for Modesty in a veil.

john
Sitting for Modesty in a veil? What the dickens d’you mean?

nell
Well, I’m married to a great artist. And if you’re married to a great artist, you do sit for Modesty in a veil.

john
Married? You’re a married woman? You? Was that old gentleman with a white beard your husband?

nell
Oh everybody’s got a white beard at Dimbola. But if you mean, am I married to the old gentleman with a white beard in the lane, yes, of course I am. Here’s my wedding ring. [She pulls it off.] With this ring I thee wed. With this body I thee worship. Aren’t you married too?

john
I married? Why I’m only twenty-two. I’m a lieutenant in the Royal Navy. That’s my ship over there. Can’t you see it?

[nell looks.]

nell
That? That’s a real ship. That’s not the kind of ship that sinks with all we love below the verge.

john
My dear girl. I don’t know what you’re talking about. Of course it’s a real ship. The Iron Duke. Thirty-two guns. Captain Andrew Hatch. My name’s Craig. Lieutenant John Craig of Her Majesty’s Navy.

nell
And my name is Mrs. George Frederick Watts.

john
But haven’t you got another?

nell
Oh plenty! Sometimes I’m Modesty. Sometimes I’m Poetry. Sometimes I’m Chastity. Sometimes, generally before breakfast, I’m merely Nell.

john
I like Nell best.

nell
Well that’s unlucky, because today I’m Modesty. Modesty crouching at the feet of Mammon. Only Mammon’s great toe was out of drawing and so I got down; and then I heard a whistle. Dear me, I suppose I’m an abandoned wretch. Everybody says how proud I ought to be. Think of hanging in the Tate Gallery for ever and ever—what an honour for a young woman like me! Only—isn’t it awful—I like swimming.

john
And sitting on a rock, Nell?

nell
Well it’s better than that awful model’s throne. Mrs. Cameron killed the turkey today. The Muse has to have wings, you see. But you can’t think how they tickle.

john
What the dickens are you talking about? Who’s Mrs. Cameron?

nell
Mrs. Cameron is the photographer; and Mr. Cameron is the philosopher; and Mr. Tennyson is the poet; and Signor is the artist. And beauty is truth; truth beauty; that is all we know and all we ought to ask. Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever. Oh, and the utmost for the highest, I was forgetting that.

john
It’s worse than shooting the sun with a sextant. Is this the Isle of Wight? Or is it the Isle of Dogs—the Isle where the mad dogs go?

nell
The apple trees bloom all the year here; the nightingales sing all the night.

john
Look here, Nell. Let’s talk sense for a minute. Have you ever been in love?

nell
In love? Aren’t I married?

john
Oh but like this. [He kisses her.]

nell
Not quite like that. [He kisses her again.] But I rather like it. Of course, it must be wrong.

john
Wrong? [He kisses her.] What’s wrong about that?

nell
It makes me think such dreadful thoughts. I don’t think I could really dare to tell you. You see, it makes me think of—beef steaks; beer; standing under an umbrella in the rain; waiting to go into a theatre; crowds of people; hot chestnuts; omnibuses—all the things I’ve always dreamt about. And then, Signor snores. And I get up and go to the casement. And the moon’s shining. And the bees on the thorn. And the dews on the lawn. And the nightingales forlorn.

john
‘Struth! God bless my soul! I’ve been in the tropics, but I’ve seen nothing like this. Now look here, Nell. I’ve got something to say to you—something very sensible. I’m not the sort of man who makes up his mind in a hurry. I took a good look at you as I jumped over that lane. And I said to myself as I landed in the turnip field, that’s the girl for me. And I’m not the sort of man who does things in a hurry. Look here. [He takes out a watch.] Let’s be married at half past two.

nell
Married? Where shall we live?

john
In Bloomsbury.

nell
Are there any apple trees there?

john
Not one.

nell
Any nightingales?

john
Never heard a nightingale in Bloomsbury, on my honour as an officer.

nell
What about painting? D’you ever paint?

john
Only the bath. Red, white and blue. With Aspinalls enamel.

nell
But what shall we live on?

john
Well, bread and butter. Sausages and kippers.

nell
No bees. No apple trees. No nightingales. Sausages and kippers. John, this is Heaven!

john
That’s fixed then. Two thirty sharp.

nell
Oh but what about this? [She takes her wedding ring off.]

john
Did the old gentleman with a white beard really give you that?

nell
Yes. It was dug out of a tomb. Beatrice’s. No, Laura’s! Lady Raven Mount Temple gave it him on the top of the Acropolis at dawn. It symbolises—let me see, what does this wedding ring symbolise? With this ring I thee wed; with this brush I thee worship—It symbolises Signor’s marriage to his art.

john
He’s committed bigamy. I thought so! There’s something fishy about that old boy, I said to myself, as I jumped over the lane; and I’m not the sort of chap to make up his mind in a hurry.

nell
Fishy? About Mr. Watts?

john
Very fishy; yes.

[A loud sigh is heard.]

nell [looking round]
I thought I heard somebody sighing.

john [looking round]
I thought I saw somebody spying.

nell
That’s only one of those dreadful reporters. The beach is always full of them. They hide behind the rocks, you know, in case the Poet Laureate may be listening to the scream of the maddened beach dragged backward by the waves. [The porpoise appears in the foreground.] Look. Look. What’s that?

john
It looks to me like a porpoise.

nell
A porpoise? A real porpoise?

john
What else should a porpoise be?

nell
Oh I don’t know. But as nightingales are widows, I thought the porpoise might be a widower. He sounds so sad. Listen. [The porpoise gulps.] Oh, poor porpoise, how sad you sound! I’m sure he’s hungry. Look how his mouth opens! Haven’t we anything we could give him?

john
I don’t go about with my bathing drawers full of sprats.

nell
And I’ve got nothing—or only a ring. There, porpoise—take that! [She throws him her wedding ring.]

john
Lord, Nell! Now you’ve gone and done it! The porpoise has swallowed your wedding ring! What’ll Lady Mount Temple say to that?

nell
Now you’re married to Mr. Watts, porpoise! The utmost for the highest, porpoise. Look upwards, porpoise! And keep perfectly still! I suppose it was a female porpoise, John?

john
That don’t matter a damn to Mr. Watts, Nell. [He kisses her.]

curtain

Act III.

The studio as before, tennyson reading Maud aloud. tennyson reads aloud for some time. Then the door opens and watts comes in, hiding his head in his hands. He staggers across the room distractedly.

tenn.

“The fault was mine, the fault was mine”—

Why am I sitting here so sturm’d and still,

Plucking the harmless wild-flower on the hill?—

It is this guilty hand!—

And there rises ever a passionate cry—

watts
Ellen! Ellen! My wife—my wife—dead, dead, dead!

tenn.
My God, Watts. You don’t mean to say Ellen’s dead?

mrs. c.
Drowned? That’s what comes of going bathing.

watts
She is dead—drowned—to me. I was behind a rock on the beach. I saw her—drown.

mr. c.
Happy Ellen! Gone to Paradise.

mrs. c.
Oh but this is awful! The girl’s dead and where am I to get another model for the Muse? Are you sure, Signor, that she’s quite dead? Not a spark of life left in her? Couldn’t something be done to revive her? Brandy—where’s the brandy?

watts
No brandy will bring Ellen to life. She is dead—stone dead—to me.

mr. c.
Happy Ellen; lucky Ellen. They don’t wear braces in Heaven; they don’t wear trousers in Heaven. Would that I were where Ellen lies.

tenn.
Yes. There is something highly pleasing about the death of a young woman in the pride of life. Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course with stocks and stones and trees. That’s Wordsworth. I’ve said it too. ’Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. Wearing the white flower of a blameless life. Hm, ha, yes let me see. Give me a pencil. Now a sheet of paper. Alexandrines? Iambics? Sapphics? Which shall it be?

[He begins to write, watts goes to his canvas and begins painting out the picture.]

watts
Modesty forsooth! Chastity! Alas, I painted better than I knew. The Ancient Egyptians were right. This veil did symbolise the fertility of fish. [He strikes his brush across it.] What symbol can I find now?

tenn.
Ahem. I have written the first six lines. Listen. Ode on the death of Ellen Terry, a beautiful young woman who was found drowned.

[Enter ellen. Everybody turns round in astonishment.]

mr. c.
But you’re in Heaven!

tenn.
Found drowned.

mrs. c.
Brandy’s no use!

nell
Is this a madhouse?

mr. c.
Are you a fact?

nell
I’m Ellen Terry.

watts [advancing brandishing his brush]
Yes Ma’am. There you speak the truth. You are no longer the wife of George Frederick Watts. I saw you—

nell
Oh you did, did you?

watts
I was on the beach, behind a rock. And I saw you—yes, abandoned wretch, I saw you, sitting on the Needles; sitting on the Needles with a man; sitting on the Needles with your arms round a man. This is the end, Ellen. Our marriage is dissolved—in the sea.

tenn.
The unplumb’d, salt, estranging sea. Matthew Arnold.

nell
I’m very sorry, Signor. Indeed I am. But he looked so very hungry, Signor; I couldn’t help it. She looked so very hungry, I should say; I’m almost sure it was a female.

watts
A female! Don’t attempt to lie to me, Ellen.

nell
Well, John thought it was a female. And John ought to know. John’s in the Navy. He’s often eaten porpoises on desert islands. Fried in oil, you know, for breakfast.

watts
John has eaten porpoises fried in oil for breakfast. I thought as much. Go to your lover, girl; live on porpoises fried in oil on desert islands; but leave me—to my art. [He turns to his picture.]

nell
Oh well, Signor, if you will take it like that—I was only trying to cheer you up. I’m very sorry, I’m sure, to have upset you all. But I can’t help it. I’m alive! I never felt more alive in all my life. But I’m awfully sorry, I’m sure—

tenn.
Don’t apologise, Ellen. What does it matter? An immortal poem destroyed—that’s all. [He tears up his poem.]

nell
But couldn’t you find a rhyme for porpoise, Mr. Tennyson?

tenn.
Impossible.

nell
Well then, what about Craig?

tenn.
Browning could find a rhyme for Craig.

mrs. c.
Ah, but in my art rhymes don’t matter. Only truth and the sun. Sit down again, Ellen. There—on that stool. Hide your head in your hands. Sob. Penitence on the stool of—

nell [standing at bay]
No, I can’t, Mrs. Cameron. No, I can’t. First I’m Modesty; then I’m the Muse. But Penitence on a Monument—no, that I will not be.

[a knock at the door]

mary
The coffins have come, Ma’am. The coffins, I say. And you couldn’t find a nicer pair outside of Kensal Green. As I was saying to his lordship just now, it do seem a pity to take them all the way to India. Why can’t you plant ’em here with a weeping angel on top?

mrs. c.
At last, at last the coffins have come.

mr. c.
The coffins have come.

mrs. c.
Let us pack our coffins and go.

mr. c.
To the land of perpetual moon shine—

mrs. c.
To the land where the sun never sets.

mr. c.
I shan’t want trousers in India—

mrs. c.
No that’s true. But I shall want wet plates—

[tennyson, who has been out of the room for a moment, returns with something between his fingers.]

tenn.
It’s all right, Julia. Look. I have bored a hole with my penknife. Solid oak. Hearts of oak are our ships. Hearts of oak are our men. We’ll fight ’em and beat ’em again and again! No ant can eat through that. You can take Maud with you.
    Well there’s still time; where did I leave off? [He sits down and begins to read Maud.]

She is coming, my own, my sweet;

Were it ever so airy a tread,

My heart would hear her and beat,

Were it earth in an earthy bed;

My dust would hear her and beat,

Had I lain for a century dead;

Would start and tremble—

mr. c. [who is looking out of the window]
Ahem! I think that’s a fact in the raspberry canes.

tenn.
Facts? Damn facts. Facts are the death of poetry.

mr. c.
Damn facts. That is what I have always said. Plato has said it. Radakrishna has said it. Spinoza has said it. Confucius has said it. And Charles Hay Cameron says it too. All the same, that was a fact in the raspberry canes. [Enter craig.] Are you a fact, young man?

craig
My name’s Craig. John Craig of the Royal Navy. Sorry to interrupt. Afraid I’ve come at an inconvenient hour. I’ve called to fetch Ellen by appointment.

mrs. c.
Ellen?

craig
Yes. Chastity, Patience, the Muse, what d’you call her. Ah here she is.

ellen
John.

tenn.
Queen Rose of the rosebud garden of girls.

watts
Ellen, Ellen, painted, powdered. Miserable girl. I could have forgiven you much. I had forgiven you all. But now that I see you as you are—painted, powdered—unveiled—

tenn.
Remember, Watts; the ancient Egyptians said that the veil had something to do with—

watts
Don’t bother about the ancient Egyptians now, Alfred. Now that I see you as you are, painted, powdered, I cannot do it. Vanish with your lover. Eat porpoises on desert islands.

craig
Hang it all, Sir. I’ve a large house in Gordon Square.

watts
Have you indeed, Sir. And where pray is Gordon Square?

craig
W.C. 1.

watts
Young man, have a care, have a care. Ladies are present.

craig
I’m not responsible for the post office directory am I?

tenn.
Hallam lived there. Wimpole Street, West Central, we called it in those more euphonious days. The long unlovely street. See In Memoriam.

craig
What’s Hallam? What’s In Memoriam?

tenn.
What’s Hallam? What’s In Memoriam? It is time I went back to Farringford. Emily will be anxious.

nell
Take care Emily don’t jump, Mr. Tennyson!

[Enter mary.]

mary
The coffins are on the fly, Ma’am.

mrs. c.
The coffins are on the fly—It is time to say good-bye.

mary
There’s no room for the turkey’s wings, Ma’am.

mrs. c.
Give them here. I will put them in my reticule.

mary
Gorblime! What a set! What a set! Coffins in the kitchen. Wet plates on the mantelpiece. And when you go to pick up a duster, it’s a marmoset. I’m sick of parlour work. I’ll marry the earl and live like a respectable gurl in a Castle.

mr. and mrs. c., john and ellen [all together]
The coffins are on the fly. It’s time to say good-bye.

mrs. c.
We are going to the land of the sun.

mr. c.
We are going to the land of the moon.

john
We’re going to W.C. 1.

nell
Thank God we’re going soon.

mrs. c.
Good-bye, good-bye, the coffins are on the fly.

mr. c.
Farewell to Dimbola; Freshwater, farewell.

john
I say, Nell, I want a rhyme to fly.

nell
Heavens, John, I can only think of fly.

mrs. c.

And my message to my age is

When you want to take a picture

Be careful to fix your

Lens out of focus.

But what’s a rhyme to focus?

mr. c.

Hocus pocus, hocus pocus,

That’s the rhyme to focus.

And my message to my age is—

Watts—don’t keep marmosets in cages—

john and nell
They’re all cracked—quite cracked—

And our message to our age is,

If you want to paint a veil,

Never fail,

To look in the raspberry canes for a fact.

nell
To look in the raspberry canes for a fact!

[Exeunt all but watts and tennyson.]

tenn.
They have left us, Watts.

watts
Alone with our art.

tenn. [going to the window]
Low on the sand and loud on the stone the last wheel echoes away. God bless my soul, it don’t! It’s getting louder—louder—louder! They’re coming back!

watts
Don’t tell me, Alfred! Don’t tell me they’re coming back! I couldn’t face another—fact!

tenn.

She is coming, my dove, my dear;

She is coming, my life, my fate.

The red rose cries, “She is near, she is near”—

mary
Her Majesty the Queen.

the queen
We have arrived. We are extremely pleased to see you both. We prefer to stand. It is the anniversary of our wedding day. Ah, Albert! And in token of that never to be forgotten, always to be remembered, ever to be lamented day—

tenn.
’Tis better to have loved and lost.

the queen
Ah but you are both so happily married. We have brought you these tokens of our regard. To you, Mr. Tennyson, a peerage. To you, Mr. Watts, the Order of Merit. May the spirit of the blessed Albert look down and preserve us all.

curtain

[]

THE
DIARY

of
Virginia Woolf

published
1977-1984
by
The Hogarth Press

the diary

Vol. I: 1915-1919

1915    1917    1918    1919

Vol. II: 1920-1924

1920    1921    1922    1923    1924

Vol. III: 1925-1930

1925    1926    1927    1928    1929    1930

Vol. IV: 1931-1935

1931    1932    1933    1934    1935

Vol. V: 1936-1941

1936    1937    1938    1939    1940    1941

[]

Volume I: 1915-1919

Edited by Anne Olivier Bell

[1977]

1915

[Diary I]

Friday 1 January

To start this diary rightly, it should begin on the last day of the old year, when, at breakfast, I received a letter from Mrs Hallett. She said that she had had to dismiss Lily at a moments notice, owing to her misbehaviour. We naturally supposed that a certain kind of misbehaviour was meant; a married gardener, I hazarded. Our speculations made us both uncomfortable all day. Now this morning I hear from Lily herself. She writes, very calmly, that she left because Mrs Hallett was ‘insulting’ to her; having been given a day & nights holiday, she came back at 8.30 a.m. ‘not early enough’. What is the truth? This, I guess: Mrs H. is an old angry woman, meticulous, indeed as we knew tyrannical, about her servants; & Lily honestly meant no wrong. But I have written for particulars—another lady wanting a character at once. Then I had to write to Mrs Waterlow about the chimney sweeping charges foisted on us, such a letter as comes naturally to the strong character, but not to the weak. And then we tramped to the Co-ops. in rain & cold to protest against their bookkeeping. Manager a bored languid young man, repeating rather than defending himself. Half way home we heard “British warship … British warship” & found that the Formidable has been sunk in the channel. We were kept awake last night by New Year Bells. At first I thought they were ringing for a victory.

Saturday 2 January

This is the kind of day which if it were possible to choose an altogether average sample of our life, I should select. We breakfast; I interview Mrs Le Grys. She complains of the huge Belgian appetites, & their preference for food fried in butter. “They never give one anything” she remarked. The Count, taking Xmas dinner with them, insisted, after Pork & Turkey, that he wanted a third meat. Therefore Mrs Le G. hopes that the war will soon be over. If they eat thus in their exile, how must they eat at home, she wonders? After this, L. & I both settle down to our scribbling. He finishes his Folk Story review, & I do about 4 pages of poor Effie’s story; we lunch; & read the papers, agree that there is no news. I read Guy Mannering upstairs for 20 minutes; & then we take Max [a dog] for a walk. Halfway up to the Bridge, we found ourselves cut off by the river, which rose visibly, with a little ebb & flow, like the pulse of a heart. Indeed, the road we had come along was crossed, after 5 minutes, by a stream several inches deep. One of the queer things about the suburbs is that the vilest little red villas are always let, & that not one of them has an open window, or an uncurtained window. I expect that people take a pride in their curtains, & there is great rivalry among neighbours. One house had curtains of yellow silk, striped with lace insertion. The rooms inside must be in semi-darkness; & I suppose rank with the smell of meat & human beings. I believe that being curtained is a mark of respectability—Sophie used to insist upon it. And then I did my marketing. Saturday night is the great buying night; & some counters are besieged by three rows of women. I always choose the empty shops, where I suppose, one pays ½[d] a lb. more. And then we had tea, & honey & cream; & now L. is typewriting his article; & we shall read all the evening & go to bed.

Sunday 3 January

It is strange how old traditions, so long buried as one thinks, suddenly crop up again. At Hyde Park Gate we used to set apart Sunday morning for cleaning the silver table. Here I find myself keeping Sunday morning for odd jobs—typewriting it was today—& tidying the room—& doing accounts which are very complicated this week. I have 3 little bags of coppers, which each owe the other something. We went to a concert at the Queen’s Hall, in the afternoon. Considering that my ears have been pure of music for some weeks, I think patriotism is a base emotion. By this I mean (I am writing in haste, expecting Flora to dinner) that they played a national Anthem & a Hymn, & all I could feel was the entire absence of emotion in myself & everyone else. If the British spoke openly about W.C’s, & copulation, then they might be stirred by universal emotions. As it is, an appeal to feel together is hopelessly muddled by intervening greatcoats & fur coats. I begin to loathe my kind, principally from looking at their faces in the tube. Really, raw red beef & silver herrings give me more pleasure to look upon. But then I was kept standing 40 minutes at Charing X Station, & so got home late, & missed Duncan who came here. Moreover, London on a Sunday night now, with all its electric globes half muffled in blue paint, is the most dismal of places. There are long mud coloured streets, & just enough daylight & insufficient electric light, to see the naked sky, which is inexpressibly cold & flat.*

* The Times today has an article upon the “Stars of London”—“We may gain from them a serviceable impulse to that steady concentration on enduring issues of which stars are a true symbol, & the glare of London is not”. So be it. (5th Jan).

Monday 4 January

I do not like the Jewish voice; I do not like the Jewish laugh: otherwise I think (in Saxon’s phrase) there is something to be said for Flora Woolf. She can typewrite, do shorthand, sing, play chess, write stories which are sometimes accepted, & she earns 30/ a week as the secretary of the Principal of the Scottish Church in London. And in doing these various arts she will keep lively till a great old age, like a man playing with five billiard balls.

The outside world burst in upon us with a clamour this morning. 1. I had a letter from Mrs Hallett. 2. I had a letter from Lily. 3. L. had a document from Sydney Waterlow. According to Mrs Hallett, Lily hid a soldier in the Butler’s pantry; she also met soldiers at the gates; & thus Mrs Hallett’s house got a bad name in the village, besides which Mrs Hallett herself was alarmed ‘there being ladies only in the house’. Lily confesses merely to one brother, but adds that Mrs H. is very ill, as well as very old. As for Sydney’s letter—I am so sick of it that I can’t describe it. The house was dirty—4 people scrubbing for a fortnight only succeeded in making it tolerable; & so & so on—all of which would have been suffered in silence but for my note. So I wrote to him, & I wrote to Lily—& after spending some time in phrasing virtuous sentiments nobly, I see clearly how official skins grow thick & shiny. To Lily I said that she must promise to behave better, if I gave her another character—for I am sure poor Mrs Hallett & her trembling old sister heard soldier voices whenever there was a wind in the laurels. Philip came after luncheon, having 4 days leave. He is sick to death of soldiering—told us tales of military stupidity which pass belief. They found a man guilty of desertion the other day & sentenced him; & then discovered that the man did not exist. The Colonel says “I like well dressed young men—gentlemen” & gets rid of recruits who sink below this level. In addition to this, the demand for cavalry at the front is exhausted, so that probably they will stay at Colchester for ever. Another dark, rainy day. An aeroplane passed overhead.

Tuesday 5 January

I had a letter this morning from Nessa, who calls Mrs Waterlow a German hausfrau, & advises us not to pay a penny—Cleanliness is a fetish not to be worshipped, she says. Certainly, neither of us do worship it; I suppose Mrs W. ran about with a duster, & dabbed her finger under beds. I can imagine the list of discoveries she gave Sydney, sitting smoking over his philosophy, & how she cursed that dreadful slut Virginia Woolf. At the same time, it is a point of honour among servants to find the house they go into filthy, & to leave it bright as a pin. But enough of Waterlows & their slop pails. We worked as usual: as usual it rained. After lunch we took the air in the Old Deer Park, & marked by a line of straw how high the river had been; & how a great tree had fallen across the towing path, crushing the railing beneath it. Three bodies were seen yesterday swiftly coursing downstream at Teddington. Does the weather prompt suicide? The Times has a queer article upon a railway smash, in which it says that the war has taught us a proper sense of proportion with respect to human life. I have always thought we priced it absurdly high; but I never thought the Times would say so. L. went off to Hampstead to give the first of his lectures to the Women’s Guild. He did not seem nervous: he is speaking at this moment. We rather think that old Mr Davies is dying—but I have an idea he’ll resist for years to come, although he wants to die, & his life prevents Margaret from much work. I bought my fish & meat in the High Street—a degrading but rather amusing business. I dislike the sight of women shopping. They take it so seriously. Then I got a ticket in the Library, & saw all the shabby clerks & dressmakers thumbing illustrated papers, like very battered bees on very battered flowers. At least they are warm & dry: & it rains again today. The Belgians downstairs are playing cards with some friends, & talk—talk—talk—while their country is destroyed. After all, they have nothing else to do—

Wednesday 6 January

The Waterlows again: Lily again. Mrs W. writes to Leonard this time, about the oven, & ends by being very much distressed to think we are annoyed—seeing how delightful they find Asheham. It is a queer thing that both the ladies in this correspondence write to both the gentlemen—feeling instinctively, I believe, that if they wrote to each other, the whole affair would become much more acid. Lily’s letter continues the story of the hidden soldier. It brings her very clearly before me, with her charming, stupid, doglike eyes, quite incapable of hurting a fly or thinking a coarse thought, & yet bound eternally to suffer for the sins of stronger characters. In this case, she was at the mercy of a parlourmaid, who invited the soldiers, & Lily had neither the strength of mind to be rude to them when they came, nor to ‘tell tales of a fellow servant’. ‘I would rather do anything than that’—& that, I imagine, was how she had her baby too. Anyhow, I have ‘spoken’ for her again, & she has promised to have no more to do with soldiers. L. went off at 10 a.m. to give his second lecture at Hampstead. The first was a great success, as I knew it would be. He finds the women much more intelligent than the men; in some ways too intelligent, & apt on that account, not to see the real point. He has another to give this afternoon, so he is staying up at Hampstead, lunching with Lilian, & perhaps seeing Janet. No one except a very modest person would treat these working women, & Lilian & Janet & Margaret, as he does. Clive, or indeed any other clever young man, would give himself airs; & however much he admired them pretend that he didn’t.

I wrote all the morning, with infinite pleasure, which is queer, because I know all the time that there is no reason to be pleased with what I write, & that in 6 weeks or even days, I shall hate it. Then I went to London, & asked at Grays Inn about Chambers. They had a set vacant; & I at once envisaged all sorts of charms, & let myself into them with a thrill of excitement. But they would be perfect for one, & impossible for two. There are 2 perfect rooms, looking over the gardens; & that is about all. Grays Inn Road thunders behind one. Next I saw a flat in Bedford Row, which promised divinely, but on asking at the agents, was told they had just been instructed to let it furnished only—And now, of course, I am convinced that there is no flat in London to equal it! I could wander about the dusky streets in Holborn & Bloomsbury for hours. The things one sees—& guesses at—the tumult & riot & busyness of it all—Crowded streets are the only places, too, that ever make me what-in-the-case of another-one-might-call think. Now I have to decide whether I shall go up again, to a party at Gordon Sqre, where the Aranyis are playing. On the one hand, I shirk the dressing & the journey; on the other I know that with the first chink of light in the hall & chatter of voices I should become intoxicated, & determine that life held nothing comparable to a party. I should see beautiful people, & get a sensation of being on the highest crest of the biggest wave—right in the centre & swim of things. On the third & final hand, the evenings reading by the fire here—reading Michelet & The Idiot, & smoking & talking to L. in what stands for slippers & dressing gown—are heavenly too. And as he won’t urge me to go, I know very well that I shant. Besides, there is vanity: I have no clothes to go in.

Thursday 7 January

No—we didn’t go to the Gordon Sqre party. Leonard got back too late, & it rained; & really, we didn’t want to go. The lectures were a great success. One old lady told Leonard that they should consider him a personal friend for life; another said that he was the only gentleman who spoke so that working women could understand. He explained Bills of Exchange & so on for an hour; & then answered questions, which again, were amazingly intelligent. I started off after lunch today, first to go to the Foundling Hospital & ask whether they would let us have Brunswick Square—or half the house; then to the Omega to buy Janet a shawl, & then to tea with Janet. Mr Chubb opened the door to me at the Hospital. He was sitting at a writing table in a very warm comfortable room, looking on to the garden; while a clerk drew plans of houses on a very high desk. Mr Chubb is growing fat. He recognised me & became immediately extremely courteous. Brunswick Sqre is already practically let to a retired Ceylon Civil Servant, called Spence, who may however be willing to let the two upper floors, which would suit us very well. I became, of course, possessed with a passion to have Brunswick Square. Mr Chubb, who has infinite leisure, & likes conversation, discussed every possibility. He did not himself admire Adrian’s frescoes, but said that most people do. The Ceylon gentleman proposed to cover them with a curtain, being apparently of opinion that they were too good to destroy, though not nice to look upon. He is a bachelor, perhaps rather a crusty bachelor, once Chief of the Colombo Lunatic Asylum— At this point a Secretary came in, also excessively polite when he heard my name. “Mrs Woolf certainly has a very strong claim to the house” he said. “And I myself don’t think Spence is quite right”—“I do” Mr Chubb replied firmly “I’ve looked him up in the Medical Directory—besides, he seems all right.” “He looks all right certainly” the secretary agreed, “but I don’t know—However it wouldn’t be playing the game to refuse at the eleventh hour.” “The twelfth you may say” said Mr Chubb. At last I left, shaking hands all round, & having begged Mr Chubb to do his best & let us know. They advised me to see a house in Mecklenburgh Sqre, which I did. It is a vast place, with a great hall, a sweeping staircase; & we could have a flat at the top—the only objection being that Grays Inn Road is at the back—When I got out, it was raining. I walked to the Omega however & bought my stuff from a foolish young woman in a Post Impressionist tunic. I went to Hampstead, found some elderly lady there already, went to the station, in order to avoid tea with Emphie; & then was allowed up to Janet. She is in bed, & will have to stay in bed for weeks. Her nerves are thoroughly wrong. She can’t read, or do anything—I can guess what she feels like—& how miserable she must be very often—especially since she is growing old, & Emphie must be wearisome with her repetitions, & general enthusiastic vagueness. & then, the fag end of life—Still she is trained to be brave, & so unselfish by nature that other people really interest her. We talked about Leonard, & Lily, & life in London & Hardy’s poems which she can’t re-read—Too melancholy & sordid—& the subjects not interesting enough. I don’t agree. It grew late; & she suggested that I should dine there & go with L. to the Peace Debate at the Women’s Guild. I couldn’t face dinner, so I retreated to the Public Library. On the way I walked through one of the worst downpours I have ever been in. It was more like a shower bath than natural rain. My shoes squeaked so with wet as I walked up the Library that I was ashamed. Then I dined at a cabmans eating house—the only dining place, & very good. Coarse, but clean & sober. At 8 I met L. at 28 Church Row. The rooms are old white pannelled rooms; one was full of working women. It was a comfort (after reading more terrific letters of childbirth) to see how the women roar with laughter, like schoolgirls. Mr Hobson spoke—It was very good—The women impressive as usual—because they seem to feel, & to have such a sense of responsibility. Another letter from Mrs Waterlow.

Friday 8 January

Sydney Waterlow came to lunch with us today ‘to make sure’ as he put it ‘that we had not quarrelled over these wretched matters’. We discussed little else for the first hour & a half. My first letter had given him a sleepless night, he told us, though Mrs Waterlow in spite of pregnancy, slept sound. As far as we could make out, Mrs W. acts & writes impulsively; when Sydney bestirred himself to think, he was appalled to realise that their behaviour was not ethically sound. He cogitated for long, devoted a whole morning to his reply, & has taken the advice of several friends; who happen to agree with him that chimneys are usually swept by landlords. “But then we should have asked your leave—I entirely yield that point—only” & so on & so on; all in the solid simple style, which is so like him. His fat pink body always seems to me boneless & hairless like that of a gigantic child; & his mind is the same. But there is a charm about him. He & L. went for a walk. I went to Chancellors, to ask whether there was any news of Hogarth. At first the man said no. When I told him that we might take a house in London, he at once confessed that he had twice seen Mrs Wontner, the present tenant, & that she does not like the house. Is this invented, &, if not, is there some good reason why she does not like it? It seems likely that we shall have to choose between Brunswick & Hogarth—unless both fail us. Sydney came back to tea, & told us how Alice had been to see them, & how he had at once regretted her “as one might regret a very fine walking-stick—She was so pretty & happy with a great fat baby. The house was full of our furniture—like a house of death to me.” But when I suggested that the present Mrs W. had been uncomfortable he was amazed. “She isnt that sort of person at all” he said. “She’s perfectly sensible…..” Still, if she saw Sydney coveting the walking stick, I thought—Sydney replied that Marg. (as he calls her) was so infinitely more to him than the walking stick that she couldn’t feel anything of the kind. He went off to Asheham. They want to take it on for another 6 months—He has no work to do, but Asheham is so delightful that he is perfectly happy doing nothing.

Saturday 9 January

At two o’clock this morning several barges moored in the river broke loose. One crashed into Richmond Bridge, & knocked off a good deal of stone from one of the arches—The others went to the bottom, or drifted down stream. All this I mention, not because we saw or heard anything of it, but because we noticed the damaged Bridge as we walked to Kingston this afternoon. The stone is yellower inside than out, which makes it more obvious. We had a very good walk. The purplish fields outside Kingston somehow reminded me of Saragossa. There is a foreign look about a town which stands up against the sunset, & is approached by a much trodden footpath across a field. I wonder why one instinctively feels that one is complimenting Kingston absurdly in saying that it is like a foreign town. On the towpath we met & had to pass a long line of imbeciles. The first was a very tall young man, just queer enough to look twice at, but no more; the second shuffled, & looked aside; & then one realised that every one in that long line was a miserable ineffective shuffling idiotic creature, with no forehead, or no chin, & an imbecile grin, or a wild suspicious stare. It was perfectly horrible. They should certainly be killed. We found a market going on at Kingston, as if it were Marlborough. We bought a pineapple for 9d. The man said they had all ripened on his hands, &, as he expected another boatload on Tuesday, he had to sell at a loss. We had a bad tea in a very pretentious place. We came back by train with a working man & two small boys. The working man began to tell us about the Lyons meat contract scandals; & told us that he was attached to the flying department at Hounslow. He was very clever, & should have been an M.P. or a journalist at least. I see Will Vaughan quoted in the Times to the effect that teachers neglect the grammar of modern languages, & talk too much about style & literature; but nothing fortifies the character & mind so much as grammar. How like him!

Sunday 10 January

I was sitting typewriting this morning when there came a tap at the door; & someone whom I thought at first was Adrian, appeared: it was Walter Lamb however, fresh from the King. Whenever he has seen the King he comes to tell us. He insisted that we should go for a walk with him in Richmond Park. What did we talk about? We forgot about the King, & Walter told us a long inexpressibly dreary story which Professor Houseman had told him, about the inefficiency of the French soldiers. Whatever Walter says, has the same flat, smooth, grey surface; & his voice alone would dull the fieriest poesy in the world. Nor does he deal in fiery poems. His life now lies among respectable, semi-smart, rich people, whom he half despises, so that his accounts are always a little condescending. The one passion of his life is for eighteenth century building. All the time this morning he was bidding us admire a moulding or a window frame or even a ‘fan light’. He ‘sees over’ any house that is to let, apparently, & notices the internal decorations. He knows who now lives in big houses, & who once lived in them. He is perfectly suited by Kew, & the Royal Academy, & the Royal Family. On our doorstep he burst at length into an account of the last Royal visit, when the King, who now treats him as a friend (or rather, as Leonard say, like a superior footman) suddenly stopped admiring the pictures, & asked Princess Victoria where she gets her false teeth. “Mine, George exclaimed, are always dropping into my plate: they’ll be down my throat next. My man is a rascal. I’m going to leave him.” Victoria then gave a tug to her front teeth, & told him that they were as sound as could be—perfectly white & useful—The King then went back to the pictures. His style of talk reminds me of George 3rd in Fanny Burney’s diary—& so one must bless Walter for something— He refused to lunch with us, saying that he had lived on pheasants all the week, & rhubarb was forbidden him, on account of his acidity. It rains hard, all the afternoon, & now Marjorie Strachey who was to dine with us, cant come because of a cold. I beard last night from Mr Chubb that old Spence wont let any part of Brunswick Square—

Monday 11 January

Leonard was in his bath this morning, & I was lying in bed, wondering whether I should stretch out my hand for Rob Roy, when I heard a commotion next door, & then someone rushed downstairs crying in a strange, unnatural voice “Fire! Fire!” As it was obvious that the house was not on fire, to any large extent, I put on my waterproof & slippers before I looked out of the window. I then smelt paper burning. I then went into the passage, & found smoke pouring from the open door of the next room. There was clearly time to escape, so I withdrew; & heard Lizzy return with the lodger; & heard her begin “I only put a bit of paper to draw the fire—” from which I guessed what had happened. “In ten minutes the room would have been ablaze” said the lodger. L. came back; & we looked out of our window, & saw a large Japanese screen, all in flames, burning on the grass plot. Later, I heard that the paper had caught; the draperies on the mantelpiece had caught; the screen had caught; the woodwork had caught. As every room in the house is lined with dry old wood, loosely papered over, 10 minutes I think, would have put the fire beyond water jugs—The lodger was in terror, too, for his priceless rugs: ‘worth hundreds & hundreds’ according to Mrs Le Grys. The wonder is how we have escaped so far, considering Lizzy. Yesterday she smashed two very nice bits of china for us.

We went up to London this afternoon: L. to see the editor of the New Statesman about an article on Diplomacy—I to go over a flat in Mecklenburgh Square. We met unexpectedly in M. Sqre. When we reached the house, however, the occupier refused to let us see it. So we had to apply to the owner, who lives a few doors off. We were shown into a beautiful room, which was disfigured horribly with velvet curtains, gigantic purple cushions, & the usual swarm of gilt & lemon coloured objects. The woman herself sat in an invalid chair, arranged, like a childs high chair, with a bar across it. Her hair (a flaxen wig) was plastered on either side of her head, & she had the usual powdered plump rouged look of Bloomsbury ladies. This always makes us both physically uncomfortable. She was very sensible however, a business woman, I suppose, owning several houses, & running them, I’m sure, at a profit. She made us see over her house, instead of the other one. We were taken over by a small, wizened, very amiable old lady, who had disfigured her part of the house until it was scarcely recognisable—The drawing room, in particular, where she had lavished her skill, made your eyes start with its innumerable, discordant, hideous small things—two clusters of flags displayed on the tables chiefly impressed me. There were all the flags of all the nations, I should think; all the photographs of all the royal families. It was like looking into a kaleidoscope, because of the innumerable separate dots of colour—& yet they weren’t colour. I went on to Days Library & L. to the London Library. He has to write an article of 1200 words by Wednesday noon, on Diplomatists—A wonderful subject anyhow.

Tuesday 12 January

Today did not begin with a fire. Leonard however had to take Mrs Le Grys to task for Lizzie’s sins. The poor woman could only agree. Since she knows she is going, she doesn’t mind how many plates she breaks—if she would only go. Mrs Le G. finds it impossible to get a servant; she pays them only £16 a year however.

Cecil came to luncheon, in mufti, I observed. In fact they are both entirely sick of the army, & see no chance of going to the front. Nevertheless, Cecil thinks of being a permanent soldier, because the life is better than a Barrister’s life. On the other hand, he & Philip may go to the colonies. The odd thing about the Woolf family, to me, is the extreme laxness of it. In my family, the discussions & agitations that went on about the slightest change in one’s way of life were endless; but with the W.’s it doesn’t much seem to matter whether they turn farmer, run away with another man’s wife, or marry a Polish Jew Tailors daughter. I remember how elaborately Aunt Mary concealed the feet that Hervey’s young woman was a kind of shopkeeper, & how indefatigable she was until the engagement was broken off. Perhaps the W.’s haven’t a family tradition. It gives a sense of freedom anyhow. From all this, obviously I have nothing to say. L. & Cecil walked to Kingston after lunch; I pottered about buying small fragments of meat & vegetables, & got some books out of the Library. I believe we shall find it more useful than the London Library, as no one, save ourselves, reads solid books. L. is now writing his article upon diplomacy, & I must go & typewrite. An entire fine day for a wonder.

Wednesday 13 January

I caused some slight argument (with L.) this morning by trying to cook my breakfast in bed. I believe, however, that the good sense of the proceeding will make it prevail; that is, if I can dispose of the eggshells. L. went off to the New Statesman office this morning with his article. I lunched here, & then went to Days, to get more books. Days at 4 in the afternoon is the haunt of fashionable ladies, who want to be told what to read. A more despicable set of creatures I never saw. They come in furred like seals & scented like civets, condescend to pull a few novels about on the counter, & then demand languidly whether there is anything amusing? The Days’ assistants are the humblest & most servile of men—They tow these aged Countesses & pert young millionairesses about behind them. always deferential, & profuse of “Ladyships”. The West End of London fills me with aversion; I look into motor cars & see the fat grandees in side, like portly jewels in satin cases. The afternoons now have an elongated pallid look, as if it were neither winter nor spring. I came back to tea. L. arrived—having seen Gordon Sqre & Maynard (who says German finance is crumbling) & Saxon, who is recovering from Influenza. He had a headache, so, instead of going to the Co-op. meeting, we are staying at home.

Thursday 14 January

We were woken this morning (I see this is going to become a stock phrase like ‘Once upon a Time’ in a Faery story) by a thumping throbbing sound as if a motor omnibus were on the roof, endeavouring to start. Experience told now, however, that Lizzy had merely made a huge kitchen fire, when there was no water in the pipes. When L. turned on the tap, steam issued, as if it were Siegfried’s dragon at Covent Garden, & then came floating bits of pipe, & the water was rust red—Nobody, however, seemed to think that the boiler might burst. We wrote all the morning. I heard from Adrian, by the way, who has gone into rooms in Cambridge without a single sheet. Now, I begin telephoning & writing about sheets, just as the Waterlows are silent. After lunch, we set off to Kingston in order to buy some charming cups, which are to be had there for 1d each. If Lizzie doesn’t go, & continues to behave as though each day were her last, we must give her something cheap to break her rage against. We came home on the top of a bus; making up phrases in the manner & tone of Walter Lamb. Leonard is going up to hear the Fabians discourse; I think I shall indulge in a picture palace—but why? I shall certainly come out saying to myself, “Nothing will induce me ever to go to a picture palace again”. I also heard from Annie, who evidently intends to be our permanent cook, for the excellent reason, I think, that ours is the easiest place in England. The Waterlows say that her young man has removed to—or been replaced by one—at Willesden. L’s article on diplomacy is to come out on Saturday. He was, of course, convinced after sending it that it would be rejected (this is a note, for future use & quotation).

Friday 15 January

I went to my picture palace; & L. to his Fabians; & he thought, on the whole, that his mind & spirit & body would have profited more by the pictures than by the Webbs, & the doctors, who were talking about their etiquette. There were 2 or 3 superb pictures; one of a barge laden with timber floating past Bagdad—another of an eastern palace, overrun with apes & pariah dogs—another of a sunken yatcht. But as usual, the drama is very boring. I wish one liked what everyone likes. The Hall was crowded, roars of laughter, applause & c.

I heard from Emphie Case this morning, who wishes me to find out about the Home at Lewes where Lily had her child—as she knows a young woman who also wants to have a child. I wonder how Emphie comes across these things. Janet much the same.

We walked to Hogarth this afternoon, to see if the noise of schoolchildren is really a drawback. Apparently, it would only affect Suffield. Well—I wonder what we shall do. I’d give a lot to turn over 30 pages or so, & find written down what happens to us. We walked into the Park, & saw Territorials flogging & spurring their carthorses; also a great fallen tree. We are dining early, & going to a Hall—an unheard of dissipation—though there was a time when I went out to operas, evenings concerts &c, at least 3 times a week—And I know we shall both feel, when its over, ‘really a good read would have been better’. L. continues to read diplomatists; I read about 1860—the Kembles—Tennyson & so on; to get the spirit of that time, for the sake of The Third Generation. They were immensely scientific—always digging up extinct monsters, & looking at the stars, & trying to find a Religion. At this moment, I feel as if the human race had no character at all—sought for nothing, believed in nothing, & fought only from a dreary sense of duty.

I began today to treat my corn. It had to be done for a week.

Saturday 16 January

I think the Hall (Coliseum) last night was worth while—in spite of draw backs.What I like in Halls are ‘turns’—comic singers, or men imitating Prima Donna’s, or Jugglers. I don’t like one act plays. It takes me a whole act to get into a play, & so one act plays are mostly sheer boredom. Therefore I was disappointed to have 3 one act plays; one the Barrie Der Tag—sheer balderdash of the thinnest kind about the German Emperor; then a play about a woman who means Parrot when she says Pirate; third Dr Johnson. To begin with Johnson spits bread & butter through his nose to end with he is paternal, sentimental & as tender as a woman—which is of course what he was bound to be on the stage. However, there was a man who sang like a Prima Donna; & a patriotic Revue—people clapped Grey more than anyone. We left, just as an Eastern jar, coloured grey & violet, shot up in the middle of the stage;—& I didn’t see my war pictures, but departed mildly as a lamb.

We wrote this morning. L’s article by the way reads very well in the New Statesman. I had a request from Adrian for silver, glass, kitchen things. They seem to have set up house without a single article. He wrote by a candle light, stuck in a saucer. L. went to the L. Library; I took Max along the River, but we were a good deal impeded, by a bone he stole, by my suspenders coming down, by a dogfight in which his ear was torn & bled horribly. I thought how happy I was, without any of the excitements which, once, seemed to me to constitute happiness. L. & I argued for some time about this. Also about the worthlessness of all human works except as a means of keeping the workers happy. My writing now delights me solely because I love writing & dont, honestly, care a hang what anyone says. What seas of horror one dives through in order to pick up these pearls—however they are worth it.

Sunday 17 January

The morning was unremarkable—in the afternoon, Herbert came & took L. for a walk. I went to a Queens Hall Concert, stayed for three beautiful tunes, & came back, to find Herbert who stayed on till dinnertime. M⁠[arjorie]. S⁠[trachey]. came to dinner; changed, somehow, at the first glance. Improved, I thought, though noticeably thinner. She complained of sleeplessness, & in the usual S. way of ‘being shattered’; & life being ‘too fearful’. But she talked of ordinary things until after dinner she began to harp very markedly on marriage—(I should say that for no reason at all, she said to us “I’ve a friend who thinks me rather beautiful, & very stupid”—& half suspecting something odd, I said “O he’s a working man, & you mustn’t marry him). Well, she pressed us more & more with questions about married life, & whether she should marry, & how she wanted to marry; & sometimes I thought she was only talking as so many unmarried people do, & sometimes I suspected there was more. At last one of us (I, perhaps) said “Well but Marjorie, what d’you want to be?” “A married woman” she answered tragically. “But is there someone you want to marry?” “Yes!” “Does he want to marry you?”. “Yes!!”—“Who is he?” She buried her face in her hands, & then exclaimed “A married man! Jos Wedgwood!” We both gasped, in silence. And then we discussed nothing else for an hour or two. It is about the oddest business I ever heard of—this being more or less what has happened. Last summer, Jos left his wife, or she left him, this point being doubtful. Since that, he has lived alone in London, & complained bitterly to Philip Morrell among others of his loneliness. Philip recommended a prostitute. Ottoline thereupon procured Marjorie. They asked her to dinner, & after dinner, Ottoline danced behind the folding doors, & left Marjorie to a tremendous tete a tete with Jos. Although this was their first meeting, he told her his history & his sorrows. Next day he called on Lady Strachey. They met constantly, &, a week or so before Xmas he proposed to her at Lockeridge. By this time she was much in love & accepted him—but what are they to do? She refuses to let him get a Divorce, on the ground that a divorce is ignominious; he, moreover, says that a Divorce would ruin him politically. He is tremendously ambitious. She wishes to live with him as his wife; but this of course means utter political ruin again. To be an ordinary mistress is out of the question for her. Lady Strachey again complicates the question, because she would be horrified at any unconventionality, & cannot be told of it. Then there is the fear of Mrs Wedgwood. If she hears, will she try to get Jos back? Will she succeed? Half of the Stracheys (Lytton among them) advise M. to think no more of it. She is obviously in love; & also quite distracted & worn out. She is going to the South of France; Jos meanwhile is going to the Front. Well—what can one make of it all? Seeing M. in love, & her love returned, I felt that the only course was the extreme one; but when I reflected, particularly upon the way in which the thing has happened, the shortness of it, & Ottoline’s manoeuvres, I had doubts—about Jos, mostly. Isn’t it a case of Sydney Waterlow over again? Will his feeling last, even if hers does? He was married for 20 years to Ethel, & they have 7 children. Leonard is pessimistic, & right, I expect. He thinks that M. is going the worst way for her own prospects, & points out the horror of her position as a mistress, without any tie upon a man who admittedly cares more for his career than anything, & has been supplied with her to gratify wants which may quickly pass—But for some time now they will be apart, & so things may settle themselves. For her, I feel it is the great affair of her life, one way or the other. This morning, obeying a nocturnal command, I wrote to Thomas Hardy! thanking him for his poem about Father, & his works!

Monday 18 January

We were still a good deal under the influence of Marjorie this morning. All night (it seemed) people were banging boxes next door. The lodger has got a wife back from New York. This afternoon we went over the houses in Mecklenburgh Sqre; which has led to a long discussion about our future, & a fresh computation of income. The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing the future can be, I think. L. went to the Webbs, & I came home—nor has anything happened since to be worth putting down save that, as I began this page, L. stated that he had determined to resign his commission to write a pamphlet about Arbitration—& now I shall stop this diary & discuss that piece of folly with him. It is partly due to my egoistical habit of always talking the argument of my book. I want to see what can be said against all forms of activity & thus dissuade L. from all his work, speaking really not in my own character but in Effie’s. Of course it is absolutely essential that L. shd. do a work which may be superbly good.

Tuesday 19 January

L’s melancholy continues, so much so that he declared this morning he couldn’t work. The consequence has been rather a melancholy day. Outside it is very cold & grey too. We walked in Richmond Park this afternoon; the trees all black, & the sky heavy over London; but there is enough colour to make it even lovelier today than on bright days, I think. The deer exactly match the bracken. But L. was melancholy, as I say. All I can do is to unsay all I have said; & to say what I really mean. Its a bad habit writing novels—it falsifies life, I think. However, after praising L’s writing very sincerely for 5 minutes, he says “Stop”; whereupon I stop, & theres no more to be said. When I analyse his mood, I attribute much of it to sheer lack of self confidence in his power of writing; as if he mightn’t be a writer, after all; & being a practical man, his melancholy sinks far deeper than the half assumed melancholy of self conscious people like Lytton, & Sir Leslie & myself. There’s no arguing with him.

Well, I’m reading The Idiot. I cant bear the style of it very often; at the same time, he seems to me to have the same kind of vitality in him that Scott had; only Scott merely made superb ordinary people, & D. creates wonders, with very subtle brains, & fearful sufferings. Perhaps the likeness to Scott partly consists in the loose, free & easy, style of the translation. I am also reading Michelet, plodding through the dreary middle ages; & Fanny Kemble’s Life. Yesterday in the train I read The Rape of the Lock, which seems to me “supreme”—almost superhuman in its beauty & brilliancy—you really can’t believe that such things are written down. I think one day I shall write a book of “Eccentrics”. Mr Grote shall be one. Lady Hester Stanhope. Margaret Fuller. Duchess of Newcastle. Aunt Julia?

Wednesday 20 January

Having finished a chapter, I went off buying small fragments of things part of the morning—For one thing, I saw a mass of pinkish stuff in the fishmongers, & bought it—Cods’ Roe. Then I made carbon copies of some notes of L’s about Arbitration. The action of nature has relieved his spirits more than all the arguments of his wife—also the day was fine. Anyhow one may now hope he will get started, which is the main thing. He went to the School of Economics after lunch; & I to Westminster. I want to see as many houses as possible. But in Barton St. the rent is £130—& that is low, on account of the war. Westminster, noiseless & shadowed by the Abbey is almost the heart of London.

By this time it was raining. I went to Days, & found my books already sent. When I tried to remember the name of one, I failed utterly; so one must feel in an examination. I read Essay upon Criticism waiting for my train at Hammersmith. The classics make the time pass much better than the Pall Mall Gazette. Maynard Keynes came to dinner. We gave him oysters. He is like quicksilver on a sloping board—a little inhuman, but very kindly, as inhuman people are. We gossiped at full speed about Adrian & Karin (Adrian’s lovemaking done in loud judicious tones) & of course Marjorie & Jos. Here, though friendly & very amusing, I thought K. a little inhuman. He saw the queerness & the fun, but didn’t seem to see that it might be serious. Nessa & Ottoline, he says, contrived the whole thing. Then we talked about the war. We aren’t fighting now, he says, but only waiting for the spring. Meantime we lavish money, on a scale which makes the French, who are fearfully out at elbow, gape with admiration. We are bound to win—& in great style too, having at the last moment applied all our brains & all our wealth to the problem.

Thursday 21 January

Maynard last night was sceptical about the value of writing on Arbitration. He was sceptical about the value of almost all work, save for the pleasure it gives the worker. He works only because he likes it. This of course, depressed poor L. once more. He was very melancholy this morning, & had to spend the day at the British Museum, which was bad enough, even if one believed in one’s drudgery. Still I believe it will be an enormous success, &, if it doesn’t prevent another war, it will put him among the eminent young men, which isn’t altogether despicable. I went to the London Library—a stale culture smoked place, which I detest. Here I read Gilbert Murray on Immortality, got a book for L. & so home, missing my train, & reading the Letter to Dr Arbuthnot on Hammersmith Station. L. came in late, having been up to Hampstead & seen Janet, who seems still the same; but so I think it must be, for months. Emphie annoyed with Margaret, who advises a proper rest cure “which one doesn’t do to the patient herself.” Sylvia Milman came to dinner—After a good deal of bowing & scraping about China (which she has dutifully seen, in her endeavour to be advanced) we got on to memories of childhood which amused me, but bored L. I’m afraid. No one ever had a duller home than she had; but by sheer hard work, without a scrap of talent, she has plodded after the Advanced i.e. Nessa, until she lives in a flat, saves money to travel, & helps at the Omega. Ida is nursing in France; Enid & Maud have a chicken farm. Clearly there was good stuff in the Dean; though never a spark of enthusiasm. She stayed on & on, until L. half rose from his chair.

Friday 22 January

When L. pulled the curtains this morning, practically no light came in; there was a kind of greyish confusion outside—soft swirling incessant snow. This has gone on all day almost, sometimes changing to rain. The Green itself is very lovely; & lights up the room with its pure white glare. But the streets became brown directly. Of course, in this House of Trouble, the pipes burst; or got choked; or the roof split asunder. Anyhow in the middle of the morning, I heard a steady rush of water in the wainscoat; & Mr Le Grys, Lizzie & various people have been clambering about the roof ever since. The water still drips through the ceiling into a row of slop pails. Mrs Le Grys cries hysterically “O it’ll be all right—you’re insured”. The plumber refuses to leave his house in weather like this. We are going to hear the Fabians at Essex Hall. I daresay we shall be swept out of our beds tonight. Its a queer winter—the worst I ever knew, & suitable for the war & all the rest of it. I never said yesterday that I heard from Thomas Hardy! He wrote a very nice, very characteristic letter, & was much pleased that I wrote. So that my nocturnal impulse was from God.

Saturday 23 January

The Fabians were well worth hearing: still more worth seeing. Miss Atkinson drivelled at length about Peace—I could understand, always, & confute generally, all that she said; so that I think it must have been very bad. The interest was watching Mrs Webb, seated like an industrious spider at the table; spinning her webs (a pun!—) incessantly. The hall was full of earnest drab women, who are thought ‘queer’ at home, & rejoice in it; & of broad nosed, sallow, shock headed young men, in brown tweed suits. They all looked unhealthy & singular & impotent. The only speech that was worth anything came from Squire, who wears a bright blue shirt & cultivates an amusing appearance. He said it was all very dull & sensible—which it was; & the idea that these frail webspinners can affect the destiny of nations seems to me fantastic. But it was well worth going,—& I have now declared myself a Fabian. We stayed in Richmond all day. We walked up the river, & were startled by the sudden fall of an avalanche of snow from a roof. It was very cold & misty. Jean asked us to go & hear some V.A.D.’s sing; but the fire after tea was too tempting. Oliver & Ray dined with us. Oliver as usual, very prompt impatient & rather testy. Ray solid & capable & soothing. We discussed the war, & Marjorie. “I cant bear to think of it. Its too revolting” O. shuddered, after saying that M. must of course live with Jos. as his mistress. Ray says she divides the world into those who are nice enough to be in love with, & those who aren’t—& Marjorie is’nt. They think her in love—but in love too with the drama of the situation. They share our fears too—but agree that anything in her case is better than nothing.

Sunday 24 January

In the middle of dinner last night, Molly rang us up to ask whether she & Desmond might come to lunch today. Oliver exclaimed that Desmond as he happened to know, had promised to lunch with Henry James. We told Molly this. It was news to her. So she came alone, about 12.30. We plunged of course into Gordon Square gossip. She has suffered acutely this winter, owing to a series of embroilments with Clive, the nature of which I can imagine; though whether he got bored first or she disgusted, I don’t know. Anyhow, as I could have foretold, after violent scenes lasting almost 18 months, they have parted, & he abuses her, & she abuses herself—for ever having listened. But she finds that an intermittent acquaintance wont do for him—‘garden party talk’ he calls it; & she feels that intimacy in those circles leads to a kind of dustiness of soul. So she has broken, & now takes Desmond off to Freshwater for 9 months, to live cheaply & write a novel. This is the very last attempt—& it sounds a little desperate. He is to come up to town once in 6 weeks. She is to manage 3 children & the house with only one servant. And she means never again to come back into the whirl. Moreover they have quarrelled with his Mother, & forfeited £100 a year; so they must live on £350, which includes Desmond’s weekly article in the New Statesman. She was incoherent, inattentive, & fragmentary as usual; like a little grey moth among machines. L. went to see his mother; I called on Jean, whom I found sitting in black velvet in a room like a cheap restaurant with brilliant lights. And there was old Mrs Thomas too, knitting incessantly: & we talked about waterpipes & soldiers; & so home, to a quiet evening thank God.

Monday 25 January

My birthday—& let me count up all the things I had. L. had sworn he would give me nothing, & like a good wife, I believed him. But he crept into my bed, with a little parcel, which was a beautiful green purse. And he brought up breakfast, with a paper which announced a naval victory (we have sunk a German battle ship) & a square brown parcel, with The Abbot in it—a lovely first edition— So I had a very merry & pleasing morning—which indeed was only surpassed by the afternoon. I was then taken up to town, free of charge, & given a treat, first at a Picture Palace, & then at Buszards. I don’t think I’ve had a birthday treat for 10 years; & it felt like one too—being a fine frosty day, everything brisk & cheerful, as it should be, but never is. The Picture Palace was a little disappointing—as we never got to the War pictures, after waiting 1 hour & a half. But to make up, we exactly caught a non-stop train, & I have been very happy reading father on Pope, which is very witty & bright—without a single dead sentence in it. In fact I dont know when I have enjoyed a birthday so much—not since I was a child anyhow. Sitting at tea we decided three things: in the first place to take Hogarth, if we can get it; in the second, to buy a Printing press; in the third to buy a Bull dog, probably called John. I am very much excited at the idea of all three—particularly the press. I was also given a packet of sweets to bring home.

Tuesday 26 January

L. went up to the School of Economics this morning: I wrote, as usual over the fire, with an occasional interruption by Lizzy, who is like a rough coated young carthorse, with muddy hoofs. After lunch, I met L. at the gates of Kew Gardens, & we walked back to Richmond through the Gardens, which are now one feels teeming with buds & bulbs, though not a spike shows. He has already grasped his Arbitration—such is the male mind—& will, I see, go through with it straight off & (here I make my prophesy) it will be a great success, & lead to as much work as he wants. As Molly sighed ‘It must be wonderful to have a husband who works!’ I think it would be much odder to have one who didn’t—Mrs Woolf & Clara are coming to dinner, so I must stop.

Wednesday 27 January

Mrs Woolf & Clara came to dinner. I dont know what it is about them—I daresay I’d better not try to define it. Perhaps their voices partly?—partly their manners. Anyhow, they gave us flowers & chocolates. Mrs W. sat & knitted. Clara smoked. I think Jewesses are somehow discontented. Clara is. Mrs W. has the mind of a child. She is amused by everything, & yet understands nothing—says whatever comes into her head—prattles incessantly, now good humoured, now ill humoured. She seems to like everyone equally, as if they were all the same. She told us how she used to go to bed with a basket of socks by her side, so as to start darning first thing in the morning.

Leonard went up to the School of Economics today. I wrote, & then went to Janet. Emphie & the cook have influenza—I was met by an elder sister—a shrewd, sensible elderly woman, who has taken charge of things. Janet seemed better, & said she was better. We talked about my novel (which everyone, so I predict will assure me is the most brilliant thing they’ve ever read; & privately condemn, as indeed it deserves to be condemned.) & about Shelley, & Poets & their immorality. She said that in her young days she would have disapproved of Shelley’s relations with women—But the old sister dodged in & out, which made conversation about morality uneasy. Home & finished Pope, & so to bed.

Thursday 28 January

Leonard off again to lunch with the Webbs, & have his Committee meeting. Once more I wrote. All these days, I may remark, are semidark, lightening a little about 3 p.m. before their final plunge into darkness; & yet I think even this darkness is the darkness of very early spring, not winter darkness any more. I decided to go to London, for the sake of hearing the Strand roar, which I think one does want, after a day or two of Richmond. Somehow, one can’t take Richmond seriously. One has always come here for an outing, I suppose; & that is part of its charm, but one wants serious life sometimes. As I dressed, my watch fell on the floor; & sitting at tea in a shop in the Strand, I found that the hands pointed to 4.30 still, though it went on ticking. So I took it to Frodsham’s, in South Molton Street, where I made great play with the name of McCabe, & the fact that the watch had been over 60 years in my family. Frodsham claims to be the only genuine watchmaker in London: the rest are jewellers. I saw a beautiful woman in the Bus; who could hardly contain her laughter because a great military gentleman was thrown on to her lap, like a sack of coals, which seemed to tickle her greatly, & the more she laughed, the nicer I thought her. About one person in a fortnight seems to me nice—most are nothing at all. Home to find L. triumphant from his Committee meeting. He is to do as he likes: & Squire throws out hints that they would like him to edit the Blue book supplement for them. Well ‘I told you so’—A new servant has come today. Lizzy left, carrying a brown paper parcel & whistling loudly—I wonder where she has gone?

Friday 29 January

Shall I say “nothing happened today” as we used to do in our diaries, when they were beginning to die? It wouldn’t be true. The day is rather like a leafless tree: there are all sorts of colours in it, if you look closely. But the outline is bare enough. We worked: after lunch we walked down the river, to that great mediaeval building which juts out into the river—It is I think a vast mill. And we came back early, so that L. might have tea before he went to a Committee at Hampstead. After that I bought our food, & did not observe much of interest. But the fact of the day for me has been a vague kind of discomfort, caused by the eccentric character of the new servant Maud. When one speaks to her, she stops dead & looks at the ceiling. She bursts into the room ‘just to see if you are there’. She is an angular woman of about 40, who never stays long in any place. I believe she lives in dread of something. She puts down plates with a start. Mrs Le Grys says that she herself is going mad, with Maud’s peculiarities. She has just announced that she is the daughter of a Colonel. I am sure her brain is full of illusions, poor creature; & I shouldn’t be surprised at anything. The only question is, how she contrives to exist.

Saturday 30 January

L. went to Chancellors this morning about Hogarth. They now volunteer that Mrs Wontner wishes to stay on—but will let us know on Monday for certain. It is a great nuisance. I have a nose for a house, & that was a perfect house, if ever there was one. We went to Wimbledon this afternoon, on the strength of Savages information that there was a beautiful house there to let. Wimbledon is a dreary, high, bleak, windy suburb, on the edge of a threadbare heath. And Savage’s house is an enlarged villa, with a rent of £150, furnished, overlooked by motor omnibuses, standing on the road. In all ways therefore utterly unsuited to us. We came home by Bus; & the world grew steadily nicer as we came to Richmond. Certainly it is the first of the suburbs by a long way, because it is not an offshoot of London, any more than Oxford or Marlborough is. It was icy cold; I had the grace to remember that many bus conductors are shivering today, but only stabs at my own comfort make me remember other people—unlike L. Maud’s secret obsession, I believe, is that she is a lady. She attempts genteel talk, about the weather, as a Colonel’s daughter very well might, & mutters something when she brings in the coal, about being accustomed to private work. She is certainly cleaner than Lizzie. I hope her mania wont develop. My corn is cured. I cannot get on with Michelet’s middle ages. L. has Indian Blue Books to review. He was kept late at Hampstead: didnt get home till 10.15. when we had hot chocolate over the fire. He read Janet ‘The Three Jews’.

Sunday 31 January

O dear! We quarrelled almost all the morning! & it was a lovely morning, & now gone to Hades for ever, branded with the marks of our ill humour. Which began it? Which carried it on? God knows. This I will say: I explode: & L. smoulders. However, quite suddenly we made it up, (but the morning was wasted) & we walked after lunch in the Park, & came home by way of Hogarth, & tried to say that we shan’t be much disappointed if we don’t get it. Anyhow, it hasn’t got the Green in front of it. After tea, as no one came (we’ve hardly seen anyone this week) I started reading The Wise Virgins, & I read it straight on till bedtime, when I finished it. My opinion is that its a remarkable book; very bad in parts; first rate in others. A writer’s book, I think, because only a writer perhaps can see why the good parts are so very good, & why the very bad parts aren’t very bad. It seems to me to have the stuff of 20 Duke Jones’ in it, although there are howlers which wd. make Miss Sidgwick turn grey. I was made very happy by reading this: I like the poetic side of L. & it gets a little smothered in Blue-books, & organisations.

Monday 1 February

I had to go out shopping this morning, so I called in on Chancellors. They say that Mrs Wontner makes conditions about taking on Hogarth, so that ‘it is possible that she won’t take it—So here we are on the seesaw again. Mrs Le Grys, also, told me this morning of a house on the Green, 3 doors off, which is to let in March. The rent is £65 & they want £75 premium. We went to look at it after luncheon, but, being a boarding house, couldn’t see over it. What we saw was defaced in every possible way; but a nice substantial house, without the charms of Hogarth, but then with the addition of the Green. We went up to London—L. to the London Library: I to Days. I walked with him across the Green Park. In St James Street there was a terrific explosion; people came running out of Clubs; stopped still & gazed about them. But there was no Zeppelin or aeroplane—only, I suppose, a very large tyre burst. But it is really an instinct with me, & most people, I suppose, to turn any sudden noise, or dark object in the sky into an explosion, or a German aeroplane. And it always seems utterly impossible that one should be hurt.

I was annoyed in the usual way at Days by the afternoon party of fashionable ladies, looking for books. We have just been rung up by Chancellors, who wish us to see the owner of Hogarth tomorrow, & possibly by our presence & respectability outwit Mrs Wontner, whose demands have annoyed Chancellors. In fact it seems quite likely at this moment that we shall get Hogarth! I wish it were tomorrow. I am certain it is the best house to take.

Tuesday 2 February

Well, it is tomorrow; & we are certainly nearer to Hogarth than we were. We have done little else & thought of little else all day, so it is as well we have some profit—

Saturday 13 February

There was a great downpour this morning. I am sure however many years I keep this diary, I shall never find a winter to beat this. It seems to have lost all self control. We wrote; & after luncheon L. went to the Library, & I went to a concert at the Queen’s Hall. I ran into Oliver Strachey, standing very like a Strachey in the Hall, because he dislikes sitting inside waiting for the music. I got by luck a very good place, for the Hall was nearly full—& it was a divine concert. But one of the things I decided as I listen⁠[ed] (its difficult not to think of other things) was that all descriptions of music are quite worthless, & rather unpleasant; they are apt to be hysterical, & to say things that people will be ashamed of having said afterwards. They played Haydn, Mozart no 8, Brandenburg Concerto, & the Unfinished. I daresay the playing wasnt very good, but the stream of melody was divine. It struck me what an odd thing it was—this little box of pure beauty set down in the middle of London streets, & people—all looking so ordinary, crowding to hear, as if they weren’t ordinary after all, or had an ambition for something better. Opposite me was Bernard Shaw, grown a whitehaired benevolent old man, & down in the orchestra was Walter Lamb, shining in his alabastrine baldness like a marble fountain. I was annoyed by a young man & woman next me who took advantage of the music to press each other’s hands; & read ‘A Shropshire Lad’ & look at some vile illustrations. And other people eat chocolates, & crumbled the silver paper into balls. I went to the W.C. at the Tube station, & found a small party going on in that chaste recess. The old woman had a vast female dog which was drinking water out of a tumbler, & her daughters were paying an afternoon call, & we were all very friendly, in odd surroundings—I thought it very sensible to have no false shame. I met L. at Spikings & we had tea, & were very happy; & stopped at Earls Court & called on his mother, but she was out. We were shown into a huge high sitting room, in which was a minute old lady, in semi darkness, sitting on the edge of a sofa. Nothing could have been more forlorn. L. has now got another book of Indian travels from the Times. He had just made up his mind that he was dismissed.

Sunday 14 February

Rain again today. I cleaned silver, which is an easy & profitable thing to do. It so soon shines again. Philip came, & he and L. went for a walk. He lunched with us & stayed talking till 3.30. They despair more than ever now of getting to the front. All Regular officers are preferred above them. Cecil has a machine gun, which may lead to his going, &, if so, almost certainly to his being killed. Poor Philip was a good deal agitated, I thought, with his prospects. What is he to do after the war is over? He thinks he must emigrate. Cecil would like to stay on in the Army, which however, one can’t do, unless one has money, & neither of them has a penny. Five hundred a year is considerably more valuable than beauty or rank. He stayed talking, wanting to talk about himself perhaps & had to go back to Colchester, where the only tolerable thing is the oysters. The men he declares never cease joking; & the worse things are the more they joke. Then we walked down the river, in the face of a cold gale (which is now raging outside) & gladly came home to tea; & now sit as usual surrounded by books & paper & ink, & so shall sit till bedtime—save that I have some mending to do, my entire skirt having split in two yesterday. L. is writing a review of his Indian book. I am now reading a later volume of Michelet, which is superb, & the only tolerable history. The people next door are singing the same song that they’ve been practising these 3 months—a hymn. From all this, it is clear that I don’t want to mend my dress: & have nothing whatever to say.

Monday February 15

There is nothing to record of this morning, except my conviction that Mrs Le Grys is the best tempered woman in England, &, if she gets her 20 roomed house at Southampton, will make it a gigantic success. We have only to hint that we want dog soap, & she washes Max (who badly wanted it).

We both went up to London this afternoon; L. to the Library, & I to ramble about the West End, picking up clothes. I am really in rags. It is very amusing. With age too one’s less afraid of the superb shop women. These great shops are like fairies’ palaces now. I swept about in Debenham’s & Marshalls & so on, buying, as I thought with great discretion. The shop women are often very charming, in spite of their serpentine coils of black hair. (By the way, I met Walter Lamb at Dover Street station—A gentleman in frock coat, top hat, slip, umbrella &c. accosted me. I fairly laughed. It was old Wat. who had just been lunching with an M.P’s wife, & seeing all the grandees. His satisfaction is amazing: it oozes out everywhere.) Then I had tea, & rambled down to Charing Cross in the dark, making up phrases & incidents to write about. Which is, I expect, the way one gets killed.

L. went to tea at Gordon Sqre where he saw Mrs Hutchinson, who is the present flame, but a very smoky one. Clive anyhow approves our scheme of a Periodical, & he is a man of business, whatever he may be as an artist.

I bought a ten & elevenpenny blue dress, in which I sit at this moment.

[]

1917

[Diary II]

Friday 3 August

Came to Asheham. Walked out from Lewes. Stopped raining for the first time since Sunday. Men mending the wall & roof at Asheham. Will has dug up the bed in front, leaving only one dahlia. Bees in attic chim⁠[n]⁠ey.

Saturday 4 August

Rained all the morning very hard. Newspapers sent on to Telscombe, but signalman lent us the Daily News. To post at Southease in the afternoon. Back over the downs. Very wet. Corn beaten down by rain. L. made book cases.

Sunday 5 August

Dull morning, getting steadily finer, until it became a very hot & sunny afternoon. Walked on M.’s walk. Saw 3 perfect peacock butterflies, 1 silver washed frit⁠[illary]; besides innumerable blues feeding on dung. All freshly out & swarming on the hill. Small flowers out in great quantities. Found mushrooms, mostly in the hollow, enough for a dish. Barbara & Bunny after dinner stayed for tea & dinner.

Monday 6 August

Very fine hot day. (Bank Holiday). Sound of band in Lewes from the Downs. Guns heard at intervals. Walked up the down at the back. Got 6th Aug. 1918 eggs 4/6 doz. plenty of mushrooms. Butterflies in quantities. Ladies Bedstraw, Round-headed Rampion, Thyme, Marjoram. Saw a grey looking hawk—not the usual red-brown one. A few plums on the tree. We have begun to cook apples. Eggs 2/9 doz. from Mrs Attfield.

Tuesday 7 August

Queer misty day. Sun not strong enough to come through. Went to Brighton after lunch. German prisoners working in the field by Dod’s Hill, laughing with the soldier, & woman passing. Went to Pier; tea at Booth’s; horrible men at our table; staged at Lewes on way back. Bicycled back from Glynde. N. & L. went to get mushrooms, & found several, also blackberries getting ripe, only have no sugar for jam.

Wednesday 8 August

Mist again. Went to post at Southease. L.’s foot very bad. Saw wooden pews put into traction engine at Rodmell Church; a man without a hand, a hook instead. Met Mrs Attfield with dead chicken in a parcel, found dead in the nettles, head wrung off, perhaps by a person. Home over downs. Fair haul of mushrooms again, best in hollow. Alix came; rain storm after tea, then fine.

Thursday 9 August

To get mushrooms with Alix: L. stayed down sawing wood, as his foot was bad. Bunny over, & climbed the roof to see bees; didn’t take them: to be left till autumn.

Friday 10 August

L. up to Labour conference in London. Fine day again. Alix & I to hills for blackberries. We found them in patches very plentiful. The servants got huge mushrooms called ‘plate’ mushrooms; the others ‘natives’ so the Woolers say.

Saturday 11 August

To picnic near Firle, with Bells &c. Passed German prisoners, cutting wheat with hooks. Officer & woman with orderly galloped onto the downs. Rain came on after tea, so made a fire of wood. Henry followed us home, bit Will & frightened the servants.

Sunday 12 August

Walked up mushrooming. L.’s leg still bad. Saw a large green caterpillar in hollow, with 3 purple spots on each side by the head. Mushrooms old & black. Horse mushrooms out in great circles; but very few real ones. N. & Lot. to Charleston.

Monday 13 August

Went into Lewes with Alix: she left us in the High St. L. had his leg looked at; probably a strain. Market in Lewes. Calves wrapped in sacking lying on platform. Walked back from Glynde. To get mushrooms before dinner; every grass almost had blues asleep on it. Found very few mushrooms, having seen the shepherd bring a bag down in the morning. Warned by Lottie that Will was going to blow up wasps nest after dinner, so we watched: much smell, explosion, wasps swarmed. This was done twice in nest near the hole in the wall.

Tuesday 14 August

To get mushrooms & blackberries; the rings of horse mushrooms seem to put an end to the others: we only get a few. Found G.L.D. when we came in. Offered a bag of mushrooms by shepherd, but found them all horses, harmless, but too timid to try. Wall done about now—not a success.

Wednesday 15 August

Nessa, Mabel, & children came to tea. Our pink flower she says is phlox: not stocks. Went into hollow without success; but Nelly found more mushrooms on the top. The Co-ops will allow more sugar, so we can now make jam. Gunn charges 4d quart for milk. Duncan over for dinner. They walked home at 10 over the downs. Quentin ate till he was nearly sick at tea.

Thursday 16 August

L. & G.L.D. played chess all the afternoon. I went to post at Southease; the church now surrounded by scaffolding poles, & old wood panels leaning against the wall; bricklayers sitting by the gate. Woman asked me to find her children pad⁠[d]⁠ling in river: they did not want to go home. L.S. arrived. went into the hollow.

Friday 17 August

All these days have been very fine, hot, blue sky, rather a high wind. Same again today. L.S. wrote on the terrace in the morning. G.L.D. & L. played chess there in the afternoon. G.L.D. decided to go to Guildford, so we walked to Beddingham with him. L.’s foot better, but got worse with walking. Found no mushrooms; we suppose the rain brought them prematurely. No yeast, so had to eat Bakers bread, wh. is very dull & dry.

Saturday 18 August

Went into Lewes, with prisoner, saw Cinema; bought several things. Met K.M.—her train very late. Bought 1 doz. Lily roots & some red leaved plants wh. have been put in the big bed.

Sunday 19 August

Sat in the hollow; & found the caterpillar, now becoming a Chrysalis, wh. I saw the other day. A horrid sight: head turning from side to side, tail paralysed; brown colour, purple spots just visible; like a snake in movement. No mushrooms. Walked over the down with L.S. B. & Mr Garnett for dinner.

Monday 20 August

To Firle after tea over the down. The thistledown has been blowing (English Maryland. about these last few days. Shepherd says mushrooms 11d S. Kensington come for a fortnight & go for a fortnight. Very fine Station) still, always S.E. wind, rather high. Home by the fields. A great deal of the corn has to be cut by hand. Men still working & women too at 7.

Tuesday 21 August

L. to London for second conference. Very hot. L.S. went to Charleston after tea. K.M. & I walked on M.’s walk. The thistledown beginning to blow. Saw the Silver Queen over the down, going towards Brighton & coming back again. A great many aeroplanes passed over the house. Most of the butterflies have red spots on their necks—some parasite. Planted a red flower with bulb given by Mrs Wooler to Nelly—some sort of lily.

Wednesday 22 August

L. up to London again to see man from the foreign office. Very hot & windy again. Thistledown blowing across the house & over the field L bought me 10 packets of cigarettes: importation stopped.very thick. K.M. went after lunch, in the fly from the Ram, which took Lytton’s bag also. Two mowing machines, with 3 horses each, cutting the corn in the field across the road. Cutting round & round: finished last patch about 5. Corn already cut & standing on the fields across the river. Eating potatoes from the garden. There was a raid today. Ramsgate.

Thursday 23 August

Glad to be alone. L.’s leg cured now. Lottie sick from eating plums at Charleston. We walked along the top, finding a few mushrooms, & down the next hollow, in hopes of some, but found none. Odd that they should stick to Asheham. Mist & rain; but on the whole fine, wind very high. Heather growing on the top, making it look purple: never seen it there before.

Friday 24 August

Wind still higher. Nelly went to Lewes to fetch book sent for review; almost blown off on bridge. We walked, startled hawk in the hollow, & found the feathers of a pigeon, he having carried away the bird.

Saturday 25 August

I went to post at Southease. L. gardened. Another windy day. Seeing Wood from the church so rotten that it left sawdust on the grass where it stood.the church surrounded by scaffolding, I went in, floor up, pews taken away, ladders all about. A notice to say that restoration will cost £227. The church there in 966 a.d. Holes in the tower & roof visible. Men at work carting corn in the field by the road.

Sunday 26 August

We meant to have a picnic at Firle, but rain started, as we were ready, & so we went to post at Beddingham instead. Left my macintosh in the hedge, so it came down hard, & we were very wet. It rained hard & steadily the whole evening & was raining violently when we went to bed. This is the first bad day we have had; even so, the morning was fine. The high wind of the last few days has broken leaves off, although only a few of the trees have begun to turn. Swallows flying in great numbers very low & swift in the field. The wind was brought down some walnuts, but they are unripe; the wasps eat holes in the plums, so we shall have to pick them. My watch stopped.

Monday 27 August

We had meant to go to Eastbourne, to get my watch mended, among other things, but about 12 it not only blew very hard but rained. The field full of swallows, & leaves broken off in bunches, so that the trees already look thin. L. thinks that the swallows are driven into the hollow by the gale, in hopes that fly’s may be out in the shelter. Swallows & leaves whirling about look much the same. L. took ms. to catch London train at Glynde: then we walked by M.’s walk on to the down; got some blackberries: the bushes laden with them; & a few mushrooms. Such wind & rain however that we were wet through & had to come home. Lit wood fire after tea. We have had them after dinner, but not yet after tea. Rained steadily; water came through the garden door.

Tuesday 28 August

Another most appalling day. Leaves & swallows blown about in the field; garden dishevelled. Branches down across the road; corn cocks tumbled over; rain drenching. Servants had meant to go to Brighton, but gave up. Had forgotten to order meat, so had to walk to Firle. Wind behind us going. A tree down at corner by the pond, made a frightful noise as one went beneath them. But it stopped raining, & there was some blue sky over the downs. Early closing in Firle. Grocer doing stamps in lamplight. Telephone broken by gale. Home against the wind, but dry. German prisoners now working for Hoper: work very well, if given tea at 4.30, wh. they insist upon, & will then work an extra hour. Impossible to carry corn in this weather. Gunn comes very seldom. Harvest wh. was good, now said to be ruined. Rain started again in the evening. Had to have a candle to end dinner with. Fires before dinner.

Wednesday 29 August

Another very bad day, though wind less furious. Swallows flying higher. Papers say storm has been all over England. Tremendous rain in the afternoon; which stopped, & we went to post at Southease, arguing about education, back over the hill; a fine evening—great sun appeared as we dined, & sunset for the first time since Saturday.

Thursday 30 August

Not actually raining, though dark so the servants went to Brighton. I went over the Down; L. cut the grass in the garden. Trees have suddenly turned brown & shrivelled on their exposed sides, though still green in shelter; as if dried up by very hot sun. No autumn tints. Blue butterflies ragged & washed out. L. was stung on the ankle by a wasp. He cut into their nest. Barbara & Nick Bagenal came over to tea & dinner, which we had to scratch up for them, servants being out. Rain came on after dinner again; but wind much fallen.

Friday 31 August

Last day of August a very beautiful one. Wind soft, & steadily grew finer & hotter so that we sat out on the terrace after tea. L. cut grass again, & I went in the water-meadows & so round onto the road, up the down, creeping behind old Bosanquet. I saw a herd of cows on the top of the down driven by a soldier & a man on a large black horse. Very odd sight. The mushroom seems to be extinct. After dinner, it still being light & hot, we took the wasps nest, burning it thoroughly, though when we left it, wasps were swarming at the mouth. Great question about Mrs Wooler’s chicken; offers it for 2/6. Eggs now gone up to 3/- the dozen. Sausages here come in.

Saturday 1 September

In spite of a perfect moonlit night, mist rain & wind, black all over the downs this morning. As bad as ever. However it blew so hard that it stopped raining in the afternoon. We went into the hollow, started a great hare, & then saw a man shooting. In fact they had shot at pigeons very near us. We went round & over the top. Seems now mid-autumn or even early winter from the look of things. Trees an ugly leaden colour outside, as if shrivelled, flowers beaten down & brown; butterflies scarcely flying. L. to Lewes to meet Mrs W⁠[oolf], & B. who came here about 7. Lovely night again. A great white owl, looking like a sea gull, sat on the rail, & flew about. Mushrooms started on my patch. L. took wasps.

Sunday 2 September

Uncertain, windy weather, with showers in the morning; but the sun seemed to get the better steadily, & it was a fine afternoon. Round M.’s walk, in a high wind, with the visitors. Hawks out, but saw nothing else. A superb evening, hot on the terrace & light over the downs till past 9. A fine September predicted. According to the papers, in most parts every day in Aug. had rain—one of the worst on record; so we have been in luck. H.W. & M.A. went after tea.

Monday 3 September

Perfect day; completely blue without cloud or wind, as if settled for ever. Watched dog herding sheep. Rooks beginning to fly over the trees, both morning & evening, sometimes with starlings. Mrs W. & B. went after lunch. Took us to Lewes with them. Asked about watch; but can’t get it done for 3 months. Boots gone up to 40/- but found an old 15/ pair in a small shop, wh. I bought; & then found a good pair in the cupboard at home. Back by train; L. bicycled. Made a straight line across fields from Glynde, a very good way. Met Nelly bringing back Co-op. box, so walked with her. Evening so fine we went out again into the hollow. Saw a shining spot, which we could not find when we came up to it. Painted Lady [Vanessa cardui] seen near Glynde.

Tuesday 4 September

Woke to find the house in a mist. We have seen this on the meadows at night. It cleared, & was a perfect day, almost without wind. In the afternoon we began to pick our apples; I did the lower ones & L. the higher ones, on a farm ladder. In the middle, Clive & Mary H. appeared, so I had to stop. They stayed for tea & dinner, & walked back over the downs.

Wednesday 5 September

Another fine morning. I walked, & L. did the garden. I saw a clouded yellow [Colias edusa] on the top—a very deep yellow the first for a long time. Clouds brewed over the sea, & it began to rain at tea; then great thunder claps, & lightning. Difficult to distinguish thunder from guns. German prisoners walked across the field. They are now helping on this farm. Corn over the road still standing in shocks uncarted. Servants stayed at Charleston all night; say that there was gun fire as well as thunder.

Thursday 6 September

To the post at Southease. A fine day, but nothing particular to be noticed.

Friday 7 September

In to Lewes, by Glynde, & the new way across the fields, to the station. Shopped, & back expecting Pernel, but she never came. A very hot, steamy day. A snake, grass, about 2 feet twisted across the path in front of us.

Saturday 8 September

We went to get blackberries on the top. Found enough easily for a pudding. A cloud over the land all day, except late in the evening, when the sun came out beneath it in an odd way. Pernel came, then Philip M⁠[orrell]. then Sydney W⁠[aterlow]. as we were sitting down to dinner.

Sunday 9 September

An almost motionless day; no blue sky; almost like a winter day, save for the heat. Very quiet. Over to picnic at Firle in the afternoon. Nessa & 5 children came after we had done; sat outside the trees. Walked home over the downs. Red sky over the sea. Woods almost as thin as winter, but very little colour in them.

Monday 10 September

To post at Southease, but my boots hurt, from being too big, so we sat down, & L. went on. A perfect rather misty but cloudless day, still & very hot. Odd to find no flowers in the hedges, all brown & dead, because of the storm. Often a sound like rain, which turns out to be leaves falling. German prisoners stacking corn at the back of the house. They whistle a great deal, much more complete tunes than our work men. A great brown jug for their tea.

Tuesday 11 September

Went over the downs by the farm; saw 2 clouded yellows by the warren, & another pair over towards Bishopstone. Heard guns & saw two airships maneuvring over the sea & valley. Found Lady’s Tresses, & Field Gentian on the Downs. Very hot day, but cold in the evening, & so had fire. Swallows have quite left the field. Pernel left. L. found a walnut sprouting with leaves & planted it in the garden.

Wednesday 12 September

I bicycled to Charleston, getting there at 12.30 A long & rather dull bit of road between Glynde & Charleston—but going slowly it is easy to do it in under the hour. L. came after tea & we bicycled back the other way by Beanstalk lane, discovered a probable short cut. Gigantic sun; colder, & windier than before. Corn in field opposite carried about now.

Thursday 13 September

A windy day. I went onto the down, after going to Southease. They have taken a slice out of the church tower; you can see a wooden frame inside. Blew up a storm of rain, had a fire after tea; servants to Charleston, home in storm over the downs. Had tea in kitchen, & saw old man who is thatching the ricks raking apples off the tree into a bucket. L. called out “When you’ve done!” & he ran away.

Friday 14 September

Meant to go to Lewes, as it became fine, but my bicycle found punctured; very annoying; but it was hopeless to start, so Nelly went instead on Mrs Hammond’s, & got us a lot of things. Very hot & fine by degrees; seems to take a lot of time to get really fine. We went after mushrooms but found none—A most disappointing season. Cut up a great fungus like cheese.

Saturday 15 September

A perfect day for our treat. We went to Eastbourne. Sat in Devonshire park & watched tennis & heard band. Saw an aeroplane in field near Glynde. It looked like a toy. Children round it: man working propeller round. Had tea & ice; bought Kodak; home to Lewes, where we bought stuff &c. Lord Hugh Cecil got out of the train at Glynde, with a guardsman &c; very amusing to watch: he had 3 leather bags; dressed as flying officer; quite white haired.

Sunday 16 September

An almost sunless, but fine day. Clouds too high for rain. Walked to Firle & had picnic. L. went on with Kodak to Charleston. I waited for him by the trees. After a time, Robin Mayor & Bobo M. came, to my surprise: at Talland (wh. they still have) for week end: had let it to Belgians. L. came back; N⁠[essa]. thought the Kodak wd. cause great jealousy, so kept it. Silver Queen over sea; a bar of red across the sea, like last Sunday. Will brought his ferrets & caught a rabbit for the servants.

Monday 17 September

Servants went in float, driven by Will, at 10: Mrs Hammond came. Time changed at 3 to winter time. A windy changeable day. Telegram from MacCs’ after lunch. Molly cant come; D. comes tomorrow. Went to post at Southease & back the usual way over the downs, talking about arctic regions. Rainy. Made chair cover after tea. A very dark evening, by new time.

Tuesday 18 September

A furious wet day; rain lashing across, sea mist when not pouring. Nevertheless we started for Lewes; but were driven back at the turning by the water mill. Spent afternoon indoors, a treat. Settled down after dinner to print photographs, deciding that D⁠[esmond] wouldn’t come; but he arrived at 8; had driven out in a fly; had to find some dinner for him.

Wednesday 19 September

Telegram to put off picnic. Day looked very bad, rained & blew all the afternoon. Walked with D. to Rodmell to ask about whiskey. Public House shut up; man came & cd. sell us none till 6. Stayed talking about the war “Whats it for?” & how soldiers wd. break the windows if they came home & found no beer. Met German prisoners on the road. D. said Guten Tag, & they all answered. Sentry said nothing. Real winter now.

Thursday 20 September

Another grey windy day, though not so much rain. Brilliant sun & blue sky for about 10 minutes in the afternoon. L. had to get whiskey in Rodmell. Picked apples, he on the table. Then to get milk at cottage, & round into hollow, where we found 3 mushrooms; & the spine & red legs of a bird, just devoured by a hawk—either pigeon or partridge. Very windy, but a starry night.

Friday 21 September

A fine day happily, though windy. L. went into Lewes to have his hair cut. I walked round M.’s walk with Desmond. Lay down a great deal in the sun, talking about society in the 70ties. Five Silver Queens over the sea round Newhaven looking for submarines D. says.

Saturday 22 September

Another very fair day, though well in autumn now. The rooks settling on the trees, & making a great noise in the early morning. A few walnuts ripe. Dahlia fully out in the bed. Trees now so thin that I can see the postman through them at the top of the hill. Clover in field opposite has been cut, & lies on the field. Still some corn standing across on the downs. Sat on the terrace after lunch: L. did garden. D. went to Glynde after tea; we sat over fire.

Sunday 23 September

Fine day. Picked apples in the afternoon, & stole straw & laid them on straw in the attics. Strolled out after tea. It becomes suddenly very cold. A more wintry sunset—very highly coloured. Too cold to stay out late. Desmond’s story after dinner.

Monday 24 September

Desmond left at 9 in the fly. An absolutely perfect autumn day. Lewes half under mist, gradually lifting. No wind. To Lewes. I to Glynde, L. bicycling all the way in order to buy plants. I met Duncan at Glynde, going on his holidays. Had 2 pears. Great crowd for the London train. Apparently my letter to Nessa lost. Shopped in Lewes. Back to Glynde & bicycled home, through a herd of Alderneys; goat got in front & ran some way. Superb sunset. Men working very late carting the clover. A threshing machine at work behind the wood.

Tuesday 25 September

The day looked so fine that we planned a picnic at Telscombe. However it turned windy with a strange black haze over the sun—like a sea mist gone black, & only in parts, for it was very fine over Lewes. But it seemed too cold to picnic far away, so we went into the valley by the deserted farm. Saw a woman painting, & asked her to keep an eye on my bicycle. Went into the valley, up a little on the other side. Had tea there. Found a field of corn flowers & poppies, apparently sewn in rows. Picked a bunch, also some roots wh. L. has planted in the front garden.

Wednesday 26 September

A rather cold day, though fine. L. picked apples, having borrowed the shepherd’s ladder. I went to post at Southease. Passed 2 troops of cadets, each headed by officer & chaplain. Home over the down—a stray horse running along the road the only other incident. Our sunflowers out now. A shooting party walking about, firing a good deal.

Thursday 27 September

A fine still day. Walked along the top, after getting a few apples in a butterfly net, & found the best clumps of mushrooms for a long time in the hollow. Still hazy, perfectly fine day. The Woolers picked apples; were given half.

Friday 28 September

Another very quiet day, which grew dark, though warm & still. Bicycled to Charleston. Roger there. Fine border of flowers. Monkbrettia(?) is the name of the orange lily. Old man brought our flowers out.

Saturday 29 September

L. came over at 3.30. Morning very lovely—seems settled into perfect weather now. Took a great many photographs. Aeroplanes over the house early, which may mean another raid. Nights bright moonlight. Home bicycling across the fields all the way—more than a mile shorter than the other way. Great red sun sinking about 6. L. says the rooks came & picked walnuts off the tree this morning—saw one flying with walnut in his beak. Has planted the Japanese anemones etc. in the front beds, on the terrace & in the back garden. We mean to abolish the large round bed.

Sunday 30 September

A perfect day. Up on the top, & found a handkerchief full of mushrooms. Met Nessa & Roger walking up to meet us. They heard guns over London & saw lights last night. Another raid. We heard nothing; save Mrs Hammond, who heard the guns very loud, as she went home. Clear moonlit nights. They went back after tea.

Monday 1 October

Bicycled in to Lewes—there & back. Passed a drunk man being driven into Lewes on his fruit cart by a policeman. Met another shouting held by 2 policemen in Lewes. Market presumably. Shopped. Met Roger. Anxious about raids. Another last night between 7 & 8: we listened but saw & heard nothing. The weather still perfectly fine warm without wind. Men came & fetched fallen trees, dragging them with horses.

Tuesday 2 October

Another fine day. Started the path in the walled garden this afternoon, & the flower bed by it. We make the path with cobbles from the wall, & work the old cement in. Great fun to do, & looks very nice from the drawing room already. Children came to tea. Looked about the house; we gave them 2 of L.’s heads of deer which they liked very much. Walked a little way back, & onto the down for mushrooms, which have begun again. Had to lie down to escape Henry who ran over the top. Clouded after tea. Heard firing.

Wednesday 3 October

Not such a fine day. Wind rose, & grew cloudy. However, the raids will be stopped. Did the garden path all the afternoon. Planted some wall flowers, daisies, foxgloves. Into the hollow after tea, when almost dark. Had to send Will in for book to Lewes. Got windier. He only came back at 10; knocked, & could not make us hear (so he says).

Thursday 4 October

Our last day a thoroughly bad one from the point of view of weather. Wind & rain; completely black sky. L. had to go, walking there & back, to Lewes to order our car for tomorrow. I went round M.’s walk for the last time. Rain stopped, but wind so tremendous that Nessa & Duncan wouldn’t be able to come as arranged. Mushroom season evidently setting in. Found several on the top. Had to lean against the wind coming down. Great fall of walnuts. Men throwing sticks to bring them down. Couldn’t work at the path. A fine starry night however.

[Diary III]
Hogarth House
Paradise Road
Richmond
Oct. 1917

Monday 8 October

This attempt at a diary is begun on the impulse given by the discovery in a wooden box in my cupboard of an old volume, kept in 1915, & still able to make us laugh at Walter Lamb. This therefore will follow that plan—written after tea, written indiscreetly, & by the way I note here that L. has promised to add his page when he has something to say. His modesty is to be overcome. We planned today to get him an autumn outfit in clothes, & to stock me with paper & pens. This is the happiest day that exists for me. It rained steadily of course. London seems unchanged, making me think of the change there used to be when one was a child. There was a man buying boots who had such a taste in boots that he knew different cuts & rows of nails; & was very cross when told his pair was “nice & strong”. “I hate nice, strong boots” he growled. Evidently there is a taste in boots. We walked through Gough Sqre; Dr Johnson’s house a fine, very well kept place, not so shabby as I expected. A little square, folded in behind Chancery Lane, & given over to printing presses. This is the best part of London to look at—not I now think to live in. Carrying my manuscript to the Times I felt like a hack much in keeping. We left it with a porter, & ran into Bruce Richmond, shining out a perfect gentleman in white gloves on the Ludgate Hill platform. He flourished his hat & disappeared. Liz has a son; therefore our fears as to paternity are set at rest.

Tuesday 9 October

We had a horrid shock. L. came in so unreasonably cheerful that I guessed a disaster. He has been called up. Though rather dashed for 20 minutes, my spirit mounted to a certainty that, save the nuisance, we have nothing to fear. But the nuisance—waiting a week, examination at 8.30 at Kingston—visits to Craig & Wright for certificates—is considerable. It was piteous to see him shivering, physically shivering, so that we lit his gas fire, & only by degrees became more or less where we were in spirits; & still, if one could wake to find it untrue, it would be a mercy.

We took a proof of the first page of K.M.’s story, The Prelude. It looks very nice, set solid in the new type. Masses of bookbinding equipment from Emma Vaughan arrived this morning—rather a testimony to her fads, for it is all good, & I suppose she never bound a book. But this is uncharitable considering. We had a short walk by the river. As it is a fine, fairly still evening, perhaps I shall have a raid to describe tomorrow. Trissie is staying her holiday with us. I forget how many people rang us up this morning, Alix for one, who wants to start her work apparently; & we have a liver & bacon Clumber [spaniel] in view, living at Wimbledon, the property of a man taken for the army. The K. Shuttleworths advertise the birth of a boy with the statement “His Perfect Gift” a good title for an Academy picture, or a Mrs Ward novel, & rather a terrible testimony to the limelight now desired by the rich upon their sacrifices.

Wednesday 10 October

No air raid; no further disturbance by our country’s needs; in fact L. made out in his bath that he deserved some good fortune, & opening his letters found a cheque for £12 from a Swedish paper which never was born & yet pays its debts. And I had 4/ for myself. Late last night, I was told to have my Henry James done if possible on Friday, so that I had to make way with it this morning, & as I rather grudge time spent on articles, & yet cant help spending it if I have it, I am rather glad that this is now out of my power. And another article upon the country in Hardy & E. Brontë is suggested. We walked down the river, through the park, & back to an early tea. At this moment L. is bringing the 17 Club into existence. I am sitting over the fire, & we have the prospect of K. Mansfield to dinner, when many delicate things fall to be discussed. We notice how backward the leaves are in falling & yellowing here compared with Asheham. It might still be August, save for the acorns scattered on the path—suggesting to us the mysterious dispensation which causes them to perish, or we should be a forest of oaks.

Thursday 11 October

The dinner last night went off: the delicate things were discussed. We could both wish that ones first impression of K.M. was not that she stinks like a—well civet cat that had taken to street walking. In truth, I’m a little shocked by her commonness at first sight; lines so hard & cheap. However, when this diminishes, she is so intelligent & inscrutable that she repays friendship. My saying—Chaste & the Unchaste—was exaggerated by Murry for reasons of his own; reasons that make him wish all of a sudden to break with Garsington. We discussed Henry James, & K.M. was illuminating I thought. A munition worker called Leslie Moor came to fetch her—another of these females on the border land of propriety, & naturally inhabiting the underworld—rather vivacious, sallow skinned, without any attachment to one place rather than another. Today poor L. had to go the round of Drs & committees, with a visit to Squire thrown in. His certifications are repeated. He weighs only 9.6. I bought my winter store of gloves, got a reference in the London Library, & met L. at Spikings for tea. Heaven blessed us by sending a quick train, & we came home, very glad to be home, over our fire, though we had to light it, & cook up our dinner, owing to the servants off day.

Sunday 14 October

That is an awful confession, & seems to show the signs of death already spreading in this book. I have excuses though. We were rung up & asked to dine with the Bells in Soho, & this, I regret to say, led to much argument; we put off going to Kingston; the night was wet, & L. didn’t want—old arguments in short were brought out, with an edge to them. So we went dolefully enough, found the place, behind the palace, dined with Roger, Nina Hamnet, Saxon & Barbara & a party such as might figure in a Wells novel: I enjoyed it though, & L. was a model of self-control. Clive’s remarks tended to prove that he is at the centre of everything, but not so aggressive as usual. Nessa has found her governess—sent, apparently by the hand of God. Then on Saturday—what happened? Saturday was entirely given over to the military. We are safe again, &, so they say for ever. Our appearance smoothed every obstacle; & by walking across Kingston we got to the doctor about 12, & all was over by half past. I waited in a great square, surrounded by barrack buildings, & was reminded of a Cambridge college—soldiers crossing, coming out of staircases, & going into others; but gravel & no grass. A disagreeable impression of control & senseless determination. A great boarhound, emblem of military dignity I suppose, strolled across by himself. L. was a good deal insulted: the drs. referred to him as “the chap with senile tremor”, through a curtain. Mercifully the impression slowly vanished as we went about Richmond. Herbert came to tea, bringing the dog, Tinker, a stout, active, bold brute, brown & white, with large luminous eyes, reminding me a little of Dominic Spring-Rice. We have taken him for a walk, but directly he is loosed, he leaps walls, dashes into open doors, & behaves like a spirit in quest of something not to be found. We doubt rather if we can cope with him. Have I put down our Manx cat, also presented to us, one day this week?

L. is up at Hampstead. We are to have Alix & Lilian [Harris] to dinner.

Monday 15 October

The chief fact today I think is the development & discovery of Tinker’s character—all in the right direction. He was taken a long walk by the river the avenue & the Park; his spirit is great, but almost under control. He fell into the river twice; jumped out again; circled madly with a black poodle, & investigated several garden gates, which seem to have a fascination for him. He is a human dog, aloof from other dogs. Alix & Lilian were much as usual last night, save that Lilian had a dark patch on the top of her head, & heard almost perfectly; the dark patch is a cup for catching sound. A more modest, amiable, & yet quietly well informed & resolute character does not exist. Her principles are invariably liberal, although her character is naturally conservative—rather a good mixture. Moreover, she has always depended on her brain, & thus discusses with great sense any question, so long as it isn’t art, that comes up. Alix has the same air of level headed desperation, solid, capacious, but as low in tone as a coal cellar. However we found her very anxious to take on our work; & comes to learn tomorrow. Manx is sitting on L.’s knee; Tinker occasionally looks at him.

Tuesday 16 October

Its odd how fate crams money into our mouths when we’ve got enough, & starves us when we’re empty. Here we’ve made 270 (I think) in Bah Lias, & this morning they write to say that Mitchells is paying 4/ in £. so that brings us another £120. Two years ago we had awkward debts, & had to sell out to pay them. We both make big or fairly big cheques monthly by reviewing. We started printing in earnest after lunch, & Alix came punctually; was instructed, & left on her high stool while we took the air with Tinkler, who jumped from a parapet into a boat covered with tarpaulin, crashed through, & out again, unhurt though surprised. We came back to find Perera, wearing his slip & diamond initial in his tie as usual; in fact, the poor little mahogany coloured wretch has no variety of subjects. The character of the Governor, & the sins of the Colonial Office, these are his topics; always the same stories, the same point of view, the same likeness to a caged monkey, suave on the surface, inscrutable beyond. He made me uncomfortable by producing an e⁠[n]⁠velope of lace—“a souvenir from Ceylon Mrs Woolf”—more correctly a bribe, but there was no choice but to take it. He being gone upstairs, Alix solemnly & slowly explained that she was bored, & also worried by her 2 hours composing, & wished to give it up. A sort of morbid scrutiny of values & of motives, joined with crass laziness, leads her to this decision; as I expect it will lead her to many more. She has a good brain, but not enough vitality to keep it working. The idea weighed upon her, & I assured her there was no need for it to weigh.

Wednesday 17 October

I went up to the show of pictures at Heal’s this afternoon, L. having spent the morning at a Coop. conference. First I stood at Mudies counter while a stout widow chose 10 novels; taking them from the hand of Mudies man, like a lapdog, only stipulating that she wanted no vulgarity, not much description, but plenty of incident. Her companion recommended South Wind—much praised by the reviews—all clever conversation, Italy; “but I can’t bear conversation—I like sensation” said the widow & gulped down another mass of sweet sensation warranted not about the war, nor about drunkards. “I must really reduce my subscription to 8 I think” she observed; & waddled off with her ten volumes to Woking, so I guessed.

Ottoline was not at her ease; closely buttoned up in black velvet, hat like a parasol, satin collar, pearls, tinted eyelids, & red gold hair. Needless to say one saw nothing of the pictures. Aldous Huxley was there—infinitely long & lean, with one opaque white eye. A nice youth. We walked up & down a gallery discussing his Aunt, Mrs Humphry Ward. The mystery of her character deepens; her charm & wit & character all marked as a woman, full of knowledge & humour—& then her novels. These are partly explained by Arnold, who brought them near bankruptcy 4 years ago, & she rescued the whole lot by driving her pen day & night. We had tea with Roger. I was very much conscious of strain—Ott. languid, & taking refuge in her great ladyhood, which is always depressing. They both seemed to have their quarrel before their eyes. I walked with her in the downpour to Oxford Street, she buying me crimson carnations, without cordiality.

Thursday 18 October

L. out until 5 at his conference: & the telephone rang constantly (so I thought, as I tried to pin Mrs Meynell down in a review). A dull life without him! Even Tinkler’s restless mind did not make up. One’s right hand becomes quite cramped holding his chain. Let loose he is very random, but on the whole obedient.* I had my tea in the kitchen, & L. came as I finished it; we sit surrounded by kittens & dogs, who now verge upon a suspicious relationship of some sort. We now expect Ka.

* This, I must say, applies to Tinker, not to L.

Friday 19 October

The sweetness of Ka’s nature, so we thought, is triumphing over the bureaucracy which threatened to straitwaistcoat all her charm. Not but what office life isn’t a pool past which one has to lead her. She complains of falling hair; but looked to me softer & rosier, & more of the smoothness of cream than for a long while. She spent the night, was down with her leather case in hand to catch an early train. I had a letter from Nessa, about servants, & so went up to Mrs Hunts this afternoon—a mysterious building, all glass compartments, leading to a space given up to the ironing & washing of pink & blue pinafores, or so it looked. Not a parlourmaid to be had. With some skilful manipulation of trains, I reached the Aeolian Hall, paid my shilling & heard a very long & very lovely Schubert octet. Coming out, I saw a grey, shockheaded woman without a hat—Alix; & we had tea at Spikings. She has a kind of independence & lack of concern for appearances which I admire. But as we walked up & down Dover Street she seemed on the verge of rolling up the usual veil of laughter & gossip & revealing her sepulchral despair—poor woman.

Where are you going now Alix?

I really dont know.

Well that sounds dismal! Dont you look forward to say eleven tomorrow morning?

I merely wish it didn’t exist that’s all!

So I left her, hatless, aimless, unattached, wandering in Piccadilly.

Saturday 20 October

Happily, or she might say unhappily for Alix she didn’t presumably wander in Piccadilly all night, or the great bomb which ploughed up the pavement opposite Swan & Edgar’s might have dug her grave. We heard two soft distant but unmistakable shocks about 9.30; then a third which shook the window; then silence. It turns out that a Zeppelin came over, hovered unseen for an hour or two & left. We heard no more of it.

Going out for a walk, we ran into a smooth, sleek provincial looking man at the pillar box, our Walter—sent by Heaven for the baptism of this book I think. And he stuck to us for hours; walked with us, came back to tea, & would with encouragement, which flagged, have dined. His stories were all of Lord Canterbury, & Mrs Saxton Noble, & the R.A.: each story throwing a gleam of light upon his own success, or tact, or prosperity. Not much gossip about the King however. He prefers the Queen, & mad Princess Victoria, who breaks into his room & announces that she means to live in his house. His complexion is that of a wax figure, his head is as smooth as an egg; he has the same cultivated taste in books, & style that he used to have, though no longer a writer, or indeed anything but a Secretary to the President, to whom he seems filial & parasitic. To us his attitude is half friendly, half suspicious. He has cast in his lot with the orthodox, but can’t make up his mind to lose the other world entirely.

Sunday 21 October

Lytton came to luncheon, & Goldie to dinner—so we must have talked for 6 or 7 hours. We walked down the river & through the Park. Lytton in good spirits, having finished a book of 100,000 words, though now pretending that it can’t be published. He means to leave London, & live “for ever” in the country. At this moment Saxon & Oliver are inspecting houses in Berkshire. It seems a good thing that one’s friends should try experiments. Poor old Goldie is evidently beyond that stage. If I were malicious I should say he had reached the stage of the complete conversationalist. A long story at dinner, very skillfully told; suited to keep the High Table amused; then facts with Leonard after dinner. One finds less power of detachment in the elderly. This war seems to possess him, to leave little over. In fact he looked shrunk & worn: infinitely good, charming, devoted, every ounce of vitality rightly applied—no time for experiments, not enough curiosity perhaps, though extreme kindliness & sympathy, which in the case of young men, becomes amorous. He has been asked to go to Russia for The Manchester Guardian; but doubts if he will get a passport.

Monday 22 October

The moon grows full, & the evening trains are packed with people leaving London. We saw the hole in Piccadilly this afternoon. Traffic has been stopped, & the public slowly tramps past the place, which workmen are mending, though they look small in comparison with it. Swan & Edgar has every window covered with sacking or planks; you see shop women looking out from behind; not a glimpse of stuffs, but “business goes on as usual” so they say. Windows are broken according to no rule; some intact, some this side, some that. Our London Library stands whole, however, & we found our books, & came home in the tube, standing the whole way to Hammersmith, & have just come in. Bert is wounded, & Nellie has gone to Liz. She felt it her duty & also her right—which shows how the servant is bettering her state in this generation.

Tuesday 23 October

Another lapse in this book, I must confess; but, if I do it against my humour I shall begin to loathe it; so the one chance of life it has is to submit to lapses uncomplainingly. I remember though that we walked, printed, & Margaret came to tea. How pale these elderly women get! The rough pale skin of toads, unfortunately: M. in particular easily loses the flash of her beauty. This time we were whelmed in the Coop, revolution; the characters of Mr King & Mr May, & possibilities. I get an occasional swinge of the tail which reminds me of the extremely insignificant position I have in this important world. I get a little depressed, a little anxious to find fault—a question of not being in the right atmosphere. L. I suppose feels the same about Gordon Sqre. And then the minute care which the elderly & solicitous take of each other impresses me: “must be back or Lilian will be anxious” questions of fatigue or cold always cropping up—partly the unmarried state perhaps; partly the sense of being the centre of one’s world, which Margaret very naturally has. But of course her niceness & valiancy always conquer me in spite of injured vanity.

Wednesday 24 October

L. to some confounded meeting; but also to take our selected sample of paper to Mr Byles, whom he met coming out of the New Statesman office. I did a little printing, & then up to Janet. With time one would naturally welcome wet & wind; already the worst chill of them is over, because one thinks of them as safety against the raid. So today I hardly grumbled, though it was heavy rain, cold, dark, inhuman, primeval weather. The Case ménage is extremely cheerful to step into; such a welcome, such anxiety about China tea or Indian, an egg, fresh bread & butter—clothes dried with a duster. Emphie spirited, discursive, inconsecutive as usual, about her day & her Ecko [? a hearing aid], & servants, & sugar & honey, all fresh & sensible, & evidently the fruit of experience, which has not embittered or aged her, though it has not given her much power of concentration. She went to write her notes, after tea (this is her great occupation) Janet & I talked, getting on well as usual. But I was packed off to wait 15 minutes at Finchley Road, lest I should miss my train; & travelled with a mother & three boys who made all the elderly gentlemen shy & yet cordial to watch their kisses & antics from behind their newspapers.

Thursday 25 October

Owing to the usual circumstances, I had to spend the day recumbent. However this is much mitigated by printing, which I do from my bed on the sloping table. We took off a proof of 2 pages, on paper of the right size & liked the looks of it immensely. Our paper will be soft & yellow tinted. A melancholy letter from Ott. this morning, complaining of age & ugliness, the weariness of London & the sadness of not being wanted—all so true, I suppose, that we have accepted an invitation, on my part rather out of pity; though also a feeling of liking for her persists. Saxon & Barbara dined with us; we are lending Asheham to the whole of that curious constellation—Nick & Saxon will revolve round Barbara; who twinkles rosily but modestly in the light of their admiration; very neat, nice, motherly. Saxon as usual when with her—gentle & giving off a sound as of a boiling, but not over boiling, kettle; speechless of course. As she has only simple direct things to say, L. & I were a little sleepy; but we have arranged that she is to take up printing when Nick goes back [to France]. I am going to Asheham on Monday with Saxon.

Friday 26 October

Either it is cold or wet or windy at night, so we sleep well, though the moon is now almost full. We are faced with the problem of providing for Tinker. His spirits make him an exacting guest. We went to find a home with the Vet. today, & discovered that a Vet. lives in part of the great red house at the back of us. We looked into a room, laid for tea, the tablecloth laid like a diamond across the table; a girl came; & I saw a black & white paved hall, evidently a fine house, now cut up into different bits. Nelly has just come back: the usual laughter begins again. We gave Lottie 5/ for doing so well.

Saturday 27 October

We were just setting off for Kingston Barracks this afternoon to get L.’s exemption card, when the telephone rang, & I heard Clive’s now unfamiliar & apparently rather nervous voice asking whether he might dine with us. So the breach is to be repaired very rapidly. We walked through the Park to Kingston, failed to get the card, & then had tea in Kingston, ending by buying me a 15/ watch for my wrist—a round bright, serviceable turnip, which I look at constantly, & really find it a saver of time. We were back late; & Clive came & was I thought, very pleasant, easy garrulous; starting a great many hares & chasing them smartly, & letting off his little tributes to himself quite inoffensively. He is so brisk & well kept mentally that I like an evening of him. L. immensely good tempered & urbane into the bargain. We gossiped; spun swiftly from thing to thing—Characters, French books, the Mansfield intrigue, & so on. He wears his chestnut suit; combs his hair back to hide the bald spot, but didn’t hitch his trousers so much as usual—in short, he was at his best. Adrian has a drs. order not to work on the land any longer.

Sunday 28 October

Still no raids, presumably the haze at evening keeps them off, though it is still, & the moon perfectly clear. The numbers who have gone out of London this week must feel a little foolish. A perfect cold October day; sun red through the leaves which are still hanging. In order to keep as much in L.’s company as I could, I determined to go to Staines with him. We walked from Shepperton through Laleham, & so to Staines by the river. Flat very quiet country, or country just turning into town. Pink arm chairs were drawn up round a crowded but not luxurious tea table; a multiplicity of little plates, minute knives, people told to help themselves. Mr Lock, with some impediment was there, & soon Alice, Flora, Clara & Sylvia all appeared—malice suggested the whole of Kensington High Street poured into a room. The normality of it all impressed me. Nothing beautiful; nothing definite; most strange why nature has produced this type in such abundance. Then, the servant said “Mr Sturgeon”; Flora cried “I will go” dashed from the room; everyone said Oh! Ah! How Splendid!, as if on the stage, which indeed the whole scene might have been. We went, after the 2nd act; Tinker dashed off; but was recovered, & so home, very cold, & Herbert looked in, & here we sit over the fire, & I wish it were this time next week.

Friday 2 November

It almost is “this time next week”; though not quite—in fact not nearly, since L. is giving a lecture at Birkenhead at this precise moment, & will then I suppose travel all night across England before reaching me. I find it impossible to read after a railway journey; I cant open Dante or think of him without a shudder—the cause being I think partly the enormous numbers of newspapers I’ve been reading in. Lottie brought me all the Times’s which have accumulated. I feel as if I’d moved about a great deal; kept moving to keep myself warm. I mean Asheham & Charleston were rather in the nature of distractions, so as not to think how strange & solitary I was. Not solitary in the literal sense of course. First I spent 2 days with Saxon; much detail, rather heightened by his greater warmth of intimacy. He is still surprised by his own sensations; takes them out, sees how they fit in; very anxious to be sure of their quality. Of course the quality is very high. The worst one can say is that his lack of virility tends to prettify & belittle to some extent. But I daresay this is the effect of B’s not very marked or magnificent nature. And of course, too, he’s exquisite in his own way; so pure, wise, good, & sensitive. Most curiously unable to cope with anything needing decision; his instinct is obviously always to avoid risk by remaining motionless. When forced to order coal or a cab his indecision is that of a spinster of 70. And yet intellectually he is definite enough; definite, but meticulous. He’s in love, & yet content that B. should marry Nick.

There was the new governess, Miss Edwards at Charleston; a very pretty, rather sharp, not very well bred or well educated young woman who has I should imagine lived on the capital of her large eyes, flaxen hair, straight dark eyebrows so much that she is a little out of it in an element where these attractions are discounted. There is no one to make eyes at—save Bunny, who remains impervious. But she controls Julian; talks French evidently rather more naturally than English. I meant to ask her what she thinks in. Yesterday it rained all day, so I sat in; writing about Aksakoff in the morning; sitting in the Studio after luncheon. Duncan painted a table, & Nessa copied a Giotto. I unpacked all my bits of gossip. They are very large in effect, these painters; very little self-conscious; they have smooth broad spaces in their minds where I am all prickles & promontories. Nevertheless to my thinking few people have a more vigorous grasp or a more direct pounce than Nessa. Two little boys with very active minds keep her in exercise. I like the feeling that she gives of a whole nature in use. In working order I mean; living practically, not an amateur, as Duncan & Bunny both to some extent are of course. I suppose this is the effect of children & of responsibility, but I always remember it in her. A love of the actual fact, is strong in her. Julian came with his letter into my room this morning; & at once curled up on my bed, & went on reading a book with a picture of a Bird of Paradise in it. He told me he had read Gardiner’s history perhaps 50 times. He disliked Kings because they were so dull; but liked Newcastle. Irish history bored him because it was shapeless, as far as I could make out; he couldn’t see that either side was in the right about the American war, which annoyed him; & he thought if we had given way about the taxes we should have got our way without their knowing it, as we have done with our other colonies. Quentin called him to lessons, or he would have gone on at length. I was a good deal impressed. Suddenly to find a child reasoning & inheriting these old puzzles gives one rather a shock. It seems a pity there can’t be a new history for each new generation; & yet its queer to hand over the old things to the new brains. I daresay he’ll do a lot of work one of these days; is it a sign of age that one’s interested & inclined to see great virtue in the youngest generation?

But I was glad to come home, & feel my real life coming back again—I mean life here with L. Solitary is not quite the right word; one’s personality seems to echo out across space, when he’s not there to enclose all one’s vibrations. This is not very intelligibly written; but the feeling itself is a strange one—as if marriage were a completing of the instrument, & the sound of one alone penetrates as if it were a violin robbed of its orchestra or piano. A dull wet night, so I shall sleep. The raid happened of course, with us away.

Saturday 3, Sunday 4, Monday 5 November

The raid didn’t actually happen but with our nerves in the state they are (I should say Lottie’s & Nelly’s nerves) the dipping down of the electric lights was taken as a sign of warning: finally the lights went out, & standing on the kitchen stairs I was deluged with certain knowledge that the extinction of light is in future our warning. I looked out of the hall door, however, heard the usual patter & voices of suburbans coming home; & then, to bear out my assurance, the lights suddenly came on again. We went to bed & to sleep. I woke 5 minutes before 7, & lay listening, but heard nothing, & was about, at 8 o’clock to flatten out all my expectations when I heard L. at the door & there he was! With the softness of a mouse he had let himself in & breakfasted. We talked for as long as we could; things kept oozing out; sudden silences & spurts; divine contentment at being once more harmonious. L. travelled all night. The most pungent of his tales is to me the story of the arguing & enquiring & experimenting. Mrs Ekhard who thrust herself into all sorts of subjects, with L., while he cut down her trees. The palms of his hands are still black from the soot of Manchester bark. We walked by the river, & to bed rather early. L. having denied that he was at all tired, tumbled asleep & slept till he was called.

On Sunday I finished my Aksakoff, & writing has the advantage of making a weekday out of the Sabbath, in spite of the clamour & blare of military music & church bells which always takes place at about 11—a noise which the other people have no right to inflict. We went up the river & through the Park, for it was a lovely warm day; & passed our Walter again with a man who looked like a schoolmaster. No deer are to be seen in the lower park, where the cedars are. And Perera came to tea, & I shut him alone with L. having no wish for more yards of lace. I think, however, that L. is now menaced with a gold watch, owing to the success of the Ceylon business. The Daily News bursts out in three separate places in indignation.

And today we’ve been to London, & just come back, & sit waiting for dinner. Expecting life & smartness at least I spent 8d upon a Magazine with Mrs Asquith’s love letters, & they’re as flat & feeble & vulgar & illiterate as a provincial Mrs Glyn might be; with something insolent about them, as though she condescended in scribbling— We went to the London Library, as usual; coming out ran in to the hatless dusky figure, L.’s dame secretaire: Alix; on her way to grope for facts, which L.’s eye finds a good deal quicker. We saw the hole in Piccadilly almost mended, though the glass is still broken. L. to Williams & Norgate about his book, which kept him so long that I had time to despise Mrs A. pretty thoroughly in Clifford’s Inn tea rooms. The talk was heated; L. accused of low dealing in offering his book to Bell. (Margaret’s doing). Some arrangement may be come to; but the man an incompetent & stupid creature, who wont give way, & will have his rights. Hanging on a strap in the Tube was Malcolm Macnaghten; grey, spruce & prosperous looking.

Tuesday 6 November

The melancholy fact is that Tinker, at the present moment, 5.30, is lost. He was let out in the garden, got into the next door house, & finding their garden door open, presumably escaped. This was discovered at lunch time. When we had done L. went off to look in the neighbourhood, but without success. We took the Bus to Kingston; visited for the last time let us hope in our lives, the Recruiting Office, & after waiting in the familiar room with the two wooden benches, the towel hanging up & the khaki coat, L. was summoned, & given his paper which states that he is “permanently & totally disabled.” We suppose this might fetch £500 if sold. However, we were rather dashed by the loss of the spaniel whom we had come to like. We gave information at the Police Office. Their immense kindness & good sense much impressed us. After taking notes, ringing up Kew &c. the police sergeant said “Much obliged to you, Sir”. Its melancholy to be asking about lost dogs again. After our experience with Tim even I find it hard to be altogether sanguine.

Saturday 10 November

Another melancholy fact is that I’ve let all these days pass—two of them, Wednesday & Thursday because I was out late, the third Friday because I was too gloomy, & we were both too argumentative, to make writing possible. However, to deal with the dissipations first, though I dont admit they were the cause of the gloom. Nessa was up, & I had a Bloomsbury afternoon. First I took my watch to a man in Poland Street, who says it needs cleaning only, then I went to the Omega where in the semidark Roger was convoying three chattering Frenchwomen round the show, & giving the impression as usual that French manners & language have a peculiar relish for him. The pictures glimmered through the dusk; & I was chiefly impressed by the Gertlers; Vanessa, too, very good: Duncan, I thought, a little pretty or tending to be. Faith vacillated about, endeavouring to make me see her show of dresses, this being private view day. We had tea in the sewing room—walking up & down munching dry cake, while Mabel stitched lining in a corner, & Roger wrote letters on his knee. Nessa came on top of this & we left, I buying an apricot coloured coat on my way. I had tea in Gordon Square, which always puzzles me under the new arrangement, there being no sitting room. She is brooding some new educational scheme—6 boys, a tutor & a governess; has planned it all for next summer. Miss Edwards has taken to meeting soldiers on the downs, & her capacity won’t last long. This was the prelude to a party [at 46 Gordon Square] on Thursday, to which I went, through the wet & the dirt, a very long expedition for 2 hours of life, though I enjoyed it. The usual people were there, the usual sensation of being in a familiar but stimulating atmosphere, in which all the people one’s in the habit of thinking of, were there in the body. A great many mop headed young women in amber & emerald sitting on the floor. Molly, Vanessa & I represented mature matronhood. Oliver seemed to be the friendly & amorous Uncle. Ray one might call the grandmother; very commanding, immensely well nourished, & competent. I spent most of my time with Oliver, & as the clock struck 10 I got up and went—an example of virtue if ever there was one. And now we see how the gloom came about. L. was testy, dispiriting, & tepid. We slept. I woke to a sense of failure & hard treatment. This persisted, one wave breaking after another, all day long. We walked on the river bank in a cold wind, under a grey sky. Both agreed that life seen without illusion is a ghastly affair. Illusions wouldn’t come back. However they returned about 8.30, in front of the fire, & were going merrily till bedtime, when some antics ended the day.

Today has been very cheerful, in spite of the worst assortment of elements to be had; bitter cold, stormy sky, rain. L. went to the Lost Dogs Home, but without success; we have put up notices, but hope runs low. I’ve been without letters for 2 days.

Sunday 11 November

Sunday, I see, is becoming for us much what it was to our fathers, the day on which social life becomes swept; & as it’s by the nature of things a dull solemn day, the plan isn’t so bad. Still, I hardly see on what principle one can approve of our luncheon at the Webbs. L. has known them;

[In LW’s hand] I rashly said that I would occasionally write a page here & now V. calls on me to redeem my word, & as it will take me from reading Joseph Chamberlain’s speeches, I dont see why I shouldn’t. We went to the Webbs for luncheon & there too were Mr & Mrs Tawny. I had met her but not him. Before they came, the Webbs told us that he was an idealist. Now that I’ve met him the only thing which I can add with certainty is that he is an idealist with black teeth. One of the worst Webb meals to which we have been. V. between Webb & Tawny & I between Mrs W. Mrs T. Mrs W. began to talk almost at once about the Reconstruction Committee which she is on. She talked incessantly & every tenth word was “committee”. She has apparently succeeded in inventing a committee for babies, a committee for lunatics, a committee for the sick, a committee for the disabled, & a committee for the dead; but the scheme or the Cosmos is not complete because she has so far failed to invent a Committee for the Able-bodied & unemployed. However she still has hopes. Meanwhile V. at one corner, & I at another sunk in silence, while Mrs T. vacuously asked W. about the case of a woman with a broken hip in an infirmary in a Union in Walthamstow. Immediately after luncheon we fled. Took a bus from Westminster to Hammersmith, very cold but refreshing after the discourse on committees.

& when we got back here we found the room full of people—Rosalind Toynbee Arnold T. & Ka. I liked her, small, pale, with dark eyes, a wisp of hair, still, & decided in her manner. I’m not sure that I did much like him. He seemed rather more commonplace & conventional than the young man one’s used to. But we talked away briskly about art & literature; & I observed R.T. thinking, when spoken to—a good sign. As far as one can see, she is so trained in culture that she is almost a specialist; if one got to know her, I mean, one would find some carefully arranged theory netting in all her feelings about literature. For example, she doesn’t like King Lear. But, or perhaps therefore, I thought her rather distinguished, more so, at any rate than the crop-heads of Bloomsbury. As we sat, with great rolls of fur, in the shadow, I cant verify my guess as to the crop-head in her case. It struck me now & then that her half-aristocratic parentage had produced a kind of old fashioned decorum in her. Her views upon the proper relation of cooks & governesses were certainly decorous. Something I think may be due to the difference between Oxford & Cambridge. It’s strange to think how much one’s mind has been affected by this difference—even mine has, I suppose, though I was never there, & am by nature critical of them. But Arnold seemed to me not very easy to talk directly to.

[Monday 12 November]

Today we’ve been to London, as usually happens on Monday. We went to the Omega, & as we were looking round us, in came Roger, which embarrassed me a little, partly because of his own pictures, & also because I don’t like talking of art in front of him. He was in process of painting a table though, & disappeared. Then we went to Gordon Sqre to fetch my umbrella, 2 pictures, & a hair binder, all left there, & who should open the door but Clive? He asked us in, & there was M.H. in one of the big armchairs, a piteous half moon of a woman, to my thinking. She seems so crushed & submissive always. I half smoked a gold-tipped cigarette, & listened to some Garsington gossip. K.M. has broken with Ott. in a letter which says “You shan’t play the Countess to my cook any more” or words to that effect. We left however, & I went to Mudies, & got The Leading Note, in order to examine into R.T. more closely, & L. went on to meet Edgar for a mysterious interview; & I came home with my book, which does not seem a very masterly performance after Turgenev, I suppose; but if you dont get your touches in the right place the method is apt to be sketchy & empty. L. is at the Suffrage; & I watch 3 fireballs glowing red hot.

Tuesday 23 November

I must again register my complaint that people wont write to me. I dont write to them, but how can one? And no book from the Times either, for which I’m glad though, as I want to get on with my novel. The other day L. began his book, & has already done two chapters. He’s like one of those mowing machines I used to watch from my window at Asheham; round & round they go, without haste without rest, until finally the little square of corn in the middle is cut, & all is done. We began our printing off this afternoon. Our first discovery was the important one that the springs aren’t even, or the balls different in weight. We—or L.—put this more or less right, & we printed 300 copies of the first page, but we should be glad of another press, though the results are very good for the most part. A very cold day. Indeed, I might have remarked the beginning of winter. No leaves to speak of left on the trees now; a sharp chill in the air. One’s room after tea most emphatically a little centre of light in the midst of profound darkness. L. is making up a lecture he’s giving at Hammersmith; I’m to preside over the Women’s Guild.

Wednesday 14 November

L. gave his lecture; I presided over my guild. It always puzzles me to know why the women come, unless they like sitting in a room not their own, gas & light free, other women on other chairs. They don’t pay much attention apparently; save Mrs Langston no one has a word to offer. Tonight Mrs Allan—a rosy, bright eyed, shrewd, but not very enlightened woman spoke for an hour upon Congress. It might have been a report; & had little more interest. When she’d done, & I’d done, no questions were asked, & she started off upon food—not the food of the country, but the individual dinner & tea provided at Torquay. Upon this subject she spoke fluently & even passionately for 15 minutes. The vices of outside traders & the virtues of self control were both illustrated at length. L. was back about 10.30, after a more profitable evening at the U.D.C. where soldiers & an Indian were among the audience. Today the servants went to see Bert in hospital at Epsom; L. went to the Dogs Home, with no result; & finally we walked towards Kew, & noticed how the great chestnut trees [were] as black and bare as iron. A dozen men stand fishing in the quiet water beneath the lock—a cheerful sign of undiminished stability. We looked in, & spent half an hour, talking to the little printer, who has 2 machines & 1 press for sale. The difficulty is to decide; but probably we shall buy one, & leave the refinements of perfection for the present, which Riddell thinks necessary, but presumably can’t provide. Besides, these machines are running & only cost £14 or £15.

Again a day of no letters.

Thursday 15 November

Again a day of no letters, unless I can count my weekly reprimand in the Supt. for what I said or didn’t say about Arnold’s poems about nature. This time I’m almost inclined to answer useless though it is, but I should like to protest against this flood of Oxford superiority. We printed off another page, very successfully, which took till tea time, & then we went round in the semi-darkness to the little printer, who will come round any moment now to see the room for the press. One little boy about the size of Julian works for him. Yesterday his cellar was flooded by the ladies bath next door. He is very precise in his language: perhaps the result of a semi-literary profession.

Monday 19 November

The little printer came round at the end of the last page, & stayed perhaps 1 hour—until Lottie had to ring the bell with meaning, but as I don’t suppose he dines himself, the meaning may have been obscure. We have advanced £10, & for that bought the cutting press, & stipulated that the printing press shall be here by Jan. 14th. The difficulty about these people is their flow of language; personal history must be told at length: I believe its a form of good manners. On Friday we went to a concert, walking out when the English piece came on into a disreputable side street clinging to the back of Bond St—reminds one rather of a Thackeray novel—a place for the footman of the great to gamble in. Tea at Spikings, with some of the upper classes; who looked like pet dogs threatened with a cold bath. They were talking of the scarcity of motor cars. I bought a pair of stockings & then home.

The stockings were in preparation for Garsington. We came back from that adventure 2 hours ago. It’s difficult to give the whole impression, save that it wasnt much unlike my imagination. People strewn about in a sealingwax coloured room: Aldous Huxley toying with great round disks of ivory & green marble—the draughts of Garsington: Brett in trousers; Philip tremendously encased in the best leather; Ottoline, as usual, velvet & pearls; 2 pug dogs. Lytton semi-recumbent in a vast chair. Too many nick nacks for real beauty, too many scents, & silks, & a warm air which was a little heavy. Droves of people moved about from room to room—from drawing room to dining room, from dining room to Ottoline’s room—all Sunday. At moments the sense of it seemed to flag; & the day certainly lasted very long by these means. Fredegond was admitted in the morning; & then after tea I had perhaps an hour over a log fire with Ottoline. Going for a walk we ran into a motor full of speckled & not prepossessing young men—one I entirely forget, but he existed, as I counted 4. The most obvious was Evan Morgan, a little red absurdity, with a beak of a nose, no chin, & a general likeness to a very callow but student Bantam cock, who has run to legs & neck. However he was evidently most carefully prepared to be a poet & an eccentricity, both by his conversation, which aimed at irresponsible brilliance, & lack of reticence, & by his clothes, which must have been copied from the usual Shelley picture. But he was as innocent as a chicken & so foolish that it didn’t seem to matter. On the whole I liked Ottoline better than her friends have prepared one for liking her. Her vitality seemed to me a credit to her, & in private talk her vapours give way to some quite clear bursts of shrewdness. The horror of the Garsington situation is great of course; but to the outsider the obvious view is that O. & P. & Garsington house provide a good deal, which isn’t accepted very graciously. However to deal blame rightly in such a situation is beyond the wit of a human being: they’ve brought themselves to such a pass of intrigue & general intricacy of relationship that they’re hardly sane about each other. In such conditions I think Ott. deserves some credit for keeping her ship in full sail, as she certainly does. We were made immensely comfortable; a good deal of food; the talk had frequent bare patches, but then this particular carpet had been used fairly often. By talking severely to Philip, L. made him come up to Parliament today. He is a weak amiable long suffering man, who seems generally to be making the best of things, & seeing the best of people whom by nature he dislikes. We came home by Oxford (where I bought 2 writing books, & L. bought a pipe, & we had coffee, & saw the colleges) then to Reading, where we lunched; then to Ealing, where we changed to Richmond. On the top of our return, Alix appeared, & has just left; but I missed most of her, feeling it necessary to have a bath.

Thursday 22 November

I boasted so much about this book & the charm of filling it from a never exhausted fount at Garsington that I’m ashamed to miss days; & yet as I point out, the only chance it has is to wait one’s mood. Ottoline keeps one by the way, devoted however to her “inner life”; which made me reflect that I haven’t an inner life. She read me a passage in my praise though, so the realities do come in sometimes. On Tuesday L. went to Williams & Norgate, who offer terms for a 2/6 book—which must be considered. Evidently they want him very much; & can’t altogether conceal this in spite of their wish to drive a hard bargain. I rather think I finished taking down a page. Anyhow on Wednesday Barbara came to make a start, & the machine thereupon completely struck work, one of the rollers being cut, & jibbing, & as our stock of K’s ran out, she could only set 4 lines. This she did however, quickly & without fault, so that she promises well. She bicycled from Wimbledon, her small crop head, bright cheeks, brilliant waistcoat give her a likeness to some vivacious bird; but I don’t know that I think this very emphatic appearance particularly interesting. It always seems to say “Now all the decks are cleared for action” & action there is none.

I dined with Roger & met Clive. We sat at the low square table covered with a bandanna, & eat out of dishes each holding a different bean or lettuce: delicious food for a change. We drank wine, & finished with soft white cheese, eaten with sugar. Then, taking a splendid flight above personalities, we discussed literature & aesthetics.

“D’you know, Clive, I’ve made out a little more about the thing which is essential to all art: you see, all art is representative. You say the word tree, & you see a tree. Very well. Now every word has an aura. Poetry combines the different aura’s in a sequence—” That was something like it. I said one could, & certainly did, write with phrases, not only words; but that didn’t help things on much. Roger asked me if I founded my writing upon texture or upon structure; I connected structure with plot, & therefore said “texture”. Then we discussed the meaning of structure & texture in painting & in writing. Then we discussed Shakespeare, & Roger said Giotto excited him just as much. This went on till I made myself go precisely at 10. And we discussed also Chinese poetry; Clive said the whole thing was too distant to be comprehensible. Roger compared the poetry with the painting. I liked it all very much (the talk I mean). Much no doubt is perfectly vague, not to be taken seriously, but the atmosphere puts ideas into one’s head, & instead of having to curtail them, or expatiate, one can speak them straight out & be understood—indeed disagreed with. Old Roger takes a gloomy view, not of our life, but of the world’s future; but I think I detected the influence of Trotter & the herd, & so I distrusted him. Still, stepping out into Charlotte Street, where the Bloomsbury murder took place a week or two ago, & seeing a crowd swarming in the road & hearing women abuse each other & at the noise others come running with delight—all this sordidity made me think him rather likely to be right.

Today has been a perfectly warm, very still day, & we just had time after printing off a page to reach the river & see everything reflected perfectly straightly in the water. The red roof of a house had its own little cloud of red in the river—lights lit on the bridge made long streaks of yellow—very peaceful, & as if the heart of winter.

Friday 23 November

L. went up to London with the rollers, & I meant to go to Kew. On the way it struck me that one ought to decide things definitely. One ought to make up one’s mind. To begin then, I settled that if it was the 6d day at Kew I wouldn’t hesitate but decide not to go in. It was the 6d day; I turned without pausing & had therefore to walk back. Certainly this decision brings a feeling of peace, though I rather think I was wrong. It was a warm, windless day, the sky genuinely blue. I counted my lumps of sugar, 31: but Saxon came in, & took one; hadn’t slept, & so was cutting his office. I meant to read Brooke’s sermons, & couldn’t; & Saxon hadn’t much to say. We discussed the jealousy of vanity & the jealousy of affection. He is immune from both. I have the one & not the other—perhaps from lack of cause. L. came in after seeing Squire, whose insignificance takes the lustre from reviewing rather. Then came Barbara, who wanted a bath; & Saxon followed her; & then Clive came in, & we chattered away—he & I in duet for the most part—till 10.30; when he went dressed like a Newmarket gent in an immensely thick coat. I find his sprightliness a rest. No hunt for subjects needed. He is after another before the first is disposed of. He abused Ott., but frankly. He discussed Lady Mary Montagu: his reviews—a publisher has offered him £40 for a book of them. He has become rather a raconteur; but there is, I think, something intellectual about him; something of the Cambridge standard, perhaps, surviving. He’s no fool, though his manners suggest overwhelming reasons for thinking him one now & then—this perpetual effort to shine, to be ‘in the know’—this vanity. A long talk with M.H. on the telephone interrupted him. He has become a great writer of intimate letters He makes a business of knowing everyone, or at any rate their affairs; but I like this.

[24 November]

Today Saturday the usual reasons have kept me recumbent; in the mitigated form which allows setting up & distributing. Barbara brought the new rollers. She lunched & stayed to tea, & has indeed only gone a short time, which wont, I hope become a habit.

Monday 26 November

I dont like Sunday; the best thing is to make it a work day, & to unravel Brooke’s mind to the sound of church bells was suitable enough. Such a wind in the night, by the way, that the milkman reported much damage down the road this morning, & raised our hopes, which were dashed on going out to see nothing smashed—not a stain of blood, or even the remnant of a hat. It was fine & wet by turns, with a high cold wind continuously. We went to Kew, & saw a blazing bush, as red as cherry blossom, but more intense—frostily red—also gulls rising & falling for pieces of meat, their crowd waved aside suddenly by three very elegant light grey cranes. We also went into the orchid house where these sinister reptiles live in a tropical heat, so that they come out in all their spotted & streaked flesh even now in the cold. They always make me anxious to bring them into a novel. L. went on to Hampstead, & I back here; where I had tea in the kitchen with the Manx cat. L. saw Margaret & discussed labour I suppose. & his book. I wish my range extended so far.

Today I went into London with my ms: & Leonard went to Harrisons. (which entry was broken off somehow—but my recollection is that L. found Desmond at the L.L.: together they look up the word f——in the slang dictionary, & were saddened & surprised to see how the thumb marks of members were thick on the page. My afternoon was by comparison chaste; though I’m hardly proud of the fact that I completely lost my way in seeking Printing House Square, & got into a maze of little half lit, very busy & professional looking streets which I should like to investigate. The profession of journalism has its heart here; carts were standing lengthwise for bales to be dumped into. A kind man in uniform, something at a warehouse he told me, took me to the Times at last; though I (still managed to miss my way, I think it must have been, for I remember walking rapidly in the wrong direction, which got darker & darker until I became suspicious & went back again—but this is a week old).

Monday 3 December

Its impossible to remember a week at a stretch, which I must confess would be my task if I were to pretend to be accurate. One day I went to the dentist; & we had Barbara here for 3 days, with disastrous results, for when we looked at her work, it was so full of faults we had to take it down. I should have expected, not much intelligence, but the quickness & accuracy of a good needlewoman. This was annoying. On Saturday L. gave a lecture at Hampstead. Strange what a stamp Hampstead sets even on a casual gathering of 30 people; such clean, decorous, uncompromising & high minded old ladies & old gentlemen; & the young wearing brown clothes, & thinking seriously, the women dowdy, the men narrow shouldered; bright fire & lights & books surrounding us, & everyone of course agreeing beforehand to what was said. Old Dr Clark indeed could quote clauses in Treaties by their numbers; & Hobson was shrewd, judicious & kindly; Janet came in looking very well. But we had to race off in the Tube to Leicester Sqre to dine with Barbara Saxon & a young woman called G. Then on to Figaro at the Old Vic. It’s perfectly lovely; breaking from one beauty into another, & so romantic as well as witty—the perfection of music, & vindication of opera.

On Sunday we heard of Cecil’s death, & Philip’s wounds.

We walked along the river in the afternoon, when L. came back from Staines, & came to an old hollow elm tree, in the sawdust of which someone so we guessed, had stuck a match. The wind was blowing in, & soon the flames were running high. A crowd stopped. The first old gentleman was so positive that I believed him; he said it was a usual process, done to get rid of an old tree; nothing to marvel at; no question of accident or malice; & so he marched on with obvious contentment. The second old gentleman admitted doubts, finally swung round to our view that no one would burn a tree down on the public path on a Sunday too. Meanwhile the tree burnt rather beautifully; we called at the police office & told them, in case the fire might run along by means of bushes to other trees. Leonard’s cold very bad—a horrid nuisance.

Today he stayed in & set up 21 lines. I went to Harrison, to Mudies, to the Times, with an article on Mrs Drew, & am just come in. Frostily cold night; stars polished to their brightest: so much brighter than the streets are. I lost my way again, & as no one knows where Printing House Sqre is, one has full scope for wandering in. I got the 2nd vol. of Ld Morley’s memories, a real solid book, I think, like the books father used to buy, looking like them too, an ugly red. One night Walter Lamb dropped in, as we sat over the fire; & his proud crest is a little dashed I think by my overpowering snobbery.

Wednesday 5 December

Our apprentice weighs rather heavily upon us. For one thing, though I’m always ashamed in her presence to feel this, her presence is rather in the way of our complete comfort. It may be her youth; something highly polished so as to reflect without depth about her—On the other hand, she’s nice, considerate; one can be open with her. The real drawback is her work. Today has been spent by L. in the futile misery of trying to print from one of her pages which wont lock up. As the other page had to be entirely taken down & re-set, her work amounts to nil; less than nil, considering L.’s time wasted. A bitter cold day too. Our only outing after dark to the printers to borrow inverted comma’s. Yesterday L. saw Philip at Fishmonger’s Hall. I set up in one room, Barbara in the other. These days indoors don’t provide much in the way of incident, & pass with the swiftest rush, so that at 9 o’clock, the present hour, one seems only starting on the days work—perhaps the result of passing without question straight from one occupation to another. L. reading Life of Dilke; worried by a flea up his back; I’m past the middle of Purgatorio, but find it stiff, the meaning more than the language, I think. We got Hardy’s new poems, but lent them to Philip.

Thursday 6 December

When I wrote that we were only at the beginning of our days work, last night, I spoke more truly than I knew. Nothing was further from our minds than air raids; a bitter night, no moon up till eleven. At 5 however, I was wakened by L. to a most instant sense of guns: as if one’s faculties jumped up fully dressed. We took clothes, quilts, a watch & a torch, the guns sounding nearer as we went down stairs to sit with the servants on the ancient black horse hair chest wrapped in quilts in the kitchen passage. Lottie having said she felt bad, passed on to a general rattle of jokes & comments which almost silenced the guns. They fired very quickly, apparently towards Barnes. Slowly the sounds got more distant, & finally ceased; we unwrapped ourselves & went back to bed. In ten minutes there could be no question of staying there: guns apparently at Kew. Up we jumped, more hastily this time, since I remember leaving my watch, & trailing cloak & stockings behind me. Servants apparently calm & even jocose. In fact one talks through the noise, rather bored by having to talk at 5 a.m. than anything else. Guns at one point so loud that the whistle of the shell going up followed the explosion. One window did, I think, rattle. Then silence. Cocoa was brewed for us, & off we went again. Having trained one’s ears to listen one can’t get them not to for a time; & as it was after 6, carts were rolling out of stables, motor cars throbbing, & then prolonged ghostly whistlings which meant, I suppose, Belgian work people recalled to the munitions factory. At last in the distance I heard bugles; L. was by this time asleep, but the dutiful boy scouts came down our road & wakened him carefully; it struck me how sentimental the suggestion of the sound was, & how thousands of old ladies were offering up their thanksgivings at the sound, & connecting him (a boy scout with small angel wings) with some joyful vision—And then I went to sleep: but the servants sat up with their heads out of the window in the bitter cold—frost white on the roofs—until the bugle sounded, when they went back to the kitchen and sat there till breakfast. The logic of the proceeding escapes me.

Today we have printed, & discussed the raid, which, according to the Star I bought was the work of 25 Gothas, attacking in 5 squadrons & 2 were brought down. A perfectly still & fine winter’s day, so about J.30-tomorrow morning perhaps—

Friday 7 December

But there was no raid; & as the moon wanes, no doubt we are free for a month. Happily no apprentice today, which gives a sense of holiday. We have had to make it rather clear to Barbara that this job may not be followed by another. She refuses payment for last week. So there’s no fault to find with her. No one could be nicer; & yet she has the soul of the lake, not of the sea. Or is one too romantic & exacting in what one expects? Anyhow, nothing is more fascinating than a live person; always changing, resisting & yeilding against one’s forecast; this is true even of Barbara, not the most variable or gifted of her kind. Nessa was up about a governess (Mrs Brereton suggested in place of the faultfinding & man-hunting Miss E.) so I ended ray afternoon in one of the great soft chairs at Gordon Square. I like the sense of space & deep large pattern one gets there. I sat alone for 20 minutes, reading a book on Children & Sex. When Nessa came we had tea & it was discovered that Clive & Mary were in the house; & Norton came in, the same party as usual. As usual to my liking; so much alive, so full of information of the latest kind; real interest in every sort of art; & in people too. I rather expect L. to disagree with all this. I judge by the amount of animation of brain produced in myself, & sense of thoughts all liberated. Not that M.H. open her lips, but she has an air of mute sympathy. I like Norton too—all that brain hoarded in his head for the most exalted ends, which makes his criticism always impartial. Clive starts his topics—lavishing admiration & notice upon Nessa, which doesn’t make me jealous as once it did, when the swing of that pendulum carried so much of my fortune with it: at any rate of my comfort. Maynard says that Bonar Law has dished the Government; the country entirely with Lansdowne, & the Government unable to stick to its own declarations. This was from Lord Reading. It sometimes occurs to me that there’s not a single secret in politics; everything is to be guessed from the newspapers. Nessa had to go round to Rogers, & I walked with her, buying sausages & cheese for a supper party on the way. Roger is becoming one of the successes of the day as a painter of perfectly literal & very unpleasant portraits.

Today (Saturday) we walked to Twickenham, where Leonard took train for Staines. I found Marny when I got back. Its 6.30 & she has just gone; so that if I don’t cover the next 10 pages with family gossip & detail of all sorts its not for want of it. Let me put a little of it down, if I can remember—but it goes so fast, & turns to ashes without the atmosphere. But Florence Bishop, married to a naval Dr lives in a flat in Earls Court—gives you Tiptree jam for tea, & looks like a picture, & is very poor, owing to old Bishop’s failings; but her husband is an elderly man, & now takes charge of wounded soldiers in trains. And we haven’t had butter for a long time, & sometimes we can’t even get the nice kind of margarine, but I wont deal at Barkers, not after the evidence at that fire. Wright’s Coal shed burnt down behind us the other night—all that coal wasted, & once last winter we’d run out. It was a Saturday too, & I went from shop to shop begging even a scuttlefull, & who should I meet at Knightsbridge but Kitty Maxse? & she said O I’ll give you coal—why I’ve got 2 cellars full: & sure enough that very afternoon up she drove in a taxi with a sack full, & that saw us through, but I’ve not seen her since that day, so distinguished looking, & not a year older, though she must be 50. Well, I’m 35; & Toad 43—but one forgets peoples’ ages, & I’m sure I don’t feel old; & you look like 25—And Nessa as lovely as ever I suppose! (here followed the whole history of Nessa, Clive, Duncan, Adrian & ourselves).

Dear me, how we all move about—partly owing to the war to be sure; though I do see some of my old friends still, like Miss Harris, who paints, you know, & very well too, but she wont show anything because she only considers herself an amateur, & she’s very busy now with war work. And Hilda Lightbody, I see her; though she’s making papier maché splints all day—yes, a widow she is, her husband having been a great invalid—And I sometimes see Adeline, who lives with Hervey, at Hastings for the winter, not having meant to stay there, but they went for a change & there wasn’t any reason why they shouldn’t stay—near the sea, of course; & Millicent not very far off. Millicent’s boy died you know, & Virginia milks cows at Lord Rayleigh’s place in Essex. She prefers horses, but she couldn’t get horses, & she’s very fond of cows. Yes Millicent still lives at Hastings, though she doesn’t like it, but Vere does, because of the sea & they know a great many people, & Millicent got up a series of dances for young people last winter, though she didn’t feel like dancing I’m sure, & she keeps the musical Festival going, though she won’t do any war work; & Augusta always loved Kent, & now theyve got a house in Kent, & a little garden, & Bob works for a neighbour sometimes, & so they get along you know—all the children out in the world now. O its wicked how they grow up—Halford quite a big boy—with a poetic side, but very practical I’m glad to say, & Janet very like Madge; & I wish Madge would write. Perhaps she’d be happier then, though I don’t think Madge could ever be really happy, but its a wonderful piece of work, & I’m sure Will owes her a great deal. I dont think I’ve gossiped so much for years. And Cousin Mia dead, & Aunt Mary killed—yes. That was extremely sad, but better than a lingering illness I daresay! And Herbert in all the papers; but Lettice doesn’t like London at all, but Herbert does, & she goes back to Sheffield for change of air—& when the raids come, we go & sit with the Wales’ on the ground floor. But they ought to tell one about the Bugles. Why, when they first blew, I thought it might be the Germans themselves, & I went out onto the landing & met a lady, though it was 2, dressed for going out, & she told me—&c &c——

Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, & Wednesday; Wednesday being the 12th of December

A melancholy record—The truth is, when we’re not printing & therefore don’t have Barbara here, we do jobs in London, & get back late & I’m disinclined to get out pen & ink. On Sunday Lytton came to tea. I was alone, for L. went to Margaret. I enjoyed it very much. He is one of the most supple of our friends; I don’t mean passionate or masterful or original, but the person whose mind seems softest to impressions, least starched by any formality or impediment. There is his great gift of expression of course, never (to me) at its best in writing; but making him in some respects the most sympathetic & understanding friend to talk to. Moreover, he has become, or now shows it more fully, curiously gentle, sweet tempered, considerate; & if one adds his peculiar flavour of mind, his wit & infinite intelligence—not brain but intelligence—he is a figure not to be replaced by any other combination. Intimacy seems to me possible with him as with scarcely any one; for, besides tastes in common, I like & think I understand his feelings—even in their more capricious developments; for example in the matter of Carrington. He spoke of her, by the way, with a candour not flattering, though not at all malicious.

“That woman will dog me”—he remarked. “She won’t let me write, I daresay.”

“Ottoline was saying you would end by marrying her.”

“God! the mere notion is enough—One thing I know—I’ll never marry anyone—”

“But if she’s in love with you?”

“Well, then she must take her chance.”

“I believe I’m sometimes jealous—”

“Of her? thats inconceivable—”

“You like me better, dont you?”

He said he did; we laughed; remarked on our wish for an intimate correspondent; but how to overcome the difficulties? Should we attempt it? Perhaps.

He brought us his Gordon. Next day he was to take the book to Chatto & Windus.

Monday [20 December]

Today was a string of meetings for L. Out to lunch, to Philip, to another meeting & not back till 8.30; I pacing the room in some anxiety till I heard him. My afternoon was very nearly normal; to Mudies, tea in an A.B.C. reading a life of Gaudier Brzeska; home again; wet soft vaporous day.

Tuesday [11 December]

The infliction of our apprentice. Things on the whole went better; & L. & I slipped out for half an hour before tea, into the brownish red light of the wintry afternoon. The green gives a very good sample of the sky & bare trees, one or two old rooks nests in the upper twigs. Back to tea; & Perera came for private talk. I own that I sounded the very depths of boredom with Barbara. She gives out facts precisely as she received them—minute facts about governesses & houses. And no doubt of her own adequacy crosses her mind; all so nice, honest, sensible, how can there be a flaw? Indeed, one figures her nature as a flawless marble, impervious, unatmospheric. And the time passed; she missed her train; waited on for another—waited until 6.10; & we were to dine at 7—& my evening fretted away without sensation, save of one standing under the drip of a water spout. My excuse for such extravagance is that I had to go in to the Guild today. No speaker came, & we were clearing the table at 9 after a lot of letter reading & intermittent discussion when a private omen came true. The speaker arrived. A Mrs Moore from Kensal Rise: middle class; dressed in velvet; vulgar, fluent. Spoke on propaganda for 20 minutes; more words than brain, & indeed she couldn’t explain her sayings to the satisfaction of Mrs Langston, & was perturbed when I showed how much I knew. But I admired the way in which she got her steam up when we were all anxious to go. The women said it was a splendid speech; sentences that melt into each other impress them.

Wednesday [12 December]

This morning ruined by the tears & plaints of Lottie, who thinks her work too hard, & finally demanded higher wages, which she could easily get, & so could Nell. I lost my temper, & told her to get them then. Up came Nelly in a conciliatory mood regretting Lottie’s outburst; though pointing out the hardships of our printing-room, so untidy—work endless; had meant to ask a rise in February—everyone’s wages raised—Of course we had to pay extra for food, but then we’d got to—We were very amicable; no difficulty about money; but L.’s taunts seemed to me unpleasant—I charged her to find out the truth—if there is such a thing in the midst of that bluster—At last she went. Walked by the river having done a little printing.

Thursday 13 December

By careful arrangement I limited the reconciliation scene with Lottie to 15 minutes at eleven sharp. She sobbed; repented; took back everything she’d said; told me how her temper had led to constant rows at “Frys” as they call it; all a fabrication about over work, & the more people we had & the more mess we made the better she liked it. She begged me not to tell anyone; she kissed me & went off, like a chastened child, leaving me with a mixture of pity & (I suppose) self complacency. The poor have no chance; no manners or self control to protect themselves with; we have a monopoly of all the generous feelings—(I daresay this isn’t quite true; but there’s some meaning [in] it. Poverty degrades, as Gissing said). Barbara had a cold & didn’t come, to my relief certainly. But that’s inaccurate; she came after luncheon, & brought a letter from Nessa who invites her to be governess there for a month, pending Mrs Brereton. Barbara was so sensible, & matter of fact that I repented & certainly she treats us with the strictest honesty, making a serious undertaking of the printing (here the light went out) which is creditable, & one could depend upon her, I fancy, to keep the exact letter of her promise. She went off directly after tea to conduct one of those curious gatherings of Nick, Oliver, & Saxon & Carrington about their house in the country. The work of furnishing has fallen of course upon Carrington; but Barbara is a good second & keeps the accounts, which will end, I assured her, by absorbing all her money on things she’ll never be paid for.

Friday 14 December

Today we went to see Philip at Fishmongers Hall. Rather a strange place a few feet from London Bridge. A pompous hall, with a porter, a gigantic fire for that porter, a German gun; & within banisters draped with crimson folds of stuff, as if for a royal visit; Nelson’s flag in a glass case; Dick Whittington in plaster standing in an alcove; a branching staircase taking one to a great gallery now divided into cubicles. Two or three nurses sat sewing outside. We found Philip up; his chair by the open window, looking into the street, which was noisy, & just catching sight of the river. I saw a notice warning patients not to throw cigarette ends out, or they might catch inflammable bales upon the wharf. To me, Philip looked well; though there was that absentmindedness which one sees in Nick. I suppose to Philip these days pass in a dream from which he finds himself detached. I can imagine that he is puzzled why he doesn’t feel more. He still talks of “we” & “our” things. I thought he must look to going back again with something like hope. But he talked very easily & cheerfully—about horses & books & so on—Another man—a great burly cavalry officer was reading his book in a far corner; unused to reading books, I should think. Nurses seemed very kindly. A feeling of the uselessness of it all, breaking these people & mending them again, was in the air, I thought. We asked Philip to Asheham, when he can move.

Home to find Sidney [Waterlow] already in the chair by the fire. He was in very good feather, & rolled out the word “I” with a sort of tremor of pride; he has indeed negotiated treaties in Paris since we met. Being self conscious & diffident his triumphs give him enormous pleasure; there is the same tremor of half incredulous self approbation in his tone when he talks of his children. I laughed at him about our quarrel. He had thought it all over, so he said—as if it mattered; & was highly pleased by the removal of the cloud. Saxon came, very late, to dinner. I gave it him, & he told me how selfish Alix was—can’t pack her own boxes; waits for Carrington. Saxon attributes this to love; I believe its in imitation of the beloved. She has picked it up from James, sees it in him & thinks it stands for the consciousness of superiority, I believe. Sydney stayed the night; & Saxon stayed till eleven; & he only spoke 3 times; & then rather pedantically, in his old way, which he has rather dropped lately.

Saturday 15 December

A cold but sunny day. It seems long since we had a day to ourselves. No printing done. We took a walk in the old style through the Park, down the avenue & back by the river, which was flooding up fast, & cut us off, making us creep along a railing so as to reach dry land. The streets remind me of Cambridge streets. People walk down the middle. This is partly because of the queues waiting to buy at Liptons. One has some difficulty in keeping on the pavement, & the motor buses are always grazing people’s sides. Home & a large tea by ourselves. Masses of papers. Perera, of course, to consult one more; & he is still sitting with L. in his room.

Monday 17 December

Monday, as I think I’ve noted before, is our marketing day—but I’m forgetting Molly MacCarthy & Walter Lamb last night—The thing arose in this way. Wat offered us the loan of his Norfolk maps. Thinking it a little cool to borrow without invitation, we asked him to bring them. We then found ourselves faced with the unbearable prospect of unmitigated Walter. But who to get at the last moment? The Strachey household denuded owing to Tidmarsh; Squire engaged; at last the idea of Molly came to me, & Heaven granted this favour. I’m not sure that her deafness doesn’t lend her a kind of piquancy (like a stammer); she——

[Thursday 3 January 1918]

I forget who it was that came in at this moment; & I have excuse for forgetting, since it is now Thursday, 3rd Jan. 1918. & we’re just back from Asheham. I remember though that the last days were full of people. Walter & Molly as I began to relate—She has sent her novel to Chatto & Windus, & calls it The Band on the Pier, or Ring Fence. The last dull I think. W.L. spruce & a little suspicious when the Royal Family appeared, as it did; wouldn’t shoot at those rabbits again for my diversion. And then I can remember that we had Ka; who contemplates resignation; & then, the night after, Bob; with his pockets bulging with Georgian poetry, his talk all of books & prices asked for printing, & number of copies sold, in the midst of which Nelly burst in to say that the Take Cover had sounded. So we had our dinner partly in the cellar; Bob talking at such a rate that it was necessary to listen at the window for the guns, loud enough though they were. I remember him attached to a large plate of suet pudding in the basement, & L. sitting on a wooden box in the coal hole reading the paper & finding one of my red pens there. All clear sounded about 10: a bad raid, though, & Barbara & Saxon suffered more than we did at Hampstead.

After that—the very next night—we went to the 17 Club dinner; a great deal of eating by some 200 people at long tables. Waiters thudding swing doors imitated guns so successfully that various officials came round & warned one of a raid. Jos.[Wedgwood] made a speech. I noticed poor Marjorie listening with her eyes on her lap. She came up from Darlington, & was dressed, poor creature, in muslin picked out with red roses & cut low; though every one else was more or less in working clothes, & fur capes. I was caught in the net of Sylvia Whitham, who cross examined me about her husbands novels; & in despair of revealing my true opinion I pretended never to have read Wolfgang—Most suitably, of all our friends shes the one to have a bomb dropped next door, & to receive it without surprise. And she’s taking to literature, & begins by translating Flaubert—a remarkable instance of a person without gift of any kind, always pushing along in the wake of other more advanced people.

Next day we went to Asheham, & the journey was the worst in our record—5 hours; spent mostly outside Clapham Junction; fog, bitter cold; every move stopping short in a minute or two. Motored out, I remember, & found the roads under snow; but very pleasant coming into the drawing room, save that we were without milk.

One of the coldest & finest of Christmases. Rather to our relief, we spent it alone, Ray falling ill, Ka coming for week end, & Nessa’s children. There was the usual visit from Maynard & Clive; my usual failure to get to Charleston corresponding to Nessa’s failure to get to Asheham. I spent a night there, & enjoyed [?] myself, through the rather obtuse barrier of poor Bunny, who took to his bed at one point, without sympathy from Nessa, who had often put him to bed, she said, for no perceivable cause. Duncan came back from London, with gossip for us; chiefly about Alix & a party at the play, who broke the partition dropped cigarettes, & had to be asked to leave. But what I like most about Asheham is that I read books there; so divine it is, coming in from a walk to have tea by the fire & then read & read—say Othello—say anything. It doesn’t seem to matter what. But one’s faculties are so oddly clarified that the page detaches itself in its true meaning & lies as if illumined, before one’s eyes; seen whole & truly not in jerks & spasms as so often in London. And then the trees, spare & leafless; the brown of the plough, &, yesterday, downs mountainous through a mist, which isn’t palpable, for only dead detail vanishes & the live grows larger & larger, & fires can be seen burning through. Solitary sportsmen beat up duck & snipe on the marshes. Windows were almost always frozen in the morning, & each blade rough with frost. Partridges would come & sit in the field, lifeless little lumps they looked, half stiff with cold perhaps.

The diary habit has come to life at Charleston. Bunny sat up late on the Old Year’s night writing, & Duncan came back with a ledger, bought in Lambs Conduit Street. The sad thing is that we daren’t trust each other to read our books; they lie, like vast consciences, in our most secret drawers. Clive, by the way, enlivened Christmas by a small book of verse—the prose fantastically foppish, the verse very pretty & light, to my mind (by wh. I mean not altogether to L.’s mind). He can do his little Owl very efficiently—Anyhow, I prefer it to the last Georgian effort—bound in blue this year, & housing that ridiculous Squire.

So we come to an end of the year, & any attempt to sum it up is beyond me, or even to cast a final glance at the evening paper, with news from Russia, which has just come in and drawn L. to remark

“A very interesting state of things—”

“And what’s going to happen?”

“No human being can foretell that.”

The End

[]

1918

[Diary IV]
Hogarth House
Paradise Road
Richmond
January: 1918

Friday 4 January

There’s no reason after all why one should expect special events for the first page of a new book; still one does: & so I may count three facts of different importance; our first use of the 17 Club; talk of peace; & the breaking of my tortoiseshell spectacles. This talk of peace (after all the most important of the three) comes to the surface with a kind of tremor of hope once in 3 months; then subsides; then swells again. What it now amounts to, one doesn’t even like to guess, having a sort of superstition about guessing; at any rate, one can’t help feeling something moving; one may wake to find the covered murmur proclaimed in every newspaper. The 17 Club is a success, on the basis of one tea. We met Alix, settled in, already an habitué by the fire; together with a knot of very youthful revolutionaries, one officer, & two sallow democratic officials. The rooms are light, bear traces of Omega, & are less formal than usual. Before this, I did my usual round; Partridge & Coopers; walk through Lincolns Inn Fields to Mudies; L. passing his afternoon in Committees. Margaret has just rung up to consult him on certain peace maneuvres in which she figures. Talk with Alix about possible books she might write: “One’s wretched without work”—“Oh, perfectly wretched” she echoed, with a glance in the direction of James, I suppose. “No hope of writing well: I see things as they are.”

Saturday 5 January

We went to Hampton Court, for the first time since we skated there, so I believe. We walked across Bushey Park, & a troop of horses took the opportunity to run from one side to the other. The gilt statue was surrounded by ice, & the ice had an inch of water on it; I broke through with my umbrella.. The beds at Hampton Court are uniformly brown, save for one yellow & one pink flower, primula’s I think. There were sacks at intervals, which L. thought might be laid down for the gymnastic exercises of Mrs Creighton. We looked in at her windows. As usual we saw nothing but those great vellum folios, containing Italian History, so I suppose. We walked along a raised bank beneath trees to the river; & sat on one of the semi-circle of empty wooden seats. It was cold, but still. Then we took a tram to Kingston & had tea at Atkinsons, where one may have no more than a single bun. Everything is skimped now. Most of the butchers shops are shut; the only open shop was besieged. You can’t buy chocolates, or toffee; flowers cost so much that I have to pick leaves, instead. We have cards for most foods. The only abundant shop windows are the drapers. Other shops parade tins, or cardboard boxes, doubtless empty. (This is an attempt at the concise, historic style.) Suddenly one has come to notice the war everywhere. I suppose there must be some undisturbed pockets of luxury somewhere still—up in Northumbrian or Cornish farm houses perhaps; but the general table is pretty bare. Papers, however, flourish, & by spending 6d we are supplied with enough to light a weeks fires. A man called Richardson works out a highly complex mathematical method of voting in the trenches.

Sunday 6 January

An infernal wet day. I left L. at the station, he having to go to Hampstead to answer a list of questions for Margaret. Home to tea alone. Alix & Fredegond for supper. The talk, after flaunting round Clive, Barbara, Garsington &c. settled upon conscience: social duties, & Tolstoy. Gerald [Shove] read Tolstoy the other day, & determined to give up tobacco, but now argues that Tolstoy’s commands were for men of looser life than he, so that he may smoke cigarettes. He thinks seriously of starting a nursery garden after the war, & threatens to give up their capital.

“What’s the use of that? L. demanded. Thats the worst of all things to do. We dont want people to live on 30/ a week.”

“Psychologically it may be necessary if one is to abolish capitalism” I remarked.

“I dont agree.” said Alix. “Besides who would he give his capital to?”

“In the ideal state everyone would have £300 a year” L. went on.

“Please tell me some reason that I can remember to take back to Gerald” Fredegond pleaded.

I forget now what the reason was.

“He’s got an awful conscience, she continued. He ate a large Christmas dinner, & then he & his brother sent out for preserved fruit & when they had finished them they were miserable. “We’ve behaved like pigs! We’re brutes!” they cried. They were both miserable.” L. gave us a great many reasons why we should keep what we have, & do good work for nothing; I still feel, however, that my fire is too large for one person. I’m one of those who are hampered by the psychological hindrance of owning capital. Alix represented some sturdy & hardheaded economy, derived from Strachey’s. After this long argument, it was time for them to go.

Monday 7 January

To London today, L. with my Jack’s article to the Times, I to Spiller about my spectacles; & I must get a new pair at a cost of £2.2. After that we met at the London Library, & then to tea at the Club; where Alix almost plays hostess; & the woman still smokes her pipe in the corner. Lytton came in, & I finished my tea with him. He is bargaining with Chatto & Windus about his book.

“When I’m asked if I like Tidmarsh, I say the country suits me”, he said, rather cryptically.

His mild benignancy with the young ladies—Fredegond, Faith & Alix, very noticeable. I told him he wrote too much after the pattern of Macaulay.

“I see you didn’t really like Gordon” he said.

He was quite unmoved, contented, almost sleek. People going in & out all the time make it difficult to talk. Chief topic the approach of peace; save that the evening papers throw doubts upon it.

Tuesday 8 January

As a sign of the times we live in, I note that Fredegond who wants to spend some months in London is advised by her practical friends to live in a hotel. They say that she would have difficulty in getting food, even if she found a servant, or a room to live in. Consequently, she is taking rooms at the Thackeray Hotel.

Some fragments came to mind today which, having nothing to record, I may as well put down. How I went to a Registry Office for Nessa; & noticed that the woman had 6 or 7 pens on her table, tried one after another, found all save one unusable; nibs stuck to the holder with crusts of ink. One night last summer getting down from a bus, I saw a fish bag left on the seat, & gave it to the woman in front of me. She thanked me & said, with half a smirk, “That comes of me not being used to carrying a bag”. The bag was evidently the mark of a lower social scale. There were of course other fragments, which at hint of needing them dissolve in my mind. Its odd, considering their triviality, how these little scenes come up again & again at odd moments: are thought of, re-enacted, & disappear. Odd too how one thinks by help of pictures of surroundings. Yesterday I couldn’t remember whether I’d left a book in my room. And then I saw myself moving my spectacles, & remembered that I moved my spectacles in order to put the book down: sure enough there it was. I’d give a good deal to know something of psychology. That was one of the books I suggested that Alix should write: but “whats the good if one can’t do it really well?” To the Printers [McDermott] today, & find him calmly asserting that he really can’t send the Press on the 14th. Can’t find anyone to move it. This is cool as he took our £10 on the understanding we should have the press without fail. However, these chilly half animate overworked little creatures can’t be taken seriously. They don’t attach the same meaning to promises, even written & stamped promises, that we do. People badgering him with small jobs, he said, & hasn’t even the time to claim his money. For the first time for weeks or months I spent a whole afternoon shopping. Coppers accumulate in my purse, parcels hang from every finger; shop people cross; shops crowded: in fact a most disagreeable duty, when done in a mass.

Wednesday 9 January

The 17 Club is something of a lure; certainly promises better conditions for tea than a shop. So, having gone for my spectacles, I went to Gerrard Street. Found Fredegond & Faith there, also a large semi-circle of Cambridge youths; including a young man with a flop of hair who had written a play, which he had with him; the pipe-smoking girl, & one or two others. I was amused at the repetition of certain old scenes from my own past—the obvious excitement, & sense of being the latest & best (though not outwardly the most lovely) of God’s works, of having things to say for the first time in history; there was all this; & the young men so wonderful in the eyes of the young women, & young women so desirable in the eyes of the young men, though this was not perceptible to me sitting elderly upon my sofa—This sort of talk—

“Ah, but have you read his play? & do you approve?”

“Most decidedly I do.”

“And you like the handling.”

“Oh immensely!”

Then a second, less favoured young woman, leans forward & says,

“But may I see it?”

“Certainly” says the youth, & produces it from a despatch box, to the girl’s delight.

“I represent the public. Edith’s so unconventional.”

However, then I was summoned to have my tea at the far end of the room; & Lytton came in, carrying Lord Morley, whom he’s reviewing for L. We tried still to overhear young Cambridge, & L⁠[ytton]. finally decamped, on my daring him, to that party, now grown even larger by the addition of several young men with large foreheads, hair combed back, in hiding from the police.

I then had some private talk with Faith. According to her Nick is getting a great deal of pain from the Saxon Barbara Nick combination. His claims are disregarded; Barbara prefers Saxon; & seems to be ashamed of the unintellectuality of Nick. She wont take him to see her Bloomsbury friends. Bloomsbury, I think, will have one more corpse to its credit; for poor B.’s attainments aren’t such as to give her a very secure footing there; & to my thinking a marriage with Nick offers more solid value than a cold blooded & only semi-real attachment with Saxon. I explained my view, with which both Faith & Fredegond agreed. I promised kindness; in case kindness persuades Barbara that there’s more in N. than she sees. Her snobbishness is irritating though natural. In the street my grey knickers came off. So it happened once to Emmy Fisher, & she wrapped a starving dog in them. Fredegond walked with me to Charing Cross. I feel like her in some fundamental way.

Thursday 10 January

Our pipes burst yesterday in the sudden thaw. From sharp frost we changed in an hour or two to mildness. L⁠[ottie]. & N⁠[elly]. dealt with this sensibly, but we are without baths. Set up in the afternoon, then to the printers. L. did not lose his temper; little MacDermott asserts that there was a verbal understanding that he need only deliver the press if his was put up. So mild, pertinacious, & muddle headed that we made no impression. The truth is he takes us for amateurs, who needn’t be treated seriously. We are to think things over.

Friday 11 January

Another sedentary day, which must however be entered for the sake of recording that the Lords have passed the Suffrage Bill. I dont feel much more important—perhaps slightly so. Its like a knighthood; might be useful to impress people one despises. But there are other aspects of it naturally. L. to lunch with Ka & a Serbian; I set up, & now find it easily possible to finish a page in an afternoon. L. back, & we took a round by the river, & so home to tea, a great many books. (Life of Keats at last).

Saturday 12 January

Now that printing has set in (we’re at page 18) there isn’t much to write down, though the day seems as well filled as a picture puzzle with succeeding events. We are still without baths, & this lends some severity to other restrictions which we have to suffer. Today, we can only get one small joint of beef, which is to last a week. There is no fat to be had; no margarine, no nutter. We are reduced to 1 lb of butter a week; eggs are 5d each, a chicken anything from 10/ to 15/. Mrs Langston made Sunday dinner last week off sausages & bread & dripping—“Never had such a Sunday dinner for 5 & 20 years.”

After printing we allow ourselves a short walk, & saw a vision of Tinker,—all but the nose accurate; but each dog has an unmistakable impression. The hope of peace all broken up again; policies once more a running in every direction, so far as one can tell.

Monday 14 January

We had Saxon to dinner on Saturday. He was at his lowest ebb. It was impossible to talk to him, but I guessed that he grieves over the inevitable frailty of mankind: his dream of love & friendship triumphing over jealousy has, I expect, been shattered by the latest developments: & he finds himself in a position odious to so scrupulous & sensitive a man as he is. Still, the effects aren’t enlivening for his friends. Even his gestures are weariful. He has been nowhere seen no one. I remember this fragment:

“Have you seen anyone Saxon?”

“I’ve finished the third volume of the Anthology.” He brought me two books of selections from Italian literature. He wrote my name in them with extreme dexterity & neatness. Played chess with Leonard, was beaten which didn’t add to his spirits, & left burdened with the mysteries of this unintelligible world.

On Sunday, Clive came to tea; he hadn’t long settled in when the Shoves arrived; & we spent an hour or two in gossip. When one sees Clive fairly often, his devices for keeping up to the mark in the way of success & brilliance become rather obvious. We were all talking of the 17 Club: upon which he rapped out “I was among the haughty people who wouldn’t join when they were asked, now of course I find its the thing to do, & I’ve had to climb down” the truth being that he wished to join & was blackballed by L. & others. Such would be the truth of many of his stories I daresay, if one knew. But one doesn’t know; the results are quite agreeable, however produced. And as I persuaded him to lend me his typewriter for Asheham, I’ve no reason to be censorious. His habits are like those of some faded beauty; a touch of rouge, a lock of yellow hair, lips crimsoned. We talked chiefly about the hypnotism exerted by Bloomsbury over the younger generation. Some merriment over Clive’s picture of “the complete schoolmaster” at Tidmarsh. F. and G. had gone there, & after tea master & pupil withdrew, but in she [Carrington] came to fetch a volume of Lord Macaulay; & later she asked to be enlightened about some anecdote of Rousseau. “That you’ll know when you’re older, my dear” said Lytton paternally. She took F. aside & confided to her some difficulty about Barbara & Nick. “Nick, she said, is reading hard”, as though there might be hope for him in that. They’re all “reading hard”. Saxon asked Maynard the other day whether he thought Petronius suitable reading for a young lady, who liked Apuleius. But the young ladies dont like Apuleius—when they’re alone. Its matter for a comedy. Indeed I see the plots of many comedies brewing just now among our friends. There’s the comedy of Alix & Bunny; of James & Anonyma; & the tragi-comedy of the two cockatoos. After Clive went, F. & G. stayed to dinner, & were more at their ease. F. told us of A.’s wedding night; undertaken by her from a dutiful wish to gain experience, though the experience included so much autobiography on B.’s part, & I’ve no doubt, eulogies of his father, & peans of the lesser literary lights of the day, that I think she bought it dear. But “on the whole I’m feeling better: partly owing to Bunny”. F. has a great turn for mimicry. She mimicked Karin breaking in late at night & asking “Have you a bite for Carry?” & proceeding to ransack their larder. Karin slapping her thigh & exclaiming “We’ll have a jaunt; we’ll crack a joke”; & also Karin bursting into tears one night from a sense that Maynard &c didn’t want to see her. In fact the dominion that “Bloomsbury” exercises over the sane & the insane alike seems to be sufficient to turn the brains of the most robust. Happily, I’m “Bloomsbury” myself, & thus immune; but I’m not altogether ignorant of what they mean. & its a hypnotism very difficult to shake off, because there’s some foundation for it. Oddly, though, Maynard seems to be the chief fount of the magic spirit. Talk about capital with Gerald: he says he means to part with his, but I guess that he always has some scruple to play with as an intellectual exercise.

Friday 18 January

Another skip, partly due to my writing a long letter to Nessa, which drained up some of the things I should have said here. But I like this better than letter writing. Perhaps one should write novels for the 2 of us only. I can remember various doings however: Toynbees & Kot. to dinner on Tuesday [15 January]; & that afternoon Lady Strachey read to us—to me for the most part, as L. was late. She read Ben Jonson’s masques. They are short, & in between she broke off to talk a little, so that it was lighter than before, & I enjoyed it. She told me how she used to read everything at her school; & can remember the books because places are associated with them. At the age of 18 her father gave her leave to read Tom Jones (I think) on condition she never said she’d read it. Told us that Lytton’s failure to get a fellowship had been one of the disappointments of her life “one of the many”. “Well, this next book won’t be a disappointment”, I said. But she thought the Arnolds would object. Her pride in Lytton & desire to see him a noted literary character very evident. I presumed on this that she was well disposed about Tidmarsh: but as she froze up, & pretended not to know where it was, I suppose there’s a family row—Indeed, its easy to see that when fronted by the present she’s not at her best; conventional, very nervous, thinks they’re ruined; once get her to the past she has no impediments of the sort, & told stories of beautiful dead Patties & Dalrymples with the greatest animation: how old Pattle shot out of his tank, & thereby killed his wife, who thought him come to life again: how the sailors drank him dry on the voyage to England; how “Dal” was charming; though not a good man to marry; how Dr Jackson was so handsome & kind—in fact she seems to divide her life into the part of the exciting romantic illuminated play; & the rest of it is merely trudging along the prosaic streets, with nothing to look forward to. Her eyes collapsed; her teeth gone; deaf; but talk of the past or of literature—& it all lights up again. Literature too must be of the past though. She read us a poem called The Old Way, of a swashing, patriotic kind, & exclaimed how fine it was, & how, as long as we had Hopwood for a poet we needn’t complain. Her patriotism has survived everything else. Patriotism & family feeling, & sights she saw long ago—as for example “You don’t remember I suppose meeting me once on a Bus, when you were 10 or 11? You & Vanessa were with your mother.” She has the family gift of fantasy. She ran out to get two little lozenge boxes which she has covered in scraps of coloured paper, preserved from the catalogues of drapers shops. She mayn’t read much, or write, & plays patience by herself—I suppose she ruminates over her past. According to her it was a splendid time to live in. For one thing, she remembers India before the Mutiny. “Splendid men they were, the Company servants. Your Prinsep relations among the finest. Fancy my horror when I went to see the Delhi pictures the other day, & found they’d called the Prinsep Pier the Princes Pier!” But talk of womens votes doesn’t move her much.

From this ancient world we came back to one younger, as far as years go, than our own. But the Toynbees aren’t spiritually very young: though surprisingly of our way of thinking (which one takes to be young & advanced still!) as to politics. I rashly took this for granted; & Arnold outdid me in anti-nationalism, anti-patriotism, & anti-militarism. At intervals Kot delivered a formal address upon Russia in broken English. There’s a good deal to be said for Kot. He has some likeness to the Russians of literature. He will begin to explain his soul without preface. He explained Katherine [Mansfield]’s soul, not at all to her credit. Her lies & poses have proved too much for him, nor does he find more than a slight gift for writing in her. I dont know that this last pleases me however, though it sounds as if I wrote it down for that reason. He is individual in his view of politics, thinks Russia too little civilised to profit by revolution, but here in England its bound to come with immense benefit because we’ve carpets & gas in our poorest houses. Russia scarcely interests him; he never means to go back; prophesies civil war in the spring, & no advantage won by it. In 1905 they were burning houses & stabbing nobles too. Rosalind has merit to look at certainly. I like her better than Arnold, who improves though, & is evidently harmless, & much in his element when discussing Oxford. He hadn’t much good to say of it; they were both sick of it, & will never go back, nor does he think that young men will ever be found to live there again, save as undergraduates. He knew the aristocratic heroes who are now all killed & celebrated—Grenfells, Lister, Shaw Steuart, Asquith, & loathed them; for one reason they must have thought him a pale blooded little animal. But he described their rows & their insolence & their quick snapping brains, always winning scholarships, & bullying & bringing bath chairs full of rats into Chapel—& admitting no one to their set, so that in the end they were almost abolished by the Colonials, who hated them back. It reads much like a Mrs Ward novel.

Wednesday, 16th, I went to the Library, where I met L. who had been on his deputation to the Colonial Office, which was ill-treated by the Secretary; & then to the Club, where we met Alix of course & Fredegond. These two were making painful efforts to set up house together; but neither could do anything decisive, though it was clear that Alix wished to come to terms, as much as she can wish anything. She had been down to Sidmouth, where her Aunt lies paralysed & doomed soon to die. Her eyelid just quivers, & one side of her lip moves; but in medical opinion she neither thinks nor feels. This had not made Alix either gloomier or less gloomy, though I believe she feels it beneath her gentlemanly good sense. As I left, F. beckoned & begged me to decide for her whether she should tell Alix how Gerald wished F. not to share with her, or prevaricate. I always say that people with short hair must be told the truth. I hear this (Saturday) morning that they have an offer of Amber’s house, which they should take, I think, in spite of Gerald.

On Thursday & Friday & Saturday we worked away at printing, so as to have 8 pages set up to print at McDermotts. Unvarying cold & gloom, which turns now to rain, now to snow. This is the Hell of the year. We seem to mark time in the mud. Wright dined with us on Thursday night—a kindly plausible but long winded man, leaning on L. for support at every point, & giving up his views when they conflicted. They went to see Rowntree together. I have my speculations, but can’t go into them now.

Monday 21 January

We had Nick to ‘look at’ on Saturday night; Barbara came too. He’s nothing very much to look at, certainly; yet so unpretending that what he has to show is satisfactory. Besides he has a pleasant Irish voice, & a quiet very simple manner which make him very tolerable in the house. I rather think that Barbara watched to see what we made of him. He talked his own shop for the most part. Lewis guns, & their mechanism. There are food riots & strikes at Woolwich, & the guards have notice to march there at any moment, & fire on the people, which their own Woolwich regiments would refuse to do. He takes things a little seriously. Next morning we had a long discourse about Irish character. He admires Synge: says that he’s heard his own men talk exactly as Synge makes them talk. They lie on the ground talking, & wont play games. They are deeply religious (the root of all evil in Ireland, he says) & die looking happy if the priest is with them, not otherwise. Their mothers constantly write to know if a son has had a grand funeral, if he has a cross over him; this is their great source of comfort. I suppose the soft, serious, rather plaintive disposition at which one guesses in Nick is Irish; & on top, but not at all offensive, there are signs of his deep admiration for the great Bloomsbury group, & culture, & problems. For instance, he deplores the gulf between what he calls the Quaker view, & the artists view; & he says the Quaker view will prevail with the young after the war. He quotes books seriously. However he went off to Hampstead; & L. went, Heaven knows what made him unless it was chess, to Gipsy Hill to lunch with the Waterlows. Lytton came to tea; stayed to dinner, & about 10 o’clock we both had that feeling of parched lips & used up vivacity which comes from hours of talk. But Lytton was most easy & agreeable. Among other things he gave us an amazing account of the British Sex Society which meets at Hampstead. The sound would suggest a third variety of human being, & it seems that the audience had that appearance. Notwithstanding, they were surprisingly frank; & 50 people of both sexes & various ages discussed without shame such questions as the deformity of Dean Swift’s penis: whether cats use the w.c.; self abuse; incest—Incest between parent & child when they are both unconscious of it, was their main theme, derived from Freud. I think of becoming a member. It’s unfortunate that civilisation always lights up the dwarfs, cripples, & sexless people first. And Hampstead alone provides them. Lytton at different points exclaimed Penis: his contribution to the openness of the debate. We also discussed the future of the world; how we should like professions to exist no longer; Keats, old age, politics, Bloomsbury hypnotism—a great many subjects. L. beat Sydney by his craft. They are leaving Gipsy Hill.

Today, Monday, I went to Harrison’s to have a broken tooth mended; L. to Staines—Philip is back with his wound once more broken out, owing to lack of care at Fowey.

Here I was interrupted on the verge of a description of London at the meeting of sun set & moon rise. I drove on top of a Bus from Oxford St. to Victoria station, & observed how the passengers were watching the spectacle: the same sense of interest & mute attention shown as in the dress circle before some pageant. A Spring night; blue sky with a smoke mist over the houses. The shops were still lit; but not the lamps, so that there were bars of light all down the streets; & in Bond Street I was at a loss to account for a great chandelier of light at the end of the street; but it proved to be several shop windows jutting out into the road, with lights on different tiers. Then at Hyde Park Corner the search light rays out, across the blue; part of a pageant on a stage where all has been wonderfully muted down. The gentleness of the scene was what impressed me; a twilight view of London. Houses very large & looking stately. Now & then someone, as the moon came into view, remarked upon the chance for an air raid. We escaped though, a cloud rising towards night.

Wednesday 23 January

I see I’ve forgotten yesterday; but it was uneventful. L. went up to a meeting, Barbara was left in control of the Press, & I took a walk by myself. I went along the river to Marble Hill. I must retract what I said about the Hell of the year. We have glimpses of Heaven. So mild that the landing window is open, & I sat by the river watching a boat launched, & half expected to see buds on the willows. River very high, swift & yellow, testifying to the floods higher up. They say its been raining heavily; I daresay it has, but such is the civilisation of life in London that I really dont know. What with fires, electric light, underground railways & umbrellas, how can one take notice of the weather. But we look out about bed time & notice the moon. Very clear cut & polished & almost full till 9 or so, & then, much as if God did turn over in his sleep & press a button, down comes a curtain of cloud, & we yawn & sleep sound. Last night, after giving B. her tea, which wastes the chief delight of the day, though poor woman she can’t be better behaved, & if she were gifted no doubt one would hate her actively, we dined early & had the Guild. Mr Adams [unidentified] spoke. The level is certainly not a high one. Even when they know their subject, as he did, they dont know it in such a way as to to make it plain to the uneducated. I doubt whether more than 3 people in the room knew that he was talking of the Co-ops. & politics. He began in the middle. He read bald phrases from Congress resolutions. He could just pronounce such a word as “autonomous”, but I don’t suppose anyone understood it. As usual, L. & I were the only people to speak, save Mrs Langston; as usual it was only when talk drifted near food that one of the women broke silence. She wanted a bread shop. They all got bread late in the day: for a time they all spoke at once—stories of their own ill treatment & of their neighbours. Oddly phlegmatic these women for the most part; with a passive sort of pleasure in sitting there & watching like so many pale grey sea anemones stuck to their rocks. Still, the children, the housework—excuses enough if one troubled to look.

Talking of sea anemones reminds me that we’re in treaty with D. H. Lawrence for his house at Zennor. Its very distant & improbable at present though sufficiently tempting to make me think of that sea & those cliffs several times a day.

Today, Wednesday, B. didn’t come, & we printed. L. did the most of it; & I made two little excursions into Richmond, one to discover the right way of spelling Mynah; the other to buy a new battery, price 1/3. Two of mine have perished during the lifetime of L’s. methusaleh: the wicked old wretch still burns like a spark from a star. I think its wise to have mine in readiness for the raid, though three tradespeople of Richmond know for a certain that there will never be another. The bakers windows now provide almost nothing but little plates of dull biscuits; sections of plain cake; & little buns without any plums. If you see a plum, it is invariably a decoy plum; there are no others. This transformation scene has been stealing on imperceptibly; last year were we still allowed iced cakes? Its unthinkable!

Thursday 24 January

The last day of being 35. One trembles to write the years that come after it: all tinged with the shadow of 40. Another spring day; I do without a fire in the morning. The only drawback is the loss of a fire, & that sense of being in a cave of comfort, with wet & dark outside. Outside its a pale grey. I went to the [London] Library to get a handful of stories on the supernatural; met Sir Henry Newbolt, a slim greyheaded weasel, but we didn’t know each other; then I beat up & down Charing Cross Rd. asking for Keats’ Letters, but they were not to be had anywhere. So to the Club, where I found Lytton by himself, & not feeling inclined for talk we read our papers near together. Fredegond came in; but after laughing a little at her telephone message, I went. She & Alix & Carrington getting together decided that I criticised them, wouldn’t stand it, rang me up, demanded a retraction, which I would only give if they put their complaints in writing: I’m afraid they wont do this. They say I depress them, & the only explanation is that I’m a Saddhist. This is the first turn of the worm. Barbara, however, lets all criticism run off her without a trace. L. printed 4 pages off at the printers today, & only got back at 6 an unsatisfactory job, owing to the incompetence of the printer.

Friday 25 January

My Birthday. L. slid a fine cow’s horn knife into my hand this morning. Nelly has knitted me a pair of red socks which tie round the ankle, & thus just suit my state in the morning. Another event kept me recumbent. Barbara came, & together we “dissed” 4 pages, & L. printed off the second 4 at the printers—altogether a fine days work. At this rate Katherine’s story will be done in 5 weeks. We rather think of doing a little book of woodcuts, either after this book or at the same time, on our small press. Our dinner tonight was a sacrifice to duty on a fine scale; never were we more ready for an evening alone; books to read; a sense of a great deal of talk already discharged this week; but rather before 7.30 came Clara [Woolf] & the Whithams, whom we had asked with a view to killing each other off without more waste than was inevitable. Whitham’s elaborately literary get up is a fair index of his mind. He is what the self-taught working man thinks genius should be; & yet so unassuming & homely that its more amusing than repulsive. His passion for writing is the passion of the amateur—or rather of the person who’s got it up from a text book. Seeing Cannan’s new novel he said “Ah, Cannan, yes—he’s very weak in construction isn’t he?” And so with all the rest. He told me his books had a way of “screaming”, & with great enthusiasm, after asking the fate of my fiction which is a point of honour in professional circles, he ran over all the novels he’s got ready or half ready, or only in want of “phrasing”—which process he applies at the end. He begins with a synopsis, which takes him 3 months: but I didn’t listen to the whole story. They withdraw soon to Devonshire, where directly the war ends (but even the war hasn’t prevented him from adding a new book to the list) he is going to work hard. Writing all the morning, reading & walking the rest of the day. And so we may hope for some 20 Whithams during the next five years or so. When he had told us all this, he went on about spiritualism: their landlord being a fat pale solicitor of 50, who lies on a sofa all day down in Devonshire communing with spirits, & feeding upon bread & margarine. Whitham had dabbled in mysticism, & had made tables walz & heard phantom raps & believed it all, but was too much afraid of the results upon his character to go in for it seriously. I thought this showed weakness, and I expect he hasn’t a good head on his shoulders, as his talk of novel writing makes one perceive. Sylvia sat marking time, & much pleased with the good impression she thought him to make; & in her precise way acknowledged the most revolutionary principles so that they seemed the gossip of a good housekeeper about the price of bacon. Clara’s silence shows I think her subservient position in the family; a person who can never make herself felt—unhappy & comfortless always, I expect. She stayed the night.

Today (Saturday) we went to Kew. Snowdrops, dwarf cyclamen, some miniature rhododendrons out; also the points of some squills or crocuses coming through the grass & dead leaves.

Sunday 27 January

As we were going out we ran flap/slap into Desmond bearing round the corner in an impetuous way. This knocked the bottom from our hope of a solitary evening, but as mercifully as possible. We took a turn in the Old Deer Park. He seemed depressed; lines drawn upon his forehead; he sighs oh dear! oh dear! at intervals, thinking about the war or private difficulties, I suppose. Indeed I thought it unpleasant how one has to steer past certain questions with him: when’s your book coming out, has Molly’s novel been taken, are you writing &c—I divine that the answers depress him acutely in the early morning. We gave him tea, & discussed the development of psychology since Shakespeare’s day. L. denied this; I asserted it. Desmond thought Othello & Desdemona very simple; but thought we were tolerably represented in fiction. I find myself altogether unmentioned there. Question whether one should write quick events in short scenes, whether fiction should be like life: whether Thackeray has profundity. Desmond has read some of the Newcomes lately: finds no depth, but a charming rippling conventional picturesqueness. So on to Bob [Trevelyan]’s poetry: “a good commonplace poet”, said Desmond—not the kind to bring up discoveries from his own entrails; looks upon the everyday world & finds the right phrase: classical—& therefore enduring—But I don’t follow this. He brought Enid Bagnold in his pocket, & now, I’m sure thinks he’s reviewed her himself. I’m not going to, after a glance at her mind. She led him to describe a Roumanian Prince, whose voice, he said, was the loveliest in London. He rang him up (to account for not coming punctually for dinner) & I listened, & heard a soft hesitating voice stumbling over long words, rather romantic down the telephone. He went off at last, having wrought himself into a state of contentment & garrulity, so that he would have stayed & given the 4th Act of the Irenaid had he been able, & would have been able, had we pressed.

Monday 28 January

On Monday I went to have my tooth finished, winding up for tea at the Club, which becomes as Goldie said, “quite a family party.” You come in to find half a dozen pairs of legs radiating from chairs towards the fire. You hear, or I heard, “its a case of revolution or evolution” & then, if you’ve heard enough, you seek the Manchester Guardian, evade Sylvia Whitham, & hide yourself for precisely 10 seconds. Fredegond, with apologies breaks through the barrier. “But they’re so fearfully dull, & I must talk something that isn’t politics.” That something, so far as I remember (its Saturday now) was Ottoline, Alix, poetry, love, until Bob, who had been jerking his head towards us could stand it no longer, but towered over us, flapping an elongated proof sheet, & wishing to know if we were talking secrets. “No such luck” I said, so he settled down, with his usual bagman’s assortment of literary gossip. First he said how Clive proposes to buy up The Egoist & start a Bloomsbury review; & then what did we think of Waley, & so on & so on, censorious, scandal loving, but innocent & indefatigable as ever. Home I went, & there was a raid of course. The night made it inevitable. From 8 to 1.15 we roamed about, between coal hole kitchen bedroom & drawing room. I dont know how much is fear, how much boredom; but the result is uncomfortable, most of all, I believe, because one must talk bold & jocular small talk for 4 hours with the servants to ward off hysteria. Next morning,

Tuesday 29 January

the after effects of the raid were swept aside by Barbara.

“Virginia, I shan’t come on Friday because I’m going to be married.”

“You’re going to marry—?”

“Yes, Nick.”

“And Saxon?”

“Saxon doesn’t mind. Nothing’s to be changed. We’re all agreed.”

These are the terms. I dont myself think that she wishes to be married; but has convinced herself that she should. Moreover, the horror of Nick’s return in a month keeps her graver than otherwise. She showed no wish to be congratulated or in any way fussed over. She stayed & printed as usual. And, expecting a raid, we asked her to sleep. This time it began at 9.10: the warning at least. It was far louder this time. An aeroplane went over the house about 11.30. Soon after, the guns were so near that I didn’t like to fetch a pair of shoes left in the bedroom. We had arranged mattresses in the kitchen & after the first noise slackened we lay all together, L. on the kitchen table, like a picture of slum life. One thud came very near; but in an hour we had the bugles, & went up to bed. The thud, wh. L. distinguished from the rest, came from the explosion of bombs at Kew. Nine people, I think killed. Servants became plaintive, & Lottie began talking of the effect upon her head; they hint that we ought to leave London.

Wednesday 30 January

Up to a concert & tea with Ottoline. She is perched in the smallest bedroom of a Bloomsbury hotel, moulting, depressed, untidy, overdressed. Not much talk of interest to me, though friendly & not so overpowering in certain directions as usual.

Thursday 31 January

A deep fog all day. We both set type. Dipping out to buy a bun for tea was as much of that air as we wanted. I remembered how glad we were, first of the fog, second of being alone, for Barbara slept at Hampstead.

Friday 1 February

A day of fog in patches. Last night the worst fog they say for 30 years, & old gents, who escaped the raid walked in numbers over the edge of platforms & were crushed. A cook stepped into the Thames; people walked by rapping our railings to keep the road. L. went to London & coming home at 10.30, reported a starry night & clear afternoon, the fog deep once more when night fell here.

Saturday 2 February

The first walk we’ve had for ever so long. Damp, mild vaporous day. Funeral bells tolling as we went out, & marriage as we came in. The streets lined with people waiting their meat. Aeroplanes droning invisible. Our usual evening, alone happily, knee deep in papers.

Sunday 3 February

Sunday has become as it used to be in Hyde Pk. Gate the social day. The sociability began early for L. at least, Riddell the printer [unidentified] coming, as we hoped to offer a press, but as we discovered only to say that presses aren’t to be had. A female friend was with him. I listened behind the bathroom door. We found Goldie when we came in from our walk; & then Pippa came; curiously untidy, as all Strachey women become at the least provocation. Without a certain degree of good looks it isn’t worth being vain—thats their reasoning, I always suppose. The talk was hampered by the suspicion that she was a jingo: & secondly an older fashioned type then we’re used to. She has the disconcerting though worthy habit of remaining quite silent when she disagrees. She disagreed with me when I said I thought cooperative housekeeping (implying beds) was an improvement on the old style. Goldie shot his direct, well pointed arrows; my only criticism in his case is the feeling which his method produces of being a method. They dig for views too cleverly, these elderly Dons—Still—still—Pippa has faded curiously; looks older, & more worn. She spoke of old days of parties, H. B. Smith, George Duckworth, Jack Hills & Christmases at Corby. She thinks that still the way to live; those people so “civilised” compared with our cropheads. But now she has no time for society; does suffrage, which will turn now into a campaign for equality, by day & night. “Mercifully, she said, there are people like you who keep out of it. Its most important that there should be people like you. That is so long as you’ve got or earned economic independence. Thats essential. No, I’m not clever. I’ve always cared more for people than for ideas—& now I must go. I’ve got work to do. I mustn’t be lured into sloth here.” So she went. It struck me that age consists not in having a different point of view, but in having the same point of view, faded. Goldie shows this too. An evening alone.

Monday 4 February

Up to the Times with a Coleridge article; & once more I lost myself, owing partly to the multiplicity of Water Lanes. Met L. at the Club, where people for once had agreed to silence, & solitary reading of books, so we were left to ourselves. We have started a bottle of saccharine, & so save our sugar.

Tuesday 5 February

Karin came to give her lecture. She arrived at tea time. I can’t help being reminded by her of one of our lost dogs—Tinker most of all. She fairly races round a room, snuffs the corners of the chairs & tables, wags her tail as hard as she can, & snatches at any scrap of talk as if she were sharp set; & she eats a great deal of food too, like a dog. This extreme energy may be connected with deafness. She has become a Bolshevik. She has offered her services to the Labour party, & hopes they’ll send her up & down England, organising constituencies, since she’s tired of reading & writing—never did much like it, & now scents a scrimmage & wants to be in the thick of it. Socialism is nibbling at our friends in a curious way. She & Adrian have scruples about the size of their income, & wish to earn money, partly because half their income depends on Mrs B. She gave her paper on League of Nations well, though speaking too quick. The difference that education makes is very marked though. I think they took her points. I was surprised to hear that she was much relieved when it was done. She stayed the night, & the next morning, which with a fitness of simile now to be explained, costs me a tooth to lose. Moreover, she sits over the fire, & I have to shout. But I see that Adrian must find her energy, her not fastidious or critical but generous & warm blooded mind, her honesty & stability a great standby—

Saturday 2 March

What is the use of finishing a sentence left unfinished a month ago? Here we are; evening; I came back from Asheham, or rather Charleston, an hour ago. After Karin went that Wednesday, rather a monotonous time began for me. Influenza began on the Friday; I was kept in bed 8 days; on the next Tuesday [19 February] we went to Asheham. My chief complaint is that I was divorced from my pen; a whole current of life cut off—Secondly I saw no one; for 5 days I wasn’t in a state for reading; but I did finally read Morley & other books; but reading when done to kill time has a kind of drudgy look in it. I was asked to write a book in a series—Makers of the 19th Century; but after deliberation refused, nor did it at any moment seem possible. But I write this down partly to give an official look to this diary, & partly because it marks a middle aged condition. Undoubtedly the country develops the spiritual side of life. One day I sat in the garden reading Shakespeare; I remember the ecstasy: every other day at least we had to walk to Southease for milk; we were only allowed one quart a day—7d a quart. The garden shows great promise. L. dug up the large bed, & transferred plants from the round middle bed to our path bed. The buds visible on the trees; sheep in the hurdles on the side of the down. For 9 of our 10 days we saw no one; my letters even failed fairly completely; but the days melted into each other like snowballs roasting in the sun. On Thursday [28 February] Nessa came for the night, & I went back with her to Charleston for Friday night, L. taking the servants up to town. Henry Moss had just arrived. We all met for dinner, for to my relief N. & I had tea alone in the drawing room. Moss & Mrs Brereton give off a fairly strong atmosphere of the paid & paying guest kind which is not pleasant. Mrs B. an elderly upright firm unflinching woman, whose integrity has been her chief capital in life. She reminded me strongly of Nurse Reid: she has the professional competence & composure. Moss one might meet—practically anywhere. He is a pale insignificant young man, either very shy or very much out of his element. We carried on as best we could, entirely unhelped by him, & though Mrs B. spoke from a sense of duty, she allowed nothing to blossom in her presence, but dealt with each remark literally & sensibly. Ann, the daughter, is much more charming than one might expect—though no doubt marriage trials & poverty have flattened out Mrs B’s charm prematurely. She calls H. Moss her “adopted son”, which sanctions their withdrawal after dinner to his bed sitting room, where they are supposed to make up stories for the Saturday Westminster. On Saturday morning Nessa, Duncan & I sat in the studio & gossiped. Part of the time we discussed art. This is what I like doing best with them. They say that there’s no one worth considering as a painter in England today—no one like K.M. or Forster even with whom its worth discussing one’s business. In France this is reversed. Nessa showed me Saxon’s letters. He has made her his confidante. He has been very unhappy; & made out his moments of exaltation & depression with his usual minuteness. In one he said that it was curious no longer to care for anything, death being as desirable as life. And then details about his health. We discussed also the peril of society, which has to some extent washed off poor old Desmond’s bloom, & would submerge Maynard, if he were an artist. I left at 1.15, walking in a high wind with 2 parcels slung across my shoulders, to Glynde; through the park. Back here for tea, & met L. buying the Hanwell Gazette. I found a letter from Saxon—a little cold, I can’t help thinking, at least showing one, after his letters to Nessa, that in this crisis I’m not his confidante. Its queer how one chooses one figure each time one’s in a state for reasons not perceptible to the figure herself. Last winter I was to hear everything.

Sunday 3 Mardi

A vile windy day. Sent off my Conrad article, at last—& printed a few labels for Bunny, but we stayed in, & were very happy.

Monday 4 March

L. took 4 pages to the printer today to print off. I being useless for this purpose went off to get into touch with London again, which I did at the three usual points—Mudie’s, London Library & Seventeen Club. London, from a spectacular point of view was at its worst; like a middle aged charwoman with hair scrubbed off a bleak forehead. In St James’ Square a village of houses has been built to shelter some ministry, I suppose; & it was strange to see how holes have been cut in the walls & the roofs to allow the trees to stand undamaged. Some of the clerks will have a tree trunk to wipe their pens upon. I found a silent group at the Club, all men, & unknown to me, with the exception of Alix who sat still as a statue reading one of Berty Russell’s books. I interrupted though this is against my principles, & we had tea together. Her chief piece of news was that she & Saxon are going to set up together in Faith’s house after Easter, for the duration of the war & 6 months beyond it. I fancy that they see something a little comic in this combination of the hopelessly enamoured, & indeed one can’t help smiling rather at the thought of silences in which each will be thinking of someone else; & one fancies their common bond leading to a great deal of sympathetic collaboration, but the plan is evidently a good one. It recommended itself first to Mrs Bridgeman, the housekeeper, who thought two such quiet people should live together. I did my best, this time, to keep low in tone, serious, & as far as possible sympathetic. Alix’s feeling had been, she said, that I ‘floated’, & didn’t mind how my prosperity reminded both her & Fredegond of all the things they lacked. But why should F. lack anything? I left her sitting there, as I believe she always sits, till they turn out the lights, or James comes to take her to dinner. What will she be at 45?

Home to find the two darkies [Perera and Jayatilaka] here. L. spent 3 hours or so printing, but did it in the end.

Tuesday 5 March

Another bitter day. L. up to a meeting at the 17 Club. I spent the afternoon “dissing”, ran out into the High Street, and was inveigled into the penny Bazaar, where the simplicity of shopping tempts one to spend. The Guild meets tonight for Nick to address it.

Wednesday 6 March

Again one has to wonder why the women come—what inducement there is in such a passive employment as sitting silent, half asleep, in a chair for an hour. Nick was in the right style for them too; simple, detailed, casual, much at his ease. He spoke for an hour. The thing that remains in my mind of the lecture is the waiting for trains, & the marching out “with moon & stars looking very cynical” he said, along perfectly straight roads lined with poplars. His matter of fact way of speaking, as if necessity must be borne—however outrageous to his sense of decency & common sense also struck me. He seemed in good spirits; proud of Barbara; telling us of her conquests, which he believes in implicitly; talking more than usual, & telling me how after the war they’d like to live in the country & make good furniture after designs by Carrington. He’s a human being of very good nature without special gifts to bend him this way or that; the same is true of her, I think. Its a rare production in our particular circle. L. to a meeting; we now have a mania for gambling over Demon patience. I lost 4/ over this in a week. Impudent letter came from Williams, about L.’s book. He is showing, or means to show, the doubtful passage to co-operators, & therefore can’t start printing yet. L. now threatens to ‘put the matter in the hands of his lawyers’!

Thursday 7 March

In these 2 days I’ve ‘dissed’ 4 pages, in the hope that we may finish 8 pages of the story before we go away again. The raids seem so distant now that this precaution seems excessive. The servants still sleep in the kitchen however, as a shadow of moon remains. Philip came after lunch, & he & L. walked to Kew. I met them on the towing path. He is obviously very wretched; has no future wishes evidently, save to get out to France. He brought some of Cecil’s poems, which we have offered to print at once, in a small book, in our old type—As giving him occupation it would be a good thing to do. & he offers to come & help. The more one sees of the effects on young men who should be happy the more one detests the whole thing. Philip takes more interest in the military side of it than Nick, I think. He has refused an offer to work in London. A bitter day, & our coal finished tomorrow. The last raid dropped a bomb on the coal merchants.

Friday 8 March

From yesterday’s writing it looks as if the raids were casting their shadow before me, & were sent expressly by God to rebuke my arrogance. However this may be, we played our patience; I lost my 3 and so to bed, the only thought in our minds being, I think, something to do with patience or printing. I’d taken my third & final roll in bed, when there was an explosion. For half a minute a raid seemed so improbable that we made out it was one of the inexplicable outbursts of motor omnibuses. However, next minute the guns went off all round us & we heard the whistles. There was no denying it. So we got our things together & went to the kitchen. This was at 11.30. Looking out we could only see stars yellowish in some sort of mist; no moon; but a still night. As we lay down on our mattresses there was a great though distant explosion; & after that the guns set in very thick & fast to north & south, never, but once, so near us as Barnes. At 12.45 we had cocoa & went to bed. The bugles sounded at 1.35—two hours from start to finish.

I shall never forget the ecstasy with which L. burst into my room at breakfast. The wretch Williams has caved in. He agrees to cancel the contract. L. was as triumphant as a fighting beast who has driven his enemy to skulk into the bushes. I think he has reason to be. For one thing it looked as though he could still worry & impede for some months to come; & L. might have been forced to arbitrate. As it is, the way is open, & instead of dealing with a surly unwilling spiteful mangy exasperating cur, he can make his own terms—which he’s doing this afternoon with Allen & Unwin. Going up in the lift at Holborn the other day I stood next a boy of 14 or so, whose head only was visible among the crowd. I noticed that it was an extremely interesting, sensitive, clever, observant head; rather sharp, but independent looking. One couldn’t tell from his cap whether he was well off or not. I came to the conclusion that he was the son of an officer with whom he stood. When we got into the street I looked at once at his legs. His trousers had holes in them. From that one could judge what a wretched affair his life will be. I began setting up Cecil’s poems this afternoon. They’re not good; they show the Woolf tendency to denunciation, without the vigour of my particular Woolf. I had all sorts of accidents & only finished one.

Saturday 9 March

L. found Unwin very ready to consider the Co-operation book, &, what is more, unqualified in his abuse of Williams, who could, he says, be sued for the damage he’s done to the book’s prospects. He proposes to issue 2 editions—one paper, one cloth, at once; after, that is, reading the book which he means to do directly. I daresay Williams will still try to keep his paw upon the manuscript.

We went to a meeting called a ‘Suffrage Rally’ in Kingsway this afternoon. It was a very fine afternoon & through a glass door one could see the day light—a difficult light for speakers to speak down. So prosaic, reasonable, & unconcentrated. The hall was fairly well filled; the audience almost wholly women, as the speakers were too. The pure essence of either sex is a little disheartening. Moreover, whether its a meeting of men or of women, one can’t help wondering why they do it. I get one satisfactory thrill from the sense of multitude; then become disillusioned, finally bored & unable to listen to a word. In truth this meeting seemed to beat the waves in vain. The vote being won, only great eloquence could celebrate the triumph. None were eloquent; & yet they had to beat up a froth. The one who impressed us most was the Russian speaker, who had imagination, & seemed to feel what she said. But at best large indisputable platitudes, finely dressed & balanced, are the only things that can be put into speeches. I watched Mrs Pethick Lawrence rising & falling on her toes, as if half her legs were made of rubber, throwing out her arms, opening her hands, & thought very badly of this form of art.

We had tea at the 17 Club. One room was crowded, & silent; at the end of the other Aldous Huxley & a young woman in grey velvet held what should have been a private conversation. A. has a deliberate & rather dandified way of speaking. All we learned & virtuous people bent over our reforming papers in dead silence; an occasional sentence of the muffled dialogue came out plain from the other end of the room now & then. They were discussing Evan Morgan & his affairs of the heart I think.

We went on to the London Library; & as we walked down the steep street someone came ambling & crouching up to us—Bob. T.—laden with an infinitely shabby baggy portmanteau—full of books, I think. So we went on together; & first he confided in L. & then in me—At least he has the air of making a confidence, or asking for one. He wanted to know whether he could add my name to the list of devout Jacobeans. Percy Lubbock & Logan Smith play this very characteristic game, of exquisite interest of course to Bob. They’ve counted 20, & Bob was seriously exerting himself to find a 21st. But I refused—with some vehemence at first, thinking I was to be asked to subscribe to a memorial. Nothing so substantial; only an elderly cultivated game.

Monday 11 March

I spent 7/ on books this afternoon; a fact to be recorded, since its the only mention of buying books this year, or last, perhaps. As a matter of fact I’ve accumulated 12/ as Times money; add 5/ for a birthday present, & I have 17/—an unparalleled gain. First, however, I beat the town for chocolate or sweets. In the whole of the stores, not one ounce of choc, to be had; but some simple square drops, such as one used to buy in a bag for a penny. Half a crown will now buy a pound of them. Half a crown in old days would have bought a coal-scuttle full. Then I went on the top of a bus, for the day was of the quality of June, only fresher, & sadder too, to Nutt’s shop to get a Leopardi; then to Mudies where I bought Mill on Liberty; then to the Charing Cross Road where I bought the Happy Hypocrite, by Max Beerbohm; & Exiles of the Snow, by Lancelot Hogben. In this way I laid out 7/. But I was amused to find that the lust after books revives with the least encouragement. I want a copy of Congreve. I could have had one containing all the plays I shall ever read for 2/6 I daresay; but this demon suggested that I might enquire for the Baskerville in two volumes. The bookseller shared my lust which increased it; in short I told him to make enquiries. He would not commit himself to name any probable price, from which I judge that he is calculating on the lust to possess it when I see it. And, after all, nothing gives back more for one’s money than a beautiful book—obviously I’m slipping. I sauntered round his shelves, as I had done in most of the shops. He is careful, select, bookish; no bargains but the type of book one might like to buy. These bookshops have an air of the 18th century. People drop in & gossip about literature with the shopkeeper who, in this case, knew as much about books as they did. I overheard a long conversation with a parson, who had discovered a shop in Paddington full of Elzevirs. He denounced the government, particularly for its waste of paper. They should abolish all newspapers, & stick a sheet in the p. office, if there happened to be any news.

So to the Club, where I found L. Fredegond, Gerald [Shove], Goldie, Brailsford, & Alix. The poet Hogben was also there. I laid his little book on the arm of my chair. Gossip of the usual kind. Poor Hogben’s book is precisely the dreary imitative stuff one might have expected; or even worse than one might have expected—what Lytton would call “illiterate”; under the influence of Swinburne, incredibly ungifted, & weakly rebellious.

Home. L. to a L. of N. meeting.

Tuesday 12 March

This page should be wholly devoted to praise of the weather. One curious effect of spring in the suburbs is that it produces an astonishing amount of male & female singing in the evening. We sit with open windows, & a lady warbles out notes in apparent ecstasy. She may be forgiven though, considering—Here are some facts. I sat by choice on a seat in the shade at Kew; I saw two Heath butterflies; willows, crocuses, squills all in bud & blossom. Black clothes look like dusty palls. As for fur, it makes one laugh. We met at Kew.

I may say that I’m “rejected by the Times”. To rub this sore point sorer, L. has 2 books from the Nation. Its the second week of my rejection; & it has the result of making me write my novel at an astonishing rate. If I continue dismissed, I shall finish within a month or two. It becomes very absorbing. We both notice that lately we’ve written at a terrific pace: L. 40,000 words & as yet hasn’t touched the book itself; I’m well past 100,000—

Thursday 14 March

If I’d written this diary last night which I was too excited to do, I should have left a row of question marks at the end. What excited me was the evening paper. After printing all the afternoon I went out later, bought a Star, looked at it casually under the public House lamp, & read that the Prime Minister needed our prayers. We were faced with momentous decisions. We Britons must cling together. In a week or even a few days facts must be faced which would change the British Empire for ever. We evolved from this an offer of peace to France: but it appears to be only L.G.’s way of whipping up his gallery. Anyhow, I was whipped. Gerald who was to have dined, rang up to say that a raid was expected, & he must “stand by”. The night was cloudy, & we weren’t much alarmed, partly because the warning came from official sources.

My dismissal is revoked. A large book on Pepys arrived, which I spent the evening reading, & now another on Swinburne awaits me at the Railway station. I’m divided whether one likes to have books, or to write fiction without interruption. But I may make a few shillings to pay for my Baskerville.

Friday 15 March

Happily the weather is turned cloudy; spring blotted out, but one must sacrifice spring to the war. Philip came & we printed—I making rather a mess of the poems, to my annoyance. Philip talked about Blimey who is a shepherd near the Quantocks.

Monday 18 March

I wrote the date, & then something interrupted me—a letter I think, to Lytton giving reasons for not reviewing his book. Today is Wednesday, & this the first moment I’ve had for writing after tea. On Saturday the chatter began. Lytton & Carrington came to tea—she apple red & firm in the cheeks, bright green & yellow in the body, & immensely firm & large all over. The talk has run off my mind, so that I don’t suppose there was anything said of great importance. They’d been at Barbara’s party till 5 the next morning. Fredegond & Nessa kept it off the rocks by giving an imitation of Ottoline. Nick & Saxon both gloomy in the background. Carrington going out of the room for a second, Lytton explained that he would like to stay with us without her, could it be managed. He asked me to review his book. I agreed without thinking. On second thoughts I dont much want to write under surveillance, or to ask B⁠[ruce]. R⁠[ichmond]. for what he must know to be the book of a friend. On Sunday the burden of visitors was oppressive. The list speaks for itself. Gerald [Duckworth] & Saxon lunch: Saxon tea; Barbara, Nick, Middleton Mur⁠[r]⁠y dinner. Gerald’s likeness to a pampered overfed pug dog has much increased. His hair is white. There is hardly a gleam of life, let alone intelligence in his eye. The feebleness of his hold on life save through the stomach must be fearful. He has no opinions, but merely a seaweeds drift in the prevailing current. His commercial view of every possible subject depressed me, especially when I thought of my novel destined to be pawed & snored over by him. But the odd thing was that he had nothing to say. This took till 3, perhaps; Saxon at his least urbane & most insignificant. Its melancholy that misfortune should be unbecoming, but I’m afraid in his case it is. His complexion suffers; his mind seems frost bitten. He was beaten at chess, & went, as if not wishing to meet N. & B. Nick was the only cheerful one of us. Poor Murry snarled & scowled with the misery of his lot. He works all day, & writes when he comes home. Worst of all, K.M. has been very ill with haemorrhage from the lungs, out in France, & has to be brought home, wh. is difficult, in order to see how bad she is. But I thought him very much more of a person & a brain than I had thought him before. I think this was partly due to the contrast with Nick. The difference between a good mind & a mediocre one is very sharp—Not that M. is as easy, or as agreeable. But he works his brains, always has worked them, & thus cuts his way through a different atmosphere. I had a good deal of talk about books with him, such as one couldn’t have with Nick—though he’s read Jane Austen, & can keep his end up by natural good sense & taste. B. was almost blotted out; scarcely spoke, I think. They went first; we said goodbye, the modern method of covering all obviously emotional crises with a varnish of prose & common sense makes such partings almost ostentatiously matter of fact. Murry stayed on, for a time, discussing French writers & Thomas Hardy. He will never write another novel, he says. Poetry is a short cut & “life seems to me now very precarious.”

On Monday [18 March] I stayed here & did my compositors work. L. to London.

On Tuesday we had tea at the Club, meeting all the usual people, save that Bryn’s a rarity, went to a general meeting, where L. was elected 5th on the committee; & then on to dine with Ka. Arnold Forster the other guest. Much to my surprise the first person to come in afterwards was Hilton Young. I dont think I’ve said 6 words to him since 1908—when we had that interview. I’ve always guessed that dark dealings on the part of O.H. intervened; at anyrate we broke completely. This knowledge made me at least uncomfortable. But we are elderly now. He a perfect type of naval officer, cleanshaven, shorn, red faced, all blue cloth & gold braid with a ribbon on his breast. His dark enigmatic ways (the Sphinx without a Secret) are swept away; & yet I liked him—thought him kind & trusty & a little romantic—I’m afraid no longer romantic about me. But how even begin to guess another’s feelings? I found myself pitying him for the very first time. I suppose he’s more than 40, & after all, he wished for something which he’s done without. We talked hard indeed. He find⁠[s] no romance in the navy after four years. We wondered about our vision of England. Not knowing his degree of pugnacity, talk was difficult save on general subjects. The Shoves came, & a brisk friend of Ka’s out of an office I think, as we left. Little W.A.F. very humble, very small, very innocent, as he used to be.

Wednesday 20 March

We printed—but just missed getting it done.

Friday 5 April

I think that Wednesday was broken off short, as they always tend to be on the verge of a move, & so far as I remember it snowed hailed thundered people. Off we went to Asheham on Thursday, in such a burst of summer heat that people in the Tube pulled blinds down, & the uproar & potency (what word will express the stir of life still cased in a soft velvet sheath?) of Richmond worshipping a Tank was like the hum of bees round some first blossom. We had the bee & the blossom in no metaphorical sense at Asheham. Once more my memory is most centred upon an afternoon reading in the garden. I happened to read Wordsworth; the poem which ends “what man has made of man”. The daffodils were out & the guns I suppose could be heard from the downs. Even to me, who have no immediate stake, & repudiate the importance of what is being done, there was an odd pallor in those particular days of sunshine. There’s always a sadness in spring of course—Our visitors broke in upon the moods which weave so thick a texture into life alone at Asheham. First Lytton. Then we waited, with eyes upon the avenue, for the appearance of Barbara. She never came though, & upon Sunday I had a letter telling the almost incredible story of her repeated attempts to get into a train; how for three days she went to Victoria; & sometimes was kept outside the barrier; sometimes was stuck opposite the gap between the carriages; never got in, & finally spent Easter alone in her studio, expecting, so we are told, to find herself in some 9 months short of a fortnight, the mother of a child. Lytton was with us one day less than a week. Our chief exercise was along the road to Beddingham. We had short, & to me, very intimate talks; intimate in the sense that he will understand from the sight of the tail what the whole body of the thought is in one’s mind. These thoughts were for the most part about books; but books include a good deal of life. I suspect that he is now inclined to question whether Eminent Victorians, 4 in number, & requiring 4 years for their production, are quite enough to show for his age, & pretensions. At anyrate he was evidently & rather painfully anxious about our opinion of their merits, & came back so often though so tactfully to the question of my review that I hesitate. I suppose the contrast (& to me there is a contrast) between his achievements & L.’s achievements made itself felt to him. Then he was sick one morning “green sickness”, Lottie described it with her usual passion & enthusiasm for painting all colours at their brightest. His ebb of health is very low; & certainly health does make one careful, perhaps a little peevish, spiritually. I remarked, whether the result of bad health or not, a distinct increase in his family pride; it has now reached almost a religious pitch; a bad sign. Like patriotism it means that certain feelings are to grow large & lusty under shelter. For instance, James must be exalted as a man of “iron will”, superb administrator &c: but the light is shed on each one of the family; & even upon cousins, like Mary H. I rather resent it. Then James & Noel came. Our patience wore rather thin. Visitors do tend to chafe one, though impeccable as friends. I’m always glad at the end of a visit to find one’s liking unmodified, as it was in all three cases,—yet I’m puzzled to account for the sense of strain & discomfort which the people one likes most manage to produce. L. & I discussed this. He says that with people in the house his hours of positive pleasure are reduced to one; he has I forget how many hours of negative pleasure; & a respectable margin of the acutely unpleasant. Are we growing old? Are our habits setting in like the Trade Winds? But this time the food difficulties certainly increased one’s discomfort. One day we came back from a long walk to find the third of a loaf of bread on the table. No more to be had in the house. This was due to bad management on Nelly’s part, but then at Asheham it’s very easy to manage badly & needs considerable thought, cycling & carrying to manage even tolerably. At one point the servants wrought themselves into the usual row. The relief of being back in comparative plenty & anyhow next door to shops is quite recognisable. We came up on Friday, went straight to lunch at Clifford’s Inn, dived into Partridge & Cooper, & then I came home and L. went to see Bonwick.

The result of seeing Bonwick is what I foretold (see page [109]). They have offered him the editorship of the new Review, & indeed make his acceptance a condition of starting it, which they propose to do at once. Some arrangements must be come to with Wright, but they will solve themselves I suspect. L. has 10 days in which to decide. There’s the question of staff, of salary & so on. If he accepts, he will be able to give up feeding the omnivorous & callous throated Eagle with reviews. Considering the merits of that cheap & thin blooded creature, (I speak of his journalism) & his methods of running the paper, his lack of power judgment & competence, I shall consider L. wise to take the other job merely as a means of escape. But in itself too it might be not a means but an end. Thus we had rather a sanguine happy sort of return, considering how disappointing returns generally are.

Saturday 6 April

This morning I had a letter from Barbara telling me that Nick was dangerously wounded on the 30th. The wound is in the back & kidneys, & they have operated.The last news said he was well through the operation. They have heard no more. If he recovers, perhaps he won’t be sent out again—but who knows? At least she has had the blow soon, & if it were me, I should think that a blessing in itself. But the state of waiting for telegrams & letters, without any certainty when they’ll come, & this baby in prospect, must be as fair a combination of torture as human beings can invent for each other. However, Saxon is moving house; she helps him; his voice on the telephone sounded as if pleasure of some sort had not entirely deserted him. But when a crisis happens, scarcely anyone meets it naturally; either they’re too composed & prosaic, or the other extreme. Saxon has a curious cul de sac of his own.

Rain all day till this moment, when it has turned brilliant. Plum in blossom in the garden, & flowers very healthy looking. To turn over books in Hiskoke’s. I bought Collins’ poems & Colley Cibber’s Autobiography—1/ both together. L. to Staines. Flora’s husband has just gone abroad.

Sunday 7 April

We are just back from tea with Barbara & Saxon in the Studio. Nick is already moved to another hospital & has written himself, so at least he must be in no immediate danger. Indeed they think he may be home any day now. We had tea; Saxon in his brown woollen vest, stepping fantastically about the room to lay the table; Barbara so evidently nervous that I suppose the child must be a fact—but that 4 days—waiting for news can try anyone’s nerves. The couple in the interior were almost too perfect an illustration of the post impressionist spirit for my taste. Even the black & white cat seemed decorated by the Omega. White wash in which the hairs of the brush remain, a striped pole, Burnet for the covers, china dogs for the mantelpiece, check cottons wherever you looked, & to the censorious eye one or two uncertainties of taste or reversions to an earlier stage, as for example a bead necklace hanging on a nail. However I came back to think my own room very ugly. The talk was sober, adequate, but not profuse. I don’t think Saxon (who had just washed his head) had anything to say; & his demeanour is a little tart & gritty at the moment. He reminded me of a hen who has laid an egg—but only one. We did not like Hampstead. The vulgarity of Richmond is always a relief afterwards.

Monday 8 April

There is an awkward moment between coming back from London & dinner which is the salvation of this book. For some reason one can’t settle to read, & yet writing seems the proper channel for the unsettled irritable condition one is generally in. Perhaps this condition is intensified by tea at the 17 Club, particularly if one happens to meet Roger in the Charing Cross Road, in his wideawake hat with four or five yellow French books under his arm. He is the centre of a whirlwind to me. Under this influence I was blown straight into a book shop, persuaded to lay out 3/7 on a French novel, Et Cie, by a Jew, made to fix a day for coming to Durbins, invited to a play & fairly overwhelmed—made to bristle all over with ideas, questions, possibilities which couldn’t develope in the Charing Cross Rd. Of course he was in a hurry to keep an appointment at the Burlington, & to produce one or two plays somewhere else—ill too, so he said, but somewhat relieved in his mind by reading Fabre, who makes him see that after all our war, hideous though it is—but here we parted. I ran in to a kind of backwater of Roger at the 17 Club: Goldie, & Miss Dudley at least. Mrs Manus & Langdon Davies & L. can’t be included under that heading. We sat in the groundfloor room; & poor old Goldie wrinkled his forehead & flung himself lightly & ardently into one question after another in his usual way—the way of a bachelor who lives by plying his mind & moving by that means from person to person, having no settled abode. A sort of gipsy or vagrant. He mourned all the deaths of the young men—Eric Whitehead the last to be killed. Said that he would fight if young enough; as it is he sits on committees. I left them to conduct another committee, & went to Poland St. to get my watch. On the way I walked through a narrow street lined on both sides with barrows, where stockings & ironmongery & candles & fish were being sold. A barrel organ played in the middle. I bought 6 bundles of coloured tapers. The stir & colour & cheapness pleased me to the depths of my heart. But I couldn’t pay 5/6 for my watch, owing to the seductive magic of Roger in the Charing X Road, & so had to leave it, ticking away like a young watch. Home by Victoria. A sunny evening, swarming with people.

Tuesday 9 April

This is most curious weather; also most unpleasant. Rain descends at intervals from a dark grey sky; even when it isn’t raining the sky is still grey. Its warm, damp, & the young leaves have a lurid look in the winter atmosphere; the green is as if seen at night by electric lights. We quarrelled yesterday, about my jug of cream; & L. was unreasonable, & I was generous. The quarrel ended at 4.25 sharp. At 4.30 Miss Mattaei arrived. I remember her at Newnham. She has left, we understand, “under a cloud”. It is easy to see from her limp, apologetic attitude that the cloud has sapped her powers of resistance. We skirted round the war, but she edged away from it, & it seemed altogether odious that anyone should be afraid to declare her opinions—as if a dog used to excessive beating, dreaded even the raising of a hand. She & L. discussed their business, which has to do with W⁠[ar]. & P⁠[eace]. & may result in an offer to her of a place on the staff. She has to earn her living. “I must tell you one thing, she said, when the talk was over, my father was a German. I find it makes a good deal of difference—it is a distinct hindrance commercially.” L. agreed that it was. She is a lanky gawky unattractive woman, about 35, with a complexion that blotches red & shiny suddenly; dressed in her best, which was inconceivably stiff & ugly. But she has a quick mind, & is an enthusiast; said she loved writing.

Wednesday 10 April

A very wet dark day. Printed. I set up one page in 1 hour & 15 minutes—my record. At this rate, the book might be done in a month. I had a letter from Miss Harriet Weaver yesterday asking whether we would consider printing Joyce’s new novel, which no other printer will do, owing presumably to its sentiments. They must be very warm, considering the success he had with his last. She is to come here, though we can hardly tackle a book. I like this dipping into the great bran pie. By the way, I’m rejected by The Times once more; & thus reel off my book at a great pace, & I suppose books will flood in all in a heap one of these days. To the printer, who has almost set up his new machine, but without power & without a compositor we are still far from getting our rights.

Thursday 11 April

To the 17 Club this afternoon. But one must describe the weather. Imagine living inside a yellow balloon, the ceiling of which floats up & down, with an atmosphere inside of exhausted air. Such is our situation. When the ceiling sinks nearly to the top of our heads we have to turn on the electric light; as we did at luncheon. Occasionally rain falls, but brings no relief. Going to London all the lights in the train were on. I went to the Omega, got my pictures & ran into Roger, carrying a roll of manuscript, which was, he said, his translation of the Lysistrata. This he has done, on a moderate knowledge of Greek, & wishes to have acted, but doubts how far one can go. I carried the pictures all the way to Gerrard Street, stopping at Poland Street to pay 5/6 & get my old gold watch, whose distinction & dignity are very marked after 6 months of Ingersoll. At the Club I found—need I repeat that old scene once more? I think the change from toast to roll & honey interested me more than the fragments of Scurr Cousins & Marshall, or than the pale constrained solemnity of poor Alix. Having robbed her of a fortnight with James I felt rather guilty. L. came in from the Natives meeting. He is going up again to a farewell party to Bertie at Mrs Hamilton’s. Last night he went, for less than 30 minutes, to a Labour Party meeting.

Saturday 13 April

L.’s farewell party was freely sprinkled with our non conforming friends. I don’t know why their virtues in combination are so depressing. There was Dora & Adrian & Karin (she announces that she is with child) & Burns & Alix & so on. Bertie broken down, & safe to be imprisoned either for his article or for his conscience. The new bill rakes in all the elder generations. All their consciences are now being racked; but so far they seem inclined to stop short of prison.

Friday was a pleasant day; the sun out, & the blossom & leaves of a natural colour. We spent the afternoon printing. It was the first evening we had alone for a long time. Sunk deep in our chairs we were interrupted in our books by Walter Lamb. Upon review of the conversation we agreed that he was slightly above his usual level. He told long stories of his walk in a snowstorm, with every detail given a prominence more interesting to him than to us; the wildest romance would be flattened, however, by that voice. Lord Canterbury is again to the fore. He is a Persian scholar & has given W. the Arabian Nights. He lives in a house which is not fashionable enough to do him justice. He has an Italian footman who secures meat from a friend in any quantity. A small loin of lamb was left at W.’s door the other morning. He expects to fall again before the temptation. He has given up reading, finding no time for it; but examines boys in the Classics. Told us stories about J. J. Thompson, whose mother keeps a small shop where Watty used to buy sweets as a boy. So we slipped on; W. sitting between us, L. yawning without concealment, I yawning with an attempt at concealment. The Academy is storing its precious pictures, only 18 in number, in some Tube. They are told to expect immense bombs at the end of the month, which will dig 20 feet deep, & then explode.

Today Saturday we printed, & finished 6 pages. As we only began on Tuesday we have done a record. A cold dismal day, & very bad news in the newspapers. Stout red-faced elderly men are visibly perturbed. And Ireland has Conscription. If one didn’t feel that politics are an elaborate game got up to keep a pack of men trained for that sport in condition, one might be dismal; one sometimes is dismal; sometimes I try to worry out what some of the phrases we’re ruled by mean. I doubt whether most people even do that. Liberty, for instance.

Last night Desmond rang us up. I’m afraid our friends’ motives won’t stand scrutiny. His book comes out on Monday; he, though forgetting everything, yet remembers a vague joking promise of mine, uttered at least a year ago, to review it in the Times. He is sending me a copy. He wants to stay here. I’m now debating how to deal with these damned authors—

Thursday 18 April

There is a grave defect in the scheme of this book which decrees that it must be written after tea. When people come to tea I cant say to them, “Now wait a minute while I write an account of you”. They go, & its too late to begin. And thus, at the very time that I’m brewing thoughts & descriptions meant for this page I have the heartbreaking sensation that the page isn’t there; they’re spilt upon the floor. Indeed its difficult to mop them up again. And at this moment the mere length of my list of unrecorded visitors frights me from beginning. Judge Wadhams, Hamilton Holt, Harriet Weaver, Ka, Roger, Nessa, Maynard, Shepherd, Goldie, not to mention the Guild & Alix & Bryn & Noel, (who may be called the 17 Club:) all these have accumulated since Sunday; & each deserves something to mark their place, & I did mark it at the time. But how recover the impression of Wadhams & Holt? It was a tremendously successful visit [on Sunday 14 April]. We had prepared ourselves most accurately. They made speeches & looked at the pictures & complimented L. all according to forecast. They were impressive to me in the first place for their vivacity which combined with their large well nourished bodies made them appear powerful; next because they treated me with respect; & then because they were simply & intensely in love with the League of Nations. Judge Wadhams had “spotted” every minister in America. They were in touch with every group of people in the world, as far as I could gather, with an army of stenographers who send out pamphlets with the personal touch wherever a pamphlet can lodge. Compared with this our record is tame. “We put you right on the top, Mr Woolf, of the constructive thinkers of the war—I can see your place on my shelves at this moment—… Pardon me, you have used the word “social” more than once. I dont rightly understand what you mean by it….” We both explained for 10 minutes. “No; I don’t understand.” “Well we must proceed to the Sidney Webbs; but we’ve done no more than scratch your surface Mr Woolf, & we must try to do more next time—With thanks to you, Mrs Woolf, for letting us see your home—” & off they went.

But almost instantly Harriet Weaver appeared. Here our predictions were entirely at fault. I did my best to make her reveal herself, in spite of her appearance, all that the Editress of the Egoist ought to be, hut she remained inalterably modest judicious & decorous. Her neat mauve suit fitted both soul & body; her grey gloves laid straight by her plate symbolised domestic rectitude; her table manners were those of a well bred hen. We could get no talk to go. Possibly the poor woman was impeded by her sense that what she had in the brownpaper parcel was quite out of keeping with her own contents. But then how did she ever come in contact with Joyce & the rest? Why does their filth seek exit from her mouth? Heaven knows. She is incompetent from the business point of view & was uncertain what arrangements to make. We both looked at the MS. which seems to be an attempt to push the bounds of expression further on, but still all in the same direction. And so she went. And Ka came & was made to drink castor oil out of an egg cup, & lay on a sofa, & was nearly sick, & had a disturbed night & was better next morning.

Then I went to Guildford. I don’t see how to put 3 or 4 hours of Roger’s conversation into the rest of this page; (& I must stop & read Viola Meynell) it was about all manner of things; on growing old; on loneliness; on religion; on morality; on Nessa; on Duncan; on French literature; on education; on Jews; on marriage; & on the Lysistrata. Occasionally he read a quotation from a book by Proust; (whose name I’ve forgotten), & then from his translation [of the Lysistrata]; & we woke next morning to find the hills covered in snow, & came up in a bitter wind & rain to the Omega; so to Gordon Sqre; where first the new Delacroix & then the Cézanne were produced. There are 6 apples in the Cézanne picture. What can 6 apples not be? I began to wonder. Theres their relationship to each other, & their colour, & their solidity. To Roger & Nessa, moreover, it was a far more intricate question than this. It was a question of pure paint or mixed; if pure which colour: emerald or veridian; & then the laying on of the paint; & the time he’d spent, & how he’d altered it, & why, & when he’d painted it—We carried it into the next room, & Lord! how it showed up the pictures there, as if you put a real stone among sham ones; the canvas of the others seemed scraped with a thin layer of rather cheap paint. The apples positively got redder & rounder & greener. I suspect some very mysterious quality of potation [?] in that picture. All day it rained, & L. was out to tea, & brought Goldie home to dinner. Goldie was “humiliated” by the fall of Bailleul, but told his neat well groomed stories, & I went to the Guild, which pleased me, by its good sense, & the evidence that it does somehow stand for something real to these women. In spite of their solemn passivity they have a deeply hidden & inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life; I believe they relish all the pomp of officers & elections because in some way it symbolises this other thing. They recanted their abuse of the woman on syphilis, which I think to their credit. Since then they have learnt, they said that she only spoke the truth. They wish me to get them a speaker on Sex Education, Mrs Hiscoke telling us that she had had to get a friend to explain the period to her own daughter, & she still feels shy if the daughter is in the room when sexual subjects are discussed. She’s 23 years old.

On Wednesday [17 April], L. went to lunch with Rowntree, & accomplished another stage of his progress to the Editor’s chair. A dummy copy is to be prepared. R. still hedges, on the question of expense, but remarked all the same “Thou art the man!” L.’s hand shook so that he had no luncheon. This came entirely of discussing the question before he went up. I went to Caslon’s, & sat in that solid impressive room among the empty desks & smooth tables while they went to fetch me 1/6 worth of h’s (lower case) & the Printer of the bank of England ordered 2,000 lbs of type to be conveyed at once in a van, the weight being beyond the capacity of a taxi. I find immense satisfaction in hearing the talk of these solid, competent business men, who give their orders with such weight & simplicity & never a word wasted, & such character of a plain sort, in every movement & feature. To tea at the 17 Club; & Alix & Bryn & Noel there, & I rather disliked them all. On Thursday we took a little walk, but in the teeth of such wind that there was little pleasure in it. Then L. had to dine with Margaret. He is becoming almost a diner out. But in our circle this is a matter more of business than of pleasure. One goes either to meet someone, or to settle something, or to say goodbye to a prisoner. Bertie’s case still hangs fire however. Today I got Desmond’s book, sent, I’m sorry to say, by request of the author. Richmond, when I asked for D.’s & Lytton’s books said “Certainly—if you can keep it secret”. I couldn’t promise to do this, & therefore wrote to tell him not to send them. And now I must inform Desmond & Lytton. They won’t suffer really I believe, but they will be anxious instead of safe, & I’m in two minds as to whether I’m glad or sorry. I think I could have said some very clever things, & a few true things, but undoubtedly one cant avoid a certain uneasiness in writing formally of people one knows so well.

Friday 19 April

A day of gigantic effort for L. Eight pages printed it off. He went at 1.30 & is still (6 p.m.) at the printers, standing in the cellar & slipping page after page between the pins, having had only a short time off for tea. By tonight I shall have 8 pages to diss. & then to set up; though the type runs to 9 pages, 3 lines with the new h’s: t being the one to give out at last. Snow, storms of wind, bitter cold, & occasional sunshine.

Sunday 21 April

How many poor people, clergymen & retired officers for the most part, must be tapping the glass & looking gloomily at their lawns covered with withered blossom—withered still half closed, & then blown off the twig. Orchards must be ruined by this time. At Kew yesterday the magnolias were a most melancholy sight; the great pinkish buds just ready to burst into the most magnificent of flowers, & now browned & shrivelled never to open, & while they live to be ugly. We noticed several branches ending in white gloves, according to L. a sign that some experiment in grafting is being tried. Even the daffodils are all blown crooked. Fruit trees brown & nipped. The weather goes on with its wind & rain & occasional snow. I went to a concert at the Palladium this afternoon; but on the whole I regretted it. A man called Julian Clifford played Mozart as if it were a Dream Waltz, slowly & sentimentally & with a kind of lugubrious stickiness which spoilt my pleasure in the G. Minor. L. to Staines. I must now write to Desmond, who has been telephoning, I fear, with thoughts of that review.

Friday 26 April

There are five or six days missed out—I don’t remember why, but partly at least because there wasn’t much to say. On Monday [22 April] I remember having tea at the Club & meeting Fredegond, Ermengard, a lady farmer & someone I took to be Bryn, but she answered to the name of Daphne. The Shoves are driven to the land again; had left it to the very last moment of course, & being under compact to have a job by Monday were still in doubt whether to try Cambridge, Hertford, or Hampshire. I talked mainly to Ermengard—a rare visitor, but somehow familiar. As L. remarked these country women get a slow bovine manner, rather refreshing to my taste. She breeds prize bulls, plays a double bass in the evening, & writes improper stories for children. She seems to have settled into a corner absolutely fitted for her, where she exists pleasantly, having a Quaker faith now to round her off. I got the impression of some large garden flower comfortably shoving its roots about & well planted in the soil—say a Stock, or a holly-hock.

On Tuesday [23 April] Wright dined & slept here. I listened with respect to a long conversation, in which both L. & he played their parts with perfect knowledge of the rules of the game. Such was the impression that their deliberate, easy & yet concise manner of speech made upon me. How far W. minded his fate it was difficult to say. The rules of the game require complete urbanity. He was extremely nice to play so well of course. He offered to help as much as he could. His opinion of his own powers as Editor being naturally higher than ours or indeed than the Trustees, this was very nice of him, but I expect there’s truth in his own saying that he’d rather get what he wants done by others than do it himself. He labours under a variety of diseases, & is very deliberate, taking twice the time to finish a meal that we do, & perhaps 4 times as long to finish a sentence. The question of salaries was discussed. W. thinks this will be referred to him. He suggests from £200 to £250 for Miss Matthaei; between £300 & £400 for L. This is more than we expected. However it depends on more people than Wright (Eagle here rings up to say he’s standing for Parliament—a labour candidate—At that rate the Manx cat has a chance).

On Wednesday [24 April] Lottie spilt half a case of type on the floor, so that I had to spend 4 hours in sorting every compartment—about the most trying work there is. She had mixed the letters in thoroughly, thinking or hoping that though divided in compartments the letters were all the same.

On Thursday I was recumbent & L. went to do proofs at the office.

On Friday we set up, & took a short walk. The weather varies between fog & sunshine, saving us at least from raids, though the moon is full.

Wednesday 1 May

There’s a fate in saying that we’re safe from raids; On Friday [26 April] I went to the Hippodrome, to see life; L. seeing a different variety of it at the 17 Club. The incredible, pathetic stupidity of the music hall, (for surely we could have risen higher, & only politeness made us laugh,) almost made me uncomfortable; but the humour of Harry Tate, though a low grade was still the queer English humour; something natural to the race, which makes us all laugh; why I don’t know; & you can’t help feeling its the real thing, as, in Athens one might have felt that poetry was. Home about 11. At 12 the usual maroons, & even extra whistling. The fine night made this likely; we bundled our bedding into the kitchen & took up our appointed stations; L. and I lying by the grate; N. & Lottie whispering in the cellar. After 20 minutes, I thought I heard bugles. One’s ears can imagine so much that I said nothing. Ten minutes later Nelly burst out “The bugles!” So they were. We went upstairs, inclined to blame some clerk whose ears played him tricks which the night made into certainties. But Desmond tells us that 3 American aeroplanes crossing the coast without giving the signal caused the false alarm, which woke the whole of London, though ignored by the press.

On Saturday [27 April] we went to Hampton Court, the first visit for a long time. But this weather (I am unjust though; Saturday was fine). We had a tremendous talk about the Equator. In the middle of a demonstration with two pebbles, Jack Radcliffe passed (or so I thought). This diverted my attention. A serious reprimand had to be administered. It was discovered that I took the Equator to be a circular mark, coloured dull red, upon the end of a football. The ignorance & inattention combined displayed in this remark seemed so crass that for about 20 minutes we couldn’t speak. However, I was forgiven, & told about the tropics of Cancer & Capricorn. The question originally was about the time of moon & sun rise & setting in different months.

On Sunday [28 April], Desmond came to dinner; that is after dinner. He has the hard sea worthy look of an old salt, cased in stiff black, with a few gold scrolls about him, & hoots made out of plain leather. But within this shell he is as tender & vague as ever, & very tired after his days work which results, he is alarmed to find & so are we, in practical action upon his evidence. His mind had a factitious spryness about it, as if still working under the official eye; but this wore off, & he yawned, & couldn’t stir himself up, though L.’s yawns were partly the cause of his. Late at night he took to reading Joyce’s ms. aloud, & in particular to imitating his modern imitation of a cat’s miau, but L. went to bed, & though capable of spending a night in this manner, I had compunction, & decoyed Desmond upstairs, collecting books as we went. Next morning, having observed that breakfast at 8.30 would possibly be early enough, he stayed talking about books till 10, & rambled off quite out of tune for his office. L. dined with the Webbs. At this point it would be useful could I command the pen of some intelligent & well informed diarist, with an eye for the future; someone who could put down what were the really interesting things that Sir Wm Tyrrell, Camile Huysman, & the Sidney Webbs said.

[In LW’s hand] Went to dine at Webbs. Camille Huysmans & Sir William Tyrrell there. The latter is now Head of Commercial Intelligence Dept & is engaged on drawing up complete dossier of our terms for the Peace Conference. A small, round, grey, friendly man, more like a well-mannered literary man—if there be such—than a diplomatist. Very frank—ostensibly—& talked incessantly of policies & people. “A friend of mine was at Kiel on the day of the murder of the Arch Duke & saw the Kaiser immediately after he had heard the news. The K. said: “Es ist ein Verbrechen gegen das Germantum”. When I heard that, I knew it meant war.” “Lichnowsky has a poor mind. He is a sort of village idiot. His Polish blood however gives him a kind of intuition so that he sees further sometimes than cleverer men—the intuition of the village idiot.” The only hope, he said, was for the Allies definitely to declare themselves for a League of Nations & define its constitution. We should be surprised, if the German offensive fails, at the stiffness of the German terms even then. “Wilson under certain circumstances will be the most immoveable of Never-endians.” “The most impertinent thing ever written was Kuhlmann’s answer to the Pope. A friend of mine met K. & K. told him when he came to England to ask me what I thought of it. I said: ‘Tell K. I think exactly what he thinks of it!” He said he had always thought that the greatest mistake the Allies ever made was to refuse to allow our men to go to the Stockholm Conference.

On Tuesday [30 April] I went to London. In fact, I went to the printers in Farringdon Street, & got wind of a second hand press; but how far this is the usual talk of shopkeepers I don’t know.

On Wednesday May 1st we were to have printed off; our 8 pages were ready, & a 9th too (w. gave out this time). But the printer has his magazine on the press & wont be free till Saturday. These impediments are inevitable but jarring—We were getting along so well.

On Thursday, we tried printing the title page on the small press. Nothing would make it come right. The disease escaped us. We had to give up in despair—irritation at least. All these days as black as November; & a high cold East wind.

Friday 3 May

L. to London to see Henderson. In course of seeing Henderson he saw all the celebrities of the day. Webbs, Goldie & so on. I went to a Registry Office in the King⁠[s] Rd. to get a servant for Nessa. The woman true Chelsea; marked as China is, by her dress, manner, & refinement. She has a servant, which is more to the point. On then, by Bus & tube to Hampstead, & to tea with Margaret. I almost mistook Lilian semirecumbent upon a green pillow for a Persian cat. Janet was there in those decorous purple draperies with which people compromise between art & fashion in Hampstead. Margaret immensely fat & broad; all black; she had stood two photographs of Ottoline opposite my plate. I felt this to be the heart of the woman’s republic. L. came in, & we had a long semi-political argument arising out of Milk combines, about government. Margaret’s carpet is there to give an air of austerity to the room.

“Ah yes, my lifes a compromise—all a compromise” she said. I was struck as usual, by her genuine character, & also by the unadorned sense of Lilian, always to the point, & surprisingly ready with her views, considering her air of modesty. As a matter of fact I believe she comes at things better than most women, being entirely unencumbered by any vanity; as she may well be; in clothing, manner, appearance, she is of the most ordinary type possible; & thus her talk, & her pipe, come with force. Janet shows signs of real old age; acquiescent; not blunted, so much as increasingly meditative—shakes her head a little. But she looked very well.

Saturday 4 May

Hodson came to lunch. A soldier now, though by profession a civil servant. A hard, straightforward man, all about him seeming as close cropped as his head. A man of average gifts, I suppose, & thus a sample of what the world does to human beings. He has no special gift or fortune to palliate life. In this light I thought him rather sad; so grim, unpretending, & taking what comes as if it were anyhow good enough for him. He didn’t like the war, but joined “as a duty”. First the bachelors went, then the married men, then those who could afford to. His passage cost him £200. But there was no trace of heroism in this: mere “such is life”. He went to Kew with Leonard. I to the printer who remains shut. The first fine day since April 1st, or thereabouts. Hot, blue sky, no wind. Birds singing; & people swarming.

Sunday 5 May

But when the wind turns to East, it pours. Such a spring I can’t remember, though for blackness the summer I spent in bed at Twickenham matched it. According to Nessa the country has the same climate. This being so, we walked out in our mackintoshes, up the river & down the Avenue. Scarcely a couple to be seen. I pitied the orange barrows, half covered over, with some wet man sheltering near under a tree, his Sunday sales demolished. The tea gardens, too, look dishevelled, with their daffodils bent & drenched. Outside Dysart House we heard a cuckoo, inside some forlorn week end party was listening to a pianola. Desmond put us off, I confess to our relief; his mother burnt her face lighting a gas stove. L. was rather headachy, perhaps owing to a swollen tooth.

Monday 6 May

L. was so uncomfortable this morning that we went out at eleven, for it was sunny & beautiful, the wind being in the East. We meant to sit in Kew Gardens, but they don’t open till 12: & therefore we sat on Kew Green, which has been turned into allotment gardens: ugly patches of raw earth, spotted with white paper stuck into sticks. At twelve we entered. To the general loveliness & freshness was added a sense of being out when we should have been at home; this always turns things into a kind of spectacle. It seems to be going on without you. We sat under a tree, & became a centre for sparrows & robins, & pestered by the attentions of a gigantic aeroplane.

L. went to Harrison’s, & had his tooth out, for it was very bad & pouring poison into him, sufficient to cause many headaches, so Harrison said. I went to London on my usual round; the one I like best. In my beatific state I forgot the principle thing I’d gone for; a typewriter ribbon; but never mind; that will be another days treat. Mudie’s I dont altogether like because I’m kept waiting, but I love Holborn, & the Charing Cross Road, & I rather like turning into the 17 Club, & finding or expecting to find someone I want to talk to. I dont like buying hats though: though I’ve conquered some part of the horror by learning how to look into the eyes of milliners, & make my demands boldly. Eighteen shillings for a hat seems a great price; but I paid it; & it relieves me so much to have bought it that I’m happy again in the end. But what women’s faces in the streets! As senseless as playing cards; with tongues like adders. I found James reading the Antigone in the Club. Presently Leonard came, with Adrian. Adrian looks immensely long, & his little bow tie somehow gives him a frivolous rather than distinguished air, as if a butterfly had settled on him by mistake. He has some job in an office. We gossiped. Blood is a very strong tie; so much can be taken for granted, after the first shyness. Then Barbara came in, in her round black hat with the cherry coloured ribbon, as neat as if she’d never been in France; but all the same I think she is a little different. Nick is in hospital, & very irritable. She spends her spare time with Saxon. I daresay the seesaw is not working quite smoothly; but one cant honestly deduce this from a shadow round her eyes! We went on to the London Library, & so home.

Tuesday 7 May

I write expecting Philip Morrell to dinner—not that one need dwell upon that—Wind East & violent rain & grey sky again. A letter from Harry Stephen, suggesting a visit, as if he’d been in the habit of dropping in after dinner once a week all these years. The ties of blood? Something very odd moves in the Stephen brain. L. better, though not entirely right. The tooth was an ancient mammoth. I must read Logan’s Trivia now. L. has gone to a [League of Nations] meeting at the House of Commons. I’ve had a rush of books as usual: three Tchekovs, Logan, Squire, & Merrick hanging over me.

Tuesday 28 May

The rush of books was disposed of, & Squire was well drubbed too; at the same time such a rush of people coincided, that I was clogged into complete dumbness, I see; but to take up the pen directly upon coming back from Asheham shows I hope that this book is now a natural growth of mine—a rather dishevelled, rambling plant, running a yard of green stalk for every flower. The metaphor comes from Asheham.

But first let me recall Janet, Desmond, Katherine Mansfield & Lilian; there were others,—yes, there was Harry Stephen & Clive. Each left with me a page full of comments, but useless now partly I think from my habit of telling these incidents over to people, & once told, I don’t want to retell them, the telling leaves a groove in my mind which gives a hardness to the memory, stereotypes it, makes it a little dull. But I wandered through Richmond Park in the moonlight with Desmond. We jumped a palisade into Miss Hickman’s funeral grove, & found the dark green mounds pointed with red rosettes. The rhododendron is a lovely flower for the moonlight. And we beheld a china watercloset also lovely in the moonlight, the divinity of a sheltered lodger, wedged in among the ferns & the flowering bushes. Desmond, who has been pestering me with inscrutable persistence, over the telephone in letters in visits to lunch with Prince Bibesco, dropped all that, drank a whole bottle, & bubbled like a tipsy nightingale, amorous, humorous, reminiscent, &, remembering the dead, perhaps melancholy in a happy sort of way. But he spoke rather pointedly of the charm & intelligence of Molly.

“Yes, I’ve never feared tragedy in your lives” I said, nor does one, though from what we hear, they strain at the collar now & then. But modern life has the merit of allowing for that. Katherine was marmoreal, as usual, just married to Murry, & liking to pretend it a matter of convenience. She looks ghastly ill. As usual we came to an oddly complete understanding. My theory is that I get down to what is true rock in her, through the numerous vapours & pores which sicken or bewilder most of our friends. It’s her love of writing I think. But she is off to Cornwall. Harry Stephen told his old stories, wrinkled his nose, & alluded several times to his great age. He is 58. An undoubted failure; but that has a freshening effect upon people; they are more irresponsible than the successes; but yet one can’t call Harry exactly irresponsible either. He is modest; humorous; all his pride for his father & ancestors. He still takes out an enormous pocket knife, & slowly half opens the blade, & shuts it. Janet was decidely more spirited than of late. She discussed Greek with L. She is still puzzling out theories about Plato: very open minded, & ready to understand whatever one may spring on her. I sprang first, Joyce’s novel, then the Murrys; who are to be neighbours. Lilian read a paper to the Guild in a thoroughly co-operative spirit; I think I should take exception to their maternal care of the women’s souls, if I were connected with the movement. But I see the terrible temptation of thinking oneself in the right, & wishing to guide & influence.

Then Clive was in his best man-of-the-world vein, fresh from Max Beerbohm, & inclined to think himself one of our foremost. He sent me his book, where I find myself with Hardy & Conrad; & Nessa & Duncan bracketed first. He babbled & prattled & hinted at all his friends & parties & interests—not offensively, to me at least. He gives, or wishes to give the impression that he sits drinking in the Café Royal with Mary, & the young poets & painters drift up, & he knows them all, & between them they settle the business. His book is stout morality & not very good criticism. He seems to have little natural insight into literature. Roger declares that he doesn’t know about pictures. On the other hand, he has the strong English sense of morality. At Asheham we had Roger, a picnic, & I spent a night at Charleston. That is by way of company. But the important thing was the weather. The heat was such that it was intolerable to walk before tea; we sat in the garden, I indolently reading, L. not sitting but gardening. We had the best display of flowers yet seen—wall flowers in profusion, columbines, phlox, & as we went huge scarlet poppies with purple stains in them. The peonies even about to burst. There was a nest of blackbirds against the wall. Last night at Charleston I lay with my window open listening to a nightingale, which beginning in the distance came very near the garden. Fishes splashed in the pond. May in England is all they say—so teeming, amorous, & creative. I talked a good deal with Nessa—much about servants & other possibilities. Roger, of course, came up from Bo-Peep, & there was Mrs B⁠[rereton], burnt brown, solid, stolid, institutional, & very competent. Roger & I croaked a kind of frogs chorus together—how we loved & admired & were only snubbed for our pains—Nessa sitting almost silent, stitching a dress by lamplight. Roger is growing more egoistical, or it is more apparent to me; & his complaints were more genuine than mine. All interesting people are egoists, perhaps; but it is not in itself desirable. There were numbers of Belgian Hares, & equal numbers of children to judge by the sound, though they are kept to their own rooms & hours by Mrs B. & don’t appear at all. Saxon & Barbara arrive at Asheham as we go—this being our compromise, for we didn’t want them as visitors as they, coolly enough, proposed that we should have them.

Thursday 6 June

These gaps are accounted for by the weather. Its not weather for drawing up to the fire & settling in. Indeed, I find some difficulty in reading. The windows are both open; the children next door are playing in the garden; the usual song comes from the singing teacher’s room above the laundry; the birds are vocal in the trees. I want to be wandering down grassy spaces. Its impossible to concentrate. Things therefore pass unrecorded. A good deal of sociability goes on in this weather—Adrian & Karin dined with us on Sunday; she resolutely artistic in a distressing way; bright green, with sturdy embroidery let in. They live rather apart from our world; from all worlds, I cant help feeling, though this may be wrong. A. never troubles himself to see anyone & together they make too dense a block to be good guests at a party. A. was amusing, however. Prejudice leads me to think my own relations rather distinguished. He certainly makes one laugh with his stories of Saxon “Fifteen minutes it takes him to get from the recumbent to the sitting position.” A. is observant, malicious, but more kindly than of old. He has the taste, & she the energy. I’ve seen Alix too—indeed asked her back here to dine with me, L. being out. I think the faintest ray of dawn is observable on the pitchy black of her horizon. She is able to conceive the possibility of one day finding some book to read. She has tried Bertie’s mathematics, relinquished it, but did not altogether dismiss my suggestion of legal history. She wants to work at something that matters to no one; & will never be used, seen, or read, & can be done for no more nor less than 3 hours a day.

Then Carrington came to tea with me, L. making a speech again, (his activities are beyond counting now—what with League of Nations & all its evil designs. War & Peace, & its possibilities, to which one must add the persistent darkies, & the 17 Club committee). Carrington stayed over 2 hours; & I think that by itself is a sign of youth. She is odd from her mixture of impulse & self consciousness. I wonder sometimes what she’s at: so eager to please, conciliatory, restless, & active. I suppose the tug of Lytton’s influence deranges her spiritual balance a good deal. She has still an immense strange admiration for him & us. How far it is discriminating I don’t know. She looks at a picture as an artist looks at it; she has taken over the Strachey valuation of people & art; but she is such a bustling eager creature, so red & solid, & at the same time inquisitive, that one can’t help liking her. She posted me up in all the gossip. Jos has married his deaf governess, & thereby blasted the hopes of Heaven knows how many Marjories. She is dismissed in the harshest way, humiliated in the face of all her friends—or so I should feel it. Lytton complains that the critics haven’t attacked his judgments. They have copied each other & complimented him without much fineness. Still his book goes into another edition; the praise from the elderly, the Ottolines & the Goldies, is lavish. I haven’t yet read it through; indeed, I’ve rather shirked formulating my own opinion, expecting to find it rather complicated. At any rate, as I’m on the verge of cooking dinner & going up to hear the Magic Flute I shan’t begin now. And Oliver has taken a new mistress, & Barbara & Saxon have left Asheham, & I can think of no more gossip for the time being.

Friday 7 June

One thing Adrian said amused me—how it positively frightened him to see peoples’ faces on the Heath “like gorillas, like orang-outangs—perfectly inhuman—frightful” & he poked his mouth out like an ape. He attributes this to the war—though I can remember other pronouncements of the same kind before that. Perhaps the horrible sense of community which the war produces, as if we all sat in a third class railway carriage together, draws one’s attention to the animal human being more closely. L. was told the other day that the raids are carried out by women. Women’s bodies were found in the wrecked aeroplanes. They are smaller & lighter, & thus leave more room for bombs. Perhaps its sentimental, but the thought seems to me to add a particular touch of horror.

I went to the Magic Flute, & thought rather better of humanity for having that in them. Goldie was in the same row with me, thinking I daresay much the same thoughts, though the proximity of two youthful men may have coloured them differently. There were Roger & Pippa, & Sheppard & finally Mary Hutch. & Jack & Alix & James—all collecting in the hall for a moment in the twilight, for the sun, at 10 of a hot day, was hardly out of the sky. Mary & Jack in their dress clothes, took me back some 20 years; more accurately they took me back to the New English Art Club, she with her plastered hair, & he with his ruddy face & black riband across his shirt front. Home, & in the carriage I saw Jean [Thomas], & remained hidden behind an officer. I dodged her successfully on getting out, & then, hurrying up the main road, distinctly heard myself called, “O there’s Virginia.” I hesitated, but judging such rudeness impossible, turned back, saw Jean! was received with the utmost surprise, for she had been talking about a cab, though thinking, so she said, of me—She introduced me to Ann, who used to figure so when I was in bed; the lady with the romance in India, which Jean prayed she might have strength to overcome. I could only see a featureless shape, & strode on again, Jean begging to come & see us, very cordially.

I admit it may be vanity; but people do certainly show themselves very cordial & anxious to come all the way out here—I think we make a good mixture—at any rate, here are the Sangers, Kot & Gertler, Pippa all waiting to be fitted in, while Ottoline never ceases to gape wide for a week end. And we’ve promised one to the Waterlows.

Monday 17 June

Another gap of ten days takes me to the conclusion of our Waterlow visit. With the sort of clumsiness one might expect of them, they’ve pitched upon a house in the village of Oare; taken it for 28 years; in spite of the way it misses all the good qualities one might have had, with such a range to choose from. You have a view of a dull farmyard; only a glimpse of down, & the house stands in the village street, too much in a hollow to be capable of a view. Sydney has mellowed & grown less susceptible to the good & bad opinions of his friends. She is a gnome like figure; but acute as the unattractive women tend to be, depending upon hard work for their wages. She produced excellent food, & manages the two unattractive children without a nurse. “All is black round me” she said, during a discussion on Saturday night, “I get no acute sensations; I wonder if its worth while.” S. talks of taking to literature again. The defect of the household lies in their relationship. She has no admiration for him; he no romance about her. Clear eyed people could scarcely feel otherwise; but how I hate the average! Strictly speaking, they’re both above the average. The average is a very queer study though: humble, aspiring, & without illusions.

None of these qualities are common with the people we see for the most part. I must run over the names of those we’ve seen in 10 days, so far as I can remember them. Ray for the night; Molly for dinner & also for the night; the Sangers & Murry;—the others are now forgotten. Ray lectured the W.C.G. How strange it is to see one’s friends taking their fixed shape! How one can foretell middle age for them, & almost see them with the eyes of the younger generation! “Rather a terror”, I think they’ll say of Ray. She has the look of conscious morality which is born of perpetual testifying to the right. She has grown heavier, more dogmatic; her attitudes are those of the public speaker & woman used to knocking about the country. She speaks in all the counties of England. She has lost such feminine charm as she had; she seems mature. But she is made of solid stuff; & this comes through & pleases me, & L. likes her better than the cropheads. We discussed the moral eminence of Moore, comparable to that of Christ or Socrates, so R. & L. held. They challenged me to match him in that respect by any of my friends. I claimed for Nessa Duncan Lytton & Desmond something different but of equal value. R. tends to think us a set of gifted but good for nothing wastrels. Her days work gives her some claim to look down upon us; but it would be unfair to say that she condescends or judges. She merely makes one aware of a different ideal. What ideal does Molly live for? A very wandering will o’ the wisp—but she chases it, & sticks in the bog, poor woman, & hasn’t the clearest of notions as to what she’s after. She has Desmond’s Character on her mind. She imagines that he is much talked about, & greatly derided. Its worth noting for my own benefit how very little talk goes on compared with the victims notion of what must go on. She had ready an elaborate defence of D. but finding it unneeded, she confessed to the truth—that she finds him a little spoilt, terribly without a will, & much at the mercy of any fine lady or gentleman with good wine. I couldn’t deny all this. I believe she worries herself acutely. Let alone the worry of money; she has a sense of failure, of decadence, & infulfilment. She means to give up London & live in the country, as an attempt at cure. But there’s something sordid about it now—no longer pure fun. She finds his mind vitiated; his views no longer so interesting.

Murry & the Sangers came here to supper last Sunday. Dora becomes increasingly ungainly. She has become so lame that in order to take off her boots, she has to kick out one leg, & then hunch herself round into an attitude where she can crook hold of it again. Indeed, I had to do it for her. Murry was pale as death, with gleaming eyes, & a crouching way at table that seemed to proclaim extreme hunger or despair. Charlie has his wintry brightness still; but weighed down by all this cadaverous company, he scarcely chirped his best. And after dinner such a duet of despair was croaked by Murry & Dora as warmed the cockles of Dora’s heart.

“At Christmas, said Murry, I was near suicide; but I worried out a formula which serves to keep me going. Its the conception of indifferentism. I have hope no longer. I live in 2 layers of conscience. (but I forget what these were.) Dora egged him on, & sounded his praises when we went through the struggle with the boots again.

But to us he seemed less nice, perhaps more anxious for effect, this time than before. Despairing young men who have worked out philosophies & describe them remind me too much of Henry Lamb. But there’s more than that in Murry. I expect he is used to being an oracle in the underworld.

Then Leonard went to the annual dinner, which was almost a dinner in honour of Lytton; but not very interesting to L. at least; & I went to Don Giovanni, to my infinite delight; & last Friday [14 June] we went to the League of Nations meeting. The jingoes were defeated by the cranks. It was a splendid sight to see. The chief jingo was H. G. Wells, a slab of a man formidable for his mass, but otherwise the pattern of a professional cricketer. He has the cockney accent in words like “day”. He was opposed by Oliver [Strachey], Mrs Swanwick & Adrian. There were also present such gnomes as always creep out on such occasions—old women in coats & skirts with voluminous red ties, & little buttons & badges attached to them—crippled, stammering men, & old patriarchs with beards, & labour men, & ourselves. Lord Shaw presided, & Sir W. Dickinson. It was comical to see their polite horror at the sight of our party, but Hobson won, by virtue, I expect, of his academic appearance. Wells, when he found himself thwarted lost the sort of effervescent good temper he has, & struck out as wildly as he could, & spat sarcasms at Williams & Hobson; & finally left the room; but we found him caballing in the hall with McCurdie & Spender, & L. is now in London hearing the result at a meeting of the executive.

Monday 24 June

The League of Nations intrigue hasn’t stayed in our favour, owing to various chicaneries practised by Sir Willoughby after the General Meeting. But I’m not competent to give a clear account of them. The amusing thing to me is to see Adrian transformed into an orator, an agitator, a man with convictions. I can’t take it quite seriously; I mean I attribute it partly to his need of defending his own attitude as a C.O. He is a little sheepish; & yet works out points, circulates letters, whips up converts, & organises meetings of the godly at the 17 Club, where they plan the most extreme measures. Its odd how people invariably fall into these separate groups, & can’t be united, each asserting a complete grasp of the right. But all this week has been harassed beyond any enjoyment by the great servant question. As I haven’t traced the stages, I won’t begin now. The question was whether N. & L. should go to Nessa for 3 months. At first they agreed with gladness; then they hesitated; then they asked for assurance that we would have them back; then they formally accepted; then they violently refused; then Trissie arrived, on a sudden, as ambassador; spent the night, argued, won her case & lost it again. Finally she and I found a widow & child in Soho who take the place; & now all is as it was, after more conversations, emotions, letters, telegrams, parleyings, compromises & diplomacies than would have set Europe in flame. Trissie’s character, so far as I can make out, is the one thing irretrievably damaged in our eyes; the rest have slightly risen in value. At one stage in this agony, Gertler & Kot dined with us. Gertler is a plump white young man, got up for the occasion very sprucely in sponge bag trousers. His face is a little tight & pinched; but the word he would wish one to use of him is evidently “powerful”. There is something condensed in all Jews. His mind certainly has a powerful spring to it. He is also evidently an immense egoist. He means by sheer will power to conquer art. But bating this sort of aggressiveness, he was well worth talking to. L. noticed his amazing quickness. He would soon have told us the story of his life. I felt about him, as about some women, that unnatural repressions have forced him into unnatural assertions. He examined our furniture & pictures. He likes shiny lodging house things best, he said. He has never felt akin to anyone. He thinks himself very much cleverer than most painters. Kot sat indulgently silent, professing scarcely to notice what was before his eyes. They both described their Jewish families. On Gertler, as upon Murry & Katherine, rests to my feeling the shadow of the underworld. You could put no trust in him; on principle, I can imagine, he is unscrupulous. Kot is different—rather in the style of the solid lodging house furniture, but with an air of romance.

We had a visit from Margaret; which opened with a tremendous broadside of cooperative shop; lamentations, aspirations & too sanguine expectations; all exaggerated, so I felt, in comparison with their real value. The vote at Congress against Peace seems to her of unspeakable importance & horror. She still talks of resigning next year; but we were interrupted in this by a strange attack in one of L.’s eyes; he dashed off to the chemist, & left alone with Margaret I became purely ribald. L. got Fergusson to take out a small fly; came back, & went on again, & M. stayed till the last train. She is a fine specimen of the public woman; a type, after all, no less marked than the literary type, though not yet so fully observed & recorded. Their eccentricities keep me amused, when to tell the truth, I’ve ceased to follow their plots & denunciations. They have the habit of considering themselves driven to death, overwhelmed with work, without a possibility of rest; & never once since I’ve known her has Margaret owned to any state of health save that of being very tired. But these peculiarities are not more than jokes to me; & the directness & superb vigour of her character always overcome me with admiration. Given a keener mind, or a subtler, or some sort of discipline that she’s never had, she might have done marvels. I sometimes guess that she thinks her work less good than it should have been. Or it may be only the terrific shadow of old age, in to which no one, not Roger or Goldie or any of them, can enter without a shudder.

But these remarks on public servants might be written over again for Ka too. She dined with us last night & slept, leaving punctually for her office this morning. With an effort she will talk of other things, but she seems bent & bowed under a load of responsibility, which I believe to be timber at present. In addition, she broods over the war. Her own happiness, I suppose, went out very completely with Rupert’s death; & I fancy she’s making up her mind to a life infinitely poorer & colder than she expected. If this is so, her illusion about the value of a desk in the shipping office, & her hallucination about her own driven, exhausted, harassed condition are merciful. To us, they seemed a little excessive. Its the atmosphere bred in an office as much as anything, the common attitude. She’s been offered a Hall at Newnham. So we all step into the ranks of the middle aged, the responsible people, the burden bearers. It makes me a little melancholy. Failure would keep us young at any rate.

Before tea this afternoon I finished setting up the last words of Katherine’s stories—68 pages.

Thursday 27 June

The echoes of the great Charleston affair may still be heard, especially in the region of the kitchen. But it will be needless I hope to take action on their account any more; I wasted Tuesday afternoon writing first a violent & then a pacific letter to Nessa with my version of our Virtue & Trissie’s baseness. L. took proofs meanwhile. The Labour Congress of course makes it impossible to bring that book to a close. L. was there all day yesterday, & had the sensation of Kerensky’s surprise visit. I still find it difficult to make head or tail of Labour party politics, or indeed of any other; but with practice I suppose it wouldn’t be harder than reviewing Mr Merrick. The interest in politics thrives among our friends just now. Adrian & Karin have become rebels & extremists & are seen in every gallery & meeting place. L. had to repeat the whole story twice over after dinner, first for Margaret & then for Bella. Bella is anti-Bolshevik; but the significant thing is that everyone takes some side or other. Everyone makes the state of the country his private affair.

Mrs Woolf & Herbert dined with us on Tuesday. She has, I think, the qualities of a person who has never altogether grown up, in spite of 9 children & all her cares. She gossips & enjoys herself & bursts into tears because she feels she ought to burst into tears; but she tells her memories with spirit, & somehow deals with life very freely & easily & with the liveliest, childlike interest in it all, mixed with the most absurd conventions. She chattered away about her first marriage, & how they’d travelled in Austria, & how she’d had a set of sables, & bought her trousseau at Swan & Edgars. “But Rasselas says the truth—a very fine truth” she observed. “Happiness is never perfect—I’ve never found perfect happiness—always something missing, Virginia,” & there she was taking back a bunch of cornflowers to Bella because it was the anniversary of Dick’s death. Herbert cordial, distant, & detached as usual.

At the Club yesterday I picked up the Times & read of Aunt Minna’s death 2 days ago at Lane End. She is buried there today. She was in her 91st year. A more composed, & outwardly useless life one can’t imagine. She merely lived all that length of time, without adventures, sorrows, difficulties, doubts, actions. She was always unperturbed. I think her great quality was her good sense. She was never in any way absurd or tiresome, & if necessary she would have been a person to ask some sorts of advice from. I saw her a few weeks ago, apparently unaware of death, taking her house for 4 years further, & saying precisely what she’d said any time—about good & bad novels, about George & Margaret & how Dalingridge wasn’t really good country, but of course one mustn’t say so. An elderly toady was with her, who had been a great beauty once, & was still fine looking, & a kind woman, according to Aunt Minna. I expect that the poor old lady was more stoical than she let on: certainly she never seemed selfish or callous; always had her own small affairs which gave her just as much interest as she wanted, & she was too level headed, too clear sighted to pretend for a second to feel more than she did or to ask for expressions of feeling. Gerald I think she was fondest of; his change of mood troubled her a good deal. She was very proud of George & Margaret. She thought it necessary to tell me that at her age she couldn’t ride a bicycle. I believe too much money had always kept her more at a distance from life than was good for her. She was a great supporter of the Duckworth family, & dies the last of them all.

Monday 1 July

Just back from tea at the Club, laden with 2 cloths had on approval from Souhami’s. L. at the League of Nations. We’ve talked a great deal since I wrote last. First there was the party at the Club on Friday. I came late & met Lytton first & then little Sanger with his name written & pinned to his buttonhole. All sorts of people one half knew from the papers—men with shaggy hair & great eyebrows—women cadaverous or flamboyant—Macdonald, Huysmans, Mrs Despard, Thomas & so on. I was pitched strangely enough into the arms of Widow Creighton who remembered me, she said. Age perhaps has toned her dogmatism. I found her easy enough; a sincere fine old thing, her face emerging out of a mist of flesh, & looking infinitely seamed & worn, like an immensely old sun shining through the mists. She said middle age was happier than youth. I was shot on again. We dined with A. & K.: a good dinner downstairs, & then sat by their open window looking on to Parliament Hill. At 9 we went on to Ray’s party—a dull affair, neither respectable nor bohemian, inundated with Belgians. I talked to Jack [Hills] however; very much like our version of him—emphatic, sententious, & very trusty & kind. I felt him pathetic too; so much seems to have gone wrong for him. On Saturday I went to tea with Janet—but my hand shakes so with carrying parcels that I can’t write.

Tuesday 2 July

My hand shakes no longer, but my mind vibrates uncomfortably, as it always does after an incursion of visitors; unexpected, & slightly unsympathetic. One’s talked nonsense; one’s ashamed; they’ve been uncomfortable; the contact of one with the other was difficult. I was reading Macaulay’s Life over my tea. (L. seeing Snowden in London) when Mrs Woolf was announced. Edgar & Sylvia called in on their way through Richmond. He is a good deal nicer than she is; as I think I’ve recorded earlier in this book, I take her to be as near the average of her sex, class, & age as may be; given Putney as birthplace, & middle class origin & rather moderate means. The great machine turns out millions like her every year. However they are supplied with a number of ready made remarks into the bargain, so we talked away our 20 minutes,—& now they are gone. But what led him to marry her? “My dear boy” she calls him. I started folding K.M.’s story this afternoon; & went round to the printers, who will only give half a promise to have his press free tomorrow. Every conceivable obstacle is flung across our road, though we do our best to come out this next week. Influenza, which rages all over the place, has come next door.

Thursday 4 July

We had a great bout of people yesterday, as we tend to do nowadays. Mary Hutch. Clive, & Borenius. They had been seeing pictures at Sir Cook’s house, & came in later, elegant, frivolous, all garrulous except Mary who scarcely speaks, wanting tea. L. was printing; so I sat in the midst and we engaged in conversation. Borenius is I fancy a good-natured bore of the foreigner type. They tell long very explicit stories, launching out on them on the least provocation; but for one evening it did very well. They dined here; & again we assembled in the drawing room & talked till we could scarcely see each other. B.’s stories filled considerable space; how he’d been made a Count & other stories encroaching upon Asquiths & Cunards. Clive jolly & jovial, cracking his whip & kicking up his heels; & we discussed pictures & jealousy, & derided a good many of our contemporaries. But, as usual, I enjoyed it; L. not quite so much. I took Mary Hutch, over the house; a very shy, or somehow unforthcoming woman; nice I expect, beneath such a fuss & exquisiteness of dress & get up that one has doubts whether she can be nice. She is going to write a story for us, if she can ever leave off scratching it out.

Today, Friday [5 July] L. printed off the last of Prelude, only the title page & dedication still to do. Today the printers machine is running, rather to our alarm, as he seems ignorant of it. We may have his press for £25. Very fine & hot.

Tuesday 9 July

I cant fill up the lost days, though it is safe to attribute much space in them to printing. The title page was finally done on Sunday. Now I’m in the fury of folding & stapling, so as to have all ready for glueing & sending out tomorrow & Thursday. By rights these processes should be dull; but its always possible to devise some little skill or economy, & the pleasure of profiting by them keeps one content. Yesterday we had a day off, & went, together for a wonder, to Souhami’s; & I hereby make a vow to buy all draperies, covers, cloths, rugs from him in future and never again go near the Omega or the Burnet’s. We have obliterated that painful staring check under a pale green & blue persian cloth—infinitely preferable. L. up in London seeing Bonwick about the dummy copy, & at 17 Club meeting. An Indian is now established in that institution perpetually playing chess. Saxon, by the way dined with us on Saturday, & supplemented this dinner by a long unnecessary intimate discussion of his feelings & health on the telephone. He doesn’t get on with Nick, he says, though Barbara manages all right. I believe he takes natural pleasure in feeling himself preferred in spite of the awkwardnesses. Now to my stapling.

Wednesday 10 July

We have sent off our first copies this evening, after spending the afternoon in glueing & covering. They surprised us when done by their professional look—the stiff blue cover pleases us particularly. I must read the book through after dinner, partly to find possible faults, but also to make up my mind how much I like it as literature.

Adrian & Karin dined here last night, & he spoke to the Guild on Peace—very composed, clear, well spoken, putting on his spectacles & reading in his pleasant intellectual voice from notes. He has traces of the judicial mind & manner. The women were more stirred than usual, though their reasoning isn’t very very strong; & they are of course ignorant. But they would all have peace tomorrow, on any terms, & abuse our government for leading us on after a plan of its own. When asked to join a Peace Meeting in Hyde Park on Sunday, Mrs Langston, as spokeswoman, intimated that on no account could they violate the Sabbath. What a terrible grip Xtianity still has—she became rigid & bigoted at once, as if God himself had her in his grasp. That I believe is still the chief enemy—the fear of God. But I was tactful enough to keep this view dark. Karin very voluble with her advanced views, though I never see how she comes by them. One can’t trace any passion.

Rain for the first time for weeks today, & a funeral next door; dead of influenza.

Friday 12 July

Just back from the Club, & therefore in the restless state most safely to be appeased by writing; reading, though I’ve Don Juan, the Tragic Comedians, Verrall upon Meredith, Crees upon Meredith, the poems of Heredia & the poems of Laforgue to read, to say nothing of the Autobiography of Tagore, & the life of Macaulay, being out of the question before dinner. Mudies, I confess, sickens me of reading: I feel disinclined even to write, what may become one of these books, so like bales of stuff upon a drapers shelves—only with out the solid merit of good wool. I stood there with the pallid & respectable & got my allowance. Great storms have been beating over England the last 3 days, the result of the Bishop’s importunity, God being, as usual, spiteful in his concessions, & now threatening to ruin the harvest. I owe God a grudge for his effect upon the Guild.

At the Club we met Lytton by appointment, & had tea downstairs, talking mainly of his book, & his success, & the violent attack upon him by Mrs Ward in the Lit. Sup. yesterday. She sees German brutality in his picture of Nightingale & Clough, professing to let the coarse caricature of Arnold pass. How this lights up the stuffed world of the first class railway carriage that she lives in! Lytton is getting Walter Raleigh to answer, though I think nothing short of a coronet will impress her imagination. He stays this week end with the Dutchess of Marlborough, whom he met in the Cunards’ box at the opera; & was fresh from Mrs Asquith. Mrs A. is of opinion that the Autobiography of Haydon is superior to the Confessions of Rousseau. She pressed upon him a copy of Hubert Crackanthorpe’s works. He is under no illusion so far about the brilliancy or desirability of this set as familiars, though very happy & comfortable & mellow in his success. Country Life begs him to continue the series in its pages. Lalla Vandervelde is going to act a play of his. His only anxiety is whether fame will continue. Maynard watches eager for him to be converted; but I see no chance, unless pleasure will be his doom: no, I think he’s safe, & really improved, as I suppose most people are by encouragement.

Yesterday & the day before we spent glueing the book, & have now paid all our debts; so that I suppose a great many tongues are now busy with K.M. I myself find a kind of beauty about the story; a little vapourish I admit, & freely watered with some of her cheap realities; but it has the living power, the detached existence of a work of art. I shall be curious to get other opinions. L. rather gloomy now about the prospects of his Review. Thomas has taken his name off the Board, on the ground that the Trade Unions have the same end in view. This is rather cool, as L. gave them the idea. I have bet 1 shilling that all will be settled by Oct. 1st; & L. editor; & the Review in being.

Tuesday 16 July

On Saturday [13 July] we took it into our head to do a little marketing, since the book is off our hands temporarily; & so went to Kingston with a basket, but found peas & beans much the same price there as here. L. bought a vellum Grotius at a bookshop which promised better than it produced.

On Sunday, a wettish cloudy day as all these days have been since the Duke of Rutland fell on his knees, we went to Staines to say goodbye to Philip who has notice to go to the front on Monday. I cant help having a good deal of sympathy with my mother in law, not only in this parting but in her general attitude to life. It is so lacking in self-consciousness; & has a natural kind of rightness & wisdom, though she never says a clever thing, & in fact says many foolish ones, & her conventions are so absurd that they scarcely count. We walked up & down a narrow lane between beds of Herbert’s vegetables; & she cried; & laughed; & then gave me 2 large eggs; & ran about among all her children, very lively & haphazard, & affectionate, evidently liking this sort of miscellaneous company of sons & their wives better than anything on earth. But to give this effect I should need a chapter, & rather hope one of these days to take one.

Monday, was as usual a day for London & tea at the Club. I was so foolish as to fritter 3/—1/6 on the blue penholder with which I write, &, when I dont write suck; 1/6 on paper, at a grossly extravagant shop in Pall Mall. I justified these extravagances by the fact that you can get into the National Gallery for nothing. I spent an hour wandering there, & then came back & tried to describe my impressions to Vanessa. But I see why I like pictures; its as things that stir me to describe them; but then only certain pictures do this; & I insist (for the sake of my aesthetic soul) that I don’t want to read stories or emotions or anything of the kind into them; only pictures that appeal to my plastic sense of words make me want to have them for still life in my novel. But the atmosphere of picture galleries, always gloomy, is worse than ever now, when the glory of war has to be taught by a life size portrait of Lord Kitchener, & almost life size battle scenes; though as the battles are 18th century battles, one can only look upon them as scenes in a gymnasium on rather a large scale. I forget now who was at the Club for tea; but one may still safely seat Alix in one chair, & dress her in green gray coat & skirt with a leather belt round her waist, & a despatch box by her side. As she’s not doing work for Alix one can’t tell whats in the despatch box.

Tuesday was a day when I stayed at home & folded & stapled paper. A French secretary from Mr David Davies interrupted me. L. makes Tuesday a kind of receptacle for shooting meetings into.

On Wednesday 17th we glued 50 copies of Prelude. So far our present supply is ample. It seems doubtful whether we shall sell more than a hundred. Clive writes a tolerant but not enthusiastic letter about it. “Doesn’t set the Thames on fire, or turn his fastidious head” so he says. Bob Trevelyan dined with us, & Adrian came in late. Bob has been through the great crisis of his life—which will find him in talk for many a day. He has escaped the army, & may now go either to France or Holland. His literary work is interrupted very seriously. He upset me so by his statement that in his absence Bessy would “live with Crompton Davies—I mean stay with him.—In fact she’s there tonight to see how she likes it—” that I did nothing but laugh, at discreet intervals. Leonard & Adrian joined in. He is a ridiculous figure precisely like the false Mandrill, especially now that he’s bent with the rheumatic, & can only creep & crawl. He is one of our egoists; what’s more he manages to be more malevolent than anyone I know, under a cover of extreme good nature. He reminds me of the man with the pointed stick, who picks up scraps of paper. So Bob collects every scrap of gossip within reach—& even stretches after those that are still beyond his reach. He told me that “he’d heard I was taking my book about to publishers”, who presumably, refuse to take it. Then he lamented the failure of K.M.’s story; accepting my corrections of both statements, but so half heartedly that he’ll repeat them wherever he goes. He insisted, too that he had met me at the Verralls’, when he was an undergraduate in the 90ties—And he rambled over a long argument about great musicians & great writers; & he praised our friends books with one breath & found rather more fault than he had given praise with the other. But his relish of all this gossip & malevolence is such that you can’t grudge it him. He went off at 9.30 this morning with L. & talked all the way up in the train about his experiences before the Tribunal.

Thursday 18 July

L. spent 3 hours trying to make sense of Sir Willoughby Dickinson & the rest; & at 4 I met him in the Reading Room of the London Library. First, however, I met a milk white horse in St James’ Square, wearing an ancient Spanish saddle, mounted upon red embroidered velvet. An old men led it. No sign of advertisement was visible. Perhaps some great Duke rides abroad like this. We went on to tea at the Club—& what a tea! Two dry biscuits, so that we had to resort to cake on coming home. All the copies that we glued yesterday have gone white in the back. We dont know the cause. Richmond rang up to offer me Rupert’s Life for next week. I told him that I should like to explain Rupert to the public. He agreed that there was much misunderstanding. “He was a very jolly sort of fellow”; he said. I’m trying to get letters out of James.

The Germans are not succeeding this time, & the weather is windy, hot, violently wet, & sunny all in turn. We are once more getting safe through the moon.

Tuesday 23 July

I think it was on Friday that I was given my green glass jar by the chemist—for nothing! Its a jar I’ve always coveted; since glass is the best of all decorations, holding the light & changing it. At Lewes for round jars, the chemist asks £2.2. On Friday anyhow, Jack Hills & Pippa dined here. All went very easily & freely. Jack has weathered life with great credit, upheld so Pippa says, by his human sympathies, & turned by them in the direction of woman’s suffrage, reform, education for the poor & so on, though remaining nominally a conservative. I’m somehow reminded of an excellent highly polished well seasoned brown boot by the look of him. He always seems fresh from the country. He gave us a long & very vivid account of his campaigning, from which one could easily gather his immense virtues as leader of men. To my surprise too, he knows about Georgian poetry, & has read Lytton’s book, & condemns the Victorians. Perhaps one was inclined to be supercilious; to confound him with George & Gerald. Pippa spent the night. She appreciates Waller immensely. We talked about the future of women next morning. She is head of a kind of exchange for finding places & training women who want work, & sees the future in those terms of course.

On Saturday [20 July] we went to Tidmarsh. From the point of view of country there is nothing that we at least can say for it; though the house & garden are nice enough. The river brings such a flood of cheap humanity down to it; red villas perched everywhere; people spending the week end at Pangbourne with leather cases & fishing rods. Lytton & Carrington were alone. No servant was visible & most of the waiting seemed to be done by Carrington. She is silent, a little subdued, makes one conscious of her admiring & solicitous youth. If one were concerned for her, one might be anxious about her position—so dependent on L. & having so openly burnt the conventional boats. She is to run her risk & take her chances evidently. Lytton was fresh from the Dss of Marlborough & Dabernon, who is taking his play in hand. Whatever there is in the way of London society is, I suppose now open to him. He is making his investigations not with a view to a permanent settlement; rather to round off his view of human nature. He declares he knows more different sorts of people than any of us; but we disputed this. A great deal of talk about Rupert. The book is a disgraceful sloppy sentimental rhapsody, leaving Rupert rather tarnished. Lytton very amusing, charming, benignant, & like a father to C. She kisses him & waits on him & gets good advice & some sort of protection. He came up with us on Monday, to lunch with Dabernon. Margaret dined with us. I lay on the sofa & caught only a few unintelligible phrases.

Tuesday. L. went as usual to his committees. There are difficulties about the Review. Macdonald wants to make it part of his Socialist Review. Then there are difficulties about the League of Nations. Unwin is bringing out the Cooperation book, but all these movements are as difficult & as much hindered by jealousies and spites as well can be.

[Diary V]
Saturday, July 27th 1918
Hogarth House
Richmond

Saturday 27 July

As usual, this diary has skipped a day or two. But first one must pause to say that here a new volume starts, the third, & therefore there is every appearance of a long, though intermittent life. If it survives the summer, when the evenings are unfavourable to writing, it should flourish in the winter. Perhaps the lack of coal may kill it. We may have to live entirely at the 17 Club. But to look ahead is disastrous, considering how much has still to be recorded of time past. On Wednesday [24 July], I had one of my field days. To London, first to meet James at the Club. He was to tell me about Rupert for my article. His first words however were, “Have you heard of Ka’s engagement?” “To Hilton?” I asked. “No, to Arnold Forster.” This annoyed me considerably. I am glad that she should marry, though she bade fair to be a marked spinster, but marriage with W.A.F. will be merely a decorous & sympathetic alliance, making her more of a servant of the state than ever. Then, as James had a medical examination, we couldn’t say much about Rupert, save that he was jealous, moody, ill-balanced, all of which I knew, but can hardly say in writing. Fredegond appeared next; I took her half way to Charing Cross. She had been having confidences from Alix, & was in the flood of affection for her. These emotions are too much in the Fisher spirit for my comfort. Her poems are soon coming out. Then, having spread my rumour about Ka, which only comes through Bob, through a letter from A.F. & thus may not be true, & I hope it isn’t, I went up to Gordon Sqre; where the vans were taking the furniture, Nessa in & out of the room all the time; & of course Clive & Mary appeared; & then everything goes over the same little rapids. We all dined at the Mont Blanc. Clive has never forgiven me—for what? I see that he is carefully following a plan in his relations with me—& resents any attempt to distract him from it. His personal remarks always seem to be founded on some reserve of grievance, which he has decided not to state openly.

“You’ve wrecked one of my best friendships” he remarked; “by your habit of describing facts from your own standpoint—”

“What you call God’s Truth” said Nessa.

“One couldn’t have an intimacy with you & anyone else at the same time—You describe people as I paint pots.”

“You put things in curl, & they come out afterwards” Mary murmured from the shadow of her sympathetic silence.

Clive however had bitterness of some sort in what he said. He meant me to see that somehow I had ended our old relations—& now all is second best. It was clear also that he lives in dread of some alliance between Mary & me which shall threaten his position with her. He protested that to show her letters of his would be unfair, on my part or on Nessa’s. She is a blank book after our much written, rewritten & scratched out torn out pages. The situation is complicated & delicate enough. He can’t make up his mind to cut adrift from me altogether. But he paid for my dinner, & we wound up good temperedly. The rain pelted down, & I rushed for my train. I wish I had had the patience to write down the more intelligent parts of our talk: criticism of books & life, & not of people & feelings. But I become too critical of badly written criticism, & write so hurriedly that it would certainly be bad.

On Thursday we had a day off; in which we glued some more copies of Prelude; I think only one more order has come in. People complain that though clever & all that, the story isn’t complete.

On Friday, 26th, L. went on his round of League of Nations, & Club. I to Omega for Roger’s new paper, to Gordon Sqre for pictures, & then, laden intolerably, to the Club for tea. By rights of importance I should remark that today L. was asked to stand for Parliament. I haven’t yet turned my mind that way. A natural disposition to think Parliament ridiculous routs serious thought. But perhaps it is’nt so ridiculous as speeches make one suppose. Journalists were given tea at the Club. I went upstairs, hid behind a door, & saw Mrs Hamilton for the first time, or rather heard her, holding forth like a jolly club man; for I didn’t dare look.

James to dinner. He promises to send us Rupert’s letters to typewrite at Asheham; but some queer Strachey intrigue is at work on the matter.

Monday 29 July

I’m paralysed by the task of describing a week end at Garsington. I suppose we spoke some million words between us; listened to a great many more, chiefly from the mouth of Mrs Hamilton, who strains at her collar like a spaniel dog, & has indeed the large hazel staring eyes of one of them. There was Gertler; Shearman & Dallas for tea; Brett. Ottoline, 3 children & Philip. The string which united everything from first to last was Philip’s attack upon Murry in The Nation for his review of Sassoon. He was half proud of himself & half uncomfortable; at any rate, I was taxed with being on Murry’s side before 10 minutes was out; & then to prove his case Philip read Murry’s article, his letter, & his letter to Murry, three times over, so I thought, emphasising his points, & lifting his finger to make us attend. And there was Sassoon’s letter of gratitude too. I think Ott. was a little bored. Happily the weather was fine, the food good, & we flowed about happily enough, & without serious boredom, which is more than one can ask of a week-end. In fact, for some reason I was rather well content. My bed was like layer upon layer of the most springy turf; & then the garden is almost melodramatically perfect, with its grey oblong pool, & pink farm buildings, its soft whitish grey stone & enormous smooth dense green yew hedges. Down these paths we wandered; once or twice with Ott.; once with Mrs Hamilton. She is a working brain worker. Hasn’t a penny of her own; & has the anxious hard working brain of a professional, earning her living all the time. I’m not sure though that she didn’t compare very well with Ott. Some time after tea we three meandered off “to the woods”. But we never got there of course. Ott. sat upon a gate very soon & discussed the character of Ly Margaret Sackville; & as usual Ott. deplored & marvelled at the very characteristics which, one would have said, she knew at first hand. However, her drift is always almost bewilderingly meandering; & I believe she often doesn’t know her own motives for taking a special line. The difficulty is that anyone listening perceives some motive unconfessed; & this gives her talk rather a distracting wearying effect. Halfway up a hill in the sun, she stopped, leant on her parasol, looked vaguely across the landscape, & began a discourse upon love. Some wind seems to blow half her words away—another reason for finding her difficult to listen to—

“Isn’t it sad that no one really falls in love nowadays? Its the rarest, rarest thing—I mean they dont see each other ideally. They dont feel that every word is something too wonderful just because the other has spoken it. Bertie does of course—but then his choice is so often unfortunate.”

Here, chiefly in order to get us home, I said that love meant a great many different things; & that to confine it to romantic love was absurd. I also maintained that one could love groups of people, & landscapes. Unluckily this remark led Ott. to lean on her parasol once more, & look longingly at a wheatfield.

“Yes. I love that—just for itself—the curve of that wheatfield seems to me as divine as any human being. I’ve always been like that ever since I can remember. I love literature too—”

“I love quite absurd things—the I.L.P. for instance”, said Mrs Hamilton.

At last we got moving again, & we asked the poor old ninny why, with this passion for literature, she didnt write.

“Ah, but I’ve no time—never any time. Besides, I have such wretched health—But the pleasure of creation, Virginia, must transcend all others.”

I said it certainly did; though I think the remark ought to have been made to include Mrs Hamilton too. We trailed back through the village, where all the peasants were lounging in the road, with their pipes & their dogs & their babies. The most affable, & I’m afraid, obsequious greetings were exchanged; the dazzling appearance of Ott. & her pearls seeming to strike the agricultural labourer neither as wrong nor ridiculous, but as part of the aristocratic show that he’d paid for. No one laughed. Old ladies in black were eager to stop & talk about the hot weather. They seemed all a little excited & very anxious to please. “Very nice people, aren’t they?” she said when we came in; & I daresay nothing for the next 300 years will make them otherwise.

I was taken to Gertler’s studio & shown his solid ‘unrelenting’ teapot (to use Brett’s word). He is a resolute young man; & if good pictures can be made by willing them to be good, he may do wonders. No base motive could have its way with him; & for this reason I haven’t great faith in him. Its too moral & intellectual an affair; or perhaps the natural gift is not abundant enough to cover his conscience & will power. He says straight out what he thinks, sits very upright; everything tight curled, tense, muscular about him; his art an agony often, as he told me. But at last he understands that he wishes to paint form in the brightest colours. Form obsesses him. He sees a lamp as an imminent dominant overwhelming mass of matter. Ever since he was a child the solidity & the shapes of objects have tortured him. I advised him, for arts sake, to keep sane; to grasp, & not exaggerate, & put sheets of glass between him & his matter. This, so he said, is now his private wish. But he can think pianola music equal to hand made, since it shows the form, & the touch & the expression are nothing.

Wednesday 31 July

Arrived at Asheham. I sit as if in the open air—the drawing room providing only a shell of shade in the intense heat. The air dances over the field; & the smoke of the farm on the meadows mixes with the haze. The garden is overgrown, & the flowers crushed out. However, at this moment L. is cutting our beans for dinner.

We spent yesterday doing jobs in London. I saw a dead horse on the pavement—a literal case of what politicians call dying in harness, & rather pathetic to me—to die in Oxford Street one hot afternoon, & to have been only a van horse; & by the time I passed back again he was removed. This shows what my business was. Mudies. The Club. I loitered past jewellers windows looking for a stone to replace my sapphire lost in the train going to Garsington. Pale cracked emeralds of doubtful value tempt me greatly. Lytton & Alix at the Club—the last scene of that familiar drama. Lytton was on his way to catch a train. Alix, I suppose, never catches them. Terrible though it is to think of, she is sitting in the 17 Club at this moment—a kind of Fate, surveying the passage of moral generations. Lytton had lunch with Lord D’Abernon together with Lord Ribblesdale & a vulgar appreciative little manager, who asked to read his Chinese play & gave hopes of producing it. Lytton affects to think poorly of it. I’ve forgotten what I think. I complimented him on the change in Carrington—he has improved her. “Ah, but the future is very dark—I must be free. I shall want to go off.” I suggested that she might follow suit, which did not perhaps quite please him. In the street we passed Oliver & the flashing Inez; & were then stopped by Kot. who wanted us to come & meet D. H. Lawrence—or perhaps to ask him here. Kot’s blood shot eyes, & general sordidity struck us, in the middle of St James Square. He is a mysterious figure—not only in his occupations, but in his desire to be a friend of ours, though he seems without many friends. Anyhow, he was the last person we saw in London, since Mr Cox of the London Library doesn’t count.

Today the servants were off by a 7 o’clock train; & we came by Clapham, & meant to go by East Grinstead, but found places in the Lewes train after all, & got to Glynde about 2.30—not a bad journey. Everyone congratulated themselves on finding room at all, after the rumours about crowds that have been put about. In my carriage we were “a family party”, according to the extremely capable, friendly dogmatic Jew business man who took us in charge. These are queer meetings; so impressed on one at the time; then so rubbed out. Already I’ve half forgotten the soldier with the nickel knee plate & the metal arch to his foot, though he talked at the top of his voice, & boasted, & made me hate him; & I have forgotten the women with children, who drank a few drops of whiskey, & how we were all offered drinks of tea, & bites of sandwiches—& were helpful & kindly & on our best manly & womanly behaviour. We ate our lunch under some trees coming from Glynde.

Saturday 3 August

There’s nothing but rustic news to record, since as we expected the Murrys have put us off. Katherine writes that she’s ill. I cant help guessing that she may be rather hopelessly ill. Anyhow its out of the question that she should come here. The weather hasn’t held good. Yesterday was as wet a day as England often produces. Almost always the afternoon is dry in England; & so it was more or less. We went mushrooming in the evening, & got a handkerchief full. So one of our great excitements has begun again. One ripe blackberry was found at the top. As I lay in the grass a hare loped past me. Perhaps we’re rather pleased to be alone after all.

Better weather today, though a black sky is about the ugliest thing in nature. L. to Lewes. He went to fetch a parcel from the New Statesman which wasn’t there. I round M.’s walk, & over the top. My record must be solely of beetles & butterflies. A ray of sun brings out the brown heaths in any number. Over Newhaven an airship floated, & the sky being blue for a space the sea was too. It struck me as odd to think of all the blazing blue safely burning behind the clouds; & how a ray on the earth made a different place of it. I must go and pick ’shrooms, the sun being out.

Monday 4 August

While waiting to buy a book in which to record my impressions first of Christina Rossetti, then of Byron, I had better write them here. For one thing I have hardly any money left, having bought Leconte de Lisle, in great quantities. Christina has the great distinction of being a born poet, as she seems to have known very well herself. But if I were bringing a case against God she is one of the first witnesses I should call. It is melancholy reading. First she starved herself of love, which meant also life; then of poetry in deference to what she thought her religion demanded. There were two good suitors. The first indeed had his peculiarities. He had a conscience. She could only marry a particular shade of Christian. He could only stay that shade for a few months at a time. Finally he developed Roman Catholicism & was lost. Worse still was the case of Mr Collins—a really delightful scholar—an unwordly recluse—a single minded worshipper of Christina, who could never be brought into the fold at all. On this account she could only visit him affectionately in his lodgings, which she did to the end of her life. Poetry was castrated too. She would set herself to do the psalms into verse; & to make all her poetry subservient to the Christian doctrines. Consequently, as I think, she starved into austere emaciation, a very fine original gift, which only wanted licence to take to itself a far finer form than, shall we say, Mrs Browning’s. She wrote very easily; in a spontaneous childlike kind of way one imagines, as is the case generally with a true gift; still undeveloped. She has the natural singing power. She thinks too. She has fancy. She could, one is profane enough to guess, have been ribald & witty. And, as a reward for all her sacrifices, she died in terror, uncertain of salvation. I confess though that I have only turned her poetry over, making my way inevitably to the ones I knew already.

Wednesday 7 August

Asheham diary drains off my meticulous observations of flowers, clouds, beetles & the price of eggs; &, being alone, there is no other event to record. Our tragedy has been the squashing of a caterpillar; our excitement the return of the servants from Lewes last night, laden with all L.’s war books & the English review for me, with Brailsford upon a League of Nations, & Katherine Mansfield on Bliss. I threw down Bliss with the exclamation, “She’s done for!” Indeed I dont see how much faith in her as woman or writer can survive that sort of story. I shall have to accept the fact, I’m afraid, that her mind is a very thin soil, laid an inch or two deep upon very barren rock. For Bliss is long enough to give her a chance of going deeper. Instead she is content with superficial smartness; & the whole conception is poor, cheap, not the vision, however imperfect, of an interesting mind. She writes badly too. And the effect was as I say, to give me an impression of her callousness & hardness as a human being. I shall read it again; but I dont suppose I shall change. She’ll go on doing this sort of thing, perfectly to her & Murry’s satisfaction. I’m relieved now that they didn’t come. Or is it absurd to read all this criticism of her personally into a story?

Anyhow I was very glad to go on with my Byron. He has at least the male virtues. In fact, I’m amused to find how easily I can imagine the effect he had upon women—especially upon rather stupid or uneducated women, unable to stand up to him. So many too, would wish to reclaim him. Ever since I was a child (as Gertler would say, as if it proved him a particularly remarkable person,) I’ve had the habit of getting full of some biography, & wanting to build up my imaginary figure of the person with every scrap of news I could find about him. During the passion, the name of Cowper or Byron or whoever it might be, seemed to start up in the most unlikely pages. And then, suddenly, the figure becomes distant & merely one of the usual dead. I’m much impressed by the extreme badness of B.’s poetry—such of it as Moore quotes with almost speechless admiration. Why did they think this Album stuff the finest fire of poetry? It reads hardly better than L.E.L. or Ella Wheeler Wilcox. And they dissuaded him from doing what he knew he could do which was to write satire. He came home from the East with satires (parodies of Horace) in his bag & Childe Harold. He was persuaded that Childe Harold was the best poem ever written. But he never as a young man, believed in his poetry; a proof, in such a confident dogmatic person, that he hadn’t the gift. The Wordsworths & Keats’ believe in that as much as they believe in anything. In his character, I’m often reminded a little of Rupert Brooke, though this is to Rupert’s disadvantage. At any rate Byron had superb force; his letters prove it. He had in many ways a very fine nature too; though as no one laughed him out of his affectations, he became more like Horace Cole than one could wish. He could only be laughed at by a woman, & they worshipped instead. I haven’t yet come to Lady Byron, but I suppose, instead of laughing, she merely disapproved. And so he became Byronic.

Friday 9 August

In the absence of human interest, which makes us peaceful & content, one may as well go on with Byron. Having indicated that I am ready, after a century, to fall in love with him, I suppose my judgment of Don Juan may be partial. It is the most readable poem of its length ever written, I suppose; a quality which it owes in part to the springy random haphazard galloping nature of its method. This method is a discovery by itself. Its what one has looked for in vain—a⁠[n] elastic shape which will hold whatever you choose to put into it. Thus he could write out his mood as it came to him; he could say whatever came into his head. He wasn’t committed to be poetical; & thus escaped his evil genius of the false romantic & imaginative. When he is serious he is sincere; & he can impinge upon any subject he likes. He writes 16 canto’s without once flogging his flanks. He had, evidently, the able witty mind of what my father Sir Leslie would have called a thoroughly masculine nature. I maintain that these illicit kind of books are far more interesting than the proper books which respect illusions devoutly all the time. Still, it doesn’t seem an easy example to follow; & indeed like all free & easy things, only the skilled & mature really bring them off successfully. But Byron was full of ideas—a quality that gives his verse a toughness, & drives me to little excursions over the surrounding landscape or room in the middle of my reading. And tonight I shall have the pleasure of finishing him—though why, considering that I’ve enjoyed almost every stanza, this should be a pleasure I really dont know. But so it always is, whether the books a good book or a bad book. Maynard Keynes admitted in the same way that he always cuts off the advertisements at the end with one hand while he’s reading, so as to know exactly how much he has to get through.

Everyone so far has failed us: Katherine ill: Ka & Will A.F. obliged to work next Sunday; so, in a wild desire to couple Bonwick with someone who will mitigate his tedium, we’ve wired both to Marjorie Strachey & Mrs Hamilton. Rather wickedly I dwelt to Marjorie, upon the fair hair of B. but she has drawn it upon herself by her confession, or rather statement, that she intends to marry.

Monday 12 August

(I believe this is near about the anniversary of our wedding day, 6 years ago) [10 August 1912]. Bonwick came; but Marjorie & Mrs Hamilton only sent telegrams. Being a man of business he made the most of his holiday, & came toiling up the hill to find us, where we were picking blackberries. A straight commonplace rigid kind of man; impervious to anything at all different from the usual. Going down the hill he told us that he spent a fifth of his income on Prisoners of War, in order to justify his exemption as a C.O. Our talk was almost wholly about The Nation. It was his only topic. The poor man has a strong Cockney accent; a perservering aspiring selfsatisfied mind, making great play with his literary connections, & pretending to be the most important part of “We” when he speaks, as he always does, of the Nation. To tell the truth, I got my first inkling of the lure of gold through hearing him talk. He gave out that he deals in hundreds & thousands. They are Rowntree’s hundreds & thousands, but Mr B. has the easy powerful air of one who deals in them. “Rowntree asked me if the Nation could afford it (1000 a year) & I said yes. So he did it—Yes, we pay our writers increased rates now. Hobson chanced to say that he had never made so little by the Nation, so I told Rowntree the fees ought to be raised.” I imagine him sitting at a desk in an ante room & opening the door for people who want to see Massingham. He told us that Mrs Phillimore has been offered £500 for a book of her religious sketches. He told us lots of gossip, how Edward Garnett was turned out; & how they got scores of letters against Roger’s articles; & madmen write to them “I am the son of God”. But I was more impressed by his commercial bearing than by his anecdotes. He told them a little as if he were superior to all these literary people—(but I confess that the mosquitoes are biting my toes, & a moth is dropping perpetually from the lamp, so that I can’t remember all the things I meant to say about Mr Bonwick. Leonard is staying with him at “my place” near Croydon tonight, & goes tomorrow to York to see Rowntree. L. declares that the profound psychologist would find B. chiefly remarkable for a complete lack of humour.

Friday 16 August

My visit to Charleston & L.’s to York are both partly responsible for this skip. But I’ve skipped too much to give a very full account of one or of the other. Bonwick’s villa precisely expresses Bonwick: & a stuffy smell thrown in; windows curtained in thick white; pictures of Niagara. They spent 17 hours in travelling to York & back; & the result, still to await another meeting of Trustees, though Bonwick is sure they mean to agree. The Labour people are to be dropped. My visit to Charleston was spent mostly in sitting in the drawing⁠[room] & talking to N. while she made herself a small brown coat. Duncan wandered in & out; sometimes digging a vegetable bed, sometimes painting a watercolour of bedroom china, pinned to a door. In the evening there was the lumpish Bunny, inclined to be surly; & N. inclined to take him up sharply. What did we discuss? There was Ka’s engagement, concerning which Duncan had a good deal to say; one of his statements being that A.-F. is 45, & always has been. Another is that he lent to certain affections & practised them in an Italian villa. I made out a description of Garsington. The hunger of poor Ottoline for some recognition in Sussex is proved by her offering herself for any day in the summer after July 8th. She was abruptly told that none suited—which explains her eagerness to insert her foot here. Then we discussed the A⁠[drian], S⁠[tephen]’s: he a dead weight, & she a live one, according to N. who warns me we shall repent of asking them here—this in front of Duncan too, who said nothing to contradict. So our relationships change, imperceptibly enough. When N. & I were alone, I supposed we discussed the two parrokeets & money, which is not any longer such a distant, speculative sort of commodity as it used to be—at least to her. We discussed the children too; the sort of talk that runs on when one knows all the facts, but wishes to ascertain how they’ve changed position—What for instance is Lytton’s view of Mrs Asquith; & hers of him; & Maynard’s of them both. Gertler’s notions of painting: his views of their painting; Duncan’s fame: Bunny’s socialism. Bunny thus defines his position: all capitalists are wrong; therefore for him to live upon Vanessa is good, inasmuch as she enjoys money that she has no right to, & could not possibly spend her interest better than by maintaining him. This evolved from a sentimental declaration by him that he ought to spend his life in giving honey to his friends for nothing. His brain must be a tangle of sentiments & half-realised socialism. I bicycled back on Wednesday & found L. & we were very happy, until it came to the fat bacon—when, alas—!

Monday 19 August

Its possible that we may have solved the problem of having visitors—not to see them. At this moment A. & K. are in the house, as an occasional sound from the drawing room proves. But we only meet at meals; so that it is possible to think of things to say in the intervals. I find that deafness imposes itself upon the mind as well as the voice; it frightens away the quicker shyer deeper thoughts so that all the talk that reaches a deaf person must be of the same hearty, plain, matter of fact kind. Try as one will, one can’t do otherwise. Carrington came for the weekend. She is the easiest of visitors as she never stops doing things—pumping, scything, or walking. I suspect part of this is intentional activity, lest she should bore; but it has its advantages. After trudging out here, she trudged to Charleston, & only came in at eleven last night, just as we were shutting the windows. Poor lugubrious Bunny escorted her, protesting that a 10 mile walk was nothing compared to the joy of having some one to talk to. She trudged off again this morning to pack Lytton’s box or buy him a hair brush in London—a sturdy figure, dressed in a print dress, made after the pattern of one in a John picture; a thick mop of golden red hair, & a fat decided clever face, with staring bright blue eyes. The whole just misses, but decidedly misses what might be vulgarity. She seems to be an artist—seems, I say, for in our circle the current that way is enough to sweep people with no more art in them than Barbara in that direction. Still, I think Carrington cares for it genuinely, partly because of her way of looking at pictures.

I finished by the way The Electra of Sophocles, which has been dragging on down here, though it’s not so fearfully difficult after all. The thing that always impresses me fresh is the superb nature of the story. It seems hardly possible not to make a good play of it. This perhaps is the result of having traditional plots which have been made & improved & freed from superfluities by the polish of innumerable actors & authors & critics, till it becomes like a lump of glass worn smooth in the sea. Also, if everyone in the audience knows beforehand what is going to happen, much finer & subtler touches will tell, & words can be spared. At anyrate my feeling always is that one can’t read too carefully, or attach enough weight to every line & hint; & that the apparent bareness is only on the surface. There does, however, remain the question of reading the wrong emotions into the text. I am generally humiliated to find how much Jebb is able to see; my only doubt is whether he doesn’t see too much—as I think one might do with a bad modern English play if one set to work. Finally, the particular charm of Greek remains as strong & as difficult to account for as ever. One feels the immeasurable difference between the text & the translation with the first words. The heroic woman is much the same in Greece & England. She is of the type of Emily Brontë. Clytaemnestra & Electra are clearly mother & daughter, & therefore should have some sympathy, though perhaps sympathy gone wrong breeds the fiercest hate. E. is the type of woman who upholds the family above everything; the father. She has more veneration for tradition than the sons of the house; feels herself born of the father’s side, & not of the mother’s. Its strange to notice how, although the conventions are perfectly false & ridiculous, they never appear petty or undignified, as our English conventions are constantly made to do. Electra lived a far more hedged in life than the women of the mid Victorian age, but this has no effect upon her, except in making her harsh & splendid. She could not go out for a walk alone; with us it would be a case of a maid & a hansom cab.

Saturday 24 August

I had to look carefully before I wrote Saturday; stranger still one won’t know that its Sunday tomorrow, I suppose. If I weren’t too lazy I think I should try to describe the country; but then I shouldn’t get it right. I shouldn’t bring back to my own eyes the look of all those old beautiful very worn carpets which are spread over the lower slopes of the hills; nor should I convey the look of clouded emerald which the downs wear, the semi-transparent look, as the sun & shadows change, & the green becomes now vivid now opaque. However I confess that I shirk almost equally the task which has accumulated for 7 days of describing our visitors. They are with us for another week, so I need not try to hit them this very moment. Bridge has broken down the partition between our sitting rooms. L. is playing at this moment, 5.40, binding himself to stop at 6; but it is doubtful if he will. I hesitate a little to write evil of my guests, nor do I think evil—exactly. I refer, in rather crablike fashion, to something coarse, material, insensitive about Karin. One would never find much interest in her; though nothing despicable or mean. No: but she’s a capable American, who will get all that can be had for the asking; & nothing that can’t. I have a theory that if one sense fails another does double work; she eats enormously. She has no concealed vices. Would she be more interesting if she had? She is not stupid; or dull; or trivial; on the contrary she is bright, capable & stirring: stirring Adrian to read books upon economics, & even stirring him to learn shorthand which according to her is useful in a literary career. She intends him to have a career. At any rate she is going to ask for that, too; for certainly Adrian will never ask for anything for himself. Yet (I confess it is “yet” to me) he is happy; gives one the sense of being well provided for, as he provides her with good manners, good looks, & good taste. I feel myself frightfully superior, so refined as to be almost apologetic to Leonard; so full of fine feelings, sub⁠[t]⁠le perceptions, intellectual tastes & the rest that I almost blush to sit here alone, writing or reading Milton. She informs me that I with my tastes would have much in common with Hope Mirrlees; “with my tastes” indeed! This account emphasises our points of difference; outwardly we are all good friends, talkative & in agreement, & not relying on gossip merely to despatch dinner with. We talk about the Labour party, & politics, & anarchy, & government. She understands an argument, deals with an article manfully—And in her way she’s a nice honest creature, not so sure of herself when it comes to taste; & knowing it too—though taste has led her, alas, to embroider a pair of shoes which A. obediently wears. I must leave what I have to say about Milton, the German prisoners, life, & other subjects for next time.

Tuesday 27 August

Now I confess that I have half forgotten what I meant to say about the German prisoners; Milton & life. I think it was that? (all I can remember now (Friday, Aug. 30th) is that the existence of life in another human being is as difficult to realise as a play of Shakespeare when the book is shut. This occurred to me when I saw Adrian talking to the tall German prisoner. By rights they should have been killing each other. The reason why it is easy to kill another person must be that one’s imagination is too sluggish to conceive what his life means to him—the infinite possibilities of a succession of days which are furled in him, & have already been spent. However, I forget how this was to go on. The prisoner, who looks very lean & hopeless, seemed to like talking; I met him later & we smiled, but the sentry was not there.

Here we are almost at the end of August, & finishing off A. & K.’s visit. They go to Charleston tomorrow. Its odd how in a visit of this kind one wears through different stages. My stages are on the whole nearer to warmth & liking than to irritation; though there is an element of criticism in our relationship, based partly on K.’s manners, appetite & appearance. Which last, poor woman, she can’t altogether help; still there seems no need to emphasise the natural process by an orange dressing gown, held in by a broad band. Her appetite is frankly a schoolboy’s. “What beef!” she exclaimed today. “Dont you feel elated at the sight of good meat?” Meals add a sort of romance to her life such as I in [my] way get, shall we say, from the post or the newspapers. I can imagine Karin, for instance, thinking with a little thrill that next day is the day for salt beef; as I think perhaps I shall get my book from the Times, or an interesting letter. L. on the other hand, is irritated, & being irritated by superficial disagreeables finds deeper causes for them than I altogether agree with. Our usual method is to begin “Why did Adrian marry her?” Then I say “I can quite understand it—she has energy” & so on. Then L. says “I’d a thousand times rather have married Ka—In fact I’d rather have married any one in the whole world. I couldn’t sit in the same room with her.” Still, I do see why Adrian married her. First & foremost she makes him like other people. He has always, I believe, a kind of suspicion that whereas other people are professionals, he remains an amateur. She provides him with household, children, bills, daily life, so that to all appearances he is just like other people. I believe he needs constant reassurance on this point; & takes constant delight in her substantiality. Yes, one wants to be found doing the ordinary things when one’s friends call. I too have this feeling to some extent. I suppose indeed that I share many of A.’s feelings. A feeling comes over me when I am with him that instead of being comfortably obtuse we are crepuscular to each other; & thus, among other things, fearfully shy when we are alone. With other people in the room we get on much better. We had a walk to the post marked by those cloggings of the wheels, which are so discomfiting; nothing seems possible; then with an odious jerk one jars on again. This was better managed than of old. He lost his diffidence & air of hearing himself talk when he told me about Karin; how deaf she is, & how depressed she gets, & how she thinks that people won’t talk loud on purpose, & thus dislikes all Stracheys & others of the low voiced mumbling family. He is very proud of her vitality. I suppose it provides him with a good deal of the stuff of life, which he does not provide for himself.

Yesterday, 22nd, I bicycled to Charleston, lunched, & came home in the evening. It was the first autumn day, warm, softly blue, & blurred with haze. Duncan spent the night before with us. He stumbled along until, by means which he only knows the secret of, he had us all laughing until the tears came. His chief effort was a description of Lady Strachey reading aloud Laurence Housman’s The Dying ploughboy speaks from the Grave—

“I hear the bells jingling, & I lie in my mothers bed. The finest poem in the language too.” Then we discussed the bursting of people’s bladders, the National Gallery, incest, perhaps, & other gossip. All sitting in the drawing room, until it grew too dark to see. We have lamps almost at dinner; but not quite. I gossiped with Nessa. A new plan is on foot to supply her with Liz for a cook. Trissie is going—but never again into service. She is one of the transition cases—the servant not yet turned lady, but past servanthood. Karin & A. have gone into Brighton to see a specialist about her ear.

Tuesday 3 September

Pernel came on Saturday; & her coming was to have coincided precisely with the Stephens’ going; but there was a hitch here; as the fly refused to take them, & thus we enjoyed another meal with Karin. I regret to say though that either nature’s protests or our mute ones have diminished her appetite, so that she was no longer a show piece for a visitor. She announced her intention of being wheeled to Charleston on Adrian’s bicycle; which considering her shortness, breadth & great pillar like legs, produced a comic picture, & so I think Adrian judged it, for he dissuaded her from mounting till they were at the bottom of the drive.

I think the best way to sum up the impression of Pernel is to quote our simultaneous exclamation on going to bed on Saturday night “What a relief to talk to a human being!” Part of the relief, of course, is the effect of her good ears; but beyond this she is sub⁠[t]⁠le, finely graded, with fine shades of understanding & perception which are not, after all, entirely a matter of ears. I suppose if Karin were witness in her own behalf she might point to a certain faintness, remoteness, & donnishness in Pernel; she does perhaps survey life through a tinted shade, but her eyes are good ones, & she is too sensible, humorous, & indolent to have taken the shape of a professor, or indeed to believe very heartily in Newnham or education or anything but books & ideas & poetry & so on. A more unambitious person does not live; but she has not the dulness & flatness which generally exist in these self effacing unselfish old maids. I wonder what we talked about? Partly about Hope Mirrlees, whom we’ve asked to write us a story; & Jane, & Lady Strachey, & writing novels, & food. Last night, L. read Hardy’s poems aloud. The night before we discussed complexes. Then it turned out that she had been to a lecture upon potato blight. I should never be surprised to find that she knows everything about Turbines or Bees: everything that can be learnt from books that is. She lacks the ambition, perhaps the power, to handle the things themselves. Here Karin again has a plea to be considered. I suppose she has done more things than Pernel. The weather was very windy, but the mushrooms have come again. She was rather unable to see them; & I suspect she mooned rather than looked about her. She always arrives here provided with two shilling books with bright covers one to read coming, the other going. During the week end she always reads one classic & one nonsense biography, such as Lady Jeune. I suppose however that she is in her quiet dreamy way obstinately conscientious, & something of a martinet towards herself.

“Nothing would ever induce me to marry” she said, with the utmost conviction. Indeed I should fancy that her bachelor life, with many women friends, & a great many books, & lectures to prepare on French literature suit her perfectly.

This is written on the return from our great Brighton treat. Everything succeeded. L. foretold a wet day by the light on our shutters, but on opening them we found a perfect September morning. The sun is thinner but very clear, & the air sparkling, now that we are past August. The colours are being burnished on the trees too. The shadows seem lighter & paler. No one could confuse the 3rd of September with the 31st August. A perfect treat must include a visit to the 2nd hand bookshops. (I bought the life of Col. Hutchinson); sweets (we found chocolate unlimited) lunch at Mutton’s; the band on the pier; some human grotesques; tea at Booth’s; Buns at Cowley’s; a trail past shops with many temptations to buy, for the most part resisted; & a debauch at some stationer; & so home, to find the downs & this house lovelier than ever. All these things we did; & we had too a feeling of lightness because of the villages won in France. Queant & Lens are taken, as we learnt from a shop window. Can’t one see the curtain lifting, very slightly, & some promise of a world of food & so on beyond? I couldn’t help thinking that the sight of an English gentleman walking the stubble after partridges with his sons & his retriever was a foretaste of better days.

Sunday 8 September

At anyrate today I am the wife of an Editor. Leonard got a letter from Bonwick to tell him that he is to get his first number out in January. He wants to know what office accommodation L. will require. It is, I think, a great triumph to have steered through the shoals of MacDonald, Trades Unions, Rowntrees, Bonwicks & all the rest. The idea is very amusing & stimulating too. I like playing with imaginary offices, & sheets of notepaper, & little boys with buttons, & myself walking up the steps to take a cup of tea, & surveying the Strand from the window. Perhaps there’ll be a shake down bed in the corner. Then Miss Matthaei in her little stall, & long galley proofs: distinguished foreign visitors; telegrams from distant capitals; general importance & glory; everything a solid improving success; yes, a very nice prospect even on its picturesque side, which I admit is the one most perceptible to me. At the same time we had a letter from Hoper offering to let us have Asheham on a yearly tenancy, in case he may ever want the house—but theres no present prospect of this. We feel fairly safe again. Ka, another letter says, is to be married at 11 tomorrow. I can’t help reading into her letter a sort of protest as to the merits of Will, & her love for him. Yet even so, I own that when I think of her I see her as a rounder warmer more complete person than she was single. I suppose I had got into the habit of seeing her faithful solitary lonely till the end of time; I like happiness too well to be very fastidious about the husband.

What has happened this last week—following upon the superb success of Brighton? For one thing the weather has been so tremendously generous, giving us after a veil of morning mist, such an endowment of sun & such clouds of alabaster firmly laid against the blue, that even people like—shall I say Melian Stawell?—must have felt jovial & random & unencumbered with high moralities. Or are they always bothering how to share the sunshine? I remember lying on the side of a hollow, waiting for L. to come & mushroom, & seeing a red hare loping up the side & thinking suddenly “This is Earth life”. I seemed to see how earthy it all was, & I myself an evolved kind of hare; as if a moon-visitor saw me. A good life it is, at such moments; but I can’t recapture the queer impression I had of its being earth life seen from the moon.

Yesterday poor Bunny came for the night, bringing 8 combs of honey, for which he charges 2/6 each. How we were robbed at Brighton! 3/- for a mixture of milk & saccarine. Poor old Bunny! He is as if caked with earth, stiff as a clod; you can almost see the docks & nettles sprouting from his mind; his sentences creak with rust. He can only lay hands on the simplest words. I suppose his vocabulary is now surpassed by Mrs Attfield & equalled by Fred. However, by dint of kindly treatment we softened him; & I must confess that for 20 hours we did very well. We wanted to know about mushrooms; & upon all funguses he is an authority; indeed he discovered one of the smallest for the first time. Then he could tell us about the agricultural labourers’ Union, which is being half secretly organised even among our Freds & Wills. He has a humanity which is not all theoretical, though he will insist upon breaking his brains over possible Labour parties. He talks to the German prisoners, who are social democrats, only fought because they would be shot for refusing, & consider the whole war a device of the artistocracy. Bunny looks forward to a democratic future. I sacrificed half my morning & sat with him hemming handkerchiefs. As an example of his uncouth absurdity which one can’t help liking he described to me a scene with Hope Mirrlees in Paris. He was furious—the creature is a most enthusiastic friend—because Lawrence’s novel was reported burnt. Hope was staying in the same hotel. He burst out to her upon the iniquity of burning books. They had never met before. She was so much of his way of thinking that he exclaimed “You darling!”—& offended her—although, as he explained, he was on the far side of the room, & used the word ‘darling’ in its other sense. I suppose he never had a rich vocabulary. Anyhow, Hope hinted that he ought to be in the army. Bunny could see nothing wrong or odd in calling a young woman “you darling!”

“Virginia, he said, intimately, I want to ask you to give me a photograph of—Alix.” He had one in mind, which I was forced to give him, to muse over, as I can fancy, by the hour, in his half sentimental simple good hearted way, while he ploughs Mr Hext’s fields with the motor plough. But I was interested by his story of the attempted rescue of Sovercar, an Indian. Bunny appeared like the manly, serious, romantic hero of a Meredith novel.

Tuesday 20 September

I spend the first five minutes with this hook before me trying to fish two drowned flies out of my ink pot on the tip of my pen; but I begin to see that this is one of those undertakings which are quite impossible—absolutely impossible. Not Darwin or Plato could do it with the tip of my pen. And now the flies are increasing & dissolving; today there are three. At Asheham I naturally bethink me of Darwin & Plato; but in this I am not singular. My intellectual snobbishness was chastened this morning by hearing from Janet that she reads Don Quixote & Paradise Lost, & her sister Lucretius in the evenings. I thought that no one in Sussex was reading Paradise Lost at this moment. Janet holds the characteristic view that Don Quixote is more humorous than Shakespeare. The coarseness of Shre I can see would distress her; she would deal with it intellectually. All her generation use their brains too scrupulously upon books, seeking meaning rather than letting themselves run on for pleasure, which is more or less my way, & thus naturally richest & best. Margaret is said to be not so well. I’m inclined to be hard hearted, as I expect to learn to my cost one of these days—about elderly ailments in general & Margaret’s in particular. She seems to me to live in an atmosphere where cold feet are more important than bronchitis elsewhere—part of the romance of life, as food is to Karin & reviewing books is to me. And then what an attentive solicitous echo is provided by Lilian & Janet! Margaret dominates, & they taking pleasure in unselfishness, lavish sympathy & somehow make out a different scale of health for M. than for the rest of the world—but this is a little fantastic, & rises partly from the thought that I would, if I were kind, write a long affectionate amusing letter to M. I am deterred from doing this by my prejudice against the patronage of the elderly. I want neither to be patronised, nor to patronise; & I feel that the sort of letter one writes on these occasions is an act of kindness, & so neither to be offered nor received. Inevitably the social worker approaches the non-social worker with a view to getting what they can give & very slightly disparaging the giver, who can be nothing better than a giver of amusement. Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic. They rule in the metropolis.

Though I am not the only person in Sussex who reads Milton, I mean to write down my impressions of Paradise Lost while I am about it. Impressions fairly well describes the sort of thing left in my mind. I have left many riddles unread. I have slipped on too easily to taste the full flavour. However I see, & agree to some extent in believing, that this full flavour is the reward of highest scholarship. I am struck by the extreme difference between this poem & any other. It lies, I think, in the sublime aloofness & impersonality of the emotions. I have never read Cowper on the Sofa, but I can imagine that the sofa is a degraded substitute for Paradise Lost. The substance of Milton is all made of wonderful, beautiful, & masterly descriptions of angels bodies, battles, flights, dwelling places. He deals in horror & immensity & squalor & sublimity, but never in the passions of the human heart. Has any great poem ever let in so little light upon ones own joys & sorrows? I get no help in judging life; I scarcely feel that Milton lived or knew men & women; except for the peevish personalities about marriage & the woman’s duties. He was the first of the masculinists; but his disparagement rises from his own ill luck, & seems even a spiteful last word in his domestic quarrels. But how smooth, strong & elaborate it all is! What poetry! I can conceive that even Shakespeare after this would seem a little troubled, personal, hot & imperfect. I can conceive that this is the essence, of which almost all other poetry is the dilution. The inexpressible fineness of the style, in which shade after shade is perceptible, would alone keep one gazing in to, long after the surface business in progress has been despatched. Deep down one catches still further combinations, rejections, felicities, & masteries. Moreover, though there is nothing like Lady Macbeth’s terror or Hamlet’s cry, no pity or sympathy or intuition, the figures are majestic; in them is summed up much of what men thought of our place in the universe, of our duty to God, our religion.

Wednesday 18 September

I have let the first freshness of the Webbs fade from my mirror; but let me bethink me of another metaphor which they imposed upon me, towards the end of Sunday. I was exalted above a waste of almost waveless sea, palish grey, & dented with darker shadows for the small irregularities, the little ripples which represented character & life love & genius & happiness. But “I” was not exalted; “I” was practically non-existent. This was the result of a talk with Mrs Webb. In truth though they deserve more careful handling. I wonder how I can recapture the curious discomfort of soul which Mrs Webb produces each time I see her again? In the intervals one forgets; in a second it comes over one again. There’s something absolutely unadorned & impersonal about her. She makes one feel insignificant, & a little out of key. She represses warmth or personality. She has no welcome for one’s individuality. She divines a little what one’s natural proclivities are, & she irradiates them with her bright electric torch.

It was a pouring wet day, on Saturday; not a day for geniality. Webb however has some coat to shake; she is as bare as a bone. We sat down to tea, without George Young. They eat quickly & efficiently & leave me with hunks of cake on my hands. After tea we were soon disposing of our topics, & I began to feel nervous, lest our cupboards should be bare. Then G. Young appeared, having like all Youngs, rejoiced in his battle with distance & wet. Liked the walk, he said. While he changed Mrs Webb rapidly gave me her reasons for saying that she had never met a great man, or woman either. At most, she said, they possessed remarkable single qualities, but looked at as a whole there was no greatness in them. Shakespeare she did not appreciate, because a sister, who was a foolish woman, always quoted him wrong to her as a child. Goethe might conceivably have been a great man. Then, this having been dealt with, down came L. & G. Young & they all pounced together upon some spot of interest floating far out beyond my ken. I think it was to do with the General Election & the views of the private soldiers. Young came provided with facts, but I rather think these did not stand much investigation. He is a slow, stiff, kindly man, with all Hilton’s romance, but less than Hilton’s brain; & through following his ideals he has left the diplomatic service, & is now a marine officer at Portsmouth. After dinner Mrs Webb plunged from brisk argument to unconcealed snoring. Then Sidney had his turn. I thought he spoke a little quick to conceal the snores, but you have only to ask him a question & he can go on informing you till you can hold no more. He sketched his idea of a Supernational authority, & the future of Bills of Exchange. The work of Government will be enormously increased in the future. I asked whether I should ever have a finger in the pie? “O yes; you will have some small office no doubt. My wife & I always say that a Railway Guard is the most enviable of men. He has authority, & he is responsible to a government. That should be the state of each one of us.”

And then we discussed L.’s plan of a state so contrived that each person has to do some work. Here there was a long argument upon the growing distance between men of different social grades & professions, Young affirming it, the Webbs denying it. I asked (in reporting conversations one’s own sayings stand out like lighthouses) one of my most fruitful questions; viz: how easy is it for a man to change his social grade? This brought down a whole shower bath of information, but let us say that the Webbs’ shower baths are made of soda water. They never sink one, or satiate. Webb told us how many scholarships were won in London in a given year, & also reported upon the educational system of E. Sussex, which bad though it is, is slightly better than that of W. Sussex. “I myself” he said “came too early to profit by secondary education. My parents were lower middle class shopkeepers, possessed, like so many of their kind, with a blind determination to educate their sons somehow, but without a ghost of a notion how to set about it. They hit on the plan of sending me & my brother abroad to France & Germany; & so we learnt French & German at least. I can still read them, though I seldom do.” Our talk must have dealt fully with education, for I remember that Mrs Webb woke with a start & delivered herself of a statement upon the German ‘wrong turning’, & put Young right on some point about the division of character & intellect. He was simple enough to separate them & to prefer what he was quite unable to define. She thrust him through & through with her rapier, but he persisted.

Next day, which was said to begin for the W.’s at 5.30, when they begin tea-drinking in their bedrooms, I had to withdraw in order to do battle with a very obstinate review of Wells’ ‘Joan & Peter’. My ideas were struck stiff by the tap of Mrs W.s foot, up & down the terrace, & the sound of her rather high, a rather mocking voice, discoursing to L. while she waited either for W. to come or the rain to stop. They walked on the downs, till lunch. I must now skip a great deal of conversation & let us suppose that Sidney & Beatrice & I are sitting on the road side overlooking Telscombe, smoking cigarettes, in bright sunshine, while the Silver Queen slowly patrols above Newhaven. The downs were at their best; & set Mrs W. off upon landscape beauty, & recollections of India, which she turns to when lying awake at night, relishing the recollection more than the reality. Sidney, one perceives, has no organ of sight whatever, & pretends to none. Mrs W. has a compartment devoted to nature. So briskly narrating their travels & impressions, which were without respect for British rule, we set off home. I saw them from behind, a shabby homely, dowdy couple, marching with the uncertain step of strength just beginning to fail, she clutching his arm, & looking much older than he, in her angularity. They were like pictures in French papers of English tourists, only wanting spectacles & Ba⁠[e]⁠dekers to finish them. Their clothes looked ill dusted, & their eyes peering in front of them. My few private words came, as I knew they would come, when Mrs W. detached us two together, passing Southease Church. She asked me about my novel, & I supplied her with a carefully arranged plot. I wished, so at least I said, to discover what aims drive people on, & whether these are illusory or not. She promptly shot forth: “Two aims have governed my life; one is the passion for investigation by scientific means; the other the passion for producing a certain good state of society by those investigations.” Somehow she proceeded to warn me against the dissipation of energy in emotional friendship. One should have only one great personal relationship in one’s life, she said; or at most two—marriage & parenthood. Marriage was necessary as a waste pipe for emotion, as security in old age when personal attractiveness fails, & as a help to work. We were entangled at the gates of the level crossing when she remarked, “Yes, I daresay an old family servant would do as well.” On the way up the hill she stated her position that one should wish well to all the world, but discriminate no one. According to her the differences are not great; the defects invariable; one must cultivate impersonality above all things. In old age people become of little account, she said; one speculates chiefly upon the possibility, or the impossibility of a future life. This grey view depressed me more & more; partly I suppose from the egotistical sense of my own nothingness in her field of vision. And then we wound up with a light political gossip & chapter of reminiscences, in which Mr & Mrs Webb did their parts equally. & so to bed; & to my horror, in came Mrs W. early next morning to say Goodbye, & perched in all her long impersonality on the edge of my bed, looking past my stockings drawers & po. This has taken so long to write that we are now arrived at

Monday 23 September,

& so many things have accumulated, that I can hardly proceed to that masterly summing up of the Webbs which I intended. I intended in particular to dwell upon the half carping half humorously cynical view which steals into one’s description of the Webbs. I had meant to point out the good qualities which come from such well kept brisk intellectual habits; how open minded they showed themselves; how completely & consistently sensible. That, I think, deserves a line under it. Good sense seems to me their invariable characteristic. How sensible it was not to fuss about goodbye, or a Collins; how sensibly they approach every question whether of servants or politics, putting their minds at your service without the least ostentation or flummery. Their horizon is entirely clear, unless in the case of Mrs Webb, as the medium said, a cloud of dust surrounds them; they have no illusions; they survey the whole panorama, which is amazingly clear to them, stoically, both for the race & for themselves as individuals. Sidney is the warmer & more human of the two, & one could even commit the impropriety of liking him personally, which one can hardly do in the case of Mrs Webb. How stoically with his perpetual little smile, he remarked that they are now 60, & therefore may expect a stroke within the next 5 years; but if he could arrange things with the divine messenger, he would compound somehow to die precisely at the same moment with “my wife”.

By rights Lottie should have a whole chapter to herself at this point; but to live through those things is unpleasant enough without reviving them here. At this moment owing to what she overheard L. say to me before breakfast, I am uncertain whether we have 2 servants or not, & to tell the truth, completely indifferent, such is the relief of being without them for a fortnight. Considering their unimportance they must be compared to flies in the eye for the discomfort they can produce in spite of being so small. But let us change the subject.

I went over to Charleston last Tuesday & was shown his shells by Quentin; sat with Nessa & laid bare my sorrows, which she can more than match; & then Clive & Mary arrived in a motor car for tea—so many were their parcels & bags; & indeed Mary produced chocolates, cakes & sweets in abundance. I’m ashamed to say that that is my chief impression, but I left soon after, & they promised to spend a night here, so that I left unsaid & unasked all my ideas & questions. She was, as usual, mute as a trout—I say trout because of her spotted dress, & also because, though silent, she has the swift composure of a fish. I walked home shoving my bicycle, too badly punctured to ride.

Well then the Times began to shower books upon me, & I was reduced at one point to writing my review in the afternoon, nor can I discover any reason why one’s brains should be unavailable between 3 & 5. When the telegraph girl rode up with a telegram from Clive to put us off, owing to some disease of Mary’s, we were both immensely relieved, & I threw down my pen, as they say, & ate a large tea, & found my load of writing much lessened. When I have to review at command of a telegram, & Mr Geal has to ride off in a shower to fetch the book at Glynde, & comes & taps at the window about 10 at night to receive his shilling & hand in the parcel, I feel pressed & important & even excited a little. For a wonder, the book, Hudson, was worth reading. Then on Saturday we went to Lewes by train & bought a two handled saw, & fish, & envelopes, & then met Gertler at the station & came out here.

Whether our exclamations on parting from our guests are good evidence, I don’t know, but on this occasion we both cried “Good God, what an egoist!” We have been talking about Gertler to Gertler for some 30 hours; it is like putting a microscope to your eye. One molehill is wonderfully clear; the surrounding world ceases to exist. But he is a forcible young man; if limited, able & respectable within those limits; as hard as a cricket ball; & as tightly rounded & stuffed in at the edges. We discussed—well, it always came back to be Gertler.. “I have a very peculiar character … I am not like any other artist … My picture would not have those blank spaces … I don’t see that, because in my case I have a sense which other people don’t have … I saw in a moment what she had never dreamt of seeing…” & so on. And if you do slip a little away, he watches very jealously, from his own point of view, & somehow tricks you back again. He hoards an insatiable vanity. I suspect the truth to be that he is very anxious for the good opinion of people like ourselves, & would immensely like to be thought well of by Duncan, Vanessa & Roger. His triumphs have been too cheap so far. However this is honestly outspoken, & as I say, he has power & intelligence, & will, one sees, paint good interesting pictures, though some rupture of the brain would have to take place before he could be a painter.

Wednesday 2 October

No, I can’t write to Margaret Davies. I spent on her the first flush of ideas after tea—It is fatal not to write the thing one wants to write at the moment of wanting to write it. Never thwart a natural process. I had so much to say here too. First, how the weather has changed, & we are on the verge of winter. Our clocks were put back on Sunday night; simultaneously I went into thick clothes; the sun lost half its heat, the nights became bitterly cold; we began to burn wood before tea; to dine by lamplight; & to shiver without fur coats on our beds. But the impulse that was to unite & fashion & give sequence to my head full of ideas perished on the ill suited page to Margaret Davies.

Monday 7 October

I infinitely regret my generous impulse to write a letter describing the Webbs to Margaret; that evening my mind was full of ideas; & Asheham deserved some richer farewell than I am able to give it, disturbed as I am by the briskness [?] of homecoming, & a little agitated by the servant problem that I have to face tomorrow. I am inclined to dwell upon the warmth & beauty of this room. I have bought another glass jar for 2/-. These things are in the foreground. It is partly due to them & partly to the dampness of the Harmsworth press that I don’t write first & foremost of the German offer of peace. Certainly it made our hearts jump at Asheham this morning. But as the Times insists upon minimising it, not much exhilaration remains.

We came up by East Grinstead to avoid the crowd, a long journey therefore, stopping at all the dullest places in Sussex—West Hoathly among others. We lunched at Valcheras, & there looked into the lowest pit of human nature; saw flesh still unmoulded to the shape of humanity—Whether it is the act of eating & drinking that degrades, or whether people who lunch at restaurants are naturally degraded, certainly one can hardly face one’s own humanity afterwards.

Saturday 12 October

The first week in London is always one of the richest; & the rich weeks always tend to pass unrecorded. I have my anniversary to celebrate also; this diary is one year old, & looking back I see how exactly one repeats one’s doings. For example this week we went to buy an overcoat for L.; last year we bought boots. Again there was the question of a party; again what I may euphemistically call an ‘argument’. Nessa was in London too; & I dined with her & Clive, only there was Duncan too, & we dined at Gordon Square. But Lord Grey’s meeting has no counterpart last year; nor could I possibly have written then, as I can now write that tomorrow morning’s paper may bring news of an armistice. Possibly the fighting will be over this time next week. Whatever we have done this week has had this extraordinary back ground of hope; a tremendously enlarged version of the feeling I can remember as a child as Christmas approached. The Northcliffe papers do all they can to insist upon the indispensability & delight of war. They magnify our victories to make our mouths water for more; they shout with joy when the Germans sink the Irish mail; but they do also show some signs of apprehension that Wilson’s terms may be accepted. L. has just come in from Staines with a paper which says, with obvious gloom, that the rumour is that Germany agrees to evacuation. She is not, of course, they add, to be allowed to make any sort of terms. Meanwhile Philip is in the thick of it, & Maurice Davies’ son has been killed.

Grey’s meeting was impressive as meetings go, which is not saying very much of course; but it does amount to saying that Grey himself struck me as a solid straightforward English Squire, curiously like Uncle Herbert magnified, in appearance, & with the kind of open air honour & sagacity which one feels to some extent in a man like Waller [Jack Hills]. He said nothing but what one has read & agreed with about a League of Nations, but he said it simply, & for a ‘great statesman’ to have sense & human feeling & no bombast does produce an odd sense of wonder & humility in me, as if human nature were worth something after all. I don’t extend my charity to Lord Harcourt however, who sat in front of us, or to Mrs Asquith & Elizabeth; they were in no way venerable or even striking; but one sees that Mrs A. has triumphed by virtue of a whipcord vitality; she is as tense as a stretched bow; as lean & wiry as a whippet; vibrating like a fiddle; but not a trace (I’m judging by my view of her profile) of any thing more profound or interesting, & as for poor pasty Elizabeth she seemed to have come straight from behind Marshall & Snelgrove’s millinery counter. There was an enormous audience, & as we left people were passing about the rumour that the Kaiser had abdicated.

I went on to my dinner at Gordon Square; thence to the Coliseum with Nessa, where we had to sit out an infinite length of Miss Clarice Mayne, after which we saw our ballet—Sche—(I can’t achieve either the spelling or the speaking of it) which isn’t one of the best, & when I saw it I remembered it better done at Covent Garden. Maynard who has the generosity & something of the manner now of an oriental prince, had hired a brougham for Nessa—an infinitely small, slow, antiquated carriage drawn by a very liverystables looking quadruped. Roger, Duncan, Maynard, Nessa & I all crammed in & padded along slowly across London to Chelsea. Somehow we passed Ottoline, brilliantly painted, as garish as a strumpet, displayed in the midst of omnibuses under an arc lamp; & she reappeared in the Sitwell’s drawing room. I had made acquaintance with the two Sitwell brothers the day before [at 46 Gordon Square], & been invited to the party. That very morning a review by me of Edith Sitwell’s poems had appeared in the Times. It’s strange how whole groups of people suddenly swim complete into one’s life. This group to which Gertler & Mary H. are attached was unknown to me a year ago. I surveyed them with considerable, almost disquieting calm. What is there to be excited about, or to quarrel over, in a party like this, I asked myself; & found myself saying the most maternal things to Gertler, who was wearing evening dress, bought from the tipsy Mr Dallas, for the first time. We stood & compared our sensations. Edith Sitwell is a very tall young woman, wearing a permanently startled expression, & curiously finished off with a high green silk headdress, concealing her hair, so that it is not known whether she has any. Otherwise, I was familiar with everyone, I think. Nina Haninet, Mary H., Jack H., Ottoline, Sheppard, Norton & so forth. I found myself discoursing to Sheppard about Sophocles. Never before have I seen him even momentarily serious.

“I think of nothing but Greek plays, he said, & people—And I’m not sure that I don’t always see people as if they were in Greek plays.” I liked him better than before; still I think he found it awkward to stand discussing Sophocles seriously; & so we parted. My complete mastery of evening parties is shown by the indifference with which I am deserted, & the composure with which I decide upon my next choice. I was a good deal impressed by this; & how calmly too, I looked at my watch, & saw it was time to leave, & went out alone, & drove to Sloane Square, not excited, not depressed, but contemplative & introspective.

Tuesday 15 October

I did not think I should so soon have to describe a meeting with a cabinet minister—though I admit that we seem to be drifting, without much desire on our part, into a circle where the great officials are sometime to be found. This is the doing of the [International] Review, mainly; but Herbert Fisher’s visit wasn’t due to the Review; it was very obviously due to old family affection. I was sitting down alone to tea on Sunday with my odious penny paper to read (the Germans having agreed to evacuate late on Saturday night) L. being gone to Sutton to speak about our colonies & the servants out, when the bell rang & I saw several figures against the glass. On opening the door I really couldn’t at first collect my wits; there were Olive & M. Heseltine & Herbert Fisher. The H’s. went off, & Herbert came in, as they had arranged beforehand. Was I nervous or proud, or anything but interested & anxious to pick his brains for news? I don’t think I felt a moments agitation. For one thing he has lost his lean intellectual look; his hollow cheeks are filled; his eyes with that pale frosty look which blue eyes get in age; his whole bearing very quiet, simple, & when not speaking rather saddened & subdued. The number of deaths in his house caused this perhaps; but I can’t help thinking that London life has rid him of his desire to say clever things to undergraduates all the time. Anyhow we talked without stopping & without difficulty.

“We’ve won the war today” he said, at once. “I saw Milner this morning, & he says we shall have peace by Christmas. The Germans have made up their minds they can’t fight a retreat. The General staff has faced the fact, & they’ve had what I think the considerable courage to admit it. Of course we can’t accept their present terms. Why, that would leave them still the greatest military power in Europe. They could begin again in ten years time. But it rests with the French. Lloyd George is going to Paris on Monday; but they are holding out for the evacuation of Alsace Lorraine as a guarantee. We shall probably demand the disarmament of certain regiments too. But we’ve won the war.”

He then told me how we’d won the war, which was, according to him, by taking a tremendous risk some time in July & leaving the English line held without reserves, & withdrawing the army to reinforce Foch in his blow, which was timed with French precision 10 minutes before the German attack. If it had failed there was nothing between the Germans & the Channel ports. There is now a good prospect of a complete defeat of the German army; Foch says “I have not yet had my battle”. Despite the extreme vindictiveness of our press & the French press, Herbert believed that we are going to baulk Foch of his battle, partly because the Germans will accept any terms to avoid it. “Lloyd George has told me again & again that he means to be generous to the Germans. “We want a strong Germany”, he says. The Kaiser will probably go. O I was a great admirer of the Germans in the beginning. I was educated there, & I’ve many friends there, but I’ve lost my belief in them. The proportion of brutes is greater with them than with us. They’ve been taught to be brutal. But it hasn’t paid. Each one of their crimes has turned out badly. No one can face another war. Why in 10 years they could blot out London by their aeroplanes. It cost us £1,000 to kill a German at the battle of the Somme [1916]; now it costs us £3,000. But the proportion of men who have never been hurt, or even seen anything horrible is very large. Seeley told me the other day that he’d spoken to thousands & thousands of soldiers, & they all wanted the war conditions of life to go on “without these bloody shells.” There’ll be trouble when they come back. They’ll find their old lives too dull. I’m going to educate them, its true; but that won’t begin yet—not in my time. I want to reform the Universities next, & then I shall have done. I can’t stay in Parliament without office. Very likely I shall go back to Oxford to teach.”

So we talked on, not altogether like a Mrs Humphry Ward novel. I tried to think it extraordinary but I found it difficult—extraordinary, I mean, to be in touch with one who was in the very centre of the very centre, sitting in a little room at Downing St. where, as he said, the wireless messages are racing through from all over the world, a million miles a minute; where you have constantly to settle off hand questions of enormous difficulty & importance—where the fate of armies does more or less hang upon what two or three elderly gentlemen decide. Herbert thinks there are 2 or 3 geniuses in the cabinet (L. George, Balfour, & possibly Winston Churchill—his definition being that they make everything appear different) & a number of mediocrities. His qualities I suppose are balance & foresight & culture. Importance seems to smooth away surface eccentricities; to give people an appearance of simplicity; they are very courteous; but somehow no longer spontaneous people; the taint of the family butler is on them. But this was more visible when L. came in. Alone with me H. was very friendly & quiet; & gave himself no airs of dignity.

Friday 18 October

Its quite obvious of course that for some reason perhaps not creditable to me I think H.F. worth many more words than Ka say, or Saxon, both of whom have dined here since. My theory is that for some reason the human mind is always seeking what it conceives to be the centre of things; sometimes one may call it reality, again truth, again life—I dont know what I call it; but I distinctly visualise it as a possession rather more in H.F.’s hands than in other peoples. For the moment he makes all the rest of the world’s activities appear as ramifications radiating from him. But this is roughly stated—

Old Ka anyhow is not in the knot in the middle of the web. She came alone, Will having hurt his knee; & not being there in the flesh, one didn’t trace him in the spirit. She seemed unchanged; but I think decidedly happier, a little defiant on Will’s behalf. The poor little gentle, weakly creature is stated to be wild & queer & his action in giving up his patrimony & refusing to go to Balliol is brought forward as proof. For myself I distrust young men who return to nature on the Wiltshire Downs, paint pictures of the sky only, & want more than anything to fly. I own though that I’m judging from my ancient view of him at Fitzroy Sqre. Saxon, we assume, has found complete consolation in Mrs Stagg & a new set of gold teeth. We have never seen him so sprightly, bold & communicative. He is already talking of his next visit to Bayreuth. He did not knit Barbara’s child’s drawers; & only showed a slight asperity when Nick was mentioned. But I write hurriedly, giving no account of the Albert Museum, nor of our suspension over what one of the papers calls ‘the precipice of peace’, since I must read a little about Voltaire before going up to hear a Promenade Concert at the Queen’s Hall. The truth is that nothing much more definite is yet known about peace. Wilson’s second note came out on Tuesday, in which he used the word ‘peradventure’; so far the Germans have not answered. But their Retreat goes on, & last night, beautiful, cloudless, still & moonlit, was to my thinking the first of peace, since one went to bed fairly positive that never again in all our lives need we dread the moonlight.

Wednesday 23 October

I went up to the concert, & heard the ghosts of lovely things, since the substance somehow escaped me; partly owing to my mood, partly to the usual vulgarity of Wood. Even so the ghosts of two Bach pieces (one for a duet of violins) were exquisitely lovely. Edith Sichel, whose entire soul is now open to me through her letters, makes me determine to write descriptions neither of pictures nor of music. She makes me consider that the gulf which we crossed between Kensington & Bloomsbury was the gulf between respectable mum⁠[m]⁠ified humbug & life crude & impertinent perhaps, but living. The breath of South Kensington lives in her pages—almost entirely, I believe, because they would not mention either copulation or w.c.’s. However this brings me to our dinner with the MacCarthy’s, when I borrowed this book. The book has a sort of fascination for me. I see the outside of that world so clearly, & take a kind of ribald pleasure in putting those figures into action—sending them slumming, to Pops [concerts], to the National Gallery, always full of high thoughts, morality, kindliness, & never seeing beyond High St. Kensington. Molly, thanks to Bloomsbury, has escaped the Ritchie touch. Her book is anyhow giving her some exquisite pleasure, & pain too. Her head, so Desmond said, shrank to the size of an apple; it is now swelling to normal again. They were both in the best spirits—extraordinary if you consider that they were in their own house, & no wine allowed. They gave us an excellent meat dinner; D. has some hopes that if Turkey makes peace he will be discharged, & will then take to wandering & writing more articles.

Thursday 24 October

The degradation of steel pens is such that after doing my best to clip & file one into shape, I have to take to a Waterman [fountain pen], profoundly though I distrust them, & disbelieve in their capacity to convey the nobler & profounder thoughts. Yes, I can speak of myself with more confidence today as noble & profound; I am capable of standing for Parliament & holding office, & becoming just like Herbert Fisher perhaps. To me the vote was as surprising as to some retired cleric in the vales of Westmorland, who will see in it the death knell of liberty, I daresay, & preach a sermon to that effect next Sunday. Then the great lady at Stocks must be feeling uncomfortable, though I am malicious enough to suppose that if by some process of selection she alone could represent Belgravia in the House of Lords, the change would not seem so devastating. Imagine her neatly accoutred in black trousers (so my imagination sees her) upon the bench at the Hague Conference! Her book, the reviews say, lays emphasis upon the fact that her novels were once thought beauties.

We are just in from Kingston—today being a holiday, L. not going up to London, & printing not started. McDermott is generally invisible, & when we caught him was just going out “partly in your interests, I may say”, & threw out ominous hints as to the decline of his business, which threatens our seven pounds, so we imagine (back again to the superior fluency & cogency of steel). However, having walked across Bushy Park, & heard a stag grating his throat in a very surly manner, his doe being couchant by his side, we took tram to Kingston & there heard the paper boys shouting out about the President’s message, which we bought & devoured in the [train.] The main points are that he is keeping negotiations going, though the Times came out with a great headline “No parley” this morning. He discriminates too, between the German people & the Kaiser; he will consider an armistice with the one but only complete surrender with the other. Anyhow, the question is now laid before England & France; & so another step in the tedious business is begun.

Privately our minds are exercised about the question of going to Tidmarsh on Sunday. Lytton wired to beg us to yesterday, saying “desolation extreme”. The difficulties are the nuisance of moving; work to be done; Herbert [Woolf] & his Freda dining here on Sunday. Yes, Herbert has been accepted by a certain Miss Freda Major—who she is or what she is, except that she is reported very active, I do not know.

Saturday 26 October

Here I am experimenting with the parent of all pens—the black J. the pen, as I used to think it, along with other objects, as a child, because mother used it; & therefore all other pens were varieties & eccentricities. What I have to record with it is the cheerful news that I am once more (see p. [?67] for the last occasion) in hot water—this time owing to Gertler,—Monty Shearman—Mary—Clive—Vanessa;—who exploded upon my head with reproaches for having almost brought her to disaster. My conscience is clear; but I’m coming to think that friendships maintained in this atmosphere are altogether too sharp, brittle, & painful. I have written to Charleston to this effect. If I could have letters from Mary & Clive I should feel myself rewarded. L. is down at Tidmarsh, & I write to relieve myself of the feeling which comes over me in his absence of being a besieged city.

We had a day in London yesterday—somehow the charm of those days is not quite what it was. Am I getting blasé—is the 17 Club less enthralling? We went to the Omega show, met Roger, were invited to tea at his studio, discussed the change in Duncan’s style, his father’s burial, half Church of England, half Quaker, representation, reality, & so on again, Waley coming in as we left. We dined at a very hot place in Soho, where you have perhaps a stone’s weight of food given you for 2/3. On again to the Club, where Leonard made his speech about Austria Hungary. As usual I find him not only very clear but with the right degree of passion to be interesting. The audience, as usual at the 17 Club, seemed made of curiosities whose aberrations of feature had driven them up & up the backwaters of life, where they dwell in semi obscurity, only issuing from their huts to plant arrows in the sides of the sleek town dwellers. If it weren’t so ugly, it might be picturesque. Or is it merely that the body resents much use of the brain?

Monday 28 October

L. found Lytton with a swollen finger & 2 or 3 spots on his hand sitting over the fire, & only moving when enveloped in a silk tablecloth, & wrapping his hand also in silk handkerchiefs & complaining of the cold, & describing nights of agony when a pain like toothache seizes upon him & develops into frantic agonies only to be allayed by morphia. This has been going on for a month, & Carrington is at her wits end, very naturally. Anything like pain is abhorrent to all Stracheys, but making all allowances for the exaggerations & terrors of the poor creature, he has had a sufficient dose of horror, I imagine, & the doctor privately warns Carrington that shingles may last months. However, Lytton is probably moving in to Mary in a day or two, avoiding London, because of the influenza—(we are, by the way, in the midst of a plague unmatched since the Black Death, according to the Times, who seem to tremble lest it may seize upon Lord Northcliffe, & thus precipitate us into peace). But I am far from peace. A fortnight ago all Bloomsbury rang with my crimes; M.H. was conveyed about London in a fainting condition in taxicabs; Lytton was appealed to come to her rescue; Duncan Clive Vanessa—all were in agonies & desperations. Why no one charged me with it then, I don’t know; my private theory is that Clive inspired V.’s letter as a precaution against further indiscretions, giving strict orders that his name should not be mentioned. I soothed myself by denouncing the spy system, & now am quite unable even to feel irritated. It all comes, so I think, from the indiscreet way in which people like M.H. accept positions which they are unable to fill, & thus flinching & shying constantly, keep everybody in a state of discomfort. I announce my intention to keep clear of that set in future; & as I write this, the post brings a letter from Eliot asking to come & see us.

To my great surprise a voice upon the telephone developed into the voice of Lady Mary Murray; asking us to lunch yesterday. We changed lunch to tea & went off to More’s Gardens, a block of flats on the Embankment, where after ringing for some time, a gigantic knock was answered by Lady Mary in person. L. was half inclined to think her an untidy but cordial housemaid. The Fisher Williams’ were there. A tea party is the least natural of situations, & produces the utmost amount of discomfort I think. Then the F.W.’s possessed only the brain of one moderate sized rabbit between them. Still it was the respectability that weighed me down, not the absence of intellect. There are certain dun coloured misty days in autumn which remind me of the Murray’s atmosphere. The cleanliness of Gilbert was remarkable; a great nurse must rub him smooth with pumice stone every morning; he is so discreet, so sensitive, so low in tone & immaculate in taste that you hardly understand how he has the boldness to beget children. She is a wispy elderly lady, highly nervous, a little off hand & much of an aristocrat in her dashing method, kindly, fussy, refined too—O yes, they are all refined. I sat & talked to Gilbert first about our love of sweets, then about the Greek love of wine, then about his standing with the Government. He has, he says, refused many honours, but was reprimanded for sending a review of a book on Job to America. Maliciously enough, I felt that his simplicity was maintained in the face of years of worship & adulation, & that the proper thing to say is “How wonderfully simple dear Gilbert Murray is!” But his niceness was unmeasured. The Toynbees came in. I had a long rigmarole with Arnold about his office & his learning & so forth; I think I frighten him; or perhaps I’m not used to the Oxford manner. Its suavity & politeness are strange to me. He is so shortsighted that he has a painful look of pinkness round the eyes, as if he were a grammar school boy exalted by the most assiduous industry to positions above his station. I’m always surprised to find how well meaning & even outspoken he is in spite of this.

Home to find Freda Major marooned at the station, so that L. had to fetch her. Herbert came after a field day; he’d been out since 6. & took F. home, & caught the last train to Staines. Freda is merely a toy dog enveloped in human flesh, but retaining the pretty, plaintive, rather peevish ways of her canine existence. She has stimulated Herbert to talk with greater fluency & enthusiasm than usual about the policeman strike & Ford’s motor cars.

Wednesday 30 October

Just in from a walk in the Park on this incredibly lovely autumn day. Various houses have orange berries growing upon them; the beech trees are so bright that everything looks pale after you have looked at them. (How I dislike writing directly after reading Mrs H. Ward!—she is as great a menace to health of mind as influenza to the body.) We talked of peace: how the sausage balloons will be hauled down, & gold coins dribble in; & how people will soon forget all about the war, & the fruits of our victory will grow as dusty as ornaments under glass cases in lodging house drawing rooms. How often will the good people of Richmond rejoice to think that liberty has been won for the good people of Potsdam? I can believe though that we shall be more arrogant about our own virtues. The Times still talks of the possibility of another season, in order to carry the war into Germany, & there imprint a respect for liberty in the German peasants. I think the distance of the average person from feelings of this sort is the only safeguard & assurance that we shall settle down again neither better nor worse.

We had a day in London yesterday; ending for me in talks with Ka & James at the Club, which now renews its life apparently. Ka has ceased to be a bureaucrat owing to Will’s illness; shed power as a chestnut its husk; & remains untouched within. James just back from Cornwall, where he had the influenza. Alix back too; without having the influenza & ready, I suppose to begin her autumn campaign, which Oliver bets that she will win. I here note that I bought my new battery on Tues. Oct. 29th; so far of extreme brilliance.

Sunday 3 November

On Friday night I went up to dine with the Arnold Forsters, partly I own, to avoid Mr Seymour Cox’s lecture upon the Secret Treaties, since I thought I knew already what Mr Seymour Cocks would say. Ka & Will live just past the Spectator office in the little semicircle of houses standing off the road, but tolerably noisy nevertheless. Here he lived before his marriage. He looked unusually small, drawn & pallid, like a face seen under a gas lamp, owing to his disease; & no longer young. He reminds me rather of one of those old ladies, who have yellow hair & very pink cheeks, but you can count their years in the way the flesh is drawn tight across the bone, & crinkled with very delicate fine lines. His person & manners are against him. He makes an impression of being very sharp, rather fretful, & acid. I think all this is largely due to his peevish voice, & little angular body, which he jerks about when he gets excited, & very little makes him emphatic. Nor did I like the pale acid decorations of the room—the lavender walls, & the one white rose drooping against them; nor did I like his niggled & emotional picture of the downs. There seemed a lack of warmth, depth, & substance. Perhaps none of this very much matters. His principles are those of the modern husband—freedom & independence for the wife—equal pleasures. Principles matter too. Ka will be happy with him. We talked very briskly. I dont think I should like his taste in books; I don’t like his slang; or his admirations; but I liked his excitement over the war office gazette. I suspect he has an able excitable rather febrile mind, which, on principle, has taken to painting pictures; I could wager my own head full of brains that he’ll never paint a good one.

On Saturday, we had one of our Hampstead afternoons, L. going to Margaret, I to Janet. I’ve done the same thing so often. I’ve found her in that green distempered room, with the ugly pictures. How well I know the benevolent look of the late Mr Case as a young man, drawn upon yellow paper & very slightly tinted on the cheeks, larger than life, framed in gold, by the late Mr Richmond. I know the photographs of young soldiers, & the silhouettes, & Janet’s books, which never seem to be read, & the greek dictionary with the piece of paper sticking out of it. Then theres Diana who takes up a lot of attention; but is now a reformed character. Emphie vagulates in & out of the room. Tea is prepared. I am pressed to eat more of everything. Questioned about butter & coal. Yesterday Emphie had a new kind of methylated spirits to show me, which you can only get in Highgate. Mr Marshall rather varied the proceedings—a well kept middle aged gentleman of Hampstead who proclaimed his wish to rule the world; & his fear lest America should rule it instead. Here was a Times leading article in the flesh. But he was also a chatty old gossip; & he & Emphie had noticed so many houses unlit, newcomers who were almost unknown, trees that wanted lopping, motor cars waiting for Mr Galsworthy, preparations for opening the Y.M.C.A., that it was like Cranford, to listen. And then they went & Janet talked to me about literature, & I fell into a passing gloom. She says that a great many novels are written, & it seems fairly evident that none are “immortal”. I suppose I referred this to my own novels; indeed, she urged me to write a biography for Basil Williams. But I fancy that what depressed me was not only the personal question, but the smell of musty morality. None of us came up to the scratch—not Lytton or Forster or anyone; but I felt beyond this fairly safe criticism the depressing effect of talking to some one who seems to want all literature to go into the pulpit; who makes it all infinitely worthy & safe & respectable. I was led into trying to define my own particular search—not after morality, or beauty or reality—no; but after literature itself; & this made Janet a little anxious & insistent, as if, conceivably, she might have missed something. Where did I find it? How did I explain it? We agreed upon a certain passage in Sophocles; but as she capped this with one in Lear, I think we were talking of different things. And she pressed me to tell her what I meant; & of course I came nowhere near it, & at length she said that she thought she was beginning to find what I meant—after all these years of reading Greek! Yes, I was depressed at her age, at something unstable about her; but I was also depressed at the implied criticism of The Voyage Out, & at the hint that I had better turn to something other than fiction. Now this seems to me foolish, & I wish I could make up a cure for it, to be taken after such encounters, which are bound to happen every month of one’s life. Its the curse of a writers life to want praise so much, & be so cast down by blame, or indifference. The only sensible course is to remember that writing is after all what one does best; that any other work would seem to me a waste of life; that on the whole I get infinite pleasure from it; that I make one hundred pounds a year; & that some people like what I write. But Janet would only admit that love counted, & said that her friends had succeeded only in “coming off” in life, not in art.

Monday 4 November

Since I’m back from the Club & waiting for L. (who has gone to see Mr Hawkins of the Temple [unidentified]) I had better assuage my fretfulness with pen & ink. I have a pen of malachite vulcanite(?) which perhaps serves the purpose of a babies coral. I’ve had no letter from Charleston which makes me feel rather sent to Coventry, though I suppose communications are going on between Clive & Mary; & then I can’t help fancying that Janet’s chill falling upon the last pages of my novel still depresses me. The depression however now takes the wholesome form of feeling perfectly certain that nothing I can do matters, so that one is both content & irresponsible—I’m not sure that this isn’t a happier state than the exalted state of the newly praised. At least one has nothing to fear, & the sheer pleasure of writing seems singularly unalloyed. It proves itself so genuine that no amount of Hampstead cold water can impair it. Praise? fame? Janet’s good opinion? How beside the mark they all are!

I keep thinking of different ways to manage my scenes; conceiving endless possibilities; seeing life, as I walk about the streets, an immense opaque block of material to be conveyed by me into its equivalent of language. (Lottie’s fire has to be nursed like a dying kitten—its my fire now, her’s being dead of course, & I’ve taken 25 minutes to get a trickle of flame between the coals.) In the intervals I’ve been thinking a good deal about this melancholy state of impending age. From the way Janet took certain remarks of mine about 60 as an age limit (for the Webbs) I felt that she took age to be a shameful disease that one shrank from hearing named. At anyrate, it is obvious that she must think about it privately, not facing it, turning away from it. And then it seems as if she were now always playing for safety. She has a kind of personal resentment against anyone, like Lytton for example, who laughs at what she holds sacred; she falls into the insidious trap of believing that any departure from the great is ephemeral & impertinent; & she argues this with personal feeling as if her own reputation depended on theirs. And all the time she’s so anxious to be in the front, to share what the young feel. But if I represent the young, my feelings tend to develop on such different lines that I can only wave my hand over leagues of Sea.

To Souhami’s; Mudies & the Club.

Saturday 9 November

Lord Mayor’s day among other things, & one of the two last of war, I suppose. It’s just possible that Lottie may bring us news that the armistice is signed within an hour. People buy papers at a great rate; but except for an occasional buzz round a newspaper boy & a number of shop girls provided with The Evening News in the train one feels nothing different in the atmosphere. The general state perhaps is one of dazed surfeit; here we’ve had one great relief after another; you hear the paper boys calling out that Turkey has surrendered, or Austria given up, & the mind doesn’t do very much with it; was the whole thing too remote & meaningless to come home to one, either in action or in ceasing to act? Katherine Murry, whom I saw on Wednesday, inclines to think that most people have grasped neither war nor peace. Two or three weeks ago I heard a citizen holding forth to a lady in the train, who asked him whether he thought there would be peace.

“I hope not…. We’re giving them everything they want & getting nothing.” Since then it is difficult to see how the most bloodthirsty citizens can squeeze anything more out of Germany. The Kaiser still wears a phantom kind of crown. Otherwise there is revolution, & a kind of partial awakenment, one fancies, on the part of the people to the unreality of the whole affair. Suppose we wake up too?

We began to set up Kew Gardens this week—Thursday was the first day of it, I think. MacDermott has surrendered his £7: after a little ineffective shuffling. On Wednesday I went up to Hampstead; found the tall ugly villa looking over the valley where the Murrys live. Katherine was up, but husky & feeble, crawling about the room like an old woman. How far she is ill, one cant say. She impresses one a little unfavourably at first—then more favourably. I think she has a kind of childlikeness somewhere which has been much disfigured, but still exists. Illness, she said, breaks down one’s privacy so that one can’t write—The long story she has written breathes nothing but hate. Murry & the Monster [LM] watch & wait on her, till she hates them both; she trusts no one; she finds no ‘reality’.

Monday 11 November

Twentyfive minutes ago the guns went off, announcing peace. A siren hooted on the river. They are hooting still. A few people ran to look out of windows. The rooks wheeled round, & were for a moment, the symbolic look of creatures performing some ceremony, partly of thanksgiving, partly of valediction over the grave. A very cloudy still day, the smoke toppling over heavily towards the east; & that too wearing for a moment a look of something floating, waving, drooping. We looked out of the window; saw the housepainter give one look at the sky & go on with his job; the old man toddling along the street carrying a bag out [of] which a large loaf protruded, closely followed by his mongrel dog. So far neither bells nor flags, but the wailing of sirens & intermittent guns.

Tuesday 12 November

We should have done well, I think, to be satisfied with the aspect of peace; how the rooks flew slowly in circles, & the smoke drooped; but I had to go to Harrison, & I think we were both conscious of a restlessness which made it seem natural to be going up to London. Disillusionment began after 10 minutes in the train. A fat slovenly woman in black velvet & feathers with the bad teeth of the poor insisted upon shaking hands with two soldiers; “Its thanks to you boys &c &c”. She was half drunk already, & soon produced a large bottle of beer which she made them drink of; & then she kissed them, & the last we saw of her was as she ran alongside the train waving her hand to the two stolid soldiers. But she & her like possessed London, & alone celebrated peace in their sordid way, staggering up the muddy pavements in the rain, decked with flags themselves, & voluble at sight of other people’s flags. The Heavens disapproved & did their utmost to extinguish, but only succeeded in making feathers flop & flags languish. Taxicabs were crowded with whole families, grandmothers & babies, showing off; & yet there was no centre, no form for all this wandering emotion to take. The crowds had nowhere to go, nothing to do; they were in the state of children with too long a holiday. Perhaps the respectable suppressed what joy they felt; there seemed to be no mean between tipsy ribaldry & rather sour disapproval. Besides the discomfort tried every one’s temper. It took us from 4 to 6 to get home; standing in queues, every one wet, many shops shut, no light yet procurable, & in everyone’s mind the same restlessness & inability to settle down, & yet discontent with whatever it was possible to do.

[End of book]

[Diary VI]

Friday 15 November

I’ve no money to buy another book; besides by waiting the paper question may once more take its place in the scale of my pleasures; good books, cheap books, books that make one wish to finish them in order to have the pleasure of buying another may be built up against the wall in stationers shops. Peace is rapidly dissolving into the light of common day. You can go to London without meeting more than two drunk soldiers; only an occasional crowd blocks the street. In a day or two it will be impossible for a private to threaten to knock out the brains of an officer, as I saw done the other day in Shaftesbury Avenue. But mentally the change is marked too. Instead of feeling all day & going home through dark streets that the whole people, willing or not, were concentrated on a single point, one feels now that the whole bunch has burst asunder & flown off with the utmost vigour in different directions. We are once more a nation of individuals. Some people care for football; others for racing; others for dancing; others for—oh, well, they’re all running about very gaily, getting out of their uniforms & taking up their private affairs again. Coming home from the Club tonight I thought for a moment that it must still be sunset, owing to the sharp bright lights in Piccadilly Circus. The streets are crowded with people quite at their ease; & the shops blazoning unshaded lights. Yet its depressing too. We have stretched our minds to consider something universal at any rate; we contract them at once to the squabbles of Lloyd George, & a General Election. The papers are unreadable. One’s sense of perspective is so changed that one cannot see at first what meaning all this gossip of parties can possibly have; one can’t be interested. Other people have more right to be sluggish than I have. One predicts a year or two of laxity save on the part of the professionals. They will have things their own way. Masses [?] will play football & cricket & take shooting in the country. The first effect of peace on our circle is to set Desmond loose, & to bring Gerald Shove up to London saying that he must find a way of making £500 a year. Before long the crowd of out of work intellectuals looking for places will be considerable. Desmond is doing what he knows how to do supremely well—going later & later to the office every day & taking longer for lunch, & sometimes not going back again. This he proposes to continue for a fortnight; then to fold up his blue & gold coat for ever—unless by cutting off the brass buttons he can make it do for an ordinary coat. His spirits are very high, though depressed occasionally by the question of earning a living. It came out that he means to suggest himself for Solomon Eagle’s place on the New Statesman; for the Eagle is flying higher. “I know so many people who write well” he said; & if that were all, he would make a perfect editor. After tea he told us the last section of the Ireniad. I suppose it would fill a book, from start to finish. It ended, characteristically, with his promising to go to lunch—& waiting eleven years before he saw her again. The story brought her back very plainly; perhaps his conclusion was right—one ought to pity any woman who is engaged to a young Cambridge man who has never been in love before—a young Cambridge man, I should add, who has read & has by heart all the novels of Henry James.

I was interrupted somewhere on this page by the arrival of Mr Eliot. Mr Eliot is well expressed by his name—a polished, cultivated, elaborate young American, talking so slow, that each word seems to have special finish allotted it. But beneath the surface, it is fairly evident that he is very intellectual, intolerant, with strong views of his own, & a poetic creed. I’m sorry to say that this sets up Ezra Pound & Wyndham Lewis as great poets, or in the current phrase “very interesting” writers. He admires Mr Joyce immensely. He produced 3 or 4 poems for us to look at—the fruit of two years, since he works all day in a Bank, & in his reasonable way thinks regular work good for people of nervous constitutions. I became more or less conscious of a very intricate & highly organised framework of poetic belief; owing to his caution, & his excessive care in the use of language we did not discover much about it. I think he believes in “living phrases” & their difference from dead ones; in writing with extreme care, in observing all syntax & grammar; & so making this new poetry flower on the stem of the oldest.

As an illustration of Eliot’s views I may add what Desmond has just (Thursday 21st Nov.) told me; D. asked him how on earth he came to add that remark at the end of a poem on his Aunt & the Boston Evening Transcript that phrase about an infinitely long street, & “I like La Rochefoucauld saying good bye” (or words to that effect). Eliot replied that they were a recollection of Dante’s Purgatorio!

Thursday 21 November

I am overwhelmed with things that I ought to have written about; peace dropped like a great stone into my pool, & the eddies are still rippling out to the further bank. Has Nelly Cecil sunk beyond recall? & that concert at Shelley House, presided over, so appropriately by Bruce Richmond? For the sake of the good report of my diary let me record the fact that Nelly Cecil met the Kaiser at Hatfield: & said he appeared a small man, in a grey suit, & “his people were afraid of him—They were afraid to tell him if his motor car was late…. He was romantic—very romantic.”

Too much space would be needed for an accurate description of Shelley House: briefly speaking it is a luxurious sham in imitation of the 18th century; but as people like the St John Hornbys never put all their eggs in one basket, the Italian renaissance is represented too; &, I should guess, Arthur Hughes shows that they patronise English art; but mainly they put their faith in George the Third. How much the annual income of the audience amounted to, I should not like to guess; they wore a substantial part of it on their backs: the furs were richly dark; the stuffs of the best black. And then the lovely music offered up before this congregation—among whom, as they say, I noticed Mrs Rathbone, Pearsall Smith, Hervey Vaughan Williams, & Mrs Muir Mackenzie.

However peace came & dissipated all that; & now where are we? According to Roger, on the brink of revolution; this is strictly speaking, according to Ray, & Ray, who is standing for Parliament as a Coalition candidate, says that if ever she were tempted to hoard food, now would be the time. The Lower classes are bitter, impatient, powerful, & of course, lacking in reason. For example they demand houses with 10 rooms at Guildford; & they have a prophet, Ditcher by name, who knows the truth; he knows what the brain is made of; & he has no use for the “middle class idealism” which cherishes doubts about some matters, & preaches liberty, toleration, & other humbug; for Ditcher knows the truth. These are a few facts that I gathered from Roger over a dish of tripe & leeks. I cheered him a little by reminding him of the existence of football & of King George. How they crowd—my memories of the past week! Mention of King George recalls Harry Stephen who sat like a frog with his legs akimbo, opening & shutting his large knife, & asserting with an egoism proper to all Stephens, that he knew how to behave himself, & how other people ought to behave, which science he taught, with success according to him, upon the Bench at Calcutta. He has need of the Royal Family; he wants someone descended from Egbert upon the throne; not a schoolmaster, like Wilson. The impenetrable wall of the middle class conservative was never more stolid; dynamite may smash it to powder; but—it is impervious to reason, or imagination or humanity; an educated version of the prophet Ditcher.

Poor James Strachey was soft as moss, lethargic as an earthworm. James, billed at the 17 Club to lecture on “Onanism”, proposes to earn his living as an exponent of Freud in Harley Street. For one thing, you can dispense with a degree.

But the real news of the past week is of a confidential nature. [Gilbert] Murray has asked L. to be his secretary if, as is possible, he is chosen to represent England on the League of Nations Committee at the Peace Conference. This would mean a visit to Paris. More than this need not be said; but it is an important possibility. Coming after it, the news that I today wrote the last words of my novel reads a little flat. Five hundred & thirty eight pages!

Saturday 30 November

I see I’ve been rather slack, & I cant remember now exactly what’s made me slack. Certainly not the General Election. I’ve reduced my reading of newspapers, though the D⁠[aily]. N⁠[ews]. has an extra sheet. They somehow keep it up. Mrs Dacre Fox bellows in the High St. McDermott demands a government which will make the Germans pay. He prints poster after poster in red ink. I’ve a new niece, Judith, not welcomed, but made the best of; & Barbara has a Judith too; & Saxon dined here, talking of death without enthusiasm. He knew for certain that he would die on a certain day last summer & then—didn’t.

One night we went to the Russian dancers; & it was incongruous enough to see what they offered the tolerant good tempered public who had been bellowing like bulls over the efforts of a man to nail a carpet down. They were tolerant, but, as I fancied, a little bit contemptuous of all this posing & springing against a flat blue wall. What a queer fate it is—always to be the spectator of the public, never part of it. This is part of the reason why I go weekly to see K.M. up at Hampstead, for there at any rate we make a public of two. On Thursday Murry came in, & we had an awkward, interesting talk; too self conscious to be enkindling. I think something or other is a little inharmonious in both of them;—in my arrogance, I suppose I feel them both too much of the underworld, with all sorts of nostrums of their own; & all this talk about being artists. I dont express what I mean. Perhaps all I mean is that they seem suspicious—Beneath the surface I expect that they are both very anxious for appreciation, not at all sure of themselves, & Murry wrings his brains dry, & becomes more & [more] hopeless of finding anything to believe in. I dont like married couples where the husband admires the wife’s work immensely.

Arthur Ponsonby came up & spoke to us at the Club the other day. He is standing somewhere, & wants to get in, if only to prove that his side has a good case; he said he didn’t much care to be in Parliament itself. A weak, moderately intelligent, kindly man, permanently puzzled, & worried too, by the strange order of the world. Living in a social class different from the one he was born into may account for this. Then we had Dr Leys to lunch on Wednesday (27th, I put in by way of mark). He has spent 17 years in East Africa, & being a very sterling direct Scotchman has a terrible tale to tell about the natives. How they concentrate, how bare of superfluity they are, these professional intellectual men!

Printing off on our little machine began today, & now I must give my very best attention to Murry’s manuscript, A Fable for Critics, which I brought home in my bag, with a view to printing.

Tuesday 3 December

(What odd stray of knowledge makes me think that this is Carlyle’s birthday? Perhaps because I’m reading about Froude;—I go on to wonder whether any one else is thinking of Carlyle’s birthday, & if so whether it gives him any pleasure; & again of the curious superstition, haunting literary people, of the value of being remembered by posterity—but I had better rein myself in).

I have to read for a second time Murry’s poem, which I found hard to read; from reasons the opposite of those that make Eliot hard to read: Murry has a plethora of words; his poem is intricate & involved & as thick as a briar hedge; he does his thinking aloud; not making you fetch it from the depths of silence as Eliot does. We’ve been walking by the river, & indeed sitting beside it, so hot it is, bland, milky, & without thrill in the air. The gulls were letting themselves be carried down stream, for a diversion I suppose; little companies of three & four gliding down, & then one dives & reappears. We discussed the origin of my present fit of melancholy, & I was divinely reassured by L. so that here I sit comfortable & secure; once more established in that degree of belief which makes life possible. But I leave out the analysis, which I have gone into sufficiently. I fancy all people have these spiritual tides in them—Heaven knows why. Altogether the more one thinks of it the stranger one’s own organisation appears.

On Sunday, that is the 1st December we had a dinner party. Six people make a dinner party. They destroy private conversation. You have to be festive. We had Nick, Carrington, Mrs Manus & Sanger: & I think it was a successful party. We were sufficiently springy & spontaneous I think. Charlie made his little jokes. Nick was nearly silent, but appreciative. I foresee a testy middle age for Nick. Mrs Manus enjoyed her dinner. Carrington has more merit than most of the young. We had chairs down and abolished the sofa. I can’t for the life of me remember what we talked about, save that Charlie emphatically despised both Herbert Fisher & Gilbert Murray. He doesn’t like to be asked to meet people because they’re interesting he said. I said no, you only like failures. On Monday I went first to Harrison’s with L. then walked across Regent’s Park & had tea with Barbara. Regent’s Park at 4.30 on a December afternoon is a dreary place. So many purple leaves seem to be flattened on the path. Then the park keepers begin whistling, & I remember being afraid of being shut in, as a child. Then the mist rolls up over that vast open space. On one side of you the commoner animals in the zoo grunt & growl—chiefly pigs now, for war purposes I suppose. This did not produce a cheerful frame of mind in which to visit an invalid; & to my horror I found that she shares a room with another, a widow, whose husband was killed; & there poor woman, she sat, pretending to read a book & not to look my way, while Barbara & I gossiped, without much spirit. B. would have preferred a son; sons, she says, are more troublesome, nervous, naughty, from birth; I suppose this is the natural feeling, though not a very desirable one; assertiveness seems to her interesting. Her own baby, with Nick’s nose, slept in a cradle; grumbling a little, but very good she said. The future seemed to oppress her.

Saturday 7 December

For some reason, not connected with my virtues I think, I get 2 or even 3 books weekly from the Times, & thus breast one short choppy wave after another. It fills up the time while Night & Day lies dormant; it gives me distinct pleasure I own to formulate rapid views of Henry James & Mr Hergesheimer; chiefly because I slip in some ancient crank of mine. But this sort of writing is always done against time; however much time I may have. For example here I have spent the week (but I was interrupted 2 days, & one cut short by a lunch with Roger) over Hakluyt: who turns out on mature inspection to justify over & over again my youthful discrimination. I write & write; I am rung up & told to stop writing; review must be had on Friday; I typewrite till the messenger from the Times appears; I correct the pages in my bedroom with him sitting over the fire here.

“A Christmas number not at all to Mr Richmond’s taste, he said. Very unlike the supplement style.”

“Gift books, I suppose?” I suggested.

“O no, Mrs Woolf, its for the advertisers.”

But to retrace. On Thursday I lunched with Roger in order to hear the following story.

Mrs McColl to Mr Cox of the London Library:

“Have you The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf?”

“Virginia Woolf? Let me see; she was a Miss Stephen, daughter of Sir Leslie. Her sister is Mrs Clive Bell I think. Ah, strange to see what’s become of those two girls. Brought up in such a nice home too. But then, they were never baptised..”

Roger & I get on very well now; more genuine & free than we were, under the shadow of Gordon Square. We agree on many points; & he, at least, perceives the isolation of our little group in the large hostile world of MacColls & Duckworths. Then we discuss prose; & as usual some book is had out, & I have to read a passage over his shoulder. Theories are fabricated. Pictures stood on chairs. Here I become rather random & desperate. Wolfe brings in a picture—The question is about a slice of green on the midmost apple. Does it interpose with the violet on the edge of the potato? “Cut it out: see the way the colours show up over there:—well try varnish then.” “I think its the best thing I’ve done yet.” “O yes, there’s more life in it—its very strong, Wolfe, very strong.”

At last, inevitably late, I go on to the 17 Club, where Mrs Manus & L. sit in the upper room, correcting proofs, but Couch [? printer] has only sent a batch. Anyhow, I was too late to help; but not to pour out tea for Miss Matthaie. Why should a woman of her sense apologise all her life long because she is an unattractive woman? She looks up sidelong, like a child who has done wrong. And yet she has more in her head than all the cropheads put together. Alix I found intoning pompously downstairs, with a perverted likeness to a colonel of the upper classes holding forth upon the iniquity of Bolshevism. Her theme is the iniquity of colonels; the method seems much the same; even the voice.

Friday, as I say was spent writing by me; by Leonard in having lunch with Will A.F. & correcting more proofs. No sooner had I done a little type setting, & ruled off the hour & a half before dinner in which to read my distinguished American novelist [Hergesheimer] recommended by Mr Galsworthy, than Lottie admitted Sydney Waterlow. My only hope for passing the time was some sort of introspective confidence on his part; but no such luck. He is prosperous, complacent, self assured even to the extent of confronting the disapproval of Gordon Square unabashed. He is now on the round of his friends, not, he was careful to explain in order to test us, but to enjoy our society. Mary Sheepshanks had been summoned to dine with us in order to discuss the Review, & MacDonald’s treachery. Paler, perhaps thinner, fading into middle age imperceptibly, with the same flavour of bitterness against a world—a world of upper class women, it is at the present moment, who ask for an indemnity. Yet, compared with the greater variety of my acquaintance, she comes out abler, better informed, more rational than I remembered her in the days of Fitzroy Square. But still she accepts her “nice evening” as the grudging poor accept a charity which is rather less than they deserve.

Tuesday 10 December

Sunday was memorable to me for another visit to Shelley House—where I actually shook hands with Miss Sands, Katie, & Elena Rathbone. All expressed great surprise at seeing me, as if I were a strange bird joining a flock of the same species. I felt strange enough; but oddly familiar with their ways after the first. Elena was almost like an old friend—a very old friend who persists, remembering what went on before I took my dive & she hers. She pressed me, almost affectionately, to come & see them. I shall do it with misgivings. Suppose we have absolutely nothing to say? All her charming frank caressing manner may vanish. And then there is the eternal, & insoluble question of clothes. Katie rather ensanguined & flesh covered, but with a great dignity & amplitude of feature, sitting very up right, eyes half closed, in the front of the room, listening to Ravel & Schumann, which she said she admired equally.

On Monday I paid what has now become my weekly visit to Katherine. Murry was there; which makes it a little stiff, though I like them both, & her better as a wife. He scarcely speaks; makes one feel that most speaking is useless; but as he has a brain of his own I don’t mind this. Besides it is more shyness than purpose. I told such stories as I could think of; Murry then explained that he had a confession to make. It only amounted to the fact that he has bought his brother a hand press, upon which some short poems of his are to be printed, beautifully, like Kelmscott books. Arthur is learning at a Polytechnic, & wishes to do ‘art’ printing. I rather suspect Arthur’s views of art. But anyhow we are to do what we like with Murry’s long poem. At present to give it McDermott seems the most feasible plan, when the great red posters are all issued, which have begun to paper Richmond during the past few days. “Payment, Punishment…” & some other P. is the policy they advocate. We shall probably vote for no one. A wet day; but we went out having “practically” finished Kew Gardens; I mean it is all ready to print save a few lines. Light in my study gives out about 3.30. Now I shall try to do a few lines of Eliot before we go away. There is one of the usual kitchen intrigues to have Liz & children to Asheham for Christmas. Nelly doesnt like to ask me; Lottie makes up a rigmarole about saving us expense & this being the last time that she will be able to leave home. How terrible it is to be in this position to other grown people!

Monday 16 December

Back from a week end with Roger. Lips, therefore, rather sore with talk, though his range is so wide, & we both have such a number of things to say that I, certainly, was neither bored nor satiated. Pamela was there, very rounded, supple, with a likeness to some naked wood creature in an Italian picture; she has the yellow brown complexion too. I suspect that children take the shape of their parents the other way about; a vivacious sociable enthusiastic father produces a quiet, unselfish, rather passive daughter. She is only sixteen, but mature in manner, as the result of living with grown up people. It was polling day on Saturday in Guildford, as in other parts of the world, & Roger very gloomy about the future of the world. No doubt he will soon forget about politics. The war is already almost forgotten. All Sunday, in spite of rain & fog he painted till the sky was black, having been grey through the time of daylight. I feel little hope about his pictures, but had to counterfeit an opinion as to the effect produced on the solidity of a bowl by a mornings work on it. He said that he grudged every hour of daylight spent not painting, since age draws near, & he must say what he wants to say before he dies. Age he proposes to spend alone, working all day long. At last he seems to do what he has always tried to do. We had some melancholy revelations about the treachery of certain friends towards the Omega. Roger’s great point is that though superficially unbalanced & exaggerated his sense of balance is always right in the end; he is always magnanimous & forgiving, however much weight he may lay upon imaginary or semi-imaginary grievances. The Omega case is that his artists accept commissions independently of the Omega. For that & other reasons the poor shop has been a source of unmitigated disillusion to him—a weariness & grievance. People hate art & him for loving it is now a frequent burden of his talk. Nor did I show myself one of the elect, with regard to painting at least. We visited the National Gallery together this morning; I thought a Rembrandt “very fine” which to him was mere melodrama. A little El Greco conveyed little until he illumined it; showed how it held more real colour than any other picture there. Then the Ingres was repulsive to me; & to him one of the most marvellous of designs. I always feel, too, that to like the wrong thing, or fail in sufficiently liking the right jars on him, like false notes, or sentimentality in writing.

Tuesday 17 December

This I cannot help fearing will be my last opportunity for writing before I go to Asheham on Friday, though I shall continue there, God being willing, in some form of new book. Tomorrow I go to K.M. Thursday I have tea with the Richmonds, & perhaps dine at the Club; so Friday is reached without any interval between tea & dinner; & even today I am stealing what belongs to Sophocles, before Mrs Hamilton arrives at 7 to address the Guild. Suppose I buy a block, with detachable leaves, I think I shall snare a greater number of loose thoughts. No doubt this is pure fancy, but then so much of one’s mental affairs are controlled by fancy. Nessa has asked us to have the children for a fortnight when the new baby is born. This is now imminent, & she fixes the 28th for the exact day. The servants go to Guildford for a week, in order that we may be free from Liz & her offspring. We shall have one week entirely alone, at Asheham, the greatest & most unmixed pleasure this world affords; enhanced very much in my mind by the absence of servants, so that often we are alone in the house. I am going to read through my novel & determine what to do with it. L.’s book is almost done; February will see it finished most likely. We have printed off the text of Kew Gardens, & got an estimate from McDermott for printing Murry’s poem. He asks £4.10. which to us seems little, for 200 copies of a 24 page book. We supply the paper, & the cover. Possibilities are opened up I think.

Weather has been so warm that I dont think I’ve had a fire in my study more than 3 or 4 times, & that only when we were printing in the afternoon. Influenza seems to be over, though Lottie had an attack lasting an hour or two on Saturday. Iced cakes are possible, but so far no more than that. As for public news, the war already seems an unimportant incident; one of our political dodges, & at this moment the news boys are shouting that Russia prepares for war. It is difficult to see how even a jingo can now believe in any good from war, or any ideal, or anything, one feels tempted to add undertaken by bodies of human beings in concert. It is said that Labour did well, & the Coalition only moderately, at the polls. Ray is said to have a good chance;—we voted on Saturday, but L. overcome with panic, very likely voted for Mrs Dacre Fox.

[]

1919

[Diary VII]
Hogarth House
Paradise Road
Richmond
January 1st 1919

Monday 20 January

I mean to copy this out when I can buy a book, so I omit the flourishes proper to the new year. It is not money this time that I lack, but the capacity, after a fortnight in bed, to make the journey to Fleet Street. Even the muscles of my right hand feel as I imagine a servants hand to feel. Curiously enough, I have the same stiffness in manipulating sentences, though by rights I should be better equipped mentally now than I was a month ago. The fortnight in bed was the result of having a tooth out, & being tired enough to get a headache—a long dreary affair, that receded & advanced much like a mist on a January day. One hours writing daily is my allowance for the next few weeks; & having hoarded it this morning, I may spend part of it now, since L. is out, & I am much behindhand with the month of January. I note however that this diary writing does not count as writing, since I have just reread my years diary & am much struck by the rapid haphazard gallop at which it swings along, sometimes indeed jerking almost intolerably over the cobbles. Still if it were not written rather faster than the fastest typewriting, if I stopped & took thought, it would never be written at all; & the advantage of the method is that it sweeps up accidentally several stray matters which I should exclude if I hesitated, but which are the diamonds of the dustheap. If Virginia Woolf at the age of 50, when she sits down to build her memoirs out of these books is unable to make a phrase as it should be made, I can only condole with her & remind her of the existence of the fireplace, where she has my leave to burn these pages to so many black films with red eyes in them. But how I envy her the task I am preparing for her! There is none I should like better. Already my 37th birthday next Saturday is robbed of some of its terrors by the thought. Partly for the benefit of this elderly lady (no subterfuge will then be possible: 50 is elderly, though I anticipate her protest & agree that it is not old) partly to give the year a solid foundation, I intend to spend the evenings of this week of captivity in making out an account of my friendships & their present condition, with some account of my friends characters; & to add an estimate of their work, & a forecast of their future works. The lady of 50 will be able to say how near to the truth I come; but I have written enough for tonight (only 15 minutes, I see).

To resume; I admit I dont like thinking of the lady of 50. Courage however; Roger is past that age, & still capable of feeling, & enjoying & playing a very considerable part in life.

Wednesday 22 January

Today is Wednesday, Jan. 22nd. Two days more were spent in bed, & today counts as my first of complete health. I even wrote a sentence of alterations and additions this morning. I have a book on Meredith to do for the Times, & we walked this afternoon, so I am back again nearly in my old position. As I can’t get up to London, & only see little framed pictures of Alix & Fredegond sitting by the fire here, I might attempt that solid foundation which I think desirable.

How many friends have I got? There’s Lytton, Desmond, Saxon; they belong to the Cambridge stage of life; very intellectual; cut free from Hyde Park Gate; connected with Thoby; but I can’t put them in order, for there are too many. Ka & Rupert & Duncan, for example, all come rather later; they belong to Fitzroy days; the Oliviers & all that set are stamped as the time of Brunswick Sqre; Clive I put a little aside; later still there are the cropheads, Alix, Carrington, Barbara, Nick, Bunny. I must insert too the set that runs parallel but does not mix, distinguished by their social & political character, headed perhaps by Margaret & including people like Goldie, Mrs Hamilton, & intermittent figures such as Matthaei, Hobson, the Webbs—no, I can’t include either the darkies, or Dr Leys, though they stand for the occasional visitor who lunches & retires to L.’s room to talk seriously. I have not placed Ottoline or Roger, & again there are Katherine & Murry & the latest of all, Hope Mirrlees, who recalls Pernel & Pippa & outlying figures such as Ray & Oliver. Gertler I must omit (& Mary Hutch, too) for reasons which if my account gets written I might give; & Eliot I liked on the strength of one visit & shall probably see more of, owing to his poems which we began today to set up.

This is a very partial account, but I shall never place half of them accurately unless I start straight away. Lytton & Desmond & Saxon then. Well, I cherish a considerable friendship for each of them; the worst of it is how seldom we meet. With Lytton & Desmond till last month tethered to a stool in the Admiralty, months pass without a sight of them. The season of letter writing is over for all of us, I think; or perhaps we need different correspondents. Brilliant letters we wrote each other once, partly for the sake of being brilliant, & we were getting to know each other then, & there was a thrill about it (I speak of my own feelings.) But when we do meet, there is nothing to complain of. Lytton is said to be more tolerant & less witty; Desmond, they say, needs a glass of wine; Saxon has his rheumatics & his hopeless love affair. Lytton again is famous these last six months, but as that was a matter of course since his first six months there is not much surprise or change in it. Moreover, I hear he has abandoned his Asquiths or they are provided with some later light. Nothing is easier or more intimate than a talk with Lytton. If he is less witty, he is more humane. Presumably, judging from precedent & taking into account the demobilisation of the army, he is now preparing to fly, but as his alliance is not with me the direction he flies in makes very little difference. I like Carrington though. She has increased his benignity. O yes, if he were to walk in at this moment we should talk about books & feelings & life & the rest of it as freely as we ever did, & with the sense, on both sides I think, of having hoarded for this precise moment a great deal peculiarly fit for the other.

Friday 24 January

Oddly enough, the day after writing this sentence I got into touch with Lytton, after a lapse of six months or so, on the telephone. & he is to dine here next Friday. But to resume. There are three words knocking about in my brain to use of Stracheys,—a prosaic race, lacking magnanimity, shorn of atmosphere. As these words have occurred automatically, & will tease me till written down, I daresay there is some truth in them. All the unpleasantness that I wish to introduce into my portrait of Lytton is contained in them, as if in deep wells. I shall only need one drop of this gall for his portrait, but I fancy a tinge of the kind is perceptible in him too—far more in James, Oliver & Marjorie. Roger’s version is that all, except Lady S., lack generosity. It is an air, a vapour, an indescribable taste of dust in the throat, something tickling & irritating as well as tingling & stimulating. But then one must combine with this a great variety of mental gifts, & gifts of character—honesty, loyalty, intelligence of a spiritual order. One might almost attribute what I mean in Lytton’s case at least to lack of physical warmth, lack of creative power, a failure of vitality warning him not to be spendthrift but to eke out his gifts parsimoniously, & tacitly assume his right to a superior share of comfort & opulence. In matters of emotion this has a slightly stingy appearance, nor is he ever unthinkingly generous & magnanimous, risking himself. Mentally of course it produces that metallic & conventionally brilliant style which prevents his writing from reaching, to my judgment, the first rate. It lacks originality, & substance; it is brilliant, superbly brilliant journalism, a supremely skilful rendering of the the old tune. Written down these words are too emphatic & linear; one should see them tempered & combined with all those charming, subtle & brilliant qualities which compose his being in the flesh. But when I think of a Strachey, I think of someone infinitely cautious, elusive & unadventurous. To the common stock of our set they have added phrases, standards, & witticisms, but never any new departure; never an Omega, a Post Impressionist movement, nor even a country cottage, a Brunswick Square or a printing press. We Stephens, yes, & even Clive, with all his faults, had the initiative, & the vitality to conceive & carry our wishes into effect because we wished too strongly to be chilled by ridicule or checked by difficulty. Even in the matter of taking Tidmarsh Lytton had to be propelled from behind, & his way of life insofar as it is unconventional, is so by the desire & determination of Carrington.

Thursday 30 January

Such is the cold today that I doubt whether I can go on with my disquisition. On such a day one would need to be of solid emerald or ruby to burn with any flame, & not merely dissolve in grey atoms in the universal grey. I saw no one in Richmond High Street who seemed to be burning with the intensity of ruby or emerald—poor pinched women, absolutely mastered by circumstances, though I did hear one speak of going home to get tea ready, which suggested the possibility of some individual life for her. A child threw her hat into the area which I had to recover, & made a whole row of them laugh by tossing it up twice so that it fell into the area again; then the Poles require copies of the In⁠[ternational]. R⁠[eview]. to be sent to Paris; & here is Nelly to say two servants may call in to see me about Nessa’s place. To my chronicle of Lytton I can only add that he writes today to put us off, being fled to Tidmarsh, since “Calvé is ill, & cannot meet me at Heinemann’s”. What he should be doing with Calvé, I dont know; but the information thus vouchsafed, suggests—well, further speculations of mine upon fame, jealousy, vanity, & so forth which I wait a more congenial season to unfold. Owing to this incubus of my friends I have said nothing of a visit from Alix, from Norton, from Fredegond, nor traced some rather interesting revelations, or developments, which may bear fruit one of these days. Alix is thinking of taking a house in Gordon Sqre “chiefly in order to live with James” she said; & this, as she announced it to L., me, & Saxon, had some quality in it that for the moment made my blood run cold. Now, to tune myself up I am going to shut Mrs Watts upon George Frederic, & open the Antigone of Sophocles. One second—I must note for future use, the superb possibilities of Freshwater, for a comedy. Old Cameron dressed in a blue dressing gown & not going beyond his garden for 12 years, suddenly borrows his son’s coat, & walks down to the sea. Then they decide to proceed to Ceylon, taking their coffins with them, & the last sight of Aunt Julia is on board ship, presenting porters with large photographs of Sir Henry Taylor & the Madonna in default of small change.

Friday 31 January

Here I solace my restlessness as usual upon returning from the Club upon this book. I visited the Omega, & heard Roger wheedling a fat German lady to buy stuff, & doing his best to be polite to Mr Powell, an art gentleman who makes glass in South Kensington I suppose, & can believe. Thence through streets of frozen mud, snow, slush, slippery & congealed into little knobs like those on an astrachan coat, to the Club (& here I am interrupted by the voice of my dear old friend, Desmond, upon the telephone—10 minutes discourse. Yes, he’s taking a house at Oare, perhaps, & wishes us to be near him, & will come on Tuesday to bring a story, & is lodging at Littlehampton, & will subscribe to the Review, & send a flimsy for 10/—no, 12/-of course, & they’ve let Wellington Square, & propose to live cheap & spend half the year in the country, which he doesn’t much like, but there it is. Here, with sympathetic enquiries about my health & tooth, we ring off.) Yes, its sympathy that Desmond has; & thus I’m switched back again to old Lytton. But old Lytton I must at once acquit of wishing to impress me with his Calves & his Heinemanns; I think he mentioned a concert, & this is it. Let me try to account for the fact that he has ‘dominated’ (why, even the word is his) a generation at Cambridge, & make it square with my disparaging remarks. How did he do it, how is he so distinct & unmistakable if he lacks orginality & the Tues Feb 4th rest? Is there any reputable escape from this impasse in saying that he is a great deal better than his books? or am I too chary of praise for those books? Am I jealous? Do I compare the 6 editions of Eminent Victorians with the one of The Voyage Out? Perhaps there’s a hint of jealousy; but, if I underrate, I think the main cause is that while I admire, enjoy up to a point & up to a point agree, I’m not interested in what he writes. Thomas Hardy has what I call an interesting mind; so have Conrad & Hudson; but not Lytton nor Matthew Arnold nor John Addington Symonds.

Life is getting crowded out altogether. But life hasn’t been very enjoyable these last few days. Conceive a conspiracy of fog, frost, strike on Tube railways, & on top of that servant hunting for Nessa. This last has ended disastrously. I braved Mrs Abbey once more yesterday, snatched my Phoebe Crane from the jaws of mistresses innumerable, only to hear now that she’s not wanted, & must be put off with a pound note to solace her. This is the imposing pinnacle to my fortnights castle building with Budge & the rest; the cards fall down & things are as they were. Letters upon letters have been written in that bold hand & business like style unnatural to me, telegrams sent, Nelly entreated, brains ransacked, & journeys of penitence made with the result that 32/- is now scattered among undeserving people. But I must record a little sunshine today, less cold; &, to balance that, the district railway on strike.

Desmond has not rung up. That is quite a good preface to the description of his character. The difficulty which faces one in writing of Desmond is that one is almost forced to describe an Irishman: how he misses trains, seems born without a rudder to drift wherever the current is strongest; how he keeps hoping & planning, & shuffles along, paying his way by talking so enchantingly that editors forgive, & shopmen give him credit & at least one distinguished peer leaves him a thousand in his will.

Saturday 15 February

What a disgraceful lapse! nothing added to my disquisition, & life allowed to waste like a tap left running. Eleven days unrecorded. Still I think if I were a painter I should only need a brush dipped in dun colour to give the tone of those eleven days. I should draw it evenly across the entire canvas. But painters lack sub⁠[t]⁠lety; there were points of light, shades beneath the surface, now, I suppose, undiscoverable. The predominant tint was furnished by the need I was under of visiting Registry Offices in the coldest weather of the year. It seems to me that I must have visited a dozen; three was in truth the utmost. But then one was on the verge of civilisation, on the outskirts of Fulham; & how hard, contained, & disillusioned the eyes of the women at the desks become, as if glued in front of them they saw eternally a cook of doubtful character! They can scarcely draw a veil of politeness over them at the sight of me, dressed up in red velvet & fur for their benefit. In the end somehow, Nelly had to go to Charleston for a week, & Phoebe Crane recovered from her illness, & was despatched there, so that peace is temporarily renewed.

Yesterday, Friday, I had one of my occasional galas. Dressed in my best I went to Sickert’s pictures, which I here pronounce the pleasantest, solidest most painter-like show in England. & there I met Clive & Mary; Clive in his fur coat, Mary in the more subdued style of the New English [Art Club]. Put a yellow cane in Clive’s hand, & hang a ribbon from an eyeglass, & he would step out of a sporting print—no, a caricature tinted with pinks & yellows. He introduced me to young Nevinson, with the Prince Albert whiskers—making allusion to our both being “such celebrated figures”, which Nevinson did not appreciate. Later, Clive, Mary & I strolled chattering like a perch of parrokeets, to Verreys, with its blue paint & gilt devices. Mary had a dutiful visit to pay her husband in hospital. So we sat & talked in an inner room,—a pleasant, dissipated place, parquet floor—curved bar, little tables—green & gold flourishes, dilapidated George the 4th style, & empty at this hour, save for some dubious ladies. We talked. We vibrated in sympathy. We billed & cooed. Rosy lights shone on his cheeks. Our intercourse was very gay, vibrant, like that of stringed instruments. Duncan passed through—a strange shaggy interlude, but, always & inevitably harmonious. He blinked as if newly exposed to the light, crumbled his brioche, & gulped down his coffee, stammering out his half articulated but immensely expressive words; & saying, I remember, how Art & Letters was the dullest & dreariest of papers (“I’ll show it you—no, its not in that pocket—no, I don’t know where it is.”) & how Julian & Quentin were so much cleverer than most children. Somehow, too soon, he hoisted himself into an astonishing long straight black coat, like a non-conformist ministers, hitched down his red waistcoat, & started off in a vague determined way to Victoria Station. And then we sat on, Clive & I, talking of writing, of my writing chiefly, which he praises sufficiently to give his strictures a good deal of force. As I half suspected, he found grave faults in that crude laborious novel of mine; & excessive merits in the Mark; the best prose, he said, written in our day. Mary came in & interrupted, or rather influenced the current of our discourse, for she hardly spoke, & then we turned out into Regent Street where the lamps were lit, & the shop opposite had all its windows full of bright clothes against a green stage scene, & so strolling in the spring twilight & laughing still we made our way through Soho, & I left them, in a street with many jewellers windows.

Tuesday 18 February

Here I sit waiting for Alix, who can’t be coming to disburden herself of confidences as I supposed; & thus my mind returns by way of her fickleness to my friends. Where was I? Desmond, & how I find him sympathetic compared with Stracheys. It is true; I’m not sure he hasn’t the nicest nature of any of us—the nature one would soonest have chosen for one’s own. I dont think that he possesses any faults as a friend, save that his friendship is so often sunk under a cloud of vagueness, a sort of drifting vapour composed of times & seasons separates us & effectively prevents us from meeting. Perhaps such indolence implies a slackness of fibre in his affections too—but I scarcely feel that. It arises rather from the consciousness which I find imaginative & attractive that things don’t altogether matter. Somehow he is fundamentally sceptical. Yet which of us, after all, takes more trouble to do the sort of kindnesses that come his way? who is more tolerant, more appreciative, more understanding of human nature? It goes without saying that he is not an heroic character. He finds pleasure too pleasant, cushions too soft, dallying too seductive, & then, as I sometimes feel now, he has ceased to be ambitious. His ‘great work’ (it may be philosophy or biography now, & is certainly to be begun, after a series of long walks, this very spring) only takes shape appears, I believe, in that hour between tea & dinner, when so many things appear not merely possible but achieved. Comes the day light, & Desmond is contented to begin his article; & plies his pen with a half humorous half melancholy recognition that such is his appointed life. Yet it is true, & no one can deny it, that he has the floating elements of something brilliant, beautiful—some book of stories, reflections, studies, scattered about in him, for they show themselves indisputably in his talk. I’m told he wants power; that these fragments never combine into an argument; that the disconnection of talk is kind to them; but in a book they would drift hopelessly apart. Consciousness of this, no doubt, led him in his one finished book [Remnants], to drudge & sweat until his fragments were clamped together in an indissoluble stodge. I can see myself, however, going through his desk one of these days, shaking out unfinished pages from between sheets of blotting paper, & deposits of old bills, & making up a small book of table talk, which shall appear as a proof to the younger generation that Desmond was the most gifted of us all. But why did he never do anything? they will ask.

At any rate in his own intermittent way Desmond is faithful. So much [one] may affirm of Saxon too, who comes next on my list. But Saxon’s fidelity is almost that of the senile colly, or broken down ass—the pensioner who can draw upon a memory of the past for a seat at one’s table in perpetuity. His present condition makes him appear almost exclusively in the character of almoner. He has little to give at the moment, life has not been generous to him. His possessions are old friendships, old memories—things we’ve talked of ages ago. Unlike the rest of us he has had no renewal of life in marriage; his hopes in that direction have been crushed. Therefore he comes to me disconsolately, grudgingly, ungenerously were the cause not one beyond his reach, asking rather than giving; asking at this moment that I shall accept Barbara at his hand—return her to him enriched with the glow of my approval. And Barbara does not appear to me somehow of that metal—that rarity—However, poor Saxon’s life is now in the uncomfortable & unbecoming season which is so painfully well reproduced out of doors. Sleet, & mud & chill, & nothing growing; no warmth, no brilliancy, not even a modest domestic glow. He lodges with Stagg in Great Ormond Street, & has summed up his own position accurately as that of one who finds himself lonely if alone, & bored if in company. But faithful—there is something worth having in Saxon’s fidelity; something that makes his most meagre visitation not altogether fruitless. One is aware, even after two hours of tepid & almost entire silence, that he is strictly true, genuine, unalloyed. You would never find him wanting; never find him callous, insincere, or grudging the last farthing of his possessions. Granted that he is not richly supplied with the gifts one might need, still I come to think in my weary age that safety—a modest competence—a truth as flawless as diamond or crystal—is not negligible, nor without its curious flashes of high remote beauty. At any rate I rest on the thought of Saxon with some relief after hovering for the past two months in a state of uncertainty over the thought of Katherine Murry. I might turn round what I have written of Saxon in order to make a background on which to paint a portrait of Katherine. It is at this moment extremely doubtful whether I have the right to class her among my friends. Quite possibly I shall never see her again. Upstairs I have letters in which she speaks of finding the thought of me a joy, dwelling upon my writing with excitement; I have letters making appointments, pressing for visits, adding postscripts of thanks & affection to visits already paid. But the last is dated December, & it is now February. The question interests, amuses, & also slightly, no, very, decidedly pains me. If it were not that I suspect her of wishing to produce precisely these emotions, save that of amusement, I should be still more put out. As it is—well I should need to write a long description of her before I arrived at my queer balance of interest, amusement, & annoyance. The truth is, I suppose, that one of the conditions unexpressed but understood of our friendship has been precisely that it was almost entirely founded on quicksands. It has been marked by curious slides & arrests; for months I’ve heard nothing of her; then we have met again upon what has the appearance of solid ground. We have been intimate, intense perhaps rather than open; but to me at anyrate our intercourse has been always interesting & mingled with quite enough of the agreeable personal element to make one fond—if that is the word—as well as curious. I was at pains to go up to Hampstead every week since mid October or November, I suppose. And then what happened? I go away for Christmas, & we send small bright presents, carefully timed to arrive on Christmas day. I add to mine one if not two long & affectionate letters; I propose to come as soon as I get back. My time in bed prevented this. But meanwhile, for no reason given or to be guessed at with any certainty, she falls silent; I get no thanks, no answers, no enquiries. So suspecting but willing to make every test before coming to conclusions, I asked Murry whether she would like a visit; to which he replied cordially & without the shadow of hesitation. I proposed to go yesterday. About eleven she, or rather the female who keeps house, rang up & put me off, saying that K.M. was too unwell for my visit; but making no suggestion of another time, nor have I any word from her or K. this morning.

Friday 21 February

But all this is made to appear rather fine drawn & exaggerated by the simple fact that I have a letter this morning from K.M. herself asking me to tea on Monday & explaining how some new treatment gives her fever for two days & makes it impossible for her to see people. Also I am asked to write for the Athenaeum, so that little scratch in my vanity is healed. Not that I want to review any more books than come my way already. But owing to my laborious, & it appears rather misleading, accounts of my friends life has been too much neglected. Let me recollect. On Sunday last Saxon & Barbara dined here; but did little more than dine, since she had to return to feed her baby. She came frisking into the room; but her mind is a sedate literal mind; the pity is that she cant always be in a state of bodily frisk. That is her natural element, I’m sure; to expect quiet talk is against nature. Saxon watches her, judging I suppose that her charms provide for them both. I let myself in for a visit to Faith’s; a tea, to see the Baby. Faith will shortly add to the race herself. A discontent is roused in me at this proceeding on her part. I’m a human being myself; I scarcely feel that Faith will do us credit. She is a lax satirical woman, finding sharp things to say, & already at 28 possessed of a grievance. There she lounges over her fire arranging little mosaic patterns of all of us in a peevish way, & making it appear that she has no other interest in life. One feels her mind a very magpies larder of gossip. Oh yes, she knew of my meeting with Hope Mirrlees; & informed me that she supposed I was one of those unstable friends, rejoicing in quarrels. She had apparently given the matter some thought. In contrast to her Barbara was ‘very nice’; direct, unaffected, sympathetic, as far as her wits will carry her; & in some queer fashion of her own a personality. I wonder what this rises from. On the doorstep in the dark she hinted her concern for poor old Saxon. And then Saxon rang me up to apologise for not staying longer, & suggest another visit.

Tuesday 25 February

Well, I haven’t even quarrelled with Mirrlees—my literary ladies are faithful, though intermittent, whether purposely or not, I don’t undertake to say. But these speculations obliterate what I see I call ‘life’. The truth is I shirk the gigantic task of giving an account of Sundays teaparty, at which I met Sir Val. Chirrol, Sir Henry Newbolt & Lady, Lady Cromer, the Bruce Richmonds, & a scattering of gallant bald cavalry officers, & mounds of South Kensington dowager respectability who must be nameless. Sir Val & Katie both foretold a revolution, & seemed to picture themselves meeting death nobly for the principle of respectability at the hands of the Russian Jews. Russian Jews invest every great city—a people of enormous energy & unscrupulosity—& then, as Sir Val remarked, 1914 will never come again—“not that anyone could accuse me of pacifism”. Meanwhile Sir Henry confessed that music, especially the music of strings, moves the fount of poetry in him, & “something always comes of a concert—something will come this evening”—he assured me, as a priest foretelling a miracle, or a conjuror producing a rabbit, But the amiability of South Kensington is disarming. A kind of modesty veils what is so prominent & disagreeable in the intellectuals. They have an air of saying “I am no one—no one at all. My only function is to be agreeable. Another cup of tea? Do for goodness sake take this arm chair—& let me fetch you a slice of bread & butter—” Thats my impression of the moment; though for some reason it doesn’t encourage one to say anything more interesting than Thank you & please dont trouble, & other phrases of the kind. Of no 23 Cromwell Houses, fronting the stuffed beasts, & quite capable of staring them out of countenance, I will only say that it is furnished on the great South Kensington principle of being on the safe side & doing the thing handsomely. Good Mrs Samuel Bruce went to the Autotype Company & ordered the entire Dutch school to be sent round framed in fumed oak. And so they were; & just covered the staircase walls, leaving an inch or two’s margin in between. The drawing room—no, I cant write it all out; memory preserves only the shoulders of a horse on a gilt easel, & three large seascapes, like slabs of thick bread & butter. The company was decorous & fur bearing as usual; & the music like the voice of spirits in another world enticing the hopelessly damned. Sir Henry wrote a patriotic song to the tune of it. But how nice they are too!—Katie shouldering her way along the streets afterwards, & letting fall sentences of curious remote force, as though she were on top of a mountain, or lost in a mist, as I can’t help feeling these aristocrats are.

Not, however, Lord Eustace Percy. But at him my pen boggles, since I cannot delve any further back into the week. How modestly he started, smoking his pipe like any commoner, like poor rubber faced little Ewer himself, or wry-necked Burns, & then by degrees how authoritative & masterly lie became, & beat the table to make his points, & pulled his audience up short, & bade them “Wait a second”, or asked them “Well, What do you suggest then? What is your answer to that?” like some transcendent head master, to whom the rest of us are but little children spelling out their lesson, very badly stumbling over the long words; & Lord Eustace, in his goodness, undertakes to enlighten us. I got the impression of a very able man & a very aristocratic man, & a very nice man—a combination that is so irresistable as to be alarming. He explained the League of Nations draft.

Very well: but now we come to another of the ornate & decorated tribe; try as she will she can never lay aside her coronet; I mean poor dear old Ottoline. We dined at Gatti’s together last night. I fetched her from the family bosom of Garlands Hotel. She has the slim swaying figure of a Lombardy poplar—the ridges & hollows of the cheeks are the only sign of her years (47 I make them); & a feeble mincing step on the street, like that of a cockatoo with bad claws. She has an indomitable spirit—plucking life out with those same gouty claws as if she were young & had illusions by the score. She had swooped down upon the land agents wife, & upon Rosa Allatini—for no reason save that the land agents wife writes novels, & Rosa Allatini has had her novel burnt by the hangman. Allatini was a bad choice, save that she almost fainted & had to be fed on bath buns, which Ottoline had by her—& confided, of course, the story of her unhappy love, which made it necessary for her to be fed on Bath Buns. Birrell had been to tea, remarking how Queen Victoria liked nothing better than the sight of a drunken man; Lopokova had been discoursing all the afternoon. As we sat a⁠[t] dinner Ott picked up scraps of talk from the other diners, & admired their profiles. And so round to Gordon Square where we found Clive at the top of the house, where I used to stand & write, in the largest arm chair ever seen, by the finest fire, with a screen across the door to keep the draught out, as affable as a cockatoo & as brightly coloured as a macaw. I left them together & lost my train.

Wednesday 5 March

Just back from 4 days at Asheham, & one at Charleston; I sit waiting for Leonard to come in, with a brain still running along the railway lines, which unfits it for reading. But oh, dear, what a lot I’ve got to read! The entire works of Mr James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, so as to compare them with the entire works of Dickens & Mrs Gaskell; besides that George Eliot; & finally Hardy. And I’ve just done Aunt Anny, on a really liberal scale. Yes, since I wrote last she has died, a week ago today to be precise, at Freshwater, & was buried up at Hampstead yesterday where 6 or 7 years ago we saw Richmond buried in a yellow fog. I suppose my feeling for her is half moonshine; or rather half reflected from other feelings. Father cared for her; she goes down the last, almost, of that old 19th Century Hyde Park Gate world. Unlike most old ladies she showed very little anxiety to see one; felt, I sometimes think, a little painfully at the sight of us, as if we’d gone far off, & recalled unhappiness, which she never liked to dwell on. Also, unlike most old Aunts she had the wits to feel how sharply we differed on current questions; & this, perhaps, gave her a sense, hardly existing with her usual circle, of age, obsoleteness, extinction. For myself, though, she need have had no anxieties on this head, since I admired her sincerely; but still the generations certainly look very different ways. Two or perhaps three years ago L. & I went to see her; found her much diminished in size, wearing a feather boa round her neck, and seated alone in a drawing room almost the copy, on a smaller scale, of the old drawing room; the same subdued pleasant air of the 18th Century & old portraits & old china. She had our tea waiting for us. Her manner was a little distant, & more than a little melancholy. I asked her about father, & she said how those young men laughed in a “loud melancholy way” & how their generation was a very happy one, but selfish; & how ours seemed to her fine but very terrible; but we hadn’t any writers such as they had. “Some of them have just a touch of that quality; Bernard Shaw has; but only a touch. The pleasant thing was to know them all as ordinary people, not great men—” And then a story of Carlyle & father; Carlyle saying he’d as soon wash his face in a dirty puddle as write journalism. She put her hand down I remember, into a bag or box standing behind the fire, & said she had a novel, three-quarters written—but couldn’t finish it—nor do I suppose it ever was finished, but I’ve said all I can say, dressing it up a trifle rosily, in the Times tomorrow. I have written to Hester, but how I doubt the sincerity of my own emotions!

Asheham was, I suppose, a qualified success only—at any rate for L. because of the discomfort; for me the discomfort such as it was was chiefly due to Philip [Woolf]’s presence. One couldn’t sink back before the log fire & read Shakespeare. That form of exalted egotism was checked, & I think perhaps Philip felt himself a little of a hindrance, as no doubt, he always feels himself now—an outsider, a spectator; unattached & very lonely. Duncan came over involved in domestic difficulties, & gave him a letter to Mr Hecks the farmer, which he was to deliver yesterday morning, in the worst downpour of the year. But we had two lovely afternoons of spring, when I kept asking myself “Now where are we? What point have we reached? Is this spring or September?” waking with a start to the fact that we are launched on another summer. Those little grey green tassels were decorating the woods, like the design on a Japanese screen. Starting out to fetch milk on one of these days we met Gunn & heard our fate. We’re to go in September. He wants Asheham to live in with his old mother. Oh dear Oh dear!—Each time I walked up the drive I though⁠[t] how nothing was ever so perfect. If it weren’t for the devil of starting something new in me, I should be in despair. L. thinks it easy to make a fetish of a house; which is true; meanwhile we hang suspended. But the need of looking for another house is a source of great pleasure. It drove us all along the Rodmell Road to Mr Stacey’s & there we heard from a pair of drab females in a chaise that Mr Robinson of Iford is going to let; so on we went, to Iford, a thickly set little village on the plain; & found a house with three green columns, a stuffed up drawing room, & a Mrs Robinson, made so L. declared & the number of her children attested, for breeding purposes. Art lamps & iridescent plates attached to the wall demonstrated the gentility of her farmer husband. Evidently they have made themselves very snug, & will want more than we can pay; even if the country there were better than it is. On the whole we incline to aim at Itford farm house—a house that could be made very attractive, with its view & its sun. We have grown out of gentlemen’s houses.

Charleston is by no means a gentleman’s house. I bicycled round there in a flood of rain, & found the baby asleep in its cot, & Nessa & Duncan sitting over the fire, with bottles & bibs & basins all round them. Duncan went to make my bed. Their staff at this moment consists simply of Jenny, the sharp Jewish looking cook; & she having collapsed, spent the afternoon in bed. By extreme method & unselfishness & routine on Nessa’s & Duncan’s parts chiefly, the dinner is cooked, & innumerable refills of hotwater bottles & baths supplied. One has the feeling of living on the brink of a move. In one of the little islands of comparative order Duncan set up his canvas, & Bunny wrote a novel in a set of copy books. Nessa scarcely leaves the babies room, or if she appears for a moment outside, she has instantly to go off & talk to Dan, Jenny’s young man & the future support of Charleston, or to wash napkins, or bottles, or prepare meals. Mrs B. & the children run rapidly to & fro between their rooms. I had an immense long talk with Ann [Brereton] about the health of the Persian cat, which, according to Mrs B. was fatally injured internally while being washed to cure it of nits; so that she demanded chloroform, which Nessa refused, & the cat recovered. Then Quentin had just been suspected of measles—The atmosphere seems full of catastrophes which upset no one; the atmosphere is good humoured, lively, as it tends to be after three months of domestic disaster. In these circumstances, I daresay I had no more than 30 minutes consecutive talk with Nessa, chiefly devoted to the great epic of the Dr the nurse & Emily. But as happens after disaster upon disaster a sudden lightening of calamity appeared this morning: Dan & his mother being engaged, a letter then arrived from a nurse who against all probability seems to wish to come if she may bring a friend. But I broke off in full tide, & had to trudge through mud to Glynde—such mud that when I went into Powell, the land agent, the sleek little clerk looked from my head to my boots in expostulation—as if such a figure couldn’t possibly require a house with 7 bedrooms & a bathroom. Unhappily there seems little chance of finding one. I’ve said nothing of my niece, who must be called so formally, since they’ve cancelled Susanna Paula, & can think of nothing else. She is a wistful, patient, contemplative little creature, examining the fire very meditatively, with a resigned expression, & very large blue eyes. I suppose not much larger than a big hare, though perfectly formed—legs, thighs, fingers & toes—both fingers & toes very long & sensitive.

Friday 7 March

Having smashed my ink pot, I have recourse to safety pots again & purple ink I see dwells in this one; but I can’t use with any effect the muffled respectability of a fountain pen. Yesterday I had a tooth out, to which the bag of a large abscess had attached itself. Harrison showed it me, previous to putting it in the fire; a token of much pain he said. The queer little excursion into the dark world of gas always interests me. I came home in the Tube wondering whether any of the people there suspected its existence. I wake from it, or seem rather to step out of it & leave it to go on hurtling through space while the World of Harrison & Dr Trueby engages my attention—“Open your mouth, Mrs Woolf—Now let me take out this little bit of wood.” Suppose one woke instead to find the deity himself by one’s side! The Christians believe it, I suppose. L. has met an immense number of people these last few days; & I should have told how Sidney Webb finds his book a most remarkable piece of work, & how it is to be printed directly by Clark of Edinburgh, & will be out, perhaps, by June. And my poor old sluggard, Night & Day, is to be taken in a parcel to Gerald [Duckworth], as soon as I can get through with these niggling, bothersome corrections. Lady Wolseley who seems a lady of the utmost distinction since she writes to the Editor of the Times in pencil, finds L.’s memoir of Aunt Anny ‘most admirable’, & the delicacy of his touches ‘a proof of Genius in him’. To balance this satisfactorily my article, according to B.R., is received with acclamation in the office, at home, & in my Club. The Richmonds want to take a house for April & May—possibly we may consider letting them Asheham. If I had L.’s experience I could here give a little story of the Coal Commission & Lloyd George behind the scenes, as reported by Mrs Webb.

Wednesday 12 March

Sunday was one of my Shelley house afternoons. There I met Clive, & in his company I was less than ever in touch with the gathering—as dusky, fur-clad & discreet as ever, though I fancy that I am less impressed by it all than I was, & even take Shelley House more or less as an ordinary house. I had to talk to Elena about Asheham, & find her so slow in her mind, so accustomed I suppose to the position of an ornate & handsome ornament that she positively can’t understand & scurries in her replies, as if she were a fat spaniel crossing a busy road. And her eyes are without depth. Clive gave me dinner at the Café Royal, which did not much interest me as a show, rather to his disappointment. However towards the end of dinner a woman of doubtful character dining alone with a man threw her glass on the floor, made a great rattle of knives & plates, upset the mustard pot & marched out like an indignant turkey Cock. Was this moment, with the eyes of the diners upon her, what repaid her? Was it for this that she protested? Anyhow she left her man very crestfallen, trying to appear nonchalant; & I daresay that was what she wanted. I couldn’t help thinking of the dreary scene in the flat next morning—the tears, the recriminations, the reconciliation—& next Sunday they’ll dine, I suppose, at another restaurant.

Dining with Clive now I always feel that we mark the change in our circumstances & views; our present is acted on a background of the past. The present is more amiable, considerably gayer than the past; though not perhaps so interesting. Its interest is different, rather, for I was interested in what he told me of Nessa & R. & D.—& in what I could guess of his own attitude; so happy; so vibrant, so epicurean—& yet has he his moments, not exactly of disillusionment, but of feeling that things might have been rather on a larger scale? I doubt it; I fancy he has found his level, & hence his comfort.

On Monday [10 March], I think, we had a day of industry. We are coming to the end of Eliot’s poems—but I’ve forgotten Saturday, when we had Marjorie Strachey, & the Shoves & Saxon to dinner. Saxon, like the sand in the oyster, was the origin of the whole pearl. We cannot quite face Saxon alone; & had recourse to telephone & telegraph to summon others. I doubt that he likes this. He wants more attention than one can give him in company, & he sits silent, outside the magic circle; no lure draws him in. To me the most interesting object that evening was Gumbo; instantly & undoubtingly I thought her changed. She has come to some decision; she has passed some stage. Doesn’t Conrad say that there’s a shadow line between youth & middle age? Well, since I saw her last she has crossed it into the smoother greyer waters beyond. She has just had notice to leave her school on account of her short sight. In old days this would not have mattered much; she would have been on with something new; but when I spoke of her as the acrobat flying from trapeze to trapeze she shook her head; no that is all over. She now has her two rooms in Kensington, lives on her earnings, comes home & is glad to be quiet there, glad to find that her charwoman has lit the fire—Things haven’t turned out well. Jos’s fault, I suppose. The prospect is drearier than I could face in my own case. I begin to see, now, how my friends’ lives are shaping. It looks a little as if Marjorie was to be one of the failures—not that I rank marriage or success in a profession as success. Its an attitude of mind—the way one looks at life.

I must notice that though the sky is as black as water one has washed one’s hands in, a bird is singing romantically & profusely at the window. On our walk today we passed almond trees in full flower. The daffodils are on the point of bursting. But so far I doubt if we’ve had one day of blue sky, or any heat; nor is there any shadow at Kew, where the shade is universal.

Last night Miss Fox, aged perhaps 26, earning her living, living in rooms with a friend, daughter of an Oxford don & Pippa’s secretary, dined here & lectured the Guild on equal pay. Leonard is preparing to dress for the first time since marriage in an assortment of clothes to dine with David Davies & Venizelos. This morning we had notice to quit from Hoper, & the further blow that he will not let us have the [Itford] Farm.

Saturday 15 March

Today was to have been the happiest of the week, & then among my letters was one from Duncan, which looked to me ominous, & proved of course to contain a demand for Nelly as soon as possible. What else but a demand is it when he says that Nessa is becoming completely knocked up by incessant work & responsibility? So I have wired to say she will go if possible for 3 weeks; & the prelude to the wire was unpleasant, & the postscript will be still more so. For the moment this house represents a little island of refuge to the childbearers; Karin rang up last night to suggest that we should take Ann, Judith & Mabel for a fortnight, which fortnight they are going to spend at Asheham. But no one can see how difficult it is to detach a cook or to take in children when one’s organisation is framed on a different scale—however its enough to live one’s disagreeables without writing them. Moreover we refused to take Mabel & Ann & Judith.

On Thursday Bruce & Elena dined here—rather an event. But it went off peaceably enough. They, at least, are well beyond the shadow line; I found him mellower & milder & less spruce than I expected, which pleased me in the admiring editor of my works. As for Elena her distinction in black with a jade jewel is undeniable; her white hair too, on the top of a face coloured like almond blossom; & with all this stateliness & repose an air, if I mistake not, of melancholy, as of hopes not realised & acquiescence accepted instead of something warmer, which slightly touched me, guessing the cause of it. Her notes are very few. But she could discuss the Indian Bill with L. & Indian religions; so that I daresay her slowness & apparent stupidity are only that she finds herself out of her element with me. We talked, much about Asheham of course, & the evening passed quietly, sedately, & with only one or two of those awkward pauses which I remember in their house. He treats her rather as a large magnificent child. “O you’ll like that” he said when I offered her a bulls eye, & she told me she had noticed a very nice sweetshop in the street. I fancy that Bruce is a kindly & very unambitious man, who has been quite pleased to spend his time in doing kindnesses to poverty stricken young men & fitting the articles into the advertisements in the Supplement, which he says is not such as easy job as it looks. “When the great catastrophe happens” he said, alluding to Lord Northcliffe, there is a Walter who is going to buy back the Times, & make it into a decent paper again. They went down to see Asheham on Friday, but the result is not yet known to us. L. is right I think in saying that Elena’s place ought to be in a big house in a village, distributing alms. I asked vaguely for a compositor & she undertook very scrupulously to find me one, being in touch of course with various organisations.

On Friday I went to London & had tea with Mrs Hamilton—Molly that is: I had to correct myself half a dozen times. L. has now got into the habit of lunching in London twice a week, & so appeasing the gaping maws of Green & Matthew. Murry is in the next room & has asked L. to do the social, I mean social reform, side of the Atheneuam, pressing upon him a large yellow book for review. James [Strachey] has extracted the post of dramatic critic. Eliot may be sub-editor. The first number comes out on April 4th. These little bits of literary gossip strike me as slightly discreditable. They point perhaps to one’s becoming a professional, a hack of the type of Mrs W. K. Clifford, who used to know exactly what everyone was paid, & who wrote what, & all the rest of it. I can see father listening with disapproval but secret enjoyment. Mrs Hamilton made me feel a little professional, for she had her table strewn with manuscripts, a book open on the desk, & she began by asking me about my novel; & then we talked about reviewing, & I was interested to hear who had reviewed Martin Schüler, & was a little ashamed of being interested. She told me a curious thing about the sensibilities of my family—Adrian had asked her to tell me how much he’d liked The Voyage Out, which he has just read for the first time, & is too shy to write & tell me so himself. She has 2 or 3 sisters, all artists according to her, though the designs for stained glass that I saw didn’t seem to me to prove it; & one is a poet, who surrounds herself with sketches of projected books on every conceivable subject, & has written a long poem which she wants us to consider publishing. “She is a poet—certainly a poet”, she said, which roused my suspicions. The truth is that Molly Hamilton with all her ability to think like a man, & her strong serviceable mind, & her independent, self-respecting life is not a writer. But we exchanged the plots of our novels, & said “How very interesting—”

Wednesday 19 March

Life piles up so fast that I have no time to write out the equally fast rising mound of reflections, which I always mark down as they rise to be inserted here. I meant to write about the Barnetts, & the peculiar repulsiveness of those who dabble their fingers self approvingly in the stuff of others’ souls. The Barnetts were at any rate plunged to the elbow; red handed if ever philanthropists were, which makes them good examples; & then, unquestioning & unspeculative as they were, they give themselves away almost to the undoing of my critical faculty. Is it chiefly intellectual snobbery that makes me dislike them?—is it snobbery to feel outraged when she says “Then I came close to the Great Gates”—or reflects that God = good, devil = evil. Has this coarseness of grain any necessary connection with labour for one’s kind? And then the smug vigour of their self-satisfaction! Never a question as to the right of what they do—always a kind of insensate forging ahead until, naturally, their undertakings are all of colossal size & portentous prosperity. Moreover, could any woman of humour or insight quote such paeans to her own genius? Perhaps the root of it all lies in the adulation of the uneducated, & the easy mastery of the will over the poor. And more & more I come to loathe any dominion of one over another; any leadership, any imposition of the will. Finally, my literary taste is outraged by the smooth way in which the tale is made to unfold into full blown success, like some profuse peony. But I only scratch the surface of what I feel about these two stout volumes.

On Monday after many failures I met Murry at the Club & we had our talk about the Athenaeum. Success has already begun to do for Murry what I always said it would do. He is more freshly coloured, even in the cheeks, than when we last met; & his mind has its high lights. Why, he chuckled like a schoolboy; his eyes shone; his silences were occupied with pleasant thoughts, I think; not that he would admit that to edit the Athenaeum was much more than preferable to a place in a government office. He talked so much about his plans, & with such zest that we sat there from 4.45 to 6.30, or past, & I had to rush. In fact I only caught my train owing to my skill as a psychologist. We were discussing his poetry, & his standing as a poet, with some intensity on his part, so that he lay back, & looked very intently at the ceiling. I was interested but guilty about dinner waiting. So I said “Yes, its true writing for one’s own press is very pleasant—Now next week I have to take my novel to Gerald Duckworth—” “Ah” his eyes came down from the ceiling at once. “What’s it called?—Oh yes—it’ll be out in the autumn I suppose. Well, d’you know I’m afraid I must be going.”

Murry is much of a small boy still, I think, in spite of his tragic airs. I suspect his boast will come true; the Athenaeum will be the best literary paper in existence in 12 months.

“What will you write Virginia?” he asked. Am I too modest in thinking that there was a shade of the perfunctory in the question? Anyhow I didn’t persecute him with any degree of pressure. I offered to look in on Thursdays sometimes & get a book; sometimes to suggest an article; he agreed quite cordially. We went over all his names, & tried to think of others, but agreed that once our intimate friends were gone through the field was mown of its poppies. The younger generation promises very little so far. An editor naturally sweeps the young writers very carefully. I doubt that I was so much of an incubus to Richmond as I thought. While we were demurring a little to the idea of James as dramatic critic, the dramatic critic looked in & saw us. I recommended Desmond for the star part. Katherine will do 4 novels every week—pray to God she don’t do mine! I feel the acid in her once more—since she doesnt take the trouble to write a card to fix an engagement; but I shall try to go up there tomorrow & judge the situation with my own eyes. Today we finished printing Eliot’s poems—our best work so far by a long way, owing to the quality of the ink. MacDermott has done Murry’s poem with such blots & blurs that we must at any rate reprint the title page.

Saturday 22 March

Today among other things the coal strike is postponed, & the Guards march through London. L. might have seen them, but thought it not worth the loss of his seat in the Tube. As to private news, our new bookcase came & one part has been set up in the drawing room: the other is too large to get upstairs to my room. Further we have decided to take 2 cottages at Tregerthen if we can get them; & this brings me to Katherine Murry from whom I heard of them. The inscrutable woman remains inscrutable I’m glad to say; no apologies, or sense of apologies due. At once she flung down her pen & plunged, as if we’d been parted for 10 minutes, into the question of Dorothy Richardson; & so on with the greatest freedom & animation on both sides until I had to catch my train. Perhaps its I who live in the suburbs & think it necessary to answer letters; that would be a proper retort to my jest of the underworld. But something—something dark & catastrophic possibly to do with Murry—has taken place since we met. So much she hinted; but said she wished now to forget it—something that had absorbed her, apparently. But this was a momentary revelation as I left. Otherwise, as I say, we chattered about the Athenaeum mostly, & I was much complimented to hear how much they wish for my writing, in proof of which I have a book this morning from Murry. And again, as usual, I find with Katherine what I don’t find with the other clever women a sense of ease & interest, which is, I suppose, due to her caring so genuinely if so differently from the way I care, about our precious art. Though Katherine is now in the very heart of the professional world—4 books on her table to review—she is, & will always be I fancy, not the least of a hack. I don’t feel as I feel with Molly Hamilton that is say, ashamed of the inkpot. Before this I met Hope Mirrlees at the Club—a very self conscious, wilful, prickly & perverse young woman, rather conspicuously well dressed & pretty, with a view of her own about books & style, an aristocratic & conservative tendency in opinion, & a corresponding taste for the beautiful & elaborate in literature. For example, she had been examining Swift as to his use of words; whether he used them properly, & found him deficient compared with Burke, who writes from this point of view magnificently though detestably from any other. She uses a great number of French words, which she pronounces exquisitely; she seems capricious in her friendships, & no more to be marshalled with the long goose wand which I can sometimes apply to people than a flock of bright green parrokeets.

‘Will you write to me, Hope?” I asked.

“O no. I can’t write to people.”

So we parted in the Charing Cross Road for the next six months, I suppose.

But to tell the truth what I’m thinking about most is neither Katherine nor Hope, but the two cottages at Higher Tregerthen. About now, I suppose, Captain Short of St Ives is opening my letter.

Thursday 27 March

Captain Tregerthen Short has now got my letter, & written me an answer, & even drawn me a sketch, & appears not only willing but anxious to let us have his three cottages, at a rent of a year each. I have replied, also in the course of these last few days, that we will probably take them, & truth to tell, I have spent the greater part of the time on the slope beneath our house, which Leonard has already planted with fuchsias, or crouched on a rock, watching the great foam swirl of the waves. In a pessimistic walk by the river yesterday L. made this capacity for being happy first at Asheham, then at Tregerthen, the text of a discourse upon the illusory nature of all pleasures & pains; from which he concludes that mankind is a wretched tribe of animals, & even the works of Shakespeare no good save as his skill in doing it excites one’s pleasure. Shall I own that I attribute some of this to my wretched family, who asked me up to dine with them, & I went? & also to Night & Day which L. has spent the past 2 mornings & evenings in reading? I own that his verdict, finally pronounced this morning gives me immense pleasure: how far one should discount it, I don’t know. In my own opinion N. & D. is a much more mature & finished & satisfactory book than The Voyage Out; as it has reason to be. I suppose I lay myself open to the charge of niggling with emotions that don’t really matter. I certainly don’t anticipate even two editions. And yet I can’t help thinking that, English fiction being what it is, I compare for originality & sincerity rather well with most of the moderns. L. finds the philosophy very melancholy. It too much agrees with what he was saying yesterday. Yet, if one is to deal with people on a large scale & say what one thinks, how can one avoid melancholy? I don’t admit to being hopeless though—only the spectacle is a profoundly strange one; & as the current answers don’t do, one has to grope for a new one; & the process of discarding the old, when one is by no means certain what to put in their place, is a sad one. Still, if you think of it, what answers do Arnold Bennett or Thackeray, for instance, suggest? Happy ones—satisfactory solutions—answers one would accept, if one had the least respect for one’s soul? Now I have done my last odious piece of typewriting, & when I have scribbled this page, I shall write & suggest Monday as the day for coming up to lunch with Gerald. I don’t suppose I’ve ever enjoyed any writing so much as I did the last half of N. & D. Indeed, no part of it taxed me as The Voyage Out did; & if one’s own ease & interest promise anything good, I should have hopes that some people, at least, will find it a pleasure. I wonder if I shall ever be able to read it again? Is the time coming when I can endure to read my own writing in print without blushing & shivering & wishing to take cover?

Our dinner last night at the Isola Bella was rather a brilliant affair in the Bohemian style, with a great deal of wine, & talk of books & pictures, & a general air of freedom & content—though I fancy that Roger—I was specially warned by Nessa not to let him know that she & Duncan were in the bath, which casts some light on his point of view. At the end of dinner the Padrone, as we called him, (Clive chattered Italian with the greatest gusto) brought a large sketch book, in which Nessa & Duncan & Roger all drew pictures, & we were rewarded by a bottle of Marsala. Then home; leaving Nessa & Roger in Fitzroy Street, with Clive, Mary & Duncan following behind. We talked by the way a great amount of Athenaeum gossip, all secretly delighted with our own importance; Clive & Roger to do art criticism, the most brilliant list of contributors on record; & indeed I open this book again solely to record the fact that Murry has applied to me for a signed article, which I shall send him.

Sunday 30 March

I open this book today merely to note that Miss Eleanor Ormerod, destroyer of insects, promises well for Murry: should he take kindly to my first (Eccentrics: I myself rather liked it). That note being made & L. not in yet from Staines I may add that I’m writing by the clear shrewd light of the sun, though its five minutes to the half past five. Last night we changed our watches. So the winter gloom is over, for which I am half sorry, since the dark evening over the fire has its charm. Moreover, should I look out of the window I should see snow in the garden. Yesterday morning the glare of white on trees & roofs when I drew the curtains was dazzling, surmounted too by a bright blue sky, as tender as June; but falsely tender, since outside one was scourged by the bitterest east wind, & I’ve not felt so cold this winter. Cold dashed in one’s face, & whirled up ones legs is far more cruel & harassing than a still profound frost. The Almond blossom is all gone, as if it were Cinderella when the clock struck.

I went up to tea at Gordon Sqre on Friday, having first visited Spicer the paper makers in Upper Thames Street. Clive sat at tea; a little grumpy, growing bald, & now showing a forehead rather in the style of Hall Caine. Very queer, as Nessa said, we all felt, united again in that drawing room as though it were 1907 again, & yet with so complete a re-arrangement of our parts. Perhaps we are all much happier; at any rate more secure & therefore tolerant towards each other. Then on to the Club, & dinner with the Shoves & Marjorie, for whom of course we paid, since they had all come out with no money. Gerald’s buttons burst off too, & his coat came unsewn; & on again across half Mayfair, discreet & semi-lit, to the Club meeting—where my attention was drawn to a large picture, the Rape of the Sabines, I daresay, given by Edward Owensmith in memory of his devoted wife Elizabeth, a Christian mother who went home Feb. 1907—I find it impossible to keep out thoughts about all sorts of things, & found that Marjorie listened attentively; but I can give no record of what happened, save that L. was elected again, 5th.

Wednesday 2 April

Yesterday I took Night & Day up to Gerald, & had a little half domestic half professional interview with him in his office. I dont like the Club man’s view of literature. For one thing it breeds in me a violent desire to boast: I boasted of Nessa & Clive & Leonard; & how much money they made. Then we undid the parcel, & he liked the title, but found that Miss Maud Annesley has a book called Nights & Days—which may make difficulties with Mudies. But he was certain he would wish to publish it; & we were altogether cordial; & I noticed how his hair is every blade of it white, with some space between the blades; a very sparsely sown field. I had tea at Gordon Sqre; Shepherd [Sheppard], Norton, Nessa, Duncan & later Clive. The disturbing effect of the company is not so great as it was. Yet I feel that the presence of these very brightly lit brains makes things go swiftly, & without padding. And then they have different cups & saucers, & pictures on the walls, & new chair covers. Later I withdrew with Nessa, though to withdraw is very difficult owing to the regulations about coal. Much domestic talk; Lil offering herself, as it proves fruitlessly. Then dinner at the Isola Bella; talk with Clive & Duncan: Clive insisting that Eliot dislikes me, & further trying to convince us that Nessa, Roger, himself, Lytton & I are the most hated people in London; superficial, haughty, & giving ourselves airs—that, I think, is the verdict against the ladies. I admit I hate not to be liked; & one of the drawbacks of Bloomsbury is that it increases my susceptibility to these shades, which are always made very visible by Clive, in so much that I own to have sulked a little under the suspicion that Murry has confided to Clive that he dislikes my article. Home to find L. in bed; a sight to restore confidence. He had dined with Bob Trevy, spoken at South Place, & performed other activities which I give no account of. I mean, he had been to the office, & the League of Nations, & the Labour party, so that between us our range was wide yesterday. Forster is back again, & said by good Dutch Bessy to be ‘more serious’.

Thursday 10 April

A great skip, how accounted for I scarcely know. Writing hard at a Times article on novels perhaps used up my desire for activity of the fingers; & then these last few days I’ve been submerged in Defoe; & only steal 10 minutes from Roxana to write this. I have to read one book a day in order to start on Saturday—such is the life of a hack. I went up to tea with Janet, & noticed the signs of age in her; gentle old ladyish smiles, & turns of speech; for her age will be a profitable season. And the Eliots, Walter & Marjorie dined here on Sunday; I amused myself by seeing how sharp, narrow, & much of a stick Eliot has come to be, since he took to disliking me. His wife a washed out, elderly & worn looking little woman, who was relieved to find Walter Lamb with his stories about the King provided for her; & indeed Walter seemed to both the ideal of manhood. Gumbo held forth in her most vivacious & commanding style. I tried to secure Faulker a nurse for Nessa & failed; went up to the Times on Monday & had an interview with Richmond—a restless vivacious little man, jumping onto a chair to see the traffic over the blind, & chivvying a piece of paper round the room with his feet. He offered many suggestions about houses in Cornwall. Yesterday Desmond appeared, & told us the strange story of Elizabeth Asquith & Hugh Gibson, which I have not time to write down, but it is remarkable that 2 years ago she knew nothing of the physical side of the sexes.

Saturday 12 April

These ten minutes are stolen from Moll Flanders, which I failed to finish yesterday in accordance with my time sheet, yielding to a desire to stop reading & go up to London. But I saw London, in particular the view of white city churches & palaces from Hungerford Bridge through the eyes of Defoe. I saw the old women selling matches through his eyes; & the draggled girl skirting round the pavement of St. James’ Square seemed to me out of Roxana or Moll Flanders. Yes, a great writer surely to be thus imposing himself upon me after 200 years. A great writer—& Forster has never read his books! I was beckoned by Forster from the Library as I approached. We shook hands very cordially; & yet I always feel him shrinking sensitively from me, as a woman, a clever woman, an up to date woman. Feeling this I commanded him to read Defoe, & left him, & went & got some more Defoe, having bought one volume at Bickers on the way. Then to the Club; & met Alix, all in a new outfit to match the spring; brown too, & happier than usual, being now mistress of 41 Gordon Square, where James is to lodge, though she declares several dusky Brazilians have made their head quarters there. So home with L. walking over Hungerford Bridge on a fine warm evening & thinking of Defoe as I say. L. is now off to address the Cingalese; & Herbert Fisher has astounded us by asking himself to lunch tomorrow, & we have been to Kew, & seen the Magnolia trees in blossom.

Thursday 17 April

We saw the magnolia tree in blossom next day with the Minister for Education himself. He is a strange mixture of ascetic & worldling. The lean secluded man now finds himself dazzled by office, & with all his learning & culture swept away by men of vitality & affairs. Such a tribute as he paid to Winston [Churchill] might have been paid by some dazzled moth to a lamp. He seems to see nothing clearly, or else some notion of responsibility forbids him to say what he thinks. He hums & haws when asked a plain question & murmurs on in a husky sort of whisper which seems bodiless & blurred as himself. His whole aspect is that of a worn & half obliterated scholar made spruce by tailors & doing his best to adopt the quiet distinguished manner of those who govern. This is his official side. In private he is a kindly, even affectionate gentleman, simple by nature, though tarnished either by Oxford or by his Fisher blood with a supercilious superficial manner which leads him to dally urbanely & in a way which belittles them with art & letters & everything but politics. This used to irritate—now it merely amuses me. He has long passed the shadow line, & his sarcasms seem directed at phantoms. All clever official men, even poor old Goldie, seem smoothed out of likeness to humanity; & impelled to babble on glibly & entertainingly as if they were under a perpetual contract to keep the high table amused. I do H.A.L.F. the credit to say that he does not give himself airs, save those of a person rendered responsible through no particular merit of his own. We took him to Kew, & chatted of Oxford & Walter Pater, & how Chesterton is a genius, & George Moore another, by way of relief from politics. And he approved of nature too, & likened the Thames beneath a shower to a picture in the Louvre. He stood still on the bank for some minutes, taking in the impression, not as a person who is accustomed to looking at things looks, but rather as a man who collects objects for the good of his soul. So it was too with the buds of the magnolia at Kew.

We had Oliver & Inez to dinner. As one of the couples they must be linked together thus. What binds him to her I did not find it easy to see. Animation perhaps, a kind of brisk professional manner, & it appears that she had read modern poetry & can deliver her opinions as if they were her own. I’m a little doubtful, when I find a cheap ready made young woman out of an office in Oxford Street & lodging at Harrow, enthusiastic about Robinson Crusoe; nor do I attribute it wholly to my intellectual snobbery. Her face, unlike the faces of all the other Cropheads, seemed to me vulgar, & unpleasant. One must remember though that Oliver is now verging upon 50; a little grey at the temples; abrupt & inclined to be snappish; so that his choice is not so wide as it was. However one may abuse the Stracheys their minds remain a source of joy to the end; so sparkling, definite & nimble. Need I add that I reserve the qualities I most admire for people who are not Stracheys? It is so long since I have seen Lytton that I take my impression of him too much from his writing, & his paper upon Lady Hester Stanhope was not one of his best. I could fill this page with gossip about people’s articles in the Athenaeum; since I had tea with Katherine yesterday & Murry sat there mud-coloured & mute, livening only when we talked his shop. He has the jealous partiality of a parent for his offspring already. I tried to be honest, as if honesty were part of my philosophy, & said how I disliked Grantorto on whistling birds, & Lytton & so on. The male atmosphere is disconcerting to me. Do they distrust one? despise one? & if so why do they sit on the whole length of one’s visit? The truth is that when Murry says the orthodox masculine thing about Eliot for example, belittling my solicitude to know what he said of me, I dont knuckle under; I think what an abrupt precipice cleaves asunder the male intelligence, & how they pride themselves upon a point of view which much resembles stupidity. I find it much easier to talk to Katherine; she gives & resists as I expect her to; we cover more ground in much less time; but I respect Murry. I wish for his good opinion. Heinemann has rejected K.M.’s stories; & she was oddly hurt that Roger had not invited her to his party. Her hard composure is much on the surface.

Sunday (Easter) 20 April

We are, for the first time for many years, spending Easter in London. We had arranged to go, but dissolved all our arrangements in 5 minutes; partly to escape what was said to be the worst journey on record; partly that L. may get 10 clear days, which will be possible at the end of the week. I own to some hopes of a wet Easter; but was disappointed. Both Friday & Saturday were of the texture of full summer. We walked along the river & through the park on Good Friday, & the sun made the crowd to swelter unpleasantly. They tramped placidly along, in their coats & skirts & bowler hats, leading their dogs, save for a random terrier who had secured a muzzle. Meanwhile the green of the leaves thrust at least one inch out of the envelopes, & today the tree against the window has some perfectly shaped small leaves, & the tree at the end of the garden is as green as it will be until September. On Saturday Bruce Richmond came in person to fetch my Defoe article; & we had a little talk about mistakes in proofs. He prides himself upon letting none through his fingers;—& charges such as do get through (& I was under the impression they were by no means rare) to Dalton. And then we walked; & I came out in my summer things, shady hat, thin muslin dress, stockings, & cloak on my arm. Today I’m sitting in a jersey & serge over the fire; but the evening repents, & through an open window the birds sing, & the leaves are yellow green in the sun. L. at Staines.

In the idleness which succeeds any long article, & Defoe is the 2nd leader this month, I got out this diary, & read as one always does read one’s own writing, with a kind of guilty intensity. I confess that the rough & random style of it, often so ungrammatical, & crying for a word altered, afflicted me somewhat. I am trying to tell whichever self it is that reads this hereafter that I can write very much better; & take no time over this; & forbid her to let the eye of man behold it. And now I may add my little compliment to the effect that it has a slapdash & vigour, & sometimes hits an unexpected bulls eye. But what is more to the point is my belief that the habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practise. It loosens the ligaments. Never mind the misses & the stumbles. Going at such a pace as I do I must make the most direct & instant shots at my object, & thus have to lay hands on words, choose them, & shoot them with no more pause than is needed to put my pen in the ink. I believe that during the past year I can trace some increase of ease in my professional writing which I attribute to my casual half hours after tea. Moreover there looms ahead of me the shadow of some kind of form which a diary might attain to. I might in the course of time learn what it is that one can make of this loose, drifting material of life; finding another use for it than the use I put it to, so much more consciously & scrupulously, in fiction. What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose knit, & yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace any thing, solemn, slight or beautiful that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk, or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds & ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, & find that the collection had sorted itself & refined itself & coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, & yet steady, tranquil composed with the aloofness of a work of art. The main requisite, I think on re-reading my old volumes, is not to play the part of censor, but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever; since I was curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard, & found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time. But looseness quickly becomes slovenly. A little effort is needed to face a character or an incident which needs to be recorded. Nor can one let the pen write without guidance; for fear of becoming slack & untidy like Vernon Lee. Her ligaments are too loose for my taste. But to return to life, albeit with something of an effort. I have forgotten to record Desmond’s visit. His main purpose in coming was to get himself a bed; but I can pardon these self seeking impulses on the part of Desmond very easily. My tolerance in this respect is far greater than poor Mary Sheepshanks’, who remarked bitterly that since she has gone to live at Golders Green her friends pay her visits on Sundays, for the sake of the country air. But then I am happy; & Mary S. is not; every virtue should be natural to the happy, since they are the millionaires of the race. I can give little account of Desmond, seeing that I was under contract to write all the morning, & he arrived late the night before. As L. had been kept by trains failing from reaching home till 8.45, he was out of tune for friendship. Desmond is a very sensitive man. He apologised, & did his best to charm; & did so, in both our cases, I think. But, sure enough, L.’s morning wasted in the sun of his laziness; for though he took a chair into the window & supplied himself with books, the books started ideas, & the ideas had to be communicated, & lying in my bath next door I heard fragments of Lord Robert’s speech read from the Times; & then a disquisition upon the authenticity of Barbellion’s diary; & this had gone on, with one excursion to buy an A.B.C. [Railway Guide] since breakfast. May we therefore be pardoned for inventing a cook’s sister, who was spending the holidays with us; without this dear old Desmond would be smoking his cigarettes & talking about catching a train in the arm chair opposite at this moment. As it was, he had reluctantly to take himself off at lunch time, & fling himself upon a world of crowded trains, & accurate hours; directing his steps towards Oare where they have taken a house, which Molly is engaged upon getting into at this moment. Desmond declared that he had despatched a kitchen table to her; but I own that I doubt it. And who can say whether he has yet reached Oare?

Thursday 24 April

On Easter Monday we went up to visit the Murrys & see Hampstead Heath. Our verdict was that the crowd at close quarters is detestable; it smells; it sticks; it has neither vitality nor colour; it is a tepid mass of flesh scarcely organised into human life. How slow they walk! How passively & brutishly they lie on the grass! How little of pleasure or pain is in them! But they looked well dressed & well fed; & at a distance among the canary coloured swings & roundabouts they had the look of a picture. It was a summers day—in the sun at least; we could sit on a mound & look at the little distant trickle of human beings eddying round the chief centres of gaiety & filing over the heath & spotted upon its humps. Very little noise they made; the large aeroplane that came flying so steadily over head made more noise than the whole crowd of us. Why do I say ‘us’? I never for a moment felt myself one of ‘them’. Yet the sight had its charm: I liked the bladders, & the little penny sticks, & the sight of two slow elaborate dancers performing to a barrel organ in a space the size of a hearthrug. Katherine & Murry & Murry’s brother met us at their door. We thought she would have enjoyed herself, from the likeness of her prose to the scene; on the contrary, she was disgusted. We had rather a stiff tea. Murry’s brother is a bumpkin; & the Rhodesian woman under a cloud of lacerated feelings I suppose; Katherine haggard & powdered; & so on. But it was no one’s fault; & their talk of Tregerthen combined with the image of it on a hot day made us determine to take it here & now. We have written to this effect to Captain Short. I try not to hope, since I feel sure we shall be disappointed.

“Let it three days ago” or no answer at all; that is what I imagine.

Last night the Coles dined here, & gave me my first view of them. Sharp, positive, hard minds; in tense taut bodies; in Cole’s case the mouth seems fixed in a kind of snarl at the world. A positive domineering young man he seemed; & she, with less force, equally sure of herself. A good laugh would do them both good; yet how laugh with those tight stretched drums for cheeks, & those curled sneering lips? I don’t accuse either of them of a desire to be savage or destructive: I write from the outsiders unsympathetic point of view. But Leonard, though he works at their works, is still humane & deliberate. Its the perpetual strife that strings them up in this way, I think; no speculative or contemplative or imaginative power seems to be left them. And what’s it all for? Who gains, even if they do win their victories. But I fancy that Mrs Cole is not a very clever woman; & such wits as she has use up all their force in keeping nimble. She has nothing left over to play with. This I write from the recollection of them which came to me on waking. “I dont like the Coles” I said to myself, before I had time to set my faculties to work upon this judgment.

Tomorrow we go down to Asheham for 10 days; alone; leaving the servants to clean here, & intending to find a house for £35 if we can, for that is our solution at present. The weather has gone to pieces; the image is a true one; it is much as if some serenely sailing ship had been wrecked on a splinter of rock & left only tatters & spars to be tossed in a swelter of grey sea.

Monday 5 May

The day mother died twenty something years ago. The smell of wreaths in the hall is always in the first flowers still; without remembering the day I was thinking of her, as I often do.—as good a memorial as one could wish.

Now it is a fine evening, the first since I wrote here last; & I’m just back from Asheham, Leonard still to come in. A fine but cloudy day; an immense weight of sun piled up behind the clouds. I race through, so as to have time for a bath. Ah but how happy we’ve been at Asheham! It was a most melodious time. Everything went so freely;—but I cant analyse all the sources of my joy—& here’s Leonard in, to find a stack of books from the New Statesman, & the drawing room floor littered with blue-black papers from Roger. Lottie & Nelly chattering away about their house cleaning.

Wednesday 7 May

& thus my writing got interrupted, but I had the hot bath I remember, after duly, though a little insincerely, admiring what had been done in my absence. To recapitulate the events of Asheham is no longer in my power, or perhaps, since they were mainly of a spiritual nature requiring some subtlety to relate, I’m too lazy to try. Happiness—what, I wonder constitutes happiness? I daresay the most important element is work, & that rarely fails either of us now. Leonard, of course, had his telegram from Sharp, & an article to do in a hurry; but 1500 words now merely fill a morning pleasantly for him. Then there were two moments of some anxiety: first, a letter from Captain Short to say we can have Tregerthen, which we now possess; then a letter from Gerald to say he has read Night & Day with “the greatest interest” & will be delighted to publish it. I suppose, as I go to the trouble of copying his words verbatim, that I was a good deal pleased by them. The first impression of an outsider, especially one who proposes to back his opinion with money, means something; though I can’t think of stout smooth Gerald smoking a cigar over my pages without a smile. However, a good deal beyond this letter in importance was Captain Short’s. For a day to two I did nothing but put my pen down or my book & see Tregerthen. Considering the extreme inhospitality of Eastbourne agents, I daresay we are well advised from a practical point of view, to be sure of some retreat. But Asheham, as if to keep our loyalty, breathed its usual charm. It compares very well with Charleston; indeed I’ve never come back to it without that feeling of being incredulous as one perfection was added to another. This time we spent most of our day in the house, owing to the weather. L. scarcely left the garden. One walk insufficiently clothed to Southease was very bitter. I got over to Charleston, though; & had a night & morning alone with V.—so far as she can ever be alone. There was Pitcher, the new gardener; Angelica; Julian & Quentin of course; the new nurse; & a fire which wouldn’t burn. Indeed living is fairly bare at the moment. I had the rare sensation of its being necessary to eat, in order to support life. They have bread by the yard, as if slid along a slot; all the necessaries; but not an ornament. My life, by comparison, seems padded at every turn. But they all looked as vigorous as possible. The floors strewn with Burnet stuffs for the Flat; & as usual, a good deal of domestic talk; sleep in the ground floor room at night, where this time last year about I heard the nightingales, & the fishes splashing in the pond, white roses tapped at the window: that night when I was told that Angelica was in evidence. Nothing but wind & rain this time, & no coal in the house.

Yesterday, Tuesday, we both renewed London life in the usual way; save that I had to buy stuff for dresses, as well as paper labels & glue. Tea at the Club, where Alix, dusky & dreary, borrowed 10/ in order to give James his dinner. They were going to hear Bertie lecture; I preferred the songsters of Trafalgar Square. The steps of the column were built up, pyramid fashion, with elderly respectable householders grasping sheets of music, which they rendered, in time to a conductor on a chair beneath, with great precision. It was Life boat day, & the elderly people were singing sailor’s chanties & Tom Bowling. This seemed to me a very amusing & instructive spectacle; & being famished for music, I could not get past, but stood & felt thrilled with an absurd visionary excitement; & walked over Hungerford Bridge making up stories.

Monday 12 May

We are in the thick of our publishing season: Murry, Eliot, & myself are in the hands of the public this morning. For this reason, perhaps, I feel slightly but decidedly depressed. I read a bound copy of Kew Gardens through; having put off the evil task until it was complete. The result is vague. It seems to me slight & short; I dont see how the reading of it impressed Leonard so much. According to him it is the best short piece I have done yet; & this judgment led me to read the Mark on the Wall, & I found a good deal of fault with that. As Sydney Waterlow once said, the worst of writing is that one depends so much upon praise. I feel rather sure that I shall get none for this story; & I shall mind a little. Unpraised, I find it hard to start writing in the morning; but the dejection lasts only 30 minutes, & once I start I forget all about it. One should aim, seriously, at disregarding ups & downs; a compliment here, silence there; Murry & Eliot ordered, & not me; the central fact remains stable, which is the fact of my own pleasure in the art. And these mists of the spirit have other causes, I expect; though they are deeply hidden. There is some ebb & flow of the tide of life which accounts for it; though what produces either ebb or flow I’m not sure.

But I have written nothing here for a week, & must cramp myself even now, in order to cut some more covers. Tuesday was written down; on Friday [9 May] I had tea with K.M. & Murry, with whom I now adopt a manner of motherly badinage; which is less fatiguing than the intellectual pose. He has not yet shed all the husks of clever youth. One feels him very unformed essentially, & capable of running on in an excited uneasy state about life such as I can recall in my own past. One tacitly assumed it to be a mark of genius. On Sunday Margaret & Lilian dined here; Margaret tending to be the flowing matron; she increases in size; & one can fancy her fitting a large arm chair, & reluctant to move. They seriously consider resignation. Lilian, M. whispered, is getting unfit for so much work. Poor Janet is depressed at having lost her job, & being fit for no other, & also very hard up. Indeed this is a melancholy season for them all; but J. has more than the usual shadows to depress her. I laughed to myself over the quantities of Armenians. How can one mind whether they number 4,000 or 4,000,000? The feat is beyond me.

Friday 16 May

These swarming hot summer days seem to quicken human life as well as vegetable. One becomes a flower oozing honey upon which ones friends cluster—or such is my version of the relationship. This week we’ve had Ottoline, & Lytton, & I’ve been to see Violet Dickinson, & tonight the Abrahamsons & Oliver Strachey dine with us; on Saturday Logan comes to tea; on Sunday we lunch with the Webbs, to say nothing of invitations we’ve refused, & leaving out a great squash at the 17 Club to hear Forster speak on Egypt, when we met Bob, Altounyan, & Dora Sanger, with the usual varieties of old friends. As usual my mind is too crammed to sift all these wares. Let me attempt Ottoline, since her hat & veil on the sofa beside me recall her. She was, I think L. was right in saying, anxious to come out & inspect us. She struck her unmistakable note on entering the room; rayed with green & blue, like the Cornish sea, & magnificently upright & held together; her blue blood giving her the carriage of assurance & self-respect which is rare among the intellectuals. We have taken, this last week, to dining in the garden, & there we sat on the flawless summer night with the apple trees softly snowed under with blossom, & a moon up. Certain layers of powder showed upon the steeps of her face—but when you reflect that she’s close on 50—& has cropped her hair like a boy! Of course we talked personalities; investigated the case of Mary Hutch. & Eliot; also Gertler; & she was apparently, & as I believe, genuinely, kindly, & well wishing, though considerably bewildered, & bewailing as usual her disasters in friendship, & inclined to blame everyone but herself, though anxious for reconciliations, & plantive rather than bitter. L’s verdict was that she was “very nice”; the first time he has ever said that. The qualities which one has glimpses of in company were steadily visible in this domestic evening, when there was nothing to stimulate, & no effort to rise to.

Her intuitions are more penetrating than many of the profoundly reasonable remarks of our intellectuals; & to me she always has the pathos of a creature vaguely afloat in some wide open space, without support or clear knowledge of its direction. Perhaps she was on her good behaviour—but if so, she was capable of wrapping herself in her great Spanish cloak, & sallying out into the street without her hat; she’s altogether such a fancy dress character that a hat more or less seems immaterial. We put her into her train with young officers who looked up startled; & despatched her to Waterloo.

Next day there was Lytton. I need not repeat the stock observations upon his mellow good humour. It is more to the point to chronicle a renewed sense of affection, which has never been seriously in abeyance, & the usual conviction that his wit & what one calls personality are as peculiar to himself as his voice, or his finger nails. And then one thinks that it doesn’t much matter if his writing is not profound or original; one begins perhaps to suspect that it may be more original than one thinks. He tells his stories of Cunards & Winston & Lord Ribblesdale admirably; with Marjorie’s dramatic talent, & with a finer power of observation. We scrutinised the condition of his soul, with his help, very closely. Ottoline had professed some alarm, We came to the conclusion that it would be absurd not to have this butterfly’s season among the great. The comparison between him & the select Norton, Alix, & James seemed entirely in his favour. The touchstone of virtue with them now is whether you attend Bertie’s lectures or not. I hereby vow to fuddle Alix completely. We sat on the river bank, & he told us of a visit to Irene Vanbrugh, with his comedy; how the singing of her canary birds almost drowned his voice; & how finally she determined against it, finding a lack of human passion. Therefore the comedy is shelved, for ever, I suspect, & he writes, & will continue to write Eminent Victorians.

Perhaps there was a little melancholy at this confession; perhaps a little desire for commendation of Lady Hester Stanhope, which we withheld; or perhaps I judge other writers’ craving for applause by my own. I’ve had Roger’s praise of Kew Gardens by the way, so I suppose I’m still safe, though no longer greeted with such exciting raptures. Indeed the books sell very slowly; & it looks as though the market for such commodities is a small one—infinitesimal; we shan’t even pay our expenses it seems. But with such a variety of matter to choose from, this can scarcely be the fault of the books themselves; it was novelty that sold them at first. I broke from Lytton with regret, & paid my visit to Violet; but she would have been hurt had I shirked it, to judge at least by her pleasure at seeing me. Its odd how people of 50 remain exactly 50. She hasn’t changed a hair for 20 years, which must be the length of our friendship. We take things up precisely as we left them; a years gap makes no difference; we have had our intimacy; something or other has fused; & never hardens again. Thus I felt in talking to her; it was the usual inconsequent, generous minded, unselfish talk. When I come onto the verge of the respectable classes I’m always struck by their unexpectedness: V. is as much of a democrat as I am; as little of an Imperialist; she blames England; she has no hate of Germany; she sends clothes to Russia; & yet she lives in Manchester Street, consorts chiefly with people like the Horners & the Thynnes, & has Ozzie for a brother. Beatrice Thynne has inherited a quarter of a million; two large properties, & one of the finest libraries in England; she has no idea what to make of them; visits them in a distracted way to see which she’d like to live in; can’t make up her mind to settle in either, & finally spends most of her time in Gray’s Inn, looked after by a charwoman. Her only acknowledgement of her balance is that now & then she pulls out strings of pearls, & parades the Squares of the Inn, with such effect that Lady H. Somerset has to beg her to remove them.

Sunday 18 May

Our seductive sweetness appears still to be drawing bees from all quarters; last night I went to bed with lips so parched with talking & brain so dazed that I could only tumble into sleep head foremost. As we left lunch & were on the stairs there was a great rapping at the door, & the hall immediately filled with strangers, who eventually became Roger, Pamela, & a strange silent foreign woman whom from her grey hair I took to be Marjorie Fry. We pitched on the grass, under a shower of apple blossom; & there sat until tea; & then Logan came; & we only fell silent at half past six or even later; nor was there a moment of repose, neither for tongue nor brain. It is true that Logan does his turns, which take the form of “delightful adventures—life is like the Arabian Nights—” & good stories, quotations, & recitations; but even these required intelligent attention. He is a very well brushed, bright eyed, rosy cheeked man, seemingly entirely satisfied with life, which he appears to have mastered; visiting each of its flowers, like a bee. These flowers he keeps stored in his waistcoat pocket: lines from Jeremy Taylor, Carlyle, Lamb, &c. An epicurean, I suppose: a little frosty, I conjecture; though kindly & humane of course; rather than human. I believe his motive was to get us to print some new works of his; anyhow he welcomed the invitation to submit them; & he lavished offers of help, & suggestions for increasing our sales; & altogether took the Hogarth Press in hand, & promises us a most splendid future. He proposes to become our agent. One must beware of becoming satellites of his set, however; cherishing single lines, & reprinting the Essays of Elia.

Thursday 22 May

A few vegetable notes ought to prelude this page: the weather continues fine; the blue seems eternal; an occasional wind rises; we rock slightly; then steady ourselves, & ride on serenely. The apple blossom, which deluged Ottoline & looked so soft beside her cheeks, is over; 2 red rambler roses are pricking through. We dine of course out of doors to the sound of the fountain. The robins douche themselves there. Last night there were six voices to drown its perpetual dripping—Altounyan, A. & K. & Bob dining with us. I had a vision of Bob as a tory squire; at any rate a conservative, mahogany coloured gentleman, innocent of rhyme. How far this is from the truth may be gauged from the fact that he swells with four separate volumes, & is to be delivered in the autumn. The good shrewd sound Trevelyan stock shows through; moreover he is well cropped & brown for a poet. He is also a comic character, & rises higher in that sphere when he feels himself inspired by laughter. His ungainly compliments to Karin, his eager awkward ways, made us all shout with laughter. Altounyan is an effervescent Armenian, shy, but ready to bubble on provocation either of a literary or political nature. But Bob talked us all down. I must omit an exquisitely flattering duet between me & A. when I had a surfeit of praise for Kew Gardens—the best prose of the 20th century, surpassing Mark on the Wall, possessing transcendent virtues, save for one passage, between the women, & highly admired by Clive & Roger. I was at pains to sweeten his enthusiasm with this relish, since his native product is not of the very highest quality perhaps. Yes, authors are rather a despicable race I think. I’d composed myself to face failure so stoically that this unexpected gift was, at the moment, delicious. Forster approves too. But Altounyan has weighted his praises with a thick wad of mss., written, not typed, which we are to read & consider, & upon our verdict depends the whole of his future. Further, he appointed us his literary executors; everything he writes in Armenia is to be sent to us—to do what we like with. He gave us £2 towards our future. Still, to read a novel in manuscript, & settle a young man’s future, & his wife’s, & his childrens—that is a severe price for 10 minutes of praise. A⁠[drian]. seemed to me to deserve Henderson’s saying “He knows the right sneer for every occasion”. He strikes me as more & more of a moon to the lusty red sun provided by Karin; & the light he throws upon whatever turns up is more & more bleaching and cadaverous. The truth is he has no occupation.

Sunday 25 May

The day recalls the fact that we lunched with the Webbs this time last week. I have made no note of it. There was the weak distinguished looking & yet vaguely apologetic Noel Buxton; & Arnott, rather self assertive, on the contrary, owing everything to his wits, & without an ounce of distinction thrown in. I cannot get over my distaste for the Fabian type; though if it came to spending a year on a desert island, I suppose I should choose him rather than Buxton. I don’t know. The Webbs were very quotable. Mrs Webb’s brilliant idea of municipal bricks for children, inscribed with the names of organisations so that in putting them together they would learn their civic duties was almost too much in character to be suitable. Even Sidney had his mild joke at her. Noel Buxton obsequiously offered his son for the experiment. Rich men nowadays can be seen divesting themselves of particles of gold with a view to the eye of the needle. Then later in the week Mrs Woolf & Sylvia came to tea, bringing fresh eggs & lilies of the valley. Sylvia amused me by her assurance that the affairs of Putney are of moment to the world; & her anxiety to get stories of her own house hunting adventures corrected—as though these were matters of importance. And Mrs Woolf, as usual, pleased me by her childishness, by which I mean her freshness & inconsequence, as if all her life were still spent among the little incidents & goings on of a large nursery. She couldn’t face a play, she told me; but she could just manage lunch at the Carlton. Why the boundary line between the impossible comes there I don’t know. And Bella since Bertie’s death finds life necessary to keep up her spirits; & is learning to Jazz; & her eyes prevent her from reading much; but she writes her page in Little Folks; & her friends are all very good to her, & she has gone to Bexhill with Martin & Emma. It is predicted that Martin will be made not quite a knight but the next best thing. Martin believes in orders, I gather, & our laughter at the O.B.E. must have saddened him the other night. Philip is cutting off lambs’ tails, & they are made into a pie at night—Philip who would step aside to avoid a caterpillar, & once fought Harold for using worms for bait, & was chased by Harold to the next village in the Isle of Wight where they were staying “& I ran after them, miles & miles, thinking that the end of the world had come!” Naturally Mrs Woolf had no time to read Sophocles—nor have I for the matter of that.

Lytton came to tea on Friday & half maliciously assured me that my industry amazed him. My industry & my competence, for he thinks me the best reviewer alive, & the inventor of a new prose style, & the creator of a new version of the sentence. People’s compliments generally manage to reserve the particular praise they wish to have themselves. But we are surprisingly honest; we have a clear perception of the others meaning. He asserted that he was disgusted by his own stereotyped ways: his two semi colons; his method of understatement; & his extreme definiteness. Without agreeing, I conveyed my sense of his dangers, & urged him to write plays—stories—anything to break the mould of the early Victorians. After a volume on Victoria, in the same manner, he is going to attempt it. But then money—he must make money—he cant write reviews—& I’ve to do Addison, & other books, & protested that all the same I’m not a hack, & he runs the risk of becoming a Logan, a superior dilettante. To which he agreed, & then we talked about Addison, & read scraps of Johnson’s lives; & so enjoyed ourselves. He told me about Princess Sophia & the d. of Cumberland.

To the Squire’s party.

Monday 9 June (Whit-Monday)

I know I meant to convey my sense of the degradation of the Squire’s party; but the sense has faded, & is not worth recapturing. A week at Asheham has intervened—from one Tuesday to another. An odd thing happened to me at Asheham, where I count upon becoming clearer & more concentrated, & reading print as if through a magnifying glass. The very opposite of this took place. I dozed & drowsed & seemed to feel the sun in my brain sending all my thoughts to seek repose in the shadow. I write there at an open window looking onto the field; & the field was gilt with buttercups; the sheep were tempting in their indolence; in short, I used to find the morning gone & only a few lines written, & so it was with my Addison, or whoever it might be, after tea. Our ship rode so steady that one came to disbelieve in motion or the possibility of change; we appeared wedged in the blue. Perhaps one day there was a cloud; but no harbourage was offered it, & congregation of clouds was impossible. The loveliness of Asheham once again brimmed the cup & overflowed. Wild ideas seized us of building a house at the Lay. To give up every foothold in that region seemed unthinkable. L. bicycled round & brought news of an ancient manor house at Denton, which excited hopes, but the sight of it next day completely dashed them. In order to popularise this large stuffy, ill lit, slightly mouldy & decayed mansion the owner, a London publican dazzled into purchasing by the aristocratic name but unable to induce his wife to live there, hit on the ambitious plan of starting a line of omnibuses to run from London, & deliver their loads at the manor house, where tea would be provided. One such feast was held, as long boards stretched on trestles, & a few dozen green wine-glasses testified; but the device failed; the Londoners had seen more seductive sights than Denton Manor, & it is still in the market. With the notion of building a house running strong in my mind I went to Charleston for a night & was there disabused of such fantasies very completely. To recapitulate a story told verbally several times would be dull. But Nessa & I quarrelled as nearly as we ever do quarrel now over the get up of Kew Gardens, both type & woodcuts; & she firmly refused to illustrate any more stories of mine under those conditions, & went so far as to doubt the value of the Hogarth Press altogether. An ordinary printer would do better in her opinion. This both stung & chilled me. Not that she was bitter or extreme; its her reason & control that give her blame its severity. Anyhow I left in rather a crumpled condition, & paused in Lewes, on L.’s advice, to see a house on the hill. A degree of that refinement & smug efficiency which one finds in Surrey houses set me against the White House; & I trudged down into Lewes again in no cheerful mood, with three hours, moreover, to spend there. To pass the time, more than anything, I asked Mrs Wycherley about houses; & she, after tepidly recommending some that were impossible & sketching the difficulties of the situation, bethought her of one newly on the market, small, old, actually in Lewes, & perhaps a little humble for one used to lodge at Asheham. I pricked my ears; since this is always the way one is told of what one wants. Off I went, up Pipes Passage, under the clock, & saw rising at the top of the sloping path a singular shaped roof, rising into a point, & spreading out in a circular petticoat all round it. Then things began to go a little quicker. An elderly and humble cottage woman the owner, showed me over. How far my satisfaction with the small rooms, & the view, & the ancient walls, & the wide sitting room, & the general oddity & character of the whole place were the result of finding something that would do, that one could conceive living in, that was cheap (freehold £300) I don’t know; but as I inspected the rooms I became conscious of a rising desire to settle here; to have done with looking about; to take this place, & make it one’s permanent lodging. Perhaps later it will amuse me to read how I went from one grade to another of desire; till I felt physically hot & ardent, ready to surmount all obstacles. I liked the way the town dropped from the garden leaving us on a triangular island, vegetables one side, grass the other; the path encircling the round house amused me; nor are we overlooked. In short I took it there & then, being egged on by Wycherley’s hesitation, & hints of a purchaser who had already asked for the refusal. Lewes that afternoon, with its many trees & laburnums, & water meadows, & sunny bow windowed houses, & broad High Street looked very tempting & dignified. The end of the story, which I must curtail, is that we have bought the Round House, & are now secure of a lodging on earth so long as we need sleep or sit anywhere.

Tuesday 10 June

I must use up the fifteen minutes before dinner in going on again, in order to make up the great gap. We are just in from the Club; from ordering a reprint of the Mark on the Wall at the Pelican Press; & from tea with James. His news is that Maynard in disgust at the peace terms has resigned, kicked the dust of office off him, & is now an academic figure at Cambridge. But I must really sing my own praises, since I left off at the point when we came back from Asheham to find the hall table stacked, littered, with orders for Kew Gardens. They strewed the sofa, & we opened them intermittently through dinner, & quarrelled, I’m sorry to say, because we were both excited, & opposite tides of excitement coursed in us, & they were blown to waves by the critical blast of Charleston. All these orders—150 about, from shops & private people—come from a review in the Lit. Sup. presumably by Logan, in which as much praise was allowed me as I like to claim. And 10 days ago I was stoically facing complete failure! The pleasure of success was considerably damaged, first by our quarrel, & second, by the necessity of getting some 90 copies ready, cutting covers, printing tables, glueing backs, & finally despatching, which used up all spare time & some not spare till this moment. But how success showered during those days! Gratuitously, too, I had a letter from Macmillan in New York, so much impressed by The Voyage Out that they want to read Night & Day. I think the nerve of pleasure easily becomes numb. I like little sips; but the psychology of fame is worth considering at leisure. I fancy one’s friends take the bloom off. Lytton lunched here on Saturday with the Webbs, & when I told him my various triumphs, did I imagine a little shade—instantly dispelled, but not before my rosy fruit was out of the sun. Well, I treated his triumphs in much the same way. I can’t feel gratified when he expatiates upon a copy of Eminent Victorians lined & initialled “M” or “H” by Mr & Mrs Asquith. Yet clearly the thought produced a comfortable glow in him. The luncheon was a success. We ate in the garden, & Lytton sported very gracefully & yet with more than his old assurance over the conversation. “But I’m not interested in Ireland—”

Saturday 14 June

The weather seems unbreakable. A delphinium is out today in the garden & one Sweet William; Lottie was discovered brushing the grass with a hearth broom, as though attending to the coat of some pet animal. They say the strawberry crop will be ruined. This is a serious matter for us as we have just bought 60 lbs. of sugar, & had arranged a great jam making. Strawberries are 2/ a lb. at this moment. Asparagus 6d & 7d, & yesterday at Ray’s I ate my first green peas. I had a Hampstead field day; first the Murrys, then Adrian & Karin, & finally dinner—it was 8.30 by the time I got it—with Ray & Dorothy Bussy. A very severe review of Murry, a severe review of Eliot, appeared in the Lit. Sup. on Thursday. Considering their general slackness, I don’t see why they choose to come down so hard upon Murry; & I wish they hadn’t. I attribute the extreme depression of him & Katherine at least partly to this. And I felt gorged & florid with my comparative success. Poor Murry pretended not to mind, but much like a small boy sticking it out that caning doesn’t hurt. A poem is a very sensitive part to be beaten. But Katherine looks so ill & haggard that I suppose health may make a great part of her depression. She is going to San Remo for a year in September. Murry means to live alone in the country. I don’t see how, all this being so, they can look forward to their future. And then there’s the question of Katherine’s writing. Isn’t she a little querulous & restless about that? Standing emphatically yet not quite firmly on her rights as an artist; as people do who must insist upon being one. In token of this she told me a long & to me rather distasteful story about her dealings with a man called Schiff, who wanted her to contribute to art & letters, & dared to offer her advice, upon which she got on her high horse, & wrote him such a letter that he replied humbly—in a style that I couldn’t make anything of, & indeed the rights & wrongs of the whole business escaped me though I protested, I’m ashamed to say, that I share Katherine’s indignation. What a fraud one is in many ways! But then if one’s on this footing of being fellow artists & all that, one’s relations are queered from the start. Anyhow I went off rather sombre, leaving them to their spare lonely meal, nothing seeming to grow or flourish round them; leafless trees.

Wednesday 18 June

I went off, as I now remember, to call on Adrian, as I was early for Ray; & found that strange couple just decided to become medical students. After 5 years’ training they will, being aged 35 & 41 or so, set up together in practise as psycho-analysts. This is the surface bait that has drawn them. The more profound cause is, I suppose, the old question which used to weigh so heavy on Adrian, what to do? Here is another chance; visions of success & a busy, crowded, interesting life beguile him. Halfway through, I suppose, something will make it all impossible; & then, having forgotten his law, he will take up what—farming or editing a newspaper, or keeping bees perhaps. I don’t see that it matters at all, so long as they always have some carrot dangling in front of them. Dinner with Ray; talk with Dorothy Bussy of her past; promise of her play, & so home with L. who had dined higher up with Margaret. That morning (Friday 13th to be exact) I got the first proofs of my novel. I’ve now had 64 pages.

On Sunday we planned to go to Kew & have tea there, but Logan rang us up, & we came home to see him. More stories, a little less carefully told & so more to my liking; & then we came indoors, & he read us his stories from the bible. At this moment we have the following manuscripts or promises of manuscripts. Paris by Hope Mirrlees. Novel by Altounyan. Stories by Logan. Play by D. Bussy. Ray’s grandmother’s sexual-religious experiences. And old Bob caught Leonard last night at the [Apostles’] dinner & pressed upon him a translation of Lucretius. What steps we’re to take is not at the moment clear to me. Whether to become a shop, or remain a small private press—whether to get help or refuse it. Logan, of course, has a charming young man up his sleeve. How futile these elderly people are! There’s Maurice Baring gone & printed one copy of an anthology at a cost of £40 to give Lady Diana Manners for a present—& she is one of those vaguely literary people who “sometimes read Shakespeare”. Logan approves of this on the whole. He likes to supervise these literary undertakings, & would even give money, but doesn’t want to be disturbed out of his habits. He is printing several anthologies himself in the autumn, “I consider that I’ve done my bit” he said, with a comfortable sigh, after saying that he had been correcting the proofs of these works. He now goes yatchting for a holiday.

Yesterday, Tuesday, I was treated to ices at Gunter’s by Clive. It was all the same as before. Little tables; long rather dark shop; numbers of gilt chairs; discreet buffet; elderly waitresses in black; & couples scattered all about silently, or almost silently, absorbing ices & sugared cakes. There was an aristocratic small boy got up like a picture of Queen Victoria as a child, with a great sash, & a bow, & a hat wreathed in roses. His mother had brought him in, we thought, from one of the great Berkeley Square houses. Then there was youth, by some misadventure not at Ascot; a coffee-coloured young man, & a semi-transparent girl. We strolled out of this solemn cave & sauntered through the purest 18th Century London to the Green Park where we sat on hard green chairs, & watched people passing down the little slope towards the Palace. This being, I suppose, the 6th week without rain the grass is already haycoloured & slippery. We gossiped, speculated, & reminisced. Very easy, agreeable talk to my mind, & then what an age I’ve know⁠[n] him! How much we’ve been through side by side—these infrequent meetings are little islands upon which one stands surveying the flood racing away in the past; looking out over the future, safely & with very little anxiety just at present. He talks of going to Paris in the autumn, to see what’s on; & he’s given up his book, & finds that articles of 2,000 words exactly suit him. He thinks of subjects in his bath. He makes money. He spends it on ices & dinners at the Café Royal. He dines out every night, enjoys every moment, & feels his senses quicker & stronger as time goes on. We agreed in finding life very delightful, though very different for each of us. Home, to await Miss Barbara Lynch, but she never came. The meeting talked to its hearts content. Mrs Whitty & another pressed me for copies of Kew Gardens. But I don’t want them to read the scene of the two women. Is that to the discredit of Kew Gardens? Perhaps a little. I’ve just been there, in the flesh, & sat under a tree, reading The Way of all Flesh, which I have to review tomorrow. According to Fredegond there’s been a crisis between Alix & James. She tried to break with him; failed; went reeling off to Tidmarsh in what state of mind I don’t quite know, & there is at the moment. James inhabits Gordon Sqre—

Monday 23 June

If I hadn’t had since midday to settle myself, I should still be twanging & twittering with Garsington. But parties don’t fluster me as they used. I dont much care now about the great question of hair, & doing up dresses; I am resigned to my station among the badly dressed, though Gravé [a dressmaker] & her vagaries, & the speeding up of my blue dress, & doubts as to its beauty scarcely seem to confirm that statement. Here, I think, the great & at present sore, question of aesthetic taste enters in. Why am I calm & indifferent as to what people say of Night & Day, & fretful for their good opinion of my blue dress?

However this may be, I enjoyed Garsington saying to myself “The worst moment will be when I come into the drawing room in my blue dress before dinner.” I planned thus to get dressed quick & come in before Ott. which is not difficult as Ott. never gets dressed quick. Mercifully I need not face Garsington squarely & draw its picture. I observed that the sealing wax red drawing room is a good deal smaller this visit than last, & last visit than first. That’s what happens to people too. There was young Lord de la Warr walking among the roses & cabbages, a boy of 19, who after sweeping mines as a seaman is now a socialist, under the guidance of Lansbury. But I took a good look at him & noticed the straightness of his body, ease, & certainty of his manner which mark him out from Gertler quite emphatically. Gertler & Nelson strolled up another garden path. Nelson one of the insignificant, I should say, who has attached himself firmly to the comforts of Garsington. His anxiety to accept an invitation to dinner proved his relish for that one of Ottoline’s bounties. The population was floating & changing. Goldie & I were permanent; Aldous H. came for one night. I shall leave out several names if I try to count them. Young Lord de la Warr said very little; but I think he would have impressed an American, & good manners conciliate me. I think Goldie was the principle element in the week end, that is to say that he took upon him the brunt of Sunday morning, & meal times; 3 hours sitting on a hard seat with Ott. & me, Philip sometimes, Gertler occasionally, & Aldous off & on was a trial; but for us all it was well surmounted. I did not guess the time once. When Philip suggested a visit to the pigs I was ready but not over-ready. I think we discussed Roger most carefully & Forster, & Bob. Ott. needled away at her embroidery, Philip’s bedspread, losing her needle once, & crouching on all fours behind the seat, while Goldie & I went on talking. This seemed to me to typify her modest position; so long as people talk she doesn’t much want to interfere, & she listens, especially if people’s characters are discussed. She had worked off the great Picasso grievance upon Goldie; I had only vague lamentations, & aspirations for my share. Yet it struck me as strange

Thursday 3 July

What struck me as strange? I cant now remember or even guess; perhaps I meant to finish by trying to define the sense of purposelessness which now & then beset me—Suppose we do settle exactly what Roger’s character is, & what degree of spite to allow Clive, & how far Logan has a heart?—well, what then? Are we going nowhere? Does the mist move with us? Well—this is too far gone for recapturing, though there was a queer enough sequel a day or two later at Asheham. We went there on the Thursday following, & came back yesterday. I can’t give much space to Philip’s letter though, seeing how many matters I must despatch; & how, to purify my mind, I must have a brush with the Ajax before L. comes in. Philip’s letter was all about my lack of heart & his terror of me; to which I have rejoined “if I’m Bloomsbury, you’re Mayfair”; to his bewilderment, as I hope. But this is moonshine. The solid fact is that we own, besides the Round House, Monks House at Rodmell, with three quarters of an acre of land. We own Monks House (this is almost the first time I’ve written a name which I hope to write many thousands of times before I’ve done with it) for ever. It happened thus. As we walked up the steep road from the station last Thursday on our way to inspect the Round House, we both read out a placard stuck on the auctioneers wall. Lot 1. Monks House, Rodmell. An old fashioned house standing in three quarters of an acre of land to be sold with possession. The sale we noted was on Tuesday; to take place at the White Hart. “That would have suited us exactly” L. said as we passed, & I, loyal to the Round House, murmured something about the drawbacks of Rodmell, but suggested anyhow a visit to the place; & so we went on. I think a slight shade of anti-climax had succeeded my rather excessive optimism; at any rate the Round House no longer seemed so radiant & unattainable when we examined it as owners. I thought L. a little disappointed, though just & polite even to its merits. The day lacked sun. The bedrooms were very small. The garden not a country garden. Anyhow it seemed well to plan a visit to Rodmell on the following day. I bicycled over against a strong cold wind. This time I flatter myself that I kept my optimism in check. “These rooms are small, I said to myself; you must discount the value of that old chimney piece & the niches for holy water. Monks are nothing out of the way. The kitchen is distinctly bad. Theres an oil stove, & no grate. Nor is there hot water, nor a bath, & as for the E.C. I was never shown it.” These prudent objections kept excitement at bay; yet even they were forced to yield place to a profound pleasure at the size & shape & fertility & wildness of the garden. There seemed an infinity of fruitbearing trees; the plums crow⁠[d]⁠ed so as to weigh the tip of the branch down; unexpected flowers sprouted among cabbages. There were well kept rows of peas, artichokes, potatoes; raspberry bushes had pale little pyramids of fruit; & I could fancy a very pleasant walk in the orchard under the apple trees, with the grey extinguisher of the church steeple pointing my boundary. On the other hand there is little view—O but I’ve forgotten the lawn smoothly rolled, & rising in a bank, sheltered from winds too, a refuge in cold & storm; & a large earthen pot holds sway where the path strikes off, crowned with a tuft of purple samphire. One pot; not two. There is little ceremony or precision at Monks House. It is an unpretending house, long & low, a house of many doors; on one side fronting the street of Rodmell, & wood boarded on that side, though the street of Rodmell is at our end little more than a cart track running out on to the flat of the water meadows. There are, if memory serves me, no less than three large outhouses of different kinds, & a stable; & a hen house—& the machinery of a granary, & one shed full of beams of ancient oak; & another stored with pea props; but our fruit & vegetables are said to flow over each summer into these receptacles, & to need selling; though so obliging in its prolific way as to flourish under the care of a single old man whose heart is of gold, & who, for 40 years I think, has spent his spare time in tending these trees for the late Mr Jacob Verrall—All this made a happy kind of jumble in my brain, together with the store of old fashioned chairs & tables, glass & furniture with which every inch of room space is crowded; I came back & told my story as quietly as I could, & next day L. & I went together & made a thorough inspection. He was pleased beyond his expectation. The truth is he has the making of a fanatical lover of that garden. It suits me very well, too, to ramble off among the Telscombe downs, when fine; or tread out my paces up the path & across the lawn when dark or wind blown. In short, we decided walking home to buy if we could, & sell Round House, as we conjecture we can. Eight hundred we made our limit, which, according to Wycherley, gave us a good chance of possession. The sale was on Tuesday. I don’t suppose many spaces of five minutes in the course of my life have been so close packed with sensation. Was I somehow waiting to hear the result, while I watched the process, of an operation? The room at the White Hart was crowded. I looked at every face, & in particular at every coat & skirt, for signs of opulence, & was cheered to discover none. But then, I thought, getting L. into line, does he look as if he had £800 in his pocket? Some of the substantial farmers might well have their rolls of notes stuffed inside their stockings. Bidding began. Someone offered £300. “Not an offer”, said the auctioneer, who was immediately opposed to us as a smiling courteous antagonist, “a beginning.” The next bid was £400. Then they rose by fifties. Wycherley standing by us, silent & unmoved, added his advance. Six hundred was reached too quick for me. Little hesitations interposed themselves, but went down rather dismally fast. The auctioneer egged us on. I daresay there were six voices speaking, though after £600, 4 of them dropped out, & left only a Mr Tattersall competing with Mr Wycherley. We were allowed to bid in twenties; then tens; then fives; & still short of £700, so that our eventual victory seemed certain. Seven hundred reached, there was a pause; the auctioneer raised his hammer, very slowly; held it up a considerable time; urged & exhorted all the while it slowly sank towards the table. “Now Mr Tattershall, another bid from you—no more bidding once I’ve struck the table—ten pounds? five pounds?—no more? for the last time then—dump!” & down it came on the table, to our thanksgiving—I purple in the cheeks, & L. trembling like a reed—“sold to Mr Wycherley.” We stayed no longer. Out we went into the High Street, & very nearly quarrelled over the address of Roger’s House.

Tuesday 8 July

We went on, however, L. to Asheham, & I to Charleston, where there was Maynard, & a good deal of brisk talk. He is disillusioned he says. No more does he believe, that is, in the stability of the things he likes. Eton is doomed; the governing classes, perhaps Cambridge too. These conclusions were forced on him by the dismal & degrading spectacle of the Peace Congress, where men played shamelessly, not for Europe, or even England, but for their own return to Parliament at the next election. They were not wholly vicious; they had spasms of well meaning; but a fate seemed to possess the business from the first, driving it all in the most fatal direction & soon no one had the strength to resist. He resigned, & is now a don at Cambridge, daily rejecting profitable offers made him by houses of business, willing, according to Duncan, to pay £4,000 a year for his attendance for a short time daily. We all came up to London early next day, Nessa having to see a Mr Cholmondeley about Julian’s education. We had an afternoon’s gaiety at the Ballet, & then went back to Gordon Sqre, everything a little glittering & unreal, as usual after the country & in Nessa’s presence.

Friday, the 4th, I went to tea with Katherine, since I begin to feel my visits numbered, how seriously I dont know, but once she gets abroad, what’s to bring her back? Murry, poor man, pale & sad as usual, for she is again only just out of bed. The weather of course is taking its revenge now for a season of generosity. We have fires every night. Worse than the cold is the drab coloured sky, so that one’s whole existence seems to be in the shadow.

On Saturday we saw the horse show, & I had a look at Queen Alexandra’s poor old effigy, still painted like a wildrose, though she is about 75, & can only hobble up a ladder like a decrepit washerwoman. Its only on the face that the pretence can be preserved.

On Sunday Mrs Hamilton brought her sister—“the poet”—to dinner. I almost laughed at the sight of her. She stumps, peering & hesitating, into a room, shakes hands with emphasis, & displays a small round pale face, with wisps of brown hair controlled by a tight band of ribbon. A mixture of schoolgirl & German professor to look at; awkward & restless in manner; & delivering herself of rounded periods which would be queer enough in themselves were they not delivered with the oddest rotundity of diction, as of one speaking from a tub,—& in a voice that swells & falls but finally swells like a musical instrument imperfectly controlled. In spite of these curiosities of manner & appearance she seemed perfectly self possessed, & referred to her stock of book learning, which seemed very large & various, with the greatest composure. “As Nietchze says” or, “To quote Dostoevsky”, or “In the opinion of the Neo-Cartesians.”—Such were her conversational openings, waiting no season but obtruding themselves spontaneously. “I do not myself feel any doubt as to the nature of the good, nor have I indeed ever felt any doubt upon that point”—this was fired off when the talk was not concerned with anything of the kind. Yet one couldn’t dislike her, or dub her a very poisonous variety of the prig. I suppose her to be the family prodigy, fed on books, & living up to now in a dark cave until like a creature deprived of light the complexion of her soul is entirely white. She has the mind of an albino. What is to become of her? I don’t suspect her a poet. I imagine her one of those prodigies who quite contentedly continue all their lives, in some country village, to absorb learning, & have their circle of correspondents. Her letters must be portentous. Molly watched her with the oddest mixture of pride & uneasiness. What were we thinking of her? Did we realise that these manners & views were only superficial; did we not see how remarkable a product she was—could we not perhaps be made, by artful questions & hints, to see it? Margot is now reading—on Comparative Religions. Margot spent all her life pretending she was a Monk or Rob Roy. We now hesitate whether or not to ask to read her poems.

Thursday 10 July

I have forgotten several people, I see. One is Arundell del Ré, Logan’s prize young man, devoted to the cause of good books, & proposing to start a shop in Chelsea for the promotion of them. He intends not only selling on a select principle, but binding, & printing, & providing a room where book lovers can love books. His weakness & paleness did not impress us; but then, perhaps weakness and paleness are the necessary qualities. At a pinch too, I think, like most men, he has business qualities, & brains enough to be dependable. His most serious contribution to an evening of vague discussion was that he should relieve us of all the business of the Hogarth Press, stock our books, keep our accounts, in return for which we’re to give him a few lessons in printing. I suppose something may come of it.

Last night I dined at the Savoy Grill Room with Clive. It is long since eating a meal was such a serious business to me—long since I had taken part in the great ceremony of dinner with others believing in it, assisting at it, & dressing for it. Fish & meat & melon & ices have come to their own again. Clive parted with a good deal of paper money. His appearance never, even now, is altogether smart or wordly; his shoulders are not broad enough, & then his hair—But he was dressed, carried a black cane, & wore a silk hat. Oddly enough my mind went back to my first sight of him years ago. He looked young & had the unselfassured manner of one not used to things, only pretending use. This ceremony of eating takes so long that it was 9 by the time we finished, & the light through the enormous window dusky & almost lamplit. He pointed out to me Picasso & Mdme Picasso making off for the ballet; & behind us sat the little ivory figure of Lopokhova’s husband. Thus there was every reason for Clive to feel assured. We drove back to Gordon Square & talked about the problems of literature. On his table lay his ‘puff’ of me in the New Republic; I daresay I should have preferred not to be bracketed with Eliot & Murry. I wonder if I talk nonsense about writing to Clive? On the whole I believe that he has an odd gift for making one talk sense. He’s so eager that one should talk sense; his enthusiasm is the engaging thing about him—deducting the tribute of his enthusiasm for me. Moreover, whatever one may think of his taste in life, however one may feel him a little battered & dusty in the pursuit of pleasure, still there’s his honesty; his vivacity; his determination not to be bored, & not to bore. In his own way he is somehow a figure.

Saturday 12 July

In public affairs, I see I’ve forgotten to say that peace was signed; perhaps that ceremony was accomplished while we were at Asheham. I’ve forgotten the account I was going to write out of the gradual disappearance of things from shop windows; & the gradual, but still only partial reappearance of things. Sugar cakes, currant buns, & mounds of sweets. The effect of the war would be worth describing, & one of these days at Monks House—but why do I let myself imagine spaces of leisure at Monks House? I know I shall have books that must be read there too, just as here & now I should be reading Herman Melville, & Thomas Hardy, not to say Sophocles, if I’m to finish the Ajax, as I wager myself to do, before August. But this dressing up of the future is one of the chief sources of our happiness, I believe. There’s still a good deal of the immediate past asserting its claim on me. I met Morgan Forster on the platform at Waterloo yesterday; a man physically resembling a blue butterfly—I mean by that to describe his transparency & lightness. He had been conveying the luggage of 5 Indians from Deptford to Waterloo; Indians seemed to weigh him down. We exchanged compliments on our writing—I’m surprised to find him openly liking a compliment, though its nothing strange in myself; & discussed Altounyan’s work a little. He did not at all care for it; no form, no character; no one figure dominating the others. I like Forster very much, though I find him whimsical & vagulous to an extent that frightens me with my own clumsiness & definiteness. Then I bought my bag of coffee, & so up to Katherine, with whom I spent my hour very happily. Indeed, I like her more & more; & think we have reached some kind of durable foundation. Home to a dinner party consisting of the two Altounyans, Ernest & Norah, Carrington (the male), & Herbert Woolf after dinner. Poor scatterbrained A. showed the least pleasant side of himself in discussing his novel, which he does not merely with passion but with a conceit that would be irritating if it weren’t transparently foolish. His only anxiety is to find how many people are capable of understanding him; about the merits of his work he has no doubt, & cut short my laborious critical survey of them. Rather coolly, he proposed that we should be his agents, finding publishers for all his works for ever. This is all rather foreign; as I found it foreign, though pleasantly foreign of him, to tell me how many people had wished to marry his sister—“For she wishes very much to be married.” “Yes” she said simply, “if one hasn’t a profession, one must marry; one must look after someone.” I liked her better than I like him. As for Carrington, he will be a very popular man in the East.

Saturday 19 July

One ought to say something about Peace day, I suppose, though whether its worth taking a new nib for that purpose I dont know. I’m sitting wedged into the window, & so catch almost on my head the steady drip of rain which is pattering on the leaves. In ten minutes or so the Richmond procession begins. I fear there will be few people to applaud the town councillors dressed up to look dignified & march through the streets. I’ve a sense of holland covers on the chairs; of being left behind when everyone’s in the country. I’m desolate, dusty, & disillusioned. Of course we did not see the procession. We have only marked the rim of refuse on the outskirts. Rain held off till some half hour ago. The servants had a triumphant morning. They stood on Vauxhall Bridge & saw everything. Generals & soldiers & tanks & nurses & bands took 2 hours in passing. It was they said the most splendid sight of their lives. Together with the Zeppelin raid it will play a great part in the history of the Boxall family. But I don’t know—it seems to me a servants festival; some thing got up to pacify & placate ‘the people’—& now the rain’s spoiling it; & perhaps some extra treat will have to be devised for them. Thats the reason of my disillusionment I think. There’s something calculated & politic & insincere about these peace rejoicings. Moreover they are carried out with no beauty, & not much spontaneity. Flags are intermittent; we have what the servants, out of snobbishness, I think, insisted upon buying, to surprise us. Yesterday in London the usual sticky stodgy conglomerations of people, sleepy & torpid as a cluster of drenched bees, were crawling over Trafalgar Square, & rocking about the pavements in the neighbourhood. The one pleasant sight I saw was due rather to the little breath of wind than to decorative skill; some long tongue shaped streamers attached to the top of the Nelson column licked the air, furled & unfurled, like the gigantic tongues of dragons, with a slow, rather serpentine beauty. Otherwise theatres & music halls were studded with stout glass pincushions which, rather prematurely, were all radiant within—but surely light might have shone to better advantage. However night was sultry & magnificent so far as that went, & we were kept awake some time after getting into bed by the explosion of rockets which for a second made our room bright. (And now, in the rain, under a grey brown sky, the bells of Richmond [are] ringing—but church bells only recall weddings & Christian services.) I can’t deny that I feel a little mean at writing so lugubriously; since we’re all supposed to keep up the belief that we’re glad & enjoying ourselves. So on a birthday, when for some reason things have gone wrong, it was a point of honour in the nursery to pretend. Years later one could confess what a horrid fraud it seemed; & if, years later, these docile herds will own up that they too saw through it, & will have no more of it—well—should I be more cheerful? I think the dinner at the 1917 Club, & Mrs Besant’s speech rubbed the gilt, if there were any grains remaining, effectually off the gingerbread. Hobson was sardonic. She—a massive, & sulky featured old lady, with a capacious head, however, thickly covered with curly white hair,—began by comparing London, lit up & festive, with Lahore. And then she pitched into us for our maltreatment of India, she, apparently, being ‘them’ & not ‘us’. But I don’t think she made her case very solid, though superficially it was all believable, & the 1917 Club applauded & agreed. I cant help listening to speaking as though it were writing, & thus the flowers, which she brandished now & again, looked terribly artificial. It seems to me more & more clear that the only honest people are the artists, & that these social reformers & philanthropists get so out of hand, & harbour so many discreditable desires under the disguise of loving their kind, that in the end there’s more to find fault with in them than in us. But if I were one of them?

Sunday 20 July

Perhaps I will finish the account of the peace celebrations. What herd animals we are after all!—even the most disillusioned. At any rate, after sitting through the procession & the peace bells unmoved, I began after dinner, to feel that if something was going on, perhaps one had better be in it. I routed up poor L. & threw away my Walpole. First lighting a row of glass lamps, & seeing that the rain was stopped, we went out just before ten. Explosions had for some time promised fireworks. The doors of the public house at the corner were open, & the room crowded; couples walzing; songs being shouted, waveringly, as if one must be drunk to sing. A troop of little boys with lanterns were parading the Green, beating sticks. Not many shops went to the expense of electric light. A woman of the upper classes was supported dead drunk between two men partially drunk. We followed a moderate stream flowing up the Hill. Illuminations were almost extinct half way up, but we kept on till we reached the terrace. And then we did see something—not much indeed, for the damp had deadened the chemicals. Red & green & yellow & blue balls rose slowly into the air, burst, flowered into an oval of light, which dropped in minute grains & expired. There were hazes of light at different points. Rising over the Thames, among trees, these rockets were beautiful; the light on the faces of the crowd was strange; yet of course there was grey mist muffling everything, & taking the blaze off the fire. It was a melancholy thing to see the incurable soldiers lying bed at the Star & Garter with their backs to us, smoking cigarettes, & waiting for the noise to be over. We were children to be amused. So at eleven we went home, & saw from my study Ealing do its best to rejoice, & indeed one fire balloon went so high that L. believed it a star; but there were none showing. Today the rain has left us in no doubt that any remaining festivities are to be completely quenched.

Thursday 24 July

Well, the peace at any rate is over; though the poor deluded servants are spending their day out on a bus to see the decorations. I was right: it is a servants peace. Last night we had Forster & the Bussys. It was not the mixture we should have chosen, since Forster would come out better alone. However, such are the penalties of owning a press. I feel something like Horace Walpole who had to limit the visitors to Strawberry Hill to 4 daily—Morgan is easily drowned even by the vivacity of the Bussys. He is an unwordly, transparent character, whimsical & detached, caring very little I should think what people say, & with a clear idea of what he wishes. I dont think he wishes to shine in intellectual society; certainly not in fashionable. He is fantastic & very sensitive; an attractive character to me, though from his very qualities it takes as long to know him as it used to take to put one’s gallipot over a humming bird moth. More truly, he resembles a vaguely rambling butterfly; since there is no intensity or rapidity about him. To dominate the talk would be odious to him. He subsided in a chair; or strolled about the room, turning over the pages of a book. Even when the B’s had gone, we made little direct headway. He will come to Asheham if we pay his fare. He has only £26 in the bank. I liked this simple way of explaining things. And he hates Stevenson; & makes up his novels as he goes along; & sees what I mean about dialogue; there’s a lot to say to him, though I don’t yet know how to say it. Its absurd at my age, & I feel very middle aged, to be as easily put out & flustered as I am. It takes the form of saying things rashly. “I want to write an article upon you” I said, & that wasn’t what I meant to say.

[Diary VIII]
Monks House
Rodmell
Sept 7th 1919

Sunday 7 September

I suppose this is the first day upon which I could easily sit down & write in my long suffering & by this time I hope tolerant diary. The lack of table, pen, paper, & ink or rather their dispersion into separate parts of the house was one reason; & then followed domestic crises which I had foretold, but that did not improve their quality when they came. Now the servants are at Charleston, Mr Dedman & his brother are naming apple trees in the orchard to Leonard & if I can resist getting up & joining them I may fill this page.

The move was accomplished in one day, thanks chiefly to the organisation of L. who tied all the books in lots. Two waggon loads, one leaving about ten, another at six did the job, & we managed to roost about the house somehow or other that night. Next morning those troubles began which I will not specify further; then L. had a night in London, & I, sitting down to my book in the dusk, heard a voice asking for me, & then, to my dismay, saw the lean fantatical figure of Altounyan cross the window. He had his wife & friend—Montana or Fontana—outside, & I had to produce ham & coffee for them & entertain my first visitors. A. had come from London on purpose to see us; on purpose, I rather think, to discuss the eternal novel once more, & perhaps contrive to get it issued by us. Mrs Hamilton has read, & found it necessary to quote King Lear. Part of this terrific egotism may be attributed to the Armenian half of him, I think; it is not offensive; but would become intensely boring. But, unhappily, people who come all the way from London & walk 10 miles for the chance of seeing one are almost always bores. I set them on their road about ten o’clock, & could not resist a dark stroll in the garden. The temptation whispers from the window all the time—so pleasant to step out onto the lawn, walk across to the tool house, & survey the downs in day time or the lights of Lewes by night. Much remains to be done inside the house, though the main arrangements are now made. But for some days one’s mind is distracted by perpetually dwelling upon the changes round one; it works with an effort. This is wearing off slightly, though I write this as if I were raising 7 stone on my pen instead of the usual number of ounces. However from all the difficulties, advantages & disadvantages of the place, I think the upshot is wholly favourable. One gains much in the way of variety here; there are more walks, & endless interests in the garden, though nothing of the flawless beauty of Asheham.

Thursday 12 September

The weight upon my mind is lessening, though, as I have not yet mastered a writing board, the long leisurely filling of these blank pages which I promised myself becomes something of a mirage. But then Duncan & Nessa have just been over unexpectedly to tea. Other peoples incursions always leave me tremulous. They break in upon a mood of depression, deep according to L.; to me of the consistency of September mist. Why is it, I wonder? Partly that for 10 days I don’t think I’ve had a letter; then I expect something unpleasant from Macmillans. Here I make my forecast. “We have read Night & Day with the deepest interest, but hardly think it would appeal to our public over here.” Though I foretell this, & see that written down it is negligible as criticism, yet I want to have that unpleasant moment over. It will infect me for a few days. And the publication of N. & D. may perhaps send an occasional tremor through me for all my boasting. If that is pronounced a failure, I dont see why I should continue writing novels. These are the usual writers melancholies. On top of them, there’s been the move, the comparison of this place with Asheham, servants—& so on. Writing has been done under difficulties. I was making way with my new experiment, when I came up against Sir Thomas Browne, & found I hadn’t read him since I used to dip & duck & be bored & somewhow enchanted hundreds of years ago. Therefore I had to break off, send for his books (by the way, I have read him fairly often, now I come to think of it) & start little stories. These are always ticklish; a bad morning reduces one to melancholy. But since I began to write this, I’ve suffered so many interruptions, that my mood is no longer benignant. I think I shall yield to temptation & see what the sun is doing over the meadows. O the thousand appliances one needs for writing even a sentence! No books from The Times either, & as for writing a letter, I cant bring myself to break the virginity of a sheet of paper.

Saturday 13 September

Well, Macmillan’s letter came this morning, & is neither so good nor so bad as it might have been. They read with great interest, think N. & D. a fine work, but not likely to appeal to a wide public in America, & too long to be, at this season, worth reprinting. But they propose to take 500 or 1000 sheets from Gerald; the same number of The Voyage Out, & understand that I will offer them my next book. On the whole, I’m rather pleased than otherwise. The Voyage Out will be exhausted; certainly this is the only method of becoming known to America, & presumably Macmillans think me worth keeping in view. Heaven knows when my next novel will be ready! The same post brought their refusal of Le’s book, they will take sheets of that too. It don’t much matter. I shall accept, I suppose, since there’s scarcely time to try elsewhere. But I dont think Macmillan had much to do with my depression. Do I envy Nessa her overflowing household? Perhaps at moments. Julian has gone into a preparatory form of breeches; everything flourishing & humane there; perhaps I can’t help a contrast which never occurs when I’m in full flood of work. I made these comparisons yesterday, when I lunched there & spent the afternoon & rode home. By the way, I’m an ingrate to nourish the least private cloud in the face of such brightness of sky. The downs all black against scarlet & gold, as I rode home, stopping to look at Asheham, which had its windows open as if lived in. Mr Geal was going up to pick apples. But Monk’s House gives one a pleasant little shock as one opens the gate. I found L. & Nelly just back from Lewes with her new bicycle. He had spent the day in London. Seven has struck & I’m tempted to walk upon the flats. I had meant to say something about these queer spiritual states. They interest me, even when I’m the subject. And I always remember the saying that at one’s lowest ebb one is nearest a true vision. I think perhaps 9 people out of ten never get a day in the year of such happiness as I have almost constantly; now I’m having a turn of their lot.

Sunday 14 September

Well, I dont think my turn of their lot is a very serious matter. The interesting thing is that one does, normally, keep up a kind of vibration, for no reason whatever. Equally for no reason whatever, the vibration stops. Then one enquires why one ever had it, & there seems no reason why one should ever have it again. Things seem clear, sane, comprehensible, & under no obligation, being of that nature, to make one vibrate at all. Indeed, its largely the clearness of sight which comes at such seasons that leads to depression. But when one can analyse it, one is half way back again. I feel unreason slowly tingling in my veins. If I could have a good morning’s work! We went for our first Sunday walk today. In order to counteract the tremendous draw of the garden we have arranged two walks a week, on Sundays & Wednesdays. Today we went on the downs towards Kingston. For the first of many days it was cloudy; a north east wind, a threatening of rain. We saw the sea at Brighton & the sea at Eastbourne to right & left of us. The valley slopes behind the down are very lovely; the down itself rising to some height, but intersected by railings. I think the views are finer this side than the other, though the downs themselves inferior. I must try a little Plato now—to prove that concentration is as easy here as elsewhere.

Sunday 21 September

Why should I pick out the one hour of the week when Church bells jangle to go on with this? A cold bright Sunday; very easy today to remember the feel of winter,—even the look of the winter earth. Yesterday, as I sat reading, Nick came knocking at the door. I had put away his letter unanswered, also, apparently, unread. We had to make ready a room, & prepare a crab, which he brought as offering. He seemed singularly featureless, rather like those chubby little village boys one sees with rosy cheeks & red ears staring in at sweet shop windows. This is I think much his real character, but superimposed is a dab of culture, taking the safe direction of 18th century literature & art. “Thomas Gray knew how to write letters from the country—very witty interesting letters—Have you ever read Thomas Gray?” Then Jane Austen appears. She is his great fan. As for apples & pears, which are now his business, his knowledge is limited; or perhaps it is due to his thin soiled brain that words are very poverty sticken, ideas seem to crawl. Looking up, I saw his face alongside L.’s; & they looked samples of different breeds, or widely spaced stages of development. “Here, the professor might say, pointing his stick at Nick, is a type of primitive man—man yet incapable of concentration or foresight—” Whereas here—well, his remarks upon L. would be highly complimentary. In spite of this grudging scrape of my pen, I liked Nick quite enough to enjoy seeing him; & having a practical, & perhaps, trained mind, we pumped him a good deal about the house. He cannot see a cupboard without discovering how it has been built in, or a pipe without running his finger along, or a brick without lifting it to pry⁠[?] out possible secrets of building. He advises as to ask Hope’s advice. Barbara arrived for lunch, in breeches & jersey, scarlet as an apple but maternal, to my eye, & with her vivid little edge of character distinguishing her from the rest of them. She is considerably more distinguished than Nick, & he recognises this abundantly. Perhaps his pride is blown upon by the covetous eyes of Saxon. Anyhow, he thinks B. a most remarkable character, stamped with the precious mark of Gordon Square’s approval. O dear—when will that mark be rubbed out? Yet it’s vain talking. What would it profit me to gain the praise of the whole world & lose that single voice? This reflection is due in part to the Memoirs of Mrs Humphry Ward. By paying 5/ I have become a member of the Lewes public library. It is an amusing place—full of old ghosts; books half way to decomposition. A general brownness covers them. They are as much alike outwardly as charity schoolchildren. Most have shed their boards years ago, & been recovered in brown paper. There is no reason, either, why Mungo Park should not be succeeded by the Sermons of Ebenezer Howard, & then Lord Morley’s Recollections, & then White Wings, or a Swallow’s Summer, & then Treasures of the Deep. Thats the sort of thing anyhow I could not resist Mrs Ward, & I stand in her unconscionably long hours, as if she were a bath of tepid water that one lacks the courage to leave. But she set me thinking after tea about fame. No one has had a deeper draught of it. The poor woman, now conscious of a little chill, brings out her old praises & hangs them out of her front windows. “See what Henry James said of me—Walter Pater—George Meredith.” And indeed these poor old grandees, solicited I suppose by presentation copies & the rest, do seem to have perjured themselves cheerfully, though I can see them winking. My point is however, that all this blare & pomp has no kind of effect upon the sensitive reader, as I claim to be. Perhaps the winks are too evident. The enormous sales, the American editions, the rumble & reverberation—Piccadilly placarded with posters ‘Marcella out!’—seem like the drum & cymbals of a country fair. No, nothing of this counts—She herself, setting out to write an intimate account of feelings & thoughts, gives nothing but bills of fare & pass books. At what point did she cease thinking? Long Long ago, I should say; & then came to believe implicitly in the mummery: names of the great serve as umbrellas covering vacancy. But all tea table talk to admonish the young, who are, I suppose, now becoming inquisitive & objectionable. What a picture though of the highest life in intellectual circles in London! What a portrait of the Servants Hall; with Mrs H. W. for housekeeper, & Uncle Matt, the master. A Detestable assembly, as she paints it. Literature served up on plate before them. I have Gosse to review, which makes me rig up some fancy scene as I stumble about the fields. To Rat Farm with L. this afternoon; & found a hawk moth drowned in the brook—privet? or what?

Sunday 28 September (perhaps the 28th at least)

Cut off as we are from all human intercourse (unless you count the Dedmans) I cannot be sure even of the date. It is said that the entire railways of England are on strike; the miners, & perhaps the transport workers, are with them. This happened yesterday morning, or rather late the night before; & though we got our papers through late in the evening, we are without posts. The signalman [Tom Pargiter] gave us some information yesterday, & believes himself to be striking against a reduction of 14/ a week in his wages. His strike pay comes to 16/ a week. How with prices what they are the strike can be kept up more than a day or two it is difficult to see. He expects a settlement tomorrow; but as he hopes it, one can’t trust him, & like all the rest, he knows far less about the reasons & machinations than we do—L. at any rate. At present, what with Sunday & the quiet one imagines on the lines, a queer deep silence seems to lie upon us. We post letters knowing they wont get further than Lewes. There is talk of a motor car service. The Government make a show of courageous determination. We are on war rations, & told to be brave & good. Not since coaching days has the village of Rodmell been so isolated as it is at the present moment. Yet a state of siege has a certain snugness & self sufficiency about it. No one can interrupt. I have given myself a respite from Hope Mirrlees, whose review ought to have been dispatched this morning. If it lasts another day or two the food difficulty will begin. Then there’s the question of getting back on Thursday.

Until this strike came our main concern has been L.’s arm. A week ago, or last Monday his wrist & arm broke into a rash. The Dr called it eczema. Then Mrs Dedman brushed this aside & diagnosed sunflower poisoning. L. had been uprooting them with bare hands. We have accepted her judgment, which is confirmed by the case of Mrs Wooler’s brother, but that doesn’t do away with the fact that its a vile & irritating disease. Today for the first time the swelling is less, & the rash improved. But the week has been much damaged in consequence. Yesterday we went over to Asheham, plundered the hollow of its mushrooms, & then got in at the drawing room window. Gunn is spending £60 on turning it into a rose pink boudoir—that colour at least predominates. But they have evidently taken a book of patterns & marked out the most respectable bright colours, so that the rooms are all as smooth & impeccable & glossy as can be. There are mustard yellows & pillar box reds. Of course, I couldn’t approve, but I should have liked it still less if he had chosen after my own taste, & the house had looked as dim & mysterious as ever. I dont know whether its one’s accommodating temper that painted the place a little shut in & dismal, with the vast hollow behind & the straight view between trees in front. I thought it lacking in variety, this time, & colour—but I expect this is one of the devices of the imagination. Anyhow Monk’s improves, after the fashion of a mongrel who wins your heart. I should have said a good deal about the garden only the temptation of being there instead of describing it from within has been too much even for my confirmed habits. The green of the turf with the bunch of purple Japanese anemones keeps getting in my eyes. We have been planting tiny grains of seed in the front bed, in the pious or religious belief that they will resurrect next spring as Clarkia, Calceolaria, Campanula, Larkspur & Scabious. I shan’t recognise them if they do; we are planting at a venture, inspired by seedsmen’s language: how they stand high & bear bright blue petals. Then there’s weeding. Very soon, in any occupation, one makes a game of it. I mean (for I’m cold & inept at the moment—church bells ringing, fire just catching, & the great log we sawed about to plunge into fiery caverns) that one gives characters to weeds. The worst is the fine grass which has to be sifted out conscientiously. I like uprooting thick dandelions & groundsel. Then the tea bell rings, & though I sit & ponder over my cigarette, L. runs out like a child allowed to get down & go. And as I say, today we’re on our island, which will be boarded tomorrow, oddly enough, by Clive.

I’ve reviewed Hope; Gosse & Swinnerton, all in the past 10 days so that the great autumn downpour is beginning. It crosses my mind now & then that Night & Day will be one drop of it: but that seems to belong to London—not here. The bore will be meeting people, who think they must say that they have not read it; perhaps worse, that they have. That will last six weeks; then no more.

Tuesday 30 September

This is opened to record the Strike bulletin. Nothing has happened. All railways are silent. I went into Lewes yesterday, & found a kind of modified Sunday prevailing; shutters half closed at post & railway station. There were numbers of motors with luggage & the pampered rich. Rumour—shop keepers, that is to say,—predicts a long strike. Who’s in the right, they dont say: ‘anyhow its bad for us’. In our private world the discomfort is mostly what we imagine for the future. We can make no plans anyhow. Last night Clive did not come, & thinking this implied disaster to N. in London, I telegraphed first thing this morning; no answer yet, & its struck seven. The papers are just in, shrunk to single sheets, & untrustworthy in their extreme—Daily Mail & Herald; truthful in the middle perhaps, Daily News. So far nothing but persistent hostility on both sides; no overtures. To increase our private sense of the ominous, Mr Dean chose this day to move the cupboards. The house is therefore scattered with books & furniture, but we gain a dining room. To appease us, the weather stays fine as possible, clear, cold, still, & sunny. Clive stayed at Charleston nursing a cold. No letters since Saturday morning, save his card, which is local. We shall be without butter, coffee, & cigarettes in a day or two, getting them from London.

Wednesday 1 October

The strike remains, so far as we can judge, the same. On the other hand, rumours of the strike change from hour to hour. A post came this morning. The postman is reported to say that all trains are running as usual. The signalman appears. Situation unchanged; much depressed. Then Dedman comes to pick apples. A notice is in the post office, he says, that trains are as usual. Nelly goes to Lewes. Comes back ‘frightened’ so she says. A few trains only, into which you get at your own risk. This sickened her of travel, which she had been urging an hour before. We went down to the signalman with books & offers of help. His wife met us; he being at Newhaven. A fiery, impulsive, vigorous woman about to bear her 5th child. She was urging him to give in. Public opinion was against them, she said. Then she explained that they had only saved 6 shillings. With their strike pay this can’t long keep off hunger. Then she couldn’t see the rights of it, “They’re like children who’ve had their sweet & dont want to give up their penny” she said, often enough to show that she’d used the argument often to him. They must give it up sooner or later, so why not now.

Tuesday 7 October

Home yesterday. The ‘docile herds’ whom I describe on Peace day are not so deluded after all. They have held the country up for eleven days, I think. We did a little to support them too, & kept one man on strike who would have gone back without our pound. Still, what’s to be read in the papers is hardly fit for my private page. I wonder if I could expound the railway strike? What they asked, & what they got? At any rate the strike broke in to our life more than the war did—but I’ve written my diary, intermittently, & have it at Rodmell. There’s a private strike to record too. I should like to write philosophically & analyse what is no doubt a sign—dont they call it?—of the times. We must think out our position. The question is, are we to fling off in a new direction? What do we want? Now at our age, where youth is not quite over, & discretion is fully blown, but not long seated—its not so easy to know what one does 9th Oct want, I meant to add, but that reflection’s two days old. Dear old Nelly came in shyly like a school girl & asked to apologise last night; & I see us settled for life, with Hogarth, Monk’s House, & two domestics.

I have no time to fill this page, since I must read my review book, (Landor), read Logan’s stories, write a letter or two, & I’ve let the time since tea slip. I began reading the first volume of my diary; & see that its second anniversary is now reached. I dont think the first volume makes such good reading as the last; a proof that all writing, even this unpremeditated scribbling, has its form, which one learns. Is it worth going on with? The trouble is, that if one goes on a year or so more, one will feel bound on that account to continue. I wonder why I do it. Partly, I think, from my old sense of the race of time ‘Time’s winged chariot hurrying near’—Does it stay it?

Saturday 11 October

Things are once more in swing, though in rather a modified form for me, since I’ve promised to be careful, which means avoiding the temptation of London, & walking down the sunny drives at Kew. In spite of cold, the sun is still the sun of holiday & country, somehow unfit for the pavement slabs. A record autumn for fineness, I should think, always falsifying the predictions of the Times prophet, who is gloomy. For the first time I went up to London yesterday in the first place to buy gloves; in the second to have tea at Nessa’s flat [36 Regent Square], A comfortable party there, seated on the kitchen floor. Julian in a Norfolk jacket & Eton collar looking a responsible Briton; Quentin still amorphous. The dim & dusky flat of James’s day is now at the very opposite pole of culture—the pole of sun & brightness. The rooms overflow with children. The books are the incongruous part of the decoration, & Nessa professed great contempt for them. “Of course, she said, there’s Shakespeare & all that on the bottom shelf, but look at that! Doesn’t that give James away?” He has all the right books, neatly ranged, but not interesting in the least—not, I mean, all lusty & queer like a writers books. The Stracheys with the exception of Lytton are down in the world. Lytton we ran into at the Club on coming back—composed, agreeable, permanently shone upon, & completely sure of himself—ah, but infinitely charming into the bargain. Success, I believe, produces a kind of modesty. It frees you from bothering about yourself. He was flattering to me, as usual; but then I’m not a success. Did I not hear from Macmillan today that Messrs Duckworth’s charges are prohibitive? So my chance of appearing in America is gone. But I’m showered under with review books; &, though I dont suppose I can pretend that any saying by a publisher is a rebuff, still I’m conscious of being almost proof—against Gordon Square? I wonder. Yes, I believe that my well of confidence, or rather pleasure, is so deep sunk as to bubble up in a day or two after any chastening. But this I shall soon be able to test. My review, laboured & well meaning as it was, of Hope’s book has so far drawn no letter of thanks from her. I’m not sure that she didn’t cherish some boundless dream about it. A whole column, in the middle, comparing her with the greatest only. Well, I’ve had my dreams too. At the same time I’m generally rather surprised by the goodness of reality.

Sunday 19 October

A gap of more than a week. Let me see how my hours after tea have been occupied. The Waterlows came last Sunday; on Monday I went up, had my tea at the Club, & met for a second, Molly Hamilton “And when’s your novel coming out?”; Tuesday I had to read through 2 volumes of an American scribbler sent me by Murry; Wednesday was crammed with George Eliot, I expect, since Logan & Clive came at 7.30; Thursday I rejoiced in Saxon & Barbara; Friday I had tea with Nessa, & supper too, & went to a Promenade; Saturday I heard L. say his lecture, & then had poor little Dorothy Hornett up to give her her sweets; so here I am with a clear conscience at Sunday, over my fire, waiting for L. to come in from Sutton. Clearly I cant go through the list. That is an unreasonable demand. Sydney Waterlow is very well pleased with himself. Yet as his talk becomes more & more complacent, his prospects more & more blooming, I always fancy that I can see a slight wobble in what should be the perfect sphere, like that which used to foretell the collapse of an air ball. He has great designs upon the F.O. nothing less than complete reformation; but if these miscarry he will accept £10,000 a year in the city. But the preposterous man has his endearing absurdity. A third project of his is to settle at Oare & write books in collaboration with Desmond. For ever he clings to the skirts of the Desmonds & Leonards & even Virginias (I’m much admired, momentarily) as if not wholly secure even now. She, Dawks, was squat & vivacious as usual. Some of her intelligent remarks fell flat though—those supposing a knowledge of Sydney’s work. He is respectful to her in her own department, & feels that her capacity there is a tribute to him. Saxon & Barbara don’t need much licking into shape: he on the sprightly side, she maternal & boyish, a little to my irritation. After all, few people dont act a part of some kind. Logan was rather more aloof & distinguished than my memory of him. Perhaps he disapproved a little of Clive. Clive certainly intended that he should. He described his entire indolence; & then his pleasures: “We dine not very well, & then slip into bed together.” “Goodness no—I dont read on a system—Goodness gracious, I dont write every day.”—so on. Now Logan’s epicurean life is well regulated; self improvement is not despicable in his eyes; his conversation is decorous. We got out 12 volumes of Gibbon, & they capped passages. We have undertaken to get Logan’s stories printed.

Tuesday 21 October

This is Trafalgar day, & yesterday is memorable for the appearance of Night & Day. My six copies reached me in the morning, & five were despatched, so that I figure the beaks of five friends already imbedded. Am I nervous? Oddly little; more excited & pleased than nervous. In the first place, there it is, out & done with; then I read a bit & liked it; then I have a kind of confidence, that the people whose judgment I value will probably think well of it, which is much reinforced by the knowledge that even if they dont, I shall pick up & start another story on my own. Of course, if Morgan & Lytton & the others should be enthusiastic, I should think the better of myself. The bore is meeting people who say the usual things. But on the whole, I see what I’m aiming at; what I feel is that this time I’ve had a fair chance & done my best; so that I can be philosophic & lay the blame on God. Lovely autumn days come one after another; the leaves hanging like rare gold coins on the trees. Clive was at the Club yesterday, & talked ostensibly to me, but to the whole room in reality some of whom judged him a little bounder, I suppose, & turned round & thanked God when he left the room.

O yes, I should like a good long review in the Times.

Thursday 23 October

The first fruits of Night & Day must be entered “No doubt a work of the highest genius” Clive Bell. Well, he might not have liked it; he was critical of The Voyage Out. I own I’m pleased; yet not convinced that it is as he says. However, this is a token that I’m right to have no fears. The people whose judgment I respect won’t be so enthusiastic as he is, but they’ll come out decidedly on that side, I think. Moreover, in a way which I can’t defend to L., I do respect Clive’s judgment. It’s erratic, but always springs from a direct feeling. I think I feel most doubtful about Morgan; after getting his report I shall be quite at ease. Three or four people count, & the rest, save as a senseless clapping of hands or hissing, are nowhere. No one of much intelligence, outside my own friends, is likely to read a very long novel. But I must stop; I’m at my hack work, & Ka dines here, & I can’t spare time to describe my concert last night. Only room for my own praises. Besides, I must thank C.

Thursday 30 October

I have the excuse of rheumatism for not writing more; & my hand tired of writing, apart from rheumatism. Still, if I could treat myself professionally as a subject for analysis I could make an interesting story of the past few days, of my vicissitudes about N. & D. After Clive’s letter came Nessa’s—unstinted praise; on top of that Lytton’s: enthusiastic praise; a grand triumph; a classic; & so on; Violet’s sentence of eulogy followed; & then, yesterday morning, this line from Morgan “I like it less than the V.O.” Though he spoke also of great admiration, & had read in haste & proposed re-reading, this rubbed out all the pleasure of the rest. Yes; but to continue. About 3 in the afternoon I felt happier & easier on account of his blame than on account of the others’ praise—as if one were in the human atmosphere again, after a blissful roll among elastic clouds & cushiony downs. Yet I suppose I value Morgan’s opinion as much as anybodies. Then there’s a column in the Times this morning; high praise; & intelligent too; saying among other things that N. & D. though it has less brilliance on the surface, has more depth than the other; with which I agree. I hope this week will see me through the reviews, I should like intelligent letters to follow; but I want to be writing little stories; I feel a load off my mind all the same.

The rheumatism made me visit the region which is in my mind the mediaeval region. Clive burst in I was going to say like a ruddy sun last night; but I wasn’t altogether in the mood, nor he either. The most selfish of men, in some ways; though I don’t know why that struck me. Letting his mood have its way, indifferent & frivolous. But I pinned him down, & made him talk about N. & D. which he did, absentmindedly at first; later he warmed to his task; but he was thinking of a jolly time in Paris.

Saturday 1 November

Shall I ever again get time for writing here? Never have I been so pressed with reviewing, for theres George Eliot to fill up all crannies left by other books, & Murry to choke effectually any empty space remaining. I think I might slack off if N. & D. succeeds. No more letters or reviews. A cheque for £25 though, on copies sold before publication. Happily the book begins to recede from the front of my mind, & I begin to be a little surprised if people speak of it (not that anyone has—but meeting Mde Champcomunal yesterday, I was glad she’d not heard of it). This lady whose name I shall never write again, wishes to share Tregerthen: the plan may be the perfect one. She is a grenadier of a woman, high red cheek bones, thin, competent, handsome, unhappy, tailor made & up to date. I met her at Regent Square—all lights out; a single candle, electricians insistent. Sometimes I wish that the old laws of life held good: a husband, a house, servants, establishments. That same afternoon I looked in at the London Group; but saw nothing save people I had no wish to see; ran into Noel Olivier walking through the Squares. November descends. Squire’s new monthly [The London Mercury] out; and now—Middlemarch!

Tuesday 4 November

And now I only steal time from an hour dedicated to Stokoe’s poems before Miss Green arrives & we plod off in the foggy cold to address the Guild upon the Russian revolution. The hard scrubbed surface of the lower middle class mind, does not attract me. This refers partly to Mr Osborne. I’m critical, intellectually, of the aristocrats but sensually they charm. I was hauled out of the background to talk to Katie at the Richmond’s concert on Sunday. Her beautiful blue eyes all bleared & blood shot now, her skin soft like the skin on an old apple; like an apple’s creased at the edge of the mouth, baggy here & there. What sorrow she has had to make her look sad I don’t know. The following dialogue went forward.

K. The Cecils have given up their house—couldn’t afford it—

V. But he has £5,000 a year!

K. No such thing; besides everyone must economise. My dear Virginia, ‘the end is coming. A la lanterne!’

V. For you I daresay; not for me.

K. Ah, there’s where you mistake. I go first, but you directly after.

V. Well, after 300 years of Longleat, you deserve it.

K. It was so beautiful—you don’t know how beautiful.

V. You rode?

K. I walked in the woods. We had music. I used to read; & always beautiful things to look at; always something new, never the same things twice over. I had it for 13 years; & I used to say I wished I could die when it was over: I wish I had.

V. But you haven’t done so badly.

K. I didn’t care for Egypt. I dont care for that sort of thing—2 men running before my carriage. I envied them—the only people who got any exercise. Civilisation is at an end. My father always warned us. I’ve read history. We’re all going to go. Painters will be [the] only people wanted—to paint bodies pretty patterns. No one means to work. There’ll be no clothes—

So we talked in the intervals of Mozart.

This is the daily talk in Mayfair I suppose. She seemed to be convinced of it; almost grown indifferent; her one desire to save something for her son, & to die before the crash. But spoken with a kind of humorous resignation which foretells a gallant death on the scaffold.

Thursday 6 November

Sydney & Morgan dined with us last night. On the whole, I’m glad I sacrificed a concert. The doubt about Morgan & N. & D. is removed; I understand why he likes it less than V.O. &, in understanding, see that it is not a criticism to discourage. Perhaps intelligent criticism never is. All the same, I shirk writing it out, because I write so much criticism. What he said amounted to this: N. & D. is a strictly formal & classical work; that being so one requires, or he requires, a far greater degree of lovabilility in the characters than in a book like V.O. which is vague & universal. None of the characters in N. & D. is lovable. He did not care how they sorted themselves out. Neither did he care for the characters in V.O. but there he felt no need to care for them. Otherwise, he admired practically everything; his blame does not consist in saying that N. & D. is less remarkable than t’other. O & beauties it has in plenty—in fact, I see no reason to be depressed on his account. Sidney said he had been completely upset by it; & was of opinion that I had on this occasion ‘brought it off’. But what a bore I’m becoming! Yes, even old Virginia will skip a good [deal] of this; but at the moment it seems important. The Cambridge Magazine repeats what Morgan said about dislike of the characters; yet I am in the forefront of contemporary literature. I’m cynical about my figures, they say: but directly they go into detail, Morgan who read the Review sitting over the gas fire, began to disagree. So all critics split off, & the wretched author who tries to keep control of them is torn asunder.

For the first time this many years I walked along the river bank between ten & eleven. Yes, its like the shut up house I once compared it to: the room with its dust sheets on the chairs. The fishermen are not out so early; an empty path; but a large aeroplane on business. We talked very easily, the proof being that we (I anyhow) did not mind silences. Morgan has the artists mind; he says the simple things that clever people don’t say; I find him the best of critics for that reason. Suddenly out comes the obvious thing that one has overlooked. He is in trouble with a novel of his own, fingering the keys but only producing discords so far. He is anxious to begin again & moderate reviewing. We timed our walk admirably for him to catch his train, We have promised to go to the Hutchinsons tonight; but as L. is at the Famine Conference, & there’s something disagreeable to me about that circle which makes me reluctant to go alone, I don’t suppose we shall.

Saturday 15 November

It is true that I have never been so neglectful of this work of mine. I think I can foresee in my reluctance to trace a sentence, not merely lack of time & a mind tired of writing, but also one of those slight distastes which betokens a change of style. So an animal must feel at the approach of spring when his coat changes. Will it always be the same? Shall I always feel this quicksilver surface in my language; & always be shaking it from shape to shape? But if this is so, it is only part cause of my neglect. There have been substantial difficulties. We were with Lytton last Sunday; on Monday I was at Harrisons, & back just in time for Moll H. (to distinguish her from Molly M.): Tuesday I wrote letters; Wednesday, at a concert, with Violet Dickinson immediately after; Thursday Molly M., for tea & after tea; Friday to Margaret & Lilian, & so here I am, sitting after Saturday tea, a large warm meal, full of currants & sugar & hot tea cake, after a long cold walk. If I shut my eyes & thought of Tidmarsh, what should I see? Carrington a little absorbed with household duties; secreting canvas in the attic; Saxon mute & sealed till Sunday night, when he flowered for a time & talked of Greek; Lytton—a more complex situation. Good & simple & tender—a little low in tone; a little invalidish. If I’d married him, I caught myself thinking, I should have found him querulous. He would have laid too many ties on one, & repined a little if one had broken free. He was in his usual health (as they say); but the sense of living so much for health, & assembling so many comforts round him with that object is a little depressing. But I always qualify these strictures, which I’m quick to find I know, with some subconscious idea of justifying myself. I need no justification. And what I feel for Lytton is as true as ever it was. We sit alone over the fire & rattle on, so quick, so agile in our jumps & circumventions. Lytton I suppose if one could dissolve all extraneous surroundings has in the centre of him a great passion for the mind. He cares for more than literature only. On his table were the latest editions of Voltaire. His books were as primly ranged & carefully tended as an old maids china. He talked of his own work, not optimistically, but one must discount the effect of my perhaps excessive optimism about my own writing. I was in the vein to feel very highly ‘creative’, as indeed he said he thought me. But he declares himself entirely without that power. He can invent nothing, he says; take away his authorities, & he comes to a full stop. Perhaps this is true of all Stracheys, & accounts for the queer feeling—which I will not analyse, since in Lytton’s case the rightness, the subtlety, the fineness, of his mind quite overcome my furtive discomfort. Moll H. still strains at her leash like the spaniel of my legend; but foams with enthusiasm for N. & D. It is a rough eager mind, bold & straightforward, but O dear—when it comes to writing! Her courage impresses me; & the sense she gives of a machine working at high pressure all day long—the ordinary able machine of the professional working woman. A tailor made coat costing £16 is essential she said to exact respect in an office. That shows her competent grasp upon life. But why do I always like people & so throw out my judgments? It is true that I always do.

I think Violet Dickinson must be skipped, save that I may note how she has been grave finding in France & planting Lady Horner’s rosemarys upon German tombs. All this she enjoyed highly, in her humorous sporting way, & had been most touched by an inscription she found telling how Ainsworth of the hussars had loved his life & loved his horse & dog.

So we skip to Molly who took her tea in the kitchen & drew an amusing sketch of Uncle Gerald Ritchie gone mad & rushing in taxis from fruiterer to fruiterer to buy melons which he showers on his friends in an ecstasy of good temper, pronounced madness by the doctors since he is positively rude to his wife. Lastly, we approach the heights of Hampstead—the immaculate & moral heights of Hampstead. Had I the energy left I would write out that scene of revelation & explanation with Margaret, since in 30 minutes we traversed more ground than in the past 3 years. Tentatively she began it—how Janet & she felt that perhaps—they might be wrong, but still in their view—in short my article on Charlotte Brontë was so much more to their liking than my novels. Something in my feeling for human beings—some narrowness—some lack of emotion—here I blazed up & let fly. So you go on preaching humanity, was the gist of what I said, when you’ve withdrawn, & preserve only the conventional idea of it. But its you that are narrow! she retaliated. On the contrary, I shiver & shrink with the oncoming contest as I step up your stairs. I? But I’m the most sympathetic, the most human, the most universal of people. You grant that Janet moralises? I said. O yes, she granted that readily. But the idea of herself as a forcible intense woman, excluding the greater half of the human heart staggered her. She took the blow well. It was as if one had suddenly drawn some curtain. She must think it over, & write to me she said. I plunged down the hill to Lilian’s bedside, & she in her serene quiet way said “Ah, I’m glad you told Margaret that; she never will let me say it.”

Friday 28 November

This gap can easily be accounted for by recalling the old saying (if it is one) that when things happen, people don’t write. Too many things have happened. Within this last fortnight the International Review has come to an end; both servants are going; two publishers have offered to publish N. & D. & V. O. in America; Angelica has stayed with us; Mrs Brewer has told us that she means to sell Hogarth & Suffield, & we are considering buying them both—together with a greater number than usual of diners, letters, telephone calls, books to review, reviews of my book, invitations to parties & so forth. It was the dinner parties that led Nelly to give notice last Monday. She did it in a tentative boastful way, as if to show off to someone behind the scenes which makes me think she would be glad now to change her mind. She would this moment if I asked her. But on the whole I’m not going to ask her. Let alone the recurring worry of these scenes we both incline to try a new system of dailies, which never ceases to attract us & what with Rodmell & a lower income from the I.R. now becomes desirable. My opinion never changes that our domestic system is wrong; & to go on saying this only breeds irritation. We mean to make the attempt now. No one could be nicer than Nelly, for long stretches; at this moment she gives Angelica her bath, & is perfectly friendly & considerate to me; but think of Rodmell—think of the summer she offered to go to Charleston! The drawbacks are too great. But the fault is more in the system of keeping two young women chained in a kitchen to laze & work & suck their life from two in the drawing room than in her character or in mine.

Perhaps I think this our chief event, since I put it first. But the chief event should be the I.R. I’m on the whole glad that we draw our £250 for half L.’s work. That is the solution so far—an amalgamation with the Contemporary. So many afternoons I walked alone, so many evenings L. sat reading proofs or papers; to me the red magazine on the first of the month seemed scarcely worth all of him that he gave. But then to have thrown that away is galling too, & the Rowntree’s methods of making arrangements is to smash everything with his heavy hooves. Then I was considerably pleased with the American publishers, & that the old V.O. should set sail again. It is like going into another form. “Mrs Woolf you are now admitted to our society.” Yet that sort of compliment means very little so far as praise goes; nor was I elated for more than 2 hours by Eagle [J. C. Squire]’s invitation to make his broad yellow production my mouthpiece. K.M. wrote a review which irritated me—I thought I saw spite in it. A decorous elderly dullard she describes me; Jane Austen up to date. Leonard supposes that she let her wish for my failure have its way with her pen. He could see her looking about for a loophole of escape. “I’m not going to call this a success—or if I must, I’ll call it the wrong kind of success.” I need not now spread my charity so wide, since Murry tells me she is practically cured. But what I perceive in all this is that praise hardly warms; blame stings far more keenly; & both are somehow at arms length. Yet its on the cards, I suppose, that N & D is a marked success; I expect a letter every day from someone or other, & now I can write with the sense of many people willing to read. Its all pleasant; lights up the first sentences of my writing of a morning. Today, bearing K.M. in mind, I refused to do Dorothy Richardson for the Supt. The truth is that when I looked at it, I felt myself looking for faults; hoping for them. And they would have bent my pen, I know. There must be an instinct of self-preservation at work. If she’s good then I’m not. I’m pained to read praise of Legend, a book by Clemence Dane. But it looks as if I had a soul after all; these are revelations, self analyses. I’m reading Ethel Smyth. I wish it were better—(odd that I wrote that genuinely meaning it; but I couldn’t have done so with the novels). What a subject! That one should see it as a superb subject is a tribute to her, but of course, not knowing how to write, she’s muffed it. The interest remains, because she has ridden straight at her recollections, never swerving & getting through honestly, capably, but without the power to still & shape the past so that one will wish to read it again. Honesty is her quality; & the fact that she made a great rush at life; friendships with women interest me.

Friday 5 December

Another of these skips, but I think the book draws its breath steadily if with deliberation. I reflect that I’ve not opened a Greek book since we came back; hardly read outside my review books, which proves that my time for writing has not been mine at all. This last week, L. has been having a little temperature in the evening, due to malaria, & that due to a visit to Oxford; a place of death & decay. I’m almost alarmed to see how entirely my weight rests on his prop. And almost alarmed to find how intensely I’m specialised. My mind turned by anxiety, or other cause, from its scrutiny of blank paper, is like a lost child—wandering the house, sitting on the bottom step to cry.

Night & Day flutters about me still, & causes great loss of time. George Eliot would never read reviews, since talk of her books hampered her writing. I begin to see what she meant. I don’t take praise or blame excessively to heart, but they interrupt, cast one’s eyes backwards, make one wish to explain or investigate. Last week I had a cutting paragraph to myself in Wayfarer; this week Olive Heseltine applies balm. But I had rather write in my own way of ‘four Passionate Snails’ than be, as K.M. maintains, Jane Austen over again.

Saturday 6 December

On Tuesday I lunched with the Cecils. Perhaps this is my first appearance as a small Lioness. The Bibescos wished to meet me. Lord Cranborne has a great admiration for me. Elizabeth was nicer, & less brilliant than I expected. She has the composed manners of a matron, & did not strain to say clever things. I thought her slightly nervous when we drew into the window to talk. Perhaps she does not like the woman’s eye to rest upon her. She is pasty & podgy, with the eyes of currant bun, suddenly protruding with animation. But her animation is the product of a highly trained mind; a mind trained by living perpetually among more highly trained minds. “Memory comes to take the place of character in the old” she said, discussing Lady D. Nevill. Again, its a help to write things down; but there’s a gulf between writing & publishing. This was said, I remember, owing to my rash abuse of Lady Glenconner & Wyndham Tennant.—her Aunt of course. She turned round, a little uneasily, to disclaim all admiration for Lady G. I suppose she wishes to stand well with the intellectuals. Bibesco is handsome, amiable, a man rather too much of the smooth opulent world to be of particular interest, & his English is too difficult to let one get straight at him. Like all foreigners, he says serious priggish things—“I prefer to believe nothing save what my reason can confirm”—or words to that effect. Lord Robert was congenial as usual, long, loose, friendly & humorous, in spite of the crucifix on his watch chain. Lord Cranbourne much of a Cecil in appearance, modest & gentle, with a long sallow face, no chin, & shiny blue coat & trousers. He had been to a lecture at the London School of Economics. I stayed talking with Nelly when the rest were gone—about adders, about servants, George Eliot, & Night & Day.

Sunday 28 December

Probably the last entry this year, & not likely to be the most articulate. Twenty two days gap to be accounted for chiefly by illness: first L.’s which dribbled on; then much in the same way I was attacked—8 days in bed, down today on the sofa, & away to Monks House tomorrow. It was influenza—what they call a low type, but prolonged, & sponging on the head as it always does. Not much to say therefore, even if I could say it. Indeed since L. started his malarial type, we’ve seen few people; & I, for the last 10 days, none at all. But I’ve read two vast volumes of the Life of Butler; & am racing through Greville Memoirs—both superbly fit for illness. Butler has the effect of paring the bark off feelings: all left a little raw, but vivid—a lack of sap though; & a stage so thinly set as to be dull & bone dry towards the finish. I’m struck by the enormous space his ‘fame’ & books played in a life so bare of human relations. Isn’t this ‘reputation’ the deepest of all masculine instincts? Almost at the end, when people began to praise, his life put forth a little flower; but too late. For such a critical & contemptuous mind, the value attached to reviews seems queer. Why, I dont think half or quarter so much of mine! But then he had indifference & silence for his lot; perhaps the most trying. It dont (the Life I mean) increase one’s respect for human nature. Here was someone I expected to admire greatly; & the pettinesses are therefore more devastating than in the case of another. Festing Jones apes him to perfection. An effective style in its way; save that it becomes too mechanical.

Here I run on, but must stop. Oh yes, I’ve enjoyed reading the past years diary, & shall keep it up. I’m amused to find how its grown a person, with almost a face of its own.

L.’s book not yet out; but we have six copies in advance. Nego⁠[tia]⁠tions proceeding for the sale of Hyde Park Gate & the purchase of this & Suffield. Servants determined to stay for ever & ever. No news of the sale of N. & D. Reviews a good deal affected by Massingham, but private opinion highly pleasing to me. I see the public becomes a question. I.R. amalgamated with Contemporary, & L. to keep his office & his virgins. We think we now deserve some good luck. Yet I daresay we’re the happiest couple in England.

[]

Volume II: 1920-1924

Edited by Anne Olivier Bell
Assisted by Andrew McNeillie

[1978]

1920

[Diary IX]
January 1920
Monk’s House Rodmell

Wednesday 7 January

To begin the year on the last pages of my old book—the few I’ve not torn off for letter writing—is all upside-down of course; but of a part with the character of the work.

This is our last evening. We sit over the fire waiting for post—the cream of the day, I think. Yet every part of the day here has its merits—even the breakfast without toast. That—however it begins—ends with Pippins; most mornings the sun comes in; we finish in good temper; & I go off to the romantic chamber over grass rough with frost & ground hard as brick. Then Mrs Dedman comes to receive orders—to give them, really, for she has planned our meals to suit her days cooking before she comes. We share her oven. The result is always savoury—stews & mashes & deep many coloured dishes swimming in gravy thick with carrots & onions. Elsie, aged 18, can be spoken to as though she had a head on her shoulders. The house is empty by half past eleven; empty now at five o’clock; we tend our fire, cook coffee, read, I find, luxuriously, peacefully, at length.

But I should not spend my time on an indoor chronicle; unless I lazily shirked the describing of winter down & meadow—the recording of what takes my breath away at every turn. Heres the sun out for example & all the upper twigs of the trees as if dipped in fire; the trunks emerald green; even bark bright tinted, & variable as the skin of a lizard. Then theres Asheham hill smoke misted; the windows of the long train spots of sun; the smoke lying back on the carriages like a rabbits lop ears. The chalk quarry glows pink; & my water meadows lush as June, until you see that the grass is short, & rough as a dogfishes back. But I could go on counting what I’ve noticed page after page. Every day or nearly I’ve walked towards a different point & come back with a string of these matchings & marvels. Five minutes from the house one is out in the open, a great pull over Asheham; &, as I say, every direction bears fruit. Once we went over the cornfield & up onto the down—a dim Sunday afternoon—muddy on the road, but dry up above. The long down grass pale, & as we pushed through it, up got a hawk at our feet, seeming to trail near the ground, as if weighted down—attached to something. It let the burden fall, & rose high as we came up. We found the wings of a partridge attached to [a] bleeding stump, for the Hawk had almost done his meal. We saw him go back to find it. Further down the hill side a great white owl ‘wavy’ (for that describes his way of weaving a web round a tree—the plumy soft look of him in the dusk adding truth to the word) ‘wavy in the dusk’, flew behind the hedge as we came past. Village girls were returning, & calling out to friends in doors. So we cross the field & churchyard, find our coke burnt through to red, toast the bread—& the evening comes.

L. has spent most of his time pruning the apple trees, & tying plums to the wall. To do this he wears two jackets, 2 pairs of socks, two pairs of gloves; even so the cold bites through. These last days have been like frozen water, ruffled by the wind into atoms of ice against the cheek; then, in the shelter, forming round you in a still pool. Yesterday I explored towards the house with the white chimneys, finding a grass drive all the way; brooks struck off to the right blue as if with sea water. From one a snipe rose zigzagging across & across, flurried & swift. As I advanced the peewits rose in clouds, one dallying behind, & crying peewit, peewit. Then up in the air across the meadows one sees the (the post—but only Mathew’s letter) handful of grain flung in a semi circle what birds they are I never know. On the down this afternoon I saw the usual flight go up in front of me, & then half wheeled round t’other way. Bells tinkling as I walked along the valley came from a flock attached to the green side, & there on the top against the sky was a string of three great cart horses, stock still, as on a summers day; for they were beside a corn stack. And this I see is my last page so my threat about counting things to that limit was a true one. Human beings have figured less than the red berries, the suns & the moon risings. Letters have come still, as usual, about N⁠[ight] & D⁠[ay], from Sheppard & Roger; both the kind I like; & old Kitty Maxse sees nothing but stupidity, which don’t hurt much—but I’m ashamed of beginning the year with this gossip. Reading Empire & Commerce to my genuine satisfaction, with an impartial delight in the closeness, passion, & logic of it; indeed its a good thing now & then to read one’s husbands work attentively. For the rest, the Education of Henry Adams, &—? I wrote my article on English prose for Murry; & now finish Rosetti, taking leave still from the Times.

Saturday 10 January

Ah, that’s all very well, but a fate conspires against a solemn opening ceremony. True, I’ve taken a new nib; but I’m perched high in bug [sic] chair, & can’t settle to read or write, waiting for Lotty to bring in tin tacks, with which to mend my aged broken down eared arm chair. Entrails years ago burst their barriers, & for the past six months I’ve sat on a ridge of wood. Leonard suddenly undertakes to confine entrails within sacking; but we wait for Lotty. A five minutes walk spreads to 45 with her; she calls on Miss Stanford.

So the New Year is broached; 10 days of it already spent. The 1917 Club has the merit of gathering my particular set to a bunch about 4.30 on a week day. There, returning on Thursday, I found Clive (I heard him from the stairs) Morgan, Fredegond & dim background figures just worth a nod turning out to be Oliviers—varieties of Oliviers. Now Clive showed as gaslight beside Morgan’s normal day—his day not sunny or tempestuous but a day of pure light, capable of showing up the rouge & powder, the dust & wrinkles, the cracks & contortions of my poor parrokeet. He makes me feel the footlights myself. The blend of the two was not agreeable; or rather not comfortable. Morgan had a matron waiting for him in Leicester Square. Clive took me in a taxi to Regent Square, after making play with the name of Lytton Strachey. I ran up ahead, & found the room bright & lively; the baby crawling out to fill up a corner, Nessa in her spotted feather hat with the pink plume. I think she thus redeems the rest of her homespun—very successfully. I also think (as Lotty won’t come in—my evening wasting—Lindsay [unidentified] to read—oh dear) that my charms are beneath the horizon; Mary’s about level with the eye; & Nessa’s rising resplendent like the harvest moon. Why, otherwise, dwell so rapturously to me on her dress at the party, her beauty, her grandeur? God knows—perhaps to make himself shine brighter. A long yellow lock hung beneath his ear. “I must cut your hair” said V. Whereupon he took his hat off quickly, fingered the long strand, recognised its mission—to cover the bald patch. But it wouldn’t stay, & fell back again a little repulsively, lacking grease to keep it in place. Compliments for me: but offered as if he were no longer the privileged purveyor. So home by Victoria, noticing there the hustler in his box.

Wednesday 14 January

On Sunday the Shoves dined here; Monday nothing; Tuesday Club & talk, almost of an intimate kind, with Gumbo; Bob. T., Fredegond, Alix, the background; Wednesday is the present moment, in from a snatched walk at Kew, awaiting Leonard, & expecting a large party, Doggats, Joshua’s &c. at 7.30. So I write as if waiting for a train. I might fill this page & the succeeding ones with the Shoves’ gossip, but I have never determined how far it is permitted to go here in indiscretion. I should have to write at length to retail this specimen properly which is the conclusive reason against it. But it referred to the three days of revelation at Garsington; there was a flush of confession it seems, poured into Fredegond’s ear. It shows how little one knows one’s kind. I should never have expected long fatuous Philip in his leather gaiters, double breasted waistcoat & jewelled buttons to go those lengths. According to Gerald, the general feeling roused in one was pity—such a lonely, in some ways unhappy man. I can’t help smiling at the thought of these semi-ducal, (demi-semi at most, I admit) children playing in the suburbs of Ealing & Streatham, living to be insurance clerks or the like, while Garsington lacks an heir. There! The cat’s out of the bag.

My intimacy with Gumbo came on the flood tide of her appreciation of N. & D. “So solid—so large—such a great—firm building”—“It belongs to literature—an addition to life”. Such sentiments warm one to people. Apart from them, as I think this diary records, I have warmed to her these past years, guessing at a good deal of dreariness, & half expecting that the old light would never blaze again. Now it begins to flicker & that is the origin of her novel. I wonder, parenthetically, whether I too, deal thus openly in autobiography & call it fiction?—Her story is the story of M.S. & J.W. & the conclusion is that she regains happiness, though losing the object. My brain at once spins to clothe her story for her,—how happiness is to be represented by a green here; a yellow there & so on. (novelist or not, some instinct of story telling is pretty quick in me). She is to send me her chapters.

Leonard’s book is out today. To judge by his calm, you would not think it. Great gales in the way of weather; a French ship sunk in the Bay of Biscay, two days after Bella must have passed through; a Cornish steamer wrecked too off Swanage; & on our windows such a battering at night that we woke twice. Violent gusts leaping out of the heart of complete calm—a suggestion of animal savagery; or human frenzy. But what with glass & brick we human beings do pretty well. I sometimes think with wonder that soon the immense thickness & stability of Hogarth House will be mine to whittle away with a penknife, should I so choose. And here—thank goodness—is L.

Saturday 17 January

Then there was the party, given in skeleton above. Miss Joshua in pale pink, & the shoes of Artemis—laced with silver round the ankles. Doggatt the spruce innocent young man; with eyes like brown trout streams. Sheppard dancing nervously; & Cecil Taylor, to my mind, adequately fitting the part of enlightened schoolmaster. We got through dinner very well on spur of Cambridge & Christianity; things went, to my taste, lightly & briskly after dinner; & then Bob [Trevelyan] came in. At once we were in another atmosphere. Fantasies were crushed. A Cambridge evening of the 90ties; a Sanger evening; the quality gone; raucous common sense; serious literary criticism, &, what annoyed me, every attempt of a different sort snuffed out directly by Bob’s indefatigable snuffer. He wears blinkers, & sees an indisputable stretch of road, but a narrow one. Sheppard ceased dancing; we argued; we vociferated. Alix arrived, pale as clay, & not much lighter in the mind. I lost my balance; my vanity was wounded—in short, I think Bob spoilt the party—but as for seeing that he spoilt it, that vista is shut from him completely. In crept doubts of my liking for S., my liking for Cecil Taylor; the young people one can scarcely like or dislike. So the party ended. Bob stayed. I was gratified by praise of my novel. On this account I suppose, I found the morning more becoming to him than the night. We got back into the Cambridge atmosphere.

Then Ka for the night: now Desmond for the night; tomorrow I go to Roger for the night. All rather heavy going, & cutting up the week into little bits. We had to put off Mrs Clifford; & I’m writing dully, wishing, though I love Desmond, for a solitary night. He has been made successor to Eagle on the Statesman.

Tuesday 20 January

Years ago as a child I made up a wise saw to the effect that if one didn’t expect a party to be nice it was & t’other way round. So Desmond’s visit was easy, refreshing, & passed without hitch. We had a fine store of talk to keep us going.—The story of his voyage—of Captain Deakes & Captain Haines; their obscenity that made one sick; the squall at sea; arrival at Cape Town; Mrs Paley’s surprise; Paley’s greeting ‘but we didn’t expect you—’ His wire ‘Desmond sailed’ arriving Desmond failed—(as indeed he might probably have done)—all this in the lovely soft voice, with more than the usual freshness & abundance. As for decadence or decay—not a trace of it: fresh & firm & friendly. Then much talk of the New Statesman—projects without number—to be noted down: letters to be written. Secretly, I think, he was much excited & pleased. Five hundred assured; 250 of it dependent on a weekly article, signed Affable Hawk (this is a dead secret). Off we went after tea to Roger’s, all across Europe to the Brecknock Arms. Buses pass you bound for Barnet. As we both depend upon holding to a button naturally we did not arrive easily. The house very high & narrow, with many large rooms, & a bright lining of pictures. Roger to my eyes slightly shrunken, aged? Can one use that word of him? And I don’t know how much I colour him from my own depression—for I guessed he didn’t much care for N. & D. So I went on to fancy him wilful; to trace veins of irrational prejudice in him. He showed freakish by side of D.’s benevolence; old sea captains telling dirty stories not in his line; nor novels either. Yet he professed to find it much superior to the V⁠[oyage].O⁠[ut].

Wednesday 21 January

It would be easy to take up the line that Roger’s praise is not worth having, since it is balanced by what appears an irrational prejudice. If the prejudice is on your side, well & good; though even so it sweeps one too far to leave one steady in the head. I sometimes fancy that the only healthy condition is that of doing successful work. Its the prime function of the soul. R.’s work never meeting with the right sort of appreciation, he suffers perpetually from an obscure irritation. The main form it takes is irritation against England; I fancy I can trace it elsewhere also. He is testy without much occasion, & too easily reverts to grievances, how art critics hate him, how its only in France that they care for his pictures—why, he was accusing Clive of taking his ideas & selling them to America for £200—but on this point I happen to agree with him. If I’m sincere, however, I see that I’m led to infer all this from what I note in my own disposition under a cloud. For one thing, I find it difficult to write. I held my pen this morning for two hours & scarcely made a mark. The marks I did make were mere marks, not rushing into life & heat as they do on good days. Perhaps Roger was the first cloud; Desmond may have contributed a little; & then how many silly things I did yesterday, ending by ringing up the Richmonds at their dinner, & being painfully snubbed by Elena on that account. I should like here to analyse; instead I must wash & dress & dine at the Club & so to Moll Hamilton’s party, which I predict will be dull, & more shocks will be administered, & I shall creep cold to bed.

Saturday 24 January

But on the contrary—I didn’t creep cold to bed, & the party amused me as a spectacle—I should more truly say astonished me as a pandemonium. Molly can be heard out in the Adelphi; then, as the hostess sets the key, some hundred people, opening their mouths, tried to overcome her, by dint of roaring. I got my station in a corner, between Clive & Norton, & enjoyed the sense of irresponsible amusement. Not a human festival at all. Everyone smiling. As they could scarcely express their pleasure in words this was a necessary device. Margot was there—oh well, unpleasantly disfigured, in a low dress. I tried to turn her periods into laughter. Humour might do more to dissolve her poetry than criticism. Then young Mr Evans confided to me that his admiration of N. & D. was personal ‘to tell you the truth I’m going through the same thing myself’—poor little man! Yet I was pleased to think my psychology ‘intense’ & ‘modern’ & illuminating the crannies of Mr Evan’s personal existence.

Oh dear, though, this talk of novels is all turned sour & brackish by a visit to Mrs Clifford. She must have supplied herself with false teeth since I saw her—20 years ago; & her hair frizzed out is surely browned by art; but she remains otherwise the same—large codfish eyes & the whole figure of the nineties—black velvet—morbid—intense, jolly, vulgar—a hack to her tips, with a dash of the stage—‘dear’ ‘my dear boy—Did you know Leonard, that I was only married for 3 years, & then my husband died & left me with 2 babies & not a penny—so I had to work—oh yes, I worked, & sold the furniture often, but I never borrowed.’ However the pathetic is not her line. She talks it to fill up space; but if I could reproduce her talk of money, royalties, editions, & reviews, I should think myself a novelist; & the picture might serve me for a warning. I think one may assume it to be more a product of the 90ties than of our age. Again, having years ago made a success, she’s been pulling the wires to engineer another ever since, & has grown callous in the process. Her poor old lips pout for a pat of butter; but margarine will do. She keeps her private & very rancid supply on some of the little tables that those distressing rooms are lumbered with (a wooden black cat on the clock, & little carved animals under it): she has a review of herself in the Bookman & a portrait, & a paper of quotations about Miss Fingal. I assure you I can hardly write this down—Moreover, I had a feeling that in these circles people do each other good turns; & when she proposed to make my fortune in America, I’m afraid a review in the Times was supposed to be the equivalent. Brave, I suppose, with vitality & pluck—but oh the sight of the dirty quills [?], & the scored blotting paper & her hands & nails not very clean either—& money, reviews, proofs, helping hands, slatings—what an atmosphere of rancid cabbage & old clothes stewing in their old water! We went away laden with two of the cheap flaring books—‘Are you going to take my mangy works! to tell the truth I’m in debt—’ Yes, but was that why we were asked to tea? Not altogether, I suppose, but, partly; subconsciously. And now, you see, all colour is taken from my boasting; a 2nd edition of the Voyage Out needed; & another of Night & Day shortly; & Nisbet offers me £100 for a book. Oh dear there must be an end of this! Never write for publishers again anyhow.

I’ve no time or finger power left to describe Desmond in his office; my haul of biographies; luncheon at Gordon Sqre; sitting in the great chairs before Clive’s fire afterwards; the apparition of Adrian; affection of Mary, & comparative docility of Clive.

I had tea with Lilian the other evening; we kissed silently: for my errand was to while away an hour of suspense for her while she waits for the verdict on her eyes. She may be blind, I suppose—oh dear; & nothing could be said about it. What courage can make one, at 50, look down the remaining years, with that calamity to darken them!

Monday 26 January

The day after my birthday; in fact I’m 38. Well, I’ve no doubt I’m a great deal happier than I was at 28; & happier today than I was yesterday having this afternoon arrived at some idea of a new form for a new novel. Suppose one thing should open out of another—as in An Unwritten Novel—only not for 10 pages but 200 or so—doesn’t that give the looseness & lightness I want: doesnt that get closer & yet keep form & speed, & enclose everything, everything? My doubt is how far it will include enclose the human heart—Am I sufficiently mistress of my dialogue to net it there? For I figure that the approach will be entirely different this time: no scaffolding; scarcely a brick to be seen; all crepuscular, but the heart, the passion, humour, everything as bright as fire in the mist. Then I’ll find room for so much—a gaiety—an inconsequence—a light spirited stepping at my sweet will. Whether I’m sufficiently mistress of things—thats the doubt; but conceive mark on the wall, K⁠[ew]. G⁠[ardens]. & unwritten novel taking hands & dancing in unity. What the unity shall be I have yet to discover: the theme is a blank to me; but I see immense possibilities in the form I hit upon more or less by chance 2 weeks ago. I suppose the danger is the damned egotistical self; which ruins Joyce & [Dorothy] Richardson to my mind: is one pliant & rich enough to provide a wall for the book from oneself without its becoming, as in Joyce & Richardson, narrowing & restricting? My hope is that I’ve learnt my business sufficiently now to provide all sorts of entertainments. Anyhow, there’s no doubt the way lies somewhere in that direction; I must still grope & experiment but this afternoon I had a gleam of light. Indeed, I think from the ease with which I’m developing the unwritten novel there must be a path for me there.

Yesterday being my birthday & a clear bright day into the bargain showing many green & yellow flushes on the trees, I went to South Kensington & heard Mozart & Beethoven. I don’t think I did hear very much of them, seated as I was between Katie & Elena, & pitched headforemost into outrageous banter of the usual kind with the Countess. But the Countess was very affable & jolly, invited me indeed insisted upon my coming, to tea with her. We turned our money under the new moon. She vibrated under the pleasure of a compliment—“when Lady Cromer’s there one feels &c &c—” a compliment to her beauty. But the room was clamorous with South Kensington. Eily Darwin in particular, fat & decorous & affectionate, yet plaintive as of old, as if protesting before one spoke against criticism. She told me I had been cruel. I forget now what I said—something wild & random, as everything said under those circumstances must be. George Booth took my arm & praised my book.

Saturday 31 January

Here is my calendar: Tuesday the Squires & Wilkinson & Edgar to dinner; Wednesday tea with Elena; Thursday lunch with Nessa, tea Gordon Square; Friday Clive & Mary here; & Saturday sitting over the fire with a morbid & I hope unfounded fear lest certain creatures infesting Lottie & Nelly may begin to twitter beneath my skin. An incident of this sort is like the blackness that used to cross the waves in the bay & make my heart sink when I sat doing lessons at the long table in St Ives drawing room. Sordid—cheap—And the impression was enforced by a visit to Putney. The streets of villas make me more dismal than slums. Each has a cropped tree growing out of a square lifted from the pavement in front of it. Then the interiors—But I dont want to dwell on this. As Leonard said, its the soul of Sylvia in stucco. They were sitting in the dining room with a large table, reading novels—Its partly that I’m a snob. The middle classes are cut so thick, & ring so coarse, when they laugh or express themselves. The lower classes don’t do this at all.

It is said that Mr Wilkinson was nearly drunk; that excuse can’t serve Mrs Squire though; she has spread more widely; is even more settled into a kind of whitish sediment; a sort of indecency to me in her passive gloating contentment in the arm chair opposite; like some natural function, performing automatically—a jelly fish—without volition, yet with terrifying potentiality. She breaks off into young on the least provocation: Squire is at least direct & honest. I don’t like it when he talks about love patriotism & paternity, but on the other hand I can speak my mind to him. Love came into the discussion on account of the Athenaeum. According to Squire the A. denies everything. It is a frost of death for all creative activity. Now the London Mercury provides a very fertile soil. He pressed me to write for the London Mercury. The A. is winning itself a bad name, on account of its hard sceptical tone. I tried to explain to Squire that there is such a thing as honesty & a high standard; his retort is & there are such things as poetry & enthusiasm. At present the battle in our circles is between James & Desmond. James wishes to ‘stab humbug dead’. Desmond & I wish, on the contrary, to revive it like a phoenix from its ashes. The difference is fundamental; but I am equally able to write for Murry, Squire or Desmond—a proof of catholicity or immorality, according to your taste.

But with us its a question of drains. We are in for a spell of bad luck & find ourselves compelled to spend £200 perhaps on drains, which, six months ago, would have been Mrs Brewer’s concern. Still, we had fears for a thousand.

At tea with Elena, in the absence of Bruce [Richmond], we broached, delicately, the subject of the [Times Literary] Supplement. She said that people were nice to her in order to influence reviews. She said they made Bruce’s life a burden to him. I lightly sketched my interview with Mrs Clifford. It was all known to her, I could see; she knew Mrs Clifford’s methods. She dines with Lady Dilke, & hears her japes with Stephen McKenna. I liked Elena for sharing my feeling of repulsion; indeed she is more clearminded & innocent than I am, & regards it through the simple brown eyes of the nicest, most modest, of collie dogs. I liked her better than before, & she sat on a stool, & told me how she does this that & the other for the diseased & the afflicted, & I thought she must be a pleasant sight at a bedside. People who have no brilliance or subtlety seem to take things in directly & sanely in such a way as to abash me, who count myself among the brilliant. There they are, it seems, without exertion or self applause: nor are they much deceived by brilliance. The rest I must skip, since I have 6 biographies to read for Desmond. A letter from a Mr Askew in Staffordshire about N. & D. pleasant; & odd to please the lower classes.

Wednesday 4 February

I had rather catch Leonard’s itch than Lottie’s—that’s my only contribution to lice psychology which still occupies our minds, & wastes our mornings; & poisons our quiet after tea. For according to Fergusson, they turn over in their lairs when warm. No improvement so far—also, so far as I know, no infection. But imagination! By taking thought I can itch at any point on my hundreds of inches of skin. I do it now.

The mornings from 12 to 1 I spend reading the Voyage Out. I’ve not read it since July 1913. And if you ask me what I think I must reply that I don’t know—such a harlequinade as it is—such an assortment of patches—here simple & severe—here frivolous & shallow—here like God’s truth—here strong & free flowing as I could wish. What to make of it, Heaven knows. The failures are ghastly enough to make my cheeks burn—& then a turn of the sentence, a direct look ahead of me, makes them burn in a different way. On the whole I like the young womans mind considerably. How gallantly she takes her fences—& my world what a gift for pen & ink! I can do little to amend; & must go down to posterity the author of cheap witticisms, smart satires & even, I find, vulgarisms—crudities rather—that will never cease to rankle in the grave. Yet I see how people prefer it to N. & D.—I dont say admire it more, but find it a more gallant & inspiriting spectacle.

To Madame Grave’s this afternoon—& found her in her great new house. Maman is getting very trying poor dear. You set her on the stool & she does nothing. Then she wants the stool again—But you’ve just been there & done nothing maman! Then she calls me cruel—very trying. And when she sleeps her mouth hangs down, as though she were dead. She’s getting senile. All this simply, tenderly even, as we wander about the house, looking at the furniture. I like her childishness, & her unquenchable desire to make me another dress which will really be done in a week when she cant finish what’s on hand.

Friday 13 February

Again many lapses & the same excuses. For some time now life has been considerably ruffled by people. Age or fame or the return of peace—I dont know which—but anyhow I grow wearied of ‘going out to tea’; & yet cant resist it. To leave a door shut that might be open is in my eyes some form of blasphemy. That may be; meanwhile I neither write my diary nor read my Greek. There was a lunch party at the Café Royal on the day of Duncan’s private view to record: 12 guests; everything handsomely done; I stimulated & fuddled with wine; a queer assortment of the usual & the unusual. There was Mrs Grant, a woman still sailing like a yatcht under the breath of mature charm; Pippa; Adrian; Bunny; Lytton. Lytton had laid out £70 on one of the pictures. Maynard rose & said “To our deep affection for Duncan”. I fancy Duncan would rather have done without fuss, & he slunk off after lunch, leaving us to visit the show. It’s absurd—my capacity for flooding scenes with irrational excitement; in which mood I say rather more than I mean; or rather what I do mean. Surveying the room with Adrian I thought him despondent, like a man now aware of failure, & contrasting his life with those of his contemporaries. ‘How distinguished we all are!’ I said; & then it came out—or did I imagine it all?—that he & K⁠[arin]. feel themselves isolated & like people who have been ploughed in some examination. About 35 the lists are posted up for everyone to read. On the impulse of this I invited them to dine; & when they come I shall find myself, I predict, utterly at fault. Meanwhile I say nothing & have nothing to say of Duncan’s pictures. They spun in my head like the white wine I’d drunk; so lovely, so delicious, so easy to adore. However I only caught glimpses here & there as well dressed people moved across them. Then tea with Roger at the Burlington, walking across with Maynard; & hearing that his book is now in the 15th thousand; but to the credit of Cambridge he remains unmoved, & is more, instead of less, modest than before.

Next day I bought one of Duncan’s pictures; sacrificing a pomegranate coloured dress which much took my fancy. The dress connects itself with tea at Eily’s. She disappointed me: slovenly, compromising, slouching through life content at heart with the second best but complaining on the surface—so she struck me; & so matronly & decorous & such a trim smug home, & such commonplace children. Honest Bernard, being honest & of the Darwin ware that never cracks, pleased me much better. He talked about golf & the Waddon Chase dispute. But I shall never see Eily again.

After that, I must skip over forgotten days & alight at Ottoline’s last night (I skip tea with Ottoline & Birrell & Tony Birrell the imbecile). Yet I don’t know that I can describe an evening party—Philip & I sitting together watched the door open & people come in. There were more of the shady smart sort than of old; or so they looked to me since I did not know them. There were Eliots & Huxleys & Forster &—all the rest. My single diversion was a dialogue with W. J. Turner, an inarticulate rednosed, infinitely modest man, with prominent brown eyes, nice vague eyes, seeming to wish to tell the truth; yet too shy to be ready with it. Squire felt me fathoming his soul t’other night; so he said; Squire respects me immensely; oh well, I’m afraid that had some share in my liking for Turner. At a party now I feel a little famous—the chances are people like Turner whose names I know, also know my name. Moreover, people like Turner are very glad to be praised. That comes always as a surprise. The Eliots gladly dine with us. Murry is affectionate & bantering. I must have one coloured figure though in my black & white; I must spare a phrase for the sealing wax green of Ottoline’s dress. This bright silk stood out over a genuine crinoline. She did control the room on account of it. Yet I dreamt all night of her disillusioned with a weak pouting face, revealing her inner discontent. If anyone is disillusioned she, so they say, is. Indeed I can’t help thinking her unhappy!

Last week end at the Arnold Forsters I’ve entirely left out.

Sunday 15 February

Partly to obliterate the Webbs, partly to put off for a few minutes reading the Voyage Out I will say that we lunched with the Webbs; had Adrian, Sanger & Hussey to dine last night. But the Webbs! I find the hour of 1.30 on a cold blowy day, precisely fitting to them. As we walk down Grosvenor Road the old papers blow & the middle classes parade in their Sunday clothes. The houses have a red raw look. Factory chimneys face the windows across the river. Owing to Sunday all barges are moored. There is no sun or warmth. But what are they going for? Why should the right pursuits be so entirely hideous? Then theres the mutton & the cabbage & apple tart—all adequate but joyless. Bad cigarettes. A little whisky. The drawing room now a glacial white with water colours hung accurately apart. Mrs Webb displaying shark like teeth. Webb daubed red, & clumsily thick in person. The window in the back room is of frosted glass to conceal back windows. No longer am I frightened; only dreary & dismal, & rasped all over by the sense of so hideous a prospect. Mr Cross of the Foreign Office had brough⁠[t] six portfolios of papers to be looked through. Mrs Webb told me it was wrong to prevent L. from going into Parliament; we want men of subtle intellect &—But what is ‘right’ & who are ‘we’. Frostily friendly she said good bye. One deals with the situation more easily, but the horror of it increases with familiarity. Shall we become like that too? I stamp up & down the platform to warm myself; steep my hands in hot water, crouch over the fire, but still I’m irritated & exacerbated.

Wednesday 3 March

So then at the end of that week we went to Rodmell, & are back again two days ago. But I’ve numbers of old clothes in my dirty clothes basket—scenes, I mean, tumbled pell mell into my receptacle of a mind, & not extracted till form & colour are almost lost. I suppose ‘going out to tea’ continued; oh, there was a dinner at Gordon Square, when Mary, becoming almost peevish in her bedroom refused to part with hair pins: I made a note of that scene; & have branded her ‘stupid’—can one say vulgar? I think not. But dressing for gentlemen induces some disease of the complexion when examined by pure feminine light. Desmond was there: Desmond warm, affectionate, the oldest friend, so I sometimes feel; perhaps the best. I was touched, that is, that he ran along the platform to wish me goodnight. Then we sold Uncle Thoby for £150 to Mr Prinsep: & directly I got the cheque I regretted it—oh dear—again. I’m learning this trick, & wake saying it.

Then there was Roger’s speech at the Club & my first effort—5 minutes consecutive speaking—all very brilliant, & opening the vista of that form of excitement not before glimpsed at. Dined with Nessa & Duncan in Soho. Saw the woman drop her glove. A happy evening. Eliot & Sydney dine—Sydney righting himself after our blow about Suffield—not without a grampus sigh or so—Then off to Monks—& here I should write large & bright about the SPRING. It has come. It has been with us over a fortnight. Never did a winter sleep more like an infant sucking its thumb. Daffodils all out; garden set with thick golden crocuses; snowdrops almost over; pear trees budding; birds in song; days like June with a touch of the sun—not merely a painted sky but a warm one. Now we’ve been to Kew. I assure you, this is the earliest & loveliest & most sustained spring I remember. Almond trees out.

Saturday 6 March

No sooner had I written this [the date] than Madame Gravé appeared, & has left only the wreck of an evening behind her. Still if I don’t fill a page now, God knows when I shall again: an endless prospect of unrecorded activity now stretches before me: also behind. Did I say that Desmond & I cheered the return of Mr Asquith to Parliament? I saw a sleek white satiny looking bare head. Also Margot standing up, swaying slightly, & drawing her hands to & from her lips, while a policeman squirmed on the carriage roof—always a touch of the grotesque in these proceedings, though emotions rose like a spring tide, & swept me off my feet, or rather elevated me unconsciously to a parapet, whence I saw the aforementioned bare white head. Tea with Molly & old Mrs MacCarthy; emotions—about the death of a friend; gossip about the Blunts’ law suit: Molly wearing 2 minute cows horns above her ears.

Then?—Tuesday & Wednesday here in Richmond printing Hope; & Elena dined with us on Tuesday & made a speech at the Guild, & presented me incidentally with one of those puzzles which I always get wrong I fancy. How far can she be talked to? Is her withdrawal shock or stupidity? Then this ‘niceness’; what does it amount to? For seconds she can make me feel crude & provincial; then, as I say, there’s the silence—& Heaven knows what goes forward. The machine seems to stop. As for her liking or disliking—I know nothing about it. Her personal presence—so comely, stately & maternal always reduces me—till I grate on the rocks of (I suppose) her indifference to my enthusiasm. I rather believe that the nice people feel more temperately & universally than we do—& with none of our passion.

Then on Thursday, dine with the Macarthys, & the first Memoir Club meeting. A highly interesting occasion. Seven people read—& Lord knows what I didn’t read into their reading. Sydney [Waterlow], to whom the occasion was one of some importance, signified as much by reading us a dream—in reality a parable, to account for explain the seeming obtuseness of daylight Sydney by the imaginative power of dreaming Sydney—altogether a queer, self-conscious, self analytic performance, interesting to me. Clive purely objective; Nessa starting matter of fact: then overcome by the emotional depths to be traversed; & unable to read aloud what she had written. Duncan fantastic & tongue—not tied—tongue enchanted. Molly literary about tendencies & William Morris, carefully composed at first, & even formal: suddenly saying “Oh this is absurd—I can’t go on” shuffling all her sheets; beginning on the wrong page; firmly but waveringly, & carrying through to the end. “These meagre Welsh, these hard-headed Scots—I detest them—I wanted to be the daughter of a French marquise by a misalliance with—” That was the tone of it—& then “these mild weak Cornishes”. Roger well composed; story of a coachman who stole geraniums & went to prison. Good: but too objective. I doubt that anyone will say the interesting things but they can’t prevent their coming out. Before this by the way, I saw Nessa’s new home, no. 50, inspected Pippa’s chaos at no. 51; & looked in upon Adrian & Karin doing biology in their dining room. Coming out we ran upon James—such is the rabbit warren nature of the place.

Poor Mills Whitham yesterday wanted praise of his book, & I hadn’t read it—poor man—Sylvia a little depressed—but then with a hu⁠[s]⁠band in brown corduroys, writing country novels—unreadably bad—no wonder.

Tuesday 9 March

In spite of some tremors, I think I shall go on with this diary for the present. I sometimes think that I have worked through the layer of style which suited it—suited the comfortable bright hour after tea; & the thing I’ve reached now is less pliable. Never mind: I fancy old Virginia, putting on her spectacles to read of March 1920 will decidedly wish me to continue. Greetings! my dear ghost; & take heed that I dont think 50 a very great age. Several good books can be written still; & here’s the bricks for a fine one.

To return to the present owner of the name: on Sunday I went up to Campden Hill to hear the S⁠[c]⁠hubert quintet—to see George Booth’s house—to take notes for my story—to rub shoulders with respectability—all these reasons took me there, & were cheaply gratified at 7/6.

Whether people see their own rooms with the devastating clearness that I see them, thus admitted once for one hour, I doubt. Chill superficial seemliness; but thin as a March glaze of ice on a pool. A sort of mercantile smugness. Horsehair & mahogany is the truth of it; & the white panels, Vermeer reproductions, omega table & variegated curtains rather a snobbish disguise. The least interesting of rooms: the compromise; though of course, thats interesting too. I took against the family system. Old Mrs Booth enthroned on a sort of commode in widows dress: flanked by devoted daughters; with grandchildren somehow symbolical cherubs. Such neat dull little boys & girls. There we all sat in our furs & white gloves. Elena asked us to dine: I (perhaps for this reason) exempt her & Bruce from this censure.

Monday at the Club, which I see I’ve ceased to describe. Alix; Bunny, Birrell; James; finally Morgan. Alix told me that Florence Darwin—still I call her Maitland—is dead. For a moment I was shocked. Then it seemed to me that her greatest happiness had been with Fred; then I pitied poor old Frank, left for the 3rd time alone. Then an attempt to remember her which I can do rather accurately: the beautiful brown eyes, with the defiant look in them; the brown hair; the colour; the emphatic manner; the exaggeration of her talk—reminding me a little of mother—indeed the manner was much mother’s. Always simply dressed in black, I think; & holding herself superbly—in the sense of proudly, tensely; nerves much on edge; but showing so to us only in her dramatic ways; quick movements; beautiful turns & glances, as she protested—Fred treating her with a kind of bantering courtesy, & amusement; which I felt was the cover of a deep understanding between them not unveiled before us. I went one evening into his study to speak to him; opened the door & stood for a second silent; he raised his eyes, thought for a moment that I was Florence, whereupon he looked tender & intimate as I had never seen him—which look of course vanished directly he recognised me. If I now heard that this letter of Fredegond’s was untrue, I should try to see her again. But what is it that prevents one from ever seeing people, when years have passed, & there have been deaths & births & marriages?

Thursday 18 March

Strange that this should be my last reflection, since without remembering it, I told Irene Noel-Baker that I dreaded the thought of meeting her after 6 or 7 years. She said the same thing—but I rather guess this was simulated. Anyhow we met at the Cecils last Sunday; & I see why she dreads meeting me—because I look at her. Oh you little adventuress, I think to myself, so now you’ve turned matron, & are pushing your way & Philip’s way into political circles—witness the bright comprehending chatter she kept up with Ld. R. & Ormsby Gore. & you’ve got a son, & are proud of nursing him yourself, & you’ve grown plump, & look less romantic—though the positive search for obvious truths is carried on as pertinaciously as ever. Lady Beatrice daughter of Lord Salisbury, a frank dashing brainless young goddess—who palpably loses divinity if you look at her. Her eyes are of the brightness, hardness, & insensibility of greyblue marbles.

Leonard went on to see Waller upon that curious family crisis which I foresaw some years ago. Still if this diary were the diary of the soul I could write at length of the 2nd meeting of the Memoir Club. Leonard was objective & triumphant; I subjective & most unpleasantly discomfited. I dont know when I’ve felt so chastened & out of humour with myself—a partner I generally respect & admire. “Oh but why did I read this egotistic sentimental trash!” That was my cry, & the result of my sharp sense of the silence succeeding my chapter. It started with loud laughter; this was soon quenched; & then I couldn’t help figuring a kind of uncomfortable boredom on the part of the males; to whose genial cheerful sense my revelations were at once mawkish & distasteful. What possessed me to lay bare my soul! Still, the usual revulsion has now taken place. I saw Nessa yesterday, & she guessed at none of this—which indeed Leonard firmly assured me was a miasma on my part due to late nights &c.

Another late night last night, dining with Lytton, Clive & Nessa at the Eiffel Tower. Lytton stuck in Vic: intimate & cordial, with perhaps a touch of regret. “How seldom we meet!” said Nessa. It was true & yet we all want to meet; & can’t do it. They are all speeding south—Nessa, Duncan & Maynard to Italy; Lytton, Carrington & Partridge to Spain.

Saturday 10 April

We sped to Rodmell, which accounts for another formidable break. By the way, Morgan keeps a diary, & in his diary Morgan writes conversation—word for word, when the humour takes him. I dont know that the humour takes me to describe our Easter at Monks House. Through the first week of it I was driven, as with shut eyes, eyes being indeed so intent upon Henry James as to see nothing else. That missive despatched, I got such pleasure out of everything that I keep putting houses & streets—yes & people too—against that background, & seeing them look flat & faded. Clive & Mary last night brought in the loud breezy atmosphere of the Brighton pier. We are getting middle aged. I see him stout, kind—indeed cordial—but so cynical as to be almost uninteresting. Poor Mary has little of the Brass Band about her; but much of the mute meretricious fille de joie—I’ve said that partly for the sake of the m’s; but there’s truth in it. Then, uncomfortably enough, I kept striking upon something soft & unprotected in her—childish, pathetic almost. She’s the mother of children too. I daresay what with one thing & another I’m grown rather brazen—so many compliments (Oh, Morgan just now writes to say my memoir was ‘splendid’—& dare he ask me to review for the Herald—Desmond sends me stalls for the pioneers tomorrow—[Bruce] Richmond—but enough of quotations). Moreover, I can wince outrageously to read K.M.’s praises in the Athenaeum. Four poets are chosen; she’s one of them. Of course Murry makes the choice, & its Sullivan who rates her story a work of genius. Still, you see how well I remember all this—how eagerly I discount it.

To describe Monks House would be to trench upon literature, which I cant do here; since we only slept by snatches last night, & at 4 a.m. turned a mouse out of L.’s bed. Mice crept & rattled all night through. Then the wind got up. Hasp of the window broken. Poor L. out of bed for the 5th time to wedge it with a toothbrush. So I say nothing about our projects at Monks, though the view across meadows to Caburn is before me now; & the hyacinths blooming, & the orchard walk. Then being alone there—breakfast in the sun—posts—no servants—how nice it all is!

I’m planning to begin Jacob’s Room next week with luck. (That’s the first time I’ve written that.) Its the spring I have it [in] my mind to describe; just to make this note—that one scarcely notices the leaves out on the trees this year, since they seem never entirely to have gone in—never any of that iron blackness of the chestnut trunks—always something soft & tinted; such as I can’t remember in my life before. In fact, we’ve skipped a winter; had a season like the midnight sun; & now return to full daylight. So I hardly notice that chestnuts are out—the little parasols spread on our window tree; & the churchyard grass running over the old tombstones like green water.

Mrs Ward is dead; poor Mrs Humphry Ward; & it appears that she was merely a woman of straw after all—shovelled into the grave & already forgotten. The most perfunctory earth strewing even by the orthodox.

Thursday 15 April

My handwriting seems to be going to the dogs. Perhaps I confuse it with my writing. I said that Richmond was enthusiastic over my James article? Well, two days ago, little elderly Walkley attacked it in The Times, said I’d fallen into H.J.’s worst mannerisms—hard beaten ‘figures’—& hinted that I was a sentimental lady friend. Percy Lubbock was included too; but, rightly or wrongly, I delete the article from my mind with blushes, & see all my writing in the least becoming light. I suppose its the old matter of ‘florid gush’—no doubt a true criticism, though the disease is my own, not caught from H.J., if thats any comfort. I must see to it though. The Times atmosphere brings it out; for one thing I have to be formal there, especially in the case of H.J.; & so contrive an article rather like an elaborate design; which encourages ornament. Desmond, however, volunteered admiration. I wish one could make out some rule about praise & blame. I predict that I’m destined to have blame in any quantity. I strike the eye; & elderly gentlemen in particular get annoyed. An unwritten novel will certainly be abused; I can’t foretell what line they’ll take this time. Partly, its the ‘writing well’ that sets people off—& always has done, I suppose. ‘Pretentious’ they say; & then a woman writing well, & writing in The Times—that’s the line of it. This slightly checks me from beginning Jacob’s room. But I value blame. It spurs one, even from Walkley; who is (I’ve looked him out) 65, & a cheap little gossip, I’m glad to think, laughed at even by Desmond. But don’t go forgetting that there’s truth in it; more than a grain in the criticism that I’m damnably refined in The Times: refined & cordial: I don’t think its easy to help it: since, before beginning the H.J. article, I took a vow I’d say what I thought, & say it in my own way. Well, I’ve written all this page, & not made out how to steady myself when the Unwritten Novel appears.

Rain has come—what I mind much more is the black sky: so ugly. Yesterday I think I was unhappy all day long. First, Walkley; then 2 teeth out; then tooth ache all the evening; L. out to speak in Richmond; & couldn’t read because of the throb in my gum. The day before I went to the Niggers’ show in Chelsea; very sad impressive figures; obscene; somehow monumental; figures of Frenchmen, I thought, sodden with civilisation & cynicism; yet they were carved (perhaps) in the Congo 100’s of years ago. Hannay came up. ‘Mrs Woolf?’ Yes—but who—? We met years ago at the Squires—Hannay. Ah, you do art criticism now? Tell me what I ought to think of the carvings. And these Peruvian bowls—Its the shape, in the bowls. I’ve lived too long with the carvings. (I don’t think this expresses him, though. A man who spaces his words with long silences—a bad critic I’m told. As one would expect of anyone working at the bookshop.) Then I heard Desmond saying O its upstairs—but in he came with a tall lean brown elderly man in frock coat & top hat. Not introduced to me, as though there were a gulf between us. I slipped out into Chelsea Church, & saw the tablet to H.J.—florid & cultivated if you like—spindly letters, & Jamesian phrases. Perhaps by Gosse. So to Madame Gravé’s—so to the 17 Club—so home. & then my tooth was beginning.

What book can I settle to read? I want something that wont colour my mornings mood—something a little severe. My notion is to write this in chapters straight off; not beginning one unless I can count on so many days clear for finishing it.

Saturday 17 April

The pain from Walkley is dying out, since I’ve begun Jacob’s Room. I can inhibit poor L. as I myself am inhibited. Your trick is repetition, I say: whereupon his pen sticks like a broken machine. To the Bach festival last night; & coincidence led me to run at once into two people I’ve not met for an age, Noel, for one; then, as I settled into my seat, a voice said Virginia! It was Walter Lamb. The egg shaped man—the billiard ball man—sat by me, & told me a great deal about Bach. Bach was very beautiful, though the human element in the choir always distracts me. They aren’t beautiful; all in greens, greys, pinks, blacks, fresh from the suburbs & high tea. The hall seemed to suit them better than the music. Home with Walter. “I had such a vivid dream of Thoby the other night” he said. “He came in after beagling, & said, something very important—I can’t remember what. Very odd—for I don’t think of him often.” He was glad to tell me this. I make him tell me about his Royalties. In fact here’s a secret that mustn’t be repeated—Walter is writing Prince Albert’s Academy speech for him. He has a nimble mind, & makes himself much at home in his corner of the world; indeed he’s one of the people for whom the world was made the shape it is. I wonder whether admiration of one’s own family is snobbish, or somehow the product of love: he seems to love Dorothy & Henry in this particular way.

Tuesday 20 April

Saw the birth of Ka’s son in the Times this morning, & feel slightly envious all day in consequence. To the Bach choir last night; but one of our failures. Is it the weather? I’d made out on waking, such a perfect day; & one by one my events missed fire. Such a good morning’s writing I’d planned, & wasted the cream of my brain on the telephone. Then the weather; great bouncing gusts all set about with rain soaking one; buses crowded; left typewriting paper in the bus; a long time waiting at the Club—then Bach unaccompanied isn’t easy—though at last (after L. had gone home) I was swept up to the heights by a song. Anna Magdalena’s song. I walked a few steps beyond Herbert Fisher coming out; followed him across the empty lamplit purlieus of Westminster, saw him step so distinguished, yet to my eye, so empty, into Palace Yard, & so to take part in ruling the Empire. His head bent—legs a little wavering—small feet—I tried to put myself inside him, but could only suppose he thought in an exalted way which to me would be all bunkum. Indeed, I feel this more & more. I’ve had my dive into their heads & come out again, I think.

I forgot to say how Hussey came on Sunday uninvited, & we took her to Margaret’s, & she talked such Stracheyese that I couldn’t think much of what she said. Binding Hope now. The books I chose were Berkeley; Maynard; & now they’ve sent Tchehov’s letters, & Barbellion. Never had so few to review—none from The Times (A.B.W⁠[alkley]. perhaps responsible?) none from the Athenaeum; but I’ve plenty to do all the same.

Saturday 24 April

Half blind with writing notices, & corrections in 160 copies of Paris, a Poem, by Hope Mirrlees. Then I’ve read some Berkeley, whom I much admire, & would like to catch the trick in his style—only I fear its thinking. Reading Maynard too—a book that influences the world without being in the least a work of art: a work of morality, I suppose. Morgan came for a night. Very easy going; as sensitive as a blue butterfly. So I was pleased to write in his birthday book which is one of his tests of niceness. And he’s obstinate about ‘niceness’—much of a puritan. Tells the truth. I wish I could write his talk down.

I must now write a postcard. Yes, I must really catch the first post if possible. I’ll take it myself—Is there time still—I’ll tell you what it is. The seat is being painted. The boy is so stupid he’ll paint it after its been rained upon. Then it will be ruined.

Nonsense said L. it wont hurt it.

But are you sure? Positive.

Oh then I’ll let it alone—if you’re quite sure. My mother is having the seat painted green. She wouldn’t let me do it, & the boy is dreadfully stupid. I found him putting on the paint without having scraped the old paint off first. &c …

This is very like Morgan; so too his reliance on Leonard. “Where d’you get your boots? Are Waterman pens the best.”

Wednesday 5 May

We have had a Thursday to Tuesday at Rodmell; which accounts, as I say, making my apology to this book, in which so few pages seem to have been written. As we sat down to dinner on Saturday, Desmond rapped at the door—To follow this up to its source, I should describe dinner at 46: Desmond, Lytton & Mary there; but I don’t much like describing dinners at 46. Desmond (this is L.’s saying not mine, & I quote it to avoid speaking grudgingly myself) produces a sense of frowst in the room. It rained; he lay back, smoking cigarettes eating sweets & opening novels which he never read. Being an editor has drugged the remnants of ambition in him, & he is now content. Content is disillusioning to behold: what is there to be content about? It seems, with Desmond now, always afternoon.

We worked at Kot’s book. Have I left him out too? His clasp of the hand crushes the little bones: his hand though inches thick is hard as bone, & typifies that dense, solid, concentrated man. He always speaks the truth, & gropes after it in psychology—rather a queer thing to do, & laying waste many a fair garden. As he says a thing, it sounds so convincing. We are publishing Gorki, & perhaps this marks some step over a precipice—I don’t know. He analysed Murry in this devastating way. K. is back I suppose; & I amuse myself with playing at the silly game—who’s to take the first step: I predict here that perhaps Murry will—if not, we dont meet for a year or two.

But hurry on to the climax—Massingham has offered Leonard Brailsford’s post on the Nation—to do the foreign article that is, drawing £400 a year. The drawback is that it means going up every Monday, perhaps Wednesdays, thus ties us tight. If this can be arranged, all else is satisfactory. He could drop his reviewing; do better work; get better pay; & perhaps—my private aim is to drop my reviewing too. But that doesn’t matter. I own I like a good compliment to L.: not boastfully; it seems right, I suppose. So now our fortunes look up again. Lytton dined here last night, & seemed confident, happy,—about to begin on Vic. in earnest. Chatto & Windus must have notice in order that they may lay in large stocks of paper in time.

Saturday 8 May

Massingham has postponed seeing L. which may mean that there’s some obstacle. Thinking it over, I shouldn’t be sorry if it fell through; for I cant help suspecting that work of this kind means more of a tie than any money—all the gold of Peru poured into my lap as Miss Mitford says—could repay. Besides, why should I slip the collar round his neck & myself spring free? Partly owing to Lytton, partly to the horror of writing 1, 2, 3, 4, reviews on end, 3 concerning Mitford too, I’ve been groaning & grumbling, & seeing myself caged, & all my desired ends—Jacob’s Room that is—vanishing down avenues. But 1 review weekly won’t hurt.

On Wednesday, Walter [Lamb], Adrian & Karin, & Molly Hamilton dined here. A chattering random vivacious evening: I cant remember any scrap of dialogue though. Perhaps with Molly & Karin that’s inevitable: Karin deaf of the ears, Molly a little obtuse in the senses. I observe that she scrupulously makes conversation to fill silences with; even though she’s nothing to say. Odd to me that life should require ‘professional women’. She is reading 500 novels, at 5/- each, for a prize competition; & had a batch of sickly stuff to masticate in the train going home. We discussed politics, A. & I trying to make her define her position; which is visionary. She is bored by the means, but believes in the end. I suppose she’ll be Hamilton M.P. one of these days; but the elections go badly for women, & Labour fights shy of them.

Yesterday I had tea with Saxon at the Club; &, remembering old lonely evenings of my own, when the married couple seemed so secure & lamplit, asked him back to dinner. I wonder though whether his loneliness ever frightens him as mine used to frighten me. I daresay office work is a great preservative.

Tuesday 11 May

It is worth mentioning, for future reference, that the creative power which bubbles so pleasantly on beginning a new book quiets down after a time, & one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in. Then one becomes resigned. Determination not to give in, & the sense of an impending shape keep one at it more than anything. I’m a little anxious. How am I to bring off this conception? Directly one gets to work one is like a person walking, who has seen the country stretching out before. I want to write nothing in this book that I dont enjoy writing. Yet writing is always difficult.

L. is up in London seeing his constituents. Eight gentlemen are waiting on him to learn his views. Then he’s having tea with Kot. He has a meeting (I think) won’t be home till late. I spent the afternoon typing & setting up Morgan’s story. Went out to buy a bun, called on Miss Milan about the chair covers, & when I’ve done this, I shall read Berkeley. At 2.15 Lady Cynthia Curzon was married to Captain Mosley. Though it was summer till 3.30, it is now brushed with blackness, & I must shut the window & put on my jersey. Nessa comes back on Friday. Clive & Mary are in Paris. Then, I had tea with A. & K. on Sunday & saw all the children—Judith a great lump of a child; Ann with a look of the Watts’ drawing of mother; yet both a good deal like Costelloes. I like coming back to Richmond after Gordon Sqre. I like continuing our private life, unseen by anyone. Murry has asked me to write stories for the Athenaeum. No mention of K⁠[atherine]’s wishing to see me.

Thursday 13 May

I open this in order to say that I had tea with Dora at the Club & was introduced to Mr Harold Banks. Who is he? Well, all the voices of the world will thunder in reply Banks! Thats his view of it anyhow. Figure a sandy florid broad faced man; talking with an American (really Australian) accent. Shirt with black lines. A pleasant smile. Eating steadily. Dora provided bread & butter. ‘No thank you I don’t smoke …’ “What is your plan exactly Mr Banks?” To tide over the revolution by the cooperation of the middle classes … Yes, but thats a little vague—A great many people wish to do that but—Well I’m here to do it Mrs Sanger—I don’t want to talk about my Russian experiences. I want to see whether I can get the middle classes with me. If not, I go to Scotland & speak in the streets—A very good idea, I’m sure—but what are you going to say? We want a change of government, Mrs Sanger—So many of us feel—Ah, but you English do nothing. You English & the French hold up the whole European movement. When the revolution comes—And when will it come? Within 5 years—you don’t believe it?

But why not write this down? I don’t believe in writing. I talk to the people. Organisation. Cooperation. Middle classes. The people. I shall do it—I’m going to do it. Organisation—There ought not to be a single horse in the streets—Look at your docks—Then these buildings ought to be turned into homes—What can we do without—The middle classes should come together—I’ve the programme ready—& Revolution is coming without a doubt.

Why do I disbelieve in Revolution—partly because of Mr Banks perhaps.

Saturday 15 May

Accurately described, today is a fine spring day, not a hot summer day—so L. & I shaded it off, walking up to the Park this afternoon. But Richmond on fine Saturdays is like a lime tree in full flower—suppose one were an insect sitting on the flower. All the others swarm & buzz, & burble. Being residents we don’t, of course.

A letter from Madge this morning, asking me to review her novel: a letter from Fisher Unwin offering to give me a copy. Such is the morality of a woman who won’t pollute her sons by staying at Charleston. I meant to say how we sat on the grass above the cedars & watched the deer; how I noticed the semi-transparent beauty of a parasol in the sun—how the air has this tenderness now that coloured dresses seem to glow in it. A long flattering review of me in the Nation, wiping out Massingham’s bitterness, & giving me my first taste of intelligent criticism, so I’m set up—even contemplate thanking the writer.

Flora & George dined here last night, ostensibly to discuss Clara [Woolf], really to tell us the simple fact that she’s going to America, & may stay there permanently. Can one imagine anything less desirable than to be a person who may stay permanently in America—& its hoped she does. The slightness of human relations often appals me. One doesn’t mind in the least whether she disappears for ever. This doesn’t apply to everyone I admit. I’m a little fidgety because Nessa hasn’t rung me up—probably she came back last night. I liked George more than I expected. A sandy salty looking youth, unambitious, lean, humorous, decided, content to be a schoolmaster for ever, so long as he doesn’t become headmaster. He talked about Sussex, the small owls, & the long eared owls; also the war; he was through it all; never wounded, & saw Damascus. He said the men are very unselfish but boring, because they can talk on so few subjects. How nice, I often think, normal people are!

Tuesday 18 May

Gordon Square begins again & like a snake renews its skin outworn—that’s the nearest I can come to a quotation. Gordon Square different—like a looking glass version of 46. You are let in, by a strange servant, go up bare steps, hear children crying at various stages, go up & up—till you reach what is, in the real Gordon Square, servants bedrooms—There’s an open door to be passed first, though, & Sophie inside, & one who, beneath a weight of flesh & bone proved to have the body of Annie Chart in her. Nessa is right at the top. Well we talked till I left at 8; interrupted though by Lytton, Angelica, & Julian. When Stella came back from Italy there were always a great many presents. So now I was given a hat, a brooch, & paper. Lytton said that James & Alix are to be married in 3 weeks. So after all, she has won. But though satisfactory, I find no excitement in this. They know each other too well to stir one’s imagination thinking of their future, as one does with most engagements. Then, talk talk; & as we were despatching the superficial & reaching the easy-intimate, I had to tear off, in the rain, to Wigmore Hall. Sat between Oliver & Saxon; & these musical people dont listen as I do, but critically, superciliously, without programmes.

Today Campbell has been to lunch. Told stories of Palestine. I like thinking I hear men speaking alone. How his general taught him to ride. “No need to say elk elk—you’re not talking to a canary.” C. dresses like a gentleman, & L. could say to him that he believed nothing without making him deny it. Little romance about the church: then I don’t see how they go through with it. How get through the service?—for you can’t gibe at God as one does at an editor—The worst of it must be that there’s no shop about God—I suppose not at least. Logan came on Sunday, & amused me for an hour. Told us about Christ, & his travels—but if you’re not amused by Logan, you’re irritated. So, alas, we begin to find; since his book flags & we run risk of losing money by it. A bad review in the Times, another in Athenaeum; no rush of orders. Hope dribbles along, but she is a negligeable matter.

Thursday 20 May

I’m filling my empty tank as fast as I can—for some reason, I’ve been in after tea lately, too lazy to read Greek, & rejected by the Times, though not by the Woman’s Times, by the by. A light article needed on Psychology of War Widows. All the burden & glory of reviewing falls on L. & I get on with Jacob—the most amusing novel writing I’ve done, I think; in the doing I mean. Up yesterday with peonies to Nessa; heard of the mysterious letters from the grave (but this story isn’t recorded—her maids disasters) also the money difficulties which threaten Maynard & through him, her. Gambling on the exchange is the technical name of it, & things rising for the moment, he loses. The question is how long he can hold out; triumph certain in the end, a crash that is. The war has put its skeleton fingers even into our pockets.

Then I went on with L. to dine with the Coles in Chelsea— The Coles are Webbs in embryo—with differences of course. I’m used to being at ease with clever young men, & to find myself stumped, caught out, leg before the wicket at every turn is not pleasant. Never was there such a quick, hard, determined young man as Cole; covering his Labour sympathies, which are I suppose intellectual, with the sarcasm & sneers of Oxford. Then there’s a bust of W⁠[illiam]. Morris on the side board, too much to eat, Morris curtains, all the works of all the classics, & Cole & Mrs hopping on the surface like a couple of Cockney sparrows incapable of more than pecks & sips which they do too skilfully for my taste. The whole effect as of electric light full in the eyes—unbecoming at my age. I think the irritation rose partly from a sense that his cleverness was inaccessible. Then they call each other ‘darling’. Then there were Mr & Mrs Mair, from Government offices, jokes about Beveridge & Shaw, & David Mair subsiding into complete silence in the background till taken home by his broad browed, loquacious wife in the rag⁠[g]⁠ed [?] petticoat. One can see Mrs Cole rapidly becoming the cleverish elderly fox terrier type of intellectual woman—as it is not a shade or valley in her mind. Cole, grinning like a gutterpipe demon took us to the door—so spry, alert, virile, & ominous.

I have written to Katherine. No answer. Mr Lynd reviewed me in the Nation.

Monday 24 May

A real Bank Holiday—blazing weather—sound of buses unceasing—crowds like queues in the streets—& we spent it properly going to Hurlingham to see polo, of which I must make this rapid note. You get the impression that the turf is india rubber—so lightly do the horses spring—touching it & up again—Captain Lockit galloping down with his stick like a Persian rider with a lance. A large white ball is then thrown in the midst. The horses twirl & dart, dance their paws, twist on their tails like cats; almost like long lean cats their scamper after the ball; only as they come past you hear a roar in the nostrils. But the bounce & agility of them all knotted together pawing the ball with their feet indescribable; passing in a second from full gallop to delicate dribbling trot as the ball is dribbled almost between their feet. This is the game of the officers of England. Each had 8 ponies, & one lasted in this frenzy of freshness only 7 minutes. Anyhow it was well worth seeing. A very large ground. The elect in a shelter; public squatting on grass, or on chairs. The horses become suddenly big when they gallop straight at you & their pace alarming. At a little distance the most graceful & controlled of movements.

Summer has set in two days ago. Yesterday for the first time we lunched out of doors. The Swedes came. Affable conversation. She a painter, a cool friendly Scandinavian, highly enlightened; but I suppose there’s some lack of temperament in the enlightened races.

Wednesday 26 May

Running through this I see I’ve left out one or two important pieces in the mosaic. Massingham has written to ask L. to act as 2nd string in the foreign dept, during vacations, which we interpret to mean that Goldie has taken the 1st string. This suits us on the whole better than t’other. Then L. has been adopted as the Labour candidate of the 7 Universities; may even be writing his letter of acceptance upstairs now. We are having the kitchen re-built at a cost of £80 at Monks House. And the night Morgan & Nessa dined here we saw a fire. Three minutes of excitement—great flames shooting up behind the playground; then a glow as of red yellow gauze, with sparks rising & falling; then a lovely sight when the hose shot into the air, wrapping itself in light & soaring like a rocket. A pouring crackling noise all the time, & now & then wood crashing in. L. went out; & many people came trotting along in mackintoshes; 12 o’clock being struck. The woman next door, wife of the fire-captain, rushed off distracted, & came home in tears, (so the servants say—they sat up, of course). And then I’m reviewed in the New Republic with high praise—indeed no blame. Is this typical of America—more cordial to the English than we are to ourselves? This morning Katherine writes a stiff & formal note thanking me for my kind post card, & saying she will be delighted to see me, though ‘grown very dull’. What does this mean—she hurt with me? Anyhow I go on Friday to find out, unless stopped as is always possible. I praised her story warmly; sincerely too.

Monday 31 May

Back from Monk’s an hour ago, after the first week end—the most perfect, I was going to say, but how can I tell what week ends we mayn’t spend there? The first pure joy of the garden I mean. Wind enough outside; within sunny & sheltered; & weeding all day to finish the beds in a queer sort of enthusiasm which made me say this is happiness. Gladioli standing in troops: the mock orange out. Kitchen wall battered down. We were out till 9 at night, though the evening was cold. Both stiff & scratched all over today; with chocolate earth in our nails. Then the halt has started again; we went into Lewes for the first time since the war. Gunn rode across the level crossing with his great bob tailed dog. The Thomases were on the platform: poor little draggle tail sisters, scarcely holding to their ladyhood any longer. Thomas affable & kindly to the men, telling them, in a sermonical voice, about the water spout at Louth. “Very se-e-erious, many lives lost, & a quarter of a million damage”, as if to conciliate them; no teeth in his upper jaw. Gunn cantered through the water meadows, his mare ‘very clever at the gates, but she won’t stand still’ as the Miss T.’s said, these things interesting them more than water spouts.

I had my interview with K.M. on Friday. A steady discomposing formality & coldness at first. Enquiries about house & so on. No pleasure or excitement at seeing me. It struck me that she is of the cat kind: alien, composed, always solitary & observant. And then we talked about solitude, & I found her expressing my feelings, as I never heard them expressed. Whereupon we fell into step, & as usual, talked as easily as though 8 months were minutes—till Murry came in with a pair of blue & pink Dresden candle pieces: “How very nice” she said. “But do fetch the candles.” “Virginia, how awful what am I to say? He has spent £5 on them” she said, as he left the room. I see that they’re often hostile. For one thing—Murry’s writing. “Did you like C. & A.?” No, I didn’t. “Neither did I. But I thought D. of an I. too dreadful—wrong—Its very very difficult, often…” Then Murry came back. We chatted as usual. Aldous was our butt. Aldous has brought out Leda: will the public canonise him too? But Murry going at length, K. & I once more got upon literature. Question of her stories. This last one, Man without a T., is her first in the new manner. She says she’s mastered something—is beginning to do what she wants. Prelude a coloured post card. Her reviews mere scribbling without a serious thought in them. And Sullivan’s praise in the A⁠[thenaeum]. detestable to her. A queer effect she produces of someone apart, entirely self-centred; altogether concentrated upon her ‘art’: almost fierce to me about it, I pretending I couldn’t write. “What else is there to do? We have got to do it. Life—” then how she tells herself stories at night about all the lives in a town. “Its a spring night. I go down to the docks—I hear the travellers say—” acting it in her usual way, & improvising. Then asked me to write stories for the A. “But I don’t know that I can write stories” I said, honestly enough, thinking that in her view, after her review of me, anyhow, those were her secret sentiments. Whereupon she turned on me, & said no one else could write stories except me—Kew [Gardens] the right ‘gesture’; a turning point—Well but Night & Day? I said, though I hadn’t meant to speak of it.

‘An amazing achievement’ she said. Why, we’ve not had such a thing since I don’t know when—,

But I thought you didn’t like it?

Then she said she could pass an examination in it. Would I come & talk about it—lunch—so I’m going to lunch; but what does her reviewing mean then?—or is she emotional with me? Anyhow, once more as keenly as ever I feel a common certain understanding between us—a queer sense of being ‘like’—not only about literature—& I think it’s independent of gratified vanity. I can talk straight out to her.

Saturday 5 June

Here we are in the prime of the year which I’ve thought of so often in January & December, always with pleasure; so that even if June’s bad, one has had more pleasure from it than from all the other months. Is that cynical? What I believe is that one brings out the taste of the month one’s in by opposing to it another. But to think of December now gives me no pleasure. I’ve gone back into winter clothes; its bitter windy; & the sun sparks & glints instead of burning. It burnt on Derby day though [Wednesday 2 June]—the day I lunched with K.M. & had 2 hours priceless talk—priceless in the sense that to no one else can I talk in the same disembodied way about writing; without altering my thought more than I alter it in writing here. (I except L. from this). We talked about books, writing of course: my own. N. & D. a first rate novel, she said. The suppression in it puzzling, but accounted for by circumstances. Then I said ‘You’ve changed. Got through something;’ indeed theres a sort of self command about her as if having mastered something subterfuges were no longer so necessary. She told me of her terrific experiences last winter—experience of loneliness chiefly; alone (or only with ‘Leslie Moor’ alias Ida Baker) in a stone house with caverns beneath it into which the sea rushed: how she lay on bed alone all day with a pistol by her; & men banged at the door. Sydney wrote ‘Stick it out’ twice, underlined. Murry sent a balance sheet of his accounts: came at Christmas with plum pudding & curd cheese; ‘Now I’m here, its all right’. Then she went to him for assurance; didn’t get it; & will never look for that particular quality again. I see what she means, vaguely. She is nervous about her book coming out; fearing lest she hasn’t done enough. What she feels exactly for fame & criticism, I don’t know; but then in our perhaps too exalted talk, this is not very exactly told. Anyhow, I enjoyed myself; & this fragmentary intermittent intercourse of mine seems more fundamental than many better established ones.

I dined last night with Walter Lamb & Mrs Madan at Hounslow. In this old manor house (cream coloured & black) Miss Arnold used to lie drunk. The high rooms are mostly panelled, or papered with Chinese papers. Outside there is a square garden, all its hair flowing in the wind. It was a cold night, & poor Mrs M. crouched in one room, near the flaring grass, supported by rich volumes, apparently not reading, nor sewing, nor talking, her husband away, & the people of Hounslow vicious & hostile. A kind of echo of great luxury everywhere, as becomes the daughter of Mrs Saxton Noble. Much talk of royalties, she & W. moving in the same sphere. One Princess, Marie Louise, lodges, for months now, in Kent House, & has driven away Mr & Master Noble. She keeps royal state with a maid of honour. The atmosphere of this struck me greatly; the unreality. Then her efforts to join the King’s private view of the R.A. Something 18th century in it; a taste of patrons & back stair intrigue. Mrs M. was a sharp shrewd unpretentious young woman, going to have a baby, entirely fed on chopped hay, I should guess, but not servile; only not happy, & never will be, I suppose, since one could detect that her husband filled no important place. They started life in this Hounslow farm 10 months ago. “But what a splendid beginning for married life!” I said. “Indeed it isn’t!” she replied. Geoffrey had gone off, & taken the key of the port. The discomfort of the third rate (W.L. that is) became acute before the evening was over; like something out of tune. Something slate grey & furtive among innocent leaves.

Tuesday 8 June

It is quite right to think of June in December, save that its a little over-fresh today, almost as if there were Brighton sea round the corner. One of my field days yesterday—National Gallery—there met Clive—ices at Gunters—much of a spectacle—old black & white lady with a confidante observing manners & customs, benevolently, amused. Young man with a back like a clothes’ horse hung with perfect grey clothes—lithe women or girls with transparent legs tripping down into the shady caves—ices sucked or sipped in the strangest silence—two young ladies with their mother eating in complete silence: not a spark of life, properly dressed, from the country perhaps. But don’t mothers & daughters ever talk? Would a young man have waked them? I could not say what went forward in those mute minds. Dine with Nessa. The whole story of Mary was told me—a complete case of servant’s hysteria; all coming, I think, from her wishing to act a day dream, & then, poor creature, stepping too far & believing it, & now babbling in St Paneras Infirmary. The sight of her taken off was sinister; & all the servants were looking from all the windows. What horrid people they are! This made my drive to Waterloo on top of a bus very vivid. A bright night; with a fresh breeze. An old beggar woman, blind, sat against a stone wall in Kingsway holding a brown mongrel in her arms & sang aloud. There was a recklessness about her; much in the spirit of London. Defiant—almost gay, clasping her dog as if for warmth. How many Junes has she sat there, in the heart of London? How she came to be there, what scenes she can go through, I can’t imagine. O damn it all, I say, why cant I know all that too? Perhaps it was the song at night that seemed strange; she was singing shrilly, but for her own amusement, not begging. Then the fire engines came by—shrill too; with their helmets pale yellow in the moonlight. Sometimes every thing gets into the same mood; how to define this one I don’t know—It was gay, & yet terrible & fearfully vivid. Nowadays I’m often overcome by London; even think of the dead who have walked in the city. Perhaps one might visit city the churches. The view of the grey white spires from Hungerford Bridge brings it to me: & yet I can’t say what ‘it’ is.

Thursday 17 June

Today is Cup day at Ascot; which I think marks the highest tide of the finest societies greatest season—all superlatives that mean little to me—save as I catch the hum of wheels in Piccadilly on a fine afternoon, & passing carriages look in & see powdered faces like jewels in glass cases. One must be young to feel the stir of it. We are on the road to Ascot. Open taxis go past; or motor cars like engines on the Great Western Railway. Yet the fine weather gives us too our sudden acceleration: dinner parties; memoir club; invitations; coming one on top of another. And now I cannot describe Mrs Mirrlees, & my dinner at the Rubens Hotel, in the heart of a rich warm hearted British family, untouched in any way since 100 years ago. Civilisation having produced that organism, stereotyped it. Booths are of the same species. I wonder whether its natural for families to keep together. I didn’t wonder, though, that night. Unlimited silver flowed out of Sneezer’s pockets.

Next day I lunched at Gordon Sqre for Roger’s show: got stuffed in the head with wine & talk & sat there not very comfortably. A toast to Roger missed fire somewhat—so, I fear, do the pictures, which fill 3 rooms garishly, as with coloured sheets of tin, not one being yet bought. Lytton & I stood in a window, & looked (at least I looked) at a woman brushing her hair, high up in some by street, & silence descended. “Is there enough to say?” Lytton asked, referring to my gay life. I said no. It scarcely went round. Then he told me how he lived for ambition; he wants influence not fame; not Maynard’s influence, but the influence of some old gentleman on whose 80th birthday people present addresses—he wants to deal little words that poison vast monsters of falsehood. This I declared to be unattainable. But I believe it to be what he wishes. Tea at Gunters; dinner at Nessa’s; & so home, a little bruised about the lips, thirsty for a great draught of solitude, which was not given me; since we dined next with the Murrys, next with Roger, & last night had the Memoir Club here, of which I’m too sleepy to give any notice. Leonard is dining with the Society, which I believe I enjoy more than he does, since I shall lie in the shallow light waiting for him; then he will come in; then I shall hear the gossip.

Wednesday 23 June

I lay in the shallow light, which should be written dark, I think, a long time, & then Moore came & took a cold bath at 1 in the morning, consequently I was too muddled next morning to follow his explanation of Berkeley. He has grown grey, sunken, toothless perhaps. His eyes small, watchful, but perhaps not so piercing as of old. A lack of mass, somewhere. He went off to take ‘my baby for a walk’. I dont see altogether why he was the dominator & dictator of youth. Perhaps Cambridge is too much of a cave. Yet (I don’t attempt to balance this properly) of course there’s his entire innocency & shrewdness; not the vestige of falsehood obscuring him anywhere.

I was struggling, at this time to say honestly that I don’t think Conrad’s last book a good one. I have said it. It is painful (a little) to find fault there, where almost solely, one respects. I cant help suspecting the truth to be that he never sees anyone who knows good writing from bad, & then being a foreigner, talking broken English, married to a lump of a wife, he withdraws more & more into what he once did well, only piles it on higher & higher, until what can one call it but stiff melodrama. I would not like to find The Rescue signed Virginia Woolf. But will anyone agree with this?—anyhow nothing shakes my opinion of a book—nothing—nothing. Only perhaps if its the book of a young person—or of a friend—no, even so, I think myself infallible. Haven’t I lately dismissed Murry’s play, & exactly appraised K.’s story, & summed up Aldous Huxley, & doesn’t it somehow wound my sense of fitness to hear Roger mangling these exact values? Poor Roger has only sold 3 or 4 sketches. There the innumerable pictures hang, like ugly girls at a dance, & no one bids a penny piece. According to Nessa, he can talk of nothing else, & they’re at their wits ends to say the right things—since what is to be said, save that bad pictures don’t sell?

I had one of my last teas at 5 Windmill Hill on Sunday, & though it was the last, it was not very agreeable. (That I see is not the way I mean to put it—but a merry go round playing incessantly distracts me). Emphie I suppose interrupted 10 times. Janet reverted to details of selling furniture & the change to the country as if it weighed on her & she sought by making it all sound nice to convince herself. Then in would pop E. with a tea cup or a plated urn for me to look at. “Then we’ve decided about Cellini & the Bible?” she would ask, which meant more explanations & diversions. I don’t know what I wanted to talk about—anything, I suppose, in preference to what was fairly exactly nothing. Then the level downpour of the rain was depressing too; & didn’t I come home to find that Nelly had declared herself dying, sent for another doctor, & had entirely ruined poor L.’s evening. She’s still in bed, seemingly ill as we were at Xmas; only now cheerful & sensible, & possibly to go home tomorrow, when we go to Monk’s House. Each time one looks forward to that more; & its blazing hot; every plant with a frill of red & white even here; the new kitchen to be seen, all of which I must leave to describe later.

Tuesday 29 June

Back from Rodmell, which was disappointing, as if held to our lips the cup of pleasure was dashed from them. We started by cutting down the laurel hedge, enthusiastically, clearing a view of the downs. Next morning L.’s arm was bad again, & so it continued, swollen & irritable, rasping every moment that should have been so delicious. The weather brooded heavy too. One day was consumed by Saxon & Barbara. Poor Barbara has the prominent nose & fixed lines of premature maturity. Such a grind & a drudge her life is as fills me with pity—seeing human life a thing to be put through the machine by necessity. For she seemed to have no choice. First Nick, then the child—& all her lines laid down for her for life, by the hand of fate, for she can’t leap them. There she treads her road. Our generation is daily scourged by the bloody war. Even I scribble reviews instead of novels because of the thick skulls at Westminster & Berlin. Saxon was airy & sprightly. The kitchen a success I think, but then I’m not a cook. Home yesterday, to find Lottie with her exaggerated forebodings—Nelly taken worse, & so on, all in an alarmist strain, until having secured her sensation she condescended to details which are not very alarming. But the poor wretches seek to protect themselves from faultfinding by so many prevarications that the truth always cowers close to the ground.

Dinner with Nessa last night. My attempt⁠[s] at sensation were overshadowed by her really great & surprising one—nothing less than the death of a young man at Mrs Russell’s dance. They sat out on the roof, protected by fairy lamps & chairs. He crossed, perhaps to light a cigarette, stepped over the edge, & fell 30 feet onto flagstones. Adrian alone saw the thing happen. He called a doctor sitting there, & very calmly & bravely, so Nessa felt, climbed the wall into the garden where the man had fallen, & helped the Dr over. But there was no hope. He died in the ambulance that fetched him. The dance was stopped. Nessa says the younger generation is callous. No one was upset; some telephoned for news of other dances. Aunt Lou bungled everything with her salt American cheerfulness. It was odd how, sitting high up, one began to get a sense of falling. The man was called Wright, aged 21: for some reason he had his birth certificate on him. Only the girl who brought him knew him. The parents, rich country people, come up, were shown the spot & had nothing to say except, ‘That was where he fell’—but what could they say? Aunt Lou gave her version of the thing ‘not a tragedy—not in the least a tragedy—a stepmother only & seven other children—& its over for him poor boy.’ A strange event—to come to a dance among strangers & die—to come dressed in evening clothes, & then for it all to be over, instantly, so senselessly. Pippa had warned them. No brandy was to be had in any of the three houses.

Tuesday 6 July

Too much to write as usual, but we work like navvies at binding Morgan, & have no time for frivolity. Festivities get wedged in where convenient. All this comes of choosing a paper that has to be enforced with a lining. It looks as though Morgan might boom, though I dont, as a critic, see altogether what the reason is. And am I a critic? Take Conrad’s book. We were at the first Athenaeum lunch—a long single file of insignificant brain workers eating bad courses. Katherine was opposite, & I heard her enthusiastically praising this very book. At last, appealed to, I confessed my perversity, whereupon she hedged—so did I. But which is right? I still maintain that I’m the true seer, the one independent voice in a chorus of obedient sheep, since they praise unanimously. They always begin that when the plays over—thats my view at least. This lunch was a little dingy & professional, a glimpse into the scullery where the Sullivans & Pounds & Murrys & Huxleys stand stripped with their arms in wash tubs. I see the obvious retort; yet I can’t rid myself of the feeling that if Lytton, Roger, Desmond, Morgan, Nessa, & Duncan had been there the atmosphere would have been less of the area steps & more of the open air. But I’m rather acid about Murry, on account of his writing I think, & Heaven knows, a story by Katherine always manages to put my teeth on edge. My story’s out—hailed by Sydney & Mrs Schiff—its odd how one’s private circle ceases to attend to these outbursts, & how if praise or blame comes its from the public now. Julian here for the week end; & the weather such constant rain as seldom happens; now & then a torrent that sets streams running in 5 minutes.

Tuesday 13 July

Oh the servants! Oh reviewing! oh the weather! Thus I try to get out of writing my proper account of things. Nelly has vacillated between tears & laughter, life & death for the past 10 days; can’t feel an ache anywhere without sending for me or L. to assure her that aches are not certainly fatal. Then she cries. Never, never, never will she get over it, she says. The doctor comes. Innumerable pills & draughts consumed. Sweats, sleepless nights, recur. My private wonder is, as usual, how they contrive to live a week—aren’t killed by the thunder, like flies. No root in reality is in them; & as for reason, when the mood’s on, as soon might one persuade a runaway horse. And nothing the matter save what one of us would call an upset inside & take a pill for. This drives us to accept invitations, since if anyone comes here, the atmosphere lowers. But where have we been? Indeed I see myself cutting covers incessantly. I don’t think the boom in Morgan will be sudden though. We are advertising in the Nation.

Now for oh Reviewing!—Three weeks I think have passed without a word added to Jacob. How is one to bring it through at this rate. Yet its all my fault—why should I do the Cherry Orchard & Tolstoy for Desmond, why take up the Plumage Bill for Ray? But after this week I do no more. As for the weather, the sun shines in a modified way at this moment; so I will say no more, save that I don’t suppose it will last, or do more than dry the topmost layer of earth upon what must be a swamp. Yet what am I thinking of? That Ka has taken the Eagle’s Nest, & that I wish it were mine.

RODMELL

Monday 2 August

Bank Holiday. I’m [in] the middle of baking a cake, & fly to this page for refuge, to fill in moments of baking & putting in my bread. Poor wretched book! Thats the way I treat you!—Thats the drudge you are! Still, take comfort from the thought that I brought you all the way from London, to save scribbling on half sheets which get lost. Our season ended unexpectedly; the blind falling with the light still in the sky. If I were not ashamed of my egotism, I could give a literal meaning to my metaphor—seeing that I had to leave Nessa’s great party at 11 in order to be home, not to disturb L., & be ready for packing & going next morning. (now for the cake). Yes, but the cake & the bread between them have made me write nothing for two days—its now Wednesday 4th, & here we are in from shrooming at Asheham—& I with so much to write (& I must keep an eye on the window to prevent Mrs Dedman from finding L. in his bath in the kitchen) that I cant begin.

Well, the great party: to me the time went in tip toe pirouettes; every minute watched, & some alas wasted. There in the corner I sat with Lady S⁠[trachey]. & we talked of my two grandfathers & the Indian Mutiny. She forges about a room like an unwieldy three decker, benignant, yet easily morose, hoarding some grievance against her family, like most old people, for not reading aloud to her, yet easy with strangers. Then Mr Parker the American—alas, when praise is tracked to the source, as often as not it proves brackish—& so was his. Never heard of me save through Potboilers: but my chief pirouetting was with Mary whose hand I took, held, & kissed, on the sofa with Clive on the other side of me. She said she hated & feared me. I wooed her like a wayward child. Does one speak the truth on these occasions, reach it on tiptoe from where it hangs inaccessible in less exalted moments? Then Nina Turton, flushed, lascivious, imbecile, with the heavy idiot voice, as of old, & yet interesting too, as impure women are to the pure—I see her as someone in mid ocean, struggling, diving, while I pace my bank. One may console oneself though by the brainlessness of the exercise. One dip is all that’s needed. Maynard said of her that she’d had more sexual life than the rest of us put together—saw it in her face (here came Mrs Thomsett—& L. stark naked in the kitchen!).

Poor L., utterly driven for a month by Tolstoy & Morgan at last confessed to feeling tired, & was indeed on the verge of destruction. As a hobby, The Hogarth Press is clearly too lively & lusty to be carried on in this private way any longer. Moreover, the business part of it can’t be shared, owing to my incompetence. The future, therefore, needs consideration. This being so, we fled a week earlier than intended, sending Nelly to recover from her vapours, & bring⁠[ing] Lottie down here. On Monday I went up, to say good bye to K.M., was inveigled into a night at 46 & could write many pages on my reflections on sleeping in London again—in Maynard’s bed too. I racked my brain to think who had his room when we lived there—how many years ago? The ease & rapidity of life in London a good deal impressed me—everything near at hand, to be compassed between lunch & tea, without setting out & making a job of it. Roger, Duncan, Nessa, Clive, & so on; I seeing it all much composed & in perspective owing to my outsider’s vision. K.M. asked me to review her book: I cried off on the ground that to review spoils the reading. She as quick as usual to take the point. They are coming to Eastbourne, so my farewell is deferred. Despicable as I am, I find myself liking to hear her underrated by C⁠[live]. & N⁠[essa]. yet protesting as a writer; & finally harbouring one or two doubts, genuine doubts, as to the merits of her stories, since the two lately printed in the A⁠[thenaeum]. have not been good.

And now I can’t write my views of Don Quixote as intended, for I’ve spun my froth off, & have no wits left.

Thursday 5 August

Let me try to say what I think as I read Don Quixote after dinner—Principally that writing was then story telling to amuse people sitting round the fire without any of our devices for pleasure. There they sit, women spinning, men contemplative, & the jolly, fanciful, delightful tale is told to them, as to grown up children—This impresses me as the motive of D.Q., to keep us entertained at all costs. So far as I can judge, the beauty, & thought come in unawares; Cervantes scarcely conscious of serious meaning, & scarcely seeing D.Q. as we see him. Indeed that’s my difficulty—the sadness, the satire, how far are they ours, not intended—or do these great characters have it in them to change according to the generation that looks at them? Much, I admit, of the tale-telling is dull—not much, only a little at the end of the first volume, which is obviously told as a story to keep one contented. So little said out, so much kept back, as if he had not wished to develop that side of the matter—the scene of the galley slaves marching is an instance of what I mean—Did C. feel the whole of the beauty & sadness of that as I feel it? Twice I’ve spoken of ‘sadness’. Is that essential to the modern view? Yet how splendid it is to unfurl one’s sail & blow straight ahead on the gust of the great story telling, as happens all through the first part. I suspect the Fernando-Cardino-Lucinda story was a courtly episode in the fashion of the day, anyhow dull to me. I am also reading Ghoa le Simple—bright, effective, interesting, yet so arid & spick & span. With Cervantes everythings there; in solution if you like; but deep, atmospheric, living people casting shadows solid, tinted as in life. The Egyptians, like most French writers, give you a pinch of essential dust instead, much more pungent & effective, but not nearly so surrounding & spacious. By God!—what stuff I’m writing! always these images.

I write Jacob every morning now, feeling each days work like a fence which I have to ride at, my heart in my mouth till its over, & I’ve cleared, or knocked the bar out. (Another image, unthinking it was one. I must somehow get Hume’s Essays & purge myself).

Tuesday 10 August

I have spent the whole afternoon yellow washing the earth closet. I can now reckon up my labours: dining room distempered & cleaned; bannisters painted blue; stairs white; & now the earth closet. Tea comes quick; post (with luck) in the middle of tea; then a lounge in the garden; then Mrs Thomsett round with the plates; green shaded lamp lit, & beneath it we sit ostensibly reading till 10.30: when candles are fetched, & we plod yawning up stairs. Our beds have dents & hollows; but we sleep till Mrs Thomsett calls us. She is one of the most punctual. But then Mr Thomsett is out with his cattle at 5. Perhaps it’s his boots that sometimes wake me—The cattle go down to the brooks. Mr Arblaster’s motor car pants under the window.

Coming home from Rat Farm on Sunday, a hot still day, Leonard initiated a scheme for the future of the Press. We are going to offer Partridge a share in it, baiting this perhaps minute titbit with the plumper morsel of secretaryship to L. About the middle of dinner L. developed this further: why not install Partridge at Suffield, & buy a complete printing outfit? Why not? Run a shop there too, perhaps. Ramifications spring unceasingly from this centre. The whole depends, however, upon Partridge, who has been invited here. Its a pleasant thing, come autumn, to make plans. Nelly still mysteriously diseased, & that being so we implore her to stay away—

Reading Don Q. still—I confess rather sinking in the sand—rather soft going—so long as the stories aren’t about him—but has the loose, far scattered vitality of the great books, which keeps me going—

‘Potterism’—by R. Macaulay, a don’s book, hard-headed, masculine, atmosphere of lecture room, not interesting to me—

Catherine Wilmot, who went on a tour in 1802—& kept a diary; but I have not yet got in to her—a necessary process. Now to pick sweet peas.

Tuesday 13 August

For the first time in memory, I sit down to this page instead of to the sterner one of duty & profit at some minutes after ten a.m. Damn these aristocrats! damn myself for being such a snob—unable to settle to Jacob’s Room because ‘about midday’ Nelly Cecil in her motor car will descend. ‘Driving Bob to Newhaven—may I take bread & cheese with you?’ A dull listless morning, too, a little close in the house, yet chilly perhaps under the acacia; & not a spark of colour glowing. My preparations for the aristocracy—but I wrong myself—Molly Hamilton, or Molly MacCarthy or any other Molly—would cause as much stir—consist in pinning a chair cover together & filling the vases with sweet peas & roses. I dont like these civic interruptions into rural life. I didn’t like the Clutton Brocks at Charleston. London yesterday I hated. More truly it was not London but a certain yard of the line between Richmond & Mortlake where we stopped for an hour & a half—I, too, due at the dentists with the treat of a lounge through my favourite streets afterwards. I wanted to buy some bright piece of china for the mantelpiece. As it was I scoured the town in taxis, lavished florins, accumulated parcels, swallowed tea, encountered Kot, & then spent 20 minutes at Victoria—however, L. was there, & we could chatter. But as the train swung out into open country life seemed fresher, sweeter, saner. One day I must pay a tribute to the humanity of dentists. Better than journalism for the soul, I told L.—but then, I’ve a vendetta with Massingham, against whom my arrow was launched. Its true though: I get more & more disinclined for journalism. I’ve written only half a page of it since coming here—three weeks ago; have refused 3 articles (summing up Jane, Charlotte, & Thackeray) & feel like a drunkard who has successfully resisted three invitations to drink.

Walking with Clive over the instep of Firle Beacon the other night we talked of all this; he seriously advising me for my good to approach America; being, as I always think, an admirable man of business, & doing very well for himself. And we talked about the future of the press & of the novel; he shrewd on both these questions, though perhaps I shall find my own opinions earning good money in his name in America. Through the pheasant wood we came, & by the cornfields; & I made up a sentence about paint with a yellow glaze on it to express the warm deep colours, laid so thickly upon field & down, & overlaid with some varnish so that it glowed, not raw, but under skilful preservation. There was Maynard, Duncan, Nessa; & we broached the new studio, where I sat with the painters all the next morning—talking, talking—till, as I say, the Brocks came, & we turned intelligent & cultured again. I rode home over the fields—one of the few days which are, as I maintain, days: the usual windy rainy weather being the variety & deviation. All being prepared, down to chicken & tongue, Molly H. of course did not come—her mother taking the occasion to fall from a ladder.

By opening the garden door I enlarge our garden so far as Mount Caburn. There I walk in the sunset; when the village climbing the hill has a solemn sheltering look⁠[,] pathetic, somehow, emblematic, anyhow very peaceful & human, as if people sought each others company at night, & lived trustfully beneath the hills. The old whitehaired women sit on the doorstep till 9 or so, then go in; & the light is lit in the upper window & all is dark by ten o’clock. I had reason to observe nocturnal habits last night, for after my recuperative draught was over, Lottie was still not home; & when 10 struck L. determined to go in search. Bicycling alone along a road in ruts in the dark she might well have fallen—& so forth. I went on foot up to the cross roads; thus passing all the men coming back from the public house, & saying more ‘Good nights’ than in a week of daylight—proving what I’ve said of the sociability of nightfall. Then, too, they’d had their lamps lit for them by Mr Malthouse’s beer. Presumably every man in the place spends his evenings in the public house of course; & I should like once in a way to hear their talk. (George Sturgeon, who came with Flora on Sunday, has disillusioned me with country talk—his is all of cricket & tennis—coarse shapes of humanity appearing through the haze, all stamped according to their position in Lewes society—I dont think the intelligentzia need fear, either on earth or in Heaven, the competition of these simple natures—for stupidity, buttressing itself with all the conventions & prejudices is not nearly so humane as we free thinkers are). Then the clover smelt sweet up by the corner; & there was Lewes flashing, truthfully speaking with a kind of diamond brilliance, & the sky all powdered (?) with stars, grey with them, since the moon was not up. L. found Lottie at the level crossing, her bicycle punctured, her lamps out, but hilarious & loquacious as a jay in the sun light.

Thursday 19 August

I raise my head from making a patchwork quilt. This is the day of the month when I despatch darning & other needlework, & do in truth more useful work than on days of free intelligence. How shifting & vacillating one’s mind is! Yesterday broody & drowsy all day long, writing easily, & yet without strict consciousness, as though fluent under drugs: today apparently clear headed, yet unable to put one sentence after another—sat for an hour, scratching out, putting in, scratching out; & then read [Sophocles’] Trachiniae with comparative ease—always comparative—oh dear me!

We had Nelly Cecil from 12 till 4.30; and how rude & even slovenly she made our equipment seem! the rooms diminishing, the silver tarnishing, the chicken drying, & the china dulling. It was hard work; one of us always at her ear, & she, poor woman, receiving words from one or other of us incessantly. Beginning on the very outskirts of intimacy we made progress to the centre. To begin with she’s shy, apologetic for the infliction: “I’ll stay one hour—oh I’m interrupting—how you must curse me for breaking in on you!” But this went by & her mind, trained to deal with the political situation kept her alert. We had much gossip too, chiefly about Mrs Asquith & her inaccuracies, how the Tennants broke up the old aristocratic world. So to religion. “I have not so much of it as I used to have. When one was young one wished for immortality. And the war made it difficult—oh yes, I go to church still. Bob leads a good, earnest life, & goes on believing.” Bob is at Deauville with the Mosley’s for a month. Indeed, one guesses at isolation unspeakable; never was there such a look of solitude on any human face as on hers; as if always away from life, alone, forced to bear it, & be grateful for any help. Her body incredibly little & shrunk; eyes slightly fading; cheeks sunk in—

Friday 20 August

Mrs Dedman cajoled us there by calling it a Sussex funeral, & promising that the bearers would wear smock frocks. But only 6 were to be found in the village; so the plan was given up; Mr Stacey was lowered to his grave by black farm labourers, two of whom managed to tumble into the grave as they lowered him. Smock frocks exist however, as she proved by showing us grandfather’s, & a fine piece of stitchery it is, with a pattern appropriate to Rodmell, distinct from all other villages. He, who now sits on the bench in the churchyard walk, wore it on Sundays. The entire male population of Kingston village came out of church after the coffin; brown faces, white hairs, showing on top of coal black coats. Four or five meagre girls provided with white handkerchiefs which they used automatically, walked first—one poor old thing with a ribbon of black velvet round her throat. The clergy acted with such portentous gloom that even now I daresay they scarcely feel comfortable. Still glowering like a gargoyle one of them sat in his taxi, waiting to go back to Lewes. The day was cold; a thunder shower purple in the sky. As usual, the service seemed chill, awkward, unmanageable; everyone subduing their natural feelings, & seeming to play a part because the others did. The coffin was a pale grey, wreaths attached by strings. Whether the Catholic form is warmer, I know not; a strange convention this. I saw one man shredding a few grains of dust at the right moment. We stood under a yew tree, by a large tomb. But the ceremonial spirit is entirely absent. We never catch fire. Then the awkwardness of old Sunday coats & hats. Kingston is a fine village, with old bow windowed houses, & the path running to the heart of the hill. I feel Sunday clinging to my clothes like the smell of camphor.—cant write, as I perceive with shame, or rather with amusement.

Wednesday 25 August

For the third time this summer, though no other summer, I went to London [on] Monday, paid 5/- for a plate of ham, & said good bye to Katherine. I had my euphemism at parting; about coming again before she goes; but it is useless to extend these farewell visits. They have something crowded & unnaturally calm too about them, & after all, visits can’t do away with the fact that she goes for two years, is ill, & heaven knows when we shall meet again. These partings make one pinch oneself as if to make sure of feeling. Do I feel this as much as I ought? Am I heartless? Will she mind my going either? And then, after noting my own callousness, of a sudden comes the blankness of not having her to talk to. So on my side the feeling is genuine. A woman caring as I care for writing is rare enough I suppose to give me the queerest sense of echo coming back to me from her mind the second after I’ve spoken. Then, too, there’s something in what she says of our being the only women, at this moment (I must modestly limit this to in our circle) with gift enough to make talk of writing interesting. How much I dictate to other people! How often too I’m silent, judging it useless to speak. I said how my own character seemed to cut out a shape like a shadow in front of me. This she understood (I give it as an example of her understanding) & proved it by telling me that she thought this bad: one ought to merge into things. Her senses are amazingly acute—a long description she gave of hosing plants—putting the hose over the high trees, then over the shrubs, then over the mignonette. And Murry said slowly, “You’ve got it wrong, Katherine. Youth wasn’t like that. At least I’m sure mine wasn’t.” Murry playing tennis all day; an oddly detached couple. She wants to live in an Italian town & have tea with the doctor. It suddenly strikes me as I write that I should like to ask her what certainty she has of her work’s merit.—But we propose to write to each other—She will send me her diary. Shall we? Will she? If I were left to myself I should; being the simpler, the more direct of the two. I can’t follow people who don’t do the obvious things in these ways. I’ve recanted about her book; I shall review it; but whether she really wanted me to, God knows. Strange how little we know our friends.

So I missed my train; & what I wanted most in the world was to catch it & travel back with L.

Nelly is now going to have her teeth seen to. No talk of her coming back yet. I am quite given up as a reviewer—seriously by the Times I believe—& forge ahead with Jacob, which I wager to finish by Xmas.

Tuesday 31 August

The last day of August—& what a day! November in the city without the lights. Then the schoolchildren singing, & as I write Lottie chatter-chattering—so I’m out of mood. Detestable grey sky—life has too few days to waste them thus. I must walk my temper off upon the downs. But first I’ve Partridge & Carrington to deal with. Another step has been taken in life: we have a partner & a secretary at a cost of £100. Rash, I suppose; but then what’s the point of life if one’s not rash? Anyhow we step out bold⁠[l]⁠y, & if the Press is to live, it had better run a risk or two. The young man, aged 26, just left Oxford, is a superb body—shoulders like tough oak; health tingling beneath his skin. Merry shrewd eyes. Since George Sturgeon I’m shy of stupid young men; but P. hasn’t that stupidity anyhow. He has been religious; is now socialistic; literature I don’t suppose counts for much: he’s written an essay on Milton, which C. was not struck by. Happily we had fine weather; & sat in the meadow & watched Squire & Sassoon play cricket—the last people I wished to see—Somehow that the downs should be seen by cultivated eyes, self conscious eyes, spoils them to me. I wish there were nothing but Dedmans, Bottens & Staceys in the world; as they alone people the graveyards. Carrington is ardent, robust, scatterbrained, appreciative, a very humble disciple, but with enough character to prevent insipidity. A little ashamed of P., I thought her. But what shoulders! what thickness of bone! He is an admirer of L.’s. Well, how will it turn out? What shall we print?

[H. G.] Wells has asked us to stay. What other news is there? The time seems to race ahead, broken into halves by the post; & I’ve such a litter of books to read—though none to review. A cold, disappointing summer. Finished Sophocles this morning—read mostly at Asheham.

Wednesday 8 September

Perhaps a little author’s egotism may be allowed—simply that I’ve taken the plunge of refusing my books from the Times, & dictated conditions for the future—only leading articles, or those I suggest myself. No answer from Richmond, so I don’t know his view of it. But, of course, far from being rejected he was respecting my holiday, & suggested a list of victims, Murry & Lawrence among them, at the thought of which I shivered & shuddered, & finally decided to run the risk. At this moment I feel it more of a risk than the day before yesterday, as Lytton, Mary, Clive, came here yesterday, discussed immortality; & I find my bid for it is as letter writer. What about poor Jacob then? & hadn’t I better drive my pen through sheets that pay of a morning, in the intervals of writing letters? Oh vanity, vanity! how it grows on me—how detestable it is—how I swear to crush it out—Learn French is the only thing I can think of. Then I didn’t like Mary; scented, tinted, lewd lipped, & blear eyed; & the consciousness that its the mean side of me that feasts on such garbage; & resentment with her for making me feed on garbage; & she saying sharp things & then hard, & I unable to say out loud “Well then, why come & sit on my lawn?” Why does she? And I always break off ‘poor wretch’—yet not quite magnanimously in her case. L. at tea put me right: M.H. is one of the few people I dislike, I said. No: he replied: one of the many you dislike & like alternately—The bread had not risen—I was worried this morning by school children; & I hate people to compare this to the disadvantage of Asheham—M.H. again. Lytton gave me a lesson in simplicity. If anyone has a right to talk of immortality he has with his 9 editions & so on. Yet when L. severely told him he had no chance of that, he did not narrow his eyes, shift his hands, or do anything but look calm & animated. It was an amusing talk. How far has our set justified its promise? Lytton maintains that in ourselves we are as remarkable as the Johnson set, though our works may perish—still we’re still at the beginning of our works. Then came that about Madame de Sevigné: then Duncan given his chance; I compared E⁠[minent].V⁠[ictorians].’s with Macaulay, & thought Lytton perhaps uncertain about Victoria. Maynard says, however, it should succeed better; indeed is better. Much talk of Athenaeum; Lady Blessington; our printing prospects; before they went. Lytton comes on Friday. After all, isn’t he the choicest of us? And now I can go out & look at the downs—where?

Wednesday 15 September

Nelly by the way has now had, I suppose every organ in her body examined, & is pronounced healthy with the exception of her teeth. So that shot of mine seems the true one;—but I confess I don’t look forward to the winter. The fact is the lower classes are detestable.

Something of that reflection I owe to Lytton who has been with us from Friday to Tuesday, & now that the rain is come, I observe maliciously, is with the Hutches at Wittering (Never does Mary darken my door, or shadow my lawn again, I observe)—And that too comes from Lytton—its a consequence of walking all along the flats with him, on a brilliant evening, so up by Northease farm onto the downs. His admiration of the place made up for all disparagement. But see how many little facts, sayings, points of view I collected from him—that Mary dislikes me ‘very feminine’, that Clive is a buffoon, that the lower classes are vulgar & stupid, that the Selby Biggs are useless & pretentious, that we only remain—but that the world’s very amusing & pleasant, on the whole, society agreeable, ‘women essential’; & I think there are one or two doubts of his about the value of his work compared with creating a world of one’s own.

Then ‘Life is very complex’—this murmured, as if intimate, referring to his own difficulties, which I had explained to me on the Roman Road. A repetition of Nick & Barbara [Bagenal]. C⁠[arrington]. lives with P⁠[artridge], till Christmas, then comes to a decision. And we walked all the way to Kingston, talking, back over the flats, talking. Save for shadows that cross & leave him ruffled, he is now uniformly amiable, & takes pains at table—so that something is always on foot. At night we had the first two or three chapters of Victoria—Disgraceful to say I was twice overcome with sleep, owing to our wood fire; but the liveliness of it is such as to make one forget whether its good or not. I dont know what qualities it has. I suspect it depends too much upon amusing quotations, & is too much afraid of dulness to say anything out of the way. Not at all a meditative or profound book; on the other hand, a remarkably composed & homogeneous book. I doubt whether these portraits are true—whether thats not too much the conventional way of making history—But I think I’m coloured by my own wishes, & experimental mood. A miracle in the matter of condensation & composition I suspect. But we are to read it when done. Blessed with fine weather, I could look from my window, through the vine leaves, & see Lytton sitting in the deck chair reading Alfieri from a lovely vellum copy, dutifully looking out words. He wore a white felt hat, & the usual grey clothes; was long, & tapering as usual; looking so mild & so ironical, his beard just cut short. As usual; I got my various impressions: of suavity, a gentle but inflexible honesty; lightning speed; something peevish & exacting; something incessantly living, suffering, reflecting moods. Still he can withdraw in that supercilious way that used to gall me; still show himself superior to me, contemptuous of me—of my morality, that is, not of my mind. For my own encouragement, I may note that he praised the Voyage Out voluntarily; “extremely good” it seemed to him on re-reading, especially the satire of the Dalloways. Night & Day he judges better, on the whole. Well, I can walk & talk with him by the hour.

I should have made more of my release from reviewing. When I’d sent my letter to Richmond, I felt like someone turned out into the open air. Now I’ve written another in the same sense to Murry, returning Mallock; & I believe this is the last book any editor will ever send me. To have broken free at the age of 38 seems a great piece of good fortune—coming at the nick of time, & due of course to L. without whose journalism I couldn’t quit mine. But I quiet my conscience with the belief that a foreign article once a week is of greater worth, less labour, & better paid than my work; & with luck, if I can get my books done, we shall profit in moneymaking eventually. And, when one faces it, the book public is more of an ordeal than the newspaper public, so that I’m not shirking responsibility. Now, of course, I can scarcely believe that I ever wrote reviews weekly; & literary papers have lost all interest for me. Thank God, I’ve stepped clear of that Athenaeum world, with its reviews, editions, lunches, & tittle tattle—I should like never to meet a writer again. The proximity of Mr Addison, reputed editor of The Field, is enough for me. I should like to know masses of sensitive, imaginative, unselfconscious unliterary people, who have never read a book—Now, in the rain, up to Dean, to talk about the door of the coal cellar.

Friday 17 September

Oh still in the rain—the green I see through the window has a sulphur tint in it—perhaps the evening sun is sinking behind Falmer—but the rain rains so as to beat the asters to the ground & wet L. through, going & coming from the E.C. We have been into Lewes nevertheless—by train, & walking home with knapsacks. I bought two pairs of stockings, L. a hair brush. We met Mr Thomas at the halt.

Rough weather! said Leonard.

“It is! It is indeed. But then you see, we are already in autumn. And the sea is only three & a half miles away.” This he said nervously & eagerly, like a child; & then came out with his measurement, the fame of which has reached Rodmell already: 250 tons of rain fell the other night. But the harvest is in. What other news is there? L. caught a bat in our bedroom & killed it with a towel. I thought the lime tree was on us last night. We were wakened by a clap of thunder. Lottie spent the night at Charleston. I write this as if it were to be my last chance. Eliot comes tomorrow. We do not look forward lightly: but its interesting, which is always something. I’ve reached the party in Jacob & write with great pleasure.

Sunday 19 September

Eliot is separated only by the floor from me. Nothing in mans or womans shape is any longer capable of upsetting me. The odd thing about Eliot is that his eyes are lively & youthful when the cast of his face & the shape of his sentences is formal & even heavy. Rather like a s⁠[c]⁠ulpted face—no upper lip: formidable, powerful; pale. Then those hazel eyes seeming to escape from the rest of him. We talked—America, Ottoline, aristocracy, printing, Squire, Murry, criticism. “And I behaved like a priggish pompous little ass” was one of his comments upon his own manner at Garsington. He is decidedly of the generation beneath us—I daresay superior—younger, though.

Monday 20 September

To go on with Eliot, as if one were making out a scientific observation—he left last night directly after dinner. He improved as the day went on; laughed more openly; became nicer. L. whose opinion on this matter I respect, found him disappointing in brain—less powerful than he expected, & with little play of mind. I kept myself successfully from being submerged, though feeling the waters rise once or twice. I mean by this that he completely neglected my claims to be a writer, & had I been meek, I suppose I should have gone under—felt him & his views dominant & subversive. He is a consistent specimen of his type, which is opposed to ours. Unfortunately the living writers he admires are Wyndham Lewis & Pound.—Joyce too, but there’s more to be said on this head. We had some talk after tea (I put off the Mayors) about his writing. I suspect him of a good deal of concealed vanity & even anxiety about this.) I taxed him with wilfully concealing his transitions. He said that explanation is unnecessary. If you put it in, you dilute the facts. You should feel these without explanation. My other charge was that a rich & original mind is needed to make such psychological writing of value. He told me he was more interested in people than in anything. He cant read Wordsworth when Wordsworth deals with nature. His turn is for caricature. In trying to define his meaning (‘I dont mean satire’) we foundered. He wants to write a verse play in which the 4 characters of Sweeny act the parts. A personal upheaval of some kind came after Prufrock, & turned him aside from his inclination—to develop in the manner of Henry James. Now he wants to describe externals. Joyce gives internals. His novel Ulysses, presents the life of man in 16 incidents, all taking place (I think) in one day. This, so far as he has seen it, is extremely brilliant, he says. Perhaps we shall try to publish it. Ulysses, according to Joyce, is the greatest character in history⁠[.] Joyce himself is an insignificant man, wearing very thick eyeglasses, a little like Shaw to look at, dull, self-centred, & perfectly self assured. There is much to be said about Eliot from different aspects—for instance, the difficulty of getting into touch with clever people.—& so forth—anaemia, self-consciousness; but also, his mind is not yet blunted or blurred. He wishes to write precise English; but catches himself out in slips; & if anyone asked him whether he meant what he said, he would have to say no, very often. Now in all this L. showed up much better than I did; but I didn’t much mind.

Sunday 26 September

But I think I minded more than I let on; for somehow Jacob has come to a stop, in the middle of that party too, which I enjoyed so much. Eliot coming on the heel of a long stretch of writing fiction (2 months without a break) made me listless; cast shade upon me; & the mind when engaged upon fiction wants all its boldness & self-confidence. He said nothing—but I reflected how what I’m doing is probably being better done by Mr Joyce. Then I began to wonder what it is that I am doing: to suspect, as is usual in such cases, that I have not thought my plan out plainly enough—so to dwindle, niggle, hesitate—which means that one’s lost. But I think my 2 months of work are the cause of it, seeing that I now find myself veering round to [John] Evelyn, & even making up a paper upon Women, as a counterblast to Mr Bennett’s adverse views reported in the papers. Two weeks ago I made up Jacob incessantly on my walks. An odd thing the human mind! so capricious, faithless, infinitely shying at shadows. Perhaps at the bottom of my mind, I feel that I’m distanced by L. in every respect.

Went to Charleston for the night; & had a vivid sight of Maynard by lamplight—like a gorged seal, double chin, ledge of red lip, little eyes, sensual, brutal, unimaginative: one of those visions that come from a chance attitude, lost so soon as he turned his head. I suppose though it illustrates something I feel about him. Then he’s read neither of my books—In spite of this I enjoyed myself: L. came over next day & found me neither suicidal nor homicidal. Home we rode after their inconvenient early tea—Charleston time, invented by Maynard, being an hour before summer time. Summer time, by the way is extended for a month, owing to the threat of a strike which I say won’t take place. But what do I know?—can’t master these leading articles. Eliot has sent me his poems, & hopes to maintain contact during the winter. This was the text of much discussion at Charleston; & in private, with N⁠[essa]. & D⁠[uncan]. that is, I divulged my intention to deal no more with M.H. They agreed, I think. N. produced further reasons why I should steer clear.

A hot summer day; too hot standing weeding in the sun. L. is clearing the big bed. Lottie goes tomorrow. Nelly is said to be recovered. No doubt Richmond has something to do with it.

Friday 1 October

Here we are at the last day; the boxes with apples standing open—this book left out by mistake, so that I take the opportunity—Yes; undoubtedly the best summer so far, in spite of execrable weather, no bath, one servant, & an E.C. down a winding glade. To that verdict we both set our hands. The place is enchanting, & though in my jealous moods I’ve reconnoitred & scrutinised every other house, on the whole I decide that this is best. Even the schoolchildren’s voices, if one thinks of them as swifts & martins skirling round the eaves, exhilarate instead of annoying. We now give them apples, rejecting their pence, & requiring in return that they shall respect the orchard. They had already stripped several trees. As I say the time has vanished, & we are back before we have been here. Nelly, by the way, returns. I must try to say nothing sharp, though inclined to. After all, without education,—there are excuses.

I have neither written nor read since Monday, owing to a threatening of headache. It was this, not Eliot I suppose, that broke off Jacob. Very slowly the well, so dry last week, seems to be re-filling. I could invent again—But first I must do Evelyn, then, perhaps, Women. I think Richmond will take as many articles from me as necessary—Murry, I notice, answers nothing; neither prints nor returns my story. Are these the manners of the underworld—what I call ‘showing off’? It doesn’t much matter. I had my account from Gerald this morning—a little disappointing, I think—I’ve sold 500 since January—which makes 1600 in all; in 8 months that is. Now it will slack off, & creep very slowly to the 2,000. I don’t very much care—but then, it gets more & more doubtful if I shall make enough money this way. Rowntree has quarrelled with the Contemporary & brought L.’s supplement to an end. We lose £250 a year—& this is the most serious part of it, for the supplement was scarcely worth while in that form. We find ourselves free however—& so speculate about travel—Italy, Greece, France—Oh well, we rummage in the great bran pie very energetically—Why not install Partridge, let Hogarth, & kick up our heels? Nessa—did I say—? has invented Major Grant & his equipage in the basement & thus gets rid of cooks. All houses will be run like this in a few years. And now its clearing: blue sky with ice bergs. I must go & see Mr Botten about sending butter. One of the charms of Rodmell is the human life: everyone does the same thing at the same hour: when the old vicar performs erratically on the bells, after churching the women, everybody hears him, & knows what he’s up to. Everyone is in his, or their garden; lamps are lit, but people like the last daylight, which was brown purple last night, heavy with all this rain. What I mean is that we are a community.

RICHMOND

Monday 18 October

This is a long break, & perhaps I should not fill it now if it were not that I am in from the Club, & can’t settle to anything. Yet we have been back seventeen days, have seen a number of people, & harboured more thoughts than there are words in my mind for: here L. came in, & told me that Rowntree wants to reconsider the death of the Supplement; will almost certainly keep it on, with a smaller staff. I’m afraid I wasn’t pleased; for here we are tied again, L. accepting £200 instead of £250; & no chance of Italy. We argued, & my fears were said to be foolish; & I daresay they are. Only I’m alarmed, sometimes, to think how easily L. might devote himself to a cause. I do my utmost to ruin his career.

Who have we seen? The usual people, Nessa & Duncan Clive Mary Stracheys Stephens, Ka, Arnold Forsters,—Kot, too, who came to bring us Tchehov, & was so excited over it & other projects as to twang like a fiddle, instead of solemnly resounding as usual like a full barrel of beer. We are well launched upon the work of the Press. Partridge—Ralph I should call him—is putting his ox’s shoulder to the wheel, & intends to do “hurricane” business. We are bringing out Three Stories by L.: my book; (printed for an experiment by McDermott;) & have in view Tchehov, Eliot, Roger, possibly Lytton’s essays; & now little priggish Mervyn A.F. wishes to employ us to print his ‘rhymes’,—which will be bad, but it is amusing to sell our skill.

Monday 25 October (first day of winter time)

Why is life so tragic; so like a little strip of pavement over an abyss. I look down; I feel giddy; I wonder how I am ever to walk to the end. But why do I feel this? Now that I say it I don’t feel it. The fire burns; we are going to hear the Beggars Opera. Only it lies about me; I can’t keep my eyes shut. It’s a feeling of impotence: of cutting no ice. Here I sit at Richmond, & like a lantern stood in the middle of a field my light goes up in darkness. Melancholy diminishes as I write. Why then don’t I write it down oftener? Well, one’s vanity forbids. I want to appear a success even to myself. Yet I dont get to the bottom of it. Its having no children, living away from friends, failing to write well, spending too much on food, growing old—I think too much of whys & wherefores: too much of myself. I dont like time to flap round me. Well then, work. Yes, but I so soon tire of work—can’t read more than a little, an hour’s writing is enough for me. Out here no one comes in to waste time pleasantly. If they do, I’m cross. The labour of going to London is too great. Nessa’s children grow up, & I cant have them in to tea, or go to the Zoo. Pocket money doesn’t allow of much. Yet I’m persuaded that these are trivial things: its life itself, I think sometimes, for us in our generation so tragic—no newspaper placard without its shriek of agony from some one. McSwiney this afternoon & violence in Ireland; or it’ll be the strike. Unhappiness is everywhere; just beyond the door; or stupidity which is worse. Still I dont pluck the nettle out of me. To write Jacob’s Room again will revive my fibres, I feel. Evelyn is done: but I don’t like what I write now. And with it all how happy I am—if it weren’t for my feeling that its a strip of pavement over an abyss.

Wednesday 10 November

I have walked some way further along the strip of pavement without falling in. Business has kept me stepping out briskly, & then, making an effort, I bought a coat & skirt, & began my social winter at Mrs Samuel Bruce’s, between Katie & Elena again, again hearing the same things, & saying the same things. Nelly Cecil spent the night with us, honest, humble, shabby, distinguished. The only people she likes are writers; her own friends she despises a little. De la Mare & Mary Coleridge she respects. Nessa’s room at Gordon Square is becoming what the drawing room at 46 was 5 or 6 years ago. I go there & find that astonishing brightness in the heart of darkness. Julian coming in with his French lesson; Angelica hung with beads, riding on Roger’s foot; Clive claret coloured & yellow like a canary; Duncan vague in the background, sitting astride a chair, looking with blurred eyes rather dimly. Then we dined with Roger, & with the Sturgeons, & altogether I sometimes feel that not to have a refuge here would be a bad thing—I don’t know. Ralph hints at a plan of sharing a London house with us—which tempts me, on some days. All three of us set up L.’s story this afternoon. I’ve been writing to finish my book; & not a word set to Jacob yet; & I must prepare a chapter for the memoir club; & so, in spite of no reviewing, I don’t do as I planned. The house now runs very smoothly, indeed melodiously. Didn’t I have tea off Nelly’s butter? days fly as usual; & I’m writing a story to ask why—

L. at work on a book for Snowden: endlessly reviewing too; no news yet from Rowntree about the supt. & that reminds me of the pickle I got into over Evelyn in the Lit. Supt. last week. 4 mistakes in 4 columns.

Saturday 13 November

This book is badly treated again; & I forget what my excuses are—no desire to write in it the chief I expect. Now I’ve finished the Symposium [Plato] I may relent perhaps. The Waterlows dined last night—Dawks exactly like a squawking dab chick, waistless, in black, about to bear a child. She is a persistent, pertinacious woman, & keeps her end up by force of will. Beauty has not blessed her. Later she complained to me of her discontent—how she feels small, insignificant purposeless. I sketched a plan of her life, to which facts do not correspond. Sydney boomed out in the background that he too was unhappy “of course I’m unhappy—aren’t we all unhappy?—isn’t it inevitable, seeing that no one of us has any satisfactory scheme of things?” This quest for a scheme comes from living with Murry, who is in pursuit of one very laboriously, hunting it through the columns of the Athenaeum, for which reason Roger has broken with him—& that too we discussed, & how he turned Dawks out of the house. I laughed a good deal, & cheered myself at their discontent. Molly & Desmond seem more seriously in debt than I realised; & have somehow warded off their creditors by mortgaging old Mrs MacCarthy’s life. Poor Dawks, who has about £1600 a year complains of John’s behaviour, which entirely ruins her day. So they take the children to the Zoo on Sundays—An odd looking couple—the wrong assortment. Unromantic—terribly unromantic.

L. now translating Tchekov, & I must set to on my share, I suppose. Ralph comes twice a week or so, an indomitable, perhaps rather domineering, young man; loves dancing; in the pink of health; a healthy brain. He described a brothel the other night—how, after the event, he & the girl sat over the fire, discussing the coal strike. Girls paraded before him—that was what pleased him—the sense of power.

Tuesday 23 November

We see too many people for me to describe them, had I the time. I have lived the past 2 weeks methodically, printing till dark, allowing myself a day off, arranging things rather successfully; so my strip of pavement (I bag that phrase for Jacob) widens. O but Ive quarrelled with Nessa & Duncan! I’m standing on my dignity. They choose to tell me lies—very well, I don’t go near them till I’m asked. Will they notice? Not in all that shindy of children &c: but I’m cheerful & composed, & conscious of the immense value of my visits. Hope has been for the weekend—over-dressed, over elaborate, scented, extravagant, yet with thick nose, thick ankles; a little unrefined, I mean. That is I like her very much & think her very clever; but I don’t like women who are vain & lacking in self-confidence at the same time. It is easily explicable—the rich uncultivated father, brother a trim officer; wealth; health; Jane superimposed, & the greed, like a greed for almond paste, for fame. We talked very well together all the same; & I did my writing (a review of Lawrence sprung upon me) all the same. Why do I dislike unbalanced criticism so much—silliness about Edith Sitwell & Fredegond? As when Ottoline loads her mantelpiece with knick knacks. Old Gumbo in her brown overcoat, spontaneous & emphatic showed up very well beside her. But I’m exaggerating her defects. She is clever & subtle, & if she hasn’t much generosity, I’m not sure that clever people always have.

Then yesterday came Bob for tea, uneasy like a dog who has been roundly beaten for stealing from a butcher’s shop, at coming uninvited, & offering to go & leave us to work every 10 minutes. Then we got on to the Poetic Drama & he owned to having begun a new one three days ago. His arguments about the need of writing classical drama, not modern drama, evidently long in use; & I thoughtlessly asked him to write prose⁠[.] “I might as well ask you to write poetry!” he said. Indeed it was unkind. Still he showed up less angular & more considerate & mellow than usual, though L. detected pain in his eye—the legacy of Gladys Deacon perhaps. I like him for praising other writers so unthinkingly—without regard that is to his own position. He praised Eliot’s criticism, which had, he said, taken away his own confidence in the poetic drama. I doubt not that under the larches of Leith Hill that will flourish again. The most amusing of his refrains was about Norton. To hear Bob sigh & tread delicately like a hippopotamus holding its breath one would suppose Norton suicidal & maniac. The truth seems to be ‘but you must discount what I say—its very difficult to know what impression I’m giving—yet one must say something to his friends; & I think its going to be all right now; if we can get over the next few weeks—’ The truth is that he has given up mathematics ostensibly on Craig’s advice, feels humiliated, & daren’t face his friends, poor devil, Gordon Square that is. I think I can trace the crisis far back; his powers proving not quite what he thought; worry; strain; despondency; envisaging failure; thought of boasting; dread of being ridiculous—all that, & then his appearance against him with young women, morbid about sex, which clearly isn’t his strong line; culminating in a kind of breakdown on the motherly housemaid’s knee of good Bessy. There he sticks, afraid to issue out, without prospects, a man who has trusted entirely in intellect, & taken his cue from that, given to despising, rejecting, & tacitly claiming an exalted rank on the strength of mathematics which cant be done, & never could be done, I expect. (I quote Maynard) Such an egotist too; never able to see any other face save his own; & worrying out such laborious relationships always b⁠[etw]⁠een himself & other people. Now, poor creature, for I pity him & know his case from my own past, he translates stories from the French, & a book said to want doing by Ponsonby. I can imagine the kind of humility that must be on him, & how he gropes this winter, for some possible method in the future. And here’s L. & I can’t go on about the Memoir Club!

Sunday 5 December

The Memoir Club was fearfully brilliant—I mean I was; & Leonard so much more impressive with so much less pains; & Morgan very professional; & Mary never laughed once at my jokes. Well, I shall laugh loud at hers next Wednesday to make up. For here I am skipped to December, & only writing now I fear because my brain is tired of reading Coleridge. Why do I read Coleridge? Is it partly the result of Eliot whom I’ve not read; but L. has & reviewed & praised into the bargain. Eliot & Goldie dined here t’other night—a successful party. A cold in the head made me desperate like wine—nothing seemed to matter. I laughed in the grim marble face & got a twinkle back. What a big white face he has beside Goldie’s mobile brown monkey one! A mouth twisted & shut; not a single line free & easy; all caught, pressed, inhibited; but great driving power some where—& my word what concentration of the eye when he argues! We discussed criticism, & I find he thinks himself a poet. A little human laughter comes very welcome to him, as I guess, & I think he would willingly break up his formal ways. His details about his father in law’s appendicitis were very precise. My guess is that he wishes to detach himself from sets, & welcomes us as an escape. Then—what? Gerald Duckworth engaged to Miss Chad—does that count as news? dinner at the Toynbees, but I cant go into that. What do I want to go into? How hard we work—thats what impresses me this winter: every compartment stuffed tight, chiefly owing to the press. Whether we can keep it up, I don’t know. Then, both so popular, so well known, so much respected—& Leonard 40, & I nearing it, so there’s not much to boast of. In my heart, too, I prefer the nondescript anonymous days of youth. I like youthful minds; & the sense that no one’s yet anybody. This refers, with shocking slovenliness—but what will you? I cant write 2,000 words an hour carefully—to tea with Miss Hussey at Clifford’s Inn. I dont know why I saw my own youth there: she on her own, a journalist, poor, untidy, enthusiastic; & a younger brother coming in, to tea; not so clever, at least not launched; awkward; oh but so young! Both going off to the play, as Adrian & I did, years ago; but perhaps she’s happier than I was. Figure a poverty stricken room; gas fire broken; margarine; one table; books, mostly cheap ones; writing table; no ornament or easy chair—(perhaps I had it) dark november day; up several staircases; bath, kitchen behind a dingy curtain, & another woman sharing. We talked about the need of education. “Surely education must achieve something” the brother stammered. She would have none of it—clever, & paradoxical, & flighty—advanced; but I forgive all that for the sake of youth.

Sunday 12 December

Nearing the end of the year. Everything muffled in snow & crisp with frost; streets knobbed & slippery; hands grimy as cold for some reason always makes them. Here we sit over the fire, expecting Roger—whose book is out; as everyone’s book is out—Katherine’s, Murry’s, Eliot’s. None have I read so far. I was happy to hear K. abused the other night. Now why? Partly some obscure feeling that she advertises herself; or Murry does it for her; & then how bad the Athenaeum stories are; yet in my heart I must think her good, since I’m glad to hear her abused.

Scenes now come to mind. Gordon Square at tea time—All those branches twisting themselves so fluently, like the Laocoon; so I saw them from Ralph’s upper room. Then there’s Lytton coming round to tea. At once we plunge, even on the cold pavement, into literature. Eliot’s book—“serious” far far better than the journalists—disgraceful review by Lynd. “Still he’s cut & dried—leaves cut—don’t like Milton.”—Shall Lytton write to the Nation? What about Vic? So we pace to Nessa’s door. And Ralph? Well, I wdn’t marry Ralph—A despot. True. But whats to happen to C. She can’t live indefinitely with me—Perhaps with him? Door opens, in I go; up I go; children there; sit over the stove; Nessa draws pictures for Angelica. And home again.

Molly Hamilton next. I’m enlarging my sphere, not very widely, but I take pains to accept what’s offered. When accepted, I feel that I must make the most. It’s not for nothing that I go out to tea. So there we sit, scratching on the match box. “I’m assistant editor to the Review of Reviews—at a salary of £570!” she cried. And so her mother can live in London; & she’s launched; poor Molly can do all this by chaining herself to the desk. There the desk was & books laid out as you see them in shops. Did the match burst into flame? Yes, I think so, about happiness, & human beings. I try not to think whether I’m liked for saying things, or what impression I make, only whether I think the things I say. But with another human being this is very difficult—so susceptible am I, so vain. The poetess came in—poor hard boiled egg, duck’s egg; going to dine at the Club, taking herself off.

I forget my first view of Molly, going down the Strand the night of the Cenotaph; such a lurid scene, like one in Hell. A soundless street; no traffic; but people marching. Clear, cold, & windless. A bright light in the Strand; women crying Remember the Glorious Dead, & holding out chrysanthemums. Always the sound of feet on the pavement. Faces bright & lurid—poor M.’s worn enough by that illumination. I touched her arm; whereupon she jumped, like some one woken. A ghastly procession of people in their sleep.

Sunday 19 December

This I see will be the last page of the year, since I go to Janet tomorrow for the night; dine in London at a festival party on Tuesday night; & leave for Rodmell on Wednesday. I shan’t take this book with me, though if I’m in the mood I might scribble a page to bring back. I ought to say how happy I am, since one of these pages said how unhappy I was. I can’t see any reason in it. My only guess is that it has something to do with working steadily; writing things out of my head; & never having a compartment empty. That doesn’t mean that I dont stuff the corners with idle moments. I gaze at the fire. I make phrases—well, thats all well known. I can’t help suspecting that both Mr & Mrs Woolf slowly increase in fame. That helps to fill compartments. No doubt I like getting letters from publishers: even to be asked to preside over Mr Beresford slightly kindles me. Next year I shall be above all that. I’ve plucked out my jealousy of Katherine by writing her an insincere-sincere letter. Her books praised for a column in the Lit Sup—the prelude of paeans to come. I foresee editions; then the Hawthornden prize next summer. So I’ve had my little nettle growing in me, & plucked it as I say. I’ve revived my affection for her somehow, & don’t mind, in fact enjoy. But I’ve not read her book.

My book seems to me rather good. L.’s book seems to him (so I interpret) rather good. I am entreated to write for the T.L.S. True, I’m not asked to write for the Dial. Lytton is. Lytton dined here the other night; tired, wearied, by C. & P. I suspect, out every night at Gordon Square & pretending doubts about Vic. We discussed Norton’s case. L. very loyal to Apostles in distress, & refusing my irreverent analysis. We talk of going to Italy together. Then there was Roger, on a bitter cold night, but we stoked up, & I’ve been given his book [Vision and Design]—a sumptuous book—in return for writing 200 addresses. I think it reads rudimentary compared with Coleridge. Fancy reforming poetry by discovering something scientific about the composition of light!

Then, characteristically, he deposited a bed, bookcases & stained glass windows in our hall; the glass, of course, broken. I observe that I’m soon muzzled; & my depredations in the herd instantly punished. Indeed, Nessa wouldn’t have me living next door for something. Indeed, my retort is, I wouldn’t live there. I see myself now taking my own line apart from theirs. One of these days I shan’t know Clive if I meet him. I want to know all sorts of other people—retaining only Nessa & Duncan, I think.

The Olivers dined here; Ray sitting impassive in the arm chair, rotund, massive, a little surly, in the style of Widow Creighton. Oliver discussed music. She disapproves of abstract questions in a world where there are so many concrete ones. When she dines out she relaxes. A strange life—to believe in that division between reality & unreality. So we reach the end of the year; which is for us cheerful, I think. For one thing we want to get to Rodmell; to see what has happened to the garden. I shall like a soft grey walk. Then the post. Then reading. Then sitting in the chimney corner. I shall walk out on the flats. We take the servants & ensure comfort, for by contriving it, we’re now on the best of terms with them. Left to myself I should invite people down.—then probably regret it. But this is dawdling & rambling—never mind—this poor book must take what it can get & be thankful. (I use my new blotter, just given me by L. for the first time.)

Tuesday 21 December

I add a postscript, observing that its the shortest day of the year, &, L. announces, the first of winter. But I want to note these things. I went to Farnham yesterday. Suburban society on the Bus going up. Young man back from city. Young woman been shopping. “Had a good day? Shall I take your parcels.” “No; you might run away with them.” Arch badinage. Oh terrible country! Like a giant hen run. Half built houses everywhere. Roads scratched. Heath sandy & mangy. Dinner with Cases. Red light on dog legs—leads me to say “How romantic other people’s lives are!” Suddenly the waits start. Scene flooded, of course: Janet not eating her maccaroni till they’d done. After dinner sitting over the fire, door half shut as usual. A mouse came out—“A nice gentleman’s mouse” I said. Consternation on part of Emphie. “But what are we to do? I’m thinking of that mouse. You can set a trap for rats but not for mice. Seems so craftly.” “Well then keep a cat”—“Yes thats nature’s way after all—” “Or leave it alone” “Oh dear no. Mice eat books; besides, they’re so dirty. Dear me Janet, I wish we hadn’t got a mouse.” Question why K.M. is indecent—“So silly, I think” says Emphie. “Might as well talk of washing one’s hands.” Biscuit & chocolate by my bed, on a small white mat, & so on. What else? oh yes: neighbours. Miss Leonard calling. “A name you don’t often hear. But theres a bootmaker in Oxford called Leonard. My brother had a pair of boots made there. His wife didn’t quite like it oh eh ha ho!” (little laughs like notes of a flute). ‘Mr Minchin writes reviews for the Spectator.’ said with great awe. Parrot’s hot stuff—Parrot’s a slack lot. Oh Parrot—Parrot’s put a sink in the front kitchen—Everyone abuses Parrot. Emphie has discovered honey at Bat’s Corner, unknown to oldest resident.

We should be dining with Nessa &c: but have been put off; & oh dear, I’m glad to sit over the fire—& how could I if I lived in London?

[]

1921

Sunday 2 January 1921

(The first time I’ve written 1921. And it shouldn’t be written here—should be written on the first page of a new book—but we’re just back from Monk’s, & I cant settle to anything—must indeed take a bath & wash my head instantly.) I want to scribble notes of the Rodmell social. Talk with Mrs Hawkesford. Cheery looking woman with pimple on end of nose, dressed in dirty ermines. We gentry sat together; rustics tramping up & down the room (the schoolroom) bumping into me; solemn; spiritless—oh infinitely pathetic the ‘parties’ of the poor! Anyhow not so badly off as clergymen’s wives. The first thing she told me, with passion, was that Russell’s had sent a plain instead of a fruit cake. “Thats the way they treat you in the country. I can’t go 7 miles to complain. None of us like plain cakes. So it won’t be eaten. I had to make another cake today. And sometimes they send things so badly packed—in dirty paper too—that they fall to pieces when they’re undone—” Then, without preface, to the sorrows of family life. Olive in London, member of the forum, won’t stick to anything, now giving dancing lessons with Miss Barker “using Miss Barker’s name of course. Lady Portarlington is joining. Still, she won’t marry, girls dont who take to those ways—& whats to happen in middle life? Thats what I say.” Then Bowen. Almost 18 but wont put her hair up—“What am I to do? There’s no life for a girl here—no girl friends—She hears Olive talk of London. She’ll go next. If she leaves me I dont think I shall be able to stand it. I never sent her to a school so that she mightn’t get unsettled. We go to Brighton. She’s fond of lectures. She likes chemistry. Olive says she ought to read The Times. We dont take The Times—nor does Mr Allinson [Allison], He lends us picture papers. But she ought to read the debates. Then she could talk to people. Why I can hardly talk to educated people now. One gets out of things. One sees no one. Things happen without one’s knowing.” She had been in London, & stayed with friends in W. Kensington (where she was brought up) & their house looked over Queens [Club Athletic Ground]. “Always some game going on—ideal I call it”. She had made Bowen learn tennis at Tonbridge. “But we were only there for a fortnight—not long enough to learn. She’s so shy—People are so stand offish in Lewes. Nothing is ever got up. No tennis parties. Mr Babington (Lord Monk Bretton’s people you know) had a lawn at Rodmell Place. Mr Duberly turned his pony on it. Now its given up completely.” I offered books, tennis, & The Times. Real unhappiness of course—such isolation too; a cruelty to animals to keep a woman without interests alone in the country to magnify cakes. Still can’t go to London because in London a clergyman depends upon pew rents. I should have to pay calls. I should have to make myself nice to people. And we should only get a poor parish. Oh I dont say a word against this—or the people—only for 7 years we’ve not had a road—its too bad—

[Diary X]
HOGARTH HOUSE RICHMOND JAN. 1921

Tuesday 25 January

Here have I waited 25 days before beginning the new year; & the 25 is, not unfortunately my 25th, but my 39th birthday; & we’ve had tea, & calculated the costs of printing Tchekov; now L. is folding the sheets of his book, & Ralph has gone, & I having taken this out of the press proceed to steal a few minutes to baptise it. I must help L. & can’t think of a solemn beginning. I’m at a crisis in Jacob: want to finish in 20,000 words, written straight off in a frenzy. And I must pull myself together to bring it off. Tomorrow we ini⁠[ti]⁠ate the Cock Club, Sanger, Pippa, Molly Hamilton & Sidney [Waterlow] dining ‘along side’ of us. Lytton has asked to dedicate Victoria to me, which pleases me, & I stipulate, from vanity, for my name in full.

Then, if I had time, I could write a new chapter in Clive’s life. Spring has miraculously renewed herself. Pink almond blossoms are in bud. Callow birds crow. In short, he’s out of love & in love, & contemplated eloping with a Spaniard in a motor car. “But after all, I said to myself as I walked back, I like to think of my book & my armchair. It’s terrible, terrible. I can’t give up my old friends after all.” The dusky one lives in Chelsea, has a car, no husband, children, & is beautiful as the Southern night. No one has ever seen her, & she, to her credit, has never heard of Maynard Keynes. We speculate about Mary’s attitude. Poor parrokeet fallen off her perch, or left to preen & prink in solitude. Then we’re just over the crest of a Sydney swell: such a solemn heaving one; the poor man’s bosom all clouded & turgid owing to Murry; who sits at Hampstead promulgating doctrines, & caring not at all that S. seriously thinks of leaving wife & children. “I have no solid core. I am unlike everyone else, & probably more unhappy.” Indeed his bloodhound eyes drooped & almost spilt tears. We talked sense into him, & the inflated tumour burst. He came down happier to breakfast; & a little less certain of the worth of Murry’s goodness. What Murry’s goodness amounts to I’m puzzled to say. K.M. (as the papers call her) swims from triumph to triumph in the reviews; save that Squire doubts her genius—so, I’m afraid, do I. These little points, though so cleanly collected, don’t amount to much, I think. I read her at the Club last night; then went with L. to the Grand Guignol.

Monday 31 January

Just back from Tidmarsh, from the Club, from Harrison’s [Dentist], from losing two books on a bus. Lytton keeps his books amazingly tidy, like books on the stage. We slept Friday night with Philip at the farm; wet of course; but dryness & comfort within. A hot bath, linen sheets (oh what a housekeeper I’m becoming!) Poor Philip—so I feel him—worn & dogged, but not much life in him. He is kept at it perpetually, now paying men, now tending a cow with ringworm. We walked to pay woodmen after breakfast through the slim green trees, fading away rather mysteriously, striping the view with their green. The woodmen had their fire in a ditch & were drinking tea. So round to the farm. The cows henpeck the bull, & don’t allow his attentions. Philip drove us over [to Tidmarsh], & we sat in the drawing room, lacking life as people’s empty rooms do. L. much depressed on Sunday morning & working out how many hours remained, before breakfast. Indeed, Saturday night was hard going. Lytton lapsed into gentle indifference, tired, depressed perhaps. Carrington I think grows older, & her doings are of the sort that age. L. told Murry’s story, & we rated him one of those born queer. Carrington had other versions of his machinations with other hypnotised rabbits. Still even this didn’t keep us going; & middle age—am I not 39?—brings I fear its dependence upon warmth & books & easy chairs. Next day was better, though of course one never has a [? box] in a strange house, & about 11.30 my eyes feel rough & sore with gazing at the fire. But it was better, undoubtedly. C⁠[arrington]. & R⁠[alph]. tactfully made out lists of summer flowers in the dining room.

“You ought to have dedicated Vic. to C.” I said.

Oh dear no—we’re not on those terms at all.

“Ottoline will be enraged.”

Yes, he thought she might be.

The ms. was there, & once I began reading it, I couldn’t stop; or rather had to stop myself. Talk of going to Italy at Easter with the party but—One of the ‘buts’ is the Press. I sometimes think that L. & I are settling in too soundly. And now, am I to learn Russian with him & Kot? If he can read it & solace his age with it I shall be furious. Talk about Keats & Wordsworth & C. & P⁠[artridge]. Lytton intends to live in Gordon Square permanently; & she is penniless; & P. is possessive—Perhaps after all, said Lytton, one oughtn’t to allow these attachments. Our parents may have been right. & so we discussed our parents, & how Ly S. & Lytton (Lord) & Fitzj. would sit talking till 2 a.m.—but what about? So many things could never be said, & the remaining ones coloured by the abstinence. But I’m broiling as I write & can’t settle to anything, & detest going away, & vow never to do it, but to work, work, work—

Saturday 5 February

Jealousy or ambition has won the day, & I’ve just had my first Russian lesson & mortgaged my time to the extent of doing three lessons weekly. L. is mumbling Russian as I write. Have I done a great deal of work in pursuance of my vow? Books begin to drop in, & so long as I can do them every other week I rather like the relief from Jacob. I am beginning the last lap; & it is a sprint towards the end, difficult to keep up.

We had the Memoir Club on Wednesday. Clive & Maynard read; both elaborate & polished, Clive mellow & reminiscent about Mrs Raven Hill (he had her 2 years after his marriage, & for the last time in 1914. She is now imbecile. This was a surprise to me. She coincided with his attachment to me then. But she was a voluptuary. He was not ‘in love’.) Maynard, of course, was the solid piece of the evening, so long indeed that we had to leave before the end. I was a little bored by the politics, & a good deal impressed by the method of character drawing. Rosy Wemyss, illegitimate descendant of William the 4th came out very well,—sitting in mock despair at the conference where he presided, unable to answer a question until Maynard had scribbled it for him. Then Melchior; & his room, where the three clerks refused to leave off playing the piano. “Smoking isn’t allowed until 5” they said; “This is the German revolution” was Melchior’s comment. “I was rather in love with him” said Maynard. I think he meant it seriously, though we laughed. Then L.G. at the table, overwhelmed by his own eloquence—denouncing Klotz & ‘goold’ making a gesture as of a miser sweeping up money bags. All this was very brilliantly told. Mary was there; & I note that one likes her better, partly for showing fight; partly, perhaps, for not being the mistress any longer. I am in hot water for having told Sydney, which I did deliberately, without malice, as conversation, thinking it allowed. Oh what a goose Sydney is! What does he do but march up & congratulate Clive in front of everyone!

Wednesday 16 February

Russian is snatching all the time spared for this book. I can only keep up with L. by running as hard as I can. Everyone prophecies an early end. But I feel myself attached to an express train. With Kot & Leonard dragging me, I must be pulled through somehow. Six months continued at this rate—Russian from 12.15 to 12.45 & from 5.30 to 6. from 9.30 to 10, & on the way to Waterloo & back again must have some result. So far the chief one is as I say that I don’t write here. Let me think how many occasions I have let slip.

We have dined twice at the Cock, repairing afterwards to Hussey’s—no Hussey has married the dullest man in England—to Niemeyer’s room; the gas fire is broken. We balance on hard chairs. But the atmosphere is easy & pleasant; the dinner modest, solid, & somehow in keeping with our clothes. More & more do I become in a state of undress. I believe this affects my writing—or its the other way about. Pale, marmoreal Eliot was there last week, like a chapped office boy on a high stool, with a cold in his head, until he warms a little, which he did. We walked back along the Strand. “The critics say I am learned & cold” he said. “The truth is I am neither.” As he said this, I think coldness at least must be a sore point with him.

Then there was Murry’s farewell dinner at 46. Clive gritty & bawling, Lytton observant & mute. The rest much as usual. I sat next Murry, & let my prejudices run away with me for the first half. He posed, I thought; looked anguished & martyred. Yet the dinner was at his request. I kept thinking how he summed up us & held us worthless. Then, at the end, I asked after Katherine. Poor man! he poured himself out. We sat on after the others had gone.

“But I lacked imagination, he said. I never saw. I ought to have understood. I’ve always held one was free to do as one likes. But she was ill, & that made all the difference. And it was nothing—nothing at all.”

This referred of course, without names, to the Bibesco Scandal, with which London, so they say, rings.

“And I adore Katherine—She’s absolutely the most fascinating person in the world—I’m wholly in love with her.”

Apparently she is worse—dying? God knows. This affair seems to have brought on a crisis. She is desperately depressed, thinks her book bad, can’t write; accuses herself; I imagine, is beside herself with jealousy. Murry asked me to write to her. She feels herself out of things, left alone, forgotten. As he spoke with great feeling, & seemed to be very miserable, & anxious to apologise (was it for this that he wished to see us all—to prove that there was nothing in it?) I liked him, felt with him, & I think there can be no doubt that his love for Katherine anyhow is sincere. All the rest seems of no great importance beside it. Sydney’s version is of course absurdly over emphatic. We went upstairs & told stories about Ottoline. Desmond was the chief performer. He gets his edges too blurred for my taste. Humanity can be due to laziness, as well as kindness. He refuses to think—seems to trust to natural niceness to float him through personal affairs—or so I feel; & thus gets nothing very sharp or thrilling. At anyrate, when Lytton & Roger came to facts they painted a far more splendid vivid figure, Owing to Leonard, it may be, or to natural good taste, I find 46 a little blaring & brazen always, & didn’t much mind catching the last train home. Lytton slipped out with us & whispered his horror & repulsion in the hall. Never would he dine there again. Clive too appalling. L. agreed. So did I. For the truth is no one can speak in their natural voice. Clive was telephoning to Gavrillana (or how does she call herself)? for twenty minutes. An envelope addressed to her lay in the hall. He plumes himself on the affair, which might be conducted on the moon for all I believe in it. I imagine her as stupid as a pearl tie pin.

I skip lots of people, lots of doings. We now think of Cornwall at Easter, with Lytton’s troupe. My book is an eyesore, & I wake in the night twitching with horror at the thought of it. Now to Dorothy Wordsworth—a quiet evening for once. We have taken to dining out, for some reason.

Friday 18 February

I have been long meaning to write a historical disquisition on the return of peace; for old Virginia will be ashamed to think what a chatterbox she was, always talking about people, never about politics. Moreover, she will say, the times you lived through were so extraordinary. They must have appeared so, even to quiet women living in the suburbs. But indeed nothing happens at one moment rather than another. The history books will make it much more definite than it is. The most significant sign of peace this year is the sales; just over; the shops have been flooded with cheap clothes. A coat & skirt that cost £14 in November went for 7 perhaps 5. People had ceased to buy, & the shops had to dispose of things somehow. Margery Strachey who has been teaching at Debenhams foretells bankruptcy for most of the shopkeepers this very month. Still they go on selling cheaply. Pre-war prices, so they say. And I have found a street market in Soho where I buy stockings at 1/ a pair: silk ones (flawed slightly) at 1/10. A hundred yards down the road they ask 5/6 to 10/6 for the same things, or so they seem. Food has fallen a penny here, a penny there, but our books scarcely show a change. Milk is high, 11d a quart. Butter fallen to 3/- but this is Danish butter. Eggs—I dont know what eggs are. Servant girls aged 20 get £45 wages. And the Times pays me 3 guineas instead of £2.2 for a column. But I think you’ll find all this written more accurately in other books, my dear Virginia: for instance in Mrs Gosse’s diary & Mrs Webb’s. I think it true to say that during the past 2 months we have perceptibly moved towards cheapness—just perceptibly. It is just perceptible too that there are very few wounded soldiers abroad in blue, though stiff legs, single legs, sticks shod with rubber, & empty sleeves are common enough. Also at Waterloo I sometimes see dreadful looking spiders propelling themselves along the platform—men all body—legs trimmed off close to the body. There are few soldiers about.

To change the subject, Rose Macaulay dined here last week—something like a lean sheep dog in appearance—harum scarum—humble—too much of a professional, yet just on the intellectual side of the border. Might be religious though: mystical perhaps. Not at all dominating or impressive: I daresay she observes more than one thinks for. Clear pale mystical eyes. A kind of faded moon of beauty: oh & badly dressed. I don’t suppose we shall ever meet for she lives with Royd Smith, & somehow won’t come to grips with us.

Monday 21 February

To fill in an awkward space between Russian & dinner I take up this book. I ought to notice the long drawn spring afternoon—tea easily by daylight—Ralph able to set up 8 lines afterwards. Leonard’s book will be printed by the end of the week perhaps. Massingham would be grateful if I would review D. Richardson for him. This amuses & slightly gratifies me—especially as I refuse. We dined with Roger the other night; & found Sydney still a grudging reluctant convert—still remembering his master, not his own man or Roger’s man. After dinner we turned over sketches in the studio—not the pleasantest occupation for a cold night. Still old Roger has a quality of imagination which attracts me—loose & warm & genuine, in contrast to the costive judicial Sydney, who was catching us out all the time. Sydney looks melancholy; is touched with grey. This gives him an air of distinction. I daresay his face has been one of his horrors. The looking glass always confirming the Apostles. Then we had Quentin & Julian for Sunday, packed Julian home with a temperature, & I put him to bed. Quentin ran in to see Angelica; came up saying she was better but very white. I liked to think of all this set going in the younger generation.

Saxon & Matthew for dinner—a successful combination. A tyrannous old mother has again devastated a daughters life. I see how easily one says of course the daughter must look after her—of course she does, & gives up her dream—only of Geneva—still it was a dream; & must now teach music in Maida Vale until the old tyrant dies.

Tuesday 1 March

I am not satisfied that this book is in a healthy way. Suppose one of my myriad changes of style is antipathetic to the material?—or does my style remain fixed? To my mind it changes always. But no one notices. Nor can I give it a name myself. The truth is that I have an internal, automatic scale of values; which decides what I had better do with my time. It dictates ‘This half hour must be spent on Russian’ ‘This must be given to Wordsworth.’ or ‘now I’d better darn my brown stockings.’ How I come by this code of values I dont know. Perhaps its the legacy of puritan grandfathers. I suspect pleasure slightly. God knows. And the truth is also that writing, even here, needs screwing of the brain—not so much as Russian, but then half the time I learn Russian I look in the fire & think what I shall write tomorrow. Mrs Flanders is in the orchard. If I were at Rodmell I should have thought it all out walking on the flats. I should be in fine writing trim. As it is Ralph Carrington & Brett have this moment gone; I’m dissipated; we dine & go out to the Guild. I cant settle as I should to think of Mrs Flanders in the orchard. Brett is gay, pink, brown, vivacious. Why did I think her a moping figure in the chimney corner? Ott’s insinuations, I suppose. She told me that she has an inner view of Ottoline unguessed by the rest of us. Deafness, she says, makes one a judge of truth. You become an expert in faces.

We came back from Rodmell yesterday; & Rodmell was all gold & sunshine. The one dismal element was provided by the human race. We went to tea at the Rectory, & found, alas, a roomful of dressed women, including Mrs Allinson, & Mr Fisher, & Mr & Mrs Shanks. This surly poet, so we judged him (and his poetry is Squire’s poetry) proposes to live in the village. We shall meet him. He will look in. Oh dear—no more dreaming & rambling for me—always the risk of a recall to editions & royalties, & what Sylvia Lynd thinks of Tomlinson. Our garden becomes a suburban garden. Anything would be better than a poet—than one of Squire’s poets. I would rather have Gerald Duckworth himself—& he is to be married tomorrow.

It is settled that we go to Zennor with the Lytton company on the 23rd. Before that we go to Manchester. So the summer is on us. Already I feel time broken up. I must buy some clothes. & I note with pride that I have just received £45 from America for the V⁠[oyage]. O⁠[ut]. Then Violet Dickinson came to tea here—grown half a foot taller, but otherwise unchanged; wrists a little coarse & even dirty; pearls & emeralds round her neck; asking questions, never listening, rapid, intuitive, humorous in her slap dash way, careering about to tea parties marriages & sick beds & keeping up her connection with lunatics & institutions, like a woman of the 90ties. One of the lay sisters who go about doing good, & talking gossip, almost improved out of existence nowadays I suppose; a survival from the 19th Century are of individual goodness.

My book is back from the printer, who has added the final eyesore—a brown back. There it is in masses, & I can’t read it, for fear of howlers, printers as well as writers. L.’s stories are today, bating a line or two, done. Now Clive proposes we should bring out his private poems. Morgan goes to India, & I think for ever. He will become a mystic, sit by the roadside, & forget Europe, which I think he half despises. In thirty years time he may turn up again, give us an amused look, & return to the East, having written a little unintelligible poetry. He has no roots here. And the news made me melancholy. I like him, & like having him about. But we shan’t see him again. He sails on Friday.

Sunday 6 March

But perhaps I colour my view of Morgan from my painter’s box. At any rate, Bob at the Cock the other night made it all seem very reasonable & desirable—“a trip to India just the thing for him—a relief after his … well, his mother is trying sometimes—very fond of him, of course; devoted to him & he…” This in the usual Bob style, hinting little defects & mysteries with one corner of his mouth, praising with the other.

We had a Cock on Friday—perhaps not quite so good, though vociferous & noisy. Marjorie dines out seldom, I fancy, likes society, throws herself into it, & dresses in salmon pink, short skirt & white stockings: like all Stracheys undoes her premedi⁠[t]⁠ated care by unpremeditated outbursts—hugs her legs till you see—well, all there is. Then I was locked with Bob; had my brain wrung dry by his horny conscientious hands. He starts so well; means so well; is a man of such seriousness & integrity—touched with white on the temples to lend him dignity too—so that to begin with I both like & admire. Oh yes: I end with that too; & yet the steam roller has gone over me—he takes criticism say, or the verse drama, & by the time its over, everything is tight tied in knots; nothing illuminated. He has a shrewd way with him; but why he ever applied himself to an art which wants invention, richness, abandon, originality I really cant say. Poor Bobo was a little stupid as she expressed it: dumb, I should have said; brooding ineffectively over the sorrows of the world. Poor Betty … poor someone else, left with a bastard. Then she can’t, as she says ‘find my form’, whether its to be realism, romance, comedy, tragedy. I was more interested in poor Betty, who has come a cropper, which as I explained, is what one likes people to do. She lost £200 on her play the other day (Wilde, Bottomley & Fielding: unrecorded) got no notices, no praise, can get no work, has spent all her money; is financed by the Mayors, but they cant make a great actress of her, provide her with a chin, or curtail her nose. She flames with the most melodramatic ambition. Nothing short of a great part, a great audience, a great success will satisfy her. She refuses to accept whatever it is she might have, leaves dreadful notes on the hall table for Bobo—who in her turn writes plays, can’t find her form, & is rejected by stage managers. One sees indeed, without much difficulty why the type is an unmarketable one. All is too soft & emotional. Now for writing or anything I believe you must be able to screw up into a ball & pelt straight in people’s faces. They vagulate & dissipate.

We parted on an island in Kingsway: she saying to me, looking out from her great dark eyes under her wide hat, hair looping down, a little wild, yet infinitely soft—even woolly, “I see this evening that I must give up writing” or words to that effect. What she meant, I dont know. Was it a compliment to me? as I should like to think. How pleasant to have ruined someone’s life all in one evening! But she is one of those who only drift a little way in desperation: she is anchored in niceness & general muddle. So I daresay, is Betty, to whom I’ve just written.

Nessa approves of Monday or Tuesday—mercifully; & thus somewhat redeems it in my eyes. But I now wonder a little what the reviewers will make of it—this time next month. Let me try to prophecy. Well, the Times will be kindly, a little cautious. Mrs Woolf, they will say, must beware of virtuosity. She must beware of obscurity … her great natural gifts &c…. She is at her best in the simple lyric, as in Kew Gardens. An Unwritten Novel is hardly a success. And as for A Society, though spirited, it is too one-sided. Still Mrs Woolf can always be read with pleasure. Then, in the Westminster, Pall Mall, other serious evening papers I shall be treated very shortly, with sarcasm. The general line will be that I am becoming too much in love with the sound of my own voice: not much in what I write: indecently [?] affected; a disagreeable woman. The truth is, I expect, that I shan’t get very much attention anywhere. Yet, I become rather well known. Now L. may have considerable success.

Thursday 10 March

Mr Chancellor has been here trying to make us discontented with our offer for Suffield—not that it is an offer: we have stated terms; will take £1400. Now Chancellors say at auction we might get £17 or £1800. But this is doubtful; & an amusing example of the tug of war between business men, & the shady shifts they resort to to poach each others game.

For news, what is there? I lunched with Nessa & Duncan the other day, & dashed my pleasure by losing my Roman brooch. Duncan has a large proper studio with a gallery, a deserted place, very silent, off Haverstock Hill, where a murder might take place, or a dead body be found. On the contrary, they were very cheerful, having been to Cambridge, seen the Greek play, heard Roger lecture, & ravished their eyes on several beauties—for there are beauties now, not seekers after truth, as in my day.

Norton has descended. Bob, of course, muddled it all up. Norton can lunch at any rate at 46; & proposes to live there; yet is desperate; verging on suicidal; can talk of nothing but himself; & will, Nessa thinks, hang about them all like an old decomposing albatross. There’s a new suggestion Dr who can make your hair curl, & unravel every knot in your nerves as far as 20 years back—but Norton can’t be made to face him. So Craig goes on rubbing in the suggestion that Norton can’t work; & he can’t work; & now proposes to get employment with the Webbs. What other news? Singularly little in the way of letters this week, not that I ever write them.

Sunday 13 March

Well our terms for Suffield have been accepted of course; & of course we feel, or I feel, slightly defrauded—great nonsense, as we are sure of our money this way, save on the auction, & at most could only have made another £150, I suppose. Still it was the gambler’s chance that I liked. People called Turner have bought it, old & deaf, which appears to be necessary should you live at Suffield.

We dined with the Sangers εahyεpob on Friday. No one there, or came in afterwards, but Molly [MacCarthy]; & all our grey heads over the fire made me feel a litde greyheaded. We discussed death, a sore subject with Dora, I suspect; one of her morbidities. She cant face it. But then death, as I made out for myself at the age of 12, coming at the end of illness is altogether different from death as one sits over the fire. Charlie a little silent as this went forward, as at the display of a wifes complexes husbands mostly are. Molly was very deaf, resigned, but intermittently deaf only. Charlie not very encouraging about Russian—at least he says the literature is scarcely worth the trouble. Nothing but the great novels, & these adequately translated. But I doubt whether any English pupil can judge of this. A person with my taste shut up in a library might unearth treasures. Anyhow this is provision for old age. Also we talk of Russia next year—also language helps one to understand writers atmosphere, like seeing their country. And then Kot will pull us through; & vanity urges. Kot, poor honest somehow wounded man let out by chance that Katherine lost 3 ms books he [word missing] of Tchehov’s letters. He patiently sets to work to write them out again. Unless she has some very good excuse this seems to me wanton cruelty on her part. She is a tidy methodical woman. How could one lose 3 books lent one by a man who gets his bread by writing? But she never abused Kot; as he does them.

Time is a good deal broken just now by the journey to Manchester next Wednesday. We come back on Friday, then to Cornwall on Wednesday. So what am I to write? What am I to read? I have scribbled an article for Desmond; tomorrow I distemper the kitchen rose pink & leaf green. I can’t begin Dorothy Wordsworth, nor start Jacob’s travels to the East. Still, I generally put in my pen & pick out something.

In the way of history the Germans have gone back to Germany. People go on being shot & hanged in Ireland. Dora described mass going on all day in Dublin for some wretched boy killed early on Monday morning. The worst of it is the screen between our eyes & these [?] gallows is so thick. So easily one forgets it—or I do. For instance why not set down that the Maids of Honour shop was burnt out the other night? Is it a proof of civilisation to envisage suffering at a distance—& then the faculty of seeing that laws matter—the constitution of Cheko-Slovakia for example—is that an important one? Anyhow very little bestowed on me.

Eliot dines here tonight, alone, since his wife is in a nursing home, not much to our regret. But what about Eliot? Will he become ‘Tom’? What happens with friendships undertaken at the age of 40? Do they flourish & live long? I suppose a good mind endures, & one is drawn to it & sticks to it, owing to having a good mind myself. Not that Tom admires my writing, damn him.

Nessa has influenza; slightly; & I’m glad to see how solicitous dear old Duncan is, waiting on her, & taking thought for her, better I think than Clive ever did. That little man postpones his poems till the autumn, meaning, I daresay, to add one or two in praise of his dusky lady. I am told that poor Moll Hutch, found the separation intolerable, & has come back to platonic intercourse; strictly platonic. How the pismire survives the tug of war; or whether he sucks pleasure from it I cannot say. Anyhow he dines out nightly, ‘not been in, I suppose, since the night you dined with us,’ he boasts; & mixes with society ‘which, thank God, he doesn’t bring here’ says Nessa. I trace some anxiety on her part for his welfare. Perhaps one doesn’t like the father of one’s children to dissolve into pure lust & gluttony & pleasure & vainglory. She hopes, anyhow, that he will return to Charleston this summer & write his book on Civilisation. His views on that subject will be on lines agreeable with her present life, I suppose. Will the lady have taught him a fresh version of the old story? I fancy when he began the book, 15 years ago, he was a Moorite. Well, I suppose there are Moors in Spain. Now the light fades (though I am just becoming brilliant) & I must tackle the aspects [of Russian verbs] & the Labour party programme—one of L.’s triumphs.

Friday 28 March

Just back from two days at Manchester. I fancied myself writing this account, & how good it would be; what lots of things I had to say; & now the pen brings blankness. Well I was kept awake by business men talking in low steady almost continuous voices in the room above till 1.30: & we were up early, breakfasted & caught a train, & so home, travelling all through the great rocky moors of Derbyshire—bald moors; the strangest looking places. So solitary they might be 18th Century England, the valleys cut by a thread of water falling roughly from heights; great sweeps of country all sunny & gloomy with bare rocks against the sky, & then behold a row of east end slum houses, with a strip of pavement & two factory chimneys set down in the midst. The houses are all stone, bleak, soot stained, different from our cottages; not cottages at all, but streets. Suddenly, in the palm of a wide valley you come on a complete town—gasworks, factories, & little streams made to run over stone steps & turn engines I suppose. Now & again no houses but wild moors, a thread of road, & farms set into the earth, uncompromising, since nothing like flowers, long grass, or hedges grow round them.

“Yes, I said to Mrs Unwin, Derbyshire is a very fine country.” We were standing in a pit at the University, a table beneath a light below us, & a row of chairs, on which sat Professors Unwin, Findlay, Goldman (a financier) & Weiss. Leonard then got up & made his speech, a very vigorous one. We sat round on hard benches, with ink pots, or the holes for them, in front of us.

All Manchester streets are the same, & all strung with tramlines. These follow each other at a few yards distance, making the roads mechanical & unsociable. You hear bells striking all the time. Then there are no tea shops, but great cafés; & no little shops, but all big drapers. We lodged (paying 18/ each for bed only) at the Queens Hotel, in a large square; but whats a square when the trams meet there? Then there’s Queen Victoria, like a large tea cosy, & Wellington, sleek as a mastiff with paw extended; none of this was quite English, or at least London. The people were lower middle class, no sprinkling of upper class.

But my observation of the university type was more profound. Mr & Mrs Weiss gave a dinner in the refectory before L.’s second speech; & there they all were—professors & wives, elderly people, depressed looking, like the inferior branch of a profession, with the manner of dons, but not the extreme confident eccentricity of first rate brains. But how supercilious I thought myself, & ultimately how much pure merit seemed in them, with the very thinnest coating of decorum. The women were dowdy; oh yes, but they too had fought for the right—which is a phrase I distrust, but how use any other of people, struggling along just decently on so many pounds a year, & sacrificing it, as a matter of course, for their views. P. Unwin told me he had been arrested 3 times for attending seditious meetings during the war. Mrs Weiss said her husband had resigned because the University refused to accept a C.O. upon which they thought better of it. And yet there is no surface brilliancy; not a scrap of romance. It is a little familiar professional society, trying to keep up the standards, which (perhaps wrongly) I suppose must be hard work in Manchester, or am I merely snobbish in thinking it harder to say clever things & write clever books in Manchester than in Cambridge? I applied the test of father’s name twice; but neither Unwin or Weiss had heard it. The women had their activities not so pronounced as in Cambridge, pleasanter perhaps; common efforts to get up bazaars; enquiries about health; shabby best clothes. Old Mrs (Findlay) Herford (I distributed the husbands & wives all wrongly) & Professor Finlay sat patiently looking at the tablecloth with nothing to say, like two old horses who have been working in the fields all day together.

L., in the large room after dinner, was emphatically first rate; I don’t mean his clothes; nor yet his speech; but its a question of being the master. Now all the professors know that they’re not masters. I think L.’s remark that he did not wish to be elected rather flabbergasted them; & I fancy they asked themselves afterwards why the Woolves had taken the trouble to come—“Are you a politician?” they asked me. “Do you do much organising work?” I said I listened. Mrs Findlay shook her head. Why was I there then? Oh for the fun of spending £10 in Manchester & seeing the Zoo. Lord! what a scatterbrain I am! But they’d none of them read my books. So we went to the Zoo; & I daresay I could write something interesting about that—a pale stone desert given over to charwomen & decorators: a few bears, a mandrill, & a fox or two—all in the desolation of depression.

Tuesday 22 March

Here we are on the verge of going to Cornwall. This time tomorrow—it is now 5.20—we shall be stepping onto the platform at Penzance, sniffing the air, looking for our trap, & then—Good God!—driving off across the moors to Zennor—Why am I so incredibly & incurably romantic about Cornwall? One’s past, I suppose: I see children running in the garden. A spring day. Life so new. People so enchanting. The sound of the sea at night. And now I go back “bringing my sheaves”—well, Leonard, & almost 40 years of life, all built on that, permeated by that: how much so I could never explain. And in reality it is very beautiful. I shall go down to Treveal & look at the sea—old waves that have been breaking precisely so these thousand years. But I see I shall never get this said, & Lottie is chattering.

We had Eliot to dinner on Sunday & went to Love for Love, he & I in the Pit; L. upstairs, with a ticket from the New Statesman. Eliot & I had to drive in to Hammersmith in a taxi, having missed our train. We passed through dark market gardens. ‘Missing trains is awful’ I said. “Yes. But humiliation is the worst thing in life” he replied. “Are you as full of vices as I am?” I demanded. “Full. Riddled with them.” “We’re not as good as Keats” I said. “Yes we are” he replied. “No: we dont write classics straight off as magnanimous people do.” “We’re trying something harder” he said. “Anyhow our work is streaked with badness” I said. “Compared with theirs, mine is futile. Negligible. One goes on because of an illusion.” He told me that I talked like that without meaning it. Yet I do mean it. I think one could probably become very intimate with Eliot because of our damned self conscious susceptibility: but I plunge more than he does: perhaps I could learn him to be a frog. He has the advantage of me in laughing out. He laughed at Love for Love: but thinking I must write about it I was a little on the stretch. We saw George Moore talking to Eddie Marsh, on some steps; a little obese, dim eyed, weak, inconsiderable. I was disappointed. There was no rakish poll to be seen. As for Clive he dresses as effectively as any beauty, & poses like someone at a first night. Mary was there. “Tom”, she said, “you must come and see the boat race.” Well, these women’s emotions, which I don’t trouble to write out, are amusing; not very serious in my case. Then we met Nessa & Duncan, as shabby as old moths, making off home together. I bought a pair of boots yesterday for 33/6, which were made for another & fit me precisely. The truth is my foot is shaped like a snake. I have muddled away these 3 days, as far as writing is concerned, & intend to write nothing in Cornwall; but to read the classics. Candide: Shakespeare—historical plays: Adolphe: Keats’ Letters: Thomas Hardy: & perhaps Hudibras. I shall find some old biography or 10th rate novel & read only that. Never mind.

Leonard is an impulsive man. He has lent Monks House to Mrs Martin. She goes there tomorrow. As she is a complete zany, has no husband, no control over anything, & floats down stream, I see no reason why she should ever get out of Monk’s House. How are we to turn her out? And somehow I see her laying eggs diffusively all over the garden—an amorphous jelly of a woman, German too.

I had tea with Nessa yesterday & heard a pack of troubles. Poor Ann has inherited Karin’s disease of the ear & must be operated on. They have notice to leave Charleston. And Clive, as she remarks, is not much help at Easter. Adrian came in to tell me that Desmond wanted me, to demand my article instantly. Adrian wears a short red-brown moustache, reminding me in a ghastly way of the hair that grows after death. So distinguished I always think him, but (to me) so repressive.

As for other news, I think I have never said that Lytton stays at home with Lady Strachey, who has taken to fainting on the floor.

Wednesday 30 March

This is the last evening, & L. is packing, & I’m not in the mood for writing, but feel superstitiously that I should like to read something actually written in Cornwall. By looking over my left shoulder I see gorse yellow against the Atlantic blue, running up, a little ruffled, to the sky, today hazy blue. And we’ve been lying on the Gurnard’s Head, on beds of samphire among grey rocks with buttons of yellow lichen on them. How can I pick out the scene? You look down onto the semitransparent water—the waves all scrambled into white round the rocks—gulls swaying on bits of seaweed—rocks now dry now drenched with white waterfalls pouring down crevices. No one near us, but a coastguard sitting outside the house.

We took a rabbit path round the cliff, & I find myself a little shakier than I used to be. Still however maintaining without force to my conscience that this is the loveliest place in the world. It is so lonely. Occasionally a very small field is being ploughed, the men steering the plough round the grey granite rocks. But the hills & the cliffs have been given over as a bad job. There they lie graceful even in spite of all their stones & roughness, long limbed, stretching out to sea; & so subtly tinted; greys, all various with gleams in them; getting transparent at dusk; & soft grass greens; & then one night they burnt the heather at Tregerthen, the smoke rolling up over the crest, & flame shining. This we saw from Ka’s. The Eagle’s Nest stands up too much of a castle-boardinghouse to be a pleasant object; but considering the winds, firm roots are needed. Endless varieties of nice elderly men to be seen there, come for climbing.

Friday 8 April

10 minutes to eleven a.m. And I ought to be writing Jacob’s Room;—I can’t, & instead I shall write down the reason why I can’t—this diary being a kindly blank faced old confidante. Well, you see, I’m a failure as a writer. I’m out of fashion; old; shan’t do any better; have no head piece; the spring is everywhere; my book [Monday or Tuesday] out (prematurely) & nipped, a damp firework. Now the solid grain of fact is that Ralph sent my book out to the Times for review without date of publication in it. Thus a short notice is scrambled through to be in “on Monday at latest”, put in an obscure place, rather scrappy, complimentary enough, but quite unintelligent. I mean by that they don’t see that I’m after something interesting. So that makes me suspect that I’m not. And thus I can’t get on with Jacob. Oh & Lytton’s book is out & takes up three columns: praise, I suppose. I do not trouble to sketch this in order; or how my temper sank & sank till for half an hour I was as depressed as I ever am. I mean I thought of never writing any more—save reviews. To rub this in we had a festival party at 41 [Gordon Square]: to congratulate Lytton; which was all as it should be; but then he never mentioned my book, which I suppose he has read; & for the first time I have not his praise to count on. Now if I’d been saluted by the Lit. Sup. as a mystery & a riddle, I shouldn’t mind; for Lytton wouldn’t like that sort of thing, but if I’m as plain as day, & negligible?

Well, this question of praise & fame must be faced. (I forgot to say that Doran has refused the book in America). How much difference does popularity make? (I see pretty clearly, I may add, after a pause in which Lottie has brought in the milk & the sun has ceased to eclipse itself, that I’m writing a good deal of nonsense.) One wants, as Roger said very truly yesterday, to be kept up to the mark; that people should be interested, & watch one’s work. What depresses me is the thought that I have ceased to interest people—at the very moment when, by the help of the press, I thought I was becoming more myself. One does not want an established reputation, such as I think I was getting, as one of our leading female novelists. I have still, of course, to gather in all the private criticism, which is the real test. When I have weighed this I shall be able to say whether I am ‘interesting’ or obsolete. Anyhow, I feel quite alert enough to stop, if I’m obsolete. I shan’t become a machine, unless a machine for grinding articles. As I write, there rises somewhere in my head that queer, & very pleasant sense, of something which I want to write; my own point of view. I wonder, though, whether the feeling that I write for half a dozen instead of 1500 will pervert this?—make me eccentric,—no, I think not. But, as I said, one must face the despicable vanity which is at the root of all this niggling & haggling. I think the only prescription for me is to have a thousand interests—if one is damaged, to be able instantly to let my energy flow into Russian, or Greek, or the press, or the garden, or people, or some activity disconnected with my own writing.

But, honestly, I need not pull a very long face yet. Roger is staying with us. I think he has the nicest nature among us—so open, sincere, & entirely without meanness; always generous, I think, & somehow hearty? He throws out a tremendous laugh. We went to the Bedford Music Hall last night, & saw Miss Marie Lloyd, a mass of corruption—long front teeth—a crapulous way of saying ‘desire’, & yet a born artist—scarcely able to walk, waddling, aged, unblushing. A roar of laughter went up when she talked of her marriage. She is beaten nightly by her husband. I felt that the audience was much closer to drink & beating & prison than any of us. The coal strike is on. If I weren’t crowded & hurried & distracted I would bring my Gordon Square gossip up to date. Juana Ganderilla has been seen—a lady in the continental style, lovely, composed, simple, illiterate, emotional, going into trances.

Sunday 10 April

I must note the symptoms of the disease, so as to know it next time. The first day one’s miserable: the second happy. There was an Affable Hawk on me in the New Statesman which at anyrate made me feel important (& its that that one wants) & Simpkin & Marshall rang up for a second fifty copies. So they must be selling. Now I have to stand all the twitching & teasing of private criticism which I shant enjoy. There’ll be Roger tomorrow. What a bore it all is!—& then one begins to wish one had put in other stories—or left out the Haunted House, which may be sentimental. Anyhow next week there’ll be Tchekhov & Leonard as well as me. And suppose every one (that is to say the 6 people who matter) praise Leonard, shall I be jealous—but, mark my word, all of this will be forgotten in 6 weeks time.

Pernel dined here: they dress badly, as I think I’ve said before. I think perhaps she grows a little pensive; but I’m not good at judging my friends’ moods. Then Roger came in—utterly unwearied—in spite of standing on a ladder for 8 hours restoring Mantegnas. He draws people here in shoals—yesterday, just after Kot had gone, in came Mr & Mrs Reece, & tomorrow there’ll be Pippa—always some slave or other attending; & as we’re in the middle of the rush we get whelmed, & I can’t write sense or nonsense, & must devote all this week to reviewing.—I want to read Victoria & Swift.

Tuesday 12 April

I must hurriedly note more symptoms of the disease, so that I can turn back here & medicine myself next time. Well; I’d worn through the acute stage, & come to the philosophic semi depressed, indifferent, & spent the afternoon taking parcels round the shops, going to Scotland Yard for my purse, when L. met me at tea & dropped into my ear the astonishing news that Lytton thinks the String Quartet ‘marvellous’. This came through Ralph, who doesn’t exaggerate, to whom Lytton need not lie; & did for a moment flood every nerve with pleasure, so much so that I forgot to buy my coffee & walked over Hungerford Bridge twanging & vibrating. A lovely blue evening too, the river sky colour. And then there was Roger who thinks I’m on the track of real discoveries, & certainly not a fake. And we’ve broken the record of sales, so far. And I’m not nearly as pleased as I was depressed; & yet in a state of security; fate cannot touch me; the reviewers may snap; & the sales decrease. What I had feared was that I was dismissed as negligible.

Roger again last night, scraping at his woodcuts while I sewed; the sound like that of a large pertinacious rat. We live in stirring times. Here is Ralph saying that Michael Davies has enlisted to protect the country, against the miners, & McIver is offered £1 exs. by government for himself & car, which he will accept. Yet no one—so far as I know—really believes that we are in for anything. It will be tided over. Our cellars will be full; our larders too. Nothing is going to upset us. People in a century will say how terrible it all was. And I walked past Downing St yesterday & saw a few men in cabs, a few men with despatch boxes, orderly public watching, wreaths being laid on the Cenotaph. Lytton’s book already selling 5 thousand copies, & the weather perfect.

Wednesday 13 April

Now I note the latest symptom—complete absence of jealousy. What I mean is that I shall feel instantly warm & pleased (not only after an hour & a sharp pang) if there’s a long & sound & appreciative review of L. in the Lit Sup tomorrow. I think this is perfectly true. Most people, though, would not have to write this down. I suppose I had a qualm or two. No time for more than this interesting & important statement. Rather to our respite, Roger is away for the night after a fair bust up yesterday—Ray Pippa Saxon all together—& I must read my book. A strike now proclaimed for Friday, & we had just planned to go to Monks.

Friday 15 April

I have been lying recumbent all day reading Carlyle, & now Macaulay, first to see if Carlyle wrote better than Lytton, then to see if Macaulay sells better. Carlyle (reminiscences) is more colloquial & scrappy than I remembered, but he has his merits.—more punch in his phrase than in Lytton’s. I don’t count this as my judgment though, since I was half asleep, & haven’t done more than half Vic yet. Lytton rang up this morning to ask for Roger, & I asked him about his book. “Are you smothered in laurels” “Well, rather depressed,” he said, & so he sounded. “I’m in the middle; & then I shall write to you about it” “And I’m writing to you about yours” he answered. “We will be candid” I said. “When shall I see you? Never, presumably.” Anyday next week would do, he said,—he is coming to tea & dinner on Wednesday. So fame hasn’t done him much harm. He’s sold, so they say, 5,000 copies this week, & another edition is printing. I have sold just 300. Well, but that doesn’t prove my immortality, as I insinuate. The truth is I have no notion of my standing, or of Lytton’s. One ought to write more of this occasion, since I suppose in 20 years’ time the publication of Queen Victoria will be thought an important matter; but these things aren’t important to us. They say he’s been given a bust of Prince Albert & a photograph of the Queen by a spectacle maker. And Max Beerbohm is doing a caricature of him, & altogether he’s a solid celebrity, one of our leading writers, not merely the hero of one book which might not be repeated. Ralph seems willing to go on with our printing, though orders have again sunk low. No review of Tchekhov or L. yet; only shorter mention by donkey Dalton I suppose in the Lit. Sup. This is the first free time for reading I’ve had for an age,—I shall lavish it all on Q.V. & must now go & fetch her, since of course Roger borrows her to read o’nights.

A queer sort of stillness seems already settling down on us, as of Sunday. This is the foreboding of the General Strike. We have put off going to Rodmell. Marjorie’s party is put off. L. has just come in with a paper which says that nothing has been done to patch up the strike. Therefore at 10 tonight, unless something happens meanwhile, all trains, trams, buses, mines, & perhaps electric light works come to an end. The servants have been to the Coops & brought back a weeks groceries. We have a bundle of candles. Our most serious lack is coal, as Nelly forgot to order any. We burn coke in the drawing room & cook on gas. Still, Heaven knows why, I don’t believe the strike will happen.

Sunday 17 April

And I was perfectly right. The strike didn’t happen. About 7 o’clock L. rang up Margaret & heard that the Triple Alliance had split: the railwaymen & transport workers refusing to go on with it, & leaving the miners by themselves. Nothing is yet accurately known. Presumably the miners will have to give in,* * They haven’t given in yet. May 9th & I shall get my hot bath, bake home made bread again; yet it seems a pity somehow—if they’re to be forced back & the mine owners triumphant. I think this is my genuine feeling, though not very profound. It is fairly obvious that working people are well enough satisfied to prefer going on working; I remember the pleasure of the railwaymen when they started running about platforms & leaning out of engines again.

Yesterday we had our avenue walk—the first for a long while; & L. explained the plan of his new book—a revised version of the Wandering Jew. Very original & solid, it seemed to me; & like a good business man, I pressed him to promise it for the press. Its true that sales & reviews flag, & I much doubt if M. & T. will sell 500, or cover expenses. But I want to push on with it nevertheless; & a solid big book like L.’s is essential. We discussed all this walking down the Avenue; looking in at the iron gates of Ham House, & so home to tea, & a Russian lesson with Kot, & now I must write to Lytton & polish off a review. Always these last paragraphs floor me.

Monday 18 April

Just back from lunching with a Cabinet Minister. I mean, of course, Herbert Fisher. We think he asked us in order to apologise for—everything. He said he had neither the physical force nor the combativeness to carry things through. He said he hated Parliament. A political life is dull, & wastes all one’s time he said; one is always listening to dull speeches, frittering time away. He leaves home at 10, gets back at 11 p.m. & then has a bundle of papers to go through. The upshot of it all was that he couldn’t be blamed for his conduct about Ireland. And then he was careful to explain that the public is ridiculously in the dark about everything. Only the cabinet knows the true spring & source of things he said. That is the only solace of the work. A flood tide of business flows incessantly from all quarters of the world through Downing Street; & there are a few miserable men trying desperately to deal with it. They have to make tremendous decisions with insufficient evidence on the spur of the moment. Then he pulled himself up, & said, solemnly, that he is going to Geneva to initiate peace—disarmament. “You are the great authority upon that, I understand”, he said to Leonard. Anyhow I confess it seemed to me, sitting opposite to Leonard in that brown ugly room with its autotypes of Dutch pictures & Aunt Mary on a donkey, that Leonard was an authority & Herbert a thin-shredded thread paper of a man, whose brain has been harrowed in to sandy streaks like his hair. Never was there a thinner lighter airier specimen I thought; his words without body, & his head cocked at a queer angle, & his hands gesticulating, & his eyes so blue, but almost vacant, & cheerful colourless words, slightly mannered & brushed up in conformity with some official standard of culture—I daresay Mr Balfour talks something like that. But after mouthing his meaning behold; it flew away like thistledown, & it appeared that this Cabinet Minister & representative of Great Britain in whose hands are armies & navies was dry & empty again—& asking me colloquially whether I remembered Aunt Mary on the donkey, which I did. ‘The donkey is too small’, I said ‘And the horse has no ears,’ he added. ‘Watts has come down in the world’ I said, feeling astonishingly young & juicy beside him.

“Yes, he said. I daresay: But I feel that the man who painted that picture was a great man—not a great painter, perhaps, but a great man.” After which he descended as usual to badinage about the arts; & praised a Mr Munnings: wonderful pictures of horses; landscapes in the 18th century style behind them. “Thats what I like—the 18th century style—old Crome & Cotman. Well, Munnings is that style—worth going to the Royal Academy to see—quite a young fellow—fought through the war.” But modern art he didn’t care for; & we walked down Victoria Street to the House of Commons; & he said he was reading Southey’s Letters—“first rate reading. There’s a beautiful description of winter. Now who are our promising litterateurs?” I said Joyce. Never heard of Joyce. So we parted, Herbert very amiable, grey & distinguished, in his pea-jacket, going to tackle the liquor bill, & envying us very much, he said, writing books at Richmond. And then we ran into Will Vaughan at the London Library, portly & hearty, & keeping up a laugh like an old sea-captains all the time he talked. Indeed, we had nothing to say.

Friday 29 April

A great deal to say, I suppose: a great many portraits to sketch; conversations to write down; & reflections to work in—had I time; which I have not (& that sentence reminds me that I mean to read Marvell.) But every afternoon for a week I’ve been up to the AEolian Hall; taken my seat right at the back; put my bag on the floor & listened to Beethoven quartets. Do I dare say listened? Well, but if one gets a lot of pleasure, really divine pleasure, & knows the tunes, & only occasionally thinks of other things—surely I may say listened. We are just back from the 5th: & I had my hand clasped by Lady Cromer in the street: we had tea with Lytton, Carrington & Ralph.

I ought to say something of Lytton. I have seen him oftener these last days than for a whole year perhaps. We have talked about his book & my book. This particular conversation took place in Verreys: gilt feathers: mirrors: blue walls & Lytton & I taking our tea & brioche in a corner: we must have sat well over an hour.

“And I woke last night & wondered where to place you” I said. “There’s St Simon & La Bruyère.

Oh God, he groaned.

And Macaulay I added.

“Yes, Macaulay” he said. “A little better than Macaulay.”

But not his mass, I insisted. More civilisation of course. And then you’ve only written short books.

I’m going to do George the IVth next, he said.

Well but your place, I insisted.

And yours he asked

“I’m the ‘ablest of living women novelists’” I said—So the British weekly says.

“You influence me” he said.

And he said he could always recognise my writing though I wrote so many different styles, “which is the result of hard work” I insisted. And then we discussed historians: Gibbon: a kind of Henry James, I volunteered. Oh dear no—not in the least he said.

“He has a point of view & sticks to it” I said. “And so do you. I wobble.” But what is Gibbon?

Oh he’s there all right; Lytton said. Forster says he’s an Imp⁠[?]. But he hadn’t many views. He believed in ‘virtue’ perhaps.

A beautiful word, I said.

But just read how the hordes of barbarians devastated the City. Its marvellous. True, he was queer about the Early Xtians—didn’t see anything in them at all. But read him. I’m going to next October. And I’m going to Florence, & I shall be very lonely in the evenings.

The French have influenced you more than the English, I suppose, I said.

Yes. I have their definiteness. I’m formed.

I compared you with Carlyle the other day, I said. I read the Reminiscences. Well they’re the chatter of an old toothless grave digger compared with you: only then he has phrases.

Ah yes, he has them, said Lytton. But I read him to Norton & James the other day, & they shouted—they wouldn’t have it. I’m a little anxious though about ‘mass’. That’s my danger is it?

Yes: You may cut too fine I said. But its a magnificent subject—George the IVth—& what fun, setting to work on it.

And your novel?

Oh I put in my hand & rummage in the bran pie. Thats whats so wonderful. And its all different.

Yes. I’m 20 people.

But one sees the whole from the outside.

The worst of George IVth is that no one mentions the facts I want. History must be written all over again. Its all morality—

& battles, I added.

And then we walked through the streets together, for I had to buy coffee.

Tuesday 3 May

Hamilton Fyfe in the Daily Mail says that Leonard’s story P. & S. will rank with the great stories of the world. Am I jealous? Only momentarily. But the odd thing is—the idiotic thing—is that I immediately think myself a failure—imagine myself peculiarly lacking in the qualities L. has. I feel fine drawn, misty, attenuated, inhuman, bloodless & niggling out trifles that don’t move people. ‘Limbo’ is my sphere; so they say in the Daily News. Then Romer Wilson has brought out a novel—to which Squire will certainly give the he did Hawthornden prize, thus robbing Katherine of it: so I have some cause for pleasure. I write this purposely, to shame it out of me. A full stop in Jacob, owing partly to depression. But I must pull together & finish it off. I can’t read it as it is.

We had Oliver & Saxon to dinner on Sunday; & I went to tea with Nessa on Saturday; & yesterday we were in London at the New Statesman office: & I bought Eliot on Prose; & Romer Wilson;—all of which I note to put off doing my Russian; I suppose: for I see I am going to say nothing sensible or witty or profound. And yet I comfort myself with the reflection that there’s no knowing what won’t interest old Virginia one of these days.

Monday 9 May

Well, but I assure you, when Virginia’s old, no one will be talking of Romer Wilson. What a book! What a perfect example of the faux bon: every attitude, scene & word, I should say matched in the old word shop of the minor poets: never a single thing seen for herself, or dared; & yet by taking all the scenery & supplying the appropriate words she has Squire, Lynd, & Turner by the heel: another proof that what people dread is being made to feel anything: a certain kind of rhapsody makes them feel wild & adventurous; & they then make out that this is passion & poetry—so thankful to be let off the genuine thing.

Yesterday I had tea with Lady Cromer, & I observe that she’s more Lady Cromer in her own drawing room than met casually in the street. Supported by her pretty chinzes, large airy rooms, family portraits by Watts & Sargent—green stained wood, parquet floors, & young bumpkin Greek God dragoon of a son she is the English Countess again: thus rather a bore, I’ve come to think. Do I travel to Finchley Rd on a Sunday missing my chocolate cake merely to exchange views with Lady Cromer upon the niceness of the Bruce Richmonds, the charm of St John’s Wood, the good qualities of the French—to hear Mr Keynes called ‘very clever’ & Lytton Strachey ‘very clever’ & myself very good to have come there? I cant get it right though. Time was when I thought this breeding & personality so distinguished & somehow celestial that it carried everything off. Now I’m more exacting: after all shes a little middle class: & then the personal goodness attitude restrains me. Doing good to peoples cooks if you’re Lady Cromer seems to me an easy way to waste time agreeably. Barbara at the club today, stunned with the problem of life, thoroughly in for it, & scarcely able to deal with it, appeared to me more interesting—thats it perhaps—than Lady Cromer swimming over the waves. But she’s a nice woman: a character: beautiful too: so upright, firm, possessed—& then that queer old way of bending her head on one side & falling half absentminded as she talks, looking out of the window; her voice so charmingly accented, her eyes half closed. I got home to find Mr Brenton of Barnes; & according to his code one asks people kindly after their health, & comes back to shake hands, very punctiliously; & the poor man is sunk cheeked, spotted, ugly: drab: yet L. says interesting, & he should judge having had 3 hours of him! An order for 25 stories of the East today from S⁠[imkin]. & M⁠[arshall].

Sunday 15 May

Whit Sunday—dull, wet, & cold; so that on the whole we dont blame the coal strike for keeping us here over the fire instead of Monks House. Moreover, L. has a chill in his inside, & sits rather dismally with his head in his hand, poor man, allowed no tea or coffee. Its that I should mind—all the romance of the day dulled. By this time I think Carrington will have made up her mind one way or t’other. She must have had an odious Sunday. But still she must make up her mind. So I told Ralph on Friday, broaching that topic after all these months of silence. He did it himself, rather, by telling me of his gloom of the night before: his loneliness. “I wished for my mother” he said. “Though she irritates me, & I could tell her nothing.” He was very shrewd & bitter about C. “She thinks herself one of the little friends of all the world” he said. Then he said she was selfish, untruthful, & quite indifferent to his suffering. So people in love always turn & rend the loved, with considerable insight too. He was speaking the truth largely. But I expect he was biassed; & also I expect—& indeed told him—that he is a bit of an ogre & tyrant. He wants more control than I should care to give—control I mean of the body & mind & time & thoughts of his loved. There’s his danger & her risk; so I don’t much envy her making up her mind this wet Whit Sunday.

I read 4 pages of sneer & condescending praise of me in the Dial the other day. Oddly enough, I have drawn the sting of it by deciding to print it among my puffs, where it will come in beautifully. The Dial is everything honest vigorous & advanced; so I ought to feel crushed. L. went on selling all last week. I very slowly dribble. Tchekhov is at a standstill. But we hear that never was there such a season for all commodities, in proof of which not a picture at the London Group was sold 2 days ago, though many are worth buying. And did I say?—we propose to spend £1000 a year upon a tea shop, book shop, gallery in Bond Street. After all, why not? I like rummaging in the great Bran pie, as I’ve said before: thus we rout middle age for one thing; for another, such queer specimens come out of it. There was Mr Reginald Morris on the hearthrug the other day—a very bad poet from Hounslow.

Monday 23 May

So Carrington did make up her mind to become Partridge—no, that is precisely what she is determined not to do; & signs herself aggressively Carrington for ever. If people ever took advice I should feel a little responsible for making up Ralph’s mind. I mean I am not sure that this marriage is not more risky than most. Certainly she is not in love; & he has the obdurate Anglo Indian in him. But still, if she couldn’t face the prospect of a week end breach, or of a journey alone to Italy, she had no alternative. So they were married on Saturday. The day before Michael Davies was drowned bathing at Oxford. Life does this sort of thing too habitually—I begin to feel bored, like a passenger thrown from side to side of a ship. I dont describe what I feel: something of anger at the unreason of it; & something of—not indifference, no: but as if one knew by this time how things go: first these marriages, at the same moment deaths. Just from not knowing how to swim he pulled another young man down, & now at the age of 21 it’s all over for both of them. And then in this fine weather too. We have been to Rodmell, & as usual I come home depressed—for no reason. Merely moods. Have other people as many as I have? That I shall never know. And sometimes I suppose that even if I came to the end of my incessant search into what people are & feel I should know nothing still. I mean I go on thinking in the belief that if one thinks about it enough one comes to some conclusion. That I begin to judge doubtful. I was thinking about this in the Strand today—wondering whether I am after some play or novel, as I go on ferreting away. But I’m too scatterbrained to get it right. I was up in the Strand with 12 copies of Monday or Tuesday; so that sells a little; & 2 goslings, to be sent to Lewes; & my review of Patmore for the Times; & then caught a train home, put my great lupins & peonies in water, & should now settle with concentration to my book. But which book? I’ve a notion of reading masterpieces only; for I’ve read literature in bulk so long. Now I think’s the time to read like an expert. Then I’m wondering how to shape my Reading book; the more I read of other peoples criticism the more I trifle; can’t decide; nor need I just yet. But how I enjoy the exercise of my wits upon literature—reading it as literature. And I think I can do this the better for having read through such a lot of lives, criticisms, every sort of thing.

We had dinner to report Desmond’s talk the other night. He talked admirably for the purpose, but less intimately which was natural; & yet I hate people to talk admirably, as if they were dining out. There was Roger, & Molly & good Miss Green. That’s my d——d condescension—I cant help condescending to very plain poor serviceable women, & then they bob up as happy as grigs & twice as able as I am.

Thursday 26 May

My evening being ruined by Gravé as usual—I mean by non-Gravé—I mean she said she was coming at 6 & its 6.30—I may as well wreak my temper, write out my fidgets, in this book. Such is the constitution of my brain that I can settle to nothing if I’m waiting. This doesn’t want settling to. Haven’t I schooled my diary well? It takes what it can get & is thankful.

I sat in Gordon Square yesterday for an hour & a half talking to Maynard. Sometimes I wish I put down what people say instead of describing them. The difficulty is that they say so little. Maynard said he liked praise; & always wanted to boast. He said that many men marry in order to have a wife to boast to. But, I said, its odd that one boasts considering that no one is ever taken in by it. Its odd too that you, of all people, should want praise. You & Lytton are passed beyond boasting—which is the supreme Triumph. There you sit & say nothing. I love praise, he said. I want it for the things I’m doubtful about. Then we got upon publishing, & the Hogarth press; & novels. Why should they explain what bus he took? he asked. And why shouldn’t Mrs Hilbery be sometimes the daughter of Katherine. Oh its a dull book, I know, I said; but don’t you see you must put it all in before you can leave out. The best thing you ever did, he said, was your Memoir on George. You should pretend to write about real people & make it all up—I was dashed of course. (& oh dear what nonsense—for if George is my climax I’m a mere scribbler). What else did we talk about? He was going to some official dinner. He gets £120 for an article—

Thursday 2 June

But this was written a week ago, today being the day after Derby Day, the very height of the season, I suppose: anyhow of leaf & flower.

People turn up regularly though with little planning on our part. Madge [Vaughan] on Friday; Kot on Saturday; Roger; Fredegond; Mr Reginald Morris. Will these names recover anything in 10 years time of the last week of May 1921? I wish I had the same record of 10 years back, when I was a young woman—only then one can’t scribble. One takes thought. One gets it too literal.

Madge asked to come; so we had her. She is curiously changed. She has become ordinary. Middle age has thickened her lines, & deepened her colour. In her mind she is grown cheerful, & commonplace. I notice now that her forehead is oddly pinched at the top. She said of herself that she was stunted—which expresses it. She has never grown up, but lived somewhere under shelter, unchastised, talking a great deal about life, but not facing it. Oh she did talk about life—always with reference to herself, which makes the mind squint. She sees nothing in itself. So we vacillated between ‘life’ & Will: ‘my life’: ‘my odd nature’, ‘I have no brain’ ‘I am very psychological’. But then I ought to have broken away, & so on; but as it is quite obvious that she is rich, successful, & happy, these complaints which make the staple of her talk, lack substance; & she easily slides into gossip, & repetition. Indeed you can’t keep her to poetry, kitchen, love, art, or children for more than a minute. Yet she has her gaiety & her vitality which protect one from the worst boredom. But not Leonard nor Roger. They were out of hand with misery. And this was the woman I adored! I see myself now standing in the night nursery at Hyde Park Gate, washing my hands, & saying to myself “At this moment she is actually under this roof.”

Fredegond came, all in black (& she dresses very badly). Uncle Hervey is dead, she said. And she was off to bury him, but couldn’t find a train (the strike, you see, is still on.) Hervey Fisher was the genius of our youth; & the only fruit of it is a volume of stories which are neither better nor worse than what one reads on a journey in a Red Magazine. They said he was dropped by his nurse; & so for 52 years, poor man, he has been plagued with illness; has been mad; has never done anything he liked, I suppose, even his marriage being called off by Aunt Mary.

Sunday 5 June

Poor Hervey Fisher has been buried a week, & is as if he had never been, I suppose: though if I chose I could imagine some feelings on the part of Adeline. Fredegond told us that he once lost his temper with Herbert, walked up to him & licked his eyelashes!

We went to Miss Royde Smith’s party on Thursday to discuss Ireland. Never did I see a less attractive woman than Naomi. Her face might have been cut out of cardboard by blunt scissors. I fixed her with my eye. She fixed me with hers. But I got to the bottom of hers & jumped on the rock in a second. She is slightly furred too; dressed à la 1860; swinging ear rings, skirt in balloons; & a body that billows out but perfectly hard. There she sat in complete command. Here she had her world round her. It was a queer mixture of the intelligent & the respectable. There were two clergymen. They made jokes, which were well within the bounds of decency. My translation of their attitude would be “See how free & playful & advanced we are—yet we have not sacrificed niceness. We are people of the world. Very open minded. Not mere intellectuals—no—look how nicely we dress.” Lady Rhondda was more plain dealing I thought; a solid bull dog, something after Ray’s pattern. I detest the mixture of ideas & South Kensington. Then Rose [Macaulay] chipped in with her witticism all in character at which the clergyman, Duncan Jones, said ‘Oh Rose!’ & everyone laughed loud, as if Rose had done the thing they expected. Yes, I disliked it all a good deal—& the furniture & the pictures—the marriage of conventionality & the Saturday Westminster. I talked to Robert Lynd—& I didn’t much care for him. He is a true journalist—all spent in clever words, elongated, exhausted, voluble, with the cloudy shifty look in the eyes which comes of catering perpetually for the Daily News. I can fancy him much liked. There’s no bite about these people. I tried to be elderly & broad minded. I thought of Bloomsbury. But then in Bloomsbury you would come up against something hard—a Maynard, or a Lytton, or even Clive.

Murry has written against our Tchekhov in the Nation. As for Kot, yesterday he couldn’t keep his seat for fury. He verged on the voice & language of the public house—He said the sort of thing I’ve heard men say before they kick each other out. Is Murry “a damned swindler”? Suppose we admired Murry’s writing, would he change his tune? In my theory he’s all parched for praise—run mad for lack of it. Yet it goes against my psychology to think people scoundrels. Moreover they’re more interesting if you can keep the stew on the boil. I think he’s a greater mix than the rest of us. I don’t know—at this moment I incline to think him a damned swindler—only a swindler so plausible that he’ll become Professor of English literature in the University of Oxford.

Tuesday 7 June

About an hour after writing this in came Eliot, & the first or third thing Eliot said was “Murry has been having tea with me—in fact he stayed a very long time, rolling another cigarette, & trying to say something, but he did not say it.” So then L. burst out, & told him about the Tchekhov article; & this was no news to Eliot, who said “When we first knew each other we seemed to be becoming very friendly; but then we realised that we were fundamentally antagonistic—We had nothing to say today. There seemed to be nothing to be said.”

“What did you say?” I asked.

“He talked mostly about himself. He said the Athenaeum had almost done for him. He got nothing from going into society except exhaustion—“I shan’t do anything till I’m 50 or 60” he said”. Eliot rolled his head & his eyes in imitation of Murry at this. “He can’t hold his own with other people. Thats why he doesn’t like going out.” I repeated my phrase “He’s parched with vanity;” “He will be very successful” said Eliot. “He’s been giving 6 lectures on style at Oxford—as though it were a duty. He takes the crown as soon as he’s offered it. But he’s not satisfied with that.”

“No, he wants us & you & Lytton to praise his poetry;”

“I’ve talked to him about his writing: I’ve never been able to praise it.”

Literature is the devil, I said (meaning for the character).

He agreed.

Leonard said how he’d never met a worse man than Murry. That was the gist of what Eliot said; I think indeed his opinion is black at all points; & he knows him, & his methods better than we do. Strange to know a bad man!

The thing is that he is always trying to bias himself against his badness—hence his confessions, his poses, & also, so Eliot said, these hysterical admirations for great men who have what he lacks.

“But never for his contemporaries—” I said.

“He used to lament the decay of D. H. Lawrence” Eliot said.

“He is a damned swine”—said L. & L. has written in this sense on a postcard to Sydney inviting him to play chess & discuss Murry.

Eliot, by the way, saw no truth in Murry’s article.

“He is extremely clever” he said.

“But you don’t mean that in a good sense”, I said.

“Oh no: not at all.”

Now I think its true that Eliot had wished us to open our eyes about Murry. He certainly agreed to all criticisms, & made me feel that he could stress them & add facts if he chose. I think it probable that one of Murry’s devices was to crab us both to Eliot, in his oblique way; & to insinuate that my writing was trivial, & so on.

“No one has any scope”—that was one of his phrases.

It will be interesting to watch his career to the high seat of authority. Unless, as L. says, he commits a felony. Probably in one word Eliot thinks him dishonest through & through.

And Eliot astounded me by praising Monday & Tuesday! This really delighted me. He picked out the String Quartet, especially the end of it. “Very good” he said, & meant it, I think. The Unwritten Novel he thought not successful: Haunted House “extremely interesting”. It pleases me to think I could discuss my writing openly with him. And I was stoical; & I write without cringing (allow me these words of commendation!) Ulysses he says is prodigious.

MONKS HOUSE, RODMELL

Monday 8 August

What a gap! How it would have astounded me to be told when I wrote the last word here, on June 7th, that within a week I should be in bed, & not entirely out of it till the 6th of August—two whole months rubbed out—These, this morning, the first words I have written—to call writing—for 60 days; & those days spent in wearisome headache, jumping pulse, aching back, frets, fidgets, lying awake, sleeping draughts, sedatives, digitalis, going for a little walk, & plunging back into bed again—all the horrors of the dark cupboard of illness once more displayed for my diversion. Let me make a vow that this shall never, never, happen again; & then confess that there are some compensations. To be tired & authorised to lie in bed is pleasant; then, scribbling 365 days of the year as I do, merely to receive without agitation of my right hand in giving out is salutary. I feel that I can take stock of things in a leisurely way. Then the dark underworld has its fascinations as well as its terrors; & then sometimes I compare the fundamental security of my life in all (here Mrs Dedman interrupts for 15 minutes) storms (perhaps I meant) with its old fearfully random condition—

Later, I had my visitors, one every day; so that I saw more people than normally even. Perhaps in future I shall adopt this method more than I have done. Roger, Lytton, Nessa, Duncan, Dorothy Bussy, Pippa, Carrington, James & Alix—all these came; & were as detached portraits—cut out, emphatic, seen thus separately compared with the usual way of seeing them in crowds. Lytton, I note, is more than ever affectionate. One must be, I think, if one is famous. One must say to one’s old friends “All my celebrity is nothing—nothing—compared with this” And that was what he did say too. We were talking about love. He said he had suffered tortures from D⁠[uncan], & H⁠[enry]. L⁠[amb]. had wished to marry them & settle down, had been refused; & now can love no more. “It is madness—” he said. “One cannot treat lovers like rational people” this was said of Ralph’s vagaries. “That won’t happen to us again” “Yet it is love that still matters—for look at you, you’ve got fame enough—I sometimes see my name in the papers—yet that is nothing.” “You mean this—he said—indicating the 3 of us sitting in the window—Oh yes, this is what matters—one’s friends.”

Tuesday 9 August

Then, as I say, there was Roger, with 20 holes in his teeth to be stopped; & I thought his teeth were all of soulless bone, as some of mine are; & now I hear that he has mercurial poisoning from these stoppings in Paris. There’s no doubt we are a weakly set of people; but then they i.e. Nessa &c have had a splendid summer of dissipation. I dont envy it: I dont want it; far far away it seems; I want nothing but quiet & an active brain. Indeed I am reading Hardy for my famous article—the one I’m always talking about. I ransack public libraries & find them full of sunk treasure. Yet I have a worm of uncertainty moving at the foundations of this pleasant life—Allison, when we asked him to cut a branch in the field, replied that he has sold the field for building purposes to a friend. So I shall have Jack Squire in a poetical villa within a hundred yards. As it is I see Shanks’ paper stand at his cottage window when I walk down my garden path; & cultivated voices & a cultivated dog barking wake us on Sunday mornings. The truth is, Rodmell is a colony for Georgian poets, & though I am all for letting live, & not reading their works, it is hard & indeed intolerable that I should have to let them live next door to me. We have even answered an advertisement about a house near Arundel; & paced out a meadow with a wonderful view, & imagined a house there. But L. says we are too old to build a house.

If one goes into the matter, & considers the good of the majority, Allinson’s descent upon Rodmell is probably a benefit. He puts up gates & hedges, mends cottages, ploughs fields, owns a telephone, gives teas in the barn, & I suppose finds work & does kindnesses when old Stacey would have been stingy & too much of a rustic to imagine a better state of things. Old Stacey it is said drank himself to death, & had to be buried straight away—which will not happen to Allinson. However for my purposes farmers who drink, & lounge about like Mr Smith, muddy & ruddy & obsolete are far preferable to Allinson who looks as if he had been dressed by one of the advertisers in his own Field.

Wednesday 10 August

But how is one to arrive at the truth? I have changed the Daily News for the Morning Post. The proportions of the world at once become utterly different. The M.P. has the largest letters & the double column devoted to the murder of Mrs Lindsay; anglo Indians, Anglo Scots, & retired old men & patriotic old ladies write letter after letter to deplore the state of the country; applaud the M.P., the only faithful standard bearer left. They lament the downfall of England, which is flourishing as usual in the D.N.; hardly spotted at all in the D.H. The heroes of the day in the Herald are the unemployed who rioted. The M.P. ignores them altogether. But the D.N. has become a vivacious scrapbag. News is cut up into agreeable scraps, & written in words of one syllable. I may well ask, what is truth? And I cant ask it in my natural tones, since my lips are wet with Edmund Gosse. How often have I said that I would never read anyone before beginning to write? The book came at breakfast, & I fell. He is one of the respectables. If Shelley had come before him now G. would have been distressed, though interested in young men of good birth. But how low in tone it all is—purred out by the firesides of Dowagers. That is not quite true, seeing that he has some sturdiness, some independence, & some love of letters. The peculiar combination of suavity, gravity, malignity & common sense always repels me. Once he sat next me & did not speak until he had an audience. Lytton, meeting him in ducal society, says he is very amusing.

Of private news, I have little, yet a thousand small events seem in progress. The time flies. I look at my watch & find it eleven. I’ve wasted 30 minutes gossiping with Mrs Dedman. L. has his rash on his arm from clearing the horrid little arch of ivy. We have bought the Dedmans’ chickens. I find the eggs with a thrill of [word illegible]—warm, smooth, with a feather or so stuck to them. The servants, or rather the angelic couple of attached familiars, return tomorrow; & are welcome for the first time. Allison (for he is neither Addison nor Allinson) is away. I pray daily for his bankruptcy, or that his wife may being dishonour upon his name.

Thursday 11 August

A fortnight already gone. It goes too quick—too quick. If only one could sip slowly & relish every grain of every hour! For, to speak the truth, I’ve thought of making my will for the first time during these past weeks. Sometimes it seems to me that I shall never write out all the books I have in my head, because of the strain. The devilish thing about writing is that it calls upon every nerve to hold itself taut. That is exactly what I cannot do—Now if it were painting or scribbling music or making patchwork quilts or mud pies, it wouldnt’ matter.

The first thing that happened when we came here was that a branch blew down off Allison’s tree. It lies with its branches standing up in the air, on a sloping part of the meadow, & the children of the cottages collect every morning & swing from rope, or are twirled round & round, till dark. A girl of 12 superintends, & I see her at work swinging the small children hour after hour. Sometimes they cry; sometimes quarrel; but the amusement lasts them. I suppose Julian & Quentin would soon be tired of it. No nurse would consent to stand there swinging them.

In the evening sometimes there’s a game of stoolball. I caught them at it, as I stood in the road beneath, pink & blue & red & yellow frocks raised above me, & nothing behind them but the vast Asheham hills—a sight too beautiful for one pair of eyes. Instinctively I want someone to catch my overflow of pleasure.

Saturday 13 August

“Coleridge was as little fitted for action as Lamb, but on a different account. His person was of a good height, but as sluggish & solid as the other’s was light & fragile. He had, perhaps, suffered it to look old before its time, for want of exercise. His hair was white at 50; & as he generally dressed in black, & had a very tranquil demeanour, his appearance was gentlemanly, & for several years before his death was reverend. Nevertheless, there was something invincibly young in the look of his face. It was round & fresh-coloured, with agreeable features, & an open, indolent, good natured mouth. This boy-like expression was very becoming in one who dreamed & speculated as he did when he was really a boy, & who passed his life apart from the rest of the world, with a book, & his flowers. His forehead was prodigious,—a great piece of placid marble;—& his fine eyes, in which all the activity of his mind seemed to concentrate, moved under it with a sprightly ease, as if it was a pastime to them to carry all that thought.

“And it was pastime. Hazlitt said, that Coleridge’s genius appeared to him like a spirit, all head & wings, eternally floating about in etherialities. He gave me a different impression. I fancied him a good natured wizard, very fond of earth, & conscious of reposing with weight enough in his easy chair, but able to conjure his etherialities about him in the twinkling of an eye. He cd. also change them by thousands, & dismiss them as easily when his dinner came. It was a mighty intellect put upon a sensual body; & the reason why he did little more with it than talk & dream was, that it is agreeable to such a body to do little else. I do not mean that C. was a sensualist in an ill sense….” which is all that I can take the trouble to quote from Leigh Hunt’s memoirs vol 2 page 223, supposing I should want to cook this up again somewhere. L.H. was our spiritual grandfather, a free man. One could have spoken to him as to Desmond. A light man, I daresay, but civilised, much more so than my grandfather in the flesh. These free, vigorous spirits advance the world, & when one lights on them in the strange waste of the past one says Ah you’re my sort—a great compliment. Most people who died 100 years ago are like strangers. One is polite & uneasy with them. Shelley died with H.’s copy of Lamia in his hand. H. wd. receive it back from no other, & so burnt it on the pyre. Going home from the funeral? H. & Byron laughed till they split. This is human nature, & H. doesn’t mind owning to it. Then I like his inquisitive human sympathies: history so dull because of its battles & laws; & sea voyages in books so dull because the traveller will describe beauties instead of going into the cabins & saying what the sailors looked like, wore, eat, said; how they behaved.

Lady Carlisle is dead. One likes people much better when theyre battered down by a prodigious seige of misfortune than when they triumph. Such a stock of hope & gifts she set out with, & lost everything (so they say) & died of sleepy sickness, her 5 sons dead before her, & the war crushing her hope for humanity.

Wednesday 17 August

To while away the time till L. comes in, from London, Fergusson, office, &c, I may as well scribble. Really I think my scribbling is coming back. Here I have spent the whole day, off & on, making up an article—for Squire perhaps, because he wants a story, & because Mrs Hawkesford has told Mrs Thomsett that I am one of the, if not the, cleverest women in England. It’s not nerve power so much as praise that has lacked, perhaps.

Yesterday I was seized with the flux, as the Bible has it, Dr Vallence was fetched, came after dinner, & paid a call. I wish I could write down his conversation—A mild, heavy lidded, little elderly man, son of a Lewes Dr, has always lived here, existing on a few broad medical truths learnt years ago, which he applies conscientiously; he can speak French, as it were, in words of one syllable. As both L. & I knew a good deal more than he did we got upon general topics—old Verrall, & how he starved himself purposely to death. “I could have had him sent away,” said Dr. V meditatively “He had been away once. His sisters away to this day—quite crazy, I believe—A bad family—very bad. I sat with him in your sitting room. We had to sit right into the chimney to get warm. I tried to interest him in chess. No. He didn’t seem able to take an interest in anything. But he was too old—too weak. I couldn’t send him away.” So he starved himself to death, pottering about this garden.

Crossing his knees, & touching his little moustache meditatively now & then, V. then asked me if I did anything? (He thought me a chronic invalid, & fine lady). I said I wrote—“What novels?—light things?” Yes, novels. “I have another lady novelist among my patients—Mrs Dudedny. I’ve had to buck her up—to fulfil a contract, a contract for a new novel—She finds Lewes very noisy. And then we have Marion Crawford…. But Mr Dudedny is the puzzle king. Give him any puzzle—he’ll tell you the answer. He makes up the sort of puzzles shops print on their menus. He writes columns in the papers about puzzles.”

“Did he help to answer puzzles in the war?” I asked.

“Well I dont know about that. But a great many soldiers wrote to him—the puzzle king.” Here he crossed his legs the opposite way. Finally he went, & invited L. to join the Lewes chess club, which I should very much like to attend myself, these glimpses into different groups always fascinating me intolerably, for I shall never join the party of Dr Vallence & the puzzle king.

I shall never … has a kind of meaning, alas. For L. has been to see Allison, & there is no doubt that our fate is the worst possible. Ted Hunter is going to build his cottage, so far as we can tell, right against the orchard wall. He is going to make a proper road, & so far as I can see, the flats will be untenable. What to do we cannot decide. And this just as we were getting settled in to our liking—& with the added bitterness that we might, twice over, have bought the field & the terrace & saved the loveliest of views for ever.

Thursday 18 August

Nothing to record; only an intolerable fit of the fidgets to write away. Here I am chained to my rock: forced to do nothing; doomed to let every worry, spite, irritation & obsession scratch & claw & come again. This is to say that I may not walk, & must not work. Whatever book I read bubbles up in my mind as part of an article I want to write. No one in the whole of Sussex is so miserable as I am; or so conscious of an infinite capacity of enjoyment horded in me, could I use it. The sun streams (no: never streams floods rather) down upon all the yellow fields & the long low barns; & what wouldn’t I give to be coming through Firle woods, dusty & hot, with my nose turned home, every muscle tired, & the brain laid up in sweet lavender, so sane & cool, & ripe for the morrows task. How I should notice everything—the phrase for it coming the moment after & fitting like a glove; & then on the dusty road, as I ground my pedals, so my story would begin telling itself; & then the sun would be down, & home, & some bout of poetry after dinner, half read, half lived, as if the flesh were dissolved & through it the flowers burst red & white.

There! I’ve written out half my irritation. I hear poor L. driving the lawn mower up & down, for a wife like I am should have a label to her cage. She bites! And he spent all yesterday running round London for me. Still if one is Prometheus, if the rock is hard & the gadflies pungent, gratitude, affection, none of the nobler feelings have sway. And so this August is wasted.

Only the thought of people suffering more than I do at all consoles; & that is an aberration of egotism, I suppose. I will now make out a time table if I can to get through these odious days.

Poor Mdlle Lenglen, finding herself beaten by Mrs Mallory flung down her racquet & burst into tears. Her vanity I suppose is colossal. I daresay she thought that to be Mdlle Lenglen was the greatest thing in the world: invincible, like Napoleon. Armstrong, playing in the test match, took up his position against the gates, & would not move, let the bowlers appoint themselves, the whole game became farcical, because there was not time to play it out. But Achilles Ajax, in the Greek play, was of the same temper.—which we all agree to call heroic in him. But then everything is forgiven to the Greeks. And I’ve not read a line of Greek since last year, this time, too; But I shall come back, if its only in snobbery; I shall be reading Greek when I’m old; old as the woman at the cottage door, whose hair might be a wig in a play, its so white, so thick. Seldom penetrated by love for mankind as I am, I sometimes feel sorry for the poor who dont read Shakespeare, & indeed have felt some generous democratic humbug at the Old Vic, when they played Othello & all the poor men & women & children had him then for themselves. Such splendour, & such poverty. I am writing down the fidgets, so no matter if I write nonsense. Indeed, any interference with the normal proportions of things makes me uneasy. I know this room too well—this view too well—I am getting it all out of focus, because I cant walk through it.

Saturday 10 September

My handwriting is getting detestable. But I have done with fidgets long ago, & sat in the sun at Bishopstone, & at Chalvington, & at Telscombe Cliffs. I recovered, & we took to seeing houses—without the least success, except that the rides to & from were successful. My only grievance is that one runs off the edge of the lovely into hideousness too soon. Newhaven is spot & rash & pimple & blister; with the incessant motor cars like active lice. Much more important (to me) than anything else, was my recovery of the pen; & thus the hidden stream was given exit, & I felt reborn. I started an article upon the obscure, & should have finished it today, according to calculations, had not Lytton come; & it is impossible to write, unless the brain is unstirred completely by anything save the usual routine. However I gained by the exchange. We talked & talked; & always dislodged some new nugget, the deeper we went. Of course, his friendships are now, as mine are, fearfully important to him—all the more, as I daresay I have said, because he has been offered all the thin shining substitutes which his fame procures—ladies & lords without stint. But what did we talk about? (oddly enough I could write more freely after tea: this is the colourless morning hour, the mist driving across the flats, & rain come at last on the sudden wind.) First we skirmish round with trivialities; next we ascertain how we stand; we recognise that our position is sound; then begin on our writing; then on books—but its all easy enough, & interspaced. He is going to write a play, “I am going to meet my Waterloo”—that is to say he is going to have a shot at the creative. If that fails, he dooms himself to history for ever—perhaps a history of English literature. Writing is an agony, we both agreed. Yet we live by it. We attach ourselves to the breath of life by our pens. The exciting illusion begins. Clive says we pour out brandy & so make romance, which does not exist. Clive came suddenly into view yesterday, in white flannel trousers, & open flannel shirt. He seemed bursting through; & his neck a series of rings of fat, like the Chess Queen’s body. A dowager would hide this with a dog collar. And the heat had sopped his hair, so that he looked debauched & rubbed by dissipation. He was obviously nervous, & instead of boasting of his triumphs, as he did a few months back, almost deprecated them. “Did Lytton think the great world dull? Was he going to give it up? Well, perhaps it is too dull—One should live in the country & work” I’m glad to say that the repentant mood gave out; & up bubbled his natural man. The New Republic—America—money—&c &c &c—

I see that I shirk giving an account of Lytton’s talk—for one thing, I dont like the appearance of writing what will interest Mr Gosse or Mrs Asquith in 50 years’ time. Then, it needs a screw of the brain. I ought to note, though, for my good, that I must get out of the way of minding what people say of my writing. I am noted for it. It breeds discomfort. For instance, when Lytton was telling me of Max [Beerbohm]’s tastes in literature, he thought it necessary to explain that Max had not read me—which was uncomfortable. My dislikes of M.H. is attributed to her low opinion of my writing. So I must give up drawing attention to ‘my writing’. One slips into the way of it; & a little slip is magnified soon. But that was the one awkward moment. In the old days there would have been a thousand.

Monday 12 September

It is true that we are alone again, but I cannot take up my pen, partly, I think, from superstition. I said goodbye to James & Alix at 9 this morning: therefore the whole day is contaminated. Freud has certainly brought out the lines in Alix. Even physically, her bones are more prominent. Only her eyes are curiously vague. She has purpose & security; but this may well be marriage. James remains precisely where he was—the only human being, Alix says, fit for the contemplative life, which is the highest. To look on comprehendingly is, she says, better than to create. But James claims no such eminence. He is the least ambitious of men—not ambitious even of being a character—low, muted, gentle, modest. I suspect that his points show in the shade—which Alix certainly provides. I can fancy him very considerate—selfish, of course, but not blind-selfish, not at all possessive, masculine, or dominating. The worst of it, as I should feel, is the greyness; nothing is worth doing; & his mind is capable enough to make out a case for anything, or against. I daresay his monotony is partly due to us. I fancy that in private he may be as gay as a small boy; perhaps they have a private language. Perhaps they go for treats. Perhaps he is the easiest & gayest of companions. Here he leapt on to my bed, directly I left it, & lay reading Jane’s pamphlet. There’s Noel, too, in the background. Noel, for James, as for Adrian, the unattainable romance, though she has married Jones or Richards, & is romantic no more. I caught Alix in profile & saw her old, masterly, advanced; always in the same coat & skirt, which indeed renews itself as if it were her natural covering.

Lytton, by the way, talked about s——y; & agreed that the b’s are all namby pambies & sentimentalists. He is himself, he said. To be a b. one must be un-virile, unpossessive, very nice indeed, but tending to be sentimental. And then their tastes become so degraded.

I have finished the Wings of the Dove, & make this comment. His [Henry James’s] manipulations become so elaborate towards the end that instead of feeling the artist you merely feel the man who is posing the subject. And then I think he loses the power to feel the crisis. He becomes merely excessively ingenious. This, you seem to hear him saying, is the way to do it. Now just when you expect a crisis, the true artist evades it. Never do the thing, & it will be all the more impressive. Finally, after all this juggling & arranging of silk pocket handkerchiefs, one ceases to have any feeling for the figure behind. Milly thus manipulated, disappears. He overreaches himself. And then one can never read it again. The mental grasp & stret⁠[c]⁠h are magnificent. Not a flabby or slack sentence, but much emasculated by this timidity or consciousness or whatever it is. Very highly American, I conjecture, in the determination to be highly bred, & the slight obtuseness as to what high breeding is.

Sept 12. 21. Charleston

My dear Virginia,

I should be sorry if Jack Squire were to suppose that he had seriously put me out; also, I can’t swear to the phrase “put them right”, though I’m sure it was nothing less impertinent; & so I hope you will say nothing about it. You don’t guess how much I enjoyed my outing to Monks, or how much I like the society of you & your husband. You have created an atmosphere different from, perhaps better than, any I know. It seems odd, considering that we all started much alike in many ways; but I suppose, as they get older, people who start at all peculiar get more & more distinct. Anyhow, what I want to say is that the pleasure of seeing you both besides being great is particular. I am half tempted to suggest some sort of reunion either here or on the downs (weather permitting) for Friday—my birthday—only Mary will be with us and, owing to some absurd misunderstanding, she, I gather, is in your black books. So perhaps we had better wait till the following week.

Yrs
Clive.

P.S. On the ballet Murry is ignorant & silly.

Wednesday 14 September

Now there’s a chapter in a novel! First: I suspect that Jack Squire rejected the article: then I suspect that Clive, with one of his violent, lovable, revulsions—& yet he’s a snob too—has turned against Coalbox, Jacks, & Lavatory, & wishes to secure his place in intellectual society; & finally, partly from the same reasons, he is determined to contrive so that Mary is on visiting terms with us. The little man is all a bubble, all a muddle; & I could have foretold the whole thing, which has been brewing, I believe, ever since I refused to be one of the ladies at his tea party; & Leonard’s abilities have become known; his star is in the ascendant; & when a star ascends, sure enough Clive will be frantically rushing after. But I say much of this is praiseworthy. Leonard demurs. He is one of those dogs that cringe, he thinks. Anyhow, to continue my comment on the text, its plain that Mary & I are to be coupled together. No gentle gliding apart into mists. Yet why? I reply that I will see her & settle what the quarrel is about if she likes; since I have heard many versions.

There was a very great storm 3 nights ago—on Sunday 11th Sept. to be exact. I had to light my candle for support. Next morning our plum tree was down, & a great tree snapped some feet from the ground in the churchyard. Several graves are under leaf; & a wreath of immortelles lies under glass undamaged. The cottagers have been busy snatching up the twigs; the larger branches belonging, perhaps, to the Rector. More rain fell that night than in the 3 previous months, yet L. is not satisfied. Our garden is a perfect variegated chinz: asters, plumasters, zinnias, geums, nasturtiums & so on: all bright, cut from coloured paper, stiff, upstanding as flowers should be. I have been planting wallflowers for next June.

Thursday 15 September

It is the loveliest of evenings—still; the smoke going up straight in the quarry; the white horse & strawberry coloured horse feeding close together; the women coming out of their cottages for no reason, & standing looking; or knitting; the cock pecking in the midst of his hens in the meadow; starlings in the two trees; Asheham fields shorn to the colour of white corduroy; Leonard storing apples above my head. & the sun coming through a pearly glass shade; so that the apples which still hang are palish red & green; the church tower a silver extinguisher rising through the trees. Will this recall anything? I am so anxious to keep every scrap, you see.

I have been dabbling in K.M.’s stories, & have to rinse my mind—in Dryden? Still, if she were not so clever she couldn’t be so disagreeable.

A letter from Morgan this morning. He seems as critical of the East as of Bloomsbury, & sits dressed in a turban watching his Prince dance, quite unimpressed. He is not impressed by Q.Vict. either. Flimsy, he says, compared with Macaulay, which was perhaps what I meant.

There is one woman of genius among the cows. She has decided to leave the herd & eat the branches on the fallen tree. She has now one disciple. The rest utterly condemn. She is a Roger Fry. I heard from Roger the other day, all in a hubblebubble about Murry’s sneering pin-pricking article. He is so angry that he can talk of nothing else, (the cow has 2 disciples). We must go on doing what we like in the desert Roger says, & let Murry climb the heights, as he certainly will.

The birds are moving about like nets full of fish; they turn sideways & vanish; sideways again, & become full of black spots.

Monday 19 September

Miss Green has been for the week end, & a more comfortable guest does not exist. One need not bother about her; yet, at meal times, she proves brisk & fresh. Her father was a professor, or teacher, of geology at Oxford. Her mother a Unitarian, & a liberal, with a great admiration for Gladstone. When Minna was 9 her father died. She has been secretary to Lady St. Davids.

“I consider you as my child” said Ly St D, & underpaid her. Then to Beerbohm Tree for 3 weeks. He walked about the room, behaved like Malvolio, & discoursed to an invisible audience about life. Minna found this trying, especially as it took place late at night in the dome of His Majesties. He used to say “Am I to give this autograph?”—Then she was with Heinemann. But his lack of courage annoyed her; he was afraid to publish Norman Angell; &, not having a penny in the world, Minna was too good a pacifist to stay—So she went on to the U.D.C. In this way she has lived all over England; & is fearfully independent—marches about, protected by her extreme plainness, unmolested, & unnoticed; yet has a strong will of her own; & observes, & won’t be put upon. She is one of that regiment of the wage earning women’s republic. She eats up everything on her plate, very thoroughly; does not keep accounts; spends nothing on dress, & I daresay subscribes to the Russian Famine Fund. Now she is off to spend a fortnight in Germany—a country which she thinks very beautiful. I said there were too many signposts & plaster statues. She would have none of it. But then her thick legs, laced boots, wooden face, flaxen hair (scanty) & red cheeks, would be respectable there; ludicrous in Italy or France.

Wednesday 28 September

Eliot’s visit passed off successfully, & yet I am disappointed to find that I am no longer afraid of him—

[Wednesday 2 November]

This was the very last thing I wrote at Rodmell—so I suppose. And today is the 2nd of November; Wednesday to be exact; 10 to 7; & Dorothea just left the house for five years & a half. But I like old Kate; who cant see, & picks up butter in mistake for bread. Dorothea surely is a survival from the glacial period. I felt her great nose sawing up and down; she has very powerful mandibles; & little pig eyes. Very soon we should have got across each other. I felt come over me the old aversion. She persists; prods; brutally tramples; & speaks with a kind of measured sweetness, such as people use in boarding houses to servants. Well we had no time to fight; since they took 2 hours to come; & had to catch a train. She salaamed to me. She said that the fruit of her Indian stay might be another book. She said “My book had a very long review in the Times.” “Oh? I said. I never knew you’d written a book.” “It was a very stupid review” she began with furious egotism, gnashing her teeth; & began eagerly to quote. So our minutes passed.

But I ought to run over the 5 weeks or so left out; & really cannot; for I have seen so many people of sorts; & so much has happened; though we are where we are. A printing machine is waiting at Richmond Station, & will be delivered at 8 a.m. tomorrow. Ralph is putting his back to the wheel, a very solid obdurate back. Some of our luncheons have been stormy, or rather silent, with sudden raps of opposition from the third party. My belief is that he has to dig his feet in vigorously in order to make any impression against L.’s superior mobility. But we have got along so far; & yielded, not reluctantly, about Tchekhov’s letters. In two days time—during the week end at any rate—I hope to finish Jacob. I have asked for books from the Times to compell myself to break off. And one of these days I must read it. We go to Rodmell on Friday. I see I can think of nothing worth saying. It has been a November day: soft, dark, as wet as the tropics, with a great funeral (Dr Gardiner’s) passing the window—

Clive hopes to see more of me. He sups with Gandarilla; & Betsy Bibesco wishes me to review her book.

Tuesday 15 November

Really, really—this is disgraceful—15 days of November spent & my diary none the wiser. But when nothing is written one may safely suppose that I have been stitching books; or we have had tea at 4 & I have taken my walk afterwards; or I have had to read something for next days writing, or I have been out late, & come home with stencilling materials, & sat down in excitement to try one. We went to Rodmell, & the gale blew at us all day; off arctic fields; so we spent our time attending to the fire. The day before this I wrote the last words of Jacob—on Friday Nov. 4th to be precise, having begun it on April 16 1920: allowing for 6 months interval due to Monday or Tuesday & illness, this makes about a year. I have not yet looked at it. I am struggling with Henry James’ ghost stories for The Times; have I not just laid them down in a mood of satiety?— Then I must do Hardy; then I want to write a life of Newnes; then I shall have to furbish up Jacob; & one of these days, if only I could find energy to tackle the Paston letters, I must start Reading: directly I’ve started Reading I shall think of another novel, I daresay. So that the only question appears to be—will my fingers stand so much scribbling?

We dined with Clive on Friday. Aldous & Mary & Maynard there. All the time I felt Mary solicitous, even affectionate; & sure enough, as I left she took my hand, said “I don’t like this plan of quarrelling” & asked me to come & see her. So far nothing has happened—for was I to ring her up, or she me—& what’s it all about?

Molly came to tea. Lilian came to lunch. Poor Lilian—poor Margaret. They sit beside the corpse of the Women’s Guild; the blinds are drawn; they are sad & white, brave, tearless, but infinitely mournful. I see what has happened. When one leaves a life work at 60, one dies. Death, at least, must seem to be there, visible, expectant. One ought to work—never to take one’s eyes from one’s work; & then if death should interrupt, well, it is merely that one must get up & leave one’s stitching—one won’t have wasted a thought on death. Margaret says in her work one gets superannuated. One must give it up. A very cruel work then; & she is left without husband or child. So we dragged Lilian over Richmond; but she saw nothing but the ground. Very unhappy she said she was. And Janet wants to sell her odious house & move to the New Forest. I can’t say that elderly group has met with the fate it deserves.

Molly was dressed in Mrs Freshfield’s velvets. A skirt is enough for an ordinary dress I daresay. “Have we quarrelled with Desmond?” we asked. Dear dear no. We seem to him cranky & crusty? Oh nonsense. Oh well thats all right then—Desmond is merely lazy. He is very uncommunicative just now. He tells me nothing. You have heard about the Waterlows? Sydney has become quite intolerable. He plants red flowers & they come up blue. She can do nothing nothing right. He grumbles all the week end. So at last she forbade him to come down. But he couldn’t stand another Alice walking out of the house. They have been abroad for 6 weeks. She broke down & told me the whole thing. We must just go on disliking each other as other couples do, she said.

Wednesday 16 November

Can I make out the Waterlow’s tragedy from this telegraphic scrap? I see I scribbled too quick to put in the quotation marks. Anyhow this was what Molly said the other day, & as I have a collection of Sydneyana I add this. I ought to be about to set off to the Wigmore Hall to hear Bach: & nature has intervened; & I am, with my usual economy, asking myself how I can get the utmost possible pleasure out of my evening, which I spend alone, since L. is dining with the Webbs, to meet Fabians. Shall I read King Lear? Do I want such a strain on the emotions? I think I do. It is pouring; but we say Thank God it is warmer. It has been freezing for a week. We go to bed under red blankets, quilts, fur coats; & I cant get up till I hear the quarter struck. But now, as I say, it is raining. I take in the Westminster Gazette. For some politics are beginning to interest me, as I suppose they interest City men—like a football match. One might become a virulent Socialist—or a Conservative? It is a game. I mean by that that I don’t think of ends (nor does any one else) but of means. The American offer about the Navy has set me off on this. I get no letters nowadays, so I read my paper. Clive’s poems have gone today to the Reviewers; our publishing day being December the 1st. Did I describe the advent of the Press? Nelly panic struck, thinking it would come through the kitchen floor. How do you invent these fears? I asked her. Indeed, if she were as ingenious in her cooking we should do well. “Don’t go & take the wire off the larder windows, for goodness sake” she said, “or we shall be having robbers.”

But never have we been so peaceful domestically for so long.

What other news is there? I have left out everyone for a month—everything. How Lady Cromer came to tea, in a charwoman’s bonnet, & cut great chunks of bread for herself. “My dear Virginia, when one is old one sees how absurd it is to think that sort of thing—I know my nieces accuse me of it—& I never give it a thought.” This was when I told her how Kitty [Maxse] was worldly, & wished me to marry into South Kensington. She spoke with that old mellow worldly benignancy, as if all her thoughts were easy & shabby & loose, which I find so charming. In my house I like her better than in hers. She is trying to keep her son not a snob: “but he’ll get among those kinds of people” she said. The Barings were horrified when she sent him to Winchester. “You send a boy to school in order to make friends” they said “The right sort”.

Friday 25 November

L.’s 41st birthday; & he has just caught a mouse in his hands. My apology for not writing is quite truthfully, the Hogarth Press. Roger’s woodcuts, 150 copies, have been gulped down in 2 days. I have just finished stitching the last copies—all but six. L. has been dismissed & taken on in another capacity by the same post; & now, this afternoon, he has been sketching a plan to Green, who is stranded, by which she may become our secretary. The Hogarth Press, you see, begins to outgrow its parents.

Last week end we spent at Tidmarsh. We must have talked our 12 hours, I suppose—& I remember so little: for with old, worn, creased, shabby, intimate friends, it runs so easily; no rapids, or waterfalls; room for everything; & no damned brilliance. We laughed over the letter of the mad negress, I remember. And it was all very warm & the details—such as cups & plates—were exquisite. Carrington & Ralph have a gigantic 4 poster bed. The geese shriek in the early morning. You see, I can’t remember a thing—except that I was warm & communicative. Monday, though, I had a headache. I thought how foolish I had been to ask Richmond for books: & now I have 4 articles to write, & my brain is recovered, & I feel able to polish them all off, rather slap dash. But I wake in the night & think that I haven’t written Hardy; & I shall open my paper & find him dead—So we go on.

Last night Saxon dined here, & behold, here is a postcard, “Mr & Mrs Patteson in 1831” which tells me a good deal. They were drowned. & Lord Houghton wrote a poem about em, & Saxon thought they were Prinseps; & this came of talking about the river Wye, & Barbara, & Sweden & the Finns, & Sydney & Desmond, & how no one will be read 100 years hence save Shaw; which Ralph said to me at tea today, you dont quite like. This is an unwonted subtlety on his part; though hs is apt to be more subtle when he’s severe. He was 27 yesterday.

Saturday 26 November

Kot just gone after hearing Leonard his Russian; & so I have an odd half hour to fill up, & reach for this book. I have been cross examining Kot upon the quarrel between Dostoevsky & Turgenev, & find him stuffed with facts, & of course passionate severe & uncompromising. For once in a way I shall have some truth to put in my article. We have spent the day mostly indoors, labelling Roger this afternoon. A yellow, prickly kind of day, with the quiet which comes of fog, & is accentuated, as it happens, by the road being up. It is said that we are to have wood pavement. Today we raised the servants wages by £2 each; & Nelly, for a joke pretended that we had raised her & not Lottie, & I believe this has taken away Lottie’s pleasure. I believe she suspects that we perhaps meant this, or preferred Nelly. At any rate, we have had no thanks.

As for Mary I am playing a fine diplomatic game. I have no time—7.30 draws near—to detail the stages. But I aim at not seeing her; at being friendly; for ever planning to meet; & never never never coming to grips. As if to emphasise this, my nib here dropped into the pot & is clogged with black ink. I can’t help suspecting that this is her game too. What could we say to each other alone?

Saturday 3 December

The diplomatic game is being played with considerable finesse, & I fancy I shan’t meet Mary face to face (which comes, I think from Crossing the Bar) at all. I shan’t cross that bar. Oddly enough, I feel sceptical & disillusioned about Clive and his doings. I’ve said so often enough out of spite; but this seems normal & true. His poor old brain has run down; as at 40 it very well may, if you drink too many cocktails, & sit too long with pretty Mrs Jowett. “Can it be Mr Jowett’s fault, Madame?” said Gravé to me the other night. But I can pass no judgment upon the potency of Mr Jowett.

I dined with the Sangers last night, & enjoyed society. I wore my new black dress, & looked, I daresay, rather nice. That’s a feeling I very seldom have; & I rather intend to enjoy it oftener. I like clothes, if I can design them. So Bertie Russell was attentive, & we struck out like swimmers who knew their waters. One is old enough to cut the trimmings & get to the point. Bertie is a fervid egoist—which helps matters. And then, what a pleasure—this mind on springs. I got as much out of him as I could carry.

“For I should soon be out of my depth” I said. I mean, I said, “all this” & I waved my hand round the room, where by this time were assembled Mr & Miss Amos, Rosalind Toynbee, a German, & Mrs Lucas— “All this is mush; & you can put a telescope to your eye & see through it.”

“If you had my brain you would find the world a very thin, colourless place” he said

But my colours are so foolish I replied.

You want them for your writing, he said. Do you never see things impersonally?

Yes. I see literature like that; Milton, that is.

The Choruses in Samson are pure art, he said.

But I have a feeling that human affairs are impure.

God does mathematics. That’s my feeling. It is the most exalted form of art.

Art? I said.

Well theres style in mathematics as there is in writing, he said. I get the keenest aesthetic pleasure from reading well written mathematics. Lord Kelvin’s style was abominable. My brain is not what it was. I’m past my best—& therefore, of course, I am now celebrated. In Japan they treated me like Charlie Chaplin—disgusting. I shall write no more mathematics. Perhaps I shall write philosophy. The brain becomes rigid at 50—& I shall be 50 in a month or two. I have to make money.

Surely money is settled upon Russells by the country, I said.

I gave mine away years ago, to help promising young men who wanted to write poetry. From 28 to 38 I lived in a cellar & worked. Then my passions got hold of me. Now I have come to terms with my self: I am no longer surprised at what happens. I don’t expect any more emotional experiences. I don’t think any longer that something is going to happen when I meet a new person.

I said that I disagreed with much of this. Yet perhaps I did not expect very much to happen from talking to Bertie. I felt that he had talked to so many people. Thus I did not ask him to come here—I enjoyed it though a good deal; & got home & drank cocoa in the kitchen; & at 7.30 this morning traced a smell of shag in the house & found L. smoking his pipe by the kitchen fire, having come back safe. There was no meeting at Newcastle; a very small one at Manchester; rather more at Durham; but it was an absurd effort for such results, & L. has spoken to Miss Green to that effect severely.

Sunday 11 December

Yes, I ought to be doing the beds; but Leonard insists upon doing them himself. Perhaps that’s Lottie on the stairs? Ought I to go out & scold her for not staying in bed? Is the hot water on? Well, soon it will be time to go out & eat a plate of meat in the restaurant in the passage. In other words, both the servants have German measles, & for 3 days we have been servants instead of masters.

Excuse this scrawl therefore;—surely that is Lottie washing up?

Well, what news can I get in?

We went to Heartbreak House with the P⁠[artridge]⁠s. & Lytton. Lytton had just bought a manuscript by Mde du Deffand. Lytton is ripe like a peach in the sun. Carrington wears his old overcoat cut down. Partridge laughs at the wrong jokes.

There was John & Mrs John slightly gross & elderly: wine making his lines thick; & her face more substantial.

Kot dined here. Why did I go to bed with the gooseflesh after hearing discourse of Sullivan Gertler & Sydney Waterlow? They have grease in their texture. And they despise women. And now & then Kot talks like a man of the underworld. No—I cannot make anything of this, what with one thing & another.

I mark that for perhaps the 50th time, I am frustrated as I mean to write poor T. Hardy. I pray that he sits safe & sound by his fireside at this moment. May all bicycles, bronchitises, & influenzas keep far from him.

Sunday 18 December

Here it is practically the end of the year, & more pages left blank than seems to me altogether wholesome. But my diary dwindles, perversely enough, when the stuff for it is most abundant. There was Roger here for tea & dinner yesterday; the day before I had to go plundering the shops for presents after tea (we have tea at 4 now to suit Ralph). The day before, Thursday, I had to put in semicolons to my Hen James article while talking to Ralph over my shoulder & then to rush to catch a train to Hampstead to dine with Brett & Gertler. Tomorrow we dine with Adrian. But in thus accumulating facts I am shirking my business of describing them. Well, Brett’s salon need give no one the gooseflesh. I thought to myself, as I sat in my black dress by the anthracite stove in the studio that if Sydney, Kot, Gerder, Brett, Miln, & Sullivan with one voice denounced me, I should sleep the sounder. It is a group without teeth or claws. For one thing they have no faith in each other. In my day groups were formidable because they coalesced. But there was Gertler dismissing Sydney as an old bore (not to his face) & Kot detecting faults, “yes very serious faults—no you misunderstand my character—I do not find fault with the people I really like—I never discuss them—” & Miln is a moonfaced cipher—what they call, justly, a quiet man—& Sullivan is too much of the indiarubber faced, mobile lipped, unshaven, uncombed, black, uncompromising, suspicious, powerful man of genius in Hampstead type for my taste. Anyhow, the hours wore rather thin, & Gertler was the chief stimulant. He has grown fat; his hair stands upright; he has the same tightly buttoned face as of old—little eyes—hard cheeks—something small & concentrated about him which makes me repeat, however foolhardily, that I don’t believe he can paint a picture—though his pertinacity would bore holes in granite, if that helped. However to balance this, I must add that he’s more spontaneous than most: has an alert mind, & is, I should say, in defiance of Ralph, something of a Puritan. Sydney shocks him. Sydney says “Now what do you do about women’s society? Do you copulate with your models?” And again, “Did you think that Marg made a bloody fool of herself the other night?”

Brett is soft, docile, & small. She danced before Q. Victoria.

Roger’s visit went off specially well. I mean we are grown rather intimate, & sit talking at our ease—practically of everything. This was not so a year ago. It is partly the good effect of having friends in common—not, as used to be the way, my seeing Roger alone, while Leonard stayed at home. I see in this one of the good effects of middle age. Roger had Benda in his pocket & read a passage aloud which started us off, & Leonard made him stand to his guns; & then on to all the usual things. Roger grudges every minute now that he doesn’t paint. So we reflected upon these strange, on the whole merciful, dispensations, by which Roger always sees masterpieces ahead of him & I see great novels—We have our atmosphere of illusion, without which life would be so much duller than it is. Here am I at last starting on Hardy, & saying to myself, not for the first time, This at least is going to be first rate. We discussed Proust, & Clive &, since I like to trace these things, I was interested to see how far apart Roger & Clive are now compared with what they were—Roger suspects Clive’s friendships: had not yet been to see him.

And before this Rosalind & Arnold T⁠[oynbee]. appeared with a kitten & the manuscript of her new novel. She is a wisp of a woman, with the eyes of a kind sensitive thoughtful nature, which can’t, I am afraid, produce much in the way of art. She can’t by any possibility write a long book, she said; & she only made £10 by her last; & altogether she seems rather shelless & defenceless, though she is Gilbert Murray’s daughter. I’m glad at least I’m not that, with a dash of aristocracy to refine still further.

Our luck seems, at last, to be in again. At least these are all good signs. Allison is tired of farming: the Americans want to have L.’s Contemporary articles; 37 copies of Tchekov were ordered yesterday; & the Labour Monthly wants L. to write another article. If each of these letters had been written the other way round we should have been very dismal, so we ought to be very cheerful. With luck we may have £400 instead of £250; & we might buy a motor car; & we might buy the meadow; & we might run up another lodge, & we might take in a new strip of garden. & so on & so on.

Monday 19 December

I will add a postscript, as I wait for my parcels to be wrapped up, on the nature of reviewing.

“Mrs Woolf? I want to ask you one or two questions about your Henry James article—”

First (only about the right name of one of the stories.) And now you use the word ‘lewd’. Of course, I dont wish you to change it, but surely that is rather a strong expression to apply to anything by Henry James. I haven’t read the story lately of course—but still my impression is—

Well, I thought that when I read it: one has to go by one’s impressions at the time.

But you know the usual meaning of the word? It is—ah—dirty—Now poor dear old Henry James—At anyrate, think it over, & ring me up in 20 minutes.

So I thought it over & came to the required conclusion in twelve minutes & a half.

But what is one to do about it? He [Bruce Richmond] made it sufficiently clear not only that he wouldn’t stand ‘lewd’, but that he didn’t much like anything else. I feel that this becomes more often the case, & I wonder whether to break off, with an explanation, or to pander, or to go on writing against the current. This last is probably right, but somehow the consciousness of doing that cramps one. One writes stiffly, without spontaneity. Anyhow, for the present I shall let it be, & meet my castigation with resignation. People will complain I’m sure; & poor Bruce fondling his paper like an only child dreads public criticism, & is stern with me, not so much for disrespect to poor old Henry, but for bringing blame on the Supplement.

And how much time I have wasted!

We dined with Adrian & there was Hope; & we sat in the high draughty cold room with all the empty spaces, shouting at each other—till I felt the light in my eyes, in my brain—all of me exposed & desolate. These deaf women make society impossible. It is like shouting in a high wind on the Brighton parade.

We had been buying presents, & sitting in the Club wedged between Kot & Bob. Kot persisting, enforcing, emphasising, analysing, rubbing in—how we are to publish Russian books—how L. is to give up the Contemporary—no, you misunderstand me—I did not say I consider your life to be worthless—Bob on the other side unusually calm & even sensitive. He is having his arteries manipulated in order to finish his play. He groaned sadly that he could not write. Desmond tells him that he is not dramatic. What with the Duchess & Desmond he has come to a full stop: & said that he felt an old fogey, & he said this simply & I felt sorry for him; still, he seems to believe in his arteries, & once they start flowing, he will take us all by surprise—Nor do I, at least, insist upon more plays.

To add to Leonard’s trophies, the Webbs have asked him to edit a book; the League of Nations Union offer to reprint Inl. Government; & the Village in the Jungle is sold among other rare first editions at 6/-. All very good.

[]

1922

[Diary XI]

Tuesday 3 January

It is a good resolution that sends me to this page so early—only came back from Rodmell last night—but it is parsimony—a gloomy forecast that makes me use the odd leaves at the end of poor dear Jacob. Blank leaves grow at the end of my diaries.

Home, as I say, last night, after 10 or 11 days at Monks House—days when the wind blew from every quarter at the top of its voice, & great spurts of rain came with it, & hail spat in our fire, & the lawn was strewn with little branches, & there were fiery sunsets over the downs, & one evening of the curled feathers that are so intense that one’s eyes see nothing for 10 seconds afterwards. Mr Shanks had the double pneumonia, & was prayed for in Church, as indeed I thought advisable when I saw Dr Vallance’s face at the window. We drank tea at the Rectory, & I was knocked over by the blast of crude emotion which that festival always releases. In the morning I wrote with steady stoicism my posthumous article upon Hardy. No more reviewing for me, now that Richmond re-writes my sentences to suit the mealy mouths of Belgravia (an exaggeration, I admit) & it is odd how stiffly one sets pen to paper when one is uncertain of editorial approval. That—my dependence upon Printing House Square—is the true reason why I give up; joined with the economic reason that I make as much by other means. Leonard planted, pruned, sprayed, though the cold & the wet & the wildness made his behaviour a heroism to be admired, not comprehended. And last night, on top of our arrival, came to dinner Peter & Topsy. Her face is unnaturally elongated. It looks as if it had been caught in a door as a child. Why, we asked, did he marry her?—but we did not ask it quite so amazedly as his brothers do. He is a romantic: an innocent; a resolute boy; & she, I suppose, had a deeper experience of life, & somehow vouched for all sorts of things which, with this innocence & scholar’s unworldliness, he was ready to take on trust. Fundamentally I guessed her to be sadder & more strained than he is; but also much less disinterested & sincere. So the evening passed; & I vacillated between liking & disliking, feeling pretty sure that I should never take to her warmly, but welcoming the spruce shining mind. With Peter one might be intimate, save that he is so young, so fresh: & not, after all, a born writer. We talked about Fredegond’s religious mania; about Cambridge; youth; our set; theirs; the past; Romer Wilson (whom I denounced, & won some agreement) & finally the Greeks & the Romans, upon which Lucas, who can answer straight off any such question & becomes definite & exact in his replies, instead of merely gentle & modest, said they must return to Blackheath. In the hall Topsy (May I call you Topsy? I asked in the hall) explained why they must return to Blackheath too volubly for my taste. But there’s 6 o’clock striking, & its my evening with the Pastons. Tonight my reading begins.

Sunday 22 January

‘Tonight my reading begins’ did I say? And two nights later I was shivering over the fire & had to tumble into bed with the influenza. How describe the fortnights lapse? Happily, it has been a mitigated lapse—not complete like the summer’s. Again I have a gallery of little bright portraits hanging against the wall of my mind—Nessa—Bobo [Mayor]—Bob—Kot—Pippa—to be exact; Nessa just back from France, alighting for a fortnight, & then off again, leaving the children, who have meanwhile got influenza, to Paris. But what am I to say about her? All very gay in French boots, hat, & check skirt; with that queer antique simplicity of surface which I compare to the marble cheeks of a Greek statue. I mean her attitude to Clive.

“Its a great pity” she said. “Mary is a stupid little woman. There she was at the station to meet us. They’ve settled down together completely. I never thought it possible after the Guano. She’s a very nice woman—quite simple & straightforward.”

“Its ruining him” I said. “He talks about writing like a fashionable man, now. And if Mary’s there, he’s intolerable.”

“Yes” said Nessa. Her acceptance of all this is complete; perfectly open, unresentful, philosophic.

But can I bind myself to go through my hoops—Bob & Bobo & the rest?

I’d rather try a general “account of my friends” to match one I made two or three years ago.

Suppose I visualise them as a group of marbles with myself in the midst?—& now one drawing near, & then another rolling off into a corner? It’s Desmond that has rolled into the corner this time. I dont know how it came about. Fundamentally, it is chance; that I was ill, & he in Ireland, & then he dines out, & has to be at the office, & so on & so on. Only there are seasons when he breaks through these hindrances persistently, & even has to be warded off (by Leonard that is for I never manage that); whereas, now, for the past 8 months, since the dinner when we hid Miss Green behind a screen, we have never seen him. Eight months—& life consists of how many months? That’s what I begin to say to myself, as I near my 40th birthday. The machinery for seeing friends is too primitive: one should be able to see them by telephone—ring up, & be in the same room. Only there is loneliness to be considered too—this exacting brain—this spirit which wont entirely accommodate itself to company. One person one must have, like air to breathe; but—as for the rest? Still I don’t like missing Desmond; & I blame myself a little for writing sharply in the N.S. (but I was right) about women; & I find myself condemning him for a penny a liner on good terms with his public.

Lytton’s marble is very close. I think he has determined, partly owing to his fame, to stick tight to one or two rocks, & his friends are one of them. So we are asked to Tidmarsh, & meetings are very carefully cherished, when they occur. His flame burns very pure. No masses of superfluity intervene. We have burnt up all that long ago. (Here mercifully I am compelled to stop in order to rule some blue lines. This is still influenza writing, or I’m inhibited by [Dr] Fergusson’s prohibition. No work for 2 or 3 weeks, he says. But I fancy I shall finish Hardy tomorrow.)

And I could only find a black pencil. But the truth is that when one is seeing people often & intimately one cannot say very much about it. I don’t see Lytton far enough away to have a clear view of him.

On the other hand, Sydney has almost vanished into the fog. Yesterday he loomed up again—for the first time since—? He hasn’t been here for 9 months perhaps. He wants to come back. But as during his absence, I have had reports of his infidelity I’m going to hum & haw a little. I doubt that he is faithful or unfaithful. And he lives in the pigsty—by which I mean the Murrys & the Sullivans & the Gertlers.

I’ve no quarrels to record. Now I come to think of it I’m on excellent terms with Clive, with Maynard, with Mary, for anything I know to the contrary. We should get on admirably on a desert island, if Mary could go behind a rock; but London, this January 1922, is not a desert island, & though we meet each other in the street now & again, the conditions don’t make for intimacy. There’s Saxon—at the end of the telephone. Infinitely weary, bored, irritable, even yawning audibly as he spoke, was he last night—grudging other people, so I thought, even their influenzas. What one envies more than anything is simply life. We all live, this way or that: Saxon has never quite got the hang of it—nor Adrian either, I fancy, though Karin obscures Adrian rather effectively. We dined there, perhaps I forgot to record, & bawled like Margate boys.

The Pope is dying today; & the Irishmen have come to terms. The church bells ring, & though it is 10 minutes to eleven I can’t see the face of the clock, nor even the trees in the garden. The birds wake us with their jangling about 7 o’clock; which I take to be a sign of spring, but then I am always optimistic. A thick mist, steam coloured, obscures even twigs, let alone Towers Place. Why do I trouble to be so particular with facts? I think it is my sense of the flight of time: so soon Towers Place will be no more; & twigs, & I that write. I feel time racing like a film at the Cinema. I try to stop it. I prod it with my pen. I try to pin it down.

Saturday 4 February

Another fortnight spent in bed. Indeed, almost as I put down my pen I was seized with a second attack, lay in bed like a piece of timber, & am still in bed, sitting up, looking at the fire, the tree twigs hung with drops of aquamarine, & my temperature a shade above normal. I think this second attack was more wearisome than the first, & I have seen very few people. Nessa came again. How painful these meetings are! Let me try to analyse. Perhaps it is that we both feel that we can exist independently of the other. The door shuts between us, & life flows on again & completely removes the trace. That is an absurd exaggeration. The truth is she was a little depressed, ostensibly because no one had mentioned painting to her in the course of three weeks. “I have seen all the cleverest people, she said, & not one asked me about the South of France. Nobody mentioned painting. I hung two of our latest paintings in Maynard’s room, & he never noticed them.”

“Surely Clive?” I said.

“Oh Clive knows nothing whatever about it” she replied. All this tends to make her turn to Paris as her dwelling place. But then there are the children, Julian at school, Quentin coming home nightly. And then there is Duncan. “And after all there is nothing binding in our relationship”, she said. “Its quite different from yours.”

And so this ruffled me: donkey that I am—am susceptible to the faintest chord of dissonance twelve fields away. I set out to prove that being childless I was less normal than she. She took offence (the words are too strong). Told me I shouldn’t enjoy café life in Paris. Told me I liked my own fireside & books & my friends visits; implied that I was settled & unadventurous. Implied that I spent a great deal upon comfort. As we had only 2 hours together, & she left for Paris next morning, & perhaps I shant see her till May, anyhow not continuously, I felt a sort of discontent, as the door closed behind her. My life, I suppose, did not very vigorously rush in.

Indeed, we are at the moment a little tremulous again. What to do about Ralph?—about the Press? Mrs Manning Sanders forges ahead. She has reached the printing off stage, which means that Ralph works in the basement, & leaves the machine dirty. We had tea at 4 yesterday, & I made myself agreeable. “And the type will be dry for me tomorrow?” I said, having dissed wet type laboriously all the afternoon.

“No it is not washed yet” he said. Then vanished.

L. was struggling with the fire. When the door shut I understood—L. was white with rage—that R. had slipped off leaving L. to go down & clean up. If he had apologised, this would have been bad enough; but to slink away, like a shamefaced schoolboy, was outrageous, & I was furious. L. had been at work all day; & now had another hour in the cold.

Upon this crystallised all our grumblings of the past—They are to the effect that he is lazy, undependable, now industrious, now slack, unadventurous, all corroded by Lytton, can’t praise, yet has no view of his own—the old story, which one has heard so often from the victims of the old serpent, but rather a serious detraction from his merits, as a partner in an enterprise. Should the enterprise be modified? Should we part company? Should we hire a woman drudge? I suspect that the work is not possible for an educated & vigorous young man: but I am being charitable.

Monday 6 February

What a sprightly journalist Clive Bell is! I have just read him, & see how my sentences would have to be clipped to march in time with his.

Mrs Manning Sanders is a bob haired, wide mouthed woman, dressed in a velvet dressing gown, plump, sandy-haired with canine brown eyes far apart. We liked her. But to Ralph her Fitzroy St origin was against her—this is his rule of thumb measure—for God knows, he said nothing, & is hard & angular as a block of wood. However, we had Mrs M.S. from 5 to 7.15.

Tuesday 14 February

So far had I written that Monday when Fergusson came in & pronounced that my eccentric pulse had passed the limits of reason & was in fact insane. So I was laid in bed again, & set up my state in the drawing room, where I now write sitting up in bed, alongside the fire, with a temperature a shade below normal, & a heart become naturally abnormal, so that perhaps I shall be up & creeping this time next week. I am reading Moby Dick: Princesse de Cleves; Lord Salisbury: Old Mortality; Small Talk at Wreyland; with an occasional bite at the Life of Lord Tennyson, of Johnson; & anything else I find handy. But this is all dissipated & invalidish. I can only hope that like dead leaves they may fertilise my brain. Otherwise, what a 12 months it has been for writing!—& I at the prime of life, with little creatures in my head which won’t exist if I dont let them out. K.M. bursts upon the world in glory next week; I have to hold over Jacob’s Room till October; & I somehow fear that by that time it will appear to me sterile acrobatics. Nevertheless, such is life, that I am very tolerably amused; see a good many people, Elena [Richmond], Kot, Adrian, Lytton today; & drowse off comfortably. It is illness at its best. We dine over the fire. L. has his tray on a little stool. We are as comfortable as cottagers (looked at through the window) & this morning dropped from the blue (yes it is blue, & frost on the roofs, & Ralph skating at Tidmarsh; & Mrs Sanders not sent her proofs) £114.18., unexpected payment by Mitchells, in whom I lost, so I thought, £600. This is mercy indeed; for we were very low at the bank, having bought type; & would have had to sell out, for our travels & printers bills. God after all does exist; for always some wind brings down an apple at the critical moment.

Elena has grown solid, like a tree trunk. She keeps her mystery. A performing seal—one doesn’t know what is instinct, what intellect. I find her sympathetic—so maternal, quiet, kindly; & liking literature as a lady does; & saying such unexpected things about it, as a lady does. She doesn’t like representation in fiction; can’t stand Wells & Bennett; attempts Dorothy Richardson; is puzzled; reverts to Scott; hasn’t heard of Joyce; comfortably waves aside indecency; I should guess that she represents the top layer of the Mudie general public very accurately. She is modest, even reserved, about her own doings, which gives her charm. Would have like a country life—dogs, garden, village charities, county committees, Gunby & Stephen Massingberd I suppose, best of all; & hates London, where she has had however her great successes. Like my father, I am attracted by the simple & affectionate & womanly. Not that she now dresses with beauty or has much to boast. She is a handsome du Maurier matron, with a double chin, settled complexion; & she dresses in a pepper & salt tailor made, wears spats, & has something of the American bust. I like chattering to her about literature. On Saturday when she comes again, I shall try to discuss the Lushingtons.

And Adrian is so happy & genial that I am really pleased. I don’t want to make him out a failure even. An unambitious man, with good brains, money, wife & children is, I daresay, the most fortunate of us all. He need not protect himself by any illusions. He sees things as they are. He is humorous, contented; free to enjoy without envy or uneasiness. “Oh well”, he said talking of his medical career, “it’s something to do.” “Its easier now to go on than to stop” he said. He has his ya(t)cht, & as the years pass, he will ripen into a delightful father. Moreover, like the whole family, he has this distinguished, cool, point of view, which always makes him good company, & admits him to any society—if he wished for any society, which needless to say, he doesn’t.

Saxon’s father is dead; & Saxon controls two houses of lunatics, some with broken legs, others with the influenza; which will make a man of him, so all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

I did not enjoy Molly [MacCarthy]’s visit. She is so deaf; so wandering; grown as plump as a ptarmigan; inconclusive more than ever; given to sudden vacant pauses, with her head dropped down; yet very affectionate in her flittermouse way; with that charming irresponsible heartlessness, which always amuses me. She wakes from a pause & raps out something quite to the point & even prosaic. She told me how she had loved the Governor of Madras, & refused Desmond for him, & was very glad now she had married Desmond, who suits her exactly she said. Why did I not enjoy Molly’s visit then? Well, she never concentrates upon me, I suppose.

I meant to make some notes of my reading (which should include Peacock by the way) but Lottie’s interminable gossip with the old witch wood woman frets me. Talk—talk—talk—wonder expressed—loud laughter—agreement—wood woman’s voice claps [?] more & more emphatic—Nelly there too—Talk with them a kind of muscular activity I think, for they never say much: repeat one thing over & over.

Goodbye goodbye—don’t forget.

Ah! at last! And now Lottie must compare notes with Nelly downstairs.

Wednesday 15 February

I thought to myself, as Lytton was talking, Now I will remember this & write it down in my diary tomorrow. And as I thought that, everything melted to mist. People don’t say things, except in biographies. True, Lytton was smooth & mild & melancholy beyond his wont; but with intimates, when talk is interesting, one sentence melts into another; heads & tails merge; there is never a complete beast. These I remember as opinions: Lady Gs. life of Salisbury is extremely good: Salisbury was a perfect aristocrat. The point about him was that he was a man of action simply & solely. Lady S. was stuck up & pert; they discussed travelling second class. And what else can I remember? Absolutely nothing? ‘Latest Racine’ he had read on the posters at Waterloo; thought it referred to Masefield; then re-read Racing. But he was back again in his old pre-Eminent Victorians despondency, partly, I guessed, because the publishers are chilly about his essays; partly because he can’t think of a plot for a play. When I told him a history of George IVth was quite good enough, I think he was pleased. How these writers live in their work—How ambition consumes them! Everything radiates from this in Lytton, & I fancy loneliness leaks in through the chinks. He gave me the first edition of a book by Beckford [not traced]; a very characteristic present, & the first he ever gave me, or I him.

We disagreed violently about Percy Lubbock’s book; & I traced poor dear Ralph’s swift unerring insight to the original source. Its annoying to me—as if Lottie picked up my gold watch & gave it a scouring with Bluebell polish (this utterly inappropriate image comes from the irritation she is just now causing me by scrubbing door plates, & turning on the electric light.) All Lytton’s subtleties & allusions come out spick & span blown through brass.

Of my reading I will now try to make some note.

First Peacock; Nightmare Abbey, & Crotchet Castle. Both are so much better than I remember. Doubtless, Peacock is a taste acquired in maturity. When I was young, reading him in a railway carriage in Greece, sitting opposite Thoby, I remember, who pleased me immensely by approving my remark that Meredith had got his women from Peacock, & that they were very charming women, then, I say I rather had to prod my enthusiasm. Thoby liked it straight off. I wanted mystery, romance, psychology I suppose. And now more than anything I want beautiful prose. I relish it more & more exquisitely. And I enjoy satire more. I like the scepticism of his mind more. I enjoy intellectuality. Moreover, fantasticality does a good deal better than sham psychology. One touch of red in the cheek is all he gives, but I can do the rest. And then they’re so short; & I read them in little yellowish perfectly appropriate first editions.

The masterly Scott has me by the hair once more. Old Mortality. I’m in the middle; & have to put up with some dull sermons; but I doubt that he can be dull, because everything is so much in keeping—even his odd monochromatic landscape painting, done in smooth washes of sepia & burnt siena. Edith & Henry too might be typical figures by an old master, put in exactly in the right place. And Cuddie & Mause are as usual, marching straight away for all time, as lusty as life. But I daresay the fighting & the story telling business prevent him from going quite ahead with his gun as in the Antiquary;

Thursday 16 February

to continue—Certainly the later chapters are bare & grey: ground out too palpably: authorities, I daresay, interfering with the original flow. And Morton is a prig; & Edith a stick; & Evandale a brick; & the preachers dulness I could take for granted. Still—still—I want to know what the next chapter brings, & these gallant old fellows can be excused practically anything.

How far can our historical portrait painters be trusted, seeing the difficulty I have in putting down the face of Violet Dickinson, whom I saw, for 2 hours yesterday afternoon? One hears her talking in a swinging random way to Lottie in the hall, as she comes in. “Where’s my marmalade?—How’s Mrs Woolf? Better eh? Where is she?” meanwhile putting down coat & umbrella & not listening to a word. Then she seemed to me as she came in gigantically tall: tailor made; with a pearl dolphin with red tongue swinging from a black ribbon; rather stouter; with her white face; prominent blue eyes; nose with a chip off the end; & small beautifully aristocratic hands. Very well: but her talk? Since nature herself could give no account of it—since nature has wilfully left out some screw—what chance is there for me? It touches Mr Bevan; bounces off to Wild Dayrell & the nurse who cut out a bit of the curtain, which was found after three hundred years to come from the curtain at Littlecote: Mrs Bevan kept hordes of goats. Mr Bevan has escaped with a Frenchwoman. His taxi—a Daimler car—went from Victoria to the Emporium & back again: away again—then to the aerodrome. Such nonsense putting old Ribblesdale & Horner on Boards—Ly.R. was an Astor & refused to let a penny of hers be invested—Your friend Miss Shreiner has gone to Bankok. Dont you remember all her boots and shoes in Eaton Square? To tell the truth I remembered neither Shreiner, her boots, or Eaton Square. Then Herman Norman is back & says things are in an awful mess at Teheran.

‘He’s my cousin’ I said.

Hows that? Off we went on to Normans. Leonard & Ralph were having tea meanwhile & sometimes intercepted a whiff of grapeshot. Now all this, properly strung together, would make a very amusing sketch in the style of Jane Austen. But old Jane, if she had been in the mood, would have given all the other things—no, I dont think she would; for Jane was not given to general reflections; one cant put in the shadows that appear curving round her, & giving her a sort of beauty. She quiets down—though believing the old doctrine that talk must be incessant—& becomes humane, generous; shows that humorous sympathy which brings everything into her scope—naturally; with a touch of salt & reality; she has the range of a good novelist, bathing things in their own atmosphere too, only all so fragmentary & jerky. She told me she had no wish to live. “I’m very happy” she said, Oh yes, very happy—But why should I want to go on living? What is there to live for? Your friends?—My friends are all dead. Ozzie? Oh he’d do just as well without me. I should like to tidy things up & disappear.

But you believe in immortality?

“No: I don’t know that I do—Dust & ashes, I say.”

She laughed of course; & yet, as I say, has somehow the all round imaginative view which makes one believe her. Certainly I like—is love the word for these strange deep ancient affections, which began in youth, & have got mixed up with so many important things? I kept looking at her large pleasant blue eyes, so candid & generous, & hearty & going back to Fritham & Hyde Park Gate.

But this doesn’t make a picture, all the same. I feel her somehow to be the sketch for a woman of genius. All the fluid gifts have gone in; but not the boney ones.

Friday 17 February

I’ve just had my dose of phenacetin—that is to say a mildly unfavourable review of Monday or Tuesday reported by Leonard from the Dial, the more depressing as I had vaguely hoped for approval in that august quarter. It seems as if I succeed nowhere. Yet, I’m glad to find, I have acquired a little philosophy. It amounts to a sense of freedom. I write what I like writing & there’s an end on it. Moreover, heaven knows I get consideration enough.

Molly Hamilton sits for her portrait today. Her portrait, to be sure, was a little shadowed by the fact that, but for her, I should have had Lytton in the chair, & should have got more for my money. She is a crude piece of work by comparison. One of the strugglers; & thus a good deal of time must be wasted upon facts—how she is to get a job—what she can live on &c. Besides, the strugglers are all worn & muscular with struggling. She is bitter against people—seems to me to snap, as a dog does with a thorn in his foot. And something of her pleasure in seeing me is the charwoman’s pleasure in talking of her bad leg: by a grate which she need not polish, & with tea things which she need not wash up. However, to give her her due, she is a warm, courageous, bustling woman; & I like her spirit, & the trophies she brings me of buffeting & rejection—‘real’ life; if one chooses to think it so. Never was anyone more on their own; & I think she means it when she wishes the motor omnibus would swerve in her direction; but cant be bothered to step to meet it. “And then I’m so angry with myself. I have a good howl & start afresh.” I shouldn’t like to come in from the Strand, grudging the omnibus its good guidance, find my fire out, no one there, & perhaps a business letter from a firm or an Editor—something severe & impersonal. A dull man wants to marry her. Why not marry a nice man? I asked. “After being on one’s own for eight years its impossible to marry anyone” she told me. “One gets into the habit of being free to do as one likes.” She had been the guest of Lady Rhondda in the South of France; & Lady R. who is a good able superficial woman, had psychologised her divorce proceedings all the time, which was boring Molly said; & Lady R. is a feminist, & Molly is not. But the lady Rs. ought to be feminists, I said; & you must encourage them, for if the rich women will do it, we neednt; & its the feminists who will drain off this black blood of bitterness which is poisoning us all. So we talked; the fire dying out; all in shadow, which is the best light for women’s nerves once they’re passed 40. I observe that my women guests of that age—Molly & Elena, move to have their backs to the window, on some excuse or other. Old Violet who has passed that stage, faces light composedly.

I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual. I like, I see, to question people about death. I have taken it into my head that I shan’t live till 70. Suppose, I said to myself the other day this pain over my heart suddenly wrung me out like a dish cloth & left me dead?—I was feeling sleepy, indifferent, & calm; & so thought it didn’t much matter, except for L. Then, some bird or light I daresay, or waking wider, set me off wishing to live on my own—wishing chiefly to walk along the river & look at things.

Saturday 18 February

Three dozen eggs at present prices work out at 10/6. Three dozen = 36. Four eggs for breakfast work out at 28 a week. This leaves 8 over for cooking. I have an egg now every night for dinner. I make these calculations not with a view to an essay upon national economy, though that comes in. My weekly books—these are in my mind—the very top layer, to be shifted off here most conveniently. For according to the papers, the cost of living is now I dont know how much lower than last year; whereas my books remain about the same. You cant question Nelly much without rubbing a sore. She threatens at once to send up a cheap meal “& Mr Woolf wont like that.” There! Not a very grievous itch; & quelled by the sight of the new Byron letters just come from Mudie’s.

Once more my mind is distracted from the thought of death. There was something about fame I had it in mind to say yesterday—oh I think it was that I have made up my mind that I’m not going to be popular, & so genuinely that I look upon disregard or abuse as part of my bargain. I’m to write what I like; & they’re to say what they like. My only interest as a writer lies, I begin to see, in some queer individuality: not in strength, or passion, or anything startling; but then I say to myself, is not ‘some queer individuality’ precisely the quality I respect? Peacock, for example: Borrow; Donne; Douglas, in Alone, has a touch of it. Who else comes to mind immediately? FitzGerald’s Letters. People with this gift go on sounding long after the melodious vigorous music is banal. In proof of this, I read that a small boy, given a book by Marie Corelli for a Sunday school prize, at once killed himself; & the coroner remarked that one of her books was not what he himself would call “at all a nice book”. So perhaps the Mighty Atom is dwindling away, & Night & Day arising—though the Voyage Out seems at the moment most in esteem. That encourages me. After 7 years next April the Dial speaks of its superb artistry. If they say the same of N. & D. in 7 years I shall be content; but I must wait 14 for anyone to take Monday or Tuesday to heart.

I want to read Byron’s Letters, but I must go on with La Princesse de Cléves. This masterpiece has long been on my conscience. Me to talk of fiction & not to have read this classic! But reading classics is generally hard going. Especially classics like this one, which are classics because of their perfect taste, shapeliness, composure, artistry. Not a hair of its head is dishevelled. I think the beauty very great, but hard to appreciate. All the characters are noble. The movement is stately. The machinery a little cumbrous. Stories have to be told. Letters dropped. It is the action of the human heart & not of muscle or fate that we watch. But stories of noble human hearts have their moments unapproachable in other circumstances. There is a quiet understated profundity in the relations between Madame de Cléves & her mother, for example. If I were reviewing it, I think I should take for my text beauty in character. Thank God though I am not reviewing it. Within the last few minutes I have skimmed the reviews in the New Statesman; between coffee & cigarette I read the Nation: now the best brains in England (metaphorically speaking) sweated themselves for I don’t know how many hours to give me this brief condescending sort of amusement. When I read reviews I crush the columns together to get at one or two sentences; is it a good book or a bad? And then I discount those 2 sentences according to what I know of the book & of the reviewer. But when I write a review I write every sentence as if it were going to be tried before 3 Chief Justices: I cant believe that I am crushed together & discounted. Reviews seem to me more & more frivolous. Criticism on the other hand absorbs me more & more.

But after 6 weeks influenza my mind throws up no matutinal fountains. My note book lies by my bed unopened. At first I could hardly read for the swarm of ideas that rose involuntarily. I had to write them out at once. And this is great fun. A little air, seeing the buses go by, lounging by the river, will, please God, send the sparks flying again. I am suspended between life & death in an unfamiliar way. Where is my paper knife? I must cut Lord Byron.

Monday 6 March

The cat lets this mouse run a few steps once more. I have walked for 10 minutes only, according to the directions of Dr Sainsbury, who after examining me for an hour said—many things; among them that we can’t go abroad. But I am back again, after 2 months this very day, sitting in my chair after tea, writing; & I wrote Jacob this morning, & though my temperature is not normal, my habits are: & that is all I care for. No more lounging & drowsing & doctors visits of a morning, I hope. Yet I no longer feel very trustful. And Ralph may be in any moment to stop these reflections.

Sunday 12 March

This book dwindles, now that I draw my stream off in the morning. Were it not for the irritation of suspense—Nelly & Lottie: the hospital; the operation, & my own raging toothache—by which I designate my desire to be writing out the preface to Reading, I should let this page lie blank. Yet many portraits are owed to it—I have seen people—& people. Eliot, Clive, Violet,—if no one else. Of these Eliot amuses me most—grown supple as an eel; yes, grown positively familiar & jocular & friendly, though retaining I hope some shreds of authority. I mustn’t lick all the paint off my Gods. He is starting a magazine; to which 20 people are to contribute; & Leonard & I are among them! So what does it matter if K.M. soars in the newspapers, & runs up sales skyhigh? Ah, I have found a fine way of putting her in her place. The more she is praised, the more I am convinced she is bad. After all, there’s some truth in this. She touches the spot too universally for that spot to be of the bluest blood.

“I’ve ceased even to think about Murry. I’ve forgotten all about him” said Tom.

What, then, did we discuss? He has written a poem of 40 pages, which we are to print in the autumn. This is his best work, he says. He is pleased with it; takes heart, I think, from the thought of that safe in his desk. Clive, via Mary, says he uses violet powder to make him look cadaverous. Thus it appears that Mary is not on good terms with Tom; & that I am seeing Clive rather frequently. He comes on Wednesdays; jolly, & rosy, & squab: a man of the world; & enough of my old friend, & enough of my old lover, to make the afternoons hum. One a week is probably enough. His letters suggest doubts. But, oh dear me, after 9 weeks claustration, I want to vault the wall, & pick a few flowers. The ethical code of Bloomsbury allows poaching; & I’m amused to see how far their ethics are merely theoretic. Moreover, & more seriously, a change of relationship, a middle aged relationship, offers new experiences.

Then I hit Morgan on the wing. He had come to London that very day, & so came here, & was, we thought, depressed to the verge of inanition. To come back to Weybridge, to come back to an ugly house a mile from the station, an old, fussy, exacting mother, to come back having lost your Rajah, without a novel, & with no power to write one—this is dismal, I expect, at the age of 43. The middle age of b——s is not to be contemplated without horror. But he was charming, transparent; & told us as much as we could get out. A years absence fills one too full for many drops to issue upon turning the bottle upside down. He told us about the sparrows that fly about the Palace—No one troubles about them. “I used to shout at them sometimes. One got caught in the electric wire. There it hung, until it wrenched its claw off & flew away. The squirrels sat on the piano. There is a great quarrel between the elder branch & the younger branch. The younger branch came to the festival of the God. He treated me very nicely, & hoped to see more of me. “If I thought they would treat you with decent politeness, I should be only too glad that you should go” the Rajah said. I used to row on the lake which was nice. The Indians were too heavy to row. There were black hills. A very nice climate, but dull. There were sparrows only. In other parts the birds were so lovely—I thought of you Virginia (which pleased me). I dont believe in native states any more. Agitators don’t exist there. If they come, they disappear. It is a very nice life; but one wants other people to talk to. It is much nicer than this. I felt no enthusiasm at seeing my native cliffs again.” That was obvious. Off he went, carrying a very heavy metal plate, to dine with Aunt Rosalie at Putney.

Friday 24 March

I write in order to drown the voice of the canary bird—Leonard’s typewriting I mean. I cannot read it down, but I can write it down. Gravé is imminent. I have nothing special to add as to my circumstances. Still invalided, I sit & receive visitors almost daily; & say nothing about them here. I am writing the first chapter of Reading with the usual fabulous zest. I have never enjoyed any writing more. How often have I said this? Does the pleasure last? I forget—I say I shall write the book in 6 months,—under the year, at any rate. For this reason, people are neglected, & accumulate, up & up & up: I cannot see them now—Nessa, Duncan, Toynbees, Bobo, Goldie, Mason, Roger, Clive, Clive, Clive, Ray. Clive is the most persistent; we talked from 4.30 to 10.15 the other day. It is clear that I am to rub up his wits; & in return I get my manners polished. I hear of supper parties; elicit facts about drink & talk & goings on. Viola Tree starts singing Mozart with a great hole in her stocking: Christabel “a little lump of passion”: Mary—mum; Shearman confiding at 3 a.m. his distaste for life. Off we go—C. & I—upon our relish for it. He enjoys everything—even the old hag in the doorway. There is no truth about life, he says, except what we feel. It is good if you enjoy it, & so forth. Obviously we reach no heights of reason. Nor do we become completely intimate. A little colour is added to taste. We have our embrace; our frill of sentiment. Impossible, as Nessa says, to talk without it. But I perceive, chiefly through his letters, that once a fortnight is the pitch of our relationship.

Nelly & Lottie have talked till the sky seems nothing but a dish cover echoing their changes of mind. They go home for the week end to settle the matter, & eat birthday cakes, & I guess that she won’t go to hospital after all. Refer back to some other scene of the kind if you wish to know how many hours have been wasted; how many reflections upon the lower classes formulated; & how often L. has approached me before I order dinner with a pained, solicitous appearance, begging me on no account to say this or that, strongly advising me at all costs to make something else plain.

Betty Potter loves me; is in despair; & I have to see her rehearse in order to keep her from suicide. How can anyone be such a fool as to believe in anyone?

Thursday 30 March

They have decided for the operation; or rather Johnston has decided for them; & no one can overrule his finding, as he alone had the materials. Now Emma Gilman is in the house, & we have just presented a rose coloured dressing jacket. The atmosphere is a little tremulous, with that kind of significance in trivial sayings which is moving & uncomfortable. It is snowing now, large loose watery flakes; they fall straight; there is no wind: four turned to large drops hang on the branch against the window; (but I am thinking out tomorrow’s writing—or even skipping to the end of the book, & thinking what I shall say about Shaw). Muddy water is in the evening sky, & we began summer time last Sunday, so the evening sky is prolonged. The poor Vaughans will find it very difficult to get through the long evening; & Emma will take a turn in Kensington Gardens, or will say, as she once said to me, “One always expects something of the summer; but somehow, it never seems to happen.” This she said some time in 1908 in Russell Square, one evening.

I am shirking Bobo’s rehearsal, which I meant to describe. Miss Craig is a rosy, ruddy ‘personage’ in white waistcoat, with black bow tie & gold chain loosely knotted.

Stop those monkey tricks, do Saunders—& let us have some light. Miss Craig (Saunders stands right up to the footlights & shouts through her hollowed hands:) “There’s a short on the battens, Miss Craig.”

Lets have the floats then….

Now, all of you. I want you to listen carefully to the music. Make the movements that suggest themselves to you.

Beautiful lady, you go up to the balcony. Can you step to the left? No: I won’t take risks. Young man, Dunlop, you walk straight—straight I say—straight—Can’t you move that table? No? Well then to the right. Miss Potter (this with some acerbity) you needn’t dance.

Poor Betty looked like the skeleton of a sheep. She is at one of her crises, & may be dismissed the stage over this affair.

But it is, as usual, the atmosphere I want to get. The supple, candid, free & easy good sense of theatrical manners, as I noted them at tea. “My dear boy,” drinking out of the same cup. Little Lanchester said, when I asked if she walked in her pyjamas, “Oh do stop being funny”—I dont think one could use one’s brain without being warned off. Still, it don’t much matter. I walked with Miss Litvinne, mother of an illegitimate child, down Longacre, & found her like an articulate terrier—eyes wide apart; greased to life; nimble; sure footed, without a depth anywhere in her brain. They go to the Cabaret; all night dances; John Goss sings. She was communicative, even admiring I think. Anyhow, I like Bohemians. Then we went into the theatre, & there was the light on, the group significant, (Bobo’s children) gold tissue; something stimulating & unreal.

Thursday 27 April

Just back—not from the Club, but from Lopokhova & Rodmell, & fingers are so cold I cant close them on my pen. It is blackening for another downpour. This is the worst spring on record. 27 days of bitter wind, blinding rain, gusts, snowstorms, storms every day. So Rodmell was mitigated joy, & to this was added Nelly’s diversion so that we had to carry coals ourselves. She left us after a week, unable to stand the bi-weekly journey to Lottie in hospital.

We saw Mayors, Nessa, & Cecils. Lady G. Cecil is much like a terrier dog in coat & skirt: worried, untidy, insignificant; ardent, masculine in talk; a terrier on a chain; a great lady much snubbed & reduced: where, I wonder, do her lines & cavities come from? The 80ties was her heyday, when she went to Glasgow with Ld Salisbury & there were 10,000 people in the station who cheered like one man—(the Gordon crisis I think). Jimmy & Hugh & I spent all our pocket money & more—Jimmy was in debt for 3 years, getting up an agitation about Gordon—hiring halls & speakers. Where’s that spirit now? The whole of politics is dominated by one personality in whom no one believes. Gladstone was a dishonest man if you like—but he was a great man. He had a policy. This man [Lloyd George] has nothing. Hugh tells me there’s no politics now as there was in our youth. Its a different thing. Your husband says the same. All spites & personalities. Very bad for the country—We faced each other standing still in the woods to deliver these views.

Sunday 11 June

Disgraceful! disgraceful! disgraceful!

From the 27th day of April to this, the eleventh of June, not a word has been recorded. And I only write now to excuse myself from copying out a page or two of Jacob for Miss Green. The depression of a return from Rodmell is always acute. Perhaps this continued temperature—I lost 3 teeth in vain the other day—may be some sort of cause for my ups & downs. Yet the 10 days at Rodmell passed smoothly. One lives in the brain there—I slip easily from writing to reading with spaces between of walking—walking through the long grass in the meadows, or up the downs; &—well I need not talk about June. Perfection is such that it becomes like a normal state. Such is ‘weather’; & happiness is not strange but normal too—And so of course, coming back from Rodmell,—blank—reason for blank forgotten as well as blanks contents. If I give my reason, I shall waste my time & energy.

Friday 23 June

I was telling lies to Dorothy Bussy the other day about this very book—how I lived in writing—& wrote & wrote in the streets—& coming home floated it off here. I think I’ve been working too hard; talking too much; to open this book. Working at copying Jacob after tea. That, of course, deserves a page or two—my premonitory shivers. As for the talk, it has been all about love & lies with Ralph. We have had a mad bull in the house—a normal Englishman in love; & deceived. My comments could fill a book, & perhaps will fill a book. I don’t find it possible to excuse all, as tradition exacts, & Ralph agrees that it should exact. In short, I don’t like the normal when it is at 1000 horse power. His stupidity, blindness, callousness, struck me more powerfully than the magic virtues of passion. And yet it was interesting—very genuine, on his part; save for the flimsy disguise with which he tried to excuse himself. I began by believing his story—that C. had lied in matters of such importance that their relations were now forever damaged. But he concealed some essentials; how he had treated her, so as to foster lies. She supplied some very queer facts, one, that he flew into a passion (& his passions are like those in books) because she got naked with V. Dobrée. And he thinks this fine. “But I am like that.” “You’re a maniac” I said. Indeed I shouted it in the train coming back from Roger’s lecture. I lost my temper. We bellowed across the trains rattling. He foxes his eyes; turns rose pink; looks like taking aim at a rabbit. Shouts louder & louder. “I should have left you if you had treated me like that.” He does not answer. That is his good point. Old Victorian sherry drinking Squire though he is, one can launch out at him, & he is trained enough to stand fire. She is far sub⁠[t]⁠ler & more civilised; a lier, I daresay; but then one must lie to children. After this, & I think a little on account of my bellowing, a reconciliation took place. At least he chatters again today, & won’t allude to it. Lytton is gone, & so is Valentine. But I sketch this, partly from discretion, partly from haste, & so leave out the links. It was the stupidity of virility that impressed me—& how, having made those convenient railway lines of convention, the lusts speed along them, unquestioning. She is not in love—with anyone, I expect; though Lytton has the afterglow of any passion she has. & this queers R.’s pitch.

Now I have little time for anything else. We have seen a great many people. Roger’s lectures provide a rendezvous. Eliot dined last Sunday & read his poem. He sang it & chanted it rhythmed it. It has great beauty & force of phrase: symmetry; & tensity. What connects it together, I’m not so sure. But he read till he had to rush—letters to write about the London Magazine—& discussion thus was curtailed. One was left, however, with some strong emotion. The Waste Land, it is called; & Mary Hutch, who has heard it more quietly, interprets it to be Tom’s autobiography—a melancholy one. Yes, Mary kissed me on the stairs. That was after the Memoir Club. Lytton & Morgan read; & our standard is such that little is left for me to hint & guess at. They say what they mean, very brilliantly; & leave the dark as it was before. Then Mary crossed the room & purred in my ear. Molly grows very deaf, & I scold myself for not sitting next her. She puts her chin on her hand & looks wistfully round: says random rather disconsolate [things]. Morgan, who is now out & about again, thanks to Leonard’s advice, very calm, serene, like a kettle boiling by some private fire, a fire at Weybridge, spent the night here after the Dinner, & then we sat round the table & discussed his book. Our list grows more & more distinguished, but why is there no boom in Tolstoi? No one buys Karn, or Fredegond; but Bunin sells now fairly well. Jacob, as I say, is being typed by Miss Green, & crosses the Atlantic on July 14th. Then will begin my season of doubts & ups & downs. I am guarding myself in this way. I am going to be well on with a story for Eliot, lives for Squire, & Reading, so that I can vary the side of the pillow as fortune inclines. If they say this is all a clever experiment, I shall produce Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street as the finished product. If they say your fiction is impossible, I shall say what about Miss Ormerod, a fantasy. If they say, You can’t make us care a damn for any of your figures—I shall say, read my criticism then. Now what will they say about Jacob? Mad, I suppose: a disconnected rhapsody: I don’t know. I will confide my view to this book on re-reading. On rereading novels is the title of a very laborious, yet rather gifted article, for the Supt. And Leonard is going to make £3,000 a year, via Mr & Mrs Holt, an incredible couple, who spent an incredible afternoon with us at Monks. “He sells everything—he’ll be selling me next” she says, very arch.

Mr Holt half winked, & cocked his head.

“Little woman, little woman” said Mr Holt.

“He’s the straightest boy that ever lived” said Mrs Holt, not without emotion.

“No there’s nothing to be done with books. Henry isn’t at all keen I should try. Henry made £30 by an hours work this morning. He keeps his mother, & his orphan sister & her child in a semi detached house with two maids. Everything as nice as it can be.”

Mr Holt looked L. straight in the eyes—liked to talk business alone—praised the house & garden too lavishly. Very much in the style of a best seller himself. Perfectly unreal, sentimental, & not, in spite of Mrs Holt, very straight, I should say.

Monday 17 July

Back from Garsington, & too unsettled to write—I meant to say read; but then this does not count as writing. It is to me like scratching; or, if it goes well, like having a bath—which of course, I did not get at Garsington. But Julian said at breakfast this morning that she wanted to be rich in order to have hot baths. Philip replied that they are now laying on water. Then Julian said she wanted to put milk in her bath, if it kept her complexion. She didn’t mind being a fine lady. She wanted to come to London; but “mummy only goes for operations & horrid things like that. I did once stay with Brett, but they wouldn’t let me go again.” O. & P. stood by with their long cold noses peering into letters assiduously.

But this was the last 10 minutes of my stay. I don’t know that any incident burnt through the long windy cold day. I liked old Birrell’s stories. He is a very well matured vintage: the barrel round & tight & mellow; & the wine within bright & sweet, & not lacking tang either. At least he laid down the law very briskly about Logan’s character: “nasty”—& Lady Colefax—a bore “I prefer Sir Alfred who makes all the money. When fat old gentlemen like myself go to the house, those rogueish Sitwell boys sit at the window opposite & cry through a megaphone ‘The Ambassador from Sweden’…” His account of the society into which Logan introduced me the other day was not rosy. A general distrust, hidden satire, gorging of pate de fois gras in public, improprieties, & incessant celebrities. Birrell does it—sits there, I suppose, by way of distraction; & pays for his tea by talk. Ottoline has her little green book room with the gilt pillars stuffed with pretty yellow books. There I sat, crouching over the fire, & we talked, rather on our guard—a little toothless, perhaps. Much disillusioned she said she was, but now indifferent to disillusionment. So we had the case of Aldous Huxley—a pretty poor one “mere marionettes, not you at all—mere marionettes—why should mere marionettes destroy a long & cherished friendship? Yours very affectionately Aldous Huxley.” But mere marionettes have destroyed it. There is Murry pleading & whining to be taken in at the Bailiffs house, with a view to Oxford honours, so Birrell shrewdly said. Still we were low in tone—had she not an operation on her bladder two days before? But energy ran like whips through her. Tea was a long rambling meal—I had Mrs Seligman [unidentified] to talk to; & plunged into her hidden tragedy—a boy undeveloped; & a girl dead. Her poor wretched hunted hare face lit it all up. The boy, she says, has, she knows, a most remarkable mind, but cant read at 11. Sheppard was there with his shiny Homers beneath his arm, depressed, & O. sought to raise his spirits by calling him the happiest of men.

P. drove me into Oxford this morning; & there was Miss Margesson on the platform. This takes me back to last week; my party at Logan’s: at Mary’s; at the Squires. Yes: I saw Lady Colefax & likened her to hard red cherries on a cheap black hat. And Lady Lewis was there, who remembered my mother before she married my father & thought her the most beautiful, the most delightful, of women “—you’re very good looking, too, but not like her”.

One gets flattered & stimulated at these places; & I found myself thinking of fame, & seeing doors open before me; but I was too much of a coward to walk in to Kent House the next day to meet la Princesse de Polignac, Lytton Strachey, & others. But one of these days no doubt I shall. But to make one love literature—this is the way. I have skimped all this disgracefully, & here vow to stitch myself a new book, & start fresh at Rodmell.

The 1917 Club has opened its new rooms, & is infested with Mayors & Husseys, (who has written a book in the style of Lytton).

Leonard has been offered Brailsford’s post on the Nation; & has taken it, short of note writing. He is quit of The Contemporary in January.

Philip is back, & installed at Waddesden.

I am finishing Jacob’s Room.

Grizzel [a dog] now belongs to us.

I have seen Hope, Logan, Lady Cromer, Hussey, Duncan, & I don’t know who all this last week, but have said nothing.

We dine in the drawing room—the dining room being given over to print & Ralph (he annoys us both considerably). My temp, goes on, as usual, & Dr Hamill thinks that my right lung is suspicious. Fergusson says no. And perhaps I shall have to see Sainsbury to settle it.

Wednesday 19 July

I will seize the opportunity of tea being done, Ralph gone, & Leonard writing letters, to pay some of my dues here. I put aside Mary to write about. One very cold wet night last week, or week before, she dined with me, alone, Leonard out, no servants; rain making the streets swim. I opened the door, & there she was with her white Pierrot face, black satin, orange shawl, laced shoes—the whole outfit merely to dine with me in the rain. She is an impulsive generous woman, whose generosity still exists; but subterraneously I think, floored over by her society varnish, & only let issue by people who don’t compete. She started off upon her treatment by Vanessa, & this was the object of her visit, I suspect; to get me, I mean, to act ambassador. But, at my age, I tend to believe in the moment, more than in posthumous reflections. She was nice enough to me, chattering about her new dress for Chrissie [MacLaren]’s party; &, whether I was deluded or not I dont know, but she seemed able to put up some defence against my literary observations. That she may repel me with Tom’s arguments is no doubt true. All I maintain (& I maintain this against Nessa & Leonard) is that she showed up well on that occasion; & indeed I suspect that Nessa unintentionally flattens her more than she suspects. The situation is against nature. Nature outs, under disguise, which of course complicates. Sitting at the kitchen table at no. 50 I had this out with Nessa; & I remember how pleased I was to be taking my ease there, & not tiptoeing in the cold at Lady Colefax’s—to meet the Princesse de Polignac. Nothing can be done says Nessa. Moreover, nothing needs to be done, since in October Clive sets up at no. 50, & can entertain Mary there. In fact, says Nessa, all this palaver about friendship with N. is merely a selfseeking device to improve M.’s own position, which, in the autumn, may need re-inforcing. And M. has set Clive against Lydia, & so turned off Maynard; & then one night she kissed Roger, & set afloat the usual contrary stories; altogether, her character is too much in holes for this last attempt to patch it up, & my embassy was fruitless. The truth is, as I am fond of beginning my sentence, that alliances of this kind always cut grooves somewhere or other—being contrary to all passion; & you cant, even in 1922, do what Plato & Shakespeare couldn’t do. No intelligence bridles the old hag—nature, to wit.

Ralph’s old hag is temporarily under control. Today he has a story that Maynard & Lytton are to buy the English Review from Austin Harrison, set him up as drudge, pay their contributors £10.10. a thousand words, & beat all rivals. If Ralph wants it, then I think Lytton may agree; not otherwise. At Garsington they were getting up a subscription to give Tom £300, & so free him from journalism. These two bits of gossip seem to belong together; & there was a third—that the Nation contributors have signed a Round Robin asking that Murry be removed—which leads naturally to Sydney Waterlow the other night—Yes, he dined here, in his pearl tie pin. I thought him sweeter, more reasonable, than usual. He has lost his last shreds of belief in Murry, save in Murry’s Criticism, but as this too, depends upon spites & whims, I don’t think even that can be saved from the wreck. Sydney is very proud of his lawn & his fruit trees. He wishes his children were bigger. The little boy promises to be intelligent. Parents never mask their pride successfully. How proud Philip & Ottoline were because Julian could say Prufrock by heart! But bitterness struggles with Ottoline’s pride. “Half a dozen tennis balls are quite enough. You only leave them out in the wet.” “I dont leave them out in the wet, Mummy”,—typical of many breakfast talks, no doubt. But Sydney is softer, for the moment, & did not blow & bellow as much as usual.

Now, I never talked to Hussey (who is Mrs Enfield) about her book, though she accosted me in the Club for that purpose, for these reasons. She doe⁠[s]⁠n’t praise my writing. She imitates Lytton. And she doesn’t know the art of reading. Never, for goodness sake, set yourself to read Balzac through & talk about it. If you must do these athletics, do them in the bathroom. Somehow the connection between life & literature must be made by women: & they so seldom do it right. There was Hussey stalking beside me to the London Library (though I wished to be alone) & mincing out highly intelligent remarks beneath the horses noses, about seeing things like God & setting the cap on, & I so much rather she’d talk about her cat, her cook, or her weekly bills. But, of course, she didn’t praise me. And she marries the dullest man in London, & they travel in Italy. What is worth while? Only feeling things for yourself—& this, I dont think poor Hussey dares do. One might feel, for example, that Ralph [Enfield] was a bore, & Balzac sometimes dull. Can you like Balzac if you like Ralph? That’s what I ask myself when I talk to Hussey. She is an ironmongers daughter, & thus the chain of Lytton galls her neck.

Saturday 22 July

My conscience drives me again to write.

“This is real rain” says L. at the window.

“Mrs Thomsett wont have to go right up somewhere to get pails of water” says Lottie.

It is pouring heavy, straight, thick. Puddles stand in the garden. It is stuffy, dirty skyed. A white mist of rain blows off the roofs. One poor plant is bent over. We have just had Saturday tea, at Yes he does in Friday Nights which we read the weeklies, & abused poor cur Murry. He slobbers over Garnett this week, which suggests that Garnett has slobbered over him. You can’t write criticism without being a good man, so I maintain. One always sees the soul through words.

Clive came to tea yesterday, & offered me only the faded & fly blown remnants of his mind. He had been up late. So had I—at the pictures. For my own part, all my strings are jangled by a night out. Dissipation would rot my writing (such as it is, I put in, modestly). Words next day dance patterns in my mind. It takes me a week to recover from Lady Colefax—who by the way invites me for Friday. Col-fox = black fox. This is from my Chaucer reading. The question yesterday was about Lytton & the English Review. Would it be good or bad for his writing? Ralph says that he is depressed; blocked by the play he can’t write—& never will be able to write, say I; & if he lubricated himself with journalism, he might reel off some history or biography, & so pass by the play unmoved; & this is his line, & a good one, too, I say. But Leonard thinks that my view & Ralph’s are temporal compromising views, to which Lytton ought not to listen. Partly I am influenced by a wish for the fun of the thing—12 numbers of a new review written by the most brilliant of the age—myself among them, paid double: London Mercury killed, &c. &c. But James is spending this wet Sunday at Tidmarsh; & James will addle the egg.

If Lytton takes it, Ralph is to be business manager, & leave us. Well? We are polite, but we don’t sigh. And here is a long letter from Dobree, opened by mistake, showing that R. is in mischief again. His spirits are down, & even the servants notice his surliness. Poor young man! For really he was never meant for intellectual whirlpools. No: he was meant for punts in backwaters, gramophones, ices, flirtations, a pretty wife, large family, & interests in the City. Nature is perpetually driving him to convert Tidmarsh into the likeness of this, & so everything goes athwart him. We have bad luck with our prentices. Next time we must stipulate for eunuchs.

Hamill sticks to it that my right lung is wrong. Fergusson finds nothing. Pneumonia germs have been discovered. And my case is to be laid before Sainsbury on the 9th—all rather a bore.

Wednesday 26 July

Just in from tea with the Mirrlees; who are vulgar, L. says: & I think I agree. They have vulgar friends. “Pocky”—the girls name was, to whom Hope & I talked. She & the second housemaid had been carrying a salmon about London. She told us the story of her cornelians. Her mother now keeps her jewels, because she can’t be trusted. Her mother calls her ‘little girl’; & her nostrils opened too wide, & she was self-possessed, & crude & cut a dash, & had no mind, & had the shingles in her hair, & would sit on gossiping with Hope, who seemed to like it all better than I thought right. Rub off the top varnish—life, youth, colour, wealth (which we grant Pocky) & what remains? A dull old woman.

On Sunday L. read through Jacob’s Room. He thinks it my best work. But his first remark was that it was amazingly well written. We argued about it. He calls it a work of genius; he thinks it unlike any other novel; he says that the people are ghosts; he says it is very strange: I have no philosophy of life he says; my people are puppets, moved hither & thither by fate. He doesn’t agree that fate works in this way. Thinks I should use my ‘method’, on one or two characters next time; & he found it very interesting, & beautiful, & without lapse (save perhaps the party) & quite intelligible. Pocky has so disturbed my mind that I cannot write this as formally as it deserves, for I was anxious & excited. But I am on the whole pleased. Neither of us knows what the public will think. There’s no doubt in my mind that I have found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice; & that interests me so that I feel I can go ahead without praise.

Friday 28 July

The affairs of the P⁠[artridge]⁠s. have engrossed us for 2 hours again; & a postscript had to be added to Lytton on the telephone. I’m afraid its a sordid business, as C. said. Nor do I like to see women unhappy. P.’s conduct is that of the village Don Juan. Again, he behaves like a bull in a garden. And with it he is malicious. He is a male bully, as L. says. I am reminded of the tantrums of Adrian & Clive. There is something maniacal in masculine vanity.

August. 1922 Rodmell

Thursday 3 August

Owing to the change of ink & the change of place, I here begin a new page. Twice a year I make good resolutions—in August & October. My good resolution for August is to work methodically, yet with the grain not against it. Often, my wisdom teaches me, good resolutions wither because forced. And modern science teaches us to respect pleasure, or that is my reading.

I should make one of my little addings up of days, since there is a break. On the whole a good summer; by which I mean that pleasures—dining out, seeing people,—were rather successfully combined with reading & writing & staying at home. On the whole, L. & I are becoming celebrities. L. would deny this; but then he did not go to Logan’s tea party, nor to Garsington. Still I draw my observation from other sources. Reputation seems to accumulate, though we published nothing this year. Mrs Nicolson thinks me the best woman writer—& I have almost got used to Mrs Nicolson’s having heard of me. But it gives me some pleasure. Again, I am on freer terms with my little world, & have the chance I think to expand it, only no money to buy clothes. I am horribly in debt for Joyce & Proust at this moment, & must sell books directly I get back to London.

We ended our season last Monday at the Commercio, with Clive & Roger. Roger came in with his hair flying & his coat flying carrying canvases—his mouth open, his eyes searching round—& we had our usual talk. Clive had his bits of gossip; & did I not by my evil eye inspire one of them? Mrs Shanks (so they say) has left the Georgian poet. But Tom, coming round to Gordon Square afterwards, was by no means so certain of this as I could wish. Tom was sardonic, guarded, precise, & slightly malevolent, as usual. Clive, of course, on his good behaviour. He sounded me as to a visit to Wittering. Nessa had the mumps downstairs. Duncan drifted in, soft haired, vague, gentle as usual. And Roger undid his canvases, & leant 2 portraits of Logan against the sofa. “Yes, I think that is the best portrait I have done so far” he said. “I think I have never carried anything quite so far as that head.” He is 55 I suppose; & still thinks he is about to begin to paint as he should—a merciful dispensation—a carrot to lure him across the desert. But it is no desert to Roger. Every faculty is used & burnished, & some fairly on the way to be worn out. He suffers, consults doctors, aches & shivers, but eternally goes on. The perfect man, as I told him, & as indeed I believe him to be. He is off to spend the summer painting with Derain. It is his obsession now—to paint, paint, paint. Nothing else is worth doing. Pamela is marrying, or failing to marry, her Roumanian Jew.

Yesterday I walked to the top of Asheham hill, & found colonies of mushrooms on the way. The house now looks a little rigid & fixed, the country shut in, & severe compared with this. But the garden here, with the outhouses & their ivy down, is a lovely patch—open & airy with views of the hills; & so far Ted Hunter remains quiescent. The rot has set in, I hope, & I pray that Ted Hunter’s wife may now elope with Mr Belloc. Allison will then lose his fortune, &, Bowen being with child by Shanks, the Hawkesfords will leave, & the Woolves be left by themselves in chastity & glory.

I must broach a new page to announce the beginning, the true not spurious beginning, of Reading this morning. I shall write next that I have never enjoyed any writing more, or felt more certain of success. Jacob’s Room is crossing the Atlantic.

Wednesday 16 August

I should be reading Ulysses, & fabricating my case for & against. I have read 200 pages so far—not a third; & have been amused, stimulated, charmed interested by the first 2 or 3 chapters—to the end of the Cemetery scene; & then puzzled, bored, irritated, & disillusioned as by a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples. And Tom, great Tom, thinks this on a par with War & Peace! An illiterate, underbred book it seems to me: the book of a self taught working man, & we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, & ultimately nauseating. When one can have the cooked flesh, why have the raw? But I think if you are anaemic, as Tom is, there is a glory in blood. Being fairly normal myself I am soon ready for the classics again. I may revise this later. I do not compromise my critical sagacity. I plant a stick in the ground to mark page 200.

For my own part I am laboriously dredging my mind for Mrs Dalloway & bringing up light buckets. I don’t like the feeling I’m writing too quickly. I must press it together. I wrote 4 thousand words of reading in record time, 10 days; but then it was merely a quick sketch of Pastons, supplied by books. Now I break off, according to my quick change theory, to write Mrs D. (who ushers in a host of others, I begin to perceive) then I do Chaucer; & finish the first chapter early in September. By that time, I have my Greek beginning perhaps, in my head; & so the future is all pegged out; & when Jacob is rejected in America & ignored in England, I shall be philosophically driving my plough fields away. They are cutting the corn all over the country, which supplies that metaphor, & perhaps excuses it. But I need no excuses, since I am not writing for the Lit Sup. Shall I ever write for them again?

I see I have said nothing about our day in London [on 9 August]—Dr Sainsbury, Dr Fergusson, & the semi-legal discussion over my body, which ended in a bottle of quinine pills, & a box of lozenges, & a brush to varnish my throat with. Influenza & pneumonia germs, perhaps, says Sainsbury, very softly, wisely & with extreme deliberation. “Equanimity—practise equanimity Mrs Woolf” he said, as I left; an unnecessary interview from my point of view; but we were forced into it by one step after another on the part of the bacteriologists. I take my temperature no more till Oct. 1st.

Meanwhile, there is the question of Ralph. This—it is the old question of his lumpiness, grumpiness, slovenliness, & stupidity versus his niceness, strength, fundamental amiability & connections—has been forced on us by one of Roger’s suggestions—a man called Whittal, wants to come in: young, intelligent, with a motor car, well dressed, sociable, & critical; living in London, & not pressed for money. I am a little alarmed by the social values of Mr W. for we don’t want the Press to be a fashionable hobby patronised & inspired by Chelsea. Whittal lives only two doors off Logan.

Tuesday 22 August

On this day, I don’t know how many years ago, 1897 to be precise, Jack came to Hindhead & was accepted by Stella in the moonlit garden. We wandered about the house till she came in & told us. Thoby thought they were tramps. I tried to describe the little trees in the moonlight. 1922
1897
25 Jack was accepted in Tyndall’s little study on that bare heath twenty five years ago. As she died so soon after, somehow it still seems to me like a real thing, unsmothered by the succeeding years.

But I always have to confess, when I write diary in the morning. It is only 11.30 to be honest, & I have left off Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street; & really why is it? I should very much like to account for my depression. Sydney Waterlow spent the week end here; & yesterday we had a days outing at Brighton. At Brighton I saw a lovely blue Victorian dress, which L. advised me not to buy. Sydney reproduced in his heavy lifeless voice exactly the phrases in which Murry dismisses my writing “merely silly—one simply doesn’t read it—you’re a back number.” Then Squire rejected Leonard’s story; & perhaps I dont like seeing new houses built all about; & get edgy about our field. So now I have assembled my facts—to which I now add my spending 10/6 on photographs, which we developed in my dress cupboard last night; & they are all failures. Compliments, clothes, building, photography—it is for these reasons that I cannot write Mrs Dalloway. Indeed it is fatal to have visitors, even like Clive for one day, in the middle of a story. I had just got up steam. All that agony now has to begin again. And Sydney, however one may discount him beforehand, is always a feather bed on a hot night—ponderous, meritorious, stuffy. The stuffing is now provided by Kot & Sullivan, who have provided him with a new outfit. Everything is conscientiously revised by their not, to me, penetrating flame; & if the process is done in one’s presence it becomes, I don’t know why, curiously enervating, humiliating & depressing. Some rooms always smell mouldy—good well built rooms too. No one ever suffered so acutely from atmosphere as I do; & my leaves drooped one by one; though heaven knows my root is firm enough. As L. very truly says there is too much ego in my cosmos.

In fact, Sydney was lighter in hand than I have known him. He had made a vow, for at 45 he makes vows, not to discuss his personal affairs. A deep groan intimated so much when we approached the delectable subject. No: he must refrain. We passed the door. And he got naked & bathed, & made the river look many sizes too small. He is a soft pink mass when naked. We talked too much about Murry. Still, it would have been as⁠[c]⁠etic not to, considering our lack of subjects of equal value. Yet Sydney considers that he can talk about literature. He can pick up a pencil doubtless; but the chances are he picks up half a dozen. I am thinking of Thoreau, whose fineness of touch was proved by some dealing of his with pencils. I mean that Sydney is entirely without fineness of touch. His grandmother was a ratcatcher’s daughter: his grandfather a printer’s devil: both facts which he profoundly regrets. And so do I.

I am once more writing off the fidgets. Ah, but how divinely happy we were until 12.30 on Thursday when Clive boarded the enchanted island with news from the world of Mary & Colefax! Never have I been so happy in my life. The day was like a perfect piece of cabinet making—beautifully fitted with beautiful compartments. It rained (I think) things must have happened in the same way & same order as today; but how differently! I could hardly keep my temper ordering dinner this morning—& so on. But I shall walk to Asheham & try to start the machine again. The odd thing is that neither of us wishes for visitors. Of course they threaten us from all sides—Partridges, M⁠[olly]. Hamilton, Americans, Lytton, Morgan, Tom, Sangers—no: leave me, leave me, is all I say: to work my brain.

Boen [Hawkesford] came to tea on Sunday—a cheap piece of crockery, for her nose reminds one of a tea pot spout; her mouth is like a slot in coarse china. She is changing; reading Bliss under Shanks’ orders; wishes to live in London in order to work; not dance; & hurried off to play tennis with him, I suppose. I surprised them on the river bank swimming the great sheep dog “They got him from a shepherd here” says Boen, with a strange accent or tremor on they, as if ‘they’ were past, yet not dead; & so, under pretext of exercising the dog, the walking out which Mrs Dedman so strongly disapproves, goes on; leading according to Sydney, to a life of misery for Shanks, Boen getting her claws into him, clinging to him, drawing him under.

“Rot!” I said. Poor man. I look forward to his Collins. Tuesday cont.

Slowly the cloud withdraws. Not that I can put pen to paper at this moment; but the waters, which that great grampus dislodged, meet together again. I am once more washed by the flood, warm, embracing, fertilising, of my own thoughts. I am too feeble to analyse the psychology, which I guess to be interesting. Its as if some foreign body had dispersed reality for the moment; the foreign body being of some gross material, inimical to thought. And if I can only protect this for the present, I shall be able to write. So the question for me is, how far to withdraw from unsympathetic society in the future? Is this cowardly, or merely good sense? For instance, here is Brett already inviting us into the heart of the enemies camp—Hampstead Thursday evenings. If I go I shall be rasped all over, or at any rate dulled & blunted, by the presence of Sullivan, Kot & Sydney. If I don’t go shall I soften & rot in the too mild atmosphere of my own familiars? Perhaps the best plan would be to live in a neutral territory—neither friend nor foe, & by this means sink the exacting claims of egoism. Is there such a society possible though?

I have ordered the blue silk dress, & must now save 10/- a week towards it.—six weeks that is. But if I save the money here, I waste it at the other end, so I have imposed this task upon myself with some amusement.

The way to rock oneself back into writing is this. First gentle exercise in the air. Second the reading of good literature. It is a mistake to think that literature can be produced from the raw. One must get out of life—yes, thats why I disliked so much the irruption of Sydney—one must become externalised; very, very concentrated, all at one point, not having to draw upon the scattered parts of one’s character, living in the brain. Sydney comes & I’m Virginia; when I write I’m merely a sensibility. Sometimes I like being Virginia, but only when I’m scattered & various & gregarious. Now, so long as we are here, I’d like to be only a sensibility. By the way, Thackeray is good reading, very vivacious, with ‘touches’, as they call them over the way at the Shank⁠[s]⁠es’, of astonishing insight.

I have so many letters to write: to Jacques (& he praised Monday or Tuesday highly; & I like to please Jacques; yet Jacques’ praises never outweigh dull donkey Sydney’s dispraises) to Ka; to Carrington; to—I forget; & shan’t bother, but shall now rock myself into literature by reading Ulysses!

Wednesday 23 August

A headache: no writing; so I will copy.

Aug. 21 1922

My Dear Virginia,

The atmosphere was extraordinarily propitious; such an effluence of beauty from the landscape & the air, with that healing touch that I’ve always found in those parts, but there was more than that. As the hours slipped by, so few & so fast, I felt more & more a deep satisfaction at having begun again with you at having picked up broken pieces & being able to hold them together with some firmness. I hope it isn’t imaginary; it seems quite solid, like something really won & earned, a real step forward in this horrific pilgrimage in which we’re all engaged. I might so easily have come away feeling it had been merely a raking over of ashes; I was quite prepared for that; my mind was open. But on the contrary! I feel enriched & alive, delighted to think you are there & are you, & not even minding a bit if you think I’m a perfect ass.

Now for an excitement. I was just beginning to write this when the telephone rung. Bewildering noises, with shouts of ‘I cant hear you’ from me, a voice I seemed to know, & then I caught a name: ‘Katherine?’ ‘Sydney, are you my enemy?’ ‘Good God, NO!’ She’s in Brett’s house at Hampstead. Thats all I could make out. I’m going to see her on Wednesday. The plot thickens.

Ever yours
S.W.

Friday 25 August

I have no time to comment. Indeed, it is a little stale, so I leave it to amuse a fresh eye. I think, still tentatively, that I have begun the story again—Brailsford writes to ask me to contribute stories &c to his new Leader. The Times (weekly) says my novels are by some thought among the finest of our time. Yet, yet, I am not quite past the depression of hearing Sydney repeat what Murry said. Did I not mention a headache, though? Common sense informs me that, when the blood ebbs, any fly can settle. One can’t brush them off. Oddly, though, sun shine, in these conditions, hardly illumines.

Saturday 26 August

Having done my morning’s writing, at 11.20, & filled a whole page not so badly after all, I may as well let my brain finish its run on this more terrestrial soil. It is a fine day—one of the dozen this summer. I dont think I have said enough about the splintered disorder of June, July & August. A broken china closet it makes me think of—so many smashes & tergivasations. But today is fine, & yesterday we went to Charleston by the Bus, for the first time. After all, one must respect civilisation. This thought came to me standing in a Brighton street the other day from which one sees the downs. Mankind was fuming & fretting & shouldering each other about; the down was smoothly sublime. But I thought this street frenzy is really the better of the two—the more courageous. One must put up a fight against passive turf, with an occasional snail, & a swell in the ground which it takes 2,000 years to produce. But I daresay this thought was forced upon me: I much prefer the downs myself.

Charleston is as usual. One hears Clive shouting in the garden before one arrives. Nessa emerges from a great variegated quilt of asters & artichokes; not very cordial; a little absent minded. Clive bursts out of his shirt; sits square in his chair & bubbles. Then Duncan drifts in, also vague, absent minded, & incredibly wrapped round with yellow waistcoats, spotted ties, & old blue stained painting jackets. His trousers have to be hitched up constantly. He rumples his hair. However, I can’t help thinking that we grow in cordiality, instead of drifting out of sight. And why not stand on one’s own legs, & defy them, even in the matter of hats & chaircovers? Surely at the age of forty…. Nessa, who concentrates upon one subject, & one only, with a kind of passive ferocity which I find alarming, took L. off primarily to discuss her attitude to Mary. Clive & I are much alike in our haphazard dealings with people. We do not concentrate; we are easily gulled & flattered; we expand & contract; we chatter & gossip; there is something much more fell, stable & determined in the characters of my sister & husband. Really, they can both determine a relationship & hold to it.

As for Duncan he requires, I think, peace for painting. He would like it all settled one way or the other. We saw a perfectly black rabbit, & a perfectly black cat, sitting on the road, with its tail laid out like a strap.

“What they call an example of melanism” said Clive—which amused me very much, & also made me like him. Why should this absurd trifle affect me when far more serious things make no impression whatever? And could one ever imagine this in the case of another person?

I dislike Ulysses more & more—that is think it more & more unimportant; & dont even trouble conscientiously to make out its meanings. Thank God, I need not write about it. Yes, Murry actually goes out of his way to drag in my name with moderate praise today. This must mean that he is coming to live in London; requires a dinner, anyhow people to get up & welcome him when he comes into a room.

Monday 28 August

I am beginning Greek again, & must really make out some plan: today 28th: Mrs Dalloway finished on Sat. 2nd Sept: Sunday 3rd to Friday 8th start Chaucer: Chaucer—that chapter, I mean, should be finished by Sept. 22nd. And then? Shall I write the next chapter of Mrs D.—if she is to have a next chapter; & shall it be The Prime Minister? which will last till the week after we get back—say Oct. 12th. Then I must be ready to start my Greek chapter. So I have from today, 28th till 12th—which is just over 6 weeks—but I must allow for some interruptions. Now what have I to read? Some Homer: one Greek play; some Plato; Zimmern; Sheppard, as text book; Bentley’s Life. If done thoroughly, this will be enough. But which Greek play? & how much Homer, & what Plato? Then there’s the Anthology. All to end upon the Odyssey because of the Elizabethans. And I must read a little Ibsen to compare with Euripides—Racine with Sophocles—perhaps Marlowe with Aeschylus. Sounds very learned; but really might amuse me. & if it doesn’t, no need to go on.

Sunday 3 September

Perhaps the greatest revolution in my life is the change of nibs—no longer can I write legibly with my old blunt tree stump—people complained—But then the usual difficulties begin—what is to take its place At the present moment I’m using Blackie [a fountain pen] against his nature, dipping him, that is to say. I should be reading the last immortal chapter of Ulysses: but I’m hot with Badmington in the orchard; L. is stamping the distemper down on my head, & we dine in 35 minutes & I must change, & the Sangers are coming in afterwards, I’m fretful with people. Every day will now be occupied till Tuesday week. So this is my last chance so far as diary goes, I daresay.

Walking in the church yard on Friday evening I made this remark—Its a very odd thing considering how impressive these country church-yards are, & how common…. when we saw Dora Sanger being escorted towards us by a stout country woman. On introduction we discovered this to be Daphne, aged 16: a nice, sleek headed, brown eyed girl; in a macintosh. Now I had pictured her aged 6 or 10, still being given her bath by Charlie. We have met daily since; & as I say, they come round tonight, to sit up here & look at the view. Dora will look at the view Charlie prefers spiritual scenery. And we never really show signs of running out of talk. I have only to say, what was a Greek bedroom like in the age of Pericles, & Charlie puts it before one.

Charlie, I was saying, puts it before one. And Daphne is very well informed, & how adorable the young are—like new brooms. I long to look over their shoulders, & see them sweeping clean. Indeed I much prefer them to the distinguished, wrapped soft in their reputations. She is at Bedales; goes to Newnham; then proposes to reform the world, by a moderate kind of revolution, so far as I understand her—for we only stood a second talking under the shadow of the tree outside the Rest, last night. She will write pamphlets, as a beginning. And the truth is that the world is reformed by Daphne Sanger’s pamphlets—no doubt about it. At her age I was for knowing all that was to be known, & for writing a book—a book—But what book? That vision came to me more clearly at Manorbier aged 21, walking the down on the edge of the sea. Never have I contrived so to wedge myself into my work as this summer—I cant endure interruptions. Maynard has asked us to Oare, where he keeps house with Lydia, & I should like to go, but we shan’t. The new plan of rotating my crops is working well so far: I am always in a fizz & a stew, either to get my views on Chaucer clear, or on the Odyssey, or to sketch my next chapter. A polite letter from Harcourt Brace informs me that my MS has not arrived—& they take great interest in my work. This comes of not registering the parcel—L.’s fault, I’m glad to say. I am galloping on, astride a J pen now, not very compactly; but the whole day has been dissipated, & now I must tidy the room.

Yes, on looking at the pages, I think the balance is all in favour of a steel nib. Blackie too smooth; the old blunderbuses too elephantine. Look how neat this is.

Wednesday 6 September

Visitors leave one in tatters; yet with a relish for words. Phrases roll on my tongue—which, really, one can’t produce for the delectation of my mother in law & Flora; who are now on their way back to Lewes; Carrington & Partridge being on their way to Chiddingley; the Sangers being on their way up Asheham Hill; & Lytton beginning to consider being on his way here.

We had our premeditated interview last night, with Ralph lying on the bed up here. Did his face show any change as Leonard went on—very forcible, measured, & impersonal. “Things have been unsatisfactory in my opinion” & so on. Ralph put up no more defence than a flock of sheep, which is disarming. So it is too to find him privately so enthusiastic about the H.P. that he could not contemplate any other career. I think it shapes itself into his becoming our printer; We take on Whitall as partner; & so start again—for ever. He is ready to face for ever, if we are, & money difficulties can be arranged. It is clear that he must live in London. Carrington is going to sit out his infidelities; which she does with her lips tight shut. She is going to paint. But she will never be a young woman again.

We had a great chatter party on Monday—Maynard, Nessa, Duncan, the Sangers. But how could I repeat the talk? It was a success though, save for the dim grey weather. Maynard is going to build a house: N. & D. are going to draw an income for 10 years from it. It is to be a hotel, perfectly appointed, in a field off Beanstalk Lane—8 suites of rooms, with 8 bathrooms, kitchens, waterclosets, surrounding a courtyard; in short a Peacock novel in stone; soon filled with the characters. No doubt we have re-arranged life almost completely. Our parents were mere triflers at the game—went to the grave with all the secret (drawers) springs unpressed. Maynard, besides being our greatest living economist, has a dancer for mistress, & is now preparing to stage a Mozart ballet, with 13 nimble dancers; interviews the Coliseum Manager; is an expert at contracts; knows the points of dancers, & can tell you all about the amours at the Imperial academy at Petersburg. Then Duncan is going to dance with Lydia. And Roger—but I need not go through the list; for my point is the same—we have all mastered the art of life, & very fascinating it is. Am I not about to manufacture coloured papers?

My proofs [of Jacob’s Room] come every other day, & I could depress myself adequately if I went into that. The thing now reads thin & pointless; the words scarcely dint the paper; & I expect to be told that I’ve written a graceful fantasy, without much bearing upon real life. Can one tell? Anyhow, nature obligingly supplies me with the illusion that I am about to write something good: something rich, & deep, & fluent & hard as nails, while bright as diamonds.

I finished Ulysses, & think it a mis-fire. Genius it has I think; but of the inferior water. The book is diffuse. It is brackish. It is pretentious. It is underbred, not only in the obvious sense, but in the literary sense. A first rate writer, I mean, respects writing too much to be tricky; startling; doing stunts. I’m reminded all the time of some callow board school boy, say like Henry Lamb, full of wits & powers, but so self-conscious & egotistical that he loses his head, becomes extravagant, mannered, uproarious, ill at ease, makes kindly people feel sorry for him, & stern ones merely annoyed; & one hopes he’ll grow out of it; but as Joyce is 40 this scarcely seems likely. I have not read it carefully; & only once; & it is very obscure; so no doubt I have scamped the virtue of it more than is fair. I feel that myriads of tiny bullets pepper one & spatter one; but one does not get one deadly wound straight in the face—as from Tolstoy, for instance; but it is entirely absurd to compare him with Tolstoy.

Thursday 7 September

Having written this, L. put into my hands a very intelligent review of Ulysses, in the American Nation; which, for the first time, analyses the meaning; & certainly makes it very much more impressive than I judged. Still I think there is virtue & some lasting truth in first impressions; so I don’t cancell mine. I must read some of the chapters again. Probably the final beauty of writing is never felt by contemporaries; but they ought, I think, to be bowled over; & this I was not. Then again, I had my back up on purpose; then again I was over stimulated by Tom’s praises.

We are having 3 fine days, & may even have 4 or 5. The garden is at its finest: the big bed spread with brilliant flowers, their petals almost touching. Henry Dedman has weeded the paths. At 7.30 on a fine night they have a phosp⁠[h]⁠orescent look, gleaming out. But it gets too cold for night wandering, & alas, I rather regret sharing my fire, & relinquishing my arm chair tonight, for the Sangers are coming. The three of them stalk in: Dora at least stumps. And though I like youth in the beginning, poor Daphne is a bit of a lump, & they fuss over her unnecessarily, & she shakes us all off, puzzled, exasperated, but not very good company, poor wretch.

Friday 8 September

When Mrs Woolf was here, she said she had been asked several times at Philip’s wedding the meaning of the word honeymoon—Mr Sturgeon has now supplied it. What things people say at weddings! She said, Again I’m a wanderer on the earth. If I could find someone to go with me, I’d buy a caravan. Now having had 10 children I am to live in 2 rooms in South Kensington. Leonard cant drink milk with the skin on. None of his family can. “I could see it in Mrs Woolf’s eyes” said Lottie—a wonderful piece of psychology. Flora told me that they eat funguses in Sweden; which grow there in great quantities. They eat all except the red funguses. She found a green one & threw it away. It was one of the best. Mrs W. said that Sweden is a great knife & fork country. They think too much about eating she said. Each of these sayings seemed to me very significant at the time; though I daresay I shant be able to see why.

The Sangers came last night. Charlie’s views on literature are oddly cut & dry to me. He discoursed upon languages, Latin & German: I know not why it is that people who aren’t writers always give one a dry bone in one’s hand, however much they may know. He has a very low opinion of Proust, but thinks that you cant write a psychological novel in French. From French he hops to Latin, to German, to Russian: but the perches are dry.

Tuesday 12 September

Lytton drove off an hour ago; & I have been sitting here, unable to read or collect myself—such is the wreckage dealt by 4 days of conversation. We had the Sangers once, & Shanks last night, so we lashed our tongues lavishly. A bitter wind blew splinters of sunshine. On Sunday it poured—as it has now once more started to do.

I told Lytton I should try to write down his talk—which sprang from a conversation about Boswell. But said Lytton, I never do talk. But you are witty, so they say, I replied. Lytton had of course read Mrs Thrale. And then we talked about Gibbon, whose method of dealing with the approach of the barbarian is quite magnificent. One night he gave us a complete account of the prison system, based on reports which he has been reading—thoroughly, with mastery, & a kind of political ability which impresses me. He would have been an admirable ruler of an Indian province. However, as usual, there was one main theme to which we returned—Ralph & Carrington. There are two questions to be settled—R. & V⁠[alentine]. D⁠[obree]. (who is settled in London) & R. & his livelihood. Both weigh upon poor old Lytton who feels himself in the position of a father, is slightly in love, yet sees, with his usual candour, all the faults & drawbacks. Ralph, too, lays the responsibility much on him—for the Hogarth Press that is—he refuses to discuss his love affairs, & Lytton sees, apprehensive & cautious as he is, how easily one might take the wrong line, & break off all communications. And so we discussed possible plans—that they should buy Suffield; that we should move into 38 Brunswick Square; that R. should be set up in a farm; that they should live in Boulogne, so that Lytton might write indecently. Perhaps Lytton was depressed. But we said scarcely anything of ‘our writing’. Not a compliment passed. I daresay this is a healthier atmosphere than the other—it is not quite so pleasant.

Then Shanks came in last night—a snub nosed putty faced shapeless little man—entirely lacking in temperament, according to Lytton—who was very silent. We chattered reviewers shop; & could not leave those rails. He tells me that the Lit. Sup. is not paying any of its contributors. Jack Squire, he said, is becoming stiff with morality. “Thats a pretty girl,” says someone in the street, whereupon Jack blushes scarlet. Indeed, Shanks says that he left the London M⁠[ercury]. because Squire refused to review Ulysses (wh. I have lent Shanks). No doubt Mrs Shanks & Miss Hawkesford somehow came in. But I gathered that Shanks does not take Squire quite so seriously as we had thought. However, I doubt that we shall get much further with a man with a boneless mind. He said he would give me mulberries. Nobody could feel sure what he thought of his evening.

Tuesday 26 September

A great many things have happened, unrecorded. This has been the most sociable summer we’ve ever had. Sometimes I feel as if, instead of sleeping through the months in a dark room, I’d been up in the light all night. Clive & Mary came; Mary in grey silk stockings; couldn’t jump a ditch; was very affable; said she liked long walks; sat on the floor; praised Clive; & half invited me to Wittering. Morgan came on Friday; Tom on Saturday. My talk with Tom deserves writing down, but won’t get it for the light is fading; & one cannot write talk down either, as was agreed at Charleston the other day.

There was a good deal of talk about Ulysses. Tom said “He is a purely literary writer. He is founded upon Walter Pater with a dash of Newman.” I said he was virile—a he-goat; but didn’t expect Tom to agree. Tom did tho’; & said he left out many things that were important. The book would be a landmark, because it destroyed the whole of the 19th Century. It left Joyce himself with nothing to write another book on. It showed up the futility of all the English styles. He thought some of the writing beautiful. But there was no ‘great conception’: that was not Joyce’s intention. He thought that Joyce did completely what he meant to do. But he did not think that he gave a new insight into human nature—said nothing new like Tolstoi. Bloom told one nothing. Indeed, he said, this new method of giving the psychology proves to my mind that it doesn’t work. It doesn’t tell as much as some casual glance from outside often tells. I said I had found [Thackeray’s] Pendennis more illuminating in this way. (The horses are now cropping near my window; the little owl calling; & so I write nonsense.)

So we got on to S. Sitwell who merely explores his sensibility—one of the deadly crimes as Tom thinks: to Dostoevsky—the ruin of English literature, we agreed; Synge a fake: present state disastrous, because the form don’t fit; to his mind not even promising well; he said that one must now be a very first rate poet to be a poet at all: when there were great poets, the little ones caught some of the glow, & were not worthless. Now there’s no great poet. When was the last? I asked; & he said none that interested him since the time of Johnson. Browning he said was lazy: they are all lazy he said. And Macaulay spoilt English prose. We agreed that people are now afraid of the English language. He said it came of being bookish, but not reading books enough. One should read all styles thoroughly. He thought D H Lawrence came off occasionally, especially in Aaron’s Rod, the last book; had great moments; but was a most incompetent writer. He could cling tight to his conviction though. (Light now fails—7.10. after a bad rainy day.)

Wednesday 27 September

An epoch making conversation is now going on within earshot. I think the Dedmans may be going, & Dedman saying so to L. But to return. While Tom & I talked in the drawing room, Morgan wrote an article up here; or flitted through; humble, deprecating, chubby like a child; but very observant. Tom’s head is all breadth & bone compared with Morgan’s. He still remains something of the schoolmaster, but I am not sure that he does not paint his lips. After Joyce, however, we came to ticklish matters—the Eliot fund; the upshot of it was (& we were elliptical, tactful, nervous) that Tom won’t leave the Bank under £500, & must have securities—not pledges. So next morning, when Ott’s letter & circular arrived, aiming at £300, on a 5 year basis of pledges, I had to wire her to stop, & then to draft a long letter giving my reasons; & another to Tom, asking him to confirm my information. I shall be scalded in two separate baths of hot water no doubt. But this can wait.

For the rest the week end was chilly & stormy. We had one blow on the hills. Tom left before dinner. Then we snuggled in, & Morgan became very familiar; anecdotic; simple, gossiping about friends & humming his little tunes; Tom asked him to contribute to the Criterion. I was impressed by his complete modesty (founded perhaps on considerable self assurance). Compliments scarcely touch him. He is happy in his novel, but does not want to discuss it. There is something too simple about him—for a writer perhaps, mystic, silly, but with a childs insight: oh yes, & something manly & definite too. He had been staying with Hardy, who is given up to vanities & attends punctiliously to reviewers. He complained of the Spectator; which was hostile he said, because he knew Lytton; & the cousins had quarrelled. Then to his pets burial ground; & some story about cats killed on the railway line—Poor old Hardy is perfectly ordinary, nice, conventional, never says a clever thing; says commonplaces about his books; has tea at the rectory; is very healthy; objects to American visitors; & never mentions literature. How am I to dress this for the Obituary?

Wednesday 4 October

Our last whole day. From the weather point of view, the summer has been altogether disappointing. It has promised & then withheld. We have not had 7 consecutive good days. There has been a scattering of good ones, but in the midst of rain, wind, & dark London looking skies. Often the Roman road was so muddy I could not walk along it. And often I heard the thunder murmuring as I walked. Grizzel was frightened & ran home—as if God would go out of his way to hurt a mongrel fox terrier walking on the flats at Rodmell! But there’s no arguing about these things. I think the garden has never been better, & we have had good crops of apples & pears, & green peas only 2 days ago.

Spiritually speaking we have made some progress in Rodmell society. I was struck by the bloodlessness of philistines the other day at the Rectory. They seem far less alive than we intellectuals. Mr Shanks & the Hoggs [unidentified] are, after all, so pale, so watery, so mild. Mrs Hawkesford still discusses the country & London; says, for the 20th time, that she is so glad she kept the tennis court going, even though they turned the pony on it during the war. Boen sits lackadaisical, & helps me to Shanks’ cigarettes. Then I don’t like underbred young men—Hogg to wit. They seem to me a little peevish & conventional; & talk slang which covers any character they may have.

I am a little uppish, though, & self assertive, because Brace wrote to me yesterday “We think Jacob’s Room an extraordinarily distinguished & beautiful work. You have, of course, your own method, & it is not easy to foretell how many readers it will have; surely it will have enthusiastic ones, & we delight in publishing it”—or words to that effect. As this is my first testimony from an impartial person I am pleased. For one thing it must make some impression, as a whole; & cannot be wholly frigid fireworks. We think of publishing on Oct. 27th. I daresay Duckworth is a little cross with me. I snuff my freedom. It is I think true, soberly & not artificially for the public, that I shall go on unconcernedly whatever people say. At last, I like reading my own writing. It seems to me to fit me closer than it did before. I have done my task here better than I expected. Mrs Dalloway & the Chaucer chapter are finished; I have read 5 books of the Odyssey; Ulysses; & now begin Proust. I also read Chaucer & the Pastons. So evidently my plan of the two books running side by side is practicable, & certainly I enjoy my reading with a purpose. I am committed to only one Supt. article—on Essays—& that at my own time; so I am free. I shall read Greek now steadily & begin ‘The Prime Minister’ on Friday morning. I shall read the Trilogy & some Sophocles & Euripides & a Plato dialogue: also the lives of Bentley & Jebb. At forty I am beginning to learn the mechanism of my own brain—how to get the greatest amount of pleasure & work out of it. The secret is I think always so to contrive that work is pleasant.

Saturday 8 October

Back again, over the fire at Hogarth House, having read the first chapters of Bentley. Grizzel sits on L.’s knee. Boxall—the kitten, called after Nelly to ingratiate her, is happily off mine; temporarily, or I could not write.

But the day has been spoilt for me—so strangely—by Kitty Maxse’s death; & now I think of her lying in her grave at Gunby, & Leo going home, & all the rest. I read it in the paper. I hadn’t seen her since, I guess, 1908—save at old Davies’ funeral, & then I cut her, which now troubles me—unreasonably I suppose. I could not have kept up with her; she never tried to see me. Yet yet—these old friends dying without any notice on our part always—it begins to happen often—saddens me: makes me feel guilty. I wish I’d met her in the street. My mind has gone back all day to her; in the queer way it does. First thinking out how she died, suddenly at 33 Cromwell Road; she was always afraid of operations. Then visualising her—her white hair—pink cheeks—how she sat upright—her voice—with its characteristic tones—her green blue floor—which she painted with her own hands: her earrings, her gaiety, yet melancholy; her smartness: her tears, which stayed on her cheek. Not that I ever felt at my ease with her. But she was very charming—very humorous. She got engaged at St Ives, & Thoby thought it was Paddy talking to his boy. They sat on the seat by the greenhouse in the Love Corner. However, I keep going over this very day in my mind.

Saturday 14 October

I was interrupted in this, & now Kitty is buried & mourned by half the grandees in London; & here I am thinking of my book. Kitty fell, very mysteriously, over some bannisters. Shall I ever walk again? she said to Leo. And to the Dr “I shall never forgive myself for my carelessness”. How did it happen? Some one presumably knows, & in time I shall hear. Nessa regrets her, but says that the breach came through Kitty. “It seems rather melancholy that it should come to an end like this” Nessa said; but she was putting Angelica to bed, & we could not dig in our past.

I have seen Nessa, Maynard, Lydia, Desmond, Saxon, Lytton, Frankie Birrell & Marjorie Fry, all within this week; & had two letters, from Lytton & Carrington, about Jacob’s Room, & written I don’t know how many envelopes; & here we are on the verge of publication. I must sit for my portrait to John o’London’s on Monday. Richmond writes to ask that date of publication may be put ahead, so that they may notice it on Thursday. My sensations?—they remain calm. Yet how could Lytton have praised me more highly? prophecies immortality for it as poetry, is afraid of my romance; but the beauty of the writing &c. Lytton praises me too highly for it to give me exquisite pleasure; or perhaps that nerve grows dulled. I want to be through the splash & swimming in calm water again. I want to be writing unobserved. Mrs Dalloway has branched into a book; & I adumbrate here a study of insanity & suicide: the world seen by the sane & the insane side by side—something like that. Septimus Smith?—is that a good name?—& to be more close to the fact than Jacob: but I think Jacob was a necessary step, for me, in working free. And now I must use this benignant page for making out a scheme of work.

I must get on with my reading for the Greek chapter. I shall finish the Prime Minister in another week—say 21st. Then I must be ready to start my Essay article for the Times: say on the 23rd. That will take say till 2nd Nov. Therefore I must now concentrate on Essays: with some Aeschylus. & I think begin Zimmern, making rather a hasty end of Bentley, who is not really much to my purpose. I think that clears the matter up—though how to read Aeschylus, I don’t quite know: quickly, is my desire, but that, I see, is an illusion.

Our great interview with Lytton as to Ralph came off on Thursday. Lytton was extremely adroit, & made points which Ralph prompt⁠[l]⁠y gave away. For Ralph will stay on any terms. Lytton proposes that we should give him complete business control; but this is coupled with his decision on no account to increase his hours of work. I’m rather in the mood to say that I won’t give serious books to a manager who wont give up his chicken breeding to look after them. And then how far could L. stand & watch Ralph’s howlers? And lunch & tea with Ralph for ever? And Whitall? This accumulates. We are to go to Tidmarsh after the rush is over & excogitate. As for my views about the success of Jacob, what are they? I think we shall sell 500: it will then go on slowly, & reach 800 by June. It will be highly praised in some places for ‘beauty’; will be crabbed by people who want human character. The only review I am anxious about is the one in the Supt.: not that it will be the most intelligent, but it will be the most read & I cant bear people to see me downed in public. The W⁠[estminster]. G⁠[azette]. will be hostile; so, very likely, the Nation. But I am perfectly serious in saying that nothing budges me from my determination to go on, or alters my pleasure, so whatever happens, though the surface may be agitated, the centre is secure.

Tuesday 17 October

As this is to be a chart of my progress I enter hastily here, one, a letter from Desmond who is halfway through: says “You have never written so well … I marvel & am puzzled”—or words to that effect: (2 Bunny rings up enthusiastic, says it is superb, far my best, has great vitality & importance: also he takes 36 copies, & says people already ‘clamour’. This is not confirmed by the bookshops, visited by Ralph Those sold under 50 today; but the libraries remain, & Simpkin Marshall

Sunday 29 October

Miss Mary Butts being gone, & my head too stupid for reading, may as well write here, for my amusement later perhaps. I mean I’m too riddled with talk & harassed with the usual worry of people who like & people who don’t like J.R. to concentrate. There was the Time review on Thursday—long, a little tepid, I think; saying that one can’t make characters in this way; flattering enough. Of course, I had a letter from Morgan in the opposite sense—the letter I’ve liked best of all. We have sold 650, I think; & have ordered a second edition. My sensations?—as usual—mixed. I shall never write a book that is an entire success. This time the reviews are against me, & the private people enthusiastic. Either I am a great writer or a nincompoop. “An elderly sensualist” the Daily News calls me. Pall Mall passes me over as negligible. I expect to be neglected & sneered at. And what will be the fate of our second thousand then? So far of course, the success is much more than we expected. I think I am better pleased so far than I have ever been Morgan, Lytton, Bunny, Violet, Logan, Philip, have all written enthusiastically. But I want to be quit of all this. It hangs about me like Mary Butts’ scent. I dont want to be totting up compliments, & comparing reviews. I want to think out Mrs Dalloway. I want to foresee this book better than the others, & get the utmost out of it. I expect I could have screwed Jacob up tighter if I had foreseen; but I had to make my path as I went.

One of the perquisities of Jacob seems to be society. I am going to Ly Colefax on Tuesday to hear Valery lecture: also to Miss Sands. They are all now (momentarily, through Logan I daresay) on my side. And at the moment I feel inclined for a plunge, though it must be on my own terms: in my own clothes, & at my own hours. I can’t go in to Whitall’s visit at length. But our position becomes more & more complicated. Clearly we cannot go on publishing seriously with Ralph attached to us like a drone. Whitall is a greyhound looking nervous American, serious, matter of fact, forced to make money. How far do we want to make money with him? At anyrate the labour & worry of getting out a long book makes me decided not to do it again on the present system. We have to go to Tidmarsh next week to explain the position. Carrington says that Lytton is most anxious for some arrangement, & the uncertainty is trying Ralph’s nerves. Yet this nervous man makes no attempt to do the most ordinary things for us. L. has to tie parcels every morning. Ralph catches no earlier or later trains. Thursday morning he spent at the tailor’s. But there is the American element in Whitall to be distrusted—in short it bothers us, & the election is beginning to roar in the newspapers. L. has a chance of getting in. We have bitten off a large piece of life—but why not? Did I not make out a philosophy some time ago which comes to this—that one must always be on the move?

Tuesday 7 November

I am, probably, through the splash, & must really try to settle in again. It has not been, publicly, much of a splash. The reviews have said more against me than for me—on the whole. Its so odd how little I mind—& odd how little I care much that Clive thinks it a masterpiece. Yet the private praise has been the most whole hearted I’ve yet had. They seem to agree that I have accomplished what in the other books I only got near accomplishing. But we scarcely sell, though it has been out 10 days. Nor do I much mind that—What do I mind then? I want to grapple with the 10th of June, or whatever I call it. Meanwhile, to keep me unsettled I get invited out. We went to Logan’s last week, & there met Percy Lubbock after 12 years. I sat next him at the Smiths the night Lytton proposed to me. I remember I saw a red azalea fountain in the middle of the dinner table; but not much else. Lady Grose [unidentified] was late; Percy pale. Percy is still pale, but mild & elderly. I was reassured by his shabby boots. He is a slow kind melancholy man; I run round him, & plant darts in his flanks, & we are to ask him to dinner. Then there was Mrs Hammersley remembering my father & the Duckworths, & I’m to go to her; & to Ethel Sands; & to the Oriental Club to lunch with Lytton. We had a stormy week end at Tidmarsh, & I’m afraid I have concluded that Ralph must go. His jealousy, & irrationality, combined with his fixed determination to make a permanent hobby out of what’s a profession to us, make the position less & less possible. Yet I am sorry, & like him, & the association. On the other hand what fun to spring off & make a good job of it! Suppose one could get a young man or woman of wits who would work violently & rashly.

Last night I dined for the first time with Clive in his rooms. Now I must make up my work account, for I have no time to say how strange that dinner was with Nessa & Clive again as we used to be so often; now a little formal superficially, & yet, miraculously, still intimate beneath: all 40 & over; all prosperous; & my book (that I felt somehow pleasing) acclaimed by Nessa “certainly a work of genius”. Lytton came in later, which made it yet stranger; & there we sat, with H⁠[arcourt]. Brace’s catalogue talking of us all by name as the most brilliant group in Gordon Square! Fame, you see.

I shall polish off my Essay article tomorrow, Wed. 8th. Then I think I shall try to sketch out Mrs D. & consult L. & write the aeroplane chapter now, for I must write out of my head again. A fortnight’s criticism is my stint. So if that takes a week, or 10 days, & brings me to 18th Nov. I must be ready to start the Greek chapter say on the 20th; only I have not read half or a 20th part, owing to interruptions. So I incline to writing that chapter in bits. First introduction & Bentley: then Odyssey: then on to Aeschylus, reading furiously the while. It is terribly easy to let the reading slip; so I must make an effort to get 2 hours either before dinner or after, & must now write to Will A.F. & refuse to go there, since I am out daily till Saturday. But oh the question of Ralph! & now I have a pressing appeal from Carrington.

Monday 13 November

And I lost my temper with Ralph, over Constable’s offer. For things are moving briskly this autumn, & Logan took me aside at Ethel Sands’ (same setting, same company, same sayings, doings & feelings) in order to negotiate an arrangement between us & Constable, who has a room to let, & wants us to combine. Ralph is jealous as a sore bear; obstructs every proposal with trumped up arguments, designed to protect his own skin, & not English literature, as he rashly makes out, & thus requires correction at my hands. We have not advertised this week owing to [the] Election, & sell slowly. Reviews are now favourable & utterly contradictory, as usual. I am quite able to write away without bother from self-consciousness, now; which shows that my splash is over. On the whole, I am perfectly satisfied, though; more so, I think, than ever before. And now I have a multitude of pleasant jobs on hand, & am really very busy, & very happy, & only want to say Time, stand still here; which is not a thing that many women in Richmond could say I think. Nessa & I are collaborating over a paper for covers which she has designed, & I am to colour. We went to the Beggars Opera the other night, L. being at Liverpool. That is the only move he is to make. But his address seems to give satisfaction, & I doubt not he could get in if he chose—next time if not this. America wishes him to write a monthly article—New York Times that is; which increases our income, & proves him at the tree top. People write little articles about him, saying he is selfless in his work for the public, & the most brilliant of our writers, & leaders of the younger school. I like this, & forgive Massingham his abuse of me from this time forward. L. is now writing his weekly article, on Turkey, having been up to see Massingham, found a pea soup [sic] in London. I walked in the Park, bought 2 wild duck & 6 snipe, all fresh & bleeding, just shot at Beaconsfield by 2 poachers I suspect. I paid 8/6, thus introducing a good deal of stir in Hogarth House kitchen. And now I must try to make out what Aeschylus wrote.

Monday 27 November

I need not say that my wild duck stank like old sea weed & had to be buried. But I cannot dally over this incident, which in tamer days might have provided some fun, because I have such a congeries of affairs to relate, & have to steal time from the Agamemnon. There is the Press to be chronicled. We had to meet Whitall at the Club, to discuss the Heinemann offer; & waiting there, we overheard one of those usual shabby, loose, cropheaded, small faced bright eyed young women, who was leaning negligently over the sofa side, & chatting with Scott as he drank tea, tell him that she was tired of teaching & meant to become a printer. “They say there’s never been a woman printer; but I mean to be one. No I know nothing whatever about it … &c.” When she went into the writing room, I followed, plucked her out, & revealed us to her as proprietors of the Hogarth Press. Yesterday she & “a friend” came to tea. This friend we called mistakenly Jones; he being Joad, of the 1917 Club; a philosopher; a sturdy short man, with very bright round eyes, hair touched with grey, cocksure, reposing much weight upon the sterling quality of his intellect, & thus dispensing with the graces & amenities, as usual with sterling young men. He tipped one of my chairs on two legs, & ate a large tea, keeping close watch over Marjorie’s interests at every point. For it was evident that she was ready to bind herself hand & foot to us, & make fantastic promises. Still, she has been thoroughly educated, must earn her living, & has written, Joad says, a first rate novel. Well its not quite written, she said; being of course, far more modest & less self confident & more excitable than Cyril. “We are going to be married in February” she said, when we came up here from the scullery. And I mean to go on working after I’m married. She now teaches at a Girls School in Gordon Square. And what does it all amount to? I should say she is 25 or 6: quick, impulsive, but with a steel thread in her from earning & learning, which is an invaluable property, & one that gives an edge to the rest. In short she might take us on & make a life work of it. Since heaven dropped the seed into her naturally, she will want no urging, & will cleave to it as to her own flesh & bone, I can see. Joad, who detests my books & adores the work of Beresford & sticks his little horns manfully into facts, may be an obstacle; since he may try to impose his literary views upon us; & I imagine him one of the steely intellectuals who treat literature as though it were an ingenious picture puzzle, to be fitted accurately together. But I dont know. Moreover, we both liked him, & her too (but she was less self assertive, passed the cake, praised the dog, & sensitively appraised the situation with antennae quivering, woman like). We all kept our heads very creditably, insisted upon strict business dealings, & are to meet again on Sunday week. But where then does Ralph come in? He looks a little glum, & says very little. I fancy our teas & lunches are a little strained. Tomorrow we interview Heinemann at his office, but I don’t think much will come from that.

Jacob has now sold 850 copies, & the second edition wont come much before it is needed I hope. People—my friends I mean—seem agreed that it is my masterpiece, & the starting point for fresh adventures. Last night we dined with Roger & I was praised whole-heartedly by him, for the first time; only he wishes that a bronze body might somehow solidify beneath the gleams & lights—with which I agree. He has been cured, so he says, by Coué; but seemed old to me. The approaching marriage of Pam, which drains upon his paternal feelings generally not shown, depresses him, & puts the stress on a side of him which is private & difficult, for, as he has always kept clear of fatherly responsibilities, he is now shy of them; cant deny his feelings for her; but cannot exercise his rights—to forbid the marriage. Oh how cold it was coming home in the train!

Sunday 3 December

I should be at Aeschylus, for I am making a complete edition, text, translation, & notes of my own—mostly copied from Verrall; but carefully gone into by me. But these are historic days. The Hogarth Press is in travail. Heinemanns made us a most flattering offer—to the effect that we should give us [sic] our brains & blood, & they would see to sales & ledgers. But we sniff patronage. If they gain, we lose. Our name has to be coupled with theirs. In the opinions of Desmond, Clive, Roger & I think Vanessa, the exchange would be capitulation. We are both very willing to come to this conclusion, & have decided for freedom & a fight with great private glee. This brought on an argument with Ralph last Friday. We must have a whole timer in January, or close down partially. After some demur, he brought forth a plan obviously concocted at Tidmarsh, by which we are to become a company, with Noel C⁠[arrington]. for London manager, Lytton, L. & I for partners, with Ralph remaining as he is. Lytton is said to hint a possibility that we should have all his work. At first tempting, this plan becomes to us less & less feasible; considering that we should have to keep N.C. in work, be ready to tackle an enormous commercial success, & fall more & more, so we suspect, into readers & advisers to the firm of Partridge & Carrington, who would become by force of circumstances, commercial mainly with only a dab of Hogarth gold left on top. At this moment we incline to Miss Tomson & freedom. Let P. & Carrington start their own press, & go ahead for ourselves, gradually branching as opportunity occurs. One is much attracted by the idea of a keen worker; & to tell the truth, Noel did not give either of us the desire to strive for him. Why, after all, should we conciliate Ralph? And is it not better to end this perpetual strain of friendship’s burden—hurting Lytton’s feelings that is, by failing to consider how fast poor R.’s heart beats after a conversation with us? Such, in short, are the reasons which come to the front; & we have to refuse to talk Hogarth matters, for the discussion is endless. Tomorrow, Ralph is going to lay before us a definite proposal on the part of Lytton.

But there is serious reason, & not mere restlessness, in our need for re-organisation. We are both giving all our spare time, & still there is far more work than we can do. Jacob has sold, I think, 850; with review copies 950; there is an ominous slackening of Simkin’s orders this last week, which shows, perhaps, that the rush is over. But we shall broach our second edition, & shall not lose, even if we sell no more, more than £10; so I am satisfied. But the books press. There are now Miss Hobhouse’s diary, & Stephen Reynolds’ letters to be read & considered, & at this rate, we have work for not 3 people but 4 or 5 or 6.

This autumn has been perhaps the busiest of my dilatory life. People & books—I sing that to the tune of Woman & Wine, which comes in the Beggars Opera. I dined with Mary on Friday, met Clive & Aldous; Aldous very long, rather puffy, fat faced, white, with very thick hair, & canary coloured socks, is the raconteur; the young man of letters who sees life. We all said we despised reviewers & told little stories to our own advantage. Both the gentlemen had been complimented by Max—but not the lady. At first one thinks the

Friday 15 December

I forget what I was to say, & only write this now as I have 15 minutes before my solitary dinner, L. dining with Sangers, after a terrific Hogarth Press discussion ending in the final parting with Ralph. It was a question of the terms upon which the Tidmarsh Press (he was to run one in conjunction with us) was to have. He stood out for one third. Finally we agreed; but the discussion raised our backs, & so—(Nell said that orange was bad—everything goes through—Lottie’s conversation is running while I write). I am too muzzy headed to make out anything. This is partly the result of dining to meet the lovely gifted aristocratic Sackville West last night at Clive’s. Not much to my severer taste—florid, moustached, parakeet coloured, with all the supple ease of the aristocracy, but not the wit of the artist. She writes 15 pages a day—has finished another book—publishes with Heinemanns—knows everyone—But could I ever know her? I am to dine there on Tuesday.

Waiting for L., I will continue. Half past ten just struck on one of these fine December nights, which come after sunny days, & I don’t know why, keep sending through me such shocks from my childhood. Am I growing old & sentimental? I keep thinking of sounds I heard as a child—at St Ives mostly.

The aristocratic manner is something like the actresses—no false shyness or modesty: a bead dropped into her plate at dinner—given to Clive—asks for liqueur—has her hand on all the ropes—makes me feel virgin, shy, & schoolgirlish. Yet after dinner I rapped out opinions. She is a grenadier; hard; handsome, manly; inclined to double chin. Dear old Desmond moped like a tipsy owl in his corner, affectionate & glad to talk to me, I think. He said something about the French admiring Jacob, & wishing to translate it. I go on getting letters, & reap more praise than ever before. Sales sluggish though. Not yet 1000. But I don’t mind.

As for Ralph—that question certainly cant be settled before L. comes in. Why did he make me, & L., so furious by saying, in his sulky schoolboy voice, that if this crisis hadn’t happened, he would have had a nice surprise to offer us at Easter?—something of Lytton’s presumably? I think the kernel of our discontent lies in that sentence—the bully, the swagger, the bribe offered us by Lytton, through this gawkish boor, & his simple rustic faith that writing by Lytton must solve all difficulties instead of which it complicates things.

So far as I can see, Ralph’s disappearance would leave us more freedom, but give us more work. We should have to make further arrangements. But the basis would be sound, which is the great thing. If we keep Ralph, there will be constant disease. He hinted that he wished to be able to break. Again, the question of borrowing money from Lytton always recurs: & the obvious pressure they make to consolidate their position. This would be perfect if Ralph were not Ralph. I see him rigid & ossified in middle age; repeating more & more accurately his lesson learnt from Lytton. And though I would give a good deal to combine with Lytton in producing literature, there is little to be got from him save his own works. I mean, I think by our own merits now we attract all the young.

[]

1923

Tuesday 2 January

If I were a dissembler I should date this the last day of 1922. So it is to all intents. We came back from Rodmell yesterday, & I am in one of my moods, as the nurses used to call it, today. And what is it & why? A desire for children, I suppose; for Nessa’s life; for the sense of flowers breaking all round me involuntarily. Here’s Angelica—here’s Quentin & Julian. Now children dont make yourself ill on plum pudding tonight. We have people dining. There’s no hot water. The gas is escaping in Quentin’s bedroom—I pluck what I call flowers at random. They make my life seem a little bare sometimes; & then my inveterate romanticism suggests an image of forging ahead, alone, through the night: of suffering inwardly, stoically; of blazing my way through to the end—& so forth. The truth is that the sails flap about me for a day or two on coming back; & not being at full stretch I ponder & loiter. And it is all temporary: yet let me be quite clear about that. Let me have one confessional where I need not boast. Years & years ago, after the Lytton affair, I said to myself, walking up the hill at Beireuth, never pretend that the things you haven’t got are not worth having; good advice I think. At least it often comes back to me. Never pretend that children, for instance, can be replaced by other things. And then I went on (the thought is always connected with Mrs Freshfield—why?) to say to myself that one must (put all one’s weight upon) (how am I to convey it?) like things for themselves: or rather, rid them of their bearing upon one’s personal life. One must throw that aside; & venture on to the things that exist independently of oneself. Now this is very hard for young women to do. Yet I got satisfaction from it. And now, married to L., I never have to make the effort. I do it, if I enjoy doing it. Perhaps I have been too happy for my soul’s good? Perhaps I have become cowardly & self-indulgent? And does some of my discontent come from feeling that? I could not stay at 46 last night, because L. on the telephone expressed displeasure. Late again. Very foolish. Your heart bad—& so my self reliance being sapped, I had no courage to venture against his will. Then I react. Of course its a difficult question. For undoubtedly I get headaches or the jump in my heart; & then this spoils his pleasure, & if one lives with a person, has one the right—So it goes on. And I will try to make up my accounts on the spiritual side before attacking the temporal, only, as usual, jerkily, disconnectedly, & without more than the sort of tap a chemist might give to the jars in his shop, naming them shortly, because he knows what is in them. At fifty, when I re-read, perhaps I shall know what I meant.

Middle Age then. Let that be the text of my discourse. I’m afraid we’re becoming elderly. We are busy & attach importance to hours. I have my correspondence to finish, says L. today. I don’t laugh. I take it seriously. But we must not let our hobbies & pleasures become objects of fetish worship. L., I think, suffers from his extreme clarity. He sees things so clear that he can’t swim float & speculate. And now we have such a train attached to us that we have to go on. It is easy, at least, to pretend that pressure is upon us. Nessa, though, who might so easily plead ties & circumstances, rides much more freely than we do. She will spend Easter travelling with the children, for instance. We have to make money—that is true. We have to have a house; 2 houses; 2 servants; a press; a Tomson; a Ralph. Yet most of this is for my sake; & am I honest in wishing it otherwise? Dont I feel (mainly) that I must ease the strain of circumstances in order to write?—that interruptions bore me: put gross matter in my fire?

I will leave it here, unfinished, a note of interrogation—signifying some mood that recurs, but is not often expressed. One’s life is made up, superficially, of such moods; but they cross a solid substance, which too I am not going to hack my way into now.

So this is the end of 1922.

[DIARY XII]

Sunday 7 January

Let the scene open on the doorstep of number 50 Gordon Square. We went up last night, carrying our bags, & a Ceylonese sword. There was Mary H. in lemon coloured trousers with green ribbons. & so we sat down to dinner; off cold chicken. In came Roger & Adrian & Karin; & very slowly we coloured our faces & made ready for number 46. It was the proudest moment of Clive’s life when he led Mary on one arm, Virginia on the other, into the drawing room, which was full, miscellaneous; & oriental for the most part. Suppose one’s normal pulse to be 70: in five minutes it was 120: & the blood, not the sticky whitish fluid of daytime, but brilliant & prickling like champagne. This was my state, & most peoples. We collided, when we met: went pop, used Christian names, flattered, praised, & thought (or I did) of Shakespeare. At any rate I thought of him when the singing was doing—Sh⁠[akespear]⁠e I thought would have liked us all tonight. Not that Bobo was other than a damp owl, with some private gloom which being too personal for my taste, she brought with her. Then there was a plain woodfaced Darwin—which? And Hussey, like a Victorian seamstress by a table covered in mohair checks. My luck was in though, & I found good quarters with Frankie & Sheppard & Bunny, & Lydia—all my friends in short. But what we talked about I hardly know. Bunny asked me to be his childs godmother. And a Belgian wants to translate me. Arnold Bennett thinks me wonderful &—&—(these, no doubt were elements in my hilarity). Gumbo distorted nursery rhymes; Lydia danced; there were charades; Sickert acted Hamlet. We were all easy & gifted & friendly & like good children rewarded by having the capacity for enjoying ourselves thus. Could our fathers? I, wearing my mothers laces, looked at Mary’s little soft Jerboa face in the old looking glass—& wondered.

I daresay no one said anything very brilliant. I sat by Sickert, & liked him, talking in his very workmanlike, but not at all society manner, of painting, & Whistler; of an operation he saw at Dieppe. But can life be worth so much pain, he asked? “Pour respirer” said the Dr. That is enough. But for two years ‘after my wife’s death’ I did not wish to live said Sickert. There is something indescribably congenial to me in this easy artists talk; the values the same as my own & therefore right; no impediments; life charming, good & interesting; no effort; art brooding calmly over it all; & none of this attachment to mundane things, which I find in Chelsea. For Sickert said, why should one be attached to one’s own body & breakfast? Why not be satisfied to let others have the use of ones life, & live it over again, being dead oneself? No mysticism, & therefore a great relish for the actual things—whatever they may be—old plays, girls, boys, Proust, Handel sung by Oliver [Strachey]; the turn of a head & so on.

As parties do, this one began to dwindle, until a few persistent talkers were left by themselves sitting in such odd positions—Oliver full length by Barbara on the floor; Ralph astride a chair in the middle of the room; Lytton & I side by side on the sofa.

“And what do you think of the Tidmarsh Press”, said Lytton.

And this was his craftly way of telling me that Ralph means to set up on his own, or rather on his own after the Hogarth model after easter. Lytton was anxious to sound me. Should we think it poaching? For it would be exactly the same as the Hogarth Press. I said I should say sharp things, but there was quite enough work for two. In the middle of the night of course I blazed up & abused Ralph for a pickpocket (myself to myself that is). But Lytton was not altogether urbane. He is possessive. His baby shall have his toy, & he shan’t share it with anyone else this time. Well—so be it. The immediate effect is to make L. & me set to—wire in as Nelly would say—& bestir ourselves for the future. We wont be downed by the prestige & power & pomposity of all the Benson medallists in England. In fact, the struggle is invigorating; though it does not improve our opinion of the ass. I especially dislike his effect upon Lytton. Lytton becomes jealous, & suspicious, & uses his wits to make the worse appear the better cause. Love is the devil. No character can stand up against it. But this passed in our trivial champagne pricking way. And so, at 3, I suppose, back to no. 50 to which Clive had gone previously.

I went up & found the light burning & so turned it out. I noticed a bluish glimmer under Clive’s door. “Reading in bed,” I thought, & hoped I should not be called in to talk. But the house was too noisy for me to sleep. People seemed to be walking. Then a woman cried, as if in anguish, in the street, & I thought of Mrs Thompson waiting to be executed. I turned about. Footsteps sounded. A door opened. I heard voices. At this hour, I thought innocently, no one can be up without cause—illness or accident. So up I jumped, thrust in my upper teeth, & opened the door.

“Is something wrong?” I asked of Clive’s shadow on his bedroom wall, for his door was open.

“I hope I’ve not waked you”, he said.

Obviously nothing was wrong. The shriek was Mary’s.

And so we breakfasted together this morning, with the church bells ringing, & all the houses full of Stracheys, Grants, Stephens & Bells & Partridges—a wet grey morning, in the heart of London, where I am so seldom at that hour.

Such is my frontispiece, which needless to say, I meant to make more brilliant, but as Nessa said this morning, I dont want brilliance. The only thing I care for is to be at my ease, (we were discussing Mary).

Now, briefly to make out my work list.

I shall write at Mrs Dalloway till, next Monday, perhaps, bringing her into full talk, I hope.

Shall I then dash off an article for Squire upon memoirs? which will take till Monday 29th. Then do the Greek chapter, for which I shall have read Odyssey (6 books) Agamemnon: Oedipus Tyrannus, Zimmern, Jebb’s Homer—Life of Jebb, & some dialogue of Plato’s? This puts off writing till rather late in the day; but I want to make myself a certain amount of money regularly, if only for pocket money. Now, therefore, I must finish Pilkington; read Greek regularly; & tackle, perhaps, another vol of Proust. First then, I must master the Agamemnon (this refers to the immediate moment). & before doing that I must write to the new apparition Vita, who gives me a book every other day.

Tuesday 16 January

Katherine has been dead a week, & how far am I obeying her “do not quite forget Katherine” which I read in one of her old letters? Am I already forgetting her? It is strange to trace the progress of one’s feelings. Nelly said in her sensational way at breakfast on Friday “Mrs Murry’s dead! It says so in the paper!” At that one feels—what? A shock of relief?—a rival the less? Then confusion at feeling so little—then, gradually, blankness & disappointment; then a depression which I could not rouse myself from all that day. When I began to write, it seemed to me there was no point in writing. Katherine wont read it. Katherine’s my rival no longer. More generously I felt, But though I can do this better than she could, where is she, who could do what I can’t! Then, as usual with me, visual impressions kept coming & coming before me—always of Katherine putting on a white wreath, & leaving us, called away; made dignified, chosen. And then one pitied her. And one felt her reluctant to wear that wreath, which was an ice cold one. And she was only 33. And I could see her before me so exactly, & the room at Portland Villas. I go up. She gets up, very slowly, from her writing table. A glass of milk & a medicine bottle stood there. There were also piles of novels. Everything was very tidy, bright, & somehow like a dolls house. At once, or almost, we got out of shyness. She (it was summer) half lay on the sofa by the window. She had her look of a Japanese doll, with the fringe combed quite straight across her forehead. Sometimes we looked very steadfastly at each other, as though we had reached some durable relationship, independent of the changes of the body, through the eyes. Hers were beautiful eyes—rather doglike, brown, very wide apart, with a steady slow rather faithful & sad expression. Her nose was sharp, & a little vulgar. Her lips thin & hard. She wore short skirts & liked “to have a line round her” she said. She looked very ill—very drawn, & moved languidly, drawing herself across the room, like some suffering animal. I suppose I have written down some of the things we said. Most days I think we reached that kind of certainty, in talk about books, or rather about our writings, which I thought had something durable about it. And then she was inscrutable. Did she care for me? Sometimes she would say so—would kiss me—would look at me as if (is this sentiment?) her eyes would like always to be faithful. She would promise never never to forget. That was what we said at the end of our last talk. She said she would send me her diary to read, & would write always. For our friendship was a real thing we said, looking at each other quite straight. It would always go on whatever happened. What happened was, I suppose, faultfindings & perhaps gossip. She never answered my letter. Yet I still feel, somehow that friendship persists. Still there are things about writing I think of & want to tell Katherine. If I had been in Paris & gone to her, she would have got up & in three minutes, we should have been talking again. Only I could not take the step. The surroundings—Murry & so on—& the small lies & treacheries, the perpetual playing & teasing, or whatever it was, cut away much of the substance of friendship. One was too uncertain. And so one let it all go. Yet I certainly expected that we should meet again next summer, & start fresh. And I was jealous of her writing—the only writing I have ever been jealous of. This made it harder to write to her; & I saw in it, perhaps from jealousy, all the qualities I disliked in her.

For two days I felt that I had grown middle aged, & lost some spur to write. That feeling is going. I no longer keep seeing her with her wreath. I dont pity her so much. Yet I have the feeling that I shall think of her at intervals all through life. Probably we had something in common which I shall never find in anyone else. (This I say in so many words in 1919 again & again.) Moreover I like speculating about her character. I think I never gave her credit for all her physical suffering & the effect it must have had in embittering her.

The Nation is probably sold over Massingham’s head; L. has a violent cold. I have been in bed, 101, again. Fergusson threatens to cut my tonsils.

Sunday 28 January

A certain melancholy has been brooding over me this fortnight. I date it from Katherine’s death. The feeling so often comes to me now—Yes. Go on writing of course: but into emptiness. There’s no competitor. I’m cock—a lonely cock whose crowing nothing breaks—of my walk. For our friendship had so much that was writing in it. However then I had my fever, & violent cold, was in & out of bed for a week, & still am below normal, I think. In casting accounts, never forget to begin with the state of the body.

K., so Ralph reports via Brett, died in 10 minutes of haemorrhage, walking upstairs with Murry who happened to be there. Brett is ‘very hard hit’ Ralph says. I soon shant have Ralph’s sayings to report. Does that make me melancholy? Like most of one’s feelings mine on losing him are mixed. We now have had Joad twice—Margery I should & do call her, & she comes tomorrow full time. She has a little too much powder & scent for my taste, & drawls. In short she is not upper class. But she has honest intent eyes, & takes it seriously, which, as she is quite without training, is as well. My only fear is lest she should prove a flibbertigibbet. Her quickness of movement, keenness, & dependability are so far a great gain on Ralph. There he sits thick as an oak & as angular. We have heard no more of the Tidmarsh Press.

I have seen quantities of people—having them here, as my invalid ways induced, bright pictures, tunes on the gramophone—but I must not insult the human soul for which I have really so much respect. Bobo & Betty have nothing sharp or bright about them. Both seem to dissolve in a November cloud; depressed, emotional, with no target for emotion. Bobo is vaguely indulging in an affair—perhaps with a medical student called Stanley—(she does not confide names). He takes her out, makes love, which she enjoys but finds somehow inferior. She likes the surroundings. She had been out with him somewhere, the night before, & said the surroundings were glittering. She yielded to the unreality; then repented, & told him this was the last time. Then she repents of that, forages in her pocket for principles, forages in mine, & I, not knowing her case, advised her to fling herself into life, to reflect, but not to withdraw, which of course pointed the way she secretly wished, & yet privately feels impure. So do I in this case.

Betty had not even any case to put before me. Never was there a limper, less objective, creature. There she lounges in the arm chair opposite, never thinking she need speak, or invent, or comment or do any of the tricks which human beings have devised for keeping the water fresh. One stagnates kindly, gently. She is a nice girl, by which I mean gentle & affectionate, but also clinging & selfish & egotistical. She says dress is a great snare. She says she lives with rotten people. She says she means to go abroad & learn singing. Meanwhile she has taken a flat in the Queen’s Road [? Richmond], so far from her haunts that she must lunch out, & spends hours daily wandering the streets, looking in at shop windows I suppose & coveting dresses.

Who else? Roger & Bob: Bob with his lid on, not talking but bubbling underneath. He had to be kept under or would have foamed all over us. Much talk of the Nation, wh, as I should have recorded, is sold to Maynard & a group, & our future once more quite uncertain. Still I cant fabricate doubts, & hereby record my expectation that we shall emerge richer in 2 months time. Massingham will start a new paper: Maynard will retain Leonard at a handsome fee. And then? (I race, before dinner comes.) Roger’s lecture, the last. Before it I dined with Noel Olivier (Richards) at the Club. She looked at me with those strange eyes in which a drop seems to have been spilt—a pale blue drop, with a large deep centre—romantic eyes, that seem to behold still Rupert bathing in the river at Christow: eyes pure & wide, & profound it seems. Or is there nothing behind them? I as good as asked her. Why didn’t you marry any of those romantic young men? Why? Why? She didn’t know, said she had moods; all Oliviers are mad she said. And Rupert had gone with Cathleen Nesbitt & she had been jealous, & he had spoken against women & gone among the Asquiths & changed. But when she read his love letters—beautiful beautiful love letters—real love letters, she said—she cries & cries. How direct & unyielding these young women are. But she is “over 30”—she would not say how much. & I am 41: which I confess. So we parted.

Then?—Morgan, buttoned like a hairdresser, cheerful, communicative, but come to talk business & soon gone.

Then Lilian [Harris], with her hands in her lap, facing old age, & horribly bored. The egotism—gentle & blood sucking—of these elderly women! She wanted work, advice, & the names of Inns. I was amused to detect her complete absorption in Margaret; her childlike record of every symptom meal & habit. But this is natural, indeed charming & pathetic too.

Wednesday 7 February

Nessa’s wedding day. Reflections suppressed. I must describe Cambridge. We walked from the station, past Rattee & Kett, cold, starry; dismal; then familiar; King’s College Chapel, hasty wash & dress, & dine with Sheppard. He was in evening dress. He carries a knobbed cane. Maynard, Norton, & Betty to dinner. A good deal of raw time had to be manufactured. I had romanced so much about Cambridge that to find myself sitting there was an anti climax. No one else was excited. Then off in the motor to the A.D.C. I think I was genuinely excited, rather than moved by Oedipus Rex. The plot is so well tied; the storys⁠[?] race so fast. Then the young men’s faces; pink & plump under their wigs, moved me. I don’t know whether memory poured a little mist. Among the audience were: Lytton, Irene Vanbrugh; Q; Faith; & so on. And so to bed; with King’s bell saying very pompously all through the night the hour. We were happy & busy all Sunday, first Sheppard, then Pernel; sitting on the Backs, strolling up to Newnham the way I used to go; then lunching with the Shoves, & Fredegond is the image of Christina Rossetti. Her faith is charitable. She has nothing very definite to say. She attends mass. She is happier & more full of vitality than before she says. Gerald, she says, took her to be confirmed, watched with interest &, coming out, wished he had a faith; wished to be a Quaker, but has taken no further steps. I think she makes the most of chance words he lets fall. So to the Moores, finding Moore smoking alone, who asked us directly whether we would come up or have the children brought down. Stout Dorothy was bathing Timothy & smoking—a truncated woman, amiable, red, a little beery; anyhow cheery; & Moore said, very kindly, dearie to the baby, crying for food, like a wise old nurse. Rather they were like a couple of fat beavers with their young. Fine little cubs too, fat, hard, sturdy, likely to do us all credit when we are all dead. The elegiac note will creep in, & shall be justified if I have time. Then to Maynard’s: I must say the pleasantest sitting room I have ever been in, owing to the colours & paintings, curtains & decorations of Bell & Grant. Here we dined well. Ramsay, the unknown guest, was something like a Darwin, broad, thick, powerful, & a great mathematician, & clumsy to boot. Honest I should say, a true Apostle. The party began after a few brilliancies on my part about religion; emotional [?] capital which I did not know how to invest, I said. And Maynard kept the old ball smartly rolling. Indeed we were rather talk-dazed. And as people arrived, I suppose one’s eyes tire; one’s brain stales. Lucas is slightly deaf, & pure & sincere, needs that is rather an effort to talk to in the grand style, about literature. Besides, I rather wished to hear Sprott praise Jacob’s Room. Never mind. Mrs Birch, honourable Mrs Birch of Firle, was introduced; like a white wild fox, body perfectly trained, intelligence wild. not a bad combination. Like Vita she detests the scrolloping honours of the great, calls her family dull & stupid, complains of a girls life, Lowndes Square, Ascot, & Aunts who rail against what they call Bo-eemians. She should have married a Guardsman, & is now in Cambridge society, believing in Topsy as I could see, & in Mrs Dobree; humbly taking from our hands whatever we choose to give.

The depression which I mentioned comes partly from the uncertainty about the Nation. Leonard thinks himself a failure. And what use is there in denying a depression which is irrational? Can’t I always think myself one too? It is inevitable. But there was Maynard arrived & trim, yet our junior. The absurd unreality of this as a standard strikes me, but it is not easy to make these truths effective. It is unpleasant waiting in a dependent kind of way to know what Massingham will do. The signs are favourable. Ramsay Muir, Maynard’s editor, is on all hands a dull dog; Maynard is entreating Tomlinson to join him, & so support him against the Wee Frees, who are his co-directors. My notion is, he will float the Nation, make a splash, then dive off, & leave it to its fate within the year. It will dwindle & die. Massingham is optimistic, but delays at Monte Carlo, & we only hear, vaguely, that he has a good chance of starting a threepenny weekly to coincide with the break on April 1st.

And our depression comes too from the time of year, wet & wan, and from Joad’s drawling voice, & Ralph’s stubbornness, & from Lytton’s hint that he means to start the Tidmarsh Press at once. Here, however, is some mystery, for Carrington professed to know nothing of it, & would only admit to a press for printing refined books, on commission—I think Joad & Ralph daily for lunch & tea, & the need for bright talk, depress also; & I shall be glad when the 15th March arrives. I suppose the Press must now lose something of its charm, & become more strenuous; acquiring let us hope a different charm. But I wish Joad were, somehow, a lady. Now to Wigmore Hall with Saxon to hear a severe Franck quintet, beyond me no doubt.

Saturday 10 February

The omens are, I think, more favourable. Maynard has presented an ultimatum, to the effect I think, but this was gathered on the telephone, that he will not work with Ramsay Muir. For my own part, what with this & that, I think it fairly certain that Massingham’s side will now prevail, in some form or other, since even if the Rowntrees are raging as red oxen, they must be open eyed enough to see that they can’t safely deposit their trust in the Wee Frees minus Maynard. Then we have £40 from income tax return—I seem to see a feather floating favourably from that region where the Gods abide. So I said as we walked in the cemetery this afternoon. A charwoman was planting hyacinths on a wet grave. She was all wet grey wool; dull, drab, like a jackal; & I prowled too among the graves to look at names, & ascertain who could be deserving of several tons of granite crucifix—the Belgian soldiers, so it turned out. On we walk again. The spring the spring, I sing in imitation of Wagner, & saw a gorze bush set with soft yellow buds. Then we got into the Park, where the rain drove dogs & humans home, & so back, on the stroke of three. It is now our plan (a day old) to walk from 2 to 3; print from 3 to 5; delay our tea; & so make headway. In fact I set up a little of Read. Morgan is finished, save for one last printing off. Ralph sticks on, defiant, argumentative, & gives one the lowest opinion of the manly virtues.

Is Mary an example of the womanly? She may be a good actress. She had a long talk with me two days ago, in the dusk, over the fire. The upshot of it is to my mind a little complex: does Vanessa misrepresent her? I don’t accuse her of brilliance & wit. But I think I detect a humbler spirit than I expected; she is, she said, shy. And she never likes the people who like her, but attaches herself in spite of all snubs to those she likes. This refers to 46. She has a temper. She flies out. She would like to live with people in numbers—not merely see them. (I thought this sincere). She might be one of those impulsive, affectionate, rather unfortunately concocted natures who are to me interesting, perpetually venturing out, rashly importunate, & then snubbed back again; aspiring; fastidious, vain & so on, but impelled by a kind of passion, for Clive, I suppose, which is sincere. Then of course I rate a womans sensibility & sympathy very high, as pleasure givers that is. Nor is she uncritical: far from it. Didn’t she tell me she could think me lovable if my desire for admiration about everything were not so insatiable? No, I said, I only want on most points to be assured that I’m of the average human stature. I have my astonishing twists & kinks, as you do. For I couldn’t imagine you shy. Yet you say you can hardly brace yourself to enter the Ritz!—your triumphal path, I should have said. And is she really tremulous? a far more instinctive nature than mine or Nessa’s & therefore one we are likely to misjudge. Nothing new, she said, would ever happen to her again. She loves pleasure, I note; & though she neither writes nor paints looks forward to the summer. One will get the blinds out, she said. But I suppose I talked most, & about myself. How I’d been depressed since Jan. 3rd. We ran it to earth, I think, by discovering that I began journalism on that day. Last Thursday, I think, I returned to fiction, to the instant nourishment & well being of my entire day. I wonder if this next lap will be influenced by Proust? I think his French language, tradition, &c, prevents that: yet his command of every resource is so extravagant that one can hardly fail to profit, & must not flinch, through cowardice.

Monday 19 February

How it would interest me if this diary were ever to become a real diary: something in which I could see changes, trace moods developing; but then I should have to speak of the soul, & did I not banish the soul when I began? What happens is, as usual, that I’m going to write about the soul, & life breaks in. Talking of diaries sets me thinking of old Kate, in the dining room at 4 Rosary Gardens; & how she opened the cabinet (wh. I remember) & there in a row on a shelf were her diaries from Jan 1 1877. Some were brown; others red; all the same to a t. And I made her read an entry; one of many thousand days, like pebbles on a beach: morning, evening, afternoon, without accent. Oh how strangely unaccented she is, sitting there all of a piece, white, unjointed, level, sagacious, with the mute sagacity of elephant or grey mare! Only once or twice did I strike a spark in the one remaining pale blue eye, which is tenderer than the glass one. Orderly solidity marked every atom there. The vases stood on mats: each was supplied with a tuft of mimosa & maidenhair. The Xmas cards—6—were ranged on the mantelpiece. Helen, photo, in frame. Red tiles newly dusted. Green walls. Objects that came from India; bookcase that belonged to Nun. Did I remember it. And said Kate I intend to live to 1944 when I shall be 84. And on her last day she will say to the charwoman who attends her, Bring me the diaries which you will find in the cabinet; & now, put them on the fire. I scarcely tried to disturb what had the sculptured classic appearance of alabaster fruit beneath glass.

In scribbling this, I am led away from my soul, which interests me nevertheless. My soul peeped out. For it is the soul I fancy that comments on visitors & reports their comments, & sometimes sets up such a to-do in the central departments of my machinery that the whole globe of me dwindles to a button head. I think this dwindling is often the result of talking to second rate people. They make the world pinch beck. Now with my dear old Leo, such cheapening is unknown. Oh no, he may refuse to kindle, but he never detracts; & so, when he does kindle, the glow is of the purest fiery red—what I see in the fire now, verging on white.

Philip [Morrell] wished to be an actor, & suffers from dual personality. He sees himself, & seldom unifies—sees himself farmer, host, speaker, & so on. But talking to us he felt himself single, so he said, & there is something diluted in the quality of his emotion. He is an amorous man, a man of a different generation & tradition, in cross over waistcoat & jewels, half man of the world, half aesthete, appreciating furniture that is, but living my word! among what humbugs, & palming them off on us plausibly enough—Ottoline &c. Layers of shifting vapour trail over him perpetually, keep him restless, chattering uneasy. They have shut Julian in a convent school at Roehampton in order to break the stubborn materialism of her nature. She conflicts with Ott’s vision of the universe. Philip says she runs after young men. And Philip has had his brat by the parlourmaid. It is all, at the foundations, a little obscene & pullulating, though on the surface so admirable, plausible—yes, plausible in the word that recurs, & uneasy.

We had a surprise visit from the Nicolsons. She is a pronounced Sapphist, & may, thinks Ethel Sands, have an eye on me, old though I am. Nature might have sharpened her faculties. Snob as I am, I trace her passions 500 years back, & they become romantic to me, like old yellow wine. I fancy the tang is gone. Harold is simple down right bluff; wears short black coat & check trousers; wishes to be a writer, but is not I’m told & can believe, adapted by nature. Soul, you see, is framing all these judgments, & saying as she sits by the fire, this is not to my liking, this is second rate, this vulgar; this nice, sincere, & so on. And how should my soul know? My soul diminished, alas, as the evening wore on; & the contraction is almost physically depressing. I reflect though that I’m the sink of 50 million pneumonia germs with a temperature well below normal. And so these contractions are largely physical, I’ve no doubt. And we are still in suspense. Massingham is back; but Maynard is on the war path. Massm. says he is now going full speed ahead. He has to collect money. Strangely enough, I with my telephone, am acting as go between. I find out Maynard’s plans from Nessa; L. telephones them on to Massm. And also I am trying to pull wires, to seat Tom at the Nation as literary editor, & unseat my foe Miss Royde Smith. Had I time I could detail my activities, & glory in my own importance. Yes, I am grown up. I give advice. I am taken seriously; & this no longer flurries me with excitement. I am a little bored indeed, & could wish that poor dear Tom had more spunk in him, less need to let drop by drop of his agonised perplexities fall ever so finely through pure cambric. One waits; sympathises, but it is dreary work. He is like a person about to break down—infinitely scrupulous, tautologous, & cautious.

Poor Snow can scarcely have her portrait drawn. But how I pitied her! like an old woman forced to stare at a pitiless light. The flesh & juice of life have left her. She is brittle, airy, might blow along the gutter. Her old sparks & acidities have dissolved. She was nervous, had lost confidence, as if life had thrown her, but she must still ride on. I could feel her envying me. This I like, but still it depresses me. And then she wavers, apologises, says “Oh you would be bored if I came to stay!” & looks so searchingly at me, & wont be deceived. She amused me by saying that the streets of Cheltenham are notoriously unsafe. Foot passengers are perpetually killed by bicyclists. It is the rarest thing to motor through without being asked to take a corpse to the doctors. And there was her story of the old lady of 94 poking the fire & almost breaking her own body with the coal. Sometimes she does fall down, & is light as a leaf to pick up. She sits in a room with a skylight, & sometimes can see a tree wave, but never goes out.

Tuesday 6 March

Undoubtedly this has been a very unpleasant quarter. I date our misery from Jan. 3rd. The main grievance has been this Nation affair, which hangs over us, lifting, then lowering, as it is at the present moment—low & black over our heads. Massm. goes on April 7th: our income ceases; Maynard has made us no definite offer—but that I think is assured so far as L. goes. But that is only £120 p.a. & we shall have to scrape up the rest rather dismally, doing journalism, I suppose. Msm. is now said to be waiting for the return of a gentleman in the East, who will he is certain finance him. The scheme is off till October anyhow. But its not the money trouble that worries us: but something psychological. The gloom is more on L.’s side than on mine. Mine is a gloom like a mist that comes & goes. One is unsettled. I dip into different circles—like Mary’s, E. Sands’, the Richmonds’ concert, & come home either exalted or depressed. My chairs look dirty. Then the social question rises between L. & me. Are we becoming ‘respectable’? Shall we dine with the Richmonds. L. says no. I regret it. Yes, some how I regret it seriously, this shutting of the door upon suburban studies. I love the chatter & excitement of other peoples houses. Have I not just said that it depresses me too? But then I wanted to meet Percy Lubbock & show myself off as a woman who can talk sense. & so on. I ask people here too often. In short I must take the social side into my own hands. I have, I think, got Reading on its feet, & hope to make way, & find my solace in that. But still I want to make life fuller & fuller.

Poor Katherine has taken to revisiting the earth; she has been seen at Brett’s; by the charwoman. I feel this somehow a kind of judgment on her for writing the kind of thing she did. Brett told me the story the other day & seemed so bare & rasped that I could not have taken this comfort from her had I wished. Nor do I wish, seriously, to obstruct any decent investigation of brains & nerves, seeing how much I’ve suffered that way myself. But then Brett is not scientific; she at once takes the old fables seriously, & repeats some jargon learnt of Dunning, but no doubt diluted in transit, about day & night, birth, & therefore death, all being beautiful. She feels the ‘contact’ she says; & has had revelations; & there she sits deaf, injured, solitary, brooding over death, & hearing voices, which soon will become, I expect, entirely fabulous; & even now talking to her has a good deal robbed the image of K.M. of its distinctness. For it came distinctly back when I read her letters. And I saw her wink when poor Brett’s note was handed in, & she said that little person can wait, or something like that. Now B. idolises her, & invests her with every quality of mind & soul. Do people always get what they deserve, & did K.M. do something to deserve this cheap posthumous life? & am I jealous even now?

No: I think one can be honest at my age.

Old Elena crossed the room to talk to me on Sunday. Oh how shy I was! How matronly & magnificent in a thick rich black way she was! & we couldn’t look each other in the eyes—at least I couldn’t; & she felt me shabby, self-conscious, suburban no doubt. I am putting down notes to use later in re-constructing this period. There is, I think, a sense of frustration & futility about just now. Partly the Nation again, I’ve no doubt, partly…. Never mind, I say; once get my claws into my writing & I’m safe. Eliot slightly disillusions me too; he is peevish, plaintive, egotistical; what it amounts to is that poverty is unbecoming. He nibbles at cherries. True, the offer, to co-operate with Royde Smith, is a wizened cherry. But he elaborates & complicates, makes one feel that he dreads life as a cat dreads water. But if I hint so much he is all claws. Now, considering my activity on his behalf no doubt I have some of the vile & patronising feelings of the benefactor. Its American, L. says; that & neurotic. I consulted Bruce Richmond—another proof of my importance. He said emphatically “He’s not the man for the job.” I can’t help agreeing.

But life, life! How I long to take you in my arms & crush you out!

Saturday 13 March

Written, for a wonder at 10 o’clock at night, with L. doing Tolstoi at the white table; the fire rather hot, & my brain saturated with the Silent Woman. I am reading her because we now read plays at 46. 46 is become a centre. For how long we don’t know, as Maynard’s marriage approaches. Nessa, astride her fine Arab, life I mean, takes further upheavals all in the days work. I daresay I shall feel it more. 46 has been very pleasant to me this winter. Two nights ago the Nicolsons dined there. Exposed to electric light eggs show dark patches. I mean we judged them both incurably stupid. He is bluff, but oh so obvious; she, Duncan thought, took the cue from him, & had nothing free to say. There was Lytton, supple & subtle as an old leather glove, to emphasise their stiffness. It was a rocky steep evening. We had the photographs out. Lytton said “I don’t like your mother’s character. Her mouth seems complaining” & a shaft of white light fell across my dusky rich red past.

And then? As to the soul, I’ve been snubbed by Squire. I sent him my memoir article, asking terms: he accepted, offering £13; £15 I said, or my ms back; & got it back by return. And now I accept £13—which perhaps I shan’t get after all. Yet I dont much mind. & only think that poverty & the shifts it puts one to is unbecoming, as I’ve said. Poor Tom the other day actually couldn’t speak for tears (thanking us) on the telephone. He is broken down, & yet must buckle to & decide: shall he take the Nation? can he defeat Maynard? I’m tired of writing the word guarantee—which is what he claims. To show his state, Richmond actually rang me up at 10 p.m. & asked me to intervene with Maynard. He seemed ‘distraught’ he said. Whether distraught people can edit the Nation lit. sup. I doubt. And it is more or less my doing. And I dont feel important. And after all we are happy. And Ralph is gone, casually, without good bye. I have seen Osbert Sitwell, Sebastian Sprot & Mr Mortimer. As Nessa says, we are becoming fashionable. Sprot & I lunched at Mary’s; then, tipsy with echoing brains, went to tea at Hill’s in [Kensington] High Street. Infinitely old I felt & rich; he is very poor. His mother used to attend Barker’s linen sales, so that he knew High Street. I dont know why his experience seemed to me so meagre. His father is a solicitor at Crowborough. He wished to meet Ottoline. He is hungry as a wolf, & snapping up delicacies in an alarming way. If at his age I had met Ottoline!—still, I wasn’t much older. I have been reflecting about society again, & think one of its merits is that it needs courage. The going into rooms properly dressed is alarming. No one cares for one; that snubs vanity; one is on equal terms with one’s fellows. The privileges of the fireside no longer prevail. But Ethel [Sands] is off till October; & I don’t know where next I shall alight. Indeed this is scribbled before a break.—Only for one month, but then physically, perhaps spiritually, the journey is long. How great writers write at night, I don’t know. Its an age since I tried, & I find my head full of pillow stuffing: hot; inchoate. And tomorrow I must get on with How it Strikes a Contemporary. Alas, for the break in my scheme of work—but we must make money, just when I don’t want to; & so the novels get shelved, & Reading, which I had tackled afresh, must be put away, & I must accept Desmond’s reviewing, & Maynard’s too, if offered; still I haven’t any good cause to complain.

Friday 23 March

No, not much reason to complain. L. has just come in with an offer from Maynard of the literary editorship of the Nation. Well, thats unexpected! Here have I been toiling these 3 weeks to make Eliot take it; finally he shied; & this is the result. No doubt there are drawbacks, but it means safety for the moment, indeed luxury. And to me it opens interesting vistas—but here I am with the typhoid germs & cant write.

Friday 11 May

The long break deserves a line, since I shall scarcely commemorate it otherwise. Have I not with infinite labour, written for the first number of the Nation To Spain? Am I not sitting waiting for L. to ‘come back from the office’ like other wives. It annoys me to be like other wives. Ah there he is! No: damn it; only Nelly gone out. As I say, I cannot go into the journey, the Temples, Brenan, Spain, Paris, et cetera. I stayed in Paris by way of facing life. Yes, I clap the spurs to my flanks & see myself taking fences gallantly. I ‘took Jane [Harrison] & Hope [Mirrlees]; not much else, save the French language, at which I failed ignominiously, & now must learn to speak French if I am in future to respect myself. I meant to use this diary to pull myself up from a fortnights debauch of journalism, Nations affairs, & so on. I must make out a work scheme. But for a moment I will dally with description. Margery [Joad] is doing well, a sign of which is that we now scarcely notice her accent. If she were doing badly it would grate upon us intolerably. We are well up in our books.

Morgan dined here the other night. We tried to cajole him to write with £10 p. 1,000 for bait. “But I dont want £200 a year” he said. “I daresay I could spend it if I had it, but I don’t want it.” So what vice could we appeal to? Vanity was not much touched. Then he has an ascetic regard for principles. People he respects think that M⁠[assingha]⁠m. was badly treated. At any rate, Morgan wd. not like to write for us, & not for Desmond, who pays £4 instead of £10. He is detached as a saint. And we couldnt press him. So far, we don’t feel the Nation blood of our blood. It may turn that way. We work very hard at it. It has temptations & attractions. How they balance the drawbacks I don’t yet know. I like having the pick of new books. My own authority over the reviewing staff is not very exciting. I am a little malicious perhaps. People crowd & crush & press for work. It is mildly amusing to say, now don’t worry, I’m not going to give you any. I have been so often in their position. But these delights are not very profound. I’m afraid it looks as though Reading must again be shelved. I can’t afford not to make hay just now. One article a month paid at £15 or so. And that precisely uses the time I had to spend from writing my novel. Yet, to take up my work account, I think I must edge in a little time every now & then at Reading. I am at the Greek chapter (in reading). Shall I read a little Greek? My notion is that I can only sketch the chapter, & must perpetually enrich it from time to time. Or shall I plunge into early Elizabethans, of whom I am appallingly ignorant? What happened between Chaucer & Shakespeare? I think that attracts me as a basis. Make notes then; &, directly opportunity offers, dash in at the Pastons & Chaucer. One might read Troilus & Cressida; but I dont feel inclined.

Sunday 12 May

It is a curious fact that I can write this diary when I am too much distracted to read. Being Sunday, I am clearing off old letters, half formal; & seven strikes; & 15 minutes can’t be made much of for any purpose. I might attempt a portrait. Karin was here yesterday with Ann. Adrian is altogether broken up by psycho analysis. (long interruption question of printing Read) His soul rent in pieces with a view to reconstruction. The doctor says he is a tragedy: & this tragedy consists in the fact that he can’t enjoy life with zest. I am probably responsible. I should have paired with him, instead of hanging on to the elders. So he wilted, pale, under a stone of vivacious brothers & sisters. Karin says we shall see a great change in 3 months. But Noel [Olivier] would have done what none of these doctors can do. The truth is that Karin, being deaf, & as she honestly says, “Your sister-in-law lacks humanity, as perhaps you’ve noticed”, the truth is she does not fertilise the sunk places in Adrian. Neither did I. Had mother lived, or father been screened off—well, it puts it too high to call it a tragedy. Ann is like him, pale, lank, sensitive, with the long cold fingers I know so well. For my part, I doubt if family life has all the power of evil attributed to it, or psycho-analysis of good. I liked Karin; pitied her too; & then felt come over me some mood of depression, not worth entering upon here.

Morgan told me that when he & Mortimer discussed novelists the other day they agreed that Lawrence & I were the only two whose future interested them. They think of my next book, which I think of calling “The Hours”, with excitement. This does encourage me. Oddly enough, I get praise from my contemporaries, or youngers; never from old stagers, who are said to step so generously from their platforms with words of encouragment.

Monday 4 June

Nat.

1…

N.S.

..3

Times

5

June Nat

10

July Nat.

10

Sept. Nat

10

2:18

But I cannot describe Garsington. Thirty seven people to tea; a bunch of young men no bigger than asparagus; walking to & fro, round & round; compliments, attentions, & then this slippery mud—which is what interests me at the moment. A loathing overcomes me of human beings—their insincerity, their vanity—A wearisome & rather defiling talk with Ott. last night is the foundation of this complaint—& then the blend in one’s own mind of suavity & sweetness with contempt & bitterness. Her egotism is so great. “I am much more sensitive than most people” she said to Julian: the first words she said that she meant. She returns to that subject again & again—to herself that is. And her lies have taken away all outlines. Yet on Saturday night I liked her. This was all clear to me a few minutes ago, but now I cannot write it.

Lyt⁠[t]⁠on & I talked all the way up in the train. He had seen a Greek Temple at Segestum. And that’s what I adore in him—his enthusiasm for beauty. He said it was like Sophocles. You saw the sea through the columns. Then we discussed Sh⁠[akespea]⁠re: he said he wanted to write about Shre as a dramatist; not as a philosopher or poet. He wanted to discuss his contrasts. The scene with Emilia in Othello for instance. And he may write on Lear from this point of view. And Sir Thomas Browne, & the letters of Phalaris; I think he has written something that pleases him. He is absolutely happy. He is in love with Ralph. He has that extraordinary simplicity he said tenderly, tremulously, talking of Ralph & Othello. But why not let oneself be content in the thought of Lytton—so true, gentle, infinitely nimble, & humane? I seldom rest long in complete agreement with anyone. But here I think one’s feelings should be unqualified.

Lord David is a pretty boy. Puffin Asquith an ugly one—wizened, unimpressive, sharp, like a street boy. Sackville West reminded me of a peevish shop girl. They have all the same clipped quick speech & politeness, & total insignificance. Yet we asked Ld David & Puff to write for the Nation, & also a dull fat man called Hartley. What puts me on edge is that I’m writing like this here, & spoke so differently to Ott. I’m over peevish in private, partly in order to assert myself. I am a great deal interested suddenly in my book. I want to bring in the despicableness of people like Ott: I want to give the slipperiness of the soul. I have been too tolerant often. The truth is people scarcely care for each other. They have this insane instinct for life. But they never become attached to anything outside themselves. Puff said he loved his family, & had nothing whatever to knock over. He disliked cold indecency. So did Lord David. This must be a phrase in their set. Puff said—I dont quite know what. I walked round the vegetable garden with him, passing Lytton flirting with Byam Shaw on a green seat; & round the field with Sackville West, who said he was better & was writing a better novel, & round the lake with Menasseh (?) an Egyptian Jew, who said he liked his family, & they were mad & talked like books; & he said that they quoted my writings (the Oxford youth) & wanted me to go & speak; & then there was Mrs Asquith. I was impressed. She is stone white: with the brown veiled eyes of an aged falcon; & in them more depth & scrutiny than I expected; a character, with her friendliness, & ease, & decision. Oh if we could have had Shelley’s poems, & not Shelley the man! she said. Shelley was quite intolerable, she pronounced; she is a rigid frigid puritan; & in spite of spending thousands on dress. She rides life, if you like; & has picked up a thing or two, which I should like to plunder & never shall. She led Lytton off, & plucked his arm, & hurried, & thought ‘people’ pursued her; yet was very affable with ‘people’ when she had to be; sat on the window sill talking to a black shabby embroideress, to whom Ott. is being kind. Thats one of her horrors—she’s always being kind in order to say to herself at night & then Ottoline invites the poor little embroideress to her party, & so to round off her own picture of herself. To sneer like this has a physical discomfort in it. She told me I looked wonderfully well, wh. I disliked. Why? I wonder. Because I had had a headache perhaps, partly. But to be well & use strength to get more out of life is, surely, the greatest fun in the world. What I dislike is feeling that I’m always taking care, or being taken care of. Never mind—work, work. Lytton says we have still 20 years before us. Mrs Asquith said she loved Scott. If I had time I would describe my surprise visit from Sydney, & my revelations about Murry’s duplicity. This is a very great shock, Sydney said. Sydney said that Murry has an angel & a devil in him. That is melodramatic said Sydney; but I do believe it. Dunning believes it. I cant help liking Sydney—fundamentally honest; fundamentally weak; gullible; & now settling down to ‘repose’, which is very delightful. And he’s a vegetarian. Such a simplification, he said. But if I saw you every day for a week I could tell you what has been happening to me. Vegetarianism is part of a whole revolution—Don’t I know it without being told it. And the Adelphi would inform me, were I ignorant. Now for Urn Burial for the Times.

Wednesday 13 June

Nessa is back & the London season of course in full swing. So I judged yesterday in the Aeolian Hall, listening, in a dazed way, to Edith Sitwell vociferating through the megaphone. There was Lady Colefax in her hat with the green ribbons. Did I say that I lunched with her last week? That was Derby Day & it rained, & all the light was brown & cold, & she went on talking talking, in consecutive sentences like the shavings that come from planes, artificial, but unbroken. It was not a successful party, Clive & Lytton & me. For Clive’s back; & he dined here with Leo Myers the other night; & then I went to Golders Green & sat with Mary Sheepshanks in her garden, & beat up the waters of talk, as I do so courageously, so that life mayn’t be wasted. The fresh breeze went brushing all the thick hedges which divide the gardens. Somehow, extraordinary emotions possessed me. I forget now what. Often now I have to control my excitement—as if I were pushing through a screen; or as if something beat fiercely close to me. What this portends I don’t know. It is a general sense of the poetry of existence that overcomes me. Often it is connected with the sea & St Ives. Going to 46 continues to excite. Dear old Nessa returned shabby, loose, easy; & 44, so she said. The sight of 2 coffins in the Underground luggage office I daresay constricts [?] all my feelings. I have the sense of the flight of time; & this shores up my emotions. N. & I sat talking, both now well known women, if it comes to that. At dinner we discussed what school Quentin should go to. “He means to be a painter”, said Nessa. “Yes” said Quentin, as if he were saying “yes, I am in love.” At least it made me feel queer.

Nothing else of great importance has happened. I should be describing Edith Sitwell’s poems, but I kept saying to myself “I dont really understand—I dont really admire.” The only view, presentable view that I framed, was to the effect that she was monotonous. She has one tune only on her merry go round. And she makes her verse keep step accurately to the Hornpipe. This seems to be wrong; but I’m all sandy with writing criticism, & must be off to my book again. Leo Myers, who is glazed with disillusionment & middle age, as tongues are glazed, said that my turn & turn about method is wrong. The Drs say so. He goes in for this kind of frigid examination of things. He has no impulses, nothing to do. He goes out every night everywhere. Clive & he capped stories of the demi-monde. Next day Clive rang up & said he had been ashamed. I fancy Clive is trying to take in a reef or two in his white waistcoat of dissipation. And as usual I want—I want—But what do I want? Whatever I had, I should always say I want, I want. Yet it comes over me that to sit on the grass at the Horse Show tomorrow with L. will be very contenting. But then I want to go to the Opera. Leo Myers said we all feel excluded. Yet he has 8,000 a year, tax free, 2 houses, 2 children, 1 motor car. We try to impress each other, he said; & had told me of a journey to Cherbourg for this purpose. True, I was deeply impressed. I said to myself he crossed in the Aquitania: then he was quite free to go anywhere he liked. His life was full of romance. And it was I who got the romance by thinking this, not poor Leo, who is glazed like a tongue.

For the rest, I should be writing to Mrs Eliot. & will, now, directly, on the instant. I say nothing about Duncan’s show: about Mollie Hamilton or Henderson who dined last night, or Bob.

Tuesday 19 June

I took up this book with a kind of idea that I might say something about my writing—which was prompted by glancing at what K.M. said about her writing in the Dove’s Nest. But I only glanced. She said a good deal about feeling things deeply: also about being pure, which I wont criticise, though of course I very well could. But now what do I feel about my writing?—this book, that is, The Hours, if thats its name? One must write from deep feeling, said Dostoevsky. And do I? Or do I fabricate with words, loving them as I do? No I think not. In this book I have almost too many ideas. I want to give life & death, sanity & insanity; I want to criticise the social system, & to show it at work, at its most intense—But here I may be posing. I heard from Ka this morning that she doesn’t like In the Orchard. At once I feel refreshed. I become anonymous, a person who writes for the love of it. She takes away the motive of praise, & lets me feel that without any praise, I should be content to go on. This is what Duncan said of his painting the other night. I feel as if I slipped off all my ball dresses & stood naked—which as I remember was a very pleasant thing to do. But to go on. Am I writing The Hours from deep emotion? Of course the mad part tries me so much, makes my mind squint so badly that I can hardly face spending the next weeks at it. Its a question though of these characters. People, like Arnold Bennett, say I cant create, or didn’t in J’s R, characters that survive. My answer is—but I leave that to the Nation: its only the old argument that character is dissipated into shreds now: the old post-Dostoevsky argument. I daresay its true, however, that I haven’t that ‘reality’ gift. I insubstantise, wilfully to some extent, distrusting reality—its cheapness. But to get further. Have I the power of conveying the true reality? Or do I write essays about myself? Answer these questions as I may, in the uncomplimentary sense, & still there remains this excitement. To get to the bones, now I’m writing fiction again I feel my force flow straight from me at its fullest. After a dose of criticism I feel that I’m writing sideways, using only an angle of my mind. This is justification; for free use of the faculties means happiness. I’m better company, more of a human being. Nevertheless, I think it most important in this book to go for the central things, even though they dont submit, as they should however, to beautification in language. No, I don’t nail my crest to the Murrys, who work in my flesh after the manner of the jigger insect. Its annoying, indeed degrading, to have these bitternesses. Still, think of the 18th Century. But then they were overt, not covert, as now.

I foresee, to return to The Hours, that this is going to be the devil of a struggle. The design is so queer & so masterful. I’m always having to wrench my substance to fit it. The design is certainly original, & interests me hugely. I should like to write away & away at it, very quick and fierce. Needless to say, I cant. In three weeks from today I shall be dried up.

Having made this very inadequate confession about the soul, I may turn now to the body—which is money & America & Mr Crowninshield. I’m asked to write for Vanity Fair & shall be paid says Clive £25 for 1500 words: & get £15 from the Nation; & two months ago I was hawking articles of 5,000 words to Jack Squire for £13.

Do you like becoming famous? Marjorie [Joad] asked me yesterday. The truth is I’m being pushed up, but many people are saying that I shant last, & perhaps I shant. So I return to my old feeling of nakedness as the backbone of my existence, which indeed it is.

For the rest, it is observed in Cornwall & the remoter parts of Weybridge that we are living through a storm of obloquy & must be entirely engrossed in the Nation’s affairs. It is not so at Hogarth House: I’m no longer so excited about the contents of L.’s dispatch box. But one thing I do feel pretty certain about & here confide it to my diary—we must leave Richmond & set up in London. The arguments are so well known to me that I cant bother to write them down. But when things come upon me in a clap I generally achieve them, because they are then things that matter to me. Leonard remains to be converted, & my God, the move—the horror—the servants. Still this is life—never to be sitting down for longer than one feels inclined.

Thursday 28 June

This may be life; but I doubt that I shall ever convert L. & now sit down baffled & depressed to face a life spent, mute & mitigated, in the suburbs, just as I had it in mind that I could at last go full speed ahead. For the capacities in me will never after 40, accumulate again. And I mind missing life far more than he does, for it isn’t life to him in the sense that it is life to me. Oh to be able to slip in & out of things easily, to be in them, not on the verge of them—I resent this effort & waste. My evening is now wasted because I’m dining with the Myers. But what should be my course now? Really, I think, to find out exactly how much I mean by this. But half the horror is that L. instead of being, as I gathered, sympathetic has the old rigid obstacle—my health. And I cant sacrifice his peace of mind, yet the obstacle is surely now a dead hand, which one should no longer let dominate our short years of life—oh to dwindle them out here, with all these gaps, & abbreviations! Always to catch trains, always to waste time, to sit here & wait for Leonard to come in, to spend hours standing at the box of type with Margery, to wonder what its all for—when, alternatively, I might go & hear a tune, or have a look at a picture, or find out something at the British Museum, or go adventuring among human beings. Sometimes I should merely walk down Cheapside. But now I’m tied, imprisoned, inhibited. All I can do is to pretend I’m writing something very important, or reading with a view to a book I shall never write. (I’m letting my pen fling itself on paper like a leopard starved for blood—& I must wash & dress—so do not, in years to come, look too harshly upon this first outcry, the expression of many yet unheard). This is the pith of my complaint. For ever to be suburban. L. I don’t think minds any of this as much as I do. But then, Lord! (not Lord in K.M.’s serious sense) what I owe to him! What he gives me! Still, I say, surely we could get more from life than we do—isn’t he too much of a Puritan, of a disciplinarian, doesn’t he through birth & training accept a drastic discipline too tamely, or rather, with too Spartan a self control? There is, I suppose, a very different element in us; my social side, his intellectual side. This social side is very genuine in me. Nor do I think it reprehensible. It is a piece of jewellery I inherit from my mother—a joy in laughter, something that is stimulated, not selfishly wholly or vainly, by contact with my friends. And then ideas leap in me. Moreover, for my work now, I want freer intercourse, wider intercourse—& now, at 41, having done a little work, I get my wages partly in invitations. I might know people. In Richmond this is impossible. Either we have arduous parties at long intervals, or I make my frenzied dashes up to London, & leave, guiltily, as the clock strikes 11.

But let me bethink me that L. is very hard worked: the present state must go on till next Christmas, & to be forever worrying is fatal & cruel & only makes the question harder to settle amicably. Still I own I am depressed & baffled.

Saturday 8 July

So we went to dine with the Myers; & it is now the hottest day of the year. & I don’t want to grumble; having seen many people—Anyhow, if a move is to be made, it can’t be till the autumn, or new year. Anyhow I am content at present, or moderately so. I am alive; rather energetic; asked to write for 2 American papers, & so on & so on. I never said that Vanity Fair has invited me & the Dial & new Broom as well as the Nation & the Times, so that I can’t help thinking myself about as successful journalistically as any woman of my day. But that is not saying much. I wish I could write The Hours as freely & vigorously as I scribble Freshwater, a Comedy. Its a strange thing how arduous I find my novels; & yet Freshwater is only spirited fun; & The Hours has some serious merit. I should like though to get speed & life into it. I got tempted, a week ago, into comedy writing, & have scribb⁠[l]⁠ed daily, & trust it will be done tomorrow. Yet I feel some reluctance to screw myself to The Hours again. Never mind. Should it bore me, into the fire with it!

The very thought of a fire is uncomfortable. I have said nothing about the weather for ages. How May & June melted into thin cold cloud. They were plucked from the year. By the way, on re-reading this book I resolved to write rather more carefully, & to record conversations verbatim. It is difficult to write carefully, as I am always having at this book by way of killing time, filling time, or writing out the fidgets. As for recording conversations, nothing is harder. Let me try.

Desmond

Janet

Leonard

Virginia

Scene tea-time Friday, 6th.

Desmond I can’t stay to dinner. No I must get back to my mother. She’s become quite an old woman. She was thrown 10 yards by the cab, & though no bones were broken, she has lost her memory. She tells the same story over again. She never stops talking about her accident. I am taking her down to the Isle of Wight.

Enter Janet I was determined to come—

Virginia And is the Forest very lovely?

Desmond All the oaks are being devoured by caterpillars. Yes, you can hear a pattering sound beneath the trees. That is the caterpillars munching. And if they eat a tree for 3 years, it is dead.

Janet O how dreadful! I do hope that hasn’t happened to our oak trees.

Leonard Well, Desmond have we settled our quarrel.

V. (explaining to Janet) Theyre rival’s you see. Desmond edits the New Statesman. They steal each others reviewers.

Leonard Desmond steals my reviewers.

Desmond Oh, the quarrel’s all made up—I say who have you got this week:

L. Bertie & Graves.

Desmond Oh thats all right. My Bertie comes next week.

So some gossip about the Nation.

Desmond Have you read the second number of the Adelphi? Have you read Murry “I have been a miserable sinner (acting & striking his breast). I have lied, I have swindled. I have laughed at what I love; but now I am speaking the truth.” He’s like a revivalist preacher. I saw Sullivan last week end. He says he doesn’t agree with Murry. Hes not one of the push. He says you couldn’t think him sincere if you only judged him by this evidence. But he says he is sincere.

Le. Its John Bull over again. “If every reader will get another reader”—& that on top of his revelations about Katherine’s death!

V. I dont object to opening the heart, but I do object to finding it empty. Murry has nothing whatever to reveal. Yet he has sold his reticence.

Janet Dear dear, dear dear! He talks about his wife’s death? Dear, dear.

Desmond Mortimer has done Katherine this week. But he’s not got to the bottom of her. Nor did I.

V. I say Desmond, whatever the reason may be, the Hawk gets daily better & better. Its never been so good. People talk about the Hawk: about reading the paper for the Hawk.

Des Oh come Virginia, it wasn’t as bad as all that before!

more gossip between Desmond & Leonard.

Janet (to me)

[Tuesday 17 July]

I forget now, it being Tuesday 17th July what Janet said. It was a hot day, I remember. Let me try another conversation. But there have been so many. Shall we attempt old Birrell the other night?

Persons: Aug. Birrell: Francis B. Tony B. L. & V.

Scene 70 Elm Park Road: first dark pannelled dining room; later the library, a room just beneath the grass of a large garden. Books all round; regular, back to back books in series & editions. Framed autographs on walls. One from Lamb. “Mary has got to leave me—She is going to be ill. Tell Forster.”

A. Birrell Oh, thats dreadful.
He is a large fine untidy old man, in blue shirt, grey hair, no tie. Very vigorous & manly in the Victorian style.
I went to hear Dickens read at Liverpool (he gave away prizes). He had to name a girl called Weller—Miss Weller, he said: & I assure you there were Bishops, Mayors, Judges—every sort of person—& they roared with laughter. No other human being could have done that by just mentioning one of his own characters. You would have taken him for an actor—or a seafaring man. He had a blue coat; & a great necktie.—a wonderful looking man.

V. (obediently, filially) And Thackeray, did you know?

A.B. No, never saw him.

V. (” ”) You should write your memoirs.

A.B. Good gracious no.

F.B. I can read all biographies—all childhoods anyhow.

A.B. (somehow got on to the Harmsworths). I knew Alfred, the father—an old Bailey Barrister—a nice chap, who may have drunk a little too much—may have. Well he was Vice President of a Club wh. met up at St Johns Wood, the Eyre Arms, I think, called what was it? The Sylvan, because they met in a wood—& I went sometimes & we debated—all young fellows. One night walking on the Embankment I met Alfred, very down on his luck he was. I’m going to die he said, & I’ve done nothing. I’m leaving my wife, & six children (I think he said) & I’ve done nothing. Well, I had an inspiration. My dear chap, I said, you’ve done the only thing you could do, & dont you worry, I said. Take my word for it, one of those boys’ll do well. They’ll look after their mother, I said; & so we parted. He died in a fortnight. And sure enough, the great Alfred got going, & made a fortune ever so soon, & every penny went to the old lady. One night I was splashed with mud from head to foot in Piccadilly, & there was the old lady, sitting in her barouche, furs on her knee, two horses, driving off to Berkely Street. Always his mother came first. When I knew them there was a smell of cold mutton & boots all over the house. But I saw what a remarkable woman she was. She controlled everything. And now she’s still alive, & Lady Nth. has married my old friend Hudson.

(Somehow we got on to Hardy’s novels; how he makes a woman confess she’s had a bastard on her wedding night; upon wh. the husband packs his bag & goes to the South Seas).

A.B. vehemently—You’re all children. You dont know what your talking about. I’d have done the same. I’d have packed my bag anyhow. Silly woman! She should have told him in the cornfield—It was a silly disgusting thing to do. Its not a question of morality. Morality dont change. Its human nature.

F.B. My dear old Pater you’re talking nonsense.

(They were very affectionate: Francis helping him to address Lady Wimbome’s telegram correctly, which I don’t think he could have done without).

V. Tennyson is a great poet.

A.B. Certainly he’s a poet, not a great poet. Hallam was a donkey. Shall never forget his telegram to Eleanor: Passed away peacefully at 3.45. Liked Austin’s book. Hallam carried his mother on his back. It was thought so beautiful. So he never had a profession & didn’t want one. He was a lazy man. Tennyson was a very direct creature—didn’t like second marriages, didn’t like Lionel’s dying at sea—no sod to visit—very old fashioned, conventional views.

(Told the story of Ellen Terry running round the bedroom naked, & Watts going to Harcourt & saying “It frightened me.” “It wouldn’t have frightened me” said Harcourt, very loud & bluff.)

Tony Birrell in a high shrill falling voice, he squints rather, is pale, wears spectacles, & suddenly disappears to range about the garden alone.

I had a letter from Hester the other day. She was coming here, but the motor car broke down!! (as if this were a surprising piece of news).

F.B. Tony, you look after the drinks don’t you.

Tony goes & fidgets at the sideboard.

In the end A.B. gave me Boswell’s Corsica, & wrote “to Victoria Woolf…” then wrote to apologise. An interesting evening, highly Victorian, well furnished with drink & cigars & carpets & leather chairs. Old B. is a storyteller, & has had his day: been a figure in society, yet remains non conformist; not, I think, a very serious writer, but a good Victorian all round humane literary type, sunned by various kinds of life, as we aren’t now—barrister, politician, essayist. He is anxious to write for L.

Persons: Vivien Eliot, Torn; Sunday tea.

Tom. Put brandy in your tea, Vivien.
No, no, Tom.
Yes. You must put a tea spoonful of brandy in your tea.

Vivien. Oh all right—I don’t want it.

V. One doesn’t like taking medicine before one’s friends.

L. What about the great question—the Adelphi? Whats to be said?

Vvn What indeed? (she’s very nervous, very spotty, much powdered, her first drive, overdressed, perhaps.)

Tom I have put a note in the Criterion. I don’t understand this business about Wells & life—this confusion that literature is not life.

V. Shall you write.

Tom. Oh dear no. Murry is now comfortable for the first time. He’s in the society he likes.

Vivien I’m living between him & Mr Joyce. Mr Joyce is very nice.

Tom His wife is very nice too—& the children. Giorgio is away in la Banque Generale (he pronounces French always with great care & pride).

V. I’ve been setting up your poem. Its a good poem.

Vivien a damned good poem, did you say?

V. Well, you’ve improved what I said. But it is a d——d good poem.

Cetera disunt.

My impression being that they were nervous, contrasted us with them, & liked us & our surroundings. And on the drive home, I daresay Vivien said “Why can’t we get on as the Woolves do?” I think they meant us to feel them in sympathy together. Certainly they were lighter, more affectionate.

Sunday 22 July

A great many conversations to record: dined with Mortimer & Schofield Thayer the other night & went on with them to Mary’s.

Mortimer is Oxford, & thus not nearly so easy to come to terms with as Sebastian [Sprott] for instance. He is all angle & polish. Wears a swallow tail white waistcoat; wants brilliancy not intimacy, is half a dandy.

M. Its far better to write reviews than secondrate novels.

L. I dont agree.

V. I should like good criticism.

S.T. Surely it would be much better if Rebecca West wrote criticism.

He was a cautious hardheaded American, edited the Dial. Like Mortimer he buys modern pictures; had met Roger outside the Nat. Gal. & said “Surely, Mr Fry? I have the advantage of you Mr Fry: I know you through your caricatures.” & so on.

But the talk was too formal & too conventional to bear writing out; or I cant do it; let me see, how did it go:

Adelphi abused.

Murry’s writing abused. We tried to explain our dislike of K.’s stories.

M. I used to have a boy to wait, & now only have an old woman

V. But this is delicious (chicken in sauce) These are exquisite—china fruit from Venice.
A good account of flying from T⁠[hayer].

S.T. The pilot sayd he wdn’t start. The company had sold three seats instead of two. But I had taken my passage 10 days before. I wouldnt budge. Some luggage was left. One man took his dachs. But we felt overweighted. Then we got above a storm. One leant over & saw the lightning dashing up at one’s face. It was terrible. I looked at my feet. One man kept going to the side & being sick. The other kept saying It is bad It is bad. And we all knew we were over weighted. Suddenly the engines stopped. We pitched up & down. We expected the whole thing to crash. The dog sat quite calm. Then after 10 minutes the engine began again. Towns looked like the handle of that salt cellar. Never again, no. And the pilot said he’d been guiding with one hand & fumbling with the other & suddenly touched the right spring by chance, & the engine started. But we might just as well have dashed to the ground.

Friday 28 July

These days before going, as we do on Wednesday are too dissipated for serious reading writing living or thinking. Variable as a barometer to phychical [sic] changes, my wits flutter & frizzle & I can get no work out of them because, somehow, they’ve picked up the rumour of a move to Sussex. Indeed, I’ve been gadding (to parody I’ve been roaming which we heard at Tancred, Mrs Lyttelton’s intolerably tedious play the other night) gadding too much for the health of my five wits. They soon jangle. Very soon I find myself out of talk, a disillusioned spectator, for instance, of Clive, Mary & Mortimer, of Mary’s great evening party, of old Roger & old Margery [Fry], of Tidmarsh with young kitten Rylands verging on the albino. However, I’ve enjoyed it too, in its rather agitating way, this half year has kept me on the hop. I like that; agitating though it is. I’ve taken my fences, as I say, & got some good gallops for my trouble. I have also to remind myself that risks imply falls. There are incidents that disquiet me. I have been peevish, exacting, excited, & moody. In these general terms I refer to a certain degree of society: to something stirring us to live more stormily than last year I think. Never settle, is my principle in life: & I try to put it in practice, but in talk more than in action I daresay. My theory is that at 40 one either increases the pace or slows down. Needless to say which I desire. But, to be just, my activity is also mental. I’m working variously & with intention. I’ve pulled through my Chaucer chapter; & written ahead at The Hours, & fill in spare space with ‘serious’ reading for my book, reading with pen & notebook. It encourages me to feel that all this reading has an end in view. In five years, I shall have fagged out a good book from it, I hope; a rough, but vigorous statue testifying before I die to the great fun & pleasure my habit of reading has given me. And I’m going to work hard, hard, hard, in every sense at Rodmell. I am going to tackle those old essays of mine, & see whether by drastic & spirited treatment they can be made worth reprinting. Courage & decision are my need, I think—to speak out, without mincing. At the moment I feel myself farely free of foreign influence: Eliot, or whoever it might be: & this I must prize, for unless I am myself, I am nobody.

As for the press, we have finished Tom, much to our relief. He will be published this August by Marjorie; & altogether we have worked at full speed since May. & that is I’m persuaded the root & source & origin of all health & happiness, provided of course that one rides work as a man rides a great horse, in a spirited & independent way; not a drudge, but a man with spurs in his heels. So I don’t force myself any more to read against my will. I’m grown epicure in my middle age. Nevertheless, some compulsion is needed for the Greek chapter, which I must investigate at Rodmell. Also I shall explore—take a motor bus ride along the downs one day—see Steyning, & Arundel & so on. I much regret not having seen Windsor this spring. But I have at least ordered my French grammar. For plans, I have immediately to write a dialogue on Conrad: so must read for that too. Fame? Is not Clive writing an article on me? Has not Bunny praised me in the Dial? Does not Madame Logé propose to translate The Voyage Out?—But fame “comes slowly up this way”. I am never praised except by my contemporaries or youngers. When Wells picks young writers, he neglects me. There are many other matters of importance to discuss at Rodmell though: the Nation; L.’s work; Hogarth House. Nessa last night, sitting in the Square, recommended Haverstock Hill.

Monday 6 August [Rodmell]

I have ruined my mornings work by making bread & buns, which require constant voyages to the kitchen. The demon then always suggests that I shall read The Hours. Sheer weak dribble it seems to me (read in these circumstances). My comfort is that I can have at it in any way I like; & if it still goes wrong, to the fire with it. Nor do I think it wrong altogether. Whenever there is a breach in my content, all disparaging criticisms creep in; meanly enough, the good ones keep off.

We went over to Charleston yesterday. Although thinking quite well of ourselves, we were not well received by the painters. There they sat like assid⁠[u]⁠ous children at a task in a bedroom—Roger, Nessa, & Duncan; Roger on chair in foreground; Nessa on sofa, Duncan on bed. In front of them was one jar of flowers, & one arrangement of still live. Roger was picking out his blue flower very brightly. For some reason, the talk was not entirely congenial. I suspect myself of pertness & so on. Clive was sitting in the drawing room window reading Dryden.

A very good edition—I want to ask your husband some questions—Will he take an article…. V. O I thought your Lytton article very good … Van. Tea’s ready—V. What am I to do with my cigarette?

Hollyhocks, decapitated, swam in a bowl; there was a loaf for tea, & a long slab of cake. Roger, I cant help thinking has become a little querulous with years. His grievances torment him; he talks of them too much. After tea, Angelica had her dolls’ tea party in the window, & beat Clive, & when he cried, ran of her own accord & picked him a flower—which was a sensitive womanly act. She is sensitive—minds being laughed at (as I do). She said she wanted a ‘slide’ in her hair. “Dont laugh at me” she said, petulantly, to Roger.

I should say that the weather is perfect, soft as a cushion, blue to the heart. A gospel caravan has just pitched its tent near, & the other night 10 young men bawled hymns…. But I am laying [sic] my mind wander to The Hours. Now its a strange thing that if I have no gift for novel writing, yet it should so absorb me—I cant diagnose my own case—which reminds me that I’ve started upon the revision of my old articles; & feel rather charitable to that side of my faculty. Leonard is at this moment beginning again his book, which I daresay he has not touched since last Christmas.

Friday 17 August

The question I want to debate here is the question of my essays; & how to make them into a book. The brilliant idea has just come to me of embedding them in Otway conversation. The main advantage would be that I could then comment, & add what I had had to leave out, or failed to get in e.g. the one on George Eliot certainly needs an epilogue. Also to have a setting for each would ‘make a book’; & the collection of articles is in my view an inartistic method. But then this might be too artistic: it might run away with me; it will take time. Nevertheless I should very much enjoy it. I should graze nearer my own individuality. I should mitigate the pomposity & sweep in all sorts of trifles. I think I should feel more at my ease. So I think a trial should be made. The first thing to do is to get ready a certain number of essays;—There could be an introductory chapter. A family which reads the papers. The thing to do wd. be to envelop each essay in its own atmosphere. To get them into a current of life, & so to shape the book; to get a stress upon some main line—but what the line is to be, I can only see by reading them through. No doubt fiction is the prevailing theme. Anyhow the book shd end with modern lit:

6

Jane Austen

In order of time

5

Addison

14

Conrad

Montaigne.

15

How it strikes a Contemporary

Evelyn.

11

The Russians

Defoe

4

Evelyn 1620

Sheridan

7

George Eliot

Sterne

13

Modern Essays

Addison

10

Henry James

Jane Austen

Re-reading novels

Ch. B.

8

Charlotte Brontë

George Eliot

2

Defoe 1661

The Russians

12

Modern Novels

The Americans

Greeks

Thoreau

9

Thoreau

Emerson

Emerson

Henry James

3

Sheridan?

Modern Fiction.

2

Sterne?

On re-reading novels

Essays

1a

Old Memoirs

How it strikes a contemp,

These are, roughly, the headings.

Suppose one begins with old memoirs. I have materials on House of Lyme; Fanshawe. Boswells letters.

1 Old Memoirs

Saturday 29 August

I’ve been battling for ever so long with ‘The Hours’, which is proving one of my most tantalising & refractory of books. Parts are so bad, parts so good; I’m much interested; can’t stop making it up yet—yet. What is the matter with it? But I want to freshen myself, not deaden myself, so will say no more. Only I must note this odd symptom; a conviction that I shall go on, see it through, because it interests me to write it.

Clive & Mary came. So did Nick [Bagenal]; so did Mrs Jones; & we went to Seaford too. An odd instinct informed me that Mr Jones was non-existent. Who then could Hugh be? He is the child of Philip Morrell! So that puzzle has fitted itself together oddly enough. Mrs J. is too self-conscious to be a widow. She has no past to deplore—an uneasy future, under my eye. The little boy has strange blue eyes—but no look of the old ram. Nick’s attachment to Barbara is very marked. By virtue of her astounding merits he is admitted among the great, in whom he still believes. He brought several pears & a melon. This melon, Molly Hamilton ate. She was windblown & breathless. She is tart, not embittered. She is brave; has herself in hand. Faces more facts every night than I do in a year. Of course her touch is not sensitive; vigorous rather, &, as I say, she licks the gilt off any scrap of gingerbread. I notice this in her descriptions. She never seems to enjoy people completely. But she admires me. I was ‘nice’ to her indeed; quite simple, quite unaffected, made no attempt to impose myself. But then, I thought, perhaps it is more amusing to be brilliant. One cannot condemn it utterly. It carries further.

Clive has an egg—a turkeys egg—for a head now—quite bald, unashamedly bald; never a hair will grow any more. Mary was shrinking, childlike, not brilliant, not attending when I read my play, but very anxious to say the right thing. She worships her canary. She pressed me to write about him. What view would I take—about this last phase, for instance, the Byronic? Chocolates she brought; she wore tight grey Alpaca, with large buttons, & she powdered & re-powdered in the drawing room. I cannot write out any verbatim talk; but will try again. Going to the dogs was discussed:

Thursday 30 August

I was called, I think to cut wood; we have to shape logs for the stove, for we sit in the lodge every night, & my goodness, the wind! Last night we looked at the meadow trees, flinging about, & such a weight of leaves that every brandish seems the end. Only a strewing of leaves from the lime tree, though, this morning. I read such a white dimity rice puddingy chapter of Mrs Gaskell at midnight in the gale “Wives & Daughters”—I think it must be better than Old Wives Tale all the same. You see, I’m thinking furiously about Reading & Writing. I have no time to describe my plans. I should say a good deal about The Hours, & my discovery; how I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters; I think that gives exactly what I want; humanity, humour, depth. The idea is that the caves shall connect, & each comes to daylight at the present moment—Dinner!

Wednesday 5 September

Here is the usual half hour to be filled before dinner, & such a mass to stuff it with as would burst a whole day. K.M. used to write all day, she told me; poor Katherine, I’m always inclined to say unpleasant things about her, for some reason: The Adelphi I suppose. Our week end was Francis Birrell & Raymond Mortimer. Leonard says that F. is 3 quarters grown up, Tony F. spills out the whole contents of his head like a nice little boy; never stops talking—And what was it about?

About the Tennysons & his mother; my mother (The B⁠[irrell]’s didn’t much like her: they had a culte for Minny) his father; aunts & so on.

“I wish I had distinguished Aunts” said Mortimer.

Rather obviously he hasnt. He is a curious half breed. An Oxford young man, inclined to smartness, dress & culture. His soul is uneasy in Cambridge company. He squirms a little visibly. One is not sure how far one likes him. He flatters. He is not very simple, candid, or talkative, like chatterbox F. who is as open as daylight.

My father is a solicitor—lives at Exmouth, & has really been a bachelor since the death of my mother. She died when I was quite small. No I dont mind being an only child at all. I am quite happy. I never look ahead. If I had two thousand a year, I should never write. I should buy pictures & travel.

We discussed writing novels on Asheham Hill. He had read the V⁠[oyage]. O⁠[ut]. when it came out; & thought it frightfully good. N⁠[ight]. & D⁠[ay]. he couldn’t get through at first, but has now. J⁠[acob’]⁠s R⁠[oom] the contemporary novel most to his liking. But he cant write novels himself. Doesnt see why he should; has no originality. Likes pictures perhaps best, because theres Picasso in painting & no one to match him in writing.

“Palaeolithic men must have lived here. They lived an extraordinary kind of life” we agreed in Asheham Hollow. “Now & then the clever ones realised that they were human.” At the same time we were talking about Clive Bell who had been to luncheon, talking a great deal. I have a culte for Bloomsbury, said Raymond (we have had to drop titles) “He seems to me a perfectly happy & developed man. He is clever, & he enjoys life too.” I said “He has renounced a good deal all the same—his great book for instance. And his happiness is partly pose”. Still, I admitted, he’s a good fellow—he’s done very well. Then Vanessa. “She has such a lovely voice, & then shes very lovely to look at. Her personality too is very impressive,” he said. In short “You can’t imagine what it has been to me getting to know Bloomsbury. Theyre different human beings from any I thought possible.” Today I have a nice, I think, letter from him. “I’d seem gushing if I told you how much I enjoyed my visit…. I’m frightfully flattered, & something more than flattered by your friendship, & only hope that when you see through my cleverness, & are thoroughly bored with it, you won’t be bored with me as well…. Anyhow Floreat Bloomsburga!”

This hits it off very well; my reserves & doubts, his self-consciousness & flattery is it?—let us call it “enthusiasm.”

A great deal of time was spent in discussing Nation affairs—the Desmond row; & their position as reviewers. L. is trying to get Bertie & Clive to join in & make the position clear. Undoubtedly the Nation breeds a good many mosquitoes for us. There’s Molly this week, refusing to sign her article. And I’m slightly dashed by the reception of my Conrad conversation, which has been purely negative—No one has mentioned it. I dont think M⁠[ortimer]. or B⁠[irrell]. quite approved. Never mind; to be dashed is always the most bracing treatment for me. A cold douche should be taken (& generally is) before beginning a book. It invigorates; makes one say “Oh all right. I write to please myself,” & so go ahead. It also has the effect of making me more definite & outspoken in my style, which I imagine all to the good. At any rate, I began for the 5th but last time, I swear, what is now to be called The Common Reader; & did the first page quite moderately well this morning. After all this stew, its odd how, as soon as I begin, a new aspect, never all this 2 or 3 years thought of, at once becomes clear; & gives the whole bundle a new proportion. To curtail, I shall really investigate literature with a view to answering certain questions about ourselves—Characters are to be merely views: personality must be avoided at all costs. I’m sure my Conrad adventure taught me this. Directly you specify hair, age, &c something frivolous, or irrelevant, gets into the book—Dinner!

Tuesday 11 September

Here we are back from The Knoll, Studland. It was reckoned that we could have got to France in less time, reckoned at Charleston last week (on a hot September afternoon, with the children putting the kitten in a dead tree, which Duncan carried about as if it had been a Christmas tree; & then I read my play, & then I got excited, & then we bicycled home—all these things I should like to remember). I wanted to observe Lydia as a type for Rezia; & did observe one or two facts. It was very hot at Lulworth, & we sat with the sun in our eyes on a verandah having tea. Suddenly she got cross, frowned, complained of the heat, seemed about to cry, precisely like a child of six. She was concerned to know what Leonard meant by coupling her with me among the “sillies”. It means that you can both be beaten, Maynard said. Maynard is grown very gross & stout, especially when he wraps his leopard spotted dressing gown tight round his knees & stands in front of the fire. I was looking at him censoriously, through the eyes of good M. Murry (4th no. of the Adelphi devoted to abuse of Mortimer & Bunny). He has a queer swollen eel like look, not very pleasant. But his eyes are remarkable, & as I truly said when he gave me some pages of his new book to read, the process of mind there displayed is as far ahead of me as Shakespeare’s. True, I don’t respect it so much. But to continue. The poet Rylands was there & Mortimer. Dady’s hair (he became Dady at 10 a.m. Monday at Poole station) is precisely the colour & consistency of the husk of straw—that thin glistening fabric which one splits off the stalk of straw. Add to this a blue cornflower coloured tweed suit, his apple red face, & blue eyes & you have—well, merely a corn flower to me, but to Raymond the most intoxicatingly beautiful young man that it is possible to imagine. Unfortunately (for R.) Dady did not share these views. He, being honest Cambridge, puts R. down for “a very clever Oxford man”. L. is inclined to agree; indeed he calls R. “slimy”. He patted Dady, enclosed him, as he sat on the floor in his arms, praised his beauty to his face; & one must agree, I think, that all exhibitions of s——feeling have something silly, mawkish, about them, though why I can’t say. Anyhow, R. had a cold in his nose, & his nose is his worst feature, square at the tip, like something that has to stand on a table. His features are not good; his hair dark; & his manners either a little too clever or too flattering. Yet, I liked him better this week end than last. Such are the elements of our party. I was interested to observe, & not much caring, as indeed happens oftener than not nowadays, to make a splash of my own. For one thing, we are grown so old now; & the young are so literal in their respect. We motored to Lulworth on Sunday, or rather to Warbarrow, which we climbed & walked 5 miles over the down. My shoes interfered with my pleasure rather. But I thought of the year 1830, & how most of England then looked as this coast looked, bays with their sweep untenanted, only coastguards & gray cottages, & rowing boats making off to little ships—And then I caught a view or two which I’ve no doubt will keep for some years & then be used: the red heather & water—the mediterranean aspect—but by the bye I must remember how curiously my week end transitory feeling conditioned all this: as if I were seeing something isolated, from a train. The clear water was very moving to me, with the pale stones showing under it like jelly fish. Lulworth of course was all skittles, & men playing in a yard; & people parading in front of a wall which, like an Italian wall, encloses the headland. An odd haze came down, so that we saw nothing distinctly: only outlines. Then we stopped, Maynard liking I think to be showman, at Bindon Abbey, having just before seen the old Manor house where Tess slept, or lived. At Bindon Lydia lay in her pink jacket with the white fur in a Bishops tomb—a kind of shaped tank sunk in the earth on the way up to the Calvary, & got up with leaves sticking to her cloak. She lay quite still, acting death, her muscular dancers legs in white silk stockings lying with the soles of the feet touching, & Maynard & I standing by. What did she think about? About Maynard, & her death, & what would happen before? Heaven knows. Bindon is all grass & trees & long stretches of water, like those at Hampton Court. We sat on the mound of the Calvary, the cross being gone, & Maynard talked about palaeolithic man & an interesting theory about the age of man—how the beginning of history about 5,000 b.c. is only the beginning of another lap in the race; others, many others, having been run previously & obliterated by ice ages. Meanwhile Raymond took his Dady along the side walks by the fish ponds. It is a damp romantic place; & one wh. perhaps I shall never see again, as I told L. I had an odd feeling that it is queer to find such places lying unknown in the country, inland. I can’t get hold of it now. I am perhaps encouraged by Proust to search out & identify my feelings, but I have always felt this kind of thing in great profusion, only not tried to capture it, or perhaps lacked skill & confidence. To return:—Dady has an ingratiating manner of pawing ladies old enough to be his mother. He threw out an idea that he might join the Press. The printing mania has come upon him & Sebastian, & it looks as if we might now start a Cambridge branch;—he asked, lightly, for he is not emphatic & very happy I should think, with all his interests & successes, & no inhibitions & good health, & money in prospect, & an editor to print his poems, & a year more at Cambridge, & a possible fellowship & so forth—he asked lightly whether he might lodge with us in the holidays, & pay his way by working the press. So you see how the future branches & extends: I mean there are ways down the forest; roads leading to right & left hitherto unseen.

It was hot & prosy in London. I bought China at Heal’s, & we lunched with Hubert H⁠[enderson].—a small, testy, unheroic man, vaguely on the look out for offence, & suspecting I think our superior vitality, & longing for a compliment, which being honest at the moment, I could not give him. He ought to have stuck to Cambridge, as, I suspect, he begins to think. He is less of a personage than I thought. Once the flush of the adventure is past, he finds himself hard put to it to keep his end up. Maynard is his standby. Bloomsbury his pest. He wants safe, charming articles, like Molly’s childhood series.

Any really good article, said L., is bound to be disliked intensely & liked intensely.

H.H. didn’t much agree to this. He thought they could be liked by everyone. He was disappointed by Lytton, who gets £40 for 15,00 words, & I think by me. Left to himself, he would soon make The Nation into the Westminster Gazette. But I don’t pretend to care very profoundly. Unfortunately, Desmond has cut up crusty, & L. is landed with F. B⁠[irrell]. for whom he must provide £150 p.A. Mortimer I think, descends safely but a little ingloriously on the New Statesman side of the fence. And Bertie [Russell] says he will resign.

Tuesday 18 September

Leonard’s day in London, & left with 30 minutes before I walk off to meet him I may as well write here. We have had visitors—Lytton & the Partridges, unexpectedly; then Nessa & Duncan; then Morgan for the week end. There are times when I want no one, times when I relish the commonest animated slug. I am worn smooth with talk at the moment, & so did not come to grips with my friends, as I should have done. Yet how good, kind, tender, & clever we all are! Chiefly I remember sitting on the wall of the public house with Duncan & discussing his painting. He said he was trying to simplify; he wants I think, to express something very abstract simply. His own loveliness seems to him now negligible. “Nessa is a happy artist” he said in the bus (I went in to Lewes). I am a stupid artist she said. She has none of these changes. She does not think things out. Sometimes I am quite ready not to paint for a long time. I suppose he is intellectual, as I suppose I am; & she more instinctive. Yet she changes too. They notice old women & babies all the time. We stood in the High Street, & saw a man drive out of the White Hart, close clipped as a convict, wearing a hard grey bowler, & driving a high stepping piebald. Duncan could not imagine what his life was. So I walked home. Not much talk of interest with Lytton. He pounced on our books. Oh books, books! he cried, & carried off Mortimer’s Oxford Circus. Fame has made him confident, taken from him I suppose, some charm, turned it to strength of some kind. I always feel a kind of mass now behind his view of his own writing. The French at the Monastery had been so enthusiastic about Racine. That set him up, & made it needless to praise his articles in the Nation, which are not, so we think, good.

Very well. We all grow old; grow stocky; lose our pliancy & impressionability. Even Morgan seems to me to be based on some hidden rock. Talking of Proust & Lawrence he said he’d prefer to be Lawrence; but much rather would be himself. We discussed his novels. I don’t think I am a novelist, he said. Suddenly I said “No, I don’t think you are” Ah! he exclaimed, eagerly, interested, not dashed. But L. denied this. “I’m not at all downcast about my literary career”, he said. I think he has made up his mind that he has much to fall back on. He is aloof, serene, a snob, he says, reading masterpieces only. We had a long gossip about servants. He found wasps in the mint sauce. This made Agnes drop the dish & go off leaving the dining room door open. Mrs Forster was cold to her for some days. “She will begin to scream & die of appendicitis” he said. And so to Miss Grant Duff & his quarrel in Alexandria. But it grows cold & dark; I shall walk off to meet L.

Monday 15 October Hogarth

This last entry seems long ago. And I meant to record for psychological purposes that strange night when I went to meet Leonard & did not meet him. What an intensity of feeling was pressed into those hours! It was a wet windy night; & as I walked back across the field I said Now I am meeting it; now the old devil has once more got his spine through the waves, (but I cannot re-capture really). And such was the strength of my feeling that I became physically rigid. Reality, so I thought, was unveiled. And there was something noble in feeling like this; tragic, not at all petty. Then cold white lights went over the fields; & went out; & I stood under the great trees at Iford waiting for the lights of the bus. And that went by; & I felt lonelier. There was a man with a barrow walking into Lewes, who looked at me. But I could toy with, at least control all this, until suddenly, after the last likely train had come in I felt it was intolerable to sit about, & must do the final thing, which was to go to London. Off I rode, without much time, against such a wind; & again I had a satisfaction in being matched with powerful things, like wind & dark. I battled, had to walk; got on; drove ahead; dropped the torch; picked it up, & so on again without any lights. Saw men & women walking together; thought, you’re safe & happy I’m an outcast; took my ticket; had 3 minutes to spare, & then, turning the corner of the station stairs, saw Leonard, coming along, bending rather, like a person walking very quick, in his mackintosh. He was rather cold & angry (as, perhaps was natural). And then, not to show my feelings, I went outside & did something to my bicycle. Also, I went back to the ticket office, & said to the humane man there, “Its all right. My husband caught the last train. Give me back my fare” which he did. And I got the money more to set myself right with Leonard than because I wanted it. All the way back we talked about a row (about reviewers) at the office; & all the time I was feeling My God, thats over. I’m out of that. Its over. Really, it was a physical feeling, of lightness & relief & safety. & yet there was too something terrible behind it—the fact of this pain, I suppose; which continued for several days—I think I should feel it again if I went over that road at night; & it became connected with the deaths of the miners, & with Aubrey Herbert’s death next day. But I have not got it all in, by any means.

We have been dealing with domestic rows; a triumphant solution for us; since Lottie is declared fit for all work by her doctor; but the expense of spirit is too great to be worth while. We lunch on trays. Marjorie [Joad] does not much like it, but submits. Marjorie has her Champagne love affair with Ralph, now developed into an attack of influenza, as I thought likely. She is a cold honest woman; prepared for the worst. I like her literal good sense, though her spirit does not bounce & spring as one could like. Its her drawl thats the worst of her. And then? My first activity has been to see houses. So far I have seen the outsides of two. And the problem is a difficult one. Its my wish to live in London, no one elses. How far can this wish bear the weight of the removal, the expense, the less pleasant surroundings, & so on? But I shall go on steadily, looking, & I hope, working. Here we are tight wedged in printing & editing. People come (Madge & Janet yesterday for 4 hours, leaving me with a brain like a wrung dish cloth) And we have Dadie in prospect.

This young man with hair like the husk of corn, says he wishes to devote his life to the Hogarth Press, & is writing a letter to that effect to Leonard. This will begin in June. He shall be a partner, & take over the work; & we shall supervise, & by degrees it will become more & more important, & we shall be the benefactors of our age; & have a shop, & enjoy the society of the young, & rummage & splash in the great bran pie, & so never, never stop working with brains or fingers or toes till our limbs fly asunder & the heart sprays off into dust. Such is my fancy picture—But I must write a careful letter to Frances Cornford & so have no time.

I am now in the thick of the mad scene in Regents Park. I find I write it by clinging as tight to fact as I can, & write perhaps 50 words a morning. This I must re-write some day. I think the design is more remarkable than in any of my books. I daresay I shan’t be able to carry it out. I am stuffed with ideas for it. I feel I can use up everything I’ve ever thought. Certainly, I’m less coerced than I’ve yet been. The doubtful point is I think the character of Mrs Dalloway. It may be too stiff, too glittering & tinsely—But then I can bring innumerable other characters to her support. I wrote the 100th page today. Of course, I’ve only been feeling my way into it—up till last August anyhow. It took me a year’s groping to discover what I call my tunnelling process, by which I tell the past by instalments, as I have need of it. This is my prime discovery so far; & the fact that I’ve been so long finding it, proves, I think, how false Percy Lubbock’s doctrine is—that you can do this sort of thing consciously. One feels about in a state of misery—indeed I made up my mind one night to abandon the book—& then one touches the hidden spring. But lor’ love me! I’ve not re-read my great discovery, & it may be nothing important whatsoever. Never mind. I own I have my hopes for this book. I am going on writing it now till, honestly, I cant write another line—Journalism, everything, is to give way to it.

Saturday 3 November

And now I’ve found a house 35 Woburn Square. Yes, shall I write that address often? Certainly I hope to. For me it would be worth £500 a year in pleasure. Think of the music I could hear, the people I could see, easily, unthinkingly. And then comes before me the prospect of walking through the city streets; starting off early, some day L.’s at the office, & walking say to Wapping; & then to tea at the office. Why this so obsesses my mind I don’t know. It was a beautiful clear November day, yesterday, when I went up & past our house (with green doors opposite the mews) & the squares with their regular houses, & their leafless trees, & people very clearly outlined filled me with joy. Indeed, it was so lovely in the Waterloo Road that it struck me that we were writing Shakespeare; by which I mean that when live people, seeming happy, produce an effect of beauty, & you dont have it offered as a work of art, but it seems a natural gift of theirs, then—what was I meaning?—somehow it affected me as I am affected by reading Shakespeare. No: its life; going on in these very beautiful surroundings. As for the house question I am solving it tonight in this fashion. We will take the house, live in our own flat upstairs—a most lovable & delightful little place; have Nelly to cook; let out the next floor to Saxon; Lottie shall do for him. Then Dady (I think, but am not sure) shall be lodged on the ground floor, entirely apart, with his own servant in the basement, & control of the press which is also lodged there. This seems to me a perfectly feasible solution of innumerable difficulties. Of course Marjorie remains. We broke Dadie to her two days ago. Leonard did it in so many words.

M. But I dont think I shall like that.

V. Did you dislike him?

M. I shant like being under him. He’d make me typewrite all day. And I suppose I should have to do what he told me?

L. He would be in the same position to you that we are.

M. I’ve never minded working under you. But this is the first time it happened. I’ve never been able to work with other people. I quarrelled with the headmistress, where I was before this.

(here is an example of the resolute, uncoloured honesty with which she behaves. But she did not show up otherwise in an attractive light—except that one can’t blame these unimaginative people for anything. She fears the loss of prestige. She is jealous, rather grasping, wants her way; but of course knows all this. That is the modern advantage.

But I have wasted my time drawing a plan of 35 on the opposite page. Nothing runs away with time like these house dreams. I must read Sophocles. After 20 years, I now know how to read Greek quick (with a crib in one hand) & with pleasure. This is for the eternal book. And my mind whips off to rents—how much can we ask for this house? I’m heartless about poor old Hogarth, where for 9 years we have been so secure. My mind whips away from Ka, & Altounyan, except that Ka was more like a sack of some of the commoner garden vegetables than ever. She has some worm gnawing at her, some persistent desire to impress us, with her romantic life, with Will’s romantic nature. Now there’s nothing human beings so quickly see as this motive, & none they more resent. For one thing, it implies some divergence of interest. She’s thinking not of you, but of how to impress you. More serious, though, is the dilution of her own interest, since she does not put her full weight on it, but only on half of it, thinking as she must, of making it impress. Her condescension is very curious. She is, or seems to be, one of the county; this she enjoys. But she is aware that being county doesn’t carry far in London, or even Richmond. Anyhow she tells too many stories about the strange figures who drive up to the Eagles Nest. Gordon Bottom ley, the Ranee of Sarawak. She dwells too much upon good Will’s passion for the conscription of natives by the French. All this protesting—thats whats at the bottom of it. But she was in some way very pathetic about Rupert. How Mrs Brooke had suddenly smiled at Mark as Ka had never seen her smile, exactly like Rupert. But if I hadn’t driven her off rather arbitrarily to the past, I don’t know how we should have got through the evening. I was glad to hear Leonard & Altounyan coming down. But I must descend to the basement, & see whats doing with Clive’s cover; which Leonard does for 8 hours daily.

Friday 16 November

No we didn’t take 35 Woburn Square, & the colour has gone out of it, & I dont want to write about it at the moment. I’m back from lunch Lady Colefax, meet Anrep at the Tate, tea Marjorie, discuss Ralph; Leonard back from Rodmell: & in rather a fritter, too much so to read Euripides. Indeed, I’ve been talking to Hugh Walpole—not an impressive man—a man who protests too much; an uneasy, prosperous vain man, who harbours some grudge against clever intellectuals & yet respects them, would like to be one. He has the look of a kindly solicitor or banker; red cheeks; very small bright eyes; a genial, but not profound or cordial manner. We talked of contemporary fame. He dwelt a good deal upon the different sets & critics, & how no book was good in the same parish. Somehow it all referred to him. An uninteresting mind, & really not able to cast a shadow even upon me. I did not feel knocked over, dashed to pieces, or anything very vividly, except that he was slightly in awe of me. There was old Lady Horner, with her grey big eyes very far apart in a face creased & crumpled like some old faded glove—an interesting subtle face; a mind worn down by society, into that kind of simple ease which enhances even small talk. I mean what she said was so freely & easily said that it had a manner with it. Spacious gardens & money have gone to it. Poor unhappy old woman—Am I sentimental to think so often of peoples unhappiness, or is it indirectly some tribute to myself? Lytton is very suave in such society⁠[;] sits in the shadow & now & then draws his sword effectively. Desmond of course does his jolly delightful tricks—eating & drinking meanwhile—acting an actress who cleans her arms like a fly in Nassau. As for Ly Colefax, there she sits painted & emphatic at the head of her table, broadcheeked, a little coarse, kindly glass eyed, affectionate to me almost, capable, apparently disinterested—I mean if she likes to listen to clever talk & to buy it with a lunch of four courses & good wine; I see no harm in it. Its a taste; not a vice. Off we streamed at 3. It amuses me to hear Ly Horner asking the servants to find out Lady Lovat’s telephone number. These free & easy ways remind me of Ly Bath, the Herberts—little accidents that impressed me years ago. Yet all it amounts to is that Ly Horner drives about London in a motor car, & has a sort of airiness instead of stuffiness about her. So to the Tate with Lytton. Lytton & I don’t need much preliminary.

Heres my book—Q.V. in French.

I daresay it reads better in French

He has almost bought a house near Hungerford, in the downs, but hesitates over the last £500. There are no drains & no water. Still I advised the leap, as I always advise leaps. And then there was Anrep, & his tinted floor, all raying out in greens & browns, like the waves of a sea; not a good metaphor, for it is really very compact, strong, & contained. Droves of schoolchildren kept sweeping over it. He explained it to me, smelling rather too much of whisky. Then he drove me to Waterloo. Now I lose interest in these facts, much as I do in writing my novels, & thus have to find a way out of saying them. Hugh Walpole wd. not be bored I suppose; therefore he is convincing. I’m now writing my Greek chapter in alternate bursts of hot & cold. It seems so superficial, & not worth foisting off upon a world provided with so much knowledge already. Yet I really must write a book about facts once in a way. And I cant keep grinding at fiction, which however goes easier this last lap than before. Here though I come lamely & softly & comfortably to a full stop. I must add that “I’ve broken off with Ralph. We had nowhere to meet. And its true—he ought to be in a park; not in restaurants. And I had two dreadful scenes with Cyril [Joad]. He wont let him come home, or let me stay away with him. I dont want to lie about it. So we’ve broken off”. Rather to her credit, I think, & certainly to our relief.

Monday 3 December

Back from Rodmell; unable to settle in; therefore I write diary. How often I have said this! An odd psychological fact—that I can write when I’m too jangled to read. Moreover, I want to leave as few pages blank as possible; & the end of the year is only some three weeks off.

I meant to write about the change which I discovered last May (about) from seclusion & obscurity to some degree of prosperity & society. My prediction was that we [were] on the verge of something of the kind. And I see now I shall get my Saxon & my house. Oh there’s Adrian’s catastrophe to record—now 2 weeks old. Nessa rang me up in the middle of dinner with Tom here. “Adrian & Karin are going to separate.” You could have knocked me down with a feather, & Clive too, so he says. The devoted & inseparable couple! And it seemed (then—this is no longer so) tragic to me; & I was overcome, at hearing they’d been unhappy for years; & then went & told Tom & Leonard; & then 2 days later, met Adrian in the bathroom at 46; kissed his hand, & he burst into tears. Its an agony! he cried. So we went upstairs holding hands, (I to get ready for my speech at the School of Economics) & he walked to the bus, & told me how it had never been right—almost, but never quite right. They hadn’t quarrelled. I am too shaky to write. But then he stayed here & I felt come over me the old despair; the crouching servile feeling which is my lowest & worst; the desire for praise, which he never gets; & the old futile comparisons between his respect for Nessa & his disrespect for me came over me, that made me so wretched at Fitzroy Sqre. To my amusement, I found that Nessa, who had been cordial & sanguine about him had changed her view, owing to his visiting her, & now only foretells with despair several long silent sittings. She says, & Clive says, that Karin did it; Karin felt it more than he did. She felt all I used to feel: the snub; the check; the rebuke; the fastidiousness; the lethargy. Poor old Adrian!—he now subsides into a flat in Mecklenburgh Sqre; & drifts phantomlike forever. Undoubtedly Haynes was right: the D.N.B. crushed his life out before he was born. It gave me a twist of the head too. I shouldn’t have been so clever, but I should have been more stable, without that contribution to the history of England. Now for a hot bath.

Wednesday 19 December

I dont know if this is my last chance of writing, or if I shall take the black book to Rodmell & fill its last pages there. I am so stifled with work of all sorts, society of all sorts, & plans of all sorts, that I can’t pour a pure stream from my tap. In an hour Sprott & Mary are coming. Merely to count my company since I wrote would take my time & waste it. How elliptical this book becomes! I dont respect events any more: I’d like to record poor Tom’s getting drunk, all the same. We went to a flat in an arcade, & asked for Captain Eliot. I noticed that his eyes were blurred. He cut the cake meticulously. He helped us to coffee—or was it tea? Then to liqueurs. He repeated, L. noticed, “Mrs Ricardo”, as L. told his story; he got things a little wrong. There was a long pale squint eyed Oxford youth on the floor. We discussed the personal element in literature. Tom then quietly left the room. L. heard sounds of sickness. After a long time, he came back, sank into the corner, & I saw him, ghastly pale, with his eyes shut, apparently in a stupor. When we left he was only just able to stand on his legs. We heard a shuffling as we went, & Clive went back. Next day, I spent 10 minutes at the telephone receiving apologies—how distressing, what could we all think? Could we forgive him—the first time—would we ever come again? no dinner, no lunch—then sudden collapse—how dreadful—what a miserable end to the evening—apologise please to Leonard, to your sister—& so on. One of those comedies which life sometimes does to perfection.

I must briefly touch on Dadie; house problem not settled; Maynard threatening to cut down reviews; Leonard at this moment threatening to resign; Mary & Sprott; Clive & Braithwait, publishing, writing; doing Hardy, & Montaigne & the Greeks & the Elizabethans & the Hours; accepted in America, neglected by all prize givers, very happy, very much on the go—thats my state, at the moment of writing 6.14 p.m. on Wednesday aforesaid.

[]

1924

[Diary XIII]
Hogarth House
Paradise Road
Richmond
Jan. 3rd 1924

Thursday 3 January

This year is almost certainly bound to be the most eventful in the whole of our (recorded) career. Tomorrow I go up to London to look for houses; on Saturday I deliver sentence of death upon Nellie & Lottie; at Easter we leave Hogarth; in June Dadie comes to live with us; & our domestic establishment is entirely controlled by one woman, a vacuum cleaner, & electric stoves. Now how much of this is dream, & how much reality? I should like, very much, to turn to the last page of this virgin volume & there find my dreams true. It rests with me to substantiate them between now & then. I need not burden my entirely frivolous page with whys & wherefores, how we reached these decisions, so quick. It was partly a question of coal at Rodmell. Then Nelly presented her ultimatum—poor creature, she’ll withdraw it, I know,—about the kitchen. “And I must have a new stove; & it must be on the floor so that we can warm our feet; & I must have a window in that wall….” Must? Is must a word to be used to Princes? Such was our silent reflection as we received these commands, with Lottie skirmishing around with her own very unwise provisoes & excursions. “You won’t get two girls to sleep in one room as we do” &c. “Mrs Bell says you can’t get a drop of hot water in this house….” “So you wont come here again, Nelly?” I asked. “No, ma’am, I wont come here again” in saying which she spoke, I think, the truth. Meanwhile, they are happy as turtles, in front of a roaring fire in their own clean kitchen, having attended the sales, & enjoyed all the cheap diversions of Richmond, which begin to pall on me. Already I feel ten years younger. Life settles round one, living here for 9 years as we’ve done; merely to think of a change lets in the air. Youth is a matter of forging ahead. I see my contemporaries satisfied, outwardly; inwardly conscious of emptiness. Whats it for? they ask themselves now & then, when the new year comes, & can’t possibly upset their comfort for a moment. I think of the innumerable tribe of Booth, for example; all lodged, nested, querulous, & believing firmly that they’ve been enjoined so to live by our father which is in heaven. Now my state is infinitely better. Here am I launching forth into vacancy. We’ve two young people depending on us. We’ve no house in prospect. All is possibility & doubt. How far can we make publishing pay? And can we give up the Nation? & could we find a house better than Monks House? Yes, thats cropped up, partly owing to the heaven sent address of Nelly. I turned into Thornton’s waiting for my train, & was told of an old house at Wilmington—I’m pleased to find [how] volatile our temperaments still are—& L. is steady as well, a triumph I can’t say I achieve—at the ages of 42 & 43—for 42 comes tripping towards me, the momentous year.

Now it is six, my boundary, & I must read Montaigne, & cut short those other reflections about, I think, reading & writing which were to fill up the page. I ought to describe the walk from Charleston too; but can’t defraud Montaigne any longer. He gets better & better, & so I cant scamp him, & rush into writing, & earn my 20 guineas as I hope. Did I record a tribute from Gosse: that I’m a nonentity, a scratch from Hudson, that the V.O. is rotten; & a compliment all the way from America from Rebecca West? Oh dear, oh dear, no boasting, aloud, in 1924. I didn’t boast at Charleston.

Wednesday 9 January

At this very moment, or fifteen minutes ago, to be precise, I bought the ten years lease of 52 Tavistock Sqre London W.C.1—I like writing Tavistock. Subject of course to the lease, & to Providence, & to the unforeseen vagaries on the part of old Mrs Simons, the house is ours: & the basement, & the billiard room, with the rock garden on top, & the view of the square in front & the desolated buildings behind, & Southampton Row, & the whole of London—London thou art a jewel of jewels, & jasper of jocunditie—music, talk, friendship, city views, books, publishing, something central & inexplicable, all this is now within my reach, as it hasn’t been since August 1913, when we left Cliffords Inn, for a series of catastrophes which very nearly ended my life, & would, I’m vain enough to think, have ruined Leonard’s. So I ought to be grateful to Richmond & Hogarth, & indeed, whether its my invincible optimism or not, I am grateful. Nothing could have suited better all through those years when I was creeping about, like a rat struck on the head, & the aeroplanes were over London at night, & the streets dark, & no penny buns in the window. Moreover, nowhere else could we have started the Hogarth Press, whose very awkward beginning had rise in this very room, on this very green carpet. Here that strange offspring grew & throve; it ousted us from the dining room, which is now a dusty coffin; & crept all over the house.

And people have been here, thousands of them it seems to me. I’ve sat over this fire many an evening talking, & save for one fit of the glooms last summer, have never complained of Richmond, till I shed it, like a loose skin.

[Postscript by VW:] I’ve had some very curious visions in this room too, lying in bed, mad, & seeing the sunlight quivering like gold water, on the wall. I’ve heard the voices of the dead here. And felt, through it all, exquisitely happy.

Saxon is dining here tonight, & will be invited to move in with his troupe of lunatics at Easter. Our move can take place any time between Feb. 1st & then. Really, since I dont want to give auctioneers particulars, I may as well say briefly that my good genius for houses whispered in my ear on Monday, when, as I was leaving Mr Coade, the flushed young lady said “Mrs Woolf, are you still looking for a house?” “Thats what I’m here for” I said. “But I’d begun to think I’d better take a flat.” “Oh well, 52 Tavistock Sqre might suit you. It has a large studio.” The perverse young man made me come to Gordon Sqre next, then misdirected me; & then I ran into Adrian; & then both together we went into Messrs Dollman & Pritchard’s, through great green baize swing doors, up stairs, into a flat, now semi-dark; & then, down into the basement where I very rapidly lost count of rooms, & out into the old gentleman’s billiard room; & so decided this is our place if ever there was one.

Well, we had a long cold busy day yesterday—going, I did, twice to London, & ending with The Flame, a play which invented emotions which nobody has felt these 100 years; nobody felt even in 1824. But by a process of hypnotism, half Bayswater last night made themselves believe that other people felt like this & therefore that they ought to.

I may say that coincident with the purchase of 52 Tavistock Sqre (how I like writing that!) is the purchase of a nine penny pen, a fountain pen, which has an ordinary nib, & writes—sometimes very well. Am I more excited by buying Tavistock Sqre, or by buying my new fountain pen?—which reflection reminds me that I have volume 7 of Montaigne to polish off, & Saxon dining here. So in spite of a clouded brain, upstairs, fetch the books, & begin. First, though, one gaze into the fire—& oh dear, I’ve forgotten my ultimatum to the poor domestics. Both to go; & both very game, & also affectionate—a trying combination.

Saturday 12 January

I have just introduced a great improvement in the cover of this book—a calendar. But to revert to those other improvements—shall I survive the process? There’s a snag in the lease: some drastic clause saying that Bedford can refuse permission to sublet. If exercised, this would throw the offices, now let at £250, on our hands. But they offer us the flat & basement separate. All this involves calculation; & what is worse, a good deal of depression on L.’s side. Then I ask myself, why do I do it? Is it worth it? Aren’t the risks too great? And I reply according to the mood I’m in. My heart turned like a wounded eel in my breast on Thursday night: it was serene as a summers day yesterday; now its sore and choppy. But I like myself for taking my fences. So long as rashness don’t become silliness. Suppose it all fails, anyhow I shall have tried to bring it off. Then Nelly has agreed to stay on alone as a general; & I am to find Lottie a place in Gordon Square. I see difficulty upon difficulty ahead. None of this would much matter if L. were happy; but with him despondent or grim, the wind is taken out of my sails, & I say what’s it all for?

But the truth is—no, I dont think I know the truth. Undoubtedly my chief prop is my writing, which cant fail me here or in London. But according to Montaigne, one is various. I cant lay down a law for my own feelings.

Its odd how entirely this house question absorbs one. It is a radical change, though. It means a revision of 4 lives. As for Lottie, I have my doubts, for her temper will always be unseating her, & I feel, after 7 years, or is it 8?, some responsibility for her. If by my doing she got into difficulty, I suppose I should blame myself. Yet for people of our age, which is in full summer, to dread risk & responsibility seems pusillanimous. We have no children to consider. My health is as good as it will be in this world, & a great deal better than it ever has been. The next ten years must see the press into fame or bankruptcy; to loiter on here is a handicap. But I’ve gone through all these matters time & time again, & wish I could think of something else. I’ve so much work on hand. Its odd how unimportant my work seems, suddenly, when a practical matter like this blocks the way. I see it as it appears to the world, from outside, not all cavernous & lit up as it appears from within.

Who have I seen? Saxon chiefly, & the Grants. They have a good deal of solid comfort at Grosvenor House Twickenham: chairs & tables & little mats on the dressing tables. There was a tight mute woman by the fire & Jim Rendel, playing chess with the old fluffy haired Major—that failure, that vivacious irresponsible old man, who lies on his sofa, a perfect gentleman, a man of the world, humorous, shrewd, practical, but ineffective utterly. In comes Ethel, & I perceive how lovely she was, & something charming still in their relationship, which is all worn away & staled; & she knows him, I suppose to be dying, & has her mind so set on practical affairs (they’re very poor) that she can’t feel anything. She is a stately kind, unimaginative woman, who pities me a little, I think. (Now dont think of the house problem!)

Seeing Saxon dont amount to much, though I see him now a distinguished man. If I met him in a room full, I should say who’s that? I think. Its partly that he’s become more sure of himself. And then, I fancy, reading Plato all through tells. I like his absence of detail—in discussing plans, for instance; though when it comes to practice, he’s a meticulous man, can’t order a taxi for himself without endless deliberations.

I saw Adrian & Karin too. There’s an unhappy woman if you like. But what is happiness? I define it to be a glow in the eye. Her eyes are like polished pavements—wet pavements. There’s no firelit cavern within. Molly’s eyes are a different matter. For I went to tea with her, in a very clean house in Oakley Street. There was Michael, a young man, blushing, nervous, in trousers. He had been out to tea, but didn’t like the people; they discuss such details, he said. “Which part of Devonshire do you like best?” Its amusing to see how that sort of question appears in reality, before one’s used to it. Molly is very pale, very shapeless, like a walrus, rather; has cut a fringe, which is pure grey; & manages to dress much better than I do. I love the distracted busy ways of these mothers—no parsimony of life, as there is with the childless—always something that must be decided, or done. Old Mrs MacCarthy is, I think, the most arrant & pernicious bore in the world; like a child, but not to be put down; insisting on her story being heard; utterly unable to see beyond her own plate of bread & butter; must know what kind of jam it is. Really I fancy these old ladies, without occupation, the most trying in the world. Two days ago she became a Roman Catholic. Charlie Sanger came in; patted Molly’s hand. He too respects maternal warmth. He has a great respect for the worth of human nature, it always strikes me; respects the upstanding qualities; knows how hard life is—not, perhaps, how pleasant. One of these days I mean to write a story about life turning all the faces in a tube carriage grey, sodden, brave, disillusioned. But why doesn’t it make any one of them look contented, happy, as if they’d got what they wanted? It gives a vivacity to the young, content to the elderly, very little intense pleasure, I shd. say, looking at them.

Sunday 20 January

——the clock striking six, & Lord Berners, Siegfried Sassoon & William the chauffeur just gone. Yes, we have got into the peerage. Do I altogether like the peerage? The trouble is that there’s something a little opaque; they tell good stories; & I’ve rather lost the art of listening to their points. This Lord is as Siegfried says, a Kilburn Jew; round, fat, pale—no fairly chubby, a determined little man, whose rank, I fancy, gives him some consistency not otherwise his. Still, rank, nowadays, at my age, is slightly vulgar, like a fringe to the mantelpiece. Vita dined here with him; & with her too rank is a velvet fringe; theres something dense instead of vibrant. Old S.S. is a nice dear kind sensitive warmhearted good fellow. He came back, with William waiting, half shut the door, & asked me to get reviewing for [W. J.] Turner—“he hasn’t asked this himself mind you”. (I dont like being in any way deflected from my comfortable ways, when it comes to writing. That’s the worst of exciting society: it somehow makes one, momentarily, meretricious, in that department.) But to return. Siegfried is all right. Then what else has happened? No final news of Tavistock Square yet, but Saxon’s cook has apparently taken Hogarth; & says the garden will be very nice for her little girl, & if Mrs Turner may bring the gas stove which was the Drs present, they’ll come in March. (The thing about aristocrats is that they veil all pretence very humbly; & let one ride on their backs; & then suddenly turn seignurial). Here we are, though, going through a time of waiting. I shall be happy so soon as my claws are into the move. At present, I feel Oh God another journey? Must I go up by train? Where am I to change before dinner tomorrow, & so on. Lottie vacillates. First she says she’s going to get £60 & be maid housekeeper to Kid Lewis; then she’ll stay with Saxon—God knows what’ll be the end; & I shall be sorry to miss her—Now, I must tackle my Montaigne quotations, since thats demanded by some Cockney in charge of the Supt.

Wednesday 23 January

And on Monday if I’d written here I should have had to say “We have lost Tavistock Square”—lost it through the sharp practice of Mr Simon, & the easy going indolence of Mr Guy Hemsley. It was a very unpleasant shock, & for my part I don’t think we could easily have got over it—found as good a house that is, let alone the infinite dreariness of the hunt. Anyhow, after sitting fidgetting at the play (Munro’s Progress) & damning it considerably I went off to Coade, found myself expected, heard a very queer story—how Simon would let the Woolves have it if Coade would take £30 instead of £40: which Coade wouldnt; so I offered the extra £10; communicated with my solicitors by phone, across the office table (oh yes I’m grown up now) & had the matter arranged in 15 minutes, & went on to tea with Nessa swelling with pride & excitement—all great nonsense, L. would say. But my house finding genius was outraged; whats the good of me, it asked, if you let these sharpers trick you? And I warn you, 52 is your house. So, practically not only spiritually speaking it now is; for in spite of Hemsley & the strike & the failure of the draft contract to arrive, &c &c; I visited the office with cheque & signature before one today; & then spent a shilling on a plate of beef. Ah well! Now I can sigh contented over my fire, in spite of the rain, & the strike, & Lady Colefax & Ethel Sands, & all cares & sorrows & perplexities. They aren’t very grievous at the moment. The New Republic has taken my article on Jane Austen; £22 from the Dial for Lives of Obscure; &c &c. This time last year we were in a very different pair of shoes. Not that even then I was more than surface ruffled. No: I remember some very black, stagnant days about this time of year.

I have seen Roger; seen his pictures, which with the irrepressible vanity of the artist, he makes even the blind like me report on, by electric light, in a hurry. But enough of that; in every other way he abounds: cut him, wherever you like, & the juice wells up. Pamela is about to bear; so was his cat. Lytton has bought his house. Nessa is convicted by the law of not owning her flat at 50. I’ve said nothing of this great affair—the battle of Bells & Stephens. Clive will be turned out & the Americans will triumph. And this reminds me that I’m resolved to draw in my horns with Mary H. I was absurdly exacerbated by a laughing report of Roger’s that Clive is circulating an account of me, wishing to dress like Lady Diana &c. Mary will cheerfully roast me to make Clive smile; & I think she relishes a little vinegar in my wounds. But I’m not proud of my own behaviour either—except that I like being natural, & talking nonsense if I’ve a mind. This one cant do safely with her, & the excitability of my temper is such that when a light flick of the whip, like Roger’s is given me, I lose more—much more—than all the pleasure I get from talking like a genius over my fire to poor dear Mary—whom I like too. But it can’t be helped. And in London I shall have too many Mary’s, & can’t face the fritter to my nerves of the old intriguing ways.

Now I’m sending off Montaigne, & back again tomorrow to The Hours, which I was looking at disconsolately—oh the cold raw edges of one’s relinquished pages—when the House business started this morning. But now I am going to write till we move—6 weeks straight ahead. I think its the design that’s good this time—God knows.

A letter from Morgan today saying “To whom first but you & Virginia should I tell the fact that I’ve put the last words to my novel?” He is moved, as I am always on these occasions.

Sunday 3 February

I didn’t write however, because L. started the flu, the very next day, & gave me an unpleasant day; but there’s an odd pleasure too, purely feminine I suppose, in ‘looking after’ being wanted; giving up my pen, & sitting with an invalid. But he was up in 4 days or less; & here we are, on the rails again, a very lovely spring day, which, by Heaven’s grace, we have spent alone. No servants at the moment; no callers. The sun laid gold leaf over the trees & chimneys today. The willows on the bank were—what word is it?—soft yellow plumy, like a cloud; like an infinitely fine spray; something showery in it; & also grains of gold. I can’t find the exact word; but reflect that I shant be walking here again next spring. I am not sentimental about it: Tavistock Square with the pale tower is more beautiful I think, let alone the adorable omnibuses.

Owing to the influenza, I don’t think I have seen more than a handful; went to Ethel [Sands]’s, was congratulated on Montaigne by Logan; Roger had stuck in it, though; talked to Arnold Bennett, a lovable sea lion, with chocolate eyes, drooping lids, & a protruding tusk. He has an odd accent; a queer manner; is provincial; very much a character; “I dont understand women—” This said as a schoolboy might say it. Everyone laughs. Then “No woman is as sensitive as I am—no woman could be….” I suspect he minds things, even my pinpricks. He is slow, kind, affectionate, hauls himself along a sofa. But there was Logan, launching questions at my head; balls one had to return. Roger came in, rather wild eyed & staring. Prince Bibesco, & a Princess, who, said Roger, made the rest of us appear provincial. What a cosmopolitan he is—how he dreads the British Parish; how he adores Paris. “She had lived in Paris” he said of this Princess: “So of course she cd. talk at once about interesting things.” But I did not stay to hear them.

Yesterday, the parochial Turners came to measure the alcoves, & ask me whether Mrs Turner’s father’s bureau could stand in the study—You must remember the piano, & the pianola case, said Edith, one of those worrying vague ‘bodies’, who compose the middle classes; wearisome women, machine made, but all bristling with their views; they get hot & cold, peevish & fluttered, like other people; more so indeed; but I can’t see why nature provides them, unless to supply Dartmouth with cadets, & colonels with wives. Nelly went to the flat with me, & next day wrote out a time table, to show that by 3 p.m. she would still have to wash up luncheon & do Leonard’s boots. Very well, I said, find a place with Lottie. But the end of a weeks consideration is, apparently, that Lottie goes with the Turners, & Nelly clings to us. The money is paid over, & the house presumably ours tomorrow. So I shall have a room of my own to sit down in, after almost 10 years, in London. I must now write to Logan, to ask for a book for the press, & then read Elizabethan for my next chapter. At any rate the reading for this blessed book is a great source of delight to me.

Saturday 9 February

We have been measuring the flat. Now the question arises Is it noisy? No need to go into my broodings over that point. Fitzroy Sqre rubbed a nerve bare which will never sleep again while an omnibus is in the neighbourhood. My feeling about this move is that we’re doing the courageous thing; facing the facts, which for ten years, it will be good to do. Yes, this little achievement has been good I think.

Morgan was here last night; A Passage to India done; & he is much excited, on the boil with it, consulting L. about terms; has been offered £750. So he’s all right. And Heinemann this morning wants to publish my essays. Hendersons to dine, & Janet [Vaughan], I boasted of L. (he says). One cant joke with people one doesn’t know. They don’t even take dinner in the basement naturally. Desmond pitched down Mary’s stairs two nights ago, & broke his knee cap. Clive couldn’t stay with him. He was in great pain, but Ethel Sands said, very brave. Now he’s very irritable. So our feelings for our friends change. Cut me anywhere, & I bleed too profusely. Life has bred too much ‘feeling’ of a kind in me. Then (I’m so tired with parcels &c I cant concentrate) Marjorie has put earrings in her ears & left Joad. Poor chit! at 24. I was at Fitzroy then, & devilish unhappy too. She found a letter, left the house,—lives in a basement. Its melodrama, but forced on her by Cyril I expect. I’m working at The Hours, & think it a very interesting attempt; I may have found my mine this time I think. I may get all my gold out. The great thing is never to feel bored with one’s own writing. That is the signal for a change—never mind what, so long as it brings interest. And my vein of gold lies so deep, in such bent channels. To get it I must forge ahead, stoop & grope. But it is gold of a kind I think. Morgan said I had got further into the soul in Jacob’s Room than any other novelist. He was taking piano lessons from Hilda Saxe—spun his fingers very nimbly on the score. (And it’s just as noisy here, if one listens, as it can possibly be in T⁠[avistock]. S⁠[quare]. One gets into a habit of not listening. Remember this sage advice). Tom, the incredible Tom, writes “I do not take any prevision of antagonism” saluting some new review. Meredith white & laurel crowned could not be more magisterial.

Karin has been confiding. Adrian wants to come back. She wants life. I dont altogether like her, kicking up her heels, yet see her point, & respect her conscience, for she has A. on her mind. He sits alone in Mecklenburgh Sqre. ‘Its the quality you Stephens have she said. Its the real thing’ like an American with a Sheraton table. Faith Henderson says she flirted with Ralph, wants moonlight, big men, diamonds, kisses; but is too old; & not good enough. Hubert takes his views from her. Janet has the Vaughan rattle in her throat; a lady; large, gawky, will marry & breed.

Saturday 23 February

Really I’ve a thousand things to do. I’ve just said to L. I’m so busy I can’t begin, which unfortunately is too true of me. My mind sits in front of a fence & pours out clouds of ideas; I have to stick spurs in sharp to make it jump. I should be reading Miss Mayor’s first chapters; Miss Bosanquet on Henry James & the Birds. Then I bethink me that with life in its present rush, I may never again write a word of this book at Hogarth House. & so should take a few minutes to lay the sod, or whatever the expression is. Its very cold, barbarous weather. Twice we have meant to go to Rodmell & failed. L. says Wells says there comes a stage when one can’t face an uncomfortable week end. Warmth is the one need I have. May’s Man, a great giant in gaiters who shook L. by the hand because we are real people & own a press, came today, & will move us on March 13th for £15. Nessa gets busy at 52 Tavy on Monday. I am going to force L. into the outrageous extravagance of spending £25 on painted panels, by Bell & Grant. We are trying to hook together all the resources of civilisation—telephone, gas, electric light, &, at this distance, naturally find it arduous. The electric light man doesn’t turn up. Lottie is going to Karin—I fancy I have forgotten that item. Really, if providence had tried, or I had set my wits to work at their most optimistic, I don’t think I could have arranged things better. First number 52 & its studio (wh. we think to make £75 on) then Saxon coming here; then Lottie next door, & so keeping Nelly in society. All could not have fallen out better, so far, I say, being by no means ready to bait the deity, who can always show his claws. That reminds me of the celebrated Mr [Bertrand] Russell the other night at Karin’s. (She gives her weekly party in the great gay drawingroom which is nevertheless a little echoing & lofty & very very chill). He said “Just as I saw a chance of happiness, the doctors said I had got cancer. My first thought was that that was one up to God. He had brought it off—just as I thought I saw a chance of happiness. When I was just getting better—I had very nearly died—my temperature was 107 twice over—the thing I liked was the sun: I thought how nice to feel the sun & the rain still. People came a long way after that. I wanted people very much, but not so much as the sun. The old poets were right. They made people think of death as going where they could not see the sun. I have become an optimist. I realise now that I like life—I want to live. Before that illness, I thought life was bad. Its an odd thing—both my pessimism & my optimism are instinctive” (I forget which he said was the deeper of the two.) So to Charlie Sanger, who is good all through; & then on to Moore. “When he first came up to Cambridge, he was the most wonderful creature in the whole world. His smile was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. We believed in Berkeley” (perhaps). “Suddenly, something went wrong with him; something happened to him and his work. Principia Ethica was nothing like so good as his Essay on Judgment (?). He was very fond of Ainsworth. I don’t know what happened—It ruined him. He took to putting out his tongue after that. You (I, that is) said he had no complexes. But he’s full of them. Watch him putting his tongue round his mouth. I said to him once, Moore, have you ever told a lie? “YES” he said—which was the only lie he ever told. He always speaks the truth at the Aristotelian. An old gentleman met me on my way here, & asked if I were going. No; I said (not such a fool). Joad is speaking tonight. Haldane made a speech once, & old Shad Hodgson had to pass a vote of thanks. He had had an epileptic fit that afternoon. He got up & talked nonsense—utter nonsense. So they asked me. And I had to thank Haldane, though I’d got ready to criticise every argument he used. Never mind: I put them all into an article, & that stung much sharper.” I asked him, as I ask everyone, to write his life for the press. But my mind is absolutely relevant. I cant ramble. I stick to facts. “Facts are what we want. Now the colour of your mother’s hair’?’ “She died when I was two—there you are—relevant facts. I remember my grandfather’s death, & crying, & then thinking it was over. I saw my brother drive up in the afternoon. Hooray! I cried. They told me I must not say hooray at all that day. I remember the servants all looking very attentively at me when I was brought to Pembroke Lodge after my father died. Whitehead’s father, who was the local parson, was sent for to persuade me that the earth was round. I said it was flat. And I remember—some seaside place, now destroyed—remembered the sands, I think. He had no one to play with. One does not like him. Yet he is brilliant of course; perfectly outspoken; familiar; talks of his bowels; likes people; & yet & yet—He disapproves of me perhaps? He has not much body of character. This luminous vigorous mind seems attached to a flimsy little car, like that on a large glinting balloon. His adventures with his wives diminish his importance. And he has no chin, & he is dapper. Nevertheless, I should like the run of his headpiece. We parted at the corner of the Square; no attempt to meet again.

Tuesday 4 March

Really I’m writing too much here. The twelve months at this rate will overflow. This is another, provisional farewell, for I may have no time—(& Thank God here’s L. Grizzle knows the way he shuts the door & jumps down & runs out:)

Wednesday 12 March

And I’m now going to write the very last pages ever to be written at Hogarth House. First; the state of the weather. Its as if a fine veil had descended & lay, clear, over the chimneys; which are a pale yellow, & brick red. The veil clouds to the horizon, & I do not see the pagoda or the trees of Kew. My head is stuffy & heavy. Last night we dined at Blunden’s farewell party, 35 covers laid, 6 or 7 speeches made, I between honest claret coloured soapy Wright, & the nice, but melodramatic looking Lynd. My little drama however was provided by Murry—Lynd’s neighbour—who shook hands, about the fish course, warmly. Then, as people were going, came & sat beside me. This he volunteered: I asked him to come & lay his case before me at Tavistock. “We’re enemies” “Not enemies. We’re in different camps. But I’ve never said a word against you, Virginia.” “Nor I against you. But what is wrong with us?” “You begin out there—” spreading his hands. “We make patterns of pretty words?” “No. But you won’t begin with your instincts. You won’t own them. With all your exquisite sensibilities—you’re content to stay at that.” Here we came into a swift confused wrangle about “writing well”. I said one must throw every ounce of oneself into expression; & that the instinctive writers scamped their work. “I don’t scamp my work” said Murry. “You say that only men who write well can say what they mean. My God Virginia—” but here L. came up, & Murry who was beginning on Jacob’s Room switched off to L.’s article on Moore. Thats typical: you dont go down to the root of things. Moore ought to have [been] smacked on the bottom for talking about Hardy as he did. That disgraceful sentence about Hardy wanting a place by Aeschylus—as if Hardy thought of any place except one by Rhoda Broughton—L. defended: said we must go. But I shant meet Murry for 10 years, & I want to finish the argument—Shall I come to the Adelphi? “Do.” “Not unless you’ll come to see me—I shall stand on my rights—” If you put it like that I will, he said, ferociously (yet so oleaginously, with a rolling lustful, or somehow leering, eye, so that I kept thinking how he’d come down in the world, spiritually, what tenthrate shillyshallying humbugs he must live among.) And we said goodbye for ten years. He liked me, he said; he had always liked me, & enjoyed meeting me like this. Off we went. How honest [?] & trusty & sterling Francis Birrell was in comparison!

So home that long cold exhausting journey for the last time. Some odds & ends of ideas came to me at the dinner. For one thing, how pungent people’s writing is compared with people’s flesh. We were all toothless insignificant amiable nonentities—we distinguished writers—Not a fig would I give for anyone’s praise or curse. Jack Squire, fat, & consequential; Eddie [Marsh] grown grey & fatherly; Nevinson beetroot coloured, & a little praising blood, & by inference himself; Tomlinson like the hard knob of a walking stick carved by a boy of 8; Blunden, despairing, drooping, crow-like, rather than Keats’ like. And did we really all believe in Blunden’s ‘genius’ Had we read his poems? How much sincerity was there in the whole thing? The truth is these collective gatherings must be floated by some conventional song, in which all can join, like He’s a jolly good fellow, which Squire started. Subtler impressions did occur to me, but I cant place them at the moment. Nor at the moment can I think of any farewell for this beautiful & lovable house, which has done us such a good turn for almost precisely nine years, so that, as I lay in bed last night, I nearly humanised it, & offered it my thanks. Old Mrs Turner will lie in my room now, & die there, it is predicted in two years time, among her china, her linen, & her great flowering wall papers, her father’s bureau, & several enormous wardrobes.

52 Tavistock Sqre

Saturday 5 April

Well, I will make a brief beginning—after 3 weeks silence. But it has not been silence at all. The noise of bus & taxi has worried me, & the noise of the human tongue has disturbed me, pleasantly & otherwise, & now I’m half asleep. Leonard working as usual.

Tonight, & one other, are the only nights I’ve been in this week; & all this afternoon went in talking to Mr Littell of the New Republic. But can I collect any first impressions? how Marchmont Street was like Paris; how my first night in the basement I saw the moon, with drifting clouds, & it was a terrifying & new [?] London moon; dreadful & exciting; as if the Richmond moon had been veiled. Oh the convenience of this place! & the loveliness too. We walk home from theatres, through the entrails of London. Why do I love it so much? … for it is stony hearted, & callous. The tradespeople don’t know one—but these disparaging remarks about the shopkeepers of Marchmont Street were interrupted & it is now Tuesday, April 15th, & L. & I have been having one of those melancholy middle aged summings up of a situation which occur from time to time, but are seldom recorded. Indeed most of life escapes, now I come to think of it: the texture of the ordinary day. We were to have had a quiet week, & I brought in Mortimer after Gerhardt last night, & he stayed & talked, aimlessly enough, about his money & his uncles; & so L. was desperately gloomy. Not a stroke of work done he says, since we came to London. This is largely imagination anticipating what people say must happen I think, though its true fish keep drifting into the net. Gerald Brenan back; Roger rampant to paint us; Morgan, elflike, mocking, aloof; Nessa & Duncan. Then there was Angelica’s accident which, for the psychology of it I should have described. Here was Nessa painting, & I answering the telephone. Positively bad news has to batter down optimism before it reaches one’s ears. Louie & Angelica have been knocked down by a motor & are in the Middlesex hospital. Having got that into my head, I had to repeat it to Nessa: to destroy all that simmering everyday comfort, with the smell of paint in the room, & Tom just coming up stairs to tea. She ran out & away from the telephone instinctively, ran round in an aimless way for a second. Then off they dashed & I after them, & so to the hospital, holding hands in the cab; & then sheer agony, for there was Louie, with her foot bandaged, & no Angelica; only an evasive nurse, parrying enquiries & taking us behind a screen where Angelica lay in bed, still, her face turned away. At last she moved. “She’s not dead” Duncan said. They both thought her dead. Then the young Dr came, & seemed silently & considerately but firmly to wish the mother to know that the case was hopeless: very grave; run over across the stomach. Yes there may have to be an operation. The surgeon had been sent for, & was now on the train. So Nessa went back to sit there, & I saw again that extraordinary look of anguish, dumb, not complaining, which I saw in Greece, I think, when she was ill. The feelings of the people who don’t talk express themselves thus. My feeling was “a pane of glass shelters me. I’m only allowed to look on at this.” at which I was half envious, half grieved. Moreover, I was sent off to find Clive, & so spared, or not allowed, the long wait there, in the chattering ward. Its a queer thing to come so close to agony as this, & just to be saved oneself. What I felt was, not sorrow or pity for Angelica, but that now Nessa would be an old woman; & this would be an indelible mark; & that death & tragedy had once more put down his paw, after letting us run a few paces. People never get over their early impressions of death I think. I always feel pursued. But theres an end of this. Nothing was wrong with Angelica—it was only a joke this time.

It takes a long time to form a habit—the habit of living at 52 Tavistock Sqre is not quite formed, but doing well. Already I have spent a week without being bothered by noise. One ceases to hear or to see. The dominant interests, I suppose assert themselves, make order by triumphing over the lesser. I notice things much less than I did 10 days ago. Soon I shall be making a habit of life in this room.

As for work, I have done the Dr chapter in my novel: & am furbishing up the Greeks; the usual depressions assail me. My criticism seems to me pretty flimsy sometimes. But there is no principle, except to follow this whimsical brain implicitly, pare away the ill fitting, till I have the shape exact, & if thats no good, it is the fault of God, after all. It is He that has made us, not we ourselves. I like that text. I don’t at all regret Richmond. Ethel Sands &c think I ought to mourn my beautiful room. But I now behold what is more beautiful—the Russell Imperial Hotel in the evening sunshine; pink & yellow like the Brighton front. I regret Saturday afternoons a little—How I meander & drivel!

Marjorie [Joad] is on her holiday. I keep shop of a morning. Dadie has been—a sensitive vain youth, with considerable grit in him, I judge. Sometimes the future appears perilous; problematical rather, the press that is, but always fruitful & interesting. I have said nothing of my speech at the London Group, which drew tears; or of a host of matters. On Thursday we go to Rodmell, the test of poor Nelly’s endurance. And now for the Elizabethans.

Grosvenor Sqre houses are precisely like saloons in Victorian Inns, or glorified boarding houses: handsome ill-proportioned rooms; gilt chairs, fretted tables; urns & vases depicted in pale mauve on the watered silk walls. Each wall has a piece—smugglers, coaching & so on; a little fire burns in a large grate; a glass screen fends it off, & there Nelly & Lord Bob perch, very chilly & formal, a dragoon bringing in little cakes.

Monday 5 May

This is the 29th anniversary of mothers death. I think it happened early on a Sunday morning, & I looked out of the nursery window & saw old Dr Seton walking away with his hands behind his back, as if to say It is finished, & then the doves descending, to peck in the road, I suppose, with a fall & descent of infinite peace. I was 13, & could fill a whole page & more with my impressions of that day, many of them ill received by me, & hidden from the grown ups, but very memorable on that account: how I laughed, for instance, behind the hand which was meant to hide my tears; & through the fingers saw the nurses sobbing.

But enough of death—its life that matters. We came back from Rodmell 7 days ago, after a royal Easter which Nelly survived heroically. After weeding I had to go in out of the sun; & how the quiet lapped me round! & then how dull I got, to be quite just: & how the beauty brimmed over me & steeped my nerves till they quivered, as I have seen a water plant quiver when the water overflowed it. (This is not right, but I must one day express that sensation). Then my troubles with the noise here—did I have a headache, or what? I Monday May 26th quite forget, being now come back again from Rodmell for the 2nd time, & using up my fidgets in the old way. For it seems to me that this diary may die of London, if I’m not careful.

London is enchanting. I step out upon a tawny coloured magic carpet, it seems, & get carried into beauty without raising a finger. The nights are amazing, with all the white porticoes & broad silent avenues. And people pop in & out, lightly, divertingly like rabbits; & I look down Southampton Row, wet as a seal’s back or red & yellow with sunshine, & watch the omnibus going & coming, & hear the old crazy organs. One of these days I will write about London, & how it takes up the private life & carries it on, without any effort. Faces passing lift up my mind; prevent it from settling, as it does in the stillness at Rodmell.

But my mind is full of The Hours. I am now saying that I will write at it for 4 months, June, July, August & September, & then it will be done, & I shall put it away for three months, during which I shall finish my essays; & then that will be—October, November, December—January: & I shall revise it January February March April; & in April my essays will come out; & in May my novel. Such is my programme. It is reeling off my mind fast & free now; as ever since the crisis of August last, which I count the beginning of it, it has gone quick, being much interrupted though. It is becoming more analytical & human I think; less lyrical; but I feel as if I had loosed the bonds pretty completely & could pour everything in. If so—good. Reading it remains. I aim at 80,000 words this time. And I like London for writing it, partly because, as I say, life upholds one; & with my squirrel cage mind, its a great thing to be stopped circling. Then to see human beings freely & quickly is an infinite gain to me. And I can dart in & out & refresh my stagnancy.

I have left the whole of society unrecorded. Tidmarsh, Cambridge, & now Rodmell: We had a queer little party here the other day—when the sinister & pedagogic Tom cut a queer figure. I cannot wholly free myself from suspicions about him—at the worst they only amount to calling him an American schoolmaster: a very vain man. He took me to Lear (unrecorded) & we both jeered & despised; & now he comes out in the Criterion with solemn & stately rebuke of those who jeer & despise. I taxed him, lightly with this: he sat tight & said that he meant what he wrote: then what does he mean by what he says? God knows. There’s something hole & cornerish, biting in the back, suspicious, elaborate, uneasy, about him: much would be liberated by a douche of pure praise, which he can scarcely hope to get. There was Philip Ritchie with his very clear cut nose. And shant I have a bath? as we’ve Dr Glover coming to discuss the P.S.S. & then put on my new red dress? Leonard thinks less well of me for powdering my nose, & spending money on dress. Never mind. I adore Leonard.

Saturday 14 June

Back from Whitsun at Rodmell, & just off to sit in Gordon Sqre with Nessa & Angelica; so my diary will be defrauded; stifled by too much life. The unrecorded clogs my pen. Roger’s story at the Etoile the other night was perhaps my most sensational piece of news. “Something dreadful has happened to me” he said, staring very steadily with his great wide open eyes. At which I, being frivolous, laughed. “But it was dreadful,” upon wh. to the credit of my heart, it stopped beating, expecting cancer. And then he told me the story of the mad French peasant woman who shot herself for love of him on the cliff at Havre looking towards England. “And so my last chance of happiness is gone” said Roger. And so we walked town Tottenham Court Rd in the pouring rain, I protesting affection, & Roger saying that he was fated; he was cursed; he had never had more than 3 weeks happiness in his life. “I have pleasure—I enjoy my friends—but no happiness.” I see what he means. And he’s so young, he says—& so fond of women. To which Nessa adds, pertinently, that he’ll recover, & do it again. For of course we cant help becoming cynical & merry. To hear us, gulls like Ott. (who’s been here contaminating the June night) would think we were heartless. But how long can Roger love a woman without driving her mad? This creature thought he laughed at her, seeing that he dyed vests yellow & sent them to her, telling her to turn to the East & put them on, as a cure for tuberculosis. And he sent her pictures of negro sculpture. For some reason, against my habit, I feel as if I should like to write a story of this.

Saturday 21 June

I am oh so sleepy; in fact just woken from a hot drowse. This week is Apostles week, & we went to a disillusioned party last night, after which L. contemplated, seriously, some scientific form of suicide. I have my moods too. If I weren’t so sleepy, I would write about the soul. I think its time to cancel that vow against soul description. What was I going to say? Something about the violent moods of my soul. How describe them, even with a waking mind? I think I grow more & more poetic. Perhaps I restrained it, & now, like a plant in a pot, it begins to crack the earthenware. Often I feel the different aspects of life bursting my mind asunder. Morgan is too restrained in his new book perhaps. I mean, what’s the use of facts at our time of life? Why build these careful cocoons [?]: why not say straight out—yes, but what?

I met Sydney Waterlow last night, & was monolithic on purpose,—a bad thing to be; but I feared gushing & depths, & intended to keep myself free. He no doubt prescribes speaking out. Murry is married again; & I don’t often think of Katherine with any vividness.

I look forward with a little alarm to Dadie coming, chiefly I think that it commits us more seriously. But that will wear off soon. It seems to me the beginning of ten years of very hard work, because, for one thing, I should hate failure, & not to fail, we must keep on pressing forward, thinking, planning, imagining, letter writing, asking Vita to write, &c &c Siegfried [Sassoon] to write, accepting Nancy Cunard; I dont see how Marjorie will fit in, altogether, & rather anticipate some rearrangement. So far, no gossip & no soul. Yet I’ve seen—Bob, Desmond, Lytton, Sebastian, Dorothy Bussy, Mrs Eliot—this last making me almost vomit, so scented, so powdered, so egotistic, so morbid, so weakly; & I already stale & talk sore with the rest of our doings.

I am writing, writing, & see my way clear to the end now, & so shall gallop to it, somehow or other. But 1 am invaded by drowsiness; & cant write out what I had in my head to write before tea; can’t even remember what it was; but shall go down to the basement where L. is printing, & then round to Gordon Sqre & then home to dinner, & then finish Romeo & Juliet by the open window, in spite of the noise, with the lovely view, & so to sleep; & to wake & all the rest of it.

Thursday 3 July

This is Dadie’s second day. I looked out of my window, dressing, yesterday & saw him in grey with black bowler, Leonard, & Grizzle marching to the pillar box. Marjorie is ill, which is all to the good: business is brisk; I sat in the basement two days ago & took £5. Undoubtedly business is increasing—all divine fun. But I have let Garsington languish like a decaying wreath on my pen. That was last Sunday. And, treading close on Garsington were the enamelled Lady Colefax, actually in this room, like a cheap bunch of artificial cherries, yet, loyal, hard, living on a burnished plate of facts: as for example Wembley: “a man who was in Canada tells me” “I happened to know the Editor of the Daily Express’ all the time slightly trembling, in fear; inquisitive; not at all able to sink to the depths; but a superb skimmer of the surface; which is bright, I suppose, & foam tipped. I can’t bring myself to despise this gull as I ought. But aristocrats, worldlings, for all their surface polish, are empty, slippery, coat the mind with sugar & butter, & make it slippery too. Solid Lord Berners, who might have [been] cleft from an oak knot, had to tell stories, could not endure silence, & much preferred laughter to thought: amiable characteristics, Clive says. To me, after a time, laborious & depressing. Good prim priggish bright eyed Peter [F. L. Lucas] is a cut above that. I met him at Clive’s, & he sliced English literature up very prettily, with a pocket knife. (Here Dadie came in & I had to make him tea; then we walked in the square in the rain; then called on the Stracheys, & I heard a good deal about Lord Lytton’s blue dressing gown from Lady Strachey.)

Saturday 5 July

Just back, not from the 1917 Club; but from Knole, where indeed I was invited to lunch alone with his Lordship. His lordship lives in the kernel of a vast nut. You perambulate miles of galleries; skip endless treasures—chairs that Shakespeare might have sat on—tapestries, pictures, floors made of the halves of oaks; & penetrate at length to a round shiny table with a cover laid for one. A dozen glasses form a circle each with a red rose in it. What can one human being do to decorate itself in such a setting? One feels that one ought to be an elephant able to consume flocks & be hung about with whole blossoming trees—whereas one solitary peer sits lunching by himself in the centre, with his napkin folded into the shape of a lotus flower. Obviously, I did not keep my human values & my aesthetic values distinct. Knole is a conglomeration of buildings half as big as Cambridge I daresay; if you stuck Trinity Clare & King’s together you might approximate. But the extremities & indeed the inward parts are gone dead. Ropes fence off half the rooms; the chairs & the pictures look preserved; life has left them. Not for a hundred years have the retainers sat down to dinner in the great hall. Then there is Mary Stuart’s altar, where she prayed before execution. “An ancestor of ours took her the death warrant” said Vita. All these ancestors & centuries, & silver & gold, have bred a perfect body. She is stag like, or race horse like, save for the face, which pouts, & has no very sharp brain. But as a body hers is perfection. So many rare & curious objects hit one’s brain like pellets which perhaps may unfold later. I cut no very intelligent sight seer beside Geoffrey Scott,—There was Lady Gerald Wellesley, & we motored down through Kent, which Vita loves; all very free & easy, supple jointed as the aristocrat is; no inhibitions, no false reserves; anything can be said; but as usual, that fatal simplicity or rigidity of mind which makes it seem all a little unshaded, & empty. More mind, my God— (I’m too jangled even to quote correctly). As a setting & preparation I always feel this, or Ottoline’s, or any aristocrat’s that I know, to be perfection. But one waits, & nothing happens. Not but what Harold [Nicolson], sitting on the iron bar before the great burning logs, gently butting the tassel from the baldaquin, or whatever its called, with his forehead, wasn’t trusty & honest & vigorous. He wore a blue velvet jacket. I liked him better than the suaver & suppler Geoffrey. I rather suspect Geoffrey suspected me; smelt me to be of his herd, & not the aristocrats, & caught himself winking at me, like a couple of ragamuffins, & did not like to be reminded of his ragamuffin days. He referred bitterly to Florence & Berensons & that awful society. But its the breeding of Vita’s that I took away with me as an impression, carrying her & Knole in my eye as I travelled up with the lower middle classes, through slums. There is Knole, capable of housing all the desperate poor of Judd Street, & with only that one solitary earl in the kernel.

Marjorie has pneumonia; & we are likely to be worked off our feet. MSS pour in; & this press becomes a serious business.

Saturday 2 August

Here we are at Rodmell, & I with 20 minutes to fill in before dinner. A feeling of depression is on me, as if we were old & near the end of all things. It must be the change from London & incessant occupation. Then, being at a low ebb with my book—the death of Septimus,—I begin to count myself a failure. Now the point of the Press is that it entirely prevents brooding, & gives me something solid to fall back on. Anyhow, if I can’t write, I can make other people write: I can build up a business. The country is like a convent. The soul swims to the top. Julian has just been & gone, a tall young man, who, inveterately believing myself to be young as I do, seems to me like a younger brother: anyhow we sit & chatter, as easily as can be. Its all so much the same—his school continues Thoby’s school. He tells me about boys & masters as Thoby used to. It interests me just in the same way. He’s a sensitive, very quick witted, rather combative boy; full of Wells, & discoveries, & the future of the world. And, being of my own blood, easily understood—going to be very tall, & go to the Bar, I daresay. Nevertheless, in spite of the grumbling with which this began, honestly I don’t feel old; & its a question of getting up my steam again in writing. If only I could get into my vein & work it thoroughly deeply easily, instead of hacking out this miserable 200 words a day, And then, as the manuscript grows, I have the old fear of it. I shall read it & find it pale. I shall prove the truth of Murry’s saying, that there’s no way of going on after Jacob’s Room. Yet if this book proves anything, it proves that I can only write along those lines, & shall never desert them, but explore further & further, & shall, heaven be praised, never bore myself an instant. But this slight depression—what is it? I think I could cure it by crossing the channel, & writing nothing for a week. I want to see something going on busily without help from me: a French market town for example. Indeed, have I the energy, I’ll cross to Dieppe; or compromise by exploring Sussex on a motor bus. August ought to be hot. Deluges descend. We sheltered under a haystack today. But oh the delicacy & complexity of the soul—for, haven’t I begun to tap her & listen to her breathing after all? A change of house makes me oscillate for days. And thats life; thats wholesome. Never to quiver is the lot of Mr Allinson [Allison], Mrs Hawkesford, & Jack Squire. In two or three days, acclimatised, started, reading & writing, no more of this will exist. And if we didn’t live venturously, plucking the wild goat by the beard, & trembling over precipices, we should never be depressed, I’ve no doubt; but already should be faded, fatalistic & aged.

Sunday 3 August

Now its already going, my silver mist, & I don’t quite recognise myself of yesterday. L. has been telling me about Germany, & reparations, how money is paid. Lord what a weak brain I have—like an unused muscle. He talks; & the facts come in, & I can’t deal with them. But by dint of very painful brain exercises, perhaps I understand a little more than Nelly of the International situation. And L. understands it all—picks up all these points out of the daily paper absolutely instantly, has them connected, ready to produce. Sometimes I think my brain & his are of different orders. Were it not for my flash of imagination, & this turn for books, I should be a very ordinary woman. No faculty of mine is really very strong.

But its a question of work. I am already a good deal pulled together by sticking at my books: my 250 words of fiction first, & then a systematic beginning, I daresay the 80th, upon the Common Reader, who might be finished in a flash I think, did I see the chance to flash & have done with it. But there’s a lot of work in these things. It strikes me, I must now read Pilgrim’s Progress: Mrs Hutchinson. Addison 1672-1719
Defoe 1659-1731
Pepys 1660
Evelyn 1660 And should I demolish Richardson? whom I’ve never read. Yes, I’ll run through the rain into the house & see if Clarissa is there. But thats a block out of my day, a long long novel. Then I must read the Medea. I must read a little translated Plato.

Friday 15 August

Into all these calculations, broke the death of Conrad, followed by a wire from the Lit. Sup. earnestly asking me kindly to do a leader on him, which flattered & loyal, but grudgingly, I did; & its out; & that number of the Lit. Sup. corrupted for me (for I cant, & never shall be able to, read my own writings. Moreover, now little Walkley’s on the war path again I expect a bite next Wednesday). Yet I have never never worked so hard. For, having to do a leader in 5 days, I made hay after tea—& couldn’t distinguish tea hay from morning hay either. So doesn’t this give me two extra hours for critical works anyhow (as Logan calls them)? So I’m trying it—my fiction before lunch, & then essays after tea. For I see that Mrs Dalloway is going to stretch beyond October. In my forecasts I always forgot some most important intervening scenes: I think I can go straight at the grand party & so end; forgetting Septimus, which is a very intense & ticklish business, & jumping Peter Walsh eating his dinner, which may be some obstacle too. But I like going from one lighted room to another, such is my brain to me; lighted rooms; & the walks in the fields are corridors; & now to day I’m lying & thinking. By the way, why is poetry wholly an elderly taste? When I was 20, in spite of Thoby who used to be so pressing & exacting, I could not for the life of me read Shakespeare for pleasure; now it lights me as I walk to think I have 2 acts of King John tonight, & shall next read Richard the 2nd. It is poetry that I want now—long poems. Indeed I’m thinking of reading [Thomson’s] The Seasons. I want the concentration & the romance, & the words all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose. Yet this must be the very opposite to what people say. When I was 20 I liked 18th Century prose; I liked Hakluyt, Merimée. I read masses of Carlyle, Scott’s life & letters, Gibbon, all sorts of two volume biographies, & Shelley. Now its poetry I want, so I repeat like a tipsy sailor in front of a public house.

We went to Charleston, & the Keynes’ (so they are now called) with Robertson in attendance came here. Lydia (I called her Rezia by mistake) leaves crumbs sticking to her face. And Maynard is grown very thick & opulent; but I like him for his innocency. At Charleston theres the fat boy in split blue cotton trousers—Quentin that is; almost a street sight, now that hes back, fatter than ever. Julian rather nervous & fine drawn in comparison; & old Roger lean, brown, & truculent, attacking first Shaw, then Conrad, & taking L.’s journalism as literally & bellicosely as usual. O these Quakers! I don’t think he’s very happy though, & that affair at Havre gnaws at him, in the midst of family life, I’ve no doubt.

I dont often trouble now to describe cornfields & groups of harvesting women in loose blues & reds & little staring yellow frocked girls. But thats not my eyes’ fault: coming back the other evening from Charleston, again all my nerves stood upright, flushed, electrified (whats the word?) with the sheer beauty—beauty abounding & superabounding, so that one almost resents it, not being capable of catching it all, & holding it all at the moment. This progress through life is made immensely interesting by trying to grasp all these developments as one passes. I feel as if I were putting out my fingers tentatively on (here is Leonard, who has ordered me a trap in which to drive Dadie to Tilton tomorrow) either side as I grope down a tunnel, rough with odds & ends. And I dont describe encounters with herds of Aldemeys anymore—though this would have been necessary some years ago—how they barked & belled like stags round Grizzle; & how I waved my stick & stood at bay; & thought of Homer as they came flourishing & trampling towards me: some mimic battle. Grizzle grew more & more insolent & excited & skirmished about yapping. Ajax? That Greek, for all my ignorance, has worked its way into me.

Mayor is printing her second edition, Stephen doing very well, Leys publishing. Nancy Cunard estimating, Mrs Devonshire … rejecting; business very brisk all round, I issuing a circular to all exhibitors at the Royal Academy of Duncan’s book. Marjorie meanwhile convalesces, presumably, & the question of her future with us comes up to be decided.

Sunday 7 September

It is a disgrace that I write nothing, or if I write, write sloppily, using nothing but present participles. I find them very useful in my last lap of Mrs D. There I am now—at last at the party, which is to begin in the kitchen, & climb slowly upstairs. It is to be a most complicated spirited solid piece, knitting together everything & ending on three notes, at different stages of the staircase, each saying something to sum up Clarissa. Who shall say these things? Peter, Richard, & Sally Seton perhaps: but I don’t want to tie myself down to that yet. Now I do think this might be the best of my endings, & come off, perhaps. But I have still to read the first chapters, & confess to dreading the madness rather; & being clever. However, I’m sure I’ve now got to work with my pick at my seam, if only because my metaphors come free, as they do here. Suppose one can keep the quality of a sketch in a finished & composed work? That is my endeavour. Anyhow, none can help & none can hinder me any more. I’ve been in for a shower of compliments too from The Times, Richmond rather touching me by saying that he gives way to my novel with all the will in the world. I should like him to read my fiction, & always suppose he doesn’t.

We had Dadie twice to stay; Clive & Mary yesterday; I slept a night at Charleston; L. went to Yorkshire: rather an odd disjointed wet summer, with people dropping in, Nelly rather moping, but loyal, Asheham offered us one evening by Mr Gunn, as he was poking his corn cocks, & looking at their blackness. I was tempted after 24 hours to buy it. We might get it for £1,500. But then it is dark & damp; & the loveliness might not quite compensate. The garden here flourishes. We put off deciding. We could let it of course, which we could not this, so that to fear being tied is no doubt foolish. Norman Leys was here one night; making it quite plain that only certain sorts of people could pass the eye of his needle; & paring one down very quick; one of these good sturdy uncompromising men, whom M⁠[argaret]. Ll⁠[ewelyn], D⁠[avies]. would like, very able, trusty; paying no attention to art of any kind, & enforcing his virtue at every turn—but it is virtue of course. “They belong to the gentlemanly side of the family…” Distrusts Oxford. Wishes to write as clearly as he can, hopes to live in the East end & educate working men. Wife spends £150 on garden; this distressing, but her only pleasure. Doesn’t like taking fees, wh. mean that children go without boots. Thought me Thackeray’s daughter & was only reassured when I cleared away dinner, & talked of religion, morality, his quarrel with the Colonial office, how he was besieged; protests too much in short; but a very nice man.

Monday 15 September

Here I am waiting for L. to come back from London, & at this hour, having been wounded last year when he was late, I always feel the old wound twingeing. He has been seeing Nancy Cunard, so I expect a fair gossip. Vita was here for Sunday, gliding down the village in her large new blue Austin car, which she manages consummately. She was dressed in ringed yellow jersey, & large hat, & had a dressing case all full of silver & night gowns wrapped in tissue. Nelly said “If only she weren’t an honourable!” & couldn’t take her hot water. But I like her being honourable, & she is it; a perfect lady, with all the dash & courage of the aristocracy, & less of its childishness than I expected. She left with us a story which really interests me rather. I see my own face in it, its true. But she has shed the old verbiage, & come to terms with some sort of glimmer of art; so I think; & indeed, I rather marvel at her skill, & sensibility; for is she not mother, wife, great lady, hostess, as well as scribbling? How little I do of all that: my brain would never let me milk it to the tune of 20,000 words in a fortnight, & so I must lack some central vigour, I imagine. Here I am, peering across Vita at my blessed Mrs Dalloway; & can’t stop, of a night, thinking of the next scene, & how I’m to wind up. Vita, to attempt a return, is like an over ripe grape in features, moustached, pouting, will be a little heavy; meanwhile, she strides on fine legs, in a well cut skirt, & though embarrassing at breakfast, has a manly good sense & simplicity about her which both L. & I find satisfactory. Oh yes, I like her; could tack her on to my equipage for all time; & suppose if life allowed, this might be a friendship of a sort. The clock strikes 7, & I wonder if I hear Leonard, above the grey wild wind, talking to Nelly in the kitchen. Grizzle pricks a ear; lies flat again. He works & works. Here has the postman been, making me choke a little, born sentimentalist that I am, by hoping so honestly & sincerely that Mr Woolf would address the ILP at Lewes on the League of Nations? This sort of thing counts: Does Murry, the professor of the soul, talk to postmen about the League of Nations? I like their trust & admiration; & the swing from Knole & Lord Sackville’s invitation (J’s R his favourite novel) to postmen getting up the local meetings, which suddenly seem to me, matters of the highest importance. All this confirms me in thinking that we’re splinters & mosaics; not, as they used to hold, immaculate, monolithic, consistent wholes. How I scribble; & what use will this be for my great memoir writing age?

With Vita we discussed the murder of Mr Joshua, Ottoline, literature. Then she took us to Charleston—& how one’s world spins round—it looked all very grey & shabby & loosely cut in the light of her presence. As for Monks House, it became a ruined barn, & we picknicking in the rubbish heap. And then I regained my zest for life about an hour later. Now to the house, waiting for L.

Monday 29 September

A fortnight later: writing partly to test my new penkala (professing fountain qualities) partly to exorcise my demon. Only Karin & Ann: only a hole blown in my last chapter. There I was swimming in the highest ether known to me, & thinking I’d finish by Thursday; Lottie suggests to Karin we’d like to have Ann: Karin interprets my polite refusal to her own advantage & comes down herself on Saturday, blowing everything to smithereens. More & more am I solitary; the pain of these upheavals is incalculable; & I cant explain it either. She saw nothing. “Disturbing the flow of inspiration?” she said this morning, having shouted outside the door till I had to fetch cotton wool. And its down in ruins my house; my wings broken; & I left on the bare ground. Odd, very odd, how violent this has become. I dread even going back to London. True, I’m in the crisis, & if this last chapter spoils, the book spoils. But what cares Karin! Thats the rub. She slightly chortles to plant us with some of her burdens & makes off well pleased at having got her way. Didn’t I years ago record in one of these very volumes that she’d get what can be got by asking, nothing more? It is a case of spiritual deafness: she hears nothing of peoples thoughts; that is why she is, as she says unhappy; & its an affliction, not her fault; certainly our misfortune. Here I am with my wrecked week—for how serene & lovely like a Lapland night was our last week together—feeling that I ought to go in & be a good aunt—wh. I’m not by nature: ought to ask Daisy what she wants; & by rights I fill these moments full of Mrs Dalloway’s party for tomorrows writing. The only solution is to stay on alone over Thursday, & try my luck. A bad night (K.’s doing again) may partly account. But how entirely I live in my imagination; how completely depend upon spurts of thought, coming as I walk, as I sit; things churning up in my mind & so making a perpetual pageant, which is to me my happiness. This brew cant sort with nondescript people. These wails must now have ending, partly because I cannot see, & my hand shakes, having carried my bag from Lewes, where I sat on the castle top, where an old man was brushing leaves, & told me how to cure Lumbago; you tie a skein of silk round you; the silk costs 3 pence. I saw British canoes, & the oldest plough in Sussex 1750 found at Rodmell, & a suit of armour said to have been worn at Seringapatam. All this I should like to write about, I think.

And of course children are wonderful & charming creatures. I’ve had Ann in talking about the white seal, & wanting me to read to her. And how Karin manages to be so aloof I can’t think. There’s a quality in their minds to me very adorable: to be alone with them, & see them day to day would be an extraordinary experience. They have what no grown up has—that directness—chatter, chatter chatter, on Ann goes, in a kind of world of her own, with its seals & dogs; happy because she’s going to have cocoa tonight, & go blackberrying tomorrow: the walls of her mind all hung round with such bright vivid things, & she doesn’t see what we see. But I’m forgetting Marjorie & only scribble till, as I hope in 15 minutes, the gate goes & L. comes. We have lost £100 a year, & he need no longer attend the office—a great gain. Now I hope for his book. I also begin to cherish dreams of retiring to a lovely house in the country, & there writing—once we get the press on its feet, & Dadie attendant. This recalls Marjorie. I thought her flimsy & cheap in 1917, enough, at first, with this harping on the niceness or nastiness of young men, which becomes so dreary. Then she said, I’ve left Cyril. The upshot of the affair is that we have to engage her as sec. at £3 a week. She depends absolutely on that. Then where is she to live? in Bloomsbury, with a girl—Its all chaotic & precipitous, & like a modern novel; but I suppose she will marry Tom Marshall.

Friday 17 October

It is disgraceful. I did run up stairs thinking I’d make time to enter that astounding fact—the last words of the last page of Mrs Dalloway; but was interrupted. Anyhow I did them a week ago yesterday. “For there she was.” & I felt glad to be quit of it, for it has been a strain the last weeks, yet fresher in the head; with less I mean of the usual feeling that I’ve shaved through, & just kept my feet on the tight rope. I feel indeed rather more fully relieved of my meaning than usual—whether this will stand when I re-read is doubtful. But in some ways this book is a feat; finished without break from illness, wh. is an exception; & written really, in one year; & finally, written from the end of March to the 8th of October without more than a few days break for writing journalism. So it may differ from the others. Anyhow, I feel that I have exorcised the spell wh. Murry & others said I had laid myself under after Jacob’s Room. The only difficulty is to hold myself back from writing others. My cul-de-sac, as they called it, stretches so far, & shows such vistas. I see already The Old Man.

But enough, enough—yet of what should I write here except my writing? Odd how conventional morality always encroaches. One must not talk of oneself &c; one must not be vain &c. Even in complete privacy these ghosts slip between me & the page. But I must here break off to go to the post, down that wonderful lamplit street, which has become more lovely more unreal through my double windows. And I sit shielded within. This house is now perfect. The studio the best study I’ve ever had.

The thought of Katherine Mansfield comes to me—as usual rather reprehensibly—first wishing she could see Southampton Row, thinking of the dulness of her death, lying there at Fontainebleau—an end where there was no end, & then thinking yes, if she’d lived, she’d have written on, & people would have seen that I was the more gifted—that wd. only have become more & more apparent. Indeed, so I suppose it would. I think of her in this way off & on—that strange ghost, with the eyes far apart, & the drawn mouth, dragging herself across her room. And Murry married again to a woman who spends an hour in the W.C. & so the Anreps have turned them out. Murry whines publicly for a flat in the Adelphi. Thats a sordid page of my life by the way, Murry. But I stick to it; K. & I had our relationship; & never again shall I have one like it.

Lytton dined here the other night—a successful evening. Oh I was right to be in love with him 12 or 15 years ago. It is an exquisite symphony his nature when all the violins get playing as they did the other night; so deep, so fantastic. We rambled easily. He is in love again with Philip Ritchie. And hurt, a little; still capable of pain; but knows it now ridiculous, which hurts him too. & he feels it. For when I asked if we could help he was touched. We talked of his writing, & I think now he will write another book; of mine; of the School of Proust, he said; then of Maynard; one side of him detestable; should have married Barbara; grown fat; of Nessa’s picture, which he may buy (I want to see Nessa at this moment, & she’s gone to Norfolk to look at a house, & I hope she won’t take it, & leave London & Charleston & live till she dies, with her children painting in Norfolk & I here, & L. may go to India— thats been brooding over me since I came back & he told me at tea the first afternoon, Saturday, how he’d been asked to go by the ILP & wanted very much to go, & take a week off to see Hambantota which a little hurt me. But I said to myself this is a side of life I’ve not lain on. I must face that too. Still nothing has been heard, though I still a little dread the mornings post, but this is concealed from L.—if he went, it would be after the Election, in Nov. Yes, after the Election, for owing to the defeat of the Govt, in the Campbell Case, we are now condemned to a dose of lies every morning: the usual yearly schoolboys wrangle has begun. If I were still a feminist, I should make capital out of the wrangle. But I have travelled on—as K.M. said to me, she saw me as a ship far out at sea. But K.M. always said affectionate admiring things to me, poor woman, whom in my own way I suppose I loved. Human affections are not to be called by very strong, or rather very positive names, I think. Heres poor old Jacques writing to me, & Gwen wants to come & see me, after 11 years: a relationship revived by the art of the pen, across France. I rather dread revivals: partly vanity; you’re fatter, less beautiful; changed; so self-conscious [?] am I; & then—the effort. Seeing people, now I see them so easily, is an effort. Why——

Phil Baker is standing as a Labour candidate. Irene will have his teeth filed & get him in—(a scrap of real dialogue). Did I put down my progress towards Perpetual Immortality (to quote one of Peggy Webling’s wishes as a child—a Brief I’m doing, or should be doing?) I asked Todd £10 for 1,000 words: she orders 4 articles at that fee: Harper wishes me (I think) to write an American Browns & Bennetts; & Vogue, (via Dadie) is going to take up Mrs Woolf, to boom her: &—&—&—So very likely this time next year I shall be one of those people who are, so father said, in the little circle of London Society which represents the Apostles, I think, on a larger scale. Or does this no longer exist? To know everyone worth knowing. I can just see what he meant; just imagine being in that position—if women can be. Lytton is: Maynard; Ld Balfour; not perhaps Hardy. Which reminds me I ought to dash in Mrs Hardy in a nursing home, having had her tumour cut out; with Miss Charlotte Mew. Nothing very exciting, even as a boast not very exciting now. H. remembers your father: did not like many people, but was fond of him; talks of him often. Would like to know you. But I cant easily fit into that relation; the daughter grateful for old compliments to her father. Yet I should like to see him; to hear him—say something. But what? One or two words about a flower, or a view, or a garden chair, perhaps.

(It strikes me that in this book I practise writing; do my scales; yes & work at certain effects. I daresay I practised Jacob here,—& Mrs D. & shall invent my next book here; for here I write merely in the spirit—great fun it is too, & old V. of 1940 will see something in it too. She will be a woman who can see, old V.: everything—more than I can I think. But I’m tired now.)

Saturday 1 November

I must make some notes of work; for now I must buckle to. The question is how to get the 2 books done. I am going to skate rapidly over Mrs D. but it will take time. No: I cannot say anything much to the point, for what I must do is to experiment next week; how much revision is needed, & how much time it takes. I am very set on getting my essays out before my novel. Yesterday I had tea in Mary’s room & saw the red lighted tugs go past & heard the swish of the river: Mary in black with lotus leaves round her neck. If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure—the relationship so secret & private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it? truthfully? As I think, this diary writing has greatly helped my style; loosened the ligatures.

We had a party the other night—S. Sassoon; R. Mortimer, Duncan, Vanessa. Nancy Cunard should have come—the little anxious flibbertigibbet with the startled honest eyes, & all the green stones hung about her. We met at Raymond’s, & she slipped into easy desperate-sounding chatter, as if she didn’t mind saying everything—everything—had no shadows no secret places—lived like a lizard in the sun, & yet was by nature for the shade. And I should be re-reading her poem to choose a title. As usual, I am, or think myself, snowed under with work to do; & this is cut into by hours of solid pleasure—going to the pictures tonight; & Suggia on Monday. For its music I want; to stimulate & suggest.

We went to Hamspray on a wet misty day, & saw what the view might be in the sun; a flat meadow with trees in groups like people talking leading to the downs. We walked to the top with Carrington; but the young men, P. Ritchie & Senhouse, are a little simple minded—for Lytton likes that sort, & thus blankets himself. Carrington was as if recently beaten by Ralph. Is she really rather dull, I asked myself? or merely a sun flower out of the sun? We came home in the rain, & a man stopped L. to ask if his dog was a bitch: an angler, he was, & I wanted to ask had he caught a fish. We travelled down with Sydney. Being rather ashamed of my temper—for one should never wall off people on theory—I was affable, yet discreet. Talked the whole time, but did not suggest future meetings. We hit it off successfully I think. Did I want John Franklin to be lenient to Mrs Dalloway? Not, I think, very seriously, & I see no harm in being faithful to old semi-friendships. His little boy is what he cares for, I imagine; & there was less protestation than usual. Murry is “tremendous” on Keats & Sh⁠[akespea]⁠re; Lawrence “tremendous” too; but a megalomaniac. They started a publishing house, like ours; which went smash, or never started, which had killed Kot’s hopes; & Lawrence, who thought the whole of London would flock after him to Mexico, has retired there with Brett alone. All this Sydney sees clearly & comicly, but intimates that there are depths beneath. I rather think the poor monster is clambering out, though. Now, for goodness sake, let me read a little—It is reading, not writing, that suffers in London—

Tuesday 18 November

Lady Colefax interrupts. I ask her to call me Virginia—so there.

What I was going to say was that I think writing must be formal. The art must be respected. This struck me reading some of my notes here, for, if one lets the mind run loose, it becomes egotistic: personal, which I detest; like Robert Graves. At the same time the irregular fire must be there; & perhaps to loose it, one must begin by being chaotic, but not appear in public like that. I am driving my way through the mad chapters of Mrs D. My wonder is whether the book would have been better without them. But this is an afterthought, consequent upon learning how to deal with her. Always I think at the end, I see how the whole ought to have been written.

Lady Colefax has made me tremble. I cannot write. We were, I was rather, at Mary’s farewell party last night, & suffer today— having, first, broken my watch, at 3.15 owing to a policeman calling; I having hotted water over the fire in the basement, being infinitely cold & as if rolled in sand, which misery still persists. The upper classes pretended to be clever. Duff Cooper, Lady Diana & all that set, as they say; & my chief amusement came from seeing them as a set. That is the only merit of these parties, that individuals compose differently from what they do in private. One sees groups; gets wholes; general impressions: from the many things being combined. No doubt Proust could say what I mean—that great writer whom I cannot read when I’m correcting, so persuasive is he. He makes it seem easy to write well; which only means that one is slipping along on borrowed skates. So Henry James gives one an unreal impetus; witness my writing after reading him, & Miss Bosanquet.

Dadie came back yesterday & we had a jolly afternoon—oh infinitely better than a party at River House!—lie though I did to Mary on the telephone, doing up Freud. I in two jackets, for it is freezing, & hair down; he in shirtsleeves. Thus one gets to know people; sucks the marrow out, not poised on the edge of a chair on the slippery floor, trying to laugh, & being spurred by wine & sugar cakes. Clive of course changes into an upper class man very loud, familiar, & dashing at once. Lytton sits in his own green shade, only emerging when the gentle youths come in. Philip Ritchie thinks rather too highly of himself, as notice from Lytton always makes them. I was impressed by Nessa, who went to this party for which we were all titivating & dressing up, in her old red brown dress which I think she made herself. (Thinking it over, I believe its getting the rhythm in writing that matters. Could I get my tomorrow mornings rhythm right—take the skip of my sentence at the right moment—I should reel it off;—there is a good deal in this which I should like to think out; its not style exactly—the right words—its a way of levitating the thought out of one—Thank God I hear L.’s key: Grizzle gets up & stands still: now wags; & then trots to the door. A very cold damp foggy night.) But I was saying that I admired Nessa’s utter independence of what people say, which triumphs, over all the tubular cropheads. Elizabeth

Saturday 13 December

Ponsonby, no doubt I meant to add. But that is all faded out. And this diary may die, not of London, but of the Press. For 14 days we have been in the thick of a long press revolution—Dadie going Marjorie going, Marjorie staying, Angus Davidson coming. That is the final result, but achieved only at the cost of 40 million words. For my own part, I could never see Dadie as a permanent partner, Dadie in his silver grey suits, pink shirts, with his powdered pink & white face, his nerves, his manners, his love of praise. Angus, however, after 3 days, already seems to me permanent & dependable. As I always talk of money here, & compliments & rebuffs, first I will own that my pamphlet is the worst seller of them all, then that Harper’s offer me “at least £50” for a Times leader article! And once upon a time I was trying to get £15 out of Jack Squire! So I am suggesting 3 articles a year, to Richmond; & this, if it fructifies, will help us on the road to giving up the Nation, to which goal I look always, though the place has many perquisites.

I am now galloping over Mrs Dalloway, re-typing it entirely from the start, which is more or less what I did with the V.O. a good method, I believe, as thus one works with a wet brush over the whole, & joins parts separately composed & gone dry. Really & honestly I think it the most satisfactory of my novels (but have not read it coldbloodedly yet). The reviewers will say that it is disjointed because of the mad scenes not connecting with the Dalloway scenes. And I suppose there is some superficial glittery writing. But is it “unreal”? Is it mere accomplishment? I think not. And as I think I said before, it seems to leave me plunged deep in the richest strata of my mind. I can write & write & write now: the happiest feeling in the world.

A London winter is full of bright rooms, passages through dark streets to scenes of brilliancy; but I only recall tea’s with Ethel Sands, a lunch with Ly Colefax, Sybil by the way she is now, a party last night at Gumbo [Marjorie Strachey]’s, which being undress & easy going gave me a good deal of pleasure. Ray is precisely like a very fine tabby, which, having been castrated, has grown to an enormous size, & never moves. She sits smiling out of her green blue cats eyes. She is sending us, rather to my trepidation, her new novel. There was also Julia Strachey whom I cross examined; the gifted wastrel. Leys & Vita are both in great demand, Simkin ordering them urgently this morning, & Angus going off in a hurry. But I will not let the Press entirely devour This quarrel has been made up this page. I am rather cross with Marjorie [Joad], about her objecting to my criticism of her private life; & then taking 3 weeks holiday, which will leave us very little, & heaven knows when. But then she seems in a state of nerves—terrified of getting ill, terrified of leaving us, jumpy, unhappy, now on edge, now obsequious, having Tom Marshall about the place, & Ralph Wright & Cyril to divorce, which, to my thinking, distract her mind from her work, & lessen my chances of selling my books. But the thing to aim at is an impersonal, amicable business relation I am sure, now we have Angus, less sympathy & more work.

Whatever they may say, Vita & Clive & Lytton, people crowd to the press, & can’t be beaten off. Bernadette Murphy was ready to come. Angus dropped like ripe fruit from the tree. Vita explains that the Heir of Redcliffe, her cousin, implores her to resist the contamination of Bloomsbury, personified in the serpent destroyer, V.W. I half like, half mind this.

Monday 21 December

Really it is a disgrace—the number of blank pages in this book! The effect of London on diaries is decidedly bad. This is I fancy the leanest of them all, & I doubt that I can take it to Rodmell, or if I did, whether I could add much. Indeed it has been an eventful year, as I prophesied; & the dreamer of Jan. 3rd has dreamt much of her dream true; here we are in London, with Nelly alone, Dadie gone it is true, but Angus to replace him. What emerges is that changing houses is not so cataclysmic as I thought; after all one doesn’t change body or brain. Still I am absorbed in “my writing”, putting on a spurt to have Mrs D. copied for L. to read at Rodmell; & then in I dart to deliver the final blows to the Common Reader, & then—then I shall be free. Free at least to write out one or two more stories which have accumulated. I am less & less sure that they are stories, or what they are. Only I do feel fairly sure that I am grazing as near as I can to my own ideas, & getting a tolerable shape for them. I think there is less & less wastage. But I have my ups & downs. As for fame & money, Clive’s long article on me is out in The Dial. £50, apparently, from Harper. Clearly, as L. said, we are safe to make, both of us, as much as we want by our pens. Never again, I daresay, shall we agitate about getting £15 from Jack Squire.

So much of my time goes talking—talking to strays in the basement, to particular people like Ethel Sands, Elena Richmond, Vita, up here, that when I write, I tend to meditate; to sing my own praises, & sum up the months work.

How sharply society brings one out—or rather others out! Roger the other night with Vita for instance. He became the nonconformist undergraduate at once, the obstinate young man, (I could see him quite young with his honest uncompromising eyes) who will not say what he does not believe to be true. The effect on Vita was disastrous; & pure honesty is a doubtful quality; it means often lack of imagination. It means self assertiveness, being rather better than other people; a queer trait in Roger to unearth after so many years of smooth intercourse. For the most part he is so sympathetic. His Quaker blood protests against Vita’s rich winy fluid; & she has the habit of praising & talking indiscriminately about art, which goes down in her set, but not in ours. It was all very thorny until that good fellow Clive came in, & addressed himself to conciliate dear old obtuse, aristocratic, passionate, Grenadier like Vita. Then came Sprott; a dull dog if ever there was one.

We have also seen Aldington, who calls like a tradesman for orders; a bluff, powerful, rather greasy eyed, nice downright man, who will make his way in the world, which I dont much like people to do. All young men do it. No young women; or in women it is trounced; in men forgiven. Its these reflections I want to enmesh, in writing; or these are among them.

Marjorie & I kissed—there above the little grave we kissed again with tears. My coldness, she said, had made it impossible for her to work. We explained, standing in the doorway. I like her; I like her inner integrity, after cutting through that rather cheap, bargain counter like surface.

All our Bloomsbury relationships flourish, grow in lustiness. Suppose our set to survive another 20 years, I tremble to think how thickly knit & grown together it will be. At Christmas I must write & ask Lytton if I may dedicate the common reader to him. And thats the last of my books to be dedicated, I think. What do we talk about? I wish I could write conversations.

With Elena we discussed women’s dress; she sitting there so matronly & ornate, in a S. Kensington way, with pearls, & a tiger trimmed black coat, all black, substantial, & middleaged.

“I love driving. I went with my grandmother on a driving tour, with Kentish horses. We did about 20 miles a day. I was at a party the other night when everyone said how charming Mrs Carnegie (you remember Mrs Chamberlain, Virginia?) looked, dressed in a fitting pink dress, cut low: every single woman in the room was dressed in a chemisette dress of georgette.” Dadie was a great success. “That enchanting creature” she called him, relieved I think to meet a human being here.

Vita talked about criticism. Ly G. Wellesley wants to found a 2nd Hawthornden prize for poets only. I said it should be for critics. What are critics, said Vita; & added, being engagingly a student of reviews of her own books, a little ink steeped indeed, that no two critics took the same view. This started Roger on aesthetic criticism, constructive criticism.

We go over the same things, undoubtedly. The press however is always casting up wreckage. People come most days. I enjoy my printing afternoons, & think it the sanest way of life—for if I were always writing, or merely recouping from writing, I should be like an inbreeding rabbit,—my progeny becoming weakly albinos. A man called Peter Miller met at Gumbo’s confirmed me in this the other night. One meets a good many men now. Theres a little thrush like creature called Tomlin who wants to sculpt me. This afternoon they cut down the tree at the back the tree I used to see from my basement skylight.

[]

Volume III: 1925-1930

Edited by Anne Olivier Bell
Assisted by Andrew McNeillie

[1980]

1925

[Diary XIII continued]

Tuesday 6 January

The disgraceful truth is that I shall run year into year, for I cant waste so many blank pages.

What a flourish I began 1924 with! And today, for the 165th time, Nelly has given notice—Won’t be dictated to: must do as other girls do. This is the fruit of Bloomsbury. On the whole, I’m inclined to take her at her word. The nuisance of arranging life to suit her fads, & the pressure of ‘other girls’ is too much, good cook though she is, & honest, crusty old maid too, dependable, in the main, affectionate, kindly, but incurably fussy, nervy, unsubstantial. Anyhow, the servant question no longer much worries me.

Last night we dined at 3 Albert Road Mary’s new villa. I like the new year to begin with warm friendly feelings—& it was a superb dinner. There were the children too, a nice girl & boy; a girl with lovely womans eyes, sympathetic, startled; & wild like a girl. (I want to begin to describe my own sex.) What do I mean about the expression? Extreme youth, & yet, one felt, this feeling has been existing forever; very feminine. Here I conceive my story—but I’m always conceiving stories now. Short ones—scenes—for instance The Old Man (a character of L.S.) The Professor on Milton—(an attempt at literary criticism) & now The Interruption, women talking alone. However, back to life. Where are we?

I spent this morning writing a note on an E⁠[lizabe]⁠than play—for which I have been reading plays all this year. Then I found the minute hand of my watch had come off (this was talking to Lytton about [Samuel] Richardson last night—I found it off then): so I went into the printing room to see the time—found Angus & Leonard doing Simkin’s bill. Stayed & laughed. L. went off to the office, when we had dog-walked round the Square. I came in & set a page of Nancy. Then out to Ingersoll to get my watch mended. Then dog walked. Then here. It being a black grained winter day; lengths of the pavement ink black where not lighted. Never shall I describe all the days I have noticed. I cannot hit it off, quite, & yet perhaps if I read this again I shall see what. I meant then.

Rodmell was all gale & flood; these words are exact. The river overflowed. We had 7 days rain out of 10. Often I could not face a walk. L. pruned, which needed heroic courage. My heroism was purely literary. I revised Mrs D⁠[alloway]: the dullest part of the whole business of writing; the most depressing & exacting. The worst part is at the beginning (as usual) where the aeroplane has it all to itself for some pages, & it wears thin. L. read it; thinks it my best—but then has he not got to think so? Still I agree. He thinks it has more continuity than J⁠[acob]⁠s R⁠[oom]. but is difficult owing to the lack of connection, visible; between the two themes.

Anyhow it is sent off to Clarks, & proofs will come next week. This is for Harcourt Brace, who has accepted without seeing & raised me to 15 p.c.

I did not see very much at Rodmell, having to keep my eyes on the typewriter.

Angus was with us for Christmas, a very quiet, very considerate, unselfish deliberate young man, with a charming sense of humour—colourless, Lytton says: passive. But I think well of him, all the same.

Wednesday 18 March

These last pages belong to the Common Reader, & were written in bed with influenza; & now, at last, having sent off the last proofs today, I have got my new diary made, & shall close this, with a thousand apologies, & some ominous forebodings at the sight of all the blank pages.

[Diary XIV:]
52 Tavistock Square WC
1925

Wednesday 18 March

This disgrace has been already explained—I think: two books to see through the press, mainly between tea & dinner; influenza, & a distaste for the pen.

At the moment (I have 7½ before dinner) I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, & thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past. This struck me on Reading platform, watching Nessa & Quentin kiss, he coming up shyly, yet with some emotion. This I shall remember; & make more of, when separated from all the business of crossing the platform, finding our bus &c. That is why we dwell on the past, I think.

We went to see the children at school: the young men, I should say. Julian was shut up in a pound, pounding Mr Eliot’s tennis court by way of punishment. (That suggests a story about a man whose ambition it was to buy a field; this kept him alive; when he bought it, he died.) Mr Goddard came up, & Julian shouted out, “I’m at it till 5” as though they were undergraduates. Not much public school about this; but oh the horror of being Mr Goddard, & wandering out, this bitter day (it snowed) to welcome home the steeplechasers. When they ran in, they at once rolled on the ground, & were covered with rugs & coats. The last lap, their legs rose very weakly. J. & Q. were utterly cynical about this, & said no one enjoyed it, but it was thought the right thing to do. But this nib scratches.

Wednesday 8 April

Just back from Cassis. Often while I was there I thought how I would write here frequently & so get down some of the myriad impressions which I net every day. But directly we get back, what is it that happens? We strip & dive into the stream, & I am obsessed with a foolish idea that I have no time to stop & write, or that I ought to be doing something serious. Even now, I pelt along feverishly, thinking half the time, but I must stop & take Grizzle [dog] out; I must get my American books in order; the truth is, I must try to set aside half an hour in some part of my day, & consecrate it to diary writing. Give it a name & a place, & then perhaps, such is the human mind, I shall come to think it a duty, & disregard other duties for it.

I am under the impression of the moment, which is the complex one of coming back home from the South of France to this wide dim peaceful privacy—London (so it seemed last night) which is shot with the accident I saw this morning & a woman crying Oh oh oh faintly, pinned against the railings with a motor car on top of her. All day I have heard that voice. I did not go to her help; but then every baker & flower seller did that. A great sense of the brutality & wildness of the world remains with me—there was this woman in brown walking along the pavement—suddenly a red film car turns a somersault, lands on top of her, & one hears this oh, oh, oh. I was on my way to see Nessa’s new house, & met Duncan in the square, but as he had seen nothing, he could not in the least feel what I felt, or Nessa either, though she made some effort to connect it with Angelica’s accident last spring. But I assured her it was only a passing brown woman; & so we went over the house composedly enough.

Since I wrote, which is these last months, Jacques Raverat has died; after longing to die; & he sent me a letter about Mrs Dalloway which gave me one of the happiest days of my life. I wonder if this time I have achieved something? Well, nothing anyhow compared with Proust, in whom I am embedded now. The thing about Proust is his combination of the utmost sensibility with the utmost tenacity. He searches out these butterfly shades to the last grain. He is as tough as catgut & as evanescent as a butterfly’s bloom. And he will I suppose both influence me & make me out of temper with every sentence of my own. Jacques died, as I say; & at once the siege of emotions began. I got the news with a party here—Clive, Bee How, Julia Strachey, Dadie. Nevertheless, I do not any longer feel inclined to doff the cap to death. I like to go out of the room talking, with an unfinished casual sentence on my lips. That is the effect it had on me—no leavetakings, no submission—but someone stepping out into the darkness. For her though the nightmare was terrific. All I can do now is to keep natural with her, which is I believe a matter of considerable importance. More & more do I repeat my own version of Montaigne “Its life that matters”.

I am waiting to see what form of itself Cassis will finally cast up in my mind. There are the rocks. We used to go out after breakfast & sit on the rocks, with the sun on us. L. used to sit without a hat, writing on his knee. One morning he found a sea urchin—they are red, with spikes which quiver slightly. Then we would go a walk in the afternoon, right up over the hill, into the woods, where one day we heard the motor cars & discovered the road to La Ciota⁠[t] just beneath. It was stony, steep & very hot. We heard a great chattering birdlike noise once, & I bethought me of the frogs. The ragged red tulips were out in the fields; all the fields were little angular shelves cut out of the hill, & ruled & ribbed with vines; & all red, & rosy & purple here & there with the spray of some fruit tree in bud. Here & there was an angular white, or yellow or blue washed house, with all its shutters tightly closed; & flat paths round it, & once rows of stocks; an incomparable cleanness & definiteness everywhere. At La Ciota⁠[t] great orange ships rose up out of the blue water of the little bay. All these bays are very circular, & fringed with the pale coloured plaster houses, very tall, shuttered, patched & peeled, now with a pot & tufts of green on them, now with clothes, drying; now an old old woman looking. On the hill, which is stony as a desert, the nets were drying; & then in the streets children & girls gossiped & meandered all in pale bright shawls & cotton frocks, while the men picked up the earth of the main square to make a paved court of it. The Hotel Cendrillon is a white house, with red tiled floors, capable of housing perhaps 8 people. There were Miss Toogood, the Howards, Miss Betsy Roberts, Mr Gurney, Mr Francis &, finally, Mr Hugh Anderson & Mr Garrow Tomlin. All deserve pages of description. And then the whole hotel atmosphere provided me with many ideas: oh so cold, indifferent, superficially polite, & exhibiting such odd relationships: as if human nature were now reduced to a kind of code, which it has devised to meet these emergencies, where people who do not know each other meet, & claim their rights as members of the same tribe. As a matter of fact, we got into touch all round; but our depths were not invaded. But L. & I were too too happy, as they say; if it were now to die &c. Nobody shall say of me that I have not known perfect happiness, but few could put their finger on the moment, or say what made it. Even I myself, stirring occasionally in the pool of content, could only say But this is all I want; could not think of anything better; & had only my half superstitious feeling as the Gods who must when they have created happiness, grudge it. Not if you get it in unexpected ways though.

Sunday 19 April

It is now after dinner, our first summer time night, & the mood for writing has left me, only just brushed me & left me. I have not achieved my sacred half hour yet. But think—in time to come I would rather read something here than reflect that I did polish off Mr Ring Lardner successfully. I’m out to make £300 this summer by writing, & build a bath & hot water range at Rodmell. But, hush, hush—my books tremble on the verge of coming out, & my future is uncertain. As for forecasts—its just on the cards Mrs Dalloway is a success (Harcourt thinks it “wonderful”), & sells 2,000—I dont expect it: I expect a slow silent increase of fame, such has come about, rather miraculously, since Js R. was published; my value mounting steadily as a journalist, though scarcely a copy sold. And I am not very nervous—rather; & I want as usual to dig deep down into my new stories, without having a looking glass flashed in my eyes Todd, to wit; Colefax to wit et cetera.

Lytton came in the other night. He seemed to me autumnal; with that charming rectitude of spirit which no one else attains so perfectly I think. His justice of mind is considerable. But Christ is dismissed, to his disappointment, for he grows more & more fussy about subjects: Christ, he says did not exist: was a figment; & so much is known that really he couldn’t pull it all together in one book. Then perhaps Philip Ritchie is waning. We talked of old buggers & their lack of attraction for young men. My anti-bugger revolution has run round the world, as I hoped it would. I am a little touched by what appears their contrition, & anxiety to condone their faults. Yet if I cant say what’s in my mind, & have a fling with Clive’s Colonel now & then, what’s the use of me? The pale star of the Bugger has been in the ascendant too long. Julian agrees emphatically. We had Good Friday at Rodmell—June weather, & again this downy billowy wave beneath us: ah, but how quickly I sink; what violet shadows there are between the high lights, & one, perhaps, as unreasonable as another. But this properly belongs to a story.

Yesterday we went to Max’s show with dear shabby old Angus, who seems to me an elder brother, 20 years younger than I am. We came back to tea (over all this the bloom of the past descends as I write—it becomes sad, beautiful, memorable) & ate a great many buns, & then discussed Murphy. Alas!—she has a temper. She is an ill-conditioned mongrel woman, of no charm, a Bohemian scallywag, something like Irish stew to look at, & not destined for a long life here, I suppose. But Angus, though plaintive is gentlemanly; does not insist, & sees the drawbacks; Leonard will have to pull out the tooth on Thursday. I suspect some hidden grievance: I suspect she harbours scores.

Marjory & her Tom looked in at the basement this evening, very happy, L. says, & indeed I think she must enjoy her situation to the last ounce—money, food, security, & a supply of young men, & her faithful Tom, & a little dress allowance, & breakfast late, & consideration. She is a nice trusty creature into the bargain, & if I wished to see anyone, I daresay it would be her.

At this moment, all we wish is to escape seeing anyone. Tomorrow I shall buy a new dress. I observe here that I am becoming jerky & jumpy, & my conscience is asserting that I ought to read Mr Ring Lardner & earn my 50 guineas.

Monday 20 April

Happiness is to have a little string onto which things will attach themselves. For example, going to my dressmaker in Judd Street, or rather thinking of a dress I could get her to make, & imagining it made—that is the string, which as if it dipped loosely into a wave of treasure brings up pearls sticking to it. Poor Murphy is in the glumps, owing to Leonard’s fiery harshness—each of which epithets he would most certainly deny. She has no string dipping into the green wave: things don’t connect for her; & add up into those entrancing bundles which are happiness. And my days are likely to be strung with them. I like this London life in early summer—the street sauntering & square haunting, & then if my books (I never speak of L.’s pamphlet) were to be a success; if we could begin building at Monks, & put up wireless for Nelly, & get the Skeats to live at Shanks’ cottage—if—if—if—What will happen is some intensities of pleasure, some profound plunges of gloom. Bad reviews, being ignored; & then some delicious clap of compliment. But really what I should like would be to have £3 to buy a pair of rubber soled boots, & go for country walks on Sundays.

One thing in considering my state of mind now, seems to me beyond dispute, that I have at last, bored down into my oil well, & can’t scribble fast enough to bring it all to the surface. I have now at least 6 stories welling up in me, & feel, at last, that I can coin all my thoughts into words. Not but what an infinite number of problems remain; but I have never felt this rush & urgency before. I believe I can write much more quickly: if writing it is—this dash at the paper of a phrase, & then the typing & retyping—trying it over, the actual writing being now like the sweep of a brush; I fill it up afterwards. Now suppose I might become one of the interesting—I will not say great—but interesting novelists? Oddly, for all my vanity, I have not until now had much faith in my novels, or thought them my own expression.

Monday 27 April

The Common Reader was out on Thursday: this is Monday, & so far I have not heard a word about it, private or public: it is as if one tossed a stone into a pond, & the waters closed without a ripple. And I am perfectly content, & care less than I have ever cared, & make this note just to remind me next time of the sublime progress of my books. I have been sitting to Vogue, the Becks that is, in their mews, which Mr Woolner built as his studio, & perhaps it was there he thought of my mother, whom he wished to marry, I think. But my present second selves is what I mean reflection is that people have any number of states of consciousness: & I should like to investigate the party consciousness, the frock consciousness &c. The fashion world at the Becks—Mrs Garland was there superintending a display—is certainly one; where people secrete an envelope which connects them & protects them from others, like myself, who am outside the envelope, foreign bodies. These states are very difficult (obviously I grope for words) but I’m always coming back to it. The party consciousness, for example: Sybil’s consciousness. You must not break it. It is something real. You must keep it up; conspire together. Still I cannot get at what I mean. Then I meant to dash off Graves before I forget him.

Figure a bolt eyed blue shirted shockheaded hatless man in a blue overcoat standing goggling at the door at 4.30, on Friday. “Mrs Woolf?” I dreading & suspecting some Nation genius, some young man determined to unbosom himself, rushed him to the basement, where he said “I’m Graves”. “I’m Graves”. Everybody stared. He appeared to have been rushing through the air at 60 miles an hour & to have alighted temporarily. So he came up, &, wily as I am, I knew that to advance holding the kettle in a dishclout was precisely, the right method, attitude, pose. The poor boy is all emphasis protestation & pose. He has a crude likeness to Shelley, save that his nose is a switchback & his lines blurred. But the consciousness of genius is bad for people. He stayed till 7.15 (we were going to Caesar & Cleopatra—a strange rhetorical romantic early Shaw play) & had at last to say so, for he was so thick in the delight of explaining his way of life to us that no bee stuck faster to honey. He cooks, his wife cleans; 4 children are brought up in the elementary school; the villagers give them vegetables; they were married in Church; his wife calls herself Nancy Nicolson; won’t go to Garsington, said to him I must have a house for nothing; on a river; in a village with a square church tower; near but not on a railway—all of which, as she knows her mind, he procured. Calling herself Nicolson has sorted her friends into sheep & goats. All this to us sounded like the usual self consciousness of young men, especially as he threw in, gratuitously, the information that he descends from dean rector, Bishop, Von Ranker &c &c &c: only in order to say that he despises them. Still, still, he is a nice ingenuous rattle headed young man; but why should our age put this burden of proof on us? Surely once one could live simply without protestations. I tried, perhaps, to curry favour, as my weakness is. L. was adamant. Then we were offered a ticket for the Cup tie, to see wh. Graves has come to London after 6 years; cant travel in a train without being sick; is rather proud of his sensibility. No I don’t think he’ll write great poetry: but what will you? The sensitive are needed too; the halfbaked, stammering stuttering, who perhaps improve their own quarter of Oxfordshire.

And on Sunday we had our first walk, to Epping.

Wednesday 29 April

Hastily (Moore waiting) I must record the fact of Tom’s long gaslit emotional rather tremulous & excited visit last night, which informed us of his release (But I have not yet sent in my demission) from the Bank; some heavensent appointment, providing “4/5th’s of my present salary” & a guarantee, being “humanly speaking” certain, to take effect next October—whether Lady Rothermere (who has become ‘very nice’) or the 4ly review, he sayeth not. Then he has a house near Sloane Sqre in view, rent £58 only, & so hopes to start fresh, & has been thinking over his state these past weeks, being alone, with time on his hands. He has seen his whole life afresh, seen his relations to the world, & to Vivien in particular, become humbler suppler more humane—good, sensitive honourable man as he is, accusing himself of being the American husband, & wishing to tell me privately (L. gone to fetch the letters) what store V. sets by me, has done nothing but write since last June, because I told her to! He then defended not writing which is her device he said, & went into her psychology. Then he said to L. (having told us that he must space his remarks very carefully to fit in all he had to say) Do you know anything about psycho-analysis? L. said yes, in his responsible way; & Tom then told us the queer story—how Martin the dr. set V. off thinking of her childhood terror of loneliness, & now she cant let him, Tom, out of her sight. There he has sat mewed in her room these 3 months, poor pale creature, or if he has to go out, comes in to find her in a half fainting state.

“Tomorrow will be wretched” he said, for he was now away from 8 to 11. We advised another doctor. But whether its doctors or sense or holiday or travel or some drastic method unknown thats to cure that little nervous self conscious bundle—heaven knows. She has the abstract, he the historic mind he said. The upshot was a queer sense of his emotion in coming to tell us all this—something not merely touching to my vanity but to my sense of human worth, I think; his liking for us, affection, trust in Leonard, & being so much at his ease in some subconscious way he said, not in conversation, with me, all making me lay my arm on his shoulder; not a very passionate caress, but the best I can do.

And now I’m a little fidgety about the Common Reader, not a single word of it from a soul, & perhaps a Review in the Lit Sup tomorrow. But this is quite recognisably superficial; beneath my fidgets being considerable stability.

Friday 1 May

This is a note for future reference as they say. The Common Reader came out 8 days ago, & so far not a single review has appeared, & no body has written to me or spoken to me about it or in any way acknowledged the fact of its existence; save Maynard, Lydia, & Duncan. Clive is conspicuously dumb; Mortimer has flu & cant review it; Nancy saw him reading it, but reported no opinion: all signs which point to a dull chill depressing reception; & complete failure. I have just come through the hoping fearing stage, & now see my disappointment floating like an old bottle in my wake & am off on fresh adventures. Only if the same thing happens to Dalloway one need not be surprised. But I must write to Gwen.

Monday 4 May

This is the temperature chart of a book. We went to Cambridge, & Goldie said he thought me the finest living critic: the paralysed man, Hayward, said, in his jerky angular way: “Who wrote that extraordinarily good article on the Elizabethans 2 or 3 months ago in the Lit. Sup.?” I pointed to my breast. Now there’s one sneering review in Country Life, almost inarticulate with feebleness, trying to say what a Common reader is, & another, says Angus, in the Star, laughing at Nessa’s cover. So from this I prognosticate a good deal of criticism on the ground that I’m obscure & odd; & some enthusiasm; a slow sale, & an increased reputation. Oh yes—my reputation increases. But I am headachy, & cannot go to a concert with Angus, & Leonard is giving Randall his farewell dinner, & it [is] a relief to sit quiet (the joy of giving up an engagement is supreme) & I wish I could describe Pernel, Cambridge, Braithwaite & Hayward, with a postscript for Thompson. A lovely place full, like all places, now, of this wave of the past. Walking past the Darwins I noticed the willows; I thought with that growing maternal affection which now comes to me, of myself there; of Rupert; then I went to Newnham, & kindled Mrs Palmer with talk of Pernel marrying an Archbishop.

No, I can’t fire it off [?]; Mrs Asquith sticks in my gizzard; I shall read Moore till dinner, & a paper then again till Leonard comes in. No, I dont want to hear Bach, & by giving Angus the tickets, secured him a charming young man for company.

Pernel was easier than I’ve ever known her. We sat over her fire, gossiping—how Kate died, taking the dog for a walk till a week of the end; entirely reserved; like a skeleton, like a dead person walking with sarcoma; no doctor. No mention of herself & the 58 brown diaries burnt, I suppose.

Saturday 9 May

Just back from the Greek play at Chiswick with Lydia & Berta Ruck; a fine spring day, all the trees out driving across the Park; that transient journey being founded on a walk with Nessa Clive & Thoby, & Thoby & I agreed in calling Hyde Park ‘urbane’.

As for the Common Reader, the Lit. Sup. had close on 2 columns sober & sensible praise—neither one thing nor the other—my fate in the Times. And Goldie writes that he thinks “this is the best criticism in English—humorous, witty & profound.”—My fate is to be treated to all extremes & all mediocrities. But I never get an enthusiastic review in the Lit. Sup. And it will be the same for Dalloway, which now approaches.

I’m jangled & jaded, having sat next the sea horse Sally Onions, who oozes lust at the sight of young men dancing. Last night we made a meagre meal with the Sangers, whose mediocrity of comfort & taste saddens me: oh for a little beauty, in life, as Berta Ruck might say—a lewd woman that, deposited in a lewd South Kensington House, like an equestrienne, in pale Jacon with a carnation, & her front teeth with a red ridge on them where her lips had touched them. Little Lydia I liked: how does her mind work? Like a lark soaring; a sort of glorified instinct inspires her: I suppose a very nice nature, & direction at Maynard’s hands.

Last night we had Morgan & Brace; Morgan pleading with Leonard to come & see him—operated on for a broken bone in the wrist, I should have added, but it is now

Thursday 14 May

The first day of summer, leaves visibly drawing out of the bud, & the Square almost green. Oh what a country day—& some of my friends are now reading Mrs D. in the country.

I meant to register more of my books temperatures. C.R. does not sell; but is praised. I was really pleased to open the Manchester Guardian this morning & read Mr Fausset on The Art of V.W. Brilliance combined with integrity; profound as well as eccentric. Now if only the Times would speak out thus, but the Times mumbles & murmurs like a man sucking pebbles—did I say that I had nearly 2 mumbling columns on me there? But the odd thing is this: honestly I am scarcely a shade nervous about Mrs D. Why is this? Really I am a little bored, for the first time, at thinking how much I shall have to talk about it this summer. The truth is that writing is the profound pleasure & being read the superficial. I’m now all on the strain with desire to stop journalism & get on to To the Lighthouse. This is going to be fairly short: to have father’s character done complete in it; & mothers; & St Ives; & childhood; & all the usual things I try to put in—life, death &c. But the centre is father’s character, sitting in a boat, reciting We perished, each alone, while he crushes a dying mackerel—However, I must refrain. I must write a few little stories first, & let the Lighthouse simmer, adding to it between tea & dinner till it is complete for writing out.

Yesterday was a terrific chatter day—Desmond on top of Dr Leyes, Lord Olivier on top of Desmond, James & Dadie to finish off with, while L. had I forget how many press interviews & committees into the bargain. The League of Nations is booming (Innes, I mean.) But I meant to describe my dear old Desmond, whom it rejoiced me to see again, & he held out both his hands, & I set him in his chair & we talked till 7 o’clock. He is rather worn & aged; a little, I think, feeling that here’s 45 on him & nothing achieved, except indeed the children, whom he dotes on—Micky to write, Dermod & Rachel trilling & warbling on flute & piano: all his human relations very fertile & flourishing, but oh, he said, talking of Houseman, don’t let him give up the Corn Exchange & take to literature! I saw him thinking of his 50 articles for 5 years, his welter of old articles lying dusty in boxes, & now Geoffrey Scott promoted to do Donne, which Desmond should have done in the year 1912. I remember him telling me the story at Brunswick Square. So I said I would take the thing in hand & see it through which touched him, for children are not enough, after all; one wants something to be made out of oneself alone—& 5 boxes of dusty articles are rather raggy & rotten for 45 years. And he praised the C.R. with enthusiasm; & will write on it, & so we chattered along; Vernon Lee, with her cheap rings in exquisite taste; & her idiomatic Italian; & her spiteful way of seeing things, so that she dare not write her memoirs; Lily Langtry coming down the playhouse steps & her daughter looming behind her, loveliness that “struck me in the breast”; also Logan & Ottoline—how Alys is ill of the cancer again—“a most unhappy miserable life poor woman—” L. having the new Mrs B.R. on one side, would be chafed to death by Ott. next door; but like a fool, Logan made none of this clear, & only complained that the village peace of Chelsea would be destroyed by O. wh. naturally she resented. In all this, Desmond acts as solvent & go between, everyone sponging on his good nature & sense. What else did we discuss? The E⁠[lizabe]⁠thans? The Phoenix; poor Ray Litvin’s miserable big mouth, & little body; when L. came, & then the dinner party, I just having time for a race round the Square; both Dadie & James very easy & affable, indeed for Dadie I feel considerable affection—so sensitive & tender is he, & one of these days will get a pull on himself, & be less of a quicksilver. Indeed, staying on he talked very seriously & excitedly of his dissertation & poets use of words, how they fix on to a word & fill it out with meaning & make it symbolic. But what these scholars want is to get at books through writing books, not through reading them.

But I must remember to write about my clothes next time I have an impulse to write. My love of clothes interests me profoundly: only it is not love; & what it is I must discover.

Friday 15 May

Two unfavourable reviews of Mrs D (Western Mail & Scotsman): unintelligible, not art &c: & a letter from a young man in Earls Court “This time you have done it—you have caught life & put it in a book…” Please forgive this outburst, but further quotation is unnecessary; & I dont think I should bother to write this, if I weren’t jangled what by? The sudden heat, I think, & the racket of life. It is bad for me to see my own photograph. And I have been lunching with Desmond, & reading that dear old Owl’s journalism. The thing is, he cant thrust through an article. Now, Lytton or I, though we mayn’t think better or write better, have a drive in us, which makes an article whole. And yet there are things worth keeping, & he becomes moved, & irrational when he thinks of it, & I want him to be pleased—So we lunched in the grill of the Connaught Rooms where other men were talking business, had a bottle of wine & delved into the filth packets as he calls them. Home to find Vogue sending photographs—more photographs: T.P. wants one, the Morning Post another. & the C.R. sells 2 or 3 copies a day.

We are going to the play out into this tawny coloured London—but journalism is the devil. I cannot write after reading it. No time—& I must change, & write about clothes some day soon.

Sunday 17 May

A wire from Raymond in Paris—just read Mrs D. it is quite beautiful—& a very good, outspoken wholly praising review of C. R. in the Observer—“no living critic” &c. But this is not all vanity; I’m recording for curiosity: the fate of a book. The only judgment on Mrs D. I await with trepidation (but thats too strong) is Morgan’s. He will say something enlightening.

Just back (all my days here begin with this) from Sutton. Oh it is full summer weather—so hot one can’t walk on the sunny side, & all London—even Lavender Hill Lambeth which peels visibly in the sun—transmogrified. We had a bad walk, all along the cinder track, with soft footpaths inviting wh. we could not take, owing to L.’s lecture, delivered in a semi-religious sanctuary, with hymns & prayers & a chapter from the Bible. The whole of Sutton was hymning something: soft intense strains of human [word omitted by VW] went warbling about, as I sat; & I was touched & moved by it: the world so beautiful, God’s gift to us, said the Chairman, who looked poor man as if he had never had an ounce of pleasure in his life. Things become very familiar to me, so that I sometimes think humanity is a vast wave, undulating: the same, I mean: the same emotions here that there were at Richmond. Please have some tea—we shall be hurt if you don’t accept our hospitality. Accordingly we do; & the same queer brew of human fellowship, is brewed; & people look the same; & joke in the same way, & come to these odd superficial agreements, wh. if you think of them persisting & wide spread—in jungles, storms, birth & death—are not superficial; but rather profound, I think. We came home on top of a bus all the way for a shilling, with the usual glimpses down lanes, into farmyards, at running streams, persisting in between villas, & behind sunbaked yellow or black motor roads. A little girl on the bus asked her mother how many inches are there in a mile. Her mother repeated this to me. I said you must go to school & they’ll tell you. But she is at school said her mother. She’s seven; & he (the baby on her knee) goes to school. He’s three. So I gave them two biscuits left over, & the little girl (see my egotism) with her bright excitable eyes, & eagerness to grasp the whole universe reminded me of myself, asking questions of my mother. We saw Lambeth, & I imagined the frolics of clergymen in the boscage, which is very thick; crossed Westminster Bridge; admired the Houses of Parliament & their fretted lacy look; passed the Cenotaph, which L. compromised by sitting with his hat off all the way up Whitehall, & so home, passing a nigger gentleman, perfectly fitted out in swallow tail & bowler & gold headed cane; & what were his thoughts? Of the degradation stamped on him, every time he raised his hand & saw it black as a monkeys outside, tinged with flesh colour within?

Yesterday we had tea with Margaret in her new house. There are three poplars, & behind them St Paul’s. But I don’t want to live in the suburbs again. There we sat, & I teased her, & she me, & she minded a little, & got red & then white, as if her centre were not very firm. She is severe to Lilian, who has the small rooms & is not allowed to plant flowers, she said bitterly, for it worries Margaret, & so nothing is done to the garden, which too worries Margaret. For these worries, she takes Ethel M. Dell & Dickens. Why, she said, should D.s characters be like people, when he can create people?—an interesting criticism, I think. We hit it off very well, chiefly owing to my wildness & harum scarumness, I think; & I am very fond of her, & sorry for her, since how awful it would be to ‘retire’ at 60: to sit down & look at poplar trees? Moreover, she once said she had ‘compromised’; her father making entire work impossible; & she now regrets things, I imagine; has seen so little of the world, & carried nothing to the extreme. Lilian irritates too, compared with what she might have had. But, after all, thats enough.

The time is now ripe for dinner. And I must answer some of my admirers. Never have I felt so much admired—so tomorrow, snubs will snub me back again into trim.

Wednesday 20 May

Well, Morgan admires. This is a weight off my mind. Better than Jacob he says; was sparing of words; kissed my hand, & on going said he was awfully pleased, very happy (or words to that effect) about it. He thinks—but I wont go into detailed criticism: I shall hear more; & this is only about the style being simpler, more like other peoples this time.

I dined with the Sitwells last night. Edith is an old maid. I had never conceived this. I thought she was severe, implacable & tremendous; rigid in her own conception. Not a bit of it. She is, I guess, a little fussy, very kind, beautifully mannered, & a little reminding me of Emphie Case! She is elderly too, almost my age, & timid, & admiring & easy & poor, & I liked her more than admired or was frightened of her. Nevertheless, I do admire her work, & thats what I say of hardly anyone: she has an ear, & not a carpet broom; a satiric vein; & some beauty in her. How one exaggerates public figures! How one makes up a person immune from one’s own pleasures & failings! But Edith is humble: has lived in a park alone till 27, & so described nothing but sights & sounds; then came to London, & is trying to get a little emotion into her poetry—all of which I suspected, & think promising. Then how eager she was to write for the Press, which had always been her great ambition, she said. Nothing could be more conciliatory & less of an eagle than she; odd looking too, with her humorous old maids smile, her half shut eyes, her lank hair, her delicate hands, wearing a large ring, & fine feet, & her brocade dress, blue & silver. Nothing of the protester or pamph⁠[l]⁠eteer or pioneer seemed in her—rather the well born Victorian spinster. So I must read her afresh. There were Francis [Birrell], Raymond [Mortimer], [Arthur] Waley & a little American toad called Towne, who soaked himself in liquor & became almost loving to us all. The three Sitwells have considerable breeding about them; I like their long noses, & grotesque faces. As for the house, Osbert is at heart an English squire, a collector, but of Bristol glass, old fashion plates, Victorian cases of humming birds, & not of foxes brushes & deers horns. His rooms are all stuck about with these objects. And I liked him too. But why are they thought daring & clever? Why are they the laughing stocks of the music halls & the penny a liners?

Not much talk; all easy goodnatured generalities after dinner, Francis bawling, Waley sombre & demure, & I very indulgent with my compliments: & now tomorrows Supt [TLS] & then (here L. came in & told me about R. Macdonald at the Labour party meeting).

Monday 1 June

Bank holiday, & we are in London. To record my books fates slightly bores me; but now both are floated, & Mrs D. doing surprisingly well. 1070 already sold. I recorded Morgan’s opinion: then Vita was a little doubtful; then Desmond, whom I see frequently about his book, dashed all my praise by saying that Logan thought the C.R. well enough, but nothing more. Desmond has an abnormal power for depressing one. He takes the edge off life in some extraordinary way; I love him; but his balance & goodness & humour, all heavenly in themselves, somehow diminish lustre. I think I feel this not only about my work, but about life. However, now comes Mrs Hardy to say that Thomas reads, & hears the C.R. read, with “great pleasure”. Indeed, save for Logan, & he’s a salt veined American, I have had high praise. Also Tauchnitz asks about them.

We are now considering a change to a widow called by courtesy Smith, Jones’ sister; which will despatch poor Murphy, but one can’t be very sentimental over her, & to settle in with a placid powerful professional woman is precisely what we want to pull us together. Angus is a little languid—not that we in any way, I hasten to say, complain of him; but Murphy is temperamental, untidy, sloppy, & turns crusty about accounts.

A week ago we had a great invasion—Ottoline surprising us with Julian Philip & a Gathorne Hardy. Ottoline was very affectionate, & perhaps affection being so much time & habit, I too have some real affection for her. But how can I analyse my feelings? I like everyone, I said at 46 the other night; & Duncan said I liked everyone, & thought everyone quite new each time. That was at dinner to meet Miss Warner, the new Chatto & Windus poetess, & indeed she has some merit—enough to make me spend 2/6 on her, I think. It is a sunny fitful day, & standing in Hyde Park to listen to the socialists, that furtive Jew, Loeb, who dogs my life at intervals of 10 years, touched us on the shoulder, & took 2 photographs of us, measuring his distance with a black tape, provided by his wife. He usually tells people to hold one end next their hearts: but this is a joke. He had been hanging about Covent Garden to photograph singers & had lunched at 2.30. I asked if he were a professional, which hurt his pride: he owned to taking a great interest in it, & said he had a large collection.

Tom came in yesterday, rather rockier than last time, not quite so flushed with emotion, & inclined to particularise the state of Vivien’s bowels too closely for my taste. We both almost laughed; she has a queer rib, a large liver, & so on. What is more to the point is that Tom is to be the editor of a new mag quarterly, which some old firm is issuing in the autumn, & all his works must go to them—a blow for us.

He said nothing of my books. With great dignity, I did not ask for his opinion. People often dont read books for weeks & weeks. And anyhow, for my part I hate giving an opinion.

[Friday 5 June]

To work off the intense depression left by Desmond. What does this come from? But I have just made this beautiful image—how he is like a wave that never breaks, but lollops one this way & that way & the sail hangs on ones mast & the sun beats down—& its all the result of dining & sitting talking till 3 in the morning with El⁠[izabe]⁠th Bibesco, with whom I had tea yesterday. She is a fat housekeeper of a woman, excellent manager, bustling, economical, entirely without nerves, imagination, or sensibility, but what a good housekeeper, how she keeps the books down, & what a good woman of business, how well she would suit an innkeeper, & how she would see to his interests—entertain his customers with her; sprightly rather broad jokes, standing with her thumbs in arms akimbo her armpits on the other side of the bar, with all her false diamonds flashing, & her little pig eyes, & her broad fat hips & cheeks. This is the spiritual truth about Bibesco: the fact being that she lies in bed, in green crepe de chine, with real diamonds on her fingers, & a silk quilt, & thinks she talks brilliantly to the most intellectual set in London—so she does, to Desmond, & Mortimer, & poor Philip Ritchie, & I was half in a rage, having sacrificed my Mozart 5tet to her, from which I should have got gallons of pure pleasure instead of the breakfast cup of rather impure delight. For it had its fun. There was old Asquith in [page ends].

And then I was ruffled by Nelly, but got over it, by spending £50 of charm. And now I remember—how fatal this is to remember after a quarrel what one did not say—how I might have said, If you have Lottie every day, why should I not have my friends? But one can’t—& she is jealous, that is the truth. And next time I will say it—& it was Miss Mayor coming that upset us; ‘always people when we have dinner parties”. And we had Vita, Edith Sitwell, Morgan, Dadie, Kitty Leaf—old Vita presenting me with a whole tree of blue Lupins, & being very uncouth & clumsy, while Edith was like a Roman Empress, so definite clear cut, magisterial & yet with something of the humour of a fishwife—a little too commanding about her own poetry & ready to dictate—tremulously pleased by Morgan’s compliments (& he never praised Vita, who sat hurt, modest, silent, like a snubbed schoolboy).

Monday 8 June

This is the hottest June on record. Do not take this seriously—only it is very hot. & we were at Karin’s yesterday. There was Irene & her Phil [Noel-Baker]. I am too sleepy having got up at ¼ to 6 this morning to describe her. She has spread a little, has a double chin, an emphatic nose, & the feet of gulls on sand round her eyes, which are of the old staring sea green blue. And she has her old ways—her straightforwardness, downrightness, ideals; love of adventure, but none of this is so becoming as of old. For in fact she’s grown stereotyped, metallic, harsh; her voice brazen, & her cheeks crude. She suspected me, & suspected Bloomsbury, & adored Leonard, whom she thought so salutary for Phil, but we both suspect [a] scheme for making Phil the foreign sec. in the next Labour Government. I liked her best when she talked about the Greek peasants, & that side may retain some charm. But she talks, talks, talks; thrusts her way with a hard kind of energy into whatever may be going forward—would like, I imagine, to wire pull, & be hostess, & know the right people, but instead protests a horror of success, & wants to keep Phil unspoilt. She also wants to be the mistress of men, I imagine, & a little resents that age should have unseated her from that familiar post, as it very obviously has. She veered, as usual, towards Desmond, professed her horror of “hurting Molly—a very gallant creature”, & almost drove L. distracted by asking him what he thought of the character of every politician.

No, she has not worn well; the plating has come off & she’s rather steely & common underneath. Needless to say, I had some waves of ancient emotion, chiefly at the sound of her voice & sight of her hands—hands expressing motherhood, perhaps; but mostly felt very flat, unable to pump up anything, & thus uncomfortable. To this, the sordid East End country, the woman who whispers with a gashed throat, the terrific pound home along the hot road, added. And the taxi never came, & we had a second night of it, hearing good, pure hearted Phil, with his principles & his ability, & his athleticism, read aloud to Irene till late.

Sunday 14 June

A disgraceful confession—this is Sunday morning, & just after ten, & here I am sitting down to write diary & not fiction or reviews, without any excuse, except the state of my mind. After finishing those two books, though, one can’t concentrate directly on a new one; & then the letters, the talk, the reviews, all serve to enlarge the pupil of my mind more & more. I cant settle in, contract, & shut myself off. I’ve written 6 little stories, scrambled them down untidily, & have thought out, perhaps too clearly, To the Lighthouse. And both books so far are successful. More of Dalloway has been sold this month than of Jacob in a year. I think it possible we may sell 2,000. The Common one is making money this week. And I get treated at great length & solemnity by old gentlemen.

A powerful, heavy, light blue eyed woman of 50, Mrs Cartwright wants to succeed Murphy; & Murphy wants to stay. How people want work! How tremendous a pull a very little money has in the world! But what the solution is to be, & how we are to find it, I know not. Here I salute Leonard with unstinted, indeed childlike, adoration. Somehow he will gently & firmly decide the whole thing, while Angus & I wobble & prevaricate. But then I have a child’s trust in Leonard. Waking this morning, rather depressed that Mrs D. did not sell yesterday, that we had Peter [Lucas], Eileen Power & Noll & Ray [Strachey] last night & found it hard work, & not a single compliment vouchsafed me, that I had bought a glass necklace for £1, that I had a sore throat & a streaming nose, rather under the weather, I say, I snuggled in to the core of my life, which is this complete comfort with L., & there found everything so satisfactory & calm that I revived myself, & got a fresh start; feeling entirely immune. The immense success of our life, is I think, that our treasure is hid away; or rather in such common things that nothing can touch it. That is, if one enjoys a bus ride to Richmond, sitting on the green smoking, taking the letters out of the box, airing the marmots, combing Grizzle, making an ice, opening a letter, sitting down after dinner, side by side, & saying “Are you in your stall, brother?”—well, what can trouble this happiness? And every day is necessarily full of it. If we depended upon making speeches, or money, or getting asked to parties—which reminds me of Ottoline’s ghastly party the other night. What possessed me to talk all the time to Helen Anrep? Partly that the plethora of young men slightly annoys me. Really, I am not a good lioness. With all my vanity, I’m come now to be a little cynical, or why don’t I so much relish the admiration of the Turners, Kitchins, & Gathorne Hardys? A woman is much more warmly sympathetic. She carries her atmosphere with her. And Ott.’s powers of hostesry are all worn threadbare. People sat about at great distances, & one had a sense of the clock ticking & Ott. saying This is a failure, a failure, & not knowing how to pick the pieces up.

Now I must answer Gerald Brenan, & read the Genji; for tomorrow I make a second £20 from Vogue. Did I say that I am rejected by Sybil? From being Sybil, she has become Lady Colefax. No invitations for a month.

Tuesday 16 June

This is the fag end of my morning’s work on Genji, which runs a little too easily from my pen & must be compressed & compacted. Dalloway, I fear, has hit her head against some impassable barrier of the public, just as Jacob did, & scarcely sells these last 3 days. Yet my friends are enthusiastic—really so, I think; & ready to acclaim me successful, arrived, triumphant with this book: Clive, Mary, Molly, Roger, my latest allies. We have sold 1240, I think; so the wave spread further than Jacob, & has a ripple left perhaps.

Tonight is Leonard’s festival night, the feast of the Brethren Apostles, & presumably some overflow of them here. “Why do human beings invent these ways of torturing themselves?” Them’s his words; for he has to preside & speak. Old Lytton, I am reminded, has fairly passed from our lives. No word about my books; no visits since Easter. I imagine that when he takes a new love, & he has Angus, he gets surly, like a stag; he feels a little ridiculous, uneasy, & does not relish the company of old cynical friends like ourselves. And in fact, when I hear the story from Angus, of his agony & entreaty & despair, I only feel slightly nauseated. He makes the young men pity him & laugh at him, & there is a touch of senility in this exposure of himself, while, practically speaking, his amours land him in society of the most tepid, milk & watery kind; nothing that taxes his mind or stimulates; poor feeble Philip for instance, who is precisely like an Eton boy in an Eton jacket: give him an ice & a sovereign.

“Them’s his words”—this reminds me I must get back to D. Copperfield. There are moments when all the masterpieces do no more than strum upon broken strings. It is very rare—the right mood for reading—in its way as intense a delight as any; but for the most part pain.

Thursday 18 June

No, Lytton does not like Mrs Dalloway, &, what is odd, I like him all the better for saying so, & don’t much mind. What he says is that there is a discordancy between the ornament (extremely beautiful) & what happens (rather ordinary—or unimportant). This is caused he thinks by some discrepancy in Clarissa herself; he thinks she is disagreeable & limited, but that I alternately laugh at her, & cover her, very remarkably, with myself. So that I think as a whole, the book does not ring solid; yet, he says, it is a whole; & he says sometimes the writing is of extreme beauty. What can one call it but genius? he said! Coming when, one never can tell. Fuller of genius, he said than anything I had done. Perhaps, he said, you have not yet mastered your method. You should take something wilder & more fantastic, a frame work that admits of anything, like Tristram Shandy. But then I should lose touch with emotions, I said. Yes, he agreed, there must be reality for you to start from. Heaven knows how you’re to do it. But he thought me at the beginning, not at the end. And he said the C.R. was divine, a classic; Mrs D. being, I fear, a flawed stone. This is very personal, he said & old fashioned perhaps; yet I think there is some truth in it. For I remember the night at Rodmell when I decided to give it up, because I found Clarissa in some way tinselly. Then I invented her memories. But I think some distaste for her persisted. Yet, again, that was true to my feeling for Kitty, & one must dislike people in art without its mattering, unless indeed it is true that certain characters detract from the importance of what happens to them. None of this hurts me, or depresses me. Its odd that when Clive & others (several of them) say it is a masterpiece, I am not much exalted; when Lytton picks holes, I get back into my working fighting mood, which is natural to me. I July 20th Have sold about 1550 don’t see myself a success. I like the sense of effort better. The sales collapsed completely for 3 days; now a little dribble begins again. I shall be more than pleased if we sell 1500. Its now 1250.

Saturday 27 June

A bitter cold day, succeeding a chilly windy night, in which were lit all the Chinese lanterns of Roger’s garden party. And I do not love my kind. I detest them. I pass them by. I let them break on me like dirty rain drops. No longer can I summon up that energy which when it sees one of these dry little sponges floating past, or rather stuck on the rock, sweeps round them, steeps them, infuses them, nerves them, & so finally fills them & creates them. Once I had a gift for doing this, & a passion, & it made parties arduous & exciting. So when I wake early now I luxuriate most in a whole day alone; a day of easy natural poses, a little printing, slipping tranquilly off into the deep water of my own thoughts navigating the underworld; & then replenishing my cistern at night with Swift. I am going to write about Stella & Swift for Richmond, as a sign of grace, after sweeping guineas off the Vogue counter. The first fruit of the C.R. (a book too highly praised now) is a request to write for the Atlantic Monthly. So I am getting pushed into criticism. It is a great stand by—this power to make large sums by formulating views on Stendhal & Swift.

Jack dined here last night; & we said how many years is it since we three were alone in a room together? he & Nessa & I, waiting for dinner, & a little nervous. I’m more nervous of these encounters than she is. She has a sweet cordiality (odd term to use) which impressed me, recalling mother, as she led him on; & laughed; so sincere, so quiet, & then, when we went on to Roger’s rather dismal gathering, gay & spirited, kissing Chrissie & flirting with Mrs Anrep, so careless & casual & white-haired—but enough of this. The truth is I am too random headed to describe Jack, yet he is worth describing. He made us laugh of course. He said such Wallerish things. “There are two kinds of biography, my dear Ginia”—in his old opinionative sententious way with enormous emphasis. He is red-copper coloured, with a pouch under his chin which rests on his collar; trusty brown eyes, a little hazy now, & one ear deaf, he said, & proceeded to tell us how he is cured by a Swiss every year, & gives the Nuns who keep the clinic a box of chocolates, which they love, being underfed. He looks in at the window & sees them handing the box round, & picking in turn. Then he told us, driving back from Roger’s—I insist upon paying this taxi my dear Leonard—how he sugared for moths last summer & caught perhaps 150—& the man he was with (on a fishing club) left his electric light on & the moths came & sat on the curtain. He exaggerates, illuminates, appreciates everyone very generously. L. thinks he “might become a bit of a bore”. Then we discussed his writing an autobiography: upon which he became very intent, & almost emotional. “But could one tell the truth? About one’s affairs with women? About one’s parents? My mother now—she was a very able woman—we all owe her an awful lot—but hard.” She said an odd thing to Nessa once—that she hated girls, especially motherless girls. “There you go very deep—It was the terror of her life—that she was losing her charm. She would never have a girl in the house. It was a tragedy. She was a very selfish woman.” (But while I try to write, I am making up “To the Lighthouse”—the sea is to be heard all through it. I have an idea that I will invent a new name for my books to supplant “novel”. A new —— by Virginia Woolf. But what? Elegy?)

Sunday 19 July

By bringing this book down here to the Studio, I have rather stinted it I think, as my mornings have all been spent writing—Swift or letters. So a whole tribe of people & parties has gone down the sink to oblivion—Ott’s parties & complaints; Gwen Raverat set sturdy dusty grim black, yesterday; Tom hedging a little over the Bank; Sybil Colefax drinking tea & protesting her desire to give up parties; her party when Olga Lynn dropped her music in a rage & had to be pacified by Balfour; & Ott lost her shawl; & the garden was lit like a stage, & Clive & Mary could be seen to the least eyelash; & so home to bed; & Mrs Asquith, Lady Oxford, called me the most beautiful woman in the room, which compliment was repeated to me the next night (so thick have parties been) by Jack Hutch, at Dadie’s, where there were many faces again, & drink, & again home to bed; & then little Eddie Sackville-West & Julian Morrell to dine (& I am to have his piano) & Philip in to fetch her; & then a party at Ott’s with Ching playing the piano; & the news of Hew Anderson’s death there broken to Angus; & Murphy going; & Mrs Cartwright coming; & my books—oh yes, the Calendar has abused Mrs D. which hurt me a little; & then the tide of praise has flowed over me again, & they both sell well, & my fears were ungrounded; & Maynard has brought us a pamphlet, wh. is called The Economic Consequences of Mr Churchill, & we are having 10,000 printed for Monday week to sell at a shilling.

On Friday I went on a river party & we dined at Formosa, & Eddie [Sackville-West] played in the round drawing room, & there was George Young in a punt. Not a moments reflection has gone to any of these statements; but I take them together, never knowing what withered straw doesn’t vivify the whole bunch of flowers. They have shone bright & gay this summer in the incessant heat. For the first time for weeks I sit by a fire, but then I am in the thinnest silk dress; & for once, it is watery & windy though I see blue sky through my skylight. A happy summer, very busy; rather overpowered by the need of seeing so many people. I never ask a soul here; but they accumulate. Tonight Ottoline, Tuesday Jack Hutch; Wednesday Edith Sitwell, Friday dine with Raymond. These are my fixed invitations; & all sorts of unforseen ones will occur. I run out after tea as if pursued. I mean to regulate this better in future. But I dont think of the future, or the past, I feast on the moment. This is the secret of happiness; but only reached now in middle age.

Monday 20 July

Here the door opened, & Morgan came in to ask us out to lunch with him at the Etoile, which we did, though we had a nice veal & ham pie at home (this is in the classic style of journalists). It comes of Swift perhaps, the last words of which I have just written, & so fill up time here.

I should consider my work list now. I think a little story, perhaps a review, this fortnight; having a superstitious wish to begin To the Lighthouse the first day at Monks House. I now think I shall finish it in the two months there. The word ‘sentimental’ sticks in my gizzard (I’ll write it out of me in a story—Ann Watkins of New York is coming on Wednesday to enquire about my stories). But this theme may be sentimental; father & mother & child in the garden: the death; the sail to the lighthouse. I think, though, that when I begin it I shall enrich it in all sorts of ways; thicken it; give it branches & roots which I do not perceive now. It might contain all characters boiled down; & childhood; & then this impersonal thing, which I’m dared to do by my friends, the flight of time, & the consequent break of unity in my design. That passage (I conceive the book in 3 parts: 1. at the drawing room window; 2. seven years passed; 3. the voyage:) interests me very much. A new problem like that breaks fresh ground in ones mind; prevents the regular ruts.

Last night Clive dined with us; & Nelly is rather waspish about it this morning; & tried to run away before Ottoline came; but it proved to be Adrian; & then we talked of cancer, & Clive got set, & Ottoline came, in tea kettle taffeta, all looped & scolloped & fringed with silver lace, & talked about Rupert & Jacques, & re-told, with emendations, the story of Ka & Henry Lamb & herself. She has been working over these old stories so often, that they hold no likeness to the truth—they are stale, managed, pulled this way & that, as we used to knead & pull the crumb of bread, till it was a damp slab. Then the old motor was heard hooting & there was Philip & Julian [Morrell], at which, at Julian that is, Clive cheered up, & was very brisk & obliging as he knows how. We argued the case of the aristocracy v. the middle class. I rather liked it. But one seldom says anything very profound. I like the sense of other people liking it, as I suppose the Morrells do, for they settle on us like a cloud of crows, once a week now. My vanity as a hostess is flattered. Sometimes a buttery crumb of praise is thrown to me—“Lady Desborough admires your books enormously—wants to meet you”—& then Clive, looking at my photographs in Vogue says of the one last year—“That is charming—but must be taken very long ago, I suppose”—so you see how I switch back from pleasure to pain, & time was when I should have ended the evening fast stuck in black despair, gone to bed like a diver with pursed lips shooting into oblivion. But enough, enough—I coin this little catchword to control my tendency to flower into phrase after phrase. Some are good though.

What shall I read at Rodmell? I have so many books at the back of my mind. I want to read voraciously & gather material for the Lives of the Obscure—which is to tell the whole history of England in one obscure life after another. Proust I should like to finish. Stendhal, & then to skirmish about hither & thither. These 8 weeks at Rodmell always seem capable of holding an infinite amount. Shall we buy the house at Southease? I suppose not.

Thursday 30 July

I am intolerably sleepy & annulled, & so write here. I do want indeed to consider my next book, but I am inclined to wait for a clearer head. The thing is I vacillate between a single & intense character of father; & a far wider slower book—Bob T. telling me that my speed is terrific, & destructive. My summer’s wanderings with the pen have I think shown me one or two new dodges for catching my flies. I have sat here, like an improviser with his hands rambling over the piano. The result is perfectly inconclusive, & almost illiterate. I want to learn greater quiet, & force. But if I set myself that task, don’t I run the risk of falling into the flatness of N⁠[ight]. & D⁠[ay].? Have I got the power needed if quiet is not to become insipid. These questions I will leave, for the moment, unanswered.

I should here try to sum up the summer, since August ends a season, spiritual as well as temporal. Well; business has been brisk. I don’t think I get many idle hours now, the idlest being, oddly enough, in the morning. I have not forced my brain at its fences; but shall, at Rodmell. When the dull sleep of afternoon is on me, I’m always in the shop, printing, dissing addressing; then it is tea, & Heaven knows we have had enough visitors. Sometimes I sit still & wonder how many people will tumble on me without my lifting a finger: already, this week, uninvited, on the verge of the holidays too, have come Mary, Gwen, Julian & Quentin, Geoffrey Keynes, & Roger. Meanwhile we are dealing with Maynard. All Monday Murphy & I worked like slaves till 6 when I was stiff as a coal heaver. We get telegrams & telephones; I daresay we shall sell our 10,000. On Tuesday at 12.30 Maynard retires to St Paneras Registry office with Lydia, & Duncan to witness (against his will.) So that episode is over. But, dear me, I’m too dull to write, & must go & fetch Mr Dobrée’s novel & read it, I think. Yet I have a thousand things to say. I think I might do something in To the Lighthouse, to split up emotions more completely. I think I’m working in that direction.

Saturday 5 September

And why couldn’t I see or feel that all this time I was getting a little used up & riding on a flat tire? So I was, as it happened; & fell down in a faint at Charleston, in the middle of Q.’s birthday party: & then have lain about here, in that odd amphibious life of headache, for a fortnight. This has rammed a big hole in my 8 weeks which were to be stuffed so full. Never mind. Arrange whatever pieces come your way. Never be unseated by the shying of that undependable brute, life, hag ridden as she is by my own queer, difficult nervous system. Even at 43 I dont know its workings, for I was saying to myself, all the summer, “I’m quite adamant now. I can go through a tussle of emotions peaceably that two years ago even, would have raked me raw.”

I have made a very quick & flourishing attack on To the Lighthouse, all the same—22 pages straight off in less than a fortnight. I am still crawling & easily enfeebled, but if I could once get up steam again, I believe I could spin it off with infinite relish. Think what a labour the first pages of Dalloway were! Each word distilled by a relentless clutch on my brain.

I took up the pen meaning to write on “Disillusionment”. I have never had any illusion so completely burnt out of me as my illusion about the Richmonds. This they effected between 4 & 6 yesterday. But Elena has no beauty, no charm, no very marked niceness even! Any country parsons wife is her match. Her nose is red, her cheeks blowsed: her eyes without character. Even her voice & movements which used to be adorable, her distinction, her kindly charm—all have vanished; she is a thick, dowdy, obliterated woman, who has no feelings, no sympathies, prominences & angles are all completely razed bare. Seriously, one as doubts for her complete mental equipment. The conversation was practically imbecile: for instance: (E). I think I could get very fond on a house. But we are so lucky. There are some delightful people near. People who like the same sort of things we do. (B). We are very lucky. There are two fellows within 4 miles who were at Winchester with me. One went to Ceylon as a tea planter. They both farm now. Are you lucky in your clergyman? So much depends in the country on one’s clergyman. (E). I really forget anything more from the lips of E. I believe it was all the same: how she would like a house with a piano: & they mean to retire & buy a house with a piano. She sees flowers, dogs, houses, people with the same quiet, stolid, almost coarse, at any rate dull indifference. Her hands are thick. She has a double chin. She wears a long American looking blueish coat, with a nondescript dowdy scarf, a white blouse, fastened with a diamond lizard oh the colourlessness, drabness, & coldness of her personality—she whom I used to think arch & womanly & comforting! She is white haired too. Bruce is completely circular: round head, eyes, nose, paunch, mind. You can’t stop him rolling from thing to thing. He never stops, he glides smoothly. It would shock him to mention writing, money, or people. All has to be dissolved in slang & kindliness.

Now the curious thing was that these qualities infected us both to such an extent that we were acutely miserable. I have sometimes felt the same when walking in the suburbs. Castello Avenue made me angry like this once. As for L. he was indignant. That human nature should sink so low, he said; & then that people should lead such aimless evil lives—the most despicable he could imagine. They took the colour, the sting, the individuality out of everything. And to think that I have ever wasted a thought upon what that goodtempered worldly little grocer thought of my writing! But E. is the great disillusionment. Partly on Thoby’s account, partly through my own susceptibility to certain shades of female charm, I had still some glow at the thought of her. Now that glow is replaced by a solid tallow candle. And I feel, this morning, having pitched into bed exhausted, physically worn out, mentally bankrupt, scraped; whitewashed, cleaned. An illusion gone.

Monday 14 September

A disgraceful fact—I am writing this at 10 in the morning in bed in the little room looking into the garden, the sun beaming steady, the vine leaves transparent green, & the leaves of the apple tree so brilliant that, as I had my breakfast, I invented a little story about a man who wrote a poem, I think, comparing them with diamonds, & the spiders webs (which glance & disappear astonishingly) with something or other else: which led me to think of Marvell on a country life, so to Herrick, & the reflection that much of it was dependent upon the town & gaiety—a reaction. However, I have forgotten the facts. I am writing this partly to test my poor bunch of nerves at the back of my neck—will they hold or give again, as they have done so often?—for I’m amphibious still, in bed & out of it; partly to glut my itch (‘glut’ and ‘itch’!) for writing. It is the great solace, & scourge. Leonard is in London this solitary perfect day; this day of the peculiar September mintage; talking to Murphy in the basement, while the vans rumble by, & peoples skirts & trousers appear at the top of the area. This leads us to think of selling Monks, & spending our summers, quit of Press, quit of Nelly, quit of Nation, quit of polar blasts, in the South of France. The news that Mr Wilkinson is longing to buy Monks shakes our resolution to sell it. A walk, in pearly mottled weather, on the marshes, plunges me in love again. Leonard then finds his potato crop good, & his autumn crocuses rising. We have been in the throes of the usual servant crisis—varied this time it is true: Nelly says Lottie wants to come back; we offer to have her; she denies it—to Karin; to Nelly she prevaricates. I was flung into a passion with Karin, & so precipitated another headache. But we are on the laps of the Gods: we don’t intend to raise a finger either way. Only it is a curious reflection that a little strain with servants more effectually screws the nerves at the back of the head than any other I am aware of. Now why? It is because it is subterranean, partly.

Tom has treated us scurvily, much in the manner that he has treated the Hutchinsons. On Monday I get a letter that fawns & flatters, implores me to write for his new 4ly; & proposes to discuss press matters as soon as we get back; on Thursday we read in the Lit. Supt. that his new firm is publishing Waste Land also (Sept 23rd) that Read is being asked to write for Tom’s Press & his other poems—a fact which he dared not confess, but sought to palliate by flattering me. He treated Jack in the same way over Vivien’s story in the Criterion. The Underworld—the dodges & desires of the Underworld, its shifts & cabals are at the bottom of it. He intends to get on by the methods of that world; & my world is really not the underworld. However, there is a kind of fun in unravelling the twists & obliquities of this remarkable man. How far will they make his poetry squint? Anyhow, at my age, without illusions of that sort any more—I mean in the greatness of Tom, or the greatness of any of us, or our power to influence each other intellectually—I remain detached, & composed. Plenty of other illusions remain to me—emotional, personal; the pleasures of inventing Wednesday walks this winter is now uppermost. I’m going to Greenwich, to Caen Woods, to Gunnersbury, all in the dripping autumn weather, with tea at an A.B.C. & home to a hot bath. Really I am going to let myself slacken in social ways: instead of feeling that I shirk a hedge, in refusing Lord Berners or Lady Colefax, I am going to allow myself to do so approvingly; saying that I strengthen a paragraph in The Lighthouse thereby, or add another hour to the shabby crony talk which I love best. Not but what I shall dip here & there; but without anxiety or preparation of clothes or any of that struggle. This gives me a delicious sense of ease. And I have earned it, too, for I spread my £35 dress allowance to its furthest, & braved many a party spartanly ‘on principle’ as the marmots would say. The ‘principle’ which I find intermittently guiding my life is—to take one’s fences. Heaven knows how I’ve dreaded them! Now, with my Studio habitable, & another servant perhaps, I shall aim at haphazard, bohemian meetings, music (we have the algraphone, & thats a heavenly prospect—music after dinner while I stitch at my woolwork—I go to Lewes this afternoon to meet Nessa & buy wools) people of our own standard dropping in; ease, slippers, smoke, buns, chocolate. For I’m naturally sociable; it cannot be denied.

Tuesday 22 September

How my handwriting goes down hill! Another sacrifice to the Hogarth Press. Yet what I owe the Hogarth Press is barely paid by the whole of my handwriting. Haven’t I just written to Herbert Fisher refusing to do a book for the Home University Series on Post Victorian?—knowing that I can write a book, a better book, a book off my own bat, for the Press if I wish! To think of being battened down in the hold of those University dons fairly makes my blood run cold. Yet I’m the only woman in England free to write what I like. The others must be thinking of series’ & editors. Yesterday I heard from Harcourt Brace that Mrs D. & C.R. are selling 148 & 73 weekly—Isn’t that a surprising rate for the 4th month? Doesn’t it portend a bathroom & a w.c. either here, or Southease? I am writing in the watery blue sunset, repentance of an ill tempered morose day, which vanished, the clouds, I have no doubt, showing gold over the downs, & leaving a soft gold fringe on the top there.

Today is
Thursday 24 September

—sad to think a week only left whole of this partially wrecked summer; however, I don’t complain, seeing as how I have dipped my head in health again & feel stabilised once more about the spinal cord, which is always the centre of my being. Maynard & Lydia came here yesterday—M. in Tolstoi’s blouse & Russian cap of black astrachan—A fair sight, both of them, to meet on the high road! An immense good will & vigour pervades him. She hums in his wake, the great mans wife. But though one could carp, one can also find them very good company, & my heart, in this the autumn of my age, slightly warms to him, whom I’ve known all these years, so truculently pugnaciously, & unintimately. We had very brisk talk of Russia: such a hotch-potch, such a mad jumble, M. says, of good & bad, & the most extreme things that he can make no composition of it—can’t yet see how it goes. Briefly, spies everywhere, no liberty of speech, greed for money eradicated, people living in common, yet some, L⁠[ydia]’s mother for instance with servants, peasants contented because they own land, no sign of revolution, artistocrats acting showmen to their possessions, ballet respected, best show of Cezanne & Matisse in existence. Endless processions of communists in top hats, prices exorbitant, yet champagne produced, & the finest cooking in Europe, banquets beginning at 8.30 & going on till 2.30; people getting slightly drunk, say about 11, & wandering round the table. Kalinin getting up, & perambulating followed by a little crowd who clapped him steadily as he walked; then the immense luxury of the old Imperial trains; feeding off the Tsars plate; interview with Zinoviev who (I think) was a suave cosmopolital Jew, but had two fanatical watch dogs with square faces, guarding him, & mumbling out their mysteries, fanatically. One prediction of theirs, to the effect that in 10 years time the standard of living will be higher in Russia than it was before the war, but in all other countries lower, M. thought might very well come true. Anyhow they are crammed & packed with sights & talks: Maynard has a medal set in diamonds, & L. a gold sovereign wh. she was allowed to take from the bags at the mint.

But the Keynes’, I need hardly say, renewed my headache, & when Lytton came, I was drooping over the fire, & could not do much battle with that old serpent. What was said I think was to the effect that he had had a fire at Hamspray, which blistered the wall, but did not touch his books—& what fire could have the heart to do that? Then he had read Bunny “Really its very extraordinary—so arty,—so composed—the competence terrific, but … well, its like a perfectly restored Inn—Ye Olde … everything tidied up & restored.” No Bunny in it, as there were signs of being in The Man in the Zoo; no humour; a perfect restoration.

But to tell the truth, I am exacerbated this morning. It is 10.25, on a fine grey still day; Lily is doing my bedroom; the starlings are in the apple tree; Leonard is in London, & Nelly I suppose is settling the greatest question of her whole life—what marriage is to a woman—with Lottie. Lily is a wide eyed sheep dog girl who comes from Iford to ‘do’; but can’t scramble an egg or bake a potato, & is thus ill armed for life, so far as I can see.

Beginning at 9.45 I wrote two pages of a story, as a test again; & passed it well, I think, anyhow my cistern is full of ideas. But to the point: why am I exacerbated? By Roger. I told him I had been ill all the summer. His reply is—silence as to that; but plentiful descriptions of his own front teeth. Egotism, egotism—it is the essential ingredient in a clever man’s life I believe. It protects; it enhances; it preserves his own vital juices entire by keeping them banked in. Also I cannot help thinking that he suspects me of valetudinarianism & this enrages me: & L. is away & I cant have my thorn picked out by him, so must write it out. There! it is better now; & I think I hear the papers come; & will get them, my woolwork, & a glass of milk.

[Wednesday 30 September]

This was I suppose successfully accomplished; & it is now Wednesday morning, damp & close & over all the sense already of transmigration, of shedding one habit for another. My autumn coat is grown. I begin to sympathise with Nelly’s longing for the ease & speed of civilisation. But I vow here not to be misled into thinking this is life—this perpetual frenzy & stretch; or I shall again be deposited in a heap, as I was in August.

Today we are on Tom’s track, riddling & reviling him. He won’t let Read off that book, has been after him 3 or 4 months. Dignity is our line; & really, as far as the poaching of authors goes, he won’t harm us. Then there is the fascination of a breach; I mean, after feeling all this time conscious of something queer about him, it is more satisfactory to have it on the surface. Not that I want a breach: what I want is a revelation. But L. thinks the queer shifty creature will slip away now.

I actually forgot to record the finish of the Lottie drama—she’s in love with the cowman at Thorpe [-le-Soken]! This emerged after an hours violent argument with Nelly. This explains & excuses all: & we are, for private reasons, thoroughly content. What is worse, is poor unfortunate Karin—in operating, they cut a nerve in her face, which is half paralysed. She can’t speak, I gather, without being all screwed up. She refuses to see the children for fear of frightening them. This final malignancy on the part of fate seems to me her knock out blow; save that somehow she will, I suppose, find a way round, as people mostly do. This softens the heart towards her. It makes one think of her courage. But how quickly the intense feeling of sympathy passes, & she resumes her place in ones mind as a person one is conscious of being permanently, dully, sorry for. But then propinquity will revive it: Tavistock Sqre, being next door, will make one more conscious of the horror of screwing up one’s own face.

Friday 27 November

Oh what a blank! I tumbled into bed on coming back—or rather Ellie tumbled me; & keeps me still prostrate half the day. Next week I shall go to the ballet, my first night out. One visitor a day. Till 2 days ago, bed at 5. So visitors have become as usual, pictures hung on the wall. On the whole, I have not been unhappy; but not very happy; too much discomfort; sickness, (cured by eating instantly); a good deal of rat-gnawing at the back of my head; one or two terrors; then the tiredness of the body—it lay like a workman’s coat. Sometimes I felt old, & spent. Madge died. Rustling among my emotions, I found nothing better than dead leaves. Her letters had eaten away the reality—the brilliancy, the warmth. Oh detestable time, that thus eats out the heart & lets the body go on. They buried a faggot of twigs at Highgate, as far as I am concerned. I drove to the gate, & saw Nessa & Leonard, like a pair of stuffed figures, go in.

My walks are extended to Oxford Street; only once so far; & then what about talks. Vita has been twice. She is doomed to go to Persia; & I minded the thought so much (thinking to lose sight of her for 5 years) that I conclude I am genuinely fond of her. There is the glamour of unfamiliarity to reckon with; of aristocracy (Raymond says, But she’s half a peasant—) of flattery. All the same, after sifting & filing, much, I am sure, remains. Shall I stay with her? Shall we go to Charleston for Christmas? The best of these illnesses is that they loosen the earth about the roots. They make changes. People express their affection. Nessa wants to have us—Indeed, I have seen more of her & Duncan than for many a day. Gwen [Raverat] comes in: threatens to dissolve, her hearty direct stodgy manner in floods of tears, as if the rivets that hold her must give way—such tragedies have beaten her, together for the moment; but suddenly she will break down & tell me something that she has not told anyone. She finds me understanding. And I suppose she is in love—or Marchand in love—& I don’t altogether want to hear it.

Reading & writing go on. Not my novel though. And I can only think of all my faults as a novelist & wonder why I do it—a wonder which Lytton increases, & Morgan decreases. Morgan is writing an article on me. This may be very helpful. It may shove me off again. Then I want to write ‘a book’ by which I mean a book of criticism for the H.P. But on what? Letters? Psychology? Lytton is off: The Loves of the Famous. Q. Elizabeth &c. I thought him at his most intimate last night; all plumy, incandescent, soft, luminous. Something slightly repels (too strong) Leonard. His character is not so good as Morgan’s, he said, walking round the square in the snow today. “There is something about all Stracheys—” Then, when we talk, L. & I, we rather crab Lytton’s writing I observe. But all this vanishes, with me, when he comes, as yesterday, to talk, & talk, & talk. That Nessa is still most beautiful—that comes over me. That Ka is thinner—& very self conscious: but nothing, in my sentimental heart, can stand against these old loyalties. I cannot keep my wits altogether about me in talk. I begin to glitter & englobe people with a champagne mist. And then it fades. I was talking of this to Raymond—whose blunt nose & flashy clothes are, I think, one’s chief grudge against him—the other day. That there is no substance in ones friendships, that they fade like—For instance, did he regret Harold [Nicolson] in Persia?* * A shrewd guess—he does regret Harold in Persia Nothing … like a coin is struck & left for ever in one’s possession. People die; Madge dies, & one cannot beat up a solitary tear. But then, if 6 people died, it is true that my life would cease: by wh. I mean, it would run so thin that though it might go on, would it have any relish? Imagine Leonard, Nessa Duncan Lytton, Clive Morgan all dead.

Monday 7 December

I want to lie down like a tired child & weep away this life of care—& my diary shall receive me on its downy pillow. Most children do not know what they cry for; nor do I altogether. It is 12 o’clock on Monday morning, a very cold day, but sunny, healthy, cheerful. Bells ring downstairs; doors are slammed. I should be in full feather, for after all these drowsy dependent weeks I am now almost quit of it again; & can read & write, & walk a little, & mildly entertain. Well, it is partly that devil Vita. No letter. No visit. No invitation to Long Poor woman! she did try to come—prevented, fog &c. Barn. She was up last week, & never came. So many good reasons for this neglect occur to me that I’m ashamed to call this a cause for weeping. Only if I do not see her now, I shall not—ever: for the moment for intimacy will be gone, next summer. And I resent this, partly because I like her; partly because I hate the power of life to divide. Also, I am vain. Clive will know why Vita did not come to see me. That old rat chased to his hole, there is Tom’s postcard about On Being III—an article which I, & Leonard too, thought one of my best: to him characteristic &c: I mean he is not enthusiastic; so, reading the proof just now, I saw wordiness, feebleness, & all the vices in it. This increases my distaste for my own writing, & dejection at the thought of beginning another novel. What theme have I? Shan’t I be held up for personal reasons? It will be too like father, or mother: &, oddly, I know so little of my own powers. Here is another rat run to earth. So now for news.

We shall spend Xmas at Charleston, which I’m afraid Leonard will not like much. We walked at Hampstead on Saturday. It was very cold—skating everywhere, save there, L. having brought his skates. It had a foggy winter beauty. We went in to Ken Wood (but dogs must be led) & there came to the duelling ground, where great trees stand about, & presumably sheltered the 18th Century swordsmen (how I begin to love the past—I think something to do with my book) & it was here that we discussed Lytton, gravely, like married people. But my God—how satisfactory after, I think 12 years, to have any human being to whom one can speak so directly as I to L.! Well, it was a question of L⁠[ytton]’s change of feeling. He has the faults of a small nature said L. He is ungenerous. He asks, but never gives. But I have always known that—often I have seen the dull eyelid fall over him, if one asked a little too much: some sheath of selfishness that protects him from caring too much, or committing himself uncomfortably. He is cautious. He is a valetudinarian. But—there are, as usual, the other things; & as I say, I have known about Lytton’s leathern eyelid since I was 20. Nothing has ever shocked me more, I think. But L. said when they were at Cambridge Lytton was not like that to him. First there was the I⁠[nternationa]⁠l Review: & Lytton refused to write; then Ralph; then never a word of praise for other people. Morgan, said Leonard, as we trod back over the slippery hillocks seeing so little as we talked (& yet all this part of Hampstead recalls Katherine to me—that faint ghost, with the steady eyes, the mocking lips, &, at the end, the wreath set on her hair:) Morgan has improved. Morgan is I think naturally more congenial to L. than Lytton is. He likes “Sillies”; he likes the dependent simplicity of Morgan & myself. He likes settling our minds, & our immense relief at this. Well, well.

I am reading The Passage to India; but will not expatiate here, as I must elsewhere. This book for the H.P.: I think I will find some theory about fiction. I shall read six novels, & start some hares. The one I have in view, is about perspective. But I do not know. My brain may not last me out. I cannot think closely enough. But I can—if the C.R. is a test—beat up ideas, & express them now without too much confusion. (By the way, Robert Bridges likes Mrs Dalloway: says no one will read it; but it is beautifully written, & some more, which L. who was told by Morgan, cannot remember.)

I don’t think it is a matter of ‘development’ but something to do with prose & poetry, in novels. For instance Defoe at one end: E. Brontë at the other. Reality something they put at different distances. One would have to go into conventions; real life; & so on. It might last me—this theory—but I should have to support it with other things. And death—as I always feel—hurrying near. 43: how many more books?

Katie came here; a sort of framework of discarded beauty hung on a battered shape now. With the firmness of the flesh, & the blue of the eye, the formidable manner has gone. I can see her as she was at 22 H⁠[yde] P⁠[ark] G⁠[ate] 25 years ago: in a little coat & skirt; very splendid; eyes half shut; lovely mocking voice; upright; tremendous; shy. Now she babbles along.

“But no duke ever asked me, my dear Virginia. They called me the Ice Queen.

And why did I marry Cromer? I loathed Egypt; I loathed invalids. I’ve had two very happy times in my life—childhood—not when I grew up—but later, with my boys club, my cottage, & my chow—& now. Now I have all I want. My garden—my dog.”

I don’t think her son enters in very largely. She is one of these cold eccentric great Englishwomen, enormously enjoying her rank, & the eminence it lends her in St John’s Wood, & now free to poke into all the dusty holes & corners, dressed like a charwoman, with hands like one, & finger nails clotted with dirt. She never stops talking. She lacks much body to her. She has almost effused in mist. But I enjoyed it. Though I think she has few affections, & no very passionate interests. Now, having cried my cry, & the sun coming out, to write a list of Christmas presents. Ethel Sands comes to tea. But no Vita.

Monday 21 December

But no Vita! But Vita for 3 days at Long Barn, from which L. & I returned yesterday. These Sapphists love women; friendship is never untinged with amorosity. In short, my fears & refrainings, my ‘impertinence’ my usual self-consciousness in intercourse with people who mayn’t want me & so on—were all, as L. said, sheer fudge; &, partly thanks to him (he made me write) I wound up this wounded & stricken year in great style. I like her & being with her, & the splendour—she shines in the grocers shop in Sevenoaks with a candle lit radiance, stalking on legs like beech trees, pink glowing, grape clustered, pearl hung. That is the secret of her glamour, I suppose. Anyhow she found me incredibly dowdy, no woman cared less for personal appearance—no one put on things in the way I did. Yet so beautiful, &c. What is the effect of all this on me? Very mixed. There is her maturity & full breastedness: her being so much in full sail on the high tides, where I am coasting down backwaters; her capacity I mean to take the floor in any company, to represent her country, to visit Chatsworth, to control silver, servants, chow dogs; her motherhood (but she is a little cold & offhand with her boys) her being in short (what I have never been) a real woman. Then there is some voluptuousness about her; the grapes are ripe; & not reflective. No. In brain & insight she is not as highly organised as I am. But then she is aware of this, & so lavishes on me the maternal protection which, for some reason, is what I have always most wished from everyone. What L. gives me, & Nessa gives me, & Vita, in her more clumsy external way, tries to give me. For of course, mingled with all this glamour, grape clusters & pearl necklaces, there is something loose fitting. How much, for example, shall I really miss her when she is motoring across the desert? I will make a note on that next year. Anyhow, I am very glad that she is coming to tea today, & I shall ask her, whether she minds my dressing so badly? I think she does. I read her poem; which is more compact, better seen & felt than anything yet of hers.

Mary’s stories, I fear, are bad. Dear me—then Roger is in love with H⁠[elen Anrep]. Morgan’s article has cheered me very much. L. is doing up rubber seals & fur rabbits at the moment. The workmen are hammering, their engines throbbing outside on the hotel. We go down to Charleston tomorrow, not without some trepidation on my part, partly because I shall be hung about with trailing clouds of glory from Long Barn wh. always disorientates me & makes me more than usually nervous: then I am—altogether so queer in some ways. One emotion succeeds another.

[]

1926

Tuesday 19 January

Vita having this moment (20 minutes ago—it is now 7) left me, what are my feelings? Of a dim November fog; the lights dulled & damped. I walked towards the sound of a barrel organ in Marchmont Street. But this will disperse; then I shall want her, clearly & distinctly. Then not—& so on. This is the normal human feeling, I think. One wants to finish sentences. One wants that atmosphere—to me so rosy & calm. She is not clever; but abundant & fruitful; truthful too. She taps so many sources of life: repose & variety, was her own expression, sitting on the floor this evening in the gaslight. We dined last night at the Ivy with Clive; & then they had a supper party, from which I refrained. Oh & mixed up with this is the invigoration of again beginning my novel, in the Studio, for the first time this morning. All these fountains play on my being & intermingle. I feel a lack of stimulus, of marked days, now Vita is gone; & some pathos, common to all these partings; & she has 4 days journey through the snow.

[Diary XV:]
52 Tavistock Square
1926

Monday 8 February

Just back from Rodmell—to use again the stock opening. And I should explain why I’ve let a month slip perhaps. First, I think, the German measles or influenza; next Vita; then, disinclination for any exertion, so that I never made a book till last week. But undoubtedly this diary is established, & I sometimes look at it & wonder what on earth will be the fate of it. It is to serve the purpose of my memoirs. At 60 I am to sit down & write my life. As rough material for that masterpiece—& knowing the caprice of my own brain as record reader for I never know what will take my fancy, I here record that I come in to find the following letters waiting me. 1. Ottoline, on that wonderful essay On Being Ill. She is doing a cure. 2. A long letter of hysterical flattery from Miss Keiller [Kieffer] who is translating Jacob’s Room. 3. a card, showing me her character in an unfavourable light from Miss Ethel Pye, who once met me in an omnibus & wishes to take a mask of my head; 4. a letter from Harcourt Brace enclosing cheque from the Forum for O⁠[n]. B⁠[eing]. Ill. 5. a letter asking me to become one of the Committee of the English Association; 6. a cutting on Hogarth Essays from the Dial; 7. a note from Clive asking me to dine to meet his brother. I think this makes me out rather specially important. It is 3 days post. I am rather tired, a little tired, from having thought too much about To the Lighthouse. Never never have I written so easily, imagined so profusely. Murry says my works won’t be read in 10 years time—Well, tonight I get a new edition of the V⁠[oyage]. O⁠[ut]. from Harcourt Brace—this was published 11 years ago.

Tuesday 23 February

Here is the usual door bell/ & I think Gwen came in, & I was rather sodden & wretched, feeling that I had nothing to give her, & she everything to ask. As I foretold, she is enmeshed in a net of fire: that is the truth; loves net; the fiery net of—who was it?—that was scorched to death: & hers is more painful than his, & more enduring. Yet how seldom one envisages what one knows! Her net lies on me; but it does not burn me. And I do little futile kindnesses to her, which are little good to anybody; & I don’t do them, & I feel compunction. Of all this I have little appetite to write, being exacerbated 1. because Nelly won’t make marmalade; 2. because a certain function impends; 3. because I can’t go, in deference to L.’s wish, to Mortimer’s farewell party, 4. because Dadie asked me to tea, & I did not go; 5. because—the last because I cannot now remember—a vague dissatisfaction: spring & funerals; yellow lights & white blossoms; beautiful black yellow pointed squares—& so on. Vita is a dumb letter writer, & I miss her. I miss the glow & the flattery & the festival. I miss her, I suppose, not very intimately. Nevertheless, I do miss her, & wish it were May 10th; & then I don’t wish it; for I have such a razor edge to my palette that seeing people often disgusts me of seeing them.

I am blown like an old flag by my novel. This one is To the Lighthouse. I think it is worth saying for my own interest that at last at last, after that battle Jacob’s Room, that agony—all agony but the end, Mrs Dalloway, I am now writing as fast & freely as I have written in the whole of my life; more so—20 times more so—than any novel yet. I think this is the proof that I was on the right path; & that what fruit hangs in my soul is to be reached there. Amusingly, I now invent theories that fertility & fluency are the things: I used to plead for a kind of close, terse, effort. Anyhow this goes on all the morning; & I have the devils own work not to be flogging my brain all the afternoon. I live entirely in it, & come to the surface rather obscurely & am often unable to think what to say when we walk round the Square, which is bad I know. Perhaps it may be a good sign for the book though. Of course it is largely known to me: but all my books have been that. It is, I feel, that I can float everything off now; & “everything” is rather a crowd & weight & confusion in the mind.

Then I have seen Lytton: seen Eddy; Mary; I forget: I have been discreet in my society, & enjoyed it. Perhaps I am again brisking, after my lethargy. The publishing season is about to begin. Nessa says Why don’t you give it up? I say, because I enjoy it. Then I wonder, but do I? What about Rome & Sicily? And Manning Sanders is not worth the grind. Am I a fanatical enthusiast for work, like my father? I think I have a strain of that, but I don’t relish it. Tonight Francis Birrell & Rose Macaulay dine with us. To celebrate the occasion, I have bought a toast rack & a bedspread, which covers that atrocious chest of drawers wh. has worried me these 2 years. I am now so pleased with the colour that I go out & look at it.

Wednesday 24 February

To continue, the second day running which is a rarity, they came last night, Francis & Rose Macaulay—I daresay I shall be calling her Rose one of these days. Francis didn’t much relish meeting her: my gnats of worries gave me little peace: Gwen ringing up; I not cordial; she shying off: I repentant; ringing up again. Then Rose—too chattery chittery at first go off; lean as a rake, wispy, & frittered. Some flimsy smartness & taint of the flimsy glittery literary about her: but this was partly nerves, I think; & she felt us alien & observant doubtless. Anyhow in the middle of dinner the lights went out: only a few candles in saucers to be had, & I left her & Francis alone in the dark to talk. After all, she has no humbug about her; is exactly on a par as far as conventions go, I imagine; only frosted & rather cheaply gilt superficially with all that being asked to speak at dinners, to give opinions to newspapers, & so on; lunching at the League of Nations; dining with Iolo Williams, meeting Jack Squire who has grown whiskers & looks like a verger.

Let me see, there’s some failure of sympathy between Chiswick & Bloomsbury, I think, she said. So we defined Bloomsbury. Her part is to stick up for common sense she said. I elaborated her being Cambridge. She is writing an article for an American paper on London after the War. It is [this] sort of thing that one distrusts in her. Why should she take the field so unnecessarily? But I fancy our ‘leading lady novelists’ all do as they are asked about this, & I am not quite one of them. I saw my own position, a good deal lowered & diminished; & this is part of the value of seeing new people—still more of going to people’s houses. One is, if anything, minimised: here in the eternal Bloomsbury, one is apt, without realising it, to expand. Then Gwen came. I like Francis. I like his laughter; & his random energy. He is a Victorian. Indeed we talked a lot, when L. was in the basement with the electrician, of father, who, said Francis, dominates the 20th Century. “He made it possible for me to have a decent life” he said. “He pulled down the whole edifice, & never knew what he was doing. He never realised that if God went, morality must follow. A remarkable man; for though he would not believe in God, he was stricter than those who did.”

“He loved lamentation” said L. coming up. R.M. said her parents called him always “poor Leslie Stephen” because he had lost his faith. Also they said he was very gentle & charming. Gwen said her father & uncles had a great respect for him. They had a very romantic feeling for my mother.

Because she was so beautiful, I said, proud that R.M. should know this; & felt rather queer, to think how much of this there is in To the Lighthouse, & how all these people will read it & recognise poor Leslie Stephen & beautiful Mrs Stephen in it. Then we talked of knowing people. R.M. said she always knew why she liked people. Gwen being perhaps tired, was a little mystical; or perhaps she has acquired views which are yet hardly articulate. Anyhow Leonard thought her ‘almost imbecile’. They got talking about whether one knew more about pictures or books. R.M. showed up rather well in argument, & maintained that a book is a subjective thing; she attacks authority in literature. But people know about painting as it is a more technical art. Then she said (this makes me think she will wish to be called Rose) how she had dreamt she was staying with us in a cottage in Surrey, a 15th century house, full of old beams & candle lit. In some lights she has the beautiful eyes of all us distinguished women writers; the refinement; the clearness of cut; the patience; & humbleness. It is her voice & manner that make one edgy.

Saturday 27 February

I think I shall initiate a new convention for this book—beginning each day on a new page—my habit in writing serious literature. Certainly, I have room to waste a little paper in this year’s book. As for the soul: why did I say I would leave it out? I forget. And the truth is, one can’t write directly about the soul. Looked at, it vanishes: but look at the ceiling, at Grizzle, at the cheaper beasts in the Zoo which are exposed to walkers in Regents Park, & the soul slips in. It slipped in this afternoon. I will write that I said, staring at the bison: answering L. absentmindedly; but what was I going to write?

Mrs Webb’s book has made me think a little what I could say of my own life. I read some of 1923 this morning, being headachy again, & taking a delicious draught of silence. But then there were causes in her life: prayer; principle. None in mine. Great excitability & search after something. Great content—almost always enjoying what I’m at, but with constant change of mood. I don’t think I’m ever bored. Sometimes a little stale; but I have a power of recovery—which I have tested; & am now testing for the 50th time. I have to husband my head still very carefully: but then, as I said to Leonard today, I enjoy epicurean ways of society; sipping & then shutting my eyes to taste. I enjoy almost everything. Yet I have some restless searcher in me. Why is there not a discovery in life? Something one can lay hands on & say “This is it?” My depression is a harassed feeling—I’m looking; but that’s not it—thats not it. What is it? And shall I die before I find it? Then (as I was walking through Russell Sqre last night) I see the mountains in the sky: the great clouds; & the moon which is risen over Persia; I have a great & astonishing sense of something there, which is ‘it’—It is not exactly beauty that I mean. It is that the thing is in itself enough: satisfactory; achieved. A sense of my own strangeness, walking on the earth is there too: of the infinite oddity of the human position; trotting along Russell Sqre with the moon up there, & those mountain clouds. Who am I, what am I, & so on: these questions are always floating about in me; & then I bump against some exact fact—a letter, a person, & come to them again with a great sense of freshness. And so it goes on. But, on this showing which is true, I think, I do fairly frequently come upon this ‘it’; & then feel quite at rest.

Is that what I meant to say? Not in the least. I was thinking about my own character; not about the universe. Oh & about society again; dining with Lord Berners at Clive’s made me think that. How, at a certain moment, I see through what I’m saying; detest myself; & wish for the other side of the moon; reading alone, that is. How many phases one goes through between the soup & the sweet! I want, partly as a writer, to found my impressions on something firmer. I said to Lord B. All you must do in writing is to float off the contents of your mind. Clive & Raymond laughed & said Thats exactly what you do anyhow. And I don’t want that to be all. Nor is it. Theres a good deal of shaping & composing in my books. However—the main idea of them is that, then; & I dont like it.

Lord B. was stockish, resolute, quick witted: analysed his own instability. His father was a sea captain; wished him not on any account to be a long haired artist; his mother used to say “My little boy plays so nicely—you should hear him play” but she minded his not hunting & riding. So, he said, he was inhibited as a musician. His talent clung (I think he said) like a creeper to the edge of a cliff. One day he wrote two marches for fun. Stravinsky saw them, thought them good, & they were published. So he was accepted as a serious musician, with only 4 lessons from Tovey in counterpoint. He had an astonishing facility. He could write things that sounded all right. Suddenly, last year, all his pleasure in it went. He met a painter, asked him how you paint; bought ‘hogsheads’—(meant hog’s bristles) & canvas & copied an Italian picture, brilliantly, consummately, says Clive. Has the same facility there: but it will come to nothing he said, like the other.

What did we talk about? Tom & the Sitwells; Eddie Marsh & Lady Colefax, & I felt one cd. go on saying these things for ever, & they mean nothing. Sure enough, he asked me to dine: & now I say I have a headache & can’t.

Wednesday 3 March

And I did have a bit of a headache—yes; all this time is rather weathering headaches. Nailing a flag to a mast in a gale, I have just compared writing a novel in London to that, in a letter to Vita. The glow is off my visit to Herbert & Freda at Cookham: a very memorable day. From their windows you look down on the top of old Mr Watkins’ bald head skulling on the Thames. You look at two twisted stakes in the river which I took for cranes; & across Marlow to some hills. They motored us up into the hills, & it was oddly strangely still & bright & empty & full of unblown flowers. We saw a Queen Anne house called—I forget; so high & remote, with turf to its door; & broad alleys; capacious windows, a woman. Well; no one gets more pleasure from these sights than I do; only the wave of pleasure leaves some regret—all this beauty going—going—going: & I in Tavistock Sqre not seeing it. And spiritually it was very interesting. I thought I had found the real human being—something so simple & fitted to its surroundings as to be almost irreflective, in Freda. She is nearer humanity than I am: eats her way into the heart of it, as I cannot. Her thighs are thick with honey. But the impression is dying, as they do, under others—how I lost my little mother of pearl brooch, bought a 16/ hat which I do not like, & must go to tea at Ethel [Sands]’s tomorrow in what then? My own lack of beauty depresses me today. But how far does the old convention about ‘beauty’ bear looking into? I think of the people I have known. Are they beautiful? This problem I leave unsolved.

Raymond gave a fancy dress party on Sunday night. I was torpid with a sleeping draught; & was dozing off, as the carriages arrived at no. 6. Still I envied them; & thought, when Raymond telephoned about the copy of Old Kensington which I gave him & said how lovely Nancy [Cunard] had looked, that I had missed the greatest sight of the season. Happily, Lucas comes to tea, & he says he hears it was a terrible sticky dull party, with not room to turn round in, which greatly pleases me. Lucas, Peter, I should call him, came, from friendship; which friendship, as I suppose, was gently stimulated by my praise of his novel. He is a bony rosy little austere priest; so whole, & sane, & simple throughout one can’t help respecting him, though when it comes to books we disagree. He says Tom &c: have thrown intellect to the winds; given up the ghost; he says Houseman & de la Mare are the real poets. I say poetry is defunct; & Tom &c anyhow try to animate it. The Sitwells, he says, advertise. They’re aristocrats, I say, thinking criticism upstart impertinence on the part of flunkeys. No merit in their works anyhow, he says. But what about this drawing room singer, de la Mare, I ask. The most charming of men. Granted. Granted, on Peter’s side, that he has no coherency whatever—is always darting after strange monsters—goldfish in bowls, I say. Well, but we cant all be great philosophical poets, he says. Anyhow Tom ain’t a drawing room singer, I say. Tom has been down lecturing, & not creating a good impression at Cambridge, I fancy. He tells the young men, in private, how they cook fish in Paris: his damned selfconsciousness again, I suppose. But Peter is, to my mind, too entire in his judgments; founded on book learning & prettiness into the bargain. He has no ascendency of brain: he is not, & now never will be, a personage: which is the one thing needful in criticism, or writing of any sort, I think; for we’re all as wrong as wrong can be. But character is the thing.

Tuesday 9 March

Then I was at two parties: Ethel’s tea; Mary’s dinner.

Ethel’s was a ghastly frizzly frying pan affair. I chattering in front of the footlights.

Well, said Ott. how are you? You look wonderfully well; as if you had never had an illness in your life.

(Now what does she say that for? To get pity for herself, sure enough.)

I can’t say I’m any better.

But she is all dressed like a girl of 18; tomato coloured Georgette & fur.

Ethel says, tittering

What a nice hat.

I’m all windblown in my old felt, come through the snow, with Dadie.

Well, I say to myself, I’ll see this through anyhow, take my seat as on a throne, & proceed, first to little smug Leigh Ashton: Read wrote that Times Leader this morning (quoting me & Joyce as examples of good prose versus death of Queen Victoria).

I should so much like to know if you think its well written—such a charming man.

Then diversion: Ethel; Ottoline: Percy Lubbock.

Are the Russians more passionate than we are?

No; I say; I have all the passions. Asked to define a dramatic scene; how Leonard says “I think the worse of you for ever” when I accept Ott’s invitation. Suddenly I remember it was Ott’s invitation. If Mr Lubbock had a daughter he would have scenes—this is sheer egotistical cruelty on Ott’s part; so home, holding Dadie by the arm; talking about his fellowship, to be announced on Saturday, (But Peter thinks he won’t get it) & abusing Chelsea, & Ottoline; & saying how unpopular I made myself.

As for Mary’s party, there, save for the usual shyness about powder & paint, shoes & stockings, I was happy, owing to the supremacy of literature. This keeps us sweet & sane, George Moore & me I mean.

He has a pink foolish face; blue eyes like hard marbles; a crest of snowhite hair; little unmuscular hands; sloping shoulders; a high stomach; neat, purplish well brushed clothes; & perfect manners, as I consider them. That is to say he speaks without fear or dominance; accepting me on my merits; every one on their merits. Still in spite of age uncowed, unbeaten, lively, shrewd. As for Hardy & Henry James though, what shall one say?

“I am a fairly modest man; but I admit I think Esther Waters a better book than Tess.”

But what is there to be said for that man? He cannot write. He cannot tell a story. The whole art of fiction consists in telling a story. Now he makes a woman confess. How does he do it? In the third person—a scene that should be moving, impressive. Think how Tolstoi would have done it!

But, said Jack [Hutchinson] War & Peace is the greatest novel in the world. I remember the scene where Natasha puts on a moustache, & Rostov sees her for the first time as she is & falls in love with her.

No, my good friend, there is nothing very wonderful in that. That is an ordinary piece of observation. But my good friend (to me—half hesitating to call me this) what have you to say for Hardy? You cannot find anything to say. English fiction is the worst part of English literature. Compare it with the French—with the Russians. Henry James wrote some pretty little stories before he invented his jargon. But they were about rich people. You cannot write stories about rich people; because, I think he said, they have no instincts. But Henry James was enamoured of marble balustrades. There was no passion in any of his people. And Anne Brontë was the greatest of the Brontës & Conrad could not write, & so on. But this is out of date.

Saturday 20 March

But what is to become of all these diaries, I asked myself yesterday. If I died, what would Leo make of them? He would be disinclined to burn them; he could not publish them. Well, he should make up a book from them, I think; & then burn the body. I daresay there is a little book in them: if the scraps & scratches were straightened out a little. God knows.

This is dictated by a slight melancholia, which comes upon me sometimes now, & makes me think I am old: I am ugly. I am repeating things. Yet, as far as I know, as a writer I am only now writing out my mind.

Dining with Clive last night to meet Lord Ivor Spencer Churchill—an elegant attenuated gnat like youth; very smooth, very supple, with the semi-transparent face of a flower, & the legs of a gazelle, & the white waistcoat & diamond buttons of a dandy, & all an Americans desire to understand psycho-analysis—I thought of my own age. I made a horrid gaffe early on: said I liked a picture, which I did not like, & found I was wrong. Now if I had followed my instinct, as one should do, I should have been right. For some extraordinary reason, this poisoned my evening, slightly. The Lord analysed everything very ingeniously: he is a clever boy. I was greatly impressed by masculine cleverness, & their ability to toss balls swiftly & surely to & fro: no butter fingers; all clean catches. Adrian Bishop came in; a ruddy bull frog; & then I went, & Clive, with a discrimination which was affectionate, but not just, apologised, thinking I had not talked enough for my pleasure; whereas I had said the wrong thing, & been depressed over that. Otherwise the evening amused me, & I wanted, like a child, to stay & argue. True, the argument was passing my limits—how if Einstein is true, we shall be able to foretell our own lives. Fortune tellers can now read one’s mind exactly according to Lord Ivor, who, by the bye, had read neither Henry James nor V.W., is about 23, & came to the Press this morning, obediently, to buy my complete works. No intellectual would have done that. They are excessively anxious to save their souls—these aristocrats; witness Lord Berners the other night, sending out for Peacock—on my recommendation.

Otherwise, we had Bea Howe to dinner; & went to Philip [Woolf]’s one hot still day of the usual loveliness, & saw the place, & the horses, & the pepper box towers of Waddesdon, & I liked the immense directness & uncloudedness of Babs; but says Eddy [Sackville-West] who came to tea on Sunday, this is “I assure you” all my imagination. She would be very dull if you knew her. He knows dozens of her. Who is not dull? Only B⁠[loomsbur]’y according to Eddy.

Then there was Sybil Colefax: she comes to heel promptly: no, I won’t go there; she may have a little cheap tea here, which she does, gratefully. She has done America with the usual dashing, joyless efficiency; could not analyse, merely report. Charlie Chaplin such a mixture of subtlety & common⁠[n]⁠ess: but why? No instances available, so I infer that she picked this up second hand, perhaps from Esme Howard; perhaps from Coolidge, or from Douglas Fairbanks or from the Italian boy who drove the car. Like a good housewife, which she is, she is making Peter begin life hard, cooking his breakfast, down on Wall Street by 9. There is a strain of hard, serious, professionalism in her, quite unmitigated by all the splendours of Argyll House.

Wednesday 24 March

“I’m going to hand in my resignation this morning” said L. making the coffee.

To what? I asked.

“The Nation”.

And it is done; & we have six months only before us. I feel 10 years younger; the shafts off our shoulders again & the world before us. I can’t pretend to make much of a to-do about this either way. It was a temporary makeshift job, amusing at first, then galling, & last night, after an argument of the usual kind about literary articles & space & so on with Maynard & Hubert L. came to the decision to resign now. There was no quarrel. Oddly enough, having tea with Nessa, she had set me thinking the same thing. Phil [Noel-]⁠Baker had said to her he thought L. the best living writer, & what a pity it was he spent so much time on the Nation & the Press. So there was I beginning, don’t you think we might give them up!—when L. came in with his contribution to the question. He was dining with Clive, so the discussion waited till this morning; was decided by 10; in the hands of the Chief by 11—& now thank God no more chiefs for either of us so long as we live I hope.

The situation appears to be that L. shall make £300; I £200—& really I don’t suppose we shall find it hard; & then the mercy of having no ties, no proofs, no articles to procure, & all that, is worth a little more exertion elsewhere, should it come to that. I’m amused at my own sense of liberation. To upset everything every 3 or 4 years is my notion of a happy life. Always to be tacking to get into the eye of the wind. Now a prudent life is, as L. pointed out in the Square the opposite of this. One ought to stick in the same place. But with £400 assured & no children, why imitate a limpet in order to enjoy a limpets safety? The next question will be, I see, the Press. Shall we give that up too, & so be quit of everything? Its not such an easy question, or so pressing. I sometimes wish it. For, speaking selfishly, it has served my turn: given me a chance of writing off my own bat, & now I doubt if Heinemann or Cape would much intimidate me. But then there’s the fun—which is considerable. The time will come, at this rate, when we have nothing in the world to resign: then, to get the effect of change, one will have to accept. We say we will travel & see the world. Anyhow I make my usual prediction—we shall be richer this time next year without the Nation than with it.

I rather like feeling that I have to earn money. I intensely dislike being in office, in any post of authority. I dislike being in people’s pay. This of course is part of the reason why I like writing for the Press. But I suppose freedom becomes a fetish like any other. These disjointed reflections I scribble on a divine, if gusty, day; being about, after reading Anna Karenina, to dine at a pot-house with Rose Macaulay—not a cheerful entertainment; but an experience perhaps.

Lydia came into the room when L. was talking to Maynard this morning to show him her Zebra shoes, which cost £5.8.6. & they were really lizard, L. says. Also it is curious how a change like this destroys formality⁠[?]—dissipates the elements.

Saturday 27 March

To continue—I don’t know why I should really tell the story of the Nation—it doesn’t figure largely in our lives. But Leonard met Phil Baker, who says he will get £300 as lecturer at the School of Economics easily if he wants it. He came in that night & said this & then we went off on a blowing night to dine at Rose M.’s ‘pothouse’, as I so mistakenly called it. There were 10 second rate writers in second rate dress clothes, Lynds, Goulds, O’Donovan: no, I won’t in any spasm of hypocritical humanity include Wolves. L. by the way was in his red brown tweed. Then the pitter patter began; the old yard was scratched over by these baldnecked chickens. The truth was that we had no interests private; literature was our common ground; & though I will talk literature with Desmond or Lytton by the hour, when it comes to pecking up grains with these active stringy fowls my gorge rises. What d’you think of the Hawthornden prize? Why isn’t Masefield as good as Chaucer, or Gerhardi as good as Tchekov: how can I embark with Gerald Gould on such topics? He reads novels incessantly; got a holiday 3 years ago, & prided himself on reading nothing but Tchekhov; knows all about a novel in the first chapter. Sylvias & Geralds & Roberts & Roses chimed & tinkled round the table. A stout woman called Gould got steadily more & more mustard & tomato coloured. I said Holy Ghost? when Mr O’Donovan said the whole of the coast. Lodged on a low sofa in Rose’s underground cheerful, sane, breezy room I talked to a young cultivated man, who turned out to be Hinks, Roger, British Museum, mild aesthete, variety of Leigh Ashton; but thank God, not a second rate journalist. All the time I kept saying to myself Thank God to be out of that; out of the Nation; no longer brother in arms with Rose & Robert & Sylvia. It is a thinblooded set; so ‘nice’, ‘kind’, respectable, cleverish & in the swim.

Then our set at Nessa’s last night, was hardly at its best. L. & Adrian silent & satirical; old Sickert rather toothless & set; I driven to chatter, not well; but Nessa & Duncan don’t consolidate & order these parties; so home in a spasm of outraged vanity, & not that altogether, for I had worked honestly if feebly, & L. had not; & then he was off early this morning to Rodmell where Philcox is in the thick of building & drains: so I had no time to uncrease my rose leaf; had to try & work, to finish the rather long drawn out dinner scene [in To the Lighthouse], & was just striking oil when in comes Angus to tell me Eddy was on the phone: would I go to Rimsky Korsakov with him on Tuesday. I agreed—more, asked him to dinner. Then was all a whirl & flutter of doubts; detested the engagement; could not settle; suddenly shook my coat, like a retriever; faced facts; sent Eddy a wire, & a letter “Cant come—detest engagements”, & pondered where shall I spend the day? decided on Greenwich, arrived there at 1; lunched; everything fell out pat; smoked a cigarette on the pier promenade, saw the ships swinging up, one two, three, out of the haze; adored it all; yes even the lavatory keepers little dog; saw the grey Wren buildings fronting the river; & then another great ship, grey & orange; with a woman walking on deck; & then to the hospital; first to the Museum where I saw Sir John Franklin’s pen & spoons (a spoon asks a good deal of imagination to consecrate it)—I played with my mind watching what it would do,—& behold if I didn’t almost burst into tears over the coat Nelson wore at Trafalgar with the medals which he hid with his hand when they carried him down, dying, lest the sailors might see it was him. There was too, his little fuzzy pigtail, of golden greyish hair tied in black; & his long white stockings, one much stained, & his white breeches with the gold buckles, & his stock—all of which I suppose they must have undone & taken off as he lay dying. Kiss me Hardy &c—Anchor, anchor,—I read it all when I came in, & could swear I was there on the Victory—So the charm worked in that case. Then it was raining a little, but I went into the Park, which is all prominence & radiating paths; then back on top of a bus, & so to tea. Molly [McCarthy] came, a warm faithful bear, of whom I am really fond, judging from the steady accumulation of my desire to see her these last 3 or 4 weeks, culminating in my asking her to come, as I so rarely ask anyone to come. Saxon came, with his great grandfather’s diary, which it pleases him I should like, & call like him; & then reading & bed. I think my rose leaf is now uncrumpled. Certainly I shall remember the ships coming up (here Tomlin rings, but I won’t see him—solitude is my bride, & she is adulterated by Clive & Mary tonight) & Nelson’s coat long after I have forgotten how silly & uncomfortable I was at Nessa’s on Friday.

Friday 9 April

Life has been very good to the Leafs. I should say it has been perfect. Why then all this pother about life? It can produce old Walter, bubbling & chubby; & old Lotta, stately & content; & little Kitty, as good & nice as can be; & handsome Charles, as loving & affectionate. Plunge deep into Walter’s life & it is all sound & satisfactory. His son kisses him & says “Bless you father”. He sinks back chuckling on his cushions. He chooses a maccaroon. He tells a story. Lotta purrs⁠[?], in her black velvet dress. Only I am exiled from this profound natural happiness. That is what I always feel; or often feel now—natural happiness is what I lack, in profusion. I have intense happiness—not that. It is therefore what I most envy; geniality & family love & being on the rails of human life. Indeed, exaggeration apart, this is a very satisfactory form of existence. And it exists for thousands of people all the time. Why have we none of us got it, in that measure? Old & young agreeing to live together: & being normal; & clever enough of course; yet not stinted or self-conscious in emotion. Much of this may be the generalised & harmonious view which one gets of unknown people as a whole. I might not think it if I saw more of them. Writers do not live like that perhaps. But it is useless frittering away the impression which is so strong. Also I keep thinking “They pity me. They wonder what I find in life.” Then I sink a little silent, & rouse myself to talk to Kitty. Also I know that nothing Leonard or I have done—not our books or the Press or anything means anything to Lotta & Walter & Charles & very little to Kitty. Charles has his motor at the door. They are perfectly happy, motoring off to Berkhamstead, which will take an hour, so they are among the lanes even now. A spring night & so on.

Sunday 11 April

Cannot read Mrs Webb because at any moment S. Tomlin may ring the bell. Also I wanted to go on about the Leafs. I have almost forgotten the impression they made on me. I have wrapped myself round in my own personality again. How does it come about—these sudden intense changes of view? Perhaps my life, writing imagining, is unusually conscious: very vivid to me: & then, going to tea with the Leafs destroys it more completely than other people’s lives because my life is saying to itself “This is life—the only life”. But when I enter a complete world of its own; where Walter cracks a joke, I realise that this is existing whether I exist or not; & so get bowled over. Violent as they are, these impressions go quickly; leaving a sediment of ideas which I shall discuss with L. perhaps when we go to Iwerne Minster. About natural happiness: how it is destroyed by our way of life.

Mrs Webb’s Life makes me compare it with mine. The difference is that she is trying to relate all her experiences to history. She is very rational & coherent. She has always thought about her life & the meaning of the world: indeed, she begins this at the age of 4. She has studied herself as a phenomenon. Thus her autobiography is part of the history of the 19th Century. She is the product of science, & the lack of faith in God; she was secreted by the Time Spirit. Anyhow she believes this to be so; & makes herself fit in very persuasively & to my mind very interestingly. She taps a great stream of thought. Unlike that self-conscious poseur Walter Raleigh she is much more interested in facts & truth than in what will shock people & what a professor ought not to say. Tomlin does not seem to be coming, & L. is at Staines, so I will try a little reading.

Sunday 18 April

(This is written)

This is not written very seriously.—obviously not—to try a pen, I think. And it is now [Friday] April 30th, the last of a wet windy month, excepting the sudden opening of all the doors at Easter, & the summer displayed blazing, as it always is, I suppose; only cloud hidden. I have not said anything about Iwerne Minster. Now it would amuse me to see what I remember it by. Cranbourne Chase: the stunted aboriginal forest trees, scattered, not grouped in cultivations; anemones, bluebells, violets, all pale, sprinkled about, without colour, livid, for the sun hardly shone. Then Blackmore Vale; a vast air dome & the fields dropped to the bottom; the sun striking, there, there; a drench of rain falling, like a veil streaming from the sky, there & there; & the downs rising, very strongly scarped (if that is the word) so that they were ridged & ledged; then an inscription in a church “sought peace & ensured it”, & the question, who wrote these sonorous stylistic epitaphs?—& all the cleanliness of Iwerne village, its happiness & well being, making me ask, as we tended to sneer. Still this is the right method, surely; & then tea & cream—these I remember: the hot baths; my new leather coat; Shaftesbury, so much lower & less commanding than my imagination, & the drive to Bournemouth, & the dog & the lady behind the rock, & the view of Swanage, & coming home.

And then it was horror: Nelly; faced her going; was firm yet desolate; on Tuesday she stopped me on the landing said “Please ma’am may I apologise?” & this time we had been so resolute & implicitly believed her that I had written 6 letters. No cooks however came; & I had enough look into the ‘servant question’ to be glad to be safe again with Nelly. Now I vow come what may, never never to believe her again. “I am too fond of you ever to be happy with anyone else” she said. Talking of compliments, this is perhaps the greatest I could have. But my mind is wandering. It is a question of clothes. This is what humiliates me—talking of compliments—to walk in Regent St, Bond Str &c: & be notably less well dressed than other people.

Yesterday I finished the first part of To the Lighthouse, & today began the second. I cannot make it out—here is the most difficult abstract piece of writing—I have to give an empty house, no people’s characters, the passage of time, all eyeless & featureless with nothing to cling to: well, I rush at it, & at once scatter out two pages. Is it nonsense, is it brilliance? Why am I so flown with words, & apparently free to do exactly what I like? When I read a bit it seems spirited too; needs compressing, but not much else. Compare this dashing fluency with the excruciating hard wrung battles I had with Mrs Dalloway (save the end). This is not made up: it is the literal fact. Yes, & I am rather famous. For the rest, we dally about the Nation. Maynard, dressed in a light overcoat, is back; hums & haws about standing for the Provost of King’s. We tell him Lydia would like it. He says it means middle age & respectability. I feel some sympathy for him. This is because he is going grey, I tell Clive. Clive’s back; Nessa departing, & I worrying about my clothes, & how Roger last night upset me by saying that Nessa finds fault with my temper behind my back. Then (at Ralph’s new left handed establishment) Inez, rather like Vivien [Eliot] to look at, searches into my eyes with her greenish pink-rimmed ones, & says, I must tell you two things: then she tells me that she admires me. That swallowed (doubtfully) she says, Did you ever have an affair with Oliver? The connection is this: she disliked me, from jealousy. I protest I never kissed him, & he never looked at me. She refuses to believe. So she has been refusing to believe for years—A queer little interview, stage managed by Oliver* & she: at last brought off. I called in Leonard, & I think convinced her.

* Oliver denied all knowledge of this; & said she invented it in order to have an excuse for an intimate conversation. “So many women are like that” said Rose Macaulay sitting spruce lean, like a mummified cat, in her chair (this is written Aug. 12th)

Wednesday 5 May

An exact diary of the Strike would be interesting. For instance, it is now a ¼ to 2: there is a brown fog; nobody is building; it is drizzling. The first thing in the morning we stand at the window & watch the traffic in Southampton Row. This is incessant. Everyone is bicycling; motor cars are huddled up with extra people. There are no buses. No placards, no newspapers. The men are at work in the road; water, gas & electricity are allowed; but at 11 the light was turned off. I sat in the press in the brown fog, while L. wrote an article for the Herald. A very revolutionary looking young man on a cycle arrived with the British Gazette. L. is to answer an article in this. All was military stem a little secret. Then Clive dropped in, the door being left open. He is offering himself to the Government. Maynard excited, wants the H⁠[ogarth]. P⁠[ress]. to bring out a skeleton number of the Nation. It is all tedious & depressing, rather like waiting in a train outside a station. Rumours are passed round—that the gas wd. be cut off at 1—false of course. One does not know what to do. And nature has laid it on thick today—fog, rain, cold. A voice, rather commonplace & official, yet the only common voice left, wishes us good morning at 10. This is the voice of Britain, to wh. we can make no reply. The voice is very trivial, & only tells us that the Prince of Wales is coming back (from Biarritz), that the London streets present an unprecedented spectacle.

Thursday 6 May

(one of the curious effects of the Strike is that it is difficult to remember the day of the week). Everything is the same, but unreasonably, or because of the weather, or habit, we are more cheerful, take less notice, & occasionally think of other things. The taxis are out today. There are various skeleton papers being sold. One believes nothing. Clive dines in Mayfair, & everyone is pro-men; I go to Harrison [dentist], & he shouts me down with “Its red rag versus Union Jack, Mrs Woolf” & how Thomas has 100,000. Frankie dines out, & finds everyone pro-Government. Bob [Trevelyan] drops in & says Churchill is for peace, but Baldwin wont budge. Clive says Churchill is for tear gas bombs, fight to the death, & is at the bottom of it all. So we go on, turning in our cage. I notice how frequently we break of⁠[f] with “Well I don’t know.” According to L. this open state of mind is due to the lack of papers. It feels like a deadlock, on both sides; as if we could keep fixed like this for weeks. What one prays for is God: the King or God; some impartial person to say kiss & be friends—as apparently we all desire.

Just back from a walk to the Strand. Of course one notices lorries full of elderly men & girls standing like passengers in the old 3rd class carriages. Children swarm. They pick up bits of old wood paving. Everything seems to be going fast, away, in business⁠[?]. The shops are open but empty. Over it all is some odd pale unnatural atmosphere—great activity but no normal life. I think we shall become more independent & stoical as the days go on. And I am involved in dress buying with Todd [editor of Vogue]; I tremble & shiver all over at the appalling magnitude of the task I have undertaken—to go to a dressmaker recommended by Todd, even, she suggested, but here my blood ran cold, with Todd. Perhaps this excites me more feverishly than the Strike. It is a little like the early hours of the morning (this state of things) when one has been up all night. Business improved today. We sold a few books. Bob cycled from Leith Hill, getting up at 5 a.m. to avoid the crowd. He punctured an hour later, met his tailor who mended him, set forth again, was almost crushed in the crowd near London, & has since been tramping London, from Chelsea to Bloomsbury to gather gossip, & talk, incoherently about Desmond’s essays & his own poetry. He has secreted two more of these works which ‘ought to be published’. He is ravenous greedy, & apelike, but has a kind of russet surly charm; like a dog one teases. He complained how Logan teased him. Clive calls in to discuss bulletins—indeed, more than anything it is like a house where someone is dangerously ill; & friends drop in to enquire, & one has to wait for doctor’s news—Quennel, the poet, came; a lean boy, nervous, plaintive, rather pretty; on the look out for work, & come to tap the Wolves—who are said, I suppose to be an authority on that subject. We suggested Desmond’s job. After an hour of this, he left,——here Clive came in & interrupted. He has been shopping in the West End with Mary. Nothing to report there. He & L. listened in at 7 & heard nothing. The look of the streets—how people “trek to work” that is the stock phrase: that it will be cold & windy tomorrow (it is shivering cold today) that there was a warm debate in the Commons—

Among the crowd of trampers in Kingsway were old Pritchard, toothless, old wispy, benevolent; who tapped L. on the shoulder & said he was “training to shoot him”; & old Miss Pritchard, equally frail, dusty, rosy, shabby. “How long will it last Mrs Woolf?” “Four weeks” “Ah dear!” Off they tramp, over the bridge to Kennington I think; next in Kingsway comes the old battered clerk, who has 5 miles to walk. Miss Talbot has an hours walk; Mrs Brown 2 hours walk. But they all arrive, & clatter about as usual—Pritchard doing poor peoples work for nothing, as I imagine his way is, & calling himself a Tory.

Then we are fighting the Square on the question of leading dogs. Dogs must be led; but tennis can be played they say. L. is advancing to the fight, & has enlisted the Pekinese in the Square. We get no news from abroad; neither can send it. No parcels. Pence have been added to milk, vegetables &c. And Karin has bought 4 joints.

It is now a chilly lightish evening; very quiet; the only sound a distant barrel organ playing. The bricks stand piled on the building & there remain. And Viola was about to make our fortune. She dined here, Monday night, the night of the strike.

Friday 7 May

No change. “London calling the British Isles. Good morning everyone”. That is how it begins at 10. The only news that the archbishops are conferring, & ask our prayers that they may be guided right. Whether this means action, we know not. We know nothing. Mrs Cartwright walked from Hampstead. She & L. got heated arguing, she being antilabour; because she does not see why they should be supported, & observes men in the street loafing instead of working. Very little work done by either of us today. A cold, wet day, with sunny moments. All arrangements unchanged. Girl came to make chair covers, having walked from Shoreditch, but enjoyed it. Times sent for 25 Violas. Question whether to bring out a skeleton Roneo Nation. Leonard went to the office, I to the Brit⁠[ish] Mus⁠[eum]; where all was chill serenity, dignity & severity. Written up are the names of great men; & we all cower like mice nibbling crumbs in our most official discreet impersonal mood beneath. I like this dusty bookish atmosphere. Most of the readers seemed to have rubbed their noses off & written their eyes out. Yet they have a life they like—believe in the necessity of making books, I suppose: verify, collate, make up other books, for ever. It must be 15 years since I read here. I came home & found L. & Hubert [Henderson] arriving from the office—Hubert did what is now called “taking a cup of tea”, which means an hour & a halfs talk about the Strike. Here is his prediction: if it is not settled, or in process, on Monday, it will last 5 weeks. Today no wages are paid. Leonard said he minded this more than the war & Hubert told us how he had travelled in Germany, & what brutes they were in 1912. He thinks gas & electricity will go next; had been at a journalists meeting where all were against labour (against the general strike that is) & assumed Government victory. L. says if the state wins & smashes T⁠[rades]. U⁠[nion]⁠s he will devote his life to labour: if the archbishop succeeds, he will be baptised. Now to dine at the Commercio to meet Clive.

Sunday 9 May

There is no news of the strike. The broadcaster has just said that we are praying today. And L. & I quarrelled last night. I dislike the tub thumper in him; he the irrational Xtian in me. I will write it all out later—my feelings about the Strike; but I am now writing to test my theory that there is consolation in expression. Unthinkingly, I refused just now to lunch with the Phil Bakers, who fetched L. in their car. Suddenly, 10 minutes ago, I began to regret this profoundly. How I should love the talk, & seeing the house, & battling my wits against theirs. Now the sensible thing to do is to provide some pleasure to balance this, which I cd. not have had, if I had gone. I can only think of writing this, & going round the Square. Obscurely, I have my clothes complex to deal with. When I am asked out my first thought is, but I have no clothes to go in. Todd has never sent me the address of the shop; & I may have annoyed her by refusing to lunch with her. But the Virginia who refuses is a very instinctive & therefore powerful person. The reflective & sociable only comes to the surface later. Then the conflict.

Baldwin broadcast last night: he rolls his rs; tries to put more than mortal strength into his words. “Have faith in me. You elected me 18 months ago. What have I done to forfeit your confidence? Can you not trust me to see justice done between man & man?” Impressive as it is to hear the very voice of the Prime Minister, descendant of Pitt & Chatham, still I can’t heat up my reverence to the right pitch. I picture the stalwart oppressed man, bearing the world on his shoulders. And suddenly his self assertiveness becomes a little ridiculous. He becomes megalomaniac. No I dont trust him: I don’t trust any human being, however loud they bellow & roll their rs.

Monday 10 May

Quarrel with L. settled in studio. Oh, but how incessant the arguments & interruptions are! As I write, L. is telephoning to Hubert. We are getting up a petition. There was a distinct thaw (we thought) last night. The Arch B. & Grey both conciliatory. So we went to bed happy. Today ostensibly the same dead lock; beneath the surface all sorts of currents, of which we get the most contradictory reports. Dear old Frankie has a story (over the fire in the bookshop) of an interview between Asquith & Reading which turned Reading hostile to the men. Later, through Clive, through Desmond, Asquith is proved to be at the Wharfe, 60 miles from Lord Reading. Lady Wimbore gave a party—brought Thomas & Baldwin together. Meeting mysteriously called off today. Otherwise strike wd. have been settled. I to H of Commons this morning with L.’s article to serve as stuffing for Hugh Dalton in the Commons this afternoon. All this humbug of police & marble statues vaguely displeasing. But the Gvt. provided me with buses both ways, & no stones thrown. Silver & crimson guard at Whitehall; the cenotaph, & men bare heading themselves. Home to find Tom Marshall caballing with L.; after lunch to [Birrell & Garnett’s] bookshop, where the gossip (too secret for the telephone) was imparted; to London Library where Gooch—a tall, pale mule, affable & long winded, was seen, & Molly dustily diligently reading the Dublin Review for 1840, walk home; Clive, to refute gossip; James to get St Loe to sign; then Maynard ringing up to command us to print the Nation as the N. Statesman is printed; to wh. I agreed, & L. disagreed; then dinner; a motor car collision—more telephones ringing at the moment 9.5.

Tuesday 11 May

I may as well continue to write—this book is used to scandalous mistreatment—while I wait—here interruptions began which lasted till the present moment/ when I write from 12.30 to 3 with Gerald Brenan in the study composing with infinite difficulty a letter to Mr Galsworthy. Arguing about the Ar⁠[chbisho]⁠p of Canterbury with Jack Squire at 12 seems now normal, but not—how often do I repeat—nearly as exciting as writing To the Lighthouse or about de Q⁠[uincey]. I believe it is false psychology to think that in after years these details willl be interesting. The war is now barren sand after all. But one never knows: & waiting about, writing serves to liberate the mind from the fret & itch of these innumerable details. Squire doesn’t want to “knuckle under”. To kneel is the duty of the Church. The Church has no connection with the nation. Events are that the Roneo workers refuse to set up L.’s article in the Nation, in which he says that the Strike is not illegal or unconstitutional. Presumably this is a little clutch of the Government throttle. Mr Baldwin has been visiting the Zoo. In the middle of lunch admirable Miss Bulley arrives, having visited Conway unsuccessfully. St Loe has joined. So Rose Macaulay & Lytton. Tonight the names are to be handed in; & then perhaps silence will descend upon us. Ralph & Gerald are our emissaries. But then everyone rings up—the most unlikely people—[Donald] Brace for instance, Kahan; the woman comes with the new sofa cover. Yesterday Ralph & Frances Marshall were in a railway accident. She had her teeth jangled. One man was killed; another had his leg broken—the result of driving a train without signals, by the efforts of ardent optimistic undergraduates. Billing has been in to say he will print anything, all his men being back & needing work. So, as poor MacDermott has been dead since January, perhaps the Nation will be done by them. Come to think of it, almost all our type is standing, so our printing was in any case hardly feasible. Must I now ring up James? Day’s Library boy was set upon by roughs, had his cycle overturned, but kept his books & was unhurt after calling here for 6 Tree. Tree dribbles along. There is an occasional order. Mrs C⁠[artwright]. arrives on Faith’s bicycle which is red with rust.

Wednesday 12 May

Strike settled, (ring at bell)

The Strike was settled about 1.15—or it was then broadcast. I was in Tottenham Court Rd. at 1 & heard Bartholomew & Fletcher’s megaphone declaim that the T.U.C. leaders were at Downing Street; came home to find that neither L. or Nelly had heard this: 5 minutes later, the wireless. They told us to stand by & await important news. Then a piano played a tune. Then the solemn broadcaster assuming incredible pomp & gloom & speaking one word to the minute read out: Message from 10 Downing Street. The T.U.C. leaders have agreed that Strike shall be withdrawn. Instantly L. dashed off to telephone to the office, Nelly to tell Pritchard’s clerk, & I to Mrs C. (But N⁠[elly]. was beforehand) then we finished lunch; then I rang up Clive—who proposes that we should have a drink tonight. I saw this morning 5 or 6 armoured cars slowly going along Oxford Street; on each two soldiers sat in tin helmets, & one stood with his hand at the gun which was pointed straight ahead ready to fire. But I also noticed on one a policeman smoking a cigarette. Such sights I dare say I shall never see again; & dont in the least wish to. Already (it is now 10 past 2) men have appeared at the hotel with drainpipes. Also Grizzle has won her case against the Square.

Thursday 13 May

I suppose all pages devoted to the Strike will be skipped, when I read over this book. Oh that dull old chapter, I shall say. Excitements about what are called real things are always unutterably transitory. Yet it is gloomy—& L. is gloomy, & so am I unintelligibly—today because the Strike continues—no railwaymen back: vindictiveness has now seized our masters. Government shillyshallies. Apparently, the T.U.C. agreed to terms wh. the miners now reject. Anyhow it will take a week to get the machinery of England to run again. Trains are dotted about all over England. Labour, it seems clear, will be effectively diddled again, & perhaps rid of its power to make strikes in future. Printers still out at the Nation. In short, the strain removed, we all fall out & bicker & backbite. Such is human nature—& really I dont like human nature unless all candied over with art. We dined with a strike party last night & went back to Clive’s. A good deal was said about art there. Good dull Janet Vaughan, reminding me of Emma, joined us. I went to my dressmaker, Miss Brooke, & found it the most quiet & friendly & even enjoyable of proceedings. I have a great lust for lovely stuffs, & shapes; wh. I have not gratified since Sally Young died. A bold move this, but now I’m free of the fret of clothes, which is worth paying for, & need not parade Oxford Street.

Thursday 20 May

Waiting for L. to come back from chess with Roger: 11.25. I think nothing need be said of the Strike. As tends to happen, one’s mind slips after the crisis, & what the settlement is, or will be, I know not.

We must now fan the books up again. Viola & Phil Baker were both struck on the wing. Viola comes, very tactfully, as a friend, she says, to consult after dinner. She is a flamboyant creature—much of an actress—much abused by the Waleys & Marjories; but rather taking to me. She has the great egotism, the magnification of self, which any bodily display, I think, produces. She values women by their hips & ankles, like horses. Easily reverts to the topic of her own charms: how she shd. have married the D. of Rutland. “Lord —— (his uncle) told me I was the woman John really loved. The duchess said to me ‘Do make love to John & get him away from ——. At any rate you’re tall & beautiful—’ And I sometimes think if I’d married him—but he never asked me—Daddy wouldn’t have died. I’d have prevented that operation: Then how he’d have loved a duke for a son in law! All his life was dressing up—that sort of thing you know.” So she runs on, in the best of clothes, easy & familiar, but reserved too; with the wiles & warinesses of a woman of the world, half sordid half splendid, not quite at her ease with us, yet glad of a room where she can tell her stories, of listeners to whom she is new & strange. She will run on by the hour—yet is very watchful not to bore; a good business woman, & floating over considerable acuteness on her charm. All this however, is not making her book move, as they say.

Eddy came in to tea. I like him—his flattery? his nobility? I dont know—I find him easy & eager. And Vita comes to lunch tomorrow, which will be a great amusement & pleasure. I am amused at my relations with her: left so ardent in January—& now what? Also I like her presence & her beauty. Am I in love with her? But what is love? Her being ‘in love’ (it must be comma’d thus) with me, excites & flatters; & interests. What is this ‘love’? Oh & then she gratifies my eternal curiosity: who’s she seen, whats she done—for I have no enormous opinion of her poetry. How could I—I who have such delight in mitigating the works even of my greatest friends. I should have been reading her poem tonight: instead finished Sharon Turner—a prosy, simple, old man; the very spit & image of Saxon, a boundless bore, I daresay, with the most intense zeal for “improving myself”, & the holiest affections, & 13 children, & no character or impetus—a love of long walks, of music; modest, yet conceited in an ant like way. I mean he has the industry & persistency in recounting compliments of an ant, but so little character that one hardly calls him vain!

Tuesday 25 May

The heat has come, bringing with it the inexplicably disagreeable memories of parties, & George Duckworth; a fear haunts me even now, as I drive past Park Lane on top of a bus, & think of Lady Arthur Russell & so on. I become out of love with everything; but fall into love as the bus reaches Holborn. A curious transition that, from tyranny to freedom. Mixed with it is the usual “I thought that when you died last May, Charles, there had died along with you”—death being hidden among the leaves: & Nessa’s birthday among the little hard pink rosettes of the may, which we used to stop & smell on the pavement at the top of Hyde Pk. Gate & I asked why, if it was may, it did not come out on the 1st; it comes out now, & Nessa’s birthday, which must be her 47th, is in a few days. She is in Italy: Duncan is said to have “committed a nuisance” for which he has been fined 10 lira.

L. has been having Nelly’s poisonous cold, brought by Lottie—Do I hear him? Grizzle says Yes: stands tail wagging—She is right. Vita has it; or I should be dining—

Now we have been sitting in the Square. L. is better. I am happier. Tomorrow we go to Rodmell—to find the bath & the W.C. & the drawing room with the wall pulled down. This cherry has been dangled & withdrawn so often that I scarcely believe we shall now munch it. And I must notice that the Strike still makes it necessary for me to find out trains at Victoria.

I have finished sketchily I admit—the 2nd part of To the Lighthouse—& may, then, have it all written over by the end of July. A record—7 months, if it so turns out.

So Vita came: & I register the shock of meeting after absence; how shy one is; how disillusioned by the actual body; how sensitive to new shades of tone something ‘womanly’ I detected, more mature; & she was shabbier, come straight off in her travelling clothes; & not so beautiful, as sometimes perhaps; & so we sat talking on the sofa by the window, she rather silent, I chattering, partly to divert her attention from me; & to prevent her thinking “Well, is this all?” as she was bound to think, having declared herself so openly in writing. So that we each registered some disillusionment; & perhaps also acquired some grains of additional solidity—This may well be more lasting than the first rhapsody. But I compared her state, justly, to a flock of birds flying hither thither, escaped, confused: returning, after a long journey, to the middle of things again. She was quieter, shyer, awkwarder than usual even. She has no ready talk confronted by Nelly or Mrs Cartwright she stands like a schoolgirl. I think it quite likely she will get Harold out of his job. But then, as I always feel, with her ‘grand life’, Dotties & so on, whom I don’t know at all, there may be many parts of her perfectly unillumined. But I cannot write. For the most part I can write. Suddenly the word instinct leaves me. This is the permanent state of most people no doubt. Maynard met George & Lady M⁠[argaret]. at the Darwins. He is a humbug & she a fiend, he writes. She now walks with a stick. What a dreary world it is these bubbles meeting once in 20 years or so.

Wednesday 9 June

Then I got the flue, last Saturday; sat shivering at Lords, in the hot sunshine; so have seen no one, except basement dwellers, & put off Don Giovanni, Dadie & Hope tonight, & Osbert [Sitwell]’s dinner tomorrow. All my bubbling up faculty at once leaves me. I grind out a little of that eternal How to read, lecture, as the Yale Review has bought it, & cannot conceive what The Lighthouse is all about. I hope to whip my brains up either at Vita’s or Rodmell this weekend.

Yes, Rodmell is a perfect triumph, I consider—but L. advises me not to say so. In particular, our large combined drawing eating room, with its 5 windows, its beams down the middle, & flowers & leaves nodding in all round us. The bath boils quickly; the water closets gush & surge (not quite sufficiently though). The weather again failed us, & we had a queer journey home, via Newhaven, Peacehaven & Brighton. Trains slow & scarce. The Strike, I should say, continues. We then went to a party at Edith Sitwell’s (I in my new dress) ‘to meet Miss Stein’, a lady much like Joan Fry, but more massive; in blue-sprinkled brocade, rather formidable. There was Morgan, Siegfried [Sassoon], Todd—to whom I proposed, wildly, fantastically, a book—which she accepts!—(& Viola so much criticised in the austere heights of Ham Spray) & Edith distraught; & cherries in handfulls, & barley water—as L. described it very brilliantly to Sybil the next day. She came: no one else; we sat & laughed—& wheres the harm in this stupidish, kindly, rather amusing woman, I asked? Then she expressed a wish to dine with us. L. is lunching with Wells today.

Wednesday 9 June

Leonard back from Wells who chattered till ¼ to 4: likes to walk through the streets; has a house in France kept for him by a very intelligent Brazilian lady. Called me “too intelligent—a bad thing”: can’t criticise; brings in social theories, because he says in an age when society is dissolving, the social state is part of the character. They lunched at Boulesteins. Leonard asked for him at the Automobile Club; “A very famous name” said the man. And the warmth & clamour of Wells’ fame seems to reach me, this chilly rainy evening; & I see how, if I stayed there, as he asks us, he would overwhelm me. (We are very hungry, by the way; Nelly is preparing a nice roast chicken & ices for dinner, which I shall enjoy. Then we shall play the Gramophone). I’m cheering up after my attack I’m glad to say, though a little undecided whether to stay with Vita or go to Monks House.

L. is going to make a book of his essays. I think of asking Lady Homer to write her memoirs. Today we discussed the date of Nelly’s holiday—& so we go on.

Wednesday 30 June

This is the last day of June & finds me in black despair because Clive laughed at my new hat, Vita pitied me, & I sank to the depths of gloom. This happened at Clive’s last night after going to the Sitwells with Vita. Oh dear I was wearing the hat without thinking whether it was good or bad; & it was all very flashing & easy; & there I saw a man with braided hair, another with long red tongues in his button hole; & sat by Vita & laughed & clubbed. When we got out it was only 10.30—a soft starry night: I had refused to go to Colefax: it was still too early for her to go. So she said “Shall we go to Clive’s & pick him up?” & I was then again so lighthearted, driving through the park, & seeing people scud before us. Also we saw all the Mayfair houses, & finally came to Gordon Sqre & there was Nessa tripping along in the dark, in her quiet black hat. So we had some lively talk. She said Duncan was having a sandwich at the public house: then he came, carrying an egg. Come on all of us to Clive’s, I said; & they agreed. Well, it was after they had come & we were all sitting round talking that Clive suddenly said, or bawled rather, what an astonishing hat you’re wearing! Then he asked where I got it. I pretended a mystery, tried to change the talk, was not allowed, & they pulled me down between them, like a hare; I never felt more humiliated. Clive said did Mary choose it? No. Todd said Vita. And the dress? Todd of course: after that I was forced to go on as if nothing terrible had happened; but it was very forced & queer & humiliating. So I talked & laughed too much. Duncan prim & acid as ever told me it was utterly impossible to do anything with a hat like that. And I joked about the Squires’ party. & Leonard got silent, & I came away deeply chagrined, as unhappy as I have been these ten years; & revolved it in sleep & dreams all night; & today has been ruined.

Thursday 1 July

These reflections about the hat read rather amusingly I think. What a weathercock of sensibility I am! How I enjoy—or at least how (for I was acutely unhappy & humiliated) these gyrations interest me, conscious as I am of a strong lynch pin controlling them—Leonard in short. Coming out from lunching with Maynard today I ran (in the hat, in the dress) into Clive & Mary, & had to stand their fire: dress praised to the skies, hat passed. So thats over. Indeed the cloud began to lift at 7 last night.

But all this has obscured Garsington; Bridges; & Wells. These great men are so much like the rest of us. Wells remarkable only for a combination of stockishness with acuity: he has a sharp nose, & the cheeks & jowl of a butcher. He likes, I judge, rambling & romancing about the lives of other people; he romanced about the Webbs: said their books were splendid eggs, well & truly laid, but addled. Described Beatrice, as by a gipsy & a Jew: a flashing creature, become Quaker as we all do as we get on. That has nothing to do with (God) Christianity. Are you a Quaker, I asked. Of course I am. One believes that there is a reason for things (I think he said). But he did not rise steadily off the ground for long. Lunch is a hot stodgy hour too. I could see from the plaintive watery look on Mrs Wells’ face (she has widely spaced teeth & in repose looks very worried, at the same time vacant) that he is arrogant lustful & bullying in private life. The virtues he likes are courage & vitality. I said how ghastly! (That is the story of Dorothy Richardson’s struggles.) No: nothing is ghastly where there is courage he said. He rambled over her life, amusingly. How she married Odel, a man who makes symbolical drawings—bubbles coming out of a human mouth & turning into womens legs & so on: which is so like life, Wells said: the heterogeneity—one thing leading to another, & the design so remarkable. But they dont sell. And now Duckworth won’t publish any more of her books.

As for Bridges: he sprang from a rhododendron bush, a very lean tall old man, with a curly grey hat, & a reddish ravaged face, smoky fierce eyes, with a hazy look in them; very active; rather hoarse, talking incessantly. We sat in his open room & looked past blue spikes of flowers to hills, which were invisible, but when they show, all this goes out he said—his one poetical saying, or saying that struck me as such. We talked about handwriting, & criticism; how Garrod had written on Keats; & they know a Petrarchan sonnet, but not why one alters it. Because they dont write sonnets, I suggested, & urged him to write criticism. He is direct & spry, very quick in all his movements, racing me down the garden to look at pinks, then into his library, where he showed me the French critics, then said Michelet was his favourite historian; then I asked to see the Hopkins manuscripts; & sat looking at them with that gigantic grasshopper Aldous folded up in a chair close by. Ottoline undulated & vagulated.

He asked me to come again: would read me his poems—not his early ones which want a beautiful voice, & aren’t interesting he said: but his later ones, his hexameters. He skipped off & held the gate open. I said how much I liked his poems—true of the short ones: but was mainly pleased & gratified to find him so obliging & easy & interested. Ottoline flattered me on this point. But she had her points too; her dwindling charm reveals them, as we sat by the lake, discussing Mary Clive life, truth, literature. Then dressed, & Aldous & Eddie & Philip Nichols, & Miss Spender Clay, who can have £100 a year if she wants it Julian said.

Sunday 4 July

Then Wells came again; & stayed till 4, when he had to meet an American. He is getting to the drowsy stage: the 60s. Seems well wishing but not so spry as he used to be. He talked about his new book, the thoughts one has at 60. He brings in everything—a man called Lubin, for instance, who invented intn agriculture (I think) a man who died in poverty & was shuffled out of the way to his grave in Rome the day that Wilson made his entry—“that shallow, pretentious empty headed professor”—Lubin was the real thinker for peace. What other ideas had he? Desmond asked. Well, to do away with Sunday. There should be [a] holiday once in 10 days. That was his own stint. 10 days work, then 4 or 5 days off. The present system is wasteful. The shadow of the week end begins on Friday, is not over till Monday afternoon. He said sometimes he wrote all day for days; sometimes not at all. He struck me again as an odd mixture of bubble & solidity—likes to blow a phrase now & then. We got him on to Hardy—a very simple, subtle old peasant man much impressed by clever people who write⁠[;] very humble, delighted when Wells took Rebecca West to call on him, walked half way into Dorchester with them—“an impudent young journalist” Wells called her. Hardy had heard of her. Came to stay with Barrie to see an air raid—wrote his early books in chapters as the printers wanted them. Then he got up to go: we asked him to stay & tell us about Henry James. So he sat down. Oh I should be delighted to stay & talk the whole afternoon, he said. Henry James was a formalist. He always thought of clothes. He was never intimate with anyone—not with his brother even: had never been in love. Once his brother wanted to see Chesterton, & climbed a ladder & looked over a wall. This angered Henry; who called in Wells & asked him for an opinion—as if I had one! Wells has learnt nothing from Proust—his book like the British Museum. One knows there are delightful interesting things in it, but one does not go there. One day it may be wet—I shall say God, what am I to do this afternoon? & I shall read Proust as I might go to the British Museum. Would not read Richardson—a man who knows all about feminine psychology (with some contempt) nobody ought to know that. I said on the contrary he knew very little: was conventional. Honour, chastity & so on. Wells said we had changed our ideas completely. That idea of chastity had vanished. Women were even more suggestible than men. Now they dont think about it—a chaste little couple (he talks of little couples) mixing with a promiscuous little couple. He said we are happier perhaps—children are certainly more at ease with their parents. But he thought they were beginning to miss restraints. They were wondering what things were for. They were very restless; discussing Henry James & Eliot, & how formal they are & overdone with manner—(he described H.J. pushing under a letter he was writing to talk to Wells “at the Reform”)—I said it was American. They were alien to our civilisation. He said he had been that himself. His father was a gardener, his mother a ladies maid. He found it very strange to meet people who went to parties & wore dress clothes. Henry James could not describe love—there comes the ahh—laying on of hands. This Wells could do himself. I am a journalist. I pride myself upon being a journalist he said. Well I have a sort of feeling that all writing should be journalism—(done with an object)—One knows nothing of what posterity will want—may be a guide book. I tell Arnold [Bennett] they will read him for his topography.

In all this he showed himself, as Desmond said afterwards, perfectly content to be himself, aware of his powers,—aware that he need not take any trouble, since his powers were big enough.

Thursday 22 July

The summer hourglass is running out rapidly & rather sandily. Many nights I wake in a shudder thinking of some atrocity of mine. I bring home minute pinpricks which magnify in the middle of the night into gaping wounds. However, I drive my pen through de Quincey of a morning, having put The Lighthouse aside till Rodmell. There all virtue, all good, is in retreat. Here nothing but odds & ends—going to the dentist, buying combs; having Maynard & Bob to tea, & then Ralph & Frances to dinner, followed by Eddie & Kitchen [C. H. B. Kitchin]. But we are both jaded, & get no clear impression any more from the human face—must dine with Osbert Sitwell tonight though, & go to Hardy tomorrow. This is human life: this is the infinitely precious stuff issued in a narrow roll to us now, & then withdrawn for ever; & we spend it thus. Days without definite sensation are the worst of all. Days when one compells oneself to undergo this or that for some reason—but what reason?

There is nothing important at the moment to record: or if so, & one’s state of mind is overwhelmingly important, I leave that, too for Rodmell. There I shall come to grips with the last part of that python, my book; it is a tug & a struggle, & I wonder now & then, why I let myself in for it. Rose Macaulay said “What else would one do with one’s thoughts?” I have not seen her again nor Gwen, nor written to Violet [Dickinson]; nor learnt French, nor finished Clarissa.

Desmond came in; talked about Shakespeare. Now to settle my mind to Suspiria.

Sunday 25 July

At first I thought it was Hardy, & it was the parlourmaid, a small thin girl, wearing a proper cap. She came in with silver cake stands & so on. Mrs Hardy talked to us about her dog. How long ought we to stay? Can Mr Hardy walk much &c I asked, making conversation, as I knew one would have to. She has the large sad lack lustre eyes of a childless woman; great docility & readiness, as if she had learnt her part; not great alacrity, but resignation, in welcoming more visitors; wears a sprigged voile dress, black shoes, & a necklace. We cant go far now, she said, though we do walk every day, because our dog isn’t able to walk far. He bites, she told us. She became more natural & animated about the dog, who is evidently the real centre of her thoughts—then the maid came in. Then again the door opened, more sprucely, & in trotted a little puffy cheeked cheerful old man, with an atmosphere cheerful & businesslike in addressing us, rather like an old doctors or solicitors, saying “Well now—” or words like that as he shook hands. He was dressed in rough grey with a striped tie. His nose has a joint in it, & the end curves down. A round whitish face, the eyes now faded & rather watery, but the whole aspect cheerful & vigorous. He sat on a three cornered chair (I am too jaded with all this coming & going to do more than gather facts) at a round table, where there were the cake stands & so on; a chocolate roll; what is called a good tea; but he only drank one cup, sitting on his three cornered chair. He was extremely affable & aware of his duties. He did not let the talk stop or disdain making talk. He talked of father—said he had seen me, or it might have been my sister but he thought it was me, in my cradle. He had been to Hyde Park Place—oh Gate was it. A very quiet street. That was why my father liked it. Odd to think that in all these years he had never been down there again. He went there often. Your father took my novel—Far From the Madding Crowd. We stood shoulder to shoulder against the British public about certain matters dealt with in that novel—You may have heard. Then he said how some other novel had fallen through that was to appear—the parcel had been lost coming from France—not a very likely thing to happen, as your father said—a big parcel of manuscript; & he asked me to send my story. I think he broke all the Cornhill laws—not to see the whole book; so I sent it in chapter by chapter, & was never late. Wonderful what youth is! I had it in my head doubtless, but I never thought twice about it—It came out every month. They were nervous, because of Miss Thackeray I think. She said she became paralysed & could not write a word directly she heard the press begin. I daresay it was bad for a novel to appear like that. One begins to think what is good for the magazine, not what is good for the novel.

You think what makes a strong curtain, put in Mrs Hardy jocularly. She was leaning upon the tea table, not eating gazing out.

Then we talked about manuscripts. Mrs Smith had found the MS of F. from the M.C. in a drawer during the war, & sold it for the Red Cross. Now he has his MSS back, & the printer rubs out all the marks. But he wishes they would leave them, as they prove it genuine.

He puts his head down like some old pouter pigeon. He has a very long head; & quizzical bright eyes, for in talk they grow bright. He said when he was in the Strand 6 years ago he scarcely knew where he was, & he used to know it all intimately. He told us that he used to buy 2nd hand books—nothing valuable—in Wyck Street. Then he wondered why Great James Street should be so narrow & Bedford Row so broad. He had often wondered about that. At this rate, London would soon be unrecognisable. But I shall never go there again. Mrs Hardy tried to persuade him that it was an easy drive—only 6 hours or so. I asked if she liked it, & she said Granville Barker had told her that when she was in the nursing home she had ‘the time of her life’. She knew everyone in Dorchester, but she thought there were more interesting people in London. Had I often been to Siegfried’s flat? I said no. Then she asked about him & Morgan, said he was elusive, as if they enjoyed visits from him. I said I heard from Wells that Mr Hardy had been up to London to see an air raid. “What things they say!” he said. It was my wife. There was an air raid one night when we stayed with Barrie. We just heard a little pop in the distance—The searchlights were beautiful. I thought if a bomb now were to fall on this flat how many writers would be lost. And he smiled in his queer way, which is fresh & yet sarcastic a little: anyhow shrewd. Indeed, there was no trace to my thinking of the simple peasant. He seemed perfectly aware of everything; in no doubt or hesitation; having made up his mind; & being delivered of all his work; so that he was in no doubt about that either. He was not interested much in his novels, or in anybodies novels; took it all easily & naturally. “I never took long with them” he said. The longest was the Dinnasts. (so pronounced). “But that was really 3 books” said Mrs Hardy. Yes: & that took me 6 years; but not working all the time. Can you write poetry regularly? I asked (being beset with the desire to hear him say something about his books); but the dog kept cropping up. How he bit; how the inspector came out; how he was ill; & they could do nothing for him. Would you mind if I let him in? asked Mrs Hardy, & in came We⁠[s]⁠sex, a very tousled, rough brown & white mongrel, got to guard the house, so naturally he bites people, said Mrs H.; Well, I dont know about that, said Hardy, perfectly natural, & not setting much stock by his poems either it seemed. Did you write poems at the same time as your novels? I asked. No. he said. I wrote a great many poems. I used to send them about, but they were always returned, he chuckled. And in those days I believed in editors. Many were lost—all the fair copies were lost. But I found the notes, & I wrote them from those. I was always finding them. I found one the other day; but I don’t think I shall find any more.

Siegfried took rooms near here, & said he was going to work very hard, but he left soon.

E. M. Forster takes a long time to produce anything—7 years, he chuckled. All this made a great impression of the ease with which he did things. “I daresay F. from the M. C. would have been a great deal better if I had written it differently”, he said. But as if it could not be helped, & did not matter.

He used to go to the Lushingtons in Kensington Sqre & saw my mother there. She used to come in & out when I was talking to your father.

I wanted him to say one word about his writing before we left & cd only ask wh. of his books he wd. have chosen, if like me, he had had to choose one to read in the train. I had taken the M⁠[ayor] of C⁠[asterbridge]. That’s being dramatised, put in Mrs H. & then brought L⁠[ove’s], L⁠[ittle]. Ironies.

And did it hold your interest? he asked.

I stammered that I could not stop reading it, which was true, but sounded wrong. Anyhow, he was not going to be drawn, & went off about giving a young lady a wedding present. None of my books are fitted to be wedding presents, he said. You must give Mrs Woolf one of your books, said Mrs Hardy, inevitably. Yes I will. But I’m afraid only in the little thin paper edition, he said. I protested that it would be enough if he wrote his name (then was vaguely uncomfortable).

Then there was de la Mare. His last book of stories seemed to them such a pity. Hardy had liked some of his poems very much. People said he must be a sinister man to write such stories. But he is [a] very nice man—a very nice man indeed.

He said to a friend who begged him not to give up poetry, “I’m afraid poetry is giving up me.” The truth is he is a very kind man, & sees anyone who wants to see him. He has 16 people for the day sometimes.

Do you think one can’t write poetry if one sees people? I asked. “One might be able to—I dont see why not. Its a question of physical strength” said Hardy. But clearly he preferred solitude himself. Always however he said something sensible & sincere; & thus made the obvious business of compliment giving rather unpleasant. He seemed to be free of it all; very active minded; liking to describe people; not to talk in an abstract way: for example Col. Lawrence, bicycling with a broken arm “held like that” from Lincoln to Hardy listened at the door; to hear if there was anyone there.

I hope he won’t commit suicide, said Mrs Hardy pensively, still leaning over the tea cups, gazing despondently. He often says things like it, though he has never said quite that perhaps. But he has blue lines round his eyes. He calls himself Shaw in the army. No one is to know where he is. But it got into the papers.

He promised me (to give up fly—) not to go into the air, said Hardy.

My husband doesn’t like anything to do with the air, said Mrs Hardy. Now we began to look at the grandfather clock in the corner. We said we must go—tried to confess we were only down for the day. I forgot to say that he offered L. whisky & water, wh. struck me that he was competent as a host, & in every way.

So we got up & signed Mrs H’s visitors books; & Hardy took my L. Little Ironies off, & trotted back with it signed, & Woolf spelt Wolff, wh. I daresay had given him some anxiety. Then We⁠[s]⁠sex came in again. I asked if Hardy could stroke him. So he bent down & stroked him, like the master of the house. We⁠[s]⁠sex went on wheezing away.

There was not a trace anywhere of deference to editors, or respect for rank, an extreme simplicity: What impressed me was his freedom, ease, & vitality. He seemed very “Great Victorian” doing the whole thing with a sweep of his hand (they are ordinary smallish, curled up hands) & setting no great stock by literature; but immensely interested in facts; incidents; & somehow, one could imagine, naturally swept off into imagining & creating without a thought of its being difficult or remarkable; becoming obsessed; & living in imagination. Mrs Hardy thrust his old grey hat into his hand & he trotted us out on to the road. Where is that? I asked him, pointing to a clump of trees on the down opposite, for his house is outside the town, with open country (rolling, massive downs, crowned with little tree coronets before & behind) & he said, with interest, “That is Weymouth. We see the lights at night—not the lights themselves, but the reflection of them.” And so we left, & he trotted in again.

Also I asked him if I might see the picture of Tess which Morgan had described, an old picture: whereupon he led me to an awful engraving of Tess coming into a room from a picture by Herkomer, “That was rather my idea of her” he said. But I said I had been told he had an old picture. “Thats fiction” he said. “I used to see people now & then with a look of her.”

———

Also Mrs Hardy said to me, do you know Aldous Huxley? I said I did. They had been reading his book, which she thought ‘very clever’. But Hardy could not remember it. Said his wife had to read to him—his eyes were now so bad. (“Was that the book where the) “Theyve changed everything now he said. We used to think there was a beginning & a middle & an end. We believed in the Aristotelian theory. Now one of those stories came to an end with a woman going out of the room.” He chuckled. But he no longer reads novels.

The whole thing—literature, novels &c—all seemed to him an amusement, far away, too, scarcely to be taken seriously. Yet he had sympathy & pity for those still engaged in it. But what his secret interests & activities are—to what occupation he trotted off when we left him—I do not know.

Small boys write to him from New Zealand, & have to be answered. They bring out a “Hardy number” of a Japanese paper, which he produced. Talked too about Blunden. I think Mrs H. keeps him posted in the doings of the younger poets.

Rodmell. 1926

As I am not going to milk my brains for a week, I shall here write the first pages of the greatest book in the world. This is what the book would be that was made entirely solely & with integrity of one’s thoughts. Suppose one could catch them before they became “works of art.”? Catch them hot & sudden as they rise in the mind—walking up Asheham hill for instance. Of course one cannot; for the process of language is slow & deluding. One must stop to find a word; then, there is the form of the sentence, soliciting one to fill it.

Art & Thought

What I thought was this: if art is based on thought, what is the transmuting process? I was telling myself the story of our visit to the Hardys. & I began to compose it: that is to say to dwell on Mrs Hardy leaning on the table, looking out, apathetically, vaguely; & so would soon bring everything into harmony with that as the dominant theme. But the actual event was different.

Next,

Writing by living people

I scarcely ever read it. but, owing to his giving me the books, am now reading C by M. Baring. I am surprised to find it as good as it is. But how good is it? Easy to say it is not a great book. But what qualities does it lack? That it adds nothing to one’s vision of life, perhaps. Yet it is hard to find a serious flaw. My wonder is that entirely second rate work like this, poured out in profusion by at least 20 people yearly, I suppose, has so much merit. Never reading it, I get into the way of thinking it non-existent. So it is, speaking with the utmost strictness. That is, it will not exist in 2026; but it has some existence now; which puzzles me a little. Now Clarence bores me; yet I feel this is important. And why?

[Saturday 31 July]

My own Brain

Here is a whole nervous breakdown in miniature. We came on Tuesday. Sank into a chair, could scarcely rise; everything insipid; tasteless, colourless. Enormous desire for rest. Wednesday—only wish to be alone in the open air. Air delicious—avoided speech; could not read. Thought of my own power of writing with veneration, as of something incredible, belonging to someone else; never again to be enjoyed by me. Mind a blank. Slept in my chair. Thursday. No pleasure in life whatsoever; but felt perhaps more attuned to existence. Character & idiosyncracy as Virginia Woolf completely sunk out. Humble & modest. Difficulty in thinking what to say. Read automatically, like a cow chewing cud. Slept in chair. Friday. Sense of physical tiredness; but slight activity of the brain. Beginning to take notice. Making one or two plans. No power of phrase making. Difficulty in writing to Lady Colefax. Saturday (today) much clearer & lighter. Thought I could write, but resisted, or found it impossible. A desire to read poetry set in on Friday. This brings back a sense of my own individuality. Read some Dante & Bridges, without troubling to understand, but got pleasure from them. Now I begin to wish to write notes, but not yet novel. But today senses quickening. No ‘making up’ power yet; no desire to cast scenes in my book. Curiosity about literature returning: want to read Dante, Havelock Ellis, & Berlioz autobiography; also to make a looking glass with shell frame. These processes have sometimes been spread over several weeks.

Proportions Changed

That in the evening, or on colourless days, the proportions of the landscape change suddenly. I saw people playing stoolball in the meadow: they appeared sunk far down on a flat board; & the downs raised high up, & mountainous round them. Detail was smoothed out. This was an extremely beautiful effect; the colours of the womens dresses also showing very bright & pure in the almost untinted surroundings. I knew, also, that the porportions were abnormal—as if I were looking between my legs.

Second Rate Art

i.e. C. by Maurice Baring. Within its limits, it is not second rate, or there is nothing markedly so, at first go off. The limits are the proof of its non-existence.. He can only do one thing: himself to wit; charming, clean, modest sensitive Englishman: outside that radius, & it does not carry far nor illumine much, all is—as it should be; light, sure, proportioned, affecting even; told in so well bred a manner that nothing is exaggerated, all related, proportioned. I could read this for ever, I said. L. said one would soon be sick to death of it.

Wandervögeln

of the sparrow tribe. Two resolute, sunburnt, dusty girls, in jerseys & short skirts, with packs on their backs, city clerks, or secretaries, tramping along the road in the hot sunshine at Ripe. My instinct at once throws up a screen, which condemns them: I think them in every way angular, awkward & self assertive. But all this is a great mistake. These screens shut me out. Have no screens, for screens are made out of our own integument; & get at the thing itself, which has nothing whatever in common with a screen. The screen making habit, though, is so universal, that probably it preserves our sanity. If we had not this device for shutting people off from our sympathies, we might, perhaps, dissolve utterly. Separateness would be impossible. But the screens are in the excess; not the sympathy.

Returning Health

This is shown by the power to make images: the suggestive power of every sight & word is enormously increased. Shakespeare must have had this to an extent which makes my normal state the state of a person blind, deaf, dumb, stone-stockish & fish-blooded. And I have it compared with poor Mrs Bartholomew almost to the extent that Shre has it compared with me.

[Monday 2 August]

Bank Holiday

Very fat woman, girl & man spend Bank Holiday—a day of complete sun & satisfaction—looking up family graves in the churchyard. 23 youngish men & women spend it tramping along with ugly black boxes on shoulders & arms, taking photographs. Man says to woman “Some of these quiet villages don’t seem to know its bank holiday at all” in a tone of superiority & slight contempt.

The Married Relation

Arnold Bennett says that the horror of marriage lies in its ‘dailiness’. All acuteness of relationship is rubbed away by this. The truth is more like this. Life—say 4 days out of 7—becomes automatic; but on the 5th day a bead of sensation (between husband & wife) forms, wh. is all the fuller & more sensitive because of the automatic customary unconscious days on either side. That is to say the year is marked by moments of great intensity. Hardy’s ‘moments of vision’. How can a relationship endure for any length of time except under these conditions?

Friday 3 September

Women in tea garden at Bramber—a sweltering hot day: rose trellises; white washed tables; lower middle classes; motor omnibuses constantly passing; bits of grey stone scattered on a paper strewn green sward all thats left of the Castle.

Woman leaning over the table, taking command of the treat, attended by two elder women, whom she pays for, to girl waitress (a marmalade coloured fat girl, with a body like the softest lard, destined soon to marry, but as yet only 16 or so)

Woman “What can we have for tea?”

Girl (very bored, arms akimbo) Cake, bread & butter, tea: Jam?

Woman Have the wasps been troublesome? They get into the jam—as if she suspected the jam would not be worth having.

Girl agrees.

Woman: Ah, wasps have been very prominent this year.

Girl Thats right.

So she doesn’t have jam.

This amused me, I suppose.

For the rest, Charleston, Tilton, To the Lighthouse, Vita, expeditions: the summer dominated by a feeling of washing in boundless warm fresh air—such an August not come my way for years: bicycling; no settled work done, but advantage taken of air for going to the river, or over the downs. The novel is now easily within sight of the end, but this, mysteriously, comes no nearer. I am doing Lily on the lawn: but whether its her last lap, I don’t know. Nor am I sure of the quality; the only certainty seems to be that after tapping my antennae in the air vaguely for an hour every morning I generally write with heat & ease till 12.30: & thus do my two pages.

[Sunday 5 September]

So it will be done, written over that is, in 3 weeks, I forecast, from today. What emerges? At this moment I’m casting about for an end. The problem is how to bring Lily & Mr R⁠[amsay]. together & make a combination of interest at the end. I am feathering about with various ideas. The last chapter which I begin tomorrow is In the Boat: I had meant to end with R. climbing on to the rock. If so, what becomes [of] Lily & her picture? Should there be a final page about her & Carmichael looking at the picture & summing up R.’s character? In that case I lose the intensity of the moment. If this intervenes, between R. & the lighthouse, there’s too much chop & change, I think. Could I do it in a parenthesis? so that one had the sense of reading the two things at the same time?

I shall solve it somehow, I suppose. Then I must go in to the question of quality. I think it may run too fast & free, & so be rather thin. On the other hand, I think it is subtler & more human than J⁠[acob’s] R⁠[oom] & Mrs D⁠[alloway]. And I am encouraged by my own abundance as I write. It is proved, I think, that what I have to say is to be said in this manner. As usual, side stories are sprouting in great variety as I wind this up: a book of characters; the whole string being pulled out from some simple sentence, like Clara Pater’s, “Don’t you find that Barker’s pins have no points to them?” I think I can spin out all their entrails this way; but it is hopelessly undramatic. It is all in oratio obliqua. Not quite all; for I have a few direct sentences. The lyric portions of To the L. are collected in the 10 year lapse, & dont interfere with the text so much as usual. I feel as if it fetched its circle pretty completely this time: & I dont feel sure what the stock criticism will be. Sentimental? Victorian?

Then I must begin to plan out my book on literature for the Press. Six chapters. Why not groups of ideas, under some single heading—for example. Symbolism. God. Nature. Plot. Dialogue. Take a novel & see what the component parts are. Separate this, & bring under them instances of all the books which display them biggest. Probably this would pan out historically. One could spin a theory which wd bring the chapters together. I don’t feel that I can read seriously⁠[?] & exactly for it. Rather I want to sort out all the ideas that have accumulated in me.

Then I want to write a bunch of ‘Outlines’ to make money (for under a new arrangement, we’re to share any money over £200 that I make): this I must leave rather to chance, according to what books come my way. I am frightfully contented these last few days, by the way. I dont quite understand it. Perhaps reason has something to do with it. Charleston & Tilton knocked me off my perch for a moment: Nessa & her children: Maynard & his carpets. My own gifts & shares seemed so moderate in comparison; my own fault too—a little more self control on my part, & we might have had a boy of 12, a girl of 10: This always rakes me wretched in the early hours. So I said, I am spoiling what I have. And thereupon settled [?] to exploit my own possessions to the full; I can make money & buy carpets; I can increase the pleasure of life enormously by living it carefully. No doubt, this is a rationalisation of a state which is not really of that nature. Probably I am very lucky. Mrs Allinson says she would like to look like me. Mary says I’m the only woman she loves. Nelly cooks admirably. Then, I am extremely happy walking on the downs. I dont want to be talking to Eddy at Charleston. I like to have space to spread my mind out in. Whatever I think, I can rap out, suddenly to L. We are somehow very detached, free, harmonious. I don’t in the least want to hurry up & finish the time here. I want to go to Seaford & walk back over the downs; to go & see the house at East Chiltington; to breathe in more light & air; to see more grey hollows & gold cornfields & the first ploughed land shining white, with the gulls flickering. No: I dont want anyone to come here & interrupt. I am immensely busy. Hence I come to my moral, which is simply to enjoy what one does enjoy, without teasing oneself oh but Nessa has children, Maynard carpets. I might go & stay with Ethel [Sands, in Normandy]. For my own wishes are always definite enough to give me a lead, one way or another; & the chief joy in life is to follow these lights; I am now almost entirely surrounded by sheep. God knows, I wish we could buy the terrace, & have a garden all round the lodge—but this is not a serious diminution of joy.

Clive & Mary came over yesterday in brilliant sun. We sat on the millstones, (one sheep has a tail like a bell-rope—the others are all bit short.) Wells. Hardy. Maynard. Richardson, [word illegible]. Christabel—going to Greece for a month with Lesley Jowitt. Maupassant’s metaphors—The Questionnaire. Lytton’s harem—Their dulness—Carrington a cook who doesn’t go out on Sundays. Whether Eddy is clever or not. Tonks & Steer & Moore—Tonks in love with Mary, Clive insists; she is modest. So we talked. Then I drove with them to the Laye, walked up the down behind Asheham & let all that wind & sun blow through the crazy sails of my old windmill, which gives me so much pleasure still. I forget what I thought about: did not think, I suppose; was all in a thrill of emotion at my being liked by Mary & being a success, &c. Home to music, my new 15/- table, talk with L.: a sense of great happiness & ease. Went & looked at the stars, but could not get quite the right sense of amazement (I can get this really well at times) because L. said “Now come in. Its too cold to be out”

Monday 13 September

The blessed thing is coming to an [end] I say to myself with a groan. Its like some prolonged rather painful & yet exciting process of nature, which one desires inexpressibly to have over. Oh the relief of waking & thinking its done—the relief, & the disappointment, I suppose. I am talking of To the Lighthouse. I am exacerbated by the fact that I spent 4 days last week hammering out de Quincey, which has been lying about since June; so refused £30 to write on Willa Cather; & now shall be quit in a week I hope of this unprofitable fiction, & could have wedged in Willa before going back. So I should have had £70 of my years 200 ready made by October: (my greed is immense: I want to have £50 of my own in the Bank to buy Persian carpets, pots, chairs &c.) Curse Richmond, Curse The Times, Curse my own procrastinations & nerves. I shall do Cobden Sanderson & Mrs Hemans & make something by them however. As for the book [To the Lighthouse]—Morgan said he felt ‘This is a failure’ as he finished The passage to India. I feel—what? A little stale this last week or two from steady writing. But also a little triumphant. If my feeling is correct, this is the greatest stretch I’ve put my method to, & I think it holds. By this I mean that I have been dredging up more feelings & character, I imagine. But Lord knows, until I look at my haul. This is only my own feeling in process. Odd how I’m haunted by that damned criticism of Janet Case’s “its all dressing … technique. (Mrs Dalloway). The C.R. has substance”. But then in ones strained state any fly has liberty to settle, & its always the gadflies. Muir praising me intelligently has comparatively little power to encourage—when I’m working that is—when the ideas halt. And this last lap, in the boat, is hard, because the material is not so rich as it is with Lily on the lawn: I am forced to be more direct & more intense. I am making some use of symbolism, I observe; & I go in dread of ‘sentimentality’. Is the whole theme open to that charge? But I doubt that any theme is in itself good or bad. It gives a chance to ones peculiar qualities—thats all. Then I’m concerned whether to stay with Ethel Sands or not: whether to buy a dress or not. Then I’m astonishingly happy in the country—a state of mind which, if I did not dislike hyphens, I should hyphen, to show that it is a state by itself.

We took Angus over the downs towards Falmer yesterday. After all these years, we have discovered some of the loveliest, loneliest, most surprising downland in these parts: lovelier I think than our rival the Seaford-Tilton down over which we walked in broiling sun last Thursday. How it beat on our heads, made poor puppy pant. Lydia & Maynard came to tea.

Wednesday 15 September

Sometimes I shall use the Note form: for instance this

A State of Mind

Woke up perhaps at 3. Oh its beginning its coming—the horror—physically like a painful wave swelling about the heart—tossing me up. I’m unhappy unhappy! Down—God, I wish I were dead. Pause. But why am I feeling this? Let me watch the wave rise. I watch. Vanessa. Children. Failure. Yes; I detect that. Failure failure. (The wave rises). Oh they laughed at my taste in green paint! Wave crashes. I wish I were dead! I’ve only a few years to live I hope. I cant face this horror any more—(this is the wave spreading out over me).

This goes on; several times, with varieties of horror. Then, at the crisis, instead of the pain remaining intense, it becomes rather vague. I doze. I wake with a start. The wave again! The irrational pain: the sense of failure; generally some specific incident, as for example my taste in green paint, or buying a new dress, or asking Dadie for the week end, tacked on.

At last I say, watching as dispassionately as I can, Now take a pull of yourself. No more of this. I reason. I take a census of happy people & unhappy. I brace myself to shove to throw to batter down. I begin to march blindly forward. I feel obstacles go down. I say it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. I become rigid & straight, & sleep again, & half wake & feel the wave beginning & watch the light whitening & wonder how, this time, breakfast & daylight will overcome it; & then hear L. in the passage & simulate, for myself as well as for him, great cheerfulness; & generally am cheerful, by the time breakfast is over. Does everyone go through this state? Why have I so little control? It is not creditable, nor lovable. It is the cause of much waste & pain in my life.

Tuesday 28 September

Every day I have meant to record a state of mind. But it has always disappeared (characteristically) yet recurred often enough to make it one of some importance. It is raining hard this evening; we have entered the calm period of Nelly’s departure. So I will try, before my fingers chill & my mind wanders to the fire, to write here what I can remember.

Intense depression: I have to confess that this has overcome me several times since September 6th (I think that, or thereabouts was the date.) It is so strange to me that I cannot get it right—the depression, I mean, which does not come from something definite, but from nothing. “Where there is nothing” the phrase came (back) to me, as I sat at the table in the drawing room. Of course I was interested; & discovered that, for the first time for many years, I had been idle without being ill. We had been walking, expeditioning, in the hot fine weather. I was writing the last pages of To the Lighthouse (finished, provisionally, Sept 16th). Somehow, my reading had lapsed. I was hunting no hares. One night I got hold of Geoffrey Scott’s book on Architecture, & a little spark of motive power awoke in me. This is a warning then; never to cease the use of the brain. So I used my brain. Then, owing to mismanagement, no one came to stay, & I got very few letters; & the high pure hot days went on & on; & this blankness persisted, & I began to suspect my book of the same thing; & there was Nessa humming & booming & flourishing over the hill; & one night we had a long long argument. Vita started it, by coming over with Plank, & L. (I say) spoilt the visit by glooming because I said he had been angry. He shut up, & was caustic. He denied this, but admitted that my habits of describing him, & others, had this effect often. I saw myself, my brilliancy, genius, charm, beauty (&c. Seethe attendants who float me through so many years) diminish & disappear. One is in truth rather an elderly dowdy fussy ugly incompetent woman vain, chattering & futile. I saw this vividly, impressively. Then he said our relations had not been so good lately. On analysing my state of mind I admitted that I had been irritated, first by the prevalency of the dogs (Grizzle on heat too.) Secondly by his assumption that we can afford to saddle ourselves with a whole time gardener, build or buy him a cottage, & take in the terrace to be garden. Then, I said, we shall be tying ourselves to come here; shall never travel; & it will be assumed that Monks House is the hub of the world. This it certainly is not, I said, to me; nor do I wish to spend such a measure of our money on gardens, when we cannot buy rugs, beds or good arm chairs. L. was, I think, hurt at this, & I was annoyed at saying it, yet did it, not angrily, but in the interests of freedom. Too many women give way on this point, & secretly grudge their unselfishness in silence—a bad atmosphere. Our atmosphere decidedly cleared, after this, Tommie [Tomlin] came for the week end, & I am once more full of work, at high pressure, interested, & quite unable, I see, to make plain even to my own eyes, my season of profound despondency.

If I wish to avoid this in future, I recommend, first, incessant brain activity; reading, & planning; second, a methodical system of inviting people here (which is possible, with Nelly obedient & gay); third, increased mobility. For next year, I shall arrange perhaps to go definitely to Ethel Sands. With my motor I shall be more mobile.

But it is always a question whether I wish to avoid these glooms. In part they are the result of getting away by oneself, & have a psychological interest which the usual state of working & enjoying lacks. These 9 weeks give one a plunge into deep waters; which is a little alarming, but full of interest. All the rest of the year one’s (I daresay rightly) curbing & controlling this odd immeasurable soul. When it expands, though one is frightened & bored & gloomy, it is as I say to myself, awfully queer. There is an edge to it which I feel of great importance, once in a way. One goes down into the well & nothing protects one from the assault of truth. Down there I cant write or read; I exist however. I am. Then I ask myself what I am? & get a closer though less flattering answer than I should on the surface—where, to tell the truth, I get more praise than is right. But the praise will go; one will be left alone with this queer being in old age. I am glad to find it on the whole so interesting, though so acutely unpleasant. Also, I can, by taking pains, be much more considerate of L.’s feelings; & so keep more steadily at our ordinary level of intimacy & ease: a level, I think, no other couple so long married, reaches, & keeps so constantly.

Thursday 30 September

I wished to add some remarks to this, on the mystical side of this solitude; how it is not oneself but something in the universe that one’s left with. It is this that is frightening & exciting in the midst of my profound gloom, depression, boredom, whatever it is: One sees a fin passing far out. What image can I reach to convey what I mean? Really there is none I think. The interesting thing is that in all my feeling & thinking I have never come up against this before. Life is, soberly & accurately, the oddest affair; has in it the essence of reality. I used to feel this as a child—couldn’t step across a puddle once I remember, for thinking, how strange—what am I? &c. But by writing I dont reach anything. All I mean to make is a note of a curious state of mind. I hazard the guess that it may be the impulse behind another book. At present my mind is totally blank & virgin of books* * Perhaps The Waves or moths (Oct. 1929) I want to watch & see how the idea at first occurs. I want to trace my own process.

I was depressed again today because Vita did not come (yet relieved at the same time); had to hold L.’s ladder in the garden, when I wanted to write or to try on Nessa’s dress; & slightly afraid that this dress is not very successful.

But I am shelving the dress problem on these principles. I am having cheap day clothes; & a good dress from Brooke; & I am being less pernickety about keeping to limits, as I have only to write & stir myself, to make, I wager, quite £50 extra in the year for my own extravagances. No longer shall I let a coat for £3 floor me in the middle of the night, or be afraid to lunch out because “I’ve no clothes.” A broader & bolder grasp is what is wanted. Here I am going into the question of order & so on, like a housekeeper, taking in supplies. Soon, this time next week, I shall have no time for glooming or introspection. It will be “When may I come & see you?” Already Betty Potter has begun.

Now I must scheme a little at my book of criticism.

Saturday 30 October

It will be when may I come & see you I—too true a prophecy, though made in the damp & solitude of Rodmell. Monday, Ozzie Dickinson, Wednesday, Lady Colefax, Thursday Morgan to meet Abel Chevalley, dine Wells to meet Arnold Bennett, Friday to Monday Long Barn. So the week slips or sticks through my fingers; rage misery joy, dulness elation mix: I am the usual battlefield of emotions; alternately think of buying chairs & clothes; plod with some method revising To the Lighthouse; quarrel with Nelly (who was to catch the afternoon train today because I told a lie about a telephone) & so we go on. Maurice Baring & the Sitwells send me their books; Leonard forges ahead, now doing what he calls “correspondence”; the Press creaks a little at its hinges; Mrs C⁠[artwright]. has absconded with my spectacles: I find Buggers bores; like the normal male; & should now be developing my book for the Press. All these things shoulder each other out across the screen of my brain. At intervals, I begin to think (I note this, as I am going to watch for the advent of a book) of a solitary woman musing⁠[?] a book of ideas about life. This has intruded only once or twice, & very vaguely: it is a dramatisation of my mood at Rodmell. It is to be an endeavour at something mystic, spiritual; the thing that exists when we aren’t there.

Among external things, we were at Cambridge for the week end; kept warm at the Bull—& there’s a good subject—The Hotel. Many people from Macclesfield talking about motor cars. Mothers, to me pathetic, looking half shyly at their sons, as if deprecating their age. A whole life opened to me: father, mother, son, daughter. Father alone has wine. An enormous man, like an advertisement of Power: sits in chair. Daddy you’ll be miserable in it says girl, herself bovine. Mother a mere wisp; sits with eyes shut; had spent hours driving up writing characters of maids. Shall I remember any of this?

Then Gosse introducing Vita at Royal —— something. I never saw the whole hierarchy of lit. so plainly exposed. Gosse the ornament on the tea pot: beneath him file on file of old stout widows whose husbands had been professors, beetle specialists doubtless, meritorious dons; & these good people, ruminating tea, & reflecting all the depths of the suburbs tinctured with literature, dear Vita told them were “The Hollow Men.” Her address was read in sad sulky tones like those of a schoolboy; her pendulous rich society face, glowing out under a black hat at the end of the smoky dismal room, looked very ancestral & like a picture under glass in a gallery. She was fawned upon by the little dapper grocer Gosse, who kept spinning round on his heel to address her compliments & to scarify Bolshevists; in an ironical voice which seemed to ward off what might be said of him; & to be drawing round the lot of them thicker & thicker, the red plush curtains of respectability. There was Vita, who was too innocent to see it, Guedalla, & Drinkwater. I dont regret my wildest, foolishest, utterance, if it gave the least crack to this respectability. But needless to say, no word of mine has had any effect whatever. Gosse will survive us all. Now how does he do it? Yet he seemed to me, with his irony & his scraping, somehow uneasy. A kind of black doormat got up & appeared to be Lady Gosse. So home, with Dotty in a rage, because she was palmed off with Plank. She did contrive to get here though in the end. One night I went in with Vita after the play. She was lying asleep at Mount Street, in a flat at the top of the house: large pale furniture about dimly seen—a dog on her bed. She woke up chattering & hysterical. Virginia Woolf Virginia Woolf My God! Virginia Woolf is in the room. For Gods Sake Vita dont turn the lights on. No light you fool! But I cant see to get the allella, mumbled Vita. She got it though. We sat & drank. Dusky shapes of glasses & things, a room I had never seen; a woman I scarcely knew; Vita there between us, intimate wi’ both; flattery, extravagance, complete inner composure on my part, & so home.

Tuesday 23 November

Here I must resolve first of all to find some long solid book to read. What? Tristram Shandy? French memoirs? This is on top of a discussion, at tea about Angus. He dont do, L. says: will never make a manager. So then shall it be another attempt, or Cape, or Seeker? These difficulties recur. I should not much like writing for Cape; yet if the Press is sagging on our shoulders, there is little sense in waiting on. Next year L. thinks we could sell to advantage. It gives one a full life: but then life is so full already. Colefax complicates the scene—Colefax is the death of this book. Aren’t I always reading her scrawls or answering them. This culminated last week in her dining alone with me, off cold chicken. I found us talking socially, not intimately, she in pearls (shams Vita says) popping up one light after another: like the switch board at the telephone exchange at the mention of names. Geoffrey Scott, Percy Lubbock⁠[,] whoever it might be. Perfectly competent, &, for her purpose, efficient. She is, I maintain, a woman of the world: has all her senses tuned to that pitch. The machine doesn’t work in private, though she was very anxious, poor aspiring, slightly suspicious & uneasy woman, that it should. She told me how she had lived till she married running after old ladies with their knitting. So, on marriage, but she was only 19, had kicked her heels up: determined to live, like Violet’s mother, who leant out of the Palace window at Auckland & said, to an old man selling kippers, Is this life? But now, aged 50, she asks, Is this life? again—rushing round, dining & giving dinners; never able to concentrate in a corner, & secretly, in my opinion, not desiring it but pretending it, as she has the habit of pretence. This is all right in her, but wrong in me. So we don’t altogether amalgamate; but I have my reservations, she hers. In came Dadie, to our relief, somewhat; then Sir Arthur, breezy, cheery, competent, patting her, controlling her, petted by her (she reverted to her arch girlish days, when she could eat soup & potatoes without any thought of her figure) sitting on the edge of my shabby dirty down at heels arm chair.

All this rushes on apace. Fame grows. Chances of meeting this person, doing that thing, accumulate. Life is as I’ve said since I was 10, awfully interesting—if anything, quicker, keener at 44 than 24—more desperate I suppose, as the river shoots to Niagara—my new vision of death; active, positive, like all the rest, exciting; & of great importance—as an experience.

‘The one experience I shall never describe’ I said to Vita yesterday. She was sitting on the floor in her velvet jacket & red striped silk shirt, I knotting her pearls into heaps of great lustrous eggs. She had come up to see me—so we go on—a spirited, creditable affair, I think, innocent (spiritually) & all gain, I think; rather a bore for Leonard, but not enought to worry him. The truth is one has room for a good many relationships. Then she goes back again to Persia, with Leigh Ashton—that putty faced low voiced rather beaten cur, who is always slinking off with his tail between his legs, but gives, they say, oyster suppers.

I am re-doing six pages of Lighthouse daily. This is not I think, so quick as Mrs D.: but then I find much of it very sketchy, & have to improvise on the typewriter. This I find much easier than re-writing in pen & ink. My present opinion is that it is easily the best of my books, fuller than J.’s R. & less spasmodic, occupied with more interesting things than Mrs D. & not complicated with all that desperate accompaniment of madness. It is freer & subtler I think. Yet I have no idea yet of any other to follow it: which may mean that I have made my method perfect, & it will now stay like this, & serve whatever use I wish to put it to. Before, some development of the method brought fresh subjects in view, because I saw the chance of being able to say them. Yet I am now & then haunted by some semi mystic very profound life of a woman, which shall all be told on one occasion; & time shall be utterly obliterated; future shall somehow blossom out of the past. One incident—say the fall of a flower—might contain it. My theory being that the actual event practically does not exist—nor time either. But I dont want to force this. I must make up my Series book.

Saturday 12 December

I have never been able to afford 2/ for a good piece of washleather, yet I buy a dozen boxes of matches for 1/6.

I am giving up the hope of being well dressed.

Violet Dickinson has just had a third serious operation & I went to an old Curiosity shop instead of going to see her.

Leonard is lunching with Maynard & a great registered parcel has just been delivered containing Dadie’s dissertation.

It is now close on 3.30.

Some superstition prevents me from reading Yeats’ autobiography as I should like.

I am very happy at the moment: having arranged my week on the whole well.

But I have been rather unscupulous. I have put off the Stephens, at Thorpe: & shall probably stay at Knole.

A few thoughts to fill up time waiting for dinner.

An article all about London:

How Vita’s inkpot flowered on her table.

Logan’s vanity: I write everything 8 times—

(So thats how its done I thought: he thought thats the only way to produce writing like mine)

But all my thoughts perish instantly. I make them up so vast. How to blunt the sting of an unpleasant remark: to say it over & over & over again. Walked to Violet’s; took her a red carnation & a white one. My feelings quickened as I drew near. I visualised the operation as I stood on the doorstep.

I also have made up a passage for The Lighthouse: on people going away & the effect on one’s feeling for them.

But reading Yeats turns my sentences one way: reading Sterne turns them another.

[]

1927

Friday 14 January

This is out of order, but I have no new book, & so must record here (& it was here I recorded the beginning of The Lighthouse) must record here the end. This moment I have finished the final drudgery. It is now complete for Leonard to read on Monday. Thus I have done it some days under the year, & feel thankful to be out of it again. Since October 25th I have been revising & retyping (some parts 3 times over) & no doubt I should work at it again; but I cannot. What I feel is that it is a hard muscular book, which at this age proves that I have something in me. It has not run out & gone flabby, at least such is my feeling before reading it over.

Sunday 23 January

Well Leonard has read To the Lighthouse, & says it is much my best book, & it is a ‘masterpiece’. He said this without my asking. I came back from Knole & sat without asking him. He calls it entirely new ‘a psychological poem’, is his name for it. An improvement upon Dalloway: more interesting. Having won this great relief, my mind dismisses the whole thing, as usual; & I forget it, & shall only wake up & be worried again over proofs & then when it appears.

We went to Cornwall (dare I characterise Will hearing him talk next door—it is Sunday—he is dining with us). He is a water-blooded waspish little man, all on edge, vain, peevish, nervous. Ka is matronly, but substantial. Some views I retain—one of the valley in the evening light—but others were only a dull impression of life suspended & frozen, & the chin sawing of Mervyn: all chapped, becolded. We came home for these reasons a day early, & next morning I had a letter from the New York H⁠[erald]. & T⁠[ribune] asking me to go there, passage paid, 120 in my pocket &, perhaps, expenses, & write 4 articles. We accepted, on conditions; but have not heard yet. Meanwhile we hesitate, for if Leonard came, we should probably be £150 out of pocket. So it seems. The adventure is tempting. But the grind of moneymaking is scarcely to be endured unnecessarily. We could go to Greece, or Italy for less.

Then Nessa has gone, poor dear creature. I came in two days ago & found her white at the telephone; Elly at the other end saying that Duncan’s illness was probably typhoid. I think a left handed marriage makes these moments more devastating: a sense remains, I think of hiding one’s anguish; of insecurity. Angus writes the most cautious alarming letters. Anyhow she went yesterday in a snowstorm, & we kissed on the pavement in the snow. We are very intimate—a great solace to me. Vita goes on Saturday. Tomorrow I dine with her at Colefaxes: a brilliant party: no clothes: hair down my back as usual. Does it very much matter? I reached that point of philosophy at Knole the other night, with the bountiful womanly Mrs Rubens & his Lordship the figure of an English nobleman, decayed, dignified, smoothed, effete; respectable I think in his modest way. But I never have enjoyed a party. Balls at Buckingham Palace are worth looking at. He spends the day sitting on Com⁠[mi]⁠tees at Maidstone; interviews parsons about livings; likes chess & crime. Vita took me over the 4 acres of building, which she loves: too little conscious beauty for my taste: smallish rooms looking on to buildings: no views: yet one or two things remain: Vita stalking in her Turkish dress, attended by small boys, down the gallery, wafting them on like some tall sailing ship—a sort of covey of noble English life: dogs walloping, children crowding, all very free & stately: & [a] cart bringing wood in to be sawn by the great circular saw. How do you see that? I asked Vita. She said she saw it as something that had gone on for hundreds of years. They had brought wood in from the Park to replenish the great fires like this for centuries: & her ancestresses had walked so on the snow with their great dogs bounding by them. All the centuries seemed lit up, the past expressive, articulate; not dumb & forgotten; but a crowd of people stood behind, not dead at all; not remarkable; fair faced, long limbed; affable; & so we reach the days of Elizabeth quite easily. After tea, looking for letters of Dryden’s to show me, she tumbled out a love letter of Ld Dorset’s (17th century) with a lock of his soft gold tinted hair which I held in my hand a moment. One had a sense of links fished up into the light which are usually submerged. Otherwise no particular awe or any great sense of difference or distinction. They are not a brilliant race. The space & comeliness of it all struck me. I came home to Marjorie Strachey, Tom Eliot, Nessa & Roger. A little constricted our society: no talk of the clergy or of the country; but how lively & agile compared with the

[text ends]

DIARY XVI

Thursday 3 February

Fate always contrives that I begin the new year in February. I ask, why another volume? (but here’s an innovation: this is not a book but a block—so lazy am I about making writing books nowadays). What is the purpose of them? L. taking up a volume the other day said Lord save him if I died first & he had to read through these. My handwriting deteriorates. And do I say anything interesting? I can always waste an idle hour reading them; & then, oh yes, I shall write my memoirs out of them, one of these days.

That reminds me of the Webbs: those 36 strenuous hours at Liphook, in an emphatic lodging house, with blue books in the passages; & those entirely devoted—by which I mean those entirely integrated people. Their secret is that they have by nature no divisions of soul to fritter them away: their impact is solid & entire. Without eyes & ears (but Mrs Webb listens in & prefers Mozart to Handel, if I may guess) one can come down with more of a weight upon bread & butter or whatever the substance is before one. On a steely watery morning we swiftly tramped over a heathy common talking, talking. In their efficiency & glibness one traces perfectly adjusted machinery; but talk by machinery does not charm, or suggest: it cuts the grass of the mind close at the roots. I’m too hurried to write. Mrs W. is far less ornamental than of old: wispy untidy drab, with a stain on her skirt & a key on her watch chain; as if she had cleared the decks & rolled her sleeves & was waiting for the end, but working.

Saturday 12 February

Exactly what has happened in the Clive Mary affair I cannot say. Did he not sheepishly admit in the kitchen the other night that he was putting it off till March? & then, casually & jauntily tell me as if by chance, the other afternoon, here, that he was going after all. But wont Mary mind? What if she does?—that was practically his answer.

Vita’s prose is too fluent. I’ve been reading it, & it makes my pen run. When I’ve read a classic, I am curbed &—not castrated: no, the opposite; I cant think of the word at the moment.

Had I been writing P⁠[assenger] to T⁠[eheran] I should have run off whole pools of this coloured water; & then (I think) found my own method of attack. It is my distinction as a writer I think to get this clear & my expression exact. Were I writing travels I should wait till some angle emerged: & go for that. The method of writing smooth narrative cant be right; things dont happen in one’s mind like that. But she is very skilful & golden voiced.

This makes me think that I have to read To the L. tomorrow & Monday, straight through in print; straight through, owing to my curious methods, for the first time. I want to read largely & freely once: then to niggle over details.

But I am forgetting, after 3 days, the most important event in my life since marriage—so Clive described it: Bobo shingled me. Mr Cizec has bingled me. I am short haired for life. Having no longer, I think, any claims to beauty, the convenience of this alone makes it desirable. Every morning I go to take up brush & twist that old coil round my finger & fix it with hairpins & then with a start of joy, no I needn’t. In front there is no change; behind I’m like the rump of a partridge. This robs dining out of half its terrors; in token of which, I’m ‘dining out’ (the distinction is clear: Roger & Clive & Bloomsbury aint dining out) with Ethel [Sands] & with the [Hubert] Hendersons.

For the rest—its been a gay tropical kind of autumn, with so much Vita & Knole & staying away: we have launched ourselves a little more freely perhaps from work & the Press. But now with Nessa away, Clive away, Duncan away, Vita away, the strenuous time sets in: I’m reading & writing at a great pace; mean to ‘do’ Morgan; have a fling at my book on fiction; & make all the money we want for Greece & a motor car. I may note that the first symptoms of Lighthouse are unfavourable. Roger, it is clear did not like Time Passes. Harpers & the Forum have refused serial rights; Brace writes, I think, a good deal less enthusiastically than of Mrs D. But these opinions refer to the rough copy, unrevised. And anyhow I feel callous: L.’s opinion keeps me steady; I’m neither one thing nor the other.

Yesterday Wells asked us to publish a pamphlet for him. This is a great rise in the world for us; & comes on top of rather a flat talk with Angus. L. says he doesn’t “manage”. Angus refuses to budge an inch. He can’t see the point of it. As he says, too, whats he to do if he leaves? He doesn’t want to leave. Though sometimes ‘fed up’ he likes it better than most work. But I’m persuaded we need, the press needs, a fanatic at the moment; not this quiet easygoing gentlemanliness. I am annoyed at doing cards, & envelopes; & L. does twice the work I do.

Monday 21 February

Why not invent a new kind of play—as for instance

Woman thinks:…

He does.

Organ Plays.

She writes.

They say:

She sings:

Night speaks:

They miss

I think it must be something in this line—though I cant now see what. Away from facts: free; yet concentrated; prose yet poetry; a novel & a play.

But today is

Monday 28 February

& I have got into another stream of thought, if thought it can be called.

Let me collect a few logs, drifting in my mind, to represent the past few days.

Clive, standing at the door.

She cries for the moon.

This was said of Mary. With it he went to Cassis for 3 months.

Again, If Mrs Woolf dont think me worth a penny stamp I said—this being Rose Bartholomew standing at her cottage door on Friday evening. Phrases suddenly seem to me very significant, & then I forget them. My brain is rather stale. Do I like The Lighthouse? I think I was disappointed. But God knows. I have to read it again.

A letter from Vita & Dottie just come. She is not an explicit letter writer. But I must be fond of her, genuinely, to start as I did at the sight of Dottie’s hand, thinking she wrote to say V. was ill.

For the rest I think Cowper is a good poet. I’d like to write about him. Shall we go to Greece, Italy or France? I’m glad I didn’t dedicate my book to Roger. This I verified in his presence, the other night [23 February]. He dined here with Raymond. Raymond is intellectually speaking underbred. Roger a pure aristocrat. Philip [Ritchie] came in, his little green eyes hazed bunged up with drink. So to Rodmell. And now the wind is making the tin screen over the gas fire rattle. How we protect ourselves from the elements! Coming back last night I thought, owing to civilisation, I, who am now cold, wet, & hungry, can be warm & satisfied & listening to a Mozart 4tet in 15 minutes. And so I was.

That ring may be Tom. No. Tom dont run upstairs—only the lower classes do that.

And I dont think I shall go out in the rain, though I am going to spend this week in long romantic London walks. I have successfully broken the neck of that screaming grey goose—society. There’s nothing to be afraid of in dining with Ethel or Sibyl—& I’m shingled now. One spins round for a moment & then settles on one’s feet. But about the Soul: the soul has sunk to the bottom. I am empty headed tonight, feeling the lack of Nessa rather, & all the prelude of Spring—the vague discomfort & melancholy & a feeling of having come to anchor. But I intend to work harder & harder. If they—the respectables, my friends, advise me against The Lighthouse, I shall write memoirs; have a plan already to get historical manuscripts & write Lives of the Obscure: but why do I pretend I should take advice? After a holiday the old ideas will come to me as usual; seeming fresher, more important than ever; & I shall be off again, feeling that extraordinary exhilaration, that ardour & lust of creation—which is odd, if what I create is, as it well may be, wholly bad.

Today I bought a new watch. Last night I crept into L.’s bed to make up a sham quarrel about paying our fares to Rodmell. Now to finish Passage to India.

Saturday 5 March

Both rather headachy & fatigued. This is the last slope up of the year which is always worst. Finishing, correcting the last proofs that is to say, of a book is always a screw. Then I have written rather incessantly, one thing after another. A holiday, without dinner to order, or telephone to answer, or people to talk to, will be a divine miracle. We go to Cassis on the 30th; then to Sicily; so home by Rome. What could be more to my heart. Often I sit & think of looking at things. The greed of my eye is insatiable. To think of seeing a new place fills me with excitement. I now make up pictures of Sicily. Think of the Campagna grey in the evening.

I have been hard pressed about the Eliot fund, & behind the scenes of ladies diplomacy—Chrissie & Sibyl, that is: so much suavity, so much distrust of each other, & so great a desire for compliments. Molly came to tea; could not get her mind off her troubles, first laughing at them—Desmond all right, & so on: then brushing laughter aside, & becoming more & more openly worried. Sibyl had cross examined her about her debts. To such indignities poverty exposes one. So I told her the truth, or what I hope will be the truth: that friends are subscribing enough to send them abroad, Oh how wonderful! she exclaimed, she never having seen Italy or Spain all these years. “I’m afraid Desmond has had rather an unhappy life,” she said. “But then think of Lytton … Of course I was extravagant about doing the house up … but then we can let it.” “Rachel goes for long walks at night & reads Coleridge—Oh Desmond’s hopeless—he’s like a dog who runs out if the door is open.” So we laid our heads together over the fire; & felt very sisterly & sympathetic. I distrust though the pleasure one gets in helping one’s friends.

Monday 14 March

Although annoyed that I have not heard from Vita by this post nor yet last week, annoyed sentimentally, & partly from vanity—still I must record the conception last night between 12 & one of a new book. I said I would be on the watch for symptoms of this extremely mysterious process. For some weeks, since finishing The Lighthouse I have thought myself virgin, passive, blank of ideas. I toyed vaguely with some thoughts of a flower whose petals fall; of time all telescoped into one lucid channel through wh. my heroine was to pass at will. The petals falling. But nothing came of it. I shirked the effort—seemed to have no impulse that way, supposed that I had worked out my vein. Faith Henderson came to tea, &, valiantly beating the waters of conversation, I sketched the possibilities which an unattractive woman, penniless, alone, might yet bring into being. I began imagining the position—how she would stop a motor on the Dover road, & so get to Dover: cross the channel: &c. It struck me, vaguely, that I might write a Defoe narrative for fun. Suddenly between twelve & one I conceived a whole fantasy to be called “The Jessamy Brides”—why, I wonder? I have rayed round it several scenes. Two women, poor, solitary at the top of a house. One can see anything (for this is all fantasy) the Tower Bridge, clouds, aeroplanes. Also old men listening in the room over the way. Everything is to be tumbled in pall mall. It is to be written as I write letters at the top of my speed: on the ladies of Llangollen; on Mrs Fladgate; on people passing. No attempt is to be made to realise the character. Sapphism is to be suggested. Satire is to be the main note—satire & wildness. The Ladies are to have Constantinople in view. Dreams of golden domes. My own lyric vein is to be satirised. Everything mocked. And it is to end with three dots … so. For the truth is I feel the need of an escapade after these serious poetic experimental books Orlando leading to The Waves. (July 8th 1933) whose form is always so closely considered. I want to kick up my heels & be off. I want to embody all those innumerable little ideas & tiny stories which flash into my mind at all seasons. I think this will be great fun to write; & it will rest my head before starting the very serious, mystical poetical work which I want to come next. Meanwhile, before I can touch the Jessamy Brides, I have to write my book on fiction & that wont be done till January, I suppose. I might dash off a page or two now & then by way of experiment. And it is possible that the idea will evaporate. Anyhow this records the odd hurried unexpected way in which these things suddenly create themselves—one thing on top of another in about an hour. So I made up Jacob’s Room looking at the fire at Hogarth House; so I made up The Lighthouse one afternoon in the square here.

Monday 21 March

This is the kind of evening when one seems to be abroad: the window is open; the yellows & greys of the houses seem exposed to the summer; there is that rumour & clamour which reminds one of Italy. Almost in a week now we shall be starting. I dislike the days before going. I went to buy clothes today & was struck by my own ugliness. Like Edith Sitwell I can never look like other people—too broad, tall, flat, with hair hanging. And now my neck is so ugly … But I never think of this at home.

How disturbing the summer is! We shall sit reading with the windows open tonight, but my mind will only just touch the page & float off. Something unsettled & melancholy will be in the air. Also it seems the threshold of that vast burning London summer, which alarms me slightly, Vita & Harold will be back; my book will be out. We shall sit in the Square. But I shall not let things worry me much, (so I say—but it is still only March.) We shall have a week at Cassis—a strange resurrection of us all abroad. Many years have gone since Nessa, Clive & I met there. Never with Leonard of course.

My brain is ferociously active. I want to have at my books as if I were conscious of the lapse of time, age & death. Dear me, how lovely some parts of The Lighthouse are! Soft & pliable, & I think deep, & never a word wrong for a page at a time. This I feel about the dinner party, & the children in the boat; but not of Lily on the lawn. That I do not much like. But I like the end.

I get too many letters to answer nowadays. Edith Sitwell came to tea: transparent like some white bone one picks up on a moor, with sea water stones on her long frail hands which slide into yours much narrower than one expects like a folded fan. She has pale gemlike eyes; & is dressed, on a windy March day, in three decker skirts of red spotted cotton. She half shuts her eyes; coos an odd little laugh, reminding me of the Fishers [VW’s cousins]. All is very tapering & pointed, the nose running on like a mole. She said I was a great writer, which pleased me. So sensitive to everything in people & books she said. She got talking about her mother, blaspheming in the nursery, hysterical, terrible; setting Edith to kill bluebottles. ‘But nobody can take a liberty with her’ said Edith, who prides herself on Angevin blood. She is a curious product, likable to me: sensitive, etiolated, affectionate, lonely, having to thread her way (there is something ghostlike & angular about her) home to Bayswater to help cook dinner. She said she would like to attach great bags & balloons of psychology, people having dinner, &c, to her poems, but has no knowledge of human nature, only these sudden intense poems—which by the way she has sent me. In other ages she would have been a cloistered nun; or an eccentric secluded country old maid. It is the oddity of our time that has set her on the music hall stage. She trips out into the Limelight with all the timidity & hauteur of the aristocratic spinster.

Sunday 1 May

We came back on Thursday night from Rome; from that other private life which I mean to have for ever now. There is a complete existence in Italy: apart from this. One is nobody in Italy: one has no name, no calling, no background. And, then, not only is there the beauty, but a different relationship. Altogether I dont think I’ve ever enjoyed one month so much. What a faculty of enjoyment one has! I liked everything. I wish I were not so ignorant of Italian, art, literature & so on. However, I cannot now write this out, or go into the great mass of feeling which it composed in me. Nelly was found, at 11.30, when we got back, in bed, with some mysterious affection of the kidney. This was a jar; the coffee was a jar; everything was a jar. And then I remember how my book is coming out. People will say I am irreverent—people will say a thousand things. But I think, honestly, I care very little this time—even for the opinion of my friends. I am not sure if it is good. I was disappointed when I read it through the first time. Later I liked it. Anyhow it is the best I can do. But would it be a good thing to read my things when they are printed, critically? It is encouraging that, in spite of obscurity, affectation & so on, my sales rise steadily. We have sold, already, 1220 before publication, & I think it will be about 1500, which for a writer like I am is not bad. Yet, to show I am genuine, I find myself thinking of other things with absorption & forgetting that it will be out on Thursday. Leonard never thinks of his book. Vita comes back on Friday. I am angry with Clive for gossiping about my letter to Nessa. It is fine, cold, clear, we dine out, have a char.

Thursday 5 May

Book out. We have sold (I think) 1690 before publication—twice Dalloway. I write however in the shadow of the damp cloud of the Times Lit Sup. review, which is an exact copy of the JsR. Mrs Dalloway review, gentlemanly, kindly, timid & praising beauty, doubting character, & leaving me moderately depressed. I am anxious about Time Passes. Think the whole thing may be pronounced soft, shallow, insipid, sentimental. Yet, honestly, don’t much care; want to be let alone to ruminate. Odd how strong this feeling is in me. Now I think we are safe to get our motor car. The next fortnight we shall both be depressed about our books.

Dined with the Wests last night, all solid, shiny, spread & spacious; as if they were settling in; wedding presents; clean covers, carpets, &c. all too handsome for my taste. I’m reverting to squalor as my milieu. And then why did she marry him? He is the type of any other cleyerish young journalist, common, glib: uneasy last night, lest we should talk of Angus. But we talked of Madge.

I know why I am depressed: a bad habit of making up the review I should like before reading the review I get. I am excited about my article on Poetry & Fiction. Writing for an audience always stirs me. I hope to avoid too many jokes. Then Vita will come tomorrow. But I dont want people: I want solitude; Rome.

Nelly away; Pinker [dog] away; Clive coming back; Opera in swing; Francis to see me about writing; fine spring weather.

Wednesday 11 May

Vita back; unchanged, though I daresay one’s relation changes from day to day. Clive & she together. I think Clive is pretty miserable: his stay at Cassis a failure, so far as writing goes. And then the question rises, has he not gone too far in eating, drinking, love making, to stop dead now? He seemed random & unsettled, much as when he left, only now with no absolute hard arm to cling to, as he fancied when he went to Cassis. He talked (always shifting away from himself yet returning, ambiguously to that centre) about going mad: sometimes thought he was going mad; then how one’s life was over; one was spent, played out; this was clear when one saw Julian & Quentin. After all, its an ignominious position to have made the grand refusal, & gone back on it. Mary was at the opera, on a hot evening like this think of listening to Wagner, he said. There’s Saxon upstairs, Mary & Sibyl Colefax below. This was all said half enviously, yet doubtfully; as if not knowing what line to take.

My book. What is the use of saying one is indifferent to reviews when positive praise, though mingled with blame, gives one such a start on, that instead of feeling dried up, one feels, on the contrary, flooded with ideas? I gather from vague hints, through Margery Joad, through Clive, that some people say it is my best book. So far Vita praises; Dotty enthuses; an unknown donkey writes. No one has yet read it to the end, I daresay; & I shall hover about, not anxious but worried for 2 more weeks, when it will be over.

Monday 16 May

The book. Now on its feet so far as praise is concerned. It has been out 10 days—Thursday a week ago. Nessa enthusiastic—a sublime, almost upsetting spectacle. She says it is an amazing portrait of mother; a supreme portrait painter; has lived in it; found the rising of the dead almost painful. Then Ottoline, then Vita, then Charlie [Sanger], then Lord Olivier, then Tommie, then Clive: poor Clive—he came in, ostensibly to praise this ‘amazing book—far the best you’ve ever written’ but found Eddie who imposed himself resolutely, sharply; & so sat on, but how wandering & unhappy. I have scarcely seen him in this mood ever before—like a person awaked from a sweet dream. But what is it? A disillusionment? A shock? He sees Mary. Has he lost faith? Has the dancing mist of rhapsody failed him—he who was based so solidly on such beef & beer or champagne rather. Suppose one woke & found oneself a fraud? It was part of my madness—that horror. But then as Clive said, you go mad but you bound up again—the inference being that he was to stay mad.

This it did on July 13th Sold 1802 of The L.: if it makes 3,000 I shall be as they say more than content. Mervyn [Arnold-Forster] dead—did I record; & I haunted for a time by the sight of his prim pinched face, with the nice blue eyes, so suddenly stilled: so unseasonably. The eye plays a large part in these affairs.

Monday 6 June (Whit Monday)

I have been in bed a week with a sudden & very sharp headache, & this is written experimentally to test my brain. It is a horrid dull damp Bank holiday morning—(here L. comes in & we spend fifteen minutes discussing advertisements. The L. has sold 2,200 & we are reprinting). Nessa says its ugly weather when I ring up to offer her half a bottle of turpentine to paint her cupboard with.

But I would like to learn to write a steady plain narrative style. Then perhaps I could catch up with the last few weeks; describe my visit to Oxford; & how I lunched with Clive & dined with Dadie & stood in the basement printing Gottstalk with a great sense of shade & shelter. I like the obscure anonymity of the Press better a good deal than I like Voltaire by Riding. And now, with Morgan’s morganatic, evasive, elusive letter this morning, The Lighthouse is behind me: my headache over; & after a week at Rodmell, my freedom from inspection, my deep dive into my own mind will begin.

How odd, it comes into my mind, is Nessa & my jealousy of each other’s clothes! I feel her, when I put on my smart black fringed cape, anguished for a second: did I get it from Champco? in the same way I run my eye over her Paris dress, & compare it with my last year’s Brooke. Then she says she is going to wear earrings: I say at once that I will; this she resents. Yet, we are both fundamentally sensible, & soon recover from our umbrage.

I think, however, I am now almost an established figure—as a writer. They dont laugh at me any longer. Soon they will take me for granted. Possibly I shall be a celebrated writer. Anyhow, The Lighthouse is much more nearly a success, in the usual sense of the word, than any other book of mine.

A great knot of people came together suddenly last week, or the week before. Tom—so glad to gossip with me off handedly over a cup—no 6 cups—of tea; then he played the gramophone: & Logan, pink & spruce, doing his trick of culture & urbanity & good sense very efficiently. He had been evoking the spirit of Henry James with Desmond in Paris. (Sibyl, by the way, takes to herself all credit for that fund, I observe. Sibyl, Clive & Raymond say, has sold her soul to the devil, & he’s now come to fetch it—This phrase is common to them both, & gives the measure of smart talk at lunch parties.) Lytton, too, I saw: an invalid after an attack of love, the most desperate since Duncan. We talked, with poor marble eyed Cynthia Noble attentive, as far as she can be, about the O’B. & his life. I often glide into intimacy with Lytton about books. He is enthusiastic, his mind bare, his attention extremely alive, about books; whereas, about love, its more cryptic. Dadie & Douglas were both starched & powdered like pasteboard young men at the ballet; legs quite straight; heads curled; shirts granulated; they were going on to Kitchin’s party, to be bored, as they knew; but in perfect trim for it. This Lytton does not quite achieve. We dined ostentatiously rather, it being part of the game to order food from Fortnum & Mason’s; part of the pathetic, rather attractive, yet also foolish, showing off, very youthful game of being precisely like other people.

Saturday 18 June

This is a terribly thin diary for some reason: half the year has been spent, & left only these few sheets. Perhaps I have been writing too hard in the morning to write here also. Three weeks wiped out by headache. We had a week at Rodmell, of which I remember various sights, suddenly unfolding before me spontaneously (for example, the village standing out to sea in the June night, houses seeming ships, the marsh a fiery foam) & the immense comfort of lying there lapped in peace. I lay out all day in the new garden, with the terrace. It is already being made. There were blue tits nested in the hollow neck of my Venus. Vita came over one very hot afternoon, & we walked to the river with her. Pinker now swims after Leonard’s stick. I read—any trash. Maurice Baring; sporting memoirs. Slowly ideas began trickling in; & then suddenly I rhapsodised (the night L. dined with the apostles) & told over the story of the Moths, which I think I will write very quickly, perhaps in between chapters of that long impending book on fiction. Now the moths will I think fill out the skeleton which I dashed in here: the play-poem idea: the idea of some continuous stream, not solely of human thought, but The Waves of the ship, the night &c, all flowing together: intersected by the arrival of the bright moths. A man & a woman are to be sitting at table talking. Or shall they remain silent? It is to be a love story: she is finally to let the last great moth in. The contrasts might be something of this sort: she might talk, or think, about the age of the earth: the death of humanity: then moths keep on coming. Perhaps the man could be left absolutely dim. France: near the sea; at night; a garden under the window. But it needs ripening. I do a little work on it in the evening when the gramophone is playing late Beethoven sonatas. (The windows fidget at their fastenings as if we were at sea.)

We have been to Hyde Park, where the Church boys were marching; officers on horses in their cloaks like equestrian statues. Always this kind of scene gives me the notion of human beings playing a game, greatly, I suppose, to their own satisfaction.

We saw Vita given the Hawthornden. A horrid show up, I thought: not of the gentry on the platform—Squire, Drinkwater, Binyon only—of us all: all of us chattering writers. My word! how insignificant we all looked! How can we pretend that we are interesting, that our works matter? The whole business of writing became infinitely distasteful. There was no one I could care whether he read, liked, or disliked “my writing”. And no one could care for my criticism either: the mildness, the conventionality of them all struck me. But there may be a stream of ink in them that matters more than the look of them—so tightly clothed, mild, & decorous—showed. I felt there was no one full grown mind among us. In truth, it was the thick dull middle class of letters that met; not the aristocracy. Vita cried at night.

Wednesday 22 June

Woman haters depress me, & both Tolstoi & Mrs Asquith hate women. I suppose my depression is a form of vanity. But then so are all strong opinions on both sides. I hate Mrs A.’s hard, dogmatic empty style. But enough: I shall write about her tomorrow: I write every day about something, & have deliberately set apart a few weeks to money making, so that I may put £50 in each of our pockets by September. This will be the first money of my own since I married. I never felt the need of it till lately. And I can get it, if I want it, but shirk writing for money.

Clive’s father died yesterday. Harold Nicolson & Duncan dined with us, & Nessa came in afterwards, very silent, inscrutable &, perhaps critical. As a family we distrust anyone outside our set, I think. We too definitely decide that so & so has not the necessary virtues. I daresay Harold has not got them; at the same time, there is a good deal in him I like: he is quick & rash & impulsive; not in our sense, very clever; uneasy; seeming young; on the turn from diplomat to intellectual; not Vita’s match; but honest & cordial. L. says he’s too commonplace. I liked my little duet with him. He wears a green, or blue, shirt & tie; is sunburnt; chubby, pert⁠[?]; vivacious. Talked of politics, but was flimsy compared with Leonard—I thought. Said it was with L. & me that he felt completely at his ease. Told stories wh. sound rather empty in the bare Bloomsbury rooms.

Thursday 23 June

This diary shall batten on the leanness of my social life. Never have I spent so quiet a London summer. It is perfectly easy to slip out of the crush unobserved. I have set up my standard as an invalid, & no one bothers me. No one asks me to do anything. Vainly, I have the feeling that this is of my choice, not theirs; & there is a luxury in being quiet in the heart of chaos. Directly I talk & exert my wits in talk I get a dull damp rather headachy day. Quiet brings me cool clear quick mornings, in which I dispose of a good deal of work, & toss my brain into the air when I take a walk. I shall feel some triumph if I skirt a headache this summer.

I sat with Nessa in the Square yesterday. Angelica sends Pinker after a ball. Nessa & I sit on the seat & gossip. She is to see Mary; she is to go to old Bell’s funeral. She is learning to motor. She has sold a picture. The point of Clive’s affair is that Mary is in love with another. This point was carefully hidden before Easter. His vanity was careful to hide it: her discretion. So I got my version out of proportion. The truth is odd enough though. Unless she will bed with him he is distracted. That she will not do; yet, for lack of him, is distracted herself. The love affair rather increases on her side. It is said to be for someone low in the world. This inclines us to think it Lord Ivor. But the point is one for curiosity only.

Vita’s book [The Land] verberates & reverberates in the Press. A prize poem—that’s my fling at it—for with some relics of jealousy, or it may be of critical sense, I can’t quite take the talk of poetry & even great poetry seriously. But the subject & the manner, so smooth, so mild, may be what I dislike; & perhaps I am corrupt. I wonder what I should think if I could get a cool look at some writing of my own.

Oh & Sibyl has dropped me: & I don’t feel the fall.

What is then the abiding truth in this phantasmagoria, I ask myself, seeking as I often do some little nugget of pure gold. I think, often, I have the happiest of lives, in having discovered stability. Now one stable moment vanquishes chaos. But this I said in The Lighthouse. We have now sold, I think, 2555 copies.

I am distressed by my failure to make cigarettes. I had a lesson from a man in Francis Street—cant do a thing with my fingers. Angelica is expert with hers already. Nessa says all painters are: this is a perquisite they get thrown in with their gift.

And Adrian came to tea on Sunday, & fairly sparkled. At last I think he has emerged. Even his analysis will be over this year. At the age of 43 he will be educated & ready to start life. I remember Harry Stephen saying that he had his fingers on the gear—the Indian judgeship that is to say—about then. So we Stephens mature late. And our late flowers are rare & splendid. Think of my books, Nessa’s pictures—it takes us an age to bring our faculties into play. And now I must write to Ethel Sands, & perhaps, go to the Ballet.

Thursday 30 June

Now I must sketch out the Eclipse.

About 10 on Tuesday night several very long trains, accurately filled (ours with civil servants) left King’s Cross. In our carriage was Vita & Harold⁠[,] Quentin, L. & I. This is Hatfield I daresay, I said. I was smoking a cigar. Then again, This is Peterborough, L. said. Before it got dark we kept looking at the sky: soft fleecy; but there was one star, over Alexandra Park. Look Vita, that’s Alexandra Park, said Harold. The Nicolsons got sleepy: H. curled up with his head on V.’s knee. She looked like Sappho by Leighton, asleep; so we plunged through the midlands; made a very long stay at York. Then at 3 we got out our sandwiches, & I came in from the wc to find Harold being rubbed clean of cream. Then he broke the china sandwich box. Here L. laughed without restraint. Then we had another doze, or the N.’s did; then here was a level crossing, at which were drawn up a long line of motor omnibuses & motors, all burning pale yellow lights. It was getting grey—still a fleecy mottled sky. We got to Richmond about 3.30: it was cold, & the N.’s had a quarrel, Eddie said, about V.’s luggage. We went off in the omnibus, saw a vast castle (who does that belong to said Vita, who is interested in Castles). It had a front window added, & a light I think burning. All the fields were aburn with June grasses & red tasselled plants, none coloured as yet, all pale. Pale & grey too were the little uncompromising Yorkshire farms. As we passed one, the farmer, & his wife & sister came out, all tightly & tidily dressed in black, as if they were going to church. At another ugly square farm, two women were looking out of the upper windows. These had white blinds drawn down half across them. We were a train of 3 vast cars, one stopping to let the others go on; all very low & powerful; taking immensely steep hills. The driver once got out & put a small stone behind our wheel—inadequate. An accident would have been natural. There were also many motor cars. These suddenly increased as we crept up to the top of Bardon Fell. Here were people camping beside their cars. We got out, & found ourselves very high, on a moor, boggy, heathery, with butts for grouse shooting. There were grass tracks here & there, & people had already taken up positions. So we joined them, walking out to what seemed the highest point looking over Richmond. One light burnt down there. Vales & moors stretched, slope after slope, round us. It was like the Haworth country. But over Richmond, where the sun was rising, was a soft grey cloud. We could see by a gold spot where the sun was. But it was early yet. We had to wait, stamping to keep warm. Ray [Strachey] had wrapped herself in the blue striped blanket off a double bed. She looked incredibly vast & bedroomish. Saxon looked very old. Leonard kept looking at his watch. Four great red setters came leaping over the moor. There were sheep feeding behind us. Vita had tried to buy a guinea pig—Quentin advised a savage—so she observed the animals from time to time. There were thin places in the cloud, & some complete holes. The question was whether the sun would show through a cloud or through one of these hollow places when the time came. We began to get anxious. We saw rays coming through the bottom of the clouds. Then, for a moment we saw the sun, sweeping—it seemed to be sailing at a great pace & clear in a gap; we had out our smoked glasses; we saw it crescent, burning red; next moment it had sailed fast into the cloud again; only the red streamers came from it; then only a golden haze, such as one has often seen. The moments were passing. We thought we were cheated; we looked at the sheep; they showed no fear; the setters were racing round; everyone was standing in long lines, rather dignified, looking out. I thought how we were like very old people, in the birth of the world—druids on Stonehenge: (this idea came more vividly in the first pale light though;) At the back of us were great blue spaces in the cloud. These were still blue. But now the colour was going out. The clouds were turning pale; a reddish black colour. Down in the valley it was an extraordinary scrumble of red & black; there was the one light burning; all was cloud down there, & very beautiful, so delicately tinted. Nothing could be seen through the cloud. The 24 seconds were passing. Then one looked back again at the blue: & rapidly, very very quickly, all the colours faded; it became darker & darker as at the beginning of a violent storm; the light sank & sank: we kept saying this is the shadow; & we thought now it is over—this is the shadow when suddenly the light went out. We had fallen. It was extinct. There was no colour. The earth was dead. That was the astonishing moment: & the next when as if a ball had rebounded, the cloud took colour on itself again, only a sparky aetherial colour & so the light came back. I had very strongly the feeling as the light went out of some vast obeisance; something The colour for some moments was of the most lovely kind—fresh, various—here blue & there brown: all new colours, as if washed over & repainted. kneeling down, & low & suddenly raised up, when the colours came, They came back astonishingly lightly & quickly & beautifully in the valley & over the hills—at first with a miraculous glittering & aetheriality, later normally almost, but with a great sense of relief. It was like recovery. We had been much worse than we had expected. We had seen the world dead. This was within the power of nature. Our greatness had been apparent too. Now we became Ray in a blanket, Saxon in a cap &c. We were bitterly cold. I should say that the cold had increased as the light went down. One felt very livid. Then—it was over till 1999. What remained was a sense of the comfort which we get used to, of plenty of light & colour. This for some time seemed a definitely welcome thing. Yet when it became established all over the country, one rather missed the sense of its being a relief & a respite, which one had had when it came back after the darkness. How can I express the darkness? It was a sudden plunge, when one did not expect it: being at the mercy of the sky: our own nobility: the druids; Stonehenge; & the racing red dogs; all that was in ones mind. Also, to be picked out of ones London drawing room & set down on the wildest moors in England was impressive. For the rest, I remember trying to keep awake in the gardens at York while Eddy talked & falling asleep. Asleep again in the train. It was hot & we were merry. The carriage was full of things. Harold was very kind & attentive: Eddy was peevish. Roast beef & pineapple chunks, he said. We got home at 8.30 perhaps.

Monday 4 July

Back from Long Barn. Thank heaven, I never had to change my dress. Such opulence & freedom, flowers all out, butler, silver, dogs, biscuits, wine, hot water, log fires, Italian cabinets, Persian rugs, books—this was the impression it made: as of stepping into a rolling gay sea, with nicely crested waves: as if the anxious worn life had suddenly been set on springs, & went bounding, springing for the week end. Yet I like this room better perhaps: more effort & life in it, to my mind, unless this is the prejudice one has naturally in favour of the display of one’s own character. Vita very opulent, in her brown velvet coat with the baggy pockets, pearl necklace, & slightly furred cheeks. (They are like saviours flannel, of which she picked me a great bunch, in texture) Of its kind this is the best, most representative human life I know: I mean, certain gifts & qualities & good fortunes are here miraculously combined—I liked Harold too. He is a spontaneous childlike man, of no great boring power; has a mind that bounces when he drops it; he opens his eyes as he looks at one; has a little immature moustache; curled hair; an air of immaturity which is welcome. I should judge him very generous & kind hearted; an Englishman overlaid with culture; coming of a sunburnt country stock; & not much fined even by diplomacy. After dinner last night we discussed the Empire. “I prefer Sydney to Paris. Australia is more important than France. After all, its our younger sons out there. I feel proud of it. The point is, Raymond, our English genius is for government.” “The governed don’t seem to enjoy it” said Raymond. Silly ass, said Harold. “We do our job: disinterestedly; we dont think of ourselves, as the French do, as the Germans do. Take the British oil fields. There’s a hospital there where they take any one, employee or not. The natives come from all over the place. Don’t tell me thats not a good thing. And they trust us.” So on to the system of bribery; to the great age of England being the age of colonial expansion. “I grant Shakespeare’s a nasty snag.” “But why not grow, change?” I said. Also, I said, recalling the aeroplanes that had flown over us, while the portable wireless played dance music on the terrace, “can’t you see that nationality is over? All divisions are now rubbed out, or about to be.” Raymond vehemently assented. Raymond is all for the triumph of mind. What action matters? Actions matter most of all, said Harold. I was sitting on a carved Italian stool over the log fire; he & Raymond bedded in the soft green sofa. Leonard’s injustice to the aristocracy was discussed. Before this, Lord Sackville & Mrs Rubens had come over, partly to protect their respectability, partly to play tennis. (They won’t stay at Knole alone if possible; & if they must, sanctify the proceeding by calling on Vita). He is a smooth worn man, inheriting noble nose & chin which he has not put much into himself; a straight, young looking man, save that his face has the lack lustre of a weak man whose life has proved too much for him. No longer does he struggle much for happiness, I imagine; accepts resignedly; & goes to Maidstone almost daily, as part of the routine of his nobility. He plays golf; he plays tennis. He thinks Bernard Darwin must be a man of surpassing brain power. We sat together under a vast goat skin coat of Vita’s, watching them play? & I found him smooth & ambling as a blood horse, but obliterated, obfusc, with his great Sackville eyes drooping, & his face all clouded with red & brown. One figured a screw or other tool whose worms & edges have been rubbed smooth, so that though they shine, plaid silver, they no longer grip.

Vita very free & easy, always giving me great pleasure to watch, & recalling some image of a ship breasting a sea, nobly, magnificently, with all sails spread, & the gold sunlight on them. As for her poetry, or intelligence, save when canalised in the traditional channels, I can say nothing very certain. She never breaks fresh ground. She picks up what the tide rolls to her feet. For example, she follows, with simple instinct, all the inherited tradition of furnishing, so that her house is gracious, glowing, stately, but without novelty or adventure. So with her poetry, I daresay. Raymond & I travelled up & discussed them. She the most noble character he said; both almost defiantly fortunate, so that Harold touches wood when he reflects on his own life, heaves a sigh & says how, if it were dashed down tomorrow, he would have had his day. But it wont be dashed down at all. It will grow freely & fully round them both; their fruit will ripen, & their leaves golden; & the night will be indigo blue, with a soft gold moon. They lack only what we have—some cutting edge; some invaluable idiosyncracy, intensity, for which I would not have all the sons & all the moons in the world.

Monday 11 July

Waiting for what I do not exactly know. In a mood of random restlessness—Nelly having for 125th time ‘given notice’ this morning. Shall I go to Ashley Gardens [Registry Office] & engage Mrs Collins & her daughter? I am sick of the timid spiteful servant mind; yet perhaps Mrs Collins will be of the same feather. Never mind.

A great storm has torn off one wing of my double windows. But I have never mentioned the absorbing subject—the subject which has filled our thoughts to the exclusion of Clive & Mary & literature & death & life—motor cars. Every evening we go round with Pinker for a game in Gordon Sqre—I talk as if the evenings had been fine—no, we sit there in between the sulphur coloured storms; under the shelter of trees with the rain pattering between the leaves. We talk of nothing but cars. Then, sometimes, word is brought that Mrs Bell is at the door in her car. I rush out, & find her, rather nervously in control of a roomy shabby Renault with Fred beside her. Three times I have been for a little tour with her. And yesterday we commissioned Fred to find us & bring instantly to our door, a Singer. We have decided on a Singer. And, the reason why I am distracted now is that Fred is going to ring me up & say if I am to have my first lesson this evening. The sun is shining; the trees dripping. Possibly I may go.

This is a great opening up in our lives. One may go to Bodiam, to Arundel, explore the Chichester downs, expand that curious thing, the map of the world in ones mind. It will I think demolish loneliness, & may of course imperil complete privacy. The Keynes’ have one too—a cheap one. Nessa thinks it will break down at once. Nessa takes a very sinister view of the Keynes’. She anticipates ruin of every sort for them, with some pleasure too. Here’s Leonard—So then I tell him about the storm, about the telephones, & about Pinker. Then Sibyl who has cut me these 3 months, suddenly writes to say she has been ‘unwell’, & will I come to tea. No I wont. And now I must quickly dress for Clive’s party, where I am to meet Cory & Nessa & Duncan & Christabel: for there’s a plethora of parties this week, & tomorrow I’m missing Lydia & Stravinsky; but a kind of philosophy protects me: I shall make out a happy evening somehow; & find a curious pleasure in staying away, imagining. So I must stop & write to Sibyl. With any luck The Lighthouse will reach 3,000 this week.

Saturday 23 July

This is very near the end of the London season. I go to Ethel [Sand]’s at Dieppe (I’m rather proud of crossing the channel again) on Wednesday, then back to Newhaven, where I may be met by my own car. Since making the last entry I have learnt enough to drive a car in the country alone. On the backs of paper I write down instructions for starting cars. We have a nice light little shut up car in which we can travel thousands of miles. It is very dark blue, with a paler line round it. The world gave me this for writing The Lighthouse, I reflect, a book which has now sold 3,160 (perhaps) copies: will sell 3,500 before it dies, & thus far exceeds any other of mine.

The night I did not go to Stravinsky Desmond came, tender & garrulous & confidential. I remember leaning with him out of the window. He was full of love for everyone. He said he loved the way Melinda [unidentified] scratched her head or put on her gloves. He said he was now in love with his children. When Derraod asks him for a new perspective for his microscope he feels what he used to feel when he was in love with a woman. He resents his gift of money a little, since he was making £2,000 a year; but then he had ‘arrears’; & has now, evidently—£200 to the Bank, £200 for income tax & so on. We talked of love owing to Clive. For that night after I dined with Clive & went through some rather artificial gambols with Christa⁠[bel McLaren] (who has always thought of me as Virginia; & can’t quite lose the sense of my being a perfect lady “Look at those hands”) Clive walked me round, & standing under the lamp expressed his complete disillusion. “My dear Virginia, life is over. There’s no good denying it. We’re 45. I’m bored, I’m bored, I’m unspeakably bored. I know my own reactions. I know what I’m going to say. I’m not interested in a thing. Pictures bore me. I take up a book & put it down. No one’s interested in what I think any more. I go about thinking about suicide. I admire you for having tried to kill yourself.” To think that I should be listening to this in the moonlight from Clive! And he spoke with such dreary good sense too. I could scarcely whip up any ardour of denial. It was all true, it seemed to me. Not, indeed, true of me, but true of him. & so I feebly asked him to come & see me; & I would prove that I was interested in him. He agreed half heartedly, waved his hand, & went off, thinking about suicide. Then we met next night at Raymonds. Hardly had I come into the room but he started up boasting & professing, perfunctorily a little, but boldly enough. He had had an adventure. Life was changed; had met the loveliest of women, seemed the nicest too, was an aristocrat; she had been kind to him; would Raymond come on to supper on Monday? All this was blustered out, with many a cuff at me (for he always wishes he says to hurt me—even over a motor car) & it was about Valerie Taylor, an actress, whom he had met lunching at the Maclagans. For my own part, I am once more at the stage of thinking Clive ‘second rate’. It is all so silly, shallow, & selfish. Granted the charm of his vitality, still one would prefer a finer taste to it. How angry his ‘secondrateness’ used to make me, in connection with Nessa. Now I think of it much less often, but I suppose the feeling is there. All this summer he has twanged so persistently on the one string that one gets bored. Love love love—Clive, Clive, Clive—that’s the tune of it, thrummed with rather callous persistency; a thick finger & thumb. Now love I dare say nothing against; but it is a feeble passion, I mean a gross dull passion, when it has no part in it of imagination, intellect, poetry. Clive’s love is three parts vanity. Now that he can say, or lie, I’ve been to bed with Valerie, his self love is assuaged. He remains Clive the undaunted lover, the Don Juan of Bloomsbury; & whether its true or not, so long as we think it true, scarcely matters. But I own that he pesters me with his jealousy, or whatever it is, does his best to annoy me, & so I’m not quite the impartial judge I might be. The interesting question remains—why does he always wish to hurt me?

So Desmond & I discussed all this. And The Lighthouse too; & I felt, susceptible as I am, he’s doing this partly to thank me for having been generous to him. But I am enough mistress of myself now to let these feelings flow & not disturb my pleasure.

All images are now tinged with driving a motor. Here I think of letting my engine work, with my clutch out.

It has been, on the whole, a fresh well ordered summer. I am not so parched with talk as usual. I have dipped into society more easily. My illness in May was a good thing in some ways; for I got control of society at an early stage, & circumvented my headache, without a complete smash. Thus it has been a free quiet summer: I enjoyed the Eclipse; I enjoyed Long Barn; (where I went twice) I enjoyed sitting with Vita at Kew for 3 or 4 hours under a cloudy sky, & dining at the Petit Riche with her; she refreshes me, & solaces me; I have worked very methodically & done my due of articles, so that with luck, I shall have made £120 over my proper sum by September. That is I shall have made £320 by journalism, & I suppose at least £300 by my novel this year. I have thought too much, though on purpose, with my eyes open, of making money; & once we have each a nest egg I should like to let that sink into my sub-consciousness, & earn easily what we need. Bruce Richmond is coming to tea on Monday to discuss an article on Morgan; & I am going to convey to him the fact that I can’t always refuse £60 in America for the Times’ £10. If I could make easily £350 a year, I would: if I could get some settled job.

At Rodmell I am going, seriously, to begin my book on fiction. With luck I might have this done by January. Then I shall have the Moths full in my brain to pour out. I am keeping it standing a long time, & rather fear that it may lose its freshness. Dadie has involved us (is the word wrong?) with Peter. Dadie dines with Topsy & she pumps him about the Wolves & Peter’s book. Dadie wants to crab it & puts it on to us. Leonard says it doesn’t do; Virginia thinks it ‘Academic’. The result is a long angry letter from Peter, half vanity, half righteous indignation; but we have explained, & all the burden now rests on Dadie. (& partly on me, for Topsy says I wrote her a rude letter about Jane Austen, but this has been explained).

The Press is going on. Novels are the great bloodsuckers. Mary’s book will cost us £100; & we shall lose too on The Marionettes. So in the past two days I have rejected Butts & Daglish & Littell; I fancy that we don’t do as well as we should with novels. And I’m exposed to the hanging lips & clamorous vanity of Lucy Clifford today: she has an article on George Eliot which she wrote for a special fee (that is where I shall end if I dont take care—talking always of ‘fees’) for the Nineteenth Century. Gottstalk is finished.

Rodmell

Monday 8 August

I was to have written here such a brilliant account of my 3 days at Dieppe. It was to have sprung, suddenly, in a beautiful fountain, out of the table in the window at (name forgotten) overlooking the Seine. The Seine there is very broad, & round the bend come constantly steamers, Norwegian, with petrol, English French; & Nan kept looking to read their names, showing in all she did a sort of nervous tremulous pride in France (or do I imagine this?) which hints at the fact that she likes their life there, alone at Auppegard, better than Ethel. “I’m gregarious” said Ethel a little waspishly, for she is brittle & acid, the spoilt pet of the more dour & upstanding Nan. We were, I think, looking over the cliff with the churchyard on it, the tombstones standing up against the blue sea. But I was to have written this, & now shall not, I suppose.—It is a very narrow house, all window, laid with pale bright Samarcand rugs, & painted greens & blues, with lovely ‘pieces’, & great pots of carefully designed flowers arranged by Loomas. A white bull terrier stalks from room to room, one ear bent over in his fights. Nan, stylishly dressed, sews dusters of an evening, & Ethel craves talk. Nessa & Duncan say that the talk skirts & flits & never settles very long; in fact that the house is built upon the finest silver wood ash: so soft so silver you don’t at first notice how it gets into your throat & makes your skin dry & dusty.

We have motored most days. We opened one little window when we bought the gramophone; now another/ opens with the motor—I was going to say, but stopped.

Wednesday 10 August

Yes, the motor is turning out the joy of our lives, an additional life, free & mobile & airy to live alongside our usual stationary industry. We spin off to Falmer, ride over the Downs, drop into Rottingdean, then sweep over to Seaford, call, in pouring rain at Charleston, pass the time of day with Clive—Nessa is at Bodiam—return for tea, all as light & easy as a hawk in the air. Soon we shall look back at our pre-motor days as we do now at our days in the caves. After a week here, Leonard has become perfectly efficient; I am held back by insufficient lessons, but shall be expert before September is half through. Various little improvements in the house keep me on the thrill with hope & despair. Shall I lavish £5 that will be mine on a new spare bed?—alas, I fear I must; then the great & distasteful operations of furnishing will be over, & next year I shall add ornament & comfort. Perhaps if I make an extra sum we might build a bed sitting room for me in the attic, enlarge L.’s study, & so have a desirable, roomy, light house. For if we had £300 every year to spend, it is difficult to think of anything, except this, travel, & pocket money, to spend it on. Here at the age of 45 are Nessa & I growing little wings again after our lean years. She may rake in another £500; perhaps more. Already she has bought a roll of linoleum & a cupboard. But my state is precarious. With The Lighthouse I may just have climbed to the top of my hill; or again we may wobble back; my journalism may pall on the Americans: no rich father in law will endow me; but Heaven knows, have not much anxiety. We are flexible, adventurous still I hope.

An odd incident, psychologically as the vanished Kot used to say, has been Morgan’s serious concern about my article on him. Did I care a straw what he said about me? Was it more laudatory? Yet here is this self-possessed, aloof man taking every word to heart, cast down to the depths, apparently, because I do not give him superlative rank, & writing again & again to ask about it, or suggest about it, anxious that it shall be published in England, & also that more space shall be given to the Passage to India. Had I been asked, I should have said that of all writers he would be the most indifferent & cool under criticism. And he minds a dozen times more than I do, who have the opposite reputation.

This brings me back to those last days in London when I called on Ottoline, had a shabby easy intimate talk with her, & then, inadvertently as if by touching a button brought on me the whole shower bath of Philip’s affection. He came the next day, inconveniently, & the day after when Sibyl was there. Once more I felt the uneasy excitement of ‘love’, that is of physical desire making someone restless, too restless & emotional to talk simply. But L. came in; Pinker came in, & the amorous Philip, who has lost most of his good looks & is coarse as an old ram, had to leave. But I found a letter at Rodmell, quoting J.’s Room—‘Come back to me Darling’—with which I shall make Vita jealous tomorrow. But what course to take, especially now that he is our neighbour, I do not altogether know; nor whether to answer his letter or not.

This, however, is Nelly’s first evening back, in the flush of good temper, with Gladys [a niece?], & I am beginning to think of my dinner. Since I dined at Auppegard I cannot be said to have dined at all: ham & eggs; cheese & raspberries; once a baked pudding—so we have fed at the hands of poor emaciated Mrs Bartholomew.

Sunday 21 August

Some little scenes I meant to write down.

One was on the flats towards Ripe one blazing hot day. We stopped in a bye road about 3 in the afternoon, & heard hymn singing. It was very lonely & desolate. Here were people singing to themselves, in the hot afternoon. I looked & saw a middle class ‘lady’ in skirt & coat & ribboned hat, by the cottage door. She was making the daughters of the agricultural labourers sing; it was about three o’clock on a Tuesday perhaps. Later we passed the ladies house; it had a wooden griffin nailed above the door—presumably her crest.

What I like, or one of the things I like, about motoring is the sense it gives one of lighting accidentally, like a voyager who touches another planet with the tip of his toe, upon scenes which would have gone on, have always gone on, will go on, unrecorded, save for this chance glimpse. Then it seems to me I am allowed to see the heart of the world uncovered for a moment. It strikes me that the hymn singing in the flats went on precisely so in Cromwell’s time.

That was our only hot day, I think. One day the rain splashed down so fast that it rose again in a fountain, up off the road in our faces.

Sunday 4 September

Many scenes have come & gone unwritten, since it is today the 4th Sept, a cold grey blowy day, made memorable by the sight of a kingfisher, & by my sense, waking early, of being again visited by ‘the spirit of delight’. “Rarely rarely comest thou, spirit of delight.” That was I singing this time last year; & sang so poignantly that I have never forgotten it, or my vision of a fin rising on a wide blank sea. No biographer could possibly guess this important fact about my life in the late summer of 1926: yet biographers pretend they know people.

A happy summer, this? Well, a striving working splashing social summer. Many meetings; & one or two gaieties. I amuse myself by watching my mind shape scenes. We sat in a field strewn with cut grass at Michelham Priory the other day. It was roasting hot. There was Angus with his pink shirt open; Duncan strolling along with a sketchbook under his arm; the sound of rushing waters; Nessa driving her old blue bonnet with Angelica perched beside her. Nothing much is said on these occasions; but the memory remains: made of what? Of coloured shirts; the pink roof of the Gateway against a greyblue sky; & Pinker; & my being cross about my book on fiction; & Leonard silent; & a great quarrel that hot night; & I coming up here to sit alone in the dark, & L. following me; & sharp hard words; right & wrong on both sides; peace making; sleep; content.

A graveyard scene.

Mr Malthouse’s son, a sailor, died of consumption & was buried in the churchyard under the big tree. I went into the churchyard with Angelica that fine afternoon. Avery was digging the grave, throwing up heavy showers of the yellow earth. Mrs Avery, immensely fat & florid, was sprawling on the edge of the grave, with her small children playing about. They were having tea, & dressed in their reds & blue looked more like a picture, by Millais, or some other Victorian, of life & death, youth & the grave, than any real sight. It was quite unconscious; yet the most deliberate picture making; hence, unreal, sentimental, overdone.

The Flying Princess, I forget her name, has been drowned in her purple leather breeches. I suppose so at least. Their petrol gave out about midnight on Thursday, when the aeroplane must have come gently down upon the long slow Atlantic waves. I suppose they burnt a light which showed streaky on the water for a time. There they rested a moment or two. The pilots, I think, looked back at the broad cheeked desperate eyed vulgar princess in her purple breeches & I suppose made some desperate dry statement—how the game was up: sorry; fortune against them; & she just glared; & then a wave broke over the wing; & the machine tipped. And she said something theatrical I daresay; nobody was sincere; all acted a part; nobody shrieked; Luck against us—something of that kind, they said, & then So long, & first one man was washed off & went under; & then a great wave came & the Princess threw up her arms & went down; & the third man sat saved for a second looking at the rolling waves, so patient so implacable & the moon gravely regarding; & then with a dry snorting sound he too was tumbled off & rolled over, & the aeroplane rocked & rolled—miles from anywhere, off Newfoundland, while I slept at Rodmell, & Leonard was dining with the Craniums in London.

Monday 5 September

Having solidified the vision of the flying Princess into words, I have, strangely enough, laid a phantom which has been very prominent before my eyes. Why should this be so? Some dissatisfaction seems laid to rest. So, gradually, the urgency of the memory dies out too, as in one’s own life; in about 48 or 96 hours all trace of the death of the Princess in her purple breeches is smoothed over.

As a matter of fact, we are just in from Brighton, & my mind is agitated by having bought a jersey, which I like; & by having let Leonard bump the back of the car on the gate post. So, to soothe these whirlpools, I write here. We went to Brighton today; & thus added a pounds worth of pleasure to life. Monotony is avoided. Oh, & I thought—but the thought is already escaping—about the enormous activity of the human kind; his feverish runnings about; Brighton & the roads being nothing but a swarm & agitation of human flesh; & yet it is not despicable.

And when I get back here, the same energy is bringing the men back from harvest across the fields; & old Mr Grey, & the poor plodding horse [?]. Now a really comprehensive magnificent statesmanlike mind would take stock of all this human activity & direct it & weld it together. I see this possibility by fits & starts: I see human beings as at the beginning of a vast enterprise, not merely with the usual writers care for the aesthetic quality. This is a point of view which is more & more forced upon one by places like Peacehaven. All aesthetic quality is there destroyed. Only turning & tumbling energy is left. The mind is like a dog going round & round to make itself a bed. So, give me new & detestable ideas, I will somehow trample a bed out of them.

Tuesday 20 September

A thousand things to be written had I time: had I power. A very little writing uses up my capacity for writing:

Laughton Place & Philip Ritchie’s death

These as it happened, synchronised. When Vita was here 10 days ago we drove over to Laughton, & I broke in, & explored the house. It seemed, that sunny morning, so beautiful, so peaceful; & as if it had endless old rooms. So I came home boiling with the idea of buying it; & so fired L. that we wrote to the farmer, Mr Russell, & waited, all on wires, edgy, excited for an answer. He came himself, after some days; & we were to go & see it. This arranged, & our hopes very high, I opened the Morning Post & read the death of Philip Ritchie. “He cant take houses, poor Philip” I thought. And then the usual procession of images went through my mind. Also, I think for the first time, I felt this death leaves me an elderly laggard; makes me feel I have no right to go on; as if my life were at the expense of his. And I had not been kind; not asked him to dinner & so on. So the two feelings—about buying the house & his death—fought each other: & sometimes the house won & sometimes death won; & we went to see the house & it turned out unspeakably dreary; all patched & spoilt; with grained oak & grey paper; a sodden garden & a glaring red cottage at the back. I note the strength & vividness of feelings which suddenly break & foam away. Now I forget to think about Philip Ritchie.

One of these days, though, I shall sketch here, like a grand historical picture, the outlines of all my friends. I was thinking of this in bed last night, & for some reason I thought I would begin with a sketch of Gerald Brenan. There may be something in this idea. It might be a way of writing the memoirs of one’s own times during peoples lifetimes. It might be a most amusing book. The question is how to do it. Vita should be Orlando, a young nobleman. There should be Lytton. & it should be truthful; but fantastic. Roger. Duncan. Clive. Adrian. Their lives should be related. But I can think of more books than I shall ever be able to write. How many little stories come into my head! For instance: Ethel Sands not looking at her letters. What this implies. One might write a book of short significant separate scenes. She did not open her letters.

We motored to Long Barn & back yesterday, through suburbs for the most part. All Hampstead, red, sanitary, earnest, view gazing, breeze requiring is lodged in the heights of Ashdown Forest. Now & again one comes on something consciously preserved like the Wren house at Groombridge. One stops the motor & looks. So do other motorists. We found Vita & Dotty sitting over a log fire. Dottie is going to spend £200 a year on poetry: to edit a series of books of unsaleable poetry. This £200 she was giving to the Poetry Bookshop, but deterred by his earnestness & his drunkenness she is crying off: & has laid it at our feet. There will be much comment she says at this. People will say she is buying her way into Bloomsbury. The children were there; Nigel very shabby: Vita dressed him as a Russian boy “Dont. It makes me look like a little girl” he said. There was the French tutor who never spoke. Dotty byronic in her dress, but much improved over the London Dotty. They do not yet know what is to become of Harold, who has refused to go to Buda Pesth.

And Quentin came, & the Keynes’s came, & Morgan came. All of this I meant, perhaps, to describe: but then how hard I drive my pen through one article after another—Hemingway, Morgan, Shelley; & now Biography.

Quentin wont let us play him Wagner: prefers Bach. Nessa’s children are terrifyingly sophisticated: so Morgan said when Angelica, rigged up in a long black shawl, acted Lady Cornflax & Lady Ottoline at Charleston. They have grown up without any opposition: nothing to twist or stunt. Hence they have reached stages at 16 or 17 which I reached only at 26 or 27.

But the summer, has never burnt; & is now ashes. Already at half past five the light out here is greyish; the wind swirling; all children indoors; & I shall write a letter or two & go into the house: sit over a fire & read, I think, biography.

But we are very happy—seldom more so, I think. Perhaps things are doing rather well. Theres the motor; Dottie’s £200;—& L. said about Laughton Place the other day, “The strange thing is that we always come to the same opinion about things”—which pleased me.

Sunday 25 September

On the opposite page I wrote notes for Shelley, I think by mistake for my writing book.

Now let me become the annalist of Rodmell.

Thirty five years ago, there were 160 families living here where there are now no more than 80. It is a decaying village, which loses its boys to the towns. Not a boy of them, said the Rev. Mr Hawkesford, is being taught to plough. Rich people wanting week end cottages buy up the old peasants houses, for fabulous sums. Monks House was offered to Mr H. for £400: we gave £700. He refused it, saying he didn’t wish to own country cottages. Now Mr Allinson will pay £1200 for a couple, & we he said might get £2,000 for this.

He is an old decaying man, run to seed. His cynicism, & the pleasant turn it gives his simple worn out sayings, amuses me. He is sinking into old age, very shabby, loose limbed, wearing black wool mittens. His life is receding like a tide, slowly; or one figures him as a dying candle, whose wick will soon sink into the warm grease & be extinct. To look at, he is like some aged bird; a little, small featured face, with heavily lidded smoky bright eyes; his complexion is still ruddy; but his beard is like an unweeded garden. Little hairs grow weakly all over his cheeks, & two strands are drawn, like pencil marks, across his bald head. He tumbles into an armchair; & tells over his stock of old village stories, which always have this slightly mocking flavour, as though, completely unambitious, & by no means successful himself, he recouped himself by laughing slyly at the humours of the more energetic. He has a hit at Allinson for building; drily tells us how Capt Stamper won’t pay his tithes; how Miss Lucas signs the Captain’s cheques for him. The outlay these flashy newcomers make on their field & farms makes him sardonic. But he wont raise a finger either way; likes his cup of Indian tea, which he prefers to China, & doesn’t much mind what anybody thinks. He smokes endless cigarettes, & his fingers are not very clean. Talking of his well, he said “It would be a different thing if one wanted baths”—which for some 70 years, presumably, he has done without. Then he likes a little practical talk about Aladdin lamps, for instance, & how the Rector at Iford has a device by which he makes the globe of the Veritas lamp wh. is cheaper serve. It appears that the Aladdin costs 10d & 2/-. But it blackens suddenly & is useless. Leaning over stiles, it is of lamp mantles that the two rectors talk. Or he will advise about making a garage: how Percy shd. cut a trench, & then old Fears should line the walls with cement. That is what he advises; & I fancy many many hours of his life have passed hobnobbing with Percys & Fears, about cement & trenches. Of his clerical character there is little visible. He would not buy Bowen a riding school he said; her sister did that. He didn’t believe in it. She has a school at Rottingdean, keeps 12 horses, employs grooms, & has to be at it all day, Sundays included. But having expressed his opinion in the family conclave, he would leave it at that. Mrs H. would back Bowen. She would get her way. The Rector would slouch off to his study, where he does, heaven knows what. I asked him if he had work to do: a question which amused him a little. Not work he said; but a young woman to see. And then he settled into the armchair again, & so sat out a visit of over an hour & a half.

Wednesday 5 October

I write in the sordid doss house atmosphere of approaching departure. Pinker is asleep in one chair; Leonard is signing cheques at the little deal table under the glare of the lamp. The fire is covered with ashes, since we have been burning it all day, & Mrs B⁠[artholomew]. never cleans. Envelopes lie in the grate. I am writing with a pen which is feeble & wispy; & it is a sharp fine evening with a sunset, I daresay.

We went to Amberley yesterday & think of buying a house there. For it is an astonishing forgotten lovely place, between water meadows & downs. So impulsive we both are, in spite of our years.

But we are not as old as Mrs Gray, who came to thank us for our apples. 1832
   86
1918 She won’t send to buy, as it looks like begging, since we never take money. Her face is cut into by wrinkles: they make wheals across her. She is 86, & can never remember such a summer. In her youth it was so hot in April often that they couldn’t bear a sheet on them. Her youth must have been almost the same time as my fathers. She is 9 years younger, I make out: born in 1841. And what did she see of Victorian England I wonder?

I can make up situations, but I cannot make up plots. That is: if I pass the lame girl, I can without knowing I do it, instantly make up a scene: (now I cant think of one). This is the germ of such fictitious gift as I have. And by the way I get letter after letter about my books, & they scarcely please me.

Further, we met Mary & Barbara [Hutchinson] in Brighton yesterday; grey, tailor made, elegant, with a touch of pink, & pink silk legs. Yet I fancied some wrinkles about Mary’s eyes; & a sharp line or two, made by Clive. We were affable, as people are when they meet after a coolness; we gave them buns. We were extra affable, perhaps; & the shadow of Clive loomed above us. Going to fetch L.’s hat from Charleston I chanced on one of those evening autumn emotional hours when people want to be intimate, perhaps to boast. And he told me an absurd romantic story—of a girl, lovely, desired, half his age; & how she loved him, & he could not believe it; she must think me a cultivated elderly man, he said; & so “I try I try to control myself” but, wondrously, they went off the other day; had 4 days perfect bliss; & now “the drama begins”. That is, it began two days ago, on Monday. Nobody has the least idea who she is. And is it lasting, or genuine, or only a set off against Mary? & will it survive Mary’s attacks, & shall we be dragged in, & so on & so on? Those are the thoughts which agitate us this October, which is the birth of the year.

If my pen allowed, I should now try to make out a work table, having done my last article for the Tribune, & now being free again. And instantly the usual exciting devices enter my mind: a biography beginning in the year 1500 & continuing to the present day, called Orlando: Vita; only with a change about from one sex to another. I think, for a treat, I shall let myself dash this in for a week, while [text ends]

Saturday 22 October

This is a book, I think I have said before, which I write after tea. And my brain was full of ideas, but I have spent them on Mr Ashcroft & Miss Findlater, fervent admirers.

“I shall let myself dash this in for a week”—I have done nothing, nothing, nothing else for a fortnight; & am launched somewhat furtively but with all the more passion upon Orlando: A Biography. It is to be a small book, & written by Christmas. I thought I could combine it with Fiction, but once the mind gets hot it cant stop; I walk making up phrases; sit contriving scenes; am in short in the thick of the greatest rapture known to me; from which I have kept myself since last February, or earlier. Talk of planning a book, or waiting for an idea! This one came in a rush; I said to pacify myself, being bored & stale with criticism & faced with that intolerable dull Fiction, “You shall write a page of a story for a treat: you shall stop sharp at 11.30 & then go on with the Romantics”. I had very little idea what the story was to be about. But the relief of turning my mind that way about was such that I felt happier than for months; as if put in the sun, or laid on cushions; & after two days entirely gave up my time chart & abandoned myself to the pure delight of this farce: which I enjoy as much as I’ve ever enjoyed anything; & have written myself into half a headache & had to come to a halt, like a tired horse, & take a little sleeping draught last night: which made our breakfast fiery. I did not finish my egg. I am writing Orlando half in a mock style very clear & plain, so that people will understand every word. But the balance between truth & fantasy must be careful. It is based on Vita, Violet Trefusis, Lord Lascelles, Knole &c.

A great many incidents to record. They come always in a rush together, these bright October days, with every one just back, fresh from solitude, cheerful, busy, sociable. Nessa has initiated, informally, Sunday evenings; & there Old Bloomsbury is to gather, after dinner—Helen Clive Roger & so on.

Then I asked the time in the Press a week ago.

“Leonard can tell you” said Angus very huffily.

“Ask Angus. I dont seem to know” said Leonard very grumpy. And I saw Mrs C. lower her head over her typing & laugh. This was the tail of a terrific quarrel about the time between them. Angus was dismissed; but tells Nessa he wants to stay, could tempers be made compatible. A bad year, this, financially, for the Press: yet prospects seem flourishing, if only Marys & Braithwaites didn’t eat up all profits. Dottie (who comes to tea with great simplicity, but sits a little long afterwards) is investing her £200 a year in Stella Gibbons &c. & lends me her own poems, which I promptly throw down the W.C. Vita stalks into the press, all red & black (so is Orlando) says Lizzie [a dog?] has been shot by a farmer, no, a publican (she respects farmers, not publicans): comes up here with me, & Harold drops in to say Good bye. We sit very cosy & intimate for all his man about the worldiness, over the gas: he has just been to the Foreign Office & they have been “ever so good. Really they spoil one” he said, being devoted to the Office, which now sends him to Berlin for 3 years. Vita will only go for a short time she says. She likes him. She pets him: wants me to make him a fresh cup of tea.

Then there’s Clive. He has laid his stairs with the vividest green, 5 inches thick: has every comfort & convenience. I dine there to meet Harold & Tom: Tom, of course, in white waistcoat, much the man of the world; which sets the key, & off they go telling stories about ‘Jean’ (Cocteau) about Ada Leverson, Gosse, Valery, &c. &c. & L. & I feel a little Bloomsburyish perhaps; no, I think this sort of talk is hardly up to the scratch. Harold does it best. He was in Petersburg when they blew up Stolypin, or his children; can describe the boom bum bum of a bomb falling from the life: & the Empress with her yellow eye whites; & King George throwing Mr Britling with a violence to the floor. & I ‘may be lacking in distinction but I’m damned if I’m an alien’ was his comment on some phrase of Wells’.

And that reminds me how we saw the pale dove grey coffin of Mrs Wells slide through the gates at Golders Green. It had tassels like bell pulls on it. Wells sat in bottle blue overcoat by [George Bernard] Shaw, sobbing. One saw his white handkerchief going in & out of his pocket. Mr Page a shaggy shabby old scholar, read some typewritten sheets, by Wells, about “our friend Caroline.” “Poor things, poor silly things she’d say, in their days of ill repute. This colloquialism merged in the burial service; & somehow the whole effect was a little nondescript. The aim was to emphasise life; & generosity & how generous lives continue; one thing touched me. “Some are set on a headland & their lives are a beacon to mankind. Others live retired & are hardly known; but their lives are the most precious” which reminds me of what my father wrote, & meant at the moment, of my mother. Then the coffin slid away “into the furnace of material creation”. She had become part of the roses she loved, & of the sun on snow. Poor Jane! It was desperate to see what a dowdy shabby imperfect lot we looked; how feeble; how ugly for the most part. And yet we were doing our best to say something sincere about our great adventure (as Wells almost called it). And he has been adventurous & plunged about in his bath & splashed the waters, to give him his due. Afterwards we stood about congratulating; Lydia sobbed; Shaw said “You mustnt cry. Jane is well—Jane is splendid” & we went off—I to Fortnum & Mason’s to buy shoes.

Sunday 20 November

I will now snatch a moment from what Morgan calls ‘life’ to enter a hurried note. My notes have been few; life a cascade, a glissade, a torrent: all together. I think on the whole this is our happiest autumn. So much work; & success now; & life on easy terms: heaven knows what. My morning rushes, pell mell, from 10 to 1. I write so quick I can’t get it typed before lunch. This I suppose is the main backbone of my autumn—Orlando. Never do I feel this, except for a morning or two, writing criticism. Today I began the third chapter. Do I learn anything? Too much of a joke perhaps for that; yet I like these plain sentences; & the externality of it for a change. It is too thin of course; splashed over the canvas; but I shall cover the ground by Jan. 7th (I say) & then re-write.

Vita comes; Dottie comes; Clive incessant; Tom; Roger; we have our Bloomsbury evenings; for the first time I have been spending money, on a bed, on a coat (the coat, at the moment, I regret) & had a delicious sense of affluence the other day when at Long Barn I tipped Loune [the butler] 5/- for a nights lodging. But the money psychology is odd; & that it doesn’t give me enormous pleasure to spend. I doubt that I want anything eno’; yet worry about spending wrongly; & must buy an evening dress which worries me too. I have refused Sibyl; accepted Ethel. Fame increases; I think. Young men write about me in their absurd random books. Domestic life, Nelly that is, good as gold.

This is a summary; for I have too many letters to write, & cant catch that cloud which was so heavy in my brain when I sat down.

I made Vita cry the other night; quietly, unself-consciously. “I hate being bored” I said, of her Campbells & Valery Taylors; & this she thought meant I should be tired of her.

Wednesday 30 November

I have just been upstairs & tried on a hat (18/11) which I have just bought at B&H (so they call it) [Bourne & Hollingsworth, Oxford Street] to wear at Sibyl’s lunch party tomorrow. With that money I could have bought a nightgown. Then I heard a man in a bus talk about quality & state of gentlemaness; & you would call me Sir; as I you Madam. This to a working woman, dowdy pasty plush with a baby. “Had more’n 8” she said to the conductor; whom she called young man; & he called her Ma. This is Dickens; or Shakespeare; or simple English cockney: whichever it is I adore it; & warm the cockles of my heart at it.

A very happy autumn this, I repeat. Nelly raised £5, & for that reason or another in constant spirits & kindness. Offered last night to clear away. She thinks it only fair, as we’ve raised her. No trouble about people coming. After Xmas discontent will set in no doubt; when must write criticism; the light languishes; Nessa Vita Clive are all away, But I will steal a march on that depression. Moreover, aren’t I proud at the moment. Ruth Draper admires me: I am to meet her on Friday at Elena Richmonds. What an incredible concatenation! So tonight I go to the Pit to see Ruth Draper. Lunch with Sibyl; dine with Ethel; & a new dress, made from one 100 years old. These are the little waves that life makes; which keep us tossing & going up & down on top of them.

[Thursday 1 December]

A rapid note about the lunch party, L. dining at the Cranium.

An art of light talk; about people. Bogey Harris; Maurice Baring. B.H. ‘knows’ everyone: that is no one. Freddy Fossle? Oh yes I know him; knows Ly So & So; knows everyone: cant admit to not knowing. A polished, burnished diner out. Roman Catholic. In the middle M. Baring says—But Lady Beaverbrook died this morning. Sibyl says Say that again. But BM. [?] was lunching with her yesterday, says Bogey. Well its in the papers: she’s dead says M.B. Sibyl says But she was quite young. Lord Ivor asked me to meet the young man her daughter’s to marry. I know Lord Ivor says, or wd say Bogey. Well its odd, says Sibyl, giving up the attempt to wrestle with the death of the young at a lunch party. So on to wigs: Lady Charlie used to have hers curled by a sailor on deck before she got up says Bogey. Oh I’ve known her all my life. Went yatchting with them. Lady … eyebrows fell into the soup. Sir John Cook was so fat they had to hike him up. Once he got out of bed in the middle of the night & fell on the floor where he lay 5 hours—couldn’t move. BM. sent me a pear by the waiter with a long letter. Talk of houses & periods. All very smooth & surface talk: depends on knowing people: not on saying anything interesting. Bogey’s cheeks are polished daily.

Tuesday 20 December

This is almost the shortest day & perhaps the coldest night of the year. We are in the black heart of a terrific frost. I notice that look of black atoms in a clear air, which for some reason I can never describe to my liking. The pavement was white with great powdery flakes the other night, walking back with Roger & Helen; this was from Nessa’s last Sunday—last, I fear, for many a month. But I have as usual ‘no time’: let me count the things I should be doing this deep winters night with Leonard at his last lecture, & Pinker asleep in his chair. I should be reading Bagenal’s story; Julian’s play; Lord Chesterfield’s letters; & writing to Hubert [Henderson] (about a cheque from the Nation). There is an irrational scale of values in my mind which puts these duties higher than mere scribbling.

Angus is finally to go: we had another semi-painful interview in the Studio; when he interrupted L.’s dismissal with his own resignation. Not enough money. We think of Francis Birrell as partner; shall ask him tomorrow; & broach the Hogarth Miscellany.

This flashed to my mind at Nessa’s children’s party last night. The little creatures acting moved my infinitely sentimental throat. Angelica so mature, & composed; all grey & silver; such an epitome of all womanliness; & such an unopened bud of sense & sensibility; wearing a grey wig & a sea coloured dress. And yet oddly enough I scarcely want children of my own now. This insatiable desire to write something before I die, this ravaging sense of the shortness & feverishness of life, make me cling, like a man on a rock, to my one anchor. I don’t like the physicalness of having children of one’s own. This occurred to me at Rodmell; but I never wrote it down. I can dramatise myself as parent, it is true. And perhaps I have killed the feeling instinctively; as perhaps nature does.

I am still writing the 3rd Chap. of Orlando. I have had of course to give up the fancy of finishing by February & printing this spring. It is drawing out longer than I meant. I have just been thinking over the scene when O. meets a girl (Nell) in the Park & goes with her to a neat room in Gerrard Street. There she will disclose herself. They will talk. This will lead to a diversion or two about women’s love. This will bring in O.’s night life; & her clients (thats the word). Then she will see Dr Johnson, & perhaps write (I want somehow to quote it) To all you Ladies. So I shall get some effect of years passing; & then there will be a description of the lights of the 18th Century burning; & the clouds of the 19th Century rising. Then on to the 19th. But I have not considered this. I want to write it all over hastily, & so keep unity of tone, which in this book is very important. It has to be half laughing, half serious: with great splashes of exaggeration.

Perhaps I shall pluck up courage to ask the Times for a rise. But could I write for my Annual I would never write for another paper. How extraordinarily unwilled by me but potent in its own right by the way Orlando was! as if it shoved everything aside to come into existence. Yet I see looking back just now to March that it is almost exactly in spirit, though not in actual facts, the book I planned then as an escapade; the spirit to be satiric, the structure wild. Precisely.

Yes, I repeat, a very happy, a singularly happy autumn.

Facts are: Clive is loved by a lady in Leicestershire: Mary loves (perhaps) Lord A. She wishes to have Clive back on terms. He forgets: has a twinge now & then, but is fancy free. Mary met them walking in Cavendish Square. Raymond will marry Valery, (so we think).

Thursday 22 December

I just open this for a moment, being dull of the head, to enter a severe reprimand of myself to myself. The value of society is that it snubs one. I am meretricious, mediocre; a humbug; am getting into the habit of flashy talk. Tinsel it seemed last night at the Keynes. I was out of humour & so could see the transparency of my own sayings. Dadie said a true thing too: when V. lets her style get on top of her, one thinks only of that; when she uses clichés, one thinks what she means. But, he says, I have no logical power & live & write in an opium dream. And the dream is too often about myself.

Now with middle age drawing on, & age ahead it is important to be severe on such faults. So easily might I become a hare brained egotistic woman, exacting compliments, arrogant, narrow, withered. Nessa’s children (I always measure myself against her, & find her much the largest, most humane of the two of us, think of her now with an admiration that has no envy in it: with some trace of the old childish feeling that we were in league together against the world; & how proud I am of her triumphant winning of all our battles: as she [battles?] her way so nonchalantly modestly, almost anonymously past the goal, with her children round her; & only a little added tenderness (a moving thing in her) which shows me that she too feels wonder surprise at having passed so many terrors & sorrows safe—

The dream is too often about myself. To correct this, & to forget one’s own sharp absurd little personality, reputation & the rest of it, one should read; see outsiders; think more; write more logically; above all be full of work; & practise anonymity. Silence in company; or the quietest statement, not the showiest, is also ‘indicated’ as the doctors say. It was an empty party, rather, last night. Very nice here, though; & F.B. is I think willing.

[]

1928

[Diary XVII]

Tuesday 17 January

In half an hour or so Nessa & Duncan will look in on their way to Roger’s to say good bye. This is the true break in the year: Bloomsbury is dispersed today till May, I suppose. Clive was off to Germany this morning.

Yesterday we went to Hardy’s funeral. What did I think of? Of Max Beerbohm’s letter, just read; or a lecture to the Newnhamites about women’s writing. At intervals some emotion broke in. But I doubt the capacity of the human animal for being dignified in ceremony. One catches a Bishops frown & twitch: sees his polished shiny nose; suspects the rapt spectacled young priest gazing at the cross he carries, of being a humbug; catches Robert Lynd’s distracted haggard eye; then thinks of the mediocrity of Squire; next here is the coffin, an overgrown one; like a stage coffin, covered with a white satin cloth: bearers elderly gentlemen rather red & stiff, holding to the corners: pigeons flying outside; insufficient artificial light; procession to poets corner; dramatic “In sure & certain hope of immortality” perhaps melodramatic. After dinner at Clive’s Lytton protested that the great man’s novels are the poorest of poor stuff; & can’t read them. Lytton sitting or lying inert, with his eyes shut, or exasperated with them open. Lady Strachey slowly fading, but it may take years. Over all this broods for me, some uneasy sense, of change, & mortality, & how partings are deaths; & then a sense of my own fame—why should this come over me?—& then of its remoteness; & then the pressure of writing two articles on Meredith & furbishing up the Hardy. And Leonard sitting at home reading. And Max’s letter. & a sense of the futility of it all.

Saturday 11 February

I am so cold I can hardly hold the pen. The futility of it all—so I broke off; & have indeed been feeling that rather persistently, or perhaps I should have written here. Hardy & Meredith together sent me torpid to bed with headache. I know the feeling now, when I can’t spin a sentence, & sit mumbling & turning; & nothing flits by my brain which is as a blank window. So I shut my studio door, & go to bed, stuffing my ears with rubber; & there I lie a day or two. And what leagues I travel in the time! Such ‘sensations’ spread over my spine & head directly I give them the chance; such an exaggerated tiredness; such anguishes & despairs; & heavenly relief & rest; & then misery again. Never was anyone so tossed up & down by the body as I am, I think. But it is over: & put away; & Lord Sackville is dead & lies at Withyam, & I passed Knole with Vita yesterday & had to look away from the vast masterless house, without a This is what she minds most. When she left the house behind the old cart horses, she went for ever, she said, after complete rule for three days.

For some reason, I am hacking rather listlessly at the last chapter of Orlando, which was to have been the best. Always always the last chapter slips out of my hands. One gets bored. One whips oneself up. I still hope for a fresh wind, & dont very much bother, except that I miss the fun, which was so tremendously lively all October, November & December. I have my doubts if it is not empty; & too fantastic to write at such length.

For the rest, Bloomsbury today revives. Clive is back: whereupon Mary asks us to lunch: & so we return to some flicker of the snowdrop pallor of very early spring.

My pen protests. This writing is nonsense, it says. And L. is with M⁠[argaret] Ll⁠[ewelyn]. D⁠[avies]. Pinker has the lice. [Several ink blots.]

Saturday 18 February

I am happy to say I have still a few pounds in the Bank, & my own cheque book too. This great advance in dignity was made in the autumn. Out of my £60 I have bought a Heal bed; a cupboard, a fur coat, & now a strip of carpet for the hall. This financial revision has been a great success. And I pan out articles so as to write one & earn £30 a month. And I should be revising Lord Chesterfield at this moment, but I’m not. My mind is woolgathering away about Women & Fiction, which I am to read at Newnham in May. The mind is the most capricious of insects—flitting fluttering. I had thought to write the quickest most brilliant pages in Orlando yesterday—not a drop came, all, forsooth, for the usual physical reasons, which declared themselves today. It is the oddest feeling: as if a finger stopped the flow of the ideas in the brain: it is unsealed, & the blood rushes all over the place. Again, instead of writing O. I’ve been racing up & down the whole field of my lecture. And tomorrow, alas, we motor; for I must get back into the book—which has brightened the last few days satisfactorily. Not that my sensations in writing are an infallible guide.

We dined with Ka. She had unshaded all Nessa’s lamps, & somehow commonplaced the house strangely. It was full too of those derelicts whom she collects—the earnest, the ugly, the unhappy. Never have I sat next such driftwood as Mrs Campbell. Garnett was as bad—an overeducated prig. So tired I cant talk—three large committees this afternoon—gave accurate information about cooking eggs.

Before that, there was Todd & Clive—Clive is ubiquitous. Todd like some primeval animal emerging from the swamp, muddy, hirsute. A woman who is commercial—rather an exception in my world. She spoke of “getting my money back” as Gerald Duckworth might have spoken with the same look of rather hostile & cautious greed, as though the world were banded to rob her. This money-grubbing way is not attractive; but it is lightened by a shimmer of dash & ‘chic’ even. She stands on her two feet as she expresses it. She is starting a paper—I’m so bored with people starting papers in May! There’s Desmond for another. But Todd has none of his bubble & gush. She finds work very dull. She likes life. [Six words omitted] flirting with Osbert I presume. She is tapir like, & the creatures nose snuffs pertinaciously after Bloomsbury.

Dadie came in for a moment, rather drawn & white, ‘making money’ too. We are a little out of that, Leonard & I: L. never makes a penny; I mean tries to: & I could almost wish we were more lavish in our ways. This is occasionally in my thoughts. And what else is? I doubt that I shall ever write another novel after O. I shall invent a new name for them.

Lunch with Mary; lunch with Clive; dinner with Clive; tea with Jane, raised in bed, with her old white head lifted up, on pillows, very aged & rather exalted, able only to talk or listen for 10 minutes or so. Mary & Jack simmering with polished domestic affluence & prettiness: gay bunches everywhere; & paint, & carpets; but not much backing to it. Jack develops, before 3 strikes, the storytelling manner: by 3.30 all the stories are told. Home to shabbiness.

Sunday 18 March

I have lost my writing board; an excuse for the anaemic state of this book. Indeed I only write now, in between letters, to say that Orlando was finished yesterday as the clock struck one. Anyhow the canvas is covered. There will be three months of close work needed, imperatively, before it can be printed; for I have scrambled & splashed, & the canvas shows through in a thousand places. But it is a serene, accomplished feeling, to write, even provisionally, The End, & we go off on Saturday, with my mind appeased.

I have written this book quicker than any: & it is all a joke; & yet gay & quick reading I think; a writers holiday. I feel more & more sure that I will never write a novel again. Little bits of rhyme come in. So we go motoring across France on Saturday, & shall be back on April 17th for the summer. Time flies—oh yes: that summer should be here again; & I still have the faculty of wonder at it. The world swinging round again & bringing its green & blue close to ones eyes.

Since February I have been a little clouded with headache, had a touch of influenza; & so, with the lights down, & all energy turned to forcing my book along, have not written here. I dislike these months. Shall we try Rome next year? Control of life is what one should learn now: its economic management. I feel cautious, like a poor person, now I am 46. But I may be dead then, I think, & so take my French lessons now, instead of waiting.

Thursday 22 March

There are the last pages at the end of Orlando, & it is twenty five minutes to one; & I have written everything I have to write, & on Saturday we go abroad.

Yes its done—Orlando—begun on 8th October, as a joke; & now rather too long for my liking. It may fall between stools, be too long for a joke, & too frivolous for a serious book. All this I dismiss from a mind avid only of green fields. The sun; wine; sitting doing nothing. I have been for the last 6 weeks rather a bucket than a fountain; sitting to be shot into by one person after another. A rabbit that passes across a shooting gallery, & one’s friends go pop-pop. Heaven be praised, Sibyl today puts us off, which leaves Dadie only, & a whole days solitude, please Heaven, tomorrow. But I intend to control this rabbit shooting business when I come back. And money making. I hope to settle in & write one nice little discreet article for £25 each month; & so live; without stress; & so read—what I want to read. At 46 one must be a miser; only have time for essentials.

But I think I have made moral reflections enough, & should describe people, save that, when seen so colourlessly, by duty not wish, one’s mind is a little slack in taking notes. Morgan & Desmond were here to tea. Morgan more of the blue butterfly than ever. Unless I talk, he says nothing. And any shadow sends him flitting. Desmond comes in, round as a billiard ball; & this is true of his dear bubbling lazy mind; which has such a glitter & lustre now from mere being at ease in the world that it puts me into a good temper to be with him. He describes, analyses, narrates; does not actually talk. All his blandishments are now active to get articles for “Life & Letters” which comes out in May. I am scarcely flattered now to be asked; yet of course dashed a little when I refuse Mrs van Doren’s £120 & she takes no notice. And a little dashed, too, not to get the Femina prize—partly because I’ve been exhibited as a competitor & people will think me dashed: which I’m not, innately.

Roger & Helen, Ka & Will, the other night. Roger malicious a little, & vain. “I am the most read critic in England, & yet I have nowhere to write.” Analysed, this amounts to the fact that The Nation only pays him £5, & Konody gets more, & the pages of the Burlington are more thumbed at his articles than at MacColl’s. There is an innocence in this vanity which is likeable; but I am touchy for the reputation of Bloomsbury. I thought I could see Ka & Will comparing us, & being glad we were not impeccable. They compare us with the political world: we them with our own. Will lay with his eyes shut, & I was rather sorry for him. He knows what Roger thinks of his pictures, & what I don’t think—for I dont look at them; but he has the generosity to praise my books. We middleaged people now scarcely covet each others good opinion very seriously: are content to be different.

Watery blowy weather; & this time next week we shall be in the middle of France.

Tuesday 17 April

Home again, as foretold, last night, & to settle the dust in my mind, write here. We have been across France & back—every inch of that fertile field traversed by the admirable Singer. And now towns & spires & scenes begin to rise in my mind as the rest sinks. I see Chartres in particular, the snail, with its head straight, marching across the flat country, the most distinguished of churches. The rose window is like a jewel on black velvet. The outside is very intricate yet simple; elongated; somehow preserved from the fantastic & ornate. Grey weather dashed all over this; & I remember coming in at night in the wet often, & hearing the rain in hotels. Often I was bobbing up & down on my two glasses of vin du pays.

It was rather a rush & a cram—as these jumbled notes testify. Once we were high up on a mountain in a snow storm; & rather afraid of a long tunnel. Twenty miles often cut us off from civilisation. One wet afternoon we punctured in a mountain village & I went in & sat with the family a nice scrupulous polite woman, a girl who was pretty, shy, had a friend called Daisy at Earlsfield. They caught trout & wild boars. Then on we went to Florae, where I found a book—Girardin’s memoirs in the old bookcase that had been sold with the house. Always some good food & hot bottles at night. And there was Nessa & Duncan & Clive (who smacked me in public—curse him for an uneasy little upstart.) Oh & my prize—£40 from the French. And Julian. And one or two hot days & the Pont du Garde in the sun; & Les Beaux (this is where Dante got his idea of Hell Duncan said) & mounting all the time steadily was my desire for words, till I envisaged a sheet of paper & pen & ink as something of miraculous desirability—could even relish the scratch as if it were a divine kind of relief to me—And there was St Remy & the ruins in the sun. I forget now how it all went—how thing fitted to thing; but the eminences now emerge, & I noticed how, talking to Raymond at The Nation this afternoon we had already pitched on the high points. Before that, crossing the graveyard in the bitter windy rain, we saw Hope & a dark cultivated woman. But on they went past us, with the waver of an eye. Next moment I heard Virginia, & turned & there was Hope coming back—“Jane died yesterday” she murmured, half asleep, talking distraught, ‘out of herself.’ We kissed by Cromwell’s daughter’s grave, where Shelley used to walk, for Jane’s death. She lay dead outside the graveyard in that back room where we saw her lately raised on her pillows, like a very old person, whom life has tossed up, & left; exalted, satisfied, exhausted. Hope the colour of dirty brown paper. Then to the office, then home to work here; & now to work & work, as hard as I can.

Saturday 21 April

A bitter windy rainy day. There is no blue, no red, no green in this detestable spring. Furs are in the shops. I have walked across the Park with Leonard; come home; find the char in the studio; must write here instead of making, as I had meant, some carefully polished sentences—for Orlando is to tell the truth, damned rough.

Life is either too empty or too full. Happily, I never cease to transmit these curious damaging shocks. At 46 I am not callous; suffer considerably; make good resolutions—still feel as experimental & on the verge of getting at the truth as ever. Oh & Vita—to change the subject & take up the burden of facts—has had a stupendous row with her mother—in the course of which she was made to take the pearl necklace from her neck, cut it in two with a pocket knife, deliver over the 12 central pearls, put the relics, all running loose, in an envelope the solicitor gave her. Thief, liar, I hope you’ll be killed by an omnibus—so ‘my honoured Lady Sackville’ adressed her, trembling with rage in the presence of a secretary & a solicitor & a Chauffeur. The woman is said to be mad. Vita very gallant & wild & tossing her head & taking me to the Zoo & saying she was wild & free & wd. make her money now herself by writing.

And I find myself again in the old driving whirlwind of writing against time. Have I ever written with it? But I vow I wont spend longer at Orlando, which is a freak; it shall come out in September, though the perfect artist would revoke & rewrite & polish—infinitely. But hours remain over to be filled with reading something or other—I’m not sure what. What sort of summer do I desire? Now that I have 16 pounds to spend before July 1st (on our new system) I feel freer: can afford a dress or a hat, & so may go about, a little, if I want. And yet the only exciting life is the imaginary one. Once I get the wheels spinning in my head, I dont want money much, or dress, or even a cupboard, a bed at Rodmell or a sofa.

Dined with Lydia & Maynard: two couples, elderly, childless distinguished. He & she both urbane & admirable. Grey comes at Maynard’s temples. He is finer looking now: not with us pompous or great: simple, with his mind working always, on Russian, Bolshevists, glands, genealogies; always the proof of a remarkable mind when it overflows thus vigorously into byepaths. There are two royal stocks in England he says from which all intellect descends. He will work this out as if his fortune depended on it. Lydia is composed, & controlled. She says very sensible things.

We went, also, to Jane’s funeral, getting ‘there’ (somewhere out of the world where buses pass only one every 15 minutes), just as the service ended; marching into the church clamorously; but it was only barely full of the dingiest people; cousins I fancy from the North, very drab: the only male relation afflicted, with a bubbly chin, a stubbly beard, & goggly eyes. Distinguished people drag up such queer chains of family when they die. They had hired Daimlers too, which succeeded the coffin at a foots pace. We walked to the grave; the clergyman, a friend, waited for the dismal company to collect; then read some of the lovelier, more rational parts of the Bible; & said, by heart, Abide with me. The gravedigger had given him, surreptitiously, a handful of clay, which he divided into three parts & dropped at the right moments. A bird sang most opportunely; with a gay indifference, & if one liked, hope, that Jane would have enjoyed. Then the incredibly drab female cousins advanced, each with a fat bunch of primroses & dropped them in; & we also advanced & looked down at the coffin at the bottom of a very steep brazen looking grave—But tho’ L. almost cried, I felt very little—only the beauty of the Come unto me all ye that are weary; but as usual the obstacle of not believing dulled & bothered me. Who is ‘God’ & what the Grace of Christ? & what did they mean to Jane?

Raymond to tea—two hours animated admirable light & airy & well seasoned talk, about facts mostly: ghosts; consciousness; novels: not people much. But he has his shirts made of figured tablecloths, shiny, hard.

And what am I to read? Pinker is back. And Leonard having tea with his mother. And perhaps the old woman has sighed herself through my room, & I can go down & do that typing, & write to the little man who smacks me in public & appeals for my pity—Clive I mean.

Tuesday 24 April

Waiting for Gumbo [Marjorie Strachey]—how I hate waiting for anybody! Can’t settle, read, think—so I write: an odd tribute to the uses I put this diary to. And I should be typing O. in the basement. Must now do 10 pages daily till June 1st. Well, I like being an ass on a mill round.

In from the triumph of buying a dress & a coat for about 5.10. What one must do is to face the girl with one’s naked kindly searching eye: speak firmly; ask for a looking glass & study effects. Then they quail, under powder & paint. A lovely soaring summer day this: winter sent howling home to his arctic. I was reading Othello last night, & was impressed by the volley & volume & tumble of his words: too many I should say, were I reviewing for the Times. He put them in when tension was slack. In the great scenes, everything fits like a glove. The mind tumbles & splashes among words when it is not being urged on: I mean, the mind of a very great master of words who is writing with one hand. He abounds. The lesser writers stint. As usual, impressed by Shre. But my mind is very bare to words—English words—at the moment: they hit me, hard, I watch them bounce & spring. I’ve read only French for 4 weeks. An idea comes to me for an article on French; what we know of it.

Friday 4 May

And now theres the Femina prize to record before I go off this brilliant summer day to tea with Miss Jenkins in Doughty Street. I am going dutifully, not to snub the female young. But I shall be overpowering I doubt not. But it is a wonderful day.

The prize was an affair of dull stupid horror: a function; not alarming; stupefying. Hugh Walpole saying how much he disliked my books; rather, how much he feared for his own. Little Miss Robins, like a red breast, creeping out. I remember your mother—the most beautiful Madonna & at the same time the most complete woman of the world. Used to come & see me in my flat (I see this as a summer visit on a hot day). She never confided. She would suddenly say something so unexpected, from that Madonna face, one thought it vicious. This I enjoyed: nothing else made much impression. Afterwards there was the horror of having looked ugly in cheap black clothes. I cannot control this complex. I wake at dawn with a start. Also the ‘fame’ is becoming vulgar & a nuisance. It means nothing; & yet takes one’s time. Americans perpetually. Croly; Gaige; offers:

We have seen an endless number of people—Eddie, Lytton, Miss Ritchie, Francis, Vita,—& now the minute Jenkins.

Thursday 31 May

No I cannot read Proust at the moment—

Leonard is reading Orlando, which goes to the printer tomorrow. It is very quiet at the moment. Whitsun is over. We were at Rodmell & saw the races, where the marsh used to be. And our field is sold to Allinson—who is going to build. And what then? I have no brain left over to think with. And Leonard is arguing in the basement with Dadie. What can it be about? Pinker is asleep in the chair. Angelica comes back tomorrow. I feel a kind of drought caused by the lack of Nessa, & ask how shall I manage if we are apart 6 months, not only 4? But my creed is to batter down opposition. I have seen—

I daresay a good many people, Rose Macaulay, Rebecca West, Maurois flash to mind in a bunch last week, & Todd’s room; rather to her credit, workmanlike; Garland pear⁠[l]⁠hung & silken; Todd as buxom as a badger. Rebecca a hardened old reprobate I daresay, but no fool; & the whole atmosphere professional; no charm, except the rather excessive charm of Garland.

Clive’s book out—a very superficial one, L. says.

The sun is out again; I have half forgotten Orlando already, since L. has read it & it has half passed out of my possession. I think it lacks the sort of hammering I should have given it if I had taken longer: is too freakish & unequal. Very brilliant now & then. As for the effect of the whole, that I cant judge. Not, I think ‘important’ among my works. L. says a satire.

Gosse is dead, & I am half reconciled to him by they’re saying in the papers that he chose to risk a dangerous operation rather than be an invalid for life. This kind of vitality always gets me. But—lies otherwise flourish round his grave, & poor dear Desmond with 3 children to keep has to be as profuse of them as anybody.

We met him yesterday in Kingsway, just as I was thinking how I should describe him if I wrote a Memoir, as Molly insists. He loomed up as if my thought had made him visible. He gave me the first number of his paper.

Rose Macaulay says “Yes I won the prize”—rather peevishly. I think at once that she is jealous, & test whatever else she says with a view to finding out whether she is or not. About Colefax: “I’m the only one of all my friends who isn’t asked there.” About work: ‘I’ve got to work tomorrow’ I say, excusing myself for not going to Raymond’s party. “So have we all” rather sharply. & so on. This shows through a dozen little phrases, as we’re talking of America, articles &c: she is jealous of me; anxious to compare us: but I may imagine it: & it shows my own jealousy no doubt, as suspicions always do. One cdn’t know them if one hadn’t got them. And now to Angelica with a packet of bulls eyes. I am again beginning to read.

L. takes Orlando more seriously than I had expected. Thinks it in some ways better than The Lighthouse; about more interesting things, & with more attachment to life, & larger. The truth is I expect I began it as a joke, & went on with it seriously. Hence it lacks some unity. He says it is very original. Anyhow I’m glad to be quit this time of writing ‘a novel’; & hope never to be accused of it again. Now I want to write some very closely reasoned criticism; book on fiction; an essay of some sort (but not Tolstoy for the Times). Dr Burney’s evening party I think for Desmond. And then? I feel anxious to keep the hatch down: not to let too many projects come in. Something abstract poetic next time—I dont know. I rather like the idea of these Biographies of living people. Ottoline suggests herself—but no. And I must tear up all that manuscript, & write a great many notes & adventure out into the world—as I shall do tomorrow, when I go to have my ears pierced with Vita.

June weather. Still, bright, fresh. Owing to the Lighthouse (car) I dont feel so shut in London as usual, & can imagine the evening on some moor now, or in France without the envy I used to have, in London on a fine evening. Also London itself perpetually attracts, stimulates, gives me a play & a story & a poem, without any trouble, save that of moving my legs through the streets. I walked Pinker to Grays Inn Gardens this afternoon, & saw—Red Lion Square: Morris’es house; thought of them on winters evenings in the joties; thought we are just as interesting; saw the (street) Great Ormond St where a dead girl was found yesterday; saw & heard the Salvation Army making Xtianity gay for the people: a great deal of nudging & joking on the part of very unattractive young men & women; making it lively, I suppose; & yet, to be truthful, when I watch them I never laugh or criticise, but only feel how strange & interesting this is: wonder what they mean by ‘Come to the Lord.’ I daresay exhibitionism accounts for some of it: the applause of the gallery; this lures boys to sing hymns; & kindles shop boys to announce in a loud voice that they are saved. It is what writing for the Evening Standard is for Rose Macaulay & I was going to say myself: but so far I have not done it.

Wednesday 20 June

So sick of Orlando I can write nothing. I have corrected the proofs in a week; & cannot spin another phrase. I detest my own volubility. Why be always spouting words? Also I have almost lost the power of reading. Correcting proofs 5, 6, or 7 hours a day, writing in this & that meticulously, I have bruised my reading faculty severely. Take up Proust after dinner & put him down. This is the worst time of all. It makes me suicidal. Nothing seems left to do. All seems insipid & worthless. Now I will watch & see how I resurrect. I think I shall read something—say a life of Goethe. Then I shall visit about. Mercifully, Nessa is back. My earth is watered again. I go back to words of one syllable: feel come over me the feathery change: rather true that: as if my physical body put on some soft comfortable, skin. She is a necessity to me—as I am not to her. I run to her as the wallaby runs to the old kangaroo. She is also very cheerful, solid, happy. The trifles that annoy other people, she passes off; as if her happiness were a million or two in the bank. And how masterfully she controls her dozen lives; never in a muddle, or desperate, or worried; never spending a pound or a thought needlessly; yet with it all free, careless, airy, indifferent: a very notable achievement.

Julian dines with us tonight to meet Miss Sylva Norman whom I fetched up from complete nonentity on the telephone last night. Another marvel of science. There she was in 10 minutes after we thought of her saying she would LOVE to come. Julian is a vast fat powerful sweet tempered engaging young man, into whose arms I let myself fall, half sister, half mother, & half (but arithmetic denies this) the mocking stirring contemporary friend. Mercifully Julian has his instincts sane & normal: has a wide forehead, & considerable address & competence in the management of life. But my tooth is aching. They will dine with us; & that is what I am ripe for—to go adventuring on the streams of other peoples lives—speculating, adrift

Friday 22 June

So far I wrote & was interrupted—always interrupted; am now off to Ruislip with Pinker to wed her, & it is

Saturday 7 July

& a Saturday morning, very hot & fine.

All last night I dreamt of Katherine Mansfield & wonder what dreams are; often evoke so much more emotion, than thinking does—almost as if she came back in person & was outside one, actively making one feel; instead of a figment called up & recollected, as she is, now, if I think of her. Yet some emotion lingers on the day after a dream; even though I’ve now almost forgotten what happened in the dream, except that she was lying on a sofa in a room high up, & a great many sad faced women were round her. Yet somehow I got the feel of her, & of her as if alive again, more than by day.

At Long Barn yesterday, a good rather happy visit. I’m interested by the gnawing down of strata in friendship; how one passes unconsciously to different terms; takes things easier; dont mind at all hardly about dress or anything; scarcely feel it an exciting atmosphere, which, too, has its drawback from the “fizzing” point of view: yet is saner, perhaps deeper.

Lay by the black currant bushes lecturing Vita on her floundering habits with the Campbells for instance. Mrs C. beat by her husband, all because V. will come triumphing, with her silver & her coronets & her footmen into the life of a herring-cooker. She cooks herrings on a gas stove, I said, always remembering my own phrases.

But having thus scrambled in a page, I must go—& yet want to stay & write about Sterne.

Monks House
Rodmell.

Wednesday 8 August

Eddy has just gone, leaving me the usual feeling: why is not human intercourse more definite, tangible: why aren’t I left holding a small round substance, say of the size of a pea, in my hand; something I can put in a box & look at? There is so little left. Yet these people one sees are fabric only made once in the world; these contacts we have are unique; & if E. were, say killed tonight, nothing definite would happen to me; yet his substance is never again to be repeated. Our meeting is—but the thread of this idea slips perpetually; constantly though it recurs, with sadness, to my mind: how little our relationships matter; & yet they are so important: in him, in me, something to him, to me, infinitely sentient, of the highest vividness, reality. But if I died tonight, he too would continue. Something illusory then enters into all that part of life. I am so important to myself: yet of no importance to other people: like the shadow passing over the downs. I deceive myself into thinking that I am important to other people: that makes part of my extreme vividness to myself: as a matter of fact, I dont matter; & so part of my vividness is unreal; gives me a sense of illusion. Eddy says he thinks “What impression am I making?” constantly & is agitated: as a matter of fact, he is probably making no impression: his agitation is about nothing: he is mistaken.

But, superficially speaking—for fundamentally I was thinking a thousand other thoughts; his presence was only I suppose a light on the surface of my mind—something green or iron-coloured or grey—while the water itself rushed on, in its old fierce way—thoughts about my writing; & about old age; & about buying the field (we bought it this morning) & about the children being noisy; & if I had bought Southease. All this went on sub-cutaneously. Yet his presence somehow checked the flow of sub-cutaneous life. I was always having to think what comes next? How am I to break into this other life which is 6 inches off mine in the deck chair in the orchard? So that my own thoughts could not flow deep or rapid, as they are doing now that Eddy is on his way to Tunbridge Wells. And what remains of Eddy is now in some ways more vivid, though more transparent, all of him composing itself in my mind, all I could get of him, & making itself a landscape appropriate to it; making a work of art for itself.

I am, as I write, wherever I come to a stop, looking out of the lodge window, at our field; & the little cottage boys with the cursed shrill voices, playing cricket half way down it; & as usual I am sentimental & worried. Children playing: yes, & interrupting me; yes & I have no children of my own; & Nessa has; & yet I dont want them any more, since my ideas so possess me; & I detest more & more interruption; & the slow heaviness of physical life, & almost dislike peoples bodies, I think, as I grow older; & want always to cut that short, & get my utmost fill of the marrow, of the essence.

I write thus partly in order to slip the burden of writing narrative, as for instance; we came here a fortnight ago. And we lunched at Charleston & Vita came & we were offered the field & we went to see the farm at Lime Kiln. Yet no doubt I shall be more interested, come 10 years, in facts; & shall want, as I do when I read, to be told details, details, so that I may look up from the page & arrange them too, into one of those makings up which seem so much truer done thus, from heaps of nonassorted facts, than now I can make them, when it is almost immediately being done (by me) under my eyes. It was a fine day, last Monday I rather think; & we drove through Ripe; & there was a girl & her feller at the gate in a narrow lane; & we had to interrupt them to turn the motor. I thought how the things they had been saying were dammed, like a river, by our interruption; & they stood there half amused, yet impatient, telling us to go to the left, but the road was up. They were glad when we went; yet gave us a flash of interest. Who are these people in their motor car: where are they going?—& then this sunk beneath the mind, & they forgot us completely. We went on. And then we reached the farm. The oasts had umbrella spokes poking out at the top: all was so ruined & faded. The Tudor farm house was almost blind; very small eyebrowed windows; old Stuart farmers must have peered out over the flat land, very dirty, ill-kempt, like people in slums. But they had dignity: at least thick walls; fireplaces; & solidity whereas now the house is lived in by one old, weedy pink faced man, who flung himself in his armchair. Go where you like—go anywhere, he said, loose jointed, somehow decayed, like the hop oasts; & damp like the mildewed carpets, & sordid, like the beds with the pots sticking out under them. The walls were sticky; the furniture mid Victorian; little light came through. It was all dying, decaying; & he had been there 50 years, & it will drop to pieces, since there is not enough beauty or strength to make anyone repair it.

Sunday 12 August

Shall I now continue this soliloquy, or shall I imagine an audience, which will make me describe?

This sentence is due to the book on fiction which I am now writing—once more, O once more. It is a hand to mouth book. I scribble down whatever I can think of about Romance, Dickens &c. must hastily [?] gorge on Jane Austen tonight & dish up something tomorrow. All this criticism however may well be dislodged by the desire to write a story. The Moths hovers some where at the back of my brain. Janie & Julian have just gone. Julian a little in the style of Jem, only so much saner: broad browed, wavy haired, vast, fat, powerful, good-tempered. He still laughs a great deal; but perhaps less than he did. Perhaps he is sticking his pitchfork in the ground. Janie is a little lapdog girl; like those pug faced prominent eyed wrinkled nosed little dogs that women carry about the streets; intelligent, vivacious, opening her mouth wide & snapping it shut; on one side a carpenters granddaughter—on the other a Strachey. Perhaps a little common do I mean? But Clive yesterday at Charleston said that there were no class distinctions. We had tea from bright blue cups under the pink light of the giant hollyhock. We were all a little drugged with the country: a little bucolic I thought. It was lovely enough—made me envious of its country peace: the trees all standing securely—why did my eye catch the trees? The look of things has a great power over me. Even now, I have to watch the rooks heating up against the wind, which is high. & still I say to myself instinctively “Whats the phrase for that?” & try to make more & more vivid the roughness of the air current & the tremor of the rooks wing (deep breasting it) slicing—as if the air were full of ridges & ripples & roughnesses; they rise & sink, up & down, as if the exercise (pleased them) rubbed & braced them like swimmers in rough water. But what a little I can get down with my pen of what is so vivid to my eyes, & not only to my eyes: also to some nervous fibre or fan like membrane in my spine.

Janie Julian Leonard & I sat in the orchard till the wind got too strong, & I made them come out on the marsh & was sorry the river was low, or they might have praised it. And (irrelevantly) Miss Ritchie praises Orlando, & I was pleased till I thought, perhaps this is gratitude for our £20. Yet I dont think much either way about Orlando. Odd, how I feel myself under orders; always marching on a definite stage with each book, tho’ it is one I set myself. And Duncan at Charleston was a little too aloof & supercilious seeming.

Tuesday 14 August

Just back from Long Barn & Dottie’s new house, Penn in the Rocks. Can one really be in love with a house? Is there not something sterile, so that one’s mind becomes stringy in these passions? She is too anxious for other people to praise it. And I don’t want possessions. I think this is true. I dont want to be Dottie collecting endless settees & arm chairs round myself. But then I have now a pressing sense of the flight of time; & if one is so soon to arrive, why pack all these things? More truthfully, if one is so soon to start, why prepare all these impedimenta. I feel on the verge of the world, about to take flight. Dottie on the other hand feels “I have at least, in spite of every other grudge on the part of fate, 10 or 15 thousand a year; & it is only fair that I should get from my money what I can.” Somehow angrily then she sets to work to make her money slave for her. She has bought for ever & ever all these couchant rocks; rocks like kneeling elephants; agonised writhing rocks elongated rocks, rocks with grotesque roots grown into them, & Japanese trees on top. She runs about, defiant strident a little discordant in her top hoots with her dogs & says “I’m so tired—so worn out”, gesticulates, exaggerates. I like the aristocratic tradition of space & a few good things. The house itself is now in sections. Half a ceiling (overhangs) intersects what were & will be dining room & bedroom above. This gives the house a provisional air; it is not a house that has been there 300 years, & housed Penn & other families; it is nothing—which in a house is distressing.

After that country, though, how I adore the emptiness, bareness, air & colour of this! Really. I would not give this view for Dottie’s rocks. A relic I think of my fathers feeling for the Alps—this ecstasy of mine over the bare slope of Asheham hill. But then, as I remind myself, half the beauty of a country or a house comes from knowing it. One remembers old lovelinesses: knows that it is now looking ugly; waits to see it light up; knows where to find its beauty; how to ignore the bad things. This one can’t do the first time of seeing. But they build with beautiful blocks of grey stone in Kent. D.’s farmhouse was the very house for me, solid, high, with the shape of the stone showing in the wall. This is all thrown in with her rocks. And she ecstasi⁠[s]⁠es over them, fancying them sympathetic to her genius, & makes them into part of her belief in her own genius.

Monks House looked very nice, unexpectedly so, & the great lily in the window has now four flowers. They opened in the night. So I was appeased aesthetically for my disappointment in having no letters—not one. I was going to remark however that Dottie’s rocks are powdered pale greys & bright greens; they are grey as elephant backs. There are, too, bunches of scarlet berries hanging against them: only all too verdant, mossy, steamy, & enclosed for my taste. However, in the train it struck me that it is, even from one’s own point of view, a great advantage that other people should like trees & so on; Why—I cant at the moment remember.

Friday 31 August

This is the last day of August, & like almost all of them of extraordinary beauty. Each day is fine enough & hot enough for sitting out; but also full of wandering clouds; & that fading & rising of the light which so enraptures me in the downs: which I am always comparing to the light beneath an alabaster bowl, &c. The corn is now stood about in rows of three for our [four or] five solid shaped yellow cakes—rich, it seems, with eggs & spice: good to eat. Sometimes I see the cattle galloping ‘like mad’ as Dostoevsky would say, in the brooks. The clouds—if I could describe them I would: one yesterday had flowing hair on it like the very fine white hair of an old man. At this moment they are white in a leaden sky; but the sun, behind the house, is making the grass green. I walked to the racecourse today & saw a weasel.

Morgan was here for the week end; timid, touchy, infinitely charming. One night we got drunk, & talked of sodomy, & sapphism, with emotion—so much so that next day he said he had been drunk. This was started by Radclyffe Hall & her meritorious dull book. They wrote articles for Hubert all day, & got up petitions; & then Morgan saw her & she screamed like a herring gull, mad with egotism & vanity. Unless they say her book is good, she wont let them complain of the laws. Morgan said that Dr Head can convert the sodomites. “Would you like to be converted?” Leonard asked. “No” said Morgan, quite definitely. He said he thought Sapphism disgusting: partly from convention, partly because he disliked that women should be independent of men.

Probably the reason why I shall be so much bored this week end by Mrs Woolf is that we shall not be able to say a word we mean. It is like talking to a child; a child, too, with ‘feelings’: a child with “rights” & a sense of propriety & respectability & what ought to be said & done. Having made up all these principles she is, & they all are, secretly dissatisfied; because they, naturally, get no pleasure from life; are cased in thick wool from any direct contact; & so these people—an immense class—are always uneasy unless they are eating, being flattered, or doing some natural task, like nursing a child. And then, if the child is Leonard, he grows up & is horribly bored by you.

I must now begin Peacock, without attempting to describe the extraordinary primeval appearance of the farm wagons; so laden with the hay in the brooks that they look like some vast shaggy animal moving on very short legs.

We have seen Mr James about the field; & will soon, I hope, sign the agreement, or cheque; & put up a fence, which is my first act as a landowner to keep the cottage children out. Nessa, being a mother, & thus not sentimental about children, says “They can easily play somewhere else.”

Monday 3 September

The battle of Dunbar, the Battle of Worcester, & the death of Cromwell—how often it seems to me I said that to my father (“my” father, not ‘father’ any more) at St Ives; standing bolt upright in the dining room at Talland House. And it is a perfect 3rd of September day. Leonard gave me the blue glass jug today, because he was cross when I slapped his nose with sweet peas, & because I was nice to his mother; & when I went into luncheon I saw it on the table. Indeed, I almost cried. He went to Brighton to get it for me. “I thought of it just as I was getting into the car” he said. Perhaps I have analysed his motives wrongly.

Seldom have I felt as tired as I did last night. This shaky ramshackle old lady of 76 wore us out. Her talk—I have written it for Nessa so cannot repeat—never stops; never follows a line; is always about people; starts anywhere; at any moment; breaks into a Schubert trio: did you know Len that Mr Harris lives in Gordon Sqre? So on to his daughters; how she met one playing bridge &c. What makes it difficult is that she divines states of feeling to some extent, & would say pointedly “You must often think of your writing when you are not writing, Virginia”, when through exhaustion I became silent. I had one moment of peculiar & acute discomfort this morning, when she became ‘intimate’, & said how much she had been touched when I sat beside her in the car yesterday. Why did I hate it so? I felt the horror of family life, & the terrible threat to one’s liberty that I used to feel with father, Aunt Mary or George. It is an emotion one never gets from any other human relationship. She had the right to exact this on my part; & would feel pleasure & pain irrationally, & somehow put her claws in me. These feelings are as violent as any. And there was the sentimental, yet very vain & almost insanely selfish discourse about her love for her children; how they—these dull plain serviceable Jews & Jewesses—were all splendid men & women; at which my gorge rose. How strangely she made everything commonplace, ugly, suburban, notwithstanding a charm too: something fresh & vital such as old women have, & not, I think, old men. But to be attached to her as daughter would be so cruel a fate that I can think of nothing worse; & thousands of women might be dying of it in England today: this tyranny of mother over daughter, or father; their right to the due being as powerful as anything in the world. And then, they ask, why women dont write poetry. Short of killing Mrs W. nothing could be done. Day after day one’s life would be crumpled up like a bill for 10 pen⁠[ce] 3 farthings. Nothing has ever been said of this.

Monday 10 September

This is written, as ‘this’ is so often written, to fill up a little jagged piece of time, with Kennedy, the soft duckling boy, with a bill that opens wide & says ‘Quack’ in the drawing room, & Leonard talking to Mr James about the field. Desmond, who lunched here with Julian has just gone. We spent the afternoon—hour after hour wasting away again, or why not say for once turning to gold & silver—for I should only have been reading Moby Dick otherwise—coining gold & silver talk then—talk very intimate now, more so than ever: a continuation of our talk in Tavistock Sqre the other day: there he said he had now 12 years to live; nine to be exact: & here we talked of his work, money, women, children, & writing; till I took him along the Roman road; & back to tea. I was amused to find that when Rebecca West says “men are snobs” she gets an instant rise out of Desmond; so I retorted on him with the condescending phrase used about women novelists ‘limitations in Life & Letters. But there was no acrimony in this. We talked with fertility; never working a seam dry. Do you suppose then that we are now coming like the homing rooks back to the tops of our trees? & that all this cawing is the beginning of settling in for the night? I seem to notice in several of my friends some endearing & affecting cordiality: & a pleasure in intimacy; as if the sun were sinking. Often that image comes to me with some sense of my physical state being colder now, the sun just off one; the old disc of one’s being growing cooler—but it is only just beginning: & one will turn cold & silver like the moon.

This has been a very animated summer: a summer lived almost too much in public. Often down here I have entered into a sanctuary; a nunnery; had a religious retreat; of great agony once; & always some terror: so afraid one is of loneliness: of seeing to the bottom of the vessel. That is one of the experiences I have had here in some Augusts; & got then to a consciousness of what I call ‘reality’: a thing I see before me; something abstract; but residing in the downs or sky; beside which nothing matters; in which I shall rest & continue to exist. Reality I call it. And I fancy sometimes this is the most necessary thing to me: that which I seek. But who knows—once one takes a pen & writes? How difficult not to go making ‘reality’ this & that, whereas it is one thing. Now perhaps this is my gift; this perhaps is what distinguishes me from other people; I think it may be rare to have so acute a sense of something like that—but again, who knows? I would like to express it too.

Pinker had 4 puppies the day (Friday) we went to the Bagenals & Dotty. Dotty was rust red, shabby, intense a little; she showed us the rocks. Leonard ‘took against’ her, as nurses say; violently. We drove home very fast. I on the other hand took in favour of Barbara—& wished I had gone up alone with her on to the downs. I—perhaps Leonard interrupted here.

Monday 17 September

I have precisely 5 minutes before dinner. Quentin has swallowed those precious two hours in which I was to have read Dorothy Osborne: Quentin grown elegant & self conscious, liking to use French words; very sophisticated, showing in every movement now the shadow of our faults, as a set; uneasy, I doubt not; quick, sensitive; but wanting something of Julian’s force & simplicity. So they change parts, growing, changing, turning from fat to thin. The drawing room smells with his paints—the gramophone like Moby Dick is white. Rachel came in with Angelica. She has quicksilver eyes, mended stockings, all the charm & dexterity of a poor clever man’s child, whose wits are kept brushed, who mends her stockings, who lives on her adventures.

Desmond was here, talking the other day: intimate again, & yet too urbane, perhaps; or do I think this from the letter that so annoyed me—speaking of my paper’s “butterfly lightness”—how angry I was, how depressed I became. Leonard agrees that he has a complex, which leads him to belittle & fondle thus.

Saturday 22 September

This is written on the verge of my alarming holiday in Burgundy. I am alarmed of 7 days alone with Vita: interested; excited, but afraid—she may find me out, I her out. I may (& theres Mabel the Bride in her white dress at the pump. The bridegroom, a carter out of work, wears white socks. Are they pure? I doubt it. They are going to spend their honeymoon near Pevensey. He was 15 minutes late & we saw her come in wearing a wreath. And I felt this is the heart of England—this wedding in the country: history I felt; Cromwell; The Osbornes; Dorothy’s shepherdesses singing, of all of whom Mr & Mrs Jarrad seem more the descendants than I am. as if they represented the unconscious breathing of England & L. & I, leaning over the wall, were detached, unconnected. I suppose our thinking is the cause of this. We dont belong to any ‘class’; we thinkers: might as well be French or German. Yet I am English in some way—)

But I was saying I should on the whole be confident about this French journey—that it will turn out well. I’m afraid of the morning most; & 3 o’clock in the afternoon; & wanting something Vita does not want. And I shall spend the money that might have bought a table or a glass. What one buys in foreign travel is a series of scenes; which gradually diminish to one or two, such as I still have of Greece & Venice as I saw them when I was 24 or 5. And I shall love the freedom from hours; & looking about; & the thought of coming back; & sitting talking, & some things I shall read; & one or two views, &—

This has been the finest, & not only finest, but loveliest, summer in the world. Still, though it blows, how clear & bright it is; & the clouds are opalescent; the long barns on my horizon mouse coloured; the stacks pale gold. Owning the field has given a different orient to my feelings about Rodmell. I begin to dig myself in & take part in it. And I shall build another storey to the house if I make money. But the news of Orlando is black. We may sell a third that we sold of The Lighthouse before publication—Not a shop will buy save in 6es & 12es. They say this is inevitable. No one wants biography. But it is a novel, says Miss Ritchie. But it is called a biography on the title page, they say. It will have to go to the Biography shelf. I doubt therefore that we shall do more than cover expenses—a high price to pay for the fun of calling it a biography. And I was so sure it was going to be the one popular book! Also it should be 10/6 or 12/6 not 9/- Lord, lord! Thus I must write some articles this winter, if we are to have nest eggs at the Bank. Down here I have flung myself tooth & mil on my fiction book, & should have finished the first draft but for Dorothy Osborne whom I’m dashing off. It will need entire re-writing but the grind is done—the rushing through book after book & now what shall I read? These novels have hung about me so long. Mercy it is to be quit of them; & shall I read English poetry, French memoirs—shall I read now for a book to be called “The Lives of the Obscure”? And when, I wonder, shall I begin the Moths? Not until I am pressed into it by those insects themselves. Nor have I any notion what it is to be like—a completely new attempt I think. So I always think.

A very gay active summer. Dined with the Keynes’ to meet Lord Gage last Wednesday—found him with his flat face & Circassian blood, more of a character than I expected. Clive with inverse snobbery had run him down. We talked about the King, & he snubbed me by saying that he remarked an odd fact—everyone talks to him about the King. Every class, every kind of person, is interested to know what the King has for dinner. And here was I, the intellectual, the labour woman, doing just the same thing. And there were the Russell Cookes; her I liked; him I hated. A woman is in some ways so much better than a man—more natural, juicy, unfettered. But then he is a bounder, a climber, a shoving young man, who wants to be smart, cultivated, go-ahead & all the rest of it. I must use that cliché because I must do my Osborne article. & it is getting cold out here.

Saturday 27 October

A scandal, a scandal, to let so much time slip, & I leaning on the Bridge watching it go. Only leaning has not been my pose: running up & down, irritably, excitedly restlessly. And the stream viciously eddying. Why do I write these metaphors? Because I have written nothing for an age.

Orlando has been published. I went to Burgundy with Vita. We did not find each other out. It flashed by. Yet I was glad to see Leonard again. How disconnected this is! My ambition is from this very moment, 8 minutes to six, on Saturday evening, to attain complete concentration again. When I have written here, I am going to open Fanny Burney’s diaries, & work solidly at that article which poor Miss McKay cables about. I am going to read; to think. I gave up reading & thinking on the 24th of Sept when I went to France. I came back, & we plunged into London & publishing. I am a little sick of Orlando. I think I am a little indifferent now what anyone thinks. Joy’s life’s in the doing—I murder, as usual, a quotation: I mean its the writing, not the being read that excites me. And as I can’t write while I’m being read, I am always a little hollow hearted; whipped up; but not so happy as in solitude. The reception, as they say, surpassed expectations. Sales beyond our record for the first week. I was floating rather lazily on praise, when Squire barked in the Observer, but even as I sat reading him on the backs last Sunday in the showering red leaves & their illumination, I felt the rock of self esteem untouched in me. “This doesn’t really hurt” I said to myself; even now; & sure enough, before evening I was calm, untouched. And now theres Hugh [Walpole] in the Morning Post to spread the butter again, & Rebecca West—such a trumpet call of praise—thats her way—that I feel a little sheepish & silly. And now no more of that I hope.

Thank God, my long toil at the women’s lecture is this moment ended. I am back from speaking at Girton, in floods of rain. Starved but valiant young women—that’s my impression. Intelligent eager, poor; & destined to become schoolmistresses in shoals. I blandly told them to drink wine & have a room of their own. Why should all the splendour, all the luxury of life be lavished on the Julians & the Francises, & none on the Phares & the Thomases? There’s Julian not much relishing it, perhaps. I fancy sometimes the world changes. I think I see reason spreading. But I should have liked a closer & thicker knowledge of life. I should have liked to deal with real things sometimes. I get such a sense of tingling & vitality from an evenings talk like that; one’s angularities & obscurities are smoothed & lit. How little one counts, I think: how little anyone counts; how fast & furious & masterly life is; & how all these thousands are swimming for dear life. I felt elderly & mature. And nobody respected me. They were very eager, egotistical, or rather not much impressed by age & repute. Very little reverence or that sort of thing about. The corridors of Girton are like vaults in some horrid high church cathedral—on & on they go, cold & shiny—with a light burning. High gothic rooms; acres of bright brown wood; here & there a photograph.

And we saw Trinity & King’s this morning. Now to concentrate on English literature—forgetting Mary & Tom & how we went to be read aloud to, & Lady Cunard, & Clive back & Nessa back, & the Well of Loneliness. But Thank God to get back to writing again.

Wednesday 7 November

And this shall be written for my own pleasure,—

But that phrase inhibits me: for if one writes only for one’s own pleasure,—I dont know what it is that happens. I suppose the convention of writing is destroyed; therefore one does not write at all. I am rather headachy, & dimly obscured with sleeping draught. This is the aftermath (what does that mean?—Trench, whom I open idly apparently says nothing) of Orlando. Yes, yes, since I wrote here I have become two inches & a half higher in the public view. I think I may say that I am now among the well known writers. I had tea with Lady Cunard—might have lunched or dined any day. I found her in a little cap telephoning. It was not her atmosphere—this of solitary talk. She is too shrewd to expand, & needs society to make her rash & random which is her point. Ridiculous little parrokeet faced woman; but not quite sufficiently ridiculous. I kept wishing for superlatives: could not get the illusion to flap its wings. Flunkeys, yes; but a little drab & friendly. Marble floors, yes; but no glamour; no tune strumming, for me at least. And the two of us sitting there had almost to be conventional & flat—reminds me of Sir Thomas Browne—the greatest book of our times—said a little flatly by a woman of business, to me who don’t believe in that kind of thing unless launched with champagne & garlands. Then in came Lord Donegall, a glib Irish youth, dark sallow slick, on the Press. Dont they treat you like a dog? I said. “No, not at all” he replied, astonished that a marquis could be treated like a dog by anyone. And then we went up & up to see pictures on stairs in ballrooms & finally to Lady C.’s bedroom, hung entirely with flower pieces. The bed has its triangular canopy of rose red silk; the windows, looking on the square, are hung with green brocade. Her poudreuse—like mine only painted & gilt stood open with gold brushes looking glasses, & there on her gold slippers were neatly laid gold stockings. All this paraphernalia for one stringy old hop o’ my thumb. She set the two great musical boxes playing & I said did she lie in bed & listen to them? But no. She has nothing fantastic in that way about her. Money is important. She told me rather sordid stories of Lady Sackville never visiting her without fobbing something off on her—now a bust, worth £5, for which she paid £100; now a brass knocker. “And then her talk I didn’t care for it…” Somehow I saw into these sordid commonplace talks, & could not sprinkle the air with gold dust easily. But no doubt she has her acuity, her sharp peck at life; only how adorable, I thought, as I tiptoed home in my tight shoes, in the fog, in the chill, could one open one of these doors that I still open so venturously, & find a live interesting real person, a Nessa, a Duncan, a Roger. Some one new, whose mind would begin vibrating. Coarse & usual & dull these Cunards & Colefaxes are—for all their astonishing competence in the commerce of life.

And I cannot think what to ‘write next’. I mean the situation is, this Orlando is of course a very quick brilliant book. Yes, but I did not try to explore. And must I always explore? Yes I think so still. Because my reaction is not the usual. Nor can I even after all these years run it off lightly. Orlando taught me how to write a direct sentence; taught me continuity & narrative, & how to keep the realities at bay. But I purposely avoided of course any other difficulty. I never got down to my depths & made shapes square up, as I did in The Lighthouse.

Well but Orlando was the outcome of a perfectly definite, indeed overmastering impulse. I want fun. I want fantasy. I want (& this was serious) to give things their caricature value. And still this mood hangs about me. I want to write a history, say of Newnham or the womans movement, in the same vein. The vein is deep in me—at least sparkling, urgent. But is it not stimulated by applause? overstimulated? My notion is that there are offices to be discharged by talent for the relief of genius: meaning that one has the play side; the gift when it is mere gift, unapplied gift; & the gift when it is serious, going to business. And one relieves the other.

Yes, but The Moths? That was to be an abstract mystical eyeless book: a playpoem. And there may be affectation in being too mystical, too abstract; saying Nessa & Roger & Duncan & Ethel Sands admire that: it is the uncompromising side of me; therefore I had better win their approval—

Again, one reviewer says that I have come to a crisis in the matter of style: it is now so fluent & fluid that it runs through the mind like water.

That disease began in The Lighthouse. The first part came fluid—how I wrote & wrote!

Shall I now check & consolidate, more in the Dalloway Jacob’s Room style?

I rather think the upshot will be books that relieve other books: a variety of styles & subjects: for after all, that is my temperament, I think: to be very little persuaded of the truth of anything—what I say, what people say—always to follow, blindly instinctively with a sense of leaping over a precipice—the call of—the call of—now, if I write The Moths I must come to terms with these mystical feelings.

Desmond destroyed our Saturday walk; he is now mouldy & to me depressing. He is perfectly reasonable & charming. Nothing surprises, nothing shocks him. He has been through it all one feels. He has come out rolled, smoothed, rather sodden rather creased & jumbled, like a man who has sat up all night in a third class railway carriage. His fingers are stained yellow with cigarettes. One tooth in the lower jaw is missing. His hair is dank. His eye more than ever dubious. He has a hole in his blue sock. Yet he is resolute & determined—thats what I find so depressing. He seems to be sure that it is his view that is the right one; ours vagaries, deviations. And if his view is the right one, God knows there is nothing to live for: not a greasy biscuit. And the egotism of men surprises & shocks me even now. Is there a woman of my acquaintance who could sit in my arm chair from 3 to 6.30 without the semblance of a suspicion that I may be busy, or tired, or bored; & so sitting could talk, grumbling & grudging, of her difficulties, worries; then eat chocolates, then read a book, & go at last, apparently self-complacent & wrapped in a kind of blubber of misty self satisfaction? Not the girls at Newnham or Girton. They are far too spry; far too disciplined. None of that self-confidence is their lot.

We paid for our dinner at the Lion. Miss Thomas & Miss ——? were relieved, not to have to part with quite so many half crowns. And they showed us the chocolate coloured corridors of Girton, like convent cells;—

And there was the meeting in Mr Williams Ellises studio—a vast hall in Ebury street, with ostentatiously ragged chair covers. Our raggedness, as a profession, was not ostentatious alas; it is part of our souls; a dowdiness that is not ragged, however; a meticulous respectability which is not my working state; for then I am, I think, almost picturesque. As a crowd together we achieve only dinginess & something egotistic & unreserved in our faces; as for old Garnett, I felt surely someone ought to put that surly shaggy unkempt old monstrosity (certainly his nails want cutting & his coat is matted with mud & burrs) in the lethal chamber. D⁠[itt]⁠o of his mistress: the top half Esquimaux, the bottom Maytime in Hampstead—sprigged muslin, sandals. Vita as usual like a lamp or torch in all this petty bourgeoisdom; a tribute to the breeding of the Sackvilles, for without care of her clothes she appears among them (in all the sanity & strength of a well made body) like a lampost, straight, glowing. None of us have that; or know not how to carry it.

Poor Rose Macaulay—a mere chit; a wafer—& so on to the Hendersons in Hampstead, where my spleen & Frankie’s were twin spleens: poor Frankie however kept his rattle & clapper going, hour after hour, sounding alone, while I sank in a tolerable arm chair & could say nothing; though Mrs Enfield who has read the whole of Balzac made advances with Proust. Faith, I think, saw in this languor, bad manners & conceit. She saw us despising her home & husband. She despised them herself. And she went to bed saying something bitter to Hubert, & looked back into the drawing room, wondering why all the colours were wrong. But then next morning there are the children at breakfast & she recovers somewhat but has to speak severely about Mrs Maypole, the hired help (10/- a night) who dropped the plates, & left Mr Birrell holding the ladle; & the ice was salt. Then she takes up Orlando & says, to Hubert, “This is a greatly over rated book—It is far far worse than The Lighthouse…’ at the same time, ‘What exciting lives these people lead! Bloomsbury…”

Thursday 8 November

Just to solace myself before correcting Hardy & Gissing, I will note that we went to Karin’s party last night. The truth is the stimulus is too brisk; one rattles; & only a shout can be heard, & one must stand; & one gets caught, like a bramble on a river by some branch; & hooked up out of the eddy. An emerald green Russian talked to me of seals & then gave me a card; I am to lecture 4 times a week for 8 weeks in America—Oh yes—& she will arrange most advantageous terms. But won’t mention money in a drawing room: so we lapse upon seals again, or Ann [Stephen]’s rabbit—a chinchilla animal lying languidly extended in the midst of the rumpus, exquisite, alien. Ethel Sands, fanning my vanity into a glow: yet she was downright the other night that Orlando isn’t a patch on Lighthouse, with talk of luncheon parties where nothing is talked about but &c. &c.

Janet & Angus to dinner. The young man who wants a job is not amiable; poor old Angus cuts up a little rough, & launches into anxious worried explanations about his play. He will never now break through that chrysalis core of gentlemanly reserve, caution, good manners which shells him in. I think he will meditate more & more upon the glories of being a Davidson. Yet he has his scallywag side, the poor man, dancing & dining, which is to his credit. Janet in comparison seemed rapid, decided & lustrous, all in gold for Karin’s party with Madge’s gold necklace, & something very like Madge now & then; but tempered with the Vaughan decision. She is an attractive woman; competent; disinterested, taking blood tests all day to solve some abstract problem.

… think it

Saturday 10 November

This unexampled fluency here is due to the fact that I should be reading Miss Jewsbury, answering letters (Lady Cunard to dine alone with George Moore) or correcting Hardy & Gissing. All these tasks are unworthy the sacred morning hours. Phrase tossing can only be done then; so I toss them privately here, feeling relieved not to be making money, once in a while. Shall I say that Bennett in the Ev⁠[ening] Standard hurt me less than Squire in the Observer? Not at all, I think;—an odd thing, though, how I am praised & abused: & what a sting I am in the flanks of Squires & Bennetts.

What is more interesting—& Lord knows this is true—I am speaking coolly & faithfully—is the trial yesterday at Bow Street. We were all packed in by 10.30: the door at the top of the court opened; in stepped the debonair distinguished magistrate; we all rose; he bowed; took his seat under the lion & the unicorn, & then proceeded. Something like a Harley St. specialist investigating a case. All black & white, tie pin, clean shaven, wax coloured, & carved, in that light, like ivory. He was ironical at first: raised his eyebrows & shrugged. Later I was impressed by the reason of the law, its astuteness, its formality. Here have we evolved a very remarkable fence between us & barbarity; something commonly recognised; half humbug & ceremony therefore—when they pulled out calf bound books & read old phrases I thought this; & the bowing & scraping made me think it; but in these banks runs a live stream. What is obscenity? What is literature? What is the difference between the subject & the treatment? In what cases is evidence allowable? This last, to my relief, was decided against us: we could not be called as experts in obscenity, only in art. So Desmond who had got under the palanquin where he looked too indifferent, too calm, too completely at his ease to be natural, was only asked his qualifications & then, not allowed to answer the obscene question, was dismissed. In the hall I talked to Lady Troubridge (who used to sculpt & last time we met was a tea party, as children, in Montpelier Sqre) & John—John lemon yellow, tough, stringy, exacerbated. Their costs run into 4 figures she said. And Leonard thinks this heralds a subscription. After lunch we heard an hour more, & then the magistrate, increasingly deliberate & courteous, said he would read the book again & give judgment next Friday at two, [on] the pale tepid vapid book which lay damp & slab all about the court. And I lost my little Roman brooch, & that is the end of this great day, so far. A curious brown top lighted scene; very stuffy; policemen at the doors; matrons passing through. An atmosphere quite decent & formal, of adult people.

Sunday 25 November

Leonard’s 48th birthday. We were at Rodmell, where all has fallen into our hands, rapidly, unexpectedly: on top of the field we get a cottage, & Percy [Bartholomew] is ‘our man’. Mrs Percy has inherited from that strange relationship of hers—I suspect her of being the illegitimate child of a circus manager—they travelled—she never speaks of her family—her father died alone—her Auntie left jewels & clothes—she has inherited £330 & some odd shillings. She has bought a set of big white teeth; & now thinks of a gramophone or a wireless set.

I took Essex & Eth (Lytton’s) down to read, & Lord forgive me!—find it a poor book. I have not finished it; & am keeping it to see if my [text ends]

Wednesday 28 November

Father’s birthday. He would have been 1928
1832
96 96, yes, today; & could have been 96, like other people one has known; but mercifully was not. His life would have entirely ended mine. What would have happened? No writing, no books;—inconceivable. I used to think of him & mother daily; but writing The Lighthouse, laid them in my mind. And now he comes back sometimes, but differently. (I believe this to be true—that I was obsessed by them both, unhealthily; & writing of them was a necessary act.) He comes back now more as a contemporary. I must read him some day. I wonder if I can feel again, I hear his voice, I know this by heart?

Last night was one of our evenings—apparently successful; Adrian, Hope, Christa, Clive, Raymond, Bunny, Lytton, Vita & Valery towards the end: & Elizabeth Ponsonby. People enjoyed it. Perhaps I didnt; perhaps I did. Half way through Lytton vanished (he lodges upstairs) brayed out of the room by Clive’s vociferation, L. thinks. Clive makes it all very strident, gaslit, band played. I marked a queer change in my feeling when Lytton went. At other times I have felt his silence disapproving; have moderated my folly under it, & tried to keep him from going. But now that man writes Elizabeth & Essex; I kept thinking: well, if he can palm that off on us after years of effort—that lively superficial meretricious book—he can go or stay as he likes. I feel no bite in his disapproval. And though one of my vile vices is jealousy, of other writers’ fame, though I am (& I think we all are) secretly pleased to find Lytton’s book a bad one, I also feel depressed. If I were to analyse, the truth is I think that the pleasure is mean, & therefore not deep or satisfying; one would, in the depths, have got real pleasure, though superficial pain, had E & E been a masterpiece. Oh yes, I should—for I have a mind that feeds perfectly dispassionately & apart from my vanities & jealousies upon literature; & that would have taken a masterpiece to itself. Mixed last night with my feeling was some curious personal dissatisfaction: that Lytton whom I loved & love should write like that. It is a reflection on my own taste. It is so feeble, so shallow; & yet Lytton in himself is neither. So one next accuses the public; & then the Carringtons & the young men. And one furbishes up a cloistered secluded invalidish Lytton whipping the flanks of the language & putting it to this foaming gallop, when the poor beast is all spavins & sores. And Dadie & Pernel & Janie Bussy & Dorothy [Bussy] all declared with emotion that this book was his best!

So the days pass, & I ask myself sometimes whether one is not hypnotised, as a child by a silver globe, by life; & whether this is living. Its very quick, bright, exciting. But superficial perhaps. I should like to take the globe in my hands & feel it quietly, round, smooth, heavy. & so hold it, day after day. I will read Proust I think. I will go backwards & forwards.

As for my next book, I am going to hold myself from writing till I have it impending in me: grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall. The Moths still haunts me, coming, as they always do, unbidden, between tea & dinner, while L. plays the gramophone. I shape a page or two; & make myself stop. Indeed I am up against some difficulties. Fame to begin with. Orlando has done very well. Now I could go on writing like that—the tug & suck are at me to do it. People say this was so spontaneous, so natural. And I would like to keep those qualities if I could without losing the others. But those qualities were largely the result of ignoring the others. They came of writing exteriorly; & if I dig, must I not lose them? And what is my own position towards the inner & the outer? I think a kind of ease & dash are good;—yes: I think even externality is good; some combination of them ought to be possible. The idea has come to me that what I want now to do is to saturate every atom. I mean to eliminate all waste, deadness, superfluity: to give the moment whole; whatever it includes. Say that the moment is a combination of thought; sensation; the voice of the sea. Waste, deadness, come from the inclusion of things that dont belong to the moment; this appalling narrative business of the realist: getting on from lunch to dinner: it is false, unreal, merely conventional. Why admit any thing to literature that is not poetry—by which I mean saturated? Is that not my grudge against novel⁠[ist]⁠s—that they select nothing? The poets succeeding by simplifying: practically everything is left out. I want to put practically everything in; yet to saturate. That is what I want to do in The Moths. It must include nonsense, fact, sordidity: but made transparent. I think I must read Ibsen & Shakespeare & Racine. And I will write something about them; for that is the best spur, my mind being what it is; then I read with fury & exactness; otherwise I slip & skip: I am a lazy reader. But no: I am surprised & a little disquieted by the remorseless severity of my mind: that it never stops reading & writing; makes me write on Geraldine Jewsbury, on Hardy, on Women—is too professional, too little any longer a dreamy amateur.

Saturday 8 December

Here is a note barely dashed off (10 to one—just finished, very provisionally “Phases of Fiction”) after Christabel MacClaren; & her ‘winkle’ party, as I call it, the other night. I mean she picked me out with a pin—about Lesbianism, & Dotty—(she is not one). My note was about her attitude to men; the adoring, flattering woman’s attitude, which I so seldom see so purely. Like a flame leaping up. Clive “the most honourable of men”—yes but said with a devoutness, a radiancy, that made me laugh. Is this the ‘natural’ attitude between the sexes? What Clive has, the other way round for women? So cordial, so appreciative; I could hear it kindling her voice when she said “The men were bathing or writing letters or talking that was at Sherfield. The men, good delightful creatures, were so engaged while that wretched furtive creature D. pursued me. And I can see man after man, Desmond, Clive &c, Wells, Shaw, warming his hands at this natural warmth, & expanding. It amused me. The other thought I had was about the limits of luxury: how far can the human soul stretch into rugs & rooms; at what point they suffocate its force. I have seen several rich people this autumn; & thought them, perhaps, dulled, coarsened by it: Lady Cunard; two days ago Mrs Bowen & Mrs Grenfell at Lydia’s.

Sunday 9 December

These reflections are written on a bitter cold evening to get the taste of a sentence into my mouth again. Angelica came this morning, & every time I lifted my pen she,—heavenly little creature that she is, demure, witty fantastic, neatly tipped the cup upside down; like a fool I went on trying to write, & only gave up when I was in a state of exasperation, not with her, but with my book: I was beginning a new beginning to Fiction. Now it is after tea; Angus will be coming to see Leonard about a character; & I am escaped, & can’t be got at; & shall read Troilus & Cressida (Chaucer) till dinner. I have again seen too many people, without much intensity. Lydia’s foolish tea party; & the Bagenals’ lunch, & Christa; & then Long Bam, & being driven up by Dotty; “I cant say I understand Harold—I can’t really say I do”—Then Vita, making a sacrifice of her quiet evening, drove up to London & heard her broadcast & went back with her, to save me the solitary drive. This worried me, rather: for whom would I give up this evening? & then Dotty with her pecking exacting ways “Please dear put the window up—put the window down” makes Vita seem to me pathetically gentle & kind. But none of this matters very much I agree, & Lord helping, I shall work all this week—save for the evenings. It is so cold my back is cold now, while the fire roasts my feet; fire is striking & many fire engines have rushed down Southampton Row. The King is dragging along, & the shop assistants are in fear lest they shall lose their Christmas bonus. Christmas impends. And we shall spend it alone here, I think, & go to Rodmell afterwards & plan a new room, with Kennedy. And then to Berlin we say. Meanwhile Nessa & I give our Tuesday evenings, & too many people press to come.

But why I ask “see” people? Whats the point? These isolated occasions which come so often. May I come & see you? And what they get, or I get, save the sense of a slide passing on a screen, I cant say.

Tuesday 18 December

Here I should be pegging away at Fiction; rather an interesting little book I think; but I cannot get my mind down on to it, like a bird of prey firmly attached. I was switched off to write a eulogy of Lady Strachey, burnt yesterday with a bunch of our red & white carnations on top of her. It is odd how little her death means to me—for this reason. About a year ago she was said to be dying; & at once (Adrian told me) I made up my usual visualisation; felt the whole emotion of Lady Strachey’s passing—her memories & so on—that night; & then she did not die; & now when she does die, not a vision, not an emotion comes my way. These little tricks of psychology amuse me.

L. has just been in to consult about a 3rd edition of Orlando. This has been ordered; we have sold over 6000 copies; & sales are still amazingly brisk—150 today for instance; most days between 50 & 60; always to my surprise. Will they stop or go on? Anyhow my room is secure. For the first time since I married 1912—1928—16 years—I have been spending money. The spending muscle does not work naturally yet. I feel guilty; put off buying, when I know that I should buy; & yet have an agreeable luxurious sense of coins in my pocket beyond my weekly 13/- which was always running out, or being encroached upon. Yesterday I spent 15/- on a steel brooch. I spent £3 on a mother of pearl necklace—& I haven’t bought a jewel for 20 years perhaps! I have carpeted the dining room—& so on. I think one’s soul is the better for this lubrication; & I am going to spend freely, & then write, & so keep my brain on the boil. All this money making originated in a spasm of black despair one night at Rodmell 2 years ago. I was tossing up & down on those awful waves: when I said that I could find a way out. (For part of my misery was the perpetual limitation of everything; no chairs, or beds, no comfort, no beauty; & no freedom to move: all of which I determined there & then to win). And so came, with some argument, even tears one night (& how seldom I have ever cried!) to an agreement with Leonard about sharing money after a certain sum; & then opened a bank account; & now, at the lowest shall have £200 to put there on Jan. 1st. The important thing is to spend freely, without fuss or anxiety; & to trust to one’s power of making more—Indeed, I cannot at this moment very seriously doubt that I shall earn more, this next 5 years, than ever before.

But to return to Max Beerbohm. I met him at Ethel’s the other night. As I came in a thick set old man (such was my impression) rose, & I was introduced. No freakishness, no fancy about him. His face is solidified; has a thick moustache; a red veined skin, heavy lines; but then his eyes are perfectly round, very large, & sky blue. His eyes become dreamy & merry when the rest of him is well groomed & decorous in the extreme. He is brushed, neat, urbane. Halfway through dinner he turned to me & we began a ‘nice’, interesting, flattering, charming kind of talk; he told me how he had read an article on Addison at Bognor during the war; when literature seemed extinct; & there was his own name. I daresay V.W. catches your eye as M.B. does mine. And nothing has encouraged me more. So I said, as I think, that he is immortal. In a small way, he said; but with complacency. Like a jewel which is hard & flawless, yet always changing. A charming image he said, very kind, approving, & what half flattered half saddened me, equal. Am I on that level? Virginia Woolf says—V.W. thinks—how do you write? & so on: I was one of his colleagues & fellows in the art of writing; but not I hoped quite so old. Anyhow he asked me how I wrote. For he hacks every step with his pen, & therefore never alters. He thought I wrote like this. I told him I had to cut out great chunks. I wish you would send them to me, he said; simply; Indeed, he was nothing if not kind; but looked long & steadily. Looked at Lord David [Cecil]—that queer painters look, so matching, so considering apart from human intent; yet with him not entirely. After dinner, he leant on the mantelpiece & Maurice Baring & I flittered round him like a pair of butterflies, praising, laughing, extravagant. And he said he was so pleased by the praise of intelligent people like ourselves. But always he had to be led off to talk politely to this person & that; finally disappeared, very dignified, very discreet in his white waistcoat, pressing my hand in his plump firm one long; & saying what a pleasure &c. I own that I dont find much difference between the great & ourselves—indeed they are like us: I mean they dont have the frills & furbelows of the small; come to terms quickly & simply. But we got, of course, very little way. He talked of Hardy, & said he couldnt bear Jude the Obscure: thought it falsified life, for there is really more happiness than sorrow in life, & Hardy tries to prove the opposite. And his writing is so bad. Then I ran down—but he reads my essays & knows this—Belloc. M.B. said that Belloc, one must remember, poured out ten books a year on history poetry &c. He was one of those full unequal people who were never perfect, as he, M.B., might be called perfect in a small way. But he was glad I didnt like him. Charles Lamb had the most beautiful things in him & then he spoilt them. He had never read a book except Pendennis & Tess of the d’Urbervilles till he left Oxford. And now at last, at Rapallo, he reads. He is taking back Elizabeth & Orlando (pronounced in the French way) to read; treats he looks forward to.

Among others were present … Mrs Hammersley, Lord David, Hutchinsons, &c.

And we dined last night with the Hutchinsons & met George Moor⁠[e]—like an old silver coin now, so white so smooth; with his little flipper hands, like a walruses; & his chubby cheeks, & little knees—yet always saying the thing that comes into his head; fresh, juvenile almost for that reason; & very shrewd. Gave a description of Riceyman Steps—the ferns covered in dust, the man with cancer marrying the woman with fits—Not what one calls a distinguished mind—& what a subject to choose! It seems as if he attaches much importance to subject. He was always praising or altering ways of treating stories. He is writing some Greek novel now, dictating to a charming lady, who has every virtue, save that she is not forthcoming & therefore will not marry. He dictates, & this gives him something to bite upon: then he re-dictates. He never writes. There are no mss of his in existence. Perhaps the dictated style is a true account of his style & H⁠[enry]. J⁠[ames]’s. & accounts for their fluidity, their verbosity. And what it comes to is that the great are very simple; quick to come to terms with; reserved; & dont pay any attention to other peoples books (Moore throws scorn on them all—Shaw—a shriek of vulgarity—poisoned with vulgarity—never wrote a good sentence in his life—Wells—I spare myself Wells—& Galsworthy—) & live in an atmosphere very serene, bright, & fenced off: for all that they are more to the point than ordinary people; go to the heart of things directly. Moore toddled off & got quickly into a cab, Jack said, for all his look of an old silver coin.

[]

1929

[Diary XVIII]

Friday 4 January

How odd to think that I have given the world something that the world enjoys—I refer to the Manchester Guardian—Orlando is recognised for the masterpiece that it is. The Times does not mention Nessa’s pictures. Yet, she said last night, I have spent a long time over one of them. Then I think to myself, So I have something, instead of children, & fall comparing our lives. I note my own withdrawal from those desires; my absorption in what I call, inaccurately, ideas: this vision.

We saw Koteliansky on Christmas day. Rather dryer & yellower in the cheeks, like an orange that is old. He was in his shirt sleeves. He had been washing up his Christmas dinner, which was “No, not a very good one … Come in Come in”. This was Katherine’s room he said. It is poverty stricken, tidy, clean—a bed, a table. It looks over back gardens to the trees of Regent’s Park. We went straight into the old abuse of Murry; went back ten years, to Richmond, & those long visits; those difficult emphatic ways. He is, one says, the same. Very poor, as definite as ever. Still talking about Lawrence; a very very good writer but his last book DISGUSTING. You must read Counterpoint. Why? Because he is a seerious man, a cultivated man. And it is typical of the age. It is a painful book a horrid book but it is that. Still the same seriousness, & concentration upon say 5 objects which he has been staring at these 40 years. Still he gnaws the bone of Katherine & Murry. And all the time some emotion was working in him. He was glad we had come. What could he give us? He gave me a red wooden box, a Russian toy, & stuffed it full of his Russian cigarettes. His voice quivered now & then. He looked at me with emotion. All the linoleum was shining, where he had cleaned it, & he had painted the woodwork with two sorts of Reckitt’s blue: so that it shone very bright. He had painted it over & over. There he lives, how heaven knows. People will no longer buy his translations. His dog (a pure Jewish dog) is dead.

Now is life very solid, or very shifting? I am haunted by the two contradictions. This has gone on for ever: will last forever; goes down to the bottom of the world—this moment I stand on. Also it is transitory, flying, diaphanous. I shall pass like a cloud on the waves. Perhaps it may be that though we change; one flying after another, so quick so quick, yet we are somehow successive, & continuous—we human beings; & show the light through. But what is the light? I am impressed by the transitoriness of human life to such an extent that I am often saying a farewell—after dining with Roger for instance; or reckoning how many more times I shall see Nessa.

Thursday 28 March

It is a disgrace indeed; no diary has been left so late in the year. The truth was that we went to Berlin on the 16th of January, & then I was in bed for three weeks afterwards, & then could not write; perhaps for another three, & have spent my energy since in one of my excited outbursts of composition—writing what I made up in bed, a final version of Women & Fiction.

And as usual, I am bored by narrative. I want only to say how I met Nessa in Tottenham Court Road this afternoon, both of us sunk fathoms deep in that wash of reflection in which we both swim about. She will be gone on Wednesday for 4 months. It is queer how instead of drawing apart, life draws us together. But I was thinking a thousand things as I carried my teapot, gramophone records & stockings under my arm. It is one of those days that I called ‘potent’ when we lived in Richmond.

Perhaps I ought not to go on repeating what I have always said about the spring. One ought perhaps to be forever finding new things to say, since life draws on. One ought to invent a fine narrative style. Certainly there are many new ideas always forming in my head. For one, that I am going to enter a nunnery these next months; & let myself down into my mind; Bloomsbury being done with. I am going to face certain things. It is going to be a time of adventure & attack, rather lonely & painful I think. But solitude will be good for a new book. Of course, I shall make friends. I shall be external outwardly. I shall buy some good clothes & go out into new houses. All the time I shall attack this angular shape in my mind. I think the Moths (if that is what I shall call it) will be very sharply cornered. I am not satisfied though with the frame. There is this sudden fertility which may be mere fluency. In old days books were so many sentences absolutely struck with an axe out of crystal: & now my mind is so impatient, so quick, in some ways so desperate.

Old age is withering us; Clive, Sibyl, Francis—all wrinkled & dusty; going over the hoops, along the track. Only in myself, I say, forever bubbles this impetuous torrent. So that even if I see ugliness in the glass, I think, very well, inwardly I am more full of shape & colour than ever. I think I am bolder as a writer. I am alarmed by my own cruelty with my friends. Clive, I say, is intolerably dull. Francis is a runaway milk lorry.

I feel on the verge of some strenuous adventure: yes; as if this spring day were the hatching; the portal; the opening through which I shall go upon this experience. So when I wake early, I brace myself out of my terrors by saying that I shall need great courage: after all, I say, I made £1000 all from willing it early one morning. No more poverty I said; & poverty has ceased. I am summoning Philcox next week to plan a room—I have money to build it, money to furnish it. And we have the new car, & we can drive to Edinburgh in June if we like, & go to Cassis.

The new year was threatened with a pumping machine, making this studio a trial; for it pumped every 25 minutes. Now for a fortnight it has not pumped. Am I saved? Now it is so quiet that I only hear sparrows; & a voice singing in the hotel. A perfect room for me. Nessa has taken a studio & will let 37, thus ending, for ever I suppose, her Gordon Square life. How much I admire this handling of life as if it were a thing one could throw about; this handling of circumstance. Angelica will go to school. I have now many admiring letters to answer. Simpkins said today that many great publishers would be proud to have our list. In 10 years we shall be rather celebrated. At anyrate, without any trouble to write well, as there should have been, I have once more launched this diary.

Saturday 13 April

Habits gradually change the face of ones life as time changes one’s physical face; & one does not know it. Here am I using this studio to sit in, & with my diary to write down here; almost always after tea I retire here. And then I never print now or address envelopes. So perhaps habit will snuff out this diary one day.

I am sordidly debating within myself the question of Nelly; the perennial question. It is an absurdity, how much time L. & I have wasted in talking about servants. And it can never be done with because the fault lies in the system. How can an uneducated woman let herself in, alone, into our lives?—what happens is that she becomes a mongrel; & has no roots any where. I could put my theory into practice by getting a daily of a civilised kind, who had her baby in Kentish town; & treated me as an employer, not friend. Here is a fine rubbish heap left by our parents to be swept.

It is very quiet & very cold. I walked Pinka through the Saturday streets this afternoon & was woken to the fact that it is April by a primrose on the pavement. I had been thinking I was on one of my January walks, with lights lit at 3.30 in peoples bedrooms. Rodmell was impracticable because of the cold; & until I have a room, I cannot go there meaning to work.

We always do mean to work.

I have just agreed to do another 4 articles for Mrs Van Doren, because she has raised her price to £50 an article—so that, whatever the cost, I can have my new room. And all this money is changing my habits. I’m not sure it is not the memorable fact about this spring—for the 1928
1912
   16 first time since 1912—16 years that is—I am able to look say at blue lustre cups in a shop & decide, well why not buy them? But they cost £6 … But then I am making over £1000 a year. I can make as much as I want. This little colloquy still takes place before I can unbend my old penurious muscles. But it is always better to buy than not to buy I think.

Hugh Walpole was here the other day, from 4.30 to 7.15 alone, over the fire. The same uneasy talk as usual; brisk & breezy, hating war; & then this morbid egotism & desire to scratch the same place over & over again—his own defects as a writer & how to remedy them, what they spring from; all mixed up with his normal, & usual sense of being prosperous & admired—from which, as he admits when I ask him, he gets great pleasure. He starts indeed to protest that he gives pleasure, does good, but can’t bring that out in my presence; which is why he seeks my presence—a scratching stone to rid him of the world’s mud. He protests too much. On the other hand, I like these bustling vigour⁠[ous] characters: I like talk of Russia, & war & great doings & famous people—If I don’t see them I romanticise them.

Leonard is upstairs finishing the Hogarth Press accounts. Yesterday he gave the three stall hands a bonus: Mrs C. £25; Belcher £20; Kennedy £20. They sent up a bunch of roses later in the day. For the first time we have made over £400 profit. And 7 people now depend on us; & I think with pride that 7 people depend, largely, upon my hand writing on a sheet of paper. That is of course a great solace & pride to me. Its not scribbling; its keeping 7 people fed & housed: a great big man like Percy; a carrot faced woman like Cartwright; they live on my words. They will be feeding off Women & Fiction next year for which I predict some sale. It has considerable conviction. I think that the form, half talk half soliloquy allows me to get more onto the page than any how else. It made itself up & forced itself upon me (in this form—the thinking had been done & the writing stiffly & unsatisfactorily 4 times before) as I lay in bed after Berlin. I used to make it up at such a rate that when I got pen & paper I was like a water bottle turned upside down. The writing was as quick as my hand could write; too quick, for I am now toiling to revise; but this way gives one freedom & lets one leap from back to back of one’s thoughts.

Happily, for my health of soul, I am now very little noticed, & so can forget the fictitious self, for it is half so, which fame makes up for one: I can see my famous self tapering about the world. I am more comfortable when shut up, self-contained as now.

The great pleasure of money is to spend a pound—as on a dinner at Richmond—without accounting for it—I dined there with Vita. It was cold. We drove round the Park. I saw a man leading a large cat on a chain. I saw many odd parties in the hotel. How can they come here tonight, I said? There was the old woman gorged like a vulture. The woman with her foot cocked under the table at this angle angle, all through dinner: the young spark in grey with the pink carnation; the two prominenteyed daughters in velvet; & all kinds of emotions, of ridicule & interest crossing the vast room perpetually from one table to another. The waiters, I thought, are only here this one night; everything is unreal & will vanish. But it is going on precisely the same at this moment. Have you had a tiring day Miss ——? says Mrs —— leaning out to speak to her. Oh dreadfully tiring says Miss —— taking her seat at the table with the reserved private bottle of soda water. And in complete desolation she waits for the courses to be brought.

Monday 29 April

And it is pouring. Oh this cold spring! Dry as a bone, though until today, but with never a blue sky. So that my red coat, which is like haws in winter, suits it. I heard the nightingale at Vita’s a week or two ago—the one warm night. And we were cold at Rodmell last week, when we went down to see Philcox, who will build two rooms for £320, & take only two months. It was cold; but how silent, how safe from voices & talk! How I resented our coming back; & quickly changed into the social sphere of my soul; & went to lunch with Sibyl; & there had, for my pains, precisely six minutes of tolerable talk with Max Beerbohm. But dear me, how little talk with great men now disturbs me. Are we all chilling & freezing, & do we look into each others old faces as into the craters of the moon? (These I saw silver white & like the spots that are made by water dropping into plaster of paris through Vita’s telescope the other day.) I begin to think that youth is the only tolerable thing to look at; & am taking Judy to the Coliseum on Wednesday.

I forgot to say that the pump has begun again & is grinding away at this moment. But I say I shall get used to it—certainly I shall.

This morning I began to revise Phases of Fiction, & with that done, I can see my way clear to a complete imaginative book.

Meanwhile, I am eddying quicker & quicker into the stream, into London: tomorrow Christabel; then Mauron’s lecture & Mary & the Keynes’ & the Eliots.

Poor Tom—a true poet, I think; what they will call in a hundred years a man of genius: & this is his life. I stand for half an hour listening while he says that Vivien cant walk. Her legs have gone. But whats the matter? No one knows. And so she lies in bed—cant put a shoe on. And they have difficulties, humiliations, with servants. And after endless quibbling about visiting—which he cant do these 8 weeks, owing to moving house & 15 first cousins come to England, suddenly he appears overcome, moved, tragic, unhappy, broken down, because I offer to come to tea on Thursday. Oh but we dont dare ask our friends, he said. We have been deserted. Nobody has been to see us for weeks. Would you really come—all this way? to see us? Yes I said. But what a vision of misery, imagined, but real too. Vivien with her foot on a stool, in bed all day; Tom hurrying back lest she abuse him: this is our man of genius.—This is what I gathered yesterday morning on the telephone.

Sunday 12 May

Here, having just finished what I call the final revision of Women & Fiction so that L. can read it after tea, I stop: surfeited. And the pump, which I was so sanguine as to think ceased, begins again. About W. & F. I am not sure—a brilliant essay?—I daresay; it has much work in it, many opinions boiled down into a kind of jelly, which I have stained red as far as I can. But I am eager to be off—to write without any boundary coming slick in ones eyes: here my public has been too close: facts; getting them malleable, easily yielding to each other.

A wet day, or we should be at Hampton Court with Roger & Mauron. And I am glad of the rain, because I have talked too much. We have seen too many people—Sydney Waterlow perhaps the most notable, as a resurrection. A desperate looking pompous sad respectable elderly man; worldly; but quivering as usual in his shell. Any pin pricks him in the unarmoured skin. I liked him. We met in the dark hall, glad of its darkness. We talked almost too easily, of Lucy Clifford buried with a service; & then his lancers & state at Bangkok—all to his liking. His importance very clear to him. At Oare he is nobody. And so he would like to go back to Bangkok & be important in the East for ever. He can seek the truth no more—has indeed seen through the search for truth, which was in him the search for power. He believes in nothing any more, he said, & is convinced now that nothing will ever change him—So, talking of something else for a moment, he suddenly burst out into a terrific peroration about Spengler; who has changed the world for him—made infinitely more difference than anybody—so fixed & stable & independent is he.

Also we had a party: Roger a little old—to my mind he needs Nessa to fertilise & sweeten him. Some queer rancour often seems to exacerbate him. When his stomach heals his leg aches. And Plomer came—a little rigid, I fear; & too much of a gentleman; & little Blunden, the very image of a London house sparrow, that pecks & cheeps & is starved & dirty. And Julian, to me a very satisfactory young man at present; full of ardour, yet clear, precise; & genial too—with all his apostolic fervour & abstractedness a good fellow, warm, kindly; much more apt to see the good than the bad. For example he thought poor little grey mouse Jenkins very nice & very intelligent & sat screwed up on the floor at her feet. He had been consoling Topsy all the afternoon. For Topsy & Peter have separated. Yes they have separated for ever, owing to her flirtatious ways.

Monday 13 May

How odd this is—here I am sitting at 3.10 with nothing much to do—nothing that I need do. I must take up printing again. But we have been to the Singers with the car—its clutch in trouble; & as we started, up came Saxon, on his holiday—Going to the Ring of course, & having a day off. For how many years has he done this—strange methodical character that he is. We dont meet for months, & take up the subject again. He took out his cheque book & said he thought the pattern was changed, with the same interest in that minute detail as he had 30 years ago. He has the same umbrella hanging by a hook on his arm; the same gold watch chain; & his pirouetting attitudes; & sprightly bird-like ways.

What then has life given you, I asked, (myself) looking at the Church at the top of Portland Street. Well, he is free to go to the Opera, to read Plato to play chess. And he will continue doing these things, as if they were the chosen things till he dies. There is a certain dignity in this steady doing of things which seem chosen. Yet—thus one always ends a comparison of lives—I wouldn’t for the whole world live yours.

And at 4 I must change & wash & go to the Mauron lecture at Argyll House; & then to Molly & then to dine with Sibyl—which will, I hope finish this lap of my race. Did I say that I still think of life as a series of laps—& still take my fences dutifully & then enjoy nothingness? So if I dine with Sibyl I need not dine with Christabel. I have never got in the frame of mind which makes these fences negligible. Then we go to Rodmell for 6 days; & then home; & then to Cassis; & then home. & then Rodmell; & then the autumn; & then the winter—Oh this pump! I wish I could say I never notice it. Moreover, the idea has come to me that I ought now to be re-reading my own books, for our ‘Collected Edition’. L. & Kennedy are working at a dust cover this moment. Shall I run away from my duty & the pump & go & see?

The election draws near, & the Derby. I will go upstairs & read Proust I think, since I am fabricating a few remarks on him for that cursed book—that stone that plunges me deeper & deeper in the water. The reason I dislike dining with Sibyl is that she exacts it: I am to give her a display of intimacy, which she cannot acquire, poor woman, for herself.

Wednesday 15 May

This is written, as many pages in the past used to be written, to try a new pen; for I am vacillating—cant be sure to stick to the old pen any more. And then every gold pen has some fatal drawback. I make a note here that I will one of these days read the whole of Matthew Arnold. Never have I met one without. And then one cant be sure till one’s written a long screed. And then one’s ashamed to go back—& then one does—& then it all begins again, like Mathew Arnold’s river, or sea (brings in again &c &c).

I went to Sibyl’s dinner; but Heavens, how little real point there is to these meetings—save indeed that the food is good; & there is wine, & a certain atmosphere of luxury & hospitality. This, on the other hand, tends to drug one; one has been given something, for which one has to pay. And I don’t like that feeling. The old white haired baby [George Moore] sat propped up in his high chair; his hair now white like flax, like silk; his cheeks tinted a childs pink; his eyes with their marble hardness; his boneless ineffective hands. For some reason, he paid me compliments, indeed referred to me as an authority on English; & even offered, which I daresay was kindly meant, though nothing has happened, to send me one of his books.

What did we discuss? Mostly himself & his books, I think; & how he had known various old dim figures, far away in the past. I told them about Lord Alfred’s threat, & this launched him on stories about Robbie Ross, & his own lawsuits. But he is a detached shrewd old man; without many illusions & not very dependent on anyone, I should say. He wanted to walk back to Ebury Street, but it was raining & they made him take a cab. He talked about Henry James, & a proof sheet which nobody could read; & he said that a sentence ought to form like a cloud at the end of the pen—dont you think so? he said to me. These little compliments were due to my Geraldine & Jane which he said & references, was an admirable story & should be published as such. It had nothing to do with fact. And I rather think he will die soon—he has to have another operation; but in his detached way. I think these artists are slightly bored by all physical transactions. Let my body die, I can imagine him saying, so long as I can go on forming sentences at the end of my pen—& why not? Save that of course he says he enjoys the pleasures of the body. But that I rather doubt.

And I doubt too if Clive does. Clive is I fancy in bad odour everywhere at the moment, with his silly egotistic ways—writing to me to boast of a ‘mystery’, which it is clear that I am to impart; but I shant. He is like Lottie au fond; & Lottie by the way is dismissed; & is said to owe Karin £8 which she can’t pay, & great scenes take place, poor Adrian, as I imagine, moping & glooming in discomfort alone; with Karin savage & violent & competent spasmodically, rushing out to pay bills & put her house in order in ten minutes when she has neglected it all these years: sordid & squalid it all is, & hardly gives me any pleasure, to tell the truth, these sufferings of my friends.

I am depressed. Brace has done it. The oval faced sallow man. They want to keep W. & F., which I like, till the spring, & make P. of F. come out this autumn—a book I hate; & was, as I think, wrongly pressed to undertake. And then Roger wants to come to Rodmell, & I don’t like after my protests, to say no; & yet to have to talk & talk—& then Philcox can’t get my rooms done, all because of Durrant’s long waiting. So my wheel is turning low. & do I like this pen or dont I? Such are my sorrows Mr Wesley, as the man said when the servant put on too many coals.

What Clive says is that he has a mystery; something he cant share; & this annoys me too; the sensation mongering, like Dotty; the desire to be talked of. Oh, I say, if only I could plunge my mind into the delights of pure imagination, & so get some pull on this horrid world of real life!

But I must some how wind up this account of flies in the eye & go up to dinner & try to think of some cause of pleasure with Leonard. Something cheerful. Oh but then I must grind on at Proust, I suppose; & then copy out passages. Never mind, I will try my new pen & see if that doesn’t cheer me. Because clearly these miseries are very small trivial miseries, & fundamentally I am the happiest woman in all W.C.1. The happiest wife, the happiest writer, the most liked inhabitant, so I say, in Tavistock Square. When I count up my blessings, they must surely amount to more than my sorrows; even when I have all these flies in my eyes.

Well, what am I going to have for dinner? And I will hastily try my new pen on this last page, making it rapidly describe my complete renovation of domestic life—odd, I didn’t do it before: that I order dinner no longer; but write it in a book & thus put glass between me & Nelly.

Oh & George [Duckworth] rang up this morning. A French couple who admire me: could I lunch: & my teeth he says, drop out, while I talk, while I eat; & they preferred Brighton to Penshurst.

Tuesday 28 May

It is an odd summer, this one, unexampled perhaps in our history. We are going off to Cassis on Tuesday for a week. This is a revolution. We have never been abroad so late in the year I think. The Election will be over. We shall be governed by a Tory or a Labour party—Tory, I suppose. For the benefit of posterity I may say that nobody pretends to know, with the exception of the candidates. They are all—even Hubert—confident. And I feel, rather oddly, that this is an important election. Walking down the King’s Road with Sidney Waterlow the other night—having been to dine at his club off a mahogany table surrounded by the portraits of statesmen—I had a cocktail, but no wine—& it was a thundery day—Leonard had a headache—& we sat in the ladies reception room—a ducks egg coloured room with globes of light sending their light up, not down—very cool, smooth solid, something like sitting inside a shape of blanc mange—then said Sidney, feeling that something must be done, shall we go & see the Sangers? It was a thing that one ought to do. It would give them such pleasure. And he bought me 3 bunches of violets at the door from a woman who said it was her 40th wedding day: a tribute to my having once been asked in marriage by Sidney was it?—I held them in my hand all the evening, & we found the Sangers out; only a menial man came up from the basement. So we said we will call on the MacCarthys. And so it was that we walked along the King’s Road, talking about the Election. Sidney said that human nature has improved. We are all becoming gentler & wiser. Even the dogs are. One never sees a dog fight now he said, & sure enough the big mongrel trotted across the road very peacefully to sniff at the door of a public house. There the story stops. For I dont think much happened at the MacCarthys. One had to talk. I noticed nothing, I think. The memorable things happen when there is a great space of silence all round them perhaps. I dont know.

Now about this book, The Moths. How am I to begin it? And what is it to be? I feel no great impulse; no fever; only a great pressure of difficulty. Why write it then? Why write at all? Every morning I write a little sketch, to amuse myself.

I am not saying, I might say, that these sketches have any relevance. I am not trying to tell a story. Yet perhaps it might be done in that way. A mind thinking. They might be islands of light—islands in the stream that I am trying to convey: life itself going on. The current of the moths flying strongly this way. A lamp & a flower pot in the centre. The flower can always be changing. But there must be more unity between each scene than I can find at present. Autobiography it might be called. How am I to make one lap, or act, between the coming of the moths, more intense than another; if there are only scenes? One must get the sense that this is the beginning: this the middle; that the climax—when she opens the window & the moth comes in. I shall have the two different currents—the moths flying along; the flower upright in the centre; a perpetual crumbling & renewing of the plant. In its leaves she might see things happen. But who is she? I am very anxious that she should have no name. I dont want a Lavinia or a Penelope: I want ‘She’. But that becomes arty, Liberty, greenery yallery somehow: symbolic in loose robes. Of course I can make her think backwards & forwards; I can tell stories. But thats not it. Also I shall do away with exact place & time. Anything may be out of the window—a ship—a desert—London.

Friday 31 May

The oculist said to me this afternoon “Perhaps you’re not as young as you were”. This is the first time that has been said to me; & it seemed to me an astonishing statement. It means that one now seems to a stranger not a woman, but an elderly woman. Yet even so, though I felt wrinkled & aged for an hour, & put on a manner of great wisdom & toleration, buying a coat, even so, I forget it soon; & am ‘a woman’ again. Another light on my character or appearance—Coming up Southampton Row, a man snapped me & then said stop; & made me pay 6d for a silly little damp film, which I did not want; nor did I want to stay talking politics to a ferrety little rascal, having had little lunch. But my face marked me for his victim.

“We are winning” Nelly said at tea. I was shocked to think that we both desire the Labour party to win—why? partly that I dont want to be ruled by Nelly. I think to be ruled by Nelly & Lottie would be a disaster. It is dribbled out. Last night at Charleston we heard election results spoken very distinctly in the drawing room. Driving home through Lewes there was not a single light downstairs. No one was even listening in. The streets were perfectly empty. One man was pumpshipping against the station wall. I had imagined a crowd, flares, shouts, white sheets—only three black cats, out on business with the mice. So we shall be ruled by labour.

We went down to Worthing to see Leonard’s mother, laid like an old rose—rather lovely this time—in a narrow room; with the sea opposite. I watched the porpoises, & some reflections of people walking on the beach. And she cried; & was very dismal; & then rambled off about Caterham 50 years ago; & the Stannards, & how Herbert had rolled all the way down stairs, & drank so much milk that people were astonished. Nothing of life, as we see it, remains to her—only this curious lit up page of the past, which she turns over & over lying in bed; & cant read or sleep, yet anxiously demands, does Leonard think she will get well? We had been saying driving down that one should take poison. She has every reason; & yet demands more life, more life, at 78. She quarrels; she cant walk; she is alone; she is looked after by nurses; lives in an hotel, but demands more life, more life. One odd thing she said was that she had slept with a governess as a child who had given her a terrible disease, & been expelled from Holland on that account. I fancy she had never told anyone this; it was her offering of intimacy to us; a thanksgiving perhaps for our having come. I was moved by her; could hardly speak. I suppose human nature, so emotional, so irrational, so instinctive, as it is in her, but not in me, has this beauty; this what they call ‘elemental’ quality. One may get it too, when one is 76. One may lie sobbing, & yet cry does doctor think I shall recover? One will not perhaps go to the writing table & write that simple & profound paper upon suicide which I see myself leaving for my friends. What a day it was—the sea flowing in & out of the bays, all the way, like the Adriatic, or Pacific; & the sand yellow; & the boats steaming along; & behind the downs like long waves, gently extending themselves, to break very quickly; smooth & sloping like the waves. Even bungalows are all burnt up & made part of this beauty; made of vapour not zinc. We voted at Rodmell. I saw a white gloved lady helping an old farm couple out of her Daimler. We have bought a motor lawn mower. I liked Francis last night. He is so abundant & fertile, so generous & warm hearted A most divine man—a man I adore—these phrases recur. And then he amused me with his imitation of Esther talking like Macaulay [unexplained]. When they read the results he was always talking so loud: & had to stop short. We called in on Long Barn & left Pinker, & here we are again after one of these little journeys which seem to have last⁠[ed] 600 years. Everything looks a little strange & symbolical when one comes back. I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again—as I always am when I write. It is scattering & heatening, this motoring about.

Saturday 15 June

Home last night from Cassis; that is to say from Arles. The hottest holiday I have ever had. And in some ways different from others; partly that it was so hot; then that we were alone with Nessa & Duncan; then that I have become, almost, a landowner. A window owner, anyhow. Yes, I almost bought La Boudard (& am not sure of the spelling) & have a contract, to go there at the cost of £2.10 a month. And this means an infinite number of things—perhaps a complete change; as buying a house so often does. Already this morning I feel an attachment—say a little island—floating some way off, but in my possession. And this island means heat, silence, complete aloofness from London; the sea; eating cakes in the new hotel at La Ciotat; driving off to Aix; sitting on the harbour dining; seeing the sardine boats come in; talk with people who have never heard of me & think me older, uglier than Nessa, & in every way inferior to her; that odd intimate, yet edgy, happy free yet somehow restrained intercourse with her & Duncan. It means also buying French books at Toulon & keeping them in my lovely cool room in the wood; Leonard in his shirtsleeves; an Eastern private life for us both; an Indian summer running in & out of the light of common day; a great deal of cheap wine & cigars; new alliances, with Currys, Cruthers, & other anomalous oddities—all this my engagement to make three windows at Boudard means to me.

I forget what the facts of our stay were. We were there for a week, coming the day before they expected us, oddly enough as we did last year. There was Duncan in his blue shirt; Angelica & Judith doing lessons on the terrace. Nessa drove Miss Campbell into the town & brought up the food every morning. I wrote a little article on Cowper, but lifting the words with difficulty in the heat, surrounded by black & white butterflies. And L. & I were very extravagant, for the first time in our lives, buying desks, tables, sideboards, crockery for Rodmell. This gave me pleasure; & set my dander up against Nessa’s almost overpowering supremacy. My elder son is coming tomorrow; yes, & he is the most promising young man in King’s; & has been speaking at the Apostles dinner. All I can oppose that with is, And I made £2,000 out of Orlando & can bring Leonard here & buy a house if I want. To which she replies (in the same inaudible way) I am a failure as a painter compared with you, & cant do more than pay for my models. And so we go on; over the depths of our childhood. Do you remember going down to the town to fetch—which ancient memories Duncan cannot share. He was divinely charming; & praised Nessa too. I put in shred after shred of feeling so that one may compose the salad, & am now running out to get my books from Riley if I can.

[Diary XIX]

Saturday 15 June

Against all laws, I am going to make this the first volume of a diary, though as ill luck has it, it is not even the first of the month. But it is the fault of practical life. I can’t write any longer in books whose leaves perish. I don’t know how to keep them. Here in a bound volume, the year has a chance of life. It can be stood on a shelf.

Pinker has just come home, very fat. And a sense of nothingness rolls about the house; what I call the sense of “Where there is nothing.” This is due to the fact that we came back from France last night & are not going round in the mill yet. Time flaps on the mast—my own phrase I think. There are things I ought to do. I ought to correct A Room of one’s own: I ought to read & correct the Common Reader. I ought to write several dull silly letters; to gentlemen in Maidstone & Kingston who tell me facts about dahlias; to Sir Philip Sassoon who most unexpectedly sends me, by motor car, his book of travels. But I cant—not for five minutes or so. Time flaps on the mast. And then I see through everything. Perhaps the image ought to have been one that gives an idea of a stream becoming thin: of seeing to the bottom. Lytton once said,—I connect it with a visit to Kew Gardens—that we can only live if we see through illusion. & that reminds me (it is odd by the way, how small a thought is which one cannot express pictorially, as one has been accustomed to thinking it: this saying of Lytton’s has always come pictorially, with heat, flowers, grass, summer, & myself walking at Kew) reminds me how the day before we went Lytton came, & we talked about Elizabeth & Essex. This was for the first time. And it was painful, because he minded what we had not said; & we had, to some extent to say it; but it was also a relief, on both sides, because we were glad to say it, & have this reserve over; & glad, I daresay, that Lytton minded; I daresay there was some discreditable element, at least in my gladness; yet not much. I daresay, among my disagreeables, is this that I am jealous enough of other writers to be glad when they are made to own their failures; but this was trifling. More important much was the relief that one could say openly that one had disliked E & E for such reasons; & we began to go into them. His suppression of irony; his being tied by the story; the difficulty of using reality imaginatively; a wrong subject for him; could only be treated exactly. He said he had been very doubtful himself; & this is what I liked—that though his surrounders—Carrington Dadie & the rest—all praised, he himself felt, he was not pleased unless we Bloomsbury, praised too. What we said mattered. And I daresay, owing to success, he minds these reservations a great deal more than I should; for I kept thinking of all the criticism I had had. One is pleased when after long yea⁠[r]⁠s’ such feelings have sway. And I felt, among the discreditable feelings, how I had no longer anything to envy him for; & how, dashing off Orlando I had done better than he had done; & how for the first time I think, he thought of me, as a writer, with some envy. Yet he amused me by protesting that to write like that would be to write like Virginia—a fatal event, it seems.

Now time must not flap on the mast any more. Now I must somehow brew another decoction of illusion. Well, if the human interest flags—if its that that worries me, I must not sit thinking about it here. I must make human illusion—ask someone in tomorrow after dinner; & begin that astonishing adventure with the souls of others again—about which I know so little. Is it affection that prompts?

Sunday 16 June

As I finished those words, in came Leonard to say that Desmond was coming round in two minutes—which he did, so that the sail filled out again & the ship went on. (The reason why I write this is that I cannot go on correcting A Room of one’s own. I have read till my own sentences jingle in my ear—& so I begin to make more). Desmond was shabby & baggy in grey. He was bubbling & simmering, off to dine with Crompton Davies at Kettner’s, & determined to be punctual. A vein of determination lies in him; & he is the most cooked & saturated of us all. Not an atom remains crude; basted richly over a slow fire—an adorable man, a divine man, as Francis would say, for all his power of taking the spine out of me. Happily we did not get on to that—writing that is to say. Julian broke down in his Apostle speech; came dressed as for a ball, & got muddled in his notes & sat down; but with his admirable Stephen solidity did not mind. Also Desmond lost £5; to Lord Rothermere, & another man lost £2,000, over the Election. What circles you live in, said Leonard; & he said that this was only due to the Empire Review. Maynard he said looked as if he were conscious of discord at the Apostle dinner. We talked of Lytton’s books. But talk ran into talk; nothing could be spread out; he must not be late for Crompton. He (C.) lives in Gledhow Terrace, with two leather chairs in the dining room; behind it his bedroom; he has his Virgil & a Milton that Desmond gave him. My Milton, said Leonard; & I offered to give Desmond a new despatch box. Off he went talking all the way. And Pinker came back &—

Sunday 23 June

It was very hot that day, driving to Worthing to see Leonard’s mother, my throat hurt me. Next morning I had a headache. So we stayed on at Rodmell till today. At Rodmell I read through the Common Reader; & this is very important—I must learn to write more succinctly. Especially in the general idea essays like the last, How it strikes a Contemporary, I am horrified by my own looseness. This is partly that I dont think things out first; partly that I stretch my style to take in crumbs of meaning. But the result is a wobble & diffusity & breathlessness which I detest. One must correct A room of one’s own very carefully before printing. And so I pitched into my great lake of melancholy. Lord how deep it is! What a born melancholiac I am! The only way I keep afloat is by working. A note for the summer I must take more Aug. 31st This vow I kept work than I can possibly get done. (I am)—no, I dont know what it comes from. Directly I stop working I feel that I am sinking down, down. And as usual, I feel that if I sink further I shall reach the truth. That is the only mitigation; a kind of nobility. Solemnity. I shall make myself face the fact that there is nothing—nothing for any of us. Work, reading, writing are all disguises; & relations with people. Yes, even having children would be useless.

We went into the beechwood by the Race Course. I like these woods; & the waters of the greenery closing over one; so shallow, with the sun on them; then so deep in the shade. And I like the beech boughs, laced about, very intricate; like many arms; & the trunks, like the stone pillars in a church. But if I were Mrs Bartholomew I should certainly do something violent. This thought kept coming to me. What though could one do, at the bottom of that weight⁠[?]; with that incubus of injustice on top of one? Annie Thompsett & her baby live on 15/ a week. I throw away 13/- on cigarettes, chocolates, & bus fares. She was eating rice pudding by the baby’s cradle when I came in.

However, I now begin to see the Moths rather too clearly, or at least strenuously, for my comfort. I think it will begin like this: dawn; the shells on a beach; I dont know—voices of cock & nightingale; & then all the children at a long table—lessons. The beginning. Well, all sorts of characters are to be there. Then the person who is at the table can call out any one of them at any moment; & build up by that person the mood, tell a story; for instance about dogs or nurses; or some adventure of a childs kind; all to be very Arabian nights; & so on: this shall be Childhood; but it must not be my childhood; & boats on the pond; the sense of children; unreality; things oddly proportioned. Then another person or figure must be selected. The unreal world must be round all this—the phantom waves. The Moth must come in: the beautiful single moth. There must be a flower growing.

Could one not get the waves to be heard all through? Or the farmyard noises? Some odd irrelevant noises. She might have a book—one book to read in—another to write in—old letters.

Early morning light—but this need not be insisted on; because there must be great freedom from ‘reality’. Yet everything must have relevance.

Well all this is of course the ‘real’ life; & nothingness only comes in the absence of this. I have proved this quite certainly in the past half hour. Everything becomes green & vivified in me when I begin to think of the Moths. Also, I think, one is much better able to enter into other’s—

Sunday 30 June

I broke off; somebody I imagine interrupted. My melancholy has been broken, like a lake by oars, since I wrote. I have been so active. We have seen so many people. Last night we dined with Roger, tonight with Clive; Lytton came; Vita came; we had a party. I brought a dress in Shaftesbury Avenue. It was very hot, I think; & is now cold, indeed, for the first time for weeks, it is, or has been raining. I am writing idly, to solace my eyes after two hours of intense correction—that much corrected book, Women & Fiction. It shall go to the printer tomorrow I swear. And then I can bask entirely in the light of some fiction. But I have written myself out of that mood, & find it difficult to get back to it. This last half year I made over £1800; almost at the rate of £4000 a year; the salary almost of a Cabinet minister; & time was, two years ago, when I toiled to make £200. Now I am overpaid I think for my little articles—And I still think that the great pleasure of prosperity is to be able to go into a shop & buy a pocket knife. Well, after tomorrow I shall close down article writing, & give way to fiction for six or seven months—till next March perhaps. And I here record my intention to see to the writing of this new book much more carefully; to strike out redundancies. Now that I have, I think, gained the free use of my pen, I must begin to curb it. Hitherto my freedom has had to be fought for.

Helen Anrep last night was distracted & worried, like a wet overblown Rose. Baba got out of her bed & went on the roof & fell asleep there. So Miss Cox proposes to put her down into a lower class for a year. And Roger had news that her Hampstead House was falling down; would need £500 spent on it. And how could she live on the income of £3,000 if she sold it to the Hampstead Hospital? The other day in Paris she thought she was going to have a child by Roger. “And I’ve failed utterly with the children I have—And I feel a hundred.” So she plained & crooned, sitting beside Roger, with her hand on the arm of his chair. Sometimes he put his hand on hers. They were affectionate & private; this is Roger’s private life. And it keeps him happy, while superficially he whirls from doctor to doctor; & springs & spins, & looks out places on the map—unable not to verify & track down any statement, however pointless. He told us how in some great French cave, there is a patch of green vegetation wherever the torchlight has fallen. And Mauron ran his hand along a ledge & thought it was moss. But it was bats dung. The bats fly up into the air.

Desmond is being very brilliant about the Byron letters & the Boswell papers. Think! There are 18 volumes of Boswell’s diaries now to be published. With any luck I shall live to read them. I feel as if some dead person were said to be living after all—an odd effect, this disinterment of a mass more of Boswell when one had thought all was known, all settled. And father never knew; & Sir Edmund Gosse is dead. These papers were in a cabinet in Ireland.

And now it is almost time for lunch; & after lunch I must again read my book; with a view, if possible, to shortening & condensing the last pages.

Monday 5 August

Yes that is the date, & the last was June 30th—a tribute to the helter skelter random rackety summer I spent. Far the pleasantest memories, standing out like greenweed on some civet grey pond, were the week ends here: the divine fresh week ends, with the hay cutting & the lights lambent; Leonard’s new room, Hedgehog Hall a-building, & my lodge being made into the palace of comfort which it now is. For I am now sitting here, oppressed by the Bank holiday atmosphere which gets into the wild country air, the lonely marshes, & makes the village seem smug & suburban. The girls & men are playing stool ball; Leonard & Percy are making a pipe conduct water into the Pond. It is a chocolate brown, & lived in by small fish. Yes it was a scattered summer; I felt as if the telephone were strung to my arm & anybody could jerk me who liked. A sense of interruption bothered me. And then these people one ‘sees’—how blurred the image becomes! What damp blotting paper my mind was, as I left Ottoline’s on Thursday afternoon, & determined not to speak to another soul. There is a sort of irreverence in treating thus the venerable soul of man: one curses it, & bites it & gets embittered by it. More pleasure is to be had from one nights talk with old dunderheaded Ka than from these flittering & glitterings. In London I should only have girded at her. Here, spreading herself out in her slow heavy footed way one took in an easy half critical, half appreciative impression—the chief element being amusement at her protestations. When the story was not to her credit as a social centre, it was to his as a speaker, politician, gardener, artist, husband, thinker—everything. Indeed I cut her short this morning, as she exalted his brain, by saying we all live on illusion; Will’s brain is one of them. Thus pulled up she jibbed a moment, & then recovered, & saw the sense; not quite, perhaps; but in her slow way, larded over with these shams & gentilities & politics & appearances, she is honest too. And we talked about Rupert. But my reflection—every visit leaves one with a reflection—was this, about talking in protest, to impress, its futility, its universality: only she is more open & insistent, for some reason, than we are—or so I hope. Take away that motive from one’s talk, & how much would be left? How often don’t I vaguely feel blessing my sentence, the face of my own vanity, which demands that I shall pay it this tribute.

And then I’m cross with Vita: she never told me she was going abroad for a fortnight—didnt dare; till the last moment, when she said it was a sudden plan. Lord Lord! I am half amused though; why do I mind? what do I mind? how much do I mind? I shall fire up & accuse her, & see to the bottom of her vessel. One of the facts is that these Hildas are a chronic case; & as this one won’t disappear & is unattached, she may be permanent. And, like the damned intellectual snob I am, I hate to be linked, even by an arm, with Hilda. Her earnest aspiring competent wooden face appears before me, seeking guidance in the grave question of who’s to broadcast. A queer trait in Vita—her passion for the earnest middle-class intellectual, however drab & dreary. And why do I write this down? I have not even told Leonard; & whom do I tell when I tell a blank page? The truth is, I get nearer feelings in writing than in walking [sic]—I think: graze the bone; enjoy the expression; have them out of me; make them a little creditable to myself; I daresay suppress something, so that after all I’m doing what amounts to confiding. Why did Pepys write his diary after all?

I should be tackling Mary Wollstonecraft. I am in the thick of my four Herald articles, thus cutting into my Moths (but I had proofs of A Room to correct) & hope to be quit of it all by August 14th & then go down step by step into that queer region. I must make a great try for it—for this difficult book—& after that? Always adventure: with that sense to guide me, I shant stagnate anyhow.

You can choose between us, I say, stopping writing; & get some satisfaction from making up caustic phrases. Yet I’m not very caustic, only by starts.

Thursday 8 August

This is written to while away one of those stupendous moments—one of those painful, ridiculous, agitating moments which make one half sick & yet I dont know—I’m excited too; & feel free Another scene, Aug. 30th; but these reflections stood me in good stead—& I laughed. But what a confounded bore it is & then sordid; & unsettled; & so on—I’ve told Nelly to go; after a series of scenes which I wont bore myself to describe. And in the midst of the usual anger, I looked into her little shifting greedy eyes, & saw nothing but malice & spite there, & felt that that had come to be the reality now: she doesn’t care for me, or for anything: has been eaten up by her poor timid servants fears & cares & respectabilities. And so at lunch L. & I settled it; & I spoke two words, which she almost pulled out of my mouth in her eagerness to show herself delighted & eager & hard & untouched—a sordid painful scene after 15 years; but then how many I have had, & how degrading they are. & if we dont break now we drift on endlessly—oh but all these old arguments I know by heart. Whats new & strange is to have made an end of it, for though we only speak of her staying away till October, I dont think we shall ever begin again. This is an occasion for some of the small virtues of life—cheerfulness, & decision, & the determination to start fresh & better. In truth we never should have gone on, I daresay, if it hadn’t been for the war; I dont know: I’m confirmed in my wish to have no resident servants ever again. That is the evil which rots the relationship. But now I must go to Annie Thomsett again.

Saturday 10 August

Well, Heaven be praised; it is all over & calm & settled. Nelly—how long ago that seems!—is staying—Yes, we found we cdnt get Mrs Thomsett; & I had two minutes of energetic courage; & so, Nelly saying, she thought—but I’m too bored. And I’m too deliciously relieved to have seen Vita this moment & find that her story to me was precisely true—& she brought documents to prove it—& was very upset—& had gone like a donkey & telephoned to Hilda—who is also very upset, & was altogether so simple & sincere & saw that my position was reasonable—oh yes, she could not have stood it a moment—but why, I ask myself, does it bore me so insufferably to write down what is so acutely exciting at the moment? My own lack of narrative power. Indeed I was more worried & angry & hurt & caustic about this affair than I let on, even to the blank page; yet afraid too of exaggeration. Of course, one is right about Nelly—right that she is, in bad moods almost insufferably mean, selfish & spiteful; but—& this is an interesting psychological remark, she is in a state of nature; untrained; uneducated, to me almost incredibly without the power of analysis or logic; so that one sees a human mind wriggling undressed—which is interesting; & then, in the midst of one’s horror at the loathesome spectacle, one is surprised by the goodness of human nature, undressed; & it is more impressive because of its undress. For example, she thought I had given her notice permanently; but instead of giving way,—& yet she had nowhere to go to—to rage or spite, she bicycled into Lewes to get us cream for dinner: the motive being genuine I think; we must not suffer; & how could she leave us without a cook? It is this mixture that one can’t understand; & that makes one always plunge so heavily in dealing with her. She said too that she would find it very difficult to get a place; since it is all the fashion now to engage cooks only who will live out (& this sentence is another example of my inability to write narrative). And it will happen again, her spite & meanness; but we shan’t part now, I think. And I’m half pleased to find that it is harder to part after 15 years than I thought. And I’m pleased—oh very pleased—about Vita.

Thursday 15 August

These tumults over, then I had a headache. And two ideas come to me—to break my rule & write about the soul for once; & to write some exact dialogue: I just note this, it being dinner time.

We are back from Brighton where I brought a corner cupboard. And if I had time, I would here dissect a curious little spotted fruit: this melancholy. It comes with headache, of course. And I had come to the blind alley—the cul de-sac. Writing this compressed article, where every word is like a step cut in the rock—hard work, if ever writing was; & done largely for money; & whats money, compared with Nessa’s children; & then the—

Monday 19 August

I suppose dinner interrupted. And I opened this book in another train of mind—to record the blessed fact that for good or bad I have just set the last correction to Women & Fiction, or a Room of One’s Own. I shall never read it again I suppose. Good or bad? Has an uneasy life in it I think: you feel the creature arching its back & galloping on, though as usual much is watery & flimsy & pitched in too high a voice.

William Plomer has been for the week end & gone. A compressed inarticulate young man, thickly coated with a universal manner fit for all weather & people: tells a nice dry prim story; but has the wild eyes which I once noted in Tom, & take to be the true index of what goes on within. Once or twice he almost cracked his crust—sitting on the stones this morning for instance.

I dont suppose you know how separate I feel myself from all my contemporaries. I am afraid I was very inadequate last night (at Charleston). I apologised for the family party. No that was delightful; except that Clive Bell seemed inharmonious. What d’you think of Wyndham Lewis, of Joyce? (V.) I dont like scolds. It spoils the voice. I like old men of 80 like Moore & Yeats who have kept their minds working. “Exactly. That’s the precise point” (these are William’s words). And fathers are difficult. Mine has no interest in anything. But I dont live at Pinner for choice. I dislike Roy Campbell’s pose. He used to fly a kite at the end of a fishing rod. William (he said the Mr was awkward) is notably trying to be like other people: to justify his life among natives & colonels, which has given him this composure. Beside him Julian seemed a mere child, & Duncan a contemporary. May he bring Butts to see us? He is a very self-contained independent young man, determined not to be rushed in any way, & having no money at all, he gave Nelly 5/ for a tip. I think he shows up well against the Raymonds & the Frankies—is somehow solid; to their pinchbeck lustre.

I have now written myself out of a writing mood; & cannot attack melancholy, save only to note that it was much diminished by hearing Nessa say she was often melancholy & often envied me—a statement I thought incredible. I have spilt myself among too many stools she said (we were sitting in her bedroom before dinner). Other peoples melancholy certainly cheers one. And now, having written my four little brief hard articles, I must think of that book again, & go down step by step into the well. These are the great events & revolutions in one’s life—& then people talk of war & politics. I shall grind very hard; all my brakes will be stiff; my springs rusty. But I have now earned the right to some months of fiction. & my melancholy is brushed away, so soon as I can get my mind forging ahead, not circling round.

Wednesday 21 August

Geoffrey Scott died last week of pneumonia in New York. Let me think what I can remember of him. I met him first in 1909 at Florence at Mrs Berenson’s. We went out for lunch, & he was there; & they discussed Francis Thompson. Afterwards we went to a party at Mrs Ross’s: Mary came in with a brother, both disguised as Barnes, & had to reveal themselves as Stracheys before Mrs Ross would take any interest. Then she emphasised the fact that she was Meredith’s mistress, leading us all down a lawn;—a terrace I suppose, overlooking Fiesole. I was unhappy that summer, & bitter in all my judgments; & cannot remember anything of Geoffrey Scott save that he was part of that unnatural Florentine society; & therefore in my mood, rather contemptible—long & familiar & aesthetic & at his ease, where I was rustic, provincial & badly dressed. This impression then waits without a second till that summer evening, in 1925, I think, at Long Barn. I had motored down with Dotty & Vita for my first visit & had sat shyly in the motor observing their endearments rather awkwardly, & how they stopped the Rolls Royce to buy great baskets of strawberries; & again I felt, not provincial, but ill-dressed, under-equipped; & so stepped on to the terrace at Long Barn; & forth came Geoffrey, smiling a little superciliously, as of old; & shook hands. Harold [Nicolson] was behind him, much more downright & burly & to my taste. That night we sat in the long room, & after Harold had grown sleepy sitting on the fender knocking his head against the fringe of the Italian cover on the mantelpice, Geoffrey sat with us, & was drawn by Dotty into telling stories for my amusement. He did this very well; I remember, though I dont remember what the stories were about. He was a very clever man, I thought; & I tried to place him, & concluded that he had some grudge against me as member of a circle he somehow respected but was not of; told me, I remember, that he could not distinguish an article by me in the Nation from one by Morgan or Lytton—we all wrote the same ironic style—& that I felt was said by way of showing me—& we were the two scallywags at that particular party—that he was up to our little ways & had no respect for them. Then next day we went over Knole, where again, as at Florence, he was very much at his ease, & knew every piece of furniture or silver & called Lord Sackville Lionel as if he had known him & Vita familiarly many years, just as he had known the Rosses & the Berensons. And he was tall, & dark & had the distinguished face of a failure; reminded me a little of Bernard Holland & other ‘brilliant’ young men, who remain ‘brilliant’ & young well into the 40ties & never do anything to prove it. Harold walked back through the Park to think out some speech about Byron, simply & straightforwardly, rather to my & I think Geoffrey’s amusement. The others—Dotty Vita & Geoffrey—took me to the station; & I said goodbye to him there, & never spoke to him again. I had the feeling that he & Dotty & Vita & Harold were all a set; very intimate & familiar, & indeed said so, when they challenged me, as usual, with Bloomsbury & its closed walls. “But you are the same—you make me feel that you are all very intimate” I said, & they half denied it; but only half. For, as I learnt later, I had broken in upon the height of his affair with Vita. It was flaming very strongly that particular month, or week; it was the time when she returned his passion, for a moment; when he was swearing that she must leave Harold & live with him. After that, my intercourse with him was only by hearsay—through messages—Karin said her mother wished her to arrange a meeting between Geoffrey & me—& then through Vita’s explanations, later, when she told me how he was waiting for her, had left his Villa Medici & Lady Sybil on her account; & was now fuming in a mews off Regent’s Park expecting her while she sat at Tavistock Square talking to me. One night, she said, he almost strangled her—seized her by the throat; & she turned black & he was frightened. And I heard how furious he was on the downs above Rodmell that summer, late at night, when they were driving home, from Lady Sackville I suppose. Vita saw lights in the valley & said that I was down there asleep. Whereupon he flew into another rage—they were calling the dogs who had gone hunting, & the wind blew his hat off. He called me ‘that woman’. And I saw him, in full evening dress, at the ballet with Sybil [Colefax]. And then never again.

He is dead in New York, & all those papers about Boswell—what will become of them; & the life that was to have made him immortal will never be written; & he remains the I was offered £2000 to write it brilliant young man for ever.

And I have turned over two pages by mistake. Perhaps I can think of some other figure to write in there, going backwards, before I need go in: & it is a lovely evening; & I want to stay out here writing, & trying my new pen.

Nobody has died, to my knowledge, of much interest. And if it comes to putting down talk, the truth is that, except in novels, people don’t talk.

Well, Bernard Holland, as I have mentioned him. But I cannot put my hand on any first meeting or even second. I believe I first heard him mentioned when I was say ten years old; & he had just become engaged to Helen Duckworth. Stella said to mother, “But can they know what he thinks then?”—or words which made me surmise that there was something dark & queer about this young man; something that to Stella seemed incongruous with the rusticity & conventionality of her Duckworth aunt & uncle. Then that little light, revealing as it was, goes out; & there is only hearsay about Bernard till, in 1902 or 3 perhaps, Dorothea took me uninvited to stay at Canterbury with Canon Holland; & there was Bernard; & he was saturnine, with his great eyebrows almost meeting; & his sunk cheeks; & his gloom; & his height; & about him there hung, now more authentically, that reputation for brilliance & strangeness that was his, years ago, at Cambridge. Poor old Bernard—he’s a genius, I once heard Harry Stephen say. He interested me because I imputed to him ‘imagination’—the quality I most admired & missed most in my father & his agnostic friends. Bernard had edited his mother’s letters, & I liked them in a sentimental way, seeing in them something imaginative, too; something that was coloured & pensive & intimate, unlike anything the Stephen family produced. So that I looked at Bernard in the low room under the Cathedral with interest, & even hoped he might think me clever or imaginative or something. But I doubt that he detached me from the shadow of Dorothea. He was occupied & mysterious, in touch with politics & Cabinet ministers; highly thought of by the Lytteltons, & vaguely credited with being himself much more able & capable than they were; but he was too much of a genius, too queer & individual, so people said, to do anything for himself. And Helen played up to this version of Bernard very femininely; wandering about vague eyed, cherry cheeked, ecstatic, religious; like some woman I thought in a novel by Charlotte Yonge. We were taken to see a sister of Mary Sibylla’s, & she said, clasping her tea cup, that whenever she heard thunder she imagined that someone had been killed by it. There was all that kind of imagination afloat. Bernard stalked about in it, aloof, intellectual, silent; appreciative perhaps, but never said so. Helen played little melancholy scraps of Beethoven; which moved me; but Bernard snapped “Whats that? Gilbert & Sullivan?” to snub her sentimentality I suppose. And then, when there was talk of going back in the train together, he stopped it. He said that he must be alone & work. So I suppose I made no impression; & received one that was not altogether favourable. A sort of false gloom was his I thought; unless indeed he were tremendously imaginative. I read a book he wrote anonymously about becoming a Roman Catholic & got a faint seductive whiff of a world where people were very brilliant & thought about their souls; a semi-worldly world it seemed; rather fluent; rather too clear & plausible & pensive, but still attractive & unfamiliar. And then again I met him at Ottoline’s; & then I was older, & he was more pronounced. That is he was still sardonic; cavernous; but no longer so lean, or so silent. He flirted, even I could see, with Ottoline; & had become one of those distinguished young men who are very brilliant when they dine out—like Herbert Paul perhaps; they appear without their wives, who are deaf or mad; influence politics; write unsigned articles; & flirt with ladies of title. Ottoline told me that Bernard had written her a sonnet, after another dinner party. And then he turned Roman Catholic. He wrote a vast life of the Duke of Devonshire; he wrote a vast history of the Holland family; but that was all that came of his gloom & his imagination & his genius, & when he died, a year or two ago, even his friends never wrote to the Times about him.

Thursday 22 August

And so I might fill up the half hour before dinner writing.

I thought, on my walk that I would begin at the beginning: I get up at half past eight & walk across the garden. Today it was misty & I had been dreaming of Edith Sitwell. I wash & go into breakfast which is laid on the check table cloth. With luck I may have an interesting letter; today there was none. And then bath & dress; & come out here & write or correct for three hours, broken at 11 by Leonard with Milk, & perhaps newspapers. At one luncheon—rissoles today & chocolate custard. A brief reading & smoking after lunch; & at about two I change into thick shoes, take Pinker’s lead & go out—up to Asheham hill this afternoon, where I sat a minute or two, & then home again, along the river. Tea at four, about; & then I come out here & write several letters, interrupted by the Post, with another invitation to lecture; & then I read one book of the Prelude. And soon the bell will ring, & we shall dine & then we shall have some music, & I shall smoke a cigar; & then we shall read—La Fontaine I think tonight & the papers—& so to bed. Here I will copy some lines I want to remember,

The matter that detains us now may seem,

To many, neither dignified enough

Nor arduous, yet will not be scorned by them,

Who, looking inward, have observed the ties

That bind the perishable hours of life

Each to the other, & the curious props

By which the world of memory & thought

Exists & is sustained.

They are from the 7th book of the Prelude. A very good quotation I think.

But my skeleton day needs reviving with all sorts of different colours. Today it was grey & windy on the walk; yesterday generous & open; a yellow sun on the corn; & heat in the valley. Both days differ greatly; both are among the happiest of my life—I mean among the happy undistinguished days, ripe & sweet & sound; the daily bread; for nothing strange or exalted has happened; only the day has gone rightly & harmoniously; a pattern of the best part of life which is in the country like this; & makes me wish to command more of them—months of them.

Now my little tugging & distressing book & articles are off my mind my brain seems to fill & expand & grow physically light & peaceful. I begin to feel it filling quietly after all the wringing & squeezing it has had since we came here. And so the unconscious part now expands; & walking I notice the red corn, & the blue of the plain & an infinite number of things without naming them; because I am not thinking of any special thing. Now & again I feel my mind take shape, like a cloud with the sun on it, as some idea, plan, or image wells up, but they travel on, over the horizon, like clouds, & I wait peacefully for another to form, or nothing—it matters not which.

One picture I saw—Phil Burne Jones sitting in the square of St Mark’s, in evening dress, alone one August night in 1912—for we were on our honeymoon. He looked dissipated & lonely, like a pierrot who had grown old & rather peevish. He wore a light overcoat & sat, his foolish nervous white face looking aged & set unhappy & eager & disillusioned, alone at a little marble table, while everyone else paraded or chattered & the band played—he had no companion—none of his smart ladies—nobody to chatter to, in his affected exaggerated voice; paying astonishing compliments, using dears & darlings & going into that once fashionable whinny of laughter which must I think have come down from Burne Jones himself—& Phil was a kind of dissipated degenerate, spending all the thousands that were paid for those wan women on staircases, on love affairs, on luxuries, on being a fashionable bachelor & fairy God father to the Trees & Taylors & other fashionable young ladies—a very timid conventional man at bottom, with a horrid taste in pictures, presumably, but a way with children. Lowell noticed that at St Ives. And I am still grateful for pictures that he drew for us. He belongs to the gallery of brilliant young men of 50, for he died a year or two ago.

The best part of my walk this afternoon was certainly on the top of the down leading to Juggs Corner.

Yes, yes, but that is days ago. I saw a woman in white sitting against soft snow banks of blue & white sky; & a child in blue: I saw all the downs glooming & brightening. But it is now

Monday 2 September

& I am writing these words because Lyn (yes, she is Lyn) is reading in the garden, & I am talk-dried, & cant begin the Moths as I should, or patch up finally those old articles. A long day it was yesterday—rather exhausting—hard work talking to someone one hardly knows in the orchard. A very nice young woman, with that essential bareness—I cant think of the word—that young women so often have—without illusions, about herself; an honesty bred of poverty. Keeping going on £200 a year in London which she earns. Pays her way week by week on articles; & her father has £600 as a presbyterian minister in Aberdeen, & will have £400 to retire on, & has 5 children. So that she will never have a penny of her own. All this breeds a kind of veracity & clear sightedness & austerity which I prefer, perhaps, to the lush undergrowth which surrounds Dotty. One gardener more or less, one persian pot more or less, what does it matter—her life is crowded & otiose; but Lyn knows every object in her room, & has saved up & bought them by saving so that they are exact & polished. Well, but of her? Oh I’m so sick of talk, & analysis.

This book would form in me could I let my mind lie asleep, calm like a tideless sea; but all this time I’m breaking my mind up; destroying the growth underneath. Never mind, after tomorrow when I go to Vita, solitude begins* * This was a sanguine guess—not fulfilled I shall ruminate for a month. Lyn has this austerity. She is direct & sensible; goes to the W.C. frankly; but is not sexually advanced I should say; has had no indulgences with young men or wine; has something cool headed & sensible about her, derived from her theological father, her Scots farmer birth no doubt. She has been trained in English literature & is, what young women so seldom are, or were, a trained critic. She gives her opinion precisely & methodically, rather as Janet Vaughan would do on a case. (Janet was here last week end, by the way.) This trained mind is new & rather strange. It seems to eliminate enthusiasm, perhaps too drastically. Its odd to find everything weighed & criticised. & words of sobriety & insight issuing from this innocent round pink face; these candid blue eyes. She will spend money on face powder—went to buy a special brand & bought a cactus instead. Oh & she told a story about the dead man on the sands. She & Enid Welsford were motoring. One night they came to a bay & Enid wanted to walk to a long stretch of sand. So they went; & Lyn saw a coat & a pair of boots in the sand; & found it was a dead man. She stopped & went back, giving Enid the slip, not thinking that children might find it; absolutely horrified; her first sight of a dead person. This was made vivid to me. Enid came back. Did you see something? Yes I saw it. So they told the villagers. The man had been unhappily married & had seemed depressed & so killed himself, to be found that sad grey night—his boots sticking out of the sand, the face I suppose very ghastly.

I have just read a page or two of Samuel Butler’s notebooks to take the taste of Alice Meynell’s life out of my mouth. One rather craves brilliance & cantankerousness. Yet I am interested; a little teased by the tight airless Meynell style; & then I think what they had that we had not—some suavity & grace, certainly. They believed in things & we didn’t; & she had 7 children & wrote about 5 paragraphs a day for society papers & so on—all the time looking like a crucified saint; & was also very merry & witty perhaps—anyhow absolutely steeped in various sorts of adventure & life—went to America lecturing & made £15 a lecture, which she sent back to help Wilfrid. But it is not exactly this that I mean. When one reads a life one often compares one’s own life with it. And doing this I was aware of some sweetness & dignity in those lives compared with ours—even with ours at this moment. Yet in fact their lives would be intolerable—so insincere, so elaborate; so I think—all this word paring & sweetness & charity. Viola cant help dropping in lump after lump of sugar—only two sharp & therefore memorable things survive—her mother failed as a friend. She never gave enough. Old Coventry Patmore, whom she thought the equal of Sh⁠[akespea]⁠re, complained that he had lost the primacy among her friends & dropped out; whereupon she went alone into the drawing room, for she hated to express her feelings, & also hated long accounts of illness & death in biographies, turning her face away from her son in her last illness, & letting him only kiss her hand. Secondly there was the oddity of her admiration for Chesterton. Had I been a man & very big I could have been Chesterton. That is, her views were all peculiar & angular, & stuck to pedantically. She had a line of her own. But it would be a wonderful relief if Viola would give up being pointed & precise & tell us something casual & familiar—only she cant: her mind in stays. Katherine Mansfield described a visit to the house in Sussex—All the Ms. in barns & cottages; & the daughters singing long monotonous ballads, & then, by way of contrast & to surprise a scallywag I daresay with their liveliness breaking into music hall songs taught them by their brothers in law. Katherine described them like so many B⁠[urne]. J⁠[ones]. mermaids with long lush hair, plucking at mediaeval instruments & intoning those verses. Mrs M. sat by. And I saw her in 1910 (?) at Mrs Ross’s, & heard her say that saying about the climate & then there she was ecstatic in an omnibus.—I recorded my regret that one ever saw poetesses in the flesh. For she was a poetess too—it strikes me that one or two little poems will survive all that my father ever wrote. But its odd—this comparing that goes on as one reads a life—I kept thinking how little good could be said of me.

Wednesday I think the 4 September

I am just back from Long Barn, that is from Ashdown forest, where L. fetched me; & I have just eaten a pear warm from the sun with the juice running out of it, & I have thought of this device: to put

The Lonely Mind

separately in The Moths, as if it were a person. I don’t know—it seems possible. And these notes show that I am very happy.

I daresay it is the hottest day this year—the hottest September day these twenty years. So the papers may say tomorrow. Really it was too hot in the garden at Long Barn. The children were querulous—Nigel riding round in between the flower beds on his bicycle, & Ben stretched on the seat saying in a reasonable sad voice, Nigel you aren’t well—you dont look well. Boski says you dont. Mummy he ought to wash his feet. Vita (from the window) but he has washed his feet. Ben. Well they’re dirty again. Boski came in with the time table. The buses dont fit. They cant get back from Fairlawn before 8. Vita. Then ring up Mrs Cazalet & say they cant come. I must tell them they must put it off. She went to Harold’s room where they sat working with Mr O’Connor, & told them. Nigel began arguing. She was firm, & strode away. All this happened in blazing heat. The car was very hot. George brought a bottle of soda water. We lunched among some pine trees in Ashdown Forest, & lay full length afterwards, I with my straw hat over my face. Then L. met us, punctually at 4, at Duddimans (no—not that name) & we sat on some prickly holly leaves on the heath & talked to Vita about Harold’s letter. He says her poems aren’t worth publishing. She is very calm & modest, & seems not to mind much—a less touchy poet never was. But then can a real poet be an un-touchy poet?

She was very much as usual [?]; striding; silk stockings; shirt & skirt; opulent; easy; absent; talking spaciously & serenely to the Eton tutor, an admirable young man, with straight nose & white teeth who went to bed, or to his room, early, leaving us alone. I remarked the boys calling him Sir & bending with salaams over his hand & then kissing Vita—how English—how summery & how upper class—how pleasant—how without accent. This has been going on a thousand years I felt; at least, I can remember summers like this—white flannels & tennis, mothers, & tutors & English houses & dinner with moths getting in the candles & talk of tennis tournaments & ladies asking one to tea all my life—so pleasant, so without accent. And the tutor was the eternal tutor of young men—joking, affectionate, stern: watching Nigel with a sort of amusement & tenderness “There spoke the real Nigel” when N. said he hoped he had spilt the gravy on his trousers:—like a stream flowing deep & correct & unruffled through narrow banks. This kind of thing we now do to perfection. It is not interesting, but from its admirable completeness & sameness makes one tender towards it.

Nelly has been out this afternoon & picked, I think, 7 lbs of blackberries to make into jam. Please remember this as her way of thanking me for having Lottie—after all, she has no other. And one tends to forget it.

Monday 16 September

Leonard is having a picnic at Charleston & I am here—‘tired’. But why am I tired? Well I am never alone. This is the beginning of my complaint. I am not physically tired so much as psychologically. I have strained & wrung at journalism & proof correction; & underneath has been forming my Moths book. Yes, but it forms very slowly; & what I want is not to write it, but to think it for two or three weeks say—to get into the same current of thought & let that submerge everything, writing perhaps a few phrases here at my window in the morning. (And they’ve gone to some lovely place—Hurstmonceux perhaps, in this strange misty evening;—& yet when the time came to go, all I wanted was to walk off into the hills by myself. I am now feeling a little lonely & deserted & defrauded, inevitably). And every time I get into my current of thought I am jerked out of it. We have the Keynes’s: then Vita came; then Angelica & Eve; then we went to Worthing, then my head begins throbbing—so here I am, not writing—that does not matter, but not thinking, feeling or seeing—& seizing an afternoon alone as a treasure—Leonard appeared at the glass door at this moment; & they didn’t go to H⁠[urstmonceu]⁠x or anywhere; & Sprott was there & a miner, so I missed nothing—one’s first egotistical pleasure.

Really these premonitions of a book—states of soul in creating—are very queer & little apprehended.

Another reflection—nothing is so tiring as a change of atmosphere. I am more shattered & dissipated by an hour with Leonard’s mother than by 6 hours—no, 6 days, of Vita. (Nessa doesn’t count). The tremendous gear changing that has to take place grinds one’s machinery to bits. And I have done this constantly—& what is more than doing it, I’ve foreboded doing it—I’ve counted up the days & felt Worthing brooding over me. & then, psychologically again, having Nelly in the car is to me a strain—imposes another forced atmosphere. None of these things would matter much if one’s engine were going at full speed—how I tossed off every interruption when I was writing Orlando!—but it is as if they got in to the spokes—clogged the wheels—always just prevented me from getting the machine swinging round. And then I am 47: yes: & my infirmities will of course increase. To begin with my eyes. Last year, I think, I could read without spectacles; wd. pick up a paper & read it in a tube; gradually I found I needed spectacles in bed; & now I can’t read a line (unless held at a very odd angle) without them. My new spectacles are much stronger than the old, & when I take them off, I am blinded for a moment. What other infirmities? I can hear, I think, perfectly: I think I could walk as well as ever. But then will there not be the change of life? And may that not be a difficult & even dangerous time? Obviously one can get over it by facing it with common sense—that it is a natural process; that one can lie out here & read; that one’s faculties will be the same afterwards; that one has nothing to worry about in one sense—I’ve written some interesting books, can make money, can afford a holiday—Oh no; one has nothing to bother about; & these curious intervals in life—I’ve had many—are the most fruitful artistically—one becomes fertilised—think of my madness at Hogarth & all the little illnesses—that before I wrote To The Lighthouse for instance. Six weeks in bed now would make a masterpiece of Moths. But that wont be the name. Moths, I suddenly remember, dont fly by day. And there cant be a lighted candle. Altogether, the shape of the book wants considering—& with time I could do it.

Here I broke off.

Saturday 21 September

Angelica goes to school for the first time today I think; & I daresay Nessa is crying to herself—one of the emotions I shall never know—a child, one’s last child—going to school, & so ending the 21 years of Nessa’s children—a great stretch of life; how much fuller than I can guess—imagine all the private scenes, the quarrels, the happinesses, the moments of excitement & change, as they grew up. And now, rather sublimely she ends her childhood years in a studio alone, going back, perhaps rather sadly to the life she would have liked best of all once, to be a painter on her own. So we have made out our lives, she & I, propelled into them by some queer force; for me, I always think of those curious long autumn walks with which we ended a summer holiday, talking of what we were going to do—‘autumn plans’ we called them. They always had reference to painting & writing & how to arrange social life & domestic life better. Often we thought about changing a room, so as to have somewhere to see our own friends. They were always connected with autumn, leaves falling, the country getting pale & wintry, our minds excited at the prospect of lights & streets & a new season of activity beginning—October the dawn of the year. But I am rambling off like an old woman into the past, when as I sat down, waiting for tea, I said to myself I have so many things to write in my diary.

Another of those curious plums, things falling unexpectedly in our way, has just happened. Annie the large eyed sad young woman has been to ask us to buy her a cottage, & let her do for us always, in fact be our servant here. She & her baby, aged two, have been turned out at a fortnights notice to make room for two spinster dog breeders. Humanity says we ought to buy her her cottage, & take no rent—let her work it off. Another £350, & repairs—more articles. She would make an ideal servant, I believe; she would be a great standby; one could come here as long as one liked—& poor dear Nelly could be left in London,—for she gave notice again this morning, to Leonard this time, about his coal scuttle. It seems we are settling & rooting almost daily. I should have to dismiss poor spindly Bartholomew. It needs some thinking—meanwhile Annie is up against this terrific high black prison wall of poverty—has to manage with a child on 15/- a week.

These reflections, which branch off down so many paths make me linger, over the two other records—Peter, & my future, which I thought I was going to write; but it is tea time, & then I want to wander off up the downs or along the river, straightening my ideas.

Please God nobody comes to tea. Yet Lytton & Antony Blunt & Peter are all at Charleston. Please God I say these delightful & divine people dont come & make me concentrate again all in my face & brain. I want to swim about in the dark green depths. By the way last night in the Evening Standard James Laver called me a great writer “nobody need seek to qualify the greatness of Miss Virginia Woolf”—hah! I hope Arnold Bennett sees that.

Sunday 22 September

And it is ten minutes past ten in the morning, & I am not going to write a word. I have resolved to shut down my fiction for the present. My head aches too easily at the moment; I feel The Moths a prodigious weight which I can’t lift yet. And yet, so odd a thing is the mind, I am never easy, at this early hour, merely reading or writing letters. Those occupations seem too light & diffused. Hence, though write letters I will & must—to Dotty, to Gerald Brenan, to peevish Eddy, I will canter here a moment. It is a fine September morning; the rooks cawing, the shadows very long & shallow on the terrace. The body has gone out of the air. It is thinning itself for winter. It is becoming pale & pure like the eyes of an old man. An exacting & rather exhausting summer this has been. What with going to London, going to Worthing & having people here, I have never settled in; I feel I should like to stay on & avoid London for a time. The car makes us almost too movable. On the other hand, this is the best appointed summer we have ever had. Never has the garden been so lovely—all ablaze even now; dazzling one’s eyes with reds & pinks & purples & mauves: the carnations in great bunches, the roses lit like lamps. Often we go out after dinner to see these sights. And at last I like looking about the drawing room. I like my rug; my carpet; my painted beams. And for some odd reason I have found lovelier walks this year than ever—up into the downs behind Telscombe. Partly it is the weather, perhaps; we have had day after day of cloudless warm sun; the sky has been blue day after day; the sun has gone down clean, clear, leaving no feathers or battlements in the west. And lying out here I have seen the sun rise, & the moon shining one night like a slice of looking glass, with all the stars rippling & shining; & one night I had that curious feeling of being very young, travelling abroad, & seeing the leaves from a train window, in Italy—I cant get the feeling right now. All was adventure & excitement.

As for Peter, how right how charming how good he is!—but damn it all, what an uninteresting mind, intellectually. I cant put my finger on it, but nothing remains in one’s mind after seeing him, nothing interesting, no suggestion. Incessant similes, perpetual quotation; he sees life with great ardour through books. And then he is now all agog to copulate, which makes his stories centre round that fascinating subject too inevitably—copulation & King’s College Cambridge. He went through the war, & has had 4 years of battle & blood & wounds, & yet his mind keeps the virginal simplicity of a girls; he has the rigidity, at 36, of a crusted college character. I suppose the mixture is not very rich in him—thats all: father a schoolmaster, mother a housekeeper, life in the suburbs, scholarships &c: that was his upbringing; & then coming out of his shell, he deliberately vowed to be pagan, to be individual, to enjoy life, to explore his own sensations when there wasn’t much matter to go on. Hence the repetition, the egotism, the absence of depth or character; but I feel all this far more when he writes than in talk. In talk his charm & niceness, his integrity, his brightness, all make him a very nice, dear, delightful, memorable (yes, but not interesting) human being. He will marry; he will become Prof. of Engl. Lit. at Camb.

Wednesday 25 September

But what interests me is of course my oil stove. We found it here last night on coming back from Worthing. At this moment it is cooking my dinner in the glass dishes perfectly I hope, without smell, waste, or confusion: one turns handles, there is a thermometer. And so I see myself freer, more independent—& all one’s life is a struggle for freedom—able to come down here with a chop in a bag & live on my own. I go over the dishes I shall cook—the rich stews, the sauces. The adventurous strange dishes with dashes of wine in them. Of course Leonard puts a drag on, & I must be very cautious, like a child, not to make too much noise playing. Nelly goes on Friday & so I shall [have] a whole week to experiment in—to become free in.

Yesterday morning I made another start on The Moths, but that wont be its title. & several problems cry out at once to be solved. Who thinks it? And am I outside the thinker? One wants some device which is not a trick.

The greenhouse began to be built yesterday. We are watering the earth with money. Next week my room will begin to rise. It strikes me that one is absurd to expect good temper or magnanimity from servants, considering what crowded small rooms they live in, with their work all about them.

Then, old Mrs. Woolf—(I mean I am making a few notes, heaven knows why, but one always thinks there is a reason.) She has come to wear a charm & dignity to me, unknown before, now her old age is crumbling down all the cheerful sentimental small talk—she becomes curiously more humane & wise, as old women are; so pliable, so steeped in life that they seem to become philosophic, & more mistress of the art of living than much cleverer people. So many many things have happened before her; illnesses, births, quarrels, troubles—nothing much surprises her, or long upsets her. True she is peevish & bored as a child; but has attained some carelessness of show & pomp & respectability, as if she had washed her hands of most things & were playing on a beach, rather an enviable old age in many ways, though intolerable too. Always take opportunities I heard her murmuring to Pinka who had eaten all our soup. And then the long stories about her cooks, & how she had taught them cooking when she was rich. ‘Now you are poor & plain’ one of them wrote ‘after my great sorrow’ here she sighs, & would cry, but is easily diverted & presses a tin of toffee on me.

I must go into the kitchen to see my stove cooking ham now

Wednesday 2 October

We have just been over Annie’s cottage—so I suppose it is. & we therefore own another fair sized house; but the arrangement with Annie seems another of those plums which since this time, or August, last year, have dropped into our hands here. She will cook; my oil stove makes hot meals practicable at all hours; but I am dazed with the Brighton conference; hearing Henderson orate & seeing him get red slowly like a lobster; we went on Monday too (how my days of reflection have dwindled! one must give it all up now) & heard a good, interesting, debate. The audience makes an extraordinary baaing noise; not talk, not footsteps—& I thought how politics was no longer an affair of great nobles & mystery & diplomacy, but of commonsense, issuing from ordinary men & women of business—not very exalted, but straight forward, like any other business affair.

The light is dying; I hear the village boys kicking footballs; & all those reflections, comments, that occur to me walking are died out—the atmosphere, winter, change, London’s imminence, scatter, finally, my poor efforts at solid concentration. Yet I have, these last days, set my book alight I think—got it going; but at a rate like that of Jacob’s Room Mrs Dalloway days—a page at most, & long sitting sucking my pen. And all the Americans write & cable for articles. And I shall go in & read Phedre, having picked some apples. Leonard in the cold windy road is cleaning the car.

Friday 11 October

And I snatch at the idea of writing here in order not to write Waves or Moths or whatever it is to be called. One thinks one has learnt to write quickly; & one hasn’t. And what is odd, I’m not writing with gusto or pleasure: because of the concentration. I am not reeling it off; but sticking it down. Also, never, in my life, did I attack such a vague yet elaborate design; whenever I make a mark I have to think of its relation to a dozen others. And though I could go on ahead easily enough, I am always stopping to consider the whole effect. In particular is there some radical fault in my scheme? I am not quite satisfied with this method of picking out things in the room & being reminded by them of other things. Yet I cant at the moment devise anything which keeps so close to the original design & admits of movement.

Hence, perhaps, these October days are to me a little strained & surrounded with silence. What I mean by this last word I dont quite know, since I have never stopped ‘seeing’ people—Nessa & Roger, the Jeffers’, Charles Buxton, & should have seen Lord David & am to see the Eliots—oh & there was Vita too. No; its not physical silence; its some inner loneliness—interesting to analyse if one could. To give an example—I was walking up Bedford Place is it—the straight street with all the boarding houses this afternoon, & I said to myself spontaneously, something like this. How I suffer, & no one knows how I suffer, walking up this street, engaged with my anguish, as I was after Thoby died—alone; fighting something alone. But then I had the devil to fight, & now nothing. And when I come indoors, it is all so silent—I am not carrying a great rush of wheels in my head—Yet I am writing—oh & we are very successful—& there is—what I most love—change ahead. Yes, that last evening at Rodmell when Leonard came down against his will to fetch me, the Keynes’s came over. And Maynard is giving up the Nation, & so is Hubert, & so no doubt shall we. And it is autumn; & the lights are going up; & Nessa is in Fitzroy Street—in a great misty room, with flaring gas & unsorted plates & glasses on the floor,—& the Press is booming—& this celebrity business is quite chronic—& I am richer than I have ever been—& bought a pair of earrings today—& for all this, there is vacancy & silence somewhere in the machine. On the whole, I do not much mind; because, what I like is to flash & dash from side to side, goaded on by what I call reality. If I never felt these extraordinarily pervasive strains—of unrest, or rest, or happiness, or discomfort—I should float down into acquiescence. Here is something to fight: & when I wake early I say to myself, Fight, fight. If I could catch the feeling, I would: the feeling of the singing of the real world, as one is driven by loneliness & silence from the habitable world; the sense that comes to me of being bound on an adventure; of being strangely free now, with money & so on, to do anything. I go to take theatre tickets (The Matriarch) & see a list of cheap excursions hanging there, & at once think that I will go to Stratford on Avon Mob fair tomorrow—why not?—or to Ireland, or to Edinburgh for a week end. I daresay I shant. But anything is possible. And this curious steed, life; is genuine—Does any of this convey what I want to say?—But I have not really laid hands on the emptiness after all.

Its odd, now I come to think of it—I miss Clive.

It occurs to me that Arthur Studd was another of the brilliant young men. But there was something innocent about him, compared with Bernard & Geoffrey: he spoke through his nose, & had a soft guttural voice; & a bald forehead, & rather handsome brown eyes, like a dogs: he was canine, in some ways; travelled, distinguished, rich; with a stout mother he disliked, & thus won my mother’s sympathy. He had thick red hands, but painted in the manner of Whistler—gesticulating over the canvas, & then producing some little pleasing melodious still life, with which, rather mystically, he was very pleased. It was ‘being an artist’ that took his fancy. He had lovely rooms in Cheyne Walk; & the white girls & pink clouds & rivers & fireworks of Whistler hung in them. He went to Samoa, to paint Whistlers perhaps, & came back when Stella was dead & grieved for her I think. He had loved her, in his fumbling ineffective way. Then he wrote little poems, about Eton, which he loved, & hoped to be buried there—But why should he think of being buried, with all his advantages? There was something ineffective about him—he could not do anything; but had, to us as children, a kind of romance; was supposed to do extravagant impossible things—like hiring a cab & taking us all off suddenly to play cricket at Lords—that I remember. I suppose he was the flower of Eton & the 90ties, getting itself varnished with art & Paris & studio life, & Chelsea. He sent me a post card from St Ives once, & a poem about Eton—& then—clap came the war; & being endlessly kind & generous & inefficient, no doubt he did great things for refugees, & died, without any notice being taken, that I am aware of—a rich bachelor; not much over 50 I suppose. Another ‘young man’—not brilliant exactly, but congenial in my memory, modest, fresh, unexpected, & always so nasal.

Sunday 13 October

It comes to me to ask, how far could I live at this moment in Nessa being with Angelica at school? Can one supplement one’s life? I think a little. Julian has driven her over from Cambridge, this still soft grey morning. It is sunny & misty in the country. She got into the car in the King’s Parade, where the paper sellers are & the young men are hurrying I suppose along to breakfast. Then they drive, with a map on their knees; Julian rather tense, staring through his spectacles. Some very intimate things are hinted at—of wh. I know nothing—or rather he grunts & half says things, which she understands. She is very excited, at the same time practical. Julian is excited too. They are both very anxious to see Angelica. How will they see her first? She will come running down the stairs into the private room, on the left; with the Adams fireplace. And then? She will ‘fly into Nessa’s arms’. Nessa will hold her very tight to get the sensation of her child’s body again. Julian will call her “dear”. They will go out together into the park. Angelica will like to show off her knowledge of rules & ways & the best places to sit in; other girls will smile, & she will say ‘Thats Claudia’ or Annie. Thats Miss Colly—Thats Mrs Curtis. And all the time they will be feeling the comfort & excitement of being together—of having only just broached their time together. Nessa will get at ever so many things: questions of happiness, teaching, liking, loneliness—change. They will be very proud of each other & aloof. & Julian will peer about, through his glasses, liking Nessa & Angelica better than anybody I daresay; the simple crude boy—whom I shall now never know, I daresay. For—as I am going to say to Nessa on Wednesday—you are a jealous woman, & dont want me to know your sons, dont want to take, but always to give; are afraid of the givers. What will she answer?

But Leonard will go on moving the apples, & so I cannot write anything except my—what I am pleased to call—my diary. I wish I could write more succinctly, by the way, & with less use of the present participle. My carelessness shocks me. Nature is having her revenge, & is now making me write one word an hour.

Wednesday 23 October

As it is true—I write only for an hour—then sink back feeling I cannot keep my brain on that spin any more—then typewrite, & am done by 12—I will here sum up my impressions before publishing a Room of One’s own It is a little ominous that Morgan wont review it.* * He wrote yesterday 3rd Dec. & said he very much liked it It makes me suspect that there is a shrill feminine tone in it which my intimate friends will dislike. I forecast, then, that I shall get no criticism, except of the evasive jocular kind, from Lytton, Roger & Morgan; that the press will be kind & talk of its charm, & sprightiness; also I shall be attacked for a feminist & hinted at for a sapphist; Sibyl will ask me to luncheon; I shall get a good many letters from young women. I am afraid it will not be taken seriously. Mrs Woolf is so accomplished a writer that all she says makes easy reading … this very feminine logic … a book to be put in the hands of girls. I doubt that I mind very much. The Moths; but I think it is to be waves, is trudging along; & I have that to refer to, if I am damped by the other. It is a trifle, I shall say; so it is, but I wrote it with ardour & conviction.

We dined last night with the Webbs, & I had Eddy & Dottie to tea. As for these mature dinner parties one has some friendly easy talk with one man—Hugh Macmillan—about the Buchans & his own career;—the Webbs are friendly but can’t be influenced about Kenya: we sit in two lodging house rooms (the dining room had a brass bedstead behind a screen) eat hunks of red beef; & are offered whisky. It is the same enlightened, impersonal, perfectly aware of itself atmosphere. “My little boy shall have his toy”—but dont let that go any further “—that’s what my wife says about my being in the Cabinet”. No they have no illusions. And I compared them with L. & myself, & felt (I daresay for this reason) the pathos, the symbolical quality of the childless couple; standing for something, united.

As for ‘seeing’ Eddy & Dottie, there is not much to it; an occasional phrase one remembers—Eddy’s being in love with two people: Dotty’s rational account of a bore whom she helps: Eddy wishes me to read his diary, but some, nameless, friend objects; but he agreed, before long: it is a gratification to him. And so 1½ hours passed. Dotty deplored Vita’s too early fame. Yet I suppose she loves her; is devoted; queer things lodge in people’s souls;

I am very carefully & cautiously becoming a reader & a thinker again. Since I have been back I have read Virginia Water (a sweet white grape); God;—all founded, & teased & spun out upon one quite simple & usual psychological experience; but the man’s no poet & cant make one see; all his sentences are like steel lines on an engraving; I am reading Racine, have bought La Fontaine, & so intend to make my sidelong approach to French literature, circling & brooding—

Saturday 2 November

It takes precisely 10 days for anything to happen to a book—It is now Saturday 2nd. Nov: & the R. of ones O. has sold, I think 100 copies this morning; none before, or scarcely any, this largely due to Vita’s flamboyant broadcast. And I cant remember all the things I was intending to say,—like Renard—the man who kept a diary of the things that occur to one.

I dreamt last night that I had a disease of the heart that would kill me in 6 months. Leonard, after some persuasion, told me. My instincts were all such as I should have, in order, & some very strong: quite unexpected, I mean voluntary, as they are in dreams, & have thus an authenticity which makes an immense, & pervading impression. First, relief—well I’ve done with life anyhow (I was lying in bed) then horror; then desire to live; then fear of insanity; then (no this came earlier) regret about my writing, & leaving this book unfinished; then a luxurious dwelling upon my friends sorrow; then a sense of death & being done with at my age; then telling Leonard that he must marry again; seeing our life together; & facing the conviction of going, when other people went on living. Then I woke, coming to the top with all this hanging about me; & found I had sold a great many copies of my book; & was asked to lunch by Madame Kallas—the odd feeling of these two states of life & death mingling as I ate my breakfast feeling drowsy & heavy.

[Tuesday 5 November]

Oh but I have done quite well so far with R. of one’s Own: & it sells, I think; & I get unexpected letters. But I am more concerned with my Waves. I’ve just typed out my mornings work; & can’t feel altogether sure. There is something there (as I felt about Mrs Dalloway) but I can’t get at it, squarely; nothing like the speed & certainty of The Lighthouse: Orlando mere childs play. Is there some falsity, of method, somewhere? Something tricky?—so that the interesting things aren’t firmly based? I am in an odd state; feel a cleavage; here’s my interesting thing; & there’s no quite solid table on which to put it. It might come in a flash, on re-reading—some solvent. I am convinced that I am right to seek for a station whence I can set my people against time & the sea—but Lord, the difficulty of digging oneself in there, with conviction. Yesterday I had conviction; it has gone today. Yet I have written 66 pages in the past month.

Yesterday Sibyl came; & I told her that she was like a bird holding a stinking mouse in its claws—& the mouse was life. She admitted it. She said she had to go through an unpleasant business; was going to Paris this morning; would The unpleasant business was that she lost her nest egg—said to be £50,000, in America. Now gives tea parties only tell me of it afterwards. Then she bemoaned her lot, guardedly; how she had grown up so late, & only now began to see what it was she wanted. I gather that it is intimacy, simplicity, & friendship that she wants; & it is a little late in life to demand them; & how can she get them now, needing £20,000 a year too? So Arthur cant retire; they must sit there & see the season through; she cant, at the moment, master life; it is not a dead mouse after all; but wriggles. She looked ringeyed, puckered—I saw her in a flash, quite old. Her eyes were very tragic.

And today Stephen Tennant comes to tea. & Arthur Waley. On Sunday we were at Rodmell; & my room is now about three feet of brick, with the window frames in; rather an eyesore, for it cuts off the garage roof & the downs—both pleasanter sights than I had thought. They have driven a small hole through the little room, for the passage; so that by this time, no doubt, that is in being. & things fall & rise & disappear & re-appear. And most of my joy was turned to rage because I let Southease sale of furniture slip, & could have furnished my room perfectly for £20 I daresay. Such is one’s life—yes, such: (a convenient phrase;) And I am asked daily to lecture; & L.’s freedom draws near. Wright will inherit, & is making his dispositions. I keep saying “We shall be able to do that when you have left the Nation”. Still, you see what with oil stoves & Annie, battling my way to freedom. Jan. 1st is the day. We have had the Nation for nearly seven years, without making it blood & bone of ours, as once I thought possible. A tepid paper; neither this nor that, with the perpetual drag of Hubert & Harold, Hubert kindly incompetent, Harold competent but to me, all wood, red apple, sawdust, plausibility, respectability, hesitation & compromise.

Sunday 17 November

A horrid date. Yes, I am feeling a little sick, a little shivery; I cant settle to anything; I am in a twitter; I try to read Mauron—to write—& my lips begin forming words; I begin muttering long conversations between myself & Vita about Dotty on the telephone; about Miss Matheson: I act parts: I find myself talking aloud; I say things over & over again like this “I want to know if after what happened the other morning you want to give me notice? … Well, then, as you wont answer, I am afraid I must now give you notice … But I want to explain exactly why it is. After you told me to leave your room I went to Mr Woolf & said that I could not keep you as my maid any longer. But I haven’t made up my mind in a hurry. I have been thinking about it since June. I tried to arrange not to order dinner so that we might avoid scenes. But the scenes at Rodmell were worse than ever. And now this is the last. I am afraid I can’t go on with it. This is the 17th of Nov. I shall expect you to go on the 17th Dec.” Yes, this is what I have to say to Nelly at 9.30 tomorrow, & then I go to Mrs Hunt’s [Domestic Agency], And I am almost trembling with this nervous anticipation as I write. But it must be done.

Monday 18 November

Well it is over, & much better than I expected—at least for the present. To my question Do you want to give me notice? she replied “I have given you notice—..” Further argument was attempted & cut short by me. “Then you wish to go at the end of your month—12th December.” “As we refused her an hours extra help when she was ill, yes.” But this was said without conviction. I clinched it by looking at the calendar (which I could not see, blind as I am) & then left her, in the calmest flattest way possible—which means I’m afraid that she has no more intention of going on Dec. 12th than I have of taking ship to Siberia. So be it. My mind is like a gum when an aching tooth has been drawn. I am having a holiday—reading old Birrell, & shall hope that the dust will be settled now for a week or two. The Horsham tiles are being put on my roof, so Percy writes this morning; which means that my rooms must be almost done. And now I have an extra room there—Nelly’s—yes; & no servant in the house here—thank God—two friends to come in one early t’other late; no more Bloomsbury gossip—no more Lottie barging in & out; no more fear of having people to lunch & tea & dinner; no more pains in the back, swollen ankles, & ups & downs of passion & effusion. And so, what with the oil stove, Annie, giving up the Nation, new rooms new servants, the new year will be one of the most interesting—a great advance towards freedom which is the ideal state of the soul. Yet it must not be thought that I have suffered acutely from servitude. My one claim on my own gratitude is that, directly I feel a chain, I throw it off: think of leaving Fitzroy; leaving Hogarth—leaving Hyde Park Gate I was going to say to round the sentence & indeed I think I have been an old struggler after my fashion—not so valiant I daresay as Nessa, but tenacious too & bold.

Monday 25 November

I merely add idly (ought I not to be correcting To the Lighthouse) that the difficulties with Nelly are to avoid an apology. She has weakened, & is now all out to catch us weakening. She wished L. many happy returns this morning. She came to me on Friday & asked me why I did not speak. I had some difficulty in being stiff & angry & saying that after her behaviour & accusations it was impossible. Mrs Hunt promises an abundance of permanent dailies, & so I think the die is cast. I have no doubt difficulties will begin, again; but not the old intolerable difficulties, no, no, never again.

I broadcast; & poured my rage hot as lava over Vita. She appeared innocent—I mean of telling H⁠[ilda] M⁠[atheson]. that I could easily cut my Brummell to bits. And then I discussed her friends, Vita’s friends, & said that here, in their secondrateness, was the beginning of my alienation. I cant have it said “Vita’s great friends—Dottie, Hilda & Virginia”. I detest the 2ndrate schoolgirl atmosphere. She sat silent for the most part, & only said I was right. Harold had said the same. The thing to do is to check it. She cant stop what she’s begun. And then in a hurry to Rodmell, where the roof is on, & the floor stretched with planks. The bedroom will be a lovely wonderful room what I’ve always hoped for.

Saturday 30 November

I fill in this page, nefariously; at the end of a morning’s work. I have begun the second part of Waves—I dont know, I dont know. I feel that I am only accumulating notes for a book—whether I shall ever face the labour of writing it, God Knows. From some higher station I may be able to pull it together—at Rodmell, in my new room. Reading The Lighthouse does not make it easier to write; nor these impending final interviews with Nelly & new servants. We had a party—dining out at the Red Lion—last night; Julian & Rachel; Lyn, Hope, Plomer, Brian Howard, Nessa afterwards. Too many people, Leonard said. I dont know. I dislike B. Howard; I dislike his decadence, & protruding eyes, & unbuttoned waistcoat & floating tie. On the make, Leonard says. Plomer, on the other hand, was very plump & vigorous, fresh from the Bayswater murder; the details of which he said—how he had cleaned scraps of brain from the carpet apparently—could not be told. The young Jewess was attacked in bed at 4 last Sunday morning by a mad husband with a razor. First he locked the door, so that she banged & kicked, with the razor slashing her all the time in vain: at last burst out, with her head hanging by the skin to die on the landing. If William had not been away that week end the Chinese man would have come to him; & he thinks, killed him too. But this is not his line, he says as a novelist; & the psychic ladies who invest the house, like the coarser kind of bug & beetle, disgust him with their sea-ants. They table turn, & hear the voice of Mrs Frip—(not her name) from the other side; one, very fat with curled hair, said, “And it all happened a million years ago.” Disgusting, William said. His eyes—the representative part of him—flashed & goggled.

It is said that Hope has become a Roman Catholic on the sly. Certainly she has grown very fat—too fat for a woman in middle age who uses her brains, & so I suspect the rumour is true. She has sat herself down under the shade. It is strange to see beauty—she had something elegant & individual—go out, like a candle flame. Julian, for instance, could not see, I think, that Hope had ever been a young & attractive woman. She has some vigour of mind though. Lyn has less than I could wish. When she has written her review, there is not much left. And her ‘niceness’—housekeeping & nursing her sister who is ill—take the edge off. Had she £100, she would insure against illness, she said; because illness means that one cant work; this week, neither she nor her sister has made a penny. On that foundation it is hard to rear any very robust character; she is fretted & anxious.

Certainly it is true that if one writes a thing down one has done with it.

Saturday 30 November

It is still Saturday the 30th November, & we have been to Greenwich, leaving Nessa & Duncan to paint Dottie’s tables in Mr James’ shed. Mr James is one of the Morris craftsmen; & has a tile making works near the river. He wears striped trousers & spats & will sit up all night, indulging himself with cups of tea, when the tiles are firing. Now & then you take out a tile to test it. He has three Kilns, the most expensive costing £300: & the Rotherhithe tunnel is near at hand. Leonard & I walked under the river (I thinking of the pressure of grey water round it; & of the absurd sublimity of errand boys & nursemaids walking on dry land under the river) & we came up in Greenwich & walked there on the parade where I walked a year or two ago in a temper. A man in a jersey was sitting in a glass shelter. How odd—to sit there, with nothing to do! And we saw the hospital, yellow & pink; & then it rained, & we went back & talked to Mr James about his tiles & then drove through the East End to the garage. I bought two crumpets for a penny; & we came home. Duncan began telling me the story of the London artists; & how Roger is so much hated by the critics that they wont notice the London artists. This is said to mean that Keith Baynes doesn’t sell. And so Nessa is having a tea party tomorrow to discuss the matter with Porter & Keith Baynes. For this she bought some cakes. And they are having Angus to dinner. So am I not thank God.

Sunday 8 December

Dear me; last Monday, as L. advised, I asked Nelly if she wished to go: & so (as I foreboded) she said reasonably no; & proposed solutions; we were landed; not emotionally, rather weariedly, & disillusionedly on my part, in a compromise: to try Mansfield for a month,—(here is L. to ask about alterations—that is a 2nd E.C. & new lavatory basin which being settled—& its a roaring wind) we (then) if the trial is unsatisfactory then to part without further discussion for ever.

Just back from Rodmell. The roof is on; the floors are made; the windows in; giving, it seemed vast sweeping views of flooded meadows; but there was only a blink of light even at midday; we were engulfed in whirling wet; working up to such a storm on Friday night as I have, I think, never been in. It went round & round; & there was thunder in the crash of the wind; & great zigzags of lightning; & hail drumming on the iron roof outside my room; & such a fury of noise one could not sleep. So at one I went up to L. & looked at the lighted windows in the village; & thought, really with some fear, of being out alone that moment. Suppose the tree crashed, or the slates came off? We were not very securely sheltered, there under our slate roof; still better than being at sea. Dreams were all blown about, elongated, distorted, that night. A tree down in the churchyard. Trees down all the way up today. A curious sense of community brought by the storm. A man killed at Chailey sleeping in a shed; a woman at Eastbourne; a boy at Worthing. However, the mind was very still & happy. I read & read & finished I daresay 3 foot thick of MS read carefully too; much of it on the border, & so needing thought. Now, with this load despatched, I am free to begin reading Elizabethans—the little unknown writers, whom I, so ignorant am I, have never heard of, Puttenham, Webb, Harvey. This thought fills me with joy—no overstatement. To begin reading with a pen in my hand, discovering, pouncing, thinking of theories, when the ground is new, remains one of my great excitements. Oh but L. will sort apples, & the little noise upsets me; I cant think what I was going to say.

So I stopped writing, by which no great harm was done; & made out a list of Elizabethan poets.

And I have, with great happiness, refused to write Rhoda Broughton & Ouida for de la Mare. That vein, popular as it is, witness Jane & Geraldine, is soon worked out in me. I want to write criticism. Yes, & one might make out an obscure figure or two. It was the Elizabethan prose writers I loved first & most wildly, stirred by Hakluyt, which father lugged home for me—I think of it with some sentiment—father tramping over the Library with his little girl sitting at HPG in mind. He must have been 65; I 15 or 16, then; & why I dont know, but I became enraptured, though not exactly interested, but the sight of the large yellow page entranced me. I used to read it & dream of those obscure adventurers, & no doubt practised their style in my copy books. I was then writing a long picturesque essay upon the Christian religion, I think; called Religio Laici, I believe, proving that man has need of a God; but the God was described in process of change; & I also wrote a history of Women; & a history of my own family—all very longwinded & El⁠[izabe]⁠than in style.

Tuesday 10 December

A bad day yesterday, because I had Vita to lunch, which I hate, & lost one of my green leather gloves. We had tea with Leonard’s mother, who, sitting in a new room, fairly flabbergasted us by her accident. The hotel was struck by lightning on Friday; a chimney stack fell; her room was filled with soot & sparks—& there she was, dramatising it, shivering, shocked, yet buoyant & secretly pleased to be the centre of catastrophe again. As usual she had behaved with perfect calm—“but I feel these things so much afterwards” & was anxious to give pounds of tobacco to the workmen engaged in mending the roof. “What right, I said to myself, have we to sit here & see those poor fellows carrying bricks? Oh their lives—carrying bricks to the roof in this gale—& I sitting here” (in a pink hotel bedroom). This is her fluid imagination—pounds of tobacco, as Harold [Woolf] said, wdn’t do much to cure the social system.

It is I think a proof of the pressure at which we live that I have said nothing of our lawsuit—or have I? against the hotel, against the jazz band. Rachel, William Plomer & ourselves go to court on Friday. Why are the facts so intolerably dull? I shrink from writing them. I rather liked Scadding & Bodkin’s office; & swearing by almighty God; but Rachel & Wm. enjoy it more than I do. It is more unexpected. Rachel will tell her friends about it—as I should have done. But whole days knocked out of the week bore me. I feel that my greatest triumph is to achieve a quiet evening—in which to read El⁠[izabe]⁠thans. And Charlie Sanger is very ill—I figure him lying worn out, worn out & without much solid happiness to show for it; like some old gold link—so good, so genuine; affectionate; honourable; but a worn disappointed man I think: no natural happiness: a conscience; & then Dora.

Thursday 12 December

Here, just back from Rodmell, & some rather forced conversation with Mr Philcox (the wife & I went to America—I dont like America—you pay separate for breakfast—room, double 24 dollars). I will rapidly note my evidence for tomorrow though Pritchard now says we shall be postponed—for the hotel cant get a witness. What I shall say—(I have the pump all right,) is this about the autumn.

We came back early in October & the music was very bad. My husband Case settled; expenses paid: 15th Jan. (about) wrote to the Secretary who wrote & assured him that everything wd. be done. Next night the music was so bad that my husband rang up the hotel; but they said they could do nothing. The music slightly improved, & we waited till the end of Nov. when it became so bad we were unable to sit in the room. The party was on 29th: on the 30th it was intolerable.

How easily facts escape me!

Saturday 14 December

No I am too tired to write; have been rushed, what with the lawsuit &c; have had toothache: & so sit passive, hoping that some drops will form in my mind. By the way, the sales of A Room are unprecedented—have beaten Orlando; feels like a line running through ones fingers; orders for 100 taken as coolly as 12’s used to be. We have sold, I think 5500; & our next years income is made.

Had I married Lytton I should never have written anything. So I thought at dinner the other night. He checks & inhibits in the most curious way. L. may be severe; but he stimulates. Anything is possible with him. Lytton was mild & damp, like a wet autumnal leaf. Lonely, & growing elderly; so he compares notes with Clive apparently. Our case stands over till next Thursday, & will probably be settled in the interval—some compromise made. Yesterday they screwed down some windows—the law had that instant effect. The law was sad-coloured, impressive. We saw Mr Preston at 10; he was in a black court coat, with dirty white bands; a self confident sandy, polite man. What a pugnacious chap you are! I heard another K.C. say to him in court. An admirable manly atmosphere—schoolboys come to responsibility they seemed; all so aquiline & definite under their frizzled grey wigs. Then the Judge (Farwell) came in. We rose. He bowed. He looked superhumanly sage, dignified, sad; the wig again cutting his forehead off & accentuating the deep reflective eyes—a sallow, sodden wearied face; so intent that he was monosyllabic—could not afford to open his mouth unnecessarily; merely nodded. All was over in 10 minutes I suppose. I felt the stress of it all; that man sitting there intent under his canopy in the small crowded court, never dropping a word, till 4 in the afternoon.

Sunday 15 December

Tooth better, but not what I call a vigorous head; an idling, unconcentrated head—too much doing in Tavistock Sqre these last days. Last night we went to The Calendar (by Edgar Wallace) with Ann; & there was a cheer, & behold a great golden Queen bowing in a very small bow windowed box. Also, when the lights went up, the King, red, grumpy, fidgeting with his hands; well groomed, bluff; heavy looking, with one white flower in his buttonhole, resenting the need, perhaps, of sitting to be looked at between one of the acts—his duty to be done; & then not much liking the little remarks cast at him, to minimise his labour, by the Queen. Once the D⁠[uche]⁠ss of York sat with the Queen; a simple, chattering, sweethearted little roundfaced young woman in pink: but her wrist twinkling with diamonds, her dress held on the shoulder with diamonds. The Queen also like a lit up street with diamonds. An odd feeling came to me of the shop window decorated for the public: these our exhibits, our show pieces. Not very impressive—no romance or mystery—the very best goods. Yet he descends, I daresay, from Hengist; goes straight back, this heavy bluff grumpy looking man, to Elizabeth & the rest; will have his face forever in our history. He took spectacles out of a bright red case.

I thought (as I so often think things) of many comments to be written. One remains. If I were reading this diary, if it were a book that came my way, I think I should seize with greed upon the portrait of Nelly, & make a story—perhaps make the whole story revolve round that—it would amuse me. Her character—our efforts to be rid of her—our reconciliations.

[Thursday 26 December]
Rodmell. Boxing day

And I am sitting in my new room—bedroom, not sitting room; with curtains fire table; & two great views; sometimes sun over the brooks & storm over the church. A violent Christmas; a brilliant serene Boxing day; & both very happy—completely, were it not for the damnable Byng-Stamper & his power to sell the down to a syndicate to exploit. That this is his intention comes through Percy; & I am wrought up to protest; indeed I must write to Ottoline & ask her the name of the little man who protects downs. This place is always being risked & saved; & so perhaps will be again. Cutting down trees & spoiling downs are my two great iniquities—what the Armenians were to Mrs Cole. I find it almost incredibly soothing—a fortnight alone—almost impossible to let oneself have it. Relentlessly we have crushed visitors—Morgan, Roger, Adrian. We will be alone this once, we say; & really, it seems possible. Then Annie is to me very sympathetic; my bread bakes well. All is rather rapt, simple, quick effective—except for my blundering on at The Waves. I write two pages of arrant nonsense, after straining; I write variations of every sentence; compromises; bad shots; possibilities; till my writing book is like a lunatic’s dream. Then I trust to some inspiration on re-reading; & pencil them into some sense. Still I am not satisfied. I think there is something lacking. I sacrifice nothing to seemliness. I press to my centre. I dont care if it all is scratched out. And there is something there. I incline now to try violent shots—at London—at talk—shouldering my way ruthlessly—& then, if nothing comes of it—anyhow I have examined the possibilities. But I wish I enjoyed it more. I dont have it in my head all day like The Lighthouse & Orlando.

Before I went Clive came to tea; sat alone for an hour or two. He asked me if I had been told that he had criticised A Room? I said no. He was a little rasped; said the jokes were lecture jokes. “Girls come round me”—too much of that—little ideas—nothing to compare with Orlando. And then, inconsistently, he praised O. above L⁠[ighthouse]. against what he said at the time. But his criticism is founded upon the theory that I cant feel sex: have the purple light cut off; & therefore must write Orlando’s not Lighthouses. I daresay there’s some truth—especially in his saying that my soliloquies, trains of thought, are better than my silhouettes. But, as always, his own axe wants grinding: that Love is enough—or if love fails, down one goes for ever. For we got on Mary of course; & again he protested that no one could have acted other than he did—& then he vaguely threatened an alliance, in France, with his loved—or the lady who loves. But does she love? Does she take him to Egypt? All trembles now on some unreality. Everything has been shifted by Mary; no fundament left. And I always feel, how jolly, how much hunting, & talking & carousing there is in you! How long we have known each other—& then Thoby’s form looms behind—that queer ghost. I think of death sometimes as the end of an excursion which I went on when he died. As if I should come in & say well, here you are. And yet I am not familiar with him now, perhaps. Those letters Clive read made him strange & external.

But a dog barks, & my lamp flickers—even in my perfect room. So down to Leonard, to read Elizabethans & put our glass dish on the fire.

Saturday 28 December

Bernard Shaw said the other night at the Keynes’—& the Keynes’s have just wrecked my perfect fortnight of silence, have been over in their Rolls Royce—& L. made them stay, & is a little inclined to think me absurd for not wishing it—but then Clive is his bugbear at present—Bernard Shaw said to me, I have never written anything except poetry. A man has written a book showing how by altering a word or two a whole act of the D⁠[octo]⁠rs Dilemma is in rhythm. In fact my rhythm is so strong that when I had to copy a page of Wells the other day in the midst of my own writing my pen couldnt do it. I was wanting to write my own rhythm—yet I hadn’t known till then that I had so strong a rhythm. Heartbreak House is the best of my plays. I wrote it after staying with you at the Webbs in Sussex—perhaps you inspired it. And Lydia is making the Lady into Queen Victoria. No I never saw Stevenson—Mrs Stevenson thought I had a cold.

You write Irish Mr Shaw. So does Mr Moore. Moore’s an odd man—a very small talent cultivated with the utmost patience. We used to laugh at him in the old days. He was our butt. He was always telling us stories about himself & a lady—a grand lady—& she was always throwing something at his head & just missing it—& he used to say “Wait wait, there’s a good passage coming”. Nobody was better tempered. But he was our laughing stock. And one day Zola said to me I’ve discovered your great English novelist! Who’s that said I. His name is George Moore. And I burst out laughing not our little George Moore, with his stories about himself? But it was. A lesson, you see, not to be too quick in judging ones friends.

But all his stories are autobiographic, I said.

Yes, they are all about George Moore & the lady who throws something at his head.—is writing a life of Moore & has asked me to tell the story of his early days. I am collecting my works. I find that I wrote a million words about the theatre. I dont know what to do with it. My wife wants me to leave out. But I think it gives a curious picture of the time. I am ashamed to think that I could ever have written so badly. The collection is limited to 21 volumes. Theyre going to be sold in different bindings in America—some in leather very expensive—others quite cheap—hawked about all over America by peddlars. Im not a modest man but even I blushed at the stuff I’ve had to write for my publishers. Essential to every home & so on. I say out of twelve people, there will always be 3 women as clever as the men. What I’ve always told them is go for the governing bodies—dont mind about the vote. Insist upon representation. Now women are far more enthusiastic about business than men. They get things done. Men gossip in clubs. Oh but youve done more for us than anyone, Mr Shaw. My generation, & Francis Birrell’s (he was sitting behind) we might be nice people, but we’re different owing to you.

Happier said Francis.

Then Lydia came & broke in, with Mrs Shaw.

[]

1930

Saturday 4 January

This is the new year, & I shall continue this book—from economy. I am having a holiday; it is fine; & so inveterate an habitual am I, I find it easier to walk after lunch than before. Far from doing nothing, I intend to write some letters, & have been pondering the early works of Miss Easedale.

The idea has come to us that we will live here from April onwards. And merely because of that idea, the view from my window looks different. It becomes usual⁠[?], something for a long unstressed time; hitherto I have always seen it as an interlude; a breathing space. I note, for that Portrait of Nelly that I should write, if I were editing these pages, that her letter to me began Dear Madam—which I hold to be as Carlyle used to say “Significant of much”. But these are notes merely; for some reason it bores me to enlarge.

Vita came yesterday with a green glass tank in which Japanese flowers expand in water. Here my mind would expand like that—the advent of the Keynes’ made it shrivel. And we wasted our fine day, that should have been spent at Rye, talking in their very ugly room. But I am not saying that they are ugly: that would be blasphemous. This perpetual denigration of human nature & adoration of solitude is suspect. Only, here I’m bound to the board, like an insect, for another three months; & my one fine day I grudge to society. Tonight we dine at Charleston & so home tomorrow to the pump, to the dance music; to Braithewaite, Goldie, Ottoline, Sprott & so on—to be ‘seen’ to ‘see’. A little music though—the opera—that I shall like. And now I must answer letters & so start London free from that anyhow.

Thursday 9 January

I merely note that I am going to try to keep next week entirely free from ‘seeing’ people, bating my dinner at Bogy Harrises to meet the Prime Minister, & Angelica’s party. I am going to see if I can keep 7 days out of the clutch of the seers. I have arranged to do my seeing all this week, & have plodded along faithfully, & industriously: Braithewait & Miss Matthews, Dottie, Ottoline, Goldie, Sprot, Quentin, Miss Matheson & Plomer last night & Eddy to tea today, Vita tomorrow, Quentin on Saturday; & then nobody I swear on Sunday.

Sunday 12 January

Sunday it is. And I have just exclaimed, And now I can think of nothing else. Thanks to my pertinacity & industry, I can now hardly stop making up The Waves. The sense of this came acutely about a week ago on beginning to write the Phantom party: now I feel that I can rush on, after 6 months hacking, & finish: but without the least certainty how its to achieve any form. Much will have to be discarded: what is essential is to write fast & not break the mood—no holiday, no interval if possible, till it is done. Then rest. Then re-write.

As for keeping a week free—I am now going to visit L.’s mother: then to the Frys after dinner. Marjorie Strachey to tea tomorrow: Duncan, I think, on Tuesday; Vita on Friday; Angelica on Saturday; Bogey Harris Wednesday: one day remains entire—Thursday—& thats the end of my week.

Thursday 16 January

A page of real life. Last night at Bogey Harrises. I came in, flung into the room in my red coat. A very painted raddled tall, pink woman (Mrs Graham Murray [unidentified]); & the rest, in an oval room, with painted ceiling, & books—“given me by Horne with Ben Johnson’s autograph—the first edition of Dante—Lady Londonderry will be late; but we wont wait”. I have forgotten the prime minister—an unimpressive man; eyes disappointing; rather heavy; middle class; no son of the people; sunk; grumpy; self-important; wore a black waistcoat; had some mediocrity of personality. In came Lady L. very late; in ruby velvet, cut to the middle of the back, small, running, quick, current, energised. All went in to dinner, & I was too blind to read Sir Robert Vansittart on the man’s card, so had to jumble for my neighbours pursuit. Never mind. They all called each other Van, Bogey, Ramsay, Eadie, across the table; engaged in governing England: A mazer bowl fingered by Roger, drew Ramsay for two minutes, rather heavily into the open; took it; looked at it, laying his shabby drab spectacle case on the table; said he had never signed any authority for the sale of the mazer to America; then lapsed into tete à tête with the ladies—murmuring, unresonant. And so upstairs, Ly L. running ahead, opening doors, taking us into little rooms to look at Majolica, at altarpieces. Then round the fire she started off, fluent, agreeable, hard hitting, like a rider, or Captain, without an ounce of spare flesh, telling stories—old men who had operations & were then mad—left their money in a muddle—her own father mad for two years—Farquhar muddling up the Fife Settlements & the Liberal Party fund—all indiscreet, open, apparently; the chat of a perfectly equipped, un nonsensical, well fed, athletic woman, riding her horse at every fence. We discussed Birth Control. ‘Dear Edie, you wont let me convert you. But when you see your miners, with those terrible illegitimate children—

Eight in a room. One bed. What can you expect? They speak straight out to me, the old fashioned ones. Cant do anything else. What would you do? What should we do, if we lived like that? But we’re not beasts. We can control ourselves. I detest Prohibition for that reason.’

Swept on, energetically, confidently, to the Webbs (woman sprung up beside me like a cobra) “Our class & yours can never meet. What difference is there? But these clever people! Yeats & Lady Gregory on a committee are hopeless—but both very clever people. Cant do anything.”

Ly L. can do whatever she wishes. She looked like an early Victorian picture—a Lawrence, I thought; a small pinched well cut face; healthy; without paint; very pink, pearls knotted about her wrists. The other woman garish, like a ruined almond tree. The rooms all set out with cases, chests, pictures objects. “I never give more than £10: I hunt about in rag & bone shops.” Bogy has the glazed stuffed look of the well fed bachelor. Is evidently one of those elderly comfortable men of taste & leisure who make a profession of society; a perfectly instinctive snob. Knows everyone; lunches with Lord Lascelles; has taken the measure of it all exactly; nothing to say; proficient; surly; adept; an unattractive type, with all his talk of Lords & ladies, his belief in great houses; something of a gorged look, which connoisseurs have; as if he had always just swallowed a bargain. Something airless & too tidy in the house; a plethora of altar pieces. He pads about, gorged, without anything to seek for, save in old rag & bone shops; at the crest (I suppose) of his world. I suppose that this centre to one’s mind—an altarpiece—is a bad one; too still & capable of acquisition. He never wants anything unattainable, I daresay: & so has feathered his nest. Roger says he has ‘flair’; Roger who looks like a ravaged scavenger & lives with sardine tins & linoleum; yes, but Roger’s house seems alive, with a living hand in it, manipulated, stretched. Why do interesting people never fix them down among objects (beautiful) & Duchesses (desirable). I tried, sitting on a priceless settee, picked up in Whitechapel for £10 (I never give more) to analyse my sensations. The ladies showed a perfect commercial grasp of the situation. Ramsay was tossed between them like a fish among cormorants. I had the impression that they did not rate this acquisition high; but took it as part of the days work. Ly L. had him to herself in a shaded room for an hour. Failing this, she had her claims written down to hand him.

Angelica said at the pantomime, as we watched the spangled lady dance, “I shall never be able to dance like that but I may be able to paint like she dances.”

Sunday 26 January

I am 48: we have been at Rodmell—a wet, windy day again; but on my birthday we walked among the downs, like the folded wings of grey birds; & saw first one fox, very long with his brush stretched; then a second; which had been barking, for the sun was hot over us; it leapt lightly over a fence & entered the furze—a very rare sight. How many foxes are there in England? At night I read Lord Chaplin’s life. I cannot yet write naturally in my new room, because the table is not the right height, & I must stoop to warm my hands. Everything must be absolutely what I am used to.

I forgot to say that when we made up our 6 months accounts, we found I had made about £3,020 last year—the salary of a civil servant: a surprise to me, who was content with £200 for so many years. But I shall drop very heavily I think. The Waves wont sell more than 2,000 copies. I am stuck fast in that It has sold about 6,500 today, Oct. 30th 1931—after 3 weeks. But I will stop now I suppose. book—I mean, glued to it, like a fly on gummed paper. Sometimes I am out of touch; but go on; then again feel that I have at last, by violent measures—like breaking through gorse—set my hands on something central. Perhaps I can now say something quite straight out; & at length; & need not be always casting a line to make my book the right shape. But how to pull it together, how to compost it—press it into one—I do not know; nor can I guess the end—it might be a gigantic conversation. The interludes are very difficult, yet I think essential; so as to bridge & also give a background—the sea; insensitive nature—I dont know. But I think, when I feel this sudden directness, that it must be right: anyhow no other form of fiction suggests itself except as a repetition at the moment.

Lord Buckmaster sat next me. I was talking to Desmond about Irene. Suddenly Ethel said leaning across,

But did you ever know Lord Tennyson? & my evening was ruined. Typical of these parties.

Monday 10 February

Charlie Sanger died yesterday, the very fine cold day, when we were driving up. I feel sorry in gusts. I wish we had dined there. I shall miss some peculiar thing—loyal, worn, romantic; flowing with affection. He knew us when Thoby died; had always clasped my hand warmly, sat sparking, glittering, elfish; very sympathetic, very serious, in the right way. He had a stern view, I think; had found life hard; & envisaged its hardness for others. Yes; I have a peculiar feeling for him—can one say more? And this is the sorrow for him—feeling one will never again have that. (I cant analyse—have indeed a slight temperature, & am in two minds if it is influenza, & whether to tell Leonard, who has had it—to put off Ethel Smyth, & Nessa—to go to bed—what is the sensible thing to do?

Sunday 16 February

To lie on the sofa for a week. I am sitting up today, in the usual state of unequal animation. Below normal, with spasmodic desire to write, then to doze. It is a fine cold day & if my energy & sense of duty persist, I shall drive up to Hampstead. But I doubt that I can write to any purpose. A cloud swims in my head. One is too conscious of the body & jolted out of the rut of life to get back to fiction. Once or twice I have felt that odd whirr of wings in the head which comes when I am ill so often—last year for example, at this time I lay in bed constructing A Room of One’s Own (which sold 10,000 two days ago). If I could stay in bed another fortnight (but there is no chance of that) I believe I should see the whole of The Waves. Or of course I might go off on something different. As it is I half incline to insist upon a dash to Cassis; but perhaps this needs more determination than I possess; & we shall dwindle on here. Pinker is walking about the room looking for the bright patch—a sign of spring. I believe these illnesses are in my case—how shall I express it?—partly mystical. Something happens in my mind. It refuses to go on registering impressions. It shuts itself up. It becomes chrysalis. I lie quite torpid, often with acute physical pain—as last year; only discomfort this. Then suddenly something springs. Two nights ago, Vita was here; & when she went, I began to feel the quality of the evening—how it was spring coming: a silver light; mixing with the early lamps; the cabs all rushing through the streets; I had a tremendous sense of life beginning; mixed with that emotion, which is the essence of my feeling, but escapes description—(I keep on making up the Hampton Court scene in The Waves—Lord how I wonder if I shall pull this book off! It is a litter of fragments so far). Well, as I was saying, between these long pauses (for I am swimmy in the head, & write rather to stabilise myself than to make a correct statement), I felt the spring beginning, & Vita’s life so full & flush; & all the doors opening; & this is I believe the moth shaking its wings in me. I then begin to make up my story whatever it is; ideas rush in me; often though this is before I can control my mind or pen. It is no use trying to write at this stage. And I doubt if I can fill this white monster. I would like to lie down & sleep, but feel ashamed. Leonard brushed off his influenza in one day & went about his business feeling ill. Here am I still loafing, undressed, with Elly coming tomorrow. But as I was saying my mind works in idleness. To do nothing is often my most profitable way.

I am reading Byron: Maurois: which sends me to Childe Harold; makes me speculate. How odd a mixture: the weakest sentimental Mrs Hemans combined with trenchant bare vigour. How did they combine? And sometimes the descriptions in C.H. are “beautiful”; like a great poet.

There are the three elements in Byron:

1 The romantic dark haired lady singing drawing room melodies to the guitar.

“Tambourgi! Tambourgi! thy ’larum afar

Gives hope to the valiant, & promise of war;

* * *

Oh! who is more brave than a dark Suliote,

In his snowy camese & his shaggy Capote”

—something manufactured: a pose; silliness.

2 Then there is the vigorous rhetorical, like his prose, & good as prose.

Hereditary Bondsmen! Know ye not

Who would be free themselves must strike the blow?

By their right arms the conquest must be wrought?

Will Gaul or Muscovite redress ye? No! …

3 Then what rings to me truer, & is almost poetry.

Dear Nature is the kindest mother still!

Though always changing, in her aspect mild;

From her bare bosom let me take my fill,

Her never-weaned, though not her favoured child.

(all in Canto 11 of CH.)

* * *

To me by day or night she ever smiled,

Though I have marked her when none other hath,

And sought her more & more, & loved her best in wrath.

4 And then there is of course the pure satiric, as in the description of

5 a London Sunday; & finally (but this makes more than three) the inevitable half assumed half genuine tragic note, which comes as a refrain, about death & the loss of friends.

All thou could have of mine, stern Death! thou hast;

The parent, Friend, & now the more than Friend:

Ne’er yet for one thine arrows flew so fast,

And grief with grief continuing still to blend,

Hath snatched the little joy that life had yet to lend.

These I think make him up; & make much that is spurious, vapid, yet very changeable, & then rich & with greater range than the other poets, could he have got the whole into order. A novelist, he might have been. It is odd however to read in his letters his prose an apparently genuine feeling about Athens: & to compare it with the convention he adopted in verse. (There is some sneer about the Acropolis). But then the sneer may have been a pose too. The truth may be that if you are charged at such high voltage you cant fit any of the ordinary human feelings; must pose; must rhapsodise; don’t fit in. He wrote in the Inn Album that his age was 100. And this is true, measuring life by feeling.

Monday 17 February

And this temperature is up;

but it has now gone down; & now

[Thursday 20 February]

Feb. 20th, I must canter my wits if I can. Perhaps some character sketches.

Snow:

She came in wrapped in a dark fur coat; which being taken off, she appeared in nondescript grey stockinette & jay blue stripes. Her eyes too are jay blue, but have an anguished starved look, as of a cat that has climbed on to a chimney piece & looks down at a dog. Her face is pale, & very small; indeed, has a curious preserved innocency which makes it hard to think that she is 50. However, her neck is very loose skinned; & there are the dewlaps of middle age. The preserved look seems to indicate lack of experience; as if life had put her in a refrigerator. And we talked—She brought me a parcel, & this was a book from Ethel Smyth, with a letter, which to veil the embarrassment which I supposed her to feel, I read aloud. Her comment was “What miles away all this is from Cheltenham!” Then we talked—but it was her starved & anguished look that remains & the attitude of mind. She seemed to be saying inwardly “I have missed everything. There are Vanessa & Virginia, They have lives full of novels & husbands & exhibitions. I am fifty & it has all slipped by.” I gathered this from the jocose pertinacity with which she kept referring to herself. She said the climate of Cheltenham is so sleepy that she often cant paint; & after lunch they put on the gramophone; & then she goes most days to her mother at Bockhampton, where she likes meeting the village people. Farmers wives shake hands. After her mothers death—but she is only 80 & as firm as a rock—she & Lily who is political, but of course that doesn’t take up all her time exactly, are going to live at Harrogate, where the climate is not so sleepy, & they know more people. Nothing long distracted her from her central concern—I have had no life & life is over. Even clothes suggested the same old theme. A dressmaker had told her that one enjoyed life more if one was well dressed. So she was trying this specific, to the tune of £8.8 at Pomeroy’s in Old Burlington Street. But this worried & fretted her too. In fact I have seldom got a more dismal impression of suffering—too ignoble & petty to be called suffering: call it rather frustration, non-entity; being lifted on a shelf, & seeing things pass; “but then I am very lazy—thats what it is—I lapse into comfort.” I should call it lapsing into despair. “What can three women do alone in the country?” Lord, how I praise God that I had a bent strong enough to coerce every minute of my life since I was born! This fiddling & drifting & not impressing oneself upon anything—this always refraining & fingering & cutting things up into little jokes & facetiousness—thats whats so annihilating. Yet given little money, little looks, no special gift, but only enough to make her devastatingly aware that other people have more gift, so that she sees her still lives against the superior still lives of Margaret Gere & the Cotswold school,—what can one do? How could one battle? How could one leap on the back of life & wring its scruff? One would joke, bitterly; & become egotistical & anxious to explain & excuse; & plaintive. What I thought most pathetic was the fact that about 5.30 she began to fidget (she never does anything boldly & directly) with her gloves, & say she must be going. But where? I asked. To the Polytechnic to hear a lecture upon French literature. But why? “Oh one never hears French talked in Cheltenham.” Dear dear, but I could tell you all about French literature, I said. However, she shillied shallied; & whether she wanted to go or to stay, I don’t know. And when I asked her what she was going to do that night, Well that depends how long the lecture lasts, she said, feebly laughing. Wont you go to a play? No I think I shall have what is called a snack at the Temperance hotel;—Lord Lord, I repeat again. And it isn’t as if she were unconscious & oblivious: no, she knows that the dog is there, & arches her back & puts out her paw, but ever so feebly & fussily.

Friday 21 February

No two women could be more extravagantly contraposed than Marjorie Snowden & Ethel Smyth. I was lying here at four yesterday when I heard the bell ring then a brisk tramp up the stairs; & then behold a bluff, military old woman (older than I expected), bounced into the room, a little glazed flyaway & abrupt; in a three cornered hat & tailor made suit.

“Let me look at you”.

That over, Now I have brought a book & pencil. I want to ask.

Here there was a ring at the bell. I went to look over. Then we went to tea.

First I want to make out the genealogy of your mothers family. Old Pattle—have you a picture? No. Well now—the names of his daughters.

This lasted out tea. Afterwards, on the sofa, with Ethel stretching her legs out on Pinker’s basket, we talked ceaselessly till 7—when L. came in. We talked—she talked considerably more than I. (On the stairs going up to tea I had asked to be Virginia; about ten minutes after tea she asked to be Ethel: all was settled; the basis of an undying friendship made in 15 minutes:—how sensible; how rapid;) & she got off; oh about music—“I am said to be an egoist. I am a fighter. I feel for the underdog. I rang up Hugh Allen & suggested lunch. My dear Sir Hugh—my dear Ethel—there are facts you dont know about your sex. Believe me I have to go on coming to London, bullying, badgering—at last, they promise me 14 women in the orchestra. I go & find 2. So I begin ringing up.” She has a vein, like a large worm, in her temple which swells. Her cheeks redden. Her faded eyes flash. She has a broad rounded forehead. She recurred to dress. I have to go to Bath to hear dear Maurice Baring’s little plays; & then we go to (here Elly interrupted) Rottingdean. And I must take an evening suit. Thats what worries me. I’m only happy in this—I have one gown I wear for conducting. And then I have to pack (here is a pineapple from Leonard’s mother who waits outside). “My maid? But she’s only a general—an Irish woman. “Dr (she calls me Dr) Mrs Woolf doesn’t mean to see you. Heres another letter from her—to put you off.” But I’ve come. And dont it show that my appetite for life is still great? I’ve thought of nothing but seeing you for 10 days. And this friendship has come to me now.” So sincere & abrupt is she, & discriminating withal—judging Vita & her secondrate women Enid Bagnold friends shrewdly—that perhaps something gritty & not the usual expansive fluff, may come of it. I like to hear her talk of music. She has written a piece—on Brewster’s Prisoner; & will have the gorgeous fun of orchestrating it this summer. She says writing music is like writing novels. One thinks of the sea—naturally one gets a phrase for it. Orchestration is colouring. And one has to be very careful with one’s ‘technique’. Rhapsodises about A Room; about Miss Williamson; about the end of some book of Maurice Baring’s. “I’m in the street. I belong to the crowd. I say the crowd is right.” Perhaps she is right to belong to the crowd. There is something fine & tried & experienced about her besides the rant & the riot & the egotism—& I’m not sure that she is the egotist that people make out. She said she never had anybody to admire her, & therefore might write good music to the end. Has to live in the country because of her passion for games. Plays golf, rides a bicycle; was thrown hunting two years ago. Then fell on her arm & was in despair, because life wd. be over if she could not play games. ‘I am very strong’ which she proved by talking till 7.30; then eating a biscuit & drinking a glass of vermouth & going off to eat a supper of maccaroni when she got to Woking at 9.

“I’ll tell you all about it” she grinned at her maid, who asked if I was a nice woman. A fine old creature, certainly, Ethel. She talks French ‘meringues’ with a highly French accent.

Saturday 22 February

I had meant to write a sketch of George—Sir George Duck-worth—as he announced himself to Nelly—& of Lytton; both unexpected visitors yesterday—for I’m not to go down to the studio till Monday; & so must canter my pen amateurishly here; but ten minutes ago the idea came to me of a possible broadsheet; which I wd. like to adumbrate, before discussing with L. My notion is a single sheet, containing say 2,000 or if printed back & front 4,000 words. Art, politics, Lit., music: an essay by a single writer to be printed at irregular intervals; sent to subscribers; costing 6d. Sometimes only a reproduction. It should be a statement about life: something somebody wants to say; not a regular comment. Very little expense wd. be involved. It would have a spring & an urgency about it wh. the regular sheets lack. Sometimes only a picture. To be closely under L. & my thumbs, And in June, I was offered the Editorship of a 4ly; by the Graphic Mr Bott & Mr Turner of the Book Club: L. is refusing it at this moment (30th June) so as to give character & uniformity. To lapse for a month if necessary. No incubus of regular appearance. A circular signed by L. & me to be sent round. Young writers enlisted. Signed articles. Everything of the humblest, least ostentatious. The Hogarth News. The Broadsheet.—name to be decided. You see I wd. like to write on Scott this week, & cant, because Richmond has sent the book already. L. wd. do politics. Roger art. The young would have their fling. Possibly, if expenses were kept down, they could get £5 or so, & have their names. But they must not be essays—always—must be topical to some extent.

That being enough to go upon in talk after lunch—& it is a fine still day & perhaps we may drive to Richmond & try my legs walking—I will obediently, like a student in the art school—sketch Sir George. First his jowl: it is of the finest semi-transparent flesh; so that one longs to slice it, as it rests, infinitely tender, upon his collar. Otherwise he is as tight as a drum. One expects his trousers to split as he sits down. This he does slowly & rises with difficulty. Still some sentiment begins to form misty between us. He speaks of ‘Mother’. I daresay finds in me some shadowy likeness—well—& then he is not now in a position to do me harm. His conventions amuse me. I suppose these family affections are somehow self-protection. He preserves a grain or two of what is me—my unknown past; my self; so that if George died, I should feel something of myself buried. He See Sir George Duckworth on ‘Pig’ in todays Times. Pigs are the most intelligent of animals. I own a small herd of white pedigree hogs.” is endlessly self-complacent. His stories, once started roll comfortably—he is immensely comfortable—into the pocket of his solid self esteem. I ask, What about the hogs (the Chesterfield hogs) & he replies that the cowman’s wife has had a very long labour. Margaret has been very worried. Dalingridge was lit up all night. They had to use the telephone—to send for the dr. The womans mother slept in the house—& so it goes on, singing cosily & contentedly the praises of the good master & mistress—which I have no doubt they are. And he trots out his little compliments—asked to be Sheriff. And he wishes to know if I am making fabulous sums—& he chuckles & dimples & respects me for being asked to a party by the Lord Mayor. And he twits Eddy Marsh for being fond of the society of the great. And he deplores the nudity of Nessa’s pictures—& so prattles & chortles & gives me turtle soup & advises about the preparation & so takes himself off, to meet Henry & return to Dalingridge & the cowman & the hogs—a very incestuous race—& his cook Janet & his Bronnie, home on leave from the Navy—well, it does appear as if human life were perfectly tolerable; his voltage is absolutely normal. The world has been made for him.

Lytton came in after dinner. Very twinkly, lustrous, easy & even warm. Leonard made cigarettes. I lay on the sofa in the twilight of cushions. Lytton had been sent a book about Columbus & told us the story making it into a fantastic amusing Lytton book—Columbus a mad religious fanatic who sailed west & west because he had read in Isaiah a prophesy; his crew being convicts let out from prison; & they came to Cuba & he made them sign a statement that this was India, because it was too large to be an island; & they picked up gold & gems & went back to Spain & the King & Queen rose as he came in. Here are all the elements of a Lytton concoction, told with great gusto; irony; a sense of the incongruous & dramatic. Then we warbled melodiously about Dadie, & Cambridge; & Charlie; & so on. He has a new gramophone. He is editing Greville. He is very content too—not for George’s reasons; & very well equipped, & buys books; & likes us; & is going to Cambridge this week end. Its odd how little one remembers what is actually said. I am thinking of the new paper.

Saturday 1 March

And then I went for a walk & brought on a headache, & so lay down again till today, Saturday—a fine day—when we propose to drive off-oh Thank God a thousand To Hampstead Garden suburb [on 22 February] times—to Rodmell & there be at rest. This little affair has taken 3 weeks, & will land me in 4, of non-writing inexpressiveness. Yet I’m not sure that this is not the very thing for The Waves. It was dragging too much out of my head—If ever a book drained me, this one does. If I had wisdom, no doubt I should potter at Rodmell for a fortnight, not writing. I shall take a look at it one of these mornings in my sunny room.

One evening here I had the odd experience of perfect rest & satisfaction. All the bayonets that prod me sank. There I lay (I daresay for an hour) happy. And the quality was odd. Not an anxiety, not a stir, anywhere. No one coming. Nothing to do. All strain ceased. A [word illegible] supreme sailing with … through the dominion (I am quoting—I think Shelley—& it makes nonsense.) This is the rarest of all my moods. I cant recall another. Perhaps at Rodmell sometimes. Everything is shut off. It depends upon having been in the stir of London for some time. Not to have to get up & see Sibyl or Ethel or anybody—what a supreme relief! And now! have a chance to brew a little quiet thought. Yesterday I was offered £2,000 to write a life of Boswell by Doran Heinemann. L. is writing my polite refusal this moment. I have bought my freedom. A queer thought that I have actually paid for the power to go to Rodmell & only think of The Waves by refusing this offer. If I accepted I would buy houses, tables & go to Italy; not worth it. Yesterday we went over 57 Russell Sqre wh. we may take. But I rather dread the noise & the size—I dont know. A lovely view.

Monday 3 March

Rodmell again. My new bedroom again. Children playing in the school. A thick pearl grey blue day; water drops on the window. Suppose health were shown on a thermometer I have gone up 10 degrees since yesterday, when I lay, mumbling the bones of Dodo: if it had bones; now I sit up, but cannot face going down & bringing an MS to read. Curiosity begins to stir all the same. Such is the effect of 24 hours here, & one ramble for 30 minutes on the flats. The sun wells up, like a pulse, behind the clouds. Tremendous shoals of birds are flying,—& the flop eared trains meeting as usual under Cabum.

Molly Hamilton writes a d—d bad novel. She has the wits to construct a method of telling a story; & then heaps it with the dreariest, most confused litter of old clothes. When I stop to read a page attentively I am shocked by the dishabille of her English. It is like hearing cooks & scullions chattering; she scarcely articulates, dashes it off, I imagine, on blocks of paper, on her knee, at the House of Commons perhaps; or in the Tube. And the quality of the emotion is so thick & squab, the emotions of secondrate women painters, of spotted & pimpled young men: I dont know how she conveys such a sense of the secondrate without gift: the soft pedal too, & the highminded pedal; & no wit; & not precision; & no word standing alone, but each flopping on to the shoulder of another—Lord what a style! What a mind. It has energy & some ability—chiefly shown in the method; but that breaks down; & that too is laboriously lifted. Now being still flabby in the march of the mind, I must read Sea Air—a good manuscript.

Tuesday 11 March

all because I have to buy myself a dress this afternoon, & cant think what I want, I cannot read. I have written, fairly well—but it is a difficult book at Waves; but cant keep on after 12; & now shall write here, for 20 minutes.

My impressions of Margaret [Llewelyn Davies] & Lilian [Harris] at Monks House were of great lumps of grey coat; straggling wisps of hair; hats floppy & home made; thick woollen stockings; black shoes, many wraps, shabby handbags, & shapelessness, & shabbiness & dreariness & drabness unspeakable. A tragedy in its way. Margaret at any rate deserved better of life than this dishevelled & undistinguished end. They are in lodgings—as usual. Have, as usual, a wonderful Xtian Scientist landlady; are somehow rejected by active life; sit knitting perhaps & smoking cigarettes, in the parlour where they have their meals, where there is always left a dish of oranges & bananas. I doubt if they have enough to eat. They seemed to me flabby & bloodless, spread into rather toneless chunks of flesh; having lost any commerce with looking glasses. So we showed them the garden, gave them tea (& I dont think an iced cake had come Lilian’s way this 6 weeks) & then—oh the dismal sense of people stranded, wanting to be energised; drifting—all woollen & hairy. (It is odd how the visual impression dominates.) There is a jay blue spark in Margaret’s eye, now & then, But she had not been out of the lodging for 5 weeks because of the East wind. Her mind has softened & wrinkled, sitting indoors with the oranges & cigarettes. Lilian is almost stone deaf, & mumbles & crumbles, emerging clearly only once, to discuss politics. Something has blunted Margaret’s edge, rusted it, worn it, long before its time. Must old age be so shapeless? The only escape is to work the mind. I shall write a history of English literature, I think, in those days. And I shall walk. And I shall buy clothes, & keep my hair tidy, & make myself dine out. But perhaps life becomes repetitious, & one takes no trouble; is glad to be shovelled about in motor cars. M. has her tragic past. She is pathetic to me now—conciliatory & nervous where she used to be trenchant & severe. Janet she says writes endless notes; has sisters for ever staying with her to convalesce; & Emphie caught up their little white dog the other day from a wild herd of racing greyhounds, & had it bitten to death in her arms. This is the sort of adventure that only befalls elderly unmarried women, on whom it makes a tremendous & very painful impression—so defenceless are they, so unable to throw off the damp blanket that surrounds them. What I miss is colour, energy, any clear reflection of the moment. I see those thick stockings & grey hairy wraps everywhere.

Monday 17 March

The test of a book (to a writer) [is] if it makes a space in which, quite naturally, you can say what you want to say. As this morning I could say what Rhoda said. This proves that the book itself is alive: because it has not crushed the thing I wanted to say, but allowed me to slip it in, without any compression or alteration.

Friday 28 March

Yes, but this book is a very queer business. I had a day of intoxication when I said Children are nothing to this: when I sat surveying the whole book complete, & quarrelled with L. (about Ethel Smyth) & walked it off, felt the pressure of the form—the splendour & the greatness—as—perhaps, I have never felt them. But I shan’t race it off in intoxication. I keep pegging away; & find it the most complex, & difficult of all my books. How to end, save by a tremendous discussion, in which every life shall have its voice—a mosaic—a ——. I do not know. The difficulty is that it is all at high pressure. I have not yet mastered the speaking voice. Yet I think something is there; & I propose to go on pegging it down, arduously, & then re-write, reading much of it aloud, like poetry. It will bear expansion. It is compressed I think. It is—whatever I make of it—a large & potential theme—wh. Orlando was not perhaps. At any rate, I have taken my fence.

Home from tea with Nessa & Angelica. A fine spring day. I walked along Oxford St. The buses are strung on a chain. People fight & struggle. Knocking each other off the pavement. Old bareheaded men; a motor car accident; &c. To walk alone in London is the greatest rest.

Tuesday 1 April

And we have got to go & dine with Raymond now, this very potent, astonishingly exciting warm evening. I sit with my window open & hear the humming see a yellow window open in the hotel: I walked back from Leicester Square. What queer memories have got themselves mixed into this evening I asked. Something from a very soft, rather mystic evening; not feverish & fretful; no; by the sea; blue; gentle. And I dropped in at the dressmaker. She has no teeth. She was stitching. She said like a friend Mrs Woolf we are going to move. And I thought you wdnt mind if I left out the stitching as my eyes ached. All that is said tonight is gentle & happy & seems to thrust into some soft tide. I cant get it right, naturally.

Nessa is at Charleston. They will have the windows open; perhaps even sit by the pond. She will think This is what I have made by years of unknown work—my sons, my daughter. She will be perfectly content (as I suppose) Quentin fetching bottles; Clive immensely good tempered. They will think of London with dislike. Yet it is very exciting; I shall sip my wine at Raymond’s, & try & elicit something from Lytton. And so must change.

Friday 4 April

I am trying to sketch my last chapter—unsuccessfully; so will use 10 minutes to note my observations at Raymond’s. Chiefly upon the atmosphere of buggery. Lytton’s face lit up with love & rapture when I deserted the delightful women, with all their gifts, for Mr Williamson, brilliant & beautiful, but unknown, of Oxford. Raymond sat on the arm of Lytton’s chair. Morgan came in from Meleager. And I went to see Ronnie behind the scenes. He was looking very nice in shorts. Eddy came in from Cochran’s latest. He had had to stand & was (I am making up The Waves) peevish, (humour is what it lacks). Anyhow, he said, Ensor (I forget) looked very pretty in a white suit—the rest oh so hideous. At this the other buggers pricked their ears & became somehow silly. I mean rather giggly & coy. An atmosphere entirely secluded, intimate, & set on one object; all agreed upon the things they liked. Raymond barked once or twice rudely (he is underbred, in voice anyhow) his feeling that I was noting, scoffing. Told me how Gerbault loathed women; then protested that I was not to believe all the stories of D’Annunzio & Duse: there was another side; she had maltreated him. A protest; raucous, & obtrusive. A photograph of Stephen Tennant (Siegfried Sassoon goes to the same dressmaker) in a tunic, in an attitude was shown about; also little boys at a private school. Morgan became unfamiliar, discussing the beauties of Hilton Young’s stepson. “His skating is magnificent” (then in an undertone deploring some woman’s behaviour). This all made on me a tinkling, private, giggling, impression. As if I had gone in to a men’s urinal.

Wednesday 9 April

What I now think (about the Waves) is that I can give in a very few strokes the essentials of a person’s character. It should be done boldly, almost as caricature. I have yesterday entered what may be the last lap. Like every piece of the book it goes by fits & starts. I never get away with it; but am tugged back. I hope this makes for solidity; & must look to my sentences. The abandonment of Orlando & Lighthouse is much checked by the extreme difficulty of the form—as it was in Jacob’s Room. I think this is the furthest development so far; but of course it may miss fire somewhere. I think I have kept stoically to the original conception. What I fear is that the re-writing will have to be so drastic that I may entirely muddle it somehow. It is bound to be very imperfect. But I think it possible that I have got my statues against the sky.

Friday 11 April

Yesterday walked through the Waddesdon Greenhouses with Mr Johnson. There were single red lines taking root in sand. Cyclamen by the hundred gross. Azaleas massed like military bands. Carnations at different stages. Vines being picked thin by sedulous men. Nothing older than 40 years, but now ready made in perfection. A fig tree that had a thousand lean regular branches. The statues tied up, like dead horses, in sheets. The whole thing dead. Made, planted, put into position in the year 1880 or thereabouts. One flower wd. have given more pleasure than those dozens of grosses. And the heat, & the tidiness & the accuracy & the organisation. Mr Johnson like a nectarine, hard, red, ripe. He was taught all he knew by Miss Alice, & accepted admiration as his income. Sir he called us.

Sunday 13 April

I read Shakespeare directly I have finished writing, when my mind is agape & red & hot. Then it is astonishing. I never yet knew how amazing his stretch & speed & word coining power is, until I felt it utterly outpace & outrace my own, seeming to start equal & then I see him draw ahead & do things I could not in my wildest tumult & utmost press of mind imagine. Even the less known & worser plays are written at a speed that is quicker than anybody else’s quickest; & the words drop so fast one can’t pick them up. Look at this, Upon a gather’d lily almost wither’d (that is a pure accident: I happen to light on it.) Evidently the pliancy of his mind was so complete that he could furbish out any train of thought; &, relaxing lets fall a shower of such unregarded flowers. Why then should anyone else attempt to write. This is not ‘writing’ at all. Indeed, I could say that Shre surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.

I meant to make this note of Waddesdon greenhouses. There were rows of hydrangeas, mostly a deep blue. Yes, said Mr Johnson, Lord Kitchener came here & asked how we blued them … I said you put things in the earth. He said he did too. But sometimes with all one’s care, they shot a bit pink. Miss Alice wouldn’t have that. If there was a trace of pink there, it wouldnt do. And he showed us a metallic petalled hydrangea. No that wouldnt do for Miss Alice. It struck me, what madness, & how easy to pin ones mind down to the blueness of hydrangeas, & to hypnotise Mr Johnson into thinking only of the blueness of hydrangeas. He used to go to her every evening, for she scarcely saw anyone, & they would talk for two hours about the plants & politics. How easy to go mad over the blueness of hydrangeas & think of nothing else.

Wednesday 23 April

This is a very important morning in the history of The Waves, because I think I have turned the corner & see the last lap straight ahead. I think I have got Bernard into the final stride. He will go straight on now, & then stand at the door; & then there will be a last picture of the waves. We are at Rodmell, & I daresay I shall stay on a day or two (if I dare) so as not to break the current & finish it. O Lord & then a rest; & then an article; & then back again to this hideous shaping & moulding. There may be some joys in it all the same.

Saturday 26 April

Having had no letters for 3 days I feel my balloon shrink. All that semi-transparent globe wh. my fame attaches to me is pricked; & I am a mere stick. This is very wholesome; & grey; & not altogether displeasing though flat.

Sunday 27 April

A queer adventure, to come back & find Lottie in the house (her great box under the kitchen table) having been dismissed by Karin for stealing. She was sent with a policeman to the station. She is to sleep here tonight. And I am to see Karin.

Tuesday 29 April

And I have just finished, with this very nib-full of ink, the last sentence of The Waves. I think I should record this for my own information. Yes, it was the greatest stretch of mind I ever knew; certainly the last pages; I dont think they flop as much as usual. And I think I have kept starkly & ascetically to the plan. So much I will say in self-congratulation. But I have never written a book so full of holes & patches; that will need re-building, yes, not only re-modelling. I suspect the structure is wrong. Never mind. I might have done something easy & fluent; & this is a reach after that vision I had, the unhappy summer—or three weeks—at Rodmell, after finishing The Lighthouse. (And that reminds me—I must hastily provide my mind with something else, or it will again become pecking & wretched,—something imaginative, if possible, & light; for I shall tire of Hazlitt & criticism after the first divine relief—. & I feel pleasantly aware of various adumbrations in the back of my head; a life of Duncan: no, something about canvases glowing in a studio: but that can wait.)

I must run upstairs & peep in & tell Leonard & ask about Lottie, who has been after a place; & by the way injured yesterdays lap I am afraid with her vicissitudes.

Pm. And, I think to myself as I walk down Southampton Row “And I have given you a new book.”

Thursday 1 May

And I have completely ruined my morning. Yes that is literally true. They sent a book from The Times, as if advised by Heaven of my liberty; & feeling my liberty wild upon me, I rushed to the cable & told Van Doren I would write on Scott. And now having read Scott, or the perky & impertinent editor whom Hugh provides to dish up tasty fragments, I wont & cant: & have got into a fret trying to read it, & writing to Richmond to say I cant; & have wasted the brilliant first of May which makes my skylight blue & gold; have only a rubbish heap in my head; cant read, & cant write, & cant think. The truth is, of course, I want to be back at The Waves. Yes that is the truth. Unlike all my other books in every way, it is unlike them in this, that I begin to re-write it, & conceive it again with ardour, directly I have done. I begin to see what I had in my mind; & want to begin cutting out masses of irrelevance, & clearing, sharpening & making the good phrases shine. One wave after another. No room. & so on. But then we are going touring Devon & Cornwall on Sunday which means a week off; & then I shall perhaps make my critical brain do a months work, for exercise. What could it be set to? Or a story?—no, not another story now. Perhaps Miss Burney’s half sister’s story,

Sunday 18 May

The thing is now to live with energy & mastery, desperately. To despatch each day high handedly. To make much shorter work of the day than one used. To feel each like a wave slapping up against one. So not to dawdle & dwindle, contemplating this & that. To do what ever comes along with decision; going to the Hawthornden prize giving rapidly & lightheartedly; to buy a coat; to Long Barn; to Angelica’s School; thrusting through the mornings work (Hazlitt now) then adventuring. And when one has cleared a way, then to go directly to a shop & buy a desk, a book case. No more regrets & indecisions. That is the right way to deal with life now that I am 48: & to make it more & more important & vivid as one grows old.

This is all very well; but what if Nelly then gets taken ill with her kidneys, must have an operation. Soberly & seriously a whole fortnight has been blown from my life; because I have had to hang about to see Elly, to buy food, to arrange with Taupin, to arrange with the hospital; to go there in an ambulance. My mind in order to work needs to be stretched tight & flat. It has been broken into shivers. With great plodding I have managed to write about the Women’s Guild. And I consider setting to work on The Waves. I have had over 6 weeks holiday from it. Only again, this morning is ruined because I sit waiting a char, who does not come. And we have Lyn & Sir R. Storrs to tea.

Sunday 15 June

How many skips there are here! Nothing said of our tour through the West; nothing said of N.’s operation; of Taupin, who lost my key broke tumblers & cooked with the faded inspiration of one who had been a good cook; & nothing said of the divine relief of my quiet evenings, without servants; & how we dine out at the Cock; & how we say, can’t this last? & then how I rang up Mrs Walters; & that experiment, an arduous one, begins tomorrow. Leonard is not apt at a crisis. I mean his caution sticks his back up. He foresees obstacles. He has a philanthropic side too, which I distrust. Must be good to dependants. I am too hurried to spread these notes wider. At anyrate, Mrs W. an American who wishes to work, has been a journalist, is an intellectual, comes into our service tomorrow; being, as it were, Miss Ritchie, or Lyn Eirven. I have to give her orders; & she has to empty the slops. Will it work? will it last? Anyhow—every sentence begins anyhow—an interesting experience.

Monday 16 June

Mrs Walters is now here. And she says “What do you want with a Char?” But then new brooms &c. She is not new in one sense; rather old & lined; no, younger than I am; but a hard face, I think; but I forbear to crack her kernel. The interest will be to get a new light on housekeeping. My books are now my idol. Can I manage on less? How many pints? How many pounds of butter? Oh to be rid of servants—for all the emotions they breed—trust, suspicion, benevolence, gratitude, philanthropy, are necessarily bad.

And Nellie is now deposited on us for a day; turned out of hospital at a moments notice. I am amused to witness the conflict between L. & me. I hold a brief (hiddenly) for Walters; he (hiddenly) for Nelly. If the books are high, he secretly rejoices. If the food is good, I secretly denigrate Nelly’s cooking. It is odd how those old scenes rankle in my mind—how unwilling I am to have her back. Partly the silence is so grateful; & partly the absence of lower classes. I think with real shrinking of having her in control again. Yet she is obliging friendly affectionate; & I cannot bring myself to talk to her as I should. I am always seeing myself told to “leave my room”.

But enough—a useful phrase.

I dont know why, but I have stinted this book. The summer is in full swing. Its elements this year are Nessa & Duncan, Ethel Smyth, Vita & re-writing The Waves. We are very prosperous. On making up half yearly accounts, we find that we each get £425: & next year is sure, owing to the gigantic sale of The Edwardians—it verges on the 20,000. And it is not a very good book. Ethel Smyth drops in; dropped in yesterday for instance, when I was so methodically devoting my morning to finishing the last page of type setting: On Being Ill; I heard a ring, went up, & saw an old char in her white alpaca coat; sat her down; disburdened her of cardboard boxes; full of white pinks; & looked at her rather monumental old colonel’s face (girt round with an inappropriate necklace, for she was going to lunch with Beecham.) I get, generally, two letters daily. I daresay the old fires of Sapphism are blazing for the last time. In her heyday she must have been formidable—ruthless, tenacious, exacting, lightning quick, confident; with something of the directness & [single-?]⁠ness of genius, though they say she writes music like an old dryasdust German music master. Her style in writing memoirs though is to her credit—indeed she has ridden post haste through life; & accumulated an astonishing number of observations, with which she qualifies her conversation so as to drive L. almost frantic. One speech of hers lasted 20 minutes unbroken, he says, the other night. We were starting for a picnic at Ken Wood with Nessa & Duncan. Their sublime ineptitude made me laugh & made Ethel laugh & made Eddy peevish. There we sat in the garage, heaving, rotating, stinking. Then we stuck in Gower Street. The night drew on & the wind rose. A spot of rain descended. We heaved our way up to Hampstead. The house was cadaverous; the rhododendrons blanched. Where should we dine? Better go back to Fitzroy St—which we did, & dined off sandwiches & strawberries about 10 o’clock in the highest glee. She is a game old bird—an old age entirely superior in vitality to Margaret’s.

[Sunday 6 July]

And to tell the truth in the 15 minutes that remain before I go up to Mrs Walter’s cold & exquisite but rather expensive lunch—to tell the truth I am slightly annoyed, both with Margaret & with Mr Birrell. Those were two kind acts of mine: the Women’s Guild article & the article on B. Neither has thanked me. M. sent a postcard. Yet I spent two or even 3 weeks on that Letter; & worked & worked. Never—this is the moral—do a kindness in writing. Never agree to use one’s art as an act of friendship. And therefore refuse to write about Maurice Baring, as he wishes.

We came into Ethel’s drawing room last Thursday & found a row standing against the window—the D⁠[uche]⁠ss of Sermoneta, M. Baring, & Joyce Wethered. Can I tell the story? I said to Maurice as we plodded after Joyce—Ethel running helter skelter after her great fuzzy dog—I said “This is like a party in literature—like Jane Austen’s box hill party.” There was a space & a formality & a definiteness about it that made it a real entertainment—with longueurs, with crises, with lapses, with culminations. We all had to wash. We all had to do this, to do that. Ethel’s home is better than I expected. She has more beauty & even comfort about than I expected from her alpaca coat. The red & pink roses were thick on the walls. The flowers were lush in the beds. All was glowing & bright. She has white rough cast walls; & no furniture that has cost more than a pound or two—much is old schoolroom furniture endeared to her by her intense egotistic imagination. “It was there I sat, when Mary played the piano … And I said Mary couldn’t you play G. sharp instead of G. natural … Thats the bed—Virginia you will have this room when you come to stay—where Sargent used to sleep, lying across: (because it is an old iron bed). And thats my father & mother—she was the artist…”

But I got the impression of a very genuine, breeze blown mind; a free, entirely energised character—no impediments no inhibitions—the freest talk with Maurice. “I met a nephew of yours Ethel, with two names”. “Well you might have—with two names”. No, I cant give the sense of her largeness, & space & ease & good breeding & character. She is, oddly, much more expert as a hostess than as a guest; doesn’t talk too much; is penetrating & quick, & has this delicious ease in summoning, conjuring up, people, like Lady Balfour & Mrs Lyttelton from the neighbourhood. They sat on the sofa while I, sipping champagne, talked fast & furious to Maurice B. who turned lobster colour & trembled, & chattered about his books. There were 5 people who used to help me: all are now dead. He has had his sorrows: I dont know what: loved ladies, I daresay.

[Monday 21 July]

And I went down again to Woking on Tuesday (this is written waiting for Vita, on a very wet cold afternoon. She is going to drive us round to look at a wardrobe. I am going to buy a gilt wardrobe I think. Well, it is very wet, & I am rather discomposed, with making 2 articles into one & so on. And I am not dining (here)

Wednesday 23 July

Edith Sitwell has grown very fat, powders herself thickly, gilds her nails with silver paint, wears a turban & looks like an ivory elephant, like the Emperor Heliogabalus. I have never seen such a change. She is mature, majestical. She is monumental. Her fingers are crusted with white coral. She is altogether composed. A great many people were there—& she presided. But though thus composed, her eyes are sidelong & humorous. The old Empress remembers her Scallywag days. We all sat at her feet—cased in slender black slippers, the only remnants of her slipperiness & slenderness. Who was she like? Pope in a nightcap? No; the imperial majesty must be included. We hardly talked together, & I felt myself gone there rather mistakenly, had she not asked me very affectionately if she might come & see me alone. Her room was crowded with odds & ends of foreigners: the uncrowned King of Barcelona; Gerald’s partner; Osbert; Lady Lavery &c. Lady L. discussed the air crash. She said le Bon Dieu had taken them all at the right time. They had all done with life. Once too she would have been glad to die … This refers to the deaths of Lord Dufferin Lady Ednam &c. I was driving down to the Temple with Vita, & we bought a Standard in the gateway. ‘Titled victims’ she said. Well it cant be Harold I said. Then I read out Lady Ednam, Marquis Dusserre (for so they reported him) & then in the stop press Lord Dufferin—What Lady Ednam? Dufferin? she cried. There was Harold on the pavement before their house. “Yes, he said, Its Lady Ednam” “But its Freddy too” cried Vita (no she spoke composedly). God said Harold & read the stop press. Now what are we to do? I cant broadcast said Vita. I must tell my mother said Harold. First I’ll get the paper though. Good Lord—Yes its Dufferin & Lady Ednam. “Is that Lady Carnock. Darling I have some bad news for you. Have you seen the paper? Freddy’s been in a smash. He’s killed, they think. Could you tell Aunt Lai?” What did your mother say Harold? Just ‘Oh’. Now we cant dine with Lady Cunard. Oh yes dear we must. Perhaps I shall have to go down & see them—It was, as one says, like a scene in a play. The newspaper: the telephoning. The extreme simplicity & composure of it all: Boski typing; the man cleaning shoes; Harold telephoning, like a man in a play. So they drove off that wet grey evening to Lady Cunard’s: dinner at 9. 30 people; & I did not go. (& I hear the whole party waited for me for half an hour)

Saturday 26 July

Just back from a night at Long Barn, where I retrieved that fact about Emerald’s party, waiting half an hour, all in the sulks too for the smash of their best friends. And Lady E. & Mrs S. strewed Kent with £62,000 worth of jewels. Jewels in their hats, round their necks: somehow this makes me less sorry for them; undemocratic though I am. I rather like thinking of pearls pendant from oak trees.

I have 15—no 12—minutes before lunch; & am all of a quiver with home coming to L., to 2 newts in the bathroom, Letters (from Ethel, & flowers) books &c. A very nice homecoming; & I daresay a sample of my life, picked out of the mass (as it is, when one comes back) makes me a little amazed at my own happiness. I daresay few women are happier—not that I am consistently anything; but feel that I have had a good draught of human life, & find much champagne in it. It has not been dull—my marriage; not at all.

I liked rambling over Vita’s new fields, & talking to Mrs Page about the haycrop; & then champagne for dinner—an extravagance of Harold’s; sleep in the sitting room; a log fire; dogs; aeroplanes at night; dogs again; & breakfast in bed—mushroom & peach & hot bath, & so home, as I say, to the newts & Leonard. Clive will come to tea. Perhaps we may go to the play. And perhaps I might decide to have a new educated woman as servant. This comes on top of a day of Nelly Lottie & Mrs Mansfield. Their jokes their presence their familiarity, wh. rouse the usual reflections.

Passing the public House this Sunday afternoon, the buzz of voices through the door was exactly the same as at an evening party. My first thought was censorious: people in public houses. But this was soon corrected. I dont see much difference between the Marchmont Arms & Argyle [Argyll] House; or 3 Albert Road if it comes to that; except that we drink champagne & wear satin, & I sit between Lord Gage & Bernstorf.

Monday 28 July

A queer inconclusive but possibly fruitful conversation with Mrs Walter this morning. I think she would like to stay, if we could offer more wages. The truth is her husband has mistresses; or flirts. And she wishes to devote herself to us entirely—to do everything—that I should never have to order coffee. But she is going to think it out in August in Italy with Karl. I rather suspect (in my private mind) that we shall make a break here with Nelly, & take her—a great risk; rather fun: I feel 10 years younger instantly at the thought of a change. Anyhow, my constant relief at the absence of Nelly seems to prove that the system is as wrong as I’ve always said. Rooms empty of servants; to sit quietly; to have no jag [?], no unreal condescending talk. Other drawbacks suggest themselves—still anything for experiment—anything.

Wednesday 6 August

This is written at Rodmell; oh yes, & it is the best, the freest, the comfortablest summer we have ever had. Figure to yourself feet swollen in boots. One takes them off—that is my state without poor dear Nelly; with nice bright Annie. The rain pelts—look at it (as the people in The Waves are always saying) now. My dinner is cooking. I have so many rooms to sit in, I scarcely know which to choose. And new chairs. And comfort everywhere, & some beginnings of beauty. But it is the freedom from servants that is the groundwork & bedrock of all this expansion. After lunch we are alone till Breakfast. I say, as I walk the downs, never again never again. Cost what it may, I will never put my head into that noose again.

I walk; I read; I write, without terrors & constrictions. I make bread. I cook mushrooms. I wander in & out of the kitchen. I have a resource besides reading. Why we ever suffered that discomfort so long, that presence always grumbling, always anyhow (for thats unfair) at a different angle from ours, needing gramo [text ends]

Wednesday 20 August

Last night was Quentin’s birthday. “Another Quentin birthday over” said Maynard, at the gate after the fireworks, counting perhaps the remaining years. The rockets went roaring up & scattered their gold grain. That is an old phrase; but I always think of grain when I see them. I can never find another. The willows were lit grey over the pond. The bonfire was forked, like branches in a wind. Nessa, in red, threw on a screen. Angelica, whirring & twirling like an old screaming witch, danced round it. “Childhood—true childhood” said Lydia. For some minutes everything that was said had the quality of sayings in a Tchekhov play.

I am writing while my potatoes boil. It has been a hot heavy ugly crusty⁠[?] day; still, sulphurous; & the dogs have barked all round the village, one starting another. And the men have hammered on the spire. And I have been driven out & in. I have slept here, over an article by Vernon Lee, sent me in Ethel’s daily letter. Ethel’s letters are daily: for we have so much to make up. Time is short. “I would like to see Italy before I die” she says in todays letter. Should I curtail her & curb them? I think not. If one adventures, adventure wholly. And she is so courageous, remarkable shrewd, that it would be mere poltroonery for me to hold off for fear of ridicule (still they hammer, at 6.45.) So I let that old bonfire rage red & perhaps throw a screen on it. It is a very happy free, & indeed to me occasionally sublime summer. Yes, I think I have decided against Nelly: but dont let me rub that sore. I think I am on the back of The Waves now. Then my walks. How lovely it was exploring yesterday to the Hump! How strange that in almost 20 years I have never been that way—out along the marsh road beyond Sutton house. I see a line I might make to Lewes. I fell in & twisted my ankle. I saw an astonishing assortment of cones & angles of grey & gold down, back against back. I was very happy. I like the still, the profound slow happiness best. One day I walked to Firle, in a shower & found a 4 bladed pocket knife.

The Waves is I think resolving itself (I am at page 100) into a series of dramatic soliloquies. The thing is to keep them running homogeneously in & out, in the rhythm of the waves. Can they be read consecutively? I know nothing about that. I think this is the greatest opportunity I have yet been able to give myself: therefore I suppose the most complete failure. Yet I respect myself for writing this book. Yes—even though it exhibits my congenital faults.

Janet Vaughan is engaged, & Gerald Brenan married.

Barbara [Bagenal] last night was aged, out of her element, peevish, & very red & beaky.

Julian silent. Clive undoubtedly on a fresh tack which does not allow of intimacy with me. I make these notes waiting in vain for that very interesting remark to occur wh. was on the tip of my tongue; & will not now emerge, though I bait & wait. If one writes little notes, suddenly one thinks of something profound. I am reading Dante, & I say, yes, this makes all writing unnecessary. This surpasses ‘writing’ as I say about Shre. I read the Inferno for half an hour at the end of my own page: & that is the place of honour; that is to put the page into the furnace—if I have a furnace. Now to mash the potatoes. & L. has laid my carpet.

Monday 25 August

Ethel came for a night on Friday, & in order to drown Percy’s mowing I will write here; for the friction of writing is a protection; & the dogs & the spire have been bad today. But they are bad because I am re-writing Hazlitt; having stopped The Waves at the break; & I am happy; & it is a very hot day; & we have been into Lewes, & I walked home part of the way. This is the only really hot day we have had. But I wish if I can to describe Ethel. At least let me pelt in a few notes of this curious unnatural friendship. I say unnatural because she is so old, & everything is incongruous. Her head is an enormous size over the temples. Music is there, she said, tapping her temples. That way lies insanity. What Walter said; what Wach (or someone) said—she cannot refrain from repeating what I guess to be very worn compliments, often repeated to herself at dead of night. For she cannot get over unfortunately her own ill-treatment. A refrain occurs; & it is all the more marked for being in contrast with the generosity, sense, balance, & shrewdness of all else. Off her own music, & the conspiracy against her—for the Press are determined to burke her, though she fills every hall—thats the line of it—she is an admirable guest. Oh yes & more. I went through some odd vicissitudes, in the way of emotion. Lying in my chair in the firelight she looked 18; she looked a young vigorous handsome woman. Suddenly this vanishes; then there is the old crag that has been beaten on by the waves: the humane battered face that makes one respect human nature: or rather feel that it is indomitable & persistent. Then, she is worldly; by which I mean something I like; unembarrassed, aired, sunned, acquainted with this way of life & that; lived in many societies; taken her own way in shirt & tie vigorously unimpeded; then I am conscious, I suppose, of the compliment she pays me. But then she is over 70. And (oh the dogs—oh Percy!—& I had marked off such a lovely evening—what am I to do?) She is sometimes startlingly quick. She has a lightning speed of perception which I liken to my own. But she is more robust; better grounded on fact than I am. She takes in a situation in one word. I told her about Margaret & my difficulties with the paper. No woman of 30 could have seen so swiftly or put the matter more succinctly in a nutshell, (her fault as a talker is diffusity). I had some interesting moments. About jealousy for instance. “D’you know Virginia, I dont like other women being fond of you.” “Then you must be in love with me Ethel”. “I have never loved anyone so much” (Is there something senile in this? I dont know). “Ever since I saw you I have thought of nothing else &c. I had not meant to tell you.” But I want affection. “You may take advantage of this”. No. Well, this, so far as I can boil it down, is Ethel’s state. But what I like in her is not I think her love for how difficult it is to make that intelligible—it is compact of so many things—she exaggerates—I am sensitive to exaggeration—what I like is the indomitable old crag; & a certain smile, very wide & benignant. But dear me I am not in love with Ethel. And oh yes—her experience.

Thursday 28 August

It is the hottest day of the year: & so it was last year, almost on this day; & I was at Long Barn, & there was the Eton tutor, a nice young man with blue eyes white teeth & straight nose—& he now lies at the bottom of a crevasse in Switzerland—this very hot evening—lies crushed beside his Mary Irving: there are the two bodies for ever. I suppose some ice drips, or shifts: the light is blue, green; or wholly black; nothing stirs round them. Frozen, near together, in their tweeds & hobnail boots there they lie. And I am here; writing in my lodge, looking over the harvest fields.

I suppose they felt whirled, like hoops; battered; senseless, after the first horror of feeling out of control.

A very violent summer.

So I said to Janie Bussy Julian & Quentin on the terrace last Sunday.

The church was finished today & the scaffolding taken down. I am reading R. Lehmann, with some interest & admiration—she has a clear hard mind, beating up now & again to poetry; but I am as usual appalled by the machinery of fiction: its much work for little result. Yet I see no other outlet for her gifts. And these books dont matter—they flash a clear light here & there; but I suppose no more. But she has all the gifts (I suppose) that I lack; can give story & development & character & so on.

Annie offered me a paper weight of Strahn [? Strachan] in Scotland today in return for our paying her oculists bill.

Tuesday 2 September

I was walking down the path with Lydia. If this dont stop, I said, referring to the bitter taste in my mouth & the pressure like a wire cage of sound over my head, then I am ill: yes, very likely I am destroyed, diseased, dead. Damn it! Here I fell down—saying “How strange—flowers”. In scraps I felt & knew myself carried into the sitting room by Maynard, saw L. look very frightened; said I will go upstairs; the drumming of my heart, the pain, the effort got violent at the doorstep; overcame me; like gas; I was unconscious; then the wall & the picture returned to my eyes; I saw life again. Strange I said, & so lay, gradually recovering till 11 when I crept up to bed. Today, Tuesday, I am in the lodge & Ethel comes—valiant old woman!

But this brush with death was instructive & odd. Had I woken in the divine presence it wd. have been with fists clenched & fury on my lips. “I dont want to come here at all!” So I should have exclaimed. I wonder if this is the general state of people who die violently. If so figure the condition of Heaven after a battle.

I think one might write a fantasia called Reflections on the sight of a daddy long legs. There was one just now (I have moved in from the lodge, thus disturbing both L. & Annie) crawling over the handmade paper on wh. I have to sign my name 600 times. This bright sunny patch was his only pleasure. Yes, & then one dislikes daddies because they eat one’s plants. One has some kindness for their very few pleasures. What is one’s relation to insects?

It suddenly comes over me how I used to hook a piece of paper to me out of the nurse’s eye in other illnesses—what a tremendous desire to write I had.

I will use these last pages to sum up our circumstances. A map of the world.

Leaving out the subject of Nelly, which bores me, we are now much freer & richer than we have ever been. For years I never had a pound extra; a comfortable bed, or a chair that did not want stuffing. This morning Hammond [Lewes furnishers] delivered 4 perfectly comfortable arm chairs—& we think very little of it.

I seldom see Lytton; that is true. The reason is that we dont fit in, I imagine, to his parties nor he to ours; but that if we can meet in solitude, all goes as usual. Yet what do one’s friends mean to one, if one only sees them 8 times a year? Morgan I keep up with in our chronically spasmodic way. We are all very much aware of life, & seldom do anything we do not want to. My Bell family relations are young, fertile & intimate. Julian & Quentin change so much. This year Q. is shabby easy natural & gifted; last year he was foppish, finicky & affected. Julian is publishing with Chatto & Windus. As for Nessa & Duncan I am persuaded that nothing can be now destructive of that easy relationship, because it is based on Bohemianism. My bent that way increases—in spite of the prodigious fame (it has faded out since July 15 th: I am going through a phase of obscurity; I am not a writer: I am nothing: but I am quite content) I am more & more attracted by looseness, freedom, & eating one’s dinner off a table anywhere, having cooked it previously. This rhythm (I say I am writing The Waves to a rhythm not to a plot) is in harmony with the painters’. Ease & shabbiness & content therefore are all ensured. Adrian I never see. I keep constant with Maynard. I never see Saxon. I am slightly repelled by his lack of generosity; yet would like to write to him. Perhaps I will. George Duckworth, feeling the grave gape, wishes to lunch with Nessa; wishes to feel again the old sentimental emotions. After all, Nessa & I are his only women relations. A queer cawing of homing rooks this is. I daresay the delights of snobbishness somewhat fail in later life—& we have done—‘made good’—that is his expression.

My map of the world lacks rotundity. There is Vita. Yes—She was here the other day, after her Italian tour, with 2 boys; a dusty car, sandshoes & Florentine candlepieces, novels & so on tumbling about on the seats. I use my friends rather as giglamps: Theres another field I see: by your light. Over there’s a hill. I widen my landscape.

[Diary XX:]
September 8th 1930
Monks House
Rodmell

Monday 8 September

I will signalise my return to life—that is writing—by beginning a new book, & it happens to be Thoby’s birthday, I remark. He would have been, I think, 50 today.

After coming out here I had the usual—oh how usual—headache; & lay, like a fibre of tired muscle on my bed in the sitting room, till yesterday. Now up again & on again; with one new picture in my mind; my defiance of death in the garden.

But the sentence with which this book was to open ran “Nobody has ever worked so hard as I do”—exclaimed in driving a paper fastener through the 14 pages of my Hazlitt just now. Time was when I dashed off these things all in the days work. Now, partly because I must do them for America & make arrangements far ahead, I spend I daresay a ridiculous amount of time, more of trouble on them. I began reading Hazlitt in January I think. And I am not sure that I have speared that little eel in the middle—that marrow—which is one’s object in criticism. A very difficult business no doubt to find it, in all these essays; so many; so short; & on all subjects. Never mind; it shall go today; & my appetite for criticism is, oddly, whettened. I have some gift that way, were it not for the grind & the screw & the torture—

Vita comes tomorrow; we go to Sissinghurst on Wednesday; I shall attack The Waves on Thursday. So this illness has meant two weeks break—but as I often think, seasons of silence, & brooding, & making up much more than one can use, are fertilising. I was raking my brain too hard.

Anyhow, this is the happiest summer since we had Monks House; the most satisfactory. We hope on Percy’s evidence—P. was tidying old Hawkesworth’s grave—that the Byng Stamper farm has been bought by a horsebreeder, & all the land is to be under grass—not bungalows. And Annie surprises one daily with her amenity, dexterity & sympathy—the most convincing argument in favour of living out that I know. Yesterday I sent an advertisement to Time & Tide—but hush! Profound secrecy is essential. The weather is September weather, bright, sunny, cool. We have a project of making my bedroom the sitting room—for the view. To let it waste, day after day, seems a crime: elderly eyes cannot waste. No, I would like to have another life, & live it in action. So I thought. looking at Caburn, & imagining the feelings of a strong young man, who was walking up it, with wife & children, & a career in the City … I think. No he was a politician; & I think he was also an Indian civil servant. He was not a writer: These are the stories one invents. And this: “At the age of 50 Priestley will be saying “Why don’t the highbrows admire me? It isn’t true that I only write for money.” He will be enormously rich; but there will be that thorn in his shoe—or so I hope. Yet I have not read, & I daresay shall never read, a book by Priestley. And I (to solace myself) get a letter from a Mr Spender saying he cares for my praise more than for that of any critic—& he sends me his poems. And I invent this phrase for Bennett & Priestley “the tradesmen of letters”.

Wednesday 24 September

I have taken up my staff again; I wish I could say that my book was my staff; but oh dear, how many people I have seen—dashing that support from my hand! It must have been the afternoon I wrote this—yes, because L. & Percy were in the middle of moving the furniture into the sitting room—that Mary & Barbara [Hutchinson]’s little medicine bottle heads appeared at the window. How I scowled! And then there was Alice Ritchie, then the Wolves, then Morgan, then a party at Charleston then London, & then those curious women, Miss Ibbotson & Mrs Starr.

“I am a cousin of Florence Nightingale” said Mrs Starr. When I said I was also related, her rather shifty eyes became shiftier. “I cant make omelettes” said Miss Ibbotson, addressing herself plaintively & at the same time peevishly to Mrs Starr. “It would be a great disaster of course if you sent in your dishes all burnt” said Mrs Starr. “You would give me notice, I suppose” said Miss Ibbotson. Miss Ibbotson was bankrupt; “Beggars can’t be choosers” she said, “& so thats why I’m back again at this’. Miss Ibbotson had once owned two motor cars & driven them for hire in London, but competition with the men had been too much. She had also been ill. She was skinny, raddled; wore a small corduroy jacket, & a rather dirty white shirt; had a red pocket-handkerchief; thick mended stockings & thick shoes. Mrs Starr was dressed in blue Liberty silk & a straw hat. She reproved Miss I. for being too diffident. “If I could have a trial” Miss I. repeated. But you will soon pick it up” said Mrs S. “I cant do fancy cooking” said Miss I. “And I would like to do some of the cleaning.” “I shall do the cleaning” said Mrs S. “& you will do the kitchen.” These remarks were shot at each other, & plainly represented much previous argument, though why Mrs S., so compact, if sly, had come into touch with Miss I., so wild, with her staring blue eyes & her wideawake, I could not say. An indefinable aroma of sordidity, instability, shadiness, shiftiness pervaded them. They were sure, I think almost at once, that we had seen through them, & that the place was not for them. “We live on Salads” said Mrs S. “though I am not a vegetarian.” Sure enough the brown holland bag which they left behind them contained a number of lettuces wrapped in paper.

Miss Rivett-Carnac is the scion of a great Indian family who let her live in Wimbledon with her mother on a pound a week. She has been through a good deal: social work; hostels; running clubs. She is about 35; a perfect lady, enough to be careless of being one; only anxious for shelter, & wages, & a little time to herself. She might do—she might be a superior Walter. She has, oh dear, suffered much. And is perhaps, vengeful, acid, worn, trusty, starved of happiness.

Could anything be done to make us less popular? we ask. For instance if I pied Leonard’s hair—would that make his mother, Bella, Tom [Southorn], Harold [Woolf], Dorothy Bussy, Ellie Rendel & Ka Cox refuse to invite themselves to see us?

When I offered Miss Rivett-Carnac £50 yesterday it seemed to me nothing, because I was thinking that I can make that by writing 2,000 words. But 5 years ago, £50 was a substantial sum. How money has shrunk in my mind! This is one of the most curious things in my existence—the shrinkage of money.

A perfect September day, after some very imperfect November days; the swallows skimming the terrace; Percy asking if it will be fine tomorrow; if so, he will mow the lawn. The bees are suspected to have been busy. In that case we shall take honey tonight. L. & P. spent the afternoon—Trim & Uncle Toby—mending the fence; I spent it walking the downs. I still have in spite of building a perfect stretch, & by juggling a little, can convert distant houses into haystacks.

I am reading Dante; & my present view of reading is to elongate immensely. I take a week over one canto. No hurry.

Our friends work us very hard. Heres Tom Eliot: when are you back? Here’s Miss Bartlett [unidentified], may we come to tea. Heres—& my two months’ respite nibbled at by all who choose. I think I will spend August next year in Northumberland.

Monday 29 September

So all those days were completely ruined by the assiduity of our friends. When one has to tidy the table, pick fresh flowers, collect chairs & be ready, at 4, or at one, to welcome, & all the rest of it the circumjacent parts of the day are ruined. On the whole L.’s family do the trick most thoroughly. Everything is such an effort; so unreal; what I say is so remote from what I feel; their standards are so different from mine; I strain myself perpetually with trying to provide the right cakes, the right jokes, the right affection & inquiries. Naturally it often goes wrong, as on Friday. Harold, who is to me the most sympathetic of them, told a story of the Woolf temper; how Philip had broken down the servants bedroom door in a rage, because they had put a bottle, unfastened, into Bab’s bed, & refused to come & make it. Mrs W. who is the vainest of women (poor old lady—yes, ones feeling of poor old woman churns⁠[?] & muddles all one’s feelings of her egotism, her vanity) took this as a slur upon herself; & began querulously & peevishly to defend her methods of education, & to pay herself the usual compliments upon her wonderful management of so many fatherless & penniless children. And then of course she requires to have these praises corroborated, & will not be satisfied until I have also wondered & exclaimed at her amazing unselfishness & courage & agreed that the Woolf temper is merely a proof of their intelligence. Here of course, I begin to see very plainly how ugly, how nosey, how irreparably middle class they all are. Indeed, my aesthetic sense is the one that protests most obstinately—how they cheapen the house & garden—How they bring in an atmosphere of Earls Court & hotels, how impossibly out of place, & stuffy & towny & dressy & dowdy they look on the terrace, among apple trees & vegetables & flowers! But there I am pinned down, as firmly as Prometheus on his rock, to have my day, Friday 26th of September 1930, picked to pieces, & made cheap & ugly & commonplace; for the sting of it is that there is no possible escape—no escape that wont make old Mrs Woolf begin to dab her eyes & feel that she is not being welcomed—she who is so “painfully sensitive”—so fond of cakes, so incapable of amusing herself, so entirely without any interest in my feelings or friends; so vampire like & vast in her demand for my entire attention & sympathy, while she sits over the fire, in her dreary furs & ugly bonnet & large boots, with her pendulous cheeks & red nose & cheap earrings, talking about Worthing & the charms of Dr Watson & the niceness of everybody, & how she will come to Worthing every year, & will expect to come to tea with us. Lord Lord! how many daughters have been murdered by women like this! What a net of falsity they spread over life. How it rots beneath their sweetness—goes brown & soft like a bad pear!

At the same time I cannot make out a case for myself as a maltreated person. No, because I have an interest beyond my own nose. But let me note that old age can only be made tolerable by having a firm anchor outside gossip, cakes, & sympathy. Think of imposing even one afternoon of such a burden upon Quentin Julian & Angelica! I shall spend my day at the British Museum. (This is one of those visual images, without meaning when written down, that conveys a whole state of mind to me)

Rodmell is full of incident, drama, &, sometimes I think, coming home over the flats, of beauty & solemnity. Mr Fears the epileptic died on Thursday. He had been locked in his room for weeks; but escaped, made off to Southease, & called on the Thomases to present his grievance to the Rector. One of his grievances was that Mrs Dedman had stolen part of his garden—& it is said—& I can believe it—that this was no figment. There she stands in the street, ominous, glum, predatory, grasping, complaining. Then a doctor taps at the window: someone has been taken ill in the street & carried into a cottage. It was the mother of Miss Emery the dog breeder. She now lies dying perhaps, & her husband must be taken for a motor drive while they are burying Mr Fears to distract him from the thought of death. It is the most miserable of days, cold & drizzling, the leaves falling; the apples fallen; the flowers sodden; mist hiding Caburn. Yet I have written well, & cannot make out a case for myself as a maltreated person.

The great game of diplomacy is begun with Nelly. I have told Dr McGlashan that we will pay her wages, but not have her back till she is well.

Saturday 11 October

The fifty coffins have just trundled by, in lorries, spread rather skimpily with Union Jacks—an unbecoming pall—& stuck about with red & yellow wreaths. The only impressive sight was the rhythmical bending backward slow march of the Guards: for the rest, the human face is often pock marked & ignoble; poor gunners [?] look bored & twitch their noses; the crowd smells; the sun makes it all too like birthday cakes & crackers; & the coffins conceal too much. One bone, one charred hand, wd. have done what no ceremony can do: & the heap of a ceremony on ones little coal of feeling presses uneasily. I refer to the burial this morning of the 48 ‘heroes’ of the R101. But why ‘heroes’? A shifty & unpleasant man, Lord Thomson by all accounts, goes for a joy ride with other notables, & has the misfortune to be burnt at Beauvais. That being so, we have every reason to say Good God how very painful—how very unlucky—but why all the shops in Oxford St & Southampton Row shd. display black dresses only & run up black bars; why the Nation should be requested to think of nothing else; why the people should line the streets & parade through Westminster Hall, why every paper should be filled with nobility & lamentation & praise, why the Germans should muffle their wireless & the French ordain a day of mourning & the footballers stop for two minutes’ silence—beats me & Leonard & Miss Strachan.

Wednesday 15 October

I say to myself “But I cannot write another word”. I say “I will cut adrift—I will go to Roger in France—I will sit on pavements & drink coffee—I will see the Southern hills; I will dream; I will take my mind out of its iron cage & let it swim—this fine October”. I say all this; with energy: but shall I do it? Shant I peter out here, till the fountain fills again? Oh dear oh dear—for the lassitude of the spirit! Rarely rarely comest thou now, spirit of delight. You hide yourself up there behind the hotel windows & the grey clouds. (I am writing this with a steel pen which I dip in the ink, so as to forestall the day when my German pens are extinct). It is dismal to broach October so languidly. I rather think the same thing happened last year. I need solitude. I need space. I need air. I need the empty fields round me; & my legs pounding along roads; & sleep; & animal existence. My brain is too energetic; it works; it throws off an article on Christina Rossetti; & girds itself up to deal with this & that.

Rivett is installed. And she cooks like a freehanded lady. Light sketchy dishes arrive. This is only our second day, & Annie, infinitely happy garrulous & anxious to stay—how can I put up with Rodmell now, she says. I shall feel shut up inside something—Annie goes today. A curious little interlude this. Alas, one day last week Nelly appeared—of course on her best behaviour—very much the old & trusted servant, with, I think, a dash of suspicion. Why did I not have her back & give her help, seeing that she had been with us 15 years?—that I think was in her mind. But we kept it down; & she is off to Colchester for 10 days & then—oh dear, I say again, oh dear. Nessa & Duncan are at Cassis, which brings the delicious vision of France too near me—Oh to walk among vineyards I cry again. And lots of people are on the buzz: dined last night with Raymond, a shabby & diminished Raymond, whom I like better than the dashing. Not much wine & so on. He has given up parties & takes Wyndham Lewis much to heart “A middle aged man-milliner” said Lewis in that pamphlet which is like the gossip & spite & bickering of a suburban housemaid who has been given notice & is getting a bit of her own back.

Saturday 18 October

But behold, I think the spirit of delight is hovering over me, after 2 days at Rodmell, in spite of Ethel Smyth, in spite of Emmie Fisher. Two teasing & tormenting letters from them were, of course, forwarded. But we walked to Lewes over the fields—yes, reached our goal, came out under that tunnel; now I have planned this walk for almost 20 years & never taken it. Home now, & find another letter, shaken & remorseful from Ethel, & Tom’s new edition of Johnson, & ever so many flowers.

Wednesday 22 October

Just back from headache cheating—there should be a name for these peregrinations—at Hampton Court, My misery at the sere & yellow leaves, & the ships coming in & I not there & I not there—drove me to take a day off; indeed to plan 2 days off; but no: it rains now; & I’m for the fire.

My misery is Leonard’s. Rivett cant cook. Poor woman! Bowed down with a sense of the failure of her life, creeping broken winged, arid, deprecatory, diffident, she sends in meagre savourless dishes & attempts nervous combinations of tapioca & orange. No, no: go she must. And then I think Annie—for ever. But the misery of these trifles can be devastating. Brown sole, brown sauce, & nothing else. And when I make a joke she laughs, as she laughed once in some tennis court to some subaltern I imagine, vainly. She is inve⁠[r]⁠tebrate; crushed; & what, I ask, is to become of her? And how am I to detach her seaweed clinging from my kitchen? For naturally this was a chance, a new start for her; something untried. And when I say No you can’t cook, she will see her hope go bang like a rabbit in a shooting gallery. And I detest these dislodgments. Nelly again yesterday: apprehensive & suspicious; though I think not shaken seriously in her belief that she will come back to her [sic]. Thank the Lord, it rains, & I can bring myself to heel easily now. Winter has set in; draw the curtains; light the fire; & so to work.

Thursday 23 October

Behold, the rather familiar experiment—a new pen, new ink. “I’m afraid ma’am”, said the youth at Partridge & Cooper’s, “that the Penkala’s are extinct.” A voice on the telephone had spoken their doom. I went along Faringdon market this afternoon looking for the man with the barrow. I saw the grey towers of, I suppose, Smithfield. I almost went into St Paul’s & saw Dr Donne, now uncovered again; but being as I say to myself, pressed for time, I walked on, down the Strand.

Ethel came in yesterday evening; rather battered in an old moleskin coat; in the triangular hat which the hotel proprietor at Bath has made into its shape with a few pins. Well, I begin to make note of her, because, among other things—how many others—she said would I like her to leave me some of her letters—the Maggie Benson & Mrs Benson & Lady Ponsonby letters in her will? Would you like me to write something about you? I said. Oh yes; what fun! But I should try some experiments. Oh what fun! How I should enjoy it! But I should get it all wrong. Yes, of course; or tear them up. Do just as you like. H. B.’s letters I’m leaving to Maurice Baring; but he’ll do nothing. He’ll tear them up.

So I am to some extent Ethel’s literary executor, a post I have always vaguely desired; & so I now make a few notes as she talks, for a portrait. One would have to bring out her enormous eagerness. She was telling me how she reads Travel books; & her eyes—her blue, rather prominent eyes, positively glitter. And this is not talk about herself, or her music—simply about how people climb—their adventures. Her cheeks burn too. But she looks now & then aged: she said that she was a very brave woman. It is a quality I adore. And I have it. One of the bravest things I ever did was to tell people my age. My vivacity &c— This she copied from Mrs Pankhurst Everyone thinks I m 20 or 30 years younger. Well—(a characteristic word, indicating what really becomes necessary—a break—a new paragraph—a wedge inserted in the flood) Well—when I wanted people to realise how long I’d waited for recognition—& have never really had it—I did that—though I hated it: I told them my age, so that they couldn’t go on saying Oh but she came into her own—she was recognised. This referred I think, but it is difficult to insert one’s own wedges, to the Jubilee Concert at Berlin, on which occasion Lady Jones behaved so badly. She was on her way—is now I suppose in the train or on the ship, this cold grey day—to Belfast, to conduct her Sea Songs (one of my best things) & then, directly thats done, back she comes, across the Irish channel, & returns to Woking & goes on writing about H.B.: that looming imponderable figure: who has so queer an existence; for if I ask about him Logan, Ottoline &c. say Oh a petit maitre; a drawing room philosopher; to which Logan adds the son of a dentist, & Ottoline adds, he made love to me, & I found him intolerable. This was the man who dominated Ethel’s life, this wraith who wanders about in Logan’s & Ethel’s lives. What a strange job then to write, as I may one day, the life of a woman whose past is thus nebulous. And I have only come in time to hear about the past. Everything is past. She hopes not to live another seven years; gives me to understand that now that her last barren years have been fructified by knowing me, she can sing her nunc dimittis. Since all the fiery years of desire are over. Yet I doubt if they are quite over. Yet it is a fine spectacle, & a curious one, this old woman summing up her experience & hymning her love for H.B. as a swan song (& people say an ugly song, for they say, her musical genius is another delusion—all her life then has been based on illusions; & that as I perceive when I talk to her is manifestly untrue). I must now write to the living Ethel—so one’s perspective shifts.

Monday 27 October

How comfortless & uneasy my room is,—a table all choked with papers. &c. I’m now grinding out Waves again, & have perhaps an hour & a half to spend: a short time on Dante; a short time on MSS: a short time here—with another pen. Yesterday we went to Warlingham & sat in a gravel pit, like a Cezanne. I made this comparison, to appease myself for not being in France. And we walked along a bridle path; & saw old quiet farms, & rabbits, & downs, all preserved as by a magic ring from Croydon. Never was the division between London & country so sharp. Home, & made dinner; & read MSS: But rather casually & unanimously we have decided within the last week to stop the Press. Yes; it is to come to an end. That is we are to go on only with my books & Ls. & Dotty perhaps; & what we print ourselves. In short, we shall revert next October to what we were in the Hogarth House days—an odd reversal, seeing that we are now financially successful. But what’s money if you sell freedom? we say. And what’s the point of publishing these innocuous novels & pamphlets that are neither good nor bad? So we make this decision, casually, walking round the Square after lunch & thus slip another shackle from our shoulders. This is what I call living with a pilot in the ship—not mere drifting ahead.

Sunday 2 November

And tonight the final letter to Nelly is to be sent; there it rests in my red bag, but I have great reluctance to read it over, as I had to write it. Yet I don’t suppose she will mind acutely. For one thing, she has been prepared, I think, by our readiness to do without her; & then since the famous scene last November I think she has been aware of a change. These 5 months at any rate have proved that we are freer, easier & no less comfortable, indeed more comfortable, without her, for all her good humour, sense & niceness; which now that I have written the letter, I see once more in their true proportions. And I am vague & in the air, because I doubt that Annie will come—doubt if she should—wish indeed to have livers out in future. Oh never again to have scenes with servants—that is my ambition. How we used to walk round the Sqre considering Nelly’s ultimatums; what hours we have spent & should still spend. No: this is a wholesome break, & takes 10 years off my shoulders. Oh, but I shall have to see her—

[? Wednesday 5 November]

These are further notes about Nelly, since it is a queer little bit of life broken off; servant psychology & so on. To my long, explicit & affectionate letter she has returned one word: Dear Mr & Mrs Woolf. Thank you for your cheque: Yrs truly.

But yesterday evening, an embittered, frightened angry voice, this is Rivett’s description, & by the sound she identified Nelly, was heard on the telephone. She asked for me; but I was, happily, out or down here. We conjecture that after launching her snub, she came up to consult Lottie, perhaps see Mrs Hunt, & for some reason they decided upon an interview. I imagine she has now gone back. And the sense of freedom spreads wider & wider. The letter is sent; the shock over. And I come in & find the house empty & silent.

A slight inaccuracy, if applied to the past few days. Ethel Lyn & Hugh Walpole to tea on Monday; Vita Clive & Hilda Matheson to dine; Hugh again later, & his piteous, writhing & wincing & ridiculous & flaying alive story of Willie Maugham’s portrait. Indeed it was a clever piece of torture; Hugh palpably exposed as the hypocritical booming thick skinned popular novelist, who lectures on young novelists & makes his own books sell: who is thick fingered & insensitive in every department. But said Hugh, turning round on his bed of thorns again & yet again, & pressing them further & further in, Thats not what I mind so much. What I mind are a few little things—little things Willie & I had together—only he & I knew—those he has put into print. Thats what I cant get over. For instance I cant tell you all the meanings there are to me in his saying I was like a man in love with a duchess—(the meaning is that Hugh is in love with a male opera singer). Would you mind Virginia? (this said past midnight, Vita & I alone) And I said I should. “And he wrote to me & said he could not believe that I could be hurt. He said he had written without a thought of me. But that letter is almost worse than the book.”

Clive is home blind of one eye & much in need of society. I thought him, why heaven knows, rather admirable & touching; determined not to be a burden on his friends, yet very grateful for our kindness (& I must ask him to come in tonight). So much instructed somehow in the little graces & also the inevitable lonelinesses, without his Mary, but then I think he has his Joan. And he cant read or write, & has hired a reader. Its the evenings that will be bad he said. Nessa characteristically writes from Cassis that she doesn’t think much of it, & supposes that spectacles, ‘which we all wear’ will put it right.

And Julian’s poems are out, & I am relieved—but why, vanity of my own critical powers? jealousy of his fame?—to hear that Vita agrees with me that for all his admirable good sense & observation & love of country life, he is no poet. People who treat words as he does rather afflict me—I say this to discharge me partially of vanity & jealousy. Common sense & Cambridge are not enough, whatever Bunny may say.

Saturday 8 November

I pressed his hand when we said goodbye with some emotion: thinking This is to press a famous hand: It was Yeats, at Ottoline’s last night. He was born in 1865 so that he is now a man of 65—& I am 48: & thus he has a right to be so much more vital, supple, high charged & altogether seasoned & generous. I was very much impressed by all this in action. He has grown very thick (Last time I met him—& I may note that he had never heard of me & I was slightly embarrassed by O.’s painstaking efforts to bring me to his notice, was in 1907—or 8 I suppose, at dinner at 46). He is very broad; very thick; like a solid wedge of oak. His face is too fat; but it has its hatchet forehead in profile, under a tangle of grey & brown hair; the eyes are luminous, direct, but obscured under glasses; they have however seen close, the vigilant & yet wondering look of his early portraits. I interrupted a long dream story of de la Mares when I came in: about seeing Napoleon with ruby eyes & so on. Yeats was off, with vehemence even, kindling & stumbling a little, on dreams; those which have colour are rare & mean—I forget what. De la Mare told another very cryptic dream about a book with circles in it; the outermost ring black, the inner blue & so on. Yeats identified this dream at once as the dream of the soul in some particular state—I forget what. Tagore had told him he said that he had dreamed once as a young man; & if he could find the dream again it would become permanent. And so on to dreaming states, & soul states; as others talk of Beaverbrook & free trade—as if matters of common knowledge. So familiar was he, that I perceived that he had worked out a complete psychology, which I could only catch on to momentarily in my alarming ignorance. De la M. had just been to the National Gallery, & had got no pleasure from the pictures. I said this flow & ebb of consciousness made all criticism unstable. He said one must go by the plus’s always. Yeats said he could get nothing from Rembrandt, nothing from El Greco. He then explained our pleasure in pictures, or other works of art, by an elaborate metaphor, taken from his psychology; about the sharp edges of things being brought into contact; & the same order then coming in our consciousness: & thus our closest contact results from some sudden clicking to of edges, which—I have lost the metaphor now completely. Then, discussing what poems we could come back to unsated, I said Lycidas; De la M. said no. Not Milton for him: he could never recognise his own emotions there. Milton’s woodbine was not his woodbine, nor M.’s Eve his Eve. Yeats said he could not get satisfaction from Milton; it was Latinised poetry (as somebody said, Milton had (in some way irreparably) damaged the English language). This attached itself to a cosmology evidently, in which Latins & Romans play their part. And so to modern poetry, & the question of the spade. Yeats said that “we”, de la M. & himself, wrote ‘thumbnail’ poems only because we are at the end of an era. Here was another system of thought, of which I could only snatch fragments. He said that the spade has been embalmed by 30 centuries of association; not so the steam roller. The great age of poetry, Shakespeare’s age, was subjective; ours is objective; civilisations end when they become objectified. Poets can only write when they have symbols. And steam rollers are not covered in symbolism—perhaps they may be after 30 generations. He & de la M. can only write small fireside poems. Most of emotion is outside their scope. All left to the novelists I said—but how crude & jaunty my own theories were beside his: indeed I got a tremendous sense of the intricacy of the art; also of its meanings, its seriousness, its importance, which wholly engrosses this large active minded immensely vitalised man. Wherever one cut him, with a little question, he poured, spurted fountains of ideas. And I was impressed by his directness, his terseness. No fluff & dreaminess. Letters he said must be answered. He seemed to live in the centre of an immensely intricate briar bush; from wh. he could issue at any moment; & then withdraw again. And every twig was real to him. He also spoke about the necessity of tragedy. It is necessary to attempt the impossible; but it must be possible. All creation is the result of conflict. James Stephens, some of whose poems he much admires, & I have never read, was so poor as a boy that he used to pick up the bread thrown to the ducks & eat it. There must be tragedy in order to bring out the reverse of the soul. (This belongs to another theory about the soul & its antitype, which I vaguely remember in his poems). He said that Tom very cleverly made use of mythologies, for instance the Fisher King in the Waste Land; & mythologies are necessary. Ezra Pound writes beautifully when he uses them. Then suddenly must speak of—some common object—& at once his rhythm breaks. I said we did not talk enough, not easily & equally. He told us of men he had met in trains. I liked his transitions to dialect & humour. With men perhaps he might be coarse. He had been staying with Masefield who, to celebrate the 30th year of their friendship, had got young women to recite Yeatses lyrics at Boars Hill. Their voices had been too small for the theatre; but Yeats had been greatly touched. Judith M. is nice & good but not pretty. Hence she will have to marry a man she knows; not at first sight. And Mrs M. seemed simple & he liked her better than usual. Indeed, he seemed very cordial, very generous; having been warmed up by his 65 years; & being in command of all his systems, philosophies, poetics & humanities; not tentative any more. Hence no doubt his urbanity & generosity. Compare him with Tom for instance, who came to tea the day before, & may be, for anything I know, as good a poet. Poor Tom is all suspicion, hesitation & reserve. His face has grown heavier fatter & whiter. There is a leaden sinister look about him. But oh—Vivienne! Was there ever such a torture since life began!—to bear her on ones shoulders, biting, wriggling, raving, scratching, unwholesome, powdered, insane, yet sane to the point of insanity, reading his letters, thrusting herself on us, coming in wavering trembling—Does your dog do that to frighten me? Have you visitors? Yes we have moved again. Tell me, Mrs Woolf, why do we move so often? Is it accident? Thats what I want to know (all this suspiciously, cryptically, taking hidden meanings). Have some honey, made by our bees, I say. Have you any bees? (& as I say it, I know I am awaking suspicion). Not bees. Hornets. But where? Under the bed. And so on, until worn out with half an hour of it, we gladly see them go. Vivienne remarked that I had made a signal that they should go. This bag of ferrets is what Tom wears round his neck.

On second thoughts, Yeats & de la Mare talk too much about dreams to be quite satisfactory. This is what makes de la Mare’s stories (lent me by Ottoline) wobbly.

[? Tuesday 11 November]

Now what will happen next, when The Waves is done? I think some book of criticism; (Mrs Stiles to take away wastepaper) But I am dissatisfied with my own smart endings. I must get on to a peak & survey the question. These are our stages.

I thought, to give this book continuity, I would copy every day the headlines in the paper. But I cant remember them.

Mr Scullin & Labour. Armistice day celebrations. The Blazing Car murder. Prince of Wales’s next Expedition.—at a shot.

William Plomer is back. Nessa returns, wifely ready to read or sit with Clive, on Thursday. Roger too. And I cry O Solitude—& look towards Rodmell. And the weather goes on blue & balmy. And I go to the dentist, & so does Leonard. And Rivett is a nervous but clean cook. And Nelly has appealed to Dr McGlashan. And we await development.

The other night, sitting on the floor by my side, Vita suffered considerably from jealousy of Ethel. She praised her, stoutly, but bitterly. She has all the abandonment that I, living in this age of subtlety & reserve, have lost. She claims you; rushes in where I force myself to hold back. When Hugh was here he said casually that he had met Ethel at tea. Such agony went through her she could not speak. And I noticed nothing; & in my usual blind way, made my usual mocking joke. This V. took seriously & brought out my letter for me to read.

[Wednesday 12 November]

Alas, too numb brained to go on with Bernard’s soliloquy this morning. A very little weight on me brings me low. And Clive has been a little weight, added to the usual round; the dentist, shops & callers &c. So I cant write. And last night we sat through a sticky valiant evening at Hope’s. Hope liberated from all restraint by [illegible] was it? Hope school girlish, voluble, excited, the first time I have seen it since Jane’s death. Mrs Plunket Greene there (20 years added since we met at Savage’s dinner party) now she is grey, pendulous; with the oddest bird technique of the head & eyes I have ever seen—for ever craning, peering, advancing, exactly like a lively arch bird of some kind. A Roman Catholic—not, unless you remembered her 20 years ago, a very nice or clever woman—something too insinuating.

Wednesday 12 November

And I had my talk with Nelly last night. Going up to sit still for an hour, & read perhaps Dotty’s poem I heard a shop bell, I thought, looked down the stairs & saw Nelly. So we sat for two hours. An odd meandering contradictory, mainly affectionate & even intimate talk. One of her preoccupations to establish her own hard lot & innocence of all offence among the servants of the click. We had treated her badly, turning her off because of ill-health. Confronted by me, she advanced this more as an excuse, almost a joke than anything. “Still I can’t understand why you won’t have me back…” But Nelly, you gave me notice 10 times in the past 6 years—& more … But I always took it back. Yes, but that sort of thing gets on the nerves. Oh ma’am I never meant to tire you—dont go on talking now if it tires you—but you wouldnt give me any help. Now Grace had all the help she wants—Well, I says, this is long service. But then Nelly you forgot that when you were with us. But then for 3 years I’ve been ill. And I shall never like any mistress as much as I like you … & so on & so on—all the old tunes, some so moving; so pathetic, some (I’m glad to say) so irrational hysterical & with that curious senseless reiteration of grievances which used to drive me frantic. The truth—but I could never tell her this—is that that kind of dependence & intimacy, with its exactness, & jealousy & its infinite minuteness wears one down; is a psychological strain. And then the gossip. Oh I wont say how I’ve heard, but I’ve heard—. You say——& so at last, after every variety of feeling, I was left with the one feeling No I could not have you sleeping here again. To be free of this inspection this frying in greasy pans, at all costs. None of this can be said, & the situation, if far less stormy than I feared, has its sharp edges. Poor old Nelly one thinks, finding a place—packing up—going to Registrys—after 15 years.

[Added later] And then I let her come back, for 3 months, from Jan. 1st. How am I ever to apologise to myself sufficiently?

Sunday 23 November

Ethel yesterday in a state of wonderment at her own genius. “Cant think how I happened” she says, putting on my hat, & bidding me observe what a nutshell it is on top of her gigantic brow.

Another observation, based on parties at Rhondda’s & lunch with Harold: given clothes I could soon dine & lunch every day & get so easily the hang of it that it mattered nothing. And so would have no point.

Sunday 30 November

“Oh I have had so much unhappiness in my life” said Mary, sobbing “It has been so dangerous, so difficult. How I envy you!”

Tuesday 2 December

No I cannot write that very difficult passage in The Waves this morning (how their lives hang lit up against Soon after this A B. went to France, drank a glass of water, & died of typhoid. (March 30th, his funeral today) the palace) all because of Arnold Bennett & Ethel [Sands]’s Party. I can hardly set one word after another. There I was for 2 hours, so it seemed, alone with B. in Ethel’s little back room. And this meeting I am convinced was engineered by B. to ‘get on good terms with Mrs Woolf’—when heaven knows I don’t care a rap if I’m on terms with B. or not. B. I say; because he can’t say B. He ceases—shuts his eyes—leans back. One waits. “begin” he at last articulates quietly, without any fluster. But the method lengthens out intolerably a rather uninspired discourse. Its true, I like the old creature: I do my best, as a writer, to detect signs of genius in his smoky brown eye: I see certain sensuality, power, I suppose: but O as he cackled out “what a blundering fool I am—what a baby—compared with Desmond McCarthy—how clumsy—how could I attack professors?” This innocence is engaging; but wd. be more so if I felt him, as he infers, a “creative artist”. He said that George Moore in The Mummer’s Wife had shown him the Five Towns: taught him what to see there: has a profound admiration for G.M.: but despises him for boasting of his sexual triumphs. “He told me that a young girl had come to see him. And he asked her, as she sat on the sofa, to undress. And he said, she took of⁠[f] all her clothes & let him look at her—Now that I dont believe … But he is a prodigious writer—he lives for words. Now he’s ill. Now he’s an awful bore—he tells the same stories over & over. And soon people will say of me “He’s dead”.” I rashly said “Of your books?” No, of me—he replied, attaching, I suppose, a longer life than I do to his books.

“Its the only life” he said (this incessant scribbling, one novel after another, one thousand words daily) I dont want anything else. I think of nothing but writing. Some people are bored. “You have all the clothes you want, I suppose” I said. “And baths—And beds. And a yacht.” “Oh yes, my clothes cdnt be better cut.”

And at last I drew Lord David in. And we taunted the old creature with thinking us refined. He said the gates of Hatfield were shut “shut away from life”. ‘But open on Thursdays’ said Lord D. “I dont want to go on Thursdays” said B. “And you drop your aitches on purpose” I said “thinking that you possess more ‘life’ than we do.” “I sometimes tease” said B. “But I dont think I possess more life than you do. Now I must go home. I have to write one thousand words tomorrow morning”.

And this left only the scrag end of the evening: & this left me in a state where I can hardly drive my pen across the page.

Question: Why does Desmond like talking to Lord Esher?

Reflection: it is presumably a bad thing to look through articles, reviews &c. to find one’s own name. Yet I often do.

Resolution: To say to Ethel one day—How can you attach this importance to everything you do when you call yourself a Christian (inspired by this mornings letter & its emphasis about the score of the Prison)

Thursday 4 December

One word of slight snub in the Lit. Sup. today makes me determine, first, to alter the whole of The Waves; second, to put my back up against the public—one word of slight snub.

Friday 12 December

This, I think, is the last days breathing space I allow myself before I tackle the last lap of The Waves. I have had a week off—that is to say I have written three little sketches; & dawdled, & spent a morning shopping, & a morning, this morning arranging my new table & doing odds & ends—but I think I have got my breath again & must be off for 3 or perhaps 4 weeks more. Then, as I think, I shall make one consecutive writing of the waves &c—the interludes—so as to work it into one—& then—oh dear, some must be written again; & then, corrections; & then send to Mabel; & then correct the type; & then give to Leonard. Leonard perhaps shall get it some time late in March. Then put away; then print, perhaps in June.

Meanwhile we dine with Mary on Sunday to meet Mr Hart Davis who may come to the press—but in what capacity? And two days ago we saw over 25 T⁠[avistock]. S⁠[quare]. to which we may move, if we decide to leave this, & can let it. But there too are obstacles; an hotel building alongside, & fewer rooms, & more expense.

Paper headlines Spanish Revolution. Russian timber yard scandal. Burst water main in Cambridge Circus.

Tuesday 16 December

I will never dine out again. I will burn my evening dress. I have gone through this door. Nothing exists beyond. I have taken my fence: & now need never whip myself to dine with Colefax, Ethel, Mary again.

These reflections were hammered in indelibly last night at Argyll House. The same party: same dresses; same food. To talk to Sir Arthur about Q. V.’s letters, & the dyestuff bill, & I forget—I sacrificed an evening alone with Vita, an evening alone by myself—an evening of pleasure. And so it goes on perpetually. Lord & Lady Esher, Arnold Bennett—old Birrell. Forced, dry, sterile, infantile conversation. And I am not even excited at going. So the fence is not only leapt, but fallen. Why jump?

Thursday 18 December

Spain strikes. Illness of M. Poincare. Suicide of Peter Warlock. Dyestuff Bill.

Lord David, Lytton & Clive last night. Told them how I had burnt my evening dress in the gas fire—general agreement that parties are a folly. Clive specially emphatic. Talk about the riddle of the universe (Jeans’ book) whether it will be known; not by us; found out suddenly: about rhythm in prose; Lytton is bringing out a new book of essays; what shall it be called; on living abroad; Clive says we (L. & I) are provincial. I say no mud abroad & fireflies in one’s hair; Blenheim discussed; Lytton against it; Clive in favour; I say no sense of human personality; Lord David’s aunt perpetually tears up her life of Ld Salisbury; feels the cause of the lunatics; no Cecils like dogs; Q.V. discussed; Bitter tea; A Lion rages; Clive’s eyes; Ld D. sneezed across the table; my bag came; fog all day.

[Friday 19 December]

Spanish Rising. Prince of Wales’ Chill. Camera beats M.

“Violet so delighted me”, said Ethel, “by saying precisely what I wished her to say. I was so struck by the terrific strength & gentleness of V. & by her nose”. Now I dont like this: I dont like that Ethel should know that I like compliments; I dont like liking them; I dont like Mrs Woodhouse fabricating them on the telephone.

Saturday 20 December

W. H. D. Douglas drowned: six English lost: New motor regulation. Lord Willingdon appointed Viceroy of India.

And Kingsley Martin lunched with us (sweeping up turkey as a char sweeps feathers) & said that the Nation & the N.S. are to amalgamate; & he is to be editor (highly secret, like all nonsense) & would L. be literary editor? No; L. wd. not.

Monday 22 December

Horror death of Douglas: Indian Conference. Fog. Intermittent. Weather to be colder.

It occurred to me last night while listening to a Beethoven quartet that I would merge all the interjected passages into Bernard’s final speech, & end with the words O solitude: thus making him absorb all those scenes, & having no further break. This is also to show that the theme effort, effort, dominates: not the waves: & personality: & defiance: but I am not sure of the effect artistically; because the proportions may need the intervention of the waves finally so as to make a conclusion.

Tuesday 23 December

I will make this hasty note about being robbed. I put my bag under my coat at Marshall & Snelgrove’s. I turned; & felt, before I looked “It is gone”. So it was. Then began questions & futile messages. Then the detective came. He stopped a respectable elderly woman apparently shopping. They exchanged remarks about ‘the usual one—no she’s not here today. Its a young woman in brown fur.” Meanwhile I was ravaged, of course, with my own futile wishes—how I had thought, as I put down my bag, this is foolish. I was admitted to the underwor⁠[l]⁠d. I imagined the brown young woman peeping, pouncing. And it was gone my 6 pounds—my two brooches—all because of that moment. They throw the bags away, said the detective. These dreadful women come here—but not so much as to some of the Oxford St. shops. Fluster, regret, humiliation, curiosity, something frustrated, foolish, something jarred, by this underwor⁠[l]⁠d—a foggy evening—going home, penniless—thinking of my green bag—imagining the woman rifling it—her home—her husband—Now to Rodmell in the fog.

Rodmell.

Saturday 27 December

But whats the use of talking about Bernard’s final speech? We came down on Tuesday, & next day my cold was the usual influenza, & I am in bed with the usual temperature, & cant use my wits or, as is visible, form my letters. I daresay 2 days will see me normal; but then the sponge behind my forehead will be dry & pale—& so my precious fortnight of exaltation & concentration is snatched; & I shall go back to the racket & Nelly without a thing done. I cheer myself by thinking that I may evolve some thoughts⁠[?]. Meanwhile it rains; Annie’s child is ill; the dogs next door yap & yap; all the colours are rather dim & the pulse of life dulled. I moon torpidly through book after book: Defoe’s Tour; Rowan’s auto⁠[biograph]⁠y; Benson’s Memoirs; Jeans; in the familiar Diary of a Somerset Rector way. The parson—Skinner—who shot himself emerges like a bloody sun in a fog. a book worth perhaps looking at again in a clearer mood. He shot himself in the beech woods above his house; spent a life digging up stones & reducing all places to Camelodunum; quarrelled; bickered; yet loved his sons; yet turned them out of doors—a clear hard picture of one type of human life—the exasperated, unhappy, struggling, intolerably afflicted. Oh & I’ve read Q.V.’s letters; & wonder what wd. happen had Ellen Terry been born Queen. Complete disaster to the Empire? Q.V. entirely unaesthetic; a kind of Prussian competence, & belief in herself her only prominences; material; brutal⁠[?] to Gladstone; like a mistress with a dishonest footman. Knew her own mind. But the mind radically commonplace, only its inherited force, & cumulative sense of power, making it remarkable.

Monday 29 December

One of my trial runs to exercise my hands. (Still in bed). Skinner was bred to the Bar, but became, unfortunately, a clergyman. Unfortunately too his wife died, of consumption, leaving him with 3 children. Of these the only satisfactory one was Laura, who inherited her father’s love of collecting & tabulating, but also her mother’s consumption, so that before she had collected, in a very orderly way, many cabinets of shells, she died; & the other children were unsatisfactory.

Skinner was rector of Camerton in Somerset, & there he remained, year after year, without any aptitude whatsoever for the souls of the living. A clever, upright conscientious man, he did his duty by his flock, by perpetually admonishing them. That they were always bad, seems strange, but was to him true. A colliery was being formed at the village. The morals of colliers are perhaps loose. At any rate, no village in England seems to have contained so many insolent, wicked, ungrateful villagers. And Skinner was forever comparing them with the Romans. His only comfort was to dream himself back into Camelodunum, & to forget 1828. But being a disciplinarian, he was tormented by the need for reproving the living. His conscience refused to let him shut his eyes upon the sufferings of the halfwitted Mrs Goold, or the iniquities practised upon imbecile paupers at the workhouse, & he must perpetually go his rounds among the sick & dying, for accidents among the miners were frequent. He was always on the side of the afflicted; never on the side of the happy. He considered himself one of the worst treated of men, & imagined malignancies & insolences on all sides. Mrs Jarrett, the Squiress, was an arch-hypocrite. All her kindness had deceit behind it. Then he was sometimes asked to a ball—to a dinner party with French dishes. He much preferred solitude to the most brilliant society. Perpetually censorious, he found fault with French dishes, with dressing up, with all enjoyment—save only that of writing & writing, long accounts of places, catalogues of antiquity, & in special, his great work upon Etymology. He met with only ridicule here too. At a parsons dinner, he was asked to explain, on his system, the name of Bumstead, which he did—& then suspected that it was all a joke against him. Suspicion always came after a moments pleasure. Perhaps the only unalloyed pleasure was found in his visits to Stourhead, the seat of [blank in ms], where a party of antiquaries stayed for a day or two, giving themselves up to questions of Romans & Britons, of camps & buried cities. There, sitting alone in the luxurious library, he enjoyed the exquisite pleasure of copying extracts from—shall we say?—Ptolemy Theophrastus; & the good Bishop of Bath & Wells made him happy too in spite of a few suspicions—by asking him to spend the week end at Wells. These however were his only alleviations. Home life at Camerton became more & more sordid, humiliating, comfortless & by degrees violent. Jeered at & insulted by the rude peasants & farmers, who told him to his face that he was mad, his treatment was no better in his own vicarage, & from his own flesh & blood. There were terrible scenes with his sons. Once Joseph told him that he was making himself ridiculous by his writings, & was insane. Attempts to keep his son from drinking cider ended—so irritating was his manner—in violent curses. The sons were always being sent to stay with their grandmother at Bath. It was his temper that was at fault, he said; but they were at fault to irritate his temper. The servants left, because he wd. not let them walk out after dinner. The farmers cursed him because he suspected them of stealing his tythes; he nervously, irritatingly & imcompetently tried to exact his due of lambs & haycocks, He knew nothing of farming, nothing of country life. All he knew was that Camerton had been Camelodunum, & his obsession on this point made even the good natured Baronet protest that he carried Camelodunum too far. So at last—all he could do was to write & write & write. The blank pages of his diary alone neither sneered, nor hawked in his face, nor mocked him behind his back, nor plotted his downfall, nor called him mad. Eighty four volumes of antiquarian lumber & daily complaint & journalising were scribbled & put away in certain great iron chests which were bequeathed to the British Museum. At last his confidant was the future—in 50 years after his death, he said, these 84 volumes were to be given to the world—which world would understand his great contribution to etymology, & take his side against the Churchwarden, Mrs Jarrett, Owen, the servant girl & all the rest of his ungrateful perpetually afflicting tribe. Fame & comfort would then be his. No doubt this secret confidence kept him going, through the gathering miseries of life. For the unhappy man was not blind to his faults. His chief misery must have come from the struggle of love & irritation. He loved his sons—yet drove them away. They fell ill, & he became all kindness & consideration—& yet how could the unfortunate Owen endure to have his father with him?—his egotistic, exacting, morose, but devoted father? He gave pain even by his affection. And suddenly the diary, written in a crabbed & illegible hand, ceases to be copied out any longer. The brother whose task it was died.

Skinner went on writing, but nobody could read his script. Perhaps the knowledge that even this confidant had failed him finally decided him. At any rate, 7 years later, he went out one December morning in the beechwoods, & fired. They found his dead body & buried it—exacerbated, scarred, covered with infernal irritation—in the grave of his wife & Laura.

Now this little narrative being run off,—& Lord, how difficult to write in bed—I report that the machine is not seriously damaged; & if I can get out, & move about, & yet not get a headache, I daresay in 3 days I shall be beginning to play gently with the waves. I dont have the temptations here of London. Not normal, but being normal is I daresay rather a fetish. All Mrs Dalloway was written with a temp, of 99 I think. How difficult though to get back into the right mental state: what a queer balance is needed. This little Skinner sketch is in the wrong order; but I dont fumble for words. Could let my mind fly, am not as I prove now, used up by an hour’s exercise.

It rains. Nessa is driving from Seend today. Vita broadcasting. That bedroom voice, singing Bach, talking of the weather, has come in handy.

Tuesday 30 December

What it wants is presumably unity; but it is I think rather good (I am talking to myself over the fire about The Waves). Suppose I could run all the scenes together more?—by rhythm, chiefly. So as to avoid those cuts; so as to make the blood run like a torrent from end to end—I dont want the waste that the breaks give; I want to avoid chapters; that indeed is my achievement, if any here: a saturated, unchopped, completeness; changes of scene, of mood, of person, done without spilling a drop. Now if it cd. be worked over with heat & currency thats all it wants. And I am getting my blood up. (temp. 99)

But all the same I went to Lewes, & the Keynes’s came to tea; & having got astride my saddle the whole world falls into shape; it is this writing that gives me my proportions.

[]

Volume IV: 1931-1935

Edited by Anne Olivier Bell
Assisted by Andrew McNeillie

[1982]

1931

[Diary XX continued]

[Friday 2 January]

This is the turn of the tide. The days are lengthening. Today was fine from start to finish—the first we have had, I think, since we came. And for the first time I walked my Northease walk & saw the moon ride at 3, pale, very thin, in a pure blue sky above wide misty flattened fields, as if it were early on a June morning.

Here are my resolutions for the next 3 months; the next lap of the year.

First, to have none. Not to be tied

Second, to be free & kindly with myself, not goading it to parties: to sit rather privately reading in the studio.

To make a good job of The Waves.

To care nothing for making money.

As for Nelly, to stop irritation by the assurance that nothing is worth irritation: if it comes back, she must go. Then not to slip this time into the easiness of letting her stay.

Then—well the chief resolution is the most important—not to make resolutions. Sometimes to read, sometimes not to read. To go out yes—but stay at home in spite of being asked. As for clothes, I think to buy good ones.

This morning Sandies brought Miranda, & she is now stood in her alcove. We went over to Charleston yesterday, & I fought, rather successfully with the usual depression. Is it their levity?—a sneer? But nothing so bad as usual. Duncan there. We came in, & the scene had the usual red cave effect—red cave in the profound winter hollow.

Wednesday 7 January

Well, we have just got back, had our tea, Francis Birrell has called been dismissed, & there are two hours to dinner. What am I to do with two hours? I dont want to spend them fuming over my new established & respectable household—Nelly in the kitchen & Lottie attempting concealment in the bed room. And I cant settle to read The Enormous Room, nor Madame du Deffand either. L. is busy coping with Miss Belsher & correspondence.

My head is not in the first spring of energy: this fortnight has brought me no views of the lapping downs—no fields & hedges too many firelit houses & lit up pages, & pen & ink—curse my influenza. It is very quiet here—not a sound but the hiss of the gaz. Oh but the cold was too great at Rodmell. I was frozen like a small sparrow. And I did write a few staggering sentences. Few books have interested me more to write than The Waves. Why even now, at the end, I’m turning up a stone or two: no glibness, no assurance; you see, I could perhaps do B⁠[ernard]’s soliloquy in such a way as to break up, dig deep, make prose move—yes I swear—as prose has never moved before: from the chuckle & the babble to the rhapsody. Something new goes into, my pot every morning something thats never been got at before. The high wind can’t blow, because I’m chopping & tacking all the time. And I’ve stored a few ideas for articles: one on Gosse—the critic as talker; the armchair critic; one on Letters—one on Queens—

Now this is true: The Waves is written at such high pressure that I cant take it up & read it through between tea & dinner; I can only write it for about one hour, from 10 to 11.30. And the typing is almost the hardest part of the work. Heaven help me if all my little 80,000 word books are going in future to cost me two years! But I shall fling off, like a cutter leaning on its side, on some swifter, slighter adventure—another Orlando perhaps.

I looked out at dawn once or twice—a redness, like wood fire cinders, in a frosty sky; frost thick on the fields; the candles alight in some of the cottages, & so back to bed, wrapping my clothes round me. And every morning I took the bellows & chafed up my logs, & made a game of it, & almost always won my blazing fire by the time L. came up.

How I dislike servants voices & giggles. Enough—enough.

We shall play the Grosse Fugue [Beethoven] tonight—Ethel, I daresay, will ring up. I shall go down & get the post. Tom, Lyn & Ethel have written: I am asked to contribute to a symposium on Love—& thats about all. But already we are committed to ‘see’ 6 people before Monday—the only one of importance is John Lehmann. And shall I now write to Arthur Symons about his novel? O dear. What machine is there for making 1 hour & 35 minutes blaze?

[Saturday 10 January]

Rather stirred by reading my own essay on Poetry in Fiction I write here instead of breaking my back over Dante. (Its true, I get more thrill from Dante, read after an hours Waves, than from almost any reading—hence the effort). And Clive is looking in for 5 minutes to say good bye. “And to see how you are” he says. “And how are you?” I say. “Blind” he says, rather dolefully. Such is the state of our relationship at 10 to 6 on Saturday Jan. 10th 1931. Lord lord, what a queer thing life is!

We walked through the little dingy streets of Seven Dials Leonard & I this afternoon, to Charing Cross Road. What a mood of tears I was in—of pathos, for Leonard, for myself; & said to him Would you like half a crown to buy a squirrel? Suddenly one is overcome with sorrow for people.

But to be connected—Lehmann may do: a tight aquiline boy, pink, with the adorable curls of youth; yes, but persistent, sharp. Shall I be paid if I come as apprentice? Can I have the Hogarth Press books? Not much atmosphere; save perhaps that his eyes are imaginative: Lord knows. And we ask 4 or 5 thousand as his share.

Now those figures have driven away my stir & the spirit of delight, whose wings were brushing me. in spite of our solid middleclass household (servants again) & over cooked meat.

I think a little Dante is indicated—Canto XXVI.

Tuesday 20 January

I have this moment, while having my bath, conceived an entire new (This is Here & Now I think May. 34.) book—a sequel to a Room of Ones Own—about the sexual life of women: to be called Professions for Women perhaps—Lord how exciting! This sprang out of my paper to be read on Wednesday to Pippa’s society. Now for The Waves. Thank God—but I’m very much excited.

Friday 23 January

Too much excited, alas, to get on with The Waves. One goes on making up The Open Door, or whatever it is to be called. The didactive demonstrative style conflicts with the dramatic: I find it hard to get back inside Bernard again.

The speech took place; L. I think slightly exacerbated: an interesting observation if a true one. Two hundred people; well dressed, keen, & often beautiful young women. Ethel in her blue kimono & wig. I by her side. Her speech rollicking & direct: mine too compressed & allusive. Never mind. Four people wish the speeches printed. Naturally I am rather used up—cant make the effort this morning of going on with The Waves. And am 99: & get headaches very easily—Lord, how often this drains my last chapters of their strength! And now Open Door is sucking at my brain too. Such accidents cant be avoided.

Vita last night: “If I, who am the most fortunate of women, can ask What is life for?, how can other people live at all?” in a vague mood of depression. She says she gets more pain than pleasure from praise of her books, which I believe to be true. Never was there a more modest writer. And yet she makes £74 in a morning—I mean a cheque drops in for a story.

Monday 26 January

Heaven be praised, I can truthfully say on this first day of being 49 that I have shaken off the obsession of Opening the Door, & have returned to Waves: & have this instant seen the entire book whole, & how I can finish it—say in under 3 weeks. That takes me to Feb. 16th; then I propose, after doing Gosse, or an article perhaps, to dash off the rough sketch of Open Door, to be finished by April 1st. (Easter [Friday] is April 3rd). We shall then, I hope, have an Italian journey: return say May 1st & finish Waves, so that the MS can go to be printed in June, & appear in September. These are possible dates anyhow.

Yesterday at Rodmell we saw a magpie & heard the first spring birds: sharp egotistical, like [illegible], A hot sun; walked over Caburn; home by Horley & saw 3 men dash from a blue car & race, without hats across a field. We saw a silver & blue aeroplane in the middle of a field, apparently unhurt, among trees & cows. This morning the paper says three men were killed—the aeroplane dashing to the earth: But we went on, reminding me of that epitaph in the Greek anthology: when I sank, the other ships sailed on.

My memory of todays headlines is this: Gandhi set free. Pavlova to be buried at Golders Green. Ripper murder on Blackheath. Death of Lady St Helier—who was so d—d condescending to me, 30 years ago.

Monday 2 February

I think I am about to finish The Waves. I think I might finish it on Saturday.

This is merely an author’s note: never have I screwed my brain so tight over a book. The proof is that I am almost incapable of other reading or writing. I can only flop wide once the morning is over. Oh Lord the relief when this week is over, & I have anyrate the feeling that I have wound up & done with that long labour: ended that vision. I think I have just done what I meant: of course I have altered the scheme considerably; but my feeling is that I have insisted upon saying, by hook or by crook certain things I meant to say. I imagine that the hookedness may be so great that it will be a failure from a reader’s point of view. Well, never mind: it is a brave attempt, I think, & marks something struggled for. Oh & then the delight of skirmishing free again—the delight of being idle, & not much minding what happens; & then I shall be able to read again, with all my mind—a thing I haven’t done these 4 months I daresay. This will have taken me 18 months to write: & we cant publish it till the autumn I suppose.

William P. talked more of his new novel, the Autobiography or Experiences? of an Emigrant the other night than L. has talked of his books all his life.

Wednesday 4 February

A day ruined, for us both. L. has to go every morning at 10.15 to the Courts, where his jury is still called, but respited always till 10.15 the next day; & this morning, wh. should have dealt a formidable blow at The Waves—B⁠[ernard]. is within 2 days I think of saying O Death—was ruined by Elly, who was to have come at 9.30 sharp but did not come till 11. And it is now 12.30, & we sat talking about the period & professional women, after the usual rites with the stethoscope, seeking vainly the cause of my temperature. If we like to spend 7 guineas we might catch a bug—but we dont like. And so I am to eat Bemax [a tonic] &—the usual routine.

How strange & wilful these last exacerbations of The Waves are! I was to have finished it at Christmas.

Today Ethel comes. On Monday I went to hear her rehearse at Lady Lewis’s. A vast Portland Place house with the cold wedding cake Adams’ plaster: shabby red carpets; flat surfaces washed with dull greens. The rehearsal was in a long room with a bow window looking on, in fact in, to other houses—iron staircases, chimneys, roofs—a barren brick outlook. There was a roaring fire in the Adams grate. Lady L. a now shapeless sausage, & Mrs Hunter, a swathed satin sausage, sat side by side on a sofa. Ethel stood at the piano in the window, in her battered felt, in her jersey & short skirt conducting with a pencil. There was a drop at the end of her nose. Miss Suddaby was singing the Soul, & I observed that she went through precisely the same attitudes of ecstasy & inspiration in the room, as in a hall. There were two young or youngish men. Ethel’s pince nez rode nearer & nearer the tip of her nose. She sang now & then; & once, taking the bass, made a cat squalling sound—but everything she does with such forthrightness directness that there is nothing ridiculous. She loses self-consciousness completely. She seems all vitalised; all energised: she knocks her hat from side to side. Strides rhythmically down the room to signify to Elizabeth that this is the Greek melody; strides back; Now the furniture moving begins, she said, referring to some supernatural gambols connected with the prisoner’s escape, or defiance or death. I suspect the music is too literary—too stressed—too didactic for my taste. But I am always impressed by the fact that it is music—I mean that she has spun these coherent chords harmonies melodies out of her so practical vigorous, strident mind. What if she should be a great composer? This fantastic idea is to her the merest commonplace: it is the fabric of her being. As she conducts, she hears music like Beethoven’s. As she strides & turns & wheels about to us perched mute on chairs she thinks this is about the most important event now taking place in London. And perhaps it is. Well—I watched the curiously sensitive, perceptive Jewish face of old Lady L. trembling like a butterflies antennae to the sound. How sensitised to music old Jewesses are—how pliable, how supple. Mrs Hunter sat like a wax figure composed, upholstered [?], transfixed, with her gold chain purse.

Saturday 7 February

Here in the few minutes that remain, I must record, heaven be praised, the end of The Waves. I wrote the words O Death fifteen minutes ago, having reeled across the last ten pages with some moments of such intensity & intoxication that I seemed only to stumble after my own voice, or almost, after some sort of speaker (as when I was mad). I was almost afraid, remembering the voices that used to fly ahead. Anyhow it is done; & I have been sitting these 15 minutes in a state of glory, & calm, & some tears, thinking of Thoby & if I could write Julian Thoby Stephen 1881-1906 on the first page. I suppose not. How physical the sense of triumph & relief is! Whether good or bad, its done; & as I certainly felt at the end, not merely finished, but rounded off, completed, the thing stated—how hastily, how fragmentarily I know; but I mean that I have netted that fin in the waste of waters which appeared to me over the marshes out of my window at Rodmell when I was coming to an end of To the Lighthouse.

What interests me in the last stage was the freedom & boldness with which my imagination picked up used & tossed aside all the images & symbols which I had prepared. I am sure that this is the right way of using them—not in set pieces, as I had tried at first, coherently, but simply as images; never making them work out; only suggest. Thus I hope to have kept the sound of the sea & the birds, dawn, & garden subconsciously present, doing their work under ground.

Friday 14 February

And I had my hair curled two days ago. With some difficulty I controlled my bottomless despair when Nessa disapproved. I will front the world curled, I said to myself at 6 o’clock a m: very valiantly; I like my experimental temper.

Janet Case yesterday, shrivelled, narrowed, dimmed, aged, & very poverty struck. I noted her cheap shoes & dirty old velvet hat. I suppose over 70 now; & yet I always think of her as 45. She clings to youth. “But we never see any young people” & so reads Tom Eliot &c: has her wits about her: but oh dear, the pathos when our teachers become our learners. She has had I suppose a far harder life than I knew—illness, poverty, & all the narrowness of living; alone with Emphie; without any luxury, & the thought—I dont know about this—of leaving E. or being left. She was staying with an old man of 91. A curious clutching anxious sense such old age gives one: her face has become pointed, whitened; shrunk; her eyes remain. How I used to wait for her lesson: & then the arguments, the excitements. I was 17 she said when she came. She felt unsuccessful.

Tuesday 17 February

And I feel us, compared with Aldous & Maria, unsuccessful. They’re off today to do mines, factories .. black country; did the docks when they were here; must see England. They are going to the Sex Congress at Moscow, have been in India, will go to America, speak French, visit celebrities,—while here I live like a weevil in a biscuit. The fog thickens. My electric lamp is broken; (because we are having fires put [in]). Lord, how little I’ve seen, done, lived, felt, thought compared with the Huxleys—compared with anyone. Here we toil, reading & writing, year in year out. No adventure, no travel; darker grows the fog. Here, by some invisible rope, we are bound. Add to this my gnats perception of filamentary relations. With Nessa for example. I think she plumes & prides herself: I think she exists self sufficient: I think her beauty is praised; I think she does not want me; I think a million things a minute. My boasts do me harm. My reality is unknown. So I go on—this is the truck [?] of The Waves. My ship has sailed on. I toss among empty bottles & bits of toilet paper. O & the servants: Lottie. Mrs M. [charwoman] Nelly comfortably installed for life.

And I am to write 6 articles straight off about what? And a story. About what? All I like is my own capacity for feeling. If I werent so miserable I could not be happy. And the Huxleys are now approaching Chesterfield, where they will interview managers. Aldous takes life in hand. Whether that damages his writing I dont know. He is ‘modern’. He is endlessly athletic & adventurous. He will be able to say he did not waste his youth. Some bitterness is the goad which drives him on. Death comes; nothing matters; at least let me see all that there is to be seen, read all there is to be read. I fancy no one thing gives him the immense satisfaction things give me. Thats all the comfort I find.

Monday 9 March

And then I went, more than a week ago to Lady Rosebery’s—blank sealit room, buffet, elderly butlers or peers. Lady R. young & shorn. Lord Revelstoke exemplary. Caviare. Lady Oxford. A curious fierce, dart in her eye: strung; pinioned. I knew your father: your mother.. &c. Is to come to tea. Wants me to write about her book. Sense of drum & blare: of Ethel’s remorseless fangs: her irresistible vanity, & some pang too for her child’s craving for a party—how tawdry how paltry: her facing out the failure of The Prison; her desperate good cheer; her one bouquet; her old battered wigged head. How mixed my feelings were—& how exhausted & windswept & disillusioned I was—with my ears ringing, & no warmth depth comfort slippers & ease anywhere: but all effort & strain: & the sense of the futility of it all.

Monday 16 March

These few & rather exacerbated entries show, I think, the back wash of The Waves. I am writing little articles of a morning, & should have been sketching the Houses of the Great this moring, but that I have not the material. This afternoon I shall try to see Carlyle’s house & Keats’ house. Tomorrow I lunch with George & Margaret to meet the Rothensteins. Miss Holtby is writing a book on me. So we go on, until, with the sun out & the birds singing as I hope, we end this lap of the year with 3 weeks holiday. I’m ready this year for holiday. I think indeed that I have seldom worked harder, one way & another. Emotionally there has been the slight perpetual restraint with Nelly; & one fine blaze, about Lady Rosebery’s party with Ethel—that valiant truculent old mosstrooper of a woman. She is so gritty to be brother with. And I respect her capacity for ignoring me. She took to reading Dean Inge, she says, when she assumed from my voice—exhausted, cold & gruff—that ‘all was over.’ Her strength of feeling is her power over one. This drives her headlong. Her Press has been catcalling—whistling. Never mind. She has other schemes on foot at once. A curious problem—what she minds, what she thinks, about her music. She descends to explanations in Time & Tide which seem deplorably low down. No, I cannot write this morning.

Barbara, Julian & Betty Jenkins the other night—Julian in a stew about his poems. And so my quiet weekend at Rodmell next week will be spent discussing Pope &c. How I grudge it—& yet cant deny the young. Ann Toby Henderson & I go to Tantivy Towers. But enough of this moping & groping.

There is no doubt that a low mood, betokening dispiritment is more enlivening to our friends than one blown with triumph & success:—

Thursday 19 March

Ethel yesterday, very uneasy about her character; & possible misrepresentations. I think deluding herself about her own motives in countering reviewers: (purely for the sake of other musicians, women in particular: I’ve nothing to lose: have suffered neglect &c all my life). I think uneasy about her own greatness, requiring assurance, & snatching it rather hastily from such vague remarks as I could make “Thats just what I wanted you to say”—she plays a losing game very gallantly. “But I detest Bohemianism. I want fresh air, above everything. Therefore I took care to afficher myself. I was the friend of the Empress. The Ambassador was an old friend of mine. I couldn’t afford to be déclassée. Couldn’t have borne it (about her standing in Roman society).

It seems possible to me that nature gave her everything except the power of expression in music: hence the race & violence & restlessness of her nature: the one outlet is stopped up. And she for ever batters at the door; it remains locked; she flows away over me, Lady Cunard—whoever it may be with the vehemence of a tortured & baffled spirit. But she would die rather than allow this. Hence her terrific egotism: her insatiable desire for praise, since she is denied the only true satisfaction. An exhausting companion, therefore.

Christabel last night.

I put Leonard higher than anybody here—above you, who are above the rest.

My fourth child is not by my husband.

Why these candours & confessions?

She did not like me, or trust me, last night

Desmond, Velinda Benita?, Vanessa, Raymond, Vita, Lord David Duncan Julian

[Wednesday 25 March]

And here I sit, waiting to go to the Richmonds, having lunched with Clive, about to dine with the Wolves. Wine at lunch flushes me & floats me. So with Tom. A bad thing. My hair came down. Yesterday at the docks with Harold. Tomorrow, Ethel’s party at Nessa’s. Friday Tantivy Towers—wh. reminds me to write more letters before I change. Lord Lord.

Saturday 28 March

Arnold Bennett died last night; which leaves me sadder than I should have supposed. A lovable genuine man; impeded, somehow a little awkward in life; well meaning; ponderous; kindly; coarse; knowing he was coarse; dimly floundering & feeling for something else. Glutted with success: wounded in his feelings: avid; thick lipped: prosaic intolerably; rather dignified; set upon writing; yet always taken in; deluded by splendour & success; but naïve; an old bore; an egotist; much at the mercy of life for all his competence; a shop keepers view of literature; yet with the rudiments, covered over with fat & prosperity & the desire for hideous Empire furniture, of sensibility. Some real understanding power, as well as a gigantic absorbing power.—These are the sort of things that I think by fits & starts this morning, as I sit journalising; I remember his determinat⁠[ion] to write, 1000 words daily; & how he trotted off to do it that night: & feel some sorrow that now he will never sit down & begin methodically covering his regulation number of pages in his workmanlike beautiful but dull hand. Queer how one regrets the dispersal of any body who seemed—as I say—genuine; who had direct contact with life—for he abused me; & I yet rather wished him to go on abusing me; & me abusing him. An element in life—even in mine that was so remote—taken away. This is what one minds.

Saturday 11 April

Oh I am so tired of correcting my own writing—these 8 articles—I have however learnt I think to dash: & not to finick. I mean the writing is free enough: its the repulsiveness of correcting that nauseates me. And the cramming in & the cutting out. And articles & more articles are asked for. For ever I could write articles.

But I have no pen—well, it will just make a mark. And not much to say. or rather too much & not the mood.

We came back on Thursday. The sun at once rose⁠[;] all the leaves pushed; the grass in the Square was literally liquid emerald. And so on. Imagine my regrets for Monks House: & how I start in the night—my early mornings are terrible battles—Fight fight—yet later I cant remember what the fights about—saying Curse, oh God, curse: as I remember that hideous new house on the top of my down; the rampart so often looked at on my evening walk. They are building the garage now; so we dig ourselves in.

And I saw Pernel & of course, on top of Pernel Peter [Lucas]; so she was cross & he was pertinacious, & I had to skim the two of them with talk about Mrs Hunt’s life of E. Siddal: not what I wanted to say. But these lovers have the pertinacity of gnats round flames: must talk, even if not about Sheilah.

On Thursday we have our fortnight in France. I intend to keep a diary so as to make each day last longer. I think I shall like La Rochelle best: I shall want to live there. I shall take a house there: I shall dream of walking there when I am old & full of sleep.

Here I will paste in—though it is hardly worth the trouble, the fitful flying notes I made, generally very cold, rather wet, with a rug round my knees, for the weather—everybody is talking about the weather. The worst April for 50 years.

That we retrieved so much from it that was lovely, ravishing, amusing & had so many good hours, spinning along the wet roads, under a complete grey cloud, speaks well for the state of our souls. After being married since August 1912 1931
1912
    19 nineteen years, how moving to find this warmth, curiousity, attachment in being alone with L. If I dared I would investigate my own sensations with regard to him, but out of laziness, humility, pride, I dont know what reticence—refrain. I who am not reticent.

Diary of Tour
to La Rochelle,
Brantome
&c.
April 16th 1931

Thursday 16 April

Newhaven: dinner, hotel lately done up in modern style. Guests surprising. 2 young men in trousers are women. One is Mrs Pilkington [unidentified]. Conversation on phone. “Oh darling Judy .. longing to see you—Ethel too marvellous. In bed at 2.30 this morning. Now at Newhaven”. Yet her stride & gestures male: check shirt. The other had feminine face: was the woman of the two: but trousers. Nobody stared. Ordered cocktails. Other guests, man like Tartarin: bushy black beard sprouting from chin: bare ankles: yatchting cap: but English. Others a newly married pair; bride in full evening dress. Rung up. Maybe the family—her’s presumably. Elderly married couples, crossing, like ourselves, looked too respectable in this comedy film star atmosphere—at Newhaven of all places. And a fairly good dinner.

Friday 17 April

Very wet: very cold: horrid seaside marine atmosphere: all drenched & shrubs blown as usual at Dieppe. Breakfast in the usual hotel [du Rhinet de Newhaven]. Started. Wind & rain: almost black air. Rain came through. At the ferry at Quilleboeuf L. saw blue sky. Great rejoicing. Lunch at Inn by ferry—cheap, coarse; burnt fish. Old man & woman country people lunching. He had a thimble of brandy in his coffee. On again. Cold but fine in bouts. Along country roads. No houses. Came to Alençon. A white elegant old town, with a great magnolia tree all stuck thick with flowers. Heard a loudspeaker in an old house, where a girl sat under rows of jars writing. Odd little scene. Vast bare Place for soldiers. Dined badly—save for wine; a whole bottle. Guests: 4 French businessmen & one Chinese business man: a girl like Fredegond [Shove, VW’s cousin] & very old man. Talk about trains to Paris. Cold water in our bath; for which we paid heavily. Bitter cold: but suffocated with hot air early in the morning. Started for Saumur. Drove more slowly. April weather, bitter cold. Not enough clothes on. Lunch at Sablé-sur-Sarthe: not good food yet. Little old town on river. Saw old castle at Durtal: turned into almshouses or hotel; dusty with waterproof peaked towers.

Saturday 18 April

Saumur, cold & wet, with gleams, though. The Loire—vast, without a single boat. France very empty. Hotel improved, hotter water. Women said they had been wearing cotton dresses—weather unknown. Saw the big round church by the river. A market. Started; having forgotten change of time. Bad morning. Went to Fontevrault. Saw beautiful bare old convent church. Dont take off your hat, said man. Its not sacred. The tombs of Plantagenets: like Edith Sitwell: straight, narrow side by side: re-painted, blue & red. Now all this great convent where filles de France educated a prison. Prison bells ringing for their dinner. Fountain where the girls washed before dinner. The cold must have been worse then. The Abbesses had themselves painted in frescoes—fat, sensual, highnosed faces.

Went on in rain across country: narrow yellow roads: old women sitting in fields under umbrellas near sheep. Biblical. Behind time. Lunch at Thouars: the food still no better than food in English Inns L. says.

Monday 20 April

Gradual southerly feeling—men playing boules. Old men getting out of cars to pick flowers in the woods. Roads as straight as rods; some of them entirely lined with trees; their tops touching. But the worst weather so far. Car shut all day. Reached Niort at 6: determined to push on 40 miles to La Rochelle. Arrived at 7.30—so quick one drives: I forgot our 2 punctures. One at Thouart [Thouars]; kept us, as the man did not mend it while we lunched. I read Sons & Lovers [by D. H. Lawrence], every word: a merry go round. Wished for fur coat. Another puncture 10 miles later. Had to stand in rain & change wheel. Scraped a hole in the road. On & off again. Went into hotel on the place. Found them dancing: so came here (de France et Angleterre) Exactly right—very ciré floors: quiet: a garden: ruins; lilac; flower pot roofs; but still gray this morning. Window open though; & not actually raining.

Tuesday 21 April

To Marennes. Cold & dark at first; gradually cleared. Our finest day. People at once begin lounging: put shutters up. Went to Marennes, across an emerald green marsh: deserted, a cow or two: a tall spare woman dressed in black like a clergyman. At Bourgeant ? [Brouage]—a town in an old wall; tufted with grass. Lovely country, a ferry, aeroplanes looping loop. Church in Marennes; old ship slung from ceiling. The hotel of the oysters 2 Ki. on. Sat at green table in the sun & drank coffee: L. had 12 oysters: alive: twisted in his mouth he said; green: with distorted shells. A pine wood; all silent; no bungalows. low sea. boats out at oyster banks. Very lovely drive back across the marsh. Tall marsh grasses fine yellow like babies’ hair: broad brown river. Friendly men on ferry. Home. Now colder. Car jammed. First wholly fine day. Lunch off paté & croissants in the marsh. Hotel food soon bores.

Saturday 25 April

Angouleme. Fair, concours agricole braying: a loudspeaker too under a vast blue & yellow cardboard tower, higher than this hotel, on wh. is written Huiles et Tourbeaux: they sell ices at a little opening. We have been to the concours: saw dogs: Belgian hares; mechanical saws; bees in hives. Then walked, in high wind & black clouds, round battlements. Slightly reminded me of Clifton—high airy terraces, overlooking breadths of cloud darkened country. Girls drinking port & eating cakes in Thé Salon.

Before this, we went to Castillon: an adventure, driving on narrow country roads, further south than Brantome. Arrived late. Asked for dinner at Boule d’Or. Walked by the Dordogne—of majestic brea⁠[d]⁠th, empty like all France, save for one racing boat. We slept here very well in soft warm beds, though there was no hot water & the cold was so great we had to go to bed. Next day was fine & warm. I went into the Church; after the school children had left. I always wonder at the immense fund of ancient piety, dragging these blocks into mere villages. Lovely spring day. Drove 7 or 8 miles to Montaigne. Rang at Castle door. No one came. Women tending cows in ancient stables. A tower at one end. A garden with flowering trees. The usual renovated peaked & black tiled Chateau: over the door Que S’cais-je—A woman came. Took us up narrow stone steps, worn; opened thick nail studded door. This is his bedroom; this is his dressing room. Here he died. Here he went down—he was very small—to Chapel. Upstairs again is his library. The books & furniture are at Bordeaux. Here is his chair & table. He wrote those inscriptions on the beams. Sure enough it was his room; a piece of an old wooden chair might be his. A circular tower, very thick; 3 small windows looking along the wall to another tower. All that remains of the fire wh. burnt the old Chateau in 1880—or thereabouts. We wandered on the terrace. Saw the vineyards below; the shaped reddish hills & terraces: one or two brooding brown farms—much his view—the curious musing man must have halted to look at what we saw. So lovely now; as then. Americans &c. Every day of the year the woman said. A dog went with us fetching a chestnut & putting it on the parapet to be thrown. So on, through lovely shaped fields, like the south, but subtler, to Bergerac, where we had our best—our only good meal L. says. Indeed when the novelty is gone, the food is ranker & commoner & less interesting than I remembered; save for this lunch; off Monbazillac wine; pâte; eggs & so on.

To Perigueux: old furniture shops: expensive chairs: a church with green domes; scraped; renewed. All worshippers are old women; all in black; all woollen; decrepit. A random priest ambling along with different gestures. Tom’s religion. (I must read his Lambeth tonight, having read myself almost out of books). So to Brantôme—in the evening sun. Man felling poplar in a flat meadow: boy fishing; a ring & loop of waters under old bridges; smoky cave dwellings lived in since Charlemagne. Cheap, clean, elementary Inn—no. Letters. Kauffer. Ethel. Vita—about my bibliography: papers: Nessa at Okehampton in floods; determined that England is intolerable—Children so excited she cant give up the tour.

Walk yesterday. Forgot the size of maps. Found Champagnac beyond us. Went wrong at Les Roches. Arrived at an old house on a green sward, with trees & walled garden. O to live here, we said. So much subtler, gentler, lovelier than Cassis. The land is flat & green as a lawn; with elongated quivering poplars just fledged; then the spade pressed hills I love; & the river, by which we walked—the river so deep, so romantic, taking the blue thunder clouds, the willows, twisting them nonchalantly, flowing on. Clumps of purple gentian in the reeds. An Elizabethan meadow—cowslips, bluebells. But the thunder roared out. We ran. We sheltered under a ruined cave of some sort. Then dashed home 2 miles of road or more; thighs aching; thunder & lightning at Cemetery. All the tin shelters & metal wreaths gleamed. Girls, mourners, took arms & ran. Home before the main shower, very heavy.

Fair. All the women in black with kids & sheep. Pens of pigs. Man said his sister in law said fish cheaper in Paris. Clerks from the Societe Generale for lunch. One black literary man. The other very southern; mobile⁠[;] talked about cars.

Sunday 26 April

On to Poitiers. Went to Movies last night after a good dinner at the hotel we shd. have stayed at. Laughed violently at animals in hotel. A light risible method—the French—of telling the story of a cycle race—done by quick drawings on a sheet. Out into cold town—all spread for sun, which does not come. Cold windy drive this morning. Country might be Hampshire, save for emptiness. No cars. Poitiers for lunch. A Restaurant. Officers lunching & their young ladies—rather provincial. Enormous meal made by a thick slab of a man—painful to see soufflé disappear. Visited churches, heard women baa-ing responses like sheep. Rain & cold by fits; so came back to read & write till dinner. A quiet homely hotel; room looking onto courtyard, but still cold. [Written on 27 April:] No central heating that night; so had to go to bed for warmth, as before.

Monday 27 April

Cloud of Sunday lifted; but heavy in the skies. Drove over high ground to Chinon; showery: a discreet charming grey & white town. Got our letters. Pleasant to be asked to wire about making a speech; & know one cant answer. A first rate lunch—one of our great successes. No comparison with White Hart at Lewes possible. Climbed the steep path to Castle. Tapped at door. Went away relieved. No woman summoned us back. Explored castle alone as usual. Not a single tourist, & only 3 English the whole tour. Saw the high unroofed room in wh. Jeanne stood before the King. The very chimney piece perhaps. Walls cut through by thin windows. Suddenly one looks down, down on roofs. How did the middle ages get through the evenings? A stone crypt in wh. J. lived: people carve their names everywhere. River silken serpentine beneath. Liked the stone roofless rooms; & the angular cut windows. Sat on the steps to hear 2 struck by the clock wh. has rung since the 13th Century: wh. J. heard. Rusty toned. What did she think? Was she mad? a visionary coinciding with the right moment. Drove on; showers; cold; bad roads; never mind—cheerful enough, till we landed at Chateau le-noir [Château-du-Loir] hoping for a small country Inn. Women holding the ends of sheets in the hall. Perpetual washing & ironing at hotels. Small child in Bureau playing with paper. Good dinner of its kind. Then the Movies began in the courtyard—talk & laughing till 12.30 or so. This damp place did its best to rejoice—valiantly, unfortunately for us. And bad breakfast in the public room, smelling of wine. So off: the day cold, but rather brighter. They call this La lune Rousse. They say it happens every year. Whether red or Russian I dont know.

So to Le Mans. Another grey & white curved, dignified, flat windowed ancient town. Letters. The Cathedral. Bought umbrellas; pen tray; lunched. The tournedos underdone & expensive. Very little good meat in town restaurants I should say; at Chinon, though, whatever it was—duck I think—excellent. Here not much to pit against the White Hart Lewes—our staple comparison. In this great argument I am always for France; L. for England. Expense seems higher than 3 years ago. I voted for Dreux; so we went there—to Hotel de Paradis; & coming in heard the violins, & saw thinly dressed girls; cheap; rigged out in ready mades from the local shop. A wedding. Dancing already at 5.30. This is the Inn that has old cupboards. Had to dine across the yard, as the dining room was danced in. Strawberries for dinner. An ice; but remembering A. Bennett, refused it. All very slow & cold. People driving up in cars all the time. Little boys scampering about in black velvet. Small girl perfectly dressed & very prim. Whole families invited: small business people I imagine. The dancing went on till 11. Then we saw the wretched waiters carrying tables across—how cynical all waiters must be & chambermaids—how terribly aware of the transitoriness of life—& the music stopped. They ate. Then at 12 or 1 (I was woken) cars began tuning up: people shouting, laughing saying goodbye. I had seen the bride dancing—a pale girl in spectacles—& thought of her borne off to fulfil her duties in some small suburban house outside Dreux, for she was marrying a clerk I should think: & they now begin to replenish the race.

This morning was our finest. I put on my shady hat & left off my jersey. So did L. And I was cajoled into considering seriously a desk; £10: then stopped in Nonancourt: found a gigantic old furniture shop—cultivated man in knee breeches well cut—sporting—a connoisseur—too aware—perhaps shall buy a bed. Then lunched at our Clara’s Bois Joli—my word! A chateau furnished each room in its own period; a chicken turned over the fire on a spit; old custom; pretty maids in pretty dresses; the usual fake; amusing; American; she said of the cowslips “Look at these baby primroses—arent they cute?” How I hate foreigners bad French. Our lunch admirable: but cost £1.10. This is Clara’s idea of heaven. Not mine. A glorified Drusilla’s teashop. Sickened me of old French furniture. Lovely as they are, things lose infinitely from being preserved not used. The sham, & the effort to tickle our vanity & feed on our money disagreeable. Lots of ancient summer houses & Skittles. An old caleche the most pleasant thing—rolled off with some rubbish in a doorway—18th Century. So here: Caudebec: & the weather is now (our last day) set fine. So be it.

[End of inserted pages]

Sunday 3 May

52 Tavistock Square.

Yes, thats all very well; but how to begin, & why begin? I mean what do these diaries amount to? O merely matter for a book, I think: & to read when I have a headache. After all, Percy could burn the lot in one bonfire. He could burn them at the edge of the field where, so we think, we shall lie buried. That was our conclusion after attending Arnold Bennett’s funeral.

But now, say I have a 3 months lap ahead of me: the 3 summer months. What shall I do? We are going to regulate ‘seeing’ people. There is to be a weekly black hole; a seething mass of people all eating tea together. We shall thus have more evenings free. In those evenings I intend to walk; to read, Elizabethans; to be mistress of my soul. Yes. And I intend to investigate Edinburgh & Stratford on Avon. Also to finish off The Waves in a dashing masterly manner. D H Lawrence has given me much to think about—about writing for writings sake. Two days are to be set aside for reading MSS: & they are not to leak into other compartments. These two decisions—the Black Hole, & Hogarth Press MSS, will I think make for an orderly & satisfactory summer. Then of course, being now so well off, with 2 frigidaires & everything handsome, I need not fritter & fribble about clothes; & having little sense of the duty of society left, shall hope to take my way about unhasting unresting. I want to see the fields & flowers, one or two new places; to write some good articles. At the moment, I seem able to write criticism fearlessly. Because of a R. of ones Own I said suddenly to myself last night.

Wednesday 13 May

Unless I write a few sentences here from time to time I shall, as they say, forget the use of my pen. I am now engaged in typing out from start to finish the 332 pages of that very condensed book The Waves. I do 7 or 8 daily; by which means I hope to have the whole complete by June 16th or thereabouts. This requires some resolution; but I can see no other way to make all the corrections, & keep the lilt, & join up, & expand & do all the other final processes. It is like sweeping over an entire canvas with a wet brush.

[Friday 15 May]

But it is a happy life. Those rules I made have so far kept my week orderly. Yesterday I went to Mrs Hunter’s sale, & before I had been in the room 5 minutes had bought through Mr Marchment of Shepherds Bush a large old rosewood & satinwood secretaire for £6.16. Heavens! The wood alone was worth that. It was a sordid, emulative, exciting, depressing scene. The trade was there in force. Jews, smoking pipes. Many winks & nods interchanged. Poor old Mrs Hunter’s little odds & ends were peered at & snatched; everybody seemed to be finding out flaws, & offering the least money. Marchment kept saying to me “Buy it—buy it—it’ll grow into money”. Thus solicited I did buy a shawl for 35/- & a little cabinet for £3.15. This I regretted; & I let slip—oh never mind. One must take these bargains & slips philosophically, in order to attain the perfectly buoyant & energised life which is now my aim. O yes, I dont waste a moment: I am always on the hop, with so much licence too allowed for sheer frivolity. Most plans of life are far too strict. I allow a liberal margin for pleasure.

The faces of Mrs H.’s rich friends disgusted me. Nothing is quite so coarse, cruel, meaningless, & sensual as a fashionable woman’s face, who is about 50: has done nothing but scavenge about London in cars; eating & drinking; marrying; coveting, tittle tattling. The Smyth-Hunter circle centres I think round the shires; the golf courses; the purlieus of the Bath Club & Whites. They are horsey, dressy; but not aristocratic, not distinguished. They are very well off; but lose money largely—or so at least I diagnose them. But their philosophy requires them to take tumbles bravely. When we went in on Friday to look at the things, Mrs H. was sitting at the desk which I want to buy, as cool & self-possessed as if she were giving a house warming, instead of seeing all her possessions, beds & blankets, paper knives & pen trays, all go for two or three shillings. “I see you so seldom. Do sit down for a moment & talk!” And what was I to say, to a woman old enough to be my mother, in that predicament?

Tuesday 19 May

A quarter of an hour:—yes, & what to say in a quarter of an hour. Lytton’s book: very good. Thats his line. The compressed yet glowing account which requires logic, reason, learning, taste, wit order & infinite skill—this suits him far better, I think than the larger scale, needing boldness, originality, sweep. I’m delighted too, to have an argument in favour of writing v. non-writing. Compare with Lawrence. These things wont tarnish & drop & let fall their petals. They hint at force; at reserve; at the strength to leave things unsaid; the strength required not to preach; not to extemporise. Like Max, though, a small talent sedulously cultivated. And I respect that. But I dont respect Logan. I loathe the vulgarity, the fribbery & frivolity of Logan (afterthoughts).

Lytton & Raymond to dinner tonight. Desmond t’other night. He needs £300. Cant handle his book—makes excuses for leaving it with us. Much obliterated in the struggle for life.

Mrs Hunt Hueffer: “I dont remember names after my illness. But I heard my mother talking to old Mr Black as I went upstairs. I did not know what it meant—intimate relations—at the time, afterwards I found out” as she has, Hugh says, with diverse people: perhaps Hugh; who winced at her name. William also (our first black hole) about his book: rather a disappointment—an Episode.

Thursday 28 May

Soon after this, I started a headache—flashes of light raying round my eyes, & sharp pain; the pain cut into me by Ethel’s voice, as she sat telling me—“You’ve got to listen”—about Adrian Boult, & how he ordered her to leave the room. And then to Rodmell, where the same thing happened—the light round my eyes, but as I could lie still in bed in my big airy room, the pain was much less. If it were not for the divine goodness of L. how many times I should be thinking of death; always knocked over as I am; but now the recoveries are full of infinite relief. Moreover, on Whit Monday the sun blazed, making the grass semi-transparent. And space & leisure seemed to lie all about; & I said, not once in an exstasy, but frequently & soberly, This is happiness. Why should I feel now calmer, quieter than ever before? Partly my disposition of life; partly Nessa Roger & Clive being away so that I am not hauled about & ruffled. Partly The Waves coming to an end—partly—I really dont know.

We went to Firle last night & brushed the buttercups on to our shoes, walking through the Park. A lovely country, even counting the villas. At Monks House we had electric light, & the Frigidaire is—today of course—working. When the electric light fused, we could hardly tolerate Aladdin lamps, so soon is the soul corrupted by comfort. Yesterday men were in the house all day boring holes for electric fires. What more comfort can we acquire? And, though the moralists say, when one has a thing one at once finds it hollow, I dont at all agree. I enjoy my luxuries at every turn, & think them wholly good for what I am pleased to call the soul.

Four young people smashed into Beddingham level crossing gates on Saturday & were cut in pieces by the 9.40 train. One man was found stripped naked, save for the hem of one trouser. Disappointed, reading lightly though, by The man who died, D. H. L.’s last. Reading Sons & Lovers first, then the last I seem to span the measure of his powers & trace his decline. A kind of Guy Fawkes dressing up grew on him it seems, in spite of the lovely silver-bright writing here & there: something sham. Making himself into a God, I suppose.

I am much interrupted again by my wish to write A Knock on the door. For some weeks I have not thought of it. It suddenly forces itself on me, & I go on making up sentences, arguments, jokes &c. Then several people have written to me lately about A Room.

Saturday 30 May

No, I have just said, it being 12.45—I cannot write any more, & p. 162 therefore halfway. in 26 days. shall finish by 1st July with luck. indeed I cannot: I am copying the death chapter: have re-written it twice. I shall go at it again & finish it, I hope, this afternoon. But how it rolls into a tight ball the muscles in my brain! This is the most concentrated work I have ever done—& oh the relief when it is finished. But also the most interesting. p. 137

A letter from Desmond this morning to say that he is sending his book to Putnam because, alas, it represents his life work; & though once he thought he could have done more, he now sees this is all, & therefore must seek a more durable publisher than the Hogarth Press.

To annoy me, Mary H⁠[utchinson]. rings up & says they are thinking of taking Southease this summer. Surrounded by fashion & bungalows, I feel like a fish in a frying pan. But no doubt shall skip out. I dont like the idea of meeting Mary & Barbara appropriately dressed on the downs. Happily, some menial of the Pritchards is now hammering, & I have an excuse to go up to luncheon.

Thursday 2 June

Yes, it is very important to write a few sentences, or I shall forget how. All this correcting—all this hammer hammer hammer on the hard high road.

Ethel again—All my ills, such as they are, spring from liver: I am a very strong woman, who needs calomel. After swallowing this terrific insult to the celebrated sensibility of my nervous system, I try to find out what motive lies behind Ethel & her calomel. I think; (but then I am not a psychologist) that she wants me to be everlasting: that she wants me to be unhurt by any amount of talk about the Prison: that she wants to have things—to her own will: that she dislikes other peoples illnesses which interfere with her vitality; that she likes to rationalise everything: that she suspects, on principle, all shrinking, subtlety & sensibility. Also she is remorseful for having sent me the picture of a sick monkey, but feels that if she can prove that the monkey was not sick but shamming, she is absolved. I dont know. It is very characteristic, & akin to the methods she pursues about her music. There too, to explain her lack of success, she fabricates a theory (about her kinship with the common man, & her consequent failure to attract the sophisticated, who control the Ring, so that Bax Vaughan Williams &c—are done, but she not).

Monday 8 June

Dreams.

I had three lately: one of Katherine Mansfield: how we met, beyond death, & shook hands; saying something by way of explanation, & friendship: yet I knew she was dead. A curious summing up, it seemed, of what has passed since she died.

Then the dream of Daphne Sanger, & how she was proved to be the heir to the throne of England. And Charlie was there. And another dream which L. coming in to say that Jean Stewart wants to come to tea, has caused me to forget. I diagnose, by the way, a coldness on the part of Ethel. No communications since last Tuesday save one rather formal card. I shall lie low & do nothing.

Oh dear me no—no quarrel at all.

Two notes: the woman in white stamping on bread in Kensington Gardens: the Indian looking woman ferreting in the litter box—both wild, outlandish, in shabby finery, within a hands pace. This was last week.

Wednesday 17 June

L. finished the first volume of his book on Sunday: begun over 10 years ago. We shall bring it out in the autumn & a reprint of The Village. He has been asked to give 6 Broadcast talks in the autumn on politics.

[Tuesday 23 June]

And yesterday, 22nd June—when, I think, the days begin to draw in, I finished my re-typing of The Waves. Not that it is finished—oh dear no. For then I must correct the re-re-typing. This work I began on May 5th, & no one can say that I have been hasty or careless this time; though I doubt not the lapses & slovenlinesses are innumerable.

A dark kind of summer. The cloud that hung over La Rochelle in April still hangs over London. In spite of this, owing to good resolutions, my little life has been adventurous & more stable than usual. There was Duncan’s show; & considerable content, indeed a kind of bubbling rapture I think, in Fitzroy Street.! must ask Nessa why we are so happy. Clive is in Cassis. Julian has grown a bristling beard like a chimpanzee & is off with volumes of Pope in MS to France. Tonight we go to the Gala Opera with Christabel. Stalls costing 25/-each.

I mean to record some literal conversations one of these days. Goldie wrote a qualified letter of praise about L.’s book: new & important ideas: the style repetitive & tedious. I distrust this, since Goldie’s own mechanical style, the mould made in Greece, since considerably smoothed out, never takes my fancy: in fact I should not exaggerate if I said that I detest it: & its currency, plausibility & general first class aspect.

On Wednesday—tomorrow—Ethel comes, & we have a party. Such is life—so gliding on. It is 12.30.

[Wednesday 24 June]

Last night we went to the gala opera; sat in the stalls, 2 rows from the stage, with Christabel & a woman, who came in late, called Lady Abingdon. Her fortune has been spent on her face. Perfectly agile, direct, slim. She has only a thin rigid trickle of a mind, & no play, range, or more than an inch of depth. But she is perfectly energised: knew what she was after. Christabel, to weld these incompatibles (L⁠[eonard]. &c) told stories of Princess Mary at Mrs Marshall’s party: how she stopped, jerked; was short clumsy, dressed like the upper housemaid in peacock blue. In the interval, old bibulous Maurice Baring red as a turkey cock, a survival from the Regency as I feel, came following, to clear Gosse’s character; which he did—but Evan Charteris had already done it—amiably enough. He has pink eye starting, & long equine teeth. Then Mrs Grenfell, whose chin, as C. said (C. is witty in her skimming way, & exactly fits this kind of thing) should have an inch or two hammered off. People passing. Old women like Roman matrons, ample, tightly girt; girls wand like: many large clear stoned necklaces & long dresses. I got the feeling of this traditional English life; its garden like quality; flowers all in beds & rows; & the ceremony that has been in being so many years. Between the acts we all stood in the street; a dry brilliant night, with women all opening their cloaks: then came dribbling through us a draggled procession of poor women wheeling perambulators & carrying small, white haired dazed children; going across Waterloo bridge. I watched Lady A’s expression to see if she had children; but could only gather a momentary schoolboyish compunction. The women, involved in this garish feathered crowd, pushed on stolidly. There was Tom Bridges; a gallant, irresistible General, with one leg, his head on one side; off the stage as it seemed, so typical of the distinguished elderly Beau. He has broken many hearts said C. but I don’t like him. C. said she might be summoned away before the end of Prince Igor. And so she went, liking this little amorous mystery. Lady A. stalked off without a good night or glance in our direction. Each of her nails was red, & cut out like a small rose petal. L. who had been reading The Lady said this was considered in bad taste; & that men, according to The Lady, dont like it. So home, by cab. Oh & my hair stood the strain very well. I believe I can now with care master my hair.

The woman who has been standing in the square for some 6 hours daily came yesterday with a sword, upon which she leant as she pretended to read the paper. This finally got upon the household nerves, & Miss Talbot summoned her in. She then spoke (said Nelly) very nicely; regretted having annoyed anybody, & said she was waiting for Dr Rowe, of the Clinic, from which we infer that she is an ex-patient with a grievance.

I was also made to waste half an hour looking at silk stockings by Mr Lowe, & lost my temper, on being asked to deposit 3/- a thing I greatly enjoy, because it makes me seem so vigorous. Now to continue Rhoda’s speech. Oh this book!——

Monday 29 June

I had an idea for a book last night—a voyage round the world, imaginary, hunting, climbing, adventurous people, shooting tigers, submarines, flying & so on. Fantastic. Some character: partly the result of L.’s saying if we go to America we shd. not make one bite of the cherry but go round the world. Then W.A. Forster said And write an Orlando of your tour.

Tuesday 30 June

Yesterday Nessa gave me the picture of Angelica.

Yesterday Ethel’s indignity reached its sordid & ridiculous climax.

Wednesday 1 July

Today Mary [Hutchinson] & Tommy dine with us & Ottoline comes in afterwards.

We go to Easdale’s concert at 3. & so on.

Jack, as a wedding gift to Miss Mary Ashton, has stopped, not only my allowance but Nessa’s & Adrian’s.

Our takings, what with the Press & my work, have given me a bonus of £860.

And now I must go up & find Ethel’s sentimental & hysterical sheets & underline the most sentimental & hysterical passages for her benefit. Pah—as people say in Shakespeare. And John Bailey is dead, aged 67. (which makes me think—no this refers to Jack—that I will read Stendhal de l’Amour).

Tuesday 7 July

O to seek relief from this incessant correction (I am doing the interludes) & write a few words carelessly. Still better, to write nothing; to tramp over the downs, blown like thistle, as irresponsible. And to get away from this hard knot in which my brain has been so tight spun—I mean The Waves.

Such are my sentiments at half past twelve on Tuesday July 7th—a fine day I think & everything, so the tag runs in my head, handsome about us. L. is now floating on the tide of celebrity: odd how the strings all begin to tug at once: asked to Broadcast, asked to go to America, asked to write the Weekly Wayfarer in the Statesman. And I am not jealous.

But I am fearful of what I call (though this much puzzles Fraulein Guide) Life. (Fr. G. is studying my works in the Brit. Mus. & cannot be sure what life is, so writes to ask me.) Clive is back, & as I observe instantly on opening the door, favourably disposed towards me. For example he says What lovely flowers! Ethel has been penitent after her fashion for her letter. That is she came yesterday, after an intermission of almost a fortnight, & defended & explained herself in a speech which lasted 20 minutes by my watch. She raised her cup of tea 6 times to her lips but always thought of some new parenthesis or qualification & put it down untouched. Her zeal, sincerity & vitality of course convince; though I’m glad to drive my stake in firmly & so avoid complete overwhelming. I shout obloquies at her like gun shots. She takes them on her solid old body with a thud like that on an elephant’s hide. Staggers, recovers herself, & stands pendant & prominent—for she has a paunch—over me. I dominate by silence—a phenomenon to her very formidable. And off she goes at 6.45 subdued—like Pinka [the Woolfs’ cocker spaniel], L. says, when she has been grouting in the rubbish heap. We kiss—she passionately in the hall, while Miss Pritchard shelters behind her door, slightly alarmed I think. But what care I might be Ethel’s song: & for that I like her.

I am reading Don Juan; & dispatch a biography every two days.

So no more.

Long discussion the other night between Ott., Tommie, Mary & ourselves upon being in the cage: Mary rampant; like a horse when a train passes a field. Must escape. Must find a brazen man & go to Spain. Why dont we do anything? Change our lives? She live with L. I with Jack? Why this hedge of telephone calls daily? Why not expose a different self?

Tuesday 14 July

It is now twelve o’clock on the morning of July 14th—& (Bob has come in to ask me to sign a paper to get Palmer a pension. Bob says … mostly about his new house, washing basins, can he use a candle still to go to bed with, Bessy is moving in today, he is off to Italy for a month, will I send a copy of my new book to Count Morra, all Italians are Counts, once he showed four Counts round Cambridge, Palmer … & so on: shuffling from foot to foot, taking his hat off & putting it on again, moving to the door & returning. O & about Desmond’s book. Desmond stole some of the articles—Putnam wrote him a very severe letter—)

& I had meant to say that I am now (here Nelly comes in with a bill for 4/6 to pay for my shoes)

I had meant to say that I have just finished correcting the Hampton Court scene (This is the final correction, please God.)

But my Waves account runs, I think, as follows:—

I began it, seriously about September 10th 1929:

I finished the first version on April 10th 1930

Sept 10th to Apr
7 months
9
3
19 months I began 2nd version May 1st 1930.

I finished 2nd version Feb. 7th 1931

I began to correct the 2nd version May 1st 1931

finished 22nd. June. 1931

I began to correct the typescript 25th June 1931

Shall finish. (I hope.) 28 June 18th July.—

Then remain only the proofs.

Friday 17 July

Yes. This morning I think I may say I have finished. That is to say I which I then lost have once more, for the 18th time, copied out the opening then lost sentences. L. will read it tomorrow; & I shall open this book to record his verdict. My own opinion,—oh dear—, its a difficult book. I don’t know that I’ve ever felt so strained. And I’m nervous, I confess, about L. For one thing he will be honest, more than usually. And it may be a failure. And I can’t do any more. And I’m inclined to think it good but incoherent, inspissate: one jerk succeeding another. Anyhow it is laboured, compact. Anyhow I had a shot at my vision & if its not a catch, its a cast in the right direction. But I’m nervous. It may be small & finicky in general effect. Lord knows. As I say, repeating it to enforce the rather unpleasant little lift in my heart, I shall be nervous to hear what L. says when he comes out, say tomorrow night or Sunday morning to my garden room, carrying the MS & sits himself down & begins “Well!”

Sunday 19 July

“It is a masterpiece” said L. coming out to my lodge this morning. “And the best of your books”. This note I make; adding that he also thinks the first 100 pages extremely difficult, & is doubtful how far any common reader will follow. But Lord! what a relief! I stumped off in the rain to make a little round to Rat Farm in jubilation, & am almost resigned to the fact that a Goat farm, with a house to be built, is now in process on the slope near Northease.

Friday 7 August

Monks House Rodmell

I have just written those august words, Rodmell. August 1931. And its as good, no better than I thought. Who else in the whole of Sussex can say that? Weather all sorts; river running; boat swimming; loud speaker, camera, Electric Light, frigidaire—thus I run through those material blessings which one ought to say make no difference. Yet they do—Heal beds too: my wide empty room to wake in; to go to bed in crossing the garden by the pale flowers—the garden lit by our bright lights. We were at Oare, & I like this country better for comparing it. And I made no note of Sydney, save that he has been given the tip by God—a queer feeling; spreads round him an oily surface of superficial calm. Then I sat to Tommie. Oh dear, what a terrific hemp strong heather root obstinate fountain of furious individuality shoots in me—they tampered with it, Nessa & Tommy—pinning me there, from 2 to 4 on 6 afternoons, to be looked at; & I felt like a piece of whalebone bent. This amused & interested me, at the same time I foamed with rage. T. was late. T. couldn’t change his plans & so on. And I had to plod along the dusty streets there.

And Rosamond Lehmann dined with Lord David; & I liked her; & at last, at last, at last, on Thursday 30th we got into the car, slammed the door, & made off. And how satisfactory it has been, is being. I writing Flush of a morning, half seriously to ease my brain, knotted by all that last screw of The Waves: L. doing his broadcast & correcting proofs, no one coming, except Bells: no one ringing up; no one to say dinner’s ready, or to be stumping about in the kitchen. Annie, composed, neat, nimble, has everything disposed of by 3—which reminds me I must go & put the pie in the oven, I think. And lights & shadows & walks—today over to Northease & back by the marsh; almost forgiving the pink slate abortion on the Telscombe horizon. Goat Farm isn’t so much of an eyesore as might have been. True, one day I was frittered into fury by Worthing & Mrs W. & her sudden curious revival of arch airs that had charmed diamond merchants in the 70s. How odd that sudden spurt of sex in a woman of 80! How repulsive to me that flutter of rather cheap attractiveness—that value for Mr Legge’s good opinion—he had taken her to the Pavilion & hired a special car. “Nice eh?” she laughed, as if she were on some beach with other Jewesses 50 years ago. So it seemed. And then one saw her old & pink & wattled & overdressed, demanding amusement, pleasure, cakes, drives—but enough (as they say): I wrote these very words last summer, & this summer all will be over, with one smashing family tea, by the 25th.

Lovely are the curves of the grey clouds sweeping; & the long barns lying; Vita writes this morning about K M’s letters & says how she longs for all poets in a garden; no more; whereas Harold is becoming, they say, editor of a new morning paper & has resigned from the Standard. And are you fond of me? she asks.

Monday 10 August

No I will not let this day be a bad one, though it has every sign of so being. First an argument with L. at breakfast about seeing his family: the usual rather embittered argument: which deprives me of my box⁠[?]; & then a headache is incipient; which is caused, partly, by Charleston; where we were very gay; & I gave away prizes; & then involved myself in one of my miserable edge sitting tenebrous exquisitely uneasy dialogues with Raymond: shd. I ask him to stay—should I not? Nessa did: Nessa who has Roger, & will have Jean. And now we were to ask R. to come; & now I sit in the lodge this grey pale morning & will not go on with Flush, because of my head; & we have a day in London tomorrow; & should begin to correct my first proofs; & perhaps shall when I’ve done this. No, I say, I will not let this day be a bad one: but by what means? Quiet & control. Eating apples—sleeping this afternoon. Thats all. And now for Waves.

I have now 10.45, read the first chapter of The Waves, & made no changes, save 2 words & 3 commas. Yes, anyhow this is exact & to the point. I like it. And see that for once my proofs will be dispatched with a few pencil strokes. Now my brood mounts: I think “I am taking my fences.. We have asked Raymond. I am forging through the sea, in spite of headache in spite of bitterness—I may also get a box⁠[?].” I will now write a little at Flush.

Saturday 15 August

I am in rather a flutter—proof reading. I can only read a few pages at a time. So it was when I wrote it, & Heaven knows what virtue it all has, this pressed [?] ecstatic book. All I note here though is that I feel vibrational; get violent impressions from Roger Raymond, Sibyl, Vita. Sibyl came by her own request yesterday; & I wondered after 2 hours jerking barren gossip, what satisfaction she got from it. Once she looked at the downs. The worst of being Sibyl is that one suspects every action of some motive. “I am proving myself a woman who loves the country”. One never feels, This is what she likes, as I do when Vita stumbles over the marsh & hardly has a word to say. S. looks at chairs & tables; sums one up: has a magpies eye, a larder of facts which she will hand on at her next meeting. Nobody scarcely will let themselves be themselves: & I am a sinner sometimes. Then, as we stood at the door, she tried to make us invite her to stay. And I resisted; why should she want us to ask her to stay? I asked. She had been at the Gages’, again, I suppose, self invited. As you see, S.’s company does not lead to lofty reflections; does not put one on one’s mettle, except to show off. Old Vita shaggy & stiff, writing another novel; but as careless about it all as ever. Eddy had written to abuse A.P.S. She was annoyed; then tore up his letter. Harold is starting a new paper Action on Oct. 1st: costing 2d. Cold, wet, lights at luncheon; the cat kittened in the coalhole; the valuable spaniel bitch died in childbed next door. A wet wild August, the coldest for 14 years; & the farmers here burning their hay. Meanwhile the country is in the throes of a crisis. Great events are brewing. Maynard visits Downing Street & spreads sensational rumours. Are we living then through a crisis; & am I fiddling? & will future ages, as they say, behold our predicament (financial) with horror? Sometimes I feel the world desperate; then walk among the downs. Last night, after Sibyl, after thunder & rain, specially [?] various, tender, fleeting, evanescent, I stood by the gate & watched Asheham hill cloud & kindle like the emerald it is. And all round the hills lay, low in cloud.

Sunday 16 August

I should really apologise to this book for using it as I am doing to write off my aimlessness; that is I am doing my proofs—the last chapter this morning—& find that I must stop after half an hour, & let my mind spread, after these moments of concentration. I cannot write my life of Flush, because the rhythm is wrong. I think The Waves is anyhow tense & packed; since it screws my brain up like this. And what will the reviewers say? And my friends? They cant, of course, find anything very new to say.

L. is in the house making his Index & printing the photographs we developed last night.

The reason why Colefax is so dull is that she never feels or thinks for herself. That is why I should suffocate of dust if she spent a night here. Also she is forever collecting facts about one, not from interest, but from curiosity. It is a warning not to go to places like Argyll House again, * The poor woman today Wednesday writes a pathetic letter about other summers & regrets, & how all the same they drank (A. & she) their delights to the full; & the sight of us tho’ it stirred these sorrows comforted her because one is expected to make some return.*

It is a good idea I think to write biographies; to make them use my powers of representation reality accuracy; & to use my novels simply to express the general, the poetic. Flush is serving this purpose.

We had a perfectly happy day yesterday. I set up some of Dadie’s poems in the new room; walked on the marshes. L. cut the apple trees; it was a lovely day—indeed this broken weather has the merit of an extraordinary capricious beauty. I doubt that I have ever seen the downs lovelier. I am in a fix though about Ethel, who with considerable brutality to back her, asks if she may come here. When people—G.L.D⁠[ickinson] for instance—put us off, we are almost shocked; & then feel an amazed relief. Is it possible that there is someone who does not want to see us? Such royalty we have become—in our set, as Ethel says. She annoys me by telling Lady Craik that I live in a set, & am a recluse. Now, alas, I must back to Bernard (on P⁠[ercival]’s death)

One of Sibyl’s sayings, or insinuations: “Ah, if only Arthur & I could afford a country cottage”—with her Rolls Royce & her chauffeur at the door.

Monday 17 August

Well now, it being just after 12.30 I have put the last corrections in The Waves; done my proofs; & they shall go tomorrow—never, never to be looked at again by me, I imagine.

Wednesday 19 August

My proofs did go: went yesterday; & I shall not see them again.

Tuesday 1 September

And so a few days of bed & headache & overpowering sleep, sleep descending inexorable as I tried to read Judith Paris, then Ivanhoe. A note on Judith Paris: its a London museum book. Hugh bouncing with spurious enthusiasm—a collection of keepsakes bright beads—unrelated. Why? No central feeling anywhere—only “I’m so vital—so big—so creative”. True, its competent enough, spare in the wording—but words without roots. Yes thats it. All a trivial litter of bright objects to be swept up.

Scott: a note. A pageant. And I know the man (I forget his name) will hit the mark. So I’m not excited. Almost incredible that my father shd. have taken this scene seriously. But I think some roots. A perfectly sincere desire surely to amuse, now & then ruffled (but oh how seldom!) by some raid from the sub-conscious—only in the humour tho. Rowena, Rebecca, hairdressers ornaments—Madame Tussaud sham jewels. Its the design thats interesting—all flat, daubed. But I think I trust him & like him, better than Hugh. Question of morality. That we are all moralists; with a temporary standard. My anger that S⁠[cott]. wont be more intense partly the result of England’s crisis this summer, (if summer it can be called).

Man came this morning when I was in my night gown to put up Nessa’s tiles in the top room. L. in London. Joyce’s birthday. Hot still September morning. Rooks gathering, cawing

Thursday 3 September

I am taking, this is the last day—my weeks holiday, with very good results. My brain is soft & warm & fertile again, I feel fresh & free with energy for talk. Yes, I can even envisage ‘seeing’ people without a clutch & a shudder. Odd how I drink up rest—how I become dry & parched like a withered grass—how then I become green & succulent. By the way, Elizabethan prose is magnificent: & all that I love most at the moment. I bathed myself in Dekker last night as in my natural element. Surely this is a nobler instrument than Scott or the 18th Century. We listened to a Bach concert with the clouds thickening purple over Caburn, the lights springing, & the pale cadaverous glow in the chalk pit. At one moment the brown horses stampeded—flinging out their great legs wildly. The worst of it is that my brain fills too fast—overflows. Waiting for breakfast I read Montaigne this morning & found a passage about the passions of women—their voracity—which I at once opposed to Squire’s remarks & so made up a whole chapter of my Tap at the Door or whatever it is, just when I was hoping to let my mind slide off on to a second Common Reader, & the Elizabethans. No letter from Vita, to whom I wrote from my bed; & none from Nessa, to whom I sent £50. A few letters from American lunatics which I must answer, must I?—& stop writing. Will I write a statement What I believe for the American Nation. No. But what do I believe? Other people do this sort of thing. Why not I?

And what was I saying? Oh I was annoyed with Desmond’s usual sneer at Mrs Dalloway—woolgathering. I was inspired to make up several phrases about Desmond’s own processes—none of which, I suppose, will ever be fired off in print. His worldliness, urbanity, decorum as a writer; his soft supple ways. His audience of teaparty ladies & gentlemen. His timidity. How he wraps everything in flannel. (Browning said this of a cold morning in Paris). And there’s truth in what I say of Desmond, not only spite. Then his ridiculous hesitations & nervousness as a writer, about publishing. His perpetual condescension. His now permanent stoop in the back. His aloofness—in the bad sense. I mean he never takes a nettle by the leaves: always wears gloves. His garrulity. Well, let me hope that all his 8 volumes will fail, that he wont be able to pay his income tax & that Michael will be eaten by leopards. Then I shall meet him & my eyes will fill with tears. But its true—a snub—even praise—from Desmond, depresses me more than the downright anger of Arnold Bennett—it saps my vitality.

I open this book again to record the fact that this is the 3rd of September. The battle of Dunbar: the battle of Worcester, & the death of Cromwell. A heavy flagging windy cloudy day with breadths of sun: not actually raining. Its odd how I always remember father saying that at St Ives on this day, & how I am always writing something in a diary on this day & generally it is crisp & clear.

Tuesday 15 September

I have come up here, trembling under the sense of complete failure—I mean The Waves—I mean Hugh Walpole doesn’t like it—I mean John L. is about to write to say he thinks it bad—I mean L. accuses me of sensibility verging on insanity—I mean I am acutely depressed & already feeling rising the hard & horny back of my old friend Fight fight. This was true: Hugh wrote to say he thinks it “unreal”. It beats him. Never mind. Here I need not disguise my tumult of feelings. Lord how I hate that Hugh shd. be running about London saying the new V W. is a disappointment—about nothing—exquisitely written of course. Ought I not then to say that Brace thinks—Oh well, do let me try to give up weighing opposite impressions. Anyhow my mind is crammed with books, & Lord, I tried to speak the truth, bombastic as the remark sounds, wrung it drop by drop from my brain. So essentially I am not horrified. But The Waves, I predict, marks my decline in reputation.

[Wednesday 16 September]

Oh but this morning I’m like a bee in the ivy bloom—cant write for pleasure. John says “But I loved it, truly loved it, & was deeply impressed & amazed by its achievement in an entirely new method…. There seems to me only the thinnest wall between such a novel & poetry. You somehow maintain the speed of prose & the intensity of poetry…” And its very difficult he adds; & so on. But my brain is flushed & flooded & I’m at once inspired to write a Letter to a Young Poet. Lord what a weathercock—no a wave of emotion is in me.

Saturday 19 September

And the last few days have been heavenly—At last some heat; & then, with this book done—for I don’t feel much anxiety now—think that John has hit off the cultivated view—I’m calm; oh & walk; oh & have to record the horror of 2 bungalows on the top of the hill. Yes. This iniquity is being inflicted on the downs for ever by our ‘prospective labour candidate’ [Hancock]. He shan’t have my vote. I swept off into dreams of a house far away in Dorsetshire. But O—again—how happy I am: how calm, for the moment how sweet life is with L. here, in its regularity & order, & the garden & the room at night & music & my walks & writing easily & interestedly at Donne of a morning, & poems all about me. I’ve come to read poetry with intensity—bought Skelton at Tunbridge Wells. For we went to the Easedales one fine hot day & saw the stuffed wolf; & I must now change for Angelica’s birthday party. George & Margaret [Duckworth, to tea] yesterday.

Monday 21 September

Here am I writing about Donne, & we have ‘gone off the Gold Standard’ this morning. Maynard & Kahan like people in the war. We sat talking economics & politics. Guards out: Tower defended (this a joke on M.’s part). Telephones: late edition of the paper. We’re off, & I write about Donne. Yes; & what could I do better, if we are ruined, & if everybody had spent their time writing about Donne we should not have gone off the Gold Standard—thats my version of the greatest crisis &c &c &c—gabble gabble go the geese, who cant lay golden eggs.

Tuesday 22 September

And Miss Holtby says “It is a poem, more completely than any of your other books, of course. It is most rarely subtle. It has seen more deeply into the human heart, perhaps, than even To the Lighthouse…” & though I copy the sentence, because it is in the chart of my temperature, Lord, as I say, that temperature which was deathly low this time last week, & then fever high, doesn’t rise: is normal. I suppose I’m safe; I think people can only repeat. And I’ve forgotten so much. What I want is to be told that this is solid & means something. What it means I myself shant know till I write another book. And I’m the hare, a long way ahead of the hounds my critics.

Sunday 27 September

Lyn & the Kingsley Martins are in the house, & I have crept out here, as I say, to write letters. But talking jangles the nerves at the back of my head. And we had the Easedales too. “Mr E. was one of those jealous gentlemen, & so he left me”. Silence on my part. “I was very young, & should have taken a stronger line.” “How terrible that a friendship like that should have been broken off!” said Joan. And we went round the garden.

Ethel must be in fine feather. General, & I think sincere praise of The Wreckers. I telegraphed—dont want to write. Dotty’s mother dead. Vita going off abroad with her. And we shall publish on 8th in spite of the G⁠[eneral].E⁠[lection]: dont expect sales anyhow.

Wednesday 30 September

I have come up here on this the last evening to clear up papers. All is softly grey: L.’s yellow dahlias are burning on the edge of the terrace. I have been over to Asheham, in the clear pale autumn afternoon, along Mandrill walk, which we walked the night of our marriage. How proud I was of my new despatch box, I remember! So its over, this summer too; & I regret it, & want to stay on, & soothe my mind with (here a wretched little post comes in) with Elizabethan poets. Instead we go up tomorrow, & doesn’t the lift of my heart tell me that strain, about The Waves, friends, reviewers, sales, &c. will then begin to make a fiddle string in my side, stretched tight, on which lots of people will carelessly twang this winter. No help for it—So it always is with a book out.

And it will be out in one week tomorrow. But I am slightly less naked than usual, as I’ve had 3 outside opinions & shan’t I suppose get any very great variety of praise or blame. I must make up my mind about the autumn lap, & my bearing. And do some quiet work: & ‘see’ people not so wearily.

But here I am saying the summer is over—the wet, driven, rather headachy summer—so August was. September improved. How happy I was writing about Donne, up here, how happy a dozen times on solitary walks, in what a rage the day I found Hancock’s horror building on the hill, & then we had many & many a game of bowls, & there was the great financial crisis, & then going to Dotty & the Easedales, & the tremendous talk carnival—which I went through with shut lips—I mean looking for no pleasure—last week end. And now apple baskets are filling in the drawing room, & I must seriously set to & destroy & mass together two months of papers.

Monday 5 October

52 Tavistock Sqre.

A note, to say I am all trembling with pleasure—cant go on with my Letter [to a Young Poet]—because Harold Nicolson has rung up to say The Waves is a masterpiece. Ah hah—so it wasn’t all wasted then. I mean this vision I had here has some force upon other minds. Now for a cigarette, & then a return to sober composition.

[Thursday 8 October]

Well, to continue this egotistic diary: I am not terribly excited: no: at arm’s length more than usual all this talk, because if The W. is anything it is an adventure which I go on alone: & the dear old Lit Sup. who twinkles & beams & patronises—a long, & for The Times, kind & outspoken review—dont stir me very much. Nor Harold in Action either. Yes; to some extent; I shd. have been unhappy had they blamed, but Lord, how far away I become from all this; & we’re jaded too, with people, with doing up parcels.

I wonder if it is good to feel this remoteness—that is, that The W. is not what they say. Odd, that they (The Times) shd. praise my characters when I meant to have none. But I’m jaded; I want my marsh, my down, & quiet waking in my airy bedroom. [LW] Broadcasting tonight; to Rodmell tomorrow. Next week I shall have to stand the racket.

Friday 9 October

Really, this unintelligible book is being better ‘received’ than any of them. A note in The Times proper—the first time this has been allowed me. And it sells—how unexpected, how odd that people can read that difficult grinding stuff!

Wednesday 14 October

A note. For since The Waves my brain wont stand hard writing-writing that must fetch a compass. I’m muscularly strained. So I stop my Letter to John & note that The W. has beaten all my books: sold close on 5,000; we are reprinting: so far, save for Hayward & Ethel, no letters. None of my presentees have written. This silence always lasts a week or two. The reviews I think the warmest yet. And so on. But Vita found it desperately dull—anyhow for 100 pages. What shall I say to Virginia? I cant get through it. Up rings Dotty. Cant get through it. Two hours later “I’m getting along better” Still, V. finds it absolutely intellectual: all one person speaking: profound loneliness of the soul; will never like it as much as the others.. Dear me, I spent 20 minutes dashing off a cooks talk—so much I need random rollicking humour. Oh what a grind that was! It comes over me now. Literally I have a pain in my head—but my head has many pains—when I try to stretch another book—And yet of course I envisage The Tree. But help help, stop stop I cry to my brain. Dont torture me again. Wreckers tonight & supper with Vita, L. & Ethel at the Eiffel Tower afterwards.

[Thursday 15 October]

Conversation last night. Stulik at the Eiffel Tower. I am talking about Schnitzler: I tell you he had six potatoes here & a bag of flour. He said “Give them to my people. I do not want them.” He had six potatoes & a bag of flour. He said “My people are starving. I do not want your alms.”….

E⁠[thel] S⁠[myth]: But they have not heard of Schnitzler. We are not musical … the English are not artists. You belong to the only race where every man one meets in the street is an artist.

Of course these people have heard of Schnitzler … And he said Take them—I do not want them. Give them to the people who are starving. He had six potatoes & a bag of flour …

Stulik has had a fit & was mildly drunk.

My heart beat when I saw you—(bowing to me with his hand on his heart) come in .. It is long years since you used to come here—you lived in Bedford Square—you had a studio—& there was Lady Utto—she used to come—And my heart leapt, Sir, when I saw you again after all these years. When you came into the room, I felt….

Going through contortions like one swimming with his arms crossing themselves on his breast There sat Rex Whistler & Malcolm Bullock in a corner. E. held forth about Parsifal; & our quarrel—dressed in pale blue with white shoes pinned with safety pins. And some of the W⁠[reckers]. was vigorous & even beautiful; & active & absurd & extreme; & youthful: as if some song in her had tried to issue & been choked [?].

Saturday 17 October

More notes on The Waves. The sales, these past 3 days have fallen to 50 or so: after the great flare up when we sold 500 in one day, the brushwood has died down, as I foretold. (Not that I thought we should sell more than 3,000). What has happened is that the library readers cant get through it & are sending their copies back. So, I prophesy, it will now dribble along till we have sold 6000 & then almost die, yet not quite. For it has been received, as I may say, quoting the stock phrases without vanity, with applause. All the provinces read enthusiastically. I am rather, in a sense, as the M’s would say, touched. The unknown provincial reviewers say with almost one accord, here is Mrs Woolf doing her best work; it cant be popular; but we respect her for so doing; & find The Waves positively exciting. I am in danger, indeed, of becoming our leading novelist, & not with the highbrows only. To show how slow a book it is, not only do Vita & Dotty find the first 100 pages boring in the extreme, but I have as yet (10 days after publication) had only 3 letters about it. Nessa’s enthusiasm is the brightest spot. And, to annotate further, the lack of sales has had the providential effect of steadying & quieting me, so that I can get back to work, & have already lost the flush & flutter of what seemed like complete success. So now, what shall I work at? So many works hover over me.

Tuesday 20 October

I trotted out yesterday & laid in a stock of Elizabethans. I should like to write a chapter called Some Ethans as prelude to the 2nd Common Reader.

I had a visit from Peter Lucas t’other night. No, he had not read The W. But he has written an Epic. He is working as usual like a miner—bright red all over—egotistic—nice, charming, boyish, hard, imperceptive, not a writer I mean, though set on writing, & indeed has a play being acted. Both our books move slowly; but L.’s I suspect with a giants foot, like an elephant through the undergrowth. Laski says, as reviewers say these things, it is a masterpiece. We makers of masterpieces remain very calm, very well content. We went to the Motor Show, for instance, last Saturday (autumn deepening) & approved The Star, which indeed we could buy if we wished. It’s a queer reversal. Here’s Lottie out of a place & Mrs Hunt wont accept fees as places aren’t to be had. How things have spun these 2 or 3 years then!

Oh its blue again over my skylight—please God it stays blue over our week end, the blessed Rodmell week end. Vaguely looking for houses again, & turning over plans for removing. All houses pale though before this one. I’m asked to be Godmother to Noel Richards’ daughter. Yet she wont dine here. Election rampant. Plomer & DoBree dined the other night. He a nimble secondrate man: his grandfather the pawnbroker in Vanity Fair.

[Friday 23 October?]

Oh but I have been made miserable—damped & disheartened—this is no exaggeration—because the Lit Sup. only gave half a column of belittlement to After the Deluge. Not that I should have cared more than a moments damn at them for the usual insignificant spiteful methods—wreaking their politics upon books they dont agree with. But L. says—& honestly believes—that this puts an end to the book—Yes he says no less than that. He says his ten years work are wasted, & that he sees no use in going on. His argument is that he wrote this book for the wider public; that this public is at the mercy of Librarians; that librarians take their orders from the Lit Sup; that they judge by the length of the review; that no librarian will advise spending 15/- after this review; so that, however Laski & the experts may applaud, as they do, in the serious weeklies, his book is dead; his work wasted. He remains with a public of experts who are poor; his sales wont reach 500 in 6 months & so on. For my own part I think this a very curious illustration of his psychology. On Sunday he told me that this was bound to happen; yet we have seldom been happier—True he said he expected one col. or one & ½ of abuse instead of ½;—Oh but the arguments which we have beaten out I daresay for 6 hours, walking in the Sqre, sitting over the fire—utterly cloud my mind. Its his curious pessimistic temper: something deeper than reason, strangling, many coiled, that one cant deal with. Influenza has exactly the same effect, liberating the irrational despondency which I see in all Woolves, & connect with centuries of oppression. The world against us &c. How can one laugh off the ½ column therefore? And when I say this morning incautiously, “I’m reviewed in the M⁠[ancheste]⁠r Guardian” L. says “Is it a long review?” And Isay, feeling like a mother to a hurt & miserable little boy, Yes. Lord what human beings are!

Now it pours; & are we to go to Rodmell?

Friday 30 October

Happily that morbidity of L.’s is over. Other things have intervened, & praise & some sale And the General Election which has returned I think 26 Labour members to Parliament. But as I went to James’s to hear the results, was in the midst of a chattering crowd (Nina Hamnet drunk) my head aches. I rubbed the ache in dining at the Woolf family party last night. Cant write, cant read. Oh—yesterday we made an offer for 47 Gordon Sqre—a house where we may die; for its a 24 years lease. Strange to anchor there again. In order that these notes may remain solid I make them; but cannot comment.

Monday 16 November

But we are not to live & die in 47. The Bedford Estate wont house a publisher; would create a precedent; vans would stop at the door. Unexpectedly complaisant, though, Mr Upton told us that we may stay on here past our term: the side of the Sqre is to be pulled down; but times are bad for building; & they will treat us with consideration. So we stay on, anyhow this next year. With John doubtful (I murmur this in secret) it is wisest so: & Lord, how I love the chance of any escape—from what? to what?

I’m disoriented; have been to the City & seen St Bartholomew’s. Came back to wait Vita. Vita has to take Dotty to a nursing home, so cant come; my evening spoilt—mind cant settle. Whats to become of Lottie, still out of a place? Nessa rings up. Will Clive have her? I am reading Clive’s book.

Here I will give myself the pleasure—shall I?—of copying a sentence or two from Morgan’s unsolicited letter on The Waves:—

“I expect I shall write to you again when I have re-read The Waves. I have been looking in it & talking about it at Cambridge. Its difficult to express oneself about a work which one feels to be so very important but I’ve the sort of excitement over it which comes from believing that one’s encountered a classic”

I daresay that gives me more substantial pleasure than any letter I’ve had about any book. Yes, I think it does, coming from Morgan. For one thing it gives me reason to think that I shall be right to go on along this very lonely path. I mean in the city today I was thinking of another book—about shopkeepers, & publicans, with low life scenes; & I ratified this sketch by Morgan’s judgment. Dadie agrees too. Oh yes, between 50 & 60 I think I shall write out some very singular books, if I live. I mean I think I am about to embody, at last, the exact shapes my brain holds. What a long toil to reach this beginning—if The Waves is my first work in my own style!

To be noted, as curiosities of my literary history: I sedulously avoid meeting Roger & Lytton whom I suspect do not like The Waves. I suspect that it is dubbed a failure also by Ottoline, Colefax, Mary, & Christabel. Lord David does not care for it, nor Hugh Walpole. I sit tight here in my fastness, only sedulously avoiding any meeting with Roger & Lytton. Why do I imagine that they are both hostile towards me, because of The Waves? It is unlikely—No; I disliked Lytton for writing Q. Eth. I remember.

But oh the happiness of this life—

I was thinking to myself today, few people in Cheapside can be saying “It is too good to be true—that L. & I are going to dine alone tonight.” Then of course, for no reason, L. is rather silent & sad at tea; Vita does not come; I cant get on with Philip Sidney; & so my perfect crystal globe has a shadow crossing it. L. is now printing; & perhaps dinner will be all I planned. And if its not, my happiness is too substantial to be tarnished. [Added later:] But dinner was very good.

I am working very hard—in my way, to furbish up 2 long Elizabethan articles to front a new Common Reader: then I must go through the whole long list of those articles. I feel too, at the back of my brain, that I can devise a new critical method; something far less stiff & formal than these Times articles. But I must keep to the old style in this volume. And how, I wonder, could I do it? There must be some simpler, subtler, closer means of writing about books, as about people, could I hit upon it.

[Added later:] (The Waves has sold more than 7,000. The Deluge is selling very well)

Theres always somebody playing a concertina if one has the window open at the back—a kind of bagpipe concertina. That reminds me, I scribble a page of what is called, I think, Diary or Calendar every morning, before setting to upon Harvey, in which I catch such reflections—& shall one day publish them in a square grey-papered covered volume, very thin: a kind of copy book, with a calendar of the month stamped upon it.

Tuesday 17 November

Yes I forget, why do I want to write here, what do I want to say? with half an hour to lunch. A foggy morning; & Vita rings up; & I say (chiefly owing to my dream that she had gone off with someone, very markedly, at a party, in a small house whose room I was about to make into my study by knocking down a wall—I still see it: I hear Nessa saying She’s tired of you: then my teeth broke; then as I say Vita went off triumphantly with somebody, being sick of me; & so I woke, about 4.30, & decided that I would be firm if she rang me up & asked me to lunch with her & Gerald Heard. In truth she did do this: & I was firm; & she was charming & warm & trusty & friendly, & said she would come in this evening then, as she so much wanted to see me. Really my firmness was due to my dream).

Isnt it odd that I’m really, I believe, ostracised by some of my friends, because of The Waves, & lifted to the highest pinnacle by others, because of it? Dadie, for instance, & Goldie: but Morgan is the only one, either side, that matters.

Friday Xmas morning

Lytton is still alive this morning. We thought that he could not live through the night. It was a moonlit night. Nessa rang up at 10 to say that he has taken milk & tea after an injection. When she went to Hungerford yesterday they were in great despair sitting round. He had taken nothing for 24 hours & was only half conscious. This may be the turn, or may mean nothing. We are lunching with the Keynes’. Now again all one’s sense of him flies out & expands & I begin to think of things I shall say to him, so strong is the desire for life—the triumph of life.

A soft misty morning.

After writing the last page, Nov. 16th, I could not go on writing without perpetual headache; & so took a month lying down; have not written a line; have read Faust, Coningsby &c. & seen Clive, Christabel, Nessa, Miss Bowen, Alice Ritchie: until the last 14 days, when I heard about Lytton. He has been ill a month. I have lived through again all grades of feeling: then the telephone; then Angelica coming; then going to see James; then coming here last Tuesday, a dark drive, a tree reminding me of Lytton. Brighton yesterday. All very quiet, misty; a blue sky & white clouds last night. Talk to L. last night about death: its stupidity; what he would feel if I died. He might give up the Press; but how one must be natural. And the feeling of age coming over us: & the hardship of losing friends; & my dislike of the younger generation; & then I reason, how one must understand. And we are happier now.

Sunday 23 December

Last night—I go to Miss Dixey’s to telephone—“the improvement continues”. I say this must mean that the stout Strachey constitution has triumphed. For 48 hours L. has been better, & now, Nessa says, realises that he is better, & eats; whatever he is allowed. I am therefore freely imagining a future with my old serpent to talk to, to laugh at, to abuse: I shall read his book on Sh⁠[akespea]⁠re; I shall stay at Ham Spray; I shall tell him how L. & I sobbed on Christmas Eve.

But this page is one of my trials to test my brain. If successful I shall go out to the Lodge tomorrow, light my electric fire, & potter about. I am cross with Desmond, for talking about dreaming subjectivity & The Waves; I have been making phrases about his damnable tepidity—he who neither loves nor hates—in short I’m in a healthy condition. And it is, remarkably, April the First. L. cant come in. I’ve been pacing the terrace. The sun is flooding the downs. The leaves of the plant in the window are transparent with light. My brain will be filling. We shall go to Lewes tomorrow. All is again released, though I shall have some trepidation about the telephone. Lunching with the Keynes, they took Lytton philosophically. “Is he alive?” Lydia asked. She had 3 helps of turkey. Maynard said that Lytton’s last relations had been very thin. He was not sure when he saw him last. He was not really changed; nothing of importance had happened. They did not go to Ham Spray because Lydia disapproves of the immorality of Carrington. She is a dog in the manger. The relationships are hypocritical.

And what d’you feel about immortality, Maynard? I asked. “I am an idealist,” said Maynard, “& therefore on the whole I suppose I think that something may continue. Clearly the brain is the only exciting thing—matter does not exist. It follows therefore…. but one is very vague.” So, more or less, he said. And L. said death was stupid like a motor accident. And M. said that Mrs Courtauld was dying, might be dead that moment. And he wished one cd. die at once: there should be death arranged for couples simultaneously, like himself & Lydia, me & Leonard. But he always supposed he would die before Lydia, & I, I said, before Leonard. Then Lydia & Leonard will marry. They will combine all these dogs—(dogs were wandering about.) And so home. And I kissed Maynard. And they are coming to tea.

I can write so far, if it is to be called [writing,] not an effusion of this old pen, without racing or pain. But when it comes to the screw—the screw that I give, & Desmond doesn’t—

Tuesday 29 December

Lytton is, if anything, better. I need not ring up Nessa today, which is a matter of exquisite relief. It seems as if he were now to be seriously ill with ups & downs for some time. They say it is positively not typhoid but ulcerated colon. Well, we have lived through every grade of feeling—how strong, how deep—more than I guessed, though that cavern of horror is well known to me. Soon the whole being can suffer no more: I cant feel anything, I say as I lift the receiver, sitting on Miss Dixey’s bed & eying with intensity her shining table & the two pale blue wine glasses; the tea caddy; & the gilt framed picture of a Victorian lady. There was also a little pile of books, a few letters, & The Dog World. In these acute states emotions are much simplified—there is none of the complexity that I feel this morning about Lytton, when I expect him to recover. I feel annoyance, humour, the desire to laugh with him.

It is a bitter windy morning, & Caburn, when I came in was white with snow. Now it is black. Shall I ever ‘write’ again? And what is writing? The perpetual converse I keep up. I’ve stopped it these 5 or 6 weeks. That excitement, which becomes a habit, is over. Why take to it again? I am dispassionate. Books come gently surging round me, like icebergs. I could write a book of caricatures. Christabel’s story of the Hall Caines suggested a caricature of Country house life, with the red-brown pheasants, Then there’s Flush: theres the Knock on the door; there’s the appalling novel; theres Common Reader … there’s my little letter to a Poet. But I’m deficient in excitement; dont feel, as I did after many such illnesses, if I dont write I shall whizz into extinction like an electric globe fused.

That makes me think that our 3 black swans came last night. I will finish this book, & begin another for 1932. And now I have a vast choice of reading matter, & feel no sort of inclination to reply to the flattering invitation of Chatto that they should reprint my books. So Faber wishes too. And L. has sold his 450; & I 9400—what figures!

[]

1932

[Friday 1 January]

This is to be quite frank the 1st Jan. 1932, but I will pretend that it is still 1931: so that I may spend the 25 minutes to lunch writing here. I will bring a new book down tomorrow. The truth is I cannot write—but must scribble. My attempt to polish up John’s letter in the lodge yesterday was a failure. Am I more severe, deeper, less of a flibbertigibbet now than of old, so that writing exacts a closer screw?—& my head is twisted with the effort? I think that possible. Anyhow, I must sail over the 7 days left here as smoothly, vacantly, serenely as may be. And use this page to sail on.

Waves have sold 9,650—Deluge 440 (?)

Yesterday we had Keynes’s & Bells to tea. Mrs Courtauld is dead. Lytton, as I must believe, very slowly mending. And I must repay a vow made in my sorrow—to send £10 yearly to old Sophie. Only when my brains dry up I feel nervous. Action is dead—O these dogs—thats my present curse. And one must learn to overcome it somehow. This irregular sharp bark is the devil. Ear stoppers? Clive as bright as a bullfinch. We talked of going to bed in front of Angelica. And of Desmond’s maniacal lies—“I have posted the article” when he hasn’t written it. And of the Stracheys;—Nessa’s description of the lounge at the Bear filled with Stracheys reading detective novels in despair. In comes Ralph. Silence. “Would you like to come, Pernel?” Pernel elongates herself & goes to get ready. “Gently fading away?” says Oliver. Ralph nods. Dorelia is summoned to be with Carrington, who will commit suicide they think. She leaves. Wires for a little bag with some money that she took out of John’s dressing gown—he might be annoyed. A man appears with the bag. Is this yours? They look & find £300 in notes inside. (I am now stopped against the dogs; but it is difficult to write stoppered; & foolish; & an extravagant demand on me by Miss Dixey; & if a knock were to come I should not hear—& the dog after all may stop barking.) Carrington moving about scarcely knowing people: Pippa violently self-controlled; Saxon helping by—I forget what; Tommie helping, too, but summoned to comfort his parents for the death of Garrow in an air spill; & the Stracheys, all grey, all woollen, all red nosed, swollen eyed, logical, quiet, exact, doing cross word puzzles; thinking of Lytton. And that afternoon (Christmas Eve) Lytton said “If its only keeping me alive a little longer, dont”. And so they did nothing; but then he drank tea & milk with brandy & enjoyed them, & the Dr happily had some serum, injected it, & so the turn—if turn they call it—began. This is a scene I can see; & see Lytton too, always reasonable, clear, giving his orders; & dying as he thought; & then, as reasonably, finding some strength returning, deciding to live. And L. & I sobbing here. And I expect Nessa & Clive sitting over the fire late, with some tears, at Seend.

During the last days here, they have been putting up a great erection of girders on the bank opposite Asheham. Is this an overhead railway or an engine house? So another view of the downs is lost forever. And Anny repeats vague gossip that there is to be a series of factories between Newhaven & Lewes: are we doomed to go—or to stay on & be worried out of all walks, all views, & become crusted over with villas?

[Diary XXI]

Wednesday 13 January

Oh but this is, as I always say, making an apology myself to myself, not the first day of the year. It is the thirteenth, & I am in one of those lassitudes & ebbs of life when I cannot heave another word on to the wall. My word, what a heaving The Waves was, that I still feel the strain!

We came back from Rodmell last Sunday afternoon—a wet evening, & comfortable to be back, here high up in the air, beyond barking dogs. “I shall go bankrupt if those dogs bark any more” I said to Anny with some vehemence, & this, implying her ruin, made her speak to Elsie, & the dogs fell silent. Miss Belsher is reported ‘very ill’. L. is to see father No: it was to get money—she was a notorious swindler who did Hugh out of £70. Belsher this afternoon, & I am to see Mrs Thring ‘on a private & confidential matter’ which I guess to be the printing of a little book of poems by herself. Time—3.30 to be exact—will prove. Then Miss Cashin is ill too; the press is supported on 2 legs, one the stout leg of good-natured Walton. John labours too, more nervously, & feels jaded, & wants a week off, & wants also, to be our manager, not partner, but to stay in that capacity. So, perhaps, & perchance—for I make no rash boasts—the dear old Press to which I owe so much labour—witness the pile of MSS before me—& fun—oh yes, a great deal of variety & oddity, life on tap down here whenever it flags upstairs—may now settle down for life. For our lives. How long will they be? Can we count on another 20 years? I shall be fifty on 25th, Monday week that is; & sometimes feel that I have lived 250 years already, & sometimes that I am still the youngest person in the omnibus. (Nessa said that she still always thinks this, as she sits down.) And I want to write another 4 novels: Waves, I mean; & the Tap on the Door; & to go through English literature, like a string through cheese, or rather like some industrious insect, eating its way from book to book, from Chaucer to Lawrence. This is a programme, considering my slowness, & how I get slower, thicker, more intolerant of the fling & the rash, to last out my 20 years, if I have them. Lytton goes on, now better, now not so well. And one has taken him back after those sepulchral days when he seemed vanished as part of life. Leonard said “We must make up our minds that we shall never see Lytton again”;—or something like that, which made us feel bereft; the end of a section; & now I say it is not the end.

And Vita supports the weight of the Nicolsons on her shoulders, working, working working so that she cant sleep o’nights, Ethel says Hilda says. But why? People should ride life like a horse. This money accumulating, keeping sons at Eton & Long Barn & Siss⁠[inghurs]⁠t in full swing seems to me a little servile: save that she loves generosity & is industrious, & has that queer vein in her of thinking the slogging money making ant like worker, the independent, the professional, romantic. And so she scribbles reviews, broadcasts—pray heaven I may never fall into the money-trap!

Monday 18 January

And then we heard that Lytton was very ill again—they had thought him dying on Sunday. “Give him morphia—it makes no difference” the Dr said. So down we went to Ham Spray on Thursday. So hot, so fresh. The larks singing over the petrol pumps I remember on the Great West Road as we stopped to fill up. They were strained, silent, held in a lock [?]. Then tears—Pippa sobbing on my shoulder at the Bear after lunch—hopeless almost—he is so ill—how can he get better? Then back to Ham Spray—how lovely, with its flat lawn, & the trees grouped & the down rising & the path climbing the down: this I noted, with envy thinking of my dogs barking, my downs ruined, as we sat at tea. I long sometimes for this sealed up, silent, remote country: long for its little villages; its muddy roads, its distance from Brighton & Peacehaven—the roads that go on to Bath, to Oxford, driving through solid England. And so home again, leaving them in the frail lovely house, with hospital nurses popping in & out, all orderly arranged as after long weeks of illness: a light in Lytton’s room, the shadow of a screen. He said he liked our coming. Odd to come thus, after all these years. Again today Carrington writes he is slightly better.

Thursday 21 January

And last night Lytton was dying “much worse” Oliver telephoned; & this morning “much better again”. So we go to Angelica’s party in fancy dress. It is like having the globe of the future perpetually smashed—without Lytton—& then, behold, it fills again.

Friday 22 January

Much better was much weaker. Lytton died yesterday morning.

I see him coming along the street, muffled up with his beard resting on his tie: how we should stop: his eyes glow. Now I am too numb with all the emotion yesterday to do more than think thoughts like this. Well, as I know, the pain will soon begin. One toys about with this & that. How queer it was last night at the party, the tightness round everyone’s lips—ours I mean. Duncan Nessa & I sobbing together in the studio—the man looking out of the mews window—a sense of something spent, gone: that is to me so intolerable: the impoverishment: then the sudden vividness. Duncan said “One misses people more & more. It comes over one suddenly that one will tell them something. Then the pang comes over one, after years”. Nessa said, What would one like if one died oneself? that the party should go on. He is the first of the people one has known since one was grown up to die she said. It was very hopeless. One knows now how irremediable—but no: I cant think of any words for what I mean, & yet go on writing, numb, torpid as I am. We are going down to Rodmell this afternoon I think. Pippa & James come up today. Carrington & Ralph tomorrow. What is to happen now to Carrington? Yes, 20 years of Lytton lost to us, stupidly: the thing we shall never have again.

Saturday 30 January

Oliver to dinner last night. His cheeks are softer, fatter: he looks a codger, a card; an old buffer. I am alert now to take these signs, as if I saw us all becoming figures: rigid, inert. Well: we talked. “Never never have I known so odd a character as Karin. Women want children. Ray wants babies. I wont have them. Theres no money for anybody. Of course I’m odd—so cold, unemotional. I haven’t any feelings as a parent. I saw Ruby in November—after 10 years. Oh yes we shall meet. Why shouldn’t we? She was a liar—thats all—couldn’t tell the truth. But very attractive. The boy is Hunter’s son. But they call him Strachey on his birth certificate. Do you know both the boys are Stracheys—said Ruby. She’s had 5 children, never by the same man. Lytton was a great man. Oh the excitement. I came back from India starved, & found—all that.” Lytton has left all books printed before 1841 to Senhouse. Why before 1841? “Some private joke I imagine. Senhouse might have preferred £1000. The unfortunate thing was that Lytton fell in love with Ralph…. You know what Jeans says? Civilisation is the thickness of a postage stamp on the top of Cleopatra’s needle; & time to come is the thickness of postage stamps as high as Mont Blanc. Possessiveness is the devil. Inez is a little too possessive. The ideal is to cease being in love simultaneously & then it passes into another state. Nobody can be in love for more than 5 years. They cant leave Carrington alone. She says she will kill herself—quite reasonable—but better to wait until the first shock is over & see. Suicide seems to me quite sensible. We’ve been born too early. Soon they’ll have found a way of curing these growths. Yes—there was an autopsy. Pippa came down—we had kept it from her—& said Oughtn’t we to have one? It had just been done. It was cancer, an early stage. Nobody guessed it—nobody could have guessed it—” This led to a long argument about doctors. Oliver is a tough old buffer: with one flame inside of him. What the Americans call ‘culture’. “Thats the only thing: to realise the legacy thats been left us. To read. To do nothing from 18 to 22 but read. Thats what we did. Thats why we shant grow old—we shant come to an end. But you cant do it if you dont do it then. A great man, Roger. He made things transcendent—showed them lifted up. He was at Yattendon—oh that was the greatest time of my life: & then there was the Aholibah; & then the Easter at Corfe: Lytton, Henry & I at one Inn; Ray Elly &—at another. Lytton had the mumps. Ottoline came down & stood beneath his window, & he leant out & they blew each other kisses. She used to take the stiles in one stride. “Such long legs” said Lytton “She cant be a woman”. Henry was his most serious love affair. Senhouse is a very nice young man—nice looking, nice manners—but no character, nothing. No Mary [Hutchinson] was rude to Inez; cut her in the street, so I cant see her. Its all a question of little Mary, nothing abstract. But I like her—only not that way of life—so absurd—that fun: but I like old Jack’s stories. Well I must go. Thank you, Virginia.”

Sunday 31 January

Having just finished, as I say, the final version as I call it, of my Letter to a young poet, I can take a moments liberty. From the cynical tone of this sentence I see that my finality is not secure. Writing becomes harder & harder. Things I dashed off I now compress & re-state. And for purposes which I need not go into here, I want to use these pages for dialogue for a time. Let me race down the subdued & dulled interview with my mother in law. Oh the heat in that rose pink bed sitting room, with 3 fierce lights on, the tables crowded with flowers; & with cakes, a fire blazing. Mrs W. sitting upright with her feet on a stool on a high straight backed chair: more pink silk cushions behind her: pearl necklaces swinging. I came in late; she was talking about—I forget: had been talking about the girl whom Cecil might have loved: the daughter of a solicitor at Colchester: Oh yes: she had had influenza & gone to a house kept up by funds left by Mr Andrews. And she was reluctant at first—a home you know. But when she got there what was her amazement? All gentlewomen: flowers everywhere; a cupboard with tonics & sweets to take after them; & Georgian silver on the dinner table; & a garden; & a saloon car to take them out; & grounds; & hot milk at eleven, or chocolate; & the wireless, & a page boy coming for orders; & gardeners. Everything you could wish & not a penny to pay for it! Thats so rare—charity that is really thoughtful; charity for educated women with nice feelings who have fallen on bad times. Well Virginia—& whats your news? Oh & there’s Captain Steel: every Christmas he has a card from the Duke of Gloucester: & he now sells Hoovers for £2.10 a week. But what can one do, in these days? One must do what one can. And what is your news, Virginia? Exodus? Dont you know Exodus? I sometimes scold myself that I haven’t read the Bible lately. Deuteronomy? Oh yes—thats about the building of the Temple. I dont say its all true; but what stories to tell children! I shall never forget telling Bella. Of course a first child is always a wonder child. She used to have her dinner with me when she was 2. And she said what a pity it was summer when Eve stole the apple. If it had been winter, there wouldn’t have been an apple. And she said too: I know where gold comes from—that’s in the ground: but where do picture frames come from? We had large gilt picture frames with family portraits in the dining room. (V.) Well why dont you write about your children? Oh no: I couldn’t say all I think about them. And you’re going so soon? But you haven’t hardly come. And you’ll dine with me next week? She came down to the hall, & was I think going into the lounge to talk to some flushed women playing cards.

Monday 1 February

Last night at Roger’s: present; ourselves, Gerald Heard, Igor. Roger rather sunk & aged after influenza. G.H. in full discourse: about the experiment made by the Yorkshireman who married 4 millions, in Devonshire.

H⁠[eard]. Its intensely interesting (all he says becomes dust). I went round the works with him. The Germans send a man all charges paid for a week. But the vats aren’t ready. All the machinery comes from Belgium. They say it’ll be delivered on a certain day: & it is. The English make excuses: always some reason why they cant deliver. He says he can keep his community supplied all except oranges & (perhaps) dates. Give him 3 months & he could supply Plymouth. Wood planting neglected in England. He buys woods ahead—9 acres, 4 acres, here & there: then the fields with stumps—whats to be done? No aboriculture in England….

Helen here captured me with questions, flattering, sub-acid, about my writing. And about Roger: & not seeing us; & Baba. She lies in bed & talks about Leonard: he was with the esquimaux & gnawed the shoes of the wives, & so sent for a puppy—her delirium. All youth is mad, I said …

Heard said something highly well informed about a Satanic picture. He is a lean starting eyed lobster man: a man of the future, without senses. In with Wells, Plunket &c: but essentially a nobody. Duncan feels this strongly. Science running thin as magnesia or quinine in his veins. Story telling about Thrings &c began & feeling his irrelevancy, for he knows all facts & no feelings, has no humour, no richness, only advanced ideas, he left. So the air became riper. Roger talked about games; children; his design for a curtain; & N⁠[essa] & D⁠[uncan] were almost too severely malicious.

[Tuesday 2 February]

Conversation piece: Monday Feb. 1st 1932. 5.30 pm.

I am reading Wells’ science of life, & have reached the hen that became a cock or vice versa. Nelly talks at the door. I hear a characteristic slow & heavy stamp. Then a bold tap at the drawing room door. In comes Ethel Smyth in her spotted fur, like an unclipped & rather overgrown woodland wild beast, species indeterminate. She wears, as usual, her 3 cornered Frederick the Great hat, & one of her innumerable relay of tweed coats & skirts. She carries a leather satchel. Before she has sat down she is talking. “Really I think that building of the kind you describe at Rodmell is worse than death. After all one may say of death its natural: but this is a wanton desecration. Why your downs? Oh I know L. wouldn’t agree; but theres my Rupert Gwynne. He said, he pounced like a wolf on the fold the other day when they were talking against landlords—We, & I hope all my family for ever, he said, refuse to sell our land. We think beauty is something to keep. We sacrifice money—Well—Yes I’m exhausted—Two hours injection .. Not tea, no: but vermouth. It wont make me tipsy? Oh I’m worn out (but she looks like a ruddy sea captain or old apple woman.) Now—questions. But I had such a good visit from Eddy. He’s writing a novel to show that the virtues of the aristocracy, in which I firmly believe though L. doesnt—must survive. Why not in his own person then I asked? Be noble magnanimous serene, instead of petty spiteful & egotistical. Oh thats his digestion: I assure you he’s a phenomenon. Musical. How I pity him! forced to live in England with that gift—you dont know the loneliness. Compare the people at [illegible]. They talk of cricket golf: in Berlin, they have their ham & beer & talk of the way the violin plays the G sharp. Eddy has the duties of his position—a very great one: very real duties. He’s a man of the world—L. despises that. I love it. What was I going to say—He played Der Wald. He said nobody knows Ethel Smyth till theyve heard all this. Who made the theme? I did. Well its the pure flower of the romantic movement. And we sat reading our books & he played & played. He has a character of his own—an original point of view. Oh yes I agree. And he has a deep feeling for you. But how could I make anything of Mary Dodge under four years he said? She’d look wild, & hook the salt cellar to her with her silver claw. V. would make something very amusing of it. Does not everybody take a back place once you’ve known V. I asked. Poor Eddy pumped up the necessary affirmation. Oh my dear dont I know it all—(reference to Lytton) those poor Stracheys: & you who care for so few people. But I must catch my train this time. I’m taking care of myself. I’m worn out. Here are the tickets for the lecture tomorrow in case you can come. My dear V. dont freeze me off—I beg of you. No I cant write to you—I’m completely taken up—three treatments a week. Beecham rang up at eleven. He’s going to do the Prison this year. And I wrote to Mrs Snowden—I’m old enough to be your mother. You say…. (these final words were rattled off on the doorstep).

Wednesday 3 February

These conversation pieces are artfully contrived to assuage me, about 11.30, after toiling at correcting Donne, who is to introduce the second volume of the Common Reader. I cant go on squeezing my sentences dry of water; & so write here for 20 minutes; then I think read Donne; then finish with a [unidentified ms] novel upon Hamlet, clever, oh yes—novels about Hamlet always are. Then lunch: then—Oh Ottoline this evening. Yet I am so much interested in Donne, or in my views that I cannot begin.

Last night then, at Clive’s. Roger, Nessa, Duncan. Clive in his brown tea cosy with the strap hanging down indecently like a tail between his legs. Roger rather shrunk up. Sherry. Lottie says dinner. Down we go to the lovely gay room with blue & white chairs. The character of Gerald Heard. D. makes a subtle distinction. “No its not that he prevents me from doing my little owl. Its not that I dislike his facts—I can absorb facts from some people. It is that he sets up no relation between himself & me so that I cannot relate his facts to anything.” R.: But he has passion of mind. V.: He is an ascetic. He refused my cigar. R.: Yet he doesn’t disapprove of the senses. D. He sees nothing. Clive: He loves me, but I find him dryer, more juiceless than a banana. He walks down Bond Street with Raymond & says What a wonderful companion Raymond is because he notices the flags. (Van:) “he notices nothing sensual. We live in our senses. He pours forth all those intelligent remarks about the Satanist picture.” Here I saw Clive look at Lytton’s picture. “Dont have it moved. Have it cleaned, by all means, but it looks very nice there. Its the best thing of Lytton. R. And that horrid vulgar picture by Henry is the one people will know him by. Thats rather summary of course (to D.) Vir: But its far the most like. R. I did a portrait of Lytton, writing E. Victorians at Durbins. Vir: I’m a little annoyed that he left all his old books to Senhouse. Clive. And his will? I’ve heard nothing. No, Roger, I dont think you understand. Nothing, humanly speaking, is more unlikely, in fact impossible, than that R⁠[alph]. should go back to Carrington. He opened his heart to me once … D.: Well, I’m fonder of Frances than of any of them; but I think as a human being, she might have behaved differently. I think so. C. But you dont understand, Duncan. She was passionately in love—is still—with R. So when it came to the point—I mustn’t come this week end—one shade of pressure from him—how could she resist it? Lytton’s letters couldn’t be published—they would hurt everybody too much. We protested. Well what about the Nortons? “I’ve just met a youth who has been a bugger since the age of puberty?” Vir: Oh buggery’s exploded—nobody could mind that now.

Wells on life: facts: Roger & I love to have facts poured over us. Clive only likes facts if they are related to something human. A great many small vegetables, handed by Lottie. The ice too hard.

So we went upstairs & then we said—that France was combining against Japan. L. gave his views on the subject of war with China & Japan. We said that war is the dullest of all things. Not naval war, said Duncan. He had a cousin Admiral Arbuthnot, who lost all his ships. That was exciting. Only for ten minutes, I said. Roger said could we not get up a society of artists to protest against the protection of works of art. Meninsky is ill & has sent the hat round. There is no public fund for helping painters—only writers. What about William Jowitt said Clive, rubbing his hands. Thats a good joke—Poor William’s off to the West Indies. I’m glad morality is vindicated, I said. No, I dont think politics ought to be a matter of Oxford & Cambridge, said Roger. Thats what I wrote & told him when the row was on, said Clive. Lesley liked it—she liked dressing up & being at Court. It was she who forced him to it—telephoning from the basement among the black beetles, I said. Good Earth is a wonderful book, Roger said. It has a quality of objectivity & calm; a new kind of beauty, though the woman’s name is Pearl Buck & she’s an American. Baron Corvo is a good writer said Clive. Once when I was editing the Athenaeum he wrote & said he cdn’t get absolution & though not destitute required more money in order to write. He had my entire sympathy.

Roger went early; stopping his car by the pillarbox, venturously; twice he left the room to see if it were stolen. So to stories of Julian, the war game, Quentin’s love affair, & so all talking we parted, Clive to be away in Rome for two months.

[Thursday 4 February]

One of the curious things I am now proving—now that I am going through the stages of Lytton’s death—is that for us fame has no existence. We say we cant publish Lytton’s letters for 50 years, if at all. We can’t write about him. He has no funeral. I dont know where his ashes are buried. There is no commemoration any more, except when we meet & talk; or in the usual ways, alone at night, walking along the streets (but these states in my case have yet to be verified: all sensation now: I mean what Lytton’s death means I dont yet know). Hence to think of fame is superfluous: what people will say when I’m dead. The solid statue that father left—that exists no longer.

Talk yesterday with Ottoline. Philip discovered in the dining room, with its yellow cloth, reddish shades, reading letters & eating scones. Ott out—selling Lawrence first editions (how I’d like to tell that to Lytton!) We discussed Dryden: P. said he can do nothing but read poetry, gets into an exalted state. I had been buying Dryden for Julian. Talk of celebrated passages. In came Ott: she had toast & tea. Talk of Bertie’s autobiography, private: he devotes a chapter to abuse of her. Katherine Mansfield had disillusioned him. “I heard them discussing me all night through the floor.” She uses too much scent & powder. She had meant nothing to him. “This he sends me—I could only write back Et tu Brute?”—I’ve had Lawrence, Aldous, Cannan, Osbert—now Bertie. He replied he was astonished I should mind, but that he always hurts those he loves … So to the yellow drawing room. So to Lytton: his charm, long thin fingers, “time I knew him about 1908, with Henry [Lamb] … But no letters could be published. He was so considerate. I wrote to him last summer—he answered with great affection, about the past. One could always count on that, though one never saw him much. I’ve asked James to send back my letters. Sprott told me he had read them—I dont want them to be handed round. And do you think he was happy? with Carrington? with Senhouse?”

So to Tom & Vivienne [Eliot] & the dog that makes messes: to Molly [MacCarthy] & her deafness; to The Waves—Jinny made me think of Mary—& Rhoda made me cry with a vision of you. But how could you write that book? the strain, the intensity—at which I kindle, as always, & say I will give her Johnson’s Lives of the Poets. And she says she is reading Eth Bowen who tries to write like me, & will L. come & meet Hodgson who breeds bull dogs; & I say I am an aristocrat in writing; & she confirms this & abuses Vita for writing about Knole, being ignobly conscious of noble blood, & I praise Vita—denounce her novels; & Philip ‘works’ next door; & there is Ott’s pug like a small Chinese lion on the chair in the hall; & Philip pops out with a copy of Dryden’s poems in double columns, & I think how I would describe this to Lytton, & so home, embraced, loved perhaps—anyhow here’s a letter this morning to ask me to think well of her when she’s dead. & to send her The Waves.

Monday 8 February

Why did I ever say I would produce another volume of Common Reader? It will take me week after week, month after month. However a year spent—save for diversions in Greece & Russia—in reading through English literature will no doubt do good to my fictitious brain. Rest it anyhow. One day, all of a rush, fiction will burst in. These remarks are jotted down at the end of a long mornings work on Donne, which will have to be done again, & is it worth the doing? I wake in the night with the sense of being in an empty hall: Lytton dead, & those factories building. What is the point of it—life, when I am not working, suddenly becomes thin, indifferent. Lytton is dead, & nothing definite to mark it. Also they write flimsy articles about him. Jack Squire for instance—as if he had not mattered very much.

And we go on—at Rodmell for the week end; & went over to Caburn, & walked among those primeval downs, like a Heal bed, L. said, so comfortable: bowl shaped shadows; half circles; curves; a deep valley. Quentin last night: how mature, in some way; speaking with deliberation. Calmly explaining his situation with John. All Nessa’s sense, & Clive’s shrewdness. Suddenly he asks in his drawling childish voice for books upon Italian history, for some account of some armament deal; for he is notably objective, interested in politics, in behaviourism, in psychoanalysis. This was what our talk was of. And Benita, he says, is too much afraid of me to send me her memoirs. Some reproach implied—unless this is merely the result of “Mrs Woolf’s palpitating sensibility unmatched since Sterne”—a phrase from an article on music in the M. Guardian, rather tickling my vanity.

Thursday 11 February

My mind is set running upon A Knock on the Door (whats its name?) owing largely to reading ‘Wells on Woman’—how she must be ancillary & decorative in the world of the future, because she has been tried, in 10 years, & has not proved anything. So in this mood I record Mary’s telling me last night how she loved cigars; but Jack refuses to let her smoke them—against his idea of what his wife should do—silly affectation—or to let her dress in a dress cut low at the back. Cant go out with you in that frock. Go & put on another. Its indecent—yet will praise Diana [Cooper] for wearing the same. “I threw everything out of the window once” she said. “He treats us—Barbara & me—as if we were tame leopards—pets belonging to him”. As indeed they do, since neither has a penny except of Jack’s earning & giving. She burst into tears, about Lytton: her best, her most intimate friend—“And now I live merely with barbarians. I have nobody to talk to. Lytton came every week. He told me about all his boys. He sat sobbing bitterly, when Roger [Senhouse] was cruel to him. Oh he loved him—just loved him—Thats what I couldn’t understand, & you could, I said. And he was so brilliant, so alive, last winter. I went to him about a fortnight before he was ill. I was in an ecstasy. I said You’re wonderful, wonderful—He was so vigorous, giving a party to five young men. We stood in the hall. There was a letter from one of them refusing to come. And he kissed me. He was so sweet. He would come in. There was the coat he wore. He would talk of everything; tell me everything. And all the time there was this growth in him; & here Virginia & Mary sit talking of him & he’s dead. I cant believe it”

Saturday 13 February

I break off from my plain duty which is to read the Anatomy of the World, to record Roger’s lecture: last night. Roger rather cadaverous in white waistcoat. A vast sheet. Pictures passing. He takes his stick. Gets into trouble with the lanternist. Is completely at his ease. Elucidates unravels with fascinating ease & subtlety this quality & that: investigates (with his stick) opposing diagonals: emphasises the immediate & instantaneous in French art. Here a Queen about to fling out her fingers: here a mother “turning to look at something & losing herself in pensive & tender reverie, while her child struggles to look the other way, & she restrains it, unconsciously, with perfect ease & control.” In the interval we talked to Mary, about the affair of Potocki which is filling our house, & making ring our telephone. (This man is sentenced to 6 months prison because he submitted for private publication the MS of a poem dedicated to John Penis in the Mount of Venus, to pay for which effusion Leonard has committed himself to find £20). Up drifted Nessa & Duncan & Raymond in a tiger sweater; & so back to more lecture; & so home, through icy streets—winter is on us—I write with both sides of my fire on, & my winter jersey—so to Nessa’s, where the stove was kindled, & there was hot soup & cold meat, & coffee & biscuits—all with the usual skill & organising capacity. There we laughed & exaggerated: about the lecture; about Bob & his outburst—‘I cant stay in your house—I must leave, if you impute such motives to my friend—he’s dying—a better socialist than you are—I am appalled at the meanness of human nature. Heres Allen, the wisest political thinker of our time—& you’ve nothing but abuse of him for taking a peerage. It dont matter of course—he’ll kill himself—he’ll be dead by next year. No I oughtn’t to say this—I’m sorry I lost my temper. I apologise’ (eating muffins; seizing the teapot, like some shaggy, surly, unkempt old animal—And then we had to give him a lift to Chelsea ..)

And we talked about a new life of Jesus, which offers two proofs of his existence—witness Roger’s intellectual vitality after speaking to the Queen’s Hall for 2 hours—really excited about the reality of Jesus. Quentin quoted French with a nice accent. Duncan had bought a pine apple with the extra 25/ I paid on his money for the screen—that now lights up the drawing room. I brought it home on Thursday. Bob never noticed.

Tuesday 16 February

And I have just ‘finished’ I use inverted commas ironically, my Donne, a great but I think well intentioned grind. And I’m fuming, slightly, over Nelly’s typical servant meanness. After you said you didn’t want Lottie hanging about here,—but I didnt say that Nelly—Oh we thought thats what you meant—not very nice to hang about—you said you wouldn’t have her doing that—of course I told her she must take a place at once: she’s gone to the lady at Victoria—this to revenge themselves on me: to make me feel uncomfortable. But I promptly lost my temper, a great relief, & told Nelly that this is the last time I help Lottie or interest myself in their affairs—whereupon she cringes & withdraws, & says she meant nothing. Then Miss McAfee has rejected my article on Skinner, & asks for one on Q. Elizabeth instead, which she shant get; then I have to dine with Ethel Sands tonight, & must go to Bradleys to try on; & must have my hair curled. And I’m quivering & itching to write my—whats it to be called?—“Men are like that?”—no thats too patently feminist: the sequel then, for which I have collected enough powder to blow up St Pauls. It is to have 4 pictures. And I must go on with the C. Reader—for one thing, by way of proving my credentials. To sit to Nessa; gay & debonair; to tie up parcels; to the Busch Quartet where I met Elena R. & reflected upon the transiency of human beauty, passion, & illusion; & so up to lunch.

Friday 26 February

Now I have ‘finished’ the Arcadia, & have 25 minutes in which I ought to correct my Letter to a Young Poet & give it to John. John is fractious & irritable, said to be the effect of love. And what a mint of people I’ve seen; dining with Ethel, having Desmond & Lord David & Ottoline & the Keynes’, & going to Monks House—so march-white & lovely, the fields, & the river where the man caught a large sea trout, trout die if you draw blood, he said, speaking very slowly, wind bitten, that bitter cold day: & then I saw—oh the Keynes—yes—they say Julian’s dissertation is no good, quite uneducated—& talked of Lytton, & how Maynard thought we really carried unconvention too far—no service, no farewell. When Ramsey died his friends went to Golders Green & the coffin was carried through them. But with Lytton there was no mark to say This is over. And he met Senhouse a fortnight later & was the first to tell him that Lytton had left him his books.

Then I’ve not seen Ethel this 2 weeks, because of the rush; & today Sibyl & Hugh & Eth Williamson all come, knocking on each others heels to tea; & we go to the Camargo on Sunday; & must go in to the Woolf 50 birthday—this will happen yearly now⁠[—]⁠after dinner tonight. And to the French pictures.

And Ka shut me in the middle class bedroom effectively last night—so condescending, so self approving, with her docile stories of respectable lunches with the Cornish aristocracy & Mrs Leverton Harris. Who is Mrs L.H.? “Oh dont you know—she signs letters on George Moore’s 80th birthday. And I do hope you will do more Common readers. I prefer them to ——” This little bit of patronage annoyed me more than it should. The day Ka came too we sold the ten thousandth copy of The Waves: which thus beats all my novels, unexpectedly.

Monday 29 February

And this morning I opened a letter; & it was from ‘yours very sincerely J. J. Thompson”—the Master of Trinity; & it was to say that the council have decided to ask me to deliver the Ford Clark Lectures next year. Six of them. This, I suppose, is the first time a woman has been asked; & so it is a great honour—think of me, the uneducated child reading books in my room at 22 H.P.G.—now advanced to this glory. But I shall refuse: because how could I write 6 lectures, to be delivered in full term, without giving up a year to criticism; without becoming a functionary; without sealing my lips when it comes to tilting at Universities; without putting off my Knock at the Door; without perhaps shelving another novel. But I am rather inclined to smile, as I lunch with Miss Dodge today, & she gives me a book with Donne’s autograph; as I buy a pair of shoes at Babers; as I sit down dutifully to correct an article for the Common Reader. Yes; all that reading, I say, has borne this odd fruit. And I am pleased; & still more pleased that I wont do it; & like to think that father would have blushed with pleasure could I have told him 30 years ago, that his daughter—my poor little Ginny—was to be asked to succeed him: the sort of compliment he would have liked.

[Thursday 3 March]

And now, Thursday 3rd March, I am rather upset because the devil whispered, all of a sudden, that I have six lectures written in Phases of Fiction; & could furbish them up & deliver the Clark lectures, & win the esteem of my sex, with a few weeks work. True, L. says since the middle 4 were published in America I could not do this without complete rewriting; & I ought therefore to dismiss the whole thing. Yet, such is the perversity of my mind, I can now think of nothing else; my mind is swarming with ideas for lectures; things I can only say in lectures; & my refusal seems lazy & cowardly. Yet two days ago I was repugnant to the thought: longed only for freedom in which to write a tap at the door; & was convinced that I should be a time serving pot hunter if I accepted. I’ve no doubt the fizz will subside—still what should I do if some friendly fellow of Trinity asked me to think it over? Soberly, I know that if I sat down to rewrite Phases of Fiction it would mean complete immersal for some weeks: I should have to re-cast, re-read: I should be impregnated with the lecturing manner: its jocosity, its emphasis; then I should be jaded by the time I approached a tap; & when I had done A tap, I should be 2 or 3 years distant from The Waves. Anyhow, I’m thankful that I wrote decidedly in the mood I was then in, before the devil whispered, & I went to my drawer & found that old MS; so well written, so full of thought—all the work done for me. The sensible thing to do would be to talk it over quietly next week end with Dadie. Moreover, L. is definitely against it. But then Nessa & Alice Ritchie were instinctively in favour.

[Tuesday 8 March]

Oh but I am too tired to write this morning—cant finish my Dorothy Osborne, all because of the Polish Count & Court yesterday.

[Thursday 10 March]

And the peaches were bad last night.

And we had Roger Jack & Mary to dine. And they said the saddle was raw, but it wasn’t.

And oh dear I had lunched with Raymond to meet Mrs Keppel; a swarthy thick set raddled direct (My dear, she calls one) old grasper: whose fists have been in the money bags these 50 years: but with boldness: told us how her friends used to steal, in country houses in the time of Ed. 7th. One woman purloined any jewelled bag left lying. And she has a flat in the Ritz; old furniture; &c. I liked her, on the surface. I mean the extensive, jolly, brazen surface of the old courtezan; who has lost all bloom; & acquired a kind of cordiality, humour, directness instead. No sensibilities as far as I could see; nor snobberies: immense superficial knowledge, & going off to Berlin to hear Hitler speak. Shabby under dress: magnificent furs: great pearls: a Rolls Royce waiting—going off to visit my old friend the tailor; & so on—But I’m fuddled with talk, & we’re starting for Ham Spray to talk to Carrington—dear, dear—a lovely day though.

Oh & Eddy says The Waves is a failure: a miss. Eddy pushed his way in; & I liked him for pushing, once I had done hating him. How formidable I must be.

Saturday 12 March

So we went to Ham Spray—a lovely bright day, & got there at 1.30. “I thought you weren’t coming” said C. She came to the door, in her little jacket & socks with a twisted necklace. Her eyes were very pale. “I sent a telegram; but I do everything wrong. I thought you didn’t get it”. She was pale, small, suffering silently, very calm. She had hot soup for us. I looked at the trees. We sat in the cold dining room. I didnt light the fire, she said. She had cooked us a nice hot lunch, succulent, with her own hands. We talked of Mary & Lytton. She had discovered whom Mary loves, owing to an indiscretion. But Lytton made her swear not to tell. So she didn’t. We talked with effort; did she want us? Did she resent our coming to spy on her? She was bitter, laughing at Barbara [Bagenal]. “She asked how she could help. I told her to cut sandwiches. But she took an hour, talking to Tommy.” Then we sat on the verandah. We asked her to make us woodcuts for notepaper. And to do designs for Julia’s book. We tried to gossip—about Mrs Keppel: about Saxon; she laughed once or twice: & her eyes seemed to get bluer. Then it got cold & we went & sat in Lytton’s study—all beautifully neat, his notepaper laid out—a great fire; all his books exactly fitting the shelves, with the letters over them. We sat on the floor round the fire. Then L. suggested a walk. She took us to her grove. She said the trees had a flower wh. smelt very sweet in summer. She said she had some notes to write & would we go by ourselves. We only walked to the bottom of the long low down. Then L. went to do the car, & I wandered in the garden & then back into the sitting room. I was taking out a book when C. came in & asked if we would have tea before we went. She had made it. She & I went upstairs, arm in arm; & I said Let me see the view from the window. We stood looking out—She said Dont you think one ought to keep a room exactly as it was? We went to Dorothy Wordsworth’s house. Her room has been kept exactly as she left it. There are even the same prints & little things on the table. I want to keep Lytton’s rooms as he had them. But the Stracheys say this is morbid. Am I romantic about it d’you think? Oh no, I’m romantic too, I said. And we went back to L.’s sitting room. She burst into tears, & I took her in my arms. She sobbed, & said she had always been a failure. “There is nothing left for me to do. I did everything for Lytton. But I’ve failed in everything else. People say he was very selfish to me. But he gave me everything. I was devoted to my father. I hated my mother. Lytton was like a father to me. He taught me everything I know. He read poetry & French to me.” I did not want to lie to her—I could not pretend that there was not truth in what she said. I said life seemed to me sometimes hopeless, useless, when I woke in the night & thought of Lytton’s death. I held her hands. Her wrists seemed very small. She seemed helpless, deserted, like some small animal left. She was very gentle; sometimes laughing; kissing me; saying Lytton had loved his old friendls best. She said he had been silly with young men. But that was only on the top. She had been angry that they had not understood how great he was. I said I had always known that. And she said I made too much of his young friends. She said Roger was “as Lytton said, very dim in the intellect.” He could never have a real intimacy—it wasn’t sharing everything—only Roger was very high spirited & liked going to Rome, & rather liked Lytton reading aloud to him—but they couldn’t talk. And this last year Lytton made up his mind to be middle aged. He was a realist. He faced the fact that Roger could not be his love. And we were going to Malaga & then he was going to write about Shakespeare. And he was going to write his memoirs, which would take him ten years. It was ironical, his dying, wasnt it. He thought he was getting better. He said things like Lear when he was ill. I wanted to take you to see him the day you came, but I was afraid to—James & Pippa said one must not run any risk, & it might have upset him. “No, of course not” I said. “Roger will take the books of course—he will have to.” And what else did we say? There was not much time. We had tea & broken biscuits. She stood by the fireplace. Then we said we must go. She was very quiet & showed no desire for us to stay.

Then, as we were leaving the room to go she suddenly picked up a little French box with a picture of the Arc de Triomphe upon it & said “I gave this to Lytton. Take it. James says I mustnt give away Lytton’s things. But this is all right. I gave it him.” So I took it. There is a coin in it. How frightened she seemed of doing wrong—like a child who has been scolded.

She came down into the front of the house. She kissed me several times. I said “Then you will come & see us next week—or not—just as you like?” “Yes, I will come, or not” she said. And kissed me again, & said Goodbye. Then she went in; & turned & I waved & she waved back & she went into the house. Next morning at 8.30 the gardener heard a noise in her bedroom. He went in & found she had shot herself through the thigh. She died in 3 hours. She was conscious when Ralph & Alix & Bunny came.

(She also took me into Lytton’s bedroom. I saw his great bed; & the Anrep mosaic; his cupboard & things.)

Thursday 17 March

So Carrington killed herself; & again what L. calls “these mausoleum talks” begin again. We were the last to talk to her, & thus might have been summoned to the inquest; but they brought it in an accident. She maintained this, even to Ralph. Her foot slipped as she was shooting a rabbit.

And we discuss suicide; & I feel, as always, ghosts (dwindling) changing. Lytton’s affected by this act. I sometimes dislike him for it. He absorbed her⁠[,] made her kill herself. Then the romantic completeness which affects Mary, ‘a beautiful gesture—her life & her death’. Nonsense says Leonard: it was histrionic: the real thing is that we shall never see Lytton again. This is unreal. So we discuss suicide, and the ghosts as I say, change so oddly in my mind; like people who live, & are changed by what one hears of them. Now we have to see Pippa, & James & Alix. Then to Rodmell: then—perhaps—to Greece with Roger & Ha. A venture that would be: & I think we’re both in the mood for ventures after this morbid time; so much talk of death; & there death is of course.

We went from Cambridge on Saturday to Kings Lynn; through the lovely lonely coast that lies between that & Cromer, where I intend to go again: green meadows against the sea; & trees, & complete solitude, & now & then a line of little old houses: & Stiffkey with its hall; & some village spread out, as in a mediaeval picture, upon the rise of a dune; & lovely stubborn unknown place names; & wild roads; & Blickling, Holt, & Coke of Norfolk & Houghton; & the Pastons—all this jumble somehow shadowed by Carrington’s death: the name Partridge of course appearing on tombs & grocers’ shops.

Friday 18 March

Last night at William Plomer’s: talk, talk talk. Let me try to remember: on cooking: breadmaking; peaches rotten; Glaspells: going over the house; Tony’s studio; Tony bald, innocent, blue eyed & slow stumbling; William compact & robust. An eye for furniture. Tony’s tables, beds & sofas, in the Empire style. Gas fire. Talk of The Fountain. Oh & Tony’s fathers first wife died of apoplexy in C⁠[onstantino]⁠ple, through running to catch the boat on a hot day, a very fat woman. Mary Butts. “I cannot say anything of my sister—She is a bad woman—pretentious—I can see no merit in her books—pretentious. She corrupts young men. They are always committing suicide. She now has married Gabriel Atkins—without any character. They were given 25 decanters for their wedding.” Tony is ashamed of Mary, who thus defiles the Butts blood. In came Louise Morgan, the interviewer, nerve drawn, lined, crimson, agile; & Mrs Paul Robeson, negroid, vivacious, supple, talking like a woman on the stage: chiefly to L. about negroes. And Janin, who admires my books, & has a friend who wants to translate; a thin skinned Frog all gesture & wrinkle; a coffee merchant ex diplomat; despises society; stories of Colefax, French Embassy. The Duke of Vendome—“Que c’est mélée, mon monde!” Talk, talk, talk. And cold; & a glass of green water; & so home to bed. William rather pompous, ceremonious, & considerate.

Tea with Nessa, Julian & Mrs Ramsey: the dissertation: Nessa wishes him to give it up. Robustly [?] satisfied with him whatever he does. How dull this is to me—who like faults. Talk of Carrington: how long shall we talk of Carrington? Dispute as to how she got her gun. Mary’s story of the 3 rabbits on the lawn.

[Thursday 24 March]

I am not sure of the precise day, save that it is Thursday & tomorrow is Good Friday & therefore we are at Rodmell on the loveliest spring day: soft: a blue veil in the air torn by birds voices. I am glad to be alive & sorry for the dead: cant think why Carrington killed herself & put an end to all this. True, they are building the vast elephant grey sheds at Asheham, but I intend to see them as Greek temples; & Percy says they are building 60 cottages—but we wait to see if this is so. And the country is lovelier & lovelier; more friendly, charming, brilliant, still with great empty spaces, where I want to walk, alone, & come to terms with my own head. Another book? What? Merciful to be free, entirely to think this out; needn’t write a line I dont want to, or squander a moment on repetition. Two books on Virginia Woolf have just appeared—in France & Germany. This is a danger signal. I must not settle into a figure.

Perhaps we are becoming more sociable. Mrs Hawkesford wants to bring her daughter to tea. I think we shall go to Greece with Roger & Margery. And—well, we go to tea with M. Baring on Monday.

I’m drowsing in this heat & quiet. Cant correct any more C.R. articles; nor write letters; yet it isn’t lunch time yet. And there’s the paper to read. Odd that Lytton didn’t write more. Which life should one lead—the life one likes. I like writing. I like change. I like to toss my mind up & watch to see where it’ll fall. Nessa off to Cassis. Clive coming back. Then the London Season: then here again. A happy life. But encompassed by solitude—human life I mean. Miss Bowen, stammering, shy, conventional, to tea [on 18 March].

Friday 25 March

Such is the atmosphere of days, that I thought this was Sunday, because it is Good Friday. The weather is Sunday weather—divinely good, warm, unclouded—Oh how lovely my view would be if it weren’t for the grey galvanised sheds—how am I to absorb them into the view? And I want to write a little story, before I go into Good Friday goose. I’m tired of my own criticism—But isn’t it futile to get away into that life—where all the proportions are different—when I still have Lord knows how many brilliant articles—all cut out rounded, coloured, like magic lantern slides, to correct? An odd gulf between the one world & the other. I think I’ll go into the house & fetch my de Quincey who comes next. I am sober & desultory, cant string all my ideas on one thread. Leonard is in a pickle with Wells, & cant get hold of the facts with which to confute him. On the other hand, the dogs are thinking more & barking less, the result of my letter. One poor beast is they say ‘taped’—has his mouth—sealed: not altogether: barking again. A good walk might be wholesome. Percy steals the anthracite, & says didn’t we hear Pinka barking all one night—a rustic attempt at mystification which fails to convince. Why is there always this relationship between master & servant?—Maynard says its the same in offices. Always deceit & distrust. Our Transition Age, perhaps. Perhaps we go to Sissinghurst tomorrow: there are 2 people with their house for life.

[Tuesday 29 March]

We went to Sissinghurst—I’m so tired with correcting Dr Burney that I must run my pen here—& it was a fine goose grey morning. Odd the merging of Sussex into Kent. The sloping hop oasts do it, I think: then the little sunk away villages: what led people to pitch on the 18th century where they did? A tudor house, alone; on the road: why build there? L. notices the way; I these little facts. Harold came out in a torn jacket: Vita in breeches & pink shirt. We went over the grounds. H. said I’m getting nobler & nobler as we get poorer. I’ve refused an offer to write for the American papers. Oh but there are myriads of things to do here. “Yes we want to turn those stables into guest bedrooms: & build a library across the courtyard”, said Vita. All is planned. H. has drawn it in his note book. Walls have been built & turf laid. Lunch in the boys cottage. Talk of Beaverbrook’s party to wh. H. went with Enid Jones—Oh so lovely—the clothes; then to Heinemann: people seemed to have dust scattered on them. Enid became quite upset. How she wants to write, but has to give parties for her husband. And I was sleepy & afraid the Rolls Royce wd. get to the Temple too quick & she’d not have finished her story. But she had finished it. And next day I got a letter to say that she had almost—killed herself? I suggested—no, broken down. She wants to be a writer. Envies the genius of Mrs Belloc Lowndes.

So we ate cold salmon & raspberries & cream & little variegated chocolates given by Lady Sackville, now at their feet, & drank oh lots of drinks; & then climbed Vita’s tower; lovely pink brick; but like Knole, not much view, save of stables that are to be guest rooms. So home. And then a very wet Sunday & a prodigious reading & drowsing—I’ve now carried to perfection the art of sleeping & reading & make up half my book in the wildest way asleep, improvising, & then surprised to wake up & find none of it true.

Yesterday we went to Rottingdean to tea with Maurice (as I’m now to call him.) He & Elizabeth [Williamson] in a long sunny room full of books, tables, plants; rather bad taste; rich; nothing very nice to look at; two sweating dusty footmen brought in innumerable plates. In came Ethel: in grey tweed; & a chinless Cavalry Captain called Grant, who is Peter Davies’ partner: the very spit & image of a soldier in Punch: many peoples ideal, I daresay; so suave, masculine, foolish; exactly a round peg in his hole. All the slang right & the snobbery & the culture & the self-possession. Had killed animals in every part of the East. Talk, of course, wildly detailed & emphatic & useless about Greece. You must see Meleora—where’s the map? You get out of the train—you get a car—no we couldnt—go to Giolman in Athens—oh & dont forget Aegina: you must hire a boat—oh that evening.. &c &c. And then talk about publishing: & I slipped my anchovy sandwich into my bag, & took it out, thinking it was my lighter. Ethel balanced by the fire: told us stories about Empresses: Maurice prompted: laughed at her. “I’ve known him 40 years & he’s always shocked—feels what people feel at the other end of the room. Nice feelings. I haven’t any. I’m going to write a book called The Mole, the Cesspool & Mrs Woolf. You’ve kept my letters you say—Yes she’s a strange woman—loves getting letters—so I write, sheet after sheet. Nothing I like better. I used to keep a diary. Since I knew her, two years ago in February, I’ve written only letters…”

And Mrs Woolf we want you to write a biography for us in 30,000 words. You’d pay a devil £15 to get up the facts for you. Then you’d have nothing to do but dash it down. You’d do it in two months. By way of bargain I’ll offer you the MS of a gardening book. Oh we’ve lost heavily over our expensive books. Dizzy’s edition fills our cellar. I’ve come in to make us less high brow. I want novels. Ideas. Thats whats the fun. Making suggestions to authors—That chinless man to suggest to me. Pah! So home; after seeing M⁠[aurice]’s bedrooms &c. A shy, lobster coloured skinless man; tripping about the room to fetch things. Keeps his house, I think, for his friends. Drinks. Sentimentalises. Would like to be taken seriously.

Monday 11 April

The eddy of travel—wisps & straws—is already whirling round. I have a list of things to buy on my table. We start at 10 on Friday; shall be sailing down the Dalmatian coast this time next week. Embedded as I am in Tavistock Sqre I cant make much play with this. Also it is fiendishly cold, wet, blowing, like last year in France. I like this adventure of Greece all the same; & the fact that we are sociably going with Roger & Margery; & that—intimacy—will be part of our journey. The result of Lytton’s death—this desire to be with friends. I am muddled headed. This perpetual criticism tires my brain. I’ve almost done de Quincey though, & am well on with the book.

As for external facts—it seems likely that our John will not stay. That is he wishes to work half time in order to write. Elizabeth Williamson is a possibility—rain rain—it drums on my skylight. L. is doing Press accounts & it looks as if we should net £2000.

Hail now; & camel coloured sky. I am waiting for lunch. Dear me, I ought to read some hideously obscure poems. Tomorrow we go to Monks House to take Pinka. This is a little girls writing—like a childs letter. I’ve seen the Nicolsons, & Ethel, & Kingsley Martin. Harold up to be looked at for that job. And James & Alix. Lytton left masses of poems & unfinished plays—not much good, James says. And box upon box of letters. Ours still lost. What to do? said James. He said nasty things about everyone. How can they be published? Could one extract a philosophy? He had meant to write one more book for money on Washington & then burn his boats: declare himself & live abroad. Declare what? Everything. His hatred [?] &c. Sex: love: But I doubt it. There was Ham Spray.

Monday 18 April

On board the Tevere, off the coast of Italy. Yes, but I’ve forgotten to get out my ink pot, & thus the splendour of these first words is committed to the gold pen.

My mind—but is this to be a record of ’my mind’—truth is I’ve not thought of a form for this book—shall it have one—or none? I was so knife-splitting, flower expanding that morning at Victoria: I felicitated myself upon being a writer. Whatever I saw was so complex. There was a bride, dressed in the colours of the Union Jack, brand new handbag. And Helen [Anrep], the full blown rose petals dewed with moisture, come to say Good bye: & the Yak that is M⁠[argery Fry]: for she is thick as an oak, & wears a rough white pelt, constrained by a girdle—the Yak said “If you’d brought a dog I should have said Good bye.” I divined antagonism. This has developed only into a pervasive inferiority complex. I’m one of those superior beings, she thinks, who exist by virtue of their white petals; this little nervousness I vanquish by visiting her in her carriage alone, while L. & R. play chess & teach each other Greek. R. is sweet, rich, accommodating, infinitely serious, & rolls out rich Italian commands to the gondoliers, all waiting for foreigners who dont come, for no one travels this year, by the canal, at the end of St Mark’s. We take a gondola for one hour, & so cross to San Giorgio; & see the miraculous apse, & peer; & climb; & smooth our soles on the red yellow rosy pavement, raying out like the sea, with inlaid flowers: & Venetian light is pale & bright: the palaces, says R. pretty frauds, examples of inlay & carpentry. That old fraud Ruskin—we were now in St Mark’s Square, looking at Adam & Eve. There are chapters about that. He was too virtuous, thats a great pity, everything had to be squared—even these finicking palaces must be morally Good—which theyre not—oh no—merely slices of coloured stone. Dinner at the Cavallo—the old one gone bankrupt. Out after the play, in the theatre slung with green glass beads, onto the black tossing water, so silent, so swaying: & the poor people asked us not to overpay the traghetto; & there were cactuses; & a man singing in the morning; & R. & I went to the Tiepolo church; & the thick yellow service with the priests weaving a web in incantation, & the little boys & the reverence & secularity & ancientness made us say This is the magic we want: & magic there must be; so long as magic keeps its place. So on board our spacious orderly well found ship, now passing the coast of Italy.

Thursday 21 April

Athens [Hotel Majestic]

Yes, but what can I say about the Parthenon—that my own ghost met me, the girl of 23, with all her life to come: that; & then, this is more compact & splendid & robust than I remembered. The yellow pillars—how shall I say? gathered, grouped, radiating there on the rock, against the most violent sky, with staring ice blue, & then cinder black; crowds flying as if suppliants (really Greek schoolchildren). The Temple like a ship, so vibrant, taut, sailing, though still all these ages. It is larger than I remembered, & better held together. Perhaps I’ve washed off something of the sentimentality of youth, which tends to makes things melancholy. Now I’m 50 (I signed this boldly in the hotel book—the good Yak refrained—another proof of inferiority complex), now I’m grey haired & well through with life I suppose I like the vital, the flourish in the face of death. Then there’s Athens like crumbled egg shells beneath, & the black grey bush tufted hills. “The Germans come out like things hidden in a pocket” I said. Sure enough, when the storm passed over, out they came, honest [?], perspiring unattractive people, claiming, we thought, more of the Acropolis than any other nation. We wandered; Roger said Awfully swell, awfully swell. At the Museum in the morning he said They dont compose. Thats a star fish shape. Look at the thinness of the lines: & no background. There were—& still are—myriads of Greek black & red or red & black pots, each capable of inspiring a volume, & before them trail tired children, tired mothers, the oddest shabbiest raggiest housemaids & clerks, whose whole fortune has been spent on the ticket, & they’ll go home, & dominate some little suburban street on the strength of “I was in Athens in April 1932”: witness the pure white marble bust after Pheidias on the mantlepiece. This is depressing in museums.

I like Athens about 7, when the streets are hurrying clamouring, flitted across by all those black whitefaced women, & shawled women, & dapper little men who come with the bats & the evening primroses in Southern towns, ari lalagos. Margery, listening to the talk at Averrov tonight said the pitch is the same as the English. She is full of reasonable & well instructed remarks—as that Christ is never painted being washed; that the priests are allowed hairpins gratis, since they wear their hair long & might be tempted into effeminate ornament. This was said by the garden where all the flowers were this morning—ranunculus like pink & violet shells many folded; the flapping black white specked irises. The other remark was made in the Byzantine Church at Daphni. “Oh awfully swell—better than I’d any notion of” said Roger depositing his hat stick pochard & two or three guides & dictionaries on a pillar. Then we all stared up at the white vindictive Christ, larger than a nightmare, in blue & white mosaic on the ceiling. We liked that Church very much. It is high & rugged, & arched, & the mosaic is mostly peeled. And one looks out of the door on those tufted green trees which seem each tufted with a sun lit & clouded wave—so bright so dark are the green waves in the wood in which we walked. A Greek family keeps the church—middle-aged men & women, sitting in town clothes (the men) with overcoats & gold rings reading a paper at 3.30. Such idleness, such aimlessness I’ve never seen in England. At last the youngest, a woman, in shawl slippers & cotton dress, strolls off, climbs a ruined wall & begins to pick yellow flowers—nothing else to do. So we drove on down to the sea—& how lovely the pure lip of the sea is touching a wild shore; with hills behind, & green plains, & Eleusis in the distance & green, & red rocks, & one steamer starting.

Friday 22 April (as I think)

It was bitter cold. That one always forgets. The wind whistled through the uncovered sides of Giolmann’s Hupmobile. L. sneezed: I shivered. All the floor was covered with painting boxes. We lunched on a table in the sun at Suniun—the chalk white pillars set high like a lighthouse. The flowers all in miniature made a bright turf—M. uprooted little irises. What did we say? Nothing much. After a week one talks only at dinner. And then drove home; that is through the plumed trees, by the red shaped fields, with the sudden carpets of deep red poppies, past the gipsies huts, made like wigwams out of pressed ferns; there a girl wandered spinning from a lump of sheeps wool; & women sat at the door—I thought of Piccadilly at this hour. How strange the patiently amenable flat land is, set with biblical trees, grazed by long woolled sheep, & not a house to be seen. This is England in the time of Chaucer. So at Sunium, the sea breaks upon green stone & red stone, & the slate-coloured slanting sailed ships go by—all as in the time of Chaucer or Homer, not a pier, not a parade; no one looking. At Salamis the Greek Army were carrying little sacks of earth to the top of the Tomb of the dead soldiers to make it [word illegible]. A tuft of flowers was on the top. Oh the cold, the cold.

Sunday 24 April

Oh the rain, the rain! That was next day at Aegina. That lovely shelving island with the baked narrow path, the sea & the beach, the little pink & yellow houses, the thyme, the steep hillside, the Temple, skeletal, dominant, the bays flowing filled with sea—all this was nothing but chill, mist, rain, Americans clustering round a thin professor; & we cowering under a pine tree which let the rain on us. Even so—Roger said awfully swell; this is superb—a sandstone temple better than Sunium. Marvellous what genius can do in a little space—heres the perfectly moving proportions—& the rain drove us down to our boat as soon as we could. They had caught red fish & octopus. How? Well they put onions, bread & so on down, & the fish settle on them, then they drop a charge & pouf!—it goes up like that, & the fish come to the top dead, & they spear them. Its not allowed. But nobody can see you, round there. Such was the account given by the stoker with the lovely Greek smile—the smile the muleteers have & the taximen. For R. & M. were mounted, & very queer they looked, jolting up the hill—the polie makria [far distant] hill, as the bright faced girl called it. For the people are desperately poor, & come, offering flowers, & are given the remains of lunch.

Today—how happy today was—at the little round Byzantine Church on the slopes of Hymettus. Why cant we live for ever like this, I said to myself, not that it was hot enough; but the rain blew over; & life seemed very free, & full of the good things—wildness, thyme smelling, cypresses, the little courtyard where R. & M. sat absorbed painting; with the great marble white dog asleep in a corner, & the usual frail slippered women padding about in their swallow rooms built upstairs, with old bits of carved marble for the doorposts. I got a handful of wild anemomes & orchids. One drives the dull part & scrambles when the ruts throw us too violently backward & forward.

Talk today about Max Eastman’s book: Roger’s theories of art; & stories. M. tells stories of falling off a horse in Canada; of Julian’s life; of Mrs Masefield—unintimate stories, for she has no foothold among us; & will slip off this rock into her obscure waters when we go back—not that she needs us. She is punctilious about trains, & has a passion for cheese—We start tomorrow early for Nauplia, in a car.

Monday 2 May

Well it is five minutes to ten: but where am I, writing with pen & ink? Not in my studio. In the gorge, or valley, at Delphi, under an olive tree, sitting on dry earth covered with white daisies.. L. is reading his Greek grammar beside me; there goes, I think, a swallow tail. Shelves of grey rock rise opposite me, each set with olive trees, & little bushes, & if I follow up, there comes the huge bald gray & black mountain, & then the perfectly smooth sky. And so back to the hot earth, & the flies sitting in yellow hearts of the daisies. There is a tinkling of goat bells; an old man has ridden off on his mule—we’re right at the bottom of the hill on top of which is Delphi, & Roger & Margery sketching. And a locust has just perched on the olive tree.

Thus I try to make visible this scene which will soon be gone forever. & perhaps too try to avoid that demon which says, perhaps so unnecessarily, that one ought to write down how we went to Corinth, Nauplia, Mycenae, to Mistra to Tripolitza, & so back to Athens, when the sun blazed, & I wore a silk dress, & we went to the gardens, & then started at 7 on Saturday morning for Delphi. I ought to write about all these places, & try perhaps to solidify some of these floating sequences that go through my mind as we drive. For the drives were very long; Oh & the wind & the sun, & how ones lips swelled & blackened & cracked & one’s nose peeled, & one’s cheeks were hot & dry as if sitting unshaded by a hot fire. All vanity has long died out. One is becoming a peasant. This reminds me of the start of joy with which I saw a tolerably well-dressed woman in the Salon at the Hotel Majestic drinking with a voluble old Greek gentleman the afternoon we came back, dry dusty red, gold, black, brown, creased, (M.’s wrinkles are marked like the stripes on the coat of a wild beast). After four or five days of the peasants & their solid draped beauty, the sharpness & subtlety of civilisation excite one’s upper scale of nerves—the violin notes.

Greece then, so to return to Greece, is a land so ancient that it is like wandering in the fields of the moon. Life is receding (in spite of that donkey). The living, these worn down, for ever travelling the roads Greeks, cannot master Greece any longer. It is too bare too stony, precipitous for them. We met them always on the high mountain passes padding along beside their donkeys, so small, existing so painfully, always marching in search of some herb, some root, mastered by the vast distances, unable to do more than dig their heels in in the rock. Such solitude as they must know, under the sun, under the snow, such dependence on themselves to clothe & feed themselves through the splendid summer days is unthinkable in England. The centuries have left no trace. There is no 18th 16th, 15th century all in layers as in England—nothing between them & 300 B.C. 300 B.C. somehow (dominated) conquered Greece & still holds it. So it is the country of the moon; I mean, lit by a dead sun. If one finds a bay it is deserted; so too with the hills & the valleys; not a villa, not a tea shop not a kennel anywhere; no wires, no churches, almost no graveyards.

But to be accurate, Nauplia & Mycenae lie in a rich soft prosperous plain, there are even occasional villages, where we stop & R. & M. get out their paint boxes, because the accent is there right for painting—where there is a house; for there there are aspens & cypresses & roofs to stand against the plains & the mountains.

What then happens (we’ve been a walk still further into the valley which still winds itself deeper & deeper, left leaves to mark the path, coming back lost it, peeled a stick for me & here we are, having shifted, owing to the sun, higher, under the olive tree; & I’ve taken off my shoes for coolness) what then happens is that the villagers come up & begin, like friends, to talk about things in general. Last night on the hill above Delphi in the evening light with Itea beginning to flash & sparkle by the sea, one ship in the bay & the snow mountains standing out in the background, & the foreground still running rich green & red brown, where the goats & sheep were grazing, & the cars passing slowly on the winding road beneath, last night as we sat there, the goat girl came bounding up as if to rick her sheep, but it was only to talk to us. No slinking past, no tittering, no shyness. She stopped before us, as a matter of course. M. made her look through her glasses, first the right way, then the wrong. Then she told us words for things. Skotos her rough thick coat, ourands the sky, a flower lullulin (?) [luludi] my watch orologe [orologiou], the car—I’ve forgotten. She shouted with laughter. She was small brown, will make a shrewd broad old woman; unconstrained, friendly. Her brother came, 18, quick, shrewd, small eyed. I took his stick & water bottle. Then there was the difficulty about the coins. First she wouldn’t take them or M.’s handkerchief: then followed us, putting her hand on her chest, asking complaining, but about what? L. repeated his gift. She took it. But not with joy. And the boy brought us a great saucepan of yaot [yoghurt]. & so home, with the electric lights coming out; & they danced after dinner in the public house, young men, punctiliously, bowing & twisting & keeping their feet on the right spot, dressed in trousers & shirts.

halfway up. It occurs to me that the ridge seen from the top is like a badly peeled pear, when lines of peel are left on the edges.

Also that Lawrence writes his books as I write this diary in gulps & jerks: & has not the strength to come down in one blow: no welding, no shaping—the result of a false anti-literariness perhaps.

Also that the male virtues are never for themselves, but to be paid for. This introduces another element into their psychology—to be paid for: what will pay. This can be sublimated but the alloy remains. (I’m thinking of the book again)

Sunday 8 May

Here it is, the last evening; very hot, very dusty. The loudspeaker is braying; L. reading, not with sympathy, Ethel Smyth; it is 2 minutes to 7 & therefore I have about 30 minutes in which to fill this book. I’ve only used 10 of my 100 nibs: my ink is still deep; how many white pages remain. This is the result of the best holiday these many years. It was so nice going off to the Post Office after our plain roll & honey; & it was so hot, & then there was always something doing. (I dont like Sundays, not even here: the little yellow cardboard looking boys are now drumming, & the dogs barking).

We went to Aegina [on 6 May]: sun & blue gradually rolling up the mist; & L. & I found a desert bay lapped by water pale & pure—no—not pale—but pure as some liquid jelly, laid quivering over stones, & shells, & anemones. L. went staggering out across the stones & flung himself in; I paddled. My bare feet burnt on the sand. I dried them by letting them burn a minute. And this was virgin sea. The island looked from the Temple like a south sea island with naked natives gathering to see the boats come in. M.—whose humanity grows & waxes, or perhaps is allowed fuller expression, became sad by the number of donkeys provided, & we only took two. Here the girls [?] pulled my hands—Ride ride they kept saying, very hot, very steep. So we pretended to shiver—said riding was too cold. And the children came pressing irises & yellow poppies.

Even so, I shant fill my book—even by writing so quickly. I’ve scarcely read either—only Roger’s Eastman, & Wells, & Murry. Oh but I’ve thought too much, about my little book. The truth is this sight seeing, this sitting, as we’ve just sat, in the [Zappeion] garden & watching the whiskered maniac against the wall laughing, as if his insanity were merely too much ripeness, & the woman with gold teeth, & the love struck boy who ate a chocolate cake, while M. painfully commiserates the poverty of the Greeks, who look anxious, she says, & the hotel keeper she says has consumption—Couldnt she give the bootblack our toast—oh yes, she cant resist the little boy with a roll of peppermints—this is her suppressed, half Quaker, half virgin attitude to the world—as I was saying while I watch all this, & wonder what the hectic lady with rouged cheeks is laughing at—is it my straw hat trimmed of half its brim last night, or can it be Roger’s paintboxes with which he’s painfully slung—as I meditate such important events, as they slip & slide & catch on the surface of my mind, I’m subterraneously sunk in scenes for my little book: make up arguments, see pictures, keep dropping something new into the cauldron, which must bubble as richly as possible before its poured & stilled & hardened—as I do this, & accept whatever suggestion the shaking cypresses & aspens, the orange flower smell, the man selling penny toys of monkeys on sticks offer me, time passes: I’m not sure if I’m in Greece or London: but think it more likely I’m in Greece, happy, easy, friendly with everything swimming easily forward. L. discussing prison reform with Marjorie, informing Roger about the break up of the atom. And then behold we come to a stop before an aviary. L. picks a tassel of grass; & the budgerigars find it & peck it to bits. On we loaf again. Its odd why khaki is used I say: & R. says thats how they see the country; then we watch a mediæval soldier in white leggings, & tufted shoes, & kilt. R. has been painting in the Parthenon, hadn’t liked to ask him to sit. We spent 3 hours a day eating says M. M. wants to give away our food says L. & Roger runs across the road for it. These are our jokes: kindly sensitive jokes. M. is still conscious of inferiority, likes to talk of her parents & to palliate R.’s severity. Would like to begin life again, I think. What is lack of charm? I ask myself. Why dont these good qualities cut more ice? And whats just [?] untied the bunch in her so that shes ineffective? Yet has every art at command; can compell yaot to breed in her house; travels; sketches; has sympathy far more widely than I have for beggars, children, state of the people. But not charm.

Then I had the vision, in Aegina, of an uncivilised, hot new season to be brought into our lives—how yearly we shall come here, with a tent, escaping England, & sloughing the respectable skin; & all the tightness & formality of London; & fame, & wealth; & go back & become irresponsible, livers, existing on bread yaot, butter, eggs, say in Crete. This is to some extent a genuine impulse, I thought, coming down the hill with easy strides; London is not enough, nor Sussex either. One wants to be sunbaked, & taken back to these loquacious friendly people, simply to live, to talk, not to read & write. And then I looked up & saw the mountains across the bay, knife shaped, coloured, & the sea, brimming smooth; & felt as if a knife had scraped some incrusted organ in me, for I could not find anything lacking in that agile, athletic beauty, steeped in colour, so that it was not cold, perfectly free from vulgarity, yet; old in human life, so that every inch has its wild flower that might grow in an English garden, & the peasants are gentle people; & their clothes, worn & burnt, are subtly coloured, though coarse. Now there are sympathies between people & places, as between human beings. And I could love Greece, as an old woman, so I think, as I once loved Cornwall, as a child.

For this reason then, that we shall come back, & because L. wants to go to dinner, & I think there is a hair in my pen, I doubt that I shall make any more ceremony about coming to an end—‘Now get ready & dont talk so much—’ I must end.

Still the last night, & L. playing chess still with Roger, & I’ve lain in one of those interesting torpors on my bed, with Lawrence to read, & have now woken & cant but try to fix these last minutes for L. will be in then—if I can. The Greeks, who dont dine till 9, are now at it—that is are chattering, hooting, driving in the street. I hear them though our window opens on the back.

It is a fine still night. Now & then a few single words become audible. The top half of a building is cadaverous. Now the loudspeaker begins, & will so reel hoarsely through a few bars, & then suddenly stop. Everything rattles & jerks as if it were a jingling ill jointed but rapid cart.

So the days in Athens will get hotter & hotter—tonight they were dining on the pavement at Costis—& the nights will get noisier & gayer. I forgot to write about the Parthenon yesterday—all a glare—an oblong of blue sky made oblong by white pillars—the compact rush of the Parthenon—a slip of shade along the Erechtheum, in which we sat. And a loose lipped good tempered blue eyed man lounged up & said might he look at L.’s stick (the ringed one, bought at Sparta). So he picked at it & we said it was Greek, & he said no. It was a banana cane from Canada—had never been made in Greece. From that he went on to talk about Greek peasants. To see how they live would make you cry he said. Always working & nothing to eat but black bread so hard you cant cut it, (this with excruciated gestures) & perhaps they make a little cheese & come & sell it but there is plenty of wine always. So to the war. Everything has been wrong since then. Before the pound was stable & so was the drachma. Now one day theyre up: another down. What does sugar cost by the kilo in England? A kilo is 3 lbs: well, its cheaper in Greece. The Government protect it. But anything that comes from abroad is dear—shoes, clothes. And we make hardly any flour. All this in tortured French, with the young French officer sitting beside us & his wife & sister reading a guide book. A French battle ship was in the bay, & an Italian, & soon the English would come & the sailors would walk about the town & say they had seen Greece. Indeed here came a guide leading the French sailors. Only French sailors would know the names of pediments & columns, said Roger, always in love with the French. The French would cook this better or do that better. Now the French President has been killed by a White Russian. M. pricks up her ears commiserates & reflects intelligently what effect this will have on politics. So we went to the hill which the driver called Phillipappos [Philopappos], all in one gulp, but it was wired off, & we therefore turned back & went on to the theatre [of Dionysos], with its curved marble seats each cut with the name of a priest seat holder as they stick cards on the boxes at Covent Garden. One, the pawed one, the lion one, was for the priest of Dionysos, & had a carving of goats prancing & vines pendant. Here L. sat & we said that Sophocles Euripides & Aristophanes must have sat here & seen—Anyhow the hills were before them, as before us. And if the 2000 years have laid a few light rubbishy stucco houses on the earth, in the way, very little has been done to damage the view—nothing solid & immense & lasting has been built. Poverty & war & misery have prevented any obliteration—here or elsewhere. Indeed one might ask for more care, & more custody, not less. This afternoon the Greek raggamuffin boys were shying stones at a marble ruined arch, & pitting it, so that in some years it will be irrecoverably damaged. And the graves are nettled, tin-canned, dirty, dissolute, though the Greeks made the tombs with their own hands—no the land is too exhausted even to guard its own interests any longer—no doubt Lord Elgin’s excuse for stealing the statues from the Parthenon & the pillars from the tomb of Agamemnon at Mycenae.

Still L. plays chess & it is nearly twelve. But Athens shows no sign of sleep, so I can’t complain. A howling whistling sound is made by the trams. This time tomorrow we shall be nearing Salonika: I shall be turning on my shelf, L. on his, & so for 3 nights till we reach Rodmell & sleep in our soft beds, in the cool English May:

Tuesday 10 May

Only the most hardened scribbler could attempt to write in the Orient Express—for the letters are swept out of my hand—heads & tails. Here we are, 10.30, in Jugo Slavia, a tamer more subjugated country far than Greece, the last of which we saw last night—crossing a terrific stone gorge on a crazy bridge & looking down till I quivered from our window, sitting down to dinner with Venus colliding with the moon, & a shepherds hut, & two men in long coats lit up by the electric lights of our restaurant car. Curious contrasts! Our sufficiency & civilisation drawing all compact through want, poverty, desolation, shepherds, sheep, torrents, lonely rivers winding through rocks. We dined, on the usual smoke grey china. Another bride & groom on board. Gathered in the salon at the station were all their friends come with boxes of chocolate. She said in English “Looking through my things I found this belt” & gave it to the young man with the choc. box. A few sentences—specially intimate—arch—coquettish?—in English; then a babble of Greek again. A language one doesn’t understand is always unaccented, sibyllant, soft, wavy, unidentifiable with words. Last night was bad. Very hot. Then interruptions. At Salonika (1.30) they came in to ask about money. We had been advised to hide all except 600 drachmas—where? In the electric light bell he said. An impossible idea—so we disposed them all over—in the pockets of Baedeker, in an envelope. In Yugo Slavia the same question. So on, stopping & starting all night. We woke, & washed, looking at mountains. But the time had changed back & we had to wait 2 hours for coffee. Now for Rousseau.

Wednesday 11 May

again this heroism in the attempt at pen & ink; but I am tired of reading Rousseau: it is 6 o’clock; & we have just said that by this time tomorrow we shall be in Monk’s House. L. will be talking to Pinka. As it is, we are shaking & rattling through Lombardy towards the Alps: & shall wake near Paris. It is a flat country set with small red houses. All is tame & rich & civilised after Greece. We went out in the rain & walked up the broad stucco streets of Belgrade yesterday: we saw nothing but very tall men in tight fitting clothes: two women in looping breeches & Turkish handkerchiefs; & so back to the train again. We saw Trieste in the same way this morning, but hot sunny [?], with its sea spread silky & boats & there attached ourselves to England by buying The Times. The paper reads empty & provincial—these good Englishmen making such a bother about the Academy & motor cars when all the time there is Athens & the Greek islands. In kindness to my eyes now & to come I stop.

[Sunday 15 May]

And now, Whit Sunday, here we are at Monks House, & Greece is perceptibly melting: just for a moment England & Greece stood side by side, each much enlivened by the other. When we landed, the English coast seemed long low sweeping empty. I exclaimed at the extraordinary English green—with its silver mixture; & L. said the earth had an unbaked look—no red in it; & the lines of the hills so sloping. Now our road seems a garden path. This was Greece still active in our eyes. But its force is waning. Already my mind is hard at work (in my absence) arranging, editing, bringing forward, eliminating, until it will present me, unasked, with visions, as I walk, of Aegina, of Athens—the Acropolis with the incandescent pillars; the view from the goatherds hill at Delphi—no, the process is not yet complete enough for me to have detached pictures. Last nights gossip at Charleston has further strewn sand over Greece. And my head has settled down; & my body is rapidly using itself to arm chairs & soft beds & English meat & Jam.

[End of inserted pages]

Tuesday 17 May

What should be is the right attitude towards criticism? What ought I to feel & say & do when Miss B. devotes an article in Scrutiny to attacking me? She is young, Cambridge, ardent. And she says I’m a very bad writer. Now I think the thing to do is to note the pith of what is said—that I dont think—then to use the little kick of energy which opposition supplies to be more vigorously oneself. It is perhaps true that my reputation will now decline. I shall be laughed at & pointed at. What should be my attitude—clearly Arnold Bennett & Wells took the criticism of their youngsters in the wrong way. The right way is not to resent; not to .. be long suffering & Christian & submissive either. Of course, with my odd mixture of extreme rashness & modesty (to analyse roughly) I very soon recover from praise & blame. But I want to find out an attitude. The most important thing is not to think very much about oneself. To investigate candidly the charge; but not fussily, not very anxiously. On no account to retaliate by going to the other extreme—thinking too much. And now that thorn is out—perhaps too easily but then of course John interrupted.

[Thursday 19 May]

John has interrupted to some purpose. All last night Nessa put his case for him & against the irascible Leonard & the hard work & the underpay. And today we have to discuss with him his ‘feelings’—I’m not specially sympathetic, thinking of all the time we’ve spent. And Hilda M⁠[atheson]. lunches tomorrow; with a view to—Oh dear, the Press, the Press—how much time it has cost us.

[Monday 23 May]

Here is a little scene that I will write, bored as I am with refurbishing Dickens.

Yesterday we were driving home [from Richmond]. As we came to Mortlake Bridge I saw some heads bobbing in the river. I thought they were boys bathing; I thought it odd; why bathe on Sunday under a bridge! And then I saw a boat flopping on its side; & then a crowd; & then putting two & two together realised that this silent bobbing scene meant that here was an accident. We stopped & got out & watched three or four people swimming very slowly in full dress the few yards to shore. Then a sound of snoring sobbing was heard. Nobody moved. Nobody was excited active or amused. One red faced dishevelled woman was lying on her back. A man was pulling & pushing her. At last they touched shore; & a bright eyed elderly man scrambled up the steep bank, ran quickly, dripping in black trousers plastered to his legs, to the parapet, where he had left a hat & an overcoat. It was a sordid, silent spectacle—this heroic rescue. Middle class people in full Sunday dress immersed in cold water. I thought of a picture of a miracle; people fully dressed floating: there was a touch of the grotesque; none of terror or sublimity. The boat lay like a log boat, on its side.

So home: & Hilda is willing; & therefore, late last night John comes & renews his application. The mixture of emotionalism & grasping is so odd: as hard as nails, & then quivering.

Wednesday 25 May

Now I have “finished” David Copperfield, & I say to myself cant I escape to some pleasanter atmosphere? Cant I expand & embalm & become a sentient living creature! Lord how I suffer! What a terrific capacity I possess for feeling with intensity—now, since we came back, I’m screwed up into a ball; cant get into step; cant make things dance; feel awefully detached; see youth; feel old; no, thats not quite it; wonder how a year or 20 perhaps is to be endured. Think, yet people do live; cant imagine what goes on behind faces. All is surface hard; myself only an organ that takes blows, one after another; the horror of the hard raddled faces in the [Chelsea] flower show yesterday; the inane pointlessness of all this existence; hatred of my own brainlessness & indecision: the old treadmill feeling, of going on & on & on; for no reason: Lytton’s death; Carrington’s; a longing to speak to him; all that cut away, gone. Eddy’s idiotic letter; the peevishness & egotism of Eddy; of John; the hardness & competitiveness of life; no space which one can expand in & say Time stand still here; L.’s goodness, & firmness; & the immense responsibility that rests on him. What to do about the press, about Hilda, about John; women; my book on professions; shall I write another novel; contempt for my lack of intellectual power; reading Wells without understanding; Nessa’s children; society; buying clothes; Rodmell spoilt; all England spoilt; terror at night of things generally wrong in the universe; buying clothes; how I hate Bond Street & spending money on clothes; worst of all is this disjected barrenness. And my eyes hurt; & my hand trembles.

A saying of Leonard’s comes into my head in this season of complete inanity & boredom “Things have gone wrong somehow”. It was the night Carrington killed herself. We were walking along that silent blue street with the scaffolding. I saw all the violence & unreason crossing in the air: ourselves small; a tumult outside: something terrifying: unreason. Shall I make a book out of this? It would be a way of bringing order & speed again into my world.

Thursday 26 May

And now today suddenly the weight on my head is lifted. I can think, reason, keep to one thing, & concentrate. Perhaps this is the beginning of another spurt. Perhaps I owe it to my conversation with L. last night. I tried to analyse my depression: how my brain is jaded with the conflict within of two types of thought, the critical, the creative; how I am harassed by the strife & jar & uncertainty without. This morning the inside of my head feels cool & smooth instead of strained & turbulent.

[Friday 27 May]

Last night at Adrian’s evening. Zuckerman on apes. Doris Chapman sitting on the floor. I afraid of Eddy coming in—I wrote him a sharp, but well earned, letter. Adrian so curiously reminiscent—will talk of his school of Greece of the past as if nothing had happened in between: a queer psychological fact in him—this dwelling on the past, when there’s his present & his future all round him: D.C. to wit, & Karin coming in late, predacious, struggling, never amenable or comforting as poor woman no doubt she knows: deaf, twisted, gnarled, short, stockish—baffled, still she comes. Dick Strachey. All these cold elements of a party not mingling. L. & I talk with some effort. Duncan wanders off. Nessa gone to Tarzan. We meet James & Alix in the door. Come & dine says James with the desire strong in him I think to keep hold of Lytton. Monkeys can discriminate between light & dark: dogs cant. Tarzan is made largely of human apes. People have libraries of wild beast ‘shots’ let out on hire. Question how the lion fight was done. Real. Probably the lion was doped or had its claws cut. Talk of Greece. Talk of Spain. Dick was taken for a ghost. A feeling of distance & remoteness. Adrian sepulchral, polite, emaciated, elongated, scientific, called Adrian by Solly; then in come rapid small women, Hughes, & I think his wife. We evaporate at 11.20: courteously thanked for coming by Adrian. Question what pleasure these parties give. Some, presumably, or these singular figures wouldn’t coagulate. A pouring wet day, & we’re off to Rodmell for the week end. As for the Press, we’re to see Harold’s woman on Tuesday & contemplate a re-arrangement: no John, no Hilda, but competent underlings; Belsher coming back after her holiday. Now for more articles. But I think one fortnight will see me through.

Wednesday 1 June

(Derby day.) Oh dear, oh dear, I dont like dining with Clive—not altogether. It is true I conquered, at 8, my profound trepidation about my clothes. “I wont wear my new dress I said, in case I should be laughed at”. This philosophy shivered on the doorstep, when I saw two 20 horse power cars drawn up, apparently, at his door. Again I fluctuated & shivered, like a blown candle flame, when I came in & found only steamy, grubby inarticulate Rex Whistler. Why have I dressed at all I asked. Then Lord David, then Bea Howe, then Mrs Quennell. Thats all. So to dinner. And the boasting! Clive rattling out noble names. Memories of Cecils, & Godolphins: how Jack Caermarthen was engaged to Mary Baker: how the deaf duchess gondoled with the deaf Mrs Baker: but I played my tricks: jumped over the candlestick; & co operated with Clive in the great business of impressing, I think it was, Mrs Quennell. She could only remember diplomatic society in Tokio. Clive luxuriated in the Embassy at Rome. “Lady—I’ve forgotten her name oh of course, Cynthia Graham”. Then, drawing round after dinner, he put me through my paces about Eddy. And he became teasing, malicious; & he said “But you’ve never known anything—once you were out of your mind—that’s all.” & he said “Now tell the truth. You were extremely disagreeable to Eddy .. Well, well; these little hooks only scratch the surface; & there were moments of brilliant fluency which I enjoyed; when I said its far better to be here, rubbing my wits with these charming people than reading Rousseau in my drawing room; then I revoked that opinion; then I floated again; then I landed in the scrannels. No, I dont think I like Clive’s partys anymore—though theyre stirring enough. I pick up too many thorns, one way & another. His oblique method of getting his own back always exacerbates. His own—what did I steal 20 years ago that he should never feel the debt paid? Anyhow, why not refuse the next party, & rummage on my own? My own pie is full enough: Mary, Christabel, Ld David tonight, Peter Lucas, Ethel tomorrow: &c.

[Thursday 2 June]

Lord David’s party last night. Half across London. Derby night. Great motors full of men with buttonholes. A rose pink girl tripping across Sh⁠[aftesbur]⁠y Avenue hand in hand with a young man: all fluff & roses. Edwardes Sqre very large leafy silent Georgian refined: so too no. 41 with its white & green; its one print—but nothing definite eno’ for my taste: Ly Salisbury by Sargent over the mantelpiece; a butler; an orange cat; Ld D. & Eth Bowen talking by the fire; then Puffin, then John Sparrow. Not a good dinner: meagre; exiguous; & I took too many asparagus. All adroit kind nice talk—the note of the Asquiths & Cecils. ‘How very true’—‘Yes, I agree entirely’—so different from B⁠[loomsbur]⁠y. Theres more body to us. Still I dont complain. A little confabulation about Eddy: then about crying at crowds, at theatres, at films; what is tragic; about football. Sp⁠[arrow]. is a bailer, a solid young man, just called to Chancery Bar who writes a life of Donne after dinner. Talk about Auden & Naomi Mitchison: her review of Auden read aloud: Aeschylus “& all that lot”. How she went to a party with corn in her hair: how her group knocks people down; how they pig in the Ellis’s [?] hotel; how she loves, poses, writes but its not really good, says David. Then they talked about the German youth movement: about bad people: about—Lindsey who likes lice in the head; about Murry; & I wore my new dress, too white & young perhaps; & so came home across London, & must now wash for Maynard’s lunch & the Bernard Shaws—oh damn, oh damn—not an idea in my head or a wish to be brilliant

[Friday 3 June]

I dont like old ladies who guzzle. My comment upon Ethel Smyth last night—no doubt a harsh one. But she champed & chopped; & squabbled over her duck; & then was over eaten & had to go home.

My comment upon the Shaws: he said “I am not sufficiently fond of myself to wish for immortality. I should like to be different. I should like to be a performer in music, & a mathematician. So I dont keep a diary. I destroy all my letters. So did [blank in ms.] He had had letters from every great man. He took them out in the garden & burnt them. But I couldnt burn Ellen Terry’s. They were works of art. It would have been like burning a page of the Luttrell psalter. The handwriting was a work of art. She scribb⁠[l]⁠ed them—never thought of a phrase. But I admit that when our correspondence was published I thought—I admit—I shall be the hero: not a bit of it: I have to admit that Ellen was the superior. She comes out far the better of the two. Frank Harris—his life of me was a life of himself. Theres no truth in it about me. No life of me has a word of truth in it. They say my father was persecuted, & that I was persecuted, as a boy—sent to a Wesleyan School. Desmond MacCarthy says he’s going to write my life—well, he may say so. He comes & talks—I cant tell the truth yet, about myself. The Webbs looked lonely somehow going off to Russia. He’s not growing old—no, I dont find that. I’ve always quarrelled with the Webbs. You see Webb has a gigantic faculty for absorbing information. He could have gone to Oxford—found some flaw in the statutes—proved it to the examiners. But didn’t go: only wanted to be in the right. And so, when I first knew him, I had to overcome an immense amount of useless knowledge. He had to forget things he had learnt. I always tell a story to illustrate this. When I was a boy I asked my father “What is a Unitarian” And he thought for a time & then he said, “Unitarians believe that after Christ was crucified he got down off the Cross & ran away on the other side of the hill.” Years later, when I was 30 or so, I was staying with the Trevelyans at Wellcomb; & the talk got upon Unitarians, & it flashed upon me, this cannot be the true story—but I’d always seen Christ running down the hill all those years. Webb would be much more effective if he’d one drop of the artist. But he has, not one. Beatrice is in despair about it. Cant make a good speech therefore. People think my style as speaker is spontaneous, colloquial. Its the most artificial ever known. I’ve taken long railway journeys & spent them saying the letters of the alphabet aloud so as to make my vowels strike out. Then they forget I’m an Irishman—I think quicker than the English. No I dont mug things up—when I write history I dont read it. I imagine the sort of things people would have done & then I say they did them & then I find out facts—one always can—that prove it. The great pleasure of the Broadcasting to me is that I can sit at home & conduct The Meistersinger myself. I sit with the book of the score & conduct & I’m furious when they dont follow me. That way one finds how often the singers make howlers—come in a bar early or late. Beecham—(here he sang a piece of the Magic Flute) turned that—which is solemn, slow, processionly [?]—into a hornpipe. I leapt in my seat (he leapt up his knees & clasped them in agony— he is never still a moment—he clenches his fists—he flings himself this way & that; he sprang up to go, as if he were 22, not 74 as L. remarked. What life, what vitality! What immense nervous spring! That perhaps is his genius. Immense vivacity—& why I dont read him for pleasure. His face is bright red; his nose lumpy: his eyes sea green like a sailors or a cockatoos. He doesnt much notice who’s there. Told stories about the fortunes of plays to Maynard who was rung up 3 or 4 times at lunch by his colleagues at the Savoy. The ballet starts on Monday & he has no notion if it will crash or flourish. People no longer book ahead. Shaw said they used to book 6 weeks ahead.

(I skipped this page, so will insert here how I heard Maynard say to Mrs Shaw “Well, we’re about as bad as we can be. Never been so bad. We may go over the edge—but as its never been like this, nobody knows. One would say we must”—which was uttered in the low tone of a doctor saying a man was dying in the next room; but didnt want to disturb the company. This referred to the state of Europe, while we lunched—very well too.

Saturday 4 June

And last night we stopped the car in Hyde Park & I watched a people on the verge of ruin. How many Rolls Royces, & other low, pink, yellow, very powerful cars werent booming through the park like giant dor-beetles, with luxurious owners, men & women, lying back, on their way to some party. A Rolls Royce means £5000 a year. Then the children in perambulators with nurses. Then the strollers & saunterers. Then the mauve grey green trees, flushed with livid pinks & yellows; the may & the laburnum scarcely burning, like colour under water that cloudy, rainy, thunder yellow evening. So back through the West End—more cars blocked; & we on the verge of a precipice.

This is written, not so much for the sake of its historical interest, as to get the taste of Madame Bolotine’s memoirs out of my mouth. The influence is perceptible. Queer, the pervasiveness of bad writing. And still queerer, the fact that this emotional, unreal badly written, flimsy book is dearer to the writer than a child, has to be delivered by hand, & is the record of a tempestuous violent Russian life yet feebler than Mrs Bartholomew’s memoirs.

[Monday 6 June]

Last night, Sunday, dining at Clive’s. Just back from Wiltshire. Brown. Good tempered. Nessa heating dinner. C. cross with Lottie—too many dishes—too much fuss—does the napkins into shapes—chatter, gossip; ballet; attack on Bolitho’s Price Consort; Quentin thinks Emperor Napoleon attractive; Clive swears he’s wrong; story of Merimée in love with the Empress Mother; so to Tommy & Raymond. Some acrimony. Duncan says “Raymond needs an arboreous bush”. Nessa says T. wd. appreciate that; Raymond wouldn’t; I say T.’s a screeching gull, & ought to be happy in a lovely young wife; Nessa laughs; they say thats the agony—he isn’t happy. What worse torture? says Clive. One would agree to try living with her in Lambs Conduit St. & then the memory of happier days (always thus lyrical about lovers). And he’s falling flat says Nessa: Angus no longer loves him, nor Barbara. Raymond can make a story out of life, T. cant, I say, for all his sitting in public houses. Oh but he can, says Nessa. Raymond only sits in drawing rooms, says D. testy. (He has been testy about Cassis gossip). So to bed: a man says I lunched with Mrs —— & she has a heavenly bull pup 7 weeks old

[Monday 13 June]

Back from a good week end at Rodmell—a week end of no talking, sinking at once into deep safe book reading; & then sleep: clear transparent; with the may tree like a breaking wave outside; & all the garden green tunnels, mounds of green: & then to wake into the hot still day, & never a person to be seen, never an interruption: the place to ourselves: the long hours. To celebrate the occasion I bought a little desk & L. a beehive, & we drove to the Lay; & I did my best not to see the cement sheds. The bees swarmed. Sitting after lunch we heard them outside; & on Sunday there they were again hanging in a quivering shiny brown black purse to Mrs Thompsett’s tombstone. We leapt about in the long grass of the graves, Percy all dressed up in mackintosh, & netted hat. Bees shoot whizz, like arrows of desire: fierce, sexual; weave cats cradles in the air; each whizzing from a string; the whole air full of vibration: of beauty, of this burning arrowy desire; & speed: I still think the quivering shifting bee bag the most sexual & sensual symbol. So home, through vapours, tunnels, caverns of green: with pink & yellow glass mounds in gardens—rhododendrons. To Nessa’s. Adrian has told Karin that he must separate She demurs. They are to start separate houses, he says, in the autumn.

Last week was such a scrimmage: oh so many people: among them Doris [Chapman] & Adrian: she like a dogfish: that circular slit of a mouth in a pale flesh: & an ugly rayed dress: but said by Nessa to be nice. Why the bees should swarm round her, I cant say. Now Vita rings up: may she & Harold dine tonight: then Ethel: I look ahead to my fortnights week end.

Saturday z8 June

Adrian rings up & says “Can you suggest a tenant for two rooms? We’re in the throes of dividing things up.” Whether he goes & Karin stays, I dont know. John stays, on a revised basis, as adviser; Miss Scott Johnson as permanent manager; & I am to consult & help John more, & not to sit here “with a red cross on your door, so that I daren’t come in.” My advice is that he shall be more malleable, & less pernickety. He craves influence & authority, to publish the books of his friends: wishes to start a magazine; is poor; cant do without pay; must economise; live with Peggy in Pimlico. Am I too aloof—partly so as not to chatter, partly to get to my own work? Ought one to be more sympathetic; but oh so many people to see & things to fit in already: nevertheless I’ll try, if the new method is to be tried. He says Leonard is “so deep: & plans things; & never comes out at once with what he means; so that I dont know how to behave.” I daresay we’ve spent 10 hours talking about all this. Ethel more than usually controlled. Headaches skirmishing. Oh & I’m finishing the C.R.: I trust to God; have done the last article, & hope to send off to be typed tomorrow. Desmond’s criticism rather sends my value up in my eyes: can’t make a dint in a pat of butter. Man of the word. Respectable, acute, astute, to the point.

Nessa & Duncan’s private view. Tatlock smelling of drink. Horsey [?] arty people. Agnews. Mrs Grant. Mrs Rendel. All this moving round the pictures, & I meeting Ethel [Smyth] in electric blue & Quentin: & she telling us at Stewarts how Miss Liddell rolled down the steps at Marlborough House dead drunk.

Friday 24 June

On the verge of my fortnightly dip at Monk’s House. Dinner at the Hutchinsons last night: sat between Desmond & Lord Balniel. Lord & Lady Derwent also there; & Lord David [Cecil] only absent because of a sprained ankle; & Lord Chichester ringing up. “So good for Leonard” Jack said, “all these Lords.” A certain thin spread tightness in the talk. Champagne necessary. Two footmen. Lady Balniel simple hard direct plain confident young with children, aristocratic. Desmond back from Cambridge & Abbott [a friend]. Very cheerful: & I think his book so bad. How then can he be cheerful? The thin stretched whipped up champagne talk was about—oh, I said to Lord B. some nonsense about pictures: & he said my writing (I’m so well known now) was more real than his politics. “I go about in my wife’s country, & up in Lancashire: I meet the oddest people; very nice: we talk: I’ve got to make a speech at a bazaar about the Christian attitude to the unemployment question. What does it mean? And so dont get much time for pictures. David Cecil & I always loved pictures, even at Eton.” Ly D. Roumanian, passionate, dumb. Jack small talk with Lady B. Mary expanding about Sadlers Wells to B. about Courthauld. B. smoking a cheroot. D. saying what it felt like to be sick. So to the Zoo: a mist rising; white bears elongated like El Grecos: stinking meat held near my nose: bear bit a boy’s arm off; bears dived; white explosion; red & yellow fairy lamps; distant music; the sea lions, rushing like torpedoes, flouncing up the rocks; in silk coats; the blind bear; one swollen white eye; birds flying under the livid green; baby sea lions, like puppies; Mary tipping the man: her sexual response: home with Desmond till 1.

Tuesday 28 June

Just “finished De Quincey”. Thus am I trying to keep pace with the days & deliver the 2nd C.R. done on the last of June—which I see with dismay is Thursday. I spent last summer thus toiling over The Waves. This is less severe by a long chalk (whats the origin of that? cricket pitch? billiards?) Anyhow it blazes; swoons; the heat. Royal, imperial, are the words I fumble with in the Square. So hot yesterday—so hot, when Prince Mirsky came with his dubious fluent Russian lady: I mean she was full of temperament; had the free gestures of the Slav; but Mirsky was trap mouthed; opened & bit his remark to pieces: has yellow misplaced teeth; wrinkles his forehead; dispair, suffering, very marked on his face. Has been in England, in boarding houses for 12 years; now returns to Russia ‘for ever’. I thought as I watched his eye brighten & fade—soon there’ll be a bullet through your head. Thats one of the results of war: this trapped cabin’d man: but that didnt lubricate our tea.

Vita came in; then Alix; both relieved of their books (Vita’s is said to be bad) & so rather elated. Vita is driving west, alone, for 4 days today. An American has offered her £250 for 2,000 words; & will offer the same to me. I doubt it. Alix like a red Indian; so large boned, & with wrinkles, & sunburn like an Indians. And tonight, to my considerable alarm, at opening an entirely new door, into an entirely new room, I dine with Katharine Furse. And here’s Morgan come to lunch. So enough.

Wednesday 29 June

The room was a very sumptuous room; a wide staircase led to it; a broad hall. I was early. “What a magnificent cabinet!” I said to hide my nervousness, with this old charwoman in the tight dress & black stockings. All her hair has shrunk. She has the hardened, lined, drawn face of a very unhappy woman. Why, in that light she looked terrible to me. Where had the handsome Katharine gone: she who strode; had firm red cheeks; & was decisive, masterly, controlled even in the great trench [?] of her unhappiness? Heavens, what an injury life inflicts! To have replaced that dashing youth with this almost intolerable look of suffering: a grudging look; a scraped bare look; the ugly poor woman look. By dint of arrangement, by looking through half closed eyes I could, as the evening wore on & the light faded piece together something fine: her eyes; small but penetrating; her gestures—they are still free & bold, though so much hampered by bare arms & tight ugly black & blue dress. What is fine is that she conceals nothing; has no shrinking left; has been wrung & mangled out of the softnesses & sensibilities. How white her face is, too; yet she commanded her table—her & Follett’s table—with the old mastery; but as if nothing gave her any pleasure. She never relaxed. Never lost her look of suffering the whole evening. To harden to blunt to coarsen that is the worst damage age—& I daresay she’s only 8 years older than I am—can inflict. Is this all Charles’ death? Or what? The talk spattered & sprinkled. A dry precise old pepperbox called Cabot, professor of Harvard, his vague wife, Mary Follett, verbose, diffuse—that was the party & we sat & let the light turn grey & cold & all the cabinets grow dim—all very elderly & ugly. Was that contained in my dismay with Katharine—the sense I look like that too. Perhaps. Then Leonard came in, in his grey suit & blue tie, sunburnt; & I felt that we are still vigorous & young. And so kissed Katharine the old woman on the doorstep. Yes, last time we met she was driving a dogcart: & it was a cold winters day, & she was going to the docks to look at treasure.

[Sunday 3 July]

Whenever I suck my pen, my lip is covered with ink. And I have no ink with which to fill my pot; & it is 10 minutes past 12; & I have just finished Hardy; & I promise myself that the C.R. will be finally done by Wednesday next. And today is Sunday. Last night at 10. the Zeppelin came past with a string of light hanging from its navel. This consoled me for not having gone to the last night of the [Camargo] ballet.

Now I have cleaned my table; which John inherits while I’m away. And I should now attack Ch. Rossetti. But Lord, how tired one gets of one’s own writing.

[Wednesday 6 July]

Today is Wednesday & the CR I confess is not yet quite done. But then—well I had to re-write the last article, which I had thought so good, entirely. Not for many years shall I collect another bunch of articles. Many many people, too, & parties still to be transacted. On Sunday the Bussies; he detached ironic Gallic; she intense, worried, ineffective rather; money troubles; war loan investments vanished; they’re left with £80 income. But we shall go to Spain in September said Simon. Then to Angelica, passing the funeral in Epping forest; Nessa made her dress for the ballet party sitting in a field after lunch, while Quentin & Angelica wandered & L. made up an article & spoke to an old man in a hedge. Then Adrian came on Sunday night, garrulous & cheerful; talking science: then [on 4 July] we dined with the James’s: Alix Red Indian: James trying to extend a feeler from his hard nut. I’m an old friend, Lytton’s friend. Will we choose books. How Carrington lied to him the night before Lytton died: said she wd not kill herself; was found unconscious in the car later. How regular your books are I said: a mere weed, he said of Eddy in Lytton’s way

These days have been very hot & very busy: books out tomorrow, Plomer, my letter & Hugh’s.

[Friday 8 July]

And so I fainted, at the Ivy: & had to be led out by Clive. A curious sensation. Feeling it come on; sitting still & fading out: then Clive by my side & a woman with salts. And the odd liberation of emotion in the cab with Clive; & the absolute delight of dark & bed: after that stony rattling & heat & Frankie shouting; & things being churned up, removed.

I write this on a blazing morning, because L. is instructing Miss C⁠[ashin]. how to arrange the books: so that I cant correct articles. “Everywhere I look everything is hopeless…. Either the Northern Saga ought not to be here at all—or it ought to be in the other room…. (John is ill: publishing day yesterday; Harold drivelling snapping, when I hoped for ‘serious criticism’—why go on hoping?) the whole of thats going over—Here are 3 things of Nature has no tune of wh. we dont sell a copy a year….”

Oh dear, I’ve twenty minutes to use; & cant ‘correct’ any more. What a fling I shall have into fiction & freedom when this is off! At once, an American comes to ask me to consider writing articles for some huge figure. And (hushed be this said) I sent Nessa a cheque for £100 last night: & Leonard gave his mother £50, & Philip [his youngest brother] £50. These are among the solid good things, I think: Nessa’s £100 will buy her some release from worry, I hope: Clive saying they must spend £600 a year less. Roger to have his operation, said to be slight, tomorrow. Adrian fretted to death—almost to fainting in the street—must anyhow stumble in to Nessa’s & ask for water & spend the evening—by the vagaries of his Doris. This is what Francis foretold: a girl of dubious morality, & to me like a codfish in her person. And there are fleas at M⁠[onks].H⁠[ouse].: to which we go; & black beetles here, & said to be mice also.

Monday 11 July

I will take a new pen & a new page to record the fact which is now a fact that I have slipped a green rubber band round the Common Reader, second series, & there it lies, at 10 minutes to one, ready to take upstairs. There is no sense of glory; only of drudgery done. And yet I daresay its a nice enough book to read—I doubt that I shall write another like it all the same. I must find a quicker cut into books than this. But heaven be praised, not now. Now I’m taking a holiday. That is to say, what shall I write tomorrow? I can sit down & think.

Wednesday 13 July

I have been sleeping over a promising novel. Thats the way to write. Its a livid hot day; & Clive has been summoned to take Mary Baker to Claridges—Oh dont think me too frivolous—& may I know who was coming—what young lady—& we’ve got Morgan instead—a change all to L.’s liking. Almost our last party.

I’m ruminating, as usual, how to improve my lot; & shall begin by walking, alone, in Regents Park this afternoon. What I mean is why do a single thing one doesn’t want to do—for instance buy a hat or read a book? Old Joseph Wright & Lizzie Wright are people I respect. Indeed I do hope the 2nd vol. will come this morning. He was a maker of dialect dixeries: he was a workhouse boy—his mother went charing. And he married Miss Lea a clergyman’s daughter. And I’ve just read their love letters with respect. And he said “Always please yourself—then one person’s happy at any rate”. And she said “make details part of a whole—get proportions right”—contemplating marriage with Joe. Odd how rare it is to meet people who say things that we ourselves could have said. Their attitude to life much our own. Joe a very thick sturdy man—‘I am unique in certain respects’ he said. ‘We must leave some record of Joe & Lizzie to posterity’. Had his old working mother to Oxford. She thought All Souls would make a good Co-op. Had a fist & struck boys. His notion of learning. I sometimes would like to be learned myself. About sounds & dialects. Still what use is it? I mean, if you have that mind why not make something beautiful? Yes, but then the triumph of learning is that it leaves something done solidly for ever. Everybody knows now about dialect, owing to his dixery. He is a coarse, sturdy variety of Sidney Webb & Walter Leaf—stockish, hairy; more humorous & forcible than either. Could work all night, wash, & work all next day. Miss Weisse, Tovey’s lady, brought them together—made Lizzy give up arranging the flowers in the Rectory & go to Oxford. She a woman of character. Wouldnt accept Jo’s offer of a job because he made her feel like a bear at the end of a chain. But she married him. They were lost in the woods by Virginia Water in 1896: & sat on a seat & had an hour of great suffering, after which she accepted him—they got on a bakers cart & were taken back to Miss Weisse. An absorbing story. Joe knew all about servants. Joe taught himself to read at 14; taught mill boys in a bedroom for 2d a week; a surly but very sensitive man, apparently. Now this is a testimony to Joe & Lizzy that I’ve been thinking how I should have liked to see them—would now like to write to her. A fine face with bright big eyes—yes—but what happens in volume two?

Thursday 14 July

‘Immunity’ I said to myself half an hour ago, lying back in my chair. Thats the state I am (or was) in. And its a holy, calm, satisfactory flawless feeling—To be immune, means to exist apart from rubs, shocks, suffering; to be beyond the range of darts; to have enough to live on without courting flattery, success; not to need to accept invitations; not to mind other people being praised; to feel This—to sit & breathe behind my screen, alone, is enough; to be strong; content; to let Nessa & D. go to Paris without envy; to feel no one’s thinking of me; to feel I have done certain things & can be quiet now; to be mistress of my hours; to feel detached from all sayings about me; & claims on me; to be glad of lunching alone with Leonard; to have a spare time this afternoon; to read Coleridge’s letters. Immunity is an exalted calm desirable state, & one I could reach much oftener than I do.

[Saturday 16 July]

Stella Benson last night: as quiet, as controlled, white, drawn as usual, also deaf: with steady honest eyes; said she had been to a great many parties. “I just say nothing. I feel none of these people matters. They say how much they liked my book .. I was given a medal. The old gentleman couldnt remember what for. He pinned it on. Both my dogs are dead. I liked one for bounding. But that was only a sign of Stannard’s disease. I go back in August—to Linlon (or some such name) a mud island. I hate Hong Kong. They play games. At Government House they give you a slip of paper with names of games on it: you have to put a cross next the one you play. Sitting out is one. James & I choose that. So we sit out together.” That was her style in a very weak but persistent voice; she coughs; & then goes on with a mild persistent patience. She is bleached; even her blue eyes are bleached. But at the same time she’s practical; realistic: talked, of course, of “Pearnie”—doesnt like her—& making money by stories; & Harpers & so on; in a sensible matter of fact way, like a working class woman. Then smiles with her charming steady eyes. The light faded grey in the drawing room, & she sat there lying back telling us in a very low voice, which went on steadily about the slave trade in H.K.; about James & his little Chinese destroyer, manned by ex-officers from England; how they steam out after sailing ships: the ships cant escape; they throw out bales of cotton & flannel: which float: James goes aboard & discovers the deck laden with opium, heroin; man cries out “That little parcel’s for my father. Let me have that”. Then all the other men say that the cement &c is a present for an aunt. There’s always fighting. Chinese planes come over very low down. Shoot with revolvers. She sits in her kitchen. All the inhabitants crowd round, thinking the English safe—pretend they’re selling eggs. Chinese generals come to dine & stand rifles on each side of their chairs: send soldiers into the kitchen to see that the food isn’t poisoned. She goes back for another two years. Writes & writes. Must buzz home in her little Morris Cowley to write 8 pages of her monthly notes for Time & Tide. I ask why? Oh its good pay. Has bought a house in Kensington. Will come back for 2 years with James, who will be The O’Gorman. All this serious, weary, intent. I like her & was glad to sign her Waves.

[Monday 18 July]

Clive & Mary [Baker] last night, small, pink, underbred; not a woman of the world; without distinction; nice; rich; has lived above her means, spiritually & socially; has a little edge to her mind; tells her little story. Clive’s bad manners—how she almost married Ld C⁠[armar]⁠then; might stand in a Tobacconists — — waspish; enamoured; C. bending over her cigarette case; fetching her coat (black: expensive): all this strained; incredible to spend weeks with her: no prestige attached; no glow; a little pickety, nervous, enthusiastic, hysterical dog—for all the world like the little yapping dog that ran mad round the Round Pond. Nessa (next day, going to the carpet shop) says Ah yes, but think of the speed boat!

Thursday 21 July

Oh but I’m so tired—I sometimes think people cant know what they do to me when they ask me to ‘see’ them: how they hold me in the scorching light: how I dry & shrivel: how I lie awake at night longing for rest—this is true. But know that I’m to be pitchforked up into the light & the glare again next day. Mary [Hutchinson] yesterday; Ethel today; Adrian tomorrow: & Ju⁠[lia Strachey], Since Monday, Nessa, Angelica: Tom & Eth Bowen; Katharine & Follett; then Adrian’s suicidal face at night gave me the nightmare. And my head aches; & my back; & I’m sapped; wilted. Never mind. I shall lie in the cool at Monks House.

Alice Ritchie ringing me up about dinner, said “One thing I want to say. Please dont go so far away in your next book”. She had just re-read The Waves: magnificent: but loneliness almost unbearable. Mrs Hardy writes that she has often wished, after my wonderful article on Hardy, that she had asked me to write his life. Had I consented she would have given me all the materials. And how proud I was to be asked to do the T.L.S. article!

On the other hand, my poet letter passes unnoticed.

[Friday 22 July]

I do not like Ethel when she is doing the powerful stunt—or whatever stunt it is: proclaiming that all is over; denouncing me; protesting her love; whipping up a scene; being august; despairing; melodramatic, & wobbly & weak all at the same time. No I do not like it: & also I am bored. This is the old fashioned version of an emotional scene—the tactics are to leave the other person in a hole—where indeed I would willingly have been left, if I had not remembered then all the letters I should have to write & the telephones: so I shouted after her, as she stumped down stairs, “Do you want your letters?” & as she tied them up—the HB letters—I teased & railed, & felt the hollowness of it all, & her unattractive old age—not much else, so dusty & jaded I am—& she went—in what mood I do not know. Its the superficiality of these things that disenchants one: her lust for emotion. Or so I felt. Seeing herself, dramatising herself instead of being anything.

But I am distraught & lazy: I am frittering away these last mornings experimenting with little stories; but, as L. says, the change makes all work impossible: the sorting⁠[;] packing; like a dog one senses the move; then there’s Adrian tonight, & Julia & so on: then there’s Welwyn I think tomorrow. Nessa is gone; oh & my proofs will soon be coming; oh & I want to think out certain problems: & to be more vagarious: not yet to eat myself into a book. I want to go to Ireland, could that be managed. Are we too aloof, & absorbed—this work—whats the use of so much money—familiar thoughts: also another novel: Desmond gets between, why⁠[?]: his tepid praise; & the difficulty: peoples minds & bodies to be separated; & clothes; & demeanour; & the autumn; & our relations with people. Dine & sleep parties. &c.

Friday 5 August

Rodmell

Yesterday L. came in to my room at Breakfast & said Goldie is dead. One of those muddles apparently; he refused to tell his sister; took advice only of Morgan & Gerald Heard; was anxious to be economical; went to Guys; had an operation, secretly, a week ago; Roger saw him on Tuesday (I think) thought the little cubicle dirty; talked; supposed him to be recovering; he died suddenly that night, of an internal haemorrhage. There was no time to send for anybody. These are the dismal details of the end of that fine charming spirit—so much a spirit that my thought was, anyhow he wont mind. And then, how much of a piece with our friends, like him, we are; it is thus we die, when they die. Regrets for not having had him here. He made his farewell intentionally at the [Apostles’] dinner in June: spoke of death & not minding it. I never knew him well but had the common feeling that I have with those trusty Cambridge fellows; & was pleased, of course, by what he wrote of The Waves; & so came nearer. I get the strangest feeling now of our all being in the midst of some vast operation: of the splendour of this undertaking—life: of being capable of dying: an immensity surrounds us. No—I cant get it—shall let it brood itself into ‘a novel’, no doubt. (Its thus I get the conception from which the book condenses). At night L. & I talked of death again the second time this year: we may be like worms crushed by a motor car: what does the worm know of the car—how it is made? There may be a reason; if so not one we, as human beings, can grasp. Goldie had some mystic belief.

And now we have been to Lewes races & seen the fat lady in black with parts of her person spilling over the shooting seat on which her bulk is so insecurely poised: seen the riff raff of sporting society all lined up in their cars with the dickies bulging with picnic baskets: heard the bark of bookies; & seen for a second the pounding straining horses with red faced jockeys lashing them pound by. What a noise they made—what a sense of muscle hard & stretched—& beyond the downs this windy sunny day looked wild & remote; & I could rethink them into uncultivated land again.

So people will go on dying until we die, Leonard said. Lytton, Carrington, Goldie—all last August to be spoken to—or let go, alas, because of the many times one would see them. That is one of my results: not to let friends lapse. But what can one do? One has to follow ones bent—mine often to be moody, irritable, longing for solitude. I will try to write to Helen: to ask Saxon down. These are the little efforts I make against death—& am at the same time, annoyed that my clean dress hasn’t come, & that I’ve re-arranged the drawing room to L.’s liking to my disliking.

Wednesday 17 August

Now I think I have corrected the CR till I can correct no longer. And I have a few minutes holiday, before I need take the proofs in to L. Shall I then describe how I fainted again?—That is the galloping horses got wild in my head last Thursday night as I sat on the terrace with L. How cool it is after the heat! I said. We were watching the downs draw back into fine darkness after they had burnt like solid emerald all day. Now that was being softly finely veiled. And the white owl was crossing to fetch mice from the marsh. Then my heart leapt; & stopped; & leapt again; & I tasted that queer bitterness at the back of my throat; & the pulse leapt into my head & beat & beat, more savagely, more quickly. I am going to faint I said & slipped off my chair & lay on the grass. Oh no I was not unconscious. I was alive; but possessed with this struggling team in my head: galloping, pounding. I thought something will burst in my brain if this goes on. Slowly it muffled itself. I pulled myself up, & staggered, with what infinite difficulty & alarm, now truly fainting & seeing the garden painfully lengthened & distorted, back back back—how long it seemed—could I drag myself?—to the house; & gained my room & fell on my bed. Then pain, as of childbirth; & then that too slowly faded; & I lay presiding, like a flickering light, like a most solicitous mother, over the shattered splintered fragments of my body. A very acute & unpleasant experience.

Saturday 20 August

A curious day in London yesterday. I said to myself standing at L.’s window, ‘Look at the present moment because its not been so hot for 21 years.’ There was a hot wind, as if one passed over a kitchen, going from the studio to the Press. Outside girls & young men lying in white on the Square grass. So hot we couldn’t sit in the dining room. L. fetched & carried & hardly let me walk upstairs carrying my own body. Coming back we had the car shut & the windscreen open—thus sat in a hot rough gale, which, as we came to the lanes & woods became deliciously cold & green. The coolest place is the front seat of a car going at 40 or 50 miles with the windscreen open. Today, at 12.30 a wind rose: clouds descended; now at 3.45 its almost a normal warm summer day. For 10 days this heat has lasted. After my faint my head soon throbs: or so I think. I think, a little, of dying suddenly. & reflect well then go about eating & drinking & laughing & feeding the fish. Odd—the silliness one attributes to death—the desire one has to belittle it, & be found as Montaigne said, laughing with girls & good fellows. And L. is staking out the dewpond; & I am going in to be photographed.

Three more books appearing on Mrs Woolf; which reminds me to make a note, some time, on my work.

Reading this August:

People this August

Souvenirs de Tocqueville

Nessa. Julian

Any number of biographies—

Clive. F. Marshall

Coleridge—one or two poems.

Maynard Lydia

Lord Kilbracken memoirs.

Sheppard. Roger.

Shaw Pen portraits.

Alice Ritchie (to stay)

Ainslie memoirs.

Tom & Vivienne.

Vita’s novel

Adrian & Karin

MSS.(Livingstones)

Judith

Nothing much good—

Nicolsons.

except de T:

Coleridges letters; but failed to finish the 2nd vol.

Friday 2 September

After this the wind blew & released all the prisoners—so I thought, walking on the down above Lewes in the sudden slaty chill. But thats long past; & it is a sea fret today, as we had meant to go to Canterbury. As we had meant—but whats the good of meaning when at any moment there’s a tap—behold Tom & Vivienne [Eliot]: we cant buy our fish for dinner. But it was a friendly thought,—she wild as Ophelia—alas no Hamlet would love her, with her powdered spots—in white satin, L. said; Tom, poor man, all battened down as usual, prim, grey, making his kind jokes with her. “Oh but why didn’t they tell me Adrian Stephen was your brother. Why? Why! Nobody mentioned it. They kept it from me.” Then her chops & changes. Where is my bag? Where—where—then a sudden amorous embrace for me—& so on: trailing about the garden—never settling—seizing the wheel of their car—suddenly telling Tom to drive—all of which he bears with great patience: feeling perhaps that his 7 months of freedom draw near. In the middle of their tea the post came with an astonishing letter from John to say that he does not intend to carry out our agreement. He has left the press. L. says he will send no answer. What could one say indeed? What a blessing! That egotistical young man with all his jealousies & vanities & ambitions, his weakness & changeableness is no loss. But we—or L. has lost an infinity of time. I suppose the severity with wh. L. was speaking to him on Friday when I came in to say Teas ready upset his trembling apple cart: his vanity could no longer endure: so he threw up the sponge, but I must say with the least possible good manners or consideration. On the whole though what a mercy. Now I can roam about the basement unperturbed. And, coming from him, with this crashing folly, one can take the line of least resistance—needn’t attempt the amicable go between—needn’t ask him to dinner.

A happy lively summer this—& I enjoy my freak of writing Flush—& think it a good idea—this easy indolent writing once in a way—to let my brain cool; & here I am, asked to write about ‘my father’ in the Times. No. So to give old Mrs Grey her basket of plums. The Common Reader went off on Monday last.

Friday 16 September

I’m in such a tremor that I’ve botched the last—penultimate chapter of Flush—is it worth writing that book—& can scarcely sit still, & must therefore scribble here, making myself form my letters, because—oh ridiculous crumpled petal—Wishart is publishing L.’s snap shot of me instead of the Lenare photograph & I feel that my privacy is invaded; my legs show; & I am revealed to the world (1,000 at most) as a plain dowdy old woman. How odd! I never gave the matter a thought till this morning. I sent the photographs off with some compunction at being too late. Now I’m all of a quiver—cant read or write; & can, rightly, expect little sympathy from L. What an ill joined web of nerves—to be kind—my being is! A touch makes the whole thing quiver. What can it matter? The complex is: privacy invaded, ugliness revealed—oh & that I was trapped into it by Wishart. Lord! One of the contributory causes is the auctioneers catalogue of the Rodmell sale. My ivy blooming walk is to be sold for building (the bees on the ivy bloom—quoted one afternoon by Tom). A road is to be made from Deans to the down path. All is to be houses inside. Shall we try to buy? Is it worth saving one crumb when all is threatened? Yet on my walk—too long—I was tired—& leapt in my bed dreaming that Angelica was dead—what a dream—how vivid—on my walk I almost felt my mind glow like hot iron—so complete & holy was the old habitual beauty of England: the silver sheep clustering; & the downs soaring, like birds wings sweeping up & up—I said [to] myself that beauty had become almost entirely satisfactory (oh my legs in the snapshot). I mean, I can fasten on a beautiful day, as a bee fixes itself on a sunflower. It feeds me, rests me, satisfies me, as nothing else does—(well thats not quite true: when Nessa, Duncan & the children come I brim equally; but with a thinner, more exciting ardour—I think a better heat⁠[?] & rapture—but not this.) This has a holiness. This will go on after I’m dead.

A very good summer, this, for all my shying & jibbing, my tremors this morning. Beautifully quiet, airy, powerful. I believe I want this more humane existence for my next—to spread carelessly among one’s friends—to feel the width & amusement of human life: not to strain to make a pattern just yet: to be made supple, & to let the juice of usual things, talk, character, seep through me, quietly, involuntarily before I say—Stop, & take out my pen. Yes, my thighs now begin to run smooth: no longer is every nerve upright.

Yesterday we took plums to old Mrs Grey. She is shrunk, & sits on a hard chair in the corner, the door open. She twitches & trembles. Has the wild expressionless stare of the old. L. liked her despair: I crawls up to bed hoping for the day; & I crawls down hoping for the night. “I’m an ignorant old woman—cant write or read. But I prays to God every night to take me—oh to go to my rest. Nobody can say what pains I suffer. Feel my shoulder” & she began shuffling with a safety pin. I felt it. “Hard as iron—full of water—& my legs too”—She pulled down her stocking. The dropsy. “I’m ninety two; & all my brothers & sisters are dead; my daughters dead; my husband is dead…” She repeated her misery, her list of ills, over & over; could see nothing else; could only begin all over again; & kissed my hand, thanking us for our pound. This is what we make of our lives—no reading or writing—keep her alive with parish doctors when she wishes to die—Human ingenuity in torture is very great.

Sunday 2 October

London

Yes. I will allow myself a new nib. Odd how coming back here upsets my writing mood. Odder still how possessed I am with the feeling that now, aged 50, I’m just poised to shoot forth quite free straight & undeflected my bolts whatever they are. Therefore all this flitter flutter of weekly newspapers interests me not at all. These are the soul’s changes. I dont believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one’s aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism. And to alter now, cleanly & sanely, I want to shuffle off this loose living randomness: people; reviews; fame; all the glittering scales; & be withdrawn; & concentrated. So I shant run about, just yet, buying clothes, seeing people. We are off to Leicester tomorrow, to the Labour party conference. Then back to the fever of publishing. My C.R. doesnt cause me a single tremor. Nor Holtby’s book. I’m interested in watching what goes on for the moment without wishing to take part—a good frame of mind, when one’s conscious of power. Then I am backed now by the downs: the country: how happy L. & I are at Rodmell: what a free life that is—sweeping 30 or 40 miles; coming in when & how we like; sleeping in the empty house; dealing triumphantly with interruptions; & diving daily into that divine loveliness—always some walk: & the gulls on the purple plough; or going over to Tarring Neville—these are the flights I most love now—in the wide, the indifferent air. No being jerked, teased, tugged. And people come easily, flowering into intimacy in my room. But this is the past, or future.

I am also reading DHL. with the usual sense of frustration. Not that he & I have too much in common—the same pressure to be ourselves: so that I dont escape when I read him; am surfeited; what I want is to be made free of another world. This Proust does. To me Lawrence is airless, confined: I dont want this, I go on saying. And the repetition of one idea. I dont want that either. I dont want ‘a philosophy’ in the least; I dont believe in other people’s reading of riddles. What I enjoy (in the Letters) is the sudden visualisation: the great ghost springing over the wave (of the spray in Cornwall) but I get no satisfaction from his explanations of what he sees. And then its harrowing: this panting effort after something; & ‘I have £6.10 left’ & then Government hoofing him out, like a toad; & banning his book; the brutality of civilised society to this panting agonised man: & how futile it was. All this makes a sort of gasping in his letters. And none of it seems essential. So he pants & jerks. Then too I dont like strumming with two fingers—& the arrogance. After all English has one million words: why confine yourself to 6? & praise yourself for so doing. But its the preaching that rasps me. Like a person delivering judgment when only half the facts are there; & clinging to the rails & beating the cushion. Come out & see whats up here—I want to say. I mean its so barren; so easy; giving advice on a system. The moral is, if you want to help, never systematise—not till you’re 70: & have been supple & sympathetic & creative & tried out all your nerves & scopes. He died though at 45. And why does Aldous say he was an ‘artist’? Art is being rid of all preaching: things in themselves: the sentence in itself beautiful: multitudinous seas; daffodils that come before the swallow dares: whereas L⁠[awrence]. would only say what proved something. I havent read him of course. But in the Letters he cant listen beyond a point; must give advice; get you in to the system too. Hence his attraction for those who want to be fitted; which I dont: indeed I think it a blasphemy this fitting of Carswells into a Lawrence system. So much more reverent to leave them alone: nothing else to reverence except the Carswellism of Carswell. Hence his minds schoolboy tweaking & smacking of anyone offered to him: Lytton, Bertie,—Squire—all are suburban, unclean. His ruler coming down & measuring them. Why all this criticism of other people? Why not some system that includes the good? What a discovery that would be—a system that did not shut out.

Thursday 13 October

It was an odd sight—Desmond with Rachel on his arm. Everybody stood up. The white & red procession with the cross in front went ahead. Then very small, smooth, pale & sleek appeared Rachel & Desmond arm in arm. I have never seen him as a father. Now he was that—gentle, kind—leading his daughter. She was a wax work—with her diamond cross; very pale; very small; carrying a white book. Oh but the inadequacy of the service—the sense of its being the entirely obsolete & primitive voice of a defunct tribal magnate, laying down laws for the government of the tribe: & then these civilised sceptical people letting themselves pretend that they obey. That clogged & diluted all the real feeling. And David’s high collar & tails: & their sober, decorous backs kneeling there: & the respectability & the wavering watery music: the perpetual compromise. I sat with Hope. Opposite were the sort of women one sees in Oxford St. at midday. (11.30). The bridegrooms side was notably better tailored & more distinguished than ours—where, as I imagine, all the Ritchies & so on had come, saying well, I’m a first cousin so I needn’t buy new gloves. Molly was much as a pouter pigeon in some maroon dress with a yellow bunch. The ceremony went decorously forward in that grey brown church. Now & then one heard a shout from the market. No I dont like the ceremony. They hauled a dilapidated bishop up by the armpits to give the blessing which he did in a trembling overemphatic voice, as if he were scrubbing the heads of David & Rachel as he called them. Then a sort of inner play went forward behind glass doors. One saw Salisburys & MacCs signing books. Then a dribble back of relatives. Then the Wagner wedding march. Then David & Rachel arm in arm sleep walking down the aisle preceded by a cross which ushered them into a car & so into a happy long life, I make no doubt—but thats not the ceremony I like—oh no not at all. And following in the wake of the sleep walkers came the Salisburys & the MacCarthys arm in arm: dwindling into Dermod & a wizened old lady—presumably old Mrs M. [Rachel’s brother and grandmother.] “Theyre hideously plain” Hope kept saying—indeed green grey light at midday off old stone is not genial—oh & I wanted some rapture—some precious stone to hold. None. None. Only endless small observations—Hubert C⁠[ornish, Rachel’s uncle], carrying two umbrellas—Ralph & Frances in grey tweeds—late—taking prominent places. Lady Oxford, Lady Hartington, Ly Colefax, Maurice Baring & so on. A queer little dolls face, Rachel’s, to harbour a passion, to bear children. And I got washed up against the Bishop going out, & heard him apologise to the cleric. But it is an honour to support a Bishop, said that man. And then they began talking about so & so, Colonel of the Scotts guards, & so to the episcopal motor car, which was holding up the meat salesmen—with its gold cross. And now Desmond is stretched out by the fire in slippers, preparing his BBC talk I daresay: & Rachel & David are—shall we say—in a first class reserved carriage going to Sherborne: & he is putting the rug straight over her knees; & she is looking at the fields, thinking Why has the whole world been given me: then they have tea: I should think he will be shy tonight.

Today the CR is out & I havent give it a thought, being entirely absorbed in my Essay, which I began yesterday. The last 3 or four days I’ve done parcels in a daze: Belsher ill; 6,000 Family History [by V. Sackville-West] to be despatched: a great bundle of orders found last night hidden in a drawer.

But I still see the two doll figures kneeling—for all the world like a picture—what do I mean? I’m too sleepy to say. And now for Spender.

Wednesday 2 November

He [Stephen Spender] is a rattle headed bolt eyed young man, raw boned, loose jointed who thinks himself the greatest poet of all time. I daresay he is—it’s not a subject that interests me enormously at the moment. What does? My own writing of course. I’ve just polished up the L⁠[eslie].S⁠[tephen]. for the Times—a good one, I think, considering the currents that sway round that subject in the Times of all papers. And I have entirely remodelled my ‘Essay’. Its to be an Essay-Novel, called the Pargiters—& its to take in everything, sex, education, life &c; & come, with the most powerful & agile leaps, like a chamois across precipices from 1880 to here & now—Thats the notion anyhow, & I have been in such a haze & dream & intoxication, declaiming phrases, seeing scenes, as I walk up Southampton Row that I can hardly say I have been alive at all, since the 10th Oct. Everything is running of its own accord into the stream, as with Orlando. What has happened of course is that after abstaining from the novel of fact all these years—since 1919—& N⁠[ight]. & D⁠[ay]. indeed, I find myself infinitely delighting in facts for a change, & in possession of quantitities beyond counting: though I feel now & then the tug to vision, but resist it. This is the true line, I am sure, after The Waves—The Pargiters—this is what leads naturally on to the next stage—the essay-novel. Then of course being so excited, so incandescent, I must needs fire up about Priestley & his priestliness, & write an essay, wh. L. very rightly advised against sending to the N. Statesman. So I have cellared it, against a rainy day, when I shall re-write it as an essay Middlebrow. And then all this incandescence led to the galloping horses in my heart the night before last. I lay in bed reasoning that I could not come smash. Death I defy you, &c. But it was a terrific effort, holding on to the reins. So at 2.30 I woke L. & asked, very reasonably, for ice, which he got me. And my horses calmed down—he was so sensible. And I slept after a time, but Elly [Rendel] came yesterday & says I am putting a strain on my heart, which of course gives out, at the Ivy, or in the garden, though there’s nothing wrong; so I take this as permission not to go to parties, like Mary’s at Sadlers Wells, not to do anything I dislike. And thats a great discovery. I think I shall have thus a very reasonable happy winter, writing The Pargiters, but for Gods sake, I must be careful, & go quietly, & order my litter of excitements—people like Logan & Eddy who torment me with their vanity; I must brood & chew & dream, & be entirely natural, feeling as I do for the first time that this book is important. Why do I feel this, & I never felt it in the least about the others? I have joined Pippa’s Society; we dined with Pippa [on 27 October] & she told us stories about cows & chimney pots.

Thursday 20 November

I am taking a morning off, having done the child scene—the man exposing himself—in the Pargiters: to polish my LS. (done) & then to write letters. Theres Ott’s memoir—a queer thing that Ott shd. come, after all these years, old shabby tender to my sofa; & I liked her; its her integrity thats sloppy; thats what we all slipped on. Cant tell the truth about love—but then thats so interesting, & not discreditable, considering her upbringing—Welbeck, the young men servants. So she lent me her memoirs, full as they are of love letters, & copulation. I must now write to her—& to Margaret Ll.D. & so on. Janet Case comes to tea today, & then theres Derick Leon & Julia to dinner— A long day for me, who must must must be quiet & spacious this autumn, to finish the P⁠[argiter]⁠s. How important I feel it!—well, this is the merest note .. And we’ve bought a Lanchester: to be delivered on Dec. 10th. Grey & green. I dont think we’ve ever been so happy, what with one thing & another. And so intimate, & so completely entire, I mean L. & I. If it could only last like this another 50 years—life like this is wholly satisfactory, to me anyhow. So to my letters.

[Undated]

Yes it was a long day & I had two days of jump jump afterwards; but owing to the caution of the cat on broken glass, I am now steadier. I was not ‘on the sofa’ yesterday; which has been my refuge after tea. And I’ve fought with Eddy; & with Logan; & L. is fighting with John; & we are the victors, I think, in all these fights: I’m rid of Eddy, have Logan to tea on his own terms; & John is in tears consulting his lawyer. But oh, how I’ve written since Oct 11th! So much that my fingers cant write, of an evening: my brain spins scene after scene. Its only the signs of some fatigue, & depression that leave me ten minutes now before lunch for this starved book.

[? Sunday 4 December]

I must finish the first part—which is to be called 1880—in a day or two; & then freshen up: & read, for the next part—1880-1900.

On Wednesday we gave our party: notable for its peeresses, its chatter, its cocktails: Ott, Ly Oxford, the Gages—& so on. Us two hussies entertaining the peerage: & boys in white jackets handing blue green yellow drinks. And my money £100—lent them—did the trick. Rather a fertile way of spending money, though I may be landed with 4 great panels. My carpet, Duncan’s, for the drawing room is come & down: & we have risen socially to the rank of the younger sons of baronets—it is like being real gentry, sitting with our feet embedded in pile.

And then, on Friday, we went to Brixton to Sophie. Maud a stout matron. Sophy presiding like a born lady. “This is more of a party to me she said; indeed it was—more than the cocktail one.

Saturday 17 December

I have precisely 4 minutes before luncheon in which to record Rebecca West at dinner—oh yes a very clever woman, rather rubbed about the thorax: with a great supply of worldly talk: & much go & humour; a silky careening society voice; flowers from her afterwards to apologise for staying till 1.30.

And Logan—lord, what a bore: a dogmatic cultivated American bore; no truth in him; but an uneasy worm squirming for compliments. This I could see through his shallow water; & was ‘very severe’ L. says (L. is always a judge of my severity: & I of his) but I cant keep my temper when people thrust. Its not playing the game. And then—oh ever so many people; & a wind up with L.’s family & then the Frys to dinner: & we’re cheated of the car for Christmas, God damn their souls: all this is very helter skelter: & dinner with Hope last night: her stuffed black dachshund sausage stretched along my knee; & so to Rodmell on Tuesday. I’ve almost written out my first fury—234 typewritten pages since Oct 10th—& shall put my brain to rest for a few days at Monks House. But the fun of the book is to come, with Magdalena & Elvira.

[Monday 19 December]

Yes, today, Dec. 19th, Monday, I have written myself to the verge of total extinction. Praised be I can stop & wallow in coolness & downs, & let the wheels of my mind—how. I beg them to do this—cool & slow & stop altogether. I shall take up Flush again to cool myself. By Heaven, I have written 60,320 words since Oct. 11th. I think this must be far the quickest going of any of my books: comes far ahead of Orlando or The Lighthouse. But then those 60 thousand will have to be sweated & dried into 30 or 40 thousand—a great grind to come. Never mind. I have secured the outline & fixed a shape for the rest. I feel, for the first time, No I mustn’t take risks crossing the road, till the book is done. And though to me it is so important, I receive, at Clive’s—at George, Ring the Bell & Run Away’s—the first of the little pricks which will be so lavishly provided when The Pargiters comes out. Oh but by then I shall have perfected my social technique. I am practising with Eddy, & intend to make further experiments, when opportunity serves, with Logan. Yes, I will be free & entire & absolute & mistress of my life by Oct. 1st 1933. Nobody shall come here on their terms; or hale me off to them on theirs. Oh & I shall write a poets book next. This one, however, releases such a torrent of fact as I did not know I had in me. I must have been observing & collecting these 20 years—since Jacob’s Room anyhow. Such a wealth of things seen present themselves that I cant choose even—hence 60,000 words all about one paragraph. What I must do is to keep control; & not be too sarcastic; & keep the right degree of freedom & reserve. But oh how easy this writing is compared with The Waves! I wonder what the degree of carat gold is in the 2 books. Of course this is external: but there’s a good deal of gold—more than I’d thought—in externality. Anyhow, what care I for my goose feather bed? I’m off to join the raggle taggle gipsies oh! The Gipsies, I say: not Hugh Walpole & Priestley—no.

In truth The Pargiters is first cousin to Orlando, though the cousin in the flesh: Orlando taught me the trick of it. Now—oh but I must stop for 10 days at least—no 14—if not 21 days—now I must compose 1880-1900 chapter which needs skill. But I like applying skill I own. L. is off to the Lanchester’s in a rage. I am going to polish off my jobs: & tomorrow we go.

A very fruitful varied & I think successful autumn—thanks partly to my tired heart: so I could impose terms: & I have never lived in such a race, such a dream, such a violent impulsion & compulsion—scarcely seeing anything but the Pargiters.

[Diary XXII]

Friday 23 December

This is not the first day of the new year; but the discrepancy may be forgiven. I must write off my dejected rambling misery—having just read over the 30,000 words of Flush & come to the conclusion that they won’t do. Oh what a waste—what a bore! Four months of work, & heaven knows how much reading—not of an exalted kind either—& I cant see how to make anything of it. Its not the right subject for that length: its too slight & too serious. Much good in it but would have to be much better. So here I am two days before Christmas, pitched into one of my grey welters. True, its partly over writing The Pargiters. But I cant get back into Flush, ever, I feel: & L. will be disappointed; & the money loss too—thats a bore. I took it up impetuously after The Waves by way of a change: no forethought in me; & so got landed: it would need a months hard work—& even then I doubt it. In that time I might have done Dryden & Pope. And I’m thus led to begin—no to end the year with a doleful plaint. It is blazing hot; like spring, with the bees on the flowers. Never mind; this is not a reverse of the first order—not at all.

Saturday 31 December

This is in fact the last day of 1932, but I am so tired of polishing off Flush—such a pressure on the brain is caused by doing ten pages daily—that I am taking a morning off, & shall use it here, in my lazy way, to sum up the whole of life. By that phrase, one of my colloquialities, I only mean, I wish I could deliver myself of a picture of all my friends, thoughts, doings, projects at this moment. Vita is on the high seas, sailing to America. Our new car came, vicariously, yesterday—we are lent one. And I had a long letter from Ottoline, of sheer affection, & one still longer from Ethel Smyth, of dubious jealousy & supressed temper & love strangled & out bursting. And Anrep wants to put me on the floor of the Bank of England as Clio, &—cards, thanks, catalogues of winter sales. On Monday we go up to Angelica’s party. On Tuesday we come back. And we shall be here till the 14th of Jan. And Miss Scott Johnson doesn’t do. And we are us usual needing manuscripts; the dew pond is filling; the gold fish are dead; it is a clear pale blue eyed winters day; &—&—&—my thoughts turn with excitement to The Pargiters, for I long to feel my sails blow out, & to be careering with Elvira, Maggie & the rest over the whole of human life.

And indeed I cannot sum this up, being tired in my head. I think of Lytton too. Yes, of course this autumn has been a tremendous revelation. You will understand that all impediments suddenly dropped off. It was a great season of liberation. Everything appeared very distinct, amazingly exciting. I had no restrictions whatever, & was thus free to define my attitude with a vigour & certainty I have never known before. I laid about me & cut down the nettles. I said I will no longer be fettered by any artificial tie. I therefore spoke out in my own voice to Eddy & tried to subdue circumscribe Logan. Well—it is always doubtful how far one human being can be free. The ties are not purely artificial. One cannot cut a way absolutely straight. However, I secured a season of intoxicating exhilaration. Nor do I intend to let myself pay for it with the usual black despair. I intend to circumvent that supervening ghost—that which always trails its damp wings behind my glories. I shall be very wary, very adept—as now—writing languidly to avoid a headache. To suppress one self & run freely out in joy, or laughter with impersonal joys & laughters—such is the perfectly infallible & simple prescription.

For example, with Julian & Lettice Ramsay last night—why not simply become fluid in their lives, if my own is dim? And to use ones hands & eyes; to talk to people; to be a straw on the river, now & then—passive, not striving to say this is this. If one does not lie back & sum up & say to the moment, this very moment, stay you are so fair, what will be one’s gain, dying? No: stay, this moment. No one ever says that enough. Always hurry. I am now going in, to see L. & say stay this moment.

[]

1933

Tuesday 3 January

This is a little out of place, but then so am I. We are up for Angelica’s party last night, & I have half an hour to spend before shooting in the new Lanchester (not ours—one lent) back to Rodmell. We have been there just short of one fortnight, & I ate myself into the heart of print & solitude—so as to adumbrate a headache. And to wipe off the intensity of concentration—trying to re-write that abominable dog Flush in 13 days, so as to be free—oh heavenly freedom—to write The Pargiters,—I insisted upon a night of chatter. Let me see.

I fell into the arms of Nan [Hudson] & Ethel [Sands]—the two discreet ladies. Nan had a banana brown mask; Ethel the head of a Parisian cocotte. I like masks. I like the disorientation they give my feelings (here I lapsed for 5 minutes into Elvira’s thoughts about civilisation—indeed, its a good discipline, this new one, of forcing one’s brain the other way for a time—see how vigorously it spurts back—) Then I was settled with Nan; & she poor woman, tried to conciliate the powers which were then in the ascendant & said she “infinitely preferred this to the Beau Monde. Oh how much hungrier I am for this meal than for my own dinner! Yes, Virginia, I’m a bohemian at heart. I have just slipped into the other. There is a certain charm in it. But our Butler is the most Bohemian of all. And then dear Ethel—” Now stop, I said, you’re going to celebrate the perfections of Ethel. I cant allow that. For I assure you, Ethel’s humanity is mere superficiality—“Oh my dear, I assure you you’re wrong. She has a very subtle sense of society—I haven’t. She gets things from Ldy Oxford for instance, that I dont. If she has a fault it is that she never sees anyones faults, which tends of course to make them—I mean, its a little lacking in salt, that is to me”. While this ambling & pacing went on—I always whip myself up to say something entire I give myself that credit—but its often very silly & something I’ve said before—Ethel was sitting by us, on the models throne talking to Raymond. And we were eating ham & chicken & ices & rolls & pate sandwiches—& drinking wine—Nessa’s commissariat was lavish & opportune—I daresay there were 60—or 40—people there. Wogan drifted up. We talked. I was very polite, because of John. He was very polite. Rosamund I thought a little chill—no, shy I daresay. Wogan said The Waves shd. be filmed: I in my vague way, said V. Isham wants to do it—but she meant to broadcast, & oddly enough, when I came home I found a letter from her saying so. Then W⁠[ogan]. talked about the autumnal Ottoline calling R⁠[osamond]. to her upstairs & leaving him to hear Dryden read by Pipsey [Philip Morrell]: to walk in the garden & get advice about trees & pagodas. W. lives a little—but lives joyously, & I daresay wantonly—in the shadow of R. who, modest I think, is yet a best seller; an American success—a musical, rapt girl or woman: too easily content though with familiar melodies. Wogan wears well cut trousers—was a sporting man—& a red jersey to symbolise that he is now disowned by his father, a painter. R. later got into-talk with L. about John; & was vague, grieved, apologetic, yet sisterly. Couldn’t, I think, put up much defense. And dear old Marjorie performed. My word! she is now an elderly fat woman—grey as a badger, but so stout, so pendulous—so much an old fireside matron for all her witch ways—which are in truth obscene with her peculiar touch of genius in being blatantly obscene. She has few, black, crooked (so it seemed to me) teeth. She opens her mouth, grimaces, claws, paws, stumps, projects, hawks, pirouettes—should have been on the stage—a Marie Lloyd. And Cory, up for his Bohemian night & determined to be Bohemian as he signified by saying in a loud voice under the lee of Nan “My family call him the Arch-Bugger”—Cory was much taken by her, & stretching a long arm I pulled one strand of her hair, & introduced them. She gets moth eaten, she says, in the country: seemed to feel it damp, clayey; is driven in on herself; reads too much; cant escape; has no one to rub up with—yet—Wogan said—is the life & soul of Leicester: plays games with the hunting set—according to him the most barbarous of all people. Children come down with blood on their foreheads for 3 days after a hunt: mustn’t wash it off. Then there was Saxon bowing & smiling in silence like a Chinese mandarin—so I bowed & smiled in silence swaying off my throne to him. “We know each other so well, we smile now” I said, reflecting that I should ask him to dinner; but I doubt if he wants it.

(my 30 minutes is stretching.) L. is talking to Miss [Scott] Johnson, who won’t do. And last night Belsher rang up to say her fur coat was stolen: might she borrow one from me: so up she came, & accused Miss Johnson’s protege an unemployed man who is allowed in; significant of the relations between Miss J. & B.—strained. The coat was worth £30, Miss B. said: too poor to buy another: & this morning she rings up to say she is ill, & so is all her family. What then about Porter? I wonder—that strapping American? Oh the future of the Press—for the millionth time it is melting again.

I daresay this will be my last appearance in this book, because I think I have destroyed this pen, tired my hand, & nothing but thin water comes from my brain, having written so much, so quickly. It is 12.35 on Tuesday January 3rd 1933.

Thursday 5 January

I am so delighted with my own ingenuity in having after only ten years or so, made myself, in 5 minutes, a perfect writing board, with pen tray attached, so that I cant ever again fly into a fury bereft of ink & pen at the most critical moment of a writers life & see my sudden sentence dissipate itself all for lack of a pen handy—& besides I’m so glad to be quit of page 100 of Flush—this the third time of writing that Whitechapel scene, & I doubt if its worth it, that I cant help disporting myself on this free blue page, which thank God in heaven, needs no re-writing. It is a wet misty day: my windows out here are all fog. And I daresay we shall drive our new car, though it is still only a substitute, twenty miles or so this afternoon, by way of a test. It is like travelling first instead of third.

Bunny’s new Pochantos is reviewed in the Lit. Sup. this morning, & I augur a great success, I think without any serious pangs of jealousy. But that of course, has yet to be proved. Jealousy may slink out its green paws, being the uncertain fabric I am. But I think not, if only because I’m in sublime reading fettle: seriously I believe that the strain of The Waves weakened my concentration for months—& then all that article compressing for the C.R. I am now at the height of my powers in that line, & have read, with close & powerful attention, some 12 or 15 books since I came here. What a joy—what a sense as of a Rolls Royce engine once more purring its 70 miles an hour in my brain: so that if Bunny’s book is a good one, there will be another stretch of road ahead of me for a few days. What I hitherto have disliked in Bunny is the falsetto. Assuming a mask to speak through: out comes his own voice stylised, mincing, though well articulated & controlled. Lytton’s saying “Ye old Cocke & Balls” of one of them sums up my meaning. I am also encouraged to read by the feeling that I am on the flood of creativeness in The Pargiters—what a liberation that gives one—as if everything added to that torrent—all books become fluid & swell the stream. But I daresay this is a sign only that I’m doing what is rather superficial & hasty & eager. I dont know. I’ve another week of Flush here, & then shall come to grips with my 20 years in one chapter problem. I visualise this book now as a curiously uneven time sequence—a series of great balloons, linked by straight narrow passages of narrative. I can take liberties with the representational form which I could not dare when I wrote Night & Day—a book that taught me much, bad though it may be. And now I must write to N. Darwin about her Jemmy Button. Hampson’s new novel is so bad we are going to advise against publishing it.

Sunday 15 January

I have come out here, our last morning, to write letters, so, naturally, I write this book. But then I haven’t written a line these 3 weeks—only typed Flush, which, Heaven be praised, I ‘finished’, almost without inverted commas, yesterday. Ah but my writing Flush has been gradually shoved out, as by a cuckoo born in the nest, by The Pargiters. How odd the mind’s functions are! About a week ago, I began the making up of scenes—unconsciously: saying phrases to myself; & so, for a week, I’ve sat here, staring at the typewriter, & speaking aloud phrases of The Pargiters. This becomes more & more maddening. It will however all be run off in a few days, when I let myself write again.

I am reading Parnell. Yes; but this scene making increases the rate of my heart with uncomfortable rapidity. While I was forcing myself to do Flush my old headache came back—for the first time this autumn. Why should The P.s make my heart jump, why should Flush stiffen the back of my neck? What connection has the brain with the body? Nobody in Harley St could explain, yet the symptoms are purely physical & as distinct as one book is from the other.

Meanwhile, L.’s hired stock has given him some form of itch. He picks what he thinks black insects off his neck—I can imagine nothing more terrible than to have insects under ones skin—I should see them parading in squads. Now I will try to call in my mind from The P.s, & attach it to Mr Shaw Desmond, to Tom, to Holtby, to K. Furse; but not I think to E. Smyth.

And I was forgetting to say that The Deluge [Lanchester car] came yesterday. It was expected at 1.15. At 3 Julian & Angelica arrived, at 4 as AJ. were going to the shop to buy sweets L. pruning, cried out its come. And it had gone. It swept up the village past us, but returned. In colour & shape it is beyond the wildest dreams—I mean it is elegant green silver beautifully compact modelled firm & not too rich—not a money car. We drove it to Lewes, & shall now take it to London; & so, I say, write letters. A cloudy, goose wing day with silver shields.

Thursday 19 January

It must be confessed that The Pargiters are like cuckoos in my nest—which should be Flush. I have only 50 pages to correct & send to Mabel [typist]; & these cursed scenes & dialogues will go on springing up in my head; & after correcting one page, I sit mooning for 20 minutes. I daresay this will increase the blood pressure when I come to write. But it is a tiresome bewildering distraction now.

Then we began London briskly with Leonard’s lice—his incurable & disgusting skin disease. We went to a Wimpole Street specialist—happily his house was almost opposite Flush’s so that I could count the storeys & verify the knockers—its true they have none, but the houses are very well pointed—while L. & Elly [Dr Rendel] were inside the consulting room. Finally the dr. said L. had never been bitten at all. And so, as the day wore on, the incurable disease was cured.

Then came Plomer & Marjorie [Strachey] to dine; & we went to Sadler’s Wells & saw Pomona with Nessa’s designs—dresses, scenery—all very pale & bright—I mean Fra Angelico against a background of Cassis—but dear (said to be from dieu) knows I cant keep my wits at the ballet; cant throw a ring round so many wild horses—music, dancing, decoration: & so hop on my perch, & merely make parrot noises of appreciation—when, at Fitzroy Street [Vanessa’s studio], we all had hot sausages. Large dishes of hot, writhing sausages, looking indecent, like black snakes amorously intertwined, were handed round. There was Bunny, flushed with triumph (I sent back Pocahontas unread—cant read with my head stuffed with Pargiters) & I said I had dreamt I was in his arms, so he took me in his arms—pale phantom of old love—the love of men & women—in the pantry. Roger was there,—is he older, less volatile? He makes his signal to Helen sooner than of old & drives off in that blind bull of a car—it charges with its head down—but not before, as I maliciously observed, he had cross-questioned me about his lectures. This insistent egotism has its charm. I never ask him to read my essays.

So home in the new car.

Saturday 21 January

Well, Flush lingers on & I cannot despatch him. Thats the sad truth. I always see something I could press tighter, or enwrap more completely. There’s no trifling with words—cant be done: not when they’re to stand ‘for ever’. So I am battening down my Pargiters say till Wednesday—it shant be later, I swear. And now I grow doubtful of the value of those figures. I’m afraid of the didactic; perhaps it was only that spurious passion that made me rattle away before Christmas. Anyhow I enjoyed it immensely, & shall again—oh to be free, in fiction, making up my scenes again—however discreetly. Such is my cry this very fine cold January morning.

In 10 minutes Angelica comes & we go to Don Giovanni at Sadler’s Wells. I have seen this week besides Plomer & Marjorie, Cotter Ludby who has been found in a Police Court, strapped to a bed in St Paneras Infirmary—been raging mad, as I can believe—& Robson & Ethel Smyth. Mrs Hunter is dead. Died standing eating drinking dressing penniless, ruined discredited, having got through 40,000 a year, not all of her own; but they say she was a great hostess & all is forgiven—rightly I think, though in another class she would have been in prison. Such is the price we pay for our great hostesses. Witness Sibyl Colefax working in a shop.

Thursday 26 January

Well, Flush is, I swear, despatched. Nobody can say I dont take trouble with my little stories. And now, having bent my mind for 5 weeks sternly this way, I must unbend them the other—the Pargiter way. No critic ever gives full weight to the desire of the mind for change. Talk of being many sided—naturally one must go the other way. Now if I ever had the wits to go into the Shakespeare business I believe one would find the same law there—tragedy comedy, & so on. Looming behind the P.s I can just see the shape of pure poetry beckoning me. But the P.s is a delightful solid possession to be enjoyed tomorrow. How bad I shall find it.

Not a letter has come my way these 2 days (oh but several parcels) & I therefore lapse into the healing sanctuary of anonymity. I think The Beau Monde has given me up—Ethel Sands is undoubtedly & no doubt reasonably annoyed with what Logan has chosen to purvey of my letters. So I say I will rout further in the bran pie; & go to my Club & meet young working women. I am going to learn Italian. Bianca my unknown adorer is to teach me. And I am to have Holtby to tea today. So perhaps I can make do without Chelsea.

I have bought several things freely & cheaply for the first time at the Winter Sales. Yesterday at Mar⁠[shall] & Snelgrove’s I said, by way of a joke to the girl, If that coats rubbed, they should sell it me for £3. And took me seriously. I heard an acrid conversation behind a screen. The girl was a greenhorn. You’ve no right to tell customers the coat is rubbed. Thats what its reduced for & so on. To my surprise my 3.19.6—formerly £5.10 coat was given me—all for my joke—for £3.10. Oh dear—the world of shops!

Thursday 2 February

No we are not deserted by the world—oh dear no: dinner Mary Monday; dinner here Friday; James & Alix dinner Wednesday—to talk about Lytton’s things, says James. “I want to see you both alone”. Hope [Mirrlees], will you come to dinner again? Ethel, will you lunch at Woking; Margaret West to tea on Sunday—a possible Press manager (S⁠[cott].J⁠[ohnson]. to go) & Bianca to tea today: on top of which we have to decide about 35 Gordon Square on Saturday. By chance, Martins [estate agent] sent us an order; we saw it; well, it might do—Its a great big corner house; a warren of a basement; a studio, a bad dining room & kitchen; but great rooms looking on to the square; & quiet, with gardens behind; with a side door, so that publishing is possible—they say: altogether, I expect we shall take it for 9 years, at much the same rent as this, & the Pritchards will share. Not that I much want a move in March, with The Pargiters on my hands. I am going however to work largely, spaciously, fruitfully on that book. Today I finished—rather more completely than usual—revising the first chapter. I’m leaving out the interchapters—compacting them in the text; & project an appendix of dates. A good idea?

And Galsworthy died two days ago, it suddenly struck me, walking just now by the Serpentine after calling on Mrs W⁠[oolf]. (who’s been dying—is recovering) with the gulls opening their scimitars—masses of gulls. Galsworthy’s dead: & A. Bennett told me he simply couldn’t stick Galsworthy. Had to praise Jack’s books to Mrs G. But I could say what I liked against Galsworthy. That stark man lies dead.

[Friday 17 February]

I steal time from my Italian verbs. Yes I think I know them. I am having 2 lessons weekly from Bianca; she suggests three; but as I have to get in Ethel &c. Oh yesterday it was like being a snail shell & having a thrush tapping till the beak of her incessant voice broke my skull. I always say “Poor old lady”. For I rather think she came all the way from Woking for this dry brittle hour. I am half ashamed—yet cant see that I’m to blame. And now she goes to Bath for 5 weeks—yes, to my relief I own. Because I cant bear being a snail shell. And she is so positive, so insistent. Being Ethel is so habitual to her.

I’m launched again in The Pargiters, in this blank season of the year—Nessa at Charleston, Clive in Jamaica, Roger in Tangier—Vita in America—which of my friends is left. But Desmond dined the night before last; Morgan came in last night; Holtby today—so there’s no lack of people. Now of course the P.s runs a little slack. This fact recording is too flat.

Saturday 25 March

It is an utterly corrupt society I have just remarked, speaking in the person of Elvira Pargiter, & I will take nothing that it can give me &c &c: now, as Virginia Woolf, I have to write—oh dear me what a bore—to the Vice Chancellor of Manchester Un⁠[ivers]⁠ty & say that I refuse to be made a Doctor of Letters. And to Lady Simon, who has been urgent in the matter, & asks us to stay. Lord knows how I’m to put Elvira’s language into polite journalese. What an odd coincidence! that real life should provide precisely the situation I was writing about! I hardly know which I am, or where: Virginia or Elvira; in the Pargiters or outside. We dined with Susan Lawrence two nights ago. A Mrs Stocks of Man⁠[cheste]⁠r U⁠[niversit]⁠y was there. How delighted my husband will be to give you your degree in July! she began. And had rattled off a great deal about the delight of Manchester in seeing me honoured, before I had to pluck up courage & say, But I wont take it. After that there was a general argument, with the Nevinsons (Evelyn Sharp), Susan Lawrence &c. They all said they would take a degree from a University though not an honour from the state. They made me feel a little silly, priggish & perhaps extreme: but only superficially. Nothing would induce me to connive at all that humbug. Nor would it give me, even illicitly, any pleasure. I really believe that Nessa & I—she went with me, & used my arguments about the silliness of honours for women—are without the publicity sense. Now for the polite letters. Dear Vice Chancellor—

Tuesday 28 March

The polite letters have been sent. So far I have had, nor could have had any answer. No, thank Heaven, I need not emerge from my fiction in July to have a tuft of fur put on my head. It is the finest spring ever known—soft, hot, blue, misty. The trees all out, the other day in the park, when we took Bunny’s child to Hayling Island. It was a June day. Poor Ray like a slum woman, so gaunt, so grim. He had a boat. It was cold on the beach—the Island is spotted with houses, like the rest of the world. And then down to Maidenhead in June weather—more bungalows. And dinner with Ly Rhondda. I felt her a disappointed woman. Should have had 10 children perhaps. She was sitting alone, shawled dowdy in an old Hampstead half [?] flat with a garden with great trees. She is what they call, I expect, ‘inhibited’—something tentative furtive. Discussed Time & Tide &c. She lives for T. & T. but is a little under the thumb of Mr Ellis Roberts. Then on to Clive; back from Jamaica. “The steward came in; & was surprised to find a young lady stark naked brushing her teeth.” True Clive. Julian has failed to get his fellowship, & thinks, or Nessa thinks, of Burma.

Thursday 6 April

Oh I’m so tired! I’ve written myself out over The Pargiters this last lap. I’ve brought it down to Elvira in bed—the scene I’ve had in my mind ever so many months, but I cant write it now. Its the turn of the book. It needs a great shove to swing it round on its hinges. As usual, doubts rush in. Isnt it all too quick, too thin, too surface bright? Well, I’m too jaded to crunch it up, if thats so; & so shall bury it for a month—till we’re back from Italy perhaps; & write on Goldsmith &c meanwhile. Then seize on it fresh, & dash it off in June July August September. Four months should finish the first draght—100,000 words I think. 50,000 words written in 5 months—my record

This is a time of ending. I’ve ever so many people to see. Ott tomorrow. The people of Manchester have written, very politely, with additional respect for me, because I dont take honours. And I’m going to Hugo [Language Institute] to hear Sigrun Martyn talk Italian. Mine is hopeless. She dashes on about her car—I limp & fumble. Bianca is in Italy. Nessa & the others at Charleston. Last night Lord Olivier, a jolly old bore, has been a dog in his day, dined here. And Pippa came in later—grown very thick, but looks unhappy. And we went to Bedford [travelling books] on Tuesday in this June weather & to St Neots & saw the carved ceiling.

I began the four great vols of Goldsmith this morning.

Thursday 13 April

No I have worked myself too dry this time. There is not one idea left in the orange. But we go [to Rodmell] today, & I shall sun, with only a few books. No I will not write; I will not see people. A little nip from Gissing in the TLS. which I must answer. But indeed I cant find words—use the wrong ones—thats my state: the familiar state after these 3 months writing—what fun that book is to me! And pressing in Italian, & seeing a mint of people—the state I say is quite familiar; & will vanish; yes, & then there’s Italy to come. I have my new corduroys; & Mr Ronald Murray is appointed my dress maker.

Sibyl lunched—one hears her dry claws tapping the perch as she hops—then Pernel, ample gentle silver grey, & very—what is the word?—there I go forgetting. The word I like—integrity. Now I must collect my things. Nelly by the way touchingly friendly. Age is like lichen on roofs—knowing people I mean: gives our relationship some yellow red glow, so I think. Ann & Judy dined here. Ann at the stage where she likes action, rather than detective plays. Judy as candid as a boy of 10. And I want to write on Goldsmith, Halifax & Turgenev. And Ethel is “cutting the painter” (between us—for the 100th time). And—no, I must really learn a smoother narrative style.

Tuesday 25 April

No, we didn’t see nobody at Rodmell. Lydia & Maynard arrived before we had been there half an hour; & we dined with them, & were invited to the royal party at Shelleys—Mr Hambro being the uncle of the proprietor; & the friend of Timmy & of the Gleichens; & they had crab, but the chicken was tough, so we did not go.

Thats all over—our ten days: & I wrote daily, almost, at Goldsmith—dont much see the point of my Goldsmiths & so on—& read Goldsmith, & so on. Yes; I should now be correcting Flush proofs—I doubt that little book to some extent: but I’m in a doubting mood: the scrambled mood of transience, for on Friday 5th we go to Siena; so I cant settle, & make up my story, in which lies permanence. And as usual I want to seethe myself in something new—to break the mould of habit entirely, & get that escape which Italy & the sun & the lounging & the indifference of all that to all this brings about. I rise, like a bubble out of a bottle. And my eyes hurt, & I must go & see Mr Doggett—Sheppard’s Johnny—today. And have 7 Italian lessons; & see Vita, Christabel, &c.

But The Pargiters. I think this will be a terrific affair. I must be bold & adventurous. I want to give the whole of the present society—nothing less: facts, as well as the vision. And to combine them both. I mean, The Waves going on simultaneously with Night & Day. Is this possible? At present I have assembled 50,000 words of ‘real’ life: now in the next 50 I must somehow comment; Lord knows how—while keeping the march of events. The figure of Elvira is the difficulty. She may become too dominant. She is to be seen only in relation to other things. This should give I think a great edge to both of the realities—this contrast. At present, I think the run of events is too fluid & too free. It reads thin; but lively. How am I to get the depth without becoming static? But I like these problems, & anyhow theres a wind & a vigour in this naturalness. It should aim at immense breadth & immense intensity. It should include satire, comedy, poetry, narrative, & what form is to hold them all together? Should I bring in a play, letters, poems? I think I begin to grasp the whole. And its to end with the press of daily normal life continuing. And there are to be millions of ideas but no preaching—history, politics, feminism, art, literature—in short a summing up of all I know, feel, laugh at, despise, like, admire hate & so on.

Friday 28 April

A mere note. We got out of the car last night & began walking down to the Serpentine. A summer evening. Chestnuts in their crinolines, bearing tapers: grey green water & so on. Suddenly L. bore off; & there was Shaw, dwindled shanks, white beard; striding along. We talked, by a railing, for 15 mins. He stood with his arms folded, very upright, leaning back; teeth gold tipped. Just come from the dentist, & ‘lured’ out for a walk by the weather. Very friendly. That is his art, to make one think he likes one. A great spurt of ideas. “You forget that an aeroplane is like a car—it bumps—We went over the great wall—saw a little dim object in the distance. Of course the tropics are the place. The Ceylon⁠[?] people are the original human beings—we are smudged copies. I caught the Chinese looking at us with horror—that we should be human beings! Of course the tour cost thousands; yet to see us, you’d think we hadnt the price of the fare to Hampton Court. Lots of old spinsters had saved up for years to come. Oh but my publicity! Its terrifying. An hours bombardment at every port. I made the mistake of accepting [blank] invitation. I found myself on a platform with the whole university round me. They began shouting We want Bernard Shaw. So I told them that every man at 21 must be a revolutionary. After that of course the police imprisoned them by dozens. I want to write an article for the Herald pointing out what Dickens said years ago about the folly of Parliament. Oh I could only stand the voyage by writing. I’ve written 3 or 4 books. I like to give the public full weight. Books should be sold by the pound. What a nice little dog. But aren’t I keeping you & making you cold (touching my arm)—Two men stopped along the path to look. Off he strode again on his dwindled legs. I said Shaw likes us. L. thinks he likes nobody. What will they think of Shaw in 50 years? He is 76 he said; too old for the tropics.

[Saturday 29 April]

Last night—to relieve myself for a moment from correcting that silly book Flush,—oh what a waste of time—I will record Bruno Walter. He is a swarthy, fattish, man; not at all smart. Not at all the “great conductor”. He is a little Slav, a little Semitic. He is very nearly mad; that is, he cant get ‘the poison’ as he called it of Hitler out of him. “You must not think of the Jews” he kept on saying “You must think of this awful reign of intolerance. You must think of the whole state of the world. It is terrible—terrible. That this meanness, that this pettiness, should be possible! Our Germany—which I loved—with our tradition—our culture—We are now a disgrace.” Then he told us how you cant talk above a whisper. There are spies everywhere. He had to sit in the window of his hotel in Leipzig? a whole day, telephoning. All the time soldiers were marching. They never stop marching. And on the wireless, between the turns, they play military music. Horrible horrible! He hopes for the monarchy as the only hope. He will never go back there. His orchestra had been in existence for 150 years: but it is the spirit of the whole that is awful. We must band together. We must refuse to meet any German. We must say that they are uncivilised. We will not trade with them or play with them—we must make them feel themselves outcasts—not by fighting them; by ignoring them. Then he swept off to music. He has the intensity—genius?—which makes him live every thing he feels. Described conducting: must know every player.

Tuesday 9 May

Juan les Pins

Yes, I thought: I will make a note of that face—the face of the woman stitching a very thin, lustrous green silk at a table in the restaurant where we lunched at Vienne. She was like fate—a consummate mistress of all the arts of self preservation: hair rolled & lustrous; eyes so nonchalant; nothing could startle her; there she sat stitching her green silk with people going & coming all the time; she not looking, yet knowing, fearing nothing, expecting nothing—a perfectly equipped middle class French woman.

At Carpentras last night there was the little servant girl with honest eyes, hair brushed in a flop, & one rather black tooth. I felt that life would crush her out inevitably. Perhaps 18. not more; yet on the wheel, without hope; poor, not weak but mastered—yet not enough mastered but to desire furiously travel, for a moment, a car. Ah but I am not rich she said to me—which her cheap little stockings & shoes showed anyhow. Oh how I envy you—able to travel. You like Carpentras? But the wind blows ever so hard. You’ll come again? Thats the bell ringing. Never mind. Come over here & look at this. No, I’ve never seen anything like it. Ah yes, she always likes the English (‘She’ was the other maid, with hair like some cactus in erection). Yes I always like the English she said. The odd little honest face, with the black tooth, will stay on at Carpentras I suppose: will marry? will become one of those stout black women who sit in the door knitting? No: I foretell for her some tragedy; because she had enough mind to envy us the Lanchester.

Thursday 11 May

Rapallo

Yesterday there was Miss Cotton. She is one of the army of spinsters, on half or quarter pay. She finds she can live at Diano Marina for 8/- a day. Her friends say But what is there to do? She says, oh there are the beauties of nature. She burst out, directly she came in to dinner, dressed in greenish dressing gown: by her side the dour Miss Thread. How was France? Was it cheap? Oh it was Liberty Hall here. Then she described the wife, the husband, of the inn: & the servants; & how there had once been an Earthquake. Meanwhile came in the 2 guests [?] in evening dress, the deaf lady & the voluble; also the powdered white lady with the red scarf: & after dinner—they often give us asparagus, she said—& they had their own bottles of wine—the two parties settled in at their own tables—where they are now & played bridge. Now this half pay spinster will dwindle on, beside the sea under the mountain, chatting, till she dies.

No we dont like the French Riviera, or the Italian much; but if it has to be, Rapallo does it best: its bay stretched with gold silk this evening, humming scented villas; all orange blossom. Quiet women reading to children, little boats, high cliffs; a sauntering indolent luxurious evening place, where one might spend ones last penny; grown old.

But we dont like these villas—like the Bussys’—laid like eggs on ledges, so that you cant go up or down but must merely sit, & for ever behold the sea & the roof of the Casino. Dorothy & Janie taking their coffee like ladies in a perfectly neat, spaced, yellow room with a large leaved tree outside;—the tree Dorothy & Simon planted 30 years ago. But we dont wish to live here, shredding out our days, in these scented villas, sauntering round the harbour.

Friday 12 May

Pisa

Yes Shelley chose better than Max Beerbohm. He chose a harbour; a bay; & his home, with a balcony, on which Mary stood, looks out across the sea. Sloping sailed boats were coming in this morning—a windy little town, of high pink & yellow Southern houses, not much changed I suppose; very full of the breaking of waves, very much open to the sea; & the rather desolate house standing with the sea just in front. Shelley, I suppose, bathed, walked sat on the beach there; & Mary & Mrs Williams had their coffee on the balcony. I daresay the clothes & the people were much the same. At any rate, a very good great man’s house in its way. What is the word for full of the sea? Cant think tonight, sky high in a bedroom at the Nettuno in Pisa, much occupied by French tourists. The Arno swimming past with the usual coffee coloured foam. Walked in the Cloisters; this is true Italy, with the old dusty smell; people swarming in the streets; under the—what is the word for—I think the word for a street that has pillars is Arcade. Shelley’s house waiting by the sea, & Shelley not coming, & Mary & Mrs Williams watching from the balcony & then Trelawney coming from Pisa, & burning the body on the shore—thats in my mind. All the colours here are white bluish marble against a very light saturated sky. The tower leaning prodigiously. Clerical beggar at the door in a mock fantastic leather hat. The clergy walking.

It was in these cloisters—Campo Santo—that L. & I walked 21 years ago & met the Palgraves & I tried to hide behind the pillars. And now we come in our car; & the Palgraves—are they dead, or very old? Now at any rate we have left the black country, the bald necked vulture country with its sprinkling of redroofed villas. This is the Italy one used to visit in a railway train with Violet Dickinson—taking the hotel bus.

Saturday 13 May

Siena

Today we saw the most beautiful of views & the melancholy man. The view was like a line of poetry that makes itself; the shaped hill, all flushed with reds & greens; the elongated lines, cultivated every inch; old, wild, perfectly said, once & for all: & I walked up to a group & said What is that village? It called itself [blank in ms]; & the woman with the blue eyes said wont you come to my house & drink? She was famished for talk. Four or five of them buzzed round us, & I made a Ciceronian speech, about the beauty of the country. But I have no money to travel with, she said, wringing her hands. We would not go to her house—or cottage on the side of the hill, & shook hands; hers were dusty; she wanted to keep them from me; but we all shook hands, & I wished we had gone to her house, in the loveliest of all landscapes. Then, lunching by the river among the ants, we met the melancholy man. He had five or six little fish in his hands, which he had caught in his hands. We said it was very beautiful country; & he said no, he preferred the town. He had been to Florence; no, he did not like the country. He wanted to travel, but had no money: worked at some village; no he did not like the country, he repeated, with his gentle cultivated voice; no theatres, no pictures, only perfect beauty. I gave him 2 cigarettes; at first he refused, then offered us his 6 or 7 little fish. But we could not cook them at Siena, we said. No, he agreed; & so we parted.

It is all very well, saying one will write notes but writing is a very difficult art. That is one has always to select; & I am too sleepy, & hence merely run sand through my fingers. Writing is not in the least an easy art. Thinking what to write, it seems easy; but the thought evaporates, runs hither & thither. Here we are in the noise of Siena—the vast tunnelled arched stone town, swarmed over by chattering shrieking children.

Sunday 14 May

Yes I am reading—skipping—the Sacred Fount [by Henry James]—about the most inappropriate of all books for this din—sitting by the open window, looking across heads & heads & heads—all Siena parading in gray & pink & the cars hooting. How finely run along those involuted threads? I dont—thats the answer. I let ’em break. I only mark that the sign of a masterly writer is his power to break his mould callously. None of H. J.’s timid imitators have the vigour, once they’ve spun their sentence, to smash it. He has some native juice—figure; has driven his spoon deep into some stew of his own—some swarming mixture. That—his vitality—his vernacular—his pounce & grip & swing always spring fresh upon me, if at the same time I ask how could anyone, outside an orchis in a greenhouse, fabricate such an orchid’s dream! Oh these Edwardian ladies with pale hair, these tailored “my dear men”! Yet compared to that vulgar old brute Creevey—L. is here bitten by a flea—H.J. is muscular, lean. No doubt the society of the Regent—the smell of brandy & bones, the painted velvet Lawrence women—the general laxity & lustiness & vulgarity are here at their superlative. Of course the Shelleys the Wordsworths the Coleridges existed on the other side of the hedge. But when it comes gushing out of Creevey’s page, its for all the world like—something between Buckingham Palace, Brighton; & the Queen’s own italic style—so uncurbed, so weak: & how can one hope for or care for a single person? There’s all the dreary Lords & Ladies ogling & over eating; & plush & gilt; & the Princess & the Prince—I think dissolution & obesity taking hold of the 18th Century & swelling it into a puffball efflorescence, 1860 is considerably more to the point.

Monday 15 May

This should be all description—I mean of the little pointed green hills; & the white oxen, & the poplars, & the cypresses, & the sculptured shaped infinitely musical, flushed green land from here to Abbazia—that is where we went today; & couldn’t find it, & asked one after another of the charming tired peasants, but none had been 4 miles beyond their range, until we came to the stone breaker, & he knew. He could not stop work to come with us, because the inspector was coming tomorrow. And he was alone, alone, all day with no one to talk to. So was the aged Maria at the Abbazio. And she mumbled & slipped her words, as she showed us into the huge bare stone building; mumbled & mumbled, about the English—how beautiful they were. Are you a Contessa? she asked me. But she didnt like Italian country either. They seem stinted, dried up; like grasshoppers, & with the manners of impoverished gentle people; sad, wise, tolerant, humorous. There was the man with the mule. He let the mule gallop away down the road. We are welcome, because we might talk; they draw round & discuss us after we’re gone. Crowds of gentle kindly boys & girls always come about us, & wave & touch their hats. And nobody looks at the view—except us—at the Euganean, bone white, this evening: then there’s a ruddy red farm or two; & light islands swimming here & there in the sea of shadow—for it was very showery—then there are the black stripes of cypresses round the farms; like fur ridges; & the poplars, & the streams & the nightingales singing & sudden gusts of orange blossom; & white alabaster oxen, with swinging chins—great flaps of white leather hanging under their noses—& infinite emptiness, loneliness, silence: never a new house, or a village; but only the vineyards & the olive trees, where they have always been. The hills go pale blue, washed very sharp & soft on the sky; hill after hill;

Friday 19 May

Piacenza

Its a queer thing that I write a date. Perhaps in this disoriented life one thinks, if I can say what day it is, then … Three dots to signify I dont know what I mean. But we have been driving all day from Lerici over the Apennines, & it is now cold, cloistral, highly uncomfortable in a vast galleried Italian inn [Croce Bianca], so ill provided with chairs that now at this present moment we are squatted, L. in a hard chair by his bed, I on the bed, in order to take advantage of the single light which burns between us. L. is writing directions to the Press. I am about to read Goldoni.

Lerici is hot & blue & we had a room with a balcony. There were Misses [?] & Mothers—misses [?] who had lost all chance of life long ago, & could with a gentle frown, a frown of mild sadness, confront a whole meal—arranged for the English—in entire silence, dressed as if for cold Sunday supper in Wimbledon. Then there’s the retired Anglo-Indian, who takes shall we say Miss Toutchet for a walk, a breezy red faced man, very fond of evensong at the Abbey. She goes to the Temple; where ‘my brother’ has rooms. Et cetera Et cetera.

Of the Apennines I have nothing to say—save that up on the top theyre like the inside of a green umbrella: spine after spine: & clouds caught on the point of the stick. And so down to Parma; hot, stony, noisy; with shops that dont keep maps; & so on along a racing road to Piacenza, at which we find ourselves now at 6 minutes to 9 P.M. This of course is the rub of travelling—this is the price paid for the sweep & the freedom—the dusting of our shoes & careering off tomorrow—& eating our lunch on a green plot beside a deep cold stream. It will all be over this day week—comfort & discomfort; & the zest & rush that no engagements, hours, habits give. Then we shall take them up again with more than the zest of travelling.

[Sunday 22 May]

To write to keep off sleep—that is the exalted mission of tonight—tonight sitting at the open window of a secondrate inn in Draguignan—with plane trees outside, the usual single noted bird, the usual loudspeaker. Everyone in France motors on Sunday; then sleeps it off at night. The hotel keepers are gorged, & scarcely stop playing cards. But Grasse was too plethoric—we came on here late. We leave here early. I dip into Creevey; L. into Golden Bough. We long for bed. This is the tax for travelling—these sticky uncomfortable hotel nights—sitting on hard chairs under the lamp. But the seduction works as we start—to Aix tomorrow—so home—And ‘home’ becomes a magnet, for I cant stop making up The P.s: cant live without that intoxicant—though this is the loveliest & most distracting alternative. But I’m full of holiday—& want work—ungrateful that I am!—& yet I want the hills near Fabbria too, & the hills near Siena—but no other hills—not these black & green violent monotonous Southern hills—We saw poor Lawrence’s Phoenix picked out in coloured pebbles at Vence today, among all the fretted lace tombs.

Tuesday 23 May

I have just said to myself if it were possible to write, those white sheets would be the very thing, not too large or too small. But I do not wish to write, except as an irritant. This is the position. I sit on L.’s bed; he in the only armchair. People tap up & down on the pavement. This is Vienne, it is roasting hot—hotter & hotter it gets—& we are driving through France; & its Tuesday & we cross on Friday & this strange interval of travel of sweeping away from habitations & habits will be over. On & on we go—through Aix, through Avignon, on & on, under arches of leaves, over bare sandy roads, under grey black hills with castles, beside vines: & I’m thinking of The Pargiters; & L. is driving; & when we come to poplars, we get out & lunch by the river; & then on; & take a cup of tea by the river, fetch our letters, learn that Lady Cynthia Mosley is dead; picture the scene; wonder at death; & drowse & doze in the heat, & decide to sleep here—hotel de la Poste; & read another letter, & learn that the Book Society will probably take Flush, & speculate what we shall do if we have 1,000 or £2,000 to spend. And what would these little burghers of Vienne, who are drinking coffee do, with that sum, I ask? The girl is a typist; the young men clerks. For some reason they start discussing hotels at Lyons, I think; & they havent a penny piece between them; & all the men go into the urinal, one sees their legs; & the Morocco soldiers go in their great cloaks; & the children play ball, & people stand lounging, & everything becomes highly pictorial, composed, legs, in particular—the odd angles they make, & the people dining in the hotel; & the queer air it all has, since we shall leave early tomorrow, of something designing [?] Vienne on my mind, significantly. Now the draw of home, & freedom, & no packing tells on us—oh to sit in an arm chair, & read & not to have to ask for Eau Minerale with which to brush our teeth!

[End of inserted pages]

Tuesday 30 May

52 Tavistock Square

Yes but of all things coming home from a holiday is undoubtedly the most damned. Never was there such aimlessness, such depression. Cant read, write or think. Theres no climax here. Comfort yes: but the coffee’s not so good as I expected. And my brain is extinct—literally hasnt the power to lift a pen. What one must do is to set it—my machine I mean—on the rails & give it a push. Lord—how I pushed yesterday to make it start running along Goldsmith again. Theres that half finished article. Lord Salisbury said something about dished up speeches being like the cold remains of last nights supper. I see white grease on the pages of my article. Today its a little warmer—tepid meat: a slab of cold mutton. Its coldish, dullish here. Yes, but I hear the clock tick, & suspect, though I must not look, that the wheels are just beginning to turn on the rails. We go to Monks House for Whitsun, which is Monday—the suburban, the diminished Monks House. No, I cant look at The Pargiters. Its an empty snail shell. And I’m empty with a cold slab of a brain. Never mind. I shall dive head foremost into The Pargiters. And now I shall make my mind run along Italian—whats his name—Goldoni. A few verbs I think.

It occurs to me that this state, my depressed state, is the state in which most people usually are.

Wednesday 31 May

I think I have now got to the point where I can write for 4 months straight ahead at The Pargiters. Oh the relief—the And I am at once called out to draw lots in our Derby sweepstake. No favourite this year they say. physical relief! I feel as if I cd. hardly any longer keep back—that my brain is being tortured by always butting against a blank wall—I mean Flush, Goldsmith, motoring through Italy: now, tomorrow, I mean to run it off. And suppose only nonsense comes? The thing is to be venturous, bold, to take every possible fence. One might introduce plays, poems, letters, dialogues: must get the round, not only the flat. Not the theory only. And conversation; argument. How to do that will be one of the problems. I mean intellectual argument in the form of art: I mean how give ordinary waking Arnold Bennett life the form of art? These are rich hard problems for my 4 months ahead. And I dont know my own gifts at the moment. I’m disoriented completely after 4 weeks holiday—no 3—but tomorrow we go to Rodmell again. And I must fill up the chinks with reading—& dont want to settle down to books—

Well, now I have to go up to Murray about my dress: & theres Ethel round the corner; but no letters; disorganisation from Whitsun again. I thought, driving through Richmond last night, something very profound about the synthesis of my being: how only writing composes it: how nothing makes a whole unless I am writing; now I have forgotten what seemed so profound. The rhododendron like coloured glass mounds at Kew. Oh the agitation, oh the discomfort of this mood.

[? Thursday 8 June]

Very well: the old Pargiters are beginning to run off: & I say oh to be done. I mean, writing is effort: writing is despair: & yet of course t’other day in the grilling heat at Rodmell, I admit that the perspective—this I think was something like my profound thought at Richmond—shifts into focus: yes: the proportion is right; though I at the top suffer strain, suffer, as this morning grim despair & shall O Lord when it comes to re-writing, suffer an intensity of anguish ineffable (the word only means one cant express it); holding the thing—all the things—the innumerable things—together.

We burst ‘the proportion’—I’m amused to compare the thing done with this inner oddity—& went to Leonards Lee, where I saw Nelly Cecil. She escaped—flying old white attenuated: I couldnt summon force to stop her. And she vanished. Violet was in the offing. So to tea in a stable with Mrs Woolf, Sylvia buying frigidaires because there’s nothing else to do; & Edgar glum, gloomy, solemn.

Tuesday 13 June

Apostle dinner last night. Morgan on Goldie. Adrian dined with me: wine; peach fed ham; Karin with inflamed eye from tattoo; Kapp: wine; cigars; in comes Hope [Mirrlees]: lost her neck, grown stubby waxy but affable. Talk of lunch to Ott: Would she like it? Yes, they say. Mention Pipsy [Philip Morrell]. And what is happening to Nan Warmington? Husband found dead in bed. And Ka. And Lottie. And Mrs Millington has hopes to inherit a fortune. Chancery opens once in 50 years.

And so on; like birds; very garrulous. The black dachshund on Hope’s knee. Has a snappy screech. Mary to call it by. Logan’s malice. His version of John & the Press. Resolved to make Logan pay for this. L. comes in. Says he must go again round to James [Strachey]. On with our stories: father, childhood. Was he utterly bad? Had friends, A. says. Cruel, says Hope, making me walk.

I am in full flood with P.s rather think it tends to a play: anyhow am floated. L. depressed, partly because of Shaw lunch, because of Pinka’s eczema; people—Bunny & E. Bowen tomorrow, Shaws, Bussys, Camargo; & now, instantly B⁠[arbara]. Hutchinson, to ask a favour, then to hat shop & Nelly Cecil.

Friday 16 June

Anrep coming in half an hour—10-10—so I cant even pretend to settle down to write. (Elvira scene finished). Oh yesterday! Oh yesterday!

Figure to yourself lunch on a hot day at the Shaws. Long narrow room overlooking river & white sepulchral buildings. The Binyons. He a plethoric bolt eyed congested little man; she, washy watery. Mrs Shaw small gimleteyed. In comes Shaw, alert for business, but not in the mood. No one in the mood. Lunch in another long narrow room. Unreal hotel lunch, butlers. Service Kitchen. Shaw’s paddle actually out of the water. Cutting no ice. Had to make a speech to friends of the Nat. Libraries that afternoon; didnt know what their object was; but hoped to say something unpleasant about the conference. And I talked. And I said This is d—d dull. I said it at intervals. Nothing flourished. Every saying died as spoken. All I retrieved was: Shaw does not visualise. I think of the sharp key as brass [?]—thats all. I never see my characters. I feel them in another way. Also, he had been sounded about the O. M. Baldwin said, he’ll only guy us. “I said I have already conferred the Order of Merit on myself”. Stories—about China: some he’d told us already. L.’s hand clattered. Story about his fathers love, which I share, of anti-climax. Throw them all into the Liffey—of his ancestors bones, when they wanted to make a new church. And I kept saying no the drug won’t work. Never once did it work; & we were all glad—Shaw glad—when Mrs S. whose mild babble is continuous—moved; & we never sat down, but had one look at the river, & Shaw escorted us along the black & white passage—very jaunty, upright—sea green eyes red face to the lift. A man of perfect poise—spring—agility—never to me interesting—no poet, but what an efficient, adept, trained arch & darter! His wires, his spring, at 76 entirely astonishing. And the hands flung out in gesture: he has the power to make the world his shape—to me not a beautiful shape—thats all. So home.

Very hot. Very hot. Had to write a letter for M. Fry about opening Squares. At 3.20 Anrep—to Ott’s. Ott in blue & red muslin—dangling earrings. What is it? Our affection for you Ott: we wish you to lunch——Oh dear, no I couldnt, I couldnt. Philip come & protect me!! Enter P. rather moth eaten. I am entirely on Ott’s side. Publicity. Too like Jack Squire. Besides, we still see our friends. And Clive has done very well without us. Do you think we are over? And so on—rather suspicious, rather hurt, rather on the high horse. And Ott genuinely disliking the ceremony. And Boris genuinely anxious expostulatory, deliberate rotund—grasping his hat & making a speech—determined. And P. saying, rather with intent, Ott has been at death’s door (yes, & we were none of us very kind then) & now, as you dont realise, cant stand any strain. Oh but we arent suggesting that she should give more parties—(And you’ll never come to parties she does give. This was sub-acute). Anyhow we walked up to T⁠[avistock].S⁠[quare]. with her—she to have her feet tended—& then B⁠[oris]. so he said, overcame her & kissed her in the street. So back here Then the wallet with the pass to the Pullman Cars picked up in the street. Then Ethel—oh & I was dumb, chill, completely insentient; & she tried to stage a quarrel & failed—failed, poor old woman, in all her effects—with the pinks too—was very unattractive—felt it—suggested going. Did I care? No. I could feel nothing, was dazed, impotent, so led her down the stairs, she, perhaps, suffering, perhaps not—& off she went, & I sank at last—at last—into silence. For had we not had Barbara Hutchinson twice, about her lover: had I not signed books, & gone to tea with Nelly Cecil, & picked up my ears with Lord Bob—& then the dinner with Bunny—taciturn, monolithic—& E⁠[lizabe]⁠th Bowen, conventional—& so on: all this I say has been whizzing & buzzing; & now Boris comes with Maynard’s letter of invitation to the Ott tea: whereupon out drops Ott’s refusal. No, no no, I cant. So thats over. And now to Rodmell this very hot June day.

Tuesday 20 June

Its a very ugly thing, a ceremony. I detest them more & more. This refers to my waste of a morning at the WCG Jubilee today. Margaret & Lilian, in grey blue, & coffee colour—how characteristic!—presented a banner. M.’s white hair, tied with black bow, wears thin. Their shoulders hunch a little. Otherwise I noted little change. The great hall full. The women all in pinks & blues. Fine old housekeepers; of the Sophie type; massive; determined. Now & then a great laugh; & very queer accents. Mrs Jones of Brighton pronounced twenty different ways. But all was ceremony. Margaret Bondfield: Susan Lawrence—& so on: the bigwigs: & they say things that arent true: they say we are on the brink of a new world; they talk of the triumph of co⁠[-operatio]⁠n. Thats why I hate ceremonies—not a word that fits—all wind blown, gaseous, with elementary emotions. Years ago I got something out of the mere conglomeration, the stir, the multitude. But today, I was not annihilated, dispersed; I said to myself The P.s is more real, truer harder, more veined with blood than all this, & longed to be back, working. How odd to spend a morning merely vacant, regardant!—How many I spend concentrated! Then we shook, & smiled with others intervening Margaret’s, Lilian’s hands: emotions not extreme; & found a back way out. I must now read Wainwrights, a possible East End novel. I am in flood again with The P.s.

Monday 26 June

The present moment. 7 o’clock on June 26th: L. printing: hot: thunderous: I after reading Henry 4 Pt one saying whats the use of writing; reading, imperfectly, a poem by Leopardi; the present moment, in my studio. A bucket banged in the mews; dog barks; woman, ‘I didn’t know if you were out here.’ Leaves door open: far away horns; a bee buzzing. Bobo’s first night; King lays stone of London Un⁠[iversity]. Doctors, scarlet, purple in streets; poor little students in gowns: so to dine, & read Archibald Marshall’s memoir; & music; thunder, I dare say; & so to open my windows, & go up: the moment done.

Thursday 6 July

Dinner at Roger’s yesterday. Company, S. Sitwells, Brennan, Oliver. All sat round about in Helen’s bedroom, eating cold things off a table. I next Georgia & Roger. Talk of patent medicines. “And then I found it was an aphrodisiac” G. says. She buys every patent medicine, by way of sedative. Bounds, abounds, halloos dogs on lawn: brown chocolate eyed; vital as they say not intellectual. Made the salad with cheese. Mrs B⁠[renan]. said to be sympathetic & soft & amusing by L. The Quennells: I in my desire not to be crushing perhaps too friendly. Francis Birrell. All chatter. Stayed late. Not much satisfaction—yet amusing enough, as such things are: Helen’s pin points; Roger reading French poetry to Mrs Q. & Gloria [Georgia]. “Gloria” says Helen, on the doorstep “has fallen in love with Dutuit. Caught her sighing at breakfast. My maid is going to have a child. Nonsense Gloria. Well, to tell the truth, I’m headlong in love—so’s he.” Gaily blinking, clumsy, moleish, attractive, always jerking from thing to thing. Knows nothing. Thats what lies behind the aphrodisiac, & the bounce I suppose.

Also to sit with George [Duckworth]—a solid mound in pink pyjamas: Margaret tender & solicitous; given eau de Cologne; also Roger’s show: also—now to the London Library meeting. Two days of misery writing Goldsmith, forced respite from Pargiters.

Friday 7 July

Being headachy after Pargiters & Goldsmith & ever so many people I have spent the whole morning reading old diaries, & am now (10 to 1) much refreshed. This is by way of justifying these many written books. And we have a party tonight—Wests, Hutchinsons, Plomer—so I need rest my head. The diary amuses me.

Monday 10 July

Bella [LW’s sister] arrived & knocked her head upon the window of the car. She cut her nose & was dazed. And then I was in ‘one of my states’—how violent how acute & walked in Regent’s Park in black misery & had to summon my cohorts in the old way to see me through, which they have done more or less. A note made to testify to my own ups & downs; many of which go unrecorded though they are less violent I think than they used to be. But how familiar it was—stamping along the road, with gloom & pain constricting my heart; & the desire for death in the old way all for two, I daresay careless words.

It seems possible that Tom has finally deserted Vivienne. Jack Hutch, came to our frosty sticky party, with the meticulous fish blooded cultivated Andrews—Rebecca merely a hard painted woman, that night, living in society—& Hutch, told us how V. has heard by cable that Tom sailed on 26th & he has not arrived. She has by today worked herself into frenzy—in bed, with a nurse; & then Jack telephoned to Faber—L.’s idea—& they say mysteriously that they cannot discuss the matter on the telephone, but if V. will pull herself together she will realise that there is no reason for anxiety. This we interpret to mean that Tom is back; has told Faber that he is parting from her; but it is kept secret, until he gives leave—which he may do today. Anyhow, V. is clearly concealing something. J⁠[ack]. read one of Tom’s last letters, & describes it as a very cold & brutal document, saying that he has made no money. I should expect that after his 6 months thought & absence he has decided to make the break here: has warned V. & provided for her. But she shuts the letters in the cupboard with the sealed string. L. is made her executor. So I go up to lunch to hear.

Thursday 20 July

This was quite a correct statement of the Eliot position. He has left her “irrevocably”; & she sits meanwhile in a flat decorated with pictures of him, & altars, & flowers. Sometimes she prevails on a stranger—like E. Bowen to believe her story, at others lapses into sense. We dine with the Hutchinsons tonight, & shall I expect found some sort of Vivienne fund. It is said that there is a Convent next door to M⁠[ary]. in which she might pass her days, praying for Tom.

I am again in full flood with The P.s after a week of very scanty pages. The trouble is to get the meat pressed in: I mean to keep the rhythm & convey the meaning. It tends more & more, I think—at any rate the E⁠[lvira].M⁠[aggie]. scenes—to drama. I think the next lap ought to be objective, realistic, in the manner of Jane Austen: carrying the story on all the time.

Vita dined [on 18 July]; Nigel has appendicitis; Vita that night had slightly painted her lips, but unskilfully. Now why?

Friday 21 July

Dinner at the Hutchinsons last night; in the garden, though there might have been a shower. Very cloudy, sultry & completely still. The white cat came out & played about. Mary in white, like a mummy; with a yellow turban, hanging down: chalk white face, like a pierrot. I said I would put her in The Pargiters. She might come in the last scene, or going half jockey too to a party. Like a little horse. We were much more natural & easy than usual. Lobster & cutlets in aspic. We talked of the Eliots a little; then of B⁠[arbara]. & Victor: how both Desmond & I said he was jealous. Then the lights began to flicker on the faces of the houses & on the trees. Mary became rather restless & said would we like to go to the Zoo. We might meet people there, she said. She wanted to go. Jack not much, nor I not much. But we went. And we met Simon [Bussy] & two frenchmen, Masson the ballet maker, in the reptile house. Mary twined the heavy scaly pythons round her: they have bright electric blue bloom on them. They feel like muscles moving under a shiny plated skin; L. took one & it wound itself round his head like a toque, sticking its head out & flicking its tongue at the side. So to the white bears, the polar bears sea lions; & looked at the brilliant green showering trees, with sleepy birds pecking about on the grass.

Vivi. E⁠[liot]. said of the scene with Tom at the solicitors: he sat near me & I held his hand, but he never looked at me.

———

He’s not a poet, no; so what is he to do “… That is poetry written here by mistake— damn. Maggie in its pre-natal stage; before it has taken wings to itself & flown to the—” She paused at the bookcase, & took down, the Antigone, translated by Edward Pargiter. to the utmost

———

Wednesday 26 July

Miss Cashin & L. doing books—‘89 here & 500 sheets’ & I very sleepy after dining with Julia [Tomlin]; having tea with E. Bowen in the heat—the great heat. Another unbroken wave. When I cant write of a morning—as now—I try to tune myself on other books: couldnt settle on any save T. Hardy’s life just now. Rather to my liking. He was unreasonable about critics, so that pale cold chicken Morgan says. And he felt bitter about the treatment of working men at Oxford; hence Jude. “The Marionnette” L. is reading out to Miss Cashin. Quentin has mild pleurisy; Nessa gone down to Charleston; finds Raymond there; at Julia’s last night Wogan [Philipps], “I think you might remainder 50 of M⁠[arionette]. L.”—Dorothy Bussy, Peter Quennell: whom I dont warm to—exiguous worm, rather: skinned: clever; cleverer than Wogan, who’s nicer than Peter. Talk of Memoir Club. “But my autobiography would be too dirty” said PQ. They said—the young—that they had no group. Talk about Ann & Judith: Q. said he deprecated Amazons. I said I liked them till 20 or so. Q. I think is in trouble, so I guess, with his doll of a * A good shot He left her, or she him soon afterwards wife.* “Marriage—”—spoken very bitterly. Told me of a visit to Plaistow to correct proofs with Desmond. Coming back in the rattling tram, D. said to him how someone (he thought Molly) had proposed to him, being a good deal more in love than he was “& they always feel the claws in their heart to this day.” Odd instance of D.’s spasmodic intimacy.

Oh if I could finish my Goldsmith & send it off. I must.

A great many visits: Miss Porter, James Stephen, half witted oaf, on business about Wilberforce, designed to push him on. Got out of meeting Low, at Kingsley Martins, of Mrs Maloney, American editor of the Feis’s. So we go off to Monks House tomorrow, & shall write: yes: The P.’s must be dealt with in masterly manner. An exciting book to write.

Sunday 30 July

Rodmell

Settled in again here. A question how far places influence one’s mood. Certain thoughts I always think: the downs spoilt, could we move, &c. leading to a well known round. Quentin ill with pleurisy; may have to have an operation—This the first illness at Charleston. We dine there tonight. And, in order to refresh my mind for P.s I’ve been writing memoirs, & cant disinfect my mind of Fitzroy Sqre. so strong is the past—so as to read Italian. I’m telling the story of W.H. & H.Y. But I am organising life here, & so far rather well. Reading & walking & swimming into lucid depths, powerfully—thats how I put it. And people impend, but can be shelved for the moment—Colefax, E⁠[lizabe]⁠th Read, Julia, the Wolves &c ..

Mrs B.’s case is interesting. It reflects credit on humanity. Her half cousin Lydia Hastie, a mad wandering witted old woman died in Florence & left 17,000: half to Mrs B. This represents safety indeed luxury for life. Now we come down & are given all the lawyers letters. Signora Colli who looked after the dying demented Hastie—Hastie’s letters to Mr Duncan in Aberdeen on politics very interesting; & her perpetual shifting of Josephus, Macaulay & so on—this Colli writes that she had expected 600 a year. And so would certainly have got it, had Miss H. signed a codicil. P⁠[ercy]. & Mrs B. say they will offer her £50 p.a. if the other legatee will do the same. She is not grasping, Miss Colli, accounts for every penny, & Dr Potts is humane: & the B.’s full of sense & restraint—more than I, had I suddenly one thousand without working. These little tributes to human nature are deserved after Hitler & Mussolini—about whom Miss Hastie often wrote. I figure her perpetually arranging her blue & gold tea set, her fathers watch, the bon bon box, & the card box made of the Fern oak in Windsor “which was mentioned in Shakespeare” in the house in Florence, where she lived with Colli aged 76.

Tuesday 8 August

Since we came here I have been twice to Charleston; seen the Keyneses; been to Worthing; had Eth Read (a nice shrewd hard girl with a public mind) to tea; the Easdales & Norman Stewart (a clever, good fellow, scientist) to tea; expect Mrs Nef at 3 to discuss her scandalous memoirs: we go to London on Friday & Ethel comes on Sunday. Is this peace? I’m heavy brained today—its been so hot; & I have read Mrs Nef from 10 to 12.20. Scandals about USA: but I am sworn to secrecy. I imagine a pretty youngish jumpy intellectual-fashionable American, completely disoriented; writes rather well; interesting; but all at sea.

Saturday 12 August

So naturally after Mrs Nef I was so tired—I shivered & shook. I went to bed for 2 days & slept I daresay 7 hours, visiting the silent realms again. It strikes me—what are these sudden fits of complete exhaustion? I come in here to write: cant even finish a sentence; & am pulled under; now is this some odd effort; the sub-conscious pulling me down into her? I’ve been reading Faber on Newman; compared his account of a nervous breakdown; the refusal of some part of the mechanism; is that what happens to me? Not quite. Because I’m not evading anything. I long to write The Pargiters. No. I think the effort to live in 2 spheres: the novel; & life is a strain; Nefs’s almost break me, because they strain me so far from the other world; I only want walking & perfectly spontaneous childish life with L. & the accustomed when I’m writing at full tilt: to have to behave with circumspection & decision to strangers wrenches me into another region; hence the collapse.

Still, Saturday, I cant focus; am disoriented; sleepy; physically tired, but quite calm; the dear old repetitions soothe me again: L.; Pinka; dinner; tea; papers; music; I have a dread of ‘seeing’ people: increase this in anticipation: but what I dread is the wrench to another sphere.

Wednesday 16 August

And owing to Sir Alan Cobham’s flying, & Angelica & Julian & fetching the boat I had another headache, & bed, & didnt see Ethel, but heard her voice & have 6 pages on the subject this morning, & didnt see the Wolves, & am out here again, nibbling at The P.s & thinking Oh Lord how am I ever going to pull all that into shape! What a tremendous struggle it’ll be! Never mind. I want to discuss Form, having been reading Turgenev, (but how my hand trembles after one of these headaches—cant lay hands on words or pens exactly—the habit has been broken)

Form then, is the sense that one thing follows another rightly. This is partly logic. T. wrote & re-wrote. To clear the truth of the unessential. Dostoevsky But then D. would say that everything matters. But one cant read D. again. Now Sh⁠[akespea]⁠re. was constrained in form by the stage (T. says one must find a new form for the old subject: but here, I suppose, uses the word differently—) The essential thing in a scene is to be preserved. How do you know what this is? How do we know if the D. form is better or worse than the T. It seems less permanent. T.’s idea that you the writer states the essential & lets the reader do the rest. D. to supply the reader with every possible help & suggestion. T. reduces the possibilities.

The difficulty about criticism is that it is so superficial The writer has gone so much deeper. T. kept a diary for Bazarov: wrote everything from his point of view. We have only 250 short pages. Our criticism is only a birds eye view of the pinnacle of an iceberg. The rest under water. One might begin it in this way. The article might be more broken, less composed than usual.

Thursday 24 August

A week ago, on Friday to be precise, having got my wind again, I dipped into The Pargiters, & determined to sweat it bare of flesh before going on, accumulating more scenes. I am rearranging too, all the first part, so as to bring it together. The death happens in the first chapter now. I think I shall reduce the size by half; it is however a little bare & jerky at present. Moreover it is rather a rush & a strain. I have just killed Mrs P. & cant shoot ahead to Oxford. For the truth is these little scenes embroil one, just as in life; & one cant switch off to a different mood all in a second. It seems to me that the realness of the beginning is complete. I have a good excuse for poetry in the second part, if I can take it. Rather an interesting experiment—if I could see the same thing from two different views.

And now I have spent the morning reading the Confessions of Arsene Houssaye left here yesterday by Clive. What a vast fertility of pleasure books hold for me! I went in & found the table laden with books. I looked in & sniffed them all. I could not resist carrying this one off & broaching it. I think I could happily live here & read forever.

It is true, we have many interruptions. Yesterday, after knocking against a wild Alsatian that ran into the car—we gave him a great bang—he lay squirming—dead, I thought, then reeled up & went galloping over the field, unhurt, though he broke our lamps & bent the mud guard—after this unpleasant shock, Clive came & Julian & Frances Marshall. Clive said only one thing to hurt me—how I could not take a beating at a game. That was a feeble effort, compared with what he can do in that line. Otherwise we were affable enough; & played bowls; & Fanny asked us to Ham Spray, where we may go, if we make our Western tour. Still, we see too many people, to my view: the Kingsley Martins, who are to me mentally & physically unattractive people; the sort of people George Trevelyan would have liked 25 years ago: this struck me, for their views are ‘right’, & she is ugly stringy earnest plain. K. eats so sloppily. And they force themselves upon us. Into the bargain, I have heard from Tom, & from Peter [Lucas]. Tom is all artifice & quips & querks. A defence. One of these days perhaps he’ll give up the trick, with marriage, or perhaps religion. All the same, our quiet days, in between times, are rightly balanced, full of peace, & possibilities. How happy, when people go, to get our dinner, & sit alone, & go to bed in my airy room, where the rising sun on the apples & asparagus wakes me, if I leave the curtain open. I am reading all Turgenev, with a view to an article; for I intend to space the arduous sections of The P.s with serene criticism. This keeps me in reading while I spin fiction. A happy day today, without visitors. Hugh Jones & the Cartwrights, alas, tomorrow.

Sunday 27 August

The Cartwrights werent so bad after all, though a bit of a grind—two gawky girls, & Hugh, a schoolboy, with a crest worked on his coat pocket. The girls squawked a little; too genteel over their tea, which they devoured. I had had the forethought to buy sugar cakes in Lewes, where we had to go in the morning, to take Martin’s [garage] man back; for he had brought the car, refurbished from the Alsatian. And my typewriter ribbon had gone wrong. So we went in & found Lewes in festival—the corporation fidgetting about on a doorstep covered with dull red: the local tradesmen habited in blue robes with thin strips of fur, because the troops were coming, on their economy march to Arundel. We ran into them; dirty men in shirtsleeves, marching, with the flaps of their caps let down over their necks, it was so hot. The natives of Lewes stood at the bottom of Station Street waving handkerchiefs, bobbing their umbrellas up & down. Not an inspiring sight—the British army; & I disliked the credulous fat faced old women who had been dabbing their handkerchiefs in the air. But the Cartwrights had their cakes, & we played bowls. They are all 3 becoming scientists, possibly scientific chemists, science, they say being the most popular subject now, though they are doubtful about jobs. Now & again Hugh reminded me of Philip. The same green blue prominent eyes, & I thought that I detected perhaps a finer grain in him than in the others. But L. denies this. They were nice, simple, shy; why did they come, I wondered? Did Mrs C. & Mrs J. insist? We drove them over to the Sea Hotel on the front at Seaford, & I saw seaside life going on. And they seemed very young & unfitted—I mean, the average, not the exception. They bathe, running down the steps of the sea hotel into the sea. A sort of beauty too. Not that I liked the couple in evening dress who passed. She was wearing a fur coat. Why dress for dinner? To show your social standing? Home, & Tarring Neville looked very lovely.

And I forgot to say that Flush has been chosen by the American Book Society. Lord!

Wednesday 30 August

And two days ago, sitting in the garden at Charleston, Clive in his queer jerky way said he had very bad news of Francis Birrell & brought out a letter from Raymond. F. has a tumour on his brain & is to be operated on, perhaps, today. So all night I dreamt of him, my dream giving me, as my dreams often do, the essence of a relationship which in real life will never find expression. I remember sitting beside him on a sofa, & how we kissed & kissed, as friends; though in my dream I do not think that I knew he was ill. I am rather haunted by it. Think of waiting all yesterday, for an operation which may well be fatal. What should I have felt had I been him? And why was I not him? The sense of friends dying is a very terrible one.

Yesterday here was hot, baking hot; & Campbell Douglas came, 10.30: Robson 2.30. “Call me Willie” he said at 5: at 6 Vita came; Mr Neil Lyons strolled in from the road to beg bay leaves for his pickled herrings, & a sprig of hazel since he suspects himself of being a water diviner. Vita stayed the night; we had grouse for dinner; she spent the morning talking to me; & Mary Hutchinson has just rung up to suggest a visit. Tomorrow we go to London.

Saturday 2 September

With that usual dread of asking for news on the telephone, I rang up Raymond on Thursday & heard to my extreme relief, that F.’s case is not so bad nearly as it seemed. The growth is small, thought to [be] on the outside, & there seems no reason why he should not recover. I seemed to see him hauled up into the air again as R. spoke. The operation is next week. Curious how all ones fibres seem to expand & fill with air when anxiety is taken off; curious also to me the intensity of my own feelings: I think imagination, the picture making power, decks up feelings with all kinds of scenes; so that one goes on thinking, instead of localising the event. All very mysterious. But anyhow I expanded, & felt very fond of that dear old rattling milk lorry, & hoped he would see me out, & must bring myself to write to him. Partly selfishness, of course, this horror, that it means another extinction of one’s own life: brings death nearer. But let us think no more of death. Its life that matters, to quote my quotation from Montaigne.

Suddenly in the night I thought of “Here & Now” as a title for The Pargiters. I think it better. It shows what I’m after & does not compete with the Herries Saga, the Forsyte Saga & so on. I have now done the first part; I mean compressed it, shall, I think, compress Eleanor’s day, & then what? The rest does not admit of much compression! think I have reduced it to 80,000 words perhaps; but it seems to me there must be another 40, to come. 80+40 = 120,00[0]. If so it will be the longest of my little brood—longer than N⁠[ight]. & D⁠[ay]. I imagine

As Percy says when he brings in the slop pail & I’m boiling the kettle “You’ve never had such a summer”. No I say, “its been fine since Christmas” which is more or less the case. We have steadied the old ship & sail through blue days again. L. is having the new pond made, the old one re-grouted, & is going to pave the front garden. Flush, I think with some pleasure, has made these extravagances possible. We should net £2,000 from that six months dogged & dreary grind. What will people say of that little book I wonder, without great anxiety. Tom wrote yesterday, telling me, in his jaunty uneasy manner, to conceal his address, & the date of his visit. The mystery I imagine flatters him. But we shall see deeper into that dark well perhaps. And I have had 2 blessed days of silence. & we walked on the marsh today, & saw a drowned sheep, & were flurried by our 3 dogs. And I have decided by the way not to accept the Leslie Stephen lectureship which has not been offered me, & feel comfortably cool & obscure & anonymous. As Lytton once said, success came to us too late to make us hop on our perches.

I am reading with extreme greed a book by Vera Britain, called The Testament of Youth. Not that I much like her. A stringy metallic mind, with I suppose, the sort of taste I should dislike in real life. But her story, told in detail, without reserve, of the war, & how she lost lover & brother, & dabbled her hands in entrails, & was forever seeing the dead, & eating scraps, & sitting five on one WC, runs rapidly, vividly across my eyes. A very good book of its sort. The new sort, the hard anguished sort, that the young write; that I could never write. Nor has anyone written that kind of book before. Why now? What urgency is there on them to stand bare in public? She feels that these facts must be made known, in order to help—what? herself partly I suppose. And she has the social conscience. I have still to read how she married the infinitely dreary Catlin & found beauty & triumph in poor, gaping Holtby. But I give her credit for having lit up a long passage to me at least. I read & read & read & neglect Turgenev & Miss C. Burnett. But why does my hand shake? Why cant I write clearly?

Sunday 10 September

To begin with another question (just read the last pages) why am I sitting here at 10.30 on a Sunday morning, rather stiff in the back, rather sore of the lips, writing diary, not novel? Because of dear old Tom largely. 24 hours (short interval for sleep) solid conversation, preluded by 2 hours flimsy conversation with the Hutchinsons. And at 1.30 Rosamond & Wogan to lunch; & at 4.30 Charleston to tea. Hence I am sitting here. Tomorrow, in the divine peace of Monday, I shall walk on the downs & think of Tom & my parched lips with some degree of pleasure. Yes, it was worth it, though when a second day seemed on the cards my tongue fainted & my heart stood still. He is 10 years younger: hard, spry, a glorified boy scout in shorts & yellow shirt. He is enjoying himself very much. He is tight & shiny as a wood louse (I am not writing for publication). But there is well water in him, cold & pure. Yes I like talking to Tom. But his wing sweeps curved & scimitar like round to the centre himself. He’s settling in with some severity to being a great man. Keats wasn’t that. We talked about Keats’s letters. Tom said that letter writing was a form he preferred to Times leader writing. I think this hints some change in his views. He said that he no longer thought felt quite so sure of a science of criticism. He also said that people exaggerate the intellectuality & erudition of his poetry. “For example Ross Williamson in his book on me … He says that very seriously. I couldnt quote Holtby with the same candour. Ross apparently attributed the dog, in Tom’s quotation from Webster, to profound associations with the dog star. Not a bit of it says Tom: I was having a joke about Webster. I connect all this with his bubbling up of life. At 46 he wants to live, to love; even seeing Rochester is an event to him. He has seen nothing, nobody, for the last 10 years. We had it out about V. at breakfast. Some asperity on Tom’s part. He wont admit the excuse of insanity for her—thinks she puts it on; tries to take herself in; for this reason, mystifies Eth Bowen. I thought him a little resentful of all the past waste & exaction. I gather he will see a good deal of us: & if I had time, & if I could move the heavy stone of his self esteem an inch or two higher, I should like to talk out to Tom about writing. Only there’s always the reservation—I cant talk about “my writing”; so that talk about his writing palls⁠[?]. But I am to find him 2 rooms in Somers Town. And we agreed about the infamy of teaching English; the idiocy of lectures; the whole hierarchy of professor, system & so on: at any rate I got him to go some way with me in denouncing Oxford & Cambridge. He learnt (1) self confidence at Oxford; (2) how to write plain English—thats all. I daresay though he will become Prof. of Poetry at Oxford one of these days.

His father was a brick merchant in St Louis; & they lived in the slums among vacant lots. & his father always gave away money; & died, alas, in 1919 before Tom had become—well, happily his mother lived to see him what she called (& I daresay Tom too) a great man. What a queer naïve vanity all this is! But of course, when you are thrown like an assegai into the hide of the world—this may be a definition of genius—there you stick; & Tom sticks. To shut out, to concentrate—that is perhaps—perhaps—one of the necessary conditions. And now it is close on eleven; the bells are tolling; the leaves are very bright on pear tree & apple tree; & I think I shall dawdle over letters & books—I must read 12th night for Lydia’s extortion (an article on her appearance) & so drowse as quietly as possible till we have to talk incessantly till 8 o’clock—& then O Lord—quiet, dine alone, & sleep in my airy room; & no talk tomorrow or tomorrow.

(why not write a book—of Cr⁠[itics]⁠m in this style?)

Saturday 23 September

This summer, I may say by way of criticism, & as a warning, has been too broken up with people. Next year I intend to be more circumspect. For the past fortnight I have lived, I say, as other people live—that is outwardly. I gave up The P.s, had reached the end of the revision; & as we had the Lucas’s, Angelica & [her friend] Eve [Younger], to stay, also to go to London, to dine with the Hutches, to have Morgan for the week end, & the memoir Club tonight, it seemed wise to attempt no concentration; but to participate with one’s friends. I’ve had to wedge in though, that horrid tough little article on 12th night; which being tentatively roughed out this morning I write here.

And it is a thorough wet day. The ponds are filling. L.’s new pond & garden are almost done, & surprisingly good, I think. The summer is put away folded up in the drawer with other summers. By Gods grace we may get 10 or 12 days without visitors before going back, but I say this not with conviction. The truth is, I like it when people actually come; but I love it when they go. It was this subconsciously that made me assume that Peter & Prudence were only staying the night—whereas he had suggested two nights. This was the cause of some embarrassment. We had to go to London soon after breakfast. She is one of the direct shorthaired terrier kind, breaking, unexpectedly, into loud barks. Why Peter, the fastidious, should commit himself for life to her, after Topsy, I cant think. A hand raised in the High or the Low would summon 20 such instantly. For life!—good God! I could not envisage a week of that ardent, shadeless, untidy, loveless, beautyless little woman; at 22 perhaps: but think of 32, 42, 52—No. He is single eyed though; paces through life between blinkers, seeing only the high road. Perhaps Prudence serves as giglamp. She works for him in libraries. They quote Greek & Latin. And he never reads a book unless he is going to write about it, she says. And so he will pen his way through life—charming, honest, fastidious, ascetic as he is; & will leave a long trail of books behind him—which I shall never read, because he writes with frozen fingers.

Old Ethel came, grown stout. And as I say, we go to Brighton today to meet Morgan, & I shall read my memoir tonight, send off my article on Monday morning, & so consider myself quit of all duties to my friends. Monday begins my holiday, my breathing space. I shall go for a long walk, I tell myself, & read Smoke [Turgenev] in the evening, having played a game of bowls with L. And it will be a very fine day. And I shall pull open my curtains & see the stars at night. Really a marvellous spectacle—all for nothing. I am reading Margot—“V W our greatest English authoress;” Molly Hamilton on Webbs: & Turgenev.

Tuesday 26 September

Why not, one of these days, write a fantasy on the theme of Crabbe?—a biographical fantasy—an experiment in biography?

I had so much of the most profound interest to write here—a dialogue of the soul with the soul,—& I have let it all slip—why? Because of feeding the gold fish, of looking at the new pond, of playing bowls. Nothing remains now. I forget what It was about. Happiness. The perfect day, which was yesterday. And so on. Now I began the morning by telephoning corrections of 12th Night to the N.S., put in a comma, take out semi-colon; & so on. Then I come out here, having seen the carp, & write Turgenev.

Monday 2 October

Yes. I had to write about the memoir Club, & Molly’s biting our hands. “Its torture anyhow, when one cant hear a word”. Then they all came over, & we sat on the terrace; eleven people here; Julian in outline with E. Read. “Julian’s going to teach me to think” she said as she went. I had to scurry back to MacCarthys. Thats all over.

Its October now; & we have to go to Hastings Conference tomorrow & Wednesday, to Vita, then back to London. I opened this in order to make one of my self-admonishments previous to publishing a book. Flush will be out on Thursday & I shall be very much depressed, I think, by the kind of praise. They’ll say its ‘charming’ delicate, ladylike. And it will be popular. Well now I must let this slip over me without paying it any attention. I must concentrate on The Pargiters—or Here & Now. I must not let myself believe that I’m simply a ladylike prattler: for one thing its not true. But they’ll all say so. And I shall very much dislike the popular success of Flush. No, I must say to myself, this is a mere wisp, a rill of water; & so create, hardly [?] fiercely, as I feel now more able to do than ever before.

Thursday 5 October

No, I will not tackle the peculiarity of Turgenev. For one thing we are starting at 11.30 sharp for Sissinghurst; & then I spent yesterday in bed; headache; infinite weariness up my back: clouds forming in my neck; half asleep; through the rift reading Steen (author of Stallion) on Hugh Walpole. My word—how Hugh can let that rotten pear lie on his name God knows. “God is Romance. God is The Character in Hugh Wal’s novels” & so on. And then Flush has taken his first fence, the Lit Sup, at a bound. Also to my pleasure, some obscure journalist detects no signs of whimsicality. So, though I shall get some nasty raps in the weeklies, I am sunning my wings this morning: this bright soft October morning: when the pear tree has a spatter of bright leaves; Caburn is under mist; the big pond is almost full; the little pond done; & thank Heaven, L. & I are driving off, ever so happily, through Kent. This is going to be a happy day, Isay;

On Tuesday we went to Hastings; a queer experience always, that conference: a door opened into a buzzing bursting humming perfectly self dependent other world. Bevan [Bevin] was vociferating when we came in. But they were all marking time owing to a compromise. There are details I never get clear. When one of the tub thumpers was up, we went & sat on the balcony. The Hall is a very gay frivolous seaside hall, & the ships passed very indifferently on the horizon adapted for municipal concerts dances & so on. We sat out & had coffee on a green table, & Gillies came, & Phil Baker, & they dissected policies, again invisible to me, though Gillies threw out the remark (in deference to me, perhaps?) that he was not naturally a politician, but preferred Gardens; had been staying at Zennor: W. A. F. has a whole field of gentians &c. Phil does not truckle to the arts, for which I like him. I always think about his teeth being filed. And then the Rodent—a mixture of Bob [Trevelyan] & Youngs—reminiscent of my early youth—a rather thin, water blooded kind of man, with hair parted & steel grey eyes—& a mouth like a spinsters reticule, but of course humane, vitalised by his humanity, sufferings of negroes, son who goes to Russia, vegetarian, once every 3 weeks overcome with lust for beef—ate fish—he gave us lunch at Frascati’s, or some such place. I had a vast plate of beef. L. fed Pinka on the bone of his cutlet. R. in his way genial, a man of the world; a gentleman I thought as I followed him through his hotel by a secret passage out. He held himself so well. Then to the Queens Hotel where the bigwigs lodge: & then Rodent being a gentleman wished to entertain us & crooked his finger & summoned Pethick Lawrence & Mr Robertson & the lady who calls herself Mrs being in fact a Fitzroy & the friend of Mrs Walter. I talked to Pethick L.; a frost-bitten blue eyed little old man now; & he was reading Holtby on V.W. You are V.W.? Yes. I said; & then in my emotional way praised his speech that wet day at Brighton: which kindled him a little; & he told me about his wife, now speaking at Oxford about armament firms. I was enlightened & horrified; how France & Germany combine to stir up war—were joint manufacturers of guns & so on. All this should be a government industry he said. I said What an argument against Capitalism! And then he had to go to the Con⁠[feren]⁠ce to hear Dalton: but we could only stand very little of Hugh; & so went out, got into the car & drove home.

The night before we went to a meeting here, in the Club, & L. broached the question of a play ground. Captain Palmer talked to me—a man with one idea in his perfectly direct upright wizened tanned little being. His wife more voluptuous had been at Wye races therefore was sleepy. He had a great idea of duty to the village: called the men Back, Hubbard & so on, & thought it a disgrace that Toc H in Lewes should be asked to supply a helper to run a boys club. He was also inclined to think Mr Hancock a menace. But I must get ready now for Vita.

Friday 6 October

Less jubilant, on account of Rebecca West’s criticism: that F⁠[lush] is not one of my best &c: but rather braced. The problem will now be how to guide oneself through popularity: a curious reversal of my old problem; but I daresay the same. An interesting problem: I like problems to change. Now for Turgenev, in my braced mood. It is better to write braced than relaxed—

[Saturday 7 October]

no doubt true; but this morning (Saturday) cheered by Bunny’s praise. Says its a new venture; the best in proportion & so on. And today not a word about me anywhere. So thats soothing. And if tomorrow were over, Sunday Times & Observer through, I could settle in snugly. Oh & Morgan says my memoir was ‘wonderful’; which pleases me for the light it throws on Here & Now. Perhaps I can bring off that style. And now, letters, packing, going from the lodge to the house; a damp dull day so far, but it will clear. However there’s the cement works here; so I must balance one thing with another. A very crowded gay summer in its way. Too crowded; but what happiness, coming back that night from London with L. for example: the country at midnight. And going [?] up early; & bowls, & our solitary evenings; & cooking dinner.

Monday 9 October

52 Tavistock Square

Back again & our burden is on us. Mrs Woolf yesterday; today David Cecil; tomorrow Nessa Quentin Julian lunch; Hugh Walpole tea; Thursday Vita & Mrs St. Aubyn—& so it begins, with Sibyl & Rosamund in the background. I’m through the Flush wave though. A small one, compared with others. Desmond praises: Morn P. tears me between the rough, coarse yellow feeble teeth of poor Mr Grigson. So its over: & if it werent for the strain of people, dentists, clothes—but no: I’m going to master this. I’m going to let my self have room & verge enough. Talk of leaving London yesterday & moving the Press to Monks House: talk of buying a cottage in the North. We have plenty of money anyhow.

A soft day; have to take the car to Hendon, am writhing with Turgenev of a morning. Can I finish this week, & start Here & now next? Can I?

[Monday 16 October]

And then Desmond broke in; yes—but today is Monday again, the 16th; & I have lived through the scrimmage of that week, & actually at 2.30 today, delivered my Turgenev to the typist, & so have tomorrow free for Here & Now. Free—yes. After Philip W⁠[oolf]. & Babs to supper yesterday. I pared the cold mutton & put it in the pot. Mary comes today: L. is sneezing; pray God not a cold; Miss Evans [unidentified] is pending; & I want, rather vainly, to read the Book of Job. Tomorrow & tomorrow & tomorrow. Yesterday we said Time stand still & walked up a hill outside Princes Risborough. I seem to have stopped inventing The P.s about Aug 20th then rewrote:

Friday 20 October

Did I say I was going to write Here & Now? Not a word done. L. had influenza; so Elly says. Up & about in 2 days of course. But last night I came to the decision to stop the career of the Hogarth Press; to revert to Richmond days. What is the use of drudging & sweating & curtailing Siena & entirely obliterating all Italy England Ireland & Greece for the sake of publishing Susan Lawrence & bad novels? No. Here we stop & take a fresh course—We go to Rodmell tomorrow & I shall there broach the new scheme. Look, I cant write, cant hold a pen, all for the bother & the worry. I can only hear the pump booming. Its true I wrote the Turgenev, all yesterday till my head spun. Its true we’ve had the devils own week. But to me the Press has lost its spring & balance, & could regain it if it now made a constriction to the old ideals. We might start the magazine.

It’s possible that Flush is to be pictured. Brace yesterday talked of a substantial sum. It will fall through I suppose; but for Gods sake, why make more money? I have a thousand letters to write & Hampson to read—cant spin a sentence in the air, or even control my nib. So no more.

Oh & Gerald Brenan’s book is unmitigated trash—a sickly slab of plum cake iced with pink fly blown sugar, in spite of Bunny.

Sunday 29 October

No my head is too tired to go on with Bobby & Elvira—theyre to meet at St Paul’s—this morning. I wish I could get it full & calm & unconscious. This last is difficult, owing to Flush, owing to the perpetual little spatter of comment that keeps me awake. Yesterday the Granta said I was now defunct. Orlando Waves Flush represent the death of a potentially great writer. This is only a rain drop; I mean the snub some little pimpled undergraduate likes to administer, just as he would put a frog in ones bed: but then there’s all the letters, & the requests for pictures—so many that, foolishly perhaps, I wrote a sarcastic letter to the N.S.—thus procuring more rain drops. This metaphor shows how tremendously important unconsciousness is when A man wrote to say that my letter is to be the basis of a new guild for the P. of P. See January number of something or other one writes. But let me remember that fashion in literature is an inevitable thing; also that one must grow & change; also that I have, at last laid hands upon my philosophy of anonymity. My letter to the N.S. is the crude public statement of a part of it. How odd last winter’s revelation was! freedom; which now I find makes it quite easy for me to refuse Sibyl’s invitations, to take life much more strongly & steadily. I willnot be ‘famous’ ‘great’. I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind & my eyes, refusing to be stamped & stereotyped. The thing is to free ones self; to let it find its dimensions, not be impeded. And though this as usual is only a pot shot, there is a great deal of substance in it. October has been a bad month; but might have been much worse without my philosophy. Its been harassed, then L. with influenza, if only for 2 days, quickens all my insight into disaster; then Nessa away; Quentin ill; with it all, however, I have forced myself to space out these horrors.

But enough. Raymond came yesterday: Francis still very much paralysed; after 10 minutes the Raymond machine clogs; an uneasy shallow sandy mind; Eth Bowen, improving; oh & the Kingsley Martins never cease to invite us to meet Low.

Shall I now read the New Testament?

The great family dinner is tonight.

I think the pump is improved, by a letter to Bentley.

Sunday 12 November

I ought to have made a note on Nessa & the aeroplane—last Friday—no Friday week—at Croydon. We took them there at 7. Had to be up by moonlight at 6.30. Drove across an empty delicately tinted London; lines all much marked; Croydon a great space like a green race course. We stood on the top of the roof; saw the aeroplane whirl, till the propellors were lost to sight—simply evaporated: then the aeroplane takes a slow run, circles & rises. This is death I said, feeling how the human contact was completely severed. Up they went with a sublime air & disappeared like a person dying, the soul going. And we remained. I saw the plane become a little mark on the sky. A good funeral could be arranged. And I did not at all enjoy waiting for Nessa to come back across the Alps: sat making conversation with Lady Simon. So thats over.

And our visit to Francis—the shaven Chinese Idol; old Birrell grown very soft & babyish, in slippers, with his shod stick beside him, apologising in an airy way for the basin & hairbrushes—all very airy now, for he cant remember names—Vanessa or Virginia? & so on. Now, this minute back from the Wogans; a lovely fox red glow from beech trees; old Oxford farm houses; theirs a large, too wide, too square & cold, old house; disguised, to me unpleasantly, by Banting’s decorations—I prefer the old to the new there, unless done with more taste. But how nice, easy, mobile, affectionate, & humane it all was. We talked of Lytton & Carrington last night, Wogan sent for, 30 miles, twice one day to master Ralph, who emerged from the bushes, where he was skulking, threatening suicide. And had barricaded his door against Frances. Wogan has a shrewd worldly sense for all his patter. Said Ralph play-acted; was a lonely, but boring man; brings you tea stark naked, a bull among heifers. Theyre all naked, they all comment eternally on ‘parts’ & breasts—a kind of rough parody of the old Ham Spray—Lytton acted in the kitchen. We walked this morning, but soft mist hid the hills; all was red brick Queen Anne, stately, arboreous—the moment of loveliness that comes to everything over it today. Harrod to lunch—a young⁠[?] man with black eyebrows & white teeth. So home to tea.

Tuesday 14 November

And I have precisely 3 minutes before tea to say that Jacqueline Stiven has taken up a great deal of time & inspired a great deal of ingenuity by sending a passage from A R of Ones O to the Statesman. L. was positive it was a hoax. But I have now been in touch with Mrs Miles Reid & Mrs Stiven the Syrian—names that will mean nothing to me in a years time. We went to Islington this afternoon to look for rooms for Tom; it is a fine autumn day; Vita & Leon dined last night, & I am so dissipated I could not write a word this morning. Then Bunny came about the hoax. So to tea, & I should add so to Westminster to hear The March of the Women, Ethel Smyth; & Rebecca speaking on married womens earnings. Instead I shall sleep over the fire, reading Tom’s criticism, & Michael Field diaries, alone thank God.

Thursday 23 November

Being too tired after dining with the Hutches last night to meet Michael Arlen to produce the finished article in Here & Now, perhaps I had better produce the raw. It was a real party—that is I wore my velvet dress.

But I took it in my stride. I was not much beglamoured. The drug only half worked. E⁠[lizabe]⁠th Bibesco came in, a ruffle of pink feathers round her shoulders, as we were ranged on the stairs coming down. Pasty, podgy, her point the eyes, which to me seemed sadder, as if she had flung away the orange. & she talked of her daughter. And I had—oh voluminously—all M.A.’s confession, as I expected. He made £50,000 out of the Green hat, which money he has perpetually to atone for—as by talking of D.H.L., & how he escaped his influence, how he made his own life how he married his own wife, a dumb Greek called Atalanta,—silent, he said, but a perfect lady—& has 2 children & can keep them all, with drains games servants—all this is protest & justification. Now he is writing an intelligent novel, from real experience, lacking to highbrows. Yet oh Mrs Woolf how I envy Aldous Huxley his background—his education. I was at a 3rd rate public school, & lived in Earls Court. His father died of a broken heart when Roumania came into the war. A little scraping dingy porous clammy monkey faced man. My wife the Contessa Atalanta … always still justifying, but I didnt feel that need myself. Sat with Victor [Rothschild] & B⁠[arbara]. in Mary’s bedroom & V. got above himself—as he will do more & more—too butcher like in his red flesh, too thick cut, underdone, assertive. “We do all this sort of thing in public”—fondling B.’s arm. We dont think of age, Virginia. Called me Virginia too often. “The most malicious person I’ve ever met”. That stung a little, but not eno’ to get a real rise. Talked of Dadie & Mrs Barnes. Gave a sporadic account of Dadie’s fathers death & so on. Was too self assured with the P⁠[rince]⁠ss.—the handsome irresistible young man. I shall tell him some home truths. B. called out of the room. Absent 20 minutes. Thats V. on the telephone. “How dare you call me conceited! We cant dine out together in future thats all … I will call you conceited—I’ll write to Virginia … You were conceited…” & so on: always bickering. He brought her a bandbox full of the Rothschild rubies, worth £300,000 so that they cant be insured—a crown that glows & drips red light. He said there was a book in the box. No, I dont altogether like that. So home at last, leaving Eth at 44.

Saturday 25 November

L.’s birthday. Off to see the Sickerts with a view to writing; see his letter. Dear me. This comes however after a lull: I mean theyre sitting in Kensington Gds & I want a breath before I go on to Kitty’s Party. (I at once make her say I oughtn’t to have been doing this kind of thing & then I see Lord Lasswade. But stop.) [Cf. The Years] I was going to say old Birrell died last Monday; & is cremated—odd, to have had that last talk, in the Hotel at Brighton—odd to have seen the sharp old man at the very edge of taking off, sitting plump pink soft yet with his rather formidable acuteness, with his shod stick & his slippers. “These legs, that have taken me to so many good places wont work any more” he said, apologising for not being able to get up. “I made it a rule never to refuse what was offered”. A story about C⁠[ampbell].B⁠[annerman]. And Frankie’s brain. “They took out what was all nonsense—the Eton part—all nonsense”. But at one moment the Birrell family was on the verge of extinction—So I got And saying “Did you know the Souls—Oh Margot—a very generous woman, believe she’s coming tomorrow”. The door opened, & I was beckoned off from old Birrell to Francis.

Wednesday 29 November

So feebly minded after too much talk—sat to Nessa, Tom to tea, Fry’s [to] dinner. I cant make way even through the shallow waters of Sickert.

I am making a sketch of him at random. And so I thought I would make a footnote about the soul. I think I’ve got rid of vanity: of Virginia. Oh what a riddance. I’ve not read an article on me by a man called Peel in the Criterion. I feel this a great liberation. Then I need not be that self. Then I can be entirely private. I have cut the string that ties me to that quivering bag of nerves—all its gratifications & acute despair. Time I did. It is another great discovery. One sees people lunging & striking at a thing like a straw horse & its not me at all. I sit back in comfort & look round. I wonder if Nessa has always been like this? It is calming. It is dignified. One does not seek uneasily for opinions on oneself. How have I come to this? Will it last? How will it work? I lie awake at night astonishingly happy sometimes. What a poem, for 10 minutes. The advantage is that it gives me a great deal to spend on L.; on reading; on doing what one likes. I wonder whether this is related to any of the famous human feelings. A rough note only which I meant to make some time ago.

Monday 4 December

Staying with the Fishers. A queer thing, people who accept conventions. Gives them a certain force. H⁠[erbert]. has the organisation behind him. But robs them of character, of vagaries, of depth, warmth, the unexpected. They spin along the grooves. H. to some extent anxious to impress his privileged impartial position. Many stories of “when I was in the Cabinet”. Yet why not? The odd thing is that when with them one accepts their standards. And whats wrong? So nice, just, equable, humane. But how chill! And over his shoulder I see the rulers; small; but not evil; striving,—a complex impression. Warden⁠[s] have lived there since 1370—or so. How can he differ? Young men all very smooth, but talkative. Nothing to strike on. A nice nameless boy told me he read Greek 8 hours daily. Some like Oxford, some think it a place of restrictions. Scatters Wilson’s son said this. Yes, Herbert accepts the current values, only rather intellectualises & refines. Dismissed Tom, Clive, Maynard (partly) in favour of the great forces of vitality—Winston, L. George. Lettice waspish about Labour Party. L.G. their trump card—their pattern man. No music in Tom. Ottoline dirty. Tells stories of Balfour & in the manner of the great man—discreet, nipped, bloodless, like a butler used to the best families. Toils at history of Europe. Is an example. Do their duty by the college. Represent culture, politics, worldly wisdom gilt with letters. Nothing to whizz one off one’s perch at New College: all in good taste, & very kind. But Lord to live like that!

Thursday 7 December

I was walking through Leicester Sqre—how far from China—just now when I read Death of noted Novelist on the poster. And I thought of Hugh Walpole. But it is Stella Benson. Then why write anything, immediately? I did not know her, but have a sense of those fine patient eyes: the weak voice; the cough; the sense of oppression. She sat on the terrace with me at Rodmell. And now, so quickly, it is gone, what might have been a friendship. Trusty & patient & very sincere—I think of her; trying to cut through, in one of those difficult evenings, to some deeper layer—certainly we could have reached it, given the chance. I’m glad I stopped her at the door as she got into her little car & asked her to call me Virginia—to write to me. And she said There’s nothing I should like better. But its like the quenching of something—her death out there in China; & I sitting here, & writing about her, & so fugitive, & yet so true; & no more to come. How mournful the afternoon seems, with the newspaper carts dashing up Kingsway “Death of Noted Novelist” on the placard. A very fine steady mind: much suffering; suppressed;—there seems to be some sort of reproach to me in her death, as in K⁠[atherine] M⁠[ansfield’]⁠s. I go on; & they cease. Why? Why not my name on the posters? And I have a feeling of the protest each might make: gone with their work unfinished—each so suddenly. Stella was 41. “I am going to send you my book ><” & so on. A dreary island, she lived on, talking to Colonels.

A curious feeling: when a writer like S.B. dies, that one’s response is diminished. Here & Now wont be lit up by her: its life lessened. My effusion—what I send out—less porous & radiant—as if the thinking stuff were a web that were fertilised only by other peoples (her that is) thinking it too: now lacks life.

Sunday 17 December

I finished part 4 of Here & Now yesterday—therefore indulge in a contemplative morning. To freshen my memory of the war, I read some old diaries. How close the tears come, again & again; as I read of L. & me at the Green: our quarrels; how he crept into my bed with a little purse, & so on: how we reckoned our income & I was given tea free for a treat. The sense of all that floating away for ever down the stream, unknown for ever: queer sense of the past swallowing so much of oneself. And today we make a loop with the past by going in our grand car to see Margaret & Lilian.

Well we are very happy. Life buds & sprouts all round us: by which I mean, everybody accepts if we ask them. Joyce Wethered would ‘adore’ to come; & on Tuesday Stephen Spender, Miss Lynd dine, & Plomer & K. Raine come in—all young, all new. And Vita lunches. And tomorrow I go to tea with the [Bruce] Richmonds. I think we live in a rich porous earth. I think we live very fully, freely, & adventurously. In short, what we made of that strange prelude is good.

The question that now fronts me as a writer is the war chapter. That I shall leave for a few days to simmer. No doubt the brew will spout out suddenly at Rodmell. We go on Thursday. This book therefore nears its end. Too thick a book.

I dined with Clive to meet Sickert the other night [15 December]. S. is sunk & old till warmed with wine. He scarcely eats. At last he expanded, & sang a French song & kissed Nessa’s hand—spontaneously; mine more formally. I think a difficult old man probably. But the ingrained artist. Therese modest, suppliant. Laughter—extravagance. How he was born in Germany, but not German. And lived at Munich till he was 8; & the German maid met the mad King who walked beside her, & she said—I forget. S. branches off. Then he went to Reading, a school kept by a drunken old woman, who beat a boy who had broken his arm. “And we 30 little wretches lay there cowed..” How far he wants me to write about him, I dont know. I suspect he is changeable: that he forgets. T. prompted him with words. She knows all his stories. He gets up at 5 & goes to his garage Studio at 7 & has difficulty in lighting his stove. He reads 3 papers. He wore a pilots cap with a green brim, but no overcoat, though it was freezing cold (I bought a fur coat by the way last week). He says one paints—let me see—the canvases galloped towards me. Angry with Agnew. Not a penny from that show came his way. Never again, he said. A fine Roman head, crisp hair, thick over the ears. Small dark eyes, broad forehead. “Oh Roger’s a darling—but dear me…” great jokes about Roger. Had wired to Lydia not to be a fool & try to act. “She’s thrown away her reputation. She had a great name with the public—now she’s lost it” Had lunched with the K⁠[eynese]⁠s. Maynard told them to listen to the WC. Sounds very audible. How she had her hour, & we must all learn to renounce, to give up: (here C. interposed one of his ring the bell sentences, about Virginia declining now from her glory & living with dogs: irritating as he meant it to be). And so we went on, a little wine-flown, but friendly & communicative, & living on our capital—I mean that we were all artists—free masonry. I cant feel very sure though of any fact or relationship; I’ve not seen him these 10 years, & then only to sing & joke. Yet he’s chiselled, severe; has read: was reading Goldoni he said. & Flaubert’s letters. And is Madame Bovary good? Is the Tentation good? I’m a literary painter, romantic—You are the only person who understands me—kissing my hand. So home in the frost to find Leon sitting with L.; & he sat & sat, propounding rather fumbling questions about literature, till at 1.45 I said I was cold, moved to the fire & he—very reluctantly—went. Younger, cruder than I thought; & I’m afraid, from reading his 2nd novel in MS, not so intelligent.

Thursday 21 December

I guess that my Turgenev, over which I took such tremendous pains, is not much liked. Richmond’s thanks merely formal. So why go on with these essays? Why not invent a new method? I’m worried over Goldsmith. Cant be good to worry so much over transitions & packing in of ideas. But I have said this before, & say it now only because this is the relic of a morning when I should tidy, pack, write letters & so on. We lunch at ¼ to one, & then go, this yellow cold morning. No, longer the great transition that it used to be.

Spender & M⁠[aire]. Lynd to dinner: a free & easy night, but both notably young & at first deferential. S. has the makings of the long winded bore. Thats odd. A handsome poetic boy to look at—& very ardent, & a great egotist. Lynd silent, secretive, hobble tongued. She will no doubt become a scribbler too, like her parents. Foolishly perhaps I denounced scribblers.

It struck me that a very plain narrative might be interesting. Yesterday I wrote Goldsmith all the morning; we lunched; Pinka’s eyes are bad; we walked round the Square; then I shopped in Oxford Street; went to Warings; liked the china cups: think of buying a dinner service; home at 4: L. to mother [?]: I round to Nessa’s; Angelica cutting out silver paper beasts: Duncan entertaining Bradford Corporation, was given desert service; back to dinner, read a good MS by a man called Graham; heard a Haydon symphony; bed. A fairly specimen day. Letter from Hugh Walpole.

[]

1934

Tuesday 16 January

I have let all this time—3 weeks at Monks—slip because I was there so divinely happy & pressed with ideas—another full flood of Pargiters or Here & Now (odd that Goldie’s letter mentions that—The Waves is also here & now—I had forgotten). So I never wrote a word of farewell to the year; not a word describing the Keynes & the Jones’s; nothing about the walks I had ever so far into the downs; or the reading—Marvell of an evening, & the usual trash. And Clara died; & I sat with Mrs Woolf who said “She asked so little of life”—she crooned it, rather, lying in a daze. Nothing of that has been written; & now we are back again. (And have I a touch of the flue?) What a bore, since I am floating rather rapturously in the Raid scene & dont think that 3 days in bed would be at all useful. No doubt its nothing though.

Vita dined last night, & we discussed Sparrow’s book, she as always generously impartial: never takes sides, or lives in a set—a good example, though without my intensity of feeling (I add immediately to recoup myself). This is rather the style of Here & Now: my random rapid letter writing style. Lyn wants me to write for her; Ethel to lend my screen; that is the worst of one’s friends—these little unfair demands that make one turn on the other side in the middle of the night. But it is lunch time. This book, alas, must continue soberly in the same cover as 1933: too wasteful to begin another & leave all this blue paper blank.

Tuesday 30 January

At this moment, 5 to 4, Ethel Smyth is about to visit Leonard on People seen: Mary Hutch. Jack in evng dress: Ld. Castlerosse’s 8/6 cigar like a jackass’s penis; Nessa Angelica, Roger Duncan: Rose Macaulay, I. Davidson: Noel Coward Ld Ivor S. Churchill. Colefax’s: business, her infringement of the Pankhurst copyright I imagine; therefore I sit down here till 4.30 in order to escape. We have Tom & Tommie [Tomlin] dining; & I am going to say I shall call you Stephen. Rather a rush of people; & a dinner to meet Noel Coward at Sybyl’s on a cold foggy night. Nessa painting me again. Christmas mercifully over. Nessa very hard up. Question how to make money. Talk of some caricatures, issued between us. Rather an old wives talk. Children, money, education, ways of life; I with my curious penetration playing tentatively round her mood, & afraid to impose my own.

Yesterday I went to Shapland about my watch bracelet, L.’s birthday present; came back; sat; talked; Julian came to tea; read Young’s French travels: rather headachy; sleepy; strange trances in which I make up the last sentence read; to bed; sleep. Today, writing Here & Now, longing to end the Raid Scene, which draws out—hence my headache; then I shall palter with something: lunch with L.: went to Danish Laundry about his collars. A nice frank spoken woman. Collars may have, got among the white stuff. Women ironing. Back room with more women standing. Coppers I daresay downstairs. Looked at flats, L. home to print, I to wander to the Law Courts. Bevir Case being tried. Penetrated from end to end. Judges Chambers: a kind of vault. Kings Bench; &c. People scurrying; my sense of guilt at having no business there. So to bus; home, & found my bracelet.

Wednesday 14 February

But it was rather a bad headache: 10 days recumbent, sleeping, dreaming, dipping into oh dear how many different books, how capriciously: Thackeray, Young’s travels in France—but too many revolutions on hand actually: I dont want to read of them: I want turnips & peace & settlement; then a book a day from the Times, Berners, Selincourt & a stout life by Neale of Q. Elizabeth which pretending to impartiality emphasises the double chin & the wig of Mary at the critical moment: a fig for impartial & learned historians! All men are liars.

And so to Rodmell for the week end, & the bees buzzing in the hyacinths: the earth emerging very chastened & sharpened from winter under a veil; which became fog as we drove up, & is fog today. In addition, the house rings with the clamour of electricians: the new bath water engine being inserted; & then the Surveyor comes & says we are weighting the floors down with books: a heavy bill threatens; so out to buy ink for my new Waterman, with which I am to take notes for a new Common Reader; & Ethel Sands to tea—my first visitor. Yesterday I had Ivy Davison for the first time to write letters. No letters therefore today. Now I have just refused the Nat. Portrait Gallery offer to draw me, thank God, & am very cautiously revising Sickert.

Friday 16 February

Five minutes here before going to lunch with Nessa. A great Nelly row yesterday; which Thereby declare the last. It was about the workmen & her day out, & the end was that we had eggs for lunch & were forced to dine at the Cock [Tavern, Fleet Street], expensively & badly. No more of this, I say, & anticipate many days of. ill ease, some violent scenes, & then pray God, after Easter, peace.

Finished my Sickert article all the same. I put off Here & Now till next week.

Sunday 18 February

And I began Here & Now again this morning, Sunday, at the point where I left off all but 3 weeks ago for my headache. Here I note that from 2 to 3 weeks is the right space. It has not gone cold, as after 6 weeks; I still carry it in my mind, & can see how to revise. It has gone—the talk during the Raid—running all over the place, because I was tired; now I must press together; get into the mood & start again. I want to raise up the magic world all round me, & live strongly & quietly there for 6 weeks. The difficulty is the usual one—how to adjust the two worlds. It is no good getting violently excited: one must combine. And I have the Nelly question on top of me in addition to the usual grind of what Ethel calls society. Some planning is therefore necessary. I have to ‘see’ Ottoline, Ethel, K. Furse, Ly Cholmondeley (perhaps), E. Bowen: Lyn comes to dinner tonight to discuss her rather acid & thin blooded bantling. And I’ve made up my mind what I’m going to say. I will write if she lets me tell the truth.

The new electric boiler in & boiling our bath water this morning. The K. of Belgium killed mountaineering. All last week they were fighting in Vienna: this somehow comes closer than usual to our safe London life: the people shot down, why? John came to see L.: as spruce as ever; & has left his poems. We went to Angelica yesterday, & ate eggs in Mrs C.’s large Adams room. A. has to speak on Mrs Pankhurst. We watched Lacrosse. A. despises all games.

Tuesday 20 February

To note the interesting stages of the duel with Nelly. Today I said, do you want this quarrel to go on? I would like it to stop now; but I shall discuss it later. Whereupon she said she wished it to end, but it was all my fault. And she wished to have nothing hanging over her. So I am indifferent calm & Lord knows if I shall shant give her notice tomorrow.

[Sunday 4 March]

10 to eleven on Sunday March 4th—a fine day, no fog; & I’m to sit to Nessa for the last time in 10 minutes; & the house is being done, & we’ve taken rooms at Pippa’s, &—&.

As for Here & Now I’m going to start that seriously tomorrow. Kitty & Ed. in Richmond: this Chapter is to be visual & animal; spring; movement; plants; birds dogs; airs; flowers.

Yesterday at Ethel Smyth’s mass. The Queen in the box: nodding from side to side; Ethel in her 3 cornered hat beside her; with her hand up. The Q. bowing, doing her duty graciously. So to Lyons—I forget the mass—where in that sordid crumby room assembled the garish Ly Diana, Ly Cunard, & the pensive Ly Lovat & ourselves; amid clerks & shop girls eating cream buns. All rather strident & obvious & rubbing too much on one string as usual to be very interesting Yet it had elements—The great sun setting behind the trees in Hyde Pk. as we drove back. Oh dear me, L. is doing the books & wont let me help. Lydia’s Dolls House tonight; on Wednesday Nessa’s Private view; Sickert here to tea—rather a rusty rat trap that man with hard little eyes, very old—no illusions about his own greatness. “They’ll collect it all one of these days” he said, sublimely about his art critic⁠[ism]⁠s. My BBC Comtee suppressed—thank the Lord. No official positions for me. Now to sit.

Wednesday 14 March

I cannot hold out any hope for the next 14 days. Theres the workmen everywhere; theres Nelly gay & garrulous as a lark. Can I do it? I must. I must. And I caught an influenza—a little shivery bout at Monks on Sunday; cant screw my brain up therefore; & yet have the feeling that some magnificent chapters wait me. If only the 14 days were over—& I in my bed again! How human beings torture each other!

A black day, pouring rain; dirt everywhere. Let me see: there was a lovely day at Monks. There was the suffusion of blue in white cotton wool. Mr Lavender talked at the meeting about growing mushrooms. Ethel [Smyth] came over—to deposit her horrid gnawed bone or sucked chocolate—C. St John’s praise to wit—at my feet. A very ruthless shoving woman in some ways. And then on the crest of the Kitty Eleanor scene comes this shiver: bed; waiting for L.; cooking dinner. Back today & a man threw a parcel containing shoes at the basement window & broke it. A thief presumably. Lady Oxford wants to meet me at Ott’s. Mr Ridge the builder talking about Tenby & a little church on the rocks. The sea comes over the chapel floor. And he bought a picture in Holland Park for 7/6 that reminded him of Wales. Then the bookbinder. Thats my day. Now in the rain to Nessa.

Monday 19 March

I cannot describe how the Nelly situation weighs on my spirits. I am determined not to discuss it with L. either. She pressed me this morning. You show no confidence in me; you dont treat me like a maid. Oh dear—how tempted I was then to say Then go; but I bit my tongue. And then down here, trying to make it up. I couldn’t imagine it would be so hard & the worst to come. On the top of it this hammering painting, ordering of books. And I cant get into flood therefore with H. & N., though I had I think rather a brilliant flash this morning how to compact the rather fluid Eleanor. I shall have a shot anyhow. But Nelly spoils all. And to think none of this need have happened had I stuck to my guns 3 years ago! Now I must & will.

We went to Cambridge on Saturday, lunch with Dadie, Rosamond & Wogan; I ought not to call him that. He is jealous about R.’s fame: she not. So to An. & C. & there was Shephard [J. T. Sheppard] with all the little Eton boys, like the white chaps of a Christmas pig. A dragging weak performance. Lovely drive home in the twilight through the wide unmarked country. To dine with Nessa last night. Clive there. N. all a blowing & aglowing with the success of her show, & the money made. Then in came Lydia, all &c. too, owing to her success; & I felt so old so cold so dumpish, nothing flowery or fiery glowing in me owing to Nelly, but not jealous: I dont think that. Mynd [Maynard] very flown too, & Duncan too, & Clive quiet & now I think of walking round to Ott’s to meet Ly Oxford & if I can change my mood—rather a violent remedy. A clear wet spring sort of day. We went to Drews & bought Cashin’s present, then to L.’s hat & tailor; so home. All yesterday I did the dining room books. Today he is finishing the study & they are painting the stairs. Oh for the end of this chapter, for Rodmell & peace & freedom to use my mind again.

Monday 26 March

“The worst is to come”—that is with Nelly. Well it is now coming very near—by this time—3.30—tomorrow it will be over. Arid then there’ll only be the one dreadful day & we shall be off. I feel executioner & the executed in one. Meanwhile it is a brilliant spring day; I’m back in my studio, white, clean, more spacious, after 3 days of Pippa’s. Miss Walton is arranging books; Hugh, Stephen, William, Ott, & Vita all coming to tea & so on; I dine with Vita; then must ring up Eth Bowen about our Irish tour, & so the immitigable day passes. I face up to it without any evasion: this has to be lived I say to myself.

Tuesday 27 March

The great scene with Nelly is now over, & of course much less violently than I supposed. She stood by the drawing room door in the full light, white & pink, with her funny rather foolish mulish face puckered up. And I made my speech correctly, & even was able to say “And I expect you want to get another place too—” persuasively. She had one outburst—“I can say nothing—its all because it was my night out, & I asked you…” which I cut short & said we had agreed to part on good terms, gave her a cheque for £25 & a £1 note for my mending “but you dont owe me anything” she said, & so she went upstairs & I came down here. I suppose some further lamentation & argument, with L. perhaps is inevitable. But Lord what a relief now!

Wednesday 11 April

I am a little proud of myself; for I have just read through the last pages, & now pat myself on the back, & say that I kept to my resolution, through thick & thin, & am now back here with Nelly gone, Annie upstairs, & Mabel, declared by Ha. to be a treasure, coming to see me tomorrow. So this has been definitely accomplished, after all these years. The sense of freedom & calm—no more brooding; no more possessiveness; no more sense of being part of Nelly’s world; & her planted there. Even if the cooking is less luxurious, that is all to the good. We had a horrid day last Wednesday—a fortnight ago; she trailed about, some how pathetic, to me, catching at me, & whimpering & revealing her own vanity. “But they’ll blame me—” However, she rattled off her spiteful little noise at L. when the parting came, thinking only of herself as usual; & there we left her in the kitchen, grasping a wet cloth; “No I really couldn’t Sir” she said, when L. held out his hand. How dazed & free & quiet I felt driving down to Lewes! She has taken with her all the cookery books, except too elementary manuals, & the chair cover—a last spasm of possessive spite.

Tuesday 17 April

So jaded am I after last night that I cannot add a word to my Sickert or make out a sketch of the last chapters of Here & Now. A high price to pay for a hurried dinner at the Hutches; racing to Macbeth; talking to Dodo MacNaghten; then to Sir Fred Pollock on the stage of Sadlers Wells.

An idea about Sh⁠[akespea]⁠re

That the play demands coming to the surface—hence insists upon a reality wh. the hovel need not have, but perhaps should have. Contact with the surface. Coming to the top. This is working out my theory of the different levels in writing, & how to combine them: for I begin to think the combination necessary. This particular relation with the surface is imposed on the dramatist of necessity: how far did it influence Shre? Idea that one cd work out a theory of fiction &c on these lines: how many levels attempted, whether kept to or not.

Wednesday 18 April

A curious little fact.

Instead of smoking 6 or 7 cigarettes as I write of a morning, I now, for 3 mornings, make myself smoke one only. And rather enjoy doing without.

Tonight Tom & Maynard dine to discuss Tom’s book; After Strange Gods. Julian & E. Bowen come in afterwards. I want to try & make myself write down the discussion tomorrow, as I am keeping off fiction.

Thursday 19 April

Oh but I am much too sleepy to make even a brief note of the talk. It began at dinner. Tom & Maynard talking about his book. You have brought up again one of the primal questions, & nobody has even tried to consider it. No, said Tom, much like a great toad with jewelled eyes.

Morality. And JM [Keynes] said that he would be inclined not to demolish Xty if it were proved that without it morality is impossible. “I begin to see that our generation—yours & mine V., owed a great deal to our fathers’ religion. And the young, like Julian, who are brought up without it, will never get so much out of life. Theyre trivial: like dogs in their lusts. We had the best of both worlds. We destroyed Xty & yet had its benefits”. Well the argument was something like that. I pressed Tom to define belief in God; but he sheered off. Then Julian came. The economic question: the religion of Communism. This the worst of all & founded on a silly mistake of old Mr Ricardo’s which M. given time will put right. And then there will be no more economic stress, & then—? How will you live Julian, you who have no moral strictness? We Julian said miss your morality which has landed us in psycho-analysis, but I prefer my life in many ways. Maynard accused the young of being anxious to publish too soon. Thats to make our names & make money. We want to chip in before the talk has changed said J. V. Its because you have no sense of tradition or continuity. I used to feel that the British Museum reading room was going on for ever. I felt I could take 15 years over a book; I wanted to take longer & longer. Whereas you write & publish at 18. Tom agreed. Tom agreed to most of this, but reserved his idea of God. Eth Bowen came in, rayed like a zebra, silent & stuttering. Had also been brought up to repress, by moral ancestors. Is 34. L. said Jews with great morality but no religion. Quoted his mother on immortality. M. talked about Montagu Norman the Governor of the B. of E. an elf; an artist, sitting with his cloak round him hunched up, saying “I cant remember—” thus evading all questions, & triumphing—going away disguised—going mad. Also about Douglas, the credit man, being interviewed, & whenever they came to par. 7 saying “To explain this I must go back to beginning”.

M. on becoming a fellow of Kings. The moving nature of the service; how they go to the Chapel & lock the doors & sit in their pews, & then the Provost asks Mr So & So to come up & put his hands in his hands & reads out a statement, about preserving the laws & traditions, & then they all shake hands & he is admitted to the brotherhood, a society for research, religion, &c. education. And thus he is accepted as a brother whom they will support & sustain. This is a great moment; & there is nothing very ceremonious; religious; only an admittance. I said did this society, this coming together move him, & M. said very much. Kings was full of such societies: & feelings.

IRELAND

[Monday 30 April]

Glengariff

This is the 30th of April, Monday, so I think, foreign travel not leading to thought. A mixture of Greece, Italy & Cornwall; great loneliness; poverty & dreary villages like squares cut out of West Kensington. Not a single villa or house a-building; great stretches of virgin sea shore; the original land that Cornwall & much of England was in Elizabethan times. And a sense that life is receding. At Lismore the Tchekov innkeeper said Theyre all going away & leaving their houses; nothing’s kept up since the war. So the old man on the island here said today—the very sad gentle old man who longed to talk. All gone—What good did the war do anyone? Only the Americans. And crooned & moaned leaning on the rake with which he was heaping up somekind of weed. Yes there is great melancholy in a deserted land, though the beauty remains untouched—miles & miles of Killarney—the lake water lapping the stones, the butterflies flitting, & not a Cockney there. Today, sitting on the verandah after lunch, the German lawyer having been forced to go to the Island—a string of touts loaf about pressing poetry & boats on one—after they had gone, the invalid, who reminds me of Nelly Cecil began to talk as they all begin to talk; & said she came from Limerick & when we asked if one could get a house there, she said—she laughed a great deal yet seems hopelessly crippled—“You can get plenty, but its not so nice when you have one.” “Servant difficulties?” I asked. “Ah, all that” she said, & one can see, after Bowen’s Court, how ramshackle & half squalid the Irish life is, how empty & poverty stricken. There we spent one night, unfortunately with baboon Conolly & his gollywog slug wife Jean to bring in the roar of the Chelsea omnibus, & it was all as it should be—pompous & pretentious & imitative & ruined—a great barrack of grey stone, 4 storeys & basements, like a town house, high empty rooms, & a scattering of Italian plaster-work, marble mantelpieces, inlaid with brass & so on. All the furniture clumsy solid cut out of single wood—the wake sofa, on wh. the dead lay—carpets shrunk in the great rooms, tattered farm girls waiting, the old man of 90 in his cabin who wdn’t let us go—E⁠[lizabe]⁠th had to say Yes The Ladies are very well several times. And we went to the wishing well, where there are broken cups as offerings & half a rosary & L. wished that Pinka might not smell, which made me laugh; & then I talked to the cook, & she showed me the wheel for blowing the fire in the windy pompous kitchen, half underground—rather like the Bride of Lammermuir—Caleb showing the guests nothing—no there was a fine turkey but everywhere desolation & pretention cracked grand pianos, faked old portraits, stained walls—& yet with character & charm, looking on to a meadow where the trees stand in a ring called Lamb’s Cradle. Talk too much of: the Chelsea bar kind, owing to C.’s—about starting a society called Bostocks, about Ireland with Alan, a good humoured bolt eyed fat hospitable man. So on here over the mountains. And pray God the C.’s dont show their gorilla faces at dinner or invade the old Squires library in which we sit.

Tuesday 1 May

Waterville [Butler Arms Hotel]

Too like its name; blowing the spray & the rain over a flat land, & a scattering of hideous 1850 watering place houses. Mist today, wind tonight; & L. opening the first Times to come our way, said George Duckworth is dead. So he is. And I feel the usual incongruous shades of feeling, one from this year, one from that—how great a part he used to play & now scarcely any. But I remember the genuine glow, from last summer when I went to see him—the thing that always made me laugh & yet was marked in him. But how little he meant, after his marriage—& yet how childhood goes with him—the batting, the laughter, the treats, the presents, taking us for bus rides to see famous churches, giving us tea at City Inns, & so on—that was the best which oddly enough returned of late years a little, with the Lincoln sausages, the bottles of eau de Cologne, the great bunch of flowers. Margaret I remember playing round him, & I thought how happy in their way they were. But this is all happening far off. Here I sit on my bed in the windy seaside hotel, & wait for dinner, with this usual sense of time shifting & life becoming unreal, so soon to vanish while the world will go on millions upon millions of years.

Wednesday 2 May

Glenbeith [Glenbeigh Hotel]

On again, after an extremely interesting encounter at the windy hotel with Ireland—that is Mr & Mrs Rowlands; he is a giant, very shapely, small head, obliterated features; she small, abrupt, vivacious. They began directly, & so we talked,—they accepted us as their sort, & were gentry, Irish gentry, very much so, he with a house 500 years old, & no land left. “But I love my King & Country. Whatever they ask me to do I’d do it”—this with great emotion. Oh yes, we believe in the British Empire; we hate the madman de Valéra.” There they live, 14 miles from Cork, hunting, with an old retriever dog, & go to bazaars miles & miles away. “Thats the way we live—no nonsense about us—not like the English people. Now I’ll give you my name, & I’ll write to my friend & she’ll tell you of a house—& I hope you’ll live in Ireland. We want people like ourselves. But wait, till the budget.” This she said, with all the airs of the Irish gentry: something very foreign about her, like old Lady Young, & yet in slave to London; of course everyone wants to be English. We think Englands talking of us—not a bit. No said the obliterated Greek torso, for such he was, when I was courting my wife—she lived in Liverpool—the young chaps used to say “now Paddy tell us one of your stories” but now they dont take any interest in us. But I’d do anything for my King & Country, though youve always treated us very badly.

So we got on to the Bowens; & established ourselves as of their sort. Yes I felt this is the animal that lives in the shell. These are the ways they live—he hunting all day, & she bustling about in her old car, & everybody knowing everybody & laughing & talking & picnicking, & great poverty & some tradition of gentle birth, & all the sons going away to make their livings & the old people sitting there hating the Irish Free State & recalling Dublin & the Viceroy.

On to Tralee & saw the gipsies coming down the road & thought of G. being buried.

Thursday 3 May

Adare [Dunraven Arms Hotel]

Theyre looking out names on maps at this moment. “That gives us a very good idea of…. What I wd suggest if I might—tomorrow on the way—we’re coming down from Killarney tomorrow—then another thing, wd you like to go to Glengarrif—” (they are 4 fattish unattractive but kindly women—wont take our fire, we’re sitting in the hotel lounge after a long day driving & I certainly can’t read Prou⁠[s]⁠t with such a patter going on. We have a roasting great fire.

Listen, I thought you’d made up your mind to do this part first—well then tomorrow. Listen—wd this be too much of a—I dont want to break the springs of that car. Thats another idea—we’re going West.

To copy down conversation is not very interesting. People say the same thing over & over again. I wd like to describe the perfection of Irish conversation, which was Mrs FitzGerald’s last night. She is exactly the great French lady—only living in a black jersey on an Irish bog. After dinner she came in, ostensibly to lend us a paper & offer advice, in fact to indulge her genius for talk. She talked till 11, & wd. willingly be talking now: about hotel keeping, about frigidaires, about her grandmother sitting on a chair in the kitchen & saying Thats done that wants another 2 minutes & so on, never stirring herself but somehow getting it done. We have the name of being good housekeepers. Then on about bogs, she has bought several fragments because now there may be money in it. However I can give no notion of the flowing, yet formed sentences, the richness & ease of the language; the lay out, dexterity & adroitness of the arrangement. There was the story of old Julia the cook, who had gone off home in a huff jealous of the young maids; had her daughter & the London husband on her, bought them gramophone records, & now wont own that she has wasted her savings. Mrs F. is one of those bluntnosed parted haired Irishwomen with luminous brown eyes & something sardonic & secretive in her expression. Talk is to her an intoxicant, but there is as Mr Rowlands said, something heartless about the I⁠[rish]: quite cold indifferent sarcastic, for all their melody, their fluency, their adorable ease & forthcomingness. She was very much on the spot, accurate, managing, shrewd, hard headed, analytic. Why arent these people the greatest novelists in the world?—with this facility, this balance, this fundamental (now L. has joined in & is advising the 3 ladies. Are they American?)

Its very kind of you telling us: thank you very much. Now the wireless is brawling. Everything looks nice in fine weather. I think I’ll go to bed. I want you to read this. One is the director of the others, severe, but apologetic, perhaps paid for.

But why isn’t Mrs F. a great novelist? Certainly the salon survives at Glenbeith, the lust for talk, & finishing one’s sentence—only with complete naturalness. For instance, explaining the bogs, “saturated, now whats the opposite word?” Desiccated, L. suggested, & she adopted it with pleasure. She said one could never understand the Irish: one had to live as they did. They sit in their cottages talking about politics; they dont dance much; they have no amusements. They at once started to poach on her bog merely because she had bought it—otherwise it had been left alone for centuries. The bogs are full of trees, cant be self planted, so orderly, but now who has planted them? And they burn in a resinous way—go up—puf!—in a flash, like petrol. Suddenly she became severe & thought me a fool. “What does this good lady mean?” Her grandmother was an innkeeper; she herself went away for 25 years; Oh, as my grandmother said, one becomes able to read peoples characters before they step over the door, & ones never wrong one way or the other. Her quickness was amazing. This morning the talk began & L. very slightly put out his hand. “Oh I know that means you wanting to be off”—& so we parted from the last representative of the French salon of the 18th Century, this strange mixture of county lady, peasant, & landlady.

Oh but the Irish loudspeaker is inferior like everything else in this down trodden land. Things cant be worse, said the one armed man—his artificial arm wore a black woollen glove—who warned us off the river walk, & then showed us the full horror of Dunraven Castle, built from 1835 to 1850 like the rest of Ireland, a French Château in grey stone costing a million, & better razed to the ground.

Nessa writes that George before he died wanted Nessa & me to wire to him—which she did. What was in his mind? some old memory? some regret? I wonder.

Friday 4 May

Galway [Great Southern Hotel]

A phrase made this windy day: the clouds looping up their skirts & letting down a shaft of light. We picked bright blue gentians on the cliff looking towards the Aran Islands. This, though raining & cloudy, was one of our best drives—to the sea; views over folds of wild land with one or two orange & yellow white cottages: the sea blue, stone coloured or deep black: the waves tossing their hair back. People gathering sea weed & heaping carts. Extreme poverty.

So on to Galway which has 2 great bookshops, otherwise wild, poor, sordid. We saw the Claddagh; shawled women, coated men, all standing in groups together beside thatched huts, like islanders, waiting for a funeral. This the original Irish quarter; G. Thompson whom we found sitting before his Greek books in a little room looking on the sea came to the hotel after dinner & told us how they spend their lives in talk, dont mind poverty so much. He teaches 6[?] Galways Greek in Irish. Directly Galway May 5th 6 or 7th Sat. May 5th he went, at 11, up started a wild pale Irishman & poured forth more talk. “I hear you’re going to Dublin. Please dont miss the Guinness brewery or the 4 mummified nuns.” & so on. He was agent for a Radio Company & was touring Ireland; was Irish, but had lived in America; a mixture of Siegfried Sassoon & Robert Graves to look at, but internally preoccupied with breweries & nuns. Pouring wet; a gale; & off now to Dublin.

Sunday 6 May

Dublin [Russell Hotel]

It is very windy wet & cold, & I am sitting alone after lunch in the lounge with a grey black netting woman. The scene is St Stephen’s Green, an Irish attempt at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, just as Merrion Square attempts Bedford Sqre & so on. We lunched at the Sherburne [Shelburne Hotel]; & there are the film actors; here they are too. Aran islanders, in thick tweeds, who sit over the fire downstairs singing what may be hymns. I heard Irish for the first time. This is a dreary waiting moment. L. has to write letters. Then, perhaps we go to the [National] Gallery. An air of inferiority sleeps or simpers or sneers or rages everywhere. A visitor from England brings back news of picture galleries, theatres. Here it is a mixture of Hampstead & Cambridge. At the Gate Theatre last night we were not sure which it was: there’s an edge of difference, & the play was good: about Emmett, advanced, pseudo-Auden, I imagine. Three instruments to make music. A curtain that wdnt close; much satire of the Irish love of bloodshed; satire of the attempts at culture; a sudden sense came over me of being in the midst of history—that is of being in an unsettled, feverish place, which would have its period given it in the books; anything may happen. Yet what can happen when the best restaurant in the capital is Jammets, when there’s only boiled potatoes in the biggest hotel in Dublin? Everywhere they seem to be living on watered wine. At last I gather why, if I were Irish, I should wish to belong to the Empire: no luxury, no creation, no stir, only the dregs of London, rather wish-washy as if suburbanised. Yet, I thought too at the Gate, they may have a spirit in them somewhere, that could make something, if freed. But they are freed, I continue—& indeed the play said, sardonically, & only this provinciality is the result. I dont believe in the songs of the Aran islanders, or in old men who cant read—that is, theyre not of necessity Homer. Their voices penetrate the glass door. The netting lady has let the fire out. The Arans are going out in full dress. I must run & see.

And I ran, & found a hot fire downstairs; & the old woman in the red shawl has moved off. Coming in yesterday I thought here was the cream of Dublin, meeting a cauliflower faced young man of redolent charm in the hall; and a fine bluff red genial man, & the little boys—heres the ancient aristocracy of Ireland, I said, but it turned out to be the producer—who lodges at the She⁠[l]⁠burne—& his troop, who lodge here. A quarrel is going on between a lady & the manager. Nothing in the wide world wd. have induced me &c. This is what upsets orderly composition & makes it impossible for me to finish—

Most unsatisfactory—will you look up my postcard—inclusive board—

No, it wouldnt do living in Ireland, in spite of the rocks & the desolate bays. It would lower the pulse of the heart: & all one’s mind wd. run out in talk. “Its awfully nice to see you & looking so well”—She’s off with a tall Irish gentleman & silence falls.

Merrion Square is about 3 times the size of Bedford Square; at one time a passion for glory must have settled on the Irish, & then having run up street after street of Bedford Row off they went. Doctors & lawyers have crept into the 18th Century shells. Oh but theyre now discussing the character of the lady who’s so angry. She’s handsome, she’s fine, but. who did she marry? & so on. Talk, talk, talk. Not as nice looking at all—in the good old days they used to come.

Grafton Street is not on the level of Sloane Street. The quays are much like the Paris quays. Bookshops. Long architectural vistas; one house after another, but some a storey too tall. Very broad streets. Our car too grand—this is what makes it impossible for me to finish Proust, I was about to say. Yet its been one of our most amusing tours. If only for the talk talk talk.

Tuesday 8 May

Worcester [Star Hotel]

We finished up Dublin in grand style yesterday. On the windy, indeed roaring windy Sunday we walked through Phoenix Park, where a crowd—this marks their lack of entertainment—watched a school of small girls playing hockey: had tea at Leixlip, pronounced Leeslip, an 18th century bare parlour, nice woman who had a child ill, & had been having a guest from Manitoba who said she was descended from the Kings—& then off we went down a leafy country lane—but the trees were lashing & one great bough fallen across the road—to Celbridge, where the famous interview with the blue eyes—I forget the phrase—took place. A girl said the Abbey was the big house down the road. It is a thick grey sham Gothic Abbey, but weathered now to look ancient, with sham Cathedral windows bricked up, & a great garden, all trees & bowers perhaps, leading down to the river. That was where she sat then; & she died here. But we could not see into the garden from the bank, & so drove home again.

The next day which was oddly enough, yesterday, for now time & the Channel have cut off Ireland, and here in Worcester, the ancient, rich, traditional, all that shifty poverty seems blotted out—yesterday we went first to the Nat Gall, of which I say nothing—the pictures are very highly cleaned—& then to St Patrick’s, where, over the door are the tremendous words; & in front of the door a diamond shaped brass, to mark the dean’s tomb. There beside him till a few years ago slept Stella; but the late Bishop, as the verger sarcastically remarked, pointing to his name opprobriously on the long list, decided that she was buried at some distance, & so moved her brass plate. I suspect this was prudery; & if Swift was buried in her grave, that seems to amount to marriage. Also her epitaph which he wrote, alludes to her being celebrated by him. However the Bishop moved them—& in prudery also Lord Guiness has cased all the old pillars of Irish marble in stucco, so that they look like South Kensington, & somebody else, of equal piety, has floored the whole building with black & red tiles such as there are in hotels—much to the dudgeon of the old verger, who, like everybody else, regretted the old days: showed us the stalls of the Knights of St Patrick, with their helmets & arms, one the Prince of Wales’s another the Duke of Connaught’s “but they dont come here now”— He too, like the shopkeepers & hotel keepers would gladly have done with the President of the Free State. “We dont want this hate—it does nobody any good” as the porter at Holyhead said to me this morning when he remarked how few cattle now came over. And at breakfast—the best I have ever eaten, because the coffee was good—I said to L. all the people themselves are sensible. Whats come over the politicians? And this we debated, & then took to the road in the wet & cold & drove in a downpour through Wales, through Shrewsbury (disappointing) through Much Wenlock (good) & much green & prosperous country, till we reached Worcester & took up lodging for the last time at the Star. L. told me not to stare so at the other tea drinkers, but I find it difficult not to gaze at these real English, these dwellers in the very heart of the land, who talk of horses & games all the time, & meet their men friends in the lounge, & sit drinking & laughing & bandying county gossip under pictures of famous race horses. Horses rule England, as salmon rule Ireland. In every hotel in Ireland sits a military man with poached egg eyes & sandy hair, a loud commanding voice, & spongebag coat & red slippers, after a day’s fishing. There he sits & drinks; & all day he fishes—landing salmon after salmon, if its at Galway, so that they lie along the bank, to the wonder of the intellectual German lawyer, whom we met again there. He told us he saw them fishing all day, & a day costs £2, & they must give back half the fish they catch, & so much on every fish caught to the man with the gaff. He marvelled. And thats what Ireland is kept for: in every place where there’s a river is built a large Inn, with town cooking & hot water & ladies & gentlemen’s lavatories, though there’s nothing but bog & hill for miles around, & there in the lounge the majors sit, & pay for the fishing, while the natives talk & talk & talk—about the old Kings of Ireland, presumably. Not that their folk lore is very interesting, Thompson said. An odd division of the country.

And here we are amidst the wealth of Worcester. Richer than ever it seems—this Cathedral city, set in the centre of ancient glovemaking & porcelain making, of Queen Ann⁠[e] guildhalls, with a girdle of the usual 18th Century ecclesiastical houses, indeed in Much Wenlock there is more ancient stone & carving & architecture to be seen than in the whole of Ireland.

We are very tired of hotels & glad that this is our last night, though the comfort is extreme.

[Wednesday 9 May]

[52 Tavistock Square]

This the 9th of May was our last day, & fine. So we saw Warwickshire—but I’ve been reading the Monologue & note how oddly another style infects—at its best: thick green, thick leaves, stubby yellow stone houses, & a fine sprinkling of Elizabethan cottages. All this led very harmoniously to Stratford on Avon; & all crabbers be damned—it is a fine, un self conscious town, mixed, with 18th Century & the rest all standing cheek by jowl. All the flowers were out in Sh⁠[akespea]⁠re’s garden. “That was where his study windows looked out when he wrote the Tempest” said the man. And perhaps it was true. Anyhow it was a great big house, looking straight at the large windows & the grey stone of the school chapel, & when the clock struck, that was the sound Shre heard. I cannot without more labour than my roadrunning mind can compass describe the queer impression of sunny impersonality. Yes, everything seemed to say, this was Shakespeare’s, had he sat & walked; but you wont find me not exactly in the flesh. He is serenely absent-present; both at once; radiating round one; yes; in the flowers, in the old hall, in the garden; but never to be pinned down. And we went to the Church, & there was the florid foolish bust, but what I had not reckoned for was the worn simple slab, turned the wrong way, Kind Friend for Jesus’ sake forbear—again he seemed to be all air & sun smiling serenely; & yet down there one foot from me lay the little bones that had spread over the world this vast illumination. Yes, & then we walked round the church, & all is simple & a little worn; the river slipping past the stone wall, with a red breadth in it from some flowering tree, & the edge of the turf unspoilt, soft & green & muddy, & two casual nonchalant swans. The church & the school & the house are all roomy spacious places, resonant, sunny today, & in & out [illegible]—yes, an impressive place; still living, & then the little bones lying there, which have created: to think of writing The Tempest looking out on that garden; what a rage & storm of thought to have gone over any mind; no doubt the solidity of the place was comfortable. No doubt he saw the cellars with serenity. And a few scented American girls, & a good deal of parrot prattle from old gramophone discs at the birthplace, one taking up the story from the other. But isnt it odd, the caretaker at New Place agreed, that only one genuine signature of S.’s is known; & all the rest, books, furniture pictures &c has completely vanished? Now I think Shre was very happy in this, that there was no impediment of fame, but his genius flowed out of him, & is still there, in Stratford. They were acting As you like it I think in the theatre.

Duffers the biographers not to make more hum & melody out of New Place. I could, so I think. For the man told us that after the great grand daughter’s death there was a sale, & why shouldn’t some of his things he said, be lost, put away & come to light? Also, Queen H. Maria, Charles the 1st’s Queen stayed there at New Place with the grand daughter (?) which shows how substantial it must have been. That he told us, & I had never heard. And he said Gastrell, the clergyman had the original house, wh. stretched across the garden almost to the chapel, pulled down because people bothered him, asking to see Shre’s house. And there (between the window & the wall) was the room he died in. A mulberry reputes to be the scion of the tree that grew outside Shre’s window. Great cushions of blue yellow white flowers in the garden, which is open, so that the living go on walking & sitting there.

[End of inserted pages]

[Diary XXIII]

Friday 18 May

I broke off, after sticking my Irish papers into the old book, & felt I suppose a little shiver. Cant be anything I said to myself after all that holiday; but it was—the flue. So I had to resign all ideas—all flood of Pargiters & the glorious & difficult end of that book: all was blotted by the damp sponge; & now it is precisely a week since I went to bed, & here we are for Whitsun at Monks; whats more amazing is that I write this with a gold Waterman, & have some thoughts of supplanting steel Woolworth. It is a sunny voluptuous day, the birds all rasping, on their nests I suppose, & cawing on the trees & early in the morning giving loud & continued bursts of song, to which I lie listening. I hear L. going about the garden with Percy. All is calm & profoundly comfortable, owing to the absence for ever even in the background of grumbling Nelly, & her replacement by the steady silent unselfish Mabel. Yes, we do without a Char; we are free, serene, matter of fact, oh what a relief! So if I can pull my head out of the bog, I may go back on Tuesday to the 3 months immersion. But I take a day or two more to rest myself. How infinitely modest & disillusioned & without ambition of any sort I became, all because of influenza. Couldnt believe that anyone would come & see me, let alone that I could ever again string a dozen words. Now self confidence, conceit, the blessed illusion by which we live begin to return; very gently. Smooth serenity is the first stage which I will not interrupt by writing.

Tuesday 22 May

At last today, which is Tuesday, after striking the match on the box despairingly, sterilely,—oh I was so overcome with rigidity & nothingness—a little flame has come. Perhaps I’m off. This refers to the devilish difficulty of starting Part 7 again after the flu. Elvira & George, or John, talking in her room. I’m still miles outside them, but I think I got into the right tone of voice this morning. I make this note by way of warning. What is important now is to go very slowly; to stop in the middle of the flood; never to press on; to lie back & let the soft subconscious world become populous; not to be urging foam from my lips. There’s no hurry. I’ve enough money to last a year. If this book comes out next June year its time enough. The last chapters must be so rich, so resuming, so weaving together that I can only go on by letting my mind brood every morning on the whole book. Theres no longer any need to forge ahead, as the narrative part is over. What I want is to enrich & stabilise. This last chapter must equal in length importance & volume the first book; & must in fact give the other side, the submerged side of that. I shant, I think, re-read; I shall summon it back—the teaparty, the death, Oxford & so on, from my memory. And as the whole book depends on bringing this off, I must be very leisurely & patient, & nurse my rather creaking head & dandle it with French & so on as cunningly as possible. We go back this afternoon, & the summer lap therefore now begins in earnest; Mabel &c.

Out of sheer white mist we drove to Charleston last night & my numbed torpor became slightly incandescent. Benita there. Clive Nessa Duncan Quentin all talking at once about Spencer’s pictures.

Monday 11 June

That hopeful page reads rather too credulous now, since I went back & again on Friday following shivered, & ached, was stiff as a rod, talking to Elizabeth Bowen: 101: bed: influenza: & so lay all that week, till last Sunday to be accurate; & then went to Rodmell; & there began the chapter again, & had a sudden fuse of ideas & then there was the opera, the nightingale singing in the ilex tree, Christabel & Mr Olaf Hambro telling stories about the Queen & Prince; & a very hot concert yesterday, so I cannot, no I cannot write today. Patience, as Carlyle wd. say (in Italian). But consider—the whole system is so strained over this end, that one tiny grit, one late night, one too tiring day—takes away all rush, all fusing. And just as I saw it clear before me: the very intricate scenes: all contrasting; building up: so wait till tomorrow.

Monday 18 June

Very very hot; day altered so as to go out after tea. A drought over the world. In flood with Here & Now, praise be. Yet—very wary; only just now I made up the scene with Renny & Maggie: a sign I am fertilising, for I should be doing French for Janie, who comes at 5. Yes, & last night we sat in Gordon Sqre with Mary Baker—a timid housemaid little body, no birth or breeding, but 2 dogs; lizards on her terrace, & scorpions, which dont bite with their claws, but punch you & then bite; she had seen one, placed in a ring of fire commit suicide; very very hot it was, the Stracheys calling through the railings to be let in. Then James & Alix, all praising that scramble & scream of a party which I hated so: rather shocked that Nessa enjoyed it. So many young screaming drunks. Well, perhaps at 2 in the morning…. I forgot we had Aldous: a most admirable, cool, antiseptic distempered, but humane & gentle man: with age just tempering his brow: experience; but admirably mature, as we are not; has gone about the world, completely sceptical, all the more humane; judging everything, yet nothing. A little theoretical, about religion & sex; not for that reason a novelist; infinitely elongated & bony: his blurred grey eye; his malice & wit; talked of Sullivan, of Ottoline; Brett; then of the French noblesse; how he visits them; and they come down, amazed to find a VC: & he had spent a weekend at Welwyn with the Sex Reformers; taken off his clothes among the cabbages & read Waste Land. Necessary to say penis & fuck; but that said, no change follows. He uses every instant to the best advantage but has somehow solved the problem of remaining just, gentle,—a very sympathetic mind, & I’m glad I troubled to write to him—one of my rare fruitful actions; not to let things slip so much, to which I owe Aldous’s visit, & we are to meet in the autumn.

Monday 2 July

Rung up by Osbert Sitwell just now. After hopping & jumping about publishers, Holroyd Reece, lunches dinners & teas, he comes out with, “And can’t anything be done about this monstrous affair in Germany?” “One of the few public acts” I said “that makes one miserable”. Then trying, how ineffectively, to express the sensation of sitting here & reading, like an act in a play, how Hitler flew to Munich & killed this that & the other man & woman in Germany yesterday. A fine hot summers day here & we took Philip [Woolf] Babs & 3 children to the Zoo. Meanwhile these brutal bullies go about in hoods & masks, like little boys dressed up, acting this idiotic, meaningless, brutal, bloody, pandemonium. In they come while Herr so & so is at lunch: iron boots, they say, grating on the parquet, kill him; & his wife who rushes to the door to prevent them. It is like watching the baboon at the Zoo; only he sucks a paper in which ice has been wrapped, & they fire with revolvers. And here we sit, Osbert I &c, remarking this is inconceivable. A queer state of society. If there were any idea, any vision behind it: but look at the masks these men wear—the brutal faces of baboons, licking sweet paper. And for the first time I read articles with rage, to find him called a real leader. Worse far than Napoleon. Established for a thousand year says somebody. Meanwhile as I say the weather is brilliant, dry, hot; Clive gives a cocktail party, Bianca [Weiss] invites us to hear singing—& I get £300 this morning from Harcourt Brace.

Friday 6 July

Being unable to continue the P.s this morning, having indeed worked out that particular vein after 5 weeks writing I suppose, I went out & bought a pen with which I write, a Swan pen, on a broiling hot day, a real scorcher. And came in & found a letter from Stephen Spender praising The Lighthouse, & was made by that to think, have I written myself out, & so read the last chapter of H. & N. disconsolately—what a silly thing to do, since, as I’ve just said, I’m out of that mood. We go to Rodmell this burning afternoon, & yesterday we were at Reigate, being tried for the inconsiderate act of passing the cyclist. A great red municipal building: sunburnt country gents one wreathed with a gold chain on the bench: L. stood in the box. 3 pounds I heard them whisper, & so it was. The old gents had made up their minds long before that. No I dont like this pen.

Wednesday 11 July

I dont like this pattern⁠[?] any better I think; but no matter. L. says all Swans have soft snub noses. And this feels so but less taut.[?] The heat goes on—the burning dry heat. Mabel making jam sweats: I’m forced to take a cab just now; I’m writing about belief in a city church by way of a change. I’m letting the subconscious populate. So dazed & dusty: I rather think of marking time till August & Rodmell: where we take Mabel, shall have Louie Everest I think as permanent. We saw her last week end—a merry little brown eyed mongrel who came running to meet us in the road. Yesterday tea with Nessa; & the Morris’s there; today Osbert. I make these marks. & hear John’s voice in Miss West’s room signing his name. L. there.

Tuesday 17 July

I forgot to put in about the Colefax Row, curiously enough. How she wrote me a violent letter—better to break all together—can no longer have you in my life, because I put off dinner to meet Noel Coward. She pleads her most difficult life: Sir Arthur?

This is one of the dryest & hottest of summers. At it again this morning. And heat brings such lassitude; & people swarm. I have let them die out, be extinct: Osbert for instance; with his very sensual Royal Guelf face; his extreme uneasiness; his childish vanity always striking the two notes: rank & genius: so easily touched by praise, so eager. Told me the story of the lady in the pink hat. He lectures in the provinces, indeed rather likes the Prince in disguise part which he plays, staying with his dentist at Gerrards X perhaps. Well, he had a letter from Verena, to say she had always posed as familiar with him: would he lend himself to the deception & recognise her? She wd wear a pink hat. So he exclaimed, out loud, Oh Verena! what a pleasure to see you! The story would have gone better had she not been Verena. So he went off to swim for an hour before dining with Princess Mary & so on. A sensitive man; voluble; august⁠[?], uneasy; spending 6 months in China alone: & gushing words. Still I like him—why I dont know.

And then the Eccles’ on Sunday at Clive’s & the Whistler picture, & talk of Margaret, my little owl done by command; for I went to fetch the picture & there was old Dick, & Margaret & I sobbed—she so soft simple & stately—in the dining room of the hired house. A curious scene: some sincerity welling up after all these indifferent years. L. talking to bluff tough gruff Dick in the drawing room. M. to stay with him & see the beech woods of Highclere. Mrs Eccles the pretty daughter of Ld Dawson of Penn. C. called her an aristocrat. Clive very flighty & talking French. R⁠[oger]. looking under his eye at the Whistler. Dyou know, I’m getting less & less sure. I’m not sure of that arm: & there’s a certain flatness … No, I’d rather you asked Turner’s advice, which Clive explained, when R. went, because R. had been duped over a Whistler once, when Clive was in the right. Mr E. a slab faced agent de change: I put stockbroker in French because I’m rather slick in that language now, & have 2 weekly lessons from Janie. This is a real solid triumph, to have made myself face that curious fear—about French—& have now, I think, routed it.

Vita to lunch, after many weeks, yesterday, with her MS. which, L. says, is perilous fantastic stuff, a woman flagellated in a cave. How much will the public stand? She has a joke about the prostate gland which we are asking her to reconsider. She has grown opulent & bold & red—tomatoe coloured, & paints her fingers & lips which need no paint—the influence of Gwen [St Aubyn]; underneath much the same; only without the porpoise radiance, & the pearls lost lustre.

[Thursday 19 July]

Is my brain dwindling, I ask myself after 1½ hours writing at the Fact & Fiction—that is, I am revising the first chapter of that old bugbear of mine on fiction. And I get so knotted & jaded; never mind. I shall lie flat a little in brain, for a few days: until I feel the well full. That is, I am priming myself for a final go at Here & Now. It is still so hot—so hot—my skylight painted smooth blue every morning—when we hear rain as we did last night we rush to the window. A puddle the rarest of sights. Smell of wet earth delicious. We drive to Cambridge to dine with Rothschilds tonight—home by starlight. Mary rings up to ask us to dine to meet Tom. How heavenly to drive by night she says. Cant because Jack wont. I did not go to Edith Jones cocktail or her party yesterday, & so felt assuaged; walked in Oxford St: bought a 15/- servants dress. Sun came out, though very soon: bought a melon therefore. How pleasant to have coins in one’s purse. On the whole a well managed summer, if my head were more vigorous. Oh these long books, what a tremendous effort they are—to whole [hold?] the entire span on my shoulders. And as Bogy Harris said, you must go on now till you die. Which is true.

No letters; no fame; rather a relief, to sit in the shade & spin. Julian trying for a Chinese professorship; will hear today. He dined & brought a skatelike looking woman—[name omitted]—a mouth cut in a wide fishlike face—entirely obtuse: sucking greedy. Why does J. like such inanities?

Saturday 21 July

A new nib. But I want sometimes to describe people, & here is our visit to the Rothschilds fading in my mind. We went down on Thursday, starting about 4.30, driving through that very spacious country that I always honour by planting myself down in a house in the midst of the corn. There are such houses; & the road runs by open unfenced fields. Why are fields always hedged off in England? The other way is much better: So to Merton Hall: a grey old house, half chapel, or college; half the usual rich young couples version of life: 4 kittens & a sickly pathetic marmoset; Barbara in a great hat, very pregnant, perched on a chair; long room, bowls of flowers, tea luxuriously spread at 6.30. I asked for a pale stale cup. She telephoned for the footman to bring long lemonades with gin—no without. And where is Mr R.? Asleep ma’am. Then V. came in, a slab of beefsteak, fat, thick, red lipped, in his open shirt. Sparring with B. about the rent they paid. Oughtn’t I to know? Don’t I pay it? & so on, partly for our edification. ‘Blubsy’ is one of his words. ‘Barbara went blubsy.’ Half asleep, he said, after a lunch party, Venetia Montagu & two of her lovers, one by the way Grey Walter, the son of our old cook. B. sat very upright, painted, like a cornflower. Wild, vivid; & then we walked about the garden, stuck like a jam tart—little square box edged beds with single flowers in them; a pretentious uncared for garden. Go & get your note book, he jibed: no I wont. Oh but she always has a note book. One thing a little shocked me; his saying, ‘I dont get much time for Barbara’. This he said perhaps boasting again, as he walked me down the narrow paths; he said he was determined not to become a specialist like the other science dons, thus spent so many hours with science, so many with books, which doesnt leave much time for Barbara. She had snapped at him; putting her heel down, when he wanted to tell me what Dadie had told her about—& the servant & the boy all in the same bed as—[names omitted]: no thats not quite it, but it was scandal on those lines. B. had been drawing (like Mary, I thought) Dadie’s confidences. As it appears from this, Victor told me the story, as we walked. Then dinner on the lawn, & they refused the ice: a luxurious decorative dinner. So in to the library: a steel bookcase packed with first editions, each sealed in a red morocco case; which we had out, Gulliver’s Travels, Boswell, Wordsworth, Swift, all laid on the floor; thousands of pounds worth, bought since last year, & I had set him reading with my Common Reader. Ah but this isnt the way to read, I almost said. Too easy; sitting at Sotheby’s bidding. But then youth has enormous power, I said, for I liked him, rather, her a good deal; she is the more sensitive & civilised, he the more robust & triumphant. Youth can have a child in September: nothing it cant do: has 50 years ahead of it, living in this very lovely England, & he said the R. fortune is now at full flood again. Shall he remain a scientist & refuse to be a financier? Thats the sort of question youth can ask. He wont live with these pickers up of minute peas in Cambridge. He said that his professor, aged 40, comes out to dine, & tells very old very dreary smutty stories, all his energy having been sucked up by science: so that is another argument against the specialist. Cant connect.

We drove home at 11, & got back at 1. A lovely cool shadowed drive through the fields again, two great steeples of light searching the sky about Ware, & an aeroplane sailing among the stars. Suddenly I saw a green star moving.

Duncan ill with very bad piles—operated on last night, or, since that sounds alarming, lanced. Spoke to Janie of the snobbishness of our sympathies. Cant really sympathise with that particular disease, though the pain is terrible. Must laugh.

I have just finished, the other pen continues, though very provisionally, the first truth telling chapter: but Lord knows if I must not entirely scrap the whole thing once more. At any rate I have now got a little fresh water in my well for Here & Now. I had one of my sudden rushes listening to Monti Verde last night. Last night came a letter from Henry to my dear Aunt Virginia saying that George has left me £100. I feel rather rebuked & uncomfortable, I dont altogether know why, at this final tip. Shall I spend it on what? Now I have so much money. And by the way Nessa came in, rather to my shame—but again, why?—only I like noting these queer waifs in my mind—dressed in a 3/6 dress she had made herself. I know what I am going to do now: I am going to come down with both feet on this dress mania: this shyness; this tremendous susceptibility: & it is not so very difficult, once faced.

I am reading Shre plays the fag end of the morning. Have read, Pericles, Titus Andronicus, & Coriolanus.

[Sunday 22 July]

We went round, I continue, to fill in ten minutes on Sunday morning—a grey blue sky above the skylight, to Nessa with fruit; & found her sublimely in command of the situation as usual. Elly [Rendel] in a panic insisting upon a nurse: look at the haemorrhage; can you take the responsibility? Certainly I can said Nessa: anyhow I must. I’m not young, & I’ve seen bloodier bandages than these. This too at the nerve racking hour of dawn. So she triumphed. I doubt whether I could have. Perhaps. Walked as usual this summer in the Park; & saw the people playing bowls, & were happy to think that next week we shall have our own bowls. Also how shall we spend our legacy? Poor old George only left £7000 or so of money: what had he done with the rest? After dinner we listened to a very good concert; L. made cigarettes, & I followed my new diversion of book binding. I am covering Proust in little shiny squares of gummed paper that one buys for 6d at Kettles: a great relief to work one’s fingers. Letter from Elizabeth Reed—ecstatic, highfalutin, unreal, in spite of miscarriage on the moors.

Tuesday 24 July

Infinitely bored with correcting, or rather inserting a snip, into, my old Sickert for those pernickety Americans, who insist that Max shall be drag⁠[g]⁠ed in.

Dinner last night at the Hutchinsons. Let me see. Praise of my dress—taken very philosophically. Desmond there & Tom—dinner: not very good: one element of pleasure lessened. Talk frivolous at first. Jack’s; jokes with Mary for being in love with Arlen. He sends her books. I do not altogether like Jack’s jokes with Mary: her lovers &c. Then, Mary describes a party: a champagne cocktail. Tom gravely attentive. Talk gets upon whether we frighten or are frightened. Tom said I made him feel I saw through all his foibles; which perhaps I do. Talk of Patmore. Desmond expatiated, praised, placed him with Crashaw: described his love of great fires, his son Epiphany, all in the Sunday Times agreeable manner, not very close to the object: a love of little pictures. Jack robust, rather coarse; how old Victorians always had an eye to the main chance. Tom remained on the verge; yellow, bony; but I regretted having denounced the Rock—so much melancholy in his face. Yes, & then, somehow to Hitler. Desmond again describing Bottomley & Pemberton Billing. I always feel he flutters & skirts, where Tom dives to the centre. And there was Leonard aquiline & lean; & so Desmond drew on to politics, & the half wit wasps whom he watched in their Hive: Fascists that is: how Hitler had dealt them a blow. So to politics & then, what with Jack’s cross examination, & Tom’s intentness, & Desmond burbling general goodwill & human love, & Leonard’s specialised convictions, the argument blazed: how the Labour party wd come in: what it would do. But how can you make any such ridiculous claim Jack boomed. What is it going to do about unemployment, about agriculture? All these questions were put from the view of here & now, capable business men; L. ideal by comparison. How 10 sensible men ‘round a table’, one of his phrases, could so manipulate the supply of locomotives & wheat that one country supplemented another. Oh if we were all men of good will, if we were all ready to be nice about it—Then Desmond as usual praised moderation, tact, the virtues of the defunct Liberal party: how civilisation runs slowly in a great wide stream, & you must slowly facilitate its course, but by no means introduce whirlpools, cut precipices & so on. The deceased Oxford [H. H. Asquith], presumably, his ideal; but this is what so depresses & baffles me in him as a critic. They heckled L. between them, & when the argument began to put its tail in its mouth, Mary asked if I would like to withdraw. We went upstairs, & she sat on the fender, & said how, being alone for the week end she had tried to write an ambitious biography. There was to be an outer story, & a second meaning; as far as I could gather. But when she had called one character George Buchanan, & another Lettice Ponsonby, they died under her hands. Could one then try to write disconnected scenes? Must they combine into a story? No need whatever I said. And she clapped her hands, as if I had given her leave; & declared that she would write scenes, & send them to me. For instance there was Syrie Maugham’s party. As a person, she had not enjoyed it. I gathered that she had not had any intimacy. Then she reflected that she had danced every dance with an entirely different person: Freyberg, Arlen, & I forget who else; Lord Hambledon; had said the same thing to each; & each was entirely different. As an artist then, a dispassionate observer, the party had been a great success. Not to her as Mary. One must cease to be Mary.

Then the others came; & Tom read Mr Barker’s poems, chanting, intoning. Barker has some strange gift he thinks & dimly through a tangle of words ideas emerge. He thinks there is some melody some rhythm some emotion lacking in the Audens, & Spenders. Wants 5/- a week for this young man, who has wife & child. So home at last. The aeroplanes were droning in the sky all the time.

Friday 27 July

Rodmell begins again: with this difference, we have Mabel just arrived, this instant; & Louie [Everest], who is moving in today. And the usual helter skelter, tidying, & nothing to settle to; must at once go to Worthing, then come back to a meeting. Not the kind of day I much like, & would rather have no servant in the house; but we shall see. Also, my old brain must wake & bestir itself over Here & Now.

This is written to kill time, as I cant settle in. Perhaps we have too many possessions. Too many tables & chairs.

Mrs B⁠[artholomew], last night: has had her hair shingled. Propped against the door talked & talked. How difficult she found it to spend money though she now has it after all those years of stinting. Had given Annie a cheque. Also pays old Grey’s insurance. A queer genuine, though untamed, I mean uneducated spray—I mean so tremulous & wispish—something wild & vagrant; this becoming more quiet; in fact rather a nice sharp kind woman. Now she has a cheque book & draws cheques. Theres the money coming, she said. She wants to leave Rodmell. Percy doesn’t. She advertises for rooms at Colchester. Cant get them. So there it is, when we can afford to go we cant. But she has been very kind coming up to oblige, washing up doing the rooms. She cooks a bit of meat for Mrs Grey—whose [maiden] name is Squelch. Oh I’m too bothered & dithered—wish to sleep—but must go to Worthing instead.

[Saturday 28 July]

ah hah—but now, having despatched that entirely disagreeable day, Worthing, & Mr Fears, representing Rodmell Labour party for an hour after dinner, I’m free to begin the last chapter; & by a merciful Providence the well is full, ideas are rising, & if I can keep at it widely freely powerfully I shall have 2 months of complete immersion. Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order. I can see the day whole, proportioned—even after a long flutter of the brain such as I’ve had this morning⁠[—]⁠it must be a physical, moral, mental necessity, like setting the engine off. A wild windy hot day—a tearing wind in the garden; all the July apples on the grass. I’m going to indulge in a series of quick sharp contrasts: breaking my bonds⁠[?] as much as ever I like. Trying every kind of experiment. Now of course I cant write diary or letters or read because I am making up all the time. Perhaps Bob T. was right in his poem when he called me fortunate above all—I mean in having a mind that can express—no, I mean in having mobilised my being—learnt to give it complete, not ju outcome—I mean, that I have to some extent forced myself to break every mould & find a fresh form of being, that is of expression, for everything I feel & think. So that when it is working I get the sense of being fully energised—nothing stunted. But this needs constant effort, anxiety & risk. Here in H. & N. I am breaking the mould made by The Waves.

Wednesday 1 August

I’m black & blue from their worrying,

They’ve tortured me early & late,

Some with their love,—God help me!

The others with their hate.

Why I trouble to copy out these [untraced] lines which are from Heine, I dont know, except that they represent what happened to my perfect free day at Charleston yesterday. One ought not to have the illusion of perfect happiness—that it is possible; yet again I did. And then, yes my friends—this is Sybil Colefax sneering to Clive at my taking too much care of myself; & this is Clive handing it on; & then this morning, poor old Francis [Birrell] paralysed; another operation tomorrow, under which says Nessa, it is to be hoped he may die, since the cancer has come back. She sees him today. How odd, ones last day, this: here very hot & fine. & then of course he may live. How I hate going through these thoughts again, & what a jumble of meanness & sordidity & the fine, one’s feelings are.

Remember, as far as S⁠[ibyl]. C⁠[olefax]. goes, never never to speak of health. In, fact this might be useful in all connections.

Thursday 2 August

My mind, only how call it so solid a name, still running not upon dear old Frankie, who may be dying—but our convention is to be very cheerful & objective—but upon that gnat Sybil. Why didnt I remind her when I wrote of the way she treated me, how she put me off twice here. What a stinging rejoinder that would have been—& I only thought of it yesterday. But perhaps I can still get it in. A curious problem: why was I not even mildly annoyed at the time, & now, in August, why am I acutely irritated. Clive’s drop of poison, I suppose, managed to crystallise the whole thing; the oddly vivid & upsetting effect of knowing that one’s been talked about. The reflection of myself in Courtauld’s drawing room, being made the subject of her & Clive’s jeers & sneers. But I dont mean to have another row, à la Eddy.

And this fly in the eye makes it impossible for me to see—no, thats not true, I can ‘see’ the nursing home, the bed, the surgeon; I can act ones last night, & being waked early in Welbeck St & all that—my eye is quite remorseless—but I dont feel. However, these flies gradually dismember themselves, & perish.

I’m worried too with my last chapters. Is it all too shrill & voluble? And then the immense length, & the perpetual ebbs & flows of invention. So divinely happy one day; so jaded the next.

Louie’s first morning here. A leap in the dark rather. Mabel making currant jam. Vast basins of black currants which she heads & tails. Mabel had a chicken that lived with her 14 years & was called Old George.

Saturday 4 August

Waiting about to go to Annie’s wedding. No signs yet. No bells ringing. So impossible to do anything, & here I am at 11 this hot August morning in full garden party dress. No news of Frankie. The tap tap of the boys playing cricket reminds me of our cricket sensations. What is the difference between memory, excited by sensation, & thought—the thought required by a page of Plato for instance?

Yesterday just as we had done tea, Adrian’s gaunt form appeared; Karin’s touseled shape, grown very thick & large. Her inferiority complex takes the form of praising Adrian. Clever old Adrian, she exclaims, if he bowls a good bowl. This is by way of saying—what? My marriage was not so bad after all? He remains perfectly unmoved, quiet, sensible; I suppose curiously immature, though able to go through all the actions correctly of a grown man, father, husband.

The night before, Enid Jones rang up & came, from 9.15 to 10.45 to discuss her book—the effect of winning the Grand National on a child, ostensibly; really another case of inferiority I think; to rub off the taste of Goodwood with Scatters Wilson. Like a dog eating grass. But why shd she need to eat grass? Because, being a scallywag she married a very rich man: is neither fish flesh fowl nor good red herring; & thats an ambiguous state that requires perpetual adjustment. She shifts from self to self. We have to provide a transition. An uneasy woman, rather hard. Brandishes all her children all her responsibilities all her gaieties in our face. Uncertain whether to stay or to go.

Clive & Julian & so on to tea today. I will swear not to pick up one of the thorns so artfully administered by the Pismire—slipped in. George ring the bell & run away. I will carefully observe his method & analyse it in action.

Saxon very glad to come here next week end. We take up a conversation broken these 10 years in our natural voices. What about Pericles? & so on. A relief after Sybil’s histrionics.

Certainly bright leaves do glare as Rupert said. No sign of the wedding yet. I think of the craving of the human being for sympathy.

Tuesday 7 August

A rather wet Bank holiday. Tea with Keyneses.

Maynard had had teeth out, but was very fertile. For instance: “Yes, I’ve been 3 weeks in America. An impossible climate. In fact it has collected all the faults of all the climates. This carries out my theory about climate. Nobody could produce a great work in America. One sweats all day & the dirt sticks to ones face. The nights are as hot as the days. Nobody sleeps. Everyone is kept on the go all day long by the climate. I used to dictate articles straight off. I felt perfectly well until I left. The shipwreck was all the Captains fault. We made a bee line for the Lightship in a fog. He had the boats launched before we struck. We had the men out of the water before they were in it. Very efficient, but not a good captain. A character. A Don Juan.” So to German politics “They’re doing something very queer with their money. I cant make out what. It may be the Jews are taking away their capital. Let me see, if 2000 Jews were each to take away £2,000—Anyhow they cant pay their Lancashire bill. Always the Germans have bought cotton from Egypt, had it spun in Lancashire: its a small bill, only a million, but they cant pay. Yet theyre buying copper all the time. Whats it for? Armaments no doubt. Thats one of the classic examples of intn trade—Now Holden has been over & says we wont go in. 20,000 people out of work. But of course there’s something behind it. What is the cause of the financial crisis? Theyre doing something foolish—no Treasury control of the soldiers.”

(but I am thinking all the time of what is to end Here & Now. I want a Chorus, a general statement, a song for 4 voices, how am I to get it? I am now almost within sight of the end. racing along: becoming more & more dramatic.

And how to make the transition from the colloquial to the lyrical, from the particular to the general?)

Sunday 12 August

This is Saxon’s week end. He is in the house, this windy cold gray day, playing chess with L. Odd that I should think of ‘honey-sweet’ Queen in connection with Saxon. But he has grown rather pink & chubby in face, & very mellow & in fact charming in mind. The old eccentricities have been melted in the sun—I cannot guess of what success. Is it The Treasury, or Mrs Sickert? Anyhow he is not merely a bundle of desiccated separate remarks about toothbrushes & trains: he is continuous & even suggestive. I have spent an hour or so talking with him about Shakespeare, books in general, then people: & there is some virtue in these old friends: I mean conversationally; they enrich. If I ask what about Francis? he can supplement my question with all his knowledge of the past; & that is joined to my knowledge; so that we say many things we mean. Thus, it was a good idea of mine to ask him. He stays away a good deal, it seems; has rather expanded into queer corners; the Beresfords & the Lambs. And he has bought a new book on Aristotle. Barbara [Bagenal] & her children the bulls eye I imagine. But the other circles all to his liking. We had the Keynes’s over. Old friends again. M. adroit & supple & full of that queer imaginative ardour about history, humanity; able to explain flints & the age of man from some book he has read. Silent while we gossip. Immensely amused too by little scenes, as of Mrs Hardy & the sausages [unexplained]. He complained that great men, Shaw & Wells, are not serious; they do their stunt. Why cant they be simple, & do no stunt? He said Shaw never said anything new, but Charlotte [Mrs Shaw] does. He has a ranging adventurous mind, which I enjoy. In short we old stagers have made a good job, on the whole—such was my feeling. They stayed late.

Duncan is still bad with the ridiculous torturing disease, & Nessa I suppose much worried.

New⁠[s] at first, through Julian, extremely optimistic about Francis. Now nothing, but perhaps more doubtful. Oh & the drought has broken: 2 carp are dead; there is the old ugly grey welter in the sky, which I’m afraid may now become ‘weather’. But all, at this moment, rather loose, random, interesting. Vita came over very late for dinner, having been kept by a row with her mother who, says M⁠[aynard], eats pate de foie with a shoehorn. She had been accusing her footman, a cocktail party boy with fair hair called Leonard, nicknamed Lemon, of putting Lysol in her medicine. Vita thinks Harold is getting soft & domestic, because he talks of grandchildren, & wants to have a butler to brush [h]⁠is clothes & a spare room. Good Lord said Vita, as if I wanted grandchildren! for which exclamation I like her. In fact she wears, to me, in spite of G⁠[wen]. & the Dark Island, very well. So in to roast beef & plum tart.

Friday 17 August

Yes. I think owing to the sudden rush of 2 wakeful nights, making up early mornings rather, I think I see the end of Here & Now (or Music, or Dawn or whatever I shall call it). Its to end with Elvira going out of the house & saying What did I make this knot in my handkerchief for? & all the coppers rolling about——

Its to be all in speeches—no play——I have now made a sketch of what everyone is to say; & it ends with a supper party in the downstairs room. I think the back is broken.

It will run to something like 850 of my rough pages I imagine: which is at 200: 850
      200
170,000 & I shall sweat it down to 130,000.

The boat came yesterday & Julian & I walloped about on the river. An expensive sail—£7.7.6 to be exact. Thats what comes of saying lightly I’d like a boat. But never mind. I have George’s legacy, & even if H. & N. cant be published till Oct. year, still I have £1000 or thereabouts saved.

Mabel, called now The Cow, is stiff with neuritis & very ‘low’ as she calls it. A very sociable summer this. I have not entered High Salvington: seeing the down made into Putney & a pneumatic drill at work; & the scented room; & Ada like a double guinea pig, pale hair en brosse; going over the windmill—such a drive & such a visit as branded itself like a new cheap villa on my brain.

But I am thinking of H. & N. & it is lunch time.

Tuesday 21 August

Having taken a week off, in the middle of the last scene, which is indeed like a scene in a play, I am too jaded to write that horrid book, I mean Fiction, this morning—

Last night the ice was hard, & we decided that Mabel must go. She is a dump. She wears her shoes on one side, & has long black stockings. Also there was a hot violent gale. It was a bad day of its kind, & I dreamt ferociously all night; about Massine; & Wilmington, & woke with all my back in hackles, like a cats, & the old cry Fight: upon wh L. opened the door; no letters; only burnt bread—& so I had ½ an hour in the kitchen which is crumby, with Mabel, & now I cant think: I shall moon the day away. This is what comes of driving ahead at that last chapter. It is very concentrated. I read Une Vie last night, & it seemed to me rather marking time & watery—heaven help me—in comparison. Its the change of gear that so upsetting⁠[?] Like a smash in a car; being spilt from one world to the other.

I shall go in & get a book & my watch & moon away the morning & pray for a good dinner. The week end will be intolerable. Plomer & Lyn, neither of whom do I wish to see. We are using the new room for the first time.

The lesson of Here & Now is that one can use all kinds of ‘forms’ in one book. Therefore the next might be poem, reality, comedy, play: narrative; psychology, all in one. Very short. This needs thinking over.

Also, a play about the Parnells,

or a biography of Mrs. P.

Sunday 26 August

Plomer & Lyn are talking outside the window. They are sitting in the walled garden, on the chairs we bought yesterday. We have left them there to read. We have supplied them with Ethel’s books, with Blind men cross the Bridge—an immense long totally absurd (work of genius the Lit Sup calls it) novel; but now they have ceased reading—indeed it is rather windy—& are talking. I catch only a word now & then. Lyn has just said that she “immensely enjoyed it”. What, I wonder?! doubt that she immensely enjoys anything. She is rather faded & suppressed & literal & conscientious wearing her horn spectacles & frowning. William I think (but L. disagrees) rather aged & disillusioned. But, against my forecast, I am enjoying the week end. For one thing the cooking has been good; Mabel ‘a treasure’. With Louie to help we live in greater comfort than any time these 5 years. Ethel came over to tea yesterday and did her owl—who is a red wattled turkey cock—very vigorously. In fact she adds considerably to the entertainment of the week end. We sat & bawled, about God & Dulwich. She only had time for half a remark about the Prison & her complete lack of ambition.

Thursday was a horrid day though, when we took Julian Angelica & Susan to London, on a windy day; & I had toothache & went to the dentist, & he says I must have 2 teeth out; & everything went as a nightmare—ending, after a bitter cold drive with a most depressing view of family life at Charleston, which I arranged into a climax of domesticity & was thoroughly irritated with Duncan for making Nessa into Aunt Mary—cant come here, cant go to London as long as he is ill; & with Nessa for her passive submission; & with myself for being the good fairy Aunt. Lord how that role can bore me—how unreal it is—& why do I act it? These were my thoughts, soothed mercifully after dinner alone by Leonard.

Monday 27 August

The week end better. I am trying to start the nameless book again; & of course find it grinding, to try to get back into those stiff boots. All the same, I enjoyed the week end. Lyn left; which was all to the good, as she has no great range poor Lyn, & W⁠[illiam]. had, I guessed, said all he could say. Then [Neil] Lyons came, & subtly pervaded the house with a smell of stale cabbage. “At Jimmy Gunn’s cocktail yesterday …. I said to Sickert—. dining in Mayfair.” He is not merely secondrate, but almost criminal; which is amusing, once in a way. A South African Jew & sharper, Wm said. Probably the son of a small tailor. Stammers on the letter A. has a sexual delusion. He told us of a small hat black woman, who; divorced her husband, 6ft 4 & in the Guards, lives at Uckfield & leaves Neil at 2. am. She drives through Lewes & blackguards the police. He would not repeat the word she used. Then Lavender the gardener is an ex-burglar: has done 14 years in gaol, & is a preventive detention man, under charge of Hancock. (This ex burglar came round the other night to borrow 15 /-). He—Neil—has his prattling amiability though, & amused me with his stories of making cigarettes & gathering samphire. A nimble light fingered little monstrosity, much concerned to amuse, to impress, & much afflicted with various desires. He eats corn cobs; & may unhappily come round to bring me some, & show off his cigarettes. What a dip in the kitchen pail!

Wm. gone this morning. I doubt that I have anything to add to the portrait of Wm. save that I think he is losing charm, & perhaps adding weight. Another novel coming this autumn. No reference to the Press. Lyn gave him a scrap of her own hand to decipher, which I thought unfair.

Thursday 30 August

If I cant even write here, owing to making up the last scenes, how can I possibly read Dante? Impossible. After 3 days grind, getting back, I am I think floated again.

Robson comes to tea today; & the Woolves tomorrow; & … another lapse making up El’s speech .. “D’you know what I’ve been clasping in my hand all the evening? Coppers.”

Well anyhow I’ve enough in stock to last out this Chapter; I daresay another 2 or 3 weeks.

Yesterday I found a new walk, & a new farm, in the fold between Asheham & Tarring Neville. Very lovely, all alone, with the down rising behind. Then I walked back by a rough broad overflowing grey river. The porpoise came up & gulped. It rained. All ugliness was disolved. An incredibly 18th century landscape, happily making me think less of Wilmington.

A tremendous hail storm after tea. Like white ice; broken up: lanced, lashing, like the earth being whipped. This happened several times. Black clouds while we played Brahms.

No letters at all this summer. But there will be many next year, I predict. And I dont mind; the day, yesterday to be exact, being so triumphant: writing: the walk; reading, Leeson, a detective, Saint Simon, Henry James’ preface to P. of a Lady—very clever, [word illegible] but one or two things I recognise: then Gide’s Journal, again full of startling recollection—things I cd; have said myself.

Sunday 2 September

I dont think I have ever been more excited over a book than I am writing the end of—shall it be Dawn? Or is that too emphatic, sentimental. I wrote like a—forget the word—yesterday; my cheeks burn; my hands tremble. I am doing the scene where Peggy listens to them talking & bursts out. It was this outburst that excited me so. Too much perhaps. I cant make the transition to E⁠[lvir]⁠as speech easily this morning. Another lull; but very slight, caused partly by the great tea table talk yesterday—9 to tea; Ks. B’s. Ky Martin & Kahan, the economic Jew, I forget his name. We arranged lots of little cakes on two tables. And some came early, others late. And they talked (as in my book that morning) about Civilisation, owing to L.’s article on Shaw, which had, as usual upset Kingsley, even to the extent of making him consider giving up the NS. & taking a professorship. “For whats the use of the NS. if there’s no future for our civilisation?” What use is there for professors in that case? Clive inappropriately tried to flirt with that scrannel woman Olga. A wrung out washerwoman’s hands woman. And K⁠[ingsley]—so histrionic, so effusive. Lydia oppressed, I thought, by the death of Cecchetti. And Maynard by his week end party. The men played bowls. The girls, including M⁠[aynard]—sat in the upstairs room. But Olga made us restrained.

I am very calm & worldly competent at the moment though. I rather like those made up words. Single words too precise. Annoyed by Duncan’s scare—a temp: must be consumption & so on. Now the specialist says nothing of the kind, as I cd. have told them. Strange to be irritated by this: but I am.

Wednesday 12 September

Roger died on Sunday. I was walking with Clive on the terrace when Nessa came out. We sat on the seat there for a time. On Monday we went up with Nessa. Ha came. Nessa saw Helen [Anrep]. Tomorrow we go up, following some instinct, to the funeral. I feel dazed: very wooden. Women cry, L. says: but I dont know why I cry—mostly with Nessa. And I’m too stupid to write anything. My head all stiff. I think the poverty of life now is what comes to me. a thin blackish veil over everything. Hot weather. A wind blowing. The substance gone out of everything. I dont think this is exaggerated. It’ll come back I suppose. Indeed I feel a great wish, now & then, to live more all over the place, to see people, to create, only for the time one cant make the effort. And I cant write to Helen, but I must now shut this & try.

Maupassant, on writers—(true I think).

“En lui aucun sentiment simple n’existe plus. Tout ce qu’il voit, ses joies, ses plaisirs, ses souffrances, ses desespoirs, deviennent instantanément des sujets d’observation.. Il analyse malgré tout, malgré lui, sans fin, les coeurs, les visages, les gestes, les intonations.”

I remember turning aside at mother’s bed, when she had died, & Stella took us in, to laugh, secretly, at the nurse crying. She’s pretending, I said: aged 13. & was afraid I was not feeling enough. So now.

Sur l’eau 116 The writer’s temperament.
“ne jamais souffrir, penser, aimer, sentir comme tout le monde, bonnement, franchement, simplement, sans s’analyser soi-meme apres chaque joie et après chaque sanglot”

Saturday 15 September

I was glad we went to the service on Thursday. It was a very hot summers day. And all very simple & dignified. Music. Not a word spoken. We sat there, before the open doors that lead into the garden. Flowers & strollers which Roger would have liked. He lay under an old red brocade with two bunches of very bright many coloured flowers. It is a strong instinct to be with ones friends. I thought of him too, at intervals. Dignified & honest & large—“large sweet soul”—something ripe & musical about him—& then the fun & the fact that he had lived with such variety & generosity & curiosity. I thought of this. Karin annoyed me coming in late, stumbling. That went off. They played Bach. Then the coffin moved slowly through the doors. They shut. They played again—Anon, I think: old music. Yes, I liked the wordlessness: Helen looking very young & blue eyed & quiet & happy. That is much to remember her for. I kissed her on the lips, in the courtyard. Then Desmond came up: said wdnt it be nice to walk in the garden? “Oh we stand on a little island” he said. But it has been very lovely I said. For the first time I laid my hand on his shoulder, & said dont die yet. Nor you either he said. We have had wonderful friends, he said. We walked a little, but Molly was out of it, with her deafness. So we took them to Wellington Sqre & had tea. A merry natural talk, about Roger & books & people, all as usual: Molly breaking in, about her philograph, & her books. Queer isolation of deafness—breeding this rather peevish but pathetic egotism. And it was roasting hot. D’you remember the dinner we gave the Memoir Club said Desmond in the street—looking at his dinner table. Never again said Molly. Oh yes, I said; & we drove off.

Very jaded; cant write; all my books seem a complete jerked⁠[?] failure. I must take a few days off. Ann & Judith upon us: then Dadie.

Tuesday 18 September

Dadie has been gone half an hour, & I am silent after talking incessantly, it seems, & is in fact almost true, since 1 on Saturday. A. & J. came, strode in without their box. Great brown naked legged colts. Then there was Mrs Jones & Hugh: bowls: I sat & listened to the poor womans plaints; knees that lock, cant make eno’; will I give her work; in a bungalow at Seaford. Then dinner: next day Angelica’s party (like the Lytton party) at Charleston. They acted; I did my poor old frenzied owl; at parting Clive, who is off to Spain till November, said But you’ll get over it—an arrow wh. stuck, for then I felt I had over acted. Never mind. Nessa infinitely mournful & struck, like a statue, something frozen about her. Janie. The children also saddened (not A. & J.). They acted very beautifully in Chinese clothes by the pond. Well I thought I can see this through Roger’s eyes: its right to enjoy every tint. And yet how can one? This has gone out of the day—that laughter; that energy; & we were all thinned & stunted. So home. And then after A. & J. went—& I had begun to fidget because they dont wipe their mouths & eat so much—the Keynes’s & Dadie came. We did not exactly repeat the funeral talk: but it loomed over us. Lydia to me rather jarring. She did not care. Nothing much loomed over her. Dear old Dadie very charming & affectionate. We talked about Cambridge; about teaching English; I held out a bare pole—I mean extended my views rashly; he was donnish, serious, very measured; believes in education; in measuring the mind, & sending youth out to Africa with ‘an improved sense of leisure’ & so on. But this rather broke down, & he admitted that he means to leave as soon as he can afford it. Peter [Lucas] a deathly warning. Teaching without zest a crime. Shepherd a complete buffoon; but good, because of his completeness. Dadie wants to marry, to have whitehaired children & live a romantic life with a dark haired feminine wife. As it is has to comfort his most desolate mother.

I like writing this morning because it takes off the strain on the lips. A cold dull day after all this blaze. Now we have [John] Graham—& Mrs W⁠[oolf]. but then, perhaps, peace, & an end to the book? O if that could be! But I feel 10 miles distant—far away—detached—very jaded now.

[Wednesday 19 September]

I had a notion that I could describe the tremendous feeling at R.’s funeral: but of course I cant. I mean the universal feeling: how we all fought with our brains loves & so on; & must be vanquished. Then the vanquisher, this outer force became so clear; the indifferent. & we so small fine delicate. A fear then came to me, of death. Of course I shall lie there too before that gate, & slide in; & it frightened me. But why? I mean, I felt the vainness of this perpetual fight, with our brains & loving each other against the other thing: if Roger could die.

[Thursday 20 September]

But then, next day, today which is Thursday, one week later, the other thing begins to work—the exalted sense of being above time & death which comes from being again in a writing mood. And this is not an illusion, so far as I can tell. Certainly I have a strong sense that Roger would be all on one’s side in this excitement, & that whatever the invisible force does, we thus get outside it. A nice letter from Helen. And today we go to Worthing—dear me, that poor old very superficial content with the outsides & shows of things woman. Who never grasps anything but lives like a butterfly unable to retain or reflect; but abundant genuine of its kind unreflecting feeling. I shall have to hear all her sorrows, & ‘cheer’ her up: which happens quite easily. A cake, a [word illegible] a compliment—chatter.

[Later] As a matter of fact she was unexpectedly sensible & rather sympathetic about Roger. She said how terrified she had been when she came to see me first at B⁠[runswic]⁠k Sqre—how she had been impressed by my tapestries—had never seen such stuff.

Sunday 30 September

The last words of the nameless book were written 10 minutes ago; quite calmly too. 900 pages: L. says 200,000 words. Lord God what an amount of re-writing that means! But also, how heavenly to have brought the pen to a stop at the last line, even if most of the lines have now to be rubbed out. Anyhow the design is there. And it has taken a little less than 2 years: some months less indeed, as Flush intervened; therefore it has been written at a greater gallop than any of my books. The representational part accounts for this fluency. And I should say—but do I always say this?—with greater excitement; not, I think of the same kind quite. For I have been more general, less personal. No ‘beautiful writing’, much easier dialogue; but a great strain, because so many more faculties had to keep going at once, though none so pressed upon. No tears & exaltation at the end: but peace & breadth, I hope. Anyhow, if I die tomorrow, the line is there. And I am fresh; & shall re-write the end tomorrow. I dont think I’m fresh enough, tho’, to go on ‘making up’. That was the strain—the invention; & I suspect that the last 20 pages have slightly flagged. Too many odds & ends to sweep up. But I have no idea of the whole—

A fine, blowing day. Starlings bathing. Must now write to Helen.

Tuesday 2 October

Yes, but my head will never let me glory sweepingly: always a tumble. Yesterday morning the old rays of light set in; & then the sharp, the very sharp pain over my eyes; so that I sat & lay about till tea; had no walk, had not a single idea of triumph or relief. L. bought me a little travelling ink pot, by way of congratulation. I wish I could think of a name. Sons & Daughters? Probably used already. Theres a mass to be done to the last chapter, which I shall, I hope, dv. as they say in some circles, I suppose still, begin tomorrow: while the putty is still soft.

So the summer is ended. Until the 9th of Sept: when Nessa came across the terrace—how I hear that cry Hes dead—a very vigorous, happy summer. Oh the joy of walking! I’ve never felt it so strong in me. Cowper Powys, oddly enough, expresses the same thing: the trance like, swimming, flying through the air; the current of sensations & ideas; & the slow, but fresh change of down, of road, of colour: all this churned up into a fine thin sheet of perfect calm happiness. Its true I often painted the brightest pictures on this sheet: & often talked aloud. Lord how many pages of Sons & Daughters—perhaps Daughters & Sons would give a rhythm more unlike Sons & Lovers, or Wives & Daughters [by Mrs Gaskell],—I made up, chattering them in my excitement on the top of the down, in the folds.

Too many buildings, alas: & gossip to the effect that Christie & the Ringmer building Co. are buying Botten’s Farm to build on. Sunday I was worried, walking to Lewes, by the cars & the villas. But again, I’ve discovered the ghostly farm walk; & the Piddinghoe walk; & such variety & loveliness—the river lead & silver: the ship—Servie of London—going down; the bridge opened. Mushrooms & the garden at night; the moon, like a dying dolphin’s eye; or red orange, the harvest moon; or polished like a steel knife; or lambent: sometimes rushing across the sky; sometimes hanging among the branches—Now in October the thick wet mist has come, thickening & blotting.

On Sunday we had Bunny & Julian; Bunny so thick & solid, like a beam out of an old tree; Julian rather smaller than usual. Bunny has grey wisps at his temples; talks like a heavy wardrobe; all heavy angular sentences. I noted how my own rushing pace, seemed too rushing, & after 10 minutes had adapted itself to Bunny.

How—do—you—start—an—aeroplane? This unheard cry [?], Lord what a wonder, filling sheets to an inch every Friday. Bunny has severe small blue eyes that slowly fix themselves. All rather heavy footed. Julian silent. So we walked on the Terrace. Then Duncan & Helen came—Helen in a long coat & the funny amateur hat with the green tuft that she wore at the service. It was rather fortunate that the first meeting should be among the flowers, vegetables, improvements. Then we went upstairs & talked & laughed about Roger, easily. I felt however the worn out, the used up feeling as if she were now— feeling the shallows, after the exaltation; the shingle grating, the sordid—poor Helen! All the [Fry] sisters conglomerate in B⁠[ernard]. St. & arrange R.’s pictures—dating them wrongly. How one can hear R. laugh! see him padding about in his slippers. Margery is left literary executor. Tatlock smelling of drink comes round & says he wants to write R.’s life. Well whats to be done about our ‘lives’ I wonder? The EMF. Goldie thing to me quite futile. But this is an aside. What we talked of was Ha & Joan & Pamela & Julian; & Helen made her usual quips & severities: but all was a little watery. Her blue & pink less bright—poor woman. She is very poor—it seems: must give up B. St. & find a flat: must perhaps give up Rodwell. Then the problem of the children—how facts come trooping in, when the great rush of emotion is past. I mean, this dealing with the difficulties used to be done so much by R.: at any rate, there he was, bullying her, laughing at her: forcing her to give it all up & come out to Venice, or St Remy. Now she’ll be more and more bothered, worried. But she has a great many friends.

And we went to Sissinghurst. Vita playing the Gramophone at the top of the pink tower. A blazing day. (I bought 1st edition of Mill on Floss at Websters by the way). Some constraint now, of a very simple & obvious kind, because of Gwen. She came in at 2. We were sitting under a pergola, lunching. An uneasy, nerve strained woman—very tense. She told us how she had taken Miss Maddock the 70 year old secretary to the Mayfair Hotel to tea. M. had eaten crumpets & cakes. Had had no lunch. Whats to become of her? Gwen rather a doer of good. This stimulates V.’s sentimental easy going benevolence, I think. And we talked of Sibyl & Ethel; & then went; V. saying, very calmly, that the majority agreed with me in thinking the D. Island a bad book. And I dont lose any of my liking for her gentleness, truthfulness, modesty. Ly S. has bought Long B. for £8,ooo.

Books read or in reading:

Shre.

Troilus.

Pericles.

Taming of Shrew.

Cymbeline.

Maupassant,

only scraps

de Vigny

St Simon.

Gide.

Library books:

Powys

Wells

Lady Brooke.

Prose. Dobrée.

Alice James.

Many M.S.S.

none worth keeping.

Thursday 4 October

A violent rain storm on the pond. The pond is covered with little white thorns; springing up & down: the pond is bristling with leaping white thorns: like the thorns on a small porcupine; bristles; then black waves: cross it: black shudders; & the little water thorns are white: a helter skelter rain, & the elms tossing it up & down: the pond overflowing on one side. Lily leaves tugging: the red flower swimming about; one leaf flapping. Then completely smooth for a moment. Then prickled: thorns like glass; but leaping up & down incessantly. A rapid smirch of shadow. Now light from the sun: green & red: shining: the pond a sage green: the grass brilliant green: red berries on the hedges: the cows very white: purple over Asheham.

Friday 5 October

The storm is over; having sunk a few ships. And half blown us along the towing path; & tossed all the apples off the trees. We are discussing plans for moving this lodge to the churchyard wall under the tree. Wicks’ estimate is for £157—which seems extreme, considering that its only a fad: will improve the view but then perhaps an improved view is worth 157. Water is also to be laid on: & I am in a mood rather to doubt my own earning capacity. That is to say the last chapter is going to give me a deal of trouble. But perhaps it is wrong to lay such stress on last chapters. They need not necessarily rise higher than the level of the book. My instinct is though that they shd. be more condensed: a summing up: a solution. If the last chapter fails does the book fail? What is the last chapter of War & Peace? I forget.

The names of the BBC committee are out: & I am interested to feel two different emotions: disappointment & relief; & a third, that it dont much matter either way.

Tuesday 9 October

Back again in London. A party last night: Mary Fisher, Eddie Playfair, Rose Macaulay & Saxon. An odd mixture; but successful. We cried with laughter. This was partly Eddie’s account of Carrie who went round the world with James: who died: & became ‘the body’. Mountains very nice. Everything very nice. This was to prove that character is one & indivisible. Rose maintained the opposite. “I’m a mere battlefield of opposite people—my ancestors” she said. “Take this as a simple illustration: I want to walk all day alone: but I also want to drive my car. We called it having “battling lizards”.” That made us laugh. Saxon & Eddie represented the uniformity of the Treasury. Also we discussed commas: Rose very erudite on that subject: & her book of extracts. How she grinds! And authors’ vanity; which was to be ravaged by fear of what one’s Aunt thinks of a review. She professed never to care, for herself, what reviewers said, & then began uneasily a story about the hostility of the Lit. Sup. to her last six novels; & how they had put her Milton into small type at the end. At which unconscious revelation we smiled. She is a ravaged sensitive old hack—as I should be, no doubt, save for L. Mary Fisher recalls Boo; but has a mean look a sharp practical look—derived from Lettice. She puts me out of conceit with the family face. Too insipid. The hair too mousy & untidy & the clothes dowdy. A drop of Fisher blood dilutes & acidifies. But she is upstanding; has lived in good company; is not a mere drudge; & adores her father, I guess; Likes authority; loves Winchester Oxford & the very urbane intellectual aristocracy; but I was not whizzed off my perch. The King of Jugoslavia & Bartou murdered this evening.

[? Wednesday 10 October]

Today, as I have a few minutes left, I think I have improvised another method for P⁠[hases]. of F⁠[iction]. to be phases of the readers mind: different situations. Part 2. to be in dialogue, in a hotel on the Mediterranean: each chapter to correspond with the period. Thus to rob it of formality.

Thursday 11 October

A brief note. In todays Lit. Sup. they advertise Men without Art by Wyndham Lewis. Chapters on Eliot, Faulkner, Hemingway, Virginia Woolf … Now I know by reason & instinct that this is an attack; that I am publicly demolished: nothing is left of me in Oxford & Cambridge & places where the young read Wyndham Lewis. My instinct is, not to read it. And for this reason: well, I open Keats: & find: “Praise or blame has 167 but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works. My own domestic criticism has given me pain beyond what Blackwood or Quarterly could possibly inflict….. This is a mere matter of the moment—I think I shall be among the English poets after my death. Even as a matter of present interest the attempt to crush me in the Quarterly has only brought me more into notice.”

Well: do I think I shall be among the English novelists after my death? I hardly ever think about it. Why then do I shrink from reading W.L.? Why am I sensitive? I think vanity. I dislike the thought of being laughed at. of the glow of satisfaction that A B & C will get from hearing V.W. demolished: also it will strengthen further attacks. Perhaps I feel uncertain of my own gifts: but then, I know more about them than W.L.: & anyhow I intend to go on writing. What I shall do is craftily to gather the nature of the indictment from talk & reviews: &, in a year perhaps, when my book is out, I shall read it. Already I am feeling the calm that always comes to me with abuse: my back is against the wall: I am writing for the sake of writing: &c. & then there is the queer disreputable pleasure in being abused—in being a figure, in being a martyr. & so on.

Sunday 14 October

The trouble is I have used every ounce of my creative writing mind in the Pargiters. No headache (save what Elly calls typical migraine—she came to see L. about his strain yesterday). I cannot puts spurs in my flanks. Its true I’ve planned the romantic chapter of notes: but I cant set to.

This morning I’ve taken the arrow of W⁠[yndham].L⁠[ewis]. to my heart: he makes tremendous & delightful fun of B. & B.: calls me a peeper, not a looker, a fundamental prude; but one of the 4 or 5 living (so it seems) who is an artist. Thats what I gather the flagellation amounts to: (Oh I’m underrated, Edith Sitwell says). Well: this gnat has settled & stung; & I think (12.30) the pain is oyer. Yes. I think its now rippling away. Only I cant write. When will my brain revive? in 10 days I think. And it can read admirably: I began [Thomson’s] The Seasons last night; after Eddie’s ridiculous rhodomontade—or so I judge it: like Madame Tussauds: a vast book called The Sun in Capricorn: a worthless book I think; so that my intention to make a beckon in his direction is now in abeyance. No. I don’t like him. Trash & tarnish; and this morbid silliness. Denzil Torrant. &c.

Well: I was going to say, I’m glad that I need not & cannot write, because the danger of being attacked is that it makes one answer back—a perfectly fatal thing to do. I mean, fatal, to arrange the P.s so as to meet his criticisms. And I think my revelation 2 years ago stands me in sublime stead, to adventure & discover, & allow no rigid poses: to be supple & naked to the truth. If there is truth in W.L. well, face it: I’ve no doubt I am prudish & peeping, well then live more boldly. But for God’s sake dont try to bend my writing one way or the other. Not that one can. And there is the odd pleasure too of being abused: & the feeling of being dismissed into obscurity is also pleasant & salutary.

Monday 15 October

Walked with L. all round Serpentine & K⁠[ensington]. Gardens yesterday (a fine blowy day: leaves falling) & asked him these questions:

1) What is the sensible attitude to criticism?
Not to read it.

2) What should I do now of a morning—creation flagging?
Read.

3) Does he feel I have prevented him from going abroad?
No. I have only prevented him from lesser activities (I think this was the answer).

We agreed to save up for foreign travel on a large scale to try to fly over America. Perhaps to go to India & China.

I now see us, far far away. A new civilisation &c.

I meant to read this morning, but got tempted into making notes for biography. Rather scrappy, but clearly the only complete escape from depression (W.L. & R⁠[oger]’s death) is in getting the mind to work. No anodyne possible I think in the morning. But I am as slack as a piece of maccaroni: & in this state cant shake off a blackness, a blankness. Now (10 to 1) after writing & beginning to read an old life of Boswell I feel the wheels grinding.

Ethel—oh d—n—after tea. Morgan tomorrow. Yes: creation drops the little personal body down: up we go: all that forgotten.

Oh & L. was divinely good: so direct: what an immense relief to talk to him! what a simplification. What an egress to open air & cold daylight: how dignified: yes, & I have him every day, as I so often think. So why—. &c. &c.

Tuesday 16 October

Quite cured today. So the W.L. illness lasted 2 days. Helped off by old Ethel’s bluff affection & stir yesterday, by buying a blouse; by falling fast asleep after dinner, when L. went to the Robsons.

Writing away this morning.

[Wednesday 17 October]

I am so sleepy. Is this age? I cant shake it off. And so gloomy. Thats the end of the book. I looked up past diaries—a reason for keeping them—& found the same misery after Waves. After Lighthouse I was I remember nearer suicide, seriously, than since 1913. It is after all natural. I’ve been galloping now for 3 months—so excited I made a plunge at my paper-well, cut that all off—after the first divine relief, of course some terrible blankness must spread. There’s nothing left of the people, of the ideas, of the strain, of the whole life in short that has been racing round my brain: not only the brain; it has seized hold of my leasure: think how I used to sit still on the same railway lines: running on my book. Well, so theres nothing to be done the next 2 or 3 or even 4 weeks but dandle oneself: refuse to face it: refuse to think about it. This time Roger makes it harder than usual. We had tea with Nessa yesterday. Yes, his death is worse than Lytton’s. Why I wonder? Such a blank wall. Such a silence. Such a poverty. How he reverberated! And I feel it through Nessa.

But selfishly, I cant throw it off as I did the first week after his death; when it became all the colours of the setting sun, in my excitement. Now theres the dulness, the cold to face & no protection. And so W.L. had the power to sting. No thats over. Only I cant get up any steam. I’m so ugly. So old. No one writes to me. I’m…. Well: dont think about it, & walk all over London; & see people. & imagine their lives. I cant read seriously. I feel so drowsy, as if my brain were dilated: cant contract: then I suddenly lapse into sleep.

Margery is going, Nessa thinks, to ask me to write about Roger. I dont feel ready to. I dread the plunge into the past. I slog away at Romance & biography of a morning.

I would like to write down more actual conversation; but its such hard work. With Nessa & Duncan at tea:

V. Roger.. well everybody he met felt like that about him. He got very restless in the last year or two. He was always jumping up to show one something. Clive made me very angry at Charleston—He abused Roger—really for the criticism in his article. He was jealous. Yes. I think it is right to have lives—What a pity that it should all be lost. Peoples impressions are good. Besides, someone will be certain to write about Roger—so it had better be by us.

Duncan. I liked Priestley’s play tho I’m told all his novels are very bad. He is very dramatic. He knows how—I mean—(D. always against public opinion—lying on the sofa—has had a cold).

Then Morgan, after tea, about the meeting of the Civil Liberties tomorrow.

M. I hadnt thought of that. I’m dreadfully ignorant. So Leonard you would say—may I have a piece of paper? Yes, then: the point is—I will say …

Wednesday 24 October

I have just written with homage in my copy of Sickert. So thats’done.

And Stephen Spender, did I say, has defended me against W.L.; & Rosamond & Read & Stephen are coming tonight. And I have been toiling at an article on the Queen of Roumania: by way of a rest. No I cant write about Roger; & yesterday I went to see Lady Simon, in Catherine St. & looked at the conventional drawing room & tried to make out why it comes together. Two red & silver shields from Marshall & Snelgrove: a reproduction of an Italian picture; a comic parrot in watercolour; bad rugs; bears & lions; sham Adams mantelpiece; green, curtains; brown fumed oak stairs & carpet—all uneasy trifles, too many details: no design: no taste: only one thing after another.

Shena on couch like Tristram.

“I’ve been thinking—dont we lead a very narrow life at Manchester? We only see business men, university people, & social workers. Ought I to try & get artists to come?”

Rather worried & puzzled: reiterative; pale after an operation: is going to the Argentine. Tell me, how do writers see things? Are you interested in all kinds of people. So I made up a scene. Am I rather acting? inventing? Well I was tired after Pam⁠[Diamand]’s nondescript visit: she came—why? Oh yes, Hike the country. Very nice. Very nice house—& the children like it. And Micu is going to do papers for sweets. A thousand yards at a time. She is becoming the driven sweet wife; very nice; childlike: no go, or backbone: no look—of Roger: but affectionate. So I walked home from Shena across Westminster: a warm spring day: summer clothes: people strolling: streets crowded.

Friday 26 October

Yesterday at Ottoline’s. Old Yeats.

What he said was, he had been writing about me. The Waves. That comes after Stendhal he said. I see what you’re at—But I want more humanity. Cant bear Stendhal: observant [?]: photographic; has a passion for Balzac: reads & re-reads. Because his people are planted in history: there they are, sitting in the box at the opera: Tolstoy leaves them at school. I’m trying to get the Irish back to the great men of the 18th Century. Swift!

But did Swift like Ireland.

Read—(what? draper letter?) He started the whole Irish movement—made Irish different from English. Oh the bitterness against England.

Must get their back to their own speech.

You have always been rich & powerful. You create without hatred. The need of tragedy: some cause: that is what creates literature.

Rather vague about the Ethns. Takes 300 years to absorb a war. Not yet time to create after 1914. Must get dignity into letters.

Goldsmith’s English.

The Occult. That he believes in firmly. All his writing depends on it. Was walking with Robinson Ellis. The words came to him “The world is the excrement of God”: 2 minutes afterwards R.E. said them. This convinced Yeats of the existence of another mind. A woman accused him of being the father of her child. He went to Lady Jowett. She wrote a message in Greek—Oh sweet singer—showed it to Waley at Brit. Mus: said it was written by an Englishman⁠[?] 200 years ago. Anyhow this proves absolutely the existence of another mind. Neither religion nor science explains the world. The occult does explain it. All in Plotinus. Has seen things. His coat hanger advanced across the room one night. Then a coat on it, illuminated: then a hand in it. Is writing his memoirs. About Moore & Ly Gregory. Ave Vale all nonsense. At the age of 50 Moore found himself impotent. Hence his sex mania. ‘I dont know why he minded so much’. Scene with M.’s cook & the policeman. Is there no law to defend me from omelettes like that? This went on for 1½ hours, I should say. At last Ott brought up Pudley, & the session ended. I was too jaded after Rosamond Spender Read & Plomer & the incessant rather sniping talk about Grigson & Stephen’s muddled theories to whip my brain: but felt Yeats’ extreme directness, simplicity, & equality: liked his praise; liked him: but cant unriddle the universe at tea. He is older, less coloured & vigorous. Little burning eyes behind great glasses: ruffled hair: tweeds. Philip [Morrell] aged, whitened, fallen in: almost 70 I suppose. A new cumquhat dog: various obscure dowds: one Dilys Powell: & so on. Home to sleep over the fire: & now to Rodmell.

[Later] Yeats said that in writing his memoirs he had to leave out himself, because no man could tell the truth about the women in his life. Also no man knew about himself. Somebody had cast his horoscope & given him a character, the very opposite of his own conception; but as he now saw, this was his real character. He believes entirely in horoscopes. Will never do business with anyone without having their horoscope. Is trying to get a play acted in London, at the Gate. But no actor can produce a play. Actors only know their own parts. They cant see that theres a piebald horse outside the window.

Yeats always has ‘a narrative man’ with whom he goes for walks—a man who tells a story.

Yeats said of Proust “a slow motion novel”.

Monday 29 October

Reading Antigone. How powerful that spell is still—Greek. Thank heaven I learnt it young—an emotion different from any other. I will read Plotinus: Herodotus: Homer I think.

Wednesday 31 October

Too tired after dining with Helen last night & talking too much with Oliver about Roger & B⁠[loomsbur]⁠y—too tired to write. And must dine with Clive to meet Aldous & the Clarks. What a life I could have led if I had been born with full rich blood to my head. As it is, one late night floors me; all sand this morning. We talked too much, I think. And I sat in Roger’s chair, & thought once he was there—Oliver’s shoes like his. The room diminished slightly: not so rich & sonorous. Baba [Anrep] an ill favoured, rough mouthed girl. And Oliver’s mistress—dear me, why mistress? Sickert I rather gather a failure: silence descends on that little flurry.

Now to read Jane Austen’s Thomson’s Seasons.

Helen by the way asked me tentatively to write Roger’s Life. Julian to collect all facts, make a skeleton; I to sum & compose. But Margery [Fry] wants to write it. Margery has the documents: is executor. I deferred. Isnt a ‘Life’ impossible? Yes, said Oliver. All sorts of people shd put down recollections. And unprintable. So whats to come of it? I deferred, (what exactly does that word mean?)

Thursday 1 November

Ideas that came to me last night dining with Clive; talking to Aldous & the Kenneth Clarks.

About Roger’s life: that it should be written by different people to illustrate different stages.

Youth.

by Margery

Cambridge,

by Wedd?

Early London life …

Post Imp.

Clive

Sickert.

Bloomsbury,

Desmond

V.W.

Later life.

Julian

Blunt.

Heard. & so on.

all to be combined say by Desmond & me together.

About novels: the different strata of being: the upper under—This is a familiar idea, partly tried in The Pargiters. But I think of working it out more closely; & now, particularly, in my critical book: showing how the mind naturally follows that order in thinking: how it is illustrated by literature.

I must now do biography & autobiography.

Talk at dinner about: Yeats; Noel Coward; the plates: Clarks cant use theirs: the hostesses: Sibyl & Emerald. Ly C⁠[unard]. says Aldous indecent: wears a false bust: their collection like playing cards; had dined & sat next Lady P. Smith; a bore; the other woman a hump back; Coward at Monte Carlo, laying his hand on A.’s arm: this this is divine—a Jazz like the rest. The variety of his gifts: but all out of the 6d box at Woolworth’s. Beating & beating & beating—an omelette without eggs, said A. Nothing there: but the heroic beating. Talk about the Occult: A. cant stand Auden. Nothing but a demagogue. Declaims: takes in the young. Something in Day Lewis—hasnt read Spender.

Friday 2 November

Two teeth out with a new anaesthetic: hence I write here, not seriously. And this is another pen. And my brain is very slightly frozen, like my gums. Teeth become like old roots that one breaks off. He broke, & I scarcely felt. My brain frozen thinks of Aldous & the Clarks; thinks vaguely of biography; thinks am I reviewed anywhere—cant look—thinks its a fine cold day. Angelica at the Nat. Gallery. Thinks how I shall read Dante; how I did not go to Vita’s lecture; how we have refused Enid Jones next week; how we should have met Wells there; I finished the Seasons last night: that is a surface reading, such as I give poetry for the first time. Ten skins to the mind. No, I cannot write at all with a frozen brain.

I went upstairs to rinse my bleeding gum—the cocaine lasts 1 an hour: then the nerves begin to feel again—& opened the Spectator & read W.L. on me again. An answer to Spender. “I am not malicious—several people call Mrs W. Felicia Hemans.” This I suppose is another little scratch of the cats claws: to slip that in, by the way—“I dont say it—others do”. And they are supercilious on the next page about Sickert; & so— Well L. says I shd. be contemptible to mind. Yes: but I do mind for 10 minutes: I mind being in the light again, just as I was sinking into my populous obscurity. I must take a pull on myself. I dont think this attack will last more than 2 days. I think I shall be free from the infection by Monday. But what a bore it all is. And how many sudden shoots into nothingness open before me. But wait one moment. At the worst, should I be a quite negligible writer, I enjoy writing: I think I am an honest observer. Therefore the world will go on providing me with excitement whether I can use it or not. Also, how am I to balance W.L.’s criticism with Yeats—let alone Goldie & Morgan? Would they have felt anything if I had been negligible? And about 2 in the morning I am possessed of a remarkable sense of driving ey⁠[e]⁠less strength. And I have L.: & there are his books; & our life together. And freedom, now, from money paring. And…. if only for a time I could completely forget my self, my reviews, my fame, my sink in the scale—which is bound to come now, & to last about 8 or 9 years—then I should be what I mostly am: very rapid, excited, amused: intense. Odd, these extravagant ups & downs of reputation: compare the American in the Mercury … no, for Gods sake dont compare: let all praise & blame sink to the bottom or float to the top & let me go my ways indifferent. And care for people. And let fly, in life, on all sides.

[Monday 12 November]

These are very sensible sayings I think. And its all forgotten & over—

What is uppermost now, is (1) The question of writing R.’s life. Helen came [on 8 November]. Says both she & M⁠[argery]. wish it. So I wait. What do I feel about it? If I could be free, then here’s the chance of trying biography: a splendid, difficult chance—better than trying to find a subject—that is, if I am free. But M. hesitates: I have heard nothing from her; & rather suspect she wants to do it herself.

We were at Monks House in a great flood of rain & storm of wind this week end; which lifted yesterday, & I took my Sunday morning walk with L. & saw the monkey that was found in the Brooks. This great yellow green ape had run all across the down from Peacehaven—a circus monkey wintering with a keeper up there. An odd sight to have met it clambering along over the downs. So I went on, to Piddinghoe, & back by the river. And my brain rose out of the mist (writing about reviewing, I mean) & I felt young & vigorous. Home with the car all acrid & yellow & red with chrysanthemums. And put them in water—a long job—& so to hear Sweeney Agonistes at the Group Theatre; an upper attic or studio: I sat by Tom: an audience, containing Ottoline & Hope & Raymond. The acting made more sense than the reading but I doubt that Tom has enough of a body & brain to bring off a whole play: certainly he conveys an emotion, an atmosphere: which is more than most: something peculiar to himself; sordid, emotional, intense—a kind of Crippen, in a mask: modernity & poetry locked together. I liked the egg speech. Talk with Hope about her thyroid gland & her dachshund: Hope as usual eccentric impulsive ecstatic odd. And there was a mint of notables.

Wednesday 14 November

Here I am taking a morning off to breathe in before I tackle the 9 volumes of that book. And I am dissipated & rather frittered. There is no doubt that to talk to Sibyl is very depressing. She mews & mows. Wont speak out; complains with one breath, asks pity but cant be induced to say what is on her mind. Perhaps there is very little there. She said ‘One is no longer so young as one was. Arthur is getting deaf. So I have to stand in a shop all day.. But one shouldn’t be—’ I think she called it ‘crimping’—I forget the exact word. Oblique references were made then to our quarrel. And I was hampered: couldnt get hold of her. Off she went, sentimentally mournful, apologetic. And she impeded Margery who came at the same moment—so that too remains, as they say, in abeyance. And this cringing makes my own soul flop.

[Thursday 15 November]

And am now, 10.30 on Thursday morning, Nov. 15th, about to tackle re-reading & re-writing The Pargiters. An awful moment.

12.45. Well that horrid plunge has been made, & I’ve started rewriting the P.s. Lord Lord! 10 pages a day for 90 days: three months. The thing is to contract: each scene to be a scene, much dramatised; contrasted; each to be carefully dominated by one interest; some generalised. At any rate this releases the usual flood & proves that only creating can bring about proportion: now, damnably disagreeable, as I see it will be—compacting the vast mass—I am using my faculties again. & all the flies & fleas are forgotten.

[? Saturday 17 November]

A note: despair at the badness of the book: cant think how I ever could write such stuff—& with such excitement: thats yesterday: today I think it good again. A note, by way of advising other Virginias with other books that this is the way of the thing: up down, up down—& Lord knows the truth.

Wednesday 21 November

Margery Fry to tea on Sunday. A long debate about the book on Roger: not very conclusive. She says she wants a study by me, reinforced with chapters on other aspects. I say, well but those books are unreadable. Oh of course I want you to be quite free she says. I should have to say something about his life, I say. The family—Now there of course I’m afraid I should have to ask you to be careful, she says. Agnes is stone deaf; has lived all her life in the family. I couldn’t let her be hurt—And so on. The upshot of all of which is that she’s to write to the NS. asking for letters: that I’m to go through them; that we’re then to discuss—so it will drag on these many months, I suppose. And I plan working at P.s: & getting in reading time with Roger’s papers, so that by October next I could write, if thats the decision. But what?

A fog lasting several days. Both of us rather cheerful again. L. has finished the first part of Quack: & it goes along vigorously. And we’ve seen—Lady Rhondda, Heard, Eth Williamson, Julian; Lyn; Tom; Kitchin; Hope …. in fact we’ve done our duty as party givers, & today heave a sigh of heavenly gladness because Raymond has a cold & puts our dinner with him off. I am reading, with interest & distaste, Wells; I want to read a great deal; & the P.s goes at 8 or 9 pages daily. & that is why I feel content.

Tom’s head is very remarkable; such a conflict; so many forces have smashed against him: the wild eye still; but all rocky, yellow, riven, & constricted. Sits very solid—large shoulders—in his chair, & talks easily but with authority. Is a great man, in a way, now: self confident, didactic; But to me, still, a dear old ass; I mean I cant be frozen off with this divine authority any longer. Not a very good evening. Talk scattered & surface pattering. Hope & her dog distracting. Kitchin a little fat & white & cunning & not up to the mark. A rather conceited touchy man, I guess; has a good opinion of himself; & is slightly commonplace. But how little I care now, for these slight misfits. Generally there’s some fun to be had—a saying, an attitude. Tom is larger minded than of old; “But thats only human” he said, when I asked him if he still liked seeing his own name in print.

Monday 26 November

At Rodmell for the week end. My Lodge is demolished; the new house in process of building in the orchard. There will be open doors in front; & a view right over to Caburn. I think I shall sleep there on summer nights. I, made out a careful map of the week; & then, of course, come home & find us asked by the Kauffers to a show of Man Ray’s photographs in Bedford Sq. So we go, & find Aldous, Mary & Jack, & a South American Vasta—was that what Roger called these opulent millionaires from Buenos Aires? Anyhow she was very ripe & rich; with pearls at her ears, as if a large moth had laid clusters of eggs; the colour of an apricot under glass; eyes I think brightened by some cosmetic; but there we stood & talked, in French, & English, about the Estancia, the great white rooms, the cactuses, the gardenias, the wealth & opulence of South America; so to Rome & Mussolini, whom she’s just seen. He was simple & kind—on purpose. She sat & forgot to call him Excellency. And he said sometimes he woke in the night & wondered Are my people happy? She said he is the Coué of Italy: repeats every day & every way &c. Also spoke of women: how no great man—Bismarck, Napoleon, Caesar, needed them: how Beatrice was only Florence. And how we all make mistakes: hers had been that she made an unhappy marriage. “But now go & have a child” he told her. The time is past she said. And so to Me de Noailles, dying of extinguished vanity in a small flat. She lay in bed, bedizened, covered with dozens & dozens of veils &c: began plucking them off; was never still a moment, lighting lamps & putting them out; demanded worship; was not old, but had outlived her fame. Nothing wrong with her but the death of her great fame. And she left letters to Barrés wh. his widow holds; & her doctor is piecing the story together. Then of a sudden we part; Man Ray says will I come & be photographed—on Tuesday 3.30. Mary says she wants to come to tea. Thats the end of my planned week—almost.

[Tuesday 27 November]

Human misery is certainly very great. We wish to comfort Nessa; have her to dinner; & tell her about Julian’s poems. At once she ruffles like a formidable hen. I am irritated. This is the religion & superstition of motherhood. Well—L. then speaks, emphatically but reasonably. She is also reasonable but cold. All our feelings are confused: mine discreditable. Why does it irritate me so, this maternal partiality? Anyhow, we all sit exacerbating ourselves, instead of consoling. And she is like a stone wall when I hint that Julian might mend his manners—at least be more considerate—perhaps conciliate Lady R⁠[hondda], “Like Eddie Playfair—she said at once. No, thats not Julian’s way.” And “I should have thought that anyone of sense could have seen—Mrs Grant [Duncan’s mother] thought him charming” .. &c &c. Then why does J. beg us to get him a job? No, it was not a nice evening; & she is lonely without Roger. And the S. American Okampo sent me orchids. I dislike many of my feelings. Most of all I hate the hush & mystery of motherhood. How unreal it all is!

Sunday 2 December

Isnt it odd? Some days I cant read Dante at all after revising the P.s: other days I find it very sublime & helpful. Raises one out of the chatter of words. But today (doing the scene at the Lodge) I’m too excited, I think it a good book today. I’m in the thick again. But I will stop at the end of the funeral scene, & calm my brain. That is I will write the play for Xmas: Freshwater a farce—for a joke. And rig up my Contemporary Criticism article: & look around. David Cecil on fiction: a good book for readers, not for writers—all so elementary: but some good points made, from the outside. I’ve done though with that sort of criticism. And he’s often wrong: gets W.H. wrong, I think: wants to have a profound theory. We—B⁠[loomsbur]⁠y—are dead; so says Joad. I snap my fingers at him. Lytton & I the two destructors.

Poor Francis lies in a hotel bedroom in Russell Sqre this rainy morning. I went in & sat with him. Quite himself with a lump on his forehead. And is aware of it all. May die under another operation, or slowly stiffen into complete paralysis. His brain may go. All this he knows; & there it was between us, as we joked. He came to the verge of it once or twice. But I cant feel any more at the moment—not after Roger. I cannot go through that again. Thats my feeling. I kissed him. “This is the first time—this chaste kiss” he said. So I kissed him again. But I must not cry, I thought, & so went. And he said, bitterly, how he had given 10 years of his life to love—to a horrid little creature. Thank God I never let you see him, he said. Gone to Russia. No I really couldnt follow him there. When I saw him first—I just came into the room—I thought I had never seen anyone so beautiful. He had talent of course. But….—So we rambled & rattled. And Hubert Waley, dark & slim, poured him out whiskey, as if they now let him have what he likes. He cant read. He lies there with one arm bandaged: in that bedroom, with the chrysanthemums, under a green silk quilt.

Today come Okampo & H—no I cant remember the name of the French journalist deposited on me by Peter [Lucas]. Oh damn ones friends!

Tuesday 18 December

Talk with Francis yesterday. He is dying: but makes no bones about it: only his expression is quite different. Has no hope. The man says he asks every evening how long will this go on, & hopes for the end. He was exactly as usual; no wandering, no incoherence. A credit to atheism. The soul deserves to be immortal, as L. said. We walked back, glad to be alive: numb somehow. I cant use my imagination on that theme. What wd it be like to lie there, expecting death? & how odd & strange a death. I write hurriedly, going to Angelica’s [school] concert this fine soft day.

Sunday 30 December

Since I forgot to bring my writing book, I must fill up here, on loose sheets. End the year; with those cursed dogs barking: & I am sitting in my new house; & it is, of all hours, 3.10; & it is raining; & the Cow [Mabel] has the sciatica; & we are taking her into Lewes to catch a train to London; after which we have tea at Charleston, act the play [i.e.: rehearse Freshwater] & dine there. It has been the wettest Christmas, I should say, drawing a bow at a venture, on record. Only yesterday did I manage my phantom farm walk; but pray God, with Christmas over, the rain will stop falling, Miss Emery’s dogs barking.

It was stupid to come without a book, seeing that I end every morning with a head full of ideas about The Pargiters. It is very interesting to write out. I am re-writing considerably. My idea is to space contrast the scenes; very intense, less so: then drama; then narrative. Keeping a kind of swing & rhythm through them all. Anyhow it admits of great variety—this book.

I think it shall be called Ordinary People. I finished, more or less, Maggie & Sarah, the first scene, in the bedroom: with what excitement I wrote it! And now hardly a line of the original is left. Yes but the spirit is caught I think. I write perhaps 60 pages before I catch that. And coming back I see it hopping like a yellow canary on its perch. I want to make both S. & M. bold characters, using character dialogue. Then we go on to Martin’s visit to Eleanor: then the long day that ends with the King’s death. I have sweated off 80 or 90 pages, mostly due to a fault in paging though.

End of the year: & Francis transacting his death at that nursing home in Collingham Place. The expression on his face is what I see: as if he were facing a peculiar lonely sorrow. One’s own death—think of lying there alone, looking at it, at 45 or so: with a great desire to live. “And so the New Statesman’s going to be the best paper that ever was, is it?” He’s dead though (of Brimley Johnson) spoken with a kind of bitterness. None of these words are exactly right.

And here we are, chafed by the Cow’s lame leg & the dogs: yet as usual very happy I think: ever so full of ideas. L. finishing his Quack Quack of a morning: the Zet [Mitz] crawling from one chair to the other—picking at L.’s head.

And Roger dead. And am I to write about him? And the stirring of the embers—I mean the wish to make up as much of a fire as possible. So to get ready for the wet drive—dogs still barking.

[]

1935

Tuesday 1 January

We went to Charleston. Nessa explained to us that Clive had made a scene the night before about bringing six friends to the party. Wouldnt come, unless he could bring 6 friends without naming them. Now why? I suppose something rankling about our not liking Raymond & so on. Final grumbles to be heard at dinner; as if he were anxious to explain. The play rather tosh; but I’m not going to bother about making a good impression as a play wright. And I had a lovely old years walk yesterday round the rat farm valley, by a new way, & met Mr Freeth, & talked about road making; & then in to Lewes to take the car to Martins [garage], & then home, & read St Paul & the papers. I must buy the Old Testament. I am reading the Acts of the Apostles. At last I am illuminating that dark spot in my reading. What happened in Rome? And there are seven volumes of Renan. Lytton calls him ‘mellifluous’. Yeats & Aldous agreed, the other day, that their great aim in writing is to avoid the ‘literary’. Aldous said how extraordinary the ‘literary’ fetish had been among the Victorians. Yeats said that he wanted only to use the words that real people say. That his change had come through writing plays. And I said, rashly, that all the same his meaning was very difficult. And what is ‘the literary’? Thats rather an interesting question. Might go into that, if I ever write my critical book. But now I want to write On being despised. My mind will go on pumping up ideas for that. And I must finish Ordinary People: & then there’s Roger. If I could finish O.P. in July: I would spend August in reading Roger, & writing Despised. Begin Roger in October 1935. Is that possible? Publish O.P. in Oct: & work at those two during 1936. Lord knows! But I must press a good deal of work in—remembering 53—54—55 are on me. And how excited I get over my ideas! And there’s people to see—

Sunday 6 January

Francis died on 2nd. It was a mercy, as we say, that it ended so soon. But a queer thing death. Last night I suddenly thought, how silly & indeed disgusting death, the decomposition of the body, &c. Why think of it as anything noble?

We lunched with Maynard & Lydia. The first fine cold day since we came. Talk rather sterile at first. Servant in the room. I suddenly scaled Lydia’s depths; & desire to have it recognised. We were talking about Somerset Maugham. She “I said to him, do you write in the morning or the evening? And he said “This is not the time to discuss things like that” he thought me so naiv: he thought I was nothing more.” “But when I write your life I will bring in the other Lydia” I said. Oh Virginia do! she exclaimed. M⁠[aynard]. talked about the books he bought at the Gibbon sale. Geoffrey bought an Herodotus full of G.’s notes. Geoffrey’s library is the best investment he ever made. After lunch we got through the formal artificial. We talked about Francis: M. said he was a case of arrested development; had been a most brilliant undergraduate, & remained one. Should have his brain analysed. Then Wells—had read his Au⁠[tobiograph]⁠y. Thought him a little squit. Ah Maynard, you could not put that word in print. A lack of decency, said M. Shaw feels it. Shaw wd. never write of anyone he respected as he wrote of Wells. Then he read us a long magnificently spry & juicy letter from Shaw, on a sickbed, aged 77. The whole of economics twiddled round on his finger, with the usual dives & gibes & colloquialities. The most artificial of all styles, I said, like his seeming natural speaking. M.[’s] own letter said that he thinks he has revolutionised economics; in the new book he is writing. “Wait ten years, & let it absorb the politics & the psychology & so on that will accrue to it; & then you’ll see—the old Ricardo system will be exposed; & the whole thing set on a new footing.” This he wrote in so many words: a gigantic boast; true I daresay. That was why we were asked to lunch not tea—that he may write his book in the soft exciting hours. “He pots” said Lydia when we got up to go. He was potting this morning. “All the weeklies are mere homes for inferiority complexes” he said. Nobody has any dignity or nobility as a critic. Except Chesterton, struck in Lydia. What we want is impersonality, I said. And we discussed Joad’s dismissal of Bloomsbury. So to our car, they hanging arm in arm. And to Lewes to get the gaiters I’m so proud of. And a teasing letter (the other night) from E⁠[lizabe]⁠th Bibesco.

“I am afraid that it had not occurred to me that in matters of ultimate importance even feminists cd. wish to segregate & label the sexes. It wd. seem to be a pity that sex alone should be able to bring them together”—

to which I replied, What about Hitler? This is because, when she asked me to join the Cttee of the anti-Fascist Exn., I asked why the woman question was ignored. So we go on, sparring & biting. I shouldn’t mind giving that woman a toss in the air [word illegible]

Friday 11 January

I have made a very clever arrangement on the new board that L. gave me for Christmas: ink, pen tray &c I never cease to get pleasure from these clever arrangements. So death will be very dull. There are no letters in the grave, as Dr Johnson said. A very long, rather formal, I mean affected letter from Tom this morning, which I must put away, as it will be so valuable. Did he think that when he was writing it? L. whose modesty is enough to make me blush, heard from Brace yesterday that they anticipate a large sale for Quack Quack. Some ass wants him to call it—some asses’ name. It will be out this spring. This spring will be on us all of a clap. Very windy; today: a damp misted walk two days ago to Piddinghoe. Now the trees are threshing. Nessa & Angelica & Eve yesterday. We talk a great deal about the play. An amusing incident. And I shall hire a donkeys head to take my call in—by way of saying This is a donkeys work. I make out that I shall reduce The Caravan (so called suddenly) to 150,000: & shall finish retyping in May. I wonder. It is compressed I think. And sometimes my brain threatens to split with all the meaning I think I could press into it. The discovery of this book, it dawns upon me, is the combination of the external & the internal. I am using both, freely. And my eye has gathered in a good many externals in its time. See how much more I write about myself than Leonard does about himself. Already engagements are piling; & the lap ahead will be full of the usual jerks & strains. I am going to a Comttee I think at the Oxfords on Wednesday: Tom suggests a fortnightly tea. And there’s Helen … I never never invite anyone; but lie like an apron under an apple tree for fruit to drop.

I cant read Dante of a morning after the struggle with fiction. I wish I could find some way of composing my mind—its absurd to let it be ravaged by scenes; when I may not have read all Dante before I—but why harp on death? On the contrary, it is better to pull on my galoshes & go through the gale to lunch off scrambled egg & sausages. Louie & L. will eat liver. Lambs liver is more tender than calfs, said Louie, thus filling up a blank in my knowledge of the world.

[Diary XXIV]

Saturday 19 January

The play came off last night, with the result that I am dry-brained this morning, & can only use this book as a pillow. It was said, inevitably, to be a great success; & I enjoyed—let me see what? Bunny’s praise; Oliver’s; but not much Christabel’s, or the standing about pumping up vivacities with David [Cecil], Cory [Bell], Elizabeth Bowen: yet on the whole, it is good to have an unbuttoned laughing evening once in a way. Angelica ravishing of course, but of course too grown up for my taste. That is, I rather dread Bloomsbury; & rather relish the clumsy directness, the hard fact of the Stephen girls: so clumsy & large. But they will become workers—in the cause of—how the phrases one has written & listened to so many times run in the head! And Bobo [Mayor] by the way, greyhaired, silver & rose, very handsome, exacerbated me by saying I was always publishing. Am I? But I carefully extracted that thorn & put it on the mantelpiece. And Morgan said it was lovely, I mean the play. In the middle, old Gumbo [Marjorie Strachey] delivered a stout envelope, with a photograph of her mother. Old: Gumbo never went to America after all. And Rosamond’s play is dubious, because Gielgud has made such a success with Hamlet. There is something pleasing in the misfortunes of ones friends: I wonder.

And there was Helen, & she said that Margery has all her spines erect again, about Roger: which makes me guess that she is doubtful about that biography. Roger’s ghost knocked at the door—his portrait of Charlie Sanger was delivered in the thick of the rehearsal. And How Francis would have enjoyed this, Leonard said. These are our ghosts now. But they would applaud the attempt. So to sleep: & now, God bless my soul, as Tenn: would say [see Freshwater], I must rinse & freshen my mind, & make it work soberly on something hard: theres my Dante; & Renan. And the horrid winter lap begins; the pale unbecoming days, like an aging woman seen at 10 o’clock. However, L. & I shall go for a walk this afternoon; & that seems to me an enormous balance at the Bank: solid happiness.

I have an idea for a ‘play’ Summers night. Someone on a seat. And voices speaking from the flowers.

Wednesday 23 January

Yes, I ought to have explained why I wrote the Sickert. I always think of things too late. I am reading the Faery Queen—with delight. I shall write about it. I took Angelica shopping. “Do you mind if I read the Heir of Redcliffe?” she said at tea, amusing me. What a curious sense the clothes sense is! Buying her coat, mine, hearing the women talk, as of race horses, about new skirts. And I am fluttered because I must lunch with Clive tomorrow in my new coat. And I cant think out what I mean about conception: the idea behind F.Q. How to express a kind of natural transition from state to state. And the air of natural beauty. It is better to read the originals. Well, Clive’s lunch will jump me out of this. And now that the play is over, we must begin to see people here: & go to Hamlet, & plan our spring journey. I am taking a fortnight off fiction. My mind became knotted. I think of making Theresa sing: & so lyricise the argument. Get as far from T (so called after my Sarah & Elvira provisionally). But oh heavens the duck squashy—this is from the pressed duck Jack [Hills] once gave us. All juice: one squab of juice. I am reading Point Counterpoint. Not a good novel, all raw, uncooked, protesting. A descendant, oddly enough, of Mrs H. Ward: interest in ideas; makes people into ideas.

A man from America returns my letters & says he is glad to see me as I am.

Friday 1 February

And again this morning, Friday, I’m too tired to go on with P.s. Why? Talking too much I daresay. I thought though I wanted ‘society’: & saw Helen, Mary, Gillet. Ann tonight. I think the P.s however a promising work. Only nerve vigour wanted. A day off today.

Saturday 2 February

Poor old Ethel has been rooked £1600 by the Treasury on unpaid income tax. She says she wont accept a penny & will pay it out of her income, but she may have to sell Coign. This at 76—

Ann to dinner last night: rather pale, rather resolute & melancholy perhaps. Talked of servants & science. She is going in for another Exn [?] at Newnham, & I had to vouch for her character to the Mistress of Girton. Rather a queer comment upon the independence of family control. Hadnt even told her parents about these formalities. Karin only seen in bed of a morning, Adrian seldom, the house full of lodgers & patients, Ann found going off alone to get a meal. An attractive girl; but uncombed; independent, proud of Stephen blood; much brought up by school mistresses; contemptuous of exams; wishes to be a doctor, & live in Geneva. Judith a great admirer of Hazlitt, & writes essays in secret.

Headachy all day. Walked to Chancery Lane in bitter rain about my spectacles, & am going to experiment with an improved version of a lorgnette. I wrote in praise of Rebecca’s book to Rebecca, & have had no answer. This I did because of the talk at Charleston, when they said how much pleasure such letters gave. I expect I have (somehow) given pain. But its no great matter. My conscience, as they say, is clear. And now I must write to Eth Williamson, about Ethel.

[? Sunday 3 February]

Notes:

Mrs W. saying she had been “happy” suddenly the night before. And once walking up Regent Street. What a divine feeling. And then it went. She did not know what caused it, or how to describe it

(2) The man in charge of the cactuses at Kew. The unreality: himself [?] become a living cactus, perhaps: or a hater of cactuses. Their involved serpentings: their grotesqueness. As a matter of fact he was a withered & bloodless old man. Gone grey, infinitely bored, by living with cactuses.

Tuesday 5 February

Why should I mind so much Rebecca not answering my letter? Vanity largely, I suppose. I thought she would be glad &c. Never mind. She is a queer ill bred mind, with all the qualities I lack & fear.

Tom to tea, yesterday. An admirable way of seeing him. And how he suffers! Yes: I felt my accursed gift of sympathy rising. He seemed to have got so little joy or satisfaction out of being Tom. We—L. rather—argued, about the T & T correspondence. Highly philosophical: on war: suddenly T. spoke with a genuine cry of feeling. About immortality: what it meant to him—I think it was that: anyhow he revealed his passion, as he seldom does. A religious soul: an unhappy man: a lonely very sensitive man, all wrapt up in fibres of self torture, doubt, conceit, desire for warmth & intimacy. And I’m very fond of him—like him in some of my reserves & subterfuges. Tonight Raymond & Joyce W.: and I dont look forward to it, my spirits damped by Rebecca. A vast sorrow at the back of life this winter. And then my blood rises & I create—yesterday walking by the lake in Regents Park, going to Hugo’s. And I finished the difficult song chapter this morning.

After abusing booksellers yesterday for some time, I said to Tom, do you ever buy a new book? Never he said. And I said, I sometimes buy poetry, thats all. So this accounts for the problem, it strikes me, why authors dont sell: why booksellers dont stock &c &c.

Wednesday 6 February

I open this book to record the fact, with all its psychological implications;—the fact that Rebecca’s snub has now worn off. It lasted about 4 days: gave me a cold goose feather feeling every morning & every evening. It will now gradually fade out; & I shall dismiss her, & all that is implicit in that situation. But I should still be very glad if she did write to me. On the other hand, the feeling of independence is even better than the feeling of pleasure would be.

O vanagloria dell’umane posse,

Com’ poco verde in su la cima dura,

se non è giunta dall etati grosse!

O empty glory of human powers! How short the time its green endures upon the top, if it be not overtaken by rude ages!

Note: a reputation does not survive the generation in which it was built up, unless a gross & unenlightened age happens to follow—

Non è il mondan romore altro che un fiato

di vento, che or vien quinci ed or vien quindi,

E muta nome, perché muta lato.

Earthly fame is but a breath of wind,

which now cometh hence & now thence,

And changes name because it changes direction.

a thousand years are a shorter space to eternity than the twinkling of an eye … Purgatorio. Canto XI. (p. 13 3).

A story Joyce Wethered told: there is a woman who was jilted by a man for a shop girl. She now spends her life going to shops & making the shop girls cry. She is a well known figure, & always does this. The girls at Fortnums are always crying: so are the men, but not so often. They cry because the head of the department says something that hurts their feelings. They are very badly paid—girls £2 a week—men 3 or 4—& it leads to nothing. But they are always anxious to come.

Friday 8 February

Wright to lunch yesterday: Miss Delafield passes me in the square: the Holtby type; dine with Nessa; & oh dear, how the ghost of Roger haunted us! What a dumb misery life is for her: [Kenneth] Clark had been in; hadnt seen anything of what Roger would have seen. An extraordinary sense of him: of wishing for him; of vacancy. A letter from Margery, who is bringing documents, & wants to see me next week. Excited about Ordinary]. P⁠[eople]. & no letter from Rebecca. My desk a failure.

Tuesday 12 February

This should be the coldest day in the year, according to averages; & it was a bitter week end [at Rodmell] & L. had a cold & I had the divine good sense to suggest staying till Monday; & Monday, when we drove up at midday was the first day of spring. We lunched at Reigate & the marmoset attracted great attention; the well of nice middle class women is bottomless; & the two men, who were talking about the mystery of razors, “I had a clean shave on Saturday … but this morning with the same razor…” & then about the County Court, poison, & the legal status of Kingswood [Surrey], being I suppose small solicitors, said Might I ask you, Sir, what that animal is? Then we came home; then Robson came to tea, & let out a number of highly sensible remarks about the rents of houses. He has—incredible though it may seem—actually, in 3 minutes, taken a perfect house in Westbourne Terrace, at an absurdly low rent, & the house, being faced with stone, not stucco, will be very cheap to repair: also the landlord is responsible for structural repairs: Willie is expecting “an addition to the family shortly”. A marvellous feat: one supposes his gestation must be as long as an elephants. He retired to L.’s room. Colefax then came half an hour late: & we had it out. Lord what a drubbing you gave me in the summer, I managed to thrust in, after the usual patter about dining last night with somebody who had been dining with Ll. George. Then her defences crumpled: she flushed & quickened; so did I. She sat on the floor by the way, & pulled down some white undergarment which had become creased. She only wears one under garment & a small belt, by the way. And she twittered out how what had hurt her had been my thinking, or insinuating, that her dinner was merely a snob dinner to bring celebrities together. The truth was Noel [Coward] adores me; & I could save him from being as clever as a bag of ferrets & as trivial as a perch of canaries. And of course, I rather liked her. And she is so childishly ready to patter about her own simple love of sunsets, comparing herself to the worldly—for example Christabel & Lady Cholmondeley. That I stubbed by saying I admired & loved those who fill their sails with the spice breezes of the great world. So she had to trim & hedge; & admit that parties are a stimulus to the imagination; & that her chief pleasure is to tell herself stories, to make up a life, a picture, as she bustles & flits. This I think was intended to be in my manner—a tribute to the imaginative, artistic life: for indeed what she cant bear is to be rated a hard society woman: as she is, partly; but then we’re all curates eggs, as I was feeling: a mix: when L. came in & the political situation, was again to the fore. “I was in Manchester last week … a cotton manufacturer told me that now Mosley has no chance in the North.. He has, I know for a fact, to shut down several branches. And he’s very hard up.” So she went & we kissed in the hall.

This morning Mabel’s brother in law, Mr Shine, said, about my studio windows, “Theres the force, the push, & the fit—to use engineering terms.” This was to show us his intellectual eminence—a nice honest eyed false toothed man, who shines in the Labour world, & cant get a job. So I will keep this phrase for Mr Duffus.

Wednesday 20 February

A row with Clive which spoilt my dinner at the Reads. Lor! the misery of human life—our capacity for making ourselves miserable & stinging & biting like so many fleas. Not a very serious fleabite this one; only rouses my old inflammation—I mean, after all those other little pismire affairs, I always get the sense of those unhappy days. He wrote one of his absurd pompous letters to Lord Ivor, as chairman of the F. Cttee: & quoted Virginia Woolf inviting me to “strike a blow for freedom”. And so Wright rang up & Mr Blunt came round, & I had to explain, & then to write a letter, which brings the blood to my head, & takes time; & sent me parched & throbbing up to that vast comfortless studio, where none of the charm of Bohemia mitigated the hard chairs, the skimpy wine, & the very nice sensible conversation. Henry Moore, sculptor & his Russian wife, something like Cordelia Fisher in the old days to look at; but more sympathetic. Respectable B⁠[ohemi]⁠a is a little cheerless. Better have Sybil or the real thing. But all went decorously. Steel chairs, clear pale colours; talk of pots; brainy talk, specialists talk. Read devitalised: possibly his look—a shop assistant. So this morning I cant write; only correct; & Hugh [Walpole] & Elth Bowen tonight, & tea with Nessa & Ethel Walker. Never mind.

Sara is the real difficulty: I cant get her into the main stream, yet she is essential. A very difficult problem; this transition business. And the burden of something that I wont call propaganda. I have a horror of the Aldous novel: that must be avoided. But ideas are sticky things: wont coalesce; hold up the creative, subconscious faculty: thats it I suppose. Ive written the chop house scene I dont know how many times.

Thursday 21 February

A good party last night with old Hugh. Hugh on Hollywood. What was interesting though & rather horrifying was his account of his own pain: an agony of pain in his arm, like broken bones twittering incessantly. Agony agony agony—hadnt realised there could be such pain. Once he burst into tears & sat up shouting. Was conveyed across America in an aeroplane. Saw ‘the sky’. And then, just as the pain was coming on at Hampstead, at Harold’s house, a parcel was delivered: a bottle of a quack medicine called Cleano. And he took a dose, & slept; & next day, he was better. And has had no pain since. But what was shocking was to see him an old man. All the buoyancy & taut pink skin gone. Yet difficult to say why one feels this. Something sunk & shuttered in him. Cavities in some lights. I liked him. And I liked his capacity for miraculous rebirth. Six months at Hollywood has completely changed him. When we said something about upper class, he laughed. Classes have been wiped out. He has seen through everything. Given up the Book of the Month; no longer frets about fame & reviews; & is taking to the great new art—the complex & amazing art of colour, music, words all in one. Of course there may be something in it. Mary came; Eth Bowen, & Julian, who as usual annoyed me by denouncing my “brutality”. What an uncomfortable relation, Aunt & nephew. And how nice he is, & how obtuse. But it was a flourishing kind of evening: better I think than the Reads. I rather mean to write to Hugh.

Tea with Nessa & old bass voiced Ethel Walker in her serge suit & red tie. We are to go to a dinner given to her. She told some instalments of her life’s history: some repetitions. Was the daughter of a hard bullying clever man. Damn you, you little brute, he said to her. And the cab horse ran away & climbed a six foot wall, while she clasped her mother, a very stout woman, & said “Screaming makes it worse”.

A letter of explanation & conciliation from Clive. No satire intended. So be it.

Tuesday 26 February

A very fine skyblue day, my windows completely filled with blue for a wonder. Mr Riley has just mended them. And I have been writing & writing & re-writing the scene by the Round Pond. What I want to do is to reduce it all so that each sentence though perfectly natural dialogue has a great pressure of meaning behind it. And the most careful harmony & contrast of scene—the boats colliding &c—has also to be arranged. Hence the extreme difficulty. But I hope perhaps tomorrow to have done, & then the dinner party & Kitty in the country should go quicker. At least I find the upper air scenes much simpler: & I think its right to keep them so. But Lord what a lot of work still to do! It wont be done before August. And here I am plagued by the sudden wish to write an Anti fascist Pamphlet. L. & I, after snarling over my cigarette smoking last night (I’m refraining altogether & without difficulty today) had a long discussion, about all the things I might put in my pamphlet. He was extremely reasonable & adorable, & told me I should have to take account of the economic question. His specialised knowledge is of course an immense gain, if I could use it & stand away: I mean in all writing, its the person’s own edge that counts. Cory [Bell] to tea.

Wednesday 27 February

And I’ve just written it all over again. But it must do this time, I say to myself. Yet I know that I must put the screw on & write some pages again. Its too jerky: too [blank in mss] Its obvious that one person sees one thing & another another: & that one has to draw them together Who was it who said, through the unconscious one comes to the conscious, & then again to the unconscious? I rather think it was Miss West about childrens drawings last night at tea. I rather suspect she wanted to be an artist. Anyhow she knew McKnight Kauffer when he was married, & told us a very discreditable story about him. Hence I suspect his extreme fawning & flattery when we meet, & my vague discomfort. A pouring wet day, after yesterdays sun; & our balmy walk across the Park to Harrods: & nobody has written to me, & I’m neglected, & I’m as safe as a sandboy; as a toad in an oak tree; & my window wont shut. Hence the draught.

I now feel a strong desire to stop reading F⁠[aery]⁠Q⁠[ueen]: to read Cicero’s letters, & the Chateaubriand Memoirs. As far as I can see, this is the natural swing of the pendulum. To particularise, after the generalisation of Romantic poetry.

Friday 1 March

First of March: first of spring. Another blue day; & we’re off to Walton on Thames, so I must cut short my Dante—dear me. Last nights party—Ann [Stephen] & Richard LI. D.—that was to have been so dashing & easy, turned out rather a grind. Ann, poor dear, in her thick shoes:—hadn’t troubled to change them, or to brush her hair, mumbled, & was shy (as I used to be, I suppose, at 19). Richard, who has never been to a public school, & therefore has no inversions & perversions, ran free as a line with a salmon on it. But, then in came Janet (the image of Madge) & a great fat shiny nosed blubber lipped man, her husband: & Saxon, shrivelled & salted. No: not an easy party. How parties differ! L. & I did our old owls with a vengeance. But we were all at the wrong angles: cousins, old friends, new;—no, it was not an easy evening. Janet told the story of her dismissal, because the Beit fellowship (?) decided that no woman can do research work. This led to a fruitful discussion—fruitful for my book I mean—of the jealousy of the medical male: vested interests; how its partly that they dislike competition; partly that they cling to the status quo. But I must go & lunch at 12.30 for our expedition.

Monday 4 March

It was a charming grey distinguished expedition too: to Walton; & we walked by the river, & said it was like a French picture. The grey trees, the weir churning, the bridge, the white cupola, & a lion in marble. L. finished Quack Quack the day before.

Yesterday I did not enjoy. What a guzzler old Ethel has become. She guzzled our very tough jobs [?chops], till I could not sit still. She is a greedy old woman; I dont like greed when it comes to champing & chawing & sweeping up gravy. And she gets red, drinking. Then the concert. How long how little music in it that I enjoyed! Beecham’s face beaming, ecstatic, like a yellow copper idol: such grimaces, attenuations, dancings, swingings: his collar crumpled. Old Hugh [Walpole] in the stalls. I went down, & saw him, tragic, sitting alone like an old man. What is there tragic now in his expression? Some loneliness, & pain. He did not know me at once: then promised of course to send Ethel a bottle that very night. Oh no, I said. “It’s very slow” he said. And was for a moment touched by my concern.

So back to Ethel. In the artists room afterwards there was Zélie with the red lips, & another ex prima donna & a dissolute musician, all waiting their turn to plague Beecham. Et toi—Zélie suddenly burst into song; but it was 25 years ago that she had her success, since when … And they hinted & shrugged that poor old Ethel was a well known imposition upon conductors. Out she came in her spotted cats fur with her hat askew, carrying her brown cardboard despatch box, upon which they—the tight hard old prima donnas, fell on her & larded her with praise. (They had played the Wreckers overture.) Who are they I said. Havent an idea, she replied. So we had tea at the Langham, which I dont mind so much as meat & gravy. And then I could stand that stab of a voice emphasising, I dont know what, no longer; & said I must go. It was a Sunday evening drizzle in the street, an 1849 night, as we padded very slowly to the Tube: & thank God, she vanished. I was out of temper. But L. miraculously enchanted me again by persuading me not to have Italian lessons from Castelli⁠[?]. For some reason this decision has given me a divine sense of immunity which wraps me round this morning. I am a toad in an oak again: neglected, at ease, completely happy. Nessa & Julian came round to us, for a wonder, after dinner. And we talked about Roger & Margery’s incestuous love. Julian at his best, weighty, reasonable & mature. Thats being with Nessa, I suppose. I said how I tried to ‘rattle’ L. into going to the Walker dinner.

Wednesday 6 March

It was great fun at Ethel’s party last night, & I enjoyed myself enormously, & I was a success (yes, I think so) with old Tonks, & obliterated Holmes, & the Charles Morgans want to dine, & all that— The difficulty is to combine the two: here & there. If I did much of that I should soon lose my hold on words, I feel: yet, before dinner, I only wanted talk gaiety other people. But thats the difficulty: not to be rubbed smoothed, jerked out into their light random galef?]. Could one manage both, then one would be a writer. Or thats my feeling. And at the age of 53 I still struggle: & still, thank Heaven, feel the rush & the glory & the agony, & never get used to any of it. But I cant write this morning.

An easy shabby party though. Nessa & Duncan made to dine alone, as we were late: I promoted to the high table,—had my little compliment, which pleased me. What I liked was the affability & character of the old saw bones Tonks, for so I called him 30 years ago when he lunched at Gordon Square & was so severe on Nessa’s pictures. Now he was all kindness: & distinguished; & appreciative, & regretting Bloomsbury & the distance between us & Chelsea. Talked of G.M. & Steer—who was there in a clergymans collar: almost hidebound; entirely silent, like a log removed from the fire & stood on end. Prof. Brown slept in his chairman’s seat: Ethel sat by him, silent, muttering in her hoarse voice, with her gnarled dirty fingers, & her hair coming down; then Holmes; Nothing could have been less formidable. A great crowd, & the Morgans as I say—he a fattish man with little pig eyes sunk: the nice respectable earnest successful ashamed of being successful man I imagined. I thought he had heard how I flung The Fountain out of the window: at any rate was a little obsequious. Then his wife came up—English dog eyed woman, brown candid simple. How they would love to dine alone, on a Friday, when Charles neednt go to a theatre. So I easily flood my empty room, if I wish. And then with the surly unhappy opinionative Adrian Daintrey in full evening dress to the Café Royal, which lacks the old romance; but I was glad to snatch a sight of it, & to wonder about life there, for a second. Not many artists, all flashy people who don’t belong anywhere, Daintrey said. How I laughed at Nessa & Duncan made to dine alone, & let in with the dessert. It was Duncan’s fault for being so late coming in. And he slept during the drone of Brown’s 84 year old soliloquy: he couldnt pull up or go on. And Tonks in his airy blue eyed way—he’s grown very transparent—kept interrupting. And then Mrs MacColl, in her French accent called him to order. And the dinner was very bad.

Monday 11 March

How I should like, I thought, some time on the drive up this afternoon, to write a sentence again! How delightful to feel it form & curve under my fingers! Since Oct. 16th I have not written one new sentence, but only copied & typed. A typed sentence somehow differs; for one thing it is formed out of what is already there: it does not spring fresh from the mind. But this copying must go on, I see, till August. I am only now in the first war scene: with luck I shall get to Ea. in Oxford Street before we go in May: & spend June & July on the grand orchestral finale. Then in August I shall write again.

It was the bitterest Sunday for 22 years: we went down [to Rodmell] (there was a little skirmish between us, for when I saw the snow falling I said, what about putting it off? At this L. was I thought unduly annoyed; so that we went—but Lord what a quarrel most old married couples would: have made of it: & it turned to a candid joke before we were half angry). Then on Sunday we went to Sissinghurst: in the bitter wind with the country all lying in its June green & blue outside the window. Now thats an odd observation I have to make. My friendship with Vita is over. Not with a quarrel, not with a bang, but as ripe fruit falls. No I shant be coming to London before I go to Greece, she said. And then I got into the car. But her voice saying “Virginia?” outside the tower room was as enchanting as ever. Only then nothing happened. And she has grown very fat, very much the indolent county lady, run to seed, incurious now about books; has written no poetry; only kindles about dogs, flowers, & new buildings. S⁠[issinghurs]⁠t is to have a new wing; a new garden; a new wall; Well, its like cutting off a picture: there she hangs, in the fishmongers at Sevenoaks, all pink jersey & pearls; & thats an end of it. And there is no bitterness, & no disillusion, only a certain emptiness. In fact—if my hands werent so cold—I could here analyse my state of mind these past 4 months, & account for the human emptiness by the defection of Vita; Roger’s death; & no-one springing up to take their place; & a certain general slackening of letters & fame, owing to my writing nothing; so that I have more time on my hands, & actually ask people to come here now & again. (But the week fills unbidden mostly). On the other hand, I have been less harassed; & have enjoyed reading again, more, I think than for 2 or 3 years past. I have read myself to a standstill in the F.Q.: & shall not press the mood till it returns naturally: I am reading Chateaubriand; & to my joy find I can read an Italian novel for pleasure, currently, easily. Yes, this is all very peaceful & profound, & I like it. But again I am harassed by the thought that Nessa will now take to abroad again—she’s off in a week or two to Italy; &—what else? No, on the whole, save for a desire to break L. of his ‘habits’, I am content to let things alone. I have been to a great many picture shows lately too: to the Nat Gall.; & thats a new picture which I should like to develop among my adumbrations. The truth is, ideas for other books are beginning to stir under the slab of The Pargiters.

Coming back in the snowstorm from Vita’s: the snow was like long ribbons of paper; whipping, mixing, getting entangled in front of the car.

Saturday 16 March

I have had 3 severe swingeings lately: Wyndham Lewis; Mirsky; & now Swinnerton. Bloomsbury is ridiculed; & I am dismissed with it. I didnt read W.L.; & Swinnerton only affected me as [a] robin affects a rhinoceros—except in the depths of the night. How resilient I am; & how fatalistic now; & how little I mind, & how much; & how good my novel is; & how tired I am this morning; & how I like praise; & how full of ideas I am; & Tom & Stephen came to tea, & Ray [Strachey] & William [Plomer] dine; & I forgot to describe my interesting talk with Nessa about my criticising her children; & I left out—I forget what.

My head is numb today & I can scarcely read Osbert on Brighton, let alone Dante. Why did Heinemann send me S⁠[winner]⁠ton? to hurt me? And that does hurt 2 seconds. And Rebecca West did answer yesterday, & signs yours ever, & had been ill, & no secretary, so thats done with. And its a warm day, & I wont remind L. that we might have gone to Rodmell. Where shall we go? How happy I am. Tom’s writing a play about T a Becket to be acted in Cy Cathedral. Asks us to tea—very easy & honest & kind to Stephen. Said he wrote the last verses of W⁠[aste].L⁠[and]. in a trance—unconsciously. Said he could not like poetry that had no meaning for the ear. Read lacking in sensuality. Poor Stephen so hurt by reviews of Vienna that he told Tom to withdraw it. Tom advises him to abstain from poetry for a time. Stephen generously praised Day Lewis. Grown heavier, less self-confident. And thats all I can twitter (Swinnerton’s word for me—but: then he admires Mary Webb) this morning. Brighton forward.

In last weeks Time & Tide St John Ervine called Lytton “that servile minded man …. that Pandar” or words to that effect. I’m thinking whether, if I write about Roger, I shall include a note, a sarcastic note, on the Bloomsbury baiters. No, I suppose not. Write them down—thats the only way.

Monday 18 March

The only thing worth doing in this book is to stick it out: stick to the idea, & dont lower it an itch, in deference to anyone. Whats so odd is the way the whole thing dissolves in company: & then comes back with a rush; & Swinnerton’s sneers, & Mirsky’s—making me feel that I’m hated & despised & ridiculed—well, this is the only answer: to stick to my ideas. And I wish I need never read about myself, or think about myself, anyhow till its done, but look firmly at my object & think only of expressing it. Oh what a grind it is embodying all these ideas, & having perpetually to expose my mind, opened & intensified as it is by the heat of creation to the blasts of the outer world. If I didn’t feel so much, how easy it would be to go on—

[Wednesday 20 March]

Having just written a letter about Bloomsbury I cannot control my mind enough to go on with the P.s. I woke in the night & thought of it. But whether to send it or not, I dont know. But now I must think of something else. Julian & Helen [Anrep] last night. Helen much improved by her loss. Sweeter, softer, more sympathetic. We talked—I forget—easily enough, about Ha. Helen anti Ha, naturally. And Julian was twitchy but amiable. A hot spring day. Desmond rang up, asking us to dine.

L. advised me not to send the letter. And after 2 seconds I see he is right. It is better he says to be able to say we dont answer. But we suggest a comic guide to Bloomsbury by Morgan & he nibbles.

Thursday 21 March

Too jaded again to tackle that very difficult much too crowded raid chapter. In fact I am on the verge of the usual headache—for one thing yesterday was such a scramble—I walked so many miles, talked so much difficult political French with a man called Malraux up at Hampstead; having first gone to Q.’s private view; the usual mincing & demurring: smart young men; little Robertson whom I met at the Fishers: Clive in his blue suit; Benita in her tight black: & then the constraint with Nessa about her sons art—as usual: am I too critical? Why this difficulty in praising? Bought nothing. Couldn’t think: walked in the hot sun through the Parks to W⁠[estminste]⁠r. Took Bus up to Hampstead; stood all the way. Crowded dining room. M⁠[alraux]. the fluent idealogical foreigner. Stephen Spender, Read—other unknowns. Exalted to a kind of eminence among this rag tag. Listened. To be a conference, of artists, in June. Paris in June—oh, too tired to note even this, so how can I tackle fiction? Rodmell tomorrow—thank goodness.

[Friday 22 March]

I have resolved to leave that blasted Chapter here, & do nothing at Rodmell. Yet, as I see, I cannot read; my mind is all tight like a ball of string. A most unpleasant variety of headache; but I think, soon over. Only a little change needed. Not a real bad headache. Why make this note? Because reading is beyond me, & writing is like humming a song. But what a worthless song! And it is the spring. Ethel last night—dear old woman, so wise in her way; but her voice is like a needle stabbing stuff. And so I got more tight wound than ever. But still I felt, she is generous & ample—a note to make for her portrait.

Monday 25 March

Last night at Nessa’s, talk all very chippy & choppy with Clive oddly inattentive, & a sense of unreality, & a great desire for Roger. Again the sense of him coming in with his great dark eyes, & his tie pin & his brown shoes & how, speaking in that very deep voice he would have discussed Max Eastman & Epstein. We only flick the surface—some means of communication—some other instrument needed to combine us all in harmony. Stories that would have amused him. How he wd have laughed at Nessa’s [lost] story of the party at Lady Harris’s when they had the lantern slides of the tigers. And all would have been deepened, & made suggestive. But never mind. This is inevitable, & we must blow on the bellows. So I tried to be nice about Quentin. And this morning, in spite of being in a rage, I wrote the whole of that d—d chapter again, in a spasm of desperation & I think got it right, by breaking up, the use of thought skipping, & parentheses. Anyhow thats the hang of it. And I cut from 20 to 30 pages.

Tuesday 26 March

A very nice dinner at MacCarthy’s last night. Desmond flung the door open & almost kissed me. But thats not our formula. So glad to see us—He looks firmer & pinker. And there was Hope & Dermod & Molly gay & amiable & not so deaf. And we talked of America. Very kind, quite untaught. D. never allowed to pay. He had enjoyed himself immensely, only netted £150 though. And he was concerned about the attacks on Lytton & says Swinnerton has a grudge because he is selfmade. This had annoyed him more than us (a vindication of me is in the Times this morning; so we score of course by being attacked & saying nothing.) Molly as I say affectionate, very happy & prosperous all the M⁠[acCarthy]⁠s. I think: Dermod now a doctor, a weak looking but somehow alert & alive young man, discussing germs with L.; Hope on a diet of course. He put matches on the floor to represent germs. I couldn’t burrow into Desmond as Molly had to be supplied. Dear me, friendship is a very happy thing. And nothing needs to be said. And I forget—We took Hope to her little Close, behind the Oratory, like a scene in the Meister-singers. We discussed the case of Harry Norton; the effect of discouragement—what D⁠[esmond]. calls Almhousing—the wish he has to retire & live on tea & bread alone in obscurity. But I said something always turns up, which is true. He had been lunching with Austen Chamberlain, who says Germany can only be treated like a slave: wont contemplate giving her anything. Patriotism is the devil—yes.

Wednesday 27 March

I see I am becoming a regular diariser. The reason is that I cannot make the transition from Pargiters to Dante without some bridge. And this cools my mind. I am rather worried about the raid chapter: afraid if I compress & worry that I shall spoil. Never mind. Forge ahead, & see what comes next. Lydia also interrupted, carrying a copy of Mirsky in her hand, very abusive of him. She is going to write and tell him that she thinks him a dirty little cad. She cannot come to meet the Morgans, as they are off for Easter to Charleston. So thats on us.

Yesterday we went to the Tower, which is an impressive murderous bloody grey raven haunted military barrack prison dungeon place; like the prison of English splendour; the reformatory at the back of history; where we shot & tortured & imprisoned. Prisoners scratched their names, very beautifully, on the walls. And the crown jewels blazed, very tawdry, & there were the orders, like Spinks or a Regent St jewellers. And we watched the Scots Guards drill; & an officer doing a kind of tiger pace up & down—a wax faced barbers block officer trained to a certain impassive balancing. The sergeant major barked & swore. All in a hoarse bark: the men stamped & wheeled like—machines: then the officer also barked: all precise inhuman, showing off—a degrading, a stupifying sight, but in keeping with the grey wall the cobbles the executioner’s block. People sitting on the river bank among old cannon. Ships &c. Very romantic: a dungeon like feeling.

So home & Elizabeth Read & Denny suddenly appeared. To have a child in August, very pretty, genuine, high principled. Talked about herself, Denny, his debts, his Dutch wife, how he is insurance agent, drives an old car about Yorkshire. They live in rooms at Sheffield, have a cottage at Caradoc. I liked her—an odd wisp, truculent, courageous, to be blown across. He a classical scholar, but a ‘mut’. Cant sleep or eat. But they are going to mend matters by having a child.

Thursday 28 March

Another bridge between P.s & Dante. But I think I have actually done the Raid this morning. A nice quiet evening last night, L. at his Mit⁠[?]; & I sitting reading over the fire. Nobody came for once. So that there is no call to make a note—unless to remind myself of the domestic atmosphere at the M⁠[acCarthy]⁠s: Desmond as father: the sense of other lives growing & changing. I am bothered by tomorrows dinner though. Cant get anyone to meet the Morgans, yet fight shy of a solitary evening, wrongly perhaps. Raymond going to the Grand National. William has the flu. But this is not much of a roseleaf under the pillow after all. Spring triumphant. Crocuses going over. Daffodils & hyacinths out. Some chestnut leaves in the birds claw stage in the park. The country trees & Square trees bare still. Little bushes all green. I want to make vegetable notes for my book. How soft & springy & fresh the air was yesterday—like the sea! And I think of being abroad. But we have not yet decided where to go.

Saturday 30 March

Charles Morgans to dinner last night. Nessa, Duncan & [John] Graham in afterwards. Not an alarming pair, the Ms. He rather sunk eyed & official: she—oh how she interrupted! Vague, vapid, well meaning. Oh but Charles you must tell them the Hancock story—Charles you mustn’t be modest &c. We were talking about the Navy: Charles wrote a book showing up the bullying of midshipmen. How they were made to do “evolutions” 4 nights out of 7. Evolutions meant jumping over chairs & being beaten. Then they drank with the beaters; were then beaten again. Those who are not virgins must report that they have had such & such women of the town by Saturday. One of them wrote it in his diary, sent it to his parson father, who reported to the Admiralty. They appealed to his patriotism. He threatened to go to Carmelite House [Daily Mail]: there was an enquiry & his son resigned. Morgan a well meaning cultivated egoist, little sunk eyes ‘[word illegible]’ like Jowitt. Lives on a plan so as to get as much out of himself as possible. Bed at 2, after the play. Breakfast at 9 in bed: writes novels from 4 to 7. So it goes on, & The Fountain is the result. Occasionally a light came in his sunk eyes; about the Dreadnought for example; but he is colourless & pale like one of the D. of Newcastle’s horses. She’s flyaway, visualises, sees, where Charles, if theyre walking in a wood, remembers—I walked here once. Charles’ father built Victoria Station & showed Charles a picture of Chatterton to dissuade him from poetry. Must have a profession & write at leisure. So at 11 he chose the Navy. Then went to Walkley, was made his understudy on the Times: will there remain, hoarding his novel money for his children. One’s 8, the other 10. A very well meaning honourable but sunken man. Graham roared with laughter when they left & said Mrs Morgan was the image of John Braddock’s wife [unidentified]. Very red & young: has shaven his beard; talked to Nessa.

Saturday 30 March

Some chestnut trees in the Park just coming out. Small leaves.

Sunday 31 March

Tea with Tom yesterday. A small angular room, with the district railway on one side, Cornwall Gardens on the other. A great spread; rolls in frills of paper. A dark green blotting paper wall paper, & books rather meagre, stood on top of each other; bookcases with shelves missing. Not a lovely room. A coloured print from an Italian picture. Nothing nice to look at. Purple covers. Respectable china “A present” said Tom; he was perched on a hard chair. I poured out tea. There was Mrs Munro, a handsome swarthy Russian looking woman in a black astrachan cap. And it was heavy going. All about cars; the jubilee; publishing; a German boy; a little literary gossip; feet conscientiously planting themselves in the thick sand; & I not liking to go too soon, & so sitting till we were all glad when Mrs M. got up, & Tom was glad, & showed us his bedroom—a section, getting the railway under it. “I forgot to ask you to drink sherry” he said, pointing to sherry & glasses on the bedroom window sill. A pallid very cold experience. He stood on the steps—it is the Kensington Rectory & he shares a bath with curates. The hot water runs very slowly. Sometimes he takes the bath prepared for the curates. A large faced pale faced man—our great poet. And no fire burning in any of us. I discover a certain asperity in him towards the woman⁠[?]—a priestly attitude. Here he gets warmed up a little. But the decorous ugliness, the maid in cap & apron, the embroidered cloth, the ornamental kettle on the mantelpiece all somehow depressed me. And as I say it was a bitter cold day & we have seen too many literary gents. How heavenly to sleep over the fire! Tom’s was a gas fire.

A long letter from Vita, by the way, about Ethel’s attack on her. She asks me why? Happily I can truthfully say I told her not to write. At the same time I agree with Ethel’s opinion of that menage more than I like (see whichever page it is). And I think E. though V. tries to think her absurd, has said something true, in her violent unnecessary way. But whats the use?

Monday 1 April

At this rate I shall never finish the Purgatorio. But whats the use of reading with half ones mind running on Eleanor & Kitty. Oh that scene wants compacting. Its too thin run. But I shall finish it before I go away. We think of 3 weeks in Holland & France: a week in Rome, flying there. We went to Kew yesterday, & if vegetable notes are needed, this is to signify that yesterday was the prime day for cherry blossom pear trees, & magnolia. A lovely white one with black cups to the flowers: another purple tinted, just falling. Another & another. And the yellow bushes & the daffodils in the grass. So to walk through Richmond—a long walk by the ponds. I verified certain details. And it was 5.30 when we got back—a soft lovely day; & then I read some MSS & we had out maps, & discussed the holiday & Mabel came in & said she had sat for 2 hours in the Piccadilly [Lyons] corner house, watching people & listening to the band. Many people do this, she said. They sit on & on, eating as slowly as possible. She was ashamed how long they had sat. But then they take a long time to bring things she said.

A letter of thanks & admiration from Mrs Morgan this morning. And I gather from Judith that poor old Ann has not passed.

Tuesday 2 April

But poor old Ann has not only passed, but won a minor scholarship: Judith was only indulging in chaff. We had Ann to dinner & took her to Bengal Lancers: but the virility & empire building bored her. She thinks for herself, or has the youthful point of view naturally that we acquired through satire. She was not satirical, merely bored—a good sign, if she is representative.

And it was a very cold day: & I read, in this room; & was glad not to pace the streets. I have now Enid Bagnold’s rather (I suspect) meretricious & much applauded book to read [National Velvet], Whats wrong with it? My nose is sniffing already. A letter of warm gratitude—why?—from Vita: says I AM a good friend, & have never failed her. Some muddle I dont fathom altogether, but suspect Gwen & St. John between them have fuddled poor old V.’s not very well founded head. Rather a lesson, not to write angry letters.

And does Louie cheat? A bill for a chicken that we had at Christmas again throws doubt on her. We must have it out about the milk this week. Not a week I want altogether. Angelica’s concert on Thursday: a [Labour Party] meeting at Rodmell. Leonard’s jury again put off.

Friday 5 April

Angelica’s last concert yesterday in a snowstorm. And we took the wrong turning & went in the sleet almost to Southend. Snow falling all the time across the dark yew trees. And not a very rich performance. Angelica acting. Judith reciting French with a perfect accent, mothers in the drawing room. A great tea. Mrs Curtis opulent. The usual things—& so home in the cold—Duncan asleep.

L. dined at the Cranium & met James who says he means, owing to Swinnerton & other attacks, to set about a very long life of Lytton with all the letters; & he wishes to ‘lay it down’ that what he wants is that I should write a character of Lytton as introduction. Lytton & Roger—so my work as a biographer is cut out—I wonder. But I’m glad, I think, that there should be a full & outspoken life. Only not as a reply to criticism. And then the buggery? But it will take James a long time. The usual heartless, cold day & we go to Rodmell. And I’m tired of writing; yet must press on & do this difficult chapter; which I shall get done before we go—to Holland we think on May 1st—3 weeks & 4 days. Oh to sit in the sun & let my mind browse!

Monday 8 April

A week end of almost incessant conversation: first Mr Hancock on Wormwood Scrubs; then Maynard on the New Statesman. Both were full of interest—but oh dear, how I grudge the silent evening reading gone! And it rains & rains. Came home in the rain, dined with Helen in the rain; went to Clive’s: rain pouring down when we drove Nessa back. All sat in Clive’s little room, as Angelica was in the big room. Talk of Dorothea & of the Statesman. Duncan snapping viciously at Kingsley. Duncan when he’s angry snaps. Nessa is terrifically monolithic & imperious—a terrifying woman in her way. And I almost laughed myself sick over Dorothea. And it was slightly empty as usual—but why? Without Roger, I suppose: & we’re all so formal & going abroad for weeks—Clive so unintimate nowadays. We must ask him to dinner in June.

And it is pelting on my skylight, & the rain has come through the roof, & I am rather jangled writing this restaurant chapter, & wish we could sit in the sun, & wish I were a more solid & capable woman; & yet manage to cut along. Here’s Boulestin asking us to lunch—must I go? What an effort. Helen with her children rather ineffective but alive; the 2 gawks chattering easily

Tuesday 9 April

I met Morgan in the London Library yesterday & flew into a passion.

“Virginia, my dear” he said. I was pleased by that little affectionate familiar tag.

“Being a good boy & getting books on Bloomsbury?” I said.

“Yes. You listen. Is my book down?” he asked Mr Mannering.

“We were just posting it” said Mr M.

“And Virginia, you know I’m on the Co⁠[mmi]⁠ttee here” said Morgan. “And we’ve been discussing whether to allow ladies—

It came over me that they were going to put me on: & I was then to refuse: Oh but they do—I said. There was Mrs Green …

“Yes yes—there was Mrs Green. And Sir Leslie Stephen said, never again. She was so troublesome. And I said, havent ladies improved? But they were all quite determined. No no no, ladies are quite impossible. They wouldnt hear of it.”

See how my hand trembles. I was so angry (also very tired) standing. And I saw the whole slate smeared. I thought how perhaps M. had mentioned my name, & they had said no no no: ladies are impossible. And so I quieted down & said nothing & this morning in my bath I made up a phrase in my book on Being Despised which is to run—a friend of mine, who was offered….. one of those prizes—for her sake the great exception was to be made—who was in short to be given an honour—I forget what—.. She said, And they actually thought I would take it. They were, on my honour, surprised, even at my very modified & humble rejection. You didnt tell them what you thought of them for daring to suggest that you should rub your nose in that pail of offal? I remarked. Not for a hundred years, she observed. And I will bring in M. Pattison: & I will say sympathy uses the same force required to lay 700 bricks. And I will show how you cant sit on Ctees if you also pour out tea—that by the way Sir L.S. spent his evenings with widow Green; yes, these flares up are very good for my book: for they simmer & become transparent: & I see how I can transmute them into beautiful clear reasonable ironical prose. God damn Morgan for thinking I’d have taken that … And dear old Morgan comes to tea today, & then sits with Bessy [Trevelyan] who’s had cataract.

The veil of the temple—which, whether university or cathedral, was academic or ecclesiastical I forget—was to be raised, & as an exception she was to be allowed to enter in. But what about my civilisation? For 2,000 years we have done things without being paid for doing them. You cant bribe me now.

Pail of offal? No; I said I was a while very deeply appreciating the hon…. In short one must tell lies, & apply every emollient in our power to the swollen & inflamed skin of our brothers so terribly inflamed vanity. Truth is only to be spoken by those women whose fathers were pork butchers & left them a share in the pig factory.

Friday 12 April

This little piece of rant wont be very intelligible in a years time. Yet there are some useful facts & phrases in it. I rather itch to be at that book. But I have been skirmishing round a headache, & cant pull my weight in the morning. It is now almost settled that we shall drive through Holland & Germany, concealing Leonard’s nose, to Rome; & so back. A giant tour on our most heroic scale. Indeed, L. has just been in to say that we have to have the car tested this afternoon; also that the first of the spring flowers is up—Mr Brace, alas. Day after day is thus blotted out.

Last night I dined with Nessa, L. being at Kingsley’s to hear the story of his divided mind. He cant make up his mind, & must display the separated parts, like a heaving oyster, to his friends. Sometimes thinks he is going mad. Everybody turns him. He makes up his mind to refuse Aberystwyth with Maynard: in comes Gerald Barry, pours scorn on journalism, K. seizes the telephone, rings up A.; says Is there still time to put my name forward? Next day the horror of A. descends on him. Goes to a psycho-analyst. Goes to Scilly Islands with his father, meets the Arnold-Forsters—rings us up at 9 this morning; wants Cleano. Meanwhile Olga threatens divorce or claims it—I forget which—& loves another, & is rejected & lives in Fitzroy Square. But I sat over the stove with Nessa & Duncan musing & rambling & discussing old Desmond’s passions for American ladies—which is the reason why Molly seeks Freiburg for six months. And they were making plates on a new system, & off today to Stoke on Trent, & so Angelica dines here—a talented youngster the Star calls her, in a paragraph that seems founded on fact.

A wild wet spring. I had the courage to wear my silver corduroy. Lord, what a shivering coward I am—but not as a writer. No. I stick to that by way of compensation.

Desmond received a deputation of his children in his room the other day to ask him to give up his love, for Molly’s sake. Upon which he said, that he thought he could assure them that it was the beginning of the end. The spit & image of Mr Micawber, as Nessa says. L. much upset by the inefficiency of electric lamps. I bought one at the Stores yesterday, for my travels, & it is too small to take an ordinary bulb. This is the kind of thing that genuinely annoys L. But I am merely running on, in order to waste the precious morning.

Saturday 13 April

Poor Kingsley Martin almost in tears on the telephone this morning—cant make up his mind—certainly gives me an added sense of power & happiness.

Sunday 14 April

Let me make a note that it would be much wiser not to attempt to sketch a draft of On Being Despised, or whatever it is to be called, until the P.s is done with. I was vagrant this morning & made a rash attempt, with the interesting discovery that one cant propagate at the same time as write fiction. And as this fiction is dangerously near propaganda, I must keep my hands clear.

Its true I’m half asleep, after the Zoo & Willy [Robson]. But he threw some coals on my fire: the horror of the legal profession: its immense wealth; its conventions: a Royal Comn. now sitting—its hidebound hoariness, & so on; worth going into one of these days; & the medical profession & the osteopaths—worth a fling of laughter. But oh dear, not now. Now for Alfieri & Nash & other notables: so happy I was reading alone last night. We saw the great dumb fish at the Zoo, & the Gorillas. Storms of rain, cloud: & I read Annie S. Swan on her life with considerable respect. Almost always this comes from Au⁠[tobiograph]⁠y: a liking, at least some imaginative stir: for no doubt her books, which she cant count, & has no illusions about, but she cant stop telling stories, are wash, pigs, hogs—any wash you choose. But she is a shrewd capable old woman.

Monday 15 April

Not a very nice last meeting at Nessa’s last night, because L. suddenly turned stony in the way I know: & cut up rusty, when we got back, ostensibly because I suggested staying not 7 days but 10 in Rome. I suppose it was the old family grievance moling again; throwing up sudden hills. But this is all silly rot, I said, as I waited for him to come & he didn’t come; so went in & laughed. The truth is he had spent the whole morning filling up forms for our journey—which, I say, I could have done; & then I upset his plans in favour of my family, & stayed talking. And he had 2 hours of Willy: & is tired. And come to think of it, we’re both very happy. I shall be glad when we can stretch a little at Monks House, & needn’t meet Bells & so start moling. By way of reward for my sweetness of temper—but what does L. think of my temper? my book went well today; I think it probably rather good.

Yesterday another defence of Bloomsbury by Ellis Roberts in the S. Times: of me in particular (thanks I think to my ‘charm’ at Ottoline’s;) I am the most original mind that has written novels in the past 20 years, & so on. Nessa is going to Cochran this morning about a new curtain for one of his shows, & I’m not jealous. But oh how nice to have all this done with for six weeks! Now to write a little Italian from Danaro. I will learn German next year.

Wednesday 17 April

So the move, anyhow the Bell move, which heralds the flock, has begun: Angelica rushed in here at 1 yesterday with patterns for my clothes—such is her passion—and left her cap behind, & today—a fine day so far—they’re off [to Rome]. Tomorrow we go to Rodmell, & when Brace, at 7, shut the door—no, I stood in the door—but slowly put on his coat, & made some very polite remark about seeing us in New York—when all this happened, I sank back & thought the holiday has begun. For I had been trying on a dress at Murray’s, in the bitter cold wind. I counted 20 between one of Brace’s words & the next; he has grown toad faced, but is all the same a decent long suffering man. Things looking up in America, so he said.

I forget—I had something in mind to write here, about ‘the soul’ perhaps. I’m jaded again, & can’t go on rewriting. The book is to be sent to America in October: may be serialised—if so won’t be out for a year. But I have still £990. Something about Spender’s book had I in mind? To jot down a few notes on it. No. about the soul. Breaking moulds. Coming out with views. A French article calls me the Fairy of Eng. lit. Odd how this fairy works then.

The Wigrams a little defensive about Jews in Germany: want to come over & see us—Susie Buchan asks us to stay. Now these painful visits are in fact the real breaking up of the soul: such a labour. And L. gets more & more addicted to solitude & astute—the old wretch—at finding good reasons for it. But then his hand trembles; mine doesnt—could I overcome the clothes fear. The soul—the soul—How far could I let myself go in an anti fascist pamphlet? I think of dashing off my professions for women, can I steal a moment between Roger Lytton & proofs. All this about being so distinguished & cultivated might be knocked on the head. In E⁠[lvira]’s soliloquy I think I have tapped a new method of argument—very short & compact: but then this is spun out with description. The sun blazes: my skylight blue; no white tufted. I’m reading, or going to read, Alfieri, Chateaubriand, Paxton, Leo Myers; Barker & Moore poetry; so Easter will fly—oh to be alone with our fine York ham. No, I’ve forgotten the soul.

Thursday 18 April

This is written with very dirty hands after tidying up. We go [to Rodmell] after lunch. But shall we be alone? I doubt it. I foresee Julian, Wigram & Kingsley Martin, who again rang up, is now inclined to go to A⁠[berystwyth]: but L. bets that he will stay at the N.S. And he said—I listened in—Suppose I’m walking on the Downs, might I come & see you? Oh God, I thought, divining that he has a craving for our society—that is to talk about himself. “Or do you want to be alone?” L. who is his confessor, said, as confessors must, damn them, No do come. And physically he’s so repulsive. A fineish sort of day. I bought a coffee mill at Fortnum yesterday, & going to look for lamps saw [Derrick] Leon, advising customers about fabrics in their wholly disgusting room, all strewn with luxury objects in the worst most opulent heartless brainless taste: women in black with white pearls & red lips. The atmosphere of a rich princely shop is not sympathetic. A kind of halfway house: a shop not a shop; shop people pseudo gentry: an attempt to seduce & coerce. The chimney lamp was 25/6 instead of 19 18/9 as at the Stores. Six shillings to pay for lipstick & scent & carpets & the casual gentlemanly manners of Mr Marshall & the strew & the carelessness. I watched a gentleman selling Easter eggs with powder puffs, to the head buyer, who might have been Christabel.

And so home. And no one came, & that was one of Gods blessings. And I’m fidgetting, getting ready. Miss West doesnt get on with Belsher; is spending Easter at Folkestone, which she dislikes. But Miss Walton is going to Amsterdam.

Saturday 20 April

The scene has now changed to Rodmell, & I am writing at the table L. made (supported on a cushion,) & it is raining. Good Friday, was a complete fraud—rain & more rain. I tried walking along the bank, & saw a mole, running on the meadow—it glides father—is like an elongated guinea pig. Pinka went & nuzzled it, & then it managed to slide into a hole. At the same time through the rain I heard the cuckoo’s song. Then I came home & read & read—Stephen Spender [The Destructive Element]; too quick to stop to think; shall I stop to think; read it again? It has considerable swing & fluency; & some general ideas; but peters out in the usual litter of an undergraduates table. Wants to get everything in & report and answer all the chatter. But I want to investigate certain questions: why do I always fight shy of my contemporaries? What is really the woman’s angle? Why does so much of this seem to me in the air? But I recognise my own limitations: not a good ratiocinator, Lytton used to say. Do I instinctively keep my mind from analysing, which would impede its creativeness? I think there’s something in that. No creative writer can swallow another contemporary. The reception of living work is too coarse & partial if youre doing the same thing yourself. But I admire Stephen for trying to grapple with these problems. Only of course he has to hitch them round—to use his own predicament as a magnet, & thus the pattern is too arbitrary; if you’re not in his predicament. But as I say, I read it at a gulp without screwing my wits tight to the argument. This is a method I find very profitable: then go back & screw.

In the public world, there are emphatic scares. L. brings home a bunch after every Cttee meeting. Its odd how seldom I report them. One of these days they may come true. For instance, Toller says we are on the brink of war. Wants the allies to declare war on Hitler. Belgium keeps its aeroplanes at active service level, all ready to rise into the air. But as Germany could be on them before they rose this seems useless. There is a dutiful perfunctory stir about the Jubilee. We have subscribed £3 towards buns & a bus shelter in Rodmell. It is a good excuse for buying what one wants. Piccadilly is marked with Venetian masts. Seats line all the main streets. The King is said to be almost comatose. Will he get through with his bowings? C. Morgan said he cant bend any longer. And—there are incessant conversations—Mussolini, Hitler, Macdonald. All these people incessantly arriving at Croydon, arriving at Berlin, Moscow, Rome; & flying off again—while Stephen & I think how to improve the world.

Monday 22 April, Bank Holiday

The Wigrams to tea; she in white checks, checked shoes, yellow curls, blue eyes, disappointed, embittered, growing old, growing fat, something like an old daisy or other simple garden flower; if a flower could look very unhappy. I suppose the deformed boy, & so on. He a cripple, with iron rods down one leg, hoisting himself about on a stick. This, I suppose, faintly disgusting physically to her. I suppose she lives with physical deformity. But she is too painted & powdered, too insipidly discontented. He is very white toothed, blue eyed, lean, red cheeked—a nice rigid honest public school Englishman. Started almost at once telling us about Hitler. He had been at Berlin with Simon. Got there early & stood at the Embassy window watching the crowd. They clustered, & a policeman held up his hand, & they obediently fell back. No resistance. Then the conversations began. Hitler very impressive; very frightening. A large picture of the Madonna & Child & one of Bismarck. He has a great jowl like Bismarck. Made speeches lasting 20 minutes with out a failure. Very able. Only one mistake on a complicated point. Very well coached. And all the time a tapping sound. Wigram thought An odd day to have the masons in. But it was the sentry marching up & down the passage. Everything came out. We want…. We have a parity in the air already. The Germans in fact have enough aeroplanes ready to start to keep us under. But if they do kill us all? Well they will have their Colonies. I want room to move about Hitler said. Must be equal, & so on. A complete reversal to pre-war days. No ideals except equality, superiority, force, possessions. And the passive heavy slaves behind him, and he a great mould coming down on the brown jelly. Talks of himself as the regenerator, the completely equipped & powerful machine. Says outright, “If I had been in control during the war, things might have gone very differently.” Wigram & the rest frightened. Anything may happen at any moment. Here in England we havent even bought our gas masks. Nobody takes it seriously. But having seen this mad dog, the thin rigid Englishmen are really afraid. And if we have only nice public schoolboys like W. to guide us, there is some reason I suppose to expect that Oxford Street will be flooded with poison gas one of these days. And what then? Germany will get her colonies.

And then we walked them round the garden, & they were, or said they were, envious & impressed. But as Mrs W. said to me, I am effusive. I was brought up in France. She has been used to listen to real talk—so she says: to buy clothes twice a year on the 9th March & Autumn, & then never to think of it again.—Here in London with my sisters of the Foreign Office she is, she says, bored, discontented, thinks of cutting the London season & staying at Southease; where, I fear, we shall now be frequently asked, to help with the garden.

And then Kingsley rang up & is now imminent. So I intend to walk.

Tuesday 23 April

Kingsley coming at eleven of our first fine morning & staying till 6 has completely taken away any power I may have over the art of fiction. In order to ensure myself 2 hours of silence & air I went off to Moggery Poke. I passed 2 really happy women sitting on the slope of Itford hill. As they smiled at me, I thought I would act the scene of Eleanor & the builder—went to them & said Did you speak? No they had not spoken. But they were very happy. I then went on—but it was a grey morning—to Moggery: & home by the river. And there was K. eating cold veal & sweeping up his cauliflower on his fork. An effusive slippery mind: always on the fizz: but how undistinguished! How without hardness or fineness of texture! & now of course all dissolved by personal anxieties into a chatter of egotism: “Is there anything more we can say about my affairs?” he remarked at 3. No, I said to myself, there is nothing more. For he had been flooding us with damp proof sheets—sticky with printers ink—all the morning. Should he stay or should he go? I could only amuse myself by probing the depths of his belief in the N.S. Directly I minimised its importance, he trotted out arguments to prove its immense value to the world. The only paper that tells the truth, the stay & bread of all the serious minded in Britain. Then, directly I’m alone with him, its his arthritis. True, he’s not quite in his right mind; but how tiring this shambling through the hot sand is! & how undistinguished—well meaning, good hearted, I doubt not, but self obsessed; with no ear or eye; no reflective faculty & catching at any straw to float on; talking profusely; sociable because afraid of being alone; with no core of truth or substance in him; garrulous, untidy, slovenly; ‘able’ as they say, quick to snatch, a snapper up of trifles, uninteresting—yes, a profoundly uninteresting man. Yet, Aberystwith is ready to pay him £1000 a year: so he must have some merchantable quality. But it is like reading a living newspaper, talking to K. He is full of short snippets. And why so dull? He runs off my mind like a torrent of lukewarm water, but leaves it stained & tired. It is like listening to a perpetual leading article, so admirable, so well meaning, so shallow.

Thursday z5 April

Whether it was Kingsley or not, the usual headache wings its way about me, rather like a fowl soaring & settling & giving me a peek in my back: clouding my mind. I think I have earned a headache & a holiday. But it remains cold. And I am not going to write a word of fiction till June 1st. Weak coffee, this morning, a badly cleaned fish; which L. visits upon the Cow, who cooked us an admirable dinner last night all the same. Must she go? An inveterate instinctive dislike on L.’s part, physical not rational. So cant be overcome. I can read Pirandello almost currently; but cant write, head begins protesting. I shall space my days quietly & buy clothes: no only shoes, I think.

Saturday 27 April

All desire to practise the art of a writer has completely left me. I cannot imagine what it would be like: that is, more accurately, I cannot curve my mind to the line of a book: no, nor of an article. Its not the writing but the architecting that strains. If I write this paragraph, then there is the next & then the next. But after a months holiday I shall be as tough & springy as—say heather root; & the arches & the domes will spring into the air as firm as steel & light as cloud—but all these words miss the mark.

Stephen Spender demands a letter of criticism; cant write it. Nor can I describe with any certainty Mrs Collett, with whom both L. & I fell in love yesterday. A whippet woman: steel blue eyes; silver spotted jersey; completely free, edged, outspoken, the widow of the Lord Mayor’s son, who was killed before her eyes flying. After that she broke down, & the only cure she said was to go to Hong Kong & stay with Bella. From that we did not expect anything much, to tell the truth; whereas she ridiculed the Jubilee, the Lord Mayor & told us all about life in the Mansion House. The L.M. spends £20,000 out of his own pocket on his year of office; 10,000 on his sheriffdom; then buys an ermine coat for £1000 in which to admit the King to Temple Bar. It rains; the King flashes past, & the coat is spoilt. I dont like my father in law, she said; he doesnt do it at all well. Her mother in law is a perfectly natural sensible woman who goes buying fish with a bag. The Queen gave her as a token of esteem 2 huge shells, engraved with the story of George & the dragon. These mercifully are left at the M⁠[ansion] House. The L.M. wears a dress that is Heavy with bullion. A terrible state of display & ugliness—but she was so nice & unexcited I actually asked her to come & see us—which, had she known it, is a compliment we never never pay even: the royal family. But I cannot write even here; so shall read a story by Pirandello. James & Alix to dine to discuss Lytton’s life I suppose.

Sunday 28 April

Very cold again. Trees dotted with green in the park yesterday. Chestnuts just beginning to flower. A black sky & the paper festoons looking purple & pink across the streets: large blue paper crowns & roses being delivered. Julian & Alix to dine, James having a cold. Conversation: whether one can give people a substitute for war. Must have the danger emotion: must climb mountains, fight bulls; but this emotion mixed, I say, with philosophy, doesnt last more than a few months in case of war. J. says all the young men are communists in order to gratify their desire to do things together & in order to have some danger; which will only last a few months. The Germans being very poor, think anything is better than this. But this was not the 1914 emotion. Lust & danger. Cant cut them out at once. Must divert them on to some harmless object. But what? Some fantasy must be provided. I say many people have found life exciting without war and bull fighting. Has war ever won any cause? Alix says our civil war.

I made up some of my Professions book. Obviously, Julian’s quite unaware of some of his own motives, at the same time very lively & energetic. Alix like a blackshirt, all brown & tie & tailor made. No talk of Lytton: all argument; but interesting. What is the use of trying to preach when human nature is so crippled?

Tuesday 29 April

I should be tidying the room, but I’m not. Everything scattered with winters soot & cigarette ash. The great joy of having money is that one can buy small treats for the journey—new shoes. And even give way to the temptation of a 30/- dress. Murray came & I tactfully showed him the blue taffeta; our relations are an odd mix of the friendly & employed. He gave me this blouse, so I gather. But he will dress me for the part of the Dss of Malfi, even in day clothes.

A long letter of enthusiasm from Mrs Ellis Roberts; her husband is writing on me to emphasize my heart, which Swinnerton denied. Dear me. I thought W. Lewis said I was sentimental—between the 3 of them!

But I was about to say that everything is a little slack now I’m not writing. Odd to be off that wave. But I want to experiment with pure external living for a month—looking sharing, taking in ideas & impressions And then watch how the old trout at the bottom of the pond rise. I predict that the desire to write will become so frantic by the time were on the way back that I shall be making up all along the French roads. At the moment I start an idea but it fades; cant write it without feeling my brain stretched; cant even write to Stephen Spender about his book. A fine spring morning, very quiet, birds chirping, all London busy wrapping up parcels for the Jubilee.

Journey to Holland, Germany, Italy & France.
May 1935

Monday 6 May

Zutphen

This is Jubilee day, it strikes me; a very hot fine day. As for Holland: in the first place the cows wear coats; then the cyclists go in flocks like starlings, gathering together, skimming in & out. Driving is dangerous. Towns are large. They are also strung out, mile on mile. We are back in 1913. Everywhere there are shops full of clothes, food, books. The people are dressed in perfect respectability. Sailors wear felt hats. From 10 to 25 the girls are elegant, dove grey, slender, skimming on their cycles in & out. From 30 to 50 they amass vast bodies. But always the bodies are tight, spruce, shoes elegant hair beautifully done (& there I’ve dropped cigarette ash on the perfectly clean sheets of this modest empty hotel). Every street is 16th or 17th century, with curved apricot coloured awnings. As we say, the houses are the glory of Holland—the richly carved big windowed houses; some lean a little, others are peaked; but each is a solid spruce perfectly self respecting house, in which last night I saw the Sunday diners, old men old women sitting round with children, cactuses; a cat & a dog. We have 20 people round us wherever we stop. The apzi—the kleine apzi! I forget exactly how it all goes. Towns too big of course: Amsterdam a swollen stone monster, shaved off like a ruin on the side of the marsh: our first lunch at the Hague had 20 courses. Very expensive. Meals very early. People immensely respectable. No sign of crisis or war; The man on the ferry, said like all the rest, they wished they had gone off the gold standard. No visitors. Trade with England ended. Oh but the carved doors, the curved white façades, the, lilac trees: the air of swept & garnished prosperity, antiquity, air, cleanliness. Here in Zutphen—but we’ve only arrived 2 hours & had our Mitzi levée, & then came to this modest Inn, with a canal outside; & a broad river beyond.

Ideas that struck me.

That the more complex a vision the less it lends itself to satire: the more it understands the less it is able to sum up & make linear. For example: Shre & Dostoevsky neither of them satirise. The age of understanding: the age of destroying—& so on.

Belchamber.

A moving, in its way, completed story. But shallow. A superficial book. But also a finished one. Rounded off. Only possible if you keep one inch below; because the people, like Sainty, have to do things without diving: deep; & this runs in the current: which lends itself to completeness. That is, if a writer accepts the conventions, & lets his characters be guided by them, not conflict with them, he can produce an effect of symmetry: very pleasant, suggestive; but only on the surface. That is, I cant care what happens: yet I like the design. Also disgust at the cat monkey psychology, to which he is admirably faithful. A sensitive sincere mind—Howdie, doing his embroidery, & making his acute observations. Not a snob either.

Wednesday 8 May

Utrecht.

We came back to our grand inn here [Hotel des Pays Bas] a cold day’s drive. We sat & lunched in the car & a funeral passed us. The horse draped in black like a medieval war horse. The plan of a Dutch town is: a bridge a canal: under an arch into a street: pointed, stepped houses; orange & green awnings; 1620: on brand new garages: a great red brick tower, then a vast church, shut up. The caretaker, a respectable rather invalidish man lives opposite. Some frescoes on whitewashed walls. Empty & magnificent. Very Protestant. Flights of cyclists. Immense profusion of highly civilised shops—flower shops, shoes, bicycles, books, everything the more solidly placed wealthy but not frivolous citizen can eat or wear or use: all shining spick & span. English, French German books equal to Dutch. Shops upon shops. People pullulating. Not a beggar, not a slum. Even solid wealth. Angularity. A feeling that Holland is a perfectly self respecting rather hard featured but individual middle aged woman. Conventions of 1913. No women smoking or driving cars. Only one man smokes a pipe in the streets.

Utrecht.

A very cold day. I am (this is copied from pencil notes) sitting in a teashop where 3 Dutch are having horns filled with cream. The nice girl smiles at me. L. is getting letters. (There were none, because of the Jubilee). The two children are eating cakes. Hoolarja, Dutchaboch!—it sounds like that. They dont have tea. A very spick & span shop. They laugh. I pretend to write postcards.

Thursday 9 May

Sitting in the sun outside the German Customs. A car with the swastika on the back window has just passed through the barrier into Germany. L. is in the customs. I am nibbling at Aaron’s Rod [by D. H. Lawrence, 1922], Ought I to go in & see what is happening? A fine dry windy morning. The Dutch Customs took 10 seconds. This has taken 10 minutes already. The windows are barred. Here they came out & the grim man laughed at Mitz. But L. said that when a peasant came in & stood with his hat on, the man said This office is like a Church & made him move it. Heil Hitler said the little thin boy opening his bag, perhaps with an apple in it, at the barrier. We become obsequious—delighted that is when the officers smile at Mitzi—the first stoop in our back.

That a work of art means that one part gets strength from another part. At Ulken: home reached late after being turned aside to make way for the Minister President.

By the Rhine, sitting at the window, looking out on the river. The waiter has been talking. He has been in America: democratic; talks as if he were host. Like a little supple monkey. “Let me see now, you like good coffee. What have we nice?” & so on. Also the manager—was in the City Road—wanted to go back & keep a German hostel in Bedford Place. We were chased across the river by Hitler (or Goering) had to pass through ranks of children with red flags. They cheered Mitzi. I raised my hand; People gathering in the sunshine—rather forced like school sports. Banners stretched across the street “The Jew is our enemy” “There is no place for Jews in—”. So we whizzed along until we got out of range of the docile hysterical crowd. Our obsequiousness gradually turning to anger. Nerves rather frayed. A sense of stupid mass feeling masked by good temper. So we came here, Unkel, an old country house, with curved bannister, shallow steps, a black grated stair door, & courtyard. A number of little eyes in the roof, rabbits & doves in outhouses. The innkeeper is playing cards with his wife. They all want to go away—back to Islington, back to Washington—Oh so lovely, said the waiter, who wants to go on talking.

Sunday 12 May

Innsbruck

L. says I may now tell the truth, but I have forgotten 2 days of truth, & my pen is weeping ink. Let me see. We went on from the old country house Inn, which ran their charges up high, & drove down the Rhine, & tried to see it as an engaged couple in 1840—no good. An ugly pretentious country—operatic scenery. High, but insignificant hills, bristling with black & green fir trees, with correct towers & ruins—a river that runs with coal barges like Oxford Street; traffic on the cobbled roads: & then a wall had fallen, & we were made to cross over to the right side again. And so to—to where? I begin to forget. The dullest day of them all. But we got to Augsburg; & we had a room with a bath, & then went on, to Heidelberg, which is—yes—a very distinguished University town, on the Neckar. The dons & their daughters were having a musical evening. I saw them tripping out to each others houses with pale blue Beethoven quartets under their arms. Something like the Verralls & the Darwins in old Cambridge—the same dress, & nice intelligent faces. Great rhododendrons blooming. Still hot & blue. And the river like sliding plate glass: And next day to Augsburg—a dull town, but with a bath. A room with a bath. The country steadily improves—becomes shaped & spaced. From Augsburg to Innsbruck where I sit in the empty room—the hotels quite empty, & the town quiet as the grave, & very stately. What did we see today? Great snow hills, with black rifts in them. Torrents. Lakes; one copper green. And it rained for the first time & was cold in the mountains. Fancy living with dirty snow at the door in May! Lovely, but utilitarian, pine woods. Black troops herded together. The Hitler feeling relaxed, though every village had a painted sign “Die Juden sind hier unwunscht”. But this seemed to be put up by authority. Changed into Austria at last; & we are now almost out of earshot.

Monday 20 May

Rome

This is out of its place. Nor can I really flatter myself that I am going to float off the drive home from Cassenlino⁠[Cassino] this evening—the women balancing blue green pots, the hot⁠[?] spring, green, blue & black precipitous mountain, flowers⁠[?], umbrella pines, the town with the perched egg shell houses. And then, globed in the luminous light, for the sunset was pouring gold all over us, St Peters, to which we drove.

Is there any ‘use’ in such notes? Perhaps when the editing of the mind has gone further one can see & select better. Quentin bought an Italian paper & read of Lawrence’s death. Butted into a motorcycle. But I will now use the half hour left before they come to dinner to copy out from the pencil book that I keep in my bag to write it when taking in petrol, waiting for something or other. Again, whats the use, but that parrot cry would stifle most things.

Brenner. Monday 13th. Odd to see the countries change into each other. Beds now made of layers on top. No sheets. Houses becoming Austrian, dignified. Winter lasts at Innsbruck till July. No spring. Italy fronts one on a blue bar. The Cheko Slovaks are in front going to the customs house.

Verona [13 May]. Written after drinking wine. I dont want to wake up. This is the lust that led many astray, but not comparable to my own private excitements. And it wears off so soon, even as I write, reason returns. I can see the world outside. The public: the grey green officer reading the paper. Queer what a part wine has played in human life. Omar [Khayyam] &c. How all impressions are mixed. I am thinking of V.D. 30 years ago: Nessa: my honeymoon: Roger: I looking at Verona from the train. The sensation is of a tight band round the head tingling in the soles of the feet, hotness, & a spring: expanding.

What would the writing of a complete drunkard be?

A Turgenev novel at lunch. The diners cosmopolitan. A woman like Alice Clifford [unidentified] who asked that her ashes might be buried at sea.

Florence [15 May]. Ash coloured houses with green doors. Smell of coffee roasting.

Perugia [15 May]. Came through Florence today—Saw the green & white cathedral. & the yellow Arno dribbling into shallows. A thunderstorm. Irises purple against the clouds. So to Arezzo. A most superb church with dropped hull.

Lake Trasimen. Stood in a field of red purple clover: plovers egg lake, grey olives, exquisite, subtle, sea cold, shell green. So on, regretting that we did not stay, to Perugia—[Hotel] Brufani where we stayed in 1908. Now all the same. The same ardent sunburnt women. But lace & so on for sale. Better to have stayed at Trasimen. I went into an Albergo yesterday to buy rolls & found a sculptured fireplace, all patriarchal—servants & masters. Cauldron on the fire. Probably not much change since 16th century: the people preserve legends. Men & women scything. A nightingale singing where we sat. Little frogs jumping into the stream.

Brufani. Three people watching the door open & shut. Commenting on visitors like fates—summing up, placing. A woman with a hard lined aquiline face—red lips—bird like, perfectly self-satisfied. French, pendulous [word indecipherable]—a rather poor sister. Now they sit nibbling, at human nature. We are rescued by the excellence of our luggage.

Rome. tea. Tea in cafe. Ladies in bright coats & white hats. Music. Look out & see people like movies. Abyssinia. Children begging. Café haunters. Ices. Old man who haunts the Greco.

Sunday cafe. N⁠[essa]. & A⁠[ngelica]. drawing. Very cold. Rome a mitigated but perceptible Sunday. Fierce large jowld old ladies. Q. talking about Monaco. Talleyrand. Some very poor black wispy women. The effect of dowdiness produced by wispy hair. The Prime Ministers letter offering to recommend me for the Companion of honour. No.

Tuesday 21 May

Oddities of the human brain Woke early & again considered dashing off my book on Professions; to which I had not given a single thought these 7 or 8 days. Why? This vacillates with my novel—how are they both to come out simultaneously. But it is a sign that I must get to pen & paper again. Yet at the moment I am going rag marketing with N. & A—who dont come.

Sunday 26 May

[Aix-en-Provence]

We went rag marketing. & suddenly out sprang, to my eyes, the old triumphant Vanessa of early married days. Why? How she would bear off in full sail with Roger Clive & me attendant. We bought pots; & a tea set, which gave her great intense potters delight more than any clothing or jewel.

And then? I’m writing at Aix; on a Sunday evening, with a band playing & stopping, & children shouting, in a too luxurious hotel where the waiters bring one the menu, & I mix my French scandalously with odd scraps of my painfully acquired Italian. Still I can rattle off Gli Indifferenti lying on my bed for pleasure. Oh the loveliness of the land still here & there—for instance that first morning’s drive out of Rome—the sea & the lip of the inviolated land; & the umbrella pines, after Civita Vecchia: then of course all the intense boredom of Genoa & the riviera, with its geraniums & its bouganvilia, & its sense of shoving you between hill & sea & keeping you. there in a bright luxury light without room to turn, so steep the vulture neck hills come down. But we slept at Lerici the first night which does the bay the brimming sea & the green sailing ships & the island & the sparkling fading red & yellow night lamps to perfection. But that kind of perfection no longer makes me feel for my pen—Its too easy. But driving today I was thinking of Roger—Brignolles—Corgés—my word, the olives & the rust red earth, & the flat green & the trees.

But now the band has begun again, & we must go down to dine sumptuously off local trout. Off tomorrow, & home on Friday. But though I’m impatient for my brain to eat again, I can dally out these last days better than sometimes. Why? why? I go on asking myself. And feel I could soon polish off those final scenes [in The Years]: a possible amplification of the first paragraph occurred to me. But I dont want to grind at ‘writing’ too hard. To open my net wide. It occurs to me, as we drive, how I’m disliked, how I’m laughed at; & I’m rather proud of my intention to take the fences gallantly. But writing again!

Nessa you see, is always interrupted by Angelica, who has the social sense & not the contemplative. Goodbye, sweet dreams, she laughed as she waved us away on Thursday night on the Piazza di Spagna. And so she always interrupts & says, Mummy, if you’re going out would you buy me some dark blue cotton. Oh yes. And then we must think about getting hair curlers. So she cant brood over pictures, which must be a divine refreshment. Never mind. I’m dipping into K.M.’s letters, Stendhal on Rome; & the Italian. Cant formulate a phrase for K.M. All I think a little posed & twisted by illness & Murry; but agonised, & at moments that direct flick at the thing seen which was her gift—Then all the old Tchekov stuff about life; & the perpetual rather sordid worries & gibes, & the doll on the bed, which I detest, & something driven & forced to cram into one year the growth of five or six. So I cant judge & get [text ends]

Tuesday 28 May

Moulins

And here we are in yet another hotel, this time with a bath. Last night at Vienne. No bath. Water cut off by town. A great bath for common washing supplied by the squash eyed manager. Very good local dinner: crayfish: a comm. travellers hotel, also patronised by lower grade officers, who discuss military tactics & flirt with waitress. Sugar, always sweetened by the hands of a woman; All this taken philosophically by a huge black lady ladling out sour milk. I can still see the last scene—how; soon they rub away—like a knock I gave my shin. All day we drove from Aix in wet straight unbroken rain, mud coloured sky over us, & peasants standing to pick cherries in the rain. Trees all red spotted with cherries—only just visible in the grey downpour. A dull boring day, but got to Vienne at last; & today has been a very good day, coming across country over the wide high hills with [text ends]

I forgot the Casino at Monte Carlo. A bright blue & white day: carved parapets gleaming; little embayed town on the sea. I saw domes & pillars & told L. this was the Casino; so we went in, & had to produce passports, & sign a paper, & give up hat & umbrella, & then paid nothing but went into a florid but dingy hall, set with seven or eight tables, something like great billiard tables, at which sat a dingy sweaty rather sordid crew, with their faces all set & expressionless watching the gold bars sweeping this way & that in the middle. They had something peculiar. One couldnt place them. Some were dingy old governesses in spectacles, others professors with beards; there was one flashy adventuress; but most were small business men—only rather, not very vicious. It was a blazing hot Sunday morning about 12, & this, we thought is the way our culture spends its holidays. Vicious, dull, & outside lurid. So on.

Wednesday 29 May

[Chartres]

And I begin this sentence on a grey noisy evening might be mid September in Chartres, determined to let a long slide of time pass before I go motoring again. The pane of glass that is pressed firm over the mind in these travels—there I am vitreated on my seat—cant read talk or write—only look I at the endless avenues—plane trees poplars—rain, rain—old man with a cart—ask the mileage—look at map light a cigarette & turn over the old problems—chiefly the same, because I cant start a new one till the cage doors are opened—all this makes the 2 last days as intolerable as the first two are rapturous.

And then it always rains; coming over the high [?] Chartres plain it was almost a fog. At Orleans it was grey as November. Only the thought of getting quiet in ones own chair again makes this racket—I write in the window looking on to a vast bare space—tolerable. But its odd how one longs to uncurl the spring in the brain—to let fly: how insipid life is without—writing is it? Yet this is the best & least distressing of all our tours. I could only have wished 2 days less coming across France.

Its the depression too of the waiters & women behind glass in the hall; But I shall enjoy my dinner. And only one day more—It’ll take a day or two however to scratch off the pane of glass.

And, putting down my pen, I fetched L. & we went to the Cathedral which was almost dark & melodramatic—I mean surprising, there only the arches & shadows showing, we all alone, & the blue windows blazing in the cold grey night. In fact it was like seeing the skeleton & eyes of the cathedral glowing there. Mere bones, & the blue red eyes. The windows are all blue & red, & at one end there’s the jewel burning—the great rose jewel, burning blue in coal blackness, for all the world like something worn upon a vast—what? woman⁠[’s] body wont do. The jewel of the world then—or is that sentimental? After we had sat & looked slowly grayness returned to the thick pillars but still the scooped shadowy look remained. Never had we seen it so bare, so architectural, a statement of proportions, save for the fiery & deep blue glass, for the glass varied from gloomy to transcendent. So back to a first rate dinner—a dinner thought out, & presided over by a graceful young chef, precisely like Raymond, only with greater gift & charm. For instance he concocted a sauce out of cream, French beans, mustard, salt & wine. To add the wine he held his finger which was not clean half over the mouth of the bottle. Then left the sauce to simmer over a spirit lamp: then another red brown casserole was brought, & the sauce poured over. Our dinner was rich & thoughtful: I had mushrooms in cream. And I observed the way a good waiter serves a dish with infinite care & respect, as if handling something precious. Now Chartres is quieter, & so to sleep.

Friday 31 May

[Monks House]

Home again, & how queer, as we drove up there was Pinka’s basket being carried up by Percy, & she had died yesterday: her body was in the basket. Just as we were saying that we would see her in a moment. Percy was very red, very sad, screwed his eyes up, would not smile at us, & then told us. So thats whats bound to happen we said. A very silent breakfast. I had been saying how she would put out my match & all the usual jokes. And the intensity of the sense of death—even for a dog—how odd—our feeling of her character, & the grotesqueness—something pathetic, & the depression, & the I suppose fear of sentimentality & so on.

A cold misting day: Pinka’s feet by the way on my blotting paper. The usual tremor & restlessness after coming back, & nothing to settle to, & some good German woman sends me a pamphlet on me, into which I couldnt resist looking, though nothing so upsets & demoralises as this looking at ones face in the glass. And a German glass produces an extreme diffuseness & complexity so that I cant get either praise or blame but must begin twisting among long words. And so I must write letters. L.’s book is reviewed in the Lit. Sup. on the day it came out & seriously without a sneer, though not with much grasp. Never a bite in that senile paper.

The view as beautiful as any I’ve seen, by the way, even on a mud coloured day. The frost has nipped the fruit, the box hedges have yellow tops. Lady Rhondda asks us to dinner, & so the snake renews its skin. We drove through Normandy yesterday & it was Bank holiday owing to Ascension day, so that all the people were dressed in respectable black coats & fur. A more ugly tribute to the spirit could not be. We lunched on the balcony at Caudebec, & the Bank holiday crowd was lunching too—getting blotched & red in the face: taking out mirrors & rubbing red & white too profusely into lips & noses. An old man next us who had to be hoisted into his car after eating largely I suppose to return to Paris. A long row of cars waiting. Plethoric after their lunch & wine the holiday makers walked up & down looking at each other’s cars. We drove off too, got early to Dieppe, smelt the usual strong smells, gave the car up & settled down to the usual 4 or 5 hours till 10 in the hotel. Mitz provided a long discourse with the wife, daughter & mother—3 generations—in the stuffy little office. The girl was translating Caesar. She must know languages, they said, & was to come to Newhaven to learn English. A great tradition—French talk: I enjoyed the expressiveness of the old woman, describing Englishwomen during the war. She was in a shop, & they didn’t know a word, but soon had the hang of it—saying Pomme, then pomme de terre. Much more style to her than to a woman of her type in Lewes. I am writing to steady the fidgets, to cover over the depression. L. has begun work, & it is only eleven, & I cant take up my book. I think that an hour of reading some good author is prescribed.

[Saturday 1 June]

My excuse for not beginning my book—I mean finishing it—is that I’ve not got the final chapter here. So what shall I do? Read the old one. But that’s fussing & fidgeting. I think wait till Monday & then flash at it, & get it done by August. Holidays are very upsetting. And its cold & grey. And my hand shakes. And I want some regular hours & work. And it’ll take at least a weeks agony to get back into the mood. And I shall slip back by reading about in the book, & dreaming after tea; & perhaps, if nature allows, taking a walk. L. very depressed too, about poor dear Pink. 8 years of a dog certainly mean something. I suppose—is it part of our life thats buried in the orchard? That 8 years in London—our walks—something of our play private life, thats gone? And—odd how the spring of life isn’t to be tapped at will. I cant get into the swim by saying it is Saturday morning & I will write. I cant get into that stream by standing & wishing it. All sorts of habits, of being unconscious of the surface, attentive to other things, have to settle naturally. Coming back one is horribly broken up, notices surfaces. Habit is the desirable thing in writing.

[End of inserted pages]

Wednesday 5 June

Back here again, & the grim wooden feeling that has made me think myself dead since we came back is softening slightly. Its beginning this cursed dry hard empty chapter again in part. Every time I say it will be the devil! but I never believe it. And then the usual depressions come. And I wish for death. But I am now seeing that the last 200 pages will assert themselves, & force me to write a play more or less: all broken up: & I stop to begin making up. Also, after the queer interlude, at once life—that is the telephone beginning—starts. So that one is forcibly chafed. (I meant to make a note about the dramatic shape which forces itself upon me). Vita; Stephen Tennant; Julian; dressmaker; going to Rodmell for Whitsun. Must I go to the Paris Conference? Amabel rings up.

Mrs Woolf yesterday talking admirable racy English. My head ached. The room bare, as she’s going to Worthing. She asked L. to read aloud Miss Daisy Knockends? letter, a daily maid whom Cecil might have married—a decayed wastrel. “But how can one give people up?” She had been to Phil’s show. “And old Queen [Mary] was led about. I enjoyed it immensely.” There were lettuces & radishes for tea, but the people complained it was cold. Babs & Phil without an ounce of flesh on their faces. Such hard work—A Gymkana. And Marie won a prize. And I often ask myself, what have I got out of life? I have brought up good men & women….

Thursday 6 June

There is no doubt that the greatest happiness in the world is walking through Regents Park on a green, but wet—green but red pink & blue evening—the flower beds I mean emerging from the general misty rain—& making up phrases after a little stimulus from little Mr Murray among his clothes. He wants to become a scene maker, to design the decors for Strauss’s ballet. He was trained in the law at Edinburgh, but gave it up because some friends excited him about his designs. And now he’s feeling a little at a dead end, & wants more scope. Why does this serve to start phrases, so that I left my bus, wasted 2d fare, & walked across Regents Park. Not that I’m fluent with my scene this morning; very difficult on the contrary. But Rome holds no greater excitement than this. So that Mabel’s terrible faux pas—she broke the gramophone—& Pinka’s death, are somehow obliterated. After dinner, however, that whining & complaining disreputable egomaniac, the Polish Count, rang up & bickered, discreditably. “I am boycotted by the entire literary world. Why I ask you does the N.S. allude to me as Montalk? Miss Rebecca West is the only writer who calls me Count Potocki—” till L. became very trenchant & weighty & cut him off: but we were exacerbated. And I had a disagreeable letter from a stranger. You of course despise anyone who lives in an Avenue, you who’ve had a book written on your philosophy by a Frenchman. The inferiority complex is thick as a nettle bed. And I cant read Dante after a morning with my novel—too hard.

Monday 10 June, Whit Monday

at Monks House. Working very hard. I think I shall rush these scenes off.

[Tuesday 11 June]

Yet I cannot write this morning (Tuesday) How can I say, naturally, I have inherited the Rose & the Star!

Wednesday 12 June

I am so glad I am not lunching with Rebecca West to meet Miss E. Jenkins; at the same [time] I am so sorry that L. wants to spend 3 days at Monks House every fortnight: from Thursday night till Monday morning.

These are my troubles Mr—as the man said when the footman put on too many coals. And I think I’ve found a bridge in that scene.

Thursday 13 June

In some ways, its rather like writing The Waves—these last scenes. I bring my brain to a state of congestion have to stop: go upstairs, run into towsled Mr Brewster; come back; find a little flow of words. Its the extreme condensation: the contrasts: the keeping it all together. Does this mean that its good? I feel I have a round of great pillars to set up, & can only drag & sweat. It’s something like that. Its getting barer & more intense. And then what a relief when I have the upper air scenes—like the one with Eleanor! only they have to be condensed too. Its the proper placing that strains me.

Pannickar & Morgan last night; rather difficult. P. so bubbling, always talking with a smile, swart & greased, like some animal with a thick pelt & very white teeth. Then Morgan, evanescent, piping, elusive, settling exactly there. Had been lunching with Rebecca; giving away prizes. My bones ached—that cold field picnic at Glynde I suppose. And Morgan divined that we would not come to Paris. Always divines the meaning & then flits off. As a matter of fact, P. had stolen 2 books of his. He did not like him. M. has a razor edge to his mind. And he cant get on with “Bloomsbury” & feels, I guess, unattached, & thus takes on public work, which depresses him.

Ought I to go & see R. West? I want to for some reason—partly about fascism. Clive rang up this morning. We dine there tonight. L. says “your” cook! which annoys me. She must go, I suppose.

Then—I will now go on with the F. Queen. & finish it. The mood has come back.

Saturday 15 June

We dined with Clive, & I felt very fond of him. He has great sympathy—as when, talking of Adrian, he said, “He gets great pleasure now from his children. When I praised Ann’s looks, he bridled.” Yes, I’m very fond of my old Clive. And Li was charming, genial, affable, urbane. Clive said, I always say youre half cracked (to me). We were saying how many Rogers & Lyttons there are. He said Segonzac thinks Nessa the best painter in England, much better than Duncan. I will not be jealous, but isnt it odd—thinking of gifts in her? I mean when she has everything else. And my head is congested again, & I will not go to Paris, because I should have a weeks misery; & for all my sweating, I’m getting ahead with the P.s; No name suggests itself. Rebecca asks me to dine. The Cecils ask us to dine.

And it is drumming with rain, & we are starting off to Philip’s. This amused me—L.’s complex. “He’s annoyed, thats why he hasnt written.” Finally, he got me to telephone last night, thinking it might be awkward if he bearded Philip who was annoyed. “Virginia? No. I never heard. But we should be delighted to see you” said Philip cordially. So we are off, in this storm.

And Nessa never writes; but why make up stories about one’s relations? An odd family complex.

Sunday 16 June

So we drove to Winchendon through the rain. I was very numb in the head by the way & saw things at a great distance, which explains the bemused state, no impact, of my impressions. London spreads about 17 miles this way, suddently stops outside Rickmansworth at Moor Park, as if some great Lord still kept an estate. Then Amersham, with the house [market hall] in the middle, rather like a peasant version of an Italian town; then a few bushyheaded woods; but always houses. At last we came to the gate, & there on the left in the green watery light were the children riding on copper coloured horses, going round under the trees; & Babs & Phil. And the talk began. They had found Cardinal Wolsey’s arms in a rubbish heap: had them mounted into a mantelpiece. But it was badly done by the local stonemason: the fruit carving injured. Tea. Proper maid. Children drinking out of Jubilee mugs. “We each have two” said Pippin who looks up under her eyes. Mary a straightnosed child Cecil sloping nosed. Talk about the great Gymkhana. P⁠[hilip]. netted £500. All the stalls had paid. 7000 for tea. And so on. Babs has yellow front teeth; wears horn glasses. Then we walked past the wicked Lords house. But I dont like parks. And B. talked of horses; used to break them in, teach riding; loves horses; used to teach boys, running beside them; filled all pigsties & hutches with horses. Riding now a passion: all Woolworth girls ride before breakfast, have 2/- rides. This very hard on the horses. The man next them hired 20 hunters; hunting on the hire system. One goes lame, is sent back, another supplied by Smiths. Laughed at George & Flora: child not allowed to eat ices; won’t talk, spoilt; family gossip: all quite running, free, what I call ‘natural living’. P. walked ahead & talked politics with L. Children tipped. Asparagus given, & so home: dine at 8.30: & I slept all the evening over the fire, & dreamt of cutting my hand in a theatre, & of a professional mistress of ceremonies who had to entertain people; & somehow Mrs Clifford came in; & I woke to find L. standing over me. And I have scrambled along this morning: & tonight we dine with Rhondda; but I am not going to Paris.

Tuesday 18 June

Yesterday, instead of reading Tom’s Murder in the Cathedral, which, having run through & tested my colour sense, I expect to be good, I had to give Ralph Brewster tea. Curious teeth; gooseberry coloured staring eyes; & an air of nervous instability. Large hands, hanging: only just neat enough to have tea. A sudden amused kindling in the gooseberry eyes; & the profuse storytelling of those who have lived with savages. Would go on & on & on.

[Thursday 20 June]

I am so oppressed by the thought of all the books I have to write that my head is like a bursting boiler. Half an hour ago, Margery Fry rang up to ask me to open an Ex⁠[hibitio]⁠n of Roger’s paintings at Bristol; to speak for 15 minutes. Oh we should all love it! she said. Then it appeared that they are counting on me to write a life. She is collecting papers. This morning theres a book (in the Lit. Sup.) complaining that women have dropped their sacred task. This floods me with my Professions book. Helen tells me that the Stracheys are hurt that I never offered to write about Lytton. “But I wanted to & they never asked me!” I said. Oh but they didn’t like to suggest it—James says they do want it. And here I am wedged—no, buoyant—in a floating storm of scenes at the end of my book, which must be compacted & pulled out & turned & (this comes from my hair waving yesterday—from 2 to 4.45 & rather successful). And we are incessantly asked to dine lunch & ‘see’ people.

Tom last night: supple & sub⁠[t]⁠le, simple & charming. Stayed till 12.15. I never felt so much at my ease. He is a dear old fellow: one of ‘us’: odd: I felt I liked him as I liked Lytton & Roger—with intimacy in spite of God. First we talked of his play. He stayed with Lady Raleigh, & she gave him cocoa & Oliver biscuits but never said a word about the play. There was a canon there. And they looked out of the window & saw 3 girls in very short shorts, naked legs & large bottoms go into the Cathedral. ‘‘The dean encourages them” said Lady R. grimly. “I am in favour of St. Paul if one must be irrational” said Tom. Now tell me about the marmozets view of Germany.” We made a good dinner. And he said he liked Stephen—“What a charming person in many ways” no, I think he didnt even qualify his remark, so kind has he become. “Auden is a very nice rattled brained boy. Some of his plays extremely good, but its superficial: stock figures; sort of Punch figures…” Publishers gossip. A story about a party to entertain the Reads, Ludo & her sister & German friend. Tom bought fireworks; sugar that dissolved & let out small fish; & chocolates that he thought were full of sawdust. “Theyre very greedy,” he said; “And by a mistake the chocolates were full of soap. They set on me…. And it was not a success. So much so that I forgot the fireworks, until they were going. I then let them off on the doorstep. And poor Herbert had to pay for a cab from Bina Gardens to Hampstead.” This was very amusing, & not as stiff as usual. L. made cigarettes. Tom drank whisky. I mused & was at my ease. Tom wants to give me all his works, but thought I didnt read them—would always have given me all his works.

[Saturday 22 June, Rodmell]

The Bees are swarming this week end, & Percy goes about in flannel trousers with a net over his head, very self important. “I’m going to get a friend to help me tonight, & we shall cut out the Queens” he’s just said.

It has suddenly become full summer: droning, misting, with birds & bees. The cuckoo calling in the elm tree at 3 or 4 this morning so that I had to stop my ears. The heat came suddenly as we walked by the river on Friday. And the field in front is red with something that [farmer] Botten’s growing in his bog. Wehad mushrooms—people come out at 4 or 5 to pick them. Instead of surveying all this in a torpid swoon of pleasure, illustrated by scenes from my book, Mrs W. & Harold came to tea; she stumbled on the doorstep & turned her ankle. Then there were figures passing the window—Jack & Jeremy: whereupon she lost all interest in life, poor old lady, thinking that no one would listen to her family stories. She cannot stretch to take in any stranger. But, after saying that the garden was the best they had ever seen, they went on to the [Glyndebourne] opera. Monty Shearman was strolling, all in black, outside .. Harold Mrs W. & I continued our rather burbling conversation: about highbrows, & then about Maids, & the hotel. I heard all about L.’s father, & how he did not take silk till he was 45, & made his name over—I forget what case; so it comes over & over again, the story of her life, with the usual comments. “And I ask myself, what for? And I am now so lonely. I have lived alone so many years now…” which, I mechanically turn off upon Bella: who is now Queen of Hong Kong. She is very ambitious. And so wonderfully tactful. And so popular. What dress did she wear? A beautiful white taffeta. Tom [Southorn, her husband] was so generous—He gave her some money to spend on clothes. She has to have so many. In the old days she did not mind how she dressed. So we droned, sitting on the terrace before, this house—very successful as a sitting place on a hot day.

Why does this talk smear my mind so that I cant settle in at 6.30 to do anything but march up & down the terrace? Poor old lady. She has shrunk slightly, carries some animal with a white belly, & white gloves. Harold brings his horse down on a trailer & rides on the downs. The horse is fed by an automatic feeder invented by himself. He has given up his yatcht, as Alice [his wife] dislikes it. L. buying newspapers was told by the newsagent the story of Miss Wightman. She wears her fathers mackintosh & nothing underneath. It is getting old, & coming to bits. She is a poet, & has won a medal from the King which she keeps in a red morocco case, & the newsagent has seen it.

Tuesday 25 June

A curious & rather unpleasant scene with Mabel. She was in tears, because Mr Woolf never believes a word she says. And I think its true. L. is very hard on people; especially on the servant class. No sympathy with them; exacting; despotic. So I told him yesterday, when he’d complained about the coffee. “If I maynt even say when the coffee is bad &c”. His extreme rigidity of mind surprises me; I mean in its relation to others: his severity: not to myself but then I get up & curse him. What does it come from? Not being a gentleman partly: uneasiness in the presence of the lower classes: always suspects them, is never genial with them. Philip & Edgar [Woolf] are the same. His desire, I suppose, to dominate. Love of power. And then he writes against it. All this I shall tell him again, for it doesnt matter, to me; in our relationship; & yet I hate people; noticing it: Nessa; Dadie; even Kingsley Martin—who all admire & respect him. An interesting study. It goes with great justice, in some ways; & simplicity too; & doing good things: but it is in private a very difficult characteristic. I must now get rid of Mabel, & find another. This row has precipitated it & given me a good excuse for sacking her: but I feel its unfair on her.

Thursday 27 June

A good thing for old Bloomsbury to be shaken up no doubt: a good thing to dine with R. West & Mr Andrews [her husband] last night in their flat in P⁠[ortman]. Sqre. with the view, with the £750 book case, & the fish carved out of a yew branch, & the modern pictures, period furniture letter box in the wall & which dont work (nor did Arnold Bennett’s—you have to poke with a stick). But the electric light in the coat cupboard does work. And what’s wrong? The plumbers nose—the miner’s canary, again. I mean scenting out differences, & let us hope inferiorities. Of course its admirable in its way—impersonal, breezy, yes, go ahead, facing life, eating dinner at Savoy, meeting millionaires, woman & man of the worldly; but—no, I must add the kindness intelligence & erudition of the admirable effete spectacled swollen eyed Andrews—the cultivated don turned banker, with his devotion to R.—Cecily he calls her, for whom he buys these fish & bookcases. Whats wrong then? Where does the gas escape? I think its the emptiness, the formality, the social strata they live on—appearances, as the Apostles would say: the sense of Now we’re having a dinner party & must talk till 11: tomorrow another. Hospitality to American publisher & the Woolves. Nothing said of any naturalness or spontaneity. Yet thats not quite so; that one cd. go on having dinner every night & never know each other better. No intimacy at the end of that Oxford Street. And I was a little diminished in my own esteem—why? Because .. did they differentiate me from other people? No. Or Leonard? But then isnt this Bloomsbury conceit—our d-d refinement? I went on the roof with Andrews & saw all London—a magnificent metropolis so brushed lip, so ornate, so continental & cosmopolitan at night in that quarter: there’s Oxford Street, theres Hyde Park, thats the new Lyons block of flats. And the West End squares; & oblongs of white light, & yellow light the faces, the rouged faces of offices & steeples & cranes; all very impressive; very soigne, like Mr Ginsburg’s little sharp face: so radiant—& I so blown about, I suppose⁠[?]. Graham came, a little fuddled: had drunk too much I think; made heavy weather with R. She has great vitality: is a broad browed very vigorous, undistinguished woman: but a buffeter & battler: has taken the waves, I suppose; & can talk in any language: why then this sense of her being a lit up modern block, floodlit by electricity?

Friday 28 June

But dinner with the [David] Cecils last night was very good: free & spontaneous; they were all dressed for a party at the Herberts: Origo was there, whom I like. She is young, tremulous, nervous—very—stammers a little—but honest eyed; very blue eyed. Have I already described her? How she came to tea. Anyhow, shes clean & picks her feet up. Talk spurted. (I hope I did not try to be brilliant?) Rachel very diaphanous, simple, erratic, with Molly’s look, some of Desmond’s humour. David growing domed & bald; his hair ruffled. We talked about: fear of people; parties; they were all afraid; Sitwell’s lunch; Osbert such a nervous host; the gilt dolphin: rank; up in the drawing room, Origo (her name is Iris) sat down on purpose I think by me, & oh dear was it for this I got so free & easy?—she has read my books, & was of course full of stumbling enthusiasm; so I made a rush, & talked about writing, spilling out ideas, of a kind. She lives near Siena, in perfect country; they talk of the seasons; harvest; vintage; share with peasants; have a great vintage feast off goose. And we talked about: biography & fiction; but with David pricking up his ears across the room. So he had to be drawn in; & I think we have said the same things before—about the relevant facts; biography as an art. Then the door opened & in came Leo Myers, like a du Maurier drawing; such a perfect white waistcoat, (I had not changed—oh dear, when I have such nice clothes now) & his grizzled distinguished head. But he still looks like a sleepy viper. Well then we talked about novels; & could one write down thoughts for a whole day? He had done this & torn it up. He does not keep a notebook. What shall we do about our biographies? Can one report talk? Fear. He is always afraid. And Origo was silent for half an hour, because of going to the party. But she would lose her fear after the entry was over. Leo will be unhappy the next morning. Why does one do these things? Because this is life, after all. One has to. In the street David said that LM is in love with Iris. Thats why he had come. The sleepy viper in his white waistcoat.

L.’s book selling now; & he is cheerful, & very contrite, in his way, about Mabel. Here he comes in about the question of Ethel writing an introduction to Brewster’s book. And Vita writes that Gwen has to have a terrible operation. And Nessa does not write. And after thunder & heat & cold it is hot again; and in an access of generosity we have lent Monks House to Stephen Tennant, & thank God we are alone this week end.

Sunday 30 June

We went to Swakeleys Farm [Ickenham] yesterday & bought a dog—Sally. She has a fine domed head; is like a three of black diamonds very globular eyes; a bloodhounds muzzle; very affectionate, stipple, 13 months old, clasps L.’s breast, climbs on to his chair, & is afraid of the basement stairs. She cost £18—dear me. Still as we say, its nice to have a good dog. And we shall breed from her. She is very distinguished looking. The only question is, has she intelligence? She has already her own rather gentle whimsical manner—fumbles, paws; is lighter, more nervous, perhaps less solid a character than Pinka. But so far she has no marked fault, unless she is perhaps fastidious about her food. Had her nose been the 18th of an inch longer, she would have been a champion like her sister, who fetched £2, or £300.

Mr Lloyd is a great expert. He lives in a trim villa residence, that is, in fact an old farm; has 1701 on the chimney. But the room where we waited was completely modernised: with all the cups & bowls, cigar cases, engraved with tributes, in what are called perhaps chiffoniers. He has made a very snug place for himself out of the passion for cockers. “A very nice little person” he said. So did the Kennel man. They have their own language. It was broiling hot, & the garden paved with sham crazy paving: all the image of a garden.

[? Thursday 4 July]

Well of course its extremely interesting having to deal with so many different selves. Theres the one that enjoys external life. Will she now insist upon my enjoying external life—the mild fluent chatter of the Buchans? Yes, I did enjoy it. I liked the simplicity the swiftness, the release, the expansion. And L. says “They spend their money getting on—thats why they⁠[re] Governor Generals” & I think thats not true. But how queer to have so many selves—how bewildering!

Monday 15 July

I have let the days slip I see, a good thing no doubt, as this book is too full; but I have left out a good many encounters; my visit to the Buchans, a strenuous day, which left me raddled; & we went to Monks House, where, as I have not noted, Stephen Tennant was planted; & came & talked, Happily gone to Piddinghoe, though; & I slept; then there was the heat wave—still indomitably with us; & then Odette & Clive & the Brehans—she [Odette] a Paris tart, with eyebrows elongated like antennae, to give her the likeness of a bird in flight, she being all for speed & vengeance & venom & vice—not a woman I like; & Clive sparred, nor did she like meeting anyone who knew her ways. Gerald to me grown commonplace & dried, like one of those hams or tongues that hang in country grocers shops: always, too, uneasily reverting to his book, which was only by way of lesson & trial; indeed he spent, some time reading up facts about rogues in the Brit. Mus. But it is fatal to try to excuse one’s works. His wife is a rather faded but L. says very nice, genuine & simple, American; & they go back to their lovely Malaga house, where Gerald has, as he rather ostentatiously intimated, his illegitimate children. There, in an English Colony, they can live patriarchally on £100 a year; & he can for ever turn & fumble over his books; looking, poor man, with those obstinate little eyes, for the right word. But it was a jangled evening, during which, by the way, round the corner at the Bussys, Frances Partridge gave birth to a son; or rather had him cut out: & all went well.

All this time the Bristol speech was weighing on me, and making me unable to get into my swing for the last lap: so I shut down, wrote it, learnt it, said it & went to Bristol, the hottest day of the year on Friday & said it, dripping, to a large, but not I think very appropriate audience. It puzzles me why such displays, using up so much nerve power, should be needed. There was Roger’s face on the canvas, smiling at me, & them. But oh the heavenly relief when we drove off in the hot evening to Bradford on Avon, & slept the night in an ancient workhouse; in the valley [the Old Court Hotel]; with a disordered garden, a stream with rotting sacks of old clothes, & the usual elderly ladies, retired business men, spaniels, bustling landladies & so on. And then, with a divine inspiration, we made across Avebury to Lechlade; went to Fairford & found the Carnival braying outside the church with the painted windows, had tea ad. lib: the milk in enamel jugs, the sugar in zinc bath tubs; under the trees; then slept at Lechlade, walked by the river, saw the moon rise, like a rose petal, & yesterday drove to Kelmscot & peeped over the wall. In this country everything is made of silver grey flaky stone, & the houses cluster round, with their little gables, all crowded, ancient, with roses, with haystacks, & the river flowing in the great grass meadows, all untouched, beyond the builders ring, which begins at Abingdon, & then till London all becomes red brick Georgian; & Riverine, that is gramo-phontic, girls in trousers, young men in shorts, all noisy & strident & a little indecent—a bad lunch at the Quarry Hotel [Bourne End], & so home here.

Nor must I forget Mr Ellis Roberts, not that he is attractive, an inky little podgy underworld man, who came to ask me to be president of the PEN in succession to Wells. This great honour, unanimously offered with Priestly enthusiastic, would involve meeting authors, for which purpose apparently it exists—that authors should meet & discuss each others works. With E.R. in front of me—but no: how could anyone invent such a post, how could anyone accept it? He pretended, poor worm, to feel as I did; which was a lie.

And now, with a brain washed cool & rid of that intolerable speech, I must dream myself back in to my own world—rather a touch & go proceeding: but its no use getting worried; the end must come. & whether its good or bad, Heaven knows.

Tuesday 16 July

A curious sense of complete failure. Margery hasn’t written to me about my speech: according to Janie Pamela thought the whole thing a failure. And it was for this that I ruined my last pages! I cant write this morning. Cant get into the swing. Innumerable worries, about getting people to dine & so on, afflict me. My head is all jangled. And I have to get that d—d speech printed, or refuse to. The director has written. Never again, oh never again!

I think though that I can get the last pages right, if I can only dream myself back into them. Yes, but how dream, when I have to see Susie & Ethel, to see Miss Belsher’s house, to ring up, & write notes & order this & that? Well, be still & ruminate; its only 16th: theres a fortnight before August. And I’m sure that there is a remarkable shape somewhere concealed there. Its not mere verbiage, I think. If necessary I could put it away. But I think no: merely go on & perhaps write a very rapid short sketch, in ink—thats a good plan. Go back & get the central idea, & then rocket into it. And be very controlled, & keep a hand on myself too. And perhaps read a little Shakespeare. Yes, one of the last plays: I think I will do that, so as to loosen my muscles. But oh this anxiety, & the perpetual knocking of the cup out of my hand.

Wednesday 17 July

Last night as I was sitting alone, L. dining with the [Noel-]⁠Bakers, there were three rings, & I went down & let in Julian, who said “I have been given a professorship in China.” He was very much excited, rather alarmed, naturally—it means that he must start in the middle of August & spend 3 years in China at Wu Jong, or some such place, alone on a flooded river. So we talked—intimately, I mean about the past & our lives, for the first time. I’m very sorry he’s to go—the delightful, honest bubbly yet after all so sympathetic & trusty young man. Still, obviously this is his first real experience. He had to break off to answer a trunk call from Tony. He said she spoke with almost too much common sense. But he had always determined not to let his private life shackle him. Then he will travel about China in his holidays, & come back a full grown mature man, with a place in the world. He wants to write on politics & philosophy & to enter politics seriously. He says politics have got more & more on his conscience. They’re on the conscience of all his generation. So he can’t be merely a poet, a writer. I see his dilemma. So he goes, & I’m sorry. Three years. He will be thirty & I 56 alas.

Just now I finished my first wild retyping & find the book comes to 740 pages: that is 174,890 148,000 words: but L think I can shorten: all the last part is still rudimentary & wants shaping; but I’m too tired in the head to do it seriously this moment. I think all the same I can reduce it: & then—? Dear me. I see why I fled, after The Waves, to Flush; One wants simply to sit on a bank & throw stones. I want also to read with a free mind; And to let the wrinkles smooth themselves out. Susie Buchan, Ethel, then Julian—so I talked from 4.30 till 1 am with only 2 hours for dinner & silence.

I think I see that the last chapter slid, be formed round N⁠[orth]’s speech: it must be much more formal; & I think I see how I can bring in interludes—I mean spaces of silence, & poetry & contrast.

Friday 19 July

No. I go on getting preliminary headaches. It is no good trying to do the last spurt, which should be much like a breeze in the heavy elms, these last days here: yes, a wind blowing in the trees that are thick with green leaves. For there must be movement as well as some weight, something for the breeze to lift. And we have Edith [Sitwell] & Eddie Playfair, & Ottoline & Julian & Quentin tonight.

Yesterday we went to tea with Mr & Mrs Standgroom. Coming out we said, no, L. had the technical phrase—but I cant remember it—that they have the world they want. Bedroom suites are made for them; all Tot. Court Road is theirs; the world is to their liking. And gramophones & cases of cutlery & table centres. All this they have & enjoy, genuinely, without any shyness. Standgroom is a wizened parched little man, under her thumb, a clerk in the Customs, who deals with tea. I thought them rather engaging, so pleased with having what everyone has. And Miss B. as she wishes to be called, is quite on top of the situation. Patted my shoulder. No snobbishness. No sense of class differences. And science has helped them to electric toasters: I mean their life materially is much freer & easier than ours at Hyde Park Gate. The only room she did not show us was the W.C. We saw her wedding dress—a pale pink. She does not mean to have children.

Saturday 20 July

But it turned out very well last night: headache lifted—we walked in Regents Park in the rain. Old Edith singular—very, with her great bald face—its sweep of rather repulsive brown—its shock of red hair. So beautiful in some lights; & the thin fan shaped hands & their gestures, timid, appealing, attached to this large fat clumsy body in its black rather sack like dress. She has great wit & some sharp edge of character. Quite decided. Knows her mind. She made us laugh all dinner, talking about W. Lewis, who used to paint her, letting her in, at a chink of the door. Who have you been seeing? Clive Bell? And he wore a patch over one eye; switched it on to another, as he disliked the light. She has a gay rambling butterfly mind; & a good deal of sting. & humanity. In came Ottoline; rather garish, & not so quick in the mind as the rest of us. Eddie a very good listener. Then Julian, with his poems, & Quentin. It was all demonstration on Edith’s part, done for our amusement very difficult to recapture. And something drenched & feeble. She has to get up at 7 to write about Queen Victoria at the bidding of Dick le Mare, who is a magician. Something yielding about her, humble, & yet a lady of quality. “The horrid middle class way” said Ott. Edith echoed her. Looks like a Plantagenet tomb said Ott. So she does, with her high nose, in the air, & her thin lips & her little peering eyes—very medieval. Ottoline said you couldnt read Sh⁠[akespea]⁠re in India—too remote.

Saturday 3 August

With that remark of Ott’s about not reading Shre in India I broke off my London summer abruptly; though it chattered itself out in great style with a dinner to John [Lehmann]—a reconciliation dinner—& the Busseys, at which he laughed so loud & free that my restraint went; & I talked French to Simon, & went round to the Bussys & saw Clive like a white robin redbreast, all got up going to a party at the Courtaulds: but I do it very seldom, he said in a huff, when Simon chaffed him. “Mon cher—vous etes arrivé.”

So the summer ended; & now opens again here, with Nessa back; Charleston in being, though rather intermittent, with Duncan in Rome still, Clive going to Greece, Julian to China, & Nessa proposing to paint the Queen Mary in London. And the harvest is positively orange on the hill, & the country divinely coloured ripe ashcoloured & gold, as I came through Tristram’s Grove up the river.

Nessa came about a cable to China; & we called in at Charleston to suggest—what its no use foraging in my rather dissipated mind to find. For, by way of a jaunt from the book—the unchristened book—I took a flight into Marryat this—& here I broke off, to go & dredge the pond I think.

Friday 16 August

I cannot make a single note here, because I am so terrifically pressed re-writing—yes, typing out again at the rate, if possible, of 100 pages a week, this impossible eternal book. I work without looking up till one: what it now is, & therefore I must go in, leaving a whole heap of things unsaid: so many people, so many scenes, & beauty, & a fox & sudden ideas.

Wednesday 21 August

Up in London yesterday. And I saw this about myself in a book [untraced] at the Times—the most patient & conscientious of artists—which I think is true, considering how I slave at every word of that book. My head is like a like a—pudding, is it—something that mildly throbs & cant breed a word at the end of the morning. I begin fresh enough. And I sent off the first 20 pages or so to Mabel [typist] yesterday.

Margery Fry comes on Friday with her hands full of papers, she says. Another book. Have I the indomitable courage to start on another? Think of the writing & re-writing. Also there will be joys & ecstasies though. Again very hot. I am going to re-paint this room. Went to Carpenters [untraced] yesterday—chose chintzes. Is this worth writing? Perhaps.

Harvest all ready. Blackberries ripe. No mushrooms. Abyssinia. Cabinet summoned. Sitting today. Should I like to be old Baldwin? returning from Aix in this heat. L. has indigestion. Mitz spent the night on the free. Janie left the door open. We have our electric stove.

Thursday 22 August

Worked in the morning. Finished Marryat. Went to Lewes, very hot day; & bought stores, also distemper. And went to the County Library; full of books. So hot after tea: walked along the river bank; a game of bowls; beaten; dined with Keynes’s. Maynard not well—rather damp talk. He went. Talk of Abyssinia. Thunderstorm at 3.30. L. made me come & sleep in the upstairs room. It strikes me that I will call this book, Other People’s Houses.

Thursday 29 August

I had meant to write one matter of fact note daily, but have never had time. My brain all tossing after the mornings work. Julian is leaving Newhaven at this moment I suppose for 3 years. I have been doing the scene of Eleanor’s day with the usual pangs & ecstasies. On Tuesday we went to Sissinghurst; lost L.’s spectacles, & the meat on the top of the car. Saw the great new room. Vita in trousers. Rather woke my affection & regret. Harold gave me Mrs Lindbergh’s book. Woke my insensate obsession—to write P & P—by telling me how a room of ones own is regarded & my American fame. The big Alsatian hunting; the pink tower & the rain on the leaves, L. said, falling as he had not heard it since Ceylon. To dine at Charleston. Julian a little depressed. Duncan laughing about Lady Blanche—his name for G. St Aubyn. Grouse. Nessa composed. Quentin in bed with throat. I very sleepy. Kissed J. in the dark garden. We think of going to China, at any rate think so, to mitigate the parting. Yesterday very drowsy. Walked the Tristram Grove & river walk. L. came to meet me & missed me. Louie’s child attacked by dog. Took it to Lewes. Mr Hancock brought in with injured leg. Very bad. Bach at night; Man playing oboe fainted in the middle. War seems inevitable. I won one game of bowls out of 3. Reading Miss Mole, Abbé Dunnet (good), an occasional bite at Hind & Panther, but brain too expanded. Oh to be done with the book & my own mistress again. Piles of Roger’s papers sent by Margery—a whole box. I have now 3 large boxes, but dare not look in, & am terribly obsessed by P. & P.

Friday 30 August

For a wonder, my head is clear, & my hand does not shake; but then I’ve been doing the Law Courts passage, which went easily: an upper air passage. Now the book seems to me very good.

Last night they sung the Belgian anthem at the Prom: out of respect for the Queen: & after that, the news-reader announced, in his most penetrated with respectful sorrow voice, the death of the Queen in a motor accident. The car ran off the road into a tree, & she was flung out; struck her head. The King kissed her, as she died “& as I could not do anything, I went on” says the most trustworthy observer, a passer by, this morning. That, in its way is a tragedy. Mr Baird [Rodmell resident] had a fit after having tea at Southease. I distempered—the colour is too blue, but better than the green; then we walked to the river, played bowls, & now expect, alas, as I’m in the swim, a teaparty of the most ferocious description, & its a blowing rainy cold day too; the Wolves, Hugh Jones, Angelica & Eve. Not much pleasure to be had, & a tired brain tomorrow; but as I often say—what do I often say? Something to the effect that one must sweep it all up in one’s stride, even as a matter of art. Could I be alone, & write & walk & read, perhaps—but no, I admit the thought at the moment has nothing but heavenly delight in it. As it is, off to Lewes, buying cakes; arrange the room; put the kettle on, & say to Mrs W. Mind the steps.

Saturday 31 August

Only the Wolves came however. Torrents & floods & rain & wind. Edgar [Woolf] like a corpse—not a pleasant one either. Yawned behind his hand. Sylvia nervous, cat faced, making conversation. Chiefly about gold fish dogs & cars. L. valiant: I did my usual owl with Mrs W. & she said, as my reward, there was no talk she enjoyed more. Went to Lewes first, in the flood, without a rain coat; went to Helen Boyd, two nervous twittering spinsters in a panelled room, about servants: want a 3 day a week girl. Called at Mount Street. Olivers out. Hugh Jones waited an hour at Southease; went home. Angelica did not come. Mercifully, as the party was damp & dismal, sitting till 6.30 in the dining room. How it rains, said Mrs W. The tap had overflowed: the window a ripple of water. Read Hind & Panther. D.H.L. by E. (good) & slept.

Everybody talking about Abysinnia, wh. I cannot spell, nor can I form letters, though the morning has been fluent—E. & Parnell [The Years, p. 120]—too fluent. A blowing grey day, laden with water.

Wednesday 4 September

The most critical day since Aug 4th 1914. So the papers say. In London yesterday. Writings chalked up all over the walls. “Dont fight for foreigners. Briton should mind her own business.” Then a circle with a symbol in it. Fascist propaganda, L. said. Mosley again active. The Queen of B’s funeral. Flags at half mast. Bought an umbrella for 25/-. The first And I think I will call the book “The Years” good umbrella I’ve had for years. Man on the bus saw it was new, with a tassel.

L. saw Miss Swinstead Smith, a very nervous, nice, odd shabby woman, youngish; her first book; Constables almost published it but cried off on commercial grounds. We are going to do it though. She lives at Sennen in a cottage rent £12 a year. I went to L⁠[eiceste]⁠r. Sqre & bought silk for nightgown. Mabel at the flat, very competent. Hot, windy. Home to grouse early. Now pouring. Letter from Denny, a silly gushing letter, has a son. Nature. She writes worse than she talks. Perhaps its writing to me. And Queenie Leavis also writes, a priggish letter, drawing attention to Life as we have known it, in that prigs manual, Scrutiny. All they can do is to schoolmaster.

Oh how it pours! I used my umbrella for the first time to cross the garden. Cant write today. I suppose after yesterday. Nessa in London. We saw a snake eating a toad: it had half the toad in, half out; gave a suck now & then. The toad slowly disappearing. L. poked its tail; the snake was sick of the crushed toad, & I dreamt of men committing suicide & cd. see the body shooting through the water.

Thursday 5 September

I’ve had to give up writing The Years—thats what its to be called—this morning. Absolutely floored. Sally in bed. Cant pump up a word. Yet I can see, just, that somethings there; so I shall wait, a day or two, & let the well fill. It has to be damned deep this time—740 pages in it. I think, psychologically, this is the oddest of my adventures. Half my brain dries completely; but I’ve only to turn over, & there’s the other half, I think, ready, quite happily to write a little article. Oh if only anyone knew anything about the brain. And, even today, when I’m desperate, almost in tears looking at the chapter, unable to add to it, I feel I’ve only got to fumble & find the end of the ball of string—some start off place, someone to look at Sara perhaps—no, I dont know—& my head would fill & the tiredness go. But I’ve been waking & worrying. Bothered about Li’s indigestion & his loss of weight, with the apple picking & the Cttee meeting autumn coming on.

A very sensational voice on the loudspeaker last night. M⁠[ussolini]. closes the door. Deep disappointment. What next? &c. But the papers this morning are less melodramatic, & incline to think that the affair will drag on undecided for some time. I was also in a stew about war & patriotism last night. And when it comes to my thinking about my country! Thank God, John Bailey’s life is out, & I shall seek consolation there. And write about Mrs Lindbergh?

Friday 6 September

I am going to wrap my brain in green dock leaves for a few days: 5, if I can hold out; till the children, L.’s nieces, have gone. If I can—for I think a scene is forming. Why not make an easier transition: Maggie looking at the Serpentine say; & so avoid that abrupt spring? Isn’t it odd that this was the scene I had almost a fit to prevent myself writing? This will be the most exciting thing I ever wrote, I kept saying. And now its the stumbling block. I wonder why? too personal, is that it? Out of key? But I wont think. A flutter & clutter of engagements: Nessa; Stephen [Tennant], Ethel, then the children; & L., as I know, is very touchy, dear love, about his family: an inferiority complex, I call it, thinking how much more vigorous & interesting my relations are: missing Julian; yes. Still whats odd is how nice people are: children always. So there’s no great harm done if I have to give up 48 hours.

Hugh, like Pipsy about the nose & eyes, Ang⁠[e]⁠l⁠[ica] & Eve & Q. to tea yesterday. Bowls & archery. Into Lewes, shopping, which I dislike. Got Mrs Thompsett to come: Sandy clear skinned; was distempering kitchen, bright green; rather a good colour. I must get Rosie to make my curtains. Reading. Miss Mole: fair, but soft; & Stella Benson but I’m hard on novels, & an old dr. called Salter, & Dryden, & Alfieri. How soon one gets the hang of a written language! My gift I think—the shape of the sentence. Violent wind & rain; violent sun & light; & they go on talking, threatening, advancing & retreating at Geneva. Look how clear my hand is when I don’t write fiction of a morning. Head cool now at 1 instead of parboiled.

Saturday 7 September

A heavenly quiet morning reading Alfieri by the open window & not smoking. I believe one could get back to the old rapture of reading if one did not write. The difficulty is, writing makes one⁠[’s] brain so hot it cant settle to read; & then when the heat goes, I’m so tired in the head, I can only skirmish. But I’ve stopped 2 days now The Years: & feel the power to settle calmly & firmly on books coming back at once. John Bailey’s life, come today, makes me doubt though—what? Everything. Sounds like a mouse squeaking under a mattress. But I’ve only just glanced & got the smell of Lit. dinner, Lit. Sup, Lit this that & the other—& the one remark to the effect that Virginia Woolf of all people, has been given Cowper by Desmond, & likes it! I, who read Cowper when I was 15—d—d nonsense.

Monday 10 September

A not so heavenly morning. Children staying here. Chill. L. in a stew about Stephen [Tennant]—that is he wants to come: why have S. 3 times & not Kingsley Martin. A very old, sorry, but not serious story. And yet how foolish to have even these disagreements; & yet I suppose how inevitable—magnets which draw other little straws along. Can I read, write or think though, going for a picnic, & the children—nice lively undistinguished brats—shooting. Yet how quick & hard & unexpected childrens minds are. Everything within 10 miles seen exactly; their school; the maid who’s in love with the gardener; a solicitor not so good as a barrister: the rank of the girls fathers: the whole of society in one drop.

Thursday 12 September

Mornings which are neither quiet nor heavenly, but mixed of hell & ecstasy: never have I had such a hot balloon in my head as re-writing The Years; because its so long; & the pressure is so terrific. But I will use all my art to keep my head sane. I will stop writing at 11.30 & read Italian or Dryden and so dandle myself along.

To Ethel at Miss Hudson’s yesterday. As I sat in the complete English Gentleman’s home, I wondered how anybody could tolerate that equipage; & thought how a house should be portable like a snail shell. In future perhaps people will flirt out houses like little fans; & go on. There’ll be no settled life within walls. There were endless clean, well repaired rooms. A maid in a cap. Cakes on pagoda trays. A terrible array of glossy brown furniture, & books—red sham leather. Many nice old rooms, but the manor house has been embellished & made of course selfconsciously elaborate. A ball room: a library—empty. And Miss Hudson all brushed up with her Pekinese, a competent ex mayor of Eastbourne, with waved grey hair, & all so neat & stout, & the silver frames askew; & the air of order, respectability, commonplace. “I’m going to call on the vicars wife.” Ethel immensely red & stout; churning out, poor old woman, the usual indefatigable egotism about deafness & her Mass. She must have a scene every six months. No. But of course, to be deaf, to be 76—well, back to Charleston with Eve & Angelica. And we called on the Wigrams & snubbed Stephen off.

Friday 13 September

What a combination for the superstitious! Driving off to visit Margaret & Lilian at Dorking; & I have got into a mild flood I think with The Ps Years. The difficulty is always at the beginning of chapters or sections where a whole new mood has to be caught plumb in the centre.

Richmond accepts my Marryat & thanks me for his poor little knighthood! L. is made all rigid by that d—d fool Brewster & his complaints about the photographs. To make matters worse, Dr Mary Gordon rings up to bother us about her life of the Ladies of Llangollen; & it has turned grey & windy. Am I to ask Angelica or not? These are my troubles, as the man said … Yesterday L. took the car in; (but I’m making up scenes: this began in the middle of last night). Then we walked to Lewes, & found the new way, after all these years, by the Canal, under the Bridge. And home to bowls, & veal cutlets. Reading Love for Love, Life of Anthony Hope, &c. A man could live on £200 at Oxford if he lived at home.

Sunday 15 September

A terrific downpour. Never was such rain, I think, as this year. Autumn showing through. Autumn birds chirping through the rain. A queer book, Hope’s life—so neat, discreet, & somehow dated. An Edwardian writer making £70,000 out of books in 10 years; very much in the world, like a du Maurier; yet sensitive, depressed: much left out I guess; only a decorous shell, sitting sucking a gold knobbed cane by the Row. But genuine in its well bred way.

I am thinking I will broach the three boxes of Roger; very staidly, merely beginning to drop a few facts into my brain. Indeed I must, as people want letters & so on. But I swear I will not let it buzz me into excitement. I will keep a space for my P. P. little book. Anthony Hope lived in dread of going sterile. I dont think I ever envisage that as a possibility. I always say on the contrary, Shall I ever have time enough to write out all thats in my head? A much happier state; though suppose what’s in my head becomes sillier & feebler? But why should it? Not if I vary it sufficiently: what with pamphlets, criticism, poetry, fiction, & as I think a play perhaps. But then I’m a very slow writer. He did his book yearly. And The Years (that name is fixed; dropped like a billiard ball into a pocket) will have taken me very nearly 3 years—say I finish it by Christmas. And I never think, seriously, of dying.

Nessa & Duncan are to come to tea; Angelica & Eve to stay the night; then London, & L.’s labour party tomorrow. So the summer ends itself. A very hard working summer.

Margaret & Lilian in a pale yellow house, fitted as compactly as a ships cabin—fires let into the wall—baths turning into cupboards more or less—in a wood. Very nice tree opposite the sitting room, & spotted woodpeckers. The best view of that silly pretty Surrey country: M. in a cap; L. very blind. We had so much to say, they were so starved of talk, that in fact we said things of the utmost triviality. That was queer. And had to see over the house. A pile of dull 19th Century classics that L⁠[ilian]. wants to sell. All spick & span: very blue & yellow. M.’s melodramatic bad taste surprising. We drove through Rusper & other small dignified Surrey towns lying shut in, airless, among hedges: merely country. Now to write letter after letter. But I cant cross the garden in this rain. Percy has to hide. Even the Church bells, I think, dont ring. A black bird digging in the grass. And the rooks cawing through the down rush; through the mist of rain.

Tuesday 17 September

So they came: I mean all the Bells, & Janie, growing a little elderly & showing her grandfather the shoemaker, but very gayly dressed; a coloured comforter round her neck; a chic little knitted cap, & a black coat with silver buttons. Quentin like a large red & white sheepdog. Eve very pretty; mouse like with her pointed twitching nose. When I woke her early next morning she looked just like a white sleeping mouse. Angelica suddenly depressed. I think I did not get enough glow into the dinner, & she thought why did I want to come?

London yesterday: a violent storm of wind all night. Garden a litter of apples & branches. Percy busy staking up trees.

[Friday 20 September]

Yes it was a terrific storm; a storm to mark, I suppose. All the trees chocolate brown on the wind side; little leaves like chipped potatoes. We went to Seaford & saw the explosions of white water over the lighthouse. The cars were stopped by a policeman. Sea coming over the road. (I passed 5 minutes making up The Years, which is now going strong: only then we have Tom for the week end of course).

People were standing under the shelter of the Buckle Inn [facing the sea]. I went creeping round while L. took a photograph, & saw the people standing in the upper window, looking out: very 18th century; the lower windows & cellars boarded up. Clive Angelica & Q. yesterday. I’m ashamed to say I had longed for this week to be all alone; reading; never had a quiet week all this summer, & the balm it would be—& even a tea party means apprehension, breakage. Went to Lewes; bought a cake; left the car, tried walking home; fine but a great tearing wind; so stopped at Iford & took the bus. Poor old Clive a little battered I thought. A grey tuft. He has a curious antiquity, premature age, sometimes: I suppose when the top doesn’t spin. He had been spinning round Greece with Dadie, Shepherd [Sheppard], aristocrats, schoolmasters; was impressed by the beauty; enjoyed himself vastly. Must have done his owl vociferously. Was very nice, I’ve no doubt, & had dined God knows with what Lallas & Hoffmans & the rich & the great at Venice. All determined on war. Clive is writing a letter to the N.S. against war. War’s so awful it cant be right anyhow—an argument for which I like him: his genuine humanity. Dislike of being uncomfortable himself: yes; but he dislikes other people’s unhappiness too. Says Mu⁠[ssoli]⁠ni is mad—the Italians say so; but all the young are frothed up. Very cold. Sat over the fire. Two nights ago I started reading Roger. There’s all the schoolboy letters to begin on: whether its wise, I dont know. But I think I can—the boys are in the churchyard, & want to climb over & get our chestnuts, but see me—mass my day all together.

Monday 23 September

Reflections on Tom week end: that it is too long. Cant write. That he is more masterly; tells a story like one who has the right; is broader & bonier & more wild eyed—long almond shaped eyes—that he means to write modern verse plays: that he is self confident although going up Charleston Lane in the dark last night (Lottie advancing in her red jacket) he told me that he has no self confidence: Joyce has; but Joyce is interminably bored with everything. What can he do when he’s finished this book? Perhaps thats why he procrastinates. We dined at Charleston. Nessa ordered eleven grouse, having doubled the number, thinking of them halved: Clive, Janie, Angelica & Eve. Acting. A. did not remember her part. We walked. Long silences. Bruce Richmond brooded over the week end. His week end: his rotund country gentleman ways: port hock bedroom candles; & telling little stories. Tom likes going there; is magisterially accepting new experiences. Likes, more than we do, respectability. Went to service at 8 on Sunday: a wet morning, & he hea⁠[r]⁠d one old woman say to another—in the churchyard, “And she was lying in bed with a still born child beside her.” But he did his duty. A very nice man, Tom; I’m very fond of Tom, & at last not much knocked off my perch by him. That is, not as I was when he came here & I was writing Jacob’s. Room. Now he cant much disturb The Years, though he makes me feel that I want to write a play.

Thursday 26 September

Why is this—that is the first scene with Sally & Maggie in the bedroom, the most difficult I have ever written?

Winifred Holtby is, I rather suspect, dying. It is a very fine day. Two luggers with brown sails are moving very slowly down the river. We were in London yesterday. And London is in full swing. “The Abyssinians have mobilised!” exclaims one suburban lady to another in the bus. And the other says “That was in the paper yesterday”. A great swarm in Rymans where I went to buy a case for my Roger notes. In future I shall write in loose leaf books, & so avoid these swelling pages. Mabel had a very nice lunch. I watched the men in T⁠[avistock]⁠ck Sqre eating on the pavement. They are having the road up with a drill. They eat with the point of the knife. They have lunch wrapped in newspaper. They warm some drink in a bucket. They have at least an hour off. But then I work my brain I say to myself. Belsher ill. Miss West travelling. Our last day up. Very glad to get back here. But the boys are making a bonfire in the field. We pray for a few days peace. Now 2 men want to come tomorrow to discuss the WEA at Rodmell. This must be mastered. L. had a certain amount of row with Kingsley about the L. party & the League.

[? Sunday 29 September]

Yesterday I saw the kingfisher again on the river. It flies across & across, very near the surface: it has a bright orange chocolate under side. And it is a tropical bird, sitting weighted on the bank. I have also seen a stoat—brown with a white tipped tail. Yesterday I went to Moggery Poke, back by the river. L. met me with Sarah [the dog], who wont walk with me. Her love increases. And I read the Lovers Melancholy & skimmed the top of the words; & want to go on reading things miles away—beautiful hard words, remote. Not Mrs Easdale, who is silly, egotistic, sloppy, & very conventional. I am shocked to find Rodmell patched on to those pages.

Wednesday 2 October

Yesterday we went to the L⁠[abour]. P⁠[arty]. meeting at Brighton, & of course, though I have refused to go again this morning, I am so thrown out of my stride that I cant hitch on to The Years again. Why? The immersion in all that energy & all that striving for something that is quite oblivious of me; making me feel that I am oblivious of it. No, thats not got it. It was very dramatic: Bevin’s attack on Lansbury. Tears came to my eyes as L⁠[ansbury]. spoke. And yet he was posing I felt—acting, unconsciously, the battered Christian man. Then Bevin too acted I suppose. He sank his head in his vast shoulders till he looked like a tortoise. Told L. not to go hawking his conscience round. And what is my duty as a human being? The women delegates were very thin voiced & insubstantial. On Monday one said, It is time we gave up washing up. A thin frail protest, but genuine. A little reed piping, but what chance against all this weight of roast beef & beer—which she must cook? All very vivid & interesting; but over lapping: too much rhetoric, & what a partial view: altering the structure of society: yes, but when its altered? Do I trust Bevin to produce a good world, when he has his equal rights? Had he been born a duke—My sympathies were with Salter who preached non-resistance. He’s quite right. That should be our view. But then if society is in its present state? Happily, uneducated & voteless, I am not responsible for the state of society. These are some of the minnows that go round my head, & distract me from what is, after all, my work. A good thing to have a day of disturbance—2 days even—but not 3. So I didnt go; & cant really write. However I will make myself when I’ve done this. Odd the enormous susceptibility of my mind to surface impressions: how I suck them in & let them swirl about. And how far does anybodies single mind or work matter? Ought we all to be engaged in altering the structure of society? Louie said this morning she had quite enjoyed doing for us, was sorry we were going. Thats a piece of work too in its way. And yet I cant deny my love of fashioning sentences. And yet … L. has gone there, & I daresay I’ll discuss it with him. He says politics ought to be separate from art. We walked out in the cold over the marsh, & discussed this. The fact is too my head easily tires. Yes, too tired to write. But a good thing to be too tired for that reason, minnows swirling, now & then. I will do some Roger.

Tuesday 15 October

Since we came back I have been in such full flush, with Years all the Seen: Janie, Walther, Joan Easdale; Nessa. Clive. Helen. Duncan. been to Richmond Park (saw snake by the Serpentine) Concert. Saw Morgan & Bob & Eth Williamson. Asked to speak at some lunch. Read all early R. letters. noted them also library books: also Keats: also MSS. morning, Roger between; tea & dinner, a walk, & people, that here’s a blank. And I only scamp Roger this evening because I wore a hole in my back yesterday; couldn’t write this morning; & must go up & receive Miss Grueber (to discuss a book on women & fascism—a pure have yer as Lottie would say) in 10 minutes. Yes, it has been 10 days of calm full complete bliss. And I thought how I shall hate it. Not a bit. London is quiet dry comfortable. I find my dinner cooked for me. No children screaming. And the sense of forging ahead easily strongly (this petered out today) at The Years. Three days I got into wild excitement over The Next War. Did I say the result of the L.P. at Brighton was the breaking of that dam between me & the new book, so that I couldn’t resist dashing off a chapter: stopped myself; but have all ready to develop—the form found I think—as soon as I get time? And I plan to do this sometime this next spring, while I go on accumulating Roger. This division is by the way perfect, & I wonder I never hit on it before—some book or work for a book thats quite the other side of the brain between times. Its the only way of stopping the wheels & making them turn the other way, to my great refreshment, & I hope improvement. Alas, now for Grueber.

Wednesday 16 October

What I have discovered in writing The Years is that you can only get comedy by using the surface layer—for example, the scene on the terrace. The question is can I get at quite different layers by bringing in music & painting together with certain groupings of human beings. This is what I want to try for in the raid scene: to keep going & influencing each other: the picture; the music, & the other direction—the action—I mean character telling a character—while the movement (that is the change of feeling as the raid goes on) continues.

Anyhow, in this book I have discovered that there must be contrast: one strata, or layer cant be developed intensively, as I did I expect in The Waves, without harm to the others. Thus a kind of form is, I hope, imposing itself, corresponding to the dimensions of the human being: one should be able to feel a wall made out of all the influences; & this should in the last chapter close round them at the party so that you feel that while they go on individually it has completed itself. But I havent yet got at this. I’m doing Crosby—an upper air scene this morning. The rest of going from one to another seems to me to prove that this is the right sequence for me at any rate. I’m enjoying the sequence, without that strain I had in The Waves.

Tuesday 22 October

I am again held up in The Years by my accursed love of talk. That is to say, if I talk, to Rose Macaulay from 4. to 6.30: to Elizabeth Bowen from 8 to 12 I have a dull heavy hot mop inside my brain next day & am a prey to every flea, ant gnat (as for example that I let P. Quennel misrepresent me & never answered him). So I have shut the book—Sal & Martin in Hyde Park—& spent the morning typing out Roger’s memoirs. This is a most admirable sedative & refresher. I wish I always had it at hand. Two days rest of that nerve is my prescription; but rest is hard to come by. I think I shall refuse all invitations to chatter parties till I’m done. Could it only be by Christmas! For instance, if I go to Edith Sitwell’s Cocktail this evening I shall only pick up some exacerbating picture: I shall froth myself into sparklets; & there’ll be the whole smoothing & freshening to begin again. But after The Years is done then I shall go everywhere: & expose every cranny to the light. As it is, who doesn’t come here? Every day this week I must talk. But in my own room I’m happier, I think. So I will now plod quietly through the Bridges letters, & perhaps begin to arrange all Helen’s tangled mass.

Sunday 27 October

Adrian’s birthday, it strikes me. And we asked him to dine. No, I will not hurry this book. I’m going to let every scene shape fully & easily in my hands, before sending it to be typed, even if it has to wait another year. I wonder why time is always allowed to harry one. I think it rather good this morning. I’m doing Kitty’s party. And in spite of the terrific curb on my impatience—never have I held myself back so drastically—I’m enjoying this writing more fully & with less strain &—whats the word? I mean its giving me more natural pleasure than the others. But I have such a pressure of other books kicking their heels in the hall its difficult to go on, very slowly.

Yesterday we walked across Ken Wood to Highgate & looked at the 2 little old Fry houses. Thats where Roger was born & saw the poppy. I think of beginning with that scene. Yes, that book shapes itself. Then theres my Next War—which at any moment becomes absolutely wild, like being harnessed to a shark; & I dash off scene after scene. I think I must do it directly The Years is done. Suppose I finish The Years in Jan: then dash off The War (or whatever I call it) in six weeks: & do Roger next summer.

It is a grey dim windy day: I walked along the Euston Rd. & was beaten by its sheer gloom; came back & did Roger—P⁠[amela]’s letters; & I’m furious with Ellis Roberts who has told the PEN I wish to be elected.

Wednesday 30 October

By way of a symptom—just because, reaching for a book, I opened my first draft of What are we to do & read the first page, I cannot settle to The Years save by dint of severe prodding. My mind is once more flooded with the desire to be at that argument. It is true that this was, I suppose, suggested by having Miss White—nice not very highly intelligent but fresh, with a prominent nose, & eyes that oddly changed from hard to soft—to tea: (a New Zealander; her father a doctor; has been ranging about the world in Cargo steamers; now lives in a flat at Highgate)—then Miss Lynd, & Adrian & William to dinner. So that no doubt my nerve tension is loosened & twangs slightly. Anyhow, here is my hour for reading Roger or a tiresome half good half bad MS—wasted in mind spinning. A very fine October day.

Went to Peace Conference, by way of a joke, yesterday, & saw several baboon faced intellectuals; also some yearning, sad, green dressed negroes & negresses, looking like chimpanzees brought out of their cocoanut groves to try to make sense of our pale white platitudes. I took some notes; walked across the Green Park; bought a little Italian frame for 7/6. The woman said (when I only had 5/) “I can trust you—yes, for two days. And if you dont pay me, well then bad luck to you”. So home just in time to put buns in the oven for Miss White, who said, “Oh but you see this isn’t just visiting a publisher. It is seeing two famous people” & she stayed getting more at her ease, till 6.30. Then my Gray (3 volumes) had come; but I had no time to cut it, for at 8 the party began, & they stayed till 12.45. And then Lynd couldn’t get her mother’s new car to start, & A⁠[drian]. forgot his keys & came back to find them. A. very spruce lively & witty. We hit it off when other people are there. I have an impression that he is far more social than he was—staying away with the Lintotts. Miss L. rather too ‘dressed’ in red plush, with one jewel, & dark hair. Not clear cut enough about the nose & lips, a little brushed with the Lynd, I mean the professional scribbler, Priestley, Walpole brush. She said that Squire now runs about won’t do anything, drinks, & has deposited Lady S. in a small ugly house in Hampstead, being no longer the old country gentleman, but merely what he was originally—that is a scallywag. Mind I suppose all rubbed away by his scribbling—if he ever had one, which L. denies. Now today we have to go to tea with Mrs W⁠[oolf]: tomorrow Clive’s lunch; then M⁠[onks].H⁠[ouse]. & a meeting in the schoolroom; & on Monday I have to go to the BBC out of sheer curiosity, to hear a record which I have no intention of supplying. No answer from the P.E.N. I must note that not to be answered is far more crushing than to be answered. Even more than the usual shower of anti-Fascist leaflets. I go up & find that the Americans demand that I shall cable at their expense.

Friday 1 November

Now again I pay the penalty of mixing fact & fiction: cant concentrate on The Years. I have a sense that one cannot control this terrible fluctuation between the 2 worlds. Take the past days: Mrs Bennett touching me on the shoulder in Kensington Gardens. “This is Virginia’. A stocky little bright eyed girl in spectacles. Firing off bombs; but doesnt like the explosion. We talk about the name ‘Virginia’. L. emerges from the Lavatory. We go to Mrs W.; very hot; Flora there; in come the Howes [unidentified] Mrs H. has collected 100 seals (glass: not animal) at Caledonian market. A good day when she only spends a penny: has sometimes to spend 2/- What for? Her only stimulus—collecting glass seals. Mr H. walks. Off home. Ethel Sands asks me to see the Baroness Nostitz [see note 6 below]. Have to ring up & arrange to be back at 4.30. Cant get her.

Lunch with Clive. Desmond & Christabel. Confusion about Lottie & Dottie. We each sketched different characters; Lottie prehensile—Oh dear me no, said Desmond, poor girl, she’s amassed thing after thing & cant order them—Oh its Lottie youre talking about. Lord Berners’ Sapphist skit. No. You shall not waste your time on it. Lunch. “I’ve been talking about Lytton,” dining with James. C. becomes emotional. Cant we put up a tablet to Francis. Saint & Wit. But where? Gerrard Street? Do we like monuments? Yes, she says. Clive chivalrously agrees. Then, just as I began to talk to Desmond, easily, about Santayana’s book, C. chips in: must read us the D. of Argyll’s letter, (which I had read in [illegible] book). This finished the lunch.

(And I forgot that Ka came the night before, all in red lace, & as usual determined to assert her dignity her importance her social value, so that we spent all the time trotting out acquaintances & honours—this she does whenever she emerges from Cornwall) Then home; Lady Howard & the Baroness for L.: then up to Mary⁠[Hutchinson]’s, because she was hurt on the telephone that we hadn’t written; Rothschilds & Aldous Huxleys; more talk; sticky at the end: A. says all this signing anti-F⁠[ascist]. rumpus is mere chitter chatter; got off on biology; Victor had a copy of Gray’s Poper in red volume. I dont like that way of book buying & so home to bed & so cant even write this. Raining & we go to Rodmell where L. speaks. Yet its fluid & amusing in a way—not a patch on the other though. I must draw in for the last lap, would my friends allow.

Tuesday 5 November

A specimen day, yesterday: a specimen of the year 1935 when we are on the eve of the Duke of Gloucester’s wedding: of a general election: of the Fascist revolution in France: & in the thick of the Abyssinian war: it being mild warm November weather; at 2.30 we went to the BBC & listened to some incomparable twaddle—a soliloquy which the BBC requests me to imitate (a good idea, all the same, if one were free) with all the resources of the BBC behind one: real railway trains; real orchestras; noises; waves, lions & tigers &c; at 3. we reach Dorland Hall; a loudspeaker proclaiming the virtues of literature, the Princess Louise having just declared the show open & said that books are our best friends. There we meet old stringy Rose Macaulay, beating about, like a cat a hawking odds & ends; Gerald Duckworth, covered with small prickly red squares, as if he had fallen on his face in a bramble bush; (Fisher) Unwin; & so out: home; at 5.15: telephone; the Baroness Nostitz has arrived early; will we see her now; up she comes; a monolithic broad faced Hindenburg, bulky; cant get in or out of my chair; says Germany is the better for Hitler;—so they say: but of course I’m not a politician: I want to get some young man to lecture on English poetry; has a rather hard, dominating impassive eye: slow, stately; must have been a beauty; statuesque; aristocratic. Then a card: in comes the Indian; stays till 7.30. was turned out of a carriage in Bengal.

Thats an Indian! the lady cried

If you dont go, I shall kick you.

He jumped out, happily into bushes, as the train was going 15 miles an hour. Liberty, justice. A girl who shot at the Governor. Hatred of the British rule. Still, its better than the Italian. Mss [Mussolini] is paying their fare & hotel bills in order to get them to side with him. You are our allies. The British will be kicked out. And now Morgan rings up—what about Jules Romains? Will you meet him. May I lunch to discuss the French question. And so we go on.

Another specimen day.

Sunday 10 November

Specimen days have somewhat relaxed later in the week. I seem to recall some walks—a great deal of rain: the D & Dss of Gloucester driving through the Sqre: she bright & gay: he like Cory: & then I met the royal coach empty & noted the white bottoms of the postilions, & the rather sheepish look of the footmens faces in the daylight, all dressed up. Then, last night there was Day Lewis at the Book show, a man who makes queer faces; very nervous at first; with blurred eyes; a nice sensitive young man; but I think it would have been better read, his speech. All poets are misfits & therefore want communion with the common people. A good deal about the Trinity: some bite in him: to explain their desire to write not pure poetry but——? What exactly is poetry that is part the desire to communicate with the common people? Political poetry? Certainly its not easy, one word Wordsworth poetry. Instead of the Leech Gatherer [Wordsworth] the tank & poison gas. Yes. Too much theory: too little gift I think & too much public speaking. But then if he wants to be in touch with the common people he must talk at Book shows. Not very anxious I think to dine with us, for which I liked him. The usual hurry & scramble of literary gents: poor red scrannel faced [Herbert] Palmer, & Rose again hawking round the area railings for scraps. So to dine at Gennaro—not very good; to N. Gallery movies—not very good; & home in the cold.

A letter from Bruce R. asking me to write more leaders; from Joe, asking me to write for The Listener. And L. says we are going to have a very lean year at the Press. I must consider money again for a moment—how not to make too much or too little, & so on.

Monday 18 November

Our election week end was not a wise move, personally. I was silly though. Why go to Patcham in pouring rain? Even if I didn’t stay in London & hear Ethel’s case, as I wished, it was foolish to have hours trapesing in the violent wind & wet to Rodmell. A wild grey white sea, & so many stops all the time, as we passed it, to take up the workmen who are building at Peacehaven. So a headache next day; & this morning a throat. I am held up & damped down. We missed Quentin & Nessa last night, from headache; and have to dine with Raymond & go to Aldous party tonight.

It struck me tho’ that I have now reached a further stage in my writers advance. I see that there are 4? dimensions; all to be produced; in human life; & that leads to a far richer grouping & proportion: I mean: I: & the not I: & the outer & the inner—no I’m too tired to say: but I see it: & this will affect my book on Roger. Very exciting: to grope on like this. New combinations in psychology & body—father like painting. This will be the next novel, after The Years.

Thursday, 21 November

Yes, but these upper air scenes get too thin. Reflection after a morning of Kitty & Edward in Richmond. At first theyre such a relief though after the other that one gets blown & flies ahead. The thing is to take it quietly; go back; & rub out detail; too many ‘points’ made: too jerky, & as it were talking ‘at’. I want to keep the individual & the sense of things coming over & over again & yet changing. Thats whats so difficult: to combine the two.

Last night L. was woken at one, by a man shouting abuse of Woolf & Quack in German under his window. Ought we to tell the police? I think it was a drunken undergraduate.

After our dinner at Raymond’s with Aldous & the subconscious hostility I always feel there, I’m facing the fact that my next book, Professions, The Next War, will need some courage. 2 million women all longing for men, Aldous said. Raymond insisted, with his little hard squeak, that men were now unfairly treated: have to maintain a woman wife. Went on to Albany. Party for the German theyve married to the postman—for £50. I talked to crazy Bob Nichols, & had my hand pressed by the rather sordid fat [word illegible] greyfaced intense Naomi [Mitchison], who wants to come & see us.

Friday 22 November

The four old ladies sitting round the tea table at Aubrey House last night made me think of a nest of little rats.; Why? One got up—Mrs Bridges—more pointed than the others. People say she’s like Lady Fry. Old Eliz? pours, tea; deaf; carpenters; once smoked when 9. Rachel brings out book about Aubrey House. Its a 17th Century house, like a college, with a quadrangle, trees. Long 18th Cent looking room; all shining: with the Dutch pictures collected by Mr Alexander. “In this room there was gummed together the first petition for Women’s Rights. John Stuart Mill carried it to Parliament. The Peter Taylors had this house. We’ve had it for 60 years.” Some joke about one of the sisters not being yet 60. Three boxes of cigarettes—“My nephews”. I sat over log fire with Mrs B. who said she cdnt write. B⁠[ridges]. refused to have a Biogy. Used to put his feet on the mantelpiece & say “Now I’ll write a letter.” Did it first in pencil & then ink. Used to say things straight out. Roger very sensitive—used to stay with them—a 3 cornered friendship. Didnt know his wife—she wore a check skirt—not at my ease with her—sorry about the quarrel over the pictures: R. minded very much—Well I’ve really nothing to tell you: Story of bowls at Failand. May we play bowls father? Robert wants to. R⁠[oger] asking Sir Edward’s permission.

Wednesday 27 November

Too many specimen days—so I cant write, yet, Heaven help me, have a feeling that Ive reached the no man’s land that I’m after; & can pass from outer to inner, & inhabit eternity. A queer very happy free feeling, such as I’ve not had at the finish of any other book. And this too is a prodigious long one. So what does it mean?

But Oh my specimen days: Sunday Ray [Strachey] for tea; dine at the hotel with Mrs W.: course after course, all bad; to Nessa’s: she & Duncan alone with new cat, Ruff: Monday, to the NatGall Francks [unidentified]; rather lost my head, too tired to think; settle my mind; Miss White [Whyte,] Stephen S. dine: Sally Graves Helen Igor in after; Tuesday; Stephen Tom & Edith Hales (Boston) tea. Black edged card handed me. M & Mme Gillet; all ruined, dryed: 3 hours wasted. L. annoyed, no music, too tired to read, & cant write; & Ethel Sands to tea, & Vita lunches tomorrow. Why cant I get quit of it all? Still happiness persists. And now for 30 mins of Roger’s letters to Helen—that vast sparkling dust heap, the best so far; but how to dig out? how to represent? I must read & read & wait on the moment of illumination. Cold frosty weather, dry for a miracle, & very sunny.

[? Thursday 28 November]

Another balk this morning: cant get the start off of the last chapter right. Whats wrong I dont know. But I needn’t hurry. And the main thing is to let ideas blow, easily; & come softly pouring. And not to be too emphatic. Of course to step straight into the middle of a new character is difficult: North: & I’m a little exacerbated; meant to have a quiet week, & heres Nelly C⁠[ecil]. & Nan Hudson both asking to come; & will I ring up: & Nan has a Turkish friend. But I will not be rushed. No.

Wednesday 4 December

I must take 10—no 5—minutes off before going up, & from reading Roger to Helen. I read & read & the packets hardly lessen, & I think of love, & L. & me; & the different lives. Yesterday Day Lewis wrote that his agent advises him to leave us for a larger firm, as he must make money. This revives the question of the Press—once again, once again. We both said walking at Caen Wood yesterday, we will now decide on a date & stop it. Yes: reading Roger I want to be free to travel as he was: free of MSS. Yet how keep our books? Or shall we try to hand it on to an intelligent youth? I rather doubt if such exist, or able to run it alone, & then we should still be tied. Raining. A lovely perfectly filled day yesterday: walk; alone; Romeo & Juliet in the evening. How fresh, rich, various coloured—& then think of the pale New England morality murder.

Tuesday 10 December

I have only 3 minutes before the clock strikes, & not much paper left. I spend my spare hour or half hour reading Roger to Helen—that explains. And next year I shall have a loose leaf book. So many people again. Nelly Cecil yesterday. I like her. Better than Colefax who cut me for Madame d’Erlanger. Thats a joke. Clive intends to spread it & rub it in: never mind.

I have promised to deliver The Years by 15th Feb. And had a bad mornings work in consequence. And Angus [Davidson] & Mary Fisher tonight. But if I want more time, I shall take it. I’m not time’s fool—no. Save that I must go up to lunch. Always write as if a cynical eye, doubting were on me. Nessa I thought very sad again, dining with Clive. What thin stuff we talk compared with what we used to talk. And then people say death doesnt matter. Clive hopping on his canary perch: V. very silent: L. too. Bought stuff for a dress, pretty stuff to amuse myself.

Wednesday 11 December

It went all right last night, on the whole. Mary [Fisher] has bright, rather beautiful eyes; but her lips are thin, & her nose too pointed. But she has all the competence of the world of masters & cabinet ministers; rather a mercy. Grown more decided. But the pigeons were tough. Helen & Alix after dinner. Talk of Lear, of Huxleys; of this that & the other; till L. got silent. Letter from Sybil [Colefax]. Carefully composed lies, about a tiresome woman in Piccadilly wanting to consult her about bedroom curtains at 5.30. I wonder she thinks it worth while. And I shall reply Full up.

Saturday 14 December

Dinner last night with the [Aldous] Huxleys: not altogether a sparkler. Julian & his wife, whom I did not recognise, but later understood from his eyebrows &c who he was. A very chirpy I dont know why I think him dull, man. Full of scraps of information; & the same quickness that Aldous has—the same vivacity—but less sympathetic. And I guess that they spar—Julian & Juliette. She would have her say—about politics: he breasted her. But Maria & I talked after dinner, about Lotte Wolf—did I say I’d spent 2 hours over their Dutch writing table under the black lamp being analysed? That was the evening Morgan rang up & said he had to have an operation: & I was very gloomy, in my funeral way, going to Piccadilly in the bitter cold, & walking down Regent St. by mistake. Then Morgan dined with us, & had a little private talk with L. I think he feels he may die. Naturally. Aldous has a man in Switzerland however who does the operation from behind, & its over, & the patient cured in a day. Aldous in great flow: enjoys London; is getting on well with his novel; & thus juicy, sympathetic. He has a sense of the suffering, as well as of the infamy of the world. Had been getting Bryan Guiness to subscribe towards the Prince; who sits 2 doors off us, starving under his purple robes. Cheeks sunk; pouting starving Aldous said, in a room of the flat of some people who teach Russian. And he led us down the long gallery to the cab.

Monday 16 December

A question, how to do Roger. Why not begin at the end with Le Mas: a whole day; & then work backwards: give the elements in combination in action, first; & then trace them—give specimen days, all through his life.

Le Mas: the mosquitoes &c. his cooking: the colour, the martins: the French novel: freedom—cast back to childhood. Quote. Then Cambridge, then America: then us. Then the end.

[Tuesday 17 December]

How terrified I’m getting of Ethel⁠[Sands’]⁠s dressed dinner tomorrow! It makes a kind of ring round my mind. What I’m to wear: my velvet or chiffon: then my hair. When I’m there it’ll be as easy as shelling peas—why this apprehension? Wolff never touched on that by the way.

Sally Graves to tea: stayed till 7. A resolute cornered mind, defiant rather; balanced; pleased L.: she’s to write on Socialism. Told me I’m abused by the Graves’ in their new magazine; said the Mag was laughable. Said she was going to Paris; & I liked her; but not effusively. Too clever: too young. All in black. On the defensive. Now Bore Will [Robson] to lunch. Shopped yesterday. I sit on a rubber cushion & can so type.

Wednesday 18 December

I’ve had a bad morning at The Years, & feel it will spray off at the end. Thats I think because I had to see M⁠[argery Fry], at Holland Park & missed my mooning airy easy afternoon—the only soother of my tired head. So started making up in bed: so tired; & have to dine with Sands tonight. & Ethel S⁠[myth]. rings up at 8.30 inviting herself to lunch. Please God we shall set off on Friday: & dear old Morgan has his operation tomorrow. A cold fine day.

Thursday 19 December

Dinner last night: the Bruce Richmonds; the Maclagans; Leigh Ashton, & a sprinkling of elderly bachelors. Not a twinge of alarm in it—only the horrid beforehand discomfort—hair doing—rose buying—& setting out in cold. And B.R. was the spryest & liveliest of the lot. L. Ashton swollen, plum pudding faced; & such silences—Elena almost stupid to extinction—unvisited by a single idea—sitting silent; rough faced; oh so commonplace & we all so elderly; & not a spark or a twinkle; a rather spare dinner; & at 11 everyone got up, & the car hadn’t come. And it was for this I crossed London in evening dress—this is society.

Friday 20 December

“Its because one changes one’s values” Nessa said last night, when we discussed why we cdnt paint or write after a dinner party. And thats true. Only artists know how to live. She cant paint after a party. Cant get back into those proportions—Worse for women, because they have to be more active at parties: have to throw themselves into it. She wont go anywhere now where they make her dress. The best thing about our notoriety such as it is is that we can see anyone we want here on our own terms. The bell went on ringing. Tut. Popkin. Clive & Benita—all by appointment to sign some documents in Duncan’s room. And as he had stuck up a notice saying Out, Flossie had to come constantly to say Mr Popkins says he’s out. Tell Popkins to go in. Then Helen—And I was not glad to see her, wh. she felt—(to my disgrace) & after one cup went. And Nessa had chosen a nice rug. And had had her London Group meeting there. And this must be the last entry in this book because we are just about to go to Rodmell for Christmas.

[Diary XXV]

Saturday 28 December

Its all very well to write that date in a nice clear hand, because it begins this new book, but I cannot disguise the fact that I’m almost extinct; like a charwomans duster; that is my brain: what with the last revision of the last pages of The Years. And is it the last revision? And why should I lead the dance of the days with this tipsy little spin? But in fact I must stretch my cramped muscles: its only half past eleven on a damp grey morning, & I want a quiet occupation for an hour. That reminds me—I must devise some let down for myself that wont be too sudden when the end is reached. An article on Gray I think. But how the whole prospect will take different proportions, once I’ve relaxed this effort. Shall I ever write a long book again—a long novel that has to be held in the brain, at full stretch—for close on 3 years? Nor do I even attempt to ask if its worth while. There are mornings so congested I cant even copy out Roger. Goldie depresses me unspeakably. Always alone on a mountain top asking himself how to live, theorising about life; never living. Roger always down in the succulent valleys, living. But what a thin whistle of hot air Goldie lets out through his front teeth. Always live in the whole, life in the one: always Shelley & Goethe, & then he loses his hot water bottle; & never notices a face, or a cat or a dog or a flower, except in the glow of the universal. This explains why his highminded books are unreadable. Yet he was so charming, intermittently.

Sunday 29 December

I have in fact just put the last words to The Years—rolling, rolling, though its only Sunday, & I allowed myself till Wednesday. And I am not in such a twitter as usual. But then I meant it to end calmly—a prose work. And is it good? That I cannot possibly tell. Does it hang together? does one part support another? Can I flatter myself that it composes; & is a whole? Well there still remains a great deal to do. I must still condense, & point; give pauses their effect, & repetitions, & the run on. It runs in this version to 797 pages: say 200 each (but thats liberal) it comes to roughly 157,000—shall we say 140,000. Yes, it needs sharpening, some bold cuts, & emphases. That will take me another—I dont know how long. And I must subconsciously wean my mind from it finally & prepare another creative mood, or I shall sink into acute despair. How odd—that this will all fade away & something else take its place. And by this time next year, I shall be sitting here, with a vast bundle of press cuttings—no: not in the flesh, I hope; but in my mind there will be the usual Chorus of what people have said about this mass of scribbled type writing, & I shall be saying, That was an attempt at that; & now I must do something different. And all the old, or new, problems will be in front of me. Anyhow the main feeling about this book is vitality, fruitfulness, energy. Never did I enjoy writing a book more, I think: only with the whole mind in action, not so intensely as The Waves.

Monday 30 December

And today, no its no go. I cant write a word; too much headache. Can only look back at The Years as an inaccessible Rocky Island, which I cant explore, cant even think of. At Charleston yesterday. The great yellow table with very few places. Reading Roger I become haunted by him. What an odd posthumous friendship—in some ways more intimate than any I had in life. The things I guessed are now revealed; & the actual voice gone. Clive Quentin, Nessa Duncan. A little boasting. Some laughter over Mrs Easdale. Politics—but carefully subdued.

I had an idea—I wish they’d sleep—while dressing—how to make my war book—to pretend its all the articles editors have asked me to write during the past few years—on all sorts of subjects. Shd. women smoke. Short skirts. War—&c. This wd give me the right to wander: also put me in the position of the one asked. And excuse the method: while giving continuity. And there might be a preface saying this, to give the right tone. I think thats got it.

A wild wet night—floods out: rain as I go to bed: dogs barking: wind battering. Now I shall slink indoors, I think, & read some remote book.

[]

Volume V: 1936-1941

Edited by Anne Olivier Bell
Assisted by Andrew McNeillie

[1984]

1936

[Diary XXV continued]

Friday 3 January

I began the year with 3 entirely submerged days, headache, head bursting, head so full, racing with ideas; & the rain pouring; the floods out; when we stumbled out yesterday the mud came over my great rubber boots; the water squelched in my soles; so this Christmas has been, as far as country is concerned, a failure, & in spite of what London can do to chafe & annoy I’m glad to go back, & have, rather guiltily, begged not to stay here another week. Today it is a yellow grey foggy day; so that I can only see the hump, a wet gleam, but no Caburn. I am content though because I think that I have recovered enough balance in the head to begin The Years, I mean the final revision on Monday. This suddenly becomes a little urgent, because for the first time for some years, L. says I have not made enough to pay my share of the house, & have to find £70 out of my hoard. This is now reduced to £700, & I must fill it up. Amusing, in its way, to think of economy again. But it would be a strain to think seriously; & worse—a brutal interruption—had I to make money by journalism. The next book I think of calling Answers to Correspondents…. But I must not at once stop & make it up. No. I must find a patient & quiet method of soothing that excitable nerve to sleep until The Years is on the table—finished; In February? Oh the relief—as if a vast—what can I say—bony excrescence—bag of muscle—were cut out of my brain. Yet its better to write that than the other. A queer light on my psychology. I can no longer write for papers. I must write for my own book. I mean I at once adapt what I’m going to say, if I think of a newspaper.

Saturday 4 January

The weather has improved, & we have decided to stay till Wednesday. It will now of course rain. But I will make some good resolutions: to read as few weekly papers, which are apt to prick me into recollection of myself, as possible, until this Years is over; to fill my brain with remote books & habits; not to think of Answers to C.ds; & altogether to be as fundamental & as little superficial, to be as physical & as little apprehensive, as possible. And now to do Roger; & then to relax. For, to tell the truth, my head is still all nerves; & one false move means racing despair, exaltation, & all the rest of that familiar misery: that long scale of unhappiness. So I have ordered a sirloin & we shall go for a drive. L. is happier: will now do his trees.

Sunday 5 January

I have had another morning at the old plague. I rather suspect that I have said the thing I meant, & any further work will only muddle. Further work must be merely to tidy & smooth out. This seems likely because I’m so calm. I feel well, thats done. I want to be off on something else. Whether good or bad, I dont know. And my head is quiet today, soothed by reading The Trumpet Major last night, & a drive to the floods. The clouds were an extraordinary tropical birds wing colour: an impure purple; & the lakes reflected it, & there were droves of plover black & white; & all very linear in line & pure & subtle in colour. How I slept! Gray again today: but I shall not go to tea with Clive & Raymond. No news of Morgan. I cd. hardly listen to the news for fear they wd. begin We regret …

Tuesday 7 January

I have again copied out the last pages, & I think got the spacing better. Many details & some fundamentals remain. The snow scene for example. & I suspect a good many unfaced passages remain. But I preserve my sense that its stated; & I need only use my craft not my creation. A pouring day—a day so wet that L. had to come in a mackintosh, & to spare him I drank my coffee in the dining room by candlelight. No news of Morgan? Why? Joe’s faithless. All the angles of the twigs have white drops on them. Thats Hardy’s gift by the way. minute obstinately individual observations. But how his reputation ever mounted, considering the flatness, tedium, & complete absence of gift of the T. Major, I cant say: & wd like to discover. I think he had genius & no talent. And the English love genius. I’m English enough too to feel my own past as a peasant expand his notes. Tom [T. S. Eliot], the American, cant; feels nothing I suppose. I think of taking sentences from great writers & expanding them. But then I’m always feathering round for some way of liberating my critical apprehensions which dont fit the strait jacket of the regular Times leader any longer. Anyhow this rain dissolves my guilt in wishing to go back. And I’ve had one or two sublime quiet evenings here—evenings of immunity, using that word in its highest sense.

Friday 10 January London.

Back again. A great gale all yesterday & a dusk over everything & rain, so that the comfort I had expected was diminished. Origo to tea; & wants to dine next week. All the same I will keep my hands on the reins. For, to tell the truth, this six weeks is going to be a most perilous enterprise. How on earth to finish, to get typed, to correct by the end of Feb? To show my state, I mistook 11 for 12 on my watch this morning; so shut up my book & stopped work with such relief that, when I discovered the mistake, I couldn’t bring myself to do the extra hour & did Roger instead. How then am I going to finish? My head is so springless. What I plan is to finish this long last lap for typing say by Monday or Tuesday: send it to Mabel [typist], & then begin at the chapter I stopped at, & go through again, & so keep the whole reading till I’ve got it all retyped. But can I do this in the time? I’m going to space my days as carefully as I can, resting after lunch, & reading only with the skin of the eye. But its the chronic problem of people that is the crux (what a word). Heres Dadie asking us to Cambridge; & old Ethel on the alert; & the usual letters. The C⁠[ambridge]. U⁠[niversity]. Lit. Soc, Dadie says, is asking me to lecture. Let it. A text for my letter. Origo rather contorted: says Italy is blind red hot devoted patriotic: has thrown her wedding ring into the cauldron too. Anticipates a long war, & then the peace they cd have had a month ago. They are more set than on the great war. 2 meatless days a week.

Saturday 11 January

This book is now becoming the oddest hop o’ my thumb work: I peck & stop; peck & stop again. Think even of continuing this after tea. Its better than trying to work straight ahead. This is one of my pauses. Twelve o’clock—a very fine day. Asked to lecture to the Cambridge English Club. Shall I say anything of what I think of these invitations? I suppose not—not yet. Ann popped in suddenly after lunch; bare legs, socks, touseled hair: wanted to borrow the second vol. of War & Peace for Judith who’s had her tonsils out. Something like a rugger blue, in a striped jersey, very tall, & vigorous. She says she has many friends in the colleges—young men—but we shouldn’t know them. Then I read Borrow’s Wild Wales, into which I can plunge head foremost; then L. went to see Morgan, found him with the usual Bugger crew: & I to tea with Nessa; & Duncan came in, & we discussed the bugger crew; which Duncan dislikes when its self conscious, as at Raymond’s, & I always liken to the male urinal. Then L. came—You see I leave out the quality of the talk … it was very sympathetic. We discussed journalism, the NS: its hard bright up to date reviews; D. had been dining with Colefax to meet Max. He becomes social—is so naturally, even though he goes on the wrong day & imagines S⁠[ibyl], having tea—bread & butter alone. Home, & dine alone, & sleep over Mr Clarkson’s memoirs. He had a sexual kink, & a passion for fish—ran Sara Bernhardt’s errands; & I suppose—but all details are lacking, made 40,000 wigs for one show.

Monday 13 January

The precious days are ticking over. About 30 now left me, & how much to do! But my new method is working I think: each hour mapped in bed, & kept to, so far. Ann & Cr. Strachey to dine last night. Christopher a charming babbling humane boy, with a great deal of Oliver—in the voice chiefly—some of the Costello coarseness, of feature; but far more dash & vitality than a pure blooded Strachey. Laughter. Talk, of course, of Gumbo & Ray; Ray & Gumbo getting naked & swimming. Yet, though the thought of R.’s nakedness makes me squirm, she has humanised her son. He eats 4 eggs, on equal terms, as he says, with her, for Sunday supper. And he was concerned that in Gumbo’s new house, ordered from a catalogue, there is only a little box room for the servant. How very unlike Lytton! But he says that Oliver is also humane. Ann in her red; an ungainly girl; but silent, brooding, with opinions, chiefly medical & political. She sells the Daily Worker (3 copies) then breaks in on Cr. who is playing Bach on the piano, & demands eggs & biscuits for lunch at 3.30. Nessa, Clive, Duncan came in: but we drew the young on to chatter about B.B.

I walked somewhere on the Sunday streets & L. went to Mrs W. & met Babs &c. with the Alsatian, which had to be returned. She had just bought it in Pug Row, if thats the name of the dog selling street in Whitechapel. Fog—mitigated fog this morning.

Thursday 16 January

Seldom have I been more completely miserable than I was about 6.30 last night, reading over the last part of The Years. Such feeble twaddle—such twilight gossip it seemed; such a show up of my own decrepitude, & at such huge length. I could only plump it down on the table & rush up stairs with burning cheeks to L. He said This always happens. But I felt, no it has never been so bad as this. I make this note should I be in the same state after another book. Now this morning, dipping in, it seems to me, on the contrary, a full, bustling live book. I looked at the early pages. I think there’s something to it. But I must now force myself to begin regular sending to Mabel. 100 pages go tonight I swear.

Iris Origo to dine alone. At first I thought this too is going to be a wash out. But, chiefly owing to L.’s charm, & making myself a little drunk, we all chattered, more intimately than we should have done had John been there or William or Harold, & we both liked her. And she is to come again. A genuine woman, I think, honest, intelligent &, to my pleasure, well dressed: also being a snob, I like her Bird of Paradise flight through the gay world. A long green feather in her hat suggests the image.

Sunday 19 January

I open this, forced by a sense of what is expected by the public, to remark that Kipling died yesterday; & that the King (George 5th) is probably dying today. The death of Kipling has set all the old war horses of the press padding round their stalls; & the papers have to eke out 5 or 6 columns with the very bare bulletin—condition causes anxiety—which they supplement with biographies of doctors, of nurses, pictures of Sandringham, remarks of old villagers, gossip about the little Princesses in their cherry coloured coats, a snow man, &c. But the fact remains that all the Princes have gathered together, & I suppose at any moment the butler may come in, just as theyre finishing dinner, & say King Edward 8th, upon which—but I need hardly invent that scene having already so many on my hands.

Privately, I rang up Nessa at 6 yesterday & was alarmed by the agitated & breathless way in which she said Not now: I’ll ring later. This left me to imagine any number of catastrophes, but I find this morning that I interrupted the crisis of that London Group meeting, which went entirely against Nessa & Duncan’s cabal; they dismissed the President, & elected Sickert. And now, at the same time that the King dies, Nessa & Duncan think of resigning & starting a new Group. It is coldish snowy weather: the snow half melts half freezes; & I pad along, & Judith dined here, & we talked to James & Alix, walked by the Serpentine & must now lunch.

I went up to an elderly stout woman reading the paper at The Times Book Club the other day. It was Margery Strachey. What are you doing? I said. Nothing! she replied. “I’ve got nowhere to go & nothing to do.”

And I left her, sitting reading The Times.

Monday 20 January

This story I repeated to Duncan last night. He also had met Marjorie at The Times. She had flung her arms round him & kissed him. Another side of Marjorie’s story. They were badly beaten, Nessa & Duncan; but both elected to the Cttee all the same. They had not arranged any speaker on their side, &, as neither of them spoke, & Nan & Ethel were silent, & the others had actually written out speeches, the result as they say was a foregone conclusion.

And the King is not dead, but the same. It is a very fine bright day; I think I must force myself to go to Lewis’s & get a dress made; &—&—we are dining with Alice Ritchie. Sibyl is only too ready to come.

Tuesday 21 January

The King died last night. We were dining with Alice Ritchie, & drove back past Buckingham Palace. It was a clear dry night, rather windy & rather cold. As we turned the corner & came by the Palace we saw cars drawn up all along the Mall. There were thin lights. On the white monument people were standing: only everybody seemed to be moving. There was a cluster like a swarm of bees, round the railings. Some people were plastered against the railings, holding on to the bars. There was a discreet frame, like a text, holding a bulletin. We had [to] drive on past the Monument before the policeman, who spoke with weary politeness, would let us stop. Then we got out, & walked back, crossing with difficulty because cars were passing all the time, & tried to shove our way through the crowd. But it was impossible. So I asked a policeman “What is the latest bulletin?” And he said, It has not been issued. So I said But what is the latest news. I havent heard. (We had only seen Strength diminishing on the placards as we drove out) to which he replied “His majesty’s life is drawing to a peaceful close.” This he said without conviction, as if he were reciting words put into his mouth, but with a certain official tolerance. There was some agitation & excitement; many foreigners talking German; a large proportion of distinguished looking men, in semi evening dress; everyone indeed looked rather tall; but by no means tragic; yet not gay; rather suppressing their excitement; & it was all very brightly lit. As we turned away, a firework—a silver gilt sputtering fizzing torch began bubbling up, like a signal, like a festival, but it was presumably a photographers light. The crowd clustering on the rails became chalky white for a few seconds; & then we got into the car & drove home. The streets were very empty. But save for the occasional placard—it was now “The King is Dying”—there was nothing out of the way. What I took for guns booming was only the banging of the loose door in the mews. But at 3 this morning, L. was woken by paper boys shouting in the street. The King had in fact died at 12.5. He was dead when we were outside the palace. There were one or two narrow lights in the little top windows, I remember. Otherwise all the white curtains were drawn.

Most of the men in Southampton Row wear black ties wh. are brand new, or dark blue ties, which are the nearest they can get. In the stationers the woman spoke with a subdued kindness as if we were both mourning a great uncle we had never seen. The woman in Dennisons said she often thought herself it was absurd only to sell plain labels by the thousand. A very fine cold day. Sun shining.

Wednesday 22 January

The people of America are mourning, as if for their own King; & the Japanese are in tears. So it goes on. But as a matter of fact the Prime Minister [Stanley Baldwin]—we are only allowed official announcements on the BBC—& if you turn it on you only hear the ticking of a vast clock—was rather fitting; almost sincere, & very well conditioned. He gave out the impression that he was a tired country gentleman; the King another; both enjoyed Christmas at home; & the Queen is very lonely; one left the other taken, as must happen to married couples; & the King had seemed to him tired lately, but very kind, & quiet as if ready for a long journey; & had woken once or twice, on the last day & had said something Kind (‘Kind’ was the adjective always) & had said to his Secretary “How is the Empire?”—an odd expression. “The Empire, Sir, is well”; whereupon he fell asleep. And then of course, he ended with God Save the King.

The shops are all black. “We always carry a large stock” the woman at Lewis’s said. But there’ll be nothing doing after this rush at all. There’ll be no work for us…” Mourning is to outlast the London Season. A black Ascot.

[Monday 27 January]

I have done something so incredibly idiotic—left my last chapter at Monks yesterday—that I can hardly get over it. And there I was in the rush of the end. We went to Canterbury & I listened to a full service while L. lectured in the County Hotel. But I wont write my impressions. Almost smashed coming back—lights went out—we backed—a great car swung down, like a liner at sea, & was I thought on us. But missed. So home. Over to Nessa’s: Quentin there. Duncan spent an hour blocked in his car outside Westminster. The death trudge goes on till 6 am. & I forgot to say we saw the coffin & the Princes come from Kings X: standing packed in the Square democracy, though held back by Nessa, swarmed through; leapt the chain, climbed the trees. Then they came, the coffin with its elongated yellow leopards, the crown glittering & one pale blue stone luminous, a bunch of red & white lilies: after that 3 undertakers in black coats with astrachan collars: “our King” as the woman next me called him, who looks blotched & as if chipped by a stone mason: only his rather set wistful despair marked him from any shopkeeper—not an ingratiating face: bloated, roughened, as if by exposure to drink life grief & as red as a fisherboys. Then it was over. & I shall not try to see more. But the whole world will be afoot at dawn tomorrow.

Tuesday 28 January

The King is at this moment being buried, & if I go up I shall hear the service. A fine mild morning. The sun is out, the streets almost empty. An occasional hoot. No registered post this morning. And a tea party this afternoon.

The most extraordinary thing about writing is that when you’ve struck the right vein, tiredness goes. It must be an effort, thinking wrong, at 5 to one, after a sterile bitter morning, the vein flows: I think now I see to the end.

[Sunday 9 February]

It is now the 9th of Feb & I have three weeks in which to finish my book. Hence this stolen minute—stolen while waiting to go round to the meeting at Adrian’s—is the first I have had in wh. to make even this elementary note. I work 3 hours in the morning: 2 often after tea. Then my head swells & I sleep.

Tuesday 25 February

And this will show how hard I work. This is the first moment—this 5 minutes before lunch—that I’ve had to write here. I work all the morning: I work from 5 to 7 most days. Then I’ve had headaches. Vanquish them by lying still & binding books & reading D. Copperfield. I have sworn that the script shall be ready, typed & corrected, on the 10th March. L. will then read it. And I’ve still all the Richmond & El. scene to type out; many corrections in that most accursed raid scene to make; all this to have typed; if I can by the 1st which is Sunday; & then I must begin at the beginning & read straight through. So I’m quite unable either to write here, or to do Roger. On the whole, I’m enjoying it—thats odd—though in the ups & downs, & with no general opinion.

Saturday 29 February

Leap Year day. A great deal of fuss about the marmots. In fact, these weeks of solitude, seeing no one, only going round to Nessa, refusing all parties—Sheppard, to see Greek Play, Ellis Roberts to meet Max, & so on—have a space & quiet thats rather favourable to private fun. I become so absorbed in The Years that I take the other world as a kind of amplification, variation in another key. Nothing interferes for the moment; & I rush on; should in fact rush on this morning; but have done so much copying—the Oxford Street scene—that I cant cut ice any more. L. is lunching with the Robsons. It is drizzling. It is a damp dismal day. All Duncan’s pictures have been refused—to give a scrap of upper air news—by the Q. Mary. A great Bloomsbury agitation set on foot. But they think Sir Percy Bates when persuaded, gently, by the whole connoisseurship of London, may be bamboozled into relenting. All the Cabinet has been murdered in Tokyo. Lydia is a great success at Cambridge. Clive in Paris. I read Quennel on Byron: dont like that young mans clever agile thin blooded mind: & very little else that counts. L. began this morning against Mabel again: because she asked for a rise. So I must face that with other accumulations during my hybernation. And now to lunch. & then to take tickets for Charlie Chaplin. And I’ve never recorded my request from Lady Oxford—that I shd. write an obituary of her writing; or my lunch there; & the little drawn up painted alert nervous brilliant woman, as hard as nails, but a good mimic.

Wednesday 4 March

Well, I’m almost through copying the raid scene, I shd. think for the 13th time. Then it will go tomorrow, & I shall have I think one days full holiday—if I dare—before re-reading. So I’m in sight of the end: that is in sight of the beginning of the other book which keeps knocking unmercifully at the door. Oh to be able once more to write freely every morning, spinning my own words afresh—what a boon—what a physical relief & rest, delight after these last months—since October year more or less—of perpetual compressing & re-writing always at that one book.

The Dolls House last night. Lydia very good; an interesting play, wh. throws light on some of my own efforts; but I wish I’d gone to Figaro instead. Not a good audience though, & I doubt if London will be as enthusiastic as Cambridge, which is Maynard’s pocket borough. Old Garnett there, like a sheep whose coat has been half torn off. No one else known to me.

Wednesday 11 March

Well yesterday I sent off 132 pages to Clark. We have decided to take this unusual course—that is to print it in galleys before L. sees it & send it to America. I’m thus feeling more at ease; but rather slack, as we went to Hedda Gabler last night with Nessa Duncan & Mrs Grant. I did not get the full impact: my mind too much set, I suppose, on my own corrections. Jean F. Robertson however was sinuous seductive sinister in a curious metallic old dress. Blue. A girl, who might have been an Ibsen lady, smiled at me. Now who is she? We cant place her. I am only writing this to mark time till lunch. Still, considering my languor, I think Ibsen comes pretty well out of it. (oh the rhythms that go on in my head. Thats one of the difficulties: I must break: want a usual [?] tone: must read Swift, I think). News is that we are going to stay one week end with David & Rachel: Morgan is again going on well. Nessa had trays of pure Chinese silk from Julian. She’s taking a room for Angelica. I’m pleased by the way that A. Bennett writing to his nephew seems, I think, to acquit me of authors’ vanity. “We got on fine, the day after I’d slanged her publicly in the E.S.…. We had a great pow-wow at Ethel Sands. Virginia’s all right..” This might be my epitaph I think.

I cant help feeling in the subcutaneous way one does feel such things that we are slightly on the up grade again: old Bloomsbury. Its rather a nicer feeling than being on the down grade perhaps. Nevinson, the painter, gave 50 centimes to the Fund to buy a Cézanne, in Roger’s memory. Now that sort of meanness makes me angry. Its all of a piece with Grigson &c. And heres Hampson coolly applying to L. who is rushed & pumped & milked by every ninny on the European situation—for help about his miserable little contracts. The European situation developed on Saturday. We were at Monks House. H⁠[itler]. has broken his word again, proposes to re-enter the League. But I’m too languid: shall even consider having an afternoon off.

Friday 13 March

Getting along rather better. So I steal 10 minutes before lunch. Never have I worked so hard at any book. My aim is not to alter a thing in proof. And I begin to suspect there’s something there—it hasn’t flopped yet. But enough of The Years—We walked round Ktn Gardens yesterday discussing politics. Aldous refuses to sign the latest manifesto because it approves sanctions. He’s a pacifist. So am I. Ought I to resign. L. says that considering Europe is now on the verge of the greatest smash for 600 years, one must sink private differences & support the League. He’s at a special L. Party meeting this morning. This is the most feverish overworked political week we’ve yet had. Hitler has his army on the Rhine. Meetings taking place in London. So serious are the French that they’re—the little Intelligence group—is sending a man to confer here tomorrow: a touching belief in English intellectuals. Another meeting tomorrow. As usual, I think Oh this will blow over. But its odd, how near the guns have got to our private life again. I can quite distinctly see them & hear a roar, even though I go on, like a doomed mouse, nibbling at my daily page. What else is there to do—except answer the incessant telephones, & listen to what L. says. Everything goes by the board. Happily we have put off all dinners & so on, on account of The Years. A very concentrated, laborious spring this is: with perhaps 2 fine days: crocuses out; then bitter black & cold. It all seems in keeping: my drudgery; our unsociability; the crisis; meetings; dark—& what it all means, no one knows. Privately … no, I doubt that I’ve seen anyone, or done anything but walk & work—walk for an hour after lunch—& so on. I must get back to H⁠[ogarth]. P⁠[ress]. MSS though.

Monday 16 March.

I ought not to be doing this: but I cannot go on bothering with those excruciating pages any more. I shall come in at 3 & do some; & again after tea. For my own guidance: I have never suffered, since The Voyage Out, such acute despair on re-reading, as this time. On Saturday for instance: there I was, faced with complete failure: & yet the book is being printed. Then I set to: in despair: thought of throwing it away; but went on typing. After an hour, the line began to taughten. Yesterday I read it again; & I think it may be my best book. However … I’m only at the Kings death. I think the change of scene is whats so exhausting: the catching people plumb in the middle: then jerking off. Every beginning seems lifeless—& then I have to retype. I’ve more or less done 250: & theres 700 to do. A walk down the river & through Richmond Park did more than anything to pump blood in. Adrian though has had another queer seizure: suddenly became unconscious: & was then very sick. This reminds me of father falling down, & I thought he was on fire. Politics have slightly died down; We had a meeting on Saturday: I went to E. Bowen & sat in her glass shining ‘contemporary’ room. Like a French picture—2 ladies sitting looking at the Lake. She is much like a picture. We discussed poor Rose M.’s terrible flurry about E. not wanting to see her. R. stopped me in T⁠[orringto]⁠n Sqre to gasp out this heart cry Does Eth no longer want to know me? I went to fetch something she had said she was out … there was a party .. reviewing young men. In fact they were BBC young men. But what a state of mind this shows!

Wednesday 18 March

It now seems to me so good—still talking about The Years—that I cant go on correcting. In fact I do think the scene at Witterings is about the best, in that line, I ever wrote. First proofs just come: so there’s a cold douche waiting me there. And I cant concentrate this morning—must make up Letter to an Englishman. I think, once more, that is the final form it will take, because after all separate letters break continuity so [text ends]

Another pause. This wandering comes from having Karin to dinner last night; & Kot before that; the same as ever: rather heavier, yellower; & then E⁠[lizabe]⁠th Williamson afterwards; & tho’ it wasn’t late, I felt like a wet towel, sitting there. My brain wont grip. Also it is the first day of Spring—hot: swarming. And, God damn these persistent old women, I must go to tea with Mrs Grosvenor. Oh what vampires they are—my blood must feed that old wretch. I dislike going—no hat, want to lie & dream after tea. Then theres Lady Simon tomorrow. And Rodmell…. Then one week of peace I will have before a week end at the Cecils.

But Karin was very nice: so brisk headed; & somehow {sad}; pathetic. Said she’d found Adrian unconscious & how awful it was. Yet they separated. A kind of suffering & capacity for something else in her, somehow, like a dog whose bones’ been snatched away, but no longer snarls. E.W. very much to the point too.

Friday 20 March

Book again very good: very bad yesterday. And what a horrid evening. First Lady Simon & Harry: then Raymond: then, Russian? No parents This was concealed. Very small, white, swollen hands: talked educated English—pattered. But a fact—She had to go. Knew she must go. Shuffled off to Bethnal Green. Used to make slips—pointing to L.’s waistcoat. Shook hands. And keep well she said longing for dinner, down I go to the Press, to see if my Macaulay’s come: & theres a tap on the window. I thought it was a little dressmakers apprentice come with my dress. But it was oh dear—a girl, fainting. Can I have a drop of water? She was hardly able to walk. Sat on the area steps while I got one. Then I took her in: got L.: hotted soup. But it was a horrible thing. Shed been walking all day to get work, had neuritis—cdnt sew, had had a cup of tea for breakfast, lived in one room alone in Bethnal Green. At first she cd hardly speak—“I’m hungry” she said. Gradually livened. Half dazed. Said You look like brother & sister, both have long noses. I’m a Jewess—a curious stress on the word as if a confession. So’s he I said. Then she perked up a little. But my God—no one to help her, she said. Friends? Oh they only think of enjoying themselves. May I take this home? taking a bun. We gave her tongue, 2 eggs, & 5/- Did you make this yourself—of the soup. Can you afford it—of the money. And a mere wisp—22—suffering. Never saw unhappiness, poverty so tangible. And felt its our fault. And she apologised. And what could we do. I shall stay in bed if I’m feeling bad & then go to the Labour Exchange. But I cant get any work. Think of one of our ‘class’: & this is what we exact.

Now its raining, & I suppose .. well, whats the use of thinking? As usual what was so vivid I saw it all the evening becomes stylised when I write. Some horror become visible: but in human form. And she may live 20 years … What a system.

Tuesday 24 March

A very good week end [at Rodmell]. Trees coming out, hyacinths, crocuses. Hot. The first spring week end. I slept. L. had a large [Labour Party] meeting. Clever people from Lewes. But I slept. Then we walked up to Rat Farm & looked for violets. Still spring here. Am tinkering—in a drowsy state. The approach of Easter that breaker up. Duncan going to Spain. Angelica coming back. We may do anything—perhaps go away with Morgan, whose book is out. Fat & blue. No time to read it yet. And I’m so absorbed in Two Guineas—thats what I’m going to call it. I must very nearly verge on insanity I think. I get so deep in this book I dont know what I’m doing. Find myself walking along the Strand talking aloud. Old Mrs W⁠[oolf]. in great spirits yesterday. Anxious to make out that Lady Oxford is not old: that a secluded life may be as good as a social one; & that parties are a natural pursuit for old women. So much of talk is always self-justification. But my five minutes is up, & I must go up. Miss Bernice Marks has been seeing Leonard.

Sunday 29 March

Now its Sunday, & I’m still forging ahead. Done Eleanor in Oxford Street for the 20th time this morning. I’ve plotted it out now, & shall have done by Tuesday 7th April, I tell myself. And I cant help thinking its rather good. But no more of that. One bad head this week, lying prostrate. So I missed Nessa’s potters party, at which Angelica made a sensation in a new hat. And we put off going to the Cecils this week end: but went instead to Richmond yesterday; saw the lovely view, with a piece of deep green grass, the gasometer, & the clouds: looking towards Ealing L. said. So home; then to the Master Builder, where I did not like Lydia’s version; partly the ugly clothes; high boots, green skirt, red shawl. And she hasnt the compass; cant swing from the real to the poetic. Elizabeth [Bowen] Cameron was there with a cousin, who agreed. In fact they were very emphatic. Hated it. Asked us to meet the Master builder & drink beer at the Café Royal; but we refused, & came home; saw the Polish Prince coming, & only locked ourselves in just in time. L. has a sore throat this morning. We think of going, & high time too, to Monks House next Friday & digging ourselves in. Nessa & Angelica, Clive & Quentin will all be there [at Charleston].

I have left out Elizabeth Robins by the way—a great curse to me; for she came at a moment of high pressure; & I had to throw myself into her infinitely intense, exacting, pernickety demands. No, she must explain—in fact had come from Brighton to explain. She cannot go to see the M.B. but she does go to plays—thats what I cant deny—with a friend. But my sight is going—now this is a secret. I dont mean I’m going blind. But I must spare my eyes. And I have a book to write. I want to keep all my strength for that. Could you explain do you think? Yes. yes. and then there [’s] another thing, I could only tell you in confidence. I couldnt go & see her Hilda. I’m Hilda. I’m the person it was written for … All very intense. A small frozen humming bird—with rouged lips: intense blue eyes, very small, old; full of accents & intensities. We are to go to dinner or tea.

Wednesday 1 April

I forgot though to make L. an April fool, & he forgot too. The Ms. are lavender & silver. We went to tea with Gerald yesterday, which was like visiting an alligator in a tank, an obese & obsolete alligator, lying like our tortoises, half in & half out of the water. I wished I had gone to Downing St. to hear Baldwin on Newnham as I sat there in the very ugly de Vere Gardens room, with the dull covers, & the tea on wheeled waiters, & the old picture that Gerald bought 40 years ago at St. Ives over the fire. I doubt that he much enjoyed seeing us, or has any capacity for enjoying anything left. We talked publishers’ shop, & she—her name I dont know—was vivacious in the strained way of a woman whose life is empty & who has perpetually to animate her husband. She is ‘got up’ but elderly; shrivelled; rather a nice woman, I suspect, but discontented. And G. told me about his diseases, & threw cold water, sensible, business man’s very faded common sense—for he has failed as a business man—on all projects. Theres nothing in it—nothing in it, he kept saying. Also, nothing doing; nothing doing whatever. I think felt us perhaps more in the swim than himself. I doubt he has any sentiment about the past either: may like George’s sons—I don’t know. And keeps up with Sophie & Emma Vaughan. So we went & walked in the park. If I can do 25 pages daily I shall be done by Tuesday next. And then the proofs. How its to come out in May, God knows. But I no longer bother much: am doing the difficult North & Sara; but philosophically.

Thursday 9 April

[Monks House]

Now will come the season of depression, after congestion suffocation. The last batch was posted to Clark at Brighton yesterday. L. is in process of reading. I daresay I’m pessimistic, but I fancy a certain tepidity in his verdict so far: but then its provisional. At any rate these are disgusting, racking at the same time enervated days, & must be thrown on the bonfire. The horror is that tomorrow, after this one windy day of respite—oh the cold North wind that has blown ravaging daily since we came, but I’ve had no ears, eyes, or nose: only making my quick transits from house to room, often in despair—after this one day’s respite, I say, I must begin at the beginning & go through 600 pages of cold proof. Why oh why? Never again, never again. No sooner have I written that, than I make up the first pages of Two Guineas, & begin a congenial ramble about Roger. But seriously I think this shall be my last ‘novel’. But then I want to tackle criticism too. Enough, though. The first task is to resume charge of life: to read Hogarth MSS. & to stir the waters. I’ve let them get a little stagnant, mildewed.

Dining at Charleston tonight, I’m glad to say. Clive’s article on the Q.M. to be discussed. We met Nessa & Angelica in Lewes: & A. looked like the heroine in a Turgenev novel, in her frogged dress & little cap. Judith Bagenal already a woman of 45 with 6 children: husband a clergyman, I think, or Lecturer at the London School of Economics.

I dont think I said we had taken Morgan to Abinger—a very very bitter cold day: his love, the stout policeman to see him off at Manchester Street. A silent drive, through suburbs, with raked roads: no view: all misted; then sharp to the right & left; up a lane, & there on a little hill was his house; & old Mrs F. columnar with the prominent grey eyes, the maid in apron & false teeth, the handy man & gardener in the distance, all there to welcome him. He has some nickname—“Tong?”—for his mother. And we had a look in at the scrupulous Victorian drawing room, with the silver kettle, & the Richmond drawings; one of Hannah More & Squirrel—& then left.

And then there was Colefax—yes, instantly on us, the first day we arrived, for lunch: in a black beret, & grey tweed coat; dried, like one of the hams in Flint’s shop [in Lewes]: not improved by sorrow I think, only posed. Poor woman, what a hard nature; so that to lose Arthur only liberates a little misty sentiment. And yet she’s brave, I think: but still the hostess, the aspiring, restless, dissatisfied—running, running, like a dog behind a carriage, that always goes too fast. And how she snaps at the other running dogs—Mrs Wigram, Madame de Margerie. We had polite conversation about notables over the fire, & then she left. Rolls Royce: going on to customers, I think.

Thursday 11 June

[52 Tavistock Square]

I can only, after 2 months, make this brief note, to say at last after 2 months dismal & worse, almost catastrophic illness—never been so near the precipice to my own feeling since 1913—I’m again on top. I have to re-write, I mean interpolate & rub out most of The Years in proof. But I cant go into that. Can only do an hour or so. Oh but the divine joy of being mistress of my mind again! Back from MH. yesterday. Now I am going to live like a cat stepping on eggs till my 600 pages [of proof correcting] are done. I think I can—I think I can—but must have immense courage & buoyancy to compass it. This, as I say, my first voluntary writing since April 9th. after wh. I pitched into bed: then to Cornwall—no note of that; then back; saw Elly: then to M.H. Home yesterday for a fortnights trial. And the blood has mounted to my head. Wrote 1880 this morning.

Sunday 21 June

After a week of intense suffering—indeed mornings of torture—& I’m not exaggerating—pain in my head—a feeling of complete despair & failure—a head inside like the nostrils after hay fever—here is a cool quiet morning again, a feeling of relief; respite: hope. Just done the Robsons: think it good.

I am living so constrainedly; so repressedly: I cant make notes of life. Everything is planned, battened down. I do ½ an hour down here; go up, often in despair, lie down; walk round the square: come back do another 10 lines. Then to Lords yesterday [MCC v. Oxford University]. Always with a feeling of having to repress; control. I see people lying on sofa between tea & dinner. Rose M⁠[acaulay]. E⁠[lizabe]⁠th Bowen. Nessa. Sat in the square last night. Saw the dripping green leaves. Thunder & lightning. Purple sky. N. & A⁠[ngelica]. discussing 4/8 time. Cats stealing round. L. dining with Tom & Bella. A very strange, most remarkable summer. New emotions: humility: impersonal joy: literary despair. I am learning my craft in the most fierce conditions. Really reading Flaubert’s letters I hear my own voice cry out Oh art! Patience. Find him consoling, admonishing. I must get this book quietly strongly daringly into shape. But it wont be out till next year. Yet I think it has possibilities, cd I seize them. I am trying to cut the characters deep in a phrase: to pare off & compact scenes; to envelop the whole in a medium.

Tuesday 23 June

A good day—a bad day—so it goes on. Few people can be so tortured by writing as I am. Only Flaubert I think. Yet I see it now, as a whole: I think I can bring it off, if I only have courage & patience: take each scene quietly: compose: I think it may be a good book. And then—oh when its finished!

Not so clear today, because I went to dentist & then shopped. My brain is like a scale: one grain pulls it down. Yesterday it balanced: today dips.

October 1936

Friday 30 October

I do not wish for the moment to write out the story of the months since I made the last mark here. I do not wish, for reasons I cannot now develop, to analyse that extraordinary summer. It will be more helpful & healthy for me to write scenes; to take up my pen & describe actual events: good practice too for my stumbling & doubting pen. Can I still ‘write’? That is the question, you see. And now I will try to prove if the gift is dead, or dormant.

Tuesday 27th. On Tuesday I went to tea with Sibyl. It was a very windy wet evening; leaves swirling along the pavement, people holding their hats & skirts. An oldish shabby man in seedy day clothes opened the door. He might have been a bailiff but was I suppose an auctioneer’s assistant. “Lady Colefax?” I said. He shook his head. He thought I had come to see the furniture. Come this way, he said, & led me, or rather disappeared in front of me, into the servants quarters—that unknown region where so many meals have been prepared, when Fielding [maid] issued, so discreet, respectable & cordial. Now there were tables set out with dinner services, with bunches of knives & forks, all ticketed & labelled. Fielding came out from the hidden premises, still in her grey dress & apron, but looking blurred & flustered. “I dont know where to put you” she said, in an agitated way, & murmuring something about finding her ladyship, about people being still here, led me finally with apologies to the dining room. That brown festive & somehow succulent room was also up for sale. The walnut table had its ticket & the little glass trees on the mantelpiece & the chandelier. It is a nice warm room I thought sitting down on one of the brown chairs, & thinking how very shy I had been there; yet how glad after, that I had overcome the terror of hair & clothes, & how nimble my tongue became, & how little alarming it was to talk to Sir Arthur on my right, or George Moore or Noel Coward on my left. Yes, I had enjoyed myself in a mixed way there—the feeling was compounded of relief to find so little to frighten & of pleasure to find so much to say—when in peered, in the tentative calculating way of a stranger looking at things he may want to buy, an obviously alien gentleman: the sort of man in a brown overcoat that one sees at sales, but not at parties at Argyll House. And no sooner had he begun sizing up the furniture than two fashionable, dimly recognisable women, peered in; one of whom, the smaller, the vaguely pretty & familiar, recognised me to the extent of smiling & half extending her hand; but clearly my name escaped her. And hers only tentatively seemed to me to be Ava Wigram. How sad—how very sad—she said (words I had used to the tremulous & flustered Fielding who seemed, as she agreed, about to burst into tears). ‘Yes its sad, very sad..’ I echoed. And then she asked, had I come to see the things? for I was sitting in my chair as if waiting. No, I’ve come to see Sibyl I said .. & they prowled round: Ava I think surprised, perhaps displeased, at this assumption of superior intimacy. They were tentatively wandering, touching this & that, into the next room, when Sibyl herself peered in: hurried, furtive; summoned me, as if she lifted me, secretly, to some private assignation out of a world now all formal, no longer friendly. And so we crossed into the drawing room, where, with a sigh & some explanations, she shut the door & sank on the sofa.

My bare hand rested for a moment on her bare hand. This is sympathy, I felt: but it must not be emphasised or prolonged. She looked like a dried up bird; marks were cut on either side of her nose. Deep clefts ran under her eyes. But of course she talked facts. Who was that, in the dining room? Ava Wigram. Oh dear—she saw me then? No I think not.

But Sibyl, you must rest?

My dear, how can I rest? The Dr & surgeon said to me You must now take 6 months holiday. But I’m not Greta Garbo … Where’s tea?

Tea, bread & butter & gingerbread, was brought.

No, everyone says Fielding is a help. I can tell you the truth. I’ve lived for 35 years with the Irish. She laughs. Then she cries.

But Sibyl, I said, trying to formulate some phrase of affection or regret, you have given … yes, passing this house, I’ve often thought that—seeing the lights.

Oh, in those days I was a millionaire. What could I do but give?

Then compliments to me, which I disdained. You’ve given to living people .. I’ve seen Arnold Bennett, George Moore, Noel Coward….

Door opens …

Lady Mary Cholmondeley my lady.

Who? I dont know any such person.. Excuse me, I must go & see for myself …

And she wont wear spectacles, because of her appearance. I say I dont mind wearing them all day .. (but she doesnt). What were we saying? Yes, those you’ve named, they were the people I like to think of … Glad you’ve had some tea—this is wretched. No, I cant talk to anyone. I go on. I cant let myself talk, or I should sink into such depths … I should never recover. There are my old Aunts, the Wedgwoods. They knew us when we were young—when we were engaged. Yes. I go on, from thing to thing.

In comes Ava & the other woman. Society small talk. We shall see you again….

My dear that woman. I dislike her.

I too, because she makes me dislike her: I dont like disliking people.

Thats true. Stories of Ava’s meanness about the Lyttons & the house in North Street. A story about the house in North Street, how she got it for 700 less. And when I woke from the anaesthetic, Michael said to me the house is gone. I said Well, its not our year, thats all about it. Its not our year. After that I got the house for 700 less than I offered—because of the Lyttons, & its been lived in by a madman, its filthy. No, I’ve always wanted to be able to say if theres anyone you want to meet, I’ll arrange it. I wanted to bring people together … Now I’m going to do two things. To collect an anthology of love poems. Isnt it odd? When I was a girl of 18 I read a poem & thought I understood it all. At 18—knowing nothing of life. I’m going to collect an anthology for lovers. And in the nursing home I went through letters—little notes from A⁠[rnold]. B⁠[ennett]. from W⁠[aker]. Raleigh.

To turn from dialogue to narrative.

She talked in a scattered nervous way, like a hen fluttering over the edge of an abyss. A brave hen. Her eyes were bright. And they say now that she has cancer in her breast. Nor could I always distinguish between the pose—I am going to show myself poetic & unworldly to Virginia—& the genuine gallantry. She has been too long exposed to artificial light to do without it. She is like a bat in a bright room when she is in darkness. She is blinded by darkness; I mean when she is alone, without the stimulus & direction of other peoples views she is uncertain. Flounders. With us it is just the opposite. But whether I imagined it or not, I still felt something genuinely rising from the depths in her: a desire to fight her adversity, a momentary desire to break down; but then she was up again & off again. When the door opened & Fielding croaked out “The car, m’lady” she was glad of the call to action & we swept through the wind swept fluttering lighted streets, sitting together in the Rolls Royce while she told stories, adequately indeed rather brilliantly, of George Moore & Wells, of Henry James & Carrie Balestier [Mrs Rudyard Kipling]. The machine had got going again, after its momentary paralysis, & she jumped out at Mount Street to pay a business visit. Then she was going to a concert & then to have a supper party

But in this hasty account I have forgotten to describe my farewell to Argyll House, as I walked with her out of the double doors, down the little path, & stood for a moment at the wrought iron gate.

Tuesday 3 November

Miracles will never cease—L. actually likes The Years! He thinks it so far—as far as the wind chapter [1908]—as good as any of my books. I will put down the actual facts. On Sunday I started to read the proofs. When I had read to the end of the first section I was in despair: stony but convinced despair. I made myself yesterday read on to Present Time. When I reached that landmark I said This is happily so bad that there can be no question about it. I must carry the proofs, like a dead cat, to L. & tell him to burn them unread. This I did. And a weight fell off my shoulders. That is true. I felt relieved of some great pack. It was cold & dry & very grey & I went out & walked through the graveyard with Cromwell’s daughters Tomb down through Grays Inn along Holborn & so back. Now I was no longer Virginia, the genius, but only a perfectly insignificant yet content—shall I call it spirit? a body? And very tired. Very old. But at [the] same time content to go on these 100 years with Leonard. So we lunched, in a constraint: a grey acceptance; & I said to L. I will write to Richmond & ask for books to review. The proofs will cost I suppose between 2 & 300 pounds which I will pay out of my hoard. As I have 700 this will leave 400. I was not unhappy. And L. said he thought I might be wrong about the book. Then ever so many strange men arrived: Mr Mumford, mahogany coloured lean, with a very hard bowler & a cane; whom I put in the drawing room with a cigarette; Mr —— very heavy & large, who said Pardon me & knocked at the door. And Lord & Lady Cecil rang up to ask us to lunch to meet the Spanish Ambassador. (I am making up 3 Guineas) Then, after tea, we went to the Sunday Times book show. How stuffy it was! How dead I felt—Oh how infinitely tired! And Miss White came up, a hard little woman, with a cheery wooden face, & talked about her book & reviews. And then Ursula Strachey came across from Duckworths & said you dont know who I am? And I remembered the moonlit river. And then Roger Senhouse tapped me on the shoulder. We went home, & L. read & read & said nothing: I began to feel actively depressed; yet could make up The Years differently—I’ve thought of a scheme for another book—it should be told in the first person.—Would that do as a form for Roger?—& I fell into one of my horrid heats & deep slumbers, as if the blood in my head were cut off. Suddenly L. put down his proof & said he thought it extraordinarily good—as good as any of them. And now he is reading on, & tired out with the exertion of writing these pages I’m going up to read the Italian book.

Wednesday 4 November

L. who has now read to the end of 1914 still thinks it extraordinarily good: very strange; very interesting; very sad. We discussed my sadness .. But my difficulty is this: I cannot bring myself to believe that he is right. It may be simply that I exaggerated its badness, & therefore he now, finding it not so bad, exaggerates its goodness, if it is to be published, I must at once sit down & correct: how can I? Every other sentence seemed to me bad. But I am shelving the question till he has done, which should be tonight. Now I must copy out my Daily Worker article; then E. Watson is coming: then Ka to lunch. It is one of the most puzzling situations I have ever been in. Of course we might appeal to Morgan.

Thursday 5 November

The miracle is accomplished. L. put down the last sheet about 12 last night; & could not speak. He was in tears. He says it is “a most remarkable book—he likes it better than The Waves.” & has not a spark of doubt that it must be published. I, as a witness, not only to his emotion, but to his absorption, for he read on & on, can’t doubt his opinion: what about my own? Anyhow the moment of relief was divine. I hardly know yet if I’m on my heels or head—so amazing is the reversal since Tuesday morning. I have never had such an experience before. Now it is pouring & we go down to Lewes for the fireworks. Eth Watson & Ka yesterday & to the Book Show & walk along V⁠[ictoria?] Street & so on.

Monday 9 November

I must make some resolutions about this book. I find it extremely difficult. I get into despair. It seems so bad. I can only cling to L.’s verdict. Then I get distracted: I tried, as an anodyne, to take up an article; a memoir: to review a book for the Listener. They make my mind race. I must fix it upon The Years. I must do my proofs & send them off. I must fix my mind on it all the morning. I think the only way is to do that, & then let myself do something else between tea & dinner. But immerse in The Years all the morning—nothing else. If the chapter is difficult, concentrate for a short time. Then write here. But dont dash off into other writing till after tea. When it is done, we can always ask Morgan.

Tuesday 10 November

On the whole it has gone better this morning. Its true my brain is so tired of this job it aches after an hour or less. So I must dandle it, & gently immerse it. Yes I think its good; in its very difficult way.

Yesterday Barnes came to tea; a very white & black professional young man. Strained: on a leash: much burdened with his job; & the moral strain of keeping the BBC up to Cambridge standards. A nice old fashioned Cambridge young man.

Before that I met L. at the Red Lion & down came Kingsley looking, I thought pale lead coloured, ravaged, unwholesome. My pity of course came to the surface; & of course he asked me to review Chesterton’s Au⁠[tobiograph]⁠y wh. he held in his hand. No doubt I could make a living that way if I chose. In fact the old fountains only want this paving stone of a book off them to spring up. I wonder if anyone has ever suffered so much from a book, as I have from The Years. Once out I will never look at it again. Its like a long childbirth. Think of that summer, every morning a headache, & forcing myself into that room in my nightgown; & lying down after a page: & always with the certainty of failure. Now that certainty is mercifully removed to some extent. But now I feel I dont care what anyone says so long as I’m rid of it. And for some reason I feel I’m respected & liked. But this is only the haze dance of illusion, always changing. Never write a long book again. Yet I feel I shall write more fiction—scenes will form. But I am tired this morning: too much strain & racing yesterday. The Daily Worker article. Madrid not fallen. Chaos. Slaughter. War surrounding our island. Mauron over, & G. Brennan. Dine with Adrian tonight.

Wednesday 11 November

Armistice day—completely forgotten, by us. I’m going along quietly, rather ashamed of my extreme deliberation. Cant review Miss Weeton either. Joe [Ackerley] will only allow me 800 words of unsigned; 1500 of signed. An amusing illustration of the virtues of capitalism. Its the advertisement, not the article, they want. And its the advertisement I dont want. But anyhow the book is bad mostly; & to compress Miss W. into 800 words would not be worth doing in the eyes of eternal truth, or any other. No. The desire to review dies out in me when I have the book. Rather an interesting experiment in its way. Again I am confirmed in my project of some private sheet.

Dined with Adrian last night: a solid man called Rickman there. A. & K⁠[arin] very busy & friendly & both enjoying life more than they did, as I think. A. very tenuous & frail & distinguished. On the whole well in the thick of things, not so aloof as of old. A good deal of p⁠[sycho]. a⁠[nalysis]. talked; & I liked it. A mercy not always to talk politics. L. by the way put down Bertie’s book just before we went, & said “Now my mind is made up.” He had become an isolationist. I feel I was, for other reasons, these many months: but for different reasons—those I want to explore. But not here. R⁠[ickman].’s family had always lived in Lewes & he remembered the violent Guy Fox days, when you had to wear goggles & wet straw. K. is pleased to make £800: a very dissatisfied woman, since she always emphasises this fact. But I’m no longer so censorious either. Have done no pages, & those the worst. Or so I hope.

[Friday 13 November]

Another moment of depression, largely caused by dining with Alix & James last night I think.

Tuesday 17 November

Lord Cecil to tea. He has grown large, but still has the angular twisting movements of a thin man. His face is moon shaped; brown & pink—it used to be lank & cadaverous. He is more genial. Indeed, much expanded, & at his ease. A man of the world. A little frieze of still brown hair, very fine, at the back of his head. Bright merry eyes. In good spirits, in spite of the world. But he said, I think there is more vitality both in men & in institutions, than one expects. We have failed (the L. of N.) no matter we must try again. I’m convinced by Winston. An alliance of France England & Russia. B. Russell—insane! Complete insanity! To tell us we are to submit to Hitler! Do what Hitler tells us! What do you think, Sally? Caressed Sally [dog] with his long pointed fingers. Had been speaking in M⁠[ancheste]⁠r. When he repeated B⁠[ertie].s arguments people’s faces fell flat. The L. Mayor of M. said to him We want Dalton as leader. Atlee’s not a colourful man. Said the peoples political sense is unerring & right. One working man said to another, Vansittart has far too much say in things. Quite true. V. ruled Simon. Simon the worst F⁠[oreign]. S⁠[ecretary]. ever been. Hoare a complete disappointment. They shd. have put in Halifax. Not a genius but courageous. Eden young, poor, ambitious: his only interest politics. Human nature being what it is, therefore … No, has no opinion of Eden. Shd. have resigned. The country sees through him. Very difficult to know when to resign, as I found. Phil Baker shd. do half what he does, & should drink wine. Everyone loves him—the boys at the Treasury will do anything for him. But dictates letters as he drives.

Had been taken to see Mussolini. An absurd fellow. There he sat at the end of a very long room, making eyes at me (he made eyes). That doesnt impress me. The F.S. should submit his facts to the P⁠[ermanen]⁠t. officials but shd. control them. They write jargon, as my father used to say. Gave the impression of extreme well being: a saucepan gently simmering on the comfort & consideration of 70 years. Best type of Eng. Governing class I suppose: the flower of 19th Century civilisation: urbane, broadminded, kind & hopeful. Much more cheerful than the intellectuals. Is it that he has not so much mind? Compare him with Bertie or Aldous. Inclined to mock the earnest intellectual. Very nice of him to come of course. I was flattered. And it was raining & he went home in the Tube. Very poor he said. Had sacrificed 5 or 6000 a year when he gave up the bar. Cdn’t afford a car. Anything else? Knows human nature from one angle. Likes it. Not much deluded I shd. say. Less of a fanatic, or more concealed than of old. Winston on side of Franco, because he has friends in that camp. But the people dont respect Winston. He changes his mind & policy. Baldwin a complete failure. He shd. have resigned when Hoare did. Awful Mansion House speech. No leaders. Young men on L⁠[abour]. side kept back till theyre over 40. I wanted to ask him to call me Virginia but refrained. Thats about all. And Chapman coming today. Mauron dined on Sunday; another nice man. telling humorous stories of Roger: his car: Josette.

Tuesday 24 November

Here I am cleft as usual in my little stick. So free & so cabined. The future. What I’m to write. Yes I think I can write &c. Began 3 Gs. yesterday. & liked it. Today the old symptoms—t. of l., cant get rid of it—the swollen veins—the tingling; the odd falling; feeling of despair. Brain not fully blooded. Hot & cold. I’m glad, how odd, that I’m lunching with Clive to meet Mme de Polignac. That I’ve a new black felt hat, bought yesterday after having Ethel S. to lunch. Glad too that Helen Anrep is dining with me: that I shant be alone, alone I fall into those trances, comas, which are I suppose t. of l: but so frustrating [?], when I want to be clear & to read. A curious throbbing this disease produces. But I’ve been on the whole vigorous & cheerful since the wonderful revelation of L.’s that night. How I woke from death—or non being—to life! What an incredible night—what a weight rolled off!

Yeats’ anthology out. Am I jealous? No: but depressed to feel I’m not a poet. Next time I shall be one. And I’ve touched ground. Whatever happens I dont think I can now be destroyed. Only work work is essential. Roger…. &c.

Very cold & dank. We came up on Sunday through the fog. Figures suddenly emerged. The kind man with a paper. I walked by his side leading the car. It crashed into a wall. The wing buckled. Walked by the kerb all through Wimbledon & Wandsworth. The kerb ended. Here I was lost in a trackless mist. & so on & on. A little boy emerged—a street ruffian. People lined the pavement watching the lost cars. Another man led us; offered me a rest. In the car I looked & found the paper was The Blackshirt. Out again. Just as we thought we must find a garage & come home by tube a bus driver told us that in 200 yards it would be clear. So, miraculously, it was. Glass clear—lit up, & so home.

I have also written my memoir [Am I a Snob?]. Indeed The Years has taught me something about scenes. But are they worth doing? I want a spell of private writing—with Nessa perhaps. Dotty much praised. My hackles rise—that she shd. lend herself to puffing, shd. print her photograph. Old E. says this is a detail. I daresay she’s right—with all her faults she has scope, proportion. She touched me by giving me her little notebook of the woman in the train, well bound, with an inscription. When I’m low, how this touches me. But I will not be low. Up & off again, like the gull in the poem. Meredith’s. I wish I cd. invent a way of dashing down criticism, as I do here.

Wednesday 25 November

L.’s birthday. Lunch with Clive. The Princess, a waxy solid handsome lady with kind eyes. Not formidable. Ros. Eddy Ld Berners. Talk all very brilliant. The usual sense of having done with that when it was half over. And the different changes of light. The intimacy. Then the superficiality. Very cold. An eyeless grey day. The same subjects recur. Sybil. Ld. B’s jokes, the same. Ros. muffled & tentative. I, rather too erratic. The P⁠[rincess]. out of things. And I must lunch with her & Ethel tomorrow.

Friday 27 November

Lunch, again with the Princess, at Claridges, where in all my 54 years I have never been. Like a private house—sumptuous yet refined. The French—little Polignac niece—a singer: Nadia Boulanger, the Conductor—wear black. Sir R. Storrs. Like George [Duckworth]: stolid, second rate, a snob, & very vain. Also disapproving. The genial man gone cold, like red beef congealed. And what a lot to eat! Half left on our plates. Ethel talking with admirable racy English. The smart white faced lady in pearls listening. How she went to prison. The Ps not very vital. Boulanger the one I liked—a vital shabby governess type. French, very, so erect & smart, not dowdy, only shabby: one cheap brooch in the right place. Little P. devitalised, pretty, said F. women must have men. B⁠[oulanger] says they rule France through influence. Its true they cant get passports officially: but unofficially get everything run everything. Storrs masculine. Only has wine at night. Reads seasonally: Dante: Homer: Shakespeare. K. Martin, approached by one of the King’s circle was asked to write an article, revealing the facts from the King’s side. Is writing his memoirs—a conceited man—a non-entity I think, but wants to come here. Why? P. tactfully puts a shade over Ethel. Ethel the only one with brains (except B.) (I think I must read Dante of a morning.) So not a very exciting or formidable affair. I walked home; in my black velvet; not a bad day. Happy to be so unconcerned.

Then he was told to wait. Finally he came out after the great splash with a very inaccurate version. The King’s men told him in strict secrecy about the sexual difficulty. L. has a confidential story about the King & Mrs Simpson, told him in secret by K. Martin. Dined alone, read Sir T. Browne’s letters. I am getting back to solid food again. My wits fritter easily, but not so easily. I must work, as I told Sally G. who suffers I think considerably & shd. break off her engagement instead of being psychoanalysed. Ott. after tea—& am I to tell her about Stephen Tennant & Lytton’s letters? She will erect herself & puff out her cobra hood if I do.

Sunday 29 November

On the contrary, she was attenuated, & abashed. She put up no fight; was all shyness & anguish, & agreed with me about S.T. & the letters. Only had forgotten there was anything intimate. St. came in by chance; had a little rucksack. So she took pity on him &c. Age is coming on her. much shrivelled; all the down worn off.

Monday 30 November

There is no need whatever in my opinion to be unhappy about The Years. It seems to me to come off at the end. Anyhow to be a taut real strenuous book: with some beauty & poetry too. A full packed book. Just finished it; & feel a little exalted. Its different from the others of course: has I think more ‘real’ life in it; more blood & bone. But anyhow, even if there are appalling watery patches, & grinding at the beginning, I dont think I need lie quaking at nights. I think I can feel assured. This I say sincerely to myself; to hold to myself during the weeks of dull anticipation. Nor need I care much what people say. In fact I hand ray compliment to that terribly depressed woman, myself, whose head ached so often: who was so entirely convinced a failure; for in spite of everything I think she brought it off, & is to be congratulated. How she did it, with her head like an old cloth I dont know. But now for rest: & Gibbon.

Monday y December

Now, we are—without a King? With a Queen? What? The Simpson affair is on the surface. It was on Wednesday 2nd Dec that the Bishop commented on the Kings lack of religion. On Thursday all the papers, The Times & D⁠[aily] T⁠[elegraph]. very discreetly, mentioned some, domestic difficulties; others Mrs Simpson. All London was gay & garrulous—not exactly gay, but excited. We cant have a woman Simpson for Queen, that was the sense of it. She’s no more royal than you or me, was what the grocer’s young woman said. But today, before the PM. makes his announcement to the House, we have developed a strong sense of human sympathy; we are saying Hang it all—the age of Victoria is over. Let him marry whom he likes. In the Beefsteak Club however only Lord Onslow & Clive take the democratic view. Harold [Nicolson] is glum as an undertaker, & so are the other nobs. They say Royalty is in Peril. The Empire is divided. In fact never has there been such a crisis. That I think is true. Spain, Germany, Russia—all are elbowed out. The marriage stretches from one end of the paper to another. Pictures of the D. of York & the Princesses fill every cranny. Mrs Simpson is snapped by lime light at midnight as she gets out of her car. Her luggage is also photographed. Parties are forming. The different interests are queueing up behind Baldwin, or Churchill. Mosley is taking advantage of the crisis for his ends. In fact we are all talking 19 to the dozen; & it looks as if this one little insignificant man had moved a pebble wh. dislodges an avalanche. Things—empires, hierarchies—moralities—will never be the same again. Yet today there is a certain feeling that the button has been pressed too hard: emotion is no longer so liberally forthcoming. And the King may keep us all waiting, while he sits, like a naughty boy in the nursery, trying to make up his mind.

Coming past the Palace last night there were crowds waiting in the cold—it is very cold—cant write—with eyes fixed on the windows. Two or 3 lights were burning in upper windows.

Tuesday 8 December

Now what am I to do about these proofs? send them off? But how exercise patience & courage? What shall I write? Sketches I think …

Thursday 10 December

The chops & changes of the Crisis wd. be worth investigating, had I time. It is a foggy cold morning, as damp & dismal as can be. I have just turned on my electric light. Has the King abdicated? I think so. At 3.30. Baldwin will speak. Each day has been different—jud⁠[g]⁠ing from the papers & shop sampling. The Times reiterates No one has hurried the King. We sympathise but … it is for his Majesty to decide. The Rothermere press & Churchill, who was shouted down in the House, have subsided. No more talk of coercing the King. Mrs Simpson at Cannes says she is ready to withdraw from an unhappy & untenable position. Cars, black cars, drive constantly to & from Fort Belvedere where the King is immured, some (Labour Party gossips) say drinking: the papers say consulting a vet, about a dog who has hurt her paw. Baldwin goes down constantly: the King is rude & drunk. Last night the Queen & Pss Mary went. A brake laden with luggage was seen to leave the fort. No royal engagements are kept. It is a time of mourning. The Q. visits old curiosity shops & is said to have bought a gold frog. Meanwhile ‘the people’ have swung round to a kind of sneering contempt. “Ought to be ashamed of himself” the tobacconists young woman said. Timmy the Q’s sec: told George Bergen that abdication is settled. Maynard says no: the difficulties, legal &c, are too great. Bergen says Timmy says he is now merely haggling for a sufficient income. K. George left him nothing; & he has lavished money & jewels on Simpson. All the royal dukes are in & out & the Chancellors & solicitors with their black boxes. Last night Mary [Hutchinson] on the telephone said that to her certain (through Lady Diana [Cooper] & Lord Brownlow) knowledge the King some weeks ago, finding Mrs S. cooling, became mad with rage; also was entirely possessed against all friends advice, of some bourgeois (her word) obsession about marriage: insisted, after 2 years of license, that the marriage service was essential—though Mrs S. did not wish it—& went to Baldwin. Baldwin, Mary says, then learnt of the situation for the first time. The rest followed. She says all his friends think him insane. He could have gone on with Mrs S. as mistress till they both cooled: no one objected. Now he has probably lost her, & thrown away the Kingdom & made us all feel slightly yet perceptibly humiliated. Its odd, but so I even feel it. Walking through Whitehall the other day, I thought what a Kingdom! England! And to put it down the sink … Not a very rational feeling. Still it is what the Nation feels. The Times is discreetly sarcastic at his expense: has a curl of disdain in its tone; quotes, in its leader this morning, letters which beginning earlier in the week with hysterical sympathy, now say Our sons & brothers gave their wives & lovers & also their lives for the country. And cant the King do even this—? But everything now hardens into the certainty that the King cant do this, & will follow his luggage to Cannes. Rather an ignominious flight—I feel again. He will live in America, Bergen says, Timmy says: & the Q. wants him to abdicate. I gather that Lady Diana, en route for [Fort] Belvedere, called on Jack [Hutchinson] in his nursing home, to ask his advice. He advised that the King should professedly give her up: abstain from her society for one year; & then revert to her. But apparently the King’s little bourgeois demented mind sticks fast to the marriage service. Mrs S. gives him, unlike all the other mistresses, physical relief: her time synchronises with him. And it is said that she is now a little cooling; so what will they do in Kentucky? I am reluctant to end this page, because it is I think the last entry I shall make in this book on the subject of Edward the Eighth. If I write tomorrow, it will be in the reign, I suppose of Albert the First—& he’s not, so Mary says, a popular choice. Let it be. This afternoon I shall go down in the fog to the hub of the universe, & hang about the H. of C.

Thursday 10 December

This is the first hour, or since it is 5.30, & the abdication was announced at 4, the first hour & a half, of the new reign. Yes, I thought, its silly buying sachets at Stags & Mantles: I will go to Westminster. A bus took me to the top of Whitehall. There traffic was turned off & I dismounted. Whitehall was full of shuffling & trampling. People going both ways. Not a thick crowd—a moving crowd. A very beautiful yellow brown light: dry pavements: still lamps lit. Lines of light at Parliament Sqre. & the houses of Parliament in silhouette. The lamp burning in the watch tower. Opposite the Horse Guards there was Ottoline, black, white, red lipped coming towards me. She intercepted my impulse Bob raising his eyebrows & qualifying in his usual way. to escape. We turned & walked on. Then Bob Trevelyan loomed up. We three stood & talked. They said it was dreadful … I’m very sad … Its a pity. Has he abdicated? I asked. No, but they say he will. No one knew if he had or hadn’t. A stir of uneasy feeling .. most people half sad, yet also ashamed, yet also excited. Bob left us, not before tho’ he’s hummed & hawed & said that Hawtrey didnt think so badly of the D. also, Under wh. King Bezonian? Speak or die? of York. Then on we wandered down the yellow brown avenue. We looked up at the beautiful carved front of—what office? I dont know. Thats the window out of which Charles the First stepped when he had his head cut off said Ottoline, pointing to the great lit up windows in their frame of white stone. So my mother always told me. I felt I was walking in the 17th Century with one of the courtiers; & she was lamenting not the abdication of Edward—still though people shuffled this way & that—but the execution of Charles. Its dreadful, dreadful, she kept saying. Of course Portland’s glad he should go. Poor silly little boy—He always lost his temper. No one could ever tell him a thing he disliked. But to throw it away…. Still he hadn’t yet, so far as we knew, thrown it away. ‘It’ seemed then, looking at the curved street, & at the red & silver guards drawn up in the court-yard with the Park & the white government buildings behind, very stately, very lovely, very much the noble & severe aristocratic Stuart England .. However, nothing seemed to happen. And she had a tea party: so we hailed a taxi. Have you any news? the man said. No. I dont know .. What do you think? I say he should. We dont want a woman thats already had 2 husbands & an American when there [are] so many good English girls .. We were thus driving & talking when a newspaper car drove by with the word Abdication very large on a placard. It stopped near us; & the first papers in the bale were bought by Ottoline & me.

This is the first moment of the new reign, I said to Milly, at the open door of number 10: but she was agitated because some unexpected visitor—a man in a coat—had come—

Sunday 10 December

Then we had the Broadcast. “Prince Edward speaking from Windsor Castle”—as the emotional butler announced. Upon which, with a slight stammer at first, in a steely strained voice, as if he were standing with his back against the wall, the King (but that is already vanishing & attaching itself to York) began: “At long last.. I can speak to you ….. The woman I love … I who have none of those blessings…” Well, one came in touch with human flesh, I suppose. Also with a set pigheaded steely mind … a very ordinary young man; but the thing had never been done on that scale. One man set up in the Augusta Tower at Windsor addressing the world on behalf of himself & Mrs Simpson. Out in the All the omnibuses were empty Square there was complete emptiness. All the life had been withdrawn to listen, to judge. Miss Strachan [clerk] wdn’t listen, for fear of sympathising. And then Edward went on in his steely way to say the perfectly correct things, about the Constitution, the P. Minister, her majesty my mother. Finally he wound up, God Save the King with a shout; after which I heard his sigh go up, a kind of whistle. Then silence. Complete silence. Then Mr Hibbert saying. And now we shut down. Good night everybody. Goodnight; & we were tucked up in our beds.

Thursday 30 December

There in front of me lie the proofs—the galleys—to go off today .. a sort of stinging nettle that I cover over. Nor do I wish even to write about it here.

A divine relief has possessed me these last days—at being quit of it—good or bad. And, for the first time since February I shd. say my mind has sprung up like a tree shaking off a load. And I’ve plunged into Gibbon & read & read, for the first time since Feb. I think. Now for action & pleasure again & going about. I cd. make some interesting perhaps valuable notes, on the absolute necessity for me of work. Always to be after something. I’m not sure that the intensiveness & exclusiveness of writing a long book is a possible state: I mean, if even in future I do such a thing—& I doubt it—I will force myself to vary it with little articles. Anyhow, now I am not going to think can I write? I am going to sink into unselfconsciousness & work: at Gibbon first: then a few little articles for America; then {{Roger/3 Guineas}} Which of the 2 comes first, how to dovetail, I dont know. Anyhow even if The Years is a failure, I’ve thought considerably; & collected a little hoard of ideas. Perhaps I’m now again on one of those peaks where I shall write 2 or 3 little books quickly: & then have another break. At least I feel myself possessed of skill enough to go on with. No emptiness.

& in proof of this will go in, get my Gibbon notes & begin a careful sketch of the article.

[]

1937

[Diary XXVI]

Sunday 10 January

Another windless perfectly brilliant day. And Tommie is dead & buried yesterday, just as Clive was saying that no one had died lately. Also there’s Tonks dead in Chelsea. But Tommie’s death is a queer piece of work. We said on the whole perhaps it was a good thing, because for the past 3 or 4 years we had scarcely seen him: when we did he seemed ravaged by his own misery; couldn’t work, had been a failure; tore everyone & everything to bits in a kind of egotistic rage. Rosamund L. said he would sit on the lawn there by the hour denouncing women, complaining of his own lot. And he had grown immensely fat, white unwholesome looking, & was said to drink.

Duncan said he spent most of his time in the public houses near Tottenham Court Road, drinking. And Julia said no one could live with him, though she loved him. Everybody said one thing or another, as if he had cocked a snook at them & gone off. My own intercourse with him broke over that bust, when I took a shudder at the impact of his neurotic clinging persistency, & perhaps behaved, though I didn’t think so at the time, unreasonably, perversely. But he was such an egotist; such a man for confiding, & getting wound up in the miserable intricacies of his own psychology. I remember his launching out on the history of his own suffering, which began, of course, with his mother & father, misunderstanding him as a child. Then there was Garrow’s death; then the difficulties with Julia; how she fell in love with someone; how he still loved her. But the odd thing was that he had, years ago, great sensibility; a human charm, & sympathy—for instance when Duncan was ill at Cassis—I remember how he came into the drawing room at 37 [Gordon Square] with his arms open: Nessa kissing him in tears. And then when Carrington killed herself he came round that evening to break the news so that I shouldn’t get the shock first hand. Yes. I remember his curious squashed face, his suppleness, something eager & friendly & warm, quivering about him. Here he sat in the drawing room, when we lit the stove for the first time & the room was full of smoke: & he talked about me then: my work; not himself. He was extremely loquacious. Anything set him off. And he had a great gift for making people love him: Angus, Eddy, Barbara. But there was something twisted, deformed in him: some shudder & profound distaste, & uneasiness. Lately he had tried, I think, living alone in the country; didn’t like it; used to haunt public houses; deserted the respectable. N. & D. say they hadn’t seen him for a long time. And then he catches some germ, goes to a nursing home in Boscombe, from the [Augustus] Johns where he was staying; the only person he wanted to see was Oliver [Strachey]: & so died aged 35. A tragic, wasted life: something wrong in it; & wrong that we shouldn’t feel it more Yet one does, by fits & starts, this very fine spring morning.

Adrian, who rang up, said it was a very good thing his death. That he was in a hopeless state. He had not heard of the death, only had overheard someone say “Poor Tommie”.

I have scribb⁠[l]⁠ed this down, because it is an off morning. I am trying to screw myself to send an article to the N.S. on fishing. My Gibbon wants polishing; & I’ve got out of the mood. So let me go on to Elizabeth Robins & Octavia Wilberforce, before Quentin & Angelica come to our last roast turkey.

They live in one of those rounded houses in Brighton—Montpelier Crescent—a shaped crescent; a solid, clean, rather unsophisticated house. Miss R. sat alone in her own room, a back room, with well polished tables, rather solid books, covers on things, a sketch of W. Wilberforce over little glass stands for table legs the fire; a large coal fire; everything spick & span; documents on the writing table; as if she had good housemaids. She is old, but gnarled. Her face is perhaps slightly rouged, but crinkled. Her hair is curled & grizzled. Her eyes L. said, a faun’s eyes: very intense: suddenly intensifying, like an actresses. All her movements angular, intense, grown rather rigid. She examined us, very tensely, but compactly, about her book. And Lord knows if we told the truth, or if it was any good what we said, for she is past her prime; but has had an interesting highly charged past evidently; she held much in reserve. I suspect she has had a great many emotional & physical experiences, which have crystallised into packed & solid views; on life, on religion, or rather the dislike of religion; on work, on sex. She was launching into a panegyric, very tense too & stylised, upon O.W: when in she came—a very fresh coloured healthy minded doctor, in black, with loops of silver chain, good teeth, & a candid kind smile which I liked. Opposite my plate she had put a little china statue of W.W⁠[ilberforce].: opposite L.’s another of Hannah More. This led us—she & me—to discuss our, I think mythical, relationship: from that we slipped to education—she had none: to families—she had 9 in family; & they coerced her, though unwanted, through pressure of antiquated family feeling & propriety, to stay at home. Only through a great struggle did she break off & become a doctor. People in Brighton, where she has practised for 13 years, play Bridge sometimes 6 or 7 hours a day; dont have children; their husbands go to London to work in offices. They sometimes take a drive—& so on. I had the flushed & exuberant feeling which means I liked being there & talking & we broached many scraps of memories. How father asked E.R. to come when he gave his Forgotten Benefactors talk. “But I couldn’t say what it made me feel…. It was tremendous. Very courageous of him. I couldn’t think how he had the courage. No I could never say what I felt about that speech”. So she clips & cuts off. And about 7 we went out into the dark crescent, & I thought, Now what are they saying about us? & hoped I had made a good impression. O. said I must have great knowledge of other peoples lives to write A R. of O. That pleased me, having read that morning something about my ‘lyrical emptiness’. Oh but I’m going to think of Cleopatra’s Needle when I get on to my old nightmare: & so canter past it. I think I can too. And L. is giving Sally a run after her bath: I must go & work in this extraordinary hot spring morning. Work, work, work—thats my final prescription—so have written to [Bruce] Richmond.

Sunday 17 January

Home again. Poor L. grumbling, making Mabel a peg on which to hang his misery oh dear. But rather a good evening all the same. Not a nice morning though: proofs; dust. How quiet London is however. Not a sound. I must make up my mind to work, & break through the enchanted circle of [illegible]. First I must tidy up: throw away all Raymond: Mary Baker: Virginia Brett: Tom Eliot: the old Years litter get things clean & fresh. Lunch with Clive tomorrow to meet I dont know who. That great mystery rather amuses me. I think Jack Hills & Violet Dickinson. A great many MSS to read. I shall also go to the Nat Gall. & to the Zoo.

Thursday 21 January

News that Miss West is dying of pneumonia. A melancholy walk with L. in the rain. The usual thoughts: & this too; that I was too aloof, & never friendly eno’, & never asked her to dine. I must conquer this aloofness if I possibly can. So little one can do; but at least do it if possible. Such a mute relationship. I pass her room, & think I might have gone in; & now never shall.

[Friday 22 January]

Miss West died yesterday. And Miss Howlett reproaches Miss Bevan, ill at Worthing. And Miss Hepworth is now seeing L. about a job. It pours. Last night I turned Nessa to steel by talking about J.’s essay on Roger—a most curious transformation: as if some tigress lay in a cave, growling. Vita to lunch today. Polishing Gibbon. Will now I think do the A. Artists [?] leaflet—& then? Oh some stuff for the NS?

Saturday 23 January

A dripping foggy day: Miss West’s funeral at Golders Green. The same table, the same flowers: a little purple coffin: a large eagle like parson: & a scatter of brown, dowdy, very old & feeble spinsters: Miss Howlett chief mourner. Miss Howlett with knotted hands: an old pink [?] face; blue steady aged eyes. Nothing dingier & less forcible cd. be imagined. And we were forced to wail through hymn 478 or some such number; about saints receiving their due; alleluia. Only the hired man from the undertaker, or one of the crematorium servants sang: once a woman piped up: but gave out. L. & I sat grimly. The attendant then touched a spring, & the little coffin slid through; after which we gathered in the cloister & inspected the wreaths. Miss Howlett then was led forward, & formally shook hands, & thanked us for our letters. As for Miss West, had she been a kitten or a puppy I think one wd. have felt as much. And yet there was something alive, humorous, kindly, & even merry in the basement room where she sat surrounded with neat papers; a spotted horse; a carved wooden flower, & a piece of green linoleum. Miss L. came up and said she was left executor of what little money belonged to Margaret. One of the wreaths was what L. called a best seller’s wreath. Miss Delafield was there. But I think on the whole Miss W. enjoyed the H.P. She liked literary parties, & had an unselfish, quite disinterested temper. But its the service—the unreality.

Thursday 28 January

Sunk once more in the happy tumultuous dream: that is to say began & ended it 12 Oct. 1937 (provisionally that is) 3 Guineas this morning, & cant stop thinking it. My plan is to write out now? without more palaver, & think perhaps it might be roughed in by Easter; but I shall allow myself, make myself, scribble a little article or two between whiles. Then I hope to float over the horrid March 15th [publication date of The Years]: wire today to say Years havent reached America. I must plate myself against that sinking in mud. And so far as I can tell, this method is almost too effective.

L. seeing Miss Lange upstairs; dining with Hutchinsons to meet Wells; & now must rush up to lunch.

Friday 29 January

Wells rather shrunk. Hair still brown, but has the dyed appearance of hair that is brown on an old face. Lines more marked: skin less plumped out. He was very affable: put both hands on top of L.’s to signalise his regret I suppose for their quarrel. Budberg is a sympathetic broad faced slow moving soft eyed slav; dignified & sincere I think. Not a nonentity. Even able to impress her slow broken English upon H.G.’s little sparrow chirp. He sat by me, & was [a] little apprehensive of the highbrow at first I think. We made talk about Scotland; then he laughed at Compton Mackenzie, always dressing up: then switched off on to the poverty of authors, & instanced Arnold [Bennett]. He totted up A.’s expense & receipts. Then we got on to Russian politics, so, somehow to Tom Eliot. Tee Ess he called him with a hiss of despite; & then proceeded to say how he, which I think meant we, had been the death of English literature. Afraid of being vulgar, thats what was at the root of it. And Tom’s religion. By that we came to the Archbishop. I wonder—if I had any brains in my foolish little head, I wish they would reveal this to me: does Cosmo Gordon Lang ever alone at dead of night face his Trinity? We all have to—But does he … & so on. He likes to be listened to; & to chatter on, loosely generally, as he said to me when the gentlemen came upstairs. We’ve had a loose general kind of talk. Then he lay back in the arm chair, put his tiny hands & still tinier feet together, & chirped away. Sometimes Budberg interrupted with her solemn intoning: attacked Germany; defended France. It was old man’s talk; mellower than I remembered; mischievous; eyes a little bleared; kindly in his way; merry. Had been warned off the air for some joke; off the Daily Mail for another joke. He gives the impression that on the whole he is a detached satisfied little man; conscious of his lack of distinction; prone to snap at any pretence; introduced “my father the professional cricketer”; content I think with his position, & immensely interested still. He wished to live to be 170. is 70. Had one seen him behind a counter he wd. have seemed the very type of busy little grocer. I couldnt ever detect any mass behind his pointed beak. And I suspect that when he faces his Trinity at dead of night there are a good many books that he thinks justly, trash: & he shuffles his hands among the loose innumerable pages; & then snaps at Culture; but remembers that he has done a vast mass of work, & thinks it wont all die; & is amused at the place he has made—from Bromley Kent to Regents Park: the Baroness; & I suppose the greatest circulation in the whole world. A humane man in some corner; also brutal; also entirely without poetry.

This I scribble with the snow darkening my skylight; we are not going to Rodmell: I need not present prizes to the young Animal Fanciers; & we are waiting to see if Mr Rich of Rich & Cowan will tell us about Miss Lange.

Slight uneasinesses pass like vapour already over me: prelude to The Years. Miss Bevan has read the proofs but says nothing; Miss West presumably had read & did say nothing. And I must expect that attitude on my friends part. And I must dig myself deep in 3 Guineas … so that the other voices are scarcely heard. It will be immensely depressing; but I’ve no doubt I can survive.

Friday 12 February

Why should I write here? Only that I am devilishly anxious. L. is going to a Harley St specialist at 4 today to get a report: whether the sugar means diabetes or prostate gland or nothing serious. And I must face facts: how to keep cool, how to control myself, if it is a bad report. Work is my only help. That is the conclusion I came to last night. Probably it is only a question of treatment. Anyhow we shall soon know, unless he keeps us hanging about.

It is a very fine cold day & we are going straight on down to Rodmell where there is a L. party meeting & Q. to dinner. I have been writing hard since Jan 28th at 3 Guineas, & must simply keep at it. Even if I dont manage to finish it,—& I expect I shall—it is the one support. I have got it into trim—that is I can I think pour all I want to rather roughly & quickly into this form. Various people skim in and out: but that becomes very dim. We had too the anxiety about Julian—he tells C. Mauron that he means to enlist for Spain. Cornford’s son was killed there last week. But I cant feel that now anything like so much as I did before this happened. Nessa was in one of her entirely submerged moods on Monday when we went in. Always that extraordinary depth of despair. But I must fight, thats my instinct. And happily these statements may be extreme; but we are faced with a horrid afternoon; & cant ignore it. Odd tho how any kind of action—that we have to get ready & go—makes thinking impossible. I feel like the man who had to keep dancing on hot bricks. Cant let myself stop. Hence I suppose I write here; wh. explains why Tolstoy & his wife kept diaries.

Monday 15 February

Oh it was heavenly driving down to Rodmell on Friday evening with that weight off us! I walked Harley Street up & down up & down for an hour; people looked at me; I bought a paper; dropped my handkerchief; always returned to the swing doors of 149. People kept on going in & out. & I hardly could make myself turn my back. At last just before 5 L. came in his new light overcoat, & smiled. Well he was quite composed. And the whole thing at once fell into different proportions. Graham thinks its only a case of diet: eats too great a whack of sugar; wdn’t even examine him for diabetes; said nothing about prostate gland; found all organs very healthy; told him to continue eating as before until Hensman communicated. And L.’s symptoms are almost over. So as I say we drove down, in that odd relieved state which seems as much physical as mental; as if one’s body could unfurl; & become warm & sleepy. Got to MH. only at 7.30. had to dine hurriedly; Q. rang up to say his car had broken down. The meeting. N. Lyons sprightly & talkative; Q. came at 9.30; in gum boots wet through; had dinner at 10.30: went back over the downs in the rain. And over us brooded the same delicious ease & content, as if another space of life had been granted us.

On Sunday the O. had 2 little mildly appreciative notes about The Years; & I observed, with pleasure, that all praise & blame & talk about that book seems like tickling a rhinoceros with a feather. This is true; & remarkable. I connect it partly with my 1932 philosophic revelation: one doesnt matter: also with my present absorption in Three Guineas.

Thursday 18 February

200
38
1600
600
7:600 I have now written for 3 weeks at 3 Guineas, & have done 38 pages. Now I’ve used up that vein momently & want a few days change. At what? Cant at the moment think. And a kind gentleman from the Motor Union has troubled my peace with a copy of the Saturday Review (USA) in which I am called a maker of films & laces; a sitter in shaded drawing rooms, & so on. Now I will use a few minutes to lay this demon. I am quite sure that the next lap of my life will be accompanied with whistlings & catcalls in this strain. If I live another 15 years & go on writing they will probably change their tune. The question I have now to settle is what ‘attitude’ to adopt. This kind of sneer has an inhibiting effect for the moment. Of course reason tells me that it is the Proletarian growl trying to rationalise itself. But I must be quit of the need even of defending myself. I want to forge ahead, on my own lines. To do this I must always have a book or article on foot: except when we can escape, as I hope in June, to other settings. But in London where I am exposed all day & every day to criticism some plating of resolution is absolutely needed. And I think I’ve got it by the tip of the tail—a new kind of indifference. I experiment with snubs & sneers. How little they matter in the sum! how little they count with other people—how little the goodness or badness of my books affects the world. And there is the world—represented by picture galleries, the Caledonian Market, Gibbon, Nessa, going to MH., walking, planning new arrangements of the room, & always throwing my mind 2 or 3 miles ahead.

Stephen Spender came to tea & dinner the other day [16 February]. Rather a beautiful if too conventionally poetic young man: sunk cheeks, large blue eyes, skin always burning; great enthusiasm, but now tempered, & rather metalled because, having married, his friend, the male, joined the F Legion, is fighting in Spain; Inez, who is political in the Oxford way only, sits at Brussels studying Spanish MSS. Stephen finds this intolerable. Why then did you marry, we asked, more or less. To stabilise himself; because he dreaded the old Brindled Tom puss life of William [Plomer], safe by the fireside. Now is torn two ways: so Inez sits there, in order, should he be killed in Spain—but he’s only broadcasting—she may have her job to fall back on. A curious interpretation of marriage, dictated by the guns. I like him: told him not to fight. He said it was the easiest thing to do. I said give up speaking—he said But it brought in money. He argued that we cannot let the Fascists overrun Spain: then it’ll be France; then us. We must fight. L. said he thought things had now gone so far it did not matter. Fighting did no good. S. said the C.P. which he had that day joined, wanted him to be killed, in order that there might be another Byron. He has a child’s vanity about himself. Interesting to me at the moment, as I’m working out the psychology of vanity. Then he went to speak about Spain at the Friends House, & we to Uncle Vanya. A very cold night. I have left out my lunch with Christabel, & various other entertainments. Oh yes, I’m rather nervous about March 15 but can hold myself very much aloof. We were dining with the MacCarthys, but ‘the eldest Miss Cornish died suddenly last night at St George’s Hospital—so she must put you off’.

Friday 19 February

The difficulty wh. now faces me is how to find a public, a way of publishing, all the new ideas that are in me? I’ve written this morning 3 descriptions for Nessa’s pictures: they can be printed by us no doubt, & somehow put into circulation. But then theres in my drawer several I think rather good sketches; & a chapter on biography. Clearly I have here in the egg a new method of writing criticism. I rather think so. I feel that I want some private way of producing these studies; these adumbrations. If one writes them for a paper the attitude changes. Theyre not Times articles or N.S. articles: yet I dont want to keep them till theyre books, or flutter them out separately … Lord knows. Anyhow I like the fruitful sense it gives me.

Yesterday Ethel Sands in black & silver fur to tea; early; had been to Eltham House: on top of her Eth Williamson, striding, masculine, shooting her linen as it used to be called. Ethel flitting by the rich dusk of high liberal life; full of swerving half sentences; betwixt & between. Talked of her own funeral: this was my private joke with her—Then L. came & we talked about India. E. had been impressed by the Eng. Civilian: most of all by the rains: how the temp. fell, like this, she drew her finger along the table cloth. Then I forget—I flirted with old Ethel: about her golden wedding present. Nan [Hudson] used to know about water gilding. The Sinclairs see no danger ahead for England. One of her nephews tho’ says this is his last winter’s hunting. Eth has a telescope wh. she will sell us cheap. Off she went. Ethel stayed on. We discussed the young; catastrophe; she went, with the usual sweetness, to sit with Nan who has laryngitis. Molly’s sister scalded her foot & died of heart failure.

Saturday 20 February

I turn my eyes away from the Press as I go upstairs, because there are all the Review Copies of The Years packed & packing. They go out next week: this is my last week end of comparative peace. What do I anticipate with such clammy coldness? I think chiefly that my friends wont mention it, will turn the conversation rather awkwardly. I think I anticipate considerable lukewarmness among the friendly reviewers—respectful tepidity; & a whoop of red Indian delight from the Grigs I suppose what I expect is that they’ll say now Mrs W. has written a long book all about nothing who will joyfully & loudly announce that this is the long drawn twaddle of a prim prudish bourgeois mind, & say that now no one can take Mrs W. seriously again. But violence I shant so much mind. What I think I shall mind most is awkwardness when I go, say to Tilton or Charleston, & they dont know what to say. And since we shant get away till June I must expect a very full exposure to this damp firework atmosphere. They will say its a tired book; a last effort … Well, now that I’ve written that down I feel that even so I can exist in that shadow. That is if I keep hard at work. And there’s no lack of that. I discussed a book of illustrated incidents with Nessa yesterday; we are going to produce 12 lithographs for Xmas, printed by ourselves. As we were talking, Margery Fry rang up to ask me to see Julian Fry about Roger. So that begins to press on me. Then L. wants if possible to have 3 Gs. for the autumn: & I have my Gibbon, my broadcast, & a possible leader on Biography to fill in chinks. I plan to keep out of literary circles till the mild boom is over. And this, waiting, under consideration is after all the worst. This time next month I shall feel more at ease. And its only now & then I mind now

Sunday 21 February

Isherwood & Sally [Chilver] last night. I⁠[sherwoo]⁠d rather a find: very small red cheeked nimble & vivacious. We chattered. He lives in a pension at Brussels; is heir to an E⁠[lizabe]⁠than house near Manchester; & likes my books. The last put some colour into my cheeks. He said Morgan & I were the only living novelists the young—he, Auden, Spender I suppose—take seriously. Indeed he admires us both I gathered warmly. For M.’s books he has a passion. “I’ll come out with it then Mrs Woolf—you see, I feel youre a poetess: he does the thing I want to do … a perfect contraption.” But I was satisfied with my share of the compliment wh. came very pat in these days of depression. Auden & he are writing away together. He does the prose, A. the poetry. A. wants innumerable blankets on his bed; innumerable cups of tea; then shuts the shutters & draws the blinds & writes. Id. is a most appreciative merry little bird. A real novelist, I suspect; not a poet; full of acute observations on character & scenes. Odd how few ‘novelists’ I know: it wd. interest me to discuss fiction with him. Sally rather smudged & pale: but then Id. & I were such chatterboxes. Suddenly he said he must meet John Andrews at Rules & motor to Croydon, has to fly to Paris for one day today. Such is the life of the young when theyre not preparing revolutions. One of the most vital & observant of the young: & a relief after the mute dismals of the others. In fact both he & Sally now think things are going well in England, & that Madrid wont fall. So we chop & change. I’ve now ‘done’ 8 incidents. Julian Fry alas for tea.

[Monday 22 February]

Julian Fry last night. Stories about his ranch. The condition of the beef trade. Unfinished work: thin cows sent to England. Stories of dances: driving home; “lit up”: we gave him the honk honk honk & the ra ra ra; my wifes passionate: they say a man marries a woman like his mother: no dont send me that letter. I like to know of it (Roger’s praises) but if it were there in an envelope I cdn’t read it. Stayed from 5:15 to 12. & oh I was sleepy after talking to G. Sturgeon in R⁠[ichmon]⁠d Park. No time. The translator coming

[? Tuesday 23 February]

That extraordinary scribble means, I suppose, the translator coming. Madame or Mlle Youniac(?) Not her name. And I had so much to write about Julian, who is half a sensitive suppressed intellectual, living with rather acute affections & perceptions in Roger’s shade. (I was devoted to him: but he wanted me to hate my public school. And I never got enough of the open air, till Joan took us to Failand. Even then I was afraid of lambs. And then I drank too much after bump suppers at Cambridge .. Oh Roger always had so many things on hand. One felt one didnt come up to his standard. Then there was Champco: & the Ott. I didnt develop that side of me till later. But I had a few days quite alone with him—let me see (he’s very precise) that was July 1934. We drove from Dieppe to Dijon. I had the impression that he was much happier. At Norwich one day the car punctured; & we didnt meet & so on, & I said to Eva, a few years ago he’d have been raging & ramping—now he was as calm as anything.) What I meant was, this the shady civilised side is only half of Julian: the other is the ordinary Colonial, which I like too; all this expert talk about cattle; & the coyotes, & how they ride. A good rider is a man who can jump into the saddle of an unbroken horse, & sit him while he breaks in two. How Julian did this, & cdn’t catch onto the saddle & fell: & Eva wdn’t let him mount; but he has a great affection for that horse. A boy of 16 is now in charge. The reason they wear high heeled boots is so that they dont catch in the stirrups. Only through wearing those boots was he now here. All the beef is sold to the liners going to China. Beef is always good on ship—not mutton. And he likes riding all day after his cattle; & thinks, at night, if he has rounded them up that he has done something. Doubts sometimes crop up I suspect; about his wife too. But one doesnt know how one makes these decisions. Roger always gave him very good advice, rather casually I gather. And he drank a bottle of claret, 2 glasses of vermouth, & got a little “lit” as he would call it. And he wd. have stayed talking about Canada till one. I suppose the stimulus of society. So I’ve no time or room to describe the translator, save that she wore some nice gold leaves on her black dress; is a woman I suppose with a past; amorous; intellectual; lives half the year in Athens; is in with Jaloux &c, red lipped, strenuous; a working Fchwoman; friend of the Margeries; matter of fact; intellectual; we went through The Waves. What does “See here he comes?” mean & so on.

And the Dr. says L. is quite normal! So all that might have been spared

[Wednesday 24 February]

Dearest Virginia, I am back when you get this, alive Westminster: will you send word to 19 North Street when & where I can come & see you? 6 o’clock or dine alone Sibyl … Paris. 12. 23.II.1937. This significant & illegible card has just been brought me by L. & I copy it as material for a memoir: raw matter to serve in writing the history of my own times: also to fill 5 minutes before luncheon. I’m off again, after 5 days lapse (writing Faces & Voices) on 3 Guineas; after a most dismal hacking got a little canter, & hope now to spin ahead. Odd that one sometimes does a transition quite quickly. A quiet day for a wonder—no one seen yesterday: so I went to Caledonian market, cdn’t find spoon shop; bought yellow gloves 3/- & stockings, 1/- & so home. Started reading French again: Misanthrope & Colette’s memoirs given me last summer by Janie: when I was in the dismal drowse & cdn’t fix on that or anything.

Today the reviewers (oh d—n this silly thought) have their teeth fixed in me; but what care I for a goosefeather bed &c. In fact, once I get into the canter over Three Gs. I think I shall see only the flash of the white rails & pound along to the goal.

Sunday 28 February

I’m so entirely imbued in 3 Guineas that I can hardly jerk myself away to write here, (here in fact I again dropped my pen to think about my next paragraph—universities—how will that lead to professions & so on.) Its a bad habit. Yesterday it was effectively broken by Desmond who came punctually at one, & stayed till 7.15. nor did we stop talking all that time. Nor was I once bored or wished it to stop. A greater tribute to D. cdn’t be paid. What did we talk about? The Amberley Papers: the Russells: her self conscious control: how she lies on the floor in an attitude calculated to attract, but pretends to ignore it. Now I like nothing better than conscious allurement, D. said. I said was he no longer attracted. And he cried out No, its all gone—all gone. As a man in a train said, I’m not impotent, but I’ve had enough. This may have been to shut off all thoughts of the nameless American lady. Anyhow, he was well lit—dear old Desmond—as round as a marble: a paunch pendant; but nearly bald: with an odd 18th Century look, as if he had been dining at the Club with Johnson—a kind of Goldsmith or Boswell; a congenial spirit. And as full of human kindness as a ripe grape with juice. I think he had set himself now not to write a great book but to be nice to other people. What can I do for you, was his last remark on the stairs. Alas, he carried off The Years, wh. means—well, never mind. We talked—so easily & merrily. I went back to old talks with Lytton—talking shop about Kipling’s style: he had the same quotation—about the man who cut his throat & looked like a robin redbreast—that I had. Then how Jack Squire has imposed another false self upon his true self, which is sensitive, unhappy. He dresses up as Dr Johnson, but a Johnson without the power of speech. Lives now with Miss Warrender & drinks: she teaches him not to drink & he teaches her to drink. So to the death of Margaret Cornish after scalding her foot in St George’s Hospital. He was rung up as he was working at 2: went to the hospital; saw she was dying, so red & panting. Told her not to be afraid. Molly too deaf to hear so went home. D. & Cecilia [her sister] sat there. Her breathing was like a saw going up & down. And they prolonged it with oxygen; so that she lay tortured till 6 when they heard the stump of the nurses bringing early tea, & the voices of children like birds, & then she died. Dear old Desmond, infinitely human & sensible—a good send-off from him to the other world. So to Rachel & Michael. & so—but now its one, on a snowy Sunday. We were prevented from going to MH. Miss Bevan strained the car. Its axle has to be mended. But a wet dreary week end anyhow.

Monday 1 March

I wish I could write out my sensations at this moment. They are so peculiar & so unpleasant. Partly T⁠[ime] of L⁠[ife]? I wonder. A physical feeling as if I were drumming slightly in the veins: very cold: impotent: & terrified. As if I were exposed on a high ledge in full light. Very lonely. L. out to lunch. Nessa has Quentin & dont want me. Very useless. No atmosphere round me. No words. Very apprehensive. As if something cold & horrible—a roar of laughter at my expense were about to happen. And I am powerless to ward it off: I have no protection. And this anxiety & nothingness surround me with a vacuum. It affects the thighs chiefly. And I want to burst into tears, but have nothing to cry for. Then a great restlessness seizes me. I think I could walk it off—walk & walk till I am asleep. But I begin to dislike that sudden drugged sleep. And I cannot unfurl my mind & apply it calmly & unconsciously to a book. And my own little scraps look dried up & derelict. And I know that I must go on doing this dance on hot bricks till I die. This is a little superficial I admit. For I can burrow under & look at myself displayed in this ridiculous way & feel complete submarine calm: a kind of calm moreover which is strong eno’ to lift the entire load: I can get that at moments; but the exposed moments are terrifying. I looked at my eyes in the glass once & saw them positively terrified. Its the 15th March approach⁠[ing] I suppose—the dazzle of that head lamp on my poor little rabbits body wh. keeps it dazed in the middle of the road. (I like that phrase. That gives me confidence.)

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Tuesday 2 March

I’m going to be beaten, I’m going to be laughed at, I’m going to be held up to scorn & ridicule—I found myself saying those words just now. Yet I’ve been absorbed all the morning in the Un⁠[iversit]⁠y part of 3 Gs. And the absorption is genuine; & my great defence against the cold madness that overcame me last night. Why did it suddenly point itself like a rain cloud & discharge all its cold water? Because I was switched off doing Pictures in the morning; & then at the play, I suddenly thought the Book Society has not even recommended The Years. Thats true; but the B.S. is not an infallible guide. Anyhow these days of waiting must be a dull cold torture. I shall be happy eno’ this time next month I’ve no doubt. Meanwhile, suffer me now & again to write out my horror, the sudden cold madness, here. It is partly T. of L. I think still. And it wont be anything like so bad in action as in prospect. The worst will be that the book will be treated with tepid politeness, as an effusive diluted tired book. All my other books have stirred up strife; this one will sink slowly & heavily. But when thats said, need I fear more? I may get praise from some people—indeed I think there must be some ‘seriousness’ in it. And I can feel a little proud that I have faced the music; that we have sold 5,000 before publication; that we shall get some money; that I’m doing my share, & not merely subsiding into terrified silence. Also my own psychology interests me. I intend to keep full notes of my ups & downs, for my private information. And thus objectified, the pain & shame become at once much less. And I have proved to my own conviction that I can write with fury, with rapture, with absorption still. Now the BBC want a story.

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Sunday 7 March

As will be seen on the last page my spiritual temperature went up with a rush; why I dont know, save that I’ve been having a good gallop at 3 Guineas. Now I have broached the fatal week & must expect a sudden drop. Its going to be pretty bad, I’m certain; but at the same time I am convinced that the drop needn’t be fatal; that is, the book may be damned, We have sold 5,300 before publication with faint praise; but the point is that I myself know why its a failure, & that its failure is deliberate. I also know that I have reached my point of view, as writer, as being. As writer I am fitted out for another 2 books—3 Gs & Roger; (let alone articles); as being the interest & safety of my present life are unthrowable. This I have, honestly, proved this winter. Its not a gesture. And honestly the diminution of fame, that people aren’t any longer enthusiastic, gives me the chance to observe quietly. Also I am in a position to hold myself aloof. I need never seek out anyone. In short either way I’m safe, & look forward, after the unavoidable tosses & tumbles of the next ten days, to a slow, dark, fruitful spring, summer & autumn.

This is set down I hope once & for all. And please to remember it on Friday when the reviews come in.

To Cockfosters yesterday, & saw the old tramp woman on the bank, lighting a damp fire & eating dry bread. I took What shall we do then in my pocket. A curious comment. Saw also the monument to the birth of George Earl Grey in 1702. Had buttered toast & jam & saw the girl going to the vicarage to rehearse a religious drama. Many people. Ethel Sands, Shaw Desmond. Eth Bowen. Miss Loeb at Clive’s.

Monday 8 March

What I noticed on the walk to Cockfosters were: the father mother & small boy: (to whom the school took off their caps, one said I gave her the glad eye) the father saying “I’ve a large book waiting for you” The son piping up “I’ve got some stamps already”—the father, “I’ve torn off lots of stamps” upon wh. I thought of L. if he had a son. Then the wall round the park; how we had to walk as the car is still broken, how at every gate or even fence there was a notice This is Private .. Private road: I thought how I cursed the possessors of great parks who made me walk along the road, shaved every second by a car or a lorry; then the tramps. It was a wet cold day: had been raining in the night; the grass border very damp. The middle aged woman was trying to make a fire: a man in townish clothes was lying on his side in the grass. Both had stupid coarse broad rather truculent faces, as if they wd fire off oaths if one spoke or even looked too long. When we came back after an hour the woman had got the fire to burn, & the man was sitting up, among some old clothes & bits of dirty paper; also I think a small perambulator of some sort. She was cutting a slice of bread off a loaf, but there was no butter. At night it became very cold, & as we sat down to our duck L. said he wondered how they [s]⁠pent the night. I said probably they go to the workhouse. This fitted in with What shall we do then, wh. I read in the train. But incidentally I’m not so much impressed as I expected by it. Vivid, but rather wordy so far.

Wednesday 10 March

The fatal day is approaching—in fact I think if I can slip out after tea & buy a paper I may have the experience tomorrow—when my little reputation lies like an old cigarette end. But I’m too jaded with 3 Gs. to care to find even the right metaphor. In my perhaps cowardly wish to store have next week as an empty compartment, I’ve crammed this too full: had Christabel yesterday, must have Nan Hudson today: & to my dismay L. suddenly wants to have Mrs R. & Elaine tomorrow: & the Bagenals are dining. On Friday we get off—the doomed discarded ridiculed novelist. What care I? I begin to whistle, but I’m too jaded.

Friday 12 March

Oh the relief! L. brought the Lit Sup to me in bed & said Its quite good. And so it is; & T. & Tide says I’m a firstrate novelist & a great lyrical poet. And I can already hardly read through the reviews: but feel a little dazed, to think then its not nonsense; it does make an effect. Yet of course not in the least the effect I meant. But now, my dear, after all that agony, I’m free, whole; round. Can go full ahead. And so stop this cry of content; sober joy. Off to MH. Julian back today.

I use my last 5 minutes before lunch to note that though I have slipped the gall & fret & despair even of the past few weeks wholly today, & shan’t I think renew them; I have once more loaded myself with the strain of 3 Gs. at which I have been writing hard & laboriously. So now I’m straining to draw that cart across the rough ground. It seems therefore that there is no rest; no sense of Its finished. One always harnesses oneself by instinct; & cant live without the strain. Now The Years will completely die out from my mind.

Car mended. But rain pouring.

Sunday 14 March

I am in such a twitter owing to 2 columns in the Observer praising The Years that I cant, as I foretold, go on with 3 Guineas. Why I even sat back just now & thought with pleasure of people reading that review. And when I think of the agony I went through in this room, just over a year ago…. when it dawned on me that the whole of 3 years work was a complete failure: & then when I think of the mornings here when I used to stumble out & cut up those proofs & write 3 lines, & then go back & lie on my bed—the worst summer in my life, but at the same time the most illuminating—its no wonder my hand trembles. What most pleases me tho’, is the obvious chance now since de Selincourt sees it, that my intention in The Years may be not so entirely muted & obscured as I feared. The TLS spoke as if it were merely the death song of the middle classes: a series of exquisite impressions; but he sees that it is a creative, a constructive book. Not that I’ve yet altogether read him: but he has pounced on some of the key sentences. And this means that it will be debated; & this means that 3 Gs. will strike very sharp & clear on a hot iron: so that my immensely careful planning won’t be baulked by time of life &c. as I had made certain. Making certain however was an enormous discovery for me, though. If there’s one triumph I applaud—excuse this flamboyant language—it is the afternoon when Desmond came, & Nan Hudson was there: & I almost cracked with the wish to talk to him about The Yrs & Nan sat on, like some tepid bread poultice; & I summoned my forces, & got her to talk to me about her own life & Ethel (that was a chink) instead of letting the agonising hour go to ruin.

Now at any rate money is assured: L. shall have his new car; we will be floated again; & my last lap—if I’ve only 10 years of life more—should be fruitful. Work—work. But at the moment, the relief is so great, not I think an ignoble fame-gratified relief—that I feel myself rocking up & down, like a bush a huge fowl sat on. Still I must remember that I’m bound to get a good many shrewd knocks. And much of The Years is very feeble—for example the scene in the college still makes me blush.

Dinner at Charleston last night. Julian grown a man—I mean vigorous, controlled, as I guess embittered, something to me tragic in the sadness now, his mouth & face much tenser; as if he had been thinking in solitude. Nessa said he hasn’t altogether given up his idea of Spain: all depends on getting a job here. I felt him changed: taut, tense, on the defensive: yet affectionate: but no longer spontaneous. He comes to tea today. And L. was irritated by the intense “self centredness” of my family: Nessa only cares for her children: Julian can’t even let her know his decision, so inconsiderate; all “on the make”. This is partly due to his family complex; but there’s some truth in it.

And now I can put my philosophy of the free soul into operation. Thats what I’m thinking—needn’t go to the writers auction on 20th. All the falsities can drop off.

Monday 15 March

Spending a lazy morning. Tired in the head. Too much talk—Julian & Bunny—why do we live in such a way that the sight of our oldest friends & nephews back from China gives us a little shock of regret—I mean misery for the quiet evening gone? Julian set & rather self centred. Can only think what he ought to do. Still if what he ought to do is something for the world at large, one must excuse this grinding of an iron upon a Granite slab. Anyhow, being too tired to write, I’ve been thinking cd. I recast the rejected section of The Years for the Uniform Edition? Why do I bother? Only I rather suspect its needed for the whole argument impression. But there it is, safe; & I needn’t consider this seriously 5,300 I think sold before publication at the moment. Keep it at the back of my mind, & judge from reviews—save that they’re all so scatter brained—how far the book misses fire on that account. We are staying till 3.30: L. has rung up the Press & about 25 more Years have been ordered. A good sale possible I think. Say 10, or 11, or 12,000.

Brooding over Gibbon. Perhaps a weeks break to finish that wd be good. I dont think I shall much mind the chitter chatter; shall be glad when this following week is over; all reviews out & forgotten; & then Lord the pleasure of coming here for 10 quiet days at Easter. And they shall be quiet too—that I swear. We have done our duty by family & society quite sufficiently.

Wednesday 17 March

The communist press began its little snigger yesterday. John Brophy in D.T. a tired anaemic middle class book. So be it. That sneer is already rubbed out. But I’m too jaded to tackle the Professional chapter of 3 Gs. so write here. Yesterday we had Buxton to lunch, who had never heard of me or my agonies; & then I fetched my new lustre, & walked in the rain all across Hyde Park, now pink with coronation seats. This morning Austen Chamberlain is dead, & its an off day for me. No reviews I hope. L.’s irritation bad; will go to Hensman. No I cant write; & think shall I look at my Gibbon? Very wisely I have kept the week empty: save for the persistent Hayward tomorrow. But we know that the Spectator is giving a whole page to The Years: that the E. Standard is giving 2 columns: Desmond promises 2 cols on Sunday: & theres the NS. on Friday—so my peace is only that of a grasshopper under a leaf. No, I dont seriously fidget any more; because its plain there are 2 lines of criticism: one the Communist; the other the free mind. Had there been only the one, I shd. have been damned. As it is I’m discussed (as usual) & no one has yet seen the point—my point.

Friday 19 March

Now this is one of the strangest of my experiences—‘they’ say almost universally that The Years is a masterpiece. The Times says so. Bunny. Something about a master-piece, & how Mrs W. since To the L has more to give us than any living novelist … astonishing fertility. &: Howard Spring: If somebody had told me I shd. write this, even a week ago, let alone 6 months ago, I shd. have given a jump like a shot hare. How entirely & absolutely incredible it would have been! The praise chorus began yesterday: by the way I was walking in Covent Garden & found St Pauls, CG for the first time, heard the old char singing as she cleaned the chairs in the ante hall; then went to Burnets [of Garrick St.]: chose stuff; bought the E. Standard & found myself glorified as I read it in the Tube. A calm quiet feeling, glory: & I’m so steeled now I dont think the flutter will much worry me. Now I must begin again on 3 Gs.

Hensman is now come, I suppose—not that I’m much upset by that: as I dont seriously think this irritation matters. At the same moment, Miss Strachan has broken out into spots. L. suggests fleas. I heard him describing fleas just now in the Press. I have toiled a little at 3 Gs. but cant concentrate sufficiently: fly up into easy flights, because I’m praised no doubt.

Yesterday at Hayward’s we heard a strange story. He lives in Bina Gardens, called Bina from Rubina, the builders favourite daughter. He sits askew in a 3 cornered chair. Cant get up. His room is an uncreative room: spick & span: too tidy. Carrington painted him a book case: the books all ranged in sizes. 2 glass horses on the Victorian mahogany table: flowers separately springing: a dish of carefully arranged fruit. The story was about his landlord: in prison for writing indecent letters to the girls at Roedean—addressed To the Head Girl—therefore opened by the headmistress. These he concocted in the kitchen while Mrs Baker? cooked John’s dinner. He interviewed all the lodgers & stated the facts. He liked telling this: partly to impress me, I think; & give a kick at Dryden & editing. Wont see more of the spring he said than Walls Ice Cream van. Has a great thick soft red lip: frozen green eyes; & angular attitudes like a monkey on a string. Said how Tom gave it as his opinion that Anglo Catholics may not, owing to Church Law, use contraceptives. Hence the indecent letters, I suppose. Another feather in the cap of Tom’s Church. Now I must creep upstairs to see if Hensmans gone. My treat is to go to the Caledonian market.

Monday 22 March

No I didnt. It rained. And I left my umbrella apparently in a bus. And my brain is tired—yes, it was a strain, holding myself erect through the suspense of last week. Now I’ve a holiday from reviews till Wednesday (Listener) then till Sunday, & Desmond does it. And all 3 Gs. is held up—yet I have it pressing for speech. Can I describe old Kot. yesterday. L. looked at the telephone, thinking he was mad. Had been ‘ill’. Mere solitude mania I think. Calmed down. Gave us tea on hard chairs in basement, abused Ott & Murry. So shall now stop writing for a day.

Thursday 25 March

Yes, 2 days lying down, & cant write today. But a divine holiday. No reviews. Listener not done it. And sales great. A rush before Easter: 280 sold yesterday. Nessa to tea. But I will not write: am only waiting for my signature to dry. B. Richmond asked one for Ormond St. hospital. Boat Race at 11.30. Then we go tomorrow. No letters about Years, save one from Ly Simon. Kot, Hayward, Margery Fry all in favour of Years. No one else has yet read, or spoken. And its very fine, clear & cold. The Dss of Bedford lost.

Saturday 27 March

No, I am not going to titivate Gibbon—that is condense by a thousand words. Too much screw needed, & my brains unstrung. Merely scribbling here, over a log fire, on a cold but bright Easter morning; sudden shafts of sun, a scatter of snow on the hills early; sudden storms, ink black, octopus pouring, coming up; & the rooks fidgetting & pecking in the elm trees. As for the beauty, as I always say when I walk the terrace after breakfast, too much for one pair of eyes. Enough to float a whole population in happiness, if only they wd. look. Curiously a combination, this garden, with the Church, & the cross of the Church black against Asheham Hill. That is all the elements of the English brought together, accidentally. We came down on Thursday, packed in the rush in London; cars spinning all along the roads: yesterday at last perfect freedom from telephones, & reviews, & no one rang up. I began Lord Ormont & his Aminta, & found it so rich, so knotted, so alive, & muscular after the pale little fiction I’m used to, that, alas, it made me wish to write fiction again. Meredith underrated. I like his effort to escape plain prose. And he has humour & some insight too—more than they allow him now. Also Gibbon. And so I’m well fitted out; but cant write more than this without the old tightening & throbbing at the back of the head.

Sunday 28 March

Again I take my tiny little flutter, with the accursed Xtian bells ringing—however, dulled as they are with 500 years or more at Rodmell I cant seriously dislike them. A June morning. A log fire & a June morning. No review by Desmond: so that sword hangs suspended. L. thinks he’s jealous. I dont think that—suspect some perplexity. Q. rings up. L. will go to tea. I shant. I shall lapse into dreams. What luck if I cd. strike a good vein! Reading Othello was it once at Asheham—I remember sitting in the garden there, so sublime.

Yesterday a reporter for the N. York Times rang up: was told he cd. look at the outside of 52 if he chose. At 4.30 as I was boiling the kettle a huge black Daimler drew up. Then a dapper little man in a tweed coat appeared in the garden. I reached the sitting room—saw him standing there looking round. L. ignored him. L. in the orchard with Percy [Bartholomew, gardener]. Then I guessed. He had a green note book & stood looking about jotting things down. I ducked my head—he almost caught me. At last L. turned & fronted him. No Mrs W. didnt want that kind of publicity. I raged. A bug walking over ones skin—cdn’t crush him. The bug taking note. L. politely led him back to his Daimler & his wife. But they’d had a nice run from London—bugs, to come & steal in & take notes.

Monday 29 March

The misery is passing off in its usual way—a drowsy slackness this morning. And there is nothing much to stir it. I read a great deal yesterday—White’s Selborne, & the London Spy. A very cold night. No, this is hardly worth writing out. A man in an overcoat took notes in the field yesterday, & then someone banged on the door. I sat tight. L. was at Charleston. Julian, he says, very depressed. Today Ethel S. writes that she has read The Y. but will not comment till she has re-read. I suppose dislikes it. Well—& will look in on Wednesday. No. My policy is to lie low & invite no visitors till the summer is over—a luxurious couching like a fox on its nest. Meredith is an influential writer: how wd it be to counter him with H. James? a kind of medical mixture? And my books are waiting at Lewes: Southey’s commonplace book; Leaves of Grass: Clarendon’s history in 6 vols—rather a leap in the dark—all for £1-8.

Tuesday 30 March

No good playing Schubert if one thinks L. minds the noise. And I dont really want it either. Cold grey day—reading rather better todays over the fire. Yesterday I walked to the Bridge [at Southease] & back over the hanger. This is a Gilbert White word. Odd thing in White is the change of proportion. 1770 proportions. Thus the downs become majestic mountains; a tortoise as large as an elephant; an oak a forest &c. A very pleasing change, like a slow motion picture: a magnifyer of things. Everything six times its present size. Thats one of the great charms to us. Then the clear bell like sentences. Had no scientific instruments: only his eyes. Question when & how science suddenly developed. 18th Cent, practically middle ages.

Ethel rings up to say she has re-read Years, under Miss Hudson’s direction, & finds it no longer unintelligible, but superb—How can this be true of any mind? Yet I’m a little relieved. For one thing it makes it unnecessary to argue. I shall accept. Also shows The Years has selling power—if Miss Hudson can spontaneously enjoy. Today our last of seclusion. Possible London post this evening. Q. to dine. L.P. meeting, I am resting my brain entirely till we go back. But Thursday will be a bit of a rub—all the way to Minstead & back with the talk thrown in: but when one’s dying one must. Janet dying I mean. How strange to lie there calmly contemplating the distant but inevitable end—& Emphie watching too. But I rather suspect she is happy in her quiet composed way—save for Emphie—reading W⁠[ordswor]⁠th & Me⁠[redi]⁠th I expect, as she used, out of her carefully annotated copies. She read them with me in the Park at Firle 30 years ago I suppose.

Wednesday 31 March

Thank goodness, better today. Clear & stable—at least I’m sunning myself on that ledge at the moment. But I will not write till Monday. A hot June morning. Little gummy noises under the trees as if buds were popping, twigs exploding. Rooks cawing. Trees still clear & coloured. Letters began last night. Lord Olivier. “Being out of sorts & unable to tackle serious books I read The Years”—that sort of drivle. And the visitors beginning—Hugh [Walpole], Sally Graves party. Today a shifty apologetic letter from Sparrow asks me not to read his review, of wh he’s not proud. L. says ‘little swine ..’ Ethel engrossed by Dotty. So be it. Q. last night pleased me, praising The Y. as poetry—like To the L the oddest novel he’d ever read. A good meeting. Fenders & pokers brought by Mr Macer Wright. Louie enchanted. But cant write as the above shows. Hand wont hold pen.

Friday 2 April

How I interest myself! Quite set up & perky today with a mind brimming, because I was so damnably depressed & smacked on the cheek by Edwin Muir in The Listener & by Scott James in the Life & Letters on Friday. They both gave me a smart snubbing: EM says The Years is dead & disappointing—so in effect did S. James. All the lights sank; my reed bent to the ground. Dead & disappointing—so I’m found out & that odious rice pudding of a book is what I thought it—a dank failure. No life in it. Much inferior to the bitter truth & intense originality of Miss Compton Burnett. Now this pain woke me at 4 am. & I suffered acutely. All day driving to Janet & back I was under the cloud. But about 7 it lifted. There was a good review, of 4 lines, in The Empire review [not traced]. The best of my books: did that help? I dont think very much. But the delight of being exploded is quite real. One feels braced for some reason; amused; roused; combative; more than by praise. Of course I was pleased when L. said none of our friends read The Listener. Anyhow, my spirits rose, calm & steady; & I feel once more immune, set on my own feet, a fighter.

No one has written to me. So I feel that buffeting is over, & I can make a fresh start. Still only Desmond to come—if he is to come: & then perfect freedom.

A very interesting visit to Janet. Both of them as spry & gay & even charming to look at as possible. Janet rounded & mellowed, with the beautiful——telephone: Keynes’s: Maynard is reading The Years. & is enthusiastic. Well that does please me, all the same—For one thing it gives more ply to 3 Guineas. Now I’m making up my Broadcast: whose date we’ve tried to change: but to continue with J. & E. A little thatched sunny house, full of nice furniture. Emphie with those lustrous eyes, as if she had always lived her life. She is completely at her ease; voluble; human, spontaneous. Flitting as usual from room to room interrupting, but as naturally as a bird, one eye spilling tears; but no gloom about—a natural gaiety & fun. Its true Janet is apparently dying; but they dont know how long she’ll be at it. Such a bore, she said, to have got this ulcer just as we’d planned to have a nice old age together. So many things we wanted to do. They had meant to go to Holland & look at birds. Nor was this a pose; no stiffness about it, quite natural. So we had a sip of talk with Janet—then with E.: E. says she can’t believe in death ending things—whats 70 years? So short—so short—Whats it all for I ask if it ends now? Oh no we go on—I’m convinced of that. It cdn’t be possible otherwise—so senseless—all the time balancing one elbow in a grey jumper on the edge of the table; a tear running. Now Janet dont believe this—she dont go to Church. I do. I’ll just see if she’s ready for you. Yes, we’ve always been poor. But then we made up our minds—we wdnt go to Theatres, we wdnt have clothes. We’d have good food—my mother always said that was so important for the young—& then we had to earn our livings. That was so interesting—made you know interesting people. Very few girls in our time had to work.

With Janet gossip, rather straitened, owing to time, about the past; the present; her belief, owing to Heard’s book, in some sort of life in common, not as individuals. Some mystic survival. The young wanting it. No religion. Katherine Asquith offering to come: but I doubt if she wants visits. Quite happy, some discomfort, cant sit or walk.

What is so odd is the switch over from thinking oneself a bad writer (after Muir) to thinking oneself a great writer (after Myanard). On the whole, being a bad writer gives one a greater feeling of freedom: but not the same glory. Difference between one’s back to the wall & soaring with pinions through the dominions..—soaring with supreme dominion—how does it go?—the most liquid line in poetry.

Saturday 3 April

Now I have to broadcast on the 29th. It will go like this: cant be a craft of words, am going to disregard the title & talk about words, why they won’t let themselves be made a craft of. They tell the truth: they arent useful. That there shd. be 2 languages: fiction & fact. Words are inhuman … wont make money, need privacy—Why. For their embraces, for their to continue the race. A dead word. The purists & the impurists. There are only impressions; not fixations. I respect words too. Associations of words. Felicity brings in absent thee. We have to can easily make new words. Squish squash: crick crack: But we cant use them in writing

Sunday 4 April

Another curious idiosyncracy. Maynard thinks The Years my best book: thinks one scene, E⁠[leanor]. & Crosby, beats Tchehov’s Cherry Orchard—& this opinion though from the centre, from a very fine mind, doesn’t flutter me as much as Muir’s blame; it sinks in slowly & deeply. Its not a vanity feeling; the other is: the other will die as soon as this weeks number of The Listener is passed. L. went to Tilton & had a long quiet cronies talk. Maynard not well; cramp in the muscle of the heart. His toes curl up. Lydia anxious. Queer, since he said at Xmas he had never been so well. Talk of what to do for Julian, who strikes everyone as depressed. Oh & no papers this morning—what a curious spite against me, to keep me mildly frizzling all day. But after all, if Desmond does me he will only be mildly avuncular & depressing. Most likely he wont do me. Oh to be quit of reviews! Reading Balzac with great pleasure. Novel reading power is coming back.

Maynard said that he thought The Years very moving⁠[;] more tender than any of my books; did not puzzle him like The Waves; symbolism not a worry; very beautiful; & no more said than was needed, hadnt yet finished it. But how compose the 2 opinions; its my most human book: & most inhuman? Oh to forget all this & write—as I must tomorrow.

Friday 9 April

“Such happiness wherever it is known is to be pitied for tis surely blind.” Yes, but my happiness isn’t blind. That is the achievement, I was thinking between 3 & 4 this morning, of my 55 years. I lay awake so calm, so content, as if I’d stepped off the whirling world into a deep blue quiet space, & there open eyed existed, beyond harm; armed against all that can happen. I have never had this feeling before in all my life; but I have had it several times since last summer: when I reached it, in my worst depression, as if I stepped out, throwing aside a cloak, lying in bed, looking at the stars, those nights at Monks House. Of course it ruffles⁠[?], in the day but there it is. There it was yesterday when old Hugh came & said nothing about The Years. He has grown fatter, coarser. I did not feel him so genial: a little vulgarised I think by Hollywood. Isherwood came. We chattered, about the Royal family: Hugh is to report the Coronation for the Daily Mail, & will get £200 for 2,000 words. Then he told us the true story of Frank Vosper & Mr Willes—sodomy—a sudden impulse—over the ships side: how his face grew; he was afraid of being a monstrosity. This is what I milk Hugh for. But his stories will get a little battered. He has Mr Davidson, the parson in the barrel to lunch calling. Not much real interest in human nature in Hugh. Always something irking him. Still the party went very briskly, & when it was over I walked round the Square, the first summer evening walk, & admired our patriotic beds of red, white & blue hyacinths. We go to France in May.

Wednesday 14 April

I must make myself correct Gibbon & send today. But after those months of correction, correction almost makes me cry out in agony. So to ease myself I’m taking 10 minutes rapid writing. I’ve done, that is scribbled down, my BBC essay—with some exhilaration. Old Ethel came to tea [on 9 April], & left her thorns in my flesh. Said I was the strongest of women, by way of hinting that L. & I had kept her away at Rodmell on a pretext. But I did not write & tell her so; No: I’m sunk in privacy in quiet. How strange! It would be flat, if I were not active in the head. Not a letter this morning: only 10 or 11 perhaps about The Years since it came out. Nobody talks to me about it, nobody now writes about it. It seems Sold I think 9,300 to have sailed out of sight. And I have some foolish shrinking from meeting anyone who would talk, or not talk of it. Yet it sells—best of all my novels. H⁠[arcourt] B⁠[race]. in America have sold 12,000 before publication—easily my record. Honestly I do not know what to think of this book: is it good or bad? Honestly I am floored—& so will not think, but cut back as quick as I can to 3 Guineas. Fresh as June dawn in my head again. Another run ahead of me.

And tonight Kingsley Martin, Stephen Spender & Julian dine. K.M. in an agitated voice on the phone asks L. why I wont write for NS. is it money? They propose to increase my fee & also offer more space. So what am I to say then? The truth?

Thursday 15 April

And Stephen says The Years is the best of my books, & Kingsley also—but that don’t please me. Stephen does. Not so much as it should. Yet soon I can cast up my accounts about The Years: add, subtract & cast up & say no more. A long close political argument. Julian, KM, Stephen—all calling each other by Xtian names. What is our duty? What is the responsible man like KM to do? Cant be a pacifist; the irresponsible can. I sat there splitting off my own position from theirs, testing what they said, convincing myself of my own integrity & justice. K.M. very neurotic, dark eyed, melodramatic. A much travelled too easily agitated superficial man—all froth & feeling—self questioning—not rooted. Julian peppery & pithy—making his strange faces, suddenly hooting with laughter—uncouth rather, yet honest, yet undisciplined, yet keeping something up his sleeve. Obstinately set on going to Spain—wont argue; tight; hard fisted—has amusing phrases “joining for duration of the quarrel”. Harry Pollitt cuts up rough when asked to arrange Tony’s & Stephen’s amours—not unnaturally, as KM. said: being in control of the CP in this war—being ravaged by deaths: pestered also by relations. The CP will only accept those who are devoted to The Cause. KM. lives much in the military area; so we discussed hand grenades, bombs, tanks, as if we were military gents in the war again. And I felt flame up in me 3 Gs. wh. has been submerged by Gibbon & BBC—that I should revise now, but cant screw this morning, after all that chatter. Stephen runs on too fluent, too formless; but as I say gave me a shock of pleasure. Says The Years gives him the sense of time; & is so precise—but he will write upon it in The Left Review. So thats the young on my side. Against: Vita; Elizabeth Williamson; Hugh Walpole; For: Maynard, Hayward, Kot, Nessa, Stephen; I refer only to the speakers not to the writers, whom to differentiate would take a whole morning. The complete absence of fan mail is curious. But America is now just beginning. And did I say that they sold—oh I think I did: & am rambling. Reading Balzac: reading A. Birrell’s memoirs; & now shall shut my Gibbon rather reluctantly: I wd. like to finish. Shall I begin another article? Scott’s letters?

Wednesday 21 April

What a mercy to use this page to uncramp in! after squeezing drop by drop into my 17 minute BBC: wh. is alternately 25 & then 15 minutes. Curse the BBC. Also the N.S. They come pestering, & instead of lounging at MH. I made up an article on Gibbon’s Aunts. Why? Partly because of pressure, unconscious, from Leonard. However, on the whole MH was a good week end. Very cold wind. Went to tea at Charleston; & there found the whole family for once. Unfortunately Julian is dog obstinate about driving an ambulance; which casts a shadow over Nessa, & us too. There he’ll be keeping us all on the tenterhooks—But it wont be for 2 months, & what’s the use of looking ahead? On Monday we drove, round London, deviously, through the half dead old villages, to Ickenham: where Sally was almost surgically mated; the after marriage taking over 20 minutes. L. & the stableman & Mr Lloyd assisted: I, prudently, & chastely sat in the car & showed Mitz to the children. Then home to find Vita waiting—tomato red with one blue yellow eye: unconscious, easy & lazy as usual. We argued about Ethel. As she approached The Years—might have been written by somebody else—no wild poetry—in came L. to say Willie [Robson] must have his tea. So that argument was scotched. She went off to Curtis Brown; then to her first night of the Edwardians at Richmond; then Julian came with my glass fish: & then at last unpacked the car, slept over the fire.

Summer time began on Sunday: & I look up & see my clock still an hour late.

These little articles ruin ones time; today spoilt because I must finish off the talk & send to The Listener. Never again. Yet of course there’s a certain thrill about writing to read aloud—I expect a vicious one. And it could have been a good article. Its the talk element that upsets it. And in the pouring rain we went to Nessa’s; saw the D. of Kent pass in his emblazoned car, & then bought some of Julian’s Chinese pots.

[Tuesday 27 April]

Yes, that’ll be nice—to sit out of doors & drink, in some French town, away from all this. I ought to buy a dress; from Murray; but can’t be bothered. Opera last night: Raymond, Molly & Shaw Taylor: not as fine as it used to be; & a faded arty opera, Ariane. BBC rehearsal at 3: then Memoir Club. Sales slackening. Coronation impending. But on the 7th we’re off. BBC have asked L. to do a whole series. Never again will I read even one talk.

Thursday 29 April

L. is talking about stock. “This oughtn’t to be here at all.. I have just done my BBC. Never again never again: “Somebody hasnt checked it properly” Well, we’ve decided to let the H.P. lapse or change next June. Yes I think, owing to Miss Lang⁠[e’]⁠s incompetency, that is now definite. Many things have happened—a crowd of little engagements—the pleasantest, indeed a happy one, was the Memoir Club meeting. We dined in a kind of sitting room behind the Etoile—& soon kindled, though it was a wet night: D⁠[uncan]. had a cold; Bunny the whooping cough; & Morgan dined with Forrest Reid. But Desmond was babbling as a nightingale—never have I known him in such jubilant good temper as this year. As if he worked only to enjoy to radiate. And my thimble of vanity was filled instantly because Maynard said my Gibbon was 20 times better than anyone elses; & praised The Years—a lovely book: & D. said he is going to write a long essay on me altogether, (but he wont) And then Molly & I kissed; & Maynard suggested that D. should give the L.S. lecture on L.S.: & we had a nice slice of savoury meat; & so round to the Studio. D. read a good account of his adventure at Florence, when he misrepresented Maynard. And then old Desmond ‘obliged’. That is he had a few notes in his hand, took a comfortable chair, & gave us with perfect ease & fluency & form a character of Wilfred Blunt & his own shooting. & so to the Trevelyans—how Sir G.O. came hopping loping like a great gorilla across the wood in the middle of the shoot to say Alfred Lyall’s poems are as near poetry as anything I can stand. Oh but it was beautifully done—& stopped when it might have gone on without boring us. Then Morgan read his condemned introduction to the Lawrence letters, which Bunny is now to do. And then we went off in the rain. Desmond said We’re not a day older, & we enjoy our society as much as we ever did. And Morgan said I felt so fond of everyone, I almost wept—I think he said that. Anyhow, it was a great success; & no nonsense about it.

Yesterday oh how Margery Fry snubbed me, by announcing, as she came into the room, that the reviews of The Y. had been so sniffy she was afraid it must have influenced the sales. This was said exactly as Dora Sanger says things. But I had hold of myself, & got some sparks out of her & then David & Rachel came, & I had the best bath of understanding praise yet had: D. said The Ys had helped him more than any book he had read; & was profoundly human, moving, & a triumph. & R. chimed in with perspicacious quotation. And I kindled & thought it genuine. BBC tonight: have put off the supper party & shall get through no doubt tolerably. I rested my brain on Lotta Leaf last night, so slept & am freshened.

Friday 30 April

So we have reached the last day of this agitating month—far better than I could have foreseen. Doesnt the Lit Sup this morning finish its Centenary article by a reference to that great artist V.W. & The Years, & head it with the same immortal name? Why do they go out of their way to be polite, I wonder? If it weren’t for Julian going to Spain I should be wholly content on our French journey.

The BBC was moderately successful: that is I got my pecker up & read with ease & emotion; was then checked by the obvious fact that my emotion did not kindle George Barnes who [is] long & weary & reminds me of Adrian in his weary days (A. is no longer so weary—he had tea the other day & I found him sympathetic). But the bright bubble, the fly in the eye, & all the other effects—premonitory shivers & disgusts of that BBC gently subsided & vanished as I walked home through the cold streets alone, & thought that very few people had listened: the world much as usual. So great was the relief that I was very cordial to Barnes, & would have agreed to do another had he asked me. Remember, however, to refrain from that folly.

A very cold grey day; the Busmen threaten to strike tonight; streets laced across; camps & latrines in all the parks, like the Crimea; poles with silver hatchets along the pavements. The Queen told David [Cecil] that she went all ice at the thought of the Coronation; said the monarchy hadnt the same position as in the days of Victoria. They went to grand party—Harold’s—at B.P.: & agreed that the food was bad, & the wine delicious. King George’s hair curls; Queen Eth is growing fat; jewels were worn, & the Band played The Merry Widow in a back room. There are miles of corridors to be walked. Many guests came in taxis. They had Lord S.’s car. All the fiddles are tuning up. Barnes told me the BBC is having 150 microphones & observers along the route. I shall try to listen in from some French café. Seats are still to be had; my hairdresser’s assistant bought one for 15/- in the New Zealand Stand. Hugh Walpole is to be knighted. We are giving a youthful party—Spenders, Chilvers, Julian, Plomer on Monday: cut Sibyl & the Bob Cecils lunch, & leave on Friday—that is one week, in which I must settle the question of clothes. In the past month & a half I have written Gibbon; Gibbon’s Aunts; & the BBC, thus making I hope about £60: but oh such hard work. Gibbon remains to be copied out—the last turn of the screw. When I come back I shall instantly pounce on 3 Guineas & see what I can do.

Allington sneers at me on the BBC—too clever “for myself who am only a simple person”—& wrist watches were not invented in 1880—so the deans have their vanity, & if I say what I mean in 3 Guineas I must expect considerable hostility. Yet I so slaver & silver my tongue that its sharpness takes some time to be felt. This maundering must cease: I must face the weekend drive down, so calm & happy, now its all over.

L.’s doctor says the eczema is much better: a disease afflicting printers oddly enough: a man, Dr Rau, intelligent enough to play with theories he cant answer. Ewart refuse for some inscrutable reason to put in our new watercloset: Norris’s mechanations suspected; with what else can I fill this last blue inch?—sales of The Y. about 10,250; Amberleys going on for 300. Mr Pritchard thought me very original & amusing last night [on the BBC]. Stephen Spender thinks The Y. my best book: poetical in the right sense; Nessa’s show early next week. Shall I buy one? Am rather stingy at the moment. Now I shall stop

Tuesday 4 May

The day mother died in 1895—that 37
  5
42 42 years ago: & I remember it—at the moment, watching Dr Seton walk away up Hyde Park Gate in the early morning with his head bowed, his hands behind his back. Also the doves swooping. We had been sent up to the day nursery after she died; & were crying. And I went to the open window & looked out. It must have been very soon after she died, as Seton was then leaving the house. How that early morning picture has stayed with me! What happened immediately afterwards I cant remember.

I’m jaded after our youthful party—they stayed till 12.45. The Bus strike on, so that they couldn’t get buses—had to walk. The streets look odd, all aflutter with banners—white in Bond Street, red at Selfridges; & no omnibuses; a lower level in the streets; all taxis & innumerable private cars; & droves & herds trudging the pavement. I went to Murray’s smart new shop in Grosvenor Street; should never have faced it if I hadnt known him in his shabby days: a lovely 18th Century library turned into a work room with long trestle tables, & some big tree on the garden wall outside. Women—middleaged fat thin short paraded like Ascot horses for my very shy & incompetent observation. I felt the lure of clothes again. Ordered a dress—was tempted to get a coat too. But cant yet feel rich again: tho’ they say The Years is in its 4th printing in America: only an advt. though, & H.B. not so scrupulous as we are. Then had to ford my way along Oxford Street, but the legs & shoulders so pressing & bothering I took to the back streets; finally the Tube; was shoved in at one door, pressed out behind a stout kind man who said “Barge after me”—why “barge”? to what social strata does that word belong? Public school, I think (by the way no letters about my BBC except private ones)

The party though—jaded as I am I must refer to the party. Sally: Julian; bell rings: the Spenders; Chilver: William. So we were crowded—no fire: a hot spring night. Julian was bitter at dinner against the B⁠[loomsbur]⁠y habit of education. He had been taught no job; only a vague literary smattering. But I wanted you to go to the Bar, I said. Yes, but you didn’t insist upon it to my mother, he remarked, rather forcibly. He now finds himself at 29 without any special training. But then he objected, as I thought, to all professions. An argument in favour of my ½ professions. Sally agreed. Downstairs we found Inez; controlled; small: of the Greek horse type; a little fixed & rigid; shy I daresay; in a red dressing gown dress: very silent; precise. William immensely fat; as if just taken off the Brighton pier: jubicund: much Hugh gossip & banter; H. is becoming a Knight, tho’ I know you’ll laugh. I was in favour of his Autobiography Julian against it. The Chilver sat all inhibited & nerve drawn, so I had to give him claret & sit by him & make party talk, about carpentering & bulbs. He wd. like to leave the Air Ministry & become a carpenter—make good chairs—but of course wont & cant, though Sally urges. Another aspect of the professional question. Air Ministry long hours, hard work; but regular & safe. Julian now all in favour of a settled job: even the Treasury. He is learning the mechanics of lorries. Hadn’t even been taught that at Cambridge—only the eternal Pope—wh. I scrambled through as a child. Poor old Julian—rather on a crazy edge of life I feel. And then there was some well informed political talk to which Inez contributed, dispassionately, sensibly. I daresay there’s something to her; but why they chose to connect themselves forever—she & Stephen—God knows. Seemed to me completely separate: he critical, polite, unintimate with her.

Every moment till we go seems now numbered like stones in a building—& thats why I shall be so relieved on Friday—no numbers of any stones for almost 3 weeks—And then—Still more must this be true of L. who, with every moment plotted has to endure the actual presence of Mrs Jones, who stumped round on foot just now, employed by Dr Jones. Reminds me of Mrs Cartwright & the General strike, arriving on a rusty bicycle. Desmond is going to do L.S. on the 26th May. Shall I go? in my new dress? Nothing from the TLS about Gibbon: but Dadie writes that G. Trev. approved. Odd how recognition eddies about. Now to write to Susie Buchan.

Tuesday 25 May

These are the rough and rapid chronicles of our last French voyage which to fill this distracted morning I will try to copy here.

For example: the first vines are to be seen at La Chemille; that is on Sunday the 8th May 1937, driving from Dieppe on a fairly fine morning. Also the road ahead looked like a white steeple. Then at rising straight up. Uzerche where we stayed we saw a woman sewing a white cloth on the banks of the river. She called the cows which obeyed. The river had a fresh lip. The flowers were like an Elizabethan meadow. A man chopped wood in the wood above. I could hear the hollow sounds. No other sound. And a boy showed us the way, opening the door of a great barn. Also that day we punctured and the man at the garage, talking about Mitz who was always our introduction to humanity, said how he’d been in Gambia, and longed to be there not in this dead alive French village; where his wifes parents made him live.

So to Souillac. There it became two hundred years ago. There we sat on the banks of the Dordogne in the evening and saw the man in the great hat and gaiters, and women washing clothes on the shingle. There was a cabin built against the rock like a scene in a play; and a man sitting there while the women went in and out. All this I said happened two hundred years ago. The castle was Cromwell Road; but had a chapel and soft brown roofed barns. Roofs here like high felt hats pulled down with a dent in the middle. Chapel reminded me of times of Rousseau. Man went fishing. Peasants employed perhaps By the great house. Sudden violent storm—as usual. Climate here ‘temperamental’.

The perfect day.—May—I forget what. Hot. To the Caves [Les Eyzies]. The brownish red tracings of prehistoric animals half rubbed out by children who used to play here, until someone from Paris came and looked for these pictures. All this country very classical with its poplars in straight decorous groves; and the hills beyond. Then I had a bad time in an antiquity shop—very nasty people the old furniture sellers everywhere. Liars and spiders catching tourists. Had to buy a five shilling plate to be quit and not popular at that. The cupboards only cost £3 but couldnt be sent. Man did bad drawings of Paris life—youthful memories, stupid and imitative. The vanity of an artist and the avarice of a peasant. But I saw their bedroom which interested me. W.C. opening out of it. Then it became very hot. A town crier went round Souillac beating a drum announcing a play by Loti. Both were upset from eating truffle perhaps. Great day at Meyronne, where I wish to live—up in the castle. An old woman shredding salsify. Talked about wild boars—sometimes killed; quite tame; they eat them. Church full of flowers for the Pentecôte. The farm with the great pigeon house; all these old things not preserved but used and allowed to fall into decay.

Sunday was the fête. People in bright clothes. Villages full of black men, standing about. The lady like the Princesse Lointaine going into the ruins. Farm carts in the cloister. A little girl who lived in the cloister and caught snails for Mitz. On 17th May I was thinking about action; how far directed or dictated by publicity motives, therefore largely impure, while we took in petrol at Villefranches: on road to Albi. Cold cloudy day. Left Souillac in a state of wild distraction. Madame like Sibyl C. at a party, doing accounts, answering questions about cheese, about bills, &c. Umbrellas open on the Place; people dining out there. Very bad dinner owing to crowd the night of the feast. At last the diners were so many we got up and left. Bank Holiday in France. Then to Najac—sordidly medieval; bossed; with great beams; and muffled grinning heads; round a mediaeval fountain. No place for human beings to live in—the middle ages. Houses perched on top of cliff. River flattened out beneath. An unreal dead crawling quiet, as if they were inhabiting an old shell. The old men gossiping with their pointed walking sticks. No life; no shops; dirt and misery. Albi on a very wet bank holiday. A flashy hotel; circle of blue and red electric light in the hall which went in and out. Bad dinner. The worst hotel yet found. Walked in the rain. Cathedral magnificent—like factory in red: firm, fluted, rock-like, painted within. And so on. Rain all night. Room thick with dust. Walls stained—bugs possible. Off to Rodez now in a northern hill country. Houses changing. Still the helmets.

At Rodez the best hotel in the world. Spirits sprung up. A long walk after tea. Sat and looked at the mountains, over the very green flat nightingale valley. No Coronation movies. Reading Elle et Lui, a very good best seller [by George Sand]. Cant stop reading. They say May is always stormy. Oh a very fine rust red cathedral at Rodez. In a valley—I suppose, stopping for petrol. The Dordogne running through a meadow; very steep green brushed hills; mob headed trees. Cold and grey.

Reading Beckford by [Guy] Chapman [1937]—but why write about this cold egotist? this nugatory man? A chirp of birds and grass hoppers. Aurillac first class hotel. Dinner of character; fried eggs, ham and rice. Choc, cream with biscuits floating. Aubergines with chopped bacon and gravy; also stuffed with cheese dressing. Am forgetting English words like artichoke. Rather a dirty sky. Now on to Toulle [Tulle].

Cold, cold and wet; slept in the village of Treysac—but how do you spell it [Treignac]? Went walking to the top of the mountain to find the druid stones; all drenched green under trees; cuckoo calling; a little shepherds farm; rain coming down in full flood; as we went up following arrows, paths twisting; divine views all misted and shrouded; green lit. Had to stop, wet to skin, plod back; change; dine for 2/-; but left hungry, so to bed; no chairs; clean little place, should be seen again so lovely was it even then; still raining—now we are driving to Gueret and now I am thinking about 4 dimensional character: different aspects to be given—not the one personal intensity. But what on earth do I mean? Not I hope to excuse my own limitations; see Desmond in Sunday Times; who as usual depresses me beyond reason. Conversation at Vallensay [Valençay] about Talleyrand. D. of Valensay. No he’s not very good, not very bad. Has no children, divorced—his wife was an American. Mlle Worth—some such name. Comes here. Keeps birds, zebras for his pleasure; has a hotel at Paris. But you should see his zebras. Great nephew of the great Talleyrand. Very rich.

Lost spectacles at Beaugency—the perfect town on the Loire. Maintenon 50 miles from Paris; old claws of ruin against the bright evening sky after dinner. Birds singing; many nightingales, very fine and pure. All silent and unspoilt. But this has rapidly changed. 50 miles an hour. C’est un oustiti—un petit singe. Est-ce qu’il est dangereux? The same talk we’ve had at every town: shows the poverty of the human race. Blazing hot taking in petrol. Lunch Rouen in a sq. off the Cathedral. No salt, the English say. I give them salt. Now petrol running out. Hot sun, but this Brighton Road empty, flat, uninhabited. Boudanville 8k. Le Havre 73k. Mitz here gave her last representation as I hope. Last petrol taken. Anxious about Maynard to the extent of dreading post or buying a paper. Old wounds twinging. Still a very good end to journey. No bad news of Maynard at Dieppe; a good hotel the Rhine; man who talked fluently and intelligently after dinner about South Africa; mines; diamonds—how different from rubies; about fish; about soles and the French taking fish from Grimsby; about cooking; his wife used to cook; now lives at residential hotel; a biologist; round; chubby; spry; very objective and interesting about facts; would like to talk to innumerable people in hotels about their jobs. Night boat; calm sea; arrive at Newhaven; the Customs find cigars in the other car; pass us; we breakfasted at the Bridge Inn; on eggs and bacon; so to M.H. all very private and quiet; and glad of chairs and intimacy and the garden lush with grass and fruit trees not standing the comparison at all badly. Sally jumped at L.; deserted Percy. Now to London for two days and another week here.

Monday 1 June

Monks House.

I have at last got going with 3 Guineas—after 5 days grind, re-copying & to some extent re-writing, my poor old brain hums again—largely I think because I had a good long walk yesterday & so routed the drowse—it was very hot—At any rate I must use this page as a running ground—for I cant screw all the 3 hours; I must relax & race here the last hour. Thats the worst of writing—its waste. What can I do with the last hour of my morning? Dante again. But oh how my heart leaps up to think that never again shall I be harnessed to a long book. No. Always short ones in future. The long book still wont be altogether downed—its rever⁠[b]⁠erations grumble. Did I say—no the London days were too tight, too hot, & distracted for this book—that H. Brace wrote & said they were happy to find that The Years is the best selling novel in America? This was confirmed by my place at the head of the list in the Herald Tribune. They have sold 25,000—my record, easily, (now I am dreaming of 3 Guineas) We think if we make money of Monday 14th Jun. The Years still is top of the list.
Monday. 12th July The Years still top of the list & has been weekly.
Aug. 23rd: Years now 2nd or 3rd 9 editions
Yesterday Oct 22nd, it was last on the list. buying perhaps an annuity. The great desirable is not to have to earn money by writing. I am doubtful if I shall ever write another novel—Certainly not unless under great compulsion such as The Years imposed on me. were I another person, I would say to myself, Please write criticism; biography; invent a new form for both; also write some completely unformal fiction: short: & poetry: Fate has here a hand in it, for when I’ve done 3 Gs—wh. I hope to have written, not yet for publication tho’, in August, I intend to put the script aside, & write Roger. What I think best wd. be to work hard at 3 Gs for a month—June: then begin reading & rereading my Roger notes.

By the way, I have been sharply abused in Scrutiny, wh., L. says, calls me a cheat in The Waves & The Years; most intelligently (& highly) praised by Faulkner in America—& thats all. (I mean thats all I need I think write about reviews now; I suspect the clever young man is going to enjoy downing me—so be it: but in private Sally Graves & Stephen Spender approve: so, to sum up, I dont know, this is honest, where I stand; but intend to think no more of it. Gibbon was rejected by the N. Republic, so I shall send no more to America. Nor will I write articles at all except for the Lit Sup: for whom I am going now to do Congreve.)

It has been August hot; Nessa came over & we had a long natural gossip. Maynard has been very ill but is better. Must rest for 6 months. Duncan in France. We stay here for one weeks perfect solitude. Then a London season, very hectic I guess. I should make a note of Desmond’s queer burst of intimacy the other evening. He came, was waiting, the evening we arrived—last Tuesday that is; read us his L⁠[eslie]. S⁠[tephen]. lecture, a rather laboured but honest but perfunctory lecture: after which he & I sitting in the twilight with the door open, L. coming in & out, discussed his shyness: he says he thinks it made him uncreative. Could he have told his intimate friends his private life it would (for some reason) have freed, enriched him. But he was shy; afraid of sinking in our opinion. Not surface shy of course; but heart shy. Reference to his mistresses. He then asked if I thought he had still power to write a good book. What could he do with his wretched stump of life? I said write your private thoughts, not autobiography. And tell us your private life. He said Oh yes, I’ll come & talk to you. And I’ll write it you. I felt something uneasy, trying to express itself; egotistical, weak I daresay. I think I see why he has been so fluent, so friendly, so embarrassingly anxious to be on some warmer footing, this last few months. Its his pressing need to write a good book somehow to assert himself before the stump of life is thrown on the fire. But how far am I sincere in thinking that he can? Isnt there a fatal softness, flabbiness; now gone too far? But how can one judge? Thats my note—not altogether satisfactory, & leaving it unshaded—the picture of D. now in my mind—my affection, my unintimate, but all the same genuine affection for him. He repudiated Maurice Baring or—some titled lady I think—as ‘friends’. Said his most intimate friend was G. Moore: but was shy with him. Could not ask him that is, if he had found marriage disappointing. D. is decided that he has. Mrs M. a woman who will drag in education.

Lady Simon, too, another visitor those crowded days, will drag in education. She sent me a report, private, of the meeting at Newnham to discuss the great question if gowns should be worn. This is connected with the question, is it time to ask the U⁠[niversit]⁠y to admit us? And she says, next time, if ever, you are asked to lecture, please print your answer; her wish being that the question should be frankly & rashly posed—by me, in default of Girton & Somerville. Well, perhaps, if I can bring off 3 Gs. But can I. Down here—now cold—I scribble & traverse miles of argument as I walk through Tristrams Grove to Piddinghoe. Mr Gwynne’s cows wear brown holland coats. Oh so hot yesterday: today the air splintered into arrows & the sun muffled & whitened. Mary H. asks me to dine to meet the Duff Coopers. Courage bids me say Yes. But my hair? & my dress?

Friday 11 June

Brain rather dried up after 6 days strenuous London. Tuesday dinner to meet Duff Cooper; Wednesday Ethel Smyth; Thursday Nessa & dressmaker; Friday Harcourt Brace. So I’m running in a circle, having got on to the university chapter a difficult one. Very very hot. Very noisy. The hotel dancing: buses everywhere; a hop & frying [?]. And on top, Julian gone to Spain on Monday: & on Tuesday, news that Wogan was wounded, a man with him killed. So, a strain: which I cannot now go into: & it must last—how long? A year? Who knows? Anything to keep talking, inventing, distracting.

Wednesday 16 June

Apostle Night last night: a good one L. says. Sydney’s son made one of the best young man speeches. But I have not heard much gossip yet, since it lasted till one; & the morning is given to business. Just finishing the education section: much re-arranged. Then I shall have a few days flutter, I think. Congreve perhaps.

Helen dined with me: & the night before I dined with the Camerons, & heard Tony’s version of Mary: looks like a gnat, or a jerboa; prominent startled blue eyes, hands held like a jerboas. A pale pretty Shelley imitation American girl there, who sat on the floor, at my feet, & unfortunately adores & worships & gave me primroses one day in the winter & her poems. Not a type from which I now get much kick. Yes. London is hectic. But I’m going to reserve the next few days for moodiness. Cant always be on the hop without shaking my brains dry. No news of Julian; cant go to MH this week end because Sally may accouche. We have laid down a mattress & clothes’ drying screens to protect her.

I’ve seen: the Hutchinsons: Diana [Cooper] beautiful, veiled, easy going. Desmond there. Then Ethel Smyth: with her rough old claws scratching. Sniffing out 3 Gs. Then to the Coronation film, bits & bits; some good; others not. Then to Herbert’s on Sunday; oh the ugliness of that perfectly self-satisfied passive stockbrokers life: the Wyandottes, the orchard, the picture—the coloured photograph—the mats, the maids, Freda soft & motherly with a cat for a child: unreal, padded, easy .. & we walked at Staines. Then Adrian after dinner, on a visit of friendship. Then the Bowen, Bowras, Butts; then Helen … Now lunch.

Sunday 20 June

An odd thought strikes me, now that I think so much of conduct &c. (for 3 Gs). Why does one secretly desire the misfortunes of one’s friends? It is a cold grey day, & secretly I’m pleased that the Bells are at Charleston & we in London: I mean I’m glad that they should have a bad week end. Yet this kind of gladness is not so pleasant as the other. But after splitting meanings in my Congreve, I dont take this page in order to continue.

I have turned on my electric fire—now the sun’s out. Willie [Robson] is upstairs, & Mabel comes in to say, shall she buy sausages? I’m rather cross, since I had hoped to have one unravished day. Cant get on with my 4 Congreve plays. Last evening Ann Watkins forced her way in: offered me—I could see the bait put on the hook—£1000 & all expenses if I wd. go to USA & lecture 3 times weekly for 3 months. What about I asked. That they didn’t mind. The more personal the better: for instance, about my experience of publishing, bringing in my marriage—a happy one. At this, your husband, who is sitting in the audience, will cry BOO! Well we declined. I was to repeat the same lecture—not to read it, but to speak it. That was very important. And Aldous & Gerald Heard, those apostles of the inner life & peace & goodness, are touring the States doing this in duet. Lord lord! what an example for the Soul … & what a good quote for my book. I was amused by her perfectly frank commercialism. Money—money—money. Couldnt help liking her—so fat, so coarse, like a bathing woman still touseled & blowsy from the sea. “I’ve had a chequered career” she said. And told us how she had lectured to “nice young women … when I wasn’t one at all myself” she said. No: I dont think she’ll even be able to sell my stories for me. What they want & Don Brace wants is that I should come over & exhibit my person, & make money for Don & for Ann. And what would they spend the proceeds of my personality on? Drink I should say, looking at Ann’s cheeks. Don would presumably buy his daughter a new dress. And I dont want a thousand myself, if I pay for it by hearing a gramophone forever braying in my head. She was honestly disappointed; & I cdn’t finish my Congreve. And must now write & thank Margaret Keynes for a nice trusty old world letter about The Years.

I must add, we are waiting for Sally to give birth: so havent gone away: but is she even pregnant? L. asks again & again. He has made her a bed behind screens in his study. But she leaps & laughs.

Tuesday 22 June

Isnt it shameful to write here first thing, not to tackle Congreve? But my brain after talking to Miss Sarton, to Murray, to Ann [Stephen] gave out after dinner, so that I cdn’t read Love for Love. And I won’t do 3 Gs. till Monday—till I’ve had a quiet breather. Then the Prof. Chapter: then the final …

So now to draw the blood off that brain to another part—according to H. Nicolson’s prescription, which is the right one. I wd. like to write a dream story about the top of a mountain. Now why? About lying in the snow; about rings of colour; silence … & the solitude. I cant though. But shant I, one of these days, indulge myself in some short releases into that world? Short now for ever. No more long grinds: only sudden intensities. If I cd. think out another adventure. Oddly enough I see it now ahead of me—in Charing X road yesterday—as to do with books: some new combination. Brighton? A round room on the pier—& people shopping, missing each other—a story Angelica told in the summer. But how does this make up with criticism? I’m trying to get the 4 dimensions of the mind .. life in connection with emotions from literature—A days walk—a mind’s adventure: something like that. And its useless to repeat my old experiments: they must be new to be experiments.

Ann is a great sea monster. Her hair is bound with a fillet bought at Woolworth. She is sunburnt, sea kissed. What I mean is she’s like the figure head of the Aurora Jane. She & Richard (engaged?) ask us to supper on Monday. This pleases us, who are now teased & tried by invitations of every sort. The young are pretty ruthless though. Fierce & egotistical, also very sensitive. Ann said she shd. have taken a First: owing to politics took a third. I gave her 5gs. but she didn’t think it cost me much—certainly hadn’t read The Years.

Sarton had: disappointed; but a ‘greater book’ than Waves. Waves her cup o’ tea. Her cup o’ rose water—that is, she’s fine drawn, wd. be poetic, more gushing though in letter than in speech. She has a shrewd American vein: she ran a theatre for 3 years in N. York; but it failed so she took to poetry, & the Zoo: that is lives, for the summer, in Julian Huxley’s lodging at Whipsnade, writing a novel for Kot, & we had to promise to dine there. Ann Watkins is now hot on the scent of magazine articles, & wants another talk. But here my gorge rises. No I will not write for the larger paying magazines: in fact, couldn’t. In this way I put 3 Guineas daily into practice. For here’s Rosemary Beresford coming, & I shall tactfully cross-examine her about Eng. Lit. at Cambridge. Ann thinks Pernel far too conservative. Miss Cristal wants a chapel. Miss C. wont let them have gramophones. But they’re allowed out at night. We’re a poor college, she said casually, therefore cant join clubs. But I doubt if she sees the force of my arguments. She is absorbed in politics—communism—& Richard. According to her the scheme is to accept L⁠[abour]. P⁠[arty]. policy, of gradual revision: Edu⁠[catio]⁠n, wages; socialism; but to be ready to enforce it by force. Force may produce win what cant be won except by force. She instanced the Fr. Revn. I denied it. Its the glory of death in battle, not in childbirth that appeals to them; the spectacular; the limelight. But I shall investigate further on Monday.

Wednesday 23 June

Its ill writing after reading Love for Love—a masterpiece. I never knew how good it is. And what exhilaration there is in reading these masterpieces. This superb hard English! Yes, always keep the Classics at hand to prevent flop. I cant write out my feeling, though; must decant it tomorrow in an article. But neither can I settle to read poor Rosemary’s verses, as I should with a view to this evening. How could L.S. in DNB. deny C⁠[ongreve]. feeling, passion [?]—more in that one play than in all Thackeray: & the indecency often honesty. But eno’—

I went shopping, whitebait hunting to Selfridges yesterday, & it grew roasting hot, & I was in black—such astonishing chops & changes this summer—often one’s caught in a storm, frozen, or roasted. As I reached 52, a long trail of fugitives—like a caravan in a desert—came through the square: Spaniards flying from Bilbao, which has fallen, I suppose. Somehow brought tears to my eyes, tho’ no one seemed surprised. Children trudging along; women in London cheap jackets with gay handkerchiefs on their heads, young men, & all carrying either cheap cases, & bright blue enamel kettles, very large, & saucepans, filled I suppose with gifts from some Charity—a shuffling trudging procession, flying—impelled by machine guns in Spanish fields to trudge through Tavistock Sqre, along Gordon Square, then where?—clasping their enamel kettles. A strange spectacle—they went on, knowing wh. way: I suppose someone directed them. One boy was chatting—the others absorbed—like people on the trek. A reason why we cant write like Congreve I suppose.

Thursday 24 June

A letter from Ott. praising my NS. Gibbon article [Reflections at Sheffield Place], Now I have observed that any of my friends who disliked The Years always praise my articles, by way of urging me to give up fiction, & I suppose to make amends to me for not liking The Years. She has been very ill; almost thought she wd I bought my 4 amber tubes as theyre called on Wednesday 23rd June. I want to see how long they last uncracked. have “waved us adieu” but is recovering at Tunbridge Wells. Pipsy reads Emma to her, & she reads H James to herself.

Last night was a hard & fruitless grind: that is, I cant see why Saxon shd have dropped Rosemary [omission] into our mill; nor was there much point in bringing the Finn—a flaxen honest girl, who spoke very little English, & couldn’t understand a third of what we said. Saxon himself maintained almost complete silence—benevolent, but self indulgent; lazy. Why? I asked again & again, and should have had even harder work if Ann & Richard Ll. D. hadn’t come in; Karin & Adrian on top, rather unharmoniously. So we tumbled & tossed. Poor little RB [omission], going to teach Eng. Lit. to children in the provinces. So I lashed out at teaching Eng Lit. Ann very spontaneous, ardent & rough, at the same time sensitive—a very attractive combination, with the beauty of a ships figure head—a little blown back & battered. Richard I suppose selfish, but amiable enough. Rebecca West asked us to dine that night. Well—I dont know if that wd have done better. Odd that Saxon was so insistent for so little reason.

Friday 25 June

To the Albert Hall meeting last night. The last I swear. Inaudible. Megaphone to those behind merely vociferates split words. A little family gossip. Nessa Duncan Morgan. Oh but I liked being introduced to Auden, who wanted Stephen to bring him up. A small rough haired terrier man: slits for eyes; a crude face; interesting, I expect, but wire haired, yellowish white. Charles Trevelyan &c. Then speeches. Then semi jocular money collecting; then an auction of pictures. One by Picasso: one by Kapp. All very stagey empty & unreal. Wogan with his arm in a sling: looked tragic when unwatched, so I thought, listening to the Basque children singing on the gramophone. Robeson sang: a sympathetic, malleable, nigger, expressive, uninhibited, all warmth. & the hot vapours of African forests. I took several snubs & benedictions; thus:—Bunny cold, Morgan indifferent, Auden warm, Sally friendly; Kingsley Martin uneasy—a man I dont like—so voluble, histrionic, & he drove us home, taking a hand off the wheel to gesticulate—a different style of driving from Leonard’s. I’m hurrying. Cant analyse. Off to MH. No puppies. A finer day. Olaf Stapledon has sent me his new book: wh. flatters me, as 3 papers say it’s a masterpiece; the 4th says its bad. But am I more genially disposed because he says he admires me? Oh for this perfect soul business: how can we pretend to it? Starting my Congreve: going to do it in 3 days at MH. Then back to 3 Gs. refreshed.

Monday 28 June

Home is the hunter, home from the hill, & the Wolves are back from Monks House. And much refreshed into, the bargain. Three solitary nights. Think of that! Was there ever such a miracle? Not a voice, not a telephone. Only the owl calling; perhaps a clap of thunder, the horses going down to the Brooks, & Mr Botten [farmer] calling with the milk in the morning. A hot sulphurous week end, as if a cloud of white dust were over Lewes. The red grasses cut. Hay in black marks on the hill. Some, in the meadows, still up to my knees, & able to cover me as I lay on the river bank yesterday. We got very hot trying to move a chair—for L. this time; but it stuck; Louie & I butted like rams; L. hauled like a horse. There it stuck half way up the stairs & was only moved, down again, by Percy in his best Sunday brown coat. (By the way he talks of leaving). Up at 7.30 this morning, picked a rose, & drove up through Wimbledon, as Wandsworth Bridge is mending. Wimbledon all lush & pastoral; a crowd in Portland Road, but back by 10.30, & at work on the Second Guinea by 11. It is now started, that very difficult chapter, but I was heartened by reading some of the first: saw it as 3 Chapters suddenly; & if I can drive my pen hard, might have it done by August. But theres a terrible lot of reasoning (for me) & fitting in of the right quotations. Roger waiting too. Letters from Altounyan, Mary Fisher—Willy is dead: saw it on Friday’s placard—& the dossier from Ethel Smyth.

[Tuesday 29 June]

Mrs Woolf will you do me a great service? chirped up that bright little bird Isherwood at Richard’s last night. It was to send a message to a conference of Int. Libertarians at Madrid. He was going with Auden & Stephen & Miss Townsend Warner. But he rang up just now to ask for Hugh Walpole’s number & said that the whole thing is probably forbidden by the F.O. owing to various incompetences. It was a hard youthful comfortless but honest & genuine evening, dining in R.’s front room with no blinds: a chicken he & Ann had cooked; asparagus fried by mistake—but he a very attentive quick witted host. And wine &c. And a cat & flowers. White walls, no colour. All tidy & bare. Ann in pink, handsome truculent, concealing some sensibilities, I suppose, of a feminine kind. An odd vessel for passionate love—I mean for tender considerate love. But there it is I suppose making her sometimes sharp. But much more mature. In came, or down from his room came, Morgan with the bright bird. Morgan on taking his coat off—a very hot night—revealed a round barrel. Has he suddenly grown a fat man? Rather silent, hopping pecking, skimming away as usual. Talk of the A⁠[lbert] H⁠[all] meeting & Madrid mostly. Morgan rose to £5 on the wings of Miss Brown. Rather glad of bed & sleep. But a good evening in its hard adolescent way. And Richard maybe not a desirable son in law, as Adrian says. I wonder: but cant wonder, must lunch. In full flush of 2nd Guinea now. Years still top. Even higher. 7th printing. But what does that mean? That I can buy a book case?

Sunday 11 July

A gap: not in life, but in comment. I have been in full flood every morning with 3 Gs. Whether I shall finish by August becomes doubtful. But I am in the middle of my magic bubble. Had I time I wd. like to describe the curious glance of the world—the pale disillusioned world—that I get so violently now & then, when the wall thins—either I’m tired or interrupted. Then I think of Julian near Madrid. & so on. Margaret Ll. Davies writes that Janet is dying, & will I write on her for The Times—a curious thought, rather: as if it mattered who wrote, or not. But this flooded me with the idea of Janet yesterday. I think writing, my writing, is a species of mediumship. I become the person. Then Society: Saxon’s Club dinner: Old Sir Wm. & Beresford. And the Nefs, Sybil, Butts, Sarton—so many faces. I cdn’t face the Bussys, tho’ I shd. have liked to meet Matisse, Pernel & the rest. But the clock strikes one.

Monday 12 July

To stop myself from thinking about 3 Gs. I will chatter here. A cold July: a grey skylight. Alone with Nessa in the studio last night. We are very gingerly in our remarks about Julian, & Madrid, I notice; but she begins to discuss politics. Always I feel the immeasurable despair just on tother side of the grass plot on wh. we walk—on wh. I’m walking with such energy & delight at the moment. The reaction from last summer years 9 months gloom & despair I suppose.

I went to Stoke Newington yesterday & found a study table in white stone on wh. James Stephen was carved, large & plain, as I suspect he was large & plain. A long inscription about Wilberforce & wife & family neatly filled with green moss on top of the study table. Next door to the old Church, which might be in a hollow under the downs, is Clissold Park, & one of those white pillared houses in which Grandpapa studied The Times while She cut roses—now it smelt of Clissold Park mothers; & cakes & tea; the smell—unpleasant to the nose—of democracy. Clissold Park runs to greyhounds [?], unlike Hyde Park. There is a stag, & some say a Kangaroo. I was much refreshed by all this.

Monday 19 July

Just back from MH. but I cant & wont write anything—too hithered & dithered. Also, I screwed my head tight—too tight—knocking together a little obituary of Janet for The Times. And couldnt make it take the folds well; too stiff & mannered. She died. Three notes from Emphie this morning. She died on Thursday, shut her eyes, “& looks so beautiful”. Today they are cremating her, & she had had printed a little funeral service—with the death day left blank. No words; an adagio from Beethoven, & a text about gentleness & faith, wh. I would have included had I known. But what does my writing matter? There is something fitting & complete about the memory of her, thus consummated. Dear old harum scarum Emphie will have her solitary moments to herself. To us she will always be a scatter brain; yet to me very touching, & I remember that phrase in her letter, how she ran into Janet’s room at midnight, & they had a nice little time together. She was always running in. Janet was the steadfast comtemplative one, anchored in some private faith wh. didn’t correspond with the worlds. But she was oddly inarticulate: no hand for words, her letters save that the last began “My beloved Virginia” always cool & casual. And how I loved her, at Hyde Pk Gate; & how I went hot & cold going to Windmill Hill: & how great a visionary part she has played in my life, till the visionary became a part of the fictitious, not of the real life.

An august Sunday: I thought of the Forest lying green in the sun, & Janet dead. But I thought—not much. Too hot & harrassed with fitting phrases. And I was badly beaten at bowls. The kitchen a great success—now green & cool, & the new window shows a square of flowers; .. Why, all these years, I never thought to lay out £20 on a new cupboard, paint & window, I dont know. Last year of course I was carefully drawing my poor limp horns in. And now Elizabeth Bowen thinks The Years—oh, all I wanted it to be. And Olaf Stapledon also, & so on. I’m now coming in for measured slow sound praise—a long article by Delattre pleased me—my deepest & strongest book—so that I can discount old Ethel, who hedges—& Vita who never hedges, but takes great rough leaps over all subtleties. I am scribbling to avoid my Congreve: to avoid deciding whether to finish that off this last 10 days, or storm the last section of 3 Gs. Cant make up my mind.

On Friday we went to Worthing. Mrs W. very plaintive. Would even like to try Dr. Alexander—have I noted—no I leave out all the interesting facts—that L. is trembling less & less—can drink his coffee steady—& has, at 56, cured a disease that has, I guess, moulded his life wrongly since he was 5. All his shyness, his suffering from society, his sharpness, & definiteness, might have been smoothed. I mean by this something mostly superficial, but possibly constricting underneath also. Mrs. W however was plaintive, & Alice solid, like a large tree in shape, & Harold, the gayest of the Wolves, said, No one ought to live after 80. Like a good fellow he does his share & more of the necessary chatter. But has now bought a farm, in order to become a venerable & protected member of society, not a hated rentier. Then a meeting at MH. where the Major, who talks to mice, & holds toads in his hand, treated us to the most drivelling murmured muddle I ever heard—about force, & religion, which is heredity, & I may say with your permission, what I mean is, its all a question of thinking isnt it, & you cant talk to a Spaniard, but you can to a Mahommedan, & thats what I feel, religion’s at the back of it, & one has to take orders, as I see it, but Sir, if I may say so, its a question of heredity—but I cant reproduce the shell shock Major; & cd. only keep from howling by fixing my eyes on a cigarette. L. summed up in a masterly flight—thats what I mean: & so concluded. Q. & I were dumb.

Friday 6 August

Monks House, Rodmell.

Well but one must make a beginning. Its odd that I can hardly bring myself, with all my verbosity—the expression mania which is inborn in me—to say anything about Julian’s death—I mean about that last 10 days in London. But one must get into the current again. That was a complete break; almost a blank; like a blow on the head: a shrivelling up. Going round to 8 [Fitzroy Street, Vanessa’s studio] that night; & then all the other times, & sitting there. When Roger died I noticed: & blamed myself: yet it was a great relief I think. Here there was no relief. An incredible suffering—to watch it—an accident, & someone bleeding. Then I thought the death of a child is childbirth again; sitting there listening.

No no, I will not go back to those days. The only thing was a kind of comfort in being there with Nessa Duncan, Quentin & Angelica, & losing completely the isolation, the spectator’s attitude in being wanted; & spontaneous. Then we came down here last Thursday; & the pressure being removed, one lived; but without much of a future. Thats one of the specific qualities of this death—how it brings close the immense vacancy, & our short little run into inanity. Now this is what I intend to combat. How? how make good what I protest, that I will not yield an inch or a fraction of an inch to nothingness, so long as something remains? Work of course. I plunged on Monday into Congreve, & have about done him this morning. And undoubtedly that sets the wheels running. Directly I am not working, or see the end in sight, then nothingness begins. I have to go over though every other day to Charleston. We sit in the studio door. It is very hot, happily. A hot bank holiday—a child killed at the top; aeroplanes droning. The thought of Julian changing so queerly, no so usually: now distant, now close; now of him there, in the flesh; now some physical encounter—kissing him surreptitiously: & so on. And then I had some relief when Tom rejected his essays, for I felt then I had not been merely spiteful, merely jealous. But how it curtails the future: how it reduces ones vision to ones own life—save for Q. & Angelica. A curiously physical sense; as if one had been living in another body, which is removed, & all that living is ended. As usual, the remedy is to enter other lives, I suppose; & the old friction of the brain; but now I must sum up, & try to get my accounts, that is my plans for working, in being again.

Well, theres 3 Guineas to finish: the last chapter, now I suppose its stiff & cold. But I will try that tomorrow: then polish off Congreve: then earn £200, so they say, with a story: & so to Roger this autumn.

Will another novel ever swim up? If so, how? The only hint I have towards it is that its to be dialogue: & poetry: & prose; all quite distinct. No more long, closely written books. But I have no impulse; & shall wait; shant mind if the impulse never formulates; tho’ I suspect one of these days I shall get that old rapture. I dont want to write more fiction. I want to explore a new criticism: One thing I think proved; I shall never write to ‘please’ to convert; now am entirely & for ever my own mistress.

Rodker is nibbling at the Press. At the first nibble, through John, we both shied so strongly, that I suspect we shall end by reducing the Press to ourselves, & keeping it for ever, reduced. Rodker is a communist. Any other hand in the Press is suspect at once. Today we go to Charleston: Clive is in France with Janis [Loeb]; Duncan has been in London; Nessa is alone today. A very hot day—I add, to escape from the thought of her.

“I shall be cheerful, but I shall never be happy again”

“I thought when Roger died that I was unhappy—”

Wednesday 11 August

I have half an hour over, & may as well spend it here. ‘Here’ I always write about writing: I’m rather ashamed. But its to set a flame to the effort & the grind of the day this summer. Now we are in the worst of the time—I think I can recognise that. We dont talk so freely of Julian. We want to make things go on. Angelica & Q. come over to play bowls. We beat up talk. Its unreal. We provide amusement, L. & I: this makes us rather quarrelsome when we’re alone—the strain I suppose. The unbecoming stage of sorrow. And we are never alone. Graham on Saturday: Mrs W. & Ada on Sunday: the children: on Monday I went by train to Charleston. Thus I left L. alone: have I the right to leave L. alone, & sit with Nessa? She was again in the submerged mood. An atmosphere of deep grey waters; & I flopping like a dilapidated fish on top. Very hard work. Then A⁠[ngelica] came to sleep & yesterday was an odious London day. L. silent; house grimy; waking up: heat; heavy rough, burnt up heat. A. late; tea; drive back: great thunderstorm, dine at C⁠[harleston]. Nessa better. But now begins the visitor crises, so bothering this summer. Are the Maurons coming? Then Judith & Adrian. I hate these decisions, & L. is silent. So I write here, not about this, but about my writing, which is the only flame the day strikes. Actually [?] I’m offered £200 for 1,500 words in the Cosmopolitan. Shall I, shant I? Why make money? Another car, I suppose; another table; some new records & a dress. Familiar tune: Nessa’s children; my envy of them, leading to work. But no use in thinking—I mean in analysis. I shall have a long walk this afternoon, to Piddinghoe: walk myself serene; play bowls, read; & not think of little arrangements; I bought a 6d. Jeans on the Mysterious Universe: I’m reading George Sand quietly; a long novel that L. thinks good carefully for the Press: shd. read Congreve to complete my study, but have had no time—only got back from Charleston late. Have Auden McNeice in Iceland from The Times [Book Club]; also some French George Sand memoirs. So I can browse along. And a huge box of Roger’s articles. Endless unwritten letters—sympathy about Julian who stalks beside me, in many different shapes.

Tuesday 17 August

Not much to say. Its true, the only life this summer is in the brain. I get excited writing. 3 hours pass like 10 minutes. This morning I had a moment of the old rapture—think of it!—over copying The Duchess & the Jeweller, for Chambrun NY. I had to send a synopsis. I expect he’ll regret the synopsis. But there was the old excitement, even in that little extravagant flash—more than in criticism I think.

At Charleston yesterday in the rain. I take the train to Lewes; shop; 4.35 bus; reach Charleston for tea. Its true that I cannot write about Nessa: have to keep myself from thinking about her.

Happily—if thats the word—I get these electric shocks—Cables asking me to write. Cha⁠[m]⁠brun offers £500 for a 9,000 word story. And I at once begin making up adventures—10 days of adventures;—a man rowing with black knitted stockings on his arms.

Do I ever write, even here, for my own eye? If not, for whose eye? An interesting question, rather. I’m musing on the nature of Auden’s egotism. Suspect its something to do with uneasiness. He wants to write straight from the heart: to discard literature; egotism may be his way of orienting himself. What I mean I dont quite know, perhaps that it seems to him thats being honest, simple, naked, taking off literary clothes.

A letter from Tom; uneasily egotistic also. Or do I impute this? Eddy Playfair & the Maurons impend. The weather has broken. A great rain storm last night. [Southease] Bridge up as we drove back: a ship coming up. The river men running about in great coats with sticks like conspirators in the 17th Century. We talked at Charleston about America. Nessa made A. read aloud a description of a flood in Dr Heynes [?] book. She has read this with interest. She has a considerable detached imaginative power. This may help. Then A. & Q. But now & then she looks an old woman. She reminds me of father taking Thoby’s arm: so she asks Q. to help her. How can she ever right herself though? Julian had some queer power over her—the lover as well as the son. He told her he could never love another woman as he loved her. He was like her; yet had a I think I mean lack of judgement: obstinate & emotional. Eddie Playfair agreed. We shd. have respected him more if he had stayed in England & face drudgery. vigour, a roughness, & then as a child, how much she cared for him. I mean, he needed comfort & sympathy more I think than the others, was less adapted to get on in the world—had a kind of clumsiness, of Cambridge awkwardness, together with his natural gaiety. And thats all lost for the sake of 10 minutes in an ambulance. I often argue with him on my walks; abuse his selfishness in going but mostly feel floored by the complete muddle & waste. Cant share the heroic raptures of the Medical Aid, who are holding a meeting next week to commemorate the six who were killed. “Gave their lives” as they call it.

[Wednesday 25 August]

In London yesterday, & write here because I cannot force myself on with Congreve. I suspect its a failure. Or am I a failure? Not a question I intend to ask: since clearly one must act. In London yesterday, I began: & saw Dr Hart & Archie Cochran about Julian. Rather a physical distress than mental; about his wounds: as if one felt them bodily; Nothing new: only that he was conscious when they got him to hospital, & anxious to explain that the road was dangerous: then anxious to get on with the operation. He became unconscious, talked in French about military things apparently … & died 4 hours later. Why do I set this down? It belongs to what is unreal now. What is left that is real? Angelica in a yellow handkerchief picking dahlias for the flower show: that Edgar took a gun: & shot Churchill’s white dog: Nessa seemed ‘better’: that is could laugh & seem interested. But the reality is very shallow this summer. We had Eddie Playfair this week end & the Maurons & Helen [Anrep] for bowls & tea. I am dried up with talk, with compacting my 2 £200 efforts; one on USA: one a story; the Jeweller; now must do Congreve. Very hard work in its way, packing & pressing. I shall soon long for the space & irresponsibility of fiction.

Our telescope came last week. The erudite Eddy focussed it. We have seen Jupiter minus the waiting women: & a plaster cast of the moon. Fog driving home from Charleston last night. The robber caught at South Heighton.

Much forced talk with Hart & Cochran. Cochran a nice simple but rather tense (naturally) practical reddish young man; giving his account stiffly kindly: Hart a Jew; neurotic, rather shiny nosed, intellectual, with the professional surgeons manner. A conflict of sympathy, tragedy, professional manner, & social politeness. Queer rather. A very fine day. Now can I tackle Congreve?

Sunday 29 August

Yes I am tackling Congreve, because I want to be quit of all articles & ready for 3 Gs on the 1st.

How far would this energy of the mind carry me—could I take this narcotic successfully if Leonard died, if Nessa died? I come out here at 10 & dont wake to anything but Congreve till one. Go in with my head swaying like a captive balloon. The thing is theres no richness & security when I wake. No depth of happiness to refresh myself in. Considerable agility & gaiety & chatter. Mrs Curtis, William Plomer, Janie, Q. & A., over yesterday. Mrs C. reminds me of Jean Thomas: something spurious—showing off. She’s a highly successful liver: had £200: therefore borrowed, ran Langford Grove; lodges 10 people on top of Firle down; is adventurous, stack full of go & slapdash; but somehow not convincing as a character. Too smooth & slick & so on. A useful phrase when I’m writing in a hurry. A very hot August again. Bowls have become a passion. I gave up a walk to play. But then I’m anxious to vary the day. How independent I feel myself of tradition; & what to do next. Simply trust to life? I think Roger said he trusted life on the whole. I mean, no cut & dried rules possible. I must think out some autumn plans one of these days. We saw the Ring of Saturn last night, like a cardboard collar. The man is still at large. Mrs Curtis pretends that she is elemental: I think thats it, sets a meal out for him & entertains cosmopolitanly. Why does any showing off mildew everything? William was portentously stout, red, & healthy. He lives at Brighton for the breezes he says, & finds Cape’s MSS. distracts him from novel writing. But in fact, as the chatter was so incessant I had no gossip or silent listening with him. And now there is little to add, except that the British Ambassador in Japan has been shot: Santander has fallen; there is war between China & Japan; Clive is at Grenoble, & for 2 days I’ve had no letters, nor yet heard if my Jeweller is commissioned

Thursday 2. September

With this odd mix up of public & private I left off: & finished my Congreve, the end too crowded, but forced myself to take it to the post just as Q. & A. & Janie drove up to tea. And todays a holiday: letter writing; reading, how strangely—to hear his voice so clear from the other side of the grave—Julian on War. I hear his sharp quizzical laugh now & then: something like Clive; shrewd & biting. But as usual, the whirl of things, of things half grasped & sweeping on, like a staircase that for ever passes the platform—bewilders me. Why could he never force himself to think to the bottom of his idea? But I’m stopping in the middle; write here to make myself take breath. 5 past 12.

Sunday 12 September

I opened this—then thought of 3 Gs: then of Julian’s essay: so wasted 5 minutes; & all I had to say was that The Duchess & the Jeweller is a firm commissn: therefore I have made £400 by these 2 stories, & we bought two fountains at Hand X going to M. in the wet. Now time up.

Sunday 26 September

Tom & Judith here: therefore I am not writing the end of 3 Gs: which has kept me completely submerged from 10 to one every morning; & driven me like a motor in the head over the downs to Piddinghoe &c every afternoon from 2 to 4. Then we play bowls from 5 to 6. Then read. Then cook dinner. Then wireless. Then read. Then chocolates. Then bed. And so it begins again. But there have been so many interruptions, the specimen day is the exception. We went to Sissinghurst—unrecorded: with Eve A. & Q.: Vita with that silent goodness, & Harold too, a sense of the human understanding unspoken, & now that Gwen is not there, for me more unbroken. Many improvements: men digging; an Elizabethan drain being dug up. Lady S.’s money now supplies Vita with enough to store the house, which is too museum like perhaps. The red amber stood in the light: Persian pots: too many possessions. & then Vita shows that she inherits the magpie gift of her mother, but stabilised & dignified by the old honourable yet rather null Sackvilles. I’m drawing upon Pepita for this illuminating sketch.

Not a happy summer. That is all the materials for happiness; & nothing behind. If Julian had not died—still an incredible sentence to write—our happiness might have been profound. “Our”—L.’s & mine, now that The Years has sold between 40 & 50,000 in America; now that we are floated financially, & perhaps to shift the Press & take a new house, & privately as happy & rounded off as can be—but his death—that extraordinary extinction—drains it of substance. I do not let myself think. That is the fact. I cannot face much of the meaning. Shut my mind to anything but work & bowls. Now theres Tom & Judith, & I think I have solved the week end problem, & made it a reasonable & even enjoyable habit, as it should be—having friends in the house. Tom in some ways—with his sensitive, shrinking, timid but idiosyncratic nature—is very like myself. This morning, as Priestley’s play is praised, he is uneasy, as I shd be, & insinuates, as I should, distrust of critics, yet reads them, as I do, furtively. Tom is liverish looking, tired; but revives under the effect of Judith’s fresh & downright & able but not sophisticated, or I daresay, highly aesthetic, youth. She is a whopper: a strapper; yet with the usual complexities I think, submerged. I should however write a pack of letters; to Vita (who sent me Nessa’s little message: to me so profoundly touching, thus sent secretly via Vita that I have ‘helped’ her more than she can say) & to Chambrun, my employer: & to the Fabian [untraced], & others, for with the autumn letters begin, & publicity puts its rather heavy, not altogether unacceptable fingers on me. More letters than usual of praise & demands therefore.

Tuesday 12 October

London.

Yes we are back at Tavistock Square; & I’ve never written a word since Sept. 27th. That shows how every morning was crammed to the margin with 3 Guineas. This is the first morning I write, because at 12, ten minutes ago I wrote what I think is the last page of 3 Gs. Oh how violently I have been galloping through these mornings! It has pressed & spurted out of me, if thats any proof of virtue, like a physical volcano. And my brain feels cool & quiet after the expulsion. I’ve had it sizzling now since—well I was thinking of it at Delphi I remember. And then I forced myself to put it into fiction first. No, the fiction came first. The Years. And how I held myself back, all through the terrible depression, & refused, save for some frantic notes, to tap it until The Years—that awful burden—was off me. So that I have deserved this gallop. And taken time & thought too. But whether it is good or bad how can I tell? I must now add the bibliography & notes. And have a weeks respite. This may be provided by Mr Davis of Harpers Bazaar, coming to tea today to discuss a story suggested by that maroon coloured sharper, as we suspect him, M. Chambrun—whom I have not described—the agent who cabled about the Duchess & the Jeweller, offered £200, & I think will somehow wriggle out.

So nothing was said here of the last weeks at Monks House. The weather was very fine. That objective statement sounds a little odd. Nessa went to Paris. Last night she came here, for the first time. We have the materials for happiness, but no happiness. All this summer, I find myself saying that verse, Lowell’s, about those whose coming steps we listen for: the verse about the nephew killed in the war. When Thoby died I used to walk about London saying to myself Stevenson’s verses: You alone have crossed the melancholy stream. Both Yours the undiminished gladness undecaying dream. doggerel I suppose: yet they say themselves spontaneously. With Thoby though I felt we were the same age. With Julian it is the old woman, saying that she wont see the young again. It is an unnatural death, his. I cant make it fit in anywhere. Perhaps because he was killed, violently. I can do nothing with the experience yet. It seems still emptiness: the sight of Nessa bleeding: how we watch: nothing to be done. But whats odd is I cant notice, or describe. Of course I have forced myself to drive ahead with the book. But the future without Julian is cut off. lopped: deformed.

We have decided, gradually, completely, not to sell the Press; but to let it die off, saving for our own books. This is a good conclusion I think. It keeps the right to adventure; cuts off some money. We cd not face writing for publishers. Thus I carry out my own theories anyhow. And we get fresh scope for experiment & freedom.

Wednesday 13 October

George Davis came & commissioned a story I think. On top of him Philip Hart the Dr who was with Julian when he died. The facts now seem to be: Julian was brought in with a very bad wound—looked deathly white. He asked H. What chance have I? Hart told him 80 per cent recover. A lie. He had only the chances of a miracle. He was very brave. After the operation, H. saw him comfortably in bed. Went back 2 hours later & found him dozing half conscious. And so he remained till he died that night. Hart said Julian & the other man lay under the ambulance. They might, & could have taken cover in a trench. But it is impossible to take precautions always. Julian was hit by a side splash from a shell: the other man not touched. It was as if he were killed at once. The mind of a person so wounded is only on immediate things. He said nothing about Nessa. Was anxious to get on with the operation.

This does not tally altogether with the other accounts: P.H. & the others thought he was alone, & so on. But now there is no more to be discovered. Hart was tormented by some sense of guilt. That they had not kept J. from the front. They would have done so later. This was his first experience. Things are now much more dangerous. The Ambulance is almost as dangerous as the Army. And so he went. He said that the worst fighting is about to come. A long talk. Like Tisdall [VW’s dentist] to look at. A nice, sensitive thin man, an enthusiast. If we allowed arms thro we shd save thousands of lives.

& then I go upstairs & find L. enraged with the L. Party which sent a deputation to the F.O. & was diddled by Vansittart. So we shant let arms through: we shall sit on the fence: & the fighting will go on—But I am not a politician: obviously, can only rethink politics very slowly into my own tongue.

Tuesday 19 October

It came over me suddenly last night, as I was reading The Shooting Party,—the story that I’m to send to America, H⁠[arper’s]. B⁠[azaar]., that I saw the form of a new novel. Its to be first the statement of the theme: then the restatement: & so on: repeating the same story: singling out this & then that: until the central idea is stated.

This might also lend itself to my book of criticism. But how I dont now, being very jaded in the brain, try to discover.

What happened was this: when I finished the S.P. I thought, now that the woman has called a taxi; I will go on to meet, say, Christabel, at T. Square who tells the story again: or I will expatiate upon my own idea in telling the story; or I will find some other person at the S.P. whose life I will tell: but all the scenes must be controlled, & radiate to a centre. I think this is a possible idea; & wd. admit of doing it in short bursts: cd. be a concentrated small book: cd. contain many varieties of mood. And possibly criticism. I must keep the idea at the back of my mind for a year or two, while I do Roger &c.

This struck me just as the Spenders came to dinner. I was depressed. Why do I resent Stephen now that Julian’s dead?—the incredible words? Just before they came I found the lines in Lowell: Biglow papers: Its hard to see the young go fust, all brimming full of gifts & graces … whose coming steps there’s some that wont, no, not lifelong leave off {expecting} awaiting, (something like that). Then Stephen comes in: not Julian. Last time they dined, it was to meet Julian. Well, one must not think of this. Julian wd. have said, “But my dear—once he said sweetheart—(I suspect his word for his loves) its clear that you’ve got to go on & comfort Nessa.” Thats what he wd say at this moment. Oh Lord!

Well: I will go to Maples about chaircovers; to Highgate to see Roger’s house; & dream today, because I must unscrew my head & somehow freshen up if I am to write, to live, to go through the next lap with zest, not like old sea weed. Stephen talked mostly about a new magazine: another; to run 6 numbers; L. to write politics in each: as the unifyer [?]. & the H.P. to publish. But he wont; & the H.P. won’t. So it fizzled out. Then there was a good deal of politics: Inez a precise, horse headed woman, at last emerged. Talked of her Spanish book. Still an Oxford student. They had been seeing Ottoline. Not much gossip. A fog.

Friday 22 October

I am basking my brains. No I didnt go to Paris. This is a note to make. Waking at 3 I decided I would spend the week end at Paris. Got so far as looking up trains, consulting Nessa about hotel. Then L. said he wd. rather not. Then I was overcome with happiness. Then we walked round the square love making—after 25 years cant bear to be separate. Then I walked round the Lake in Regents Park. Then … you see it is an enormous pleasure, being wanted: a wife. And our marriage so complete.

To return to facts (tho’ this ‘fiction’ is radiant still under my skin): walked to see Roger’s Highgate birthplace: suddenly L. developed the idea of making the young Brainies take the Press as a Cooperative company (John [Lehmann]; Isherwood; Auden; Stephen). All are bubbling with discontent & ideas. All want a focus; a manager: a mouthpiece: a common voice. Wd. like L. to manage it. Couldnt we sell, & creep out? Thats the idea—& yet keep the soul, translated into this on the whole appropriate body? Anyhow, John was heard in the Press: consulted; interested; fights shy of money; £6,000: will lunch with I. & discuss. And now telephones he will come on Monday. So that fats a frizzling. Off now, not to Paris, but to the Grocer with the Cupid, so to MH, Q. & the L.P. meeting: a fair exchange for Paris, where, too, I shd. have met & mixed with Nick, Barbara, Saxon, & the Easdales. Nick, the lout with a veneer of 2nd hand Bloomsbury, came to tea, & considerably exacerbated me. He is having lectures on ways of improving his intercourse with Judith. Duncan gave me a green brooch. A fine day.

Monday 25 October

A terrific gale this week end. We went to Cuckmere, via Seaford; The sea over the front: great spray fountain bursting to my joy over the parade & the lighthouse. Right over the car. Then we walked down to the sea at Cuckmere; the birds came up like shots out of a catapult. We cd. not stand against the wind, the breath pressed out of us; nor see. We stood behind a shed, & watched the waves: a yellow rough light on them; pounding; a great curled volume roughened of water. Why does one like the frantic the unmastered? And the brooks streaked with white & blue lines; where the wind I suppose raised a long streak of drops. Also the drops were like the spurt made by a stone falling—shaped something like pinched up glass. The light over the marsh steel blue & tawny.

So to Charleston, wet & soaking. Saw Q. & Kapp as dry & merry as sandhoppers, & so bought muffins, toasted them, had tea; & a tree fell in Princes gap on top of Bannister’s lorry. Also the branch fell in the churchyard over the vegetables.

A meeting on Friday: Mr Hancock, Lyons &c. The new garden ready, save for the basins still to be embedded. The view is now clear through the walled garden to the down. Talk of Drawbell building: also building at Knotts Bushes—my Tristram’s Grove.

Monday 1 November

A damp depressed morning. So why not write here? Pouring; vanity hurt by the preference given to Morgan by Day Lewis in the Book Society News [not traced]. Why not V.W? Yes, thats the mean little worm that will nibble when I wake talk tired after yesterday. We went to Philip’s for lunch. We had dined at the Hotel—the 87th birthday party. So hot the clothes stuck to one. Abrahamson soliloquised. Most of the daughters in law munching like cows in a field. And poor Connie Ross in brown, with a trickle of ribbons, poised on an armchair like a much battered moth, the moth that has been attracted out of the even damper garden by the light & the noise. And we played whist. Then yesterday we went to Philip’s; a soft warm late summer morning: stopped at Milton’s cottage. Persuaded the cultivated man to show us round. Babs said “We want to consult you about Cecil”. The poor little boy wont say whats the matter. He takes no interest in anything. Wont turn & wave to her, or write to her; drudges on at Latin. Babs uninhibited. Simple. And the many ponies followed us round the garden. Not a happy family exactly. No high spirits. Attenuated critical children. Education weighing on Philip & Babs. A beautiful sweep of 18th century view.

So home. Wyndham Lewis Auby: hot mean reading. Exacerbates. Yet diminishes vitality. Thank God, it will be out of the house today. Dinner with Clive: Janis: Nessa, Angelica. I think poor old Clive even a little on the bare wheels; no blown up tires. That to me is very ominous [?]—if Clive’s spirits should give way—if he were to give up his enjoyment of life! We discussed education; dreams; N. & A. stitched at some private garment. A. alternately silent & decisive. Duncan came in. Not much boasting. I feel that N. has, with her bad eye, given up all hope of painting at the moment. She is querulous sometimes about my “success”. When I told her the actual figures—40,000—she was, I think, relieved (as I shd. have been in her place) to find them less than reported.

An odds & ends evening, neither one thing nor another. I am revising the 1st Guinea: shall send them all off, to be typed: show to L.: then provide notes. But no more this morning. The Co-operative Press hangs: I think the young are eager to bite. Pepita begins to boom; also Sally Bowles. Dick Sheppard died at his desk yesterday; just elected Rector some where. A pity, I expect; if peace is a cause, he had some gift that way.

On Saturday I “saw”; by wh. I mean the sudden state when something moves one. Saw a man lying on the grass in Hyde Park. Newspapers spread round him to keep off the damp. A cheap attaché case; & half a roll of bread. This moved me. So uncomplaining: a positive statement. He was asleep. Others lying near. The last time I ‘saw’ was at MH. last week end, when Louie was discussing the building at Knotts Bushes. My mother used to take us that way when we were children. She used to tell us how she walked from Telscombe to Newhaven to shop—a vision of the little caravan, absolutely private silent, unknown, going over the downs, talking. Ought one only to write about what one “sees” in this way? These sights always remain. Isherwood, now Christopher, & John, beg me to write a story for New Writing. A compliment. Suggestion: “Portrait of a Young man” but I’m so fed up with short stories. Todays the day of the deputation to the H of C. But the PM has the gout. Must I go? Cant I get out of it?

Wednesday 3 November

Yes, I did get out of it: much to my regret next morning when I read that the deputation had been received by the PM in the Cabinet room at Downing Street. What a chance of “seeing” to have missed! But I had the sense to weigh my own peace over the fire with a book; & my freshness the next morning which sped me through the revision. So I cry quits.

To Southwark & Lambeth, walking, yesterday. A great autumn for long City walks this. I discovered St James Garlick hill: & St Mary’s Lambeth. A quiet day. Missed seeing David Cecil too. On the other hand Rosemary Hodgson rang up fr. The Daily Express to ask me to write a signed article. Its your name they want—& shant have. L. is writing a strong Letter to the Listener who cut his phrase about privacies⁠[?].

Tuesday 30 November

Yes, its actually the last day of November; & theyve passed like a streak of hounds after a fox because I’ve been re-writing 3 Guineas with such intentness, indeed absorption, that several times 5 minutes past one has shown on the clock & I still at it. So I’ve never even looked at this stout volume. I have left out Cambridge: Peter & Prudence; the shiny busts; the bitter cold silent city; the chatter at Ann’s; Newmarket; Oh & people innumerable. Or so I think, for I have not time to re-read. A great strain; but how merciful a compulsion, so that I need not go into the sensation I have on drinking tea at 8 [Fitzroy Street] with Nessa. No, no, I will not describe that: dont I dread it? But I make myself all the same stay on when she’s alone. Innumerable people: the Hutchinsons, Katie Lewis, Adrian, Cecil Duckworth, Gerald’s relics still littering the drawing room. Some extravagances: Oxford Walpole bought off Hopkins at the Book Show: Vita there, signing, dabbing her lips red, with Gwen in attendance; my profound distaste for Harold’s Dufferin, its falseness; equal exacerbation from Wyndham Lewis & Nevinson’s autobiographies; strong effect of mean minds; & buying with some recklessness, fur boots, leather waistcoat, underclothes; for money once more brims the pot. I could make £100 by choosing books for the Pelicans, with Morgan & Hugh & Aldous, but have refused, by way of a snub to Lane 200 for shifting, sans apology, from Leonard to me. And I’m paid 200
120
120
  25
465 by Cosmopolitan, 120 by H⁠[arper’s]. B⁠[azaar]: another 120: then 25: which adds up to 465. £465 for a handful of old sketches. This a little shames me in comparison with Nessa’s sales: but then I reflect, I put my life blood into writing, & she had children.

At Duncan’s show, we met the Bugger boys, Joe, Morgan, William; & savoured the usual queer scent. Joe the slave of The Listener. And what will the slaves say when 3 Gs. comes out? in March I suppose. Then the Webbs ask us to lunch to meet the Shaws. We fight shy; & are now asked to Liphook. A very foggy November: a trail of brown every day, keeping us at home of an evening. And one of these foggy evenings, Ethel Smyth came, & then Madame de Polignac, like a perfectly stuffed cold fowl (K. Lewis, with her white hands, plump, with emeralds, had that look too). Another evening Lady Simon came, commends my secret & nefarious projects: not to get anyone else into trouble. &c. And so the month has run through my fingers, with a walk or two: many letters & some divine quiet evenings. L. in his stall, I in mine, reading Chateaubriand now, bought in 6 fine vols for one guinea at Cambridge: also much random trash as usual, & many lives & some blue books for my little harlequin book; but no poetry I observe—no Shakespeare, because by instinct I suppose, & here must change by force to white paper, I want prose to quiet my brain. Or am I lazy? Now the sacred hour comes, luncheon: a wet damp day; & I must alas lavish my after tea time upon Eth Bowen, for all that I like her, a source of regret.

Wednesday 15 December

And then I had one of my little dips into the underworld—a temperature, sofa, 3 days recumbent, Monks House in a snowstorm; no walking; foot & mouth still dominant; back to our party. Young Newnham, all most free & easy, vigorous & inspiriting—Nat & Harry & George & Margaret & Ann Williams & Elizabeth somebody else [friends of Ann and Judith Stephen]—all sitting on the floor; & then—writing, writing; the 1st chapter taken on Monday to the Chancery Lane typist; cold & rain; visits from Mrs Woolf & Herbert, from John yesterday; the Press question looms & lapses; offers from Rodker & Seeker & even Miss Lange wd. like to buy; & our views change: secretly we both wish to fade, not to sell; but John is eager to buy, yet stingy; must consult Isherwood & Stephen; & settle by mid January; Vita, who dined [on 23 December], more matronly & voluptuous than ever, wont go in with them: a parcel of hot headed & ignorant boys;—well, no use trying to pull this five minutes before lunch sentence together so I stop it. I have spent £35 on a picture by Duncan, nervously; Karin has taken a house in Regents Park & is transported; Adrian & Katie Lewis hit it off very well at tea; Nessa & Angelica go on Sunday to Cassis. Christmas is on us, & owing to Lord Ivor’s gossip, I am once more riddled by invitations from Sybil. I hope to find an Italian oil jar & a column waiting upstairs.

Saturday 18 December

Oh this cursed year 1937—it will never let us out of its claws. Now its L.’s kidneys: Rau says he may have a chill, or it may be something wrong with the kidneys; possibly the prostate gland—that perennial horror. Its more likely, he says, to be a chill; but cant tell for a fortnight. So we go away with that hanging over us—And once more my only refuge is work. So I wont expatiate. The great cat is playing with us once more.

How much do I mind death? I wondered last night, when I did not go to Helen’s painters party, & concluded that there is a sense in which the end could be accepted calmly. Thats odd, considering that few people are more immensely interested by life: & happy. Its Julian’s death that makes one sceptical of life I suppose. Not that I ever think of him as dead: which is queer. Rather as if he were jerked abruptly out of sight, without rhyme or reason: so violent & absurd that one cant fit his death into any scheme. But here we are, on a fine cold day, going to mate Sally at Ickenham: a saner proceeding than to analyse here. In fact I’m still spinning over 3 Gs. Finished the 2nd today for typing.

Helen’s party, Mabel said, viewing it from the pantry where she washed up till 2.30 am, was crowded noisy drunk. Several young people fell down tipsy. The fumes of punch made her head ache. This is a jaundiced pantry view; but so would mine have been I daresay had I gone. And I’ve promised to guarantee £25 for 2 years. Why? Helen’s rather exacerbating partisanship, when she dined with Joe here & was the old cantankerous Helen of Bernard St. made me ask this question.

[]

1938

[Diary XXVII]

Sunday 9 January

Yes, I will force myself to begin this cursed year. For one thing I have ‘finished’ the last chapter of Three Guineas, & for the first time since I dont know when have stopped writing in the middle of the morning.

How am I to describe ‘anxiety’? I’ve battened it down under this incessant writing, thinking, about 3 Gs—as I did in the summer after Julian’s death. Rau has just been, & says there is still a trace of blood: if this continues, L. will have to go next week to a nursing home & be examined. Probably it is the prostate. This may mean an operation. We shall know nothing till Tuesday. What use is there in analysing the feelings of the past 3 weèks? He was suddenly worse at Rodmell; we came up on Wednesday:—the 28th or thereabouts [29 December]; since when its been a perpetual strain of waiting for the telephone to ring. What does the analysis show &c? He went to the hospital to be X rayed; has been, is still, in bed. There is a sense in which feelings become habitual, dulled; but only laid under a very thin cover. I walk; work, & so on. Nessa & Angelica & Duncan all at Cassis, which shuts off that relief, but why should she have this forced on her? Anyhow, they come back in a fortnight I suppose.

Harry Stephen, Judith, I think our only visitors. A dead season. No one rings up. Fine today. And the result of writing this page is to make me see how essential it is to steep myself in work; so back to 3 Guineas again. Then the time passes. Writing this it flags.

Tuesday 11 January

Rung up last night: Specimen completely normal.

So the claws relax for the moment.

Ideas: An Ode to Whitaker.

Specimen lecture in USA: both in rhymed prose.

Saturday 15 January

In the 5 minutes left me before starting for MH. I cant describe the relief of hearing at 8 on Wednesday: Specimen perfectly normal. You can go away—Thats where we are at this moment of a wet & windy January. Definitions, explanations can wait. And I’ve just taken the last pages of the last guinea to Chancery Lane [to be typed], so deserve one days pause.

Tuesday 1 February

Nor can I begin analysing now. Still fairly relieved: shall be more so when the 4 weeks test is over next week. But influenza since last Monday has downed me. And 3 Gs. A week at MH. hard at work. Nessa & Angelica back—dinner at Charleston. Wet, but open fields at last. So home: then temperatures; bed; complete submersal, on the sofa &c. Now down for final corrections. 3 Gs. to be shown up to L. tonight. And I feel quite confident once in a way, & only frustrated because it cant now come out till mid May, & I must remain dumb under the shadow of The Years & Miss Storm Jameson’s bitter disappointment till then. Never mind. I can make it more compact & the notes shorter & sharper in the time added. This is only a run of my pen—the usual treat. Now for sofa.

Thursday 3 February

Tomorrow is Julian’s birthday: his 30th I suppose. And I’ve been reading what Charles has to say of him. Nobleness his sign mark: & naturalness. Thats true too. A complete lack of self-consciousness; a directness won for him by our flounderings; & yet when he had gained the open world he had to make his choice. Had to be killed in Spain—an odd comment upon his education & our teaching. I dont think Charles, who has many very precise bees in his bonnet, quite sees to the bottom of the crisis, but then my vision—how Julian wanted a profession—his innate desire for self assertion, to be a figure, perhaps thats tinged by some obfuscation of my own.

Judith brought a Leslie Humphries to tea the other day—I still in my dressing gown after my first walk. A very nice couple. They’re free too; but more balance to them, I rather think. Anyhow I spurted my ideas for a new society at Newnham to Judith; who at once enlarged them to consist of dinners in private rooms with a subject for discussion—say Hazlitt, for whom she has a passion. This is putting flesh & blood on the ideas in 3 Gs. a work wh. L. is now reading.

One always has to allow for the extreme diminution of force: the effect on a second person is so much slighter than one expected. My satire seems to him mild. But the final verdict has not yet been given. I have now to do the notes. A love letter from Philip: the Press business practically through: John our partner: his first interview with Miss Lange yesterday: the Cecils today; Nessa afterwards; Monks House; still fine day.

Friday 4 February

A ten minutes spin here. L. gravely approves 3 Gs. Thinks it an extremely clear analysis. On the whole I’m content. One cant expect emotion, for as he says, its not on a par with the novels. Yet I think it may have more practical value. But I’m much more indifferent, thats true: feel it a good piece of donkeywork, & dont think it affects me either way as the novels do.

David Cecil to tea—a thin slip of a man: like the stalk of a bluebell. Said he begins, at 36, to feel stale. Therefore accepts Clark lectureship, on Hardy, & would like a Provostry at Wadham. A dried analytic mind. Not much room or verge in him. No juice: interesting as a type; & until Nessa & Leonard came in & were judicial—she very set & almost stern—I enjoyed my intimacy. Again, what is Desmond, why is he, whom all our swains adore, so melancholic & superficial? The façade. Could he have broken it, would he have written better? Old questions. Now to Rodmell

Monday 7 February

(Mother’s birthday) where we had by the way a perfect week end, still, brisk spring: crocuses in the garden; birds rapturous; Q. to dine; Hubbard to ask L. advice about divorce. That dour gra⁠[s]⁠ping Dedman daughter has made his life Hell for 14 years; & now he finds romance in Doris Thompsett. Oh the lives of the poor! But (save for a twinge at the imminence of the sample, & thinking of Nessa) I was very happy: relieved of my book; & tossing ideas as I walked over the downs. For instance: an illustrated sheet to be called The Outsider: a barrel organ tune about The Shrivelled Thorn Furze tree on the downs, through which I see the bungalows: rhymed burlesque. A good idea. But I must do the notes to 3 Gs first.

Nessa, D. & A. dining here.

Thursday 10 March

Relieved of my book? What nonsense. Here am I working 5 hours a day to finish off those notes, those proofs, & severely warned by L. today that unless I send off both in 6 days from this very Thursday, we must postpone till the autumn. But I’ve done my due today; & have said nothing here for so long: nothing about the Press; how 10 days ago I signed my rights away to John; how the last week has been June weather; & then all the people: & yesterday I went to Bunhill Fields Burial Ground; & we met Nessa & D. & A. at the 3 Sisters: & Hugh [Walpole] & Saint Denis. I dont think I can add at this moment; & shall owl round the corner to buy a surreptitious packet of cigarettes.

The new Radio came yesterday. We dine alone & shall try it. Bobo came to tea: a yellow pariah dog, still amorous, flinching from the name of Clive.

Reading scraps only; shall I ever force myself to this hard task again—& again? Yet no sooner is one idea fledged, than another cackles. Morgan told me he wrote 11 letters daily. And I none. Maynard & Lydia in residence. Two steps up into the great new room. M. recumbent, but with a stock of ideas. Bentham the origin of evil. Lydia like a peasant woman, wringing her hands, on a stool. Oh why was I born in this age? It is a terrible age. This refers to the Russian spy trials, which reflect the middle ages. A veil of insanity everywhere: & whats to be done, save keep pegging round one’s little plot?

Saturday 12 March

Hitler has invaded Austria: that is at 10 last night his army crossed the frontier, unresisted. The Austrian national anthem was heard on the wireless for the last time. We got a snatch of dance music from Vienna. This fact, which combines with the Russian trials, like drops of dirty water mixing, puts its thorn into my morning: a pernickety one spent over notes. The strength of the ray emitted from Vienna can therefore be judged. Privately I’m, as usual at the proof stage, bored with the book which was like a spine to me all last summer; upheld me in the horror of last August; & whirled me like a top miles upon miles over the downs. How can it all have petered out into diluted drivel? But it remains, morally, a spine: the thing I wished to say, though futile. Three USA papers have rejected it; but the Atlantic will pay £120 for 12,000 words. Their cable came when Morgan was here—blown in like thistledown—a very round & voluminous down he is now: but with a breeze behind him: he likes, I think, & very naturally, the praise which now comes from the young. And do I grudge it that he should be the best living novelist? He handed me a cutting, about Rose’s book, in which he is thus saluted. And so, jealous as I am, rather mean always about contemporaries, I got my dejection, to run into the dirty drop. He had been staying with Charles Trevelyan, & had his novelists bag full of small odds & ends there collected: Charles a good sort; dislikes his daughters pets; theyre sick on the carpet; Lady T.’s tapestry; the face & shield of the ancestral knight hollow; Macaulay’s books: all noted with a view to the whole, much as I do. Then Rose as usual rang up. Do you like my book? Havent yet read it. Well I do wonder what people will make of it &c. Privately I know they dont take much stock of it. But this reminds me that our last Leonard & Virginia season is perhaps our most brilliant: all the weeklies I think single out Isherwood, Upward, & even Libby Benedict for the highest places. Yes: if there is success in this world, the Hogarth Press has I suppose won what success it could. And money this year will fairly snow us under. £4,000 about from The Years: then Pépita &c &c. In fact we have asked Mr Wicks [Lewes builder] to estimate for a library at MH. in spite of Hitler. But its all a little—my earnings—in the air. To solidify them I bought 2 pairs of American shoes, with rubber soles, yesterday: item: a paper holder, now holding my great notebooks: item: a chair. & negotiated the exchange of my embroidered table—The delight of money; buying freely. Yet, puritanically, I spend next to nothing on dress. Mabel’s lugubrious sister copies very cheaply. The delight of spending is to say I want this & buy it outright, especially small articles of furniture & stationary. Perhaps in a fortnight I shall start Roger.

Tuesday 22 March

The public world very notably invaded the private at MH. last week end. Almost war: almost expected to hear it announced. And England, as they say, humiliated. And the man in uniform exalted. Suicides. Refugees turned back from Newhaven. Aeroplanes droning over the house. L. up to his eyes in the usual hectic negotiations. The Labour Party hemming & hawing. And I looked at Quentin & thought Theyll take you. And then, just as in private crises, a sudden lull. The tension relaxes, whether really or only because no one can keep it up; again the Torso case, the private English disputes come to the surface. And it was like June—& so remains—bland sunny blue; with the thought of Julian dead, somehow not pointless; but I keep thinking why is he not here to see the daffodils; the old beggar woman—the swans;—a useless thought: but one that comes so near the surface at Charleston, as if we were all thinking, & might see him.

I am drowsing away my last 20 minutes, having once more tried to recast the last page. Now I must ward off the old depression: the book finished, whats the use of it, feeling. So yesterday I went to Wapping Old Stairs, & roamed through Shadwell & Whitechapel; a change, as complete as France or Italy. Then Tom to dinner, & to Stephen’s Judge. A moving play: genuine; simple; sincere; the mother like Nessa. Too much poetic eloquence. But I was given the release of poetry: the end, where they murmur Peace freedom an artist’s, not an egoist’s end. He gave me a copy, & wants me to write an opinion. I like him always: his large sensitive sincerity better than the contorted nerve drawn brilliancy of the others … And a certain richness; but only about 50 people there. And I’m too eye dazzled to write more.

Miss Hepworth’s friend the bookseller finds the proofs of 3 Gs exciting.

Saturday 26 March

On Monday the galleys will go. So I can then seriously turn my mind off onto Frys, Highgate, the past. And this is a fact. And would have been accomplished yesterday were it not that Pippa comes to dinner, to lay more facts before us; & Hugh Jones afterwards: hence jaded yesterday; wind & rain & cold; so to Kew, perversely, with Ann, who stayed till 8. A fine figure, athletic, hardheaded; emotional too I guess, living at Brunswick Sqre with Richard. On Monday they go to Corsica for a family jaunt together. Influenza has attacked Flossie & Clive. Dinners supplied to 8 F. Street. How dull I’m grown: what they call objective: it needs a good brain to be objective. The crisis still shakes our telephone, the voice of Kingsley appealing to L. to have his mind made. The crisis has once more set it violently in motion. But the lull is hushing us; not very profoundly though. When the tiger, ie Hitler, has digested his dinner he will pounce again. And privately, I have no letters. I must take up life again on Monday: by which I mean ask E. Bowen to tea, buy a new dress off Murray, arrange one or two parties, & not let myself be submerged in Roger quite so completely as in 3 Gs. But that submersal was a remedy; an anodyne. How could I have toiled along these last months without? As usual I have drawn too many words from my well, & want to fill it from some good book. Mandeville The Bees, I think. No sooner do I say this than I am pelted with MSS. Vast meritorious novels, that one cant skimp. My insatiable appetite for reading will glut itself on Roger. Then what? Oh my Outsider papers: The TLS is now a paper like another, not my paper. And some attempts at brief scenes. And the Odyssey. And a few days doing nothing between tea & dinner: the unconscious is asking for a rise.

[Thursday 31 March]

But I have too much drudgery donkey work, now correcting proofs of notes, to write, or to invite: Rose & Jeremy Hutchinson dining tonight. And the nibs are wrong. And I detest my own now paralytic hand. Two pages of Roger written: then that cup dashed down by proofs. Then there’ll be page proofs. Walking in the City the great relief. Leather Lane & Neville’s Court—both new ground—& the Cut with its stale fish—yesterday. Then Ethel Smyth. Then K. Martin with his eternal article after dinner. Then MH & LP tomorrow. So its not yet possible to dive into darkness. And I’ve just bought E. FitzGerald on Sevigne, & may broach her. Very hot again. No letters again. Colefax snubbed short. L. writing his play—the one he’s brewed these 10 years & more. This is his only free week. Then accounts. John still abroad. He was in Vienna for the Hitler coup. Sheilah Grant Duff to come tonight. Oh & Judith & Ann about the place, with Richard, & a minute figure called Shawn.

Tuesday 12 April

Anyhow, on April 1st I think, I started Roger; & with the help of his memoirs have covered the time till Clifton. Much of it donkey work; & I suppose to be re-written. Still there is 20 pages put down, after being so long put off. And it is an immense solace to have this sober drudgery to take to instantly & so tide over the horrid anti climax of 3 Gs. I didnt get so much praise from L. as I hoped. He had to swallow the notes at a gulp though. And I suspect I shall find the page proofs (due tomorrow) a chill bath of disillusionment. But I wanted—how violently—how persistently, pressingly compulsorily I cant say—to write this book; & have a quiet composed feeling; as if I had said my say: take it or leave it; I’m quit of that; free for fresh adventures—at the age of 56. Last night I began making up again: Summers night: a complete whole: that’s my idea. E. Bowen to tea; cut out of coloured cardboard but sterling & sharpedged; Lennox Robinson (bright blue tweeds) called: we have John on us now—John saddened & hammered by his experiences at Vienna. K⁠[ingsley] M⁠[artin]. still rings up, at inordinate length: I’ve time to change & write a letter while they talk; its about emigrating now from our doomed Europe. “If it weren’t that I feel I must stay by the paper”—Also W. Robson is back; gave me the vertebrae of a cow, with his usual kind simplicity, made into a brooch; Easter is on us: Bells at Charleston; hard blue dry weather with a cold wind. Margery F. dines tomorrow; Roger surrounds me; & then to MH on Thursday, & that infernal bundle of proofs.

Am I right though in thinking that it has some importance—3 Gs—as a point of view: shows industry; fertility; & is, here & there as “well written” (considering the technical problems—quotations arguments &c) as any of my rather skimble skamble works? I think there’s more to it than to A Room: which, on rereading, seems to me a little egotistic, flaunting, sketchy: but has its brilliance—its speed. I’m suspicious of the vulgarity of the notes: of a certain insistence.

Wednesday 13 April

But the proofs have not come; & thus I have had a mitigated respite, which has been spent (am) reading R.’s letters; trying to decide what to leave out in the School fragment; & collecting the Clifton dossier. Now I shall not be so literal; but what am I to be? And I a little resent so much fact seeking. Also resent being told by some French scribbler [not identified] that I cant externalise; so to contradict him wish to be intelligent—so wd like to read 3 Gs & see if I am intelligent—& so on. A very fine clear day. A spring without any paralell. so enduring: so constantly unexpected this sun. All the trees are now full out. And no checks. The hyacinths over. So in MH we shall get the full blast. Summer time last Sunday. And today (oh these pens—I’m always throwing them away & hoping for a better one) … we may go into society; to a party at Susan Lawrence’s. Why? God knows, having rejected so many others. Probably our Press takings this year will beat all others: £2,500?

Tuesday 26 April

We had our Easter at MH; but as for the sun, it never shone; was colder than Christmas; a grudging lead-coloured sky; razor wind; winter clothes; proofs; much acute despair; curbed however, by the aid of divine philosophy; a joy in discovering Mandeville’s Bees (this really a fruitful book; the very book I want) then Q. rings up; to warn you: Have you had a letter from Pipsy? Ottoline is dead. They told her P. might die, & the shock killed her; & hes asking you to write about her. (with Mr Wicks & Mr Muzzell [builders] exploring the attics for the new room). So I had to write; the horrid little pellet screwed my brain; leaves it giddy. Yet in spite of that here am I sketching out a new book; only dont please impose that huge burden on me again, I implore. Let it be random & tentative; something I can blow of a morning, to relieve myself of Roger: dont, I implore, lay down a scheme; call in all the cosmic immensities; & force my tired & diffident brain to embrace another whole—all parts contributing—not yet awhile. But to amuse myself, let me note: why not Poyntzet Hall: a centre: all lit. discussed in connection with real little incongruous living humour; & anything that comes into my head; but “I” rejected: ‘We’ substituted: to whom at the end there shall be an invocation? “We” … composed of many different things … we all life, all art, all waifs & strays—a rambling capricious but somehow unified whole—the present state of my mind? And English country; & a scenic old house—& a terrace where nursemaids walk? & people passing—& a perpetual variety & change from intensity to prose. & facts—& notes; &—but eno’. I must read Roger: & go to Ott’s memorial service, representing also T. S. Eliot at his absurd command. 2.30 at Martins in the Fields.

[? Wednesday 27 April]

Ottoline’s burial service. Oh dear, oh dear the lack of intensity; the wailing & mumbling, the fumbling with bags; the shuffling; the vast brown mass of respectable old South Kensington ladies. And then the hymns; & the clergyman with a bar of medals across his surplice; & the orange & blue windows; & a toy Union Jack sticking from a cranny. What all this had to do with Ottoline, or our feelings? Save that the address was to the point: a critical study, written presumably by Philip & delivered, very resonantly, by Mr Speiaght the actor: a sober, & secular speech, which made one at least think of a human being, though the reference to her beautiful voice caused one to think of that queer nasal moan: however that too was to the good in deflating immensities. P.’s secretary buttonholed me, & told me to sit high up. The pew was blocked by a vast furred lady who said “I’m afraid I cant move”—as indeed seemed the fact. So, I stationed myself rather behind; near eno’ though to see the very well set up back of P. in his thick coat; & his red Rams head turned now & then looking along the ranks: also I pressed his hand, simulated I fear, more emotion than I felt when he asked me, had I liked the address? & so slowly moved out on to the steps—past Jack & Mary, Sturge Moores, Molly, &c: Gertler having tears in his eyes; various household staffs; was then pounced on & pinioned by Lady Oxford: who was hard as whipcord; upright; a little vacant in the eye, in spite of make up which made it shine. She said she had expostulated with Ott. about the voice. Mere affectation. But a wonderful woman. Tell me, though, why did her friends quarrel with her? Pause—She was exigeante, Duncan volunteered at last. And so Margot refused to ask further; & modulated into stories of Symonds & Jowett, when I bantered her on her obituary. Mine, of Ott. for the Times, has not appeared nor do I much regret. So to Nessa’s where we recounted the story; & yet I’m left fumbling for a house I shant go to. Odd how the sense of loss takes this quite private form: someone who wont read what I write. No illumination in Gower Street, an intimacy {checked} abolished.

[Thursday 28 April]

Walked in Dulwich yesterday & lost my brooch by way of a freshener when confronted with the final proofs just today (April 28th) done; & to be sent this afternoon: a book I shall never look at again. But I now feel entirely free. Why? Have committed myself, am afraid of nothing. Can do anything I like. No longer famous, no longer on a pedestal; no longer hawked in by societies: on my own, for ever. Thats my feeling: a sense of expansion, like putting on slippers. Why this shd. be so, why I feel myself enfranchised till death, & quit of all humbug, when I daresay its not a good book, & will excite nothing but mild sneers; & how very inconsequent & egotistical V.W. is—why why I cant analyse: being fluttered this morning. Lady Simon this afternoon—Well I’ve done my bit for that cause, & cant be bullied. And then, when they badger me, I can say Refer to 3 Gs.

Rain & dark. A lost dog in the Square; political lull. Income Tax up to 5/6. Our earnings prodigious. Income last year about £6,000. John much impressed. Press worth £10,000. & all this sprung from that type on the drawing room table at Hogarth House 20 years ago. I can now give all my mind to Roger; also blow a few private bubbles of a morning; & dont wait publication day with any expectations. I shall I feel forget this book completely. Yet I never wrote a book with greater fervour; under such a lash of compulsion. And it stood me in good stead. Now America wants Common Reader articles. (Penguin republishes in the autumn) will pay £50: & I think of Walt Whitman: Walpole’s Letters; & White’s Selborne. 3 Gs. has won me the right to go back to that world: no doubt a more ‘real’ world: but debarred by brambles for 4 years.

[Friday 29 April]

The difficulty is that I get so absorbed in this fantastic Pointz Hall I cant attend to Roger. So what am I to do? This however is only my first day of freedom; & I have been rendered self-conscious by a notice of T⁠[hree]. G⁠[uineas]. on the front page of the new bloated TLS. Well it cant be helped; & I must cling to my ‘freedom’—that mysterious hand that was reached out to me about 4 years ago.

Meanwhile, Lady Simon came to tea, & of course looks forward to my castigation at their expense—for so I suspect it will be; a very nice salt of the earth dowdy but decisive woman, with whom I’m on impersonal good terms. Yet she alluded yesterday to my daughter, the most gifted of my children who died. And off she went in chocolate brown fur & puce to investigate elementary schools in Suffolk.

A fine day for once. Dog loose in square. L. & I have our week’s treat this afternoon. I’m in a dazed state, hovering between 2 worlds like a spiders web with nothing to attach the string to. Why not write about Scott’s diaries, so bring in the immortal novels? My Times obit, on Ott. printed in early editions, omitted by mistake, they say, from the later. A thousand from H⁠[arcourt]. B⁠[race].: the last fruit I suppose from The Years. This makes about 3,000 from them. Can I therefore buy a chair? & 2 dresses? Oh how odd to see the blue sky at the top of the skylight again!

Tuesday 3 May

Pouring now; the drought broken; the worst spring on record; my pens diseased, even the new box; my eyes ache with Roger, & I’m a little appalled at the prospect of the grind this book will be. I must somehow shorten & loosen; I cant (remember) stretch out a long painstaking literal book: later I must generalise & let fly. But then, what about all the letters? How can one cut loose from facts, when there they are, contradicting my theories? A problem. But I’m convinced I cant physically, strain after an RA portrait.

What was I going to say with this defective nib? Heres L. to ask me what I think Libby Benedict looks like? I guess fat & Jewish: she’s thin & Jewish. I think I suspect our first breach with John. It’ll be over his fashion complex. HP must be in the movement. Wants to reject the Kabbalah (a powerful Arnold Bennett novel) because its old fashioned. And what line am I to take about a story for New Writing: when I dont mean to be a signpost to that gang of elderly novelties? These are our problems. Mrs Nicholls also a problem. A flashy underworld flibbertigibbet on the surface; daughter of a Hastings Dr: has a child: the child has tonsils. Mrs N. very “naive”: has kept underworld company. Lange has waddled off; gooselike; into what line of life we dont know. I have very few letters. And we take our treat on Friday now, & went to St Albans, in the grey blizzard; & saw Roman pavements, guarded by men in overcoats, attending upon imbecile sons. Had tea, & heard the local ladies discussing the Empire Day celebrations, which are to include a red white & blue cake decorated with flags. What will they say to 3 Gs? But I’m philosophic, fundamentally; & feel, as I’ve said, oddly quit of it all. A Row in the papers about Wyndham Lewis’s rejected portrait of Tom: & Tom has to be represented at Ott’s funeral. Clive at Charleston. Sunday evening alone with Nessa: oh dear—That signifies my desperation: Julian not there, I mean. The wound bleeding; & nothing to be said. So I will buy a chair this wet day, in order to keep moving.

Monday 9 May

This is written to fill up the usual distracted relics of Mondays broken morning: drove up [from Rodmell] in the clear May morning light: sun out wonderously; laburnum all chipped by the bitter spring: but pink on the may, & various fine shades of gold red & bluebell blue on the trees all the same. Found here that Richard cant dine & go to A.’s play this evening (she had a triumph, dancing, Nessa says [;] is mentioned in the Times): also Miss Phyllis Bentley’s lecture on me; shall I tell her anything true about The Years for example? Then Tom in Portugal; then Mary Hutch, whom I met in a shoe shop; then Morgan asking some literary help about a quotation in a pageant. Then I ring up Sally & mercifully secure her for tonight: find Mabel has moved the drawing room chair here—oh what comfort I now sit in after 10 years moderate discomfort; but her chair, her long promised chair, has stuck. A rather patchy week end: bitter cold, Q. didnt come; I had no good nonsense book; & giddy in the head; cant settle either to my Play (Pointz Hall is to become in the end a play) or to Roger’s Cambridge letters. The truth is we want a holiday; & have to dribble along rather jaded, trying odds & ends to keep moving, until June 8th or so, when we escape. However on Sunday, we walked, rather slowly to save my head, from Tarring Neville toward Bishopstone, along the long Down road made by primeval carts; & half the down was blue purple with some grass: & then the gorse blazing silky, nutty, hares racing; home to bowls & the silly clever imitation & oh how she makes me detest my own writing—May Sarton’s book this refers to, ungrammatically. A social week ahead: Bella back; lunch Clive; to Philip [Morrell] to choose a ring & emotionalise; 2 plays of A⁠[ngelica’]⁠s & God damn it, Saturday at Ray’s. L. rather on edge about that. Now lunch.

Thursday 12 May

Lunch Clive (balderdash, respectability rampant; hard superficiality) to Philip’s after tea. Shook hands with Grey Millie. Two interesting things: that Ott. confided everything in M. whom she had had all M.’s life: the other the vast importance she attached to her Memoirs. To be saved in a fire before anything. They were her justification; the proof to herself I suppose & the world that Ott was not what they thought. Sat in the upper room with P. kindly, I wary. Simple. Some little reserve; touched hands over the ring. He pressed things on me. I felt rather uncomfortable: a vulture feeling; didnt want to take so much. But took the big green ring & pearl earrings, shawl & fan. A kind of ripple of laughter at myself “doing well out of Ottoline”. But thats not the whole. P. has been left out of it all as he said. O. when dying last summer, suddenly named Hacket, a vulgar Irish peasant, P. says, joint lit. executor with Bob. G. Hardy & Hope. I advised P. to write a solid memoir at once. He will, but am I to add a chapter? We had out the great box with all the orange bound books she used to keep on a stool—all full. Whats to be done? And then the great bedspread? Julian [daughter] despises the old curiosity shop side of O. Wont look at these things. O. not a good mother—didn’t want children. P. rather battered—simple, cheerful, with a vast black satin cravat. Had a bad heart, from an old rowing strain. The specialist thinking Ott. an ordinary wife said “Do you want the truth?” Yes. “Well any shock will kill you. How old? 67. You wont see 68—except you live like a potato.” She burst into tears, which she seldom did. Then he recovered, she got ill—paralysed—some nerve affection. They then told her of the Drs. death: she was sick all night; recovered; & suddenly died in the early morning. She had written though a letter of farewell to the duke as if expecting this. Drawing room littered & unkempt. A lovely thrush egg blue evening; domes & chimneys very pure & sharp walking home with my green shagreen box the shawl & the fan. O.’s last gifts.

Friday 20 May

Time & again I have meant to write down my expectations, dreads, & so on, waiting the publication on—I think June 2nd—of 3 Gs—but haven’t, because what with living in the solid world of Roger, & then (again this morning) in the airy world of Poyntz Hall I feel extremely little. And dont want to rouse feeling. What I’m afraid of is the taunt Charm & emptiness. The book I wrote with such violent feelings to relieve that immense pressure will not dimple the surface. That is my fear. Also I’m uneasy at taking this role in the public eye—afraid of autobiography in public. But the fears are entirely outbalanced (this is honest) by the immense relief & peace I have gained, & enjoy this moment. Now I am quit of that poison & excitement. Nor is that all. For having spat it out, my mind is made up. I need never recur or repeat. I am an outsider. I can take my way: experiment with my own imagination in my own way. The pack may howl, but it shall never catch me. And even if the pack—reviewers, friends, enemies—pays me no attention or sneers, still I’m free. This is the actual result of that spiritual conversion (I cant bother to get the right words) in the autumn of 1933—or 4—when I rushed through London, buying, I remember, a great magnifying glass, from sheer ecstasy, near Blackfriars: when I gave the man who played the harp half a crown for talking to me about his life in the Tube station. The omens are mixed: L. is less excited than I hoped; Nessa highly ambiguous; Miss Hepworth & Mrs Nicholls say “Women owe a great deal to Mrs Woolf” & I have promised Pippa to supply books. Now for R.’s letters & Monks H—at the moment windy & cold.

Tuesday 24 May

I’m pleased this morning because Lady Rhondda writes that she is “profoundly excited & moved by 3 Gs.” Theo Bosanquet who has a review copy read her extracts. And she thinks it may have a great effect, & signs herself my grateful Outsider. A good omen; because this shows that certain people will be stirred; will think; will discuss: it wont altogether be frittered away. Of course Ly R. is already partly on my side; but again as she’s highly patriotic & citizenlike she might have been roused to object. Its on the cards that it will make more splash among the ink pots than I thought—feeling very dim & cold these last weeks, & indifferent too: & oblivious of the great excitement & intensity with which (certainly) I wrote.

But as the whole of Europe may be in flames—its on the cards. One more shot at a policeman, & the Germans, Czecks, French will begin the old horror. The 4th of August [1914] may come next week. At the moment there is a lull. L. says K. Martin says we say (the P.M.) that we will fight this time. Hitler therefore is chewing his little bristling moustache. But the whole thing trembles: & my book may be like a moth dancing over a bonfire—consumed in less than one second. Morgan rang up yesterday about Rosamond’s great meeting for writers to protest against Spain, for wh. she has hired the Queens Hall. But hasnt asked us. What is he to do? Thinks it foolish. So I let fly a few, guarded hints as to my own attitude. We must attack Hitler in England. “Thats what I’m always saying” he said “But how?” “Oh I’m in touch with Pippa & Newnham…” He seemed to sympathise. Anyhow he wont speak at QH. or send a message. Now for the [Chelsea] Flower Show; dinner at the Hutch. What am I to wear?

Aeroplanes growling overhead in the cloudy blue sky. They look like sharks, seen through our wavy window. No rain. No fruit. Vegs. dried up.

Wednesday 25 May

Too tired after a dreary dinner at the Hutchinsons to write: so let me scribble. Ka is dead. I read it by chance in the [News] Chronicle yesterday before going to the flower show. No flowers, no mourning. Why did she die? And what do I feel? Oh that one could feel more for the deaths of ones friends! But it comes & goes, feeling. Always at first visual—Ka lying drawn & white, there with the flat sea underneath—the ships passing. And Will pretending, poor little dried squeezed man—all her thought would be for him. Her passion for the boy—that she had left him, unknowing what he was to become, unable to go on educating protecting planning for Mark. I remember going there one spring morning when he was asleep in the perambulator at the door. And she came hurrying out agitated lest we should wake him. Her own identical life ended when Rupert died. So I think. After that she was acting a part very carefully & deliberately chosen. Maternity, Will, public life. Hence some squint; she was never natural, never with me at least. And I was self-conscious; remembering how she had seen me mad. She used to come to Asheham, to Holford: condescending, patronising, giving up her own pleasures to tend me & help L. I dont think I was ever at my ease with her. Yet we had an old affection; remembered things—Rupert &c—that we never spoke of. She had that irritating Quack Quack in her voice; as if she always must be impressing me with her busyness, her social standing even among the county families; her responsibilities: how she was a JP on some Education Co⁠[mmi]⁠ttee; doing actual things with important real people, while we frittered our time away writing books in London. She protested too much—a sign of dissatisfaction I suppose—with Will? She had to transform him into something noble, unconventional, brilliant, good; from the material which was none of those things really. But she liked Cornwall; so did I. She liked the view that day she took us to—the promontory all silver & blue—the lovely moor—the badger & the foxes barking round the house, & the long drives over Zennor Moor; seeing the gipsy woman in her tent; I daresay alone she was happier than she ever got said. In her house—a singularly ugly house in some ways—with a kind of formality & no luxuriance—she was too much the hostess who keeps open house. But at the same time that was her role: to help; to lift lame dogs; to entertain; to arrange; manage; receive confidences. And what was wrong with all that? Only that after Rupert’s death she was playing a part. Yet this is superficial. For there was a trustiness in her; a stable goodness; a tenderness under the assumption—Children, she wd. say & irritated me—& a good deal of fortitude, patience; a determination to oar her way—Bruin I called her, at the Vienna Café one day with Rupert—Bruin oaring her way—with a beavers tail, & short clumsy paws. He liked the image. It conveyed her thickness, breadth. She was very broad cheeked; & her face was long drawn out. In spite of her clumsiness & sturdiness she was very pale. She had thinned & wrinkled last time we stayed there. She wore 2 or 3 good Rings—cameos with heads on them. She chose bright pure colours for her clothes; wore a coloured handkerchief round her hair; often stuck it with a silver pin: an individual looking woman; derived partly from a John painting; but also practically equipped for her car driving, committees; her endless meetings in St Ives & Truro; she took her place very capably on the Bench: had a great shrewdness & capacity & some humour, only suppressed by Will’s acidity. Now I come to think of it, she had managed her life with great (composure) individuality. There was her cottage at Aldbourne; her ability to make excursions, take charge of situations, oar her way courageously where she wished. I wonder, did she know she was dying? & what did she think of it all? And why? As usual, I regret: that she sent me cream at Christmas, & in the flurry of L.’s illness I never wrote & thanked; that she suggested coming, & absorbed in Nessa last autumn, I did not arrange it. But this is always so; & can’t be helped. And I am thinking of her with affection—old Ka. The deep silence between us was threaded with something that could vibrate, & does: chiefly through the eye at this moment. I can imagine a half smiling So goodbye Children & dont bother. Old Ka’s all right … But Mark?

Thursday 26 May

Ka had a seizure & died without regaining consciousness. This is from a typed form sent by Chris A.F. [her brother-in-law] this morning. She is buried today—rainy & dark: & I shall not go to the service. Will is in Canada.

My usual 5 minutes for notes. The PH mood used up. Roger at Cambridge difficult to recover. 3 weeks before Scotland, & rather anxious (though its true I’m more indifferent than ever before) during these 3 coming out weeks. Mercifully we shall be away mostly. And I think to fill in the time quietly by forcing myself to do a Horace Walpole sketch for America. Why not? It means close reading; alien matter; & just time to do it. I cant broach another R. chapter—too tired of facts.

Friday 27 May

Its odd to be working at half cock after all those months of high pressure. The result is half an hour every day to write here. Roger I’m retyping; & shall then sketch Walpole. I have just been signing in bright green ink those circulars. But I will not expatiate on the dreariness of doing things one ought to do. A letter, grateful, from Bruce Richmond, ending my 30 year connection with him & the Lit Sup. How pleased I used to be when L. called me “You’re wanted by the Major Journal!” & I ran down to the telephone to take my almost weekly orders at Hogarth House! I learnt a lot of my craft writing for him: how to compress; how to enliven; & also was made to read with a pen & notebook, seriously. I am now waiting for today week—when thats over, my swell will subside. And cant I prophesy? On the whole I shall get more pain than pleasure; I shall mind the sneers more than I shall enjoy Ly Rhondda’s enthusiasm. There’ll be many sneers—some very angry letters. Some silences. And then—3 weeks yesterday—we shall be off. And by July 7th when we come back—or sooner, for we dread too many hotels—it will be over, almost entirely; & then for 2 years I think I shall publish nothing, save American articles. And this week of waiting is the worst, & its not very bad—nothing in the least comparable to the horror of The Years: (that deadened into indifference so sure was I of failure). As for sales, I am not very hopeful; 6 thousand I daresay; the shops are tepid.

Today I’m had in a corner by a persistent Miss Neilsen, my evening ruined. L. went to his Jury this morning, only to be told “You will be pleased to hear that you’re discharged.” So thats over.

Saturday 28 May

A pouring wet day as dark as November. May—this spring has been blotted from the calendar. Heres my daily canter: which will take the form I suppose of a temperature Chart. The Buzz is beginning, though the little gadfly only emerges from its shell next Thursday. Mrs Lynd in Harper’s Bazaar sneers, says I preach sitting still on a sofa; & Miss Osier or some such name writes to thank & praise—my grand work &c &c. These first rumours always give the shape of whats to come: I can foretell that those who dislike will sneer at me for a well to do aesthete; & those who approve will echo Rhondda’s “most exciting” profoundly moving. All reviews & letters will ring changes on those notes; now I have to send a copy to Pippa, with my heart beating: after that it will beat to the time of sneer enthusiasm, enthusiasm sneer. And I rather think I shall sum it all up in 6 months in a pamphlet; & if my facts are challenged get 29 M⁠[arsham]. S⁠[treet]. to reply.

To the Caledonian market in my new pinching shoes yesterday, where I bought 6 tea spoons & some flowers. Miss Nielsen came; a daneish bee haunted American lit. prof., entirely distracted by Einstein, & his extra mundane influence upon fiction. L. threaded the maze to the muddle in the centre. I gave up on the outskirts. Rather genuine, naive, a little like Christabel; & as usual much more likeable than her letters. One cant dislike people in the flesh. But she ruined my reading of Walpole to wh. I now happily turn.

L. lunching with Robsons.

Monday 30 May

Nessa’s birthday—the 58th [59th] I think it must be. She is at Charleston, with A. & Q. now that A.’s time at Islington is done. Oh dear—Julian not there. And it rains hard—she says she is glad to be away. How could she have lived through the suspense last summer? what torture—so I thought, as I walked to Gough Square yesterday, by way of freshener before the Robson children & Tom at tea. A great spread; mostly eaten. The little boy crammed his mouth with sweets, & added one that Sally had already sucked. Tom came, most respectable; swallow tails & grey silk tie, having he explained to slip into his evening service in time to take round the plate—a churchwarden in South Kensington. Very friendly; & elaborate description of his triumphal progress through Portugal as Brit. Rep. on some prize giving commission. And then he spoke at Salisbury on George Herbert, in aid of the Cathedral, staying with the Richmonds. I was amused at the careful analysis he gave Juliette—a very sympathetic Frog—no humbug—no clothes—giving dinner to 30 people off cold food & so on—of his own plays failure, & of Priestley’s artistic nonentity, scrupulously, painfully conscientious in detail; with his wild hazel eyes.

But I meant to record the chart: Observer has a friendly forecast: says 3 Gs. is poetic; profound; in my essayists vein; so that brings in another note—poetry, beautifully written & lucidly argued. No word from Pippa. L. says I must expect some very angry reviews from men. I add, From women too. Then there’ll be the clergy. But I think I can sit calm as a toad in an oak at the centre of the storm. And am training myself to inhabit that centre⁠[;] read quietly: Walpole; Johnson; & stodge away at Roger. I possess my soul—now thats a thing one can do. I am not forcing myself to buy a new dress from Murray—a great victory for the shabby city haunting V. Its true—people cant really “get at one”.

Tuesday 31 May

A letter from Pippa. She is enthusiastic. So this is the last load off my mind—which weighed it rather heavy, for I felt if I had written all that & it was not to her liking I should have to brace myself pretty severely in my own private esteem. But she says its the very thing for which they have panted; & the poison is now drawn. Now I can face the music, or donkeys bray or geeses cackle by the Reviews so indifferently that (truthfully) I find myself forgetting that they’ll all be out this week end. Never have I faced review day so composedly. Also I dont much mind my Cambridge friends either. Maynard may have a gibe; but what care I? And I shant send copies to my family, & so they need say nothing. What the bemedalled Wolves, with whom we dined last night, will say I dont know, but would find probably amusing. And the old Prostitutes, Hugh, Compton Mackenzie, Guedalla, Storm Jameson &c who are meeting next week to declare their belief in Liberty—well, they’re not going to show it save on the platform, & can hardly deny me the right they preach. So I expect a good deal of fun one way & another: some teasing of venerable gents; some innuendos, some digs at the Lynds & Squires; as well as a fountain of effusion from the faithful. But its the fun I shall enjoy: Hugh’s elaborate defence of his creative zest for honours & cheques.

The dinner last night was a severe middleclass patriarchal grind: T⁠[om] & B⁠[ella] had been to Court. “He looked the type of a beautiful man” Mrs W. said—“in all his medals & cocked hat & Bella with her tiara, & no flowers—they wd. have hidden the medals”. A very long dinner, hard chairs & very forced cheery talk. But we get off easily.

Friday 3 June

Rodmell

This is the coming out day of 3 Gs. And the Lit Sup has 2 columns & a leader; & the Referee a great black Bar Woman declares sex war; or some such caption. And it makes so much less difference than any other cackle on coming out day that I’ve written quietly at Poyntz Hall; haven’t even troubled to read R. Lynd, nor look at the Ref: nor read through the Times article. Its true I have a sense of quiet & relief. But no wish to read reviews, or hear opinions. I wonder why this is? Because its a fact I want to communicate rather than a poem? I daresay something of the kind. Mercifully we have 50 miles of felt between ourselves & the din. L. has been talking to Mrs Ebbs about the school, & finally won her over by praising her new chintz covers, hideous as they are. Then I found a grass snake sunning itself in the hedge, but when L. came, it was gone. Then Mrs Curtis wired to ask us to go to Macbeth at Glyndebourne. Refused. It is sunny, warm, dry & like a June day but will rain later. Oh it pleased me that the Lit Sup says I’m the most brilliant pamphleteer in England. Also that this book may mark an epoch if taken seriously. Also that the Listener says I am scrupulously fair, & puritanically deny myself flights. But thats about all.

Anyhow thats the end of six years floundering, striving, much agony, some ecstasy: lumping the Years & 3 Gs together as one book—as indeed they are. And now I can be off again, as indeed I long to be. Oh to be private, alone, submerged.

I talked to Nessa about Julian on Wednesday. She can hardly speak. What matters compared with that? Yet I was always thinking of Julian when I wrote.

Whit Sunday 5 June

This is the mildest childbirth I have ever had. Compare it with The Years! I wake knowing the yap will begin & never bother my head. Yesterday I had T. & Tide, & various London obscurities: today Observer: Selincourt: A terrible indictment. Sunday Times, N. Statesman, & Spectator, reserved for next week presumably. So the temperature remains steady. I foretell a great many letters on Tuesday night: some anonymous & abusive. But I have already gained my point: I’m taken seriously, not dismissed as a charming prattler as I feared. The Times yesterday had a paragraph headed “Mrs Woolf’s call to women. A serious challenge that must be answered by all thinkers”—or something like that; prefacing the Lit Sup. advt: unknown before I think; & must be some serious intention behind it. A note of ecstasy from Ethel half way through.

Walked on the racecourse: bought {stockings} cakes in Lewes. Charleston & Bunny to tea today, yesterday the first hot summer day. People in tails & white shirts tripping about Lewes. Glyndebourne in full flower. Mrs Curtis asked us. We refused. Windy today, but still fine, & the sun still active—after I suppose 2 months drought {damp} & darkness. The ugliest spring on record. So we were wise to save our holiday, though I’m so rested now, & writing gaily at P.H. that I dont want very much: to look at the sea however wd. be a relief: we shall attempt Skye, for if we dont now we never shall. L. says we are old. I say we are middle aged.

Saturday 11 June

Only five minutes to record the merciful fact that the N.S. is out (K. John prattling is foolish but as L. says well meaning) & now, save for the Sunday Times, the ink splash is over, & I can count it on the whole a good deal better than I expected. On the whole 3 Gs is taken seriously: many high compliments; some snarls (Spring in the E. Standard has his hackles up) but generally kind, rather surprised, & its over— Off we can go to Scotland for a holiday that I dont really need, but still a freshener before Roger wont come amiss. No book ever slid from me so secretly & smoothly. Letters begin from America, about the extract in the Atlantic. None, save Pippa Ray & an amusingly tepid one from Judith, who likes it very much but thinks the end diffuse. No thanks: no enthusiasm from the young for whom I toiled. But thats as I expected, & as it should be. Ray & Pippa are the prime relief. Nothing from Pernel, or Vita. Sales began slowly; but today & yesterday, 300 sold. I think 10,000 will go off. And its hit the crest of the wave. Tom being given his degree at Cambridge: walking in procession with the other bigwigs: Trinity feast; Tattoo; honours List—if anyone reads it, the illustration is pat to hand. Quit of all this, I’ve written an article on Walpole, very fast & free, for America. Walked several good walks. Weather much recovered, though unstable. Mrs Ebbs put the School meeting off. We go up this evening after tea. Bowls. Bells. & the garden being planted by L. with some little help from me. And I must go in to cold mutton.

Thursday 16 June

Baldock. Stop to light a pipe on the Icknield Way, a scrubby street of yellow villas. Now St James Deeping. After Croyland, a magnificent moulded Church. Now very hot; flat; an old gent fishing. Spread out and exposed. River above road level. On now to Gainsborough. Lunch at Peterborough: factory chimneys. Railway gate opened; off again. Gainsborough. A red Venetian palace rising among bungalows; in a square of unkempt grass. Long windows, leaning walls. A maze of little lanes. A strange forgotten town.

Sunday [19 June] at Housesteads [Northumberland], Thorn trees; sheep. The [Roman] wall and white headed boys in front. Miles and miles of lavender campagna. One thread coloured frail road crossing the vast uncultivated lonely land. Today all cloud and blue and wind. The wall is a wave with a sharp crest, as of a wave drawn up to break. Then flat. Bogs under the crest. Waiting now for the rain to stop, for it blew and rained that day on the wall. Now a few miles from Corbridge waiting in the middle of the moor. Very black. Larks singing. Lunch deferred. A party of ninety lunching at the Inn at Piercebridge [on 17 June], A sense of local life; 18th century inn diners to celebrate some sport. So on to a Manse in a garden; a very solid private house that takes in residents. Hot ham, and fruit, but real cream, looking over an ugly range. The country early today was fen Wash country. Then the Pennines. These are shrouded in a heat mist. Larks singing. L. now looking for water for Sally, (but this should precede the wall).

Sunday [19 June], Sitting by the road under the Roman wall while L. cleans sparking plugs. And I have been reading translations of Greek verse, and thinking idly. When one reads the mind is like an aeroplane propeller invisibly quick and unconscious—a state seldom achieved. Not a bad Oxford introduction, trying to be in touch, up to date; scholarly but Oxford. Cows moving to the top of the hill by some simultaneous sympathy. One draws the others. Wind rocks the car. Too windy to climb up and look at the lake. Reason why the hills are still Roman—the landscape immortal … what they saw I see. The wind, the June wind, the water, and snow. Sheep bedded in the long turf like pearls. No shade, no shelter. Romans looking over the border. Now nothing comes. Also I’m thinking with an occasional rasp of Vita’s letter—‘misleading’, could beat me down with fisticuffs. Well let her. But none of this very serious. All the wild white flowers along the grass border in violent agitation. Many buried camps. Grass still takes their shape. Why dig up? Not I think an impressive reconstruction of the past—too like the foundations of farm buildings, when they do. The outpost feeling though from the little watchtowers remains. Forts to fight from; the wall to look from. In one well a glass bottle was dug up. And the latrines and the treasure house.

[Monday 20 June] Scotch border: Monday ten to eleven. Sitting in the car looking across a vast spread emerald tinted little hills rising a great flow of green land. Some bars of trees otherwise grass, uncultivated, no roads. Carter Fell behind; ripples of hills in the distance; a few single scattered trees. One red brown field; some tent shaped hills. Board has Scotland written on it—a moor road. How Scott must have come this way—near Jedburgh. Burke Sir Walter. A cold windy day with blue slabs consequent floating colours. A novelist should be able to describe two spinsters sisters opening letters at breakfast—letters with stamped addresses. “How awfully stupid—I said the 18th” (a fragment from the breakfast table at Chollerford. These old ladies caught me smoking a cigar. They played patience ferociously; but not on Sunday. Then they read solid books.)

Tuesday [21 June]. Now in Midlothian. Stopping for petrol. On the way to Stirling. Scotch mist driven across the trees. Normal Scots weather. Great hills. Ugly puritanical houses. The Hydro [Hotel, Melrose] built 90 years ago. A woman called and said she had seen Mrs Woolf walking in Melrose on Saturday. Second sight as I was not there. Galashiels a manufacturing town. Hideous. Fragments of talk overheard at the Hydro Melrose. Soft voiced old Scotch ladies sitting in their accredited places by the fire under the window. “I was wondering why you walked about with an umbrella.” One who is stitching, “I wonder if I should wash it and begin again. I’m working on a dirty ground.”

Here I interpose. We stopped at Dryburgh to see Scott’s grave. It is under the broken palanquin of a ruined chapel. Just enough roof to cover it. And there he lies—Sir Walter Scott Baronet, in a caddy made of chocolate blancmange with these words cut large and plain on the lid. As Dame Charlotte who is buried beside him is covered with the same chocolate slab it must have been his taste. And theres something fitting in it. For the Abbey is impressive and the river running at the bottom of the field, and all the old Scots ruins standing round him. I picked a white syringa in memory but lost it. An airy place but Scott is much pressed together. The col. by his side, and Lockhart his son in law at his feet. Then there’s Haig’s stuck about with dark red poppies.

But the old ladies are discussing Dr John Brown whose brother was a doctor in Melrose. Soon ones head would ache and ones senses fuddle. One would eat too many cakes at tea and theres a huge dinner at 7. “I think he’s very nice—her husband. She’s got a personality of her own. A very nice cir-r-cle. Where do they live? Retired to Perthshire…. I’m three stitches out … Miss Peace came along to the reading room with her friend and wanted a fire. Couldnt she have rung the bell or something? Out you come! (unpicking the knitting.) Theres so much opened up now. Two years ago was the Centenary (of Dryburgh?). I went to the meeting. There was a service—most interesting. All the Ministers. Five on the platform. Possibly the Moderator. At any rate it was very nice and it was a beautiful day and the place was very full. The birds joined in the music. Alan Haig’s birthday. There was a service at Dryburgh. I like D. I’ve not been to Jedburgh—awfully pretty.” No, I don’t think I can write it all out. The old creatures are sitting on a sofa not much older than I am I daresay. Yes, they’re about 65. “Edinburgh’s nice—I like it. We have to go away before we appreciate it. You have to go away from your birthplace. Then when you go back everything changed. A year does it—2 years do it. I should leave it (of the work) and see the effect afterwards. What church d’you go to? Church of Scotland—not to St Giles. It used to be the Troon. We go to St Giles. It was St George’s parish—my husband was an elder in St George’s parish Charlotte Square. D’you like Waugh? I like him in a way. I don’t hear him and its a common complaint. He gives very hard sermons—you cant take anything away. The choir’s beautiful. I cant get a sitting from which you can hear. I feel it infra dig rushing with the crowd. The crowd hasnt reached—I’ve just got to sit still—I’m having a service—I hear the prayers the young men the music. It was pretty well where they come in from the Thistle chapel. They passed me bang. I rose and moved along. There are some seats the people never come to, and often the best seats. I like St Giles, a lovely old place. The old lady whose seat I had told me the church was all renovated. Chambers did it, and when it came to the opening not a seat retained for the Chambers family. Badly arranged. Someone provided seats for them. A stupid thing. Always some higher church alteration. I like the episcopal. If it be episcopal let it be; if. Church of Scotland, let it be Ch. of Scotland. Dr Waugh’s brother is at Dundee. He would like Roseneath. Someone said that the minister at Roseneath is delicate.”

Wind rages trees leafless bannocks and a blue pound note the only changes. Glencoe. Menacing. Leaf green hills, islands floating, a moving string of cars; no inhabitants, only tourists…. Ben Nevis with stripes of snow. The sea. Little boats; feeling of Greece and Cornwall. Yellow flags and great foxgloves no farms villages or cottages; a dead land overrun with insects. An old man who could not get up from his chair, two other ladies, her legs overflowing her shoes; all dress for dinner, and sit in the drawing room. This was the good inn at Crianlarich [on 21 June]. Lake with hanging stalactites green trees in the middle: bowl of the hills. Hills with velvet leaf green. The Bannington of Eaton Place. She had found winter green for her father-in-law, a botanist. Sky light at 11. Bad review of Three Guineas by G. M. Young. Pain lasted ten minutes: over then. Loch Ness swallowed Mrs Hambro. She was wearing pearls.

[In handwriting:] And then, sick of copying, I tore the rest of it up—a lesson, next journey, not to make endless pencil notes that need copying. Some too I regret: some Boswell experiments in Inns. Also the woman whose grmother worked for the Wordsworths & remembered him an old man in a cloak with a red lining muttering poetry. Sometimes he wd pat the children on the head, but never spoke to them. On the other hand, H. Coleridge was always drinking at the pub with the men

Tuesday 5 July

A thunderstorm, still further to distract my already distracted brain. How am I to calm & contract back again to Roger? We returned on Saturday. Now this morning I settled to a difficult passage in P.H. Pippa rings up. 20 minutes with her about 3 Gs. L. comes in & asks me to choose 3 quotes for the Observer. Nessa brings Maynard on Julian. Lightning. Torrents. Yet I must slide beneath all this if I’m to make a job of the summer lap. I think I will read Roger tonight, & so slide down into the water, & I will use this final half hour of a ruined morning to type out my Skye notes—not that theyre worth it, save as an authentic relic, like a sprig or leaf torn from a hedge & pressed between the pages of a book. My hand staggers. I will type.

Thursday 7 July

Oh the appalling grind of getting back to Roger, after these violent oscillations: 3 Gs. & P.H. How can I concentrate upon minute facts in letters? This morning I have forced myself back to Failand in 1888. But Gumbo [Marjorie Strachey] last night threw cold water on the whole idea of biography of those who have no lives. Roger had, she says, no life that can be written. I daresay this is true. And here am I sweating over minute facts. Its all too minute & tied down & documented. Is it to be done on this scale? Is he interesting to other people in that light? I think I will go on doggedly till I meet him myself—1909—& then attempt something more fictitious. But must plod on through all these letters till then. I think contrast the 2 all the time. My view, his & other peoples. And then his books. Meanwhile Freud (son) & John Lunch:. Sarton to tea; & I’m so raddled & raked with people, noise, telephones—cant copy my Skye notes: have endless letters to write, long for peace; holiday seems over; & what can I recover from all this litter? 3 G’s selling well⁠[:] 5,400 I think. But if I get into that mood I cant do anything at Roger. I must order & lay my mind out in pigeon holes. Now to change for lunch.

Sunday 17 July

No time—Time wasted writing an angry letter to John about New Writing: letter shown to L. & torn up. My new clock says its just on one: & my new clock cant lie. So I note: 3 Gs has struck the rock of rage, I think; & sells very little—almost on 6,000—wont reach the 8… Then oh the rush of people. Susie telling me in strict confidence of her unutterable gilded fly boredom. Memoir Club. Desmond dined. Molly ill. Bunny read. Last night at the Robsons. Old French woman in skimpy black; beautiful eyes, playing Beethoven & looking round like Mitz at Juliette: their faces playing: voluptuous absorption & sorrow & exaltation. Lovely brown swollen cello—Old lady wd have been congenial to Roger. Rothenstein tomorrow to discuss Roger. I’m stuck in a bristle of dates. Cant get on. Wet, black cold—worst July on record—Morgan’s pageant. Kathleen Knott & Eddie dined. Ben & Judith & Rose [Macaulay] afterwards. Still letters come about 3 Gs. On the whole I’m pleased at the splash in the inkpots & hidden references in papers—indirect results. Not a word said of it by any of my family or intimates

Tuesday 19 July

What about yesterday as a specimen day? Work at Roger—fearful niggling drudgery till 15 to 1. Robson to lunch. Isherwood wants to see me at 3. I slip out; buy flowers for Madame Alwin, pate de foie for Adrian. Back at 3.15. peep in at Stephen Spender, Chris [Isherwood] & John & L. all talking in J.’s room. Receive present of deaths head [moth] in box from Jack [Hills]. Sit down upstairs. Visit Adrian, tea on balcony. Dog playing cars passing—Judith there. Ann to marry on Thursday. No invitations. Karin in & out. Look at house. Gossip & home. Will R⁠[othenstein]. to dine. A respectable, suppressed, but I dont think quite such a snake as Duncan makes out. Only dimmed, tamed; kindly, fairly obstinate: I think on his guard. No enthusiasm for life:—too much high nobility. But of course instructed, experienced, & kind. Only … Compared with R⁠[oger]. how blunted, tolerant, & a little plausible. Wished to make out a case, to some extent. Gave me letters. So to bed with sore lips. Nothing vivid about R. & Paris, all dim now. Wdn’t eat—abstemious. Fetched by a chauffeur & car. respectable. But not so slimy as they said.

Mercifully no one—I repeat no one—today. Today Julian was killed last year. And its hot again. Angelica’s first night in Regents Pk Lysistrata. So we go on. I shant say anything to Nessa. Oh dear—And shall I buy Desmond [?] a case? & myself a Chair? Or what? We go—this is an event for us—to the Ballet at Drury Lane in proper seats tonight. 3 Gs selling very slowly. Abusive or sneering letters the last 2 days.

Friday 22 July

If I were not rather proud of my abstracting power, how could I keep my head now, called on to write Roger a m: to interview Origo, [Lady] Simon &c. about 3 Gs. 5 to 7.: to combat John & the young generation this evening; to sympathise with Adrian, see Bussys, Rothensteins; give tea to Virginia Richards aged 8; & have Elizabeth Bowen, &c skirmishing in & out? Nor do I suspect that Rodmell will be a shelter. Mary threatens to come & stay. So I must exercise my new muscles; be adept at making compartments; filling them, like a pipe, full but not too full. I’m getting more adept at leaping from swing to swing this summer, better than last anyhow. Its odd how one’s friends torment one. Oh & Richard Hughes duns me for a written opinion on his book. Also theres Vita & her poem. And I have written to say that she must withdraw her charges.

Weather steamy but no longer blue. Sat in Gordon Sqre last night & D. & V. were we thought unreasonable about R. & W. Rn. & the Grafton. What a kettle of fish! And 3 Gs. is once more selling: has now broached the 6 thousand. But my new clock says it’s 2 mins. to one. The man came, like a doctor, to regulate. Ann was married yesterday. I gave her £15; L. £10. Thats all I’ve time for.

Tuesday 26 July

Its very true that I have no time. I have simply dedicated the last fortnight to people—seeing people—not a day free from it. Always an engagement. If you let it fill your sails there’s something to be said for it. But I’m doing it deliberately & so …—well: here’s a list: Elizabeth Bowen Saturday; Lehmann Sunday; Nessa & Duncan; Monday I will keep free after tea: in comes Angelica: but we talked about Julian, & I adored her sobriety & depth; am in doubts if she’ll stick at acting; today our Bussy dinner & others in afterwards; then Vita (oh she wired Horrified by your letter), to lunch: put off Noel & Virginia; D. asks me to tea to fetch my glass; then shall we go to Lysistrata in Regents Park: so we reach Thursday through this lit up gallery of many faces. And phones—& books. Buchan & Susie present theirs: Hughes his. And its now one. I’m staggering through Beaufort St.

Wednesday 27 July

Yesterday we had John to tea, & the Bussys to dinner, Chilvers in after dinner. Rather hard bilingual work. Simon praised W. Rothn. Inclined to laugh at B⁠[loomsbur]⁠y. He said they had never noticed his work. D⁠[oroth]⁠y. said this. Clive & Roger ignored him. Thought R⁠[oger]. an illuminé; his best work on Cézanne. Threw things over. Marchand dropped—put his hands out—down on the ground. But very learned & charming. Is Matisse sincere? asked him meeting in the street, 1910.

Thursday 4 August

Monks House

What a very silly thing I did—not that it was my fault. I thought I knew the voice, asking for Mrs Woolf: & so got let into conversation with a woman called Coralie Anderson, a Dublin broadcaster, from New Zealand, at Newhaven: & had the idiotic good manners to say she could No: she had the tact not to come. come to a dull family tea party today: that is, a strange woman, of the most insensitive kind, may, indeed will, walk in, on top of Mrs Woolf Edgar & Sylvia today. And L. will be glum; & Mrs W. resent the interruption. The fact was, Vita was there: hence I answered the telephone. And this is how we escape to the peace of the country. Came down on Thursday; almost mute with botheration: 6 from Charleston on Sunday; Angus [Davidson] & Eddie [Playfair]; then Vita on Tuesday for the night & yesterday; & now this incongruous assembly. Yet we are very happy. I should add that we found a new gable thrown out in the roof, workmen hammering, Mr Wicks started work, without warning, & says he will be here 3 weeks which means 5. Two days ago L. had the brilliant idea of converting half the library into an open air verandah with glass doors, in which we can sit on a hot night & survey the stars. This is now in progress. We shall have a balcony & rails.

It has been very hot with a strong hot wind. And I’m taking a gallop in fiction, after bringing Roger to his marriage. Rather a jerk & an effort, my work at the moment. Switching from assiduous truth to wild ideas. But I liked seeing Vita, so free & easy again. We sat out here & discussed her loves; death; father Darcy on death; Ben’s tears, on being scolded by Vita; Willy Maugham; Clive, who’s writing a book, secretly, on war; Julian; Nessa; looking so ill; so many women have lost sons & lovers; I forget how it went. Also she brought a basket of peaches & half a bottle of Chateau Yquem from her mothers cellar. Nigel only got a third. He & Harold mind. She doesnt. And off she went in her great black car that impresses Mrs Bartholomew so, to entertain Mrs Rubens & her final husband, who likes fishing. She has a daily visitor—not to sleep though. She was much like old times.

I cant unstring my mind after trying to write about a lily pool. P.H. is to be a series of contrasts. Will it come off? Am I in earnest? Its to end with a play. L. is writing his in the garage room. I note he doesnt like to be asked when will it be done? He has, amusingly, all an artists sensibilities. And now?—Well there’s always a heap of Roger’s papers—old paper cuttings—to go through. And I might, of course, revise the last chapter: Beaufort Street; but am waiting for Bob’s notes. What an undertaking! R.’s 2 lives enough for 6 books: emotion & art.

Saturday y August

I rather enjoy doing PH. Thats something, for it wont please anyone, if anyone should ever read it. Ann Watkins by the way says the Atlantic readers haven’t read enough of Walpole to understand my article. Refused. Thats another reason then for my Outsider to be born. The Times Lit Sup this week has an article discussing, among other views, Mrs Woolf’s view on intellectual harlotry. I rather think the book wh sells slowly is sinking in. ,

Yesterday I saw 6 tanks with gun carriages come clambering down the hill & assemble like black beetles at Rat Farm. Small boys playing idiotic games for which I pay. Harold is very dismal, Vita says: predicts war, but not this week. A lull at the moment. And terrifically hot. A great purple black cloud massed itself behind Mrs W. Sylvia & Edgar as they sat out here; then thunder: then rain, at last. And we had lights lit. Why they so rub the country bloom off—these family Woolves—I dont know. Always a dusty feeling of Earls Court & offices. Oh & the commonplaceness of the talk—mostly about furniture at Lexham: lovely silver mirrors, most artistic overmantels, suites of dining room chairs, coffee cups. She lies awake counting them, deciding who’s to have what, & so falls asleep. Why is it all so low in tone, even as human life? Sylvia might be one slice of bread off the eternal loaf. Workmen tapping. The verandah being cut open. Yesterday the men about the wireless. Too many gadgets & dodges perhaps in this house. And the children shrieking. But we go to Charleston for tea: & Bob has written, revising in some respects my chapter: upon which I start work again tomorrow. I plan a short chapter on marriage; then a difficult one on R.’s early work; some discussion of his theories & development; so to Hampstead & America. So to the Post I⁠[mpressionists]. & ourselves. That will make the break in the book. A change of method. Then the Omega: before the war. Then the Dalmeny, Bernard Street. Consummation. So (here at least) the end is in sight. I may have it written over by Xmas; re-written by next August. Out in spring of 1940?

Wednesday 17 August

No I won’t go on doing Roger—abstracting with blood & sweat from the old Articles—right up to lunch maybe. I will steal 25 minutes … In fact I’ve been getting absorbed in Roger. Didnt I say I wouldn’t? Didnt L. say theres no hurry? Except that I’m 56; & think that Gibbon then allowed himself 12 years, & died instantly. Still why always chafe & urge & strain at the leash? What I want is a season of calm weather. Contemplation. I get this sometimes about 3 am when I always wake, open my window, & look at the sky over the apple trees. A tearing wind last night. Every sort of scenic effect—a prodigious toppling & cleaving & massing, after the sunset that was so amazing L. made me come & look out of the bathroom window—a flurry of red clouds; hard; a watercolour mass of purple & black, soft as a water ice; thin hard slices of intense green stone; blue stone, & a ripple of crimson light. No: that wont convey it: & then there were the trees in the garden. & the reflected light: our hot pokers burning on the edge of the steep.

I’m too tired in the head & fingers to sum up. We have been sociable in a scattered way. Seen Edgar’s new house,—& Mr Colbourne’s Alsatians, routing Gwen’s pocket handkerchief from a tub of rags, jumping through fiery hoops, & also retrieving L.’s bandanna from a distant field. All dogs can do this, Mr C. said. A dog at its prime at 3. Dogs entirely changed by education. For this, see 3 Gs. (wh. stops selling, between 6 & 7000: but still wrings letters from schoolmasters. Oh & I must answer one of them).

I began Mme de Sevigne last night. Then there was the sunset, & then some music on the new set. The window, with the round top, is going in today. Less noise than I expected.

The old woman who lived up at Mt Misery drowned herself 3 days ago. The body was found near Piddinghoe—my usual walk. Her son died; she turned queer; had been a midwife in Brighton; lived in the broken windowed half of Mr Bradfield’s house. She used to moon over the downs with a dog. Once she came to the shop late on Sunday to beg 2d of paraffin—she was alone in the dark. They threatened to turn her out—farm wanted. She had killed her dog. So at last off she goes, on Monday perhaps when the tide was high in the afternoon, & jumps in. Louie says her brother found a drowned woman the other day at Barcombe Mills—a horrid sight. So I order dinner hastily & come out here to brew more Roger. But I wont go into my doubts—partly due to reading B.J. by his wife & thinking it richer & warmer & more important than Morgan on Goldie. So, at supper, we discussed our generation: & the prospects of war. Hitler has his million men now under arms. Is it only summer manoeuvres or—? Harold broadcasting in his man of the world manner hints it maybe war. That is the complete ruin not only of civilisation, in Europe, but of our last lap. Quentin conscripted &c. One ceases to think about it—thats all. Goes on discussing the new room, new chair, new books. What else can a gnat on a blade of grass do? And I would like to write PH.: & other things. I worry a little over the young generation & its complacent compromises. This is partly of course that we sold the HP share very cheap: that Mrs Lehmann [Johns mother] lives in far greater style than we do; that the young in short have an eye to the main chance, a bitter tongue, & a fawning way of asking sympathy. Thats my nettle under the mattress; but a very little frail one—not so stinging as a row that once lasted a whole month here with Colefax. I mean one of those nagging worries that I say aloud when I’m walking.

Tonight we dine off the first grouse at Charleston. Q.’s birthday. Oh & we went to Pulborough & saw A. act—but I forget—I may have written this down—so casual am I in what I say or dont say: & have half a mind one of these days to explain what my intention is in writing these continual diaries. Not publication. Revision? a memoir of my own life? Perhaps. Only other things crop up. Pippa says Waller [Jack Hills] has been desperately ill. Logan [Pearsall Smith] has recovered—as Logan would.

Monday 22 August

The first, I think, really soaking wet day since we came. We therefore went into Lewes about the threat of the Sewage Pump. They want to plant it on us: ‘they’ being instigated by Jansen & Botten so L. suspects. The village cabal against us is roused by the L.P. & the Village Council matter, & they are rumoured (Percy says) to be going to seize our field for a play ground. This delightful sample of village life—the egg under the microscope—doesn’t please: such is human nature. Also I am in the wars, or shall be. Maynard sends for us on Wednesday; is said by Lydia to be very critical of 3 Gs: & a note in the Observer (Hayward) says that Miss Wilson is preparing a counter-blast; & no-one can better correct, contradict & amplify than she. Now the thing to remember is that I’m an independent & perfectly established human being: no one can bully me: & at the same time nothing shall make me shrivel into a martyr or a bitter persecution maniac. The one specific is to write a thorough good book—i.e. Roger. I’ve not got the words right about the soul. I mean I stand on my own feet. Maynard & the rest can only puff: & the honesty of my intention in 3 Gs is bound to see me through. But this is written in too great detail. In fact I must now, as we cant play bowls, read my Roger chapter: after the criticism I must … but not here. All Charleston & William Plomer yesterday: a lovely thin blue day. Bowls. Nessa painted, better I think. Clive talked. I liked him—he has some shiver of sensibility still.

[Tuesday 23 August]

Its odd to be as nervous as I am at the idea of seeing Maynard tomorrow, & his heckling: dear old Hitler. But I wont be nervous; I’ll go & walk on the terrace for 10 minutes before lunch. The worst of this kind of controversy is that it adds so much friction to my work on Roger: I have to urge my mind on, while the surface is all worried & flurried into tufts & vapours of replies [&] arguments. So it kindles, like a meteor, & burns, instead of keeping cool & dark & solid as I had hoped this summer. The price I pay, though, for having views. Never mind. Now the terrace—& a treat this afternoon [a drive to Tunbridge Wells].

Sunday 28 August

The character of this summer is extreme drought. Brooks dry. Not a mushroom yet. By the way Maynard never said a word. Some were unsaid. As for instance, Lydia: we all put up with you Virginia, said significantly, kissing me at parting. M. tired, extended, rather grim. But emotion had to be restrained. Sunday is the devils own day at M.H. Dogs, children, bells…. there they go for evensong. I cant settle any where. Beaten after 3 hard fights at bowls. Bowls is our mania. Reading rather scamped. I’m strung into a ball with Roger—got him, very stiffly to the verge of America. I shall take a dive into fiction; then compose the chapter that leads to the change. But is it readable—& Lord to think of the further compressing & leavening.

Ding dong bell…. ding dong—why did we settle in a village? And how deliberately we are digging ourselves in! And at any moment the guns may go off & explode us. L. is very black. Hitler has his hounds only very lightly held. A single step—in Cheko Slovakia—like the Austrian Archduke in 1914 & again its 1914. Ding dong ding dong. People all strolling up & down the fields. A grey close evening. Dr Chavasse died on Friday, while Nessa & Q. were here—she to paint the view—he my table. Oh thank God, Ding dong—no, its begun again.

I should call it a very free summer, happy compared with last. However, I cant go into that. I mean Julian’s ghost. How could he ever become a ghost—My dear Aunt—then the burst of laughter; & how he gripped the sides of the chair. Angelica announces that she is giving up the stage. That I think revives Nessa. At any rate they are free—more united—& go to Cassis. I ponder—as usual—a flight to the Maurons. But shall I get there? Sybil [Colefax] meanwhile thrusts herself on us, for dinner; we have the Jones’s at Seaford: visits to London; must say good bye to Bella. The autumn mists assemble. And I’m irritable with work & noise. We dine at Charleston. Now its as quiet as the grave .. all grey; the chestnut leaves hanging heavy; birds on the telegraph posts.

Letters fret me. Never one thats disinterested. Requests always to speak, write, lecture, see people. Thats Fame—dogs again. Thats because Miss Emery is with the dead I suppose. Yap Yap. Perhaps the house would be better & Madame de Sevigne—who may inspire me, as good writing does, to write to Ethel—so no more.

Wednesday 31 August

War seemed round the corner again. Question what Hitler will do, when he’ll do it. Cabinet Ministers summoned. &, of course, Kingsley Martin ringing up, & annoyed that L. isn’t in London to hold his hand, & make it write an article. I say As if articles mattered! We were in London yesterday. Streets fuller than last time, perhaps, by reason of the Crisis. K.M. to lunch—stout & dark & brown & black & theatrical. 3 possibilities. One of them European war. But not at once. A game of bluff on H⁠[itler]’s part, possibly. Anyhow he doesn’t want a European war now. So may isolate the shindy; & we may rat with the French at the last moment. If theres a war, “my own solution is suicidal”—while he munches mutton chops, & sweeps up fragments, scraping his knife & fork round in a way I hate. But cant hate anyone in the flesh. So he burbled on: with his own article, & his own figure, histrionically arrayed, in the centre. Some bye-references, with an eye to me, on the Prostitution of Journalists. I walked off, bought a pewter plate, a scissors, & a lustre globe, encouraged by a letter from Brace reporting enthusiasm for 3 Gs in our office, good advance orders, & great praise. Also encouraged by the E⁠[uropea]⁠n situation: gather rosebuds while we may. So we came back to find the roof painted a first coat of white; men erecting L.’s new Crystal Palace greenhouse in the orchard; & the fireplace ready in the new room.

Sally was mated on Monday, with much coyness: we had tea with Mrs Jones, Hugh, & a sturdy girl who’s going to teach a school in Bexhill. Mrs Jones like a pricked air ball flopped on the floor. Hugh the spit of Philip.

Thursday 1 September

A very fine clear September day. Sybil threatens to dine, but may put us off—should a Cabinet Minister crop up. Politics marking time. A violent attack on 3 Gs in Scrutiny by Q. Leavis. I dont think it gave me an entire single thrill of horror. And I didnt read it through. A symbol though of what wiggings are to come. But I read eno’ to see that it was all personal—about Queenie’s own grievances & retorts to my snubs. Why I dont care more for praise or wigging I dont know. Yet its true. A slight distaste for my biog. of Roger this morning: too detailed & flat. But I must take it up tomorrow, & lay aside P.H. I fear. Quentin over to finish his table. We have settled to keep the roof Cornish cream colour. I found a new walk down Telscombe valley to the river yesterday.

Oh Queenie was at once cancelled by a letter from Jane Walker—a thousand thanks … 3 Gs ought to be in the hands of every English speaking man & woman &c.

Monday 5 September

Its odd to be sitting here, looking up little facts about Roger & the M⁠[etropolitan] M⁠[useum]. in New York, with a sparrow tapping on my roof this fine September morning when it may be the 3rd Aug 1914 … What would war mean? Darkness, strain: I suppose conceivably death. And all the horror of friends: & Quentin … All that lies over the water in the brain of that ridiculous little man. Why ridiculous? Because none of it fits. Encloses no reality. Death & war & darkness representing nothing that any human being from the Pork butcher to the Prime Minister cares one straw about. Not liberty, not life … merely a housemaids dream. And we woke from that dream & have the Cenotaph to remind us of the fruits. Well I cant spread my mind wide eno’ to take it in, intelligibly. If it were real, one cd. make something of it. But as it is it merely grumbles, in an inarticulate way, behind reality. We may hear his mad voice vociferating tonight. Nuremberg rally begun: but it goes on for another week. And what will be happening this time 10 days? Suppose we skim across, still at any moment, any accident may suddenly bring out the uproar. But this time everyone’s agog. Thats the difference. And as we’re all equally in the dark we cant cluster & gossip; we are beginning to feel the herd impulse: everyone asks everyone, Any news? What d’you think? The only answer is, wait & see. Sybil fresh from London, can only titivate this answer into shapes that reveal her own complicity, but utter ignorance. The talk, when she came that wet evening [1 September] all the way from London to dine, turned most satisfactorily upon the Windsors; & how, as he came late into Willy Maugham’s lunch party, he said, “Her Royal Highness was detained by the American sailors…” That is what he will have her called.

Old Mr Thomsett meanwhile after driving horses to the brooks & about the fields for 74 years has died in the hospital. & L. is to read his will on Wednesday. He left it all—how much?—to Doris; & Annie thinks the other children will protest. L. made his will for him. I like this in L.

Saturday 10 September

I dont feel that the crisis is real—not so real as Roger in 1910 at Gordon Square, about which I’ve just been writing; & now switch off with some difficulty to use the last 20 minutes that are over before lunch. Of course we may be at war this time next week. Seven ships are mobilised today. The Papers each in turn warns Hitler in the same set grim but composed words, dictated by the Govt, presumably, that if he forces us we shall fight. They are all equally calm & good tempered. Nothing is to be said to provoke. Every allowance is to be made. In fact we are simply marking time as calmly as possible until Monday or Tuesday, when the Oracle will speak. And we mean him to know what we think. The only doubt is whether what we say reaches his own much cumbered long ears. (I’m thinking of Roger not of Hitler—how I bless Roger, & wish I could tell him so, for giving me himself to think of—what a help he remains—in this welter of unreality.) All these grim men appear to me like grown up’s staring incredulously at a child’s sand castle which for some inexplicable reason has become a real vast castle, needing gunpowder & dynamite to destroy it. Nobody in their senses can believe in it. Yet nobody must tell the truth. So one forgets. Meanwhile the aeroplanes are on the prowl, crossing the downs. Every preparation is made. Sirens will hoot in a particular way when there’s the first hint of a raid. L. & I no longer talk about it. Much better to play bowls & pick dahlias. They’re blazing in the sitting room, orange against the black last night. Our balcony is now up. Today Morgan comes, & we have our crowded Memoir Club week end. It is at Tilton, in the afternoon, to suit Maynard, who is going to read. Q. & Molly lunch here tomorrow, & I’ve no doubt we shall all behave as if the moment were eternal—as Roger said to Goldie. What other attitude—but its not one—is possible to even moderately adult people? As far as I can judge the villagers share it. Whats the use of war? We dont want war. Thats Louie’s verdict. But our candidate, our little Mr Black who dined here the other night, has the brains of a rabbit, reminds me of Tisdall, will only talk of his daughter’s pet mice—she breeds many coloured mice which she sells for 5d to a local breeder, & his other girl makes posters depicting mice, while he himself collects matchboxes—well, he’s the average politician, I suppose: & he’s all for war, at once. Why? to build a new state … & what kind of new state? One in which mice & matchboxes are collected.

Sunday 11 September

Morgan here. He is writing in the garden. L. in his room. I have been sorting old cuttings out here. Molly & Q. will soon come. A very fine clear spruce blue day. The news as black as possible. Hitler has at any rate cursed, & Goering spat: nothing said till tomorrow. And now in to the house to tidy rooms & hair. Easy & intimate with M⁠[organ]. about GLD⁠[ickinson] & Roger &c. He wears a new tie given by Stephen Tennan⁠[t]

Monday 12 September

Papers all say that we shall know the truth, one way or the other, tonight. But Maynard yesterday thought Hitler may say nothing for some days. The Cabinet all occupied whenever they emerge—sitting all day—in making plain without actual statement that we shall fight if France fights. Press all harmonious. So there’s nothing to do but wait.

Memoir Club meeting had its little sensation. M⁠[olly] & Q. lunched. After lunch, as she came down stairs, M. tripped & fell over the loose tile. Lay very white in great pain. Cdnt move. Obviously a bad twist. After a time we managed to hop her to the terrace—sat & talked; but when we had to go, she couldn’t move. Ankle swollen. So we took her, after various telephones, to [Dr] Tooth’s substitute: & he—a blue serge red faced knobby man—was afraid the bone was hurt. Then the X ray: the man out: at last to Tilton; carried her in. Maynard read a very packed profound & impressive paper so far as I could follow, about Cambridge youth; their philosophy; its consequences; Moore; what it lacked; what it gave. The beauty & unworldliness of it. I was impressed by M. & felt a little flittery & stupid. Then he had to rest; it turned grey & cold. M. had to be slowly conveyed—a bed made on the ground floor at Charleston. Nevertheless a very human satisfactory meeting. Tea: Lydia presiding, “Now boys & girls sit down.” Hot cakes. Ham sandwiches. No politics. Bunny, Desmond, Q. & Lydia, ourselves Morgan Clive Nessa (in big hat: much more herself than ever yet). Rachel is to have a baby. Molly very much more composed: brave; matter of fact; & heard what we said. But we are off now to lunch with William [Plomer] at Brighton, taking Morgan.

Tuesday 13 September

No war yet anyhow. Hitler boasted & boomed but shot no solid bolt. Mere violent rant, & then broke off. We listened in to the end. A savage howl like a person excruciated; then howls from the audience; then a more spaced & measured sentence. Then another bark. Cheering ruled by a stick. Frightening to think of the faces. & the voice was frightening. But as it went on we said (only picking a word or two) anti-climax. This seems to be the general verdict. He darent cross the line. Comes up to it & stands bawling insults. Times very scathing & sarcastic. How can people stand this nonsense? Negotiations to go on, under threat that he will use force if &c.

Immense relief last night at Monk’s House, after a gloomy dinner. Very hot. Jaded with Brighton. Lunch with Wm & Morgan at a place where he knew the waitress. I depressed by praise of Morgan’s Credo: silence on all my friends part about my own. But the impersonal attitude worked well. I let myself sink like a bag from a balloon: & felt, if dejected, light & free. A good piece of work that, for it leaves me free to go on my way in silence. Not from journalists or schoolmasters though. A great packet of reviews from USA. All summer in a day again. Oh we enjoy being alone, save that I’m too jaded to do Roger. Wicks here about the tiles. John tomorrow. London & farewell to Charleston on Thursday. Peaceful if depressed: anyhow a week or 2 without war.

Odd this new public anxiety: how it compares with private: how it blinds: but too stupid to write. And lunch waiting this roasting hot morning.

Wednesday 14 September

Things worse today. Rioting in Prague. Sudeten ultimatum. It looks as if Hitler meant to slide sideways into war. Raises riots: will say cant be stopped. This came on the 9.30 wireless last night. This morning more marking time. No one knows. Headachy, partly screw of Roger: partly this gloom. So I’m stopping Roger; as we go up to lunch with Bella tomorrow. And whats the private position? So black I cant gather together. Work I suppose. If it is war, then every country joins in: chaos. To oppose this with Roger my only private position. Well thats an absurd little match to strike. But its a hopeless war this—when we know winning means nothing. So we’re committed, for the rest of our lives, to public misery. This will be slashed with private too. Quentin: all the young married people. Ann &c. We—L. & I—can make out I suppose down here: vegetables & fruit. And I’ve made some money. Needn’t cringe. Thats about all. I feel I said what I wanted in 3 Gs. & am not to care if its 1: made my own friends hostile; laid me open to abuse & ridicule; also praise where I dont want it; & paying bills for Wms. Societies: £3.9 for a ridiculous leaflet—Thats my debt to civilisation. Then suppose John called up! The Press? But all wallows & wavers in complete chaos. Odd that this should be a stimulus to the complete artist. One will have to sit at home & write. I suppose air raids may toss a bomb through the skylight. Growls go on overhead. Louie says the carpenter is on the reserve. They chaff him as he’s a socialist. 1914 but without even the illusion of 1914. All slipping consciously into a pit.

But John lunches. Q. & A. to tea. Dine tomorrow at Charleston. Fine summer day.

Friday 16 September

Chamberlain has flown to see Hitler. Universal relief & approval. No news yet. They say this means Peace. Peace was written large on the Evening Standard placard yesterday in London. There’ll be no war, the shopkeeper in Long Acre said when I bought cardboard for Eddie’s book. Rosinsky says they will give way. Hitler will save his prestige: the C⁠[zecho] S⁠[lovak]⁠s will be sacrificed. War staved off for one year. But until the wireless announces the result of the visit—& there’s to be another—tonight we once again mark time. Nessa Duncan Angelica & Q. start for Cassis tonight, driving across France. We settle in for 10 days alone—that is, Clive & Janice come on Sunday; but I mean to make these 3 weeks serve me to finish, sketch out rather, the last chapters.

Dined at Charleston. All seem agreed that a country life is best. Clive is giving notice to Gordon Square. We hear or rather the Garden Comttee heard, that T. Sqre will be pulled down in 3 years. Shall we not all provide ourselves with single rooms in London & live here? Never make any fixed plans for life—thats my motto. Really, for the 10 years that remain, be free of the world. But I’m kicking my heels with P.H. after Roger this morning, & the relief of fiction after all that fact, lightens the load of both worlds inconceivably. And I feel so free from any criticism; own no authority.

HAL Fisher asks me to go & see him. After my remarks on OM’s this is conciliatory. He wants me to send a signed copy. And his time is drawing out: resignation impending. Very fine clear weather. I saw a kingfisher. The lunch [with Mrs Woolf and Bella] was very heavy, stodgy, full of meat & wine. Walked down the Strand all a buzzing, full season feeling, in the afternoon.

Saturday 17 September

Chamberlain back. In a hard business man’s voice told us, as he stepped out of the plane at Croydon, that he was to meet Hitler again: that Hitler was coming to meet an old man half way (is this symbolical?) & we meanwhile not to believe rumour. No statement today. Cabinet meeting. Just as in violent personal anxiety, the public lapses, into complete indifference. One can feel no more at the moment. And its the essence of an English September. Saw the yearling sale at Northease yesterday. Mrs Mounsey writes to ask me to head an Outsiders’ movement. Clive & Janice tomorrow. Nessa &c lunching now at Auppegard—& thats all for the moment. I thought yesterday, enjoying my valley walk, that Julian wd entirely have approved of that. And, oddly enough, I never said that the whole summer here was set on its feet the first day by L. visiting the Lewes Dr who pronounced him absolutely normal. Yet I suppose it was the most important feeling of all. We met on the towing path the very day after we came here.

Dreamt of Julian one night: how he came back: I implored him not to go to Spain. He promised. Then I saw his wounds. Dreamt of Roger last night. How he had not died. I praised Cezanne. And told him how I admired his writing. Exactly the old relationship. Perhaps easier to get this in dreams, because one has dreamt away the fact of his death, to which I woke as L. came in.

Tuesday 20 September

Since I’m too stale to work—rather headachy—I may as well write a sketch roughly of the next chapter. (I’ve been rather absorbed in P.H. hence headache. Note: fiction is far more a strain than biography—thats the excitement.)

Suppose I make a break after H⁠[elen’]⁠s death (madness). A separate paragraph quoting what R. himself said. Then a break. Then begin definitely with the first meeting. That is the first impression: a man of the world not professor or Bohemian. Then give facts in his letters to his mother. Then back to the second meeting.

Pictures. Talk, about art. I look out of window. His persuasiveness—a certain density—wished to persuade you to like what he liked. Eagerness—absorption—stir—a kind of vibration like a hawkmoth round him. Or shall I make a scene here—at Otts?

Then C⁠[onstantino]⁠ple. Driving out—getting things in—his deftness in combining. Then quote the letters to R.

The first 1910 show.

The ridicule. Quote W⁠[ilfred] Blunt.

Effect on R. Another close up.

The letter to MacColl. His own personal liberation. Excitement. Found his method (but this wasn’t lasting, his letters to V⁠[anessa]. show that he was swayed too much by her.)

Love. How to say that he now was in love?

Give the pre-war atmosphere. Ott. Duncan. France. Letter to Bridges about beauty & sensuality. His exactingness. Logic.

Thursday 22 September

By mistake I wrote some pages of Roger here; a proof, if proof is needed, as I’m in the habit of saying, that my books are in a muddle. Yes, at this moment, there are packets of letters to V.B. 1910-1916—packets of testimonials for the Oxford Slade—endless folders, each containing different letters, Press Cuttings, & extracts from books. In between come my own, now numerous, semi-official 3 Gs letters (now sold 7,017..) I never get a disinterested letter: always demands. But all the same we get asked to have Noel & Virginia, Judith, & go to Sissinghurst in order that L. may discuss politics with Harold. No sober silent weeks of work alone all day as we’d planned, when the Bells went. I suppose one enjoys it. Yet I was just getting into the old, very old, rhythm of regular reading, first this book then that; Roger all the morning; walk from 2 to 4; bowls 5 to 6.30: then Madame de Sevigne; get dinner 7.30; read Roger; listen to music; bind Eddie’s Candide; read Siegfried Sassoon; & so bed at 11.30 or so. A very good rhythm; but I can only manage it for a few days it seems. Next week all broken. A minor treat today: solicitor in Lewes; then walk …

The public fluctuates. Chamberlain flying today to Gotesberg (?). A strong opposition has risen. Eden, Churchill & the L⁠[abour] P⁠[arty] all denounce serving C.S. on the altar & bidding it commit suicide. CS. very dignified & tragic. Everyone calling everyone else a pick pocket. The prospect of another glissade after a minor stop into abyss. All Europe in Hitler’s keeping. What’ll he gobble next? Thats the summary of us in Sussex.

Wednesday 28 September

This may be the last day of peace; so why not record it, as I’ve 20 minutes & nothing to do? Why record it? But this “why?” has to be battened down.

A tumultuous week end—Judith, Noel & Virginia; Charleston: Clive Janice Raymond. Pouring wet Monday. L. came out to say Kingsley Martin begged him to come up, in order to act as liaison between the LP & the Liberals. He was the only person &c. So we decided to go at once & spend the night. Drove up in the rain. Men digging trenches at Turnham Green. London crowded. Dropped Judith. L. went to see K.M. I to buy coffee &c. “Its a miserable day & our thoughts are miserable” the woman at de Bry [Coffee Merchants, New Oxford Street] said. She said we should win; & that it would not be a long war. “But whats the point of winning?” I said, at which she exclaimed & shrugged her shoulders in agreement. Then KM to dinner; charcoal black round the eyes; as usual something histrionic. All about his article in the NS: had he been wrong? We’ve all been wrong. A desire to confess. But also very wretched. Hopelessly restless. Melodramatic in his gestures, swaying as he walked to the telephone; perpetually looking at the time & ringing people up. Got the BBC. “Well A.C. Whats Hitler said? Ah hah—” Then Phil Baker. Do you agree with what I wrote? No word of any possible plan or reason for summoning L. Stayed on, drinking, smoking. Then said he was going to walk the streets. Couldnt sleep. Still thought it possible we should rat. Also Phil said Hitler would cry off. So to bed. Telephones all the morning. I went to the London Library. Sat in the basement & looked up The Times on PIP [Post-Impressionism] in 1910. Old sweeper gently dusting. Came & said, Theyre telling us to try on our masks. Have you got yours I asked. No not yet. And shall we have war? I fear so, but I still hope not. I live out in Putney. Oh theyve laid in sand bags; the books will be moved; but if a bomb strikes the house…. May I dust under your chair? I looked in at the Nat Gall, being warned by a sober loud speaker to get my gas mask as I walked down Pall Mall. A man repeats this warning through a megaphone as he drives. A lecture being given by a red faced elderly man on Watteau & French painting. A largish crowd following. I looked at Renoir, Cezanne &c: tried to see through Roger’s eyes: tried to get some solidity into my mind. So to lunch. Question what to do about the Press. The girls sensible but of course apprehensive. Plans can only be sketched. Possibly John will transport the whole Press to Fieldhead. Nothing can be done till Saturday. House meets today. We arranged for Mabel to go to Bristol. We shall stay here, provisionally. I went to Lewis & bought folders.* We must settle into * The boy there the only person I saw obviously frightened & therefore snappy & rude—poor little wretch. work at any rate. We must drive our pens & keep the Press going that way. Rain settled in. Miss Moir of the Forum arrived at 3.15—& John & Rosinsky for L. She was a painted battered professional journalist. Wants controversial articles: £20 only: but can say what I like, I gave her vermouth. Stayed talking. Sister of a Suffolk clergyman. The Govt, is evacuating the East End to Suffolk. All cottages prepared to billet.

So it goes on. We had a rather unpleasant farewell with the Press—they staying, we going. Its reasonable of course. But one doesnt like leaving them there: & yet they want to stay, for the money. We may have to pay them, or let them go, & try to keep on paying. But as L. & I say, we cant now decide, or think. A violent rain storm; a great crowd in the streets. The worst—longest drive in half lights under trees, rain splashed; & so late that we only got here at 8.15. Poor Louie missed the PM’s broadcast. He said nothing—except that we cd not fight for the small C.S. matter only—a possible hint. But we’ve given up stressing the importance of hints. Hitler seems as they say “for it.” These futile notes are now ended by lunch. It was oddly peaceful & sane, getting out here after London. Mr Perkins brought gas masks about 10.30. & so at last we went to bed.

Thursday 29 September

We listened in yesterday at 5 expecting to hear that War was declared. Instead “Mr Chamberlain made a sensational announcement. He has been invited by Herr Hitler to meet him tomorrow at Munich. Signor Mussolini & Daladier will be present. Mobilisation is postponed for 24 hours.” It was like coming out of a dark room. Now we are waiting. Some compromise? The selling of the C.S? What? Anyhow war for the moment is postponed. Perkins & Janson called last night to say 50 children arrive in Rodmell today & to note numbers of our rooms. Off to Sissinghurst this afternoon to see Harold.

Friday 30 September

L. has just come in, it being 11.15. to say that he overheard a Broadcast when he was in the W.C.: dashed out: turned on our wireless; & heard that terms are being made at Munich. I cant go into them. But it means peace. That was the upshot of the stop press in The Times this morning. They are agreeing to let some Germans into C.S. today: then English Italian & French are to enter & guarantee: then a 3 months pause. Three months in which to settle the question, instead of bombs on London & Paris today! Well, Chamberlain must be looking on the bright sunshine this morning with a good deal of relief. He went off yesterday quoting Hotspur “Out of this nettle danger we pluck the flower safety”—words that Katherine Mansfield has on her tomb. Such a reversal was never known: save that there was always a huger nightmare unreality that clouded all distinct feeling. I’m doing Roger & PIP [Post-Impressionism] & must break off this historical note to go back to that.

Harold kept in London caballing with Winston & Eden to keep the PM from giving away too much. Certainty of peace not quite certain yesterday; but the 9,000 children who were to have come to Sussex held up. The obvious feeling everywhere was We dont want this war. No glorification, as Mrs Dean [the smith’s wife] remarked: the mouthpiece of the nation, as much as Chamberlain. Oh & the K. of Italy is said to have stiffened Musso: who stiffened Ch⁠[amberlai]⁠n., & thus weakened Hitler, by threatening abdication. So Vita reported from Harold.

I will continue, as I have 10 minutes before lunch: continue that is to try & describe the reversal; which is soberly & truly life after death. For we, even if we escaped, should have had our noses rubbed in death; ruin; perhaps the end finally of all order, so L. admitted was his background. It would have meant our last 15 years of life spent in battling for a thread of liberty; keeping the Press going among the deaths of the young. And now suddenly we can travel & move & use our normal faculties. No slaughter of the young beneath us. I wonder if we could have faced it even here—entertaining East end children in the hall; writing; getting all the dismal fag ends of things thrown us; & reading Casualty Lists. Now of course one makes not new resolutions, but attacks the old with some fervour. They seem to have blood in them. I wonder how far we cd. really get a move on; make a difference, if we tried? Possibly—sanguinely—a new view will dominate. Hitler will sink instead of swell. But what a shave! Northease Barn already turned into a hospital; Gwen’s daughter “evacuated” to school at Stanmer Park; 60 children laid on mattresses in the gallery; marvels of organisation recited on the BBC last night. All who wish to leave London to go to certain tube stations, with a thick coat & enough food for the day: children to bring no [?] glass bottles: parents not to come. Public will then be taken free of charge to towns & villages 50 miles out of London. Each will be given a stamped card on wh. to write to friends. No choice of destination. &c. Eddy Sackville volunteered to drive an ambulance in London. Food all arranged for. The net result is that we are presented with 2 gas masks by the Govt: & have bought 4 candlesticks at Woolworths, & ordered an extra supply of coals.

A very fine day.

[Saturday 1 October]

A violent storm—purple ink clouds—dissolving like blots of ink in water—strong enough to drive us in here in the middle of our game. L. is storing apples—finest harvest for perhaps some years. No longer a matter of concern. We were to live on apples honey & cabbage. Postman delivered an oration—“just my own thoughts” on War & Dictators. How all will worship C⁠[hamberlai]⁠n. now: but in 5 years time we may be saying we ought to have put him, Hitler, down now. These dictators & their lust for power—they cant stop. He’ll get stronger & stronger. Then … But now we cant help being glad of peace. Its human nature. We’re made that way. A solid clear spoken if repetitive private thinker who kept our letters waiting 10 minutes. Only the N. Statesman &c. Soon looked through & tossed aside. Peace when they went to Press hung on a straw. Now grown (we suppose) to a rope—unless this storm is symbolical; its odd how susceptible the mind becomes to weather symbols—roping everything in—in crises like this is, or was. Of course there’s bound to be a turn against relief—but I’m watching the storm—as in violent illness. One turns peevish & has a sense of emptiness. I should fill this now either by letter writing or sketching R. wh last as the least burdensome, I will do.

Sunday 2 October

Yesterday would have been the first day of the proclamation of war. It might be amusing to scribble down pall mall some higgledy piggledy of incidents: as they remain over; & will soon be forgotten.

The BBC in a measured trained voice: how the public was to go with warm clothing: no glasses: post cards: this interrupted by the ArchB’s prayers: then cold menace: a spaced dictated message from the Admiralty to ships. Obviously we’d sunk mines. Then the afternoon (Wednesday) when all foreign stations were jammed. War broken out already L. thought. Then the statement that all poisonous snakes at the Zoo would be killed, & dangerous animals shot—Vision of London ravaged by cobras & tigers. Sense of preparation to the last hair. Some complacency on the part of organisers. How Mrs Nicholls was refused the key of the Square: trenches only available to residents. All this mixture of minute detail; with invocations to God; with Hitler baying & the Germans howling; then the composed & cultured voice breaking in, say about not taking pets. Then over all a feeling of the senselessness, futility, so that there was a dilution of emotion. A childs game. Yet extreme physical relief when peace seemed 24 hours longer. Some instinctive self preservation. I felt this most when we drove away from 52, a selfish gladness that we should be quietly in the country. Some remorse at leaving the clerks exposed. Now rapidly other emotions chase each other; that peace seems dull, solid. Then that we must have a bone to gnaw. The opposition already marshalling & we shall be attacked. Some obliquity: after all we admired Chn. in the crisis. Is it fair to abuse him now? Duff Cooper has resigned. A wet day. Keynes come to tea.

Thursday 13 October

I should be well advised to take a holiday from writing, & maunder off into the vineyards at Cassis. But I cant: too weak minded; dependent upon L.: & life’s too fixed. So I must dandle my brain, & find a substitute. Tired, after London yesterday. Cant screw either to PH or Roger. Elizabeth Bowen now? A walk? Pick apples? only 11.30—a familiar, but not hopeless, situation. In fact I’m like a teetotum, that’s so weighted it always spins, wherever dropped. Only too sleepy today to spin. Finish after a devilish week end. Richard & Ann here. Talk for 48 hours. A nice couple: I like him. Some body & some brain. Charm & integrity. She helter skelter, adolescent, vigour, but I daresay neurotic. Much younger, more uneven than he. Oh & we went to Tilton & read L.’s play [The Hotel] to the K.s. They gravely approved. M. as intent as a terrier. Very interesting. We like it very much. Suggest the Group Theatre. Off to Cambridge. End of the season. Clive gone already.

Sandbags still in position in B⁠[loomsbur]⁠y. Southampton Row being pulled down. Clerks had bought spade & first aid outfit. John reasonable. Nice to come home to duck. Today the first time without workmen. L. arranging books in the gallery.

Friday 14 October

Two things I mean to do when the long dark evenings come: to write, on the spur of the moment, as now, lots of little poems to go into P.H.: as they may come in handy: to collect, even bind together, my innumerable T.L.S. notes: to consider them as material for some kind of critical book: quotations? comments? ranging all through English lit: as I’ve read it & noted it during the past 20 years.

Now, having made this note, I must in sober earnest write letters; to Ray [Strachey]: to Joan Easdale, who’s marrying Jim Rendel; to Suh about her autobiography. In fact I must clear my table, as L. calls it & does it—before we go on Sunday. No more then here. But at last its a fine day: & head better.

Thursday 20 October

52 Tavistock Square.

Only Thursday! It seems 14 days since we left MH. I knew the break would be a jangle; but not that I should feel the mixture of humiliation & dissolution wh. I feel today, after a sleeping draught. And the curious fact is all this is the result of offering to pay Helen Anrep’s overdraught. I thought it wd be 50 it is 150 or 200. So I’ve committed myself again, on the impulse of the moment: just as I’d sworn not to. Cant spend freely. Must write an article. And is it worth it? L. at once says he will go shares. No. But why do I hesitate over this? 1. She disliked 3 Gs. I know its the right thing to do. I dont like talking emotionally (about Roger chiefly [?]). Then I was jangled by the temptation of a week at Cassis. L. very divine—walked in the Sq. I dont think I come altogether badly out of it. I’ve forced myself to work at R. this morning. Theres some taste about it that I dislike. And worrying L. And the sleeping draught heavy on me, like a hand. Yet it is right to give her the money, as she’s doing without a servant. I mean if one cared for R. this is a way to show it—better than buying clothes or another room. So don’t let me vacillate. Only be more careful in future.

Saturday 22 October

Decidedly less jangled; though my promise to pay H.’s overdraught still remains: she has not sent me any word tho’, & thus cowardlike I hope I may keep my hoard intact. Yet I’m glad not to have to buy expensive clothes. An odd little kink in my mind, which I cant untwist. I daresay this will make interesting reading to me one of these days, should I write a true memoir. Anyhow, it did slightly bear fruit when Colefax came to see me yesterday. I said I will only dine with you if I may walk. Dressing & driving in a cab destroy my sentence—jerk me fr one consciousness to another. I’ll dine with you to meet the D. of Devonshire as I am. Now this was logical & sensible: making the best of modern conditions as R. has it. She asserts that her ambition is to preserve civilisation. So is my ambition. It boils down to dining with S⁠[ibyl]. in day clothes. Also to bring Isherwood & Auden to dine there. That I dont promise: but why not explore this possibility of seeing the great world from a new angle? I think it fits in with my general scheme at present. Then I can pay Helen: keep my self respect &c. And we’re lunching early to go to Hampton Court, after a long grind—not quite fruitless—at R.—the Broussa scene. I’m interested, though the drudgery is intense—quotes & general outline. But I see it: its the doing the detail in words thats the worry.

Sunday 30 October

Words, words, words, so many & so many—That I think is the vocalisation of my little sensation this morning. I am tired of writing. At least its a bad life when for some reason one has an intermittence of feeling. Perhaps this is due to the jerk of 2 days at MH: & then straight back, yesterday, from perfect warmth & summer blue to London, dinner with all the W⁠[oolf]’s at Freda’s Club. This was Lord Spencer’s house. I sat next Martin [Abrahamson] & Harold & said almost exactly what I said a year ago. These reunions are rather like shows of old clothes. Freda & Alice & Sylvia all stouter; & so on. Mrs W. shrivelled, upheld by a new belt.

“Words” refers partly to Vita’s new poem, Solitude. Does it jab on the nerve? Is it only sleek eloquence? The words I found on my lips were “suave & sumptuous”. I suspect there’s a good deal more. But no doubt I’m at an angle, as I say. I dont want reflections on God: nor do I altogether forget her superficial view of 3 Gs: that she never troubled to think out what I meant. This is partly personal; partly not.

Miss Gardiner hauled me out of the Lodge yesterday. The young are reading 3 Gs: it is a revelation. I let her explain. It seemed to explain to us what we’re doing. She gave me Thomas Mann, who does the same. Now Vita never contemplated that quality in 3 Gs.

Nessa away slightly rasps me. I have no circumference; only my inviolable centre: L. to wit. He has been offered £500 by Gollancz for a book on Civn. His play will be tried by the Group. Stephen S. thinks it a roaring comedy & very original.

I should like to be quit of all this: am more & more dissatisfied with modern lit: & the criticism thereof; envy painters; yet suspect that I must grate myself upon people to get my sense of “words” dried up. So dine tomorrow to meet Max [Beerbohm] &c: & C. Isherwood comes too. I think I shall read Chaucer: & En⁠[glis]⁠h poetry concurrently with French prose. But I’m word haunted. The ugliness of the W.s in middle life last night rasped me: & their complete lack of—what? Something I shall find at Sybil’s? I wonder. Fire at Marseilles; Parliament meeting; To the L. out in Dents. CR in Pelican. Asked to write a story for Harpers. Also to give a book to the Ox. Univ. Press. Hugh writes. A great deal on foot. Words words & now roast beef & apple tart. An evening alone.

Tuesday 1 November

Max like a Cheshire cat. Orbicular. Jowld. Blue eyed. Eyes grow vague. Something like Bruce Richmond—all curves. What he said was, Ive never been in a group. No, not even as a young man. It was a serious fault. When you’re a young man you ought to think Theres only one right way. And I thought—this is very profound, but you maynt realise it—“It takes all sorts to make a world.” I was outside all the groups. Now dear Roger Fry who liked me, was a born leader. No one so “illuminated”. He looked it. Never saw anyone look it so much. I heard him lecture, on the Aesthetics of Art. I was disappointed. He kept on turning the page—turning the page…. Hampstead hasnt yet been spoilt. I stayed at Jack Straw’s Castle some years ago. My wife had been having influenza. And the barmaid, looking over her shoulder said—my wife had had influenza twice—“Quite a greedy one arent you?” Now thats immortal. There’s all the race of barmaids in that. I suppose I’ve been ten times into public houses. George Moore never used his eyes. He never knew what men & women think. He got it all out of books. Ah I was afraid you would remind me of Ave atque Vale. Yes. Thats beautiful. Yes, its true he used his eyes then. Otherwise its like a lovely lake, with no fish in it. The Brook Kerith …

Coulson Kernahan? (I told how CK. stopped me in Hastings. Are you Edith Sitwell? No, Mrs W. And you? Coulson Kernahan.) At this Max gobbled. Instantly said he had known him in Yellow Book days. He wrote God & the Ant. Sold 12 million copies. And a book of reminiscences—How I visited Lord Roberts … The great man rose from his chair. His eyes—were they hazel? were they blue? were they brown?—no they were just soldier’s eyes … And he wrote, Celebrities I have not met—Max Beerbohm. I gave him Ottoline’s ring. “I only knew her superficially—Was she happy. She quarrelled—Eleanor (or whatever Mrs B.’s name is [Florence]: she is drooping; washed out; loose lipped; sympathetic; one finger plastered) & Ottoline quarrelled. Your obituary was lovely. Did he indeed ring you up? Well, how strange people are. And they write, Lady Eglantyne … has raised the standard of heaven …

About his own writing: dear Lytton Strachey said to me: first I write one sentence; then I write another. Thats how I write. And so I go on. But I have a feeling writing ought to be like running through a field. Thats your way. Now how do you go down to your room, after breakfast—what do you feel? I used to look at the clock, & say Oh dear me, its time I began my article…. No, I’ll read the paper first. I never wanted to write. But I used to come home from a dinner party & take my brush & draw caricature after caricature. They seemed to bubble up from here … he pressed his stomach. That was a kind of inspiration, I suppose. What you said in your beautiful essay about me & Charles Lamb was quite true. He was crazy, he had the gift … genius. I’m too like Jack Horner. I pull out my plum. Its too rounded, too perfect … I have a public of about 1500—Oh I’m famous, largely thanks to you, & people of importance at the top like you. I often read over my own work. And I have a habit of reading it through the eyes of people I respect. I often read it as Virginia Woolf would read it—picking out the kind of things you would like. You never do that? Oh you should try it.

Willie Maugham came in: like a dead man whose beard or moustache has grown a little grisly bristle after death. And his lips are drawn back like a dead mans. He has small ferret eyes. A look of suffering & malignity & meanness & suspicion. A mechanical voice as if he had to raise a lever at each word—stiffens talk into something hard cut measured. Talked of Aldous—his conversion. He thinks his soul & Gerald Heard’s soul are one soul. Max said he had been taught by Leonard Huxley at Charterhouse. Poor fellow, so distinguished, so cultivated … they ragged him. And I could picture the interview with the headmaster. I am so glad that you are finding a larger scope for your abilities—getting rid of him. And I could imagine this charming fellow, newly married to a delightful young lady &c &c. Willie M. never imagined in this way. Sat like an animal in a trap: or like a steel trap. And I could not say anything that loosed his dead man’s jaw. He wanted searching analytical statement about Gerald Heard’s character. GH has been very kind to me, he said, as if he needed kindness. But I want to know: do you think he has—I think he wanted to know if he were a genuine person; but I couldn’t fit my mind to his. Then the B⁠[eerbohm]⁠s went; & MB reappeared, in a smart overcoat (he wore double breasted blue suit) carrying a black cane with a white billiard ball on top. “Do you see how careful I was to say Sybil? before I came in, to warn her, lest she might be saying, What an old bore Max has become!”

Isherwood & I met on the doorstep. He is a slip of a wild boy: with quicksilver eyes. Nipped. Jockey like. That young man, said W. Maugham “holds the future of the English novel in his hands.” Very enthusiastic. In spite of Max’s brilliance, & idiosyncrasy, which he completely realises, & does not overstep, this was a surface evening: as I proved, because I found I could not smoke the cigar which I had brought. That was on the deeper level. All kept to the same surface level by Sybil’s hostesscraft. Stories. Compliments. The house: its shell like whites & silvers & greens; its panelling; its old furniture. And Lord Ivor: & Lord de la Warr.

We are going to look at 6 Endsleigh St after lunch, a freehold house, costing £7,500.

[?Monday 14 November]

So many pages, I see about the Colefax party, & none about the incessant stream here. I use my old image. Trying to drink a cup of tea, & having it knocked out of ones hand. Spenders & Joan [Easedale]; then Hugh [Walpole], Spenders, Elizabeth [Bowen] & Sybil. Then Helen (on Saturday, my only day’s solitude) followed by Adrian.

I am a little ruffled: spending my morning writing Biography for America in order to pay off Baba’s debts. So it seems. My £150 has been lent; given I suppose; & I must replace it. I feel I maynt have the chance in a year or two. We never reach the pinnacle where I needn’t make owing to my—shall I say generosity? or impulsiveness? Helen came—oh yes—no doubt she wants the money—was desperate, evidently, if I decided not to give it. So I gave it. Voila qui est fait, as Mme de Sevigne says. To school myself against silly puritanism, I instantly spent £5.10 on a very charming bookcase. And shall buy a dresser this afternoon. But my brain racked by biography wont describe life; or analyse the lending emotions. Some were very happy. I mean, paying the debt to Roger. Then the reaction. Irritation. Then the refugees—They clamour. So I dig my toes in: & on the one hand buy furniture; on the other make money.

A letter from Duncan. Complete bliss at Cassis, has a country life in view, Angelica perfect. So’s the weather today. Jews persecuted, only just over the Channel. Here we feel a faint heat under us, like potatoes frying. But no more than that. I here vow to see no one till Vita on Thursday.

Tuesday 15 November

I did not buy the dresser. We cannoned into Rose Macaulay, an incredibly shrunk, hair twisted figure, dealing with her car at a garage. She never saw us. I like these unseen visions. Then I walked to Selfridge: so across all the Parks, following two perfect Guardsmen. A soft & remote blue ceiling of sky over the Park. My one quiet evening since Thursday. Read Chaucer: began Lytton Q.E. & Essex [Strachey’s Elizabeth and Essex, 1928] for my article. Ideas popped up, but I want to write fiction, my weeks off, not more hard highroad prose.

Tonight we dine with Clive. Ethel Sands pesters. Fixed for Tuesday fortnight I should say. I am determined not to be a means provider: to have & enjoy things as ends. Otherwise I could go on lending money; earning money in order to lend money; writing books in order to please Nessa & Ha [Margery Fry] & Helen; no I must dig my feet in & do the things I think my own ends. And so left L. & walked across the park: this was an end, not a passage way to this that & the other. What end shall I make this afternoon? Very foggy which obscures the end. Might have gone to Cockfosters.

I shall read Sevigné & Chaucer & 50 Years of a Drs life if it comes from the Library. Many publicity letters. The Cigar quarrel. In⁠[tellectua]⁠l. Liberty appeals & Mrs Moggridge [unidentified].

Wednesday 16 November

There are very few mountain summit moments. I mean, looking out at peace from a height. I made this reflection going upstairs. That is symbolical I’m “going upstairs” now, when I write Biography. Shall I have a moment on top? Or when I’ve done Roger? or tonight, in bed, between 2 & 3? They come spasmodically. Often when I was so miserable about The Years.

Viola Tree died last night, of pleurisy: 2 years younger than I am.

I remember the quality of her skin: like an apricot; a few amber coloured hairs. Eyes blistered with paint underneath. A huge Goddess woman, who was also an old drudge; a big boned striding figure; much got up, of late. Last time I saw her at the Gargoyle [Club] Cocktail; when she was in her abundant expansive mood. I never reached any other; yet always liked her. Met her perhaps once a year, about her books. She dined here the night her Castles in Spain came out. And I went to tea in Woburn Sq. & the butter was wrapped in a newspaper. And there was an Italian double bed in the drawing room. She was instinctive; & had the charm of good actress manners; & their Bohemianism, & sentimentality. But I think was a sterling spontaneous mother & daughter; not ambitious; a great hand at life; I suppose harassed for money; & extravagant; & very bold; & courageous—a maker of picturesque surroundings. So strong & large, that she shd. have lived to be 80: yet no doubt undermined that castle, with late hours; drink? I dont know. She could transmit something into words. Her daughter Virginia to be married this week. And think of Viola lying dead—How out of place—unnecessary.

Dinner at Clive’s. Janice lashing out, like a bird that begins to flutter & peck. Wants to be off? Anyhow we all talked: about Jews: about Clive’s lunch party with Willy Maugham & de la Mare: which are the best books for the illiterate: then about being Jews: then about technique: the word broken in the Bible; L. read passages. A confused argument about technique; wh. Janice sided I dont know. Anyhow she spoke up. A symptom of revolt from the elderly? She left when we did. Clive looking down from his dining room window. He leaves Gordon Square in January.

Friday 18 November

Leonard has a rash on his back; decided it was the result of the prostate; sent for Rau; who says no its your new pyjamas; takes a sample; dismisses idea of prostate about wh. he was so positive—& the result of all this is, I was all on edge with Vita yesterday: & still think, if the telephone rings, Oh thats Rau to say the specimen is impure. But there is no message—12.45. And yet my morning has been spoilt. I cant settle to Biography yet intend to finish it by Monday. The old wound of last Januarys anxiety has made me irrational. We are off to MH. on a milky blue day, for this autumn is unparalelled—a summer heat. Vita sensitive about Solitude.

Tuesday 22 November

I meant to write Reflections on my position as a writer. I dont want to read Dante; have 10 minutes over from rehashing Lappin & Lapinova, a story written I think at Asheham 20 years ago or more: when I was writing Night & Day perhaps.

Thats a long stretch. And apparently I’ve been exalted to a very high position, say about 10 years ago: then was decapitated by W⁠[yndham] Lewis & Miss Stein; am now I think—let me see—out of date, of course; not a patch, with the young, on Morgan; yet wrote The Waves; yet am unlikely to write anything good again; am a secondrate, & likely, I think, to be discarded altogether. I think thats my public reputation at the moment. It is based largely on C. Connolly’s Cocktail criticism: a sheaf of feathers in the wind. How much do I mind? Less than I expected. But then of course, its all less than I realised. I mean, I never thought I was so famous; so dont feel the decapitation. Yet its true that after The Waves, or Flush, Scrutiny I think found me out. W.L. attacked me. I was aware of an active opposition. Yes I used to be praised by the young & attacked by the elderly. 3 Gs. has queered the pitch. For the G.M. Youngs & the Scrutineers both attack that. And my own friends have sent me to Coventry over it. So my position is ambiguous. Undoubtedly Morgan’s reputation is much higher than my own. So is Tom’s. Well? In a way it is a relief. I’m fundamentally, I think, an outsider. I do my best work & feel most braced with my back to the wall. Its an odd feeling though, writing against the current: difficult entirely to disregard the current. Yet of course I shall. And it remains to be seen if there’s anything in P.H. In any case I have my critical brain to fall back on. But how widely I feel outside it all: untrapped by the Morgan communist group. And I know, I think, my faults. This is not the measured criticism of my position I meant to write. I’m not able to go deeply. For heres the usual stir & bother—Nessa back tomorrow, Flossie ill: am I to go Hunting? & so on. A wild wet Sunday [at Rodmell]; a walk to Muggery; no Quentin; alone; & thank heaven, no message whatever from Rau; so all that strain was gratuitous. An odd reflection: how much anguish I wasted last January. Had I only known then that it would be dispersed thus—

Thursday 24 November

Yes & when Nessa came back, whom I so much wanted to see, the old irritation about Helen bubbled up, & I walked all through Finsbury Park this afternoon, telling over & over the story of my loan. I wonder why. Why life suddenly seems empty & endless: & I seem for ever climbing the endless stair, forced; unhelped; unthanked; a mere slave to some harsh—shall I say destiny—or is the word too big for what is probably some superficial reaction; part the old jealousy of Nessa’s children is it? And then oh the bore of writing out a story to make money!

Friday 25 November

L.’s birthday—58? But I open this, to note, at the foot of the last pessimistic page, in 2 minutes, the fact that pessimism can be routed by getting into the flow: creative writing. A passage in Bio⁠[graph]⁠y. came right. After an incredible empty churning & grinding. Cold tears standing behind my eyes. It came right & I’m floated. So why not, when pessimistic, dandle the brain a little, until it gets into its circuit?

A fine cold day: L.’s birthday.

Monday 28 November

More brain churning to add a passage to L⁠[appin] & L⁠[apinova]. & all my courage needed. Then R.’s letters to his father. I can work my brain. So thats all right. And one of these days I shall be off writing what I like. To Harrow yesterday: sudden fog: shouts; terror; never was so suddenly obliterated. Turned & walked at Hampstead. Dinner at Clive’s. An English Turkey. Duncan flown; argumentative, persistent; chattering against T. E. Lawrence &c. amusing.

[Thursday 1 December]

I think it would be a relief to write a free sentence here, after so much churning. And so much fitting in. Let me count the people only: Angelica, silent & reserved took my free Monday evening. On Tuesday, I went to Ethel Sands. Did my tricks in front of Guy Ridley, little Sinclair & Shaw Taylor: ashen coloured heap of ashes, that house. Fine, silver, suffocating. Sally, a smudge, talked of Baba; then Ann & Richard: Sally stayed till 12.30. On Wednesday, Mary at 4, Richard Hughes at 5: Colefax at 6: went to see the moon at Elizabeth Williamson’s observatory, & did not see it. Tonight Vita. Tomorrow MH. Is it wonderful that I break in upon L. & exclaim we will sell the Press & live in the country? John is making scenes. This adds to the strain. Turns red & gobbles. So whats the point of hoping for a balmy & fruitful future? A very bad season. No sales. Can I afford D⁠[uncan’]⁠s £40 carpet? Regret Helen’s £150: but I’m a little proud that I made myself write the story & the article in two weeks; & started Roger again. But I have lost the scent. Dont feel him real any more. Chafing & drudgery necessary. Shall work at that till April now. And then rest my head.

Sunday 11 December

A few scattered notes.

We walked back from 12th Night (disappointing) on a clear cold night. Talked of death in Russell Sqre. L. said he had taught himself not to think about it. 2 or 3 years ago fear of death became an obsession. I said I should not wish to live if he died. But until then found life what? exciting? Yes I think so. He agreed. So we dont think of death. This came from David Cecil’s account of Desmond: who has an idee fixe: his old mothers death; & then cant rouse himself from accusations; how he is war guilty or “we” are: the English presumably.

Very long hours of semi-drudgery on R. The war years. I want to sum up my 3 G. conclusions, had I time or brain before the end of the year.

How horribly the year began! As a detail, I chose a gay cover [for her diary] to counteract what I suspected—L.’s serious illness. All that blown away. The rash is caused possibly by Sally’s hair. Mrs W. has had a heart attack. But her vitality may again pull her over. The Jews obsess her. My private naggery to coin a word for the bone one gnaws at odd moments is Helen taking £150 off me with which to supply sympathy to sympathy addicts. But thats unfair. But then one is unfair at 2 in the morning. This autumn reveals plainly our ‘celebrity’: that is, that we never get a day to ourselves; & attract a constant stream, from all quarters. Political, social, literary. I suppose this is secretly pleasing. I wonder. A month in winter fields will cool me down. Biography writing not much tax on the higher faculties as I perhaps shd. not call my rather doubtful gifts in that line. The young all swarm, even if they criticise. And I’m working in Rose Macaulay, Tom Eliot, Martin Freud, the Robsons & Ethel Smyth—all this week: a hint that I shd. use the morning then for Roger & not scribble, in a hand so worn with writing it hardly writes, any longer.

Monday 12 December

Rather a debauched Sunday evening at Clive’s last night. Was he drunk? He was so quarrelsome & peevish, after dinner. A long tirade against motorists. Suddenly Nessa got quite red & said “This conversation is so foolish we’d better change it”. But Clive wdn’t change it. Every change had its head snapped off. David Cecil derided; Lytton’s books dismissed. I thought of Roger & Lytton & how we used to talk of a Sunday evening. Now all personal gossip & these tedious bickerings.

L. lacerated with his rash. Injections only painful & do no good. He limped round St James Park. Very gloomy today. Fine weather—thats all that can be said in favour of the world & my grind at R. joyless & unprogressive. 2 days rewriting the transition page after 1918.

Thursday 15 December

This is hells Black Calcutta hole week.

Monday Angelica. Tuesday Rose. Wednesday lunch Vita to meet Stark: after dinner to William’s to meet von Schuberts; Freud & E. Williamson to dine tonight. Tomorrow E. Bowen & Robson: Cal⁠[edonian]. Market: Ethel Smyth; Saturday Robsons: Sunday Tom—& why?

But I have invented a very good scheme: putting weight on enjoyment not duty. I think it works. I am going to make out a private budget for the New Year. Clothes; presents; &c: & see if this will give me more   20
    8
100
  30
    5
  10
  15
150
  10
348 20 money to spend lawfully on myself. Last year I gave away £20 to Nessa; £8 for her chair; £100 to Angelica; bought D.’s picture £30: Q.’s table 5: tiles £10: mirror £15. lent H. 150. Sophie [Farrell] £10. That (roughly counted) makes £348 given or lent, with a philanthropic element; as in the art objects. This I must control. I must continue A.’s 100 & Sophie’s £10. but draw in the other miscellaneous givings. No verbal commissions any more. But how much on dress & pocket money & house furnishing? Charity? And I will forecast my income. H⁠[arper’s]. B⁠[azaar]. (London) “likes” L⁠[appin and]. L⁠[apinova], but wont commit themselves till they hear from Davis. I suspect they wont take it.

Monday 13 December

I will spend the last morning—for tomorrow will be an odious scramble—in summing up the year. True, there are 10 days or so to run; but the liberty of this book allows these—I was going to say liberties, but my meticulous conscience bids me look for another word. That raises some questions; but I leave them; questions about my concern with the art of writing. On the whole the art becomes absorbing—more? no, I think its been absorbing ever since I was a little creature, scribbling a story in the manner of Hawthorne on the green plush sofa in the drawing room at St Ives while the grown ups dined.

The last dinner of the year was to Tom Eliot last night. Physically he is a little muffin faced; sallow & shadowed; but intent (as I am) on the art of writing. His play—Family Reunion?—was the staple of the very bitter cold evening. (The snow is now falling: flakes come through my skylight: I am huddled in my red rain jacket, opportunely given by L.) It has taken him off & on 2 years to write, is an advance upon Murder; in poetry; a new line, with 3 stresses; “I dont seem popular this evening”: “What for do we talk of cancer again” (no: this is not accurate). When the crisis came, his only thought was annoyance that now his play would not be acted. And he hurried up the revision (so David Cecil came to town & divided Melbourne into 2 vols.: so that at least one should be printed).

Tom said the young don’t take art or politics seriously enough. Disappointed in the Auden-Ish⁠[erwoo]⁠d. He has his grandeur. He said that there are flaws in the new play that are congenital, inalterable. I suspect in the department of humour. He defined the different kinds of influence: a subtle, splitting mind: a man of simple integrity, & the artists ingenuous egotism. Dines out & goes to musical teas; reads poems at Londonderry house; has a humorous sardonic gift which mitigates his egotism; & is on the side of authority. A nice old friends evening. And we did not go to Judith’s party.

This year I have worked at 3 Gs; & began, about April 1st, Roger: whom I have brought to the year 1919. I have also written Walpole; Lappin & Lapinova, & the Art of Biography. John says that 2 cabinet ministers are in favour of giving me the OM. The other candidates are Clemence Dane & Dame—the painter who does circuses. So the compliment is not as high as I should like: though its true I was the chosen … I mean, preferred; but its only lunch party gossip at Kenneth Clarks.

The reception of 3 Gs. has been interesting, unexpected—only I’m not sure what I expected. 8,000 sold. Not one of my friends has mentioned it. My wide circle has widened—but I’m altogether in the dark as to the true merits of the book. Is it.. ? No, I wont even formulate qualities; for, its true, no one has yet summed it up. Much less unanimity than about Room of Ones Own. A suspended judgment upon that work then seems fittest. I’ve written too 120 pages of Pointz Hall. I think of making it a 220 page book. A medley. I rush to it for relief after a long pressure of Fry facts. But I think I see a whole somewhere—it was simply seized, one day, about April, as a dangling thread: no notion what page came next. And then they came. To be written for pleasure.

Money I’ve summed up: & good resolutions. We shall find the new window in at MH. And its the coldest day for 5 years. Snow steadily falling. John temperamental. Another boil over on Saturday. A very bad season. Probable loss.

Reading Chaucer & Sevigne & the usual trash books. 2 years more of 52. The new flats going up in Southampton Row. Clive leaving 50. A last message from Ottoline this morning [unexplained]. Deaths this year: Ottoline, Ka. Mrs W. recovering.

[]

1939

[Diary XXVIII]

[Thursday 5 January]

So I take a new nib, after bringing Roger to the verge of Josette with the old one, & spend my last 5 minutes, this very fine January morning, in writing the first page of the new Year. Last 5 minutes before lunch—how inaugurate this important volume in that time, with this brain? A brain still running in the rut of the last sentence, which last sentence will be re-written a dozen times, too. So the dominant theme is work: Roger: the others the usual Rodmell themes. That is, I’ve let the frost go too far away. We came down 14 or 15 days ago & found all pipes frozen. There was snow for 5 days—bitter cold; wind. We staggered for one hour through the blizzard. Chains were on our wheels. We ground over to Charleston & Tilton on Christmas day. Then, 2 days later, woke to find green grass everywhere. The long spikes of ice that hung down the kitchen window had drops on their noses. They melted. The pipes thawed. Now its a June morning with an east wind. And times up. But the book’s begun anyhow. And perhaps I shall get a clearer head & say 10 minutes tomorrow. To Alciston yesterday, & envied the view & the farmhouse. But L. says “I prefer Monks House” Walked in Firle Park. At sight of that great yellow white mansion, L. said, “I prefer Monks House.” So to lunch.

Monday 9 January

Now that I have brought my brain to the state of an old washerwomans flannel over Roger—Lord the Josette chapter—& its all too detailed, too tied down—I must expand, first on this irresponsible page, & then, for 4 days I swear, before we go back on Sunday, in fiction. Though I’ve ground out most wish to write, even fiction. Rodmell is a grind on the brain: in winter especially. I write 3 solid hours: walk 2: then we read, with intervals for cooking dinner, music, news, till 11.30. I’ve thus read L.’s second volume: very good; full; moulded; subtle; & ever so many packets of R.’s letters; & some Sevigné, Chaucer—& some nonsense books. Weather now broken. Floods & gales; marsh under water. Charleston broken up. Maynard’s father dying.

And that reminds me of 2 obituaries I should have written, had I not been immersed: Jack Hills & Mitz. Mitz was found dead on Boxing day I think: her white old womans face puckered; eyes shut; tail wrapped round her neck. L. buried her in the snow under the wall. Jack died the same day about—no Xmas Eve: & if I had a brain (but havent) I could retell his life; as it affected ours, 30 years ago. The last time I saw him was in the London Library a year ago: grown stout & rosy; I heard his odd stammer: was too shy to speak. He was talking to a lady about a visit they had paid together—a sign of his unknown life. For who he saw, where he lived even had long been lost to me. Yet of all our youthful directors he was the most open minded, least repressive, could best have fitted in with later developments, had we not gone our ways—he to politics & sport, we to Bloomsbury. I remember his address to me in Fitzroy Square after V⁠[anessa]’s marriage on the sexual life of young men. Can they be honourable? I asked—when he said how all male talk was about women; how every young man had his whore. He was amused. I remember the moonlight night at Hindhead: the tramp: the shadows in the garden; Stella & he in the summer house; Thoby shouting at the tramp. Sophie confirms this: the tramp looked in at the kitchen window, where she sat getting a meal for Mr George. And then Stella’s death, one year later, & how he came round & sat with me, & talked in his natural voice. And then those appalling evenings at Painswick, sitting with him in a summer house, after dinner; he grasping my hand in agony: torn asunder—you cant understand—& I fixing a small bush & making it a symbol of agony. Then the long interviews with Nessa: her love; the row with George. “Are they going to get married?”—how he burst in on me & rather brutally told me his suspicion; asked me to speak to her—to warn her. I remember her dignified reproach—“You too?” And father’s sense. “If she wants to I wont interfere.” Then he fell in love, with Elena; with Imogen. A letter from Italy: “Never think that I’ve forgotten Stella, tho’ I’ve loved other women”—& so the dispersal, the very casual meetings; his marriage; & the end. This sketch must serve, since I’m too jaded to write.

Tuesday 17 January

[52 Tavistock Square]

London on Sunday. Five minutes left of the morning. Yesterday I went to the London Library; thought I’d been there for 40 years; read Tom’s swan song in the Criterion, or rather slipped his condensed meanings over my fluid mind; home & read Delacroix journals; about which I could write: I mean the idea that its among the painters not the writers one finds stability, consolation. This refers to a sentence of his about the profundity of the painter’s meaning; & how a writer always superficialises.

I wish I could distill some of my thoughts about “the situation” into nuggets. The Spanish war is being won yesterday today tomorrow by Franco. I dreamt of Julian. A sniping [?] article on him “The limitations of Bloomsbury” by Janet Adam Smith. She advises life in a mining village as a remedy: what is her practice? This represents a vein of thought that I may work out. Igor [Anrep, Helens son] has bought a motor car—out of my £150? Another vein of thought with which I struggle. The purification of the soul. This is a fact, however: my struggle. Today—dreary wet—I may go to Mathew Smith’s pictures; or may not. John comes. Question of our relations with John.

At Clive’s on Sunday. A good discussion of painting & music. Janice gave tongue. Angelica sang a song. L. talked. So did Nessa.

I’m taking 4 days holiday from Roger, writing P⁠[ointz] H⁠[all], the Barn scene. I’ve learnt something from The Years—just translated into French.

Now the clock strikes one.

Wednesday 18 January

It is undoubtedly a great freshener to have my story [Lappin and Lapinova] taken by Harper’s. I heard this morning. A beautiful story, enchanted to have it. 600 dollars made then. Therefore I am paying off Helen’s money, as I said I would. But the encouragement, I must note, by way of ruffling my theories that one should do without encouragement, is a warmer, a reviver. I cant deny it. I was, perhaps partly on that account, in full flood this morning with P.H. I think I have got at a more direct method of summarising relations; & then the poems (in metre) run off the prose lyric vein, which, as I agree with Roger, I overdo. That was by the way the best criticism I’ve had for a long time: that I poetise my inanimate scenes, stress my personality; dont let the meaning emerge from the matière—Certainly I owed Roger

I went to Her⁠[t]⁠ford House in the yellow rain yesterday & saw Bodington and Bumalfacco—no thats not the name—a little bit of verification for the book to which I must turn tomorrow. Next pages are about R.’s politics. Now dont, because [Janet] Adam Smith gibes, apologise, for she’s not worth a nail on Roger’s toe.

John to tea—depressed. He & L. never alluded to their exchange of abuse. But I thought him rather worn down. I am not yet up in London politics. One of our lulls. We are still away to our friends; but I must see Mela Spira the refugee Austrian Jewess; & today Mrs Woolf—the blanks will fill. I am going walking & adventuring going to see pictures of an afternoon; & often come face to face, after tea, at odd moments, with the idea of death & age. Why not change the idea of death into an exciting experience?—as one did marriage in youth? Age is baffled today by my creative gift—still a bubble. And then the steady passion with which I now read … A rainy day. Rain real wet drops: white splashing from the road. I must somehow ease my way back into Roger—shut PH firmly; my mind full of figures—Isa in the greenhouse—to be put in their boxes.

Sunday 22 January

And my article on Biography has been taken by the Atlantic. Thus in a little over 2 weeks I made something (over) round about £160. Helen paid off. At the same time, the Spiras, a battered couple lodging in Hampstead, came to tea [on 20 January]; implore us to get her a permit to teach German; both in the depths of a kind of shifty unformulated despair: driven from Gratz with a bundle of old pictures only which no one will buy. Also, war is coming close again, just as in September. L. thinks the next screw will be in March. PM to broadcast today on National service. We are warned to buy extra food & see to our supply of water. Desmond came to lunch, outstayed the Spiras, left at 8. Suddenly his face falls into the fixity of a tragic old man’s despair. Then twinkles. Always thinking. “My chief delight is in the uprush of thought to the brain. No I dont care whether Rachel has a child or not. I live in ideas. And what a world to bring children into” (another fixed moment). A discussion about readers & writers criticism. How to uphold the standard; & yet have a sense of direction. That is to encourage St Denis even if the particular play is bad. How the cultivated always kill their own offspring i.e. the Omega, or the Life & Letters: partly snobbery. “I’ve too high a standard.” He is off to America to net £200 by lecturing. I look at my letters from editors. Its odd [text ends]

Tuesday 24 January

On the placards this afternoon: Franco at the gate of Barcelona: Measures for defence. This refers to our new voluntary service. The one is the cause of the other. Yesterday 300 bullets were found thrown into the bushes the other side of Tavistock Square. A reporter came to ask if Mr Woolf could give any information. One of the Irish rebels lodges in Tavistock Place or Court. These are notes I scribble hastily, while L. (exacerbated by the itch again) goes to the Cocktail at the BBC. I to read over Helen’s letters, on a fine spring day, the eve of my 57th birthday. And on the bus coming back from the Flower Show I described my new ‘novel’: & we planned the books we shd. write, if we could live another 30 years.

Sunday 29 January

Yes, Barcelona has fallen: Hitler speaks tomorrow; the next dress rehearsal begins: I have seen Marie Stopes, Princesse de Polignac, Philip & Pippin, & Dr Freud in the last 3 days, also had Tom to dinner & to the Stephens’ party.

Dr Freud gave me a narcissus. Was sitting in a great library with little statues at a large scrupulously tidy shiny table. We like patients on chairs. A screwed up shrunk very old man: with a monkeys light eyes, paralysed spasmodic movements, inarticulate: but alert. On Hitler. Generation before the poison will be worked out. About his books. Fame? I was infamous rather than famous, didnt make £50 by his first book. Difficult talk. An interview. Daughter & Martin helped. Immense potential, I mean an old fire now flickering. When we left he took up the stand What are you going to do? The English—war.

Monday 30 January

Freud said It would have been worse if you had not won the war. I said we often felt guilty—if we had failed, perhaps Hitler would have not been. No, he said, with great emphasis; he would have been infinitely worse. They considered leaving for 3 months; made up their minds in 24 hours. Very alert at L.’s mention of the case when the Judge decreed that the criminal should read 20 of Freud’s books. Adrian says the Pss Bonaparte gave him this great silent solid Hampstead mansion. “But we dont like it as well as our flat in Vienna” said Anna. A certain strain: all refugees are like gulls with their beaks out for possible crumbs. Martin & his novel; she on her book. The strain on us too of being benefactors.

A⁠[drian]’s party varied & no doubt successful. The young danced till 3. Bobo in crimson velvet, Tom in Lytton’s beard with a brown pop eye: Janice in a great nose; Clive ebullient, dancing with Bobo; repairing that old breach. Duncan a blond French prince: Ann almost naked, very distinguished, lovely; aloof; fierce; Richard urbane & inscrutable: always the same, Angelica said; Molly oldish; Rachel in a red shawl, about to bear a Cecil; David chirping about his book [The Young Melbourne], out on Thursday; attacked, liked, disliked; refused by USA & Book Society &c. And the usual bobbing corks on the waves—dullards hoping to get into touch with someone or thing & approaching & driven off & then attaching themselves: Portia Holman, the Enfields. A kind of liberation caused by wearing a mask, tipsiness & abandonment at not being one’s usual self. Tom expanding in the lights & stir, much as I do.

Last night Yeats’ death announced. That great thick long jowled poet, whom I met last at Ottoline’s. Dotty will fall from her high estate; but I try to cultivate sympathy rather than satire. And we are all on tiptoe, waiting Hitler’s speech tonight.

Tuesday 31 January

A very sensible day yesterday. Saw no one. Took the bus to Southwark Bridge. Walked along Thames Street; saw a flight of steps down to the river. I climbed down—a rope at the bottom. Found the strand of the Thames, under the warehouses—strewn with stones, bits of wire, slippery; ships lying off [?] the Bridge (Southwark?—no, the one next to Tower Bridge [London Bridge]). Very slippery; warehouse walls crusted, weedy, worn. The river must cover them at high tide. It was now low. People on the Bridge stared. Difficult walking. A rat haunted, riverine place, great chains, wooden pillars, green slime, bricks corroded, a button hook thrown up by the tide. A bitter cold wind. Thought of the refugees from Barcelona walking 40 miles, one with a baby in a parcel. So to Tower. Made a circuit: discovered St Olave’s Hart Street: Pepys Church; too cold to explore; wandered about Fenchurch alleys, Billingsgate; walked through Leadenhall Market; thought of Thoby buying the wild geese; saw a golden pheasant; so back by omnibus; the street & shops the product of this factory world; tried to buy Wells (Country of the Blind) praised by Tom t’other night; failed; so home; left the kettle on; it blew out its connection; read Michelet; wrote to Desmond about his poetess; L. out at Fabians; played gramophone; listened to Our Masters Voice, Hitler less truculent than expected; read MSS; read The Magnificent Rothschilds; & so to bed.

My head has now protested once more against Roger & facts; so to humour it, I wrote the old Henry Taylor telescope story thats been humming in my mind these 10 years; & have a feeling of life & activity again. Put off Eth Bowen & Sean O’Faolain this afternoon, we go to Mrs Woolf instead: & now, as usual, lunch.

[Thursday 9 February]

Too tired even to fold up Nessa’s Berlin letters [to Roger Fry, 1929]. This tiredness was bred of 8 hours incessant talk after four days incessant sun. That was our 4 days at MH. So people accumulate. Eth Bowen, Sean O’Faolain, Busch concert.

Looking at my old Greek diary I was led to speculate. I extract only this: that I won’t budge from the scheme there (1932) laid down for treating decline of fame. To accept; then ignore; & always venture further. Obviously there are no limits unless one submits. Always shave off the expected, dictated attitude; & find whats under it. But I cant even write this plain. And Molly … But we go to Crufts dog show: fine again.

Friday 17 February

Jangled with talk—talk to David [Cecil] from 4 to 5; then to Katie Lewis; the Hambourgs, talk; home, & Raymond, Anna Freud, the Chilvers talk till 12.30—9 hours solid, frothy, talk, varied by buying Michelet at Nutts, & the Country of the Blind. A hammer & a drill this morning exacerbate still further: they’re pulling down T⁠[avistock]. S⁠[quare]. & building offices. So out in the brisk cold to buy note books. I’m starting my grand tour of literature. That is I’m going to write a book of discovery, reading as one pulls a string out; & must follow my trail through Sevigne Michelet Somerset Maugham &c. Thats the idea; encouraged by that vast marsupial Margery Strachey, who implored me to do criticism: as indeed I’ve long wanted. David grows friendlier: Raymond—oh what a little bank clerk, snub, common, he’s grown; hard as nails, & smug, with a new sawing motion with his hands, & none of the old flutter & sweetness. Severe is your toll, oh age. And I too shrivelled, & was very very old. Rachel waiting her child.

Tuesday 28 February

It is unfortunate, for truths sake, that I never write here except when jangled with talk. I only record the dumps & the dismals, & them very barely. A holiday from Roger. And one day’s happiness with P.H. Then too many parcels; books coming out; & a head numb at the back. As usual, when I’m prone, all the gnats settle. The usual ones: I neednt specify. I have to ‘speak’ to polytechnics; & engagements multiply. Innumerable refugees to add to the tangle. There—I’ve recorded them when I said I wouldnt. Harold [Woolf] upstairs talking, about refugees, to L. I go in, out of courtesy. He is doing a job for me.

Morgan to lunch yesterday. Much argument: communism defined, also his duties on the Libel Commission: also gossip about Peter & Prudence [Lucas]; she mad. Nessa after dinner. My old thorn about Helen rankles. Oh she’ll never repay you. Lives as usual. Saxon 20 minutes on the phone. Will I lunch with Graham Harris. Odd change into a deliberate old man’s voice. Add to this my petty jealousies. All the same I think I can stamp it out, literally, by walking this afternoon. Plenty of things to see; neednt buy clothes; & sleep over a book. So shall be sane tomorrow. If it were not 12.15 I would walk now. Only it pours. So I will read poetry quietly, I think—having Shelley down here with me.

I have just read [Shelley’s] Mont Blanc, but cant make it “compose”: clouds perpetually over lapping. If a new poem, what should I say? I think a great idea somewhere; but the language so nebulous, or rather words overlapping, like ripples, each effacing the other, partly: & a general confusion results.

Yesterday, Franco was recognised. And Julian killed for this. Nessa though I suppose making herself live: succeeding: very busy.

Friday 3 March

Whats the origin of the expression A flea in his ear?—thats what I’ve just written: & must—(12.15) switch from that to describe yesterday, Thursday: a very long day, but on the whole successfully accomplished. Not at all a nice morning, & worried by my speech, so I walked. And bought some frilling; & then off we went to the Polytechnic; & met a little brown faced supple man in corduroys; inspected a wall of illustrations to O⁠[rlando]. & then in came, say 50 art students: blouses, shirts; nimble, young, inquisitive; stood up, & not very nervously spoke, improving, colloquially. Then L. gave his views; as a publisher. And that was a great success—very valuable indeed, said the professor: & asked him to start again, which he did. No it wasnt formidable. It was rather cheerful. And free & easy. Better much than Oxford & Cambridge: which reminds me that Liverpool today offered me a Doctor’s Degree; which I refused. Then they gave us a specimen book of rather too artistic printing; & then we got off. And I cooled myself with Chaucer. Then to dine at the studio, & a long, but on the whole, admirable & agreeable, Thursday evening. Rogers: 2 fat beavers, identical; artists; Spenders; Inez improving, independent sharp; Tangye Lean, the man with the absurd name who writes in the N. Chronicle; & Dermod MacCarthy; & L. in from The Cranium. I was pleased, vanitously, to find that Inez thinks me a poet-novelist, not a fraud; & T.L. also liked something or other. So we talked shop. The novel. They both incubate novels. He tears up. She has her’s in a drawer. And my jadedness thawed. So that I’ve written several pages of P.H. although Miss Compton Burnett is praised.

Must face the end of Roger, perhaps at MH. this week end. A very fine June blue day at top of the skylight. But I meant to say that Nessa’s conduct of these parties seemed to me admirable; & once she laughed, & laughed & laughed; trying to describe the prevalence of ‘stuff”. I laughed too. Then we discussed tin: iron; & D⁠[ermod]. who has his vein of queer humour, told us how Raymond Abbott said that organ pipes are pure tin. Mrs Rogers described the making of felt: & so on. Very easy, & sensible, & sympathetic. A great many parties in the offing. We have the materials for happiness again. A new Pope elected. A lull in the shindy. Poor Spira’s pictures all frauds. & a Labour P. meeting tonight.

Saturday 11 March

Yesterday, that is Friday 10th, I set the last word to the first sketch of Roger. And now I have to begin—well not even to begin, but to revise & revise. A terrible grind to come: & innumerable doubts, of myself as biographer: of the possibility of doing it at all: all the same I’ve carried through to the end; & may allow myself one moments mild gratification. There are the facts more or less extracted. And I’ve no time to go into all the innumerable horrors. There may be a flick of life in it—or is it all dust & ashes?

A day in bed at MH: such a rush with the meeting, & dining at C⁠[harleston]. & then back to the burglary. I heard the burglar laugh as he slammed the door taking our £6 in a cashbox. We thought it was John. Then the Great Psycho Analysts dinner on a wild wet night: Adrian late: dinner at 9 till 12.30. Speeches of a vacancy & verbosity incredible. Lord de la Warr rambling jocosely. And gossip with Duncan & Adrian; the rest of our table sit in unmitigable gloom. Poor Mrs so & so—Meynell & Money Kyrle dead silent: food profuse, snatched, uncharacteristic. Mary Hutch: Rebecca West: & set upon & committed to ask to dinner Mrs Klein.

Then a cocktail at John’s; Rosamond & her new fancy, little self conscious G. Rees, underbred, intelligent; & our German von—something. I shall call you Renny said L. And I dont know why I agreed to lunch with Diana Cooper to meet Ethel Smyth on the spur of the moment—why am I so impulsive? Why am I so old, so ugly, so—& cant write. And the Spender grandmother on Sunday; but alone today.

Thursday 16 March

Jack [Hills] I see in this mornings paper left £3,000 only. I see too that Hitler has marched into Prague. This, says the PM. “is not in the spirit of the Munich meeting”. My comment anyhow is superfluous. We sit & watch. Yesterday in Bond Street where I finally did lay out £10 on clothes, I saw a crowd round a car, & on the back seat was a Cheetah with a chain round his loins. I also found a presentation copy of Tom’s Family Reunion; & sucked no pleasure from the first pages. Yet I enjoyed Chaucer, Michelet & Me. de Sevigné. I reserve judgment. The night before Mrs Klein dined—the backwash of my P⁠[sycho]. A⁠[nalysts’]. party—unrecorded? A woman of character & force & some submerged—how shall I say—not craft, but subtlety: something working underground. A pull, a twist, like an undertow: menacing. A bluff grey haired lady, with large bright imaginative eyes.

It was on the tip of my pen—only I had to write—to re-write Roger—to record, in brief form, Lunch with Lady Diana Cooper costs 3/6. Yes, for some impulse of my own, I said I would lunch to meet old Ethel. Old Ethel very deaf. So as to impress the aristocracy who aren’t ever impressed, I took a 1/- cab from Hyde Pk Corner: & Chapel Street was only one step down the road. Curious, the feebleness of the aristocracy in the eye line. Diana has inherited a vast house—sat in a drawing room like the floor of a shop: was furnishing—Chin⁠[t]⁠zes piled up. A glass room, looking on to the D. of Westminster’s great wall—he has a private tennis court. Dishevelled creepers hang down. This great house is so timidly faced. The tinted mask of the late Duchess in a glass case. Rex Whistler discreet amusing fakes of 18th Century decoration—all diluted, reminiscent. And then Duff’s great library, that might have done for Lord Acton or Lord Macaulay—here Rex again at work, fabricating 18th Century. Praise of Sargent. Praise of the late Duchesses tomb at the Tate. The usual space & simplicity. Many little dishes. Many concoctions. But empty & full of unsaturated possessions. “I dont like possessions” said D. She has a bedroom like a shop again. On the table a 6d Penguin. Rooms for Madame de Maintenon, Montespan &c. Only Diana, all niceness, goodness, with that free sweep that I like in the aristocracy: putting on Ethel’s 3 cornered hat (wh. became her) as if they were free, but had nowhere to go. Talk trumpeted, emphatic, difficult, about Maurice Baring. Little rough haired boy came in. So I drove Ethel to Waterloo & paid 2/6 & was then too cold in my finery to walk, so home. Refused lunch with Harry [Stephen] at the Athenaeum.

I’m thinking of a critical book. Suppose I used the diary form? Would this make one free to go from book to book—or wd it be too personal? I might take some fribble, like Peter Opie: so to Sevigne &c. But I must let it simmer.

A blessed space of quiet today—tea with Nessa; then alone tonight; MH. this weekend, & my new green linen waterproof. L.’s back improving. Rau talks of an allergic doctor, who discovers sensibilities; but Rau does not ring up.

Wednesday 22 March

Tom sent me his play, Family Reunion. No, it dont do. I read it over the week end. It starts theories. But no … You see the experiment with stylised chatter isnt successful. He’s a lyric not a dramatic. But here theres no free lyricism, is caught back by the character: has no power to embody: as stiff as pokers. And the chief poker is Tom: but cant speak out. A cold upright poker. And the Fates behind the drawing room curtain. A clever beginning, & some ideas; but they spin out: & nothing grips: all mist—a failure: a proof hes not a dramatist. A monologist. This is stated very politely by the papers this morning. The News not so politely. We go on Thursday. I’m of course for reasons I can’t go into selfishly relieved: why? Had it been a success would it have somehow sealed—my ideas? does this failure confirm a new idea of mine—that I’m evolving in PH about the drama? Or is it jealousy? & then theres L.’s play. A mixture of motives …

Very fine at the moment; & alone; & confronted with a dress maker; & L. all rash. Rau says it will go in time. Reading Eddie Marsh. Finished the 18th cent scene in PH. Odd how freely & happily I dash that off. Roger put aside. No, I cant write here. Politics lulled: but Kingsley vocal on the phone. An account of Ly Astor’s lunch party.

Wednesday 29 March

There can be no doubt that Tom knew that his play was a failure. He was very yellow & heavy lidded. We talked about his cold, & I noted that he said his lectures, on Church & State, were “very bad”, a proof, I think, that all his work now seems so. But the evening was oddly successful. Kingsley Martin invited himself, & gave Ann & Sally their modicum of politics; otherwise literature wd have been too ascendant. Then Mr Ellis St Joseph, also self-invited, came. And paid out elaborate, yet oddly interesting, stories: about smoking hashish—how he was given for 10/- amber cigarettes wh. he supposed to be drugged; & puffed in & out, with Oliver Bell on the next bed. And they were only scented. An intricate, pompous, yet interesting young man. And they stayed till 12.30. Hence I’m tired in the head, & cant tackle anything. Think of walking, to prepare for Hugh. A silly idea, having him alone; but I must brisk up something, not sit dreaming here, or my head will ache. KM. privately told L. that German aeroplanes have been flying over London.

Madrid surrendered. KM. says war is inevitable.

Thursday 30 March

No, it was a good idea having Hugh alone. He gave me a full account of his sexual life, of which I retain these facts. He only loves men who dont love men. Tried to drown himself once over Melchior. Jumped into a river; stuck in mud; seized a carving knife; saw himself in the glass; all became absurd, reconciliation. Told me too of the Baths at the Elephant & Castle. How the men go there: saw Ld C⁠[name omitted] naked: saw Ld B⁠[name omitted] in the act with a boy; later at the Beefsteak all medals. Has had a married life with Harold for 15 years without intercourse. All this piles up a rich life of wh. I have no knowledge: & he cant use it in his novels. They are therefore about lives he hasnt lived wh. explains their badness. Hasnt the courage to write about his real life. Would shock people he likes. Told me how he had had a father & son simultaneously. Copulation removes barriers. Class barriers fade. Lives at Hampstead with Harold’s family & friends completely naturally. All this is a great deal better than his literary talk. It led me to compare experience with thought. Apostles with phenomenons. He’s been at Rome writing daily articles for Hearst papers. We couldn’t do this. Started making 2 or 3000 a year in 1912. Has supported Melchior & others. Saw, at any rate, another Hugh. Odd that he’s never felt any feeling for women; but his sister is a suppressed Lesbian; & his brother entirely without sex—a schoolmaster. This lasted from 4.30 to 7.30; without a break. And I liked him & enjoyed it, tho’ crushed in the head.

I went to Highgate in the morning; saw the Whittington Stone & met 2 old women on Parliament Hill: each wore a cap of Turkish embroidery on her white straggly hair: very poor unkempt; big boots; black wrinkled stockings & a dog. One said Now if you dont come Peter I shall run away … they were hobbling. Curious vision of their extreme poverty, decrepitude, & the place played in their lives by Peter. How they fed him; & were identical—.. Still brain compressed: Memoir tonight. Molly’s operation over, apparently successful. Desmond with a bad cold; Clive to read. So thats all, & I’m fiddling again with Roger.

Friday 31 March

Yes I made a phrase last night about bearing the panoply of life, & being glad to lay it down. I wonder if its true. After a worried domestic day; then L. had a temperature & went to bed; the Memoir Club was imminent. I felt I was bearing up the panoply of life & wd be glad to let it sink. I said to myself, Remember, this is the description of age coming. I’m on the qui vive to describe age: to note it. I often think of things in this way, but forget them. And as L. is normal & up & as its a fine morning, I’m not conscious of holding up my panoply, only distracted rather & cant settle in but must do R.’s Cambridge letters.

Clive read, truculently, with some motive I guess at the back of him, about R., amusing stories—“The old creature was lying on a camp bed reading with a candle beside him” this is the only touch I need to remember, at Charleston, at 1.30 in the morning. Said R. grew less magnanimous with age: reference to the NS. review, I expect. Nessa silent, disagreeing. Desmond did not come. Rang up. A rather scattered meeting.

Tuesday 11 April

How much identity, to use my own private slang, is needed to surmount a little hillock: for instance, Lydia on Lappin & Lapinova yesterday at Tilton; & Tilton’s comfort, & quiet; all seem to make it harder for me to get on with revising Roger. Revising Roger at the rate of 2 weeks to a chapter will take me 3 months. Then there’s the war. The finest Easter possible has this purple background. We wait like obedient children to hear what we shall be told when Parliament meets on Thursday. At Tilton we talked first medicine; Maynard’s drastic cure by Plesch; then politics; five minutes left for Tom’s play. Every day, save 2, something’s turned up. Private peace is not accessible. Miss Robins tomorrow. Then Charleston. Then L.P. here. Maynard, even Maynard, cant find much that’s hopeful now that Italy has nipped off Albania save that theres a unity of hatred. The men women children dogs &c. are solid for war if war comes. But privately—how one rockets between private & public—his eyes are bluer, his skin pinker, & he can walk without pain. Lydia has devoted herself to the treatment. They think Nessa suppresses Clive—wont have things out. Never will have anything out. But the⁠[n] L⁠[ydia]. is always on husbands side—a serf like spirit, natural in the circumstances. My allegiance is to N. & D. as usual: but I like all my friends—though not the taste of Tilton.

Roasting hot: birds a chirp: butterflies.

I am reading Dickens; by way of a refresher. How he lives; not writes: both a virtue & a fault. Like seeing something emerge; without containing mind. Yet the accuracy & even sometimes the penetration—into Miss Squeers & Miss Price & the farmer [in Nicholas Nickleby] for example—remarkable. I cant dip my critical mind, even if I try to. Then I’m reading Sevigné, professionally for that quick amalgamation of books that I intend. In future, I’m to write quick, intense, short books, & never be tied down. This is the way to keep off the settling down & refrigeration of old age. And to flout all preconceived theories—For more & more I doubt if enough is known to sketch even probable lines, all too emphatic & conventional.

Maurice, the last of the Ll. Davies brothers is dead; & Margaret lives—lives too carefully of life, I used to feel. Why drag on, always measuring & testing one’s little bit of strength & setting it easy tasks so as to accumulate years?

Also I’m reading Rochefoucauld. Thats the real point of my little Brown book—that it makes me read—with a pen—following the scent: & read the good books; not the slither of MSS & the stridency of the young chawking—the word expresses callow bills agape & chattering—for sympathy. Chaucer I take at need. So if I had any time—but perhaps next week will be more solitudinous—I should, if it weren’t for the war—glide my way up & up in to that exciting layer so rarely lived in: where my mind works so quick it seems asleep; like the aeroplane propellers. But I must retype the last Clifton passage; & so be quit for tomorrow & clear the decks for Cambridge. Rather good, I expect it is: condensed & moulded.

Thursday 13 April

Two days of influenza after that, mild but sucking one’s head as usual, so I’m out here this morning only to drone my way through a few Roger letters.

I finished my first 40 pages—childhood &c—well under the week; but then they were largely autobiography. Now politics impend. Cham⁠[berlai]⁠n’s statement in the House today. War I suppose not tomorrow, but nearer. Charleston to tea today. L. went to Brighton yesterday, & had a long talk with Miss Robins in bed, which was interesting, so I’m sorry I missed it, yet glad of solitude, such as it is here. If I could only embed myself for 10 days … I read about 100 pages of Dickens yesterday, & see something vague about the drama & fiction: how the emphasis, the caricature of these innumerable scenes, forever forming character, descend from the stage. Literature—that is the shading, suggesting, as of Henry James, hardly used. All bold & coloured. Rather monotonous, yet so abundant, so creative: yes: but not highly creative: not suggestive. Everything laid on the table. Nothing to engender in solitude. Thats why its so rapid & attractive: nothing to make one put the book down & think. But these are influenza musings; & I’m so muddled I shall take Sir Edward [Fry’s letters] into the house & extract him over the fire. Weather now blackening a little, after 4 days full summer heat—over 70. A Comma butterfly, sunning on the wall. L.’s rash improving. We live on macaroni.

Note: Lydia’s hostility to all married women.

Saturday 15 April

Its odd what extreme depression a little influenza & a cold in head produces. Happily I’m interested in depression; & make myself play a game of assembling the fractured pieces—I mean I light a fire, & somehow dandle myself over it. Cooking is helpful. Oh but I was very down & dismal yesterday. And then noises & houses abuilding oppress: & there’s always our dear old war—now postponed for a month. Sneezing & blowing is better than incubating germs.

I’ve done rather well at Roger considering: I dont think I shall take 2 weeks over each chapter. And its rather amusing—dealing drastically with this years drudgery. I think I see how it shapes: & my compiling method was a good one. Perhaps its too like a novel. I dont bother. No letters; no news; & my head too stupid for reading. L. galloping through his book [Barbarians at the Gate]. I should like a holiday—a few days in France—or a run through the Cotswolds.

But considering how many things I have that I like—whats odd—(I’m always beginning like this) is the severance that war seems to bring: everything becomes meaningless: cant plan: then there comes too the community feeling: all England thinking the same thing—this horror of war—at the same moment. Never felt it so strong before. Then the lull & one lapses again into private separation—

But I must order macaroni from London.

Wednesday 26 April

[52 Tavistock Square]

I’ve done a ¼—100 pages of Roger—well I shall have by tomorrow. As there are 400 pages, & one hundred takes 3 weeks (oh but I was interrupted)—it will take 9 weeks to finish. Yes, I ought to have finished it by the end of July—only we may go away. Say August. And have it all typed in September…. Well—then it will be out this time next year. And I shall be free in August—What a grind it is; & I suppose of little interest except to six or seven people. And I shall be abused.

Friday 28 April

Very much screwed in the brain by trying to get Roger’s marriage chapter into shape; & also warmed by L. saying last night that he was fonder of me than I of him. A discussion as to which would mind the other’s death most. He said he depended more upon our common life than I did. He gave the garden as an instance. He said I lived more in a world of my own. I go for long walks alone. So we argued. I was very happy to think I was so much needed. Its strange how seldom one feels this: yet ‘life in common’ is an immense reality. For instance, I cant go to The Wreckers tonight with Ethel Smyth because: 1. I have a little temperature: 2: (& more serious) I’d rather stay at home with L. Its no use fighting against this. Its one of the facts.

Oh such a dismal tea with Mrs W. yesterday. She is completely lifeless—like an old weed on a rock. And always recurring to the complaints. That was how, by the way, we came to discuss our deaths. L. said he hoped he would predecease me. Her lonely old age is so intolerable. But its lonely, he said, because she has adopted an unreal attitude. Lived in a sentim⁠[ent]⁠al make believe. Sees herself as the adored matriarch, & forces the children to adopt her attitude. Hence the unreality of all relations. This obsession of hers has also shut her off from all other interests: doesn’t care for any impersonal thing—art, music, books. Wont have a companion or reader; must depend on her sons. Constant innuendoes therefore about the goodness of Herbert & Harold; inference that L. neglects her; hints that I have taken him away from his family; absorbed him in mine. So in that crowded pink hot room we sat for 2 hours trying to beat up subjects for conversation. And there were awful silences, & our heads filled with wool; & all was dusty, dreary, old, & hopeless. Yet she followed us out on to the stair & made L. swear that she looks better—“Sure Len? Sure I look better?” as if she still clings hard to life & cant be removed. So to walk in the hail in Ken. Gardens; & see the cherry trees livid & lurid in the yellow storm haze. Very cold winter spring.

Saturday 29 April

But what are the interesting things? I’m thinking of what I should like to read here in 10 years time. And I’m all at sea. Perhaps literal facts. The annal, not the novel. Yesterday I went out in a fur coat, for it was bitter cold, to walk in London. I stopped by the Savoy Church: there were photographers. Soon the Bride arrived. The car glided on⁠[;] there were too many cars behind. Mother & small page arrived: 2 girls in absurd little boat hats. They helped the Bride with her veil. “Can you get it over my bouquet?” she asked—very gay; rather red; very slim. Husband & best man waiting in grey trousers & cutaway coats. Old sitters in the sun watching. Camera men. A little procession—rather skimpy & cold & not very rich I thought. The old man—my age—had shabby boots. Shaven, brushed, red, thin. They are Mr Sholto Douglas Barnes, & Miss Marjorie Berkeley, daughter of a deceased ICS Colonel—so I learn today. Then I walked along the Embankment, up into the fur quarter behind Blackfriars. Men in white coats aparelled in silver fur skins. A smell of fur. Found some old City Company houses. One the Inn Keepers Company. Also a green plant bursting out of a factory. Also one of the usual 18th Century mansions tucked away. So into Cannon St. Bought a paper with Hitler’s speech. Read it on top of Bus. Inconclusive—cut up in Stop Press. Everyone reading it—even newspaper sellers, a great proof of interest. So to Kingsway. Bought some folders. Failed to buy a guide to Cotswolds. L. had 4 gents to discuss Sir John Maynard’s memo. Read Chaucer. Enjoyed it. Was warm & happy not to go to Sadlers Wells. Nessa rang up. Bed.

Monday 1 May

A bad morning, because I’m dried up about Roger. I’m determined tho’ to plod through & make a good job, not a work of art. Thats the only way. To force myself on—& yes to relax with a [indecipherable] fiction: & then a few days in the Cotswolds. But there’s no blinking the fact that it is drudgery & must be; & I must go through with it. My hand, as I see, wont write.

Sunday 14 May

That last sentence might be repeated. Its a fortnight I see since I had my few minutes margin between Roger & lunch. And thus I need not repeat the fact that my head is a tight wound ball of string. To unwind it, I lie on my Heal chair bed & doze of an evening. But the noise worries me. The 2 houses next door are down; we are shored up. There are patches of wall paper where there used to be hotel bedrooms. Thus the Southampton Row traffic gets at me; & I long for 37 Mecklenburgh Sq: but doubt if we shall get it. Pritchard is negotiating with the Bedfords. A talk about the future with John. He is harassed by the lean year. Cant live in London on £500 minus his mothers interest &c. 37 is a large seeming & oh so quiet house, where I could sleep anywhere. But it dont do to dwell on it. & there would be the horror of the move in August.

Day Lewis came one day; thrust in on the wake of Elizabeth. A stocky sturdy man. truculent, a little like Muggins 40 yrs ago, as I think George called Malcolm Macnaghten. “Priestley lolling on the beach” was should it be lōl ling or lolling? discussed. I made him laugh by repeating that word. I wish I could repeat more words. Boswell did it. Could I turn B. at my age? “I’m doing films for the gas people … I live a purely country life. A rather too arty home. Devonshire.” I infer some rupture with the Bugger Boys.

Boswell at Sissinghurst. Gwen walking through the Bluebell woods, speaking of her youth—a little to justify herself. Had been advertiser to a scent shop, had done welfare work. Her daughter Jiccy meets a prostitute outside the Berkeley whom she has deliv⁠[er]⁠ed. “Must just speak to Bessy” she says to the youth who’s treating her—“Its her beat.” G. a little shocked. And I liked the soft cream & yellow flowers on the sunny grass & the bend stooping like a picture. And the thread of bright blue bells: & Vita in her breeches.

We are going to Brittany by the way after Whitsun. A whole 2 weeks rambling. Now that’ll fill my dry cistern of a head. But this is nothing like so bad as The Years. A nun writes to invite me to stage a meeting of Outsiders in Hyde Park. I stop to answer her. Gertler tonight.

Thursday 25 May

A queer little note to run off in a hurry: L. is bargaining for 37 M. Sq upstairs: I’m packing. We’re off: & very likely I shant write much more in this now so tidy studio. Tidied for Ben to work in. I must pack upstairs. Brittany & Rodmell for 3 weeks.

Party last night. G. Keyneses: Eth Wn & her underworld friend. Ben Nicolson.

Interrupted by parties come to see the house. The first day its in the agents hands. Shall we end our lives looking in that great peaceful garden; in the sun? I hope so.

Friday 23 June

Back to London again after 4 weeks. Two spent driving about Brittany. I kept notes in a little square ruled pocketbook in my bag; a good method perhaps, if carried out in London; but I doubt if its worth sticking them here. Perhaps a few, for like pressed leaves they somehow bring back the whole forgotten hedge. So soon forgotten in bulk. The London uproar at once rushes in. Okampo today; John; then I must go to Penman. We have 37 M⁠[ecklenburgh] S⁠[quare]: & this is still unlet. Ben Nicolson has spread my studio with MSS all laid on the floor. This scarcely helps my attack on R⁠[oger Fry], begun this morning. The appallingly difficult PIP [Post-Impressionist] chapter. How to get the right proportions &c. I have now 5 weeks before August. And 200 pages to do. Difficulties with Gollancz about L.’s book not yet stated. And people abound. But I must do my job like a navvy & let society rip & clothes &c. Here’s lunch.

Saturday 24 June

Yes, London broke in fairly vigorously yesterday. Ocampo bringing Giselle Freund & all her apparatus, which was set up in the drawing room, & all the lit. gents & ladies shown on a sheet. On top of them house seers—an old lady who was born at 52, & whose father had built this studio. And the upshot is, a sitting—oh curse this petty vulgar photography-advertising stunt—at 3. No getting out of it, with Okampo on the sofa, & Freund there in the flesh. So my afternoon is gone in the way to me most detestable & upsetting of all. A life sized life coloured animated photograph—however L. is drawn in. Also, on top of this, sheets of evasion & dishonesty from Gollancz; & John; & Nessa about Angelica. She is in a nursing home with an infected kidney. All the old anxieties rampant—for Nessa again. And old Mrs W. this afternoon. And Tom & a friend—& Sarton. I suppose there’s stir in it; & stimulus; but I’m bothered about the PIPs—cant get into the right mood; & its so laboured, & I cant, without a mood, toss it & lighten it: yet must somehow drive thro’ to the end.

Now to prepare for photography. Such are one’s friends—& their deformities.

Monday 26 June

Talk at Nessa’s last night. Much about Gertler’s suicide. He gassed himself 2 nights ago in his studio. We had talked with him about his other attempt the night he dined with us. It was because of some hitch in his work he said then, & he had completely recovered. He had got through into a new stage as a painter. This was true, Nessa & Duncan said; his last show, just over, was a great advance & very remarkable. So why did he turn on the gas, when his model left him? She found him, when [she] came back, still alive, but unconscious. A most resolute serious man: intellectual; fanatical about painting, even if a fanatical egotist. And he seemed established; with his own friends; dining out with Priestleys & Lynds. Poor of course, & forced to teach; & fundamentally perhaps too rigid, too self centred, too honest & narrow, like Kot in his uncompromising severity, to be content or happy. But with his intellect & interest, why did the personal life become too painful? His wife? We know no more.

Angelica better; & no time to describe our lunch with Flora, & her analysis, clear & unflinching, of the old tyrant, the matriarch manqueé.

Tuesday 27 June

Talk of Gertler at Clive’s. Old Cory rather deflated (in spirit, not body). Frothy talk, succeeding 2½ hours interview with Philip [Woolf] & his milky eyed little boy who wants to be a sailor. But doesnt want it very much. No, they dont want anything, said Phil, who doesnt want to go to Brittany, about which he consulted us.

Eliot & Morley today. So the days are rushed through.

Gollancz prevaricating.

Wednesday 28 June

Vita came to a late lunch; Mrs Woolf fell down & broke 2 ribs; Tom brought Mr Morley to tea … These are the elements upon which yesterday was founded. [illegible] with Vita. Home. Change. Talk. Telephone. L. to the nursing home after dinner. She will not die, so I assume. There is a terrible passive resistance to death in these old women. They have the immortality of the vampire. Poor Flora will be sucked drop by drop for years to come. This is I suppose a cruel remark to make. But honestly, everyone would be relieved if she could make an end of it. Its so exhausting, & as Flora said, she has contrived to falsify all emotions, till the end is the only thing the family who are forced to be so devoted by her fantasy honestly wish for. And now John to lunch. After wh. can I escape to buy some shoes, & ought I to buy shoes with the flat still to let? I’ve said I’ll write an article on Royalty for PP. for £25 by way of a sop to our income & our liabilities.

Thursday 29 June

The grind of doing Roger & PIP makes my head spin, & I let it reel itself off for 10 minutes here. I wonder why; & if I shall ever read this again. Perhaps if I go on with my memoirs, also a relief from R., I shall make use of it.

A dismal day yesterday; shoe hunting in that Hall of humbug, Fortnums. A Sale; but only of the unsaleable. And the atmosphere, British upper classes: all tight & red nailed; myself a figure of fun—whips my skin: I fidget: but recoup myself walking in the rain through the Parks. Come home & try to concentrate on Pascal—I cant; still, its the only way of tuning up, & I get a calm if not understanding. These pin points of theology need a grasp beyond me. Still I see Lytton’s point—my dear old serpent. What a dream life is to be sure—that he should be dead, & I reading him; & trying to make out that we indented ourselves on the world; whereas I sometimes feel its been an illusion—gone so fast, lived so quickly; & nothing to show for it, save these little books. But that makes me dig my feet in, & squeeze the moment. So after dinner I walked to the Clinic with L.: waited outside with Sally tugging; watched the evening sight: oh & the purple grey clouds above Regents Park with the violet & yellow sky signs made me leap with pleasure.

Noise here very great. Even if we lose our rent, no doubt its worth it—37 will be heavenly quiet. The letter war with Gollancz continues—more time frittered, wasted. L. very calm; & how sane, compared with me.

Monday 3 July

L.’s mother died last night. And its been jading & somehow very depressing—watching her die. She gradually ceased to breathe. There were 3 days though of going there—sitting in the alcove in that long corridor. Flora sat with her. Sometimes she talked. L. found her cheerful one night. Virginia must write a book called “The fallen woman.” I remember that; out of a litter of odds & ends, because it was the last time she spoke of me. It was like watching an animal die, L. said. Rau burst into tears. She wanted to live, asked the matron if she had known an old woman recover, asked Rau. Both of course said Yes. Last night, as Flora, Edgar & Harold were dining here off cold chicken, Herbert rang up to say it was critical; & she had just died when they got there. Her breathing, as Rau said it would, stopped. And then they decided that her wish—to be taken to a private home, not left in the mortuary, must be gratified: so the body is taken to Laleham [Harold Woolf’s home] today: then will go to the Jewish Cemetery. A watcher came from the Synagogue. It was a bright, showery day. We walked in Regents Park, after giving Kingsley Martin lunch. I always notice the weather in which people die, as if the soul would notice if its wet or windy. Then, when L. had come back, we went round to Clive’s: found Nessa interviewing Lottie; & talked about doctors & skin diseases with Clive & Duncan.

But I cannot do my Royalty article, & have a regret for that spirited old lady, whom it was such a bore to visit. Still she was somebody: sitting on her high backed chair with the pink cushion, all the flowers round her, a cigar always for Leonard, & plates of cakes which she pressed us to eat. Last time—Saturday week—she was peevish & querulous. It was about not seeing Herbert as usual. Children no longer respected their parents. And she got up & fell back. But these feelings are mixed, scrappy, & I’m in the scraped state when writing dont work.

Thursday 6 July

“Lady” to call her by the name she liked to explain—she always talked about the past best—was buried yesterday; & there was a service in the Synagogue. Women admitted, so I went. But its a compromise; & had nothing whatever to do with “Lady”. What was she like then? Let me see—She was small, narrow shouldered—things slipped off—she wore a low blouse with a pearl necklace—& rather heavy. Her head nodded. She had stiff curled grey black hair. She would say as we came in “And Virginia?” My joke was, Conceal your disappointment at sight of me. Then she would laugh, kiss me, & give me a little pat. We were on friendly laughing terms, always at the same stock joke, which carried us through those 2 hour teas. “And tell me what you have been doing?” I would have some story ready. She liked hearing about Ann & Judith: not much interested in any other relations of mine. For many years we never reached even this intimacy. I think she suspected me of not being family. She came over to see us of course. And how often we drove to Worthing! It was trumped up mostly. Yet there was something spontaneous about her. A great joy in family; in society; she could make friends out of anyone: was very popular with elderly gentlemen. One at Worthing stood her dinners, took her to the theatre. She liked telling the story of plays. She would tell the whole plot of Gone with the Wind for example; talking as if they were real: a trait odd to me in so shrewd a woman; for she had as she was often boasting, brought up 9 children. Never went to bed, she said, without a basket of socks by her side. All was personal. And the ruts of course became deeper; one knew what would come next. Sometimes tho’ she made me feel the daughter emotion—when I kissed her when Clara died. She attaches to nothing in my own life: except the comment she made; that she was the ‘elder generation’: & I (now the elder, to most people) was the younger. I never saw her save in her own surroundings. These were fussy, yes, but full of stir: always presents of flowers: children’s letters: What news of Bella & Tom? Where is Phil going for his holiday? She was the centre of that net work & until Edgar & Flora disabused me, I thought they depended on it. Perhaps, when the freedom is over, they will miss it. “Bel”—the day of whose retirement in March—poor old lady—was the “day I count the days to it…” so she said last Saturday week—Bel cabled a silly effusion wh. makes their relation look artificial. The truth was, age had taken everything away that was real, I think: only age left the pathetic animal, which was very real; the body that wanted to live. I know nothing of any interest about her, now that I come to write, only little anecdotes, about Holland: nothing that makes her a real person—save Is Virginia coming? which touches me.

Tuesday 11 July

Interrupted by a man to look over the Studio. Would take the place at once, if he could have it for 6 years. Thats the end of all these visits. Back from MH. & cross—to use the nurses word. Cross at my waste of time over PIPs, doubtful about the book—angry at the immense drudgery. Still I must get on. Q. for the weekend—oh that we could ever be wholly alone: & yet I dont want to be wholly alone. The usual fight between solitude & society, scarcely worth noting, let alone dissecting. Very fine July weather. And is Charles [Mauron] blind? And am I to buy a new dress? And what about—I think the true proportions are better in the country. Over all hangs war of course. A kind of perceptible but anonymous friction. Dantzig. The Poles vibrating in my room. Everything uncertain. We have got into the habit however. Work, work, I tell myself.

Wednesday 12 July

For the first time for weeks, after being so damnably down in the mouth yesterday, I’ve worked with some pleasure at R. The new Omega chapter. I might still pull it through. Yet how dumpish we were—starting off to the Movies, after dinner—L. asking me what I wanted to see, I not wanting to see anything—the crowds of deformed & stunted & vicious & sweating & ugly hooligans & harridans in the Tott. Ct. Road—the sticky heat—all this brooded, till I was saying, step out, on, on, in my usual desperate way. Then instead we went to Nessa’s. A⁠[ngelica]. in bed. Clive there: Duncan bubbling. I read Philip’s letter about L.’s Latin epitaph & we had a good laugh & gossip. P. has denounced Duncan’s portrait. I think a fine one. Wants a jolly girl; instead of this black frump. Mrs Gertler had been round to Pip at midnight with her guitar. P. looked out of the window & refused it. This is in the old B⁠[loomsbur]⁠y manner. P. in his nightcap, vagrant & vagulous. Duncan pobbling his words. Couldn’t remember Lady David Cecil, who has been arrested—no threatened. Burbling on about a book by a clergyman bought in Berwick Church. V. very silent, worried I suppose: yet ‘cheerful’ too. She will laugh & take part, even if she sinks again. Queer horror of seeing her exert herself. Perhaps I exaggerate. Julian in the background. Oh dear—why waste all that? But a jovial sunny evening that rolled off my glooms effectively; perhaps L.’s. Its not a nice season in London. To 37 this afternoon.

Now my mind is running on R. a good sign, at p. 230, so that’s more than half.

Thursday 13 July

A bad morning. All fiddling again. Because I woke worried—about what? L.’s gloom: not lifting this; I dont know what; & lit up & read MacColl & started the machine running. And so am numb headed. What a head to work with—never again a long book. And no walk. 2 hours at M⁠[ecklenburgh]⁠S⁠[quare]. planning, electric light kitchen &c. The practical difficulty appals—all our books carpets furniture & L. gloomy. This is all surface gloom though. A grim thought struck me: wh. of these rooms shall I die in? Which is going to be the scene of some—oh no, I wont write out the tragedy that has to be acted there. A free man thinks of nothing &c. So I read Pascal & Pater & wrote letters & cooked dinner & did my embroidery. But couldnt sleep sound.

Tuesday 25 July

On this page I should sum up reflections on leaving 52 Tavistock Square. But—

Interruption. This must wait till M.H.

Friday 28 July

The use of this book is to write things out, hence: the Greenhouse. I’m so unhappy. A portmanteau word. Analysed: headache; guilt; remorse … The house, L.’s house, … oh dear, his hobby—his pear tree peach tree—to be pulled down because of me. How can I get sensible? I mind so much. Oh dear—the conflict—the ugliness: v: L.’s wish. And is it worth this misery?—oughtn’t I to have said go ahead, when he came to me in the Bath this morning? The men had come—Shd. they put it up? I said you must decide. So he sent them away & its to be pulled down. How to live it over? Forget he says: but I shant … & cant read or write—.

I have composed myself, momentarily, by reading through this years diary. Thats a use for it then. It composes. Why? I think shows one a stretch, when one’s grubbing in an inch. Head relieved anyhow by reading. Odd that I can read here without repulsion. Why? My own mind I suppose claws me when others slip.

I forget that we came down; & its been fine, rather; lovely on the marsh. Hay cutting. Figures spaced on the marsh. Old Bob thanks me for my letter. Much hurt by Stephen’s review. A letter from Susie Tweedsmuir—deadly dull at Quebec. Reading Gide’s diaries, recommended by poor death mask Eddie [Sackville-West]. An interesting knotted book. Its queer that diaries now pullulate. No one can settle to a work of art. Comment only. That explains but scarcely excuses Peter Lucas; & his exhibition of Prudence. Shd. one judge people by what they write? Shd. people show their naked skins? Eddie shows his death mask—Dear, I forgot my shudder at Helen’s son [omission]; nor can dissect my mix up of the debt, the dislike of Igor’s great fleshy mouth. (I’m whistling to keep up my spirits this very strained grey day—the Greenhouse morning.) I must now carry off lunch. What annoys me is L.’s adroitness in fathering the guilt on me. His highhandedness. I see the temptation. “Oh you dont want it—so I submit.” This spoilt bowls last night. We shied them at the Jack. Yet so happy in our reconciliation. “Do you ever think me beautiful now?” “The most beautiful of women”—

Sunday 30 July

The great affair of the GH. has been settled amicably: a cold house at the back. So its over; what a waste of emotion. Is it that I lack will? For now Nessa bothers me about mantelpieces. Human voices wake us & we drown. Never been so free & happy; but human voices do wake one. Its fine; & our day’s varied with what we enjoy. Such an expansion after the London pressure. I take my brain out, & fill it with books, as a sponge with water. Miss Robins—Kilvert—Gide—cdn’t read a word in London. Taking a day or two with PH. to rest myself from Roger. And have spun off a speech for Flavinda. Whether this book will ever compose, written thus at 3 month intervals, I doubt. But I’m all in favour of the wild, the experimental.

Sunday 31 July

Human voices wake us & we drown—quotations on hearing the telephone yesterday asking us to Charleston. Bunny there; Angelica moody; conversation however well beaten up—Duncan’s 480 canvases; new studio: N.’s bedroom on the garden; Q.’s potting shed. Talk about Rumours of war. Bunny described K⁠[ingsley] M⁠[artin]’s ague, or malaria: fever high on Monday; sub-normal on Wednesday when paper gone to press. L. caps with anecdotes. N. gives an account of McDougall’s methods of selling pictures. How he wheedled Mr Schiff. Next Memoir meeting discussed. So home. Very cold & cloudy—yet the downs aglow with corn much to my liking. Today theyve chipped off the pink brick & removed the greenhouse shed. Really a load off my eye—queer what a relief—to see the shape of the wall & the pink Jackmanna again. How my eye feels rested. Now for the mantelpiece question. Then lunch. My poor old head very feeble—tho’ why? Trying it on PH. Age is it? or Roger? Walk this afternoon, & so lull oneself asleep.

[Wednesday 2 August]

I am trying to kid myself into believing that a penholder is a cigarette. So far I’m taken in. This by way of a solution of the old age problem, & improving my bowls.

London tomorrow. Katherine Furse to tackle … Certainly no cigarettes clears the brain—certainly the tongue. Must copy, out Roger on J.A.S. Oh these old bits of bones … Begin R. again on Friday I suppose.

Monday y August [Bank Holiday]

I am now going to make the rash & bold experiment of breaking off, from condensing Vision & Design, to write here for 10 minutes instead of revising, as I ought, my mornings grind.

Oh yes. I thought of several things to write about. Not exactly diary. Reflections. Thats the fashionable dodge. Peter Lucas & Gide both at it. Neither can settle to creative art (I think, sans Roger, I could). Its the comment—the daily interjection—that comes handy in times like these. I too feel it. But what was I thinking?

I have been thinking about Censors. How visionary figures admonish us. Thats clear in an MS I’m reading. If I say this So & So will think me sentimental. If that … will think me Bourgeois. All books now seem to me surrounded by a circle of invisible censors. Hence their selfconsciousness, their restlessness. It wd. be worth while trying to discover what they are at the moment. Did Wordsworth have them? I doubt it. I read Ruth before breakfast. Its stillness, its unconsciousness, its lack of distraction, its concentration & the resulting “beauty” struck me. As if the mind must be allowed to settle undisturbed over the object in order to secrete the pearl.

Thats an idea for an article.

The figurative expression is that all the surroundings of the mind have come much closer. A child crying in the field brings poverty: my comfort: to mind. Ought I to go to the village sports? Ought thus breaks in to my contemplation.

Oh & I thought, as I was dressing, how interesting it would be to describe the approach of age, & the gradual coming of death. As people describe love. To note every symptom of failure: but why failure? To treat age as an experience that is different from the others; & to detect every one of the gradual stages towards death which is a tremendous experience, & not as unconscious at least in its approaches, as birth is.

I must now return to my grind. I think rather refreshed.

Clive at Cn yesterday, with an enormous white jersey which he patted & prodded from time to time. A little testy about his room.

I needn’t say I’ve been palmed off with the worst in [the] house. Desiring sympathy, Duncan said, & admiration. All his books were put in order by the others. Rather an elderly tea party. Q. away.

Wednesday 9 August

My grind has left me dazed & depressed. How on earth to bring off this chapter? God knows.

Percy gave notice yesterday. Something about leaving lilies in the shed did the trick. You dont like what I do—&c … Whether final or not, God knows, & we dont much care. These things always blow up once every other year. To Miss Robins today. A yeasty frowsty August in weather. I’m beaten nightly at bowls. Must air my head before lunch.

[Friday 25 August]

Perhaps it is more interesting to describe ‘The Crisis’ than R.’s love affairs. Yes we are in the very thick of it. Are we at war? At one I’m going to listen in. Its very different, emotionally, from last September. In London yesterday there was indifference almost. No crowd in the train—we went by train. No stir in the streets. One of the removers called up. Its fate, as the foreman said. What can you do against fate? Complete chaos at 37. Ann met in graveyard [St. George’s Fields]. No war, of course not, she said. John said Well I dont know what to think. But as a dress rehearsal its complete. Museums shut. Search light on Rodmell Hill. Ch⁠[amberlai]⁠n says danger imminent. The Russian pact a disagreeable & unforeseen surprise. Rather like a herd of sheep we are. No enthusiasm. Patient bewilderment. I suspect some desire “to get on with it”. Order double supplies & some coal. [Duncan Grant’s] Aunt Violet in refuge at Charleston. Unreal. Whiffs of despair. Difficult to work. Offer of £100 from Chambrun for a story. Haze over the marsh. Aeroplanes. One touch on the switch & we shall be at war. Dantzig not yet taken. Clerks cheerful. I add one little straw to another, waiting to go in, palsied with writing. There’s no cause now to fight for, said Ann. Communists baffled. Railway strike off. Ld. Halifax broadcasts in his country gentlemans voice. Louie says will clothes be dear? Underneath of course wells of pessimism. Young men torn to bits: mothers like Nessa 2 years ago. But again, some swerve to the right may come at any moment. The common feeling covers the private, then recedes. Discomfort & distraction. And all mixed with the mess at 37.

Monday 28 August

I stay out here, after bowls, to say—what? on this possibly last night of peace. Will the 9 o’clock bulletin end it all?—our lives, oh yes, & everything for the next 50 years? Everyone’s writing I suppose about this last day. I walked on the downs; lay under a cornstack & looked at the empty land & the pinkish clouds in a perfect blue summer afternoon sky. Not a sound. Workmen discussing war on the road—one for it, one against. So to bowls. I bowling am happy: I outside the garden what? Numb I think. Vita says she feels terror & horror early—revives then sinks. For us its like being on a small island. Neither of us has any physical fear. Why should we? But theres a vast calm cold gloom. And the strain. Like waiting a doctors verdict. And the young—young men smashed up. But the point is one is too numbed to think. London seemed cheery. Most people are numb & have a surface optimism. Hugh Slater yesterday, has an instinct that there wont be war. Old Clive sitting on the terrace, says “I dont want to live through it.” Explains that his life recedes. Has had the best. We privately are so content. Bliss day after day. So happy cooking dinner, reading, playing bowls. No feeling of patriotism. How to go on, through war?—thats the question. Of course I have my old spurs & my old flanks. No I cant get at it—so whats the use of staying out? One wanders in; dines; then listens. Sense tells me there’ll be no news till tomorrow. Yes, its a lovely still summer evening; not a sound. A swallow came into the sitting room. I talked to the girl who keeps elk hounds on the hill, by the ivy bloom tree. May flies buzz. I’m sleeveless in the heat. No word from Vita who was coming. How difficult, unexpectedly to write.

Wednesday 30 August

Not at war yet. Par⁠[liamen]⁠t met: yesterday. Negotiations. We are firm. A pause. L. & I discussing the Broadcast are up & down. Very black—then less so. L. pessimistic more than I am this morning. He thinks that H⁠[itler]. is making up his mind to spring. Raging voices began again last night in German. Last years mad voice heard again, as if he were lashing himself up. At the same time, a reply of 8 pages has been sent last night to the Cabinet. The French are out of it this time.

I’m dull headed. Spreading my mind out to synthesise the last chapter. Well, its a good thing as a distraction. Also wrote a synopsis of a story for Chabrun [Chambrun]. Will they really order 3,000 words on that flimsy sketch for £200? Seems impossible. Nobody keeps engagements or answers letters. A kind of block & suspension. No furniture unpacked. We go up tomorrow.

Brilliant—yes, the light is very evanescent—shining—weather. Very hot. To Lewes about shoes &c. All the tradespeople one wd say indifferent. Question of buying bicycles. Lots of bicycles. But why? Oh d’you think there’ll be a war?

Now I must listen to the one ’clock.

Red faced boys in khaki guarding Rodmell Hill. The soldiers in the village. Otherwise quiet & usual eno’…

Friday 1 September

War is on us this morning. Hitler has taken Dantzig: has attacked—or is attacking—Poland. Our P⁠[arliamen]⁠t meets at 6 tonight. This after a day in London, submerged doubts & hopes. Last night we heard terms to Poland read. We then had some hope. Now at 1 I go in to listen I suppose to the declaration of war.

A dull hot day. I dont know why I write this, or what I feel, or shall feel. Children may come at 2—have told Mabel to come. All is hovering over us. And a grouse bought for John at Wimbledon for lunch & Inputting bags on fruit trees, & the man putting up our columns; & complete silence everywhere. 5 to 1 ..

Sunday 3 September

This is I suppose certainly the last hour of peace. The time limit is out at 11. PM to broadcast at 11.15. L. & I “stood by” 10 minutes ago. Why repeat what’ll be in all the papers? We argued. L. said Greenwood was right—forcing the PM in the House last night. I argued its “they” as usual who do this. We as usual remain outside. If we win,—then what? L. said its better to win; because the Germans, vanquished, are what they are. Mus⁠[solini’]⁠s last try, a try on. All the formulae are now a mere surface for gangsters. So we chopped words. I suppose the bombs are falling on rooms like this in Warsaw. A fine sunny morning here; apples shining. Mabel came to my regret last night. Atmosphere at once stiff & prickly. Mustn’t mind, says L. No children yet come. Nessa & Angelica over as I took up the book yesterday. 14 in house: 3 children dumped. Maynard has given Q. a job as tractor driver. This is a relief. No one knows how we’re to fight. Rumours beginning. A flurry of people shopping in Lewes yesterday: the flight of cars with beds fairly thick. Shops rather empty. People buying stuff for windows. Little girl says If we have a chink they’ll spy us out. Flint [grocer] cross. Many of them that—as if half unhappy half resentful. No excitement visible. M⁠[abel]. said train very empty. I believe little exact notes are more interesting than reflections—the only reflection is that this is bosh & stuffing compared with the reality of reading say Tawney; writing, & re-writing one sentence of Roger. So this experiment proves the reality of the mind. Two hours sewing [black-out] curtains. An anodyne, pleasant to do something: but so tepid & insipid. One’s too tired, emotionally, to read a page. I tried Tawney last night—cdn’t concentrate. Church bells ringing. Mrs Ebbs carrying a sheaf of gladioli. Where from? Breaky Bottom. They hardly ever come to church, but now & then send lovely flowers for the church. Question: if we had a church? The relief of having some common outside interest or belief. If it were a belief … Q. & A. to eat John’s grouse.

Its the unreality of force that muffles every thing. Its now about 10.33. Not to attitudinise is one reflection. Nice to be entirely genuine & obscure. Then of course I shall have to work to make money. Thats a comfort. Write articles for America. I suppose take on some writing for some society. Keep the Press going. Of course no beds or heat on at 37. So far plenty of petrol. Sugar rationed. So I shall now go in. Nothing in the garden or meadows that strikes me out of the way—& certainly I cant write.

Wednesday 6 September

Our first air raid warning at 8.30 this morning. A warbling that gradually insinuates itself as I lay in bed. So dressed & walked on the terrace with L. Sky clear. All cottages shut. Breakfast. All clear. During the interval a raid on Southwark. No news.

The Hepworths came on Monday. Rather like a sea voyage. Forced conversation. Boredom. All meaning has run out of everything. Scarcely worth reading papers. The BBC gives any news the day before. Emptiness. Inefficiency. I may as well record these things. My plan is to force my brain to work on Roger. But Lord this is the worst of all my life’s experiences. I note that force is the dullest of experiences. It means feeling only bodily feelings: one gets cold & torpid. Endless interruptions. We have done the curtains. We have carried coals &c into the cottage for the 8 Battersea women & children. The expectant mothers are all quarrelling. Some went back yesterday. We took the car to be hooded, met Nessa, were driven to tea at Charleston. Yes, its an empty meaningless world now. Am I a coward? Physically I expect I am. Going to London tomorrow I expect frightens me. At a pinch eno’ adrenalin is secreted to keep one calm. But my brain stops. I took up my watch this morning & then put it down. Lost. That kind of thing annoys me. No doubt one can conquer this. But my mind seems to curl up & become undecided. To cure this one had better read a solid book like Tawney, an exercise of the muscles. The Hepworths are travelling books in Brighton. Shall I walk? Yes. Its the gnats & flies that settle on non-combatants. This war has begun in cold blood. One merely feels that the killing machine has to be set in action. So far, The Athena has been sunk. It seems entirely meaningless—a perfunctory slaughter, like taking a jar in one hand, a hammer in the other. Why must this be smashed? Nobody knows. This feeling is different from any before. And all the blood has been let out of common life. No movies or theatres allowed. No letters, except strays from America. “Reviewing” rejected by Atlantic. No friends write or ring up. Yes, a long sea voyage, with strangers making conversation, & lots of small bothers & arrangements seems the closest I can get. Of course all creative power is cut off.

Perfect summer weather.

[Later.] Its like an invalid who can look up & take a cup of tea—Suddenly one can take to the pen with relish. Result of a walk in the heat, clearing the fug & setting the blood working. This book will serve to accumulate notes, the fruit of such quickenings. And for the 100th time I repeat—any idea is more real than any amount of war misery. And what one’s made for. And the only contribution one can make—This little pitter patter of ideas is my whiff of shot in the cause of freedom—so I tell myself, thus bolstering up a figment—a phantom: recovering that sense of something pressing from outside which consolidates the mist, the non-existent.

I see Priestley consolidating his idea of himself too. Begins his article, Helping to receive refugees &c…. thus bringing before himself P. the active, the helper in the cause of common life: & so doubtless releasing his rush of ideas. But I dont like P.’s figment, necessary as it may be. I conceived the idea, walking in the sun baked marsh where I saw one clouded yellow, of making an article out of these 15 odd diaries. This will be an easy slope of work: not the steep grind of Roger. But shall I ever have a few hours to read in? I must. Tonight the Raid has diminished from a raid on Southwark; on Portsmouth; on Scarborough, to an attempt on the E. Coast without damage. Tomorrow we go up.

Monday 11 September

I have just read 3 or 4 Characters of Theophrastus, stumbling from Greek to English, & may as well make a note of it. Trying to anchor my mind on Greek. Rather successful. As usual, how Greek sticks, darts, eels in & out! No Latin wd have noted that a boor remembers his loans in the middle of the night. The Greek has his eye on the object. But its a long distance one has to roll away to get at Theophrastus & Plato. But worth the effort.

Mrs Nicholls a great frost. A painted metallic shrill nagging woman; with a mind that pecks the same rotten apple again—this side, that side. Her daughter: & her future: & Tigger the Dalmatian: full of her shoddy contacts; her cocktails: shall I buy a housecoat for raids or trousers? At last, at 8 am, she left us; but depressed, for one doesnt like coins to turn out false. Of course she ruined Sunday tea: Charleston over. Much grumbling from Clive at their inmates. Nessa who is making a chicken house is philosophic. But she compares the Grants & Breretons.

To London on Thursday. Pitiless fine weather. Over London a light spotted veil—the balloons. Very empty streets. A curious strained silence. At the Press, Miss P⁠[erkins, clerk]. listening for Sirens. So I listened. Sat in the sunny window. Cases all empty but piled up. Mabel & I laid carpets. Sandwiches with John. Stephen came in. His great joints seemed to crack. Eyes stared. Is writing reams about himself. Can’t settle to poetry. London after sunset a mediaevel city of darkness & brigandage. Mrs [Cyril] Connolly told by a taxi man he had just been robbed & knocked over the head. The darkness they say is the worst of it. The air raid had been very trying—at 2.30. John had drunk a glass of water & sat in the cellar. No one can control their nerves. So I was glad to be on the road home. No raids yet. Poland being conquered, & then—we shall be attended to.

I’ve offered to write for the NS. I dont know if wisely: but it’s best to have a job, & I dont think I can stand aloof with comfort at the moment. So my reasons are half in half. Intolerable tedium.—no papers: no letters; & all this made up talk with Nicholls.

Cooler now.

Saturday 23 September

Meanwhile Poland has been gobbled up. Russia & Germany divide it. An aircraft carrier has been sunk. But there have been no raids. And I—having said impulsively that I would write for the NS by way of using my faculties patriotically—have written 2 & used up every morning to the margin. Also people have been staying here … oh such a fritter & agitation—solid weekends with Mrs Nicholls, Miss Perkins, Miss Woodward—both very good samples: public house life & greengrocers. So distracted I’ve scudded over the surface of the days. And now Stephen is on us alone; & so we shall be lip sore & addle headed. Then theres John on Monday.

Civilisation has shrunk. The Amenities are wilting. Theres no petrol today: so we are back again with our bicycles at Asheham 1915. And once more L. & I calculate our income. Can I give A. her allowance? How much must we both earn? Once more we are journalists. I’ve offered to do an article, required by The Times, on artists & the crisis; offered others. My old age of independence is thus in danger. But in fact its hard to keep aloof & do my books. Theres a pressure about an article—even White & Bewick—that keeps one absorbed. But how sick of 1500 words by Wednesday I shall get!

Then one begins stinting paper, sugar, butter, buying little hoards of matches. The elm tree that fell has been cut up. This will see us through 2 winters. They say the war will last 3 years. We had an SOS from Kingsley. He came for the night. What was it he cdn’t say on the telephone? Nothing. Should he come out in favour of peace? Cha⁠[mberlai]⁠n has the terms in his pocket. All in the know say we are beaten. Troops guard the East end. A bomb—& he means to bomb the docks—will lead to revolution. He was happy—but chuckling, quick & low, like a delirious bird. Always seeing himself, & pleased to see himself a martyr. Nothing of the least importance is said though in his article. A sensationalist—his mind rotted with hot coterie talk—all pitted & soft as a hot dis⁠[h]⁠cloth—steaming, unwholesome, unreal. Yet I rather liked him—a Celt.

I forget who else has been. Nessa painting L. Drove to Newhaven yesterday to buy plaster of Paris for Q. & we saw the 2 hospital ships painted green & white in the harbour. Many games of bowls. No reading. No Theophrastus—only article reading. But this must be stopped, as I’m now up to time with my little flutterers; & thank God old Mabel who is like one of the clammy kitchen flies, goes back on Tuesday. London no worse, she says than anywhere. An opinion I encourage.

Sunday 24 September

Stephen scribbling diary—no, reading Proust in English in the drawing room. Doubts thrown upon Gilbert White out here. Odd how the diffuse, expostulating, exaggerating young disturb my atmosphere. Yet I shall get back. I’ve talked miles since last night, in spite of Stephen’s colic. A loose jointed mind—misty, clouded, suffusive. Nothing has outline. Very sensitive, tremulous, receptive & striding. So we’ve rambled over Inez: can she forgive herself. She has taken his money. Can she still be generous & large minded? over religion, at breakfast; over justice; & walking the terrace, we plunged & skimmed & hopped—from sodomy & women & writing & anonymity &—I forget. At last I said I must write—tho’ my little bowl was clouded & troubled by all this talk—& he must write; & so ordered boiled potatoes for his lunch; & sit in semi-retreat out here, re-typing without much conviction, G⁠[ilbert] W⁠[hite]. for the N.S. My own flurry & responsiveness is an awful bore—I can catch so many rumours & reverberate so instantaneously.

Freud is dead, the stop press says. Only these little facts interrupt the monotonous boom of the war. I get restless now & then & wd. like to be rubbing my back against London. And so must take a turn on the terrace, throw away my cigarette & go in to more rambling & discursive sauntering over all the countries of the mind. Yet, he says, I like the finished the definite: Bach & Gluck: then why sprawl so? But a very sensitive considerate man—not condensed into anything. And tremulous. And fertile. & I suppose poetical. Yet discriminating. John a bit coarse, obtuse. He has bought for £5 in the Ladbroke Road a press & type. Talk of starting a magazine. I read his MSS poems—all repetitions & gradual beatings out, mostly unintelligible. Whén I say we must discuss our works, without caring for praise, am I sincere? Could I do it? Never mind. Forge ahead, in my own little way.

Monday 25 September

The week end was sheer drudgery & has left me out of temper out of mood. Roger seems hopeless. Yet if one cant write, as Duncan said yesterday, one may as well kill oneself. Such despair comes over me—waking early. And we’re fretted & tormented with people—Portia Holman today, John—Vita. Then Q. & perhaps Judith—How can I cool & smooth my head? But I intend to work.

L.’s book [After the Deluge, vol. II] out today.

[Wednesday 27 September]

No I’m not sure of the date. And Vita is lunching here. I’m going to stop R⁠[oger] at 12. Then read something real. I’m not going to let my brain addle. Little sharp notes. For somehow my brain is not very vigorous at the end of a book tho’ I cd. dash off fiction or an article merrily eno’. Why not relieve it then? Wasnt it my conscientious grind at The Years that killed it. So I whizz off to Stevenson—Jekyll & Hyde—not much to my liking. Very fine clear Sept weather windy but lovely light. And I cant form letters.

Sunday 1 October

This last week a mere scramble of people. Q. & Bradfield; then Judith; asked if she might stay. Then Leslie … talk talk—bowls in a blizzard. Proof correcting. Then the divine relief last night of silence alone with L. Rain today. But peace—my private peace—restored. London tomorrow. Sunday clearing up. Oh how torturing life in common is! like trying to drink a cup of tea & always its dashed from one. Judith has her jocose school girl garrulity increased by the rather commonplace Leslie. A pity she shd. marry him—porous, stupid, good humoured, Tunbridge Wells to the backbone.

Friday 6 October

Well, I have succeeded in despite of distractions to belong to other nations in copying out again the whole of Roger. Needless to say, its still to be revised, compacted, vitalised. And can I ever do it? The distractions are so incessant. Today I’m asked to take on Bunny’s job on the N.S. Yes I’ve been slipping into the frying pan of journalism—letting myself in for a monthly article, making, or attempting to make, £15.15 terms. All this is very frittering, exciting, degrading. And shivers my detachment. Also theres the war: or rather the non-war. Nothing happens. All is held up. Nightly we’re served out with a few facts, or a childstory of the adventures of a submarine. Hitler is said to make peace terms today. London is all agog; & also all a quiver. Raymond wrote me an SOS letter; describing the whirlpool—round round round—twigs, old curling paper & bits of straw—at the NS Office. Shaw writes an article; Maynard has a heart attack over it; KM. an attack of hysteria. Stonier is stony. Poor RM. prays for help from Leonard, even from me. Here its distracted weather—hailstorms & gales & sun; Nessa is painting L.: & theres a centre of rustic simplicity—old Botten picking up the walnuts & burbling on & I sitting on Kingston Hill & watching the destroying clouds point like a great feathered grey blue wing over the channel. Suddenly rain bursts & I dash home: a great evening, & bowls with L. I’m beaten. I compose articles on Lewis Carroll & read a great variety of books—Flaubert’s life, R.’s lectures, out at last, a life of Erasmus & Jacques Blanche. We are asked to lunch with Mrs Webb, who so often talks of us. And my hand seems as tremulous as an aspen. I have composed myself by tidying my room.

Cant quite see ray way now as to the next step in composition. Tom this week end.

I meant to record a Third Class Railway carriage conversation. The talk of business men. Their male detached lives. All politics. Deliberate, well set up, contemptuous & indifferent to the feminine. For example: one man hands the E. Standard, points to a womans photograph. “Women? Let her go home & bowl her hoop” said the man in blue serge with one smashed eye. “She’s a drag on him” another fragment. The son is going to lectures every night. Odd to look into this cool man’s world: so weather tight: insurance clerks all on top of their work; sealed up; self sufficient; admirable; caustic; laconic; objective; & completely provided for. Yet thin, sensitive: yet schoolboys: yet men who earn their livings. In the early train they said, “Cant think how people have time to go to war. It must be that the blokes haven’t got jobs.” “I prefer a fools paradise to a real hell.” “War’s lunacy. Mr Hitler & his set are gangsters. Like Al Capone”. Not a chink through which one can see art, or books. They play cross words when insurance shop fails.

Saturday 7 October

Its odd how those first days of complete nullity when war broke out—have given place to such a pressure of ideas & work that I feel the old throb & spin in my head more of a drain than ever. The result partly of taking up journalism. A good move, I daresay; for it compacts; & forces me to organise. I’m masterfully pulling together those diffuse chapters of R. because I know I must stop & do an article. Ideas for articles obsess me. Why not try the one for The Times? No sooner said than I’m ravaged by ideas. Have to hold the Roger fort—for I will have the whole book typed & in Nessa’s hands by Xmas—by force. Cha⁠[m]⁠brun now demands a dog story: the other too sophisticated. So I have that floating about. In short I’m more on the buzz than when I was contemplating books only. And it keeps me feverishly skating over the thin ice.

We have a fortnight its said to consider Hitler’s terms. If rejected, all the guns boom. So we may get a last safe week in London. And I dont much want to go. Once settled here, it seems congenial to stop. The war has at least made the country question easy to solve. Tom sent me his Cat poems today. A very wet day.

Ch⁠[arlesto]⁠n. yesterday. Gages heard booming. Nessa exposed to show the house. A. & Q. in hiding A. says she will cry if I call her, compared with the public spirited Judith a butterfly. One review of L.’s book: good; but merely expositional.

Clive says everyone wants peace.

Sunday 22 October

Oh let me fly from Roger to a page of a very different sort. We have spent a week in London. The poster read, at Wimbledon: “The War begins … Hitler says, Now its on”. So as we drove to M.S. I said “Its foolish to come to London the first day of war.” It seemed as if we were driving open eyed into a trap. The trap feeling was strong those first days. I kept one ear pricked. The flat was oh in such a mess—very small, very crowded. Whistles sounded. The dark was as thick as Hell. One seemed cut off. No wireless. There we sat. And people came running in & out. The Arnold Fosters: Tom: Stephen: John: we lunched with the Webbs. I recover; old age means an accumulation of the past. Like Wells one’s obsessed; or like Shaw scatter brained. The old woman, wearing a white spotted headdress, was as alive as a leaf on an autumn bonfire: burning, skeletonised. I was, & am, no not so much now, so harassed & distracted, with the trap on me, that I could not expand my mind to receive impressions.

You never escape the war in London. People are all thinking the same thing. All set on getting the day’s work done. Hitches & difficulties hold one up. Very few buses. Tubes closed. No children. No loitering. Everyone humped with a gas mask. Strain & grimness. At night its so verdurous & gloomy that one expects a badger or a fox to prowl along the pavement. A reversion to the middle ages with all the space & the silence of the country set in this forest of black houses. A torch blinks. An old gentleman revealed. He vanishes. That red light may be a taxi or a lampost. People grope their way to each others lairs. We were talking in our lair about 6 hours daily. Great caterpillars dug up the square. Gradually the sense of siege being normal replaced the fear—the individual fear. My ears were not pricked. It was irritating & one’s temper was rubbed. This was increased by the sheer discomfort & perpetual need for clearing drawers, arranging furniture. The kitchen very small. Everything too large. Stairs bad. No carpets. The clerks scream like parrots. Miss Woodward left in torrents of tears. Rain poured—profuse unbridled mediaeval rain. I wrote & rewrote in barren horror Lewis Carroll—my hands & feet cold. Did nothing—was indeed in fretful useless distraction. Sally was paralysed. L. had her rib plastered. So we came down & the world rises out of dark squalor into this divine natural peace. My brain is smoothing already, in spite of A. & Q. yesterday. Alone today & for many days. It was an odd morbid week of many disagreeable sensations.

Wednesday 25 October

About the 24th anyhow. And “the war begins today.” So Ribbenthrop said or rather howled last night. For so far its sporadic & halfhearted. How then can I say anything about it here? Here it peters out. I rode my cycle to Lewes yesterday. Now Nessa’s come & is painting L. & Sally is recovering. And its a blowy but sunny autumn day. And I’m screwed like a vice to the re-composing of the last chapter wh. I’m running into one, called Transformations. Its a question of arrangement. Then a new quote comes & alters all the proportions. But I think if I can see steadily for a fortnight I shall have grasped it. Temptations to write other things fret me. R.M⁠[ortimer], sends books. A dog story wd. bring in £200. & Freud’s papers. As a journalist I’m in demand (not with the TLS though). To relax I read Little Dorrit & think of going on with my Au⁠[tobiograph]⁠y. Never have I been so set on my own spinning. Gerald Heard’s book spun me to distraction last night. So good & suggestive & firm for 200 pages: then a mere bleat bitter repetition contorsion & inversion. Like a dog going after its tail; & there is no tail. No, he’s nothing to offer, once he’s done historical accounting. A mere tangle. And his fanatical starved or as he would say strangulated individuality presides. A scream, a distracted scream issues, instead of the soaring spirit. So I shant read Aldous. wh. develops GH in fiction. So to lunch. And a [WEA] meeting tonight.

Wednesday 1 November

Oh how gladly I reach for this free page for a 10 minutes scamper after copying & re-copying, digging in those old extract books for quotes all the morning! And how compose adapt oneself to the sense of freedom? How compete with the compression & lucidity & logic of Gide writing his Journal? Well, the plain truth is I cant. Yet ideas shoot into my head perpetually. Only as my head is always on the anvil—for I will finish this week—they skim away uncaught. It strikes me that Morgan probably keeps an admirable diary. I’d like to ask Morgan down. Our week ends are now taking the place of our dinners. Rather a laborious extension. But here we are settling in, very steadily, to a country life, & there’s much to be said for it. The space, the concentration, the freedom. Every day on my walk I get a colour bath: the greens dying, the winter colours burnishing. Society too is fairly brisk. There was Raymond (green trousers) Dora Morris (yellow jersey) at C⁠[harlesto]⁠n. last Sunday. Clive with his hair cut abrupt & truculent. Janice’s car has come. We are as free as before almost with our double ration. The car bucks & is draughty. We went to Tun. Wells [on 30 October]. Here am I evading ideas. One of these days I shall be free to write them. Tonight L. lectures to the new village group on Democracy. The village is hungry for lectures. Tom comes for the week end. Eddy Sackville invites himself for next week. London & 37 recede. Dim voices reach us. No war news. An admirable naval man broadcast about a convoy. And its grey & misty.

Thursday 9 November

How glad I am to escape to my free page. But I think I’m nearing the end of my trouble with Roger, doing once more the last pages: & I think I like it better than before. I think the idea of breaking up the last chapter into sections was a good one. If only I can bring that end off. The worst of journalism is that it distracts. Like a shower on the top of the sea. Rev⁠[iewin]⁠g. came out last week; & was not let slip into obscurity as I expected. Lit Sup had a tart & peevish leader: the old tone of voice I know so well—rasped & injured. Then YY polite but aghast in the NS. And then my answer—Why an answer should always make me dance like a monkey at the Zoo, gibbering it over as I walk, & then re-writing, I dont know. It wasted a day. I suppose its all pure waste: yet if one’s an outsider, be an outsider—only dont for God’s sake attitudinise & take up the striking the becoming attitude.

We had a day in London [on 6 November]. Oh, yes, Tom for the week end: more supple, less caked & rigid than of old. His teaching he told me, is that one improves with age. I suppose the working of the divine spirit which as usual he adored at 8 on Sunday morning, receiving communion from Mr Ebbs—who did not impress him. The flat improved; a great thunderstorm; L. caught Louie’s cold: had to stand about; a feverish cold: better now; but now its pouring; & owing to my impulsive idiocy—saying I hoped to see him—Eddy Sackville has imposed his petulance upon us for this week end. Shall I tell him so? or must impulsiveness be punished? But remember another time how people grasp at straws. And how I hate being a straw. Two days will be ruined, just at the climax. And we’ve seen so many people; & these solitary days are so completely satisfactory. And if duty calls, its not to amuse young men with large country houses. Duty did not call me to listen to Mr Bradfield last night. Instead we listened to the ravings, the strangled hysterical sobbing swearing ranting of Hitler at the Beer Hall. The offer of mediation—Holland & Belgium—is the fat on the fire. Today they say there was an explosion after he’d left. Is it true? Theres no getting at truth now all the loud speakers are contradicting each other. Its a crosseyed squint, like the beams that make a tent over the church at night the searchlights meet there.

Mabel is here: pathetic to me in her dumb acceptance of snubs & all life is a snub to her. And now she’s ringing for lunch.

Monday 13 November

Monday morning after a week end is a wash out. I cannot re write R.’s last page. Thats laid to the account of Eddy. He was on guard against egotism, & was spry & bonny⁠[?] eno’; but I walked 7 miles alone to Charleston & suffer for it (as Nurse Lugton used to say). Today restless & unidead. Its a good shake up no doubt; but I wanted peace. I must devise a plan for evading the after book gloom. My flutter in the NS was a fritter. I had a letter of abuse in the TLS so I must dig myself in. Indeed I dont see why I should poke my head out again for a very long time. I’ve done my duty as an outsider for some months. And I suppose have only made myself more unpopular: ah yes: but freer. Thats the point. Never again shall I be asked to write for the TLS: thats a gain.

Mabel goes back on Wednesday; & we revert to the old happy obscurity with Louie. Save for Robson & A. & Q…. but they dont count.

Monday 27 November

Since I wrote here, we have been in London, had a party, A. & K. & Rose Mac; seen Colefax; & come back. It is all storm & rain now. Many ships sunk. Men out in boats. The magnetic mine active. Ch⁠[amberlai]⁠n. speaking like a military shopwalker. Ive been drudging at 2 articles, one Bewick; done & sent off R.’s first chapters. Feel rather free now I’m thoroughly snubbed & put in my place for Reviewing. L. was praised by Desmond in the Sunday Times—& Lord what a day! What a storm to rush through back to the house.

Lunch Charleston yesterday. Judith Bagenal; sharp; obvious; but assured & I should say a good worker, not a drone, will marry her clergyman I should say. Clive away. D. has sold a picture to the Queen. I forgot about our legacy. Nor do we know how much. Stella’s settlement money. This was a surprise. Henry wrote & told me. Perhaps 4 or 500 each? This will serve at anyrate to gild our pill—the 7/6 income tax. A long war its to be, Sybil said. The Empire to be destroyed in May. This is only the prelude to the operation. Now for the wet.

Wednesday 29 November

A nice dine & sleep visit from John, who pans out well under familiar scrutiny—dining in the kitchen &c—& things aren’t doing badly: in fact stirring under the blanket of war. Rosinski sells: L. slowly. Ideas sprout. For a Bloomsbury Book Club … for ‘our’ new magazine; I mean a revival of N⁠[ew].W⁠[riting].: to which Rosamund has sent a long story. Yes, the young do manage to pull along. I’m never to have a good review again. The Spec vicious, John says. And a long gossip … bed wetting at Eton; its disastrous consequences. Repressions—homosexuality: this explains, I suppose, John’s dash. One odd thing about the war is the failure of the post. No letters. John gets garrulous after wine. He cant make it up with Stephen. Stephen half lies about Horizon & his part in it mostly. Offers to bring it to the Hog. Steals young writers &c. I think its an emotional crux.

Wind & rain. Again, after a screw at articles, screwing at R. Withers says do I want stock or cash? L. says cash. How much? I have only 2 minutes left. I think I shall write a Monday Tuesday for N.W. No more long laboured articles at the moment. J. enthusiastic about [LW’s] Bs at Gate, which is out tomorrow. So I take a back place. Now I dont mind that. Should I, 20 years ago? J. says my R⁠[eviewing]. p⁠[amphle]⁠t. very interesting: couldnt be said by the young. Part of my Outsider Campaign. A letter from Shena Simon referring to 3 Gs.

Thursday 30 November

Very jaded & tired & depressed & cross, & so take the liberty of expressing my feelings here. R. a failure—& what a grind … no more of that. I’m brain fagged & must resist the desire to tear up & cross out—must fill my mind with air & light, & walk & blanket it in fog. Rubber boots help—I can flounder over the marsh. No I will write a little memoir.

Saturday 2 December

Tiredness & dejection give way if one day off is taken instantly. I went in & did my cushion. In the evening my pain in my head calmed. Ideas came back. This is a hint to be remembered. Always turn the pillow. Then I become a swarm of ideas. Only I must hive them till R. is done. It was annoying to get on to the surface & be so stung with my pamphlet [Reviewing]. No more controversy for a year, I vow. Ideas: about writers duty. No, I’ll shelve that. Began reading Freud last night; to enlarge the circumference, to give my brain a wider scope: to make it objective; to get outside. Thus defeat the shrinkage of age. Always take on new things. Break the rhythm &c. Use this page, now & then, for notes. Only they escape after the mornings grind.

L.’s book [Barbarians at the Gate] out and noticed at length. I forgot to note our very interesting talk about detachment at 37 t’other night. L. has trained himself to cut adrift completely from personal feelings: its common sense, because one has no real identity there: & losing it gives one the only happiness thats secure. Yes. to learn to discuss say ones work eliminating oneself. This is quite true—one gets it now & again—an astonishing freedom & expansion. L. very subtle & wise: & down here its made easier, owing to the open country. I saw a Kingfisher & a cormorant the other days walk in rubber boots. Planes very active. Russia attacking Finland. Nothing happens in England. Theres no reason anywhere. Brutes merely rampant. This suspends one’s judgment: makes it foolish even to discuss. Its like being in a temporary shelter with a violent storm raging outside. We wait. L.P. meeting here. Great diversity & freedom among the villagers.

Oh & my memoir will have to be compacted. And no letters. And the legacy may be £7 or 800. We go to 37 for 2 nights next week, & I see Ethel & Shena Simon. This life here has now become the rule; t’other the exception.

Friday 8 December

Two days in London: a great distraction; leaving my mind in a torn state, which I record, being all of a muzz. Lady Simon; a 3 talk, so a little disappointing. A nice woman. Did I wish to expose some egotism? I suppose so. Its breaking into new levels after concentrating here thats so distracting, & I daresay salutary. Shopping—tempted to buy jerseys & so on. I dislike this excitement, yet enjoy it. Ambivalence as Freud calls it. (I’m gulping up Freud). Then Ethel & Gillies. That upset me—Ethel’s wig—5 incongruous curls, that made her look babyish & foolish. Also she has gone downhill. She is now shut up quite alone in her old age—talks to herself, about herself. I felt this pathetic: also somehow ugly; humiliating; watching the old baby sucking its corals; compliments; the old story of her genius & its non-recognition. How hideous to be reduced to that kind of feeblemindedness—at 84. Something pitiable, unvenerable; not imbecile, but near it. Or was it partly her curls that were so distasteful? Gillies chattering about war secrets: Ethel mumbling on about what Bruno Walter said to—no I didnt listen after a time. And HB’s death; & what he said in 1890 about The Wreckers. I think it was pity more than anything that I felt; & all her clothes were undone; shaggy; untidy—like King Lear only without any tragedy or poetry. And the old charm in abeyance. Off she went to Plesh [Dr Plesch]. Then off I went to the Galeries Lafayette [Regent Street]. Out of that brilliancy I stepped into dead darkness—had no torch. A curious wild beauty—medieval, furtive—figures shuffling & darting Then Willie Robson. To stir the brew still further, into a race & whirlpool, a letter from The Forum asking me to write about women & peace. All the old, & a few new, ideas at once rise to the surface. I lay awake writing articles. It might be an outlet. But didn’t I swear I would abjure controversy for a year? Isnt R.F. a finer piece of work? But for America?—then the money—then the desire to let fly: also, I suppose, to justify myself? Cant form letters. Raining hard.

Saturday 9 December

I suppose that is the date. It is a Saturday morning, & looks fine & still, after the broken whirlpool of weather yesterday. We took Louie to Lewes to have teeth out, & it was blackout driving for the first time. Like fog driving, one cant see people. All the cars have small red eyes. The margins of the road are lost. But I’m thinking of a dozen things as usual. Should I begin my Forum article with a definition of angle, to explain my angularity? Ideas pullulate, but escape when I try to catch them here. Freud is upsetting: reducing one to whirlpool; & I daresay truly. If we’re all instinct, the unconscious, whats all this about civilisation, the whole man, freedom &c? His savagery against God good. The falseness of loving one’s neighbours. The conscience as censor. Hate … But I’m too mixed. I’m going to begin Mill on Liberty [1859]. I’m making up for the hurried London years; spreading my mind, calmly to take in things wholly. Only thats Louie ringing for lunch. And L. is irritated with Percy—all the bulbs dug up when we were in London. And then Raymond wants me to write. And Shena is writing something for me—took that random shot to heart. I’m driving so many horses in my team. Probably we get 1100 (gross) from Stella. A great hare is hung in the kitchen, odd that we shall eat it. So, these are the little wild ponies that tug me so many ways at once. And I shall walk myself calm this afternoon.

Saturday 16 December

The litter in this room is so appalling that it takes me 5 minutes to find my pen. R. all unsewn in bits. And I must take 50 pages, should be 100, up on Monday. Cant get the marriage chapter right. Proportion all wrong. Alteration, quotation, makes it worse. But its true I dont fuss quite so much as over a novel. I learned a lesson in re-writing The Years wh. I shall never forget. Always I say to myself Remember the horror of that. Yesterday I was, I suppose unnecessarily⁠[?], cheerful. 2 letters from admirers of 3 Gs; both genuine: one a soldier in the trenches; the other a distracted middle-class woman at Yeovil. And a letter which I must now answer from Stephen, asking me to contribute “On the Young” or anything to Horizon. No no. Still at war, he says, with John. If I write for glory its to be in our own paper.

Bought rubber boots yesterday. Met Lydia. Slapped her shoes on counter “Hugh Walpole—Priestly—tell Leonard—gossip—catching bus—off”. Roars of laughter in the shop. I explained her celebrity. L. bought a new mackintosh.

Horizon out; small; trivial, dull. So I think from not reading it. And now—oh now must I tidy up? London, the Hutchinsons &c looms. And I’ve promised to lecture the WEA at Brighton. And to write for the Forum.

Sunday 17 December

Once more, as so often, I hunt for my dear old red-covered book, with what an instinct I’m not quite sure. For what the point of making these notes is I dont know; save that it becomes a necessity to uncramp, & some of it may interest me later. But what? For I never reach the depths; I’m too surface blown. And always scribble before going in—look quickly at my watch. Yes. 10 minutes left—what can I say. Nothing that needs thought: which is provoking; for I often think. And think the very thought I could write here. About being an outsider. About my defiance of professional decency. Another allusion of a tart kind to Mrs W. & her desire to kill reviewers in the Lit Sup. yesterday. Frank Swinnerton is the good boy, & I’m the bad little girl. And this is trivial. Compared with what? Oh the Graf Spee is going to steam out of Monte Video today into the jaws of death. And journalists & rich people are hiring aeroplanes from which to see the sight. This seems to me to bring war into a new angle; & our psychology. No time to work out. Anyhow the eyes of the whole world (BBC) are on the game; & several people will lie dead tonight, or in agony. And we shall have it served up for us as we sit over our logs this bitter winter night. And the British Captain has been given a KCB. & Horizon is out; & Louie has had her teeth out; & we ate too much hare pie last night; & I read Freud on Groups; & I’ve been titivating Roger: & this is the last page; & the year draws to an end; & we’ve asked Plomer for Xmas; &—now times up as usual. I’m reading Ricketts diary—all about the war the last war; & the Herbert diaries & … yes, Dadie’s Shakespeare, & notes overflow into my 2 books.

[]

1940

[Diary XXIX]

Wednesday 3 January

Monks House, Rodmell

This very large sheet which I bought at Baxter’s [Lewes stationers] two days ago begins a new year, on a new system. Evening over the fire writing, instead of end of the morning scrambling. Thus I hope to write a better hand, &, if it weren’t that I’ve just heated my head over Roger, the PIP [Post-Impressionists] (a bad chapter) more solidly. For unless I can put a little weight into this book, it’ll have no interest, even for an old woman, turning the pages. I have just put down Mill’s autobiography, after copying certain sentences in the volume I call, deceptively, the Albatross. We have been out in Janice’s car, looking for skating. Its a long bitter winter frost—I forget how many degrees of a night—I think 22 below freezing. Figure an Italian sun yesterday; & hard white snow; & the street like glass; the village treat to Brighton; chains round the wheels; the butcher saying he’d had enough of it, which, as he has to be in the shop cutting joints at 6, I can follow.

I am oppressed & distracted with all my ideas. All the little cuckoos shoving the old bird—Roger—out of the nest. A book on W⁠[ome]⁠n & peace—& here’s L. down from his book.

Saturday 6 January

Which of our friends will interest posterity most? Maynard? So that if I had any regard for the future I would use this hour to record what he said. About his parents. Lying extended on the sofa the other night with the two fog lamps burning, & Lydia a sort of fairy tale elf in her fur cap. We were talking of my legacy; of Leonard’s mother. And L. said how she had lived in a dream world. So that he made her cry. Upon which M. said his parents had always let him alone: now they reaped the benefit. The old Dr plays Bridge; Mrs, his mother has M.’s temperament. “But not ruthless as you can be” said Lydia. M. hesitates, gulps & all his words come out in a rush. He is now supreme, mounted on his sick throne, a successful man—farmer, bursar, a man of business, he called himself, applying for petrol. A heavy man with a thick moustache. A moralist. As interested in Patsy the black dog with the bald patch as in Europe. He was saying—odd how hard it is to remember—he was telling us about salt; water; heat & cold & their effect on the urine. About Roger. “Can I mention erection?” I asked. Lydia “What?” M. “Stiff” (their private word). No you cant. I should mind your saying it. Such revelations have to be in key with their time. The time not come yet. Sodomy & the WC disinfected. Is he right, or only public school? All is now so ordered, so royally arrayed, that we had to go that Wednesday [27 December], because otherwise—“No Maynard says it is not convenient” L⁠[ydia]. on the telephone. But words are soon lost. I am writing this, the d—d party, the dark drive in prospect & L. glooming, in order to have a free fling.

So tight & tortured of a morning, but enough of that. Can I descend to the spontaneous populous strata … after living so long above ground? An obituary: Humbert Wolfe. Once I shared a packet of choc, creams with him, at Eileen Power’s. An admirer sent them. This was a fitting tribute. A theatrical looking glib man. Told me he was often asked if I were his wife. Volunteered that he was happily married, though his wife lived—Geneva? I forget; remember thinking, why protest? whats worrying you? Oh it was the night Arnold Bennett attacked me in the En Standard. Orlando? I was going to meet him at Sybil’s next day. There was a queer histrionic look in him, perhaps strain in him. Very self assured, outwardly. Inwardly lacerated by the taunt that he wrote too easily; & deified satire; thats my salvage from an autobiography of him—one of many, as if he were dissatisfied & must always draw & redraw his own picture. I suppose the origin of many of the new middle-aged autos. A kind of self psychoanalysis; oh & Viola Garvin—a fume rises from the old cabbage pail of literary gossip—was in love with him; a fact she expressed in a review of Requiem that positively split its sides, ripped open like a balloon—the pressure of praise in it was so terrific. Requiem Vita had with her at Oxford when I lectured once. How rotten, I said, looking at it, as it lay on the dressing table in the Inn. And she was glad she said, owning with her usual simplicity what I, should I?—have hidden. So the inspirer of these vague winter night memories—he who sends for the last time a faint film across my tired head—lies with those blackberry eyes shut in that sulphurous cavernous face. (If I were writing I should have to remove either lies or eyes. Is this right? Yes, I think for me; nor need it spoil the run. Only one must always practise every style: its the only way to keep on the boil: I mean the only way to avoid crust is to set a faggot of words in a blaze. That phrase flags. Well, let it. These pages only cost a fraction of a farthing, so that my exchequer isnt imperilled.)

Mill I should be reading. Or Little Dorrit, but both are gone stale, like a cheese thats been cut in & left. The first slice is always the best. Mr Gwynn⁠[e] caught me at Piddinghoe on the down yesterday—a nobleman: lean, sporting, dried, with little wet pebble eyes; a severe man. I smiled. He I think apprehended some incongruity: I was scrambling under the barbed wire in my wool helmet. “Where d’you come from?” “Only taking a walk”. “This is private.” “Hope I’m not spoiling your sport?” “Not at all. You can go on…” He’ll ask his wife, what odd looking woman lives at Rodmell. She’ll guess, Mrs Woolf. He’ll say … Louie says he’ll say he dont hold with the Labour Party. He had a row with Paul about the wood on his down. The villagers mustn’t steal it. Paul said they had a right. Story dwindles off. The idiot boy has pneumonia, should die but of course, wont.

Friday 19 January

I cant say that this after tea system has been good for this large page. But Sussex has been sociable. A⁠[ngelica]’s 21st birthday party, & its legacy of Lewises; then Flora; then Morgan; then London, from which we came back this after noon to frozen pipes. Dean is flaring away at the spare room at this instant, & this gives me an excuse for not nailing my brain to some solid book—an essay of Bertie [Russell]’s say. My London technique is improving. A concert at Nat Gal; Hugh [Walpole] & Wm Plomer to dinner, Sybil to tea—all accomplished. And last night The Importance of Being Earnest, a thinnish play, but a work of art; I mean, its bubble dont break. And I took about 60 pages to be typed.

By way of a brain graph, I record that for 5 days I could do nothing but improvise my WEA lecture—syllabled it in the bath, on walks; wrote a sketch nefariously. Now its spent, that fever, & I shall attack the Omega with appetite tomorrow. Why this sudden pressure on the brain? Its uncontrollable.

Hugh is rather like the winter sun—his ruddy edges slightly blurred. He wore a red flower. Wm. in a buff waistcoat, but sharpened, disappointed,—life unsatisfactory; embittered—no blur, rather a chopping block. I diagnose some sense of defeat & strain, part private, part war. A man in pain—on the stretch; so that some string gives a discord. No, thats not quite it. Looks dissipated, with work, with dull & dreary work; & no creativeness; but a standard, which dear old Hugh (he wrote to thank “Dearest Virginia” this morning) has forced down. I suppose a little second rate. At dinner when I told him that Maynard had read Sea Tower [1939], he looked like a small boy tipped—an endearing bashfulness. We talked—if I could face the labour of inverted commas—about Horizon: Stephen condemned; & about Humbert Wolfe; dead of overwork; about Frankau (his memoirs as chirpy as a robin—honest, edited of course, rasping, & with the real life profusion which only the shelly & tough skinned can stand) & then Hugh told us the story of the Conrads, told it very well: about C. sizing up the sod. masseur at tea; withdrawing, shrieking; & Miss Hallows & Jessie, who wouldnt ask Miss Hallows for the salt; & C. shut up alone with her; & Jessie growing fat on the sofa with her bad leg; about Boris & his forgery; so to diaries, his own left to Rupert Hart Davis; [omission] & so to Dickens; & the Vn hypocrisy, Thackeray haling a prostitute in the street opposite the Garrick; Dickens & his mistress; (all spoken as if they were old friends—so they are—if youre in the Hugh tradition, but Wm. & I arent)—so to Trollope; & defamation of Wells; a mere scribbler; compare him with Conrad. What then is an artist? A question I’d like to solve. A bitter cold night & they stayed till 12.30: then went into the moonlight, & left the door open.

Here I change pens: my hands are so cold; & my brains cold, yes, very like Janice’s cheap car, which wont start. One should have a piece of porous paper to press on the brain when its hot, instead of chafing it to work, as I do now, from idleness, from distraction. Oh I made up a little of P.H. at 37, & think I’ve tapped something perhaps—a new combination of the raw & the lyrical; how to slide over. I think 2 years at Roger may have filled the cistern.

Then Sybil. I was touched. Her cheeks were so cold when she came in. Why did she think it worth coming? Vanity was flattered. After working off all our graces & paces—Hugh to dine—oh Hugh wrote to me this morning—we got warmer about the past. She never liked George. Used to meet him at the Wards. He patronised her. He broke hearts. Dorothy Ward was in love—passionately. G. didn’t care. An arch snob. Old Gerald, the greedy, the vulgar, far more to him. The young intellectuals at the Savile liked him; disliked George. So I sketched our family life. She was more human—asked me to dine at the Ordinary. & went out into the bitter black & white square.

Saturday 20 January

I think it would be better to read quietly some severe classic, & not make up some ranting rhymes, this bitter cold night. Smoking cigarettes over the fire & feeling—just because the rent of 37 is so high [£250 p.a.]—that we were, for once, foolish. Then L. went & skated & I walked on the bank & home over the marsh. The beauty was etherial, unreal, empty. A June day. 10 degrees of frost. All silent, as if offered from another world. No birds, no carts, men shooting. This specimen against the war. This heartless & perfect beauty. The willows ruby red, no rust red; plumed; soft; & all the roofs orange & red; & the hills white. But some emptiness in me—in my life—because L. said the rent was so high. And then the silence, the pure disembodied silence, in which the perfect specimen was presented; seemed to correspond to my own vacancy, walking muffled with the sun in my eyes, & nothing pressing urging only this iron hard, ground, all painted. The men were waiting for widgeon—the quickest birds. Come down like an express. We sat in the sun on the bank. All looked very distant, & picked out—the little stems of smoke—the wild duck—the horses huddled & still. No thoughts populated; I was somehow held in a pair of pincers, & came home to cook crumpets to revise my article; & all the words seem bodiless too. So what about a severe classic?

A fire at Charleston. Fire Engines called out on Wednesday night. No letters. Reaction after London? And Roger reeling off my fingers. And the future. I must tuck myself in with work. A child crying in the school. What do I do to help? But in fact, these are the moments for compacting; for living: unless one’s to blow out; which I entirely refuse to do.

Friday 26 January

These moments of despair—I mean glacial suspense—a painted fly in a glass case—have given way as they so often do to ecstasy. Is it that I have thrown off those two dead pigeons—my story, my Gas at Abbotsford (printed today). And so ideas rush in. I began one night, absolutely submerged, throttled, held in a vice with my nose rubbed against Roger—no way out—all hard as iron—to read Julian. And off winged my mind along those wild uplands. A hint for the future. Always relieve pressure by a flight. Always violently turn the pillow: hack an outlet. Often a trifle does. A review offered of Marie Corelli by the Listener. These are travellers notes which I offer myself shd I again be lost.

I think the last chapter must be sweated from 20 to 10 thousand. This is an attempt at the first words:—

“Transformations is the title that Roger Fry chose for this gave to [his] last book of essays. And it seems natural enough, But transformations must express not only change, but achievement looking back at the last ten years of his life, so full to choose it by way of title for them too so full were they of change, so little & also of achievement For They were also full of achievement. His position as a critic was became established His position as a critic was became established to choose a title wh. expresses change; they were full of experiment & experience Those changes, it was because they were he acquired a position They were years not years not of repose & stagnation. They were years of change, but of perpetual experiment & new experience. In the course of them His position as a critic became established. “At the time of his death” writes Howard Hannay, “Roger Fry’s position in the English art world was unique, & the only parallel to it is that of Ruskin at the height of his reputation.” And the perpetual This was achieved Perpetual speculation. But that position was only his because a room. So he But it was a position that The transformations then, the perpetual revisions of the his left threw out left behind them something that his thought that This perpetual revision of thought in the light of experience, resulted in something But this reputation position depended upon was the result of the freedo of his which he had the energy & the & the vigour with which he carried on his intellectual life; & so closely connected that it [is] impossible to separate them, went the other adventure with which he extended & enlarged his view. And it Nor was he less adventurous in his the other life which after all with whieh the oth nor is it possible to separate the two. And there too, transformations left resulted in what was something permanent, as Sir K Clark says: Although he was remarkably consistent in the main outlines of his beliefs, his mind was invincibly experimental & ready for any adventure, however far it might lead him beyond the boundaries of aesthetic academic tradition.

And Physically, the strain was very great. His health had suffered from the long years at the Omega

No I cannot reel it off at all. How queer the change is from private writing to public writing. And how exhausting. My little fund of gossip & comment is dried up. What was I going to say? Oh that the lyric mood of the winter—its intense spiritual exaltation—is over. The thaw has set in, & rain & wind, & the marsh is soggy, & patched with white, & two very small lambs were staggering in the east wind. One old ewe was being carted off; & shirking the horror I crept back by the hanger. Nor have I spent a virtuous evening, hacking at these phrases. I’m enjoying Burke though, & shall tune up on the French Revolution.

Q. last night. Miss Gardner on Federation. She writes short stories; her brother [Paul], a slip of a blue bell stalk beside Q.’s rosy sun, writes poetry, & is in touch with “our group”. We plan printing; indeed L. set up an address this afternoon. Then we hung Nessa’s picture, & it being now 6 o’clock, I shall take a plunge into some current. We go up next week, shall have Tom to dine & go to the new O’Neil play. No, its useless writing biography between tea & dinner. Better dream.

Tuesday 30 January

Unable to go to London because of the worst of all frosts. A sudden return. Everything glass glazed. Each blade is coated, has a rim of pure glass. Walking is like treading on stubble. The stiles & gates have a shiny green varnish of ice. Percy has to dig paths. Ink frozen. On Sunday no cars cd. move. Nessa said the Lewises had to give up. Thats the last I heard from Charleston. On Monday the electric light failed. Cooked breakfast on dining room fire. Came on at 12.30. Today all idea of travel impossible. Trains hours late or lost. No buses running. Walked to Lewes & back. Met snow plough; 2 or 3 cars; no walkers. Lewes very empty. Home by the short cut; which was painful. A great flight of wild geese. The grass is brittle, all the twigs are cased in clear brown cases, & look thick, but slippery, crystallised, as if they were twigs of fruit at dessert. Now & then the wireless reports a ship sunk in the North Sea. Almost out of meat, but at last the Coop sent. Very still tonight. More snow? No papers till the afternoon.

[? Wednesday 31 January]

To that rapid note—how odd that I still feel I cant leave a new sight undescribed—there is nothing much to add today. It is thawing. Theres a rush, like a mattress falling, as the snow slides off the roof. We walked on the marsh, & saw a half devoured hare. Dabs of blood on the snow, & such a scrape of a wind, & such hobbling & tumbling over frozen tussocks into the snow that I cut the walk, & came home to type out my ten guinea Corelli. Vita is offered £1,850 for a 25,000 word story. My righteous backbone stiffens. Then what about my £200 dog story? Ah, but I wouldn’t for any money write 25,000 words. I think I’ve proved that to be true in this way: the humiliation, that is the obstinate refusal of the brain to comply & one’s drubbings, & re-writings, & general despondency, even for 2,000 words, make it not so much morally, as physically, intellectually a torture. But its interesting to take the moral temperature now & then. A little quick article I enjoy.

Settled in for another 2 weeks, & only village meetings & books; which however are very ‘real’—I like Burke. I think with luck I may concentrate & sweat out R.’s last Transformations. True, I should have enjoyed a wander, but old Mabel reports streets all ice & so on. And I cling to my tiny philosophy: to hug the present moment (in which the fire is going out).

Friday 2 February

Met Nessa outside Uridges today so the frost of isolation is over. It was broken by a meeting though, at which I gossiped with Mrs Funnell & said I’d find her a dachshund. “Dasshund” she called it, being lower class.

I wish I could conglobulate reflections like Gide. Half of his are daily jottings. Then something solid forms. And they occur at breakfast, or when I’m up to my knees in mud. The lost thoughts—a fine covey they’d make if ever hived—the thoughts I’ve lost on Asheham down, & walking the river bank. Yesterday a smart car stopped: a glowing lady gave me a lift; burnished & aquiline like Bobo; said to [be] Mrs Drawbell of the hated house. The snow remains, slightly pocked, but the road is clear. The cream woman slipped another ½lb of butter into my bag; the Coops, inserted a lb. of sugar instead of sago into our groceries. And I’m asked not only to write, combatively on peace, for The Forum, but they want to reprint Reviewing. So, what with the Statesman & The Listener, no doubt I could grind out a good many Guineas: & I enjoy the friction: keeps my mind warm, thinking lost thoughts.

Mabel coming (alas) tomorrow. Then London.

I forget to make extracts from the papers, which boom, echoing, emptily, the BBC. Hitler’s speech—Churchill’s—a ship sunk—no survivors—a raft capsized—men rowing for 10 or 12 or 30 hours. How little one can explode now, as perhaps one would have done, had it been a single death. But the Black Out is far more murderous than the war. Prices rise by 2d then 3d. So the screw tightens gradually; & I cant even imagine London in peace—the lit nights, the buses roaring past Tavistock Square, the telephone ringing, & I scooping together with the utmost difficulty one night or afternoon alone. A reminder to use the present astonishing space for Burke &c. Only the fire sets me dreaming—of all the things I mean to write: the break in our lives from London to country is a far more complete one than any change of house. Yes, but I havent got the hang of it altogether. The immense space suddenly becomes vacant; then illuminated. And London, in nips, is cramped & creased. Odd how often I think with what is love I suppose of the City: of the walk to the Tower: that is my England; I mean, if a bomb destroyed one of those little alleys with the brass bound curtains & the river smell & the old woman reading I should feel—well, what the patriots feel—L. & Sally arrive.

Wednesday 7 February

(Mother’s birthday: Nessa’s wedding day.) Oh I had such a profound reflection on the tip of my tongue, L. being downstairs, chiming in with Bradfield’s lecture. It was to the effect that now, no longer in the movement, & remote in this water sogged country, now’s the time to see if the art, or life, creed, the belief in something existing independently of myself, will weather the/stand the hold good. These hesitations signify that I’ve been titivating R.: how spell Fr Bartolomeo?

Well, if it dont stand like a flagstaff, then its been a washout, (word chosen in deference to the new movement.) John for the night; & he plunges us in new this & that. Very nice—so eager & ‘boyish’ as the old women say: pulling up his shirt to show his rash. We had the Gardners to tea. The old wispy red veined blue eyed pussy purring Major. Very courteous, rather rambling, & inclined to dodder off into moralities about the Crab. That is why the crab is so small, & walks sideways—an old Indian story. The children bolt eyed & transfixed, partly in fear of what Papa might say. And John rather Prince Consort. So a fair beat up talk about poetry, about communism. John obviously bored, but chivalrous. And then out with his documents, & his plans. Radiant hope for the New Writing; for the young. Clearly his metier to go ringing his cowbell in advance. Inclined to write about Wm Morris. Oh & all the doings of the boys. Peter Watson sponged upon by Connolly, Guardsmen & Hamilton. The sink of buggery. Berkeley Square houses the whole hive. Stephen fallen into vice again; sentimentalising with Freud & another; Bleeding his heart all over the place; & J. half hurt, half scornful. Its a queer little eddy, just below the surface;—& familiar of old, tho’ not so highly organised. So I drivel longing for the meeting to be over. I will copy the days headlines—Towards a Settlement with Japan. The next phase in India; Red rout in Finland. 5,000 killed & no room for the rest.

Thursday 8 February

{Frau} Dr—yes, she wasn’t Frau though she looked it—& her name? Hinder? Hinckel?—I never caught it so to speak firmly,—has just gone. This murky February day in which is concealed some flower, some little gesture, of spring—how does one feel that? how say it. The light that comes in a London street—more widely here; she has gone, back to London, to her house with its lounge & its modern Swedish furniture, in Hampstead Garden suburb. She saw her two babies off to Liverpool this morning to stay with their grandmother. And her husband is a doctor, & they are about to spend two weeks in Bath,—Oh to have a knapsack & go tramping! she said, being a swarthy hooknosed red cheeked racy Jewess. At least that phase lasted out lunch—We discussed races; she was born in South Africa. Natives smell she said. Native servants rooms smell very strong. We discussed how nice ordinary people are. Then why are they so repulsive in the mass? A question hot solved, partly because the landslip at Redhill had made her so late that lunch (roast chicken; apple amber;) lasted till 2.30. After that she & L. retired to the library to discuss a Fabian treatise on South Africa, wh. she is to undertake, & he to supervise; & I in rubbers & great coat plunged into the marsh, which was, as I’ve said, veiling, oh very effectively, for the wind blew, our unopened Spring. Here I stop to insert a remark often occurring: how we’re being led to the altar this spring: its flowers will I suppose nod & yellow & redden the garden with the bombs falling—oh, its a queer sense of suspense, being led up to the spring of 1940—So I came back, & had to offer tea. Now at tea she shrivelled in a hard high hat into the common, the lemon on steel acid vulgarity of the obvious, the cheap hard Jewess, which at lunch I hadn’t seen. Confronted with Nessa’s carpet Duncan’s table she could only remember her Hampstead lounge; a transition which made me think of the future: & what’ll it be, ruled & guided by these active & ambitious & after all competent, & I suppose able, Fabians—oh why dont they any of them embrace something—but what? Poetry, I suppose, the sensuous, the musical? Why must they always stress the ugliness of life; & yet be themselves so vital? And feeling chilled & put in my little compartment, I posted my letters & met poor dying Botten, & stopped L. on the high road & so have arrived here.

Friday 9 February

For some reason hope has revived. Now what served as bait? A letter from Joe Ackerley approving my Corelli? Not much. Tom dining with us? No. I think it was largely reading Stephen’s autobiography: tho’ it gave me a pang of envy, by its youth & its vigour, & some good novelists touches—I cd. pick holes though. But its odd—reading that & South Riding both mint new, give me a fillip after all the evenings I grind at Burke & Mill. A good thing to read one’s contemporaries, even rapid twinkling slice of life novels like poor W. H.’s. And then, I’ve polished off, to the last gaiter button, the 3 d—d chapters for London on Monday; & got my teeth I think firm into the last Transformations; & though of course I shall get the black shivers when I reread let alone submit to Nessa & Margery, I cant help thinking I’ve caught a good deal of that iridescent man in my oh so laborious butterfly net. I daresay I’ve written every page—certainly the last—10 or 15 times over. And I dont think I’ve killed: I think I’ve brisked. Hence an evening glow Yet the wind cuts like a scythe: the dining room carpet is turning to mould; & John Buchan has fallen on his head & is, apparently, dying. I have already composed a letter to Susie, who, poor goose, will be crying her eyes out, over there in the great carpeted Palace that she hated so. I think she “adored” him: that is being a goose, believed poor prolific John to be a kind of Providence. I remember all the MSS bound in blue morocco—scarcely corrected—a kind of genius, she said—wistfully looking for some corroboration. Indeed, she flattened me out with John’s biographies, inscribed by John. Monty Shearman is also dead; & Campbell, L.’s absurd nice old Parson friend—his bachelor Buffy friend.

Now the wind rises; something rattles, & thank God I’m not on the North Sea, nor taking off to raid Heligoland. Now I’m going to read Freud. Yes, Stephen gave me 3 hours of continuous illusion—& if one can get that still, there’s a world—whats the quotation—There’s a world outside? No. From Coriolanus?

Sunday 11 February

By way of postponing the writing of cheques—the war, by the way, has tied up my purse strings again, as in the old days of 11/- a week pocket money—I write here: & note that the authentic glow of finishing a book is on me. Does this mean its good; or only that I have delivered my mind successfully? Anyhow, after shivering yesterday, today I made a stride, & shall I think finish this week at 37. Its tight & conscientious anyhow. So, walking this mildish day, up to Telscombe I invented pages & pages of my lecture: which is to be full & fertile. The idea struck me that the Leaning Tower school is the school of auto-analysis after the suppression of the 19th Century. Quote Stevenson. This explains Stephen’s auto⁠[biograph]⁠y; Louis MacNeice &c. Also I get the idea of cerebration: poetry that is not unconscious, but stirred by surface irritation, to which the alien matter of politics, that cant be fused, contributes. Hence the lack of suggestive power. Is the best poetry that which is most suggestive—is it made of the fusion of many different ideas, so that it says more than is explicable? Well thats the line; & it leads to Public Libraries: & the supersession of aristocratic culture by common readers. Also to the end of class literature: the beginning of character literature; new words from new blood; & the comparison with the Elizabethans. I think there’s something in the psycho-analy⁠[s]⁠is idea: that the L.Tower writer couldn’t describe society; had therefore to describe himself, as the product, or victim: a necessary step towards freeing the next generation of repressions. A new conception of the writer needed: & they have demolished the romance of ‘genius’ of the great man, by diminishing themselves. They haven’t explored, like H. James, the individual: they havent deepened; theyve cut the outline sharper. And so on.

L. saw a grey heraldic bird: I only saw my thoughts. No news from Charleston, but so absorbed in all this, I’m indifferent.

Friday 16 February

This diary might be divided into London diary & Country. I think there is a division. Just back from the London chapter. Bitter cold. This shortened my walk, which I meant to be through crowded streets. Then the dark—no lighted windows, depressed me. Standing in Whitehall, I said to my horses “Home John”, & drove back in the grey dawn light, the cheerless spectral light of fading evening on houses—so much more cheerless than the country evening—to Holborn, & so to the bright cave, wh. I liked better, having shifted the chairs. How silent it is there—& London silent; a great dumb ox lying couchant. The people I saw were, Margery Fry: 2 or 3 hours: a touching soft furred bundle; red nosed, or cheeked, with so many thorns in her softness. I remember: “People are divided into lovers & friends”—to justify her lack of love. So we rummaged in old memories, & revived whats been said so often about Roger’s loves & character. She is off to France, & pricked my apathy by suggesting that I should come—& made me deplore my spineless acquiescence; she so mobile.

Dinner party: Tom & Saxon: Clive in afterwards. Saxon a pink plump hoarse oldish man: in his raucous sudden mood: complete silence; then raps out some statement, as hard as a walnut—no sequence, no suggestiveness. Tom’s great yellow bronze mask all draped upon an iron framework. An inhibited, nerve drawn; dropped face—as if hung on a scaffold of heavy private brooding; & thought. A very serious face. & broken by the flicker of relief, when other people interrupt. But our talk?—it was about Civilization. All the gents, against me. Said very likely, more likely than not, this war means that the barbarian will gradually freeze out culture. Nor have we improved. Tom & Saxon said the Greeks were more thoroughly civilised. The slave was not so much a slave as ours are. Clive also pessimised—saw the light going out gradually. So I flung some rather crazy theories into the air. Then to Humbert Wolfe, striking odd little sparks from Tom’s ‘genius’ vanity. Thats refreshing, his innocent seriousness about himself as a writer. About H.W. Clive told a story—how at the Ivy [Restaurant] he received his death blow from E. Bibesco, who read him 30 pages: so he went home & died. That led to Tom’s saying he used commas at the beginning of a line; so I added, & no capitals. Then we searched for an old book to trace capital letters. Saxon emitted some scholars facts. What else? It lasted till 12, so there must have been other sayings: John Buchan, I suppose. Yes, he died, & I haven’t yet written to poor black Susie, who’s unhappy I suspect, clinging to her John as lightning conductor. Tom talked about Stephen’s diary. Pages of S.’s conversation “for I cant remember what T.S.E. said”—were sent to T.S.E. He’s benevolent & tolerant of the young. Oh & Yeats. Tom said Turner had made up to Yeats; who was an ill read man; & Dotty successfully imitated him—hence her trumpeting. A good deal of cold weather talk—Tom’s landlady providing one jug of water, & Tom bathing at Fabers. Oh & Sydney Waterlow. “I never knew them (S. & Dawks) in the moment of e⁠[c]⁠stasy”—Tom said with his sly smile. & I thought the same of Tom & Vivienne. S. says Saxon feels himself on the shelf, & so digs hard. This is more or less an accurate specimen of talk in the winter preceding the Spring of 1940.

I had Cilia’s Finnish letter. People suddenly become grave: forget gossip; remember what at least they ought to be feeling. She [unidentified] wrote to me, out of the blue, about the death, or immortality of Finland. How little that means, at 37 … no: it means something, but what?—Then I suffered from my clothes complex acutely buying 2 new sets of clothes, & being persuaded into a blue striped coat by an astute & human woman at Lewises. “But I want you to have this—I dont want you just because you’re in the country, to fling on anything. You’ve got to think of others” .. as if she guessed all my private life—queer: she seemed genuine. Of course I looked a shaggy dowdy old woman. Then to Desire under the Elms: disappointing; flat; elemental situation bare of words; like a scaffold. And B.L. not exciting: & the streets tunnels of gloom.

Monday 19 February

I may as well make a note I say to myself; thinking sometimes who’s going to read all this scribble? I think one day I may brew a tiny ingot out of it—in my memoirs. Lytton is hinted as my next task by the way. And 3 Gs a dead failure in USA: but enough. I was going to write about Sally [Chilver].

The snow came down on Saturday: thick white cake sugar all over the garden, blowing into my room in the night: door hinge frozen. She arrived battered, carrying her case, how unlike John, up from Southease; left this morning. And oh to be alone—after 5 nights talk—A very nice young woman, with a brain; a magpie I called her: has picked up so many facts: & adds objective facts: about cars, pumps, politics. Thats her line. Not art: tho’ she struck me by her dispraise of the neo Corns; & her respect for the artist—Sitwells for instance. A lunch & tea at Charleston. “Blow your nose” said Clive. Snow falling. Talk—gossip: Robert Graves has left Laura; Anreps; An⁠[astasi]⁠a left debts to be paid by Sally; Nessa feeding hens; gave us 6 new eggs. Duncan asked us to buy cigarettes, wh. I did standing in the snow. Political argument about USA & Ireland between Q., Clive, & Sally. Her real name’s Elizabeth. Angelica silent, not disapproving. Sally (dog) kissed Leonard. L. smiled at me. Talk about Hugh W. about Eddy Devonshire—about—I suppose mostly gossip, with some extravagance, about Frys, & poor Helen’s autopsy—brain pressed by a bone—contributed by me. London adventures. Saxon by the way wrote to thank me. Home to cook turkey—tough.

Now the thaw has come: L. has his barometer: explains it to me. Walk over Mount Misery. Snow still thick, but the cart tracks run with rivulets. Snow cleared half way to Knotts Bushes. A dim wet ordinary spring winter day. Snowdrops on the graves. L. lent Connolly [Frederick Conolley, a farm hand] a pound. Turned in to the Army by Botten.

So Sally went, & kissed me, being a warm hearted woman, rather valiant, & free minded. What’ll become of her? Oh & my new coat, the blue striped one, came, & its not too loud: I’m pleased. And so the week starts again; & I must send off—oh I cant defer it—Roger to M⁠[argery Fry].

Thursday 7 March

A fortnight—well on Saturday it will be a fortnight—with influenza. Up today for the first time. So it shows my inveterate—whats the word for love of writing?—that I open this. Head a white vapour: legs bent candles. All hope abandoned. I think that was the main current, lying in bed. Too feverish in London to abandon hope. Had to scribble down my Lecture, until that was abandoned; & correct the last script of R. Then back on Saturday to bed: with a throat like plates of rough iron, which cracked when I swallowed. Oh & before getting into bed that bitter afternoon I read my epitaph—Mrs W. died so soon, in the N.S. & was pleased to support that dismissal very tolerably. A firm conviction somewhere in my survival power. Yet there I lay abandoned. And read all Havelock Ellis, a cautious cumulative, teased & tired book; too pressed down with that very common woman, Edith: so I judged her; but she was life to him: he lacked life; lacked all quick response: & she was stirring; farmed; preached; at last leapt out of [a] window. And loved women. He’s honest & clear but thick [illegible] & too like the slow graceful Kangaroo with its cautious soft leaps. But thats much due to influenza. Nessa yesterday. Out on terrace today. Spring smells—clean, sharp, varied. Crocuses out & snowdrops. L. making rock garden. All sounds of human life stilled. Robins & Smyth bag unattended. Some nice person, wanting to hear me lecture, sent me violets. A calm convalesence. But how now can we bring out R.? And does it matter? Anyhow finished. And my brain neednt run on. The lecture can run itself. And … & … I forget. Oh its the spring thats come while I was ill—birds chirping. P⁠[ercy]. spraying apple trees; blue crocuses with snowdrops. Yes: eno’ to try my hand on is done.

Wednesday 20 March

Yes, another attack—in fact 2 other attacks: one Sunday week [10 March]—101 with Angelica there to put me to bed; tother last Friday, 102 after lunch. So to bed up here in L.’s room, & Dr Tooth, who keeps me in bed (where I sit up with L. reading proofs) till tomorrow. Thats the boring history. What they call recurring with slight bronchitis. Yes. And the Book’s read [Roger Fry]. & cd. I write out my chart, it wd. be interesting. One Sunday (the 101 Sunday) L. gave me a very severe lecture on the first half. We walked in the meadows. It was like being pecked by a very hard strong beak. The more he pecked the deeper, as always happens. At last he was almost angry that I’d chosen “what seems to me the wrong method. Its merely anal⁠[ysis], not history. Austere repression. In fact dull to the outsider. All those dead quotations.” His theme was that you cant treat a life like that: must be seen from the writers angle, unless the liver is himself a seer, wh. R. wasnt. It was a curious example of L. at his most rational & impersonal: rather impressive; yet so definite, so emphatic, that I felt convinced: I mean of failure; save for one odd gleam, that he was himself on the wrong tack, & persisting for some deep reason—dissympathy with R.? lack of interest in personality? Lord knows. I note this plaited strand in my mind; & even while we walked & the beak struck deeper deeper had this completely detached interest in L. character. Then Nessa came; disagreed: Margery’s letter “very alive & interesting”; then L. read the 2nd half thought it ended on the doorstep at Bernard St.; then N.’s note “I’m crying cant thank you”—then N. & D. to tea up here; forbid me to alter anything; then Margery’s final letter—“Its him … unbounded admiration”. There I pause. Well, I think I re-write certain passages, have even in bed sketched them, but how in time for this spring? That I shelve till tomorrow. Great relief all the same. Its a slippery floor this: great flower pots; L. walking on his rubber soles; a plan to make this my bedroom: have a bath in cupboard. Yes, its a great relief. Suppose all the first half were to do again—as I’d decided—3 months grind .. And Lord to be quit of it & free—& Lord to have given Nessa back her Roger, lost since Julian died. Also I’m rather proud of my tenacity & conscience in that book: & want to—I suppose to increase my reputation, as biographer, when its sunk as novelist: want to be winging off on small articles & stories. Dog story brought in £170 today; a translation £20; & then Cha⁠[m]⁠brun says Harpers wants an essay on Ly Hester Stanhope: the book I read that Christmas at Lelant, & finished too soon, & put Lytton on the scent of. Yes; so I’m set up: & had a letter from Vita, who says we’re out of touch, & she minds. Not on my side I reply. She dont answer. I write to say why dont you answer … I think thats a fair though fuggy & frowsty annal (hows it spelt?) of the past 2 weeks. Cold blue & white weather from my window. Mabel here. Suavity & capacity itself, tho’ the usual strain with L. & Louie. War thought to be beginning. Peace with Finns. The G.’s raid Scapa. A disgrace. So we raid them. This may prelude a general attack. But why waste even this half inch upon these blaring & boring politics? Even Tooth, the red haired Dr whose name shd. be Hector told me he had no kind or sort of enthusiasm for this war—yet had craved for the last. Yet we must stick it out he said. An average decent opinion.

Thursday 21 March

Here is the Good Friday festival beginning. How one can sense that in a garden, with flowers & birds only, I cant say. Now for me begins the twilight hour, the emerging hour, of disagreeable compromise. Up to lunch. In the sitting room for tea. You know the dreary, messy, uncomfortable paper strewn, picking at this & that frame of mind. And with R. hanging over me. Walk out as soon as possible, & keep on reading Hervey’s memoirs. And so come to the top slowly. I’m thinking of some articles. Sidney Smith. Madame de Stael. Virgil. Tolstoy, or perhaps Gogol. Now I’ll get L. to find a life of Smith in the Lewes Library. A good idea. Poor L.—who looks like an Elizabethan, the picture of Charles Lamb, with his green velvet collar standing round his neck—& so bothered with fetching & carrying, & so serious, & with the old roadmenders bucket of red coal smouldering in him. I’ll ring up Nessa about sending Helen that chapter, & establish an engagement.

I read Tolstoy at Breakfast—Goldenweiser, that I translated with Kot in 1923 & have almost forgotten. Always the same reality—like touching an exposed electric wire. Even so imperfectly conveyed—his rugged short cut mind—to me the most, not sympathetic, but inspiring, rousing; genius in the raw. Thus more disturbing, more ‘shocking’ more of a thunderclap, even on art, even on lit.re than any other writer. I remember that was my feeling about W. & Peace, read in bed at Twickenham. Old Savage picked it up. “Splendid stuff!” & Jean tried to admire what was a revelation to me. Its directness, its reality. Yet he’s against photographic realism.

Sally is lame & has to go to the vet. Sun coming out. One bird pierces like a needle. All crocuses & squills out. No leaves, or buds on trees.

I’m quoted, about Russian, in Lit sup leader oddly enough.

Easter Sunday 24 March

A curious sub-life has set in, rather spacious, rather leisured, & secluded & content. Still sleep in L.’s room; then I slowly bath & dress & sit in the sitting room, quietly, entering M⁠[argery’]⁠s corrections. Not much bothered really, though I’ve so short a time. I cant help thinking, in spite of L., that its interesting: & I can I think liven & improve. And I’m buoyed up by M. & N. & D. And feel in one fortnight I shall be quit (oh no, there’ll be proofs). This is an egg shell life—so gingerly do I step to avoid rousing my temp: which was 99 pt 4 & is again a little up: but if I dont walk in the wind I think I can refrigerate, & yet keep my brain calm for the morning. Wobbly like one of the spring lambs in my legs. Mabel increases comfort 100 fold. And its refreshing & rejuvenating to see the gold thick clumps of crocuses, & the unopened green daffodils, & to hear my Asheham rooks dropping their husky caws through the gummy air. Birds are having a trial. L. works all the afternoon in his blue shirt making the rock garden. Old Botten is dying. Mabel & Louie have gone to church at Southease, & the Lambs bleat.

I’m beginning Sense & Sensibility—& reading about Apes. That reminds me—to do a C⁠[ommon]. R⁠[eader]. on Darwin. V. of the Beagle one section: Downe the other. So when I’m quit of R. & of the WEA I shall do little articles—& oh the relief of not having the whole building of a book on my shoulders! Of course there’ll be the wave splash in June, if we bring it out; but I’m fortified beforehand—thats odd. The first book thats been read first by others. Dear me, tho’, I’ve many paragraphs to rewrite, & there’s the end, & Helen still to comment. All the birds are sitting up in L. & V. The twig carrying has begun, & this goes on while all the guns are pointed & charged & no one dares pull the trigger. Not a sound this evening to bring in the human tears. I remember the sudden profuse shower one night just before war wh. made me think of all men & women weeping.

Tuesday 26 March

A curious letter from Hugh this afternoon, part of which I will copy, for I like reading old letters.

“As to my book (I wrote about Roman Fountain) of course I knew that you would dislike some of it very much, but hoped you wd like some which apparently you do. MacCarthy speaks to me as to a child, so does Harold N. talking of my babyish love of my toys in the D.T…. But do you care to hear the truth? Half of me is very mature, half has never grown up at all. I cant help my excitement which irritates you all. I never had anything when I was young (cant read). As to my writing you & I are the opposite ends of the bloody stick? You are the supreme example of the aesthetic-conscience—there has never been such another in English fiction. But you dont write novels. What you write needs a new name. I am the true novelist—a minor one but a true one. I know a lot about the novel & a lot about life seen from my very twisted child-haunted angle. Had I been normal I might have been a major novelist. As it is I am a Siamese twin…”

No I cant be bothered to copy any more. It rushes up into a Bengal light spirit of self-glorification—crocuses, sausages, Harold & chess—at the end, & skirts all the thorns & all the truth as usual. What Desmond said was he hasnt a “rare” mind … Dear dear, I’ve no mind to add my own comment.

John rings up to ask if he may bring a friend—a London friend—to lunch tomorrow. Then shall we ask Nessa to bring Helen to meet Margery? And there’s London on Monday … And I’m half inclined to kick my heels & despatch R. to the printer; & get rid of my artistic conscience. Ignorance was the begetter of that conscience. When I wrote TLS articles & knew nothing I slaved to make every sentence do instead of accuracy. How one’s mind interests one! A mercy, seeing its a wild tempest of a day: no outing; rain lashing & streaking the windows. Lottie & Grace over. A great flirt with Percy & presents of tomatoes & plants. And yesterday old Botten faded out under the eyes of Mrs West who’s layer out & night watcher to the village. A frail old man; the last of the old villagers—save Dedman—talking the melodious Sussex, sprinkled with words like ‘nard’ for shoulder, wily & sly & grasping; yet poetic too. And a bore. Bringing the milk he’d stay talking, so we always cut at the sight of him. Like a pollard willow grey greaved moss grown to look at—a tree I mean with very small shrivelled grey leaves.

And what else to fill the page! Such a batter at the window. The effect of the war on weather. Shall I listen in, & rake some music my way instead of raking my mind? No, I will not look at R. again.

Friday 29 March

What shall I think of that⁠[s] liberating & freshening? I’m in the mood when I open my window at night & look at the stars. Unfortunately its 12.15 on a grey dull day, the aeroplanes are active, Botten is to be buried at 3: & I’m brain creased after Margery, after John & his John after Q.. But its the little antlike nibblings of M. that infest me—ants run in my brain—emendations, tributes, feelings, dates—& all the detail that seems to the non-writer so easy (“just to add this about Joan &c”) & to me is torture. Thumbing those old pages—& copying onto the carbon. Lord lord! And influenza damped. Well I recur what shall I think of? The river. Say the Thames at London bridge; & buying a notebook; & then walking along the Strand & letting each face give me a buffet; & each shop; & perhaps a Penguin. For we’re up in London on Monday. Then I think I’ll read an Elizabethan—like swinging from bough to bough. Then back here I’ll saunter … oh yes & we’ll travel our books round the Coast—& have tea in a shop—& look at antiques, & there’ll be a lovely farmhouse—or a new lane—& flowers—& bowls with L. & reading very calmly for C.Rs. but no pressure. & May coming & asparagus, & butterflies. Perhaps I’ll garden a little oh & print, & change my bedroom furniture. Is it age, or what that makes life here alone, no London no visitors seem a long trance of pleasure—or might be, could I be quit of Helen A. & R.

I’m inducing a state of peace & sensation feeling—not idea feeling. The truth is we’ve not seen spring in the country since I was ill at Asheham—1914—& that had its holiness in spite of the depression. I think I’ll also dream a poet-prose book, perhaps make a cake now & then. Now, now—never any more future skirmishing or past regretting—relish the Monday & the Tuesday & dont take on the guilt of selfishness feeling: for in Gods name I’ve done my share, with pen & talk, for the human race. I mean young writers can stand on their own feet. Yes, I deserve a spring—I owe nobody nothing. Not a letter need I write (there are the poems in MS all waiting) nor need I have week-enders—For others can do that as well as I can, this spring. Now being drowned by the flow of running water, I will read Whymper till lunch time.

Sunday 31 March

I would like to tell myself a nice little wild improbable story to spread my wings after this cramped ant-like morning—which I will not detail—for details are the death of me. Thank God, this time next week I shall be free—free of entering M⁠[argery’]⁠s corrections & my own into margins. The story?—oh about the life of a bird, its cheep cheep—its brandishing of a twig by my window—its sensations. Or about Botten becoming one with the mud—the glory fading—the million tinted flowers sent by the doleful mourners. All black like a moving pillar box the woman was—& the man in a black cardboard casing. A story dont come—no but I may unfurl a metaphor—No. The windows very dove grey & dim blue islands—a rust red on L. & V. & the marsh green & dark like the floor of the sea. At the back of my head the string is still wound tight. I will unwind it playing bowls. Then Bobo. And still waxen legs. To carry the virtues of the sketch—its random reaches its happy finds—into the finished work is probably beyond me. Sydney Smith did in talk. Note. To Read P. Plymley. Yes, bare wood spring painted is very fine—flesh pink & elephant grey. Knitting is also a help. Margery says its useless.

Butter all eaten by guests. Asked to meet Tom & Desmond at Hutchinsons. Excitement. Wine. Good food. Old Desmond—shall we go? I wd like to write short book stories. I would like to recapture my own fling.

S⁠[ense]. & S⁠[ensibility]. all scenes, very sharp. Surprises. masterly. Some pedestrian stylised pages, wh. she ends brusquely. The door opened. In came…. Willoughby … or, Edward. Very dramatic. Plot from the 18th Century. Mistressly in her winding up. No flagging. Rather heres an end. And the love so intense, so poignant. And marriage ends all. Sisters love sympathetic. Old Mrs Dashwood the image of—Mrs Curtis? Mrs Easdale?—Elinor I suppose Cassandra: Marianne Jane, edited. Well now for my blue knitting.

Saturday 6 April

Whom did we meet in London this week? Bonamy Dobrée the very moment we arrived. Spick & span, clipped, grey, with a rainbow of medal ribbons across his breast. Training cadets at Filey. Keen unconscious young men, very good at their jobs: instinctively patriotic; the rest ‘Bolshies’—I mean the intellectuals. Asked his professional opinion about the war, B. said it might last years. No one can afford to attack. So, unless driven by some goad, there we shall sit: until perhaps food or other shortage drives Hitler to sting. No sign of it so far. All quiet save for spasmodic raids. So, having little to add, we planed down on to civilisation talk: about books, the young, the growth of classes, the origin of biography; Tom’s last poem “didactic”, & he left thanking us for civilisation. Also he mentioned Valentine, & her house keeping; & how her child is in America; & how we all descend the rungs of lady & gentlemanhood. Has inherited from his odd Pawnbroking banking forefathers a great chest of V⁠[ictoria]⁠n Silver.

Then a day in bed with headache. Then to my task again—Thurs; lunch with John: met Worsley; a round mild spectacled brown young man, rubbed, smoothed. No relation of GT’s: now at the N.S: where he tidies Raymond’s table. As we talked we hacked thick steak; Oh said John my woman has a dodge for getting rations. No wonder. Some Bloomsbury cabhorse; & for the first time in my lunching out, I had to exchange for a steak that I could cut—And that with difficulty. Then L. was riddled & needled by Miss Robins for 2 hours. A French clock left by Sir Hugh Bell went on striking. She uncovered her secret after the man from Frodsham had mended it—to leave us the MS of Raymond in her will. I spent one afternoon at the L⁠[ondon] L⁠[ibrary]. looking up quotes. Another buying silk for vests. & we did not dine with the Hutchinsons to meet Tom & Desmond, & how glad I was of the drowsy evening. And so, at 12.45 yesterday handed L. the 2 MSS & we drove off as happy as Bank holiday clerks—Thats off my shoulders! Good or bad—done. So I felt wings on my shoulders: & brooded quietly, till the tire punctured: we had to jackal in mid road; & I was like a stalk, all crumpled, when we got here. And its a keen spring day; infinitely [?] lit & tinted & cold & soft: all the groups of daffodils yellow along the bank; lost my 3 games, & want nothing but sleep. Still, other ideas prick; & Watkins offers £400 (about) for an essay on a character. Brace shies at Roger though “no interest in him in the USA”.

Two days holiday before I begin my lecture. Knitting ties. Reading Sydney Smith. Odd feeling to have done (temporarily) a book. And is it good or dull? And what’ll the old friends say? Never mind that for 3 weeks.

Saturday 13 April

“The first crunch of the war”—thats how Winston puts it. The Gs. have invaded Norway. Battles are going on. News leaks out. Some say this is Hitler’s downfall. I must make this record, for in fact it gives the old odd stretch to the back curtain of the mind. A fine spring day in front; daffodils luminous groups along the terrace. Aeroplanes overhead. Mine fields laid, apparently to let us land our army. I write, because it is a crunch; after the long lapse; also that I’m maggoty with lecture writing. Must ease my head. These are my motives. And Nessa rings up about the Roger pictures. Herbert Fisher was knocked senseless, had arm & ribs & skull fractured 2 days ago by a lorry. On Tuesday, London: perhaps Sybil Tom & Desmond. No letters. Mrs Chavasse to tea about the play on Monday. Walking up the violet bank this afternoon. Reading Sydney Smith. Damn this running in the head that comes of lecture writing—cant think why I bother: why I let myself run on—is it suppressed jealousy? partly. Also I’m interested. But surely its excessive to go on making up, when its only 20 old ladies in black bonnets I shall make up for. Dinner in the oven. Meat bad & scarce. Eggs for dinner. Fish for L. maccaroni. And its time

Saturday 20 April

Desmond to dinner [on 18 April]. London week. Talk went like this: “Youre the spit of Sydney Smith—” He said he wanted streets not country. “Must have the muddy London streets—So S.S. said. Oh & there’s so much to talk about. And let me see your fathers shabby old books—Now (at dinner) a few leading questions … about the war. I have a plan for giving G⁠[ermany]. everything, everything: but no arms. We must see to that. And is it impossible? … Then, I must tell you—I’ve told several people—of my revelation. I was reading the Hesperides—the smutty bits—when a voice said August 16th Armistice day … But which August? And I wasnt excited. It was an outer voice. I was thinking of Herrick….” After dinner,—“Michael in an unhappy state. No sense of comfort. Cant love a silly cocktail woman, nor live with a rough woman … The women I’ve loved never cared for clothes. I like quizzy cats. Why all this larding? Even Rachel has a silly row of curls. You wdnt dream of painting your face. Diana [Cooper], after a time, I found in spite of her esquimaux trousers & pearls—oh how ridiculous she looked meeting me at the station—she’s humble. Roger … a very dull letter writer. I’m very curious to read yr book. It’ll be such an odd book. I saw him in Trinity Great Court. Thats R.F. said Eddy Marsh. A gigantic intellect. Its too hot to talk to a man with that intellect … Molly is a lady. Desmond says all the same she enjoys my coarse stories. I’m writing Desmond M⁠[acCarthy’]⁠s Dictionary. Its my autobiography. Under M. marriage, money—easier for a short winded writer than a book … One loses the power of sequence with age. Cant prolong an emotion. The senile forget at once. My daughter dead? (weeps) but why d’you give me marmalade for tea? I only like it at breakfast … I’m noting every stage of old age. Its this lack of intensity the young mind in us. Certain gifts are sucked by age … The Sunday Times has cut me down £250. And my mother only left 11,000. I gave D⁠[ermod]. & M⁠[ichael]. each £1000. So I’m about square. But cd I afford to buy a house in Lewes? Molly wants to have a very nice tidy home. I dont mind squalor. Then I shd have a room in London—a cup of tea sent up, like Morgan … The young can describe passing things—a bridge seen from the train. No. One doesnt remember them. We read Tolstoy. I kept Dos⁠[toevs]⁠ky to myself in my selfish way. They read Jane Austen—Eddie cd say what Mr Woodhouse did on Wednesday. Thats odd about Hugh Walpole—Spender ought to tell us more about Inez—everything or nothing. The idea of being perfectly frank with the public—When is Moore coming? Ask him to stay an extra day. I’ll mark that week end—May 18th in my book. Juliet Duff gave it me—gives me one every year. Oh I’ve stayed so late—¼ to 1…”

And we had Sybil [Colefax] & Herbert Woolf [to tea]. And came back yesterday. I remember Clive saying how he was the only person who felt uncomfortable when a singer had a flybutton undone. I had meant to note some such fragments; but the talk has rattled me.

A stuffy evening. News suspended. Herbert Fisher dead. Sybil saw him the day before—of course.

Thursday 25 April

My mother, I was thinking had 2 characters.

I was thinking of my memoirs. The platform of time. How I see father from the 2 angles. As a child condemning; as a woman of 58 understanding—I shd say tolerating. Both views true? Herbert’s death recalls him. The groan. That man will kill me! H. going up to talk in the study. Hearing his wheeze of a laugh on the stairs at night. Essence of a prig—a don, I thought. He came into the day nursery. Advised us to read some shilling shocker. Uneasy condescension. A more friendly memory of a walk at Brighton. I had to choose the way. Chose against his wish. His frock coat. The King coming to Oxford. Uncle H. advising. Cd be pressed. H.’s shyness. How he told Emmy “dont be a fool!” crossing the road, when she screamed. At Oxford when a don. Walking to Bores Hill. He asked me about Trevy’s book. I praised it. He demurred. The same question next year. I denigrated it. He defended—but pleased. His vanity. His advice at the Ilberts’ house. History required special training. I was left alone to consult him. Did I suggest history? or fiction? a serious depressing interview. “H. posts his letters on the school room table.” Then the Cabinet—coming to Hogarth House, discussing action v. contemplation. “I’m not a great hand at writing…” Some uneasy self-consciousness. The Magnolias at Kew. H. looking. And the lunch—the Dutch sweets. “Mr F. at a Cabinet meeting.” A long talk alone about Armistice day. Olive brought him. He stayed. Told me about Milner. The war won today. So to the last social meeting at New College. The party. His light cats tread. His hollow benevolence. His shell. His affection. His considerateness. His enthusiasm. Father & Fred. His stories. Warmer & mellower—asking me to come again. Gave me Homer, gave me his books. But the distance too great. & so—I shant give him the pleasure—never went there. And thats over.

Herbert Fisher as a young man was almost ungainly: with his prominent cheekbones & adams apple. He had innocent blue eyes: a wisp of hair. Much improved in dignity & distinction as he aged. Finally the very type of culture & distinction—light in a pea jacket. Composed, ben⁠[ev]⁠olent, wary. A crane like man. Much like Adrian.

Butterflies ball day 3 days ago. Cuckoo heard. Swallows come.

Advertisements: For 16 years housekeeper & faithful friend … Note the doglike attribute.

There is nothing in the world so much admired as a man who knows how to bear unhappiness with courage. Seneca.

Lady, formerly supported by brother, Army Colonel … in urgent need as only income gifts from former servant.

Monday 6 May

Nessa has just been & told us a ‘very tiresome piece of family news’—A.’s affair with B. (I keep to the discretion of initials). A most astonishing piece of news. Today they set off for 2 months alone in Yorkshire. Pray God she may tire of that rusty surly slow old dog with his amorous ways & his primitive mind. It makes one feel oddly old: even to me comes the emptiness that Nessa feels, as I can guess. A. off alone in love, passionately, with someone old eno’ to be her father. How curiously without youth & laughter; Julian’s death renewed—And what can she be feeling, in the train to Yorkshire this sullen May night? All the nightingales singing from that rusty canine jaw? And the future? I prognosticate an excuse to return in 5 weeks from now. A scene with B.: then a happy summer here, half repentant, as when she gave up the stage.

This blocks the way to my crowded London diary, & reduces it to fribble & patter. Clive’s night: the police; & Mary’s visit; the Duke of Devonshire & his midnight daffodils; Clive’s unshaven cheeks; Desmond next day—all this I leave like torn scraps in a wastepaper basket. Item my tea with Hugh; the fall of Fatty [Claude] Rogers’ picture; Hart Davis fresh from Peter Fleming [1907-71, travel writer]; the sulphurous vista of the Green Park; the traffic; Hugh’s sodomitic confession of affection; our intimacy interrupted; then Raymond; & little soft round Worsley’s discourse on the young [?]—which should bring in my lecture; 200 about there; Robins’ carnations; no fear on my part—& so home, last Friday, jaded & jangled, with my proofs—& this evenings work blown up, by this explosion of love; & the dream of the Yorkshire moors, & those two setting the supper in order, & retiring to the couch. Nothing will induce her to marry. So the land recedes from my ship which draws out into the sea of old age. The land with its children.

And we have withdrawn from Norway. The first defeat of the war. Hawhaw has it all his own way. Nessa advises us to prognosticate about that. Compare Maynard’s optimism 3 weeks ago. War practically over … Kingsley of course croaks in triumph. Another lull.

In London we had Wogan & Stephen: then Stephen again with his last poems at 12 am. His book [The Backward Son] sneered at; I praised it. John—well, Mrs L⁠[ehmann]. has broken her thigh. The cold is such I shall have my wood fire. Wrote to GBS this evening.

The worst year we’ve ever had in the Press, I gather.

An old tramp comes to grind scissors. I give him 2, & then reflect—should I spend 1/8 on scissors? This money anxiety contracts & loosens. Oh & I’ve forgotten I think Vita’s visit [on 23 April], & can only assure whoever may read this page that we’ve seen & talked a great deal, & I’ve laboured over my wretched book, unable to strangle my conscience or to write one line as I write here—for the 2 weeks that have passed since I described Herbert’s death—about which Mary, by the way, was highly philosophic. But there’s no Angelica to hoard gossip for.

Its odd how much I thought of that lecture, & now its all forgotten—the agony & the sweat & the old man praising me, & the tea at Fullers, & the man in tweed with the whore, so L. called her.

Monday 23 May

I admit to some content, some closing of a chapter, & peace that comes with it, from posting my proofs today: I admit—because we’re in the 3rd day of “the greatest battle in history.” It began (here) with the 8 oclock wireless announcing, as I lay half asleep, the invasion of Holland & Belgium. The third day of the Battle of Waterloo. Apple blossom snowing the garden. A bowl lost in the pond. Churchill exhorting all men to stand together. “I have nothing to offer but blood & tears & sweat”. These vast formless shapes further circulate. They aren’t substances; but they make everything else minute. Duncan saw an air battle over Charleston—a silver pencil & a puff of smoke. Percy has seen the wounded arriving in their boots. So my little moment of peace comes in a yawning hollow. But though L. says he has petrol in the garage for suicide shd. Hitler win, we go on. Its the vastness, & the smallness, that make this possible. So intense are my feelings (about Roger): yet the circumference (the war) seems to make a hoop round them. No, I cant get the odd incongruity of feeling intensely & at the same time knowing that there’s no importance in that feeling. Or is there, as I sometimes think, more importance than ever?

Basket given us by the WEA—then G. & Annie⁠[?]. A horrid little scrub called Lee wastes a morning, about Curtis. Q. & Eth Watson dine. And we have Desmond & Moore this week end. I made buns for tea today—a sign my thralldom to proofs (galleys) is over.

Tuesday 14 May

Yes, we are being led up garlanded to the altar. A soldier with his rifle. The Dutch Govt & Court here. Warned of clergymen in parachutes. War war—a great battle—this hot day, with the blossom on the grass. A plane goes over—

Wednesday 15 May

An appeal last night for home defence—against parachutists. L. says he’ll join. An acid conversation. Our nerves are harassed—mine at least: L. evidently relieved by the chance of doing something. Gun & uniform to me slightly ridiculous. Behind that the strain: this morning we discussed suicide if Hitler lands. Jews beaten up. What point in waiting? Better shut the garage doors. This a sensible, rather matter of fact talk. Then he wrote letters, & I too: thanked Bernard Shaw for his love letter. Copied my lecture contentedly. A thunderous hot day. Dutch laid down arms last night. The great battle now raging. Ten days, we say, will settle it. I guess we hold: then dig in; about Nov. the USA comes in as arbitrator. On the other hand—

Mabel just come. She says theyre building wooden bridges beside the others on the Thames. Pop-pop-pop, as we play bowls. Probably a raider over Eastbourne way. Now thunder rain sets in. L. & P⁠[ercy] discussing Miss Emery’s fruit. John wishes we’d come up. Mr Pritchard (the old one) dead at last. No, I dont want the garage to see the end of me. I’ve a wish for 10 years more, & to write my book wh. as usual darts into my brain. L. finished his yesterday. So we’ve cleared up our book accounts—tho’ its doubtful if we shall publish this June. Why am I optimistic? Or rather not either way? because its all bombast, this war. One old lady pinning on her cap has more reality. So if one dies, it’ll be a common sense, dull end—not comparable to a days walk, & then an evening reading over the fire. Hospital trains go by. A hot day to be wounded. Anyhow, it cant last, this intensity—so we think—more than 10 days. A fateful book this. Still some blank pages—& what shall I write on the next 10?

This idea struck me: the army is the body: I am the brain. Thinking is my fighting.

Monday 20 May

This idea was meant to be more impressive. It bobbed up I suppose in one of the sentient moments. The war is like desperate illness. For a day it entirely obsesses; then the feeling faculty gives out; next day one is disembodied, in the air. Then the battery is re-charged, & again—what? Well, the bomb terror. Going to London to be bombed. And the catastrophe—if they break through: Channel this morning said to be their objective. Last night Churchill asked us to reflect, when being bombed, that we were at least drawing fire from the soldiers for once.

Desmond & Moor⁠[e] are at this moment reading—i.e. talking under the apple trees. A fine windy morning. Moor⁠[e] has a thatch of soft unattached hair: red rimmed eyes, very steady; but less force & mass to him than I remembered. Less drive behind his integrity which is unalloyed, but a little weakened in thrust by the sense of age (65) & not quite such a solid philosophic frame as I suppose when we were all young we anticipated. So that our reverence—how mute I was at the Sangers—how timidly I ventured my little compliment—is now what one might call retrospective. At tea yesterday with Nessa & Quentin we remembered his great influence: his silences. “I didnt want to be silent. I couldnt think of anything to say” he said, rebutting, I think with some feeling that he’d carried this influence too far—our charge that he had silenced his generation. Hence his dependence on Desmond; who started talking, to the towel horse, to the cat, when he was a baby, & was sent to school to silence him. Many old memories. These spin a kind of gauze over the war: wh. is broken by papers: & at listening in time. The war then is waged vigorously till I throw Coleridge into the fire: & it takes another leap. D. & I discussed Irene; & some of the old anecdotes of course appear intact. A good talker makes his toilet of a morning much as a Mary Hutchinson makes up. Word for word we had the definition of age; wh. I think I recorded after our dinner. What is impressive however, are the improvisations. I like hearing Desmond give his first version—say of—I forget—on the spur of the moment. Nessa & I sat & talked here (the Lodge) while they bowld. Politics—the peace terms—how the young havent had a chance—Even we. She knitting Q.’s grey stockings: will have a show at the Leicester Galleries. Then to London the whole lot of us tomorrow; & on Friday here again. Roger & the proofs have entirely receded; nor can I tackle Walpole—havent even read the book; & its ¼ to 12: then lunch: extravagant guinea fowl; Moor⁠[e] munches like a chaff cutter; I guess has not a liberal table at home; takes a logical view of food; eats philosophically to the end: while Desmond sprinkles sugar & cream, also liberally but erratically. So the housekeeper in me rises into being, in this miserable life of detail & bombast.

Saturday 25 May

Then we went up to what has been so far the worst week in the war. And so remains. On Tuesday evening, after my freshener, before Tom & Wm. P. came, the BBC announced the taking of Amiens & Arras. The French PM told the truth & knocked all our “holding” to atoms. On Monday they broke through. Its tedious picking up details. It seems they raid with tanks & parachutists: roads crammed with refugees cant be bombed. They crash on. Now are at Boulogne. But it also seems these occupations arent altogether solid. What are the great armies doing to let this 25 mile hole stay open? The feeling is we’re outwitted. Theyre agile & fearless & up to any new dodge. The French forgot to blow up Bridges. The G.s seem youthful, fresh, inventive. We plod behind. This went on the 3 London days. The party (Tuesday) agreed to ignore. William told a story about Mrs Hyde Colville’s camellia hat being burnt as a wreath at a cremation. Tom, I thought, is ossifying (after Desmond’s geniality) into that curious writers egotism. “Coleridge & I … people read only our best poems. They ignore all the rest of me. It is difficult, when lecturing, to leave out oneself. Yet poor man if this complacency gives him a shell, no doubt it protects him from suffering. A very self centred, self torturing & self examining man, seen against Desmond’s broad beam, & Moore’s candid childs eyes.

Then I had Sybil: & noted her—what in another would be heroism: her son at Arras: she working all day: yet has so much fluid worldliness, & something hard at bottom that one doesnt credit her with enough of her courage. “We’re all in it” she said; simply; yet then curled & shrivelled, because we had had D. & M. & she had been talking to the respectable Cynthia Asquith. Envy writhes at once. Then there was the mad Kot: all his hair brushed up; heavy, yellow, bloodshot. To begin with he told us the story of a Tolstoy. It struck me he lives in what he reads: makes it do instead of living. Then fabricates what he calls a theology. From that he turned to Gertler: his suicide. Has become opinionated & violent. But his madness was about the war. He seemed raving. He seemed almost drunk. All the old rage with Murry is now with Fascists. All Germans are devils. We must kill every one. Then some hare brained scheme. Smoking his expensive cigarettes. And his handshake as crushing as ever—as positive. But something gone queer—a screw loose. He gets up at 6 to listen to the BBC at 7. is obsessed—brooding alone at Acacia Road. Does his own housework, & denounces, lays down the law. Had lectured Gertler about his son.

Rodmell burns with rumours. Are we to be bombed, evacuated? Guns that shake the windows. Hospital ships sunk. So it comes our way.

Todays rumour is the Nun in the bus who pays her fare with a mans hand.

Tuesday 28 May

And today at 8, the French P.M. Broadcast the treachery of the Belgian King. The Belgians have capitulated. The Government is not capitulating. Churchill to broadcast at 4. A wet dull day.

Wednesday 29 May

But hope revives—I dont know why. A desperate battle. The allies holding. How sick one gets of the phrase—how easy to make a Duff Cooper speech, about valour, & history, where one knows the end of the sentence. Still it cheers, somehow. Poetry as Tom said is easier to write than prose. I cd reel off patriotic speeches, by the dozen. L. has been in London. A great thunderstorm. I was walking on the marsh & thought it was the guns on the channel ports. Then, as they swerved, I conceived a raid on London; turned on the wireless; heard some prattler; & then the guns began to lighten: then it rained. Mrs Dedman off north for the duration. We had our First Aid meeting. Miss Emery English country spinsterhood at its best: sturdy, yet conciliatory, lucid, humorous, with a bar of medal tabs. Everything spaced, brief & clear. L. said the English genius for unofficial organisation. All about the Water Co. & the tap & the Rectory scullery—very tactful too. Mrs Hubbard, like a great turkey cock, head of the committee. Hubbard limping outside. Then the [W.I.] plays rehearsed here yesterday. My contribution to the war is the sacrifice of pleasure: I’m bored: bored & appalled by the readymade commonplaceness of these plays: which they cant act unless we help. I mean, the minds so cheap, compared with ours, like a bad novel—thats my contribution—to have my mind smeared by the village & WEA mind; & to endure it, & the simper. But this is to be qualified—only theres Miss Griffiths [Hogarth Press clerk] coming for the weekend—all simper & qualification. So, if Margaret Ll. Davies says, how insolent we middleclass women are, I argue, why cant the workers then reject us? Whats wrong is the conventionality—not the coarseness. So that its all lulled & dulled. The very opposite of “common” or working class.

Began P.H again today, & threshed & threshed till perhaps a little grain can be collected. I sent off my Walpole too. After dinner I began Sidney Smith; plan being to keep short flights going: P.H. in between. Oh yes—one cant plan, any more, a long book. H. Brace cable that they accept Roger—whom, which, I’d almost forgotten. So thats a success; where I’d been expecting failure. It cant be so bad as all that. 250 advance. But we shall I suppose certainly postpone. Reading masses of Coleridge & Wordsworth letters of a night—curiously untwisting & burrowing into that plaited nest. Withers Green cant sleep for thinking of raids. No news of Louie’s brother [Harry West]. Rumours about Gwyn’s wounds & Col. Westmacott. They’re fully furbished in 5 minutes. Rain—& purple & now its over—clear over Caburn & the birds shouting. A rill of sound—a flutter of ribands—no continuity or connection with each other. Reading Thomas A’Quinas [1933] by Chesterton. His skittish over ingenious mind makes one shy (like a horse). Not straightforward, but has a good engine in his head. I want to send out parachutes into these remote places—I cant find the word I want.—prospectors, perhaps?

Thursday 30 May

Walking today (Nessa’s birthday) by Kingfisher pool saw my first hospital train—laden, not funereal, but weighty, as if not to shake bones. Something what is the word I want: grieving & tender & heavy laden & private—bringing our wounded back carefully through the green fields at which I suppose some looked. Not that I could see them. And the faculty for seeing in imagination always leaves me so suffused with something partly visual partly emotional, I can’t though its very pervasive, catch it when I come home—the slowness, cadaverousness, grief of the long heavy train, taking its burden through the fields. Very quietly it slid into the cutting at Lewes. Instantly wild duck flights of aeroplanes came over head; manoeuvred; took up positions & passed over Caburn. Percy has seen Westmacot⁠[t]’s man, home on leave, very thin, drawn & aged; says its a hell: was at Arras: all had to fight. And the same stories as the papers about the brutality to refugees. Mrs Dedman is off north. Louie worried & sad. Her mother cant stand the strain now the boys are gone, alone with the chattering idiot. A Mrs Ayres, who loves my books, called, to suggest a mental home. Mrs West has made up her mind to become a nurse & let him go. So whats to become of father, Louie asks, whose nerves are bad? This is a pinch of Hitler in the cottages of Rodmell too. No news today. Holding the line—heroism—all the usual perorations, in the usual highflown tense voice. Oh for a speaking voice, once in a way—not Harold’s though, which disgusted me Armies retreating unbroken in spite of uncovered left wing as well as Mr McLaren. “Does Mr Nicolson speak before or after dinner?—” Like the imposition of personality in writing—say Meredith’s style, or Carlyle’s, when one wants facts. And being beaten at bowls irritates me; & I’m strained writing PH—so much more of a strain than Roger. And no meat today. And weeded this morning. And was very happy—the moment can be that: only theres no support in the fabric—if you see what I mean, as Charlie Sanger used to say—theres no healthy tissue round the moment. It’s blown out. But for a moment, on the terrace, no one coming, alone with L., ones certainly happy. And I like the windblown state of ones body in the open air—wind, warm wind washing all the crevices, a feeling one doesnt have in London, an air cleanliness, not a soap & water one.

Friday 31 May

Scraps, orts & fragments, as I said in PH. which is now bubbling—I’m playing with words; & think I owe some dexterity to finger exercises here—but the scraps: Louie has seen Mr Westmacot’s man: “Its an eyesore”—his description of fighting near Boulogne. Percy weeding: “I shall conquer ’em in the end. If I was sure of our winning the other battle…” Raid, said to be warned, last night. All the searchlights in extreme antennal vibration. They have blots of light, like beads of dew on a stalk. Mr Hanna ‘stood by’ half the night. Rumour, very likely: rumour wh. has transported the English in Belgium who, with their golf sticks ball & some nets in a car coming from Flanders, were taken for parachutists: condemned to death, released; & returned to Seaford. Rumour, via Percy, transplanted them to “somewhere near Eastbourne” & the villagers armed with rifles, pitchforks etc. Shows what a surplus of unused imagination we possess. We—the educated—check it: as I checked my cavalry on the down at Telscombe & transformed them into cows drinking. Making up again. So that I couldnt remember, coming home, if I’d come by the mushroom path or the field. How amazing that I can tap that old river again; & how satisfying. But will it last? I made out the whole of the end; & need only fill in; the faculty, dormant under the weight of Roger, springs up. And to me its the voice on the scent again. “Any waste paper?” here I was interrupted by the jangling bell. Small boy in white sweater come, I suppose, for Scouts, & Mabel says they pester us daily at 37, & make off with the spoils. Desperate fighting. The same perorations. Coming through Southease I saw Mrs Cockell in old garden hat weeding. Out comes a maid in muslin apron & cap tied with blue ribband. Why? To keep up standards of civilisation? I also heard a pick-pick as I passed Mount Misery, & crouched low under the thick hedge of cow parlsey & saw the scrub—Lee—risked rudeness, & marched on. Land girls weeding in the field by the river. One elegant in blue trousers & green head band; the other a dumpy elderly spinster, with a vast bottom in knickerbockers. Two more, with hairdressed hair, among the Dedman, Wests & Thompsett men. Began Balzac, Vautrin.

[Monday 3 June]

Leonard said, after Miss Griffiths went, “If it gives them so much happiness, we ought to put up with it from time to time”. I said, But how, seeing she never spoke & was as unresponsive as a fish, could it have given her pleasure? “She leads such an awful life in Acton. She likes the food & sitting in a garden.” This fairly sums up a very laboured week end; when we drew bucket up after bucket & nothing happened. Acton is noisy. She lives with an Aunt and a grandmother who forgets things, & they have gas. But we made her sing, Monteverdi: & she sang quite simply. Will she marry? or fade? Again I’m struck with the helplessness of the lower orders. All of us on top. What can they get at—? Louie said this morning “The Duke of Northumberland has been killed”. I had a sense of a very heavy tree fallen. A young man so loaded with everything to be lopped. A kind of crash it seemed, for a duke to fall, compared with a Harry West. I was woken by a great boom rattling my windows. Listened for another; none came. But 2 bombs were dropped “in Sussex”. Buttercups & sorrel week end—the very flush of the first summer. May still in but bruised: a tossing wind today; none yesterday. Poor little Griffiths looking at the evening. So quiet after Acton.

Nessa & Duncan & Q. over on Saturday. We discussed Helen. D. said, She’s not intimate eno’ with you to be honest about money. Then A. & B.—how discreet! D. can only say to him Pass the salt—He would not begin upon his anger, as I expressed mine. Nessa said, One must look on the good side. She might have loved an airman. She has an odd streak of luck. Then the weekend descended. I’ve just only just been beaten at bowls. Breakfast was at 7.30. And this time tomorrow shall I or not be having cocktails with Colefax? I think so yes: in order to discipline myself. Only clothes? gloves? stockings? 4 5ths of the army over here now. A respite, a pause, perhaps. Perhaps Italy comes in … Then what about Roger? No proofs. We have now been hard at it hero-making. The laughing, heroic, Tommy—how can we be worthy of such men?—every paper, every BBC rises to that dreary false cheery hero-making strain. Will they be grinding organs in the street in 6 months? Its the emotional falsity; not all false; yet inspired with some eye to the main chance. So the politicians mate guns & tanks. No. Its the myth making stage of the war we’re in. “Please, no letters” I read this twice in the Times Deaths column from parents of dead officers.

Friday 7 June

Just back this roasting hot evening. The great battle which decides our life or death goes on. Last night an air raid here. Today brittle [?] hard sparks. Up till 1.30 this morning, Kingsley, diffusing his soft charcoal gloom. Question of suicide seriously debated among the 4 of us—R. Macaulay the other—in the gradually darkening room. At last no light at all. This was symbolic. French are to be beaten; invasion here; 5th Coin active; a German pro-Consul; Engsh Govt in Canada; we in concentration camps, or taking sleeping draughts. The menace now is Ireland. K.M. gives us about 5 weeks before the great attack on Engld begins. I will continue tomorrow when less sleepy. Saw Stephen, Sybil, John, Morgan, Judith, Raymond, K.M. Rose Macaulay, finally W. Robson—but cant discriminate

Sunday 9 June

I will continue—but can I? The pressure of this battle wipes out London pretty quick. A gritting day. As sample of my present mood, I reflect: capitulation will mean all Jews to be given up. Concentration camps. So to our garage. Thats behind correcting Roger, playing bowls. One taps any source of comfort—Leigh Ashton at Ch⁠[arlesto]⁠n yesterday for instance. But today the line is bulging. Last night aeroplanes (G?) over: shafts of light following. I papered my windows.

Another reflection: I dont want to go to bed at midday: this refers to the garage. What we dread (its no exaggeration) is the news that the French Govt. have left Paris. A kind of growl behind the cuckoo & t’other birds: a furnace behind the sky. It struck me that one curious feeling is, that the writing ‘I’, has vanished. No audience. No echo. Thats part of one’s death. Not altogether serious, for I correct Roger: send finally I hope tomorrow: & could finish P.H. But it is a fact—this disparition of an echo.

Monday 10 June

A day off. I mean one of those odd lapses of anxiety which may be false. Anyhow they said this morning that the line is unbroken—save at certain points. And our army has left Norway & is going to their help. Anyhow—its a day off—a coal gritty day. L. breakfasted by electric light. And cool mercifully after the furnace. Today, too, I sent off my page proofs, & thus have read my Roger for the last time. The Index remains. And I’m in the doldrums; a little sunk, & open to the suggestion, conveyed by the memory of Leonard’s coolness, enforced by John’s silence, that its one of my failures. Reading it as closely as I did, I couldn’t generalise the whole. I think it has a certain completeness; but I also think there are patches of anal; too much quotation; sometimes its cramped & poky. Thats about all I can lay hands on at the moment. The after book stage is on me.

Now to record a funny little—what shall I call it?—snag in my Elizabeth Bowen relationship. I decided, as my October letter went unanswered, & as Rose said she’d seen her, to take that little bull by the horns & telephone; she was out. So I sent a card, asking if we could meet. No answer today. If there’s no answer at all, then that friendships over. But why? Cant conceive. But as I cant go on writing, over it must be. And indeed, its not so petty a snag; for I was fond of her; & I think she of me. And we could talk seriously. And she’s the only one of the younger generation of women … But whats the use of asking what can have happened? Some gossip? Some mischief making? But as I never said a word, or saw any go between,—again, whats the use? If she’s dumb, one of these days I’ll ask David Cecil. Thats my little snag.

Now I must at once forage, & busy myself. Raymond, who is leaving the NS for the M. of Information, sends me Haryo. I’m not in the mood for memoirs. What next? Darwin? Mme de Stael? It must be solid, yet short. I must put my head to the gallop, so as to cover these weeks. PH can be finished. And my Sketch of the Past continued. Some experiment I think. The old book of critical excursion, perhaps … Yes, an experiment not a drudge.

Tuesday 21 June

Today or yesterday Italy came in: French said to be holding most lines; Govt offices leaving Paris; no letter from Eth Bowen; plays rehearsed, working till eyes blind at Index.

A slaty queasy feeling about E.B. discussed it with L. What a time to quarrel with friends. Wound to vanity & affection.

Wednesday 12 June

Black news. French apparently withdrawing but only guarded news. Maurois begging for help last night. Percy says the little boats all summoned again, as if to fetch off more troops. Mrs Richardson (Lady Reading’s gardeners wife [of Southease]) told me of a friend of her husbands dead on the beach at Dunkirk—not a wound—shock. The West boy [Harry] writes he’s hunting his battalion—no clothes—won’t go back he says; but gives no word of his wounds. Some say hes the only survivor of his regiment. Landed in a sailing boat at Ramsgate. Twined in with all this—& the fine weather—& the drill & drone of the planes at night—& Mabel here—& my long long Index making—twined in is E. Bowen: who dont answer, & is I suspect to be written off henceforth. Why? Is she a touchy? Is she a lover of rows? Really I dont know her well enough to diagnose. And how soon anger & sternness & complete disregard for this sort of twittering triviality come to one’s help. I’m not wounded in my vanity, for I cant play those games. So have drafted a letter, & shall send it on Friday—for I’m almost sure, in my bones, as L. wd say, that she’s set on a break. If the Index is finished tomorrow, thats the very last load home. Whether we publish or not, I’m quit.

No letters of any sort: & no Times book: but all the same I feel decks cleared & scrubbed, & can set to, in a jiffy—oh dear, I’ve not thanked Shaw—yes, I’ll write all my letters tomorrow. I was asked to write a life of Margaret Bondfield—I forgot to say: also to contribute to some Womens Symposium in USA; and Judith is the only one to get a First.

[Thursday 13 June]

I should love to see you—would you be in &c—Elizabeth. Let that abstract of this mornings postcard be a reminder & a warning about mares nests & jumping to conclusions & feeling in ones bones—not but what I had some justification. If it werent for—oh dear the retreat—Paris now almost besieged—20,000 of our men cut off—still the Fr. have gained 5 miles somewhere—if it werent for this—today wd have been a happy day. Elizabeth to begin with, which warmed & consoled, for if one’s friends are to die in the flesh now, whats left?—Then Dotty’s Yeats book with her praise of Virginia; then the milkman with 400 eggs for sale. We have bought two great crocks & glass water, or whats it called. My Index sent off—so thats the very final full stop to all that drudgery. John rang up yesterday to say he’s been offered a job at India Office, wh., foreboding as it does Mrs N. & Miss H. here, if evacuated, greatly increased my private gloom. Indeed, after we’d heard Haw-Haw, objectively announcing defeat—victory on his side of the line that is—again & again, left us about as down as we’ve yet been. We sat silent in the 9 o’clock dusk; & L. could only with difficulty read Austen Chamberlain. I found the Wordsworth letters my only drug. Yet today we’re again publicly more cheerful. Why? Up & down—up & down. No petrol at the pumps—providing for Invasion, only served a dribble, the man said.

Friday 14 June

Paris is in the hands of the Germans. Battle continues. We spent the day seeing Penshurst with Vita—picnicked in the park. Gwen in military dress—V. in trousers. Very fine & hot. The house of yellowish Oxford stone. Banqueting hall: disappointing furniture, like heavy & over ornamental Tot Court Rd. only made 1314—Q. Elizth dancing—tilted up by Essex? Ladies & gents all sitting on the benches laughing. Elizabeth herself in another picture, delicate skinned red haired, aquiline. Then the shell of Lady Pembroke’s lute—like half a fig. Then Sidney’s shaving glass. Then some very ugly tables … a long panelled room with soft veined panels. Out into the garden, which has certain trim lawns, & long grass walks, then lapses into wilderness. Sidneys very poor—given up weeding. A great lily pond; the goldfish making an odd subacqueous tapping as they moved among reeds. Then through old pink courtyards, with the Boar & the broad arrow to the car: but the butler came & said his. Lordship wanted to see us. Vita went—we stayed. Then were summoned. Ld. de Lisle & Dudley is like a very old liver & white Sussex spaniel—heavy pouched, both eyes with cataract, 87 but looks younger, waistcoat undone. Glad of company. Easy going at his ease, loose limbed, twinkling. “Do you mind if I say it—but the statue of the Q. outside Buck Palace is like a lady on a close stool—Showed that (Q. Charlotte) to Queen Mary. She didnt like it when I said it was like her.” Padded us into a small room; made us look at pictures said to be good—one, skied, of A. Sidney. Then a reputed Rembrandt. Can only keep a few rooms open. And those like seaside lodging rooms—There we left him alone, blind, with his shilling box of cork tipped cigarettes, some patience or other game, a few novels, & the photographs of his nephew “—a very nice boy” & his grey lady the only signs of youth, on a side table. Vita said he’d told her he was so poor he couldnt have people to stay: whole place run by 2 maids & a boy & butler; is alone—but d’you mind being alone? she asked. “Hate it” he said. Twice a week he goes to Tonbridge & plays Bridge. There this old snail sits in the corner of his tremendous shell. The taste of the present Sidneys is all for carved tables & yellow varnish. He had hardly any fingers when we shook hands, each thanking him, & he was anxious to give us tea. But I must get back for my fire practice Gwen said. Whats the use? he remarked. Odd to have seen this Elizabethan great house the first day that invasion becomes serious. But I like MH better.

Thursday 20 June

London diary: just back; & dinner so close & events so crowded that I must abstract. Monday lunch: John. The French stopped fighting: whats to become of me? Offered a Roumanian bookshop. Then what about Press? KM. after dinner. Now we suffer what the Poles suffered. Fight in our fortress: are conquered: I have my morphia in pocket. Tuesday, dine with Adrian. They both off to air raid rehearsal at Middlesex hospl. Adrian promises us a prescription. Ch⁠[urchi]⁠ll broadcasts. Reassuring about defence of England; not all claptrap. Now we’re fighting alone with our back to the wall. Bombs first, then invasion. Ethel Smyth tea. Oh of course we shall fight and win. Then Wednesday. Mrs N⁠[icholls]. & daughter fled from air raid at Thetford. Tea with her & Eth Bowen. In comes L.: air raid practice at H. of C. Those are the skeleton facts of our 3 London days. Monday ended in charcoal gloom. KM. says we must & shall be beaten. He says perhaps 4 more numbers of NS will come out.

Here, as soon as we begin bowls, Louie comes agog. Harry came back on Monday. It pours out—how he hadnt boots off for 3 days; the beach at Dunkirk—the bombers as low as trees—the bullets like moth holes in his coat—how no English aeroplanes fought; how the officer told them to take their shoes off & go past a pill box on all fours. Then went himself with a grenade & blasted it. At Dunkirk many men shot themselves as the planes swooped. Harry swam off, a boat neared. Say Chum Can you row? Yes, he said, hauled in, rowed for 5 hours, saw England, landed—didnt know if it were day or night or what town—didnt ask—couldn’t write to his mother—so was despatched to his regiment. He looted a Belgian shop & stuffed his pockets with rings, which fell out in the sea; but 2 watches pinned to his coat survived: one is chased, & chimes. Mrs Everest has them. He saw his cousin dead on the beach; & another man from the street. He was talking to a chap, who showed him a silk handkerchief bought for his joy lady. That moment a bomb killed him. Harry took the handkerchief. Harry has had eno’ war, & is certain of our defeat—got no arms & no aeroplanes—how can we do anything?

Saturday 22 June

Is Harry the real animal behind the brave, laughing heroic boy panoply which the BBC spreads before us nightly?—[omission] a natural human being, not made for shooting men, but for planting potatoes, [omission] And is he, as I suspect, the average sample? I gather he’d shoot himself rather than go to France again. And he hates the French, who gabble & become hysterical & run mad; & yet dont give him little loaves for nothing like the nice Belgian woman. So it was at Waterloo I suppose. And the fighting goes on in France; & the terms aren’t yet public; & its a heavy grey day, & I’ve been beaten at bowls, feel depressed & irritated, & vow I’ll play no more, but read my book.

My book is Coleridge; Rose Macaulay; the Bessborough Lord Moynihan’s life; letters—rather a foolish flight inspired by Hary-o; I would like to find one book & stick to it. But cant. I feel, if this is my last lap, oughtn’t I to read Shakespeare? But cant. I feel oughtn’t I to finish off P.H.: oughtn’t I to finish something by way of an end? The end gives its vividness, even its gaiety & recklessness to the random daily life. This, I thought yesterday, may be my last walk. On the down above Bugdean I found some green glass tubes. The corn was flowing with poppies in it. And I read my Shelley at night. How delicate & pure & musical & uncorrupt he & Coleridge read, after the left wing group. How lightly & firmly they put down their feet, & how they sing; & how they compact; & fuse, & deepen. I wish I cd invent a new critical method—something swifter & lighter & more colloquial & yet intense: more to the point & less composed; more fluid & following the flight, than my C.R. essays. The old problem: how to keep the flight of the mind, yet be exact. All the difference between the sketch & the finished work. And now dinner to cook. A role.

Nightly raids on the east & south coast. 6, 3, 12 people killed nightly.

[Thursday 27 June]

How difficult to make oneself a centre after all the rings a visitor stirs in one—in this case E. Bowen. How difficult to draw in from all those wide ripples & be at home, central. I tried to center by reading Freud. These rough rapid twinkling ripples spread out & out—for some hours after EB is in the train. It is a disagreeable after-visit feeling. It has its connection too with too many cigarettes, with incessant knitting. A high wind was blowing; Mabel & Louie picking currants & gooseberries. Then a visit to Charleston. Threw another stone into the pond. And at the moment, with PH only to fix upon, I’m loosely anchored. Further, the war—our waiting while the knives sharpen for the operation—has taken away the outer wall of security. No echo comes back. I have no surroundings. I have so little sense of a public that I forget about Roger coming or not coming out. Those familiar circumvolutions—those standards—which have for so many years given back an echo & so thickened my identity are all wide & wild as the desert now. I mean, there is no ‘autumn’ no winter. We pour to the edge of a precipice … & then? I cant conceive that there will be a 27th June 1941. This cuts away something even at tea at Charleston. We drop another afternoon into the millrace. Clive sullen, & effort ridden. Duncan patched & peeled like an onion. He fell down stairs. Then Bunny as bluff & burly & beefy as a Farmer lurches in with Angelica. A clock ticks somewhere. Nothing said.

And so, in this high wind, we reach the present moment; & I find it difficult to centre. I think I must force a C.R. essay into being. E.’s stammer also had a disintegrating effect: like a moth buzzing round a flower—her whirr of voice as she cant alight on a word—a whirr of sound that makes the word quiver & seem blurred. We talked however—& very on the whole congenially. But having spent my words on analysing the central, & being apprehensive that Judith will come & smash [?] me again, I do not record what we said. A very honourable horse faced, upper class hard [?] constricted mind.

Thursday 4 July

Again, back from London. But its here that the events take place. Louie, toothless, but all agog: yesterday at 5 pm. pop, pop pop out over the marshes. She was picking fruit. Backfiring she thought. Told by someone it was a raid. So she went in. They bombed the train at Newhaven: the driver died this morning. Passengers lay under seats. Rails wrecked. Today a plane—ours—crashed at Southease. So, the Germans are nibbling at my afternoon walks. The French fleet has been seized & sunk. All Lewes listening to the wireless. Mr Uridge, of whom I bought butter, says the PM “made a strong speech. Now we’re getting to business”. Indeed the fleet capture is the first good news since—Narvik? In London K.M. decreed that Tuesday, or today, Thursday, was fixed for invasion. London very safe & solid in feeling. Pink brick fortresses—for ammunition?—in main streets. Wire mazes in Whitehall &c. We passed strings of ambulances coming down tagged with boughs. Canadians swarm—want to see Buck Palace. Theres dinner: so private life must be postponed.

Friday 5 July

Why should I be bothering myself with Coleridge I wonder—Biog. Lit. & then with father’s essay on Coleridge, this fine evening, when the flies are printing their cold little feet on my hands? It was in order to give up thinking about economy; whether to give up Mable. I wanted to think myself up into calmness. Economy, means that I must make money: thus when Dotty offers me £50 for an essay upon fiction, 10,000 words, I cut it up into articles, & reckon; no: thats poor pay. I’d better finish Pointz Hall.

I took my Times [Book Club] order to the post & there met Mrs Ebbs. “So Mr Woolf has seen Monks House again!” she said. I of course said, “but you’ve been having fighting here.” Then she told me how the cups rattled in her hand, at tea, at Seaford, when the raider was fired at, & brought down at sea. “The poor fellow, the engine driver was killed between Newhaven & Seaford” she said. Also that the silly fellow who crashed his plane on the marsh, tipped its nose over the brook: He didnt know about the brooks. So I walked down & saw it—a little gnat, with red & white & blue bars; a tent keeping guard. Louie said that Audrey Hubbard who was in the pea field ran to give first aid. The man had a face like two faces. She made him write his name on a cigarette card: he was taken to Lewes, & has lockjaw. But this is rumour—rumour, via Percy, has it that the streets of Newhaven were machine gunned. L. gets annoyed with Percy. I see the imagination—that should have turned a wheel, running to waste & foam instead. L. back from the Library with a great volume of Gifford’s Laws. So to bowls. The French Fleet fought: Petain cuts off diplomatic relations. So shall we be at war with our ally? Last month indissolubly determined to fight to the end.

If someone comes in one writes differently: now, having been beaten at bowls, in a high wind, hearing planes above,—I note: to remember: the circular walk at the Tower with the hollyhocks; & the little 1870 girl in white with bands of black looking out of the window in its deep wall, as Eth Bowen & I sat talking. We walked from 37 through Temple, along river, up Thames Street, to the Tower, talking talking about what? her going to Ireland on a Govt mission; leaving Clarence Terrace; writing, it was my ‘greatness’ as we circled the town. No, I dont think it was only flattery I wanted. Something warmer. On top of bus, we talked again—a good idea; talking in many changing scenes: it changes topics & moods, battling among the Billingsgate porters with their shelly fishy hats; then stopping: crossing: running up bus steps.

I forgot to record my idiotic anguish, the night the Hutches—J., M. & Jeremy dined, about my dress. How queer that wave of agony: about 2 in the morning: so overpowering & irrational. Next day I found Jeanne in Judd Street to alter it & recovered serenity, & even had, once more, the bright inspiration that Jeanne of Judd Street—a small brown moth of a woman—who succeeded the old improper Frenchwoman—shall make all my clothes in future, beautifully, & for nothing.

Friday 12 July

How odd that I should have had 3 letters in praise of Trimmer—Lady Oxford, Pipsey & a Helen Browne—when I was going to tear the proof up! How silly I was to be enraged yesterday (1) by Miss Gardner (2) by being beaten at bowls. Yet how the grass shone pale emerald green when I walked off my temper on the marsh after dinner. The passages of colour, over Asheham, like the green backgrounds in Vermeer & then the little rusty grey church, & the cows, sun beaded, fringed with sun. We quarrelled about our communal feeling: I said I simper when I cohort with Gardner. L. said … but we made it up.

We were shown how charcoal absorbs gas in the Hall. And then, after a dull necessary lecture, old Miss Green, shedding her officers cloak, appeared in blue trousers & let herself down from the Rectory window, hanging by her toenails & descending with a jump. Captain Hanna said his bones were like glass. If he jumped, even from a bus, they would break. A red lipped woman asked me if Aga saucepans were made of aluminium; & L. has given all our saucepans to Mrs Ebbs to make aeroplanes with. I dont like any of the feelings war breeds: patriotism; communal &c, all sentimental & emotional parodies of our real feelings. But then, we’re in for it. Every day we have our raids: at night the bloodhounds are out. I open my window when I hear the Germans, & the broad stalks of light rise all over the meadow feeling for them—a strange early morning spectacle. One sees nothing but the feelers of light. Then the drone buzz booms away, rather like a dentists drill. No invasion so far.

I refused Dotty & Hilda, rather tartly; for Hilda’s hand on the reins is a heavy one—why not write the same article, she suggests, twice in different words? Why not indeed. The idea of their book is one of those meritorious meretricious tidy-minded ideas, that are the most detestable & the least pinned downable. Money patriotism, literature & some organising [?] arranging [?] motive, all embracing & intertwining.

Saturday 20 July

Things to write about when I’m less sleepy (back an hour ago from London). 1. Ray’s death; 2. Talk with Rose Macaulay; 3. Book to come out on 25th; 4. Madame Spira; 5. Lady Oxford: 6. Bella & Tom. I daresay theres a 7th & an 8th. But these headings will remind me, when I’ve walked & slept off the extreme jadedness of London. 7 might be Jack & Jeremy Hutch to stay the night. 8 the photographs of the womans body in the abortionists cupboard: her dead face: long hair: legs trussed up. 9. Must be Hitler’s speech yesterday: lets talk common sense & end the war—if not: & instead of any more headings I shall now cool & expand on the marsh. Oh 10 might be my new resolve of tidiness. Desk & table both clear.

Wednesday 24 July

Yes those are things to write about; but I want at the moment, the eve of publication moment, to discover my emotions. They are fitful: thus not very strong—nothing like so strong as before The Years—oh dear nothing like. Still they twinge. I wish it were this time next week. There’ll be Morgan, & Desmond. And I fear Morgan will say—just enough to show he doesn’t like, but is kind. D. will certainly depress. The Times Lit Sup (after its ill temper about Reviewing) will find chinks. T. & T. will be enthusiastic. And—thats all. I repeat that 2 strains, as usual will develop: fascinating; dull; life like; dead. So why do I twinge? knowing it almost by heart. But not quite. Mrs Leh⁠[man]⁠n enthusiastic: John silent. I shall of course be sneered at by those who sniff at Bloomsbury. I’d forgotten that. But as L. is combing Sally I cant concentrate. No room of my own. For 11 days I’ve been contracting in the glare of different faces. It ended yesterday with the W.I.: my talk—it was talked;—about the Dreadnought. A simple, on the whole natural, friendly occasion. Cups of tea; biscuits; & Mrs Chavasse, in a tight dress, presiding: out of respect for me, it was a Book tea. Miss Gardner had 3 Gs. pinned to her frock; Mrs Thompsett 3 weeks: & someone else a silver spoon.

No I cant go on to Ray’s death, about which I know nothing, save that that very large woman, with the shock of grey hair, & the bruised lip; that monster, whom I remember typical of young womanhood, has suddenly gone. She had a kind of representative quality, in her white coat & trousers; wall building, disappointed, courageous, without what? imagination?

Lady Oxford said that there was no virtue in saving; more in spending. She hung over my neck in a spasm of tears. Mrs Campbell [unidentified] has cancer. But in a twinkling she recovered & began to spend. A cold chicken she said was always under cover on the sideboard at my service. The country people send butter. She was beautifully dressed in a rayed silk, with a dark blue tie; a dark blue fluted Russian cap with a red flap. This was given her by her milliner: the fruit of spending.

All the walls, the protecting & reflecting walls, wear so terribly thin in this war. There’s no standard to write for: no public to echo back: even the ‘tradition’ has become transparent. Hence a a repetition I see certain energy & recklessness—part good—part bad I daresay. But its the only line to take. And perhaps the walls, if violently beaten against, will finally contain me.

I feel tonight still veiled. The veil will be lifted tomorrow, when my book comes out. Thats what may be painful: may be cordial. And then I may feel once more round me the wall I’ve missed—or vacancy? or chill?

I make these notes, but am tired of notes—tire of Gide, tired of de Vigny notebooks. I want something sequacious now & robust. In the first days of the war I cd read notes only.

Ray’s hair stood up very vigorously on either side of the parting which lately she had made in the middle. Her bitterness at Oliver, whom she had loved, & did love, was perceptible—something tart about her; & as if some of the petals of what she hoped, as a girl, to be so yellow a sunflower—she was ambitious, self confident, was greedy & a little insensitive about ‘fame’—as if these petals had withered & she cd. no longer be confident; was indeed disappointed, a little wounded, embittered; chiefly shown by her immense activity, as if always trying to get what she could not. And she grew so unwieldy; & cared so little for appearances; yet was envious, I guess, of the graces; & hadnt achieved altogether what her intention in disregarding the graces had been. I mean, she planned a great unconventional rough hewn figure; & it didnt altogether come off. She played patience endlessly. She had educated her children so carefully. Yet look what failures they both are. Christopher unimaginative; Barbara—oh, well she ran off the rails completely: B. was bitter against intellect—which Ray reverenced: yet had no aesthetic sense. What else? Her humanity: offered to help when I was ill. Her competence. Her good nature. Her wisdom—yes, as she grew older, it was there. Perhaps at 70 she wd have created the legend of—the wise matriarch: have been surrounded, & central. But she died while it was in the rough, aged 53. Also a kind of rough radiance. Corpulent. Yet keen. Bright eyed. But I never knew her domestically. Always something of the office—documents, overalls, interviews—about her. One of the people who was ‘in love’ in the old way. Oliver’s letter asking her to see over some factory made her flush, at Firle in my little dining room. She tore it to scraps I think. So I’ve written higgledypiggledy, about Ray. Her cordiality—& queer little quick voice: smoking: it used to be a pipe. Initiative⁠[?], but no charm. Wrote without stopping. No form, no fineness. Her life much of a scramble & a fight: but in the office I guess very commanding, controlling & masterly.

Thursday 25 July

I’m not very nervous at the moment: indeed at worst its only a skin deep nervousness; for after all, the main people approve; still I shall be relieved if Morgan approves. That I suppose I shall know tomorrow. The first review (Lynd.) says: “deep imaginative sympathy…. makes him an attractive figure (in spite of wild phrases): There is little drama….. at the same time those interested in modern art will find it of absorbing interest…” Then he goes on to mis-quote, having I daresay his whiskey by him.

I shall settle in very happily I think to Coleridge after the splash is over. I expect some letters. But what is true, is that then I can write entirely to please myself: first a C.R: then PH: leaving spaces for odds & ends: for ex: an article for the pressing American lady. I’m thick in Mme Spira’s affairs: she sobbed & left her strangled wool gloves behind her. I’ve heard from Margot & M. Storm Jameson—oh the bore of being kind! This war inflicts boredom endlessly. My little triumph today was that Flint [Lewes grocer] gave me extra tea. Now margarine is rationed; & I have a horrid skinflint morning ordering dinner, suspecting Louie who of course helps herself to this & that.

What a curious relation is mine with Roger at this moment—I who have given him a kind of shape after his death—Was he like that? I feel very much in his presence at the moment: as if I were intimately connected with him; as if we together had given birth to this vision of him: a child born of us. Yet he had no power to alter it. And yet for some years it will represent him.

Friday 26 July

I think I have taken, say a good second, judging from the Lit Sup review. No Morgan. Times say it takes a very high place indeed among biogs: Times say I have a genius for the relevant: Times (art critic I gather) goes on to analyse R.’s tones &c. Times intelligent, but not room for more.

Its a nice quiet feeling now. With my Coleridge beneath me, & this over, as it really very nearly (how I hate that clash) is, I’m aware of something permanent & real in my existence. By the way, I’m rather proud of having done a solid work. I am content, somehow. But when I read my post its like putting my hand in a jar of leeches: Spira asking this; Douie soliciting books; John my L⁠[eaning] T⁠[ower] article; & so I’ve a mint of dull dreary letters to write. But its an incredibly lovely—yes lovely is the word—transient, changing, warm, capricious summer evening. Also I won two games.

A large hedgehog was found drowned in the lily pool; L. tried to resuscitate it. An amusing sight. 2/6 is offered by the Govt. for live hedgehogs. I’m reading Ruth Benedict with pressure of suggestions—about Culture patterns—which suggests rather too much. Six vols of Aug. Hare also suggest—little articles.

But I’m very peaceful, momentarily, this evening.

Saturday I suppose a no-review day. Immune is again the right word. No, John hasn’t read it. When the 12 planes went over, out to sea, to fight, last evening, I had I think an individual, not communal BBC dictated feeling. I almost instinctively wished them luck. I should like to be able to take scientific notes of reactions. Invasion may be tonight or not at all—thats Joubert’s summing up. And—I had something else to say? but what. And dinner to get ready.

Sunday 28 July

Oh yes I see what this book is—its a refuge from Desmond. The mild kind avuncular Desmond. I’ve been beaten at bowls, & so the half paragraph turns to lead. Now if Morgan had written I shouldnt have turned it to lead. But I feel my irritation at being beaten fasten itself & phrase make—make the old phrases, for wh. God knows, there’s no justification whatever today. Why do I mind being beaten at bowls? I think I connect it with Hitler. Yet I played very well. And, in an hours time, shall be repeating the other phrase wh. I made during the first game: a Season of calm weather. Such a curious peace; a satisfactory quiet. I shall see no one in London Yes for a moment I believe that I can compass a season of calm weather. Yet ‘they’ say the invasion is fixed for Aug. 16th. A season of calm weather is the crown for which I’m always pushing & shoving, swimming like the hedgehog who cuts his throat with his paws Nessa said yesterday at C⁠[harlesto]⁠n, if he swims. Angelica there: I diagnose strain; a little defiance, restlessness. And feel in Q. something heavy, mature, depressed. Almost a year he’s been in the fields: all corn coloured & red poppied with his blue eyes for convolvulus. Judith & L. came on Monday.. Thus our island will be invaded—my season of calm weather. Many an island a green isle—why cant I remember poetry? Clive silly & truculent about Auden & Isherwood. I guess he’d already looked up his own name in R⁠[oger]. Said he’d only read Margery⁠[’s Foreword]. And my family will accept this book in complete silence. 2 years hard work. But I shall hear eno’ from ‘the public’. Why dont we praise, or blame, each other? Has everything been said? Is it the repletion at the end of a party?

Queer, when its so tame after all, a book coming out, why one writes them? How much part does ‘coming out’ play in the pleasure of writing then? Each one accumulates a little of the fictitious V.W. whom I carry like a mask about the world.

[Later.] Waiting for the Sunday papers in which RF. will, or may, be disposed of by Desmond &, perhaps, Basil de Selincourt—looking up over the page to see if L. is coming across the orchard—does not favour the looking up of quotations in Coleridge’s letters. I know that I shant get any superlatives either way. I know that Desmond (who very likely won’t do it) will if he does, gently hum & haw something about Mrs Woolf’s charm & sympathy & then proceed to give his own version of R. which will probably be more amusing than mine; & that’ll fill his short column. Of course I am anxious partly to know how it strikes R.’s friends: thats an element not present in a novel review. Anyhow, how much less exacerbating this Sunday morning is than The Years Sunday morning. I remember coming out here in an ecstasy almost a bewilderment of relief when B. de S. for whose opinion I have hardly any respect, praised it—I thought too highly. No, L. does not come.

Its a splendid summer morning, & Janet’s white butterflies—the white birds she saw when she was dying—are all about the trees. It is 10.30 & I think I am calm eno’ to return to Coleridge, until 11. when I shall allow myself to go indoors. I forgot, in the above analysis, to include the Frys—their reactions to good or bad reviews. That also tells.

[Later.] Yes, Desmond is, as always to me, slightly depressing. I divine that is that he feels I haven’t given the familiar, the human, Roger—‘our’ Roger. That I’ve made a just & animated biography, stressing the public side, the intellect, the austerity & so on; but not been personal & ungirt enough. I think this is what L. felt. But then Nessa & Margery didn’t. Anyhow there it is—& Desmond is going to write at greater length next week. Nothing in the Observer. So I return, not much depressed, not much exalted, to my Coleridge.

Thursday 1 August

I was going to say, when Judith interrupted, the book is a dud to my friends: but seems selling well. This comment is made on coming back from London this lovely night: & a very good dinner, a Burma Cigar & am not a jot depressed. Indeed—he that is down need fear no fall &c.—a dud, I’ll explain later why I say this.

Friday 2 August

Complete silence surrounds that book. It might have sailed into the blue & been lost. “One of our books did not return” as the BBC puts it. No review by Morgan, no review at all. No letter. And tho’ I suspect Morgan has refused, finding it unpalatable, still I remain—yes honestly, quiet minded, & prepared to face a complete, a lasting silence. And full—no not of ideas—I’m so jaded after Philip Morell, Pippa, & the London uproar—but with a sense of things forming, & freedom. So thats satisfactory.

About Philip—laid in a lemon coloured jersey in bed. Ott’s drawing room cut in half. P. rather shaky, rather patched in complexion, & plausible, fluent & undistinguished. Reminisced: about Roger: a most ineffective man; a most unhappy man; his life so sordid. “No, I’ve not had a happy life. I wasted my time in politics. No we were very unhappy Ottoline & I at Garsington. Quarrelled often. Thought of separating. We were so unhappy we came here. Our last years were very happy.” This said with his old rams watery smile. Cheerful enough, but only with Bridge & old memories. I think disillusioned about Ott. Tepid about her diaries. Thinks he’s getting weaker & wont live through the winter. Things suddenly go black. Surrounded by polished furniture: too much furniture. Very flabby yet mildly affectionate. Showed me photographs: if I’ve the energy I’ll get one copied for you. Then summoned Milly had out shawls pressed one—a coloured one I chose—on me. Outside Milly asked me to look at his bathroom, said “He’s very lonely very lonely. He’s too proud to ask people to come. None of the old friends come; only the family. Miss Julian does her best. But she’s always been hard—she doesnt care for any of her ladyships things. She’s no comfort. The Dr says dont be shocked if you go in & find him dead. I’m glad you encouraged him to play Bridge. I say after all whats the use of living without …… but he’s better now. I put him straight to bed when he comes back. There is his place—in the dining room with a book rest in front of his plate.”

I shook hands & walked off with my shawl.

Sunday 4 August

Just time, while Judith & Leslie finish their game, to record oh a great relief—Desmond’s review really says all I wanted said. The book delights friends & the younger generation say Yes, yes we know him; & its not only delightful but important. Thats enough. And it gave me a very calm rewarded feeling—not the old triumph, as over a novel; but the feeling I’ve done what was asked of me, given my friends what they wanted. Just as I’d decided I’d given them nothing but the materials for a book I hadnt written. Now I can be content: needn’t worry what people think: for Desmond is a good bell ringer; & will start the others—I mean, the talk among intimates will follow, more or less, his lines. Herbert Read & MacColl have bit their hardest; put their case; now only Morgan remains, & perhaps a poisoned dart from W. Lewis. I thought I’d mentioned Read: polite to me; very mean & spiteful about R.

Tuesday 6 August

Yes I was very happy again when I saw Clive’s blue envelope at breakfast (with John) this morning. Its Clive almost—what?—devout—no quiet, serious, completely without sneer approving. As good in its way as the best of my books—the best biography for many years—The first part as good as the last & no break. So I’m confirmed in what I felt, even when I had that beak pecking walk in March with a temperature of 101 with Leonard—confirmed in what I feel—that the first part is really more generally interesting, though less complex & intensified than the last. I’m sure it was necessary—as a solid pavement for the whole to stand on. So I’m really & truly immune, & feel, if only Louie’s father hadnt died, & Mabel’s lover hadnt gone to hospital so that I’ve all the cooking & washing up to do today, that I could go on to the next thing—to many next things. Is it an illusion that I’m freer & stronger, as a writer, than ever? Only now John persistently presses for my LT article; & the American lady—one never is free for more than a dogs chain length.

Men excavating gun emplacements in the bank. They look like little swarms of busy ants, as I walk. Cementing floors; sand bagging walls. Great lorries of material go bursting down the Roman Road. No one pays any attention—so blasé are we. Guns along the river, boughs for camouflage, excite no one. Its like the raising of the gallows tree, for an execution now expected in a week or fortnight. R. sells well. Talk of reprint.

Saturday 10 August

And then Morgan slightly damped me: but I was damp already from Leslie hum haw the night before & the day before & again tomorrow. So Morgan & Vita slightly damped: & Bob slightly elated & Ethel, & some old boy in the Spectator, attacking Read. But Gods truth, thats the end of it all. No more reviews, & if I had solitude—no men driving stakes digging fresh gun emplacements & no neighbours, doubtless I cd. expand & soar—into PH. into Coleridge; but must first—damn John—re-write the LT.

Incessant company is as bad as solitary confinement—Angelica for 2 nights, adorable, oh yes, & intimate & mature, & I see so much more of her side when I talk to her—her so reasonable & lovely side—if it werent too, a delusion. But is love ever quite a delusion? Well J.’s is. I reduce myself to initials for discretion; but cant spin a word to catch a fly after these 10 days of people & people again. Now Mabel’s here wh. adds to comfort but diminishes privacy. So thats my chart at the moment. No invasion. Large air flights—little white gnats this evening. Sales very good—2nd edition ordered. But I want sleep & silence.

Friday 16 August

Third edition ordered. L. said, at 37 on Wednesday “Its booming.” The boom is dulled by our distance. And why does a word of tepidity depress more than a word of praise exalts? I dont know. I refer to Waley: I dont refer to Pamela—great work of art &c. Well, Its taking its way. Its selling. Its done. And I’m writing PH. wh. leaves a spare hour. Many air raids. One as I walked. A haystack was handy. But walked on, & so home. All clear. Then sirens again. Then Judith & Leslie. Bowls. Then Mrs Ebbs &c to borrow table. All clear. I must make a stop gap for the last hour, or I shall dwindle, as I’m doing here. But PH. is a concentration—a screw. So I will go in, & read Hare & write to Ethel.

Very hot. Even out here.

[Later.] They came very close. We lay down under the tree. The sound was like someone sawing in the air just above us. We lay flat on our faces, hands behind head. Dont close yr teeth said L. They seemed to be sawing at something stationary. Bombs shook the windows of my lodge. Will it drop I asked? If so, we shall be broken together. I thought, I think, of nothingness—flatness, my mood being flat. Some fear I suppose. Shd we take Mabel to garage. Too risky to cross the garden L. said. Then another came from Newhaven. Hum & saw & buzz all round us. A horse neighed on the marsh. Very sultry. Is it thunder? I said. No guns, said L. from Ringmer, from Charleston way. Then slowly the sound lessened. Mabel in kitchen said the windows shook. Air raid still on, distant planes. Leslie playing bowls. I well beaten.

My books only gave me pain, Ch. Brontë said. Today I agree. Very heavy dull & damp. This must at once be cured. The all clear. 5 to 7. 144 down last night.

Monday 19 August

Yesterday, 18th, Sunday, there was a roar. Right on top of us they came. I looked at the plane, like a minnow at a roaring shark. Over they flashed—3, I think. Olive green. Then pop pop pop—German? Again pop pop pop, over Kingston. Said to be 5 Bombers hedge hopping on their way to London. The closest shave so far. 144 brought down—no that was last time. And no raid (so far) today. Rehearsal. I cannot read Remorse. Why not say so?

Friday 23 August

Book flopped. Sales down to 15 a day since air raid on London. Is that the reason? Will it pick up? But I’m ravaged by Ann in house, Judith Leslie Eleanor Camilla in & out of house. Ann goes tomorrow. L. says he has a moral feeling of duty to young.

Wednesday 28 August

How I should like to write poetry all day long—thats the gift to me of poor Ann, who never reads poetry because she hated it at school. She stayed from Tuesday to Sunday night, to be exact; & almost had me down. Why? Because (partly) she has the artists temperament without being an artist. She’s temperamental, but has no outlet. I find her charming; individual; honest, & somehow pathetic. Her curious obtusity, her slatiness of mind, is perceptible to her. And she hesitates. Ought one to make up? Richard says yes—I say no. The truth is she has no instinct for colour; no more than for music or pictures. A great deal of force & spirit & yet always at the leap something balks her. I can imagine her crying herself to sleep. So, having brought no rations, or book, she floundered on here. I called her, to mitigate her burden, My good dog, my Afghan hound—with her long too thick legs, & her long body; & the shock of wild unbrushed hair on top. I’m glad I’m so nice looking she said. And she is. But well it taught me, that week of unintermittent interruptions, bowls, tea parties & droppings in, what public school is like—no privacy. A good rub with a coarse towel for my old mind no doubt. And Judith & Leslie are about to play bowls. This is why, my first solitary morning, after London, & the protracted air raid—from 9.30 to 4am—I was so light so free so happy I wrote what I call PH poetry. Is it good? I suppose not, very.

I should say, to placate V.W. when she wishes to know what was happening in Aug. 1940—that the air raids are now at their prelude. Invasion, if it comes, must come within 3 weeks. The harrying of the public is now in full swing. The air saws; the wasps drone; the siren—its now Weeping Willie in the papers—is as punctual as the vespers. We’ve not had our raid yet, we say. Two in London. One caught me in the L. Library. There I sat reading in Scrutiny that Mrs W. after all was better than the young. At this I was pleased. John Buchan—“V.W is our best critic since M. Arnold & wiser & juster—” also pleased me. I must write to Pamela. Sales a little better.

28th Aug. P.S. to the last page. We went out on to the terrace, began playing. A large two decker plane came heavily & slowly—L. said a Wellesley something. A training plane said Leslie. Suddenly there was pop pop from behind the Church. Practising we said. The plane circled slowly out over the marsh & back, very close to the ground & to us. Then a whole volley of pops (like bags burst) came together. The plane swung off, slow & heavy & circling towards Lewes. We looked. Leslie saw the German black cross. All the workmen were looking. Its a German; that dawned. It was the enemy. It dipped among the fir trees over Lewes & did not rise. Then we heard the drone. Looked up & saw 2 planes very high. They made for us. We started to shelter in the Lodge. But they wheeled & Leslie saw the English sign. So we watched—they side slipped glided swooped & roared for about 5 minutes round the fallen plane as if identifying & making sure—then made off towards London. Our version is that it was a wounded plane, looking for a landing. “It was a Jerry sure eno’” the men said: the men who are making a gun hiding by the gate. It wd have been a peaceful matter of fact death to be popped off on the terrace playing bowls this very fine cool sunny August evening.

Saturday 31 August

Now we are in the war. England is being attacked. I got this feeling for the first time completely yesterday. The feeling of pressure, danger horror. Vita rang up at 6 to say she cdn’t come. She was sitting at S⁠[issinghurs]⁠t. the bombs were falling round the house. Theyd been fighting all day. I’m too jaded to give the feeling—of talking to someone who might be killed any moment. Can you hear that? she said. No, I cdnt. Thats another. That’s another. She repeated the same thing—about staying in order to drive the ambulance—time after time, like a person who cant think. She’d heard that Christopher Hobhouse was killed by a bomb: that Cynthia North—so lovely like a young colt she was killed by a bomb she trod on. It was very difficult talking. She said it was a comfort to talk. She broke off—Oh how I do mind this, & put the telephone down. I went & played bowls. A perfect quiet hot evening. Later the planes began zooming. Explosions. We were talking to Leslie & Judith & Pat Trench [unidentified.]. To bed. Planes very close: explosions. Nessa says today there was a great blaze at Ripe. A tinkling sound in the field. Bomb cases found today. A great raid on London last night. Today quiet here. When I rang up St. after dinner, someone cut in with a call to Maldon. “Restricted service. Things very bad there just now.” The feeling is that a battle is going on—a fierce battle. May last 4 weeks. Am I afraid? Intermittently. The worst of it ones mind wont work with a spring next morning. Of course this may be the beginning of invasion. A sense of pressure. Endless local stories. No—its no good trying to capture the feeling of England being in a battle. L. has just driven Judith & Leslie to the station. At last we shall be alone. Molly wont come. I daresay if I write fiction & Col⁠[eridge] & not that infernal bomb article for USA, I shall swim into quiet water. L. sleeps sound all through it every night.

Monday 2 September

There might be no war, the past 2 days. Only one raid warning. Perfectly quiet nights. A lull after the attacks on London. At Charleston yesterday a skeleton Memoir Club. We sat in the sun. It was hot. The apples hung red. Not a sound. Angelica & B. produced a sense of strain. Maynard what I call unredeemed Maynard, rather severe, snubbing, truculent. Talk about lives. Mine of Roger I gather is called by Maynard “The official life”. ‘Why not write the real life for the Memoir Club?’ (thats why I thought him morose & savage.) Bunny said Biographies will always interest. Morgan said not to the next generation. The sensitive like ourselves wont interest them. I said autobiographies are their line. M. interested came over to me. We discussed Hugh. I said he was a prostitute. Q. said Derain was a prostitute. I read my Dreadnought notes, not very well. Lydia wdn’t come. “She feels this is not the time for brains” said Maynard. Tired after bowls & writing my USA War article my mind jibs at recording. Yet talk is interesting. Nessa said artists always did what they could. Maynard said there’d be no change after the war. We shd. go back to where we were. Morgan lost his spectacles—found them in a book. Clive had been on Firle Tower & saw the flash at sea when the explosion came. Said it was a German big gun firing across Channel. Q. denied this. Bunny A. & Maynard walked off. I told Morgan how I’d tried being honest with Hugh. Hugh had snubbed Morgan. Talk about Penguins. Argument as to whether they’re read.

So lovely an evening that the flat & the downs looked as if seen for the last time. No raid. Slept over Sara Coleridge. Letters from Ben (R. absorbing) from Bessie T. (a great biography). Letters I shd be answering instead of scribbling here. It is perfect summer weather. A man stopped on the bank with all its battlements to say so. Mr Freeth showed me the fire engine: danger of incendiary bombs. Will Jansen paint the iron shed? He’s a matter of fact chap. I urged camouflage if only on artistic grounds. And so this page is perhaps unnecessarily filled

Thursday 5 September

Hot, hot, hot. Record heat wave, record summer if we kept records this summer. At 2.30 a plane zooms; 10 minutes later air raid sounds; 20 later, all clear. Hot, I repeat; & doubt if I’m a poet. HP [sic] hard labour. Brain w—no, I cant think of the word—yes, wilts. An idea. All writers are unhappy. The picture of the wor⁠[l]⁠d in books is thus too dark. The wordless are the happy: women in cottage gardens: Mrs Chavasse. Not a true picture of the wor⁠[l]⁠d; only a writers picture. Are musicians, painters happy? Is their world happier.

Now, in my nightgown, to walk on the marshes.

Saturday 7 September

An air raid in progress. Planes zooming. No, that one’s gone over, very quick & loud. Cdnt see if it were English.

Ben Nicolson for the night. A very tall red faced obstinate tongue tied apprehensive gentle but obdurate not very clever, slow indeed, serious however; reminding us of Vita (to look at) then Harold, then a touch queerly incongruously of Eddy. Very well mannered wh. perhaps increases difficulty. Very diffident. Coming from a large world. But speechless: till after dinner: when he developed his charge against Roger: that he didn’t personify artists, & by omitting biography, intellectualised: so didnt reach the masses, “didnt show that Leonardo was thinking of a tree.” I guess B.’s got hold of a crooked stick; & will produce (come peace) rather formless, many worded, literary books. Dressed as a private in big boots this morning.

More planes over the house, going I suppose to London, which is raided every night. A fight no doubt in Kent.

Tuesday 10 September

Back from half a day in London—perhaps our strangest visit. When we got to Gower St. a barrier with Diversion on it. No sign of damage. But, coming to Doughty St. a crowd. Then Miss Perkins at the window. Meek S. roped off. Wardens there, not allowed in. The house about 30 yards from ours struck at one this morning by a bomb. Completely ruined. Another bomb in the square still unexploded. We walked round the back. Stood by Jane Harrison’s house. The house was still smouldering. That is a great pile of bricks. Underneath all the people who had gone down to their shelter. Scraps of cloth hanging to the bare walls at the side still standing. A looking glass I think swinging. Like a tooth knocked out—a clean cut. Our house undamaged. No windows yet broken—perhaps the bomb has now broken them. We saw Sage Bernal with an arm band jumping on top of the bricks—who lived there? I suppose the casual young men & women I used to see, from my window; the flat dwellers who used to have flower pots & sit on the balcony. All now blown to bits—The garage man at the back—blear eyed & jerky told us he had been blown out of his bed by the explosion; made to take shelter in a church—a hard cold seat, he said, & a small boy lying in my arms. “I cheered when the all clear sounded. I’m aching all over.” He said the Jerrys had been over for 3 nights trying to bomb Kings X. They had destroyed half Argyll Street, also shops in Grays Inn Road. Then Mr Pritchard ambled up. Took the news as calm as a grig. “They actually have the impertinence to say this will make us accept peace—!” he said: he watches raids from his flat roof & sleeps like a hog. So, after talking to Miss Perkins & Mrs Jackson (a bloodless sand hopper), but both serene—Miss P. had slept on a camp bed in her shelter—we went on to Grays Inn. Left the car & saw Holborn. A vast gap at the top of Chancery Lane. Smoking still. Some great shop entirely destroyed: the hotel opposite like a shell. In a wine shop there were no windows left. People standing at the tables—I think drink being served. Heaps of blue green glass in the road at Chancery Lane. Men breaking off fragments left in the frames. Glass falling. Then into Lincolns Inn. To the N.S. office: windows broken, but house untouched. We went over it. Deserted. Wet passages. Glass on stairs. Doors locked. So back to the car. A great block of traffic. The Cinema behind Mme Tussaud’s torn open: the stage visible; some decoration swinging. All the R⁠[egent’s]. Park houses with broken windows, but undamaged. And then miles & miles of orderly ordinary streets—all Bayswater, & Sussex Sqre as usual. Streets empty. Faces set & eyes bleared. In Chancery Lane I saw a man with a barrow of music books. My typists office destroyed. Then at Wimbledon a Siren—people began running. We drove, through almost empty streets, as fast as possible. Horses taken out of the shafts. Cars pulled up. Then the all clear. The people I think of now are the very grimy lodging house keepers, say in Heathcote Street; with another night to face: old wretched women standing at their doors; dirty, miserable. Well—as Nessa said on the phone, its coming very near. I had thought myself a coward for suggesting that we shd. not sleep 2 nights at 37. I was greatly relieved when Miss P. telephoned advising us not to stay, & L. agreed.

Wednesday 11 September

Churchill has just spoken. A clear, measured, robust speech. Says the invasion is being prepared. Its for the next 2 weeks apparently if at all. Ships & barges massing at French ports. The bombing of London of course preparatory to invasion. Our majestic city—&c. which touches me, for I feel London majestic. Our courage &c. Another raid last night on London. Time bomb struck the Palace. John rang up. He was in Meck. Sqre the night of the raid. Wants the press moved at once. L. is to go up on Friday. Our windows are broken John says. He is lodging out somewhere. Meck. Sqre evacuated. A plane shot down before our eyes just before tea: over the [Lewes] race course; a scuffle; a swerve: then a plunge; & a burst of thick black smoke. Percy says the pilot baled out. We count now on an air raid about 8.30. Anyhow, whether or not, we hear the sinister sawing noise about then, which loudens & fades; then a pause; then another comes. “Theyre at it again” we say as we sit, I doing my work, L. making cigarettes. Now & then theres a thud. The windows shake. So we know London is raided again.

I decided today after tears from Mable (about L. & the electricity—the latest of many grievances) that she must go. She said—oh the usual things—about not giving him satisfaction; too nervous to speak to him. The poor tallow fleshed almost petrified woman; who can smile tho’, & is unselfish (to me) but its no good.

Thursday 12 September

A gale has risen. Weather broken. Armada weather. No sound of planes today only wind. Terrific air traffic last night. But the raid beaten off by new London barrage. This is cheering. If we can hold out this week—next week—week after—if the weather’s turned—if the force of the raids on London is broken—

We go up tomorrow to see John about moving Press; to patch the windows, rescue valuables, & get letters—if that is we’re allowed in the square. Oh, blackberrying I conceived, or remoulded, an idea for a Common History book—to read from one end of lit. including biog; & range at will, consecutively.

Friday 13 September

A strong feeling of invasion in the air. Roads crowded with army wagons: soldiers. Just back from half day in London. Raid, unheard by us, started outside Wimbledon. A sudden stagnation. People vanished. Yet some cars went on. We decided to visit lavatory on the hill; shut. So L. made use of tree. Pouring. Guns in the distance. Saw a pink brick shelter. That was the only interest of our journey—our talk with the man woman & child who were living there. They had been bombed at Clapham. Their house unsafe. So they hiked to Wimbledon. Preferred this unfinished gun emplacement to a refugee over crowded house. They had a roadmans lamp; a saucepan & cd boil tea. The nightwatchman wdn’t accept their tea; had his own. Someone gave them a bath. In one of He laid rather a thin rug on the step for me to sit on. An officer looked in. “Making ready for the invasion” said the man, as if it were going off in about ten minutes. the Wimbledon houses there was only a caretaker. Of course they cdn’t house us. But she was very nice—gave them a sit down. We all talked. Middle class smartish lady on her way to Epsom regretted she cdnt house the child. But we wdn’t part with her, they said—the man a voluble emotional Kelt, the woman placid Saxon. As long as she’s all right we dont mind. They sleep on some shavings. Bombs had dropped on the Common. He a house painter. Very friendly & hospitable. They liked having people in to talk. What will they do? The man thought Hitler wd soon be over. The lady in the cocks hat said Never. Twice we left. More guns. Came back. At last started, keeping an eye on shelters & peoples behaviour. Reached Russell Hotel. No John. Loud gunfire. We sheltered. Started for Meck. Sqre: met John, who said the Sqre still closed; so lunched in the hotel. Decided the Press emergency—to employ Garden City Press—in 20 minutes. Raid still on. Walked to Meck. Sqre. Refused admittance. John told us the story of Monday night. Bombs whistle, if they fall near. He heard two whistles. Looked out. A great blaze in Guilford St. Gas main struck & the Foundling shelter opposite Stephen hit. He decided he’d take shelter. Then an explosion. He went into Square & saw a tree where Byron Court had been. Also a great cloud of thick grey dust. Also a man walking slowly in his pyjamas. Then they were told to leave the Square. Later he met several young women at some Bar with hair, he thought, powdered—really the dust of the house. Some saved by an iron bar in the basement. Some its thought killed. They became merry. He rather white & shaky. Left him with distant guns firing—Started back. All clear in Maryleb⁠[one] High St.

Saturday 14 September

A sense of invasion—that is lorries of soldiers & machines—like cranes—walloping along to Newhaven. An air raid is on. A little pop rattle wh. I take to be machine guns, just gone off. Planes soaring & roaring. Percy & L. say some are English. Mabel comes out & looks. Asks if we want fish fried or boiled. As the result of a friendly cool talk, she’s going to ask Flossie [her sister] about plans. They may set up outside the raid area. Anyhow, its settled, I think that she leaves here. A great relief. I like being alone in our little boat. I like provisioning & seeing alls shipshape & not having dependants. And must now write to Harry Stephen before bowls—a warm letter, couched in Stephenese, about Roger. Distant pops—a rapid little patter of sound over Newhaven way. Workmen on the hanger haystack—disguising a gun—said “Wish I were as sure of a thousand pounds as of winning the war.” Complete confidence. Buck Palace bombed. Altar exposed; & in Eastbourne yesterday a church ruined & organ thrown on road. The BBC become rather sanctimonious over this.

The great advantage of this page is that it gives me a fidget ground. Fidgets: caused by losing at bowls & invasion; caused by another howling banshee, by having no book I must read; & so on. I am reading Sevigné: how recuperative last week; gone stale a little with that mannered & sterile Bussy now. Even through the centuries his acid dandified somehow supercilious well what?—cant find the word—this manner of his, this character penetrates; & moreover reminds me of someone I dislike. Is it Logan? Theres a ceremony in him that reminds me of Tom. I suggest supercilious Theres a parched artificial cruelty &—oh the word! the word!— Am I oversensitive to character, in writing? I think we moderns lack love. Our torture makes us writhe. But I cant go into that—a phrase that brings in old Rose [Macaulay], to whom I mean to write. One always thinks theres a landing place coming. But there aint. A stage, a branch, an end. I dislike writing letters of thanks about Roger. I’ve said it so many times. I think I will begin my new book by reading Ifor Evans, 6d Penguin. And whatever happens I will settle & sun on the moment. 58—not so many more. This is quite possible, in any condition. I sometimes think about violent death. Who’s whistling in the churchyard? The Major says there was a landing, repulsed, at Bournemouth⁠[?]. Keep out the war from this page, now & then. I’m reading Henry Williamson. Again I dislike him.

Sunday 15 September

No invasion yet. Rumours that it was attempted, but barges sunk with great loss. Via Maynard, via Major Gardner & Percy. Raids over Brighton this afternoon. Hornets (our own) swarmed over my head on the marsh. Sheep frightened. Its difficult to see the English white circle. Mabel goes tomorrow; so pray God the Church bells dont ring tonight. Domestically, a great relief & peace, & expansion, it’ll be tomorrow, into merry kitchen harum scarum ways. Now we go to our last Cook cooked dinner for I dont know how long. Could it be the end of resident servants for ever? This I pray this lovely fitful evening, as well as the usual Damn Hitler prayer. Carried wood; bowls; asked for Sara Coleridge, as tho the New Statesman were immortal.

Monday 16 September

Well, we’re alone in our ship. A very wet stormy day. Mabel stumped off, with her bunions, carrying her bags at 10. Thank you for all your kindness, she said the same to us both. Also wd I give her a reference? “I hope we shall meet again” I said. She said Oh no doubt—thinking I referred to death. So that 5 years uneasy mute but very passive & calm relation is over: a heavy unsunned pear dropped from a twig. And we’re freer, alone. No responsibility: for her. The house solution is to have no residents, but I’m stupid; have been dallying with Mr Williamson’s Confessions, appalled by his ego centricity. Are all writers as magnified in their own eyes? He cant move an inch from the glare of his own personality—his fame. And I’ve never read one of those immortal works.

To Charleston this afternoon, after provisioning for our siege in Lewes. Last night we saw tinsel sparks here & there in the sky over the flat. L. thought they were shells bursting from the London barrage. Great air traffic all night—some loud explosions. I listened for Church Bells, thinking largely I admit, of finding ourselves prisoned here with Mabel. She thought the same. Said that if one is to be killed one will be killed. Prefers death in a Holloway shelter playing cards—naturally—to death here.

Tuesday 17 September

No invasion. High wind. Yesterday in the Pub. Library I took down a book of Peter Lucas’s criticism. This turned me against writing my book. London Library atmosphere effused. Turned me against all lit crit; these so clever, so airless, so fleshless ingenuities & attempts to prove—that T. S. Eliot, for example is a worse critic than F.L.L. Is all lit. crit. that kind of exhausted air?—book dust, London Library, air. Or is it only that F.L.L. is a second hand, frozen fingered, university specialist, don trying to be creative, don all stuffed with books, writer? Would one say the same of the Common Reader? I dipped for 5 minutes & put the book back depressed. The man asked What do you want Mrs Woolf? I said a history of English literature. But was so sickened, I cdn’t look. There were so many. Nor cd I remember the name of Stopford Brooke.

I continue, after winning two games of bowls. Our island is a desert island. No letters from Meck. No coffee. Papers between 3 & 4. Cant get on to Meck, when we ring up. Some letters take 5 days coming. Trains uncertain. One must get out at Croydon. Angelica goes to Hilton via Oxford. So we, L. & I, are almost cut off. John agitated. Talks of L.’s “bravado”: but L. hasnt spent a night in London. This irritates L. who says he will go up by train tomorrow. Happily he now postpones. I dont want to spend a day bomb dodging; train prisoned. We found a young soldier in the garden last night, coming back. “Can I speak to Mr Woolf?” I thought it meant billeting for certain. No. Could we lend a typewriter? Officer on hill had gone & taken his. So we produced my portable. Then he said: “Pardon Sir. Do you play chess?” He plays chess with passion. So we asked him to tea on Saturday to play. He is with the anti aircraft searchlight on the hill. Finds it dull. Cant get a bath. A straight good natured young man. Professional soldier? I think the son, say of an estate agent, or small shopkeeper. Not public school. Not lower class. But I shall investigate. “Sorry to break into your private life” he said. Also that on Saturday he went to the pictures in Lewes.

Wednesday 18 September

“We have need of all our courage” are the words that come to the surface this morning; on hearing that all our windows are broken, ceilings down, & most of our china smashed at Meck. Sq. The bomb exploded. Why did we ever leave Tavistock?—whats the good of thinking that? We were about to start for London, when we got on to Miss Perkins who told us. The Press—what remains—is to be moved to Letchworth. A grim morning. How can one settle into Michelet & Coleridge? As I say, we have need of courage. A very bad raid last night on London. Waiting for the wireless. But I did forge ahead with PH all the same.

Thursday 19 September

Less need of courage today. I suppose the impression of Miss P.’s voice describing the damage wears off. Another loud night Another bad raid. Oxford Street now smashed. John Lewis, Selfridge, B⁠[ourne] & H⁠[ollingsworth], all my old haunts. Also British Museum forecourt. A gale & rain here. I picked blackberries, & became absorbed in my LP speech—dear—10 minutes talk—but how difficult—for tomorrow. No letters yet from M⁠[ecklenburgh]. S⁠[quare]. No parcels. Pippin [Woolf] wont come. I’m relieved. Percy is up to some swindle about honey. It costs us about 5/- a comb at this rate. He tervisagates in the usual way. Also has stolen wood.

Saturday 21 September

We’ve just bottled our honey. I’m in a rage. Nessa has told those d—d Anreps they can come to the [Rodmell] cottage for a fortnight. I walked to Piddinghoe & saw a wedding The clergyman in the vestry said: This page was signed in 1542—almost 400 years ago. 400 years hadnt chiselled those red shy yokels into a very sharp shape. The girl was townish, in pleated purple. The man red & coltish. He was seized by a friend in the porch who stuffed a whole bag of confetti between skin & shirt. “To make up for Brighton!” he said. Then the air raid went. I heard bombs on Brighton.

I have forced myself to overcome my rage at being beaten at Bowls & my fulminations against Nessa by reading Michelet:

As I told Ethel Smyth, one must drop a safety curtain over ones private scene. Michelet is my safety curtain. Posts still held up. No Buszard; no Times book; no answer from N.S. about Coleridge. The train only goes so far as Peckham. (Theres the all clear, I rather think). Mrs Chavasse says someone left London at 6: arrived at 2 am. We go up on Monday to salvage & see John. Mabel is said to have nailed curtains over the windows. A bomb in Gordon Sqre. All windows at 46 broken. L. has written to ask the Bedfords to remit our rent [of 52 Tavistock Square]. If refused, we mean to tackle the Duke, & ventilate in the papers. Very still & warm today. So invasion becomes possible. Smoke was going up like a picture on the house over the hill in Piddinghoe. The river high; all softly blue & milky: autumn quiet—12 planes in perfect order, back from the fight, pass overhead. Last night I read a potted version of my USA article. Quentin very burly & male. Mrs West prefers not to have money. A woman shd. stay at home. Miss Gardner amiable & silly but handsome. Fears [the postman] admitted: the wage earner keeps a perk for himself. A scattered discussion. How odd if one cd strip the flesh & see the various motives function.

Wednesday 25 September

It must have been the next day that the Anrep crisis happened. They had taken the cottage, Nessa told me, indefinitely: Helen & the 2 oafs. Then I lost my temper, more than for years. Sure enough they came on Monday. Had I time I would detail my great philosophic scheme for organising emotions for the length of their stay. Every fortnight a decorous tea. A letter to Helen explaining … & so on. Then, like a Star arising, Nessa wrote (we are cold & distant, after our wrangle) that they stay only a week. Well—I cannot now dissect my maneuvres. All day—Monday—in London I was composing my attitude; in the flat; dark; carpets nailed to windows; ceilings down in patches; heaps of grey dust & china under kitchen table; back rooms untouched. A lovely Septr day—tender—three days of tender weather—John came. We are moved to Letchworth. The Garden City was moving us that day. Roger surprisingly sells. The bomb in Brunswick Sqre exploded. I was in the bakers. Comforted the agitated worn women. Then letters, from Arthur Ponsonby & Lord Bicester & Christabel from the choked maw of the post office. So home. And now, constricted by the Anreps in the village, I plan a tea say Saturday; clench my teeth, shut my eyes; & after that, to the peace of this empty house, & renewed country. Invasion again withdraws.

Thursday 26 September

A rather strained talk on the phone with Nessa. She hasn’t forgiven the Anrep conversation;—damn Helen for once more moving herself into an impregnable position. However, Nessa held the Trump card. “Both our studios have been destroyed. The roofs fallen in. Still burning. Pictures burnt.” So I had to pipe low. My fallen ceilings a trifle. Helen a mares nest. Our strategy was to invite the A.s & the B.s to the same tea. The A.s accept rapturously. So therell be 3 very unpleasant hours on Saturday. I must prepare my behaviour. Think of things to say. Gathering apples all the afternoon. German raider comes over. Shots fired at Asheham. Bombs towards Seaford. Writing to Ld Ponsonby I remain unmoved. Only a German bomber? Oh thats all—No I didn’t look out—Consider this remark last year—still more, 10 years, still more 50 years ago. In flush with PH. thank God: & The Listener suggests a review. So I’m nose to the grindstone; the perfect antidote to Anreps.

I never mentioned Ken Sheppard, the unknown soldier. But must return to Michelet.

Sunday 29 September

A bomb dropped so close I cursed L. for slamming the window. I was writing to Hugh, & the pen jumped from my fingers. Raid still on. Its like a sheep dog, chasing a fox out of the fold—you see them yapping & biting & then the marauder, dropping a bone, a bomb towards Newhaven, flies. All Clear. Bowls. Villagers at their doors. Cold. All now become familiar. I was thinking: (among other things) that this is a lazy life. Breakfast in bed. Read in bed. Bath. Order dinner. Out to Lodge. After rearranging my room (turning table to get the sun: Church on right; window left; a new very lovely view) tune up, with cigarette: write till 12; stop; visit L.: look at papers; return; type till 1. Listen in. Lunch. Sore jaw. Cant bite. Read papers. Walk to Southease. Back 3. Gather & arrange apples. Tea. Write a letter. Bowls. Type again. Read Michelet & write here. Cook dinner. Music. Embroidery. 9.30 read (or sleep) till 11.30. Bed. Compare with the old London day. Three afternoons someone coming. One night, dinner party. Saturday a walk. Thursday shopping. Tuesday going to tea with Nessa. One City walk. Telephone ringing. L. to meetings. KM. or Robson bothering—that was an average week; with Friday to Monday here.

I think, now we’re marooned, I ought to cram in a little more reading. Yet why? A happy, a very free, & disengaged—a life that rings from one simple melody to another. Yes; why not enjoy this after all those years of the other? Yet I compare with Miss Perkins day. At 58 Miss P. may live as I do.

Anreps yesterday. Easy & familiar & friendly. The brats [omission] astonishingly rude to Helen, to whom therefore I relented. Both treat her as a menial, a servant, an imbecile. Both very callow, callous, rattling & over emphatic—unrestrained; embryos, unlicked cubs. Ba goes to the pub at night. Ba attacked Phoebe Poole [an Oxford contemporary]. She wants to go back to London. An undisciplined, unschooled & not very attractive or seductive mind. Crude & raw. Both of course young—& so have vitality. Helen their slave.

Nessa rang up. A statue & frigidaire alone salved.

Wednesday 2 October

Ought I not to look at the sunset rather than write this? A flush of red in the blue; the haystack in the marsh catches the glow; behind me, the apples are red in the trees. L. is gathering them. Now a plume of smoke goes from the train under Cabum. And all the air a solemn stillness holds. till 8.30 when the cadaverous twanging in the sky begins; the planes going to London. Well its an hour still to that. Cows feeding. The elm tree sprinkling its little leaves against the sky. Our pear tree swagged with pears; & the weathercock above the triangular church tower above it. Why try again to make the familiar catalogue, from which something escapes. Should I think of death? Last night a great heavy plunge of bomb under the window. So near we both started. A plane had passed dropping this fruit. We went onto the terrace. Trinkets of stars sprinkled & glittering. All quiet. The bombs dropped on Itford Hill. There are two by the river, marked with white wooden crosses, still unburst. I said to L.: I dont want to die yet. The chances are against it. But theyre aiming at the railway & the power works. They get closer every time. Caburn was crowned with what looked a settled moth, wings extended—a Messerschmitt it was, shot down on Sunday.

I had a nice gallop this morning with Coleridge—Sara. I’m to make £20 with 2 articles. Books still held up. And Spiras free, & Margot writes to say ‘I did it’ & adds, “a long letter all about yourself & what you believe.” What do I? Cant at the moment remember. Oh I try to imagine how one’s killed by a bomb. I’ve got it fairly vivid—the sensation: but cant see anything but suffocating nonentity following after. I shall think—oh I wanted another 10 years—not this—& shant, for once, be able to describe it. It—I mean death; no, the scrunching & scrambling, the crushing of my bone shade in on my very active eye & brain: the process of putting out the light,—painful? Yes. Terrifying. I suppose so—Then a swoon; a drum; two or three gulps attempting consciousness—& then, dot dot dot

Sunday 6 October

I snatch this page with Anreps & Ruth Beresford imminent to say—what? Will it ever seem strange that L. & I walking on the marsh first look at a bomb crater: then listen to the German drone above: then I take 2 paces nearer L., prudently deciding that 2 birds had better be killed with one stone? They got Lewes at last yesterday. Eleven bombs Percy says—not one of em drawing blood; only sheds, graveyards & windows. We discount Percy. But its indisputable—the crater in the field by the line. Two or three crashes today. A very stormy huddled clouded day. Favourable for hiding planes. Wild geese on the river. So I say. L. says Cormorants. But my old St Ives sea sense scouts that.

I’m earning £30 this week. 2 Coleridges; Sitwells. And cant help running them all into a book, in & out, round & round I shall thread a necklace through English life & lit. But no, I wont let myself reel it off. Never had a better writing season. P.H. in fact pleases me; & so little to do now. Many letters to write. Lord Bicester introduces the Morgans, who are deeply distressed by Roger. But I cant write with Anreps imminent. Praise be, they go tomorrow. Yet I like Baba—perking up so fresh & spouting through that crooked spout her nose: alive; foolish. Helen of course,—well, I dont like the suppliant; yet cant see how she cd. better it. The weak are the wrong doers, as old Waller [Jack Hills] once said. The drifters that foul the nets. Only—only—I see too many sides now, growing old. Whats she to do, being a drifter? Vita on Wednesday. I think I could stuff this hole—oh the Anreps—as I cant bowl in this gale—with Michelet. I’m tired of article writing.

Thursday 10 October

Rather flush of ideas, because I have had an idle day, a non-writing day—what a relief once in a way—a Vita talking day. About what? Oh the war; bombs; which house hit, which not; then Ben’s attack; then our books—all very ample easy & satisfying. She has a hold on life, knows plants & their minds & bodies, lunches with Prince Bernhart, makes a curtsey to the wrong man “I am Robert of Austria”—washes up with R. of A. & is generally slack & abundant & wholly without the little artists back kitchen smell, so perceptible in Helen, large & tolerant & modest, with her hands loosely upon so many reins: sons; Harold; garden; farm. Humorous too, & deeply, I mean awkwardly, dumbly affectionate. I’m glad that our love has weathered so well. She drove us to Lewes; a great storm; car incommoded; siren sounded as we left her at the crossroads. A wave of her hand; she drives off in her leggings brown velvet coat & yellow shirt grown, I suppose people wd. say, rather heavy & blowsy; her eyes less lustrous; her cheeks spread—but so careless of it all, it dont matter. So we walked home across the marsh. How free, how peaceful we are. No one coming. No servant. Dine when we like. Living near to the bone. I think we’ve mastered life rather competently.

I was thinking of Mabel’s history. Her friend has died. Could I write it, how profoundly succulent it wd be. The cold pear shaped woman: her suppressed country childhood: no its her life with Charles that interests me. He was ‘on his own.’ Did a good deal of shady dealing I imagine. Lived in lodgings kept by an old lady near Elephant & Castle. Used to eat raw tripe—being from Yorkshire. A typical underworld card. He made a good deal at dog races. He wd take Mabel to race after race. How did they meet? He was life & romance to her. Why didnt they marry? Had he a wife? Every spare day I wd find him a solid red face grizzled man in his shirtsleeves—perhaps helping to wash up. His other passion was the Opera. He knew them all by heart. For hours they wd stand in a queue, at the Old Vic &c. She knew all the tunes. What a queer relationship—she so dumb & passive yet following him; maternally proud of him, to races, to plays: following the form of horses; always with something on. I gave him 3 lemons⁠[?]; but I also made her come down here, when he was ill—Lord, the bloodless servitude of the domestic poor! Now she’s been “as near death as can be”—the flats toppling on to their shelter. It is something like an Arnold Bennett novel the life of the bastard woman; her subterranean London life, with this ‘friend’ as she called him. Charles Stanford I think his name was—Charles will do—or wont do—She thought of him as of a small impetuous boy. Now his life is over; & no one will know more than I do about Charles & Mabel.

Saturday 12 October

I would like to pack my day rather fuller: most reading must be munching. If it were not treasonable to say so, a day like this is almost too—I wont say happy: but amenable. The tune varies, from one nice melody to another. All is played (today) in such a theatre. Hills & fields; I cant stop looking; October blooms; brown plough; & the fading & freshening of the marsh. Now the mist comes up. And one things ‘pleasant’ after another: breakfast, writing, walking, tea, bowls, reading, sweets, bed. A letter from Rose about her day. I let it almost break mine. Mine recovers. The globe rounds again. Behind it—oh yes. But I was thinking I must intensify. Partly Rose. Partly I’m terrified of passive acquiescence. I live in intensity. In London, now, or 2 years ago, I’d be owling through the streets. More pack & thrill than here. So I must supply that—how? I think book making inventing. And there’s always the chance of a rough wave: no, I wont once more turn my magnifying glass on that. Scraps of memoirs come so coolingly to my mind. Wound up by those 3 little articles (one sent today) I unwound a page about Thoby.

Fish forgotten, I must invent a dinner. But its all so heavenly free & easy—L. & I alone. We raised Louie’s wages to 15/- from 12/- this week. She is as rosy & round as a small boy tipped. I’ve my rug on hand too. Another pleasure. And all the clothes drudgery, Sybil drudgery, society drudgery obliterated. But I want to look back on these war years as years of positive something or other. L. gathering apples. Sally barks. I imagine a village invasion. Queer the contraction of life to the village radius. Wood bought eno’ to stock many winters. All our friends are isolated over winter fires. Letters from Angelica & Bunny &. Chance of interruption small now. No cars. No petrol. Trains uncertain. And we on our lovely free autumn island. But I will read Dante, & for my trip thro’ English lit book. I was glad to see the C.R. all spotted with readers at the Free Library to wh. I think of belonging.

Thursday 17 October

Our private luck has turned. John says Tavistock Sqre is no more. If thats so, I need no longer wake in the night thinking the Wolves luck has taken a downward turn. For the first time they were rash & foolish. Second, an urgent request from Harpers Bazaar for an article or story. So that tree, far from being barren, as I thought, is fruit bearing. And I’ve spent I dont know how much brain nerve earning £30 gs. with 3 little articles. But I say, the effort has its reward; for I’m worth, owing to that insect like conscience & diligence, £120 to the USA.

A perfect day—a red admiral feasting on an apple day. A red rotten apple lying in the grass; butterfly on it, beyond a soft blue warm coloured down & field. Everything dropping through soft air to rest on the earth. The light is now fading. Soon the Siren; then the twang of plucked strings … But its almost forgettable still; the nightly operation on the tortured London; Mabel wants to leave it. L. sawing wood. The funny little cross on the Church shows against the downs. We go up tomorrow. A mist is rising; a long fleece of white on the marshes. I must black out. I had so much to say. I am filling my mind slowly with E⁠[lizabe]⁠thans, that is to say letting my mind feed like the Red Admiral—the Siren, just as I had drawn the curtains. Now the unpleasant part begins. Who’ll be killed tonight? Not us, I suppose. One doesn’t think of that—save as a quickener. Indeed I often think our Indian summer was deserved: after all those London years. I mean, this quickens it. Every day seen against a very faint shade of bodily risk.

But to continue—Ly Oxford writes a crude grasping letter. Ethel, having done her usual trick—sympathy, I must have sympathy—forgets & owns she’s alive, in fact, bustling; so why be taken in by the extroverts ever again? They scream to rouse an echo—like Hugh, Ethel must must be heard. Vita sent a broken po, & Jacobs sheep wool. Not an extrovert. And I returned to PH today; & am to transfer my habitual note taking I think—what I do on odd days—to Random reading. The idea is, accumulate notes. Oh & I’ve mastered the iron curtain for my brain. Down I shut when I’m tied tight. No reading no writing. No claims, no ‘must’. I walk—yesterday in the rain over, the Piddinghoe down—a new line.

Sunday 20 October

The most—what?—impressive, no, thats not it—sight in London on Friday was the queue, mostly children with suitcases, outside Warren St tube. This was about 11.30. We thought they were evacuees, waiting for a bus. But there they were, in a much longer line, with women, men, more bags & blankets, sitting still at 3. Lining up for the shelter in the nights raid—which came of course. Thus, if they left the tube at 6 (a bad raid on Thursday) they were back again at 11. So to Tavistock Sq. With a sigh of relief saw a heap of ruins. Three houses, I shd. say gone. Basement all rubble. Only relics an old basket chair (bought in Fitzroy Sqre days) & Penmans board To Let. Otherwise bricks & wood splinters. One glass door in the next door house hanging. I cd just see a piece of my studio wall standing: otherwise rubble where I wrote so many books. Open air where we sat so many nights, gave so many parties. The hotel not touched. So to Meck. All again litter, glass, black soft dust, plaster powder. Miss Talbot & Miss Edwards in trousers, overalls, & turbans, sweeping. I noted the flutter of Miss T.’s hands: the same as Miss Perkins. Of course friendly & hospitable in the extreme. Jaunty jerky talk. Repetitions. So sorry we hadnt had her card … to save you the shock. Its awful … Upstairs she propped a leaning bookcase for us. Books all over dining room floor. In my sitting room glass all over Mrs Hunter’s cabinet—& so on. Only the drawing room with windows almost whole. A wind blowing through. I began to hunt out diaries. What cd we salvage in this little car? Darwin, & the Silver, & some glass & china. Then, I on my chair hunting, Mabel came. As discreet & matronly as ever. Rather finer & sadder. I arranged that she shd. come here for a fortnight. She too almost, in her very trained servant way, overcome. Our house, she said, like a monkeys house. Hadnt had her clothes off since she left. And going to the hospital—here she paused. “You hear them whistling round you, you wonder is it our turn next?” The flats had fallen on top of her shelter. Anxious of course to sweep to recover my fur coat. I worked with her in the kitchen packing Duncan’s glasses, Nessa’s plates. Very friendly, devoted, her training as helper uppermost. Offered her fare. She refused. (And she hasnt come, greatly to our relief—Oh the pleasure of the empty house—of the ship in wh. we’re the crew …) Then lunch off tongue, in the drawing room. John came. I forgot the Voyage of the Beagle. No raid the whole day. So about 2.30 drove home. L. says £10 wd cover our damage. Cheered on the whole by London. Damage in Bloomsbury considerable. 3 houses out in Caroline Place: but miles & miles of Hyde Park, Oxford & Cambridge Terrace, & Queens Gate untouched. Now we seem quit of London.

Plans for buying a house in Lewes & storing our furniture. Perhaps hiring rooms for our books at the Rectory. Exhilaration at losing possessions—save at times I want my books & chairs & carpets & beds—How I worked to buy them—one by one—And the pictures. But to be free of Meck, wd now be a relief. Almost certainly it will be destroyed—& our queer tenancy of that sunny flat over … In spite of the move & the expense, no doubt, if we save our things, we shall be cheaply quit—I mean, if we’d stayed at 52 & lost all our possessions. But its odd—the relief at losing possessions. I shd like to start life, in peace, almost bare—free to go anywhere. Can we be rid of Meck tho’?

Nessa to tea yesterday. Talk of a farmhouse at Chalverton?—for A. & B. I at once long to buy it—Checked by L. Tomorrow we go to Lewes & house agents.

I must add that today is as hot as August: walked on downs; heard gunfire at Dover?—shelling Calais; summer clothes; L. cleaning beds. Too hot for fire. Mist rising, must black out.

[Tuesday 22 October]

Mabel has come. I thought I heard a rat gnawing when I came in from the marsh. Strode into the kitchen & found her there. So all our solitude is gone. There she is, passive, dependant. And how to make a move? Seems impossible. The old weight of respectable damp despair is on me. L. says she’s positively cheered by Charles’ death—after an operation at Tooting. “I could envy him” she said to me this morning. “They say I’ve grown fatter—sitting doing nothing”

To Lewes. Asked the rent of Yew Tree house—£110, with a view to buying & storing. Denny Botten has rooms. Mrs Ebbs has a stable. Mrs Ebbs always reads “your wife’s books. But doesn’t understand them—for the beautiful English.” I wish I didn’t play bowls, & cd. settle in & write calmly or read. As it is, in I rush, having irritated L. who said he had bad luck; I won the 2nd game—too hasty to do more than black out before dinner.

Mable somewhere secretively observant. The vast ideas that float are never caught. I thought: how L. sees people in the mass: I singly. I thought biography is like the rim of sea anemones left round the shore in Gosse’s Father & Son [1907]: I thought Beresford, Ruth’s father, has been killed by a bomb: I thought, I will write supports & additions for my old TLS articles; a good deal about manners, & our class; about my rug (L. sneezes in the wc. I jump;) about a prayer for the V⁠[ictoria]⁠n scene in P.H.; no reply from Harpers. Gramophone mended but bad; if I wait the thought may return; a lovely almost a red admiral & apple day; 24 vols of diary salved; a great mass for my memoirs. The lazy talk of pregnant women—to wit, Mrs Cruttenden in the bakers shop; lou⁠[n]⁠ged out & stood in the sun; & now I will light the fire, as L. comes in with the logs. And so, rug, reading, music, bed.

Wednesday 23 October

Heard the whistle of bombs for the first time today. About 5—windy cloudy: playing bowls. Suddenly heard a plane: suddenly heard a whistle. Like a toy pig escaping—rather: Then I saw smoke, over the field path. Then 4 separate thuds—said to be at Iford & by the new house opposite Northease. Went into village. What about the children, said Annie’s sister in law. Then Annie & two children appeared. In the bus from Lewes they had seen the bombs fall near. No one hurt—as far as known. L. now holding agricultural meeting. How instinctive the mothers reaction is! The children … off she ran. Jaded with story spinning fr. an empty well in reply to 2 more letters from H⁠[arper’s]. B⁠[azaar].

Saturday 26 October

“The complete Insider”—I have just coined this title to express my feeling towards George Trevelyan; who has been made Master of Trinity: whose history of England I began after tea (throwing aside Michelet vol. 15 with a glorious sense of my own free & easiness in reading now). Herbert Fisher is another. So (with a ‘perhaps’) is Maynard. They are Romans not Greeks. I like outsiders better. Insiders write a colourless English. They are turned out by the University machine. I respect them. Father was one variety. I dont love them. I dont savour them. Insiders are the glory of the 19th century. They do a great service like Roman roads. But they avoid the forests & the will o the wisps.

Rather a harassed day yesterday—Leslie Humphreys: carrying the bust of Sir James. He climbs. He’s agile. He’s communicative. But a bore—or will be—a garrulous bore. At the same time he part touched, part flattered me by his little private talk about Judith. How she refers “things to you & Leonard. You’ve got hold of something worth having.” He pools his Bank balance with her: is proud, worshipping, of her; says she suffers, from a sense of guilt. Provides her I suppose with confidence & the normal. But he irritated L.: & Mabel has trod on L.’s spectacles; & the Frys will have her. Too cold for more.

Tuesday 29 October

Rather than wash my head I will here record (it has taken me 10 minutes to fit new sheets into this book) a London day. Up by train. Saying a chill early morning good bye to Mabel, who’s gone to Isabel Fry [one of Roger’s sisters]. Train luxurious & fast. Bus 18 waiting. Very little new damage. City looked untouched. The flat wind swept. So walked—all our part pitted & scarred. At 52 we saw the panels still pendant—3 at least. The scavenger talked to us about Sally—L.’s old fine trusty crone. To buy wool. So round the squares home. Cold sausages in the cold room. Salvaged a few books off the floor. Pritchard had his gardener up with a spade. Much lamented our carpet inches deep in plaster & glass. L. to the Fabians [in Westminster]. I by some hanky panky on part of my watch so late—5 to the ½ hour in Piccadilly—had to jump into a taxi. St James Church a shell; also the shop opposite. Ruins in Leicester Sqre. Crater in front of the Palace. Willie & L. standing outside Fabians, to Victoria. Air raid sounded. Sat there for ¾ hour. No guns. So home. And how happy—several letters—one from the woman gardener, who has never read anything so disgusting as p. 34 in R.F.; book (E.F. Benson) from Times: wood fire & thats all. Today I cycled to Newhaven—City of the Dead. Sepulchred shops empty; silent, dour men. Baker boasted of the raid—at 5.30 yesterday 25 Germans descended: dropped 25 bombs—houses ruined—little girl killed. “And not a Spitfire any where near ..” The gloomy self consequence of the newly bombed. Home by Tarring Neville. The loveliest of low views.

Friday 1 November

A gloomy evening, spiritually: alone over the fire—L. in bed with influenza cold: caught off Percy. So I am alone; & by way of conversation, apply to this too stout volume.

My Times book this week is E. F. Benson’s last autobiography—in which he tried to rasp himself clean of his barnacles. I learn there the perils of glibness. I too can flick phrases. He said “One must discover new depths in oneself.” Well I dont bother about that here. I will note, tho’, the perils of glibness. And add, considering how I feel in my fingers the weight of every word, even of a review, need I feel guilty?

The relics of my distracted morning—I had to ring up Miss Talbot—who was to come tomorrow—&c &c, were spent tightening that wretched £150 story, The Legacy. Well, I combed & tidied it—so far as ‘it’ has any hair on its head. Then dipped into my memoirs: too circuitous & unrelated: too many splutters: as it stands. A real life has no crisis: hence nothing to tighten. It must lack centre. It must amble on. All the same, I can weave a very thick pattern, one of these days, out of that pattern of detail. Then I carried L.’s lunch. Then I pumped my bicycle. Then I rode to Lewes. I saw a chocolate velvet Bradfield, & slid past. Early in the morning Annie came, asked me to stand for W.I. Cttee. “No” I cried too violently. The poor dont understand humour. I repented; went round later & found her in the sunny parlour with all the sisters⁠[?] artificial carnations, & said I would. For I could see, by the pleasure she felt when I offered to nominate her, that she takes this infernal dull bore seriously: its an excitement. Two white Penfold brats. They run out like dogs she said chasing them. If one lives in a village, one had better snatch its offerings. Miss Talbot rang up. Sister too shy to come. Arranged both will come—oh dear—next week. And the raid was bad last night. At 3 am. a bomb dropped 2 doors off—seriously hurt a man. She said it was an English shell, unexploded. The Italians, she says, are practising: nosing in the dark—as they did t’other night here. This very simple self-conversation had better end with the page—paper being scarce, & so on.

I forgot to say that I heard of Hilda Matheson’s death today from Ethel. But she calls up no image.

Sunday 3 November

Yesterday the river burst its banks. The marsh is now a sea with gulls on it. L. (recovered) & I walked down to the hanger. Water broken, white, roaring, pouring down through the gap by the pill box. A bomb had exploded last month; old Thompsett told me it took a month to mend. For some reason (bank weakened Everest says by pill box) it burst again. Today the rain is tremendous. And gale. As if dear old nature were kicking up her heels. Down to the hanger again. Flood deeper & fuller. Bridge cut off. Water made road impassable by the farm. So all my marsh walks are gone—until? Another break in the bank. It comes over in a cascade: the sea is unfathomable. Yes, now it has crept up round Botten’s haystack—the haystack in the floods—& is at the bottom of our field. Lovely if the sun were out. Medieval in the mist tonight.

T’other night cooking alone, Freeth came. Light showing. A plane overhead (It was bright starlight). Later, P.C. Collins. Here I observed the official bully. So ‘rude’: so rasping; the working man male dressed up. Gave me a dressing down. Threatened. Scolded. What a chance to give a lady a bit of his mind! When theyre not respectful, theyve no “manners” to fall back on: only original—well not savagery, nor brutality: bully is the fittest. Every night you show a light. No other house does. Next time—prison, fine, indicated. I tried my lady battery on him. No good. Mr Woolf in bed—thats why. No good. So I took notes of him too: useful this breach in the bank of class manners. Anyhow we spent 4 hours stitching curtains yesterday. L. still hanging. And Mary H. on the phone, asking to bring Franzetti tomorrow. I am happy, quit of my money making; back at P.H. writing in spurts: covering, I’m glad to say, a small canvas. Oh the freedom—

Tuesday 5 November

The haystack in the floods is of such incredible beauty … When I look up I see all the marsh water. In the sun deep blue, gulls caraway seeds: snowberries⁠[?]: atlantic flier: yellow islands: leafless trees: red cottage roofs. Oh may the flood last for ever—a virgin lip; no bungalows; as it was in the beginning. So we showed it to Mary & Mrs Hamilton (an Italian; formerly married to Franchetti). Now its lead grey with the red leaves in front, our island sea. Caburn is become a cliff.

I was thinking: the University fills shells like H.A.L.F. & Trevelyan. They are their product. Also: never have I been so fertile. Also: the old hunger for books is on me: the childish passion So that I am very ‘happy’ as the saying is: & excited by PH. This diary shorthand comes in useful. A new style—to mix.

Yvonne knew Rezia. She now dreads germs. Covers her hands to shake hands. A very dull life in the Palazzo Corsini. Nerino a doctor. Was with the Huxleys & Sullivan when Ott & Pip came. Ott bathing in pink tights with a great hat. I liked her when I found she was Italian. Mary like a jennet—a mare with ears laid back. I liked her. Jimmy Sheehan drinks. All the young English drink spirits. I like wine. Air raids much less. Greeks holding out. Prospect more hopeful. A crybaby letter from John. Doing the work of 3 men for 2$—all our fault. This his reaction to his own folly in poaching Auden. Auden has cried off—taking John’s £100. Hamish Hamilton a publisher. Publishes Mrs Thirkell. Mr Hanna arrives with L.’s [A.R.P.] armlet: violet silk with gold letters. Oh the black out wh. nips me in the bud. Miss Pound out with the Canadian. The Canadian playing a game in the road as I ordered dinner. Estimate from Carvills [of Lewes] for bringing furniture £25. No letters—only Denny. And so to read George Trevelyan the perfect product of the Universities.

Thursday 7 November

Morgan asks if he may propose me for the L⁠[ondon] L⁠[ibrary] Committee. Rather to my pleasure I answered No. I dont want to be a sop—a face saver. This was a nice little finish to a meeting with EMF years ago in the L.L. He sniffed about women on Cttee. One of these days I’ll refuse I said silently. And now I have. Here is L. so I stop. Bad bombing last night—4 thuds: at 7—said to be Glyndebourne. London tomorrow Oh Lord the Talbots for the weekend.

1940

37 Mecklenburgh Square existed till September. Then bombed.

We went up every other week & slept there

We had Mable.

Roger was published on 25th June.

The raids on London began in September.

France collapsed in June.

Raids here began in September.

There was the fear of invasion.

We were victorious over the Italians.

The Greeks were successful in Albania.

Herbert Fisher died Ray Strachey died.

Humbert Wolfe died.

Hilda Matheson died.

Judith & Leslie stayed here for August.

Ann stayed with us.

Mabel left in October.

Louie takes on the house.

We go up only for the day.

L. arranges the vegetable growing.

Gives 12 W E A lectures.

I am Treasurer of the W I.

Morgan asked me to stand for L.L. Committee. I refused.

Tuesday 12 November

Chamberlain is dead: & if we hold on till March we have broken the back (or whatever the phrase is). These two facts sum up the papers. I could add about Greece … Hitler’s speech … no: time goes so heavy & slow, that nothing marks the days. A bomb fell at lunch yesterday. There is nothing new. Eastbourne bombed. London. I am shirking, in these semi public utterances, the Talbot character. I had it on the tip of my tongue. [omission]

Friday 15 November

As I cannot write if anyone is in the room, as L. sits here when we light the fire, this book remains shut. A natural slimming process. A screw over the end of P H. made me rather sink into the disillusions yesterday. We have been a bit pressed. Michael MacCarthy to lunch; L.’s [WEA] lecture; Nessa to lunch—2 hard shopping days, in one of wh. I bought blue serge slacks—all this has rattled my head; so I plunged into the past this morning; wrote about father; & then we walked in top boots & trousers through the flood. Increased again. Lewes this evening with 2 lights showing looks like a harbour—like a French town spreading its skirts round a bay. I had a gaping raw wound too reading my essay in N.W. Why did I? Why come to the top when I suffer so in that light?

Coventry almost destroyed. The usual traffic last night. All the hounds on their road to London. A bad raid there. When I am not writing fiction this fact seeps in. The necessity of living in the upper air. Then I tidied my room & threw masses on to the potato box for Louie. This also revives. I am a mental specialist now. I will enjoy every single day. We took 2 rooms at Botten’s. I am always behindhand with letters. I am reading Read’s Auty: a tight packed unsympathetic mind, all good cabinet making. And pin my faith still to Trevy’s history. And now return to that. Wind rising. So perhaps the traffic will be interrupted.

Sunday 17 November

I observe, as a curious trifle in mental history—I shd like to take naturalists notes—human naturalists notes—that it is the rhythm of a book that, by running in the head, winds one into a ball: & so jades one. The rhythm of PH. (the last chapter) became so obsessive that I heard it, perhaps used it, in every sentence I spoke. By reading the notes for memoirs I broke this up. The rhythm of the notes is far freer & looser. Two days of writing in that rhythm has completely refreshed me. So I go back to PH tomorrow. This I think is rather profound.

Butter stolen yesterday; Louie says “You are too well liked for any villager to take it—Had it been Mr Coates…” This flatters us. A fight over Knotts Bushes. 6 little companies of exclamation marks. Supposed to be the shrapnel after the air gun shell. Two loud explosions. A great chase, & all the farm out watching. Dumb Thompsett making wild attempts at comment. Flood even higher. And the plumes of the sky in the water—& the wild birds—& L. cut down the rusty funereal trees today. And I lost the saw. I cannot fix my mind to details. The butter disappeared when we were playing bowls. A mans voice heard, & the card of St Dunstan’s found in the door. Assumption then that the voluntary Collector took it.

A Canadian soldier stole Peter’s bicycle pump. Two Miss Pounds left the house holding nothing in their hands. Mrs Chavasse—I’m a lone woman—always sleeps in her shelter—a cellar, dripping wet—Lord!—

Monday 18 November

These queer little sand castles, I was thinking; I was finishing Herbert Read’s autobiography this morning at breakfast. Little boys making sand castles. This refers to H. Read; Tom Eliot; Santayana; Wells. Each is weathertight, & gives shelter to the occupant. I think I can follow Read’s building; so far as one can follow what one cannot build. But I am the sea which demolishes these castles. I use this image; meaning that owing to Read’s article on Roger, his self that built the castle is to me destructive of its architecture. A mean, spiteful Read dwells outside. What is the value of a philosophy which has no power over life? I have the double vision. I mean, as I am not engrossed in the labour of making this intricate word structure I also see the man who makes it. I should say it is only word proof not weather proof. We have to discover the natural law & live by it. We are anarchists: We take the leap (glory that is) from what we know to the instinctive. This is his defence of romanticism, of sur-realism. His selection from literature is: Flaubert, Henry James, Blake, Wordsworth. All we at the moment can do is to make these selections: like dogs seeking the grass that cures us. But of course, being a tower dweller, Read then walls them in, others out. Plato of course did not write reviews for The Spectator. I can thus endow him with a purity that is impossible when I know that little Read attacks Roger. Little Read is the image in the face of a pasty boardschool boy. Is this word “little” inevitable of the living? I am carrying on, while I read, the idea of women discovering, like the 19th century rationalists, agnostics, that man is no longer God. My position, ceasing to accept the religion, is quite unlike Read’s, Wells’, Tom’s, or Santayana’s. It is essential to remain outside; & realise my own beliefs: or rather not to accept theirs. A line to think out.

Saturday 23 November

Having this moment finished The Pageant—or Poyntz Hall?—(begun perhaps April 1938) my thoughts turn, well up, to write the first chapter of the next book (nameless). Anon, it will be called. The exact narrative of this last morning should refer to Louie’s interruption, holding a glass jar, in whose thin milk was a pat of butter. Then I went in with her to skim the milk off: then I took the pat & showed it to Leonard. This was a moment of great household triumph.

I am a little triumphant about the book. I think its an interesting attempt in a new method. I think its more quintessential than the others. More milk skimmed off. A richer pat, certainly a fresher than that misery The Years. I’ve enjoyed writing almost every page. This book was only (I must note) written at intervals when the pressure was at its highest, during the drudgery of Roger. I think I shall make this then my scheme: if the new book can be made to serve as daily drudgery—only I hope to lessen that—anyhow it will be a supported on fact book—then I shall brew some moments of high pressure. I think of taking my mountain top—that persistent vision—as a starting point. Then see what comes. If nothing, it wont matter.

To lunch with B. & A. at Claverham yesterday. B. was surly from the start. A. a little spotty. Also nervous. I got a little solitary gossip in the chimney corner. But its not the old family ease. B. suspects the family influence. B. dislikes the house. No room to swing a cat in he grumbled. “But I rather like the country.” I, of course, at once saw the country as something I envied. We lost our way. Up a lane we went to a tree shadowed house, with a pond; & a swan; & a curious thatched barn, with small Gothic windows. I waited in the car. Such antiquity all gone to pieces. Some old farm waggons, some ploughs; a battered car in the yard. L. was wrongly directed. I knocked again; & an old buck in riding breeches—blue eyed, nair netted, munching her solitary lunch, came out. I noticed the ancient bits, walking sticks; & also the very fine panelled door. C⁠[laverham]. farm house is in the fields. It has a pond. Long tracks of grass. Red plumed woods in the distance. And four hollow trees. Also a barn. I cd have fancied living there; it has a marble bath & W.C.: many rooms; thick walls; tiled passages; central heating. But they said it was betwixt & between: nothing in itself. When I think of Monks House when we took it—when I think of the E⁠[arth] C⁠[loset] in the garden; & the cane chair over a bucket, & the dogs barking; & how I hated the village—which has now become familiar & even friendly—arent I on the Cttee of the WI—dont I go to a meeting on Monday?—then I wd have given my eyes to live in Claverham, with the fields, & the green paths, & the farm horses ploughing. L. however saw none of this. In fact, A.’s position, with B. as her mentor, struck us both as almost grotesque—a distortion: a dream; for how can she endure Bottom. And when will she wake? So we drove back to the civilisation of Lewes, & I bought my cream separator: a sieve with which you skim the milk.

The flood is less today—as Q. & Elizabeth Watson lunch tomorrow to see it. No word from John. The L.T. article starred in a Lit. Sup. leader. Am I again in favour? Yesterday a raider came popping over the hill: L. saw a smoke rise. In fact it was shot down at Tarring Neville. Louie says the country people “stomped” the heads of the 4 dead Germans into the earth.

Friday 29 November

Many many deep thoughts have visited me. And fled. The pen puts salt on their tails; they see the shadow & fly. I was thinking about vampires. Leeches. Anyone with 500 a year & education, is at once sucked by the leeches. Put L. & me into Rodmell pool & we are sucked sucked—sucked. I see the reason for those who suck guineas. But life—ideas—thats a bit thick. We’ve exchanged the clever for the simple. The simple envy us our life. Last night L.’s lecture attracted Suckers. Gwen Thompsett is a sucker. (L. is getting logs so I cant write). From this to manners:—a thought to keep for my book.

John has written—wobbly: wants lime light & bouquets. 3rd imp. of Roger: & I not told.

Very busy this last week. To London: Bella & Tom. The last of 37 as a residence: furniture arrives on Monday. Leech Octavia asks to come. B. & A. tomorrow. Now I must read Ellen Terry.

Friday 6 December

And then what they call real life broke in. Vans arrived in a deluge. Oh, we unpacked standing in the rain. And the Bottens did the dirty on us. Result: MH. gorged with old jugs & lidless pots. And the Christian room laden with 4 tons of old damp books. Real life is a helter skelter, healthy for the mind doubtless. I cant climb up to the other life in a hurry. I see what a working womans life is. No time to think. A breeze ruffles the surface. No silence. I cannot concentrate upon E. Terry partly because I’m not sure of my audience in Harper’s.

Quentin last night; urbane & happy. Fears told us the story of South African war—war seen from the ground by the private. A childs eye view. Rather depressing—old papers, letters, notebooks: I’m going to bind the survivors tonight; & in coloured paper they may refresh my eye. All this writing—what a deluge of words I’ve let loose—on paper only: I mean not printed. And must now climb a low rung—Trevy—up towards my heights.

Sunday 8 December

I have only five minutes after a struggle with Ellen Terry to say that the war—yes I have left only 5 minutes to fill in that omission—the war goes on; In ten years I shall ask, what was happening to the war? It is better. The Greeks are driving the Italians out of Albania. Perhaps this is the turning point in the war. But it dribbles out in such little drops. One cant always catch them. The war slowly enacts itself on a great scene: round our little scene. We spend 59 minutes here; one minute there. Badoglio has resigned. And if we beat Italy we beat Germany. It is a cold windy winter day.

Monday 16 December

Exhausted with the long struggle of writing 2,000 about Ellen Terry,—interrupted by 4 days of furniture moving—distracted by the chaotic state of our possessions—oh the huddle & hideousness of untidiness—oh that Hitler had obliterated all our books tables carpets & pictures—oh that we were empty & bare & unpossessed—I take my pen to drawl & drowse a little. The year draws to an end; & I am harassed, damp: but I am relieved of a visit from Margot; & so will take the matter in hand: scrub & polish & discard: & make our life here as taut & bright & vigorous as it can be.

Its rather a hard lap: the winter lap. So cold often. And so much work to do. And so little fat to cook with. And so much shopping to do. And one has to weigh & measure. Then Kingsley comes & devours sugar & butter. I will write memoirs, I think: then Reading at Random. Measure, order, precision are now my gods. Even my hand shakes. We have the kitten. One day last week we lunched at Kings Cross with John. He was polite impersonal—the Prince Consort. A ceremonious lunch. Why are we hooked to that large, rather pretentious livid bellied shark? And must I spend my last years feeding his double row of teeth? I forget. I forget what I wished to say.

K.M. effusive but less distasteful. He ruined 2 days, now I come to think of it. The sensitive plate of his mind only takes the surface. Yes, its like going to the films—the film of December 1940 talking to Kingsley. He reels off Bob Boothby: shelters; air raids; politics; not composed, but fluent. I sit with my eyes dazed. Then at meals he scrapes & sops. I cook in the damp kitchen. And the village keeps tugging & jogging. The W I. party tomorrow. My old dislike of the village bites at me. I envy houses alone in the fields. So petty so teasing are the claims of Gardners & Chavasses. I dont like—but here I stop. Italy is being crushed. Laval dismissed. No raids lately. Margot asks me to lunch & has left me Voltaire in her will.

Thursday 19 December

1940 is undoubtedly coming to an end. The shortest day comes this week: then the days draw out. It wd be interesting if I could take today, Thursday, & say exactly how the war changes it. It changes it when I order dinner. Our ration of margarine is so small that I cant think of any pudding save milk pudding. We have no sugar to make sugar puddings: no pastry, unless I buy it ready made. The shops don’t fill till midday. Things are bought fast. In the afternoon they are often gone. Meat ration diminishes this week. Milk is so cut that we have to consider even the cats saucer. I spent an hour making butter from our skim of cream—a week’s takings provides about ½lb. Petrol changes the day too. Nessa can only come here when she goes to Lewes shopping. All prices rise steadily. The screw is much increased since the summer. We buy no clothes but make do with the old. These are inconveniences rather than hardships. We dont go hungry or cold. But luxury is nipped off, & hospitality. It takes thought & trouble to feed one extra. The post is the most obvious inconvenience perhaps. It takes 2 days to get a London letter: 4 to get a parcel. Turkeys impossible. The pinch is said to be worse than last war. If it increases much we shall be hungry, I suppose. Economy on Mabel means less variety in food, more dusting & L. tidying. I bicycle to Lewes instead of driving. Then the black out—thats half an hour daily drudgery. We cant use the dining room after dark. These mornings L. breakfasts in the parlour by electric light. We dip into our great jars for pickled eggs & pretend they dont taste differently. We are of course marooned here by the bombs in London. This last week the raids are so few that we forget to listen for a siren. That used to come at 6.30 punctually. No bombs fall most nights. Beaverbrook warns us that early in Feb. not only raids but invasion will come. The Germans are said to be sending troops to occupy the recumbent Italy. Whats Hitler got up his sleeve next?—we ask. A certain old age feeling sometimes makes me think I cant spend force as I used. And my hand shakes. Otherwise we draw breath as usual. And its a day when every bough is bright green & the sun dazzles me.

Friday 20 December

Is there a difference of temperature between the morning mind & the evening? If so, it will be detected in the pages that come before this, the morning pages. We have been shopping in Brighton. It is a raw cold day, with the wind rising now. And I am mooning over my Shre. chapter in R⁠[eading at] R⁠[andom] trying to find some clue: some transition from the home to the host and hostess. Biblical prose I am thinking is not colloquial. But I wont work it out: rather give it an hour or so of dumb blind life & trust it will come to the top tomorrow. We bought a duck for our Xmas luncheon. We bought some buns & a wedge of cheese. I bought Eileen Power for 6d & regret not buying a new cigarette holder—mine being foul. Yesterday we went to the village school. They make things. If Raymond had been shown the spindly striped animals he wd have said they were prehistoric—invaluable Mycenean toys. I sat beside the flushed & cushioned Mrs Jansen; also beside Mrs Hanna, & invited Mrs Ebbs to tea, for she has a picture of the Dreadnought.

Sunday 22 December

How beautiful they were, those old people—I mean father & mother—how simple, how clear, how untroubled. I have been dipping into old letters & fathers memoirs. He loved her—oh & was so candid & reasonable & transparent—& had such a fastidious delicate mind, educated, & transparent. How serene & gay even their life reads to me: no mud; no whirlpools. And so human—with the children & the little hum & song of the nursery. But if I read as a contemporary I shall lose my childs vision & so must stop. Nothing turbulent; nothing involved: no introspection.

[Tuesday 24 December]

I note with some dismay that my hand is becoming palsied. Why I cant say. Can I make clear straight lines any more? It seems not. I write this by way of an experiment, indeed its less palsied this morning, but then I’ve been copying my Ms. of P.H., & am word drugged—but wont go into that. And must go in & wash & dress for the Anreps & our rather forced lunch party.

[Later] 24th Dec. Christmas Eve, & I didnt like to pull the curtains so black were Leonard & Virginia against the sky. We lunched with Helen; & again “I could have fancied living there”. An incredible loveliness. The downs breaking their wave, yet one pale quarry; & all the barns & stacks either a broken pink, or a verdurous green; & then the walk by the wall; & the church; & the great tithe barn. How England consoles & warms one, in these deep hollows, where the past stands almost stagnant. And the little spire across the fields … We sat in a ground floor garden room, untidy, littered, with the 2 oaves; & they had a spread for us. So back through Lewes. And I worshipped the beauty of the country, now scraped, but with old colours showing.

L. is now cutting logs, & after my rush of love & envy for Alciston farm house, we concluded this is the perfect place. L. says it is exactly right, for we needn’t be cumbered with possessions here. Which reminds me. We are very poor; & my hoard is 450: but must not be tapped again. So I must write. Yes, our old age is not going to be sunny orchard drowse. By shutting down the fire curtain, though, I find I can live in the moment; which is good; why yield a moment to regret or envy or worry? Why indeed?

Yesterday Octavia came with milk & cream; & Lady Oxford sent her car down with the bust of Voltaire on a book. Very heavy. An extravagant gesture on her part. And we saw the Keynes; & I cowered beneath his pugnacious positive puritan ways—A blank wall of disapproval; till I kissed him, on wh. he talked of Lydia, having a book about the ballet, in his eager, stammering way. Questions of peace remains only, he says: our victory certain. Churchill addressed the Italians.

Sunday 29 December

There are moments when the sail flaps. Then, being a great amateur of the art of life, determined to suck my orange, off, like a wasp if the blossom I’m on fades, & it did yesterday—I ride across the downs to the Cliffs. A roll of barbed wire is hooped on the edge. I rubbed my mind brisk along the Newhaven road. Shabby old maids buying groceries, in that desert road with the villas; in the wet. And Newhaven gashed. But tire the body & the mind sleeps. All desire to write diary here has flagged. What is the right antidote? I must sniff round. I think Mme de Sevigné. Writing to be a daily pleasure. Charleston dumb; Leslie vocal. Anreps lunched. I detest the hardness of old age—I feel it. I rasp. I’m tart.

The foot less prompt to meet the morning dew,

The heart less bounding at emotion new,

And hope, once crush’d, less quick to spring again.

I actually opened Matthew Arnold & copied these lines [from ‘Thyrsis’]. While doing so, the idea came to me that why I dislike, & like, so many things idiosyncratically now, is because of my growing detachment from the hierarchy, the patriarchy. When Desmond praises East Coker, & I am jealous, I walk over the marsh saying, I am I; & must follow that furrow, not copy another. That is the only justification for my writing & living.

How one enjoys food now: I make up imaginary meals.

[]

1941

[Diary XXX]

Wednesday 1 January

On Sunday night, as I was reading about the great fire, in a very accurate detailed book, London was burning. 8 of my city churches destroyed, & the Guildhall. This belongs to last year. This first day of the new year has a slice of a wind—like a circular saw. Leslie H. came to lunch; said um-um so often I nearly goggled; he was discussing the foundations of communism, having come chiefly to pick L.’s brain. Gossip in between; then old Octavia came, with her market womans basket. Great white bottles of milk & cream. L. looking at the comet. Rather a strong moon, & so cant identify the constellation. Mrs Coleridge Taylor tapped at the door; about a concert. And now its close on cooking time. This book was salvaged from 37: I brought it down from the shop, with a handful of Elizabethans for my book, now called “Turning a Page”. A psychologist would see that the above was written with someone, & a dog, in the room. To add in private: I think I will be less verbose here perhaps—but what does it matter, writing too many pages. No printer to consider, no public.

Thursday 9 January

A blank. All frost. Still frost. Burning white. Burning blue. The elms red. I did not mean to describe, once more, the downs in snow; but it came. And I cant help even now turning to look at Asheham down, red, purple, dove blue grey, with the cross so melodramatically against it. What is the phrase I always remember—or forget. Look your last on all things lovely.

Yesterday Mrs Dedman was buried upside down. A mishap. Such a heavy woman, as Louie put it, feasting spontaneously upon the grave. Today she buries the Aunt whose husband saw the vision at Seaford. Their house was bombed by the bomb we heard early one morning last week. And L. is lecturing & arranging the room. Are these the things that are interesting? that recall; that say Stop you are so fair? Well, all life is so fair, at my age. I mean, without much more of it I suppose to follow. And t’other side of the hill there’ll be no rosy blue red snow. I am copying P.H. I am economising. I am to spend nothing. One day, 11 years ago I spent £2.2 on glass jars. That was the loosening of the purse—& I said it was difficult. Is it difficult now to string tight? The great change isnt that but the change to the country. Miss Gardner instead of Elizabeth Bowen. Small beer. But, space, silence; & time. I can sit down to a book. This I havent done since 1924, I suppose when we went to 52: & the scrimmage began. Oh but I’m so tormented by the evening beauty, & I assure you Asheham down is purple pink. And the smoke, rolling like a convoluted—should I dare to say bowel?—is incandescent. Juliette has a boy. Elaine has the measles; & to conclude the marsh is of the colour & substance of an opaque emerald. Many mad letters from adoring women. I never like or respect my admirers, always my detractors. Desmond’s book has come. Dipping I find it small beer. Too Irish, too confidential, too sloppy & depending upon the charm of the Irish voice. Yet I’ve only dipped, I say to quiet my critical conscience, which wont let me define things so easily. Bardia taken.

Wednesday 15 January

Parsimony may be the end of this book. Also shame at my own verbosity, which comes over me when I see the 20 it is—books shuffled together in my room. Who am I ashamed of? Myself reading them.

I answered David Cecil’s silly sneer at Lytton & Mrs Woolf, withdrawing from life to cultivate their art in quiet. The little man I suppose justifies himself by sneering at us. Then Joyce is dead—Joyce about a fortnight younger than I am. I remember Miss Weaver, in wool gloves, bringing Ulysses in type script to our tea table at Hogarth House. Roger I think sent her. Would we devote our lives to printing it? The indecent pages looked so incongruous: she was spinsterly, buttoned up. And the pages reeled with indecency. I put it in the drawer of the inlaid cabinet. One day Katherine Mansfield came, & I had it out. She began to read, ridiculing: then suddenly said, But theres some thing in this: a scene that should figure I suppose in the history of literature. He was about the place, but I never saw him. Then I remember Tom in Ottoline’s room at Garsington saying—it was published then—how could anyone write again after achieving the immense prodigy of the last chapter? He was for the first time in my knowledge, rapt, enthusiastic. I bought the blue paper book, & read it here one summer I think with spasms of wonder, of discovery, & then again with long lapses of intense boredom. Shanks borrowed it; saying it must be hidden from Bowen Hawkesford. This goes back to a pre-historic world. And now all the gents are furbishing up opinions, & the books, I suppose, take their place in the long procession.

We were in London on Monday. I went to London Bridge. I looked at the river; very misty; some tufts of smoke, perhaps from burning houses. There was another fire on Saturday. Then I saw a cliff of wall, eaten out, at one corner; a great corner all smashed; a Bank; the Monument erect; tried to get a Bus; but such a block I dismounted; & the second bus advised me to walk. A complete jam of traffic; for streets were being blown up. So by tube to the Temple; & there wandered in the desolate ruins of my old squares: gashed; dismantled; the old red bricks all white powder, something like a builders yard. Grey dirt & broken windows; sightseers; all that completeness ravished & demolished. So to Buszards where, for almost the first time, I decided to eat gluttonously. Turkey & pancakes. How rich, how solid. 4/- they cost. And so to the L.L. where I collected specimens of Eng. litre. & heard from Mr Cox how he sat over the kitchen fire at Kingston.

Monday 20 January

I will be curt, compressed. A mood like another. Back from a damp, perhaps rather strained, visit to Charleston. Nessa & Quentin; Adrian has almost died of pneumonia. Nessa apprehensive, on guard, when I spoke of Angelica’s dirt. Search for epidiascope in Lewes. Fruitless. Lecture tomorrow. 5 small trout for lunch. Octavia’s cream. Talk of soup making. Reading Gide. La Porte Etroite [1909] feeble, slaty, sentimental.

Visit from Oliver Strachey. All stocky gloom. Flogged my brain for topics. Lighted on the war. Civilisation over for 500 years. “And my life is at an end.” Enter two breezy brisk colleagues. He shares a sitting room. I lost several pages of PH. I say to Nessa, Do you find painting gets slower? Yes. One can do more. And money? Never think of it. And Helen? She does nothing. I like being alone. How can one do nothing? Duncan coming & Clive. All the same MH is somehow cheerful. Q. has an offer of a draughtsman job at Dorking. Better than farm work. The Girls school at Lewes is behind Ann of Cleves House, a large, tiled, swept, clamorous place. The headmistress large & tight, practical. “No one knows we exist” she said. I am reading—oh all lit. for my book. No answer from David, or Harper’s Bazaar. And Ethel’s letters go unread—oh dear.

Sunday 26 January

A battle against depression, rejection (by Harper’s of my story & Ellen Terry) routed today (I hope) by clearing out kitchen; by sending the article (a lame one) to N.S.: & by breaking into PH 2 days, I think, of memoir writing.

This trough of despair shall not, I swear, engulf me. The solitude is great. Rodmell life is very small beer. The house is damp. The house is untidy. But there is no alternative. Also days will lengthen. What I need is the old spurt. “Your true life, like mine, is in ideas” Desmond said to me once. But one must remember one cant pump ideas. I begin to dislike introspection. Sleep & slackness; musing; reading; cooking; cycling; oh & a good hard rather rocky book—viz: Herbert Fisher. This is my prescription. We are going to Cambridge for two days. I find myself totting up my friends lives: Helen at Alciston without water; Adrian & Karin; Oliver at Bedford, & adding up rather a higher total of happiness. There’s a lull in the war. 6 nights without raids. But Garvin says the greatest struggle is about to come—say in 3 weeks—& every man, woman dog cat even weevil must girt their arms, their faith—& so on.

Its the cold hour, this, before the lights go up. A few snowdrops in the garden. Yes, I was thinking: we live without a future. Thats whats queer, with our noses pressed to a closed door. Now to write, with a new nib, to Enid Jones.

Friday 7 February

Why was I depressed? I cannot remember.

We have been to Charlie Chaplin. Like the milk girl we found it boring. I have been writing with some glow. Mrs Thrale is to be done before we go to Cambridge. A week of broken water impends. Cambridge; then Elizabeth Bowen; then Vita & Enid Jones. Helen has repaid me £25. Do I like her better for it? I think so. The snow came back. Marshes in the thaw a swamp. We were in London [on 5 February], & had to come home, owing to a bomb, by Dorking; the car was locked at Martin’s [garage]; we dined at the White Hart—poor soup & oxtail; London streets are very empty—Oxford Street a wide grey ribbon. My red purse bag stolen & L. gave me another. At Charleston Clive was stockish, like a Bell. I said “What a risk Nessa ran marrying him!” The Sitwells are proving their existence as poets in the Law Courts—This is despicable but delightful. And what else? [Ellen] Terry appears today in the N.S. The Italians are flying. The 3rd week in March is fixed for invasion. Now black out, & perhaps write to Mary. No I think read—what? I must tune up for my Elizabethans.

Sunday 16 February

In the wild grey water after last weeks turmoil. I liked the dinner with Dadie best. All very lit up & confidential. I liked the soft grey night at Newnham. We found Pernel in her high ceremonial room, all polished & spectatorial. She was in soft reds & blacks. We sat by a bright fire. Curious flitting talk. She leaves next year.

Then Letchworth—the slaves chained to their typewriters, & their drawn set faces, & the machines—the incessant more & more competent machines, folding, pressing, glueing & issuing perfect books. They can stamp cloth to imitate leather. Our Press is up in a glass case. No country to look at. Very long train journeys. Food skimpy. No butter, no jam. Old couples hoarding marmalade & grape nuts on their tables. Conversation half whispered round the lounge fire. Eth Bowen arrived two hours after we got back, & went yesterday; & tomorrow Vita; then Enid; then perhaps I shall re-enter one of my higher lives. But not yet.

Wednesday 26 February

My ‘higher life’ is almost entirely the Elizabethan play. Finished Pointz Hall, the Pageant: the Play—finally Between the Acts this morning. Flora & Molly have just gone; leaving me to ask this bitter bright spring day, why they came?

Yesterday in the ladies lavatory at the Sussex Grill at Brighton I heard:

She’s a little simpering thing. I dont like her. But then he never did care for big women. (So to Bert) His eyes are so blue. Like blue pools. So’s Gert’s. They have the same eyes, only her teeth part a little. He has wonderful white teeth. He always had. Its fun having the boys … If he dont look out he’ll be court martialed.

They were powdering & painting, these common little tarts, while I sat, behind a thin door, p—ing as quietly as I could.

Then at Fuller’s. A fat, smart woman, in red hunting cap, pearls, check skirt, consuming rich cakes. Her shabby dependant also stuffing. Hudson’s van unloading biscuits opposite. The fat woman had a louche large white muffin face. T’other was slightly grilled. They ate & ate. Talked about Mary. But if she’s very ill, you’ll have to go to her. Youre the only one…. But why should she be?….. I opened the marmalade but John doesnt like it—And we have two pounds of biscuits in the tin upstairs…. Something scented, shoddy, parasitic about them. Then they totted up cakes. And passed the time o’ day with the waitress. Where does the money come to feed these fat white slugs? Brighton a love corner for slugs. The powdered the pampered the mildly improper. I invested them in a large house in Sussex Sqre. We cycled. Irritated as usual by the blasphemy of Peacehaven. Helen has fallen through, I mean the house I got her with Enid Jones, the day Enid lunched here, with Vita; & I felt so untidy yet cool; & she edgy & brittle. No walks for ever so long. People daily. And rather a churn in my mind. And some blank spaces. Food becomes an obsession. I grudge giving away a spice bun. Curious—age, or the war? Never mind. Adventure. Make solid. But shall I ever write again one of those sentences that gives me intense pleasure? There is no echo in Rodmell—only waste air. I spent the afternoon at the school, marbling paper. Mrs D. discontented. & said, Theres no life in these children, comparing them with Londoners, thus repeating my own comment upon that long languid meeting at Chavasses. No life: & so they cling to us. This is my conclusion. We pay the penalty for our rung in society by infernal boredom.

Saturday 8 March

Just back from L.’s speech at Brighton. Like a foreign town: the first spring day. Women sitting on seats. A pretty hat in a teashop—how fashion revives the eye! And the shell encrusted old women, rouged, decked, cad⁠[a]⁠verous at the tea shop. The waitress in checked cotton.

No: I intend no introspection. I mark Henry James’s sentence: Observe perpetually. Observe the oncome of age. Observe greed. Observe my own despondency. By that means it becomes serviceable. Or so I hope. I insist upon spending this time to the best advantage. I will go down with my colours flying. This I see verges on introspection; but doesn’t quite fall in. Suppose, I bought a ticket at the Museum; biked in daily & read history. Suppose I selected one dominant figure in every age & wrote round & about. Occupation is essential. And now with some pleasure I find that its seven; & must cook dinner. Haddock & sausage meat. I think it is true that one gains a certain hold on sausage & haddock by writing them down.

Last night I analysed to L. my London Library complex. That sudden terror has vanished; now I’m plucked at by the H. Hamilton lunch that I refused. To right the balance, I wrote to Stephen & Tom: & will write to Ethel & invite myself to stay; & then to Miss Sharp who presented me with a bunch of violets. This to make up for the sight of Oxford Street & Piccadilly which haunt me. Oh dear yes, I shall conquer this mood. Its a question of being open sleepy, wide eyed at present—letting things come one after another. Now to cook the haddock.

Monday 24 March

She had a face nose like the Duke of Wellington & great horse teeth & cold prominent eyes. When we came in she was sitting perched on a 3 cornered chair with knitting in her hands. An arrow fastened her collar. And before 5 minutes had passed she had told us that two of her sons had been killed in the war. This, one felt, was to her credit. She taught dressmaking. Everything in the room was red brown & glossy. Sitting there I tried to coin a few compliments. But they perished in the icy sea between us. And then there was nothing.

A curious sea side feeling in the air today. It reminds me of lodgings on a parade at Easter. Everyone leaning against the wind, nipped & silenced. All pulp removed.

This windy corner. And Nessa is at Brighton, & I am imagining how it wd be if we could infuse souls.

Octavia’s story. Could I englobe it somehow? English youth in 1900.

Two long letters from Shena & O. I cant tackle them, yet enjoy having them.

L. is doing the rhododendrons …

[]

BOOKS
AND
PORTRAITS

by
Virginia Woolf

published
1978
by
Harcourt Publishers Ltd

books and portraits

Part One: Of Writing and Writers.

On a Faithful Friend.

English Prose.

Impressions at Bayreuth.

Modes and Manners of the Nineteenth Century.

Men and Women.

Coleridge as Critic.

Patmore’s Criticism.

Papers on Pepys.

Sheridan.

Thomas Hood.

Praeterita.

Mr Kipling’s Notebook.

Emerson’s Journals.

Thoreau.

Herman Melville.

Rupert Brooke.

The Intellectual Imagination.

These are the Plans.

Mr Sassoon’s Poems.

A Russian Schoolboy.

A Glance at Turgenev.

A Giant with Very Small Thumbs.

Dostoevsky the Father.

More Dostoevsky.

Dostoevsky in Cranford.

The Russian Background.

A Scribbling Dame.

Maria Edgeworth and Her Circle.

Jane Austen and the Geese.

Mrs Gaskell.

The Compromise.

Wilcoxiana.

The Genius of Boswell.

Shelley and Elizabeth Hitchener.

Literary Geography.

Flumina Amem Silvasque.

Haworth, November 1904.

Part Two: Mainly Portraits.

The Girlhood of Queen Elizabeth.

The Diary of a Lady in Waiting.

Queen Adelaide.

Elizabeth Lady Holland.

Lady Hester Stanhope.

The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt.

Lady Strachey.

John Delane.

Body and Brain.

“In the Orchard” and “A Woman’s College from Outside”: see The Complete Shorter Fiction

[]

Acknowledgments:
I am very much indebted to Ian Parsons for his editorial advice and wise guidance throughout my work on this book. I am also grateful to Miss B.J. Kirkpatrick both for her personal research on my behalf and for her excellent Bibliography, an invaluable book for all Virginia Woolf scholars.

Part One: Of Writing and Writers.

On a Faithful Friend.

There is some impertinence as well as some foolhardiness in the way in which we buy animals for so much gold and silver and call them ours. One cannot help wondering what the silent critic on the hearthrug thinks of our strange conventions—the mystic Persian, whose ancestors were worshipped as gods whilst we, their masters and mistresses, grovelled in caves and painted our bodies blue. She has a vast heritage of experience, which seems to brood in her eyes, too solemn and too subtle for expression; she smiles, I often think, at our late-born civilization, and remembers the rise and fall of dynasties. There is something, too, profane in the familiarity, half contemptuous, with which we treat our animals. We deliberately transplant a little bit of simple wild life, and make it grow up beside ours, which is neither simple nor wild. You may often see in a dog’s eyes a sudden look of the primitive animal, as though he were once more a wild dog hunting in the solitary places of his youth. How have we the impertinence to make these wild creatures forgo their nature for ours, which at best they can but imitate? It is one of the refined sins of civilization, for we know not what wild spirit we are taking from its purer atmosphere, or who it is—Pan, or Nymph, or Dryad—that we have trained to beg for a lump of sugar at tea.

I do not think that in domesticating our lost friend Shag we were guilty of any such crime; he was essentially a sociable dog, who had his near counterpart in the human world. I can see him smoking a cigar at the bow window of his club, his legs extended comfortably, whilst he discusses the latest news on the Stock Exchange with a companion. His best friend could not claim for him any romantic or mysterious animal nature, but that made him all the better company for mere human beings. He came to us, however, with a pedigree that had all the elements of romance in it; he, when, in horror at his price, his would-be purchaser pointed to his collie head and collie body, but terribly Skye-terrier legs—he, we were assured, was no less a dog than the original Skye—a chieftain of the same importance as the O’Brien or the O’Connor Don in human aristocracy. The whole of the Skye-terrier tribe—who, that is, inherited the paternal characteristics—had somehow been swept from the earth; Shag, the sole scion of true Skye blood, remained in an obscure Norfolk village, the property of a low-born blacksmith, who, however, cherished the utmost loyalty for his person, and pressed the claims of his royal birth with such success that we had the honour of buying him for a very substantial sum. He was too great a gentleman to take part in the plebeian work of killing rats for which he was originally needed, but he certainly added, we felt, to the respectability of the family. He seldom went for a walk without punishing the impertinence of middle-class dogs who neglected the homage due to his rank, and we had to enclose the royal jaws in a muzzle long after that restriction was legally unnecessary. As he advanced in middle life he became certainly rather autocratic, not only with his own kind, but with us, his masters and mistresses; such a title though was absurd where Shag was concerned, so we called ourselves his uncles and aunts. The solitary occasion when he found it necessary to inflict marks of his displeasure on human flesh was once when a visitor rashly tried to treat him as an ordinary pet-dog and tempted him with sugar and called him ‘out of his name’ by the contemptible lap-dog title of ‘Fido’. Then Shag, with characteristic independence, refused the sugar and took a satisfactory mouthful of calf instead. But when he felt that he was treated with due respect he was the most faithful of friends. He was not demonstrative; but failing eyesight did not blind him to his master’s face, and in his deafness he could still hear his master’s voice.

The evil spirit of Shag’s life was introduced into the family in the person of an attractive young sheep-dog puppy—who, though of authentic breed, was unhappily without a tail—a fact which Shag could not help remarking with satisfaction. We deluded ourselves into the thought that the young dog might take the place of the son of Shag’s old age, and for a time they lived happily together. But Shag had ever been contemptuous of social graces, and had relied for his place in our hearts upon his sterling qualities of honesty and independence; the puppy, however, was a young gentleman of most engaging manners, and, though we tried to be fair, Shag could not help feeling that the young dog got most of our attention. I can see him now, as in a kind of blundering and shamefaced way he lifted one stiff old paw and gave it me to shake, which was one of the young dog’s most successful tricks. It almost brought the tears to my eyes. I could not help thinking, though I smiled, of old King Lear. But Shag was too old to acquire new graces; no second place should be his, and he determined that the matter should be decided by force. So after some weeks of growing tension the battle was fought; they went for each other with white teeth gleaming—Shag was the aggressor—and rolled round and round on the grass, locked in each other’s grip. When at last we got them apart, blood was running, hair was flying, and both dogs bore scars. Peace after that was impossible; they had but to see each other to growl and stiffen; the question was—Who was the conqueror? Who was to stay and who to go? The decision we came to was base, unjust, and yet, perhaps, excusable. The old dog has had his day, we said, he must give place to the new generation. So old Shag was deposed, and sent to a kind of dignified dower-house at Parson’s-green, and the young dog reigned in his stead. Year after year passed, and we never saw the old friend who had known us in the days of our youth; but in the summer holidays he revisited the house in our absence with the caretaker. And so time went on till this last year, which, though we did not know it, was to be the last year of his life. Then, one winter’s night, at a time of great sickness and anxiety, a dog was heard barking repeatedly, with the bark of a dog who waits to be let in, outside our kitchen-door. It was many years since that bark had been heard, and only one person in the kitchen was able to recognize it now. She opened the door, and in walked Shag, now almost quite blind and stone deaf, as he had walked in many times before, and, looking neither to right nor left, went to his old corner by the fireside, where he curled up and fell asleep without a sound. If the usurper saw him he slunk guiltily away, for Shag was past fighting for his rights any more. We shall never know—it is one of the many things that we can never know—what strange wave of memory or sympathetic instinct it was that drew Shag from the house where he had lodged for years to seek again the familiar doorstep of his master’s home. And it befell that Shag was the last of the family to live in the old house, for it was in crossing the road which leads to the gardens where he was taken for his first walks as a puppy, and bit all the other dogs and frightened all the babies in their perambulators, that he met his death. The blind, deaf dog neither saw nor heard a hansom; and the wheel went over him and ended instantly a life which could not have been happily prolonged. It was better for him to die thus out among the wheels and the horses than to end in a lethal-chamber or be poisoned in a stable-yard.

So we say farewell to a dear and faithful friend, whose virtues we remember—and dogs have few faults.

[Guardian, Jan 18, 1905]

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English Prose.

[A Treasury of English Prose, edited by Logan Pearsall Smith.]

If it should be proposed to appoint Mr Pearsall Smith Anthologist Royal to the English-speaking races, I, for one, would willingly contribute rather more than I can afford to his stipend. For three hundred years and more a dead preacher called John Donne had cumbered our shelves. The other day Mr Pearsall Smith touched him with his wand, and behold!—the folios quake, the pages shiver, out steps the passionate preacher; the fibres of our secular hearts are bent and bowed beneath the unaccustomed tempest. But no figure could be more misleading than this of the wand and the wizard. Conceive, rather, a table piled with books; folio pages turned and turned again; collations, annotations, emendations, expurgations; voyages in omnibuses; hours of disillusionment—for who reads prose? life wasting under the rays of a green lamp; the prize of months one solitary paragraph—truly if Mr Pearsall Smith is a wizard he has learned his craft where none but the bold and the faithful dare follow him. Therefore if I go on to say that in one respect I am his superior, it will be understood that it is not to his learning that I refer. I refer to his taste. In reading the ‘Treasury of English Prose’ I became aware that my taste is far better than Mr Pearsall Smith’s; it is in fact impeccable. But I need scarcely hasten to add what everyone knows for himself; in matters of taste each man, woman and child in the British Isles is impeccable; so are the quadrupeds. A dog who did not rate his own taste better than his master’s would be a dog not worth drowning.

This being said, let us waste no more time but proceed at once to Stevenson. I had hoped, not very confidently, to look for Stevenson in vain. I had hoped that the habit of cutting out passages from Stevenson about being good and being brave and being happy was now confined to schoolmasters and people at the head of public institutions. I had hoped that private individuals were beginning to say, ‘What is the point of Stevenson? Why did they call him a master of prose? What did our fathers mean by comparing this thin-blooded mummery with Scott or Defoe?’—but I had hoped in vain. Here is Stevenson occupying one of two hundred and fifteen pages with reflections upon Happiness—reflections addressed in a private letter to a friend. It begins all right. Nobody can deny that it needs every sort of good quality to step along so briskly, with such apparent ease, such a nice imitation of talk running down the pen and flowing over the paper. Nor do I shiver when the pen steps more circumspectly. A writer’s letters should be as literary as his printed works. But all my spines erect themselves, all my prejudices are confirmed when I come to this: ‘But I know pleasure still; pleasure with a thousand faces, and none perfect, a thousand tongues all broken, a thousand hands and all of them with scratching nails. High among these I place this delight of weeding out here alone by the garrulous water, under the silence of the high wood, broken by incongruous sounds of birds.’ Then I know why I cannot read the novels; then I know why I should never allow him within a mile of the anthologies.

Skipping (for no one reads an anthology through), we next alight upon Walter Pater—nervously, prepared for disappointment. Can he possibly be what he once seemed?—the writer who from words made blue and gold and green; marble, brick, the wax petals of flowers; warmth too and scent; all things that the hand delighted to touch and the nostrils to smell, while the mind traced subtle winding paths and surprised recondite secrets. This, and much more than this, comes back to me with renewed delight in Mr Pearsall Smith’s quotations. The famous one still seems to me to deserve all its fame; the less famous, about a red hawthorn tree in full flower—‘a plumage of tender crimson fire out of the heart of the dry wood’—revives the old joys and makes the nerve of the eye vibrate again; but if one cannot praise fitly it is better to be silent and only say that there can be no doubt—from the quotations at least—about Walter Pater.

About Emerson there is I think considerable doubt; or rather there is no doubt at all that he must be altogether different from what we supposed to deserve eleven full pages where there is no room for a single line of Dryden, Cowper, Peacock, Hardy, the Brontës, Jane Austen, Meredith (to take the obvious omissions); only two scraps of Sterne and a page and a bit of Conrad. Yet one sees what Mr Pearsall Smith means. Emerson wrote for anthologies. Passages seem to break off in one’s hands like ripe fruit without damage to the tree. The first passage reads beautifully; the second almost as well. But then—what is it? Something bald and bare and glittering—something light and brittle—something which suggests that if this precious fruit were dropped it would shiver into particles of silvery dust like one of those balls that were plucked from the boughs of ancient Christmas trees, and slipped and fell—is Emerson’s fruit that kind of fruit? Of course the lustre is admirable—the dust, the dust of the stars.

But if Mr Pearsall Smith puts in and leaves out according to a rule of his own, that is an indispensable merit in an anthologist. He puts in, for example, Jeremy Taylor, and so reveals a great English writer, who, to my shame, had been no more than an obscure clerical shade among the folios. For that I could forgive him—I was going to say the neglect of Mr Hardy; but Mr Pearsall Smith can hardly have neglected all, or almost all, the great English novelists. He has rejected them, and that is another matter, that leads one to consider what may be his reasons. I suppose there are at least twenty of them, and all so profound and lying at the roots of things that to lay bare a single one would need more columns than I have words. Lightly then will I run over a few suggestions and leave them to wither or perhaps fall on fertile soil. To begin with, every novelist would, I suppose, suspect a critic who complimented him on the beauty of his writing. ‘But that’s not what I’m after,’ he would say, and add, a moment later, with the susceptibility of his kind. You mean, I’m dull.’ And as a matter of fact the great novelists very seldom stop in the middle or in the beginning of their great scenes to write anything that one could cut out with a pair of scissors or loop round with a line of red ink. The greatest of novelists—Dostoevsky—always, so Russian scholars say, writes badly. Turgenev, the least great of the Russian trinity, always, they say, writes exquisitely. That Dostoevsky would have been a greater novelist had he written beautifully into the bargain no one will deny. But the novelist’s task lays such a load upon every nerve, muscle, and fibre that to demand beautiful prose in addition is, in view of human limitations, to demand what can only be given at the cost of a sacrifice. Let us choose two instances from among the writers of our own tongue. There is no novel by Mr Conrad which has not passages of such beauty that one hangs over them like a humming-bird moth at the mouth of a flower. Yet I believe that one pays for such beauty in a novel. To achieve it the writer has had to shut off his energy in other directions. Hence, I think, so many pages of Mr Conrad’s novels are slack and slumberous, monotonous like the summer sea. Mr Hardy, on the other hand, has not in the course of some twenty volumes written a single passage fit to be included in a treasury of English prose. Impossible! Yet I could not, at a moment’s notice, lay my hand on one. The greater number of our novelists are in the same boat with him. But what, then, can we be talking about? What is this “beautiful English prose’?

Surely the most beautiful of all things! the reader of Mr Pearsall Smith’s selection will exclaim—the most subtle, the most profound, the most moving and imaginative. And who are the people who keep it alive, extend its powers and increase its triumphs? The novelists. Only we must not go to them for perfect passages, descriptions, perorations, reflections so highly wrought that they can stand alone without their context. We must go to them for chapters, not for sentences; for beauty, not tranquil and contained, but wild and fleeting like the light on rough waters. We must seek it particularly where the narrative breaks and gives way to dialogue. But it must be conceded that the novelists put their English to the most menial tasks. She has to do all the work of the house; to make the beds, dust the china, boil the kettle, sweep the floors. In return she has the priceless privilege of living with human beings. When she has warmed to her task, when the fire is burning, the cat here, the dog there, the smoke rising from the chimney, the men and women feasting or love-making, dreaming or speculating, the trees blowing, the moon rising, the autumn sun gold upon the corn—then read Mr Hardy and see whether the common prose of English fiction does not carry herself like the Queen she is—the old Queen, wise in the secrets of our hearts; the young Queen with all her life before her. For though English poetry was a fine old potentate—but no, I dare not breathe a word against English poetry. All I will venture is a sigh of wonder and amazement that when there is prose before us with its capacities and possibilities, its power to say new things, make new shapes, express new passions, young people should still be dancing to a barrel organ and choosing words because they rhyme.

[Athenaeum, Jan 30, 1920]

[]

Impressions at Bayreuth.

The commonplace remark that music is in its infancy is best borne out by the ambiguous state of musical criticism. It has few traditions behind it, and the art itself is so much alive that it fairly suffocates those who try to deal with it. A critic of writing is hardly to be taken by surprise, for he can compare almost every literary form with some earlier form and can measure the achievement by some familiar standard. But who in music has tried to do what Strauss is doing, or Debussy?Before we have made up our minds as to the nature of the operatic form we have to value very different and very emphatic examples of it. This lack of tradition and of current standards is of course the freest and happiest state that a critic can wish for; it offers someone the chance of doing now for music what Aristotle did 2,000 years ago for poetry. The fact however that so little has yet been done to lay bare the principles of the art accounts for the indecision which marks our attempts to judge new music. As for the old, we take it for granted, or concentrate our minds upon the prima donna’s cold. It is criticism of a single hour, in a particular day, and tomorrow the mark has faded.

There is only one way open thus for a writer who is not disposed to go to the root of the matter and is yet dissatisfied with the old evasions—he may try to give his impressions as an amateur. The seats in the great bare house in Bayreuth are packed with them; they have a secret belief that they understand as well as other people, although they seldom venture an opinion; and, at any rate, there is no doubt that they love music. If they hesitate to criticize, it is perhaps that they have not sufficient technical knowledge to fasten upon details; a criticism of the whole resolves itself into vague formulas, comparisons, and adjectives. Nevertheless, no one can doubt that the audience at Bayreuth, pilgrims possessed with tranquillity at the same time, for the words are continued by the music so that we hardly notice the transition.

It may be that these exalted emotions, which belong to the essence of our being, and are rarely expressed, are those that are best translated by music; so that a satisfaction, or whatever one may call that sense of answer which the finest art supplies to its own question, is constantly conveyed here. Like Shakespeare, Wagner seems to have attained in the end to such a mastery of technique that he could float and soar in regions where in the beginning he could scarcely breathe; the stubborn matter of his art dissolves in his fingers, and he shapes it as he chooses. When the opera is over, it is surely the completeness of the work that remains with us. The earlier operas have always their awkward moments, when the illusion breaks; but Parsifal seems poured out in a smooth stream at white heat; its shape is solid and entire. How much of the singular atmosphere which surrounds the opera in one’s mind springs from other sources than the music itself it would be hard to say. It is the only work which has no incongruous associations.

It has been possible, during these last performances, to step out of the opera-house and find oneself in the midst of a warm summer evening. From the hill above the theatre you look over a wide land, smooth and without hedges; it is not beautiful, but it is very large and tranquil. One may sit among rows of turnips and watch a gigantic old woman, with a blue cotton bonnet on her head and a figure like one of Durer’s, swinging her hoe. The sun draws out strong scents from the hay and the pine trees, and if one thinks at all, it is to combine the simple landscape with the landscape of the stage. When the music is silent the mind insensibly slackens and expands, among happy surroundings: heat and the yellow light, and the intermittent but not unmusical noises of insects and leaves smooth out the folds. In the next interval, between seven and eight, there is another act out here also; it is now dusky and perceptibly fresher; the light is thinner, and the roads are no longer crossed by regular bars of shade. The figures in light dresses moving between the many of them from distant lands, attend with all their power. As the lights sink, they rustle into their seats, and scarcely stir till the last wave of sound has ceased; when a stick falls, there is a nervous shudder, like a ripple in water, through the entire house. During the intervals between the acts, when they come out into the sun, they seem oppressed with a desire to disburden themselves somehow of the impression which they have received. Parsifal, in particular, lays such a weight upon the mind that it is not until one has heard it many times over that one can begin, as it were, to move it to and fro. The unfamiliarity of the ideas hinders one at the outset from bringing the different parts together. One feels vaguely for a crisis that never comes, for, accustomed as one is to find the explanation of a drama in the love of man and woman, or in battle, one is bewildered by a music that continues with the utmost calm and intensity independently of them. Further, the change from the Temple of the Grail to the magic garden, with its swarms of flower-maidens and its hot red blossoms, is too violent a break to be bridged conveniently.

Nevertheless, although they are great, these difficulties scarcely do more than disturb the surface of a very deep and perhaps indescribable impression. Puzzled we may be, but it is primarily because the music has reached a place not yet visited by sound. An anthem sung with perfect skill in some great church will suggest a part of the scene in the vast hall, with its green distances, and yet a part only. Ecclesiastical music is too rigidly serene and too final in its spirit to penetrate as the music of Parsifal penetrates. Somehow Wagner has conveyed the desire of the Knights for the Grail in such a way that the intense emotion of human beings is combined with the unearthly nature of the thing they seek. It tears us, as we hear it, as though its wings were sharply edged. Again, feelings of this kind that are equally diffused and felt for one object in common create an impression of largeness and, when the music is played as it was played on the night of the nth, of an overwhelming unity. The Grail seems to burn through all superincumbences; the music is intimate in a sense that none other is; one is fired with emotion and yet trees of the avenue, with depths of blue air behind them, have a curiously decorative effect. Finally, when the opera is over, it is quite late; and half-way down the hill one looks back upon a dark torrent of carriages descending, their lamps wavering one above another, like irregular torches.

These strange intervals in the open air, as though a curtain were regularly drawn and shut again, have no disturbing effect, upon Parsifal at least. A bat from the woods circled Kundry’s head in the meadow, and little white moths dance incessantly over the footlights. It was curious, although scarcely fair, to test Lohengrin two days after one had heard Parsifal. The difference which a chorus, alive in all its parts so that eyes and arms are moving when the voice is silent, can make to a work in which the chorus means so much is surprising certainly; and yet, recognizing the admirable performance, other reflections were suggested by it. The same surroundings that were so congenial to Parsifal turn much of Lohengrin to tinsel and sham armour; one thinks of gorgeous skirts and the mantles of knights trailed along the dusty paths and pricked by the stubble. An opera house which shelters such a troop should be hemmed in by streets with great shop windows; their splendour somehow dwindles away and falls flat in the empty country.

But although this was one of the impressions that Lohengrin gave rise to, can it be held to be any reflection upon the music? No one, perhaps, save a writer properly versed in the science, can decide which impressions are relevant and which impertinent, and it is here that the amateur is apt to incur the contempt of the professional. We know the critic who, in painting, prefers the art of Fra Angelico because that painter worked upon his knees; others choose books because they teach one to rise early; and one has only to read the descriptive notes in a concert programme to be led hopelessly astray. Apart from the difficulty of changing a musical impression into a literary one, and the tendency to appeal to the literary sense because of the associations of words, there is the further difficulty in the case of music that its scope is much less clearly defined than the scope of the other arts. The more beautiful a phrase of music is the richer its burden of suggestion, and if we understand the form but slightly, we are little restrained in our interpretation. We are led on to connect the beautiful sound with some experience of our own, or to make it symbolize some conception of a general nature. Perhaps music owes something of its astonishing power over us to this lack of definite articulation; its statements have all the majesty of a generalization, and yet contain our private emotions. Something of the same effect is given by Shakespeare, when he makes an old nurse the type of all the old nurses in the world, while she keeps her identity as a particular old woman. The comparative weakness of Lohengrin urges one to such speculations, for there are many passages which fit loosely to the singer’s mood, and yet carry one’s mind out with a beauty of their own.

In the meantime, we are miserably aware how little words can do to render music. When the moment of suspense is over, and the bows actually move across the strings, our definitions are relinquished, and words disappear in our minds. Enormous is the relief, and yet, when the spell is over, how great is the joy with which we turn to our old tools again! These definitions indeed, which would limit the bounds of an art and regulate our emotions, are arbitrary enough; and here at Bayreuth, where the music fades into the open air, and we wander with Parsifal in our heads through empty streets at night, where the gardens of the Hermitage glow with flowers like those other magic blossoms, and sound melts into colour, and colour calls out for words, where, in short, we are lifted out of the ordinary world and allowed merely to breathe and see—it is here that we realize how thin are the walls between one emotion and another; and how fused our impressions are with elements which we may not attempt to separate.

[The Times, Aug 21, 1909]

[]

Modes and Manners of the Nineteenth Century.

[Translated by M. Edwards. 3 vols.]

When one has read no history for a time the sad-coloured volumes are really surprising. That so much energy should have been wasted in the effort to believe in something spectral fills one with pity. Wars and Ministries and legislation—unexampled prosperity and unbridled corruption tumbling the nation headlong to decay—what a strange delusion it all is!—invented presumably by gentlemen in tall hats in the forties who wished to dignify mankind. Our point of view they ignore entirely: we have never felt the pressure of a single law; our passions and despairs have nothing to do with trade; our virtues and vices flourish under all Governments impartially. The machine they describe; they succeed to some extent in making us believe in it; but the heart of it they leave untouched—is it because they cannot understand it? At any rate, we are left out, and history, in our opinion, lacks an eye. It is with unusual hope that we open the three volumes in which a nameless author has dealt with the Modes and Manners of the Nineteenth Century. Thin and green, with innumerable coloured pictures and a fair type, they are less like a mausoleum than usual; and modes and manners—how we feel and dress—are precisely what the other historian ignores.

The connection between dress and character has been pointed out often enough. Because dress represents some part of a man picturesquely it lends itself happily to the satirist. He can exaggerate it without losing touch with the object of his satire. Like a shadow, it walks beside the truth and apes it. The device of making the smaller ridicule the greater by representing it recommended itself to Swift and Carlyle. But to discover soberly how far thought has expressed itself in clothes, and manners as we call them, is far more difficult. There is the temptation to hook the two together by the most airy conjectures. A gentleman had the habit, for example, of walking in the streets of Berlin with tame deer; that was characteristic, we are told, of a certain middle-class section of German society, in the twenties, thirties, and forties, which was learned, pedantic, Philistine, and vulgar; for to make oneself conspicuous is a mark of the vulgarian, and to walk with tame deer is to make oneself conspicuous. But there are more solid links. The French Revolution, of course, sundered the traditions of ages. It decreed that man in future must be mainly black, and should wear trousers instead of breeches. The waistcoat alone remained aristocratic, and drew to itself all the reds and oranges of the other garments, and, as they became cotton, turned to plush and brocade. At length this rich territory was conquered, and sparks of colour only burnt in the cravat and on the fob. The different garments moved up and down, swelled and shrank at intervals, but after 1815 a man’s clothes were ‘essentially the same as they are now’. Men wished to obliterate classes, and a dress that could be worn at work became necessary. Women, on the other hand, were exposed to fewer influences, so that it may be easier to trace one idea in their clothes. The effect of the Revolution seems to be definite enough. Rousseau had bidden them return to nature; the Revolution had left them poor; the Greeks were ancient, and therefore natural; and their dress was cheap enough for a democracy. Accordingly, they dressed in pure white cottons and calicoes, without a frill or an exuberance; nature alone was to shape the lines; nature was to suffer not more than eight ounces of artificial concealment. The effect of these tapering nymphs, dancing on a hilltop among slim trees, is exquisite but chill. Because Greek temples were white, they whitewashed their walls; the bedroom was the Temple of Sleep; the tables were altars; the chair legs were grooved into columns; reticules were shaped like funeral urns, and classical cameos were worn at the neck. The absolute consistency of their attitude may be ridiculous, but it is also remarkable. In fact, the society of the Empire is the last to ‘boast a style of its own, owing to the perfect correspondence between its aims, ideas, and character, and their outward manifestations’. Any unanimity is overwhelming; it is one of the great gifts we bestow upon the Greeks; and, although there were many beautiful episodes in the nineteenth century, no single style was again strong enough to make everything consistent. Before the Revolution some sort of order was stamped upon fashion by the will of the Queen, who could afford to make beauty the prime virtue; but in 1792 Mlle Bertin, Marie Antoinette’s modiste, fled from Paris, and although she touched at other Courts, eventually settling in England, her rule was over; shops for ready-made clothing opened as she left. For ten years, 1794-1804, the didactic classic spirit served instead of the Royal will; and then a confusion set in which threatens never to grow calm. Still the author does his best to make one change account for another, at the risk of wide generalizations. ‘Feeling and sensibility took the place in this generation [the generation of the Napoleonic wars] of religion … During the First Empire love and passion had been but the passing gratification of the moment, but now love was to be the one lasting object of life and being’—therefore puffs and ruffs were worn; the furniture became rococo, and Gothic cathedrals influenced the chairs and the clocks.

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

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

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

[Times Literary Supplement, Feb 24, 1910]

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Men and Women.

[La Femme Anglaise au XIXème Siècle et son Evolution d’après le Roman Anglais contemporain. By .]

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

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

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

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

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

[Times Literary Supplement, Mar 18, 1920]

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Coleridge as Critic.

[The Table Talk and Omniana of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. With a Note on Coleridge by Coventry Patmore.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coleridge’s mind was so fertile in such ideas that it is difficult to conceive that, given the health of a coal-heaver and the industry of a bank clerk, he could ever have succeeded in tracking each to its end, or in embracing the whole of them with their innumerable progeny in one vast synthesis. A great number spring directly from literature, but almost any topic had power at once to form an idea capable of splitting into an indefinite number of fresh ideas. Here are some chosen for their brevity. ‘You abuse snuff! Perhaps it is the final cause of the human nose!”Poetry is certainly something more than good sense, but it must be good sense at all events.’ There is no subjectivity whatever in the Homeric poetry.”Swift was anima Rabelaisii habitans in sicco—the soul of Rabelais dwelling in a dry place.”How inimitably graceful children are before they learn to dance!’ There is in every human countenance either a history or a prophecy.”You see many scenes which are simply Shakespeare’s, disporting himself in joyous triumph and vigorous fun after a great achievement of his highest genius.’ A respectable library could be, and no doubt has been, made out of these ideas; and Coleridge, not content with carrying the stuff of many libraries in his head, had what in England is more remarkable, the germs of an equal susceptibility to painting and to music. The gifts should go together; all three are perhaps needed to complete each one. But if such gifts complete a Milton or a Keats they may undo a Coleridge. The reader of the Table Talk’ will sometime reflect that although, compared with Coleridge, he must consider himself deaf and blind as well as dumb, these limitations, in the present state of the world, have protected him and most of his work has been done within their shelter. For how can a man with Coleridge’s gifts produce anything? His demands are so much greater than can be satisfied by the spiritual resources of his age. He is perpetually checked and driven back; life is too short; ideas are too many; opposition is too great. If Coleridge heard music he wanted hours and hours of Mozart and Purcell; if he liked a picture he fell into a trance in front of it; if he saw a sunset he almost lost consciousness in the rapture of gazing at it. Our society makes no provision for these apparitions. The only course for such a one to pursue is that which Coleridge finally adopted—to sink into the house of some hospitable Gillman and there for the rest of his life to sit and talk. In better words, ‘My dear fellow! never be ashamed of scheming!—you can’t think of living less than 4,000 years, and that would nearly suffice for your present schemes. To be sure, if they go on in the same ratio to the performance, then a small difficulty arises; but never mind! look at the bright side always and die in a dream!’

[Times Literary Supplement, Feb 7, 1918]

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Patmore’s Criticism.

[Courage in Politics and Other Essays by Coventry Patmore.]

Books of collected essays are always the hardest to read, because, collected though they may be, it is often only the binding that joins them together. And when the author was a man whose main work in life was to write poetry, it is more than likely that his essays will be mere interjections and exclamations uttered spasmodically in the intervals of his proper pursuits. The list of contents makes us suspect the sort of thing we are to find. One day Coventry Patmore will write upon Mr Gladstone; another upon December in Garden and Field; again upon Coleridge; next upon dreams; and finally it will strike him to set down his views upon Liverpool Cathedral and Japanese houses. But our foreboding that we shall be jerked from topic to topic and set down in the end with a litter of broken pieces is in this case quite unfounded. For one thing, these thirty-seven papers were written within the compass of eleven years. Next, as Mr Page points out, Coventry Patmore’s criticism was based upon considered principles. ‘The book is a book of doctrine, and is “original” only in that it goes back to origins; the doctrines are those of Aristotle, of Goethe, of Coleridge, indeed, as one can imagine Patmore saying, “of all sensible men”. The style only that holds them together is his own.’

The style which holds so many separate parts so firmly is undoubtedly a good one. One would perhaps feel some discomfort, some unfitness in finding a column of such solid construction among the blurred print of an evening newspaper. Clearly one must look not among ephemeral scribblers but among established worthies if one is to find a writer against whom to test the merits and defects of Patmore’s style. It is much in the eighteenth-century manner—concise, plain, with little imagery, extravagance, adventure, or inequality. Placed directly after one of Johnson’s Lives of the Poets one of Patmore’s essays can be read, so far as the diction goes, without any of that gradual loosening of the attention which attacks us as prose weakens under the adulteration of unnecessary words, slack cadences, and worn-out metaphors. But thus read we shall somehow gather the impression that while Johnson is constantly outrageous and Patmore almost invariably civilized, Johnson’s papers are the small visible fragment of a monster, Mr Patmore’s essays have about them no such suggestion of unexpressed magnitude. A few pages seem to hold quite comfortably all that he has to say. He is small and wiry, rather than large and loose.

But the chief distinction of Mr Patmore’s criticism is that to which Mr Page draws attention. He had a great dislike for the impressionist criticism which is ‘little more than an attempt to describe the feelings produced in the writers by the works they profess to judge’ and tried consistently to base his own judgments upon doctrines set beyond the reach of accident and temperament. His pages provide many examples of the successful practice of this form of criticism, and some also of the defects which, though not inherent in the method, seem most apt to attack those who pursue it.

In the essay upon out-of-door poetry, for instance, instead of dallying with roses and cabbages and all the other topics which so pleasantly suggest themselves, he makes straight for the aesthetic problem. The quality which distinguishes good descriptive poetry from bad descriptive poetry is, he says, that the poet in the first case has seen things ‘in their living relationships’. The heather is not much, and the rock is not much; but the heather and the rock, discerned in their living expressional relationship by the poetic eye, are very much indeed—a beauty which is living with the life of man, and therefore inexhaustible … but true poets and artists know that this power of visual synthesis can only be exercised, in the present state of our faculties, in a very limited way; hence there is generally, in the landscapes and descriptions of real genius, a great simplicity in and apparent jealousy of their subjects, strikingly in contrast with the works of those who fancy that they are describing when they are only cataloguing.’ This is fruitful criticism because it helps us to define our own vaguer conceptions. Much of Wordsworth (here Mr Patmore would not agree) is oppressive because the poet has not seen nature with intensity either in relation to his poem, to himself, or to other human beings; but has accepted her as something in herself so desirable that description can be used in flat stretches without concentration. Tennyson is of course the master of those Victorian poets who carried descriptive writing to such a pitch that if their words had been visible the blackbirds would certainly have descended upon their garden plots to feed upon the apples and the plums. Yet we do not feel that this is poetry so much as something fabricated by an ingenious craftsman for our delight. Of the moderns, Mr Hardy is without rival in his power to make nature do his will, so that she neither satiates nor serves as a curious toy, but appears at the right moment to heighten, charm, or terrify, because the necessary fusion has already taken place. The first step towards this absorption is to see things with your own eyes, in which faculty Patmore held the English poets to be easily supreme.

Then, from poetry we turn to the little essay which is, of course, quite insufficient to deal with Sir Thomas Browne; but here again Patmore speaks to the point, drawing attention not to his own qualities, but to those which are in the work itself. ‘The prose of the pre-revolutionary period was a fine art. In proportion to the greatness of its writers, it was a continually varying flow of music, which aimed at convincing the feelings as the words themselves the understanding. The best post-revolutionary prose appeals to the understanding alone.’ The prose of the Religio Medici (oddly enough Patmore values neither Urn Burial nor Christian Morals) is certainly fine art. Yet in reading it again one is struck as much by the easy colloquial phrases as by the famous passages. There is an intensity of the modern sort as well as the poetic sonority of the ancient. The art of the deliberate passages is evident; but in addition to that Sir Thomas has something impulsive, something we may call, in default of a better word, amateurish about him as if he wrote for his own pleasure with language not yet solidified, while the best modern prose writers seem to remember, unwillingly no doubt, that prose writing is a profession.

Whether or not we agree with what Patmore says on these points, it is good criticism because it makes us turn to think about the book under consideration. But the criticism which is based upon the ‘doctrines of Aristotle, of Goethe, and of Coleridge’, especially when practised in the columns of a newspaper, is apt to have the opposite effect. It is apt to be sweeping and sterile. The laws of art can be stated in a little essay only in so compressed a form that unless we are prepared to think them out for ourselves, and apply them to the poem or novel in question, they remain barren, and we accept them without thinking. There is no true poem or novel without a moral; least of all such as, being all beauty (that is to say, all order), are all moral.’ A statement of that kind applied with little elaboration to the ‘Vicar of Wakefield’ does not illumine the book, but, especially when coupled with an uncalled for fling at Blake, ‘who seems to have been little better than an idiot’, withdraws attention from the ‘Vicar of Wakefield’ and concentrates it upon Coventry Patmore. For it is evident that though the manner remains oracular this is the voice of a private person—of a person, moreover, who has written poetry himself, has been attacked by the critics, and has evolved a highly individual philosophy, into which Goldsmith and Coventry Patmore fit precisely as they are, but Blake, Shelley, and Miss Austen can only be made to fit by taking a knife to their edges. Blake was little better than an idiot; ‘Pride and Prejudice’ was inferior to ‘Barchester Towers’; Shelley was an immoral writer; and by the side of Thomas Hardy, not indeed his equal but worthy of comparison and of the highest eulogy, appears the author of the ‘Mischief of Monica’, a lady, it is now perhaps necessary to say, called Mrs Walford. For these freaks and oddities it is, of course, unnecessary to make Aristotle responsible. The Angel in the House is the undoubted parent. In an impressionist critic of the school Which Patmore condemned you will meet precisely the same freaks of prejudice and partisanship, but with the difference that as no attempt is made to relate them to doctrines and principles they pass for what they are, and, the door being left wide open, interesting ideas may take the opportunity to enter in. But Patmore was content to state his principle and shut the door.

But if Patmore was an imperfect critic the very imperfections which make it sometimes useless to argue further about literature prove that he was a man of great courage and conviction, much out of harmony with his age, intolerant of the railway, a little strident we may think in his conservatism, and over-punctilious in his manners, but never restrained by sloth or cowardice from coming out into the open and testifying to his faith like a bright little bantam (if we may use the figure without disrespect) who objects to express trains, and says so twice a day, flying to the top of the farmyard wall and flapping his wings.

[Times Literary Supplement, May 26, 1921]

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Papers on Pepys.

[Occasional Papers of the Pepys Club. edited by H. B. Wheatley. Vol. I, 1903-14.]

The number of those who read themselves asleep at night with Pepys and awake at day with Pepys must be great. By the nature of things, however, the number of those who read neither by night nor by day is infinitely greater; and it is, we believe, by those who have never read him that Pepys is, as Mr Wheatley complains, treated with contempt. The Pepys Club ‘may be considered’, Mr Wheatley writes, ‘as a kind of missionary society to educate the public to understand that they are wrong in treating Pepys with affection, tempered with lack of respect’. The papers published in the present volume would not have suggested to us so solemn a comparison. A missionary society, however, which dines well, sings beautifully old English songs, and delivers brief and entertaining papers upon such subjects as Pepys’s portraits, Pepys’s stone, Pepys’s Ballads, Pepys’s health, Pepys’s musical instruments, although it differs, we imagine, in method from some sister institutions, is well calculated to convert the heathen. Lack of respect for Pepys, however, seems to us a heresy which is beyond argument, and deserving of punishment rather than of the persuasive voices of members of the Pepys Club singing ‘Beauty retire.’

For one of the most obvious sources of our delight in the Diary arises from the fact that Pepys, besides being himself, was a great Civil Servant. We are glad to remember that it has been stated on authority, however well we guessed it for ourselves, that Pepys was ‘without exception the greatest and most useful Minister that ever filled the same situation in England, the acts and registers of the Admiralty proving this beyond contradiction’. He was the founder of the modern Navy, and the fame of Mr Pepys as an administrator has had an independent existence of its own within the walls of the Admiralty from his day to ours. Indeed, it is possible to believe that we owe the Diary largely to his eminence as an official. The reticence, the pomposity, the observance of appearances which their duties require, or at least exact, of great public servants must make it more congenial to them than to others to unbend and unbosom themselves in private. We can only regret that the higher education of women now enables the wives of public men to receive confidences which should have been committed to cipher. Happily for us, Mrs Pepys was a very imperfect confidante. There were other matters besides those naturally unfit for a wife’s ear that Pepys brought home from the office and liked to deliver himself upon in private. And thus it comes about that the Diary runs naturally from affairs of State and the characters of Ministers to affairs of the heart and the characters of servant girls; it includes the buying of clothes, the losing of tempers, and all the infinite curiosities, amusements, and pettinesses of average human life. It is a portrait where not only the main figure, but the surroundings, ornaments, and accessories are painted in. Had Mrs Pepys been as learned, discreet, and open-minded as the most advanced of her sex are now reputed to be, her husband would still have had enough over to fill the pages of his Diary. Insatiable curiosity, and unflagging vitality were the essence of a gift to which, when the possessor is able to impart it, we can give no lesser name than genius.

It is worth reminding ourselves that because we are without his genius it does not follow that we are without his faults. The chief delight of his pages for most of us may lie not in the respectable direction of historical investigation, but in those very weaknesses and idiosyncrasies which in our own case we would die rather than reveal; but our quick understanding betrays the fact that we are fellow-sinners, though unconfessed. The state of mind that makes possible such admission of the undignified failings even in cipher may not be heroic, but it shows a lively, candid, unhypocritical nature which, if we remember that Pepys was an extremely able man, a very successful man and honourable beyond the standard of his age, fills out a figure which is perhaps a good deal higher in the scale of humanity than our own.

But those select few who survive the ‘vast and devouring space’ of the centuries are judged not by their superiority to individuals in the flesh, but by their rank in the society of their peers, those solitary survivors of innumerable and nameless multitudes. Compared with most of these figures, Pepys is small enough. He is never passionate, exalted, poetic, or profound. His faults are not great ones, nor is his repentance sublime. Considering that he used cipher, and on occasion double cipher, to screen him in the confessional, he did not lay bare very deep or very intricate regions of the soul. He has little consciousness of dream or mystery, of conflict or perplexity. Yet it is impossible to write Pepys off as a man of the dumb and unanalytic past, or of the past which is ornate and fabulous; if ever we feel ourselves in the presence of a man so modern that we should not be surprised to meet him in the street and should know him and speak to him at once, it is when we read this Diary, written more than two hundred and fifty years ago.

This is due in part to the unstudied ease of the language, which may be slipshod but never fails to be graphic, which catches unfailingly the butterflies and gnats and falling petals of the moment, which can deal with a day’s outing or a merrymaking or a brother’s funeral so that we latecomers are still in time to make one of the party. But Pepys is modern in a deeper sense than this. He is modern in his consciousness of the past, in his love of pretty, civilized things, in his cultivation, in his quick and varied sensibility. He was a collector and a connoisseur; he delighted not only in books, but in old ballads and in good furniture. He was a man who had come upon the scene not so early but that there was already a fine display of curious and diverting objects accumulated by an older generation. Standing midway in our history, he looks consciously and intelligently both backwards and forwards. If we turn our eyes behind us we see him gazing in our direction, asking with eager curiosity of our progress in science, of our ships and sailors. Indeed, the very fact that he kept a diary seems to make him one of ourselves.

Yet in reckoning, however imperfectly, the sources of our pleasure we must not forget that his age is among them. Sprightly, inquisitive, full of stir and life as he is, nevertheless Mr Pepys is now two hundred and eighty-five years of age. He can remember London when it was very much smaller than it is now,” with gardens and orchards, wild duck and deer. Men ‘justled for the wall and did kill one another’. Gentlemen were murdered riding out to their country houses at Kentishtown. Mr Pepys and Lady Paulina were much afraid of being set upon when they drove back at night, though Mr Pepys concealed his fears. They very seldom took baths, but, on the other hand, they dressed in velvet and brocade. They acquired a great deal of silver plate too, especially if they were in the public service, and a present of gloves for your wife might well be stuffed with guineas. Ladies put on their vizards at the play—and with reason if their cheeks were capable of blushing. Sir Charles Sedley was so witty once with his companion that you could not catch a word upon the stage. As for Lady Castlemaine, we should never persuade Mr Pepys that the sun of beauty did not set once and for all with her decline. It is an atmosphere at once homely and splendid, coarse and beautiful, of a world far away and yet very modern that is preserved in his pages.

The Pepys Club, which draws its life from so fertile a source, may well flourish and multiply its members. The portraits reproduced here, in particular a page of Mr Pepys’s ‘individual features’, are of themselves sufficient to make this volume of memorable interest. And yet there is one contribution which we would rather have left unread. It consists only of a little Latin, a few signs, two or three letters of the alphabet, such as any oculist in Harley-street will write you out upon half a sheet of note-paper for a couple of guineas. But to Samuel Pepys it would have meant a pair of spectacles, and what that pair of spectacles upon that pair of eyes might have seen and recorded it is tantalizing to consider. Instead of giving up his Diary upon May 31st, 1669, he might with this prescription have continued it for another thirty years. It is some relief to be told that the prescription is beyond the skill of contemporary oculists; but this is dashed by Mr Power’s statement that had Pepys chanced to sit upon the ‘tube spectacall’ of paper which his oculist provided so that he must read through a slit,

he would then have found his eye strain removed; his acute mind would have set itself to determine the cause; he would have pasted slips of black paper on each side of his glasses, and the Diary might have been continued to the end of his life; whilst the paper he would certainly have read upon the subject before the Royal Society would have added still greater lustre to his name, and might have revolutionized the laws of dioptrics.

But our regret is not purely selfish. How reluctant Pepys was to close his Diary the melancholy last paragraph bears witness. He had written until the act of writing ‘undid’ his eyes, for the things he wished to write were not always fit to be written in long-hand, and to cease to write ‘was almost as much as to see myself go into my grave’. And yet this was a writing which no one, during his life at any rate, was to be allowed to read. Not only from the last sentence, but from every sentence, it is easy to see what lure it was that drew him to his Diary. It was not a confessional, still less a mere record of things useful to remember, but the storehouse of his most private self, the echo of life’s sweetest sounds, without which life itself would become thinner and more prosaic. When he went upstairs to his chamber it was to perform no mechanical exercise, but to hold intercourse with the secret companion who lives in everybody, whose presence is so real, whose comment is so valuable, whose faults and trespasses and vanities are so lovable that to lose him is ‘almost to go into my grave’. For this other Pepys, this spirit of the man whom men respected, he wrote his Diary, and it is for this reason that for centuries to come men will delight in reading it.

[Times Literary Supplement, Apr 4, 1918]

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Sheridan.

[The Life of Richard Brinsley Sheridan by Walter Sichel.]

At first sight there may seem some incongruity between one’s idea of Sheridan and the size of Mr Sichel’s volumes. Nine people out of ten, if asked to give you their impression of Sheridan, would tell you that he wrote three standard plays, was famous for his debts, his wit, and his speech at the trial of Warren Hastings; they would add that he had played a distinguished but not a commanding part as a statesman, and flitted through the society of the Georgian era, a brilliant but slightly intoxicated insect, with gorgeous wings but an erratic flight. The important aspect of two stout volumes, numbering some 1,100 pages between them, seems strangely at variance with such a figure. How completely Mr Sichel corrects the popular view we shall attempt to show; but let us insist at once that the heaviness of the volumes is true in a literal sense only, and that, after reading from cover to cover, the importance of his subject seems to demand an even fuller treatment than it was possible to bestow. We should like more about the Linleys, more of Sheridan’s own letters, and more of Mrs Tickell and her sister.

If only to enlighten the reader as to the extreme interest and complexity of his task, and to point out its true nature, it is best to read the ‘Overture’ first, in which Mr Sichel seeks to ‘psychologize a temperament and a time’. At first (let us own) the clash of contrasts, urged with unusual sharpness and precision, blinds our eyes to the form which they would reveal; simplicity and extravagance, generosity and meanness, rash confidence and moderation, passion and coldness—how are we to compose them all into one human shape? But later, when we begin to understand, it appears that the clue to Sheridan’s baffling career must be sought among these contradictory fragments. For, looked at from the outside, the inconsistencies of his life fill us with a sense of dissatisfaction. Before he was thirty he had written three plays that are classics in our literature; then, once in Parliament, he turned to reform and finance and gave up writing altogether; ‘the Muses of Love and Satire beckoned to him from Parnassus, and to the last he persisted in declaring that they, and not politics, were his true vocation’; yet ‘his heart stayed in the Assembly of the nation, and to the last, like Congreve, he slighted his theatrical triumphs’; his married life, which began with two duels on his wife’s behalf, and ended in an agony of grief as she lay dying in his arms, would present a perfect example of devotion were it not that he had been unfaithful while she lived, and married again, a girl of twenty, three years after her death; finally, his political career is as incomprehensible as the rest, for, with gifts as orator and statesman that made him famous over Europe, he never held high office; with a character of singular independence he acted ‘equivocally’, and with a record of devotion to his Prince he lost his favour completely, and died, without a seat, dishonoured and in debt. Nothing tends to make us lose interest in a character so much as the suspicion that there is something monstrous about it, and the achievement of Mr Sichel’s biography is that it restores Sheridan to human size and brings him to life again.

The first gift that makes itself felt is the gift that is always present and at work, but is yet the hardest to recapture—the gift of charm. There has been nothing like it since the days of Orpheus,’ wrote Byron; it made the boys at Harrow love him; Sumner, the headmaster, overlooked his mischief because of it; it drew the bailiffs in later days to stand behind his chair; as for his sister, she confessed that she ‘admired—I almost adored him’. In early days his face expressed only the finer part, of him; ‘its half heaviness was lit up by the comedy of his smile, the audacity of his air’, and the brilliance of those eyes that were to outshine the rest of him, and to ‘look up at the coffin lid as brightly as ever’ when the mouth and chin had grown coarse as a Satyr’s. There are only two letters from Sheridan at Harrow; and they are both about dress. In one he complains that his clothes are so shabby that he ‘is almost ashamed to wear them on Sunday’; in the other he is anxious to have the proper mourning sent him on his mother’s death. Most schoolboys are conventional, but in addition to conforming to its laws, Sheridan liked the world to know that he grieved. A year or two later, when we come to Miss Linley and the famous elopement and the duels, the romance of Sheridan’s nature blossoms out, with curious qualifications. He discovered that the beautiful Miss Linley, who sang like an angel, was tormented by a man called Mathews, who was married; she had flirted with him as a child and he now pressed her dishonourably. Sheridan became her knight; he snatched her away to France without her parents’ knowledge, and placed her in a convent. It is probable that they went through ‘some form of marriage’ near Calais. Mathews, meanwhile, proclaimed his rival a liar and a scoundrel in the Bath Chronicle, and Sheridan vowed that he ‘would never sleep in England till he had thanked him as he deserved’. He left Miss Linley in her father’s hands, fought with Mathews twice, and obliged him to fly the country. It is a tale no doubt that might be matched by others of that age, but in the romantic arrangement of the plot, in the delicate respect with which he treated his charge, and in the extravagance of the vow which constrained him to spend the night out of bed at Canterbury and to reach his rival starved for want of sleep, there are signs of something out of the ordinary. Nor was his behaviour ordinary in the months of separation that followed. In his letters and his lyrics he luxuriated—for the passion that finds words has pleasure about it—in the shades of his emotion.

But love also started his brain into activity. Not only did he work at mathematics, make an abstract of the history of England, and comment upon Blackstone, but he thought about the principles upon which the world is run. It seemed to him that ‘all the nobler feelings of man’, which he began to perceive in himself, were blunted by civilization, and sighed for the early days when the ties of friendship and of love ‘could with some safety be formed at the first instigation of our hearts’.Now and perhaps throughout his life he believed that one’s emotions are supreme, and that one should rate the obstacles that thwart them as tokens of bondage. He was fond of dreaming about the enchanted world of the Arcadia and of the Faëry Queen, liking rather to dwell upon ‘the characters of life as I would wish that they were than as they are’, and persuading himself that his wish was really a desire to pierce beneath the corruptions of society to the true face of man beneath. Perhaps he felt that a world so simplified would be easier to live in than ours—but can one believe in it? He wished to replace all Fielding and Smollett with knights and ladies, but he did not believe in them either. The true romantic makes his past out of an intense joy in the present; it is the best of what he sees, caught up and set beyond the reach of change; Sheridan’s vague rapture with the glamour of life was only sufficient to make him discontented, sentimental, and chivalrous. The strange admixture is shown in his behaviour when he was asked to allow his wife—for they had married with the consent of her father, but to the rage of his—to sing publicly for money. He refused to agree, although they were very poor and large sums were offered. It was said that the sight of George III ogling her decided him, and Johnson declared, “He resolved wisely and nobly, to be sure.” But later, when he was struggling for a position in London drawing-rooms he allowed her to advertise concerts ‘to the Nobility and Gentry’ at which she was to sing without taking money. He gained a reputation for chivalry, for it implied that he cared for his wife’s honour more than for gold, and spurned a friendship that was bought; but then he valued the favour of the great very highly, and if it is true that he never cared for money, he seldom paid his debts.

Sheridan would do anything to make the world think well of him; he would wear intense mourning; he would keep a fine establishment; he would faint if people wished it; he could anticipate the popular desires, and exaggerate them brilliantly. The actor’s blood in him, which rises on applause like a ship on the waves, was responsible for the touch of melodrama; but the finer perceptions of artists were his too, and these, trained to discover emotions beneath small talk and domesticity, threw him off his balance in the uproar of the world. There is certainly a strange discrepancy between Sheridan in private and Sheridan in public—between his written words and his spoken. The three famous plays were written before he took to public life, and represent more of him than tradition or the imperfect reports of his speeches can now preserve. They show what Sheridan thought when there was no public to send the blood to his head. The way in which he takes the word ‘honour’ in The Rivals and makes it the jewel of a frightened country bumpkin and the sport of his shrewd serving-man assures us that he fought his own duels with a full sense of their absurdity. ‘Odds blades! David,’ cries Acres, ‘no gentleman will ever risk the loss of his honour!”I say, then,’ answers David, ‘it would be but civil in honour never to risk the loss of a gentleman. Look’ee, master, this honour seems to me to be a marvellous false friend: ay truly, a very courtier-like servant,’ and so on, until honour and the valiant man of honour are laughed out of court together.

Then again we have some reason to believe that Sheridan was an unthinking sentimentalist, and so slipshod in his morality that he acted upon no reasoned view, but used the current conventions. If that were so, he would have been the last to see the humour of Charles Surface in The School for Scandal. The good qualities of this character are lovable only because we know them to be slightly ridiculous; we are meant to think it a weak but endearing trait in him that he refuses to sell his uncle’s picture. ‘No, hang it; I’ll not part with poor Noll; the old fellow has been very good to me, and, egad, I’ll keep his picture while I’ve a room to put it in.’ And Sheridan satirizes his own system of generosity by adding to Charles’s offer of a hundred pounds to poor Stanley, ‘If you don’t make haste, we shall have some one call that has a better right to the money.’ These are details, but they keep us in mind of the acutely sensible side of Sheridan’s temperament. He laughs at the vapours of his age—at old women sending out for novels from the library, at bombastic Irishmen, picking quarrels for the glory of it, at romantic young ladies sighing for the joys of ‘sentimental elopements—ladder of ropes!—conscious moon—four horses—Scotch parson … paragraphs in the newspapers’. The pity is that his Irish gift of hyperbole made it so easy for him to heap one absurdity on another, to accumulate superlatives and smother everything in laughter. Mrs Malaprop would be more to the point if she could stay her tongue from deranging epitaphs; and the play scene in The Critic suffers from the same voluble buffoonery—but that it has such a rapture of fun in it that we can never cease to laugh.

The wind whistles—the moon rises—see,

They have kill’d my squirrel in his cage!

Is this a grasshopper?—Ha! no! it is my

Whiskerandos—you shall not keep him—

I know you have him in your pocket—

An oyster may be cross d in love!—Who says

A whale’s a bird?—

His humour makes one remember that he liked practical jokes. It is absolutely free from coarseness. The most profound humour is not fit reading for a girls’ school, because innocence is supposed to ignore half the facts of life, and however we may define humour, it is the most honest of the gifts.

Among other reasons for the morality of the stage in Sheridan’s day may be found the reason that it lacked vigour of every kind. Sheridan, the first of the playwrights, was prevented, partly by the fact that his audience would not like it, and partly by an innate prudery of his own—a touch of that sentimentality which led him to prefer unreal characters to real ones—from giving a candid account of his life. He took some thought of appearances, even in the study. His own view of the stage may be gathered in the first act of The Critic. Having regard to the limitations of an audience which could not brook Vanbrugh and Congreve, one should not ‘dramatize the penal laws’ or make the stage the school of morality, but find the proper sphere for the comic muse in ‘the follies and foibles of society’. That was Sheridan’s natural province, in spite of a fitful longing, to write a romantic Italian tragedy. If we grant that he had not the power which moves us so keenly in Congreve of showing how witty people love, and lacked the coarse vigour which still keeps The Rehearsal alive, we are conscious that he has another power of his own; Sir Henry Irving found it in his ‘play of human nature’; Mr Sichel speaks of his sympathy—‘a sympathy that Congreve lacked’. It is that surely that gives his comedy its peculiar glow. It does not spring from insight, or from any unusual profundity. It lies rather in his power to get on with ordinary people—to come into a room full of men and women who know him for the cleverest man of his time, and to set them at once at their ease. Other dramatists would treat such a character as Charles Surface with condescension, for a blockhead, or with uneasy respect, because of his courage and muscle; but Sheridan liked him heartily; he was his ‘ideal of a good fellow’. This humanity—it was part of his charm as a man—still warms his writing; and it has another quality which also appeals to us. He reminds us sometimes of our modern dramatists in his power to. see accepted conventions in a fresh light. He tests the current view of honour; he derides the education that was given to women; he was for reforming the conventions of the stage. His interest in ideas was only a faint forecast of our own obsession; and he was too true an artist to make any character the slave of a theory. A great fastidiousness was one of the many gifts that were half-failings, and the more he wrote the less possible it became to make the drama an instrument of reform. The School tor Scandal was polished and polished again; ‘after nineteen years he had been unable to satisfy himself’ with his style. The excessive care was fatal; it helped to dry up his vein before he had fully explored it, and his last comedy Affectation has dwindled to a few careful sentences, very neatly written in a small copybook.

An acute sense of comedy does not seem compatible with a reformer’s zeal; and, when the success of his plays and the charm of his wife brought him into touch with the rulers of the country, the chance of acting among them proved irresistible. His success with the great ladies who came to his wife’s drawing-room showed him what kind of power might be his—he might lead human beings. From the first, too, he had had the political instinct—a sense of distress among the people and a desire to make their lives better by improving the laws of the land. ‘Government for the people, through the people, and by the people’ was the creed with which he started his career under the guidance of Fox. A boyish essay shows how natural it was to him to think of man as a free being oppressed by the laws. ‘… all laws at present are Tyranny … All Liberty consists in the Probability of not being oppressed. What assurance have we that we shall not be taxed at eight shillings in the pound? No more than the colonies have.’ One of the first causes that attracted him was the cause of the American colonies, and he urged passionately their right to independence. He resolved to ‘sacrifice every other object’ to politics, and to ‘force myself into business, punctuality, and information’.

But it is not necessary to trace Sheridan’s Parliamentary career. Mr Sichel proves, if one can separate them, that it was more important than his career as a man of letters, and for this reason his second volume is even more interesting than his first. What is interesting, of course, is the spectacle of a man who tries to give some shape to his beliefs, and has great opportunities. He had to do what he could with questions like that of the American colonists, of the Irish Union, of Indian government, of the French Revolution, which sprang up one after the other. They have come to be facts now, lying sunk beneath a heap of results; but they were then in the making, composed of the united wills of individuals and shaped by the wills of individuals. This is one source of interest; but it happens very often that we lose sight of the aim in amazement at the spectacle. When Sheridan entered Parliament, Burke and Pitt and Fox, to take the leaders only, gave every question an extraordinary depth and complexity. It seems that we are not tracing ideas, but watching a gigantic drama, like those old Homeric combats where the motive may be the sack of Troy, but in which the episodes represent every phase of human life. Sometimes the central figure is undraped; and we have to contemplate the absurd or touching spectacle of a gentleman afflicted with the gout—‘a poor, bare, forked animal’, touched in his mind, too, who for the moment represents humanity. There are strange anecdotes in the Duchess of Devonshire’s diary. The King began to go mad, and said ‘the Prince of Wales is dead, so women may be honest’. He made Sir George Baker go down on his knees to look at the stars; he ordered a ‘tye wig, and danc’d with Dr Reynolds’; the courtiers had to pretend that he could play chess when he could only play draughts, and that they had all been a little mad and wore strait waistcoats themselves. Such contrasts abound, but if we know enough there appears to be some order in the tumult; it is shaped something after a human form. We need only observe out of what elements the conduct of a public man is made.

Sheridan, in spite of his vanity and irresponsibility, had an unwavering sense of something more stable than any private advantage. He could look beyond his own life, and judge clearly of things to come. Again and again we find him on the side of reform, courageous and ‘unpurchaseable’, a statesman whose views grew wider as he aged. And yet, how strangely little traits of character, small vices unchecked since boyhood, assert themselves and corrupt his actions! The speech upon the Begums of Oude, which made great men tremble and women cry with ecstasy, lacks something essential, for all its thunder of eloquence. Years afterwards he met Warren Hastings, shook his hand, and begged him to believe that ‘political necessity’ had inspired some of his rage. When Hastings ‘with greaty gravity’ asked him to make that sentence public, he could only ‘mutter’, and get out of it as best he might. It is the same with his friendship for the Regent; he could not care for anything for its own sake. The man was a Prince, girt about with romance, and hung with stars and ribbons; Mrs Fitzherbert was a woman, beautiful and in distress; his sympathies were volatile, and he moved in a world of gems and decorations, which might be had for the asking. Yet gold was too gross to tempt him; he craved for love, confidence, and demonstrative affection in the face of the world. What he asked he could not get, or perhaps he asked it of the wrong people. From the first an uneasy note sounds beneath the rest. The beautiful Mrs Sheridan implored him, when they began to rise, to let his friends know of their poverty. He had not the courage to do it, and she was led on to bet and to flirt. ‘Oh, my own,’ she wrote him, “ee can’t think how they beat me every night.’ He condoned her frailties with the tact of a perfect gentleman. But once in the race there was no standing still. The Duchess of Devonshire, Lady Bessborough, Lady Elizabeth Foster—all the great ladies and the brilliant young men were there to egg him on. At their pressure such a fountain of wit and satire and imagery sprang from his lips as no one else could rival. His face might grow fiery and his nose purple, but his voice kept its melody to the end. Yet, in spite of all this, he was never at his ease, and always conscious of a certain misfit. When he stood on the Down where, twenty years before, he had fought and lain wounded, he considered his situation:

What an interval has passed since, and scarcely one promise that I then made to my own soul have I attempted to fulfil … The irregularity of all my life and pursuits, the restless, contriving temper with which I have persevered in wrong pursuits and passions makes [some words erased, of which ‘errors’ is legible] reflexion worse to me than even to those who have acted worse.

He thought he could foresee the ‘too probable conclusion’, but even his imagination, though made intense by sorrow, could hardly have foreseen the end. Perhaps it was the humour of it that he could not have foreseen. He became ‘Old Sherry’ to the younger generation, and was to be met ‘half seas over’, a disreputable figure, but still talking divinely, a battered Orpheus, but still a very polite gentleman, a little bewildered by the course of events, and somewhat disappointed by his lot. He fell into sponging houses, escaped ingeniously from the ‘two strange men’ who had followed him all his life, and begged as eloquently as ever, with a touch of Irish brogue in his voice. They are going to put the carpets out of window, and break into Mrs Sheridan’s room, and take me’ he wrote, but was sanguine on the morrow. Then he lay dying, and the prescriptions were unopened in the bare parlour, and ‘there were strange people in the hall’. But so long as life promised adventures Sheridan had a part to act, and could welcome a future. It is not in any event that his tragedy lay, for there is something ludicrous in the stupidity of fate which never fits the fortune to the desert and blunts our pain in wonder. The tragedy lies in making promises, and seeing possibilities, and in the sense of failure. There at least the pain is without mixture. But one does not fail so long as one sees possibilities still, and the judgment on our failure is that which Byron murmured when he heard that Sheridan was dead, and praised his gifts and greatness—‘But alas, poor human nature!’

[Times Literary Supplement, Dec 2, 1909]

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Thomas Hood.

[Thomas Hood: his Life and Times by Walter Jerrold. Poems by Thomas Hood, edited by F. C. Burnand.]

At the same time that Keats and Lamb were writing there flourished—so thick that even men like these showed little higher than the rest—a whole forest of strenuous and lusty human beings, journalists, artists, or people simply who happened to live then and rear their children. What profuse clamour, what multitudinous swarms of life a wise biographer can call up for us from fields long since shorn and flat if he will take for his subject one of these mortals it is really bewildering for a moment to consider. A student of letters is so much in the habit of striding through the centuries from one pinnacle of accomplishment to the next that he forgets all the hub-bub that once surged round the base; how Keats lived in a street and had a neighbour and his neighbour had a family—the rings widen infinitely; how Oxford-street ran turbulent with men and women while de Quincey talked with Ann. And such considerations are not trivial if only because they had their effect upon things that we are wont to look upon as isolated births, and to judge, therefore, in a spirit that is more than necessarily dry. Mr Jerrold’s life of Thomas Hood gives rise to a number of such reflections, both because he has written with delightful good taste and discrimination and because his subject, after all, belonged almost the whole of him to the race of the mortals. If it had not been for his two or three poems perhaps he would have sunk with the rest of them, with the load of albums and annuals and their makers, or would have survived as some half mythical comic figure, the father of a few good stories and the author of innumerable puns. There is even something nugatory about the facts of his life; they suggest, in the easy ordinary way in which they fit and succeed each other, that there were hundreds of Thomas Hoods, sons of middle-class parents, apprenticed to engravers, with a turn for writing verse or prose; kindly domestic young men, who if they did take to letters—their parents were well advised in dissuading them—would make no mark there, but fill endless columns satisfactorily. Such, to a great extent, was the life of Hood; but there was just that exaggeration of temper or fortune in it that made him, while he was one of a class, typical of it also. He was impelled by his gifts and his feelings to travel the whole course that slighter men trod partly, until he achieved something significant and completed his symbol.

As a boy he showed an abnormal facility; if he went away on a holiday he sent home profuse letters full of descriptions. Already the surface show of life tickled him with its incongruities; and at a time when most boys are aping some older writer he was simply observing with a lively eye what went on round him and scribbling it down in sheets of fresh easy prose. He laughed at his fellow lodgers, or stood at the window and took off the people whom he saw passing on their way to church. The study of character (I mean of amusing ones) I enjoy exceedingly,’ he wrote when he was sixteen, and in the same spirit he dashed off a long poem on the town of Dundee, in imitation of the ‘New Bath Guide’. No one could doubt where his gift would lead him, in spite of the engraving; and when he was twenty-two some papers, accepted by the London Magazine, definitely determined him, as Mr Jerrold thinks, to trust entirely to his pen. From that time onward his life was the complex life of a busy journalist. There was no respite, scarcely any partition; for where are we to seek the events of his life but in his writings? And when we read him we must remember his wife and children, his ill-health, the ceaseless pressure of money cares. If a particular style pleased the public he must continue it, though the mood was spent; and as his first success was made in the ‘Whims and Oddities’ he had still, as he says, to ‘breathe his comic vein’. ‘Could Hood at this moment have taken some editorial appointment [writes Mr Jerrold] we might have had more of his best and less of that journeyman work.’ That is a very moderate statement of the regret that bursts from our lips at many stages of this panting, hard-driven career: but in our desire to round the picture, to possess our tragedy, are we not inclined to fall into the fallacy to which Thackeray gave shape in his paper ‘On a joke I once heard from the late Thomas Hood’? He speaks of the grinning and tumbling, ‘through sorrow, through exile, poverty, fever, depression’, ‘the sad marvellous picture of courage, of honesty, of patient endurance, of duty struggling against pain’—until in our compassion we forget very likely the true spirit of the man, his exuberance and brilliancy, the odd vulgar humour of a cockney life, the practical jokes and the supper parties. ‘O Hood, Hood, you do run on so!’ exclaimed poor Mrs Hood, half inarticulate, at one of these feasts. The very fact that he gave himself with such pliancy to the drudgery of a journalist’s life proves that there was something in the nature of his gift and temperament akin to it.

And when we turn to his writing we can surely discover there signs, not only of work ‘pumped out’, but of ideas springing gladly to the surface at the cheerful command of throbbing presses and fast falling sheets. No other invitation could have sounded quite so aptly to a man with a brain full of puns. But it is largely on account of these puns, we are told, that Hood is now so little read. Indeed, the portent is one that strikes the attention directly, and it must be held to typify something fundamental in the constitution of his mind. For his puns divide themselves into two classes or degrees; the greater part of them are simply happy matchings of sound in which there is so thin a burden of meaning that the contrast is almost purely verbal.

Alas; they’ve taken my beau Ben

To sail with old Benbow

But there are others in which the pun is the result of some strange association in Hood’s mind of two remote ideas, which it is his singular gift to illustrate by a corresponding coincidence of language.

Even the bright extremes of joy

Bring on conclusions of disgust;

Like the sweet blossoms of the May,

Whose fragrance ends in must.

These lines are taken from one of his most serious poems, that on Melancholy, and serve to illustrate, compactly, a remarkable tendency—perhaps it is the remarkable tendency—of his thought. They show how the original leaning of his mind was really to wild and incongruous associations, grotesque and monstrous conceits, not in words only, but in human life, such as those we see so strikingly displayed in poems like ‘Eugene Aram’, ‘The Haunted House’, and ‘The Last Man’. And also we may discover a certain superficiality of conception, which suffers him to find such contrasts as the verbal one of ‘may’ and ‘must’ adequate, and makes him so supersensitive to the surface inflections of language as he was sensitive to the influence of contemporary writers. The influence of Lamb is clear in his prose, of Keats in his verse, and Coleridge one may guess affected his thought more deeply than either.

From these poems Sir Francis Burnand has lately published in the Red Letter Library a selection which gives a fair representation of the different moods in which Hood sang. They are broadly farcical, or romantic, or satirical or wildly fantastical; and there are the two famous poems which admirers of Hood will scarcely classify at all except by calling them inspired. The ‘Song of the Shirt’ in particular makes Sir Francis ‘positively disinclined to dwell upon any other serious poems of Hood’s be it even the “Bridge of Sighs” ‘; and he has some quarrel with Thackeray for the way in which he dwelt upon Hood’s perverse love of ‘comicalities’. He points out that it was the jesting that paid, and that Hood was forced to make an income. But what perhaps is overlooked is the necessary relationship between Hood’s fun and Hood’s tragedy; you could not have the one without the other—if he laughed in this way he must cry in that—and the faults which we find in his light verse surely reproduce themselves in his serious poems. Thus, the reason why we cannot, with deference to Sir Francis Burnand, accept the ‘Song of the Shirt’ as an enduring masterpiece is because of the slight cheapness of effect, tending to the melodramatic, which has something in common with the verbal dexterity, the supersensitive surface of mind already noticed. Such lines as

Sewing at once, with a double thread,

A shroud as well as a shirt.

or,

A little weeping would ease my heart,

But in their briny bed

My tears must stop, for every drop

Hinders needle and thread!

go straight, as he says, to our hearts; but not to the noblest part of them. ‘Ruth’ or The Death Bed’ touches a higher note. You must honour and pity so fine a nature, so honest and brilliant a mind, stung now to impulsive and passionate utterance by the sorrows of the world, now to irrepressible showers of merriment by its oddities. But in the most solid of his work the sharp blade of his own circumstance is always wearing through. You do not find all of him in his work; you rise from it unsatisfied, to ask what were the accidents of his life that made him write so. Mr Jerrold’s book, then, is a valuable addition to our knowledge of Hood, and anyone who has had occasion to consult the Memorials by his son and daughter will perceive at once how much all readers in the future must be indebted to Mr Jerrold’s laborious research and good judgment. A life was needed, and he has provided it.

[Times Literary Supplement, Jan 30, 1908]

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Praeterita.

That an abridgement of ‘Modern Painters’ should lately have been published may be held to prove that while people still want to read Ruskin, they have no longer the leisure to read him in the mass. Happily, for it would be hard to let so great a writer recede from us, there is another and much slighter book of Ruskin’s, which contains as in a teaspoon the essence of those waters from which the many-coloured fountains of eloquence and exhortation sprang. ‘Praeterita’—‘outlines of scenes and thoughts perhaps worthy of memory in my past life’ as he called it—is a fragmentary book, written in a season of great stress towards the end of his life, and left unfinished. It is, for these reasons perhaps, less known than it should be; yet if anybody should wish to understand what sort of man Ruskin was, how he was brought up, how he came to hold the views he did, he will find it all indicated here; and if he wishes to feel for himself the true temper of his genius, these pages, though much less eloquent and elaborate than many others, preserve it with exquisite simplicity and spirit.

Ruskin’s father was ‘an entirely honest’ wine merchant, and his mother was the daughter of the landlady of the Old King’s Head at Croydon. The obscurity of his birth is worth notice because he paid some attention to it himself, and it influenced him much. His natural inclination was to love the splendour of noble birth and the glamour of great possessions. Sitting between his father and mother when they drove about England in their chariot taking orders for sherry, he loved best to explore the parks and castles of the aristocracy. But he owned manfully, if with a tinge of regret, that his uncle was a tanner and his aunt a baker’s wife. Indeed, if he reverenced aristocracy and what it stood, or should stand for, he reverenced still more the labours and virtues of the poor. To work hard and honestly, to be truthful in speech and thought, to make one’s watch or one’s table as well as tables and watches can be made, to keep one’s house clean and pay one’s bills punctually were qualities that won his enthusiastic respect. The two strains are to be found conflicting in his life and produce much contradiction and violence in his work. His passion for the great French cathedrals conflicted with his respect for the suburban chapel. The colour and warmth of Italy fought with his English puritanical love of order, method and cleanliness. Though to travel abroad was a necessity to him, he was always delighted to return to Herne Hill and home. Again, the contrast finds expression in the marked varieties of his style. He is opulent in his eloquence, and at the same time meticulous in his accuracy. He revels in the description of changing clouds and falling waters, and yet fastens his eye to the petals of a daisy with the minute tenacity of a microscope. He combined, or at least there fought in him, the austerity of the puritan and the sensuous susceptibility of the artist. Unluckily for his own peace of mind, if nature gave him more than the usual measure of gifts and mixed them with more than her usual perversity, his parents brought him up to have far less than the usual power of self-control. Mr and Mrs Ruskin were both convinced that their son John was to become a great man, and in order to insure it they kept him like any other precious object, in a cardboard box wrapped in cotton wool. Shut up in a large house with very few friends and very few toys, perfectly clothed, wholesomely nourished and sedulously looked after, he learned, he said, ‘Peace, obedience, faith,’ but on the other hand, ‘I had nothing to love … I had nothing to endure … I was taught no precision nor etiquette of manners … Lasdy and chief of evils, my judgment of right and wrong, and power of independent action, were entirely undeveloped; because the bridle and blinkers were never taken off me.’ He was not taught to swim, that is to say, but only to keep away from the water.

He grew up, therefore, a shy, awkward boy, who was intellectually so highly precocious that he could write the first volume of ‘Modern Painters’ before he was twenty-four, but was emotionally so stunted that, desperately susceptible as he was, he did not know how to amuse a lady for an evening. His efforts to ingratiate himself with the first of those enchanting girls who made havoc of his life reminded him, he said, of the efforts of a skate in an aquarium to get up the glass. Adèle was Spanish-born, Paris-bred and Catholic-hearted, he notes, yet he talked to her of the Spanish Armada, the Battle of Waterloo and the doctrine of Transubstantiation. Some such pane of glass or other impediment was always to lie between him and the freedom of ordinary intercourse. Partly the boyish days of anxious supervision were to blame. He had much rather go away alone and look at things, he said, than stay at home and be looked at. He did not want friends; he marvelled that anyone should be fond of a creature as impersonal and self-contained as a camera lucida or an ivory foot-rule. And then he was still further withdrawn from the ordinary traffic of life by Nature who, to most people only the background, lovely or sympathetic to their own activities, was to him a presence mystic, formidable, sublime, dominating the little human figure in the foreground. But though she thus rapt him from his fellows. Nature did not console him. The cataract and the mountain did not take the place of the hearth and lamplight and children playing on the rug; the beauty of the landscape only made more terrible to him the wickedness of man. The rant and fury and bitterness of his books seem to spring, not merely from the prophetic vision, but from a sense of his own frustration. More eloquent they could hardly be; but we cannot help guessing that had little John cut his knees and run wild like the rest of of us, not only would he have been a happier man, but instead of the arrogant scolding and preaching of the big books, we should have had more of the clarity and simplicity of ‘Praeterita’.

For in ‘Praeterita’, happily, there is little left of these old rancours. At last Ruskin was at peace; his pain was no longer his own, but everybody’s pain; and when Ruskin is at peace with the world, it is surprising how humorously, kindly, and observantly he writes of it. Never were portraits more vividly drawn than those of his father and mother; the father, upright, able, sensitive, yet vain, too, and glad that his clerk’s incompetence should prove his own capacity; the mother, austere and indomitably correct, but with a dash of ‘the Smollettesque’ in her, so that when a maid toppled backwards over a railing in full view of a monastery, she laughed for a full quarter of an hour. Never was there a clearer picture of English middle-class life when merchants were still princes and suburbs still sanctuaries. Never did any auto-biographer admit us more hospitably and generously into the privacy of his own experience. That he should go on for ever talking, and that we should still listen, is all we ask, but in vain. Before the book is finished the beautiful stream wanders out of his control and loses itself in the sands. Limpid as it looks, that pure water was distilled from turmoil; and serenely as the pages run, they resound with the echoes of thunder and are lit with the reflections of lightning. For the old man who sits now babbling of his past was a prophet once and had suffered greatly.

[T.P.’s Weekly, Dec 3, 1927, as “Ruskin Looks Back on Life”]

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Mr Kipling’s Notebook.

[Letters of Travel 1892-1913, by Rudyard Kipling.]

Between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one, speaking roughly, every writer keeps a large note book devoted entirely to landscape. Words must be found for a moonlit sky, for a stream, for plane-trees after rain. They ‘must’ be found. For the plane-tree dries very quickly, and if the look as of a sea-lion sleek from a plunge is gone, and nothing found to record it better than those words, the wet plane-tree does not properly exist. Nothing can exist unless it is properly described. Therefore the young writer is perpetually on the stretch to get the thing expressed before it is over and the end of the day finds him with a larder full of maimed objects—half-realized trees, streams that are paralytic in their flow, and leaves that obstinately refuse to have that particular—what was the look of them against the sky, or, more difficult still to express, how did the tree erect its tent of green layers above you as you lay flat on the ground beneath? Early in the twenties this incessant matching and scrutiny of nature is relaxed, perhaps in despair, more probably because the attention has been captured by the usual thing—the human being. He wanders into the maze. When once more he can look at a tree it seems to him quite unnecessary to consider whether the bark is like a wet seal, or the leaves are jagged emeralds. The truth of the tree is not in that kind of precision at all. Indeed the old notebooks, with their trees, streams, sunsets, Piccadilly at dawn, Thames at midday, waves on the beach, are quite unreadable. And for the same reason so is much of Mr Kipling—quite unreadable.

A fat carp in a pond sucks at a fallen leaf with just the sound of a wicked little worldly kiss. Then the earth steams and steams in silence, and a gorgeous butterfly, full six inches from wing to wing, cuts through the steam in a zigzag of colour and flickers up to the forehead of the god.

That is a perfect note. Every word of it has been matched with the object with such amazing skill that no one could be expected to bury it in a notebook. But when it is printed in a book meant to be read consecutively, and on to it are stitched all the notes that Mr Kipling has made with unfaltering eye, and even increasing skill, it becomes, literally, unreadable. One has to shut the eyes, shut the book, and do the writing over again. Mr Kipling has given us the raw material; but where is this to go, and where that, and what about the distance, and who, after all, is seeing this temple, or God, or desert? All notebook literature produces the same effect of fatigue and obstacle, as if there dropped across the path of the mind some block of alien matter which must be removed or assimilated before one can go on with the true process of reading. The more vivid the note the greater the obstruction. The malady can be traced to Lord Tennyson, who brought the art of taking notes to the highest perfection, and displayed the utmost skill in letting them, almost imperceptibly, into the texture of his poetry. Here is an example:

Crisp foam-flakes scud along the level sand,

Torn from the fringe of spray.

That must have been seen one day on the beach at Freshwater, and preserved for future use; and when we come upon it we detect its bottled origin, and say, ‘Yes, that is exactly like a foam-flake, and I wonder whether Tennyson’s floam-flakes were yellowish, and had that porous look which I myself have thought of comparing to the texture of cork? “Crisp” he calls it. But surely cork…’ and so on through all the old business of word-matching, while the ‘Dream of Fair Women’ wastes in air. But when Keats wanted to describe autumn, he said that he had seen her ‘sitting careless on a granary floor’; which does all the work for us, whether innumerable notes were the basis of it or none at all. Indeed, if we want to describe a summer evening, the way to do it is to set people talking in a room with their backs to the window, and then, as they talk about something else, let someone half turn her head and say, ‘A fine evening,’ when (if they have been talking about the right things) the summer evening is visible to anyone who reads the page, and is for ever remembered as of quite exceptional beauty.

To return to Mr Kipling. Is he then directing us to nothing, and are these brilliant scenes merely pages torn from the copy-book of a prodigy among pupils? No; it is not so simple as that. Just as the railway companies have a motive in hanging their stations with seductive pictures of Ilfracombe and Blackpool Bay, so Mr Kipling’s pictures of places are painted to display the splendours of Empire and to induce young men to lay down their lives on her behalf. And again, it is not so simple as that. It is true that Mr Kipling shouts, ‘Hurrah for the Empire!’ and puts out his tongue at her enemies. But praise as crude as this, abuse as shallow, can be nothing but a disguise rigged up to justify some passion or other of which Mr Kipling is a little ashamed. He has a feeling, perhaps, that a grown man should not enjoy making bridges, and using tools, and camping out as much as he does. But if these activities are pursued in the service of Empire, they are not only licensed, but glorified. Hence the excuse. Yet it is the passion that gives his writing its merit, and the excuse that vitiates it:

I wonder sometimes whether any eminent novelist, philosopher, dramatist, or divine of today has to exercise half the imagination, not to mention insight, endurance, and self-restraint, which is accepted without comment in what is called ‘the material exploitation’ of a new country … The mere drama of it, the play of the human virtues, would fill a book.

It has, indeed, filled many books, from the travels of Hakluyt to the novels of Mr Conrad, and if Mr Kipling would concentrate upon ‘the mere drama of it, the play of the human virtues’, there would be no fault to find with him. Even as it is, there are pages in the ‘Letters of Travel’ in the contemplation of which the most lily-livered Socialist forgets to brand the labouring and adventuring men with the curse of Empire. There is, for example, an account of a bank failure in Japan. All Mr Kipling’s sympathy with men who work is there displayed, and there, too, much more vividly than by means of direct description, is expressed the excitement and strangeness of the East. Up to a point that is perfectly true; Mr Kipling is a man of sympathy and imagination. But the more closely you watch the more puzzled you become. Why do these men, in the first shock of loss, step there, turn their backs just there, and say precisely that? There is something mechanical about it, as if they were acting; or is it that they are carefully observing the rules of a game?

A man passed stiffly, and some one of a group turned to ask lightly, ‘Hit, old man?”Like Hell,’ he said, and went on biting his unlit cigar … ‘We’re doing ourselves well this year,’ said a wit grimly. ‘One free-shooting case, one thundering libel case, and a bank smash. Showing off pretty before the globe trotters, aren’t we?’

It is as if they were afraid to be natural. But Mr Kipling ought to have insisted that with him at least they should drop this pose, instead of which the effect of his presence is to make them talk more by rule than ever. Whether grownup people really play this game, or whether, as we suspect, Mr Kipling makes up the whole British Empire to amuse the solitude of his nursery, the result is curiously sterile and depressing.

[Athenaeum, Jul 16, 1920]

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Emerson’s Journals.

[Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, edited by E. W. Emerson and W. Emerson Forbes, 1820-32. Two vols.]

Emerson’s Journals have little in common with other journals. They might have been written by starlight in a cave if the sides of the rock had been lined with books. In reality they cover twelve most important years—when he was at college, when he was a clergyman, and when he was married for the first time. But circumstances as well as nature made him peculiar. The Emerson family was now threadbare, but it had noble traditions in the past. His widowed mother and his eccentric aunt were possessed with the fierce Puritan pride of family which insisted upon intellectual distinction and coveted with a pride that was not wholly of the other world a high place for their name among the select families of Boston. They stinted themselves and stinted the boys that they might afford learning. The creed of the enthusiastic women was but too acceptable to children ‘bom to be educated’. They chopped the firewood, read classics in their spare time, and lay bare in all their sensitiveness to the ‘pressure of I know not how many literary influences’ with which the Emerson household was charged. The influence of Aunt Mary, their father’s sister, was clearly the most powerful. There are general rough sketches of men of genius in the family, and Miss Emerson rudely represented her nephew. She possessed the intense faith of the first Americans, together with a poetic imagination which made her doubt it. Her soul was always in conflict. She did not know whether she could suffer her nephews to reform the precious fabric, and yet was so full of new ideas herself that she could not help imparting them. But, unlike them, she was only self-taught, and her fervour boiled within her, scalding those she loved best. ‘I love to be a vessel of cumbersomeness to society,’ she remarked. But the strange correspondence which she kept up with Ralph, although it is but half intelligible from difficulty of thought and inadequacy of language, shows us what an intense and crabbed business life was to a serious American.

With such voices urging him on Emerson went to school fully impressed with the importance of the intellect. But his journals do not show vanity so much as a painful desire to get the most out of himself and a precocious recognition of ends to be aimed at. His first object was to learn how to write. The early pages are written to the echo of great prose long before he could fit words that gave his meaning into the rhythm. ‘He studied nature with a classical enthusiasm, and the constant activity of his mind endowed him with an energy of thought little short of inspiration.’ Then he began to collect rare words out of the books he read: ‘I’ll conditioned, Caméléon, Zeal, Whordeberry.’ The frigid exercises upon ‘The Drama’, ‘Death’, ‘Providence’ were useful also to decide the anxious question whether he belonged to the society of distinguished men or not. But it was the responsibility and the labour of being great and not the joy that impressed him. His upbringing had early made him conscious that he was exceptional, and school no doubt confirmed him. At any rate he could not share his thoughts with friends. Their arguments and views are never quoted beside his own in the diary. The face of one Freshman attracted him, but ‘it would seem that this was an imaginary friendship. There is no evidence that the elder student ever brought himself to risk disenchantment by active advances’. To make up for the absence of human interest we have the annals of the Pythologian Club. But although they show that Emerson occasionally read and listened to papers comparing love and ambition, marriage and celibacy, town life and country life, they give no impression of intimacy. Compared with the contemporary life of an Englishman at Oxford or Cambridge, the life of an American undergraduate seems unfortunately raw. Shelley took the world seriously enough, but Oxford was so full of prejudices that he could never settle into complacent self-improvement; Cambridge made even Wordsworth drunk. But the great bare building at Harvard, which looks (in an engraving of 1823) like a reformatory in the middle of a desert, had no such traditions; its pupils were profoundly conscious that they had to make them. Several volumes of the Journals are dedicated to ‘America’, as though to a cause.

A weaker mind, shut up with its finger on its pulse, would have used a diary to revile its own unworthiness. But Emerson’s diary merely confirms the impression he made on his friends; he appeared ‘kindly, affable, but self-contained … apart, as if in a tower’; nor was he more emotional writing at midnight for his own eye; but we can guess the reason. It was because he had convictions. His indefatigable brain raised a problem out of every sight and incident; but they could be solved if he applied his intellect. Safe in this knowledge, which time assured, he could live alone, registering the development, relying more and more on his sufficiency, and coming to believe that by close scrutiny he could devise a system. Life at twenty-one made him ponder thoughts like these: ‘Books and Men; Civilization; Society and Solitude; Time; God within.’ Novels, romances, and plays seemed for the most part written for ‘coxcombs and deficient persons’. The only voice that reached him from without was the voice of his Aunt Mary, tumultuous in fear lest he should lose his belief in original sin. Before he had developed his theory of compensation, he was sometimes harassed by the existence of evil; occasionally he accused himself of wasting time. But his composure is best proved by an elaborate essay headed ‘Myself. There one quality is weighed with another, so that the character seems to balance scrupulously. Yet he was conscious of a ‘signal defect’, which troubled him because it could destroy this balance more completely than its importance seemed to justify. Either he was without ‘address’, or there was a ‘levity of the understanding’ or there was an ‘absence of common sympathies’. At any rate, he felt a ‘sore uneasiness in the company of most men and women … even before women and children I am compelled to remember the poor boy who cried, “I told you, Father, they would find me out” ‘. To be a sage in one’s study, and a stumbling schoolboy out of it—that was the irony he had to face.

Instead, however, of slipping into easier views, he went on with his speculations; nor was he bitter against the world because it puzzled him. What he did was to assert that he could not be rejected because he held the universe within him. Each man, by finding out what he feels, discovers the laws of the universe; the essential thing, therefore, is to be as conscious of yourself as possible.

He that explores the principles of architecture and detects the beauty of the proportions of a column, what doth he but ascertain one of the laws of his own mind?… The Kingdom of God is within you … I hold fast to my old faith: that to each soul is a solitary law, a several universe.

Every man is a new creation: can do something best, has some intellectual modes or forms, or a character the general result of all, such as no other in the universe has.

But this is different from selfishness; praise or blame or a reflection in the face of society—anything that made him remember himself discomfited him; a solitude as empty as possible, in which he could feel most acutely his contact with the universe, rejoiced him. The more exclusively idiosyncratic a man is, the more general and infinite he is’—that was the justification of solitude, but the fruits depend upon the worth of the man. Small minds, imbibing this doctrine, turn their possessors into cranks and egoists, and a delicate mind is strained until it is too pure to act: there was Mr Bradford, for example, who, ‘too modest and sensitive’ to be a clergyman, became a ‘teacher of classes for young ladies’, and was a ‘devoted gardener’. In Emerson the reason was strong enough to lift him beyond the temptation of purifying his own soul. Yet it did not free him, in youth at least, from an interest in the distempers of his spirit which is unpleasantly professional. Often in company and in solitude he was absorbed in regulating his sensations. ‘When I stamp through the mud in dirty boots, I hug myself with the feeling of my immortality.’ Only the bland and impersonal spirit which never left him makes such reflections other than smug; they are often dismal enough. But the wonder is that, treating as he does of platitudes and expounding them for our good, he yet contrives to make them glow so frequently, as if, next minute, they would illumine the world. He had the poet’s gift of turning far, abstract thoughts, if not into flesh and blood, at least into something firm and glittering. In the pages of his diary one can see how his style slowly emerged from its wrappings, and became more definite and so strong that we can still read it even when the thought is too remote to hold us. He discovered that ‘No man can write well who thinks there is any choice of words for him … In good writing, every word means something. In good writing, words become one with things.’ But the theory has something priggish about it. All good writing is honest in the sense that it says what the writer means; but Emerson did not see that one can write with phrases as well as with words. His sentences are made up of hard fragments each of which has been matched separately with the vision in his head. It is far rarer to find sentences which, lacking emphasis because the joins are perfect and the words common, yet grow together so that you cannot dismember them, and are steeped in meaning and suggestion.

But what is true of his style is true of his mind. An austere life, spent in generalizing from one’s own emotions and in keeping their edges sharp, will not yield rich romantic pages, so deep that the more you gaze into them the more you see. Isolated, one loses the power of understanding why men and women do not live by rule, and the confusion of their feelings merely distresses one. Emerson, born among half-taught people, in a new land, kept always the immature habit of conceiving that a man is made up of separate qualities, which can be separately developed and praised. It is a belief necessary to schoolmasters; and to some extent Emerson is always a schoolmaster, making the world very simple for his scholars, a place of discipline and reward. But this simplicity, which is in his diaries as well as in his finished works—for he was not to be ‘found out’—is the result not only of ignoring so much, but of such concentration upon a few things. By means of it he can produce an extraordinary effect of exaltation, as though the disembodied mind were staring at the truth. He takes us to a peak above the world, and all familiar things have shrunk into pinheads and faint greys and pinks upon the flat. There, with beating hearts, we enjoy the sensation of our own dizziness; there he is natural and benign. But these exaltations are not practicable; they will not stand interruption. Where shall we lay the blame? Is he too simple, or are we too worn? But the beauty of his view is great, because it can rebuke us, even while we feel that he does not understand.

[Times Literary Supplement, Mar 3, 1910]

[]

Thoreau.

A hundred years ago, on July 12th, 1817, was born Henry David Thoreau, the son of a pencil maker in Concord, Massachusetts. He has been lucky in his biographers, who have been attracted to him not by his fame so much as by their sympathy with his views, but they have not been able to tell us a great deal about him that we shall not find in the books themselves. His life was not eventful; he had, as he says, ‘a real genius for staying at home’. His mother was quick and voluble, and so fond of solitary rambling that one of her children narrowly escaped coming into the world in an open field. The father, on the other hand, was a ‘small, quiet, plodding man’, with a faculty for making the best lead pencils in America, thanks to a secret of his own for mixing levigated plumbago with fuller’s earth and water, rolling it into sheets, cutting it into strips, and burning it. He could at any rate afford, with much economy and a little help, to send his son to Harvard, although Thoreau himself did not attach much importance to this expensive opportunity. It is at Harvard, however, that he first becomes visible to us. A classmate saw much in him as a boy that we recognize later in the grown man, so that instead of a portrait we will quote what was visible about the year 1837 to the penetrating eye of the Rev. John Weiss:

He was cold and unimpressible. The touch of his hand was moist and indifferent, as if he had taken up something when he saw your hand coming, and caught your grasp on it. How the prominent grey-blue eyes seemed to rove down the path, just in advance of his feet, as his grave Indian stride carried him down to University Hall. He did not care for people; his class-mates seemed very remote. This reverie hung always about him, and not so loosely as the odd garments which the pious household care furnished. Thought had not yet awakened his countenance; it was serene, but rather dull, rather plodding. The lips were not yet firm; there was almost a look of smug satisfaction lurking round their corners. It is plain now that he was preparing to hold his future views with great setness and personal appreciation of their importance. The nose was prominent, but its curve fell forward without firmness over the upper lip, and we remember him as looking very much like some Egyptian sculpture of faces, large-featured, but brooding, immobile, fixed in a mystic egoism. Yet his eyes were sometimes searching, as if he had dropped, or expected to find, something. In fact his eyes seldom left the ground, even in his most earnest conversations with you …

He goes on to speak of the ‘reserve and inaptness’ of Thoreau’s life at college.

Clearly the young man thus depicted, whose physical pleasures took the form of walking and camping out, who smoked nothing but ‘dried lily stems’, who venerated Indian relics as much as Greek classics, who in early youth had formed the habit of ‘settling accounts’ with his own mind in a diary, where his thoughts, feelings, studies, and experiences had daily to be passed under review by that Egyptian face and searching eye—clearly this young man was destined to disappoint both parents and teachers and all who wished him to cut a figure in the world and become a person of importance. His first attempt to earn his living in the ordinary way by becoming a schoolmaster was brought to an end by the necessity of flogging his pupils. He proposed to talk morals to them instead. When the committee pointed out that the school would suffer from this ‘undue leniency’ Thoreau solemnly beat six pupils and then resigned, saying that school-keeping ‘interfered with his arrangements’. The arrangements that the penniless young man wished to carry out were probably assignations with certain pine trees, pools, wild animals, and Indian arrowheads in the neighbourhood, which had already laid their commands upon him.

But for a time he was to live in the world of men, at least in that very remarkable section of the world of which Emerson was the centre and which professed the Transcendentalist doctrines. Thoreau took up his lodgings in Emerson’s house and very soon became, so his friends said, almost indistinguishable from the prophet himself. If you listened to them both talking with your eyes shut you could not be certain where Emerson left off and Thoreau began in his manners, in the tones of his voice, in his modes of expression, even in the hesitations and pauses of his speech, he had become the counterpart of Mr Emerson’. This may well have been so. The strongest natures, when they are influenced, submit the most unreservedly: it is perhaps a sign of their strength. But that Thoreau lost any of his own force in the process, or took on permanently any colours not natural to himself the readers of his books will certainly deny.

The Transcendentalist movement, like most movements of vigour, represented the effort of one or two remarkable people to shake off the old clothes which had become uncomfortable to them and fit themselves more closely to what now appeared to them to be the realities. The desire for readjustment had, as Lowell has recorded and the Memoirs of Margaret Fuller bear witness, its ridiculous symptoms and its grotesque disciples. But of all the men and women who lived in an age when thought was remoulded in common, we feel that Thoreau was the one who had least to adapt himself, who was by nature most in harmony with the new spirit. He was by birth among those people, as Emerson expresses it, who have ‘silently given in their several adherence to a new hope, and in all companies do dignify a greater trust in the nature and resources of man than the laws of the popular opinion will well allow’. There were two ways of life which seemed to the leaders of the movement to give scope for the attainment of these new hopes; one in some co-operative community, such as Brook Farm; the other in solitude with nature. When the time came to make his choice Thoreau decided emphatically in favour of the second. ‘As for the communities,’ he wrote in his journal, ‘I think I had rather keep bachelor’s quarters in hell than go to board in heaven.’ Whatever the theory might be, there was deep in his nature ‘a singular yearning to all wildness’ which would have led him to some such experiment as that recorded in ‘Walden’, whether it seemed good to others or not. In truth he was to put in practice the doctrines of the Transcendentalists more thoroughly than any one of them, and to prove what the resources of man are by putting his entire trust in them. Thus, having reached the age of twenty-seven, he chose a piece of land in a wood on the brink of the clear deep green waters of Walden Pond, built a hut with his own hands, reluctantly borrowing an axe for some part of the work, and settled down, as he puts it, ‘to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived’.

And now we have a chance of getting to know Thoreau as few people are known, even by their friends. Few people, it is safe to say, take such an interest in themselves as Thoreau took in himself; for if we are gifted with an intense egoism we do our best to suffocate it in order to live on decent terms with our neighbours. We are not sufficiently sure of ourselves to break completely with the established order. This was Thoreau’s adventure; his books are the record of that experiment and its results. He did everything he could to intensify his own understanding of himself, to foster whatever was peculiar, to isolate himself from contact with any force that might interfere with his immensely valuable gift of personality. It was his sacred duty, not to himself alone but to the world; and a man is scarcely an egoist who is an egoist on so grand a scale. When we read ‘Walden’, the record of his two years in the woods, we have a sense of beholding life through a very powerful magnifying glass. To walk, to eat, to cut up logs, to read a little, to watch the bird on the bough, to cook one’s dinner—all these occupations when scraped clean and felt afresh prove wonderfully large and bright. The common things are so strange, the usual sensations so astonishing that to confuse or waste them by living with the herd and adopting habits that suit the greater number is a sin—an act of sacrilege. What has civilization to give, how can luxury improve upon these simple facts? ‘Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!’ is his cry. ‘Instead of three meals a day, if it be necessary eat but one; instead of a hundred dishes, five; and reduce other things in proportion.’

But the reader may ask, what is the value of simplicity? Is Thoreau’s simplicity simplicity for its own sake, and not rather a method of intensification, a way of setting free the delicate and complicated machinery of the soul, so that its results are the reverse of simple? The most remarkable men tend to discard luxury because they find that it hampers the play of what is much more valuable to them. Thoreau himself was an extremely complex human being, and he certainly did not achieve simplicity by living for two years in a hut and cooking his own dinner. His achievement was rather to lay bare what was within him—to let life take its own way unfettered by artificial constraints. ‘I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life…”Walden’—all his books, indeed—are packed with subtle, conflicting, and very fruitful discoveries. They are not written to prove something in the end. They are written as the Indians turn down twigs to mark their path through the forest. He cuts his way through life as if no one had ever taken that road before, leaving these signs for those who come after, should they care to see which way he went. But he did not wish to leave ruts behind him, and to follow is not an easy process. We can never lull our attention asleep in reading Thoreau by the certainty that we have now grasped his theme and can trust our guide to be consistent. We must always be ready to try something fresh; we must always be prepared for the shock of facing one of those thoughts in the original which we have known all our lives in reproductions. ‘All health and success does me good, however far off and withdrawn it may appear; all disease and failure helps to make me sad and do me evil, however much sympathy it may have with me or I with it.”Distrust all enterprises that require new clothes.”You must have a genius for charity as well as for anything else.’ That is a handful, plucked almost at random, and of course there are plenty of wholesome platitudes.

As he walked his woods, or sat for hours almost motionless like the sphinx of college days upon a rock watching the birds, Thoreau defined his own position to the world not only with unflinching honesty, but with a glow of rapture at his heart. He seems to hug his own happiness. Those years were full of revelations—so independent of other men did he find himself, so perfectly equipped by nature not only to keep himself housed, fed, and clothed, but also superbly entertained without any help from society. Society suffered a good many blows from his hand. He sets down his complaints so squarely that we cannot help suspecting that society might one of these days have come to terms with so noble a rebel. He did not want churches or armies, post-offices or newspapers, and very consistently he refused to pay his tithes and went into prison rather than pay his poll tax. All getting together in crowds for doing good or procuring pleasure was an intolerable infliction to him. Philanthropy was one of the sacrifices, he said, that he had made to a sense of duty. Politics seemed to him ‘unreal, incredible, insignificant’, and most revolutions not so important as the drying up of a river or the death of a pine. He wanted only to be left alone tramping the woods in his suit of Vermont grey, unhampered even by those two pieces of limestone which lay upon his desk until they proved guilty of collecting the dust, and were at once thrown out of the window.

And yet this egoist was the man who sheltered runaway slaves in his hut; this hermit was the first man to speak out in public in defence of John Brown; this self-centred solitary could neither sleep nor think when Brown lay in prison. The truth is that anyone who reflects as much and as deeply as Thoreau reflected about life and conduct is possessed of an abnormal sense of responsibility to his kind, whether he chooses to live in a wood or to become President of the Republic. Thirty volumes of diaries which he would condense from time to time with infinite care into little books prove, moreover, that the independent man who professed to care so little for his fellows was possessed with an intense desire to communicate with them. ‘I would fain,’ he writes, ‘communicate the wealth of my life to men, would really give them what is most precious in my gift … I have no private good unless it be my peculiar ability to serve the public … I wish to communicate those parts of my life which I would gladly live again.’ No one can read him and remain unaware of this wish. And yet it is a question whether he ever succeeded in imparting his wealth, in sharing his life. When we have read his strong and noble books, in which every word is sincere, every sentence wrought as well as the writer knows how, we are left with a strange feeling of distance; here is a man who is trying to communicate but who cannot do it. His eyes are on the ground or perhaps on the horizon. He is never speaking directly to us; he is speaking partly to himself and partly to something mystic beyond our sight. ‘Says I to myself,’ he writes, ‘should be the motto to my journal’, and all his books are journals. Other men and women were wonderful and very beautiful, but they were distant; they were different; he found it very hard to understand their ways. They were as ‘curious to him as if they had been prairie dogs’. All human intercourse was infinitely difficult; the distance between one friend and another was unfathomable; human relationships were very precarious and terribly apt to end in disappointment. But, although concerned and willing to do what he could short of lowering his ideals, Thoreau was aware that the difficulty was one that could not be overcome by taking pains. He was made differently from other people. ‘If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.’ He was a wild man, and he would never submit to be a tame one. And for us here lies his peculiar charm. He hears a different drummer. He is a man into whom nature has breathed other instincts than ours, to whom she has whispered, one may guess, some of her secrets.

‘It appears to be a law,’ he says, ‘that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature. Those qualities which bring you near to the one estrange you from the other.’ Perhaps that is true. The greatest passion of his life was his passion for nature. It was more than a passion, indeed; it was an affinity; and in this he differs from men like White and Jefferies. He was gifted, we are told, with an extraordinary keenness of the senses; he could see and hear what other men could not; his touch was so delicate that he could pick up a dozen pencils accurately from a box holding a bushel; he could find his way alone through thick woods at night. He could lift a fish out of the stream with his hands; he could charm a wild squirrel to nestle in his coat; he could sit so still that the animals went on with their play round him. He knew the look of the country so intimately that if he had waked in a meadow he could have told the time of year within a day or two from the flowers at his feet. Nature had made it easy for him to pick up a living without effort. He was so skilled with his hands that by labouring forty days he could live at leisure for the rest of the year. We scarcely know whether to call him the last of an older race of men, or the first of one that is to come. He had the toughness, the stoicism, the unspoilt senses of an Indian, combined with the self-consciousness, the exacting discontent, the susceptibility of the most modern. At times he seems to reach beyond our human powers in what he perceives upon the horizon of humanity. No philanthropist ever hoped more of mankind, or set higher and nobler tasks before him, and those whose ideal of passion and of service is the loftiest are those who have the greatest capacities for giving, although life may not ask of them all that they can give, and forces them to hold in reserve rather than to lavish. However much Thoreau had been able to do, he would still have seen possibilities beyond; he would always have remained, in one sense, unsatisfied. That is one of the reasons why he is able to be the companion of a younger generation.

He died when he was in the full tide of life, and had to endure long illness within doors. But from nature he had learnt both silence and stoicism. He had never spoken of the things that had moved him most in his private fortunes. But from nature, too, he had learnt to be content, not thoughtlessly or selfishly content, and certainly not with resignation, but with a healthy trust in the wisdom of nature, and in nature, as he says, there is no sadness. ‘I am enjoying existence as much as ever,’ he wrote from his deathbed, ‘and regret nothing.’ He was talking to himself of moose and Indian when, without a struggle, he died.

[Times Literary Supplement, Jul 12, 1917]

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Herman Melville.

Somewhere upon the horizon of the mind, not recognizable yet in existence, ‘Typee’ and ‘Omoo’ together with the name of Herman Melville, float in company. But since Herman Melville is apt to become Whyte Melville or Herman Merivale and ‘Omoo’ for some less obvious reason connects itself with the adventures of an imaginary bushranger who is liable to turn jockey and then play a part in the drama of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’, it is evident that a mist, due to ignorance or the lapse of time, must have descended upon those far distant regions. Ignorance we do not scruple to admit; the lapse of time, since the first of August marks the centenary of Melville’s birth, is undeniable; but this haziness may spring in part from a little seed dropped years ago by the books themselves. Was not someone talking about the South Seas? Typee,’ they said, was in their opinion the best account ever written of—something or other. Memory has dropped that half of the sentence, and then, as memory will, has drawn a great blue line and a yellow beach. Waves are breaking; there is a rough white frill of surf; and how to describe it one does not know, but there is, simultaneously, a sense of palm trees, yellow limbs, and coral beneath clear water. This blundering brushwork of memory has been corrected since by Stevenson, Gauguin, Rupert Brooke and many others. Yet, in some important respects, Herman Melville, with his ‘Typee’ and ‘Omoo’ and his ineradicable air of the early forties, has done the business better than the more sophisticated artists of our own day.

He was not sophisticated; perhaps it would be wrong to call him an artist. He came, indeed, to the Marquesas Islands as an ordinary seaman on board a whaling ship in the year 1842. Nor was it a love of the picturesque, but rather a hatred of salt beef, stale water, hard bread, and the cruelty of a captain that led him, in company with another sailor, to try his fortunes inland. They deserted, and, with as much food and calico as they could stow in the front of their frocks, made off into the interior of Nukuheva. But at what point their marvellous adventures in reaching the valley of the Typees cease to be authentic and become, for the sake of an American public, of the heroic order we have no means of saying. The number of days that two strong men, going through incredible exertions meanwhile, can support themselves upon a hunk of bread soaked in sweat and ingrained with shreds of tobacco must be fewer than Melville makes out; and then the cliff down which they lowered themselves by swinging from creeper to creeper with horrid gaps between them—was it as steep as he says, and the creepers as far apart? And did they, on another occasion, as he asserts, break a second gigantic fall by pitching on to the topmost branches of a very high palm tree? It matters little; whatever the proportions of art and truth, each obstacle, and that is all we ask of it, seems impassable. There can be no way out of this, one says for the tenth time, a little grimly, for one has come to feel a kind of comradeship for the poor wretches in their struggles; and then, at the last moment, the incredible sagacity of Toby and the manful endurance of Melville find an outlet, as they deserve to do; and we have just drawn breath and judged them warranted in breaking off another precious crumb of the dwindling loaf when Toby, who has run on a little ahead, gives a shout, and behold, the summit on which they stand is not the end of their journey, but a ravine of immense depth and steepness still separates them from the valley of their desire; the bread must be put back uneaten and, with Melville’s leg getting more and more painful, and nothing to cheer us but the conviction that it is better to die of starvation here than in the hold of a whaling ship, off again we must start. Even when the valley is reached there is a terrible moment while Melville hesitates whether to reply ‘Typee’ or ‘Happar’ to the demand of the native chief, and only by a fluke saves them from instant death; nor need one be a boy in an Eton jacket to skip half a dozen chapters in a frenzy to make sure that the reason of Toby’s disappearance was neither tragic nor in any way to his discredit as a friend.

But then, when they are settled as the guests, or rather as the idolized prisoners, of the Typees, Melville appears to change his mind, as an artist is not generally supposed to do. Dropping his adventures, at which, as Stevenson said, he has proved himself ‘a howling cheese’, he becomes engrossed in the lives and customs of the natives. However much the first half of the book owed to his imagination, the second we should guess to be literally true. This random American sailor, having done his best to excite our interest in the usual way, now has to confess that what he found when he blundered into the midst of this tribe of South Sea islanders was—a little puzzling. They were savages, they were idolaters, they were inhuman beasts who licked their lips over the tender thighs of their kindred; and at the same time they were crowned with flowers, exquisite in beauty, courteous in manner, and engaged all day long in doing not only what they enjoyed doing but what, so far as he could judge, they had every right to enjoy doing. Of course, he had his suspicions. A dish of meat was not to be tasted until he had ascertained that it was pig slaughtered hospitably for him and not human flesh. The almost universal indolence of the natives was another remarkable and not altogether reassuring characteristic. Save for one old lady who busied herself ‘rummaging over bundles of old tappa, or making a prodigious clatter among the calabashes’, no one was ever seen to do anything in the way of work. Nature, of course, abetted them in their indolence. The bread fruit tree, with very little effort on their part, would give them all the food they wanted; the cloth tree, with the same gentle solicitation, provided them with tappa for their clothing. But the work needed for these processes was light; the climate divine; and the only intimations of industry were the clear musical sounds of the different mallets, one here, one there, beating out the cloth, which rang charmingly in unison throughout the valley.

Being puzzled, Melville, very naturally, did his best to make a joke of it. He has a good laugh at Marheyo for instance, who accepted a pair of mouldy old boots with profound gratitude, and hung them round his neck for an ornament. The ancient naked women who leapt into the air like so many sticks bobbing to the surface, after being pressed perpendicularly into the water’, might be widows mourning their husbands slain in battle, but they did not seem to him decorous; he could not take his eyes off them. And then there were no laws, human or divine, except the queer business of the taboo. Yet what puzzled Herman Melville, as it puzzled Lord Pembroke twenty years later, was that this simple, idle, savage existence was after all remarkably pleasant. There must be something wrong about happiness granted on such easy terms. The earl, being the better educated of the two, puzzled out the reason. He had been smothered with flowers and hung with mats until he looked like a cross between a Roman Catholic priest and a youthful Bacchus. He had enjoyed it immensely.

I was so happy there, that I verily believe I should have been content to dream away my life, without care or ambition … It could not be, and it was best for me as it was … Peace, and quiet, and perfect freedom, are useful medicines, but not wholesome diet. Their charm lies in contrast; there is no spark without the concussion of the flint and steel; there is no fine thought, even no perfect happiness, that is not born of toil, sorrow, and vexation of spirit.

So the earl and the doctor sailed back to Wilton, and Providence saw to it that they were shipwrecked on the way. But Melville only made his escape with the greatest difficulty. He was almost drugged into acquiescence by those useful medicines, peace, quiet and perfect freedom. If there had been no resistance to his going he might have succumbed for ever. Laughter no longer did its office. It is significant that in the preface to his next book he is careful to insist that ‘should a little jocoseness be shown upon some curious traits of the Tahitians, it proceeds from no intention to ridicule’. Did his account of some curious traits of European sailors, which directly follows, proceed from no intention to satirize? It is difficult to say. Melville reports very vividly and vigorously, but he seldom allows himself to comment. He found the whaling vessel that took him off in ‘a state of the greatest uproar’; the food was rotten; the men riotous; rather than land and lose his crew, who would certainly desert and thus cost him a cargo of whale oil, the captain kept them cruising out at sea. Discipline was maintained by a daily allowance of rum and the kicks and cuffs of the chief mate. When at last the sailors laid their case before the English Consul at Tahiti the fountain of justice seemed to them impure. At any rate, Melville and others who had insisted upon their legal rights found themselves given into the charge of an old native who was directed to keep their legs in the stocks. But his notion of discipline was vague, and somehow or other, what with the beauty of the place and the kindness of the natives, Melville began once more, curiously and perhaps dangerously, to feel content. Again there was freedom and indolence; torches brandished in the woods at night; dances under the moon, rainbow fish sparkling in the water, and women stuck about with variegated flowers. But something was wrong. Listening, Melville heard the aged Tahitians singing in a low, sad tone a song which ran: The palm trees shall grow, the coral shall spread, but man shall cease’; and statistics bore them out. The population had sunk from two hundred thousand to nine thousand in less than a century. The Europeans had brought the diseases of civilization along with its benefits. The missionaries followed, but Melville did not like the missionaries. There is, perhaps, no race on earth,’ he wrote, ‘less disposed, by nature, to the monitions of Christianity’ than the Tahitians, and to teach them any useful trade is an impossibility. Civilization and savagery blended in the strangest way in the palace of Queen Pomaree. The great leaf-hung hall, with its mats and screens and groups of natives, was furnished with rosewood writing desks, cut-glass decanters, and gilded candelabras. A coconut kept open the pages of a volume of Hogarth’s prints. And in the evenings the Queen herself would put on a crown which Queen Victoria had good-naturedly sent her from London, and walk up and down the road raising her hand as people passed her to the symbol of majesty in what she thought a military salute. So Marheyo had been profoundly grateful for the present of a pair of old boots. But this time, somehow, Melville did not laugh.

[Times Literary Supplement, Aug 7, 1919]

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Rupert Brooke.

[The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke.]

This memoir of Rupert Brooke has been delayed, in Mrs Brooke’s words, because of ‘my great desire to obtain the collaboration of some of his contemporaries at Cambridge and during his young manhood, for I strongly believe that they knew the largest part of him’. But his contemporaries are for the most part scattered or dead; and though Mr Marsh has done all that ability or care can do, the memoir which now appears is ‘of necessity incomplete’. It it inevitably incomplete, as Mr Marsh, we are sure, would be the first to agree, if for no other reason because it is the work of an older man. A single sentence brings this clearly before us. No undergraduate of Rupert Brooke’s own age would have seen ‘his radiant youthful figure in gold and vivid red and blue, like a page in the Riccardi Chapel’; that is the impression of an older man. The contemporary version would have been less pictorial and lacking in the half-humorous tenderness which is so natural an element in the mature vision of beautiful and gifted youth. There would have been less of the vivid red and blue and gold, more that was mixed, parti-coloured, and matter for serious debate. In addition Mr Marsh has had to face the enormous difficulties which beset the biographers of those who have died with undeveloped powers, tragically, and in the glory of public gratitude. They leave so little behind them that can serve to recall them with any exactitude. A few letters, written from school and college, a fragment of a diary—that is all. The power of expressing oneself naturally in letters comes to most people late in life. Rupert Brooke wrote freely, but not altogether without self-consciousness, and it is evident that his friends have not cared to publish the more intimate passages in his letters to them. Inevitably, too, they have not been willing to tell the public the informal things by which they remember him best. With these serious and necessary drawbacks Mr Marsh has done his best to present a general survey of Rupert Brooke’s life which those who knew him will be able to fill in here and there more fully, perhaps a little to the detriment of the composition as a whole. But they will be left, we believe, to reflect rather sadly upon the incomplete version which must in future represent Rupert Brooke to those who never knew him.

Nothing, it is true, but his own life prolonged to the usual term, and the work that he would have done, could have expressed all that was latent in the crowded years of his youth—years crowded beyond the measure that is usual even with the young. To have seen a little of him at that time was to have seen enough to be made sceptical of the possibility of any biography of a man dying, as he died, at the age of twenty-eight. The remembrance of a week spent in his company, of a few meetings in London and the country, offers a tantalizing fund of memories at once very definite, very little related to the Rupert Brooke of legend, presenting each one an extremely clear sense of his presence, but depending so much upon that presence and upon other circumstances inextricably involved with it, that one may well despair of rendering a clear account to a third person, let alone to a multiple of many people such as the general public.

But the outline at least is clear enough. So much has been written of his personal beauty that to state one’s own first impression of him in that respect needs some audacity, since the first impression was of a type so conventionally handsome and English as to make it inexpressive or expressive only of something that one might be inclined half-humorously to disparage. He was the type of English young manhood at its healthiest and most vigorous. Perhaps at the particular stage he had then reached, following upon the decadent phase of his first Cambridge days, he emphasized this purposely; he was consciously and defiantly pagan. He was living at Grantchester; his feet were permanently bare; he disdained tobacco and butcher’s meat; and he lived all day, and perhaps slept all night, in the open air. You might judge him extreme, and from the pinnacle of superior age assure him that the return to Nature was as sophisticated as any other pose, but you could not from the first moment of speech with him doubt that, whatever he might do, he was an originator, one of those leaders who spring up from time to time and show their power most clearly by subjugating their own generation. Under his influence the country near Cambridge was full of young men and women walking barefoot, sharing his passion for bathing and fish diet, disdaining book learning, and proclaiming that there was something deep and wonderful in the man who brought the milk and in the woman who watched the cows. One may trace some of the effects of this belief in the tone of his letters at this time; their slap-dash method, their hasty scrawled appearance upon the paper, the exclamations and abbreviations were all, in part at least, a means of exorcising the devils of the literary and the cultured. But there was too much vigour in his attitude in this respect, as in all others, to lend it the appearance of affectation. It was an amusing disguise; it was in part, like many of his attitudes, a game played for the fun of it, an experiment in living by one keenly inquisitive and incessantly fastidious; and in part it was the expression of a profound and true sympathy which had to live side by side with highly sophisticated tastes and to be reported upon by a nature that was self-conscious in the highest degree. Analyse it as one may, the whole effect of Rupert Brooke in those days was a compound of vigour and of great sensitiveness. Like most sensitive people, he had his methods of self-protection; his pretence now to be this and now to be that. But, however sunburnt and slap-dash he might choose to appear at any particular moment, no one could know him even slightly without seeing that he was not only very sincere, but passionately in earnest about the things he cared for. In particular, he cared for literature and the art of writing as seriously as it is possible to care for them. He had read everything and he had read it from the point of view of a working writer. As Mrs Cornford says, ‘I can’t imagine him using a word of that emotional jargon in which people usually talk or write of poetry. He made it feel more like carpentering.’ In discussing the work of living writers he gave you the impression that he had the poem or the story before his eyes in a concrete shape, and his judgments were not only very definite but had a freedom and a reality which mark the criticism of those who are themselves working in the same art. You felt that to him literature was not dead nor of the past, but a thing now in process of construction by people many of whom were his friends; and that knowledge, skill, and, above all, unceasing hard work were required of those who attempt to make it. To work hard, much harder than most writers think it necessary, was an injunction of his that remains in memory from a chaos of such discussions.

The proofs of his first book of poems were lying about that summer on the grass. There were also the manuscripts of poems that were in process of composition. It seemed natural to turn his poetry over and say nothing about it, save perhaps to remark upon his habit of leaving spaces for unforthcoming words which gave his manuscript the look of a puzzle with a number of pieces missing. On one occasion he wished to know what was the brightest thing in nature? and then, deciding with a glance round him that the brightest thing was a leaf in the sun, a blank space towards the end of Town and Country’ was filled in immediately.

Cloud-like we lean and stare as bright leaves stare.

But instead of framing any opinion as to the merit of his verses we recall merely the curiosity of watching him finding his adjective, and a vague conception that he was somehow a mixture of scholar and man of action, and that his poetry was the brilliant by-product of energies not yet turned upon their object. It may seem strange, now that he is famous as a poet, how little it seemed to matter in those days whether he wrote poetry or not. It is proof perhaps of the exciting variety of his gifts and of the immediate impression he made of a being so complete and remarkable in himself that it was sufficient to think of him merely as Rupert Brooke. It was not necessary to imagine him dedicated to any particular pursuit. If one traced a career for him many different paths seemed the proper channels for his store of vitality; but clearly he must find scope for his extraordinary gift of being on good terms with his fellow-creatures. For though it is true to say that ‘he never “put himself forward” and seldom took the lead in conversation’, his manner shed a friendliness wherever he happened to be that fell upon all kinds of different people, and seemed to foretell that he would find his outlet in leading varieties of men as he had led his own circle of Cambridge friends. His practical ability, which was often a support to his friends, was one of the gifts that seemed to mark him for success in active life. He was keenly aware of the state of public affairs, and if you chanced to meet him when there was talk of a strike or an industrial dispute he was evidently as well versed in the complications of social questions as in the obscurities of the poetry of Donne. There, too, he showed his power of being in sympathy with the present. Nothing of this is in the least destructive of his possession of poetic power. No breadth of sympathy or keenness of susceptibility could come amiss to the writer; but perhaps if one feared for him at all it was lest the pull of all his gifts in their different directions might somehow rend him asunder. He was, as he said of himself, ‘forty times as sensitive as anybody else’, and apt, as he wrote, to begin ‘poking at his own soul, examining it, cutting the soft and rotten parts away’. It needed no special intimacy to guess that beneath ‘an appearance almost of placidity’ he was the most restless, complex, and analytic of human beings. It was impossible to think of him withdrawn, abstracted, or indifferent. Whether or not it was for the good of his poetry he would be in the thick of things, and one fancies that he would in the end have framed a speech that came very close to the modern point of view—a subtle analytic poetry, or prose perhaps, full of intellect, and full of his keen unsentimental curiosity.

No one could have doubted that as soon as war broke out he would go without hesitation to enlist. His death and burial on the Greek island, which ‘must ever be shining with his glory that we buried there’, was in harmony with his physical splendour and with the generous warmth of his spirit. But to imagine him entombed, however nobly and fitly, apart from our interests and passions still seems impossibly incongruous with what we remember of his inquisitve eagerness about life, his response to every side of it, and his complex power, at once so appreciative and so sceptical, of testing and enjoying, of suffering and taking with the utmost sharpness the impression of everything that came his way. One turns from the thought of him not with a sense of completeness and finality, but rather to wonder and to question still: what would he have been, what would he have done?

[Times Literary Supplement, Aug 8, 1918]

[]

The Intellectual Imagination.

[Rupert Brooke and the Intellectual Imagination, by Walter de la Mare.]

‘Is not life both a dream and an awakening?’ Mr de la Mare asks in his study of Rupert Brooke. The greatest poets, having both the visionary imagination and the intellectual imagination, deal with both sides of life; in the lesser poets either the one kind of imagination or the other predominates. Blake and Shelley are obvious instances of the visionary; Donne and Meredith of the intellectual. The distinction is finely and subtly elaborated by Mr de la Mare; and when he affirms that Rupert Brooke possessed the intellectual imagination in a rare degree we assent with a conviction which shows that the problem of Rupert Brooke’s poetry has, for us, come nearer solution.

A poet of one’s own time and acquaintance is inevitably much of a problem. We hear so many strains in his voice that will be silent in a hundred years’ time. Nor do we know what allowance to make for our personal attachment, nor what for old arguments and theories once taken in such good part and such high spirit by an unknown and eager boy. There is in existence a copy of his first volume, in which a pencil has underlined each adjective judged wrong or unnecessary. The lines still stand, though the poet is dead and famous. He would not have had it otherwise. But, do what we will, it is idle to read ‘The Fish’, where a great number of those marks occur, without finding them the signposts of memories and dreams. Rupert Brooke was certainly fond of adjectives. But was not his passion for loading his lines, like the fingers of some South American beauty, with gem after gem, part of his boldness and brilliancy and strength? So he went to the South Seas, turned Socialist, made friend after friend, and passed from one extreme to another of dress and diet—better preparation, surely, for the choice of the right adjective than to sit dreaming over the fire with a book. But all this time one is not reading The Fish’; one is thinking of Rupert Brooke, one is dreaming of what he would have done. When we turn again to Mr de la Mare, he helps us to define what was, and still is, our case against the adjectives. Magic, he says, ‘is all but absent from his verse’. The words remain separate, however well assorted. Though he has described most of the English country sights, it has never happened to us, walking the woods, to hum over a line or two and, waking, to find them his. The test is personal and, of course, imperfect. Yet perhaps the same is generally true of those poets in whom the intellectual imagination predominates. The supreme felicities of Keats or Shelley seem to come when the engine of the brain is shut off and the mind glides serene but unconscious, or, more truly, perhaps, is exalted to a different sphere of consciousness. Like Meredith and like Donne, Rupert Brooke was never for a second unconscious. The brain was always there, working steadily, strenuously, and without stopping.

There can be no question that his brain was both a fine instrument and a strong one; but there are other questions, for is it not true that the intellectual poet, unlike the visionary poet, improves and develops with age? Though Keats died younger, and Shelley only a year or two older, than Rupert Brooke, both left behind them unmistakable proof not merely that they were great poets, but that their greatness was of a particular character. If we cannot call Rupert Brooke a great poet, that is to some extent the result of feeling that, compared with the others, he has left us only sketches and premonitions of what was to come. He was of the type that reacts sharply to experience, and life would have taught him much, perhaps changed him greatly. Like Dryden, like Meredith, like Donne himself, as Mr Pearsall Smith has lately shown us, it might have been in prose and not in poetry that he achieved his best. It might have been in scholarship; it might have been in action. But if we seem to disparage what he left, there again we trace the effect of friendship. We do not want our friend rapt away into the circle of the good and the great. We want still to cherish the illusion that the poems will be bettered, the adjectives discussed, the arguments resumed, the convictions altered. The actual achievement must always have for those who knew him a ghostly rival in the greatness which he did not live to achieve. But he was of the few who seem to exist in themselves, apart from what they accomplish, apart from length of life. Again and again Mr de la Mare turns from the poetry, greatly though he admires it, to bathe and warm himself in the memory of the man. One sort of magic may have been absent from his verse, but ‘above all Brooke’s poems are charged with and surrender the magic of what we call personality. What, if he had lived, he would have done in this world is a fascinating but an unanswerable question. This only can be said: that he would have gone on being his wonderful self.’ One might add that he still goes on being his self, since none of those who knew him can forget him; and it must be a wonderful self when no two people remember the same thing, but all are agreed that he was wonderful.

[Times Literary Supplement, Dec 11, 1919]

[]

These are the Plans.

[Marlborough and Other Poems by Charles Hamilton Sorley.]

So far as we can read Charles Sorley’s character between the lines of his book, nothing would have annoyed him more than to find himself acclaimed either a poet or a hero. He was far too genuine a writer not to be disgusted by any praise implying that his work, at the stage it had reached, was more than a promise and an experiment. It is indeed largely because Charles Sorley was experimental, here trying his hand at narrative, here at description, always making an effort to shed the conventional style and press more closely to his conception, that one is convinced that he was destined, whether in prose or in verse, to be a writer of considerable power. The writer’s problem presented itself very early in his life. Here at Marlborough, where he was at school, the downs showed themselves not, as other poets have seen them, soft, flowery, seductive, but stony, rain-beaten, wind-blown beneath a clay-coloured sky. He tried to put down in verse his delight in that aspect of nature and his corresponding notion of a race of men

Stern, sterile, senseless, mute, unknown,

But bold, 0, bolder far than we!

He tried to say how much had been revealed to him when he wandered, as he was fond of doing, alone among the downs:

I who have walked along her downs in dreams,

And known her tenderness, and felt her might,

And sometimes by her meadows and her streams

Have drunk deep-storied secrets of delight,

Have had my times, when, though the earth did wear

Her selfsame trees and grasses, I could see

The revelation that is always there,

But somehow is not always clear to me.

Succeeding these schoolboy attempts at landscape comes the natural mood of feeling that beauty is better not expressed, and that his spirit, compared with the spirits of the poets, is dumb. Running alongside of them, also, is his characteristic view—or the view that was characteristic of that stage of his life—of our modern sin of inactivity. The rain beats and the wind blows, but we are sluggish and quiescent—

We do not see the vital point

That ’tis the eighth, most deadly, sin

To wail, ‘The world is out of joint’—

And not attempt to put it in.

We question, answer, make defence,

We sneer, we scoff, we criticize,

We wail and moan our decadence,

Enquire, investigate, surmise—

We might of course cap these verses with a stanza to prove that Sorley found satisfaction in the outbreak of war, and died bidding men

On, marching men, on

To the gates of death with song.

Sow your gladness for earth’s reaping.

So you may be glad though sleeping,

Strew your gladness on earth’s bed.

So be merry, so be dead.

And yet from the evidence of his poetry, and still more from the evidence of his remarkable prose, it is clear that Sorley was as far from trumping up a precocious solution, as ready to upset all his convictions and be off on a fresh track, as any other boy with a mind awakening daily more widely to the complexity of things, and naturally incapable of a dishonest or sentimental conclusion. ‘A Call to Action’, from which we have quoted, was written when Sorley, at the age of seventeen, was going through a phase of admiration for the work of Mr Masefield. And then came a time, in Germany, of ‘setting up and smashing of deities’, Masefield and Hardy and Goethe being the gods to suffer, while Ibsen and the Odyssey and Robert Browning inherited the vacant pedestals. Almost at once the war broke out.

I’m sure the German nature is the nicest in the world, as far as it is not warped by the German Empire [he wrote]. I regard the war as one between sisters … the efficient and intolerant against the casual and sympathetic … but I think that tolerance is the larger virtue of the two, and efficiency must be her servant. So I am quite glad to fight against the rebellious servant … Now you know what Sorley thinks about it.

“What Sorley thinks about if appears to us of extreme interest, because, as our quotations have tried to show, Sorley thought for himself, and fate contrived that the young men of his generation should have opportunities for doing the thinking of a lifetime in a very few years. Such opportunities for changing his mind and moving on Sorley used to the full. There was, directly he joined the army, the problem of what he called ‘the poorer classes’. ‘The public school boy,’ he said, ‘should live among them to learn a little Christianity; for they are so extraordinarily nice to one another.’ After that reflection there comes, a page or two later, the remark: ‘I have had a conventional education: Oxford would have corked it.’ So his dream for next year is to be perhaps in Mexico, selling cloth.

Or in Russia, doing Lord knows what: in Serbia or the Balkans: in England never. England remains the dream, the background: at once the memory, and the ideal … Details can wait—perhaps for ever. These are the plans.

It is upon the plans rather than upon the details that one is inclined to dwell, asking oneself to what goal this generation, captained by men of such vigour and clear-sightedness as Sorley, was making its way.

We know not whom we trust,

Nor whitherward we fare,

But we run because we must

Through the great wide air,

are lines from an early poem that seem to express a force yet undirected seeking a new channel. But the poems are more than scattered details to be used to illustrate an imaginary career. They have often enough literary merit to stand upon their own feet independently of any personal considerations. They have the still rarer merit of suggesting that the writer is so well aware of his own purpose that he is content to leave a roughness here, a jingle there, for the sake of getting on quickly to the next stage. What the finished work, the final aim, would have been we can only guess, for Charles Sorley at the age of twenty was killed near Hulluch.

[Athenaeum, Aug 1, 1919]

[]

Mr Sassoon’s Poems.

[The Old Huntsman and Other Poems and Counter-Attack and Other Poems, by Siegfried Sassoon.]

As it is the poet’s gift to give expression to the moments of insight or experience that come to him now and then, so in following him we have to sketch for ourselves a map of those submerged lands which lie between one pinnacle and the next. If he is a true poet, at least we fill up in thought the space between one poem and another with speculations that are half guesses and half anticipations of what is to come next. He offers us a new vision of the world; how is the light about to fall? What ranges, what horizons will it reveal? At least if he is a sincere artist this is so, and to us Mr Sassoon seems undoubtedly sincere. He is a poet, we believe, meaning by that that we cannot fancy him putting down these thoughts in any form save the one he has chosen. His vision comes to him directly; he seems almost always, before he began to get his words into order, to have had one of those puzzling shocks of emotion which the world deals by such incongruous methods, to the poet often, to the rest of us too seldom for our soul’s good. It follows that this one slim volume is full of incongruities; but the moments of vision are interesting enough to make us wish to follow them up very carefully.

There are the poems about the war, to begin with. If you chance to read one of them by itself you may be inclined to think that it is a very clever poem, chiefly designed with its realism and its surface cynicism to shock the prosperous and sentimental. Naturally the critical senses rise in alarm to protect their owner from such insinuations. But read them continuously, read in particular The Hero’ and The Tomb-Stone Maker’, and you will drop the idea of being shocked in that sense altogether.

‘Jack fell as he’d have wished,’ the Mother said,

And folded up the letter that she’d read.

‘The Colonel writes so nicely.’ Something broke

In the tired voice that quavered to a choke.

She half looked up. ‘We mothers are so proud

Of our dead soldiers.’ Then her face was bowed.

Quietly the Brother Officer went out …

He thought how ‘Jack’, cold-footed, useless swine,

Had panicked down the trench that night the mine

Went up at Wicked Corner; how he’d tried

To get sent home; and how at last he died,

Blown to small bits. And no one seemed to care

Except that lonely woman with white hair.

What Mr Sassoon has felt to be the most sordid and horrible experiences in the world he makes us feel to be so in a measure which no other poet of the war has achieved. As these jaunty matter-of-fact statements succeed each other such loathing, such hatred accumulates behind them that we say to ourselves “Yes, this is going on; and we are sitting here watching it’, with a new shock of surprise, with an uneasy desire to leave our place in the audience, which is a tribute to Mr Sassoon’s power as a realist. It is realism of the right, of the poetic kind. The real things are put in not merely because they are real, but because at a certain moment of emotion the poet happened to be struck by them and is not afraid of spoiling his effect by calling them by their right names. The wounded soldier looking out of the train window sees the English country again—

There shines the blue serene, the prosperous land,

Trees, cows, and hedges; skipping these, he scanned

Large friendly names that change not with the year,

Lung Tonic, Mustard, Liver Pills, and Beer.

To call back any moment of emotion is to call back with it the strangest odds and ends that have become somehow part of it, and it is the weeds pulled up by mistake with the flowers that bring back the extraordinary moment as a whole. With this straight, courageous method Mr Sassoon can produce such a solid and in its way beautiful catalogue of facts as that of the train leaving the station—The Morning Express’.

But we might hazard the guess that the war broke in and called out this vein of realism before its season; for side by side with these pieces there are others very different, not so effective perhaps, not particularly accomplished, but full of a rarer kind of interest, full of promise for the future. For the beauty in them, though fitful, is of the individual, indefinable kind which comes, we know not how, to make lines such as we read over each time with a renewed delight that after one comes the other.

Where have you been, South Wind, this May-day morning,

With larks aloft, or skimming with the swallow,

Or with blackbirds in a green, sun-glinted thicket?

Oh, I heard you like a tyrant in the valley;

Your ruffian haste shook the young, blossoming orchards;

You clapped rude hands, hallooing round the chimney,

And white your pennons streamed along the river.

You have robbed the bee, South Wind, in your adventure,

Blustering with gentle flowers; but I forgave you

When you stole to me shyly with scent of hawthorn.

Here we have evidence not of accomplishment, indeed, but of a gift much more valuable than that, the gift of being a poet, we must call it; and we shall look with interest to see what Mr Sassoon does with his gift.

Counter-Attack

It is natural to feel an impulse of charity towards the poems written by young men who have fought or are still fighting; but in the case of Mr Sassoon there is no temptation to indulge in this form of leniency, because he is so evidently able-bodied in his poetic capacity and requires no excuses to be made for him. At the same time, it is difficult to judge him dispassionately as a poet, because it is impossible to overlook the fact that he writes as a soldier. It is a fact, indeed, that he forces upon you, as if it were a matter of indifference to him whether you called him a poet or not. We know no other writer who has shown us as effectually as Mr Sassoon the terrible pictures which lie behind the colourless phrases of the newspapers. From the thousand horrors which in their sum compose one day of warfare he selects, as if by chance, now this of the counter-attack, now that of mending the front-line wires, or this again of suicide in the trenches. The General’ is as good an example of his method as another:

‘Good-morning; good-morning!’ the General said

When we met him last week on our way to the line.

Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of ’em dead,

And we’re cursing his staff for incompetent swine.

‘He’s a cheery old card,’ grunted Harry to Jack,

As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.

But he did for them both by his plan of attack.

The vision of that ‘hell where youth and laughter go’ has been branded upon him too deeply to allow him to tolerate consolation or explanation. He can only state a little of what he has seen, a very little one guesses, and turn away with a stoical shrug as if a superficial cynicism were the best mask to wear in the face of such incredible experiences. His farewell to the dead is spoken in this fashion:

Good-bye, old lad! Remember me to God,

And tell him that our politicians swear

They won’t give in till Prussian Rule’s been trod

Under the heel of England … Are you there?…

Yes … and the war won’t end for at least two years;

But we’ve got stacks of men … I’m blind with tears,

Staring into the dark. Cheero!

I wish they’d killed you in a decent show.

There is a stage of suffering, so these poems seem to show us, where any expression save the barest is intolerable; where beauty and art have something too universal about them to meet our particular case. Mr Sassoon sums up that point of view in his ‘Dead Musicians’. Not Bach or Beethoven or Mozart brings back the memory of his friends, but the gramophone does it bawling out ‘Another little drink won’t do us any harm’. Mr Sassoon’s poems are too much in the key of the gramophone at present, too fiercely suspicious of any comfort or compromise, to be read as poetry; but his contempt for palliative or subterfuge gives us the raw stuff of poetry.

[Times Literary Supplement, May 31, 1917 and July 11, 1918]

[]

A Russian Schoolboy.

[A Russian Schoolboy by Serge Aksakoff. Translated by J. D. Duff.]

The previous volumes of this chronicle, Tears of Childhood’ and ‘A Russian Gentleman’, left us with a feeling of personal friendship for Serge Aksakoff; we had come to know him and his family as we know people with whom we have stayed easily for weeks at a time in the country. The figure of Aksakoff himself has taken a place in our minds which is more like that of a real person than a person whom we have merely known in a book. Since reading the first volume of Mr Duff’s translation we have read many new books; many clear, sharp characters have passed before our eyes, but in most cases they have left nothing behind them but a sense of more or less brilliant activity. But Aksakoff has remained—a man of extraordinary freshness and substance, a man with a rich nature, moving in the sun and shadow of real life so that it is possible, as we have found during the past year or two, to settle down placidly and involuntarily to think about him. Such words as these would not apply truthfully perhaps to some very great works of art; but nothing that produces this impression of fullness and intimacy can be without some of the rarest qualities and, in our opinion, some of the most delightful. We have spoken of Aksakoff as a man, but unfortunately we have no right to do that for we have known him only as a boy, and the last volume of the three leaves him when he has but reached the age of fifteen. With this volume, Mr Duff tells us, the chronicle is finished; and our regret and desire to read another three, at least, is the best thanks we can offer him for his labour of translation. When we consider the rare merit of these books we can scarcely thank the translator sufficiently. We can only hope that he will look round and find another treasure of the same importance.

Ignorant as we are of the works of Aksakoff, it would be rash to say that this autobiography is the most characteristic of them, and yet one feels certain that there was something especially congenial to him in the recollection of childhood. When he was still a small boy he could plunge into ‘the inexhaustible treasury of recollection’. He is not, we think, quite so happy in the present volume because he passes a little beyond the scope of childhood. It deals less with the country; and the magic, which consists so much in being very small among people of immeasurable size so that one’s parents are far more romantic than one’s brothers and sisters, was departing. When he was at school the boys were on an equality with him; the figures were contracting and becoming more like the people whom we see when we are grown up. Aksakoff’s peculiar gift lay in his power of living back into the childish soul. He can give to perfection the sense of the nearness, the largeness, the absolute dominance of the detail before the prospect has arranged itself so that details are only part of a well-known order. He makes us consider that for unreflecting passion and for amazement the life of a grown person cannot compare with the life of a child. He makes us remember, and this is perhaps more difficult, how curiously the child’s mind is taken up with what we call childish things together with premonitions of another kind of life, and with moments of extreme insight into its surroundings. He is thus able to give us a very clear notion of his father and mother, although we see them always as they appeared to a child. The effect of truth and vividness which is so remarkable in each of his volumes is the result of writing not from the man’s point of view, but by becoming a child again, for it is impossible that the most tenacious memory should have been able to store the millions of details from which these books are fashioned. We have to suppose that Aksakoff kept to the end of his life a power of changing back into a different stage of growth at the touch of recollection, so that the process is more one of living over again than of remembering. From a psychological point of view this is a curious condition—to view the pond or the tree as it is now without emotion, but to receive intense emotion from the same sight by remembering the emotion which it roused fifty years ago. It is clear that Aksakoff, with his abundant and impressionable nature, was precisely the man to feel his childhood to the full, and to keep the joy of reviving it fresh to the end.

The happiness of childhood, he writes, is the Golden Age, and the recollection of it has power to move the old man’s heart with pleasure and with pain. Happy is the man who once possessed it and is able to recall the memory of it in later years! With many the time passes by unnoticed or unenjoyed; and all that remains in the ripeness of age is the recollection of the coldness or even cruelty of men.

He was no doubt peculiar in the strength of his feelings, and singular compared with English boys in the absence of discipline at school and at college. As Mr Duff says, ‘His university studies are remarkable; he learnt no Greek, no Latin, no mathematics, and very little science—hardly anything but Russian and French.’ For this reason, perhaps, he remained conscious of all those little impressions which in most cases fade and are forgotten before the power of expressing them is full grown. Who is there, for example, who will not feel his early memories of coming back to a home in the country wonderfully renewed by the description of the return to Aksakovo:

As before I took to bed with me my cat, which was so attached that she followed me everywhere like a dog; and I snared small birds or trapped them and kept them in a small room which was practically converted into a spacious coop. I admired my pigeons with double tufts and feathered legs … which had been kept warm in my absence under the stoves or in the houses of the outdoor servants … To the island I ran several times a day, hardly knowing myself why I went; and there I stood motionless as if under a spell, while my heart beat hard, and my breath came unevenly.

Nor is it possible to read his account of butterfly collecting without recalling some such period of fanatical excitement. Indeed, we have read no description to compare with this one for its exact, prosaic, and yet most stirring reproduction of the succeeding stages of a child’s passion. It begins almost by accident; it becomes in a moment the only thing in the world; of a sudden it dies down and is over for no perceptible reason. One can verify, as if from an old diary, every step that he takes with his butterfly net in his hand down that grassy valley in the burning heat until he sees* within two yards of him ‘fluttering from flower to flower a splendid swallowtail’ And then follows the journey home, where the small sister has begun collecting on her brother’s account, and has turned all the jugs and tumblers in her room upside down, and even opened the lid of the piano and put butterflies alive inside of it. Nevertheless, in a few months the passion is over, and ‘we devoted all our leisure to literature, producing a manuscript magazine … I became deeply interested in acting also’.

All childhood is passionate, but if we compare the childhood of Aksakoff with our memories and observations of English childhood we shall be struck with the number and the violence of his enthusiasms. When his mother left him at school he sat on his bed with his eyes staring wildly, unable to think or to cry, and had to be put to bed, rubbed with flannels, and restored to consciousness by a violent fit of shivering. His sensitiveness to any recollection of childhood was such, even as a child, that the sound of a voice, a patch of sunlight on the wall, a fly buzzing on the pane, which reminded him of his past, threw him into a fit. His health became so bad that he had to be taken home. These fits and ecstasies in which his mother often joined him will hardly fail to remind the reader of many similar scenes which are charged against Dostoevsky as a fault. The fault, if it is a fault, appears to be more in the Russian nature than in the novelist’s version of it. From the evidence supplied by Aksakoff we realize how little discipline enters into their education; and we also realize, what we do not gather from Dostoevsky, how sane, natural and happy such a life can be. Partly because of his love of nature, that unconscious perception of beauty which lay at the back of his shooting and fishing and butterfly catching, partly because of the largeness and generosity of his character, the impression produced by these volumes is an impression of abundance and of happiness. As Aksakoff says in a beautiful description of an uncle and aunt of his. The atmosphere seemed to have something calming and life-giving in it, something suited to beast and plant.’ At the same time we have only to compare him, as he has been compared, with Gilbert White to realize the Russian element in him, the element of self-consciousness and introspection. No one is very simple who realizes so fully what is happening to him, or who can trace, as he traces it, the moment when ‘the radiance’ fades and the ‘peculiar feeling of sadness’ begins. His power of registering these changes shows that he was qualified to write also an incomparable account of maturity.

He gives in this book a description of the process of letting water out of a pond. A crowd of peasants collected upon the banks. ‘All Russians love to watch moving water … The people saluted with shouts of joy the element they loved, as it tore its way to freedom from its winter prison.’ The shouts of joy and the love of watching both seem the peculiar property of the Russian people. From such a combination one would expect to find one of these days that they have produced the greatest of autobiographies, as they have produced perhaps the greatest of novels. But Aksakoff is more than a prelude; his work in its individuality and its beauty stands by itself.

[Times Literary Supplement, Nov 8, 1917]

[]

A Glance at Turgenev.

[The Two Friends and Other Stories by Ivan Turgenev. Translated by Constance Garnett.]

If this were not the sixteenth volume of a classic—if it were the first volume by an unknown writer—what should we find to say? To begin with we should say that M. Turgenev is an observant young man, who, if he can restrain his faculty for observing detail, may in time have something to offer us. ‘She had the habit of turning her head to the right while she lifted a morsel to her mouth with the left hand, as if she were playing with it.”… They pacified the infuriated curs, but a maidservant was obliged to drag one of them … into a bedroom, getting bitten on her right hand in the process.’ In themselves both those facts are admirably noted; but we should not fail to point out that it is dangerous to observe like that—dangerous to stress little facts because one happens to have a store of them in readiness. All round us are strewn the melancholy relics of those who have insisted upon telling us that she was bitten on the right hand, but raised her fork with the left. And then, even as we are making this observation, the details dissolve and disappear. There is nothing left but the scene itself. It lives unsupported, unvouched for. The father and mother; the two girls; the visitors; the very sheep dogs and the food on the table are all contributing spontaneously to the final impression which makes us positive, when the door shuts and the two young men drive off, that nothing will induce Boris Andreyitch to marry Emerentsiya. That is the principal thing we know; but we also know, as the house recedes in the distance, that in the drawing-room Emerentsiya is simpering over her conquest; while the plain sister Polinka has run upstairs and is crying to the maid that she hates visitors; they will talk to her about music; and then her mother scolds her.

That scene is not the work of a prentice hand. It is not the result of keen eyesight and notebooks crammed with facts. But it would be impossible if we had only that scene before us to say that we detect a master’s hand and are already certain that this unknown Russian writer is the famous novelist Turgenev. The story goes on, however. Greatly to the surprise of his friend, Boris marries a simple country girl. They settle down; life is perfect, but perhaps a trifle dull. Boris travels. He goes to Paris, and there drifting vaguely into an affair with a young woman he is challenged by her lover and killed. Far away in Russia his widow mourns for him sincerely. But after all Boris did not ‘belong to the number of people who are irreplaceable. (And indeed are there such people?)’ Nor was his widow ‘capable of devoting herself for ever to one feeling. (And indeed are there such feelings?)’ So she marries her husband’s old friend, and they live peacefully in the country, and have children and are happy, ‘for there is no other happiness on earth’. Thus, that first scene which was so lively and suggestive has led to other scenes; they add themselves to it; they bring in contrast, distance, solidity. In the end everything seems to be there. Here is a world able to exist by itself. Now perhaps we can talk with some certainty of a master; for now we have not a single brilliant episode which is gone the moment after, but a succession of scenes attached one to another by the feelings which are common to humanity. Space forbids us to inquire more minutely by what means this is achieved. Besides, there are other books by Turgenev which illustrate his powers more clearly. The stories in this volume are not equal to his best work. But they have this characteristic of greatness—they exist by themselves. We can judge from them what sort of world Turgenev created. We can see in what respects his vision was different from other people’s.

Like most Russian writers, he was melancholy. Beyond the circle of his scene seems to lie a great space, which flows in at the window, presses upon people, isolates them, makes them incapable of action, indifferent to effect, sincere, and open-minded. Some background of that sort is common to much of Russian literature. But Turgenev adds to this scene a quality which we find nowhere else. They are sitting as usual talking round the samovar, talking gently, sadly, charmingly, as Turgenev’s people always do talk, when one of them ceases, gets up, and looks out of the window. ‘But the moon must have risen,’ she says, ‘that’s moonlight on the tops of the poplars.’ And we look up and there it is—the moonlight on the poplars. Or take, as an example of the same power, the description of the garden in Three Meetings’:

Everything was slumbering. The air, warm and fragrant, did not stir; only from time to time it quivered as water quivers at the fall of a twig. There was a feeling of languor, of yearning in it … I bent over the fence; a red field poppy lifted its stalk above the rank grass …

and so on. Then the woman sings, and her voice sounds straight into an atmosphere which has been prepared to wrap it up, to enhance it, and float it away. No quotation can convey the impression, for the description is part of the story as a whole. What is more, we feel again and again that Turgenev evades his translator. It is not Mrs Garnett’s fault. The English language is not the Russian. But the original description of the garden in the moonlight must be written, not with this inevitable careful exactness, but flowingly; there must be melody, variety, transparency. But the general effect is there even if we miss the beauty with which it is rendered. Turgenev, then, has a remarkable emotional power; he draws together the moon and the group round the samovar, the voice and the flowers and the warmth of the garden—he fuses them in one moment of great intensity, though all round are the silent spaces, and he turns away, in the end, with a little shrug of his shoulders.

[Times Literary Supplement, Dec 8, 1921]

[]

A Giant with Very Small Thumbs.

[Turgenev: The Man, his Art, and his Age by Avrahm Yarmolinsky.]

In this substantial book Mr Yarmolinsky has collected an immense amount of information about Turgenev, but the value is seriously diminished by the fact that the statements are taken from books which are not accessible to Western readers and no references are given. Mr Yarmolinsky is, if not a disillusioned, still a highly critical biographer. The faults of his subject are very clear to him. But we must be grateful to him for raising the whole question of Turgenev again, and for giving us a profusion of material on which to found our own judgment. Of all the great Russian writers, Turgenev is, perhaps, the one who has had least justice done him in England. It is easy to guess the reason; here is a new country, people said, and therefore its literature must be different, if it is true literature, from any other. They sought out and relished in Chekhov and Dostoevsky those qualities which they supposed to be peculiarly Russian and therefore of peculiar excellence. They welcomed joyously an abandonment to emotion, an introspection, a formlessness which they would have detested in the French or in the English. People drank tea endlessly and discussed the soul without stopping in a room where nothing could be seen distinctly; such was our supposition.

But Turgenev was different altogether. In the first place he was a cosmopolitan, who hunted in England and lived, rather ambiguously, in France. His domestic circumstances indeed were not such as to attach him to his native land. His mother was a woman of extraordinary character. In the heart of Russia she tried to mimic the ceremonies and splendour of the French aristocracy before the Revolution. She was despotic to the verge of mania. She banished serfs for neglecting to bow to her. She had her porridge brought hot by relays of horsemen from a village where they made it to her liking ten miles away. A waterfall was turned from its course because it disturbed her sleep. Whether or not these stories are true, it is certain that she drove her sons from the house. The novelist, in particular, with his democratic sympathies, detested his mother’s behaviour, and being, as he was fond of saying, a man with very small thumbs, he found it simpler to withdraw. Pauline Viardot received him. He had a seat allotted to him on one of the gilt paws of the bear skin on which her admirers sat and talked to her between the acts of the play. Nor was he ever to find another lodging. At the end of his life he advised young men with melancholy humour to find a home of their own and not to sit ‘on the edge of another man’s nest’. Madame Viardot, it is said, never asked him to come inside. There he sat, ‘a large man with a weak mouth and a skull padded with fat, who gave the impression of being as soft as butter’, until he died in her presence. But for all his melancholy and his loneliness, it was probable that the arrangement, with its mixture of freedom and intimacy, was the one that suited him best. The rigours of domesticity would have thwarted him. He was always late for meals; he was extremely generous, but very untidy; and he had, after all, a passion for art.

It is this passion of his that makes him so unlike the English idea of what a Russian should be. For Turgenev novels might well be the late ripe fruit on a very old tree. Such restraint, such selection one attributes to ages of endeavour. All his books are so small in bulk that one can slip them into one’s pocket. Yet they leave behind them the impression that they contain a large world in which there is ample room for men and women of full size and the sky above and the fields around. He is the most economical of writers. One of his economies is at once obvious. He takes up no room with his own person. He makes no comments upon his characters. He places them before the reader and leaves them to their fate. The contact between ourselves and Bazarov, for instance, is peculiarly direct. No saying is underlined, no conclusion is forced upon us. But the reader’s imagination is perpetually stimulated to work for itself, and hence each scene and each character has a peculiar vitality. Hence, too, another peculiarity; we are never able to say that the point lies here or the point lies there. Return to a definite page, and the meaning, the power, seems to have fled. For in this highly suggestive art the effect has been produced by a thousand small touches which accumulate, but cannot be pinned down in one emphatic passage or isolated in one great scene. For this reason Turgenev can handle, with a sweetness and wholeness which put our English novelists to shame, such burning questions as the relations of fathers and sons, of the new order and the old. The treatment is of such width and dispassionateness that we are not coerced in our sympathies, and so do not harbour a grudge against the writer which we shall liberate when opportunity serves. After all these years ‘Fathers and Sons’ still keeps its hold on our emotions. In this clarity lie profound depths; its brevity holds in it a large world. For though Turgenev was, according to his present biographer, full of weaknesses and obsessed with a sense of the futility of all things, he held strangely rigorous views on the subject of literature. Be truthful to your own sensations, he counselled; deepen your experience with study; be free to doubt everything; above all, do not let yourself be caught in the trap of dogmatism. Sitting on the edge of another man’s nest, he practised these difficult counsels to perfection. Untidy in his habits, a giant with very small thumbs, he was nevertheless a great artist.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Apr 2, 1927]

[]

Dostoevsky the Father.

[Fyodor Dostoevsky by Aimée Dostoevsky.]

It would be a mistake to read this book as if it were a biography. Mlle Dostoevsky expressly calls it a study, and to this the reader must add that it is a study by a daughter. The letters, the facts, the testimonies of friends, even to a great extent the dates which support the orthodox biography are here absent or are introduced as they happen to suit the writer’s purpose. And what is a daughter’s purpose in writing a study of her father? We need not judge her very severely if she wishes us to see him as she saw him—upright, affectionate, infallible, or, if he had his failings, she is to be excused if she represents them as the foibles of greatness. He was extravagant perhaps. He gambled sometimes. There were seasons when, misled by the wiles of women, he strayed from the paths of virtue. We can make allowance for these filial euphemisms; and if we come to feel, as this book makes us feel, that the daughter was fond as well as proud of her father, that is a real addition to our knowledge. At the same time we should have listened more sympathetically if Mlle Dostoevsky had suppressed her version of the quarrel between Dostoevsky and Turgenev. To make out that your father is a hero is one thing; to insist that his enemies are villains is another. Yet she must have it that all the blame was on Turgenev’s side; that he was jealous, a snob, ‘even more cruel and malicious than the others’. She neglects the testimony supplied by Turgenev’s own works, and, what is more serious, makes no mention of the evidence on the other side which must be known to her. The effect is naturally to make the reader scrutinize Dostoevsky’s character more closely than he would otherwise have done. He asks himself inevitably what there was in the man to cause this shrill and excited partisanship on the part of his daughter. The search for an answer among the baffling yet illuminating materials which Mlle Dostoevsky supplies is the true interest of this book.

If we were to be guided by her we should base our inquiry upon the fact that Dostoevsky was of Lithuanian descent on his father’s side. Mlle Dostoevsky has read Gobineau, and shows a perverse ingenuity and considerable industry in attributing almost every mental and moral characteristic to race heredity. Dostoevsky was a Lithuanian and thus loved purity; he was a Lithuanian and thus paid his brother’s debts; he was a Lithuanian and thus wrote bad Russian; he was a Lithuanian and thus a devout Catholic. When he complained that he had a strange and evil character he did not realize that it was neither strange nor evil, but simply Lithuanian. As Dostoevsky himself never attached much importance to his descent, we may be allowed to follow his example. We shall not come much closer to him by pursuing that track. But Mlle Dostoevsky increases our knowledge by more indirect methods. A clever little girl cannot run about her father’s house without picking up many things which she is not expected to know. She knows whether the cook is grumbling; which of the guests bores her parents; whether her father is in a good temper, or whether there has been some mysterious grown-up catastrophe. Considering that Aimée was very young when her father died, she could scarcely be expected to observe anything of much greater importance than this. But then she is a Russian. She has that apparently involuntary candour which must make family life so disconcerting in Russia. Her father’s greatness subdues her to a dutiful attitude, which, if reverent, is also a little colourless. But no one else has that power over her. ‘Her self-esteem was always excessive, almost morbid; a trifle would offend her, and she easily fell a victim to those who flattered her.’ Thus she describes her mother, and her mother is still alive. As for her uncles and aunts, her step-brother, her father’s first wife, his mistress, she is completely outspoken about them all and—were it not that she qualifies her blame by detecting strains of Slav, Norman, Ukrainian, Negro, Mongol, and Swedish blood—equally severe. That, indeed, is her contribution to our knowledge of Dostoevsky. No doubt she exaggerates; but there can also be no doubt that her bitterness is the legacy of old family quarrels—sordid, degrading, patched-up, but bursting out afresh and pursuing Dostoevsky to the verge of his death-chamber. The pages seem to ring with scoldings and complainings and recriminations; with demands for more money and with replies that all the money has been spent. Such, or something like it, we conclude, was the atmosphere in which Dostoevsky wrote his books.

His father was a doctor who had to resign his appointment owing to drunkenness; and it was on account of his drunken savagery that his serfs smothered him one day beneath the cushions of his carriage as he was driving on his estate. The disease was inherited by his children. Two of Dostoevsky’s brothers were drunkards; his sister was miserly to the verge of insanity, and was also murdered for her money. Her son was ‘so stupid that his folly verged on idiocy. My uncle Andrey’s son, a young and brilliant savant, died of creeping paralysis. The whole Dostoevsky family suffered from neurasthenia.’ And to the family eccentricity one must add what appears to the English reader the national eccentricity—the likelihood, that is to say, that if Dostoevsky escapes death on the scaffold and survives imprisonment in Siberia he will marry a wife who has a handsome young tutor for her lover, and will take for his mistress a girl who arrives at his bedside at seven in the morning brandishing an enormous knife with which she proposes to kill a Frenchman. Dostoevsky dissuades her, and off they go to Wiesbaden where ‘my father played roulette with passionate absorption, was delighted when he won, and experienced a despair hardly less delicious when he lost’. It is all violent and extreme, later, even, when Dostoevsky was happily married, there was still a worthless stepson who expected to be supported; still the brothers’ debts to pay; still the sisters trying to make mischief between him and his wife; and then the rich aunt Kumanin must needs die and leave her property to stir up the last flames of hatred among the embittered relations. ‘Dostoevsky lost patience and, refusing to continue the painful discussion, left the table before the meal was finished.’ Three days later he was dead. One thinks of Farringford flourishing not so very far away. One wonders what Matthew Arnold, who deplored the irregularities of the Shelley set, would have said to this one.

And yet, has it anything to do with Dostoevsky? One feels rather as if one had been admitted to the kitchen where the cook is smashing the china, or to the drawing-room where the relations are gossiping in corners, while Dostoevsky sits upstairs alone in his study. He had, it is clear, an extraordinary power of absenting his mind from his body. The money troubles alone, one would think, were enough to drive him distracted. On the contrary, it was his wife who worried, and it was Dostoevsky, says his daughter, who remained serene, saying, ‘in tones of conviction, “We shall never be without money.”’ We catch sight of his body plainly enough, but it is rather as if we passed him taking his afternoon walk, always at four o’clock, always along the same road, so absorbed in his own thoughts that ‘he never recognized the acquaintance he met on the way’. They travelled in Italy, visited the galleries, strolled in the Boboli gardens, and ‘the roses blooming there struck their Northern imaginations’. But after working at The Idiot’ all the morning how much did he see of the roses in the afternoon? It is the waste of his day that is gathered up and given us in place of his life. But now and then, when Mlle Dostoevsky forgets the political rancours of the moment and the complex effect of the Norman strain upon the Lithuanian temperament, she opens the study door and lets us see her father as she saw him. He could not write if he had a spot of candle-grease on his coat. He liked dried figs and kept a box of them in a cupboard from which he helped his children. He liked eau-de-Cologne to wash with. He liked little girls to wear pale green. He would dance with them and read aloud Dickens and Scott. But he never spoke to them about his own childhood. She thinks that he dreaded discovering signs of his father’s vices in himself; and she believes that he ‘wished intensely to be like others’. At any rate, it was the greatest pleasure of her day to be allowed to breakfast with him and to talk to him about books. And then it is all over. There is her father laid out in his evening dress in his coffin; a painter is sketching him; grand dukes and peasants crowd the staircase; while she and her brother distribute flowers to unknown people and enjoy very much the drive to the cemetery.

[Times Literary Supplement, Jan 12, 1922]

[]

More Dostoevsky.

[The Eternal Husband and Other Stories. Translated by Constance Garnett.]

Each time that Mrs Garnett adds another red volume to her admirable translations of the works of Dostoevsky we feel a little better able to measure what the existence of this great genius who is beginning to permeate our lives so curiously means to us. His books are now to be found on the shelves of the humblest English libraries; they have become an indestructible part of the furniture of our rooms, as they belong for good to the furniture of our minds. The latest addition to Mrs Garnett’s translation, The Eternal Husband’, including also The Double’ and ‘The Gentle Spirit’, is not one of the greatest of his works, although it was produced in what may be held to be the greatest period of his genius, between The Idiot’ and The Possessed’. If one had never read anything else by Dostoevsky, one might lay the book down with a feeling that the man who wrote it was bound to write a very great novel some day; but with a feeling also that something strange and important had happened. This strangeness and this sense that something important has happened persist, however, although we are familiar with his books and have had time to arrange the impression that they make on us.

Of all great writers there is, so it seems to us, none quite so surprising, or so bewildering, as Dostoevsky. And although ‘The Eternal Husband’ is nothing more than a long short story which we need not compare with the great novels, it too has this extraordinary power; nor while we are reading it can we liberate ourselves sufficiently to feel certain that in this or that respect there is a failure of power, or insight, or craftsmanship; nor does it occur to us to compare it with other works either by the same writer or by other writers. It is very difficult to analyse the impression it has made even when we have finished it. It is the story of one Velchaninov, who, many years before the story opens, has seduced the wife of a certain Pavel Pavlovitch in the town of T——. Velchaninov has almost forgotten her and is living in Petersburg. But now as he walks about Petersburg he is constantly running into a man who wears a crêpe hat-band and reminds him of someone he cannot put a name to. At last, after repeated meetings which bring him to a state bordering on delirium, Velchaninov is visited at two o’clock in the morning by the stranger, who explains that he is the husband of Velchaninov’s old love, and that she is dead. When Velchaninov visits him the next day he finds him maltreating a little girl, who is, he instantly perceives, his own child. He manages to take her away from Pavel, who is a drunkard and in every way disreputable, and give her lodging with friends, but almost immediately she dies. After her death Pavel announces that he is engaged to marry a girl of sixteen, but when, as he insists, Velchaninov visits her, she confides to him that she detests Pavel and is already engaged to a youth of nineteen. Between them they contrive to pack Pavel off to the country; and he turns up finally at the end of the story as the husband of a provincial beauty, and the lady, of course, has a lover.

These, at least, are the little bits of cork which mark a circle upon the top of the waves while the net drags the floor of the sea and encloses stranger monsters than have ever been brought to the light of day before. The substance of the book is made out of the relationship between Velchaninov and Pavel. Pavel is a type of what Velchaninov calls ‘the eternal husband’. ‘Such a man is born and grows up only to be a husband, and, having married, is promptly transformed into a supplement of his wife, even when he happens to have an unmistakable character of his own … [Pavel] could only as long as his wife was alive have remained all that he used to be, but, as it was, he was only a fraction of a whole, suddenly cut off and set free, that is something wonderful and unique.’ One of the peculiarities of the eternal husband is that he is always half in love with the lovers of his wife, and at the same time wishes to kill them. Impelled by this mixture of almost amorous affection and hatred, he cannot keep away from Velchaninov, in whom he breeds a kind of reflection of his own sensations of attraction and repulsion. He can never bring himself to make any direct charge against Velchaninov; and Velchaninov is never able to confess or to deny his misconduct. Sometimes, from the stealthy way in which he approaches, Velchaninov feels certain that he has an impulse to kill him; but then he insists upon kissing him and cries out, ‘So, you understand, you’re the one friend left me now!’ One night when Velchaninov is ill and Pavel has shown the most enthusiastic devotion Velchaninov wakes from a nightmare to find Pavel standing over him and attempting to murder him with a razor. Pavel is easily mastered and slinks away shamefaced in the morning. But did he mean to murder him, Velchaninov muses, or did he want it without knowing that he wanted it?

But did he love me yesterday when he declared his feeling and said ‘Let us settle our account’? Yes, it was from hatred that he loved me; that’s the strongest of all loves … It would be interesting to know by what I impressed him. Perhaps by my clean gloves and my knowing how to put them on … He comes here ‘to embrace me and weep’, as he expressed it in the most abject way—that is, he came here to murder me and thought he came ‘to embrace me and to weep’. But who knows? If I had wept with him, perhaps, really, he would have forgiven me, for he had a terrible longing to forgive me! … Ough! wasn’t he pleased, too, when he made me kiss him! Only he didn’t know then whether he would end by embracing me or murdering me … The most monstrous monster is the monster with noble feelings … But it was not your fault, Pavel Pavlovitch, it was not your fault: you’re a monster, so everything about you is bound to be monstrous, your dreams and your hopes.

Perhaps this quotation may give some idea of the labyrinth of the soul through which we have to grope our way. But being only a quotation it makes the different thoughts appear too much isolated; for in the context Velchaninov, as he broods over the blood-stained razor, passes over his involved and crowded train of thought without a single hitch, just, in fact, as we ourselves are conscious of thinking when some startling fact has dropped into the pool of our consciousness. From the crowd of objects pressing upon our attention we select now this one, now that one, weaving them inconsequently into our thought; the associations of a word perhaps make another loop in the line, from which we spring back again to a different section of our main thought, and the whole process seems both inevitable and perfectly lucid. But if we try to construct our mental processes later, we find that the links between one thought and another are submerged. The chain is sunk out of sight and only the leading points emerge to mark the course. Alone among writers Dostoevsky has the power of reconstructing these most swift and complicated states of mind, of re-thinking the whole train of thought in all its speed, now as it flashes into light, now as it lapses into darkness; for he is able to follow not only the vivid streak of achieved thought but to suggest the dim and populous underworld of the mind’s consciousness where desires and impulses are moving blindly beneath the sod. Just as we awaken ourselves from a trance of this kind by striking a chair or a table to assure ourselves of an external reality, so Dostoevsky suddenly makes us behold, for an instant, the face of his hero, or some object in the room.

This is the exact opposite of the method adopted, perforce, by most of our novelists. They reproduce all the external appearances—tricks of manner, landscape, dress, and the effect of the hero upon his friends—but very rarely, and only for an instant, penetrate to the tumult of thought which rages within his own mind. But the whole fabric of a book by Dostoevsky is made out of such material. To him a child or a beggar is as full of violent and subtle emotions as a poet or a sophisticated woman of the world; and it is from the intricate maze of their emotions that Dostoevsky constructs his version of life. In reading him, therefore, we are often bewildered because we find ourselves observing men and women from a different point of view from that to which we are accustomed. We have to get rid of the old tune which runs so persistently in our ears, and to realize how little of our humanity is expressed in that old tune. Again and again we are thrown off the scent in following Dostoevsky’s psychology; we constantly find ourselves wondering whether we recognize the feeling that he shows us, and we realize constantly and with a start of surprise that we have met it before in ourselves, or in some moment of intuition have suspected it in others. But we have never spoken of it, and that is why we are surprised. Intuition is the term which we should apply to Dostoevsky’s genius at its best. When he is fully possessed by it he is able to read the most inscrutable writing at the depths of the darkest souls; but when it deserts him the whole of his amazing machinery seems to spin fruitlessly in the air. In the present volume, The Double’, with all its brilliancy and astonishing ingenuity, is an example of this kind of elaborate failure; ‘The Gentle Spirit’, on the other hand, is written from start to finish with a power which for the time being turns everything we can put beside it into the palest commonplace.

[Times Literary Supplement, Feb 22, 1917]

[]

Dostoevsky in Cranford.

[An Honest Thief and Other Stories. Translated by Constance Garnett.]

It is amusing sometimes to freshen one’s notion of a great, and thus semi-mythical, character by transplanting him in imagination to one’s own age, shore, or country village. How, one asks, would Dostoevsky have behaved himself upon the vicarage lawn? In ‘Uncle’s Dream’, the longest story in Mrs Garnett’s new volume, he enables one to fancy him in those incongruous surroundings. Mordasov bears at any rate a superficial resemblance to Cranford. All the ladies in that small country town spend their time in drinking tea and talking scandal. A newcomer, such as Prince K., is instantly torn to pieces like a fish tossed to a circle of frenzied and ravenous seagulls. Mordasov cannot be altogether like Cranford, then. No such figure of speech could be used with propriety to describe the demure activities and bright-eyed curiosities of the English circle of ladies. After sending our imaginary Dostoevsky, therefore, pacing up and down the lawn, there can be no doubt that he suddenly stamps his foot, exclaims something unintelligible, and rushes off in despair. ‘The instinct of provincial newsmongers sometimes approaches the miraculous … They know you by heart, they know even what you don’t know about yourself. The provincial ought, one would think, by his very nature to be a psychologist and a specialist in human nature. That is why I have been sometimes genuinely amazed at meeting in the provinces not psychologists and specialists in human nature, but a very great number of asses. But that is aside; that is a superfluous reflection.’ His patience is already exhausted; it is idle to expect that he will linger in the High-street or hang in a rapture of observation round the draper’s shop. The delightful shades and subtleties of English provincial life are lost upon him.

But Mordasov is a very different place from Cranford. The ladies do not confine themselves to tea, as their condition after dinner sometimes testifies. Their tongues wag with a fury that is rather that of the open market-place than of the closed drawing-room. Though they indulge in petty vices such as listening at keyholes and stealing the sugar when the hostess is out of the room, they act with the brazen boldness of viragos. One would be alarmed to find oneself left alone with one of them. Nevertheless, in his big rough way, Dostoevsky is neither savagely contemptuous nor sadly compassionate; he is genuinely amused by the spectacle of Mordasov. It roused, as human life so seldom did, his sense of comedy. He tries even to adapt his dialogue to the little humours of a gossiping conversation.

‘Call that a dance! I’ve danced myself, the shawl dance, at the breaking-up party at Madame Jamis’s select boarding-school—and it really was a distinguished performance. I was applauded by senators! The daughters of princes and counts were educated there! … Only fancy’ [she runs on, as if she were imitating the patter of Miss Bates] ‘chocolate was handed round to everyone, but not offered to me, and they did not say a word to me all the time … The tub of a woman, I’ll pay her out!’

But Dostoevsky cannot keep to that tripping measure for long. The language becomes abusive, and the temper violent. His comedy has far more in common with the comedy of Wycherly than with the comedy of Jane Austen. It rapidly runs to seed, and becomes a helter-skelter, extravagant farce. The restraint and aloofness of the great comic writers are impossible to him. It is probable, for one reason, that he could not allow himself the time. ‘Uncle’s Dream’, ‘The Crocodile’, and ‘An Unpleasant Predicament’ read as if they were the improvisations of a gigantic talent reeling off its wild imaginations at breathless speed. They have the diffuseness of a mind too tired to concentrate, and too fully charged to stop short. Slack and ungirt as it is, it tumbles out rubbish and splendour pell-mell.

Yet we are perpetually conscious that, if Dostoevsky fails to keep within the proper limits, it is because the fervour of his genius goads him across the boundary. Because of his sympathy his laughter passes beyond merriment into a strange violent amusement which is not merry at all. He is incapable, even when his story is hampered by the digression, of passing by anything so important and lovable as a man or a woman without stopping to consider their case and explain it. Thus at one moment it occurs to him that there must be a reason why an unfortunate clerk could not afford to pay for a bottle of wine. Immediately, as if recalling a story which is known to him down to its most minute detail, he describes how the clerk had been born and brought up; it is then necessary to bring in the career of his brutal father-in-law, and that leads him to describe the peculiarities of the five unfortunate women whom the father-in-law bullies. In short, once you are alive, there is no end to the complexity of your connections, and sorrow and misery are so rubbed into the texture of life that the more you examine it the more cloudy and confused it becomes. Perhaps it is because we know so little about the family history of the ladies of Cranford that we can put the book down with a smile. Still, we need not underrate the value of comedy because Dostoevsky makes the perfection of the English product appear to be the result of leaving out all the most important things. It is the old, unnecessary quarrel between the inch of smooth ivory and the six feet of canvas with its strong coarse grains.

[Times Literary Supplement, Oct 23, 1919]

[]

The Russian Background.

[The Bishop and Other Stories by Anton Tchehov. Translated by Constance Garnett.]

Thanks chiefly to the labours of Mrs Garnett we are now not so much at sea when a new translation from the Russian novelists comes our way. Since ‘The Bishop’ is the seventh volume of the tales of Tchehov, this comparative degree of enlightenment does not say much perhaps for our perspicacity. We ought not, as we read, to be still drawing a rough plan, with the left hand, of this strange Russian temperament; we ought not to feel any warmth of self-approbation when the sketch rapidly fills itself in and wears a momentary air of completeness.

Yet the seventh volume finds us not quite so ill-prepared as its predecessors. No one now is going to be so foolish as to complain that the story of The Bishop’ is not a story at all but only a rather vague and inconclusive account of a bishop who was distressed because his mother treated him with respect, and soon after died of typhoid. We are by this time alive to the fact that inconclusive stories are legitimate; that is to say, though they leave us feeling melancholy and perhaps uncertain, yet somehow or other they provide a resting point for the mind—a solid object casting its shade of reflection and speculation. The fragments of which it is composed may have the air of having come together by chance. Certainly it often seems as if Tchehov made up his stories rather in the way that a hen picks up grain. Why should she pick here and there, from side to side, when, so far as we can see, there is no reason to prefer one grain to another? His choice is strange, and yet there is no longer any doubt that whatever Tchehov chooses he chooses with the finest insight. He is like the peasant in his story ‘The Steppe’, who could see the fox lying on her back playing like a dog far in the distance, where no one else could see her. Like Vassya, Tchehov’s sight is so keen that he has, ‘besides the world seen by everyone, another world of his own, accessible to no one else, and probably a very beautiful one’.

All these doubts and false starts are now powerless to disturb our enjoyment of Tchehov. We may, therefore, attempt to press on a step further. Is it possible to adopt with Tchehov the position that comes so easily in the case of writers of one’s own tongue? We want to understand the great sum of things which a writer takes for granted, which is the background of his thought; for if we can imagine that, the figures in the foreground, the pattern he has wrought upon it, will be more easily intelligible. Our own background, so far as we can detach ourselves from it, is presumably a very complex and yet very orderly civilization. The peasant, even in the depths of the country, has his station assigned to him, and is in a thousand ways controlled by London; and there must be very few windows in England from which it is not possible to see the smoke of a town by day or its lamps by night. We become more aware of the detail and of the intricacy of all that we hold in our minds when Tchehov describes ‘the things that come back to your mind’, ‘the things one has seen and treasured’—the things, that is, which form his background.

… of the unfathomable depth and infinity of the sky one can only form a conception at sea and on the steppes by night when the moon is shining. It is terribly lonely and caressing … Everything looks different from what it is … You drive on and suddenly see standing before you right in the roadway a dark figure like a monk … the figure comes closer, grows bigger; now it is on a level with the chaise, and you see it is not a man, but a solitary bush, or a great stone … You drive on for one hour, for a second … You meet upon the way a silent old barrow or a stone figure put up God knows when and by whom … the soul responds to the call of the lovely austere fatherland, and longs to fly over the steppes with the nightbird.

Tchehov is here describing, very beautifully we can guess even through the coarse mesh of a foreign tongue, the effect of the steppe upon a little company of travellers. The steppe is the background for that particular story. Yet, as the travellers move slowly over the immense space, now stopping at an inn, now overtaking some shepherd or waggon, it seems to be the journey of the Russian soul, and the empty space, so sad and so passionate, becomes the background of his thought. The stories themselves, in their inconclusiveness and intimacy, appear to be the result of a chance meeting on a lonely road. Fate has sent these travellers across our path; whoever they may be, it is natural to stop and talk, and as they will never come our way again it is possible to say all kinds of things that we do not say to friends. The English reader may have had something of the same experience when isolated on board ship on a sea voyage. From the surrounding emptiness, from the knowledge that they will soon be over, those meetings have an intensity, as if shaped by the hand of an artist, which long preserves their significance in memory. ‘All this,’ says Tchehov, describing a camp by the wayside where the men sit gathered together over the camp fire—‘all this was of itself so marvellous and terrible that the fantastic colours of legend and fairy tale were pale and blended with life.’ Take away the orderly civilization: look from your window upon nothing but the empty steppe, feel towards each human being that he is a traveller who will be seen once and never again, and then life ‘of itself’ is so terrible and marvellous that no fantastic colouring is necessary. Almost all the stories in the present volume are stories of peasants; and whether or not it is the effect of this solitude and emptiness, each obscure and brutish mind has had rubbed in it a little transparency through which the light of the spirit shines amazingly. Thus the convict Yakov, as he walks in chains, comes by this means to the conviction that ‘at last he had learned the true faith … He knew it all now and understood where God was.’ But this is not merely the end of a Tchehov story; it is also the light which, falling fitfully here and there, marks out their conformity and form. Without metaphor, the feelings of his characters are related to something more important and far more remote than personal success or happiness.

[Times Literary Supplement, Aug 14, 1919]

[]

A Scribbling Dame.

[The Life and Romances of Mrs Eliza Haywood, by George F. Whicher.]

There are in the Natural History Museum certain little insects so small that they have to be gummed to the cardboard with the lightest of fingers, but each of them, as one observes with constant surprise, has its fine Latin name spreading far to the right and left of the miniature body. We have often speculated upon the capture of these insects and the christening of them, and marvelled at the labours of the humble, indefatigable men who thus extend our knowledge. But their toil, though comparable in its nature, seems light and certainly agreeable compared with that of Mr Whicher in the book before us. It was not for him to wander through airy forests with a butterfly net in his hand; he had to search out dusty books from desolate museums, and in the end to pin down this faded and antique specimen of the domestic house fly with all her seventy volumes in orderly array around her. But it appears to the Department of English and Comparative Literature in Columbia University that Mrs Haywood has never been classified, and they approve therefore of the publication of this book on her as ‘a contribution to knowledge worthy of publication’. It does not matter, presumably, that she was a writer of no importance, that no one reads her for pleasure, and that nothing is known of her life. She is dead, she is old, she wrote books, and nobody has yet written a book about her.

Mr Whicher accordingly has supplied not merely an article, or a few lines in a history of literature, but a careful, studious, detailed account of all her works regarded from every possible point of view, together with a bibliography which occupies 204 pages of print. It is but fair to him to add that he has few illusions as to the merits of his authoress, and only claims for her that her ‘domestic novels’ foreshadowed the work of Miss Burney and Miss Austen, and that she helped to open a new profession for her sex. Whatever help he can afford us by calling Pope ‘Mr’ Pope or Pope Alexander, and alluding to Mrs Haywood as ‘the scribbling dame’, he proffers generously enough. But it is scarcely sufficient. If he had been able to throw any light upon the circumstances of her life we should make no complaint. A woman who married a clergyman and ran away from him, who supported herself and possibly two children, it is thought without gallantry, entirely by her pen in the early years of the eighteenth century, was striking out a new line of life and must have been a person of character. But nobody knows anything about her, save that she was born in 1693 and died in 1756; it is not known where she lived or how she got her work; what friends she had, or even, which is strange in the case of a woman, whether she was plain or handsome. ‘The apprehensive dame,’ as Mr Whicher calls her, warned, we can imagine, by the disgusting stanzas in the ‘Dunciad’, took care that the facts of her life should be concealed, and, withdrawing silently, left behind her a mass of unreadable journalism which both by its form and by the inferiority of the writer’s talent throws no light upon her age or upon herself. Anyone who has looked into the works of the Duchess of Newcastle and Mrs Behn knows how easily the rich prose style of the Restoration tends to fall languid and suffocate even writers of considerable force and originality. The names alone of Mrs Haywood’s romances make us droop, and in the mazes of her plots we swoon away. We have to imagine how Emilia wandering in Andalusia meets Berinthus in a masquerade. Now Berinthus was really Henriquez her brother … Don Jaque di Morella determines to marry his daughter Gementine to a certain cardinal … In Montelupe Clementina meets the funeral of a young woman who has been torn to pieces by wolves … The young and gay Dorante is tempted to expose himself to the charms of the beautiful Kesiah … The doting Baron de Tortillés marries the extravagant and lascivious Mademoiselle la Motte … Melliora, Placentia, Montrano, Miramillia, and a thousand more swarm over all the countries of the South and of the East, climbing ropes, dropping letters, overhearing secrets, plunging daggers, languishing and dying, fighting and conquering, but loving, always loving, for, as Mr Whicher puts it, to Mrs Haywood ‘love was the force that motivated all the world’.

These stories found certain idle people very ready to read them, and were generally successful. Mrs Haywood was evidently a born journalist. As long as romances of the heart were in fashion she turned out romance after romance; when Richardson and Fielding brought the novel into closer touch with life she followed suit with her ‘Miss Betsy Thoughtless’ and her ‘Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy’. In the interval she turned publisher, edited a newspaper called The “Parrot, and produced secret histories and scandal novels rather in the style of our gossip in the illustrated papers about the aristocracy. In none of these departments was she a pioneer, or even a very distinguished disciple; and it is more for her steady industry with the pen than for the product of it that she is remarkable. Reading when Mrs Haywood wrote was beginning to come into fashion, and readers demanded books which they could read ‘with a teacup in one hand without danger of spilling the tea’. But that class, as Mr Gosse indicates when he compares Mrs Haywood to Ouida, has not been improved away nor lessened in numbers. There is the same desire to escape from the familiar look of life by the easiest way, and the difference is really that we find our romance in accumulated motor-cars and marquises rather than in foreign parts and strange-sounding names. But the heart which suffered in the pages of the early romancers beats today upon the railway bookstall beneath the shiny coloured cover which depicts Lord Belcour parting from the Lady Belinda Fitzurse, or the Duchess of Ormonde clasping the family diamonds and bathed in her own blood at the bottom of the marble staircase.

In what sense Mr Whicher can claim that Mrs Haywood ‘prepared the way for … quiet Jane Austen’ it is difficult to see, save that one lady was undeniably born some eighty years in advance of the other. For it would be hard to imagine a less professional woman of letters than the lady who wrote on little slips of paper, hid them when anyone was near, and kept her novels shut up in her desk, and refused to write a romance about the august House of Coburg at the suggestion of Prince Leopold’s librarian—behaviour that must have made Mrs Haywood lift her hands in amazement in the grave. And in that long and very intricate process of living and reading and writing which so mysteriously alters the form of literature, so that Jane Austen, born in 1775, wrote novels, while Jane Austen born a hundred years earlier would probably have written not novels but a few exquisite lost letters, Mrs Haywood plays no perceptible part, save that of swelling the chorus of sound. For people who write books do not necessarily add anything to the history of literature, even when those books are little old volumes, stained with age, that have crossed the Atlantic; nor can we see that the students of Columbia University will love English literature the better for knowing how very dull it can be, although the University may claim that this is a ‘contribution to knowledge’.

[Times Literary Supplement, Feb 17, 1916]

[]

Maria Edgeworth and Her Circle.

[Maria Edgeworth and Her Circle, by Constance Hill.]

So far as we can remember, Miss Hill does not ask herself once in the volume before us whether people now read Miss Edgeworth’s novels. Perhaps she takes it for granted that they do, or perhaps she thinks that it does not matter. The past has an immense charm of its own; and if one can show how people lived a hundred years ago—one means by that, how they powdered their hair, and drove in yellow chariots, and passed Lord Byron in the street—one need not trouble oneself with minds and emotions. Indeed, we can know very little of the dead; when we talk of the different ages of the past we are really thinking of different fashions of dress and different styles of architecture. We have an enormous supply of such properties in our minds, deposited there by a library of books like this book of Miss Hill’s. She stamps the figure of a chariot in gold upon her boards, as though it helped us to understand Miss Edgeworth. We persuade ourselves that it does, and yet we should think it strange if the future biographer of ‘Mrs Humphry Ward and her Circle’ illustrated his meaning by a hansom cab. To Miss Edgeworth herself, we may be sure, Miss Hill’s account of her would seem a little irrelevant and perhaps not very amusing; nevertheless, we are under the illusion that this enumeration of trifles and names helps us somehow to see her more clearly than before, as certainly it produces in us a mild feeling of benevolence and pleasure. To Miss Hill undoubtedly belongs the credit of choosing her illustrations happily, so that they excite in us the curious illusion that we are peopling the past. For the moment it seems very much alive, and yet it is nothing like the life we know. The chief difference is that it makes us laugh much more consistently than the present does, and that it is composed to a much greater extent of visual impressions—of turbans and chariots with nothing inside them.

Miss Edgeworth, although she lived in Ireland, sometimes visited London and Paris. She crossed the Channel for the first time in 1802, the voyage taking three hours and a half, ‘a comparatively quick passage for those days of sailing packets’, Miss Hill points out, invoking the spell of the past. Something, after all, must be invoked when one has a heroine who, brought face to face with Mme Récamier, merely remarks, ‘Mme Récamier is of quite an opposite sort, though in the first fashion a graceful and decent beauty of excellent character.’ To solidify the chapter one can also quote at length what the poet Rogers said about the famous bath and how Miss Berry admired the famous bed. At the same time, we cannot believe that Maria would have included Mme Récamier among her circle. In common with all the women writers of the eighteenth century, Miss Edgeworth was strikingly modest. Her habits were such that no one would have taken her for a remarkable person, but it is scarcely necessary to be at such pains to prove it. She was diminutive in figure, plain in feature, and wrote demurely at her desk in the family living-room. Nevertheless, she observed everything, and in congenial company talked well upon ‘old French classic literature’ and listened sympathetically to stories of the Revolution. Moreover, she was so sprightly and sensible that young men of fashion both of ‘the light, easy, enjoying-the-world style’ and of the ‘melancholy and Byronic’ were fascinated and let her twit them with impunity. She turned the conversation adroitly from politics to wit, and ridiculed the fashion for the ‘triste’ in manner and ‘le vague’ in poetry. One love affair she had with a Swedish gentleman called Edelcrantz, whose understanding was superior and whose manners were mild. But, on ascertaining that she would have to leave her family and live in Sweden if she married him, she refused, although, “being exceedingly in love with him’, she suffered much at the time and long afterwards. In May 1813, Maria Edgeworth, with her father and stepmother, spent some weeks in London. The town ran mad to see her; at parties the crowd turned and twisted to discover her, and as she was very small, almost closed above her head. She bore it with composure and amusement; the general verdict seems to have been Lord Byron’s: ‘One would never have guessed that she could write her name; whereas her father talked, not as if he could write nothing else, but as if nothing else was worth writing.’ On the other hand, we have Miss Edgeworth: ‘Of Lord Byron I can tell you only that his appearance is nothing that you would remark.’

The obvious thing happened; people stared, were disappointed, laughed good-humouredly, and began to talk of other things. Her biographer is in the same predicament. She has recourse, with the rest of the world, to Mme de Staël. That lady was lavishing her eloquence upon London; report said that when she was silent—that is while her hair was dressed and while she breakfasted—she continued to scribble. She extorted four words from that Duke of Marlborough, who was scarcely known to speak. ‘Let me go away,’ he cried, on hearing her announced. Unfortunately, Napoleon escaped from Elba and Miss Edgeworth withdrew to Ireland, and for some reason we hear much more of Mme d’Arblay’s impressions of the battle of Waterloo than of a much more interesting subject—Miss Edgeworth herself. Maria took no part in the campaign, save that she describes (from hearsay) a banquet given at Drogheda by the Lord Mayor, at which the victorious generals were represented in sugared paste. Perverse although it may seem, Drogheda and the opinion of Drogheda upon the victory interests us far more than the account of Wellington’s reception in Paris; I possibly if we were told what Miss Edgeworth saw among the peasants on her estate we should realize far better what Waterloo meant than by reading the faded exclamations of Mme d’Arblay upon the spot.

Europe settled down again, however, and Maria was able to visit Hampstead in 1818, and to stay with Miss Joanna Baillie, the author of ‘Plays on the Passions’, and the lyric.

The chough and crow to roost are gone,

admired by Scott. In spite of her fame she, too, was modest:

‘No one could have taken her for a married woman. An innocent maiden grace hovered over her to the end of old age.’ She walked discreetly behind her elder sister when the two old ladies, dressed in grey silk and lace caps alike, were present at the reading of one of Joanna’s ‘Plays on the Passions’ in the assembly rooms. On hearing of it some of her friends were shocked and wrote, ‘Have ye heard that Jocky Baillie has taken to the public line?’ There was Mrs Barbauld also, who sometimes stayed at Hampstead, and was severely reproved by the Quarterly Review for her Ode, ‘1811’, by which she depressed the spirits of the nation. There was Lady Breadalbane, who fell asleep in her carriage and was locked up in the coachhouse; nobody missing her for a considerable time, several carriages were rolled in after hers, and then, ‘she wakened’—but what she said Maria has no time to report. There was Mr Standish, ‘the tip-top dandy’, who stayed at Trentham and displayed such a toilet-table that all the ladies’ maids were invited to a private view of his dressing-case, ‘which, I assure you, my lady, is the thing best worth seeing in this house, all of gilt plate, and I wish, my lady, you had such a dressing-box’. How charming our ancestors were!—so simple in their manners, so humorous in their behaviour, so strange in their expressions! Thus, as we run through Miss Hill’s book, we pick up straws everywhere, and dull must be our fancy if we fail in the end to furnish all the Georgian houses in existence with tables and chairs and ladies and gentlemen. There is no need to tease ourselves with the suspicion that they were quite different in the flesh, and as ugly, as complex, and as emotional as we are, for their simplicity is more amusing to believe in and much easier to write about. Nevertheless, there are moments when we bewail the opportunity that Miss Hill seems to have missed—the opportunity of getting at the truth at the risk of being dull.

[Times Literary Supplement, Dec 9, 1909]

[]

Jane Austen and the Geese.

[Personal Aspects of Jane Austen, by Mary Augusta Austen-Leigh.]

Of all writers Jane Austen is the one, so we should have thought, who has had the least cause to complain of her critics. Her chief admirers have always been those who write novels themselves, and from the time of Sir Walter Scott to the time of George Moore she has been praised with unusual discrimination.

So we should have thought. But Miss Austen-Leigh’s book shows that we were far too sanguine. Never have we had before us such certain proof of the incorrigible stupidity of reviewers. Ever since Jane Austen became famous they have been hissing inanities in chorus. She did not like dogs; she was not fond of children; she did not care for England; she was indifferent to public affairs; she had no book learning; she was irreligious; she was alternately cold and coarse; she knew no one outside her family circle; she derived her pessimistic view of family life from observing the differences between her father and mother. Miss Austen-Leigh, whose piety is natural but whose concern we cannot help thinking excessive, is persuaded that there is some ‘misapprehension’ about Jane Austen, and is determined to right it by taking each of the geese separately and wringing his neck. Someone, properly anonymous and we can scarcely help thinking fabulous, has expressed his opinion that Jane Austen was not qualified to write about the English gentry. The fact is, says Miss Austen-Leigh, that she was descended on her father’s side from the Austens, who sprang, ‘like other county families, from the powerful Clan of the Clothiers’; on her mother’s from the Leighs of Addlestrop, who entertained King Charles. Moreover, she went to dances. She moved in good society. ‘Jane Austen was in every way well fitted to write of the lives and feelings of English gentle people.’ In that conclusion we entirely concur. Still the fact that you are well fitted to write about one set of people may be taken to prove that you are not well fitted to write about another. That profound observation is to the credit of a second anonymous fowl. Nor, to be candid, does Miss Austen-Leigh altogether succeed in silencing him. Jane Austen had, she assures us, opportunities for a wider knowledge of life than falls to the lot of most clergymen’s daughters. An uncle by marriage lived in India and was a friend of Warren Hastings. He must have written home about the trial and the climate. A cousin married a French nobleman whose head was cut off in the Revolution. She must have had something to say about Paris and the guillotine. One of her brothers made the grand tour, and two were in the Navy. It is, therefore, undeniable that Jane Austen might have ‘indulged in romantic flights of fancy with India or France for a background’, but it is equally undeniable that Jane Austen never did. Yet it is difficult to deny that had she been not only Jane Austen but Lord Byron and Captain Marryat into the bargain her works might have possessed merits which, as it is, we cannot truthfully say that we find in them.

Leaving these exalted regions of literary criticism the reviewers now attack her character. She was cold, they say, and ‘turned away from whatever was sad, unpleasant, or painful’. That is easily disposed of. The family archives contain proof that she nursed a cousin through the measles, and ‘attended her brother Henry, in London, in an illness of which he nearly died’. It is as easy from the same source to dispose of the malevolent assertion that she was the illiterate daughter of an illiterate father. When the Rev. George Austen left Steventon he sold five hundred books. The number that he must have kept is quite enough to prove that Jane Austen was a well read woman. As for the slander that her family life was unhappy, it is sufficient to quote the words of a cousin who was in the habit of staying with the Austens. ‘When among this Liberal Society, the simplicity, hospitality, and taste which commonly prevail in different families among the delightful vallies of Switzerland ever occurs to my memory.’ The malignant and persistent critic still remains who says that Jane Austen was without morality. Indeed, it is a difficult charge to meet. It is not enough to quote her own statement, ‘I am very fond of Sherlock’s sermons.’ The testimony of Archbishop Whately does not convince us. Nor can we personally subscribe to Miss Austen-Leigh’s opinion that in all her works ‘one line of thought, one grace, or quality, or necessity … is apparent. Its name is Repentance.’ The truth appears to us to be much more complicated than that.

If Miss Austen-Leigh does not throw much light upon that problem, she does one thing for which we are grateful to her. She prints some notes made by Jane at the age of twelve or thirteen upon the margin of Goldsmith’s History of England. They are slight and childish, useless, we should have thought, to confute the critics who hold that she was unemotional, unsentimental and passionless. ‘My dear Mr G——, I have lived long enough in the world to know that it is always so.’ She corrects her author amusingly. ‘Oh! Oh! The wretches!’ she exclaims against the Puritans. ‘Dear Balmerino I cannot express what I feel for you!’ she cries when Balmerino is executed. There is nothing more in them than that. Only to hear Jane Austen saying nothing in her natural voice when the critics have been debating whether she was a lady, whether she told the truth, whether she could read, and whether she had personal experience of hunting a fox is positively upsetting. We remember that Jane Austen wrote novels. It might be worth while for her critics to read them.

[Times Literary Supplement, Oct 28, 1920]

[]

Mrs Gaskell.

[Mrs Gaskell, by Ellis H. Chadwick.]

From what one can gather of Mrs Gaskell’s nature, she would not have liked Mrs Chadwick’s book. A cultivated woman, for whom publicity had no glamour, with a keen sense of humour and a quick temper, she would have opened it with a shiver and dropped it with a laugh. It is delightful to see how cleverly she vanishes. There are no letters to be had; no gossip; people remember her, but they seem to have forgotten what she was like. At least, cries Mrs Chadwick, she must have lived somewhere; houses can be described. ‘There is a long, glass-covered porch, forming a conservatory, which is the main entrance … On the ground-floor, to the right, is a large drawing-room. On the left are a billiard room … a large kitchen … and a scullery … There are ten bedrooms … and a kitchen garden sufficiently large to supply vegetables for a large family.’ The ghost would feel grateful to the houses; it might give her a twinge to hear that she had ‘got into the best literary set of the day’, but on the other hand it would please her to read of how Charles Darwin was ‘the well-known naturalist’.

The surprising thing is that there should be a public who wishes to know where Mrs Gaskell lived. Curiosity about the houses, the coats, and the pens of Shelley, Peacock, Charlotte Brontë, and George Meredith seems lawful. One imagines that these people did everything in a way of their own; and in such cases a trifle will start the imagination when the whole body of their published writings fails to thrill. But Mrs Gaskell would be the last person to have that peculiarity. One can believe that she prided herself upon doing things as other women did them, only better—that she swept manuscripts off the table lest a visitor should think her odd. She was, we know, the best of housekeepers, ‘her standard of comfort”, writes Mrs Chadwick, being ‘expensive, but her tastes were always refined’; and she kept a cow in her back garden to remind her of the country.

For a moment it seems surprising that we should still be reading her books. The novels of today are so much terser, intenser, and more scientific. Compare the strike in ‘North and South’, for example, with the Strife of Mr Galsworthy. She seems a sympathetic amateur beside a professional in earnest. But this is partly due to a kind of irritation with the methods of mid-Victorian novelists. Nothing would persuade them to concentrate. Able by nature to spin sentence after sentence melodiously, they seem to have left out nothing that they knew how to say. Our ambition, on the other hand, is to put in nothing that need not be there. What we want to be there is the brain and the view of life; the autumnal woods, the history of the whale fishery, and the decline of stage coaching we omit entirely. But by means of comment, dialogues that depart from truth by their wit and not by their pomposity, descriptions fused into a metaphor, we get a world carved out arbitrarily enough by one dominant brain. Every page supplies a little heap of reflections, which, so to speak, we sweep aside from the story and keep to build a philosophy with. There is really nothing to stimulate such industry in the pages of Thackeray, Dickens, Trollope, and Mrs Gaskell. A further deficiency (in modern eyes) is that they lack ‘personality’. Cut out a passage and set it apart and it lies unclaimed, unless a trick of rhythm mark it. Yet it may be a merit that personality, the effect not of depth of thought but of the manner of it, should be absent. The tuft of heather that Charlotte Brontë saw was her tuft; Mrs Gaskell’s world was a large place, but it was everybody’s world.

She waited to begin her first novel until she was thirty-four, driven to write by the death of her baby. A mother, a woman who had seen much of life, her instinct in writing was to sympathize with others. Loving men and women, she seems to have done her best, like a wise parent, to keep her own eccentricities in the background. She would devote the whole of her large mind to understanding. That is why, when one begins to read her, one is dismayed by the lack of cleverness.

Carriages still roll along the streets, concerts are still crowded by subscribers, the shops for expensive luxuries still find daily customers, while the workman loiters away his unemployed time in watching these things, and thinking of the pale, uncomplaining wife at home, and the wailing children asking in vain for enough of food—of the sinking health, of the dying life of those near and dear to him. The contrast is too great. Why should he alone suffer from bad times? I know that this is not really the case; and I know what is the truth in such matters; but what I wish to impress is what the workman feels and thinks.

So she misses the contrast. But by adding detail after detail in this profuse impersonal way she nearly achieves what has not been achieved by all our science. Because they are strange and terrible to us, we always see the poor in stress of some kind, so that the violence of their feeling may break through conventions, and, bringing them rudely into touch with us, do away with the need of subtle understanding. But Mrs Gaskell knows how the poor enjoy themselves; how they visit and gossip and fry bacon and lend each other bits of finery and show off their sores. This is the more remarkable because she was hampered by a refined upbringing and traditions of culture. Her working men and women, her outspoken and crabbed old family domestics, are generally more vigorous than her ladies and gentlemen as though a touch of coarseness did her good. How admirable, for instance, is the scene when Mrs Boucher is told of her husband’s death.

‘Hoo mun be told because of th’ inquest. See! hoo’s coming round; shall you or I do it? Or mappen your father would be best?”

‘No; you, you,’ said Margaret.

They awaited her perfect recovery in silence. Then the neighbour woman sat down on the floor, and took Mrs Boucher’s head and shoulders on her lap.

‘Neighbour,’ said she, ‘your man is ded. Guess yo’ how he died?’

‘He were drowned,’ said Mrs Boucher feebly, beginning to cry for the first time at this rough probing of her sorrow.

‘He were found drowned. He were coming home very hopeless o’ aught on earth … I’m not saying he did right, and I’m not saying he did wrong. All I say is, may neither me nor mine ever have his sore heart, or we may do like things/

‘He has left me alone wi’ a’ these children!’ moaned the widow, less distressed at the manner of the death than Margaret expected; but it was of a piece with her helpless character to feel his loss as principally affecting herself and her children.

Too great a refinement gives ‘Cranford’ that prettiness which is the weakest thing about it, making it, superficially at least, the favourite copy for gentle writers who have hired rooms over the village post-office.

When she was a girl, Mrs Gaskell was famous for her ghost stories. A great story-teller she remained to the end, able always in the middle of the thickest book to make us ask ‘What happens next?’ Keeping a diary to catch the overflow of life, observing clouds and trees, moving about among numbers of very articulate men and women, high-spirited, observant, and free from bitterness and bigotry, it seems as though the art of writing came to her as easily as an instinct. She had only to let her pen run to shape a novel. When we look at her work in the mass we remember her world, not her individuals. In spite of Lady Ritchie, who hails Molly Gibson ‘dearest of heroines, a born lady, unconsciously noble and generous in every thought’, in spite of the critic’s praise of her ‘psychological subtlety’, her heroes and heroines remain solid rather than interesting. With all her humour she was seldom witty, and the lack of wit in her character-drawing leaves the edges blunt. These pure heroines, having no such foibles as she loved to draw, no coarseness and no violent passions, depress one like an old acquaintance. One will never get to know them; and that is profoundly sad. One reads her most perhaps because one wishes to have the run of her world. Melt them together, and her books compose a large, bright, country town, widely paved, with a great stir of life in the streets and a decorous row of old Georgian houses standing back from the road. ‘Leaving behind your husband, children, and civilization, you must come out to barbarism, loneliness, and liberty.’ Thus Charlotte Brontë, inviting her to Haworth, compared their lives, and Mrs Gaskell’s comment was ‘Poor Miss Brontë.’ We who never saw her, with her manner ‘gay but definite’, her beautiful face, and her ‘almost perfect arm’, find something of the same delight in her books. What a pleasure it is to read them!

[Times Literary Supplement, Sep 29, 1910]

[]

The Compromise.

[The Life of Mrs Humphry Ward, by Janet Penrose Trevelyan.]

None of the great Victorian reputations has sunk lower than that of Mrs Humphry Ward. Her novels, already strangely out of date, hang in the lumber-room of letters like the mantles of our aunts, and produce in us the same desire that they do to smash the window and let in the air, to light the fire and pile the rubbish on top. Some books fade into a gentle picturesqueness with age. But there is a quality, perhaps a lack of quality, about the novels of Mrs Ward which makes it improbable that, however much they fade, they will ever become picturesque. Their large bunches of jet, their intricate festoons of ribbon, skilfully and firmly fabricated as they are, obstinately resist the endearments of time. But Mrs Trevelyan’s life of her mother makes us consider all this from a different angle. It is an able and serious book, and like all good biographies so permeates us with the sense of the presence of a human being that by the time we have finished it we are more disposed to ask questions than to pass judgments. Let us attempt, in a few words, to hand on the dilemma to our readers.

Of Mrs Ward’s descent there is no need to speak. She had by birth and temperament all those qualities which fitted her, before she was twenty, to be the friend of Mark Pattison, and ‘the best person’, in the opinion of J.R. Green, to be asked to contribute a volume to a history of Spain. There was little, even at the age of twenty, that this ardent girl did not know about the Visigothic Invasion or the reign of Alfonso el Sabio. One of her first pieces of writing, A Morning in the Bodleian, records in priggish but burning words her scholar’s enthusiasm: ‘… let not the young man reading for his pass, the London copyist, or the British Museum illuminator,’ hope to enjoy the delights of literature; that deity will only yield her gifts to ‘the silent ardour, the thirst, the disinterestedness of the true learner’. With such an inscription above the portal, her fate seems already decided. She will marry a Don, she will rear a small family; she will circulate Plain Facts on Infant Feeding in the Oxford slums; she will help to found Somerville College; she will sit up writing learned articles for the Dictionary of Christian Biography; and at last, after a hard life of unremunerative toil, she will finish the book which fired her fancy as a girl and will go down to posterity as the author of a standard work upon the origins of modern Spain. But, as everyone knows, the career which seemed so likely, and would have been so honorable, was interrupted by the melodramatic success of Robert Elsmere. History was entirely forsaken for fiction, and the Origins of Modern Spain became transmuted into the Origins of Modern France, a phantom book which the unfortunate Robert Elsmere never succeeded in writing.

It is here that we begin to scribble in the margin of Mrs Ward’s life those endless notes of interrogation. After Robert Elsmere—which we may grant to have been inevitable—we can never cease to ask ourselves, why? Why desert the charming old house in Russell Square for the splendour and expenses of Grosvenor Place? Why wear beautiful dresses, why keep butlers and carriages, why give luncheon parties and week-end parties, why buy a house in the country and pull it down and build it up again, when all this can only be achieved by writing at breathless speed novels which filial piety calls autumnal, but the critic, unfortunately, must call bad? Mrs Ward might have replied that the compromise, if she agreed to call it so, was entirely justified. Who but a coward would refuse, when cheques for £7,000 dropped out of George Smith’s pocket before breakfast, to spend the money as the great ladies of the Renaissance would have spent it, upon society and entertainment and philanthropy? Without her novel-writing there would have been no centre for good talk in the pretty room overlooking the grounds of Buckingham Palace. Without her novel-writing thousands of poor children would have ranged the streets unsheltered. It is impossible to remain a schoolgirl in the Bodleian for ever, and, once you breast the complicated currents of modern life at their strongest, there is little time to ask questions, and none to answer them. One thing merges in another; one thing leads to another. After an exhausting At Home in Grosvenor Place, she would snatch a meal and drive off to fight the cause of play centres in Bloomsbury. Her success in that undertaking involved her, against her will, in the anti-suffrage campaign. Then, when the war came, this elderly lady of weak health was selected by the highest authorities to peer into shell-holes, and be taken over men-of-war by admirals. Sometimes, says Mrs Trevelyan, eighty letters were dispatched from Stocks in a single day; five hats were bought in the course of one drive to town—‘on spec., darling’; and what with grandchildren and cousins and friends; what with being kind and being unmethodical and being energetic; what with caring more and more passionately for politics, and finding the meetings of liberal churchmen ‘desperately, perhaps disproportionately’ interesting, there was only one half-hour in the whole day left for reading Greek.

It is tempting to imagine what the schoolgirl in the Bodleian would have said to her famous successor, literature has no guerdon for bread-students, to quote the expressive German phrase … only to the silent ardour, the thirst, the disinterestedness of the true learner, is she prodigal of all good gifts.’ But Mrs Humphry Ward, the famous novelist, might have rounded up her critic of twenty. ‘It is all very well,’ she might have said, ‘to accuse me of having wasted my gifts; but the fault lay with you. Yours was the age for seeing visions; and you spent it in dreaming how you stopped the Princess of Wales’s runaway horses, and were rewarded by “a command” to appear at Buckingham Palace. It was you who starved my imagination and condemned it to the fatal compromise.’ And here the elder lady undoubtedly lays her finger upon the weakness of her own work. For the depressing effects of her books must be attributed to the fact that while her imagination always attempts to soar, it always agrees to perch. That is why we never wish to open them again.

In Mrs Trevelyan’s biography these startling discrepancies between youth and age, between ideal and accomplishment, are successfully welded together, as they are in life, by an infinite series of details. She makes it apparent that Mrs Ward was beloved, famous, and prosperous in the highest degree. And if to achieve all this implies some compromise, still—but here we reach the dilemma which we intend to pass on to our readers.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Sep 29, 1923]

[]

Wilcoxiana.

[The Worlds and I by Ella Wheeler Wilcox.]

How can one begin? Where can one leave off? There never was a more difficult book to review. If one puts in the Madame de Staël of Milwaukee, there will be no room for the tea-leaves; if one concentrates upon Helen Pitkin, Raley Husted Bell must be done without. Then all the time there are at least three worlds spinning in and out, and as for Ella Wheeler Wilcox—Mrs Wilcox is indeed the chief problem. It would be easy to make fun of her; equally easy to condescend to her; but it is not at all easy to express what one does feel for her. There is a hint of this complexity in her personal appearance. We write with forty photographs of Mrs Wilcox in front of us. If you omit those with the cats in her arms and the crescent moons in her hair, those stretched on a couch with a book, and those seated on a balustrade between Theodosia Garrison and Rhoda Hero Dunn, all primarily a tribute to the Muse, there remain a number which represent a plump, personable, determined young woman, vain, extremely vivacious, arch, but at the same time sensible, and always in splendid health. She was never a frump at any stage of her career. Rather than look like a bluestocking, she would have forsaken literature altogether. She stuck a rod between her arms to keep her back straight; she galloped over the country on an old farm horse; she defied her mother and bathed naked; at the height of her fame ‘a new stroke in swimming or a new high dive gave me more of a thrill than a new style of verse, great as my devotion to the Muses was, and ever has been’. In short, if one had the pleasure of meeting Mrs Wilcox, one would find her a very well-dressed, vivacious woman of the world. But, alas for the simplicity of the problem! there is not one world but three.

The pre-natal world is indicated rather sketchily. One is given to understand that Mrs Wilcox is appearing for by no means the first time. There have been Ella Wheeler Wilcoxes in Athens and Florence, Rome and Byzantium. She is a recurring, but an improving phenomenon. ‘Being an old soul myself,’ she says, ‘reincarnated many more times than any other member of my family, I knew the truth of spiritual things not revealed to them.’ One gift, at least, of supreme importance she brought with her from the shades—‘I was born with unquenchable hope … I always expected wonderful things to happen to me.’ Without hope, what could she have done? Everything was against her. Her father was an unsuccessful farmer; her mother an embittered woman worn down by a life of child-bearing and hard work; the atmosphere of the home was one of ‘discontent and fatigue and irritability’. They lived far out in the country, five miles from a post office, uncomfortably remote even from the dissipations of Milwaukee. Yet Ella Wheeler never lost her belief in an amazing future before her; she was probably never dull for five minutes together. Although acutely aware that her father’s taste in hats was distressing, and that the farmhouse walls were without creepers, she had the power within her to transform everything to an object of beauty. The buttercups and daisies of the fields looked to her like rare orchids and hothouse roses. When she was galloping to the post on her farm horse, she expected to be thrown at the feet of a knight, or perhaps the miracle would be reversed and it was into her bosom that the knight would be pitched instead. After a day of domestic drudgery, she would climb a little hill and sit in the sunset and dream. Fame was to come from the East, and love and wealth. (As a matter of fact, she notes they came from the West.) At any rate something wonderful was bound to happen. ‘And I would awaken happy in spite of myself, and put all my previous melancholy into verses—and dollars.’ The young woman with the determined mouth never forgot her dollars, and one respects her for saying so. But often Miss Wheeler suggested that in return for what he called her ‘heart wails’ the editor should send her some object from his prize list—bric-à-brac, tableware, pictures—anything to make the farmhouse more like the house of her dreams. Among the rest came six silver forks, and judge of her emotion! conceive the immeasurable romance of the world!—years later she discovered that the silver forks were made by the firm in which her husband was employed.

But it is time to say something of the poetic gift which brought silver forks from Milwaukee, and letters and visits from complete strangers, so that she cannot remember ‘any period of my existence when I have not been before the public eye’. She was taught very little; there were odd volumes of Shakespeare, Ouida, and Gauthier scattered about the house, but no complete sets. She did not wish to read, however. Her passion for writing seems to have been a natural instinct—a gift handed down mature from Heaven, and manifesting itself whenever it chose, without much control or direction from Mrs Wilcox herself. Sometimes the Muse would rise to meet an emergency. ‘Fetch me a pencil and pad!’ she would say, and in the midst of a crowd, to the amazement of the beholders, and to the universal applause, she would dash off precisely the verse required to celebrate the unexpected arrival of General Sherman. Yet sometimes the Muse would obstinately forsake her. What could have been more vexatious than its behaviour in the Hotel Cecil, when Mrs Wilcox wished to write a poem about Queen Victoria’s funeral? She had been sent across the Atlantic for that very purpose. Not a word could she write. The newspaperman was coming for her copy at nine the next morning. She had not put pen to paper when she went to bed. She was in despair. And then at the inconvenient hour of three a.m. the Muse relented. Mrs Wilcox woke with four verses running in her head. ‘I felt an immense sense of relief. I knew I could write something the editor would like; something England would like.’ And, indeed, The Queen’s Last Ride’ was set to music by a friend of King Edward’s, and sung in the presence of the entire Royal family, one of whom afterwards graciously sent her a message of thanks.

Capricious and fanciful, nevertheless the Muse has a heart of gold; she never does desert Mrs Wilcox. Every experience turns, almost of its own accord and at the most unexpected moments, to verse. She goes to stay with friends; she sits next a young widow in the omnibus. She forgets all about it. But as she stands before the looking-glass fastening her white dress in the evening, something whispers to her:

Laugh and the world laughs with you,

Weep and you weep alone,

For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,

It has trouble enough of its own.

The following morning at the breakfast table I recited the quatrain to the Judge and his wife … and the Judge, who was a great Shakespearean scholar said, ‘Ella, if you keep the remainder of the poem up to that epigrammatic standard, you will have a literary gem.’

She did keep the poem up to that standard! and two days later he said, ‘Ella, that is one of the biggest things you ever did, and you are mistaken in thinking it uneven in merit, it is all good and up to the mark.’ Such is the depravity of mankind, however, that a wretched creature called Joyce, belonging to ‘the poison-insect order of humanity,’ as Mrs Wilcox says, afterwards claimed that he had written ‘Solitude’ himself—written it, too, upon the head of a whisky barrel in a wine-room.

A poetess also was very trying. Mrs Wilcox, who is generosity itself, detected unusual genius in her verse, and fell in love with the idea of playing Fairy Godmother to the provincial poetess. She invited her to stay at an hotel, and gave a party in her honour. Mrs Croly, Mrs Leslie, Robert Ingersoll, Nym Crinkle, and Harriet Webb all came in person. The carriages extended many blocks down the street. Several of the young woman’s poems were recited; ‘there was some good music and a tasteful supper’. Moreover, each guest, on leaving, was given a piece of ribbon upon which was printed the verse that Mrs Wilcox so much admired. What more could she have done? And yet the ungrateful creature went off with the barest words of thanks; scarcely answered letters; refused to explain her motives, and stayed in New York with an eminent literary man without letting Mrs Wilcox know.

To this day when I see the occasional gems of beauty which still fall from this poet’s pen I feel the old wound ache in my heart … Life, however, always supplies a balm after it has wounded us … The spring following this experience my husband selected a larger apartment.

For by this time Ella Wheeler was Wilcox.

She first met Mr Wilcox in a jeweller’s shop in Milwaukee. He was engaged in the sterling-silver business, and she had run in to ask the time. Ironically enough, she never noticed him. There was Mr Wilcox, a large, handsome man with a Jewish face and a deep bass voice, doing business with the jeweller, and she never noticed his presence. Out she went again, anxious only to be in time for dinner, and thought no more about it. A few days later a very distinguished-looking letter arrived in a blue envelope. Might Mr Wilcox be presented to her? ‘I knew it was, according to established ideas, bordering on impropriety, yet I so greatly admired the penmanship and stationery of my would-be acquaintance that I was curious to know more of him.’ They corresponded. Mr Wilcox’s letters were ‘sometimes a bit daring’, but never sentimental; and they were always enclosed in envelopes ‘of a very beautiful shade’, while ‘the crest on the paper seemed to lead me away from everything banal and common’. And then the Oriental paper-knife arrived. This had an extraordinary effect upon her such as had hitherto been produced only by reading ‘a rare poem, or hearing lovely music, or in the presence of some of Ouida’s exotic descriptions’. She went to Chicago and met Mr Wilcox in the flesh. He seemed to her—correctly dressed and very cultured in manner as he was—‘like a man from Mars’. Soon afterwards they were married, and almost immediately Mr Wilcox, to the profound joy of his wife, expressed his belief in the immortality of the soul.

Mrs Wilcox was now established in New York, the admired centre of a circle of “very worth-while people’. Her dreams in the sunset were very nearly realized. The Bungalow walls were covered with autographs of brilliant writers and the sketches of gifted artists. Universal brotherhood was attempted. It was the rule of the house ‘to treat mendicants with sympathy and peddlers with respect’. No one left without ‘some little feeling of uplift’. What was wanting? In the first place, ‘the highbrows have never had any use for me’. The highbrows could be dispatched with a phrase. “May you grow at least a sage bush of a heart to embellish your desert of intellect!’

All the same, in her next incarnation she will have nothing to do with genius. To be a gifted poet is a glory; to be a worth-while woman is a greater glory.’ There are moments when she wishes that the Muse would leave her at peace. To be the involuntary mouthpiece of Songs of Purpose, Passion, and Power, greet the war with Hello, Boys, and death with Sonnets of Sorrow and Triumph, to feel that at any moment a new gem may form or a fresh cameo compose itself, what fate could be more appalling? Yet such has been the past, and such must be the future, of Ella Wheeler Wilcox.

[Athenaeum, Sep 19, 1919]

[]

The Genius of Boswell.

[Letters of James Boswell to the Rev. W. J. Temple.]

The letters which are here reprinted have had an adventurous history. It was in the year 1850 that a gentleman making a purchase at Boulogne found that his parcel was wrapped in sheets of old manuscript. The sheets proved to be letters written by Boswell to the Rev. W.J. Temple, an ancestor of the archbishop, and when the rest of the series had been recovered from the paper merchant they were published in 1857 by Richard Bentley, with an introduction from the hand of an anonymous editor. Mr Seccombe, who introduces the present edition, conjectures that his predecessor was Sir Philip Francis, of the Supreme Consular Court of the Levant. If, as there is reason to think, Boswell never wrote without some thought of posterity, his ghost must have gone through a long time of suspense. The edition of 1857 was greeted with applause by the critics; ‘The Times devoted six entire columns to a review of the book’; but it was sold out in under two years (a fire, it is thought, helping to destroy it), and there has been no reprint of the book until the present time. There must be many, then, who love their Boswell, but have never read his letters—many, therefore, who will thank Messrs Sidgwick and Jackson for the handsome shape of the volume and Mr Seccombe for the skill and humour with which he has introduced his subject. When a man has had the eyes of Carlyle and Macaulay fixed upon him it may well seem that there is nothing fresh to be said. And yet each of these observers came to a very different conclusion; Carlyle, although he called Boswell ‘an ill-assorted, glaring mixture of the highest and the lowest’ contrived to make him glow with much of the splendour of the true hero-worshipper; and Macaulay indulged in the famous paradox, which, like the twisted mirror in the fair, shows us the human body with corkscrew legs and an undulating face. Mr Seccombe is not so amusing, but he is far more judicious. He has no theory to parade, and he has had the advantage of studying the letters; he can talk thus of ‘a tender-hearted man’ in spite of ‘ludicrous immoralities’; he can see that Boswell was a ‘great artist’ as well as a ‘freak’. The letters certainly tend to make the usual discrepancies less marked, because they show that Boswell existed independently of Johnson, and had many qualities besides those that we are wont to allow him. To read a man’s letters after reading his works has much the same effect as staying with him in his own house after meeting him in full dress at dinner parties.

The letters begin in 1758, when Boswell was a boy of eighteen; they end a few months only before his death, and though they are scattered with wide gaps over a great many years, the story is continuous—there is a glimpse of Boswell on every page. The Rev. W.J. Temple met Boswell in the Greek class at Edinburgh University; he held the living of Mamhead and then the living of St Gluvias in Cornwall, and Mr Seccombe describes him, judging from published correspondence (unluckily it is not to Boswell), as a ‘dissatisfied atrabilious man’. But there is no doubt that he provided Boswell with a perfect audience. He was neither illustrious, like Johnson, nor a humorous correspondent, like the Hon. Andrew Erskine, but he was a contemporary, a man with literary ambitions, and a cleric. They shared their loves and their ‘hopes of future greatness’; and it was under ‘the solemn yew’ at Mamhead that Boswell made one of his vows. Temple, who had received the earliest of Boswell’s confidences, who had reflected the image of what Boswell would like to be, was used ever after as the person who had a right to know what became of Boswell. During the first years of the correspondence he acted the part of the brilliant but irresponsible young man, whose follies are a proof of his spirit. He was a Newmarket courser yoked to a dung-cart; he was ‘a sad dupe—a perfect Don Quixote’; his life was ‘one of the most romantic that I believe either you or I really know of; his scenes with his ‘charmers’ were incredible. In short, with such a turmoil of gifts and failings buzzing through his brain, he was often really at a loss to account for himself. There were so many attitudes, and they were all so striking; should he be a Don Juan, or the friend of Johnson and Paoli, or the ‘great man at Adamtown’? And then, because he finds himself writing ‘in a library forty feet long’, these visions fade, and he determines to live like ‘the most privileged spirits of antiquity’. He imagines himself with his folios before him the head of a great family and an erudite country gentleman. He was always imagining himself; it is difficult to decide how much of genuine feeling he put into these imaginations. He had affairs with half-a-dozen ladies before he married; he went through ecstasy and anguish; they failed him or they did not deserve him; but he was never driven from his elegant and half quizzical attitude, like a man who is conscious that he has the eye of the audience upon him. ‘Come why do I allow myself to be uneasy for a Scots lass? Rouse me, my friend! I must have an Englishwoman … You cannot say how fine a woman I may marry; perhaps a Howard or some other of the noblest in the kingdom.’

Was it his vanity that made him such good company? For the vanity of Boswell was a rare quality. It kept him alive and it gave a point to him. He was not anxious merely to display all his emotions, but he was anxious to make them tell. He left out much that other people put in, and directly that he had a pen in his hand he became a natural artist. One may go further, indeed, and credit him with a sense that was oddly at variance with his egoism and his garrulity; a sense, as it seems, that something of value lay hidden in other people also beneath the babble of talk. ‘I got from my lord a good deal of his life. He says he will put down some particulars of himself if I will put them together and publish them.’ In order to get from a man a good deal of his life you must be able to convince him that you see something that he wishes to have seen, so that your curiosity is not impertinent. Boswell was not content, after all, with a view of a ‘visible progress through the world’; it was ‘a view of the mind in letters and conversation’ that he sought, and sought with all the rashness of a hero. He had the gift, which is rare as it is beautiful, of being able ‘to contemplate with supreme delight those distinguished spirits by which God is sometimes pleased to honour humanity’. Perhaps that was the reason why most people found something to like in him; it was a part of his wonderful sense of the romance and excitement of life.

His intense consciousness of himself made his progress like a pageant, and every day was a fresh adventure. If he dined out he noticed that there were ‘three sorts of ice creams’; he noticed the handsome maid; he noticed whether people liked him, and he remembered what clothes he wore. ‘It is hardly credible what ground I go over, and what a variety of men and manners I contemplate every day, and all the time I am myself pars magna, for my exuberant spirits will not let me listen enough.’ But as time went on this same exuberance was his undoing; he could never cease imagining, and settle to what lay before him. He made vows in St Paul’s Church and under solemn yews; he vowed to reform and read the classics; he broke them the day after and was carried home drunk; and then ‘all the doubts which have ever disturbed thinking men’ came over him, and he lay awake at night ‘dreading annihilation’. It is characteristic that he helped himself out of his depression by remembering that worthy men like Temple cared for him. He used his friends to reflect his virtues. It is possible, too, that as the years failed to fulfil his hopes he was teased by a suspicion that other people had found something that he had missed. He had conceived too many possibilities to be content to realize one only, and now again he was able to see, as he saw everything, that he had somehow failed in life. ‘O Temple, Temple, is this realizing any of our towering hopes which have so often been the subject of our conversations and letters?” he exclaimed. Was there, perhaps, as he was wont to hint, some strain of madness in him that made his will shake always before an effort? ‘Why should I struggle?’ he breaks out. ‘I certainly am constitutionally unfit for any employment.’ Was it madness or some power allied to genius that let him see in sudden incongruous flashes, as the scene shifted round him, how strange it all was? To get the full impression it would be necessary to quote letters at length; but when we read (for example) the letter upon the death of his wife with its grief for ‘my dear, dear Peggy’, and its glory in the nineteen carriages that followed the hearse, and its repentance and its genuine cry of dismay and bewilderment, we feel that Boswell, as he sat and wrote it, had something of the clown in Shakespeare in him. It was granted to this scatter-brained and noisy man with a head full of vanity and grossness to exclaim with the poets and the sages, ‘What a motley scene is life!’

It would be more rash in his case than in another’s to say what he felt or how strongly he felt it; and yet, whether it was due to his wife’s death or whether his system really proved impossible, his fortunes from that time dwindled away. His hopes of preferment were disappointed; he failed at the English bar; and to hearten himself he drank more than ever. But we should underrate the amazing vitality that clung to the shreds of him if we believed that he shuffled out of life, a dejected and disreputable figure, by some back door. There was still a twinkle of curiosity in his eye; the great lips were moist and garrulous as ever. But there is a harsh strain henceforward in his chatter, as though some note had cracked with too much strumming. Someone stole his wig, ‘a jest that was very ill-timed to one in my situation’, but was probably irresistible. Then he began to finger ‘several matrimonial schemes’, to plume himself that his classical quotations had not deserted him, and to run after a certain Miss Bagnal. Mr Temple, near the end of their strange correspondence, had to admonish him, for Boswell answers, Tour suggestion as to my being carried off in a state of intoxication is awful.’ How was he ‘carried off’ in the end? Were his wits fuddled with wine and was his imagination dazed with terror, and did some snatch of an old song come to his lips? It is strange how one wonders, with an inquisitive kind of affection, what Boswell felt; it always seems possible with him as with living people that if one watches closely enough one will know. But when we try to say what the secret is, then we understand why Boswell was a genius.

[Times Literary Supplement, Jan 21, 1909]

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Shelley and Elizabeth Hitchener.

[Letters from P. B. Shelley to Elizabeth Hitchener, edited by Bertram Dobell.]

Lovers of literature have once more to thank Mr Dobell for discharging one of those patient and humble services which only true devotion will take the pains to perform. Shelley’s letters to Miss Hitchener have already been printed, indeed, but privately; and now we have them issued in a delightful shape, enriched with an introduction and with notes by Mr Dobell himself, so that one more chapter in the life of Shelley becomes plainer and more substantial. Nor can it be objected that the piety in this instance is excessive, for although the letters are chiefly remarkable because they illustrate the nature of a boy who was, five or six years later, to write consummate poetry, still Shelley’s character is always amazing. And in spite of the verbosity and the pale platitudes of his style in 1811, it is impossible to read the letters without an exquisite sense of faded scenes come to life again, and dull people set talking, and all the country houses and respectable Sussex vicarages once more alive with ladies and gentlemen who exclaim, ‘What! a Shelley an Atheist!’ and add their weight to the intense comedy and tragedy of his life.

Elizabeth Hitchener was a schoolmistress at Hurstpierpoint, and Shelley first knew her in 1811 when he was nineteen and she was twenty-eight. She was the daughter of a man who kept a public house and was, or had been, a smuggler; and all her education was due to a Mrs Adams, who is called, in the language of the letters, ‘the mother of my soul’. Miss Hitchener was thin, tall, and dark, an austere intellectual woman with a desire for better things than the society of a country village could afford her, although she was not, as Shelley was eager to assure her, a Deist and a Republican. But she was probably the first clever women he had met; she was oppressed, lonely, misunderstood, and in need of someone with whom she could discuss the pleasant agitations of her soul. Shelley rushed into the correspondence with enthusiasm; and she, no doubt, though a little mystified and awkward in her flight, was touched and anxious to prove herself as passionate, as philanthropic, and almost as revolutionary as he was. Shelley’s first letter indicates the nature of the friendship; he speaks of certain books which, in the manner of ardent young men, he had thrust upon her—Locke, The Curse of Kehama’, and Ensor’s ‘National Education’. He goes on to attack her Christianity, exclaims that ‘Truth is my God,’ and ends up, ‘But see Ensor on the subject of poetry.’ It would be delightful if we could have Miss Hitchener’s letters also, for some allusions in Shelley’s answers show the way in which, on occasion, she would try to cap his speculations. ‘All nature,’ she wrote, ‘but that of horses is harmonical; and he is born to misery because he is a horse.’ An Ode on the Rights of Women began,

All, all are men—women and all!

But it is clear enough, without her replies, that Shelley was not anxiously concerned with the state of her mind. He assumed easily that she was of a more exalted temper than he was; so that it was not necessary to investigate details, but he might pour forth to her, as to some impersonal deity, the surprising discoveries and ardent convictions which come, with such bewildering rapidity, when for the first time the world asks a definite question and literature supplies a variety of answers. The poor schoolmistress, we can gather, took vague alarm when she found to what a mate she had attached herself, to what speculations she was driven, what opinions she must embrace; and yet there was a strange and not laughable exhilaration in it, which urged her on. The relationship, moreover, was soon justified by Shelley’s marriage with Harriet Westbrook, and her approval of the correspondence. It was to be a spiritual companionship, in no way inspired by carnal love of that ‘lump of organized matter which enshrines thy soul’; and, further, there was the insidious bait which Shelley offered, with his curious lack of humanity, in the letter which explains why he married Harriet. He begged the ‘sister of his soul’ to help him in educating his wife. ‘Blame me [for the marriage] if thou wilt, dearest friend, for still thou art dearest to me; yet pity even this error, if thou blamest me.’ Miss Hitchener, it is clear, was keenly susceptible” to praise of her mind which so subtly implied a closer tie; her letters became voluminous, and showed, so Shelley declared, ‘the embryon of a mighty intellect’. But the prophetess kept one shrewd and sensible and, it must be added, honourable eye upon the earth; she was well aware that Harriet might become jealous, nor could she disregard the mischievous chatter of Cuckfield gossips and attend only, as Shelley bade her, to the majestic approval of her conscience. Tragedy, of a sordid and substantial kind, was bound sooner or later to dissolve this incongruous alliance between the rushing poet, whose wings grew stronger every day, and the painstaking but closely tethered woman. The illusion was only sustained because for so long Shelley was in Wales or Cumberland or Ireland, and the lady remained at Hurstpierpoint, earning her living, which was noble in itself, and teaching small children, which was yet nobler; for to teach is ‘to propagate intellect … every error conquered, every mind enlightened, is so much added to the progression of human perfectibility”. Then the first of the poet’s illusions was terribly destroyed; Hogg’s treachery was discovered; and poor Shelley, more in need than ever of understanding, turned wholly to his ‘almost only friend’, as he calls her in the letter which tells her of the blow.

His desire, reiterated with the utmost emphasis, was that Elizabeth should join his wandering household directly; and Harriet, in some of the most interesting letters in the volume, was made to add her entreaty to his, in a tone that tried, with some pathos, to imitate his enthusiasm and generosity, but would lapse easily, it is clear, into plaintive common-sense when he was out of hearing. Miss Hitchener for a long while declined, for a variety of reasons; she would have to give up her school, her only support, depend entirely on Shelley, defy her father, and, besides, people would talk. But these arguments, coming on the top of so much impassioned rhetoric, were inadmissible; ‘the hatred of the world’, Shelley declared, ‘is despicable to you. Come, come, and share with us the noblest success, or the most glorious martyrdom. Assert your freedom … Your pen … ought to trace characters for a nation’s perusal’. Whatever the reason, she yielded at length, and set off in July 1812, on her disastrous expedition to Devonshire. For a time all acted up to their high missions; Portia (for ‘Elizabeth’ was already sacred to Harriet’s sister), discussed ‘innate passions, God, Christianity, &c.’, with Shelley, walked with him, and condescended so far as to exchange the name Portia, which Harriet did not like—‘I had thought it would have been one more common and pleasing to the ear”—for Bessy. Professor Dowden gives us a singular picture of the time; Shelley and the tall dark woman, who is taken by some for a maidservant, wander on the shore together, and set bottles and chests stuffed with revolutionary pamphlets floating out to sea, uttering words of ecstatic prophecy over them. Within doors she wrote from his dictation and read as he directed. But the decline of this artificial virtue was inevitable; the women were the first to discover that the others were impostors; and soon Shelley himself veered round with childlike passion. The spiritual sister and prophetess became simply The Brown Demon’, ‘a woman of desperate views and dreadful passions’, who must be got rid of even at the cost of a yearly allowance of a hundred pounds. It is not known whether she ever received it; but there is a very credible tradition that she recovered her senses, after her startling downfall, and lived a respectable and laborious life at Edmonton, sweetened by the reading of the poets, and the memory of her romantic indiscretions with the truest of them all.

[Times Literary Supplement, Mar 5, 1908]

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Literary Geography.

[The Thackeray Country, by Lewis Melville. The Dickens Country, by F. G. Kitton.]

These two books belong to what is called the ‘Pilgrimage’ series, and before undertaking the journey it is worth considering in what spirit we do so. We are are either pilgrims from sentiment, who find something stimulating to the imagination in the fact that Thackeray rang this very door bell or that Dickens shaved behind that identical window, or we are scientific in our pilgrimage and visit the country where a great novelist lived in order to see to what extent he was influenced by his surroundings. Both motives are often combined and can be legitimately satisfied; as, for instance, in the case of Scott or the Brontës, George Meredith or Thomas Hardy. Each of these novelists may be said to possess a spiritual sovereignty which no one else can dispute. They have made the country theirs because they have so interpreted it as to have given it an ineffaceable shape in our minds, so that we know certain parts of Scotland, of Yorkshire, of Surrey, and of Dorset as intimately as we know the men and women who have their dwelling there. Novelists who are thus sensitive to the inspiration of the land are alone able to describe the natives who are in some sense the creatures of the land. Scott’s men and women are Scotch; Miss Brontë loves her moors so well that she can draw as no one else can the curious type of human being that they produce; and so we may say not only that novelists own a country, but that all who dwell in it are their subjects. It seems a little incongruous to talk of the Thackeray ‘country’ or the Dickens ‘country’ in this sense; for the word calls up a vision of woods and fields, and you may read through a great number of these masters’ works without finding any reason to believe that the whole world is not paved with cobble stones. Both Thackeray and Dickens were Londoners; the country itself comes very seldom into their books, and the country man or woman—the characteristic product of the country—hardly at all. But to say that, a man is a Londoner implies only that he is not one of the far more definite class of countrymen; it does not stamp him as belonging to any recognized type.

In the case of Thackeray any such definition is more than usually absurd; he was, as Mr Melville remarks, a cosmopolitan; with London for a basis he travelled everywhere; and it follows that the characters in his books are equally citizens of the world. ‘Man and not scenery’, says Mr Melville, ‘was what he strove to portray’; and it is because he took so vast and various a subject that the only possible scene for a pilgrim in Thackeray’s footsteps is the great world of London. And even in London, the scene of ‘Vanity Fair’, of ‘Pendennis’, of ‘The Newcomes’, it is not easy to decide upon the exact shrine at which we are to offer incense. Thackeray did not consider the feelings of these devout worshippers, and left many of his localities vague. Whole districts rather than individual streets and houses seem to be his; and though we are told that he knew exactly where Becky and Colonel Newcome and Pendennis lived, the photographs of the authentic houses somehow leave one’s imagination cold. To imprison these immortals between brick walls strikes one as an unnecessary act of violence; they have always tenanted their own houses in our brains, and we refuse to let them go elsewhere. But there can be no such risk in following Thackeray himself from one house to another; and we may perhaps find that it adds to our knowledge of him and of his books to see where he lived when he was writing them and what surroundings met his eye. But here again we must select. Charterhouse and the Temple, Jermyn-street, and Young-street, Kensington, are the genuine Thackeray country, which seems to echo not only his presence but his spirit; these are the places that he has interpreted as well as pictured. But it needs either a boundless imagination or a mind that holds sacred the boots and umbrellas of the great to follow Thackeray with unflagging interest in his journeyings to Ireland, to America, and to all parts of the Continent; and at No. 36 Onslow-square, Brompton, the most devoted pilgrim might find it difficult to bend the knee.

We do less violence to the truth if, in our love of classification, we describe Dickens as a cockney. We might draw a very distinct line round London—even round certain districts of London—if we wished to circumscribe his kingdom. It is true that the late Mr Kitton, who brought what we must consider a superfluous zeal and a too minute knowledge to the task, begins his book with two or three pictures of Portsmouth and Chatham. We are asked to imagine the child Dickens as he looked at the stars from the upper window of No. 18 St Mary’s-place, and we are assured that he enjoyed many a ramble with his sister and nurse in the fields near Chatham. The imagination oppressed with these details has to bear an altogether insupportable load before it has followed Dickens to his last resting place. Mr Melville was wise enough to ignore the ‘hundred and one places of minor importance’ in writing of Thackeray and select only those that seemed to him of primary interest—from which the reader will probably make a further selection. But Mr Kitton, whose mind was a unique storehouse of facts about Dickens, lets us have the full benefit of his curiously minute scholarship. He knows not only every house where Dickens lived, but every lodging that he took for a month or two in the summer; he tells us how Dickens seemed to prefer “houses having semi-circular frontages’ and describes the inns where Dickens lodged and the mugs from which he is said to have drunk and the ‘stiff wooden chair’ in which he sat. A pilgrimage, if one followed this guide, would be a very serious undertaking; and we doubt whether the pilgrim at the end would know very much more about Dickens and his writings than he did at the beginning. The most vivid and valuable part of the book is that which describes the various dwelling places of Dickens as a young man before he was famous and could afford a ‘frightfully first-class family mansion’, as he calls it. It was while he lived in these dreary and dingy back streets in Camdentown and the neighbourhood of the Debtors’ Prison that Dickens absorbed the view of life which he was afterwards to reproduce so brilliantly. These early experiences, indeed, read like the first sketch for David Copperfield. No one probably has ever known his London so intimately as Dickens did, or has painted the life of the streets with such first-hand knowledge. He was not really happy when he was alone. He made one or two conscientious expeditions into the country in search of local colour, but when it had yielded the words he wanted he had no further use for it. He spent his summer holidays at various seaside resorts, and in London he lived in a variety of houses which leave no single impression upon the mind. Indeed, the book is such an accumulation of detail that it is, after all, from his own writings that one must draw one’s impression of the Dickens country.

And perhaps, when everything is said, this is always bound to be the case. A writer’s country is a territory within his own brain; and we run the risk of disillusionment if we try to turn such phantom cities into tangible brick and mortar. We know our way there without signposts or policemen, and we can greet the passers by without need of introduction. No city indeed is so real as this that we make for ourselves and people to our liking; and to insist that it has any counterpart in the cities of the earth is to rob it of half its charm. In the same way too the great dead come to each of us in their own guise, and their image is more palpable and enduring than any shapes of flesh and blood. Of all books therefore the books that try to impress upon the mind the fact that great men were once alive because they lived in this house or in that are those that seem to have least reason for their being, for Thackeray and Dickens, having done with earthly houses, live most certainly in our brains.

[Times Literary Supplement, Mar 10, 1905]

[]

Flumina Amem Silvasque.

[A Literary Pilgrim in England, by Edward Thomas.]

It is a proof of the snobbishness which, no doubt, veins us through that the mere thought of a literary pilgrim makes us imagine a man in an ulster looking up earnestly at a house front decorated with a tablet, and bidding his anaemic and docile brain conjure up the figure of Dr Johnson. But we must confess that we have done the same thing dozens of times, rather stealthily perhaps, and choosing a darkish day lest the ghosts of the dead should discover us, yet getting some true pleasure and profit nevertheless. We cannot get past a great writer’s house without pausing to give an extra look into it and furnishing it as far as we are able with his cat and his dog, his books and his writing table. We may justify the instinct by the fact that the dominion which writers have over us is immensely personal; it is their actual voice that we hear in the rise and fall of the sentence; their shape and colour that we see in the page, so that even their old shoes have a way of being worn on this side rather than on that, which seems not gossip but revelation. We speak of writers; the military or medical or legal pilgrim may exist, but we fancy that the present of his heroes’ old boots would show him nothing but leather.

Edward Thomas was as far removed from our imaginary pilgrim as well may be. He had a passion for English country and a passion for English literature; and he had stored enough knowledge of the lives of his heroes to make it natural for him to think of them when walking through their country and to speculate whether the influence of it could be traced in their writing. The objection that most writers have no particular country he met in a variety of ways, which are all excellent, and many of them illuminating, because they sprang from the prejudices and preferences of a well-stocked mind. There is no need to take alarm, as we confess to have done, at finding that the counties are distributed among the poets; there is no trace whatever of the ‘one can imagine’ and ‘no doubt’ style of writing.

On the contrary the poets and the counties are connected on the most elastic and human principle; and if in the end it turns out that the poet was not born there, did not live there, or quite probably had no place at all in his mind when he wrote, his neglect is shown to be quite as characteristic as his sensibility. Blake, for instance, comes under London and the Home Counties; and it is true that, as it is necessary to live somewhere, he lived both in London and at Felpham, near Bognor. But there is no reason to think that the tree that was filled with angels was peculiar to Peckham Rye, or that the bulls that ‘each morning drag the sulphur Sun out of the Deep’ were to be seen in the fields of Sussex. ‘Natural objects always did and do weaken, deaden, and obliterate imagination in me!’ he wrote, and the statement, which might have annoyed a specialist determined to pin a poet down, starts Mr Thomas off upon a most interesting discussion of the state of mind thus revealed. After all, considering that we must live either in the country or in the town, the person who does not notice one or the other is more eccentric than the person who does. It is a fine opening into the mind of Blake.

But the poets, as Mr Thomas shows, are an extremely capricious race, and do for the most part show a bird’s or butterfly’s attachment to some particular locality. You will always find Shelley near the water; Wordsworth among the hills; and Meredith within sixty miles of London. Matthew Arnold, although associated with the Thames, is, as Mr Thomas points out in one of those critical passages which make his book like the talk of a very good talker, most particularly the poet of the garden and of the highly cultivated land.

I know these slopes; who knows them, if not I?

‘has the effect of reducing the landscape to garden scale’. There is, he points out, ‘a kind of allegorical thinness’ about Arnold’s country, ‘as if it were chiefly a symbol of escape from the world of “men and towns” ‘. Indeed, if one takes a bird’s-eye view of Arnold’s poetry the background seems to consist of a moonlit lawn, with a sad but not passionate nightingale singing in a cedar tree of the sorrows of mankind. It is much less easy to reduce our vision of the landscape of Keats to something marked upon a map. We should be inclined to call him more the poet of a season than the poet of a place. Mr Thomas puts him down under London and the Home Counties because he lived there. But although he began as most writers do by describing what he saw, that was exercise work, and very soon he came to ‘hate descriptions’. And thus he wrote some of the most beautiful descriptions in the language, for in spite of many famous and exact passages the best descriptions are the least accurate, and represent what the poet saw with his eyes shut when the landscape had melted indistinguishably into the mood. This brings us, of course, into conflict with Tennyson. The Tennysonian method of sifting words until the exact shade and shape of the flower or the cloud had its equivalent phrase has produced many wonderful examples of minute skill, much like the birds’ nests and blades of grass of the pre-Raphaelite painters. Watching the dead leaves fall in autumn, we may remember that Tennyson has given precisely the phrase we want, ‘flying gold of the ruin’d woodlands’; but for the whole spirit of autumn we go to Keats. He has the mood and not the detail.

The most exact of poets, however, is quite capable of giving us the slip if the occasion seems to him to demand it; and as his theme is most often a moment of life or of vision, so his frozen stream, or west wind, or ruined castle is chosen for the sake of that mood and not for themselves. When that ‘sense of England’, as Mr Thomas calls it, comes over us driving us to seek a book that expresses it, we turn to the prose writers most probably—to Borrow, Hardy, the Brontës, Gilbert White. The sense of country which both Mr Hardy and Emily Brontë possess is so remarkable that a volume might be spent in discussion of it. We should scarcely exaggerate our own belief if we said that both seem to forecast a time when character will take on a different aspect under the novelist’s hand, when he will be less fearful of the charge of unreality, less careful of the twitterings and chatterings which now make our puppets so animated and for the most part so ephemeral. Through the half-shut eyes with which we visualize books as a whole, we can see great tracts of Wessex and of the Yorkshire Moors inhabited by a race of people who seem to have the rough large outline of the land itself. It is not with either of these writers a case of the word-painter’s gift; for though they may have their detachable descriptions, the element we mean is rubbed deep into the texture and moulds every part. Ruskin, we observe, who did the description pure and simple to perfection, is not quoted by Mr Thomas; and the omission, which seems to us right, is a pleasant sign of the individual quality of the pilgrimage. We have seldom read a book indeed which gives a better feeling of England than this one. Never perfunctory or conventional, but always saying what strikes him as the true or interesting or characteristic thing, Mr Thomas brings the very look of the fields and roads before us; he brings the poets, too; and no one will finish the book without a sense that he knows and respects the author.

[Times Literary Supplement, Oct 11, 1917]

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Haworth, November 1904.

I do not know whether pilgrimages to the shrines of famous men ought not to be condemned as sentimental journeys. It is better to read Carlyle in your own study chair than to visit the sound-proof room and pore over the manuscripts at Chelsea. I should be inclined to set an examination on Frederick the Great in place of entrance fee; only, in that case, the house would soon have to be shut up. The curiosity is only legitimate when the house of a great writer or the country in which it is set adds something to our understanding of his books. This justification you have for a pilgrimage to the home and country of Charlotte Brontë and her sisters.

The Life, by Mrs Gaskell, gives you the impression that Haworth and the Brontës are somehow inextricably mixed. Haworth expresses the Brontës; the Brontës express Haworth; they fit like a snail to its shell. How far surroundings radically affect people’s minds, it is not for me to ask: superficially, the influence is great, but it is worth asking if the famous parsonage had been placed in a London slum, the dens of Whitechapel would not have had the same result as the lonely Yorkshire moors. However, I am taking away my only excuse for visiting Haworth. Unreasonable or not, one of the chief points of a recent visit to Yorkshire was that an expedition to Haworth could be accomplished. The necessary arrangements were made, and we determined to take advantage of the first day for our expedition. A real northern snowstorm had been doing the honours of the moors. It was rash to wait fine weather, and it was also cowardly. I understand that the sun very seldom shone on the Brontë family, and if we chose a really fine day we should have to make allowance for the fact that fifty years ago there were few fine days at Haworth, and that we were, therefore, for sake of comfort, rubbing out half the shadows in the picture. However, it would be interesting to see what impression Haworth could make upon the brilliant weather of Settle. We certainly passed through a very cheerful land, which might be likened to a vast wedding cake, of which the icing was slightly undulating; the earth was bridal in its virgin snow, which helped to suggest the comparison.

Keighley—pronounced Keethly—is often mentioned in the Life; it was the big town four miles from Haworth in which Charlotte walked to make her more important purchases—her wedding gown, perhaps, and the thin little cloth boots which we examined under glass in the Brontë Museum. It is a big manufacturing town, hard and stony, and clattering with business, in the way of these Northern towns. They make small provision for the sentimental traveller, and our only occupation was to picture the slight figure of Charlotte trotting along the streets in her thin mantle, hustled into the gutter by more burly passers-by. It was the Keighley of her day, and that was some comfort. Our excitement as we neared Haworth had in it an element of suspense that was really painful, as though we were to meet some long-separated friend, who might have changed in the interval—so clear an image of Haworth had we from print and picture. At a certain point we entered the valley, up both sides of which the village climbs, and right on the hill-top, looking down over its parish, we saw the famous oblong tower of the church. This marked the shrine at which we were to do homage.

It may have been the effect of a sympathetic imagination, but I think that there were good reasons why Haworth did certainly strike one not exactly as gloomy, but, what is worse for artistic purposes, as dingy and commonplace. The houses, built of yellow-brown stone, date from the early nineteenth century. They climb the moor step by step in little detached strips, some distance apart, so that the town instead of making one compact blot on the landscape has contrived to get a whole stretch into its clutches. There is a long line of houses up the moor-side, which clusters round the church and parsonage with a little clump of trees. At the top the interest for a Brontë lover becomes suddenly intense. The church, the parsonage, the Brontë Museum, the school where Charlotte taught, and the Bull Inn where Branwell drank are all within a stone’s throw of each other. The museum is certainly rather a pallid and inanimate collection of objects. An effort ought to be made to keep things out of these mausoleums, but the choice often lies between them and destruction, so that we must be grateful for the care which has preserved much that is, under any circumstances, of deep interest. Here are many autograph letters, pencil drawings, and other documents. But the most touching case—so touching that one hardly feels reverent in one’s gaze—is that which contains the little personal relics, the dresses and shoes of the dead woman. The natural fate of such things is to die before the body that wore them, and because these, trifling and transient though they are, have survived, Charlotte Brontë the woman comes to life, and one forgets the chiefly memorable fact that she was a great writer. Her shoes and her thin muslin dress have outlived her. One other object gives a thrill; the little oak stool which Emily carried with her on her solitary moorland tramps, and on which she sat, if not to write, as they say, to think what was probably better than her writing.

The church, of course, save part of the tower, is renewed since Brontë days, but that remarkable churchyard remains. The old edition of the Life had on its title-page a little print which struck the keynote of the book; it seemed to be all graves—gravestones stood ranked all round; you walked on a pavement lettered with dead names; the graves had solemnly invaded the garden of the parsonage itself, which was as a little oasis of life in the midst of the dead. This is no exaggeration of the artist’s, as we found: the stones seem to start out of the ground at you in tall, upright lines, like an army of silent soldiers. There is no hand’s breadth untenanted; indeed, the economy of space is somewhat irreverent. In old days a flagged path, which suggested the slabs of graves, led from the front door of the parsonage to the churchyard without interruption of wall or hedge; the garden was practically the graveyard too; the successors of the Brontës, however, wishing a little space between life and death, planted a hedge and several tall trees, which now cut off the parsonage garden completely. The house itself is precisely the same as it was in Charlotte’s day, save that one new wing has been added. It is easy to shut the eye to this, and then you have the square, box-like parsonage, built of the ugly, yellow-brown stone which they quarry from the moors behind, precisely as it was when Charlotte lived and died there. Inside, of course, the changes are many, though not such as to obscure the original shape of the rooms. There is nothing remarkable in a mid-Victorian parsonage, though tenanted by genius, and the only room which awakens curiosity is the kitchen, now used as an ante-room, in which the girls tramped as they conceived their work. One other spot has a certain grim interest—the oblong recess beside the staircase into which Emily drove her bulldog during the famous fight, and pinned him while she pommelled him. It is otherwise a little sparse parsonage, much like others of its kind. It was due to the courtesy of the present incumbent that we were allowed to inspect it; in his place I should often feel inclined to exorcise the three famous ghosts.

One thing only remained: the church in which Charlotte worshipped, was married, and lies buried. The circumference of her life was very narrow. Here, though much is altered, a few things remain to tell of her. The slab which bears the names of the succession of children and of their parents—their births and deaths—strikes the eye first. Name follows name; at very short intervals they died—Maria the mother, Maria the daughter, Elizabeth, Branwell, Emily, Anne, Charlotte, and lastly the old father, who outlived them all. Emily was only thirty years old, and Charlotte but nine years older. ‘The sting of death is sin, and the strength of sin is the law, but thanks be to God which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.’ That is the inscription which has been placed beneath their names, and with reason; for however harsh the struggle, Emily, and Charlotte above all, fought to victory.

[Guardian, Dec 21, 1904]

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Part Two: Mainly Portraits.

The Girlhood of Queen Elizabeth.

[By Frank A. Mumby.]

There is a memorable passage at the end of Froude’s History, in which, before summing up the qualities of the great Queen and delivering judgment, he bids us consider what it is to be a Sovereign. Their mean thoughts ‘rise like accusing spirits … out of the private drawers of statesmen’s cabinets’. They may not stand aside, but must always act. Their duties cling to them as their shadows. Their words and deeds live after them, and must bear a scrutiny to which few could look forward without dismay. Having pronounced this warning, he goes on to strip Elizabeth of every virtue that was claimed for her, save the virtue of her supreme bravery. In some degree such seems to be the fate of the majority of rulers of whom we can form a judgment. Human nature when set upon a throne seems unable to sustain the enormous enlargement. The very early kings alone, in whom courage was the essential virtue, are dubbed ‘the Good’. The later ones, grown subtle, are deformed by vice, stupidity, or bigotry. And yet, partly because it is extraordinary, the spectacle of Royalty never fails to surprise us. To see the pageant is strange enough, but it is far stranger to look into the mind of one of the great actors themselves and to watch the normal human being struggling, an ant laden with a pebble, beneath the superhuman burden laid upon it by its fellows. The difficulty of framing an opinion arises from the necessity that such a person is under of conforming to an unnatural standard, so that it is only at rare moments that one can see how he behaves as an individual. For the rest, one must use one’s imagination. Mr Rait, in introducing the present volume of Queen Elizabeth’s private letters, enumerates other difficulties that must beset the student of early documents. With their formalities and encumbrances, the very language they write is different from ours; they have a thousand inducements to tell lies, nor can they always tell the truth if they wish it. But, allowing for all obstacles, ‘it remains true’, he proceeds, ‘that in such letters as are contained in this book we have the very marrow of history’. By the very marrow in this case we mean the temperament of the woman who ruled England from the time she was twenty-five, and whose whims and qualities lay at the centre of the vast expansion of the Elizabethan age. If we can arrive at some knowledge of her nature and of the circumstances that formed it, we shall read our history with a greater understanding; and Mr Mumby’s collection gives us a splendid chance at least, by laying the original matter out of which history is fashioned before us. He has restricted himself to supplying the necessary links as briefly and as lucidly as possible.

The story from the first is strange and violent. Her birth made enemies of her own kinsmen, for on that account her half-sister was degraded of her title and shorn of her household. Then three years later Elizabeth was deposed in her turn, without a mother, and left in the hands of a governess who confessed that she did not know what to do with her. The Princess, she wrote, had scarcely any clothes, and it was not good for a child of three who had ‘great pain with her great teeth and they come very slowly forth’ to sup every day at the board of Estate. ‘For there she shall see divers meats, and fruits, and wine, which it would be hard for me to restrain her Grace from.’ It was the third stepmother, Catherine Parr, who first noticed her, and encouraged her to learn. Elizabeth, aged eleven, recognizing her ‘fervent zeal … towards all goodly learning’, dedicated to her a translation which she had made of ‘The Mirror, or Glass, of the sinful soul’. Making allowance for the constraint put upon her, one may infer that Elizabeth was a very precocious and somewhat priggish child, whose precocity was sometimes disagreeable. At the age of fourteen she was ripe for a serious flirtation with her stepmother’s husband, Thomas Seymour, and was so outspoken in this precocious love-making as to bring all those concerned into trouble and herself, finally, to disgrace. Yet, though Elizabeth was forward enough according to her governess, it seems pitiable that a girl of that age should have her feelings made the subject of inquisition by a council of noblemen. She subdued her passions, and in the retreat at Hatfield vanity drove her to excel in the only direction now open to her. Grave scholars like William Grindal and Roger Ascham had been her tutors from the first, and had predicted great things of ‘that noble imp’. At the end of her sixteenth year Ascham reckoned up her accomplishments, and stated that she could speak French and Italian like English; Latin and Greek she could speak with fluency; she had read some of Cicero, Livy and Sophocles; she liked a style that was ‘chaste in its propriety and beautiful in perspicuity’, but ‘greatly admired metaphors’; at that age (her tutor says) she preferred simple dress to ‘show and splendour’. This was one stage in her development. Such an educational one was enough to isolate her from her sex, save for the half-dozen noble ladies, the Greys and the Cecils, who were also prodigies.

Then, when Mary came to the throne she had to summon all her ability and the composure which learning gives in order to devise a policy and steer ‘like a ship in tempestuous weather’ between the two parties. The Protestant party endangered her by their favouritism and made her the Queen’s most serious rival. Every movement was watched; after Wyatt’s conspiracy the Queen’s nerve was so much shaken that she dared the people’s rage and sent Elizabeth to the Tower. The three years that followed were sufficient to give her the habit of telling lies all her life. But the memory of her unhappiness was bitter enough also to rouse in her the one ‘sustained and generous feeling’ of her life; she showed, Mr Froude thinks, true pity for the Queen of Scots when, years afterwards, she too lay in prison. To be ‘cold and unemotional’, the faults with which Elizabeth is oftenest charged, was the natural refuge for a woman of powerful intellect in the midst of spies. To think perpetually and never to act without a motive was the one safe policy. But it makes it unusually difficult to arrive at her genuine feeling. Thus, someone wishing to endow the magnificent young woman with human tenderness suggests that she was really fond of children, because when she walked in the Tower Garden she liked to play with a child of four who gave her flowers. Yet it was at once suspected that her motive was not tender after all, but that letters from Courtenay lay hid among the leaves. Perhaps it is a trifle, yet it is our certain knowledge of the incidents of life that inspires our conception of character, for there is much less individuality in the way great acts are done. It would be interesting to know how far we still make use of tradition in giving colour to the great figures of the past when we are without details. But there are more definite statements about her appearance: she was tall, with a swarthy skin, and fine eyes—‘above all a beautiful hand, of which she makes display’. She liked to have it said that she resembled her father, for ‘she prides herself on her father and glories in him’. In manner it is probable that she was overbearing and argumentative, insisting, ‘from vanity’, in talking Italian to Italians, and because she spoke it better than Mary.

Thus, at the age of twenty-three she was a remarkable personage, impressing the Venetian Ambassador by her intellect and by her ‘astute and judicious’ behaviour, and a perpetual menace to her sister. Some of the most interesting letters in the collection are the Bedingfeld papers concerning her imprisonment at Woodstock, which Froude, it seems, had never read. They show that Sir Henry Bedingfeld, far from ill-treating her as is commonly said, very much disliked his task and did what he could to help her. But Elizabeth was a formidable prisoner, very observant, silent if crossed, capable of a ‘most unpleasant’ manner, and so Royal in her demeanour that it seemed impertinent to restrain her. There was nothing for her to do save to embroider the covers of a Bible and scratch plaintive verses on the window panes; she asked for books, a Cicero and an English Bible; she wanted to walk freely and demanded to write her complaints to the Council. Sir Henry had to check her in every way; he was made uneasy if a servant bringing presents of ‘freshwater fish … and two dead pheasant cocks’ stayed too long gossiping with the servants. But such was the tone in which she issued ‘an importunate command’ that in spite of all injunctions Sir Henry not only gave her pen and paper, but wrote at her dictation, although he spelt very badly, the Princess ‘saying that she never wrote to your Lordships but by a secretary’. He pointed out the inconveniences of Woodstock as a residence in winter—how the wind and rain would come through the chinks, and how the villagers grumbled already at the soldiers who were quartered upon them. It is clear that he only wished to be rid of her.

When Mary died three years later no more seasoned woman of her age could be found in Europe than Elizabeth. She had known love, and seen death very close; she had learnt to suspect almost everyone, and to let men struggle and plot before her without taking part. Her intellect was trained to wrestle with intricate arguments and to delight in flourishes of ornament. Her poverty had taught her to hoard money and to hint for gifts. In short, her education and her adventures had equipped her with a complete armour of cold and harsh feelings, under the control of a perfectly dauntless bravery. Thus, splendid and inscrutable, she rode through London on the day of her Coronation; arches, pyramids, and fountains stood in her way, from which boys sang greeting; a fine snow kept falling over her, but the gems and the golden collars shone clearly through the whiteness.

[Times Literary Supplement, Dec 30, 1909]

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The Diary of a Lady in Waiting.

[By Lady Charlotte Bury, edited by A. Francis Steuart.]

Lady Charlotte Bury was the daughter of the fifth Duke of Argyll, and her beauty and her wit made her at once the talk of London when she came up to town in the last years of the eighteenth century. But her head was full of romance, and she preferred a marriage with her kinsman. Jack Campbell, who was handsome, ‘a great fellow’, but badly off, to an alliance with some rich nobleman in England. They lived in Edinburgh for the most part, and Lady Charlotte was queen of the literary society there, scribbling her own verses, and receiving the compliments of Walter Scott, C.K. Sharpe, and Monk Lewis. Their circumstances, however, were never easy; nine children were born to them, and, when she was thirty-four, her husband died, and left her to bring them up as she might. The natural profession, for a woman with her connections, was about the Court; and it is characteristic of her that she sought service with the Princess of Wales, with whom she had long sympathized, although the Princess was then in an uncomfortable situation, separated from her husband and estranged from the Royal family. At the same time Lady Charlotte began to keep a diary, and it is this work which is now reprinted, with the omission of certain unnecessary parts, and the addition of a great number of names which the discretion of previous editors thought fit to conceal beneath a dash. As it is, the size of the volumes is sufficiently formidable, and were it not for the watery Georgian atmosphere which they preserve we might wish that Lady Charlotte’s sentiments had been curtailed. ‘Those evanescent emanations of spirit which are only cognisable to the very few, and which thrive not unless under the influence of congenial feelings’ have fallen, to continue her metaphor, upon a barren soil, and are withered by the cold blight of criticism.

The Princess of Wales’s court, if it has a right to the name, was a comfortless and incongruous place. She kept up all the forms of royalty at Kensington and Blackheath, but she was constantly meeting with some insolence from the great nobles, and flouting them with an irresponsible outburst of wild spirits. She would walk solemnly with her ladies in Kensington-gardens and suddenly ‘bolt out at one of the smaller gates and walk all over Bayswater and along the Paddington Canal’, asking at every door whether there were any houses to be let, and chuckling at her own ingenuity. Some respectable people stood by her, and gave her parties the semblance of dignity, but as soon as these gentlemen left she ‘felt a weight’ off her. ‘She calls it dull’ observes Lady Charlotte, or, in her own phrase, ‘Mine Gott! Dat is de dullest person Gott Almighty ever did born!”and true enough’, the moralist proceeds, ‘good society is often dull’. Brougham and Whitbread were always coming with documents for her to sign, and good advice for her to follow. There was perpetual talk of policy, whether she should go to the opera, whether she should accept the Regent’s terms, or hold out for her own rights; she was always acting on the spur of the moment, and upsetting calculations that were not, as Lady Charlotte guessed, entirely disinterested. They go over the whole story of her wrongs again and again, at those dreary dinner parties; and when that subject becomes intolerable, she chatters about books, or talks scandal, wishes people dead, or sings—‘squall—squall—squall’—with the Sapios, for she loved to imagine herself the centre of a brilliant society. Lady Charlotte had much to deplore from the first, although her kind and sentimental heart was constantly touched by the poor lady’s miseries, the cause, she guessed, of much of her levity; and she had sense enough to see that a little good management at this crisis might have invaluable results. The Princess occasionally would act with the utmost dignity, or endure some insult without a word, so that Lady Charlotte herself felt humiliated. A friend reported on one occasion that the Tsar of Russia meant to call upon her, an honour for which she said she would give both her ears, though they are ‘very ugly’. She dressed in delight, and waited all the afternoon, with Lady Charlotte beside her, till it was seven o’clock. For four hours they sat opposite each other keeping up a miserable small talk; and, though the Tsar never came, the Princess would not own that she was disappointed. It was not wonderful, perhaps, that she should relapse after these fruitless efforts into wilder dissipation than ever. When there was no company she would sit over the fire after dinner modelling a little figure of her husband in wax, transfixing it with a pin, and holding it over the flames so that it melted away. Was one to laugh, or was it not unspeakably tragic? Sometimes, says Lady Charlotte, she had the feeling of one who humours a mad woman.

But advice and sentiment had no power to stay the course of the uneasy woman; she was too sensitive to ignore the slights which people who, as she observed, would eat her food thought fit to put upon her, and she was foolish enough to seek redress by making friends of her inferiors. The description which Lady Charlotte gives of ‘that incongruous piece of patchwork’, the villa at Blackheath—‘It is all glitter and glare and trick; everything is tinsel and trumpery about it; it is altogether like a bad dream’—represents very well the impression which her life makes upon us; it is like Cremorne or Vauxhall by daylight, when the lamps are out, and the pale minarets and pagodas are exposed to the sun, with all their stains and frivolities and their midnight grimace. Lady Charlotte’s proprieties were constantly shocked; and, as she could in no way prevent the disaster, she left her mistress in 1814, without offending her, in order, she pretended, to take her children to Geneva. She was little more, however, than a correct and kindly woman, with a diffuse taste for sentiment of all kinds, whether in people, or art, or letters, and, when she had no point to concentrate her mind upon, her observations become insipid. The Princess of Wales, vulgar and flighty as she was, had the quality of making people interested in her, not for her fate alone, but because she had lively feelings and expressed them nakedly. Lady Charlotte when set adrift upon the Continent and exposed now to a picture, now to a church, now to the historical associations of Versailles, floats, with all her sails spread, upon a leaden sea. ‘I gazed once more at the undying beauties of the immortal Venus. I felt a spark of inspiration emanate from the divine Apollo … Time and circumstance tore me away.’ She came at length to Geneva, and settled herself in the midst of the ‘literary and scientific republic’, smiling and sighing when she remembered the ‘great stage of life’ upon which she had acted so lately. But she was not to philosophize for long. The rumour spread that the Princess, with a motley court, was upon them, and some of the English ladies hastily made up a ball in her honour. With what an expression Lady Charlotte gazed upon the figure of her late mistress, dressed ‘en Venus’, waltzing all night long, we can imagine; it is a delightful picture. ‘I was unfeignedly grieved … and thought it would be my own fault if she caught me again in a hurry.’ But Lady Charlotte was too good-natured to desert anyone in difficulties; she had a family to support; and after a few months she joined the Princess at Genoa as her lady in waiting. She found that Mr Craven and Mr Gell, her respectable English friends, had left her, and her own position was more odious than ever. Bergami, the tall Italian courier, was now the favourite, and the Princess drove about in a carriage shaped like a sea-shell, lined with blue velvet and drawn by piebald ponies. She protested that she meant to travel on and on, to visit Greece, and never to return to England. Lady Charlotte had to shut both eyes and ears; but her charity was at length exhausted, and she finally left the Princess in 1815, the last of the English courtiers to stay with her. Lady Charlotte went to Rome, and the Princess wandered about Italy, adding doubtful countesses ‘of decayed nobility’ to her train, and abbés who could speak forty-four different languages, both living and dead, in perfection—so ‘they assure me’. The last sight of her was reported by an English lady living at Florence, who came upon a procession of carriages at some little country village, drawn by the piebald horses, and occupied by a ‘rabble rout’ of low-looking men and women, dressed like ‘itinerant show players’, of all nationalities; among them was ‘one fat woman’, who was said to be the Princess of Wales. Most readers will be tempted to skip the reflections which Lady Charlotte has to record about Rome, for she echoed the taste of her time, and it is not ours; but she corresponded still with the Princess and received from her a number of those odd ungrammatical letters, where all the t’s are d’s, which still sound so lively, so absurd, and so unhappy.

All de fine English folk leave me [she writes]. I not send them away, though, bye the bye, some of dem not behave as civil as I could like.

… I detest Rome. It is the burial-place of departed grandeur. It is very well to see it once, like a raree show … I shall die of de blue devils, as you English call it … Very often we cook our own dinner! What voud de English people say if dey heard dat? Oh, fie! Princess of Wales.’

Lady Charlotte returned to London in 1819, in order to introduce an orphan niece to the world. She was forty-four, and the diary, though it is still as profuse as ever, describes merely the respectable life of a lady living in good society, with the remains of beauty, and many memories of happier days. Major Denham described the interior of Africa; Tom Moore sang ‘The Parting of the Ships’, ‘each to sail over the lonely ocean! How very true it is to nature! How thrilling to those who have witnessed the scene!’ Once she met Mrs Mee, the miniature painter, and ‘another eccentric little artist, by name Blake’, who talked to her about his painting, and seemed to her full of imagination and genius. She saw Sir Thomas Lawrence sneer as he watched them. But the diary ends, fitly enough, with the death of Queen Caroline a few days after she had knocked at the door of Westminster Abbey in vain. Many people felt that there was an end to an awkward situation; Lady Charlotte, as one might expect, had a final word of regret for the poor woman, and in this case, at least, we may believe that she meant it, for she had been a good friend.

[Times Literary Supplement, Jul 23, 1908]

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Queen Adelaide.

[The Life and Times of Queen Adelaide, by Mary F. Sandars.]

‘I request not to be dissected nor embalmed, and desire to give as little trouble as possible/ wrote Queen Adelaide characteristically when she was considering the disposition of her dead body; and all the industry of Miss Sandars has not been able to violate the privacy of her spirit. For if Queen Anne is dead, we must invent some more absolute form of annihilation for Queen Adelaide. We cannot boldly affirm, after reading 289 pages about her, that she never existed; but we feel much as though we had been to visit someone in a large handsome house, and after wandering through all the state rooms and up the grand staircase and through the attics had heard only the swishing of a skirt and once—that was the most vivid moment of all—caught a glimpse of a ‘wonderful red and grey parrot’, but never met the owner of the house, or heard more than the murmur of her voice in the next room. It is not Miss Sandars’s fault. She has done her best to produce the Queen for us, and, as the Queen is dumb, has imagined what her feelings must have been on several very important occasions, as for example when she landed in England to marry a husband she had never seen.

The sea was rough … and the Princess Adelaide’s spirits were doubtless at a low ebb … Nothing is reported of the interview between him and his future bride, and we can only guess the feelings of the Princess when, at the end of what must have been for one of her delicate physique a most exhausting fortnight, she was introduced to her middle-aged, garrulous, unpolished bridegroom. We may guess, however, that even were her agitation great, nothing of it appeared on the surface. Her manners were good, she was possessed of much reticence and self-control, and she doubtless behaved suitably and with the sense of propriety natural to her.

That is the style of the volume. We are made to feel that it is not permitted in the case of a great lady so recently dead to impute to her any feelings save those that she might show to the public through the windows of her crystal coach on her way down the Mall when, although in constant fear of assassination, she made a point of sitting rather forward and very upright. She was always on her guard with the English, who disliked her, and she never lost the traces of her long girlhood in the pious, secluded Court of Meiningen, where a paternal Government issued decrees about coffins, and begging, and dancing on Sundays and wrestled, unsuccessfully it appears, with the problem of geese who stray from the flock. The Princess was well suited to pet and bully a state of devoted retainers, but only the arbitrary exigencies of politics could have forced a woman so trained to become the bride of William the Fourth, with his large family of illegitimate children, and given her the most corrupt Court and the least reputable Royal Family in Europe for her circle and surroundings.

As fate would have it, she became Queen Consort when England was struggling for reform. The mere thought of reform, were it merely the introduction of gas in a palace, affected Queen Adelaide like an explosion of gunpowder, and suggested immediate death on a scaffold. She would accept William and George the Fourth, and a large impertinent family of Fitz-Clarences with angelical sweetness and submission, as part of the lot of womanhood, but the idea of giving power to the people stiffened her into something like self-assertion. All the influence she had she brought to bear on the King against the Reform Bill, and drew on herself such hatred from the people that William paced the room anxiously if she were late home from the opera, and the newspapers bespattered her with names which nowadays would not be applied to any woman in the land.

But the Reform Bill passed and there was no martyrdom for Adelaide. Her head, that is, remained on her shoulders; but the discomforts of her lot surely amount in sum of agony to a beheading if it were possible to extract them and compute them. Doubtless, to borrow a very useful phrase from Miss Sandars, the manners of the Royal Family afflicted her considerably. They remind us of those astounding scenes in Dickens and George Eliot when uncles and aunts behave in such a manner at the dinner table that we are inclined to think it is put on for the reader’s benefit; but William the Fourth had exactly the same method. At a birthday dinner he took the occasion to jump up and abuse the Duchess of Kent, who was sitting next to him: ‘I have no hesitation in saying that I have been insulted—grossly and continually insulted—by that person now near me’ upon which the Princess Victoria burst into tears, and the Duchess ordered her carriage. At another dinner party, to annoy the same lady’s brother, he pretended to be deaf; and we have an appalling picture of the scene after dinner, when the chairs were placed in such a way that conversation was impossible, and the only diversion apparently for that silent company was to listen to the snores of the Duke of Somerset happily sleeping behind a pillar. But the domestic evenings of calm were no less trying, according to poor Lady Grey, who hoped that she might never see a mahogany table again after sitting for two evenings round the one at Windsor, while the Queen netted a purse, and the King slept, ‘occasionally waking for the purpose of saying, “Exactly so, Ma’am” and then sleeping again’. When he kept awake for any length of time, the King would pull out a ‘curiosity” for the company to look at, and then wander about signing papers, which a Princess blotted for him, while the Queen beckoned a small society of intimate friends into a corner and handed round her sketches. The nearest approach to the hypnotized boredom of that assembly is to imagine thirty people gathered nightly in a dentist’s waiting room, with its round tables, and albums, its horsehair chairs, and diamond spotted carpet, and without even the excitement of the anticipated summons. This dreary scene dragged on until 1837, when the Queen found herself a widow, with an income of £100,000 a year. But her perpetual colds in the head and other indispositions had now developed into chronic ill health, which made her ‘rather fidgety about due attention being shown her’, and her chief interest seems to have lain in seeking health, in suppressing dissent and providing Colonial Bishops, in smiling graciously upon assembled multitudes and, let us hope, in admiring the gifts and cherishing the plumage of that remarkable bird, the red and grey parrot.

[Times Literary Supplement, Jan 13, 1916]

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Elizabeth Lady Holland.

[The Journal of Elizabeth Lady Holland, edited by the Earl of Ilchester, two vols. and The Holland House Circle by Lloyd Sanders.]

Two handsome volumes, with large print and wide margins, portraits, annotations, and introduction, give us after a lapse of almost a century the diary which Lady Holland kept from the year 1791 to the year 1811. At the same time Mr Lloyd Sanders publishes The Holland House Circle’, a thick volume with many chapters. Each chapter represents a different group of men and women, of all ranks and callings, and is distinguished generally by one important name. But the chief interest of these groups lies in the fact that they were once dispersed about the great drawing-rooms at Holland House, and that the people composing them had been picked out from the tumult of London, and drawn to this one spot by the power of Lady Holland and her husband. Indeed, so much time has passed that it begins to seem strange to us that the imperious-looking lady who sits with her foot displayed in Leslie’s picture, as though subjects bowed to her throne, should once have gone upstairs to her room, taken out a sheet of paper, and written down what she thought of the scene. We are told continually how she snubbed people, how she dropped her fan, how she sat at the head of her table and listened to the cleverest talk in England until she was bored, and cried out: ‘Enough of this, Macaulay!’ But it is hard to remember that she passed through many more experiences than usually fall to the share of women, so that when she sat at her table she may have been thinking of different scenes and marvelling at the accidents that had brought her to this position. Until Lord Ilchester published her diaries there was only material for such A book as that by Mr Lloyd Sanders; we only knew what impression she had made on other people, and had to guess what she had been feeling herself. She was the daughter of a wealthy gentleman of Jamaica, Richard Vassall, and he married her to Sir Godfrey Webster, of Battle Abbey, when she was but fifteen. By her own account she had run wild, picked up her learning where she might, and come by her views without help from anyone else. It was not from lack of care on her parents’ part; they were too fond of her to tame her; and it was quite consistent with their affection that when they saw her grown a fine girl with a proud spirit they should think that she deserved to marry. A baronet who was almost twenty-three years her elder, who owned a country seat, was Member of Parliament, and was ‘immensely popular in the country, perhaps partly on account of his liberality and extravagance’, must have appeared to them mainly in the light of a fine career for their daughter; there could be no question of love. At the time of their marriage Sir Godfrey lived in a small house close to the Abbey; the building itself was tenanted by his aunt. One may gather something of young Lady Webster’s temper from the question which she used to send across to the Abbey in the mornings: ‘If the old hag was dead yet.’ The days in the little Sussex village were dreary enough, for Elizabeth amused herself by rambling over the great house, which had fallen into ruins, and rattling chains, like a naughty child, to frighten her aunt. Her husband was busy with local affairs, and, though he had some of the simple tastes of a country gentleman, was not a husband whom a clever young woman could ignore; he was not merely rough, but his temper was violent; he gambled, and he sank into fits of depression. From all these circumstances Lady Webster conceived such a picture of life in the country that she always shuddered at the thought of it afterwards, and wrote, on leaving a country house, that she felt as though she had ‘escaped from some misfortune’. But even as a girl it was not her way to suffer when anything could be done by protesting. She worried her husband with her restlessness until he consented to travel. One must not deny that he made some effort to see her point of view, and had enough affection to try to satisfy her, for to travel in those days of coaches and to leave his own corner of Sussex must have been a genuine hardship for an important man. Lady Webster, at all events, had her way, and it is likely that she gave her husband fewer thanks for the sacrifice than he deserved. They set off for Italy in 1791, and it was then, being twenty years of age, that Lady Webster began to keep a diary. An English traveller in the eighteenth century could not profit completely by the experience unless he wrote down what he had seen and reflected; something was always left over at the end of the day which had to be disposed of thus, and Lady Webster began her diary from such an impulse. It is written to propitiate her own eye when she reads it later in Sussex; to assure her that she was doing her duty with all her faculties, and that she was going about the world as a sensible young Englishwoman, much like other people. But one imagines that she would never feel on easy terms with this version of herself, and would turn to the pages more and more for a date or a fact, and would soon dissociate herself entirely from her reflections. Her case differs a little, however, from the usual one. From her earliest youth Lady Webster seems to have had a quality which saved her diary from the violent fate of diaries, and spared the writer her blushes; she could be as impersonal as a boy of ten and as intelligent as a politician. How far she really cared to know that flax is grown by the inhabitants of Kempten, and that they must consume their produce themselves, ‘for there are no navigable rivers’, one cannot tell; but she thought it worth while to observe the fact, and proceeded quite naturally to moralize ‘perhaps they are happier without facility of intercourse’, for commerce breeds luxury, and luxury leads to a love of gain, and thus ‘simplicity of manners’ is destroyed, which the moralist felt to be a pity. What strange conversations and what gloomy silences there must have been in the post-chaise! The young lady was indefatigable, and honestly scorned her husband because he had no enthusiasms and no theories.

When they got to Rome the situation was even worse. Lady Webster was beginning to be aware of the fact that she was a remarkable young woman, and all the masterpieces of the world were here to prove it. She set out directly upon her ‘course of virtu’, tramped through galleries, craned her neck back, looked intently where ‘old Morrison’ bade her look, and wrote stiff sentences of admiration in her diary. When her husband came with her he either hurried her along, so that she could not see the pictures, or flew into such a passion that she could not distinguish them. The pictures, it is clear, threw a disastrous light upon Sir Godfrey. At Rome, too, there were sympathetic married ladies who assured Elizabeth that her husband was a monster, and encouraged her to see herself in a tragic light. She sobbed herself sick, reflected that human miseries must have an end, and pitied herself for thinking so. But there is no doubt that she was unhappy, however one may apportion the blame; for one must pity any young woman of twenty-two who leans out of her window at night, snuffs the air, sees water gleaming, and feels a strange stir in her spirit, and yet must write a few days later that she is now able to laugh at her husband’s menaces, although they used to terrify her. It is natural to dread one’s own faults, and to feel a peculiar dislike for the circumstances that develop them, for they make you ignoble in your own eyes; and the strain of bitterness which we trace in Lady Webster’s diaries points to the presence of this discomfort. She knew that she was disposed to be hard, and she resented treatment which drove her to it, for she was a proud woman, and would have liked to admire herself unreservedly. In Italy, too, she felt often what she had seldom felt in England: hours of confused happiness in which the land was fair and she was young, and wonderful capacities stirred within her. She could not soothe such ecstasies with any of her ‘cold maxims of solitary comfort’, but admitted the thought of ‘another’ for her ‘heart to open itself into’. Directly that other had shown what he could do in relieving her she dismissed him in agitation, comforting herself with the reflection that there was a ‘want of passion’ in her nature which would save her from many disasters. ‘But what will be my resource if both head and heart accord in their choice?’ Her honesty drove her to ask herself that question, but it is evident that it alarmed her still as much as it excited her.

It was in Florence, not a year after the words were written, that she met Lord Holland for the first time. He was a young man of twenty-one, just returning from his travels in Spain. Her first impression is as direct as usual: ‘Lord H. is not in the least handsome.’ She notes his ‘pleasingness of manner and liveliness of conversation’; but it was the ‘complex disorder’ in his left leg ‘called an ossification of the muscles’, that interested her most, for, like other practical women, she had a great curiosity about physical disease and loved the society of doctors. She repeats their phrases as though she flattered herself that they meant more to her than to most people. One cannot trace the friendship accurately, for it was not the purpose of her diary to follow her feelings closely, or indeed to record them at all, except to sum them up now and then in a businesslike way, as though she made a note in shorthand for future use. But Lord Holland became one of that singular company of English people, travelling in Italy in the last years of the eighteenth century, whom we come upon later in the first years of the nineteenth when we read the story of Shelley, Byron, and Trelawny. They went about together, like adventurers in a strange land, sharing carriages and admiring statues, had their own little society in Florence and Rome, and were allied generally by birth and wealth and the peculiarity of their taste for the fine arts. Sir Godfrey (it is no wonder) grew restive, and was impatient to put an end to this aimless wandering with a family of small children in a land of foreigners, among pictures and ruins which bored him acutely. One entry, made at Rome, shows us what was going on in the spring of 1794: ‘Almost the whole of our Neapolitan set was there … we all made an excursion to Tivoli. I conveyed Lord Holland, Mr Marsh and Beauclerk … We got back late at night … In the course of our evenings Lord H. resolved to make me admire a poet … Cowper. My evenings were agreeable … A sharp fit of gout, brought on by drinking Orvieto wine did not increase the good temper of (my husband).’ One of the attractive features of those early Italian travels is the leisure that people had, and the instinct, natural in a beautiful land far from all duties, which made them fill it with long hours of aimless reading. Lady Webster says of herself that she ‘devoured books’, histories, philosophies, serious books for the most part, to increase her knowledge. But Lord Holland made her read poetry; he read Pope’s ‘Iliad’ aloud, besides a translation of Herodotus, ‘a good deal of Bayle and a great variety of English poetry’. Her head was conquered, and that, in Lady Webster’s case, was the only way to her heart. Sir Godfrey left her alone in Italy for months together; finally, in May 1795, he returned to England without her. The diary is still as sensible as ever; one might imagine her a cultivated British matron with all the natural supports. But, remembering that she had not determined to defy the law and to honour her own passion, there is something more highly strung than usual in the record of her days. She never repents, or analyses her conduct, her diary is still occupied with Correggio and the Medici family and the ruts in the roads. She drove about Italy with her own retinue, spending a few days in one place, a week in another, and settling in Florence for the winter. Lord Holland’s name occurs again and again, and always as naturally as another’s. But there is a freedom in her manner, a kind of pride in her happiness, which seems to show that she was perfectly confident of her own morality. In April, Lord Holland and Lady Webster travelled back to England together; Sir Godfrey divorced his wife in July 1797, and in the same month she became Lady Holland. Something remarkable might have been expected from such a marriage, for the feeling between a husband and wife who have won each other by such means will not be conventional or easy to explain. One does not know, for instance, how far Lady Holland was led to live the life she did from a sense of gratitude to her husband, and one suspects that Lord Holland was tender and considerate beyond what was natural to him because his wife had made an immense sacrifice on his behalf. He saw, what other people did not see, that she was sometimes made to suffer. One can be sure at least that the oddities were only superficial, and that Lord and Lady Holland, grown old and sedate, never forgot that they had once been in league together against the world, or saw each other without a certain thrill. ‘Oh, my beloved friend,’ exclaimed Lady Holland, ‘how hast thou, by becoming mine, endeared the everyday occurrences of life!’

I loved you much at twenty-four:

I love you better at three-score

was, so Lord Holland wrote when they had been married for thirty-four years, the

One truth which, be it verse or prose,

From my heart’s heart sincerely flows.

If that is so, we must admire them both the more for it, remembering what a reputation Lady Holland won for herself in those years, and how difficult she must have been to live with.

She may well have taken possession of Holland House with a vow to repay herself for wasted time and a determination to make the best of herself and of other people at last. She was determined also to serve Lord Holland in his career; and those unhappy years when she had roamed about the Continent, making her sensible observations, had taught her, at least, habits that were useful to her now, ‘to talk the talk of men’ and to feel keenly the life in people round her. The house at once, with such a mistress, came to have a character of its own. But who shall say why it is that people agree to meet in one spot, or what qualities go to make a salon? In this case the reason why they came seems to have been largely because Lady Holland wished them to come. The presence of someone with a purpose gives shape to shapeless gatherings of people; they take on a character when they meet which serves ever after to stamp the hours so spent. Lady Holland was young and handsome, her past life had given her a decision and a fearlessness which made her go further in one interview than other women in a hundred. She had read a great deal of robust English fiction, histories and travels, Juvenal in a translation, Montaigne and Voltaire and La Rochefoucauld in the French. ‘I have no prejudices to combat with/ she wrote; so that the freest thinker could speak his mind in her presence. The reputation of this brilliant and outspoken young woman spread quickly among the politicians, and they came in numbers to dine or sleep or even to watch her dress in the morning. Perhaps they laughed when they discussed her afterwards, but she carried her main point triumphantly—that they should come to see her. Two years after her marriage she notes: Today I had fifty visitors.’ Her diary becomes a memorandum book of anecdotes and political news; and it is very seldom that she raises her eyes for a moment to consider what it is all about. But at one point she gives us a clue, and observes that although she cares for her old friends best she seeks new acquaintances ‘with avidity’, because ‘mixing with a variety of people is an advantage to Lord H.’. One must live with one’s kind and know them, or ‘the mind becomes narrowed to the standard of your own set’, as the life of Canning had shown her. There was so much good sense always in what Lady Holland said that it was difficult to protest if her actions, in their excessive vigour, became dangerous. She took up politics for Lord Holland’s sake, with the same determination, and became before long a far greater enthusiast than he was; but, again, she was able and broad-minded. Such was her success, indeed, that it can be said by a student of the time—nearly a hundred years after it has all faded away—‘Holland House was a political council chamber … and the value of such a centre to a party under exclusively aristocratic leadership was almost incalculable’. But, however keen she became as a politician, we must not pretend that she inspired Ministers, or was the secret author of policies that have changed the world. Her success was of a different nature; for it is possible even now, with her diaries before us, to reconstruct something of her character and to see how, in the course of years, it told upon that portion of the world which came in contact with it.

When we think of her we do not remember witty things that she said; we remember a long series of scenes in which she shows herself insolent, or masterful, or whimsical with the whimsicality of a spoilt great lady who confounds all the conventions as it pleases her. But there is some quality in a scene like the following, trivial as it is, which makes you realize at once the effect of her presence in the room, her way of looking at you, her attitude even, and her tap with her fan. Macaulay describes a breakfast party. ‘Lady Holland told us her dreams; how she had dreamed that a mad dog bit her foot, and how she set off to Brodie, and lost her way in St Martin’s Lane, and could not find him. She hoped, she said, the dream would not come true.’ Lady Holland had her superstitions. We trace it again in her words to Moore, This will be a dull book of yours, this “Sheridan”, I fear’; or at dinner to her dependant, Mr Allen, ‘Mr Allen, there is not enough turtle soup for you. You must take gravy soup or none.’ We seem to feel, however dimly, the presence of someone who is large and emphatic, who shows us fearlessly her peculiarities because she does not mind what we think of them, and who has, however, peremptory and unsympathetic she may be, an extraordinary force of character. She makes certain things in the world stand up boldly all round her; she calls out certain qualities in other people. While she is there, it is her world; and all the things in the room, the ornaments, the scents, the books that lie on the table, are hers and express her. It is less obvious, but we expect that the whole of the strange society which met round her board owed its flavour to Lady Holland’s freaks and passions. It is less obvious, because Lady Holland is far from eccentric in her journal, and adopts more and more as time goes by the attitude of a shrewd man of business who is well used to the world and well content with it. She handles numbers of men and women, rough-hews a portrait of them, and sums up their value. ‘His taste is bad; he loves society, but has no selection, and swallows wine for quantity not quality; he is gross in everything…”He is honourable, just, and true.’ These characters are done in a rough style, as though she slashed her clay, now this side, now that. But what numbers of likenesses she struck off, and with what assurance! Indeed, she had seen so much of the world and had such knowledge of families, tempers, and money matters, that with greater concentration she might have shaped a cynical reflection in which a lifetime of observation was compressed. ‘Depraved men,’ she writes, “are in a corrupt state of things, but yet they like the names of virtues as much as they abhor the practice.’ La Rochefoucauld is often on her lips. But merely to have dealt with so many people and to have kept the mastery over them is in itself the proof of a remarkable mind. Hers was the force that held them together, and showed them in a certain light, and kept them in the places she assigned to them. She took in the whole sweep of the world, and imprinted it with her own broad mark. For not only could she subdue all that happened ordinarily in daily life, but she did not falter when the loftiest heights, which might well have seemed beyond her range, lay across her path. She sent for Wordsworth. ‘He came. He is much superior to his writings, and his conversation is even beyond his abilities. I should almost fear he is disposed to apply his talents more towards making himself a vigorous conversationalist … than to improve his style of composition. He holds some opinions upon picturesque subjects with which I completely differ … He seems well read in his provincial history.’

Monstrous and absurd as it is, may we not find there some clue to her success? When anyone is able to master all the facts she meets with, so that they fall into some order in her mind, she will present a formidable figure to other people, who will complain that she owes her strength to her lack of perception; but at the same time so smooth a shape of the world appears in her presence that they find peace in contemplating it, and almost love the creator. Her rule was much abused in her lifetime, and even now we are disposed to make little of it. We need not claim that it was ever of very great importance; but if we recall her at all we cannot, after all these years, pretend that it has no existence. She still sits on her chair as Leslie painted her—a hard woman perhaps, but undoubtedly a strong and courageous one.

[Cornhill Magazine, December 1908, as “The Journal of Elizabeth Lady Holland”]

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Lady Hester Stanhope.

[By Mrs Charles Roundell.]

The writers in the Dictionary of National Biography have a pleasant habit of summing up a life, before they write it, in one word, thus—‘Stanhope, Lady Hester Lucy (1776-1839), eccentric.’ The reason why her life is written at all is that she differed from other people, but never converted them to her own way of thinking. Mrs Roundell, who has written the latest account of her, is sympathetic and respectful, but she is clearly no convert. One feels that she is smoothing over eccentricities, as though we were all at a tea party together. It would be polite there to remark, ‘Lady Hester is very fond of cats,’ but in private, and writing is private, one should allow oneself to luxuriate in the fact that she kept forty-eight of them, choosing them for the harmony of their stars with her own, joining in a deep bass voice with their music at night, and accusing her doctor of a lumpish, cold, effeminate disposition if he found the noise intolerable. But the merit of Mrs Roundell’s work, together with its simplicity and its quotations from later writers, is that it brings or recalls to our notice a most entertaining book. The Memoirs and Travels of Lady Hester Stanhope’, by Dr Meryon, in six volumes. The charm of Dr Meryon’s work lies in its comprehensiveness. He lived with her off and on for twenty-eight years, and the people we live with are the last we seek to define in one word. Dr Meryon never attempted it. To him she was not an eccentric by profession, but a lady of exalted birth, who condescended when she shook hands with him, a woman of political greatness, inspired at times, with a spell like Circe. As a middle-class Englishman, as a doctor, as a man respecting woman’s courage but a little touched by the need for it, he felt her charm. She treated him like a servant, but the ‘magical illusion which she ever contrived to throw around herself in the commonest circumstances of life’ kept its glamour. Happily the conditions of life on Mount Lebanon in the ‘thirties of the last century allowed him to write profusely, and gave him only the one subject to treat. When he got back at dawn from those long audiences, by the end of which the lady was hidden in smoke, he tried to put down the stories and to express the kind of stupefaction with which she overwhelmed him.

Very little, unfortunately, is known of Lady Hester’s early life. When she kept house for William Pitt she made herself disliked, presumably, from the account that she gives of her triumphs. With a scanty education but great natural force, she despised people without troubling to give them a reason for it. Intuition took the place of argument, and her penetration was great. ‘Fort grande, fort maigre, fort décidée, fort indépendante’ a French lady describes her as a girl in the ball-room; she herself recalled her complexion of alabaster and her lips of carnation. Further, she had a conviction of the rights of the aristocracy, and ordered her life from an eminence which made her conduct almost sublime. ‘Principle!’ she exclaimed; ‘what do you mean by principle?—I am a Pitt.’ Unluckily her sex closed the proper channels. ‘If you were a man, Hester,’ Mr Pitt would say, ‘I would send you on the Continent with 60,000 men, and give you carte blanche; and I am sure that not one of my plans would fail, and not one soldier would go with his shoes unblacked.’ But, as it was, her powers fermented within her; she detested her sex, as though in revenge for the limitations with which ordinary women cramp remarkable ones; and drove herself as near madness as one can go by feeding a measureless ambition upon phantoms.

When her uncle died she had a pension of fifteen hundred a year and a house in Montague-square; but she pointed out in a remarkable conversation how these conditions are precisely the most intolerable if you are a person of rank. They condemn you to nothing less than imprisonment in your own drawing-room, for you cannot do yourself justice in the streets upon such a pittance. She preferred to sacrifice her health rather than lower her standards, until it occurred to her that simplicity, so extreme that no one can connect it with necessity, is the other way of being distinguished. Accordingly she retired to a cottage at Builth, in Wales, where she lived in a room ‘not more than a dozen feet square’, ‘curing the poor’ and keeping a diary. She was then thirty-two. With a mixture of true greatness and grandiloquence, she determined that English ways of life are made to suit timid herds, and that a remarkable person must seek a land less corrupted by hypocrisy, where nature prevails. With what expectations she set sail for the East we know not, but she emerged in Syria, astride her horse, in the trousers of a Turkish gentleman. For the rest of her life she did nothing but shake her fist at England, where the people had forgotten their great men.

As usual, her sublimity was accompanied by a touch of the ridiculous. It is impossible not to feel that the presence of Mrs Fry, the respectable English maid, impaired the romance of the cavalcade. Dressed in men’s clothes, she was expected to ride like a man, but with the heroism of her class she persisted in sitting ‘in the decorous posture customary with women in England’, and was thus ‘often exposed to the danger of falling from her ass’. Then, how pathetic were her attempts to redeem the wild Eastern names to the semblance at least of Christianity—Phillippaki became Philip Parker and Mustapha Mr Farr. Lady Hester and Dr Meryon saw nothing in this but the feebleness of a womanish disposition. A convent on the slopes of Mount Lebanon was bought, and there Lady Hester settled down to exert her mysterious spells. All round the house, which was perched on the top of a hill, she dug an elaborate garden, from whose terraces one could see the Mediterranean between the hills. Her influence at one time was vast, though vague; the children for twenty miles round Constantinople had heard her name. The apparition of this Englishwoman, with her large frame and her cadaverous face and her connection with august personages in England, was in itself a miracle; the natives thought her neither man nor woman, but a being apart. The chiefs came to her for counsel, because she was absolutely without fear and loved to intrigue. The English Consuls all along the coast held her in horror. Sitting on her hilltop, she thought that she arranged the affairs of the countryside and overheard the faintest whispers. A sponge diver called Logmagi was sent to pick up news in the seaports and the bazaars of Constantinople, and in particular to report the first tidings of unrest among the people. At once new rooms and secret tunnels were added to the house, till it was shaped like a labyrinth, for she believed that ‘events and catastrophes’ would come to pass, when people of all nations would fly to her, and she would lead them forth to Jerusalem itself, mounted upon one of the two sacred mares which now fattened in her stalls. Upon the other ‘a boy without a father’ would ride, who was none other than the Messiah Himself. For some time the Duke of Reichstadt was the boy of the prophecy, but when he died she ‘fixed on another’.

Talk, since nothing ever happened, became the solace of her life. The memoirs are made out of talk. Wrapped in a white cloak, with a great turban on her head, she sat in the dusk, so that you might not notice how her skin was wrinkled ‘like the network which we see on the rind of some species of melons’, picking spoonfuls of meat and sweetstuff from saucers, and pouring forth her soliloquy. Nothing that had happened in the years she lived with Mr Pitt was forgotten: she remembered how she had snubbed Admiral ——, what the Duchess of D. had worn, what a leg had Sir W—— R——; in particular, how Mr Pitt had praised her, and he liked his food. She gossiped as though she were talking over the events of the night before, although she sat among broken crockery, in the Syrian mountains, smoking pipes with her doctor, twenty years or more after it had all faded away. Thus she rambled on.

What can be the reason? I am now always thinking of Sir G. H——. I have been thinking how well he would do for Master of the Horse to the Queen, and I have a good way of giving a hint of it through the Buckleys; for I always said that, next to Lord Chatham, nobody ever had such handsome equipages as Sir G.; nobody’s coaches and horses were so neatly picked out as theirs. Sir G. is a man, Doctor, from what you tell me, that would have just suited Mr Pitt. That polished and quiet manner which Sir G. has was what Mr Pitt found so agreeable in Mr Long. It is very odd—Mr Pitt always would dress for dinner, even if we were alone. One day I said to him, ‘You are tired, and there is no one but ourselves; why need you dress?’ He replied, Why, I don’t know, Hester; but if one omits to do it today, we neglect it tomorrow, and so on, until one grows a pig.’

Her spirits fell, and she went on:

To look at me now, what a lesson against vanity! Look at this arm, all skin and bone, so thin, so thin that you may see through it; and once, without exaggeration, so rounded that you could not pinch the skin up. My neck was once so fair that a pearl necklace scarcely showed on it; and men—no fools, but sensible men—would say to me, ‘God has given you a neck you really may be proud of; you are one of Nature’s favourites, and one may be excused for admiring that beautiful skin.’ If they could behold me now, with my teeth all gone and with long lines in my face—not wrinkles, for I have no wrinkles when I am left quiet and not made angry; but my face is drawn out of composure by these wretches. I thank God that old age has come upon me unperceived. When I used to see the painted Lady H., dressed in pink and silver, with her head shaking, and jumped by her footman into her sociable, attempting to appear young, I felt a kind of horror and disgust I can’t describe. I wonder how Lady Stafford dresses now she is no longer young; but I can’t fancy her grown old.

Fierce storms of rage possessed her, and then she would weep with a wild howl painful to hear, as though Bellona should weep. More and more, as time passed without any revolution and her influence waned, and debts crushed her, did she seek the support of magic. Although she had failed to subdue the forces of this world, and the Queen and Lord Palmerston were against her, she was mistress of arts that the vulgar knew nothing of. She saw the sylphs perched on her chest of drawers and clumsy fellows tripped up for ignoring them; seated in the convent at Dar Djoun, she could look into the heart of Paris or of London; she knew the cavern where the King of the Serpents lived, with the head of a man; she knew where to find the lost book of Adam and Eve’s language written in letters a span high; ‘I believe in vampires, but the people in England know not how to distinguish them.’

After a time she never left her hilltop; then she scarcely went beyond her room, but sat in bed, arguing, scolding, and ringing bells perpetually, the floor littered with pipes and bits of string; she was never to ride into Jerusalem upon her mare, and the aristocratic ideal remained high. She would let no European come near her, and at last she turned even Dr Meryon away. In June 1839, the news came to Beirut that she had died with only native servants round her. Rooms were found full of mouldy stores hoarded for the great emergency, but her valuables had been stolen while she lay helpless. The dead lady looked ‘composed and placid’, but she was so much in the habit of hiding her feelings that her expression told nothing. She was buried in a corner of her rose garden in the grave of a certain prophet, where she had not wished to be buried. Ten years later the place was a thicket of brambles and roses; now there are lines of mulberry trees. But Lady Hester, the last of the great English aristocrats, lives on in despite of the plough.

[Times Literary Supplement, Jan 20, 1910]

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The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt.

There are good reasons why, when an actress promises to give us her memoirs, we should feel an unusual interest and excitement even. She lives before us in many shapes and in many circumstances, the instrument of this passion and of that. Meanwhile, if we choose to remember it, she also sits in passive contemplation some little way withdrawn, in an attitude which we must believe to be one of final significance. It might be urged that it is the presence of this contrast that gives meaning to the most trivial of her actions, and some additional poignancy to the most majestic. We know, too, that each part she plays deposits its own small contribution upon her unseen shape, until it is complete and distinct from its creations at the same time that it inspires them with life. And when she undertakes to show us what manner of woman this has become, should we not feel an exceptional gratitude and an interest that is more than usually complex?

Perhaps no woman now alive could tell us more strange things, of herself and of life, than Sarah Bernhardt. It is true that when she comes to this final act of revelation she makes use of certain conventions, poses herself with greater care than we could wish, before she allows the curtain to rise; but that, too, is characteristic, and, to drop all metaphor, her book surely should do what none of her parts has done, and show us what cannot be shown upon the stage.

She was brought up in the Convent of Grands Champs at Versailles, and her life at once forms itself into separate and brightly coloured beads; they succeed each other, but they scarcely connect. She was so intensely organized even then that there were explosions when she came into contact for the first time with hard things in the world outside her. When she was confronted by the sad walls of the convent, she exclaimed: ‘Papa, papa! I won’t go to prison. This is a prison, I am sure.’ But at that moment a ‘little round short woman’ came out veiled to the mouth. After she had talked for a time she saw that Sarah was trembling, and with some strange instinct she raised her veil wholly for a second. ‘I then saw the sweetest and merriest face imaginable … I flung myself at once into her arms.’ Her actions within the walls were as sudden and as passionate. Her hair, for example, grew thick and curled, and the sister who had to comb it in the early morning tugged callously. ‘I flung myself upon her, and with feet, teeth, hands, elbows, head, and indeed all my poor little body, I hit and thumped, yelling at the same time.’ The pupils and the sisters came running, they muttered their prayers and waved their holy signs, at a distance, until the Mother Prefect had recourse to a further charm and dashed a spray of holy water over the active devil of Sarah Bernhardt. But after all this spiritual display it was the good Mother Superior, with her sure instinct for effect, who conquered by no more potent charm than ‘an expression of pity’. But such tempers were partly the result of the extreme fragility of her health. It is more significant to read how she built up for herself the reputation of a ‘personality’ among her fellows. She carried about with her little boxes full of adders and crickets and lizards. The lizards generally had their tails broken, for, in order to see whether they were eating, she would lift the lid and let it fall sharply ‘red with surprise’ at their assurance in rushing forwards. ‘And crac—there was nearly always a tail caught.’ So, while the sister taught she was fingering the severed tails and wondering how she could fasten them on again. Then she kept spiders, and when a child cut her finger, ‘“Come at once,” I would say, “I have some fresh spider web, and I will wrap your finger in it.”’ With such strange crafts and passions, for she was never good at her books, she touched the imagination. And of course all this intensity of feeling went, in the convent, to paint some beautiful dramatic picture in which she acted the chief part as the nun who had renounced the world, or the nun who lay dead beneath a heavy black cloth, while the candles flared, and the sisters and pupils cried out in delightful agony. ‘You saw, O Lord God,’ she prayed, ‘that mamma cried, and that it did not affect me!’ for ‘I adored my mother, but with a touching and fervent desire to leave her … to sacrifice her to God’. But a violent escapade which ended in a bad illness finished the religious career that promised so well. She left the convent, and though she still cherished only one ambition, to take the veil, it was decided in the most casual fashion in a remarkable family council to send her to the Conservatoire. Her mother, an indolent charming woman, with mysterious eyes and heart disease and a passion for music, who was at any rate no ascetic, was in the habit of assembling relations and advisers when any family business had to be transacted. On this occasion there were present a notary, a godfather, an uncle, an aunt, a governess, a friend from the flat above, and a distinguished gentleman, the Due de Moray. Most of these people Sarah had some reason to hate or to love—‘he had red hair planted in his head like couch grass’, ‘he called me “ma fil”’—‘he was gentle and kind … and occupied a high place at Court’. They discussed whether, with the 100,000 francs which her father had left her, it would not be best to find her a husband. But upon this she flew into a passion and cried ‘I’ll marry the Bon Dieu … I will be a nun, I will,’ and grew red and confronted her enemies. They murmured and expostulated, and her mother began to talk in a ‘clear drawling voice like the sound of a little waterfall’… Finally the Duc de Moray was bored, and rose to go. ‘Do you know what you ought to do with this child?’ he said. ‘You ought to send her to the Conservatoire.’

The words, as we know, were to have tremendous consequences, but it is worth while to consider the whole scene apart from them as an example of that curious gift which gives to so many passages in this autobiography the precision and vitality of coloured and animated photographs. No emotion that could express itself in gesture or action was lost upon her eye, and even though such incidents had nothing to do with the matter in hand, her brain treasured them and could, if necessary, use them to explain something. It is often something quite trivial, but for that reason, perhaps, almost startling in its effect. Thus the little sister was sitting on the floor ‘plaiting the fringe of the sofa’; Madame Guérard came in ‘without a hat; she was wearing an indoor gown of indienne with a design of little brown leaves’. Later, a little drama is given thus. ‘My godfather shrugged his shoulders, and getting up, left the box, banging the door after him. Mamma, losing all patience with me, proceeded to review the house through her opera-glasses. Mlle de Brabender passed me her handkerchief, for I had dropped mine and dared not pick it up.’ That perhaps may be taken as a simple example of the way in which it is natural for an actress, be she only twelve years old, to see things. It is her business to be able to concentrate all that she feels into some gesture perceptible to the eye, and to receive her impressions of what is going on in the minds of others from the same tokens also. The nature of her gift becomes increasingly obvious as the memoirs proceed, and the actress matures and takes her station at this point of view. And when, as is here the case, the alien art of letters is used to express a highly developed dramatic genius, some of the effects that it produces are strange and brilliant, and others pass beyond this limit and become grotesque and even painful. On the way back from her examination at the Conservatoire, in which she had been successful, she prepared a scene for her mother. She was to enter with a sad face, and then, when her mother exclaimed ‘I told you so,’ she was to cry ‘I have passed!’ But the faithful Madame Guérard spoilt the effect by shouting the true story in the courtyard. ‘I must say that the kind woman continued so long as she lived … to spoil my effects … so that before beginning a story or a game I used to ask her to go out of the room.’ Not seldom we find ourselves in the same position as Madame Guérard, although perhaps we might be able to offer an excuse. There are two stories, out of a bewildering variety, which will serve to show how it is that Sarah Bernhardt sometimes crosses the boundary, and becomes either ludicrous or painful—or is it that we, like Madame Guérard, should leave the room?

After her astonishing exertions in the Franco-Prussian war she felt the need of a change, and went accordingly to Brittany. ‘I adore the sea and the plain … but I neither care for mountains nor for forests … they crush me … and stifle me.’ In Brittany she found horrid precipices, set in the ‘infernal noise of the sea’, and rocks to crawl beneath, which had fallen there ‘in unknown ages, and were only held in equilibrium by some inexplicable cause’. There was a crevasse also, the Enfer du Plogoff, which she was determined to descend in spite of the mysterious warnings of her guide. Accordingly she was lowered by a rope attached to a belt, in which additional holes had to be pierced, for her waist ‘was then but forty-three centimetres’. It was dark, and the sea roared, and there was a din as of cannons and whips and the howling of the damned. At last her feet touched ground, the point of a little rock in a swirl of waters, and she looked fearfully about her. Suddenly she saw that she was observed by two enormous eyes; a little further, and she saw another pair of eyes. ‘I saw no body to these beings … I thought for a minute that I was losing my senses.’ She tugged violently, and was slowly raised; ‘the eyes were lifted up also … and while I mounted through the air I saw nothing but eyes everywhere—eyes throwing out long feelers to reach me’. Those are the eyes of the shipwrecked ones,’ said her guide, crossing himself. ‘I knew very well that they were not the eyes of shipwrecked ones … but it was only at the hotel that I heard about the octopus.’ It might puzzle a scrupulous chronicler to assign their original parts in this drama to the octopus, the fisherman, and to Sarah Bernhardt; for the others it does not matter.

Then, again, ‘my dear governess, Mlle de Brabender,’ was dying, and she went to visit her.

‘She had suffered so much that she looked like a different person. She was lying in her little white bed, a little white cap covering her hair; her big nose was drawn with pain, her washed-out eyes seemed to have no colour in them. Her formidable moustache alone bristled up with constant spasms of pain. Besides all this she was so strangely altered that I wondered what had caused the change. I went nearer, and bending down, kissed her gently. I then gazed at her so inquisitively that she understood instinctively. With her eyes she signed to me to look on the table near her, and there in a glass I saw all my dear old friend’s teeth.’

There is one quality that most of the stories she tells have in common: they are clearly the productions of a very literal mind. She will accumulate fact upon fact, multiply, her octopuses indefinitely, in order to achieve her effect, but she will never invoke any mystical agency. How could one manage ‘the souls of the drowned’? All the vast unconscious forces of the world, the width of the sky and the immensity of the sea, she crinkles together into some effective scenery for her solitary figure. It is for this reason that her gaze is so narrow and so penetrating. And although her convictions as an artist hardly enter these pages, it may be guessed that something of her unmatched intensity on the stage comes from the capacity which she shows for keen and sceptical vision where character is concerned; she is under no illusions. ‘I had played badly, looked ugly, and been in a bad temper.’ One figures her the most practical of women when she chooses, a cheapener of fowls with the best of them, who will only suffer herself to be cheated from the same cynicism with which, no doubt, she would cheat herself if she wished it. For so clear an insight does not seem in her case at least consistent with a very exalted view of her kind; if she had it by nature she may have found that it would not lend itself easily to the resources of her art, that the effects to be got by it were uncertain, and it is her glory to make any sacrifice that her art demands. Certainly, when you have read some way in the book you become aware of a hardness and limitation in her view, which perhaps may be accounted for by the fact that all these violent scenes are the result of certain well-contrived explosions which serve but to illumine the curious face, so unlike any other face, of the actress. And in a world thus lit for us in lurid bursts of violet and crimson light the one figure in all its poses is always vivid enough, but the others which fall just outside the circle are strangely discoloured. Thus, she saved a lady from falling downstairs on board ship, who murmured ‘in a voice that was scarcely audible “I am the widow of President Lincoln” … A thrill of anguish ran through me … her husband had been assassinated by an actor, and it was an actress who prevented her from joining her beloved husband. I went to my cabin and stayed there two days.’ And what was Mrs Lincoln feeling meanwhile?

Such a multiplication of crude visible objects upon our senses wearies them considerably by the time the book is finished, but what we suffer—it is the final triumph of ‘the personality’—is exhaustion and not boredom. Even the stars, when she draws her curtain at night, shine not upon the earth and the sea, but upon ‘the new era’ which her second volume will reveal to us also.

With our eyes dazzled by this unflinching stare we are urged to say something of the revelation—and vainly, no doubt. For the more you are under the obsession of a book the less of articulate language you have to use concerning it. You creep along after such shocks, like some bewildered animal, whose head, struck by a flying stone, flashes with all manner of sharp lightnings. It is possible, as you read the volume, to feel your chair sink beneath you into undulating crimson vapours, of a strange perfume, which presently rise and enclose you entirely. And then they draw asunder and leave clear spaces, still shot with crimson, in which some vivid conflict goes forward between bright pigmies; the clouds ring with high French voices perfect of accent, though so strangely mannered and so monotonous of tone that you hardly recognize them for the voices of human beings. There is a constant reverberation of applause, chafing all the nerves to action. But where after all does dream end, and where does life begin? For when the buoyant armchair grounds itself at the end of the chapter with a gentle shock that wakes you and the clouds spin round you and disappear, does not the solid room which is suddenly presented with all its furniture expectant appear too large and gaunt to be submerged again by the thin stream of interest which is all that is left you after your prodigal expense? Yes—one must dine and sleep and register one’s life by the dial of the clock, in a pale light, attended only by the irrelevant uproar of cart and carriage, and observed by the universal eye of sun and moon which looks upon us all, we are told, impartially. But is not this a gigantic falsehood? Are we not each in truth the centre of innumerable rays which so strike upon one figure only, and is it not our business to flash them straight and completely back again, and never suffer a single shaft to blunt itself on the far side of us? Sarah Bernhardt at least, by reason of some such concentration, will sparkle for many generations a sinister and enigmatic message; but still she will sparkle, while the rest of us—is the prophecy too arrogant?—lie dissipated among the floods.

[Cornhill Magazine, February 1908]

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Lady Strachey.

There are some people who without being themselves famous seem to sum up the qualities of an age and to represent it at its best. Lady Strachey, who died last week at the age of eighty-eight, was among them. She seemed the type of the Victorian woman at her finest—many-sided, vigorous, adventurous, advanced. With her large and powerful frame, her strongly marked features, her manner that was so cordial, so humorous, and yet perhaps a little formidable, she seemed cast on a larger scale, made of more massive material than the women of today. One could not but be aware even to look at her that she was in the line of a great tradition. She came of a family famous for its administrators and public servants; she married into one of the great Anglo-Indian families of the nineteenth century. One could easily imagine how, had she been a man, she would have ruled a province or administered a Government department. She had all that instinct for affairs, that broad-minded grasp of politics that made the great public servant of the nineteenth century. But, in addition, like all Victorian women of her stamp, she was emphatically a mother and a wife. Even while she wrote dispatches at her husband’s dictation and debated—for she was in the counsels of the men who governed India—this problem, that policy, she was bringing up, now in India, now in England, a family of ten children. She was presiding over one of those vast Victorian households which, chaotic as they seem now, had a character and a vitality about them which it is hard to suppose will ever be matched again. Memory provides a picture of the many-roomed house; of people coming and going; of argument; of laughter; of different voices speaking at once; of Lady Strachey herself a little absent-minded, a little erratic, but nevertheless the controller and inspirer of it all, now wandering through the rooms with a book, now teaching a group of young people the steps of the Highland reel, now plunging into ardent debate about politics or literature, now working out, with equal intentness, some puzzle in a penny paper which if solved would provide her with thirty shillings a week and a workman’s cottage for life.

In her old age she wrote down a few memories of the past which show, very briefly, how naturally, how as a matter of course, she was in touch with the great figures of the Victorian world. She joked with Huxley; she exchanged spectacles with Tennyson; she was a special favourite with George Eliot, and, ‘though much ashamed of my vanity in recording it’, could not help remembering how ‘Lewes told a friend of mine that I was his idea of Dorothea in Middlemarch’. She sat up to all hours of the night, ‘eagerly discussing every aspect of humanity’, with the most distinguished men of her time, openly but impersonally, rather as if they were in full evening dress, so it seems to a less formal age. For together with her keen interest in public questions, particularly in the education and emancipation of women, went an interest as vigorous in music and the drama, and especially in literature. She had a vast capacity for enthusiasm which fed happily and confidently as was common with the Victorians upon her own contemporaries and their works. She had no doubts whatever about the greatness of the men she knew and the lasting importance of their books. When she met Browning for the first time at a concert she wrote on her programme:

‘And did you once see Browning plain?

And did he stop and speak to you?’

and kept it, a sacred relic. She counted it one of her great pieces of good luck that she was born contemporary with Salvini. She went to the theatre every night on which he acted. But she was not only attracted by the great figures of her own age. She was an omnivorous reader. She had her hands upon the whole body of English literature, from Shakespeare to Tennyson, with the large loose grasp that was so characteristic of the cultivated Victorian. She had a special love for the Elizabethan drama, and for English poetry—Beddoes was one of the obscure writers whom she championed and discovered—a little incongruously perhaps, for her own affinities seemed rather with the age of reason and the robust sense of the great English prose writers. She was, above all things, rational, positive, agnostic, like the distinguished men who were her friends. Later in life, after her husband’s death, when her activities were somewhat lessened, though they were still varied enough to have filled the life of a younger woman, she would spend an entire winter’s afternoon in reading an Elizabethan play from end to end. For reading aloud was one of her great natural gifts. She read with fire and ardour, and with a great clarity and distinction of utterance. Often she would pause to point out the beauty of some passage, or propound with extreme ingenuity some emendation, or impart a curious illustration that had stuck in her mind from her wide and miscellaneous foraging among books. Then, when the reading was over, she would launch out into stories of the past; of Lord Lytton and his sky-blue dressing-gown; of Lord Roberts helping to mend her sewing machine; of Lawrence and Outram (she never passed the statue of Outram without making a salute, she said); of Patties and Prinseps; of bygone beauties and scandals—for though she observed the conventions she was not in the least a prude; of Indian society fifty years, eighty years, a hundred years ago. For she had the Scottish love of following family histories and tracing the friendships and alliances of the present back to their roots in the past. Thus a haphazard party would come in her presence to have a patriarchal air, as she recalled the memories and the marriages that had bound parents and grandparents together years ago, in the distant past.

Gradually, though the vigour of her mind was as great as ever, it seemed to withdraw from modern life and to focus itself more and more upon the past. She did not remember clearly what had happened the week before, but Calcutta in 1870, Robert Browning’s laugh, some saying of George Eliot’s, were as clear, as dear, and as vivid as ever. It was her hard fate to lose her sight almost entirely some years before she died. She could no longer go foraging and triumphing through English literature—for it seemed as if she carried on even the passive act of reading with something of the vigour with which she strode the streets, peering forward with her short-sighted eyes, or tossed her head high in a shout of laughter. But she could talk, she could argue, she could join in the disputes of the younger generation and follow with pride the successes of her children. Her mind was still busy with literature, still active with suggestions for reviving forgotten plays, for editing old texts, for bringing to light some hidden splendour in those old books which she could no longer read herself, but almost commanded the younger generation to love as she had loved them. Her memory, grown to be the strongest part of her, still kept unimpaired in its depths some of the loveliest things in English poetry. When she was past eighty, she stopped one summer evening under a tree in a London square and recited the whole of ‘Lycidas’ without a fault. Last summer, though too weak to walk any more, she sat on her balcony and showered down upon the faces that she could not see a vast maternal benediction. It was as if the Victorian age in its ripeness, its width, with all its memories and achievements behind it were bestowing its blessing. And we should be blind indeed if we did not wave back to her a salute full of homage and affection.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Dec 22, 1928]

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John Delane.

[The Life and Letters of John Thadeus Delane, by Arthur Irwin Dasent.]

If, in the middle days of the last century, you had seen the figure of a certain tall young man, ruddy of complexion and powerful of build, you might have foretold a dozen successful careers for him, as squire, lawyer, or man of business, but perhaps you would not have fitted him at once with his indubitable calling. That spark of genius, for surely it was not less, flashed in the brain of John Walter, proprietor of the Times’, when he saw the second son of a neighbour of his in the country riding to hounds or conducting a successful election on his behalf. John Thadeus Delane went to Oxford and distinguished himself there rather as a bold rider—‘Mr Delane is part and parcel of his horse,’ wrote his tutor—a tennis-player, or a boxer (for the hot Irish blood in him would rise) than as a nice scholar or a mathematician. His letters to his friend George Dasent show him something of a Philistine, with a command of vigorous and wholesome English, lending itself happily to such casual remarks as those he had to make about his studies and his sports. He did not know, for instance, ‘how I am to cram a sufficient store of divinity into my head. As the premises will only be occupied a short time with the last-named commodity, the trouble of storing it should be slight. [I must] try to secure a patent safety vehicle … This is a most glorious country—capital people, excellent horses, prime feeding, and very fair shooting.’ Such is the slang of the ‘forties, which, with its comfortable lapse from the dignity of contemporary prose, reveals a young man lazily conscious of his power, with a capacity for shooting words straight if need be, and for distorting them at will, which is the despair of lady novelists who seek to reproduce it.

Directly he had taken his degree, in 1840, he went to Printing-house Square, and was occupied with various duties about the paper. Little is said of their nature, or of the way in which he discharged them, for he had now entered that unnamed world which is crowded but unchecked; there are duties which belong to no profession, nor are the limits of work bounded so long as the brain urges on. He made himself familiar with the House of Commons, we are told, ‘summarizing the remarks of the principal speakers’. We must imagine how swiftly he took the measure of the world around him, gauging silently the capacity of his machine for reporting and perhaps for directing the turmoil. A year later, at any rate, when Mr Barnes, the editor, died, Mr Walter had no hesitation in choosing ‘the youngest member of all the staff’, whose age was then twenty-three, to succeed him. Sense and industry and ability were his, but the easy margin of strength, as of a loosely fitting coat, which may be detected in his Oxford letters, marked him, to a discriminating eye, as the man who would put forth greater power than he had yet shown, with a competent tool in his hand, or would so weld himself to his instrument that their joint stroke would be irresistible. But it is one of the mysteries that tempt us and baffle us in this biography that the transition is almost unmarked. We hear Mr Delane exclaim once, in ‘tremendous spirits’, ‘By Jove, John, … I am editor of the ‘Times”,’ but in future the editor and the Times’ are one, as in the old days the undergraduate was part of his horse. What the condition of the paper was when he came to it, or what private estimate he had formed of its scope, we are not told. But as all agree that the age of Delane was the great age, and that the paper grew with its editor, we may believe that he undertook the task without articulate reflection, conscious of a power within him that would soon fill all the space permitted it. *What I dislike about you young men of the present day is that you all shrink from responsibility,’ he was wont to laugh, when people wondered.

Much of the paper’s industry as chronicler and reporter and simple publisher was merely that of a gigantic natural force, sucking in and casting forth again its daily cloud of print impartially; and the editor was lost in its shade. But almost at once the brain of the monster, which expressed itself daily in the four leading articles, was given cause to show its quality. There was a ‘Ministerial crisis’ and Delane had not only to anticipate the rest of the world in publishing the news, but to express an opinion. No study, were there material for it, could be more fascinating than the analysis of such an opinion. Hawthorne himself might have found scope for all his imagination, all his love of darkness and mystery, in tracing it from its first secret whisper to its final reverberation over the entire land. A great Minister sends for the editor to his private room, and speaks to him; a note from someone who has picked up a word at Court is left on him; instantly, with an audacity that may land him in disaster, he fits the parts together, and instructs his leader-writer to embody them in a column of English prose; tomorrow a voice speaks with authority in Court and market and Council Chamber. But whose voice is it? It is not the voice of Mr Delane, the urbane gentleman who rides along Fleet Street on his cob, nor is it the voice of Dr Woodham, the learned Fellow of Jesus. It has the authority of Government and the sting of independence: Downing Street trembles at it and the people of England give ear to it, for such is the voice of the ‘Times’.

It is easy to submit to the fascination of the idea, and to conceive a monster in Printing-house Square without personality but with an infallible knowledge of persons, ruthless as a machine and subtle as a single brain. And there are facts in this book which seem to justify the most extravagant statement that we can make. There is, of course, the romantic story of the ‘Times’ and the repeal of the Corn Laws; we read also how Louis Philippe and Guizot thought it worth their while to impede the paper’s correspondence; how the Czar heard of the Ultimatum of 1854 through the Times’ and not through the Foreign Office; how it was objected in the House of Lords that Cabinet secrets were made public, and the Times’ answered, ‘We are satisfied that it was useful to the public and to Europe’; how the Times’ foretold the Indian Mutiny, and was the first to reveal the state of the army in the Crimea; how the Times’ was foremost with the Queen’s Speech and with texts and resignations innumerable; making Ministries, deciding policies, exalting statesmen, and casting them down. The list might be lengthened, but surely without avail; for already there is some risk lest we grow beyond our strength and forget, what these volumes should recall, the character, the individual will, directing this giant force and placing its blows in such tender quarters His contemporaries certainly did not forget, for it was the independence of the paper that was chiefly valuable, or dangerous, as fortune chanced, and the spirit that preserved it from the blunt blow and shapeless mass of a machine was of course the spirit of Mr Delane. Together with these triumphs of organization we read of other triumphs that are no less remarkable. Prime Ministers and Secretaries of State lay aside (with relief one guesses) their impassive public countenance, and entrust Mr Delane not only with State secrets, but with private prejudices of their own. Here was one with greater knowledge than the best instructed of Ministers, with whom no secrecy availed, who was moreover so sequestered from the public eye that you might approach him without reserve, as patients their physician, or penitents their confessor. A letter from Lord Palmerston begins, ‘I am told you disapprove …’ and goes on to justify his action with allusions to foreign politics and the gout which, though each had a share in his behaviour, would not have been used to explain it either to the public or to his friends.

The anonymity which Delane took such care to preserve was no doubt of the utmost value in the conduct of the paper, investing it with an impersonal majesty; but there is reason to think that it came from no mere professional policy but was a deeply seated instinct in the character of the man. He was infinitely receptive, and so far ‘anonymous’ by nature that the broad columns of the Times’, filled with the writing of other men but sharpened and guided by himself, expressed all of him that he chose to express. When he left his rooms in the morning he rode about London, followed by a groom, calling at the House of Commons or at Downing Street, and took his lunch with one great lady and his tea with another. He dined out almost nightly, and met frequently all the great nobles and celebrities of the time. But his demeanour, we are told, was inscrutable; he was of opinion that society should be exclusive; and his attitude generally was one of ‘observant silence’. He never mentioned the Times’ after he had left the office, though the paper was always in his thoughts. At length, when he had stored his mind with observations, he returned to Printing-house Square, and, with his energies at full play and his staff circling round him, shaped the course of the paper in accordance with his own view until it was three or four in the morning and he must rest before the labours of the day. And yet, in spite of his silence—his broad way of looking at tendencies and institutions rather than at individuals—men and women, we read, gave him their confidences. They were sure of able consideration from a man who had infinite experience of men, but, as it appears from his letters, they were sure also of a massive integrity which inspired absolute trust, both that he would respect your secret, and that he would respect more than you or your secret, what was right. His letters, however, can seldom be said to add anything that the columns of the Times’ have not already supplied; but they are token again of the liberal truth of his phrase, when there was talk of his retirement, ‘All that was worth having of [my life] has been devoted to the paper.’

There was not sufficient space between his professional life and his private life for any change of view or difference of code. We may find in that fact some clue to the amazing authority which he wielded, for it is easy to see that if you disproved some opinion of his or disparaged some method you aimed a blow at the nature of the man himself, the two being of one birth. When he travelled abroad and visited towns famous for their beauty or their art he was unconscious of their appeal, but was inclined to adopt on such occasions the attitude of a portly gentleman with pretty children. Perhaps he had noticed some new factory or some stout bridge from the train window, and had found in it the text of a leading article. He travelled much, and visited any place that might become the centre of action; and in time of peace he went on pilgrimage through the great houses of England, where the nerves of the country come nearest to the surface. It was his purpose to know all that could be known of the condition and future of Europe, so far as certain great signs reveal it, and if he ignored much there was no wiser or more discriminating judge of the symptoms he chose to observe.

One quality seems to mark his judgments and to add to their value—they are so dispassionate. The indifference he always showed to what was thought of him came, naturally, from his well-founded trust in himself; but there was another reason for it, once or twice hinted in the course of this book, and once at least outspoken. The paper was more to him than his own fortunes, and, thus divested of personality, he came to take a gigantic and even humorous view of the whole, which sometimes seems to us sublime, sometimes callous, and sometimes, when we read certain phrases near the end, very melancholy. He was the most attentive observer of the political life of his age, but he took no part in it. When he was attacked he gave, with one exception, no answer. His anonymity, his reticence—no man was to take his portrait or to make him look ridiculous—are allied surely with the casual bluntness of speech and indifference to praise or blame which gave his opinion its peculiar weight. ‘Something like consternation prevailed at the War Office and at the Horse Guards when it became known that Delane intended to be present upon Salisbury Plain.’ But could he have cared so much for the world, for politics, for the welfare of numbers had he not been indifferent to his personal share in it? or again, would he so soon have tired of the scene had some part of it touched him more nearly? Again and again the phrase recurs. The New Year found me, as the last had done, alone at Printing-house Square,’ and the loneliness deepened as life drew on until we find such a sentence as this: “Nobody now [his mother being dead] cares about me or my success, or my motives, and that weariness of life I had long felt has been gaining on me ever since … I have much to be thankful for, [but] I have become so indifferent to life … weary both of work and idleness, careless about society and with failing interests.’ But it would be unwise to allow such a sentence to set its seal upon the rest, or to colour too sadly that colossal erection of courage and devotion which he called ‘the Paper”; his success only was tinged with ‘a browner shade’ than it might otherwise have worn.

When he was middle-aged he bought himself a tract of common near Ascot, and busied himself in reclaiming the land and in playing the farmer. It is easy to see him there, looking much like a country squire with the interests of his crops at heart, as he rode about and drew in great draughts of the open air. From the clods of earth and the watery English sky he received a passive satisfaction, and came perhaps to enjoy an easier intercourse with these dumb things than with human beings.

[Cornhill Magazine, June 1908]

[]

Body and Brain.

[Theodore Roosevelt, by William Roscoe Thayer.]

One might read the lives of all the Cabinet Ministers since the accession of Queen Victoria without realizing that they had a body between them. To imagine any of the statues in Parliament Square running, climbing, or even in a state of nudity is not only impossible but also unseemly. The life, dignity, character of statesmen is centred in the head; the body is merely a stalk, smooth, black and inexpressive, whether attenuated or obese, at the end of which flowers a Gladstone, a Campbell-Bannerman, or a Chamberlain. But you have only to look at a photograph of Theodore Roosevelt to see that he and his body are identical. The little round pugnacious head with the eyes screwed up as if charging an enemy is as much part of his body as a bull’s head is part of his body. Decency requires that the man’s body shall be cut off from his head by collar, frock coat and trousers, but even under that disguise we still see, without any sense of unseemliness, bones, muscles, and flesh.

As Mr Thayer remarks in the course of his witty and sensible biography, very little is yet known of the interaction between mind and body. The mind in biography as in sculpture is treated as a separate and superior organ attached to an instrument which is, happily, becoming obsolete. If Cabinet Ministers exercise their bodies for a few hours it is only in order to clarify their brains. But Roosevelt, though given by nature a sickly and asthmatic body which might have claimed the pampered life of a slave, always treated his body as a companion and equal. Indeed, his education until he left college was more the education of the body than of the mind. It was not until he had wrought a light weak frame into a tough thick body capable of immense endurance that his brain came into partnership. If he used his brain at all it was not to think about books but about animals. He was taken on a tour through Europe as a small boy, but what did he see? Only that there are flocks of aquatic birds on the banks of the Nile, and that in Cairo there is a book by an English clergyman that tells you a great deal about them. In Venice he wrote in his diary, ‘We saw a palace of the doges. It looks like a palace you could be comfortable and snug in (which is not usual).’ The poor boys have been dragged off to the orful picture galery’ wrote his little sister. Roosevelt had no artistic sense either as boy or man, so that we are not able to consider the effect upon an artist of owning a body. But directly the body and mind came into partnership it was plain that for political purposes no combination is more powerful.

American politics in the ‘eighties appear to an English reader as a rough-and-tumble shindy of public house loafers in which the only serviceable weapon is a strong right arm. When Roosevelt said on leaving college ‘I am going to try to help the cause of better government in New York; I don’t exactly know how,’ his ambition seemed to his friends ‘almost comic’. Politics were not for ‘gentlemen’. Jake Hess, the Republican Boss, and his heelers were equally amused. What business had a youth of the ‘kid glove and silk stocking set’ among such as them? After a little experience of him they owned that he was ‘a good fellow’—‘a good mixer’. Both friends and enemies were wont to expatiate upon his luck. Directly Roosevelt was safely shelved for life as Vice-President, President McKinley was shot dead. The greatest prize in the United States fell into his hands without an effort. That was the sort of thing that always happened to Roosevelt. But it is impossible to feel that his progress had anything accidental about it. Fortune, indeed, showed her self quite ready to suppress him had he been made of suppressive material. The year 1883 found him out of politics, alienated from many of his best friends, and bereaved of his wife. Intellectually and emotionally he was disillusioned and disheartened. Then flooded in to his rescue that strange passion for using muscles and breathing fresh air and throwing oneself naked upon nature and seeing what happens next which cannot be called intellectual but which is certainly not merely animal. He became a ranchman. His companions were uncivilized; his duties were those of a primitive man. He lived with horses and cattle and at any moment might have to shoot or be shot. The same thing happened with the desperadoes of Little Missouri as had happened with Boss Hess and his heelers. They began by despising his spectacles and ended by thinking him the same kind of man as themselves. When he was President of the United States a cowboy came up to him and said, “Mr President, I have been in jail a year for killing a gentleman.” “How did you do it?” asked the President, meaning to inquire as to the circumstances. “Thirty-eight on a forty-five frame,” replied the man, thinking that the only interest the President had was that of a comrade who wanted to know with what kind of tool the trick was done.’ No other President, it is said, from Washington to Wilson would have drawn that answer.

Undoubtedly, it was not his fight against Trusts, or his action in ending the Russo-Japanese war, or any other political faith of his that gave him his popularity so much as the fact that his development was not limited to the organs of the brain. He was a good mixer. We have seen the effect upon bosses and cowboys. Now let us go to the other extreme and see how the President affected a highly cultivated Frenchman, the ambassador, M. Jusserand. Desired by his government to sketch some account of the President’s temperament, M. Jusserand sent a dispatch describing ‘a promenade’ in Washington. ‘I arrived at the White House punctually in afternoon dress and silk hat … The President wore knickerbockers, thick boots and soft felt hat, much worn … On reaching the country, the President went pell-mell over the fields, following neither road nor path, always on, on, straight ahead! I was much winded, but I would not give in, nor ask him to slow up, because I had the honour of La Belle France at heart. At last we came to the bank of a stream, rather wide and too deep to be forded. I sighed relief … But judge of my horror when I saw the President unbutton his clothes and heard him say, “We had better strip, so as not to wet our things in the creek.” Then I, too, for the honour of France, removed my apparel, everything except my lavender kid gloves. The President cast an inquiring look at these but I quickly forestalled any remark by saying, “With your permission, Mr President, I will keep these on, otherwise it would be embarrassing if we should meet ladies.” And so we jumped into the water and swam across.’ They came out on the other side firm friends. That is the result of taking off everything except one’s lavender kid gloves.

It was the combination of brain and body that was remarkable—for neither, separately, excelled immensely those of other men. Was it not the essence of his teaching that almost any man can achieve great things by getting the utmost use out of ‘the ordinary qualities that he shares with his fellows’? Put an ordinary man under a microscope and you see President Roosevelt. Unfortunately, many shadows are needed even in the crudest snapshot. Directly you are conscious of being ordinary you cease to be ordinary. And, after all, can we call the President a perfect example of a successful man? Are we not conscious towards the end of his life of a lack of balance which destroys his value as a magnified specimen of the human race? The slaughter of animals played too large a part in his life. And why start exploring the Brazilian River of Doubt at the age of fifty-five? Nature, outraged, sent him back with a fever in his bones from which he died years before his time. So difficult is it at this late stage of civilization for one and the same person to have both body and brain.

[New Statesman, Jun 5, 1920]

[]

WOMEN
AND
WRITING

by
Virginia Woolf

published
1979
by
Harcourt Publishers Ltd

women and writing

Women and Leisure.

The Intellectual Status of Women.

Women Novelists.

Indiscretions.

Jane Austen Practising.

Olive Schreiner.

Dorothy Richardson: 1. The Tunnel.

“The Duchess of Newcastle”, “Jane Austen”, “‘Jane Eyre’ and ‘Wuthering Heights’” and “George Eliot”: see The Common Reader I.

“Aphra Behn”: excerpt from A Room of One’s Own.

“Mary Wollstonecraft”, “‘Aurora Leigh’” and “‘I am Christina Rossetti’”: see The Common Reader II.

“Professions for Women”: see The Death of the Moth.

“Royalty”: see The Moment.

“Women and Fiction” and “A Terribly Sensitive Mind (Katherine Mansfield)”: see Granite and Rainbow.

“Men and Women”, “A Scribbling Dame (Eliza Haywood), “Haworth, November 1904”, “Mrs Gaskell”, “The Compromise (Mrs Humphry Ward)” and “Wilcoxiana (Ella Wheeler Wilcox)”: see Books and Portraits.

“Dorothy Richardson: 2. Revolving Lights”: excerpt from “Romance and the Heart”

[]

[The text follows the 1979 Harcourt Brace edition.]

Women and Leisure.

Sir,—I must thank Miss Irvine for her very intelligent and generous article on my book, A Room of One’s Own. But perhaps you will allow me to dispute one or two of her contentions. ‘The poorest community of men,’ she says, ‘would never sit down week in, week out, to such a diet’ (i.e., a diet of prunes and custard). And she infers that men are therefore endowed with some desirable power that women lack. But, after all, the majority of Englishmen are sitting down at this moment to such a diet. The working-class man does not possess either £500 a year or a room of his own. And if the majority of men, without the burden of child-bearing and with the professions open to them, yet find it impossible to earn a wage that admits of leisure and the production of works of art, it would seem to prove that both sexes, men as well as women, are forced to eat prunes and custard not because they like them, or are patient or can imagine nothing better, but because that is all that they can get. It is the middle-class man to whom we owe our art; but whether he would have enjoyed his very valuable degree of comfort and prosperity had the duty of child-birth been laid upon him in the flower of his youth, and had all the professions been closed to him by his sex, seems to me disputable.

Then again, Miss Irvine contends that if the Brontë sisters had lived now they would have become schoolmistresses, and would have travelled abroad under the auspices of Thomas Cook and Son; but they would have lost their leisure, she says, and we should have lost Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. What kind of ‘leisure’ the women of the nineteenth century enjoyed is, I think, made very plain by Florence Nightingale in Cassandra. ‘Women never have half an hour in all their lives (excepting before or after anybody is up in the house) that they can call their own, without fear of offending or of hurting someone.’ I submit that Charlotte Brontë would have enjoyed more true leisure as a schoolmistress now than she did as the daughter at home in close attendance upon a beloved, but it would seem somewhat exacting, parent in a vicarage in a graveyard. Nor can I stifle my suspicion that if Emily had travelled in the summer holidays even under the guidance of Mr Cook she might not have died of consumption at the age of twenty-nine. But, of course, in no circumstances could the Brontë sisters have been either typical schoolmistresses or typical globe-trotters. They remain rare and remarkable women. And my argument was that if we wish to increase the supply of rare and remarkable women like the Brontës we should give the Joneses and the Smiths rooms of their own and five hundred a year. One cannot grow fine flowers in a thin soil. And hitherto the soil—I mean no disrespect to Miss Smith and Miss Jones—has been very starved and very stony.—Yours, &c.,

Virginia Woolf.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Nov 16, 1929]

[]

The Intellectual Status of Women.

Sir,—Like most women, I am unable to face the depression and the loss of self-respect which Mr Arnold Bennett’s blame and Mr Orlo Williams’ praise—if it is not the other way about—would certainly cause me if I read their books in the bulk. I taste them, therefore, in sips at the hands of reviewers. But I cannot swallow the teaspoonful administered in your columns last week by Affable Hawk. The fact that women are inferior to men in intellectual power, he says, ‘stares him in the face’. He goes on to agree with Mr Bennett’s conclusion that ‘no amount of education and liberty of action will sensibly alter it’. How, then, does Affable Hawk account for the fact which stares me, and I should have thought any other impartial observer, in the face, that the seventeenth century produced more remarkable women that the sixteenth, the eighteenth than the seventeenth, and the nineteenth than all three put together? When I compare the Duchess of Newcastle with Jane Austen, the matchless Orinda with Emily Brontë, Mrs Haywood with George Eliot, Aphra Behn with Charlotte Brontë, Jane Grey with Jane Harrison, the advance in intellectual power seems to me not only sensible but immense; the comparison with men not in the least one that inclines me to suicide; and the effects of education and liberty scarcely to be overrated. In short, though pessimism about the other sex is always delightful and invigorating, it seems a little sanguine of Mr Bennett and Affable Hawk to indulge in it with such certainty on the evidence before them. Thus, though women have every reason to hope that the intellect of the male sex is steadily diminishing, it would be unwise, until they have more evidence than the great war and the great peace supply, to announce it as a fact. In conclusion, if Affable Hawk sincerely wishes to discover a great poetess, why does he let himself be fobbed off with a possible authoress of the Odyssey? Naturally, I cannot claim to know Greek as Mr Bennett and Affable Hawk know it, but I have often been told that Sappho was a woman, and that Plato and Aristotle placed her with Homer and Archilocus among the greatest of their poets. That Mr Bennett can name fifty of the male sex who are indisputably her superiors is therefore a welcome surprise, and if he will publish their names I will promise, as an act of that submission which is so dear to my sex, not only to buy their works but, so far as my faculties allow, to learn them by heart.—Yours, etc.

Virginia Woolf.

[letter to New Statesman, Oct 9, 1920]

[]

Women Novelists.

[The Women Novelists by R. Brimley Johnson]

By rights, or, more modestly, according to a theory of ours, Mr Brimley Johnson should have written a book amply calculated, according to the sex of the reader, to cause gratification or annoyance, but of no value from a critical point of view. Experience seems to prove that to criticize the work of a sex as a sex is merely to state with almost invariable acrimony prejudices derived from the fact that you are either a man or a woman. By some lucky balance of qualities Mr Brimley Johnson has delivered his opinion of women novelists without this fatal bias, so that, besides saying some very interesting things about literature, he says also many that are even more interesting about the peculiar qualities of the literature that is written by women.

Given this unusual absence of partisanship, the interest and also the complexity of the subject can scarcely be overstated. Mr Johnson, who has read more novels by women than most of us have heard of, is very cautious—more apt to suggest than to define, and much disposed to qualify his conclusions. Thus, though his book is not a mere study of the women novelists, but an attempt to prove that they have followed a certain course of development, we should be puzzled to state what his theory amounts to. The question is one not merely of literature, but to a large extent of social history. What, for example, was the origin of the extraordinary outburst in the eighteenth century of novel writing by women? Why did it begin then, and not in the time of the Elizabethan renaissance? Was the motive which finally determined them to write a desire to correct the current view of their sex expressed in so many volumes and for so many ages by male writers? If so, their art is at once possessed of an element which should be absent from the work of all previous writers. It is clear enough, however, that the work of Miss Burney, the mother of English fiction, was not inspired by any single wish to redress a grievance: the richness of the human scene as Dr Burney’s daughter had the chance of observing it provided a sufficient stimulus; but however strong the impulse to write had become, it had at the outset to meet opposition not only of circumstance but of opinion. Her first manuscripts were burnt by her stepmother’s orders, and needlework was inflicted as a penance, much as, a few years later, Jane Austen would slip her writing beneath a book if anyone came in, and Charlotte Brontë stopped in the middle of her work to pare the potatoes. But the domestic problem being overcome or compromised with, there remained the moral one. Miss Burney had showed that it was ‘possible for a woman to write novels and be respectable’, but the burden of proof still rested anew upon each authoress. Even so late as the mid-Victorian days George Eliot was accused of ‘coarseness and immorality’ in her attempt ‘to familiarize the minds of our young women in the middle and higher ranks with matters on which their fathers and brothers would never venture to speak in their presence’.

The effect of these repressions is still clearly to be traced in women’s work, and the effect is wholly to the bad. The problem of art is sufficiently difficult in itself without having to respect the ignorance of young women’s minds or to consider whether the public will think that the standard of moral purity displayed in your work is such as they have a right to expect from your sex. The attempt to conciliate, or more naturally to outrage, public opinion is equally a waste of energy and a sin against art. It may have been not only with a view to obtaining impartial criticism that George Eliot and Miss Brontë adopted male pseudonyms, but in order to free their own consciousness as they wrote from the tyranny of what was expected from their sex. No more than men, however, could they free themselves from a more fundamental tyranny—the tyranny of sex itself. The effort to free themselves, or rather to enjoy what appears, perhaps erroneously, to be the comparative freedom of the male sex from that tyranny, is another influence which has told disastrously upon the writing of women. When Mr Brimley Johnson says that ‘imitation has not been, fortunately, the besetting sin of women novelists’, he has in mind no doubt the work of the exceptional women who imitated neither a sex nor any individual of either sex. But to take no more thought of their sex when they wrote than of the colour of their eyes was one of their conspicuous distinctions, and of itself a proof that they wrote at the bidding of a profound and imperious instinct. The women who wished to be taken for men in what they wrote were certainly common enough; and if they have given place to the women who wish to be taken for women the change is hardly for the better, since any emphasis, either of pride or of shame, laid consciously upon the sex of a writer is not only irritating but superfluous. As Mr Brimley Johnson again and again remarks, a woman’s writing is always feminine; it cannot help being feminine: the only difficulty lies in defining what we mean by feminine. He shows his wisdom not only by advancing a great many suggestions, but also by accepting the fact, upsetting though it is, that women are apt to differ. Still, here are a few attempts: ‘Women are born preachers and always work for an ideal.’ ‘Woman is the moral realist, and her realism is not inspired by any idle ideal of art, but of sympathy with life.’ For all her learning, ‘George Eliot’s outlook remains thoroughly emotional and feminine.’ Women are humorous and satirical rather than imaginative. They have a greater sense of emotional purity than men, but a less alert sense of honour.

No two people will accept without wishing to add to and qualify these attempts at a definition, and yet no one will admit that he can possibly mistake a novel written by a man for a novel written by a woman. There is the obvious and enormous difference of experience in the first place; but the essential difference lies in the fact not that men describe battles and women the birth of children, but that each sex describes itself. The first words in which either a man or a woman is described are generally enough to determine the sex of the writer; but though the absurdity of a woman’s hero or of a man’s heroine is universally recognized, the sexes show themselves extremely quick at detecting each other’s faults. No one can deny the authenticity of a Becky Sharp or of a Mr Woodhouse. No doubt the desire and the capacity to criticize the other sex had its share in deciding women to write novels, for indeed that particular vein of comedy has been but slightly worked, and promises great richness. Then again, though men are the best judges of men and women of women, there is a side of each sex which is known only to the other, nor does this refer solely to the relationship of love. And finally (as regards this review at least) there rises for consideration the very difficult question of the difference between the man’s and the woman’s view of what constitutes the importance of any subject. From this spring not only marked differences of plot and incident, but infinite differences in selection, method and style.

[Times Literary Supplement, Oct 17, 1918]

[]

Indiscretions.

It is always indiscreet to mention the affections. Yet how they prevail, how they permeate all our intercourse! Boarding an omnibus we like the conductor; in a shop take for or against the young lady serving; through all traffic and routine, liking and disliking we go our ways, and our whole day is stained and steeped by the affections. And so it must be in reading. The critic may be able to abstract the essence and feast upon it undisturbed, but for the rest of us in every book there is something—sex, character, temperament—which, as in life, rouses affection or repulsion; and, as in life, sways and prejudices; and again, as in life, is hardly to be analysed by the reason.

George Eliot is a case in point. Her reputation, they say, is on the wane, and, indeed, how could it be otherwise? Her big nose, her little eyes, her heavy, horsey head loom from behind the printed page and make a critic of the other sex uneasy. Praise he must, but love he cannot; and however absolute and austere his devotion to the principle that art has no truck with personality, still there has crept into his voice, into textbooks and articles, as he analyses her gifts and unmasks her pretentions, that it is not George Eliot he would like to pour out tea. On the other hand, exquisitely and urbanely, from the chastest urn into the finest china Jane Austen pours, and, as she pours, smiles, charms, appreciates—that too has made its way into the austere pages of English criticism.

But now perhaps it may be pertinent, since women not only read but sometimes scribble a note of their opinions, to enquire into their preferences, their equally suppressed but equally instinctive response to the lure of personal liking in the printed page. The attractions and repulsions of sex are naturally among the most emphatic. One may hear them crackling and spitting and lending an agreeable vivacity to the insipidity of weekly journalism. In higher spheres these same impurities serve to fledge the arrows and wing the mind more swiftly if more capriciously in its flight. Some adjustment before reading is essential. Byron is the first name that comes to mind. But no woman ever loved Byron; they bowed to convention; did what they were told to do; ran mad to order. Intolerably condescending, ineffably vain, a barber’s block to look at, compound of bully and lap-dog, now hectoring, now swimming in vapours of sentimental twaddle, tedious, egotistical, melodramatic, the character of Byron is the least attractive in the history of letters. But no wonder that every man was in love with him. In their company he must have been irresistible; brilliant and courageous; dashing and satirical; downright and tremendous; the conquerer of women and companion of heroes—everything that strong men believe themselves to be and weak men envy them for being. But to fall in love with Byron, to enjoy Don Juan and the letters to the full, obviously one must be a man; or, if of the other sex, disguise it.

No such disguise is necessary with Keats. His name, indeed, is to be mentioned with diffidence lest the thought of a character endowed as his was with the rarest qualities that human beings can command—genius, sensibility, dignity, wisdom—should mislead us into mere panegyric. There, if ever, was a man whom both sexes must unite to honour; towards whom the personal bias must incline all in the same direction. But there is a hitch; there is Fanny Brawne. She danced too much at Hampstead, Keats complained. The divine poet was a little sultanic in his behaviour; after the manly fashion of his time apt to treat his adored both as angel and cockatoo. A jury of maidens would bring in a verdict in Fanny’s favour. It was to his sister, whose education he supervised and whose character he formed, that he showed himself the man of all others who ‘had he been put on would have prov’d most royally’. Sisterly his women readers must suppose themselves to be; and sisterly to Wordsworth, who should have had no wife, as Tennyson should have had none, nor Charlotte Brontë her Mr Nicholls.

To put oneself at the best post of observation for the study of Samuel Johnson needs a little circumspection. He was apt to tear the tablecloth to ribbons; he was a disciplinarian and a sentimentalist; very rude to women, and at the same time the most devoted, respectful and devout of their admirers. Neither Mrs Thrale, whom he harangued, nor the pretty young woman who sat on his knee is to be envied altogether. Their positions are too precarious. But some sturdy match-seller or apple woman well on in years, some old struggler who had won for herself a decent independence would have commanded his sympathy, and, standing at a stall on a rainy night in the Strand, one might perhaps have insinuated oneself into his service, washed up his tea cups and thus enjoyed the greatest felicity that could fall to the lot of woman.

These instances, however, are all of a simple character; the men have been supposed to remain men, the women women when they write. They have exerted the influence of their sex directly and normally. But there is a class which keeps itself aloof from any such contamination. Milton is their leader; with him are Landor, Sappho, Sir Thomas Browne, Marvell. Feminists or anti-feminists, passionate or cold—whatever the romances or adventures of their private lives not a whiff of that mist attaches itself to their writing. It is pure, uncontaminated, sexless as the angels are said to be sexless. But on no account is this to be confused with another group which has the same peculiarity. To which sex do the works of Emerson, Matthew Arnold, Harriet Martineau, Ruskin and Maria Edgeworth belong? It is uncertain. It is, moreover, quite immaterial. They are not men when they write, nor are they women. They appeal to the large tract of the soul which is sexless; they excite no passions; they exalt, improve, instruct, and man or woman can profit equally by their pages, without indulging in the folly of affection or the fury of partisanship.

Then, inevitably, we come to the harem, and tremble slightly as we approach the curtain and catch glimpses of women behind it and even hear ripples of laughter and snatches of conversation. Some obscurity still veils the relations of women to each other. A hundred years ago it was simple enough; they were stars who shone only in male sunshine; deprived of it, they languished into nonentity—sniffed, bickered, envied each other—so men said. But now it must be confessed things are less satisfactory. Passions and repulsions manifest themselves here too, and it is by no means certain that every woman is inspired by pure envy when she reads what another has written. More probably Emily Brontë was the passion of her youth; Charlotte even she loved with nervous affection; and cherished a quiet sisterly regard for Anne. Mrs Gaskell wields a maternal sway over readers of her own sex; wise, witty and very large-minded, her readers are devoted to her as to the most admirable of mothers; whereas George Eliot is an Aunt, and, as an Aunt, inimitable. So treated she drops the apparatus of masculinity which Herbert Spencer necessitated; indulges herself in memory; and pours forth, no doubt with some rustic accent, the genial stores of her youth, the greatness and profundity of her soul. Jane Austen we needs must adore; but she does not want it; she wants nothing; our love is a by-product, an irrelevance; with that mist or without it her moon shines on. As for loving foreigners, some say it is an impossibility; but if not, it is to Madame de Sévigné that we must turn.

But all these preferences and partialities, all these adjustments and attempts of the mind to relate itself harmoniously with another, pale, as the flirtations of a summer compared with the consuming passions of a lifetime, when we consider the great devotions which one, or at most two, names in the whole of literature inspire. Of Shakespeare we need not speak. The nimble little birds of field and hedge, lizards, shrews and dormice, do not pause in their dallying and sportings to thank the sun for warming them; nor need we, the light of whose literature comes from Shakespeare, seek to praise him. But there are other names, more retired, less central, less universally gazed upon than his. There is a poet, whose love of women was all stuck about with briars; who railed and cursed; was fierce and tender; passionate and obscene. In the very obscurity of his mind there is something that intrigues us on; his rage scorches but sets on fire; and in the thickest of his thorn bushes are glimpses of the highest heavens, and ecstasies and pure and windless calms. Whether as a young man gazing from narrow Chinese eyes upon a world that half allures, half disgusts him, or with his flesh dried on his cheek bones, wrapped in his winding sheet, excruciated, dead in St Paul’s, one cannot help but love John Donne. With him is associated a man of the very opposite sort—large, lame, simple-minded; a scribbler of innumerable novels not a line of which is harsh, obscure or anything but propriety itself; a landed gentleman with a passion for Gothic architecture; a man who, if he had lived today, would have been the upholder of all the most detestable institutions of his country, but for all that a great writer—no woman can read the life of this man and his diary and his novels without being head over ears in love with Walter Scott.

[Vogue, London, November 1924]

[]

Jane Austen Practising.

[Love and Freindship by Jane Austen]

The summer of 1922, remarkable for public reasons in many ways, was privately remarkable for the extreme coldness of its nights. Six blankets and a quilt? A rug and a hot water bottle? All over England men and women went to bed with such words upon their lips. And then, between two and three in the morning, they woke with a start. Something serious had happened. It was stifling. It was portentous. Steps must be taken immediately. But what a frightful effort it needs in the early hours of the morning to throw off all one’s clothes!

All over England for the past ten or twenty years the reputation of Jane Austen has been accumulating on top of us like these same quilts and blankets. The voices of the elderly and distinguished, of the clergy and the squirearchy, have droned in unison praising and petting, capping quotations, telling little anecdotes, raking up little facts. She is the most perfect artist in English literature. And one of her cousins had his head cut off in the French Revolution. Did she ever go fox hunting? No, but she nursed Miss Gibson through the measles. Her knowledge of the upper middle classes was unrivalled. One of her ancestors entertained King Charles. Macaulay, of course, compared her with Shakespeare. And where is Mansfield Park? So they pile up the quilts and counterpanes until the comfort becomes oppressive. Something must be done about it. But what a frightful effort it needs at this time of day to shake off all these clothes!

Now opportunely, in the nick of time, comes Love and Freindship to give us the very chance we want. Here is a little book written by Jane Austen long before she was the great Jane Austen of mythology. The Jane Austen of Love and Freindship was a girl of seventeen scribbling stories to amuse the schoolroom. One is dedicated with mock solemnity to her brother. Another is nearly illustrated with water-colour heads by her sister. Nobody (for we may leave Mr Chesterton to the end) has been here before us, and so we may really read Jane Austen by ourselves for the first time.

She is a girl of seventeen writing in a country parsonage. And on page two, without turning a hair, out she raps ‘natural daughter’. Yet her mother might have come in at that very moment. The eighteenth century, of course, still persisted. The little Austens had the freedom of the house as no other children were to have it for a century at least. Money and marriage would no doubt be jokes in the nursery as they were, much more coarsely, jokes upon the stage. And clever children, beginning to laugh at their elders, would in the year 1790 pick up the last new novel and make fun of its heroine. ‘Ah! what could we do but what we did? We sighed and fainted on the sofa.’ When Jane Austen read that aloud, no doubt her brothers and sisters took the reference to Adeline Barrett, or whoever was the fashionable heroine of the moment. And as the Austens were a large family, and Mrs Austen stitched and darned and lay an invalid on the sofa, her daughters, while still very young, were well aware that life in a country parsonage has little in common with life in Mrs Radcliffe’s novels. This is all plausible enough, and much more might be written in the same strain. But it has nothing whatever to do with Love and Freindship. For this girl of seventeen is not writing to amuse the schoolroom. She is not writing to draw a laugh from sister and brothers. She is writing for everybody, for nobody, for our age, for her own; she, in short, is writing. ‘A sensibility too tremblingly alive to every affliction of my Friends, my Acquaintance, and particularly to every affliction of my own, was my only fault, if a fault it could be called. Alas! how altered now! Tho’ indeed my own Misfortunes do not make less impression on me than they ever did, yet now I never feel for those of an other.’ The authoress of those lines had, if not a whole sitting room to herself, some private corner of the common parlour where she was allowed to write without interruption. But now and then, as the writing of Love and Freindship proceeded, a brother or a sister must have asked her what she was laughing at. And then Jane Austen read aloud, ‘I die a martyr to my grief for the loss of Augustus. One fatal swoon has cost me my life. Beware of Swoons, Dear Laura…. Run mad as often as you chuse, but do not faint….’And taking up her pen again she wrote, it is clear, as fast as she could write, and faster than she could spell, for the incredible adventures of Laura and Sophia popped into her head as quick as lightning. She was in the enviable position of having one page to fill and a bubbling fancy capable of filling half a dozen. So if she wants to dispose of the husband of Phillipa she decrees that he shall have one talent, driving, and one possession, a coach, and he shall drive for ever between Edinburgh and Stirling, or, for Jane Austen does not exaggerate, shall drive to Stirling every other day. And Philander and Gustavus—what shall we do with them? Oh, their mothers (and, by the way, no one knew who their fathers were—perhaps Philip Jones the bricklayer, and Gregory Staves the staymaker)—their mothers kept their fortune of nine hundred pounds in the table drawer. So they stole it, and wrapped it in nine parcels, and spent it in seven weeks and a day, and came home and found their mothers starved, and went upon the stage and acted Macbeth. Spirited, easy, full of fun, verging with freedom upon sheer nonsense, there can be no doubt that Love and Freindship makes excellent reading. But what is this note which never merges in the rest, which sounds distinctly and penetratingly all through the volume? It is the sound of laughter. The girl of seventeen is laughing, in her corner, at the world.

Girls of seventeen are always laughing. They laugh when Mr Binney helps himself to salt instead of sugar. They almost die of laughing when old Mrs Tomkins sits down upon the cat. But they are crying the moment after. They have no fixed point from which they see that there is something eternally laughable in human nature. They do not know that wherever they go and however long they live they will always find Lady Grevilles snubbing poor Marias at a dance. But Jane Austen knew it. That is one reason why she is so impersonal and remains for ever so inscrutable. One of those fairies who are said to attend with their gifts upon cradles must have taken her on a flight through the air directly she was born. And when she was laid in her cradle again she knew what the world looked like. She had chosen her kingdom. She had agreed that if she might rule over that territory she would covet no other. Thus at seventeen she had few illusions about other people and none about herself. Whatever she writes is finished and turned and set in its relation to the universe like a work of art. When Jane Austen, the writer, wrote down, in the most remarkable sketch in the book, a little of Lady Greville’s conversation, there is no trace of anger at the snub which Jane Austen, the clergyman’s daughter, no doubt once received. Her gaze passes straight to the mark, and somehow we know precisely where, upon the map of human nature, that mark is. We know because Jane Austen kept to her compact; she never trespassed beyond her boundaries. Never, even at the emotional age of seventeen, did she round upon herself in shame, and obliterate a sarcasm in a spasm of compassion, or blur an outline in a mist of rhapsody. Spasms and rhapsodies, she seems to have said, end here. And the boundary line is perfectly distinct. But she does not deny that moons and mountains and castles exist—on the other side. She has even one romance of her own. It is for the Queen of Scots. She really admired her very much. ‘One of the first characters in the World,’ she called her, ‘a bewitching Princess whose only freind was then the Duke of Norfolk, and whose only ones now Mr Whitaker, Mrs Lefroy, Mrs Knight and myself.’ With these words the passion is neatly circumscribed, and rounded with a laugh. It is amusing to remember how the young Brontës wrote, not so very much later, about the Duke of Wellington.

It may be that we are reading too much into these scraps and scribbles. We are still under the influence of the quilts and counterpanes. But just as we determine to shake ourselves free—and, after all, she was a limited, tart, rather conventional woman for all her genius—we hear a snatch of music. ‘Yet truth being I think very excusable in an historian.’ And again, ‘She was nothing more than a mere good tempered, civil, and obliging young woman; as such we could scarcely dislike her—she was only an object of contempt.’ And yet again, ‘… for what could be expected from a man who possessed not the smallest atom of sensibility, who scarcely knew the meaning of simpathy, and who actually snored’. She is only humming a tune beneath her breath, trying over a few bars of the music for Pride and Prejudice and Emma. But we know that there is no one else who can sing like that. She need not raise her voice. Every syllable comes quite distinctly through the gates of time. And whatever they may say about her genius and her cousins and Mansfield Park we are content to listen all day long to Jane Austen practising.

[New Statesman, Jul 15, 1922]

[]

Olive Schreiner.

[The Letters of Olive Schreiner, ed. by Cronwright Schreiner.]

Olive Schreiner was neither a born letter-writer nor did she choose to make herself become one. She wrote carelessly, egotistically, of her health, of her sufferings, of her beliefs and desires, as if she were talking in the privacy of her room to a friend whom she trusted. This carelessness, while it has its charm, imposes some strain on the reader. If he is not to drop the book, dispirited by the jumble and muddle of odds and ends, plans and arrangements, bulletins of health and complaints of landladies—all of which are related as if Olive Schreiner were a figure of the highest importance—he must seek some point of view which imposes unity, some revelation in the light of which this rather distant and unfamiliar figure becomes of interest. He will find it perhaps in two sentences written in the same letter the year before she died. ‘Nothing matters in life but love and a great pity for all our fellows,’ she writes. That, indeed, was her teaching. A few lines lower down she adds, ‘It’s ten days ago since I’ve spoken to anyone except the girl who brings up my coals and water.’ That was her fate. The discrepancy between what she desired and what she achieved can be felt, jarring and confusing, throughout the book. Always she is striving for something which escapes her grasp. Always some fault or misfortune interferes with her success. She loves the world at large, but cannot endure any individual in particular. Such would seem to be an outline snapshot of her position. But it is difficult to say further where the fault or the misfortune lay. Early in life she won fame and popularity enough to gratify the most ambitious with her first book, The Story of an African Farm. She came to England, and was at once the centre of an appreciative group of distinguished men. Her husband, as he told us last year in his biography, sacrificed a livelihood so that she might pursue her work under the most favourable conditions. She herself had a profound belief in her genius, and an overwhelming enthusiasm for her convictions. Nevertheless, all the strife and agony which ring through her letters—‘The hidden agony of my life no human being understands’; ‘I am a fine genius, a celebrity, and tomorrow all these people would tread me under their feet’—resulted in one remarkable novel and a few other fragmentary works which no admirer of The Story of an African Farm would care to place beside it. But that famous book itself provides some explanation of her failure to become as she bade fair to become, the equal of our greatest novelists. In its brilliance and power it reminds us inevitably of the Brontë novels. In it, as in them, we feel ourselves in the presence of a powerful nature which can make us see what it saw, and feel what it felt with astounding vividness. But it has the limitations of those egotistical masterpieces without a full measure of their strength. The writer’s interests are local, her passions personal, and we cannot help suspecting that she has neither the width nor the strength to enter with sympathy into the experiences of minds differing from her own, or to debate questions calmly and reasonably.

Unfortunately for her fame as a writer, it was into debate and politics, and not into thought and literature, that she was impelled, chiefly by her passionate interest in sex questions. She was driven to teach, to dream and prophesy. Questions affecting women, in particular the relations between the sexes, obsessed her. There is scarcely a letter in the present volume in which she does not discuss them with passion, insight, and force, but interminably, in season and out, while her gifts as a writer were bestowed upon a stupendous work upon woman, which, though it took up her time and thought for years, remained, unfortunately, an unfinished masterpiece.

Her private life, disclosed very openly in the present book, seems equally thwarted and disappointed. Driven by asthma to travel perpetually, unrest, dissatisfaction, and, in the end, a profound loneliness, seem to take possession of her. ‘I am only a broken and untried possibility,’ she wrote. And again, ‘… the only feeling I have about my life is that I have thrown it all away, done nothing with it.’ Ironically enough, when she first came to London, her landlady turned her out because she had too many gentlemen visitors; in her last years she was expelled because she had a German name. It is impossible not to feel for her something of the pity and respect which all martyrs inspire in us, and not least those martyrs who are not required to sacrifice their lives to a cause, but sacrifice, perhaps more disastrously, humour and sweetness and sense of proportion. But there were compensations; the cause itself—the emancipation of women—was of the highest importance, and it would be frivolous to dismiss her as a mere crank, a piece of wreckage used and then thrown aside as the cause triumphed onwards. She remains even now, when the vigour of her books is spent, and her personal sway, evidently of the most powerful, is a memory limited to those who knew her, too uncompromising a figure to be so disposed of. Her obsessions and her egotism are perfectly obvious in her letters; but so, too, are her convictions, her ruthless sincerity, and the masterly sanity which so often contrasts on the same page with childish outbursts of unreason. Olive Schreiner was one half of a great writer; a diamond marred by a flaw.

[New Republic, Mar 18, 1925]

[]

Dorothy Richardson:
1. The Tunnel.

Although The Tunnel is the fourth book that Miss Richardson has written, she must still expect to find her reviewers paying a great deal of attention to her method. It is a method that demands attention, as a door whose handle we wrench ineffectively calls our attention to the fact that it is locked. There is no slipping smoothly down the accustomed channels; the first chapters provide an amusing spectacle of hasty critics seeking them in vain. If this were the result of perversity, we should think Miss Richardson more courageous than wise; but being, as we believe, not wilful but natural, it represents a genuine conviction of the discrepancy between what she has to say and the form provided by tradition for her to say it in. She is one of the rare novelists who believe that the novel is so much alive that it actually grows. As she makes her advanced critic, Mr Wilson, remark: ‘There will be books with all that cut out—him and her—all that sort of thing. The book of the future will be clear of all that.’ And Miriam Henderson herself reflects: ‘but if books were written like that, sitting down and doing it cleverly and knowing just what you were doing and just how somebody else had done it, there was something wrong, some mannish cleverness that was only half right. To write books knowing all about style would be to become like a man.’ So ‘him and her’ are cut out, and with them goes the odd deliberate business: the chapters that lead up and the chapters that lead down; the characters who are always characteristic; the scenes that are passionate and the scenes that are humorous; the elaborate construction of reality; the conception that shapes and surrounds the whole. All these things are cast away, and there is left, denuded, unsheltered, unbegun and unfinished, the consciousness of Miriam Henderson, the small sensitive lump of matter, half transparent and half opaque, which endlessly reflects and distorts the variegated procession, and is, we are bidden to believe, the source beneath the surface, the very oyster within the shell.

The critic is thus absolved from the necessity of picking out the themes of the story. The reader is not provided with a story; he is invited to embed himself in Miriam Henderson’s consciousness, to register one after another, and one on top of another, words, cries, shouts, notes of a violin, fragments of lectures, to follow these impressions as they flicker through Miriam’s mind, waking incongruously other thoughts, and plaiting incessantly the many-coloured and innumerable threads of life. But a quotation is better than description.

She was surprised now at her familiarity with the details of the room … that idea of visiting places in dreams. It was something more than that … all the real part of your life has a real dream in it; some of the real dream part of you coming true. You know in advance when you are really following your life. These things are familiar because reality is here. Coming events cast light. It is like dropping everything and walking backward to something you know is there. However far you go out you come back…. I am back now where I was before I began trying to do things like other people. I left home to get here. None of those things can touch me here. They are mine.

Here we are thinking, word by word, as Miriam thinks. The method, if triumphant, should make us feel ourselves seated at the centre of another mind, and, according to the artistic gift of the writer, we should perceive in the helter-skelter of flying fragments some unity, significance, or design. That Miss Richardson gets so far as to achieve a sense of reality far greater than that produced by the ordinary means is undoubted. But, then, which reality is it, the superficial or the profound? We have to consider the quality of Miriam Henderson’s consciousness, and the extent to which Miss Richardson is able to reveal it. We have to decide whether the flying helter-skelter resolves itself by degrees into a perceptible whole. When we are in a position to make up our minds we cannot deny a slight sense of disappointment. Having sacrificed not merely ‘hims and hers’, but so many seductive graces of wit and style for the prospect of some new revelation or greater intensity, we still find ourselves distressingly near the surface. Things look much the same as ever. It is certainly a very vivid surface. The consciousness of Miriam takes the reflection of a dentist’s room to perfection. Her senses of touch, sight and hearing are all excessively acute. But sensations, impressions, ideas and emotions glance off her, unrelated and unquestioned, without shedding quite as much light as we had hoped into the hidden depths. We find ourselves in the dentist’s room, in the street, in the lodging-house bedroom frequently and convincingly; but never, or only for a tantalizing second, in the reality which underlies these appearances. In particular, the figures of other people on whom Miriam casts her capricious light are vivid enough, but their sayings and doings never reach that degree of significance which we, perhaps unreasonably, expect. The old method seems sometimes the more profound and economical of the two. But it must be admitted that we are exacting. We want to be rid of realism, to penetrate without its help into the regions beneath it, and further require that Miss Richardson shall fashion this new material into something which has the shapeliness of the old accepted forms. We are asking too much; but the extent of our asking proves that The Tunnel is better in its failure than most books in their success.

[Times Literary Supplement, Feb 13, 1919]

[]

THE COMPLETE
SHORTER FICTION

by
Virginia Woolf

published
1985
by
The Hogarth Press

the complete shorter fiction

Phyllis And Rosamond.

The Mysterious Case Of Miss V.

The Journal Of Mistress Joan Martyn.

A Dialogue upon Mount Pentelicus.

Memoirs Of A Novelist.

The Evening Party.

Sympathy.

A Woman’s College From Outside.

In The Orchard.

Nurse Lugton’s Curtain.

The Widow And The Parrot.

Happiness.

A Simple Melody.

The Fascination Of The Pool.

Scenes From The Life Of A British Naval Officer.

Miss Pryme.

Ode Written Partly In Prose On Seeing The Name Of Cutbush Above A Butcher’s Shop In Pentonville.

Portraits.

Uncle Vanya.

Gipsy, The Mongrel.

The Symbol.

The Watering Place.

“Kew Gardens”, “The Mark On The Wall”, “An Unwritten Novel”, “A Society”, “A Haunted House”, “Monday Or Tuesday”, “The String Quartet”, and “Blue & Green”: see Monday or Tuesday.

“Three Pictures”: see The Death of the Moth.

“Solid Objects”, “The New Dress”, “Together And Apart”, “The Man Who Loved His Kind”, “A Summing Up”, “Moments Of Being”, “The Lady In The Looking-glass”, “The Duchess And The Jeweller”, “Lappin And Lappinova”, “The Shooting Party”, “The Searchlight”, and “The Legacy”: see A Haunted House.

“Mrs Dalloway In Bond Street”, “Ancestors”, and “The Introduction”: see Mrs Dalloway’s Party.

[]

[The texts follow the 1985 Hogarth Press edition, except ‘A Dialogue upon Mount Pentelicus’, which follows the second edition, (1987).]

Phyllis and Rosamond.

In this very curious age, when we are beginning to require pictures of people, their minds and their coats, a faithful outline, drawn with no skill but veracity, may possibly have some value.

Let each man, I heard it said the other day, write down the details of a day’s work; posterity will be as glad of the catalogue as we should be if we had such a record of how the door keeper at the Globe, and the man who kept the Park gates passed Saturday March 18th in the year of our Lord 1568.

And as such portraits as we have are almost invariably of the male sex, who strut more prominently across the stage, it seems worth while to take as model one of those many women who cluster in the shade. For a study of history and biography convinces any right minded person that these obscure figures occupy a place not unlike that of the showman’s hand in the dance of the marionettes; and the finger is laid upon the heart. It is true that our simple eyes believed for many ages that the figures danced of their own accord, and cut what steps they chose; and the partial light which novelists and historians have begun to cast upon that dark and crowded place behind the scenes has done little as yet but show us how many wires there are, held in obscure hands, upon whose jerk or twist the whole figure of the dance depends. This preface leads us then to the point at which we began; we intend to look as steadily as we can at a little group, which lives at this moment (the 20th June, 1906); and seems for some reasons which we will give, to epitomise the qualities of many. It is a common case, because after all there are many young women, born of well-to-do, respectable, official parents; and they must all meet much the same problems, and there can be, unfortunately, but little variety in the answers they make.

There are five of them, all daughters they will ruefully explain to you: regretting this initial mistake it seems all through their lives on their parents’ behalf. Further, they are divided into camps: two sisters oppose themselves to two sisters; the fifth vacillates equally between them. Nature has decreed that two shall inherit a stalwart pugnacious frame of mind, which applies itself to political economy and social problems successfully and not unhappily; while the other two she has made frivolous, domestic, of lighter and more sensitive temperaments. These two then are condemned to be what in the slang of the century is called ‘the daughters at home’. Their sisters deciding to cultivate their brains, go to College, do well there, and marry Professors. Their careers have so much likeness to those of men themselves that it is scarcely worth while to make them the subject of special enquiry. The fifth sister is less marked in character than any of the others; but she marries when she is twenty-two so that she scarcely has time to develop the individual features of young ladydom which we set out to describe. In the two ‘daughters at home’ Phyllis and Rosamond, we will call them, we find excellent material for our enquiry.

A few facts will help us to set them in their places, before we begin to investigate. Phyllis is twenty-eight, Rosamond is twenty-four. In person they are pretty, pink cheeked, vivacious; a curious eye will not find any regular beauty of feature; but their dress and demeanour give them the effect of beauty without its substance. They seem indigenous to the drawing-room, as though, born in silk evening robes, they had never trod a rougher earth than the Turkey carpet, or reclined on harsher ground than the arm chair or the sofa. To see them in a drawing-room full of well dressed men and women, is to see the merchant in the Stock Exchange, or the barrister in the Temple. This, every motion and word proclaims, is their native air; their place of business, their professional arena. Here, clearly, they practise the arts in which they have been instructed since childhood. Here, perhaps, they win their victories and earn their bread. But it would be as unjust as it would be easy to press this metaphor till it suggested that the comparison was appropriate and complete in all its parts. It fails; but where it fails and why it fails it will take some time and attention to discover.

You must be in a position to follow these young ladies home, and to hear their comments over the bedroom candle. You must be by them when they wake next morning; and you must attend their progress throughout the day. When you have done this, not for one day but for many days then you will be able to calculate the values of those impressions which are to be received by night in the drawing-room.

This much may be retained of the metaphor already used; that the drawing-room scene represents work to them and not play. So much is made quite clear by the scene in the carriage going home. Lady Hibbert is a severe critic of such performances; she has noted whether her daughters looked well, spoke well⁠[,] behaved well; whether they attracted the right people and repelled the wrong; whether on the whole the impression they left was favourable. From the multiplicity and minuteness of her comments it is easy to see that two hours entertainment is, for artists of this kind, a very delicate and complicated piece of work. Much it seems, depends upon the way they acquit themselves. The daughters answer submissively and then keep silence, whether their mother praises or blames: and her censure is severe. When they are alone at last, and they share a modest sized bedroom at the top of a great ugly house; they stretch their arms and begin to sigh with relief. Their talk is not very edifying; it is the ‘shop’ of business men; they calculate their profits and their losses and have clearly no interest at heart except their own. And yet you may have heard them chatter of books and plays and pictures as though these were the things they most cared about; to discuss them was the only motive of a ‘party’.

Yet you will observe also in this hour of unlovely candour something which is also very sincere, but by no means ugly. The sisters were frankly fond of each other. Their affection has taken the form for the most part of a free masonship which is anything but sentimental; all their hopes and fears are in common; but it is a genuine feeling, profound in spite of its prosaic exterior. They are strictly honourable in all their dealings together; and there is even something chivalrous in the attitude of the younger sister to the elder. She, as the weaker by reason of her greater age, must always have the best of things. There is some pathos also in the gratitude with which Phyllis accepts the advantage. But it grows late, and in respect for their complexions, these business-like young women remind each other that it is time to put out the light.

In spite of this forethought they are fain to sleep on after they are called in the morning. But Rosamond jumps up, and shakes Phyllis.

‘Phyllis we shall be late for breakfast.’

There must have been some force in this argument, for Phyllis got out of bed and began silently to dress. But their haste allowed them to put on their clothes with great care and dexterity, and the result was scrupulously surveyed by each sister in turn before they went down. The clock struck nine as they came into the breakfast room: their father was already there, kissed each daughter perfunctorily, passed his cup for coffee, read his paper and disappeared. It was a silent meal. Lady Hibbert breakfasted in her room; but after breakfast they had to visit her, to receive her orders for the day, and while one wrote notes for her the other went to arrange lunch and dinner with the cook. By eleven they were free, for the time, and met in the schoolroom where Doris the youngest sister, aged sixteen, was writing an essay upon the Magna Charter in French. Her complaints at the interruption—for she was dreaming of a first class already—met with no honour. ‘We must sit here, because there’s nowhere else to sit,’ remarked Rosamond. ‘You needn’t think we want your company,’ added Phyllis. But these remarks were spoken without bitterness, as the mere commonplaces of daily life.

In deference to their sister, however, Phyllis took up a volume of Anatole France, and Rosamond opened the ‘Greek Studies’ of Walter Pater. They read for some minutes in silence; then a maid knocked, breathless, with a message that ‘Her Ladyship wanted the young ladies in the drawing-room.’ They groaned; Rosamond offered to go alone; Phyllis said no, they were both victims; and wondering what the errand was they went sulkily downstairs. Lady Hibbert was impatiently waiting them.

‘O there you are at last,’ she exclaimed. ‘Your father has sent round to say he’s asked Mr Middleton and Sir Thomas Carew to lunch. Isn’t that troublesome of him! I can’t think what drove him to ask them, and there’s no lunch—and I see you haven’t arranged the flowers, Phyllis; and Rosamond I want you to put a clean tucker in my maroon gown. O dear, how thoughtless men are.’

The daughters were used to these insinuations against their father: on the whole they took his side, but they never said so.

They silently departed now on their separate errands: Phyllis had to go out and buy flowers and an extra dish for lunch; and Rosamond sat down to her sewing.

Their tasks were hardly done in time for them to change for lunch; but at 1.30 they came pink and smiling into the pompous great drawing-room. Mr Middleton was Sir William Hibbert’s secretary; a young man of some position and prospects, as Lady Hibbert defined him; who might be encouraged. Sir Thomas was an official in the same office, solid and gouty, a handsome piece on the board, but of no individual importance.

At lunch then there was some sprightly conversation between Mr Middleton and Phyllis, while their elders talked platitudes, in sonorous deep voices. Rosamond sat rather silent, as was her wont; speculating keenly upon the character of the secretary, who might be her brother-in-law; and checking certain theories she had made by every fresh word he spoke. By open consent, Mr Middleton was her sister’s game; she did not trespass. If one could have read her thoughts, while she listened to Sir Thomas’s stories of India in the Sixties, one would have found that she was busied in somewhat abstruse calculations; Little Middleton, as she called him, was not half a bad sort; he had brains; he was, she knew, a good son, and he would make a good husband. He was well to do also, and would make his way in the service. On the other hand her psychological acuteness told her that he was narrow minded, without a trace of imagination or intellect, in the sense she understood it; and she knew enough of her sister to know that she would never love this efficient active little man, although she would respect him. The question was should she marry him? This was the point she had reached when Lord Mayo was assassinated; and while her lips murmured ohs and ahs of horror, her eyes were telegraphing across the table, ‘I am doubtful.’ If she had nodded her sister would have begun to practise those arts by which many proposals had been secured already. Rosamond, however, did not yet know enough to make up her mind. She telegraphed merely ‘Keep him in play.’

The gentlemen left soon after lunch, and Lady Hibbert prepared to go and lie down. But before she went she called Phyllis to her.

‘Well my dear,’ she said, with more affection than she had shown yet, ‘did you have a pleasant lunch? Was Mr Middleton agreeable?’ She patted her daughter’s cheek, and looked keenly into her eyes.

Some petulancy came across Phyllis, and she answered listlessly. ‘O he’s not a bad little man; but he doesn’t excite me.’

Lady Hibbert’s face changed at once: if she had seemed a benevolent cat playing with a mouse from philanthropic motives before, she was the real animal now in sober earnest.

‘Remember,’ she snapped, ‘this can’t go on for ever. Try and be a little less selfish, my dear.’ If she had sworn openly, her words could not have been less pleasant to hear.

She swept off, and the two girls looked at each other, with expressive contortions of the lips.

‘I couldn’t help it,’ said Phyllis, laughing weakly. ‘Now let’s have a respite. Her Ladyship won’t want us till four.’

They mounted to the schoolroom, which was now empty; and threw themselves into deep arm chairs. Phyllis lit a cigarette, and Rosamond sucked peppermints, as though they induced to thought.

‘Well, my dear,’ said Phyllis at last, ‘what do we decide? It is June now; our parents give me till July: little Middleton is the only one.’

‘Except—’ began Rosamond.

‘Yes, but it is no good thinking of him.’

‘Poor old Phyllis! Well, he’s not a bad man.’

‘Clean sober, truthful industrious. O we should make a model pair! You should stay with us in Derbyshire.’

‘You might do better,’ went on Rosamond; with the considering air of a judge. ‘On the other hand, they won’t stand much more.’ ‘They’ intimated Sir William and Lady Hibbert.

‘Father asked me yesterday what I could do if I didn’t marry. I had nothing to say.’

‘No, we were educated for marriage.’

‘You might have done something better. Of course I’m a fool so it doesn’t matter.’

‘And I think marriage the best thing there is—if one were allowed to marry the man one wants.’

‘O I know: it is beastly. Still there’s no escaping facts.’

‘Middleton,’ said Rosamond briefly. ‘He’s the fact at present. Do you care for him?’

‘Not in the least.’

‘Could you marry him?’

‘If her Ladyship made me.’

‘It might be a way out, at any rate.’

‘What d’you make of him now?’ asked Phyllis, who would have accepted or rejected any man on the strength of her sister’s advice. Rosamond, possessed of shrewd and capable brains, had been driven to feed them exclusively upon the human character and as her science was but little obscured by personal prejudice, her results were generally trustworthy.

‘He’s very good,’ she began; ‘moral qualities excellent: brains fair: he’ll do well of course: not a scrap of imagination or romance: he’d be very just to you.’

‘In short we would be a worthy pair: something like our parents!’

‘The question is,’ went on Rosamond; ‘is it worth while going through another year of slavery, till the next one comes along? And who is the next? Simpson, Rogers, [Leiscetter?].’

At each name her sister made a face.

‘The conclusion seems to be: mark time and keep up appearances.’

‘O let’s enjoy ourselves while we may! If it weren’t for you, Rosamond, I should have married a dozen times already.’

‘You’d have been in the divorce court my dear.’

‘I’m too respectable for that, really. I’m very weak without you. And now let’s talk of your affairs.’

‘My affairs can wait,’ said Rosamond resolutely. And the two young women discussed their friends’ characters, with some acuteness and not a little charity till it was time to change once more. But two features of their talk are worth remark. First, that they held intellect in great reverence and made that a cardinal point in their enquiry; secondly that whenever they suspected an unhappy home life, or a disappointed attachment, even in the case of the least attractive, their judgments were invariably gentle and sympathetic.

At four they drove out with Lady Hibbert to pay calls. This performance consisted in driving solemnly to one house after another where they had dined or hoped to dine, and depositing two or three cards in the servant’s hand. At one place they entered and drank a cup of tea, and talked of the weather for precisely fifteen minutes. They wound up with a slow passage through the Park, making one of the procession of gay carriages which travel at a foot’s pace at that hour round the statue of Achilles. Lady Hibbert wore a permanent and immutable smile.

By six o’clock they were home again and found Sir William entertaining an elderly cousin and his wife at tea. These people could be treated without ceremony, and Lady Hibbert went off to lie down; and left her daughters to ask how John was, and whether Milly had got over the measles. ‘Remember; we dine out at eight, William,’ she said, as she left the room.

Phyllis went with them; the party was given by a distinguished judge, and she had to entertain a respectable K.C.; her efforts in one direction at least might be relaxed; and her mother’s eye regarded her with indifference. It was like a draught of clear cold water, Phyllis reflected, to talk with an intelligent elderly man upon impersonal subjects. They did not theorise, but he told her facts and she was glad to realise that the world was full of solid things, which were independent of her life.

When they left she told her mother that she was going on to the Tristrams, to meet Rosamond there. Lady Hibbert pursed up her mouth, shrugged her shoulders and said ‘very well,’ as though she would have objected if she could have laid her hands on a sufficiently good reason. But Sir William was waiting, and a frown was the only argument.

So Phyllis went separately to the distant and unfashionable quarter of London where the Tristrams lived. That was one of the many enviable parts of their lot. The stucco fronts, the irreproachable rows of Belgravia and South Kensington seemed to Phyllis the type of her lot; of a life trained to grow in an ugly pattern to match the staid ugliness of its fellows. But if one lived here in Bloomsbury, she began to theorise waving with her hand as her cab passed through the great tranquil squares, beneath the pale green of umbrageous trees, one might grow up as one liked. There was room, and freedom, and in the roar and splendour of the Strand she read the live realities of the world from which her stucco and her pillars protected her so completely.

Her cab stopped before some lighted windows which, open in the summer night, let some of the talk and life within spill out upon the pavement. She was impatient for the door to open which was to let her enter, and partake. When she stood, however, within the room, she became conscious of her own appearance which, as she knew by heart, was on these occasions, like that of ladies whom Romney painted. She saw herself enter into the smokey room where people sat on the floor, and the host wore a shooting jacket, with her arch little head held high, and her mouth pursed as though for an epigram. Her white silk and her cherry ribbons made her conspicuous. It was with some feeling of the difference between her and the rest that she sat very silent scarcely taking advantage of the openings that were made for her in the talk. She kept looking round at the dozen people who were sitting there, with a sense of bewilderment. The talk was of certain pictures then being shown, and their merits were discussed from a somewhat technical standpoint. Where was Phyllis to begin? She had seen them; but she knew that her platitudes would never stand the test of question and criticism to which they would be exposed. Nor, she knew, was there any scope here for those feminine graces which could veil so much. The time was passed; for the discussion was hot and serious, and no one of the combatants wished to be tripped by illogical devices. So she sat and watched, feeling like a bird with wings pinioned; and more acutely, because more genuinely, uncomfortable than she had ever been at ball or play. She repeated to herself the little bitter axiom that she had fallen between two stools; and tried meanwhile to use her brains soberly upon what was being said. Rosamond hinted from across the room that she was in the same predicament.

At last the disputants dissolved, and talk became general once more; but no one apologised for the concentrated character it had borne, and general conversation, the Miss Hibberts found, if it did occupy itself with more trivial subjects, tended to be scornful of the commonplace, and knew no hesitation in saying so. But it was amusing; and Rosamond acquitted herself creditably in discussing a certain character which came into question; although she was surprised to find that her most profound discoveries were taken as the starting point of further investigations, and represented no conclusions.

Moreover, the Miss Hibberts were surprised and a little dismayed to discover how much of their education had stuck to them. Phyllis could have beaten herself the next moment for her instinctive disapproval of some jest against Christianity which the Tristrams uttered and applauded as lightly as though religion was a small matter.

Even more amazing to the Miss Hibberts however was the manner in which their own department of business was transacted; for they supposed that even in this odd atmosphere ‘the facts of life’ were important. Miss Tristram, a young woman of great beauty, and an artist of real promise, was discussing marriage with a gentleman who might easily as far as one could judge, have a personal interest in the question. But the freedom and frankness with which they both explained their views and theorised upon the whole question of love and matrimony, seemed to put the whole thing in a new and sufficiently startling light. It fascinated the young ladies more than anything they had yet seen or heard. They had flattered themselves that every side and view of the subject was known to them; but this was something not only new, but unquestionably genuine.

‘I have never yet had a proposal; I wonder what it feels like,’ said the candid considering voice of the younger Miss Tristram; and Phyllis and Rosamond felt that they ought to produce their experiences for the instruction of the company. But then they could not adopt this strange new point of view, and their experiences after all were of a different quality entirely. Love to them was something induced by certain calculated actions; and it was cherished in ball rooms, in scented conservatories, by glances of the eyes, flashes of the fan, and faltering suggestive accents. Love here was a robust, ingenuous thing which stood out in the daylight, naked and solid, to be tapped and scrutinised as you thought best. Even were they free to love as they chose, Phyllis and Rosamond felt very doubtful that they could love in this way. With the rapid impulse of youth they condemned themselves utterly, and determined that all efforts at freedom were in vain: long captivity had corrupted them both within and without.

They sat thus, unconscious of their own silence, like people shut out from some merrymaking in the cold and the wind; invisible to the feasters within. But in reality the presence of these two silent and hungry eyed young women was felt to be oppressive by all the people there; although they did not exactly know why; perhaps they were bored. The Miss Tristrams, however, felt themselves responsible; and Miss Sylvia Tristram, the younger, as the result of a whisper, undertook a private conversation with Phyllis. Phyllis snatched at it like a dog at a bone; indeed her face wore a gaunt ravenous expression, as she saw the moments fly, and the substance of this strange evening remained beyond her grasp. At least, if she could not share, she might explain what forbade her. She was longing to prove to herself that there were good reasons for her impotence; and if she felt that Miss Sylvia was a solid woman in spite of her impersonal generalisations, there was hope that they might meet some day on common ground. Phyllis had an odd feeling, when she leant forward to speak, of searching feverishly through a mass of artificial frivolities to lay hands on the solid grain of pure self which, she supposed lay hid somewhere.

‘O Miss Tristram,’ she began, ‘you are all so brilliant. I do feel frightened.’

‘Are you laughing at us,’ asked Sylvia.

‘Why should I laugh? Don’t you see what a fool I feel?’

Sylvia began to see, and the sight interested her.

‘Yours is such a wonderful life; it is so strange to us.’

Sylvia who wrote and had a literary delight in seeing herself reflected in strange looking-glasses, and of holding up her own mirror to the lives of others, settled herself to the task with gusto. She had never considered the Hibberts as human beings before; but had called them ‘young ladies’. She was all the more ready now therefore to revise her mistake; both from vanity and from real curiosity.

‘What do you do?’ she demanded suddenly, in order to get to business at once.

‘What do I do?’ echoed Phyllis. ‘O order dinner and arrange the flowers!’

‘Yes, but what’s your trade,’ pursued Sylvia, who was determined not to be put off with phrases.

‘That’s my trade; I wish it wasn’t! Really Miss Tristram, you must remember that most young ladies are slaves; and you mustn’t insult me because you happen to be free.’

‘O do tell me,’ broke forth Sylvia, ‘exactly what you mean. I want to know. I like to know about people. After all you know, the human soul is the thing.’

‘Yes,’ said Phyllis, anxious to keep from theories. ‘But our life’s so simple and so ordinary. You must know dozens like us.’

‘I know your evening dresses,’ said Sylvia; ‘I see you pass before me in beautiful processions, but I have never yet heard you speak. Are you solid all through?’ It struck her that this tone jarred upon Phyllis: so she changed.

‘I daresay we are sisters. But why are we so different outside?’

‘O no, we’re not sisters,’ said Phyllis bitterly; ‘at least I pity you if we are. You see, we are brought up just to come out in the evening and make pretty speeches, and well, marry I suppose, and of course we might have gone to college if we’d wanted to; but as we didn’t we’re just accomplished.’

‘We never went to college,’ said Sylvia.

‘And you’re not accomplished? Of course you and your sister are the real thing, and Rosamond and I are frauds: at least I am. But don’t you see it all now and don’t you see what an ideal life yours is?’

‘I can’t see why you shouldn’t do what you like, as we do,’ said Sylvia, looking round the room.

‘Do you think we could have people like this? Why, we can never ask a friend, except when our parents are away.’

‘Why not?’

‘We haven’t a room, for one thing: and then we should never be allowed to do it. We are daughters, until we become married women.’

Sylvia considered her a little grimly. Phyllis understood that she had spoken with the wrong kind of frankness about love.

‘Do you want to marry?’ asked Syvlia.

‘Can you ask? You are an innocent young thing!—but of course you’re quite right. It should be for love, and all the rest of it. But,’ continued Phyllis, desperately speaking the truth, ‘we can’t think of it in that way. We want so many things, that we can never see marriage alone as it really is or ought to be. It is always mixed up with so much else. It means freedom and friends and a house of our own, and oh all the things you have already! Does that seem to you very dreadful and very mercenary?’

‘It does seem rather dreadful; but not mercenary I think. I should write if I were you.’

‘O there you go again, Miss Tristram!’ exclaimed Phyllis in comic despair. ‘I cannot make you understand that for one thing we haven’t the brains; and for another, if we had them we couldn’t use them. Mercifully the Good Lord made us fitted for our station. Rosamond might have done something; she’s too old now.’

‘My God,’ exclaimed Sylvia. ‘What a Black Hole! I should burn, shoot, jump out of the window; at least do something!’

‘What?’ asked Phyllis sardonically. ‘If you were in our place you might; but I don’t think you could be. O no,’ she went on in a lighter and more cynical tone, ‘this is our life, and we have to make the best of it. Only I want you to understand why it is that we come here and sit silent. You see, this is the life we should like to lead; and now I rather doubt that we can. You,’ she indicated all the room, ‘think us merely fashionable minxes; so we are, almost. But we might have been something better. Isn’t it pathetic?’ She laughed her dry little laugh.

‘But promise me one thing, Miss Tristram: that you will come and see us, and that you will let us come here sometimes. Now Rosamond, we must really go.’

They left, and in the cab Phyllis wondered a little at her outburst; but felt that she had enjoyed it. They were both somewhat excited; and anxious to analyse their discomfort, and find out what it meant. Last night they had driven home at this hour in a more sullen but at the same time in a more self-satisfied temper; they were bored by what they had done, but they knew they had done it well. And they had the satisfaction of feeling that they were fit for far better things. Tonight they were not bored; but they did not feel that they had acquitted themselves well when they had the chance. The bedroom conference was a little dejected; in penetrating to her real self Phyllis had let in some chill gust of air to that closely guarded place; what did she really want, she asked herself? What was she fit for? to criticise both worlds and feel that neither gave her what she needed. She was too genuinely depressed to state the case to her sister; and her fit of honesty left her with the convinction that talking did no good; and if she could do anything, it must be done by herself. Her last thoughts that night were that it was rather a relief that Lady Hibbert had arranged a full day for them tomorrow: at any rate she need not think; and river parties were amusing.

[June 20-23, 1906]

[]

The Mysterious Case of Miss V.

It is a commonplace that there is no loneliness like that of one who finds himself alone in a crowd; novelists repeat it; the pathos is undeniable; and now, since the case of Miss V., I at least have come to believe it. Such a story as hers and her sister’s—but it is characteristic that in writing of them one name seems instinctively to do for both—indeed one might mention a dozen such sisters in one breath. Such a story is scarcely possible except in London. In the country there would have been the butcher or the postman or the parson’s wife; but in a highly civilised town the civilities of human life are narrowed to the least possible space. The butcher drops his meat down the area; the postman shoves his letter into the box, and the parson’s wife has been known to hurl the pastoral missives through the same convenient breach: no time, they all repeat, must be wasted. So, though the meat remain uneaten, the letters unread, and the pastoral comments disobeyed, no one is any the wiser; until there comes a day when these functionaries tacitly conclude that no. 16 or 23 need be attended to no longer. They skip it, on their rounds, and poor Miss J. or Miss V. drops out of the closeknit chain of human life; and is skipped by everyone and for ever.

The ease with which such a fate befalls you suggests that it is really necessary to assert yourself in order to prevent yourself from being skipped; how could you ever come to life again if the butcher⁠[,] the postman and the policeman made up their minds to ignore you? It is a terrible fate; I think I will knock over a chair at this moment; now the lodger beneath knows that I am alive at any rate.

But to return to the mysterious case of Miss V., in which initial, be it understood is concealed the person also of Miss Janet V.: it is hardly necessary to split one letter into two parts.

They have been gliding about London for some fifteen years; you were to find them in certain drawing-rooms or picture galleries, and when you said, ‘Oh how d’you do Miss V.’ as though you have been in the habit of meeting her every day of your life, she would answer, ‘Isn’t it a pleasant day,’ or ‘What bad weather we are having’ and then you moved on and she seemed to melt into some armchair or chest of drawers. At any rate you thought no more of her until she detached herself from the furniture in a year’s time perhaps, and the same things were said over again.

A tie of blood—or whatever the fluid was that ran in Miss V.’s veins—made it my particular fate to run against her—or pass through her or dissipate her, whatever the phrase may be—more constantly perhaps than any other person, until this little performance became almost a habit. No party or concert or gallery seemed quite complete unless the familiar grey shadow was part of it; and when, some time ago, she ceased to haunt my path, I knew vaguely that something was missing. I will not exaggerate and say that I knew that she was missing; but there is no insincerity in using the neuter term.

Thus in a crowded room I began to find myself gazing round in nameless dissatisfaction; no, everyone seemed to be there—but surely there was something lacking in furniture or curtains—or was it that a print was moved from the wall?

Then one morning early, wakening at dawn indeed, I cried aloud, Mary V. Mary V!! It was the first time, I am sure that anyone had ever cried her name with such conviction; generally it seemed a colourless epithet, used merely to round a period. But my voice did not as I half expected, summon the person or semblance of Miss V. before me: the room remained vague. All day long my own cry echoed in my brain; till I made certain that at some street corner or another I should come across her as usual, and see her fade away, and be satisfied. Still, she came not; and I think I was discontented. At any rate the strange fantastic plan came into my head as I lay awake at night, a mere whim at first, which grew serious and exciting by degrees, that I would go and call on Mary V. in person.

O how mad and odd and amusing it seemed, now that I thought of it!—to track down the shadow, to see where she lived and if she lived, and talk to her as though she were a person like the rest of us!

Consider how it would seem to set out in an omnibus to visit the shadow of a blue bell in Kew Gardens, when the sun stands halfway down the sky! or to catch the down from a dandelion! at midnight in a Surrey meadow. Yet it was a much more fantastic expedition than any of these that I proposed; and as I put on my clothes to start I laughed and laughed to think that such substantial preparation was needed for my task. Boots and hat for Mary V.! It seemed incredibly incongruous.

At length I reached the flat where she lived, and on [looking at] the signboard I found it stated ambiguously—like the rest of us—that she was both out and in. At her door, high up in the topmost storey of the building, I knocked and rang, and waited and scrutinised; no one came; and I began to wonder if shadows could die, and how one buried them; when the door was gently opened by a maid. Mary V. had been ill for two months; she had died yesterday morning, at the very hour when I called her name. So I shall never meet her shadow any more.

[ca. summer 1906]

[]

The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn.

My readers may not know, perhaps, who I am. Therefore, although such a practice is unusual and unnatural—for we know how modest writers are—I will not hesitate to explain that I am Miss Rosamond Merridew, aged forty-five—my frankness is consistent!—and that I have won considerable fame among my profession for the researches I have made into the system of land tenure in mediaeval England. Berlin has heard my name; Frankfurt would give a soirée in my honour; and I am not absolutely unknown in one or two secluded rooms in Oxford and in Cambridge. Perhaps I shall put my case more cogently, human nature being what it is, if I state that I have exchanged a husband and a family and a house in which I may grow old for certain fragments of yellow parchment; which only a few people can read and still fewer would care to read if they could. But as a mother, so I read sometimes not without curiosity in the literature of my sex, cherishes most the ugliest and stupidest of her offspring, so a kind of maternal passion has sprung up in my breast for these shrivelled and colourless little gnomes; in real life I see them as cripples with fretful faces, but all the same, with the fire of genius in their eyes. I will not expound that sentence; it would be no more likely to succeed than if that same mother to whom I compare myself took pains to explain that her cripple was really a beautiful boy, more fair than all his brothers.

At any rate, my investigations have made a travelling pedlar of me; save that it is my habit to buy and not to sell. I present myself at old farm houses, decayed halls, parsonages, church vestries always with the same demand. Have you any old papers to show me? As you may imagine the palmy days for this kind of sport are over; age has become the most merchantable of qualities; and the state moreover with its Commissions has put an end for the most part to the enterprise of individuals. Some official, I am often told, has promised to come down and inspect their documents; and the favour of the ‘State’ which such a promise carries with it, robs my poor private voice of all its persuasion.

Still it is not for me to complain, looking back as I can look back, upon some very fine prizes that will have been of real interest to the historian, and upon others that because they are so fitful and so minute in their illumination please me even better. A sudden light upon the legs of Dame Elizabeth Partridge sends its beams over the whole state of England, to the King upon his throne; she wanted stockings! and no other need impresses you in quite the same way with the reality of mediaeval legs; and therefore with the reality of mediaeval bodies, and so, proceeding upward step by step, with the reality of mediaeval brains; and there you stand at the centre of all ages: middle beginning or end. And this brings me to a further confession of my own virtues. My researches into the system of land tenure in the 13th⁠[,] 14th and 15th Centuries have been made doubly valuable, I am assured, by the remarkable gift I have for presenting them in relation to the life of the time. I have borne in mind that the intricacies of the land tenure were not always the most important facts in the lives of men and women and children; I have often made so bold as to hint that the subtleties which delight us so keenly were more a proof of our ancestors’ negligence than a proof of their astonishing painstaking. For what sane man, I have had the audacity to remark, could have spent his time in complicating his laws for the benefit of half a dozen antiquaries who were to be born five centuries after he was in the grave?

We will not here discuss this argument on whose behalf I have given and taken many shrewd blows; I introduce the question merely to explain why it is that I have made all these enquiries subsidiary to certain pictures of the family life which I have introduced into my text; as the flower of all these intricate roots; the flash of all this scraping of flint.

If you read my work called ‘The Manor Rolls’ you will be pleased or disgusted according to your temperament by certain digressions which you will find there.

I have not scrupled to devote several pages of large print to an attempt to show, vividly as in a picture, some scene from the life of the time; here I knock at the serf’s door, and find him roasting rabbits he has poached; I show you the Lord of the Manor setting out on some journey, or calling his dogs to him for a walk in the fields, or sitting in the high backed chair inscribing laborious figures upon a glossy sheet of parchment. In another room I show you Dame Elinor, at work with her needle; and by her on a lower stool sits her daughter stitching too, but less assiduously. ‘Child, thy husband will be here before thy house linen is ready,’ reproves the mother.

Ah, but to read this at large you must study my book! The critics have always threatened me with two rods; first, they say, such digressions are all very well in a history of the time, but they have nothing to do with the system [of] mediaeval land tenure; secondly, they complain that I have no materials at my side to stiffen these words into any semblance of the truth. It is well known that the period I have chosen is more bare than any other of private records; unless you choose to draw all your inspiration from the Paston Letters you must be content to imagine merely, like any other story teller. And that, I am told, is a useful art in its place; but it should be allowed to claim no relationship with the sterner art of the Historian. But here, again, I verge upon that famous argument which I carried on once with so much zeal in the Historian’s Quarterly. We must make way with our introduction, or some wilful reader may throw down the book and profess to have mastered its contents already: O the old story! Antiquaries’ Quarrels! Let me draw a line here then so——and put the whole of this question of right and wrong, truth and fiction behind me.

On a June morning two years ago, it chanced that I was driving along the Thetford road from Norwich to East Harling. I had been on some expedition, a wild goose chase it was, to recover some documents which I believed to lie buried in the ruins of Caister Abbey. If we were to spend a tithe of the sums that we spend yearly upon excavating Greek cities in excavating our own ruins what a different tale the Historian would have to tell!

Such was the theme of my meditations; but nevertheless one eye, my archaeological eye, kept itself awake to the landscape through which we passed. And it was in obedience to a telegram from this that I leapt up in the carriage, at a certain point and directed the driver to turn sharply to the left. We passed down a regular avenue of ancient elm trees; but the bait which drew me was a little square picture, framed delicately between green boughs at the far end, in which an ancient doorway was drawn distinctly in lines of carved white stone.

As we approached⁠[,] the doorway proved to be encircled by long low walls of buff coloured plaster; and on top of them, at no great distance was the roof of ruddy tiles, and finally I beheld in front of me the whole of the dignified little house, built like the letter E with the middle notch smoothed out of it.

Here was one of those humble little old Halls, then, which survive almost untouched, and practically unknown for centuries and centuries, because they are too insignificant to be pulled down or rebuilt; and their owners are too poor to be ambitious. And the descendants of the builder go on living here, with that curious unconsciousness that the house is in any way remarkable which serves to make them as much a part of it, as the tall chimney which has grown black with generations of kitchen smoke. Of course a larger house might be preferable, and I doubt not that they would hesitate to sell this old one, if a good offer were to be made for it. But that is the natural, and unself-conscious spirit which proves somehow how genuine the whole thing is. You can not be sentimental about a house you have lived in for five hundred years. This is the kind of place, I thought, as I stood with my hand on the bell, where the owners are likely to possess exquisite manuscripts, and sell them as easily [to] the first rag man who comes along, as they would sell their pig wash, or the timber from the park. My point of view is that of a morbid eccentric, after all, and these are the people of truly healthy nature. Can’t they write? they will tell me; and what is the worth of old letters? I always burn mine—or use them to tie over jampots.

A maid came, at last, staring meditatively at me, as though she ought to have remembered my face and my business. ‘Who lives here?’ I asked her. ‘Mr Martyn,’ she gaped, as if I had asked the name of the reigning King of England. ‘Is there a Mrs Martyn, and is she at home, and might I see her?’ The girl waved to me to follow, and led me in silence to a person who could, presumably, undertake the responsibility of answering my strange questions.

I was shown across a large hall, panelled with oak, to a smaller room in which a rosy woman of my own age was using a machine upon a pair of trousers. She looked like a housekeeper; but she was, the maid whispered, Mrs Martyn.

She rose with a gesture that indicated that she was not precisely a lady to receive morning calls, but was nevertheless the person of authority, the mistress of the house; who had a right to know my business in coming there.

There are certain rules in the game of the antiquary, of which the first and simplest is that you must not state your object at the first encounter. ‘I was passing by your door; and I took the liberty—I must tell you I am a great lover of the picturesque, to call, on the chance that I might be allowed to look over the house. It seems to me a particularly fine specimen.’

‘Do you want to rent it, may I ask,’ said Mrs Martyn, who spoke with a pleasant tinge of dialect.

‘Do you let rooms then?’ I questioned.

‘O no,’ rejoined Mrs Martyn, decisively: ‘We never let rooms; I thought perhaps you wished to rent the whole house.’

‘It’s a little big for me; but still, I have friends.’

‘As well, then,’ broke in Mrs Martyn, cheerfully, setting aside the notion of profit, and looking merely to do a charitable act; ‘I’m sure I should be very pleased to show you over the house—I don’t know much about old things myself; and I never heard as the house was particular in any way. Still it’s a pleasant kind of place—if you come from London.’ She looked curiously at my dress and figure, which I confess felt more than usually bent beneath her fresh, and somewhat compassionate gaze; and I gave her the information she wanted. Indeed as we strolled through the long passages, pleasantly striped with bars of oak across the white wash, and looked into spotless little rooms with square green windows opening on the garden, and where I saw furniture that was spare but decent, we exchanged a considerable number of questions and answers. Her husband was a farmer on rather a large scale; but land had sunk terribly in value; and they were forced to live in the Hall now, which would not let; although it was far too large for them, and the rats were a nuisance. The Hall had been in her husband’s family for many a year, she remarked with some slight pride; she did not know how long, but people said the Martyns had once been great people in the neighbourhood. She drew my attention to the ‘y’ in their name. Still she spoke with the very chastened and clear sighted pride of one who knows by hard personal experience how little nobility of birth avails, against certain material drawbacks, the poverty of the land, for instance, the holes in the roof, and the rapacity of rats.

Now although the place was scrupulously clean, and well kept there was a certain bareness in all the rooms, a prominence of huge oak tables, and an absence of other decorations than bright pewter cups and china plates which looked ominous to my inquisitive gaze. It seemed as though a great deal must have been sold, of those small portable things that make a room look furnished. But my hostess’ dignity forbade me to suggest that her house had ever been other than it was at present. And yet I could not help fancying a kind of wistfulness in the way she showed me into rooms that were almost empty, compared the present poverty to days of greater affluence, and had it on the tip of her tongue to tell me that ‘Things had once been better.’ She seemed half apologetic, too, as she led me through a succession of bedrooms, and one or two rooms that might have served for sitting rooms if people had had leisure to sit there, as though she wished to show me that she was quite aware of the discrepancy between such a house and her own sturdy figure. All this being as it was, I did not like to ask the question that interested me most—whether they had any books? and I was beginning to feel that I had kept the good woman from her sewing machine long enough, when she suddenly looked out of the window, hearing a whistle below, and shouted something about coming in to dinner. Then she turned to me with some shyness, but an expression of hospitality, and begged me to ‘Sit down to dinner’ with them. ‘John, my husband, knows a sight more than I do of these old things of his, and I know he’s glad enough to find some one to talk to. It’s in his blood, I tell him,’ she laughed, and I saw no good reason why I should not accept the invitation. Now John did not fall so easily beneath any recognized heading as his wife did. He was a man of middle age and middle size, dark of hair and complexion, with a pallor of skin that did not seem natural to a farmer; and a drooping moustache which he smoothed slowly with one well shaped hand as he spoke. His eye was hazel and bright, but I fancied a hint of suspicion when its glance rested upon me. He began to speak however, with even more of a Norfolk accent than his wife; and his voice, and dress asserted that he was, in truth if not altogether in appearance, a solid Norfolk farmer.

He nodded merely when I told him that his wife had had the kindness to show me his house. And then, looking at her with a twinkle in his eye he remarked, ‘If she had her way the old place would be left to the rats. The house is too big, and there are too many ghosts. Eh Betty.’ She merely smiled, as though her share of the argument had been done long ago.

I thought to please him by dwelling upon its beauties, and its age; but he seemed little interested by my praises, munched largely of cold beef, and added ‘ayes’ and ‘noes’ indifferently.

A picture, painted perhaps in the time of Charles the First, which hung above his head, had so much the look of him had his collar and tweed been exchanged for a ruff and a silk doublet, that I made the obvious comparison.

‘O aye,’ he said, with no great show of interest, ‘that’s my grandfather; or my grandfather’s grandfather. We deal in grandfathers here.’

‘Was that the Martyn who fought at the Bogne,’ asked Betty negligently while she pressed me to take another slice of beef.

‘At the Bogne,’ exclaimed her husband, with query and even irritation—‘Why, my good woman, you’re thinking of Uncle Jasper. This fellow was in his grave long before the Bogne. His name’s Willoughby,’ he went on speaking to me, as though he wished me to understand the matter thoroughly; because a blunder about such a simple fact was unpardonable, even though the fact itself might not be of great interest.

‘Willoughby Martyn: born 1625 died 1685: he fought at Marston Moor as Captain of a Troop of Norfolk men. We were always royalists. He was exiled in the Protectorate, went to Amsterdam; bought a bay horse off the Duke of Newcastle there; we have the breed still; he came back here at the Restoration, married Sally Hampton—of the Manor, but they died out last generation, and had six children, four sons and two daughters. He bought the Lower Meadow you know Betty,’ he jerked at his wife, to goad her unaccountably sluggish memory.

‘I call him to mind well enough now,’ she answered, placidly.

‘He lived here all the last part of his life; died of small pox, or what they called small pox then; and his daughter Joan caught it from him. They’re buried in the same grave in the church yonder.’ He pointed his thumb, and went on with his dinner. All this was volunteered as shortly and even curtly as though he were performing some necessary task, which from long familiarity had become quite uninteresting to him; though for some reason he had still to repeat it.

I could not help showing my interest in the story, although I was conscious that my questions did not entertain my host.

‘You seem to have a queer liking for these old fathers of mine,’ he commented, at last, with an odd little scowl of humorous irritation. ‘You must show her the pictures after dinner, John,’ put in his wife; ‘and all the old things.’

‘I should be immensely interested,’ I said, ‘but I must not take up your time.’

‘O John knows a quantity about them; he’s wonderful learned about pictures.’

‘Any fool knows his own ancestors, Betty;’ growled her husband; ‘still, if you wish to see what we have, Madam, I shall be proud to show you.’ The courtesy of the phrase, and the air with which he held the door open for me, made me remember the ‘y’ in his name.

He showed me round the Hall, pointing with a riding crop to one dark canvas after another; and rapping out two or three unhesitating words of description at each; they were hung apparently in chronological order, and it was clear in spite of the dirt and the dark that the later portraits were feebler examples of the art, and represented less distinguished looking heads. Military coats became less and less frequent, and in the 18th century the male Martyns were represented [in] snuff coloured garments of a homely cut, and were briefly described as ‘Farmers’ or ‘him who sold the Fen Farm’ by their descendant. Their wives and daughters at length dropped out altogether, as though in time a portrait had come to be looked upon more as the necessary appendage of the head of the house, rather than as the right which beauty by itself could claim.

Still, I could trace no sign in the man’s voice that he was following the decline of his family with his riding crop, for there was neither pride nor regret in his tone; indeed it kept its level note, as of one who tells a tale so well known that the words have been rubbed smooth of meaning.

‘There’s the last of them—my father,’ he said at length, when he had slowly traversed the four sides of the Hall; I looked upon a crude canvas, painted in the early sixties I gathered, by some travelling painter with a literal brush. Perhaps the unskilful hand had brought out the roughness of the features and the harshness of the complexion; had found it easier to paint the farmer than to produce the subtle balance which, one might gather, blent in the father as in the son. The artist had stuffed his sitter into a black coat, and wound a stiff white tie round his neck; the poor gentleman had never felt at ease in them, yet.

‘And now, Mr Martyn,’ I felt bound to say, ‘I can only thank you, and your wife for …’

‘Stop a moment,’ he interrupted, ‘we’re not done yet. There are the books.’

His voice had a half comic doggedness about it; like one who is determined, in spite of his own indifference to the undertaking, to make a thorough job of it.

He opened a door and bade me enter a small room, or rather office; for the table heaped with papers, and the walls lined with ledgers, suggested the room where business is transacted by the master of an estate. There were pads and brushes for ornament; and there were mostly dead animals, raising lifeless paws, and grinning, with plaster tongues, from various brackets and cases.

‘These go back beyond the pictures;’ he said, as he stooped and lifted a great parcel of yellow papers with an effort. They were not bound, or kept together in any way, save by a thick cord of green silk, with bars at either end; such as you use to transfix bundles of greasy documents—butcher’s bills, and the year’s receipts. ‘That’s the first lot,’ he said ruffling the leaves with his fingers, like a pack of cards; ‘that’s no. 1: 1480 to 1500.’ I gasped, as anyone may judge: but the temperate voice of Martyn reminded me that enthusiasm was out of place, here; indeed enthusiasm began to look like a very cheap article when contrasted with the genuine thing.

‘Ah indeed; that’s very interesting; may I look?’ was all I said, though my undisciplined hand shook a little when the bundle was carelessly dropped into it. Mr Martyn indeed offered to fetch a duster before desecrating my white skin; but I assured him it was of no consequence, too eagerly perhaps, because I had feared that there might be some more substantial reason why I should not hold these precious papers.

While he bent down before a book case, I hastily looked at the first inscription on the parchment. ‘The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn,’ I spelt out, ‘kept by her at Martyn’s Hall, in the county of Norfolk the year of our Lord 1480.’

‘My grandmother Joan’s diary,’ interrupted Martyn, turning round with his arm full of books. ‘Queer old lady she must have been. I could never keep a diary myself. Never kept one beyond the 10th of February, though I tried often. But here you see,’ he leant over me, turning the pages, and pointing with his finger, ‘here is January, February, March, April—so on—a whole twelve months.’

‘Have you read it, then?’ I asked, expecting, nay, hoping that he would say no.

‘O yes, I’ve read it;’ he remarked casually, as though that were but a simple undertaking. ‘It took me some time to get used to the writing, and the old girl’s spelling is odd. But there are some queer things in it. I learnt a deal about the land from her, one way and another.’ He tapped it meditatively.

‘Do you know her history too?’ I asked.

‘Joan Martyn,’ he began in the voice of a showman, ‘was born 1495.

She was the daughter of Giles Martyn. She was his only daughter. He had three sons though; we always have sons. She wrote this diary when she was twenty-five. She lived here all her life—never married. Indeed she died at the age of thirty. I daresay you might see her tomb down there with the rest of them.’

‘Now this,’ he said touching a thick book bound in parchment, ‘is more interesting to my mind. This is the household book of Jasper for the year 1583. See how the old gentleman kept his accounts; what they eat and drank; how much meat and bread and wine cost; how many servants he kept—his horses, carriages, beds, furniture, everything. There’s method for you. I have a set of ten of them.’ He spoke of them with greater pride than I had heard him speak of any of his possessions yet.

‘This one too makes good reading of a winter’s night,’ he went on, ‘This is the Stud book of Willoughby; you remember Willoughby.’

‘The one who bought the horse of the Duke, and died of small pox,’ I repeated glibly.

‘That’s so,’ he nodded. ‘Now this is really fine stuff this one.’ He went on, like a connoisseur, talking of some favourite brand of port. ‘I wouldn’t sell this for £20. Here are names, the pedigrees, the lives, values, descendants; all written out like a bible.’ He rolled some of the strange old names of these dead horses upon his tongue, as though he relished the sound like wine. ‘Ask my wife if I can’t tell ’em all without the book,’ he laughed, shutting it carefully and placing it on the shelf.

‘These are the Estate books; they go down to this year; there’s the last of ’em. Here’s our family history.’ He unrolled a long strip of parchment, upon which an elaborate genealogical tree had been inscribed, with many faded flourishes and extravagances of some mediaeval pen. The boughs spread so widely by degrees, that they were lopped unmercifully by the limits of the sheet—a husband depending, for instance, with a family of ten children and no wife. Fresh ink at the base of all recorded the names of Jasper Martyn, my host, and his wife Elizabeth Clay: they had three sons. His finger travelled sagaciously down the tree, as though it were so well used to this occupation that it could almost be trusted to perform it by itself. Martyn’s voice murmured on as though it repeated a list of Saints or Virtues in some monotonous prayer.

‘Yes,’ he concluded, rolling up the sheet and laying it by, ‘I think I like those two best. I could say them through with my eyes shut. Horses or Grandfathers!’

‘Do you study here a great deal then?’ I asked, somewhat puzzled by this strange man.

‘I’ve no time for study,’ he returned, rather roughly, as tho’ the farmer cropped up in him at my question. ‘I like to read something easy in the winter nights; and in the morning too, if I wake early. I keep them by my bed sometimes. I say them to send myself to sleep. It’s easy to know the names of one’s own family. They come natural. But I was never any good at book learning, more’s the pity.’

Asking my permission, he lit a pipe and began puffing forth great curls of smoke, as he ranged the volumes in order before him. But I kept No. One, the bundle of parchment sheets, in my hand, nor did he seem to miss it from the rest.

‘You would be sorry to part with any of these, I daresay?’ I hazarded, at last, covering my real eagerness with an attempt at a laugh.

‘Part with them?’ he returned, ‘what should I part with them for?’ The idea was evidently so remote that my question had not, as I feared, irritated his suspicions.

‘No, no,’ he went on, ‘I find them far too useful for that. Why, Madam, these old papers have stood out for my rights in a court of law before now; besides, a man likes to keep his family round him; I should feel—well kind of lonely if you take my meaning, without my Grandfathers and Grandmothers, and Uncles and Aunts.’ He spoke as though he confessed a weakness.

‘O,’ I said, ‘I quite understand—’

‘I daresay you have the same feeling yourself Madam and down here, in a lonely place like this, company means more than you could well believe. I often think I shouldn’t know how to pass the time, if it weren’t for my relations.’

No words of mine, or attempts at a report of his words, can give the curious impression which he produced as he spoke, that all these ‘relations’ Grandfathers of the time of Elizabeth, nay Grandmothers of the time of Edward the Fourth, were just, so to speak, brooding round the corner; there was none of the pride of ‘ancestry’ in his voice but merely the personal affection of a son for his parents. All generations seemed bathed in his mind in the same clear and equable light: it was not precisely the light of the present day, but it certainly was not what we commonly call the light of the past. And it was not romantic, it was very sober, and very broad and the figures stood out in it, solid and capable, with a great resemblance, I suspect, to what they were in the flesh.

It really needed no stretch of the imagination to perceive that Jasper Martyn might come in from his farm and his fields, and sit down here alone to a comfortable gossip with his ‘relations;’ whenever he chose; and that their voices were very nearly as audible to him as those of the labourers in the field below, which came floating in, upon the level afternoon sunlight through the open window.

But my original intention of asking whether he would sell, almost made me blush when I remembered it now: so irrelevant and so impertinent. And also, strange though it may seem, I had lost for the time my proper antiquarian zeal; all my zest for old things, and the little distinguishing marks of age, left me, because they seemed the trivial and quite immaterial accidents of large substantial things. There was really no scope for antiquarian ingenuity in the case of Mr Martyn’s ancestors, anymore than it needed an antiquary to expound the history of the man himself.

They are, he would have told me, all flesh and blood like I am; and the fact that they have been dead for four or five centuries makes no more diffence to them, than the glass you place over a canvas changes the picture beneath it.

But on the other hand, if it seemed impertinent to buy, it seemed natural, if perhaps a little simpleminded, to borrow.

‘Well, Mr Martyn,’ I said at length, with less eagerness and less trepidation than I could have thought possible under the circumstances, ‘I am thinking of staying for a week or so in this neighbourhood—at the Swan at Gartham indeed—I should be much obliged to you if you would lend me these papers to look through during my stay. This is my card. Mr Lathom, (the great landowner of the place) will tell you all about me.’ Instinct told me that Mr Martyn was not the man to trust the benevolent impulses of his heart.

‘O Madam, there’s no need to bother about that,’ he said, carelessly, as though my request were not of sufficient importance to need his scrutiny. ‘If these old papers please you, I’m sure you’re welcome to ’em.’ He seemed a little surprised, however, so that I added, ‘I take a great interest in family histories, even when they’re not my own.’

‘It’s amusing eno’, I daresay, if you have the time,’ he assented politely; but I think his opinion of my intelligence was lowered.

‘Which would you like,’ he asked, stretching his hand towards the Household Books of Jasper; and the Stud book of Willoughby.

‘Well I think I’ll begin with your grandmother Joan,’ I said; ‘I like beginning at the beginning.’

‘O very well,’ he smiled; ‘though I don’t think you’ll find anything out of the way in her; she was very much the same as the rest of us—as far as I can see, not remarkable—’

But all the same, I walked off with Grandmother Joan beneath my arm; Betty insisted upon wrapping her in brown paper, to disguise the queer nature of the package, for I refused to let them send it over as they wished, by the boy who took the letters on his bicycle.

(1)

The state of the times, which my mother tells me, is less safe and less happy than when she was a girl, makes it necessary for us to keep much within our own lands. After dark indeed, and the sun sets terribly soon in January, we have to be safe behind the hall Gates; my mother goes out as soon as the dark makes her embroidery too dim to see, with the great keys on her arm. ‘Is everybody within doors?’ she cries, and swings the bells out upon the road, in case any of our men may still be working in the fields. Then she draws the Gates close, clamps them with the lock, and the whole world is barred away from us. I am very bold and impatient sometimes, when the moon rises, over a land gleaming with frost; and I think I feel the pressure of all this free and beautiful place—all England and the sea, and the lands beyond—rolling like sea waves, against our iron gates, breaking, and withdrawing—and breaking again—all through the long black night. Once I leapt from my bed, and ran to my mother’s room, crying, ‘Let them in. Let them in! We are starving!’ ‘Are the soldiers there, child,’ she cried: ‘or is it your father’s voice?’ She ran to the window, and together we gazed out upon the silver fields, and all was peaceful. But I could not explain what it was that I heard; and she bade me sleep, and be thankful that there were stout gates between me and the world.

But on other nights, when the wind is wild and the moon is sunk beneath hurrying clouds, I am glad to draw close to the fire, and to think that all those bad men who prowl in the lanes, and lie hidden in the woods at this hour cannot break through our great Gates, try as they will. Last night was such a night; they come often in Winter when my father is away in London, my brothers are with the army, save my little brother Jeremy, and my mother has to manage the farm, and order the people, and see that all our rights are looked to. We may not burn the tapers after the church bell has struck 8 times, and so we sit round the logs, with the priest, John Sandys, and one or two of the servants who sleep with us in the Hall. Then my mother, who cannot be idle even by fire light, winds her wool for her knitting, sitting in the great chair which stands by the cheek of the hearth. When her wool gets tangled she strikes a great blow with the iron rod, and sends the flames and the sparks spurting in showers; she stoops her head into the tawny light, and you see what a noble woman she is; in spite of age—she is more than forty—and the hard lines which much thought and watching have cut in her brow. She wears a fine linen cap, close fitting to the shape of her head, and her eyes are deep and stern, and her cheek is coloured like a healthy winter apple. It is a great thing to be the daughter of such a woman, and to hope that one day the same power may be mine. She rules us all.

Sir John Sandys, the priest, is, for all his sacred office, the servant of my mother; and does her will simply and querulously, and is never so happy as when she asks him for advice, and takes her own. But she would scold me well if I ever whispered such a thing: for she is the faithful daughter of the Church, and reverences her Priest. Again there are William and Anne, the servants who sit with us, because they are so old that my mother wishes them to share our fire. But William is so ancient, so curved with planting and digging, so bruised and battered by the sun and the wind that one might as well ask the pollard willow in the fen to share one’s fire, or join one’s talk. Still, his memory goes back a great way, and if he could tell us, as he sometimes tries to begin, of the things he has seen in his day, it would be curious to hear. Old Anne was my mother’s nurse; she was mine; and still she mends our clothes, and knows more about household things than any, save my mother. She will tell you, too, the history of each chair and table or piece of tapestry in the house; but most of all she likes to discuss with mother and Sir John the men whom it would be most suitable for me to marry.

As long as the light serves it is my duty to read aloud—because I am the only one who can read though my mother can write, and spell words beyond the fashion of her time, and my father has sent me a manuscript from London; called The Palace of Glass, by Mr John Lydgate. It is a poem, written about Helen and the Siege of Troy.

Last night I read of Helen, and her beauty and her suitors, and the fair town of Troy and they listened silently; for though we none of us know where those places are, we see very well what they must have been like; and we can weep for the sufferings of the soldiers, and picture to ourselves the stately woman herself, who must have been, I think, something like my mother. My mother beats with her foot and sees the whole processions pass I know, from the way her eyes gleam, and her head tosses. ‘It must have been in Cornwall,’ said Sir John, ‘where King Arthur lived with his knights. I remember stories I could tell you of all their doings, but my memory is dim.’

‘Ah but there are fine stories of the Northmen, too,’ broke in Anne; whose mother was from those parts; ‘but I have sung them often to my Mister, and to you too Miss Joan.’

‘Read on Joan, while there is light,’ commanded my mother. Indeed, of all I think she listened closest, and was most vexed when the Curfew tolled from the Church nearby. Yet she called herself an old fool for listening to stories, when the accounts had still to be made up for my father in London.

When the light is out and I can no longer see to read, they begin talking of the state of the country; and telling dreadful stories of the plots and the battles and the bloody deeds that are going on all round us. But for all I can see, we are not worse now than we have always been; and we in Norfolk today are much the same as we were in the days of Helen, wherever she may have lived. Was not Jane Moryson carried off on the eve of her wedding only last year?

But anyhow, the story of Helen is old; my mother says it happened long before her day; and these robbings and burnings are going on now. So the talk makes me, and Jeremy too, tremble and think that every rattle of the big door, is the battering ram of some wandering highwayman.

It is far worse tho’, when the time for bed comes, and the fire sinks, and we have to feel our way up the great stairs, and along the passages, where the windows shine grey, and so into our cold bed rooms. The window in my room is broken, and stuffed with straw, but gusts come in and lift the tapestry on the wall, till I think that horses and men in armour are charging down upon me. My prayer last night was, that the great gates might hold fast, and all robbers and murderers might pass us by.

(2)

The dawn, even when it is cold and melancholy, never fails to shoot through my limbs as with arrows of sparkling piercing ice. I pull aside the thick curtains, and search for the first glow in the sky which shows that life is breaking through. And with my cheek leant upon the window pane I like to fancy that I am pressing as closely as can be upon the massy wall of time, which is for ever lifting and pulling and letting fresh spaces of life in upon us. May it be mine to taste the moment before it has spread itself over the rest of the world! Let me taste the newest and the freshest. From my window I look down upon the Church yard, where so many of my ancestors are buried, and in my prayer I pity those poor dead men who toss perpetually on the old recurring waters; for I see them, circling and eddying forever upon a pale tide. Let us, then, who have the gift of the present, use it and enjoy it: That I confess, is part of my morning prayer.

It rained steadily today, so that I had to spend the morning with my sewing. My mother was writing her letter to my father which John Ashe will take with him to London next week. My thoughts naturally dwelt upon this journey, and upon the great city which perhaps I may never see, though I am for ever dreaming of it. You start at dawn; for it is well to spend few nights on the road. John travels with three other men, bound to the same place; and I have often seen them set forth, and longed to ride with them. They gather in the courtyard, while the stars are still in the sky; and the people of the neighbourhood come out wrapped in cloaks and strange garments, and my mother carries out a tankard of strong Ale to each traveller; and gives it to him from her own hand. Their horses are laden with packs before and behind, but not so as to hinder them from starting out in a gallop if need be; and the men are well armed, and closely dressed in fur lined habits, for the winter days are short and cold, and maybe they will sleep beneath a hedge. It is a gallant sight in the dawn; for the horses champ and fret to be gone; the people cluster round. They wish their God speeds and their last messages to friends in London; and as the clock strikes four they wheel about, salute my mother and the rest, and turn sharply on their road. Many young men and women too, follow them some paces on the way till the mist comes between, for often men who set forth thus in the dawn, never ride home again.

I picture them riding all day along the white roads, and I see them dismount at the shrine of our Lady and do homage, pray [to] her for a safe journey. There is but one road, and it passes through vast lands, where no men live, but only those who have murdered or robbed; for they may not dwell with others in towns, but must pass their lives with the wild beasts, who murder also, and eat the clothes from your back. It is a fearful ride; but, truly, I think I should like to go that way once, and pass over the land, like a ship at sea.

At midday they reach an Inn—for there are Inns at all the stages upon the journey to London, where a traveller may rest in safety. The landlord will tell you the state of the road, and he will ask you of your adventures, so that he may give warning to others who travel the same way. But you must press on, to reach your sleeping place before the dark lets loose all those fierce creatures, who have lain hidden in the day. John has often told me how as the sun comes from the sky silence falls on the company, and each man has his gun swung beneath his hand, and even the horses prick their ears and need no urging. You reach the crest of the road, and look fearfully beneath you, lest something moves in the shade of the fir trees by the wayside. And then Robin, the cheerful Miller, shouts a snatch of a song, and they take heart, and step bravely down the hill, talking lest the deep breath of the wind, as of a woman who sighs deeply, may cast a panic into their hearts. Then some one rises in his stirrup and sees the spark of a lodging far off on the rim of the land. And if Our Lady is merciful to them they reach this in safety when we at home are on our knees in prayer for them.

(3)

My mother called me from my book this morning to talk with her in her room. I found her in the little chamber where my father is wont to sit, when he is at home, with the Manor Rolls and other legal papers before him. It is here that she sits when she has duty to do as the head of the household. I curtseyed deeply; thinking that I guessed already why she had sent for me.

She had a sheet spread before her, covered with close writing. She bade me read it; and then before I had taken the paper in my hand she cried, ‘No—I will tell you myself.’

‘Daughter,’ she began, solemnly, ‘it is high time that you were married. Indeed it is only the troubled state of the land’—she sighed—‘and our own perplexities, that have delayed the matter so long.’

‘Do you think much of marriage?’ she looked at me half smiling.

‘I have no wish to leave you,’ I said.

‘Come, my child you speak like a Babe,’ she laughed, though I think she was well pleased at my affection.

‘And besides, if you married as I would have you marry’—she tapped the paper—‘you would not go far from me. You might for instance rule over the land of Kirflings—your land would touch ours—You would be our good neighbour. The Lord of Kirflings is Sir Amyas Bigod, a man of ancient name.’

‘I think it is a suitable match; such as a mother might wish for her daughter,’ she mused, always with the sheet before her.

As I have only seen Sir Amyas once, when he came home with my father from the sessions at Norwich, and as on that occasion my only speech with him was to invite him gravely to drink the sack which I proffered, curtseying, I could not pretend to add anything to what my mother said. All I knew was that he had a fair, straight face; and if his hair was gray, it was not so gray as my father’s, and his land bordered ours so that we might well live happily together.

‘Marriage, you must know my daughter,’ went on my mother, ‘is a great honour and a great burden. If you marry such a man as Sir Amyas you become not only the head of his household, and that is much, but the head of his race for ever and ever, and that is more. We will not talk of love—as that song writer of yours talks of love, as a passion and a fire and a madness.’

‘O he is only a story teller, Mother,’ I chimed in—

‘And such things are not to be found in real life; at least I think not often.’ My mother was used to consider gravely as she spoke.

‘But that is beside the question. Here, my daughter,’ and she spread the paper before her, ‘is a writing from Sir Amyas, to your father; he asks for your hand, and wishes to know whether there are other treaties for you and what dowry we will give with you. He tells us what he will provide on his part. Now I give you this paper to read by yourself; that you may consider whether this exchange seems to you a fair one.’

I knew already what lands and monies I had as my portion; and I knew that as the only daughter of my father my dowry was no mean one.

So that I might continue in this country which I love, and might live on close to my mother, I would take less than my right both of wealth and of land. But the gravity of the compact is such that I felt as though several years were added to my age, when my mother handed me the roll of paper. Since I was a child, I have always heard my parents talk of my marriage; and during the last two or three years there have been several contracts almost made I know, that came to nothing in the end. I lose my youth however, and it is high time that a bargain were struck.

I thought, naturally, for a long time, until the dinner bell rung indeed at midday, of the general honour and burden, as my mother calls it, of marriage. No other event in the life of a woman can mean so great a change; for from flitting shadow like and unconsidered in her father’s house, marriage suddenly forms her to a substantial body, with weight which people must see and make way for. That is of course, if her marriage is suitable. And so, every maiden waits this change with wonder and anxiety; for it will prove whether she is to be [an] honourable and authoritative woman for ever, like my mother; or it will show that she is of no weight or worth. Either in this world or in the next.

And if I marry well, the burden of a great name and of great lands will be on me; many servants will call me mistress; I shall be the mother of sons; in my husband’s absence I shall rule his people, taking care for herds and crops and keeping watch on his enemies; within doors I shall store up fine linens and my chests shall be laden with spices and preserves; by the work of my needle all waste of time and use will be repaired and renewed so that at my death my daughter shall find her cupboards better lined with fine raiments than when I found them. And when I lie dead, the people from the countryside shall pass for three days before my body, praying and speaking good of me, and at the will of my children the priest shall say mass for my soul and candles shall burn in the church for ever and ever.

(4)

I was stopped in the midst of such reflections firstly by the dinner bell; and you must not be late, or you interfere with Sir John’s grace and that means no pudding; and then, when I might have put myself more into the position of a married woman, Jeremy my brother, insisted that we should go for a walk with Anthony, my father’s chief steward—after my mother that is.

He is a crass man, but I like him because he is a faithful servant, and knows as much about land and sheep as any man in Norfolk. It was he also who broke Lancelot’s head in last Michaelmas for using bad language [to] my mother. He is for ever tramping our fields, and knows them better and loves them more, so I tell him, than any human creature. He is wedded to this clump of earth, and sees in it a thousand beauties and gifts such as ordinary men see in their wives. And, as we have trotted by his side since we could walk alone, some of his affection has become ours too; Norfolk and the parish of Long Winton in Norfolk is to me what my own grandmother is; a tender parent, dear and familiar, and silent to whom I shall return in time. O how blessed it would be never to marry, or grow old; but to spend one’s life innocently and indifferently among the trees and rivers which alone can keep one cool and childlike in the midst of the troubles of the world! Marriage or any other great joy would confuse the clear vision which is still mine. And at the thought of losing that, I cried in my heart, ‘No, I will never leave you—for a husband or a lover,’ and straightway I started chasing rabbits across the heath with Jeremy and the dogs.

It was a cold afternoon, but a bright one; as though the sun were made of gleaming ice and not of fire; and its rays were long icicles that reached from sky to earth. They splintered on our cheeks, and went glancing across the fen. And the whole country seemed empty, save of a few swift rabbits, but very chaste and very glad in its solitude. We ran to keep warm, and chattered when the blood raced sparkling through our limbs. Anthony stalked straight on, as though his stride were the best thing in the world against the cold. Certainly when we came to a broken hedge, or a snare stretched for a rabbit, he took off his gloves and leant on his knee and took note of it as though it were a midsummer day. Once we came upon a strange man, slouching along the road, in rusty green, with the look of one who knows not which way to take. Anthony held my hand firmly; this was a Sanctuary man he said, prowling out of bounds in search of food. He had robbed or murdered, or perchance he was only a debtor. Jeremy swore he saw blood on his hands: but Jeremy is a boy, and would like to defend us all with his bow and arrows.

Anthony had some business at one of the cottages, and we came in with him out of the cold. But indeed, I could hardly stand the heat and the smell. Beatrice Somers, and her husband Peter live here, and they have children; but it was more like the burrow of some rabbit on the heath than the house of a man. Their roof was of brush, and straw, their floor was but the earth trodden bare of grass or flower; sticks burnt in the corner, and sent the smoke stinging into our eyes. There was but a rotten log on which a woman sat, nursing a baby. She looked at us, not with fright, but with distrust and dislike written clear in her eyes; and she clasped her child more closely. Anthony spoke to her as he would have spoken to some animal who had strong claws and a wicked eye: he stood over her, and his great boot seemed ready to crush her. But she did not move or speak; and I doubt whether she could have spoken, or whether snarling and howling was her only language.

Outside we met Peter coming home from the fen, and tho’ he touched his forehead to us, he seemed to have no more human sense in him than his wife. He looked at us, and seemed fascinated by a coloured cloak which I wore; and then he stumbled into his burrow, to lie on the ground I suppose, rolled in dried bracken till morning. These are the people we must rule; and tread under foot, and scourge them to do the only work they are fitted to do; as they will tear us to pieces with their fangs. Thus Anthony spoke as he took us away, and then clenched his fists and set his lips as though he were razing to the earth some such poor wretch already. Still the sight of that ugly face spoilt the rest of the walk; since it seemed that even my dear country bred pests like these. I saw such eyes staring at me from the furze bushes, and the tangles of the undergrowth.

It was like waking from a nightmare to enter our own clean hall, where the logs burnt tidily in the great chimney, and the oak shone bright; and my mother came down the staircase in her rich gown, with spotless linen on her head. But some of the lines on her face, and some of the sternness of her voice, had come there, I thought suddenly, because she always saw not far from her such sights as I had seen today.

(5)

May

The spring which has now reached us means more than the mere birth of green growing things; for once again the current of life which circles round England is melted from its winter frost, and in our little island we feel the tide chafing at our shores. For the last week or two strange wayfarers have been seen on the roads, who may be either pilgrims and pedlars, or gentlemen travelling in parties to London or the North. And at this season the mind becomes eager and hopeful even though the body must stay motionless. For as the evenings lengthen and new light seems to well up from the West so one may fancy that a new whiter light of another kind is spreading over the land; and you may feel it hitting your eyelids as you walk or sit over your embroidery.

In the midst of such a stir and tumult, one bright May morning, we saw the figure of a man striding along the road, walking fast and waving his arms as though he conversed with the air. He had a great wallet at his back and we saw that he held a stout book of parchment in one hand at which he glanced occasionally: and all the while he shouted words in a kind of measure with his feet, and his voice rose up and down, in [menace?] or in plaint till Jeremy and I shrank close against the hedge. But he saw us; and pulled off his cap and made a deep bow; to which I curtseyed as properly as I could.

‘Madam,’ he said, in a voice that rolled like summer thunder, ‘may I ask if this is the road to Long Winton?’

‘It is only a mile in front of you, Sir,’ I said, and Jeremy waved down the road with his stick.

‘Then Sir,’ he went on, shutting his book, and looking at once more sober and more conscious of the time and place, ‘may I ask further where is the house where I could sell my books most easily? I am come all the way from Cornwall, singing songs, and trying to sell the manuscripts I have with me. My wallet is still full. The times are not favourable to songs.’

Indeed the man, though ruddy of cheek, and lusty of frame, was as ill dressed as any hind; and his boots were so patched that walking must have been a penance. But he had a kind of gaiety and courtesy about him, as though the fine music of his own songs clung to him and set him above ordinary thoughts.

I pulled my brother’s arm, and said, ‘We belong to the Hall ourselves Sir, and we will gladly shew you the way. I should be very glad to see those books of yours.’ His eye lost its merriment at once; and he asked me almost sternly, ‘Can you read?’

‘O Joan’s always got her nose in a book,’ called out Jeremy, starting to talk, and pulling me too.

‘Tell us about your travels Sir. Have you been to London? What is your name?’

‘I am called Richard Sir,’ said the man smiling. ‘Doubtless I have another name, but I never heard it. I come from Gwithian which is in Cornwall; and I can sing you more Cornish songs, Madam, than any man in the Duchy.’ He turned to me, and wound up with a flourish of one hand with the book in it. ‘Here for instance—in this little volume, are all the stories of the Knights of the round Table; written out by the hand of Master Anthony himself, and painted by the Monks of Cam Brea. I value this more than my wife or children; for I have none; it is meat and drink to me, because I am given supper and lodging for singing the tales in it; it is horse and staff to me, for it has lifted me over many miles of weary road; and it is the best of all companions on the way; for it has always something new to sing me; and it will be silent when I wish to sleep. There never was such a book!’

Such was the way he talked, as I have never heard any man talk. For in speaking he did not seem to speak his mind exactly, or to care whether we understood him. But words seemed dear to him, whether he spoke them in jest or earnest. We reached our courtyard, and he straightened himself, flicked his boots with a handkerchief; and tried with many swift touches of his fingers to set his dress somewhat more in order than it was. Also he cleared his throat, as one preparing to sing. I ran to fetch my mother, who came slowly, and looked at him from an upper window before she would promise to hear him.

‘His bag is stuffed with books, mother,’ I urged; ‘he has all the Tales of Arthur and the Round Table; I daresay he can tell us what became of Helen when her husband took her. O Mother, do let us hear him!’

She laughed at my impatience; but bade me call Sir John, for after all it was a fine morning.

When we came down the man Richard was walking up and down, discoursing to my brother of his travels; how he had knocked one man on the head, cried to the other, ‘“Come on Rascal” and the whole lot had fled like,’ here he saw my mother, and swept off his hat as was his way.

‘My daughter tells me Sir that you come from foreign parts, and can sing. We are but country people; and therefore I fear very little acquainted with the tales of other parts. But we are ready to listen. Sing us something of your land; and then, if you will, you shall sit down to meat with us, and we will gladly hear news of the country.’

She sat down on a bench beneath the oak tree; and Sir John came puffing to stand by her side. She bade Jeremy open the Gates, and let any of our people in who cared to hear. They came in shyly and curiously, and stood gaping at Master Richard, who once again waved his cap at them.

He stood on a small mound of grass; and began in a high melodious voice, to tell the story of Sir Tristram and the Lady Iseult.

He dropped his gay manner, and looked past us all, with straight fixed eyes, as though he drew his words from some sight not far from him. And as the story grew passionate his voice rose, and his fists clenched, and he raised his foot and stretched forth his arms; and then, when the lovers part, he seemed to see the Lady sink away from him, and his eye sought farther and farther till the vision was faded away; and his arms were empty. And then he is wounded in Brittany; and he hears the Princess coming across the seas to him.

But I cannot tell how it seemed that the air was full of Knights and Ladies, who passed among us, hand in hand, murmuring, and seeing us not; and then the poplars and the beech trees sent grey figures, with silver gems, floating down the air; and the morning was full, suddenly, of whispers, and sighs, and lovers’ laments.

But then the voice stopped; and all these figures withdrew, fading and trailing across the sky to the West where they live. And when I opened my eyes, the man, and the grey wall; the people by the Gate, slowly swam up, as from some depths, and settled on the surface, and stayed there clear and cold.

‘Poor things!’ spoke my mother.

Meanwhile Richard was like a man who lets something slip from his clasp; and beats thin air. He looked at us, and I had half a mind to stretch out a hand; and tell him he was safe. But then he recollected himself, and smiled as though he had reason to be pleased.

He saw the crowd at the Gate; and struck up a jolly tune, about a Nut Brown Maid and her lover, and they grinned and stamped with their feet. Then my mother bade us come into dinner; and she sat Master Richard at her right side.

He eat like a man who has fed upon hips and haws, and drunk water from the brook. And after the meat had been taken away, he solemnly swung round his wallet; and took from it various things; which he laid upon the table. There were clasps and brooches, and necklaces of beads: but there were also many sheets of parchment stiched together; though none of such a size as his book. And then seeing my desire he placed the precious volume in my hands and bade me look at its pictures. Indeed it was a beautiful work; for the capital letters framed bright blue skies, and golden robes; and in the midst of the writing there came broad spaces of colour, in which you might see princes and princesses walking in procession and towns with churches upon steep hills, and the sea breaking blue beneath them. They were like little mirrors, held up to those visions which I had seen passing in the air but here they were caught and stayed for ever.

‘And have you ever seen such sights as these?’ I asked him.

‘They are to be seen by those who look,’ he answered mysteriously. And he took his manuscript from me, and tied the covers safely across it. He placed it in his breast.

It was as yellow and gnarled outside as the missal of any pious priest; but inside the brilliant knights and ladies moved, undimmed, to the unceasing melody of beautiful words. It was a fairy world that he shut inside his coat.

We offered him a night’s lodging, nay more, if he would but stay and sing to us again. But he listened to our prayers no more than the owl in the ivy: saying merely, ‘I must go on my way.’ By dawn he was out of the house, and we felt as though some strange bird had rested on our roof for a moment, and flown on.

(6)

Midsummer

There comes a week, or may be it is only a day, when the year seems poised consciously on its topmost peak; it stays there motionless for a long or a short time, as though in majestic contemplation, and then slowly sinks like a monarch descending from his throne, and wraps itself round in darkness.

But figures are slippery things!

At this moment I have the feeling of one swung high into tranquil regions; upon the great back of the world. The peace of the nation, and the prosperity of our own small corner of it—for my father and brothers are at home—make a complete circle of satisfaction; you may pass from the smooth dome of sky, to our own roof without crossing any gulf.

Thus it seemed a most suitable time for our midsummer pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady at Walsingham; more especially as I have this year to give thanks for much, and to pray for more. My marriage with Sir Amyas is settled for the 20th day of December; and we are busy making ready. So yesterday I started at dawn, and travelled on foot in order to show that I approached the shrine with a humble spirit. And a good walk is surely the best preparation for prayers!

Start with your spirit fresh like a corn fed horse; let her rear and race, and bucket you hither and thither. Nothing will keep her to the road; and she will sport in dewy meadows, and crush a thousand delicate flowers beneath her feet.

But the day grows hot; and you may lead her, still with a springing step back to the straight way; and she will carry you lightly and swiftly, till the midday sun bids you rest. In sober truth, and without metaphor, the mind drives clearly through all the mazes of a stagnant spirit when a brisk pair of legs impells it; and the creature grows nimble, with its exercise. Thus I suppose I may have thought enough for a whole week lived indoors during those three hours that I spent striding along the road to Walsingham.

And my brain that was swift and merry at first, and leapt like a child at play, settled down in time to sober work upon the highway, though it was glad withal. For I thought of the serious things of life—such as age, and poverty and sickness and death, and considered that it would certainly be my lot to meet them; and I considered also those joys and sorrows that were for ever chasing themselves across my life. Small things would no longer please me or tease me as of old. But although this made me feel grave, I felt also that I had come to the time when such feelings are true; and further, as I walked, it seemed to me that one might enter within such feelings and study them, as, indeed, I had walked in a wide space within the covers of Master Richard’s manuscript.

I saw them as solid globes of crystal; enclosing a round ball of coloured earth and air, in which tiny men and women laboured, as beneath the dome of the sky itself.

Walsingham, as all the world knows, is but a very small village on the top of a hill. But as you approach through a plain that is rich with green, you see this high ground rising above you for some time before you get there. The midday sun lit up all the soft greens and blues of the fen land; and made it seem as though one passed through a soft and luxurious land, glowing like a painted book; towards a stern summit, where the light struck upon something pointing upwards that was pale as bone.

At last I reached the top of the hill, joining with a stream of other pilgrims, and we clasped hands, to show that we came humbly as human beings and trod the last steps of the road together, singing our Miserere.

There were men and women, and lame people and blind people; and some were in rags, and some had ridden on horseback; I confess that my eyes sought their faces curiously, and I thought desperately for a moment that it was terrible that flesh and [fens?] should divide us. They would have strange, merry stories to tell.

But then the pale cross with the Image struck my eyes, and drew all my mind, in reverence towards it.

I will not pretend that I found that summons other than stern; for the sun and storm have made the figure harsh and white; but the endeavour to adore Her as others were doing round me filled my mind with an image that was so large and white that no other thought had room there. For one moment I submitted myself to her as I have never submitted to man or woman, and bruised my lips on the rough stone of her garment. White light and heat steamed on my bare head; and when the ecstasy passed the country beneath flew out like a sudden banner unfurled.

(7)

Autumn

The Autumn comes; and my marriage is not far off. Sir Amyas is a good gentleman, who treats me with great courtesy and hopes to make me happy. No poet could sing of our courtship; and, I must confess that since I have taken to reading of Princesses, I have sometimes grieved that my own lot was so little like theirs. But then they did not live in Norfolk, at the time of the Civil Wars; and my mother tells me that the truth is always finest.

To prepare me for my duties as a married woman, she has let me help her in the management of the house and lands; and I begin to understand how much of my time will be passed in thoughts which have nothing to do with men or with happiness. There are the sheep, the woods, the crops, the people, things all needing my care and judgment when my Lord is away as he will be so often; and if times are as troubled as they have been, I must also act as chief Lieutenant in the disposition of his forces against the enemy. And then there will be my proper work as a woman calling me within the house. Truly, as my mother says, there will be little time for Princes and Princesses! And she went on to expound to me what she calls her theory of ownership; how, in these times, one is as the Ruler of a small island set in the midst of turbulent waters; how one must plant it and cultivate it; and drive roads through it, and fence it securely from the tides; and one day perhaps the waters will abate and this plot of ground will be ready to make part of a new world. Such is her dream of what the future may bring to England; and it has been the hope of her life to order her own province in such a way that it may make one firm spot of ground to tread on at any rate. She bids me hope that I may live to see the whole of England thus solidly established; and if I do, I shall thank my mother, and other women like her.

But I confess that deeply though I honour my mother and respect her words, I cannot accept their wisdom without a sigh. She seems to look forward to nothing better than an earth rising solid out of the mists that now enwreathe it; and the fairest prospect in her mind is, I believe, a broad road running through the land, on which she sees long strings of horsemen, riding at their ease, pilgrims stepping cheerily unarmed, and waggons that pass each other going laden to the coast and returning as heavily laden with goods taken from ships. Then she would dream of certain great houses, lying open to the sight, with their moats filled up and their towers pulled down; and the gate would open freely to any passer by; and there would be cheer for guest or serving man at the same table with the Lord. And you would ride through fields brimming with corn, and there would be flocks and herds in all the pasture lands and cottages of stone for the poor. As I write this down, I see that it is good; and we should do right to wish it.

But at the same time, when I imagine such a picture, painted before me, I cannot think it pleasant to look upon; and I fancy that I should find it hard to draw my breath upon those smooth bright ways.

Yet what it is that I want, I cannot tell, although I crave for it, and in some secret way, expect it. For often, and oftener as time goes by, I find myself suddenly halting in my walk, as though I were stopped by a strange new look upon the surface of the land which I know so well. It hints at something; but it is gone before I know what it means. It is as though a new smile crept out of a well known face; it half frightens you, and yet it beckons.

Last Pages

My father came in yesterday when I was sitting before the desk at which I write these sheets. He is not a little proud of my skill in reading and writing; which indeed I have learnt mostly at his knee.

But confusion came over me when he asked me what I wrote; and stammering that it was a ‘Diary’ I covered the pages with my hands.

‘Ah,’ he cried, ‘if my father had only kept a diary! But he, poor man, could not write his own name even. There’s John and Pierce and Stephen all lying in the church yonder, and no word left to say whether they were good men or bad.’ Thus he spoke till my cheeks were pale again.

‘And so my grandson will say of me,’ he went on. ‘And if I could I should like to write a line myself: to say “I am Giles Martyn; I am a middle sized man, dark skinned, hazel eyed, with hair on my lip; I can read and write, but none too easy. I ride to London on as good a bay mare as is to be found in the County.”’

‘Well what more should I say? And would they care to hear it? And who will they be?’ he laughed; for it was his temper to end his speech with a laugh, even though he began it soberly.

‘You would like to hear of your father,’ I said; ‘why shouldn’t they care to hear of you?’

‘My fathers were much as I am;’ he said; ‘they lived here, all of ’em; they ploughed the same land that I plough; they married women from the countryside. Why they might walk in at the door this moment, and I should know ’em, and should think it nothing strange. But the future’—he spread out his hands—‘who can tell? We may be washed off the face of the earth, Joan.’

‘Oh no,’ I cried; ‘I am certain we shall live here always.’ This pleased my father secretly; for there is no man who cares more for his land and his name than he does; though he will always hold that had we been a prouder race, we should not have stayed so long in the same prosperity.

‘Well then Joan, you must keep your writing,’ he said; ‘or rather, I must keep it for you. For you are going to leave us—not to go far though,’ he added quickly; ‘and names matter but little. Still, I should like to have some token of you when you are away; and our descendants shall have cause to respect one of us at least.’ He looked with great admiration at the neat lines of my penmanship. ‘Now my girl, come with me, to the Church, where I must see to the carving on my father’s tomb.’

As I walked with him, I thought of his words and of the many sheets that lie written in my oaken desk. Winter had come round again since I made my first flourish so proudly. Thinking that there were few women in Norfolk who could do the like; and were it not that some such pride stayed with me I think that my writing would have ceased long before this. For, truly, there is nothing in the pale of my days that needs telling; and the record grows wearisome. And I thought as I went along in the sharp air of the winter morning, that if I ever write again it shall not be of Norfolk and myself, but of Knights and Ladies and of adventures in strange lands. The clouds even, which roll up from the west and advance across the sky take the likeness of Captains and of soldiery and I can scarcely cease from fashioning helmets and swords, as well as fair faces, and high headdresses from these waves of coloured mist.

But as my mother would say, the best of stories are those that are told over the fire side; and I shall be well content if I may end my days as one of those old women who can keep a household still on a winter’s evening, with her tales of the strange sights that she saw and the deeds that were done in her youth. I have always thought that such stories came partly out of the clouds, or why should they stir us more than any thing we can see for ourselves? It is certain that no written book can stand beside them.

Such a woman was Dame Elsbeth Aske, who, when she grew too old to knit or stitch and too stiff to leave her chair, sat with clasped hands by the fire all day long, and you had only to pull her sleeve and her eyes grew bright, and she would tell you stories of fights and kings, and great nobles, and stories of the poor people too, till the air seemed to move and murmur. She could sing ballads also; which she made as she sat there. And men and women, old and young, came long distances to hear her; for all that she could neither write nor read. And they thought that she could tell the future too.

Thus we came to the church where my fathers lie buried. The famous stone Carver, Ralph of Norwich, has lately wrought a tomb for my grandfather, and it lies almost finished now, above his body; and the candles were flaring upright in the dim church when we entered. We knelt and whispered prayers for his soul; and then my father withdrew in talk with Sir John; and left me to my favourite task of spelling out the names and gazing down at the features of my dead kinsmen and ancestors. As a child I know the stark white figures used to frighten me; especially when I could read that they bore my name; but now that I know that they never move from their backs, and keep their hands crossed always, I pity them; and would fain do some small act that would give them pleasure. It must be something secret, and unthought of—a kiss or a stroke, such as you give a living person.

[August 1906]

[]

A Dialogue upon Mount Pentelicus.

It so happened not many weeks ago that a party of English tourists was descending the slopes of Mount Pentelicus. Now they would have been the first to correct that sentence and to point out how much inaccuracy and indeed injustice was contained in such a description of themselves. For to call a man a tourist when you meet him abroad is to define not only his circumstance but his soul; and their souls they would have said—but the donkeys stumble so on the stones—were subject to no such limitation. Germans are tourists and Frenchmen are tourists but Englishmen are Greeks. Such was the sense of their discourse, and we must take their word for it that it was very good sense indeed.

Mount Pentelicus⁠[,] as we who read Baedeker know, yet bears on her side the noble scar that she suffered at the hands of certain Greek stone masons who had the smile and perhaps the curse of Pheidias as their reward of their labour. And so if you would do justice to her you must meditate on several separate themes and combine them as best you may. You must think of her not only as the outline that ran across many Greek casements—Plato looked up from his page on sunny mornings—but also as the workshop and as the living place where innumerable slaves wore out their lives. And it was salutary when at midday the party dismounted, to stumble painfully among the crude blocks of marble, which for some reason had been overlooked or cast aside when the carts went down the hill to Athens. It was salutary, because in Greece it is possible to forget that statues are made of marble, and it was wholesome to see that marble opposes itself, solid and sharp and perverse to the sculptor’s chisel.

‘Such were the Greeks!’ And if you had heard that cry you would have supposed that each speaker had some personal conquest to celebrate and was the generous victor of the stone himself. He had forced it to yield its Hermes or its Apollo once with his own hands. But then the donkeys, whose ancestors had been stabled in the grotto put an end to meditation and the riders⁠[,] six of them in order⁠[,] stepped gravely down the hill side. They had seen Marathon and Salamis and Athens would have been theirs too had not a cloud caressed it; at any rate they felt themselves charged on each side by tremendous presences. And to prove themselves duly inspired, they not only shared their wine flask with the escort of dirty Greek peasant boys but condescended so far as to address them in their own tongue as Plato would have spoken it had Plato learned Greek at Harrow. Whether they were just or not shall be left for others to decide; but the fact that Greek words spoken on Greek soil were misunderstood by Greeks destroys at one blow the whole population of Greece, both men and women and children. At such a crisis one word came aptly to their lips; a word that Sophocles might have spoken, and that Plato would have sanctioned; they were ‘barbarians’. To denounce them thus was not only to discharge a duty on behalf of the dead but to declare the rightful inheritors, and for some minutes the marble quarries of Pentelicus thundered the news to all who might sleep beneath their rocks or haunt their caverns. The spurious people was convicted; the dusky garrulous race, loose of lip and unstable of purpose who had parodied the speech and pilfered the name of the great for so long was caught and convicted. Obedient to the cry the muleteer came down upon the quarters of his charge—a white mule led the file—with the good will of one who saves his own back each blow that he lays upon another’s. For when the English shouted he judged that it was best to go faster. Nor could he have proved himself a happier critic; the moment had its word; no poet could do more; a prose writer might easily have done less. So with that single shout the English tumbled loosely from their climax and rattled down the mountain side as careless and as jocund as though the land were theirs.

But the descent of Pentelicus is stayed by a flat green ledge where nature seems to stand upright for a moment before she plunges down the hill again. There are great plane trees spreading benevolent hands, and there are comfortable little bushes ranged in close domestic order, and there is a stream which may be thought to sing their praises and the delights of wine and song. You might have heard the voice of Theocritus in the plaint that it made on the stones, and certain of the English did so hear it, albeit the text was dusty on their shelves at home. Here at any rate nature and the chant of the classic spirit prompted the six friends to dismount and rest themselves. Their guides withdrew, yet not so far but that they could be seen at their barbarian antics, rolling and singing, pulling each other by the sleeve and chattering of the vintage that now hung purple in the fields. But if there is one thing that we know about the Greeks it is that they were a still people, significant of gesture and speech, and when they sat down by the stream beneath the plane tree they disposed themselves as the vase painter would have chosen to depict them: the old man propped his chin on his staff so that his brow bent dark above the youth who lay upon the grass at his feet. And grave women in white draperies passed behind, silent, with pitchers balanced on their shoulders. No scholar in Europe could have rearranged that picture, or convinced our friends that any had a better right to construct such visions than themselves.

They stretched themselves then in the shade, and it was no fault of theirs or of the ancients if their discourse fell short in design at least of its noble model. But since dialogues are even more hard to write than to speak, and it is doubtful whether written dialogues have ever been spoken or spoken dialogues have ever been written, we will only rescue such fragments as concern our story. But this we will say, that the talk was the finest talk in the world.

It ranged over many subjects—over birds and foxes, and whether turpentine is good in wine—how the ancients made cheese—the position of women in the Greek state—that was eloquent!—the metres of Sophocles—the saddling of donkeys: and so sinking and surging like the flight of an eagle through mid-air it dropped at last upon the tough old riddle of the modern Greek and his position in the world today. Some, of optimistic nature⁠[,] claimed for him a present, some less credulous but still sanguine expected a future, and others with generous imagination recalled a past; but it was left for one to combat all these superstitions as he struck at the stump of a withered olive tree, and to demonstrate with great shocks of speech and of muscle what it was that the Greeks had been, and what it is that they are no longer.

Such a people he said—and as he spoke the sun was in the sky, and a golden eagle hung above the hill—such a people were as sudden as the dawn, and died as the day dies here in Greece, completely. Ignorant of all that should be ignored—of charity, religion, domestic life, learning and science—they fixed their minds upon the beautiful and the good, and found them sufficient not for this world only but for an infinite number of worlds to come. ‘Where the Greeks had modesty—’ but to finish the quotation, for he must read what none now could speak, he called for his Peacock, and his Peacock had been left with certain socks and a tin of tobacco, the bitterest loss of all, in the ruins of Olympia, and he was forced to take up the strain a little lower down in the scale though with no less earnestness than he began it. He said then how the Greeks by paring down the superfluous had revealed at last the perfect statue, or the sufficient stanza, just as we obversely by cloaking them in our rags of sentiment and imagination had obscured the outline and destroyed the substance. Look he exclaimed, upon the Apollo at Olympia, upon the head of a boy in Athens, read the Antigone, stroll among the ruins of the Parthenon, and ask yourself whether there is room at the side or at the foot for any later form of beauty to creep in. Rather is it not true, as fancy hints in the dark and the pallid dawn, that just so many shapes of beauty swam in the vague for thought to realise as the Greeks circled with stone and with language, and that nothing is left for us but to worship in silence or if we choose, to chum the empty air?

One answered him, whose character was already spotted with a dangerous heresy; for only a year ago he had made use of a brand new vote to affirm that Greek should cease as he put it, ‘to whip stupid boys into good behaviour.’ And yet he was a scholar. His argument, but we must beware of the dialogue⁠[,] was something of this sort, save for certain interruptions which no rearrangement of the alphabet will convey.

‘When you talk of the Greeks⁠[,]’ he said⁠[,] ‘you speak as a sentimentalist and a sloven, and you are very fond of talking of the Greeks. It is no wonder that you love them, for they represent⁠[,] as you have been saying⁠[,] all that is noble in art and true in philosophy, and as you might have added all that is best in yourself. Certainly there never was a people like them; and the reason why you—who took a third in your tripos, you may remember—call them the Greeks is because it seems to you impious to call them the Italians or the French or the Germans, or by the name of any people indeed who can build bigger fleets than ours or talk a language that we can understand. No, let us give them a name which can be spelt in different ways, which can be given to different peoples, which etymologists can define, which archaeologists can dispute⁠[,] which can mean in short all that we do not know and as in your case all that we dream and desire. Indeed there is no reason why you should read their writings, for have you not written them? Their mystic and secret pages embalm all that you have felt to be beautiful in art and true in philosophy. For there is⁠[,] you know, a soul of beauty that rises unchristened over the words of Milton as it rises over the Bay of Marathon yonder; perchance it may slip us and fade, for we distrust phantoms. But you I doubt not are busy even at this moment baptising it with a Greek name, and enclosing it in a Greek shape. Is it not already that ‘something in the Greek’ which you never read there; and part—the best part—of Sophocles and Plato and all those dark books at home? So, while you read your Greek on the slopes of Pentelicus, you deny that her children exist any longer. But for us scholars—’

‘O ignorant and illogical’ interrupted the answer, and so might have continued to the end of the paragraph but that another reply was vouchsafed which seemed conclusive at the moment though it did not proceed from Heaven but only from the hill side. The little bushes creaked and bent, and a great brown form surged out of them, his head obscured by the bundle of dried wood that he carried on his shoulders. At first there was some hope that he might be a fine specimen of the European bear, but a second glance proved that he was only a monk discharging the humble duties of the monastery near by. He did not see the six Englishmen till he was close up to them, and then their presence made him stand erect and gaze as though startled against his will from pleasant meditations. So they saw that he was large and finely made, and had the nose and brow of a Greek statue. It was true that he wore a beard and his hair was long, and there was every reason to think him both dirty and illiterate. But as he stood there, suspended, with open eyes, a fantastic—a pathetic—hope shot through the minds of some who saw him that his was one of those original figures which, dipped in the crude earth, have resisted time, and recall the first days and the unobliterated type: there might be such a thing as Man.

But it is no longer within the power of the English mind—the gift may be enjoyed perhaps in Russia—to see fur grow upon smooth ears and cloven hoofs where there are ten separate toes. It is their power to see something different from that, and perhaps, who knows?, something finer. At any rate the six English stretched beneath the plane tree felt themselves first of all compelled to draw in their untidy limbs and then to sit erect and then to return the gaze of the brown monk as one man gazes at another. Such was the force of the eye that fixed them, for it was not only clarified by the breeze among the olive groves but it was lit by another power which survives trees and even plants them. And certainly, interpret it how you will, whether you tell it as a fact or whisper it as a miracle, and it may be both, the light was such that it made the trees murmur and the air blow. And thousands of little creatures moved about in the grass, and the earth turned solid for miles and miles beneath the feet. Nor did the atmosphere begin and end with that day and that horizon, but it stretched like a lucid green river on all sides immeasurably and the world swam in its girdle of eternity. Such was the light in the brown monk’s eye, and to think of death or dust or destruction beneath its gaze was like placing a sheet of tissue paper in the fire. For it pierced through much, and went like an arrow drawing a golden chain through ages and races till the shapes of men and women and the sky and the trees rose up on either side of its passage and stretched in a solid and continuous avenue from one end of time to the other.

And the English could not have told at the moment at which point they stood, for the avenue was as smooth as a ring of gold. But the Greeks, that is Plato and Sophocles and the rest⁠[,] were close to them, as close to them as any friend or lover, and breathed the same air as that which kissed the cheek and stirred the vine, only like young people they still pressed in front and questioned the future. Such a flame as that in the monk’s eye⁠[,] though it had wandered in obscure places since, and had shone upon the barren hill side and among the stones and the stunted little trees⁠[,] had been lit once at the original hearth; and doubtless it will bum on still in the head of monk or peasant when more ages are passed than the brain can number.

All that the brown monk said however was καλησπέρα[,] which is good evening, and it was odd that he addressed the gentleman who had been the first to proclaim the doom of his race. And as he returned the salutation, rising to do so and taking the pipe from his lips, the conviction was his that he spoke as a Greek to a Greek and if Cambridge disavowed the relationship the slopes of Pentelicus and the olive groves of Mendeli confirmed it.

But the dusk that cuts short the Grecian day was falling like a knife across the sky; and as they rode home along the high way between the vines the lights were opening in the streets of Athens and the talk was of supper and a bed.

[late 1906]

[]

Memoirs of a Novelist.

When Miss Willatt died, in October 1884, it was felt, as her biographer puts it, ‘that the world had a right to know more of an admirable though retiring woman.’ From the choice of adjectives it is clear that she would not have wished it herself unless one could have convinced her that the world would be the gainer. Perhaps, before she died, Miss Linsett did convince her, for the two volumes of life and letters which that lady issued were produced with the sanction of the family. If one chose to take the introductory phrase and moralise upon it one might ask a page full of interesting questions. What right has the world to know about men and women? What can a biographer tell it? and then, in what sense can it be said that the world profits? The objection to asking these questions is not only that they take so much room, but that they lead to an uncomfortable vagueness of mind. Our conception of the world is that it is a round ball, coloured green where there are fields and forests, wrinkled blue where there is sea, with little peaks pinched up upon it, where there are mountain ranges. When we are asked to imagine the effect of Miss Willatt or another upon this object, the enquiry is respectful but without animation. Yet, if it would be [a] waste of time to begin at the beginning and ask why lives are written, it may not be entirely without interest to ask why the life of Miss Willatt was written, and so to answer the question, who she was.

Miss Linsett, although she cloaked her motives under large phrases, had some stronger impulse at the back of her. When Miss Willatt died, ‘after fourteen years of unbroken friendship,’ Miss Linsett (if we may theorise) felt uneasy. It seemed to her that if she did not speak at once something would be lost. At the same time no doubt other thoughts pressed upon her; how pleasant mere writing is, how important and unreal people become in print so that it is a credit to have known them; how one’s own figure can have justice done to it—but the first feeling was the most genuine. When she looked out of the window as she drove back from the funeral, she felt first that it was strange, and then that it was unseemly, that the people in the street should pass, whistling some of them, and all of them looking indifferent. Then, naturally, she had letters from ‘mutual friends’; the editor of a newspaper asked her to write an appreciation in a thousand words; and at last she suggested to Mr William Willatt that someone ought to write his sister’s life. He was a solicitor, with no literary experience, but did not object to other people’s writing so long as they did not ‘break down the barriers’; in short Miss Linsett wrote the book which one may still buy with luck in the Charing Cross Road.

It does not seem, to judge by appearances, that the world has so far made use of its right to know about Miss Willatt. The volumes had got themselves wedged between Sturm ‘On the Beauties of Nature’ and the ‘Veterinary Surgeon’s Manual’ on the outside shelf, where the gas cracks and the dust grimes them, and people may read so long as the boy lets them. Almost unconsciously one begins to confuse Miss Willatt with her remains and to condescend a little to these shabby, slipshod volumes. One has to repeat that she did live once, and it would be more to the purpose could one see what she was like then than to say (although it is true) that she is slightly ridiculous now.

Who was Miss Willatt then? It is likely that her name is scarcely known to the present generation; it is a mere chance whether one has read any of her books. They lie with the three volume novels of the sixties and the seventies upon the topmost shelves of little seaside libraries, so that one has to take a ladder to reach them, and a cloth to wipe off the dust.

She was born in 1823, and was the daughter of a Solicitor in Wales. They lived for part of the year near Tenby, where her father had his office, and she ‘came out’ at a ball given by the officers of the local Masonic Guild in the Town Hall, at Pembroke. Although Miss Linsett takes thirty six pages to cover these seventeen years, she hardly mentions them. True, she tells us how the Willatts were descended from a merchant in the sixteenth century, who spelt his name with a V; and how Frances Ann, the novelist, had two uncles, one of whom invented a new way of washing sheep, and the other ‘will long be remembered by his parishioners. It is said that even the very poorest wore some piece of mourning … in memory of “the good Parson.”’ But these are merely biographer’s tricks—a way of marking time, during those chill early pages when the hero will neither do nor say anything ‘characteristic’. For some reason we are told little of Mrs Willatt, daughter of Mr Josiah Bond, a respected linendraper, who, at a later date seems to have bought ‘a place’. She died when her only daughter was sixteen; there were two sons, Frederic, who died before his sister, and William, the solicitor, who survived her. It is perhaps worth while to say these things, although they are ugly and no one will remember them, because they help us somehow to believe in the otherwise visionary youth of our heroine. When Miss Linsett is forced to talk of her and not of her uncles, this is the result. ‘Frances, thus, at the age of sixteen, was left without a mother’s care. We can imagine how the lonely girl, for even the loving companionship of father and brothers could not fill that place [but we know nothing about Mrs Willatt] sought for consolation in solitude, and, wandering among the heaths and dunes where the castles of an earlier age are left to crumble into ruins, &c &c.’ Mr William Willatt’s contribution to his sister’s biography is surely more to the purpose. ‘My sister was a shy awkward girl, much given to “mooning.” It was a standing joke in the family that she had once walked into the pigsty, mistaking it for the wash house, and had not discovered her whereabouts until Grunter (the old black sow) ate her book out of her hands. With reference to her studious habits, I should say that these were always very marked…. I may mention the fact that any act of disobedience was most effectually punished by the confiscation of her bedroom candle, by the light of which it was her habit to read in bed. I well remember, as a small boy, the look of my sister’s figure as she leant out of bed, book in hand, so as to get the benefit of the chink of light which came through the door from the other room where our nurse was sewing. In this way she read the whole of Bright’s history of the Church, always a favourite book with her. I am afraid that we did not always treat her studies with respect…. She was not generally considered handsome, although she had (at the date of which I speak) a nearly perfect arm.’ With respect to this last remark, an important one, we can consult the likeness which some local artist made of Miss Willatt at the age of seventeen. It needs no insight to affirm that it is not a face that would have found favour in the Pembroke Town Hall in 1840. A heavy plait of hair, (which the artist has made to shine) coils round the brow; she has large eyes, but they are slightly prominent; the lips are full, without being sensuous; the one feature which, when comparing her face with the faces of her friends, generally gave her courage, is the nose; perhaps someone had said in her hearing that it was a fine nose—a bold nose for a woman to have; at any rate her portraits, with one exception, are in profile.

We can imagine (to steal Miss Linsett’s useful phrase) that this ‘shy awkward girl much given to mooning’ who walked in to pigsties, and read history instead of fiction, did not enjoy her first ball. Her brother’s words evidently sum up what was in the air as they drove home. She found some angle in the great ball room where she could half hide her large figure, and there she waited to be asked to dance. She fixed her eyes upon the festoons which draped the city arms and tried to fancy that she sat on a rock with the bees humming round her; she bethought her how no one in that room perhaps knew as well as she did what was meant by the Oath of Uniformity; then she thought how in sixty years, or less perhaps, the worm would feed upon them all; then she wondered whether somehow before that day, every man now dancing there would not have reason to respect her. She wrote to Miss Ellen Buckle, to whom all her early letters are addressed, that ‘disappointment is mixed with our pleasures, wisely enough, so that we may not forget &c &c.’ And yet, it is likely that among all that company who danced in the Town Hall and are now fed on by the worm, Miss Willatt would have been the best to talk to, even if one did not wish to dance with her. Her face is heavy, but it is intelligent.

This impression is on the whole borne out by her letters. ‘It is now ten o’clock, and I have come up to bed; but I shall write to you first…. It has been a heavy but I trust not an unprofitable day…. Ah, my dearest friend, for you are dearest, how should I bear the secrets of my soul and the weight of what the poet calls this “unintelligible world” without you to impart them to?’ One must brush aside a great deal of tarnished compliment, and then one gets a little further into Miss Willatt’s mind. Until she was eighteen or so she had not realised that she had any relationship to the world; with self-consciousness came the need of settling the matter, and, consequently, a terrible depression. Without more knowledge than Miss Willatt gives us, we can only guess how she came by her conceptions of human nature and right and wrong. From histories she got a general notion of pride, avarice and bigotry; in the Waverley novels she read about love. These ideas vaguely troubled her. Lent religious works by Miss Buckle, she learnt, with relief, how one may escape the world, and at the same time earn everlasting joy. There was never to be a greater saint than she was, by the simple device of saying, before she spoke or acted, is this right? The world then was very hideous, for the uglier she found it the more virtuous she became. ‘Death was in that house, and Hell yawned before it,’ she wrote, having passed, one evening, a room with crimson windows and heard the voices of dancers within; but the sensations with which she wrote were not entirely painful. Nevertheless her seriousness only half protected her, and left space for innumerable torments. ‘Am I the only blot upon the face of nature?’ she asked in May, 1841. ‘The birds are carolling outside my windows, the very insects are putting off the winter’s dross.’ She alone was ‘heavy as unleavened bread’. A terrible self-consciousness possessed her, and she writes to Miss Buckle as though she watched her shadow trembling over the entire world, beneath the critical eyes of the angels. It was humped and crooked and swollen with evil, and it taxed the powers of both the young women to put it straight. ‘What would I not give to help you?’ writes Miss Buckle. Our difficulty as we read now is to understand what their aim was; for it is clear that they imagined a state in which the soul lay tranquil and in bliss, and that if one could reach it one was perfect. Was it beauty that they were feeling for? As, at present, neither of them had any interest except in virtue, it is possible that aesthetic pleasure disguised had part in their religion. When they lay in these trances they were at any rate out of their surroundings. But the only pleasure that they allowed themselves to feel was the pleasure of submission.

Here, unfortunately, we come to an abyss. Ellen Buckle, as was likely, for she was less disgusted with the world than her friend and more capable of shifting her burdens on to human shoulders, married an engineer by whom her doubts were set at rest for ever. At the same time Frances had a strange experience of her own, which is concealed by Miss Linsett, in the most provoking manner conceivable, in the following passage. ‘No one who has read the book (Life’s Crucifix) can doubt that the heart which conceived the sorrows of Ethel Eden in her unhappy attachment had felt some of the pangs so feelingly described itself-, so much we may say, more we may not.’ The most interesting event in Miss Willatt’s life, owing to the nervous prudery and the dreary literary conventions of her friend, is thus a blank. Naturally, one believes that she loved, hoped and saw her hopes extinguished, but what happened and what she felt we must guess. Her letters at this time are incurably dull, but that is partly because the word love and whole passages polluted by it, have shrunk into asterisks. There is no more talk of unworthiness and ‘O might I find a retreat from the world I would then consider myself blessed’; death disappears altogether; she seems to have entered upon the second stage of her development, when, theories absorbed or brushed aside, she sought only to preserve herself. Her father’s death, in 1855, is made to end a chapter, and her removal to London, where she kept house for her brothers in a Bloomsbury Square begins the next one.

At this point we can no longer disregard what has been hinted several times; it is clear that one must abandon Miss Linsett altogether, or take the greatest liberties with her text. What with ‘a short sketch of the history of Bloomsbury may not be amiss,’ accounts of charitable societies and their heroes, a chapter upon Royal visits to the hospital, praise of Florence Nightingale in the Crimea, we see only a wax work as it were of Miss Willatt preserved under glass. One is just on the point of shutting up the book for ever, when a reflection bids one pause; the whole affair is, after all, extraordinarily odd. It seems incredible that human beings should think that these things are true of each other, and if not⁠[,] that they should take the trouble to say them. ‘She was justly esteemed for her benevolence, and her strict uprightness of character, which however never brought upon her the reproach of hardness of heart…. She was fond of children animals and the spring, and Wordsworth was among her ‘bedside poets’… Although she felt his (her father’s) death with the tenderness of a devoted daughter, she did not give way to useless and therefore selfish repining…. The poor, it might be said, took the place to her of her own children.’ To pick out such phrases is an easy way of satirising them, but the steady drone of the book in which they are imbedded makes satire an afterthought; it is the fact that Miss Linsett believed these things and not the absurdity of them that dismays one. She believed at any rate that one should admire such virtues and attribute them to one’s friends both for their sake and for one’s own; to read her therefore is to leave the world in daylight, and to enter a closed room, hung with claret coloured plush, and illustrated with texts. It would be interesting to discover what prompted this curious view of human life, but it is hard enough to rid Miss Willatt of her friend’s disguises without enquiring where she found them. Happily there are signs that Miss Willatt was not what she seemed. They creep out in the notes, in her letters, and most clearly in her portraits. The sight of that large selfish face, with the capable forehead and the surly but intelligent eyes, discredits all the platitudes on the opposite page; she looks quite capable of having deceived Miss Linsett.

When her father died (she had always disliked him) her spirits rose, and she determined to find scope for the ‘great powers of which I am conscious’ in London. Living in a poor neighbourhood, the obvious profession for a woman in those days was to do good; and Miss Willatt devoted herself at first with exemplary vigour. Because she was unmarried she set herself to represent the unsentimental side of the community; if other women brought children into the world, she would do something for their health. She was in the habit of checking her spiritual progress, and casting up her accounts in the blank pages at the end of her diary, where one notes one’s weight, and height and the number of one’s watch; and she has often to rebuke her ‘unstable spirit that is always seeking to distract me, and asking Whither?’ Perhaps therefore she was not so well content with her philanthropy as Miss Linsett would have us believe. ‘Do I know what happiness is?’ she asks in 1859, with rare candour, and answers after thinking it over, ‘No.’ To imagine her then, as the sleek sober woman that her friend paints her, doing good wearily but with steadfast faith, is quite untrue; on the contrary she was a restless and discontented woman, who sought her own happiness rather than other people’s. It was then that she bethought her of literature, taking the pen in hand, at the age of thirty-six, more to justify her complicated spiritual state than to say what must be said. It is clear that her state was complicated, even if we hesitate, remote as we are, to define it. She found at any rate that she had ‘no vocation’ for philanthropy, and told the Rev. R. S. Rogers so in an interview ‘that was painful and agitating to us both’ on February the 14th, 1856. But, in owning that, she admitted that she was without many virtues, and it was necessary to prove, to herself at least, that she had others. After all, merely to sit with your eyes open fills the brain, and perhaps in emptying it, one may come across something illuminating. George Eliot and Charlotte Brontë between them must share the parentage of many novels at this period, for they disclosed the secret that the precious stuff of which books are made lies all about one, in drawing-rooms and kitchens where women live, and accumulates with every tick of the clock.

Miss Willatt adopted the theory that no training is necessary, but thought it indecent to describe what she had seen, so that instead of a portrait of her brothers (and one had led a very queer life) or a memory of her father (for which we should have been grateful) she invented Arabian lovers and set them on the banks of the Orinoco. She made them live in an ideal community, for she enjoyed framing laws, and the scenery was tropical, because one gets one’s effects quicker there than in England. She could write pages about ‘mountains that looked like ramparts of cloud, save for the deep blue ravines that cleft their sides, and the diamond cascades that went leaping and flashing, now golden, now purple, as they entered the shade of the pine forests and passed out into the sun, to lose themselves in a myriad of streams upon the flower enamelled pasturage at their base.’ But when she had to face her lovers, and the talk of the women in the tents at sundown when the goats came in to be milked, and the wisdom of ‘that sage old man who had witnessed too many births and deaths to rejoice at the one or lament at the other’ then she stammered and blushed perceptibly. She could not say “I love you,” but used “thee” and “thou,” which, with their indirectness, seemed to hint that she was not committing herself. The same self-consciousness made it impossible for her to think herself the Arab or his bride, or any one indeed except the portentous voice that linked the dialogues, and explained how the same temptations assail us under the tropical stars and beneath the umbrageous elms of England.

For these reasons the book is now scarcely to be read through, and Miss Willatt also had scruples about writing well. There was something shifty, she thought, in choosing one’s expressions; the straightforward way to write was the best, speaking out everything in one’s mind, like a child at its mother’s knee, and trusting that, as a reward, some meaning would be included. Nevertheless her book went into two editions, one critic likening it to the novels of George Eliot, save that the tone was ‘more satisfactory’, and another proclaiming that it was ‘the work of Miss Martineau or the Devil.’

If Miss Linsett were still alive (she died in Australia however, some years ago) one would like to ask her upon what system she cut her friend’s life into chapters. They seem, when possible, to depend upon changes of address, and confirm us in our belief that Miss Linsett had no other guide to Miss Willatt’s character. The great change came, surely, after the publication of Lindamara: a Fantasy. When Miss Willatt had her memorable ‘scene’ with Mr Rogers she was so much agitated that she walked twice round Bedford Square, with the tears sticking her veil to her face. It seemed to her that all this talk of philanthropy was great nonsense, and gave one no chance of ‘an individual life’ as she called it. She had thoughts of emigrating, and founding a society, in which she saw herself, by the time she had finished her second round, with white hair, reading wisdom from a book to a circle of industrious disciples, who were very like the people she knew, but called her by a word that is a euphemism for ‘Mother.’ There are passages in Lindamara which hint at it, and allude covertly to Mr Rogers—‘the man in whom wisdom was not.’ But she was indolent, and praise made her plausible; it came from the wrong people. The best of her writing—for we have dipped into several books, and the results seem to square with our theory—was done to justify herself, but, having accomplished that, she went on to prophesy for others, dwelling in vague regions with great damage to her system. She grew enormously stout, ‘a symptom of disease’ says Miss Linsett, who loved that mournful subject—a symptom to us of tea parties in her hot little drawing-room with the spotted wall paper, and of intimate conversations about ‘the Soul’. ‘The Soul’ became her province, and she deserted the Southern plains for a strange country draped in eternal twilight, where there are qualities without bodies. Thus, Miss Linsett being at the time in great despondency about life, ‘the death of an adored parent having deprived me of all my earthly hope’, she went to see Miss Willatt, and left her flushed and tremulous, but convinced that she knew a secret that explained everything. Miss Willatt was far too clever to believe that anyone could answer anything; but the sight of these queer little trembling women, who looked up at her, prepared for beating or caress, like spaniels, appealed to a mass of emotions, and they were not all of them bad. What such women wanted, she saw, was to be told that they were parts of a whole, as a fly in a milk jug seeks the support of a spoon. She knew further that one must have a motive in order to work; she was strong enough to convince; and power, which should have been hers as a mother, was dear to her even when it came by illegitimate means. Another gift was hers, without which the rest had been useless; she could take flights into obscurity. After telling people what to do, she gave them, in a whisper at first, later in a voice that lapsed and quavered, some mystic reasons why. She could only discover them by peeping, as it were, over the rim of the world; and to begin with she tried honestly to say no more than she saw there. The present state, where one is bound down, a target for pigmy arrows, seemed to her for the most part dull, and sometimes intolerable. Some draught, vague and sweet as chloroform, which confused outlines and made daily life dance before the eyes with hints of a vista beyond, was what they needed, and nature had fitted her to give it them. ‘Life was a hard school,’ she said, ‘How could one bear it unless—’ and then there came a rhapsody about trees and flowers and fishes in the deep, and an eternal harmony, with her head back, and her eyes half shut, to see better. ‘We felt often that we had a Sibyl among us,’ writes Miss Haig; and if Sibyls are only half inspired, conscious of the folly of their disciples, sorry for them, very vain of their applause and much muddled in their own brains all at once, then Miss Willatt was a Sibyl too. But the most striking part of the picture is the unhappy view that it gives of the spiritual state of Bloomsbury at this period—when Miss Willatt brooded in Woburn Square like some gorged spider at the centre of her web, and all along the filaments unhappy women came running, slight hen-like figures, frightened by the sun and the carts and the dreadful world, and longing to hide themselves from the entire panorama in the shade of Miss Willatt’s skirts. The Andrews, the Spaldings, young Mr Charles Jenkinson ‘who has since left us’, old Lady Battersby, who suffered from the gout, Miss Cecily Haig, Ebenezer Umphelby who knew more about beetles than any one in Europe—all these people who dropped into tea and had Sunday supper and conversation afterwards, come to life again, and tempt us almost intolerably to know more about them. What did they look like, and do, what did they want from Miss Willatt and what did they think of her, in private?—but we shall never know, or hear of them again. They have been rolled into the earth irrecoverably.

Indeed there is only space left to give the pith of that last long chapter, which Miss Linsett called ‘Fulfilment’. Certainly, it is one of the strangest. Miss Linsett who was powerfully fascinated by the idea of death, coos and preens herself in his presence and can hardly bring herself to make an end. It is easier to write about death, which is common, than about a single life; there are general statements which one likes to use once in a way for oneself, and there is something in saying good-bye to a person which leads to smooth manners and pleasant sensations. Moreover, Miss Linsett had a natural distrust of life, which was boisterous and commonplace, and had never treated her too well, and took every opportunity of proving that human beings die, as though she snubbed some ill-mannered schoolboy. If one wished it thus, one could give more details of those last months of Miss Willatt’s life than of any that have gone before. We know precisely what she died of. The narrative slackens to a funeral pace and every word of it is relished; but in truth, it amounts to little more than this. Miss Willatt had suffered from an internal complaint for some years, but mentioned it only to her intimate friends. Then, in the autumn of 1884, she caught a chill. ‘It was the beginning of the end, and from that date we had little hope.’ They told her, once, that she was dying, but she ‘seemed absorbed in a mat which she was working for her nephew.’ When she took to her bed she did not ask to see any one, save her old servant Emma Grice who had been with her for thirty years. At length, on the night of the 18th of October, ‘a stormy autumn night, with flying clouds and gusts of rain’, Miss Linsett was summoned to say good-bye. Miss Willatt was lying on her back, with her eyes shut, and her head which was half in shadow looked ‘very grand’. Miss Willatt lay thus all night long without speaking or turning or opening her eyes. Once she raised her left hand, ‘upon which she wore her mother’s wedding ring’, and let it fall again; they expected something more, but not knowing what she wanted they did nothing, and half an hour later the counterpane lay still, and they crept from their corners, seeing that she was dead.

After reading this scene, with its accompaniment of inappropriate detail, its random flourishes whipping up a climax—how she changed colour, and they rubbed her forehead with eau-de-cologne, how Mr Sully called and went away again, how creepers tapped on the window, how the room grew pale as the dawn rose, how sparrows twittered and carts began to rattle through the square to market—one sees that Miss Linsett liked death because it gave her an emotion, and made her feel things for the time as though they meant something. For the moment she loved Miss Willatt; Miss Willatt’s death the moment after made her even happy. It was an end undisturbed by the chance of a fresh beginning. But afterwards, when she went home and had her breakfast, she felt lonely, for they had been in the habit of going to Kew Gardens together on Sundays.

[1909]

[]

The Evening Party.

Ah, but let us wait a little!—The moon is up; the sky open; and there, rising in a mound against the sky with trees upon it, is the earth. The flowing silvery clouds look down upon Atlantic waves. The wind blows soft round the corner of the street, lifting my cloak, holding it gently in the air and then letting it sink and droop as the sea now swells and brims over the rocks and again withdraws.—The street is almost empty; the blinds are drawn in the windows; the yellow and red panes of the ocean liners cast for a moment a spot upon the swimming blue. Sweet is the night air. The maids linger round the pillar box or dally in the shadow of the wall where the tree droops its dark shower of blossom. So on the bark of the apple tree the moths quiver drawing sugar through the long black thread of the proboscis. Where are we? Which house can be the house of the party? All these with their pink and yellow windows are uncommunicative. Ah,—round the corner, in the middle, there where the door stands open—wait a moment. Let us watch the people, one, two, three, precipitating themselves into the light, as the moths strike upon the pane of a lantern stood upon the ground in a forest. Here is a cab making swift for the same spot. A lady pale and voluminous descends and passes into the house; a gentleman in black and white evening dress pays the driver and follows her as if he too were in a hurry. Come, or we shall be late.

On every chair there is a little soft mound; pale whisps of gauze are curled upon bright silks; candles burn pear shaped flames upon either side of the oval looking-glass; there are brushes of thin tortoise-shell; cut bottles knobbed with silver. Can it always look like this—is this not the essence—the spirit? Something has dissolved my face. Through the mist of silver candle light it scarcely appears. People pass me without seeing me. They have faces. In their faces the stars seem to shine through rose coloured flesh. The room is full of vivid yet unsubstantial figures; they stand upright before shelves striped with innumerable little volumes; their heads and shoulders blot the corners of square golden picture frames; and the bulk of their bodies, smooth like stone statues, is massed against something grey, tumultuous, shining too as if with water beyond the uncurtained windows.

‘Come into the corner and let us talk.’

‘Wonderful! Wonderful human beings! Spiritual and wonderful!’

‘But they don’t exist. Don’t you see the pond through the Professor’s head? Don’t you see the swan swimming through Mary’s skirt?’

‘I can fancy little burning roses dotted about them.’

‘The little burning roses are only like the fireflies we’ve seen together in Florence, sprinkled in the wistaria, floating atoms of fire, burning as they float—burning, not thinking.’

‘Burning not thinking. And so all the books at the back of us. Here’s Shelley—here’s Blake. Cast them up into the air and see their poems descend like golden parachutes twinkling and turning and letting fall their rain of star-shaped blossoms.

‘Shall I quote you Shelley? “Away! the moor is dark beneath the moon—”’

‘Wait, wait! Don’t condense our fine atmosphere into drops of rain spattering the pavement. Let us still breathe in the fire dust.’

‘Fireflies among the wistaria.’

‘Heartless, I grant you. But see how the great blossoms hang before us; vast chandeliers of gold and dim purple pendant from the skies. Don’t you feel the fine gilt painting our thighs as we enter, and how the slate coloured walls flap clammily about us as we dart deeper and deeper into the petals, or grow taut like drums?’

‘The professor looms upon us.’

‘Tell us, Professor—’

‘Madam?’

‘Is it in your opinion necessary to write grammar? And punctuation. The question of Shelley’s commas interests me profoundly.’

‘Let us be seated. To tell the truth open windows after sunset—standing with my back—agreeable though conversation—You asked of Shelley’s commas. A matter of some importance. There, a little to the right of you. The Oxford edition. My glasses! The penalty of evening dress! I dare not read—Moreover commas—The modern print is execrable. Designed to match the modern exiguity; for I confess I find little admirable among the moderns.’

‘I am with you there entirely.’

‘So? I feared opposition. At your age, in your—costume.’

‘Sir, I find little admirable among the ancients. These classics—

Shelley, Keats; Browne; Gibbon; is there a page that you can quote entire, a paragraph perfect, a sentence even that one can’t see amended by the pen of God or man?’

‘S-s-s-sh, Madam. Your objection has weight but lacks sobriety. Moreover your choice of names—In what chamber of the spirit can you consort Shelley with Gibbon? Unless indeed their atheism—But to the point. The perfect paragraph, the perfect phrase; hum—my memory—and then my glasses left behind me on the mantelpiece. I declare. But your stricture applies to life itself.’

‘Surely this evening—’

‘The pen of man, I fancy, could have little trouble in re-writing that. The open window—standing in the draught—and, let me whisper it, the conversation of these ladies, earnest and benevolent, with exalted views upon the destiny of the negro who is at this moment toiling beneath the lash to procure rubber for some of our friends engaged in agreeable conversation here. To enjoy your perfection—’

‘I take your point. One must exclude.’

‘The greater part of everything.’

‘But to argue that aright, we must strike down to the roots of things; for I fancy that your belief is only one of those fading pansies that one buys and plants for a night’s festival to find withered in the morning. You maintain that Shakespeare excluded?’

‘Madam, I maintain nothing. These ladies have put me out of temper.’

‘They are benevolent. They have pitched their camp on the banks of one of the little tributary streams, whence picking reeds and dipping them in poison, with matted hair and yellow tinted skin, they issue forth now and then to plant them in the flanks of the-comfortable; such are the benevolent.’

‘Their darts tingle. That and the rheumatism—’

‘The professor is already gone? Poor old man!’

‘But at his age how could he still possess what we at ours are already losing. I mean——’

‘Yes?’

‘Don’t you remember in early childhood, when, in play or talk, as one stepped across the puddle or reached the window on the landing, some imperceptible shock froze the universe to a solid ball of crystal which one held for a moment—I have some mystical belief that all time past and future too, the tears and powdered ashes of generations clotted to a ball; then we were absolute and entire; nothing then was excluded; that was certainty—happiness. But later these crystal globes dissolve as one holds them: some one talks of negroes. See what comes of trying to say what one means! Nonsense!’

‘Precisely. Yet how sad a thing is sense! How vast a renunciation it represents! Listen for a moment. Distinguish one among the voices. Now. “So cold it must seem after India. Seven years too. But habit is everything.” That’s sense. That’s agreement. They’ve fixed their eyes upon something visible to each of them. They attempt no more to look upon the little spark of light, the little purple shadow which may be fruitful land on the verge of the horizon, or only a flying gleam on the water. It’s all compromise—all safety, the general intercourse of human beings. Therefore we discover nothing; we cease to explore; we cease to believe that there is anything to discover. “Nonsense” you say; meaning that I shan’t see your crystal globe; and I’m half ashamed to try.’

‘Speech is an old torn net, through which the fish escape as one casts it over them. Perhaps silence is better. Let us try it. Come to the window.’

‘It’s an odd thing, silence. The mind becomes like a starless night; and then a meteor slides, splendid, right across the dark and is extinct. We never give sufficient thanks for this entertainment.’

‘Ah, we’re an ungrateful race! When I look at my hand upon the window sill and think what pleasure I’ve had in it, how it’s touched silk and pottery and hot walls, laid itself flat upon wet grass or sun-baked, let the Atlantic spurt through its fingers, snapped blue bells and daffodils, plucked ripe plums, never for a second since I was born ceased to tell me of hot and cold, damp or dryness, I’m amazed that I should use this wonderful composition of flesh and nerve to write the abuse of life. Yet that’s what we do. Come to think of it, literature is the record of our discontent.’

‘Our badge of superiority; our claim for preferment. Admit, you like the discontented people best.’

‘I like the melancholy sound of the distant sea’

‘What’s this talk of melancholy at my party? Of course if you both stand whispering in a corner—. But come and let me introduce you. There’s Mr Nevill, who likes your writing.’

‘In that case—Good evening.’

‘Somewhere, I forget the name of the paper—something or other of yours—I forget now the name of the article—or was it a story? You write stories? It’s not poetry that you write? So many of one’s friends—and then every day something new comes out which—which—’

‘One does not read.’

‘Well, ungracious as it seems, to be honest, occupied as I am all day with matters of an odious or rather fatiguing nature—what time I have for literature I spend with—’

‘The dead.’

‘I detect irony in your correction.’

‘Envy, not irony. Death is of the utmost importance. Like the French, the dead write so well, and, for some reason, one can respect them, and feel, while equal, that they’re older, wiser, as our parents are; the relationship between living and dead is surely of the noblest.’

‘Ah, if you feel that, let us talk of the dead. Lamb, Sophocles, de Quincey, Sir Thomas Browne.’

‘Sir Walter Scott, Milton, Marlowe.’

‘Pater, Tennyson.’

‘Now, now, now.’

‘Tennyson, Pater.’

‘Lock the door; draw the curtains so that I see only your eyes. I fall on my knees. I cover my face with my hands. I adore Pater. I admire Tennyson.’

‘Daughter, proceed.’

‘It’s an easy thing to confess one’s faults. But what dusk is deep enough to hide one’s virtues? I love, I adore—no, I can’t tell you what a rose of worship my soul is—the name trembles on my lips—for Shakespeare.’

‘I grant you absolution.’

‘And yet how often does one read Shakespeare?’

‘How often is the summer’s night flawless, the moon up, the spaces between the stars deep as the Atlantic, through the dusk the roses showing white? The mind before reading Shakespeare—’

‘The summer’s night. O this is the way to read!’

‘The roses nodding—’

‘The waves breaking—’

‘Over the fields coming those strange airs of dawn that try the doors of the house and fall flat—’

‘Then, lying down to sleep, the bed’s—’

‘A boat! A boat! Over the sea all night long—’

‘And sitting upright, the stars—’

‘Out alone in mid-ocean our little boat floating isolated yet upheld, drawn on by the compulsion of the Northern lights, safe, surrounded, melts where the night rests upon the water; there diminishes and disappears, and we, submerged, sealed cold as smooth stones, widen our eyes again; dash, stroke, dot, splash, bedroom furniture, and the rattle of the curtain on the pole—I earn my living.—Introduce me! O he knew my brother at Oxford.’

‘And you too. Come into the middle of the room. Here’s someone who remembers you.’

‘As a child, my dear. You wore a pink frock.’

‘The dog bit me.’

‘So dangerous, throwing sticks into the sea. But your mother—’

‘On the beach, by the tent—’

‘Sat smiling. She was fond of dogs.—You know my daughter? That’s her husband.—Tray was he called? the big brown one, and there was another, smaller, who bit the postman. I can see it now. What one remembers! But I’m preventing—’

‘O please (Yes, yes, I wrote, I’m coming) Please, please—Damn you, Helen, interrupting! There she goes, never again—pushing through the people, pinning on her shawl, slowly descending the steps: gone! The past! the past!—’

‘Ah, but listen. Tell me; I’m afraid; so many strangers; some with beards; some so beautiful; she’s touched the peony; all the petals fall. And fierce—the woman with the eyes. The Armenians die. And penal servitude. Why? Such a chatter too; except now—whisper—we all must whisper—are we listening—waiting—what for then? The lantern’s caught! O take care of your gauze! A woman died once. They say it’s waked the swan.’

‘Helen’s afraid. These paper lanterns catching, and the windows open letting the breeze lift our flounces. But I’m not afraid of the flame, you know. It’s the garden—I mean the world. That frightens me. Those little lights out there each with a circle of earth beneath it—hills and towns; then the shadows; the lilac stirs. Don’t stay talking. Let’s be off. Through the garden; your hand in mine.’

‘Away. The moon is dark upon the moor. Away, we’ll breast them, those waves of darkness crested by the trees, rising for ever, lonely and dark. The lights rise and fall; the water’s thin as air; the moon’s behind it. D’you sink? D’you rise? D’you see the islands? Alone with me.’

[ca. 1918]

[]

Sympathy.

Hammond, Humphry, on the 29th of April, at The Manor, High Wickham, Bucks.—Celia’s husband! It must be Celia’s husband. Dead! Good Heavens! Humphry Hammond dead! I meant to ask them—I forgot. Why didn’t I go the day they wanted me to come? There was a concert where they played Mozart—I put them off for that. He scarcely spoke the night they dined here. He sat opposite in the yellow arm chair: he said that ‘furniture’ was what he liked. What did he mean? Why did I say nothing to make him explain? Why did I let him go with all that he might have said unsaid? Why did he sit there silent so long, and leave us, talking about motor omnibuses, in the hall? How plainly I see him now and fancy that shyness, or the feeling of meaning something that he could not say, determined him to stop when he had said that about ‘liking furniture.’ I shall never know now. Now the pink cheeks are pale and the eyes with the young man’s look of resolution and defiance closed, defiant still beneath their lids. Male and unyielding stiff he lies upon his bed, so that I see it white and steep; the windows open, the birds singing, no concession to death; no tears no sentiment, a bunch of lilies scattered where the sheet folds perhaps—his mother’s or Celia’s.—Celia. Yes … I see her, and then not. There is a moment I can’t fancy: the moment in other people’s lives that one always leaves out; the moment from which all that we know them by proceeds; I follow her to his door; I see her turn the handle; then comes the blind moment, and when my fancy opens its eyes again I find her equipped for the world—a widow; or is she not, in the early hours of the morning, veiled in white from head to foot as if the light cleft itself asunder on her brow? The outward sign I see and shall see for ever; but at the meaning of it I shall only guess. Enviously I shall mark her silences and her severities; I shall watch her moving among us with her secret unconfessed; I shall fancy her eager for the night to come with its lonely voyage; I shall picture her landing among us for the day’s work, contemptuous and tolerant of our amusements. In the midst of clamour I shall think that she hears more; the emptiness has for her its ghost. For all this I shall envy her. I shall envy her the security—the knowledge. But the white veil, as the sun grows stronger, fades from her brow and she comes to the window. The carts rattle down the road, and the men standing upright to drive, whistle or sing or shout to one another.

Now I see her more distinctly. The colour has come back to her cheeks; but the bloom is gone; the film which made her glance gentle and vague has been rubbed from her eyes; the stir of life sounds harsh to her, and standing by the open window, she contracts and shrinks together. There I follow her; no longer with envy. Does she not shrink from the hand I stretch to her? [We are all robbers; all cruel; all drops in a stream which flows past her indifferently. I may cast myself out to her, but only to be drawn back again to flow swiftly on with the stream. The pity which bids me tender my hand to her to bite becomes, or will become, an impulse of compassion which in its generosity appears to her contemptuous.] Immediately she shouts to the woman shaking rugs next door, ‘A fine morning!’ The woman starts and looks at her, nods her head and hurries indoors. She stares at the fruit blossoms spread upon the ruddy wall, leaning her head on her hand. The tears slip down; but she rubs her knuckles in her eyes. Is she twenty-four?—at most twenty-five. Can one offer her—a day’s walk in the hills? Striking our boots sturdily upon the high road we start out, jump the fence and so across the field and up into the wood. There she flings herself upon the anemones and picks them ‘for Humphry’; and refrains, saying that they will be fresher in the evening. We sit down and look at the triangular space of yellow-green field beneath us through the arch of bramble twigs which divides them so queerly.

‘What d’you believe?’ she asks suddenly, (as I fancy) sucking at the stalk of a flower. ‘Nothing—nothing,’ I reply driven, against my intention⁠[,] to speak abruptly. She frowns, throws away her flower, and jumps up. She strides ahead for a yard or two, and then swings herself impetuously by a low branch to look at a thrush’s nest in the lap of a tree.

‘Five eggs!’ she cries. And abruptly again I call back, ‘What fun!’

But it’s all fancy. I’m not in the room with her, nor out in the wood. I’m here in London, standing by the window, holding The Times. But how death has changed everything!—as, in an eclipse of the sun, the colours go out, and the trees look thin as paper and livid while the shadow passes. The chill little breeze is perceptible and the roar of traffic sounds across a gulf. Then, a moment later, distances are bridged, sounds merged; and as I look the trees though still pale, become sentinel and guardian; the sky arranges its tender background; and all remote as if exalted to the summit of a mountain in the dawn. Death has done it; death lies behind leaves and houses and the smoke wavering up, composing them into something still in its tranquillity before it has taken on any of the disguises of life. So, from an express train, I have looked upon hills and fields and seen the man with the scythe look up from the hedge as we pass, and lovers lying in the long grass stare at me without disguise as I stared at them without disguise. Some burden has fallen; some impediment has been removed. Freely in this fine air my friends pass dark across the horizon, all of them desiring goodness only, tenderly putting me by, and stepping off the rim of the world into the ship which waits to take them into storm or serenity. My eye cannot follow. But one after another with kisses of farewell and laughter sweeter than before they pass beyond me to set sail for ever; trooping orderly down to the water’s edge as if this had always been their direction while we lived. Now all our tracks from the first become apparent, swerving and diverging to run together here under the solemn sycamore with the sky thus tender and the wheels and cries sounding now high, now low in harmony.

The simple young man whom I hardly knew had, then, concealed in him the immense power of death. He had removed the boundaries and fused the separate entities by ceasing—there in the room with the open windows and the bird’s song outside. He silently withdrew, and though his voice was nothing his silence is profound. He has laid his life down like a cloak for us to tread over. Where does he lead us? We come to the edge and look out. But he has gone beyond us; he faints in the far sky; for us the tenderness of the green and the blue of the sky remain; but transparent as the world is he will have none of it; he has turned from us grouped on the very limit of the verge; he disappears cleaving the dawn asunder. He is gone. We must go back then.

The sycamore shakes its leaves stirring flakes of light in the deep pool of air in which it stands; the sun shoots straight between the leaves to the grass; the geraniums glow red in the earth. A cry starts to the left of me, and another, abrupt and dissevered, to the right. Wheels strike divergently; omnibuses conglomerate in conflict; the clock asseverates with twelve distinct strokes that it is midday.

Must I then go back? Must I see the horizon shut in, the mountain sink and the coarse strong colours return? No, no, Humphry Hammond is dead. He is dead—the white sheets, the scent of flowers—the one bee humming through the room and out again. Where does it go next? There’s one on the Canterbury Bell; but finds no honey there, and so tries the yellow wall flower, but in these ancient London gardens what hope of honey? The earth must be dry as grains of salt scattered above great iron drain pipes, and the curves of tunnels.—But Humphry Hammond! Dead! Let me read the name in the paper again; let me come back to my friends; let me not desert them so soon; he died on Tuesday, three days ago, suddenly, two days illness; and then finished, the great operation of death. Finished; the earth is already over him perhaps; and people have set their courses a little differently; although some, not having heard, still address their letters to him; but the envelopes already look out of date upon the hall table. It seems to me that he has been dead for weeks, for years; when I think of him I see scarcely anything of him, and that saying of his about liking furniture means nothing at all. And yet he died; the utmost he could do gives me now scarcely any sensation at all. Terrible! Terrible! to be so callous! There is the yellow arm chair in which he sat, shabby but still solid enough, surviving us all; and the mantelpiece strewn with glass and silver, but he is ephemeral as the dusty light which stripes the wall and carpet. So will the sun shine on glass and silver the day I die. The sun stripes a million years into the future; a broad yellow path; passing an infinite distance beyond this house and town; passing so far that nothing but sea remains, stretching flat with its infinity of creases beneath the sunlight. Humphry Hammond—who was Humphry Hammond?—a curious sound, now crinkled now smooth as a sea shell.

The terrific battery! The post! These little white squares with black wriggling marks on them. ‘My father-in-law … will you dine …’ Is she mad, talking of her father-in-law? She wears the white veil still; the bed is white and steep; the lilies—the open window—the woman beating rugs outside. ‘Humphry is managing the business’ Humphry—who is dead?—‘we shall I suppose, move into the big house.’ The house of death? ‘where you must come and stay. I have to be in London, buying mourning.’ O don’t tell me he lives still! O why did you deceive me?

[ca. spring 1919]

[]

A Woman’s College from Outside.

The feathery-white moon never let the sky grow dark; all night the chestnut blossoms were white in the green, and dim was the cow-parsley in the meadows. Neither to Tartary nor to Arabia went the wind of the Cambridge courts, but lapsed dreamily in the midst of grey-blue clouds over the roofs of Newnham. There, in the garden, if she needed space to wander, she might find it among the trees; and as none but women’s faces could meet her face, she might unveil it blank, featureless, and gaze into rooms where at that hour, blank, featureless, eyelids white over eyes, ringless hands extended upon sheets, slept innumerable women. But here and there a light still burned.

A double light one might figure in Angela’s room, seeing how bright Angela herself was, and how bright came back the reflection of herself from the square glass. The whole of her was perfectly delineated—perhaps the soul. For the glass held up an untrembling image—white and gold, red slippers, pale hair with blue stones in it, and never a ripple or shadow to break the smooth kiss of Angela and her reflection in the glass, as if she were glad to be Angela. Anyhow the moment was glad—the bright picture hung in the heart of night, the shrine hollowed in the nocturnal blackness. Strange indeed to have this visible proof of the rightness of things; this lily floating flawless upon Time’s pool, fearless, as if this were sufficient—this reflection. Which meditation she betrayed by turning, and the mirror held nothing at all, or only the brass bedstead, and she, running here and there, patting, and darting, became like a woman in a house, and changed again, pursing her lips over a black book and marking with her finger what surely could not be a firm grasp of the science of economics. Only Angela Williams was at Newnham for the purpose of earning her living, and could not forget even in moments of impassioned adoration the cheques of her father at Swansea; her mother washing in the scullery: pink frocks out to dry on the line; tokens that even the lily no longer floats flawless upon the pool, but has a name on a card like another.

A. Williams—one may read it in the moonlight; and next to it some Mary or Eleanor, Mildred, Sarah, Phoebe upon square cards on their doors. All names, nothing but names. The cool white light withered them and starched them until it seemed as if the only purpose of all these names was to rise martially in order should there be a call on them to extinguish a fire, suppress an insurrection, or pass an examination. Such is the power of names written upon cards pinned upon doors. Such too the resemblance, what with tiles, corridors, and bedroom doors, to dairy or nunnery, a place of seclusion or discipline, where the bowl of milk stands cool and pure and there’s a great washing of linen.

At that very moment soft laughter came from behind a door. A prim-voiced clock struck the hour—one, two. Now if the clock were issuing his commands, they were disregarded. Fire, insurrection, examination, were all snowed under by laughter, or softly uprooted, the sound seeming to bubble up from the depths and gently waft away the hour, rules, discipline. The bed was strewn with cards. Sally was on the floor. Helena in the chair. Good Bertha clasping her hands by the fire-place. A. Williams came in yawning.

‘Because it’s utterly and intolerably damnable,’ said Helena.

‘Damnable,’ echoed Bertha. Then yawned.

‘We’re not eunuchs.’

‘I saw her slipping in by the back gate with that old hat on. They don’t want us to know.’

‘They?’ said Angela. ‘She.’

Then the laughter.

The cards were spread, falling with their red and yellow faces on the table, and hands were dabbled in the cards. Good Bertha, leaning with her head against the chair, sighed profoundly. For she would willingly have slept, but since night is free pasturage, a limitless field, since night is unmoulded richness, one must tunnel into its darkness. One must hang it with jewels. Night was shared in secret, day browsed on by the whole flock. The blinds were up. A mist was on the garden. Sitting on the floor by the window (while the others played), body, mind, both together, seemed blown through the air, to trail across the bushes. Ah, but she desired to stretch out in bed and to sleep! She believed that no one felt her desire for sleep; she believed humbly—sleepily—with sudden nods and lurchings, that other people were wide awake. When they laughed all together a bird chirped in its sleep out in the garden, as if the laughter—

Yes, as if the laughter (for she dozed now) floated out much like mist and attached itself by soft elastic shreds to plants and bushes, so that the garden was vaporous and clouded. And then, swept by the wind, the bushes would bow themselves and the white vapour blow off across the world.

From all the rooms where women slept this vapour issued, attaching itself to shrubs, like mist, and then blew freely out into the open. Elderly women slept, who would on waking immediately clasp the ivory rod of office. Now smooth and colourless, reposing deeply, they lay surrounded, lay supported, by the bodies of youth recumbent or grouped at the window; pouring forth into the garden this bubbling laughter, this irresponsible laughter: this laughter of mind and body floating away rules, hours, discipline: immensely fertilising, yet formless, chaotic, trailing and straying and tufting the rose-bushes with shreds of vapour.

‘Ah,’ breathed Angela, standing at the window in her night-gown. Pain was in her voice. She leant her head out. The mist was cleft as if her voice parted it. She had been talking, while the others played, to Alice Avery, about Bamborough Castle; the colour of the sands at evening; upon which Alice said she would write and settle the day, in August, and stooping, kissed her, at least touched her head with her hand, and Angela, positively unable to sit still, like one possessed of a wind-lashed sea in her heart, roamed up and down the room (the witness of such a scene) throwing her arms out to relieve this excitement, this astonishment at the incredible stooping of the miraculous tree with the golden fruit at its summit—hadn’t it dropped into her arms? She held it glowing to her breast, a thing not to be touched, thought of, or spoken about, but left to glow there. And then, slowly putting there her stockings, there her slippers, folding her petticoat neatly on top, Angela, her other name being Williams, realised—how could she express it?—that after the dark churning of myriad ages here was light at the end of the tunnel; life; the world. Beneath her it lay—all good; all lovable. Such was her discovery.

Indeed, how could one then feel surprise if, lying in bed, she could not close her eyes?—something irresistibly unclosed them—if in the shallow darkness chair and chest of drawers looked stately, and the looking-glass precious with its ashen hint of day? Sucking her thumb like a child (her age nineteen last November), she lay in this good world, this new world, this world at the end of the tunnel, until a desire to see it or forestall it drove her, tossing her blankets, to guide herself to the window, and there, looking out upon the garden, where the mist lay, all the windows open, one fiery-bluish, something murmuring in the distance, the world of course, and the morning coming, ‘Oh,’ she cried, as if in pain.

[written ca. July 1920, published in Atalanta’s Garland: Being the Book of the Edinburgh University Women’s Union, November 1926]

[]

In the Orchard.

Miranda slept in the orchard, lying in a long chair beneath the apple-tree. Her book had fallen into the grass, and her finger still seemed to point at the sentence ‘Ce pays est vraiment un des coins du monde où le rire des filles éclate le mieux …’ as if she had fallen asleep just there. The opals on her finger flushed green, flushed rosy, and again flushed orange as the sun, oozing through the apple-trees, filled them. Then, when the breeze blew, her purple dress rippled like a flower attached to a stalk; the grasses nodded; and the white butterfly came blowing this way and that just above her face.

Four feet in the air over her head the apples hung. Suddenly there was a shrill clamour as if they were gongs of cracked brass beaten violently, irregularly, and brutally. It was only the school-children saying the multiplication table in unison, stopped by the teacher, scolded, and beginning to say the multiplication table over again. But this clamour passed four feet above Miranda’s head, went through the apple boughs, and, striking against the cowman’s little boy who was picking blackberries in the hedge when he should have been at school, made him tear his thumb on the thorns.

Next there was a solitary cry—sad, human, brutal. Old Parsley was, indeed, blind drunk.

Then the very topmost leaves of the apple-tree, flat like little fish against the blue, thirty feet above the earth, chimed with a pensive and lugubrious note. It was the organ in the church playing one of Hymns Ancient and Modern. The sound floated out and was cut into atoms by a flock of fieldfares flying at an enormous speed—somewhere or other. Miranda lay asleep thirty feet beneath.

Then above the apple-tree and the pear-tree two hundred feet above Miranda lying asleep in the orchard bells thudded, intermittent, sullen, didactic, for six poor women of the parish were being churched and the Rector was returning thanks to heaven.

And above that with a sharp squeak the golden feather of the church tower turned from south to east. The wind changed. Above everything else it droned, above the woods, the meadows, the hills, miles above Miranda lying in the orchard asleep. It swept on, eyeless, brainless, meeting nothing that could stand against it, until, wheeling the other way, it turned south again. Miles below, in a space as big as the eye of a needle, Miranda stood upright and cried aloud: ‘Oh, I shall be late for tea!’

Miranda slept in the orchard—or perhaps she was not asleep, for her lips moved very slightly as if they were saying, ‘Ce pays est vraiment un des coins du monde … où le rire des filles … éclate … éclate … éclate …’ and then she smiled and let her body sink all its weight on to the enormous earth which rises, she thought, to carry me on its back as if I were a leaf, or a queen (here the children said the multiplication table), or, Miranda went on, I might be lying on the top of a cliff with the gulls screaming above me. The higher they fly, she continued, as the teacher scolded the children and rapped Jimmy over the knuckles till they bled, the deeper they look into the sea—into the sea, she repeated, and her fingers relaxed and her lips closed gently as if she were floating on the sea, and then, when the shout of the drunken man sounded overhead, she drew breath with an extraordinary ecstasy, for she thought that she heard life itself crying out from a rough tongue in a scarlet mouth, from the wind, from the bells, from the curved green leaves of the cabbages.

Naturally she was being married when the organ played the tune from Hymns Ancient and Modern, and, when the bells rang after the six poor women had been churched, the sullen intermittent thud made her think that the very earth shook with the hoofs of the horse that was galloping towards her (‘Ah, I have only to wait!’ she sighed), and it seemed to her that everything had already begun moving, crying, riding, flying round her, across her, towards her in a pattern.

Mary is chopping the wood, she thought; Pearman is herding the cows; the carts are coming up from the meadows; the rider—and she traced out the lines that the men, the carts, the birds, and the rider made over the countryside until they all seemed driven out, round, and across by the beat of her own heart.

Miles up in the air the wind changed; the golden feather of the church tower squeaked; and Miranda jumped up and cried: ‘Oh, I shall be late for tea!’

Miranda slept in the orchard, or was she asleep or was she not asleep? Her purple dress stretched between the two apple-trees. There were twenty-four apple-trees in the orchard, some slanting slightly, others growing straight with a rush up the trunk which spread wide into branches and formed into round red or yellow drops. Each apple-tree had sufficient space. The sky exactly fitted the leaves. When the breeze blew, the line of the boughs against the wall slanted slightly and then returned. A wagtail flew diagonally from one corner to another. Cautiously hopping, a thrush advanced towards a fallen apple; from the other wall a sparrow fluttered just above the grass. The uprush of the trees was tied down by these movements; the whole was compacted by the orchard walls. For miles beneath the earth was clamped together; rippled on the surface with wavering air; and across the corner of the orchard the blue-green was slit by a purple streak. The wind changing, one bunch of apples was tossed so high that it blotted out two cows in the meadow (‘Oh, I shall be late for tea!’ cried Miranda), and the apples hung straight across the wall again.

[written in 1922, published in Criterion, April 1923]

[]

Nurse Lugton’s Curtain.

Nurse Lugton was asleep. She had given one great snore. She had dropped her head; thrust her spectacles up her forehead; and there she sat by the fender with her finger sticking up and a thimble on it; and her needle full of cotton hanging down; and she was snoring, snoring; and on her knees, covering the whole of her apron, was a large piece of figured blue stuff.

The animals with which it was covered did not move till Nurse Lugton snored for the fifth time. One, two, three, four, five—ah, the old woman was at last asleep. The antelope nodded to the zebra; the giraffe bit through the leaf on the tree top; all the animals began to toss and prance. For the pattern on the blue stuff was made of troops of wild beasts and below them was a lake and a bridge and a town with round roofs and little men and women looking out of the windows and riding over the bridge on horseback. But directly the old nurse snored for the fifth time, the blue stuff turned to blue air; the trees waved; you could hear the water of the lake breaking; and see the people moving over the bridge and waving their hands out of the windows.

The animals now began to move. First went the elephant and the zebra; next the giraffe and the tiger; the ostrich, the mandrill, twelve marmots and a pack of mongeese followed; the penguins and the pelicans waddled and waded, often pecking at each other, alongside. Over them burnt Nurse Lugton’s golden thimble like a sun; and as Nurse Lugton snored, the animals heard the wind roaring through the forest. Down they went to drink, and as they trod, the blue curtain (for Nurse Lugton was making a curtain for Mrs John Jasper Gingham’s drawing-room window) became made of grass, and roses and daisies; strewn with white and black stones; with puddles on it, and cart tracks, and little frogs hopping quickly lest the elephants should tread on them. Down they went, down the hill to the lake to drink. And soon all were gathered on the edge of the lake, some stooping down, others throwing their heads up. Really, it was a beautiful sight—and to think of all this lying across old Nurse Lugton’s knees while she slept, sitting on her Windsor chair in the lamplight—to think of her apron covered with roses and grass, and with all these wild beasts trampling on it, when Nurse Lugton was mortally afraid even of poking through the bars with her umbrella at the Zoo! Even a little black beetle made her jump. But Nurse Lugton slept; Nurse Lugton saw nothing at all.

The elephants drank; and the giraffes snipped off the leaves on the highest tulip trees; and the people who crossed the bridges threw bananas at them, and tossed pineapples up into the air, and beautiful golden rolls stuffed with quinces and rose leaves, for the monkeys loved them. The old Queen came by in her palanquin; the general of the army passed; so did the Prime Minister; the Admiral, the Executioner; and great dignitaries on business in the town, which was a very beautiful place called Millamarchmantopolis. Nobody harmed the lovely beasts; many pitied them; for it was well known that even the smallest monkey was enchanted. For a great ogress had them in her toils, the people knew; and the great ogress was called Lugton. They could see her, from their windows, towering over them. She had a face like the side of a mountain with great precipices and avalanches, and chasms for her eyes and hair and nose and teeth. And every animal which strayed into her territories she froze alive, so that all day they stood stock still on her knee, but when she fell asleep, then they were released, and down they came in the evening to Millamarchmantopolis to drink.

Suddenly old Nurse Lugton twitched the curtain all in crinkles.

For a big bluebottle was buzzing round the lamp, and woke her. Up she sat and stuck her needle in.

The animals flashed back in a second. The air became blue stuff. And the curtain lay quite still on her knee. Nurse Lugton took up her needle, and went on sewing Mrs Gingham’s drawing-room curtain.

[ca. autumn 1924]

[]

The Widow and the Parrot.

A True Story

Some fifty years ago Mrs Gage, an elderly widow, was sitting in her cottage in a village called Spilsby in Yorkshire. Although lame, and rather short sighted she was doing her best to mend a pair of clogs, for she had only a few shillings a week to live on. As she hammered at the clog, the postman opened the door and threw a letter into her lap.

It bore the address ‘Messrs Stagg and Beetle, 67 High Street, Lewes, Sussex.’

Mrs Gage opened it and read:

‘Dear Madam; We have the honour to inform you of the death of your brother Mr Joseph Brand.’

‘Lawk a mussy,’ said Mrs Gage. ‘Old brother Joseph gone at last!’

‘He has left you his entire property,’ the letter went on, ‘which consists of a dwelling house, stable, cucumber frames, mangles, wheelbarrows &c &c. in the village of Rodmell, near Lewes. He also bequeaths to you his entire fortune; Viz: £3,000. (three thousand pounds) sterling.’

Mrs Gage almost fell into the fire with joy. She had not seen her brother for many years, and, as he did not even acknowledge the Christmas card which she sent him every year, she thought that his miserly habits, well known to her from childhood, made him grudge even a penny stamp for a reply. But now it had all turned out to her advantage. With three thousand pounds, to say nothing of house &c &c, she and her family could live in great luxury for ever.

She determined that she must visit Rodmell at once. The village clergyman, the Rev Samuel Tallboys, lent her two pound ten, to pay her fare, and by next day all preparations for her journey were complete. The most important of these was the care of her dog Shag during her absence, for in spite of her poverty she was devoted to animals, and often went short herself rather than stint her dog of his bone.

She reached Lewes late on Tuesday night. In those days, I must tell you, there was no bridge over the river at Southease, nor had the road to Newhaven yet been made. To reach Rodmell it was necessary to cross the river Ouse by a ford, traces of which still exist, but this could only be attempted at low tide, when the stones on the river bed appeared above the water. Mr Stacey, the farmer, was going to Rodmell in his cart, and he kindly offered to take Mrs Gage with him. They reached Rodmell about nine o’clock on a November night and Mr Stacey obligingly pointed out to Mrs Gage the house at the end of the village which had been left her by her brother. Mrs Gage knocked at the door. There was no answer. She knocked again. A very strange high voice shrieked out ‘Not at home.’ She was so much taken aback that if she had not heard footsteps coming she would have run away. However the door was opened by an old village woman, by name Mrs Ford.

‘Who was that shrieking out “Not at home”?’ said Mrs Gage.

‘Drat the bird!’ said Mrs Ford very peevishly, pointing to a large grey parrot. ‘He almost screams my head off. There he sits all day humped up on his perch like a monument screeching “Not at home” if ever you go near his perch.’ He was a very handsome bird, as Mrs Gage could see; but his feathers were sadly neglected. ‘Perhaps he is unhappy, or he may be hungry,’ she said. But Mrs Ford said it was temper merely; he was a seaman’s parrot and had learnt his language in the east. However, she added, Mr Joseph was very fond of him, had called him James; and, it was said, talked to him as if he were a rational being. Mrs Ford soon left. Mrs Gage at once went to her box and fetched some sugar which she had with her and offered it to the parrot, saying in a very kind tone that she meant him no harm, but was his old master’s sister, come to take possession of the house, and she would see to it that he was as happy as a bird could be. Taking a lantern she next went round the house to see what sort of property her brother had left her. It was a bitter disappointment. There were holes in all the carpets. The bottoms of the chairs had fallen out. Rats ran along the mantelpiece. There were large toadstools growing through the kitchen floor. There was not a stick of furniture worth seven pence halfpenny; and Mrs Gage only cheered herself by thinking of the three thousand pounds that lay safe and snug in Lewes Bank.

She determined to set off to Lewes next day in order to claim her money from Messrs Stagg and Beetle the solicitors, and then to return home as quick as she could. Mr Stacey, who was going to market with some fine Berkshire pigs, again offered to take her with him, and told her some terrible stories of young people who had been drowned through trying to cross the river at high tide, as they drove. A great disappointment was in store for the poor old woman directly she got in to Mr Stagg’s office.

‘Pray take a seat, Madam,’ he said, looking very solemn and grunting slightly. ‘The fact is,’ he went on, ‘that you must prepare to face some very disagreeable news. Since I wrote to you I have gone carefully through Mr Brand’s papers. I regret to say that I can find no trace whatever of the three thousand pounds. Mr Beetle, my partner, went himself to Rodmell and searched the premises with the utmost care. He found absolutely nothing—no gold, silver, or valuables of any kind—except a fine grey parrot which I advise you to sell for whatever he will fetch. His language, Benjamin Beetle said, is very extreme. But that is neither here nor there. I much fear you have had your journey for nothing. The premises are dilapidated; and of course our expenses are considerable.’ Here he stopped, and Mrs Gage well knew that he wished her to go. She was almost crazy with disappointment. Not only had she borrowed two pound ten from the Rev. Samuel Tallboys, but she would return home absolutely empty handed, for the parrot James would have to be sold to pay her fare. It was raining hard, but Mr Stagg did not press her to stay, and she was too beside herself with sorrow to care what she did. In spite of the rain she started to walk back to Rodmell across the meadows.

Mrs Gage, as I have already said, was lame in her right leg. At the best of times she walked slowly, and now, what with her disappointment and the mud on the bank her progress was very slow indeed. As she plodded along, the day grew darker and darker, until it was as much as she could do to keep on the raised path by the river side. You might have heard her grumbling as she walked, and complaining of her crafty brother Joseph, who had put her to all this trouble ‘Express,’ she said, ‘to plague me. He was always a cruel little boy when we were children,’ she went on. ‘He liked worrying the poor insects, and I’ve known him trim a hairy caterpillar with a pair of scissors before my very eyes. He was such a miserly varmint too. He used to hide his pocket money in a tree, and if anyone gave him a piece of iced cake for tea, he cut the sugar off and kept it for his supper. I make no doubt he’s all aflame at this very moment in Hell fire, but what’s the comfort of that to me?’ she asked, and indeed it was very little comfort, for she ran slap into a great cow which was coming along the bank, and rolled over and over in the mud.

She picked herself up as best she could and trudged on again. It seemed to her that she had been walking for hours. It was now pitch dark and she could scarcely see her own hand before her nose. Suddenly she bethought her of Farmer Stacey’s words about the ford. ‘Lawk a mussy,’ she said, ‘however shall I find my way across? If the tide’s in, I shall step into deep water and be swept out to sea in a jiffy! Many’s the couple that been drowned here; to say nothing of horses, carts, herds of cattle, and stacks of hay.’

Indeed what with the dark and the mud she had got herself into a pretty pickle. She could hardly see the river itself, let alone tell whether she had reached the ford or not. No lights were visible anywhere, for, as you may be aware, there is no cottage or house on that side of the river nearer than Asheham House, lately the seat of Mr Leonard Woolf. It seemed that there was nothing for it but to sit down and wait for the morning. But at her age, with the rheumatics in her system, she might well die of cold. On the other hand, if she tried to cross the river it was almost certain that she would be drowned. So miserable was her state that she would gladly have changed places with one of the cows in the field. No more wretched old woman could have been found in the whole county of Sussex; standing on the river bank, not knowing whether to sit or to swim, or merely to roll over in the grass, wet though it was, and sleep or freeze to death, as her fate decided.

At that moment a wonderful thing happened. An enormous light shot up into the sky, like a gigantic torch, lighting up every blade of grass, and showing her the ford not twenty yards away. It was low tide, and the crossing would be an easy matter if only the light did not go out before she had got over.

‘It must be a Comet or some such wonderful monstrosity,’ she said as she hobbled across. She could see the village of Rodmell brilliantly up in front of her.

‘Bless us and save us!’ she cried out. ‘There’s a house on fire—thanks be to the Lord’—for she reckoned that it would take some minutes at least to burn a house down, and in that time she would be well on her way to the village.

‘It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good,’ she said as she hobbled along the Roman road. Sure enough, she could see every inch of the way, and was almost in the village street when for the first time it struck her, ‘Perhaps it’s my own house that’s blazing to cinders before my eyes!’

She was perfectly right.

A small boy in his nightgown came capering up to her and cried out, ‘Come and see old Joseph Brand’s house ablaze!’

All the villagers were standing in a ring round the house handing buckets of water which were filled from the well in Monks House kitchen, and throwing them on the flames. But the fire had got a strong hold, and just as Mrs Gage arrived, the roof fell in.

‘Has anybody saved the parrot?’ she cried.

‘Be thankful you’re not inside yourself, Madam,’ said the Rev James Hawkesford, the clergyman. ‘Do not worry for the dumb creatures. I make no doubt the parrot was mercifully suffocated on his perch.’

But Mrs Gage was determined to see for herself. She had to be held back by the village people, who remarked that she must be crazy to hazard her life for a bird.

‘Poor old woman,’ said Mrs Ford, ‘she has lost all her property, save one old wooden box, with her night things in it. No doubt we should be crazed in her place too.’

So saying, Mrs Ford took Mrs Gage by the hand and led her off to her own cottage, where she was to sleep the night. The fire was now extinguished, and everybody went home to bed.

But poor Mrs Gage could not sleep. She tossed and tumbled thinking of her miserable state, and wondering how she could get back to Yorkshire and pay the Rev Samuel Tallboys the money she owed him. At the same time she was even more grieved to think of the fate of the poor parrot James. She had taken a liking to the bird, and thought that he must have an affectionate heart to mourn so deeply for the death of old Joseph Brand, who had never done a kindness to any human creature. It was a terrible death for an innocent bird, she thought; and if only she had been in time, she would have risked her own life to save his.

She was lying in bed thinking these thoughts when a slight tap at the window made her start. The tap was repeated three times over. Mrs Gage got out of bed as quickly as she could and went to the window. There, to her utmost surprise, sitting on the window ledge was an enormous parrot. The rain had stopped and it was a fine moonlight night. She was greatly alarmed at first, but soon recognised the grey parrot, James, and was overcome with joy at his escape. She opened the window, stroked his head several times, and told him to come in. The parrot replied by gently shaking his head from side to side, then flew to the ground, walked away a few steps, looked back as if to see whether Mrs Gage were coming, and then returned to the window sill, where she stood in amazement.

‘The creature has more meaning in its acts than we humans know,’ she said to herself. ‘Very well, James,’ she said aloud, talking to him as though he were a human being, ‘I’ll take your word for it. Only wait a moment while I make myself decent.’

So saying she pinned on a large apron, crept as lightly as possible downstairs, and let herself out without rousing Mrs Ford.

The parrot James was evidently satisfied. He now hopped briskly a few yards ahead of her in the direction of the burnt house. Mrs Gage followed as fast as she could. The parrot hopped, as if he knew his way perfectly, round to the back of the house, where the kitchen had originally been. Nothing now remained of it except the brick floor, which was still dripping with the water which had been thrown to put out the fire. Mrs Gage stood still in amazement while James hopped about, pecking here and there, as if he were testing the bricks with his beak. It was a very uncanny sight, and had not Mrs Gage been in the habit of living with animals, she would have lost her head, very likely, and hobbled back home. But stranger things yet were to happen. All this time the parrot had not said a word. He suddenly got into a state of the greatest excitement, fluttering his wings, tapping the floor repeatedly with his beak, and crying so shrilly, ‘Not at home! Not at home!’ that Mrs Gage feared that the whole village would be roused.

‘Don’t take on so James; you’ll hurt yourself,’ she said soothingly. But he repeated his attack on the bricks more violently than ever.

‘Whatever can be the meaning of it?’ said Mrs Gage, looking carefully at the kitchen floor. The moonlight was bright enough to show her a slight unevenness in the laying of the bricks, as if they had been taken up and then relaid not quite flat with the others. She had fastened her apron with a large safety pin, and she now prised this pin between the bricks and found that they were only loosely laid together. Very soon she had taken one up in her hands. No sooner had she done this than the parrot hopped onto the brick next to it, and, tapping it smartly with his beak, cried, ‘Not at home!’ which Mrs Gage understood to mean that she was to move it. So they went on taking up the bricks in the moonlight until they had laid bare a space some six feet by four and a half. This the parrot seemed to think was enough. But what was to be done next?

Mrs Gage now rested, and determined to be guided entirely by the behaviour of the parrot James. She was not allowed to rest for long. After scratching about in the sandy foundations for a few minutes, as you may have seen a hen scratch in the sand with her claws, he unearthed what at first looked like a round lump of yellowish stone. His excitement became so intense, that Mrs Gage now went to his help. To her amazement she found that the whole space which they had uncovered was packed with long rolls of these round yellow stones, so neatly laid together that it was quite a job to move them. But what could they be? And for what purpose had they been hidden here? It was not until they had removed the entire layer on the top, and next a piece of oil cloth which lay beneath them, that a most miraculous sight was displayed before their eyes—there, in row after row, beautifully polished, and shining brightly in the moonlight, were thousands of brand new sovereigns!!!!

This, then, was the miser’s hiding place; and he had made sure that no one would detect it by taking two extraordinary precautions. In the first place, as was proved later, he had built a kitchen range over the spot where his treasure lay hid, so that unless the fire had destroyed it, no one could have guessed its existence; and secondly he had coated the top layer of sovereigns with some sticky substance, then rolled them in the earth, so that if by chance one had been laid bare no one would have suspected that it was anything but a pebble such as you may see for yourself any day in the garden. Thus, it was only by the extraordinary coincidence of the fire and the parrot’s sagacity that old Joseph’s craft was defeated.

Mrs Gage and the parrot now worked hard and removed the whole hoard—which numbered three thousand pieces, neither more nor less—placing them in her apron which was spread upon the ground. As the three thousandth coin was placed on the top of the pile, the parrot flew up into the air in triumph and alighted very gently on the top of Mrs Gage’s head. It was in this fashion that they returned to Mrs Ford’s cottage, at a very slow pace, for Mrs Gage was lame, as I have said, and now she was almost weighted to the ground by the contents of her apron. But she reached her room without any one knowing of her visit to the ruined house.

Next day she returned to Yorkshire. Mr Stacey once more drove her into Lewes and was rather surprised to find how heavy Mrs Gage’s wooden box had become. But he was a quiet sort of man, and merely concluded that the kind people at Rodmell had given her a few odds and ends to console her for the dreadful loss of all her property in the fire. Out of sheer goodness of heart Mr Stacey offered to buy the parrot off her for half a crown; but Mrs Gage refused his offer with such indignation, saying that she would not sell the bird for all the wealth of the Indies, that he concluded that the old woman had been crazed by her troubles.

It now only remains to be said that Mrs Gage got back to Spilsby in safety; took her black box to the Bank; and lived with James the parrot and her dog Shag in great comfort and happiness to a very great age.

It was not till she lay on her death bed that she told the clergyman (the son of the Rev Samuel Tallboys) the whole story, adding that she was quite sure that the house had been burnt on purpose by the parrot James, who, being aware of her danger on the river bank, flew into the scullery, and upset the oil stove which was keeping some scraps warm for her dinner. By this act, he not only saved her from drowning, but brought to light the three thousand pounds, which could have been found in no other manner. Such, she said, is the reward of kindness to animals.

The clergyman thought that she was wandering in her mind. But it is certain that the very moment the breath was out of her body, James the parrot shrieked out, ‘Not at home! Not at home!’ and fell off his perch stone dead. The dog Shag had died some years previously.

Visitors to Rodmell may still see the ruins of the house, which was burnt down fifty years ago, and it is commonly said that if you visit it in the moonlight you may hear a parrot tapping with his beak upon the brick floor, while others have seen an old woman sitting there in a white apron.

[written in 1924/25, published in The Charleston Bulletin]

[]

Happiness.

As Stuart Elton stooped and flicked off his trousers a white thread, the trivial act accompanied as it was by a slide and avalanche of sensation, seemed like a petal falling from a rose, and Stuart Elton straightening himself to resume his conversation with Mrs Sutton felt that he was compact of many petals laid firmly and closely on top of each other all reddened, all warmed through, all tinged with this inexplicable glow. So that when he stooped a petal fell. When he was young he had not felt it—no—now aged forty-five, he had only to stoop, to flick a thread off his trousers, and it rushed down all through him, this beautiful orderly sense of life, this slide, this avalanche of sensation, to be at one, when he stood up again adjusted—but what was she saying?

Mrs Sutton (still being dragged by the hair over the stubble and up and down the ploughed land of early middle age) was saying that managers wrote to her, even made appointments to see her, but nothing came of it. What made it so difficult for her was that she had naturally no connections with the stage, her father, all her people, being just country people. (It was then that Stuart Elton flicked the thread off.) She stopped; she felt rebuked. Yes, Stuart Elton had what she wanted, she felt, as he stooped. And when he stood up again, she apologised—she talked too much about herself she said—and added, ‘You seem to me far the happiest person I know.’

It chimed oddly with what he had been thinking and that sense of the soft downward rush of life and its orderly readjustment, that sense of the falling petal and the complete rose. But was it ‘happiness’? No. The big word did not seem to fit it, did not seem to refer to this state of being curled in rosy flakes round a bright light. Anyhow said Mrs Sutton, he was of all her friends the one she envied most. He seemed to have everything; she nothing. They counted—each had money enough; she a husband and children; he was a bachelor; she was thirty-five; he forty-five; she had never been ill in her life and he was a positive martyr, he said, to some internal complaint—longed to eat lobster all day long and could not touch it. There she exclaimed! as if she had her fingers on it. Even his illness was a joke to him. Was it balancing one thing against another, she asked? Was it a sense of proportion, was it? Was what, he asked, knowing quite well what she meant, but warding off this harum scarum ravaging woman with her hasty ways⁠[,] with her grievances and her vigour, skirmishing and scrimmaging⁠[,] who might knock over and destroy this very valuable possession, this sense of being—two figures flashed into his mind simultaneously—a flag in a breeze, a trout in a stream—poised, balanced, in a current of clean fresh clear bright lucid tingling impinging sensation which like the air or the stream held him upright so that if he moved a hand, stooped or said anything he dislodged the pressure of the innumerable atoms of happiness which closed and held him up again.

‘Nothing matters to you,’ said Mrs Sutton. ‘Nothing changes you,’ she said awkwardly making dashes and splashes about him like a man dabbing putty here there trying to cement bricks together while he stood there very silent, very cryptic, very demure; trying to get something from him, a clue, a key, a guide, envying him, resenting him, and feeling that if she with her emotional range, her passion, her capacity, her gifts had that added, she could straight off be the rival of Mrs Siddons herself. He would not tell her; he must tell her.

‘I went to Kew this afternoon,’ he said, bending his knee and flicking it again not that there was a white thread there, but to make sure, by repeating the act, that his machine was in order, as it was.

So if one were being pursued through a forest by wolves one would tear off little bits of clothing and break off biscuits and throw them to the unhappy wolves, feeling almost, but not quite secure oneself, on one’s high swift safe sledge.

With this whole pack of famished wolves in pursuit, now worrying the little bit of biscuit he had thrown them,—those words, ‘I went to Kew this afternoon’—Stuart Elton raced swiftly ahead of them back to Kew, to the magnolia tree, to the lake, to the river, holding up his hand, to keep them off. Among them (for now the world seemed full of howling wolves) he remembered people asking him to dinner and lunch, now accepted now not, and his sense there on the sunny stretch of grass at Kew of mastery, even as he could swing his stick so he could choose, this that, go here, there, break off bits of biscuit and toss them to the wolves, read this, look at that, meet him or her, alight at some good fellow’s rooms—‘To Kew alone?’ Mrs Sutton repeated. ‘By yourself?’

Ah! the wolf yapped in his ear. Ah! he sighed, as he had for one instant thinking of the past sighed ah by the lake that afternoon, by some woman stitching white stuff under a tree with geese waddling past, he had sighed, seeing the usual sight, lovers, arm in arm, where there was now this peace, this health once there had been ruin storm despair; so again this wolf Mrs Sutton reminded him; alone; yes quite alone; but he recovered, as he had recovered then, as the young people passed, grasping this, this, whatever it was and held it tight and walked on, pitying them.

‘Quite alone,’ Mrs Sutton repeated. That was what she could not conceive she said, with a despairing swoop of her dark bright haired head—being happy, quite alone.

‘Yes,’ he said.

In happiness there is always this terrific exaltation. It is not high spirits; nor rapture; nor praise, fame or health (he could not walk two miles without feeling done up) it is a mystic state, a trance, an ecstasy which, for all that he was atheistical, sceptical, unbaptised and all the rest of it, had⁠[,] he suspected⁠[,] some affinity with the ecstasy that turned men priests, sent women in the prime of life trudging the streets with starched cyclamen-like frills about their faces, and set lips and stony eyes; but with this difference; them it prisoned; him it set free. It freed him from all dependence upon anyone upon anything.

Mrs Sutton felt that too, as she waited for him to speak.

Yes he would stop his sledge, get out, let the wolves crowd all about him, he would pat their poor rapacious muzzles.

‘Kew was lovely—full of flowers—magnolias azaleas,’ he could never remember names he told her.

It was nothing that they could destroy. No; but if it came so inexplicably, so it might go, he had felt, leaving Kew, walking on the river bank up to Richmond. Why, some branch might fall; the colour might change; green turn blue; or a leaf shake; and that would be enough; yes; that would be enough to shiver, shatter, utterly destroy this amazing thing this miracle, this treasure which was his had been his was his must always be his, he thought getting restive and anxious and without thinking about Mrs Sutton he left her instantly and walked across the room and picked up a paper knife. Yes; it was all right. He had it still.

[ca. spring 1925]

[]

A Simple Melody.

As for the picture itself it was one of those landscapes which the unlearned suppose to have been painted when Queen Victoria was very young, and it was the fashion for young ladies to wear straw hats shaped like coal scuttles. Time had smoothed away all the joins and irregularities of the paint and the canvas seemed spread with a fine layer, here the palest blue, here the brownest shadow, of smooth lacquer-like glaze. It was a picture of a heath; and a very beautiful picture.

Mr Carslake, at least, thought it very beautiful because, as he stood in the corner where he could see it, it had the power to compose and tranquillize his mind. It seemed to him to bring the rest of his emotions—and how scattered and jumbled they were at a party like this!—into proportion. It was as if a fiddler were playing a perfectly quiet old English song while people gambled and tumbled and swore, picked pockets, rescued the drowning, and did astonishing—but quite unnecessary—feats of skill. He was unable to perform himself. All he could do was say that Wembley was very tiring; and that he believed it was not being a success; and things like that. Miss Merewether did not listen; after all, why should she? She played her part; she did one or two rather clumsy somersaults; skipping that is to say from Wembley to the character of Queen Mary, which she thought sublime. Of course, she thought nothing of the sort really. Mr Carslake assured himself of this by looking at the picture of the heath. All human beings were very simple underneath, he felt. Put Queen Mary, Miss Merewether and himself on that heath; it was late in the evening; after sunset; and they had to find their way back to Norwich. Soon they would all be talking quite naturally. He made not a doubt of it.

As for nature herself, few people loved her better than he did. If he had been walking with Queen Mary and Miss Merewether he would have been often silent; and they too, he was sure; calmly floating off; and he looked at the picture again; into that happy and far more severe and exalted world, which, was also so much simpler than this.

Just as he was thinking this, he saw Mabel Waring going away, in her pretty yellow dress. She looked agitated, with a strained expression and fixed unhappy eyes for all she tried to look animated.

What was the cause of her unhappiness? He looked again at the picture. The sun had set, but every colour was still bright, so that it was not long set, only just gone beyond the brown mound of the heath. The light was very becoming: and he supposed that Mabel Waring was with him and the Queen and Miss Merewether, walking back to Norwich. They would be talking about the way; how far it was; and whether this was the sort of country they liked; also, if they were hungry; and what they would have for dinner. That was natural talk. Stuart Elton himself—Mr Carslake saw him standing alone lifting a paper knife up in his hands and looking at it in a very strange way—Stuart himself, if he were on the heath, would just drop it, just toss it away. For underneath, though people seeing him casually would never believe it, Stuart was the gentlest, simplest of creatures, content to ramble all day with quite undistinguished people, like himself, and this oddity—it looked like affectation to stand in the middle of a drawing-room holding a tortoise-shell paper knife in his hand—was only manner. When they once got out on the heath and started to walk to Norwich this was what they would say: I find rubber soles make all the difference. But don’t they draw the feet? Yes—no. On grass like this they’re perfect. But on the pavement? And then socks and sock suspenders; men’s clothes, women’s clothes. Why, very likely they would talk about their own habits for a whole hour; and all in the freest, easiest way, so that suppose he, or Mabel Waring, or Stuart, or that angry looking chap with the tooth brush moustache who seemed to know nobody—wanted to explain Einstein, or make a statement—something quite private perhaps—(he had known it happen)—it would come quite natural.

It was a very beautiful picture. Like all landscapes it made one sad, because that heath would so long outlast all people; but the sadness was so elevated—turning away from Miss Merewether, George Carslake gazed at the picture—arose so plainly from the thought that it was calm, it was beautiful, that it should endure. But I cannot quite explain it, he thought. He did not like churches at all; indeed, if he said what he felt about the heath remaining and them all perishing and yet that this was right and there was nothing sad about it—he would laugh; he would dispose of that silly sentimental twaddle in a moment. For such it would be, spoken: but not, he felt, thought. No, he would not give up his belief that to walk over a heath in the evening was perhaps the best way of passing one’s time.

One did come across tramps and queer people of course. Now a little deserted farm; now a man and a cart; sometimes—but this was perhaps a little too romantic—a man on a horse. There would be shepherds very likely: a windmill: or if these failed, some bush against the sky, or cart track which had this power—again he trembled on the silly words,—‘to reconcile differences—to make one believe in God’. It almost stung him that last! To believe in God indeed! When every rational power protested against the crazy and craven idiocy of such a saying! It seemed to him as if he had been trapped into the words. ‘To believe in God’. What he believed in was a little simple talk with people like Mabel Waring, Stuart Elton, the Queen of England for the matter of that—on a heath. At least he had found great comfort in their having much in common—boots, hunger, fatigue. But then he could figure Stuart Elton, for example stopping, or falling silent. If you asked him What are you thinking about? perhaps he would say nothing at all, or something not true. Perhaps he would not be able to speak the truth.

Mr Carslake again looked at the picture. He was troubled by the sense of something remote. Indeed people did think about things, did paint things. Indeed, these parties on the heath do not annihilate differences, he thought; but he maintained, he did believe this—that the only differences remaining (out there, with that line of heath in the distance, and never a house to break the view) are fundamental differences—like this, what the man thought who painted the picture, what Stuart Elton thought about—about what? It was probably a belief of some kind.

Anyhow, on they went; for the great point of walking is that nobody can stand still very long; they have to rouse themselves up, and on a long walk fatigue, and the desire to end the fatigue, give the most philosophic, or those even distracted by love and its torments, an overpowering reason for setting their minds upon getting home.

Every phrase he used, alas, tinkled in his ears with a sham religious flavour. ‘Getting home’—the religious had appropriated that. It meant going to Heaven. His thoughts could not find any pure new words which had never been ruffled and creased and had the starch taken out of them by others’ use.

Only when he was walking, with Mabel Waring⁠[,] Stuart Elton⁠[,] the Queen of England and that fierce bolteyed looking uncompromising man there, this old melodious singsong stopped. Perhaps one was a little brutalised by the open air. Thirst brutalised; a blister on the heel. When he was walking there was a hardness and a freshness about things: no confusion; no wobbling; the division at least between the known and the unknown was as distinct as the rim of a pond—here was dry land, here water. Now a curious thought struck him—that the waters possessed an attraction for the people on earth. When Stuart Elton took his paper knife or Mabel Waring looked about to burst into tears, and that man with the tooth brush moustache glared, it was because they all wished to take to the water. But what was the water? Understanding perhaps. There must be someone who was so miraculously endowed, so fitted with all the parts of human nature, that these silences and unhappinesses, which were the result of being unable to fit one’s mind to other people’s, were all rightly understood. Stuart Elton dived in: Mabel dived. Some went under and were satisfied; others came gasping to the top. He was relieved to find himself thinking of death as a plunge into a pond; for he was alarmed at his mind’s instinct, when unguarded, to rise into clouds and Heaven, and rig up the old comfortable figure, the old flowing garments and mild eyes and cloudlike mantle.

In the pond, on the other hand, were newts, and fish and mud. The point about the pond was that one had to create it for oneself; new, brand new. No longer did one want to be rapt off to Heaven, there to sing and meet the dead. One wanted something here and now. Understanding meant an increase of life; a power to say what one could not say; to make such vain attempts as Mabel Waring’s—he knew her way of doing something suddenly quite out of her character, rather startling and dashing, [would] succeed—instead of failing and plunging her deeper into gloom.

So the old fiddler played his tune, as George Carslake looked from the picture at the people, and back again. His round face, his rather squarely built body expressed a philosophic calm which gave him, even among all these people, a look of detachment, of calm, of restfulness, which was not sluggish, but alert. He had sat down, and Miss Merewether who might easily have drifted off sat beside him. People said that he made very brilliant after-dinner speeches. They said he never married because his mother needed him. No one thought of him, however, as an heroic character—there was nothing tragic about him. He was a barrister. Hobbies, [tastes?], gifts over and above his able mind, he had none in particular—except that he walked. People tolerated him, liked him, sneered at him slightly, for he had done nothing that you could lay your hands on, and he had a butler who was like an elder brother.

But Mr Carslake did not bother his head. People were very simple—men and women much alike; it was a great pity to quarrel with anyone; and indeed he never did. That is not to say that his feelings were not sometimes hurt; unexpectedly. Living near Gloucester, he had an absurd touchiness about the Cathedral; he fought its battles, he resented its criticism as if the Cathedral were his blood relation. But he would let anyone say what they liked about his own brother. Also, anybody might laugh at him for walking. His was a nature smooth all over but not soft; and suddenly little spikes jutted out—about the Cathedral, or some glaring injustice.

The old fiddler fiddled his simple melody to this effect: We are not here, but on a heath, walking back to Norwich. Sharp, self-assertive Miss Merewether who said that the Queen was ‘sublime’ had joined the party on condition that she talked no more silly nonsense that she did not believe. ‘The school of Crome?’ she said, looking at the picture.

Very well. This being settled, they went on, it might be a matter of six or seven miles. It often happened to George Carslake; there was nothing strange about it—this sense of being in two places at once, with one body here in a London drawing-room, but so severed, that the peace of the country, its uncompromising bareness and hardness and [spirit?], affected that body. He stretched his legs. He felt the breeze on his cheek. Above all he felt, we are all of us, very different superficially, but now united; we may stray; we may seek the water; but it is perfectly true that we are all cool, friendly, physically easy.

Rip off all those clothes my dear, he thought looking at Mabel Waring. Make a bundle of them. Then he thought, don’t worry, my dear Stuart, about your soul, its extreme unlikeness to anyone else’s. The glaring man seemed to him positively amazing.

It was impossible to put this into words, and it was unnecessary. Beneath the fidgety flicker of these little creatures was always a deep reservoir: and the simple melody without expressing it, did something queer to it—rippled it, liquefied it, made it start and turn and quiver in the depths of one’s being, so that all the time ideas were rising from this pool and bubbling up into one’s brain. Ideas that were half feelings. They had that kind of emotional quality. It was impossible to analyse them—to say whether they were on the whole happy or unhappy, gay or sad.

His desire was to be sure that all people were the same. He felt that if he could prove it, he would have solved a great problem. But was it true? He kept looking at the picture. Was he not trying to impose on human beings who are by their very nature opposed, different, at war, a claim which is perhaps incongruous—a simplicity that does not belong to their natures? Art has it; a picture has it; but men do not feel it. These states of mind when one is walking, in company, on a heath, produce a sense of similarity. On the other hand, social converse, when everyone wants to shine, and to enforce his own point of view, produces dissimilarity; and which is the more profound?

He tried to analyse this favourite theme of his—walking, different people walking to Norwich. He thought at once of the lark, of the sky, of the view. The walker’s thoughts and emotions were largely made up of these outside influences. Walking thoughts were half sky; if you could submit them to chemical analysis you would find that they had some grains of colour in them, some gallons or quarts or pints of air attached to them. This at once made them airier, more impersonal. But in this room, thoughts were jostled together like fish in a net, struggling, scraping each other’s scales off, and becoming, in the effort to escape,—for all thinking was an effort to make thought escape from the thinker’s mind past all obstacles as completely as possible: all society is an attempt to seize and influence and coerce each thought as it appears and force it to yield to another.

So he could see everyone now engaged. But it was not, strictly, thought; it was being, oneself, that was here in conflict with other beings and selves. Here there was no impersonal colouring mixture: here walls, lights, the houses outside, all reenforced humanity, being themselves the expression of humanity. People pressed upon each other; rubbed each other’s bloom off; or, for it told both ways, stimulated and called out an astonishing animation, made each other glow.

Whether pleasure or pain predominated, he could not say. On the heath, there would be no doubt about it. As they walked—Merewether, the Queen, Elton, Mabel Waring and himself—the fiddler played; far from rubbing each other’s scales off, they swam side by side in the greatest comfort.

It was a beautiful picture, a very beautiful picture.

He felt a stronger and stronger wish to be there, on the Norfolk heath, indeed.

He then told Miss Merewether a story about his small nephew at Wembley; and as he told it she felt, as his friends always felt, that though he was one of the nicest people she had ever met, George Carslake was a dark horse, a queer fish. There was no saying what he was after. Had he any affections, she wondered? She smiled⁠[,] remembering his butler. And then he made off, [that was all?] he said—went back to [Dittering?] tomorrow.

[ca. 1925]

[]

The Fascination of the Pool.

It may have been very deep—certainly one could not see to the bottom of it. Round the edge was so thick a fringe of rushes that their reflections made a darkness like the darkness of very deep water. However in the middle was something white. The big farm a mile off was to be sold and some zealous person, or it may have been a joke on the part of a boy, had stuck one of the posters advertising the sale, with farm horses, agricultural implements, and young heifers, on a tree stump by the side of the pool. The centre of the water reflected the white placard and when the wind blew the centre of the pool seemed to flow and ripple like a piece of washing. One could trace the big red letters in which Romford Mill was printed in the water. A tinge of red was in the green that rippled from bank to bank.

But if one sat down among the rushes and watched the pool—pools have some curious fascination, one knows not what—the red and black letters and the white paper seemed to lie very thinly on the surface, while beneath went on some profound under-water life like the brooding, the ruminating of a mind. Many, many people must have come there alone, from time to time, from age to age, dropping their thoughts into the water, asking it some question, as one did oneself this summer evening. Perhaps that was the reason of its fascination—that it held in its waters all kinds of fancies, complaints, confidences, not printed or spoken aloud, but in a liquid state, floating one on top of another, almost disembodied. A fish would swim through them, be cut in two by the blade of a reed; or the moon would annihilate them with its great white plate. The charm of the pool was that thoughts had been left there by people who had gone away and without their bodies their thoughts wandered in and out freely, friendly and communicative, in the common pool.

Among all these liquid thoughts some seemed to stick together and to form recognisable people—just for a moment. And one saw a whiskered red face formed in the pool leaning low over it, drinking it. I came here in 1851 after the heat of the Great Exhibition. I saw the Queen open it. And the voice chuckled liquidly, easily, as if he had thrown off his elastic side boots and put his top hat on the edge of the pool. Lord, how hot it was! and now all gone, all crumbled, of course, the thoughts seemed to say, swaying among the reeds. But I was a lover, another thought began, sliding over the other silently and orderly as fish not impeding each other. A girl; we used to come down from the farm (the placard of its sale was reflected on the top of the water) that summer, 1662. The soldiers never saw us from the road. It was very hot. We lay here. She was lying hidden in the rushes with her lover, laughing into the pool and slipping into it, thoughts of eternal love, of fiery kisses and despair. And I was very happy, said another thought glancing briskly over the girl’s despair (for she had drowned herself). I used to fish here. We never caught the giant carp but we saw him once—the day Nelson fought at Trafalgar. We saw him under the willow—my word! what a great brute he was! They say he was never caught. Alas, alas sighed a voice, slipping over the boy’s voice. So sad a voice must come from the very bottom of the pool. It raised itself under the others as a spoon lifts all the things in a bowl of water. This was the voice we all wished to listen to. All the voices slipped gently away to the side of the pool to listen to the voice which so sad it seemed—it must surely know the reason of all this. For they all wished to know.

One drew closer to the pool and parted the reeds so that one could see deeper, through the reflections, through the faces, through the voices to the bottom. But there under the man who had been to the Exhibition; and the girl who had drowned herself and the boy who had seen the fish; and the voice which cried alas alas! yet there was always something else. There was always another face, another voice. One thought came and covered another. For though there are moments when a spoon seems about to lift all of us, and our thoughts and longings and questions and confessions and disillusions into the light of day, somehow the spoon always slips beneath and we flow back again over the edge into the pool. And once more the whole of its centre is covered over with the reflection of the placard which advertises the sale of Romford Mill Farm. That perhaps is why one loves to sit and look into pools.

[May 29, 1929]

[]

Scenes from the Life of a British Naval Officer.

The rushed waters of the Red Sea dashed past the porthole; occasionally a dolphin leapt high into the air, or a flying fish exploded an arch of fire in mid air. Captain Brace sat in his cabin with a map spread on the vast equality of the table in front of him. His face had a carved look as if it had been cut by a negro from a well seasoned log, had been polished for fifty years, had been dried in a tropical sun; had stood out in the freezing cold; had been sluiced by tropical rains; had then been erected before grovelling multitudes as their idol. It had acquired the inscrutable expression of the idol to whom questions have been put for many centuries without eliciting an answer.

The cabin held no furniture save the vast table and the swivel chair. But on the wall behind the Captain’s back hung seven or eight white faced instruments whose dials were inscribed with figures and symbols to which very fine hands were moving, sometimes with so slow an advance as to be imperceptible, sometimes with a sudden decisive spring. Some invisible substance was being divided⁠[,] measured, weighed and counted in seven or eight different ways simultaneously. And as the substance itself was invisible, so was the measuring, dividing⁠[,] weighing and counting carried on inaudibly. Not a sound broke the silence. In the centre of the instruments hung the photograph of a lady’s head surmounted by three ostrich feathers.

Suddenly Captain Brace swung round in his chair so that he faced all the dials and the photograph. The idol had suddenly turned its back upon the suppliants. The back of Captain Brace was cased in a suit that fitted his bulk as tightly as a snake skin. [His back] was as inscrutable as his face. The suppliants might well address their prayers to back or front indifferently. Suddenly, after a long scrutiny of the wall, Captain Brace swung back. He took a pair of compasses, and began to draw on a large sheet neatly divided into squares a design of such immense elaboration and exactness that each stroke seemed to create an immortal object that would endure precisely so for ever. The silence was unbroken, since the rush of the sea and the throb of the engines was so regular and so much in the same key that they too seemed to be silence expressed in a different medium.

Suddenly—every movement, every sound was sudden in an atmosphere of such tension—a gong blared out. Tremors sharp as muscular contractions, twitched the air. Three times sound blared. Three times the atmosphere thus twitched was crisped into sharp muscular contractions. The last had lapsed for three seconds precisely when the Captain rose. With the sweep of an automatic action, he pressed a blotting paper over his design with one hand; with the other he placed his cap on his head. Then he marched to the door; then he marched down the three steps that led to the deck. Each distance seemed already cut up into so many stages; and his last step brought him exactly to a particular plank⁠[,] to his station in front of five hundred blue jackets. Five hundred right hands flew exactly to their heads. Five seconds later the Captain’s right hand flew to his head. After waiting precisely two seconds it fell as the signal falls when an express train has passed. Captain Brace passed with the same measured stride through the ranks of the blue jackets and behind him at their proper distance marched a group of officers in their order too. But at the door of his dining room the Captain faced them, received their salute⁠[,] acknowledged it by his own and withdrew to dine alone.

He sat alone at his dinner table as he had sat alone at his desk. Of the servants who put plates before him he had never seen more than the white hands, putting down plates, taking plates away. When the hands were not white, they were dismissed. His eyes never raised themselves above the hands and the plates. In orderly procession meat, bread⁠[,] pastry⁠[,] fruit were placed before the idol. The red fluid in the wine glass slowly sank, rose, sank⁠[,] rose and sank again. All the meat disappeared, all the pastry, all the fruit. At last, taking a piece of crumb about the size of a billiard ball the Captain swept this round the plate⁠[,] devoured it and rose. Now his eyes were raised until they looked at their own level straight ahead. Whatever came before them—wall, mirror, brass rod—they passed through as if nothing had any solidity to intercept them. So he marched as if he followed in the wake of the beam cast by his eyes up an iron ladder onto a platform⁠[,] higher and higher up beyond these impediments until he had mounted onto an iron platform upon which stood a telescope. When he put his eye to the telescope the telescope became immediately an extension of his eyes as if it were a horn casing that had formed itself to enclose the penetration of his sight. When he moved the telescope up and down it seemed as if his own long horn covered eye were moving.

[ca. end of 1931]

[]

Miss Pryme.

It was the determination to leave the world better than she found it—and she had found it, in Wimbledon very dull, very prosperous, very fond of tennis, very inconsiderate, inattentive, and disinclined to pay any sort of attention to what she said or wished—that made Miss Pryme⁠[,] the third daughter of one of Wimbledon’s doctors⁠[,] to settle at the age of thirty-five at Rusham.

It was a corrupt village—partly, it was said because there were no omnibuses; and the road to the town was impassable in winter; hence Rusham felt no pressure of opinion; Mr Pember, the Rector⁠[,] never wore a clean collar; never took a bath; and had it not been for Mabel his old servant, would have been often too unpresentable to appear in church. Naturally there were no candles on the altar; the font was cracked; and Miss Pryme had caught him slipping out in the middle of the service and smoking a cigarette in the graveyard. She spent the first three years of her residence catching people doing what they should not do. The tips of Mr Bent’s elm tree’s branches swept the coffins as they passed up the lane; it should be trimmed; Mr Carr’s wall bulged; it must be rebuilt. Mrs Pye drank; Mrs Cole lived notoriously with the policeman. As Miss Pryme caught out all these people doing wrong she acquired a sour expression; she stooped; and she scowled askance at people she met; and she determined to buy the cottage which she rented; for she could certainly do good here.

First she took up the matter of the candles. She went without a servant; thus she saved enough to buy tall thick sacerdotal candles from an ecclesiastical shop in London. She earned the right to instal them on the altar by scrubbing the church floor; by working a mat for the altar; and by getting a scene from Twelfth Night so as to pay for mending the font. Then she faced old Mr Pember with her candles. He lit another cigarette holding it between fingers that looked jaundiced with nicotine. His face, his body was like a bramble spray straying, bristling, red, unkempt. And he mumbled that he wanted no candle. Didn’t hold with popish ways—never had. And off he shambled to swing, smoking, on the farm yard gate, talking about Cropper’s pigs.

Miss Pryme waited. She held a bazaar to get up funds for reshingling the church. The Bishop was present. Once more she asked Mr Pember about the candles. She mentioned the Bishop⁠[,] it is said⁠[,] in her support—it is said; for there were now two parties in the village, both gave versions of what happened when Miss Pryme countered the Rector; some sided with Miss Pryme; others with Mr Pember. Some sided with candles; and strictness; others with the dear old man and ease⁠[;] and Mr Pember said quite testily that he was Rector of the parish; he didn’t hold with candles; there was an end on’t. Miss Pryme retired to her cottage and wrapped the candles carefully in the long drawer. She never went to the rectory again.

But the Rector was a very old man; she had only to wait. Meanwhile Miss Pryme went on improving the world. For nothing gave her a quicker sense of the passage of time. At Wimbledon it flagged; here it raced. She washed up her breakfast and then filled up forms. Then she drew up reports. Then she nailed a notice to a board in her garden. Then she visited the cottages. She sat with old Malthouse night after night when he was dying and saved his relations a lot of trouble. By degrees a new and most delicious sensation began to prick and stir in her veins. It was better than married love; better than children; it was power to improve the world; power over the infirm; the illiterate; the drunken. By degrees as she tripped up the village street with her basket, or went to church with her broom she was attended by a second Miss Pryme, who was larger, fairer, more radiant and remarkable than the first; indeed she was rather like Florence Nightingale to look at; and before five years were out these two ladies were one and identical.

[undated]

[]

Ode Written Partly in Prose on Seeing the Name of Cutbush above a Butcher’s Shop in Pentonville.

Oh Cutbush, little John, standing glum between

your father and mother, the day they decided what

to make of you, should you be florist or butcher,

hearing them decide your fate; shall you be florist

or butcher; while the long wave lies iridescent

on the shores of California; and the elephant in

Abyssinia and the humming bird in

Aethiopeia and the King in Buckingham Palace

go their ways:

Shall John be florist or butcher?

Coming down the asphalt path,

with her velvet beret on her head, saucily

askew,

Comes Louie, betweenmaid to Mrs Mump at the

Rectory, infant still innocent still; but

avid for love; sixteen years old; glancing

saucily; past the pond where the dogs bark; and the

ducks quack;

Lovely are the willows

and lilies sliding and twitching; and

behold the old gentleman trying to disentangle the

child’s boat with his stick from the willows; and John says to Louie,

In summer I swim here; Sure? Yes I swim here.

making believe he is among the great athletes;

like Byron he could swim the Hellespont; John

Cutbush of Pentonville. And the dusk falls;

dusk gilt with lights from the upper windows;

one reads Herodotus in the original at his upper

window; and another cuts waistcoats in the basement;

and another makes coins; and another turns pieces

of wood that shall be chairlegs; lights fall

on the dusk; on the pond; lights are

zigzagged in the water. Cheek and shoulder together

cuddling kissing; pressing; there they

stand while the gentleman disentangles the boat

with his stick; and the church tolls.

From the harsh steeple fall the iron notes;

warning Louie Louie of time and tea;

how Cook will say, If you’re out larking with the

boys again I’ll tell Her meaning Mumps, Adela,

wife of Cuthbert the clerygman.

Up she starts from her couch on Primrose Hill;

from her couch on the sweet cold bed of earth;

earth laid over buds and bulbs; over pipes and

wires; taking to its cold sweet breast now the

water pipe; now the wire; which flashes messages

to China where the mandarins go, mute, cruel; delicate;

past the gold pagodas; and the houses have paper

walls; and the people smile wise inscrutable smiles.

Up she gets and he follows her, down the Avenue

as far as the corner, by the paper shop; Man

murdered in Pimlico is on the placard; where they

kiss by the paper shop; and so part, and dark

night enfolds them; and she hurries down the area

to the lit kitchen with the saucepans steaming

for master’s dinner.

And he hires a barrow and goes to Smithfield

at dawn; at chill dawn sees the cold meat,

shrouded in white nets borne on men’s shoulders;

meat from the Argentines; from haired and red pelted

hogs and bullocks.

All in white like surgeons go the butchers of

Smithfield, handling the shrouded cadavers;

the stark and frozen corpses that shall lie like

mummies in the ice house till the Sunday fire revives

them and they drip juice into the big plate to

revive church goers.

But I swam the Hellespont—he dreams; he had read

Byron in the Charing Cross Road he had sipped and

tasted Don Juan where it stood dust parched wind

blown exposed to the lights of the pavement.

Shall I serve for ever Massey and Hodge meat

merchants of Smithfield? He stands cap in hand

but upright in front of his master, having served

his apprenticeship. A young chap must fend for

himself.

And he sees the violets and the asphodel and the

naked swimmers on the bank in robes like

those worn by the Leighton pictures at Leighton

house. Louie of the Avenue kitchenmaid to the

clergyman, watches and waves her bare arm as he

dives.

So he sets up shop on his own.

To the passer by it is another of those shops

that stay open till one on Saturdays. Although the

west end is curtained and shuttered, here, in the

purlieus of London, the residue of London,

the night is the time

of gala. The flares are lit over barrows. The

feathers and blouses blow like flowers. The

meat blazes. The sides of oxen are patterned with

flower leaves in the pink flesh. Knives slice.

The lumps are tossed and wrapped. Bags bulge on

women’s arms. They stand first on this foot then on

that. The children gaze up at the flares and the

coarse light and the red and white faces burn them

selves for ever on the pure eyeballs. The barrel organ

plays and the dogs snuffle in the dust for scraps

of meat. And all over Pentonville and Islington

floats a coarse balloon of yellow colour and far

away in the city there is a white faced church and

steeple.

John Cutbush butcher of Pentonville stands at the

door of his shop.

He stands at the door of his shop.

Still he stands at the door of his shop.

But time has run its wheels over him. So many million miles

have the trams passed; so many million hogs and

bullocks have been sliced and tossed; so many bags

bulged. His face is red; his eyes bleared;

staring at the flares so many nights. And sometimes

he stares past the faces, past the new shop opposite

where the young man inveigles; into the gloomy

hollow. And he wakes and says And for you, Maam?

and for you?

But some note the new butcher opposite; and shuffle

past Cutbush to try Ainslies.

And Louie in the room behind the shop is broad

thighed, sullen eyed; and the little boy died;

and the girl is a worry, always after the boys;

and there framed on the wall is Mrs Mump in the dress

she wore to be presented; and meat smells everywhere

and the day’s takings diminish.

These are semblances of human faces seen in passing

translated from a foreign language.

And the language always makes up new words.

For next door are urns and slabs of marble in an

undertaker’s window; next door are musical instruments

next a home for cats and dogs; and then the Convent

and there on that eminence stands

sublime the tower of the Prison; and there is the

waterworks; and here is a whole dark private street

like those lines of burrows where nocturnal animals

dwell in deserts; but here not marmots and sand

martins; but borough inspectors; rate collectors;

officials of the gas company, the

waterworks; with their wives and children;

also some clerks fresh from Somerset and Suffolk;

also a maiden lady who does her own house work.

And so home along the High Street past the churchyard

where the cats celebrate their rites and butchers

promise eternal faith to kitchenmaids;

The flower of life ever shakes free from the

bud; the flower of life flaunts on placards

in our faces; and we give thanks to the armies

and navies and flying men and actresses

who provide our nightly entertainment and as we

hold the Evening Standard under the lamp how little

we think of the wealth we can gather between the

palms of two hands; how little we can grasp;

how little we can interpret and read aright

the name John Cutbush but only as we pass his

shop on Saturday night, cry out Hail Cutbush,

of Pentonville, I salute thee; passing.

[October 28, 1934]

[]

Portraits.

WAITING FOR DÉJEUNER

When the humming birds quivered in the flower’s trumpet; when the vast slab-footed elephants squelched through the mud; when the animal-eyed savage pushed off from the reeds in his canoe; when the Persian woman picked a louse from the hair of the child; when the zebras galloped across the horizon in wild arabesques of mating; when the blue-black hollow of the sky resounded with the tap tap tap of the vulture’s beak on skeleton that had a little flesh and only a half tail:—Monsieur and Madame Louvois neither saw nor heard.

When the waiter in his creased shirt, shiny coat, apron tied in the middle and sleeked back hair spat on his hands then wiped the plate to save the trouble of rinsing it; when the sparrows in the road collected over a spot of dung; when the iron gates of the level crossing swung to; and the traffic coagulated; one lorry with iron rails; one with crates of oranges; several cars; a barrow drawn by a donkey; when the old man impaled a paper bag in the public gardens; when the lights flickered over the Cinema announcing the new Jungle Film; when the grey-blue clouds of the northern hemisphere let a grey-blue patch shine for a moment on the waters of the Seine:—Monsieur and Madame Louvois stared at the mustard pot and the cruet; at the yellow crack on the marble topped table.

The humming bird quivered; the gates opened; the lorries jerked on; and the eyes on Monsieur and Madame Louvois lit with lustre; for down on the marble topped table in front of them the sleek haired waiter slapped a plate of tripe.

THE FRENCHWOMAN IN THE TRAIN

Most garrulous, pendulous, snuffing like a tapir the succulent lower leaves of the cabbages; rootling among the herbage; even in the third class railway carriage avid for some titbit of gossip … Madame Alphonse said to her cook … the earrings swinging as in the large lobed ears of some pachydermatous monster. A hiss with a little saliva comes from the front teeth which have been yellowed and blunted, biting at cabbage stalks. And all the time behind her pendulous nid-nodding head and the drip of saliva the grey olives of Provence ray out, come to a point; make a wrinkled background with wry angular branches and peasants stooping.

In London in a third class carriage against black walls pasted with shiny advertisements she would be running through Clapham on her way to Highgate to renew the circle of china flowers on the grave of her husband. There at the Junction she sits in her corner⁠[,] on her knee a black bag; in the bag a copy of the Mail; a picture of the Princesses—in her bag redolent of cold beef, of pickles, of tented curtains, of church bells on Sunday and the Vicar calling.

Here she bears on her immense and undulating shoulder the tradition; even when her mouth dribbles, when her wild pig eyes glitter one hears the croak of the frog in the wild tulip field; the hush of the Mediterranean lipping the sand; and the language of Molière. Here the bull neck bears baskets of grapes; through the train rattle comes the din of the market; a butting ram, men astride it; ducks in wicker cages; ice cream in cornets; rushes laid over cheese; over butter; men playing boules by a plane tree; a fountain; the acrid smell at the corner where peasants openly obey the dictates of nature.

PORTRAIT 3

And it seemed to me sitting in the courtyard of the French Inn, that the secret of existence was nothing but a bat’s skeleton in a cupboard; and the riddle nothing but a criss-cross of spider’s web; so very solid she looked. She was sitting in the sun. She had no hat. The light fixed her. There was no shadow. Her face was yellow and red; round too; a fruit on a body; another apple, only not on a plate. Breasts had formed apple-hard under the blouse on her body.

I watched her. She flicked her skin as if a fly had walked over it. Some one passed; I saw the narrow leaves of the apple trees that her eyes were flicker. And her coarseness, her cruelty, was like bark rough with lichen and she was everlasting and entirely solved the problem of life.

PORTRAIT 4

She had taken him to Harrods and to the National Gallery since he had to buy shirts before he went back to Rugby and acquired culture. He did not brush his teeth. And now she must really think, as they sat in the restaurant which Uncle Hal had recommended if they wanted something not cheap, not dear either, what she ought to say to him before he went back to Rugby…. They were a long time bringing the hors d’oeuvres…. She could remember dining here with a sandy haired boy before the War. He had admired her, without actually asking her to marry him…. Yet how could she put it, about being more like his father; she was a widow; the one she did marry had been killed; and brushing his teeth? She would have Minestrone? Yes. And after that? Wiener Schnitzel? Poulet Marengo? That’s with mushrooms? Are they fresh?… But I must say something he can keep by him, to help him, in moments you know, of temptation. ‘My mother …’ What a time they take! That’s the hors d’oeuvres at the next table, but all the sardines are gone already….

And George sat silent; looking with the eyes of a carp which after a winter’s immersion comes flush with the surface, and sees over the rim of the Soho carafe flies dancing, girls’ legs.

PORTRAIT 5

‘I am one of those people,’ she said looking down with secret satisfaction at the still substantial crescent of white sugared pastry in which she had as yet made one bite only, ‘who feel everything dreadfully.’

And here with her three-pronged fork half way to her mouth she yet contrived to brush her hand over her fur as if to indicate the motherly sisterly wifely tenderness with which, even if there were only a cat in the room to stroke, she stroked it. Then she let fall one more drop from the scent bottle which she carried in a gland in her cheek with which to sweeten the sometimes malodorous emanations of her own not sufficiently appreciated character, and added:

‘At the Hospital the men used to call me Little Mother,’ and looked at her friend opposite as if waiting for her to confirm or deny the portrait she had drawn, but since there was silence she pronged the last inch of sugared pastry and swallowed it, as if only from inanimate things did she get that tribute which the selfishness of humanity denied her.

PORTRAIT 6

It’s very hard on me—I who should have been born in the eighties find myself something of an outcast here. Can’t even wear a rose suitably in my button hole. Should have carried a cane, like my father; must wear a felt hat with a dent in it, even walking up Bond Street, not a topper. I still love though, if the word’s proper now, society, graded like one of those ices wrapped in frilled paper—it’s true they said the Italians kept them under their beds in Bethnal Green. And Oscar being witty; and the lady with the red lips standing on a tiger skin on a slippery floor—the tiger’s mouth wide open. ‘But she paints!’ (so my mother said) which meant of course the women in Piccadilly. That was my world. Now every one paints. Everything’s sugar white, even the houses, in Bond Street, made of concrete, with bits of steel filing.

Whereas I like cool things; pictures of Venice; girls on a bridge; a man fishing; Sunday calm; perhaps a punt. I’m off now in the next motor omnibus to tea with Aunt Mabel in the Addison Road. Her house now keeps something of what I mean; the goat, I mean, lying in the sun on the pavement; the distinguished aristocratic old goat; and the bus drivers wearing the Rothschild pheasants slung on their whips; and a young man like myself sitting on the box by the driver.

But here they come brandishing ash plants even in Piccadilly; some hatless; all rouged. And virtuous; serious; so desperate the young are nowadays, driving in their racing cars to revolution. I can assure you the Traveller’s Joy in Surrey smells of petrol. And look there at the corner; rose red brick giving up its soul in a puff of powder. Nobody but myself minds a scrap—and Uncle Edwin and Aunt Mabel. They hold up against these horrors their little candle; as we can’t do it, who lapse and crash and bring the old chandelier down on top of us. I always say anyone can smash a plate; but what I admire is old china, riveted.

PORTRAIT 7

Yes, I knew Vernon Lee. That is to say we had a villa. I used to get up before breakfast. I used to go to the Galleries before they were crowded. I’m devoted to beauty…. No, I don’t paint myself; but then one appreciates art all the better perhaps. They’re so narrow, artists; nowadays too they live so wildly. Fra Angelico, you remember, painted on his knees. But I was saying, I knew Vernon Lee. She had a villa. We had a villa. One of those villas hung with wistaria—something like our lilac, but better—and Judas trees. Oh why does one live in Kensington? Why not in Italy? But I always feel, still, I do live in Florence—in the spirit. And don’t you think we do live in the spirit—our real life? But then I’m one of those people who want beauty, if it’s only a stone, or a pot—I can’t explain. Anyhow in Florence one meets people who love beauty. We met a Russian Prince there; also at a party a very well known man whose name I forget. And one day as I was standing in the road, outside my villa, a little old woman came along leading a dog on a chain. It might have been Ouida. Or Vernon Lee? I never spoke to her. But in a sense, the true sense, I who love beauty always feel, I knew Vernon Lee.

PORTRAIT 8

‘I’m one of those simple folk, who may be old fashioned, but I do believe in the lasting things—love, honour, patriotism. I really believe, and I don’t mind confessing it, in loving one’s wife.’

Yes, the tag Nihil humanum often falls from your lips. But you take care not to talk Latin too often. For you have to make money—first to live on; then to sit on: Queen Anne furniture; mostly fakes.

‘I’m not one of the clever ones. But I will say this for myself—I’ve blood in my veins. I’m at home with the parson; with the publican. I go to the pub, and play darts with the men.’

Yes you’re the middle man; the go between; a dress suit for London; tweeds for the country. Shakespeare and Wordsworth you can equally ‘Bill’.

‘What I must say I loathe are those poor bloodless creatures who live in …’

The high ground or the low ground. You’re all for betwixt and between.

‘And I have my family …’

Yes you’re highly prolific. You’re everywhere. When one walks in the garden, what’s that on the cabbage? Middle brow. Middle brow infecting the sheep. The moon too is under your sway. Misted. You dull tarnish and make respectable even the silver edge (excuse the expression) of heaven’s own scythe. And I ask of the gulls who are crying on desolate sea sands and of the farm hands who are coming home to their wives, what will become of us, birds, men and women, if middle brow has his way, and there’s only a middle sex, but no lovers or friends?

‘Yes, I’m one of the simple folk, who may be old fashioned, but I do believe, I don’t mind admitting it, in loving one’s kind.’

[ca. 1937]

[]

Uncle Vanya.

‘Don’t they see through everything—the Russians? all the little disguises we’ve put up? Flowers against decay; gold and velvet against poverty; the cherry trees, the apple trees—they see through them too,’ she was thinking at the play. Then a shot rang out.

‘There! now he’s shot him. That’s a mercy. Oh but the shots missed! The old villain with the dyed whiskers in the check ulster isn’t hurt a bit…. Still he tried to shoot him; he suddenly rose erect, reeled up the stairs and got his pistol. He pressed the trigger. The ball lodged in the wall; perhaps in the table leg. It came to nothing anyhow. “Let it all be forgotten, dear Vanya. Let us be friends as of old,” he’s saying…. Now they’ve gone. Now we hear the bells of the horses tinkling away in the distance. And is that also true of us?’ she said, leaning her chin on her hand and looking at the girl on the stage. ‘Do we hear the bells tinkling away down the road?’ she asked, and thought of the taxis and omnibuses in Sloane Street, for they lived in one of the big houses in Cadogan Square.

‘We shall rest,’ the girl was saying now, as she clasped Uncle Vanya in her arms. ‘We shall rest,’ she said. Her words were like drops falling—one drop, then another drop. ‘We shall rest,’ she said again. ‘We shall rest, Uncle Vanya.’ And the curtain fell.

‘As for us,’ she said, as her husband helped her on with her cloak, ‘We’ve not even loaded the pistol. We’re not even tired.’

And they stood still for a moment in the gangway, while they played ‘God Save the King’.

‘Aren’t the Russians morbid?’ she said, taking his arm.

[1937]

[]

Gipsy, the Mongrel.

‘She had such a lovely smile,’ said Mary Bridger, reflectively. They were talking, the Bridgers and the Bagots, late one night over the fire about old friends. This one, Helen Folliott, the girl with the lovely smile, had vanished. None of them knew what had happened to her. She had come to grief somehow, they had heard, and, they agreed, each of them had always known that she would, and, what was odd, none of them had ever forgotten her.

‘She had such a lovely smile,’ Lucy Bagot repeated.

And so they began to discuss the oddities of human affairs—what a toss up it seems whether you sink or swim, why one remembers and forgets, what a difference trifles make, and how people, who used to meet every day, suddenly part and never see each other again.

Then they were silent. That was why they heard a whistle—was it a train or a siren?—a faint far whistle that sounded over the flat Suffolk fields and dwindled away. The sound must have suggested something, to the Bagots anyhow, for Lucy said, looking at her husband, ‘She had such a lovely smile.’ He nodded. ‘You couldn’t drown a puppy who grinned in the face of death,’ he said. It sounded like a quotation. The Bridgers looked puzzled. ‘Our dog,’ said Lucy. ‘Tell us the story of your dog,’ the Bridgers insisted. They both liked dogs.

Tom Bagot was shy at first, as people are who catch themselves feeling more than is reasonable. He protested too that it wasn’t a story; it was a character study, and they would think him sentimental. But they urged him, and he began straight off—‘“You can’t drown a puppy who grins in the face of death.” Old Holland said that. He said it that snowy night when he held her over the water butt. He was a farmer, down in Wiltshire. He’d heard gipsies—that’s to say a whistle. Out he went into the snow with a dog whip. They’d gone; only they’d left something behind them, a crumpled piece of paper it looked like in the hedge. But it was a basket, one of those rush baskets that women take to market, and in it, stitched up so that she couldn’t follow, was a little scrap of a dog. They’d given her a hunk of bread and a twist of straw—’

‘Which shows,’ Lucy interrupted, ‘that they hadn’t the heart to kill her.’

‘Nor had he,’ Tom Bagot went on. ‘He held her over the water and then—’ he raised his little grizzled moustache over his upper teeth, ‘she grinned up at him like that, in the moonlight. So he spared her. She was a wretched little mongrel, a regular gipsies’ dog, half fox terrier, half the lord knows what. She looked as if she’d never had a square meal in her life. Her coat was as rough as a door scraper. But she had—what d’you call it when you forgive a person a dozen times a day against your better judgment? Charm? Character? Whatever it was, she had that. Or why did he keep her? Answer me that. She made his life a burden to him. Put all the neighbours against him. Chased their hens. Worried the sheep. A dozen times he was on the point of killing her. Yet he couldn’t bring himself to do it—not until she’d killed the cat, his wife’s favourite. It was the wife who insisted. So once more he took her out into the yard, stood her against the wall, and was about to pull the trigger. And again—she grinned; grinned right into the face of death, and he hadn’t the heart to do it. So they left it to the butcher; he must do what they couldn’t. And then—chance again. It was a little miracle in its way—our letter coming that very morning. A pure fluke, look at it which ever way you will. We lived in London then—we’d a cook, an old Irish body, who swore she’d heard rats. Rats in the wainscot. Couldn’t sleep another night in the place and so on. By chance again—we’d spent a summer there—I thought of Holland, wrote and asked him if he’d a dog to sell us, a terrier, to catch rats. The postman met the butcher; it was the butcher who delivered the letter. So by the skin of her teeth Gipsy was saved again. He was glad I can tell you,—old Holland. He popped her straight into the train with a letter. “Her looks are against her”,’ Bagot quoted again. ‘“But believe me, she’s a dog of character—a dog of remarkable character.” We stood her out on the kitchen table. A more miserable object you never saw. “Rats? Why they’d eat her,” said old Biddy. But we heard no more of that tale.’

Here Tom Bagot paused. He had come it seemed to a part of his story that he found it difficult to tell. It is difficult for a man to say why he fell in love with a woman, but it is still more difficult to say why he fell in love with a mongrel terrier. Yet that was what had happened evidently—the little beast had exerted over him some indescribable charm. It was a love story he was telling. Mary Bridger was sure of that by something in his voice. A fantastic idea came to her that he had been in love with Helen Folliott, the girl with the lovely smile. He connected the two somehow. Aren’t all stories connected? she asked herself, and thus dropped a sentence or two of what he was saying. The Bagots, when she listened, were remembering absurd little stories that they hardly liked to tell, and yet they meant so much.

‘She did it all off her own bat,’ Tom Bagot was saying. ‘We never taught her a thing. Yet every day she’d have something new to show us. One little trick after another. She’d bring me letters in her mouth. Or, Lucy lighting a match, she’d put it out’—he brought his fist down upon a match—‘so. With her naked paw. Or she’d bark when the telephone rang. “Curse that bell” she’d say as plain as anything. And visitors—d’you remember how she’d size our friends up as if they were her own? “You may stay”—she’d jump and lick your hand; “No, we don’t want you” and she’d rush to the door as if to show them the way out. And she’d never make a mistake. She was as good a judge of people as you are.’

‘Yes,’ Lucy confirmed him, ‘she was a dog of character. And yet,’ she added, ‘lots of people didn’t see it. Which was another reason for liking her. There was that man who gave us Hector.’

Bagot took up the story.

‘Hopkins by name,’ he said. ‘By calling a stockbroker. Very proud of his little place in Surrey. You know the sort—all boots and gaiters, like the pictures in the sporting papers. It’s my belief he didn’t know one end of a horse from the other. But he “couldn’t endure to see us with a wretched little mongrel like that”.’ Bagot was quoting again. The words had evidently had a sting in them. ‘So he made so bold as to give us a present. A dog called Hector.’

‘A red setter,’ Lucy explained.

‘With a tail like a ramrod,’ Bagot continued, ‘and a pedigree as long as your arm. She might have sulked—Gipsy. She might have taken it amiss. But she was a dog of sense. Nothing petty about her. Live and let live—it takes all sorts to make a world. That was her motto. You’d meet ’em in the High Street—arm in arm, I was going to say, trotting round together. She taught him a thing or two I’ll be bound …’

‘Give him his due, he was a perfect gentleman,’ Lucy interrupted.

‘A little lacking in the upper storey,’ said Tom Bagot tapping his forehead.

‘But with perfect manners,’ Lucy argued.

There is nothing like a dog story for bringing out people’s characters, Mary Bridger reflected. Of course, Lucy had been on the side of the gentleman; Tom on the side of the lady. But the lady’s charms had vanquished even the Lucy Bagot who was inclined to be hard on her sex. So she must have had something in her.

‘And then?’ she prompted them.

‘All went smoothly. We were a happy family,’ Tom continued. ‘Nothing to break the harmony until—’ here he hesitated. ‘Come to think of it,’ he blurted out, ‘you can’t blame nature. She was in the prime of life—two years old. What’s that for a human being? Eighteen? Twenty? And full of life—full of fun—as a girl should be.’ He stopped.

‘You’re thinking of the dinner party,’ his wife helped him. ‘The night the Harvey Sinnotts dined with us. The fourteenth of February—which,’ she added with a queer little smile, ‘is St Valentine’s day.’

‘Coupling day they call it in my part of the country,’ Dick Bridger interposed.

‘So it was,’ Tom Bagot resumed. ‘St Valentine’s day—the God of love isn’t he? Well, people of the name of Harvey Sinnott were dining with us. Never met ’em before. Connected with the firm,’ (Tom Bagot was the London partner in the great Liverpool engineering firm of Harvey, Marsh and Coppard). ‘It was a formal occasion. For simple people like ourselves a bit of an ordeal. We wished to show them hospitality. We did our best. She,’ he indicated his wife, ‘took no end of trouble, fussed about for days beforehand. Everything must be just so. You know Lucy …’ He gave her a little pat on the knee. Mary Bridger knew Lucy. She could see the table spread; the silver shining, everything as Tom said “just so” for the honoured guests.

‘It was a slap up affair and no mistake about it,’ Tom Bagot went on. ‘A trifle on the formal side …’

‘She was one of those women,’ Lucy struck in, ‘who seemed to be asking themselves “What’s it cost? Is it real?” while they talk to you. And rather over dressed. She was saying—dinner half through—what a pleasure it was—they were staying as they always did at the Ritz, or at the Carlton—to have a quiet little meal. So simple, so homely. It was such a rest….’

‘No sooner were the words out of her mouth,’ Bagot broke in, ‘than there was an explosion … A sort of under table earthquake. A scuffle. A squeak. And she rose to her feet in all her …’ he spread his arms wide to show the voluminous lady, ‘panoply,’ he hazarded, ‘and screamed, “Something’s biting me! Something’s biting me!”’ he squeaked in imitation. ‘I ducked under the table.’ (He looked under the flounce of a chair.) ‘Oh that abandoned little creature! That imp of mischief! There on the floor at the good lady’s feet … she’d given birth … she’d had a puppy!’

The memory was too much for him. He lay back in his chair shaking with laughter.

‘So,’ he continued, I wrapped a napkin round ’em. I carried ’em both out. (Mercifully the puppy was dead, stone dead.) I faced her with the fact. I held it under her nose. Out in the back yard. Out in the moonlight, under the pure gaze of the stars. I could have beaten her within an inch of her life. But how can you beat a dog that grins …’

‘In the face of morality?’ Dick Bridger suggested.

‘If you like to put it that way,’ Bagot smiled. ‘But her spirit! By Jove! She scampered round the yard, the little hussy, chasing a cat … No, I hadn’t the heart to do it.’

‘And the Harvey Sinnotts were very nice about it,’ Lucy added. ‘It broke the ice. We were all good friends after that.’

‘We forgave her,’ Tom Bagot continued. ‘We said it mustn’t happen again. And it didn’t. Never again. But other things did. Lots of things. I could tell you one story after another. But the truth is,’ he shook his head, ‘I don’t believe in stories. A dog has a character just as we have, and it shows itself just as ours do, by what we say, by all sorts of little things.’

‘You’d find yourself asking, when you came into a room—it sounds absurd but it’s true,’ Lucy added, ‘now why did she do that? just as if she were a human being. And being a dog one had to guess. Sometimes one couldn’t. The leg of mutton for instance. She took it off the dinner table, held it in her forepaws, laughing. By way of a joke? A joke at our expense? It seemed so. And one day we tried to play a trick on her. She had a passion for fruit—raw fruit, apples, plums. We gave her a plum with a stone in it. What’ll she do with it? we asked. Rather than hurt our feelings, if you’ll believe me, she held that plum in her mouth, and then, when she thought we weren’t looking, dropped the stone in her bowl of water and came back wagging her tail. It was as if she’d said, “Had you there!”’

‘Yes,’ said Tom Bagot, ‘she taught us a lesson. I’ve often wondered,’ he went on, ‘what was she thinking of us—down there among all the boots and old matches on the hearthrug? What was her world? Do dogs see what we see or is it something different?’

They too looked down at the boots and old matches, tried for a moment to lie nose on paws gazing into the red caverns and yellow flames with a dog’s eyes. But they couldn’t answer that question.

‘You’d see them lying there,’ Bagot continued, ‘Gipsy on her side of the fire, Hector on his, as different as chalk from cheese. It was a matter of birth and breeding. He was an aristocrat. She a dog of the people. It was natural with her mother a poacher, her father the lord knows who, and her master a gipsy. You’d take them out together. Hector prim as a policeman, all on the side of law and order. Gipsy jumping the railings, scaring the royal ducks, but always on the side of the sea gulls. Vagabonds like herself. We’d take her along the river, where people feed the gulls. “Take your bit of fish,” she’d say. “You’ve earned it.” I’ve seen her, if you’ll believe me, let one of them feed out of her mouth. But she had no patience with the pampered rich—the pug dogs, the lap dogs. You could fancy they argued the matter, down there on the hearthrug. And by Jove! she converted the old Tory. We ought to have known better. Yes, I’ve often blamed myself. But there it is—after a thing’s over, it’s easy to see how it could have been prevented.’

A shadow crossed his face, as if he remembered some little tragedy that, as he said, could have been prevented, and yet to the listener would mean nothing more than the fall of a leaf, or the death of a butterfly by drowning. The Bridgers set their faces to hear whatever it was. Perhaps a car had run over her, or perhaps she had been stolen.

‘It was that old fool Hector,’ Bagot continued. ‘I never like handsome dogs,’ he explained. ‘There’s no harm in them, but there’s no character. He may have been jealous. He hadn’t her sense of what’s fitting. Just because she did a thing, he’d tried to go one better. To cut the matter short—one fine day he jumped over the garden wall, crashed through a neighbour’s glass house, ran between an old chap’s legs, collided with a car, never hurt himself but made a dint in the bonnet—that day’s work cost us five pound ten and a visit to the police court. It was all her doing. Without her he’d have been as tame as an old sheep. Well, one of them had to go. Strictly speaking it should have been Gipsy. But look at it this way. Say you’ve two maids; you can’t keep them both; one’s sure of a place, but the other—she’s not everybody’s money, might find herself out of a job, in the soup. You wouldn’t hesitate—you’d do as we did. We gave Hector to friends; we kept Gipsy. It was unjust perhaps. Anyhow, that was the beginning of the trouble.’

‘Yes, things went wrong after that,’ said Lucy Bagot. ‘She felt she’d done a good dog out of a home. She showed it in all sorts of ways, those queer little ways that are all a dog has after all.’ There was a pause. The tragedy whatever it was came closer, the absurd little tragedy which both these middle-aged people found it so hard to tell and so hard to forget.

‘We never knew till then,’ Bagot continued, ‘how much feeling she had in her. With human beings, as Lucy says, they can speak. They can say “I’m sorry” and there’s an end of it. But with a dog it’s different. Dogs can’t talk. But dogs,’ he added, ‘remember.’

‘She remembered,’ Lucy confirmed him. ‘She showed it. One night for instance she brought an old rag doll into the drawing-room. I was sitting there alone. She took it and laid it on the floor, as if it was a present—to make up for Hector.’

‘Another time,’ Bagot went on, ‘she brought home a white cat. A wretched beast, covered with sores, hadn’t even a tail. And he wouldn’t leave us. We didn’t want him. She didn’t either. But it meant something. To make up for Hector? Her only way? Perhaps …’

‘Or there may have been another reason,’ Lucy went on. ‘That’s what I never could decide. Did she want to give us a hint? To prepare us? If only she could have spoken! Then we could have reasoned with her, tried to persuade her. As it was we knew vaguely all that winter that something was wrong. She’d fall asleep and start yelping, as if she were dreaming. Then she’d wake up, run round the room with her ears cocked as if she’d heard something. Often I’d go to the door and look out. But there wasn’t anyone. Sometimes she’d begin trembling all over, half afraid, half eager. If she’d been a woman, you’d have said that some temptation was gradually overcoming her. There was something she tried to resist, but couldn’t, something in her blood so to speak that was too strong for her. That was the feeling we had … And she wouldn’t go out with us any longer. She would sit there on the hearthrug listening. But it’s better to tell you the facts and let you judge for yourselves.’

Lucy stopped. But Tom nodded at her. ‘You tell the end,’ he said, for the plain reason that he couldn’t trust himself, absurd though it seemed, to tell the end himself.

Lucy Bagot began; she spoke stiffly as if she were reading from a newspaper.

‘It was a winter’s evening, the sixteenth of December 1937.

Augustus, the white cat, sat on one side of the fire, Gipsy on the other. Snow was falling. All the street sounds were dulled I suppose by the snow. And Tom said: “You could hear a pin drop. It’s as quiet as the country.” And that of course made us listen. A bus passed in a distant street. A door slammed. One could hear footsteps retreating. Everything seemed to be vanishing away, lost in the falling snow. And then—we only heard it because we were listening—a whistle sounded—a long low whistle—dwindling away. Gipsy heard it. She looked up. She trembled all over. Then she grinned …’ She stopped. She controlled her voice and said, ‘Next morning she was gone.’

There was dead silence. They had a sense of vast empty space round them, of friends vanishing for ever, summoned by some mysterious voice away into the snow.

‘You never found her?’ Mary Bridger asked at length.

Tom Bagot shook his head.

‘We did what we could. Offered a reward. Consulted the police. There was a rumour—someone had seen gipsies passing.’

‘What do you think she heard? What was she grinning at?’ Lucy Bagot asked. ‘Oh I still pray,’ she exclaimed, ‘that it wasn’t the end!’

[1939/40]

[]

The Symbol.

There was a little dent on the top of the mountain like a crater on the moon. It was filled with snow, iridescent like a pigeon’s breast, or dead white. There was a scurry of dry particles now and again, covering nothing. It was too high for breathing flesh or fur covered life. All the same the snow was iridescent one moment; and blood red; and pure white, according to the day.

The graves in the valley—for there was a vast descent on either side; first pure rock; snow silted; lower a pine tree gripped a crag; then a solitary hut; then a saucer of pure green; then a cluster of eggshell roofs; at last, at the bottom, a village, an hotel, a cinema, and a graveyard—the graves in the churchyard near the hotel recorded the names of several men who had fallen climbing.

‘The mountain,’ the lady wrote, sitting on the balcony of the hotel, ‘is a symbol …’ She paused. She could see the topmost height through her glasses. She focussed the lens, as if to see what the symbol was. She was writing to her elder sister at Birmingham.

The balcony overlooked the main street of the Alpine summer resort, like a box at a theatre. There were very few private sitting rooms, and so the plays—such as they were—the curtain raisers—were acted in public. They were always a little provisional; preludes, curtain raisers. Entertainments to pass the time; seldom leading to any conclusion, such as marriage; or even lasting friendship. There was something fantastic about them, airy, inconclusive. So little that was solid could be dragged to this height. Even the houses looked gimcrack. By the time the voice of the English Announcer had reached the village it too became unreal.

Lowering her glasses, she nodded at the young men who in the street below were making ready to start. With one of them she had a certain connection—that is, an Aunt of his had been Mistress of her daughter’s school.

Still holding the pen, still tipped with a drop of ink, she waved down at the climbers. She had written the mountain was a symbol. But of what? In the forties of the last century two men, in the sixties four men had perished; the first party when a rope broke; the second when night fell and froze them to death. We are always climbing to some height; that was the cliché. But it did not represent what was in her mind’s eye; after seeing through her glasses the virgin height.

She continued, inconsequently. ‘I wonder why it makes me think of the Isle of Wight? You remember when Mama was dying, we took her there. And I would stand on the balcony, when the boat came in and describe the passengers. I would say, I think that must be Mr Edwardes … He has just come off the gangway. Then, now all the passengers have landed. Now they have turned the boat … I never told you, naturally not—you were in India; you were going to have Lucy—how I longed when the doctor came, that he should say, quite definitely, She cannot live another week. It was very prolonged; she lived eighteen months. The mountain just now reminded me how when I was alone, I would fix my eyes upon her death, as a symbol. I would think if I could reach that point—when I should be free—we could not marry as you remember until she died—A cloud then would do instead of the mountain. I thought, when I reach that point—I have never told any one; for it seemed so heartless; I shall be at the top. And I could imagine so many sides. We come of course of an Anglo Indian family. I can still imagine, from hearing stories told, how people live in other parts of the world. I can see mud huts; and savages; I can see elephants drinking at pools. So many of our uncles and cousins were explorers. I have always had a great desire to explore for myself. But of course, when the time came it seemed more sensible, considering our long engagement, to marry.’

She looked across the street at a woman shaking a mat on another balcony. Every morning at the same time she came out. You could have thrown a pebble into her balcony. They had indeed come to the point of smiling at each other across the street.

‘The little villas,’ she added, taking up her pen, ‘are much the same here as in Birmingham. Every house takes in lodgers. The hotel is quite full. Though monotonous, the food is not what you would call bad. And of course the hotel has a splendid view. One can see the mountain from every window. But then that’s true of the whole place. I can assure you, I could shriek sometimes coming out of the one shop where they sell papers—we get them a week late—always to see that mountain. Sometimes it looks just across the way. At others, like a cloud; only it never moves. Somehow the talk, even among the invalids, who are every where, is always about the mountain. Either, how clear it is today, it might be across the street; or, how far away it looks; it might be a cloud. That is the usual cliché. In the storm last night, I hoped for once it was hidden. But just as they brought in the anchovies, The Rev. W. Bishop said, “Look there’s the mountain!”

Am I being selfish? Ought I not to be ashamed of myself, when there is so much suffering? It is not confined to the visitors. The natives suffer dreadfully from goitre. Of course it could be stopped, if any one had enterprise, and money. Ought one not to be ashamed of dwelling upon what after all can’t be cured? It would need an earthquake to destroy that mountain, just as, I suppose, it was made by an earthquake. I asked the Proprietor, Herr Melchior, the other day, if there were ever earthquakes now? No, he said, only landslides and avalanches. They have been known he said to blot out a whole village. But he added quickly, there’s no danger here.

As I write these words, I can see the young men quite plainly on the slopes of the mountain. They are roped together. One I think I told you was at the same school with Margaret. They are now crossing a crevasse….’

The pen fell from her hand, and the drop of ink straggled in a zig zag line down the page. The young men had disappeared.

It was only late that night when the search party had recovered the bodies that she found the unfinished letter on the table on the balcony. She dipped her pen once more; and added, ‘The old clichés will come in very handy. They died trying to climb the mountain … And the peasants brought spring flowers to lay upon their graves. They died in an attempt to discover …’

There seemed no fitting conclusion. And she added, ‘Love to the children,’ and then her pet name.

[March 1, 1941]

[]

The Watering Place.

Like all seaside towns it was pervaded by the smell of fish. The toy shops were full of shells, varnished, hard yet fragile. Even the inhabitants had a shelly look—a frivolous look as if the real animal had been extracted on the point of a pin and only the shell remained. The old men on the parade were shells. Their gaiters, their riding breeches, their spy glasses seemed to make them into toys. They could no more have been real sailors or real sportsmen than the shells stuck onto the rims of photograph frames and looking-glasses could have lain in the depths of the sea. The women too, with their trousers and their little high heeled shoes and their raffia bags and their pearl necklaces seemed shells of real women who go out in the morning to buy household stores.

At one o’clock this frail varnished shell fish population clustered together in the restaurant. The restaurant had a fishy smell, the smell of a smack that has drawn up nets full of sprats and herrings. The consumption of fish in that dining room must have been enormous. The smell pervaded even the room that was marked Ladies on the first landing. This room was separated by a door only into two compartments. On the one side of the door the claims of nature were gratified; and on the other, at the washing table, at the looking-glass, nature was disciplined by art. Three young ladies had reached this second stage of the daily ritual. They were exerting their rights upon improving nature, subduing her, with their powder puffs and little red tablets. As they did so they talked; but their talk was interrupted as by the surge of an indrawing tide; and then the tide withdrew and one was heard saying:

‘I never did care about her—the simpering little thing…. Bert never did care about big women…. Ave you seen him since he’s been back?… His eyes … they’re so blue … Like pools … Gert’s too … Both ave the same eyes…. You look down into them … They’ve both got the same teeth … Are He’s got such beautiful white teeth…. Gert has em too…. But his are a bit crooked … when he smiles …’

The water gushed … The tide foamed and withdrew. It uncovered next: ‘But he had ought to be more careful. If he’s caught doing it, he’ll be courtmartialled …’ Here came a great gush of water from the next compartment. The tide in the watering place seems to be for ever drawing and withdrawing. It uncovers these little fish; it sluices over them. It withdraws, and there are the fish again, smelling very strong of some queer fishy smell that seems to permeate the whole watering place.

But at night the town looks quite ethereal. There is a white glow on the horizon. There are hoops and coronets in the streets. The town has sunk down into the water. And the skeleton only is picked out in fairy lamps.

[1941]

[]

THE ESSAYS

of
Virginia Woolf

[For Rob H.]

edited by
Andrew McNeillie & Stuart N. Clarke

published
1986–2011
by
The Hogarth Press

the essays

’04    ’05    ’06    ’07    ’08    ’09    ’10    ’11

’12    ’13    ’16    ’17    ’18    ’19    ’20    ’21

’22    ’23    ’24    ’25    ’26    ’27    ’28    ’29

’30    ’31    ’34    ’37    ’38    ’40

[1904]

‘The Son of Royal Langbrith.’

[1905]

‘Next-Door Neighbours.’

The Feminine Note in Fiction.

‘A Belle of the Fifties.’

Mr Henry James’s Latest Novel.

The Decay of Essay-Writing.

Street Music.

‘Barham of Beltana.’

‘By Beach and Bogland.’

‘The Fortunes of Farthings.’

‘Nancy Stair.’

‘Arrows of Fortune.’

‘A Dark Lantern.’

Journeys in Spain.

The American Woman.

‘Rose of Lone Farm.’

An Andalusian Inn.

A Priory Church.

The Letters of Jane Welsh Carlyle.

The Value of Laughter.

Their Passing Hour.

‘The Letter Killeth.’

‘Lone Marie.’

‘The Devil’s Due.’

‘The House of Mirth.’

‘The Debtor.’

‘A Flood Tide.’

‘The Making of Michael.’

A Description of the Desert.

‘The Brown House and Cordelia.’

‘Delta.’

Two Irish Novels.

‘The Tower of Siloam.’

A Walk By Night.

[1906]

A Nineteenth-Century Critic.

‘After His Kind.’

The Sister of Frederic the Great.

‘The Scholar’s Daughter.’

‘A Supreme Moment.’

‘The House of Shadows.’

‘Blanche Esmead.’

‘The Face of Clay.’

The Poetic Drama.

Poets’ Letters.

Wordsworth and the Lakes.

‘The Compromise.’

‘Mrs Grundy’s Crucifix.’

The Bluest of the Blue.

‘Coniston.’

‘The Author’s Progress.’

Sweetness—Long Drawn Out.

Trafficks and Discoveries.

‘The English Mail Coach.’

Portraits of Places.

‘Chippinge.’

‘Occasion’s Forelock.’

‘Abbots Verney.’

Impressions of Sir Leslie Stephen.

[1907]

‘The Lonely Lady of Grosvenor Square.’

‘Memoirs of a Person of Quality.’

‘The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft.’

‘Temptation.’

‘Disciples.’

‘Carlyle and the London Library.’

Old Hampshire Vignettes.’

Mary Christie.

‘The Wingless Victory.’

Lady Huntingdon.

‘In Playtime.’

Some Poetic Plays.

The Call of the East.

‘The Longest Journey.’

‘Fräulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther.’

Mrs Sellar’s Recollections.

‘Letters of a Betrothed.’

‘The Glen o’ Weeping.’

Philip Sidney.

Venice.

‘A Mirror of Shalott.’

‘The Feast of Bacchus.’

‘The Red Sphinx.’

Lady Fanshawe’s Memoirs.

‘Love the Judge.’

‘The New Religion.

‘Tales of Two People.’

‘Mam Linda.’

‘The Weavers.’

‘The Square Peg.’

‘Outrageous Fortune.’

‘A Swan and Her Friends.’

‘The Desert Venture.’

‘The Forest Playfellow.’

‘The Northern Iron.’

William Allingham.

[1908]

Some Poetical Plays.

Rachel Gurney of the Grove.

‘The Sentimental Traveller.’

‘Father Alphonsus.’

‘Colonel Kate.’

‘The Inward Light.’

‘The Ways of Rebellion.’

‘The Wolf.’

The Memoirs of Lady Dorothy Nevill.

Wordsworth Letters.

‘The Sword Decides.’

‘The Red Neighbour.’

‘Destinies.’

‘Marotz.’

‘Between the Twilights.’

The Stranger in London.

‘A Week In The White House.’

Scottish Women.

Louise de La Vallière.

‘A Room with a View.’

‘Château and Country Life.’

Letters of Christina Rossetti.

‘Blackstick Papers.’

A Vanished Generation.

[1909]

‘Venice.’

‘One Immortality.’

More Carlyle Letters.

‘Gentlemen Errant.’

Caroline Emelia Stephen.

The Opera.

Art and Life.

‘Masques and Phases.’

A Cookery Book.

[1910]

Lysistrata.

[1911]

The Duke and Duchess of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne.

‘Rachel.’

‘The Post-Impressionists.’

[1912]

The Novels of George Gissing.

‘Frances Willard.’

[1913]

Chinese Stories.

A Friend of the Great Duke.

‘Women of the Country.’

‘Les Copains.’

[1916]

Charlotte Brontë

‘Past and Present at the English Lakes.’

A Man With a View.

Heard on the Downs: The Genesis of Myth.

‘The Park Wall.’

Butterflies and Moths: Insects in September.

The Fighting Nineties.

Among the Poets.

‘London Revisited.’

In a Library.

Old and Young.

‘Social Life in England.’

Mr Symons’s Essays.

[1917]

‘Romance.’

Tolstoy’s ‘The Cossacks’.

Melodious Meditations.

‘Before Midnight.’

Parodies.

‘The House of Lyme.’

A Talker.

‘In Good Company.’

A Cambridge v.a.d.

The Perfect Language.

‘Creative Criticism.’

‘South Wind.’

‘Books and Persons.’

‘Lord Jim.’

‘John Davidson.’

A Victorian Echo.

Mr Galsworthy’s Novel.

To Read Or Not To Read.

Mr Conrad’s ‘Youth’.

A Minor Dostoevsky.

‘Hearts of Controversy.’

Stopford Brooke.

Mr Gladstone’s Daughter.

‘Charlotte Brontë.’

‘Rebels and Reformers.’

Sunset Reflections.

The New Crusade.

[1918]

Philosophy in Fiction.

A Book of Essays.

‘The Green Mirror.’

Mr Conrad’s Crisis.

Swinburne Letters.

‘Second Marriage.’

Two Irish Poets.

Tchehov’s Questions.

Imitative Essays.

Moments of Vision.

Dreams and Realities.

The Claim of the Living.

Loud Laughter.

A Victorian Socialist.

Mr Merrick’s Novels.

Two Soldier-Poets.

A Practical Utopia.

‘The Sad Years.’

The ‘Movie’ Novel.

War in the Village.

The Rights of Youth.

Mr Hudson’s Childhood.

Caution and Criticism.

Adventurers All.

Honest Fiction.

Valery Brussof.

The Rough Road.

‘The Candle of Vision.’

‘Abraham Lincoln.’

Mr Howells on Form.

Bad Writers.

Trafficks and Discoveries.

‘The Three Black Pennys.’

A View of the Russian Revolution.

‘Mummery.’

‘The Method of Henry James.’

[1919]

The War from the Street.

Small Talk About Meredith.

Lady Ritchie.

‘Sylvia and Michael.’

Dickens by a Disciple.

Washington Irving.

The Eccentrics.

‘The Obstinate Lady.’

‘Java Head.’

On Some of the Old Actors.

Is This Poetry?

‘The Way of All Flesh.’

Forgotten Benefactors.

A Positivist.

‘The Old Madhouse.’

A Real American.

‘Sonia Married.’

‘September.’

Mr Gosse and His Friends.

‘Madeleine.’

Landor in Little.

Winged Phrases.

Real Letters.

The Limits of Perfection.

Maturity and Immaturity.

Watts-Dunton’s Dilemma.

Memories of Meredith.

‘Gold and Iron.’

[1920]

Pictures and Portraits.

An American Poet.

Cleverness and Youth.

Mr Norris’s Method.

Freudian Fiction.

‘The Higher Court.’

An Imperfect Lady.

A Good Daughter.

An Old Novel.

The Wrong Way of Reading.

‘The Mills of the Gods.’

A Disillusioned Romantic.

The Pursuit of Beauty.

Pure English.

The Plumage Bill.

‘The Cherry Orchard.’

A Born Writer.

Gorky on Tolstoy.

A Character Sketch.

John Evelyn.

Postscript or Prelude?

Pleasant Stories.

A Flying Lesson.

[1921]

‘Revolution.’

Mr Norris’s Standard.

‘Vision and Design.’

Henley’s Criticism.

A Prince of Prose.

George Eliot (1819—1880)

Congreve.

Ethel Smyth.

Scott’s Character.

Trousers.

Fantasy.

[1922]

A Letter to a Lady in Paraguay.

[1923]

Romance and the Heart.

Sir Thomas Browne.

An Impression of Gissing.

‘Maud-Evelyn, &c.’ and ‘The Sacred Fount’.

‘The Art of Thomas Hardy.’

The Chinese Shoe.

[1924]

‘The Poems, English and Latin, of Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury.’

‘Glimpses of Authors.’

‘Unpublished Letters of Matthew Arnold.’

‘Arthur Yates: an Autobiography.’

‘Letters and Journals of Anne Chalmers.’

I was given the opportunity …

Aesthetically speaking, the new aquarium …

‘Anatole France, the Man and His Work.’

The Private View of the Royal Academy …

Mr Benson’s Memories.

‘Marie Elizabeth Towneley.’

What is a Good Novel?

‘Unwritten History.’

‘The Life and Last Words of Wilfrid Ewart.’

‘Robert Smith Surtees.’

The Weekend.

Stendhal.

‘Days That Are Gone.’

‘Before the Mast—And After.’

‘The Truth at Last.’

Character in Fiction.

Editions-de-Luxe.

Strangely enough, that engaging acrobat …

The cheapening of motor-cars.

Appreciations.

The Schoolroom Floor.

Restoration Comedy.

It is strange as one enters the Mansard Gallery …

Not the least pitiable victims …

‘Richard Hakluyt.’

‘Smoke Rings and Roundelays.’

‘Memories of a Militant.’

‘Peggy. The Story of One Score Years and Ten.’

Can neither war nor peace …

‘These Were the Muses.’

‘The Faithful Shepherdess’ …

[1925]

‘Coming Back to London…’

‘This for Remembrance.’

The Two Samuel Butlers.

‘Guests and Memories: Annals of a Seaside Villa.’

‘Mainly Victorian.’

John Addington Symonds.

‘Further Reminiscences, 1864—1894.’

‘The Letters of Mary Russell Mitford.’

‘What the Bloods of the ’Nineties Used to Say …’

‘A Player Under Three Reigns.’

‘The Tragic Life of Vincent Van Gogh.’

Gipsy or Governess?

‘Celebrities of Our Times.’

‘The Tale of Genji.’

‘Pattledom.’

‘Unknown Essex.’

‘In My Anecdotage.’

‘Time, Taste, and Furniture.’

‘A Brilliant Englishwoman Writes to Me …’

‘In Any Family Save the Darwins …’

Congreve.

‘Twenty Years of My Life.’

Saint Samuel of Fleet Street.

Melba.

‘Some of the Smaller Manor Houses of Sussex.’

‘From Hall-Boy to House-Steward.’

[1926]

‘Mary Elizabeth Haldane, a Record of a Hundred Years.’

‘Queen Alexandra the Well-Beloved.’

‘Paradise in Piccadilly.’

‘Reminiscences of Mrs Comyns Carr.’

‘The Days of Dickens.’

‘The Flurried Years.’

‘Steeplejacks and Steeple jacking.’

Romance and the ’Nineties.

Laughter and Tears.

Julia Margaret Cameron.

George Eliot.

[1927]

‘Victorian Jottings.’

‘The Immortal Isles.’

What Is a Novel?

The Governess of Downing Street.

[1928]

‘Memories and Notes.’

‘The Cornish Miner.’

‘Stalky’s Reminiscences.’

Preferences.

Mr Yeats.

‘Behind the Scenes with Cyril Maude.’

‘Behind the Brass Plate.’

‘The Book of Catherine Wells.’

‘On the Stage: An Autobiography.’

An Introduction to Mrs Dalloway.

‘Clara Butt: Her Life Story.’

‘Day In, Day Out.’

‘The Diaries of Mary, Countess of Meath.’

Plays and Pictures.

Memories.

[1929]

On Not Knowing French.

The ‘Censorship’ of Books.

[1930]

Foreword to Recent Paintings by Vanessa Bell.

Augustine Birrell.

[1931]

George Eliot, 1819-1880.

[1933]

London Squares.

[1934]

Foreword to Catalogue of Recent Paintings by Vanessa Bell.

[1937]

Miss Janet Case: Classical Scholar and Teacher.

[1938]

Lady Ottoline Morrell.

America, which I Have Never Seen …

Women Must Weep.

[1940]

Georgiana and Florence.

[]

1904

‘The Son of Royal Langbrith.’

[The Son of Royal Langbrith (Harper & Bros, 1904) by W.D. Howells]

Mr Howells is the exponent of the novel of thought as distinct from the novel of action. Men interest him primarily as thinking, not as doing, animals. The Son of Royal Langbrith is another experiment in this line, and one that has a singular interest. The outline of the story is this:—There was a certain Royal Langbrith, an owner of paper-mills in a New England town. He has been long dead when the book opens, so that his child knows him only through the words of the widow, which, for a good reason, are few. But the son has contrived to make a hero of his father, and a church and a village library are proofs of the munificence of the dead man. We are soon let into the secret, however, which is the property of the widow, one Dr Anther, and two others—that the public-spirited Royal Langbrith is a grotesque myth; he was in reality a scoundrel who got his wealth by appropriating the inventions of another. But, as he was not exposed in his life-time, there seems no need why the unpleasant truth should be told now, except for this reason—Dr Anther and Mrs Langbrith are old friends, and wish to marry, the fatal objection being that the son James reveres his father’s memory so deeply that for his mother to remarry would be sacrilege. Mrs Langbrith is weak, and cannot face her son’s displeasure, nor give him the reasons that make his father’s memory anything but venerable. As he grows up he enlarges upon the paternal virtues to such an extent as to present a medallion of his father to the library. The one person from whose lips James would naturally learn his father’s character is the unfortunate Hawberk, whose inventions were stolen, and who was ousted from his partnership in the prosperity of the mills by a threat to disclose a slightly discreditable past to his wife. But his hardship makes him take to opium-eating, and in his dreams he cherishes the delusion that Langbrith was his best friend. Indeed, all things combine to make it necessary for the living to shield the memory of the dead man, even at their own sacrifice. The chief sufferers are Mrs Langbrith and the high-minded Dr Anther, whose conscience will not let him disabuse the son of his romantic ideal, although this ideal puts an end to his own chance of happiness. It does, in fact, happen as Anther foretold: Mrs Langbrith consents to marry him without telling her son the truth about his father. James, when he hears of the engagement, accuses both of infidelity to his father’s memory. Mrs Langbrith has not the courage to withstand him, and breaks off the engagement. At this point the opium-eating Hawberk recovers, and his delusions about Royal Langbrith disappear. He decides, however, as James Langbrith is in love with his daughter, that Royal’s crimes did enough harm in their day, and that there is no reason to let them affect the lives of the next generation. He dies suddenly, without breathing the secret to any one. James Langbrith, meanwhile, in disgust at his mother and Anther, had migrated to Paris; he returns on hearing of Hawberk’s death, and in the train meets the fourth person who can tell him his father’s true history—his uncle John. John is moved by an insulting comparison between him and Royal, who was ‘at least a gentleman’, to show what kind of gentleman he was, which he does with great power and effect. The result is that James reaches his mother’s house crushed, and prepared to accept her marriage, and learns from her that Dr Anther is just dead of typhoid. The book ends very naturally with the happy marriage of James and Hope Hawberk, and the population of Saxmills is suffered, after consideration, to revere the medallion of Royal Langbrith as that of a good man and citizen. The weak point of the book seems to us to lie in the fact of James’s devotion to his father, on which the plot mainly depends. He had no materials for his worship, except a few vague words of his mother, the library, and a not very pleasant portrait. And yet it is for this reason that, over twenty years after her husband’s death, he objects to his mother’s remarriage. It would be more natural to object, not that his father should have a successor, but that he himself should have a stepfather. Another, however, is personally acceptable, and his sole disqualification is that he is to succeed Royal Langbirth. It is difficult to believe that a young man’s devotion to a father whom he could not remember would lead him to such extravagances. However, the mere plot is not essential to a book which treats with such fineness of subtler things. The grasp of the ‘dead hand’ is felt in every page, and the book is full of fine observation and delicate character-drawing. It is needless to say that the whole is beautifully proportioned, and told in the reserved and expressive language of a man who has much skill in writing.

[Guardian, Dec 14, 1904]

[]

1905

‘Next-Door Neighbours.’

[Next-Door Neighbours (Hodder & Stoughton, 1904) by W. Pett Ridge]

Mr Pett Ridge is a gentleman who finds his best entertainment in London streets. He is an open-eyed and interested observer, who overhears a few words, jots them down in his notebook, and passes on. We can imagine that he is attracted by any little street incident, and forms one of the crowd which collects round a fallen cab-horse or a drunken man. He always chooses a seat next the driver of the omnibus and likes to enter into conversation with his fellow-passengers. He has given us in this book the result of his observations in nineteen very short stories, if stories they can be called. They have no plot as a general rule, but are rather a series of brief lantern-slides which pass over the sheet and disappear. The scenes are almost all laid in London back streets, the figures are those of shopgirls, policemen, porters, and clerks at railway stations. They are, for the most part, very good-tempered, slightly commonplace people, who fall in love or don’t fall in love. In either case our sympathies are not very deeply stirred. Mr Pett Ridge’s plots certainly do not strike one as probable. Does a young lady behind a counter think it a point of honour to ask the fireman who rescues her to become her husband, though she is at the time engaged to another? According to Mr Pett Ridge she does, and the incident deserves to be made into a short story and bound up into a book. These nineteen stories, we are of opinion, might with advantage have been left to adorn the columns of a daily paper, for they are not of more than ephemeral interest.

[Guardian, Jan 4, 1905]

[]

The Feminine Note in Fiction.

[The Feminine Note in Fiction (Chapman & Hall, 1904) by W.L. Courtney]

Mr Courtney is certain that there is such a thing as the feminine note in fiction; he desires, moreover, to define its nature in the book before us, though at the start he admits that the feminine and masculine points of view are so different that it is difficult for one to understand the other. At any rate, he has made a laborious attempt; it is, perhaps, partly for the reason just stated that he ends where he begins. He gives us eight very patient and careful studies in the works of living women writers, in which he outlines the plots of their most successful books in detail. But we would have spared him the trouble willingly in exchange for some definite verdict; we can all read Mrs Humphry Ward, for instance, and remember her story, but we want a critic to separate her virtues and her failings, to assign her right place in literature and to decide which of her characteristics are essentially feminine and why, and what is their significance. Mr Courtney implies by his title that he will, at any rate, accomplish this last, and it is with disappointment, though not with surprise, that we discover that he has done nothing of the kind. Is it not too soon after all to criticise the ‘feminine note’ in anything? And will not the adequate critic of women be a woman?

Mr Courtney, we think, feels something of this difficulty; his introduction, in which we expected to find some kind of summing-up, contains only some very tentative criticisms and conclusions. Women, we gather, are seldom artists, because they have a passion for detail which conflicts with the proper artistic proportion of their work. We would cite Sappho and Jane Austen as examples of two great women who combine exquisite detail with a supreme sense of artistic proportion. Women, again, excel in ‘close analytic miniature work;’ they are more happy when they reproduce than when they create; their genius is for psychological analysis—all of which we note with interest, though we reserve our judgment for the next hundred years or bequeath the duty to our successor. Yet it is worth noting, as proof of the difficulty of the task which Mr Courtney has set himself, that he finds two at least of his eight women writers ‘artists’—that two others possess a strength which in this age one has to call masculine, and, in fact, that no pair of them come under any one heading, though, of course, in the same way as men, they can be divided roughly into schools. At any rate, it seems to be clear according to Mr Courtney that more and more novels are written by women for women, which is the cause, he declares, that the novel as a work of art is disappearing. The first part of his statement may well be true; it means that women having found their voices have something to say which is naturally of supreme interest and meaning to women, but the value of which we cannot yet determine. The assertion that the woman novelist is extinguishing the novel as a work of art seems to us, however, more doubtful. It is, at any rate, possible that the widening of her intelligence by means of education and study of the Greek and Latin classics may give her that sterner view of literature which will make an artist of her, so that, having blurted out her message somewhat formlessly, she will in due time fashion it into permanent artistic shape. Mr Courtney has given us material for many questions such as these, but his book has done nothing to prevent them from still remaining questions.

[Guardian, Jan 25, 1905]

[]

‘A Belle of the Fifties.’

[A Belle of the Fifties: Memoirs of Mrs Clay, of Alabama. Put into Narrative Form by Ada Sterling (Heinemann, 1905).]

I have come upon no record of any other woman of her time who has filled so powerful a place politically, whose belleship has been so long sustained, or whose magnetism and compelling fascinations have swayed others so universally as those of Mrs Clay-Clopton.

So writes the lady to whom these memoirs were dictated, and to confess that one has not heard of so distinguished a person argued, at any rate, a culpable ignorance of the America of the Fifties. Indeed, Mrs Clay’s memories show her—she is still alive, but the book reaches only to the year 1866—to have been a very important person in her day, and in that day all kinds of stirring things came to pass. Her position as the wife of Senator Clement Clay, junior, and her own personal gifts gave her not only the influence of her ‘belleship’, as the quaint American has it, but a real political power as well. She was, in fact, an American version of our European ‘great lady’, with certain characteristic differences, and women of her type were commoner before than after the war. All this makes her story well worth listening to, and she tells it with the charming candour of the old who can dispense with the hesitations and self-consciousness of those who have no such reason to be sure of themselves. As we read we feel that we are one of the circle of great nephews and nieces who love to hear for the hundredth time, perhaps, what a brilliant and beautiful young woman this old lady of eighty was fifty years ago—how many distinguished men admired her, what dress she wore at Mrs Gwin’s famous fancy-dress ball in ’58, and those sadder memories which still have power to stir her blood, of the war and the terrible days after the murder of Lincoln.

Mrs Clay, born Virginia Tunstall, came of the aristocracy of America, and was brought up in Tuscaloosa, the capital of Alabama, where the old aristocratic tradition of the South was splendidly preserved, and the planters lived the lives of great English landowners, with vast estates and retinues of slaves dependent on them. All this was pleasant and as it should be, and the little girl was brought up to honour three things religiously—her name, blood, and section; her Bible; and the Richmond Enquirer. She early showed herself possessed of beauty, an impulsive wit, and great power of fascination. She tells us how before she was fifteen she had her first bitter sorrow. She fell desperately in love with a hero, who proved to be already provided with wife and child, and for twelve or fourteen hours she went through an agony of disappointment. She recovered, happily, and soon afterwards married the rising young statesman, Clement Clay. Immediately after their marriage he was elected a Senator of the United States, and thus began her brilliant career in political circles at Washington. Here, although she notes as early as 1854 the growing strain between the North and the South, which made social civilities difficult between them, society was almost feverishly gay. The Southerners, by virtue of their inherited polish, were the leaders of society, and, as we guess, Mrs Clay was the leader of the Southerners. Washington, though the capital of a democracy, was as rigidly divided into sets, and these sets were as strictly ruled by their separate codes of etiquette as any capital that owns a court and a nobility. The foreign ministers lent an air of distinction to the diplomatic gatherings, and, says Mrs Clay, were the ‘critics and mentors of the Americans, who were not so highly accomplished’. In the ‘mess’ of the Southerners, she declares, there was ‘scarcely a man who had not won a conspicuous position in the nation’s affairs: hardly a woman without wit or beauty’. The ladies, indeed, received tributes of admiration which are, we are told, of international fame. There was the famous trio of beauties—Mrs Pugh, the perfect brunette; Mrs Douglas, the blonde; Mrs Pryor, a brunette of lighter complexion, with soft brown hair and eyes—and it was to Mrs Pugh that the Austrian Ambassador paid the compliment which is now, as it deserves to be, a ‘classic in the capital’:

It was at a dance at which pretty women thronged. As the Minister’s gaze rested upon Miss Chalfant (afterwards Mrs Pugh) his eyes expanded with admiration. Approaching, he knelt suddenly before her, exclaiming ‘Madame! I have from my Empress a piece of precious lace’—and he fumbled, alas! vainly in his pockets as he spoke—‘which her Majesty has commanded me to present to the most beautiful woman in Washington. You … you are, more—the most beautiful in the world! I have not with me the lace, but I will send it, if you will permit me!’ And he kept his word.

Then there were other ladies—Miss Walton, Madame de Bodisco, Addie Cutts, and Mrs Pendleton—whose portraits in the curls and crinolines of the Fifties are given us to make good their long-forgotten claim to belleship. Then we have the description in minute detail of the dress of fifty years ago; how ‘Low necks and lace berthas were worn almost universally; panelled skirts, in which two materials, a plain and embossed or embroidered fabric, were combined, and basques with postilion backs became the order of the day.’ Fine dress material, we observe, had to be bought abroad and made up at home. Thanks to Mrs Clay, we are able to realise that the ladies who were covered with all this old-fashioned finery did really exist beneath the mass of artificialities which makes our own early Victorian days so strangely unreal. There is the delightful ‘Lady’ Crittenden, for instance, who appears before us, mountainous and stately, with her dress slipping from her ‘superbly moulded’ shoulders and her skirt extended over a monster crinoline—a splendid monument of her time. She was wont to boast of her ‘perfect happiness’, which she accounts for thus:

I have been married three times, and in each alliance I have got just what I wanted. My first marriage was for love, and it was mine as fully as I could wish; my second for money, and Heaven was as good to me in this instance; my third was for position, and that too is mine. What more could I ask?

There is a certain delightful freedom from restraint about the American; witness also the senator who kept a supply of soft wood in his desk in the Chamber which he whittled perpetually—on one occasion into a heart—during the sitting, and blew kisses to the Ladies’ Gallery. We cannot dwell further upon what are somewhat barbarously called the ‘antebellum days’, nor can we do justice to the famous fancy dress ball to which Mrs Clay went dressed as Aunt Ruthy Partington, an American Mrs Malaprop, and where she so distinguished herself with a flow of witticisms, which did not cease all the evening, that her husband declared, ‘When she married me America lost its Siddons!’ Mrs Clay was famous for her wit, we gather, and made so bold as to pun upon the English Ambassador’s name when she asked him whether some lovely American lady was likely to be ‘Lyomsed’. But soon came ‘the saddest day of my life’, when, on 21 January 1861, Mr Clay took up his portfolio and left the Senate Chamber. The whole of the Southern party went with him, the capital was deserted, and the four years’ war begun.

Mrs Clay was by birth and sympathy a Southerner—a lady of vehement emotions, who took up her cause with enthusiasm. Consequently we are not allowed to weigh the questions which separated the two sides, and almost immediately we find ourselves at the Southern headquarters at Richmond. McClellan’s army was gradually closing round, and the city soon took on some of the familiar aspects of a place besieged by an enemy. Nevertheless, Mrs Clay had brought some fine dresses to the front, and with undaunted energy, The Rivals, in which she acted Mrs Malaprop, was given by the officers and their wives to the distant boom of the Northern guns. But food and money running short, it was thought advisable for Mrs Clay and others to seek shelter in the South, and she went to stay with friends in Georgia. The old home at Huntsville was in possession of the enemy, and Mrs Clay had to picture the Northern general’s daughter, Miss Mitchell, mounted on her mare and dressed in her own green riding-habit. Emissaries from Europe told only of hostile feeling towards the South, and the superior resources of the North began to tell. In short, the fortunes of the South were waning, and Mrs Clay paints an attractive picture of the old plantation life as she looked on it for the last time. She stayed at the great Redcliffe estate in South Carolina, where 400 slaves were owned by one man. The colony was entirely self-supporting; they had their own mills, their smithies, their farms, and their flocks and herds, and they all looked up, as did feudal retainers in mediæval England, to one lord whose word was law. Their lives were of idyllic peace and prosperity, according to Mrs Clay, and the freedom for which they were not ready was a gift that they abused. After peace was made she describes how she went back to her husband’s city to be jostled in the streets by the now insolent and emancipated negroes, and the conclusion she draws is, naturally, the conclusion of the deposed aristocrat.

After Lincoln’s murder Mr Clay, together with President Davis, was imprisoned under conditions of brutal severity at Fortress Monroe, and the rest of Mrs Clay’s book is devoted to a detailed account of her efforts to secure his freedom, which hardly possess for us the interest that they naturally have for a partisan. He was finally liberated in 1866 and, here, briefly foretelling his death, worn out by services and sufferings undergone for his country, Mrs Clay brings her most entertaining book to an end. Her own brilliant part in the fortunes of her country at a critical stage of its growth was over, and we can only thank her for letting us share in the memories which she relates with such spirit and enthusiasm.

[Guardian, Feb 8, 1905]

[]

Mr Henry James’s Latest Novel.

[The Golden Bowl (Methuen, 1905) by Henry James.]

Mr Henry James is one of the very few living writers who are sufficiently great to possess a point of view. We know by this time what that point of view is, and when we read a new book by him we do not expect to make discoveries, but to look once more at familiar sights through the old spectacles. And yet, though he has written so much and so well, this last book, with its all but 550 closely printed pages, gives proof that he finds the old problems as engrossing as ever, and is still toiling to say what he means, to say all he means, to leave nothing unsaid that can by any possibility complete the picture. We may dispute his theory of what a novel ought to be; but no one can deny that he brings gifts to the task which fail very little of first-rate quality, and that in using them he employs a high conscientiousness which is as admirable as it is rare. In the 550 pages of his last book there is not one, we may assert, that bears traces of haste or carelessness; there is not one that does not make one think; not one that has not its own exquisite felicity of word or thought which alone would illumine a whole chapter of an ordinary novel.

The plot, if one can call it so, is of the slightest; an episode—an incident to be disposed of by the average novelist in ten pages or less. Everything that happens in The Golden Bowl might have happened to a score of people one knows; but it needs skill of the very highest to make novels out of such everyday material. Mr James is one of the few who attempt to picture people as they are; his work, therefore, always commands our respect and gratitude. But, again, though he is almost over-scrupulous not to exaggerate, to see people as they are and the lives that they really lead, it is naturally through his own eyes that he sees them. Mr James’s eyes, we are often led to think, must be provided with some extra fine lens, the number of things he sees is so extraordinary. It follows that his characters are similarly endowed. The 550 pages of The Golden Bowl are devoted to showing how four people met a certain natural difficulty which must frequently occur outside Mr James’s novels, but which can hardly ever, one would imagine, produce such an amount of thinking and analysing and hair-splitting as it does within them. They are all four superlatively high-minded, and only too solicitous for each other’s happiness. The book, indeed, might be called a study in the evils of unselfishness, so much pain does their care for each other inflict. The tragedy, if that is not too strong a word, is acted in dumb show. A ‘scene’ would have been impossible between all these well-bred and distinguished people, but Mr James has a singular power of intimating what four separate people are thinking and showing us the silent conflict of their thought without making his character speak or act. The greater part of the book is taken up with a long-drawn-out struggle for supremacy between two women; but though there are vital interests at stake and all the force of both is put into the contest, the battle and victory are eminently decorous, and when speech is necessary the words are few, and the voices are not raised.

It is, after all, a slight theme on which to spend so much ingenuity, and we suffer from a surfeit of words. For all the skill and care that have been spent on them the actors remain but so many distinguished ghosts. We have been living with thoughts and emotions, not with live people. The effect of all this marvellous accumulation of detail—all of it doubtless true, all there to see if we look close enough—obscures the main outlines. Mr James is like an artist who, with a sure knowledge of anatomy, paints every bone and muscle in the human frame; the portrait would be greater as a work of art if he were content to say less and suggest more. But Mr James tortures himself and wearies his readers in his strenuous effort to get everything said that there is to say. Many overburdened sentences could be quoted as proof of this curious sense of duty: ‘This perception expanded, on the spot, as a flower, one of the strangest, might, at a breath, have suddenly opened.’ ‘She rubbed with her palm the polished mahogany of the balustrade, which was mounted on fine iron-work, eighteenth-century English.’ These are trivial instances of detail which, perpetually insisted on, fatigues without adding to the picture. Genius would have dissolved them, and whole chapters of the same kind, into a single word. Genius, however, is precisely what we do not find; and it is for this reason that we do not count Mr James’s characters among the creatures of our brains, nor can we read his books easily and without conscious effort. But when we have made this reservation our praise must be unstinted. There is no living novelist whose standard is higher, or whose achievement is so consistently great.

[Guardian, Feb 22, 1905]

[]

The Decay of Essay-Writing.

The spread of education and the necessity which haunts us to impart what we have acquired have led, and will lead still further, to some startling results. We read of the over-burdened British Museum—how even its appetite for printed matter flags, and the monster pleads that it can swallow no more. This public crisis has long been familiar in private houses. One member of the household is almost officially deputed to stand at the hall door with flaming sword and do battle with the invading armies. Tracts, pamphlets, advertisements, gratuitous copies of magazines, and the literary productions of friends come by post, by van, by messenger—come at all hours of the day and fall in the night, so that the morning breakfast-table is fairly snowed up with them.

This age has painted itself more faithfully than any other in a myriad of clever and conscientious though not supremely great works of fiction; it has tried seriously to liven the faded colours of bygone ages; it has delved industriously with spade and axe in the rubbish-heaps and ruins; and, so far, we can only applaud our use of pen and ink. But if you have a monster like the British public to feed, you will try to tickle its stale palate in new ways; fresh and amusing shapes must be given to the old commodities—for we really have nothing so new to say that it will not fit into one of the familiar forms. So we confine ourselves to no one literary medium; we try to be new by being old; we revive mystery-plays and affect an archaic accent; we deck ourselves in the fine raiment of an embroidered style; we cast off all clothing and disport ourselves nakedly. In short, there is no end to our devices, and at this very moment probably some ingenious youth is concocting a fresh one which, be it ever so new, will grow stale in its turn. If there are thus an infinite variety of fashions in the external shapes of our wares, there are a certain number—naturally not so many—of wares that are new in substance and in form which we have either invented or very much developed. Perhaps the most significant of these literary inventions is the invention of the personal essay. It is true that it is at least as old as Montaigne, but we may count him the first of the moderns. It has been used with considerable frequency since his day, but its popularity with us is so immense and so peculiar that we are justified in looking upon it as something of our own—typical, characteristic, a sign of the times which will strike the eye of our great-great-grandchildren. Its significance, indeed, lies not so much in the fact that we have attained any brilliant success in essay-writing—no one has approached the essays of Elia—but in the undoubted facility with which we write essays as though this were beyond all others our natural way of speaking. The peculiar form of an essay implies a peculiar substance; you can say in this shape what you cannot with equal fitness say in any other. A very wide definition obviously must be that which will include all the varieties of thought which are suitably enshrined in essays; but perhaps if you say that an essay is essentially egoistical you will not exclude many essays and you will certainly include a portentous number. Almost all essays begin with a capital I—‘I think’, ‘I feel’—and when you have said that, it is clear that you are not writing history or philosophy or biography or anything but an essay, which may be brilliant or profound, which may deal with the immortality of the soul, or the rheumatism in your left shoulder, but is primarily an expression of personal opinion.

We are not—there is, alas! no need to prove it—more subject to ideas than our ancestors; we are not, I hope, in the main more egoistical; but there is one thing in which we are more highly skilled than they are; and that is in manual dexterity with a pen. There can be no doubt that it is to the art of penmanship that we owe our present literature of essays. The very great of old—Homer and Aeschylus—could dispense with a pen; they were not inspired by sheets of paper and gallons of ink; no fear that their harmonies, passed from lip to lip, should lose their cadence and die. But our essayists write because the gift of writing has been bestowed on them. Had they lacked writing-masters we should have lacked essayists. There are, of course, certain distinguished people who use this medium from genuine inspiration because it best embodies the soul of their thought. But, on the other hand, there is a very large number who make the fatal pause, and the mechanical act of writing is allowed to set the brain in motion which should only be accessible to a higher inspiration.

The essay, then, owes its popularity to the fact that its proper use is to express one’s personal peculiarities, so that under the decent veil of print one can indulge one’s egoism to the full. You need know nothing of music, art, or literature to have a certain interest in their productions, and the great burden of modern criticism is simply the expression of such individual likes and dislikes—the amiable garrulity of the tea-table—cast into the form of essays. If men and women must write, let them leave the great mysteries of art and literature unassailed; if they told us frankly not of the books that we can all read and the pictures which hang for us all to see, but of that single book to which they alone have the key and of that solitary picture whose face is shrouded to all but one gaze—if they would write of themselves—such writing would have its own permanent value. The simple words ‘I was born’ have somehow a charm beside which all the splendours of romance and fairy-tale turn to moonshine and tinsel. But though it seems thus easy enough to write of one’s self, it is, as we know, a feat but seldom accomplished. Of the multitude of autobiographies that are written, one or two alone are what they pretend to be. Confronted with the terrible spectre of themselves, the bravest are inclined to run away or shade their eyes. And thus, instead of the honest truth which we should all respect, we are given timid side-glances in the shape of essays, which, for the most part, fail in the cardinal virtue of sincerity. And those who do not sacrifice their beliefs to the turn of a phrase or the glitter of paradox think it beneath the dignity of the printed word to say simply what it means; in print they must pretend to an oracular and infallible nature. To say simply ‘I have a garden, and I will tell you what plants do best in my garden’ possibly justified its egoism; but to say ‘I have no sons, though I have six daughters, all unmarried, but I will tell you how I should have brought up my sons had I had any’ is not interesting, cannot be useful, and is a specimen of the amazing and unclothed egoism for which first the art of penmanship and then the invention of essay-writing are responsible.

[Academy & Literature, Feb 25, 1905]

[]

Street Music.

‘Street musicians are counted a nuisance’ by the candid dwellers in most London squares, and they have taken the trouble to emblazon this terse bit of musical criticism upon a board which bears other regulations for the peace and propriety of the square. No artist, however, pays the least attention to criticism, and the artist of the streets is properly scornful of the judgment of the British public. It is remarkable that in spite of such discouragement as I have noted—enforced on occasion by a British policeman—the vagrant musician is if anything on the increase. The German band gives a weekly concert as regularly as the Queen’s Hall orchestra; the Italian organ grinders are as faithful to their audience and reappear punctually on the same platform, and in addition to these recognised masters every street has an occasional visit from some wandering star. The stout Teuton and the swarthy Italian certainly live on something more substantial than the artistic satisfaction of their own souls; and it is therefore probable that the coins, which it is beneath the dignity of the true lover of music to throw from the drawing-room window, are tendered at the area steps. There is an audience, in short, who is willing to pay for even such crude melody as this.

Music, to be successful in a street, must be loud before it is beautiful, and for this reason brass is the favourite instrument, and one may conclude that the street musician who uses his own voice or a violin has a genuine reason for his choice. I have seen violinists who were obviously using their instrument to express something in their own hearts as they swayed by the kerb in Fleet Street; and the copper, though rags make it acceptable, was, as it is to all who love their work, a perfectly incongruous payment. Indeed, I once followed a disreputable old man who, with eyes shut so that he might the better perceive the melodies of his soul, literally played himself from Kensington to Knightsbridge in a trance of musical ecstasy, from which a coin would have been a disagreeable awakening. It is, indeed, impossible not to respect any one who has a god like this within them; for music that takes possession of the soul so that nakedness and hunger are forgotten must be divine in its nature. It is true that the melodies that issued from his labouring violin were in themselves laughable, but he, certainly, was not. Whatever the accomplishment, we must always treat with tenderness the efforts of those who strive honestly to express the music that is in them; for the gift of conception is certainly superior to the gift of expression, and it is not unreasonable to suppose that the men and women who scrape for the harmonies that never come while the traffic goes thundering by have as great a possession, though fated never to impart it, as the masters whose facile eloquence enchants thousands to listen.

There is more than one reason perhaps why the dwellers in squares look upon the street musician as a nuisance; his music disturbs the householder at his legitimate employment, and the vagrant and unorthodox nature of such a trade irritates a well-ordered mind. Artists of all kinds have invariably been looked on with disfavour, especially by English people, not solely because of the eccentricities of the artistic temperament, but because we have trained ourselves to such perfection of civilisation that expression of any kind has something almost indecent—certainly irreticent—about it. Few parents, we observe, are willing that their sons should become painters or poets or musicians, not only for worldly reasons, but because in their own hearts they consider that it is unmanly to give expression to the thoughts and emotions which the arts express and which it should be the endeavour of the good citizen to repress. Art in this way is certainly not encouraged; and it is probably easier for an artist than for a member of any other profession to descend to the pavement. The artist is not only looked upon with contempt but with a suspicion that has not a little of fear in it. He is possessed by a spirit which the ordinary person cannot understand, but which is clearly very potent, and exercises so great a sway over him that when he hears its voice he must always rise and follow.

Nowadays we are not credulous, and though we are not comfortable in the presence of artists we do our best to domesticate them. Never was such respect paid to the successful artist as there is to-day; and perhaps we may see in this a sign of what many people have foretold, and that the gods who went into exile when the first Christian altars rose will come back to enjoy their own again. Many writers have tried to trace these old pagans, and have professed to find them in the disguise of animals and in the shelter of far-away woods and mountains; but it is not fantastic to suppose that while every one is searching for them they are working their charms in the midst of us, and that those strange heathens who do the bidding of no man and are inspired by a voice that is other than human in their ears are not really as other people, but are either the very gods themselves or their priests and prophets upon earth. Certainly I should be inclined to ascribe some such divine origin to musicians at any rate, and it is probably some suspicion of this kind that drives us to persecute them as we do. For if the stringing together of words which nevertheless may convey some useful information to the mind, or the laying on of colours which may represent some tangible object, are employments which can be but tolerated at best, how are we to regard the man who spends his time in making tunes? Is not his occupation the least respectable—the least useful and necessary—of the three? It is certain that you can carry away nothing that can be of service to you in your day’s work from listening to music; but a musician is not merely a useful creature, to many, I believe, he is the most dangerous of the whole tribe of artists. He is the minister of the wildest of all the gods, who has not yet learnt to speak with human voice, or to convey to the mind the likeness of human things. It is because music incites within us something that is wild and inhuman like itself—a spirit that we would willingly stamp out and forget—that we are distrustful of musicians and loath to put ourselves under their power.

To be civilised is to have taken the measure of our own capabilities and to hold them in a perfect state of discipline; but one of our gifts has, as we conceive, so slight a power of beneficence, so unmeasured a power of harm, that far from cultivating it we have done our best to cripple and stifle it. We look upon those who have given up their lives to the service of this god as Christians regard the fanatic worshippers of some eastern idol. This arises perhaps from an uneasy foreknowledge that when the pagan gods come back the god we have never worshipped will have his revenge upon us. It will be the god of music who will breathe madness into our brains, crack the walls of our temples, and drive us in loathing of our rhythmless lives to dance and circle for ever in obedience to his voice.

The number of those that declare, as though confessing their immunity from some common weakness, that they have no ear for music is increasing, though such a confession ought to be as serious as the confession that one is colour blind. The way in which music is taught and presented by its ministers must to some extent be held answerable for this. Music is dangerous as we know, and those that teach it have not the courage to impart it in its strength, from fear of what would happen to the child who should drink so intoxicating a draught. The whole of rhythm and harmony have been pressed, like dried flowers, into the neatly divided scales, the tones and semitones of the pianoforte. The safest and easiest attribute of music—its tune—is taught, but rhythm, which is its soul, is allowed to escape like the winged creature it is. Thus educated people who have been taught what it is safe for them to know of music are those who oftenest boast of their want of ear, and the uneducated, whose sense of rhythm has never been divorced or made subsidiary to their sense of tune, are those who cherish the greatest love of music and are oftenest heard producing it.

It may be indeed that the sense of rhythm is stronger in people whose minds are not elaborately trained to other pursuits, as it is true that savages who have none of the arts of civilisation are very sensitive to rhythm, before they are awake to music proper. The beat of rhythm in the mind is akin to the beat of the pulse in the body; and thus though many are deaf to tune hardly any one is so coarsely organised as not to hear the rhythm of its own heart in words and music and movement. It is because it is thus inborn in us that we can never silence music, any more than we can stop our heart from beating; and it is for this reason too that music is so universal and has the strange and illimitable power of a natural force.

In spite of all that we have done to repress music it has a power over us still whenever we give ourselves up to its sway that no picture, however fair, or words however stately, can approach. The strange sight of a room full of civilised people moving in rhythmic motion at the command of a band of musicians is one to which we have grown accustomed, but it may be that some day it will suggest the vast possibilities that lie within the power of rhythm, and the whole of our life will be revolutionised as it was when man first realised the power of steam. The barrel-organ, for instance, by reason of its crude and emphatic rhythm, sets all the legs of the passers by walking in time; a band in the centre of the wild discord of cabs and carriages would be more effectual than any policeman; not only cabman but horse would find himself constrained to keep time in the dance, and to follow whatever measure of trot or canter the trumpets dictated. This principle has been in some degree recognised in the army, where troops are inspired to march into battle to the rhythm of music. And when the sense of rhythm was thoroughly alive in every mind we should if I mistake not, notice a great improvement not only in the ordering of all the affairs of daily life, but also in the art of writing, which is nearly allied to the art of music, and is chiefly degenerate because it has forgotten its allegiance. We should invent—or rather remember—the innumerable metres which we have so long outraged, and which would restore both prose and poetry to the harmonies that the ancients heard and observed.

Rhythm alone might easily lead to excesses; but when the ear possessed its secret, tune and harmony would be united with it, and those actions which by means of rhythm were performed punctually and in time, would now be done with whatever of melody is natural to each. Conversation, for instance, would not only obey its proper laws of metre as dictated by our sense of rhythm, but would be inspired by charity, love and wisdom, and ill-temper or sarcasm would sound to the bodily ear as terrible discords and false notes. We all know that the voices of friends are discordant after listening to beautiful music because they disturb the echo of rhythmic harmony, which for the moment makes of life a united and musical whole; and it seems probable considering this that there is a music in the air for which we are always straining our ears and which is only partially made audible to us by the transcripts which the great musicians are able to preserve. In forests and solitary places an attentive ear can detect something very like a vast pulsation, and if our ears were educated we might hear the music also which accompanies this. Though this is not a human voice it is yet a voice which some part of us can, if we let it, understand, and music perhaps because it is not human is the only thing made by men that can never be mean or ugly.

If, therefore, instead of libraries, philanthropists would bestow free music upon the poor, so that at each street corner the melodies of Beethoven and Brahms and Mozart could be heard, it is probable that all crime and quarrelling would soon be unknown, and the work of the hand and the thoughts of the mind would flow melodiously in obedience to the laws of music. It would then be a crime to account street musicians or any one who interprets the voice of the god as other than a holy man, and our lives would pass from dawn to sunset to the sound of music.

[National Review, no. 265, March 1905]

[]

‘Barham of Beltana.’

[Barham of Beltana (Methuen, 1905) by W.E. Norris]

Mr W.E. Norris inherits the tradition of Anthony Trollope, and like that master produces his novels punctually and copiously because it is his business in life to do so. At this time of day he is not ambitious; he is content to reproduce the surface of a certain section of contemporary English life, and he tells his simple story without any desire to discuss problems or suggest that everything is not precisely as it ought to be. He is the type of writer who regards marriage and the events that precede it as the legitimate end of a novel; and when he has satisfactorily disposed of the difficulties that are necessary to make a plot, the sound of marriage bells is the signal for a general handshaking, and we feel that we can all depart in a state of mild felicity. His last novel is not an exception to Mr Norris’s ordinary rule; there is a sufficiently elaborate plot, which does not harrow our feelings unduly, because we know that it will all be happily solved upon the final page. Mr Norris would probably be the first to admit that real life is deficient in plots; but he would also quite readily agree that there is no need to take his unpretentious pictures too seriously. He has no wish, as he says somewhere, to discuss motives and analyse emotions, and therefore it is necessary for the interest of his story that certain more or less improbable things should happen. The plot of Barham of Beltana, for instance, would be very surprising if it were true, and many modern novelists would think it beneath the dignity of their art to make use of such old-fashioned stage properties. But Mr Norris does not take his art too seriously, and is a little amused by the whole business himself. His writing is always that of a gentleman quite at his ease, and whatever subject he treats he never loses his self-control or says a word more than he means. He has piloted too many heroes and heroines through their difficulties to take any very excessive interest in the performance, and his sympathies, we gather, are with the elderly fathers in the background rather than with the sons and daughters who for the moment occupy the stage. ‘Some of us,’ he says, ‘know well enough what is ordinary in human existence and its ever-recurring developments; but we prefer not to contemplate the normal, the monotonous, the saddening.’ That clearly represents a middle-aged, perhaps a prosaic point of view; but if it is not profound it is certainly sane and sincere, and these are qualities which give all Mr Norris’s work a charm of its own. The present novel will not sadden; it will not excite; but it will provide an hour or two of healthy entertainment; and that, we imagine, is a result with which the author would declare himself content.

[Times Literary Supplement, Mar 17, 1905]

[]

‘By Beach and Bogland.’

[By Beach and Bogland (Fisher Unwin, 1905) by Jane Barlow]

Stories which illustrate the peculiarities of a certain race, whether the Scotch or the Irish, have generally an interest of their own, and the writer who wishes to preserve this charm finds it most obvious in the poorer classes of the people. The peasants who have lived on the same plot of ground for generations, and who seem, in default of other education, to have received some very intimate communication from the land itself, are the genuine natives; and whoever wishes to understand the history of Ireland must decipher these not easily intelligible characters. In Miss Barlow we have an interpreter on whose word we feel we may depend. She does not create by force of a great imagination, but she writes from first-hand knowledge, and gives us a succession of pictures which satisfy partly because they are not ambitious. All the stories in this book describe various scenes in the lives of the peasants in far-away Irish villages; and, though the incidents in their lives are rare and unimportant, this very monotony has a charm, because we feel it to be true. The peasant very often spends a lifetime within the radius of his own little village, and every pebble and blade of grass is seen as through a microscope. The few human beings loom proportionately large. If one old lady loses a shilling it is a serious event, and the whole population turn out to look for it. The importance of shillings in such a world is something that we cannot estimate; the lack of them narrows life to its meanest boundaries. But to make up for their poverty in all the things that money can buy, the sea, the bog, the moorland, have an interest for them that is keener than any merely aesthetic pleasure. All this is faithfully painted by Miss Barlow, so that her book keeps a great deal of the charm of the wild and melancholy land, and of the people who scrape a scanty living from it.

[Guardian, Mar 22, 1905]

[]

‘The Fortunes of Farthings.’

[The Fortunes of Farthings (Harper Bros, 1905) by A.J. Dawson.]

The Fortunes of Fathings by A.J. Dawson has little in common with the average modern novel. The point of view throughout strikes one as old-fashioned. The characters are of the conventional type of hero and villain, and they play their parts with simple-minded consistency. The date of the story has perhaps something to do with this; it took place in the beginning of the eighteenth century, and the scene is laid in Dorset. In those days, apparently, the bottle was the inseparable companion of the old English gentleman, and the squire who had any pretensions to humanity ended the day beneath the dinner-table. The villain kept sober, but this is but another proof of the coldness of his heart. This sober gentleman was ‘wizened as a forgotten russet apple in spring time, his nose was sharp as a ferret’s, and his sound eye was a grey green gimlet in a pink frame; the other was a forbidding blank.’ He is in short everything that an English gentleman of that date ought not to be, and his machinations supply the plot of the book. Mr Dawson draws a more pleasant and truthful picture when he describes the life of the country people of the time, which he has studied ‘in cosy chimney-corner talk, over cider mugs dipped into by venerable cronies, among yellow old letters’. His style, which is pleasant and diffuse without being distinguished, is more suited to the farm and the simple country life than to the complexities of the human character. The picture of Dorset of 200 years ago is the most successful part of the book, but unfortunately the one-eyed squire contrives, for good reasons of his own, that our hero shall be kidnapped and carried off on board ship. The snip is taken by Sallee Rovers, and the hero finds himself a Christian slave in the possession of the Sultan of Morocco. The hardships which he underwent in this capacity, and the amazing brutalities of his master fill the last half of the novel. Mr Dawson is a conscientious novelist; not only does he give his authority for every instance of the Sultan’s cruelty from contemporary writers, but he tells us that before inflicting a certain penance on his hero he tried it on himself! But such learning and endurance are quite secondary qualities in a novelist, and divert our sympathies from the characters themselves. It is, perhaps, for this reason that we are not deeply interested in the pair of faithful lovers who, after going through many painful experiences, are happily united at last and enjoy all the good fortune they deserve. Mr Dawson has no very strong grasp of character, and he easily lapses into sentimentality and a patriotism which tends to be ridiculous. But if the reader wants a long, amiable, and pleasantly garrulous novel to take to bed with him The Fortunes of Farthings will serve his purpose.

[Times Literary Supplement, Mar 32, 1905]

[]

‘Nancy Stair.’

[Nancy Stair. A Novel (Heinemann, 1905) by Elinor MacCartney Lane.]

At the outset of this book the reader is met by a problem which should by this time be familiar—whether the story is true, as it purports to be. Biographical dictionaries throw no light on the matter, for, though there are many earls of Stair, not one had a daughter who would correspond with the gifted Nancy of this volume, the poetess and friend of Burns. However, it matters little, for the title-page proclaims the book a novel, and the further one reads the more one is convinced that Miss MacCartney Lane has not been studying the dictionaries. The story is acted in the last half of the eighteenth century; Scotland is the scene; and thus we are at liberty to be as romantic as we like. Nancy Stair is everything that a heroine ought to be, beautiful, witty, a genius at making verses moreover. But it is as a child that we think her most charming, when she reminds us not a little of that other brilliant Scottish child, Marjorie Fleming. She is motherless, and her unusual gifts determine her father to give her a man’s education, in spite of a friend’s warning that women are not meant to be civilised, and that it is useless to attempt it. The experiment certainly succeeds, in that by the time she grows up the world is at her feet and her poems are famous. But, unfortunately, Miss MacCartney Lane will not let her escape the orthodox doubts as to woman’s mission which were to become fashionable a hundred years later. Verse-making had seemed to her the most important thing in the world till she met Burns, who opened her eyes to the fact that divine genius is consistent with very human failings. She realises ‘how little value verse-making holds to the real task of living’, and understands the real task of living to mean, for a woman at any rate, marriage and motherhood. The genius for poetry seems to be incompatible with the duties of wife and mother, and, as the least important, Nancy has no hesitation in quenching it in order to marry and live happily ever afterwards. This is the eighteenth-century solution of the doubts of the nineteenth century. Such a solution is, of course, the popular one, and it is right, perhaps, that a novelist should take a sentimental point of view and rejoice at the conventional ending. The prosaic mind may be tempted to suggest that the world might, perhaps, be considerably poorer if the great writers had exchanged their books for children of flesh and blood. But Miss Lane does not go very deeply into these problems, and she prefers the romantic to the probable. The scheme of the book, indeed, is too ambitious, and, in spite of footnotes with ostentatious facts and figures, the characters strike us as weak and unreal. But if you represent brilliant young women, great poets, and noble dukes, you have need of an imagination to match your daring. Miss Lane fails in this; but, nevertheless, contrives to write a lively and amusing story.

[Guardian, May 10, 1905]

[]

‘Arrows of Fortune.’

[Arrows of Fortune: a tale (Arrowsmith, 1904) by Algernon Gissing.]

The reviewer of Mr Algernon Gissing’s last book need not spend much time in criticism of his characters. Their names speak for them. Sir Philip Scorton and Marian Kellbrook are, on the face of it, hero and heroine; Crispin Cragg is obviously the villain. In the first chapter an old book is found in which Marian’s dead father has registered his curse and demand for vengeance upon Crispin Cragg, who has apparently done him great wrong in his lifetime. The law-courts, however, had decided that Crispin was within his rights. But Marian is a heroic young woman, and determines, at whatever personal risk, to punish the infamous Cragg. We do nor know what precise form her vengeance is to take, because at the first hint of her determination Crispin has her conveyed to a convenient desert island somewhere near the Isle of Man, where she stays for three weeks concealed in a secret room in a smuggler’s cottage. She is rescued by the knightly youth, Sir Philip Scorton, who proposes to marry her. She cannot consent to spoil his life because she well knows that she must give herself up to the destruction of Cragg. An alternative is, however, suggested which shall close the feud—that she shall marry Hartley, the son of Cragg. This, with noble self-sacrifice, she consents to do; Sir Philip is fetched from Oxford in the nick of time to overhear a conversation behind a rock at Solway between Marian and Hartley, and the result is that the three take an evening stroll together. Sir Philip and Marian are suddenly seized by rough hands who are in the employment of Hartley, and would, we understand, have conveyed Marian to Bristol—for what ultimate destination nobody knew’—but for the intervention of Rhoda Grike, the widow of the smuggler on the desert island. In the scuffle one of the ‘Arrows of Fortune’ strikes Hartley dead. Marian is naturally accused of his murder, but is acquitted in a Scotch court of law. Crispin has still to be disposed of before the feud can be closed, and Marian comes to the pacific conclusion to let bygones be bygones. Crispin is alarmed less the race of Cragg should become extinct, and proposes to prolong the line by marriage with Rhoda Grike. To this, with a meritorious desire for peace, she consents, on an occasion when the whole party, Marian and her brother Julius, Crispin, and herself seek shelter from a storm in a shed. Marian in each flash of lightning states that she will not consent to this sacrifice, but will end the feud by burning the book herself. Crispin then most opportunely walks out into the storm, where he is struck by the second arrow in the form of a thunderbolt. It only remains for Julius to marry Rhoda and for Marian to become engaged to Sir Philip, who by this time was no longer a boy, ‘as a year ago he had begun to shave’. Marian and Philip make a bonfire in a wood into which they drop the evil book (it was, as we suspected, always concealed about her person), where we can only hope that it was burnt to ashes.

[Guardian, May 17, 1905]

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‘A Dark Lantern.’

[A Dark Lantern (Heinemann, 1905) by Elizabeth Robins]

Of this novel it can be said without exaggeration that every page interests. If such a thing were possible, it might almost be added that it is too interesting, or, perhaps, that the interest it excites is not quite of the right quality. Miss Robins has the gift of charging her air with electricity, and her readers wait for the expected explosion in a state of high tension. This is partly due to the fact that she is always in earnest—that she is one of the few novelists who can live in their characters. But it is also true that her work would be finer if its intensity were, not less, but, so to speak, diffused over a greater surface. As it is, she is too closely interested in her characters to be able to take a dispassionate view of them. A character like that of Garth Vincent, for instance, comes near failure because of this tendency to a kind of passionate concentration on the part of the novelist. He is one of the many versions of Rochester. The argument applied once more by Miss Robins seems to be that, if you want a man to be excessively masculine, you have only to take certain of the conventional masculine qualities and develop them to the desired strength. The result has overpowering effects within the covers of the novel; but, outside, the hero is more melodramatic than impressive. In the woman’s character Miss Robins shows far more sense of proportion, and we protest that if Miss Katherine Dereham had met Mr Garth Vincent under normal conditions she would not have allowed herself to take him seriously. A great part of the book is devoted to the medical details of a nervous breakdown and a rest cure, in which Mr Garth Vincent is the doctor in attendance. Here, too, Miss Robins seems to have had some purpose in her mind which leads her to insist, rather more emphatically than is artistic, upon the faults of hospital nurses and the incidents of physical illness. The defects of the book seem to us to be the persistent atmosphere of the sick-room; of morbidity, whether of body or mind; and the lack of a sense of humour. But there can be no doubt that few living novelists are so genuinely gifted as Miss Robins, or can produce work to match hers for strength and sincerity.

[Guardian, May 24, 1905]

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Journeys in Spain.

[Letters from Catalonia and Other Parts of Spain (2 vols, Hutchinson, 1905) by Rowland Thirlmere]

Before going on a journey the question of a guide-book naturally suggests itself. Your need is not altogether simple, and, though many profess to supply it, few, when put to the test, are found to succeed. Baedeker settles your hotel and the amount you are expected to tip the waiter; but one suspects Baedeker as an art critic. The asterisk with which he directs you to the best picture and tells you to a superlative how much praise you must be prepared to expend seems too simple a solution of the difficulties of criticism. But though you consult him surreptitiously it is often solely upon him that you come to depend. His work, as generations of grateful travellers can testify, is a necessity, though hardly a luxury. No one thinks of reading him for pleasure, for the reason, perhaps, that his is the most impersonal of books, and even tourists like to be treated as human beings. He provides materials in abundance, but expects you to draw your own conclusions. Thus the traveller when he comes to choose finds that guide-books separate themselves into two classes, and neither gives him completely and compactly what he wants. Books of the type of those that lie before us disclaim, if they do not despise, the name of guide-book. Sterne, when he invented the title of Sentimental Journey, not only christened but called into existence a class of book which seems to grow more popular the more we travel and the more sentimental we become. It is their aim to provide all that Baedeker ignores; but as their aim is more ambitious so is their success very rarely so complete. The Sentimental Journeys that succeed are among the most delightful books in the language; Sterne succeeded and so did Borrow, and Kinglake, and Lord Dufferin, and Mr Henry James. But the list, if we count the competitors, is not a long one. Theirs are books that we may read with almost equal pleasure in the country that they describe or seated a thousand miles away with no prospect of ever seeing the place except with the mind’s eye. They owe their success not to any strangeness in the things they saw or to any adventures they met with on the way, but to the faculty of seeing they had in them and of interpreting the sight to others. A book such as this is as much a guide-book to the mind of the man that wrote it as it is to any definite region of the earth’s surface. At the same time, the balance is kept even; the sentiment is not allowed to displace the fact, however deeply it colours it. The Bible in Spain, for instance, gives a clear portrait both of Borrow and of Spain, but it would be hard to say where Spain ends and Borrow begins. Such an amalgamation demands rare literary genius, and it is no harsh criticism of the writers before us if we say that the secret is not theirs.

Mr Thirlmere gives us two substantial volumes of Letters of Catalonia, in which there is considerably more information about Mr Thirlmere than about Catalonia. Catalonia, we gather, is a place which, like many others, possesses sunsets and stars and mosquitoes and cathedrals. Mr Thirlmere has a great deal that is pleasant to say upon all these subjects, and they give rise to reflections which lead us in many directions not marked upon the map of Spain. The sentiment is out of all proportion to the journey. It is but fair to say that we are warned beforehand that many changes will be rung on certain subjects, ‘such as sunsets, rustic wit, Germany, politics, and so forth’; and when he reaches his 800th page Mr Thirlmere is genuinely surprised to find how seldom he has found it necessary to allude to Catalonia. The book then consists of a miscellaneous collection of meditations and facts and personal opinions which conceal any definite outline of Catalonia as behind a shifting veil. The traveller will still need his Murray; but the two large volumes, though they make no special appeal to travellers, can be read with pleasure by anyone who has a taste for light reading of a miscellaneous nature. The value of the book is much increased by the many excellent reproductions of pictures and photographs of Spain, especially of the drawings of Mr Frank Brangwyn.

Mr Somerset Maugham’s single volume, The Land of the Blessed Virgin, is slim and reticent. He writes of Andalusia, and, so to speak, edits the country carefully. He selects certain scenes which have remained in his mind as typical and illustrative of the country which he knows so well, and they are not necessarily those prescribed by the guide-book. In his work, too, the personal element preponderates; he is content in more than one instance to let an impression stand as a permanent record which was admittedly coloured by facts of purely personal significance. But he has his pen well under control, and strikes out pictures now and again which are true in themselves and yet could have been so seen by one person only. ‘Ah, the beautiful things which I have seen which other men have not!’ he exclaims, and he has a sincere desire to find the right word for the beauty which he genuinely loves and which, consequently, interests him more than any peculiarities in the individual who observes it. His book thus, even when the desire is beyond his power of satisfying it, has a value of its own, both for the traveller and for the reader who remains in his study chair.

[Times Literary Supplement, May 26, 1905]

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The American Woman.

[The Women of America (Macmillan Co., 1904) by Elizabeth McCracken.]

Miss McCracken, in her investigations into the natural history of the American woman, travelled over nearly the whole of the United States, in a journey which occupied six months, which she found to be all too short. She came home with her boxes full of pamphlets and calendars and her notebooks full of statistics. But when she began to write she found it best to put aside all these and to draw her picture from life. Instead of a scientific treatise on the nature of woman or a blue-book upon her place in the national life, she gives us fourteen snapshots of the woman herself as she works or plays, in whatever position she happened to be found. This method is admittedly superficial, but in the space of one short volume we are taken over a great distance of country and shown many queer people living out-of-the-way lives.

There are many types of the American woman—more, perhaps, than of the English woman—but they have a curious unity. We begin with the pioneer who is set down in the Western prairie where ‘one need not yet keep to the path, for there is none. You make your own trail.’ She and her husband have to make their own house, their home, and their town, and the woman’s work here is even more important than the man’s. ‘I want to help try new ways,’ says one of these pioneer women who lived in a small cattle-ranch thirty-five miles from the nearest town. ‘We have our whole lives before us […] And […] we intend to make them good.’ The woman in the small town does, perhaps, the most important work done by women in America. America, says Miss McCracken, is a nation of small communities, and the influence of home, which is the influence of woman, is paramount here. It is significant that almost all the public libraries in these towns were founded by women, their librarians were usually women, and the women read almost exclusively ‘real books’. In the South she found that the women who had suffered most in the war were teaching the negroes and fitting them for public life.

Miss McCracken is a cordial admirer of her own sex, and in only one case does her sympathy fail. For the last ten years the women of Colorado have had the ballot, and, while she admits that they have done good work publicly by means of it, she thinks that it has been at the expense of their own womanliness. Charitable acts are done with a view to votes, and the woman’s perception of right and wrong has been dulled. But it is open to remark that the same might be said as emphatically of the male politician, and that the real question is whether the use made by women of political freedom is sufficiently valuable to justify the alleged injury. It is characteristic that the American woman’s club is almost invariably a kind of Charity Organisation Society for the improvement of themselves and others, and the democratic motto of one of them, Of all, by all, for all,’ is appropriate to many. Indeed, the American view of charity is typical and peculiar. A charitable English lady, for example, may read to the blind in her village; but the work is personal, and probably ceases in the case of her illness or death. An American woman in the same circumstances at once organised a society from the members of her club to help the blind. Then, not content with this, she got a commission appointed by the State of Massachusetts to inquire into the condition of the blind, with the result that the State will probably institute schools for the training of the blind at public expense. There are many other illustrations of the same genius for organisation, and of the peculiar nature of American charity, which is not satisfied with relieving suffering, but must find out and, if possible, eliminate the cause of it.

We have not space to comment upon the many interesting lines of thought that Miss McCracken opens up. One remark of hers seems to us to suggest the essential difference between American and other women, which gives them their special interest, and which has made it possible to paint such a sketch as this of a whole race with marked and recognisable features. The province of the American writer, she says, is the short story, because American life lends itself to ‘instantaneous portraiture’. ‘It is so young, without any deep furrows on its face.’ ‘The oldest of us in America are still rather new’, said one lady, who went on to say that they were not old enough yet to be even really democratic. A mother can point to her own mother, herself, and her daughter as representing three stages of development, and can lay her finger on the causes which have made them different. So many causes have combined to make an Englishwoman, that it is impossible to trace their effects, and the succession of influences may well have neutralised each other. But everything that alters her own or her country’s life at present tells upon the American woman, and to watch the process is a study of exceeding interest.

[Guardian, May 31, 1905]

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‘Rose of Lone Farm.’

[Rose of Lone Farm (Smith, Elder & Co., 1905) by Eleanor G. Hayden]

Miss Hayden, it is clear, knows the country and loves it. Something of its charm, at any rate, is reproduced in these pages, and also something of the oddity of the life of the country people. She is not so sure of herself when she treats of the hero and heroine who are drawn tamely after the conventional pattern. Miss Hayden’s gift seems to lie in close and humorous observation of the details of life on a country farm. The character of the ‘fogger’ Esau, for instance, is the most faithful bit of work in the book. But she is trammelled by the limitations of the novel form, and is at her best when she describes what she has seen and forgets the necessity of telling a story. The story in this case serves merely as an excuse for introducing us to a circle of south country farms, where we are mildly entertained by the gossip of the farmer’s wife and the blunders of the good lady who tries to use ‘dixshonry’ words. The tendency here is, perhaps, to exaggerate these peculiarities at the expense of the truth; and, if we look to the proportions of the book as a whole, we must complain that many of the scenes are too obviously given as specimens of country manners without connection with the main theme. But these little pictures have a certain value of their own which the more ambitious scenes are without.

[Guardian, Jul 19, 1905]

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An Andalusian Inn.

Hotel-keepers are apparently subject to that slight and amiable obliquity of the moral sense which goes by the name of loyalty. Thus, when we asked whether we should find good quarters for a night’s rest at a certain little country town in Andalusia where we had to sleep we were assured that the hotel there was good. Not, of course, a first-class establishment such as the palatial building in which we stood, but, nevertheless, a good second-class inn, where we should be made comfortable and provided with beds of the cleanest. At half past nine, then, when after a long day’s loitering through the country the train finally came to a stop and announced its intention of going no further, the hotel-keeper’s word sounded comfortable in our ears. We should be content with little, we reflected, and during the last stages of the journey, as the orthodox dinner hour passed uncelebrated and the wick which swam in the oil-lamp committed suicide—and its life had not been happy—we dwelt much upon the terms of this recommendation and the good second-class inn became an epitome of all that is desirable in life. Here we should meet with a simple-hearted welcome; we pictured the innkeeper and his wife coming out to greet us, eager to take our bundles and our wraps—bustling about to prepare our rooms and catch the fowl who was to make our dinner. For the night’s rest between clean and scented sheets the plain but delicious dinner and the excellent breakfast before our early start they would ask some ridiculously small sum. We should be made to feel that silver is a most vulgar coin in which to pay such hospitality, and that that noble virtue—long dead among the innkeepers of our own country—still flourishes in Spain.

In thoughts like these we passed the time till the train had reached the station where we were to be rewarded for all our joltings and fatigues. It was a little disconcerting to find that the porters, at any rate, were evidently surprised that two travellers with heavy luggage should be deposited on the platform at this time of night. The inevitable crowd came running to stare at us, and gaped when we produced the careful arrangement of Spanish words in which we signified our desire for an inn. A sentence in a conversation-book is something of the nature of an extinct monster in a museum: only the specially initiated can tell you that it is related to the live animal. It was at once obvious that our specimen was hopelessly extinct, and, further, a terrible doubt insinuated itself that it was the nature of what we asked as much as the language in which we asked it that was unintelligible. At length, after much Spanish, French, and English had clashed unprofitably, it dawned upon the natives that we did not speak their language, and the powers of gesticulation were tried upon us. Presently an official appeared who informed us that he could speak French. Our request for an hotel was joyfully translated into that language. ‘The train goes no further tonight,’ answered the interpreter. ‘We know that, and therefore we wish to sleep here,’ we said. ‘To-morrow morning, at 5.30.’ ‘But to-night, an hotel,’ we insisted. The gentleman who spoke French produced a pencil with an air of resignation, and wrote large and very black the figures 5 and 30. We shrugged our shoulders, and vociferated ‘hotel’ first in French and then in three different kinds of Spanish. The crowd had by this time made a complete circle round us, and every one was translating for the benefit of his neighbour. We then bethought us of a Spanish dictionary, which had consistently refused to be left behind, and the Spanish equivalent for the English word ‘hotel’ was found and emphasised with a forefinger. As many heads as could be pressed together gazed blankly at the spot thus indicated, and the interpreter was struck by a brilliant idea. He lost the place and searched feverishly for a word of his own among the 5s and the 7s. We helped him to the Spanish department of the dictionary, and left him to prolonged, but, as it turned out, fruitless researches.

Meanwhile we repeated our solitary word in the chance that it might somewhere fall upon fertile soil. At every utterance a buzz of good Spanish rose from the crowd; finally, when we were trying to define hotel with an umbrella, a small old man forced himself upon our notice. To the inevitable question he answered by laying his hand upon his breast and bowing profoundly. We asked him three times in succession, and he always answered in the same way, as though in his solitary person he combined all the qualities we needed. Public opinion seemed to be unanimous that we should accept him as the representative of dinner and bed, and a few last attempts at the Spanish for ‘inn’ were answered by hands stretched in his direction. To settle the matter he gripped us by the arm and drew us outside the station to the edge of a sandy desert grown with tufts of reeds and lighted by a large moon. On one side was a steep hill, crowned by a Moorish castle, and at a little distance we saw a solitary cottage. The choice apparently lay between the two, and neither seemed precisely what we had expected. We looked at the old man, and observed not without relief that he was both old and small. One of our doubts, at any rate, was soon at an end, for it was clear that the white cottage was to be our lodging, and that the hotel-keeper at Granada had had the imagination of an artist. We were shown into a room where a lamp burnt, and where several men and women sat round a fire drinking and talking. There was a pause, in which several eyes inspected us at their leisure, and we were led into an ante-room, in whose honour that word ‘hotel’ had been applied to the cottage. There was a bed and a canvas partition to serve as door, water to wash in, if we chose to keep up that respectable farce, and a candle in case we wished for light. Food, it was clear, must be sought at the station; and we were by no means unwilling to go out into the fresh air again. When at the hour of eleven we were tired of the Spanish desert, and the Moorish castle, and the conversation of the gentleman who could speak French, but did not think it essential to understand that language, we returned to the inn and began what promised to be a somewhat weary vigil. The company sat late and talked loud. Scraps of vehement Spanish penetrated the canvas partition, and somehow seemed to be concerned with us. Spanish is a fierce and bloodthirsty language when heard under these conditions. The figure of our small friend with his perpetual bows and finger laid on his breast became towards midnight of a very sinister aspect; we remembered his ominous silence, his persistent determination that we should be parted from our luggage. Country people of honest conscience, we reflected, should have been in bed long before this. The only precaution possible to us was to stand the solitary chair on its hind legs against the door. That must have had a strangely composing effect upon our minds, for, thus fortified against the murderous assault which we expected, we fell asleep in our clothes, and dreamed that we had found the Spanish word for ‘inn’.

The sound that finally awoke us at half past four in the morning was certainly an assault upon the door; but when we cautiously looked out there was no one more hostile than the peasant woman with a basin of goat’s milk in her hands.

[Guardian, Jul 19, 1905]

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A Priory Church.

You see Christchurch from afar like a ship riding out to sea. The land all round is flat as water; if the sun shines it may light up a little gleam of river or of the sea itself, because, as soon appears, the church is almost an island in the midst of waters. The sun when we made our expedition was not visible, but in spite of that the whole air was full of light. It was as though a white curtain had been drawn across the sky, by which the sunbeams as they fell were filtered to a pure white light. There was on the horizon a rim of sky like tarnished silver, but, otherwise, there was no slit in the curtain. The town of Christchurch resolves itself into one long street, which rises very slightly, and bursts at the top into its flower, which is the Priory Church. The church is built on the pattern of a small cathedral, and, perhaps, because of its comparative insignificance, has suffered very little from reformers and restorers. The stonework within has worn very white, and has crumbled in places, but for the most part the chiselling is as sharp as though it had just left the mason’s hand. Much of the carving is of exquisite delicacy, and so perfect that one needs the assurance of the date inscribed on it to realise that the work is more than three hundred years old. But the most beautiful possession of the old church—and it has many both beautiful and curious—is the view from the square tower. Here out on the leads, with the sharp spine of the church running out beneath you, you look to the sea on two sides; and directly at your feet the rivers Stour and Avon loop and cross and entangle themselves like a silver chain. The church is one of the few great churches that has not chosen to plant itself on a hill; the stream laps at its feet, and it looks as though an extra large wave would roll across the land and break against the church walls. Only a breadth of flats, dun-coloured with feathery bulrushes, separates the land from the water; looking east there is no hill, and on the horizon an undulating shadow marks the beginning of the New Forest.

[Guardian, Jul 26, 1905]

[]

The Letters of Jane Welsh Carlyle.

[Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle (3 vols, Longmans, 1883)]

There is happily no longer any temptation for the reader of these letters to use them merely as so much material for a brief on one side or another of a very unpleasant dispute. Mrs Carlyle’s letters must rapidly lose, if they have not already lost, the interest which they had for a generation that had seen Carlyle in the flesh and had the morbid appetite of contemporaries for personal gossip. ‘These seem to me about the cleverest letters I ever read,’ wrote Carlyle, and although other issues for the moment obscured that verdict, a later generation finds it sound.

Few people, indeed, have been able to cast so brilliant an image of themselves upon paper. And yet it is noteworthy that she has not taken advantage of the usual method of self-portraiture that recommends itself to letter-writers; she seldom talks of herself as other than an active and practical human being. Letters of the ‘inner woman’ sort, ‘all about feelings’, anything that savoured of self-analysis or introspection she checked ruthlessly. But in spite of this reserve, which drove her to make her letters out of facts, they were facts which did more to illuminate herself than most people’s feelings. She could not go for a drive or meet a neighbour without bringing back two or three precious words of description. Her letters, for example, are full of ‘coterie speech’, little phrases which she has picked up for something odd in the expression, or for something characteristic of the speaker in them, as a connoisseur with a fine eye might collect curiosities. This, though it was done so swiftly and faultlessly, demands an insight into character and a power of seizing on the essential, which is creative as well as critical, and, in her, amounted to genius. It meant that out of all the talk she heard, and all the sights she saw, she could infallibly select the one word or scene which, written down, brings the spirit of the past before us. She made no claim to style in the modern sense of the word; but if a manner of speech which is perfectly expressive of the thought and of the thinker deserves such a title, she never wrote six lines without it. Quotation is difficult because she seldom concentrated her wit into flashes, though it plays everywhere abundantly, and is often brilliant. But such coruscations as we find in the letters of Charles Lamb, for instance, are seldom spontaneous; and Mrs Carlyle wrote as easily and copiously as she talked. She was in all things a practical woman, and would have despised a letter which was not content with its simple mission.

Carlyle was writing for his biographer, she supposed, when he sent her descriptions of scenery instead of some humbler but more necessary details. Her own letters are emphatically genuine letters in the sense that she had always some definite object in writing them at a particular moment to a particular person. Thus, though she read widely, and was educated beyond the standard of her time, she seldom writes a word of literary criticism. She was content to make her letters out of simple things; the fact that she had a higher ambition made her always ironically alive to the smallness of mere letter-writing. But if there were such a branch of learning as the study of human nature Mrs Carlyle would have been one of its most distinguished professors. While her husband sat upstairs in the sound-proof room deciphering the motives and characters of the actors in some long-forgotten drama, Mrs Carlyle was practising the same art over her teacups. Occasionally the live bodies were treated a little too much as though they were dried inscriptions on parchment who might be made to yield an amusing sentence in the next letter. Her dark eyes had a dangerous light in them, as Mr Froude says, and her wit, we gather, generally had its victim. But this power of sarcasm and of administering a shrewing of which we hear so much was in some degree a measure of protection; she was very sensitive and had an inner woman to defend. She had constant reason, too, to recover her balance in the emotions of life with a man of genius by some strong, possibly caustic, effort of common sense. ‘This world looks always the more absurd to me the longer I live in it’ was a reflection that was often at the back of her mind, and that was called forth particularly by anything exaggerated or insincere. ‘The style which suits me best is the natural and simple style, and … my soul cannot be thrown into deliquium by any hundred horse-power of upholstery or of moral sublime.’ Thus she was a harsh critic of the class who have most time to deal in superlatives, and was merciless to bores. But her bores were bores by reason of some pretentiousness or pomposity; simple stupidity did not sharpen her tongue, though she might note its symptoms with amusement.

On the other hand, there is ample proof that she could be the most faithful and sympathetic of friends where her sympathy was genuinely needed. Take, for instance, a scene from her notebook, in the first volume of the Letters and Memorials, which is typical of many. She has visits from Count d’Orsay and Lord Jeffrey, ‘the prince of dandies and the prince of critics’, and sketches brilliant little pictures of both. Then she goes on to ask, ‘Why does every miserable man and woman of my acquaintance come to me with his and her woes, as if I had no woes of my own, nothing in the world to do but to console others?’ ‘Here has been that ill-fated C.J.’ Then she goes out of doors and finds in the King’s Road a child ‘of “the lower orders” in the act, it seemed, of dissolving all away in tears’. She takes the child back with her to Cheyne Row, to wait investigations, and finds a note from a lady who feels it ‘due to herself to make some disclosures to me’. ‘It was a desperate interview.’ The disclosures end in tears and embraces, also in some advice—‘she will not, of course, follow a syllable of it’. The child meanwhile ‘munched away unconscious in the tragic scene’, ‘drowning its recent sorrows in bread and butter’. Mrs Carlyle, like the true humorist she was, has eyes for all sides of the little dramas that enact themselves in her drawing-room and never loses her sense of proportion.

To the poor, the sick, the unhappy, to any one who depended on her, Mrs Carlyle could show the deeper and more tender side of her character. She did not want for dependents—humble people, for the most part, who would not appreciate her wit. But the basis of her wit, as they knew well, was a substantial common sense, a power of seeing things as they are, which gave the sting to her words, and, at the same time, made her effective in all practical ways. She had the same attraction for ‘mad people or miserable people’, she writes, ‘that amber has for straws’. She could sympathise, but her sympathy never blinded her to the facts of the case or made her lower her own high standard. Some one declared her to be a ‘cross betwixt John Knox and a gipsy’, and the austere preacher in her was not slow to denounce any ‘sumptuosity’ or indolence that came in her way. Oh, dear me! I wonder why so many people wish for high position and great wealth’ when it merely emancipates them ‘from all the practical difficulties, which might teach them the facts of things, and sympathy with their fellow-creatures’. ‘I … could not be other than perfectly miserable in idleness, world without end.’ Thus, when she had to give up her ambition to work with her pen she worked none the less hard, though in humbler ways. Her practical difficulties were some of them sordid enough, but she made them yield the very best that was in them. Her battles with crowing cocks and barking dogs, barrel-organs and household repairs are grotesque enough in themselves, but as she writes of them they become a real significance. ‘The facts of things’ might be found in unexpected places. She might sometimes resent the fate which had driven her to squander all her gifts on such apparently trivial ends—‘the eternal writing of little unavoidable notes’ and the rest—but that is not a reflection that will occur to her readers. Under other conditions she might have written more; she could hardly have written better.

[Guardian, Aug 2, 1905]

[]

The Value of Laughter.

The old idea was that comedy represented the failings of human nature, and that tragedy pictured men as greater than they are. To paint them truly one must, it seems, strike a mean between the two, and the result is something too serious to be comic, too imperfect to be tragic, and this we may call humour. Humour, we have been told, is denied to women. They may be tragic or comic, but the particular blend which makes a humorist is to be found only in men. But experiments are dangerous things, and in trying to attain the humorist’s point of view—in balancing himself on that pinnacle which is denied his sisters—the male gymnast not infrequently topples over ignominiously on to the other side, and either plunges headlong into buffoonery or else descends to the hard ground of serious commonplace, where, to do him justice, he is entirely at his ease. It may be that tragedy—a necessary ingredient—is not so common as it was in the time of Shakespeare, and therefore the present age has had to provide a decorous substitute which dispenses with blood and daggers, and looks its best in a chimney-pot hat and long frock-coat. This we may call the spirit of solemnity, and if spirits have a gender, there is no doubt that it is masculine. Now, comedy is of the sex of the graces and the muses, and when this solemn gentleman advances to offer his compliments she looks and laughs, and looks again till irresistible laughter comes over her, and she flies to hide her merriment in the bosoms of her sisters. Thus humour very rarely comes into the world, and comedy has a hard fight for it. Pure laughter, such as we hear on the lips of children and silly women, is in disrepute. It is held to be the voice of folly and frivolity inspired neither by knowledge nor emotion. It gives no message, conveys no information; it is an inarticulate utterance like the bark of a dog or the bleat of sheep, and it is beneath the dignity of a race that has made itself a language to express itself thus.

But there are some things that are beyond words and not beneath them, and laughter is one of these. For laughter is the one sound, inarticulate though it be, that no animal can produce. If the dog on the hearthrug groans in pain or barks for joy we recognise his meaning and it has nothing strange in it, but suppose he were to laugh? Suppose that when you came into the room he did not express his legitimate joy at the sight of you by tail or tongue, but burst into peals of laughter—grinned—shook his sides and showed all the usual signs of extreme amusement. Your feeling then would be one of shrinking and horror, as though a human voice had spoken from a beast’s mouth. Nor can we imagine that beings in a higher state than ourselves laugh; laughter seems to belong essentially and exclusively to men and women. Laughter is the expression of the comic spirit within us, and the comic spirit concerns itself with oddities and eccentricities and deviations from the recognised pattern. It makes its comment in the sudden and spontaneous laugh which comes, we hardly know why, and we cannot tell when. If we took time to think—to analyse this impression that the comic spirit registers—we should find, doubtless, that what is superficially comic is fundamentally tragic, and while the smile was on our lips the water would stand in our eyes. This—the words are Bunyan’s—has been accepted as a definition of humour; but the laughter of comedy has no burden of tears. At the same time, though its office is comparatively slight compared with that of true humour, the value of laughter in life and in art cannot be over-rated. Humour is of the heights; the rarest minds alone can climb the pinnacle whence the whole of life can be viewed as in a panorama; but comedy walks the highways and reflects the trivial and accidental—the venial faults and peculiarities of all who pass in its bright little mirror. Laughter more than anything else preserves our sense of proportion; it is for ever reminding us that we are but human, that no man is quite a hero or entirely a villain. Directly we forget to laugh we see things out of proportion and lose our sense of reality. Dogs, mercifully, cannot laugh, because, if they could, they would realise the terrible limitations of being a dog. Men and women are just high enough in the scale of civilisation to be intrusted with the power of knowing their own failings and have been granted the gift of laughing at them. But we are in danger of losing this precious privilege, or of crushing it out of our breasts, by a mass of crude and ponderous knowledge.

To be able to laugh at a person you must, to begin with, be able to see him as he is. All his cloak of wealth and rank and learning, so far as it is a superficial accumulation, must not blunt the keen blade of the comic spirit which probes to the quick. It is a commonplace that children have a surer power of knowing men for what they are than grown people, and I believe that the verdict that women pass upon character will not be revoked at the Day of Judgment. Women and children, then, are the chief ministers of the comic spirit, because their eyes are not clouded with learning nor are their brains choked with the theories of books, so that men and things still preserve their original sharp outlines. All the hideous excrescences that have overgrown our modern life, the pomps and conventions and dreary solemnities, dread nothing so much as the flash of laughter which, like lightning, shrivels them up and leaves the bones bare. It is because their laughter possesses this quality that children are feared by people who are conscious of affectations and unrealities; and it is probably for this reason that women are looked upon with such disfavour in the learned professions. The danger is that they may laugh, like the child in Hans Andersen who said that the king went naked when his elders worshipped the splendid raiment that did not exist. In art, as in life, all the worst blunders arise from a lack of proportion, and the tendency of both is to be over-emphatically serious. Our great writers blossom in purple and roll in magnificent periods; our lesser writers multiply their adjectives and luxuriate in the sentimentalism which in a lower class produces the sensational placard and the melodrama. We go to funerals and to sick-beds far more willingly than to marriages and festivals, and we cannot rid our minds of the belief that there is something virtuous in tears and that black is the most becoming habit. There is nothing, indeed, so difficult as laughter, but no quality is more valuable. It is a knife that both prunes and trains and gives symmetry and sincerity to our acts and to the spoken and the written word.

[Guardian, Aug 16, 1905]

[]

Their Passing Hour.

[Some Famous Women of Wit and Beauty. A Georgian Galaxy. With eight illustrations (Constable & Co., 1905) by John Fyvie.]

‘A witty woman’, says George Meredith, ‘is a treasure; a witty beauty is a power.’ The volume before us gives us ample reason to ponder this saying and goes to prove that there were at least eight separate instances in which it once held good. It is melancholy to be forced to change the present tense to the past and to confess that we can no longer proclaim ourselves the subject of that sway. No beauty, it seems, is too great to perish; no wit long outlives the echo of the voice that speaks it. Mr Fyvie’s eight chapters, indeed, are responsible for some sombre reflections. We cannot doubt that the power of which they speak was real enough in its day and that these ladies wielded it for the most part in circumstances of truly regal splendour. The fact, then, is all the more strange that when we come, some fifty years or so later, to ask in what the secret of their rule consisted we must confess ourselves not a little puzzled to account for it. ‘She was splendidly handsome,’ we read. ‘She had rich colouring and blue-black braids of hair.’ The memoirs and the diaries seldom achieve any portrait that is more striking than that; or: ‘She was extremely epigrammatic in her talk,’ we are told, when we ask for a specimen of the famous wit. There is also considerable difference of opinion; the same lady is at once ‘an enthusiastic angel from heaven’ and—if we look at her from another point of view—‘bold, forward, coarse, assuming and vain’. You must reconcile both these extremes before you can make any likeness of the woman who captivated Nelson.

The paradox has challenged considerable and distinguished attention; four at least of the eight famous women who are sketched here have had their champions and their enemies; more than one has snatched her fame at the cost of her reputation; all have thrown down their gauntlets to the world in one way or another. But the problem still fascinates, partly perhaps because the solution must always escape us. The secret of the spell seems to have died in each case with its possessor; it could not be transmitted to another. That fatal condition was attached to it, but the effect was all the more concentrated because it could not be prolonged. If it survives the grave at all, it is as some phantom and elusive will-o’-the-wisp, which flits through the vague regions of Victorian memoir-writers and leaves us with empty hands when we try to grasp it. Such a book as this spurs us on to the pursuit once more by its sober recapitulation of the miracles that were accomplished by some such intangible force. The means seem so slight in proportion to the results which they achieve that we are forced to imagine the presence of some subtle quality which is now lost to us. At the same time, when we are inclined in sheer despair to belittle the miracle, we must remember that we have substantial proofs before us. We find, for instance, that enigmatic lady, Mrs Fitzherbert, the daughter of a small country squire, winning for herself a power second only to that of the queen; and there is the blacksmith’s daughter who without manners or wit could rule our greatest admiral and command the fleet. The book supplies us with not a few instances of the kind. This apparent discrepancy between her powers and her fame may become merely pathetic when we are in a position to test the lady’s gifts by some authentic product that remains to us.

We have the ‘Essay on the Genius and Writings of Shakespeare’, for example, if we wish to inquiry into Mrs Montagu’s title to fame, but it is charitable to remember, before we form our verdict, that Johnson said of the author: ‘She diffuses more knowledge in her conversation than any woman I know or, indeed, almost any man.’ The book, we must suppose, in this case, as in many others, is no adequate substitute for the talk. Mrs Lennox, on the other hand, survives, if she survives at all, by virtue of The Female Quixote, or the Adventures of Arabella, which, we take Mr Fyvie’s word for it, is ‘unquestionably a work of genius’. The poor lady might have succeeded better with a witty tongue; she lived in poverty, and a friend had to pay the expenses of her burial. We must not, it is plain, turn to the ladies’ literary works to help us to account for their celebrity. The pen, in two cases at least, was merely a useful drudge driven late into the night by beautiful women who must, unfortunately, earn their bread. Lady Blessington and Mrs Norton both contributed copiously to these Keepsakes and Books of Beauty in which rank and fashion might use their brains without demeaning themselves. Mrs Norton was styled on a famous occasion ‘The Empress of Fiction’: her novels had enormous vogue. And now—save for one or two of her poems which have been rescued by the anthologists—the rubbish-heaps of tarnished finery remain undisturbed. It was, as we have noted, the nature of these women’s genius that it seemed inseparable from the living voice and the smile of the lips; it evaded the grosser interpretation of pen or pencil.

We must look for our portrait, then, not so much in any substantial token that has been left us, as in the reflection of the splendour which we can still discover on the face of contemporary society. We catch our best glimpse of Lady Blessington in those remarkable parties at Gore House in the youth of the last century, when all the lions of the season were collected round her. She made an art of such entertainments, and believed that they could yield really important results. Mrs Grote, too, held a salon of the same kind. London society, it seems, was then of such proportions that the different sets could be made to revolve round some appropriate drawing-room centre, and women of high natural gifts thought it no mean ambition to occupy the position of authority. It asked no small artistic genius, they might have claimed, though their work must be anonymous. Lady Eastlake, again, was not only a hostess of ‘great conversational powers’ but an art critic of high reputation. Her criticism of John Ruskin, for instance, makes very good reading still, and would be accepted with little alteration, we believe, by the artist of the present day.

There is, happily, no need for us to construct for ourselves any laborious portrait of the most brilliant of these eight women, the Hon. Mrs Norton. We need not attempt to put flesh on such bare bones as are thrown to us by contemporary observers, when we have Diana of the Crossways upon our shelves. Mr Meredith, as we know, desires his work ‘to be read as fiction’; but the word fiction applies only to the unessential facts, and it is safe to predict that generations to come will read the truth of this famous woman and of many like her in the pages of a novel. Genius alone can preserve for us the wit that has been spoken and the beauty that has long faded, by creating them afresh. We must be grateful, however, for Mr Fyvie’s addition to our materials, although we still await the wizard who shall transform them into flesh and blood. Thanks must be given, too, for eight very interesting illustrations.

[Academy & Literature, Aug 26, 1905]

[]

‘The Letter Killeth.’

[The Letter Killeth: a romance of the Sussex Downs (S.W. Partridge & Co., 1905) by A. Cunnick]

It is almost inevitable that the story of a religious phase in its moment of crisis should sound unreal and somewhat distasteful to a generation far outside its influence; and it needs rare skill to interpret the religious fanatic so that he is sympathetic to those who do not share his enthusiasm. The subtler marks of character seem to be obliterated by the one mastering passion; and the novel which has such persons for its chief figures tends, unless it can infect the reader with its own fervour, to become a little flat and monotonous. Such a criticism seems to apply to The Letter Killeth, by A.C. Inchbold, which gives a picture of the early days of the Wesleyan revival on the coast of Sussex. For, in spite of the fact that the author writes well and can give us an interesting study of the effect of the sudden stimulus upon the illiterate peasants, the main characters are coldly conceived and have little likeness to palpable human beings. A sense of humour, unfortunately, is no necessary part of excellence, and the tension of strict virtue is but seldom relaxed. The famous preacher George Gilbert and his son are not much more than lay figures upon which the conventional virtues hang stiffly enough; and though the character of Naomi, the visionary enthusiast, is drawn with greater delicacy, the actors seem for the most part to live in a rarefied atmosphere among shadows. The minor characters are drawn with greater freedom and force and provide some welcome relief. The plot hinges upon the inevitable conflict between the fleshly and the spiritual loves, which must be combined harmoniously before the nature even of a Wesleyan minister can be considered perfect. The means by which this result is reached are of the ordinary kind, and the author does not attempt to penetrate beneath a somewhat elementary conception of character. Within these modest limits the book is simply written and pleasantly free from exaggeration.

[Times Literary Supplement, Oct 27, 1905]

[]

‘Lone Marie.’

[Lone Marie (Macmillan, 1905) by W.E. Norris]

The novel-reader who sees the familiar name of Mr W.E. Norris upon the title-page can dismiss all doubts as to the quality of his entertainment. No problems will perplex him; no tragedies will disturb his peace; and if the serenity of the atmosphere tends at times to become a trifle soporific few will be so unreasonable as to complain of boredom. Indeed, it sometimes puzzles the reader to decide why it is that with so many rare and indisputable gifts for his calling Mr Norris has never achieved any work of first-rate importance. His last novel, Lone Marie, once more proves him a master of technique; once more we find ourselves perpetually surprised by some felicity of expression or subtlety of insight which would seem to hint at the presence of a talent more than ephemeral in value. But the depths thus indicated remain unrevealed. In the present book the characters, so far as they go, are suggested with admirable ease and delicacy of touch, but the wise reader will ask no more than a suggestion if he does not wish to be disappointed. Gordon Heneage, the loveable rascal, Marie Ludlow, even Mrs Strover, are all of them excellent studies of their kind; Mr Henry James might have noted them down for future use in some brief sketch-book. There is the same economy of incident, and restraint of treatment, and even a trace of Mr James’s marvellous penetration. And if the likeness ends there it is not obscured on Mr Norris’s part by any supervening defect; the fact is merely that he is ready to stop when Mr James is just prepared to begin. Even so we have every reason to thank Mr Norris for a delightful and delicate piece of work which if it does not reach the highest standard of contemporary fiction is still further removed from the average level.

[Guardian, Nov 1, 1905]

[]

‘The Devil’s Due.’

[The Devil’s Due. A romance (Hutchinson & Co., 1905) by George Brown Burgin.]

Mr Burgin tells us at starting that it is his intention to draw an ‘unrepentant villain’ and if the reader is fond of villains he will have no reason to complain. Unfortunately nature is less consistent than novelists would wish her to be, and seldom achieves a saint or a villain who is not spoilt for artistic purposes by some taint of vice or virtue. It is necessary also if you have drawn one character above life-size to heighten the others in due proportion, so that although Mr Burgin makes praiseworthy attempts to descend to the level of ordinary life, we must confess that they seem strangely unnatural. When you have tuned your mind to believe in a deserted wife who follows her husband disguised as a man, works in his employment for months, haunts the neighbourhood as a disembodied voice, and is partly drowned in a cellar beneath the villain’s dinner-table, Canadian humour seems more than usually out of place. Mr Burgin has facility of expression, and can describe Canadian scenery vividly, but the picture he draws of life and manners in the village of Four Comers is, we hope and believe, imaginary. The story might be played on the stage with success, but it hardly endures the cold light of print.

[Guardian, Nov 1, 1905]

[]

‘The House of Mirth.’

[The House of Mirth (Macmillan & Co., 190J) by Edith Wharton]

The first pages of this novel make it obvious, even if the writer’s name had not conveyed the information, that we have to consider a serious work of fiction. It is serious, not in the sense that it has any definite purpose to expound, but in that the writer has chosen her subject with deliberate foresight, and has spared no pains to make her delineation exact. The moral may be left to the reader. She gives us, as we do not remember to have seen it given before, a picture of that ‘set’ in New York society which contains not only all that is wealthiest, but also all that, for whatever reason, is most exclusive. The members of the community in which the heroine, Lily Bart, is placed are bound together not only by the possession of wealth, but also by a certain gift, which has its equivalent with us, too, perhaps—‘a force of negation which eliminated everything beyond their own range of perception’. However we define them, there is no doubt that these ‘affinities’, as Mrs Wharton calls them, which bring the elect together, produce a curiously cold and vicious society. We are invited to watch this force at work upon a girl who, though by birth a member of the set, is partially disqualified by her poverty. The story traces her gradual descent, how, in the first instance, she loses money at bridge, and has to recoup herself by allowing a friend’s husband to speculate for her; how her name is involved in a scandal, her friends desert her, and finally, the necessary sleeping-draught brings a death which, if not sought, is at least not unwelcome. In outline this is unpleasant; in detail it is tragic, because, though the girl has many of the faults of her surroundings she has a capacity for better things which is never to be exercised. There is no doubt that Mrs Wharton has so illuminated the House of Mirth for us that we shall not soon forget it.

[Guardian, Nov 15, 1905]

[]

‘The Debtor.’

[The Debtor: a novel … Illustrations by W.D. Stevens (Harper & Bros, 1905) by Mary E. Wilkins]

Miss Wilkins, to use the name with which we are familiar, was known originally as the writer of very brief and delightful New England stories. They were unpretentious in theme and slight in construction, but, thanks to the skill and charm of the workmanship, they managed to outlive much that was apparently more robust. Since that time she has surprised us more than once by producing a compact work of fiction which so far as the size is concerned has nothing in common with those eminently short stories of an earlier date. Her new book, The Debtor, is a substantial volume of some 560 closely printed pages, which are all, moreover, spent upon a single subject. But on closer inspection it seems that Miss Wilkins has not changed her method so greatly as this might lead one to expect. The story is placed in one of those American villages which correspond with our English Cranford, but in this case Banbridge, the town in question, is within range of the lights of New York. In reproducing the minute humours of the little place, the rivalries and intimacies of its inhabitants, Miss Wilkins is at her best. In the midst of this rural innocence and simplicity a Southern family of the name of Carroll has taken up its lodging. Arthur Carroll, the father, is a man of good birth and great personal charm, who, having been cheated of his rights in early youth, has since considered himself the creditor of society at large and has no scruples in exacting the debt. To Banbridge he figures first as a rich man; later he fails to meet his bills; and in the end he is forced to get a living by dancing as a negro on the stage. The descent is slow and illustrated from every possible point of view. The characters of the debtor himself, of his wife and children, of his creditors, of any one remotely connected with him are drawn in with a curious elaboration. And yet the effect is not wholly successful. Occasionally we are given a chapter which, complete and detached as it is, might stand for a short story by itself, but these scenes are linked together by pages of close description and unessential detail which should have been transacted silently in the writer’s brain. As it is the novel seems to lack unity, and in spite of much subtlety and fine workmanship the effect is that of a succession of disconnected studies of character rather than of a single and well-proportioned whole.

[Times Literary Supplement, Nov 17, 1905]

[]

‘A Flood Tide.’

[A Flood Tide (Edward Arnold, 1905) by Mary H. Debenham.]

It has been maintained that an interval of sixty years places a novelist at the most satisfactory distance from his characters. At closer quarters he is liable to be confused by a multiplicity of detail, and if he withdraws too far from his creations they are likely to lack vitality. Miss Mary Debenham in placing her story, A Flood Tide, some hundred and thirty years back lays herself under certain limitations; but she has made use of the corresponding advantages in such a way as to justify her choice. Indeed, for a novelist who desires dramatic situations and richness of colouring rather than psychological subtlety the eighteenth century is incomparably superior to the nineteenth. In A Flood Tide, for example, we are busied from the first page to the last with the intricacies of two main plots, one political and the other private, which are further complicated with echoes of the Stuart cause and a lavish supply of the usual romantic element. A novelist with such extravagant tastes must clearly look to the past to satisfy them. It says much for Miss Debenham’s dexterity that she can combine all these different threads not only without confusion but so that they seem to spin themselves naturally from the circumstances of the time. Of the plot it is not necessary to say more than that it is concerned with the peace of 1763 and with a hitherto unpublished conspiracy on the part of the French which was to bring it prematurely to an end. The gentlemen charged with this affair contrive to get involved in the family difficulties of an English country squire, and the mixture of political and private intrigue results in some sufficiently dramatic situations. The incidents indeed are occasionally too closely crowded for comfort; but, on the whole, Miss Debenham has given us a very spirited picture of the time. Like most novelists who deal with a period other than their own, she lays a little too much emphasis upon the superficial distinctions of custom and manner, and is inclined to forget that even in that picturesque age men and women were made of something more substantial than powder. As a novel of adventure rather than of character, the book is successful and a very good specimen of its class.

[Times Literary Supplement, Nov 17, 1905]

[]

‘The Making of Michael.’

[The Making of Michael (George Allen, 1905) by Mrs Fred Reynolds.]

The Making of Michael, by Mrs Fred Reynolds, is the history of the career of a child who from his infancy showed unmistakable signs of genius. In the first chapter he asks an elderly spinster whether she knows what love is. He goes on with the same amazing precocity to distinguish between photographs and real pictures, and further declares that sound and colour are the two best things in the world. Later chapters chronicle other remarkable statements and actions, until it becomes obvious that he must either die prematurely or develop into one of those surprising geniuses who are not uncommon in novels. Happily, his genius is of such an order that it is essential that he should impart its message, and he becomes finally the greatest violinist of his time. Such a nature as this is not to be judged by ordinary standards, and the book therefore which portrays it is scarcely a novel in the sense that it attempts a sober study of life or character. The vagueness with which the different persons are described is indicated by the fact that they are seldom endowed with proper names, but are dubbed ‘Stranger’ or ‘Dreamer’ or ‘Musician’, as though they were possessed of only one quality apiece. The ‘Child’ himself passes through the various stages of existence—‘Dawn’, ‘Growth’, ‘Experience’, and so on, each symbolised by some significant event, till finally he becomes ‘The Man’. This method, if somewhat elementary, has the merit of simplicity, and the writer who is not concerned with the exact truth may be picturesque where another must be prosaic. On the other hand, it needs great imaginative force as well as rare powers of language to embody the truth in beautifully coloured symbols. Mrs Reynolds has tried to create a character at once real and ideal; he is to be as other boys and yet to typify a pure and inspired genius. The result is that he is neither one thing nor the other, and in spite of a certain grace of style the picture is too vague to leave other than a shadowy and fantastic impression upon the mind.

[Times Literary Supplement, Nov 17, 1905]

[]

A Description of the Desert.

[The Voice of the South (Hurst & Blackett Ltd, 1905) by Gilbert Watson.]

Mr Watson might echo the delightful claim which another writer of whom we are occasionally reminded put forward on behalf of his book. ‘I believe I may truly acknowledge,’ wrote Kingslake, ‘that from all details of geographical discovery … from all historical and scientific illustrations, from all useful statistics, from all political disquisitions … the volume is thoroughly free.’ That is the spirit, we believe, in which journeys ought to be undertaken, as it is certainly the spirit in which many people choose to have them chronicled. And yet if we judge by results it must be obvious that few travellers who write share this simple faith. A new country to most is simply a sheet of statistics upon which they can decipher the annual returns of rice or tea or tobacco, and upon which are inscribed in terms as brief the ‘habits’ of those whom we call indiscriminately ‘the natives’. It is much to Mr Watson’s credit that he has not once glanced upon this page, but has trusted to his own powers of observation.

From Biskra in Southern Algeria he travelled to Tougourt, on the edge of the desert of Sahara; it is not a great distance on the map, nor was his path interrupted by adventures. But when the reader has submitted himself to the charm of the narrative he is quite content that it should be uneventful, and is only disappointed that it should not be prolonged. Mr Watson is master of a leisurely and graceful style well suited to the spirit of the story, and when he chooses he can make it yield little pictures of real beauty. The vast desert appears to soothe the mind into a state of philosophic calm, and from the serene height of a camel’s back you behold all things dispassionately and yet with a humorous sense of their incongruities. All day the little caravan moves on through ‘the high sea of the desert’; a troop of horsemen drift past with courteous salutation on their lips, or a bride passes in her golden palanquin journeying with her kinsfolk to her husband’s village. At midday the praying-rugs are stretched on the sand, and, standing upright or bending till their foreheads touch the ground, the Arabs pray to Allah. By nightfall the green line on the horizon is reached, and they seek shelter in the oasis as in ‘an open boat upon the rolling desert sea’. This metaphor of the sea is one that recurs so often that by degrees the two ideas of the desert and the ocean rise and blend spontaneously in the mind. The immense solemnity, indeed, might become monotonous were it not for an artifice by which the sameness of the journey is relieved, and by which also the spirit of the South becomes articulate. Mr Watson was attended by two Arabs, Athman, the guide, and Abdullah, the owner of the camels. Athman had negro blood in his veins, of which he was deeply ashamed, but the mixture of dignity and simplicity which the two different strains produced, made him a curiously interesting companion. He was a poet, and beguiled the way by reciting from the manuscripts which were packed in large quantities about his person; he was always gay, kind, and demonstrative, but there were some subjects which he felt too deeply to discuss. One of these was his religion. Once Mr Watson caught him busied with several superfluous parcels of candles. Careful questioning revealed the fact that a light was to be offered at each tomb of a Marabout that was passed on the journey, and the vow was kept faithfully even when the shrine had long been tenanted by jackals. With this piety he combined a delightful strain of childlike credulity. Mr Watson tells us that he possessed a beautiful meerschaum pipe carved into the head of a laughing negro. For this pipe Athman conceived a curious affection, and his sympathy was genuine when it was explained to him that the negro had once been white, but would become entirely black in the course of continuous smoking. One day, before this process was complete, Mr Watson found the negro’s head severed from his body; the culprit was Athman, who had taken this decisive step to rescue the negro from the ignominious fate in store for him.

Tougourt, on the edge of the great desert, was the goal of the journey, and here Mr Watson hired a house and took up his lodging for some time. The expedition so far as we are concerned ends here with the fantastic disappearance of Athman. For by chance he saw a dancer who as she danced expressed in some mysterious way that voice of the South, to which the Arab, as he had once explained, can never be deaf. To follow her he left his master and his friends, and rode away from Tougourt into the desert. Whether we accept this and much that is like it as fact or fiction, there is no doubt that Mr Watson has managed to convey to us something of the mystery and charm of the strange land where such things happen.

[Guardian, Dec 6, 1905]

[]

‘The Brown House and Cordelia.’

[The Brown House, and Cordelia (Edward Arnold, 1905) by Margaret Booth]

This volume contains two stories which one may infer to be the work of an immature writer who has not yet mastered the technical difficulties of her profession. The first pages of ‘The Brown House’ offer but cold welcome to the tentative reader. We are presented with genealogical problems before we can have the least interest in their solution, and we are hurried from one fresh character to another with uncomfortable rapidity. But when these introductions have been conscientiously performed, the author is free to exercise a talent that is both delightful and original. The scene is laid, in both cases, in an English country house, and the story concerns itself with the normal lives of its inhabitants and the incidents of the village world around them. Miss Booth has set herself a difficult task, for the whole interest of the book depends upon the skill with which the different shades of character can be revealed. To achieve this she relies almost entirely upon dialogue, and shows herself possessed of a real talent for conceiving talk that is at once natural and characteristic. She is at her best in conveying the atmosphere of family life, and the delicate distinctions of temperament which a keen and humorous observer is able to detect in it. She is scarcely so happy when she has to face some more emphatic situation, and is clearly hampered by the intricacies of the necessary plot, but it is not rash to expect that she will give us something still better in the future.

[Guardian, Dec 6, 1905]

[]

‘Delta.’

[The Life of Mansie Wauch, Tailor in Dalkeith. Written by Himself (Blackwood, 1905) by ‘Delta’.]

That a very dusty little volume dated 1818 should blossom in all the fairness of a new edition at this prolific season of the twentieth century seems a somewhat impudent defiance of the laws of nature, for it must be owned that Mansie Wauch was among the least substantial of that ghostly company of the books which are no longer read. And yet, as piety alone would not be responsible for this resurrection, the curious will look further and ask not only who is this ‘Mansie Wauch’, of surprising vitality, but also whose is the name that stands upon the title-page.

David Macbeth Moir was born of ‘respectable’ parents at Musselburgh in 1798. His education was good, and his boyhood in no way extraordinary, except that, besides playing games energetically, he also saved his pocket-money to buy books. The result of buying books is often the writing of books, and at the age of fifteen poems began to accumulate in his desk, while The Cheap Magazine, a local sheet, printed some very early works in prose. But instead of developing along these orthodox lines Moir was early apprenticed to a Musselburgh doctor, and henceforth medicine was his profession, and literature was only a hobby, to be indulged when his patients allowed, indeed, his profession was a very serious matter. The death of his father left his mother dependent on him, and when, in 1817, he became the partner of Dr Brown, of Musselburgh, he was kept so closely at work that he was not free till nine or ten at night. His brother, who shared a bedroom with him, tells us how literature was served when the day’s task was over. ‘After supper a candle was lighted and the work of the desk begun … With that loving kindness of heart and tender care for others’, which many remarked in him, Moir would first persuade his brother to go to bed; often, however, when the night was far spent, the boy woke and saw the candle burning and the figure still bent over the open books and the half-written sheets. By the light of that midnight candle he wrote the rhyming epistles, mock heroic translations from Horace, parodies, and cockney love songs which supplied many magazines till the long and fruitful connection with Blackwood’s Magazine was firmly established. But it is probable that among all these miscellaneous occupations Moir took most pride as well as pleasure in the serious poetry to which alone he affixed his hieroglyphic ‘Delta’.

By one of those ironies with which most writers are familiar, the work which cost the writer least trouble and gave him least satisfaction is that by which he was best known in his lifetime and is solely remembered now. The Life of Mansie Wauch was, as he writes, ‘dashed off’ as ‘a mere sportive freak’, and for years he hesitated to acknowledge it. It began as a series of chapters in Blackwood in 1824, and ran on for the three following years. It was instantly popular, so that Mr Aird tells us of ‘districts where country clubs waiting for the magazine met monthly and had Mansie Wauch read aloud amidst explosions of congregated laughter’. It came out as a volume in 1828, and was accepted-again we quote the biographer—as a standard classic of humour, not only in Scotland but in England and America also, ‘giving Moir for all time to come a uniqueness of fame as a novelist’.

To-day we have more sympathy with the author’s own judgment, except that we are inclined to put the prose work above the poetry. It is a very simple-minded performance—the narrative of a tailor in Dalkeith, who tells the story of his life in the pleasant Scottish dialect. If it still has power to please, it is more because we feel the good humour and kindly simplicity of the writer than because we can join very heartily in the ‘congregated laughter’ which the story of the deacon who sat down on the cat or of the bailies who ate their cigars, called forth from a less sophisticated age. But it is noticeable that when Moir speaks in the person of the tailor he writes with a force and humour which are lacking in the smoothly conventional periods of his educated prose, and for this reason the story has a certain humble value by virtue of which it has endured to our day.

But any one who writes of Moir as a literary man alone must remember that he is speaking only of evenings and odd moments, and that the working daylight was spent in labour of a different sort. To Musselburgh—where he was born, lived, and died—Moir was known as the devoted doctor who had nursed the town through the cholera epidemic of 1832, the member of the town council, the elder of the church; it was to this good citizen that a statue was raised on the banks of the river Esk by his fellow-townsmen. He was too good a doctor to be a poet; he prescribed employment of the mind as the best method of dispelling the vapours, and might have treated genius itself as some symptom of physical disease. But this sanity, if it was opposed to inspiration, was almost medicinal in its simplicity; the savage Jeffrey wrote that one of Moir’s poems had excited ‘soothing and, I hope, bettering emotions’ in him; ‘it was so tender and true, so sweet and natural as to make all lower recommendations indifferent’; and Carlyle, on hearing of his death, exclaimed, ‘A fine, melodious nature.’

[Guardian, Dec 13, 1905]

[]

Two Irish Novels.

[Dan the Dollar (Maunsel & Co., 1905) by Shan F. Bullock
The Red-Haired Woman: Her Autobiography (John Murray, 1905) by Louise Kenny.]

Dan the Dollar, by Shan F. Bullock and The Red-Haired Woman: Her Autobiography, by Louise Kenny both treat of the Irish people, and even—an important addition—of the same Irish people. Mr Bullock’s peasants come from the county of Fermanagh, and the O’Currys in Miss Kenny’s book have their ancestral mansion on the coast to the west of the Shannon. As far as the map is concerned, then, there is little difference between them, and although both writers are unlike in all else, they have yet one substantial point in common. They both agree that this geographical fact is all important and that the type which it produces is so original as to be worth study as a type alone. Mr Bullock’s novel, indeed, makes scarcely any effort at an interest independent of its interest as a picture of Irish peasant character. There is an Irish farmer and his wife, their niece, and a farm-hand. They live in great poverty, but with a certain frugal grace and charm of their own. The farmer, Felix, is a lovable and imaginative man, who is incapable of work, but who meets bad luck and poverty always with the same pious, half humorous, acquiescence in the ways of fate. Och, och, that’s bad. But sure it was to be’ is the bitterest complaint he knows, for after all life has so many compensations. We hear the familiar voice of the Celtic poet issuing not incongruously from his lips:

We go about working, or fretting … and we kind of forget all the big things that are happening everywhere about us. No matter what we be at the autumn comes at the right minute, and the sun keeps on rising later every day, and we have frosts and dews, and whether we like it or not the hedges wither and burst out again … Ah, it’s wonderful strange.

With such a philosophy it is not surprising that the farmer and all connected with him gradually sink deeper and deeper into poverty. They are rescued by a son, Dan the Dollar, who has emigrated at an early age to America and now returns, a rich man. Is it possible that America will turn the son of a dreaming Irishman into a strenuous business man in whom all the characteristic qualities of the Anglo-Saxon are preeminent? ‘The boy wants us all to be like himself, grand and prosperous. But how could that happen in a country like this and with people like ourselves?’ asks Felix. That is one of the many questions which Mr Bullock suggests to us; he is too fine an artist to press an answer upon us, but it is not unlikely that his candour conceals one.

Miss Kenny in The Red-Haired Woman deals also with life in the west of Ireland, and, like Mr Bullock, she is always, both consciously and unconsciously, pointing her finger at the peculiarities of the Irish temperament. But it is curious to see how differently that temperament appears to two observers presumably of the same nationality. We may adjust the two points of view to some extent by considering that, while Mr Bullock scarcely leaves the peasant’s cottage, Miss Kenny is at home in the landlord’s great house; the two views are opposed, but each to some degree supplements the other. The ‘I’ in Miss Kenny’s book is Miss Peggy O’Curry, daughter and heiress of O’Curry of the Dunes, ‘the offset of a thousand princes and gentlemen of Ireland’ on her father’s side and a Dane on her mother’s. This, to begin with, is an important distinction; she is not of the people who are ‘rooted to the soil’; on the other hand, perhaps as a result of her foreign blood, she is conscious in every fibre of her noble Irish descent. Miss Kenny’s peasants, so far as we have anything to do with them, are of the conventional ‘Moonlighter’ type, and in every way her conception of character is more emphatic and less subtle than Mr Bullock’s. In place of the delicately natural life of the peasants, the O’Currys masquerade with all the properties of an ancient family; they talk of their ‘Luck’, apostrophise their ancestors, and keep an ancestral corpse embalmed on the top of their tower. All this might be Scottish as it might be Irish. The writer seems to have absorbed a strange miscellany of facts, legends, and theories, which she has poured out without any regard to form or coherency. Why, we ask, did Miss Kenny burden herself with the pretence of a plot or the pretence of characters? For we are constantly tantalised by signs of an original mind stored with interesting knowledge struggling to express itself in an uncongenial medium. A patient reader, however, will find much that illuminates the Irish character in the labyrinths of Miss Kenny’s novel.

[Times Literary Supplement, Dec 15, 1905]

[]

‘The Tower of Siloam.’

[The Tower of Siloam (Alston Rivers, 1905) by Mrs Henry Graham]

This novel, like many others, purposes to give a picture of that aristocratic section of English society which seems to exercise so strong a fascination over the modern novelist. There are some, like Mr E.F. Benson and Mr Anthony Hope, who find it frankly amusing, but not otherwise eccentric, and there are others, like Mrs Graham, who conceive that nobility of birth implies not only a certain superficial difference of manner, but also a radical distinction of character and morality. Those who incline to the more emphatic belief are generally of opinion that the distinction is wholly discreditable to the aristocrat, and if we are to believe in the truth of Mrs Graham’s portrait we must come to the same conclusion. But it must be confessed that in whatever light you consider her characters it is difficult to believe in the fidelity to life. It is true that they race, gamble, and play bridge, and reflect with considerable sentimentality at intervals that ‘it is the heart that matters most, whether its owner lives in Whitechapel or in Mayfair’, but the atmosphere of the book is both morbid and artificial, and an occasional promise of cleverness is not fulfilled.

[Guardian, Dec 20, 1905]

[]

A Walk By Night.

On an expedition reaching to a certain fold in the coast to the west of St Ives, known as Trevail, the autumnal dusk fell before the party had fairly started homewards. And indeed the view, still solid in the twilight, was such as to draw one’s silent and steadfast attention. There stood out into the sea a solemn procession of great cliffs fronting the night and the Atlantic waves with what seemed an almost conscious nobility of purpose, as though yet once more they must obey some immemorial command. Now and again a far lighthouse flashed its golden pathway through the mist and suddenly recalled the harsh shapes of the rocks. The sight was sufficient to indicate the lateness of the evening in view of those six or seven miles which must yet be traversed on foot; and so vague, moreover, was the surrounding country that it seemed prudent not to forsake the road. In half-an-hour’s time even the white surface beneath us swam like mist, and our feet struck somewhat tentatively as though they questioned the ground. A figure withdrawing itself some yards wavered for a moment and was then engulfed as though the dark waters of the night had closed over it, and the voice sounded like one reaching across great depths. It was noticeable that though we walked in close companionship and tried to defy the dark with cheerful argument our voices sounded strange to each other, and the most cogent reasoning lacked authority; insensibly we glided into such topics as are suitable to sombre and melancholy places.

In those silences which came too frequently the identity of the figure walking beside one seemed to merge in the night; one strode on alone, conscious of the pressure of the dark all around, conscious, too, that by degrees resistance to it grew less and less; that the body carried forward over the ground was some thing separate from the mind which floated away as though in a swoon. The road, even, had been left behind, and we had struck—if a word implying definite action can be used of anything as indefinite as our course now became, across the fields of the daytime—the trackless ocean of the night. From time to time it was advisable to test the ground beneath the feet in order that its substance might be proved indisputably. Both eyes and ears were fast sealed, or, for the pressure on them was of something intangible, had grown numb insensibly, so that the apparition of several lights beneath us had to be realised almost with conscious effort. Could one really see, as in the daytime, or was this some vision within the brain like those stars which a blow scatters before the eye? There they hung, floating without anchorage, in soft depths of darkness in a valley beneath us; for directly that the eye had proved them true the brain woke and constructed a scheme of the world in which to place them. There, too, must be a hill, a town beneath it, the road winding round as we remembered it; a dozen lights can do much to solidify the world. The strangest part of our pilgrimage was over, for something visible had emerged; we had a proof before us. Moreover, we found ourselves upon a road, and walked forward more freely. There were human beings down here too, though they were not as the people of the daytime are. Suddenly a light burnt close at our side, and even as we saw it bearing down upon us a wheel crunched, and a man in a cart was lit up before us; in a second his lights were out and his wheels were dumb; no voice of ours could have reached him. Again, as though scenes were passed swiftly before us and withdrawn, we found ourselves in a farmyard, where a lantern swung an unsteady disc of light over the huddled shapes of cattle, and even discovered parts of our submerged persons. The voice of the farmer bidding us goodnight recalled us as though a firm hand had grasped ours, to the shores of the world, but in two strides the immense flood of darkness and silence was over us again. Yet once more lights stood beside us, as though they had approached with silent steps like the lights of ships passing at sea—the lamps that we had seen from the hill-top. The village was quiet, but not asleep, as though it lay wide-eyed in tacit conflict with the dark; we could distinguish forms leaning against the house-walls, men apparently, who could not sleep with that weight of night pressing against their windows, but must come forth and stretch their arms in it. How puny were the rays of the lamp against the immeasurable waves of darkness surging round them! A ship at sea is a lonely thing, but far lonelier it seemed was this little village anchored to the desolate earth and exposed every night, alone, to the unfathomed waters of darkness.

And yet, once accustomed to the strange element, there was great peace and beauty in it. It seemed as though only the phantoms and spirits of substantial things were now abroad; clouds floated where the hills had been, and the houses were sparks of fire. The eye might bathe and refresh itself in the depths of the night, without grating upon any harsh outline of reality; the earth with its infinity of detail was dissolved into ambiguous space. The walls of the house were too narrow, the glare of the lamps too fierce for those thus refreshed and made sensitive; we were as birds lately winged that have been caught and caged.

[Guardian, Dec 28, 1905]

[]

1906

A Nineteenth-Century Critic.

[Lectures and Essays (ed. H.C. Beeching; 2 vols, Macmillan & Co., 1905) by Canon Alfred Ainger]

Canon Ainger’s Lectures and Essays give rise to some reflections which are only indirectly inspired by the text. It is no disparagement to the author to say that we find his volumes of greater interest as a revelation of his point of view than as a criticism of the subjects which he professes to treat. His point of view, by which we may understand the personal attitude towards literature as distinct from the intellectual, was far more clearly marked than his critical gift. And this attitude is interesting not only in itself, but because, as Ainger would have been the first to agree, it is much less common to-day than it was yesterday, and the nineteenth century is already yesterday. Canon Beeching says with obvious truth that ‘Ainger’s interest in literature was in the main ethical.’ He goes on to attribute this characteristic to the fact that he lived in ‘one of the great ages of creative impulse’, and the writers of such an age, he says, are chiefly concerned with ideas. But the distinction of the writers of the nineteenth century, so far as we are now able to judge them, seems to be that the ideas which interested them were, roughly speaking, ethical rather than aesthetic. If for this reason alone then, Canon Ainger seems to us a typical product of the nineteenth century, the more so because his individual gift was not of sufficient strength to colour or confuse his faithful reflection of the bent of contemporary thought.

The reader is driven to some such general criticism of the present collection of essays and lectures; by the form of work as well as by its nature. The lectures are considerably in the majority, and anyone who has had the misfortune to be lectured knows that certain defects are almost inherent in the form. The sense has to be adapted to the understanding of the least intelligent among the audience, and points must be made far more obvious to the ear than they need be to the eye. Again, as Canon Beeching points out, Ainger was ready to make some sacrifice of his style ‘for the sake of the lessons to be taught’, and the publication of the present volumes has been undertaken partly because, in the editor’s opinion, these lessons still need to be enforced. Here we are reminded that Canon Ainger possessed a ‘professional bias’, and we feel inclined to echo the criticism which he anticipated for himself, ‘Sermoni propriora’—these things are ‘properer for a sermon’. But a man is a clergyman because he upholds certain principles; he does not, certainly if he is Canon Ainger, don them with his black coat and his shovel hat. In his case the bias was innate and unconscious; it affects every view upon life or literature that is expressed in these volumes; but it is only occasionally that we feel that the lecturer is speaking by virtue of his office. However we may account for it, the reader of these lectures and essays will have to consider this point of view seriously; it is part of the lesson. Many quotations might be found to illustrate it. In his lecture upon the ethical element in Shakespeare, for instance, Ainger quotes with approval a saying of Coventry Patmore to the effect that a good poet must first be a good man. Byron, he says, might have written the lines:

To me the meanest flower that blows can give

Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears

but if Byron had written them they would not have ‘affected our imagination and evoked the kind of response in our hearts’ as they do when we know that they were written by Wordsworth. The reason is that ‘we are, in fact, whatever our theories upon this head, affected in our estimate of some beautiful and touching thought by our acquaintance with the personality of the author of it’.

Canon Ainger goes on, of course, to point out that we draw our conception of an author’s ‘personality’ from the whole body of his work and not from isolated phrases. This estimate would not be altered by any knowledge of the actual facts of his life, because the man and his work are indivisible. But as it is true that we can judge a man’s character from his writings, so we can lay emphasis upon that element in his work which reveals his character; the ethical element that is in preference to the purely intellectual. In the case of Shakespeare we have no evidence that affects our estimate of him save that which is supplied by his works; but with other writers it is not so. It is tempting, in many instances, to use our knowledge of a man’s life to interpret his work, and the result may be not only that we lay too great a stress upon the ethical element with which it is allied. This, we must confess, seems to us the weakness inherent in all Canon Ainger’s writing; his chief aim in criticism seems to be to institute an anxious inquiry into the state of the writer’s morals. Shakespeare thus was chiefly superior to Marlowe because he had ‘a dominating sense of the supremacy and beauty of goodness’. Mr Stephen Phillips is not a great poet because the ethical element is absent from his plays; Tennyson is superior to Shelley and Keats because his sympathies are ‘in close touch with man, his sorrows, his hopes, his eternal destiny’. No one will deny that a man may reasonably hold these judgments, but no one will feel that they are comprehensive. We may even assert that they imply some intellectual confusion. The upshot of it is that Canon Ainger, we feel, gives undue prominence to moral excellence in literature; his literary judgment is swayed by what he knows of a man’s life, and his affection for a writer blunts his critical insight. One might almost sum up his position by the advice which he gives to those who aim at ‘being pleasant in conversation’. ‘Take care of the heart and the intellect will take care of itself.’ Such advice, as he knew well, would be held merely amazing by a generation which is more concerned with the state of its art than with the state of its soul. Thus he found himself in the position of one who has to teach a lesson; he detected grave faults in the new age; and he did not hesitate to condemn them. But though we cannot agree in the value of the lesson which he consciously sets forth, we believe that unconsciously he has taught a lesson well worth learning. The picture of the man himself is the best thing in these volumes, for though no one will call him a great critic, all will agree that he reverenced letters; that he possessed a mind of singular culture and sincerity; and that his sympathy was with everything both in life and in letters that he held to be sweet and true. For these reasons it seems that he had something of that ‘secret of charm’ which he defined to be ‘the presence of the moral element; that is, “the human element—the ear that hears … the still sad music of humanity” and responds to it.’

[Speaker, Jan 6, 1906]

[]

‘After His Kind.’

[After His Kind (Duckworth & Co., 1905) by M. Sturge Henderson.]

The stories which make this volume all treat of the different aspects of love. But Mrs Henderson has chosen in every instance an unusual point of view. She has not tried to elaborate plots or to analyse character; rather she has taken up her story at some point of emotional crisis and has dropped it when the crisis is past. And the crisis comes where you do not expect it. Her stories then are very short and in most cases very intense. They are even occasionally abrupt; we are left standing on the edge of a precipice as it were. But however brief and elliptical, every story manages somehow to hold the attention, often to puzzle it. The people are strange, their actions are odd, their speech is unwonted—everything about them is a little harsh and angular. But this austerity, when it is due to discrimination, has a force of its own; the story of the Italian priest and the Madonna, of the preacher in the docks, of the don and Jane Austen, for example—and we could quote others—express much more than they say. And even when the writer is not so successful she yet interests us by the directness and originality of her touch. The book, in short, stimulates our appetite, and we hope that Mrs Henderson will give us more.

[Guardian, Jan 10, 1906]

[]

The Sister of Frederic the Great.

[Wilhelmina Margravine of Baireuth (2 vols, Chapman & Hall Ltd, 1905) by Edith E. Cuthell.]

The sister of Frederic the Great left behind her not only a considerable mass of correspondence, but also, according to the habit of her age, a memoir, which, she had never been able to finish to her liking. After her death the manuscripts fell into the hands of publishers, and various editions with different claims to authenticity excited for the time considerable interest and controversy. Wilhelmina, it appeared, had used her pen freely, some thought unscrupulously, and the critics were quick to convict her of disloyalty as a friend and of inaccuracy as a writer. Nevertheless, Carlyle, with his keen eye for worth, finds it ‘a human book … a veracious book, done with heart, and from eyesight and insight’. To Sainte-Beuve it revealed talents no less remarkable than those of her famous brother. Miss Cuthell, although her method is at times too crude and colloquial to be altogether pleasing, has given us a picturesque and readable account of a woman who is invariably interesting.

On her mother’s side Wilhelmina was a granddaughter of George I of England and of Sophia Dorothea, the prisoner of Ahlden. Her father’s mother was more pleasantly distinguished as the friend of Leibnitz and Bayle, who did her best to kindle something of the brilliancy of Parisian salons in Charlottenburg. The parents of Frederic and Wilhelmina had done little to deserve two such children, and the relationship was from the first strangely incongruous. Frederic William, the father, with many solid claims to respect, treated his children with a grotesque brutality which suggested insanity; Sophia Dorothea, the mother, was a stern and ambitious woman, who, like her husband, was too much dominated by her own wishes to have much independent affection for her children. Wilhelmina was a precocious child, but, save for one circumstance, an unhappy one. The happiness of her childhood, as to a great extent of her whole life, depended upon her brother Frederic, who was born three years after her: they had two bodies and one soul, he wrote in later years. They were ‘inseparable in the nursery’: at six years old Wilhelmina had impressed the eye of a painter with one attitude that was to be characteristic of her future life; she lays her hand on Frederic’s arm to restrain him from some infantine campaign on which he is bent with his big drum. But in the nursery Wilhelmina had to suffer from the tyranny of nurses and the erudition of scholars. The Queen was already ambitious for her daughter, and, not content with the simple teaching of governesses, procured a tutor who could instruct in ‘six modern languages without counting Slav and Basque dialects and Oriental tongues including Chinese’. With this gentleman Wilhelmina absorbed ‘universal history’ with such thoroughness that it took her four years of steady toil to reach the eighth century starting from ‘before the Deluge’. She was so good a linguist that, as Sainte-Beuve says, she might have written her memoirs in English or German had she not chosen to write them in French; but, unfortunately, she was taught neither Greek nor Latin, and with her deep interest in the classics only knew them through translations. All this learning, however, so far as the Queen was concerned, was but an instrument to fit Wilhelmina for marriage. Her marriage engrossed her thoughts while she was still strumming her scales and learning her declensions, for thus early the Queen had chosen Frederic, Prince of Wales as the most desirable suitor for her daughter. To further the match she condescended to intrigues and secret negotiations in which Wilhelmina soon became an accomplice, for, although both mother and daughter ignored the wider issues that were at stake, the King considered the English marriage from its political aspect only. The part that this intrigue played in Wilhelmina’s early life seems curiously out of proportion to its intrinsic importance, or perhaps we may complain that Miss Cuthell has followed the complications too laboriously. After six years of scheming and diplomacy the negotiations were broken off by the King in a sudden fit of rage: and, before Wilhelmina knew what was to become of her, the Crown Prince’s plot to escape to France was discovered. It was natural that Wilhelmina should be suspected of complicity, and after a violent scene with her father she was sent to prison and bidden to reflect on the merits of her two suitors, the Duke of Weissenfels and the Hereditary Prince of Baireuth. Her mother was still of opinion that ‘a prison is better than a bad marriage’, but Wilhelmina, when her brother’s pardon was promised on condition of her consent, was weak enough to give in. She agreed to marry the Prince of Baireuth, and received two letters from her parents, in one of which her ‘faithful father’ promised that he would never forsake her, and in the other her mother exclaimed: ‘I swear you an eternal hatred, and will never forgive you.’ In spite of the fervour of this statement the Queen proved herself fairly consistent.

So far the brutal and cumbersome machinery of the court had effectually obscured the finer shades of Wilhelmina’s character. Her love of her brother was the most individual trait in her nature, except for a habit she had, when ill in bed or locked up in prison, of reading and writing and composing music. But now that she was married she could expand more freely, although the atmosphere was still sufficiently harsh. The little court of Baireuth was humble compared with that of Berlin, and Her Royal Highness seemed both to herself and others too grand a lady for such simplicity. The Margrave, her father-in-law, moreover, was as economical as her own father, and less respectable. He might have been induced to die, thought Frederic, ‘if only he was sure that they distilled brandy in Heaven’. But Wilhelmina was happy in her husband, who to some extent shared her cultivated tastes. A daughter, their only child, was born to them and named Frederica after her uncle. The Margrave died in 1735, and with her accession began the few happy years of Wilhelmina’s life. As Margravine she had some scope for her energies, although in many ways they were still pitiably circumscribed. Her husband consulted her in the affairs of the government and she began to meditate plans for transforming Baireuth into a centre, or at least a reflection, of intellectual brilliancy. She corresponded with her brother about Italian actors and musicians, and the rustic taste of Baireuth was trained by the performance of French plays and operas. Her intellectual tastes were revived and stimulated; she read philosophy and expounded her views upon the theory of atoms and the existence of God. She began to build extravagantly, in the classical style. This, it is clear, was the real Wilhelmina: the woman of brilliant and volatile intellect, eager for knowledge and experience and craving above all the stimulus of companionship. She stayed once at Rheinsberg when Frederic was King, and the days passed in music, acting, and the conversation that she loved. There she met Voltaire, and began an intimacy which lasted her lifetime. But the King left this brilliant company for the opening campaign of the war of the Austrian succession and henceforward the Margravine’s life was never free from anxiety. ‘My great joy,’ she had written, ‘has always been study, music and above all the delight of society.’ All her life, with one or two brief exceptions, she was only to know this joy through translations. The music and the society of Baireuth she found ‘detestable’. Nor was she to enjoy her studies and the companionship of her husband for long. Wilhelmina’s beauty faded as her health became increasingly frail, and her husband was drawn into an intimacy with her greatest friend, Dorothea von Marwitz. Wilhelmina, in spite of her sarcastic tongue, was distinguished by a certain proud loyalty where her friends were concerned, and for a long time would see no ill. The effect of her disappointment when she could no longer ignore it was to concentrate her affections still more exclusively upon her brother. He inspired the most profound feeling in a nature too fastidious to be passionate. She threw herself into the intellectual reform of Baireuth, founded a university and anticipated the present opera house. Baireuth was sufficiently gay to attract Frenchmen from their metropolis; Voltaire, with whom the Margravine corresponded, paid her the high compliment of coming himself. But all this activity was carried on in defiance of the failing health which obliged her to winter in the South. To Wilhelmina the journey was an intellectual pilgrimage to be performed in a spirit of due reverence, but the account so faithfully recorded by Miss Cuthell is not more interesting than such itineraries generally are. Wilhelmina at the age of forty-five preserved an insatiable appetite for the sights of the world.

The last years of her life were years of physical and mental suffering. She tried to negotiate a peace for her brother, and failed. She had to hear of his defeats and to read of his desire to kill himself. ‘Medieval barbarism’ she thought was to engulf the little spot of light and reason which she had tended with so much care. Her daughter’s marriage proved a failure. But her mind, as she wrote in her last letter to her brother, ‘is always with me’, and she might have added, always occupied with others. She died in October 1758, aged forty-nine, and ‘Vanity of Vanities’ was by her own choice the text of her funeral sermon. Miss Cuthell’s book is full of interesting materials for any one who cares to preach it.

[Academy & Literature, Jan 13, 1906]

[]

‘The Scholar’s Daughter.’

[The Scholar’s Daughter (Methuen, 1906) by Beatrice Harraden]

The picture of a girl, young, beautiful, and gifted, brought up solely among learned scholars who are preparing a colossal dictionary of the English language attracts attention at the outset in The Scholar’s Daughter by Beatrice Harraden. But afterwards we complain that the author has been satisfied with the obvious reading of the situation, so that its attraction and promise remain on the surface. Perhaps it is impossible to feel much sympathy for the self-possessed young woman with her high spirits and her slang; or perhaps the scholarly atmosphere with which she contrasts is but a very diluted version of the real thing. The three bookworms with their tender hearts and their tempered love of philology are not convincing as men or scholars, if, as Miss Harraden would have us, we must make that distinction. The book, indeed, seems to fall between two stools; either Miss Harraden might have concentrated her powers upon the sufficiently amusing intricacies of the plot and turned out a well-filled short story, or, had she chosen to expound the characters more elaborately, she might have given us an interesting study of the conflict of one temperament with another. But, as it is, if we consider the book as a serious novel its superficiality irritates us, or if we take it as a short story we are wearied by the protracted explanations. If it is said that in spite of this it is easy to read The Scholar’s Daughter with interest and amusement it is obvious how much more might have been expected of the writer than she has given us here.

[Times Literary Supplement, Feb 16, 1906]

[]

‘A Supreme Moment.’

[A Supreme Moment (Fisher Unwin, 1905) by Mrs Hamilton Synge.]

It is not easy to account for the impression that A Supreme Moment by Mrs Hamilton Synge leaves upon the mind; even during the process of reading one is conscious of a little amazement at the result which is being achieved by apparently simple means. A commonplace stretch of English country, dotted with substantial country houses and snug vicarages, will either be described, one expects, quite frankly as it stands or made the scene of some violent and romantic contrast. But Mrs Synge, starting, as it seems, to go patiently over the familiar ground of mothers’ meetings and village scandals, somehow contrives always to skip what we expect and to show us something different. Nothing more happens than that a girl, brought up with some freedom abroad, comes to stay with a quiet English family; but her coming slightly changes the perspective all round. The girl herself is not much more than a shadow; but she has the property of proving that the characters among whom she passes are living flesh and blood. The gradual unfolding of Agatha, the staid Englishwoman of middle age, when brought into contact with something unlike what she has ever known is the real achievement of the book; for without any crudeness or improbability we are shown the way in which, with all the odd reserves and simplicities of her type, she alters the point of view which education and tradition have given her. Thus by the end of the book she has become a new person with hardly any alteration in the facts of her life to accentuate the change which has taken place within. Mrs Hamilton Synge’s method is carefully simple; she always understates and often omits what we expect to be put in; but, in spite of the fact that some of her characters are hints rather than people, each stroke makes its impression, and the result is that the book as a whole is undeniably memorable among its fellows.

[Times Literary Supplement, Feb 16, 1906]

[]

‘The House of Shadows.’

[The House of Shadows (Edward Arnold, 1906) by R.J. Farrer.]

In many novels the situation seems to have been suggested by the author’s desire to introduce certain characters; in others the writer seems to have conceived his scheme first and to have made his characters its creatures. Mr R.J. Farrer, in The House of Shadows, has written a novel under the stress of an idea; and although his method has certain drawbacks it has undoubtedly produced a book remarkable for its force and continuity. The story is concerned with an old Yorkshire house and its squire, Ladon by name, who has nursed his eccentricities and his pride in solitude with an only son since the death of his wife twenty-five years ago. The son has never mixed with the world; and the first visit that he pays to London sends him back to Yorkshire with a wife. Between this vulgar, but beautiful and passionate, woman and her morose old father-in-law things go wrong from the first; indeed, in his fierce headaches his dislike of her becomes almost insane. Then he is suddenly told by a specialist that he is suffering from a disease that must kill him after a year of increasing agony. A niece, guessing that her symptoms are the same as her uncle’s, poisons herself; and he resolves to do the same thing, but that his religion forbids suicide. His son refuses to administer the draught, and he determines to exact this deed in revenge from his daughter-in-law. The situation verges upon the melodramatic; but the reserve and humour with which it is treated keep it in proper proportions. The same purpose, that is, links all the chapters together, and each adds something of its own to the single impression. And that impression is so consistently gloomy that it is possible to resent the power with which it is expounded. For the writer seems possessed with the idea of physical pain, and its conflict with the forces of the human soul—with love and religion; and it is pain that conquers. The drawback of the concentration which is the result of the scheme of the book is naturally that the characters are always seen under some kind of distortion, and that at intervals the idea behind comes too prominently and crudely to the foreground. The author harangues us on occasion as though he were speaking from the pulpit. And the defect that is allied to the subject of the book qualifies our admiration at its strongest; the pain and conflict are inevitably degraded by the taint of the merely bodily anguish from which they proceed. But these are the limitations of a remarkable book, and in some degree spring from its strength. Moreover, pleasure of a less sardonic kind can be taken in Cousin Coralie the Countess, the Reverend Mr Lancaster, with his devout respect for titles, and Mrs Bolpett, of the ancestral Bolpetts. Mr Farrer clearly is a writer to be remembered.

[Times Literary Supplement, Mar 9, 1906]

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‘Blanche Esmead.’

[Blanche Esmead: a story of diverse temperaments (Methuen, 1906) by Mrs Fuller Maitland]

Mrs Fuller Maitland calls her novel Blanche Esmead, a study of diverse temperaments; the frail and exquisite Blanche Esmead has married an honest country parson who can talk only of the Clothing Club and of the drunkenness of Hoggins. The diversity, however, between the parson and his wife manifests itself in such very trivial ways—he likes cold beef, for instance, and his wife cannot bear it—that a catastrophe of any kind between them seems quite unnecessary. For some reason we do not realise that there is an essential gulf between the two, of which these trifles are the superficial indication. But then Mrs Fuller Maitland writes so gracefully and evolves her story with such smooth skill that we are content to remain on the surface and laugh at trifles. There is no need to take anybody or anything very much to heart. Good John Esmead was no doubt a very worthy man; but as he will quote proverbs on every occason, call his wife ‘the wifie’, knock over the ink, and tread upon the dog, what can we do but laugh at him? Every village in England must be supplied with such a vicar and such a Mrs Crowle who cuts out the clothes and manages the societies and is full of intolerance and virtuous wrath, if we are to believe the novelists. Somehow it seems conceivable that the novelists have been satisfied with a traditional conception of these parts, and that the pattern may have changed since it was first originated. But Mrs Fuller Maitland is quite content with things as they are, or may conveniently be supposed to be. Then there is, of course, the great lady of the neighbourhood, who on this occasion is a lady of doubtful reputation; and Zéphine, the fashionable widow from London in whom Blanche confides. There is a little flavour of the disagreeable, some discomfort; ‘neuralgia of the soul’ as Blanche calls it. But Blanche is too refined to be wicked, and when the crisis comes prefers to die gracefully of influenza—until her good husband somehow suggests to her that a coffin and a grave are necessary parts of death, upon which she eats her dinner and recovers. It is then obvious that John must collide with a motor-car, and so set his wife free in the eye of the law to marry her irreproachable lover Basil Forde. All this naturally is treated in a facile and frivolous style, in which pet dogs and paper knives seem of equal value with men and women. But within its limits—the limits of a fashionable drawing-room—this is a graceful and entertaining novel, and the action is swift and sparkling from first to last, if it is also shallow.

[Times Literary Supplement, Mar 23, 1906]

[]

‘The Face of Clay.’

[The Face of Clay: an interpretation (John Murray, 1906) by H.A. Vachell]

Mr H.A. Vachell could hardly have chosen a happier setting for his novel The Face of Clay than the fishing village of Pont-Aven in Brittany. The rustic barbarity of the peasant life becomes something primitive and beautiful when it is set against the mysterious background of the sea. It is as though the presence of this great force at their doors simplified and lent dignity to the lives which are so constantly risked upon it. Certainly Mr Vachell has caught the spirit of the place and conveyed it to us in a quantity of delicate and vivid pictures of the sea and of the characters bred beneath its influence. His heroine, Téphany Lane, belongs in a double sense to the twofold life of the town and its colony of artists; on her mother’s side she comes of an old Breton family, and her father was an English painter who is drowned, as the book opens, in the sea almost beneath his daughter’s eyes. But it is the Breton element in her that predominates, and her strong inheritance of Breton instincts and superstitions that gives its meaning to the story. Indeed, the first half of the book, in which the life of both peasant and artist is illustrated with great charm and an indication of perfect fidelity, attracts us more than the development of the story itself. Michael Ossory, the painter of genius, who leads a life of failure and misanthropy in remorse for a mysterious crime committed early in life, is not a figure who convinces one of his truth, or impresses one with his supreme capabilities. The touch of mystery and superstition, which seems natural in a Breton peasant, becomes slightly melodramatic in the character of an English gentleman. For this reason the second half of the book, in which the story of the crime, symbolised by the face of clay, is confessed and cleared up, is less successful than the perfectly natural and sincere opening. Mr Vachell is conscious perhaps that he has a moral to expound, and he becomes, therefore, a little solemn and emphatic. ‘Clinton Carne,’ he remarks, ‘walks out of these pages a better man than he entered them, and a finer artist.’ That may be true, but the conclusion ought to have been so closely woven into the texture of the story that there was no need to sum it up in so many words. But though there are some weak passages, especially, it seems, in any crisis of emotion, the book is interesting not only as a study of curious beliefs and superstitions, but in a wider sense as a study of the life that is not limited to peasants. The subsidiary characters of Mary Machin, and Johnnie Keats, the delightful Satellite, are observed with such humour and sympathy that they make a very severe touchstone by which to test the other characters in the book. And the story of Yannik, the peasant girl, whose caste forbids her to sit as a model, and the grandmother who craves for the ‘fat five-franc pieces’ in order to save her sons’ souls, is observed with such delicacy that it touches the reader perhaps more than anything else in the book.

[Times Literary Supplement, Apr 13, 1906]

[]

The Poetic Drama.

[King William I (Elkin Mathews, 1905) by Arthur Dillon;
Aurelian: a drama of the later Empire (Longmans, 1905) by Spencer Moore;
Sir Thomas More: an historical play in five acts (Constable & Co., 1905) by Archibald Douglas Fox;
The Little Mermaid: a play in three acts … suggested by Hans Andersen’s fairy tale … (Elkin Mathews, 1906) by Alexandra von Herder;
The City: a poem-drama, and other poems (Macmillan & Co., 1905) by Arthur Upson;
Plays & Poems (Kegan Paul & Co., 1905) by Paul Hookham;
The Two Arcadias: plays and poems … with an introduction by Richard Garnett (Brimley Johnson & Ince, 1905) by Rosalind Travers.]

It is at least encouraging to see with what energy people can still devote themselves to poetry even in its most arduous and ambitious branches. No less than three of the seven volumes before us are seriously concerned with the drama, and merit our respect, therefore, however we may rate their achievement. Mr Dillon, indeed, has given us not only a play but a trilogy—a threefold illustration of the life of William the Conqueror. It is a tremendous theme, and the author has attacked it vigorously, but his vigour is spasmodic rather than sustained, and he never reaches those equable heights to which the masters of blank verse seem to rise without effort. Thus he can keep up to a fair level of dignity for a passage at a time, and then the strain becomes too tense and he drops to a metaphor like this:

‘These words are gridirons whereon we lie stretched

In lingering agony …’

Or this:

‘Let me gather up the shreds,

The potsherds of the broken crock, my son’

and the spell is rudely broken. But it would be unfair to criticise a work of such magnitude by single phrases. The general impression left upon the mind of the reader is somewhat fragmentary and confused, as though a great many scenes and characters had passed across the stage without much order or continuity.

Mr Spencer Moore is more successful in the narrower limits of his Aurelian. He has used his materials more completely and has the advantage of a skilled and mellifluous pen. His gift, it is true, is more for a picturesque rhetoric than for the imaginative depths of poetry. Passages like the following abound:

‘The sun in golden plashes beats upon

My battlemented glory! Do you not hear

The waves of adulation lapping me?’

And that is not poetry. But in the mouth of Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra, the lines are not inappropriate; or at any rate we can accept them in default of better. Mr Moore, moreover, can make his drama move with some swiftness and dramatic skill so that it is not hard to read him, even with some degree of pleasure. It is curious, indeed, to hear a Roman Emperor address his son as ‘sonny’ and speak of a ‘protégé’; while Zenobia, adjusting her diadem after her submission, asks, ‘Is it on straight?’ The insight into feminine nature that is shown in the last touch is hardly permissible in a poet who is not Euripides. But with the exception of a few slips like these the play is vivid and occasionally eloquent.

With Mr Douglas Fox we draw nearer our own time and the change is welcome. For both the dramatists we have passed in review respect the splendid surface of their kings and queens too deeply to credit them with human subtleties. Mr Fox shows traces of a warmer sympathy. He takes five scenes from the life of Sir Thomas More and leaves him on the scaffold with the axe about to fall. The drama moves gently and melodiously, with no very great vigour but without consistent dignity of thought and expression. There are lines, too, which suggest that he has it in him to produce something more than lengths of irreproachable English, as, for instance, the concluding lines of the fine speech on page 22:

‘… rather march

With souls attuned to heavenly purposes

And fortified by stout fidelity

To ancient, high, and venerable things,

Beneath old banners into lands unknown.’

The figure of Dame More is excellent. Sir Thomas himself is a little too flatly and evenly drawn to excite much sympathy.

Miss von Herder leaves the solid world and takes us beneath the sea. But it must be confessed that her mermaidens, and her Sea Queen in particular, would do credit to Belgravia, and that is a disappointment. Matthew Arnold, in his ‘Forsaken Merman’, made the sea and its people both true and mysterious, but Miss von Herder makes the fatal mistake of adding a tail to the ordinary mortal and thinking that she has created a mermaid. However, the tails are an excuse for much pretty and fantastic verse, and if the sound and the sense are somewhat thin, it is all thoroughly sweet and amiable.

Of Mr Upson’s ‘poem-drama’, again, it is difficult to speak enthusiastically, though it would be unjust not to speak respectfully. Unfortunately it is possible to write a great number of lines in perfect taste and rhythm without saying anything that has not been said before. Any one with sufficient culture and leisure might be expected to write as Mr Upson has written with no other or rarer gift from the gods. The City, in which he has for his theme the story of Abgar, King of Edessa, and of his appeal to Christ, is not so successful as the shorter pieces which succeed it. Culture is less able to deal with such far-off things than with the gentle meditations inspired by an Oxford garden. Here Mr Upson is pleasantly at his ease, and muses not unmelodiously.

The claim which Mr Hookham makes for his book is doubtless justifiable; it is ‘the individual expression of an individual mind’ and no plagiarism either in thought or expression. Whether the individual mind is so interesting that we wish to have an exact copy of it may be a matter of opinion. So long as the poem flows easily among familiar thoughts it is graceful enough, but directly the writer has to face a crisis his imaginative force gives out, and he takes refuge in the conventional and obvious. This is sufficiently clear from the Sappho, where there are some genuinely graceful passages; while in The Cup and the Lip (written in conjunction with Mr Edward Ferris) the exigencies of the plot are painfully beyond the strength of the verse. Indeed, we get the impression that the drama was written primarily for the stage, and that the authors have not considered how crudely their work reads in the paler light of the study. For the rest Mr Hookham has paraphrased a great number of La Fontaine’s fables, and has also written some shorter original pieces. These show him to be possessed of a sincere and appreciative mind, which reflects thoughtfully upon such themes as Spring and Age, The Snowdrop, Equality, and so forth.

We have left to the last the volume which has given us the clearest impression of original talent. Miss Travers is a young writer who publishes for the first time. She is at the stage, evidently, of revolt and intolerance; of question rather than of answer. She reads as though she wrote under some sort of compulsion, and not merely because words can be made to rhyme. In the ‘Arcady in Peril’ and the ‘Suburbiad’ she lashes the ugly surface of modern life with satire, often pointed but sometimes shrill. But in spite of this tendency to see the merely ridiculous side of things—perhaps because of it—she is equally sensitive to the underlying beauty:

‘These shift and pass; the Unknown Powers remain

The Everlasting Voices linger yet

By field and flood.’

In other poems, notably ‘The Enemy Within’, ‘The Cliff Head’, ‘The Tramp’, Miss Travers lets her imagination dwell on subjects that are more congenial to it, and proves that she can see clearly, passionately, and with her own eyes. Such gifts make this little book noticeable among its fellows, for they promise work to come no less original and more deeply imaginative than that which we have in the volume before us.

[Guardian, Apr 18, 1906]

[]

Poets’ Letters.

[Elizabeth Barrett Browning in her Letters (Smith, Elder, 1906) by Percy Lubbock;
Robert Browning, and Alfred Domett (Smith, Elder, 1906) ed. F.G. Kenyon]

If it were possible to condense into set phrases that mist of felt rather than spoken criticism which hangs round all the great names in literature, it is tolerably certain what result we should reach in the case of Mrs Browning. We should have to interpret some brief decision to the effect that she was a bad poet, and that our fathers were strangely mistaken when they exalted her to the place which she holds, in theory at least, at the present day. It is true that a candid inquirer would have to enlarge and qualify such a verdict considerably before it could be allowed to stand; but in its rude way it points to a fact that need not be made the subject of inquiry here, that Mrs Browning, as a poet, has ceased to play much part in our lives.

The appearance of Mr Lubbock’s book, however, makes one wonder whether the method which he has applied to her letters might not be applied with equally happy results to the voluminous body of her poetry. For her letters, especially we must own the famous volumes of love letters, are responsible for a great deal of our partly instinctive distrust of her poetry. It was dreadful, the sensitive said, to overhear; but if one did sin, the more callous suggested, it was as well to be guilty of a pleasant crime. And the eavesdropper became so weary of those emphatic voices, protesting and asseverating, uttering commonplaces with dreadful distortion of the lips and drowning even the simple emotions in a twisted torrent of language, that he might surely consider that his fault was expiated as soon as committed. Mr Lubbock, then, has done Mrs Browning and her readers a substantial service. With singular discretion and tact he has gone through the many volumes of her correspondence, prompting her as it were to speak just those words which explain herself and connecting them with admirably intelligent comments of his own. In the compass of one modest volume we have all the passages we could wish to see preserved, and, when thus skilfully pieced together, it is seen that they compose a finished and brilliant portrait of the writer. And then it appears how summary would have been that decision which disposed of her merely as an extravagent freak of early Victorian taste and denied her any more permanent claim on our attention.

For, paradoxically enough, it is more easy to understand what was meant by her genius when we study her life than when we read those works that were the legitimate expression of it. It is as though the pure and intense flame which we detect when we read or hear of her had been blown into all kinds of vague and diffuse gusts, more of smoke than of fire when she yielded herself in her enthusiastic way to the inspiration of poetry. But when we approach her work through a knowledge of her life, something of the disappointment is explained, although the pity of it is deepened. It is one of the merits of Mr Lubbock’s book that the familiar facts of Mrs Browning’s life, of her unmarried life in particular, are so arranged that they seem to gather a new and significant force. In hands less just and discriminating the story becomes so monstrous that its real effect upon Mrs Browning is obscured. But as it is told here, with the perpetual illustration of the letters, it becomes clearly a thing that did really happen and that had an immense but calculable influence on the victim’s life. We see how, gradually, after those first years of astonishing precocity, Elizabeth was silently secluded from the world, forced to acquiesce in her position as a life-long prisoner in a London house, guarded by a mad gaoler in the person of her father, and nourished almost solely upon books and her own writings. Without definite disease she was relegated by family consent to a sofa in a single room, which she scarcely left for five years. It is true that she saw a few visitors who could be smuggled upstairs without meeting her father, and she carried on a voluminous correspondence with mild literary gentlemen who were anxious to direct her talent. But it was hardly possible, as she knew herself, that sane poetry should issue from such conditions.

You (she writes to Browning) seem to have drunken of the cup of life full, with the sun shining on it. I have lived only inwardly, or with sorrow for a strong emotion. Before this seclusion of my illness, I was secluded still, and there are few of the youngest women in the world who have not seen more, heard more, known more, of society than I, who am scarcely to be called young now. (When she was supposed to be dying she thought) that I had stood blind in this temple I was about to leave—that I had seen no human nature, that my brothers and sisters of the earth were names to me, that I had beheld no great mountain or river, nothing in fact … And do you also know what a disadvantage this ignorance is to my art? … that I am in a manner, as a blind poet? Certainly, there is a compensation to a degree. I have had much of the inner life, and from the habit of self-consciousness and self-analysis I make great guesses at human nature in the main. But how willingly I would, as a poet, exchange some of this lumbering, ponderous, helpless knowledge of books, for some experience of life and man, for some …

The vigour with which she threw herself into the only life that was free to her and lived so steadily and strongly in her books that her days were full of purpose and character would be pathetic did it not impress us with the strength that underlay her ardent and sometimes febrile temperament. Indeed, there is no questioning her deliberate and reasonable love of literature and all that the word contains. Not only was she a very shrewd critic of others, but, pliant as she was in most matters, she could be almost obstinate when her literary independence was attacked. The many critics who objected to faults of obscurity and technique in her writing she answered indeed, but answered authoritatively, as a person stating a fact, and not pleading a case. ‘My poetry,’ she writes to Ruskin, ‘which you once called “sickly” … has been called by much harder names, “affected”, for instance, a charge I have never deserved, for I do think, if I may say it of myself, that the desire of speaking or spluttering the real truth out broadly, may be a cause of a good deal of what is called in me careless and awkward expression.’

The desire was so honest and valiant that the ‘splutterer’ may be condoned, although there seems to be no reason to agree with Mrs Browning in her tacit assertion that the cause of truth would be demeaned by a more scrupulous regard for literary form. But it is not possible to consider what she might have done had her life been propitious—had not one half of it dwindled in a London sick-room—had not the other been exposed suddenly to the fierce Italian sun and Robert Browning. Or, if we are to speculate, we must remember her own consolation. ‘I love poetry better than I love my own success

We may all know now, if we choose to finish the poem in prose, what became of Waring; that he was Alfred Domett, CMG; that he went to New Zealand, rose to be Prime Minister there, and ‘came back the other day after thirty years’ absence, the same as ever—nearly … with a poem’. Browning, moreover, wrote to him frequently for some years, and the letters, with some from another friend, Joseph Arnould, are now printed together in a small volume. Browning, it is clear, was not what is called a good correspondent.We can almost hear the groan with which he sat down to his task when ‘Chris Dowson’ called to bid him ‘Get a letter ready, seeing that the ship is ready for it.’ One may guess that as a poet he grudged the use of his fine tools upon such rude and trivial work as letter-writing. ‘Consider these scratches but as so many energetic “kickings of the feet”, and that what they mean is God bless you’, is the kind of phrase that constantly testifies his dissatisfaction with the scrawled sheets in front of him. But although he strives like a giant in chains with the conventional ‘hopes and anxieties and good wishes’, he gets his meaning expressed in the end with his usual energy. Almost all the letters are written early, before his marriage, and the atmosphere is full of hope and defiance. The true best of me is to come, and you shall have it.’ ‘Expect more and better things’* are phrases called out by his friend’s enthusiastic trust in him. ‘I believe as devoutly as ever in Paracelsus, and find more wealth of thought and poetry in it than in any book, except Shakespeare,’ writes Arnould. In return for this confidence, Browning expounds some of his aims and theories in his own cryptic and abundant method, which may not be quoted here. Few and fragmentary though the letters are, all lovers of Browning will feel that they add some vigorous strokes to the poet’s familiar portrait.

[Speaker, Apr 21, 1906]

[]

Wordsworth and the Lakes.

[Wordsworth’s Guide to the Lakes. Fifth ed., 1835. With an introduction and appendices and notes … by E. de Sélincourt (Henry Frowde, 1906)
Months at the Lakes, With nine illustrations (James Madehose & Sons, 1906) by Rev. H.D. Rawnsley]

Wordsworth wrote his Guide to the Lakes in 1810, to preface a work by the Rev. Joseph Wilkinson, who had drawn a folio volume of select views. But the drawings were, as Wordsworth was the first to pronounce, so ‘intolerable’.’ that he had his preface severed from the main volume and published separately. In spite of its popularity in this shape, however—some one asked him whether he had written anything else—the book has not been reprinted as a separate volume since 1864; and many readers will have reason to thank Mr de Sélincourt for his letter of introduction to a new and happily permanent friend. In his excellent preface, which, besides furnishing all facts, suggests the right way of approaching them, Mr de Sélincourt tells us something of the sentimental history of the Lakes. In 1810 they were already the subject of curiosity, although they had not been domesticated in the sense that they are to-day. The people who went went in the conscious spirit of explorers, to bring back tales of what they had seen and to figure hereafter as travellers, rather than as private people who might keep their emotions to themselves. It was the custom to preserve these experiences in prose or verse; but these volumes do not as Mr de Sélincourt says, ‘afford invigorating reading’. There was, perhaps, some affectation in their appreciation, and a tendency to approach lakes and mountains with a mind on the defensive against any attacks upon its sensibility. Mountains are ‘horrid’, and when praise is given, the curiously obsolete and artificial sound of it suggests that it is inspired by a wish to save the writer’s reputation as a man of taste rather than by a simple desire to write the truth.

Wordsworth, coming after these somewhat perplexed and perfunctory tourists, wrote with the calm authority of one who had lived for all but three years of his life among the scenes he describes. He has all the courtesy and consideration of an old inhabitant who does the honours of the place to a stranger, and who not only undertakes to show him the beauties, but will explain from his abundant and well-ordered knowledge any fact of history or geography that seems to him worth observation. He is jealous for his country’s credit, but his familiarity with the place is so perfect that no view will drive him into hasty exaggeration; he admires what he has seen and tested during a lifetime and knows to deserve and require every word he bestows. At first, it is true, the readers may detect some old-fashioned formality in his guide; he uses still the somewhat rigid vocabulary that was then thought proper for natural things; he will talk of a view that is ‘rich in a diversity of pleasing or grand scenery’, of ‘prospects’ and ‘situations’, and he condescends more than a poet should to direct you how best to secure beds at the inn, ‘as there is but one, and it is much resorted to in summer’. But this very sedateness has its value, and seems to prove that the beauty is real enough to suffer examination by a perfectly candid and conscientious temper. These sober details, moreover, give a tone of solidity to the whole, and suggest the rough surface of the earth, k which is as true a part of the country as its heights and its splendours.

Let us station ourselves in a cloud, he begins, hanging midway between Great Gavel or Scawfell; ‘we shall then see stretched at our feet a number of valleys, not fewer than eight … diverging from the point … like spokes from the nave of a wheel.’ After this general survey he goes on to follow out certain paths in detail, making general observations on the form of the country and gradually narrowing his gaze till he gives us those closely observed trifles which only a very penetrating eye after long search could have selected and described. He knows not only the scientific reasons why the rocky part of a mountain is blue or ‘hoary grey’, with a tinge of red in it ‘like the compound hues of a dove’s neck’, but also which shade of green is due to the lichen and which to the fern that grows when the first grass is faded. But all through this minute and scrupulous catalogue there runs a purpose which solves it into one coherent and increasingly impressive picture. For all these details and more ‘which a volume would not be sufficient to describe’ are of such interest to him because he sees them all as living parts of a vast and exquisitely ordered system. It is this combination in him of obstinate truth and fervent imagination that stamps his descriptions more deeply upon the mind than those of almost any other writer. ‘Days of unsettled weather’, he says, ‘with partial showers, are very frequent, but the showers, darkening or brightening as they fly from hill to hill, are not less grateful to the eye than finely interwoven passages of gay and sad music are touching to the ear.’ Or again, ‘There is also an imaginative influence in the voice of the cuckoo, when that voice has taken possession of a deep mountain valley’. Or ‘We observed the lemon-coloured leaves of the birches, as the breeze turned them to the sun, sparkle, or rather flash like diamonds, and the leafless purple twigs were tipped with globes of shining crystal.’ He suggests, moreover, in a curious way, the loneliness of nature; how one may think ‘of the primaeval woods shedding and renewing their leaves with no human eye to notice, or human heart to regret or welcome the change.’ ‘Flowers, the most brilliant feathers, and even gems, scarcely surpass in colouring some of those masses of stone which no human eye beholds except the shepherd or traveller be led there by curiosity; and how seldom must this happen!’

But a more characteristic passage, perhaps, is that in which he reflects why it is that a lake carries you ‘into recesses of feeling otherwise impenetrable. The reason of this is that the heavens are not only brought down into the bosom of the earth, but that the earth is mainly looked at and thought of through the medium of a purer element.’ A thought like that, he seems to suggest, must be common to every tourist; it is as easy for him to see heaven in the earth as to see grass and stones there. Indeed, his quiet assumption that not only mountains, trees and lakes, but the most minute changes of leaf and herb, are the seriously important things in all lives, amusing as it is at first, persuades us in the end that it is, or should be, really so. For in Wordsworth’s eyes this spectacle of the countryside which we find variously pleasant or delightful as a relief from other things is the most solemn truth that exists. It is no mere curiousity or a taste for the picturesque that drives him to walk out among the hills, and to know all that can be known about the things that grow there. Rather he is trying to read the signs which, whatever their meaning, are to him never made in vain. And, conscious as he is of a beautifully adjusted symmetry in all natural things, his condemnation is most severe of those whose arrogance leads them in any way, by their buildings or plantations, to violate that order. His usual austerity almost breaks into tenderness when he speaks of the little republics of shepherds and farmers which lie among the hills. Theirs was the perfect life whose constitution had been ‘imposed and regulated by the mountains which protected it’; and theirs, also, were the perfect dwelling places which seem ‘to have risen, by an instinct of their own, out of the native rock’ and ‘appear to be received into the bosom of the living principle of things’. This belief, so gravely and reverently worshipped, one may almost say, in the live force which lies beneath woods and hills and is perpetually working in them for good, gives to this little book its tone of solemn enthusiasm. You draw from it the impression that a walk among the lakes is to be undertaken in a spirit of reverence, for the sights which rejoice the eye also minister to the soul.

It is scarcely fair perhaps to take Canon Rawnsley as a sequel to Wordsworth. There are few who would not seem to write diluted English after the terse veracity of the poet’s prose. The Canon’s style, moreover, starred as it is with a great variety of pretty words and fashioned into innumerable conceits, seems, if not impertinent, at least irrelevant when you remember the respect with which Wordsworth subordinated his pen to the truth. The snowdrop, for instance, becomes in Canon Rawnsley’s hands ‘a fair maiden of February’, who conceals a secret ‘that … deep below in the ground is marvellous activity. By every rootlet’s tiniest mouth, in the great laboratory of growth in which the Spring is chief chemist,’ and so on, and so on. Elsewhere we read of meres and tarns, ‘like sapphires … to-morrow they will be as white as a dead man’s face’. When the sun strikes a rhododendron bush it seems as though ‘coloured fire was springing in a fountain from the ground’; the sun is a ‘rosy jewel’; the bracken in August is like ‘torrents of green verdure’; clouds are ‘white galleons that come sailing into seas of sapphire’. Indeed, although the Canon devotes a chapter to every month, the dazzling colours in which he sees them prevent us from realizing what stage of the year we have reached, and the individual features of plant and tree are wholly lost in a shower of light. If there are any dark days they are cheered by ‘Bands of Hope meetings, parish room concerts, magic lantern entertainments, and tea drinkings’. In December, finally, we feel that we have passed a very innocent and brightly coloured year, although we are not quite sure that we have been at the Lakes.

[Times Literary Supplement, Jun 15, 1906]

[]

‘The Compromise.’

[The Compromise (Hutchinson & Co., 1906) by Dorothea Gerard.]

The skilful description, with which The Compromise by Dorothea Gerard opens, of a slate quarry in the highlands, gives fair promise of what is to come. The author writes with such ease that to read her is a safe and pleasant undertaking. As an experienced novelist she models her material with a certain largeness and simplicity of touch that defies conventional boundaries. Thus she skips from generation to generation, tells ghost stories, and shows a comfortable forgetfulness at times of the necessity of going on with the story. It needs a large stage upon which to show the workings of a compromise made between the flesh and the spirit; it is necessary to see John M’Donnell first as a slate worker, then as a student at Glasgow, then as a minister married to a shallow and worldly wife. She plays the part of the flesh in the compact with considerable vitality. When he proposes to dedicate his life to the people, she is thinking of reforming the dinner-table; he has brothers and sisters in the slate quarries, while she recognises the bishop and the ‘county people’ only. Soon—too soon for the reader’s pleasure—she dies, and leaves her husband with three children, who embody the discord between their parents. The elements of a very interesting study are here, but somehow they are suggested rather than discussed. Dorothea Gerard keeps upon the outskirts of the problem and therefore upon the outskirts of her characters; but at the same time she must be allowed the credit of keeping the balance humorously poised between all extremes. She tempers her characters in a way that is pleasantly like nature. The weakness of John M’Donnell, for instance, makes it credible that marriage should represent to him that Pride of Life which necessitates a compromise. He is only completely happy and effective when at the end of the book he is left without wife or child, ‘glorying in his isolation’. It is because you are moving all the time in an atmosphere that is cool and natural if in no way stimulating that the considerable length at which the story is told does not become tedious; and the writing, if somewhat diffuse, keeps to a consistently high level. It is in short a spacious and temperate book, which is satisfactory rather than exciting, but which even within these limits must be treated with respect.

[Times Literary Supplement, Jun 15, 1906]

[]

‘Mrs Grundy’s Crucifix.’

[Mrs Grundy’s Crucifix (Hutchinson, 1906) by Vincent Brown.]

The motive, if we may call it so, of Mr Vincent Brown’s novel, Mrs Grundy’s Crucifix, is suggested upon the fifth page of the volume, when the mention of a certain Mrs Gilpin leads Walter Ingram to denounce her, or rather the institution of which she is a type, in words which seem to proceed from the author himself. ‘She is the only immaculate thing the British people have ever done … She expresses the immortality of money and respectability … She is the high priestess of the Philistines,’ and the torrent continues vigorously, if in somewhat well-worn channels, for another page or so. The reader may guess what this prologue implies. A good woman who has been unfortunate will be sacrificed to Mrs Gilpin; and the characters in the book will be divided into those who minister to the Idol and those who deny her divinity. And it is very soon clear that this portentous old lady dominates her immediate world in such fashion that a happy English village is transformed into a community—with one or two exceptions—of abject devotees. We are introduced to a scene which is already familiar; it is that circus of a small country town in which parson and patron and spinster go through their staid and irreproachable antics, if not to our applause, at least to our comfortable acquiescence. But in this case, though all the figures are in their places, they suffer some malicious twist before the performance starts. We watch all the wits in the town feverishly and ignobly at work upon the reputation of a woman whom they have vague reasons for believing to be disreputable; and finally she is confronted with the truth in a scene where the horror is grotesque and the pathos is sentimental. The vulgarity and the spite might be there, but surely they would be more subtly mixed. And at the risk of joining the worshippers of Mrs Gilpin we confess that it seems to us possible that there was some excuse for them. A woman who says, ‘It is true. I have a little boy at school, I have never been married,’ may be the victim of harsh social laws; but at the same time the fact here stated does not seem sufficient by itself to prove that she is the noblest of her sex. Indeed Mr Brown has given one more proof of the danger of the novel that undertakes a crusade. So much of natural human nature, so many lights and shades, so much truth, in short, must be sacrificed altogether if you insist upon your crucifix and your crucified. And in the end, it must be said regretfully, we feel small love for the injured woman, in spite of her sins, and her rescuer is little more than a tract which has been put somewhat crudely into a human case. This is all the more to be regretted because Mr Brown is a clever writer, and has made one character, Harry Albemarle, with whom the reader’s sympathies are genuine.

[Times Literary Supplement, Jun 22, 1906]

[]

The Bluest of the Blue.

[A Woman of Wit and Wisdom: a memoir of Elizabeth Carter, one of the ‘Bas Bleu’ Society, 1717–1806 (Smith, Elder, 1906) by Alice C.C. Gaussen.]

Every one who lived in the age of Johnson seems to have possessed a little of his genius for sitting for his portrait. Ladies and gentlemen not otherwise distinguished had the gift of arranging themselves, with a certain deliberation and simplicity of pose, as though they were draping themselves becomingly for the eye of posterity. The group thus formed by those famous ladies, the Blues, has been often reproduced in the mass, but it seems questionable whether the single figures will stand isolation in the way that Miss Gaussen has attempted in the present book. There is clearly very little to be said about Mrs Carter unless you possess a real gift for the interpretation of character, and Miss Gaussen is content with the more superficial part of a biographer’s duties. There is no doubt that the pose which Elizabeth Carter adopted was from the first that of the learned woman. No affectation or pretension need be implied by such a statement, for if a woman knew Greek in that age she was immediately set apart from her sex and supplied with a character in life from which she could hardly deviate. And perhaps it was the consciousness of this separation that made the learned lady so very learned; as she must give up all distinctions of another sort, she might as well specialise in learning, and in the eccentricities which go with it. When she was a mere girl Elizabeth seems to have made up her mind to be a thorough prodigy; not only did she learn the essential Greek and Latin, but also Hebrew, Italian, Spanish, German, Portuguese, and finally Arabic, although she did not profess to understand the last sufficiently well to read it without a dictionary. So much learning needed and inspired heroic qualities. She had to struggle with a vigorous frame which slept soundly and loved exercise. To conquer sleep she had a bell tied to the head of her bedstead to which a string was attached, leading through a ‘crevasse’ in her window to the garden below. At four or five in the morning a friendly sexton tolled the bell, Elizabeth sprang from her bed and worked at her books till six, when she took a stick and tramped the countryside till it was time for breakfast. Her walking was as vigorous as her reading, and she claimed to be one of the best walkers in England. Snuff, and green tea, and wet towels were called in to goad her brain to its task, and no one can assert that her fame was easily earned.

The fruit of this immense energy was the publication in 1758 of her translation of Epictetus, and the reception with which it met proved that it was worthwhile to be learned in those days. Not only did she make £1000 by it, but it introduced her to the Blues and established her in an oracular position for life. She did not escape the faults which are common to oracles; she could utter common sense as though it were the inspired wisdom of the gods. But good judges have put it beyond doubt that she was a very able woman—a sound scholar, and a shrewd and sensible friend. The place she took in the society of the time was rather that of a monitor and instructress, apparently, than of a wit. When it was proposed to form a government of women, Johnson appointed ‘Carter’, to be Archbishop of Canterbury—‘Who is there’, he wrote, ‘that you cannot influence?’ Although she had to prove herself a true woman by producing a shirt and a pudding, it was evident that Nature meant her to be learned. She was shy and shortsighted, and came into a room with an ‘idiot look’, and felt, as she said, like ‘a dog in a dancing school’. But her sense and kindliness made her oddities delightful, and her learning, which was so thorough that she was never conscious of it, gave her a place of real authority among her friends. Fine ladies like Mrs Montagu and Mrs Vesey depended on her, and the world held no puzzle for her that common sense could not solve or childlike faith accept. She deliberately made up her mind that marriage was ‘a very good scheme for everybody but herself, and broke off the one connection which might have ended in matrimony because the gentleman wrote some verses ‘of which she could not approve’. She ‘dreaded nothing so much as irregularity’, and, being strictly High Church, had the courage to ‘forbear reading any book, however sound and sober, which proceeded from any other quarter’. With such qualities it is not surprising that her fortunes were equable rather than exciting, and that her life was as long as even she could desire. She died in 1806 in her eighty-ninth year, and left instructions characteristic of her brave common sense—that she was to be buried wherever she died ‘with as little expense as possible’.

[Guardian, Jul 11, 1906]

[]

‘Coniston.’

[Coniston, with illustrations by Florence Scovel Shinn (Macmillan & Co., 1906) by Winston Churchill.]

The reader of Mr Winston Churchill’s new novel, Coniston, will be struck once more, as he has probably been struck many times already, by a certain shabbiness in American fiction when it deals with the natives in their own land. And in saying this we refer to a quality in the men and women themselves and in the atmosphere of the place, and not to the peculiar manner of the novelist. They seem to be dressed by nature in clothes of the last generation which do not exactly fit them. In this novel, for instance, we are introduced to the primitive society of Coniston, a New England village in the time of President Grant, where politics are as complicated and apparently as corrupt as in the capital. But the glitter and resonance with which such manoeuvres are made attractive in European states are entirely absent here. Their corruptness is so uncouth indeed that you must suspect some hidden virtue. A tanner, Jethro Bass by name, becomes, with the help of bribery, the ‘senior selectman’ of Coniston, and thereby forfeits the affections of the minister’s daughter. The reader, it is clear, must know something of village politics in New England in order to give these phrases their meaning. But Mr Jethro Bass, with his ungainly name, and his stammer and his twang, is a man of great force and ability, who studies the life of Napoleon and proposes to imitate him in America. His career is successful, although his victories are not won upon the battlefield, and he becomes finally the most important man in his state. He has, that is, carried to such perfection his system of collecting mortgages that he controls the votes of the countryside and can get his bills through the State House, and can appoint his own men to the official posts. But to follow the transactions of these shrewd men of business, who, in Mr Churchill’s words, ‘found so many chinks in the Constitution to crawl through and steal the people’s chestnuts, that the era may be called the Boss Era’, is a very long and somewhat obscure business; and Mr Churchill’s novel swells considerably beyond the normal limit. Mr Bass has a habit of repeating the last words of his sentences, which his biographer seems to have caught from him. The book is as long and loose-limbed and deliberate as one of the characters themselves, and it seems also to have copied the shapelessness of a people whose latent energies are not yet properly fashioned for use. There is a considerable amount of latent energy in Mr Churchill’s book, but it must be dug out of the unchiselled mass. He chronicles with infinite patience not only the intricacies of railway politics, but the gossip of humorous villagers and the love affairs of young men and women. It is love finally that triumphs over Jethro’s corrupt practices and drives him to sacrifice some very substantial advantages for a sentimental consideration. Mr Churchill finally admits that he has ‘grown to love’ his characters, and is reluctant to leave them. It seems an affection born more of habit than of passion, and he is not able or does not care to observe his old friends too closely. But the simplicity of the process and the candour with which he confesses ‘I do not know why I have dwelt so long on such a minor character as Bijah, except that the man fascinates me,’ induces the reader to agree that such reasons for writing are quite sufficient. A confession of this kind, however, points to Mr Churchill’s limitations as an artist; he transcribes rather than creates, and his effects are got by plodding equably ahead with his narrative rather than by any flash of inspiration. But the system is pleasant as it is pleasant on a lazy summer’s day to listen to a story told by a native in the rustic dialect. You rise with the impression that you have absorbed a great deal of the raw material of history, and in this case it is a history that will make strange reading.

[Times Literary Supplement, Jul 13, 1906]

[]

‘The Author’s Progress.’

[The Author’s Progress; or the Literary Book of the Road (Blackwood & Sons, 1906) by Adam Lorimer]

We have an uncomfortable impression that the author of this book wrote it under some kind of wager not to leave off till the due number of pages was accomplished. There is so little you can tell a writer about writing, so little even that you can tell him about publishing. Or it may be that the subject is so essentially depressing that the briefest statement is sufficient, and an elaboration of the theme is almost more than the reader can bear. For here we have the ugliest form of ‘shop’ expounded, garnished with innumerable jokes and topical allusions, solidified with calculations and figures, and presented with all the sober conviction of print. There is no escaping the fact that a great many people write, and most of them write for money, and that there are ways of increasing that wage of which the ‘dear young author’, as Mr Lorimer calls him, would do well to take account. Let him write to the publisher on good paper stamped with the family crest; let him employ no agents; let him refuse his photograph to the world, but in all other ways let him advertise himself as loudly as he can. The result may be—Mr Lorimer has worked out the sales and the expenses and the royalties—so many pounds and shillings and pence of hard cash. It is affected to pretend that this form of ‘shop’ is without its interest, as it is unreasonable to complain that it is for the most part concerned with very base things. The root of the matter is that the confusion between art and trade must always be ugly, and that the confusion—since writing is sold as boots are sold—is inevitable. Mr Lorimer’s book states the case very plainly, and all that goes to make a book successful independently of the book itself may be learnt in his pages.

[Guardian, Jul 15, 1906]

[]

Sweetness—Long Drawn Out.

[A German Pompadour. Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine von Grävenitz, Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg. A narrative of the Eighteenth Century (Constable & Co., 1906) by Marie Hay.]

There has been lately a rage for the memoirs of respectable or disreputable ladies of the eighteenth century, not unlike the fashion which rose at the same time for mezzotints from Sir Joshua’s portraits of women. It was not necessary that they should have possessed remarkable minds or should have lived irreproachable lives. But it was essential that they should move in brilliant circles, should sweep through the world in satin and powder, and should charm their way from one splendid height to another by virtue of smiles and courtesies and little exquisite phrases which brought peers and princes to their knees. Their prosaic descendants were expected to do homage also at the mere recollection of those vanished charms. How far such a creature was possible it is scarcely fitting to ask; but if she lived at all, and lived by means of such graces as these, it must surely have been in the age when Sir Joshua painted her. But then the biographer must approach her with peculiar tact, for words pierce beneath paint, and the souls of Pompadours may look fairer upon the surface.

The difficulties of the task are great, we may admit; and Miss Marie Hay seems to have complicated them still further by the method which she has adopted in her Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine von Grävenitz. It is a true story, dug, we are told, from official archives, but the facts briefly stated with ‘colourless reticence’ by the lawyers have been expanded and embellished in Miss Hay’s imagination till they are certainly not reticent, and there is plenty of colour, although it is not always in quite the right place. But her compromise between history and fiction is maintained throughout; she is always guiding herself by authentic facts, and her emotions are regulated by the documents at her side. And here lies the defect of the system. She cannot give her imagination free rein, and yet she may indulge it to such an extent that the reader does not know when he is reading history and when he is reading fiction. This is an awkward frame of mind, and the artistic merits of the book suffer from the compromise. It is easy to suggest that the figure of Wilhelmine invited treatment in one of two ways: she might have made an interesting study if her biographer had kept strictly to the truth and allowed her to speak in her own words, or she might have posed for a very picturesque portrait in the manner of Sir Joshua. But here we have a composite production, where the truth has the vagueness of fiction and the fiction is diluted with fact.

Wilhelmine was the sister of a courtier at the palace of Duke Eberhard Ludwig of Wirtemberg. The book opens in the year 1705 when this gentleman, finding that he cannot afford to live there any longer, sends for his sister to captivate the Duke, dethrone the old favourite, and raise her own family to the heights with her. She is a poor girl, of great beauty, with the eyes of a witch and the voice of a nightingale, and her triumph is instant and complete. ‘“Ah Mademoiselle (says the Duke at their first meeting) will you leave the Duke here on the balcony, and come and look at the stars with the ridiculous poet-fellow?” … Who could resist him, this man with the pleading eyes and deep, strong voice?’

Wilhelmine, at least, had no intention of resisting him, and the intimacy, begun poetically under the stars, was continued in all its extravagant and familiar phases for some twenty years. It is not difficult in the early stages to be thrilled in the right places by all the cumbersome ceremonial of the little German court: the eye is pleased with the pageantry of dance and festival, and the ear is flattered with the ‘Monseigneurs’ and ‘Highnesses’ that drop from the lips of profoundly obeisant great ladies and gentlemen. Wilhelmine has the gift of appearing suddenly in the doorway, robed in the ‘Grävenitz yellow’; all eyes are fixed upon her and she achieves some triumph or passes unmoved with her snake glance through some terrible insult. But there comes a time when the sensational moment fails to thrill, and the sarcasm of the outraged ladies, which generally takes the form of suggesting that the favourite has had the smallpox very badly, is not sufficiently pointed to draw our blood. To make the interest endure when the brilliant surface has worn thin, we want to feel that Wilhelmine was a high-spirited, romantic woman in spite of her morals, that the Duke had some lovable quality that touched her heart and not merely her ambition; in short, that the whole set of decorous eighteenth-century figures were driven by human passions, and were not the puppets of some elaborate court machine. But in spite of many picturesque passages it is difficult to move with any swiftness through the long-drawn vicissitudes of the favourite’s career. They tend to repeat themselves and to twist and turn with languid motion in the familiar channels. A novelist here would have been at liberty to select and epitomise; but Miss Hay, with the burden of documents on her shoulders, follows the story patiently, and engrafts upon the bare outline a lavish but indiscriminate wealth of description and conversation which seems not to be spun from the legitimate source of inspiration in her brain, but to be the spurious outcome of research in official archives. It does not reveal character, that is, but encumbers it.

It is enough to say that the favourite rose to be Prime Minister as well as mistress, accumulated lands till the peasants called her the ‘Land-despoiler’, and surrounded herself with splendours of marble and satin that were to rival Versailles. But it remained a German copy till the end. We catch glimpses of her beneath all this shifting mass of finery, and of other figures more visionary still, but they move in a drifting atmosphere where the laws that bind live men and women can scarcely be applied. It is not possible to try their conduct by any ordinary standard, nor does their biographer attempt to pronounce the moral verdict. Wilhelmine falls, and we read how in the end ‘A soft evening breeze came stealing round her. The long Spring twilight faded, night drew near—and the Grävenitz turned away. “Farewell,” she said aloud, “the night comes. Farewell Spring.”’

And is that the voice of the dismissed courtesan or of her biographer?

‘Like a faint fragrance of faded rose-leaves,’ we read, ‘a breath of this woman’s charm seems to cling and elusively to peep out of the curt record of her crimes.’ But the ordinary reader will question whether the record of Wilhelmine might not give off a more pungent odour to other nostrils; and still more will he doubt whether this vagrant air is potent enough to steep three-hundred-and-fifty-odd pages in its fragrance. A magazine article or a sonnet were the proper vessel for such sweetness.

[Academy & Literature, Jul 28, 1906]

[]

Trafficks and Discoveries.

[The English Voyages of the Sixteenth Century (James MacLehose & Sons, 1906) by Professor Walter Raleigh.]

Whoever has read Hakluyt from those five cumbrous volumes in which the printers of 1811 thought good to entomb him will have felt the need of the preface or chart which Professor Raleigh’s book provides. It was possible, like one of those early seamen, to have one’s head so gloriously confused with the medley of rich names and places, of spices and precious stones, of strange lands and monsters, of regal charters and proclamations that the hard outlines of the earth swam and melted in a gorgeous mist. The reader could never detach himself sufficiently from the yellow page with its decorative spelling, to supply the spectators comment, and see the whole pageant in its proper proportions. Like one groping in the dark he stumbled about the world, knocking suddenly against America or beating fruitlessly up and down that long barrier which separated him from Cathay and all the splendours of the East. The five volumes swung only a warm disc of light over that romantic ambiguity, without map or index or editorial footnote to point the way. Professor Raleigh is one of the few writers from whom we can bear illumination, and one of whom we can say that although he orders and establishes this miscellaneous world he rather increases than impoverishes its beauty. To know that it was all founded on hard truth, that the voyagers were substantial Elizabethan seamen, and that the whole makes a consecutive chapter of English history checks the tendency which we feel towards a vague enthusiasm, but founds it on a real and permanent basis. And the more detailed our knowledge of the men and their adventures the more potently they touch our imaginations.

The story, as Professor Raleigh points out, is by no means simple; there were missionaries and empire builders, merchants, and men of science among the seamen, and you find traces of all these different interests woven into the great theme of adventure and discovery. But there is in common to all an immense belief that the unknown world holds what they seek, that the future and the veiled continent are alike rich with portentous shadows hardly to be traced by the hand of that age. Wherever you open the volumes you are struck by the wide-eyed credulity of the Elizabethan sailors and the largeness of their imaginations, stretched to hold any miracle undoubtingly. The poets, too, accompanied these journeys in the spirit and wrought their discoveries into the texture of plays and poems:

If the voyagers explored new countries and trafficked with strange peoples, the poets and dramatists went abroad too, and rifled foreign nations, returning with farfetched and dear-bought wares; or explored lonely and untried recesses of the microcosm of man. One spirit of discovery and exultant power animated both seamen and poets. Shakespeare and Marlowe were, no less than Drake and Cavendish, circumnavigators of the world.

But it is not, as Professor Raleigh goes on to remark, in literature that we must look for the influence of the Elizabethan voyagers. Their actions were not handed down to us in poetry, nor are they dependent upon poetry for their survival. The charm of Hakluyt’s great book, indeed, does not lie in any meditated felicity so much as in its air of rough and unsophisticated simplicity, so often made a matter for apology by the writers themselves. They have neither learning nor leisure to ‘vary or multiply words’. But their laborious pens, dipping into the stately vocabulary which was common to seaman and poet, build up such a noble structure of words in the end that the effect is as rich and more authentic than that got by more artistic processes. The frequent lists of ‘commodities’ even have a strange charm. ‘And in all these countries there are oak, and bortz, ashes, elms, arables, trees of life, pines, prussetrees, cedars, great walnut trees, and wild nuts, hasel trees, wild pear trees, wild grapes, and there have been found red plums. And there are goodly forests wherein men may hunt. And there are great store of stags, deer, porkpicks, and the savages say there be unicorns.’ All the pleasant roots and spices of the earth are massed together with sweet-scented trees and gold and silver and precious stones till a fragrance seems to rise from the page itself. In these long lists, moreover, little landscapes are let in, all the more romantic because they have been observed with the same sober and veracious eye and inscribed with the same stiff pen. You read of perilous woods, of the strange thunder of waters, of a mighty cataract, ‘with diamonds and other precious stones on it’, which ‘shine very far off’, of a ‘most beautiful country’ with ‘fair green grass … the deer crossing on every path, the birds towards evening singing on every tree, cranes, and herons of white crimson and carnation perching in the rivers side, the air fresh with a gentle easterly wind, and every stone that we stooped to pick up promised either gold or silver by his complexion’. The lustre of that promise is upon all these southern voyages, till in Drake’s voyage round the world it breaks into a blaze of splendour. The progress of the Pelican and the fleet along the coast of the Pacific was, as Professor Raleigh says, ‘a carnival of plunder’. Silver and gold in wedges and bars ‘of the fashion and bigness of a brickbat’, silk and fine linen, china ware and precious stones, crucifixes set with ‘goodly greaf emeralds’ poured into the ships in a continuous stream. Great Spanish vessels waited them, laden from the kingdom of Peru, lying innocently at anchor without guard or suspicion. The tale reads like some coloured opium dream. But the intoxication does not spring solely from the material glitter of the words. The profusion of the earth itself seems typical of the whole age, and the grosser counterpart of that opulence of the imagination which was now yielding treasures of another sort. The bleak voyages to the north and the north-east bear such sentences as that quoted by Professor Raleigh: ‘There is no land unhabitable, nor sea innavigable’. Gilbert, in the teeth of the storm, is seen by those in the Hinde, ‘sitting abaft with a book in his hand’ and crying, ‘We are as near to Heaven by sea as by land.’ Suddenly the ship’s lights went out, and they were seen no more. Wherever you open the book you may find some rough phrase to be tuned to such melody, and as you go along you may be your own poet.

Professor Raleigh meanwhile keeps the larger scheme of the work before you, and makes these phrases its natural ornament. Anyone, then, who owns the original text will wish to complete it with this luminous and authoritative comment.

[Speaker, Aug 11, 1906]

[]

‘The English Mail Coach.’

[Selections Grave and Gay (14 vols, James Hogg, 1853—60) by Thomas De Quincey.]

That a true book dictates the mood and season in which it shall be read is certainly as simple-minded a statement as that mustard demands to be eaten with beef. The only reason for dragging in such a platitude is that there are certain cases in which we find it somewhat altered or embellished, and then it is possible that it may make the starting point for some reflections radiating in very different directions.

The writings of Thomas De Quincey, for instance, if we may make a selection from that formidable row which shall include the Autobiography, and the Lake Poets, and The English Mail Coach, have the quality of suggesting quite forcibly to each individual reader the circumstances which set them off to the best advantage. Take us out of doors, they seem to plead, read us in a leisurely mood when time is more than usually irrelevant, and supplement the printed page with draughts of generous sunlight. Then we will do our best for you. In a chill atmosphere indoors, certainly, with a clock ticking on the mantelpiece, De Quincey is far from looking his best; and the opinion of the age seems to be—meaning by that, of course, the opinions of two or three elderly people—that the writings of De Quincey are best suited to the taste of the young. But that verdict can be interpreted in more ways than one; and at the present moment the reading that seems most suggestive is that which indicates a youthfulness not of years but of generation. Men who were old in the early days of the nineteenth century enjoyed De Quincey and gave him his fame because their taste in prose was, as we should call it now, ‘immature’—that is, it was considerably different from our own. Indeed, to read a page of De Quincey beside a page of Walter Pater or of Stevenson is like picking out of the waste-paper basked some rapid, exuberant sketch which either of these writers might have made in order to get their ecstasies disposed of before setting to work in earnest. We can almost see upon the printed page the stroke that would have run not only through lines and epithets but through whole paragraphs; each sentence, surely, would have been clipped and combed, and the architecture of the whole thing would have been freshly ordered and established. It is sufficiently easy to see all this scored on the page before you; but the fact that it is not easy to read any addition there hints that, after all, the older writer had a great deal of his own to say, although nowadays, maybe, we could teach him how to say it better. Or did not his fault of speech result from causes far too deeply-seated and too intimately connected with his virtues to be drilled into good behaviour by Stevenson and his art of writing?

De Quincey’s chief fault at least is one that under other circumstances becomes his chief virtue. He suffers from the gift of seeing everything a size too large, and of reproducing his vision in words which are also a size too large, unless indeed, they are applied as, happily, is so often the case, to emotions which cannot be magnified. But when the nature of his narrative compels him to state certain ordinary facts they become gigantically ridiculous, like boots seen in an elongated mirror; when he laughs you see a pre-historic monster on its hind legs. And it is one of the weaknesses of this copious mind, a sensitive spot in its splendid equipment, that it cannot pass by an allusion or a statement that is capable of further explanation without setting down the whole burden of the story and proceeding to remove the imperceptible pebble, elaborately, from the reader’s path. Thus the casual mention of ‘my sister Mary’s governess’ requires three-quarters of a page of small print to explain it, because she was, unfortunately a niece of John Wesley, and De Quincey has views of his own upon the connection between Wesleys and Wellesleys and the evolution of family names in general, and this, to his thinking, is as good a place as another in which to expound them. Different readers may have different standards of morality concerning the faithful reading of notes, but the most lax can scarcely help feeling an uncomfortable twinge at the complete neglect of a star. But it is well worth while to be callous in reading De Quincey, or in the midst of some rushing sentence like that upon the mail coach—‘A fiery arrow seems to be let loose, which from that moment is destined to travel, without intermission, westwards for three hundred miles’—you are suddenly pulled up by the necessity of considering minutely what the effect of such a statement would be upon the mind of a thoughtless American. And the same habit of giving precise and unnecessary information creeps into the text and neutralises all its splendour; as, in the eloquent passage upon the emotions of the young man and woman in the pony-carriage when they see the Royal Mail thundering down upon them, he states that if the man is found wanting the girl ‘must, by the fiercest of translations—must, without time for a prayer—must, within seventy seconds, stand before the judgment-seat of God.’

But if his mind is thus painfully contracted by the action of certain foreign substances upon it, the conditions in which it dwells habitually allow it to expand to its naturally majestic circumference. Indeed, De Quincey’s writing at its best has the effect of rings of sound which break into each other and widen out and out till the brain can hardly expand far enough to realise the last remote vibrations which spend themselves on the verge of everything where speech melts into silence. The image which affixes itself most easily to his writing is that of an organ booming down the vast and intricate spaces of a cathedral, because there is an obvious relation between De Quincey’s use of language and a musician’s use of sound; and the sounds which he delights in most are those that suggest vast dimly lighted places, solemn and mysterious, like those ancient cathedrals where the organ speaks with appropriate voice. That beautiful sights and strange emotions created waves of sound in his brain before they shaped themselves into articulate words, and thus suggested words that reproduced sound as well as meaning seems likely, among other reasons, from the frequent and peculiar use that he makes of the word ‘orchestral’. Thus to his ear, ‘the sea, the atmosphere, the light, bore each an orchestral part in the universal lull’. And his favourite images are those which combine the two ideas of sound and infinite space; as when he stands by the dead body of his sister and hears the ‘solemn wind that might have swept the fields of mortality for a thousand centuries’, and ‘a vault seemed to open in the zenith of the far blue sky, a shaft which ran up for ever’.

His mind seems naturally to haunt the region of clouds and glories; and his voice travels down to us from great heights, reverberating with strange thunders. Such experiments must often fail; and a more self-conscious age will hesitate to run the risk; for a man who looks for stars in broad daylight, and stumbles over a pail, is held, rightly or wrongly, to be an object of ridicule. Still, the generous reader, reading luxuriously in some sheltered garden where the view between hedges is of a vast plain sunk beneath an ocean of air, will find that a page of De Quincey is no mere sheet of bald signs, but part of the pageant itself. It will carry on the air and the sky, and, as words do, invest them with a finer meaning.

[Guardian, Aug 29, 1906]

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Portraits of Places.

[English Hours (Heinemann, 1905) by Henry James.]

Nothing, it seems, should be so easy as to paint the portrait of a place. The sitter reclines perpetually in an attitude of complete repose outside the drawing-room windows; he is there whenever you want him; he submits to any amount of scrutiny and analysis; and, moreover, there is no need to trouble about his soul. We press the point too far, indeed, when we suggest that he has a sex. Such a representation of the duties of a landscape artist, must, of course, be entirely insufficient, because, acting upon it, writers have produced by no means encouraging results. Indeed, it is safe to say that if you want to know the look of some town in Cornwall or Wales or Norfolk the best plan will be to get a map and study its portrait there. For some reason there is more of the character of a place in this sheet of coloured paper, with its hills of shaded chocolate, its seas of spotless blue, and its villages of dots and punctures than in all the words of an ordinary vocabulary, arrange them how you will. The swarm of names, the jagged edge of the coast-line, the curves that ships make ploughing round the world, are all romantic grains of fact brewed from the heart of the land itself, and sluggish must be the mind that would refuse to work with such tools as these. And the reason is, perhaps, that, after all, the country is a very solid and ancient place, and a page stamped with printed words skims off but a thin and superficial slice on the top of it. The swiftest portrait carried off by the eye has a great many different elements in its composition, although the brain may never separate them or call them by their right names. There are associations—things you have read or imagined, or had driven into you—blending with all the blues and greens of the turf and the sky; there is scarcely a field in England that is not, as Mr Henry James has it, ‘richly suggestive’ and not easily to be expounded. Indeed, the psychology of the land becomes so increasingly complex the more you think of it that the wonder is that any written picture should do more than cast a flimsy and ineffectual veil over the surface. The first touch of the real thing, a name with crossed swords over it, a cottage with a date upon the door, will be sufficient to tear the fabric asunder.

Who, then, of living writers, can present upon his page a spectacle so tremendous, with such memories and emotions and experiences seething and blending beneath the placid face that we know so well? If any one is fit for the task, it must be the same writer who has made such astonishing discoveries beneath other tranquil surfaces. Indeed, it is possible to read Mr Henry James upon various aspects of the English countryside not only with pleasure, and possibly with profit, but also certainly with amusement. Forgetting for the moment the purpose with which we set out of finding a picture that does justice to our own land, it is really entertaining to find that we ourselves are part of the show. Indeed, we may be said to be the flower of it. And as clearly such a flower is only to be plucked by hands from without, Mr James starts with one initial advantage over the native chronicler. He sees us as the natural and most significant result of all that has gone before, and our actions and attitudes point morals and draw pictures that are imperceptible to the shortsighted eye of a person immediately concerned in them. Perhaps it is this deficiency that makes our own statements of the same kind look so bare. And, as an American stranger, he enjoys yet another advantage, for he comes to most of our sights and institutions with an eye that is unblunted by custom. Add to this his individual gifts of perception and description and you have every right to expect from him a picture that is both pleasant and perspicacious.

Indeed, the pleasantness of Mr James’s writing is never more serene and persuasive than when he is dealing with countries that are not his own. His attitude is that of an irresponsible guest who may look upon the whole of Europe as an entertainment preserved, long after its original use has disappeared, for his own diversion. All his duty to his host consists in keeping an open eye for picturesque attitudes and impressions, and it would be really harmful to the tact and discrimination of his taste if it were biased by any racial or political prejudices. Besides, it is none of his business to advise. The spectacle of a profesional amateur wandering over the world with his brain exposed like a very sensitive photographic film to the outward aspects of things has a singular charm, and no little value, in this serious age. The process seems so simple and so little fatiguing. You need merely lounge in front of a picture, or ramble at your will about a church, or stroll through a town, and meanwhile all kinds of pictures are depositing themselves in your brain to be smoothed out upon a sheet of paper when the occasion presents itself. It is only what we could all of us do, we may say, if we chose to keep our eyes at the proper focus; but, unfortunately, if you are a native there is always something to startle you out of the proper detachment. Only an American can be really impartial where sights of ancient interest are concerned. Only an American could have written so widely and tenderly and humorously of Warwickshire as Mr James has done, because no English person could forget so happily that Shakespeare was born there. Mr James, it is true, does not entirely ignore the fact; but he contrives to suggest that that was, after all, what might have been expected from the landscape. Certainly and that is the important thing—you are convinced that he was ‘on the point of going into one of the ale-houses to ask Mrs Quickly for a cup of sack’. And then he passes quite naturally and decorously, as though he were offering a suggestion about the sonnets, to discuss the temperaments and appearances of certain young English women who are playing tennis in the parsonage garden. They possess, according to him—no Briton could have said it!—‘something that he can best describe as an intimate salubrity’. ‘The face of this fair creature had a pure oval, and her clear, brown eye a quiet warmth … The young man stood facing her, slowly scratching his thigh, and shifting from one foot to the other. He had honest, stupid, blue eyes, and a simple smile that showed his handsome teeth. He was very well dressed. “I suppose it’s pretty big,” said the beautiful young girl. “Yes; it’s pretty big,” said the handsome young man. “It’s nicer when they are big,” said his interlocutress, and for some time no further remark was made.’

No English writer would have thought that scene worth recording, nor would any Shakespearian scholar have believed that it threw any light upon his text. But as Mr James tells it, it illuminates all kinds of things. For it is not the descendant of centuries of such conversations in English gardens, and English castles; and were not the same things said in the time of Shakespeare, and was not Shakespeare himself a link in the same interminable chain? It is a little surprising, it must be owned, to find from Mr James’s pages how spectacular we are; and were it not for the grace and urbanity with which the show is exhibited, we might fairly resent the position in which we are placed. We are, according to him, enormously old; we are full of ancient mannerisms and antiquated phrases; we have accumulated such a deposit of tradition and inheritance on top of us that the original substance is scarcely to be discovered. At any rate, it is so thoroughly steeped in associations of all kinds that the commonest handful of English earth, like the most ordinary young man or woman at a country tea-party, is something venerable and subtle, and probably more than a little quaint. We were not conscious, perhaps, of the extreme richness and complexity—to use two favourite adjectives—of our temperaments, and it is not altogether pleasant to be treated with such respect by the young. But we may comfort outselves, if need be, by making an addition to the title of the book, and reading ‘or the portrait of an American’ after Portraits of Places, for both are there. Still, we have no reason to complain if, demanding a picture of ourselves, we see a good deal of America reflected in our own face, when that portrait is, after all, so charming and so true.

[Guardian, Oct 3, 1906]

[]

‘Chippinge.’

[Chippinge by Stanley J. Weyman]

To read Mr Stanley Weyman is, perhaps, as safe an undertaking as an adventure of that kind can possibly be. You are confident from the beginning that you are in able hands, and trust in his author is as great an advantage to a novel reader as trust in his doctor is essential to an invalid. But in dwelling upon his sound sober qualities of care, and thoroughness, and technical skill we must not forget that rarer virtues are needed to produce such results as he has produced. A book like Chippinge, for instance, has a certain steady glow about it that makes it, as the phrase runs, difficult to lay down unread. You are recalled to the drama as though you could see it acted before you in the flesh. Mr Weyman places his characters in the year of the Reform Bill, and the interest of the story is cleft asunder by that measure into its two divisions; the lady and her parent are on this side—the gentleman and his principles are on that. Nor is this by any means one of those convenient situations which a novelist uses for his own ends and dismisses when he has done with it. The conflict of the two parties at Westminster, at Chippinge, and at Bristol is the very backbone of the book; indeed, the danger is that you may read it rather as history than as fiction. For Mr Weyman, we guess, was attracted to the subject because he saw in it a tremendous drama in which the deepest interests of his country were concerned. But he was inclined to forget that the purpose of a novelist demands individual men and women who will fall in love with each other, and fight their dragons and live happily ever afterwards. And the dragons serve but to develop their virtues and to exhibit their characters. But when that dragon is the Reform Bill the lovers run a terrible risk of annihilation, and that is the fault which we have to find with Mr Weyman. We follow him so closely in the House of Commons, at the hustings, among the rioters, we are so eager to listen to all that Lord Brougham and Sir Charles Wetherell have to say, that we have really no time to think of the love affairs of Arthur Vaughan and Mary Vermuyden. Their private fortunes are nicely twisted by the public disasters; the same disasters unravel them as smoothly in the end, but the interest of the book does not lie there. It is as a picture of a crowd where the action of separate legs and arms is merged in the whole that the book is memorable; and the impression of stir and tumult over a vast space is so well conveyed that the reader has little cause to complain. Novels that urge you along with them as Chippinge does are not so common that you can afford to quarrel with the means by which they do it.

[Times Literary Supplement, unsigned, Nov 9, 1906]

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‘Occasion’s Forelock.’

[Occasion’s Forelock (Edward Arnold, 1906) by Violet A. Simpson.]

No one certainly ever took hold of occasion’s forelock with greater energy and success than Eustace Gleig in Occasion’s Forelock, by Violet A. Simpson. At the outset we find him considering whether he shall kill himself or go into the workhouse, and a bundle of unpaid bills bequeathed him by a disreputable father is the only tie which determines him to remain in this world. However, novels are not made out of such material, and occasion presents him immediately with the post of private secretary to the famous statesman Lucian Harwich. Then there are the two daughters, there is the family skeleton, there are the diverse paths of duty and ambition. Miss Simpson is certainly generous—and generous beyond her means, for these lavish promises remain in outline, with no substance in their composition. Her interest, we may venture to affirm, does not lie in the House of Commons, or in the intricacies of a disputed will; but she is frankly and sympathetically alive to the humours of ordinary people in pleasant daily life. Thus her old spinster, Miss Mary Harwich, is one of those characters who speak in print as they do in the flesh, and reveal, as though unconsciously, fresh idiosyncracies with every phrase. But unfortunately we must have a leader of the House of Commons with his ‘epoch making’ speech, and his conviction that ‘a firm steady policy is what this country requires to lean upon.’ Indeed, the men are feminine abstracts, who might be labelled ‘politician,’ ‘secretary,’ ‘saint,’ and so on, and dismissed without further trouble. It is not so with the women, and the liveliest part of the book is that which describes the life of the heroine in a woman’s college at Oxford. Here Miss Simpson writes with the sure and spontaneous pen of one who sees what she draws, and we only regret that after placing the scene upon the canvas she leaves it so abruptly unfinished. And so we have to listen, as dutifully as may be, to the complications of a marriage by which the leader of the House has for many years enjoyed his brother’s property. But the necessity of marrying the secretary to his chief’s daughter brings this good-humoured and loosely constructed book to an end, and no one has any reason to complain.

[Times Literary Supplement, unsigned, Dec 7, 1906]

[]

‘Abbots Verney.’

[Abbots Verney by R. Macaulay (John Murray, 1906);]

The author of Abbots Verney, by R. Macaulay, an interesting and indeed remarkable book, would probably wish us to append a masculine name to the ambiguous initial. So much we may gather from the consistency with which the male characters talk slang, the energy with which they repress their feelings, and the manliness with which they behave from start to finish. Still, when the force that compels them is so real it is no great matter if it is occasionally misdirected. The most serious defect in the book, however, arises, as we conceive, from some such misunderstanding. For, though the thread of the story is not very strong it requires you to believe in a certain North country family named Ruth, in the head of this family Colonel Francis Ruth, and, above all, in this gentleman’s exceedingly strait and ubiquitous code of honour. Because his son Meyrick cheats at cards therefore his grandson Verney must also cheat at cards; and if heredity makes this possible, yet the course of the story makes it so improbable that old Colonel Ruth’s suspicions and the scenes to which they give rise have a taste of the melodramatic. A real Colonel Ruth would not have disinherited his grandson; a real Colonel Ruth would very probably have remarked that women have a singular sense of honour. But R. Macaulay has filled the book with so much thought and character that this weak spot is only occasionally noticeable. If Verney, the injured grandson, is kept at a distance from us by his reticence and other masculine attributes we can yet discern a vigorous figure, drawn in line as though by a discriminating eye from outside. And when his character and his struggle for bread become merged in a very clever and careful study of Rome in summer the result is unpleasant, but it is also remarkable. Then there is Meyrick, the charming and dissolute father, and Miss Ilbert, and Pattinson; the list of characters who really call for notice might be prolonged, for the author has the gift of cutting them sharply from the background with a very few strokes. They talk a great deal; they discuss the world with the energy of the young; and they say a great many very clever things. That they are all taking part in a story, and that that story requires a certain amount of action and a good deal of emotion occasionally slips their memories; or is it that they are inclined to mistrust any sentiment that is not neat and telling and calculated to shock the commonplace? The result is a book that might well be pruned of half its pages, and that might well be pleasanter to read; but these are the criticisms that imply respect. For it is undoubtedly a very able and interesting piece of work, and the failures are of the kind that promise success.

[Times Literary Supplement, unsigned, Dec 14, 1906]

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Impressions of Sir Leslie Stephen.

My impression as a child always was that my father was not very much older than we were. He used to take us to sail our boats in the Round Pond, and with his own hands fitted one out with masts and sails after the patterns of a Cornish lugger; and we knew that his interest was no ‘grown-up’ pretence; it was as genuine as our own; so there was a perfectly equal companionship between us. Every evening we spent an hour and a half in the drawing-room, and, as far back as I can remember, he found some way of amusing us himself. At first he drew pictures of animals as fat as we could demand them, or cut them out of paper with a pair of scissors. Then when we were old enough he spent the time in reading aloud to us. I cannot remember any book before Tom Brown’s School Days and Treasure Island; but it must have been very soon that we attacked the first of that long line of red backs—the thirty-two volumes of the Waverley Novels, which provided reading for many years of evenings, because when we had finished the last he was ready to begin the first over again. At the end of a volume my father always gravely asked our opinion as to its merits, and we were required to say which of the characters we liked best and why. I can remember his indignation when one of us preferred the hero to the far more lifelike villain. My father always loved reading aloud, and of all books, I think, he loved Scott’s the best. In the last years of his life, when he was tired of reading anything else, he would send one of us to the bookshelf to take down the first of the Waverley Novels that happened to present itself, and this he would open at random and read with quiet satisfaction till bedtime. He put Guy Mannering before most of the others because of Dandie Dinmont, whom he loved, and the first part of The Heart of Midlothian he admired so much that his reading of it cannot be forgotten. When my brothers had gone to school, he still went on reading to my sister and me, but chose more serious books. He read Carlyle’s French Revolution, and stopped in the middle of Vanity Fair, because he said it was ‘too terrible’. He read Miss Austen through, and Hawthorne and some of Shakespeare and many other classics. He began too to read poetry instead of prose on Sunday nights, and the Sunday poetry went on till the very end after the nightly reading had been given up.

His memory for poetry was wonderful; he could absorb a poem that he liked almost unconsciously from a single reading, and it amused him to discover what odd fragments and often quite second-rate pieces had ‘stuck’ to him, as he said, in this way. He had long ago acquired all the most famous poems of Wordsworth, Tennyson, Keats, and Matthew Arnold, among moderns. Milton of old writers was the one he knew best; he specially loved the ‘Ode on the Nativity’, which he said to us regularly on Christmas night. This was indeed the last poem he tried to say on the Christmas night before he died; he remembered the words, but was then too weak to speak them. He loved, too, and knew by heart since he had first read it, George Meredith’s ‘Love in the Valley’, and he made us remark—and this was a rare instance of its kind—the beauty of Mr Meredith’s metres and his mastery over them. As a rule he disliked criticism of technical qualities, and, indeed, disliked being drawn into criticism of any kind. He often repeated, too, with enthusiasm, some of Sir Alfred Lyall’s Verses written in India. His taste in poetry was very catholic, and if he liked a thing, it did not matter who had written it or whether the writer was unknown; it ‘stuck’ to him, and was added to his large store. He knew many of Mr Rudyard Kipling’s ballads by heart, and shouted Mr Henry Newbolt’s ‘Admirals All’ at the top of his voice as he went about the house or walked in Kensington Gardens, to the surprise of nursery-maids and park-keepers. The poets whose work he most cared to recite were, I think, Wordsworth, Tennyson and Matthew Arnold, whose ‘Scholar Gipsey’ was one of his greatest favourites. He very much disliked reading poems from a book, and if he could not speak from memory he generally refused to recite at all. His recitation, or whatever it may be called, gained immensely from this fact, for as he lay back in his chair and spoke the beautiful words with closed eyes, we felt that he was speaking not merely the words of Tennyson or Wordsworth but what he himself felt and knew. Thus many of the great English poems now seem to me inseparable from my father; I hear in them not only his voice, but in some sort his teaching and belief.

After my mother’s death, my father was very anxious to take her place and to teach us as she had taught us, and for some years he gave up two of his precious morning hours to the drudgery of the schoolroom. Later on I read with him some Greek and some German. His method of teaching a language was always the same. He put all grammar on one side, and then, taking some classic, made straight for the sense. He once said that he owed Eton a grudge for not having made a scholar of him. In his last years he did not, I think, read any of the Greek or Latin classics by himself, except his little Plato, which, being of a convenient size for his pocket, went with him on his journeys, and travelled to America and back. He read German, but seldom read it for pleasure, except Heine and Goethe. During his last illness he read French books by the score.

[From ch. xxi, ‘The Sunset’ 1902–4 of F.W. Maitland’s The Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen (Duckworth & Co., 1906)]

[]

1907

‘The Lonely Lady of Grosvenor Square.’

[The Lonely Lady of Grosvenor Square by Mrs Henry de la Pasture (John Murray, 1907).]

If you are to read Mrs Henry de la Pasture’s new novel, The Lonely Lady of Grosvenor Square, with any kind of conviction you must have faith in Grosvenor-square. You must believe that the houses there are unlike other houses and that the people who live in them are liable to certain emotions proper to their district. If we do not accept this creed, or complain that it is but superficial, we shall miss a great deal of the interest which Mrs de la Pasture would have us feel in the lonely lady, and some of her emotions will seem to us a little unreal. She is the descendant of a Welsh farmer and a family of the ancient French nobility, and the opening chapter discovers her eating her lunch off Crown Derby china—‘clinging garlands of smilax curling in and out of the dessert dishes’—alone; the menservants are not allowed to wait at luncheon. Her aunt, the wealthy Miss Marny, has suddenly called her from the Welsh farm with the intention of forgiving an old family feud in case her niece should prove presentable. She has just time to bestow all her wealth on Jeanne’s brother Louis, a soldier now in South Africa, before she dies, and Jeanne is left alone to eat her lunch in Grosvenor-square indefinitely. The poignancy of the situation depends, of course, upon the contrast between a Welsh farm and Grosvenor-square, maidenly simplicity and Grosvenor-square, youthful gaiety and Grosvenor-square. But Mrs de la Pasture is too light of hand to insist unpleasantly upon a somewhat false comparison, and the scenes which spring from the contrast are treated as light comedy and still lighter tragedy. There is a Duke in Grosvenor-square, with a club foot to give pungency to his rank; and Jeanne, in spite of her simple manners, her ignorance of the conventions, her ingenuous questions, and her brother and his photograph, captivates the Duke, stays at the Ducal castle, and finally—but this is quite at the end, as it should be—becomes the ‘little Duchess.’ The length at which all this is told would lead you to expect much subtlety of character or intricacy of plot; but in truth Mrs de la Pasture can write charming chapters of small talk without advancing her story or impeding it or saying anything that is not quite natural and as it should be. ‘Charming’ is the word that attaches itself instinctively to her work; it may not be the highest praise, but in this case it implies popularity as well.

[Times Literary Supplement, unsigned, Feb 1, 1907]

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‘Memoirs of a Person of Quality.’

[Memoirs of a Person of Quality: Being Extracts from Certain Journals Written at Different Times by My Great Uncle, The Honble. George Augustus Frederick Chorley Fanshawe, Second Son of the Fifth Earl of Blakenham. edited by Ashton Hilliers.]

It is really somewhat melancholy to think how few people will ever read the four hundred close pages of the admirable Memoirs of a Person of Quality, edited by Ashton Hilliers. Not only is it a portentous size for a novel, but it has very few of the qualities, both good and bad, that attract the public. When a British nobleman, born in the year 1777, sits down to write his memoirs for the benefit of his descendants he settles himself comfortably in his chair and passes the long winter evenings much to his satisfaction. That is the impression that Mr Ashton Hilliers has succeeded in giving us, and to endow the book with further authority he has not spared us at times the prolixity and rigmarole of which no doubt the noble author was also capable. But the peculiarity of the book is that the faults and the virtues are very much those that we should suspect of such a writer, and both style and substance are curiously in the spirit of their age. Mr Fanshawe, the autobiographer, is a younger son of the Earl of Blakenham. We find him driving down to York in the stage coach to join his regiment, the 5th Dragoon Guards; there are bustards on the moor, and the guard ‘shifts his blunderbuss’ as they cross the heath. At the change-house (‘And now I think on’t, ’twas the Barn Inn’) one of the passengers descends to fight with a rider on a cob who has insulted him. So the story runs on, with no great impetus or direction, taking us through the pleasant scenes of the 18th century country-side, among soldiers, inns, and Methodists. Mr Fanshawe, through a grave injustice, has to leave his regiment, and, for his father disowns him, to tramp the country as a farm labourer. He falls in with the well-known Quaker family of Ellwood, and is much concerned about the state of his soul. But there is no more plot to follow than is to be found, by the casual observer, in real life; and Mr Hilliers has taken singularly little advantage of his artistic right to arrange and amend. But that he has it in him to write true fiction as well as true fact is proved by the very vigorous scene in which Mr Fanshawe convicts Mr Vyze of playing with loaded dice. The atmosphere of the 18th century which clings about the book is further promoted by the excellent English in which it is written. Without affectation, it has a pleasant flavour of sedate Georgian prose, and its polish and lucidity reflect the best qualities of that period.

[Times Literary Supplement, unsigned, Feb 8, 1907]

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‘The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft.’

[The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (Constable & Co., 1903) by George Gissing]

When The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft first came out in 1903 attentive ears recognised the accent of a true book that would endure when the clamour of a season of books was passed away. Here was a voice that spoke straight and shapely words at its natural pitch, and carried their meaning by the impulse of some rare sincerity to the recesses of the mind. Since that date much has been said of the author, who was held in this little volume to have spoken for the first time in his proper person. The novelist, it was said, had dropped his mask, and the sight of the real man beneath had a peculiar interest for readers who had long known the conjuror. But that the book has an interest for many who are without this incentive to read it seems proved by the fact that later editions are called for, and many to whom the novels of George Gissing are unknown read the reflections of Henry Ryecroft. It is not necessary that you should identify the two men and prove them to have one personality apiece, when Henry Ryecroft, without other background or circumstance than those he chooses to reveal, stands solidly on his own feet, and needs no exterior support. For, with whatever name you christen him, there is no doubt that the man who wrote these Papers wrote down what he thought, and that, in this sense, it is the most genuine of all autobiographies. The interest of the book, indeed, proceeds to many readers not from the beauty of its writing, the sweetness of its humour, or the maturity of its knowledge, but from the impression that it leaves of a live, human creature, who has not scrupled to let us know his foibles, and his failings, and his imperfect human shape. It is in no sense a confession, but into the sensitive outline much may be read that reticence forebore to state.

He was a man, we learn, who had to make his living by writing, and to support others; for many years his pen and a scrap of paper were the tools with which he had to fashion food and house and clothing. Finally, in middle life, when he was beginning to fear that he could hold out no longer, a friend died and left him an annuity of £300. It was then for almost the first time, and certainly for the last, that he wrote because he wished it, and left as final bequest these notes of the thoughts and books which came in the end to mean most to him. The charm of the writing then is of the sober and tranquil kind, like the grey light which comes after the sunset and has no future illumination to hope for or to dread. And yet the final impression is by no means melancholy; it seems on the whole a creditable thing that a life so bare of outer luxuries should find within itself gifts that could be sufficient by themselves. He was born with qualities that are neither rare nor splendid: good brains, for instance, and a passion for books; but it is inspiring to see how these two gifts in their naked austerity—for neither ever attracted anything foreign to it—are able to supply all that a man wants; at any rate, all that he needs to be a respectable, independent, and harmless human being. If one must feel that such epithets applied to a strenuous life are somewhat meagre, they have yet the charm of flawless integrity. It seems as though Henry Ryecroft had pared down every emotion, every thought, and every book until the pith of it only remained—as if poor men may not afford to feel or to think insincerely. And the residue is the pure metal, of such strong and equable heat that it will irradiate the whole of a man’s life, so that it becomes worth living. It is hard that even such a talent for economy of both kinds was not sufficient to keep him possessed of the few things he wanted. He had to sell books in order to buy warmth and light, and he had to go without the pleasures of the country. And these are sacrifices that imply many others. Then, again, he had to sell his brains, and in a double sense, for if he had had the means to use them respectfully they might have kept their value undiminished. All this paring down did, it cannot be doubted, cut him to the quick, for his capacity for happiness was radically weakened when the chance for using it came. The harsh fights in his youth, when he struggled for the little ray of joy there might be in reading and walking, had strained his muscles, so that he could not grasp firmly the beautiful and abundant treasures that surrounded him at the end. His delight in the spring at last, when he has time to know it, is made tremulous by the knowledge that haunts him of the few that can enjoy it with him; and he must ask himself ‘whether I shall not have to pay, by some disaster, for this period of sacred calm’.

Still, one must ask, what would have been his lot had he been a rich man—had he been able even to feed his brains on all the things they craved? He might have been an ‘owl-eyed pedant’, a don who had never left his college walls—and that may have been what Nature meant in shaping the sensitive, meditative man; but, had she been consistent, we should never have had the sight, grotesque and painful, but deeply inspiring also, of this owl turned out among the harsh lights and rough corners of the world. He would have had no need to measure books with life, to know men as well as letters, and to come finally to a philosophy of his own that was lean and muscular and serviceable in every strand of it. The result of such training was that the smallest sum that left him in peace to read by himself in the country was such a competence to him as it could not have been had he learnt even unconsciously to buy things with money. Given food and clothing, and his own brain would do the rest. And thus it is that the picture of a middle-aged literary man sitting in a Devonshire garden and reading all day long is not the mild, benevolent portrait that we know, but something even heroic. His daily life, his food, his servant, his room are all worn down till every superfluous quality is gone, and only what poverty has taught him to be essential remains. Nothing that he owns is without its beauty of use and scrupulous refinement. ‘My house is perfect. Just large enough to allow the grace of order in domestic circumstance … The fabric is sound … In the garden I can hear singing of birds, I can hear the rustle of their wings. And thus, if it please me, I may sit all day long and into the profounder quiet of the night … Oh! blessed silence!’ How much, one may ask, must one not have suffered to appreciate these things? How much must one not have read! For when all else has been attenuated and economised, the love of books alone has grown strong and lusty. Only with the weary cynicism of a man who has failed, he is inclined to put more trust in books than in people. It might be said that books are to him no relief from life or comment upon life, but are life itself, save for some stretches of the English countryside, where he has the strength to walk and botanise. And even these he sees instinctively through some veil of written words. Like all exquisitely literate minds, his brain plays a kind of battledore and shuttlecock with life and literature; a passage of print suggests a sunny meadow, or a lighted window in the evening lane sends him thirsting to Tristram Shandy. He wakes in a strange place at night and hears church bells. ‘Then a glow came over me. “We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow!”’

This enriching process is never complete; there are always strange, new islands floating somewhere in remote seas to be explored and plundered of their treasures. There is the ‘ancient geography of Asia Minor’; there is Egypt; there are all the histories that call up pictures out of the abyss and let them slip again. But it does not matter. ‘Perhaps the last fault of which I shall cure myself is that habit of mind which urges me to seek knowledge.’ And at the end he could wish for ‘many another year’; not because the years would bring him new things, but because they might let him live on thus, with a passive body and a mind ranging over the world and coming back to settle in that corner of it which he had chosen. This is the kind of freedom, so delightful and so sufficient, that all might desire, and the charm of the book is that it suggests, not only that such a power exists, but that it lies within the grasp of most of us. A book, a pen, a cottage in the country, and the world is at your feet.

[Guardian, Feb 13, 1907]

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‘Temptation.’

[Temptation (Methuen, 1907) by Richard Bagot]

Mr Richard Bagot has one advantage over the ordinary novelist; he has a knowledge of Italy which allows him to take that land for his stage and its people for his actors. In his new book Temptation, for instance, there is a great charm, superficially at any rate, in the mere change of scene; the life is so different, the manners are so picturesque, and over all lies such a magic of place that you are willing to concede much to the novelist who can produce the illusion. But on a closer inspection the result is not quite so satisfactory; for, with all the appreciation and understanding of an admirer, Mr Bagot is still the sympathetic stranger, interested in habits, and observant of differences. There is a hint that the purpose of the book is to illustrate Italian life for our instruction, and we are to compare and draw conclusions. But apart from this formality—and it is less noticeable as the story proceeds—the book is interesting as an able study of character, and whether it is Italian character or English character matters but little. There is a certain Count Ugo Vitali, the head of an ancient family of the provincial nobility, who lives in his ancestral palace at Viterbo. He has married beneath him a woman whose beauty and whose passions hint at the peasant blood in her veins. She is ambitious of all the things that her husband distrusts, for he is a simple country gentleman of aristocratic instincts, with the interests of his people much at heart. Then there is the cousin from Rome, who comes to stay and talks philosophy. Cristina listens and finds the philosophy pleasant; she is terribly bored by her husband; finally she brings herself to believe in his disloyalty. The end—and the plot is slight—is very much what you might expect from the woman’s character, and if we add that the end is violent it will be seen that Mr Bagot has written skilfully. With less restraint of treatment the last chapters might be not only unpleasant, but also incredible. And we certainly believe all that we are told. The truth is that we could believe something more. Mr Bagot spends so much care on the few characters whom he introduces, and offers so close an explanation of their motives, that we are prepared both for greater vigour of action and greater subtlety of speech. But he seldom drops his attitude of the grave observer pondering wide issues. In any case, however, it is an interesting book: you lay it down not infrequently, but you open it with respect.

[Times Literary Supplement, Feb 22, 1907]

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‘Disciples.’

[Disciples by Mary Crosbie (Methuen, 1907).]

If Mary Crosbie wished to fence all the world from her work, she could surely find no better protection than the first two or three chapters of Disciples. There is epigram and pose and even bad English till we fear very much lest the fortunes of the book have been blighted by the malign breath of Mr Meredith’s influence. In defence she might urge that she is merely stating the first part of her problem with due emphasis. Miss Denise Bourke, sitting in an Italian garden with counts and ladies with whom she snaps epigrams on equal terms, is yet determined to seek ‘the nakedness of things.’ Her attitude, therefore, must be clear and can hardly fail to be ungraceful. She proposes to seek this nakedness in Ireland where her sister lives ‘in the dullest world she has seen.’ Before she starts on her pilgrimage love is offered her by a Doctor Ravignani, who is tender and pitiful and devotes his life to children and to those in pain. But Denise rejects it because she is full of heroic faiths—as that the world is vast and austere, that the virtues are honesty and endurance, and that ‘to fraternise with the weak and rule your life by your brother’s need’ is to live among ‘trivialities and pretty impulses.’ But in Ireland things go better, and the humour of the place issues spontaneously. Miss Bourke comes in contact at any rate with people who own cows and pigs and visit the poor, if this can be called ‘nakedness.’ And the author, when she is no longer under the necessity of twisting her speech into hard little pellets of wit, shows herself both a humorist and an observer. Mrs O’Malley, for instance, is an admirable creation, and the Dillon family, nicely bounded and described, suggests that it is the real Irish type from which so many caricatures have sprung. Maev, the girl who can nurse a sick cow and loves all hills and seas, and writes second-rate verse, has the virtues and limitations of a genuine character. The two people who always remain a little vague and cold are the chief actors in the experiment, Denise and Dr Ravignani. He is a mere symbol, as may be inevitable where such a didactic young lady is concerned, and she is so careful and calculating that her revelations leave us unmoved. The only excuse for such painful self-consciousness is that you have a self very well worth illuminating, and Miss Bourke is not quite sufficiently brilliant. But there is a certain keenness of question running through the book which makes it always good reading; and it is so clever that its crudity is the token that the author’s next book will be wholly excellent.

[Times Literary Supplement, unsigned, Mar 8, 1907]

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‘Carlyle and the London Library.’

[Carlyle and the London Library: Account of its Foundation: Together with Unpublished Letters of Thomas Carlyle to W.D. Christie, C.B., arranged by Mary Christie, ed. Frederic Harrison (Chapman and Hall, 1907).]

Nearly three thousand people now draw consolation and piety and wisdom—indeed there is no limit to the virtues they acquire—from the London Library, and it has for them all the qualities of smoothness and sublimity which belong to a permanent institution. But the little book, Carlyle and the London Library, arranged by Mary Christie, and edited by Frederic Harrison, throws a glance at a time when all was doubt and question, when London had prisons but no good lending library, when Carlyle, as usual, had a great many faults to find but provided, strange to tell, the best of possible remedies. The twenty letters here printed for the first time from Carlyle to William Dougal Christie cast the kind of bright and almost fierce illumination upon the foundation of the library which has lit up for us so many obscure faces and dark corners of our history. When, as Mr Harrison says, Carlyle had finished his French Revolution and was about to begin his Cromwell he found that there was no ‘high-class lending library’ which would send books to him in the quiet of Chelsea. This discovery was announced with a burst of emphatic eloquence—‘If London must lie bookless Heaven and earth will witness!’—the peasant in Iceland could bring back books to his hut more easily than Carlyle in London—in short, the ‘stir’ resounded till it reached high quarters, a prospectus was made out, a meeting called, and the business set going with a library and a librarian. But the character of the undertaking was very much more marked than is usual in the case of successful institutions recording their annual self-congratulations. Carlyle could not keep decorously to the surface and the conventions; and his letters, always bubbling with metaphors and boring to the depths, make this little bit of history lively and colloquial. The character of a librarian is the text of one discourse; ‘How needful is a man for us in these very days!’ and he goes on to utter such good sense as should be ‘inscribed over the portal of every one of Mr. Carnegie’s new libraries.’ Indeed, the book is worth reading if only that one may see how deftly and surely Carlyle could model practical business while he stormed—what an eye he had for practical worth. And besides this, there is scarcely a word of his writing or speech that does not seem dyed with brighter colours than the words of ordinary people, so that you remember, and the thing he speaks of seems real. There is the speech that he made at the first public meeting, in which the nature of a library is expounded once and for all and pushed higher and higher till there is nothing left but to call it a ‘church’—‘with no quarrelling, no church rates’—and the speaker has to sit down. It is thanks to the emphatic stirring of the waters by Carlyle and his friends ‘till they are all in white froth’ that the ‘Sea Goddess of a library is born and floated safe to land,’ and Mr Balfour, speaking in June, 1906, can doubt ‘whether there is a parallel to it in the rest of the world.’ Iceland is no longer a reproach to us.

[Times Literary Supplement, unsigned, Mar 22, 1907]

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Old Hampshire Vignettes.’

[Old Hampshire Vignettes by the author of Mademoiselle Ixe (Macmillan, 1907).]

There is a certain ‘shallow, low-rimmed valley’ not two hours from London brimming with sweet waters and studded with ample trees. It is smoothed and carpeted from all surprise and irregularity. Its beauties are of the kind that we associate with the domestic virtues, for they flourish in seclusion and are best loved by those who know them best. It follows, of course, that the tourist with a crude eye for a view shoots past to the north or the west. And so, in Old Hampshire Vignettes, by the author of Mademoiselle Ixe, it is a privilege to be domesticated by a native and allowed to share the simple lives and jests of the inhabitants; ‘a kindly but unaspiring race, noted, so strangers tell us, for their dulness, their apathy, their capacity for doing nothing.’ But, if we take the hint, this judgment is only recorded that we may see how differently things look in the valley to one who knows. From the kindly eminence of the big house such faults become very lovable, and the village is seen to be full of individuals with quaint characters, or strange histories. There is the immaculate groom with his respect for form and ceremony, and his phrase ‘It looks-se-bad’ for any lapse; the cook who exhorts her underlings ‘Hο! pray don’t let us have anything low’; the old gardener with his ‘virile grasp of economic truths’—‘I’ve allus a-said to them, ’ev you’ve a shellun in yer pawket you’ve a friend in yer pawket, and ef you aint, you’ve gawt ne’er-a-won.’ The people of the valley are still capable of the home-made English which the diffusion of print is expected to supplant. ‘Elevenpence three farthings short of a shilling,’ is excellent for a degree of imbecility not otherwise to be reckoned; ‘I baint accustomed to speak to queens and lords’ gives a small boy’s vision of his superiors. But it does not do to detach the separate sayings from the delicate framework of suggestion which supplies a natural background for the phrase. The writer has attempted, for the most part, to catch her pose or quality on the wing as it were; and it says much for her skill that she has almost always succeeded. If she fails it is because her sketch is sometimes so slight as to be almost evanescent; but in most cases she has swiftly touched off the humour or the oddity and bathed the people meanwhile in an atmosphere of the tenderest banter, ‘as that of a mother over the antics of her babes.’

[Times Literary Supplement, unsigned, Mar 22, 1907]

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Mary Christie.

[A Tardiness m Nature and Other Papers by Mary Christie, ed. with introductory note and memoir by Maud Withers (Manchester University Press, 1907).]

How far it is wise to make a memoir of a friend because she was well loved may be doubtful; you ask a kind of sympathy which it is painful not to give; but all the more then must we praise the gallantry of the attempt. And in the case of the Memoir prefixed to A Tardiness in Nature and Other Papers, by Mary Christie, edited by Maud Withers, we can see, at any rate, what is meant when Miss Christie’s friends speak of her ‘influence’ and their affection and esteem. Because she was a brave, strong-minded woman, because she wrote a mass of sound literature, because she spent her time and strength toiling in different ways for high objects, it is right that she should have a monument—the more so in that her gifts were not of such a nature as to create their own memorial. Her best work probably can only be judged from the testimony of her friends, how she helped and cheered and praised them. But in these few pages of memoir we are told the main facts of her life. She was the daughter of that W.D. Christie who was concerned with Carlyle in founding the London Library; she took to her pen very young, and made it not only the staff of her life, but also the channel of her activity. Editors speak of her versatility, and her safeness; how, moreover, she always wrote sense, and ‘almost always excellent sense’; how she could not review a book without putting the whole of her self into it. Clearly she was ‘a delightful and invaluable contributor’; but that those good qualities which turn columns satisfactorily are not quite so effective when you release your substance from the constraint of the daily Press and expand it in the chapters of a book the various articles here reprinted bear testimony. Miss Christie was always something of a partisan with a zealot’s bigotry. And this quality, which gives zest to a magazine article, is monotonous in a more leisurely undertaking, like the high pitch of a scolding voice. Her essays upon George Eliot and Thackeray, for example, both drive home her perpetual question with such insistency that all other questions are silenced: had Thackeray a religious purpose? How could George Eliot write her books and believe her beliefs? But in the pursuit of her theory—and all her criticism is strung on the same thread—she shows great vigour and a kind of wholesome shrewdness, like a capable housemaid with a broom. She loves literature while she rates it; you have incurred a debt by reading a good book, she says, ‘which not to pay is to be a dishonest adventurer in spiritual concerns.’ And you pay it, of course, with an increase of moral virtue. It is remarkable that books fought with her and against her in the two great crises of her life; she lost her faith through reading Paradise Lost, and she was helped back to it by the Faerie Queen, But, after all, the value of her work does not come from isolated phrases about literature, but from the glow that burns in each sentence and welds the mass together. And that is caused not by a fine literary taste, but by the joy that she took in life and by the ardour with which she was for ever investigating it. The same fervour which would always pour out four columns of print when she was asked for two led her to organise and reform; took her to Covent Garden at dawn to see the fruit come in, to Stonehenge for the sunrise. ‘Think of me as one who loved the beauty of the world to the end,’ she said. And it is worth while thinking of such people.

[Times Literary Supplement, unsigned, Mar 29, 1907]

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‘The Wingless Victory.’

[The Wingless Victory by Mary Patricia Willcocks (John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1907).]

There should be more words in the dictionary, or those we have should be less timeworn, for the task of praising sincerely is almost vain when you must use such phrases as ‘excellent’ and ‘admirable,’ smoothed flat on the tongues of countless reviewers. And here, in the case of Miss Willcocks’s book, The Wingless Victory, we have need of some emphatic word that shall signify a book that is not a season’s masterpiece or a giant among pigmies, but, as we conceive, one that takes its place, if not among the highest, still among the books where rules of measurement seem a little out of place. It is among the books that are, like other living things; we have no need to test the degree of life. And if that is an uncritical compliment it is a very high one, especially when you consider the nature of Miss Willcocks’s book. She has trusted to the power of wholesome living things to give her book its interest—the things, that is, that have not been conceived or wrought by the hands of men who live in cities. The scene is laid in Devonshire, the actors are Devonshire people, and how much the book owes to the earth and sky it would be difficult to overstate. Wilmot Quick, of a yeoman stock, has married Dr Borlace, or, rather, has entered into a straightforward compact with him uninspired by passion. He has seen the world and needs a housekeeper; she has read—the classics even—and does not believe in love. Not many novel-readers, or men and women for the matter of that, will doubt the sequel; that again is one of Miss Willcocks’s simplicities—she dares to accept the obvious. But then, as she tells it, it is not at all obvious that Dr Borlace and his wife should each discover that the plan of their marriage was wrong. The drainage system at Challacombe, for example, enters largely into the discovery; the crisis is fought over the question whether there shall be iron pipes or lead pipes in the town. And it is no mean crisis, for the very reason, perhaps, that so much that is gross and substantial takes part in it. Miss Willcocks loves the earth and the sea and even the drainpipes; masters them and transmutes them, and gives us the result in very full-blooded men and women; the feminine virtues are chastity and cleanliness; in men they are courage and honesty. That is the code of Joanna Buckingham, and it points out the line on which Miss Willcocks models her characters with most assurance. The subtler and more volatile type, like Wilmot, eludes her grasp; but the people who are more directly born of the earth that she loves, like Joanna, Captain Penrice, and Dr Borlace, who have that largeness of outline and simplicity of sin, the whole nature falling when it does fall, such characters she presents with a boldness and humour that must be called masterly. A book which deals with the discipline of souls may so easily become hysterical; and Miss Willcocks is quite capable of that intensity which isolates its objects from all natural surroundings; only, while she gives the individual agony, she shows that it is but a point in a vast globe—there are always the drainpipes. And that is why it reads, not so much as a single story, but as an epitome of many. Such books are worth keeping on the shelves, even by the classics, for they are painted in colours that do not fade.

[Times Literary Supplement, unsigned, Apr 5, 1907]

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Lady Huntingdon.

[The Countess of Huntingdon and her Circle by Sarah Tytler (Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, 1907).]

When a girl of nine is so much impressed by the sight of a child’s funeral that she falls into the habit of retiring to pray unobserved, and persuades her sisters to join with her, it is not difficult to foretell some part at least of her history. Again, one of the desires of her prayer was that she might marry into a ‘serious family’; and if you add that this precocious fanatic was Lady Selina Shirley, daughter of Lord Ferrers, and was born in the year 1707, you have the main threads in your hand at any rate. She was devout, she was masterful, she was the wife and daughter of a nobleman. Miss Sarah Tytler’s serious and conscientious work The Countess of Huntingdon and Her Circle, states all these facts with a kind of gravity that allows the reader to supplement them with his own conclusions, for the religious history, like most spiritual adventures, is little more than a statement. Soon after Lady Selina had become Countess of Huntingdon she joined ‘the despised, derided Methodists,’ converted, it is said, by her sister-in-law, but impelled by certain dissatisfactions with her own faith. She had a characteristic distrust of the violence and eccentricity of the Methodists, which might so easily disturb the aristocratic order; but, when she had taken the step, the very qualities that made her hesitate gave her a place of singular authority. She could rule and organise as well as preach; and her rank lent her words an impulse that was denied to mere fervour. But there is ample evidence to show that this angular Countess, with the compressed lips and the upright carriage, could make good her claim to be a ruler. At first she turned to the poor about her gates, like any other great lady who dispenses charity and religion; but later she took up a work that needed far greater courage and preached her doctrines among those of her own class. To Horace Walpole, of course, the spectacle of a zealous woman who dressed oddly was exquisitely delightful; and he reserved for her many paragraphs in his comment on the times, calling her ‘Queen of the Methodists’ or ‘Pope Joan Huntingdon,’ and speculating whether she was mad or hypocritical. The kind of argument which she had to meet is well stated by the Duchess of Buckingham.

I thank your Ladyship for the information concerning the Methodists preeching; these doctrines are most repulsive and highly tinctured with impertinence … as it is monstrous to be told that you have a heart as sinful as the common wretches that crawl on the earth…. I cannot but wonder that your Ladyship should relish any sentiment so much at variance with high rank and good breeding.

And such words were far more than a happy burlesque to the lady of rank and breeding. But she persisted, patronising the preachers all the more ardently, and had Wesley and Whitefield to instruct a curious crowd, in which fashion and wit and infidelity were gathered together in her drawing-room at Chelsea. And then she began to spend her fortune for her faith, and travelled the country, building chapels where chapels were wanted, and founding the college at Trevecca for boys who wished to enter the Church. Some sixty clergymen were dependent upon her, whom she appointed and directed, ‘doing the work of a Bishop,’ and ‘not one accusation survives of caprice, injustice, or of weak incapacity.’ Indeed it is the work that impresses one. For the masterful woman did not lose the world while she kept her soul in all austerity. It was the secret of her success, at any rate, that Lord Chesterfield was still ‘dear Lord Chesterfield’ and Bolingbroke was her friend. Her coronet was there, although, as in the print in which Walpole saw an ‘old basket-woman,’ it is proudly stamped beneath her foot. Lady Glenorchy, her friend, her disciple almost, had far more of the mystic temper that makes ascetics. And at the same time she is far less of a character; her private features are all suffused in the unearthly radiance. For though it is conceivable that Lady Huntingdon might have embraced a strenuous cause—the franchise of women, for example—had she lived in another age, Lady Glenorchy is a ‘saint,’ as Miss Tytler calls it, whatever her time. And the two women make a remarkable pair.

[Times Literary Supplement, unsigned, Apr 5, 1907]

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‘In Playtime.’

[In Playtime by H. Maynard Smith (Blackwell and Chapman & Hall, 1907)]

Mr H. Maynard Smith is so thoroughly well sophisticated that to criticise his essays In Playtime is as thankless a task as, shall we say, to search for precipices in a billiard ball. Does he not know precisely what he wishes to do, and are not his powers nicely adjusted to his end? His theory, or we should say rather his recipe, is that an essay should be ‘written for amusement,’ very probably with ‘a pencil in bed’; it should be neither precious nor profound, and it should be short and possibly pleasant. You may write of shopping, or furnishing, or Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night so long as you are always urbane and benevolent. Certainly, judged by these canons Mr Maynard Smith is successful. He says nothing to waken any sleeping ideas that you may possess, but he contrives to give them pleasant dreams. His views on all subjects are so sensible and kindly, and, if we do not exaggerate, in such good taste. Mothers should make the holidays pleasant for their sons; kitchens can be made pretty without much expense; warming pans should not be dressed in ribbons and hung in the dining-room. Dining rooms, we know, are places where you eat wholesome food and entertain old college friends. There should be easy chairs, a little shabby if possible, and pipes are better than cigars. To save all this from insipidity Mr Smith writes with a certain flavour of humour, and his style fulfils his own requirements. His English is so easy as to suggest that comfortable habit of body which he advises, and the mild optimism of his point of view is as soothing as the purring of the fireside cat or the song of the tea kettle. And what is more, we are certain that he will be the first to appreciate the comfort and domestic peace that are implied by such metaphors.

[Times Literary Supplement, unsigned, Apr 5, 1907]

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Some Poetic Plays.

[Constantine the Great: A Tragedy by Newman Howard (J.M. Dent, 1906),
King Arthur Pendragon by Arthur Dillon (Elkin Mathews, 1906),
Three New Plays by A.R. Williams (2nd éd., T. Werner Laurie, n.d.),
Apotheosis: A Poem by Reginald Francis Hallward (Elkin Mathews, 1906),
Desiderio: A Drama in Three Acts by Maurice Baring.]

A reviewer has cause to be grateful when a poet will state his aims and methods as explicitly as Mr Newman Howard has done in his Preface to his tragedy. For thus certain topics are provided ready-made upon which to discourse, and the discourse should not be as irrelevant as is usually the case when prose sits in judgment upon poetry. ‘Action, characterisation, and the stage picture are the quest,’ the writer tells us, and not ‘that red herring of the poetic drama, the “purple passage”’—so much, indeed, a student of his work might have guessed without the authority of the key. The drama is founded upon the story of the Emperor Constantine and his son Crispus, born of his divorced wife Minervina. But the scheme is complex, and involves great questions—a background of religious crisis, a foreground of fidelity to ‘a friend, a cause, and a past,’ and the themes are wrought together with force and skill. Indeed, if Mr Howard writes to please a pictorial eye he is surely to be congratulated. But he might bear in mind with tolerance the fact that the ear craves other qualities than those that can be seen—a subtler characterisation, a smoother (though not less virile) melody. Mr Howard is a little too keen upon the scent of red herrings. He is for ever beating and stirring his measures lest they should lapse into placidity or swell into turbulence, and the effects are sometimes more spasmodic than forcible. But such criticism only occurs to a mind that is favourably disposed to the object of criticism, which believes that these faults mar a real poetic gift and distort a fine sense of beauty. The action runs swift and strong, the characters are sharply pourtrayed, and the thought is full of substance, which is often encased in a form of memorable beauty—take, for instance, the chorus on page 60. There is, moreover, a remarkable symmetry of action which hints that the play would arrange itself naturally on the stage. Such are gifts that promise excellence, and achieve an interesting, if unequal result.

Whatever may be the virtues of Mr Dillon’s stout drama, that of fitness for the stage is not among them. There is little attempt at grouping or arrangement; there are no points or pictures upon which the mind would instinctively seize. And such deficiencies hint at more serious failings than mere weakness of stagecraft. Like other poets, the author has made use of the marvellous works of Sir Thomas Mallory; like other poets, he has conveyed more of the substance than of the spirit—if words literally repeated can be said to have substance. Here are serious knights and ladies, drifting soberly about the world, conversing in archaic English, at great length, with much propriety. Still, it remains a question why they should enjoy the names of those remarkable presences—King Arthur, Queen Gwinever, and Sir Lancelot du Lac; while the mystic sound of such places as Brocyli and and Camelot tempts us with a promise that is not fulfilled. Certainly there is much to praise in the sober purpose which leads Mr Dillon to fill so many pages with level blank verse, and keeps his strain always so smooth and so decorous;

Now was I aware

Of a ship, scarved in black, that, breathless, hove

Near and yet nearer, her gunwales and thwarts

Thronged with ladies, who made outcry of shrieks

Piteous to hearing.

This is a fair specimen, and closely modelled upon the original text, but the ship is no longer the ship that bore away King Arthur, and the ladies are no more those majestic mourning Queens. Once again we realise how difficult it is for the modern, fed on books and lighted by lamps, to re-capture the mediæval magic, though there is no reason to condemn the pious attempt.

Turning to the three plays by A.R. Williams, we find ourselves not only in the present day but in a hospital for consumption somewhere in the City. The presence of all the dreary accurate facts of illness in ‘Fame and the Artist’ gives the play a lurid semblance to the truth, and wakes us painfully to the sordid and the substantial. It is swift and clever, and capable of thrilling an audience for two or three minutes. They will sink back in their chairs when the curtain falls, gratefully sensible that they have really felt an unpleasant emotion. The second play, ‘The Street,’ is the longest and the most ambitious of the three. It is about a bank clerk’s widow, who lodges in the Strand with two daughters of finer temperament than her own. All the action takes place in a room overlooking the street, and there are careful stage directions for the proper illumination of the view. It is grey and blank, purple and ominous, misty and quiescent as the tempers of the actors require. Indeed, artificial light seems to be an essential part of the drama, an emotion on the part of the sky which reflects and influences the moods of the actors. The play is undeniably clever, with the kind of cleverness that has a natural affinity with the unpleasant, and is paralysed by the large and the normal. But the skill of the dialogue and the poignancy of many of the situations should secure the success of the piece if it were acted, and if the limelight were in the hands of a capable artist. The last of the three, ‘Jack Hamblin, Gambler,’ poises all its weight on a single situation, and the construction is so skilful that it crashes down with effect upon the ear of a silent reader. On the stage, like its companions it should succeed, for the gifts of the author demand body and colour to express them, and mute black letters are too severe a test.

‘Apotheosis’ is an allegorical poem in which the great questions of life and death are treated in the temper of one of those early Mystery Plays which have lately become so popular. They have become popular, perhaps, not for any special literary beauty, but because they approach difficult matters in a spirit of simplicity and trust that is charming in itself, and the little old words express it with exquisite precision. Such a spirit is far from the spirit of our age, and attempts, like the one before us, to fall into the old devout position are not usually successful. The charm is gone directly the pose is conscious of itself. Still there is real merit in the grave simplicity of ‘Apotheosis,’ in which the story is told of a pilgrim and his passage through the world. A chorus of spirits calls him, and he leaves his betrothed and starts on his long and difficult quest. He is shown the sights of the world, passes through the Temple of Sorrow and preaches the doctrine of brotherhood to a struggling and blasphemous crowd. He dies after giving his message, and is received into Heaven, having learnt and taught the great lesson of brotherhood and love:

Not any longer now do creeds divide:

Man seeks for that which is in all men’s hearts

And purged from any doctrine that divides;

And so the heart of man once more vibrates,

The curtain lifted that withheld the Christ.

In such words there is neither the beauty of inspiration nor the majesty of thought, but, like the outline drawn by a child’s hand, they hint at a large shape, and by their very simplicity preserve it undefaced.

Mr Baring has chosen a romantic theme for his play, suggested, he tells us, partly by the story of Kaspar Hauser and partly by an Eastern legend. The people of Corsica are oppressed by a foolish King; the Count and the Cardinal plot to depose him and to succeed to the power themselves—had they but a dummy king to elect in his stead. As they discuss the plan the door opens and Desiderio enters dressed as a beggar, young and wild looking, but of king-like appearance. He is chosen King, but refuses to further the interest of his councillors when they are harmful to his people. He is, on the whole, a foolish, fantastic creature, born of the earth, and flitting through the set ceremonies of courts and policies like a winged bird of the woods. Good women and bad women follow the lure of his voice. But, as Mr Baring tells it, the story is wanting in the romantic force that will make us believe it. Desiderio is no more than a weak man of good intentions, who speaks like a benevolent politician of Liberal views:

I will have no fresh taxes.

Do we meditate a war on foreign countries? To defend ourselves

We are sufficient to ourselves.

And these sentiments, however seemly, are scarcely appropriate in the mouth of one who sings:

I am the child who’s born to be King.

I come from the dark, to the dark I go.

On the topmost tree I shall dangle and swing.

And out of my bones shall the white rose grow.

It reads as though Mr Baring had been attracted by the surface of a charming story, but had not warmed it sufficiently in the depths of his imagination to put forth much more than a thin outline. There are some melodious snatches of song like that already quoted, and the lines which Thais sings:

The sky is stormy and red;

The wanderer comes from the west;

He knocks at the door and dread

Knocks at the heart in my breast.

Wanderer, what is thy quest?

recur like a natural refrain. But the body of the drama is made of threadbare material.

[Guardian, unsigned, Apr 24, 1907]

[]

The Call of the East.

[The Call of the East by Charlotte Lorrimer (Gay and Bird, 1907).]

In The Call of the East, by Charlotte Lorrimer the author is inspired by the point of view expressed in her introduction—that we have forgotten the precious knowledge which is still current in the East, though we can recollect it and desire it in silence. We have lost the power to ‘enjoy simple things—the shadow of the trees at noon and the insect humming on a summer’s night.’ This is the usual and may be the proper spirit in which Europeans of culture approach the mysteries of China and Japan; it lends their words a certain pathos; they seem so able to enjoy, and so powerless to understand. So Miss Lorrimer, sitting at her window in Japan, watches the mother who has lost her child, and sees her decorate herself for the burial, and arrange her lips in the set sweet smile which is to hide her sorrow. The spectator’s attitude is courteous, and she would like to help; but how? She is puzzled; she does not understand. The most she can do is to write down the actions in the little drama reverently, to notice all that is fair and quaint and different, and to believe that beneath the decorous surface there is the ‘deep underlying poetry’ of the Oriental faith. And the Eastern face keeps its mask-like serenity; the almond eyes are vague and the oval face is smooth as stretched silk. But the simple tales which relate how the people are used to meet the crises of their lives have the charm—perhaps it is a little of a hot-house fragrance—of all that is rare and exotic. Miss Lorrimer knows too well the delicate nature of the wares she has to offer to insist or explain; often her story is but an outline. But, after all, the differences which we should think so insignificant elsewhere are the only keys we have to unlock the mystery. From the nature of the case Miss Lorrimer is more successful when she leaves the cryptic drama of the men and women and expounds the face of the land; for here any one with an eye can learn. She can describe, moreover, with natural ease, and has the gift of matching hills and water with words which keep their shape in print. ‘The Inland Sea’ and the ‘Blossoming Peach Orchards’ are painted in the mind like bright water colours. Indeed, any one who wishes to refresh the memory of the East, or to dream remote dreams could hardly do better than spend an hour or so in turning the pages of this book. The pity is that it is so brief.

[Times Literary Supplement, unsigned, Apr 26, 1907]

[]

‘The Longest Journey.’

[The Longest Journey by E.M. Forster (William Blackwood and Sons, 1907).]

Readers who remember Where Angels Fear to Tread remember some hours of lively entertainment, and the question at the end, ‘What will the next book be?’ Now that the next book, The Longest Journey, is before us the question seems only transferred once more, and to the credit of Mr E. M. Forster’s power of entertainment we ask it as curiously as ever. For The longest Journey, although it is entirely free from shyness, has still much of the character of a young book; it is so very clever and so very well pleased with its own ingenuity. Mr Forster fastens himself again, like some sharp wholesome insect, upon the life of the suburbs and the ideals of those who dwell in red brick villas and in the form rooms of public schools. And in the art of stinging these good people to exhibit their antics in a natural manner he is undoubtedly an expert; Sawston is certainly alive. His hero, Rickie Elliot, is born under the influence; ‘he had opened his eyes to filmy heavens and taken his first walk on asphalt. He had seen civilisation as a row of semi-detached villas and society as a state in which men do not know the men who live next door.’ But, inconveniently enough, he manages to preserve the power of seeing something beyond, and cannot acquiesce. At Cambridge, of course, he meets people who have nothing to do with the suburbs and can sit discussing the existence of objects and drawing circles within squares. ‘Are they real?’ ‘The inside one is—the one in the middle of everything, that there’s never room enough to draw.’ But certain visions obscured Rickie’s view of the true circle, and he is married by a suburban lady, Miss Agnes Pembroke, the sister of a master at Sawston school. Then he must give up his dell, somewhere near Cambridge, where Fauns live and a fair woman pursued by suburban love can turn into a tree. But to follow the theory of Rickie’s life, so skilfully developed and illustrated in its various stages—Cambridge, Sawston, Wiltshire—is hardly within our scope. It is certainly a very skilful arrangement, and yet it does not afford us so much satisfaction as the dexterity of the writer seems to intend. It is a serious matter, and yet if we are to feel it so the comedy should be a little less shrill. But the jingle which the idols make as they fall, adroitly knocked on the head by a tap of Mr Forster’s pen, destroys the deeper note; there is a sound like the striking of hollow brass. But then, and we return to our ‘but,’ how vivacious and neat-handed it all is! Mr Forster has mastered his method, and manipulates his facts, his theories, and finally his men and women with a facility that leaves the reader, as may be he is meant to be left, gasping and groping for support. Where are the connexions? Sometimes the short cut succeeds and sometimes it fails; Miss Pembroke is a success, and Mrs Failing, though pierced again and again, is almost completely missed. The method is clearly dangerous. And yet we have a sense of some larger background, where there are Greeks, if they are only there as a contradiction to Sawston; just as Rickie’s vision is always shot by a pellet of suburban mud. But it is interesting and living and amusing, and we still ask, ‘What will be the next?’

[Times Literary Supplement, unsigned, Apr 26, 1907]

[]

‘Fräulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther.’

[Fräulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther. Being the Letters of all Independent Woman (Smith, Elder, 1907) by Elizabeth von Arnim]

Fräulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther by the author of Elizabeth and her German Garden, contains the letters of ‘an independent woman’ one Rose-Marie Schmidt, of Jena, to Mr Anstruther, of the Foreign Office in London, to whom for a brief period she was engaged. They broke off their engagement, but she still went on writing to him; she may well be writing to him now; she is probably writing to some one else, and the final ‘I shall not write again’ is a mere pause for breath, as who should say ‘You must wait a moment, while I change my dress.’ Mr Anstruther does not appear once, even as a reflection in the mirror, and there is cause to believe that this is for the good reason that he does not exist. It is Rose-Marie then who is important; but why should she be called Fräulein Schmidt and supplied with the troublesome properties of her part when she is really Elizabeth in a German lodging house, or Princess Priscilla, or any other cultivated woman with a taste for poetry and a fluent pen? That this is so points, of course, to serious limitations, for it means that the book is merely a record of personal impressions veiled but scarcely coloured by a few conventions of name and circumstance, and that these are so thinly laid upon the surface that you may shift them altogether if you choose. Rosie-Marie was not in love, nor was she poor, nor did she know how to cook; but to say precisely what she was is more difficult, and it is probable that different readers will answer differently. She was charming, all would agree; or why should we read—with various degrees of pleasure it is true—a whole volume of her meditations which are without form, often shallow, sometimes slipshod, and never inspired? But she writes so freshly and sensibly and happily that to ask for a closer attention to these matters would be like asking a thrush, for example, to whistle a Bach fugue. She follows her moods, and delights in them: ‘The weather, time of day, the light in the room … the scent of certain flowers, the sound of certain voices—the instant my senses become aware of either of these things I find myself flung into the middle of a fresh mood.’ The violets in Schiller’s garden, the beans in the Englishman’s field, Stevenson, Whitman, the notes of a violin—she is at the mercy of all these sounds, and smells, and her ecstasies carry her buoyantly, as on the back of curving waves, which never rise too high for comfort, over all the experiences of life. The experiences that admit of this treatment best are homely ones; vegetarianism, for example, and servants, and the pettiness of life in a small German town. There the humour is exhilarating and sufficient; but it does not lift more weighty matters successfuly. ‘The muse never seized and shook him (Goethe) till divinenesses dropped off his pen without his knowing how or whence.’

Perhaps what you really want most is a prolonged dose of Walt Whitman … the faint breath of corruption hanging about Christina Rossetti’s poetry makes me turn my head the other way … And at least in one place she gives directions as to the proper use of green grass and wet dewdrops upon her grave—implying that dewdrops are sometimes dry.

Is this the place?

Be the green grass above me

With showers and dewdrops wet;

And if thou wilt, remember,

And if thou wilt, forget.

We turn our heads away too. But if you accept the point of view there is, as we began by saying, charm in the frankness and simplicity, in the verbosity even, with which it is written down; as though you listened to vivacious talk and conceived an affection for the talker for the sake of tones and gestures, not to be called reasons, and not always to be defined. That is why this book will be popular with many, and why to many criticism will seem beside the point.

[Times Literary Supplement, May 10, 1907]

[]

Mrs Sellar’s Recollections.

[Recollections and Impressions by E.M. Sellar (William Blackwood and Sons, 1907).]

Mrs Sellar, the author of Recollections and Impressions, is the widow of Professor Sellar, the scholar, Professor of Humanity in the University of Edinburgh. That, it is clear, is the fact that she would have stand first, although ‘of what was best and deepest in one’s own life I cannot speak.’ She gives us the wrong side, or shall we say the inside, of the scholar’s life, the pattern that is not wrought for the world; though, as it is the virtue of this book to show, it means so much to those who see it. Mrs Sellar was a Miss Dennistoun, the daughter of Alexander Dennistoun, of Golfhill; she had many cousins, many friends; she is now a great grandmother. For over twenty-five years she had an official position in the cultivated society of Edinburgh. But it is not by amassing these facts that we shall produce the atmosphere which floats so lightly over her book. Nor shall we convey it by saying that Mrs Sellar has met many distinguished men, Tennyson, Jowett, Herbert Spencer, Stevenson,’ for we cannot go on to quote the ‘good stories’ or the ‘interesting opinions’ which, if we are to believe most writers of memoirs, they handed to their friends like pebbles. Rather, ‘it is strange the foolish things that stick to one’s memory,’ writes Mrs Sellar; but, we may add, if they do stick it scarcely matters that they are foolish. So, that Spencer kept indiarubber balls to stop his ears when conversation threatened to excite him, is less characteristic than Mrs Sellar’s casual memory:—‘“Yes, Mr. Spencer,” I said, “we have lived and loved together through many a changing year!” “We have lived,” he corrected, with decision. “Ah,” I said, “you can’t answer for my feelings!” upon which he grimly smiled.’ And there, as in most natural stories, you see something of the expression on both faces if it is gone the next moment. It is the charm of Mrs Sellar’s memories as of her life that there is no gulf at all between the great and the simple—we hear just as much of the Ferriers and the Grants and the Tods and the Sandarses who are not famous, on this side of the border at any rate, as of the standard bigwigs—because it is quite possible that the unknown are as charming as the known. Indeed, if we were to assign a reason why Mrs Sellar’s book should interest posterity—but that is none of her ambition—it would be simply for the sake of the unknown people in it. Such, a later critic might say, was the life of a cultivated English woman in the nineteenth century; such was the quality of the background. It would not be true, indeed it would be almost stupid, to pretend that Mrs Sellar was much concerned in any society that is likely to survive of its own accord; if the Edinburgh of those days was memorable as Paris has been memorable, or London, Mrs Sellar is not the chronicler. But it is almost better as it is certainly rarer to see how the lettered people lived at their ease ‘a life of native gaiety, exuberant fun, and freedom, and friendship, mingled with the best talk on all subjects,’ than to have one little point of light accurately reflected. That is the picture that Mrs Sellar sets before you with entire simplicity; certainly we echo Jowett’s wish that ‘aged persons would write down some recollections of people they have known.’

[Times Literary Supplement, unsigned, May 17, 1907]

[]

‘Letters of a Betrothed.’

[Recollections and Impressions by E.M. Sellar (William Blackwood and Sons, 1907).]

There have been printed lately so many letters from people in all stages of affection that a new book with a sentimental title promises a variation merely on the old theme and we distrust it. But it must be said at once that Letters of a Betrothed, during the German War of Liberation, 1804–1813, edited by Edith Freiin von Cramm, and translated by Leonard Huxley, differs essentially from the rest because it is obviously sincere, and you have the satisfaction of knowing that, whether beautiful or not, the emotions it sets before you spring directly from the truth. A few lines would give the history of the letters; how they are written by Philippine von Griesheim to her friend Charlotte von Münchhausen during a period of nine years, from 1804 to 1813; how, in the course of that time, which covered her life from the age of fourteen to twenty-three, she became engaged to Albert von Wedell; the engagement lasted one year, and was ended by the death of Albert, who was shot, by the French, together with ten other young German officers. Such was very possibly the story of many German women during the War of Liberation; and it is no doubt partly this knowledge that makes her write of her fate in a large spirit as though there was no need to brood and specialise over a case which was like that of so many others. She began to write as a child who wished to ‘dance through the whole of life’ and saw ‘through a green veil’; marriage was a ‘detestable slavery’; ‘sugary compliments’ were degrading; she had all she wanted in her home, and was healthy enough to include all things, the persistent growl of war even, in a happy scheme of the universe. So far the fact that she has been writing to another child, a girl too, matters little; in what follows the candour and lack of self-consciousness are probably only possible in writing to one whose sex and age make of her a colourless medium; she will understand so well that she draws out more than you have known yourself to possess. ‘The allusions in this letter’—they had not been too obvious—‘make me ashamed, and I hardly dare mention the name of Albert again.’ You may see how Lotte is used to drape the argument upon, and how at the same time she permits no duplicity. ‘He singles me out because I am the most perfect likeness of his mother…. He also reads me beautiful poems … to mould my taste. Ah! love—friendship—I would say, is the best teacher. Don’t laugh at this rhapsody…. I almost believe I am ill. Could this come from overstudy?’ When her love is frankly confessed, in the next letter or so, there is something pathetic in the simplicity with which she enjoys it; it seems that such a robust emotion should have a larger share of mortal life than others. She is not mistress of her pen when a year later she hears of Albert’s death; but ‘swoons,’ dashes, notes of exclamation, and the stiff phrases of mourning show that, like most people in the same condition, she found language a rude implement. But the interest for a later reader lies very much in this impression of a high-spirited downright person who will thread all the stir and tumult of a rough time on the string of her single experience. After Albert’s death it seems as though her affection for him was continued in the interest with which she watched the war. She married at ‘the wish of her mother and sisters’ and, though it seems to put the picture, otherwise so curiously complete, out of perspective, lived on till 1881. Then the people of Brunswick, remembering the past, gave her the funeral honours which belong generally to soldiers of high standing in the army.

[Times Literary Supplement, unsigned, May 17, 1907]

[]

‘The Glen o’ Weeping.’

[The Glen o’ Weeping (Alston Rivers, 1907) by Marjorie Bowen]

Miss Marjorie Bowen writes a preface to her new book, The Glen o’ Weeping, in which some rather emphatic opinions upon the proper writing of history are flung together—in haste, as it seems. ‘The unconscious historian is the only one that may be trusted … the letters, in fact, of the world’s statesmen and women.’ Hume and Smollett are ‘pernicious’ because ‘they merely chronicle “opinions” that the dogma of the prejudiced and the acceptance of the unthinking have converted into what are known as “historical facts”. Drink your history neat, in short; but beware, we might add, lest the fumes are too strong for your head and colour historical facts no less queerly than the spectacles of the scientific historian. But this is an old quarrel, and only pertinent here because Miss Bowen has cast aside her Hume and her Smollett and uses the same sarcastic commas for the massacre of Glencoe and for these ‘opinions’ and ‘facts’. Probably no true novelist makes it his business to administer strict historical justice; and we think him successful in the best sense if he can set people talking and fighting once more, and thinking even, as they did and do to this very day. But, although there are only two ‘absolute liberties with facts’, honestly confessed, and the truth of the matter is a question, we cannot go on to say that Miss Bowen has written a book which we must believe though all the doctors in Oxford cried shame on us. And yet she possesses some of the gifts that should make a novelist. People group themselves before her; she sees lonely figures watching on the shore, and solitary horsemen on deserted roads; the picture forms itself instinctively; it is there in every chapter. And we must add with speed that there is a great deal more than this, and we should even find it hard to give an intelligible sketch of the plot. There is the feud of the Campbells and the Macdonalds; the Jacobite plots, the Orange plots, and, above all, the Master of Stair. Miss Bowen is as daring in her way as one of her own conspirators; she shirks no crisis, she is lavish of adventures and escapes, and a murder is undertaken with the utmost indifference. Still, while we admire her spirit, it is difficult to feel that all this ‘slightly grandiloquent magnificence’ is satisfactory; it is a rich cloak, but it does not take the place of bones and flesh.

[Times Literary Supplement, May 24, 1907]

[]

Philip Sidney.

[Sir Fulke Greville’s Life of Sir Philip Sidney (1652). With an introduction by Nowell Smith (Tudor & Stuart Library, Clarendon Press, 1906).]

So simple and complete is the image that we have of Sir Philip Sidney that we use his name almost as an adjective, as we speak of Don Quixote, when we wish to give a figure to a cluster of closely related qualities. The cup of water and the phrase ‘Thy necessity is yet greater than mine’, though very nearly the last of his actions and his speeches, have inspired all that went before them in the imaginations of most; for not many, it is likely, draw their information from the Arcadia, and the Life by Greville (unless this reprint attracts as much attention as it deserves) is not known to the ordinary reader at all. And yet the life of which we have here a reprint, edited and annotated by Mr Nowell Smith, is the first authority for that phrase, and, as seems likely, the original though hidden source of much that is scarcely so articulate. Sir Fulke Greville was the author of several plays and poems, ‘political treatises rather than plays,’ says Lamb, and poems ‘frozen and made rigid with intellect’. So you might go on to qualify the term ‘life’ as applied to this pamphlet which professes to be a dedication and is a volume; which has much of Spain and Elizabeth and Greville in it, and very little of the life of any one, unless we choose to divorce the word from the hard framework of date and fact to which in our day it has grown so close. But if this is not the method of biography of which we approve, if we like letters and dates and events all ranged in order, surely we must admit that in good hands it has advantages, and that in the case of Sidney particularly it is the only way in which the rare stuff of his life could be preserved and made of value. Sir Fulke began, as we said, to dedicate his poems; but the name of Philip Sidney so wrought upon his imagination that he could not stay till he had fashioned a monument to him, carved and decorated it, twisted and plaited it, in the best style of the early sevententh-century prose. And, like other sepulchral monuments, it celebrates the virtues of the dead and traces the outlines of their form with a smooth and generous hand. But it is neither mere panegyric such as you speak to patrons, nor is it the mournful eulogy that is chanted appropriately over the bodies of heroes; and yet it has much of the exaltation and largeness of period that are common to both these styles. Even so, perhaps, it still seems natural to write of Philip Sidney.

The figure of Sidney, alive, making love, making war, writing poems, or walking in the gardens at Wilton, cast upon the minds of his contemporaries the same image, only infinitely brighter, that is still visible before us. They did not see a poet or a soldier or a statesman, but a man who somehow held all these qualities latent in his mind, but so fused that no one of them issued separately. The difficulty of writing his life at all was that there was no point to indicate to the eye of posterity as the sufficient reason of Sidney’s fame; but all qualities rather must be kept melting and mixing in their confinement, beautiful in their sum and in their harmony rather than in the supremacy of any single one of them. And yet that was also the reason of writing; for there was need to fear that a future age with no proof before it might disbelieve that any such man had ever lived; and that death might have more power over a frame so exquisitely composed than over one made in a coarser pattern. For to know the perfection of Sidney’s nature it is clear you must have known him in the flesh; only the minutes and the seconds of daily life were fine enough in texture to receive the impression of so rare a spirit. Such was the task that Greville set himself ‘to the end that in the tribute I owe him, our nation may see a sea-mark, rais’d upon their native coast, above the level of any private Pharos abroad’. So, happily careless of detail where the mass was so admirable, Greville stands back from his model, and composes the full-length figure as a work of art, detached from time and matter, like a Greek statue, where the foot is necessary to the head.

The familiar course of Sidney’s life followed the pattern usual to young men of his rank; he travelled the Continent in the suite of a nobleman, conversed with emperors and men of letters, learnt to ride, and finally attached himself to the Court of Elizabeth. But as it seemed to Greville and to all who knew him—and we must acquiesce—he was never ‘possessed of any fit stage for eminence to act upon’; all his virtues were but hinted or spilt by the way in pamphlets and Arcadias to the anger, and pride too, of his friends; if he had chosen to economise, what might he not have done, and yet such is the carelessness of wealth. As a boy, even, he was always for enlarging the task given him to do and for expanding the ceremonies of diplomacy, so as to make them include matters of vital interest to his country. His stage became steadily wider; it spread over England, Ireland, and Spain and, had fate allowed, it was to embrace the ‘main of America’ as ‘an Emporium for the confluence of all nations that love, or profess any kinde of vertue, or Commerce’. And this was undertaken from no mere opulence of spirit, but gravely, like all his plans, with the sagacity of a far-sighted statesman. Had he lived, so we may guess with Greville, his nature would have found its proper scope in rule and statecraft, for it was in the temper of a magistrate after all that he approached the peaceful arts. He was not so much a poet or a romance writer as an explorer of fresh tracts for other men to cultivate, and, in the best sense of the word, a patron of poets. One may figure him still leading at Wilton or at Leicester House, with Spenser and Greville for followers, and indicating as from some summit above his men the noble land which they are to press on and occupy. So he reclaimed classic metres strange to English verse, and pronounced his eloquent Defence of Poesie’ ‘But the truth is, his end was not writing, even while he wrote.’ Such was the characteristic opinion of his friend, at any rate, who perhaps had two ends in his mind. It was one ‘end’ to conceal sound political philosophy within the bodies of fantastic princes living in Arcadia; ‘in all these creatures of his making his intent and scope was to turn the barren philosophy precepts into pregnant images of life’. Modern readers will be less alive to the moral and will endow Sidney with a greater measure of purely literary inspiration than Greville thought due to him or entirely to his credit. But there was another end, not to be reached by pen and ink; for we may agree that his knowledge was ‘not moulded for table or schools; but both his wit and understanding bent upon his heart, to make himself and others, not in word or in opinion, but in life and action, good and great, in which Architectional art he was such a master, with so commending, and yet equall waies amongst men, that wheresoever he went, he was beloved, and obeyed’.

The temptation is to copy out still more of one of the many noble passages in the book; and it is hard too to resist a temptation not altogether so innocent. For, upborne upon such stately pinions it would be easy to glide in serene air, to exalt and magnify till the figure of Sidney became of colossal proportions, and we might find ourselves in the end mouthing fine periods about a man who had ceased to exist. But Greville was not only a statesman and a philosopher, but also a writer of fine English prose. He had, of course, the vices of his rime in that he used a medium not yet refined for utilitarian purposes, and he is often closely throttled in the embraces of a sinuous metaphor. Mr Nowell Smith has had to perform—and most adequately has he done it—the task of an editor of a corrupt classic, and on more than one occasion the meaning must still be left an open question. But the obscurities arise from a congestion of precious metal; ideas and images and learning collide and block the way; but when the stream runs clear it is both swift and deep. ‘In these passages’, says Mr Nowell Smith, ‘he haunts the ear with that solemn and rich and varied rhythm which is the peculiar glory of Elizabethan and Jacobean prose.’ And he goes on to point out the beauty of one particular chapter and paragraph. But, pleasant as it is for the cultivated modern to find in Greville’s book a collection of rare old curiosities to be handled separately, it has a higher value perhaps as a complete work in which the whole figure is embalmed, and there is no rent perceptible in the encircling envelope. For, although Sidney is raised a little beyond the ordinary human stature so that his outline runs free unchecked by petty interruptions, and has become a ‘sea-mark’ and a standard for men to sail by, it is due to his friend’s art that it is still a solid figure which we may feel warm to our touch. If it is true that he is a type and has something of the general and public nature of a type, the type after all was closely allied with the particular. For it is the virtue of the Elizabethan age, unless imagination is too partial, that such heroes should have space to expand there to their natural circumference, and men can stand back and gaze at them. So that when Sidney died, at the age of thirty-two, his death was but the final harmony of a life that was too short, but that was complete; indeed, the shortness of such lives seems in some way a necessary part of their perfection. Poets sang of him as an ideal fit for worship; and other countries besides his own lamented as though some image common to them all had been withdrawn from sight. Best of all is the tribute of his friend, for there you hear a sterner note than eulogy and see the exact countenance that was then deemed heroic:

Indeed he was a true modell of Worth; A man fit for Conquest, Plantation, Reformation, or what Action soever is greatest, and hardest amongst men; Withall, such a lover of Mankind, and Goodnesse, that whosoever had any real parts, in him found comfort, participation, and protection to the uttermost of his power; like Zephyrus he giving life where he blew.

[Times Literary Supplement, May 31, 1907]

[]

Venice.

[Venice by Beryl de Sélincourt and May Sturge Hen]

The most difficult tasks are always those that have a treacherous surface; it seems so easy to write of Venice if you have been there; and yet out of all the splendid structures of words that have been raised in her honour and likeness, how many are there that a reader cares to use at all? There is a passage in Ruskin, a phrase or two in Browning—but every one has his own specific; this only is probably true of all, that the words are numbered. The authors of Venice—Beryl de Sélincourt and May Sturge Henderson—are aware of this perversity in their Goddess: ‘each … has a new question to ask of her, and … the answer will be given to him alone.’ But they believe that there may be marks on her stones still unperceived, words in her manuscript yet unread, music in her stars yet unheard, and that ‘with patience and love we may redeem … a chord … or a tone.’ The profusion of images which this statement of their aims calls forth is typical of the method used throughout. They cannot fix their gaze on a single object; but they catch its shadow on the wall, or its reflection in the waters, or its mirage in the sky, and in doubt which is the real thing they preserve them all so that the reader may choose for himself. They are also in possession of a varied vocabulary, so that the heap of precious words increases fast and a substantial volume is the result. But a certain amount of solid history is included to illustrate Venice under different aspects; there is an account of a visit of Henry the Third to Venice in 1574 to illustrate a Venetian festival; tales out of Marco Polo to illustrate the travels of a Merchant of Venice; there is a description of a Crusade, and a chapter on the Venetian Painters of the Renaissance. But though we come across many of the striking phrases that are the outcome of real sympathy the effect is always dulled by the accumulation of phrases that are just wide of the mark. It seems extravagant, doubtless, to demand a gift great enough to see the single object clearly, but it is difficult to say what good purpose can be achieved, in a work of this kind, without a considerable touch of that power. There are several brightly-coloured illustrations by Mr R. Barrett.

[Times Literary Supplement, unsigned, Jun 14, 1907]

[]

‘A Mirror of Shalott.’

[A Mirror of Shalott: Composed of Tales Told at a Symposium by Robert Hugh Benson (Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, 1907).]

‘With the Father Rector’s permission we will tell our tales, one each night…. And Mr Benson shall write them down, if he wishes to, and make an honest penny or two, if he can get any publisher to take the book.’ So in A Mirror of Shalott, by Robert Hugh Benson, we have fourteen stories told by Reverend Fathers, in each of which there is some miracle or ghost story, or merely something irrelevant that cannot be explained. A candid inquirer, with no professional bias, might have written the stories; and at no point are we asked to believe that the meaning is this or that; ‘Catholics are the only genuine agnostics alive.’ Indeed ‘miracle’ is far too bigoted a word to apply to any of Mr Benson’s stories; and for the most part they lack the substance of ghost stories. Let us call them then rather emotional experiences, to which the profession of the storyteller gives a religious setting, and, sometimes, a religious flavour. Such are the stories of the man who substituted himself for his brother who was losing his faith; of the woman whose devil was exorcised; of the artist who regained his faith and lost his art because evil had inspired it; and there are others again which any country gentleman might tell his guests at bedtime; nor would their rest be broken. In truth, qualities that are admirable elsewhere rather prevent Mr Benson from telling his tales so as to excite the feelings which people, whatever their faith, cherish for the supernatural. He is too surefooted, too painstaking. The most interesting, because the least dependent on help from without, are stories like Father Girdlestone’s story, and Mr Bosanquet’s story. Here Mr Benson has to describe the experiences of a mind—of a man who was tempted in one case, of a man who died in the other—in very remote and subtle conditions. But his method is too robust to deal with such intricate and at the same time poignant emotions; he sets everything in order, tells you how the basket chair clicked, and what happened next, and works out the situation methodically with the desire clearly to get at the truth. But when we reach the heart of this substantial edifice the thing, whatever it was, has gone. The Fathers, it is true, let their cigars go out and sit tense with emotion, for naturally Mr Benson is keenly alive to all the accessories of a good story; as naturally the stories which are most substantially shored up, as it were, with incident are the most successful. Only, while we are interested and even instructed, no sudden chasms open beneath us or above us; because perhaps Mr Benson is a little too much of an agnostic. But it is a great matter that every story makes an impression of sincerity and intelligence.

[Times Literary Supplement, unsigned, Jun 14, 1907]

[]

‘The Feast of Bacchus.’

[The Feast of Bacchus: A Study in Dramatic Atmosphere by Ernest G. Henham (Brown, Langham, 1907).]

Mr E.G. Henham defines his novel, The Feast of Bacchus, as a ‘study in dramatic atmosphere’; but that does not go very far to explain his intentions, or, rather, the way in which he has carried them out. It is clear, at least, that he has written a novel to illustrate an idea; that it is something of an experiment, and that the success of the story depends upon the way in which the theory will achieve itself. He conceives a deserted house and garden, the Strath, in which hang two masks of tragedy and comedy, and whoever lives or wanders there feels the influence of one of them without knowing what it is. But the Strath is something much more important than an ordinary haunted house; ‘The lessons of the Strath were those of the didactic drama, which teaches that mortals must submit to unchanging laws. It had no phantasm to show, … it could only shape minds for good or evil … causing the puppets to act and speak in comic or in tragic mood, showing them that life is not a small thing, the world no passing scene, but rather a permanent stage.’ From this quotation and from the sermon, delivered by an English parson, ‘on the birth and early history of the drama,’ we may gather that Mr Henham has read Greek plays, and has his mind full of destinies and unities; but the work is not so formidable in execution as in design. Various people, a clergyman, a squire, a frivolous lady, living in the neighbourhood come beneath the influence; there are Bacchic revels, scenes from the eighteenth century, murders, as the comic or the tragic mask predominates. But the tremendous properties of the house are far less vivid than the little pictures which Mr Henham intersperses of life in the daylight, for he can write cleverly of substantial things when he chooses. But the presence of this mysterious place interferes with the action, and seems to confuse the lines of the characters without steeping them in the mystic beauty which Hawthorne, for example, could draw from the supernatural. When, finally, we reach the second scene of the fifth act called ‘Masque’—for it is thus that Mr Henham names his chapters—the revelations which the spirits of the house make before they are destroyed are fantastical, whimsical; but not real in the very poignant way in which dreams can be real. In truth, you lay a great stress on your characters when you submit them to the supernatural and expect them to survive. But in spite of Aristotle and the rest, Mr Henham’s book is a graceful suggestion, and perhaps one day he will carry it out.

[Times Literary Supplement, unsigned, Jun 21, 1907]

[]

‘The Red Sphinx.’

[The Red Sphinx: A Romance by Edward Uffington Valentine and S. Eccleston Harper (T. Fisher Unwin, 1907).]

In calling The Red Sphinx, by E.U. Valentine and S.E. Harper, a ‘romance,’ the authors seem to wish to indicate a slight variety upon the usual form of fiction. And we may detect some difference, however we choose to christen it. It is clear that they have spent a great deal of care upon the story; it is not intricate, indeed, but of the kind that we may liken to some tremendous parasite sucking all the colour from the pale little characters it grows upon to maintain its own sleekness. There is a passionate American girl with a genius for the stage, who is for ever talking of her art and making the sacrifices that it requires. So, after rejecting a millionaire, she comes to Paris, and we hear a great deal about the Cours Bassot, about recitations—‘Then with a gesture she seemed to awaken as from a trance’—about cabarets at Montmartre, and the precise way in which chansonniers make absinthe. But all this is merely sketched in so that we may realise the atmosphere in which actresses recite dialogues at cabarets and impersonate the ‘Red Sphinx of Anarchy’ in poems written for them by sinister and half-insane men of genius. It is still more ominous, however, when the chivalrous young man to whom she is engaged takes to painting her in the same character. In this work she is shown as a ‘gigantic halfhuman figure’ hovering above the church of the Sacré Cœur, ‘the white dome of which was streaked crimson with sacrificial gore dripping from the outstretched wings.’ The Salon refused the picture; and, as any one may guess, at the same moment that Leonore, the Sphinx, is reciting the poem before Notre Dame, early in the morning, the unfortunate painter is jumping into the Seine near by. The picture was too like her. And the end is equally appropriate. But it is not probable that the plot when detached from the context will give pleasure to any one; and we are thus guilty of some ingratitude to the writers. For there is a certain candour and good faith in the way in which they set out their wares before you, as who should say ‘Some people may like to hear about this, though we none of us believe it,’ which induces the reader to acquiesce. There are, moreover, some pieces of description of the Boulevards by night and the Halles in the early morning which bring you down with a shock upon the hard earth again. The characters themselves pass on the story from hand to hand; and really you can ask no more of them.

[Times Literary Supplement, unsigned, Jul 5, 1907]

[]

Lady Fanshawe’s Memoirs.

[The Memoirs of Ann Lady Fanshawe. Wife of the Honble. Sir Richard Fanshawe, Bart., 1600—71. Reprinted from the original manuscript in the possession of Mr Evelyn John Fanshawe of Parsloes … (John Lane, 1907).]

The memoirs of Lady Fanshawe are probably the memoirs of many other ladies of her time who did not go to the trouble of writing them down. Such were the stories that were current in halls and manor houses all over England in the luxurious Restoration days; how ‘your father was the tenderest father imaginable’, how he loved hospitality, which he thought ‘wholly essential for the constitution of England’; was loyal, honest, and walked often with a poetry book in his hand; listen, then, while I tell you how he lived, so that you may live like him, and grow up true and charitable and discreet. The writer, in this instance, might go on to speak of grandfathers and uncles and aunts, all of them ‘honest, worthy, virtuous men and women who served God in their generation’ and lay now obscure beneath their tombs. Indeed, she could hint at far generations, doubtless once practising the same virtues, who had accumulated in the chancel of the church at Dronfield, and bore the same name, spelt variously ffaunchel, ffauncall, or Fanshawe, above them. Nor would it be hard for a stranger who finds himself in that churchyard, or comes upon the low little stone house from which they issued, to perceive a family history running alongside of all seasons of English life, inconspicuously, as a murmured accompaniment. So set humming, the whole land seems to swim in a pleasant kind of harmony, in which no age is more present than another, and all are of the one piece.

Lady Fanshawe’s memoirs serve but to freshen colours now grown dim; one might read them beneath the yew tree on a hot summer day with no sense of incongruity, no discordancy. She was the daughter of Sir John Harrison, and, through her mother, cousin already of the Fanshawe family; her father was a member of five parliaments, and a devoted servant of the Royal cause, which, as a rich man, he supported with his purse. Ann was educated in ‘working all sorts of fine works with my needle, and learning French, singing, the lute, the virginals, and dancing’; but a vigorous love of ‘active pastime’ breaking through these restraints made her ‘that which we graver people call a hoyting girl’. At Oxford, where they had come with the Court, she married her husband, Sir Richard Fanshawe, the talk of battles in her ears, sickness and the spectacle of war before her eyes; and immediately the turbulent business that was to last their life together began. She makes, as perhaps she once made on her knees, some solemn little preface to this undertaking—‘ as faith is the evidence of things not seen, so we upon so righteous a cause cheerfully resolved to suffer what that would drive us to’. And, without further meditation, she began her voyages and shipwrecks and adventures, till, having lavished herself with characteristic profusion—bearing eighteen children in twenty-one years, for example, and losing most of them—she was laid in the church of Ware beside her husband. It is the lack of meditation in proportion to so much action that strikes the reader, and colours, if we do not mean rather washes with a single shade, the whole book. The atmosphere is singularly clear; you see what happens now and what comes next, the clothes Sir Richard wore, the wondrous fruits that drooped from trees, the commodities of the land, the detail and solidity of things as in a child’s story of adventure. It is a method full of charm; a method, it seems, that marks another age. Indeed, we should miss a great deal if we tried to convict Lady Fanshawe of much fine feeling; it is precisely her candour and simplicity that are valuable, adding nothing to the fact, but, at the same time, in no way obscuring it.

In October, as I told you, my husband and I went into France by way of Portsmouth, where, walking by the seaside … two ships of the Dutch shot bullets at us, […] so near that we heard them whiz by us; at which I called my husband to make haste back, and began to run. But he altered not his pace, saying, if we must be killed, it were as good to be killed walking as running.

An attitude of mind which Lady Fanshawe gives us to understand is proper to a nobleman on all occasions. Such is the rather serene and florid spirit, easily to be made visible to the eye, in which the whole drama is presented—the two embassies to Madrid, the shipwrecks, the escape from Cork, the imprisonment of Sir Richard. Their adventures stir in them no petty feelings of resentment against men or against nature; it is the lot of gallant knights to tilt nobly against obstacles, as the knights in The Faery Queene proved their chivalry against the monsters of allegory. So, when they part with Charles I:

I prayed God to preserve his Majesty … He stroked me on the cheek and said, ‘Child, if God pleaseth it shall be so; but both you and I must submit to God’s will …’ Thus did we part from that glorious sun that within a few months after set, to the grief of all Christians that were not forsaken by God.

The phrase is round; it gives the surface and the ceremony, much as a curtsey duly regulated expresses what it is proper to feel in the presence of the Sovereign; but the pen is scarcely more subtle than the knee. After all we must allow that in an age when there was so much ceremony, so much action needed merely to cross to Spain—‘we saw coming towards us with full sail a Turkish galley, well manned, and we believed we should all be carried away slaves’—it would have needed a deeper mind than Lady Fanshawe’s to accept all these events and stain them in any peculiar dye, or crack them open and show what was inside. As it is, there is so much of a likeness between one thing and another as they appear in this medium that we give almost the same value to the story of the little Portuguese boy who was rolled in honey as to the Restoration of Charles II. On both occasions it is the show that the writer lays before us, without comment, almost without arrangement. But the charm of such unconsciousness is that it permits her to make statements plainly which most writers would in some way distort; and the reader has the pleasure of filling in the picture with fresh colours. ‘I found a twenty shilling piece of gold which nobody owning that was by, I kept.’ Of Irish ghosts: ‘She spake aloud, and in a tone I never heard, thrice “Ahone”; and then with a sigh more like wind than breath she vanished … Your father entertained me with telling how much more those apparitions were usual in Ireland than in England.’

It is something of a surprise to find that this candid tale with its air of something naturally completed, a statement as round and as detached as a bird’s song, is in need of five appendices and nearly 350 closely printed pages of notes. The supplement includes not only the minute comment of history but the still more minute additions of family pride; and both together make Lady Fanshawe’s memoirs a matter of far greater or other importance than she or her readers were aware. The perspective is changed of a sudden, and instead of vague ‘business’ into which she did not inquire too narrowly, you have accurate texts faithfully recovered from the originals in the British Museum, the Bodleian, the Public Record Office, and from nearly a thousand printed volumes. You have what Pepys wrote and Evelyn; distances measured on the map; a precise examination of dates and Christian names, for Lady Fanshawe was casual even as to her own children; a little biography of every name she mentions and often a genealogy as well; till the family of Fanshawe seems to cast itself like an intricate net over the entire population of England. The curiosity of such speculations is great; some one with a fiery imagination might fuse the text and its notes into such a whole as should constitute a complete little globe of human life; meanwhile the book remains curious, delightful so far as Lady Fanshawe is concerned, elaborate and admirable so far as we can absorb her editor. The touch, ‘a real personage, whose memory is specially dear to the family of her husband’, colours much very pleasantly that we are apt to call mere antiquarianism. Lady Fanshawe, it seems, is still a grandmother.

[Times Literary Supplement, Jul 26, 1907]

[]

‘Love the Judge.’

[Lone the Judge by Wymond Carey (Methuen, 1907).]

The conviction with which Low? the Judge, by Wymond Carey is written, goes some way to achieve its end. If we cannot believe that such people lived, we can almost believe that some one thinks they do; indeed we can believe that a great many people are glad to accept them as one of those imitations which are rather better than the real thing. Mr Carey’s method is so confident, it treats such large matters so boldly, and declares the results so decisively that many will read him with something of gratitude mixed with their pleasure. Great financiers should be like Richard Forster; they should think in continents; they should not only wear their dinner jackets with remarkable ease, but power should stamp their foreheads ‘compensating for the absence of the hall-mark of birth.’ Then it is pleasant to think, with a start of surprise of course, that such a man reads poetry, takes it like a pill to counteract the effects of ‘money grubbing’; and best of all that if you pick up the book lying on the seat beside him at Monte Carlo you will find it to be ‘The Book of the Spiritual Life.’ This is simple, and somehow gratifying. Further we can all follow the problems which are strenuously debated in the course of the volume. What is it that a great man needs in his wife? Love or intellect? Which is the greater power? What constitutes true womanhood? and so forth; and the answers are rapped out as from a pulpit in Hyde-park. In the same way, too, we should like to believe in Kitty, and Dot, and Gertrude, because each is so simple a statement of what might be if life would arrange itself in such a way as to ask simple questions and admit simple replies. But in justice to Mr Carey we must add that he has done all in his power to throw his characters into strong relief, exhibiting them by means of financial crises, as by some crude white flashlight. Nor is his plot any less muscular, if we may say so, than the emotions it inspires; we are shown candidly what it is to control several companies, to juggle with thousands as with pence, to make stockbrokers turn and look at you with a shudder. There is no suspicion of satire or subtlety, and if it is to be done this is certainly the way to do it. But there are dreadful moments, not a few of them, when we can believe no more; as when Gertrude Wyatt, who represents intellect without love, advises Forster to learn Greek. ‘Only those who can understand great literature know what an anodyne it can be … the literature of modern Christian or of modern pagan culture rests on Greek thought … true statesmanship for our world to-day must begin, though it does not end, with the assimilation of Hellenism.’ Can we ask our imagination to accept that? No; the burden is too great. If we are to read the novel we must not violate our consciences by bidding them take it for the truth. We must agree to enjoy it as the distortion of an earnest mind; and to find its value in the fact that it is a reflection.

[Times Literary Supplement, unsigned, Aug 23, 1907]

[]

‘The New Religion.

[The New Religion. A Modern Novel (Methuen, 1907) by Marten Maartens]

No one has any right, perhaps, with a title like The New Religion, and the additional clause ‘A Modern Novel’ and the dedication ‘For those who are sick—for those who believe they are sick’, and so on, to be very much surprised by what follows; and yet there are moments of illusion. A beautiful young woman waiting her husband’s return in a country garden, soft, affectionate, pure-minded; a faithful business man, submitting tenderly to the punctual button-hole, whose years confirm his sincerity—here is the stuff for close domestic analysis, combined, perhaps, with some debate of current heresies. But before this picture has established itself it is clear that the interest does not lie in those regions at all, but, to begin with, in the state of Mrs Lomas’s health. She is ill, and there is a country doctor who hints at a possible complication; then there is a specialist, and then another specialist, and then we see that it is not Mrs Lomas’s health that we are to be interested in, but health in general, and doctors of all kinds. Each character is introduced in turn with some familiar phrase on his lips; they come so swift and so pat that the reader has to abandon any original desire to follow the fortunes of individuals, and must devote all his agility to taking the points as they rise; a restless, exacting duty, not, however, to be forgone. He will have to listen to private conversations between Dr Russett, ‘the greatest living nerve specialist’, and his wife. ‘The whole thing’s just a big financial and social spec,’ he remarks when his wife murmurs something about the cause of humanity. Next a boy proves the victory of prayer over surgery; and an old gardener pleads the cause of charms and simples. When all these points have been made with considerable vivacity, Mrs Lomas is pronounced to be suffering from general debility, and Dr Russett prescribes a year in a sanatorium in the Vaudois Alps, which will cure her if, as he remarks in the hall, she has not a spine complaint which is incurable. At Gringinges-sur-Aulches there is a vast establishment dedicated to the ‘Return to Nature’. The founder, Dr Vourray, has discovered that man is nearly allied to the apes; and ‘Live as the monkey, and you will regain your lost strength’ is the creed. Here Mrs Lomas was shut in a dark room, with a nurse who exhibits, submissively but as pointedly as the rest, the vices of her class; while Henry Lomas undergoes the treatment prescribed for apoplexy, since, as the doctor discovers, his symptoms point to that disease. To bring down the whole of this colossal imposture Henry Lomas is suddenly stricken with consumption; and a mad patient breaks into Mrs Lomas’s isolation at night-time while her nurse sleeps. The next task, then, is to exhibit the fallacies that are current with respect to consumption; ‘dosimetry’ in this case, and the Riviera. But the proof this time requires that the invalid shall die; and another symptom directly takes his place, in the person of Mrs Lomas’s divorced father, who suffers from something that we are now perhaps permitted to call ‘Angelina Pectoris’. For in truth the point of view has once more shifted. The satire of the earlier chapters was after all directed against the solid bodies of doctors and faiths, and it was possible for Mr Maartens to inspire them with rigorous rhetoric—‘Tis the new religion’, cried Dr Russett. ‘Nobody listens to the poor dead parsons. We are the new infallible priests,’ and so on; and though we have heard this before, we feel that we ought perhaps to believe in it. But now the connexion with things that are shaped somewhat after the fashion of life is blown aside, and Mr Maartens indulges a delightful irresponsible mood which neglects all the missions, and charges nobody with the disagreeable duty of abolishing shams. Can we believe, for example, in the doctor who, to refute the germ theory of disease, swallows a tinful of tubercles and calls his daughter ‘Microbe d’Amour; my cabbage, she infecteth nobody’? But it is amusing. Again, shall we conceive a millionaire endowed with sufficient imagination to cruise among the Aegean islands in search for a prophet with miraculous powders that either cure you or kill you? But the story is one of the most charming in the book. At last we are entertained with a wild jumble of the different creeds in conflict, issuing from the lips of valets, and ladies’ maids, and sea captains; and the babble of petroleum pills, biblical texts, and auto-suggestion is the exhilarating effervescence into which all the sense and satire of the book boil over. It is a mistake to impose a solid ending upon such chaos; nor do we believe that Dr Russett cedes the Lomas property upon which he had built his gigantic sanatorium, his culminating fraud; or that young Russett, after proving his devotion by swallowing a powder, marries Mrs Lomas, with the chronic spinal complaint; or that his final vow is ‘to succour the sick.’ We have not believed in the loves or the diseases; nor have we profited by the satire; but we have been very much entertained, and wit and fantasy are good, call them what you will.

[Times Literary Supplement, Sep 6, 1907]

[]

‘Tales of Two People.’

[Tales of Two People by Anthony Hope (Methuen, 1907), 6s.]

It would be hard to find a safer investment for four shillings and sixpence than to buy with them a novel from the hand of Mr Anthony Hope. He seems, as an artist, to have taken up the position which in the present volume of stories—Tales of Two People—he assigns to ‘Mr. Wynne,’ the gentleman of great experience and discretion who listens and gives advice. As a spectator he is amused; he is never a partisan; never startled, at a loss, or dull. His expense, so to speak, is always comfortably within his income, and that income is itself satisfactory; not splendid, indeed, but at the same time in no way precarious. The present volume contains some sixteen short stories, and in each we have to do with matter of much the same quality. The emotions which attract Mr Hope are those that fall to the lot of clean and well-mannered English people; they are sufficiently strong to put those good manners in action; they are never strong enough to disturb them. If he wishes to complicate the fortunes of his characters he will contrive some ingenious sport which threatens neither farce nor tragedy; but dissolves of its own accord when the exhibition is over. Take, for instance, the case of ‘Helena’s Path,’ the first and the longest of the stories. A lady of high birth, beauty, youth, owns a property bordering on that of the eccentric but also young and beautiful Lord Lynborough. There is a path between the estates which makes a convenient short cut to the sea from Lord Lynborough’s Castle. The lady asserts her right to padlock the gate, the gentleman sends her the padlock at breakfast time. The strategies on both sides become more and more whimsical until a legal document is made out in which Lord Lynborough promises, in recognition of his right to use the road, a yearly homage to the lady ‘by falling on his knee and kissing the hand of the said Marchesa.’ Treated as Mr Hope treats it, this little drama is light and successful; you have, in addition to the diversities of the plot, an almost physical sense of the charm of sunny moors, healthy meals, and, as we come back to it, of excellent manners. But after a certain number of these stories, the reader may become conscious of the monotony of so much prosperity, and ask how, on wet days, or in harsher circumstances, these ladies and gentlemen comport themselves. They are capable, of course, but are they not exceedingly commonplace? There is no attempt to answer such a question; and the only relief we are offered is in the affairs of one of those conveniently exiled Royal Princesses. I have always found something pathetic about a superseded will. It is like a Royal family in exile.’ But to be able to write sixteen stories which are all of them respectable, efficient as some of the stupid, pleasant heroes themselves, is another proof of what Mr Hope somewhere calls ‘the triumph of externals.’ To make them triumph once more in literature shows again how well Mr Hope knows his craft; and the present volume will satisfy all who admire that achievement; and will cause even those who distrust it to applaud the ingenuity and good workmanship with which it is done.

[Times Literary Supplement, unsigned, Sep 10, 1907]

[]

‘Mam Linda.’

[Mam’ Linda: A Novel by Will. N. Harben (Harper Brothers, 1907).]

Mam Linda, by Will N. Harben, is without doubt an excellent specimen of the American novel. It is so good that you feel it to be typical; its virtues and failings are more those of a number of people, of a time and of a country, than of an individual. The scene is laid in Georgia, in a town where the white people are divided into two parties; one, whose fathers owned slaves and made it their boast that they had never lashed them; the other, who have never owned them or understood them and consider them as ‘black criminal brutes that are plotting to pull down the white race.’ Carson Dwight, a candidate, as they put it, for the Legislature, is a member of the first party; and when the book opens he has not only damaged his political chances but exposed himself to the bullets of his opponent by denouncing the mob which has lately raided the negro quarter of the town and nearly ‘thrashed the life out of them.’ He saw old Mam Linda while her son was being flogged; ‘when I think of that and admit that I stand by with folded hands, and see their only child beaten till he is insensible, my blood boils with utter shame.’ The story goes on to describe the astonishing struggle which he made against his political enemies and others to save the negro from being lynched. For it is astonishing to believe that such scenes as Mr Harben describes are still at work beneath the forms of civilised life, and yet he writes of them in such a way that you must believe it. But there is another side of the book that is by no means so happily treated. Mam Linda, we read, was also the old nurse of Miss Helen Warren; and every man in the town admired Miss Warren so much that when she came home after a journey a subscription ball was got up in her honour. Carson, of course, was in love with her, and it is she who shows us what kind of social life it is that exists in the midst of these passionate race feelings. They may be primitive, but they are on a large scale; the social life of the place is also primitive, but it is not only carried out in the ugly frock coat of American civilisation, but it is as diminutive and unsophisticated as Cranford, shall we say, without the subtleties that make Cranford even dignified. The crudity of their manners and emotions would be distressing to a novelist with an eye for fine social distinctions; Mr Harben treats this side of the story with a curious formality; the hero and heroine behave themselves in the usual situations with about as much ease as an English peasant in his Sunday clothes. But this is insignificant beside the impression which he gives us of a vigorous young population striking out with its arms and legs, careless as yet of the proprieties.

[Times Literary Supplement, unsigned, Oct 3, 1907]

[]

‘The Weavers.’

[The Weavers: A Tale of England and Egypt of fifty Years Ago by Sir Gilbert Parker (William Heinemann, 1907).]

‘This book,’ writes Sir Gilbert Parker in a prefatory note to The Weavers, ‘is not intended to be an historical novel’; but in spite of that the story follows, in outline, the accepted history of England and Egypt fifty years ago. But if we can suggest different names for some of his characters their circumstances are so much altered that the puzzle of identity frets us not at all. Indeed, the difficulty of believing that David Claridge was David Claridge and that Lord Eglington was Lord Eglington is quite sufficient without troubling ourselves to discover historical features behind their masks. The story tells us how David Claridge, of Quaker birth and belief, travelled into Egypt and took service under Prince Kaïd and devoted his life to the good of the country. With magic speed he rose from humble rank as nephew of a carpet merchant to a place of supreme importance in the eyes of his master. Still preserving his Quaker dress, his ‘thee’ and ‘thou,’ and his steadfast morality, he was concerned in all the works that civilised and brought prosperity to the land. Finally he led an expedition into the Sudan, where he was surrounded and besieged and left without help from England. But to complicate the story there are not only a number of sinister natives, but the wife also of the Undersecretary for Foreign Affairs, who was rescued by David from a terrible predicament as a girl. And we are also to believe that Claridge Pasha was not Claridge at all, but, as certain documents prove, the elder brother of the so-called Earl of Eglington, the peer who heads the Opposition in Parliament against the party which is to relieve David. In short, it is a complicated story in need of a violent solution if the end is to be, as it is so decidedly, happy for all who deserve happiness. And yet ungrateful though it may seem it is not easy to follow this long drama with any keen interest or to feel that the people in it are any more sensitive than the props that sustain old-fashioned cumbersome draperies. It is ungrateful because the purpose of the book is earnest, and Sir Gilbert evidently writes with knowledge and from his own observation. But in spite of all his effort, and his four hundred and sixty pages of prose, David, the central figure, remains always as he is represented in the illustrations, in dusky outline with his head conveniently haloed by the moon. He speaks a fluent rhetoric and reminds one in his virtues and stolidity of that other mid-Victorian hero, John Halifax, in Miss Mulock’s famous book. All who have to do with him seem to feel the strain of his high and melancholy character, nor do the humorous attempts of the Duchess of Snowdon and of Lacey succeed in breaking the monotony. The effect of the long elaborate book, with its abundance of description and its fluency of reflection, is, of course, praiseworthy, but distinction or vitality it has not.

[Times Literary Supplement, unsigned, Oct 10, 1907]

[]

‘The Square Peg.’

[The Square Peg by W.E. Norris (Archibald Constable, 1907).]

Whenever Mr Norris produces another of his regular deliberate novels the reader is in two minds at once about it; are we to be grateful or disappointed, to say how much abler it is than most, or to exclaim, ‘Still, it ought to have been better’? And do we refine too much if we impute some of our own reflections to the novelist himself? Easy and good humoured as his view is, there is an occasional touch of cynicism in it, an almost sardonic air of keeping within limits, seeming to hint that he knows his boundary line as well as others and recognises that it is a narrow one, while at the same time he refuses pleasantly to push beyond it. Or does he begin to think it comprehensive? But the result is, at any rate, that we ought not to call ourselves disappointed, for the compact has been stated, and the efficiency of Mr Norris’s workmanship within those bounds gives us no cause to complain. Only once again, and this time more consciously than usual, we find ourselves beating against the barrier, protesting that much lies outside it, and demanding why it is that Mr Norris is so well content to remain within. The Square Peg tells the story of an artist who is poor and who has a mother and sisters dependent on him. An offer is made by a rich cousin whose sons are dead to accept him as the heir on condition that he will live down at the seat in Devonshire and act the part of eldest son to them. He must shoot and ride and adopt Conservative views; possibly he must ask the daughter of a wealthy neighbour to marry him. But although he gives no sign of what is commonly held to be the artistic temperament, he yet finds it impossible in one instance after another to acquiesce. He shoots the gamekeeper, rides over the hounds, and attacks the rights of landlords from the village platform. Moreover, he cannot manage to fall in love where he should. Then there are complications which involve some not very agreeable pictures of ‘brutish and brutal’ landowners, and the hardly more attractive young ladies whom they wish to marry. Indeed, closely as Mr Norris respects ‘the proprieties’ in this case as in others, there is in the present volume a certain coarseness of type and handling which seems to indicate that he finds himself out of temper at last with his sturdy countrymen and women. And as he is not one of those who pierce very far into their creatures’ souls, the loss of good manners is not repaid by a corresponding increase of vitality or wit. One after another they seem to give up the attempt to believe that life has ideals, to confess that for them love is a weak thing, that money and position are desirable, that hunting and bridge playing are best of all. The only woman who is not crabbed or despicable is, as her maker confesses, commonplace; the men are more straitly laced in the code of their class, but the best of them has no wish to disregard it. Of course the story is skilfully twisted, so that if you want to know what happens you must read every page; and the writing is so competent that such a task is easy. Many readers, therefore, will feel that the book is satisfactory; others will have to answer that this time Mr Norris has disappointed them.

[Times Literary Supplement, unsigned, Oct 24, 1907]

[]

‘Outrageous Fortune.’

[Outrageous Fortune by Bak (William Heinemann, 1907).]

No one, it is safe to predict, will find it hard to answer the problem set them in Outrageous Fortune, by Bak. Indeed we exaggerate by calling that a problem which is really little more than a copy-book maxim, which the youngest of us may copy out and interpret profitably. Mrs Hayes was left a widow at the age of thirty-two, with an annual income of four hundred and fifty pounds; by selling half her jewels, however, her lease and the furniture of her house, her horses and carriages, she could increase this sum to the total of six hundred pounds a year. But investments are not always sound, there are risks even in house property, and no one ‘accustomed to a certain position in the social scale’ would think of marrying on that allowance a man whose income was never more than four or five hundred a year. Between them Mrs Hayes and her lover, for he somewhat rashly proposed to her after these financial arrangements had been discussed, had a bare ten or eleven hundred a year; and when you consider that six dresses at £20 apiece amount to £120, and you ‘must have wraps, gloves, boots, and all your underclothing as well,’ you will not wonder that a sensible woman exclaims, ‘on our united incomes marriage is utterly impossible.’ The problem is stated and answered by a certain Lady Gray. So long as you are unmarried, she says, you can just manage to live on six hundred a year and ‘remain in society’; directly you marry you will have to give up the habits of men and women of the world; and those habits are ‘the one thing that neither you nor any one else can give up for love.’ Then the calculation—for the book with its tone of earnest simplicity, its level monotony of good sense and excellent arithmetic, has the effect of a solicitor’s statement—is worked out, and added up with infallible accuracy. Mrs Hayes is so unreasonable as to live in society and preserve her love; the comment is to be read in her dress-maker’s bills and in her pass-book; she has to borrow from a rejected suitor; Arthur Mortimer discovers the loan, and, with that sense of honour which distinguishes his type, throws her over and marries Edith Wilton, whose income, presumably, is sufficient to maintain the habits and shelter the love. Mrs Hayes thereupon—this is the moral—‘turned her face to the wall.’ The only reason why this conscientious work can be read, for it is neither witty nor subtle, is for the sake of that prosaic good sense which gives it the appearance of truth and solidity, on the surface at any rate. You derive from it that sense of instruction in unimportant matters which you get by looking from the train window at a flat stretch of the countryside.

[Times Literary Supplement, unsigned, Oct 24, 1907]

[]

‘A Swan and Her Friends.’

[A Swan and Her Friends (Methuen, 1907) by E.V. Lucas.]

Macaulay, so we read in those marginal notes of his that have just been published, once amused himself by going through the six volumes of Miss Seward’s letters with a pen in his hand. Surely no more effective and economic way could be found—nor does it need great subtlety—of disposing of such a rubbish heap, and of preserving any trifle of value that may chance to lie hid there. One quotation, for quotation has already been made in these columns, will be enough. The Latins, Miss Seward remarks (rebuking ‘pleasant Mrs Piozzi’) place their lyric Horace next to their epic Virgil, much more on account of his odes than of his satires. ‘What Latins?’ asks Macaulay; ‘There is not a word of the sort in any Latin writer.’ Then it was her grammar, then her taste. Finally we have the verdict, ‘Was ever such pedantry found in company with such ignorance?’. which we should do well perhaps to couple with some softer phrase to the effect that she could write simply when (for example) she was describing the last illness of her tiresome old father. But this is not the way that seems good to Mr Lucas; and we agree with some of his reasons for thinking that Miss Seward and her friends deserve an ampler investigation. Not only were their views on most matters of literature and life repulsive to us, but they were, as Mr Lucas points out, ‘acclaimed with enthusiasm’ by the mass of the intelligent people of their time. What kind of society that was, and the nature of the revolution that destroyed it, is surely an interesting topic enough; and in this case the extravagance of the contrast and the delightful emphasis with which the old monstrous doctrine was expressed make it as lively a subject as the wittiest could desire.

But Mr Lucas is neither historian nor satirist; he is content with the simpler duties of the caricaturist, with the useful but modest art of the maker of amusing books. Let us grant at once that the portentous Swan tempts the parodist if any one ever did; her writing is of the kind that you feel to be almost too good to be true; another touch and it is incredible. That touch would have come from some convincing correspondence between her life and her work, and we cannot bring ourselves to believe that she ever gave it. And a true humorist would also refrain; he would lead us, as Miss Bates leads us, to the very limits of comedy, suffer us perhaps to glance at the ridiculous, and then, by means of some skilful light upon another side of the character, he would draw us smoothly away, give our comic sense a respite, and urge it forth again with a fresh start. Thus the character would float buoyantly all the time within its proper limits. But Mr Lucas is not careful of limits, he wishes us to laugh, to laugh almost incessantly; and so the chance he had of drawing in these three hundred pages an exquisitely comic figure typical not only of Lichfield and the time, but of something vast and enduring in human nature is lost; we have instead the conventional buffoon. For she could be made, of course, to comport herself precisely as the caricaturist would have her; so that it is possible, as Mr Lucas has proved, to let her mouth forth a whole volume of autobiography in what he calls ‘Sewardese’. But how much of it is characteristic of her? How much is merely the exaggerated manner in which all second-rate writers parody the temper of their age? What, in short, is really the flesh and blood behind this drapery, the idea that this particular pose represents? Mr Lucas deals lightly with a few of these questions. Why should Miss Seward need a biography? Because ‘it is interesting to mark changes … and nothing could be less (sic) out of place in the present day than Anna Seward’s pontifical confidence, her floridity, and her sentimentalism’. Why was she admired? Because she was a pioneer, because a fashion for poetry was in the air. ‘There are certain phases of human incompetence that really are worth examination,’ and Miss Seward, it is added, was ‘the last and greatest of the unhumorous women’. And then we hear what Lamb said about Miss Benjay; we read, not perhaps for the first time, Miss Pinkerton’s letter in Vanity Fair and we are told what, it is true, we did not know before—that ‘I entered Lichfield in a station omnibus filled otherwise with a commercial traveller and three rural deans’. The first ten or twenty pages of the performance are so comic for one reason or another that we are ready to sink all our objections to the method. The Swan, as Mr Lucas says, ‘sprang from the egg almost fully fledged’. She began by writing verses at the challenge of Erasmus Darwin, who doubted whether she could really do all that fame protested. At once the verses spout, profuse and pompous, with the same capital letters, the same platitudes, rounded and rhymed, that were to serve her all her life for poetry. Unfortunately, however, it was not until 1784 that she kept copies of her letters, and there is little record of a time that was not, perhaps, completely obscured by the full development of her style. But even at the age of twenty-one this was the way in which life was arranged; she describes the engagement of a younger sister:

I stood by her toilet while she dressed … she sighed often, and once or twice exclaimed, ‘Ah! Heaven!’ in a pensive, languid tone, and with an emphatic shake of the head, as she put on her light hat and ribands. ‘Bless me,’ said I, ‘one would think thou wert adorning a victim and not a mistress. If that idea has passed across thy mind, prithee, put a stop to this business at once! … Study a pretty harangue of dismissal …

and so on and so on. There is one shrewder phrase:—‘I grew so saucy to my mother … that she took her pinch of snuff first at one nostril and then at the other.’ But after that we have superabundant reasons for knowing how she thought that she ought to think, and how she trained herself to express it. It would be easy and delightful to quote—to make her illustrate every vice that is known to literature, to indicate most of the vices that can infect the character. We are gorged with falseness of every description; the whole society echoes her accents; the Hayleys, the Ansteys, the Whalleys, and the Potters deluge us with bad criticism, bad poetry, and bad emotion. We laugh till we are bored, and we are bored because we are still conscious that this is all too far removed from life to give us much reason to dislike or love or know them more than any other tedious and prolix people much at the mercy of their pens. We are only curious to know why it is that clever people, as these were, ever thought it right to submit to such a convention. For there are touches that remind us that they had brains and that they lived; we hear Miss Seward dub herself a ‘fat cook maid’, and laugh in private with ‘the Bard of Sussex’ over her lameness and her figure. Scott, who received her letters ‘with despair’, ‘really liked’ her when he met her and heard her talk ‘with the keenness and vivacity of youth … with a ready perception of the serious and the ludicrous’, and listened to her admirable mimicry of Johnson. It is this that tantalises the reader; for, here we feel and dimly see that it is a toweringly humorous figure who did contrive to embody with overwhelming success an ideal of the moment, because, among other reasons, she embodied it with more vigour than other people. Ten pages are enough to prove to us that she was ludicrous; but the essential point of her—that her letters half cover and half express a genuine attitude towards life—is what Mr Lucas with all his vivacity fails to show.

[Times Literary Supplement, Nov 14, 1907]

[]

‘The Desert Venture.’

[The Desert Venture by Frank Savile (Edward Arnold, 1907).]

Under what influences Mr Frank Savile wrote The Desert Venture it is not perhaps necessary to say, for it stands on its feet with sufficient vigour of its own. Shall we detect in it the influence of the school that worships Empire, takes the builder for hero, and sacrifices many things so that print shall represent the heat and turmoil, the muscular contortions of strong men in conflict? Certainly Mr Savile has made sacrifices—of probability to begin with. We are introduced to an English county family; Arthur Steynard, the son and landlord, begins, on the terrace after tea, to tell the story of a certain Marquis of Saint Serreze. This gentleman, a French officer, was sent on an expedition into the French Congo, and deserted it on the borders of the Slai district, taking with him troops and stores; for this offence he was degraded from the service by a Court-martial at home. But Steynard, who has been primed by a Captain Speedwell, denies the crime, declares his knowledge of the purpose and position of the Marquis, and proposes to start at once with ‘rifles, ammunition, tools, even artillery,’ in order to offer them with his own services to his hero. The boy’s step-uncle Fraine, the American Consul at El Sedineh, stigmatises his conduct as that of one suffering from an overdose of Marryat, Ballantyne, and Mayne Reid, but in vain. Early next morning Arthur has left England, in the company of his instructor. Fraine, a silent capable man of infinite experience in the doubtful life of the African coast, can guess at the true meaning of this ‘preposterous and quixotic’ business; he knows Speedwell for a ‘slave catcher and dealer,’ ruined, and in want of capital to carry on his trade, which is an illicit traffic in ivory only to be compassed by the employment of slave labour. Fraine starts at once in pursuit, sends home for a thousand pounds, and, as no other messenger proves so prompt, Miss Eva Steynard, Arthur’s half-sister, conveys it to him herself at El Sedineh. It is then discovered that the expedition is really on its way to the Marquis, who is encamped somewhere in the ‘mountainous region south of the Sahara’ in the neighbourhood of a certain wealthy tribe known as the Amurai. Such is the framework of the story; and thus by hook or by crook all the situations that Mr Savile desires are put within his grasp. But to give any account of them would be vain, for they would seem not only impossible but colourless. There are fights, imprisonments, escapes, dreadful nights spent in the African jungle, rough green pebbles that are really emeralds—it is all as exciting as a nightmare. And when you have agreed to treat it as crude adventure, without connexion with this earth or this life, it is really as good as you can wish. The language in which it is told is alert and vivid, and once again much is sacrificed to make you see and hear. The actors, of course, are left in an elementary stage, but they can feel fear and pain and the excitement of battle, and they are brilliantly successful in the carving of Empires.

[Times Literary Supplement, unsigned, Nov 28, 1907]

[]

‘The Forest Playfellow.’

[The Forest Playfellow by E.K. Sanders (Archibald Constable, 1907).]

How much more respectfully this age treats its children than any other! In Sandford and Merton they are lectured all the time, as though the natural state of childhood were sin; even the Mid-Victorians shake their heads, purse their lips, and go through horrid contortions to show the different kinds of vice that children incline to, how they are punished, and how the good child must die. No grown person could possibly stand in need of such instruction; that was part of the lesson; and so the line between children’s books and grown-up books was a sharp one. But we own ourselves unable to decide whether Miss E.K. Sanders’s The Forest Playfellow, in common with others, inspired perhaps by Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling, is meant for children or for mature people. It is written entirely from the child’s point of view; but it is so sympathetic that a child might conceivably imagine after reading it that he was as good as his parents. It is just possible, and this is the weakness of such delicate respect, that he might think himself, by reason of his innocence and sensibility, rather better than older people, so that the moral may really be meant for them. At any rate, Alwyne or Jock was a little boy of the utmost simplicity and charm, and his faults are very natural ones. He lived alone with his father in a great house near a forest. He was very lonely, and his father, who had travelled and fought, was too brave a man to understand his terrors. But one day in the mysterious forest he met another small boy with bright eyes and beautiful manners who showed him how to build bridges and gently cured him of his terrors. But how can we tell a story that is really no story, but a succession of fanciful pictures in which fact slips into fancy and out again as in some light dream, without an affectation of simplicity that is quite unknown to Miss Sanders? It would be inexcusably bad taste to pull such innocent work to pieces; it seems to confide in you; we are only in doubt whether it will meet with such tender handling from the children themselves. ‘But was it a real watch?’ and ‘How could a man who was dead turn into a boy again?’ are the kinds of questions that children will ask unless their imaginations are robustly conquered.

[Times Literary Supplement, unsigned, Dec 5, 1907]

[]

‘The Northern Iron.’

[The Northern Iron by G.A. Birmingham (Maunsel, 1907).]

Mr G.A. Birmingham in The Northern Iron tells a true story in the sense that it has a definite date in history and that the fortunes of his characters are determined by things that really took place in Ireland about the year 1798. His choice does not necessarily, of course, impose upon him any limitations, as Scott proved again and again; but it seems to hold good with novelists of slighter build at any rate that to use the stuff of history in fiction lays you under certain restrictions. We find, and Mr Birmingham’s work is a case in point, that politics ardently pursued tend to dwarf and annihilate private affairs, that it is all ‘drum and trumpet’ fiction, and the slow accumulations of character, the tranquil aspects of life, are hastily overlooked. Broad masses of character are quite sufficient to interest when the action is violent in itself, and in such crises, as the novelists treat them, it is the habit to herd men together into groups, and to allow them none of the features of individuals. The line of Mr Birmingham’s story is as old as love or warfare; the hero is the son of a Presbyterian minister and a member of the band of United Irishmen, and he loves the daughter of a loyal Irish peer, Lord Dunseveric. All that difference of class and difference of party can do to separate and to dramatise is done, and it is easy to foresee the kind of complication that must come to pass. But as the story develops and the action becomes increasingly crowded this theme drops into the background or only serves to give poignancy to one or two situations and to supply a definite and satisfactory end to a story which in truth was doubtful and unhappy. But Mr Birmingham has his brain charged with the spirit and colour of the time, and the book is abundantly filled without the help of such contrivances. The story opens in the beginning of the Rebellion of 1798 and plunges at once into the thick of the plotting by which the Irish were to win their independence. Neal Ward was driven into the conflict immediately; he chased James Finlay the informer who betrayed the cause to the Government, he narrowly escaped death at the hands of the yeomanry, and had finally to fly from prison, and seek refuge in America. Such at least is the thread which holds the different scenes together; but indeed the value of the book lies in the broad view it gives of the mass of the struggle, and Mr Birmingham writes, if not with brilliancy, still with a thorough grasp of his time and an enthusiasm for his subject which interest and satisfy.

[Times Literary Supplement, unsigned, Dec 19, 1907]

[]

William Allingham.

[William Allingham. A Diary. ed. H. Allingham and D. Radford (Macmillan & Co., 1907).]

Are we on the whole to regret the fortune that left William Allingham’s autobiography unfinished, and gave us the chance of reading his diaries and notebooks unprepared as he wrote them? The finished narrative covers his childhood and the first years of his youth; a time that seems always most happily treated by people of imaginative temper, because the view is broad, and there are at the same time events of inexplicable interest which seem to sum up long trains of thought and experience suddenly in some quaint symbol, persistent all through life. Allingham remembered certain trees that grew in the garden at Ballyshannon, one ‘leafy spray that touched my face was an enchantment beyond all telling’, vague, ‘warm scented white roses’ and fig trees with crooked boughs, stables with forks and curry-combs, ‘where perpetual twilight reigned’; and all these things shaped and coloured his life with their odd meanings far more than the real people about him. But when these first impressions have ceased to come together into pictures and the world intrudes ‘obstinate questionings’ and much dull action which must be recorded, then, in default of the supreme artist, Mr Allingham’s plan of short spontaneous notes seems happiest.

In spite of his appointment in the Customs in Ireland, he found time for frequent visits to London, where, in 1847, he knew first Leigh Hunt, a friendly, communicative man, who was ready to bestow all the wealth of the age upon the boy who had an enthusiasm for letters. ‘“Dickens,” he exclaimed, “a pleasant felow! Carlyle—I know him well. Browning lives at Peckham because no one else does! I will take an opportunity of asking Dickens, Carlyle, and Browning to meet you.” (Gracious powers!)’ Indeed, whether it was due to Leigh Hunt, or to his own merits, or to the convenient nature of literary society in those days, Allingham was soon admitted to all the great men and able to talk with them familiarly of their friends and their writings. He met Tennyson at Twickenham in 1851, ‘a tall, broad-shouldered man’, ‘strange and almost spectral’ in appearance, who began reading Allingham’s own poems aloud in ‘rich slow solemn chant’ and spoke of George Meredith’s poems lately sent him—‘author only twenty-three’—‘I thanked him for it and praised it—“Love in the Valley” the best.’ When Allingham lived at Lymington some years later he saw much of Tennyson, and has to record not so much definite stories of him as an impression of the whole vast nature of the man, his odd, simple ways and direct speech. They came to a ‘large tangled fig tree … “It’s like a breaking wave,” says I. “Not in the least,” says he.’ Then, as his thought swept round, ‘“Man is so small! but a fly on the wheel […] Allingham, would it disgust you if I read ‘Maud’? Would you expire?”’ As he read he cried, ‘“This is what was called namby pamby! That’s wonderfully fine”,’ and so on. But it is Carlyle as usual, if we are to choose, whose sentences cut from the context and dulled by time still burn brightest. It is sometimes the obverse side of him that shows; when, for example, Allingham stands at the door and Carlyle is heard from within, ‘Go away, Sir! I can do nothing with you!’ But for the most part he was generous and accessible and lavish of his uncompromising judgments. ‘Shelley had not the least poetic faculty. I never could read anything he wrote. It was all a shriek merely.’ Of Swinburne, ‘There is not the least intellectual value in anything he writes.’ Whistler was ‘the most absurd creature on the face of the earth’. Of Whitman, ‘It is as though the town bull had learnt to hold a pen.’ But of Shakespeare, ‘The longer I live the higher I rate that much belauded man.’ And he described ‘like an imaginative child,’ as George Eliot said, the murmur that went up in the theatre when Othello was played. ‘The voices of the men rising—in your imagination—like a red mountain, with the women’s voices floating round it like blue vapour.’ It is curious to read that he judged Sartor a book of very little value, and cared most for his Cromwell. But the volume might yield many more stories than those we have taken; and most of them are true in the best sense of the word. How often, in the future, biographers will come here who want to know exactly what Carlyle said of Browning, or how it was that he disposed of his old pipes! An index makes all these facts available; and the book has several interesting portraits from the brush of Mrs Allingham.

[Times Literary Supplement, Dec 19, 1907]

[]

1908

Some Poetical Plays.

[Deirdre: Being Volume Five of Plays for an Irish Theatre by W.B. Yeats (A.H. Bullen and Maunsel, 1907);
Prunella: or, Love in a Dutch Garden by Laurence Housman and H. Granville Barker (A.H. Bullen, 1906);
The Romance of King Arthur by Francis Coutts (John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1907);
Sir Walter Ralegh: A Drama in Five Acts by H.A.A. Cruso (T. Fisher Unwin, 1907);
The Goddess of Reason by Mary Johnston (Archibald Constable, 1907);
Scorn of Women by Jack London (Macmillan, 1906);
The Virgin Goddess: A Tragedy by Rudolf Besier (J.M. Dent, 1907).]

To criticise Mr Yeats, to say precisely what it is that he writes about, is no less brutal a task than to impale some insect with wings of gauze. The ‘play’ before us fills some forty-five pages of large print; the scene throughout is unchanged, and the action is of the simplest possible. Deirdre and her husband, Naisi, who married her in despite of her guardian, King Conchabar, are come to a guest-house in a wood, at the invitation of the King, who, after hunting them for seven years, now proposes peace. But he proves treacherous, and slays Naisi, and then Deirdre kills herself upon her husband’s body. The scene passes in a dim room, shadowed by the forest; now and again the musicians, women who ‘have no country but the roads of the world,’ chant either a comment or a chorus; no violence, however violent the act, breaks the strange and melancholy peace which Mr Yeats casts about his work like a mantle. That impression, of something still, far withdrawn from the colour and the energy of life, is charming, at the same time that it baffles a reader who, reading of kings mad with love, of young men murdered, of queens who kill themselves to preserve their honour, requires some token that they were made of flesh to feel the smart of the flesh. Mr Yeats, of course, gives them melodious stanzas to chant and some single exquisite lines:

Praise the beautiful and strong;

Praise the redness of the yew;

Praise the blossoming Apple stem;

But our silence had been wise.

What is all our praise to them,

That have one another’s eyes?

I have heard

Monstrous, terrible, mysterious things,

Magical horrors and the spells of wizards.

But these people do not speak as passionate human beings in such tremendous circumstances would have spoken had a great poet conceived them. But to talk of ‘great poets’ is a compliment such as can be paid to the work of few; and, indeed, whatever your race, Mr Yeats’s voice, with its delicate sure accent, must sound as the voice of a true poet.

Those who did not see Mr Housman’s play as it was acted by real men and women, and read it now in print, find it hard to conceive what satisfaction the public took in it; unless, indeed, the performance gained something from solid flesh and solid furniture which in this form it lacks. The outline of the story is probably known already—how Prunella is a maiden brought up by her Aunts Prim, Prude, and Privacy within the walls of a Dutch garden, where stands a statue of Love. The mummers pass by, and Pierrot forces his way in, elopes with Prunella, leaves her, and comes back repentant at last, to find her in the Dutch garden again. A story like this docs not require that a writer shall put forth his full power; but it is capable of much quaintness, delicacy, and lightness of treatment, and need not, perhaps, compress itself within the simple limits of Mr Housman’s piece. His Prunella and his Pierrot are little more than somewhat angular Dutch figures, carved by a rustic knife and, for quaintness of effect, daubed red and yellow; trivial little figures, with one or two simple notes in their compass. Still, the performance is lively, and the strings are twitched by dexterous fingers. A good example of the kind of verse that is used is that which begins

How now, everywhere up in air stars stare;

On the roof shines the moon,

Little bird in your nest, are you there?

But the pitfall of such delicate experiments is that they lapse so often, to the public satisfaction, into the pretty and the easily pathetic. And then the thing seems scarcely worth while.

It is not hard to understand the immense attraction which our great romance still has for poets—each year sees some proof of it. Some one has been poring over Mallory and has escaped from a crude world into a spacious, somewhat dimly-lighted landscape, where knights go tilting along the roads, and there are deep forests with enchanters and wild, strange maidens. The service which the pre-Raphaelites did us in reclaiming this beautiful place for our recreation is so great that it seems ungenerous to complain of certain drawbacks. But reliance upon the generous mediæval legend seems to sap the imagination of a modern; it offers so much beauty and so strong a tradition that original talent seems enmeshed in it, and made incapable of individual action. Such, at least, is the impression with which you read Mr Coutts’ King Arthur. His verse is best when it describes the landscape and the pageantry of the time:

The quiet meadows, with their browsing kine,

The watery vale and swarded hills, o’erswept

From morn till eve by shadows of white clouds;

Whisper of lime and poplar, or the lisp

Of rivulet, beneath the willow boughs

Telling her pebbles.

And of the burial of Lancelot:

And down the sloping meads, with long array

Of black, cowled brethren, marshalled in their train,

They followed their dead captain; round them flamed

The mystic torches; round the ship they flamed,

When they embarked; they flamed about the bier,

Which, as they well foredeemed, awaited them,

With eight black horses, on the further shore.

It is, then, the substantial fabric of the world, the beautiful surface of such processions as this, that Mr Coutts sees; he does not really believe in the loves of Guenever and Lancelot, while Arthur becomes, under modern treatment, almost inevitably no great King, half shrouded in mystery, but an amiable imperialist, Governor of a Colony, or Secretary of State. Such is the strain that these old fables impose on modern eyes that would see them at once composed in fair garments and vigorous with life. But in spite of this the poem has great charm and dignity; to read it is to lose oneself in some shaded place, sequestered from noise, melodious with zephyrs and the songs of birds.

It is really more difficult for the reader of Mr Cruso’s drama to say what qualities it lacks than to number those it certainly has. For the little book has none of those palpably weak places that tend to throw all their surroundings into discredit; you may read on and on with confidence, upborne upon strong terse lines, which always mean something, though they never, perhaps, penetrate to those regions of the brain where so many delicate ideas lie furled that words wake more images than they bring. If it is that gift which marks the poet, then Mr Cruso is no poet, but an admirable workman with high standards and careful practice. The drama covers the last two years of Raleigh’s life, and it ‘follows the main course of history closely.’ Indeed, without the text of history before us, we could award Mr Cruso that credit. Further, he claims that the story of Raleigh’s last years ‘brings to birth that sense of progressive tension which is the atmosphere of drama.’ Here there is no space to dispute such a theory; we can only mark that in practice the constant effort, as it seems, to keep the emotions on the strain after certain large issues results in a kind of hoarseness, as though we had been speaking above our natural voices for a long time. The story of Raleigh’s last years can be made the story of plot, ambition, politics, and noble effort after freedom. And Mr Cruso has not only studied Gardiner and Spedding, but has read the literature of the time, the plays and the trials we imagine, till he can write a very tolerable old English, can make the populace talk of Spain, and ostlers crack jokes in the stables, while great ladies and gentlemen, even Bacon himself, roll their platitudes and conceits, make, of course, their puns, not quite like real people, but with very much more of stuff in them than the dramatists usually allow. Indeed, there are some notably fine speeches, undistorted by any antiquarianism:

O God! how every slighted star will laugh

To see this little earth, self-styled divine,

Cold in affection, colder in belief,

Clog into frost again, when man’s proud spirit

That flamed undying fealty to God,

Is recognised fantastic kin of earth,

And flickers and dies, and all is old and still.

It is not, of course, from such work that we take away increased knowledge of our kind, or add figures to our gallery of imagination, but it is work that does Mr Cruso far more credit than, perhaps, a hasty reader will ever pay him.

Few books, not classics, have the good taste or the temerity to publish themselves in so noble a form as this drama, issued by Messrs Constable; paper, print and binding all do what they can to make the book last. It is melancholy then to find that the soul thus solidly enshrined shows very little power to inspire its tenement, so that in a month or two the handsome page will be as white paper once more, with the words faded from off it. The drama is about the French Revolution, and follows the complicated fortunes of the Baron of Morbec and Yvonne, the Breton peasant girl. The Revolution, of course, is the most powerful instrument for dramatising human life that has ever existed; but Miss Johnston has trusted too implicitly to the services which such external violence can render an artist who is, as it seems, in need of ideas. Imagination, riding the storm, might triumph; but imagination cowering away from it, shrinking and furling itself, does very little indeed. A scene from the very crisis of the play reads thus:

Yvette Charuel!

[Goddess of Reason!]

So pale.

No Rose?

Only her lips are red.

So heavy eyed?

I have not slept.

Oh, Oh!

Thy voice! ’Tis like a violin playing!

Occasionally there is an amiable little song, which has small connection with the circumstances or the singer. But there is no force or continuity to bind all these plaintive cries and interjections together, no insight into character to point them, or profundity of thought to make them significant. It is easy to skim lightly from cover to cover, but at the end we must ask why did any one print so frail a conception? How can we be asked to believe in it?

Want of robustness is not the fault of Mr London’s work. Indeed, if we are to criticise, we must complain of an excess of vigour that expresses itself in all the lustiness of slang, careless writing, over-emphasis, and human passions not of the most exalted kind. Mr London’s gift, of course, is of no very exalted kind; but it is competent to produce a short dramatic play, which draws you on, in good spirits, till the last curtain. The scene is at Dawson and the characters are those of Eldorado kings, dog punchers, miners, and one or two vague, rather doubtful women, their wives or lovers. The local colour is a matter of great importance, and there are passages that need a glossary. Men come in with their lips bound together by a frozen moustache; gold dust is weighed out in payment for the only newspaper; there is a great deal about dogs and the cold and the scarcity of provisions. Still, these are only meant as the appropriate setting for the incident—the play is over in thirteen hours—of Floyd Vanderlip and the various ladies who combine so skilfully for his good. No one exhibits any great interest of character, but they all play their parts in a rude vigorous way, and are quite capable of all the action that is required of them.

Mr Besier’s play is interesting for many reasons. It has been acted, and should be judged, as the writer reminds us, ‘as an acting play, not as a literary tour de force, and although it is ‘not strictly modelled on the Attic drama,’ yet the scene is in Greece, and the most decisive part in the play is awarded to the Goddess Artemis. The plot, moreover, is of the classic type; we have the king who falters, the brother devoted to the service of Artemis, and in love with the king’s wife, the aged blind mother, and the crime of a brother’s murder; finally the Goddess demands her sacrifice, and to appease her, the lover, now king, kills his bride at the altar. But all this austere classic framework throws a strange light on the substance of the drama. Hephæstion, Althea, and the rest are modern, if we mean by modern personal and passionate, and they speak in the language of moderns. Indeed the merit of Mr Besier’s work lies in the force with which he has represented the love of the Queen for her brother-in-law. He has sacrificed willingly, as it seems, those carefully constructed passages which preserve their value off the stage, in silence. But that he has not sacrificed too much for the pleasure of the reader such a passage as this, for example, and we might quote others, shows:

Long since a shepherd on the lonely hills

Of Arcady beheld in waking dream,

Parting with silver feet the daffodils

That fringed his highland stream,

And followed by her nymphs in fluttering race,

And with wild light upon her face,

Immortal beauty out of moonlight wrought,

Artemis armed and sandalled for the chase.

The flaw in the drama is perhaps the presence of a power never deeply realised, and the tremendous consequences that proceed from it. Artemis is suffered to knot the destinies and in the end to cleave them, but how did she come, we ask, to lay any constraint upon creatures infinitely removed from her, from any belief in her?

[Guardian, unsigned, Jan 1, 1908]

[]

Rachel Gurney of the Grove.

[Rachel Gurney of the Grove by Sir Alfred E. Pease, Bart. (Headley Brothers, n.d.).]

The reasons that have led Sir Alfred Pease to publish Rachel Gurney of the Grove, a ‘fragment of family history,’ are of the simplest, but they are not of the sort that can be judged by any literary canon. His great aunt, Rachel Gurney, a daughter of Joseph Gurney, of Lakenhamgrove, Norwich, lived for twenty-three years the life of a kind-spirited girl who scarcely went beyond the family circle. She left a certain number of letters to parents and brothers and sisters and Sir Alfred, coming across these in his researches, found that they gave so charming a proof of the simple domestic virtues which our grandmothers possessed, and we, it is said, have forfeited, that he put them together as a lesson. ‘I have thought just because it was a very simple story of a very simple life that the very simple lesson might be the more easily learnt.’ It is undeniable that the records of good people preserved on faded paper to which your own name is attached have a charm and possibly a value which it would need imagination and tolerance to discover in the writings of those who are still alive. And yet it is in this simplicity that the true danger lies; quaintness of dress and speech, difference of manner, are so often interpreted by a friendly chronicler as tokens of some lost spiritual charm, and the lesson loses in truth what it gains in grace. Rachel was born in the year 1794, in the very heart of the Quaker tradition. The Gurneys married consistently with the Barclays, the Buxtons, the Peases, the Backhouses, and these are the names that occur most often. A child, and she was scarcely to be anything else, cannot give an external view of her surroundings; but from her unaffected letters it is pleasant to see how sensible and little bigoted was the life of the earnest Quaker families at that time. There was no harshness, no terrible religious gloom, of which, had it existed, we should certainly have found the reflection in the writing of a sensitive child, precocious, and liable to exaggerate terrors had they been suggested to her. She can see and, what is more significant, can tell the mild fun of some Quaker practices. ‘There was not as much wit displayed in it [a Bible meeting] as in the last, yet was quite as “satisfactory” (as they would say at Earlham); you would have been entertained by Joseph’s eloquence, I do not say gracefulness.’ If she had lived it is easy to believe that she would have married and spent a happy domestic life, for already at least one suitor was attracted to her. But a cold, caught in driving through the snow one winter, began an illness which, with the assistance of the doctors, made her an invalid for the last three years of her life. She was bled and kept indoors or sent to cure her lungs by breathing ‘the close air of London city.’ Melancholy are the records of such times, and it is natural to dwell upon them unduly in the effort to make them yield something of special significance. The charm of the book is greatly increased by a number of delicately coloured portraits of the different children, taken from old drawings.

[Times Literary Supplement, unsigned, Jan 2, 1908]

[]

‘The Sentimental Traveller.’

[The Sentimental Traveller. Notes on Places (John Lane, Bodley Head, 1908) by Vernon Lee]

It is, perhaps, the confession of a narrow spirit, but have we not heard a little too much lately about this pervasive Genius Loci? Nature has innumerable beauties and defects; the smallest congregation of cottages is of profound significance; and the more we feel this or see how it can be felt the more we resent the incessant evocation by one writer after another of a spirit that we believe to be in its purity both remote and austere. Vernon Lee, who gives us The Sentimental Traveller, in particular boasts the utmost familiarity with this demon; she looks out of a train window, or parts her bedroom curtains of a morning, and the picture, compounded partly from the shape of the land, partly from such expression as human habitation has given it, composes itself at once. But this is the bodily form only in which the genius manifests itself; the spirit of the sight travels everywhere, and wakens echoes in her mind of people, of her childhood, of music, of books, or perhaps she is led by it to consider some deep question of life or morality. Her method then, so far as the portrait of the place is concerned, is purely impressionist, for if she were to concentrate her mind upon the task of seeing any object as exactly as it can be seen there would be no time for these egotistical diversions. And who but pedants and antiquaries want to know when a palace was built, or the exact style of its architecture? To separate herself emphatically from such worthies she will indulge in quite gratuitous ambiguities. ‘To the earlier Greeks, navigating the dangerous Adriatic, the sun sets visibly among the seagirt cones; hence Phaeton, Icarus, and Geryon, who, if you remember, was in some manner connected with the Hesperides …’ The dots are a characteristic device, and part of an artistic system that prevails throughout. If only, in travelling, you will open your mind to receive all impressions and force your imagination to track down the most fugitive of suggestions, something charming and valuable, because original, will be recorded. This is perhaps the course that any sensitive mind adopts naturally, though it does not always go on to trace it out upon paper. But what art is needed to give such perishable matter an enduring form!—the art of Charles Lamb or of Henry James. Vernon Lee, with much of the curiosity, the candour, and the sensitiveness to trifles of the true essayist, lacks the exquisite taste and penetrating clearness of sight which make some essays concentrated epitomes of precious things. Such phrases as ‘that bathing-place of dim Napoleonic Grecian-Pilaster and lyre-backed-chair fashionableness’ or ‘the poor, pomatum-locked, faintly moustachioed, wasp-waisted grandson’ attempt to snatch the essential; but they surely light on something quite different. Or when the process is reversed, and a waistcoat button is made the centre of branching avenues of thought, do we feel that they strike inevitably from the spot of heat in the middle? ‘That he (Goethe) should have brought back just this basket seems so human and touching, opening vistas of the kind of memories he, like some others among us, would clutch at; mornings in Verona market-place, and such like. Or perhaps …’ That is slipshod thinking, and if it does stumble on the truth we feel inclined to congratulate ourselves on the accident. The question as to what exactly distinguishes the truth from the falsehood in such work is a delicate one, and the value of the book depends entirely upon our immediate certainty—this is precisely right. We can hardly appeal to any standard but that of our own taste in such matters; why, for instance, does an image like the following satisfy us—‘That melancholy sunset, the smell of torn-up seaweed and wet sands, has always remained in my mind as symbolical of a soul’s shipwreck’—when the comparison that follows between the shell-fish and the human beings seems altogether forced and unimaginative? Of such quivering slime we also are made up; and our microscopic realities steep in our living liquids as these creatures in the sea.’ Perhaps the most satisfactory essays in the book are those that treat of real people, for their characters are more profoundly realised, and are not too fragile to stand a delicate and sure examination.

[Times Literary Supplement, Jan 9, 1908]

[]

‘Father Alphonsus.’

[Father Alphonsus by H.A. Hinkson (T. Fisher Unwin, 1908).]

Father Alphonsus, by H.A. Hinkson, has that degree of merit which implies a capacity for better work. The theme of the book, the conflict between the flesh and the spirit in a priest’s life, is an ambitious one; and Mr Hinkson so far realises its importance as to make it the central theme from which all other incidents depend. The narrative of a pleasant Irish family, which forms the setting, is entertaining enough to make us wish for more of it; but the spiritual experiences of a brilliant and erudite gentleman who is forced by human passion to fly the church, and driven back to seek refuge in its utmost austerity, demand a far more exalted treatment. Unfortunately, Mr Hinkson, with his cheerful and rather obvious point of view, is not such a master as the task demands; and yet he attacks it boldly. Father Alphonsus is the son of an Irish Squireen, and he enters the church at the proud desire of his mother. When he is ordained his parents present him with a silver chalice inscribed with his name, ‘as a mark of respect and esteem.’ ‘His human father took off his hat to him; his mother curtseyed; both addressed him as Father…. He stood on a pedestal of renunciation,’ and so on. For other than æsthetic reasons this picture of the place occupied by an Irish priest in the eyes of his fellows, together with the popular feeling for a ‘spoilt priest,’ is curious and interesting. But the inevitable development which is to change all this prosperity and reveal the true man and his faith is a conventional process which takes a familiar and sensational course. The headlines of the chapters point the way—‘The Heart of a Woman,’ ‘The Lost Battle,’ ‘The Dawn.’ For there is a beautiful convert whose husband dies and leaves her in a consumption to tempt her confessor. The Father yields, ‘The blood mounted to his brain; the priest was killed in him.’ He flies abroad with her, and she dies. Mr Hinkson delights in the sudden dramatic action which always comes at the right moment to transform, as by a burst of limelight, the weak disproportionate thought beneath it. But the background of this unconvincing strife is, as we have said, far more pleasant and successful. The Irish family, Mr and Mrs Daly and the boy Larry, are drawn with evident knowledge and some real humour. Larry, indeed, is the happiest conception of them all, but then, unfortunately, he must die on the hunting field in order to hasten the crisis of his brother’s character. The peasant and the small landlord, with unheroic but human lives, come easily within the writer’s scope, and make us desire that he would turn from sentiment and psychology to write of simple people, occupied for the most part with animals and the earth.

[Times Literary Supplement, unsigned, Feb 6, 1908]

[]

‘Colonel Kate.’

[Colonel Kate by K.L. Montgomery (Methuen, 1908).]

One is sometimes tempted to ask, when a new historical novel conies in one’s way, what kind of spell it is that bids an imaginative writer lay himself under such restrictions. For certainly there are restrictions. You must not only observe facts, and take care not to outrage features that history has made familiar, but you must spur your mind to create an obsolete world, where the customs are different from ours and the speech is only to be guessed at. In return, perhaps, if you are of sufficient vigour to assimilate all these obstacles, you may create a rich romantic atmosphere, in which battles, intrigues, kidnappings, and so forth happen of their own accord in a light that becomes their nature. But once more we are driven to conclude that the adventure is perilous. Miss K.L. Montgomery in Colonel Kate chooses a very romantic, but also a very well-worn, theme—the passions of the Highland clans at the time of the landing of Charles Edward in Scotland. Out of all this turbulence she selects a certain Catherine Bristo, who, as the book opens, makes a forced and dramatic marriage with her cousin, Captain Hector MacEoghan. Another suitor was the notorious Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat, and a third his son, the Master of Lovat. But if the book has a central figure it is the lady, who is, of course, brilliant and impetuous, and a fervent Jacobite into the bargain. At Fettercairn she is the neighbour of the Lovats, and as her husband falters from the cause she involves herself in daring conspiracies with the treacherous and astute nobleman. The result of them is so far satisfactory that she is one of the first to salute the Chevalier after his arrival in Edinburgh, and in thanks for her service is named by him ‘Colonel Kate.’ But in the interval she has been swept off in a plaid, taken prisoner by the Merry Dancers, and brutally maltreated by her husband. Truly, in that age the world was very different from what it has since become; there were strange hags with mystic riddles on their lips, romantic maidens, and terribly sinister young men. Miss Montgomery, it must be spoken to her credit, can infect her creatures with a feverish kind of energy which makes her world a lively one, though it is also somewhat incoherent; for the liveliness does not lie in character or event, but in a restless and often tortured brilliancy of atmosphere. She has a dread of dulness, and a commendable desire to recapture her period by the use of obsolete or Gaelic words which require to be translated in the notes. But did any one, however romantic or long deceased, express themselves in this way? ‘Bray me softly, asses, or the loudest of you will be apt to learn the second use of a halter!’ Surely there should be a simpler way out of the difficulty.

[Times Literary Supplement, unsigned, Feb 20, 1908]

[]

‘The Inward Light.’

[The Inward Light (Macmillan Sc Co., 1908) by Harold Fielding Hall]

An Englishman travelling for business in Burma fell from his pony and broke his leg. The monks from the monastery above found him and laid him in a dim room, and bound his head with leaves. He slept and woke in peace, and looked from his windows over a great valley and heard only the murmur of cattle, and the cries of peasants, down below, and at dawn and sunset the melodious chant of Gregorian prayers. When his own people came to carry him away with them he begged to be left where he was, telling them of all the things round him—the fields, the air, the monks, the children who sang—that refreshed him, and added ‘I am quite happy’. Indeed, when he was recovered and could walk out in the country the simplest and most usual sights delighted and surprised him; not only had they a fresh beauty of their own, but he became aware that each plant or animal had in it a soul akin to his soul which made of the earth one coherent and harmonious whole. To share in this gave a new meaning to life; To live was good’. And then, as readers of Mr Fielding Hall’s works will expect, the Englishman of the present volume ‘began to think’. Why should this accidental stay at a wayside monastery so change the view of a mature man, who had spent his life in various travel and effort and had achieved success? Again he resisted the invitation of his friends to return to them, and met their half scornful questioning with gentle but resolute replies. He determined that he would set himself to learn the clearly visible faith which makes the Eastern life so different from the Western, and decided that the fundamental difference was to be found in the consciousness, which the Burmese at least still cherish, of the live presence, the message, of nature. Inspired with this belief he lived on in the midst of the people and put to them the questions that no European asks of another: ‘What is it you think of life? What is man’s soul?’ The state of civilisation in which these questions are naked and urgent provides also an atmosphere of such clarity that very broad answers are possible. In the same spirit, Mr Fielding Hall makes use again and again, with gentle persistency, of the old images; life is a stream, a wind; it is a shaft of sunlight—composed of separate beams, indeed, but you may not part them and bid one burn in the lamp and another in the grate. It is a tide flowing in different measure, but not in different kind, through every living thing, through plants and beasts and man; and they are not units in themselves, but ‘fractions of (infinity) and must be joined to make One’. That is something of what people told him, and of what was borne in upon him by the sight of their simple ways, and the voice, for such it became, of the beautiful and happy world of nature. He was further told, in answer to his questioning, that the soul of man had been evolved, but the soul has a separate consciousness of its own which is not transmitted to the children of its body, with their physical form. What then happens to it? Is it merged in the wind? No; the monk shook his head. ‘It goes on for ever, until—until— … Why should we wish to know?’ A steamer coming up the river soon afterwards, ‘a myriad-jewelled water creature breasting the stream’, provided the parable of the lamp with the light in it, which it put out, and the energy that made it goes—who knows where? ‘Tout lasse, tout casse, tout passe. Et tout renaît.’

Such fragments of wisdom, though expressed with all Mr Fielding Hall’s usual charm of diction, will never perhaps satisfy a mind which asks for counsel earnestly; they are too vague, too slight, too humble. But then, as the author himself would urge, he has never desired to impose the faith of ‘this little people in their Eastern valley’ upon the virile and indomitable West. He is the first to recognise its limitations; but also he is convinced of the value of certain qualities which he finds in the one belief and not in the other. And, as we are all concerned with the business of living, though few consider it philosophically, the impressions of so sensitive an observer have charm and value also. There are, it seems, two distinguishing qualities in the Burmese faith—it makes them happy and it keeps them unafraid. It teaches them that the life of the world from the beginning has been a continuous procession of all its parts towards the infinite light, and that none of the attributes of life are important compared with the capacity for life which is in each; for it is that, the simple living in the midst of other live things, that confers the supreme happiness. Thus they make no distinction between one class and another; their sexes, with different duties, are of equal value; no sharp division of creed or race can separate men who all breathe alike. In order that you may realise the purity of this existence the better, a European who has become a Burman in religion without adopting their conception of the whole passes through one of their merry festivals, and painfully disturbs it; his face is sharp and white and sad. He has come from a land where the faith is dry and formal, as a thing enclosed in sealed vessels; his soul cannot melt into the universal harmony; it is a ‘little nut within a changing kernel’. So, when the famine came it found a meek and acquiescent victim in the race which had no fear of death; ‘Famines come and go—only the soul lasts on’; and, when the Englishman listened to the prayers of men and women tortured and left desolate, he did not hear bitter words of revolt or hopeless words of submission, but a peaceful sound ‘like the murmur of the pigeons on the flags’. Indeed, the impression which the book leaves, in part perhaps unconsciously, is one of singular peace, but also of singular monotony. The continued metaphors in which their philosophy is expressed, taken from the wind and light, waters, chains of bubbles and other sustained forces, solve all personal energy, all irregularity, into one suave stream. It is wise and harmonious, beautifully simple and innocent, but, if religion is, as Mr Hall defines it, ‘a way of looking at the world’, is this the richest way? Does it require any faith so high as that which believes that it is right to develop your powers to the utmost?

[Times Literary Supplement, Feb 27, 1908]

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‘The Ways of Rebellion.’

[The Ways of Rebellion by Reginald Farrer.]

Terrible, it seems, even in this age, is the havoc that young men deal by merely choosing to think for themselves. Michael Hallibon is the culprit in Mr Reginald Farrer’s novel, The Ways of Rebellion, who revolts against the placid and luxurious system in which he lives, as the heir to a property and the inheritor of an ancient name. He is disturbed at Oxford by certain socialistic views which compel him, when he comes home, to see in his solid possessions, his mother and his relations, nothing more substantial than shadows. Under the influence of this discovery he sells his house, and plunges into enlightened work on behalf of the poor—philanthropy he will not call it—in London. Doubtless such people exist and act in the way which Mr Farrer describes, hut they are for the most part neither intelligent nor humorous, nor can we take their fervours and their conversions very much to heart. The essential thing is, of course, that the antagonist in such a contest shall be strong enough to call forth his adversaries’ best powers, or the struggle becomes unimpressive at once. And Michael’s foes, though Mr Farrer describes them minutely and with evident gusto, are too clumsy to provide us with a noble spectacle. He has a number of aristocratic relations, who eat too much and think too little, and the only argument they can advance against Michael’s freshly acquired logic is, ‘What is the use of our ancestors having made rules if we go and break them?’—and it does not need great spirit or great ingenuity to see that such arguments are bad. The real champion of the opposite faith, however, is Miss Elinor Lestrange. She is beautiful and well-born also, and her views lead her to rebel against her own surroundings, but to adopt an entirely different solution. She marries a rich old baronet at the same moment that Michael devotes himself to work in the East End. The story would run its course with all the directness of a tract were it not for certain unaccountable episodes, introduced, presumably, to enliven the way and drive home the moral; but very much at the expense of the consistency of the different characters. Elinor, for example, proposes to elope with Michael; he refuses, naturally; and she sends a house party of her guests to break up one of his meetings. The shock almost kills him; she nurses him, and then runs away with him to the South, where his passions revive with his strength, and they live as husband and wife until, suddenly, he falls down dead. Bewildering as this is, the final solution is still more difficult to accept, for the patient husband comes out to find his wife, hears her story, and will only say that her ‘soul is straight’ so that they can start life together again happily. Mr Farrer can write with vigour and originality, nor do these gifts wholly desert him here, but it is disappointing work compared with The House of Shadows, for it has so much more in common with the ordinary novel.

[Times Literary Supplement, unsigned, Mar 12, 1908]

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‘The Wolf.’

[The Wolf by J.E. Buckrose (Hutchinson, 1908).]

There is something, surely, of what Ruskin called the ‘pathetic fallacy’ in the view which the ordinary novelist takes of the character of the peasant. Because we think that trees and fields and farmyards are innocent and simple things, we insist that the people who live among them must be equally elementary; they shall register emotions bred in us by books and towns. The author of The Wolf—J.E. Buckrose—it is clear, is not a writer of exceptional power, nor one dissatisfied with the conventional answer to the questions that we all ask ourselves when we come in contact with a side of life unfamiliar to us. How do the people in country villages live? What can they think about? They are, the author would assure us, very much what they seem—simply constructed to feel one or two large passions, but, for the rest, scarcely more developed than their flocks. In this case the village is Suddaby, in the eastern counties; there is an old maid who keeps a sweet shop and has a pretty niece who falls in love with the local schoolmaster. But as he is unjustly turned out of his situation the marriage, in spite of their love of each other, would end disastrously were it not for the eccentric offer made them by the squire of the place, George Hamilton. Handsome and brilliant as he is, his life is ruined by the fear that he will die as his father died, insane; and he is determined to leave no son to inherit the curse. Again and again he hears the ‘cry of the wolf.’ ‘The cry is sounding so nearly, just round everybody’s house of life. “What’s the good? What’s the good?”’ He proposes, however, on the birth of a son to the Branscombes to allow the parents to live in the big house and to make the child his heir. The offer is accepted, but scandal follows, of course; ludicrous old women, who pride themselves, as provincial ladies only do in novels, upon their remote connexion with the ‘Bishop of Mandalay,’ hint at the improper basis of the relationship, and the book almost ends in tragedy; but tragedy is not to be fashioned out of such materials as we have here. Indeed, it is surprising how, from such ordinary matter and with such slight treatment, the author can yet manage to spin so entertaining and lively a novel. In spite of the morbid refrain ‘What’s the good?’ which is only morbid because it is not genuinely felt, she writes cheerfully and with unflagging interest in her characters. At the same time, she will indulge in a curiously obsolete form of humour; a yardful of pigs drink themselves drunk upon champagne, or an old maid refuses an offer of marriage that has never been made to her, and the gentleman throws a basin of water over her head. The writer has better means of making us laugh if she chooses to use them.

[Times Literary Supplement, unsigned, Mar 12, 1908]

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The Memoirs of Lady Dorothy Nevill.

[The Reminiscences of Lady Dorothy Nevill. Edited by her son Ralph Nevill (E. Arnold, 1906);
Leaves from the Note-Books of Lady Dorothy Nevill. Edited by Ralph Nevill (Macmillan & Co., 1907).]

Sometimes, coming home at night through dark streets, you may see vanishing round the corner the curved shape of a ghostly chariot; it must be on its way surely to some brilliant festival where the lights have been out these hundred years. But no—the omnibus driver points too; it is Lord So-and-So’s coach. That great nobleman, then, has still the imagination to conceive himself properly conveyed down Regent Street, on a muddy night, in a swinging crystal box, with angels adoring a coat of arms on the panels, and two symbolical footmen erect behind him to ward off all the perils of the dark—and it is a great achievement, which deserves our gratitude. For assuring ourselves that it is April, shall we say, in the year nineteen hundred and eight, and that the white blaze among the trees over there is symbol of a royal court, we may go on to indulge ourselves in a number of exquisite scenes, shut hitherto between the covers of books. When the chariot stays the serving men leap down, and stand with uncovered heads as the Lord and his Lady step through them, and into the great white hall. Hand in hand they mount the staircase, and bow, and curtsey, and pass on leisurely into vast rooms, clear as windswept skies, where the ladies have space to spread their trains like peacocks, and the lords toy gently with their silver swords. Other couples and groups swim past them, until the floor, as the family portraits look down upon it, is a beautiful pattern of moving colours which never stay or crowd, but circle easily in and out, as though they trod the measure of a stately dance. But there is an inner room, where there are gilt chairs on a polished floor, and one or two brocaded sofas. A wood fire burns clearly, and there are innumerable soft candles. Here, sitting lightly upright, we find some score perhaps of ladies and gentlemen who have no other occupation, it seems, but the use of their tongues. And what talk it is! Each speaks with confidence, and with an indescribable air of ease and dignity commingled, as though, after rolling wisdom for five centuries in the brain, it issued at length in smooth drops, bright as silver, but ponderous with purpose. The Prime Minister, there, unfolds the future of England for the inspection and correction of a certain sagacious dowager with a fan; here a brilliant youth explodes with paradoxes that are to become laws; and here again one pulls a blotted sheet from his shirt frill and reads, while all listen gravely, poems that sound like Keats. A lady quotes Sappho in the Greek, and another flashes with inspired epigram—what was it? for the words escape us. But Lady Dorothy Nevill should be able to repeat them.

It is the only consolation, indeed, of one forced to see Buckingham Palace from the outside and to people it within from the novels of Mrs Humphry Ward, perhaps, that the aristocrat will nowadays grant us a reflection of his privileges by means of his pen. Otherwise the stout walls of their parks, the locked doors of their galleries would be intolerable to any one possessed of pen and ink or dynamite. But memoirs in the past have led us to believe that by refraining from such violence we cherish certain sanctuaries where all that is high-minded and witty and fair can live happily; and for the credit of the race it seems good that a handful of us should grow up with Greek statues round us, Titians on our walls, spacious gardens to walk in, time for reading and music and talk.

Lady Dorothy, as she is proud to tell you, has an indisputable right to all these privileges, for she is the daughter of Lord Orford, and for many generations a Walpole has succeeded a Walpole at the family seat in Norfolk. In her two volumes of memoirs she confirms all that we have imagined of the aristocratic life, but with this qualification: it exists no longer. In the Forties and the Fifties of the last century Society was a real thing, and with melancholy pride she writes of the brilliant days and contrasts them with the ugly, respectable life which has replaced them. Courtesy and good humour distinguish her naturally; she will try to see that there is some good in the change; but, pathetically enough, her native instincts are always asserting themselves.

Society in the old days cannot in any way be compared with the motley crowd that calls itself society today … The general level of conversation in the so called society of modern days must, of necessity, be low, for society, or what passes for it, is now very large, whilst wealth is more welcome than intellect. Good conversation, therefore, is practically non-existent.

In the old days society was very small, for birth was the first qualification; then it followed that they all knew each other, ‘so that it was more like a large family than anything else’, and then though this seems less a matter of human than of divine arrangement, that they were all endowed with powers of intellect as rare as their blood. But if you grant them these gifts and conceive that they have ‘no ulterior object beyond intelligent cultured and dignified enjoyment’ as Lady Dorothy puts it, you do indeed imagine such a society as that of Athens in the time of Pericles or Paris in the time of Madame Récamier, and our belief in the virtues of our own British aristocracy is splendidly fulfilled. But when we come to read the account of what they said, something—is it time that has done it, or print, or is our taste too plebeian?—something at any rate is not as it should be. For having arranged the whole scene enthusiastically, according to Lady Dorothy’s directions, and set noble men and women eating their oysters with knives or toying with a dish of home-grown truffles beneath a shower of prismatic glass in the great dining-room in Berkeley Square, we listen to the talk which, as Lady Dorothy tells us, people could talk then. After ‘an awful pause’ we hear Miss Gordon Cumming raise her voice. ‘I beg to call the attention of the company to the very lucid interval between Novar’s waistcoat and his trousers’—Munro of Novar, it must be said, was ‘very unconventional in his attire’. ‘This utterance naturally provoked uproarious laughter.’ Then Bernal Osborne, ‘an autocrat of the dinner-table at which his sway was practically unquestioned’, utters those brilliant but bitter personalities which delighted a society where all were friends. He nicknames one ‘grave and dignified politician’ ‘the high-stepping hearse horse’ ‘of a somewhat colourless character’ he says. ‘He has no affections at all except rheumatic ones.’ A political opponent with a slight twist in the neck he calls the man ‘with the Tyburn face—a creature who had been imperfectly operated upon’.

This display of wit may continue throughout a meal unchecked, or some unfortunate lady, who is only invited because she is rich, may quote French delightfully badly, and again, perhaps, provoke uproarious laughter. No one, so far as we can discover, of natural rather than hereditary gifts ever found his way into these dining-rooms, although Lady Dorothy assures us that ‘the old leisured aristocracy … delighted in gathering together people of conversational power, and for this reason alone certain individuals whose sole credentials were their wit and mental cultivation were accorded a place in society. There were several such men, of whose origin nothing was known or asked’—so that we must lay the blame on the clever men themselves. Did they ask questions then? and if so, what answer would they get?

And with Lady Dorothy’s volumes for text we must admit that the answer returned to our anxious questioning is a strange one. It is very natural that, writing of the past, she should write with regret, and wit, as every one knows, is perishable. But there is ample room in the space of two large volumes for something far more illuminating than a dozen obsolete epigrams, nor has she failed to construct round these poor tarnished little scenes a substantial edifice. It is in the strangeness, the audacity, the combined airiness and solidity of this conception that we must find the real value of her book and the answer to our question. For life is not merely a matter of dinner parties; there are the ‘lower classes’, country houses, politics and the arts. In order that you may have a society such as that which she laments, all these surroundings must be properly arranged in due relation to it. We must begin at the beginning, with the farmer. ‘People,’ she writes, ‘were merry in those days (the Thirties and Forties) … Many of my father’s tenants had held the same farm for generations, and all of them were imbued with great reverence for the old families.’ A robust kind of sympathy existed between the lord and his tenant, bred of dependence on the one side, benevolence on the other, which was comfortable and picturesque. They drew your carriage home for you on occasions of joy, and loaded the hall with cream of their own making on your marriage day. Innumerable customs and crafts still lingered in the pretty old villages, which the great lady loved to encourage, before the board schools came with their ‘smatterings of many totally useless subjects’ and destroyed the delightful practice, for example, of the art of ‘buttony’. There were still old chairs and tables to be picked up, for ridiculously small sums, in the country farms, and ‘dignified and spiritual’ traditions still flourished in illiterate minds; the whipping of the bounds was continued, and once even, but this was in happier days, an elder sister was ‘obliged to dance in a hog’s trough should the younger sister marry before her’.

With this superficial rearrangement it is clear that life becomes far more amusing directly. It is so full of charming nooks and corners, in which superstitions and gallantries may lodge themselves, and picturesque inequality breaks up everywhere the monotony of plain human life. But, after all, this is no more than a pleasant disposition of the little village outside the park gates, and the heart of the whole matter is to be found within. How does Lady Dorothy approach her equals?

I have always been much interested in art and artistic people.! do not mean the kind of art which is associated with affectation and oleaginous pedantry, but the cult of what is curious and beautiful and interesting. At different times I have collected all sorts of things and attempted nearly all kinds of amateur work, including book illumination … leather working, wood carving, and of late years a kind of old-fashioned leather work […]

It is this sublimely insolent disrespect for art that vitiates the whole of the structure, for, surely, it is fatal if you are an aristocrat not to honour the only people who have imagination enough to believe in your beauty. And piecing together one phrase with another, the jests and opinions and habits, what an astonishing erection it is! She has collected watch papers and wedding rings and bills and old buttons, she has surrounded herself with odds and ends of furniture in all styles, she has bred silkworms and imported crayfish, she has visited innumerable picture galleries, and said ‘How d’you do’ to half the distinguished names in England. Rare dogs and strange birds and ‘gifted men’ have amused her and paid her compliments. But why does the book, in spite of all these diversions, fill us with depression, as though on a rainy day we had lost ourselves in some dingy and rambling old house, crowded with ornaments, and frivolous in spite of its age? It is partly because it is so solid still in appearance and formidable with all the furniture of life, and partly because whatever genuine test you apply to it, it goes to pieces directly. If you were so rash as to quote Keats there an almost visible struggle would go on for a moment between the words and the atmosphere, alarming as a sudden precipice in a meadow; and afterwards the house is more shabby and less beautiful than ever, as though lightning had singed it. But lightning is rare, and such establishments continue to send their smoke up placidly enough in all the counties of England, and perhaps, melancholy as the conclusion is, do no great harm to anybody.

[Cornhill Magazine, vol. XXIV, April 1908]

[]

Wordsworth Letters.

[Letters of the Wordsworth Family. From 1787 to 1855. Collected and edited by William Knight (3 vols, Ginn & Co., 1907).]

We have at last, in three stout volumes, a collection of Wordsworth’s letters, including those already published and scattered in many books, some freshly discovered and a number written by his sister, his wife, and one or two near relatives as well. ‘As the work progressed’, says Professor Knight, ‘it became increasingly evident that no new Life of Wordsworth was needed.’ It might be well, as he suggests, that some one in the future should condense them and compose out of so much fresh matter a fresh picture of the writer, but he fears unfortunately that he must leave that task to a successor. In the meantime lovers of Wordsworth owe him their thanks for his labour, and in default of the arrangement of a master hand, must rejoice in the noble mass of material here given over to them.

But in what sense can it be said, as Professor Knight says, that ‘few of his contemporaries, and none of his fellow poets, revealed themselves more fully than (Wordsworth) did’ in his letters? He loathed, we know, the labour of penmanship, nor did his mind take naturally to the epistolary form. We never get from him the impression which the great letter-writers, Lamb or FitzGerald or Mrs Carlyle, give us, that the scene which they have in their mind is precisely fit for a sheet of letter paper, and that it is a keen delight to smooth it out there. Wordsworth addressed himself to his task reluctantly, always under other compulsion than his own, and often with audible groans at that which had become a necessity. But the result is that nothing is uttered without urgent need for utterance; there is no frivolity or ornament; and the letters accumulate upon the imagination in a solid mass, and leave there a monument of his mind and nature monotonous and monolithic indeed, but impressive as an authentic building where every stone has been lifted laboriously to its place by the poet’s own hand. The letters again cover a long stretch of years, from 1790 to 1849, and must be held therefore to give the amplest possible comment upon his life; the three volumes should illustrate continuously the three periods of effort and achievement and repose. But, though with his poems before us we are able to arrange some such division, there is curiously little in the letters themselves to confirm it. A young man, who is to lead the great poetic revolution of his age, who meets for the first time with other young men of equal genius and with views that correspond with his, should, one conceives, write the most interesting letters in the language. But when we turn to one of the letters, printed here for the first time, written in 1799 and to Coleridge, our expectations are sublimely, if ludicrously, brushed aside. ‘Dorothy is now sitting by me, racked with toothache.’ The chimney smokes. They have hired a woman to wash the dishes—‘We could have had this attendance for eighteenpence a week, but we added the sixpence for the sake of the poor woman.’ ‘I feel little disposed to notice what you say of Lyrical Ballads.’ And when he does deal with matters of prime interest to them both, it is with the judicial discretion of middle age. ‘When it is considered what has already been executed in poetry it is strange that a man cannot perceive, particularly when the present tendencies of society … are observed, that it is the time when a man of genius may honourably take a station upon different ground.’ Epigram or any unpremeditated utterance which strikes the mind as though red hot, is not to be found in this cautious record of daily life and accumulating experience. And though there are some terse criticisms of writers—Walpole is ‘that cold and false-hearted Frenchified coxcomb’, Carlyle and Emerson write ‘a language which they suppose to be English’—yet we have his own word for it that he ‘never felt inclined to write criticism’.

But, although it would be easy enough by quotation to establish the view that Wordsworth, when he was not inspired, had the mind of a country clergyman’s wife, that is a piece of impertinence which the succession of the letters completely crushes out of existence. The ‘revelation’ which they make is so comprehensive that at the very moment when he shows you something petty or commonplace you become aware of the vast outline surrounding it, majestic and indifferent to your sneers. When we expect rhapsody and poetry we find instead careful reckoning of income, or wise plans for the education of the family left, by the death of both parents, in a precarious state. But we get also such words as those which Dorothy uses of her brother, when he was twenty-three. He has, she wrote, a ‘violence of affection […] which demonstrates itself every moment of the day […] in a sort of restless watchfulness which I know not how to describe, a tenderness that never sleeps’; and their companionship, so equal, so simple, and so sincere, continued throughout their lives, is beautifully apparent; every letter hints at the exquisite relationship. They walk together, notice the same buds and clouds, read at the same table; and Dorothy, when she has given her criticisms, bids him, in fine words, trust the rest to posterity. ‘His writing will live,’ is her valiant assertion, ‘when we and our little cares are all forgotten.’ The impression left by the long letters to Mathews, Wrangham, or Sir George Beaumont is of a writer compelled to turn aside for a moment from a sight of absorbing interest; he will concentrate his mind upon his task, give advice, sympathy, or information, but all the while he is engrossed in the country outside the window, and the stern and sufficient life which he has shaped in harmony with it. Again and again he considers the perplexed lives of his friends, Coleridge or De Quincey, and sums up the position with the utmost sagacity. ‘Do your duty to yourself immediately’ he bids De Quincey. ‘Love nature and books; seek these and you will be happy.’ He is not blind for a moment to the disastrous weakness underlying the splendid powers of Coleridge, but exposes it with the melancholy insight of a physician. ‘I give it you as my deliberate opinion, formed upon proofs that have been strengthening for years, that he neither will nor can execute anything of important benefit to himself, his family, or mankind.’ And yet nothing shakes his belief in Coleridge’s powers; no one upholds with greater reverence the sanctity of genius, or believes more profoundly in the immeasurable virtue of poetry. This constant faith kindles all these sober judgments, the sheets of political pessimism, the elaborate instructions for the laying out of a garden, the minute description of colours and shapes on the hillside, and, unifying them, proves them all so much fuel for the true fire of poetry. ‘To be incapable of a feeling for poetry, in my sense of the word, is to be without love of human nature and reverence for God.’

This, then, is the source of the satisfaction which encompasses us as we read on with little humour or variety of mood to entice us. There is no gulf between the stuff of daily life and the stuff of poetry, save that one is the raw material of the other; and the change is effected constantly, even before our eyes—‘things are lost in each other, and limits vanish, and aspirations are raised’. When he walks in London, melancholy and very thoughtful, he suddenly becomes aware that Fleet Street lies before him, under snow, ‘silent, empty, and pure white […]! cannot say how much I was affected … and what a blessing I felt there is in habits of exalted imagination. My sorrow was controlled, and … seemed at once to receive the gift of an anchor of security.’ There is arrogance in that, perhaps, but it is of the kind that makes us ask how we are to distinguish between a reverence for himself and a reverence for nature. The pitch of a common life that permits these transitions is very high; and when, now and again, he speaks of his own beliefs, or his own unhappiness, the words have a poignancy that reaches to the uttermost depths. Beautiful, though we smile, is the sense that comes over him abroad of his own irritability, so that he must ask pardon of his wife at once. ‘Dearest Mary, when I have felt how harshly I often demeaned myself to you … while correcting the last edition of my poems, I often pray to God … that I may make some amends to you … You have forgiven me, I know, as you did then; and perhaps that somehow troubles me the more.’ Such feelings come frequently to mitigate, with curious pathos, the loneliness and austerity of his figure, and assure us that at no point did he lose his power of living, as he says, ‘in the midst of the realities of things’. Metaphors rise constantly to the lips in thinking of him which shall express his majesty, his serenity, in the form of some enduring natural object, a mountain or a river. But it is the merit of the letters that they forbid impersonal abstractions. Noble as his life was, they show it to be made of common stuff, ‘transmuted’, as he would have said, into a permanent shape by the perfect sincerity of his ambition. His daily life, exposed to us here so largely, and with such indifference to effect, has thus the same quality that moves us in the deepest of his poems; it points unswervingly, through trials and obscurities, to the most exalted end.

[Times Literary Supplement, Apr 1, 1908]

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‘The Sword Decides.’

[The Sword Decides! A Chronicle of a Queen in the Dark Ages: Founded on the Story of Giovanna of Naples by Marjorie Bowen (Alston Rivers, 1908).]

Any critic of Miss Marjorie Bowen’s work is met at the outset—on the page fronting the title-page, indeed—by the pronounced eulogies of his fellow critics. One declares that her work is ‘not very far’ from the work of Scott; another proclaims her ‘something of a wonder’; the chorus repeat again and again that she is brilliant and imaginative and has a remarkable sense of style; they all predict her popularity. There can be no doubt that this last prophecy is fulfilled already, and it is this fact that seems significant; for it is not often that the public and the critics are of one mind. Once more, in The Sword Decides Miss Bowen has chosen to write an historical novel, founded upon this occasion on the story of Giovanna of Naples. But it is plainly not for the sake of the history that she makes this choice; she is not, that is to say, a precise student of events, and she makes little attempt to penetrate to the heart of the time. A powerful imagination turned upon some old crisis may show us men with minds like ours, but coloured by the temper of the age, engaged in a conflict which exhibits their characters in the most striking light. Difference of dress and manner is but an incident, attractive, indeed, but as superficial then as it is now. But Miss Bowen, it would seem, uses history, not because it shows character in action, but because it offers many colours and many differences of speech and habit. The story, therefore, is of secondary importance, and no one will rise from the book better versed in the history of medieval Naples than he was before. Andreas of Hungary is the rightful heir to the throne of Naples, but Giovanna declares herself Queen and refuses to marry him. When the Pope confirms his claim, she flies from Naples, with a few faithful nobles, and later entices him to visit her. He comes and is strangled in her presence, and flung from her bedroom window. The rest of the book tells how his brother Ludovic succeeds to the crown; and there are battles and murders, lies, and a final confession. But this, as we have said, is of little importance, because Miss Bowen takes so slight an interest in the motives and the characters of kings and queens. Some external force seems to bring about these effects; we may call it by any large name we like,—love, or ambition, or hate. The emotions are either of the simplest kind—‘They put the great crown on her head. “How heavy it is,”’ she said—or they follow, rudely enough, the traditional lines of tragedy. The blood of the murdered king stains the floor. ‘If it dries it never comes out,’ she muttered—‘never—comes—out!’ Any delicacy of psychology is frankly disregarded. What remains, then, is a perfectly frank and crude delight in what we may call the pageantry of the time. By placing your scene in Naples and dating it 1343 all restrictions that could bind an accurate lover of the picturesque are solved. Every page is alight with gorgeous clothes, sunshine, marble, splendid names; there are tourneys and festivals and fights in the narrow streets. Men and women are all of them of peerless beauty or sinister magnificence. Hearts beat beneath ‘pink velvet bodices’ and struggle against ‘tight gold cords.’ But sumptuous as it all is, Miss Bowen is too light-handed to let it weigh upon us; there is always something going forward to animate the splendour. Her popularity, then, can be accounted for, although not all critics can give the same reason for it.

[Times Literary Supplement, unsigned, Apr 9, 1908]

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‘The Red Neighbour.’

[The Red Neighbour by W.J. Eccott (William Blackwood and Sons, 1908).]

The Marquise de Polignac, wife of the Secretary for War under de Louvois, had in Mr W.J. Fxcott’s The Red Neighbour been so foolish as to buy powders or charms from a woman then fashionable for her cures, who went by the name of the Red Neighbour. But suddenly one to whom her dose had been administered died, and she was put in prison, ostensibly on the charge of poisoning. All Paris, all the great ladies who had lovers and wished to remove their husbands, trembled lest, when put to ‘the Question,’ she should reveal their names. But Marie de Polignac was so far from guilty that her powder was to reclaim her husband’s love, and not to quench it. He was devoted to the service of his country, and, in particular, he was absorbed in the endeavour to keep Turenne supplied with good food for men and horses. As it was, the Marshal complained constantly of a mysterious deficiency, and that his men fell ill. The Red Neighbour, however, was something far more remarkable than a mere quack. She was no less a person than the wife of the great forage contractor Bocal, whom he had deserted; and her object now in accumulating wealth was simply to ruin him. A seasoned reader of romance, with these clues in his possession, will not fail to see how artfully the aims of quack and War Minister and contractor and wife and lover will combine and conflict, nor does Mr Eccott lose a single opportunity. He has, indeed, a remarkable gift for keeping the whole concoction on the boil; dropping in fresh flavours when the mixture cools, stirring now here, now there, so that the whirlpool never stays for a second. The movement is, if anything, too incessant. Thus, for example, de Polignac rides in the rear of Bocal to the frontier, testing the Government stores all along the road; he finds chalk in sacks of flour, and rubble in place of stone; trees fall almost on top of him, herds of horses are driven over him, now and again he runs some rascal through the body. And when at last he has reached the army in safety the Marquise starts in pursuit of him, and we have her adventures of a different kind. Directly she finds rest for a moment her daughter in the convent at Meudon jumps from the window, and rides across France in pursuit of her mother with the son of the forage contractor, who has never met his father and does not know his trade. At one point all the characters seem to be hasting over different roads at the same time; they undergo a variety of adventures with the utmost spirit; and finally, of course, rush into each other’s arms at the end. By all the laws of fiction this is inevitable, but yet we are taken by surprise. That, perhaps, is the true test whether a book in which probability is so gallantly sacrificed and character made so light of is really successful. And in this case the romantic atmosphere has so completely enveloped us that we ask no questions, bewildered though we are, till the book is shut. It infects us with its delightfully irresponsible spirit, and we are well content.

[Times Literary Supplement, unsigned, Apr 16, 1908]

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‘Destinies.’

[Destinies by Henry Normanby (Sisley’s, n.d.). Reprinted: MFS.]

There are twenty-five short stories in Mr Normanby’s book Destinies, and, in spite of the variety of their plots, they show a distinct uniformity of design. It is clear that in so narrow a space you must choose your note and strike it firmly, and in so doing you must eliminate much, and make much subservient. You may either choose some incident of emotion like Mr Henry James, which seems almost too subdued, too much part of a context, to admit of this separate illumination, or you may boldly pluck the brightest incidents, the summits and terminations of life, which, in their very nature, seem to lack connexion with past and with future. This last is Mr Normanby’s choice; almost every story introduces some violent event, and when that is over darkness falls and we ask no more. A few examples will be enough. A fisherman is called from his wedding feast to save a shipwrecked crew, and his bride sees him drowned before her eyes. A man who is swimming for life with his son on his back has to decide whether they shall both be drowned, or whether he shall save himself by losing his son. An old couple are met on their way to the workhouse by their long lost child, who promptly embraces them and takes them home again. Or perhaps the shock is heightened by a flavour of the supernatural; but it is a matter of no very great moment whether the affair is explicable or not. For even when the plot is brought about by visible means, the writer takes very little pains to make them ingenious or credible. The point then for the reader to decide is whether these incidents, in spite of suppression and improbability, really achieve an effect—shock, surprise, or delight us, with a sudden revelation, no matter how brought about, of the deeper connexion that exists between outwardly incongruous things. Now and again the position is striking enough to make one wonder how one would have thought or acted in such circumstances; but for the most part Mr Normanby’s stories do not disturb the mind with their problems; they are more like pageants that pass across the eye and leave little trace. His love of contrasts threatens him sometimes with the false and melodramatic. James we read, ‘crawled into the Park to get away from the hardness of the pavements and human hearts.’ Medical students, in order to heighten the pathos, are called ‘human vultures,’ and the nurse has an ‘appointment with the house physician in the kitchen.’ And the moment that the reader suspects that the facts will not bear the strain that is put on them, the effect is ruined. Indeed, the suspicion will suggest itself that a great number of these stories were meant to be read swiftly in a train, and to preserve them in a book is to imprison them unkindly.

[Times Literary Supplement, unsigned, Apr 23, 1908]

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‘Marotz.’

[Marotz by John Ayscough (Archibald Constable, 1908).]

From a remark dropped far on in the book we learn that the date of Mr John Ayscough’s story Marotz is somewhere about 1886; the scene is laid in Italy, and for the most part in Sicily. But these facts are so often displaced in order to make way for irrelevant little studies of the preceding generation, and these, again, are dealt with so minutely, that a certain vagueness hangs over the plot and the characters. We are never quite certain whether we follow the fortunes of mother or daughter, or whether we are to pay attention to a very close study of convent life or to the state of parties in modern Rome. For Mr Ayscough writes as a student interested in all sides of the Italian people rather than as an artist who must choose one story and keep closely to it. Marotz was the heiress of a noble Sicilian house, but her father was half a Czech and half an Englishman. She was beautiful, with ‘sombre fathomless eyes,’ but the mixture of blood in her had chilled half of her Southern nature, and led her to meditate and to repel the advances of her suitors. In this mood, to the grief of her parents, she entered the Convent of the Reparation as a postulant, and we are given a pleasant but distracting picture of the nuns and their customs. She discovers, however, that she has no true vocation for the life, and she leaves the convent to marry the least principled and the least passionate of her admirers. What was the reason of this violent reversion of feeling we know not, for Mr Ayscough is too busy with his pictures of peasants and miserly old duchesses to pay much attention to his heroine. But he secures at least the inevitable result. When Marotz discovers her husband’s infidelity she leaves him, and brings up the son who is born to her in pious seclusion. And later, of course, when the boy discovers his history, there is a struggle between the diverse natures of the two parents in him, which ends with the triumph of the mother and the death of the father. This all works itself out very neatly, but there is something too well balanced in the plot to suggest that it is the story of living people. The characters are too remote. Marotz, in particular, sinks into a smooth emblem of purity and piety, and the true life of the book is to be found in scenes which have little to do with the main story. Mr Ayscough, obviously, has more than a literary knowledge of Italy, and he places this shadowy drama in a scene that has much grace and many bright touches. He writes more or less pleasantly and with ease.

[Times Literary Supplement, unsigned, May 7, 1908]

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‘Between the Twilights.’

[Between the Twilights: Being Studies of Indian Women by One of Themselves by Cornelia Sorabji (Harper and Brothers, 1908).]

Between the Twilights, by Cornelia Sorabji, gains much that is impressive, and loses something of distinctness from the fact that, dealing with Indian women, it is written by one of themselves. Miss Sorabji evidently has been educated in England, so that she can write English almost as an Englishwoman; she was born a native of India, and she sees the world she describes almost as a native. But as there are sentences which read laboriously, like literal translations of phrases natural to one language and alien to the other, so there are points of view which, because they are so familiar to her, she fails to make clear to us. She has gone back to her native land partly with the desire of interpreting their religious customs, by showing that they are derived from excellent reasons. Thus the sacred Basil is cultivated in every Hindu courtyard and worshipped, not because it is ‘the wife of the Great God,’ but because it keeps away mosquitos. And she finds the same basis of truth in other legends, for it is one of the charms and puzzles of her book that her facts turn suddenly into fairy tales, and she gives far more space to the legend than to the small seed of truth. For the women, of whom she writes for the most part, are devout believers in their miracles. ‘Her worship of the Gods, of her husband, her children, they are all the same, part of her religion, and they make her life.’ The story of Kali is at the root of a Hindu woman’s conception of her nature and destiny. It was ordained that no man should conquer the Giants of Discord, and for this purpose it was necessary to create a woman. But when she had conquered, and was descending from the mountain blind with pride, her husband, Shiva, lay in her path, and she trampled on him and woke ashamed. Thus she is ‘vanquished only by the husband who lies under her feet.’ Her power and duty became ever after to conquer, but to conquer for others; and to accept her service is the highest honour you can pay her. It need not be said that the exalted nature of this legend is much belittled in practice. The Hindu woman, cloistered and uneducated, cannot conquer anything of much greater importance than the innumerable duties of her religion and her household; but it is true that her husband exacts entire submission from her. He has a superstitious respect for her virtue—‘She is his toss of a penny.’—but there can be no companionship between them. Still this type of woman is not universal; the women of Rajputana ‘demand something,’ and there are women who rule, and women who are priestesses. These varieties, however, are but touched upon; and we take away from Miss Sorabji’s book a number of strange pictures, of infants who are brides, and children who are widows, of secluded rooms where terrible superstitions prevail, and barbaric households, ruled by despotic Queens, where the entrance of the husband brings awe. But Miss Sorabji foretells a happier state, and her book itself is proof that a critical and independent spirit is awake among them, which may be the herald of great reform. Every one must wish that she may turn her singular opportunities for finding out the truth and reporting it to solid account.

[Times Literary Supplement, unsigned, Jun 11, 1908]

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The Stranger in London.

[Londoner Skizzenbuch (Leipzig, Degener, 19—) by A. von Rutari (Arthur Levi) and
Londres Comme je L’ai Vu, texte et dessins par Charles Huard (Paris, Eugene Rey, Libraire-Editeur, 1908).]

Every one who writes at all writes a diary of impressions when he travels abroad. The scene is so new, so original, and so charmingly arranged as though on purpose to be looked at and written about, that the fingers curve round a visionary pen, and the lips form words instinctively. It would be pleasant to think that this habit is not altogether vain; and the eagerness with which we read foreign impressions of ourselves gives us good reason to hope. It is not necessary to be profound, to compare situations, or to forecast the future in order to interest; all that is required of you is to see truly, and to describe as closely as may be. The gift is almost obsolete among natives, of a respectable age, for the same reason that you rarely find a middle-aged person who can describe the shape of a coal scuttle. Oxford Street, Kensington Gardens, Piccadilly—the names of these places alone rouse so many echoes, the sight of them is so confused with a multitude of other sights, that a cockney who should sit down to describe them might end with an essay upon party government, or a dissertation upon the immortality of the soul. The impressions of M. Huard and Herr Rutari make excellent reading because they have a certain detachment; we see our surface as though in some spontaneous mirror, and yet the image there is coloured by a number of personal and national idiosyncrasies which make it in another sense full of suggestions for us. The foundation of the picture is much the same in both cases. Each traveller exclaims at the size of London, its uproar, its multitudes, its incongruities. One might think, to hear them, that Paris was a clean country town, and Berlin a centre of provincial culture, like Leeds. Each takes a drive through the streets and is bewildered and exhilarated by the innumerable types which pour through the narrow channels, always moving, always changing, and giving off a perpetual uproar. Each marvels at the dexterity of the newsboys, and at the majesty of the policemen. They visit the City, the Tower, Greenwich, and show themselves sensitive, as only foreigners are, to the imprisonments and executions which have taken place there. Êtes-vous bien sûr,’ M. Huard asked the guard at the Tower, ‘qu’aucun fantôme n’erre ici la nuit, traînant ses chaînes et murmurant ses plaintes?’ ‘Quite sure, Sir,’ the good man answered; and we should most of us agree with him. They quote their Lambs, and their Spectator, recall what Dr Johnson said about Charing Cross, and imagine how many distinguished people have walked where we walk now.

There is something perhaps a little simple in these reflections, suggestive of a tourist with a Baedeker; but when we have read further we understand that it is no pose, but a genuine impulse. London, they both agree, is immensely old. If Addison and his friends were to come to life again, nay, Richard the Third himself, they would find their haunts unchanged. ‘In keinem Lande verändern sich die Zustände so wenig wie in England,’ says Herr Rutari, and goes on to insist that it is on account of this conservatism that it has a greater charm than any other town in the world. Both travellers dwell with a kind of humorous tenderness upon the oddities and inconsistencies which are felt even in our streets. They find a perpetual fascination in the sight of the immense town which has gone on growing for so many centuries, absorbing whole worlds and finding space for them, adding impartially, splendid buildings and mean ones, and holding the tumult together by some central heat of its own. The variety of the streets never palls; and owing to the capricious way in which the place has come together, contrasts of the strongest kind are everywhere laid side by side, like strips of different colour. M. Huard, an artist, as his illustrations prove, does not care to seek the causes of sights that make London unlike any other place to look at; he hazards an explanation, breathes a sigh, and then devotes himself to the subtleties of our mysterious atmosphere. We may trace a certain sprightly malice in some of his remarks; the meetings at the Marble Arch tickled him considerably. An old gentleman expounds the Scriptures accompanied by ‘une veille lady, sèche, propre, anguleuse, qui ferme les yeux dès qu’elle ouvre la bouche et la bouche dès qu’elle ouvre les yeux’,’ and shoots severe glances at frivolous French strangers. Could we ever do the like in Pais? ‘J’en doute, car malins et moqueurs, nous avons à l’excès le sentiment du ridicule, et nous hésitons toujours à publier une conviction forte.’ We may even suspect a smile, hidden quickly, when he expatiates upon the ‘discrets petits squares silencieux … qui ont gardé ce je ne sais quoi d’intime, d’humain, de personnel, qui fait le charme des habitations anglaises’; they are charming, but a little shabby and humble after the smart white streets of Paris.

Herr Rutari is as sensitive to the beauty of London as M. Huard, but he prefers the sterner side of it, and cannot stop at æsthetic appreciation but must find a meaning beneath the surface. The City fascinates him more than any other part, because of the tremendous operations which take place there; they excite him so much that he fancies a peculiar dignity in the face of the poorest clerk who earns his living at the centre of the world. It fascinates him, too, because it brings home to him, in the most conclusive way, the reverse of the picture; the innumerable beggars, the horror of the low streets, and the struggle which drives the populace up and down the pavement all day long seeking a living. Like M. Huard, he is amazed by the tokens of intense poverty that meet his eye everywhere, mocking the splendour of Mayfair even, and protests that such sights are only to be seen in London. But then, ‘Ist doch London der Inbegriff aller Widersprüche’; and by weighing one quality with another he comes at a likeness of the English character which is sufficiently agreeable whether we recognise it or not. The English, he says, are a people without nerves, of admirable cleanliness and muscular force. All their virtues are displayed upon the turf at Lord’s, when the youth of England play the hereditary game, under the eyes of their parents, and may be summed up in the true English word—‘Gentleman’. Centuries have gone to produce this excellent specimen, endowing him finally with an atmosphere almost of romance; and his sister, with her fresh cheeks, at once suggests that she is the descendant of the long line of illustrious women whose portraits hang in the ancestral home. The rich past underlies all English customs and ideas, and serves, together with their isolated position, to make them almost grotesquely independent of other people. Not only do they hoard all kinds of odd little habits, but they have built up a singular point of view for themselves in art and literature. While Tolstoy, Ibsen, and Nietzsche sent waves of fresh thought across the Continent, the English slept undisturbed or did not raise their eyes from their own affairs. A more serious charge is that a foreigner, accustomed to a free discussion of all subjects upon the Continent, finds no ‘frischen lebhaften Streit der Geister’ in England. And yet, such is their inconsistency that in spite of this reticence and the complete indifference of the State, a lusty art flourishes, fills an Academy full of pictures every year, and private people are found to line their houses with portraits in a way that is unknown on the Continent. As to the quality of these works, Herr Rutari is not enthusiastic. He finds in them robust thought, humour and a taste for depicting children and dogs; but all English art, he declares, is tinged with sentimentality. The English temperament, however, is on the whole a wonderful compound of humours and oddities; controlled, as the City of London herself, by some profound heat which now and again throws off a Shakespeare or a Dickens. It is characteristic of the Continental view that Dickens is more quoted than any other English writer, and is held to be the type of our national genius.

[Times Literary Supplement, Jul 30, 1908]

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‘A Week In The White House.’

[A Week in the White House with Theodore Roosevelt: a study of the President at the nation’s business (G.P. Putnam’s & Sons, 1908) by William Bayard Hale]

Dr Hale was invited lately to spend a week at the White House, and during his stay he observed the President ‘from morning till night’. He was further allowed to write down these observations, to publish them in a small volume, and to claim for his work that it is ‘by all odds the most intimate study of Mr Roosevelt ever made public’. It is not often that distinguished men will submit to such an ordeal, but Dr Hale is surely speaking the truth when he says that if, by such means, one could get an ‘accurate and realistic’ picture of the President (or of the dustman, we might add) nothing could exceed the interest of it. But prudence, a glance at biographies, a glance at living men and women, make us reflect that it is a perilous undertaking, and suggest a doubt whether Dr Hale’s method is really so simple as it seems. His plan, to use his own words, is to give a ‘verbal cinematographic study’ of the President, to sit with open eyes and let the President print his image a million times upon the retina. Chartran, Sargent, Rouland, and others have tried to secure his likeness in paint; but he is imprisoned on canvas. The only medium that can keep pace with his moods, flowing into them as lead into a mould that is forever recast, is the medium of words. The objection to the method is perhaps that it lays too great a strain upon the reader in the first place; he receives so many shocks, and must understand so much by them; and, in the second, that words were never meant to take the place of eyes, but to interpret what they see. To enlarge upon these peculiarities, however, would be to brand oneself both dullard and pedant—an unenviable reputation, and to escape it let us own immediately that Dr Hale’s book leaves a very distinct impression. Whether you are justified in thinking that it is an impression of Mr Roosevelt is another matter, but it should be explained at once that Dr Hale confines himself to the character of the man, and has nothing to say of his politics.

‘Get the permanent features of the scene in mind,’ Dr Hale commands, in the manner of one who is about to bring off a conjuring trick, and accordingly we imagine a room furnished with a large writing-table, some leather armchairs, a globe, and an ‘Art Nouveau’ lamp. There is a photograph of a bear, and a framed autograph of a sonnet, by J.J. Ingalls, called ‘Opportunity’. The impression which you are to take away from this glance is naturally that the President of the United States enjoys no greater luxury than the ordinary business man, that decrees which change the face of the world are written at a commonplace table, from a substantial armchair. You may moralise as you choose upon the contrast, and if you are happily inspired the figure of the President himself, which is flashed upon the plate directly afterwards, will crown your thoughts appropriately.

‘You know his features—the close-clipped brachycephalous head, close-clipped moustache, pince-nez, square and terribly rigid jaw; hair and moustache indeterminate in colour, eyes a clear blue, cheeks and neck ruddy.’

He is, in short, for there must be an end of quotation, a burly man, who prefers comfort and solidity to the refinements of art, and connects the plainness of his furniture, perhaps, with the republican virtues. From ten till half-past one every morning a procession passes through this room, ‘a panorama of the national life’, composed of men who come from all classes, and represent all professions. They ask questions, give information, lay their plaints, seek advice, receive instructions, discuss policies, or merely crack their jokes and tell their stories. The President receives each, says something, and the man goes away, content, convinced, or at the least, in a better humour because he has seen the President, and some of his illusions have been dispelled. These conversations last but a minute or two; nevertheless, the matter is discussed thoroughly, and in almost every case some phrase is added which enlivens the interview and gives the visitor something to talk about when he gets home. Surely the President was unusually pleased to see him, or delighted to greet a descendant of Jonathan Edwards. ‘What was your mother’s name? Then you must be descended from Jonathan Edwards … He was a great man, but he had no sense of humour.’

Italics, capital letters, all the resources of the printer’s art are used to give effect to the explosions of the President’s speech. Dr Hale, who cannot, of course, reproduce the entire conversation, prints a number of different openings, as Mr Roosevelt sees his visitor, advances upon him, and wrings his hand.

‘Senator, I—am GLAD to see you! Senator, this is a—VERY great pleasure! Your daughters? I am, indeed, pleased to have this visit from you! How DARE you introduce yourself to me? A great pleasure—a VERY—GREAT pleasure indeed!’

But the remarkable point about these greetings is, not only that they are discriminating, but that with all their emphasis they are sincere. Contact with another human being seems to ignite some spark in the President, and the shout of laughter, the ‘mitrailleuse discharge’; the hand-clasp, and thump upon the back represent simply the roar of the necessary explosion. When his visitor is kindled into animation and is conscious of a desire to return the blow, the business of the interview is transacted at lightning speed. Deputations forget their addresses and speak good American; old grievances dissolve; pedants are ashamed; no one can be confused, or subtle, or malicious beneath such a torrent of good humour. Whatever the business may be, the President at once insists that he has personal knowledge of it, that he has driven a train, or run a fire-engine, or lived on a ranche, and is, therefore, fallible and human; moreover, such passions have a part in the sum of civic virtue. While he talks he stands or walks about the room, throws himself on a sofa, or perches on the corner of his table; but now and then you see him write a note, or sign his name, and at intervals a secretary slips in quietly, takes the paper, and disappears. It is tempting, but perhaps inaccurate, to imagine that the great man is thus silently manipulating a thousand strings as he talks, and that the process of government is going on beneath the surface all the time. However this may be, there is no doubt that the interminable conversation fulfils other purposes besides the obvious one of allowing people to state their case to the President in person, and to receive his answer. Every man has in him something that the President does not know, and would like to possess; his talk is often but a rapid search for a fact or a point of view. ‘He takes up a new man with a new interest like a machine grabbing a new piece of metal to shape it to the requirement in precisely so many seconds.’ One of the results of this habit is that the President has an amazing number of facts in his brain, which have come there with their own little circle of associations round them, such as you get from talking to the actor, rather than from reading his narrative. His talk, if you listen to it for half an hour, lights with astonishing precision upon a great number of topics, most of them as far apart from each other as sport and ethics, literature and politics, law and food. ‘Each subject,’ writes Dr Hale, ‘gets full attention when it is up; there is never any hurrying away from it, but there is no loitering over it.’ Such sentences, of course, are meant solely as a tribute to Mr Roosevelt’s excellent qualities, his power, vitality, and industry, but they come to produce an effect, upon the mind of a stranger, that is little less than distressing. The notion which this book conveys so vividly, of an alert machine, efficient in all its parts, from the simplest to the most private, is impressive, but it also strikes a foreigner with a sense of suffocation, with a feeling almost as of a gigantic hand laid upon the windpipe. Business of course must be conducted with the speed of a machine, but when the whole range of human speculation is made food for such mechanical measures—‘there is never any hurrying away from it, but there is no loitering over it’—we ask ourselves what state of civilisation can make such lives desirable, or anything but depressing to the beholder. The answer, as Dr Hale gives it, is that America is a democratic country, and that the President is worshipped by his compatriots as the type of their national virtues. It is, indeed, clear from many touches, from the symbolism of plain furniture and boisterous welcome, that we are to lay stress upon a particular side of the President’s character, that we are to connect it with something of far greater importance than the temperament of a single man. The scene which takes place daily in the President’s study when scores of unknown people shake him by the hand and are greeted as fellow men, makes an American ‘proud of his fellow countrymen’, impresses him with a ‘sense of the essential worth of American civilisation’, and leads him to assert that no one ‘has ever seen anywhere on earth a scene of such far-reaching results’. Few people perhaps will be inclined to deny the good sense of such simplicity in outward ornament and ceremony, but the peculiar distinction of President Roosevelt is that he has carried it into more serious matters than any of his predecessors. He asserts that he is President by virtue of his ability, but that the office, by itself, in no way separates him from other men; his claim, indeed, is that the greater your ability the more power you have to sympathise with your fellows, and it is the main advantage of a high position that it gives you an extraordinary opportunity for such intercourse. No one, judging from Dr Hale’s book, can doubt that the astonishing thing about this daily pilgrimage through Mr Roosevelt’s study lies not at all in any melodramatic contrast between government and leather armchairs, Presidents and farmers, but in the immediate sympathy which at once, so to speak, melts the two men together. There is no need to recapitulate the different types who come to him and at once get into touch with him; it is more interesting to discover what quality this is which most people possess in some degree, and Mr Roosevelt possesses in perfection. The broad explanation is perhaps that which Dr Hale gives. ‘Life and the world in every one of innumerable phases, the multitudinous deeds of men, their thoughts and ways, attract him with indescribable fascination.’ It is his power of sympathy that distinguishes him from other remarkable men; it is this power, if we may judge from Dr Hale, that stirs American hearts, and makes them recognise in their President the true flower of democracy. Not only does he sympathise perpetually and vigorously, but he sympathises with the common feelings of men, and is as indifferent to the shades of mind and spirit as he is indifferent to degrees of rank or wealth. His natural democracy carries him even further; there are some qualities which, because they can belong only to a few, have no attraction for him. The academic, he says, must give way to the wise and the practical; he does not care for the ‘worlds of poetry or romance’; he ‘respects sentiment’, but himself indulges only in the sentiments that are common to most men; niceties of speculation annoy him; ethical refinements make little appeal to him, ‘dreams do not nest in his heart’. But it is unneccessary to point out that even in the most democratic of countries there must be some who dream, who meditate, who enjoy rare and lovely emotions, nor need we insist that to disregard such men is to admit the taint of aristocracy. We need but remark that even the President will not suffer everybody. But the true interest of these limitations is that they serve to define the nature of his sympathy, and show that it is for the simplest form of life, for experiences that are common to all, for humanity in general and not for individuals. He is intoxicated by a crowd; he might do homage to the glow in a dog’s eye; the fact that in each of the people who come before him there burns something of the flame, that they are carrying forward the vast onset of life, that he can further it, increase its volume, excites him, and touches him to the quick. His sympathy is with the normal development of this spark; marriage, birth, the upbringing of children, the steady tramp of life through dusty paths to the grave. He is, therefore, understood and loved by the enormous numbers who are occupied with these matters, and they yield to the temptation, to which Dr Hale also falls a victim, of glorifying the man who is so like themselves, who, by his eminence, authorises their contentment.

‘After all,’ breaks out Dr Hale, in a rhapsody of paradox, ‘common humanity is very wonderful and very noble … To represent absolutely the average man … would be to be great beyond all other greatness … to be the possessor of the greatest thoughts that live in the world’ to surpass ‘any isolated seer or poet whatsoever.’

This is the theme of the book, and it is a familiar doctrine, for it is not only convenient, but it makes a curious appeal to the emotions, so that one who denies it is judged to be both mistaken and morally corrupt—a cynic, and a person of cold imagination.

But however harshly you may judge the embodiment of such a theory—and, to speak honestly, there is nothing lovable in Dr Hale’s presentment of him—you cannot deny him the tribute which a moth perhaps pays to a lighted lamp. It is a coarse flame, fed on the unstrained oil, but at the same time there is a certain rude joy in creeping close to the fire, and in feeling your limbs grow warm and your brain become passive. The American people, however, find a peculiar and a different comfort in such a sensation, if we are to continue the metaphor, or, to change it, in such a reconcilation. People, forced as they are to do without the luxuries of tradition, must find in themselves a raw material and exalt it above the finished form. People, again, set in the midst of vast lands beneath the shadow of forests and seas have need to worship their own force and resent any belittlement of it. In President Roosevelt, who governs and is the peer of kings, they feel at once a muscular strength which is infinitely reassuring to them, and a huge indiscriminate power, equally distributed over the whole of him, which makes him the reconciliation of innumerable qualities, the starting-point of all their energies. Every virtue is possible, no other way of life surpasses theirs, when there is one who recognises in his own person and in the persons of others the sufficiency of their native gifts for all aims that a human being need pursue. They welcome him as the accurate type of their soul, flung off by nature in an impetuous mood, and claim for it that it is made after the original pattern, and fashioned out of the pure clay.

[Cornhill Magazine, vol. xxv, August 1908]

[]

Scottish Women.

[A Group of Scottish Women (Methuen & Co., 1908) by Harry Graham.]

The title of Mr Graham’s book suggest that it belongs to a class which is of doubtful reputation. The public, we know, will pay thrice as much for an engraving from Sir Joshua, if the subject is a woman, as it will pay for a picture of equal merit, if the subject is a man. The pious belief seems to be that great grandmothers, when they are dead, crumble to a sweet dust, like the dust of old rose leaves, resembling no substance or fragrance that we can find among the living. In order to gratify the taste the print shops hang their windows with Countess Spencers and Nelly O’Briens, and the book shops are prolific of their memoirs and their love-letters, from which it appears that half the disreputable women of history were ladies of distinguished merit and domestic charm. We are relieved to find that Mr Graham is not among the devout; he will pay his subject the compliment of believing that it has substance enough to stand close examination, and will not vanish even if he sometimes chooses to laugh at it. It has been his object to present ‘biographical portraits’ of women of different types who have only this in common, that they are Scotswomen, and in some way or other have influenced the history of their country.

When, twenty years ago, the ladies of Scotland raised a sum of money in order to erect a statue to a ‘famous and typical Scotswoman’ they could settle upon no one who came up to their ideal. There were numbers of interesting women, but no single great one. It would, of course, be too rash to assign a cause for this failure, for we know that nature where genius is concerned will not listen to reason. But these nineteen types serve to show us at any rate some of the facts that made the women of Scotland what they were, and it is perhaps because it furnishes us with this comprehensive view that Mr Graham’s book has its interest. The nineteen Scotswomen, at the same time that they reveal themselves, seem to be revealing a view of Scotland from age to age; and, if this is partly because genius never made them independent of their circumstances, it is also because they were in touch with a more permanent state of affairs than the women of England or of France. To understand them, we must know something of the history of their country.

We find the early woman the slave of her husband, a stout labourer in the fields where the thickness of her legs got her the title of ‘strong-posted timber’ from some English traveller; and, if she misbehaved herself, her husband could have her shut up in a cage. It is not surprising that women of high rank and character should devote themselves to arduous works of a philanthropic nature, such as the establishment of colleges and the building of bridges, when their means permitted it; for the benefits that appealed to them, naturally, were of a practical kind. Later, when their husbands and brothers were fighting with their own countrymen or the stranger, there is scarcely a clan without its story of some heroic lady who hid her husband, outwitted his enemy, or, like Black Agnes of Dunbar, held his fortress for months against the English. Their vigour showed itself also in a peculiar power of coarse witticism, the wit of a woman against men. But they paid dear for their passions, and were burnt, caged, or branded after the brutal custom of the times. In the days of the Covenant women, as one might expect, were the hottest enthusiasts. Lady Hamilton rode against her own son, with golden bullets in her pistol to exorcise his devil; a servant girl would die rather than keep from the meetings and the martyrs of the Solway persisted in their faith until the waves covered them. But what remains of such people?—a rhyme or a legend, unless we can show that their virtues have somehow gone to fortify the race. The lives of women like the Duchess of Lauderdale, Lady Grisell Baillie, and Gay’s Duchess of Queensberry, though they differ very much in the way it is applied, show equally a strain of wild vigour running through them, and suggest that it came to them from the blood of such parents. Grisell Baillie displays their qualities at the best; the eldest of eighteen children, she proved herself the most trustworthy, shrewd, and resourceful of daughters, able to plan and carry out some deed of great daring, or to clean a house, or to write one of those melancholy old ballads with which Scottish ladies have so often whiled away their time. She lived to a great age, and who shall limit the influence of her ‘dogged and defiant spirit’ persisting for more than eighty years in right dealing and passionate care for her kindred? The Duchess of Queensberry had fewer obstacles to fight against, and, accordingly, her high spirits spent themselves in whims and eccentricities that made her notorious in her day. She insisted upon dressing like a Scottish peasant, used to be overcome by ‘the humour of the situation’ in the Royal dressing-room, and led the peeresses, when their gallery was closed to them, against the House of Lords. At the same time, she was a true friend to Gay, and any one who reads her letters to Swift can judge that she had a mind.

It is clear, however—and with their past it is surely not surprising—that the ‘Scotswomen’s genius is not of a creative or speculative kind’. If they wrote, they wrote ballads, in their own dialect, to hum over their work or to sing to their children, and were anxious, above all things, not to be ‘suspected of writing anything’, ‘perceiving,’ as Lady Anne Barnard, the author of ‘Auld Robin Gray’, said, ‘the shyness it created in those who could write nothing.’ It is due to this modesty, perhaps, that so many of the beautiful Scottish ballads are without the name of their author; and we may attribute some of them at least to rustic poetesses like Isobel Pagan, the Ayrshire peasant woman, who was entirely illiterate, deformed, and a woman of the wildest morality, but had a strain of rough music in her that set all the gossip of the countryside to song. All that we learn of their literary habits certainly goes to show that writing was a frivolous accompaniment, in their view, to a life that was generally active enough. In the eighteenth century Edinburgh began to be famous for those ‘little snug supper parties’ which were so homely and so distinguished. Women, of course, collected the guests and saw to their entertainment. Elderly Scotswomen, in particular, seem to have had a genius for a kind of middle-aged hospitality; they are full of breeding, tell innumerable stories in a pleasant accent, and have at the same time a sound literary culture joined to their shrewdness. Such women were Mrs Alison Cockburn, Lady Louisa Stuart, and Mrs Grant of Laggan. But though they could keep a salon—of a kind—the drawing-room, with all its limitations, scarcely seems the proper place for them. We like to think of them on their estates, in the midst of their own people; they deal out medicines, and scold unthrifty housewives; when they are old they become, perhaps, slightly eccentric, and take, like Lady Eglinton, to the taming of rats; but no one dares laugh at them, and in the winter evenings they bethink them of those interminable ‘Memoirs for My Grandchildren’ which make the raciest reading in the world. Unhappily, their reserve will sometimes forbid them to publish them. Mr Graham tempts us with his story of Lady Anne Barnard, who has left eighteen folio volumes of manuscript, with instructions that they are never to be printed. For Mr Graham’s brief portraits, which are so careful, and have at the same time so many happy turns of humour and sympathy, serve to whet our appetite and make us wish for more.

[Times Literary Supplement, Sep 3, 1908]

[]

Louise de La Vallière.

[Louise de La Vallière et la jeunesse de Louis XIV. D’Après des Documents Inédits (4th edition, Pans, Plon-Nourrit et Cie, 1907) par J. Lair.]

Louise de La Vallière was the daughter of an ancient, though scarcely noble house, with honourable traditions of military service, discharged from one generation to another by father and son. Her own father had taken part in many campaigns with distinction, but his efforts brought him little wealth, and he retired, after the birth of his daughter, to lead the life of a small country gentleman on his estate at Reugny, near Tours. It was from this little property that the family took the name of La Vallière, for the house stands on a gentle hill, and looks over two valleys, a small valley on one side, and on the other the larger valley of the Brenne. A few walls only of the ancient house remained, but within this shell the family of La Vallière had employed some architect, ‘se reposant des grands travaux de Chambord ou de Blois’ to build them ‘un charmant pavillon’, ornamented with all the skill of the Renaissance. The windows looked down the slope to flat meadows, where the river circled between rows of tall poplars. There were soft hills all round, covered with woods and vineyards—a charming country indeed, in which a girl might grow up happy in the consciousness of her own beauty. There were painted chimney-pieces in the rooms also, which, with their gentle allegorical scenes—a group of ladies on the grass for instance, and Love hid behind a tree with his bow drawn—might charm her eye; and her father, no doubt, would translate for her the motto that was cut in the stone above. ‘Ad Principem ut ad Ignem Amor indissolutus.’ ‘Au Prince, comme au feu de l’autel, amour indissoluble.’ Unhappily the father of Louise died when she was barely ten years old, and she had in future no one to teach her Latin, or to see to it that her translations were correct. Her mother from the first showed herself an indifferent parent, who married, when her husband had been dead scarcely a year, the Marquis de Saint-Remi, first Maître d’hôtel in the household of the Duke of Orleans. There were three young princesses for Louise to play with, who also were little controlled by their mother. ‘Tenez vous droites, levez la tête’ was all the advice she had to give them when they came in to see her. They read romances, romped about the castle of Blois, and wondered which of them should be Queen of France. When their father died the widow moved her household to Paris, the Saint-Remis and Louise going with her, and there, lodged in the Palace of the Luxembourg, they danced and they dreamed with greater zest than ever. The King indeed was married, but there were princes, their cousins, who hunted the woods with them, and Mademoiselle, their half-sister, with her band of violins to set them all dancing. They were gay and extremely young, for the King himself was but twenty-two, and boys and girls of sixteen and seventeen could marry and become at once people of importance. The knowledge that their play was played on the verge of that supreme stage where the King acted in the face of Europe lent it a tragic kind of brilliancy. One or two ladies already had stepped into the full light, and had disappeared again, without applause. The event which decided Louise’s fate took place when she was but sixteen, in the spring of 1661. In that year the King’s brother married the Princess Henrietta, daughter of Charles I of England, and was endowed at the same time with some of the property of the late Duke of Orleans. The Dowager Duchess, therefore, in whose service the Saint-Remis still continued, was deprived of much of her power, and the future of her dependents seemed doubtful. At this crisis it appeared that Louise had already attracted the notice of an influential woman, Madame de Choisy, who was anxious to be in with the Court, but had neither youth nor beauty of her own to recommend her. With her competent eye she saw that Louise would do what she needed, and suggested that she should be given the post of maid-of-honour in the household of Madame Henriette, which was then being formed.

Madame Henriette was a girl of sixteen also, but, as years were counted at Court, a mature woman, in the flush of her beauty. Indeed, the transformation was surprising; she had been a thin, insignificant child; Louis himself had called her ‘les os du cimetière des Innocents’; but the spring of 1661 revealed her suddenly as an exquisite young woman, frail and capricious, perhaps, but of an ‘esprit vif, délicat, enjoué’. Louise and her family had good reason to congratulate themselves on the appointment; it was of substantial value, and the maid-of-honour to such a mistress would be in the highest places of the Court.

The summer of 1661 was known in after years for its splendour. June, in spite of some storms, was more lovely even than May; and the Court was at Fontainebleau. To imagine what happened when the sun rose, on a cloudless summer morning, and promised brilliant hours till dusk, and then a warm summer night among the trees, one must conceive the untried vigour of men of twenty and of women of eighteen, set free from all constraint, and inspired by love and fine weather. They drove out to bathe in the morning and came back in the cool of the day on horseback; they wandered in the woods after dinner, at first to the sound of violins, which faded away as the couples drew further and further into the shadows, losing themselves till the dawn had risen. In all these delights Madame Henriette showed the gayest and most passionate. It was seen too that the King enjoyed them best by her side, and took pains to discover fresh ways of amusing her. There were spectacles, and ballets danced on horseback, at night, to the flare of torches. After a month the first check was felt; everyone was saying that they had for each other ‘cet agrément qui précède d’ordinaire les grandes passions’, and the King’s wife and mother perceived it.

It was clear that the intrigue could not go on unless some cover could be found for it. The cover they contrived together was simple, and at the moment neither could see where the fatal danger would lie. Madame Henriette and the Queen had enough maids-of-honour between them to tempt the King’s taste. If he professed love to one of them jealousy would be diverted, and he could court his sister-in-law in peace. The plan was adopted. The friends of one girl sent her to Paris; another was quick enough to suspect; there remained the third, Louise de La Vallière, who had no friends and was simple enough to believe. Had she been profoundly astute and wildly ambitious she could have done no more. Neither the courtiers themselves nor observers of her own time ever credited her with much wit, or accused her of ambition. The epithets they apply to her are always soft and honourable; she was ‘douce’ and ‘naïve’, ‘sincère’, and ‘sage’. She was not even beautiful; but the portraits and descriptions of her bring before us the image of a tall young woman, supple, her head curled with yellow ringlets; her eyes were blue, and had an expression of great sweetness; an honest look, moreover, simple and claiming nothing. Charm, they all repeat, was her genius—charm in youth that turned before her youth was over to a dignity that had something of melancholy in it. One imagines that she was very silent, and said nothing witty unless she stumbled into it; but her voice for commonplaces was of a ‘douceur inexprimable’.

The King had been used to a different kind of love; he had had the flattery of ambitious women, who offered a splendid return for the splendours he could bestow, and never lost consciousness of the bargain. To find himself in possession of an entirely simple and uncalculating affection was a new experience. At first it may have been even embarrassing. When Louise confessed, drawn on by false encouragement, that she loved him, the King tired of the plot, changed his view, and found himself enamoured. The true courtship began carefully, under disguises; but soon, in a fortnight indeed, the love was unconcealed. Madame Henriette had turned elsewhere, and the relationship between Louis and La Vallière was confessed.

It was the etiquette at court that when the King approached all other suitors should withdraw, so that they had solitude when they wished it; but it was pleasant perhaps to come home late from some ride in the woods together, and hours of simple talk, to find their vows confirmed by the flattery of the Court who were waiting for them to act their parts as Shepherd and Shepherdess in one of Benserade’s ballets. Louise, when she looked back, could claim that she had spent one happy month. The simplicity that had made her a dupe suffered her to keep a strange innocence all her life, as though she were conscious that the heart of her pleasure had been pure. But she woke by degrees to the fact that her state was no simple one of devotion given and received, but involved relationships with other people which were not happy and reflected harshly upon her passion. The Queen and the Queen Mother, clinging together in their virtuous solitude, had been able to ignore the King’s pre-occupation. When he walked with Louise in the garden of an afternoon, followed by a troop of courtiers, they kept indoors with their eyes turned from the windows. But the lovers, growing insolent, triumphed one day over the most sensitive obstacle of all, and sat down to cards together in the Queen Mother’s private rooms. Louise, when she became devout, confounded all her sins in one vast crime, needing a lifetime of penitence. Had she distinguished them she might have owned that it was at this season, in the autumn of 1664, that she sinned with the greatest consciousness of sin, and with the greatest confusion of feeling. She was at the height of her beauty, and courtiers who had sneered at her because she had neither rank nor wit were now obsequious. Still, she had but little to count upon, and if she exulted in her splendid moment it was largely because she knew it for a passing one, which she must relish to the full, though half her joy were pain. Her happiness could be disturbed by looking in the glass and finding her face grown thin. People began to remark that she could not stand broad daylight, and then noticed that she had, after all, ‘peu d’esprit’. But although she understood what this meant, and suffered acutely, she had a moment of faith in herself and in Louis. She respected their love. ‘J’ai perdu presque tout ce qui peut plaire,’ she told the King. ‘Cependant, ne vous trompez pas, vous ne trouverez jamais ailleurs ce que vous trouvez en moi.’ Brave words! In uttering them she seems to return once more to the innocence of the first months of all. The King protested, but the charms of Madame de Montespan were irresistible.

Louise had always kept one resource at the back of her mind, as though she distrusted her happiness; when the King deserted her she would take the veil. But the King found her useful to cover his fresh intrigue, and at the age of twenty-five it seemed best to edify the world by remaining at Court and making public her conversion. She tried to saitsfy herself with scraps of philosophy and a pretence of learning, but what she read served only to disillusion her, and to convince her that peace was to be found in religion alone. At Court she owned to a friend she suffered ‘comme une damnée’.

It was not until 1674 that the King allowed her to enter the order of the Carmelites, after having inflicted upon her the most exquisite of punishments. A life where the mind was bent to servile tasks and the body chafed with sackcloth was peace in comparison. She lived to be a rheumatic old woman of sixty-five, whose passions, save for one ‘importunate memory’, were smoothed away as the expression of a marble face is smoothed by pious kisses; and such was her penitence that her body, when she was dead, was thought by the poor to have divinity enough to bless their offerings. At the time of the Revolution her bones were scattered with the royal bones. Sentiment would like to have it that their dust was mixed.

[Cornhill Magazine, vol. xxv, October 1908]

[]

‘A Room with a View.’

[A Room with a View (Edward Arnold, 1908) by E.M. Forster.]

Mr E.M. Forster’s title A Room with a View is symbolical, of course; and to explain the sense which he conveys by it will introduce our comment also. Lucy Honeychurch and her elderly cousin Charlotte go to stay at a pension in Florence; their rooms, they grumble, have no view. A gentleman promptly exclaims, ‘I have a view; I have a view’, and proceeds to offer them his room and the room of his son George. They are outraged, but they consent; and when cousin Charlotte has insisted that she shall occupy the young man’s apartment, because he is a bachelor, she discovers, pinned over the washstand, ‘an enormous note of interrogation’. ‘What does it mean? she thought … Meaningless at first, it gradually became menacing, obnoxious, portentous with evil.’ But if we are not cousin Charlotte, in age or temper, if, moreover, we have read what Mr Forster has written in the past, we are amused rather than bewildered. We are more than amused, indeed, for we recognise that odd sense of freedom which books give us when they seem to represent the world as we see it. We are on the side, of course, of Mr Emerson and his son George, who say exactly what they mean. We care very much that Lucy should give up trying to feel what other people feel, and we long for the moment when, inspired by Italy and the Emersons, she shall burst out in all the splendour of her own beliefs. To be able to make one thus a partisan is so much of an achievement, the sense that one sees truth from falsehood is so inspiriting, that it would be right to recommend people to read Mr Forster’s book on these accounts alone. If we are honest, we must go on to say that we are not so confident by the time the book is at an end. The story runs simply enough. Lucy is kissed by George Emerson, and the ladies fly to Rome. In Rome they meet Mr Cecil Vyse, a young man who feels in his own accord what other people feel, both about art and about life. When Lucy is back again in her ugly home in Surrey she agrees to marry Mr Vyse. But happily the Emersons take the villa over the way, and Lucy is made to own that she can tell the true from the false before it is too late. To compress the motive of the book into this compass is, of course, to simplify it absurdly, for nothing is said of the cleverness, the sheer fun, and the occasional beauty of the surrounding parts. We sketch the story thus, however, because we believe that it was meant to take this line, and we are conscious of some disappointment when for one reason or another it goes a different way, and the view is smaller than we expected. The disappointment is not due to any change of scene, but to some belittlement, which seems to cramp the souls of the actors. Lucy’s conversion becomes a thing of trifling moment, and the views of George and his father no longer spring from the original fountain. But should we complain when we have originality and observation, and a book as clever as the other books that Mr Forster has written already?

[Times Literary Supplement, Oct 22, 1908]

[]

‘Château and Country Life.’

[Château and Country Life in France (Smith, Elder, 1908) by Mary King Waddington.]

Cultivated people grumble at trains, and, if they are old enough, prefer the days of the stage coach. When you crawled over the surface of the earth, and swayed in the ruts, and saw the whole landscape through the steam of four fine horses you knew it face to face, they argue, as one should know one’s friends. But surely it is time that someone should sing the praises of express trains. Their comfort, to begin with, sets the mind free, and their speed is the speed of lyric poetry, inarticulate as yet, sweeping rhythm through the brain, regularly, like the wash of great waves. Little fragments of print, picked up by an effort from the book you read, become gigantic, enfolding the earth and disclosing the truth of the scene. The towns you see then are tragic, like the faces of people turned towards you in deep emotion, and the fields with their cottages have profound significance; you imagine the rooms astir and hear the cinders falling on the hearth and the little animals rustling and pausing in the woods. French country, or that space of field and wood which a window frames, has great order and some peculiar distinction. The towns are very compact and the woods themselves seem more definite than in England, as though nature had Latin blood in her veins. Sometimes you see exquisite old houses with a great air of poverty and breeding; sometimes the woods part and there are those ornate country mansions, with their peaked roofs shining like a pigeon’s breast with innumerable slates.

Emotions that form, round themselves, break, and disappear, to swell again, are, of course, only to be had in such profusion by exposing oneself to new things, emphatically presented. When a person sits down, as we imagine that Madame Waddington sat down, to describe her life from day to day, she sees none of these outlines; her impression is created by a number of scenes, and some overlap the others. It is not her purpose, although she writes, to treat the matter consciously, conceiving a whole and separating what belongs to it from what does not. Accordingly we take away a pleasant picture from her book, in which somehow the figure of a benevolent country lady is indicated also against a dim landscape. She lived in ‘a fine old Château … a long, perfectly simple, white stone building’ close to the forest of Villers Cotterets. The windows overlooked ‘the great plains of the Oise—big green fields stretching away to the skyline, broken occasionally by little clumps of wood, with steeples rising out of the green’. Her life was very solitary, for the railway was distant, and French people in the country visit little. The evenings, for instance, were stately, but long and sombre; they sat in the big drawing-room, with one lamp in the middle of the room, so that the corners sank into darkness, and Monsieur A. read Molière or some of the old French memoirs aloud, with discretion. Occasionally Madame A., who wore a green shade over her eyes, played Beethoven and Handel, and as the night drew on ‘a mantle of silence seemed to thicken on the house and park’. The roads were all silent, and a branch tapping the pane, or a log shifting, sounded ‘like a canon shot echoing through the long corridor’. Madame Waddington, listening for her husband’s return, could hear the sound of his horse’s hoofs for fifteen minutes before he reached the gate. When she drove out in the daytime to visit some of her neighbours the impression of those lonely nights was confirmed. In the middle of the afternoon you find French ladies seated reposefully at their embroidery frames ‘in the embrasures of the windows’, while the gentleman of the house reads Musset aloud to them. Cake and wine is brought, and the company all sit round, ‘so polite, so stiff’, enduring long periods of silence, ‘when nobody seemed to have anything to say’. ‘Ils ne sont pas de notre monde’ was the phrase with which well-bred ladies swept back all that could disturb the serenity of the circle. Something of this silence one may impute to the neighbourhood of a great forest; to visit or to take the train one must drive for miles along the silent forest roads. The only people one meets are of the kind that steal out in dreams; they come shuffling past you, stare furtively, and disappear, wanting you no more than the foxes do. Madame Waddington, as a mistress responsible for her tenants, asked about some people whom she met, heard that they were poachers, and saw the hut in which they lived; but a lame woman at the door prevented her from entering. ‘Do they really want one to visit them?’ she asks. ‘But if you do, you must be prepared to hear a woman say of her father who sits huddled in a corner, “Cela mange comme quatre, et cela n’est plus bon à rien”.’ Perhaps, to an imaginative mind, the phrase would not be entirely repulsive—there is too much truth in it.

But, if one is going to construct an image of France from Madame Waddington’s book, one will have, undoubtedly, to ignore a great deal of repetition, to make shift with thin material, and to see in a few sentences something more than she sees. Yet there is reason to be grateful when any one will write very simply, both for the sake of the things that are said, and because the writer reveals so much of her own character in her words.

[Times Literary Supplement, Oct 29, 1908]

[]

Letters of Christina Rossetti.

[The Family Letters of Christina Rossetti, ed. William Michael Rossetti (Brown, Langham, 1908).]

Almost all the letters which Mr Rossetti publishes in this volume passed between Christina Rossetti and her brothers. They have therefore certain qualities which interest only if the reader is prepared to take a peculiar interest in the Rossetti family, and they lack almost entirely the obvious qualities which attract us in the letters of distinguished people—they are not remarkable for their wit, nor do they tell us any secrets. But the interest which many readers will feel is surely quite legitimate, for Christina Rossetti was a true artist, and her attitude in private life may well be the same as that which she expressed so exquisitely in her verse. We get it, only, in a different form, obscured of course by all the furniture of existence, but the spirit is the same in both.

She was, as we are not surprised to learn, ‘a highly punctual correspondent’, and wrote to her brothers charming letters, the letters that sisters write when they are anxious to keep pace, proud of confidences, and conscious at the same time of gifts that should be recognised. Little family jokes are used frequently, and go to support the half-ludicrous images of themselves which children start in the nursery and continue in private when they are grown up. ‘Yesterday I made a dirt pudding in the garden, wherein to plant some slips of currant. The unbusinesslike manner in which the process was gone through affords every prospect of complete failure. We have visited the Z. Gardens. Lizards are in strong force, tortoises active, alligators looking up. The weasel-headed armadillo, as usual, evaded us.’ There is nothing profound in it, but it was the same mind that conceived the fantasies of Goblin Market. In one sense the letters contain less than one might expect of the personalities that can make private letters the most intimate form of literature that exists. Unless Mr Rossetti has taken care to omit such passages, there are no disputes, no reflections, no discussion of her own character, or of the characters of other people. But it appears simply enough from what is printed that the reason why Christina Rossetti did not take an interest in these matters was because she had a very clear conception of her own attitude. She knew that she was born with one genuine gift, and that in order to be true to it she must see the world consistently in a certain perspective. ‘I am rejoiced,’ she wrote when young, ‘to feel that my health does really unfit me for miscellaneous governessing.’ She withdrew quite deliberately and, so to speak, with a smile upon her face, from the business of life, and felt, though she would not express it, an infinite difference separating herself and her brother, who were poets, from the crowd of people who were not. She was quite secure in her belief, and all the tremulous qualities of the most modest of maiden ladies are composed by it, so that her figure is at once dignified and curiously distinct. There is no need to say that this impression is taken much more from her opinions upon other things and people than from any judgment of her own upon her gifts.

In the family life we see that she played the part of the solicitous maiden sister, the guardian of family traditions, and the conscientious woman who is careful of her relations’ susceptibilities. On the death of her grandmother, for example, she found herself without black clothes, and wrote that she had still ‘managed to put on nothing contrary to mourning’, a sentence typical of something scrupulous and precise in her nature, which only escapes the charge of pettiness because she was never commonplace. Perhaps, after all, that is the remarkable quality in her letters, for though they are slight in manner and trivial in matter she always contrives to give her subject a turn; she writes a language, without affectation, which seems to be the pick of multitudes of words. Remembering her poems again, it is easy to imagine that the writer was naturally downcast and morbidly devout; ‘seated’, in D.G. Rossetti’s phrase, ‘by the grave of buried hope’. But her letters show that her usual attitude was detached indeed, but exquisitely playful, as though she had a standard by which to judge events and was not likely to exaggerate their importance. If we talk of a standard we mean, in Christina Rossetti’s case above all, an instinctive belief that some things are better than others. But when we have said that she valued most highly an aspect of life that found its only form in poetry, we have said no more than that she was a poet and knew herself for such. She would have added, of course, that she was not a great poet, for did she not answer, when someone urged her to write about ‘politics or philanthropy’—‘It is impossible to go on singing out loud to one’s one-stringed lyre’; if but she was satisfied herself, she was bold to claim her rights, it is something of a “lyric cry”, and such I will back against all skilled labour,’ she wrote to Gabriel, to whom it must have needed courage to write, of one of her poems. When poets sent her their verses again, she could not be made to say that they were good if they were only mediocre; and, considering her tender ways, there is something moving in her decision. The most timid of women will show herself obstinate and heroic though still visibly alarmed in the defence of her children; and Christina Rossetti, one suspects, had that feeling on behalf of her art. The presence of such a feeling is hinted now and again, and it is impossible to mistake the constant presence of her devotion. It dignifies her gentle and rather indolent figure, and suggests irresistibly that to understand what was best in her one must turn to her poems. If the letters have that power, it is surely right that they should have been printed, and we must offer our thanks to Mr Rossetti, for many people would have thought them too slight to be preserved.

[Times Literary Supplement, Nov 12, 1908]

[]

‘Blackstick Papers.’

[Blackstick Papers (Smith, Elder, 1908) by Lady Ritchie—Anne Isabella]

Sir Richard Jebb spoke once of Lady Ritchie’s ‘fairy-like way of viewing life’, and fitly enough she invokes the good Fairy Blackstick to preside over the fresh collection of her papers, Blackstick Papers. They deal with ‘certain things in which she was interested—old books, young people, schools of practical instruction, rings, roses, sentimental affairs, &c.’ But the fairy does more than preside; we are convinced, as we read, that she inspires too. Again and again we put the book down, and exclaim that it is impossible to define the charm, or refer it, as the critic should, to some recognised source. It is far simpler to ascribe it to magic, and to leave it to the spirits themselves to say what magic is. It is true that Lady Ritchie makes use of many things that are not in the least supernatural; she picks up an old book about Haydn, or a new book about George Sand; she stays at a place like Brighton, where we may all stay for ourselves if we wish it. We know the kind of treatment which such themes receive generally at the hands of the essayists; they are learned, prosaic, or sentimental. But Lady Ritchie is none of these things. If we try to discover what her method is we must imagine that she looks out of a window, takes somehow the impression of a gay, amusing world, turns over the leaves of her book and seizes a sentence here and there, remembers something that happened forty years ago, and rounds it all into an essay which has the buoyancy and the shifting colours of a bubble in the sun. The genuine nature of her magic is proved by the truth of much that seems almost too good to be true; she snatches a figure from the past, and shows as George Sand ‘a sort of sphinx in a black silk dress. Her black hair shone dully in the light as she sat motionless; her eyes were fire; it was a dark face, a dark figure in the front of a theatre box.’ Nor is she invariably kind. Comparing modern women with their mothers, she says—‘They may be authors, but they are not such authorities; they may be teachers, but they are no longer mistresses.’ We must remember, when we talk of fairies and magic, that the best of them are not purely visionary, but see something more in common things than we do, and have rather a different standard to judge them by. Lady Ritchie will surprise us again and again by her flitting mockery. It is for this reason that we are so little conscious of the fact that by far the greater part of her book is devoted to the past and dead people—Haydn, Tourgénieff, Bewick, the Misses Berry. There is ‘a vivid and innocent brightness’, to quote Sir Richard again, in her view, so that the past itself wears cheerful colours. It seems sometimes that she is more at home in the earlier days, when people were upright, smiling, and discreet, than in the present; the words of Horace Walpole lie in perfect harmony upon her page, and we imagine that the great ladies of the eighteenth century had something of the manner of her prose. But to praise good breeding is an impertinence; it will be better to quote one passage, and so to give what analysis fails to give. ‘The stately old tree falls, and we miss its spreading shade and comprehending shelter; to the last the birds have sung for us in the branches and the leaves hang on to the end, and old and young gather round still, and find rest and entertainment until the hour comes when all is over. The old branches go, and the ancient stem with so many names and signs carved deep in its bark, and the memories of the storms and sunshines of nearly a century.’

[Times Literary Supplement, Nov 19, 1908]

[]

A Vanished Generation.

[Memoirs of a Vanished Generation. 1813—35. Edited by Mrs Warenne Blake. With an introduction by the Lady St Helier (John Lane, 1909).]

In Captain Mahan’s biography it is said that Nelson insisted that there was a meaning in all written words, and it is surely an admirable text to hang up in a library. We take the great books on trust, or we are happy enough to need no spur; but to deal with the smaller books requires some faith such as Nelson had, lest, in the midst of the downpour, we become dismayed, our eyes closed, our senses numbed, the earth and sky a phantom to us. Yet, if we can but reach the meaning, what a prize awaits us! There are sights, and voices quite audible for a moment; living things behind us and all round; each book peoples some vague region, and instead of a sharp circle of light cast by one pair of eyes on the ground beneath us we walk attended by a whole radiance, as though the sun himself flamed within our heads. A great effort will put that prize within our reach, and a book like A Vanished Generation needs this assurance, for it makes, it must be owned, a severe strain upon our sight. Lady St Helier contributes an introduction, in which she asserts that although the writers were neither well known nor brilliant their letters deserve to be published because they give ‘a delightfully fresh account of the everyday life of their time’. Mrs Blake, who edits them, claims that they are worth reading because they are written by people with a ‘strong sense of duty … who did their best’. The ‘sacred ties of nature’ she fears are loosened in this age, and the present generation may profit by the sight of the ‘sweet and wholesome life’ which was possible to their parents and grandparents. The book is composed, save for the connecting paragraphs, of the letters and diaries of the Knox family from about the year 1813 to the year 1867. The chief characters are Captain the Hon. E.S.P. Knox, r.n., and his son, Thomas Edmond Knox, a captain in the army; but there are also letters from sisters and cousins, fragments of diaries, journals of travels abroad in the early part of the century—the sweepings of a great many old drawers, in short. The time had come, it is plain, which must come to all people who are too scrupulous to burn their letters, when it was necessary to decide what should be done with them. Were they to be tied up and put away, or burnt, or printed? Different reasons must determine; but we cannot pretend that Mrs Blake’s solution—of publication—seems to us in this case entirely the right one. If we look for new lights upon distinguished people we are disappointed; if we look for wit or style we are given something that was never meant to be read outside the schoolroom, and if we dismiss all thoughts of art, and ask simply for human nature in the raw, it must be confessed that the Knox family was in no way extraordinary. But it is still possible to take our stand where, after all, Mrs Blake would have us stand, and to enjoy the spectacle of harmonious family life in the nineteenth century. It is always possible to dub oneself, as she says, ‘a student of human nature’.

Captain E.S.P. Knox, after chasing a certain number of French frigates and having the temporary command of the Eurotas, left the Navy when peace was proclaimed in 1814. He had married Miss Jane Hope Vere, a lady with a ‘slight trim figure, charming hazel eyes, and an expression of great vivacity and sweetness’. He himself was a sturdy man, with a pink and white skin, ‘apparently quite impervious to the weather’, who was in the habit of saying, ‘All for the best.’ They travelled in Italy, a family was born to them; they lived much in Paris, and when the only son Tom was old enough he entered the Army and served with his regiment in Canada. Letters were despatched regularly; a gloom was on the breakfast-table if the mail came in without his sheet; but no disasters overtook him. His sisters, on their side, have nothing but cheerful gossip to impart; how they have danced and had a music lesson, seen a cousin, or (if the worst comes to the worst) buried a dog. ‘Let the melancholy fate of the Duke of Orleans be a warning to you never to jump out of a carriage,’ his mother writes. ‘Do not run into debt but apply to your old father and confide all your little misfortunes to him,’ writes Captain Knox. Such quotations will explain why it is unnecessary to quote at greater length; with such sentences we must construct our picture. But these pages make a definite impression on the mind when thus read together in the lump. We can distinguish the different people from each other; the mother more plaintive, with daughters to marry; the sisters high-spirited and affectionate, but shapeless as young women are shapeless. They move about among cousins and aunts, dim figures with distinguished names, just distant enough to be old-fashioned, but hardly as yet picturesque. It seems very probable that such people were alive in the year 1840; it is comfortable to imagine that the world before our time was so cheerful a place. Much of our history has to do with the deeds of such men and women in the mass; and to read their trivial family letters is like standing on the hearthrug in the firelight and listening to evening gossip. Captain Knox and his son, although they took part in the campaigns and manoeuvres of the great armies and navies, are among the multitudes who have vanished. There is a certain thrill in the spectacle; we see so bright an image of the family, glowing for a minute, in a compact body; they seem too simple to survive; a kind of pathos is on them, because they must go. But to feel this is to feel also that Mrs Blake might have given us more of what we value and saved us much labour had she been artist as well as editor. The book might have been half the size; she might have brought out a distinct shape, according to her conception, by skilful quotation and comment. But her book is another example of the strange methods of modern English biography; you are presented with a great bundle of papers, and bidden, substantially, to make a book for yourself. To arrange or to criticise, to make people live as they lived, is considered unnecessary, or perhaps disrespectful. We feel that there is a spirit in letters which we must not allow to perish, but we are too timid to set it free.

[Times Literary Supplement, Dec 3, 1908]

[]

1909

‘Venice.’

[Venice. Its Individual Growth from the Earliest Beginnings to the Fall of the Republic (6 vols, John Murray, 1906–8) by Pompeo Molmenti. Translated by Horatio F. Brown.]

The first part of Signor Molmenti’s work told the history of Venice from the earliest settlement to the fall of Constantinople. In the four volumes now issued in a translation by Mr Horatio Brown he deals with the Golden Age following the fall of Constantinople, and with the decadence which continued throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and was completed in the eighteenth. He follows as before the history of the ‘individual growth’ of the state, ignoring her fortunes abroad and narrowing his gaze upon the nature of her constitution, and, in particular, upon the customs and characteristics of the people in all ranks and upon all occasions.

We take up the story of Venice at the moment of her fullest life. The contest which had occupied the reign of Doge Foscarr left her with an empire on the mainland, and not only gave her the ascendency over other Italian states, but established her among the powers of Europe. Her policy of ‘wise egoism’ and ‘self-knowledge’, the advantages of her position apart from the world but yet in the centre of it, and the peculiar strength of her constitution set her above her competitors. She had crushed Genoa, she was mistress of the Levant trade, and it seemed as though all these victories were but the prelude to her majestic career as a territorial state. But that, as we know, was not her destiny. She failed to secure her land empire; and, left alone in her struggle against the Turk, she lost her command of the East and spent her strength in vain. The history of Venice after the fifteenth century is the record of foreboding and decay; but at the same time there is no history which so moves us both by its splendour and its tragedy, and the likeness which it bears to the ruin of some great soul. Thanks not only to the learning of Signor Molmenti, but to the vivid way in which he presents his facts, we can make one study supplement the other; we can gaze into streets and workshops and drawing-rooms, and with this insight into the temperament of the people we can understand more clearly their actions abroad.

The first impression no doubt which the reader receives from the opening chapters of The Golden Age is one of surprise and paradox. Venice was supreme, but she was exhausted; we pass from the discovery of the Cape route to the League of Cambray, from the Peace of Passarowitz to the conquest by Napoleon. There is a constant demand for wealth and energy and an increasing failure to meet the demand. And yet it was during this time that the private life of the city was most brilliant and luxurious and that her genius in art and learning reached its prime. One part of the paradox at least can be explained; centuries of prosperous trading had endowed the great families with enormous riches; and when the eastern trade diminished they turned bankers or invested their money in estates upon the mainland. For the moment there was no lack of private wealth, and it was possible to maintain the paradox that war and loss outside and an empty exchequer were consistent with a profusion of splendour within. ‘After the League of Cambray,’ says Mr Brown, ‘the Republic resigned herself to the role of magnificent self-presentation.’ The city itself was decorated and rebuilt during the sixteenth century by ‘a whole army of artists’ drawn into her service from all parts of Italy. Palaces were raised along the Grand Canal, wood was turned to stone and bronze, and such masters as Sansovino and Palladio wrought out their prodigious conceptions unhampered. The islands where the grass still grew were laid with stone, and buildings rose upon them; the streets were paved, and bridges crossed the canals everywhere. The gondola succeeded to the horse, and by the end of the sixteenth century a fleet of ten thousand floated in the waterways, not black as yet, but brilliant with green and purple, trimmed with embroideries, and with gilt upon the prow. Venice became, as Signor Molmenti says, ‘like one vast dwelling-place where the inhabitants could conduct their lives in the open’; the Piazza served for drawing-room, and the great fairs and carnivals were acted in this wonderful apartment with stone for its walls and the sky for ceiling.

The Venetian love of pageantry was stimulated in this age both by the policy of the government, which sought to hide their inner weakness by display, and by that spirit of life which had come to the race, after the austerity of the Middle Ages, later than to the other peoples of Italy. Their houses looked down on spectacles without number; there was a victory to celebrate, or a stone to lay, or some foreign king to entertain. Each crisis in private life, birth, marriage, death, had its formal celebration; processions wound across the Piazza, or there came a great cluster of gondolas down the canal with the Bucentaur in their midst. Signor Molmenti gives the detail of each occasion: we can but compose some picture which shall serve for many. The little black figures of the old prints which cross the Piazza in a narrow file are in truth all cloaked in gold and scarlet; long red staves strike lines across the background; the people crowd and wave like barley in the wind when the coins are flung among them. One imagines a blue sky and the faintest breeze to make the reflections twist in the water. It is easy to conceive the crowd, but not so easy, with one’s cramped modern sense, to conceive the surpassing beauty of details and individuals. Glasses were raised that were blown at Murano and had strange golds and opals in them and spiked seahorses for handles; the tables at which they sat were carved with monsters and chimeras; goblets of gold, chased by a master’s hand, held the sweetmeats; and the women wore stiff robes of velvet, damask or brocade, of rich or pale colours, with buttons of crystal, hairpins of amber, and a myriad of gems. We must imagine a spirit taking form everywhere and expressing in detail and in mass the beauty of Venice and the joy of life in Venice. The Greek and Latin classics came from the Aldine Press; scholars from Constantinople lived in Venice and taught the wonderful dead languages; private people began to store books in ‘cupboards and on shelves of carved walnut’ and the State founded the great library in the magnificent building of Sansovino. But the genius of the time is most fully preserved in its paintings. They hang in our galleries like windows into the majestic past, and display both the body of the time and the purest essence of its spirit. The Golden Age in Venice, it is often said, needed the plastic arts to express it, and Signor Molmenti suggests that there is a relationship between the genius of these pictures and the genius of the Venetian constitution. In painting, ‘the protagonist of the scene is hardly ever an individual, but the crowd’; and in politics ‘the individual was absorbed in the State, which refused independent initiative to the individual, and aimed at co-ordinating the action of each member of the community with the movement of the State’. The private houses were built to frame banquets and assemblies of people; the vast rooms did not cherish an intimate family life or shelter talk between men and women. ‘Most of the treatises which deal with the family abound in moral maxims”, we read. The women led secluded lives of voluptuous calm, and only emerged in their stiff brocades when they were needed as pieces in the pageant. Again and again the State interfered to check extravagance of dress, food, or pageantry, but the nobles preferred in many instances to pay the heavy fines rather than curb their passion for display. Even the tombs of the Renaissance are loaded with the symbols of life; it is rare, says Signor Molmenti, to hear of suicide, and, if so, it is mentioned with a kind of grotesque horror. His remark that ‘the profound melancholy of death finds no expression even in Venetian poetry’ suggests why it is that the Republic produced painters but no great poet. When we think of our own literature at the same period we think not only of a pageant, but of the sleep that rounds it. The ruin, however, was approaching which distorts before it utterly destroys, and the still virile type of the Renaissance relaxed into the ‘fatuous, insolent, servile physiognomy’ of the Seicento. Symptoms of decline showed themselves in public and in private life; there was bribery in the rank of the state officials; the aristocracy wasted fortunes in gambling and refused to practise the trades of their fathers; the guilds suffered from competition and their own conservatism, and foreign ships deserted the port. The arts both of painting and architecture showed the same corruption; the stone was carved into florid clusters of ornament, and the lines were waved incongruously; palaces like the Pesaro, churches like the Salute, are typical of this ‘grotesque Renaissance’, as Ruskin called it.

But as Venice lapsed slowly from her position as a European power, and from her position as the great artist of Europe, she took on another aspect, not less marked than the rest and stamped by a peculiar beauty. She became during the last part of the seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth, the playground of all that was gay, mysterious, and irresponsible. Her likeness to a great dwelling-place increased, for the people were sociable as one large family, ‘with the Doge as grandpapa of all the race’, and the fact that they had no political existence united them in their pleasures. A ball that overflowed its room would dance out into the street. The great majority of the nobles were discouraged from taking any interest in the government, and they spent their energies in toying exquisitely with the trifles of life. They studied the art of deportment and the science of the snuffbox; ‘how to blow the nose, how to sneeze, how to beg from a lady “a pinch of her graces”’. The charms of coffee houses were recognised, and in the drawing-rooms there was talk of art and love and letters between men and women, with some light discussion, as time went on, of revolutionary principles. Conversation, wit, scandal, all the intimate relationships of life, flourished with their appropriate parts in perfection. The manners were exquisite, the dress superb, and Venetian art could still adorn a woman or furnish a drawing-room with inimitable taste. But Venice had more to show than this. She was also the city of dark streets and deep waters; there were houses, ‘in gloomy and far-off recesses of the city’, where one could buy the elixir of life or the philosopher’s stone. The crooked waterways, with their sudden angles and shadows, tempted strange wanderers to haunt them and sheltered loves and crimes. One might meet both Casanova and Cagliostro among the crowd of queer people who walked in the piazza. The history of Venice in the eighteenth century has the fascination of extreme distinction and at the same time of a curious unreality. The sounds and sights of the outer world are to be found here, but only in quaint echoes, as though, in passing through the waters, they had suffered some sea change.

But once more, before she fell silent, Venice reflected her image with the utmost decision. The pictures of Canaletto and Guardi, the comedies of Goldoni remain to describe her both within and without. It is no longer a turbulent spectacle; but when we look into these orderly and luminous canvases we can hardly imagine a greater beauty or regret the loss of the old splendour. For who shall say when it was that Venice touched her greatest heights, or deny that we who enjoy her to-day perceive a beauty unimagined by the people of her Golden Age?

[Times Literary Supplement, Jan 7, 1909]

[]

‘One Immortality.’

[One Immortality (Macmillan, 1909) by H. Fielding Hall. Reprinted: CW.]

There are a certain number of people who share Mr William Watson’s feeling about the world:

I have never felt at home,

Never wholly been at ease—

and are for ever musing upon their discomfort and asking themselves what it means. Some such discontent seems to be the natural lot of poets, and, even when it is vague and fruitless, it is at any rate a step in the right direction—the first step perhaps towards making something better. Thus we can imagine an audience to whom Mr Fielding Hall, the author of One Immortality brings consolation, and we must be careful in dealing with his words to sympathise with the feeling that prompts them. The need for such a book as this, indeed, is not obvious, unless one bears these considerations in mind. It is cast in the form of a novel, but it has nothing in common with the ordinary novel; it is much taken up with general questions upon life and conduct, but it is neither accurate nor profound; and, finally, although one book is called the West and another the East, there is little of that gentle and charming account of Eastern beliefs that gave Mr Hall’s previous books their interest. A number of people travelling to India meet at Venice and become fellow-voyagers for the rest of the journey. Some are happily married, and others unhappily; there are nuns on board the ship, a learned German professor, an Indian girl going home, a certain Mr Holt, and a girl called Miss Ormond. But to supply them with names is to put the picture out of perspective; a name implies substance, passions, and a number of relationships, and Mr Hall’s figures have no more flesh than will cover a single point of view. It is, indeed, a modern version of the old allegory; the men and women are brought together solely in order that one may ask a question and another may answer it. There was never a gentler prophet than Mr Hall, but still it is as a prophet, gifted with the sense of what things are not and what things should be, that he comes among us. He feels that the West has forgotten how to live, but it is difficult to say what this means precisely, or how it is to be reformed. The things that he sees and hears suggest to him meditations and explanations. When he sits in the Piazza at Venice, for example, and hears the band play he reflects that ‘the nation which first learns how to bring back the music to the battle line will sweep the world’. He goes on to dwell upon the modern doctrine of efficiency, and the mistake of thinking that human beings are machines; and then his train of thought swells into a mystic rhapsody in which it is said that ‘all music is a march, a dance, a requiem, or between them … All life is love or war, and ends in death … The sweetest music is the saddest; the least sad is that which drives to war. That is a truth of life.’ If the company in the Piazza had been in the mood for it, these remarks might have led to a prolonged argument, and Mr Hall would have deserved the thanks of the party for setting up a theory to be pulled in pieces. But as it is, the argument must be carried on in silence, and we are hard put to it to find some term which shall express Mr Hall’s form of thought without suggesting that it pretends to be more than it is. The greater part of the book is devoted to a discussion of love; and the different standpoints of men rind women, East and West, religious people, and learned men are touched upon, illustrated, and so turned that they seem to make parts of a simple whole. Is not this the secret of Mr Hall’s popularity? Phrases like ‘marriage is the union of man and woman into one organism’, or ‘the souls of all are part of the World Soul that lives for ever’ have an Eastern charm about them, as though they were uttered by some placid philosopher, sitting in the road way, in his rags. And there is virtue surely in the position of one who takes nothing for granted, and is always ready to discuss the universe.

[Times Literary Supplement, Feb 4, 1909]

[]

More Carlyle Letters.

[The Love Letters of Thomas Carlyle and Jane Welsh ed. Alexander Carlyle (2 vols, John Lane, 1909).]

It is impossible to doubt that the feeling with which we regard Mr and Mrs Carlyle has much changed in the last ten or fifteen years. The gauntlet has been thrown down twice at least, for, by the publication of Mr Froude’s My Relations with Carlyle, and by the introduction which Sir James Crichton-Browne affixed to the New Letters and Memorials, we have been urged to declare ourselves upon one side or upon the other. But the public which observes silently and gives the verdict is less and less inclined to read the letters with a view merely to deciding who was in the right and who was in the wrong. As the material for making a judgment increases it becomes more vain to narrow the question to one such issue; it taxes our powers to the utmost to understand; the more we see the less we can label, and both praise and blame become strangely irrelevant.

Carlyle himself forbade the publication of these letters, but Mr Alexander Carlyle urges that as the prohibition has been disregarded already it is his duty to publish the letters in full, so that ‘every reader will have the full evidence before him, and be in a position to judge for himself’. It is not hard to see that the editor holds strong views of his own, and allows them once or twice to emphasise a phrase in a way that seems to us unnecessary; but we have nothing but gratitude for his work as a whole. It is true that friends and relations must always shudder when the public is admitted, but if they do as Mr Carlyle has done and ‘print practically in full’, they kill the most odious form of curiosity. The lives of Mr and Mrs Carlyle are revealed by the additon of these their most private letters on so vast a scale that to confine them to the limits of a drawing-room is no longer possible. We do not deny the truth of those ‘revelations’ which startled the world when the letters were first published, but when we see them in relation to the rest the facts, if they are still there, are different.

As every one knows, Carlyle was introduced by Edward Irving to Jane Welsh at Haddington in 1821. The letters which fill these volumes were written during the five years that passed between their first meeting and their marriage, Carlyle lent her books; he asked her to write to him, propounding questions such as ‘What do you think of the Lady de Staël?’ which seem to indicate safe lines for their correspondence. From the first she made it clear that she would not have ‘meaning words underlined’. It was his intellect that she admired, and it was her intellect that she would have him admire. The early letters are full of the delights of fame and genius, of high aspirations, of their hero Byron, of the noble works which they mean to write in time. They are not remarkable letters as yet, and this is partly, we may guess, because the bond was an artificial one. Carlyle when he wrote to a girl of twenty was not sure of himself, and felt his way behind the cover of formal sentences exhorting her to diligence and virtue, which shows that he did not see the facts clearly. He took her genius very seriously, and did his best to draw up a programme for the cultivation of it.

I would familiarise myself with whatever great or noble thing men have done or conceived since the commencement of civilisation—that is, I would study their history, their philosophy, their literature—endeavouring all the while not merely to recollect but to apply, not merely to have in my possession, but to nourish myself with all these accumulated stores of the Past, and to strengthen my hands with them for adding to the stores of the Future.

Their genius, their ambitions, was the one bond which they could recognise. But as they learn to know each other better the tone of the letters becomes bolder. Even though they were never to speak of love, they find that they have much else to speak of, and gradually their first vague raptures give way to a more definite relationship; they discover that they are remarkable people—‘two originals for certain … it is very kind in Fortune to have brought us together; otherwise we might have gone on single-handed to the end of time.’ She is still ‘my dear pupil’, who is urged to write a drama upon Boadicea, an essay upon friendship,” or to combine in a novel; but the master’s care was not for the mind only.

I continue to lament this inordinate love of fame which agitates you so … But it is not merely in an intellectual point of view that I congratulate myself upon the progress you are making. As a woman, it strikes me that your improvement is not less marked.

Miss Welsh, as she says herself, was ‘powerfully influenced’ in life and character from the moment that she knew such a man, and from her letters we can conceive what the nature of the influence was. They are constrained, anxious, sometimes even fretful. She had often, we can imagine, to define to herself the precise nature of this influence—to assure herself that it was ‘intellectual’ merely, and that one could not allow a man who was lacking in elegance, and was the son of a stonemason, to tyrannise over one’s finer feelings. She advanced absurd little fences which were to mark the boundaries; she made him realise her rank and her prospects, and that his manners in the drawing-room were clumsy. She talked of literature until, when he came to know her better, he had to warn her against ‘too great an isolation from the everyday interests and enjoyments of life’, and to remind her of the ‘warm variegated world’ and of the ‘solid living concerns of our fellow-creatures’ which it is not wise to neglect. It is as strange to think that Mrs Carlyle ever needed that warning as to think that her mind was once engrossed with thoughts of her own fame and writings. To some extent, no doubt, she kept to that pose in writing to him because it was the safe one, but it is also clear that she was still unripe and chill. The society of Haddington was not large, and it was easy—too easy, she began to think—to be both genius and beauty there. In taking Carlyle for her friend she was admitting a force that would be checked by no limit save a natural one, and to resist it would compel her to know and to use all her powers. In that lay both the joy and the danger. Lovers she had in plenty, but none that felt her charm as Carlyle felt it, and yet criticised her at the same time. She was discontented and unable to work at home, and his letters, if they increased her discontent, brought her ‘consolation’. Oh! you have no notion how great a blessing our correspondence is to me! … I owe you much! feelings and sentiments that ennoble my character, that give dignity, interest, and enjoyment to my life. In return I can only love you, and that I do, from the bottom of my heart,’ she wrote in 1823. To this he answered in words which hint at marriage without (for that would have risked too much) proposing it. Jane Welsh withdrew at once; he had misunderstood her, she said; she loved him, but could love without thought of marriage. ‘All the best feelings of my life are concerned in loving you’, but the sentiment was ‘calm’, ‘delightful’, ‘unimpassioned’.

It was clear, however, as Carlyle wrote but a few months later, that ‘things cannot stand as they are’. But the quick obvious changes which lead to the union of ordinary people were not possible for them. We may analyse their feeling and trace it to the intellect, or to pride, or to selfishness, but the further we read the less we trust to definitions; in their case love demanded a knowledge as complete as was possible of themselves and of each other. The change, then, that comes over them seems to be not so much in their feeling for each other as in their knowledge of themselves. They were both people of extraordinary capacity, and it seemed again and again, as the process of development and revelation went on, that it was not tending to marriage. The change naturally was more marked in his character than in hers, and the letters which began so respectfully with talk of her genius and future became more and more occupied with his own. The ‘genius’ which they had both claimed—‘for there is a kind of genius in us both’—was beginning to work in him, and not perhaps as she had expected it to work. Indeed, if we are to understand the nature of their alliance, it is necessary to follow his career, for it became obvious that if she ever married him she would have to adapt herself to fit it. Carlyle was never blind to facts, nor did he flinch from speaking them; and he laid before her repeatedly and with vehement insistence what had come to seem to him the truth. He was beginning to realise what was in him, and what would be his fate. The burden of his letters changes. ‘Do you know this as it is? Do you dare to front it? How in the name of wonder dare you think of marrying me?’ What was it that she was to know, and to dare?

What is my love of you or any one? A wild peal through the desolate chambers of my soul, forcing perhaps a bitter tear into my eyes, and then giving place to silence and death? You know me not; no living mortal knows me … seems to know me … I can never make you happy. Leave me then!

And again, if she thinks of happiness she must know that

Self is a foundation of sand … Fools writhe and wriggle and rebel at this; their life is a little waspish battle against all mankind for refusing to take part with them; and their little dole of reputation and sensation, wasting more and more into a shred, is annihilated at the end of a few beggarly years, and they leave the earth without ever feeling that the spirit of man is a child of Heaven and has thoughts and aims in which self and its interests are lost from the eye, and the Eagle is swallowed up in the brightness of the sun, to which it soars.

It is true that she hesitated, said that she was not ‘in love’ with him, and could imagine a love that swept through her like a torrent. It is here, too, that the reader also hesitates, for even without our knowledge of the future it is clear that two ways were open to her. If she hesitated it was because she realised the sacrifice; if, however, she consented, it was because ‘one loves you in proportion to the ideas and sentiments which are in oneself; according as my mind enlarges and my heart improves, I become capable of comprehending the goodness and greatness which are in you, and my affection for you increases’. And then again, ‘Are you believing? I could easily convince you with my eyes and my kisses; but ink-words are so ineloquent!’

How shall we, when ‘ink-words’ are all that we have, attempt to make them explain the relationship between two such people? She married him, and if it was a tragedy, yet a study of their letters convinces us that it was a noble tragedy. They are not the wittiest or the best letters that their authors wrote, but they are among the most interesting, because they show us (as it seems) why it was necessary that the story should follow the course it followed, and make us respect the man and woman who kept to their parts more profoundly as we understand them better. ‘How terrible,’ wrote Jane Welsh in the last letter before her marriage, ‘and yet full of bliss.’

[Times Literary Supplement, Apr 1, 1909]

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‘Gentlemen Errant.’

[Gentlemen Errant. Being the Journeys and Adventures of Four Noblemen in Europe during the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (John Murray, 1909) by Mrs Henry Cust]

The object of Mrs Cust has been to select four narratives from the old German chronicles, relating the adventures of German noblemen, little known to fame, and by ‘suppressing or compressing their more “prolixious and Teutonic” divagations to render them agreeable reading’. She speaks modestly of her own work, for not only is it a severe task to extract the pith out of crabbed and verbose writers, but her notes and her long list of contemporary and modern authorities prove how much she has read round her subject before offering the results to her readers. Indeed, were we to complain, we should urge that her modesty has been excessive. Of my own part in this book,’ she writes, ‘not much need be said.’ If we had had more of her ‘own part’, we should not venture the one criticism which the study of her work suggests. We feel occasionally that the adventures of the four gentlemen are not of sufficient interest to be followed so carefully, and that the scrupulous itinerary is sometimes so bald as to be tedious. We should have chosen either that Mrs Cust had furnished us with some richer background of history, or should have allowed herself the liberty which her learning makes a safe one, of interpreting the chronicles instead of piecing them together. A greater freedom might after all have suited the subject better, for each of these four gentlemen had once an extraordinary vitality. It did not, it is true, lift them much above the level of other men, or bring them into contact with any of the great movements of the century; but that they were obscure increases in some respects the interest of their story.

The hundred odd years (1465—1588) during which they lived were momentous years for Europe, and it is curious to see how men could live through them in ignorance of the change, and also how it affected them. There is, for example, the Lord Lev of Rozmital and Blatna, who set forth in the year 1465 on a ‘grand expedition throughout the world’, his purpose being, it is said, partly political, but also religious and merely inquisitive. He went through France to England, from England to Spain and Portugal, from Spain to Italy, and so home to Bohemia. The mediaeval journey is like the progress of a fly which stops to investigate every knob, every tassel, every drop of water. On the approach of Rozmital and his company of forty ‘knights, nobles, bannerets, and serving men’ an escort was sent out to meet them, if the ruler of the town were friendly; they were feasted, served with wine ‘both red and white in mighty golden cans’, presented with jewels and horses, and invited to display themselves in some great tourney. At each town the process is repeated, until we get the impression that the towns of that period were small but brilliant treasure houses set down in a girdle of stone walls in the midst of a savage country. The ‘marvellous rich and busy city of Bruges’, for example, housed the ‘wares of the known world’. Oranges and lemons from Castile … wines and fruits from Greece … spices and confections from Alexandria and all the East, “even as though one were there”; furs from the Black Sea … all Italy with its brocades, its silken stuffs and its armour.’ The visitors were generally shown over the treasury where gold and silver and jewels were hoarded; they were shown the parks full of wild beasts, and invited perhaps to choose some precious trinket as token of their visit. They saw the ‘great ships, galleons, and cogs’ of the English fleet lying at anchor off Sandwich, and in London they were admitted to watch Queen Elizabeth Woodville at her dinner. ‘And she ate for three hours and many costly meats, whereof it would take too long to write. And all were silent; not a word was spoken.’

This picture of the Queen seated on her golden chair, with her mother and sisters sitting or kneeling far below her, is somehow portentous and compels us to consider. The narrative, we must remember, was written by two scribes who rode in Lord Lev’s train for the purpose of recording his adventures. They are not, therefore, concerned with his political mission, nor is it their business to speculate. What interests them mainly is the day’s adventure, what they see, what legends, miracles, and strange customs they hear tell of. If we find the scene sometimes dull and curiously flat, we must remember Mrs Cust’s claim that we are seeing the age as the writers saw it, and that we have first-hand material for whatever judgment we may pass. We find, then, that the mediaeval chronicler was a simple, matter-of-fact man, who was almost entirely occupied with the things he saw, and recorded the solemn ceremonies of the age (as we have seen) with perfect faith. Whenever something appears to be out of the way, a legend is invented to account for it; the mind seems content to register and never to inquire. The result, then, is a curious mixture of literal catalogue and vague credulity. The genuine charm which the chronicles possess is surely the result of the contrast. The passions and joys of the travellers are simple and coarse; their reflections are childlike; their eyes are drawn like a child’s to bright colours and strange objects; but, on the other hand, they are able to widen their horizons and flood the world with mystery until all things—the romance of the Faerie Queen, the romance of the early Shakespeare plays—seem possible. Standing on the cliff at Finisterre, they look out to sea and tell each other tales of the phantom islands that have sprung out there, where the houses are of gold and silver and the roofs of flowers, and of ships that had sailed away with vigorous young men and returned in two years’ time with a crew of withered grey beards. In addition, there is for the modern reader a charm in these narratives which presumably the chroniclers neither felt nor attempted to convey. The land which they describe (the land, say, between London and Poole) is empty and unfamiliar to us; the adventures of a man on horseback in an age when the roads were few and dangerous have a wonderful sincerity of detail that convinces us, like a story by Defoe.

But it is more interesting perhaps when the chronicler becomes biographer and attempts to describe a hero. There is the life of Wilwolt von Schaumburg, written by Eyb in 1507, ‘the oldest biography of a German nobleman and commander of Landsknechts at present known’. He was a page in the train of the Emperor Frederick the Third; he learnt the art of war under Duke Charles of Burgundy; finally, he became a professional soldier, ready to serve any master who had need of him. It is not necessary to follow the story of the innumerable ‘battles, sieges, jousts, and courses’, which he carried through so triumphantly that his biographer likens him to one of the ‘ancient knights of the Round Table’. The impression that one gets after all these years, is not of a man but of a type, once held admirable and once no doubt necessary. The forests of Germany swarmed with cut-throats; the town walls were besieged with ponderous castles of wood; moats separated knights from their ladies; and ropes weighted with a great knob of wax were let down to them; steep walls, storms that drive the ship on to the enemies’ lands, clouds dropping over the moon at the critical moment take part in the struggle of man with man; they seem to get between any rational human relationship, to distort it, and make it picturesque. Eyb’s ‘perfect knight’ then was versed in all the crafts which do battle with these obstacles, and we must endow him further with a kind of simple heroic beauty both of person and of nature. The death of Count William of Henneberg, who died in a village inn on his way to Italy, shows us at once the beauty and the barbarity of this ideal. He called for a candle and seized it ‘even as though it were a lance’ and defied death in these words, ‘Thou evil enemy, thou hast no hold upon me, and I will overcome thee with this spear;’ he then drank deep, clasped his crucifix, and prayed to God; those who stood round said they had never beheld a ‘more reasonable ending by any man in all our time’. There is beauty in that; we feel, for an instant, what kind of faith drove men on, like people in a mist, through that dreary age of bloodshed and brutality. But when all is said this hero of Eyb’s remains a mythical personage; the ideal which the chronicler has in his mind implies a world so crude, so barbarous, and so inhuman that we must look upon it as a spectacle in which we have no part. ‘Few things’, writes Mrs Cust, ‘are more astonishing … than the strange blend of penury and splendour that constantly appears in the annals of fifteenth-century knighthood.’ She refers, of course, to their dress and furniture, but it is also true of their point of view. They have a certain greatness of soul and are incredibly callous at the same time. They travel with a company of gorgeous knights, and seven of them use the water in a wine jar for a bath; they excel in courage and have such blunt perceptions that the spectacle of bloodshed is a treat to which men and women flock greedily. In their love affairs they were either frankly animal, or, if the diplomatic courtship of the Palsgrave Frederick is to be taken as an example, made them an excuse for indulging in forms and ceremonies that are unspeakably tedious to us.

The last of Mrs Cust’s studies, ‘An Epic of Debts’, is in some ways the most interesting of the four. It is taken from the memoirs of Hans von Schweinichen, who served six dukes of Liegnitz and brought his story from the last half of the sixteenth century down to the year 1602. The ducal court of Liegnitz was the home of a strange race, sprung from the Piasts of Poland, who only ruled the land in order to scrape money from it, and by the time that Hans entered their service had laid their house heavily in debt. It was his duty to travel round with his master, begging money, pacifying creditors, and trying to preserve still some show of princely state. Whenever they managed to raise a few crowns they were lavished at once upon fresh trappings or a splendid feast. But there is a note in this chronicle which we have not heard before. It is a note of ridicule and comedy; the portentous ceremonies of an earlier age seem to be burlesqued in this one. There are still the old embassies, the banquetings, and the sieges; but ‘three hundred and twenty-five aged rams, so old that none other would buy them’, serve the ducal feast; and the great ‘butter war’ of Liegnitz, when the town was besieged by the Imperial army, harmed only the cows upon the ramparts. Do we trace here the rude echo of that spirit of joy which, according to a famous historian, characterises the great men of a great age? At any rate, the attitude of the world has changed, even in small German courts, since Lord Lev of Bohemia set out on his travels; the Renaissance has come to its full splendour, and these obscure lives have somehow flitted on the verge of it. To combine the two stories, the story of a country and the story of an individual, throws a new light on each of them, and it is the great charm of Mrs Cust’s book that it not only excites a thousand speculations, but gives us sound matter to make them of.

[Times Literary Supplement, Apr 15, 1909]

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Caroline Emelia Stephen.

The death of Caroline Emelia Stephen will grieve many who knew her only from her writing. Her life had for years been that of an invalid, but she was wonderfully active in certain directions—she wrote, she saw her friends, she was able occasionally to read a paper to a religious society, until her final illness began some six weeks ago. Her books are known to a great number of readers, and it is not necessary here to dwell upon their contents. The Service of the Poor was published in 1871, Quaker Strongholds in 1890, The First Sir James Stephen in 1906, and Light Arising in 1908. A few words as to her life and character may interest those who had not the happiness of knowing her personally. She was born in 1834, and was the daughter of Sir James Stephen, Undersecretary for the Colonies, and of his wife, Jane Catherine Venn, daughter of the Rector of Clapham. She was educated, after the fashion of the time, by masters and governesses, but the influence which affected her most, no doubt, was that of her father, always revered by her, and of her home, with its strong Evangelical traditions. Attendance upon her mother during her last long illness injured her health so seriously that she never fully recovered. From that date (1875) she was often on the sofa, and was never again able to lead a perfectly active life. But those who have read her Quaker Strongholds will remember that the great change of her life took place at about this time, when, after feeling that she ‘could not conscientiously join in the Church of England Service’ she found herself ‘one never-to-be-forgotten Sunday morning … one of a small company of silent worshippers’. In the preface to that book she has described something of what the change meant to her; her written and spoken words, her entire life in after-years, were testimony to the complete satisfaction it brought her.

Her life was marked by little outward change. She lived at Malvern for some time, but moved in 1895 to Cambridge, where she spent the last years of her life in a little cottage surrounded by a garden. But the secret of her influence and of the deep impression she made even upon those who did not think as she did was that her faith inspired all that she did and said. One could not be with her without feeling that after suffering and thought she had come to dwell apart, among the ‘things which are unseen and eternal’ and that it was her perpetual wish to make others share her peace. But she was no solitary mystic. She was one of the few to whom the gift of expression is given together with the need of it, and in addition to a wonderful command of language she had a scrupulous wish to use it accurately. Thus her effect upon people is scarcely yet to be decided, and must have reached many to whom her books are unknown. Together with her profound belief she had a robust common sense and a practical ability which seemed to show that with health and opportunity she might have ruled and organised. She had all her life enjoyed many intimate friendships, and the dignity and charm of her presence, the quaint humour which played over her talk, drew to her during her last years many to whom her relationship was almost maternal. Indeed, many of those who mourn her to-day will remember her in that aspect, remembering the long hours of talk in her room with the windows opening on to the garden, her interest in their lives and in her own; remembering, too, something tender and almost pathetic about her which drew their love as well as their respect. The last years of her life among her flowers and with young people round her seemed to end fittingly a life which had about it the harmony of a large design.

[Guardian, Apr 21, 1909]

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The Opera.

The Opera season is upon us, and for some weeks the programme from which a selection will be made has lain under discussion. No one, of course, is satisfied; but then universal satisfaction could only be obtained if we all thought alike. As it is, the Grand Opera Syndicate has to consider a variety of tastes, and the ambiguous state of mind which their list indicates hints at the varieties of the public taste. We shall have Artnide and La Traviata, Die Walküre and Pelléas et Mélisande to choose between. From these hints we may arrange the public in groups, something after this fashion. There are numbers who prefer Traviata to Walküre; there are some who disapprove of opera altogether, but, go, cynically enough, for the sake of what they term its bastard merits; and there is a third party which opposes Gluck to Wagner.

This last is the difference of opinion most worthy of discussion, because each side takes the Opera seriously, and finds fault with its rivals’ theory of the art. It is an old dispute, of course; but its survival shows that the difference is profound, and a glance at the views expressed may throw light upon other divisions in the public mind. Certain differences lie on the surface: thus, the lover of Gluck will point out that his master deals with emotions that are far from ordinary experience; they express themselves more fittingly in movement and colour than in speech. It is true that his music is in close relation with the emotions of the actors, but these emotions are not essentially dramatic, and the music raises in us emotions of a general character which cannot be referred to the experiences of a particular person. So nice is the correspondence between the music and the emotions which it expresses that they seem to be caused by the music itself, and only to be reinforced by the men and women on the stage. In short, the mysterious shapes, dances, and exquisite melody which here come miraculously together produce a perfect whole of which the parts seem to embody a beauty which we could realise by no other means. But with Wagner it is very different: not only does he express human emotions with far greater closeness than Gluck, but these emotions are of the most pronounced character; they flash out in men and women, as the story winds and knots itself, under the stress of sharp conflict. The music which follows them and expresses them excites the strongest sympathy in us. And yet, swept away as we are at some moments, there are others when we seem to be dropped again. It is that there is some cleavage between the drama and the music? Music (it may be) raises associations in the mind which are incongruous with the associations raised by another art; the effort to resolve them into one clear conception is painful, and the mind is constantly woken and disillusioned. Something like this, we imagine, is the meaning of the gentleman who leaves the opera-house on Wagner nights protesting, ‘This is not music.’

But then there can be no doubt that Wagner is incomparably the more popular of the two, and for this among other reasons: his story and his characters appeal to people who would never listen to music in a concert-room. They find a Wagner opera much the same as a play, but easier to follow, because the emotions are emphasised by the music. They find the men and women much like themselves, only with a wonderful capacity for feeling things. How many, as the opera goes on, see themselves in the place of Tristan and Iseult, are delighted with the depth of their own capacities, but feel little sympathy with the passages where they cannot undertake the parts? Strange men and women are to be found in the cheap seats on a Wagner night; there is something primitive in the look of them, as though they did their best to live in forests, upon the elemental emotions, and were quick to suspect their fellows of a lack of ‘reality’, as they call it. They find a philosophy of life in the operas, hum ‘motives’ to symbolise stages in their thought, and walk off their fervour on the Embankment, wrapped in great black cloaks. There are further the scholarly Wagnerians, detecting ‘motives’ by the flash of their electric lamps, and instructing humble female relatives in the intricacies of the score. And finally there is the true enthusiast, who may include or reject all these reasons for admiring his master, but declares that the opera as he wrote it is the last and highest development of musical art.

If it is true that the reason which attracts most people to the Wagner operas is that they find there real men and women with passions like our own, it is also true that this very quality repels others. Mme Tetrazzini in the mad scene in Lucia is an ideal to great numbers. To begin with, it is impossible to conceive how she does it; and then her notes are flawless; but, above all, the combination of exquisite clothing, madness, melody, and death is irresistible. It is just the world for men and women who are by nature or calling of a shrewd practical disposition in the daytime. The ideas are simple but highly romantic, and they are set out with the utmost luxury. There is more than one opinion, however, about Italian opera; and among the audience no doubt one could find some elderly old-fashioned gentlemen recalling the days of Malibran and Mario, ‘when singing was an art’. The Opera to them is merely the occasion for a number of beautiful airs, without any dramatic connexion, upon which the prima donna lavishes all her skill.

These are but a few points of view, but the variety seems to show that there is, at any rate, no general idea as to the true nature of the Opera, and that those who believe it to be a serious artistic form are much in the minority. The words ‘The Opera’ alone call up a complex vision. We see the immense house, with its vast curved sides, its soft depths of rose colour and cream, the laces hanging down in loops from the boxes, and the twinkle of diamonds within. We think of this: of the hum and animation when the pyramid of light blazes out and all the colours move; and of the strange hush and dimness when the vistas of the stage are revealed and the voices mingle with the violins. Undoubtedly the great dome which has risen so pompously among the cabbages and slums shelters one of the oddest of all worlds—brilliant, beautiful, and absurd.

[The Times, Apr 24, 1909]

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Art and Life.

[Laurus Nobilis: Chapters on Art and Life (John Lane, 1909) by Vernon Lee]

There is in everything that Vernon Lee writes an emotional quality which makes it particularly hard to criticise her work. Again, in the present book, we feel her enthusiasm; and that somewhat vague sensation is perhaps the most definite thing that we take away from her writing. On this occasion she wishes to lay stress upon three ‘coincidences’, as she calls them—‘that between development of the aesthetic faculties and the development of the altruistic instincts; that between development of a sense of the higher harmonies of universal life; and, before everything else, the coincidence between the preference for aesthetic pleasures and the nobler growth of the individual’.

In the main few people will deny that these coincidences exist, but difficulties begin when we have to define our meaning. In the first place, who is going to say what aesthetic beauty is? Here, at any rate, is Vernon Lee’s definition: ‘Beauty is that mode of existence of visible, audible, or thinkable things which imposes on our contemplating energies rhythms and patterns of unity, harmony, and completeness; and thereby gives us the foretaste and the habit of higher and more perfect forms of life.’ If we accept this definition, we may find fault with the application. As Vernon Lee applies it, for example, the works of Wagner are said to have less of this quality than the works of Handel. But, setting aside applications for the moment, we must agree in our definition if we are to agree in our estimate of the influence of beauty and art upon life, and to define this, after all, is the main purpose of Vernon Lee’s work. If aesthetic beauty is to affect other qualities in the human being the emotion which we get from beauty must in some way induce us (for example) to do right. She establishes the connection by conceiving that there is a power outside ourselves, which is, as Plato has it in the Symposium, ‘the essence of beauty’. The effect of this ‘real beauty’ is to make us aware of some of ‘the immense harmonies of which all beauty is the product, of which all separate beautiful things are, so to speak, the single patterns happening to be in our line of vision, while all around other patterns connect with them, meshes and meshes of harmonies spread out, outside our narrow field of momentary vision, an endless web like the constellations which, strung on their threads of mutual dependence, cover and fill up infinitude’. We cannot perceive beauty through the senses without its awakening other harmonies within us, which are a part of the Divine harmony outside of us. A man who loves beauty in painting, therefore, will be more alive to moral beauty also; he will be a better citizen than a man without the aesthetic sense.

Further, as whatever is in harmony with the absolute harmony satisfies our innate sense of harmony more completely, it also fulfils our needs more completely, for ‘attention is rendered difficult by lack of harmony’, and therefore a beautiful object is also more useful to us, by reason of its beauty. A Greek pot which ‘embodies the same visible rhythm of being’ as a Greek temple was more useful because it was more harmonious than a modern jug turned off by a machine; and, following this train of reasoning, it is easy to see how the degeneracy of the moderns is both proved and accounted for. But these theories, which bring into force a power outside ourselves, are not to be disputed because one has to deal with intuitions. As far as we can judge, the qualities that constitute a ‘harmony’ and ‘real beauty’ may be different to different people, and it is only when we come to apply these theories that we are upon sure ground. Thus it is said that a love of beauty will bring about a love of simplicity and usefulness, because the beauty ‘of people working in a field … is enhanced by their being common and useful’. But the fact that they are common and useful may not increase their beauty at all; and, if this is so, then we can appreciate their beauty to the full without any love of the qualities that accompany it. The school which Vernon Lee would attack, therefore, is the school which has for its catchword ‘Art for art’s sake,’ and allows no connection between aesthetic beauty and beauty of other kinds. The vagueness and occasional inconsistency of Vernon Lee’s arguments seem to arise from a desire to account for things logically without defining her terms sufficiently, and at the same time to prove that they are all pieces in a Divine system which the reason cannot appreciate. It will be remembered how, when one is reading Plato, there comes a moment, after pages of question and answer, when the constructive part of the dialogue is given us, very often in a myth or in the words of some wise woman. The device makes us realise that we are no longer arguing, but that we are listening to something beyond the reach of argument, now that we have gone as far as reason will take us. That is the point where Vernon Lee begins, with very little attempt to make the long ascent which leads to the view; and the result is that her statements have none of the Divine impersonality which stamps the myths and visions of Plato, but they are expressions of individual opinion. The very qualities of her style get in the way of any clear sight of the matter which she discusses; images and symbols, unless they spring from a profound understanding, illustrate not the object but the writer.

But if Vernon Lee lacks the temper of the great aesthetic critic, she has many of the gifts of a first-rate disciple. She has read Plato and Ruskin and Pater with enthusiasm because she cares passionately for the subjects they deal with. Moreover, although we may doubt her conclusions or admit that they bewilder us, her exposition is full of ingenuity, and has often the suggestive power of brilliant talk. One may not make things more clear by talking about them, but one can infect others with the same desire.

[Times Literary Supplement, Aug 5, 1909]

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‘Masques and Phases.’

[Masques & Phases by Robert Ross (Arthur L. Humphreys, 1909).]

It is true that Mr Robert Ross’s Masques and Phases is made out of tiny fragments, ‘like an old patchwork quilt,’ as he says, yet we seem to discover in the last and longest fragment an eminence from which to survey the rest. Here, at least, we come upon that ‘vein of high seriousness’ which he claims for himself, and may take it for a text. In art, he says, there is no such thing as decay; genius, when repressed on one side, springs out on another. Thus, while we talk of decay, Mr John, Mr Shannon, and Mr Rothenstein are among us; in another art we find Mr Granville Barker, Mr Galsworthy, and Mr Masefield; there are also Mr Shaw, Mr Kipling, and Mr Wells. With such names ranged before one, his contention may not seem bold; and yet, though people pick out single names for praise, and it is common to compare one generation with another, very few live in the present and believe in it as Mr Ross does.

From books it seems that artists in any great movement were a little body, made one by a single aim. The history of literature as we look back seems to fall asunder into chapters. But at the present moment we can detect no school turning the talent of the age upon one subject; either our fathers did not state the truth with sufficient emphasis for us to demolish it, or we have no clear view of our own desire. Happily, the more one reads of books the more one distrusts the history of them; the more likely it appears that they were written in separate garrets, from different points of view, and that our classifications are only to be made from a height and with very nervous fingers. The truth that Mr Ross perceives seems, then, to be the most important; whatever shape it will wear in the end, we must know that there is a movement going on among us, and that we live as hotly as our ancestors. This is the spirit that exhilarates us in Mr Ross’s essays and gives them a kinship; but, naturally, one does not always agree with him, and sometimes one docs not even take his points. There is an allegory, for instance, in which we find the following passage:

Far off Sir Bedivere [Sir William Richmond] sees Lyonesse submerged; Camelot-at-Sea has capitulated after a second siege to stronger forces. The new Moonet is high in the heaven and a dim Turner-like haze has begun to obscure the landscape and soften the outlines. Under cover of the mist the hosts of Mordred MacColl, en-Taté with victory, are hunting the steer in the New English Forest…. Hark, the hunt (not the Holman Hunt) is up in Caledon (Glasgow); they have started the shy wilson steer: they have wound the hornel; the lords of the International, who love not Mordred overmuch, are galloping nearer and nearer. Sir Bedivere can see their insolent penells waving black and white flags: and the gamekeepers and beaters (critics) chant in low vulgar tones:

When we came out of Glasgow town

There was really nothing at all to see

Except Legros and Professor Brown,

But now there is Guthrie and Lavery.

One can guess, of course; but, like a paper in a college magazine, its true meaning is to be enjoyed only by those who are behind the scenes; they will enjoy it all the more no doubt because we, the public, are outside. This is true of a great many of Mr Ross’s essays, and it is the defect of his otherwise delightful habit of discussing the living as though they were the dead. We are flattered to be told so much; at the same time, feeling that we are not really initiated, it is natural to protest that this is not the whole of life, nor (since it excludes us) the best of it. There are essays, however, which do not depend upon allusion for their wit—essays upon Simeon Solomon, Aubrey Beardsley, and Walter Pater; and these have the same qualities of lightness and grace, while they trip us up less often. Will it seem inconsistent with what we have said of Mr Ross’s modernity if we now insist that his style, an important part of him, belongs to yesterday rather than to the present? The Yellow Book, Aubrey Beardsley, Oscar Wilde, with their distinction and their limitations, are of yesterday, and it is with them that Mr Ross seems to dwell, the pale shade of Walter Pater in their midst, controlling their revels. ‘In the glens of Parnassus there are hidden flowers always blooming’—if one were to make out a creed for Mr Ross that would be the substance of it. But in looking for beauty one must not take oneself too seriously, and one must above all find the spectacle perpetually amusing. How highly one ought to rate this last quality we do not know; but we should place it first among Mr Ross’s gifts. The obvious thing and the important thing to say about his book is that it makes very pleasant reading.

[Times Literary Supplement, unsigned, Oct 28, 1909]

[]

A Cookery Book.

[The Cookery Book of Lady Clark of Tillypronie. Arranged and edited by Catherine Frances Frere (Constable & Co., 1909).]

Independently of the knowledge they convey, cookery books such as The Cookery Book of Lady Clark of Tillypronie, arranged and edited by Catherine Frances Frere, are delightful to read. A charming directness stamps them, with their imperative, ‘Take an uncooked fowl, and split its skin from end to end’; and their massive common sense which stares frivolity out of countenance. Then, apart from the wonderful suggestive power of the words they deal in—Southdown mutton, hares, jugged venison, fresh strawberries—it is pleasant to think of herbs growing on moors, hares running in the stubble, spices brought, with bales of embroidery, from the Indies; and the strings of words themselves often have a beauty such as poets aim at. ‘Strain it and sweeten to taste with sugar honey or candied Eringo root … add a few cloves, whole pepper, salt, a bay-leaf, a sprig of thyme, one of marjoram, and some parsley … Then a finger-glass and rose and orange water poured over the guests’ hands.’ Not only are the furs and fruits beautiful in themselves, as they lie heaped together on a Dutch canvas, with a thin Venetian glass among them and a necklace of silver balls drooping over the corner of the table, but it is a relief to think of anything so practical as cookery. The cook gets something done every day; she has no time to ask why she cooks, or to question the ultimate effect upon the world; the plainest cooks are happier than most artists in that they have one dish which they do to perfection—a work of genius in its way. Sir John Clark’s anxiety lest the reader should infer that because his wife was interested in cookery, she was a ‘mere housewife’ seems to us misplaced. It is a genuine art after all, calling not only for skill, but for virtues of character; and the fact that one is interested in any subject, whatever it may be, makes it all the more likely that one is interested in others. From a glance at those ‘three thousand pages of manuscript’, scored ‘like a shepherd’s plaid’, from which Miss Frere has compiled the present book, we can see that to Lady Clark the kitchen was only one ‘department’ of life; the library was another. Anecdotes, rhymes, names of French plays, and new books to be read, quotations like the quotation from Voltaire—‘Tout est perdu quand on digère mal; c’est l’estomac qui fait les heureux’—crowd into the corners of the recipes. Then, too, she was cosmopolitan, for, when her husband was in the Diplomatic Service, she had the chance of knowing many people and of sampling the cookery of Europe. ‘When any dish interested her’ she made inquiries of the artist, who, touched by her intelligence, told her what she wanted; if this was impossible, she ‘sketched’ her impressions in a notebook. Thus, as Miss Frere says, Lady Clark ‘may be said to have focussed much of the best cookery of Europe in her collection’; India and Turkey each yielded her something. Royal ladies and ambassadors contributed to the book. There is a poet’s pudding—the poet Rogers’ pudding—otherwise called lemon pudding. ‘… brown it with browning, Lady Clark commands cryptically on one occasion. ‘Do not scruple to add rabbits if it suits a somewhat empty larder’ is an aside under goose pie; and then there is a sentence which reads like an aphorism, ‘When a pig is sacrificed for future bacon, there is still a good deal for present consumption.’ But the housekeeper confronted in the chill early hours with the formidable ‘What shall we have to-day, Ma’am?’ will rather be assured that Lady Clark’s book is full of suggestions for small houses and simple tables, which the ordinary cook will accept gratefully and can carry out triumphantly. In saying this we shall have the support of a number of witnesses, for Lady Clarke’s wisdom, copied and passed from hand to hand (like the songs of the early minstrels), lies in many a kitchen drawer already. Even for those who know them, this handsome volume, in which references to the recipes are made as easy as possible, is a far more convenient shape in which to possess them; and a much larger public will thank Sir John Clark for putting his wife’s collection at their disposal. When tired or dispirited the cook should read the introduction by Miss Frere, and the description which is given there of a Scottish household will put energy into her at once.

[Times Literary Supplement, Nov 25, 1909]

[]

1910

Lysistrata.

[Lysistrata by Aristophanes, adapted by Laurence Housman, Little Theatre, John Street, Adelphi, London, Oct 10–Nov 5,]

For acting modern plays there should be modern theatres. The spirit of the audience should be flicked into a cheerful kind of audacity before the curtain rises. The past broods in red plush and clogs the mind with the fumes of old conventions. Miss Kingston, in designing and decorating her little theatre has skilfully flattered her audience. A swift, vivacious race, they seem to themselves, straining at the heels of the newest idea, as they settle into their stalls in this large, gay drawing-room. That, too, is a clever tribute on Miss Kingston’s part to the modern spirit. Size at once suggests a business enterprise, which to succeed must cajole the public. A large drawing-room, she insinuates, will hold all the people who know a good play when they see one. Then, too, a good play is so good to them that they will pay for it. Play-going is not a diversion to be bought for one shilling or two. Even the rich do not spend their half-guineas lightly. As for the poor, they will stint themselves of cabs, of warm gloves, and music-halls and charities, for the sake of the real thing. Is that not the sweetest compliment of all?—that she should put her trust in the power of the intellect over the appetites of the poor? The Little Theatre, then, is filled with an audience happy in the consciousness of their own worth, and in the certainty that Miss Kingston is conscious of it too. And she has given them, to begin with, a Greek play, which though translated into English, implies somehow that one has the text at home.

Of many of this select, vivacious audience that would be true enough. There are translations of Aristophanes which, English fronting Greek, tempt one to lay the two words together, to suck the meaning from one and snatch the bloom of the lovely language from the other. Remembering how, a hundred years ago, even the notes were locked in Latin, the change in our view of Greek must be surprising. Democracy will not tolerate the formality of the verbs in —μι. If the Greeks are to survive, they must prove themselves alive. The only people now who read the classics for pleasure reach them by thrusting through obstacles with translations, and without dictionaries. The result, naturally, must be that poets with meaning endure while poets with melody languish beyond our reach and die. Thus, we do not act Sophocles or Æschylus; but we translate Euripides, we act him, and now, in a much-chastened version, we are producing one of the great works of Aristophanes. For we call Euripides and Aristophanes alive because, even stripped of their poetry, they have an eye on our own problems.

For the Lysistrata, it is chiefly interesting because of what modern women are doing. It is Greek enough in this, that the audience knows far more than the actors are telling them—knows, in fact, twenty-four hundred and twenty-eight years of history. But the things they know rather conflict with the moral of the play, if moral there is, and to a suffragist audience it is full of surprises. Lysistrata would not quite do on a platform, nor would her policies make converts. One supposes that she means well, for she looks so beautiful and impressive in her graceful robes, and at times her plain words sound true and right; but at other times, and there are more of these, her Punchlike followers and their farcical methods make one glad to think that the play was only meant for Athens. It is all done very skilfully, and constantly makes one laugh, but it is uneasy laughter, lest perhaps any one should take it for true because it is made to seem topical, and because they do it so well. Lysistrata herself is almost a convincing character, but perhaps it is Miss Kingston who makes her so. Certainly she puts into the play a vast amount of energy and life, and the spectators, remembering their daily papers, supply the rest.

It must be admitted, however, that Mr Housman, who is now confessed as the adaptor, supplied for his part a good many jokes, and a good many suffrage sentiments. The original Lysistrata, for instance, never recommended improved sanitation for Athens, nor does one find in the mouths of the old men the ‘physical force argument.’ It is true that he was obliged to leave out a good number of Aristophanic jokes, so that perhaps leaves the account square. In any case the whole result is interesting, and amusing, and irritating, and certainly well worth seeing.

[Englishwoman, November 1910]

[]

1911

The Duke and Duchess of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne.

[The First Duke and Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne (Longmans, Green, & Co., 1910) by Thomas Longueville.]

Some one has probably written a story in which the hero is for ever thinking about the dead. It troubles him that people think of them so little. He is always wondering what he ought to do for them. Then he wonders whether it really needs more imagination to believe in the present or in the past. Becoming obsessed by the idea, he spends his life in reading, volume after volume. He discovers that great men had uncles and aunts and cousins. He dives after them, so to speak, and rescues them by the hair of their heads. It is another form of philanthropy. After all, when he comes to think of it, he cares much more genuinely for the late Duchess of Newcastle than for the old woman who cleans his stairs; he thinks about her all day. What else is affection? Indeed, affection for the living is generally a far more hazardous business than this; the living change and lie and drop one; all the arguments, in short, are on his side; and finally, outraged by contact with unreal fugitive flesh-encumbered live people, he draws his razor and departs.

That there is some truth in this unhappy story no one who owns a library will deny. The anonymous author of this book is evidently touched by the feeling. It is that which keeps his narrative so fresh. One can imagine that it makes him uneasy to sit beside books for long; he hears people talking in them, and must let them out. To do this one must get at them, see them, make them talk sense; a fascinating employment, although not without its risks. Fortunately there is generally some obstacle to prevent us from crashing through the little plank on which we stand into the immense abyss; there is the difficulty of language. When the Duke of Newcastle was in exile he was very deeply in debt, but wished to leave Paris. ‘That day,’ writes the Duchess, ‘when we left Paris, the creditors, coming to take their farewell of my Lord, expressed so great a love and kindness for him, accompanied with so many prayers and wishes, that he could not but prosper on his journey.’ ‘No wonder!’ the editor exclaims. ‘It is easy to understand that they would be anxious to have a few words with him—perhaps a good many words—and to come to a very clear understanding before losing sight of him. Love and kindness, indeed!’ Yet our impression is that the Duchess was subtle in her language, and that the editor is polishing the bloom off. They were formal obsequious citizens, abashed by nobility in distress, and not seedy-looking men in black coats, ready to whip one off in a four-wheeler to the police court. That is the kind of difficulty that makes it heartbreaking sometimes to read of the ancient dead. With all our knowledge of literary history, we do not know what our ancestors thought about writing. Far more direct of speech than we are, not one of their written sentences could have been spoken by the lips. It may be that writing was always connected in their minds with legal business; certainly the style survives in the letters one receives from solicitors, banks, and men of business in general. But, where our formal style is purely vicious, theirs is often beautiful and characteristic, as though the soul were different and not the manner.

Looking about for a modern figure to compare with the first Duke of Newcastle, we find no one who will do. If we could find a rich nobleman, ‘amorous in poetry, music, and art’, a bit of a poet, though not much of a scholar, we should not find him in command of the army in time of war. He would finance an opera house. But to be born about the year 1592, and to be the fruit of a succession of fortunate marriages, put one in a position which we can barely conceive. Cavendish, going to Cambridge at fourteen, learnt there how to manage horses and weapons; he left at eighteen, finding the food bad and the ‘disputations’ of the hungry scholars ‘wracking’ to the brain. Next he visited Savoy, in the suite of Sir Henry Wotton, and began to write verses, like his master; although he ‘entirely concealed the scholar under the more taking appearance of the fine gentleman’. His father’s death left him very wealthy and a personage at Court. If, for instance, King Charles was making a progress, and passed near Welbeck, Newcastle would invite him to dinner. Ben Jonson would be sent for to write a masque; the country gentry would be called in, and four or five thousand pounds would be spent upon the feasting. In this way he mounted the steps of the peerage, and bought the post of Governor to the King’s son. Money, it may be, could do as much for a nobleman now, but he would, surely, have to specialise. Possibly that is where we differ. Owing to the scarcity of rich men and the subjection of the poor, a fortunate human being had space to grow in. We see how gorgeously Newcastle’s tastes were fed. With a taste for poetry and art, he had Vandyke, Suckling, and Ben Jonson for friends; with a taste for diplomacy, he served under Wotton, and was in the counsels of his King; with a taste for riding, he became commander of the army in the north against Cromwell. With sublime confidence in the virtues of gentle birth, he made those qualities go as far as they could. ‘In acts of courtesy, affability, bounty, and generosity he abounded … but the substantial part and fatigue of a general, he did not in any degree understand (being utterly unacquainted with war) nor could submit to.’ Having risked his life like a gentleman, he retired like a gentleman to enjoy his music. He chose poets for captains. Davenant was his General of Artillery, ‘because he was a poet’; the Church was represented by the ‘Rev Mr Hudson’, who, being ‘a very able Divine’, became ‘Scout Master General of the Army’. Duty to royalty made him waive his own opinion and fight at Marston Moor. ‘“Happen what may,” he declared, “I will not shun to fight; for I have no other ambition than to live and die a loyal subject of his Majesty.”’ Accordingly, he drove behind the army to Marston Moor, in his state coach and six; having reached the field, he lit his pipe, sank upon the cushions and slept until the attack should begin. Directly he heard the pistols and the shouting, he sprang up, and with a little ‘half-leaden sword’ belonging to his page, ran three Scots through the body himself. He stayed on the field to the end, and then escaped to Holland. In excuse for his flight, it must be said that he had spent all his fortune, save ninety pounds, upon the cause, and that he had proved that this kind of war wanted a different sort of general. ‘His edge, a friend said, had too much razor in it; for he had a tincture of a romantic spirit, and had the misfortune to have somewhat of the poet in him.’ It may have been the poet, the comic poet, that fell in love, in Paris, with that eccentric Maid of Honour, Margaret Lucas. It may have been, as the author is inclined to think, his inherited instinct for a good match; why the dead loved and how is one of those points that we finger but leave unsolved. They cannot explain it. Only, so soon after Shakespeare wrote, there must have been people who fell in love for no reason whatever.

Margaret Lucas was not happy at Court. She was often lost in thought. Have snails got teeth? Do hogs have the measles? Why do dogs that rejoice swing their tails? It was a bad habit in the eyes of the French ladies. One of the pleasant things about Newcastle is that he seems to have allowed her to go on with these investigations without bullying her, although she brought him no children. His ‘manage’ it may be took up all his thoughts. Enraged too, with his great work A New Method and Extraordinary Invention to Dress Horses, &c., he may not have noticed that his wife was making a name for herself with her folios. They are to be seen at the British Museum, but one would be a ‘Mountebank in learning’, as she has it, to pretend that one has read them. Now and then adventurous editors extract a slim volume, and, lured on by Lamb’s praises, a few people in every generation will take them off the shelves. The Duchess had what is called an active mind. It was a dangerous possession if you were a woman and a Duchess and lived in the time of Charles the Second. It was not trained; its gambols were received with explosions of flattery; it could have the run of all the sciences. If a clever Duchess chanced to be vain into the bargain, there was nothing to stop her. ‘Ipse dixit,’ the Duke remarked, ‘will not serve my turn’; the Duchess prided herself upon a still more perfect ignorance. She had only seen Descartes and Hobbes, not questioned them; she did ask Mr Hobbes to dinner once, but he would not come; she knew no French, though she had lived abroad five years; she seldom listened to what was said to her; in short her genius was her own. If she found a spider’s web, she did her best to explain it; her maid brought her a chrysalis and she pinched its tail; ideas upon the destiny of mankind came over her in bed; ‘John,’ she cried, ‘I conceive!’ and a servant came running with a pen. She was like a child picking a watch to pieces. Sir Thomas Browne had the same kind of curiosity. But she had the misfortune to live either too late or too soon. In Elizabeth’s time she might have been one of the select band of learned ladies who were taught Greek; if she were alive now, we should turn her energy on to a thousand committees. Our ancestors were wittier but more cruel than we are. The Society of the Restoration was as intolerant of eccentricity as the society of boys at a public school. The Duchess, with her folio volumes, her odd manner of dress and behaviour, was a laughing stock in London. They called her ‘That fool Madge Newcastle.’ The children ran after her coach, so that Mr Pepys, puffing behind them, could only see that it was painted silver where it is usually painted gold.

As I was getting out of my chair (said Count Grammont), I was stopped by the devil of a phantom in masquerade … It is worth while to see her dress; for she must have at least sixty ells of gauze and silver tissue about her, not to mention a sort of pyramid upon her head, adorned with a hundred thousand baubles. ‘I bet,’ said the King, ‘that it is the Duchess of Newcastle.’

Thus baited, the Duchess withdrew to contemplate alone in the gardens at Welbeck. She was still full of ideas, but there was no one to listen to her; the Duke was teaching a horse to dance, or at work on a play of his own. If there had been any kind of discussion—a literary society such as we have now in the provinces—something might have come of her ideas. Some practical woman might have educated her daughter. ‘The best bred women,’ she said, ‘are those whose minds are civilest.’ ‘Women live like Bats or Owls, labour like Beasts, and die like Worms.’ Again it is better to be an atheist than a superstitious man. Hunting, she declared, was a cruel sport. But what did it matter if she thought sanely, or chattered about the affections of the loadstone? Nobody listened to her. ‘I shall not rashly go there again,’ she declared, commenting upon a scene, no doubt a real one, in which she had told certain wives that they were no better than they should be. Easily bored—‘I hate your Fools’—she dismissed dull guests by ‘bragging of myself’ which so frightened them that they went, calling her heartless and a pedant. Left alone she worked herself into a glow by telling over the praises of posterity.

All this being over, the Duke and Duchess lie beneath their tomb in Westminster Abbey; when we look upon them, we think not of them, but of ourselves, and the mystery of the past. Tombs are milestones to show us how far we have travelled along the invisible way.

[Times Literary Supplement, Feb 1, 1911]

[]

‘Rachel.’

[Rachel. Her Stage Life and Her Real Life (Chapman and Hall, 1911) by Francis Gribble.]

According to Mr Gribble the manse and the rectory are under illusions about the stage. Innocent girls and innocent parents dream of a beautiful place in London where genius displays its treasures and virtue is adored. Possibly Mr Gribble, who knows all about France and the stage, is under illusions about England and the rectory. However this may be, it seems hard upon the world that clergymen’s daughters should have to be educated publicly. They are responsible for the only fault we find with Mr Gribble’s book. The vices are made very plain; the melancholy very dark. ‘It was borne in upon her at last, indeed, that she was a shadow pursuing shadows, but the habit of the chase had hold of her, and she could not desist … La pauvre Rachel! That is the Leitmotif. We can imagine a country clergyman’s daughter reading this exclaiming, ‘Poor thing! But I’m not a bit like that,’ and going up to town as gay as ever.

Leaving the rectory out of the question, however, how far is this fair to Rachel? Was she so vicious and so melancholy? What did her genius mean to her? To make up one’s mind about an actress is, of course, the most troublesome of tasks. Mr Gribble is bold—he talks of her ‘stage life and her real life’. ‘The real individual is only to be discovered after the curtain has fallen and the applause has ceased.’ When the curtain fell it is clear that Rachel was generally to be found reckless and demoralised. She went off to supper, and spent the night in dissipation. She scattered rings about the table. She used Musset’s swordstick to pick her teeth. Dipping her lace sleeves in the sauce, she confided to the company that she could not remember a time when she was ‘what the world calls innocent’. She drank punch from a spoon already sticky with soup. With one supper for sample we can imagine the rest. We can imagine Grand Dukes jumping on to the dinner-table to stare at her, and Empresses tossing diamonds on to the stage. We can imagine Queen Victoria remarking to her lady-in-waiting, ‘Such a nice modest girl’ and the great Duke of Wellington paying compliments in broken French! We can take all this for granted. But her acting? Can we imagine that?

Upon her acting Mr Gribble has some interesting remarks to make. An actress, he says, does not create; she interprets; and although ‘interpretation affords scope for genius as well as talent’, it only leaves a little room for the expression of personality. The personality asserts itself when the curtain falls. Here we have the secret of Rachel’s sadness; that was why she wept and cried, ‘It is because I have to live the life of others and not my own.’ But what, after all, is one’s ‘own life’? Why should we draw these distinctions between real life and stage life? It is when we feel most that we live most; and we cannot believe that Rachel, married to a real man, bearing real children, and adding up real butcher’s bills, would have lived more truly than Rachel imagining the passions of women who never existed.

We are taking it for granted, with Mr Gribble, that Rachel had genius as but two or three actresses have ever had it. But even so, it is hard to decide about an actress. Did she mean more when she cried, ‘I have lived the life of others’ than a poet or a novelist would have meant? In one sense, of course, she did. ‘I was thinking,’ she said, ‘that time would soon carry away every trace of my talent, and that nothing would remain of what had once been Rachel.’ But besides the transiency of great acting compared with other forms of art, there is another reason for discontent, we must believe. A great deal that is not felt comes into the life; there is a great deal of pose and bad art. Rachel was a Jewess, the daughter of a pedlar and an old-clothes woman. As a child she jolted about France in the back of her father’s cart, and sang at street corners. With his trained eye for business he saw that there was money in her talent. She was taught enough to learn her parts, rinsing the carrots as she read, but for a long time she never read a play through, and when she was famous, she could not answer her own invitations.

Scarcely any one could be less trained or supported to stand the blaze of sudden and violent celebrity. But that was her fate before she was twenty. Her career makes one think of a very ingenious debtor, always finding means at the last moment to pay his creditors. Manners that served very tolerably in the Faubourg St Germain she acquired. She coaxed a great lawyer to spell for her; to those who liked virtue she pretended that she was modesty besieged. She could persuade authors who gave her their books that what she liked best was a quiet hour with the classics. Then she had her supper parties and defined the state of her innocence. Was she real at such times, or was she real when Charlotte Brontë saw her?

I had seen acting before, but never anything like this; never anything which astonished Hope and hushed Desire; which outstripped Impulse and paled Conception; which, instead of merely irritating Imagination with the thought of what might be done, at the same time fevering the nerves because it was not done, disclosed power like a deep swollen winter river, thundering in cataract, and bearing the soul, like a leaf, on the steep and steel sweep of its descent.

The truth seems to be that one does not stop acting or painting or writing just because one happens to be dining or driving in the Park; only trying to combine the two things often ends disastrously. Perhaps disaster is more common among actresses than among other artists, because the body plays so large a part upon the stage. At any rate, Rachel’s experiment ended in something like ruin, if we consider that she died of exhaustion at the age of thirty-seven, having kicked her body round the world, secured no permanent happiness, and outlived her success. Melancholy indeed she was. But surely the seed of that melancholy lay in the thought, not that she had been an actress, leading an unreal life, but that she might have been a greater actress, leading a still more real life. ‘I have not been one quarter as great as I might have been. I have talent, but I might have had genius. Ah, if only I had been brought up differently! If I had had different friends around me! If I had lived a better life! What an artist I should have been in that case!’ There, surely, is the true cry of sorrow. Her life was so hurried, so mixed; there was so much trash in it, and such enormous ecstasy.

[Times Literary Supplement, Apr 20, 1911]

[]

‘The Post-Impressionists.’

[The Post Impressionists (Methuen, 1911) by C. Lewis Hind]

In many ways, Mr Hind is the ideal writer for a book that aims at spreading the underlying idea of Post-Impressionism among a wider public than has hitherto tried to grasp it. He has the light touch and the persuasive manner. His sincerity is undoubted; at the same time he preserves, at any rate, the semblance of impartiality. To doubting Thomases he holds out the hand of the sweetly reasonable Cicerone. ‘Just come with me a moment,’ he says, in effect, ‘and I will tell you a little story of how the Post-Impressionists affected me, and why.’ Then gently, almost apologetically, he explains that while the now historic exhibition at the Grafton Gallery came as a shock to most people, his own nerves withstood the strain, because he had had previous experience of the cult in Paris and Berlin. His conversion to Cezanne, Gauguin, and Van Gogh—the leaders of the movement—appears to have come fairly quickly once he was convinced that the appreciation of their art was reconcilable with that of old favourites among the masters; that to Henri Matisse took longer, but he at length learned to understand, if not to love, him; and it follows that the understanding had to be extended to the sculptures of Jacob Epstein and Eric Gill. So the book progresses vivaciously in its plea for the open mind and for recognition of the possibility that Art has still a future before it. Perhaps Mr Hind’s best point is concerned with the reconcilability of a taste for Post-Impressionism with that for more conventional forms of artistic expression. He found it possible to reconcile Puvis de Chavannes and Matisse by the simple expedient of altering his point of view. This sounds—and is—simple and sane enough; but it is unfortunately a fact that very few critics of Art have thought it worth while to try it, and we are afraid that the lay opponents of Post-Impressionism never will. Human nature is perverse where preferences in Art are concerned. Nevertheless, this book is eloquent enough to give pause to the most rabid opponent—to make him consider whether he cannot respect even where he cannot like; and it is refreshingly lucid after the confused masses of ethics, mysticism, aestheticism, and Art that have hitherto served, for the most part, for the serious literary criticism of the movement.

[Nation, Oct 14, 1911]

[]

1912

The Novels of George Gissing.

[new edition of the works of George Gissing by Sidgwick & Jackson]

Let any one who has spent his life in writing novels consider the day which has now arrived for George Gissing. The fruit of his life stands before us—a row of red volumes. If they were biographies, histories, books about books even, or speculations upon money or the course of the world, there would be no need for the peculiar shudder. But they bear titles like these—Denzil Quarrier, Born in Exile, New Grub Street; places and people that have never existed save in one brain now cold. They are only novels. It seems that there is genuine cause for shuddering when one’s work takes this form. Dead leaves cannot be more brittle or more worthless than things faintly imagined—and that the fruit of one’s life should be twelve volumes of dead leaves! We have one moment of such panic before the novels of George Gissing, and then we rise again. Not in our time will they be found worthless.

An interesting letter to Mr Clodd was printed the other day. In it Gissing wrote:

By the bye, Pinker has suggested to me that he should try to get all my works into the hands of some one publisher. I should like this, but I have a doubt whether the time has come yet. There is a curious blending of respect and contempt in the publishers’ minds towards me, and I should like to see which sentiment will prevail. If the contempt, one must relinquish ambitions proved to be idle, and so attain a certain tranquillity—even if it be that of the workhouse. I was always envious of workhouse folk; they are the most independent of all.

Respect has prevailed; Messrs Sidgwick and Jackson reprint the eight later works both well and cheaply. One, Born in Exile, is to be bought upon railway bookstalls for sevenpence. Nevertheless it is his own word ‘respect’ that seems to describe the attitude of the public towards him; he is certainly not popular: he is not really famous. If we may guess at the destiny of this new edition, we can imagine that it will find its way to houses where very few novels are kept. Ordinary cultivated people will buy them of course: but also governesses who scarcely ever read; mechanics; working men who despise novels; dons who place him high among writers of English prose; professional men; the daughters of farmers in the North. We can imagine that he is the favourite novelist of a great many middle-aged, sceptical, rather depressed men and women who when they read want thought and understanding of life as it is, not wit or romance. In saying this we are saying also that Gissing does not appeal to a great multitude; the phrase ‘life as it is’ is always the phrase of people who try to see life honestly and find it hard and dreary. Other versions of life they reject. They are not, perhaps, in the majority, but they form a minority that is very respectable, and perhaps increasing.

If this is at all true of his readers, what shall we say of the writer himself? There is a great difference between writing and reading, and Gissing was a born writer. When a novelist has been dead for some years and his books are gathered together we want as far as possible to stand where he stood; not to be moved by one character or one idea, but to grasp his point of view. His books are very sad; that is the first thing that strikes the reader. The ordinary excitement of guessing the end is scarcely to be indulged in. Conceive the most gloomy, yet natural, conclusion to every complexity, and you are likely to be right. He had, as most novelists have, one great theme. It is the life of a man of fine character and intelligence who is absolutely penniless and is therefore the sport of all that is most sordid and brutal in modern life. He earns, perhaps, a pound a week. He has thrown up his job in an office because an editor has accepted one of his stories. He marries a woman of some refinement; they live in a couple of rooms somewhere off the Tottenham Court Road. In a short time they cannot pay the rent; they move; they sell pieces of furniture; they live off tea and bread and butter; then his books go; all day long, in spite of headache and sore throat, in bitter fog and clinging mist, the wretched man has to spin imaginary loves and imaginary jests from his exhausted brain. He has the additional agony of loving good writing; he can lose himself still in dreams of the Acropolis or in argument about Euripides. His wife leaves him, for the dirt repels her; at last his stuff has become too poor even to sell, and he dies knowing himself beaten on every hand.

Many readers, happily, rebound from their depression when the end is reached, exclaiming, ‘After all, this is only one side.’ There are quantities of people who have enough money to avoid these horrors; a few who can command luxury. But what Gissing proves is the terrible importance of money, and, if you slip, how you fall and fall and fall. With learning, sensitive feelings, a love of beauty both in art and in human nature—all the qualities that generally (one hopes) keep their possessor somehow afloat—he descended to the depths where men and women live in vast shoals without light or freedom. What a strange place it is—this Nether World! There are women as brutal as savages, men who are half animals, women still preserving some ghost of love and pity, men turning a stunted brain upon the problems of their lot. All the things that grow fine and large up here are starved and twisted down there; just as the squares and parks, and the houses standing separate with rooms measured off for different occupations, are shrivelled into black alleys, sooty patches of green, and sordid lodging houses, where there is shelter, but only the shelter that pigs or cows have, not room for the soul. Without money you cannot have space or leisure; worse than that, the chances are very much against your having either love or intelligence.

Many writers before and after Gissing have written with both knowledge and sympathy of the poor. What, after all, is more stimulating to the imagination than the sight of great poverty or great wealth? There was Mrs Gaskell, for instance, and Dickens; a score of writers in our own day have studied the conditions of their lives. But the impressive part about Gissing is that knowing them as he did he makes no secret of the fact that he hated them. That is the reason why his voice is so harsh, so penetrating, so little grateful to the ears. Can any one hate poverty with all their soul who does not hate the poor? ‘Some great and noble sorrow,’ he writes, ‘may have the effect of drawing hearts together, but to struggle against destitution, to be crushed by care about shillings and sixpences … that must always degrade.’ There is no sentimentalism about the fundamental equality of men in his works. Adela Mutimer in Demos, gazing at her husband’s face opposite her, ponders thus; Gissing must often have thought the same:

It was the face of a man by birth and breeding altogether beneath her.

Never had she understood that as now; never had she conceived so forcibly the reason which made him and her husband and wife only in name. Suppose that apparent sleep of his to be the sleep of death; he would pass from her consciousness like a shadow from the field, leaving no trace behind. Their life of union was a mockery; their married intimacy was an unnatural horror. He was not of her class, not of her world; only by violent wrenching of the laws of nature had they come together. She had spent years in trying to convince herself that there were no such distinctions, that only an unworthy prejudice parted class from class. One moment of true insight was worth more than all her theorising on abstract principles. To be her equal this man must be born again, of other parents, in other conditions of life … She had no claims to aristocratic descent, but her parents were gentlefolk; that is to say, they were both born in a position which encouraged personal refinement rather than the contrary, which expected of them a certain education in excess of life’s barest need, which authorised them to use the service of ruder men and women in order to secure to themselves a margin of life for life’s sake. Perhaps for three generations her ancestors could claim so much gentility; it was more than enough to put a vast gulf between her and the Mutimers. Favourable circumstances of upbringing had endowed her with delicacy of heart and mind not inferior to that of any woman living; mated with an equal husband, the children born of her might hope to take their place among the most beautiful and the most intelligent. And her husband was a man incapable of understanding her idlest thought.

It would have been so much easier to lessen the gulf; so much more graceful to waive the advantages of three generations of gentle birth. But to have the vices of the poor is the way to incite the best kind of pity. The measure of his bitterness is the measure of his love of good.

But there is nothing surprising in the fact that Gissing was never popular. However harsh and censorious people are in their daily actions, they do it unofficially as it were; they shrink from any statement of the creed that makes them act thus. In fiction particularly, which is a relaxation, like golf, they detest anything severe. It is part of their enjoyment to see others looking rosy and thus to feel somewhat rosier themselves. Gissing had no sympathy whatever with this common weakness. ‘No, no,’ he makes Biffen say in New Grub Street, ‘let us copy life. When the man and woman are to meet for the great scene of passion, let it all be frustrated by one or other of them having a bad cold in the head, and so on. Let the pretty girl get a disfiguring pimple on her nose just before the ball at which she is going to shine. Show the numberless repulsive features of common decent life. Seriously, coldly; not a hint of facetiousness, or the thing becomes different.’ The novel that Biffen wrote on these lines is, of course, a failure, and eventually he takes his own life upon Putney Heath.

The reader, then, whose pleasure it is to identify himself with the hero or heroine, and to feel in some strange way that he shares their virtues, is completely baffled. His natural instinct is to find fault with the cynicism of the writer. But Gissing is no cynic; the real cynics are the writers who have a trivial merry view of life, and make people easily content and drugged with cheap happiness. What good Gissing finds in human beings is absolutely genuine, for it has stood such tests; and the pleasures he allows them, the pleasures of reading, companionship, and a few comfortable evenings, glow with a warmth as of red-hot coals. His work has another quality that does not make for popularity either. His men and women think. When we seek the cause of his gloom is it not most truly to be found there? Each of the people who from one cause or another has to suffer the worst bruises in the Nether World is a thinking creature, capable not only of feeling, but of making that feeling part of a view of life. It is not gone when the pain is over, but persists in the form of melancholy questionings. What is to be said for a world in which there is so much suffering? By itself this peculiarity is enough to distinguish Gissing’s characters from those of other novelists. There are characters who feel violently; characters who are true types; witty characters, bad ones, good ones, eccentric ones, buffoons; but the thinking man has seldom had justice done to him. The great advantage of making people think is that you can describe other relationships besides the great one between the lover and the beloved. There is friendship, for instance; the relationship that is founded on liking the same books, or sharing the same enthusiasms; there is a relationship between one man and men in general. All these, it seems to us, Gissing has described with extraordinary fineness. It is out of these relationships that he makes the texture of his works. Loves have exploded; tragedies have fired up and sunk to ashes; these quiet, undemonstrative feelings between one man and another, one woman and another, persist; they spin some kind of thread across the ravages; they are the noblest things he has found in the world.

Naturally Gissing practised what is generally called the English method of writing fiction. Instead of leaping from one high pinnacle of emotion to the next, he filled in all the adjoining parts most carefully. It is sometimes very dull. The general effect is very low in tone. You have to read from the first page to the last to get the full benefit of his art. But if you read steadily the low almost insignificant chapters gather weight and impetus; they accumulate upon the imagination; they are building up a world from which there seems to be no escape; violence would have the effect of an escape. But thus it comes about that it is difficult to point to any scene or passage and demand admiration. Do we even single out one character among all his men and women to be remembered? He has no Jane Eyres, no Uncle Tobys. But here is a passage that is characteristic of his terse workmanlike prose, glowing at the heart with a kind of flameless fire:

Manor Park Cemetery lies in the remote East End, and gives sleeping places to the inhabitants of a vast district … The regions around were then being built upon for the first time; the familiar streets of pale, damp brick were stretching here and there, continuing London, much like the spreading of a disease. Epping Forest is near at hand, and nearer the dreary expanse of Wanstead Flats.

Not grief, but chill desolation makes this cemetery its abode. A country churchyard touches the tenderest memories, and softens the heart with longing for the eternal rest. The cemeteries of wealthy London abound in dear and great associations, or at worst preach homilies which connect themselves with human dignity and pride. Here on the waste limits of that dread East, to wander among tombs is to go hand in hand with the stark and eyeless emblem of mortality; the spirit fails beneath the cold burden of ignoble destiny. Here lie those who were born for toil; who, when toil has worn them to the uttermost, have but to yield their useless breath and pass into oblivion. For them is no day, only the brief twilight of a winter sky between the former and the latter night. For them no aspiration; for them no hope of memory in the dust; their very children are wearied into forgetfulness. Indistinguishable units in the vast throng that labours but to support life, the name of each, father, mother, child, is as a dumb cry for the warmth and love of which Fate so stinted them. The wind wails above their narrow tenements; the sandy soil, soaking in the rain as soon as it has fallen, is a symbol of the great world which absorbs their toil and straightway blots their being.

We are in the habit of throwing faults upon the public as though it were a general rubbish heap, for it cannot bring an action for libel. But to be unpopular is a sign that there is something wrong, or how have the classics come to be the classics? Gissing’s public we believe to be a very good public, but it leaves out much that is good in the great public. The reason is that he wrote his best only when he was describing struggles and miseries and noble sufferings like those we have dwelt upon above. Directly he dealt with men and women living at ease he lost his grip; he did not see; directly he changed his sober prosaic prose for a loftier style he was without merit. He had a world of his own as real, as hard, as convincing as though it were made of earth and stone—nay, far more so—but it was a small world. There is no such place as ‘the’ world; no such life as ‘life as it is’. We need only consider the result of reading too much Gissing; we want another world; we take down Evan Harrington. Which is true—that misery, or this magnificence? They are both true; everything is true that can make us believe it to be true. Beauty beyond all other beauty, horror beyond all other horror still lie hidden about us, waiting for some one to see them. The thing that really matters, that makes a writer a true writer and his work permanent, is that he should really see. Then we believe, then there arise those passionate feelings that true books inspire. Is it possible to mistake books that have this life for books without it, hard though it is to explain where the difference lies? Two figures suggest themselves in default of reasons. You clasp a bird in your hands; it is so frightened that it lies perfectly still; yet somehow it is a living body, there is a heart in it and the breast is warm. You feel a fish on your line; the line hangs straight as before down into the sea, but there is a strain on it; it thrills and quivers. That is something like the feeling which live books give and dead ones cannot give; they strain and quiver. But satisfactory works of art have a quality that is no less important. It is that they are complete. A good novelist, it seems, goes about the world seeing squares and circles where the ordinary person sees mere storm-drift. The wildest extravagance of life in the moon can be complete, or the most shattered fragment. When a book has this quality it seems unsinkable. Here is a little world for us to walk in with all that a human being needs. Gissing’s novels seem to us to possess both these essential qualities—life and completeness—and for these reasons we cannot imagine that they will perish. There will always be one or two people to exclaim, ‘This man understood!’

[Times Literary Supplement, Jan 11, 1912]

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‘Frances Willard.’

[Frances Willard. Her Life and Work. With an introduction by Lady Henry Somerset. And eight illustrations (Fisher Unwin, 1912) by Ray Strachey.]

The great merits of Mrs Strachey’s life of Miss Willard, its directness and candour and complete lack of padding, produce a very interesting picture of the famous philanthropist. They make one ask questions about her and her life which the ordinary biographer usually contrives to stifle, because his subject is dead. To begin with, Miss Willard was once young and very imperfect. Brought up in the West when the West was an untamed land, she loved shooting, climbing trees, and would rather saddle a cow than not ride at all; she hated housework, and had a passion for horse-racing. Very vivid is the account of their life in the middle of the last century at Janesville:

We see the hard work of the farm; the fencing and ploughing, the cutting of trees and rearing of cattle, the growing of the precious crops, and all the daily difficulties; how the house was banked up for fear of the winter hurricanes, and how the prairie fires were fought with fire; how the hogs escaped down the road, the gophers ate up the corn, and the rats got among the potatoes; how the apple trees died and the oxen were lost, and the milk froze in the churn by the fire and the blue-jays were caught in the quail traps.

In those days she was no more interested in temperance than clever girls usually are. Her own culture was the object of her greatest enthusiasm. Although she loved her home, she insisted upon getting away from it to make experiments and have experiences of her own. Because the man she loved and was to marry proved also a prig, though a worthy one, she broke off her engagement and lived the rest of her life independently. She was, in short, a delightful and spirited American girl, and Mrs Strachey has surely done well to concentrate upon this period of her life and to devote less space to the years of immense success and celebrity. For Miss Willard did not remain, as she had become, a great schoolmistress. The merest accident, a heavy fall of snow, induced a certain Dr Dio Lewis, who was lecturing about the country in 1873, to stay over the night and deliver another lecture upon temperance. It started a crusade which ‘spread with the violence of a prairie fire’. Women were the crusaders.

It must have been very strange (writes Mrs Strachey) to see the lines of women marching out from the churches into the snowy streets, singing their gentle hymns to warlike tunes, and strange to watch them halt before the saloons to kneel on the pavement to weep and ‘pray for the soul of the proprietor that he might see the error of his ways’. And it must have been stranger still when these proprietors surrendered and rolled out their barrels into the streets to pour the ‘poison’ into the gutter, confessing their sins with tears, while the church bells rang, and the women wept for joy, and the roughs scooped up the rum-soaked snow and cursed the praying women.

But the strangest thing of all was that Miss Willard gave up the profession which she loved to kneel upon the floors of public houses, too. She formed the women into a society, with herself for their leader. The story of the growth of that society is told briefly and competently by Mrs Strachey. Beginning with two or three women in a dingy little office, it spread over America, reached to England, rose in distant countries, India, China, Japan, culminating in a world society, with ‘Do Everything’ for its motto, and world conventions with Miss Willard at their head. It is a wonderful story, and yet this part of the book is the least vivid. When one begins dealing with figures one is apt to be paralysed by them. Three hundred and sixty-five meetings a year—ten thousand letters—those facts are so startling that we forget to ask, What were they about? It is strange how little we know what Miss Willard believed, how vague her own creed was. Perhaps it is summed up as well in the message that her sister left her when she died as in other words: ‘Tell everybody to be good.’ Miss Willard spent the best years of her life in doing that; in telling them, that is, not to drink, to be pure, to love each other, to enfranchise women, to help the poor. There is nothing very profound in that teaching, but consider the scale on which she did it. In 1881 she sent out ten thousand letters; ‘forty different branches of work were carried on’; ‘she averaged 365 meetings and many thousand miles of travel every year’; thirty million pages of literature were issued yearly from her office. So prolific was she that she put together 650,000 words of autobiography in three weeks. It is all very American, but it is also very philanthropic. The modern philanthropist must also be an amazingly efficient machine. The reason is not far to seek. Their mission is not to create new ideas—Johnson, Shelley, Rousseau were not philanthropists—but to popularise, to make people practise as far as practicable the ideas of others, old ideas for the most part, ideas that have become rather dull and rather vague to most people. Of course their books, as Mrs Strachey says that Miss Willard knew her own to be, are ‘horrible’. Could they fulfil their mission if they were not? You must have bold phrases to slip in under people’s doors, to force into their hands, to bawl into their faces. They must be phrases, too, about the most private of emotions. You must be ready to share all with crowds in the streets. Thus Miss Willard, when she heard of the death of her only brother, went to her meeting, told the audience ‘all about it, and they cried together, praying, and talking of the heavenly life’.

She shared everything; she died of sharing things, worn out, and glad to die long before she was an old woman. And the result? The result is as difficult to estimate as the number of letters she wrote is easy, for what things make people good, and what being good consists in are questions not easy to answer. Only no one who has read Mrs Strachey’s book can doubt that Miss Willard was one of those rare beings, true, single-minded and courageous, above all of immeasurable powers of love, who may be said to be good, and therefore to do good whether we hold that telling people to be good on any possible scale of vastness is valuable or merely a kind of friction on the surface.

[Times Literary Supplement, Nov 28, 1912]

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1913

Chinese Stories.

[Strange Stories from the Lodge of Leisures. Translated from the Chinese by George Soulié of the French Consular Service in China (Constable & Co. Ltd, 1913).]

According to Mr George Soulié, the translator of these stories, we seriously mistake the nature of the ordinary Chinaman if we imagine him any more exclusively occupied with the great classics of his literature than we are with ours. If we see him with a book in his hand it is likely to be ‘a novel like the History of the Three Kingdoms or a selection of ghost stories’. Like us they have a hunger for novels and stories, which they read over and over again, so that, although in the West nothing is known about it, the influence of such light literature upon the Chinese mind ‘is much greater than the whole bulk of the classics’. They may resemble us in their craving for something lighter, nearer to the life they know than the old and famous books, but in all else how different they are! The twenty-five stories in Strange Stories from the Lodge of Leisure, translated from the Chinese by George Soulié, were written in the second half of the eighteenth century by P’ou Song-Lin, at a time, that is, when with Fielding and Richardson our fiction was becoming increasingly robust and realistic. To give any idea of the slightness and queerness of these stories one must compare them to dreams, or the airy, fantastic, and inconsequent flight of a butterfly. They skim from world to world, from life to death. The people they describe may kill each other and die, but we cannot believe either in their blood or in their dissolution. The barriers against which we in the West beat our hands in vain are for them almost as transparent as glass.

Some people (one of the stories begins) remember every incident of their former existences; it is a fact which many examples can prove. Other people do not forget what they learned before they died and were born again, but remember only confusedly what they were in a precedent life. Wang, the acceptable of the yellow peach-blossom city, when people discussed such questions before him used to narrate the experience he had had with his first son.

And the story which occupies three little pages tells how a boy had once been born a student, then a donkey, and then a boy again. Very often these stories are like the stories a child will tell of a sight which has touched its imagination for no reason that we can discover, lacking in point where we expect the point to come, suddenly breaking off and done with, but somehow memorable. Or it may be they are extravagantly sensational, or of the nature of fairy stories, where all is miraculously set right in the end, or again purposeless and callous as a child’s stories, the good man being killed merely to make an end. But they all alike have a quality of fantasy and spirituality which sometimes, as in ‘The Spirit of the River’ or ‘The River of Sorrows’, becomes of real beauty, and is greatly enhanced by the unfamiliar surroundings and exquisite dress. Take, for example, the following description of a Chinese ghost;

He went farther and farther; the moving lights were rarer; ere long he only saw before him the fire of a white lantern decorated with two red peonies. The paper globe was swinging to the steps of a tiny girl clothed in the blue linen that only slaves wore. The light behind showed the elegant silhouette of another woman, this one covered with a long jacket made in a rich pink silk edged with purple. As the student drew nearer the belated walker turned round, showing an oval face and big long eyes wherein shone a bright speck cruel and mysterious.

So queer and topsy-turvy is the atmosphere of these little stories that one feels, when one has read a number of them, much as if one had been trying to walk over the bridge in a willow pattern plate.

[Times Literary Supplement, May 1, 1913]

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A Friend of the Great Duke.

[The Diary of Frances Lady Shelley, 1818–1873, ed. Richard Edgcumbe (John Murray, 1913).]

Lady Shelley was a very clever woman; she was sincere and spirited into the bargain; and she knew, as the phrase is, every one worth knowing; but the peculiar charm of her diaries arises largely from the fact that they are genuine diaries. The book has not been rolled out and made into one smooth composition. Here we have a bundle of letters; here a rhyme; here a reflection; it is the cream of many desks in short rather than a connected history. We are reminded of the bright and romantic view of trees and hedges which a travelling carriage lamp calls into life for an instant as it passes down a road in the darkness. At one moment we seem to come so close to the dead that we can see the cut of their clothes and hear their voices; and then they vanish altogether; we never see them again. The great events are sometimes ignored and the little incidents that seem so unimportant laboriously preserved. But this is the way in which things happen; and this is why an old diary can be so much more startling than a well-considered book. We are beginning, for example, to feel that there is nothing new to be said about Shelley, the poet; but when Lady Shelley casually refers to ‘my husband’s young kinsman Percy Shelley, who seems disposed to become a poet,’ he flashes surprisingly into life. ‘When I spoke to Mr Scott about him,’ she continues, ‘he told me that he seemed to possess great talent; but I have no means of judging of this myself, as I have not seen any of his productions.’ After all, as they were both young and alive, it is very natural that she should not trouble to see ‘any of his productions’; and when we turn to the year 1822, imagining that no one of her name can quite ignore what happened then, we find that it is memorable solely on account of a blouse which the great Duke of Wellington brought back for her from Italy.

Those who have not read the first volume of her diaries would come most closely into touch with her by recalling the atmosphere and conditions of one of Meredith’s novels. The Shelleys, living down in Sussex with their racehorses and coming up to town to attend Parliament, leading a high-spirited, gay life somehow detached from all the commonplace cares with which we are familiar, remind us again and again of the splendid and robust race which the novels preserve for us. Sir John Shelley was a very popular Sussex squire and member of Parliament, who owned the Derby favourite, adored his wife, and made her risk the dangers of a ‘profligate society’ because he was proud of her virtue. ‘He would say to me, “I want the whole world to know the treasure I possess,”’ Lady Shelley had much of the temperament of those beautiful and witty women whom Meredith was the first to create in fiction; she, too, could—

talk the talk of men,

And touch with thrilling fingers.

And she had also her share of the moods and despondencies which accompany the growth of a brain in a fair body. But so long as she was young she was able to scatter her doubts by a gallop across the downs.

May 20.—This morning, after having been at a ball until 3 o’clock, Shelley, Mr. Jenkinson, and I drove down to Sutton in the barouche, and at 9 o’clock we mounted our horses, and galloped over that delightful turf—a ride of about eight miles—to Michelham Down, where we saw Prince Paul gallop.

The smell of the firs, the springy, daisy-spangled turf, covered with patches of fern and gorse, undulating in hills and vales, was delicious.

Witty and daring herself, she accused Scott of making his heroines too insipid, to which he replied that ‘the fault was probably due to the author’s fear of being charged with immorality; he therefore made his characters as blameless as possible. “An author,” said he, “would not like to have his work called immoral.”’

When she left Abbotsford she wrote to him that she was disappointed with Scotland; there were no floods, no mists, no Highlanders talking their native tongue—and, just as she wanted floods and black clouds to charge the landscape with mystery, so she desired great and heroic characters to adore. She had a passion both for knowledge and for the romance which great natures seem able to throw upon ordinary surroundings. It is the figure of the Duke of Wellington indeed which gives continuity to the diaries; for although the Duke scarcely shows himself, yet, as is the case with people of great individuality, we feel his presence even when he says nothing. His letters are for the most part short and on business, but it is curious to see what a stamp of power and character he sets on the briefest note, and how the short phrases convey also an impression of the depth and kindness of his feeling. We see him most clearly, however, in the letters which Mrs Arbuthnot and Lady Shelley wrote to each other. He is ‘the Sun’ in their letters; does he look well or ill, pale or brown? Is he cheerful, or does he work too hard? ‘We three together,’ Lady Shelley wrote, ‘formed a perfect union, where no jealousy or littleness of feeling ever intruded to destroy its harmony.’

The Duke [she continued] required a fireside friend, and one quite without nerves. Mrs. Arbuthnot often said that he ought to have found this at his own fireside…. Alas, the Duchess had precisely the faults which annoyed him most…. Mrs. Arbuthnot, who was often the Duke’s adviser and gave him her clear and honest opinion on matters of which others were afraid to speak … was invaluable to the Duke. Their intimacy may have given gossips an excuse for scandal; but I, who knew them both so well, am convinced that the Duke was not her lover…. Mrs. Arbuthnot used to laugh at my reverence for and my shyness with the Duke; she had no such feeling.

Her shyness and reverence made her almost faint with emotion when the Duke at last came to stay with them at Maresfield. She could scarcely sleep all night; and next morning she followed him when he shot, and rushed up to console an old country woman whose bare arms had been peppered by the Duke. ‘My good woman!’ she exclaimed, ‘this ought to be the proudest moment of your life. You have had the distinction of being shot by the Duke of Wellington!’ ‘The pheasant,’ she observes later, has been stuffed and put in her dressing-room with other treasures of the same kind.

Then, in the unexpected way in which catastrophes happen in diaries, this pleasant society is dispersed: we hear that Mrs Arbuthnot is dead, and a few pages later the Duke has broken off his friendship with Lady Shelley. It was an unlucky affair. The Duke having written a private letter to Sir John Burgoyne on the defenceless state of England, Sir John thought good in the interests of England to make known its contents, in which pious duty, as she thought it, Lady Shelley did her utmost to help him. The consequence was that the Duke wrote her a series of tremendous-sarcastic letters (‘It is quite Delightful to live in times with your ladyship: with Sir John, Lady and Miss Burgoyne,’ &c.), and their friendship for two years was ruined. It was repaired to some extent by Sir John Shelley, who walked up to the Duke at a party and remarked in his most winning way how the cackling of geese had once saved Rome. ‘I had been thinking that perhaps the cackling of my old goose may yet save England!’ The Duke burst into a hearty laugh. ‘By G—d, Shelley, you are right,’ he exclaimed. ‘Give me your honest hand.’ Two years after that Sir John is dead; the Duke followed him a few months later. Still the diaries continue, now in Ireland, now in Italy; but they are different. It is partly that the writer begins to look back, to compare and to despond; but the age also is changing. The world is no longer a place of ‘springy daisy-spangled turf’ upon which she gallops in the early morning, but a far more decorous place, where she meets Mr Gladstone and goes tours down the Rhine. ‘Alas!’ she exclaims. ‘I now see things as they are and not as they used to be when I cast around them a halo of historical and legendary romance.’ She reads the third canto of ‘Childe Harold’ on the very spot; but it is no good; the castles are repaired, or something else has changed. Without any analysis of her own emotion or description, she conveys the impression of age and change, and ugly new things rising up against the profound and tender past. The romantic woman who had lived in a profligate society, among men who drank and gambled and fought duels, turns from the window where, as the sun set over the lake, she had been thinking of these things, to behold ‘a large lady from Boston extended at full length on the only sofa in the room,’ while ‘odious Yankee boys and girls’ run in and out ‘who displayed their national independence by utterly ignoring the comfort of others.’

But beneath all the changes that life brought her—for she lived until 1873—there remains the memory of the years when she enjoyed the friendship of the great Duke. In the same way that this friendship underlies her fragmentary diaries it seems to have run through the scattered parts of her life, so that when she was very old and attempted to write her own life she wrote a few pages about him and then ceased. But we need not regret that she wrote no more; for it is difficult to believe that by any other method she could have conveyed more vividly than she has done this figure and that figure and the dress and manner and temper of the age, and shown us so clearly at the same time how strangely, in spite of the appearance of change and fragility, one life is involved with another.

[Times Literary Supplement, unsigned, Jun 19, 1913]

[]

‘Women of the Country.’

[Women of the Country by Gertrude Bone (Duckworth, 1913).]

It is very seldom that we find a book which, in dealing with the country, preserves that particular aspect of it which sometimes seems to us to be the most profound. It is the impression which is made upon us by a stretch of rather ugly country, scattered with commonplace farms, and small villages set in the midst of great fields. Such is the country which forms the background in Women of the Country, by Gertrude Bone. ‘There were no hills, no grandeur, no proximity to the sea,’ and the lives of the women who live there are in harmony with it. It is a plain dumb country, and the people who live in it are plain and dumb, but it is the plainness, the peace, the dumbness that appeal to us, and the sense of mighty endurance which arises from it.

The women of the country are for the most part shrewd and practical people, full of charity and full of brutality. They live so near to and so much at the mercy of the harsh and petty things of daily life that their narrowness of vision and brutality of speech are more than superficial. ‘“Other people’s got to live in the house besides you,” said the woman. “If you want so much attention, you know where you can get it.” The bed-ridden woman lay still at the threat of the workhouse.’ As so often happens in real life, it is the queer woman who seems to have glimpses of higher understanding than all the rest. Anne Hilton, the unpractical, pious, eccentric woman who goes from house to house supplying advice or reproof or charity according to a point of view of her own, is the central figure of the book. A rich horse-breeder has taken a farm girl to be his mistress, and Anne goes hither and thither, until we are made aware of the state of public opinion in the village concerning her. There is the enormously fat farmer’s wife, who was so respectable herself that she could ‘spare great charity for the rest of the world,’ and there is the poor woman who had ‘lain many years in the kitchen, whose narrow hot space was all she saw of the world.’ From very different reasons she too had learnt charity—‘“They’re all afraid of the trouble to themselves about the girl,” she said with her bitter intonation. “They’re afraid they’ll be called on to do something for her sooner or later.”’ But perhaps the most vivid picture in the book is that of the workhouse infirmary, where the girl, who has finally been deserted by her husband, goes before the birth of her child. The room is full of very old women and very young women with babies. The old women are quarrelling for a place next the fire, and, when a stranger comes in they begin screaming out, ‘Give me a ha’penny! Spare a ha’penny!’ until a tiny imbecile old woman lifts up her skirts and begins to dance for a halfpenny. These are pictures of an impressionist—that is to say, it is left to us to make a body for a few vivid words, but Mrs Bone’s skill is indisputable. She never allows us to forget that there is much beauty even in a plain country, but the great merit of her book is that, without shirking either the plainness or the meanness, she yet makes us feel the fine quality of the human nature which persists in its life, in spite of everything.

[Times Literary Supplement, unsigned, Jul 10, 1913]

[]

‘Les Copains.’

[Les Copains (Eugène Figuière et Cie, 1913) by Jules Romains.]

It is doubtful whether it would be possible to recall the names of half a dozen living novelists in England and France and honestly say to oneself in the case of each, ‘He has not brought it off yet, but really his next book might be a masterpiece.’ When M. Jules Romains two years ago published Mort de Quelqu’un, for some people he certainly entered into this select and honourable band. The book was not only a good book, but it had that particular type of goodness which does not kill the hope that the author may produce one infinitely better; and a novel infinitely better than Mort de Quelqu’un would undoubtedly deserve some consideration from posterity. M. Romains has this year published Les Copains, and he would probably himself agree that, as far as posterity is concerned, his last book leaves him in the position he occupied in 1911. He has not attempted to fulfil the promise of two years ago; he has, in a sense, begun again. It would be impossible to imagine a more serious book than Mort de Quelqu’un or a less serious one than Les Copains. The former belonged to that class of modern French roman of which there is scarcely an equivalent in English fiction, in which there are no ‘characters’, no humour, no plot, only a few dramatised psychological and metaphysical theories. The latter is a farce—for the most part a broad-humoured, rather knockabout, and sometimes salacious farce.

There is, of course, no reason why a farce should not be a masterpiece, although the literature of all countries seems to show that it is easier to weep or preach or mock or even revile with genius than to fool with genius. It is rather refreshing, therefore, to find in a French novel so much honest fun as there is in M. Romains’s book. It recalls in an odd way the extravaganzas of Mr Chesterton. No two writers have less in common in style, feelings, opinions; and yet one can imagine a Latin Mr Chesterton telling with the same genial gusto the story of the adventures of the seven copains who set out to revenge themselves upon the two provincial towns, Issoire and Ambert, for looking as they did upon the map of the eighty-six departments of France. And, as in Mr Chesterton’s books, though there is plenty of fun for fun’s sake, some of the best things in Les Copains point a moral or possess a sting which take them out of the province of farce into that of satire. M. Romains knows that it is pleasant to laugh, but still pleasanter to laugh at someone. He does so in the Rabelaisian sermon which Bénin preaches in the church at Ambert. Sometimes his irony has the lightness and effectiveness of the best French tradition. The copain Broudier is going to play a practical joke upon the garrison of Ambert by pretending to be a cabinet minister; he dresses up his three companions in full finery and decorates them with orders to represent his ‘commandant’, ‘mon cher directeur’, and ‘mon secrétaire particulier’; then he addresses them as follows:

Quant à moi, vous le voyez, j’ai la mise savamment negligée et la bonhomie autoritaire qui convient aux premiers serviteurs d’une démocratie. Vous êtes là pour me garnir. Je porte moi-mème ma puissance; mais c’est vous qui portez mon décorum, comme un larbin mon pardessus.

In France they are at present fond of labels for writers as well as for painters, and M. Romains’s label is, of course, Unanimisme. There is not, perhaps, at first sight a very great deal of the doctrine in Les Copains; it does not dominate the book as it did Mort de Quelqu’un; but the important thing which lies behind the label and the doctrine is always with M. Romains. What really interests him is the feelings of persons, not as individual characters, but as members of groups; what he delights and excels in doing is to trace the mysterious growth, where two or three are gathered together, of a kind of consciousness of the group in addition to that of each individual of the group. It is probable that M. Romains intended Les Copains to be the farce of Unanimisme; but it is important, as showing where his powers and his future lie, that the best things in the book are to be found, not where he is laughing at anything, even his own doctrines, but where he makes us feel in subtle language those kinds of feelings which peculiarly interest him. The following passage could only have been written by the author of Mort de Quelqu’un, and it makes one hope that M. Romains believes, as we do, that he may write a much better book than Les Copains, but that it will not be a farce:

Le Saint-Péret mousseux débarbouilla les esprits. Il accrut l’ardeur, mais en l’épurant.

Les copains étaient envahis par un sentiment singulier, qui n’avait pas de nom, mais qui leur donnait des ordres, qui exigeait d’eux une satisfaction soudaine: on ne sait quoi qui ressemblait à un besoin d’unité absolue et de conscience absolue.

Ils en arrivèrent à comprendre qu’ils voulaient certaines paroles, qu’ils seraient assouvis par une voix.

Si plusieurs choses n’étaient pas dites, cette nuit même, il serait à jamais trop tard pour les dire.

Si plusieurs choses n’étaient pas constatées et manifestées, elles seraient à jamais perdues.

[Times Literary Supplement, Aug 7, 1913]

[]

1916

Charlotte Brontë

The hundredth anniversary of the birth of Charlotte Brontë will strike, we believe, with peculiar force upon the minds of a very large number of people. Of those hundred years she lived but thirty-nine, and it is strange to reflect what a different image we might have of her if her life had been a long one. She might have become, like other writers who were her contemporaries, a figure familiarly met with in London and elsewhere, the subject of anecdotes and pictures innumerable, removed from us well within the memory of the middle-aged, in all the splendour of established fame. But it is not so. When we think of her we have to imagine someone who had no lot in our modern world; we have to cast our minds back to the fifties of the last century, to a remote parsonage upon the wild Yorkshire moors. Very few now are those who saw her and spoke to her; and her posthumous reputation has not been prolonged by any circle of friends whose memories so often keep alive for a new generation the most vivid and most perishable characteristics of a dead man.

Nevertheless, when her name is mentioned, there starts up before our eyes a picture of Charlotte Brontë, which is as definite as that of a living person, and one may venture to say that to place her name at the head of a page will cause a more genuine interest than almost any other inscription that might be placed there. What new thing, one may well ask, is to be said of so strange and famous a being? How can we add anything about her life or her work which is not already part of the consciousness of the educated man and woman of today? We have seen Haworth, either in fact or in picture; long ago Mrs Gaskell stamped our minds with an ineffaceable impression; and the devotion of later students has swept together every trifle that may render back the echoes of that short and circumscribed life.

But there is one peculiarity which real works of art possess in common. At each fresh reading one notices some change in them, as if the sap of life ran in their leaves, and with skies and plants they had the power to alter their shape and colour from season to season. To write down one’s impressions of Hamlet as one reads it year after year, would be virtually to record one’s own autobiography, for as we know more of life, so Shakespeare comments upon what we know. In their degree, the novels of Charlotte Brontë must be placed within the same class of living and changing creations, which, so far as we can guess, will serve a generation yet unborn with a glass in which to measure its varying stature. In their turn they will say how she has changed to them, and what she has given them. If we collect a few of our impressions today, it is not with any hope of assigning her to her final position, or of drawing her portrait afresh; we offer merely our little hoard of observations, which other readers may like to set, for a moment, beside their own.

So many novels once held great have gone out of fashion, or are pronounced unreadable, that we may justly feel a little anxiety when the time comes to make trial of Jane Eyre and the rest. We have suggested that a book, in order to live, must have the power of changing as we change, and we have to ask ourselves whether it is possible that Charlotte Brontë can have kept pace with us. Shall we not go back to her world of the fifties and find that it is a place only to be visited by the learned, only to be preserved for the curious? A novelist, we reflect, is bound to build up his structure with much very perishable material, which begins by lending it reality, and ends by cumbering its form. The mid-Victorian world, moreover, is the last that we of the present moment wish to see resuscitated. One opens Jane Eyre with all these half-conscious premonitions and excuses, and in ten minutes one finds the whole of them dispersed and the light shining and the wind blowing upon a wild and bracing prospect.

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

As a room full of people makes one who enters suddenly conscious of heightened existence, so the opening passages of this book make us glow and shiver as though we stood out in the storm and saw the rain drive across the moor. There is nothing here that seems more perishable than the moor itself, or more subject to the sway of fashion than the ‘long and lamentable blast’. Nor is this exhilaration short-lived; it rushes us through the entire volume and scarcely gives us time to ask what is happening to us, nor in the end are we able to make out a very clear account of our adventures. We may reflect that this is exactly the opposite of our experience with certain other books justly numbered among the great. When we have finished The Idiot, or Jude the Obscure, and even in the course of reading them, the plethoric state of mind which they induce is to be traced in a head resting on the hands, and oblivious eyes fixed upon the fire. We brood and ponder and drift away from the text in trains of thought which build up round the characters an atmosphere of question and suggestion in which they move, but of which they are unconscious. But it is not possible, when you are reading Charlotte Brontë, to lift your eyes from the page. She has you by the hand and forces you along her road, seeing the things she sees and as she sees them. She is never absent for a moment, nor does she attempt to conceal herself or to disguise her voice. At the conclusion of Jane Eyre we do not feel so much that we have read a book, as that we have parted from a most singular and eloquent woman, met by chance upon a Yorkshire hillside, who has gone with us for a time and told us the whole of her life history. So strong is the impression that if we are disturbed while we are reading the disturbance seems to take place in the novel and not in the room.

There are two reasons for this astonishing closeness and sense of personality—that she is herself the heroine of her own novels, and (if we may divide people into those who think and those who feel) that she is primarily the recorder of feelings and not of thoughts. Her characters are linked together by their passions as by a train of gunpowder. One of these small, pale, volcanic women, be she Jane Eyre or Lucy Snowe, has but to come upon the scene, and wherever she looks there start up round her characters of extreme individuality and intensity who are branded for ever with the features she discerns in them. There are novelists, like Tolstoy and Jane Austen, who persuade us that their characters live and are complex by means of their effect upon many different people, who mirror them in the round. They move hither and thither whether their creator watches them or not. But we cannot imagine Rochester when he is apart from Jane Eyre, or rather we can only see him in different situations as she would have seen him in them, and to be always in love and always a governess is to go through the world with blinkers on one’s eyes.

These are serious limitations, perhaps, and it may be true that they give her work a look of crudeness and violence beside that of more impersonal and more experienced artists. At the same time it is by reason of this marvellous gift of vision that she takes her place with the greatest novelists we have. No writer, that is to say, surpasses her in the power of making what she describes immediately visible to us. She seems to sit down to write from compulsion. The scenes in her mind are painted so boldly and in such strong colours that her hand (so we feel) drives rapidly across the paper, and trembles with the intensity of her thought. It is not surprising to hear that she did not enjoy writing her books, and yet that writing was the only occupation that could lift her up when the burden of sorrow and shame which life laid on her weighted her to the ground. Every one of her books seems to be a superb gesture of defiance, bidding her torturers depart and leave her queen of a splendid island of imagination. Like some hard-pressed captain, she summoned her powers together and proudly annihilated the enemy.

But although much has been said of her habit of describing actual people, and introducing scenes which had happened to her, the vividness of the result is not so easy to analyse. She had both an abnormal sensibility which made every figure and incident strike its pattern upon her mind, and also an extraordinary tenacity and toughness of purpose which drove her to test and investigate these impressions to the last ounce of them. ‘I could never,’ she writes, ‘rest in communication with strong discreet and refined minds, whether male or female, till I had passed the outworks of conventional reserve and crossed the threshold of confidence, and won a place by their hearts’ very hearthstone.’ It is by the ‘heart’s very hearthstone’ that she begins her writing, with the light of it glowing on her page. Indeed, her production, whatever its faults, always seems to issue from a deep place where the fire is eternal. The peculiar virtues of her style, its character, its speed, its colour and strength, seem all of her own forging and to owe nothing to literary instruction or to the reading of many books. The smoothness of the professional writer, his ability to stuff out and sway his language as he chooses, was never learnt by her. She remains always unsophisticated, but with a power through sheer force of meaning of creating the word she needs and winging her way with a rhythm of her own. This mastery over language grew as she gained maturity as an artist; and in Villette, the last and greatest of her works, she is mistress not only of a strong and individual style, but of a style that is both variable and splendid. We are made to remember, too, her long toil with brush and pencil, for she has a strange gift, rare in a writer, of rendering the quality of colour and of texture in words, and thus investing many of her scenes with a curious brilliance and solidity.

Yet it was merely a very pretty drawing room, and within it a boudoir, both spread with white carpets, on which seemed laid brilliant garlands of flowers; both ceiled with snowy moulding of white grapes and vine leaves, beneath which glowed in rich contrast crimson couches and ottomans; while the ornaments on the pale Parian mantelpiece were of sparkling Bohemia glass, ruby red; and between the windows large mirrors repeated the general blending of snow and fire.

We not only see that, we can almost touch it. She never heaps her colours, but lays a blue or a purple or her favourite crimson so rightly on the page that they paint the sentence as with actual pigment. Naturally, therefore, we should expect to find her a great landscape painter, a great lover of the air and the sky and all the pageant that lies between earth and heaven; nor may a student of hers tell whether he cares more for her people or for the keen air and the scent of the moor and the ‘plumes of the storm’ which surround them with such light and atmosphere, and such overwhelming poetry. Her descriptions, too, are not separate visions, as they tend to be so often with writers of less powerful gift, but work themselves into the heart of the book.

It was a mile from Thornfield, in a lane noted for wild roses in summer, for nuts and blackberries in autumn, and even now possessing a few coral treasures in hips and haws, but whose best winter delight lay in its utter solitude and leafless repose. If a breath of air stirred, it made no sound here; for there was not a holly, not an evergreen to rustle, and the stripped hawthorn and hazel bushes were as still as the white worn stones which causewayed the middle of the path. Far and wide on each side there were only fields where no cattle now browsed, and the little brown birds which stirred occasionally looked like single russet leaves that had forgotten to drop.

How beautifully that spreads the mood of the moment over the face of the land!

But these are the details of a great literary gift. We go back to her books, and sometimes this quality strikes us and sometimes that. But all the while we are conscious of something that is greater than one gift or another and is perhaps the quality that attaches us to books as to people—the quality, that is, of the writer’s mind and personality. With their limitations and their great beauty these are stamped upon every page that Charlotte Brontë wrote. We do not need to know her story, or to have climbed the steep hill and gazed upon the stone house among the graves to feel her tremendous honesty and courage, and to know that she loved liberty and independence and the splendour of wild country, and men and women who are above all things passionate and true-minded. These are part of her as her imagination and genius are part of her; and they add to our admiration of her as a writer some peculiar warmth of feeling which makes us desire, when there is any question of doing her honour, to rise and salute her not only as a writer of genius, but as a very noble human being.

[Times Literary Supplement, Apr 13, 1916]

[]

‘Past and Present at the English Lakes.’

[Past and Present at the English Lakes (James MacLehose & Sons, 1916) by the Rev. H.D. Rawnsley]

We all know the charm of the country newspaper, in which columns are devoted to the flower show, or the trial of a poacher, or the wedding of the mayor’s daughter, while the speeches of the Prime Minister and the agitations of the Empire are dismissed in very small type in some obscure corner. In reading Canon Rawnsley’s book we feel something of this delightful change of proportion, as if a magnifying glass had been laid over the fells and dales of the north, and everything that happened beyond the rim of his glass had no existence at all.

Moreover, it is not the present time that his glass magnifies, but the summers of a century ago. We hear Hartley Coleridge murmur as he stops before each portrait in a friend’s dining room, ‘I wish you could give me a glass of beer.’ We see Wordsworth and Coleridge, De Quincey and Scott; and so steeped is Canon Rawnsley in their thought that, though he travels in a motor-car, the landscape comes before him still as it was when Wordsworth looked at it. Shall we ever, we cannot help wondering, see these famous hills with our own eyes as though Wordsworth had never lived? And why is it that the art of describing places and skies in words is so seldom successfully accomplished? When Canon Rawnsley paints directly from the scene before him his sunsets and sunrises tend to remain merely an assembly of the names of colours—purple and gold, fawn and amber—without enough coherence in them to stir our imaginations into activity. But, on the other hand, in a charming paper called ‘Crossing the Sands’ his method is different and far more successful. It is the narrative of a summer day’s walk across the sand of Morecambe Bay. There are a great many facts, a certain amount of history, and a straightforward itinerary; but it is told in such a manner that we feel ourselves to be walking, too, upon the hard-baked sand with its wave-like ridges, fording the rivers and talking to the guide, and getting hot and blistered, and suddenly seeing the beauty of the whole, much as though we were there in the flesh. Perhaps then if you are not a Ruskin or a Wordsworth, it is best not to look straight into the sunset but to rub along with humble facts until the mind at last is all of a glow and sees the sunset without its being described.

But the most interesting paper in the book is that on Gough and his dog. Everyone remembers the story of the young man who was killed on Helvellyn and of the dog who watched beside his body until the shepherds found it three months later, for both Scott and Wordsworth have told the story in famous poems. Canon Rawnsley desired to commemorate the event by placing a tablet on the spot. But almost by accident he was led to inquire into the facts, and now there came to him and to us a most cruel disillusionment. To us, living at a distance, it does not very much matter whether Gough fell at Striding Edge or at Swirrel Edge, so long as fall he did; but to read the heartless statement of a contemporary that the dog was found ‘uncommonly fat’ by her master’s side, ‘and the flesh of the latter was mostly consumed’, was of the nature of a catastrophe. For how many years, we exclaim, has not this impious creature robbed us of our sympathy!

But Canon Rawnsley’s energy and faith were boundless, although at every step he was met by fresh disillusionments. For when once the story was examined each fact became doubtful, or was variously reported by different witnesses. Gough was certainly killed; but whether he fell or perished of starvation, whether he was fishing or making scientific observations, whether he was accompanied by two dogs or by one, nobody seemed to know. The breed of the dog varied as much as its character. Was it a spaniel or a terrier, a Dandie Dinmont or a ‘laal yallow short-haired tarrier dog’? The artists were consulted, but to no purpose. One has painted a huge white mongrel, another a black and tan collie, another a retriever, and another a small white terrier. Wordsworth would only say that it was not of mountain breed and barked like a fox. In his perplexity Canon Rawnsley sought out the descendant of the young man, and established the fact that he often went out with a dog and a walking-stick, and was fond of reciting poetry in the evening. Aged nurses and peasants tottering on the edge of the grave were consulted. The more anxious point of the dog’s behaviour was submitted to a series of shepherds versed in the nature of dogs. Canon Rawnsley finds them unanimously of opinion that ‘a dog wad nivver dea sic a thing; and he kenned dogs, t’ naatur o’ t’ animal. But they did say that ravens had picked at him a bit.’ Still, as Canon Rawnsley says, ‘better far does it seem that the poor traveller should have fallen a prey to the fowls of the air, those natural scavengers of the mountain side, than that the honour and fidelity of his faithful four-footed friend and mourner should be called in question’. In the end it is pretty well established that Mr Gough was accompanied by two dogs, one of which left him, while the other remained, giving birth to puppies, and maintaining herself respectably upon the bodies of sheep, until she was discovered much emaciated and so wild that the hounds had to be set upon her before she could be taken. She was an Irish terrier, and her name was Foxey. But those who like to see the way in which the artist’s mind works upon a subject cannot do better than compare the versions of the same story which have been given by a journalist, by Scott, by Wordsworth, and by De Quincey.

[Times Literary Supplement, Jun 19, 1916]

[]

A Man With a View.

[Samuel Butler: Author of Erewhon, the Man and His Work (Grant Richards, 1916) by John F. Harris.]

It is probable that any one who reads Samuel Butler will wish to know more about him. He is one of those rare spirits among the dead whom we like, or it may be dislike, as we do the living, so strong is their individuality and so clearly can we make up our minds about their manners and opinions. Johnson is of this company, and we can each add others according to our private tastes; but the number of people who will put Samuel Butler upon their list must be increasing every day. For this reason we would give a good deal to have a life of Butler, with plenty of letters and anecdotes and reports of those private sayings and doings in which surely he must have excelled. Mr Harris has had access apparently to no more information than is already before the public, so that he cannot gratify us in this respect; and at first there may seem little reason for another study of Butler’s works when Mr Cannan’s book is scarcely a year old. But Mr Harris is quite strong enough to dispel our doubts. He writes clearly and with considerable force; he generates in us a desire to contradict him flatly, and again he makes us sigh, half with relief and half with annoyance, when he says something so true that we have always been on the point of saying it ourselves. His work has the merit, in particular the very clear chapter on the scientific books, of bringing out the main lines of thought which unite all Butler’s work, so that instead of thinking him an eccentric who took up subjects much at random, we have a more serious picture of a man who built up solidly a house with many storeys. But the justification of Mr Harris’s volume is that directly we have finished it we take down Butler to see what the change in our conception of him amounts to.

All this writing and disputing on his account is, of course, much what Butler himself expected of an intelligent posterity. But why is it that his lamp not only still shines among the living, but with a light that positively grows brighter and seems altogether more friendly and more kindling as the years go by? Perhaps it is that the other lights are going out. Certainly Mr Harris paints a very depressing picture of the great Victorians. There was George Eliot with her philosophic tea parties; and Tennyson declaiming pompously before the statues in the British Museum; and Pater with a style that Butler likened to the face of an enamelled old woman; and Arnold’s ‘odour which was as the faint sickliness of hawthorn’. It was an age, according to Mr Harris, ‘of false values and misplaced enthusiasms, unaccountable prejudices, astonishing deficiency in artistic perception, and yet with it a bewildering lack of real practical efficiency’. Whether this is true or not, it represents very fairly Butler’s own point of view. Further on, however, Mr Harris points out more suggestively that Butler was singular in being the spectator of his age, an amateur, ‘a non-professional worker … as well as a lover’. These words seem to us to indicate the most vital distinction that there was between Butler and his contemporaries. The Victorian age, to hazard another generalisation, was the age of the professional man. The biographies of the time have a depressing similarity; very much overworked, very serious, very joyless, the eminent men appear to us to be, and already strangely formal and remote from us in their likes and dislikes. Butler, of course, hated nothing more than the professional spirit; and this may account for the startling freshness of his books, as if they had been laid up all these years in sweet-scented roots and pungent spices. Naturally his fellow men owed him a grudge (though we should like more evidence of what Mr Harris calls ‘the conspiracy’ against him), as schoolboys set to do their sums in a dreary schoolroom have a grudge against a boy who passes the window with a butterfly net in his hand and nothing to do but enjoy himself.

But why, if they were imprisoned, was Butler free? Had the achievement been an easy one, we should not owe him the enormous debt of thanks which is his due. To free himself from the fetters which he found so galling it was not enough by a long way merely to refuse to be a clergyman. He had to preserve that kind of honesty, originality, or sensibility which asserts itself whether you are about to baptise a child or go to an evening party, and asks, ‘Now why am I doing this? Is it because other people do it? Is it right? Do I enjoy doing it?’ and is always preventing its possessor from falling into step with the throng. In Butler’s day, at any rate, such a disposition was fatal to success. He failed in everything he took up—music and science, painting and literature; and lived the most secluded of lives, without need of dress clothes, in a set of rooms in Clifford’s Inn, where he cooked his own breakfast and fetched his own water. But his triumph lay not in being a failure, but in achieving the kind of success he thought worth while, in being the master of his life, and in selecting the right things to do with it. Never, we imagine, did Butler have to plead that he was too busy for some pleasant thing, such as a concert or a play, or a visit to a friend. Every summer found him with sufficient pocket money to afford a trip to Italy; his weekend jaunts to the country were conducted with extreme regularity, and we should guess that he seldom put himself out to catch a train. But, above all, he had achieved a freedom of soul which he expressed in one book after another. In his obscurity he had wrought out a very clear notion of ‘the Kingdom of Heaven’ and of the qualities needed by those who seek it; of the people who are the ‘only people worth troubling about’, and of the things ‘which nobody doubts who is worth talking to’. He had, of course, a splendid collection of hatreds, just as he worshipped Handel and Shakespeare, Homer and the authoress of the Odyssey, Tabachetti and Bellini, so as to make him rather suspicious of other worshippers. In his isolation and idiosyncrasies he sometimes recalls Edward FitzGerald, but with the great difference that whereas FitzGerald early realised the vanity of fighting the monster, Butler was always busy planting his darts in the flanks of his age, always pugnacious and always full of self-confidence. And against neglect and disapproval he had a private supply of most satisfactory consolations. It was much better fun, he said, to write fearlessly for posterity than to write, ‘like, we will say, George Eliot, and make a lot of money by it’. These reflections certainly kept his temper cooler than is usual in the case of a man who has so much to satirise, and also preserved in all its vigour his most uncompromising individuality. But perhaps his greatest fault as a writer springs from this irresponsibility, his determination, that is, to humour his own ideas in season and out of season, whether they serve to clog the story to stagnation, as sometimes happens in The Way of All Flesh, or to give it shade and depth. Very occasionally he reminds one of those eccentric and insistent people who persist in bathing daily in the Serpentine, or in wearing a greatcoat all the year round, and proclaim that such is the only road to salvation. But that trifling defect is the one drawback of the solitude to which he was condemned.

His many-sided training in art and music, sheep-farming and literature, by exposing so many different sides of his mind to the light, kept him amazingly fresh to the end of life; but he achieved this freshness quite consciously also by treating life as an art. It was a perpetual experiment which he was for ever watching and manipulating and recording in his note-books; and if today we are less ambitious, less apt to be solemn and sentimental, and display without shame a keener appetite for happiness, we owe this very largely to Butler’s example. But in this, too, he differed very much from his contemporaries.

All these qualities and a thousand more—for Butler is a very complex personality, and, like all great writers, finally inscrutable—are to be found in his books. Of these the most remarkable, perhaps, are The Way of All Flesh, and The Note-books. He had worked upon both for many years, and the novel he would have written yet again had he lived. As it is, it has all the qualities of work done almost as a hobby, from sheer love of it, taken up and laid down at pleasure, and receiving the very impress of the maker’s hand. And yet it is easy to understand why it did not arouse enthusiasm when it first appeared—why it yields more upon the third reading than upon the first. It is a book of conviction, which goes its own way, passing the conventional turnings without looking at them. But, after reading it, we hardly care to inspect some of the masterpieces of English fiction; it would be as unkind as to let in the cold light of day upon a dowager in a ball dress. It would be easy to enumerate many important and splendid gifts in which Butler as a novelist was deficient; but his deficiency serves to lay bare one gift in which he excelled, and that is his point of view. To have by nature a point of view, to stick to it, to follow it where it leads, is the rarest of possessions, and lends value even to trifles. This gift Butler had in the highest degree; he gives a turn or a twist to the most ordinary matter, so that it bores its way to the depths of our minds, there to stay when more important things have crumbled to dust. If proof of this is wanted, read his account of buying new-laid eggs in The Note-books, or the story of ‘The Aunt, the Nieces, and the Dog’, or the anecdote of the old lady and her parrot in The Humour of Homer. These Note-books of Butler’s will certainly beget many other note-books, which will be a source of profound disappointment to their owners. It seems so simple a thing to have a note-book and to have ideas; but what if the ideas refuse to come, or lodge in the same place instead of ranging from earth to Heaven? We shall, at any rate, learn to respect Butler more highly. The truth is that despite his homeliness and his seeming accessibility, no one has ever succeeded in imitating Butler; to do so one would have to unscrew one’s head and put it on altogether differently. At one time we think it is his humour that eludes us, that strange, unlaughing, overwhelming gift which compresses his stories at one grasp into their eternal shape; at another the peculiar accent and power of his style; but in the end we cease to dissect, and give ourselves up to delight in a structure which seems to us so entire and all of a piece; so typically English, we would like to think, remembering his force of character, his humanity, and his great love of beauty.

[Times Literary Supplement, Jul 20, 1916]

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Heard on the Downs: The Genesis of Myth.

Two well-known writers were describing the sound of the guns in France, as they heard it from the top of the South Downs. One likened it to ‘the hammer stroke of Fate’; the other heard in it ‘the pulse of Destiny’.

More prosaically, it sounds like the beating of gigantic carpets by gigantic women, at a distance. You may almost see them holding the carpets in their strong arms by the four corners, tossing them into the air, and bringing them down with a thud while the dust rises in a cloud about their heads. All walks on the Downs this summer are accompanied by this sinister sound of far-off beating, which is sometimes as faint as the ghost of an echo, and sometimes rises almost from the next fold of grey land. At all times strange volumes of sound roll across the bare uplands, and reverberate in those hollows in the Downside which seem to await the spectators of some Titanic drama. Often walking alone, with neither man nor animal in sight, you turn sharply to see who it is that gallops behind you. But there is no one. The phantom horseman dashes by with a thunder of hoofs, and suddenly his ride is over and the sound lapses, and you only hear the grasshoppers and the larks in the sky.

Such tricks of sound may easily be accounted for by the curious planes of curve and smoothness into which these Downs have been shaped, but for hundreds of years they must have peopled the villages and the solitary farmhouses in the folds with stories of ghostly riders and unhappy ladies forever seeking their lost treasure. These ghosts have rambled about for so many centuries that they are now old inhabitants with family histories attached to them; but at the present moment one may find many phantoms hovering on the borderland of belief and scepticism—not yet believed in, but not properly accounted for. Human vanity, it may be, embodies them in the first place. The desire to be somehow impossibly, and therefore all the more mysteriously, concerned in secret affairs of national importance is very strong at the present moment. It is none of our business to supply reasons; only to notice queer signs, draw conclusions, and shake our heads. Each village has its wiseacre, who knows already more than he will say; and in a year or two who shall limit the circumstantial narratives which will be current in the neighbourhood, and possibly masquerade in solemn histories for the instruction of the future!

In this district, for instance, there are curious ridges or shelves in the hillside, which the local antiquaries variously declare to have been caused by ice-pressure, or by the pickaxes of prehistoric man. But since the war we have made far better use of them. Not so very long ago, we say a hundred years at most, England was invaded, and, the enemy landing on the Down at the back of our village, we dug trenches to withstand him, much like those in use in Flanders now. You may see them with your own eyes. And this, somehow, is proof that if the Germans land they will land here, which, although terrifying, also gratifies our sense of our own importance.

But these historical speculations are for the contemplative mind of the shepherd, or of the old cottager, who can almost carry back to the days of the great invasion. His daughter has evidence of the supernatural state of things now existing without going farther than the shed in which her hens are sitting. When she came to hatch out her eggs, she will tell you, only five of the dozen had live chicks in them, and the rest were addled. This she attributes unhesitatingly to vibrations in the earth caused by the shock of the great guns in Flanders. If you express a doubt she will overwhelm you with evidence from all the country round. But no one here limits the action of the guns to the addling of a few hen’s eggs; the very sun in the sky, they assert, has been somehow deranged in his mechanism by our thunder on earth. The dark spell of cloudy weather which spoilt July was directly due to these turmoils, and the weather-wise at the cottage laid it down as a fact that we should see no more sun all summer. None could rightly divine the reason; but to offer a reason for such sublime transactions would be almost to cast a doubt upon them. The sun has shone fiercely since then and is shining still, and local wisdom has fastened with renewed hope upon the behaviour of the church bell. The bell belongs to a church which stands solitary upon a hill in the midst of wild marshes, and is gifted with the power of foretelling the return of peace by dropping from the belfry exactly three months before peace is declared. Thus, at least, did it testify to the advent of peace after the Boer War; and once again, on 3 May last, to the delight of all beholders, the rope broke and the bell fell to earth.

August is well on its way, but you may still hear the guns from the top of the Downs; the sun blazes in a cloudless sky, and the eggs are no longer addled; but we are by no means downcast, and merely turn our minds to the next riddle, with a deeper conviction than before that we live in a world full of mysteries.

[The Times, ‘from a correspondent’, Aug 15, 1916]

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‘The Park Wall.’

[The Park Wall (Cassell & Co. Ltd., 1916) by Elinor Mordaunt]

The Park Wall confirms us in our belief that Elinor Mordaunt takes a very high place among living novelists and also a very honourable one. The book, indeed, is good enough to make us cast our eyes back to the old novels of great reputation, not merely to make the old comparisons and declare that here at last we have a writer worthy, &c., &c.; but to see how far we have travelled and in what respects we differ. Mrs Mordaunt’s books appear to us sufficiently original and therefore emphatic to serve as a landmark. She writes in her way, and they in theirs; and one writer may be more richly gifted than another: but that sometimes seems to be of less importance than to have, as only true artists have, a world of one’s own; and we begin to think that, whether big or small, Mrs Mordaunt’s world is certainly her own.

The Park Wall is a wall of solid bricks, for Alice Ingpen, the heroine, lives in a substantial country house, but it is also a wall of tough though immaterial prejudice. Although she is by nature very slow and diffident, Alice soon finds herself amazingly further outside her park wall than most young women of her station. In the first place, her marriage takes her to live at Terracine, an island which lies ‘a species of blister on the hot face of the Indian Ocean’; and then her husband turns out to be ‘a common low cad’, a speculator, a gambler, and, naturally, a completely unfaithful husband. By means of a stratagem he sends her back to England on the same ship with a man to whom she has no tie save that of friendship; and directly they land he proceeds to divorce her. Her family shut their park gates against her. A child is born to her, and she goes to live in the south of London, where eventually she finds work in a factory for making cheap dresses. We may add that the story, after many more complications than we have described, ends happily; but the story is not the important thing.

If it were the important thing there would be faults to find with it—the husband’s stratagem, to begin with, is not a very convincing one; nor can we believe that a respectable family of country gentlefolk would bring themselves to desert their daughter, as the Ingpens deserted Alice. But does it very much matter? So long as the writer moves from point to point as one who follows the lead of his mind fearlessly, it does not seem to matter at all. Mrs Mordaunt’s mind is an extremely honest one, and where it points, she follows. She takes us with her, therefore, our intelligence on the alert, uncertain what is to happen, but with an increasing consciousness that all that happens is part of a genuine design. The writer is sufficiently mistress of her art to hold this out firmly before us, without any of those sudden immersions in this character or that incident which overcome the ill-equipped writer and destroy his composition. Her mastery of her subject allows her to enrich it with reflections of real profundity:

In the romance of young lovers there is the bud; in marriage there is the real fruit, sweet or bitter, as the case may be. Those who have their teeth in the rind may be slow to discover its flavour, for there is a sort of shock of the taste which for a while conceals taste. But while they are still uncertain the onlookers know all about it; wait, with some interest, for the inevitable grimace, and then go away. The man or woman who thinks to keep them amused by going on grimacing is mistaken.

This ability to withdraw slightly and see the picture as a whole and reflect upon it is very rare; it generally implies, as we think it does in the case of Mrs Mordaunt, a power to strike out characters with solid bodies and clear-cut features. Her men (unless we are merely hypnotised to think so by a woman’s name on the title page) are less good than her women; but even they fill their spaces in the design satisfactorily, and Alice herself is extraordinarily successful. We feel ourselves thinking so closely with her that, as in the case of a living person, we almost anticipate her words. Mrs Mordaunt treats her without any of the self-consciousness and the random boldness which mark her portraits of men, and makes us wonder whether the most successful work in fiction is not done almost instinctively. Again, we find ourselves glancing back at the classics. But if anyone seeks proof that the moderns are attempting and achieving something different from the great dead, let him read the scene in the Bloomsbury hotel, when the family spirit utters itself in scarcely articulate cries and curses, with a curious effect as of angry parrots fluttering in a cage round some mute dove with folded wings. Surely Mrs Mordaunt is here attempting something that the Victorians never thought of, feeling and finding expression for an emotion that escaped them entirely. But whether this is so or not, the fact remains that The Park Wall is separate and individual enough to be studied for itself.

[Times Literary Supplement, Aug 31, 1916]

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Butterflies and Moths: Insects in September.

Are there as many butterflies now as there were when we were children? Where are the Small Coppers, the Wood Arguses, the Clouded Yellows which were then so frequent? You may sit in the sun for an hour surrounded by flowers and count only one Tortoiseshell, 20 Common Whites, and three Meadow Browns; and these are all dull butterflies as butterflies go. The truth may be, as we learnt in ‘Eyes and No-Eyes,’ that having ceased to collect, we have also ceased to notice.

Outside the garden, at any rate, there is no reason to complain of a lack of butterflies, once we look for them, though certain species, once common, seem now curiously scarce. Almost every step through the long grass sends some brown insect on a swift, curved flight to the next resting place, and suddenly one finds oneself on the outskirts of a great camp of blue butterflies. One little butterfly seems to be attached to each grass stem near the top, serving as a flag or highly decorated sail as it sways in the breeze. If you wade among them the air is full at once of exquisite little blue flakes, which settle the moment after with close folded wings. But you may walk another mile without meeting even the hardy brown butterfly which seems like a spray of the heath taking wings and returning to heath again. And next moment you come to a patch of clover or a sunny hollow among trees which seems to possess some irresistible charm for insects, some sweetness or stillness or echo—what is it that charms a dragon fly? for they circle by the score, floating joyfully and silently on their red and blue and white wings, as if they were at worship about a shrine of sunbaked turf.

No one who has ever dogged a Clouded Yellow for an hour up and down a moor strewn with rocks and caught it at last with a swoop of the net high in air can see butterflies dancing in the wild without feeling the lust of the chase again. What if a Purple Emperor should descend or a Camberwell Beauty? Is that a Common Blue and not a Mazarine or an Adonis? Ironically enough, it is when one’s hunting days are over that the greatest chances come our way. One fine September morning a black patch appeared on the wall of the house. Smouldering ambitions instantly revived and we declared that it was a moth, a large Hawk moth—why not a Death’s Head Hawk moth? And so, when carefully brought to land, it proved to be; as large and soft as a mouse, with the skull and crossbones marked as if in velvet. All day it lay drowsily inert, squeaking if disturbed, and in the evening took its flight.

The autumn nights are full of moths. As the light fades they begin to busy themselves among the flowers, and few sights have a greater enchantment than that of a Hawk moth with its vibrating wings blurred in movement, suspended above a tobacco plant or an evening primrose. The pursuit of them, too, must surely have given many children their first perceptions of natural loveliness. There is, to begin with, the fascination of sugaring the trees. At dusk, rags steeped in treacle with a dash of rum are pinned to the trunks; and when it is dark these are visited and the light cautiously allowed to play upon them. The treacle has run down the bark in rivulets and upon each there sits a moth or two with his proboscis deep-plunged in the flood, and often so drunk that a tap sends him helpless to the ground. It is an exciting moment. On a good night the tree is covered with little dark knobs. They are mostly common moths, yellow underwings, Hearts and Darts, and a persistent visitor called in the books ‘Setacious Hebrew Character.’ But sometimes as the light approaches a flash of scarlet shows that a Crimson Underwing is tasting delight, for though he is not rare, there is always a certain pomp and splendour about him. But whatever we catch, there is mystery and charm in the night and the insects whom we arrest in the dark ocean of the air.

Best of all is it to sugar for moths in the New Forest. A little distance within the wood it is completely still and dark, even on a September night. The lantern seems to shove aside the blackness, as a snow-plough drives a path through the snow. When it is stood upon the ground, what strange creatures of the underworld edge up to it—spiders and beetles and perhaps a great green grasshopper, to whom light seems to give an ecstasy of joy. The circle of pale-green grass where the radiance falls is soon full of grotesque insects, who come with angular and crab-like movements through the grass blades, so that you can hear tiny brittle sounds as they move.

[The Times, Sep 14, 1916, ‘From a Correspondent’]

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The Fighting Nineties.

[Nights. Rome, Venice in the Aesthetic Eighties. London, Paris in the Fighting Nineties … With sixteen illustrations (William Heinemann, 1916) by Elizabeth Robins Pennell]

As the title indicates, this is not an autobiography or a book of ordinary recollections so much as the selection of a few memories dear to the writer. Mrs Pennell has never made notes—never, as it seems, had the time to stop and comment when life pressed such a succession of duties and delights upon her. She tells few anecdotes even of the dead, and leaves a wide space between herself and those living celebrities who are, she hints, ready to spring out with all their claws displayed at the least rattle upon the bars of their privacy. But her memories are much too personal and spontaneous to need such artificial ornaments. If ‘Arnold at Venice’ catches your eye, you will read of a gentleman who ‘found the café as comfortable a place to sleep in as any other’, and ‘the one thing that roused him was baseball’, from which we may deduce that he was not even related to Arnold the poet.

Mrs Pennell’s day was one of strenuous bicycling and journalism; but this she cuts off and dwells almost exclusively upon a long series of nights in Rome and Venice, London and Paris, when the gilt mirrors of innumerable restaurants reflected little parties of very youthful artists discussing all things in life and art, until the proprietor had to produce candles for them to go home with. Mrs Pennell conveys very charmingly the impression of the wonderfully gifted beings who drifted round the table on those nights, with their eccentric adventures, and their casual way of upsetting all the traditions current in Spruce Street, Philadelphia, where she was brought up. At first she was continually surprised; they never mentioned ‘history, dates, periods, schools’, took no account of Ruskin, and considered living artists more interesting than dead ones. ‘The vital questions were treatment, colour values, tone, mediums … There were nights when I went away believing that nothing mattered in the world except the ground on a copper plate or the grain of a canvas, or the paint in a tube.’ And they all believed consistently that in the whole world the only thing that matters is art.

Nights when the little tables in a café attract all the artists in a quarter have never flourished in London, although Mrs Pennell’s pages give the lie once more to the notion that English people refuse to congregate and talk if they are given a comfortable private room, whisky and soda and a hospitable hostess. To judge by names, the best of all the nights, so far as brilliance of talk goes, must have been those in the Buckingham Street rooms overlooking the river. Henley came there, and R.A.M. Stevenson, Henry Harland, Whistler, Aubrey Beardsley—all the stars, in short, of the last years of the nineteenth century. The rooms shook with Henley’s robust roar, which drove timid spirits to seek far corners; or there was heard the ‘Ha, ha!’ of Whistler, which also made certain guests thankful that the room was provided with many doors.

And here we must make what appears to be a confession. The little shelf of books bequeathed to us by the writers of that age has always seemed the fruit of an evening time after the hot blaze of day, when swift, moth-like spirits were abroad; a time of graceful talent and thin little volumes whose authors had done with life long before they were old. Nothing annoys Mrs Pennell more than such a description of her incomparable age. They were days above all of fighting and clamour. What they despised they called ‘bleat’; what they loved they called ‘human’. ‘The Fighting Nineties’ she calls them in preference to any other description—fighting, it seems, ‘Victorian sham prudery and respectability’. Whether the historian will agree with her hardly matters. To the people who lived in them they were, mercifully enough, the one tolerable season of recorded time. If fortune has given us a different period, we may think Mrs Pennell mistaken, but we can sympathise. The difficulty is to sympathise with her in the later chapters, when she becomes so drastically exclusive that ninety-nine out of a hundred of her readers must feel themselves included in the vast herd of ‘tourists’, ‘outsiders’, or ‘average Englishmen’, who, as they flounder about in cafés and galleries, have to be avoided, or, if they cannot be avoided, to be shocked. And from this artistic exclusiveness the step is very short to the worst exclusiveness of all—that which shuts itself up against youth and decries and belittles its work. The change from intense enjoyment of her own youth to disparagement of the youth of others is really surprising. What, one wonders, would Mrs Pennell have said if anyone had addressed her group as she addresses the artists of today?

I have watched with sympathetic amusement these late years one new movement, one new revolt after another, started and led by little men who have not the strength to move anything, or the independence to revolt against anything, except in their boast of it.

Or again:

Their inability to take themselves with gaiety is what makes the young men of the twentieth century so hopelessly different from the young men of the eighteen-nineties. Their high moral ideal and concern with social problems would not permit them to see anything to laugh at in the experiment of feeding a peacock on cake steeped in absinthe.”

If such is the toll that time exacts from those who have tasted the best of life, one may surely be content to dine at all the wrong places and be shocked by all the right things.

[Times Literary Supplement, Oct 12, 1916]

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Among the Poets.

[An Evening in my Library Among the English Poets (John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1916) by the Hon. Stephen Coleridge.]

On the face of it there is a great deal to be said in favour of such a book as this. For it is very pleasant to think of literature rather informally sometimes, and to be led about a library by some enthusiast who is always pulling out a volume and saying ‘Listen to this’. And there is a real service to be performed by people who are not professors or specialists, but merely know good writing when they see it. The mass of new poetry is vast; every year hundreds of poems must sink to the depths and be lost for ever. We need, therefore, watchers with trained eyes who will go through book after book and extract what is worth keeping. And who, after all, is better qualified than Mr Coleridge to discharge the duties of an examiner or warden of letters? ‘I have lived all my life in libraries,’ he writes, ‘first in my father’s, which was magnificent, and afterwards in my own, which is precious.’ And, then, he is a Coleridge.

He begins with sufficient spirit to raise our hopes very high. Here, he says, taking down a book of poems by a young American, called Charles Henry Luders, ‘is one of the most lovely things in the world’. Naturally after hearing that we are disappointed by the poem itself. We are immediately prepared to cap it with something just as good by someone as little known. Next we have an extract from a prize poem on the Apollo Belvedere by Dean Milman; and then, after a little discourse upon the value of classical study, a famous sonnet of Wordsworth’s. What are the principles that guide Mr Coleridge in choosing selections for our improvement and delight? It is not difficult to discover them. The prize always goes to the poet of finish and scholarship, who observes the laws of prosody and elevates and refines the passions, which is, Mr Coleridge observes, the ‘true function of the poet’. And with this for his standard he moves his poets up and down like boys in a class. Walt Whitman and his admirers go to the very bottom. ‘… it is as impossible to argue with persons who admire this kind of flux from a dictionary (The Song of the Broad Axe) as it is to discuss principles of beauty in art with an admirer of the Cubists …’; and so on. There is more to be said for Lowell, but Mr Coleridge pauses in his remarks upon him to observe rather plaintively that he wore a beard. On the other hand, Miss Anne Reeves Aldritch and Miss Lucy Larcom get almost full marks. But Mr Coleridge’s range is very wide and purposely haphazard. Here, for instance, he opens Swinburne, and remarks, ‘In the later years of the nineteenth century Swinburne enjoyed a very considerable reputation.’ We may possibly be aware of that already; but other comments are more disputable and should make Mr Coleridge’s library ring with argument. Pope, he says, ‘never attains the grand style’; ‘it is remarkable that even the finest work of Wordsworth appears to be generally quite uninspired’; ‘the finest work is always perfectly simple’; of Walter Savage Landor, ‘his excursions into poetry do nothing to enhance his fame’. To all of which we can only reply that we do not agree with a word of it.

Living writers as a rule are not well represented in Mr Coleridge’s library; or, if he admits them, there must be labels attached to them to warn off the public. Both Mr Masefield and Mr Bernard Shaw have ‘projected upon the public the foul expletive which never passes the lips of any decent person’. And Mr Yeats is by no means safe reading. He encourages a loose habit of mind—a confusion between beauty and vagueness. There is a line of his about evening which has been much admired by the young:

And evening, full of the linnet’s wings,

whereas the truth is that linnets ‘go to roost no later than any other birds’.

But these quotations show Mr Coleridge with the birch in his hand, driving intruders out of the sanctuary; and, that done, he falls down and worships with the most devout and thankful of hearts. His god—one need hardly say it—is Tennyson. And his final exhortation is to read through In Memoriam once a year at least; then he quotes ‘Tears, Idle Tears’, and the beauty of it is so much greater than we remembered that we take down Tennyson at once. Enough has been said, perhaps, to show that, though we should not allow Mr Coleridge to choose our new poets for us, he is a very vigilant guardian of the old.

[Times Literary Supplement, Nov 2, 1916]

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‘London Revisited.’

[London Revisited. With sixteen drawings in colour by Η. M. Livens and sixteen other illustrations (Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1916) by E.V. Lucas.]

It is rather difficult to decide what section of the public ought to be advised to lay out six shillings upon Mr Lucas’s book. If you want to look up information about a church or a building as you look up a train in the ABC, you will find nine times out of ten that there is no mention of that church or building. If, again, you want to contemplate London philosophically, humorously, or aesthetically, the lists of pictures, statues, and historic houses, delivered in the impersonal manner of a cathedral guide, will grate upon your teeth rather dryly. But if you belong to what is evidently no small section of the human race—that is, the public which reads whatever Mr Lucas writes—the book may be recommended as a good example of his manner. He displays his neat, trim style, his love of old books, odd characters, cricket, Charles Lamb, collections, antiquities, water-colour paintings, curiosities, quotations—but the list threatens to be a long one; and the dominant interest in the present book is certainly London.

But if Mr Lucas had a million interests he could safely find pegs for them all in the streets of London. Personally, we should be willing to read one volume about every street in the city, and should still ask for more. From the bones of extinct monsters and the coins of Roman emperors in the cellars to the name of the shopman over the door, the whole story is fascinating and the material endless. Perhaps cockneys are a prejudiced race, but certainly this inexhaustible richness seems to belong to London more than to any other great city. By side of her Paris is small and frivolous; and, though all Continental cities have copied Paris, for Londoners, at any rate, there is only one real example of a town in the world—compared with her the rest are country villages. But each Londoner has a London in his mind which is the real London, some denying the right of Bayswater to be included, others of Kensington; and each feels for London as he feels for his family, quietly but deeply, and with a quick eye for affront.

Many of us, for instance, have never quite reconciled ourselves to the attempt which has been made of late to comb out her huddle of little streets and substitute military-looking avenues with enormous symbolical mounds of statuary placed exactly at the wrong spot—for we have no sense, like the French, for the outdoor dramatic. And the lavish use of white stone, though commended by Mr Lucas (it is, he says, ‘the only true building material for London’), lends itself too much in the hands of modern architects to scrolls and festoons, fit for the white sugar of a wedding cake rather than for the streets of a great city. But in the last two winters many of us must have realised the beauty of the white church spires for the first time; as they lie against the blue of the night in their ethereal ghostliness. There is room for all diversion of opinion about London; and, however often you may walk her streets, you are always picking up new facts about her. How many of us know two facts mentioned by Mr Lucas—that in St Giles’s-in-the-Fields off the Charing Cross Road lie buried Marvell and Chapman, James Shirley and Lord Herbert of Cherbury? and that all the lampposts in the parish of St Martin-in-the-Fields bear a relief of St Martin giving his cloak to the beggar? The list of open-air statues which Mr Lucas has compiled is far longer than we should have expected. We own to finding ourselves completely outdone by Mr Lucas in appreciation of these works. But even the statues of London are lovable; and the sparrows find the top hats of statesmen good lodging for their nests. Finally, if Cleopatra’s Needle is to count as a statue, why is there no mention of one of the few pieces of sculpture in the streets of London that is pleasing to the eye—the woman with an urn which fronts the gates of the Foundling Hospital? In future editions of this book we hope that Mr Lucas will spare her a word of praise; and reveal the name of the sculptor.

[Times Literary Supplement, Nov 9, 1916]

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In a Library.

[A Quiet Corner in a Library (G.G. Harrap & Co., 1916) by W.H. Hudson. Reprinted: CW.]

We hope that the modesty of Professor Hudson’s preface will not mislead many of his readers into thinking that it is quite a simple matter to write such a book themselves. It is, he says, a by-product of ‘more serious work in literature’, and unless we are much mistaken, behind each of the essays lies a background of extremely wide and serious reading. The learning is suppressed rather than obtruded; but it raises Professor Hudson to an eminence from which he can see his subject in the right proportions, and makes his treatment at once light and authoritative.

Anyone who chances to read an essay now and again upon such forgotten writers as Henry Carey and George Lillo is aware how earnestly the essayist strains to prove the importance of his subject. Either he was the unacknowledged father of the novel or the forgotten originator of the essay—a claim we would willingly concede, for the most part, if by so doing we might escape the proofs of it. Professor Hudson, on the other hand, frankly acknowledges the obscurity of his heroes, and, by demonstrating that their writing was often extremely dull, persuades us to find a good deal of amusement in it. But, having all the facts at his fingers’ ends, he can do what is more to the point—he can show us why it is that men like Carey and Lillo, while themselves unimportant, are yet interesting figures in the history of literature.

Carey, we all know, wrote ‘Sally in our Alley’. But we do not know that he wrote it after ‘dodging’ a shoemaker’s ’prentice who was taking his sweetheart to a ‘sight of Bedlam, the Puppet-Shows, the Flying Chairs, and all the elegancies of Moorfields’. We do not perhaps know that he was one of the first writers in that aristocratic age to see the ‘beauty of a chaste and disinterested passion, even in the lowest class of human life’. Before his time, chaste and disinterested passions were considered to be the monopoly of the peerage. It was only when you wrote a comedy or wanted to provide some comic relief that you could introduce the lower classes with propriety. This interesting theory is discussed at greater length in the paper upon George Lillo, whose play, The London Merchant, did much to bring middle-class men and women upon the stage not as butts, but as heroes and heroines—a piece of presumption which much offended ‘the Town’, although the play has been acted from 1731 down to our own time, when Sir Henry Irving used to play it in the provinces. As a stout democrat Professor Hudson asserts that the prejudice which made an aristocratic hero essential is nowadays ‘in the last degree unintelligible’. But is that so? Considering the rarity of coronets, the number of lords and ladies in modern fiction is really notable, and must be supported by some demand on the part of the public. And the tendency is not quite so unintelligible or so vicious as Professor Hudson would have it. Without saying that certain kinds of emotion are actually made more dignified by the fact that they are felt by a king or a queen it is far easier to make them seem dignified. The associations are on the side of the peerage. And who shall say that a line like

Queens have died young and fair

would have the same charm if it were merely girls, or maids, who had died young and fair?

The question, however, is not one of title or no title so much as the more interesting question of realism or romance. It is in this respect that Lillo was a great innovator. His heroes and heroines were not only merchants and clerks, but they felt like merchants and clerks. Their virtues were decency, honesty and thrift; and, however tragic they might be, they spoke in prose. And so, as Professor Hudson observes, we descend to the plays of Ibsen and the modern development of prose fiction. But have we made things any easier for the novelist or the dramatist by widening their scope? Naturally not; for where everything may be written about, the difficulty is to know what to leave out. Our modern problem is that we want to preserve the beauty and romance of the heroic together with what is called character-drawing and likeness to life; and the peerage, if it tempts, tempts because it puts our characters a little further from us and invests them with a softer light. The whole subject of the middle-class drama and the growth of realism is a very interesting one, and we are glad to see that Professor Hudson proposes to treat it at length in a forthcoming book.

[Times Literary Supplement, Nov 23, 1916]

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Old and Young.

[I Sometimes Think. Essays for the Young People (Macmillan 8 Co., 1916) by Stephen Paget]

We have one reason, not the only one by any means, for thinking highly of this book of essays: it makes us wish to write an essay of our own, for the old people. We believe that if they were treated to their share of sermons, in which youth reasoned with them and defined their temptations as frankly as Mr Paget has done it for the young in the present volume, the ordinary life of the household would be much improved. No doubt we have improved it already. The child who calls his mother Mary and his father John is not going to be tongue-tied with false reverence when he grows up; those parents may hope never to stiffen into tyrants living in a sacred, and presumably unhappy, isolation. But as things are the old are as mysterious as idols in a temple; we take off our shoes before we approach them. The whole of our tradition is against unpremeditated intercourse with them; before we speak we sort out what it is proper to say to them as if they were newly made acquaintances, although in fact they may be related to us by the closest ties.

Whether this tradition rests on some truth or is the relic of an age of ancestor worship we do not know; but the effect of such treatment is that we are curiously cut off from communication with the old. They are for the most part mute and scarcely ever the subject of imaginative speculation. And when they do emerge the result is strange. Three or four years ago there was an exhibition of Post-Impressionist pictures, which acted, oddly enough, as a trumpet call to the elderly and consolidated their forces into one opaque block. Everyone of both sexes who was over sixty felt apparently that not only were the principles of art attacked, but also the sanctity of old age. The virulence of the greyheaded was a revelation of the passion that was, and no doubt still is, in them. It was not less puzzling than the pictures themselves. At that time some textbook dealing with the psychology of the old would have been of great assistance; and we suggest that Mr Paget should consider the composition of one. We would ask him to examine particularly the change of mind which takes place between the ages of fifty and sixty. It is when they reach that age, we note, that we begin to treat our elders with respect. Losing the stimulus of contradiction, and relaxing their minds now that they have climbed their ladders, they develop a strange jealousy, a pontifical attitude of mind, so that a celebrated surgeon thinks nothing of dictating laws to a painter, and a successful barrister defines the province of realism in music. Indirectly, Mr Paget’s book throws some light on these problems; and his complete immunity from these vices at once makes us desire to qualify any suspicion of harshness in the above remarks. For the old, after all, are the deep mirrors of life, in whose depths we may see all the processions of the past, closely surrounded by the unknown, as the day by the darkness of night.

Mr Paget’s book, however, is compact of so many things that we cannot pretend to lasso either it or him with one fling of the rope. We do not know that we can even prove him old as years go; fifty years ago, he tells us, he was a small boy learning Euclid; so that at the most he can lay claim to sixty years only. We accept his word that he is about to become a fossil, and also that his book contains sermons; our experience of the pulpit would not have suggested that particular word. And at the very start he amply proves his own contention that fossils ‘are aggressive, contradictious creatures, always spoiling for a fight’. Put him in a Devonshire garden in April and instead of fixing his eyes upon the nearest hedge with a critical stare which suggests the decadence of evergreens, he is off at once upon the beauty of nature and the kindness of his friends. No clergyman could wish for clearer signposts for a sermon; but as Mr Paget treats them they point many different ways. We never know what we may meet at the turn of the page. ‘No need here for guide-book talk,’ he says; and, indeed, we had settled down to expect something of the kind from him. ‘If you want to pay a compliment to the beauty of nature … just say Oh, my! and expire.’ And if Mr Paget talks about himself, he bids us not be offended, because ‘every library is full of the beauty of nature and the loving-kindness of man. But so many of these descriptions are impersonal,’ he adds, ‘they look outside self, not into self.’ One more quotation we may take from this essay:

We do feel, all of us, when we think steadily about it, that there must be some sort of limit to what is bad; some level of reality where it leaves off, some purpose which it does not prevent. In our common talk, our stock phrases, we admit this feeling. We explain away, as if we were in eternity—where, indeed, we are—the misconduct not only of ourselves but of others. He didn’t realise what he was doing, we say … or, again, One of his uncles is in a lunatic asylum. […] And I say these feelings are not only sane; they are as near the truth as we can get them.

Now all this, we think, throws a little light upon the problems of old age. We see at once that the essayist is wonderfully at his ease, careless of what people may think of him, and convinced that any pretence is waste of time. All these good qualities spring from familiarity with life. But there are two other qualities which are present and which are even more significant. One is the happiness of old age, and the other is the certainty of the old as to what is right and what wrong. This happiness is quite consistent with a belief that things are very much worse than they were fifty years ago; that, indeed, may be one of the causes of it, though certainly it is not so in the case of Mr Paget. But the content of the old is much greater than their discontent, partly because they are for the most part irresponsible; and partly because they do not look ahead, but into the past and into the present. When we come to consider their certainty as to what is right and what wrong, however, we enter into the mystery of age.

It is clear that Mr Paget collects these essays in the hope that they will make young people in some way better. That, we think, is certain to be the result of so charming a book, but would anyone under sixty cherish such an aim? Until we reach that age those of us who are not moralists by profession have not made up our minds about our own lives, let alone the lives of other people. After that age we become, if we have a turn for thinking at all, full of concern for the soul. We lose the sense of separateness from others, and it becomes of great moment to us that people should understand the value of goodness. For evidently some kind of simplification takes place in the minds of the old. The soul rids itself of a multitude of cares and desires, and attaches itself with the greatest devotion to the one or two beliefs which survive. We think that for the most part these are beliefs in the goodness and badness of conduct, and that this is so is certainly confirmed by every one of Mr Paget’s essays. Very active of mind, and having that mind stored with a great variety of knowledge, still the main question for him is always the moral question, whether he is discussing ‘Moving Pictures’, ‘Handwriting’, or ‘The Beauty of Words’. He has no doubt at all that this is the important aspect of each subject, and therefore he calls us to consider it with an authority which is more impressive than any other of his gifts. By what combination of simplicity, sympathy and absolute sincerity he brings us to an attitude of open-mouthed attention we do not know. But though we cannot define it exactly this we take to be the peculiar gift of the old, which forbids us to be quite at our ease with them, but invests them with mystery and compels our reverence for a knowledge which we ourselves have not.

[Times Literary Supplement, Dec 14, 1916]

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‘Social Life in England.’

[Social Life in England 1750–1850 (Macmillan & Co., 1916) by F.J. Foakes Jackson.]

These eight lectures were delivered in March 1916, by Dr Foakes Jackson before the Lowell Institute in Boston. The audience apparently received them graciously, and the lecturer has now printed them for a wider audience under a title and inside a cover which seem to us both a little misleading. Dark blue books are not, it is true, necessarily profound; but the title seems to promise something more solid than we have here. That particular century was a momentous one in our social history. The industrial revolution, which turned England from an aristocracy to a democracy, which drove the country people into the factories and raised a large and politically powerful middle class, and the passing of the Reform Bill—to mention the most obvious events alone—moulded England into a new shape. If Shakespeare had come to life again in the middle of the eighteenth century, he would very soon have understood his position; but if Shakespeare were to awake now! The thought of what he would see in the sky and on the earth is at once appalling and fascinating.

No one could expect an exhaustive account of such a transformation in eight lectures lasting presumably one hour each; but we might look for some grouping or emphasis which would bring a general theory to our attention. That is the kind of service which lectures, with all their disadvantages, tend to perform; and it is a real one. But in this readable little book with its amusing assembly of quotations from Creevey and Dickens, Trollope and Surtees, the reader slips from one picture to another, and is left for the most part to make up his mind as to the kind of world they illustrate for himself. If he looks for guidance to Dr Foakes Jackson he will receive it, but that will not help him materially, because the lecturer does not seem to be altogether sure of his own opinion. In one place he seems to suggest that the society of the Regency was far more exclusive than the society of the present day; in another he asserts that the ‘rift between classes’ is deeper in our own age than in any other. Now he is of opinion ‘that the passions of men are much the same as formerly, and that, if the advantage is on either side, it is with the present rather than with the past’; and later he declares that we are living under a plutocracy which tends to ‘substitute prudery and respectability for real Christianity’. But there is no reason to be downcast; if we find these statements either contradictory or depressing we must lay the blame, if blame it is, upon the audience.

To Americans, we suppose, England is always something of an old curiosity shop; they rummage in our past with inquisitive affection, and even, one might suggest, with an eye for bargains. Dr Foakes Jackson dips here and there in our annals to provide his hearers with quaint tokens of the past, old rings, and bits of brocade; and he is careful not to go beyond the curiosity shop. He must not fatigue them with dates and details; he must not harrow their feelings, or offend their morals; he must, if possible, introduce some personal flavour into his discourse by informing them that his great grandparents entertained Crabbe, and that he had a very bad cold when he went to Aldeburgh to prepare his lecture. All this is done very neatly and with a gentlemanly modesty which disarms criticism by advancing only the most temperate opinions and supporting them almost invariably by the authority of others. And so, very naturally, we have an account of the trial of Queen Caroline, taken from the pages of Mr Creevey, a sketch of John Wesley, the narrative of Margaret Catchpole, and so on. There is no need to tell our own public that Mr Creevey and John Wesley and Charles Dickens are all very good reading. But what Dr Foakes Jackson has given us, oddly enough, is not a picture of ourselves, but a picture of a cultivated American audience. They are, we gather, exquisitely urbane; they do not like outspoken criticism even of the poet Crabbe; the best way to lead them across the desert of the lecture hour is to bring a pocketful of sweetmeats and produce them one after another until the minutes are consumed. Read by this light, one of Dr Foakes Jackson’s sentences has a pathetic ring in it. ‘I hope,’ he says, ‘you will pardon the flippancy of the subject I am about to introduce; but I may say that it is not possible to understand English life without studying it.’ Sweeping as the pronouncement is, we are inclined to agree with him.

[Times Literary Supplement, Dec 21, 1916]

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Mr Symons’s Essays.

[Figures of Several Centuries (Constable Sc Co., 1916) by Arthur Symons]

Somewhere in the present volume Mr Symons quotes the saying of Charles Lamb, ‘I love books about books’, and adds that that is the test of the book-lover—the test of him, we sometimes think, not because such books are boring or difficult, but rather because they are demoralising. Books about books are apt, one hardly knows why, to reduce Literature to a safe and comfortable pursuit for elderly valetudinarians by the fireside on winter evenings; and to love them seems to mean that such is our love of their subject that we can extract good even from these doubtful surroundings. But there is another sense in which we may take this remark—a sense in which it would certainly apply to the book before us—and that is that to be able to love and understand true criticism of writing is the final test of a love of books, and one of the sweetest rewards of it. Certainly, to be able to write such criticism is so rare a gift that one is inclined to doubt whether it is ever done save by the poets themselves. Our best criticism we owe to them. Coleridge and Lamb, Arnold and Sainte-Beuve were all poets, either with the right hand or with the left. Indeed, it seems impossible for anyone who is not actually dealing with the problems of art to know the nature of them; or—and this is of greater importance—to have a lively enough passion for the artist’s view to be in sympathy with the different forms of it.

Mr Symons is a very distinguished poet; as, indeed, we could have guessed from the character of his criticism. These papers are for the most part short: but they are aimed so directly at the heart of the subject that in each case they seem to show us something we had missed before. And it is always done as the poet knows how to do it: without display of knowledge or chain of argument, but directly, simply, and, in spite of the narrow bounds of the essay, fully. He has so fine an instinct for the aim and quality of each writer that the result seems effortless and brimming with truth. Naturally we do not accept all that Mr Symons says; but we must consistently pay homage to the spirit in which he approaches these different writers. It is the spirit of a man to whom art is as undoubtedly a part of life as bread, or air; but who, though his days are spent in the presence of it, never loses his sense of its divinity. In writing of Coventry Patmore he says:

… while he talked to me of the basis of poetry, and of metres and cadences, and of poetical methods, what meant more to me than anything he said, though not a word was without its value, was the profound religious gravity with which he treated the art of poetry, the sense he conveyed to me of his own reasoned conception of its immense importance, its divinity.

‘Profound religious gravity’ expresses exactly the spirit of Mr Symons’s essays; but there goes along with it a sense, most rare and refreshing, that to care for art is the most natural thing in the world. Very often it is the effect of criticism to make art appear so intricate and so remote from the interests of ordinary people that it is useless for them to try to care for it, let alone to attempt the practice of it. They persuade themselves that they are glad not to be artists, and make allowances for those who are. Mr Symons, on the other hand, treats literature with a kind of natural seriousness which should make even the least lettered aware that to write is the most normal occupation for man, or woman either; and we may study and love writing without being in the least queer ourselves. Those who care for literature already may repeat what Mr Symons has said of Coventry Patmore. If he had no other quality save this religious gravity, this reasoned conception of the immense importance, the divinity of poetry, we should be deeply grateful to him; as it is, we must also rejoice in the subtlety of his mind and in his brilliant intelligence. His work is more than a support to us; it serves to stimulate us to quicker feelings.

As to the brilliance, we do not suppose that Mr Symons cares to lay claim to much of that rather doubtful virtue. He has trained himself, as he says with perfect truth, to be ‘infinitely careful in all matters of literature’. But it is not seldom that his thought and language fuse themselves in a flash, perhaps a little to the surprise of the author and much to the delight of the reader. We may quote his saying about Meredith: ‘In prose he would have every sentence shine; in verse he would have every line sparkle; like a lady who puts on all her jewelry at once, immediately after breakfast.’ This, too, is very true: ‘To write poetry as if it had never been written before is to attempt what the greatest poets never attempted.’ And here is a comment upon Charles Lamb, so penetrating that we wonder, now that it is said, why it was never said before:

The quality which came to him from that germ of madness which lay hidden in his nature had no influence upon his central sanity. It gave him the tragic pathos and mortal beauty of his wit, … and, also, a hard, indifferent levity, which, to brother and sister alike, was a rampart against obsession, or a stealthy way of temporising with the enemy. That tinge is what gives its strange glitter to his fooling: madness playing safely and lambently around the stoutest common sense.

As we read through Mr Symons’s essays we come to recognise, as is the case with all true critics, a certain vein of thought which underlies many of his judgments and gives them personality. He has so great a passion for beauty that he is a little hard upon work which has other qualities, perhaps more valuable than beauty. On this account he seems to us less than just to Ibsen and more than generous to Swinburne. He can write of Ibsen—‘Given the character and the situation, what Ibsen asks at the moment of crisis is, What would this man be most likely to say? not, What would be the finest, the most deeply revealing thing that he could say? In that difference lies all the difference between prose and poetry’. That, to us, is a complete misunderstanding. In such crises, we should say, Ibsen’s attempt has been to give what is deeply revealing together with what is likely, and from that source springs his tremendous power. No doubt he failed often, and when he failed he produced either ‘the language of the newspaper recorded with the fidelity of the phonograph’, or a fantastic symbolism which serves merely to throw dust in our eyes. But when he succeeds his success is based upon the fact that he has not flinched from the prosaic look of things as they are and yet has made them yield as true a poetry as any to be found in the plays of Swinburne. The danger of asking oneself, What is the finest, the most deeply revealing thing that I can make my character say? is demonstrated over and over again by Swinburne, and by most of our poetic dramatists. When their inspiration flags they continue automatically to produce fine words with the semblance of beauty on them; and that is a disease of which it will take many Ibsens and not a few Walt Whitmans to cure us.

Probably Mr Symons intends his distinction between prose and poetry to refer only to the particular prose under discussion—that of Ibsen. But all through his volume there is an evident glory in the beauty of poetry, an exaltation of poetry as the most inspired form which literature can take. Perhaps we may account for this by the curious fact that it was not until he read Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance that he ‘realised that prose also could be a fine art’. And, unconsciously no doubt, he is led to lay stress upon this predilection of his because the temper of the age is impatient with beauty and the particular skill in which he delights. Too fine a critic not to feel worth where it exists, he will not admit the poetic power of Ibsen, and calls Leaves of Grass the ‘most monstrous and magnificent failure of the nineteenth century’. But the interesting point is not whether one style is bad and another good, or whether we exalt poetry or prefer prose, but that prose has been the chosen medium of the greatest writers of our time—of Dostoevsky, of Carlyle, of Tolstoy. And modern poetry seems more and more to glance at prose and make trial of the methods of prose. Nor can we attribute this to a shallow impatience with tradition or to a failure of artistic power. It springs rather from the belief that there is a form to be found in literature for the life of the present day—for a life lived in little houses separated only by a foot or two of brick wall; for the complicated, intense and petty emotions of the drawing room; for the acts and sights of the streets, and for the whole pageant of life without concealment of its ugly surface. The language which shall express all this is neither the speech of the poets nor the speech of actual life, but it, too, is the result of that ‘crystallisation in which direct emotion or sensation deviates exquisitely into art’, as Mr Symons puts it, writing of John Donne. The form of prose produces prolonged and cumulative effects; the form of poetry produces instant and intense effects; and for this, among other reasons, what we have to say now seems to shape itself more easily in the form of prose than in the form of poetry. But to place any limit upon either, or to predict that one will supersede the other, is to play with generalities and to force a living being between the walls of a rigid mould. The book of Mr Symons’s essays should warn us against any excess of this kind; for whatever his own prejudices may be, he invariably brings all his imagination and all his skill to the understanding of the work before him.

[Times Literary Supplement, Dec 21, 1916]

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1917

‘Romance.’

[Romance. Two Lectures (Princeton, 1916) by Sir Walter Raleigh.]

This little book entitled Romance contains two lectures, the first upon the origin of Romance, the second upon imitation and forgery. Each, the lazy reader may say, might well have split itself into another pair at least; but Sir Walter Raleigh has never had the interests of the lazy reader at heart. We must be prepared, then, to hold a slim little book in our hands and to find that each sentence holds enough matter to fill a page. The pleasure and the risk of such reading rather resemble the pleasure of finding oneself suddenly out of one’s depth at sea. In the first place many of our most trusty props are removed. ‘The best way’, we are told, ‘to restore the habit of thinking is to do away with the names.’ Is Romance, then, or the revival of Romance, to which heading our literary primers have accustomed us, merely a name? We mean something when we use it; but Sir Walter Raleigh is not going to tell us what we mean. He intends that we should find out for ourselves. Like all scholars who know what there is to be known and mix their learning with love, he discards those convenient but indigestible little pellets which between them have made the history of English literature about as interesting as Bradshaw, although of course not so accurate. He touches his subject with life, and invests it with all the uncertainty, the possibility, and the vagueness of a living thing.

You cannot define Romance; you cannot classify and explain the significance of men and books; ‘to study the ascertained facts concerning men and books is to study … the only competent and modest part of the history of literature.’ The greater part of these lectures, therefore, is devoted to a sketch of the history of Romance, and there is only a tentative definition of Romance itself. But this sketch does much to define and clarify our ideas. For let us suppose that we have come into the lecture room believing rather vaguely that the romantic revival was a reaction against the school of Pope and Dryden; that it is chiefly marked by a return to nature; and that its most typical examples are to be found in ‘Kubla Khan’ and the ‘Ode to a Nightingale’. The lecturer knocks down our neat compartments one after another by observing that the great writers of all ages have always returned to nature, Pope no less than Wordsworth; that you may find the purest Romance in Virgil; that the Romance writers proper were distinguished by being actual, modern and realistic; that Romance became as bookish as decadent classicism. As for there being one period that is exclusively romantic, and another that is without romance, wherever we look in English literature we shall find Romance in the upper or in the under world. Further, even the age which we associate particularly with the revival of Romance contains Wordsworth, who ‘drew straight from life’ and ‘shunned what is derived from other books’, and Scott, whose ‘love for the knighthood and monkery was real but it was playful. His heart was with Fielding.’ Evidently it is a good thing to avoid, ‘except for pastime, the discussion of tendencies and movements’, and stick as far as we can to the men and the books.

But there are some facts which may lead us to a clearer view. Many of our misconceptions about Romance may be attributed to a wrong understanding of another famous and ill-used name—the Renaissance. The study of Greek and Latin, for which that name stands, was consummated not in the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries, but in the eighteenth; thus the romantic revival was a reaction against the Renaissance. Fashion turned against the classics now that the classics were familiar and demanded a return to medieval Romance and chivalry. According to Sir Walter the strange thing about this movement was that it was not the supply which created the demand, but the demand which created the supply. Romance had to be made artificially in the forgeries of Ossian and at Strawberry Hill before there arose a generation which could make the real thing.

So curious a state of things suggests speculations which will no doubt lead us to break our necks over another definition of Romance. For how does a country demand romantic poetry? And is it conceivable that sham castles and forged manuscripts, the products of a perfectly false feeling, had it in them to inspire certain little boys with the germs of some of the most genuine feelings that have ever existed? We cannot help thinking that the process was different, and infinitely complex, and that you make your poet as you make your demand for poetry, by a thousand influences which probably have very little to do with art. But the artistic influences are the easiest to trace. It is evident, as Sir Walter points out, that landscape painting, by inducing people to imagine themselves among mountains and sunsets and precipices, played an enormous part in the revival of Romance. We may also find matter for thought in those eighteenth-century gardens which were so strangely unlike the houses they surrounded. What did the gentleman in knee breeches and brocade think about when he stepped from his exquisitely civilised drawing room into a garden that was all green-covered ponds, ruins and blue distances? One may suppose that he thought a great deal about himself, and, removed from the constraint of furniture, rambled in a wilderness among the disorderly recesses of his own mind. To think about oneself is, of course, to think about a great many other things and people too; but perhaps there is truth in the distinction which Sir Walter draws between the ‘modern romantic poet’, who ‘must keep himself aloof from life, that he may see it’, and the epic poet ‘who holds his reader fast by strong moral bonds of sympathy with the actors in the poem’.

We mean a great many things when we say that a poem is romantic. We refer to an atmosphere of vagueness, mystery, distance; but perhaps we most constantly feel that the writer is thinking more of the effect of the thing upon his mind than of the thing itself. And up to a point there is nothing more real than the effect of things upon one’s mind. The difficulty is to resist the temptation of conjuring up sensations for the pleasure of feeling them; and when he does that the writer is lost. For such a one,

… lives alone,

Housed in a dream, at distance from the Kind.

The great poets, as Sir Walter Raleigh says, are those who ‘face the discipline of facts and life’. They may begin as Keats began, with a sense of the wonder of the visible world; of passion and love and beauty; but there comes a time when the passion turns to dream, and only the greatest wake themselves from that and make poetry with their eyes open. For, as Sir Walter says very finely, ‘the poetry which can bear all naked truth and still keep its singing voice is the only immortal poetry’.

[Times Literary Supplement, Jan 18, 1917]

[]

Tolstoy’s ‘The Cossacks’.

[The Cossacks and Other Tales of the Caucasus … translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude (O.U.P., 1916) by Leo Tolstoy]

It is pleasant to welcome Tolstoy’s The Cossacks and other tales of the Caucasus to the World Classics. ‘The greatest of Russia’s writers,’ say Mr and Mrs Maude in their introduction. And when we read or re-read these stories, how can we deny Tolstoy’s right to the title? Of late years both Dostoevsky and Tchehov have become famous in England, so that there has certainly been less discussion, and perhaps less reading, of Tolstoy himself. Coming back to him after an interval the shock of his genius seems to us quite surprising; in his own line it is hard to imagine that he can ever be surpassed. For an English reader proud of the fiction of this country there is even something humiliating in the comparison between such a story as ‘The Cossacks’, published in 1863, and the novels which were being written at about the same time in England. As the lovable immature work of children compared with the work of grown men they appear to us; and it is still more strange to consider that, while much of Thackeray and Dickens seems to us far away and obsolete, this story of Tolstoy’s reads as if it had been written a month or two ago.

It is as a matter of fact an early work, written for the most part some years before it was published, and preceding both the great novels. He gathered the materials when he was in the Caucasus for two years as a cadet, and the chief character is the same whom we meet so often in the later books, the unmistakable Tolstoy. As Olenin he is a young man who has run into debt and leaves Moscow with a view to saving a little money and seeing a fresh side of life. In Moscow he has had many experiences, but he has always said to himself both of love and of other things, ‘That’s not it, that’s not it.’ The story—and like most of Tolstoy’s stories it has no intricacy of plot—is the story of the development of this young man’s mind and character in a Cossack village. He lives alone in a hut; observes the beauty of the Cossack girl Maryanka, but scarcely speaks to her, and spends most of his time with Daddy Eroshka in shooting pheasants and talking about sport. At length he comes to know the girl and asks her to marry him, to which she seems inclined to consent; but at that very moment the soldier to whom she is engaged is wounded, and she refuses to have anything more to do with Olenin. He therefore gets himself put upon the staff and leaves the district. When he has said good-bye to them all, he turns to look back. ‘Daddy Eroshka was talking to Maryanka, evidently about his own affairs, and neither the old man nor the girl looked at Olenin’. Nothing is finished; nothing is tidied up; life merely goes on.

But what a life! Perhaps it is the richness of Tolstoy’s genius that strikes us most in this story, short though it is. Nothing seems to escape him. The wonderful eye observes everything; the blue or the red of a child’s frock; the way a horse shifts its tail; the action of a man trying to put his hands into pockets that have been sewn up; every gesture seems to be received by him automatically, and at once referred by his brain to some cause which reveals the most carefully hidden secrets of human nature. We feel that we know his characters both by the way they choke and sneeze and by the way they feel about love and immortality and the most subtle questions of conduct. In the present selection of stories, all the work of youth and all laid in a wild country far from town civilisation, he gives freer play than in the novels to his extraordinary keenness of physical sensation. We seem actually able to see the mountains, the young soldiers, the grapes, the Cossack girls, to feel the firmness of their substance, and to see the bright colours with which the sun and the cold air have painted them. Nowhere perhaps has he written with greater zest of the excitement of sport and of the beauty of fine horses; nowhere has he made us feel more acutely how fiercely desirable the world appears to the senses of a strong young man. At the same time the thought which unites these scenes and gives them so keen an edge is the thought which goes on incessantly in the brain of Olenin. He throws himself down in the middle of the hunt to rest under the brambles in a lair where a stag has just lain:

And it was clear to him that he was not a Russian nobleman, a member of Moscow society, the friend and relation of so-and-so and so-and-so, but just such a mosquito or pheasant or deer as those that were now living all round him. ‘Just as they, just as Daddy Eroshka. I shall live awhile and die, and as he says truly: grass will grow and nothing more.’

‘But what though the grass does grow?’ he continued thinking. ‘Still I must live, and be happy, because happiness is all I desire … How then must I live to be happy, and why was I not happy before?’ … and suddenly a new light seemed to reveal itself to him. ‘Happiness is this!’ he said to himself. ‘Happiness lies in living for others’ … He was so glad and excited when he had discovered this, as it seemed to him, new truth, that he jumped up and began impatiently seeking someone to sacrifice himself to, to do good to, and to love. ‘Since one wants nothing for onself’, he kept thinking, ‘why not live for others?’

But Lukashka, to whom he gives a horse, suspects his motives for making such a valuable gift; and Eroshka, whom he treats as a friend and to whom he gives a gun, forgets him as soon as his back is turned. Perhaps then he is on the wrong tack after all. Here, as everywhere, Tolstoy seems able to read the minds of different people as certainly as we count the buttons on their coats; but this feat never satisfies him; the knowledge is always passed through the brain of some Olenin or Pierre or Levin, who attempts to guess a further and more difficult riddle—the riddle which Tolstoy was still asking himself, we may be sure, when he died. And the fact that Tolstoy is thus seeking, that there is always in the centre of his stories some rather lonely figure to whom the surrounding world is never quite satisfactory, makes even his short stories entirely unlike other short stories. They do not shut with a snap like the stories of Maupassant and Mérimée. They go on indefinitely. It is by their continuous vein of thought that we remember them, rather than by any incident; by thoughts such as that which comes to him in the middle of battle.

The spectacle was truly magnificent. The one thing that spoilt the general impression for me, who took no part in the affair, and was unaccustomed to it, was that this movement, and the animation and the shouting, appeared unnecessary. Involuntarily the comparison suggested itself to me of a man swinging his arms from the shoulders to cut the air with an axe.

And thus we end by thinking again of the unlikeness between ourselves and the Russians; and by envying them that extraordinary union of extreme simplicity combined with the utmost subtlety which seems to mark both the educated Russian and the peasant equally. They do not rival us in the comedy of manners, but after reading Tolstoy we always feel that we could sacrifice our skill in that direction for something of the profound psychology and superb sincerity of the Russian writers.

[Times Literary Supplement, Feb 1, 1917]

[]

Melodious Meditations.

[An Apology for Old Maids … With a Preface by Owen Wister (Macmillan & Co., 1917) by Henry Dwight Sedgwick]

The poets of the eighteenth century were fond of making their verse sound dignified by spelling certain qualities with a capital letter. It required a very good poet to make such personifications acceptable even then, and the habit has long been dropped. But we sometimes fancy that these antiquated ghosts merely took ship to America, lodged with the best families, and now walk abroad in those essays which the Americans write so frequently upon Old Age, Old Maids, On Being Ill, and Sorrow. In those abstract contemplations we seem to recognise their nearly featureless faces, bloodless cheeks, and impeccable dignity of deportment. Life is difficult, but the good man triumphs; sorrow is not always evil; happiness depends upon what we are and not upon what we have; our truest friends are to be found among our books. If all these substantives began with capital letters, and if the lines were trimmed to the right length, we should at once have an eighteenth-century ode contributed by some country clergyman to the Gentleman’s Magazine.

And why this eternal commotion? Is all this turmoil the struggle of a baser element to attain self-realisation, to achieve psychic life? Is the whole universe seeking more life and fuller? Or is life our original sin, and death the great purifier? Is it beneficent death that is striving to cast out the vexing seeds of life and restore a universal calm? Is death the great ocean of peace to which all the rivers of existence flow? Is the blotting out of the universe, &c.

This passage is taken at random from one of Mr Sedgwick’s essays. Almost any novel, certainly any book of facts, seems to us better reading than these melodious meditations; and we say this emphatically in order to correct what we believe to be a misunderstanding on the part of Mr Wister. The American essayists, he says, unlike the novelists, ‘save our face. We can point to them without blushing.’ They show the stranger that ‘some of us are writers and readers of civilised intelligence’. Anyone who has read even a little of American literature hardly needs such assurance; there is nothing to blush at in the whole of it, except perhaps Walt Whitman; and that is the worst we have to say of it. Their intelligence seems, oddly enough, more civilised, gentler, lower in tone than ours. And perhaps the studious refinement of their great writers is the result of this determination to show the stranger that they are people of civilised intelligence. Certainly Mr Sedgwick’s essays carry out this theory, for they are not all as mild and melancholy as the above quotation would seem to show. When he writes upon Goethe, the Classics, Literature and Cosmopolitanism he writes with a great deal of sense and energy, and enables us at least to understand the point of view of cultivated Americans towards their literature. He looks to literature to refine and restrain the boisterous spirit of democracy. He would give democracy supreme power over politics and economics; but then ‘it must no longer seek to lay its hand on literature, art, higher education, pure science, philosophy, manners’. The men of genius and learning are to constitute a priesthood, held in special reverence; and the intellectual traditions of generations of educated men should be taught by them as a special cult.

Was there ever a plan better calculated to freeze literature at the root than this one? We must imagine all our writers and artists properly pensioned and quartered in comfortable rooms in Oxford and Cambridge, where so long as they live the masses shall do them honour. In the Victorian age, which for all its faults was prolific of genius, this system was to some extent put into practice; the great men were secluded and worshipped, with the result that they wrote twice as much as they ought to have written, and, being geniuses all day long and every day, were for the most part extremely ill at ease and out of temper. That seems to be the inevitable effect of a Priesthood upon the Priests who compose it; and though to reverence may be very good for the soul of the masses, still the best artistic work is done by people who mix easily with their fellows. Even with us art is far too much of a mystery and a luxury, but it is evidently still more beyond the reach of ordinary people in America. For the American critic attaches enormous importance to the appreciation of art, and seems to care very little for the making of it. It has been their misfortune perhaps to inherit our language with all those traditions which can hardly be taught, but must be felt naturally if they are to blossom into beauty. With a language of their own which would make its own traditions, they would have greater self-confidence, and would lose their excessive sensitiveness to the criticisms of those English professors who examine them from time to time and send them to the very bottom of the class. For no one can doubt that theirs is a splendid opportunity; or if any one is sceptical as to the future of American art let him read Walt Whitman’s preface to the first edition of Leaves of Grass. As a piece of writing it rivals anything we have done for a hundred years, and as a statement of the American spirit no finer banner was ever unfurled for the young of a great country to march under:

There will soon be no more priests. Their work is done […] A new order shall arise, and they shall be the priests of man, and every man shall be his own priest […] They shall find their inspiration in real objects today, symptoms of the past and future. They shall not deign to defend immortality or God, or the perfection of things, or liberty, or the exquisite beauty and reality of the soul. They shall arise in America, and be responded to from the remainder of the earth.

[Times Literary Supplement, Feb 8, 1917]

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‘Before Midnight.’

[Before Midnight (Cassell & Co. Ltd., 1917) by Elinor Mordaunt]

Before reviewing Mrs Elinor Mordaunt’s new volume of short stories, Before Midnight, we ought to confess two, perhaps unreasonable, prejudices: we do not like the war in fiction, and we do not like the supernatural. We can only account for the first of these prejudices by the feeling that the vast events now shaping across the Channel are towering over us too closely and too tremendously to be worked into fiction without a painful jolt in the perspective; but, reasonable or unreasonable, this feeling is roused by one of Mrs Mordaunt’s stories only. Better reasons for disliking the use of the supernatural might be given, especially in the case of a writer like Mrs Mordaunt, who has shown in her novels so great a gift for presenting the natural. Nobody can deny that our life is largely at the mercy of dreams and visions which we cannot account for logically; on the contrary, if Mrs Mordaunt had devoted every page of her book to the discovery of some of these uncharted territories of the mind we should have nothing but thanks for her. But we feel a little aggrieved when the writers who are capable of such delicate work resort instead to the methods of the conjurer and ask us to be satisfied with a trick.

As an example of what we mean let us take the second story, ‘Pan’. Here a fashionable lady, who is recovering her health in the north meets a man out fishing who possesses himself of her heart in the most immediate and mysterious way, so that she follows him every day without knowing who he is, and is finally drowned at night in her endeavour to cross the river to reach him. All this is an allegory—but it is founded upon a theory which might form the basis of a deeply interesting study.

Yes, the country is a dangerous place if one once lets oneself become intimate with it, slipping one’s soul free from the stolid correctness of country folk, that correctness which has gained them the reputation of piety, and is, really, due to lack of imagination. For the fact is this: only the stolid, the unimaginative remain; the rest have gone back to the gods.

That seems to promise extremely well. But to drag in the pointed ears, the shaggy hoofs, the strange music of the hemlock pipes in exchange for an analysis of the lady’s state of mind seems to us equivalent to saying that the situation is too difficult to be pursued any further. Mrs Mordaunt has, as usual, so many shrewd and original things to say about the men and women of flesh and blood before she has recourse to magic that we resent the powers of darkness more than ever.

But it is not fair to say that she always avails herself of these short cuts. The first story in the book is rather a study in heredity than in magic, and so is the last; and there are traces in both of them of that individuality which, whether it is the result of saying what one thinks or whether it is a special grace of nature, is certainly among the most refreshing of gifts. At the same time we must own that we like Mrs Mordaunt best when she is most resolutely matter-of-fact. Indeed, it is when she is keeping strictly to what she has observed that we catch sight of those curious hidden things in human life which vanish instinctively directly there is talk of ghosts or of gods.

[Times Literary Supplement, Mar 1, 1917]

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Parodies.

[Tricks of the Trade (Martin Seeker, 1917) by J.C. Squire]

A good parody is rather a complex thing, for it should be amusing in itself, and should also do the work of the critic with greater daring than the critic can usually display. Mr Squire’s parodies are very good examples of what he terms ‘a not wholly admirable art’; first they make us laugh, and then they make us think. Instead of analysing his author’s gifts and fitting them as closely as he can with the right epithets, he makes a little model of the work in question and expresses his sense of the defects of that work by a few deft pinches and twists which bring out the absurdity without destroying the likeness. Although we may laugh we cannot deny that he tells us more about Mr Belloc, or Mr Wells, or Sir H. Newbolt than many serious and industrious articles where the gifts and failings of these writers are scrupulously weighed to an ounce. Thus when we read,

And as I watch bees in a hive,

Or gentle cows that rub ’gainst trees,

I do not envy men who live,

No fields, no books upon their knees.

I’d rather lie beneath small stars

Than with rough men who drink in bars

we recognise Mr Davies wearing an air of artless innocence only a little in excess of his natural expression. And if we read, very quickly,

It was eight bells in the forenoon and hammocks running sleek

(It’s a fair sea flowing from the West),

When the little Commodore came a-sailing up the Creek

(Heave Ho! I think you’ll know the rest)

we get the same hearty feeling as of an old sea-dog rolling across the harbour in a salt sou’-wester which the genuine works of Sir Henry Newbolt are wont to produce. And it needs a second glance to assure us that it is all nonsense. Mr Wells is very good, too:

V

And then it was that Mary Browne came into my life (…) But now there was about her a certain quality of graciousness, very difficult to define, but very unescapable when it is present, that gave to her mouse-grey hair and rather weak blue eyes a beauty very rare and very subtle. She had spent, she told me, two years in the East End at some social work or other …

VI

And then I met Cecilia Scroop …

Of the parodies of modern writers, that of Mr Shaw seems to us the least successful. His style is much too workmanlike to present any obviously weak points to the caricaturist; and to parody his matter you would have to be quicker and more agile of intellect than he is himself. Moreover, Mr Shaw parodies himself far better than anyone else could do it.

As a rule, we imagine, it is much easier to hit off one’s own contemporaries, whose little foibles are as well known to us as those of our friends, than it is to dress up in the clothing of some old and famous poet so as to look precisely like him. This is really playing the sedulous ape as Stevenson prescribed it to those in search of a style, and means that at one time or another you have done homage very humbly to the poet in question. If we had to teach children how to write English, no doubt this would be one of our instruments of torture. And Mr Squire complicates the exercise still further. He imagines how Gray would have written the Spoon River Anthology, or Lord Byron the ‘Passing of Arthur’ or Pope ‘Break, break, break’. We get the same sort of pleasure from noting his skilful translations from one style to another that scholars find in savouring Greek versions of English poetry. What could be more charming than,

Nor the bright smiles of ocean’s nymphs command

The pleasing contact of a vanished hand

as an Augustan version of mid-Victorian Tennyson? We can almost see the imperturbable good breeding and courtesy with which Pope, as Mr Squire presents him, receives the lyrical cry of his successor, contemplates it with a little distress, and smooths it out, into impeccable rhyming couplets. It is, indeed, a vivid little summary of a whole chapter of the history of literature.

[Times Literary Supplement, Mar 8, 1917]

[]

‘The House of Lyme.’

[The House of Lyme. From its Foundation to the End of the Eighteenth Century (William Heinemann, 1917) by the Lady Newton.]

After reading Lady Newton’s history of the house of Lyme and looking at the pictures which adorn it we are inclined to think that the production of such works by the people who inherit such houses should be made compulsory by Act of Parliament. To have in one’s possession this private door into the past, through which one can see back to the pale beginnings of English life four or five centuries ago, and to keep it locked against the public, is no less heinous an offence than to burn a portrait by Velasquez once a year. It is true that we are still under the spell of Lady Newton’s narrative, and her gifts, unfortunately, are by no means common ones. We are still looking through the door which she has thrown open at many generations of the family of Legh, at much of the history of England. Owing to her skilful arrangement and to a freshness of feeling which imparts a most delightful naturalness to her story, we are able for the moment to forget the substantial veil of the present and to gaze upon the lives which have receded from us but have not disappeared. To Lady Newton, we fancy, the veil is a very thin one, and to her the Leghs of the past are people of distinct character, tastes, clothing, appearances. She writes of them as if she had known them, and when she quotes their letters they take up the story with the most natural intonation. For although nothing, we imagine, would be more out of keeping with the family tradition than to rattle behind wainscots at dawn or indulge in other ghostly antics, we can scarcely believe that the dead Leghs have gone very far from their beloved possessions. No house can have a greater share of those happier ghosts who are with us in the daytime. It was surely at the prompting of one of these spirits that Lady Newton was led to open that ‘fireproof cupboard the existence of which was unknown or had been forgotten’, and take from it ‘a large quantity of papers’, tied up in bundles, labelled “Old Letters”’. Certainly, if the ghosts felt the need of an interpreter, they could not have made a better choice.

On a high spot in the park of Lyme there stand two pillars of rough stone whose origin has never been accounted for, although it is agreed that they are of great antiquity. Beneath them spreads the plain of Cheshire and around them lie the hills of Derbyshire—‘an almost boundless view’—and, in the days when those stones were set there, a view without sign of building or population. It is as if those old pagans had placed a mark here, and decreed that here a limit should be set to the wilderness of nature and man build himself a dwelling-place. The name of Lyme, indeed, stands for limes, a border, for the three counties of Cheshire, Lancashire, and Derbyshire come together at this point. And here, some time in the beginning of the fifteenth century, a house was built for the family of Legh; another house succeeded it in the middle of the sixteenth century, and the building and rebuilding of the house continued until the middle of the nineteenth century, when the designs of Leoni were at last accomplished. If we consider these facts we shall see that Lady Newton has chosen her title well. Here in the same spot the same family has been building at the same house for something like five centuries. A son has succeeded a father, one tomb has been placed beside another, a new wing has been added to the house, or the windows have been altered. So slow is the growth of the house, so orderly the progress of life, that watching the gradual development we lose count of time and wake with a start to find that, while we have watched the house being built and one Sir Piers succeed another, we have traversed the greater part of our English history. We have passed from the Middle Ages to the world as we know it now.

The Leghs were not a race to disturb the continuity of their history by any startling adventures. One, perhaps, fought at Flodden; another at Agincourt; a third sailed with Essex against the Spaniard and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth. But for the most part they have been content to stay at home and do their duty; or, if compelled to serve in Parliament, have shown no anxiety to dictate the laws of the country, but hastened back to Lyme to shoot their stags or race their horses. The country might change its king or its religion without greatly disturbing the peace of mind of the master of Lyme; and by luck and wise conformity they lived through many troubled ages without losing their lives or their fortunes. The only one of the race who suffered a short term of imprisonment in the cause of the Stuarts very soon came to his senses and, when the rising of ’45 once more tempted the rasher heads of the county to venture their lives, sensibly refused to have anything to do with it. A set of Jacobite drinking glasses with the Stuart roses engraved upon them bears witness to a little post-prandial enthusiasm for the King over the water, and in congenial company a clock would chime out twelve Jacobite airs, as indeed it does to the present day.

The indifference of contemporaries to events which to us seem of the greatest, perhaps of the only, importance is one of the surprises which family letters generally hold in store for us. The Legh letters are no exception to the rule. Lady Newton tells us of a tradition that one of the Leghs, writing from London on the day that King Charles had his head cut off, makes no mention of that fact; but this, of course, may be attributed to caution rather than negligence. Later, however, when news of the Plague and the Fire of London would, one thinks, have filled up a letter to the country very pleasantly, there is only one mention of either of them, and that, characteristically, introduces a compliment to Lyme, ‘where health and wealth conspire to make you happy’. To us this seems very right and fitting. The great value and interest of such letters as these lies in the fact that they drown the drums and trumpets of history with a deeper and subtler music of their own. We do not need the evidence of state papers or the eloquence of the College of Heralds to prove that Peter and Thomas and Richard Legh were all gentlemen of the highest integrity and of the greatest importance to their corner of the world. By them the law was made and administered, they were the fountains of charity, the arbiters of right and wrong, the source of such influence as no one family in England wields today. We need not wonder that to go up to London and play a minute part in the passing of some Act of Parliament or even to take arms for a Cromwell or a Stuart seemed to them of less importance than other work lying closer at hand. Their house was not only a house in every room of which traditions of their race had accumulated, but a law court, a theatre, a public building, and an hotel all in one; a self-sufficient community highly organised in each of its departments, and the centre of civilisation in that district. They did their duty also by their library, and at one time possessed a band of musicians. When visitors of importance came a play was provided.

Much labour and contrivance was continually needed to keep such an institution in working order. In the year 1607, for instance, eighty or a hundred people were employed in the house every day; the staff had to include brewers, spit-turners, glaziers, ‘tincklers’, carpet-makers, tailors, marlers, plasterers, gutterers, besides mole catchers, rat catchers, carters, and bricklayers. The house, we must remember, was always being altered, furnished, and rebuilt, gardens dug and terraces levelled. In addition to the usual brewing, baking, and dairying, they slaughtered their own cattle, and made their own candles and soap. Besides the people regularly employed in these pursuits there was a floating population consisting of visitors from the great families in the neighbourhood, a sprinkling of poor relations who assisted at all births and marriages, and were expert at needlework and pastry making, and the squires who came for the racing and the hunting and stayed late to drink such toasts as ‘May Aristocracy Rise on the Ashes of Democracy’, or, ‘A Fresh Earth and a High Metaled Terrier’, or ‘A Cellar well filled and a House Full of Friends’. The Leghs were not a family to take to the pen without cause, and this is generally provided by some cock-fight or horse-race, or business connected with the famous herd of red deer. There is an amusing account of a hunt in Lancashire which tells how the writer returned after the fox was killed ‘to drink a bowle of Hott Punch with ye fox’s foot stew’d in it. Sr Willm drank pretty plentifully, and just at last perceiv’d he should be fuddled, “but,” quoth he, “I care not if I am, I have kill’d a fox today.”’ And whenever they are away they long that Parliament may rise and let them get back to ‘sweet Lyme’ again and their wives and children. ‘Dearest,’ writes the delightful Richard, ‘I want nothing this night to compleat the joy I am in but thy deare company and the brats.’

Moving against this background of servants and dependents, household cares and country sports in the house which gradually changes and is rebuilt over their heads we see old Sir Piers and the Peters and Richard discharging their businesses, making matches, settling disputes, doing their duty, and presiding over the life of the house, much to the satisfaction of their neighbours. The changes in the house correspond to a change which slowly transforms the race which lives in it. Nothing is more curious than to watch the gradual thawing of the human race from the monolithic isolation of Elizabethan days to the humanity and garrulity of the eighteenth century. The bare and comfortless rooms of the sixteenth century become furnished; the beds have cushions; the chairs are easy chairs; there are forks to eat with, and some regard for intimacy and privacy. Even the speech ceases to be the dialect of the district, and educated people have to observe the same laws of spelling. No longer can old Sir Peter thunder forth his commands and extort obedience from his grown-up sons; and by the time the book is finished the inaccessible House of Lyme is in close touch with the gossip and the shops of London.

But the most profound impression left upon us by this delightful and absorbing book is not one of change; it is one of continuity. The red deer have roamed the park for upwards of five hundred years; the famous mastiffs of Lyme, though ‘now alas, threatened with extinction’, still exist whose ancestors followed their master in the Battle of Agincourt; the oak still stands beneath which the Duke of York killed a stag; the clock which Richard bought in 1675 is keeping time for his descendants; and the red hair for which the Leghs were marked five hundred years ago grows once more upon the head of their latest descendant. In a world which seems bent on ruin and oblivion we cannot refuse a feeling of affectionate respect for the courage with which such old houses still confront life, cherish its traditions, and are a sanctuary for the lovely wreckage of the past.

[Times Literary Supplement, Mar 29, 1917]

[]

A Talker.

[The Great Valley (T. Werner Laurie, 1916) by Edgar Lee Masters]

When one opens a book of poetry and discovers the lines:

In 1863 Charles publishes

How Orchid Flowers are Fertilized by Insects,

or

In 1833 a man named Hallam,

A friend of Alfred’s, died at twenty-two,

one may be either delighted or annoyed; one may feel that this method is the genuine, unhumbugging speech which poets would always use if they were sincere; or one may inquire with some asperity why, if Mr Masters wants to say this sort of thing, he does not run all his lines into one, and say it in prose. But this last seems to us a stupid criticism: the lines would be no better if they were all of the same length, and, moreover, they would not be prose. The lines we have quoted are not prose; the lines that follow are not prose.

Up there in the city

Think sometimes of the American village and

What may be done for conservation of

The souls of men and women in the village.

The difficulty of describing Mr Masters lies precisely in the fact that if he is not a prose writer, still less is he a poet. And for this reason it is not necessary to consider him as a man who is making serious experiments in metre like the Imagists or the Vers Librists. He has none of the sensibility which, whether we think it irritable or perverted or inspired, is now urging them to break up the old rules and devise new ones, more arduous than the old. He seems to us to have little ear for the sound of words, and no poetic imagination. When he does an exercise in the classical style, such as ‘Marsyas’, or ‘Apollo at Pherae’, he is as smooth and dull and conscientious as a prize poet at one of our universities. His metaphors are then of this description:

And looking up he saw a slender maid

White as gardenias, jonquil-haired, with eyes

As blue as Peneus when he meets the sea

or,

And once he strove with music’s alchemy

To turn to sound the sunlight of the morn

Which fills the senses as illuminate dew

Quickens the ovule of the tiger-flower.

Whatever poetry may be, it is nothing at all like this; and although we very much prefer

For when they opened him up

They found his heart was a played out pump,

And leaked like a rusty cup,

we doubt whether that is any more in the right direction.

But if Mr Masters is neither a poet nor a prose writer, we must, after reading 280 pages of his work, find a name for him; and on the whole we think it nearest the mark to call him a talker. His jerky, creaking style, the inconsecutiveness of his thought, his slap-dash use of language, his openness and plain speaking (the best of his poems is too frank to be quoted) all seem to mark him as a person who utters his ideas in talk, without stopping very long to think what he is saying. As the above quotations will have shown, when he stops to think he becomes the shadow of other respectable people; even the restraint of a rhyme seems to shackle him at once. But when he is most at his ease, and therefore at his best, we seem to see him in the corner of a New England public house, telling stories about Jerry Ott, Cato Braden, Malachy Degan, or Slip Shoe Lovey, with considerable shrewdness, humour, and sentimentality. In this mood he resembles a very primitive and provincial Robert Browning. And when there is a political crisis he gets upon his feet and delivers a harangue about life in general—for he is extremely didactic—more in the style of one of our village orators, save that his background is made of great advertisement hoardings, factory chimneys, and skyscrapers, instead of ancient churches and the oaks of ancestral parks.

Suppose you do it, Republic.

Get some class.

Throw out your chest, lift up your head,

Be a ruler in the world.

And not a hermit in regimentals with a flint-lock.

Colossus with one foot in Europe,

And one in China,

Quit looking between your legs for the reappearance

Of the star of Bethlehem—

Stand up and be a man!

To a stranger the familiarity of this colloquial style seems to show that Mr Masters is at any rate a true son of the house. The chief interest of his work, indeed, comes from the fact that it is self-consciously and self-assertively American; and it is for that reason we suppose that the American public hails it with delight, on the principle, with which we must agree, that one native frog is of more importance than a whole grove full of sham nightingales.

[Times Literary Supplement, Apr 12, 1917]

[]

‘In Good Company.’

[In Good Company. Some personal recollections of Swinburne, Lord Roberts, Watts-Dunton, Oscar Wilde, Edward Whymper, S.J. Stone, Stephen Phillips (John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1917) by Coulson Kernahan]

We have enjoyed Mr Kernahan’s book so much that we find ourselves asking what the reason can be. For the most part snapshot reminiscences of celebrities, though we can no more help reading them than we can help turning the pages of a picture paper, leave us with a slight feeling of depression. The little pictures are so real, so authentic—and yet if Tennyson really said this or did that have we missed so very much by never having known Tennyson? And thus we determine to check our natural instinct of reverence, and come rather to disbelieve in great men. The impression that Mr Kernahan’s book produces is the exact opposite of this. He is a good but by no means a blind hero-worshipper; he makes little use of stories or personalities; and some of his heroes are hardly to be counted among the great or even the celebrated. But he succeeds very singularly in making us feel that to all these men life was a rich and remarkable affair, and that, after all, is what we want to know about; that is what we cannot altogether get from their books. The average person is chiefly struck by the eccentricities of the great; Mr Kernahan, on the other hand, bears witness to the fullness, sincerity, and passion with which great men live compared with lesser men. It is our method, indeed, of passing time and spending money that should rightly be called eccentric—not theirs.

Consider, for instance, what the present of a bunch of flowers meant to Swinburne.

In an ecstasy of delight, he took the flowers from my outstretched hand … He bent his head over them in a rapture that was almost like a prayer, his eyes when he looked up to thank me for the gift alight and brimming over with thoughts that were not far from tears … Then he turned to Miss Watts with his courtly bow. ‘As you have been as equally honoured as I, you will not think me robbing you if I carry my bunch away with me to put them in water and to place them in my own room. I want to find them there when I wake in the morning.’

This was an important event to him; his next day would begin with a solitary ecstasy over a bunch of flowers. We must change our focus altogether if we want to understand how the day which begins with the contemplation of lilies is lived by the poet. Many incidents must be blurred; others brought out with a sudden and amazing intensity. And this impression of a change in the focus is still with us when Mr Kernahan writes of Watts-Dunton, although, of course, it is a very different change. His day was spent not in ecstasies over bunches of flowers, but in a busy interminable traffic with ideas and literature. Never, as Mr Kernahan says, a professional literary man, he was steeped in every sort of literary knowledge and memory which somehow made it impossible for him ever to become an author himself. A book of some kind—on the first principles of literary criticism, a biography, a novel—was always impending over his head; every day his equipment became more stupendous; the fame of the unwritten masterpiece was such that publishers would come down in order to induce him at last to pluck the ripe fruit. ‘“Yes,” he would say, “I cannot deny that I could write such a book. Such a book, I do not mind saying in confidence, has long been in my mind, and in the minds of friends who have repeatedly urged me to such work.”’ He toyed complacently with the idea of fame and accomplishment. He would then telegraph to one or two of his friends for their advice, and in imagination the book was already completed. But sitting down to write the first words of it, he was overcome by doubts; suddenly it seemed essential to use that particular hour for the composition of one of his innumerable letters, and so, although his intentions for books were enough to fill a large space in the British Museum, he left only two published volumes behind him.

The study of Edward Whymper gives us another view of the life which has got itself out of the rut, though in his case this was achieved by no bias of extraordinary genius, unless, as sometimes seems to be the case, to be a ‘character’ is to be an artist, although you produce no work of art. The account of this masterful, independent, and self-isolated man, who lived for choice at the top of a high house in Southend, with a house-keeper in the basement and the intervening storeys completely unfurnished, so that he might feel himself alone, interests us like one of those portraits of queer people painted to perfection by Borrow. We would draw attention in particular to the delightful scene with the photograph of himself when he had already kept Mr Kernahan waiting from 8.30 to 12.30 for his supper. Mr Kernahan was very hungry; he could see nothing remarkable in the photograph. At length Whymper tapped it with the stem of his pipe. ‘What I wondered was whether you’d notice that the smoke coming from the bowl of the pipe has been painted-in upon the negative … When you get to know me better you’ll find that I’m slow and methodical, but minutely accurate, even about little things.’ But, like all Mr Kernahan’s studies, this is a portrait, and we have no right to spoil it by picking out a handful of eccentricities; for he makes us understand that the queer ways of the great are for the most part only an impatient short cut to a life beyond our reach.

[Times Literary Supplement, Apr 12, 1917]

[]

A Cambridge V.A.D.

[From Cambridge to Camiers Under the Red Cross (W. Heffer & Sons Ltd., 1917) by E.M. Spearing.]

The war, so people say, is breaking down barriers between the classes which seemed of adamant. Many individuals would have something of the kind to relate of havoc wrought within their own personalities by the same disaster. They have been made aware, to their delight, that they possess powers and desires which are entirely at variance with each other and with their accepted beliefs about themselves. Here we have the case of Miss Spearing, a late Fellow of Newnham, engaged when war broke out upon ‘research work on certain Elizabethan dramas’. Not even this war, one might have thought, would have disturbed an occupation so utterly alien to itself; and yet the proofs of her book sent to the Louvain University Press were among the first things to perish in the flames. She found compensation ‘and much more’ for its loss by becoming a V.A.D. at Cambridge, and this little book consists of notes and diaries she wrote there and later when she was nursing at hospitals in various parts of France. She does not attempt to analyse her feelings very closely, as no doubt she had little time to indulge in them; but something of the excitement of a student plunged from books into practical work and finding herself quite capable of it is perceptible in her account and exhilarating to the reader.

Her first taste of camp life was not a mild one. The hospital camp was among chalk hills swept by the wind; the tents were blown down in the middle of the night; the camp was a sea of mud; the month November. When the snow came ‘it was difficult to creep out of the tent without allowing a heavy mass of snow to fall in and overwhelm everything.’ ‘Yet most of us,’ Miss Spearing adds, ‘find camp life decidedly congenial.’ It is very healthy, for one thing; and then ‘one makes friends quickly’, such conditions, one may suppose, providing a fine test of friendship. As for the soldiers, her patients, Miss Spearing has the usual story to tell—so usual that we have almost forgotten how remarkable it is. They are very gentle, very grateful, very much like children, and yet in some respects the conventional picture does not do them justice. Beneath a surface which is so much alike that it resembles a uniform assumed for convenience, ‘the modern Tommy is often a highly strung individual, very sensitive to pain’, a man living in abnormal conditions, and showing naturally some qualities that one would not expect. Among them there is his taste, which Miss Spearing found a little puzzling, for highly sentimental songs, about ‘home and mother and sweetheart’, which he will get up and sing with ‘the utmost seriousness’. But this surely is of a piece with the desire for noise and merriment which breaks out unreasonably as a reaction from the strain of the trenches. ‘We all,’ she says, ‘live very much for the day,’ and try to get as much into the day as possible, for it is a short one, and those who meet now may be moved elsewhere tomorrow.

This concentration of life is, perhaps, the secret of the fascination which so many people find in a hard and dangerous existence. The best qualities, and the most real, which might be hidden in the slow intercourse of normal life, come quickly to the surface. They find the readiest expression, so far as the English are concerned, in humour. But in the nurses, and in the soldiers, such experiences are forming deeper thoughts, of ‘an underlying reality’, of a ‘community of suffering’; and it is this which is in Miss Spearing’s mind when she writes, ‘I have had horrors enough to last me my whole life, but still I don’t think I would have missed it if I had been given my choice.’ And yet she by no means shares the sentimental illusions about wounded soldiers and the effects of war on the character which she found rife in England on her return. A time in the trenches does not make bad men good; soldiers ‘are very ordinary people, with an unfortunate weakness for getting drunk, and an inability to say “No” to a pretty girl.’ But among all these conflicting impressions there are two which in her case grow ever stronger—the love of poetry and the love of England. The poetry is the poetry of today, and England is the English country, the Cambridge country—‘the slow, quiet river … the old Roman highway … the yellow cornfields, the pleasant green meadows’.

[Times Literary Supplement, May 10, 1917]

[]

The Perfect Language.

[The Greek Anthology. With an English translation by W.R. Paton, vol. ii. The Loeb Classical Library (Heinemann, 1917).]

To those who count themselves lovers of Greek in the sense that some ragged beggar might count himself the lover of an Empress in her robes, the Loeb Library, with its Greek or Latin on one side of the page and its English on the other, came as a gift of freedom to a very obscure but not altogether undeserving class. The existence of the amateur was recognised by the publication of this Library, and to a great extent made respectable. He was given the means of being an open and unabashed amateur, and made to feel that no one pointed the finger of scorn at him on that account; and in consequence, instead of exercising his moribund faculties almost furtively upon some chance quotation met in an English book, he could read a whole play at a time, with his feet on the fender. With such treatment, too, his little stock of Greek became improved, and occasionally he would be rewarded with one of those moments of instant understanding which are the flower of reading. In them we seem not to read so much as to recollect what we have heard in some other life.

Of course, no translation, as Mr Paton would probably be the first to agree, is going to reproduce the bloom and scent, the natural poise and sequence, all that we feel before we understand the meaning, of the original words. No one is going to translate—

O Proserpina,

For the flowers now, that frighted thou let’st fall

From Dis’s waggon!

It is necessary perhaps to be English to understand that. But there are other qualities which can be rendered. A spirited version will give the movement and the form of a play so that a thousand suggestions can be received by a mind unable to grasp a fraction of them when weighed down with the labour of translation. It is important to read quickly, if only because the friction of speed creates in the reader the arrogant and, in this case, scarcely warrantable belief that he knows precisely what Aeschylus meant, that the misunderstood Aeschylus reserved a peculiar meaning for him, that he is for the first time building up a perfectly original figure of the poet. Without this conviction the reading of the classics is apt to become insipid, and the burden of other people’s views a weight too heavy to be borne. But, once fired with the spirit of the partisan, it is wonderful what hardships no longer repel us, and how little respect is paid to the authority of the great. It is true that humiliation has generally to be faced at the end of these outbursts of zeal, for the reason that Greek is an immensely difficult language. A great deal of knowledge is essential for the moderate understanding of it, and not easy to come by. How many people in England can read Homer as accurately as a child of eight can read the morning paper? for example; and the few who read Sophocles perfectly are about as singular as acrobats flying through space from bar to bar.

To our thinking the difficulty of Greek is not sufficiently dwelt upon, chiefly perhaps because the sirens who lure us to these perilous waters are generally scholars of European reputation. They have forgotten, or never knew, or for reasons of their own choose to belittle, what those difficulties are. But for the ordinary amateur they are very real and very great; and we shall do well to recognise the fact and to make up our minds that we shall never be independent of our Loeb. And the more we own the difficulty, and confess the sense of unrewarded effort, the consciousness of pygmy understanding, the more we must testify to the miracle of the language. It will not let us go. It will not agree to be a respectable branch of learning which we are well content to admire in the possession of others. A branch of learning suggests a withered stick with a few dead leaves attached to it. But Greek is the golden bough; it crowns its lovers with garlands of fresh and sparkling leaves. We have only to open this volume of the anthology at haphazard to fall once more beneath the spell:

I Brotachos, a Gortynian of Crete, lie here, where I came not for this end, but to trade.

The serene, restrained, and penetrating sound of that detaches itself at once from all others, even in the English version. What is added to it by the Greek words it is impossible to define. To appreciate them fully one would have, no doubt, to be born a Greek. But we are not aware of any affectation when we say that once having read them we know, even with our imperfect understanding, that there is a beauty in the Greek language which is unlike and beyond any that we have met elsewhere. Let us turn the page and read:

I am the tomb of a shipwrecked man; but set sail, stranger; for when we were lost other ships voyaged on.

or,

If to die will be the chief part of virtue, Fortune granted this to us above all others; for striving to endue Hellas with freedom, we lie here possessed of praise that groweth not old.

or,

Tears, the last gift of my love, even down through the earth I send to thee in Hades, Heliodora …

Here we have the peculiar magic, the lure that will lead us from youth to age, groping through our island fogs and barbarities towards that unattainable perfection. But perfection has a chill sound. It scarcely seems the right word for that extremely individual and definite spirit which is the flame of the Greek character. No one can read the few lines quoted above without feeling not only their extreme beauty, but also their extreme unlikeness to anything in any other language. It is an unlikeness that perpetually rouses our curiosity about them. These lines, in the first place, seem to be written neither in the infancy nor in the old age of the world, but in its maturity. There is no prettiness as there is no mysticism in them. We hear the voice of men whose outlook on life was perfectly direct and unclouded. There is, of course, that virtue of restraint so often praised in the Greeks that we tend to forget that it is most of all a virtue when, as in the present case, there is much to restrain. And although the present volume of the anthology is devoted to epigrams upon the dead, it is evident that this people had everything to restrain, a love of man or woman, a love of earth, a love of life itself more passionate, it seems, than ours. Nevertheless they are able to dismiss life with stoical clearness of sight, and of all their grief allow only one cry to escape them.

The difference between them and ourselves is made very clear in these epigrams where feelings of such depth and scope are concentrated into so small a space. They have to do with individual men and women; and we see, as in a vignette, a little view of the house, of the daily work, of the country outside the door. We can see the sharp lines of the mountains, the changing colour of the sea, the little vines stooping with grapes, and hear the harsh song of the crickets. It is the South, but it is not Italy. It is life, but it is not our life. When we attempt to visualise the Greek world we see it standing in outline against the sky without crowd or detail. One is inclined to think of their literature, too, as a succession of complete and perfect utterances; for (to the amateur at least) there are no schools in Greek literature, or imitations, no bad shots at great things which tend to blur the outline of the masterpiece when it is achieved. For us at least no chance saying in Greek, or association of words, opens up a view of irrelevant vulgarity such as it is well nigh impossible to exclude from the pages of those who write in a living tongue. On the contrary, we feel that if by chance the veil lifts in their writing it is to reveal something beautiful, something strong and sincere.

But we doubt whether it is right to use our English word beauty so perpetually when we speak of the Greeks, for they do not seem to have our conception of beauty, or of its rarity or of its value. Another power seems to be theirs—the power of gazing with absolute candour upon the truth of things, and beauty seems to come of its own accord, not as an ornament to be applied separately but as an essential part of the world as it appears to them. Theirs is a beauty of the whole rather than of parts; and although it would be possible, no doubt, to make a book of the beauties of their poets, we should miss much more by this treatment of them than we should if it were applied to our own Elizabethans. Among the epigrams of the anthology there are many examples of this flawless quality; save among the latest it would be hard to find one without a trace of it. It is a quality which has the likeness of impersonality were it not for that inflection of the voice with which they charge their words with all the sorrow, the passion, or the joy that words can say, or, more marvellously still, leave unsaid.

Now the white violet blooms, and blooms the moist narcissus, and bloom the wandering mountain lilies; and now, dear to her lovers, spring flower among the flowers, Zenophile, the sweet rose of Persuasion, has burst into bloom. Meadows, why idly laugh in the brightness of your tresses? For my girl is better than garlands sweet to smell.

The beauty of that seems to us incomparable and yet it is only a reflection of the beauty of the Greek.

But we could go on multiplying quotations and seeking and persuading ourselves that we find new reasons for our love of them indefinitely. For the truth is that, even to an amateur, Greek literature is not so much literature as the type of literature, the supreme example of what can be done with words. Even to him the words have their strong and unmistakable accent. Other words of other languages may come nearer to us, but what in Latin or English has this stamp of finality, what in any other literature so convinces us that the perfect form of human utterance has been found once and for all? Found easily, as we feel, almost unconsciously, such was the genius of the race for expression. And, although it seems ungracious to add this when we have owned so much indebtedness to translators, some knowledge of the language is a possession not to be done without. With the best will in the world the translators are bound to stamp their individuality or that of their age upon the text. Our minds are so full of echoes that a single word such as ‘aweary’ will flood a whole page for an English reader with the wrong associations. And such is the power of the Greek language that to know even a little of it is to know that there is nothing more beautiful in the world.

[Times Literary Supplement, May 24, 1917]

[]

‘Creative Criticism.’

[Creative Criticism: Essays on the Unity of Genius and Taste (Henry Holt & Co., 1917) by J.E. Spingarn]

Mr Spingarn has some hard things to say of American criticism, of its dependence on the decayed and genteel tradition of Victorian England, of its ‘hopeless chaos in the face of new realities of art’, which we admit that we have sometimes wished to say for ourselves, but they come with greater force and grace from the lips of an American. He demolishes more decayed and genteel traditions than the Victorians can justly be taxed with; and in the face of new realities his enthusiasm is so keen and clear-sighted that we wish that he would give us a few examples of the art besides this spirited defence of it. We wish indeed that he had written a longer book; for the subjects he deals with are very complex, and many of the interesting things that he says would be still more interesting if they were discussed more fully.

Mr Spingarn’s chief object is to confute those people who still hold that the critic is an inferior being, and his art a base one. He sets out to show that his opinion is founded upon a misconception of the power that ‘poets and critics share together’; for whatever the power is, he asserts that ‘in their most significant moments the creative and the critical instinct are one and the same’. This conception of the nature of criticism is of very modern date. It depends upon the assumption that the task of the critic is to ask himself—‘What has the poet tried to express and how has he expressed it?’ As Mr Spingarn shows, in a very interesting and suggestive summary of the history of criticism, this question was never asked with any unanimity until we come to the nineteenth century, and in particular to Coleridge, Carlyle, and Sainte-Beuve. Horace asked whether there were more than three actors on the stage, or more than five acts in the drama; Dr Johnson whether the poet numbered ‘the streaks of the tulip’; innumerable critics of less importance applied yet more arbitrary tests before they tied on the right label—epic, pastoral, tragedy, comedy as the case might be. It was little wonder that the critic and his art fell into disrepute, for the first act of any vigorous writer was to break all the laws and tear up all the labels. Nowadays, thanks to Sainte-Beuve and others, the conception of criticism has changed; we try to enter into the mind of the writer, to see each work of art by itself, and to judge how far each artist has succeeded in his aim. We do not think that our work is done when we have taken his measure by a standard roughly adapted to fit that particular class.

The important change of course, as we think that Mr Spingam is right in saying, was the change which led critics to conceive of literature as an art of expression. A great deal might be said about this view of art, and about the statement that ‘art has performed its function when it has expressed itself’. But if you hold that view a great many questions that used to be taken into account have to be thrown overboard. Mr Spingarn makes a long and a bold list of them. In his phrase we have ‘done with’ the old rules; we have done with the genres; we have done with technique as separate from art; we have done with the history and criticism of poetic themes; we have done with the race, the time, the environment of the poet; we have done with all moral judgment of literature; we have done with the ‘evolution’ of literature. None of these questions, though each is interesting in itself, has anything to do with the value of a work of art. Possibly this may be so, although we cannot help thinking that of two poems the one with a higher morality is better aesthetically than the one with a lower morality. The critic then is confronted by the work of art in itself. He has to reproduce in his own mind the ‘essence of unmixed reality’, if we like to call it so, and to say how completely it has been expressed. In order to do this, says Mr Spingarn, ‘aesthetic judgment becomes nothing more or less than creative art itself’. That any writer capable of this feat is deserving of the highest praise is indisputable; but that his genius is of the same order as that of the poet we are not so certain. For criticism is not merely the re-creation of a work of art; the process of re-creation gone through by the critic is very different from the process which created the original work. Criticism is largely the interpretation of art, and it is difficult to see how a work which contains the element of interpretation can be a work of art in the sense in which a poem is a work of art. There is a difference not of degree but of kind between Coleridge’s Lectures on Shakespeare and the Ancient Mariner. It does not seem possible to say of critical work, as it is possible to say of poetical work, that ‘beauty is its own excuse for being’. But to decide the exact amount of the difference, or the relative value of the two gifts, supposing them to be distinct, is not of great importance, even were it possible to do so. On the other hand, it is of very great importance to open the mind as widely as possible to see what each writer is trying to do, and in interpreting him only to frame rules which spring directly from our impression of the work itself.

For how in criticism are we to go altogether without ‘rules’? Is not the decision to do so merely another rule? Although to feel is of the first importance, to know why one feels is of great importance too. There can be no doubt, however, that to be free to make one’s own laws and to be alert to do it afresh for every newcomer is an essential part of any criticism worth having. And that criticism is worth having Mr Spingarn has proved conclusively; in another essay he might go on to tell us the reason why.

[Times Literary Supplement, Jun 7, 1917]

[]

‘South Wind.’

[South Wind (Martin Secker, 1917) by Norman Douglas. Reprinted: CW.]

We have no quarrel with the shape or size or colour of this novel; but we believe that if, instead of being a brown, plump, freshly printed volume, it were slim, a little yellow, the date about 1818, the cover of a faded green, marked, perhaps, with the rim of an ancient tea cup—if, in short, it resembled the first edition of Nightmare Abbey or Crotchet Castle—there would be people willing to sift the old bookstalls in search of it, to pay a sovereign for it: people fond of taking it from the shelf and reading their favourite passages aloud, and apt to remark, when they put it back again, ‘What a pity it is that novelists don’t write like this nowadays!’ They very seldom do write like this. But when the reader, a few pages deep and beginning to feel settled in the new atmosphere, collects himself, his first comment is likely to be that it is a very strange thing that no one has thought of writing this book before Mr Douglas. The comment is a compliment, although there is a trace of annoyance in it. It signifies that the idea is one of those fresh and fruitful ideas that have been sailing just out of range on the horizon of our minds and now have been brought to shore and all their merchandise unladen by another.

Take all the interesting and eccentric people you can think of, put them on an island in the Mediterranean beyond the realms of humdrum but not in those of fantasy: bid them say shamelessly whatever comes into their heads: let them range over every topic and bring forth whatever fancy, fact, or prejudice happens to occur to them: add, whenever the wish moves you, dissertations upon medieval dukes, Christianity, cookery, education, fountains, Greek art, millionaires, morality, the sexes: enclose the whole in an exquisite atmosphere of pumice rocks and deep blue waves, air with the warm and stimulating breath of the South Wind—the prescription begins something in this way. But we have left out the most important element of all. We are at a loss to define the quality of the author’s mind, his way of presenting these men and women, of turning his ideas. We glance at Peacock, and then, for a second, at Oscar Wilde. Peacock is superbly eccentric and opinionated; Wilde is persuasive and lucid. Mr Douglas possesses these qualities, but they are his own. His book has a distinguished ancestry, but it was born only the day before yesterday. So individual is the character of his mind that as we read we frequently congratulate him upon having found the right form for a gift that must have been hard to suit. As frequently we congratulate ourselves on the fact that the whole affair is turning out so surprisingly and delightfully successful.

Upon the Island of Nepenthe, then, ‘an islet of volcanic stone rising out of the blue Mediterranean’, are congregated for various reasons a great many people of marked idiosyncrasy—Mr Keith, Mr Eames, Miss Wilberforce, Mr and Mrs Parker, Count Caloveglia, Mme Steynlin, Mr Denis, and the Duchess of San Martino, to name only the most prominent. The Bishop of Bampopo, Mr Heard, alights here for a short stay on his way home from episcopal duties in the Equatorial Regions. He is introduced to them all one after another. We scarcely venture to attempt any summary of their characters or of their conversation. We may say, however, that Mr Eames was engaged in annotating Perrelli’s Antiquities. But ‘it is not true to say that he fled from England to Nepenthe because he forged his mother’s will, because he was arrested while picking the pockets of a lady at Tottenham Court Road station, because he refused to pay for the upkeep of his seven illegitimate children’. None of this is true at all. He once had a love affair, which left him chronically sensitive on the subject of balloons. But Mr Eames was the reverse of Mr Keith. Mr Keith collected information for its own sake. ‘He could tell you how many public baths existed in Geneva in pre-Reformation days, what was the colour of Mehemet Ali’s whiskers, why the manuscript of Virgil’s friend Gallius had not been handed down to posterity, and in what year and what month the decimal system was introduced into Finland.’ His was a complex character; he held marked and peculiar views upon the origin of our English spleen; he was an epicure; and, ‘chaster than snow as a conversationalist, he prostituted his mother tongue in letter-writing to the vilest of uses’. We are not surprised on the whole that ‘friends of long standing called him an obscene old man’. Of Mrs Parker we need only say that she treasured and displayed in her drawing room a piece of fine blue material fished from the floating débris of a millionaire’s yacht, from which she deduced and expressed certain opinions as to the habits of travelling millionaires. Of the millionaire himself, what can be said? The Malthusian philosophy had no more distinguished supporter, and the part he played when in the opinion of the island it became necessary to protect Miss Wilberforce from herself was much to his credit. This poor lady, of unblemished descent and connections, having lost her lover at sea had taken to the bottle and given way to noctambulous habits, when she was liable to divest herself of her raiment. The Duchess, it is true, was not a duchess at all, but as she talked and behaved like one the right was conceded her. Mme Steynlin, on the other hand, ‘cared little what frocks she wore so long as somebody loved her’. The reader must imagine how they talked, and how one of them was induced incidentally to slip over the edge of a precipice.

But as we have left out all mention of the Alpha and Omega Club, of Buddha and the Little White Cows, together with innumerable other interesting and delightful facts, we must cease to summarise. Indeed, a summary of their conduct and conversation is too likely to give the impression that the characters are merely a gallery of whimsical grotesques, mouthpieces for the brilliant and well-informed mind of their author. That is far from the truth. There are an astonishing number of things that never get into novels at all and yet are of the salt of life; and the achievement of South Wind is that is has arrested a great number of these things and proved once more what a narrow convention the novelist is wont to impose on us. Meanwhile, although the hot season has dispersed the original party, Mr Keith is still in residence; Mr Roger Rumbold, the advocate of Infanticide for the Masses, and Mr Bernard, author of The Courtship of Cockroaches, have lately arrived. How often in the coming months will our thoughts seek relief if not repose in the Island of Nepenthe, and with what eagerness shall we await a further and even fuller report of its history!

[Times Literary Supplement, Jun 14, 1917]

[]

‘Books and Persons.’

[Books and Persons. Being comments on a past epoch 1908–1911 (Chatto & Windus, 1917) by Arnold Bennett]

There are two kinds of criticism—the written and the spoken. The first, when it gets into print, is said to be the cause of much suffering to those whom it concerns; but the second, we are inclined to think, is the only form of criticism that should make an author wince. This is the criticism which is expressed when, upon finishing a book, you toss it into the next armchair with an exclamation of horror or delight, adding a few phrases by way of comment, which lack polish and ignore grammar but contain the criticism which an author should strain all his forces to overhear. If criticism can ever help, he will be helped; if it can ever please, he will be enraptured; the pain, even, is salutary, for it will be severe enough either to kill or to reform. One or two writers there are who can put this criticism into prose; but for the most part the adjectives, the grammar, the logic, the inkpot—to say nothing of humanity and good manners—all conspire to take the dash and sincerity out of it, and by the time speech becomes a review there is nothing left but grammatical English.

Mr Arnold Bennett is one of the few who can catch their sayings before they are cold and enclose them all alive in very readable prose. That is why these aged reviews (some are nearly ten years old) are as vivacious and as much to the point as they were on the day of their birth. They have another claim upon our interest. They deal for the most part with writers who are still living, whose position is still an open question, about whom we feel more and probably know more than we can with honesty profess to do about those dead and acknowledged masters who are commonly the theme of our serious critics. At the time when Mr Bennett was Jacob Tonson of the New Age, Mr Galsworthy, Mr Montague, Mrs Elinor Glyn, Mr W.H. Hudson, Mr John Masefield, Mr Conrad, Mr E.M. Forster, Mr Wells and Mrs Humphry Ward were not exactly in the positions which they occupy today. The voice of Jacob Tonson had something to do with the mysterious process of settling them where, as we think, they will ultimately dwell. It is true that we are not going to rank any book of Mr Galsworthy’s with Crime and Punishment, and we dissent a little from the generosity of the praise bestowed upon the novels of Mr Wells. But these are details compared with the far more important question of Mr Bennett’s point of view. We have said that his is spoken criticism; but we hasten to add that it is not at all what we are accustomed to hear spoken at dinner tables and in drawing rooms. It is the talk of a writer in his workroom, in his shirt sleeves. It is the talk, as Mr Bennett is proud to insist, of a creative artist. ‘I am not myself a good theoriser about art,’ he says. ‘I … speak as a creative artist, and not as a critic.’ The creative artist, he remarks, on another occasion, produces ‘the finest, and the only first-rate criticism’.

We do not think that this is a book of first-rate criticism; but it is the book of an artist. Nobody could read one of these short little papers without feeling himself in the presence of the father of fifty volumes. The man who speaks knows all that there is to be known about the making of books. He remembers that a tremendous amount of work has gone to the making of them; he is versed in every side of the profession—agents and publishers, good seasons and bad seasons, the size of editions and the size of royalties, he knows it all—he loves it all. He never affects to despise the business side of the profession of writing. He will talk of high-class stuff, thinks that authors are quite right in getting every cent they can for it, and will remark that it is the business of a competent artist to please, if not the, certainly a, public. But it is not in this sense only that he is far more professional than the English writer is apt to be or to appear; he is professional in his demand that a novel shall be made absolutely seaworthy and well constructed. If he hates one sin more than another it is the sin of ‘intellectual sluggishness’. This is not the attitude nor are these the words of ‘mandarins’ or ‘dilettanti’—the professors and the cultivated people whom Mr Bennett hates much as the carpenter hates the amateur who does a little fretwork.

London swarms with the dilettanti of letters. They do not belong to the criminal classes, but their good intentions, their culture, their judiciousness, and their infernal cheek amount perhaps to worse than arson or assault … They shine at tea, at dinner, and after dinner. They talk more easily than (the artist) does, and write more easily too. They can express themselves more readily. And they know such a deuce of a lot.”

Whether we agree or disagree we are reminded by this healthy outburst of rage that the critic has not merely to deal out skilfully measured doses of praise and blame to individuals, but to keep the atmosphere in a right state for the production of works of art. The atmosphere, even seven years ago, was in a state so strange that it appears almost fantastic now. Canon Lambert was then saying, ‘I would just as soon send a daughter of mine to a house infected with diphtheria or typhoid fever as’ let her read Ann Veronica. About the same time Dr Barry remarked, ‘I never leave my house … but I am forced to see, and solicited to buy, works flamingly advertised of which the gospel is adultery and the apocalypse the right of suicide.’ We must be very grateful to Mr Bennett for the pertinacity with which he went on saying in such circumstances ‘that the first business of a work of art is to be beautiful, and its second not to be sentimental’.

But if we were asked to give a proof that Mr Bennett is something more than the extremely competent, successful, businesslike producer of literature, we would point to the paper on ‘Neo-Impressionism and Literature’. These new pictures, he says, have wearied him of other pictures; is it not possible that some writer will come along and do in words what these men have done in paint? And suppose that happens, and Mr Bennett has to admit that he has been concerning himself unduly with inessentials, that he has been worrying himself to achieve infantile realisms? He will admit it, we are sure; and that he can ask himself such a question seems to us certain proof that he is what he claims to be—a ‘creative artist’.

[Times Literary Supplement, Jul 5, 1917]

[]

‘Lord Jim.’

[Lord Jim. A Tale (J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1917) by Joseph Conrad.]

This new edition of Lord Jim will be succeeded, we suppose, by the rest of Mr Conrad’s works—those that are already published, and the many, as we hope, that are still to come. But will they all appear in the binding which disfigured The Shadow Line and now afflicts us once more in Lord Jim? Will they all be of a sad green colour, and sprinkled with chocolate-brown nautical emblems such as might be stamped upon club note-paper, or upon some florid philanthropic pamphlet drawing attention to the claims of sea-captains’ widows? As a general rule we submit to the will of publishers in silence, but it is time to cry out when they ask us to disfigure our shelves upon so large a scale as this. It is not a question of luxury, but of necessity: we have to buy Mr Conrad; all our friends have to buy Mr Conrad; and that Mr Conrad of all people should be robbed even of a shred of that dignity and beauty which he more than any living writer is able to create seems quite distressingly inappropriate.

Let us give thanks, however, for the portrait, and especially for the few words of introduction which Mr Conrad prefixes to the book. He tells us two facts of great interest: there is, or was, in existence a lady who does not like Lord Jim. That, though discreditable to her, is possible. But what are we to say of her reason? ‘“You know,” she said, “it is all so morbid.”’ … ‘The pronouncement,’ writes Mr Conrad, ‘gave me food for an hour’s anxious thought.’ That is sufficiently surprising, too. If Mr Conrad had taken this extravagantly bad shot into account for the space of a minute, we should have thought it an excessive compliment to the unknown lady; for is there any word in the language less applicable to Lord Jim than ‘morbid’? In the second place, Mr Conrad has a few words to say about the origin of the story. He tells us that his first thought was of a short story concerned only with the pilgrim-ship episode; but after writing a few pages he became discontented, and laid them aside. But Mr Blackwood happened to ask him for a story, and ‘it was only then that I perceived that the pilgrim-ship episode was a good starting point for a free and wandering tale’. A great many of his readers we think, will say that this statement explains a great deal: it explains that difficult break in the narrative; it explains the one criticism which we have ever formulated against this superb romance—that the second part of the book does not develop satisfactorily out of the first. The adventures at Patusan are not quite on a level with the rest.

Nevertheless, after reading Lord Jim again we are inclined to agree with what appears to be Mr Conrad’s own opinion and to put Lord Jim at the head of all his works. There is The Heart of Darkness; there is ‘Youth’; there is Typhoon; there is The Shadow-Line; for ourselves, we should claim a very high place for that beautiful fragment of Reminiscences still unfinished; but in Lord Jim Mr Conrad seems to have found once for all the subject that brings out his rare and wonderful qualities at their best. By a chance that does not come to every novelist, he has found his opportunity and made use of it to the very utmost. But it is not for us while he is still, happily, midway in his career to attempt to place Mr Conrad’s books in order of merit or to weigh this famous work once more in our scales. Indeed, those critical susceptibilities which are set on edge by nine books out of ten and insist upon recording their complaints lie down happily and sleep in this case, and leave us with leisure to ruminate one or two ideas about Mr Conrad’s work.

It is in Lord Jim that one of those passages occurs which interest us almost more for what they reveal of the writer than for any light they throw on the story. Marlow is drinking with that French naval officer who appears very distinctly for a few pages and then drops out altogether, and he remarks:

As if the appointed time had arrived for his moderate and husky voice to come out of his immobility, he pronounced ‘Mon Dieu, how the time passes!’ Nothing could have been more commonplace than this remark; but its utterance coincided for me with a moment of vision. It’s extraordinary how we go through life with eyes half shut, with dull ears, with dormant thoughts … Nevertheless, there can be but few of us who had never known one of these rare moments of awakening, when we see, hear, understand ever so much—everything—in a flash, before we fall back again into our agreeable somnolence. I raised my eyes when he spoke, and I saw him as though I had never seen him before.

That, so it strikes us, is the way in which Mr Conrad’s mind works; he has a ‘moment of vision’ in which he sees people as if he had never seen them before; he expounds his vision, and we see it, too. These visions are the best things in his books. In Lord Jim particularly, how they crowd about us, these wonderful figures—Brierly, Chester, Stein—with their strange experiences all laid bare for an instant before, just as they come from darkness, they fade into darkness again! The gift of seeing in flashes is, of course, a limitation as well as a gift; it explains what we may call the static quality of Mr Conrad’s characters. They change and develop very slightly; they are for the most part people whose characters are made up of one or two very large and simple qualities, which are revealed to us in flashes. But Mr Conrad’s genius is a very complex one; although his characters remain almost stationary they are enveloped in the subtle, fine, perpetually shifting atmosphere of Marlow’s mind; they are commented upon by that voice which is so full of compassion, which has so many deep and fine cadences in its scale. Mr Conrad has told us that it is his conviction that the world rests on a few very simple ideas, ‘so simple that they must be as old as the hills’. His books are founded upon these large and simple ideas; but the texture through which they are seen is extremely fine; the words which drape themselves upon these still and stately shapes are of great richness and beauty. Sometimes, indeed, we feel rather as if we were lying motionless between sea and sky in that atmosphere of profound and monotonous calm which Mr Conrad knows so strangely how to convey. There is none of the harassing tumult and interlocking of emotion which whirls through a Dostoevsky novel, and to a lesser extent provides the nervous system of most novels. The sea and the tropical forests dominate us and almost overpower us; and something of their largeness, their latent inarticulate passion seems to have got into these simple men and these old sea-captains with their silent surfaces and their immense reserves of strength.

[Times Literary Supplement, Jul 26, 1917]

[]

‘John Davidson.’

[John Davidson: A Study of the Relation of his Ideas to his Poetry, ‘A Thesis presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy’ (University of Pennsylvania, 1916), by Hayim Fineman.]

If you write a thesis ‘in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy’ upon a poet, it is inevitable perhaps that you should approach that poet solemnly and heavily, and, if he is not among the great, should attribute to him an importance which makes his familiar features appear strained and unnatural. Mr Fineman has not been able to avoid this common error. His essay opens with a cannonade of sonorous general statements about Victorian life and literature which it is difficult to bring into relation with actual books and facts. No doubt there is a connection between the discovery of electricity and the growth of realism in art, but it is a statement which puts a great strain upon the imagination; nor is it easy to make flesh and blood of an analysis of our modern view of romance, such as the following:

It either became symbolism; and this appealed to an age of increased intensity of commercial production because of the nerve-irritation that symbolic methods of double interpretation and aroused expectancy involved and implied; or else it became the romance of cruelty and tragic endings with occasional by-products of Wellsian science-romances and Davidsonian cosmological testaments.

But when Mr Fineman gets on to Davidson himself he is not so heavy-handed and he has plenty of interesting things to say. He takes Davidson from the point of view of the philosopher, and there is, of course, much in Davidson that the reader who is primarily interested in thought will find it worth his while to unravel. It is possible, and Mr Fineman’s study lends support to this view, that to future generations Davidson will be interesting chiefly as the man who expressed most forcibly a materialistic view of the world in poetry. But Mr Fineman sends us back to Davidson’s books and, leaving the views of future generations out of account, we try to take stock of our own.

It is less than ten years since Davidson died, leaving behind him the tragic preface in which, among other reasons for making an end, he stated that he had to ‘turn aside and attempt things for which people will pay’. His books came out in the last years of the nineteenth century and in the first years of this. The tragedy and whatever of achievement there is in the work are quite close to us; and yet already his voice has become a strange one. That is always so with a poet who is not great enough to be in the air as well as in print; when you do not read him he ceases to exist. But the neglect, at least in the case of Davidson, brings its compensation, for surprise is uppermost in re-reading him that anyone so good should be so little famous. And when we call him good, we mean, first and foremost, energetic, passionate, sincere, and master of his own method of expression. Take for example the first half of the Testament of John Davidson. He wishes to do no less than re-fashion our conception of the universe. We are to admit no vision of another existence than ours; we are to realise that gods, centaurs, goblins, the lands of faery and romance, the whole ‘wonderful Cosmogony of Other World’, are merely the reflections of man’s unenlightened mind.

Upon the mirror of eternity.

… God and gods

Are man’s mistake; no brain exists

Behind the galaxies, above them or beneath;

No thought inhabiteth eternity,

No reason, no intelligence at all

Till conscious life begins.

The first half of the poem, in which man states his claim for supremacy to Hecate, has not only beauty in the poetic sense, but also a degree of interest which experience has scarcely led us to expect in such circumstances. It seems as if the fire of the new faith were to shrivel up finally those pallid and abstract gods and goddesses whose help is so often invoked by the academic poets for the sake of the poetic atmosphere which they create. Davidson is wholly in earnest; he sees and feels with remarkable force the vast conceptions which he is trying to express; and, above all, he is absolutely convinced of the paramount importance of his theme. And that, so we think, is his undoing. When man unrolls the whole origin, construction, and pageant of the universe, he is so burdened by all the facts which prove him right in his materialism that the poem breaks down beneath their weight; it becomes a lecture upon biology and geology delivered by an irate and fanatical professor. The facts which cumber his lines may be correct, but we do not want them stated as the following lines state them:

Secreted by the primal atom, all

The other atoms, the planets cooled,

Became; and all the elements, how much

So ever differing in appearance, weight,

Amount, condition, function, volume (gold

From iodine, argon from iron) wrought

Of the purest ether, in electrons sprang

As lightning from the tension filling space.

Our quarrel is not at all with the words, which might very well take their place in poetry, or with the subject, which is magnificent, but with the proselytising spirit, which makes the truth of the facts of more importance than the poetry, and with the growing arrogance and acerbity of manner, as of one dinning the Gospel into the heads of an indifferent public. It is an open question how far Milton and Dante believed the truth of the doctrines which they sang, and it is possible to enjoy them to the utmost without agreeing with them. But Davidson raises a spirit of controversy which makes it plain that if you do not agree with him you are damned.

Yet there are very few modern poets who need to be reduced to their proper stature by the august shades of Milton and Dante. The sturdy persistence with which Davidson thinks out his theme stands him in good stead now that the years have gone over him. He is always an interesting poet, and a far better spokesman for his time than others more mellifluous, although nature denied him the faculty of making even one of those little poems which everybody knows by heart. His shorter work, like the Fleet Street Eclogues and the Ballads, has more chance of this form of popularity, but the chief interest of it, too, comes from the attitude of his thought; as Mr Fineman says, it is not the passing vision of ordinary joys and sorrows that haunts his imagination but rather the queries that lie back of it. His philosophy was no mood but a deep-seated conception which modified his views on language, on metre, on everything that had to do with his art. He thought that modern poetry has lost its strength because the poets still feign a belief in what they know to be false. ‘… the material forces of mind and imagination,’ he wrote, ‘can now re-establish the world as if nothing had ever been thought or imagined before.’ He meant to see the world anew, and to create an unliterary literature as if nothing had been written in the past, and the new poets were to be greater than Shakespeare. Literature, he said, is the greatest foe to literature.

Lo! thirty centuries of literature

Have curved your spines and overborne your brains!

And in order to lay the foundations of the new age he began by bringing into literature not only scientific words that were hitherto unknown there, but he took for his poems subjects that are superficially prosaic—Fleet Street, the Crystal Palace, Liverpool Street and London Bridge railway stations. To our mind these are the best of his poems. They are original without being prophetic, they show his curious power of describing the quality of matter, and they are full of observation and of sympathy with the sufferings of man. The Bank Holiday scene at the Crystal Palace is a first-rate piece of description:

Courageous folk beneath

The brows of Michael Angelo’s Moses dance

A cakewalk in the dim Renascence Court.

Three people in the silent Reading-room

Regard us darkly as we enter: three

Come in with us, stare vacantly about,

Look from the window and withdraw at once.

A drama; a balloon; a Beauty Show;—

People have seen them doubtless, but none of those

Deluded myriads walking up and down

The north nave and the south nave anxiously—

And aimlessly, so silent and so sad.

The mood reminds us of that of Gissing in his novels of middle-class life in London. Both men knew and felt the horror of the sordid and the squalid with peculiar intensity; Gissing because he was at heart a scholar, Davidson because he was by conviction, at least, an aristocrat. Indeed, here we come to that strange combination of different strands of thought which gives the poems of Davidson their very individual flavour. On the one hand we have:

I see the strong coerce the weak,

And labour overwrought rebel;

I hear the useless treadmill creak,

The prisoner cursing in his cell;

I see the loafer-burnished wall;

and on the other:

Soul, disregard

The bad, the good:

Be haughty, hard,

Misunderstood.

Be an Overman, be an Englishman, be a man of imperious imagination who stamps his will upon the world, be one of those dukes, marqueses, earls, or viscounts to whom the Testament of John Davidson is dedicated, and if that is impossible, submit to be ruled by your superiors. Having disposed of the gods of the old mythology, he sets up a new god, man himself, to rule over man. It may seem a harsh and insolent creed, but Davidson nevertheless lavishes beauty on it, and sings it not only with conviction, but with the sensibility of a poet:

Stand up; behold

The earth, life, death, and day and night!

Think not the things that have been said of these;

But watch them and be excellent, for men

Are what they contemplate.

[Times Literary Supplement, Aug 16, 1917]

[]

A Victorian Echo.

[Parables and Tales by Thomas Gordon Hake. With a Preface by his son, Thomas Hake. Illustrated by Arthur Hughes (Elkin Mathews, 1917).]

This reprint is, much to our pleasure, illustrated by the original woodcuts of Arthur Hughes. A reader who knows nothing of painting could scarcely fail to date these pictures within a year or two accurately enough; and, although literature is not so easy to classify as painting, we think we could give reasons for placing Dr Hake in the middle of the nineteenth century in spite of the claim that Rossetti made for him:

… Dr Gordon Hake is, in relation to his own time, as original a poet as one can well conceive possible. He is uninfluenced by any styles or mannerisms of the day to so absolute a degree as to tempt one to believe that the latest English singer he may have even heard of is Wordsworth.

It is quite true, as Rossetti goes on to point out, that one thinks of a good many writers (Quarles, Bunyan, Pope and Gray are the ones he selects) while reading Dr Hake, although his substance is remarkably his own. But there are two qualities which seem to us to stamp his date upon him very visibly—his simple way of accepting the current morality, and his Victorian method of describing Nature.

Turning to his pages after reading our Georgians we feel ourselves, as far as morality is concerned, back in the nursery. His imagination liked to work upon rather obvious themes rich in sentiment and rounded with a moral. We have the orphan child wandering in the woods to seek food for her starving grandparent and coming home to find him dead:

No sound, no breath she heard above,

Where grandsire in the garret lay.

But one was there whose looks of love,

‘Poor little orphan,’ seemed to say.

She knew the chaplain’s kindly face;

The bearer of the lady’s grace.

Dr Hake believed in the chaplain, he believed in the noble lady and her stately pile, and when he had a heroine he called her quite seriously the Lady May of Alton Moor. All this side of him is very charmingly represented by the minute story-telling woodcuts of Mr Hughes, where the more you peer into the shadows the more horn spectacles and family Bibles you discover. But the strange thing is that we only call either poems or pictures sentimental by an afterthought; and upon seeking a reason it seems to be that if you are going to tell stories about orphan girls, blind boys, and deserted children the way to do it is with the perfect sincerity and good faith of Dr Hake. It is an art known to the Victorians. They heard a sad story; they were genuinely moved by it; they wrote it down straightforwardly, asking no questions and without a trace of self-consciousness; and this is what we cannot do, and this is what we find most strange in them.

But the youngest of our critics could not dismiss Dr Hake as nothing more than a simple-minded and sentimental story-teller. He may have high-born ladies and maidens who, when asked their names, reply with ‘looks that gave a sweetness out, “Lily of the Vale”’, but he is quite capable of sending the cripple child to the workhouse; his most indignant lines are about the evils of the public house; and the most remarkable poem in the book, ‘Old Souls’, satirises one vice or humbug after another very deftly and with a neatness which recalls the satirists of the eighteenth century. Above all—and this is the quality which gave him his high repute with such critics as Rossetti and Mrs Meynell—he was an artist; a writer with an exquisite sense of language, a strange and individual sense of humour, and a power, urged on we are told by a rigorous self-criticism, of working at his verse until nothing is left but terse original speech giving his meaning exactly and carrying the narrative on firmly and lightly. It is excellent story-telling. The ground is covered from one point to another without going round or going back or losing the way. And each one of his poems contains some beautifully accurate description of Nature. For example:

Of loving natures, proudly shy,

The stock-doves sojourn in the tree,

With breasts of feathered cloud and sky,

And notes of soft though tuneless glee;

Hid in the leaves they take a spring,

And crush the stillness with their wing.

or,

Before the sun, like golden shields,

The clouds a lustre shed around;

Wild shadows gambolling o’er the fields

Tame shadows stretching o’er the ground.

Towards noon the great rock-shadow moves,

And takes slow leave of all it loves.

Each of the quotations seems to us typically Victorian. Each is an example of the Victorian passion for getting Nature perfectly accurately, for her own sake, into poetry. And when, with much observation, much matching of words and of similes, the right description is found, down it goes, and the emotions of the poem pass round it as if it were an island in mid-stream and leave it unmoved.

[Times Literary Supplement, Aug 13, 1917]

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Mr Galsworthy’s Novel.

[Beyond (William Heinemann, 1917) by John Galsworthy]

Everyone, especially in August, especially in England, can bring to mind the peculiar mood which follows a long day of exercise in the open air. The body is tired out; the mind washed smooth by countless gallons of fresh air, and for some reason everything seems dangerously simple, and the most complex and difficult decisions obvious and inevitable. There is something truly or falsely spiritual about this state, and it is one which if prolonged may easily lead to disaster. In Mr Galsworthy’s new novel the people fill us with alarm, because they appear all more or less under the influence of the great narcotic and therefore not quite responsible for their actions. They have been out hunting all day for so many generations that they are now perpetually in this evening condition of physical well-being and spiritual simplicity. With minds one blur of field and lane, hounds and foxes, they make sudden and tremendous decisions marked by the peculiar lightness and boldness of those who are drugged out of self-consciousness by the open air. Just before they drop off to sleep they decide that they must get married tomorrow, or elope with a housemaid, or challenge someone to fight a duel. This, of course, is an exaggeration, but some theory of the kind must be fabricated to explain this rather queer book, Beyond.

Charles Clare Winton, a major in the Lancers, was evidently in the condition described when he fell in love and had a child by a lady who was already the wife of a country squire, his friend. Nothing was more against all his ideas and, what is more important in the case of Major Winton, his tradition of good breeding than such behaviour. The child, a girl called Gyp, was left to his guardianship by the unsuspecting squire; and he salved his conscience to some extent by looking after her affairs and improving her investments. She lived with him and took his name. Being his daughter she was naturally extremely well-bred, loved dogs, and rode like a bird; but being a woman, very attractive, in an ambiguous position, and endowed with a passion for music, her lot was evidently to be complicated by queer sudden impulses on the part of others besides those which she felt for herself. At her first dance she was kissed on the elbow; by the time she was twenty-two she was involved in an affair with a long-haired Swedish violinist, called Fiorsen, whom she met when her father went to take the waters at Wiesbaden. In a second, as it seems to our apprehensive eyes, she is embraced by him; next minute she is actually married to a man whose past has been disreputable, and whom her father dislikes. ‘That long, loping, wolfish, fiddling fellow with the broad cheek bones and little side whiskers (good God!) and greenish eyes, whose looks at Gyp he secretly marked down, roused his complete distrust.’ But he was a man of few words, and his own experience of love had convinced him that it was useless to interfere. The alarming thing was that Gyp herself had never given the matter any serious thought; her talks with Fiorsen, in spite of the embraces, had been of the most elementary and formal description. For example, coming home ‘bone-tired’ from a long day’s hunting, she hears that Fiorsen is in the house; she has a hot bath and does for a moment consider what will happen if she refuses him. ‘The thought staggered her. Had she, without knowing it, got so far as this? Yes, and further. It was all no good. Fiorsen would never accept refusal even if she gave it. But, did she want to refuse? She loved hot baths, but had never stayed in one so long. Life was so easy there, and so difficult outside.’ She was not in love with Fiorsen; the only serious element in her decision was that, according to a certain Baroness, Fiorsen wanted saving from himself; and the task appealed to her. No wonder, then, that when she finds herself alone with her husband for the first time after the wedding, ‘she thought of her frock, a mushroom-coloured velvet cord’.

From these quotations it is not possible, perhaps, to gather that Mr Galsworthy is giving Gyp his closest and most serious attention. He represents her not only as a very finely organised being, fastidious, sensitive, and proud, but she lives her life and meets the harsh and inevitable blows of fate by a code of morality which has Mr Galsworthy’s respect. It is by this time a matter of course that whatever Mr Galsworthy respects we must take seriously; whatever story he writes is likely to be not merely a story but also a point of view. But this time we must admit that we have not been able to get ourselves into that sympathetic state in which we read if not with agreement still with conviction. At every crisis in Gyp’s fate, instead of feeling that the laws of society have forced her into positions where her passion and her courage vindicate her behaviour completely, we feel that she acts without enough thought to realise what she is doing—and therefore callously and conventionally; without enough passion to carry her triumphantly ‘beyond’. She never forgets what the servants will think; and at a terrible moment she can remember that she is walking down Baker Street without any gloves on and can forget her emotion in buying a pair. Behind her behaviour there is no code of morality; there is only a standard of manners which she was taught, no doubt, by the charming maiden aunt who lives in Curzon Street. This, of course, would be all very well if there were any trace of satire or of protest in Mr Galsworthy’s portrait of her and her surroundings; but there is none. If you try to read the book as a satire upon honourable officers in the Lancers who hunt all day and sleep all night, to see in Gyp an amiable and innocent girl who has been flung disastrously from her dogs and ponies to sink or swim in the whirlpool of the world without any weapon save good manners, you are painfully at cross-purposes with your author. Gyp, he is careful to point out, is neither a ‘new woman’, nor is she a ‘society woman’; she is a woman of temperament, or refinement, and of courage. And we are asked to believe that in the great things of life she was carried ‘beyond’ other people, and that these weapons of hers were good enough to fight her battles very finely, and to leave her in the end mistress of her soul and able to say, although her heart is broken and she can only find comfort in a Home for Poor Children, ‘I wouldn’t have been without it.’

There are many other characters in the book, but they have, unfortunately, as we think, to comply with the standard which Gyp accepts. Fiorsen and Rosek are men of rather unpleasant character; Summerhay is a man of rather pleasant character. Gyp sums him up very well by her remark: ‘I like men who think first of their dogs.’ Unfortunately she is led to exclaim more than once in the book also, ‘What animals men are!’ Did she give them a chance, we wonder, of being anything much better? But the whole society seems to us to have had its sting, whether for good or for evil, for happiness or unhappiness, drawn long ago, and to be living rather a colourless than a vicious or beautiful life. There is nothing coarse or boisterous about this world; nobody seems to want anything very much, and when we think it all over at the end we remember, and this we mean sincerely and not satirically, a great many most delightful dogs.

[Times Literary Supplement, Aug 30, 1917]

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To Read Or Not To Read.

[How To Lengthen Our Ears. An enquiry whether learning from books does not lengthen the ears rather than the understanding (c. W. Daniel Ltd, 1917) by Viscount Harberton]

There was once an old gentleman who could, if you gave him time, trace every evil of public and private life, and he thought them both in a bad way, to one and the same cause—the prevalence of the rat. He died, unfortunately, from the bite of one of the black or Hanoverian species before he was able to collect his arguments in a book, and the principles of his faith are lost to us for ever. Let us, therefore, make the most of Viscount Harberton while we have him; he has not rediscovered the lost theory of the rat, alas! but he has invented one that will do almost as well. Whenever our old friend would have wagged his head, looked very solemn, and ejaculated, ‘Rats!’ Lord Harberton goes through the same process and cries, ‘Books!’ What sin do you most abhor? Is it drunkenness or lying, cruelty or superstition? Well, they all come from reading books. What virtues do you most admire? Pluck them in handfuls, wherever you like, the answer is still the same; that is the result of not reading books. The trouble is that somehow or other the vicious race of readers has got the virtuous race of non-readers into its power. Wherever you look you find the readers in authority. ‘Every administrative post throughout the Empire is being confined more and more to minds that can display a distorted faculty for reading and remembering what they are told, instead of judging for themselves what they care to read and remember.’ Worse than this, ‘our scholastics’ have ‘managed to acquire complete control in moulding the minds of the next generations’. The vice is spreading daily, and things have come to such a pass that if we do not look out the aristocracy will have forfeited their special merit of ‘disliking study and being more interested in their own opinions than in those of their author’.

But at this point the prophet’s message seems capable of two interpretations, each capable of founding a different sect. We are told with great emphasis that all the power is in the hands of the readers, but upon another page we—the well-to-do gentry, that is—are warned that it is owing to our vicious habit of reading that the Labour leaders have us at their mercy. Let the Socialists and trade unionists have every opportunity for reading, Lord Harberton advises; but let us stop at once, for it is only by so doing that we shall regain our lost ascendancy. It is really very difficult to know what to do. And there is another source of confusion. It is laid down on page 55 that the gift of writing is no more ‘guarantee of sense than the gift of song or the gift of the gab’. We are to remember that ‘few men of letters are absolutely sane, and their silly side is the main factor of their popularity’. No sooner have we grasped this principle and jeered where we used to do honour than we are presented with a list of untaught, unread people, and bidden to own at once that ‘in actual writing, in drama, poetry, and fiction’, in the art, that is to say, which needs no gift and is best practised by insane people, ‘they have more than held their own’.

In spite of these obscure passages it would be mere affectation to pretend that there is any doubt about Lord Harberton’s meaning. The unread man is a kind of natural genius, nosing his way through the world with an instinctive eye for the good and the right which is utterly beyond the reach of thought, and can only be compared with the flick of the wrist of a first-rate racquets player. Once common enough, these creatures, owing to the spread of books, have become so rare that it will be necessary in time for every household to keep one in its employ, so as to preserve a contact with reality; Lord Harberton himself has one already. The well-read man, on the other hand, is the ‘champion bigot’, the spirit of evil in our midst, who has endowed each one of the professions with its long ears of pedantic absurdity. Look (merely to look is enough) at Darwin; look at Lord Lister; look at Huxley, ‘that old bone-man’; look in the frontispiece at the faces of Swinburne, Goldsmith, Wordsworth, and Gibbon, and compare them with the face of William Whiteley, the Universal Provider. You will see that he is ‘more alert, quite as intelligent, and with twice the vitality and character’.

But though we have tried to show by these quotations that Lord Harberton makes good his claim for himself—‘education resisted, faith small; degrees none’—there is a great deal in his book that might have been written by anyone. Take this, for example: ‘There are plenty of minds who might read all the best authors at their own convenience and yet never be led to think at all; but when they are doing something practical the mind is alive and on the watch, and afterwards they think about it and how to do better, and they discover small improvements and inventions’. That is almost the remark of a professor. And to say that the examination test has been a failure, and that letters after one’s name are no proof of ideas within one’s head—all this has been said by the schoolmasters over and over again. Nevertheless, such is the bustle and sprightliness of Lord Harberton’s mind, such the audacity with which he flies from Tariff Reform to inoculation, from Party Government to Home Rule, to settle finally upon the flanks of the incorrigible reader, that we were just laying a faggot to our bookcase in the hope of catching his style, when we came upon the names of Schopenhauer and Herbert Spencer. No praise is too high for them; in their books, we are told, we shall find the secret of the universe. After all, then, Lord Harberton is merely one of those cultivated people who play the innocent for a holiday. Still, one reader will give him the benefit of the doubt and take his advice to the extent of refraining for ever from the pages of Schopenhauer.

[Times Literary Supplement, Sep 6, 1917]

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Mr Conrad’s ‘Youth’.

[Youth: A Narrative and two other stories (J.M. Dent & Sons, 1917) by Joseph Conrad.]

Mr Arnold Bennett recently protested against those people who, when Mr Conrad is mentioned, exclaim ‘Ah, Conrad!’ as if that were a different thing altogether, as if you were now talking about something that mattered. It is a form of exclusiveness that is very irritating, no doubt, particularly if you happen to be a novelist yourself; but when a new novel, or a reprint of an old novel, by Mr Conrad comes into our hands how can we suppress that exclamation? How can we help feeling that it is a different thing altogether—so different, indeed, that even our minute duties with regard to it attain a momentary dignity? There are two novelists in England today, so we feel spontaneously if wrongly, whom it seems no waste of time to criticise, whose work, we feel certain, is of such lasting importance that we are even serving a useful purpose when we try to value it, to make its shape a little more definite, its beauty a little more evident. Some naturalists, we are told, put their specimens into ant heaps to be eaten clean of unnecessary flesh—a humble office much like ours where these great men are concerned. Innumerable critics each armed with his pick and shovel do in the end, perhaps, clear away a few encumbrances. But Mr Hardy and Mr Conrad are the only two of our novelists who are indisputably large enough to engage the services of a whole anthill. They are not men of one success, or one impression; they are men whose art has been large enough to develop now on this side, now on that, so that it is only by laying one book beside another that you can make out what the proportions and circumference of the giant really are.

‘Youth’ was first published in 1902; it is now republished by Mr Dent, with a note by the author. He tells us something of his relations with Marlow which we are glad to know:

He haunts my hours of solitude, when, in silence, we lay our heads together in great comfort and harmony; but as we part at the end of a tale I am never sure that it may not be for the last time. Yet I don’t think that either of us would care much to survive the other … Of all my people he’s the one that has never been a vexation to my spirit. A most discreet, understanding man…

He has not very much to say about the three stories—‘Heart of Darkness’ and ‘The End of the Tether’ are, of course, the other two—and that is what one might have expected; there is not much to be said. But he says that each one is the product of experience, pushed in the case of ‘Heart of Darkness’ ‘a little (and only very little) beyond the actual facts of the case for the perfectly legitimate, I believe, purpose of bringing it home to the minds and bosoms of readers’. He also says that the three stories lay no claim to unity of artistic purpose. And yet, though the mood is distinct and different in each, it is surely not difficult to see that these three stories are the work of one and the same period, just as Chance and Victory are the work of another period. After reading them again one is inclined to say that here Mr Conrad is at his best; but it would be more just to say not that he is better, but that he is different. We probably mean that in these stories he gives us the most complete and perfect expression of one side of his genius—the side that developed first and was most directly connected with his own experience. It has an extraordinary freshness and romance. It is not so subtle or so psychological as the later mood. His characters are exposed far more to the forces of sea and forest, storm and shipwreck, than to the influence of other human beings. And these great powers, working in their large and inscrutable fashion, bring into action those qualities in mankind which always seem most dear to Mr Conrad’s heart—courage, fidelity, magnanimity in the face of suffering. They are the qualities which mark those men who seem to have most of nature in them; they have been overlaid by civilisation and need the particular tests of nature to call them out, but they exist, so Mr Conrad seems to tell us, in the poorest and most apparently worthless of men. Those ‘profane scallywags without a redeeming point’ plucked from the heart of a Liverpool slum, when tested by the supreme test of sea and fire, will be found to conceal these great possessions in the depths of their hearts. The ship is burning and ‘we went aloft to furl the sails … What made them do it?’ Was it praise, or sense of duty, or their most inadequate pay? ‘No; it was something in them, something inborn and subtle and everlasting … There was a completeness in it, something solid like a principle, and masterful like an instinct—a disclosure of something secret—of that hidden something, that gift of good or evil, that makes racial difference, that shapes the fate of nations.’

‘There was a completeness in it.’ Perhaps it is that quality which satisfies us so enormously in these stories. When the burning ship sinks, when Marlow adventures into the Heart of Darkness, and, most of all, when old Captain Whalley, betrayed by nature and by man, fills his pockets with iron and drops into the sea we feel a rare sense of adequacy, of satisfaction, as if conqueror and conquered had been well matched and there is here ‘nothing to wail’. Mr Conrad, it is needless to say, has done other things supremely well; but in these first visions of life there is often a simplicity, a sense of perfect harmony, which is broken up as life goes on; and in the case of Mr Conrad we feel that this simplicity reveals the largest outlines, the deepest instincts.

[Times Literary Supplement, Sep 20, 1917]

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A Minor Dostoevsky.

[The Gambler and Other Stones (William Heinemann, 1917) by Fyodor Dostoevsky, From the Russian by Constance Garnett.]

The second-rate works of a great writer are generally worth reading, if only because they are apt to offer us the very best criticism of his masterpieces. They show him baffled, casting about, hesitating at the branching of the paths, breaking into his true vein, and, misled by temptation, lashing himself in despair into a caricature of his own virtues and defects until the plan of his mind is very clearly marked out. The latest of Mrs Garnett’s translations, The Gambler (it includes also ‘Poor People’ and ‘The Landlady’), will throw a good deal of light upon the processes of the mind whose powers seem almost beyond analysis in such works as The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov. If we call it second-rate compared with these, we mean chiefly that it impresses us as a sketch flung off at tremendous and almost inarticulate speed by a writer of such abundant power that even into this trifle, this scribbled and dashed-off fragment, the fire of genius has been breathed and blazes up, though the flame is blown out and the whole thing thrown to the ground in the same sudden and chaotic manner as that in which it comes into existence.

To begin with, all the characters—that is, a whole room full of Russian generals, their tutors, their stepdaughters, and the friends of their stepdaughters, together with miscellaneous people whose connection is scarcely defined—are talking with the greatest passion at the tops of their voices about their most private affairs. That, at least, is our confused and despairing impression. We are not certain whether we are in an hotel, what has brought all these people together, or what has set them off at this rate. And then, in the usual miraculous manner in the midst of ever-thickening storm and spray, a rope is thrown to us; we catch hold of a soliloquy; we begin to understand more than we have ever understood before, to follow feverishly, wildly, leaping the most perilous abysses, and seeming, as in a crisis of real life, to gain in flashes moments of vision such as we are wont to get only from the press of life at its fullest. Then the facts begin to emerge. The hero of the story is tutor in the General’s family; he is in love with the General’s stepdaughter Polina; she is involved with the French Marquis de Grieux; and her stepfather is in debt to the Marquis and in love also with a French adventuress. The stepfather’s aunt, an old lady of seventy-five who should save them by dying, turns up in perfect health and proceeds to gamble away her fortune at the tables. They are all staying at Roulettenburg, and it is always possible to put everything to rights by a lucky spell at the tables. In order to save Polina the tutor begins to gamble, is sucked into the whirlpool, and never comes out again. All this is going at full speed at the moment of our first introduction to them; and to crowd the atmosphere still further, everyone is made to appear as if he or she had come upon the scene with all the preoccupations and tendencies which other circumstances have bred in them, so that we are speculating about all kinds of things that may happen in the spacious margin that lies on either side of Dostoevsky’s page.

No one but Dostoevsky is able even to attempt this method successfully, and in ‘The Gambler’ where he is not completely successful one can see what fearful risks it entails—how often in guessing the psychology of souls flying at full speed even his intuition is at fault, and how in increasing the swiftness of his thought, as he always tends to do, his passion rushes into violence, his scenes verge upon melodrama, and his characters are seized with the inevitable madness or epilepsy. Every scene either ends or threatens to end with an attack of unconsciousness, or one of those inconsequent outbursts into which he falls, we cannot help feeling, when the effort to think is too exhausting. For example:

She cried and laughed all at once. Well, what was I to do? I was in a fever myself. I remember she began saying something to me—but I could scarcely understand anything. It was a sort of delirium—a sort of babble—as though she wanted to tell me something as rapidly as possible—a delirium which was interrupted from time to time with the merriest laughter, which at last frightened me.

To control this tendency there is not in Dostoevsky, as there always is in Tolstoy, a central purpose which brings the whole field into focus. Sometimes in these stories it seems as if from exhaustion he could not concentrate his mind sufficiently to exclude those waifs and strays of the imagination—people met in the streets, porters, cabmen—who wander in and begin to talk and reveal their souls, not that they are wanted, but because Dostoevsky knows all about them and is too tired to keep them to himself.

Nevertheless, one finishes any book by Dostoevsky with the feeling that, though his faults may lie in this direction or in that, the range is so vast that some new conception of the novelist’s art remains with us in the end. In this case we are left asking questions about his humour. There is a scene in ‘The Gambler’ where the General and the Marquis try to draw the old aunt from the gaming tables with visions of a little expedition into the country.

‘There are trees there … we will have tea …’ the General went on, utterly desperate. ‘Nous boirons du lait, sur l’herbe fraîche,’ added De Grieux, with ferocious fury.

There is very little more, so little that when we come to re-read it we are astonished at the effect of humour that has been produced. Given the same circumstances, an English writer would have developed and insisted upon a humorous scene; the Russian merely states the facts and passes on, leaving us to reflect that, although humour is bound up with life, there are no humorous scenes.

[Times Literary Supplement, Oct 11, 1917]

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‘Hearts of Controversy.’

[Hearts of Controversy (Burns & Oates, 1917) by Alice Meynell.]

Although Mrs Meynell is a true critic, courageous, authoritative, and individual, she will only consent to use her gift, publicly, in the cause of controversy. ‘Exposition, interpretation,’ she says, ‘by themselves are not necessary. But for controversy there is cause.’ She sets no high value upon criticism—‘Poor little art of examination and formula!’ as she calls it. But we should suppose that no one today is more scrupulously careful than Mrs Meynell to determine what is to be said for and against any book that she thinks worth reading. We are conscious that she has made up her mind with unusual firmness, and that there is no writer of worth whom she has not by this time placed within a fraction of an inch of what she judges to be his right position. She, much more than most of us, knows what her standards are, and applies them as she reads. Her criticism, therefore, has a character and a definiteness which make it worth considering, worth testing, and worth disagreeing with.

The present volume of essays is an attempt to set right certain great reputations which, owing to our general habit of reading quickly and lazily accepting the current view of the case, are in danger of losing their proper proportions. The public version is a strange thing. It sways us much more than we are aware. We are swept along by an anonymous voice which alternatively debases Tennyson, exalts Swinburne, pits Thackeray against Dickens, and bestows the laurel wreath and withdraws it on the impulse of the moment. Mrs Meynell’s call to order is timely, and in many instances we come to heel with a good deal of contrition for our misdemeanours. The evident courage of her outspoken essay on Swinburne need not distract our attention from the profound though unwelcome truth of much of her criticism of him. But we have one complaint to lodge without entire confidence in its justness, so that we prefer to put it in the form of a question. Is it right that a critic should make his audience so conscious of their stupidity? May we not charge it partly to over-ingenuity on his part, although the main blame must rest with us? We were content in the belief that no one was going to say anything that we had not dimly foretold about Tennyson. And Mrs Meynell, with her precision and power of phrase, puts our dim foreboding perfectly. He is ‘the poet with the great welcome style and the little unwelcome manner’, she says. That is in the first place. But in the second he is, not so obviously, ‘the poet who withstood France’. Throwing out by the way the provocative remark that Matthew Arnold spoke of France as he spoke French, with ‘an incurably English accent’, she finally proclaims Tennyson ‘our wild poet, … and wilder poet than the rough, than the sensual, than the defiant, than the accuser, than the denouncer’. Wild is not the word we foresaw; but it is, of course, the exact word that Mrs Meynell means. Mrs Meynell never says a loose thing; and therefore we have to see, though we feel blind and blundering as we set about it, what we can do with this new ingredient in our conception. Then there is Dickens. Her distinction between exaggeration and caricature is admirably fine, and her reproof of our age in the person of Mr Lascelles Abercrombie is exquisite: ‘My dear, you exaggerate.’ But then comes the queer shock that Mrs Meynell admires chiefly in Dickens, together with the humour and his dramatic tragedy, ‘his watchfulness over inanimate things and landscape’. The quotations she makes prove us partly in the wrong there too. If we give ourselves a bad mark for that oversight, must we have another because we are unable to trace the influence of Bolingbroke upon his style, and a third because we cannot point directly to the two words that Dickens ‘habitually misuses’ although we are given the clue that Charles Lamb ‘misuses one of them precisely in Dickens’s manner’? On the whole, we are inclined to make a distinction. Sometimes—the greater number of times by far—Mrs Meynell writes like a critic, and sometimes she writes like a specialist; sometimes she says the large sound thing, and sometimes she picks up the curious detail, puts it in the foreground, and lavishes upon it an attention which it does not deserve.

And where should we place the question of the English language—in the background or in the foreground? Our own prejudice would lead us to put it as far in the shadow of the background as possible. We prefer never to know, certainly never to mention, the pedigree of a word. We can see no reason for believing that a long pedigree makes a good word, or that there is any test of a word save the test of taste, which varies widely and should have every liberty to vary. The critic who brands certain words or phrases with the mark of his displeasure interferes with the liberty of the writer, and fetters his hand in the instinctive reach for what he wants. Let us then say nothing of words, let us leave grammar to right itself, and let us use them both as little consciously as possible. But here we are at variance with Mrs Meynell, whose sense of right and wrong in these matters is so clearly defined that she can make the question of Charlotte Brontë’s use of English in the earlier books a cause of controversy. She wrote ‘to evince, to reside, to intimate, to peruse’; she spoke of ‘communicating instruction’, ‘a small competency’, and so on. It is quite true, and, to us, quite immaterial. A particle of dust, however, is not going to blind our eyes to the force and skill with which Mrs Meynell sends her arrow again and again to the heart of her target.

[Times Literary Supplement, Oct 25, 1917]

[]

Stopford Brooke.

[Life and Letters of Stopford Brooke (John Murray, 1917) by Lawrence Pearsall Jacks.]

‘As to Lord Selborne’s Life, why do you read a book of that kind and done by a relation, too? One knows beforehand all that it will be, and that more than half will only be of interest to the relative and none to the world.’ Such was Stopford Brooke’s opinion of the ordinary biography, and the reader who sits down to a couple of stout volumes dedicated to Brooke’s own life, ‘done by a relation, too’, may nurse a question of the same sort at the back of his mind. Judged by some of the standards which justify lavish and minute biography, Stopford Brooke may be found wanting. He left behind him no literary work of the first class. Time seems already to have withered a little the profusion and vitality of much that he wrote, and it is scarcely fair to read as literature much that he spoke. But books are not the only test of greatness, even among those whose lives are spent in making them. The little circle of the great must be enlarged to include some of those who have spent themselves upon many things rather than concentrated upon a single one. But the question of greatness, always of little account in biography, need not trouble us at present. No reader of this book is likely to ask whether it was worth doing; and he will be wise, we think, not to attempt to sum up Stopford Brooke as this, that, or the other until he has read to the end, when the desire for such definitions may have left him.

For this biography has one quality at least which makes it very unlike the usual biography. It has the quality of growth. It is the record of the things that change rather than of the things that happen. Instead of knowing beforehand all that it will be, we constantly, as in life itself, find ourselves baffled and trying to understand. Much is due to the beautifully loving and alert skill with which Mr Jacks has done his work. Apart from the closeness of his relationship, he has by nature a singular insight into the qualities which made Stopford Brooke so memorable. He is peculiarly fitted to interpret the mass of documents which Brooke, with his passion for self-expression and his hatred of concealment, had written at all times of his life and left behind him. To our thinking, the result is a book not of revelations or confessions in the usual sense, but of spiritual development which carries the art of biography a step further in the most interesting direction now open to it—that of psychology.

The facts of Brooke’s life are probably well known. Born in 1831, the son of a poor but well-born Irish clergyman, he was ordained in 1857, was curate at Kensington from 1859 to 1863, took the lease of St James’s Chapel in 1865, and left the Church of England in 1880. From such a record we should expect to find conflicting strains at work in him. In his case they are so marked as to lie upon the surface, so profound as between them to rule his whole being.

One side of his nature (says Mr Jacks) belonged to religion; the other to art … He possessed a deep natural piety … but his feet were firmly planted on the earth; no pagan ever loved it better or received from contact with the things of sense a fuller current of the joy of life … and there is little doubt that had he lived in some age or society to which Christian culture was unknown he would have found satisfaction and won eminence … Between these two tendencies, the Christian and the Greek … the mediating power in Brooke was the impassioned love of beauty in all its forms, both natural and spiritual … His finest work, which ripened slowly and late, was the fruit of their union.

In our age such a dual spirit is perhaps no uncommon inheritance; in the majority of cases one instinct triumphs and the other dies, or they both survive, imperfectly, in a state of chronic warfare. But it is extremely rare to find a mind open enough to widen year by year so that there is room for each different plant to come to flower. In the process the formal limitations devised by the hand of man might be swept aside, as indeed they were. Brooke, naturally enough, was marked down ‘unsafe’ as a curate, and kept out of the danger of preferment by his superiors. He vacillated in the strangest way between Lisson Grove and Piccadilly, where he astonished the dowagers of that day by exclaiming, ‘We must have more joy in life—I say, more joy!’ He found out in time that he was not meant to remain a curate. Nor would he go on acting as chaplain to the embassy at Berlin, in spite of the opportunities which that position at one time seemed to promise of teaching future emperors of Germany the meaning of liberty. ‘She (the Crown Princess of Prussia) wants an English tutor for her boys, to teach them, she said, “liberal principles, the English Constitution, and the growth of the nation into free government. Princes nowadays have no chance, Mr Brooke, unless they are liberal.”’ He preferred to take his own chapel and preach his own message.

Then, after preaching for twenty-five years, he finds that the Church of England has become a fetter upon him, and he unloosens himself and passes on with no more effort, it seems, than a flower displays when it opens another bud. The faculty is puzzling and deserves our attention. ‘No man,’ says Mr Jacks, ‘ever lived who was less in trouble about his soul than Brooke.’ ‘His power of dismissing things,’ said Mr Chesterton, ‘is beyond praise’. Mr Jacks’s comment upon this is that when the issue was to be decided by argument Brooke’s faculty of dismissing things ‘would sometimes lead him to discharge the argument altogether and replace it with a bold statement of his own intuition’. It is possible to suppose that if Brooke had been a deeper thinker this could not have been so; and, if, as Mr Jacks says, his position in the Church morally admitted of a very simple definition, ‘that of a man who week by week publicly declares that he believes what he does not believe’, it is strange that it should have taken him till he was nearly fifty to find that ‘such a position is positively hateful’.

But one must remember that Brooke attached very little importance to thinking—‘there is always the knowledge at the back of the mind that the secret of life is not in thinking, but in loving’. And he spoke with impatience always of ‘self-vivisecting souls … twisting and turning incessantly in the labyrinth of their own spiritual entrails’. But it is vain to attempt to summarise in a few words the many different intuitions and susceptibilities which resulted in Brooke’s peculiar faith. It was the growth of his love of art, in which one may include the love of liberty and the love of humanity, his friendship with such men as Ruskin, Burne-Jones, Morris, and Holman Hunt, that chiefly made it impossible for him to wear ‘an official uniform’ any longer. The story of a walk through the streets of London with his daughter illustrates in an amusing way his power of living in the world of imagination. They determined to act the ‘Seven Ages of Man’ as they went along in order that ‘the Londoners might at last have the benefit of some really good Shakespearean acting’. Having astonished the Londoners who recognised their preacher, they burst at last into the room of J.R. Green, shouting ‘Here we are, Green, sans eyes, sans teeth, sans taste, sans everything.’ Meanwhile, he was making a very beautiful house in Manchester Square. There were books in precious bindings, and pictures everywhere, beautiful things which he loved to buy, loved to explain, and loved to give away. A stranger to that house and to that talk of literature and art would, says Mr Jacks, have guessed him to be an artist, but on hearing that he was a clergyman ‘there would have been no ultimate surprise’. And this we fancy is the point for the reader to hold fast in his mind. We have spoken of growth and change, but the goal is always towards some synthesis in which views generally found antagonistic are harmonised. The goal is pursued, moreover, down crowded streets and in the thick of men and women. His week contained many dinner parties and interviews and long delightful talks in the ‘eagle’s nest’ at the top of the house; but for all that this is not a life in which individual men and women are seen vividly or described intimately. Famous though many of the names are, the ‘good stories’ are few or none. The aim was at some large community founded upon brotherhood rather than towards the salvation of the individual soul.

Significantly enough Mr Jacks has recourse to the words of an Indian writer and quotes from the Sādbanā of Tagore when he wishes to give ‘the essential message’ of Stopford Brooke. The passage, describing the unity between man and nature, is too long to quote in full; and it is difficult, we think, to understand it. But even for those who are aware of an impediment in their understanding of such philosophies the last years of Brooke’s life suggest many more ideas than can be dealt with at all adequately in a review. The bare facts are that he withdrew from London with powers unabated, ceased to work, and was completely happy. So rare is happiness that it sometimes seems as if the desire for it must be among the weakest of our desires. One has come to take it for granted that the possession of great intellectual gifts is equivalent, in the West at least, to unhappiness in manhood and an old age of resignation or battered peace at the best. One saying of Brooke’s throws, we think, much light upon his reversal of the common experience. ‘Green said, “I die learning.” I say I shall die un-learning, and, ’pon my word, it’s the wiser of the two sayings.’ We cannot help connecting the faculty of ‘un-learning’, which implies so much else, with that other power which is so marked and has such curious results in the memorable story of Brooke’s old age. It happened that he found himself in 1898 at Homburg surrounded by people who reminded him of the characters in Ibsen—that is to say, people one would not touch ‘even with a fishing rod ten yards long’. As a way of escape he invented a myth in which the three springs of the place became people. Begun in play the story became something which he accepted as having actually taken place. We have not space to go into the details of this strange dream world, or of Mr Jacks’s most interesting analysis of it. We call it strange because the expression of that state with anything like Brooke’s degree of fullness is so rare; but we cannot help thinking that the experience in one shape or another is common enough, especially among those who are in the habit of putting their mental experiences into words. For the most part a moral objection of some sort tends to deny this side of the mind expression, and thus starves it of life. With Brooke the tendency is of the opposite kind. The whole story of his life is the story of a mind kept open in part by a powerful instinct of self-expression, and in part also by the tendency which became stronger and stronger in him against morality ‘save as the expression of love’. The record of the development of such a mind is one of the greatest interest, and one rarely attempted.

[Times Literary Supplement, Nov 29, 1917]

[]

Mr Gladstone’s Daughter.

[Some Hawarden Letters. 1878–1913. Written to Mrs Drew. Before and after her marriage. Chosen and arranged by Leslie March-Phillipps and Bertram Christian (Nisbet & Co. Ltd., 1917).]

Those who say that the art of letter-writing is dead are not presumably the daughters of prime ministers. We may make so bold as to suppose that these favoured people still sometimes sigh when their share of the postbag is meted out to them. The envelopes are not only numerous, but in some cases they are swollen beyond the scope of easy breakfast-table reading. In writing to Mrs Drew, Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff, for instance, would enclose a record of a twenty-six days’ tour in India and proceed to make his statement about the condition of Hyderabad. Lord Stanmore, then Sir Arthur Gordon, would give expression to the difficulties which beset a colonial governor conscious of a ‘power of work and attention to detail with an ungrudging trust in my subordinates’. Other correspondents remark that it is very important that the new Bishop (of London) shall be a Liberal; and again someone pleads that a poet shall be given a pension, and does that pension last his lifetime or ‘does it end if the country wants to be Tory’?

That is the official side of Mrs Drew’s correspondence, the inevitable privilege, or penalty, of being her father’s daughter. But the men and women who came to Hawarden to see Mr Gladstone generally became almost independently of that the friends of Mrs Drew. The character of her correspondents makes it inadmissible to suppose that she was ever made use of—save with the completely open injunction. ‘Please tell Mr Gladstone’—to take a message from the writer to her father. And yet some of the most amusing passages in these letters are amusing precisely because of the accident of her birth. People who, as we must feel, had no business in that sphere at all came fluttering through it in a delightfully audacious way. Ruskin had written an article which interested Mr Gladstone, and was invited to stay at Hawarden. He came, with a telegram of recall in his pocket, ‘as suspiciously as a wild animal entering a trap’. When he left he was on such cordial terms with them all that he wrote at once to his publisher to cancel certain strictures in Fors, being, as he put it, ‘greatly dismayed’ to find how much more admirable Mr Gladstone was than he had expected to find him. All went well for two years. He was then moved to declare that he cared no more for Mr Gladstone or Mr Disraeli than he did for two old bagpipes. This he could not retract, so he explained to Mrs Drew, because he meant it; nor would he mind if Mr Gladstone called him a ‘broken bottle stuck on the top of a wall’, upon which Mr Gladstone exclaimed with delight, ‘He stands apart from and above all other men.’ Whether his further vociferations against Home Rule and in favour of land possession for all the world ‘eternal as the mountains and the sea’ ever reached Mr Gladstone’s ears we are not told; but when he and Burne-Jones talk about politics they do so with a freshness and a passion which might have made even Mrs Gladstone less bored by that subject than she was quite unashamed to be.

Politics have their share in these letters, but no more than their share. The interest lies rather in the attitude of that particular group of highly privileged people towards the books and the pictures and the men and women of their time. The group (‘chiefly drawn from the Gladstone, Balfour, and Lyttelton families’) was intimate, communicative, and honestly persuaded that nature as well as fortune had been generous at any rate to the others. They were alive to whatever went forward in a good many different worlds, and took their sides enthusiastically. The Life of Carlyle forms them into an anti-Froude society; Progress and Poverty goes the round from one earnest correspondent to another; The Vulture Maiden is ‘devoured’; first impressions of Robert Elsmere are debated with extreme seriousness and not a little apprehension as to what the result of the book may be; the ‘Maiden Tribute’ crusade of Mr Stead is discussed passionately by Professor Stuart and gravely by Alfred Lyttelton. And Diana of the Crossways and The Minister’s Wooing, and ‘Mme de Mauves’ and the Redemption of Edward Strachan are all coming out and getting inextricably mixed in importance and commendation.

Such was the nucleus of the larger group of the eighties ‘styled, by those who did not belong to it, “The Souls”’. Is there still, as the severity of these words implies, a public which impudently pretends to know more than it possibly can know about that gifted constellation, and in default of facts invents rumours? Here at any rate it is not going to be satisfied; here are only glimpses, not secrets. But these glimpses are certainly very pleasant. Mr Balfour stands at the top of a great double staircase and reflects, ‘The worst of this staircase is that there is absolutely no reason why one should go down one side rather than the other. What am I to do?’ Joachim asks Miss Gladstone whether Wednesday would suit her ‘to play with my accompaniment’. In short, we can see quite enough to know that we should like to see more. The pity is that so little, not even the newspaper which was to advocate higher truths and at the same time let off the scum, survives for our edification. For although Mrs Drew’s letters throw lights upon a past society significant even to the public and illuminating doubtless to friends, they are on the whole, and with the exception of Burne-Jones’s letter, oddly inexpressive, oddly unformed and undistinguished, if you consider the names and the gifts of the writers. When it is a question of Wyndhams and Lytteltons one can scarcely help considering their names and thinking of the eighteenth century, and remembering how Horace Walpole too was the son of a Prime Minister.

[Times Literary Supplement, Dec 6, 1917]

[]

‘Charlotte Brontë.’

[Charlotte Brontë 1816–1916. A Centenary Memorial. Prepared by the Brontë Society. Edited by Butler Wood F.R.S.L. With a foreword by Mrs Humphry Ward and 3 maps and 28 illustrations (Fisher Unwin Ltd., 1918).]

Thirteen well-known writers, twenty-eight illustrations and three maps here unite in testifying that Charlotte Brontë is still a shining object to which the eyes of the living turn with love and question after a hundred years. Indubitably, she shines on, but it is also evident that no two people see the same star. Indeed, this book would be well worth reading were it only as a lesson in the meaning and nature of criticism. If we are ever inclined to think that the last word has been said and that our minds are made up for the rest of our lives, we may now change that opinion. Here are thirteen writers, all particularly fitted to define the character of this one woman and to pass judgment upon her three books, and each one of them is struck by a different quality, or values the same quality at a different rate. Nevertheless, although we must resign the comfort of depending upon an infallible support, by this means we get a much richer, more various, and finally, we believe, truer estimate than is usual. It is an example that might well be followed, were it not that few subjects lend themselves so happily to this particular treatment.

There are not many writers capable, after a century, of kindling such vivid sparks in such different minds. The essay by Mrs Humphry Ward is on the whole the most comprehensive, not only because we read it before we have been disturbed, but because she is herself a novelist and has a wide knowledge of literature to lend authority to her view. She insists, quoting Renan, upon the Celtic nature of the Brontë genius; the nature which grasps at passion and at poetry for their own sakes, which breaks all the rules and which neglects ‘that shaping and fastidious instinct which is, in truth, the ultimate thing’. Charlotte Brontë, she says, lives because she is both dreamer and observer, ‘bringing the poetic faculty to bear on the truth nearest to her’. To this we should assent were it not that by doing so we must, according to Mrs Ward, sacrifice at least partially the curates in Shirley. Her art has not transmuted them from reality to literature, Mrs Ward explains; and yet if you cancel the first chapter of Shirley you lose, we think, the most convincing proof that Charlotte Brontë had a sense of humour.

But here already criticism has done part of its duty. It has revived our impression and given us the sense of possessing a live and combative conception of our author. Good criticism also is subtly suggestive; Mrs Ward whispers ‘poetry, truth, feeling’, and sets us thinking how we too have felt the breath of the moors, and seen the purple sunset, and loved that angular honesty and rated it above wisdom. Still, Mr Gosse interrupts, checking a mood which easily runs riot, have you ever thought how it would be to talk to Charlotte Brontë? ‘It would probably have been disconcerting to the highest degree.’ She was without experience of the ‘social amenities’. The atmosphere of Haworth was hard and dry; she lived in the ‘blast of a perpetual moral east wind’. ‘She has the impatience, the unreasonable angers and revolts, of an unappreciated adolescent.’ All this, too, was latent in our conception, an important element, and one that has stamped itself irrevocably upon her work. If she had gone to Paris, not Brussels, if, as Mr Gosse suggests, she had studied Balzac, if even she had enjoyed a few years of happiness, in what directions might she not have developed? It is tempting to speculate how humour and charity and genius itself would have ripened in the sun of a happy marriage. But such reflections are presently cut short by Bishop Welldon. ‘If,’ he says, ‘Charlotte Brontë owed much to her own life, most of all did she owe to its sadness.’ For the moment this gives us pause; we grudge deeply any tribute to the value of sadness. The moral east wind and the anger bred of sadness are still too fresh in our minds. But then, after all, that intensity of passion which we honour most perhaps in Charlotte Brontë was only ground out by conflict; make her happy, make her amiable, make her fluent in society, and the writer we know has ceased to exist.

In spite of their diversities, however, these three critics have helped us to shape our conception and have not said anything which is so incompatible that we cannot make use of it. But there are more general questions to be considered, and upon these, too, the critics are at variance. Dr Garnett tells us that her principal shortcoming was that she could not create a character ‘by sheer force of imagination’, and therefore, having to draw upon experience, had already exhausted her material. Completely though this verdict is reversed a few pages later by Professor Vaughan, the question for us lies not in reconciling the critics, but in deciding what is meant by ‘sheer force of imagination’. Tolstoy, for example, drew far more accurately from life than Charlotte Brontë, but one can hardly charge him with a lack of creative power, or with poverty of material. Indeed, the opposite seems to be the truth; those who fix their eyes upon life itself depend more upon ‘sheer force of imagination’ than the purely subjective artists, if such there be, who create from their own resources. But the danger of using such ugly words as the old subjective and objective is illustrated by Dr Garnett, who, in spite of her dependence upon experience, puzzles us by placing Charlotte Brontë chief among those writers who are subjective.

But, although there are dangers, assumptions and questions of ill-defined scope leading us as far as we choose to go, the tenor of this book is unmistakable. She is the novelist of passion, of intensity, of revolt. Upon the general outlines all are agreed, but only one critic, Mr Chesterton, makes, to our thinking, an unexpected contribution. An Irish friend of his, living in Yorkshire, ‘once made to me the suggestive remark that the towering and over-masculine barbarians and lunatics who dominate the Brontë novels simply represent the impression produced by the rather boastful Yorkshire manners upon the more civilised and sensitive Irish temperament’. That is all the more suggestive if you remember that the Brontës, being Irish and Cornish by birth, were as fanatical in their love of Yorkshire as adopted children are apt to be. There is, then, still much to ponder and much to guess; and yet, after all, the important thing after a hundred years is to feel what each of these writers feels, that whatever our differences we are all looking at a star. We have quoted Mr Gosse when he criticises Charlotte Brontë; let us end with his praise of her. ‘She was, in her own words, “furnace-tried by pain, stamped by constancy”, and out of her fires she rose, a Phoenix of poetic fancy, crude yet without a rival, and now, in spite of all imperfections, to live for ever in the forefront of creative English genius.’

[Times Literary Supplement, Dec 13, 1917]

[]

‘Rebels and Reformers.’

[Rebels and Reformers. Biographies for Young People (George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1917) by Arthur and Dorothea Ponsonby.]

Mr and Mrs Ponsonby’s book is intended for children or for those who are too busy to read books in many volumes. But the interest of it lies not in the necessarily short and simple narratives giving the story rather than the ideas, although these are done clearly and with spirit, but in the reflections which lie about those stories and lodge here and there in the reader’s mind. Like all books worth reading, this one is the outcome of a mass of judgments and beliefs which may be very briefly expressed in the work itself but lend it the gift which in the case of human beings we call personality.

When the writers remark how few lives there are of rebels and reformers compared with those of men of action, when they say that ‘life is conflict’, that most famous men are of humble origin, that it is even more difficult to struggle against luxury than against poverty, that indifference and indolence are the worst of failings, that history has hitherto been the history of wars, then, to use a homely phrase, we prick up our ears and attend. If we sat among the children to whom this book will be read aloud in the winter evenings we should have guessed by this time what answer would please our teachers. As this book is meant primarily for children, it may be worth while to consider what the effect upon them of such stimulus is likely to be. Will it stir them from an early age to redress the wrongs of the world, or is there not in the human mind a curious tendency to go against the ideas suggested in childhood, so that the effect may be precisely the opposite of what Mr and Mrs Ponsonby intend? Tolstoy, we remember, refused to force his views upon his children. The truth may be that if you want to breed rebels and reformers you must impress upon them from the beginning the virtues of Tories and aristocrats.

Mr Ponsonby enforces a point which the lives of these twelve heroes illustrate over and over again. It is ‘the very struggle and continuous effort that is the making of them’. What sort of future must we expect if the light of reason and humanity is lit in the earliest dawn of understanding in the nursery? Multiply the enlightened nurseries of the world and the race of rebels and reformers is extinct, until, indeed, the next wave of reaction sets in. The argument may throw a little light upon the very puzzling tendency of the human race to resist its reformers and to burn its rebels. The fact that rebels and reformers are a race of people who live by struggle and conflict may be some slight justification for the peculiar shrinking with which the normal mind regards them. For ourselves we are in agreement with many doctrines explicit and implicit in Mr and Mrs Ponsonby’s book; and yet even from their straightforward pages the shadow of the spectre looks out and chills us against our will and against our reason. A strange melancholy pervades us. It may be that the element of denial and destruction enters more largely than that of creation or belief into the reformer’s attitude. It may be that circumstances force him to dwell disproportionately upon the bad and the wrong and to draw a circle round the right which excludes many of the things we care for most. It may be that the average human mind, so far as it desires anything, desires to create and to like. At any rate by easy stages of ‘indolence and indifference’ back we slip into a mood demanding poetry, music, fiction—Shakespeare, perhaps, most of all.

Now Mr and Mrs Ponsonby provide us with four men of letters, Cervantes, Voltaire, Hans Andersen and Tolstoy; but they are careful to explain that although they wrote some famous books they are here for reasons not connected with their art. The reasons are good ones; yet what more living and prolific source of reform is to be found than the plays of Shakespeare? His claim to the title of reformer is no doubt obscured by the fact that he burnt no one and died presumably in his own bed; but, as every scribbler knows, each sentence wins its way to existence through a crowd of temptations or dies at their hands, and the most effective victory over evil seems to lie not so much in Acts of Parliament as in a song or two.

But these reflections, which certainly have not escaped Mr and Mrs Ponsonby, only go to prove the truth of their main contention that those who have won the title of rebels and reformers are never given their due of admiration. Either we feel ourselves in opposition to them for one of the above reasons, or the evils which they overcame seem too gross to call for heroic qualities in those who vanquish them. William Lloyd Garrison did more than anyone to abolish slavery, yet we find ourselves, as Mrs Ponsonby points out, less inclined to admire him than to be shocked that such views should be rare enough to demand admiration. Perhaps at the root of all our grudging hesitation lies the deep-seated human vanity which is wounded, after all these years, as the record of human cruelty and superstition is unrolled before us. But the struggle still continues; we find the rebel flame burning at its purest in the cry of little Ivan Tolstoy, who, when his mother told him that Yasnaya was his property, stamped his foot and cried, ‘Don’t say that Yasnaya Polyana is mine! Everything is everyone else’s’. No less true and persistent is the other cry which comes to us from the mouth of Countess Tolstoy. Her husband, she knows, goes ahead of the crowd, pointing the way. ‘But I am the crowd […] I live in its current, and see the light of the lamp which every leader, and Leo of course, carries, and I acknowledge it to be the light. But I cannot go faster; I am held by the crowd and by my surroundings and habits.’

[Times Literary Supplement, Dec 20, 1917]

[]

Sunset Reflections.

[The Happy Fields. A Country Record (Shakespeare Head Press, 1917) by E.M. Martin.]

Mr Martin’s little book will be welcomed, we believe, particularly by Americans. It comes from Stratford-upon-Avon in the first place; and that appeal is enforced by a gentle resignation of tone, a placid smoothness of utterance, a tendency to indulge in moralities and mysticisms, to harp wistfully upon the past, which are characteristic more of the essayists of that country than of ours. As a vision of England before the war, too, it will have greater interest for them than for us. The face of Europe, Mr Martin points out in his dedication, is being changed out of all knowledge by the war, and therefore ‘it has seemed well to gather together these few peace pictures of a vanishing landscape and of those who once made it their home’. ‘There is a mystery and a loveliness’ he proceeds, ‘in the sun’s setting, distinct and apart from the wonder of his rising.’

Whether it is that the light of sunset is on his face, or whether our memories are short ones, we certainly have difficulty in recognising Mr Martin’s greengrocer’s boy. It was a wet morning in October when he came in and told Mr Martin that, although wet here, it was shining ‘in the happy fields’. When asked where these might be, ‘he was puzzled and even a little distressed’. […] ‘The happy fields where men sing as they work.’ And he shouldered his basket and went off, leaving Mr Martin to a whole morning of what we may call in his own phrase ‘the compelled silence of easeful meditation’. He provided a title for the book, however, and therefore may be excused. But the old woman in the Welsh village with whom Mr Martin lodged has no such claim upon our charity. When, after trying for six weeks to get into a field which he saw from his window, Mr Martin asked her why the field for ever eluded him, and why he might not pass through that unguarded entrance, she replied, ‘Fields and hedges can keep their secrets as well as we, but maybe things look different seen near to.’ If the war has put an end to such greengrocers’ boys and taught such old ladies to give a plain answer to a plain question, we shall have something to thank it for.

The lower classes, as we know, may always be used more or less for purposes of allegory, but even upon the upper, the cultivated classes, the sunset, according to Mr Martin, has had the same transforming effect. Two grown people, for instance, would sit down seriously to discuss whether on the whole they preferred the sky or the earth. The lady explained, at greater length than we can grant her, how she liked the sky better ‘because the sky stays unchanging in the beauty of its thousand shifting scenes … The gentleman replied that he preferred the earth, and as he has just exclaimed that the earth is his mistress, he has some right to be heard. ‘We of the earth,’ he wound up, ‘would not change our wild wind-blown reeds for the faultless strings of Apollo.’ Again, before the war (and this we can verify from personal observation) poets were in the habit of saying that, given a crystal or allowed to make certain passes with the hands, they could make you see whatever vision they chose. In Mr Martin’s version the lady holds an antique jewel in her delicate, thin-fingered hand, ‘such a hand as Memling would have loved to paint’, and her answer was always the same, ‘I see a bright light,’ until at last she said, ‘I see flames everywhere, red flames burning like a great flower.’ The poet had meant her to see a lonely reed-covered lake. Now about the same time a poet was willing a lady of our acquaintance to see a burning rose; and to all his exhortations she would reply with the single word ‘Frog.’ We tell this story for the double purpose of showing that the visions presumably got mixed, and of assuring ourselves and any American readers that even in the time of the sunset we were occasionally monosyllabic.

But we are not altogether just to Mr Martin. Although devoted to every form of sunset himself, he recognises the fact that even in this land of decaying ruins, secular oaks, Shakespeare and the rest of it, some remain untouched. A case occurred in February 1912. There was then a sunset the like of which has never been seen and never will be seen by Mr Martin again. It affected even the spirits of his dog. But when he went about asking eagerly whether anyone else had seen the sunset, the replies were invariably disappointing. The dog then looked at him with ‘grave silent reproach. What does it matter (so she seemed to say) what others have seen or think, when we two know; is it not enough that for us the heavens have been opened, and we have seen the glory of a new earth?’ She may have meant all that, but why not give the poor animal the benefit of the doubt?

[Times Literary Supplement, Dec 20, 1917]

[]

The New Crusade.

[Prose Papers (Elkin Mathews, 1917) by John Drinkwater]

The process of making anything, whether it be a horseshoe, an ironclad, or a cigarette, has a fascination absent from the finished object, and of all creative processes that of the poet is the one we would give most to have the chance of watching were it possible. But of all makers poets are apt to be the least communicative about their processes, and, perhaps, owing in part to the ordinary nature of their material, have little or nothing that they choose to discuss with outsiders. The best way of surprising their secrets is very often to read their criticism. Thus, although Mr Drinkwater has many acute things to say about different poets in these papers, his most illuminating remarks are those which give us for a second a glimpse into his workshop. There we can see the unfinished stanzas, the litter of words, the chaos of conceptions from which at last the little poem of four lines is struck out by work ‘colossal in its severity compared with that involved in any other kind of labour’. Our fancy picture of Mr Drinkwater’s workshop must represent a place without ornament or ease, but everywhere the signs of strife and austerity. His criticism bears the same stamp. He speaks of poets more as a soldier in a hard fought battle might speak of another soldier fighting with him or against him than as a critic looking from a distance and without share in the strife.

It is natural to consider further whether this point of view does not lie behind much of the best poetic work of our time, and in what directions that influence is making itself felt. When a poet speaks of poetry as the hardest labour in the world we may infer that he is up in arms against some popular fallacy which has at length goaded him to anger; nor does Mr Drinkwater leave us long in doubt as to the source of his irritation. ‘We artists,’ he writes in his dedication, ‘have the world to fight. Prejudice, indifference, positive hostility, misrepresentation, a total failure to understand the purposes and the power of art, beset us on every side.’ The first few essays develop this position and are therefore extremely and almost wholly combative. Mr Drinkwater expresses with a certain stiffness, but with much honest eloquence, the view and the claims of the disinherited. Very possibly you will find the same sense of isolation in the artists of any period of the world’s history; but it is no doubt more marked in such an age as ours where callings are sharply specialised and the artist cannot be a bank manager into the bargain. There is by nature, or there has come to be by custom, a deep gulf between the little body of visionaries and the great mass of practical people. But when we find Mr Drinkwater, who speaks for many of his generation, claiming his rights and asserting his capacities, we see that we are reaching a new phase in the old tacit hostility. The days of the truce which most of the poets of the past were quite content to observe are over, and there has gone with them perhaps a certain conception of the art of poetry. At least the conception of the artist himself has changed. It is we artists, says Mr Drinkwater, who are the strictly practical people, we ‘who have our eyes set straight, not squinting; and so can see beyond our noses’. Further, he threatens that if in the future, as in the past, no heed is paid to art, and it is treated as a luxury and not as a necessity, the work of civilisation is doomed. ‘Here is the new crusade.’ The first step in the new crusade is to teach children to read poetry, and from that simple foundation all the civic virtues will grow of themselves. People who have learnt to love Shakespeare will, ‘in less than a generation’, Mr Drinkwater insists, desire decent conditions to live in. Perhaps that does not overrate what, for brevity’s sake, one calls poetry, but the possibility of teaching a love of poetry save by the indirect means of health and leisure seems to us problematical, to say the least of it.

But if Mr Drinkwater does not here discuss the practical part of the problem, we do not on that account accuse him of easy idealism or of irresponsible prophecy. This little book is solid testimony to the effect which such ideas have had upon his art. Tokens of the spirit which is inspiring the new crusade are scattered throughout Mr Drinkwater’s pages. Poetry, he says, makes clarity and order out of vagueness and difficult confusion; it translates common simple life into the most exact and stirring beauty. As for the old taunt that a poet leads a life of luxury and indolence, Mr Drinkwater is almost too ready to enlarge upon the severity of discipline which he must be ready to undergo; but we must remark that the labour is of a special nature. It is not the labour of building up elaborate stanza structures, for ‘the whole range of verse technique […] may be covered in a perfectly regular five-foot quatrain’. It is the labour rather of making what is vague clear, what is abstract concrete, what is common beautiful. Rightly or wrongly, we cannot help connecting these views of poetry with the belief that a capacity for the love of art is commoner than people allow. Mr Drinkwater’s anger is not the anger of the aristocrat who despises, but of the democrat who wishes to share. Whether such views are favourable to what used to be called inspiration we do not know; but we may prophesy that our age will be known not for one or two great poets, but because a large number of smaller men held such views as these and gave them the best shape they could.

Of the critical papers that on Rupert Brooke will be read perhaps with most interest; and it is one of the few that do not inevitably suggest the question what Rupert Brooke himself would have said if he could come back to find himself thus idolised. To the loss of him his friends have had to add the peculiar irony of his canonisation; and any one who helps us to remember that volatile, irreverent, and extremely vivacious spirit before the romantic public took possession of his fame has a right to our gratitude. If the legend of Rupert Brooke is not to pass altogether beyond recognition, we must hope that some of those who knew him when scholarship or public life seemed even more his bent than poetry will put their view on record and relieve his ghost of an unmerited and undesired burden of adulation.

[Times Literary Supplement, Dec 27, 1917]

[]

1918

Philosophy in Fiction.

[Mad Shepherds and other human stories (1910), Among the Idolmakers (1911), From the Human End (1916). All Men Are Ghosts (1913), Philosophers in Trouble (1916), collected, 6 vols, Williams & Norgate, 1916–17, as Writings by L.P. Jacks.]

After one has heard the first few bars of a tune upon a barrel organ the further course of the tune is instinctively foretold by the mind and any deviation from that pattern is received with reluctance and discomfort. A thousand tunes of the same sort have grooved a road in our minds and we insist that the next tune we hear shall flow smoothly down the same channels; nor are we often disobeyed. That is also the case with the usual run of stories. From the first few pages you can at least half-consciously foretell the drift of what is to follow, and certainly a part of the impulse which drives us to read to the end comes from the desire to match our foreboding with the fact. It is not strange then that the finished product is much what we expected it to be, and bears no likeness, should we compare it with reality, to what we feel for ourselves. For loudly though we talk of the advance of realism and boldly though we assert that life finds its mirror in fiction, the material of life is so difficult to handle and has to be limited and abstracted to such an extent before it can be dealt with by words that a small pinch of it only is made use of by the lesser novelist. He spends his time moulding and remoulding what has been supplied him by the efforts of original genius perhaps a generation or two ago. The moulds are by this time so firmly set, and require such effort to break them, that the public is seldom disturbed by explosions in that direction.

These reflections arose when we try to account for the discomfort which so often afflicts us in reading the works of Mr Jacks. We do not insinuate that he is therefore a great writer; he has not increased the stock of our knowledge very largely, nor has he devised a shape which seems completely satisfactory for his contributions; but nevertheless he is disconcerting. In the first place he has one distinction which we wish that more novelists shared with him, the distinction of being something besides a novelist. His bias towards philosophy and religious speculation leads him off the high road and carries him to blank spaces where the path has not been cut nor the name chosen. He is an explorer, and in view of that fact we can forgive him some wanderings which seem to lead nowhere and others which end, as far as our eyesight serves us, in a fog. We fancy that he reverses some of the common methods of those who write fiction. More often than not the seed which the novelist picks up and brings to flower is dropped in some congregation of human beings, from sayings, gestures, or hints; but we should guess that Mr Jacks most commonly finds his seed between the pages of a book, and the book is quite often a book of philosophy. That at once gives him a different method of approach and a different direction. He is acquainted with Moral Science: he looks up from the page and wonders what would happen should some of its doctrines be put into practice. He conceives an undergraduate and sets him the task of atoning for the sins of a dissolute father according to the teachings he has learnt in the schools. The crisis of the story therefore takes the form of a philosophical argument between two undergraduates as to the morality of giving a shilling to a tramp, and the one who proves his case shall marry the lady. It seems to us extremely unlikely that anyone could hum the rest of that tune from hearing the first few bars. It is plain that if you are ordering your imaginary universe from this angle your men and women will have to adapt themselves to dance to a new measure. The criticism which will rise to the lips of every reader who finds himself put out by the unwonted sight is that the characters have ceased to be ‘real’ or ‘alive’ or ‘convincing’. But let him make sure that he is looking at life and not at the novelist’s dummy. Or he might do worse than reflect whether likeness to life is the prime merit in a novel; and, if that is agreed upon, whether life is not a much more ubiquitous presence than one is led by the novelist to suppose. Whether or not Mr Jacks has discovered a new vein of the precious stuff, some rare merit must be allowed a writer who through five volumes of stories lures us on to the last word of the last page.

He causes us to remember the exhilaration of driving by dusk when one cannot foresee the ups or the downs of the road. With Mr Jacks starting his story anywhere, following it anywhere and leaving it anywhere, as he is in the habit of doing, the incentive of the unexpected is constantly supplied to us. ‘Oh, I’m nobody in particular,’ he remarks in ‘A Grave Digger’s Scene’. ‘Just passing through and taking a look round’; and anything that his eye lights upon may start a story, which story may be a parable, or a satire upon religious sects, or a ghost story, or a straightforward study of a farmer’s character, or a vision, or an argument, with figures merely put in as pegs to mark the places. But although he disregards all the rules and effects a most arbitrary tidying up when he remembers them, there is one invariable partner in all his enterprises—a keen and educated intelligence.

Intelligence, with its tendency to acquire views and its impatience with the passive attitude of impartial observation, may be a source of danger in fiction should it get the upper hand; but even in a state of subjection it is so rare that we must welcome it on its own terms. The only reservation which we feel disposed to make in the case of Mr Jacks’s intelligence is that it fills his mind too full with ideas derived from other sources to give him a wide and unprejudiced view of his subject. Instead of going on with his tale, he has views upon socialism, or sex problems, or education, or psychology which must be brought in and investigated at the expense of the individual. But even this reservation must be qualified. The portraits of Farmer Perryman, Farmer Jeremy and Peter Rodright have the stuff in them of three-volume novels, and give the essence of different types without deviation into the mystical or the abnormal. On account of their solid truth we prefer them to the study of Snarley Bob in Mad Shepherds, whose portrait seems to have been made up from some cunning prescription found in the books rather than from direct observation. Yet as we make this criticism we are aware that it may merely represent the shudder of a conservative mind forced to consider what it has always shunned, invited to land upon one of the ‘Desolate Islands’ not marked upon the map. Expectancy mingles itself in equal proportions with our distrust, for the things that Mr Jacks tries to bring into the light are among the deepest and the most obscure. ‘Things from the abyss of time that float upwards into dreams—sleeping things whose breath sometimes breaks the surface of our waking consciousness, like bubbles rising from the depths of Lethe.’

Inevitably it is extremely difficult to combine these new trophies of psychology with the old; and the results are often queer composite beings, monsters of a double birth, fit for the museum rather than the breakfast table. When, among other curiosities, we read of a mare which has mysteriously acquired the personality of a professor’s lost love we can hardly help remarking, ‘Piecraft is trying to live in two worlds, the world of imagination and the world of pure science; he will come to grief in both of them.’ But if we are more often interested than moved by Mr Jacks’s stories, the balance is so seldom on that side that it would be churlish to demand a combination which only the very few can give us. For some reason or other intelligence is particularly rare in fiction. At first sight it seems that there must be something amiss with a story which is aimed at the reason; when we find sentence after sentence brief, pointed, and expressive we shiver at a nakedness that seems momentarily indecent. But when we have rid ourselves of a desire for the dusky draperies of fiction there is no small pleasure in being treated neither as child nor as sultan, but as an equal and reasonable human being. Mr Jacks uniformly achieves this wholesome result by writing with an exactness which gives a sharp idea of his meaning. Nothing is modified out of deference to our laziness. And occasionally, as in the remarkable paper called ‘The Castaway’, he writes what we may read not only for the light which it casts upon his methods, but for its own rare beauty. We quote the last passage:

Desolate Islands, more than I could ever explore, more than I could count or name, I found in the men and women who press upon me every day. Nay, my own life was full of them; the flying moment was one; they rose out of the deep with the ticking of the clock. And once came the rushing of a mighty wind; and the waves fled backward till the sea was no more. Then I saw that the Islands were great mountains uplifted from everlasting foundations, their basis one beneath the ocean floor, their summits many above the sundering waters—most marvellous of all the works of God.

[Times Literary Supplement, Jan 10, 1918]

[]

A Book of Essays.

[If The Germans Conquered England and Other Essays (Maunsel & Co. Ltd., 1917) by Robert Lynd]

The order of the serious sixpenny weekly paper must originally have been evolved like the now almost extinct order of the meats and the sweets, in deference to some demand of the public appetite. It is a rule that after the politics we come to the lighter form of essay and so to the reviews; and as this order is never upset, it must have been devised either for our pleasure or for our good. We are confessing an abnormality, then, when we say that to us the essay is the superfluous part of the feast. To be honest, we can only bring ourselves to read it if the train has stopped for more than twenty minutes in a fog and it is no longer amusing to speculate upon the lost terrier for whom a reward is offered in the advertisements. We find our justification in the belief that there is nothing quite so rare as a good essay and nothing quite so dismal as a bad one. The very titles are enough to darken the landscape; the groan of the slave at his task is audible to our ears. Our gorge rises at the thought of all the turns and twists and devices which some fellow-creature is going through in order to persuade us to swallow a fragment of the truth without recognising it. For the essay is now chiefly employed to mitigate the severity of Acts, reforms, and social questions; it entices us to perform the operation of thinking under an anaesthetic. Worse still, there may be no question of thinking; the only question may be how best to amuse the public for the space of 1,500 or 2,000 words, in which case the essay is no more than a dance upon the tight rope, where if a single caper is cut clumsily the acrobat suffers death or humiliation before our eyes.

For these reasons there is one course in our weekly dinner which we invariably omit, and thus it comes about that we read Mr Robert Lynd for the first time. With reasons to back us we do not intend to climb down unreservedly, but we must admit that we might do better than read the advertisements next time the train stops in a fog. Mr Lynd is so competent a writer that we need have no fear that he is going to break his bones, and there are sure signs that he enjoys his work. Whether he writes upon the ‘Horrors of War’, or ‘Grub’, upon ‘Taking a Walk in London’, or ‘Revenge’ he seems to be following his own bent without too much anxiety either for our good or for our entertainment. The narrowness of his limits does not obviously constrict him, nor does he think it necessary because he has only fifteen hundred words at his disposal to make each one do the work of ten. The exigencies of the time may make it necessary to consider either ‘Courage’, or ‘Treating’, or ‘Refugees’, but that forbidding signpost is in his mind, the centre of all sorts of pleasant paths which lead either to the humours of the public house or, by way of a red omnibus and the Strand, to the top of a little eminence such as this:

We are exiles, if not fugitives, from the perfect city. We are sojourners and strangers under the sun; we build houses of a day in the valleys of death. There seems to be no patriotism of the earth for many of those, like St Paul, whose patriotism is in Heaven. Their psalms and hymns are like native songs remembered by those who will admit no citizenship here. The saint is still a foreigner in every land, a sorrowing refugee from skies not ours.

In addition to the literary skill here displayed, which could be matched easily by other quotations, Mr Lynd has all the merits of an open and generous mind. He is always tolerant and for the most part sanguine, and would rather spoil his period than make a point at the expense of some charity or decency. The streets of London offer so many charming thoughts to one of his fertile fancy that it would be most excusable in him to find no room for his final reflection: ‘We must never be allowed to enjoy walking in London till London has been made fit to walk in.’ Thus remembering the claims of humanity he no doubt willingly suppresses what we take to be the chief stock-in-trade of the essayist—himself. It is a most serious omission. Whether a first-rate essay has ever been written which is not the ripe fruit of egoism may be doubted. The essays of Elia are so many confidences which impart to us the most private secrets of Lamb’s heart. There is room in them for all sorts of facts about his whims and habits, but there is very little concern for the public good. The most delightful parts of Montaigne’s essays are those where he breaks from the consideration of some abstract quality to explore the peculiarities of his body or his soul. It is the same with Hazlitt, or with Thackeray in the Roundabout Papers. None of these men has the least fear of giving himself away, and, perhaps, in a short piece that is the only thing of value that one can give away. In 2,000 words you cannot do much to reform society or inculcate morality, but you can tell us about your imperfect sympathies, your poor relations, or ‘Mackery End in Hertfordshire’. When we consider that this gift of intimacy is the most difficult of all to make, and that to convey anything so personal needs the impersonality of the highest art, we need not wonder that it is not often offered us between the politics and the reviews. We have reason indeed to be grateful when an essayist like Mr Lynd writes well enough to make us remember the possibilities of his form.

[Times Literary Supplement, Jan 17, 1918]

[]

‘The Green Mirror.’

[The Green Mirror. A Quiet Story (Macmillan & Co. Ltd., 1918) by Hugh Walpole.]

In the drawing room, over the mantelpiece, there hung a green mirror. Many generations of the Trenchard family had seen themselves reflected in its depths. Save for themselves and for the reflection of themselves they had never seen anything else for perhaps three hundred years, and in the year 1902 they were still reflected with perfect lucidity. If there was any room behind the figures for chair or table, tree or field, chairs, tables, trees and fields were now and always had been the property of the Trenchard family. It is impossible to limit the pride of this family in itself.

Not to be a Trenchard was to be a nigger or a Chinaman…. The Trenchards had never been conceited people—conceit implied too definite a recognition of other people’s position and abilities. To be conceited you must think yourself abler, more interesting, richer, handsomer than someone else—and no Trenchard ever realised anyone else.

The reader who is acquainted with modern fiction will at this point reflect that he has met these people or their relations already; they must belong to that composite group of English families created by Mr Galsworthy, Mr Arnold Bennett and Mr E.M. Forster. Very different in detail, they all share a common belief that there is only one view of the world, and one family; and invariably at the end the mirrors break, and the new generation bursts in.

This is said more in order to describe Mr Walpole’s novel than to criticise it, although it is by this door that criticism will enter. There is no fault to be found with the theme. If the family theme has taken the place of the love theme with our more thoughtful writers, that goes to prove that for this generation it is the more fertile of the two. It has so many sides to it, like all living themes, that there is no reason why one book should repeat another. You may destroy the family and salute the dawn by any means at your disposal, passion, satire, or humour, provided that you are in love with your cause. But the danger of a cause which has had great exponents lies in its power to attract recruits who are converts to other people’s reforms but are not reformers themselves. In so far as Mr Walpole presents the Trenchard family as a type of the pig-headed British race with its roots in the past and its head turned backwards he seems to us to fail. The place for the Trenchard type is the didactic stage. All the exaggerations of their insularity would hit the mark delivered from the mouths of actors, but from the mouths of people in a book with the merits of this book they sound forced and unreal. ‘It was one of the Trenchard axioms that anyone who crossed the English Channel conferred a favour’; no Trenchard can marry a man who thinks ‘Russia such a fine country’. And quite in keeping with the limelight is the Uncle’s well-known lecture upon the approaching break-up of his class. ‘Nearly the whole of our class in England has, ever since the beginning of last century, been happily asleep … Oh, young Mark’s just one of the advance guard. He’s smashing up the Trenchards with his hammer the same way that all the families like us up and down England are being smashed up.’ The hammer is thrown and the mirror comes down with a crash. Upstairs a very old Mr Trenchard falls back dead; and out we pour into the street looking askance at the passers-by as though we ought to tell them too that another English family has been smashed to splinters and freedom is stealing over the roof-tops.

Mr Walpole’s gift is neither for passion nor for satire, but he possesses an urbane observant humour. He has a true insight into the nature of domesticity. He can render perfectly the ‘friendly confused smell of hams and medicine, which is the Stores note of welcome’. The psychology of a lady charged with the exciting duty of buying three hot-water bottles is no secret to him. We have seldom met a better account of a long Sunday in the country and the cold supper with which it ends. On this occasion the servants were out, and there was no soup. These are the small things in which Mr Walpole is invariably happy, and in our view it is no disparagement to a writer to say that his gift is for the small things rather than for the large. Scott was master of the large method, but Jane Austen was mistress of the small. If you are faithful with the details the large effects will grow inevitably out of those very details. In its way the portrait of the hobbledehoy brother Henry is a large achievement, based though it is upon a careful study of hot-water bottles and Sunday suppers. The aunts, too, when they are not drawn violently from their orbits by the young man who has spent some years in Moscow, prattle, squabble, and make it up again in the warm soft atmosphere of true imagination. There is no reason for Mr Walpole to apologise for what is slow, uneventful, and old-fashioned in the world which he portrays. We feel convinced that in these respects the war has done nothing to change it. The Trenchard family, far from having sprung apart when the mirror was unfortunately broken, had it mended at an expensive shop in Bond Street, and it was hanging as usual over the mantelpiece on 4 August 1914. Mrs Trenchard never did anything so hysterical as to turn her daughter from her house because she married a young man who talked rather superficially about Russia. Mother and daughter are at this moment knitting comforters together. The only person who turned out badly, as Mrs Trenchard said he would, was Mr Philip Mark—but it is no business of ours to write other people’s novel. We confess that in this case we should like to, but that is only because Mr Walpole has done it in many respects so extremely well himself.

[Times Literary Supplement, Jan 24, 1918]

[]

Mr Conrad’s Crisis.

[Nostromo. A Tale of the Seaboard (1904; J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd, 1918) by Joseph Conrad.]

To possess a fuller account of the processes which have produced some notable books we should be willing to offer their distinguished authors liberal terms in the shape of our gratitude, or, if it suited them better, promise to forgo a chapter here, a volume there, in return for the gift of a few pages of spiritual autobiography. It is no impiety. We are not asking that the creator should dismember his own creatures. We ask only to be allowed to look more closely into the creative process and see those whom we know as Nostromo, Antonia, or Mrs Gould as they were before they came into the world of Sulaco, while they existed merely in the rarer atmosphere of their maker’s mind.

For whatever we learn of their pre-existence undoubtedly adds to our understanding of them when they come before us as men and women of established character and settled destiny. An artist like Mr Conrad, to whom his work is the life of his life, can only speak of his characters in the tone with which we speak of lives that have an existence independent of our own. There is a suggestive power in what he says about his intentions or his affections for these people which enables us to guess at more than is actually said. It is necessary to help out the words themselves with whatever power of intuition we may possess. In the Note, which is of course much too short for our satisfaction, Mr Conrad tells us that after writing Typhoon there occurred

a subtle change in the nature of the inspiration; a phenomenon for which I cannot in any way be held responsible. What, however, did cause me some concern was that after finishing the last story of the Typhoon volume it seemed somehow that there was nothing more in the world to write about.

It is for us to guess what this check in the course of his development amounted to. We should like to fancy that we see how it happened that when one conception had worked itself out there was a season of seeming emptiness before the world again became full of things to write about; but they were not the same things, and we can guess that they had multiplied in the interval. The knowledge of this crisis, if such we can call it, lends vitality to an old dilemma into which it is common to find people plunging when Nostromo comes up for discussion. Is it ‘astonishing’, or is it a ‘failure’, as critics according to Mr Conrad variously term it, or can one hold that it is both?

In either case it is illuminating to know that it is the work of a writer who has become aware that the world which he writes about has changed its aspect. He has not got used to the new prospect. As yet it is a world in which he does not see his way. It is a world of bewildering fullness, fineness, and intricacy. The relations of human beings towards each other and towards those impersonal ideals of duty and fidelity which play so large a part in Mr Conrad’s scheme of life are seen to be more closely related and finely spun than had been visible to his youthful eye. From all this there results a crowding and suffocating superabundance which makes Nostromo one of those rare and magnificent wrecks over which the critics shake their heads, hesitating between ‘failure’ and ‘astonishing’, unable to determine why it is that so much skill and beauty are powerless to float the fabric into the main stream of active and enduring existence. The demon which attends Mr Conrad’s genius is the demon of languor, of monotony, of an inertness such as we see in the quiescence of the caged tiger. In Nostromo the tiger broods superb, supine, but almost completely immobile.

It is a difficult book to read through. One might even say, had he not in later books triumphantly proved himself master of all his possessions, that the writer would have been better served by slighter gifts. Wealth of every sort pours its avalanche from different tributaries into his pages. It would be difficult to find half a dozen thin, colourless, or perfunctory sentences in the length of the book. Each is consciously shaped and contributes its stroke to the building up of a structure to which we are sometimes tempted to apply terms more applicable to the painter’s art than to the writer’s. ‘… there was not a single brick, stone, or grain of sand of its soil that I had not placed in position with my own hands,’ he tells us in that passage of his Reminiscences where he records how for twenty months, ‘neglecting the common joys of life,’ he ‘wrestled with the Lord’ for his creation. One may be aware, perhaps, of the extreme effort of this labour of construction, but one is also conscious of the astonishing solidity of the result. The sun is hot, the shadows profound, the earth weighted and veined with silver; the very plaster of Mrs Gould’s drawing room appears rough to our touch, and the petals of her flowers are red and purple against it. But in a novel we demand something more than still life, and where the still life is thus superbly designed we want humanity as largely modelled and inspired by a vitality deep and passionate in proportion to the magnificence of the conception. As is apt to be the case with any work by Mr Conrad, his characters have the rare quality of erring upon the side of largeness. The gestures with which they move upon his wide stage are uniformly noble, and the phrases lavished upon them are beautiful enough to be carved for ever upon the pedestals of statues. But when critics speak of the ‘failure’ of Nostromo it is probable that they refer to something inanimate and stationary in the human figures which chills our warmer sympathies. We salute the tragedy with a bow as profound and deferential as we can make it; but we feel that nothing would be more out of keeping than an offering of tears.

[Times Literary Supplement, Mar 14, 1918]

[]

Swinburne Letters.

[The Letters of Algernon Charles Swinburne. With some personal recollections by Thomas Hake and Arthur Compton-Rickett (John Murray, 1918).]

It is possible that before opening this book of Swinburne’s letters the reader may ask himself what pleasure, considering the poet’s genius, he has a right to expect. The achievements of poets as letter writers in the past would warrant the highest hopes. There are people who would exchange all Byron’s poems for half his letters, and upon many shelves The Task is spruce and virginal while Cowper’s correspondence has the dog’s ears, the sloping shoulders, the easy, inevitable openings of a loved companion. Again, no one would wish to sacrifice a line that Keats ever wrote; but we cling as firmly to some of his letters as to some of his poems. So far as it is possible to judge at present, Swinburne is not with these men among the great letter-writers. Perhaps it may not be fantastic to seek some clue to his failure in this respect in the familiar portrait by Watts which is reproduced as a frontispiece to the present volume. It is rather the portrait of a spirit than the portrait even of a poet’s body. The eyes are set upon a distant vision. The mouth is slightly pursed in concentrated attention. The whole aspect is exquisitely poetical; but it is also strangely fixed and set. One can imagine how such a figure would take its way through crowded streets looking neither to right nor to left. One seems to perceive an underlying wholeness of nature in this man which would make it unusually hard to turn him from his purpose or to impress him with a different purpose of one’s own. The authors of the present book contradict these speculations in their suggestive recollections by dwelling upon the ‘plastic and sensitive’ nature of Swinburne’s temperament. He ‘speedily took on’, they write, ‘the colour (for good or ill) of his immediate environment’, which statement they prove by the fact that he ‘changed with almost miraculous alacrity’ as soon as he came to live with Watts-Dunton. This may be true and yet not exclude a rigidity of mental character which, while it increased the fervour of his admirations and the violence of his denunciations, did not lend itself happily to the give and take of familiar correspondence.

The letters in the present selection begin in 1869 and end some ten years before the poet’s death. The early and more interesting letters are addressed chiefly to Rossetti, but the greater number are written to Watts-Dunton in the years before they set up house together at Putney. It is safe to say that they will give a great deal of pleasure to lovers of Swinburne because, if they fail in the peculiar intimacies, abandonments and improvisations which mark certain famous letters, they by no means fail to conjure up the astonishing ghost of Swinburne. He appears in the beginning as the extremely careful and sagacious critic of poetry. In 1869 Rossetti asked him to criticise the proof sheets of his forthcoming volume. He received the criticism which only a poet could give. In reading it we have a sense of watching a jeweller handling his diamonds and rubies. Here it is a question whether ‘the break’ does not come too soon and suddenly; here it is a matter of sound—a choice between ‘what’s’ and ‘what is’; here ‘I should unhesitatingly reject the five added lines in the Haymarket … because they utterly deaden and erase the superb effect of the lines preceding … The “yesterday’s rose in the bosom” is better than beautiful, being so lifelike, but I would condense if I could the thought into a couplet.’ Many of the criticisms were accepted, suffused as they were with the glow of Swinburne’s already rapturous commendation. ‘I cannot tell you how ineffable in wealth of thought and word and every beauty possible to human work I see that set of sonnets to be … or how brutally inadequate I feel the best and most delicate comment possible on them to be.’ But at the age of thirty-two there was a mean between Swinburne’s loves and his hates not so perceptible in later life, as a criticism upon The Earthly Paradise will prove. ‘(Morris’s) Muse is like Homer’s Trojan women; she drags her robes as she walks. I really think any Muse (when she is neither resting nor flying) ought to tighten her girdle, tuck up her skirts, and step out … Top’s is spontaneous and slow. [slow.’]

The impious wish must sometimes occur to us that some friend could have done for Swinburne’s mind what Watts-Dunton did for his body. So much beauty and truth, such wit and insight seem to have been buried beneath the explosions of his amazing but in its later developments so sterile vocabulary. The talent, for instance, which is displayed in Love’s Cross Currents foretold the advent and indeed proclaimed the presence of a delightful and original novelist. But the prophecy was never fulfilled. The critic in his turn suffered the same extinction or dissipation; for Swinburne’s praise or blame blots out the object of it as effectually as a dust storm conceals a daisy, and the verbal whirlwind of his later utterance becomes as monotonous as the smooth drone of a large humming top. In reading his letters, however, the criticism which we have impatiently uttered is disarmed. There is a gallantry about this enthusiastic figure which is irresistible. Moreover, it is impossible not to lay the blame for such catastrophe as there was upon a thousand circumstances which are hidden, as so much of Swinburne’s life remains hidden, from our knowledge. The British public whom he delighted to flout and to tease did not surround their surprising fellow citizen with an atmosphere of sympathy. Perhaps, indeed, the man who could persuade the secretary of the Society for the Suppression of Vice to state in public that his Society did not, as the poet asserted, intend ‘to burke’ Rabelais, Shakespeare, and the Holy Bible, deserved to do penance every Sunday of his life at Putney, shut up in his room because he dared not venture out in the midst of the holiday-making crowd. That day, according to the authors of this book, was the ‘one prosaic time of Swinburne’s life at the Pines’. The company of the Elizabethan dramatists was not sufficient; he was forced to extend his hours of sleep. On the other hand, Captain Webb had only to swim across the Channel and no voice was more vociferous in his praise. ‘I consider it,’ Swinburne wrote, ‘the greatest glory that has befallen England since the publication of Shelley’s greatest poem, whichever that may be.’

But in truth the staple of these letters is composed neither of poetic meditation nor of invective against the public; matters of business provide the chief theme of the letters to Watts-Dunton, and would threaten them with dulness if that danger were not always averted by some delightful thrust or phrase or suggestion. When all the difficulties of his publishing affairs had been arranged, his landladies still had drunken husbands, his books were still left behind him in London, his letters still succeeded in getting lost, his tradesmen still insisted upon being paid.

‘Such is the present excess of human baseness, and such the weltering abyss of social anarchy in which we live, that this demoralised Mammonite, whose all would be at my disposal—his life and his property alike—in a commonwealth duly based on any rational principle of order and good government, actually requires money for goods supplied to Me.’ In such crises of daily life Swinburne instinctively took up his pen and wrote a full and eloquent statement of the case to Watts-Dunton. In one such document, written, he declares, in great haste, it is possible to count seven separate commissions. Watts-Dunton is to draw up a form of subscription to the Pall Mall; to find an unfinished article in a drawer; to discover the lost letter of a Hungarian countess; to explain how to answer and direct it properly; to give an opinion upon both parties in a libel action; to forward a large number of books and manuscripts, and to order a variety of magazines. Finally, he need not trouble about the missing penholder; that has already been found.

[Times Literary Supplement, Mar 21, 1918]

[]

‘Second Marriage.’

[Second Marriage (Martin Seeker, 1918) by Viola Meynell.]

Fiction is probably the most living form of literature in England at the present moment, and for that reason it is the most difficult to judge. Far from having reached its full height, it is in a state of growth and development; we scarcely know on opening a new novel what to expect; the most sagacious has difficulty in deciding where to draw the line, and nowhere perhaps do our personal prejudices so confuse what should be our aesthetic judgments. To sit with crossed hands impartially observant when everything that is said or done rouses some irrational antagonism or sympathy, is like or unlike what we are accustomed to call life, conflicts with or ignores rules tentatively framed beforehand, requires more than the usual degree of infallibility. Nothing is so hard to criticise as a new novel, but nothing is more interesting than to make the attempt.

Miss Viola Meynell is not likely to upset anyone by the obvious novelty of her methods. She does not plunge you beneath the surface into a layer of consciousness largely represented by little black dots. She does not experiment with phrases that recur like the motive in a Wagner opera. She has no animosity against adjectives, nor does she exterminate verbs upon principle. Her characters are related to each other in the normal way, and they live in a house which is definitely stated to be situated in the Fen country. All the same you will probably find yourself stopping before you have read very far in Second Marriage to ask yourself what Miss Meynell is after; for the picture is sufficiently unlike life to forbid anyone to rest in the belief that it is a straightforward story with one simple knot which the last chapter will successfully untie. The reader has always to answer some such question when the writer is anything of an artist; he has to adjust his sight to the focus of another. If in this case we have found the adjustment more difficult than usual it is not because there is any special complexity in the story. The story is too simple to require much analysis. It is made out of the different engagements and marriages of Rose, Ismay, and Esther, the three daughters of Mr and Mrs Glimour, of Skirth Farm, in the Fens. Concurrently with their story runs the story of the farm and in particular the story of the pumping engine, the invention of Arnold Glimour, a young man who has quarrelled with his cousins at the farm. Ismay Hunt, the incredibly beautiful daughter of the Glimours, returns home, a widow, after a year of marriage, endowed with three thousand pounds. Instead of using this sum to facilitate her sister’s marriage, she invests it in the pumping engine, saves the land from the floods which threaten it, and finally marries the inventor.

And now the question is what impression Miss Meynell’s arrangement of this story makes upon us. If it is for her to carry out her design faithfully, it is for us to attempt to see what she has meant us to see. In our case we must admit that the attempt has been attended with more of groping and straining than is consistent with complete pleasure, or indeed with the certainty that we have seen aright. The impression is a little inconclusive. In the first place the introduction of men and women with some degree of detail at once incites us to do what we can to imagine them alive and real. But the process has hardly begun when it is checked; for some reason, possibly connected with the flatness and scarcity of the dialogue, our instinct is snubbed; we begin to suspect that Miss Meynell does not care very much for life or reality. If we are not to bother about life we must cast about until we find another track. It may be a novel of still life, a novel, such as Miss Meynell is well qualified to write, about substance and texture, with a design of men and women indicated like a fresco upon a wall. But from this conception of the right point of view we are roused by snatches of slang, by the apparatus of breakfast, dinner and tea, and by sudden attempts at brutality such as the scene when Arnold Glimour ties his young brother to a tree, stamps a shilling into the earth and laughs to see him grub it out with his teeth. The scene has a curiously medieval taste about it. The fight between Arnold and Maurice, for all its parade of violence, is best conveyed to us by one of Miss Meynell’s precise observations: ‘Up in the dark, raftered roof the cobwebs shook and waved in the wind of their fight.’

In the end, then, we settle to listen to the reflections which life in general has suggested to a curious and very fastidious observer, to whom the Glimour family was known not very intimately but with discernment, and to whom the characters of trees and skies are as well worth watching as the character of human beings. The different aspects of water, the effect of summer mist upon the trees, the sound of a storm, are described not only with care but with a sudden unexpected intensity as if the writer, having allowed the mass of obvious ideas and commonplace words to stream past her, suddenly saw and selected the single one of interest to her.

For the wind never came with a clean smooth edge; what it was doing it was never doing right—like a diver who does not cut neatly into the water but falls flat upon it, to his own violence and destruction. The shuddering blow it gave the house was like all the violent things done wrong and awkwardly in the world; and one could imagine that the reason why the wind grew in fury was because every blow it gave with such awkward violence was as hurtful to itself as to what it struck.

Applied to the lives of people—Ismay, Rose, Maurice, Arnold—this method has the effect of telling you some recondite detail about them while leaving entirely unnoticed the substance of which they are made. Moreover, by this method everything is told you; it never happens, nor is it ever said. Indeed the dialogue is curiously timid, put into the mouth, not issuing from it, and losing in its colloquial reality the beauty of quality which Miss Meynell so frequently attains in her carefully wrought passages of description and analysis. The fifteen minutes after a book is finished recreate the impression of the whole in the reader’s mind as upon reaching home the course of a walk comes before you from start to finish. At the end of Second Marriage we see no particular person, we remember no particular scene, but we have a general impression of having examined in a pleasing and quiet way rather an intricate pattern, full of ornament and detail, hidden in a secluded place where the sun, falling through greenish panes of old glass, has no longer any heat.

[Times Literary Supplement, Apr 25, 1918]

[]

Two Irish Poets.

[Last Songs (Herbert Jenkins Ltd, 1918) by Francis Ledwidge
Reincarnations (Macmillan & Co., 1918) by James Stephens.]

That the song of a nightingale is sad and that a poet desires fame are two statements that have all the authority of legend behind them. Thus, Lord Dunsany will find room in a page or two of introduction to the Last Songs of Francis Ledwidge to lament that the poet died before he saw his fame. The regret seems more fitting in the case of a poet than it would be in any other case, although at first sight the ungratified desire for fame seems merely pathetic and the attainment of the desire even a little ridiculous. Why should fame mean so much to anyone? The reason why it means so much to a poet will, perhaps, occur to the reader of these Last Songs. They seem to ask with a simplicity denied to poets of a richer or more powerful gift that we should be in sympathy with the singer. It is not praise that he wants, but that we should be on his side in liking what he likes.

Without some such assurance the task of writing the kind of poetry which this book contains must be difficult:

I took a reed and blew a tune,

And sweet it was and very clear

To be about a little thing

That only few hold dear.

Most of Mr Ledwidge’s poems are about those little things that only few hold dear not because they are rare or remote, but because they lie all about us, as common as grass and sky. There are poems about Spring, and Autumn, and Youth, and Love, and Home; and with no obvious ecstasy to thrill you it is difficult at first to see why Francis Ledwidge ventured to make poetry where most of us are silent. But either you are caught by a phrase like that about a tree at evening:

And when the shadows muster and each tree

A moment flutters, full of shutting wings,

or by a sense of completeness such as the following lines, ‘With Flowers’, convey:

These have more language than my song,

Take them and let them speak for me.

I whispered them a secret thing

Down the green lanes of Allary.

You shall remember quiet ways

Watching them fade, and quiet eyes,

And two hearts given up to love,

A foolish and an overwise.

And you come to believe in the end that you, too, hold these things dear. Mr Ledwidge has not made them great, or passionate, or different; but he has believed in the worth of his own feelings; and he has believed that there was enough sympathy with such feelings for him to confide in a world rather ostentatiously interested in other things. His belief was deep enough to give him delight in stating it whether the world listened or not, whether the Irish fields were before his eyes or seen in imagination through the smoke of battle.

Irish blood produces a likeness which it would be easy to exaggerate, and yet, reading first Mr Ledwidge and then Mr Stephens, you cannot deny that the likeness exists. It is to be found in a common rightness of feeling, as if, with whatever difference of gift, it came by nature to them to say neither too much nor too little, but to keep well in the middle of the note. The lilt of the voice which we believe we can detect in their literature no less than in their speech is also easy to feel though difficult to analyse. Synge was the most potent master of it, and in the hand of his imitators we must confess to have grown a little tired of the Irish style in prose. But in poetry the natural charm and natural turn of voice give quality and style to slight verses which without that grace would be almost negligible. The ‘Reincarnations’ of Mr Stephens are very graceful, but by no means negligible. Having printed his note at the end of the book—a habit to be commended to all authors—we read through the poems in the belief that they were entirely his own work, and in that belief admired his range and variety of mood. As a matter of fact everything in the book ‘can be referred to the Irish of some one hundred to three hundred years ago’. In two cases only is the translation exact, and in the rest of the poems Mr Stephens himself could hardly tell at what point and in what measure his words have mixed themselves with the words of Raftery, O’Rahilly, and O’Bruadhair, We get a generalised impression that Raftery was a master of easy melody, that O’Rahilly was a satirist, and that O’Bruadhair was the most complex of them all, well endowed with words and inclined to run them into an ‘unending rebellious bawl’:

As lily grows up easily,

In modest gentle dignity

To sweet perfection,

So grew she,

As easily.

Or as the rose that takes no care

Will open out on sunny air

Bloom after bloom, fair after fair,

Sweet after sweet;

Just so did she,

As carelessly.

That is the voice of Raftery.

The lanky hank of a she in the inn over there

Nearly killed me for asking the loan of a glass of beer.

May the devil grip the whey-faced slut by the hair,

And beat bad manners out of her skin for a year.

That is the style of the witty, eloquent and truculent O’Bruadhair. However closely or loosely these versions may fit the originals, each seems to come from the mouth of an Irishman, who writes from his tradition and not from ours. These poems, like the translations from the Chinese, make you aware of another attitude towards poetry, of another civilisation. The difference in this case may not be very profound; it may only be as the change from the Cockney accent to broad Devonshire; but, even so, the sound is welcome in our ears.

[Times Literary Supplement, May 2, 1918]

[]

Tchehov’s Questions.

[The Wife and Other Stories, The Witch and Other Stories … translated by Constance Garnett (Chatto & Windus, 1918)
Nine Humorous Tales (Boston: Stratford Publishing Co., ?1918) by Anton Tchehov.]

An anonymous American critic, introducing Nine Humorous Tales by Tchehov to his contemporaries, defines the Russian writer thus: ‘If Tchehov is more humanly self-revealing than de Maupassant, he is on the whole more deep than O. Henry. If O. Henry may be called the American Tchehov with a “punch”, Tchehov may equally be termed the Russian O. Henry with a caress.’ You look at that rather as you look at an advertisement cow standing in a field among real cows. The critic has tried to cut out a pattern of Tchehov with a very large, but, alas! a very blunt pair of scissors. The shape is so grotesque that it does not fit even the shadow of Tchehov preserved from past readings; and this is the more disappointing because Tchehov is still one of the nebulous, undefined writers of whom one is glad to have even an outline.

Everyone has read him by this time; one can foretell a large and inquisitive public for the fifth and sixth volumes of his stories, but it seems doubtful whether there will result from all this reading a unanimous verdict such as was passed in so short a space of time upon Dostoevsky. That hesitation may be a sign that he is not on a level with the greatest of the Russian writers. He is at any rate not among the unmistakable and overwhelming geniuses who bend you, whether you are upstanding or flexible, in the way their spirit blows. He is more on a level with ourselves. He is not heroic. He is aware that modern life is full of a nondescript melancholy, of discomfort, of queer relationships which beget emotions that are half ludicrous and yet painful, and that an inconclusive ending for all these impulses and oddities is much more usual than anything extreme. He knows all this as we know it, and at first sight he seems no more ready than we are with a solution. The attentive reader who is on the alert for some unmistakable sign that now the story is going to pull itself together and make straight as an arrow for its destination is still looking rather more blankly when the end comes. Perhaps it comes in this way. ‘With whom was he angry? Was it with people, with poverty, with the autumn nights?’ That is the end of a story called ‘The Post’. The postman has to drive a student to the station, and all the way the student tries to make the postman talk, but the postman remains silent, and at last the student falls silent too. Suddenly, just before they reach the station, the postman says unexpectedly, ‘It’s against the regulations to take anyone with the post … Yes. It makes no difference to me, it’s true, only I don’t like it, and I don’t wish it.’ And he walks up and down the platform with a look of anger on his face. But why was he angry?

The recurrence of this question, not only in the form of an actual note of interrogation but in the choice of incidents and of endings, produces at first a queer feeling that the solid ground upon which we expected to make a safe landing has been twitched from under us, and there we hang asking questions in mid air. It is giddy, uncomfortable, inconclusive. But imperceptibly things arrange themselves, and we come to feel that the horizon is much wider from this point of view; we have gained a sense of astonishing freedom. The method that at first seemed so casual and inconclusive, ordinary and upon the level of our own eyesight, now appears to be the result of an exquisitely fastidious taste, controlled by an honesty for which we can find no match save among the Russians themselves. There may be no answer to these questions, but at the same time let us never manipulate the evidence so as to produce something fitting, decorous, or agreeable to our vanity. Away fly half the conclusions of the world at once. Accept endlessly, scrutinise ceaselessly, and see what will happen.

But it is easy to make out a message that is momentarily satisfying, and to dwell too emphatically upon the philosophy of Tchehov. His philosophy is, of course, inseparable from all that he writes, but it has to blend itself with another element that springs with immense vigour and fecundity from a very deep source. He is a born story-teller. Wherever he looks, whatever he sees, wherever he goes, stories shape themselves quickly and with a sort of spontaneous directness which reminds one of an earlier age of the world’s literature when story-telling was natural to man. The whole mass of Russia seems to be leavened with the spirit, instead of small patches or thin crusts. Frequently one of Tchehov’s peasants will ask to be told a story, and his friend, who is also a peasant, will pour out a story which is not funny or an adventure, but the history of his life, told with coarseness perhaps, but with a subtlety and passion which we accept from him, though it would be impossible to imagine an English farmer speaking thus. ‘“It is interesting,” said Savka (the watchman and scarecrow), “whatever one talks about is always interesting. Take a bird now, or a man … or take this little stone; there’s something to learn about all of them.”’ Or it is an account of a dinner in a small country house, where the local doctor is one of the guests. He leads a very dull life, and when he has the chance over-eats himself enormously. Yet he begins almost at once upon the nature of life. ‘Yes! if one thinks about it, you know, looks into it, and analyses all this hotchpotch, if you will allow me to call it so, it’s not life, but more like a fire in a theatre!’ He goes on to describe his sensations in this blazing theatre. And this is not by any means the speech of Tchehov through a mask: the doctor speaks; he is there, alive, himself, an ordinary man, but he looks at things directly; there is in him too a fibre of individuality which gives out its own sharp vibration to the touch of life.

Innumerable as Tchehov’s characters seem to be, they are all different, and their differences are indicated by fine clean strokes dealt with astonishing celerity and certainty, for the whole story often occupies only a page or two. And yet, we ask again, what aim is there behind this certainty? What was his purpose in defining so many scores of men and women, who are for the most part so disagreeable in themselves or in their circumstances so degraded? Did he find no connecting link, no final arrangement which is satisfying and harmonious in itself, although the parts which compose it are painful and mean? It is difficult not to ask that question, and the very fineness and delicacy of Tchehov’s mind make it unusually difficult to be sure of an answer. He seems able with one tap to split asunder those emotions that we have been wont to think whole and entire, leaving them scattered about in small disconnected splinters. How much of your mental furniture remains entire when you have read ‘A Dreary Story’? Even when the tale is apparently straightforward, another view of it is reflected in some mirror in the background. But if he were merely cynical, brilliant, and destructive, we should have no question to ask; we should already know the answer. He is more profoundly disturbing than any cynic because his gifts are so rich and various. But among these gifts there are at least three which seem to contradict those who hold him the novelist of hopelessness and despair. There is no one who seems endowed, even through the necessarily coarse medium of a translation, with a keener sense of beauty. In some of the stories we may find that this beauty is by itself sufficient. Again, there is an originality in his choice of the elements that make up a story which sometimes produces an arrangement so unlike any we have met with before that it is necessary to consider whether he is not hinting at some order hitherto unguessed at, though perhaps never fully stated by him. ‘Gusev’ is an example of this. And, finally, in his cruelty, in the harshness of his pictures, especially of the peasants and of their life is there not by implication a statement of the only sympathy which is creative?

[Times Literary Supplement, May 16, 1918]

[]

Imitative Essays.

[The Gold Tree … with initials designed by Austin O. Spare and cut in wood by W. Quick (Martin Secker, 1917) by J.C. Squire]

It is always a misfortune to feel oneself out of sympathy with another person’s taste. You cannot reason about a question of taste; you can only feel for yourself; you are bound to feel strongly, and yet your feeling may be quite unintelligible to a third person. Mr Squire’s book of essays provides us with a case in point. The first essay, ‘The Gold Tree’, describes a tree in a college garden, whose leaves turn gold in a wonderful autumn, hang miraculously beautiful for a season, and then vanish. The essay, after gently meandering through moralities which seem a little obvious, ends with this passage: ‘But may it not be, perhaps, that when I am an old man, near my grave, I shall some day wander into the gardens below my window and find a second time the tree of gold, still and perfect, under a consoling autumnal sky?’ The sentiment of that is one that makes us uncomfortable. The murmur of voices, singing in church, a few chords struck gently in the dusk—these things also make us uncomfortable. We grow more and more solemn as we read with that uneasy solemnity which suddenly turns to untimely laughter. Let us quickly find something that it is permissible to laugh at. We hastily turn the page and light on this:

The cook, when middle-aged, had married a daughter of the keeper of the Great Seal; but she unhappily was one day killed by that ferocious animal (it was as large as a walrus) … and left her husband a widower with an only son, a small boy, who spent much of his time wondering about vain and foolish things. He wondered, for example, why he often heard of aeroplanes turning turtle, but never of a turtle turning aeroplane; and also why it was that no one ever threw a third or a quarter of a brick at anyone else.’

Our plight is worse than ever; we are as glum as an undertaker in the spring.

These are questions of taste, that must be decided by the individual judgment of each reader. But if you are so unhappy as to be neither charmed nor amused by such sentiment or such humour, you will find yourself asking how it comes about that a writer who has shown himself a vivacious satirist, and at least a serious writer of verse, can produce so insipid a volume of prose. The answer seems to be that he has failed because he has tried to write beautifully. The danger of trying to write beautifully in English lies in the ease with which it is possible to do something very like it. There are the old cadences humming in one’s head, the old phrases covering nothing so decently that it seems to be something after all. Preoccupied with the effort to be smooth, rotund, demure, and irreproachable, sentimentality slips past unnoticed, and platitudes spread themselves abroad with an air of impeccable virtue. A quotation from one of the eighty-nine pages of this expensive and beautifully printed book will show what it is that we are objecting to:

As the long scroll of memory unfolded he felt that he had walked all his manhood among phantoms; and he derived no pain from the reflection that his friends were dead, and he himself already half-forgotten, save as a legend. For he knew, watching the stream, that it would have been better had he remained all his life in that garden with that river that did not change. The fountains of speech, now he would willingly converse with the river, were rusted and choked; why, when he was young had they been sealed? Why had he been compelled to go round the world to find himself?

The fatal effect of such smoothing and mincing is that as you read on and on and on you gradually cease to feel or to think; edges are rounded, colours are faded, one trite simile follows another, and yet it is done so decorously that you can never put your finger upon a definite evil. A lover of literature will tolerate many varieties of failure and hold them fertilising in their season, but what good cause is served by a volume of plausible imitation? Is it worth making a protest, not only because Mr Squire is capable of doing much better work, but because, poured voluminously into a world too busy or too careless to discriminate, such writing does more harm, we fancy, than work which is marked all over with the stamp of the second-rate.

[Times Literary Supplement, May 23, 1918]

[]

Moments of Vision.

[Trivia (Constable & Co., 1918) by Logan Pearsall Smith]

To some readers the very sight of a book in which the plain paper so generously balances the printed paper will be a happy omen. It seems to foretell gaiety, ease, unconcern. Possibly the writer has written to please himself. He has begun and left off and begun again as the mood seized him. Possibly he has had a thought for our pleasure. At any rate, our attention is not going to be stretched on the rack of an extended argument. Here is a handful of chosen flowers, a dinner of exquisite little courses, a bunch of variously coloured air balloons. Anticipating pleasure of this rare kind from the fact that Mr Pearsall Smith’s Trivia seldom do more than reach the bottom of the page and sometimes barely encroach upon its blankness, we deserve to be disappointed. We deserve to find moral reflections or hints for the economical management of the home. Perhaps our unblushing desire for pleasure of itself deserves to be disappointed. We can fancy that many of Mr Pearsall Smith’s readers will placate their consciences for the sin of reading him by some excuse about going to bed or getting up. There are times, they will say, when it is impossible to read anything serious.

It is true that there is little to be got from this book except pleasure. It has no mission, it contains no information, unless you can dignify with that name the thoughts that come into the head, buzz through it, and go out again without improving the thinker or adding to the wealth of the world. The head of the author of Trivia contains, as he confesses, a vast store of book learning; but his thoughts have little serious concern with that; they may light upon some obscure folio as a robin might perch for a moment upon a book before flitting to the marble bust of Julius Caesar and so on to the shining brass head of the poker and tongs. This lightness, more justly to be compared to the step of a crane among wild flowers, is perhaps the first thing you notice. The second is that although Mr Pearsall Smith has preserved the freshness and idiosyncrasy of his idea he has done so by the unostentatious use of great literary skill. Nor can we long overlook the fact that his purpose is as serious as the purpose that fulfils itself in other books of more ambitious appearance. If we are not mistaken, it is his purpose to catch and enclose certain moments which break off from the mass, in which without bidding things come together in a combination of inexplicable significance, to arrest those thoughts which suddenly, to the thinker at least, are almost menacing with meaning. Such moments of vision are of an unaccountable nature; leave them alone and they persist for years; try to explain them and they disappear; write them down and they die beneath the pen.

One of the reasons which has led to Mr Pearsall Smith’s success is that he has taken neither himself nor his thoughts too seriously. Most people would have been tempted to fill the blank pages. They would have strained to be more profound, more brilliant, or more emphatic. Mr Pearsall Smith keeps well on this side of comfort; he knows exactly how far his gift will carry him. He is on easy terms with what he calls ‘that Masterpiece of Nature, a reason-endowed and heaven-facing Man’ […] ‘What stellar collisions and conflagrations, what floods and slaughters and enormous efforts has it not cost the Universe to make me—of what astral periods and cosmic processes am I not the crown and wonder?’ Nevertheless, he is conscious of belonging to that sub-order of the animal kingdom which includes the orang-outang, the gorilla, the baboon, and the chimpanzee. His usual mood towards himself and towards the rest of us is one of ironic but affectionate detachment, befitting an elderly Pierrot conscious of grey hairs. The poplar tree delights him and the ‘lemon-coloured moon’. ‘After all these millions of years, she ought to be ashamed of herself!’ he cries out, beholding the ‘great amorous unabashed face of the full moon’. As he listens to the talk of the thoughtful baronet:

I saw the vast landscape of the world, dim, as in an eclipse; its population eating their bread with tears, its rich men sitting listless in their palaces, and aged Kings crying, ‘Vanity, Vanity, all is Vanity!’ laboriously from their thrones … When I seek out the sources of my thoughts, I find that they had their beginning in fragile chance; were born of little moments that shine for me curiously in the past … So I never lose a chance of the whimsical and perilous charm of daily life, with its meetings and words and accidents. Why, today, perhaps, or next week, I may hear a voice, and, packing up my Gladstone bag, follow it to the ends of the world.

The voice may be the voice of Beauty, but all the same he does not forget to pack his Gladstone bag. Compared with the ‘whimsical and perilous charm of daily life’, compared with the possibility that one of these days one may discover the right epithet for the moon, are not all the ends of serious middle-aged ambition ‘only things to sit on’?

We have marked a number of passages for quotation, but as it would be necessary to quote them only in part we refrain. But the mark was not in the margin of the book; a finger seemed to raise itself here and there as if to exclaim, ‘At last! It has been said.’ And, without making extravagant claims for a gift which would certainly refuse to bear a weight of honour, to cut these passages into two or otherwise mutilate them would be to damage a shape so fitting and so characteristic that we can fancy these small craft afloat for quite a long time, if not in mid stream, still in some very pleasant backwater of the river of immortality.

[Times Literary Supplement, May 23, 1918]

[]

Dreams and Realities.

[Motley and Other Poems (Constable & Co. Ltd, 1918) by Walter de la Mare.]

Several years ago, turning the pages of a miscellany of some kind in which bad verses abounded, the present reviewer chanced upon a scrap of poetry signed with the name of Walter de la Mare. The name was then unfamiliar, and the little poem, since we have never seen it republished, did not perhaps seem to Mr de la Mare worthy of preservation. Yet to us the shock of surprise with which we encountered this sharply and, considering its surroundings, almost improperly individual voice is still memorable. Reading the verses once more in the expectation of reducing them to harmony with the mediocrity of their companions, we were forced by their persistent assertion of merit to conclude that someone by a fluke or a freak had brought off a success which he would never repeat again. In the light of Mr de la Mare’s subsequent achievements this judgment, if we think it discriminating, was certainly pessimistic. The voice which sounded so fine and distinct in that obscure gathering of the commonplace now speaks not only to a large audience, but to a great number of listeners it is a voice which has no fellow. The surprise, the sense of finding an unseized emotion reduced to its unmistakable form of words, possesses us when we read his latest volume, as it possessed us then.

Of the many proofs of the value of poetry, the conviction that the poet has said what was hitherto unsaid is among the most conclusive. In future for that emotion or mood, which he seems half to create and half to reveal, there is no other poet who serves instead of him.

Far are those tranquil hills,

Dyed with fair evening’s rose;

On urgent, secret errand bent,

A traveller goes.’

Many readers could recognise the authorship of that simple statement of a characteristic theme without a name to it. The shapes of the day have lost their form; the low limits of the world stretch far on the horizon; the voice comes to us from just beyond the verge of light. He is the poet of hush and silence, of the deserted house, of flowers bowed in the moonlight.

Speak not—whisper not;

Here bloweth thyme and bergamot;

Softly on the evening hour

Secret herbs their spices shower,

Dark-spiked rosemary and myrrh,

Lean-stalked, purple lavender;

Hides within her bosom, too,

All her sorrows, bitter rue.

He is the poet who wakes when the world sleeps, the poet of dreams, the poet who, when slumber is heavy upon the earth, hears faint stirrings and far murmurs and footfalls, for above all, perhaps, he is the poet who rouses us to an expectation of something that we can neither hear nor see.

‘Secrets,’ sighs the night-wind,

’Vacancy is all I find;

Every keyhole I have made

Wail a summons, faint and sad,

No voice ever answers me,

Only vacancy.’

‘Once, once …’ the cricket shrills,

And far and near the quiet fills

With its tiny voice, and then

Hush falls again.

The poem ends in silence and hush, but, strangely, the sound goes on. The quiet has become full of tremors and vibrations; we are still listening long after the words are done. Possessed of this secret, Mr de la Mare is able in a few verses to make full contact between the reader and some intangible feeling of mystery, wonder or fear.

Those who delight in marking out as definitely as may be the circumference of a poet’s mind will not fail to point out that Mr de la Mare has not proved himself capable of writing anything so sustained as, shall we say, the Prelude. A poet who is above all things personal is closely limited by the bounds of that personality. We may defer to this criticism to the extent of admitting that when Mr de la Mare takes upon himself to discharge a patriotic duty, as in ‘Happy England’ he writes what many others might have written. His verses to ‘E.Τ.’ have also an air of being written in a broad daylight to which the writer is ill accustomed. But it is a mistake to suppose that because the whimsical and fantastic are specially akin to him he is therefore to be banished until the moon is up and the flowers of a June night are whispering with phantoms. He proves once more that the essence of reality is only to be reached through the substance.

Where blooms the flower when her petals fade,

Where sleepeth echo by earth’s music made,

Where all things transient to the changeless win,

There waits the peace thy spirit dwelleth in.

In poems like ‘Vain Questionings’, ‘Eyes’ and ‘Life’ Mr de la Mare gives clear enough evidence of mortality. Far from being rapt on some moonlit island remote from human passion, he is conscious of ‘an endless war twixt contrarieties’ of a ‘livelong tangle of perplexities’ of a necessity binding us to turn back from ecstasy to ‘earth’s empty track of leaden day by day’. Without that understanding of the gross body which divides the seer from the seen his vision of the spirit in plant and man could not be so distinct, nor his command to seek beauty and love it above everything so imperious.

Look thy last on all things lovely,

Every hour. Let no night

Seal thy sense in deathly slumber

Till to delight

Thou have paid thy utmost blessing;

Since that all things thou wouldst praise

Beauty took from those who loved them

In other days.

[Times Literary Supplement, May 30, 1918]

[]

The Claim of the Living.

[A Novelist on Novels (W. Collins Sons & Co. ltd, 1918) by W.L. George. Reprinted: CW.]

Mr George is one of those writers for whom we could wish, in all kindness of heart, some slight accident to the fingers of the right hand, some twinge or ache warning him that it is time to stop, some check making brevity more desirable than expansion. He has ideas and enthusiasms, prejudices and principles in abundance, but in his fluency he repeats himself, bolsters up good arguments with poor illustrations, and altogether uses more paper than the country can well afford. The following sentence shows how his ideas tend to overlap each other owing to the speed at which they are composed: ‘Autobiography has had its way with him (Mr E.M. Forster) a little in A Room with a View, and very much more in that tale of schoolmasters The Longest Journey, but it was Howards End, that much criticised work, which achieved the distinction of being popular, though of high merit.’ Thus hooking one statement to another Mr George rambles over a great many ideas connected with novelists and their art, and abuses the public at great length for its insolent neglect of the artist. Proof is added to proof. When Lord Curzon, the Bishop of London, and Mr Conrad come into a room which of them causes ‘a swirl in “the gilded throng”’? The [‘The] attitude of the State to the novelist defines itself most clearly when a royal commission is appointed.’ What novelist has ever been asked to sit upon a royal commission? What novelist has ever been welcomed as a son-in-law? To cut the matter short, if the present Lord Nelson owns 7,000 acres of land, what is the amount of pension enjoyed by Leigh Hunt’s daughter?

But Mr George’s chief claim to attention lies not in this voluble and elementary satire, but in the courage with which he has faced his contemporaries. It is a courage that overshoots its mark, but still it needs considerable courage to declare that one has found ‘more that is honest and hopeful in a single page of Tono-Bungay than in all the great Victorians put together’. It needs, oddly enough, some quality rarer than courage and more desirable to have read all the novels mentioned in this book and to hold a serious opinion as to their merits. For it is extremely difficult to take the writings of one’s contemporaries seriously. The spirit in which they are read is a strange compact of indifference and curiosity. On the one hand the assumption is that they are certainly bad, on the other the temptation assails us to find in them a queer and illicit fascination. Between these two extremes we vacillate, and the attention we grant them is at once furtive, intermittent and intense. In proof of this let anyone read over the list of seven young novelists accepted by Mr George as the most promising of their generation—Mr Beresford, Mr Cannan, Mr Forster, Mr Lawrence, Mr Compton Mackenzie, Mr Onions and Mr Swinnerton. The list is fairly representative, but certainly if our income depended upon passing an examination in their works we should be sweeping the streets tomorrow. We feel sure that such a test would produce a large army of street-sweepers. It is not that we have neglected to order a certain number of their novels from the library. It is not that, on seeing them before us, we have neglected to read them. But our knowledge is perfectly haphazard and nebulous. To discuss the point of view, the growth, nature and development of any one of these writers in the same spirit that we discuss the dead proves impossible. The difficulty which lies at the root of this attitude affects Mr George too, in spite of his enthusiasm for modern fiction and his proud claim for the prose form. He does not find it at all easy to make out what is happening.

The literary tradition is changing and a new one is being made. Perhaps we may divide these seven writers into three groups—self-exploiters, mirror-bearers and commentators … They stand midway between the expression of life and the expression of themselves … A new passion is born, and it is a complex of the old passions; the novelist … needs to be more positive, to aspire to know what we are doing with the working class, with the Empire, the woman question, and the proper use of lentils. It is this aspiration towards truth that breaks up the old form: you cannot tell a story in a straightforward manner when you do but glimpse it through the veil of the future.

Fiction is becoming chaotic and formless and omnivorous. But the attempt at a general survey, or at any grouping of tendencies, is very vague; and Mr George turns not without relief to the criticism of the novels in detail, to biographical sketches, and even to memories of garden parties on Campden Hill. The criticism is not bad criticism, but it has too great an air of the personal and provisional to be accepted with conviction. There is no perspective, no security about it.

But the fault hardly lies with Mr George and scarcely at all with the novelists. They must live before they achieve the repose which is so much more ornamental than life. They must appear at garden parties and achieve, or fail to achieve, the ‘swirl’ which Mr George thinks a proper tribute to their powers. But they must be content to forgo authoritative criticism until they are long past the age at which they can profit by it. They must put up with the random patronage of people who subscribe to libraries and to the snapshots of reviewers. Meanwhile they enjoy a kind of homage which is not altogether to be despised. We should judge it an immense calamity if all the writers whom Mr George speaks of were destroyed in a single night. Yes, in our condescending, indolent way we are proud of them; we need them; we have a dim consciousness of a band of light upon the horizon which is due to their incessant imaginative fervour, and sometimes we seem to see that from all this agitation and confusion something of great importance is taking shape.

[Times Literary Supplement, Jun 13, 1918]

[]

Loud Laughter.

[Frenzied Fiction (John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1918) by Stephen Leacock.]

We have seen Mr Leacock described both as Doctor and Professor; and his industry and success in making people laugh seem to entitle him to the brass plate, the variegated letters, and the consulting room of the specialist. If when Mr Leacock has applied all the batteries and tests of the most improved humorous science upon you you still remain grave and careworn in his hands, it is probable that you are hopelessly deficient—a chronic invalid. Upon us, we admit at once, his verdict was grave; he said that he had only been able to produce hearty laughter nine or ten times in the course of two hundred and forty pages; that our risible faculties were far too easily exhausted; and from the alert condition of the critical faculty under the process he could detect signs of premature decay. Possibly this was due to the enervating influence of an ancient civilisation; possibly the American climate might even now work wonders.

That is the worst that we have to say about Mr Leacock; he is a specialist in laughter. He is one of those people with an abnormal gift such as brings its possessor to celebrity upon the music-hall stage. His skill in producing the comic reminds us of the gentleman who whips off the tablecloth and turns it into Napoleon’s hat; so Mr Leacock seems to delight in showing how he can make funniness out of anything. Humour, to judge by the reviewers’ chorus of praise, is the right term to apply to his production; but to our thinking it is no more humour than the tablecloth is Napoleon’s hat. It is a specialised product which, like a pug dog or a garden plant, has been bred so carefully that it no longer resembles the common stock. We have the hardihood to declare that the common stock flourishes naturally and profusely in these islands. With Falstaff and Mrs Gamp for parents it could not well be otherwise; but leaving them, as fairness requires, out of account, what we call humour in England seems to us a very different thing from the humour of Frenzied Fiction. Mr Leacock’s method is probably too well known for it to be necessary to describe these fresh examples in great detail. They are almost without exception funny stories; and the fun consists in turning some foible or craze upside down by heaping exaggeration upon exaggeration, so that you laugh both at the absurdities of Mr Leacock’s fancy and at the wretched ghost of reality thus nimbly travestied. A skit upon amateur agriculture opens in the following way:

I have hung up my hoe in my study; my spade is put away behind the piano; I have with me seven pounds of Paris Green that I had over. Anybody who wants it may have it. I didn’t like to bury it for fear of its poisoning the ground. I didn’t like to throw it away for fear of its destroying cattle. I was afraid to leave it in my summer place for fear that it might poison the tramps who generally break in in November. I have it with me now. I move it from room to room, as I hate to turn my back upon it. Anybody who wants it, I repeat, can have it.

And so he goes on piling it up, one fantasy on top of another, until we hold our breath and wonder with what final perversion of sense he will cap the towering pyramid. The effect is cumulative, and fragmentary quotations give no true impression of the intensity and unreality which make this humour so different from the English variety. In candour we must admit that in certain of these skits, such as ‘The Prophet in our Midst’ and ‘To Nature and Back Again’, Mr Leacock makes points a great deal quicker than we are used to take them. His lively sense of satire is never too deeply sunk in extravagances to cease to sting. But if laughter, if the degree in which we are soothed and expanded and persuaded into a mood of tolerant joviality are the tests of humour, we have no hesitation in bestowing our palm elsewhere. Ruling out the immortals, let us consider the claims of Mr Briggs of Victorian Punch. Let us put in a word, too, for the humour that flourishes every night among a tangle of rubbish in the music halls. This humour is much slower and more cumbrous than anything in Frenzied Fiction; it can scarcely be said to have a point; but it has breadth, it has character; in its primitive way it has a good deal of human nature in it. It takes hold of the audience; it shakes them and seizes them and settles them down again in a mood of immense good temper. And then, quite slowly and deliberately and with an odd mixture of emotions, we begin to laugh.

Perhaps, after all, when we call Mr Leacock a specialist we mean that his emotions are not sufficiently mixed. He has isolated one from the rest, and each time he takes up his pen he goes straight for it, as if the human mind were a target with a golden bull’s-eye in the centre and neat circles of different colours surrounding it. In truth, the book of humour is something of a prodigy, although custom has brought us to see nothing unnatural in it. But turn it the other way round; suppose that Mr Leacock had written, instead of Frenzied Fiction, Funereal Fiction. Suppose we began with a sob, went on to a tear, developed into a roar, and culminated in a paroxysm of uncontrollable lamentation—should we think that a desirable form of art? Would the critics be so eager then to acclaim him a master of tears?

[Times Literary Supplement, Jun 20, 1918]

[]

A Victorian Socialist.

[Reminiscences and Reflexions of a Mid and Late Victorian (George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1918) by Ernest Belfort Bax.]

The reminiscences and reflections of Mr Belfort Bax are distinguished from most of their kind by the conception which the writer has formed of his task. His aim has been to ‘offer data and suggestions … for the due appreciation, now or hereafter, of the particular period of historic time in which my life has been cast—to wit, roughly speaking, the last third of the nineteenth and the opening years of the twentieth century’. The ‘personal note’ has been rigorously ‘damped down’, whether from shyness on the writer’s part or because such matters do not seem to him likely to interest the historian of the future. However this may be, the method certainly produces a curious sense that the mid and late Victorian age, so near ours in point of time, is already distant and different enough to be summed up and judged as we sum up and judge the lives of the dead. As we read we feel ourselves exalted almost to the rank of that impartial observer to whom the England of the nineteenth century will appear as the Rome of the year 116 appears to an observer of the present day. Bating a certain unnecessary sensitiveness to possible disagreements and one or two beliefs whose fervour seems rather personal than universal, Mr Bax’s book might very well stand for the book of the average thinking man of middle-class origin and socialist persuasion born in or about the year 1854. It is very sincere, very plain spoken, and very much in earnest.

An aged American gentleman who revisited England in 1901 told Mr Bax that he was astonished at the change between the English of that day and the English of 1848. When he compared the men and women he met in the Strand with their forebears they seemed to him to belong to a different race. Not only dress, but faces, ways, and manners had completely changed. In what the change consisted he unfortunately omitted to say; but the reader of Mr Bax’s book will find a great deal to help him in framing an opinion upon that point. When, for example, Mr Bax was a boy the main topic of conversation in the family was religious dogma. Not only in his family but in most families of the Evangelical set Romanism and Latitudinarianism, preachers and the quality of their orthodoxy, were the staple of discussion, and upon all brooded equally the shadow of Sunday and the ban of social enjoyment. The theatres were especially condemned, save indeed as convenient signposts of destruction; for had not a lady, seeing the words ‘To the Pit’ emblazoned on the theatre door, read into them their right meaning and immediately sought salvation elsewhere? The only permissible form of art, according to Mr Bax, was the oratorio. The Messiah and the Elijah were the only legitimate channels for aesthetic emotions, and the one piece of music that resounded from church, chapel and parlour indiscriminately was Mendelssohn’s ‘O rest in the Lord’. How far this religious fervour was genuine, and how far it was the result of what Mr Bax calls ‘unconscious hypocrisy’ it is hard to determine; but it is certain that those who were young enough to be coerced and sensitive enough to revolt ‘preserved enduringly unpleasant reminiscences of that time’. Worse still, the memories of those who had held these ‘morally repulsive and intellectually foolish beliefs’, were held in no respect by their descendants, for ‘their characters were poisoned and warped by the foulness and follies of their creed’.

From such unpleasant reminiscences and early impressions sprang, no doubt, the drastic moral tone of Mr Bax’s generation. No words seem to have been more often upon their lips than ‘humbug’, ‘cant’, ‘sentimentalism’ and ‘superstition’. No generation has ever put more trust in reason, or rated more highly the powers of pure intellect. In an interesting passage Mr Bax traces the decline and death of his own belief in the supernatural, and is so sanguine as to suppose that reason has so far permeated the race that the modern child goes to bed without any fear of the dark. It seems probable that each generation of children will have its own fear of the dark, but we may certainly cede to Mr Bax’s generation the credit of having marked out the boundary where light ends and darkness begins. This temper is notable in his remarks upon the Society for Psychical Research. After examining some of the claims put forward by the Society, he comes to the conclusion that his own attitude may be described as ‘an “agnostic” one, with a bias in favour of the negative opinion’. The conclusion seems to us highly characteristic of his generation. With fairness, with honesty, with a display of reason before which emotion must shrink abashed, they tested the common objects of belief and proved them for the most part baseless, or, if judgment was suspended, they had a distinct ‘bias in favour of the negative opinion’. Whether it is due to this spirit or to some temperamental quality of his own, the pervading atmosphere of this book would lead us to judge the mid and late Victorian period a dry, if wholesome, stage in our mental history. The moral earnestness which replaces and demolishes a too-easy credulity is bound in retrospect to seem a little excessive. Even when they took upon them to chide prigs or to denounce asceticism, one feels that the ghosts of the Evangelicals have inspired them rather than a pure delight in the joys of the senses. Mr Bax supports his advocacy of drink in moderation, or rather his attack upon the asceticism of doctors, by the statement that it ‘is a noteworthy fact that the physical degeneration of the Scotchman of today is coincident with an increasing abstemiousness as regards whisky’. It is hardly necessary to tell us that he has never ‘gloried and drunk deep’. One of the very few stories in the book of the great men with whom he has associated leaves us with an added impression of the seriousness which might attend even a walk in the country. He was walking with William Morris by the side of a stream.

Suddenly Morris became morose and unsociable in manner. A little while after again coming upon the high road we turned into an inn for luncheon. Sitting after the meal, I asked Morris the reason of his grumpiness. He replied that he was much exercised in passing through those fields in that he saw bulls regarding us in a more or less menacing manner, and that, although he himself could have escaped by swimming across the little river, knowing that I could not swim, he was perplexed as to what course to pursue in the event of a bovine attack. Hence his surliness.

But these, after all, are trifles, little eccentricities that strike the eye as it rests upon the surface of an age. It need scarcely be said that the age was one that brought about an important change, and that if Mr Bax and his friends did their work of destruction, they also sought to establish what he calls ‘the only true religion for human beings’, that which has for its object ‘the devotion to the future social life of Humanity’. In this crusade Mr Bax has fought valiantly; upon that cause he has lavished all his passion. The only tears recorded in his book were shed ‘in secret and in my own room’ for the martyrs of the Commune; his deepest source of gratification lies in the enlightenment of the working classes. His hope for the future is so deeply founded that it bridges the gulf cut by the war. The Socialist ideal reaches beyond ‘any mere material transformation’; and, believing in its attainment, he looks forward to a time when the working classes of the world will be united in such an international society that the struggle of race with race will be for ever impossible.

[Times Literary Supplement, Jun 27, 1918]

[]

Mr Merrick’s Novels.

[While Parts Laughed. Being Pranks and Passions of the Poet Tricortin and of Conrad in Quest of His Youth. An Extravagance of Temperament. With an introduction by J.M. Barrie (Hodder & Stoughton, 1918) by Leonard Merrick]

Twelve distinguished authors ‘have fallen over each other’, says Sir James Barrie, ‘in their desire to join in the honour of writing the prefaces’ to the edition of Mr Merrick’s collected works. At the present moment only the first of the twelve, Sir James Barrie, has appeared in the capacity of introducer, and he is in charge of Conrad in Quest of his Youth. Sir James, we need not say, makes the introduction in the most graceful terms, and leaves us to become better acquainted with the genial assurance that we shall get on splendidly; but, should it fall out otherwise, it will make no difference to his opinion of Mr Merrick. ‘For long he has been the novelist’s novelist, and we give you again the chance to share him with us; you have been slow to take the previous chances, and you may turn away again, but in any case he will still remain our man.’ To start us on the right track he gives it as his opinion that Conrad in Quest of his Youth ‘is the best sentimental journey that has been written in this country since the publication of the other one’. To leave us in no possible doubt of his meaning he adds, ‘I know scarcely a novel by any living Englishman, except a score or so of Mr Hardy’s, that I would rather have written.’

The reader, thus advised and admonished, bethinks him perhaps of the Sentimental Journey, conjures up the name of any novel by a living author that he might choose to have written, and conjectures that Mr Merrick will be first and foremost an artist whose gift has a rarity that specially appeals to connoisseurs. We maintain that this is the wrong way of approaching Mr Merrick. When Sir James suggests Sterne, when he talks of Mr Hardy, he is challenging us to make comparisons which we would much rather make in silence. He is putting us into the ungrateful position of the critic whose main business it is to find fault. Now the interest and value of the art of criticism lie more than anything in the critic’s ability to seize upon what is good and to expatiate upon that. The only criticism worth having, we sometimes think, is the criticism of praise; but to give praise its meaning the standard of the first rate must be present in the mind, unconfused and unlowered, though kept in the background unless the merit of the work makes open reference to it worth while. Rightly or wrongly we cannot see that there is anything to be gained by naming the classics when we are discussing the interesting but unequal works of Mr Alerrick.

Conrad in Quest of his Youth is an extremely readable book. More than that, it is sufficiently unlike other books to make you wish to take its measure, to account for its failure or its success. Here, evidently, is a novelist endowed with wit, with lightness of touch, with a sensitive quick-darting intelligence, and with just that turn of mind that is needed to give his work an unmistakable character of its own. Perhaps this last is the quality that has endeared him to his fellow writers. It is very rare, and yet, if unsupported by commoner gifts, it is apt to be thrown away, or at least completely ignored by the public. Competence, completeness and a dozen other virtues are negligible compared with the sensitive though perhaps ineffective handling of the artist. Within his limits Mr Merrick shows unmistakable traces of this endowment. Is not Conrad in Quest of his Youth an undoubted proof of it? From a dozen different scenes, precariously poised one on top of another, we get a charming irregular whole; we get a sense of the past; of deserted piers, of bathing places out of season, of barrel organs out of tune, of ladies past their prime. It has an atmosphere of its own. Mr Merrick possesses the cynicism peculiar to the sentimentalist; and in Conrad the mixture is extremely skilful, the sweet turning bitter, the sunset merging surprisingly into the daylight of three o’clock in the afternoon. His talent seems to lend itself peculiarly well to the faded distinction of the year 1880, when Piccadilly was blocked with hansom cabs and well-dressed people sat by Rotten Row and offered each other nicely turned phrases which already sound a little obsolete. Here is an example of this urbane dialogue; Conrad is talking to the lady whom he loved in his youth:

‘You hurt me,’ said Conrad, ‘because for the first time I realise you are different from the girl I’ve looked for. Till now I’ve felt that I was with her again.’ ‘That’s nice of you, but it isn’t true. Oh, I like you for saying it, of course … If you had felt it really—’ ‘Go on.’ ‘No; what for? I should only make you unhappier.’ ‘You want comedy?’ he demurred; ‘you have said the saddest things a woman ever said to me!’ She raised a white shoulder—with a laugh. ‘I never get what I want!’ ‘It should have taught you to feel for me, but you are not “wondrous kind.”’ Oh, I am more to be pitied than you are! ‘What have I got in my life? Friends? Yes—to play bridge with. My husband? He delivers speeches on local option, and climbs mountains. Both make me deadly tired. I used to go in for music—God Save the King is the only tune he knows when he hears it, and he only knows that because the men take their hats off. I was interested in my house at the beginning—after you’ve quarrelled in your house every day for years it doesn’t absorb you to make the mantelpiece look pretty. I wanted a child—well, my sister has seven! … Voilà my autobiography up to date.’ ‘There is tomorrow,’ said Conrad, moved. ‘Tomorrow you must give me the comedy,’ she smiled (…)

There is much that is up to that level, a good deal that is above it, and as his books are full of dialogue you may accuse Mr Merrick of airiness, perhaps of emptiness, but never of being a bore.

The success of Conrad in Quest of his Youth lies in the skilful balance of sweetness and bitterness, of romance and reality. But in the other novels the union is far more unequal, and in some of them the results appear to us to be more interesting. We can guess that Mr Merrick has tried, as most good novelists try, to shape a world bearing some resemblance to the world of his vision. Failure, the loss of ideals, the sacrifice of good to evil, and, above all, the degradation wrought upon the character by poverty, were some of the aspects of life that claimed Mr Merrick’s attention. He did not master his theme, and perhaps he spoilt a book or two in trying; but it is evident that he was not content with a scene of brilliancy here, a character of vitality there, but aimed at something more complete. If you choose, as this characteristic makes it possible, to consider his books as one large composition, you must place in the centre a blazing fire, a radiance that casts its fictitious splendour to the furthest corners of the picture. This, of course, is the stage. Into that fire, from distant and obscure sources, come running heroes and heroines and other strange figures, who struggle to the light and pass out again into the dreary twilight of failure or disillusion, or remain hovering unsatisfied at a distance. And now we reach the dilemma by which Mr Merrick seems so often to have been posed. He feels the glamour of the stage in every nerve, he thrusts his men and women again and again into the furnace, but then at the last moment he repents and saves them alive. He bestows all sorts of gifts upon them. This one turns out to be a successful dramatist; that one earns £4,000 a year by painting pictures which are, incredibly enough, works of the highest merit. We do not believe with Sir James Barrie that Mr Merrick has frightened the public by his pessimism; we think it more probable that he has puzzled it by his compromises. His mediocrity is so strangely combined with his excellence. We have always to reckon with a lapse into melodrama as in the ending to The Man Who Was Good, or with the commonplace and conventional as in the climax of The House of Lynch.

But we own to a grudge against the influence that has tried to spoil Peggy Harper or The Quaint Companions, because, pruned of certain weaknesses, each of these books contains first-hand truth seized and set down with extraordinary vivacity. The proximity of the stage always revives Mr Merrick, and a second-rate actress never fails to put him on his mettle. Her cheap prettiness, her artistic incompetence, her vanity, her courage, her poverty, her makeshifts and artifices and endurance, together with the seduction of the theatre, are described not with mere truth of detail, though we guess that to be considerable, but with the rarer truth of sympathy. The description of Peggy Harper’s home and of her mother, the decayed actress who has taken to drink but preserves the artistic instincts and passions, makes you feel that you have learned the truth about that section of humanity once for all. From each of Mr Merrick’s books one could select a chapter or two possessing, often among second-rate surroundings, this stamp of first-hand quality. We find it most often when he has to deal with the seamy side of the stage; we find it oddly often in some minor character or in some little scene dashed off apparently by an afterthought. A touring company comes to grief, a girl stumbling through her part before the author, a troupe of actors trailing their draggled feathers and cheap tinsel across the windy parade of a seaside resort at Christmas time—into such scenes he puts so much spirit, so many quick touches of insight, that the precarious, flaring, tenth-rate life of the provincial stage has not only glamour and bustle, but beauty into the bargain. These are the scenes that we shall wish to read again.

The last of Mr Merrick’s books, While Paris Laughed, should win a greater popularity than the others. Nothing in it is so good as certain passages that we should have liked to quote, from Peggy Harper in particular, but the quality is far more equal. It has all the quickness, lightness, and dexterity which scarcely ever fail him, and, in addition, the balance of this uneven talent is more successfully maintained. In recording the adventures of the poet Tricortin in Paris he is never quite serious, but he never laughs aloud; he hints at disagreeables and glances at delights; he suggests the divinity of art and the obtuseness of the public, but never for an instant does he pass from raillery to satire, or from suggestion to statement. It is a very skilful and craftsmanlike piece of work, and, if Mr Merrick still remains unpopular, we confess ourselves unable to guess the reason.

[Times Literary Supplement, Jul 4, 1918]

[]

Two Soldier-Poets.

[Counter-Attack and Other Poems (William Heinemann, 1918) by Siegfried Sassoon;
Poems (William Heinemann, 1918) by Geoffrey Dearmer.]

It is natural to feel an impulse of charity towards the poems written by young men who have fought or are still fighting; but in the case of Mr Sassoon there is no temptation to indulge in this form of leniency, because he is so evidently able-bodied in his poetic capacity and requires no excuses to be made for him. At the same time, it is difficult to judge him dispassionately as a poet, because it is impossible to overlook the fact that he writes as a soldier. It is a fact, indeed, that he forces upon you, as if it were a matter of indifference to him whether you called him poet or not. We know no other writer who has shown us as effectually as Mr Sassoon the terrible pictures which lie behind the colourless phrases of the newspapers. From the thousand horrors which in their sum compose one day of warfare he selects, as if by chance, now this of the counter-attack, now that of mending the front-line wires, or this again of suicide in the trenches. ‘The General’ is as good an example of his method as another:

‘Good-morning: good-morning!’ the General said

When we met him last week on our way to the line.

Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of ’em dead,

And we’re cursing his staff for incompetent swine.

‘He’s a cheery old card,’ grunted Harry to Jack,

As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.

******

But he did for them both by his plan of attack.

The vision of that ‘hell where youth and laughter go’ has been branded upon him too deeply to allow him to tolerate consolation or explanation. He can only state a little of what he has seen, a very little one guesses, and turn away with a stoical shrug as if a superficial cynicism were the best mask to wear in the face of such incredible experiences. His farewell to the dead is spoken in this fashion:

Good-bye, old lad! Remember me to God,

And tell him that our politicians swear

They won’t give in till Prussian Rule’s been trod

Under the heel of England … Are you there? …

Yes … and the war won’t end for at least two years;

But we’ve got stacks of men … I’m blind with tears,

Staring into the dark. Cheero!

I wish they’d killed you in a decent show.

There is a stage of suffering, so these poems seem to show us, where any expression save the barest is intolerable; where beauty and art have something too universal about them to meet our particular case. Mr Sassoon sums up that point of view in his ‘Dead Musicians’. Not Bach or Beethoven or Mozart brings back the memory of his friends, but the gramophone does it bawling out ‘Another little drink won’t do us any harm.’ Mr Sassoon’s poems are too much in the key of the gramophone at present, too fiercely suspicious of any comfort or compromise, to be read as poetry; but his contempt for palliative or subterfuge gives us the raw stuff of poetry.

No two poets could be more different than Mr Sassoon and Mr Dearmer; the difference in point of view is unimportant, but the difference in expression is very interesting. Mr Dearmer writes of soldiers waiting in the trenches:

We waited, like a storm-bespattered ship

That flutters sail to free her grounded keel,

and from that image it is at once evident that Mr Dearmer is trying to make a kind of poetry so different that the comparison with Mr Sassoon will serve us no longer. Reality is an accident that passes across the mirror of his mind and makes images that interest him far more than the object that caused them. While he unfolds his metaphor the scene that he is describing is over and done with. The cavalry and the batteries and the mules are tramping down the street, ‘but all is dim’—

Only my dreams are still aglow, a throng

Of scenes that crowded through a waiting mind.

A myriad scenes: For I have swept along

To foam ashriek with gulls, and rowed behind

Brown oarsmen swinging to an ocean song

Where stately galleons bowed before the wind.

Some of the loveliest poems in the language have been produced in the manner that Mr Dearmer attempts, and a young poet venturing once more as Keats ventured commands our sympathy. But if the prize is of the greatest the undertaking is so perilous that it is no harsh criticism to say that Mr Dearmer’s imagination is neither strong enough nor trained enough to do the work he asks of it. The romantic poet lays heavier tasks upon his imagination than any other. The vision alone is not enough; he must see it in detail as well as hold it in mass; he must know when to release and when to restrain the words which flock too fast and freely. Mr Dearmer has a wide range of language, but he trusts too much to chance, as if beauty could be captured by a random fling, and twenty words wide of the mark made no difference provided six or seven fall moderately near. He slips too often into the habit of imaginative inaccuracy; he compares men dashing to their holes to ‘burrowing moles’; he says that gossamer clouds crossing the moon ‘scurrying ran’; he makes glow-worms ‘crawl excitedly’; he stuffs out his verse with such tags as ‘glad tidings’, ‘laughter of the main’, ‘jewelled night’. These instances may seem trivial, but they help to explain why it is that, though the effect of Mr Dearmer’s longer poems is vaguely fine and vigorous, the whole seems to be slackly or numbly grasped, or, as in ‘Gommecourt’ to reel itself off into rhetoric. The war, perhaps, has brought these pieces forth before their time; for, where he is forced to concentrate, as in his ‘Eight Sonnets’, he comes much nearer to writing poetry.

[Times Literary Supplement, Jul 11, 1918]

[]

A Practical Utopia.

[The New Moon. A Romance of Reconstruction (Hodder & Stoughton, 1918) by (George) Oliver Onions]

Mr Onions has undertaken a much more difficult task than that of making a Utopia. It is much easier to forecast what will happen in a hundred years’ time than in ten years’ time. A century gives you space in which to remould the world to your liking, but in ten years’ time England will be much the same as she is now—or only a little different.

Leaving the exact date undetermined Mr Onions supposes that the war is over; the period of reconstruction is in full swing. Dick Helme, who was wounded in the war, is now a member of the Canals and Water Power Section of the Imperial Transport Service. He is taking a convoy of motor lorries to their headquarters on the Severn, when Miss Betty Lygard, of the Sixth District of the Western Agricultural Area, asks him to give her a lift with her patent beehives and grindstones and bill-hooks. They have never met before, but by the time she is set down with her cases they have arranged to marry each other. You get the impression that these questions will be dispatched very plainly and efficiently in ten years’ time, as, indeed, there is not a minute to spare and not a farthing to waste. For the same reason each individual seems to be badged, numbered, and graded in the service of the State. The period of the blood-letting had exhausted England so far that new fabric had to be made from the very beginning. Every living creature was put to use. Every yard of land was turned to advantage. The power of electricity threaded the whole country. A picture of the scene on one of the main roads will serve to show the activity of the hive:

Half the population seemed to have become mobile. The towns were being eviscerated of their slums … And wherever there was a settlement or the nucleus of one or the site for one, there was traffic. Steam tractors drew the wagons loaded with building materials, six, and eight, and ten at a time. Lorries followed them with separators and churns, egg crates, and cheese wrings for the dairy services. Reapers and binders and cultivators followed these again drawn by horses. Along the main road, bands of workmen and labourers walked on foot, splitting into detachments, and scattering as they went. Then there was the furniture, the chars-à-bancs with families, loaded with bedding and birdcages …

It is a fascinating little model, but, as tends to be the case with all forecasts of this kind, too much stress seems to be laid upon the development of electricity and too little upon the development of humanity. The real triumph for the imagination would be to reveal the end that has been produced by these improved means. A conversation, for example, between a group of people in ten years’ time might show us more of the condition of England, than any enumeration of mechanical changes. What things do they take for granted? What startling announcements fall from them naturally? It is comparatively easy to imagine a town clear of smoke, or dinner raised by touching a switch, or an entire house run by a competent engineer in the basement. Perhaps we are meant to infer that the ancient stuff of human nature changes with extreme slowness, and that ten years (if we choose that period) even of such prodigious surface development as we have beheld can do but little to modify the natures of men. If we are to take Mr Onions for a prophet the change is in the direction of briefness, bluntness, and efficiency, as if more than half the attention of the race still went to control the machinery they have devised for saving time. And, clogging the free sweep of every reformer’s imagination are the masses of the uneducated upon whom no swift conjuring tricks of change can be performed. The form is necessarily rough and vague, but we can guess how Mr Onions intends his model to shape out. In the world of business there is to be the Amity, a confederation of business interests in alliance instead of competition; in the world of politics the machine is to be worked frankly by newspaper men as a business concern. We are to reach no Utopia in our time. We are to become more clear-sighted, more unselfish, and necessarily more hard-working. Those who find an absorbing interest in making models of the future will find a much greater store of raw material for their industry in The New Moon than we have been able to indicate. The solidity of the work is shown by the resentment with which in the last chapter we see the whole structure tumble down and dissolve into a dream.

[Times Literary Supplement, Aug 15, 1918]

[]

‘The Sad Years.’

[The Sad Years (Constable & Co. Ltd, 1918) by Dora Sigerson (Mrs Clement Shorter).]

More than half of the poetry which flowers in England seems to be grown from the same seed—the desire for self-expression. The seed, happily, is as various as the self. But through the screen of language and metre one can see plainly enough that the origin of the poem was a personal experience, too personal and disconnected from other experiences to be projected into a story or wrought into an argument. The presence of this element is one reason for finding most poetry, even most bad poetry, worth reading, and for reading it with a confusion of spirit such as the narrative of the writer’s experience if told in person would inspire. Nevertheless, we are inclined to attribute the unimportance of most verse to the same cause. There are the seeds of two poems, for instance, in the two statements that so-and-so was unhappy on Friday because it rained, and happy on Saturday because the sun was out; but unless our fount of sympathy is inexhaustible we get tired of a volume composed of these simple experiences of sunshine and rain. The mere fact of rhyming and scanning, like the fact of being in a confessional, somehow hallows what is written and said; so that all platitudes and confessions naturally seek the sanctuary of verse. Women are more prone than men to take refuge in this form of simple egotism, though for reasons, perhaps, that have more in common with modesty than conceit. They appear to be more shy of using their brains and of displaying their love of language in poetry than men of the same poetic gift. A simple statement, a mere cry, is enough, the argument seems to be, if you are writing poetry, and with luck it may turn out that you have written a masterpiece.

Something of this kind applies to Mrs Shorter’s work, although she was frequently almost lucky enough to make it seem a wise policy. ‘The gifts came to her out of the air, so to speak,’ writes Katharine Tynan, ‘real gifts and nothing acquired.’ We need not quarrel with the statement that her gifts were real. Every page of her book goes to prove it. The most severe of critics if asked for advice could only have advised her to go on writing poetry; and, indeed, it is likely that the woman who wrote the following verses would have written verses against all the dissuasion in the world:

I saw children playing, dancing in a ring,

Till a voice came calling, calling one away;

With sad backward glances she went loitering,

Hoping they would miss her and so cease to play.

Pettishly and pouting, ‘Tis not time to sleep,’

Sobbing and protesting, slowly she did go;

But her merry comrades they all run and leap,

Feeling not her absence, heeding not her woe.

The line that the critic might have taken would have been to urge her to concentrate, to enrich, to perfect, not to trust merely to ‘passionate emotion to give it wings’. For to arrive at art without any apprenticeship may, as Mrs Tynan says, make the word genius not inapplicable to those who so arrive; but the difficulty is to name these fortunate people. Mrs Shorter, moreover, interests us partly because she was not content with her gift for singing songs that seem to sing themselves. The ideas behind several of her poems are subtle and difficult, and have evidently broken through her powers of expression so that they remain sketches rather than completed poems. One need not grudge an occasional stumble caused by an honest inability to get the meaning into words. But this faultiness of technique helps to make her verse seem unduly personal; she cannot give her melancholy or her indignation the impersonal stamp which perfect expression bestows, so that we forget the particular grief and the particular writer.

With these reservations one must give her a high place among those writers whose gift is such that one is almost afraid to advise them to concentrate, to finish or to perfect, lest in so doing they should spoil. They have virtues which seem to give their work the charm and intimacy of the living voice. To their own contemporaries they often seem more sympathetic, because they are more on our level of feeling, than the aloof and the contemplative. In reading Mrs Shorter’s poetry, for instance, we are almost as much interested by her personality as we are by her poetry. We hardly know whether we like the verses we have quoted because they make us sympathise with her emotion or because we find them beautiful in themselves. The future of work marked by this twofold appeal is precarious, because its accent will scarcely be understood by a later age; but from that very reason arises much of its significance to us.

[Times Literary Supplement, Aug 29, 1918]

[]

The ‘Movie’ Novel.

[The Early Life and Adventures of Sylvia Scarlett (Martin Seeker, 1918) by Compton Mackenzie]

When we say that the adventures of Sylvia Scarlett are much more interesting than Sylvia Scarlett herself, we are recommending the book to half the reading public and condemning it in the eyes of the other half. There are people who require the heroines of their novels to be interesting, and they know by experience that the adventurous heroine is apt to be as dull in fiction as she is in life. It is true that adventurers are not dull in the ordinary sense of the word; they are monotonous, self-centred, serious, rather than dull. They have spun all their substance into adventure, and nothing remains of them but a frail shell inhabited by a very small creature with an enormous egotism and an overweening vanity. The charge may be just, yet there is a great deal to be said in praise of adventures themselves, and not a little relief in finding occasionally that people are not quite so interesting as writers are in the habit of insisting, in novels, that we shall find them. Perhaps Sylvia might have been interesting if she had ever had the time to set about it. She had her moments of introspection, as upon that occasion when she announced ‘I represent the original conception of the Hetaera—the companion. I don’t want to be made love to, and every man who makes love to me I dislike. If I ever do fall in love, I’ll be a man’s slave.’ But perhaps she was aware that being interesting was not in her line, as we are inclined to agree with her that it was not. At any rate, this reflection occurs in a momentary lull, and directly Mr Mackenzie catches her in the lazy pose of self analysis he gives a crack of his whip and sends her flying, as merrily as if she had never heard the word Hetaera, through the next hoop.

We cannot begin even to count those hoops. They are so many and so variously designed that a bare programme of the entertainment or a catalogue of the actors’ names would fill perhaps a score of columns. In very early youth Sylvia came to England dressed as a boy and christened Sylvester to share the shifts and adventures of her father, an absconding clerk, in the shadier suburbs of London. From the addresses of their lodgings and the names of their friends the experienced reader who has read, among other books, the novels of Dickens will gather what sort of life they led, and will even be able to improvise a certain amount of the conversation of Mrs Bullwinkle, Mrs Gowndry, Mr Monkley; and General Dashwood of Tinderbox Lane. But it is better and simpler to rely entirely upon Mr Mackenzie. He does it so fast and so deftly that merely to keep up with him is quite enough strain upon the faculties. He not only finds names for landladies, cabmen, mountebanks, actresses, tenors, managers, schoolmistresses, barons, clergymen, natives of Brazil, and maiden ladies living in villas appropriately named too, but he provides them with queer occupations, and clever things to say, let alone a number of surprising things to do. You can scarcely open the book anywhere without finding a cab bolting down Haverstock Hill with an eloping couple inside it, or a baboon escaping from Earl’s Court Exhibition, or an actor dropping dead, or a curtain going up, or a landlady being funny. Here is a shop incident to show how quickly it rattles along:

The confusion in the shop became general: Mr Gonner cut his thumb, and the sight of the blood caused a woman who was eating a sausage to choke; another customer took advantage of the row to snatch a side of bacon and try to escape, but another customer with a finer moral sense prevented him; a dog, who was sniffing in the entrance, saw the bacon on the floor and tried to seize it, but, getting his tail trodden upon by somebody, he took fright and bit a small boy who was waiting to change a shilling into coppers. Meanwhile Sylvia … jumped on to the first omnibus, (&c., &c.)

When we reached this point we seized the opportunity, not so much of being bored as of being out of breath, to reflect upon the propriety after all of using the word adventure. It is true that Sylvia is left on top of an omnibus bound for West Kensington without a penny in the world; she is young, beautiful, and friendless into the bargain; we have no idea what is going to become of her; why then do we refuse to call it an adventure? The obvious way to settle the question is to bring to mind Tom Jones, Moll Flanders, Isopel Berners, or the Flaming Tinman. These people may not be interesting either, but when any one of them has not a penny in the world it is a serious matter. Compared with Mr Mackenzie’s characters they are a slow-moving race—awkward, ungainly and simple-minded. But consider how many things we know about them, how much we guess, what scenes of beauty and romance we set them in, how much of England is their background—without a word of description perhaps, but merely because they are themselves. We can think about them when we are no longer reading the book. But we cannot do this with Mr Mackenzie’s characters; and the reason is, we fancy, that though Mr Mackenzie can see them once he can never see them twice, and, as in a cinema, one picture must follow another without stopping, for if it stopped and we had to look at it we should be bored. Now, it is a strange thing that no one has yet been seen to leave a cinema in tears. The cab horse bolts down Haverstock Hill and we think it a good joke; the cyclist runs over a hen, knocks an old woman into the gutter, and has a hose turned upon him. But we never care whether he is wet or hurt or dead. So it is with Sylvia Scarlett and her troupe. Up they get and off they go, and as for minding what becomes of them, all we hope is that they will, if possible, do something funnier next time. No, it is not a book of adventures; it is a book of cinema.

[Times Literary Supplement, Aug 29, 1918]

[]

War in the Village.

[The Village Wife’s Lament (Martin Seeker, 1918) by Maurice Hewlett. Reprinted: CW.]

Nowadays many whose minds have not been used to turn that way must stop and ponder what thoughts the country people carry with them to their work in the fields, or cogitate as they scrub the cottage floor. It is a matter for speculation and shyness since the gulf between the articulate and inarticulate is not to be crossed by facile questioning, and silence may seem after all the best we can offer by way of sympathy to people whose lives seem so mysteriously and for such ages steeped in silence. Thus Mr Hewlett has chosen one of the most difficult of tasks when he tries to think himself into the mind of the village wife, and to express thoughts ‘which she may never have formulated, but which, I am very sure, lie in her heart too deep for any utterance save that of tears’. He has succeeded, beyond doubt, in writing a terse, moving, and very sincere poem; but that it is the lament of a village woman for her shepherd husband killed in France, and for the baby whose death followed upon his death, we are not so sure.

Yet it would be difficult to say what quality we seek for in Mr Hewlett’s poem and find lacking. Where it would have been easy to offend there is no ground for offence; the conception is very dignified and as completely without a touch of the sentimentality, which the theme invites, as the language is almost equally free from the taint of the professional writer. The village wife has nothing idyllic about her. From her birth upwards she takes her share in what Mr Hewlett calls ‘the unending war’ waged from one generation to another by the sons and daughters of the poor. She scrubs and rinses and milks the cows year in and year out.

On winter mornings dark and hard,

White from aching bed,

There were the huddled fowls in yard

All to be fed.

My frozen breath stream’d from my lips,

The cows were hid in steam;

I lost sense of my finger-tips

And milkt in a dream.

Very finely and truly Mr Hewlett bases her life deep down among the roots of the earth; she grows among the other growing things, and the hills and woods of her parish are England and the world to her, and she has inherited from generations of village women who lived this life and knew its perils the morality upon which their lives were founded.

I learned at home the laws of Earth;

The nest-law that says,

Stray not too far beyond the hearth,

Keep truth always;

And then the law of sip and bite:

Work, that there may be some

For you who crowd the board this night,

And the one that is to come.

The laws are so for bird and beast,

And so we must live:

They give the most who have the least,

And gain of what they give.

For working women ’tis the luck,

A child on the lap;

And when a crust he learn to suck,

Another’s for the pap.

This hard natural life scarcely shares in the changes of the self-conscious world. It has grown so close to the earth and so shaped itself to the laws of nature that it might well remain unshaken for ever. But one summer evening the village wife hears one stranger say to another as he passes, ‘Then that means war’. From that moment her security is troubled, and by November, to her inexpressible bewilderment, her own house and happiness are at the mercy of a force so remote that, though it has power to take her husband from her, she can hardly figure to herself what the nature of it is. Her husband feels it, and goes; more strangely it takes not only his body, but makes unfamiliar all that she knew in his spirit. She hears that he is missing, and exclaims:

Missing! My man had been dead

Before he went away.

What, then, remains for her? Nothing but to ask perpetually those questions as to the reason and justice of these events which in the mind of a woman who has placed her trust in the rightness of the natural order have an extreme bitterness mixed with their bewilderment. She must puzzle out why the world has deceived her; why her right was not right after all.

The verses, as our quotations show, are plain, deeply felt, and often beautiful. But, for all their scrupulous care and regard for the truth, they strike us not so much as the thoughts and laments of the woman herself as the words of a very sympathetic spectator who is doing his best to express what he supposes must be there beneath the silence and at the heart of the tears. The argument has too much cogency, the thoughts follow each other in too orderly a fashion to be the cry of a woman bereft of husband and son. Perhaps it is coarseness—the quality that is the most difficult of all for the educated to come by—that is lacking. By coarseness we mean something as far removed from vulgarity as can be. We mean something vehement, full throated, carrying down in its rush sticks and stones and fragments of human nature pell-mell. That is what we miss in Mr Hewlett’s poem, fine though it is.

[Times Literary Supplement, Sep 12, 1918]

[]

The Rights of Youth.

[Joan and Peter. The Story of an Education (Cassell & Co. Ltd., 1918) by H.G. Wells]

The moralists of the nursery used to denounce a sin which went by the name of ‘talking at’, and was rendered the more expressive by the little stress which always fell upon the ‘at’, as if to signify the stabbing, jabbing, pinpricking nature of the sin itself. The essence of ‘talking at’ was that you vented your irritation in an oblique fashion which it was difficult for your victim to meet otherwise than by violence. This old crime of the nursery is very apt to blossom afresh in people of mature age when they sit down to write a novel. It blossoms often as unconsciously as we may suppose that the pearl blossoms in the breast of the oyster. Unfortunately for art, though providentially for the moralist, the pearl that is produced by this little grain of rancour is almost invariably a sham one.

In the early chapters of Joan and Peter there are a great many scenes and characters which seem to have been secreted round some sharp-edged grain which fate has lodged in the sensitive substance of Mr Wells’s brain. Lady Charlotte Sydenham had some such origin; so, too, had Miss Phoebe Stubland; the sketch of Arthur Stubland was due to a disturbance of the kind, and certainly the schoolmistresses of St George and the Venerable Bede had no other begetter. We catch ourselves wondering whether Mr Wells is any longer aware of the grotesque aspect of these figures of his, burdened as they are with the most pernicious or typical views of their decade, humped and loaded with them so that they can hardly waddle across the stage without coming painfully to grief. The conscientious reader will try to refer these burlesques to some such abstraction as the Anglican Church, or the vagaries of aimless and impulsive modernism in the eighteen-nineties; but if you are indolent you will be inclined to give up playing your part in the game of illusion, and to trifle with idle speculations as to the idiosyncrasies of Mr Wells. But soon the very crudeness of the satire leads us to make a distinction, and directly we are satisfied of its truth our irritation is spent and our interest aroused. Mr Wells is not irritated with these people personally, or he would have taken more pains to annoy them; he is irritated with the things they represent. Indeed, he has been so much irritated that he has almost forgotten the individual. He is sore and angry and exaggerated and abusive because the waste, the stupidity, the senility of our educational system have afflicted him as men are, for the most part, afflicted only by their personal calamities. He possesses the queer power of understanding that ‘the only wrongs that really matter to mankind are the undramatic general wrongs’, and of feeling them dramatically, as if they had wronged him individually. Here, he says, we have two children endowed with everything that the world most needs, and let us see what the world will make of them. What education have we to offer them? What are we able to teach them about the three great questions of sex and state and religion? First, he gluts his rage upon Lady Charlotte and Miss Phoebe Stubland, much to the detriment of the book, and then the matter is seriously taken in hand by Mr Oswald Stubland, V.C., a gallant gentleman with imaginative views upon the British Empire. He had believed that the Empire was the instrument of world civilisation, and that his duty in Central Africa was the duty of an enlightened schoolmaster. But when his health broke down he returned to the far more difficult task of educating two of the children of the Empire in the very metropolis of civilisation. He started off upon a pilgrimage to the schools and colleges of England, asking imaginative questions, and getting more and more dismayed at the answers he received.

Don’t you know that education is building up an imagination? I thought everybody knew that … Why is he to do Latin? Why is he to do Greek? … What will my ward know about Africa when you have done with him? … Will he know anything about the way the Royal Exchange affects the Empire? … But why shouldn’t he understand the elementary facts of finance?

This is a mere thimbleful from the Niagara which Mr Wells pours out when his blood is up. He throws off the trammels of fiction as lightly as he would throw off a coat in running a race. The ideas come pouring in whether he speaks them in his own person or lets Oswald have them, or quotes them from real books and living authorities, or invents and derides some who are not altogether imaginary. He does not mind what material he uses so long as it will stick in its place and is roughly of the shape and colour he wants. Fiction, you can imagine him saying, must take care of itself; and to some extent fiction does take care of itself. No one, at any rate, can make an inquiry of this sort so vivid, so pressing, so teeming and sprouting with suggestions and ideas and possibilities as he does; indeed, when he checks himself and exclaims, ‘But it is high time that Joan and Peter came back into the narrative,’ we want to cry out, ‘Don’t bother about Joan and Peter. Go on talking about education.’ We have an uneasy suspicion that Joan and Peter will not be nearly so interesting as Mr Wells’s ideas about their education and their destiny. But, after all, we know that Mr Wells is quite right when he says that it is time to bring them in. He would be shirking the most difficult part of his task if he left them out.

Like his own Oswald Stubland, Mr Wells ‘belongs to that minority of Englishmen who think systematically, whose ideas join on’. He has ‘built up a sort of philosophy for himself’, by which he does try his problems and with which he fits in such new ideas as come to him. He is not writing about education, but about the education of Joan and Peter. He is not isolating one of the nerves of our existence and tracing its course separately, but he is trying to give that nerve its place in the whole system and to show us the working of the entire body of human life. That is why his book attains its enormous bulk; and that is why, with all its sketchiness and crudeness and redundancy, its vast soft, billowing mass is united by a kind of coherency and has some relation to a work of art. If you could isolate the seed from which the whole fabric has sprung you would find it, we believe, to consist of a fiery passion for the rights of youth—a passion for courage, vitality, initiative, inventiveness, and all the qualities that Mr Wells likes best. And as Mr Wells can never think without making a picture of his thought, we do not have youth in the abstract, but Joan and Peter, Wilmington and Troop, Huntley and Hetty Reinhart. We have Christmas parties and dressings-up and dances and night clubs and Cambridge and London and real people disguised under fictitious names, and very bright covers on the chairs and Post-Impressionist pictures on the walls and advanced books upon the tables. This power of visualising a whole world for his latest idea to grow in is the power that gives these hybrid books their continuity and vitality.

But because Mr Wells’s ideas put on flesh and blood so instinctively and admirably we are able to come up close to them and look them in the face; and the result of seeing them near at hand is, as our suspicions assured us that it would be, curiously disappointing. Flesh and blood have been lavished upon them, but in crude lumps and unmodelled masses, as if the creator’s hand, after moulding empires and sketching deities, had grown too large and slack and insensitive to shape the fine clay of men and women. It is curious to observe, for example, what play Mr Wells is now constrained to make with the trick of modernity. It is as if he suspected some defect in the constitution of his characters and sought to remedy it with rouge and flaxen wigs and dabs of powder, which he is in too great a hurry nowadays to fix on securely or plaster in the right places. But if Joan and Peter are merely masquerading rather clumsily at being the heirs of the ages, Mr Wells’s passion for youth is no make-believe. The sacrifice, if we choose to regard it so, of his career as a novelist has been a sacrifice to the rights of youth, to the needs of the present moment, to the lives of the rising generation. He has run up his buildings to house temporary departments of the Government. But if he is one of those writers who snap their fingers in the face of the future, the roar of genuine applause which salutes every new work of his more than makes up, we are sure, for the dubious silence, and possibly the unconcealed boredom, of posterity.

[Times Literary Supplement, Sep 19, 1918]

[]

Mr Hudson’s Childhood.

[Far Away and Long Ago. A History of my Early Life (J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1918) by W.H. Hudson.]

Since in this account of his childhood Mr Hudson speculates as to the origin of certain childish instincts, one may perhaps suitably begin what one has to say of his book by recalling a childish impression which his writing has brought to mind. Between or behind the dense and involved confusion which grown-up life presented there appeared for moments chinks of pure daylight in which the simple, unmistakable truth, the underlying reason, otherwise so overlaid and befogged, was revealed. Such seasons, or more probably seconds, were of so intense a revelation that the wonder came to be how the truth could ever again be overcast, as it certainly would be overcast directly this lantern-like illumination went out. Somehow or other Mr Hudson writes as if he held his lantern steadily upon this simple, unmistakable truth, and had never been deluded or puzzled or put off by the confusions which overlay it. It is an effect that the great Russian writers produce far more commonly than the English, and may perhaps be connected with the surroundings of their childhood, so different both for Mr Hudson and for the Russians from the surroundings of the ordinary English childhood. Therefore one is reluctant to apply to Mr Hudson’s book those terms of praise which are bestowed upon literary and artistic merit, though needless to say it possesses both. One does not want to recommend it as a book so much as to greet it as a person, and not the clipped and imperfect person of ordinary autobiography, but the whole and complete person whom we meet rarely enough in life or in literature.

But Mr Hudson himself provides one clue to the secret which we have clumsily tried to prise open. He has been saying that it is difficult not ‘to retouch, and colour, and shade, and falsify’ the picture of childhood by the light of what we have since become. Serge Aksakoff, he goes on to say, in his History of My Childhood, was an exception ‘simply because the temper and tastes and passions of his early boyhood—his intense love of his mother, of nature, of all wildness, and of sport—endured unchanged in him to the end and kept him a boy in heart, able after long years to revive the past mentally and picture it in its true, fresh, and original colours’. That is true also of Mr Hudson. When he writes of himself as a little boy he does not get out of his large body into a small different one, or fall into that vein of half-humorous and romantic reverie which the recollection of our small predecessor usually inspires. The little boy whom he remembers was already set with even fresher passion upon the same objects that Mr Hudson has sought all his life. Therefore he has not to reconstruct himself, but only to intensify. It seems, too, as if it must be the easiest thing in the world to remember clearly such a childhood as his was, spent not in some cranny, artificially scooped out of the grown-up world, but in a place naturally fitted and arranged for it. His father lived in a vast house on ‘the illimitable grassy plain of South America’, at a little distance from a plantation of various kinds of trees which were the nesting-place of many different birds. A man upon horseback raised three or four feet above the surrounding level would see all round

a flat land, its horizon a perfect ring of misty blue colour, where the crystal blue dome of the sky rests on the level green world … On all this visible world there were no fences and no trees excepting those which had been planted at the old estancia houses, and these being far apart the groves and plantations looked like small islands of trees, or mounds, blue in the distance, on the great plain or pampa … The picture that most often presents itself is of the cattle coming home in the evening; the green quiet plain extending away from the gate to the horizon; the western sky flushed with sunset hues, and the herd of four or five hundred cattle trotting homewards with loud lowings and bellowings, raising a great cloud of dust with their hoofs, while behind gallop the herdsmen urging them on with wild cries.

One is inclined to hold the view, indeed, that parents of children have no business to live anywhere except on the pampas of South America. For beyond the daily ecstasy of living out of doors, fate seems to have seen to it that the few human beings who wandered into the large house as guests, beggars or tutors summed up in their persons the most marked characteristics of humanity. There was Captain Scott, captain of what is unknown, but an Englishman of immense bulk, ‘with a great round face of a purplish red colour’, dressed always in a light blue suit, who would arrive with his pockets bulging with sweets from the distant land where sweets were made, and stand, ‘looking […] like a vast blue pillar,’ motionless upon the bank, rod in hand. Unknown in origin, he disappeared to an unknown fate, ‘yet in my mind how beautiful his gigantic image looks!’ Then every seven or eight weeks the Hermit arrived, to beg not money but food, which he would take only in the form of flawless biscuits, for should they be chipped or cracked he would have none of them. He was supposed to have committed some terrible crime, which he expiated by wearing a very thick mattress stuffed with sticks, stones, lumps of clay, horns, and other heavy objects, enough to weigh down two men, which he dragged about with him, in penance for what no one knew, since he could speak no intelligible language and died under his mattress alone on the plains without confessing the nature of his crime. The supply of tutors in the pampas was also limited to men who had mysterious reasons of their own, whether it was a devotion to white Brazilian rum or difficulties with the Roman Catholic Church, for choosing a nomadic life and being unable to retain their employment for long. Mr Trigg, for example, ‘followed teaching because all work was excessively irksome to him’, and was hired by the month, like the shepherd or the cowman, to teach children their letters, until his failing found him out, and in spite of his delightful social gifts and his passion for reading Dickens aloud, he had to take his horse again and ride off with a bag containing all his possessions over the plains.

With reluctance one must resist the temptation of transcribing one such character sketch after another, not only because the transcription damages the pleasure of coming upon the page itself, but also because to give the impression that the book is mainly composed of such sketches would not be true. The remarkably handsome young gentleman with a wash-leather bag attached to his wrist who threw pebbles at small birds on the Parade at Buenos Aires, the immensely fat lady who sat perpetually on a cane chair attended by four hairless dogs, the three on the floor ‘ever patiently waiting for their respective turns to occupy the broad warm lap’, the stranger who played divinely on the guitar but could not go on playing for thinking of his own family in Spain, Don Gregorio with his passion for breeding piebald horses and his rage against anyone possessed of such an animal who refused to sell it—all these figures met the eyes of the observant little boy, and are faithfully presented as the sort of thing that you saw if you looked up in South America from the absorbing business of life. For he was a child, almost a baby, when he discovered instinctively what was the business, or rather the spirit, of life, the string upon which all sights and thoughts and adventures were hereafter to be threaded. He begins as a small child who notices things in the bulk to gaze at the trees in the plantation. It was a ‘wonderful experience to be among them, to feel and smell their rough, moist, bark, stained green with moss, and to look up at the blue sky through the network of interlacing twigs’. Then those trees became full of birds, and Mr Hudson is constantly tempted to make ‘this sketch of my first years a book about birds and little else’. He resists the temptation, but, like all writers of strong individuality, a colour gets into his pages apart from the actual words, and even when they are not mentioned we seem to see the bird flying, settling, feeding, soaring through every page of the book. There are the immensely tall white-and-rose-coloured birds of earliest memory who stand feeding in the river and then shake out their wings, which are of a glorious crimson colour; then the resounding screams of the travelling parrots are heard, and they appear, flying at a moderate height, ‘with long pointed wings and long graduated tails, in their sombre green plumage touched with yellow, blue, and crimson colour’. These are the birds of earliest childhood, and from them his dreams spring and by them his images are coloured in later life. Riding at first seemed to him like flying. When he is first among a crowd of well-dressed people in Buenos Aires he compares them at once to a flock of military starlings. From watching birds comes his lifelong desire to fly—but it is a desire which no airship or balloon but the wings of a bird alone will satisfy. Later these first impressions were intensified by his habit of rambling off alone and standing motionless, staring at vacancy as his mother, following him in anxiety for his state of mind, supposed; but to her joy she found that he was not staring at vacancy, but observing ‘an insect perhaps, but oftener a bird’.

And yet if we were to say that on this account Mr Hudson’s book is written chiefly for naturalists it would not be true. The naturalist will see the bird accurately enough, but he will not see it in relation to the tree, to the small boy, to the strange characters of the plain; nor will the bodies of birds represent for him that mysterious spirit which Mr Hudson, for some reason that psychologists must explain, finds in all nature, but in birds particularly. Because Mr Hudson is able to do all this, to read his book is to read another chapter in that enormous book which is written from time to time by Rousseau and Borrow and George Sand and Aksakoff among other people—a book which we can never read enough of; and therefore we must beg Mr Hudson not to stop here, but to carry the story on to the farthest possible limits.

[Times Literary Supplement, Sep 26, 1918]

[]

Caution and Criticism.

[Modern English Writers: Being a Study of Imaginative Literature 1890–1914 (Sidgwick & Jackson Ltd, 1918) by Harold Williams. Reprinted: CW.]

One is inclined to say that if Mr Williams had been less impartial and less conscientious he would have written a better, at least a more readable, book. If, like most historians of modern literature, he had written to prove a theory or impose a view of art, the 360-odd writers whose works he examines in these pages would have merged themselves magically in an orderly pattern, which, whether fallacious or not, we should have taken in at a glance. As it is each of these writers stands obstinately a little apart from his fellow; and when Mr Williams, drawing back and half closing his eyes, tries to resolve them into schools or tendencies he is forced to confess, being an honest man, that he can see nothing but individuals. That he set out in the hope of reducing them to some kind of order is obvious from the opening pages of his book. The year 1890, he does his best to insist, was the year in which the Victorianism of the Victorian age virtually, or practically, or to some extent, passed away; but as it was not of one texture, nor disappeared all at once, owing to the longevity of George Meredith and other causes, nothing so dramatic as a fresh age could immediately succeed it. It was replaced gradually by a patchwork of influences—the significance of Oscar Wilde’s aestheticism, the aims of the Yellow Book, and the Savoy; the influence of W.E. Henley; and the ideals of the Celtic revival in Ireland. Under these banners we have with qualifications and exceptions, and, of course, with innumerable inter-alliances and reactions, fought until that other convenient date—August 1914.

This general statement being very guardedly and tentatively laid down, Mr Williams proceeds to examine into the cases of particular writers and finds before very long that it is impossible to keep them even within these sufficiently elastic boundaries. As early as page 68 he finds it necessary to content himself with the study of separate writers whose aims become increasingly individual and disconnected. Then a rough chronological order is attempted, and at one point it seems as if the novelists were to be grouped, not according to their age, but according to their worthlessness. It becomes, indeed, more and more evident, as Mr Williams says, that ‘we are reading with our eyes too close to the book to see the print distinctly’. Hampered by this drawback, and having no ulterior reward to offer himself in the shape of an aesthetic theory, Mr Williams is indefatigable and undaunted. His zeal is comparable to the zeal of the scientist who examines innumerable specimens and yet allows himself to draw no conclusions. The examination, too, seems to be equally thorough, whether the specimen is as rare and curious as Mr Conrad, or as commonplace and abundant as writers whom we refrain from mentioning. His singular lack or disregard of personal preferences leads him to pronounce carefully balanced judgments upon books which, so far as we can see, no more deserve description than the dandelions of the year before last.

A forgotten writer called Henry Dawson Lowry was once apparently compared by his admirers to Keats and Heine. Mr Williams in his careful way finds space to assure us that he has nothing ‘of Heine’s wayward strength, nothing of Keats’s wealth of language and picturesque decorativeness,’ as if we were still in danger of wrecking ourselves upon that obsolete rock. Books whose writers alone can have any interest in their fate are carefully compared, their plots often analysed, and their final worth summed up in phrases which, if they censure, are generally moderately encouraging at the same time. ‘Mr O’Sullivan has no affectation of startling originality, but he is rarely wholly commonplace.’ ‘Auguries (1913) contains grave and regular verse embodying the not too eager musings and emotions of a cultivated, thoughtful, but not original, mind.’ ‘Her verse is never enhanced by those sudden and illuminating felicities of phrase and thought which mark greater poetry … but, on the other hand, she is not frequently disconcertingly empty of matter, and her sentiment rarely degenerates to insipidity.” Such things have no doubt to be said in the world we live in, but we have always been sanguine enough to hope that the succeeding week strewed oblivion upon them.

But, making allowance for a certain formal remoteness of manner, which is, no doubt, inevitable considering the numbers to be surveyed, Mr Williams’s judgment is uniformly fair and his mind singularly open. He finds a good word not only for Mr Bennett and Mr Wells, but for Mr Tirebuck and Miss Milligan. Most writers, again, set upon a task of such labour would by some means have deluded themselves into the belief that a good number of their vast flock of geese were swans. But Mr Williams is singularly without illusions. He reminds us that ‘at the beginning of the twenty-first century, in all probability, the great number of the poets named in this book, with all their poems, will only be matter for comparative study by the literary expert’.

As to the novelists. Of those who find a place here the greater number will be forgotten in a few decades.’ In a mood of intelligible pessimism he tells us indeed that it is better ‘to read contemporary verse for the joy and inspiration it may afford us individually, untroubled by any desire to speak or write of it’. Nevertheless, Mr Williams has been troubled to write, and to some purpose, for though the lack of complete bibliographies and the insufficiency of the biographies will not suit students who seek exact information, a foreigner wishing to take a bird’s-eye view of modern English literature will find Mr Williams a safe guide.

[Times Literary Supplement, Oct 3, 1918]

[]

Adventurers All.

[The Cockpit of Idols (Methuen & Co. Ltd, 1918) by Muriel Stuart;
The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems (B.H. Blackwell, 1918) by Aldous Huxley;
Clowns’ Houses (B.H. Blackwell, 1918) by Edith Sitwell;
Songs for Sale. An Anthology of Recent Poetry (B.H. Blackwell, 1918) ed. E.B.C. Jones.]

Miss Stuart comes very near to being a poet, and if she fails it is, we believe, because she cherishes some old superstitious belief about the sanctity of inspiration; her Muse is an inspired figure with wild locks and a bandage round her eyes. The power of feeling emotion quickly and strongly is a great one and Miss Stuart has, in addition to this, an unusual power of putting her emotions, and also, for she thinks as well as feels, her ideas, into words that express them both beautifully and freely. For example, we might quote, although it is scarcely fair to quote single passages from a long poem, this from ‘The Cockpit of Idols’:

And while these gods in the great shambles die,

Thrust on each other’s spears,

He, nameless and unchallenged, wanders by

In every tree that peers

Into the wizard darkness of the hill,

And in each tarn most deeply contemplates

The image of His beauty, lingers still

To twist again the purfled clover’s ears,

World-weary feet He cools

Where windless noons lie bathing in the pools,

Or takes His solitude

Where, in the purple cloak of twilight, waits

The moon to pierce the solitary wood.

But too often at the height of her mood, when the utmost discretion and vigilance are needed, she seems to resign herself merely to utter words, herself accepting no responsibility for the sense or beauty or fitness of what is said. The common notion that poetry is something wild, emphatic, uttered in a shriek rather than in a singing or speaking voice, has persuaded her to pitch her normal tone so loud that when she wishes to be specially emphatic there is nothing for it but to coin monstrous superlative superlatives such as ‘this most unquietest heart’ or these ‘most forlornest shells’, to rely upon the fortifying effect of capital letters, or upon a violence of imagery which jerks the whole stanza out of perspective. But faults of taste are not the worst of faults, and Miss Stuart proves, in such a poem as the quiet and beautiful ‘Heliodore’, that she can free herself from them completely and remarkably.

The connection between Miss Stuart and Mr Huxley is the obvious one that they have nothing in common. The one is strong precisely where the other is weak. Miss Stuart has too many ideas and emotions, and is too careless as to what she does with them. But after reading the first few poems in Mr Huxley’s little book it is clear that any idea or emotion that comes to him has the best possible chance of surviving beautifully. The criticism implied is, of course, that he is better equipped with the vocabulary of a poet than with the inspiration of a poet. He writes about the things he has thought and seen rather than about things he has felt, and in rendering them he shows a facility which begins by charming, but ends, as verse that relies so much upon happy adjectives is always apt to end, by running fluently to waste. The advice that one is inclined to give to an urbane and cultivated writer of his quality is to cease to use poetry in the serious, traditional manner, and to use it instead to explore those fantastic, amusing, or ironical aspects of life which can only be expressed by people of high technical skill and great sensibility. Mr Huxley proves himself, in verses like ‘Social Amenities’, ‘Topiary’, or ‘On the ’Bus’, quite capable of doing this:

Sitting on the top of the ’bus,

I bite my pipe and look at the sky.

Over my shoulder the smoke streams out

And my life with it.

‘Conservation of energy,’ you say.

But I burn, I tell you, I burn;

And the smoke of me streams out

In a vanishing skein of grey.

Crash and bump … my poor bruised body!

I’m a harp of twittering strings.

An elegant instrument, but infinitely second-hand,

And if I have got phthisis it is only an accident.

Droll phenomena!

If by a chance, which is not so improbable as at first sight appears, Miss Sitwell’s teapot reminded her first of the Tower of London and then of Joan of Arc she would say so without hesitation or consistency. The moon in one poem reminds her of a milk-white unicorn; in the next ‘nurse’s white gown’ shines through the trees like a unicorn of unspecified colour. For the most part we believe that Miss Sitwell is trying her best to be honest with her own conceptions, and, that being so, she is of course perfectly right not to care whether they appear outlandish, farfetched, or startling upon the printed page. But honesty of imagery is, after all, only the groundwork of writing. When you are sure that the sea is ‘sequined with noisy light’ or that ‘colours like a parokeet Shrill loudly to the chattering heat’, you still have to decide what whole you wish to build up with these vivid or remarkable or unexpected phrases. By themselves they are little more than bright colours. But at this stage of her career the chief thing that Miss Sitwell has to tell us about the world is that it is extremely bright and very noisy. The air is brittle and bright as glass; ‘plush mantles seemed to purr’; people are bright sparks; sound becomes substance, and sight becomes sound. There is almost invariably a brass band playing in the sun and tight green parasols reflect the blare of the brass. Miss Sitwell owes a great deal to modern painters, and until her optic nerve has ceased to be dazzled it is difficult to say how interesting her vision is.

Green apples dancing in a wash of sun—

Ripples of sense and fun—

A net of light that waves as it weaves

The sunlight on the chattering leaves;

The half-dazed sound of feet,

And carriages that ripple in the heat.

The parasols like shadows of the sun

Cast wavering shades that run

Across the laughing faces and across

Hair with a bird-bright gloss.

The swinging greenery cast shadows dark,

Hides me that I may mark

How, buzzing in this dazzling mesh, my soul

Seems hardening it to flesh, and one bright whole.

O sudden feathers have a flashing sheen!

The sun’s swift javelin

The bird-songs seem, that through the dark leaves pass;

And life itself is but a flashing glass,

That is proof that she can make charming ornaments already; in imitation of her manner we might liken them to the stiff china dogs that stand on farmhouse mantelpieces. But manner in the young is a form of paralysis, and already Miss Sitwell repeats her favourite adjectives and similes so often as to suggest that she is becoming prematurely imprisoned within the walls of her own style. She is too vigorous a writer to rest content with making china dogs indefinitely.

If you should buy the little anthology of recent poetry edited by Mr Jones in the expectation of being brought into touch with the youngest and most revolutionary of modern poets you will, according to your temperament, be disappointed or relieved. Here is nothing to surprise and nothing to shock. The general attitude which we should have tried to define is very well expressed for us by Mr Earp:

I have been reading books

For about twenty years;

I have laughed with other men’s laughter,

Wept with their tears.

Life has been a cliché

All these years.

I would find a gesture of my own.

Of course there are exceptions. Mr Betts in ‘The Pawns’ writes not only very well, but with a good deal of meaning; Mr Jones has an imagination which is trying to express itself; Miss Bridges does exquisitely what it is no disparagement to say that her father has done more exquisitely still; and we can see no reason to think that Miss Sitwell has spent even a fraction of Mr Earp’s twenty years in reading other people’s books. But, speaking generally; [generally,] the poets here represented in such modest quantities seem to be dealing with emotions received from books in language learnt from books. We must wait a little longer for that ‘gesture of my own’.

[Times Literary Supplement, Oct 10, 1918]

[]

Honest Fiction.

[Shops and Houses (Methuen & Co. Ltd, 1918) by Frank Swinnerton]

Shops and Houses is one of those books which by their health and robustness should confute those who hold that English fiction is in a languid or degenerate condition. There can be no reason for despondency or for disparaging comparisons when novels of such care and conscience and ability are produced, not of course in any quantity, but still by a small and undaunted band of writers, among whom we must now place Mr Swinnerton. He is among the group of honest observers of contemporary life who filter their impressions sedulously and uncompromisingly through the intellect and suffer nothing to pass save what possesses meaning and solidity.

It is not necessary that Mr Swinnerton should say anything very strange or very unpleasant in Shops and Houses. He sets out to show us the life in a suburb not far from London where the men work in the city all day and the women spend their time ordering their households, going to tea parties, and buying things in shops. Mr Swinnerton takes up his position upon a little mound of intellectual honesty, from which he observes and according to which he judges. Perhaps there once happened to him what happened to his hero Louis Vechantor at the Hughes’s tea party. ‘… He seemed for a moment to lose consciousness […] The tea-table chatter sounded like a confused roaring of a crowd some distance away … Their laughter seemed to him like the grinning of skulls … Louis had never fainted, or he would have known that a curious sweet remoteness precedes the total loss of sensation. It was just that feeling of being apart and contemplative that had assailed him.’ Shops and Houses may well have had its origin in some such moment of remoteness at a tea party, but, having seen his vision, Mr Swinnerton set to work to search out and verify every detail that went to compose the large effect; and as each was received it was tested by a standard which we may roughly describe as the standard of intellectual honesty. How did they live, what did they live for, what were these healthy unemployed young women, these indolent elderly ladies, after? He has discovered an astonishing number of very minute facts as to the manner in which the ladies of Beckwith perform their chief occupation in life—the ‘consumption of precious time’. He is with them when they wish to attract, and when they cease to wish to attract; he observes their attempts to marry or to prevent marriage; he sees them piecing together into interminable romances little shreds of gossip picked from the dust-heap. He examines the process by which the public opinion of Beckwith is formed, and traces it in operation upon a case specially submitted to it. How would Beckwith, he asks, deal with the case of a respectable resident’s disreputable cousin who has the effrontery to set up a grocer’s shop in Beckwith itself? By means of details and fragments he has set working a model Beckwith which performs all the functions of spending time with the regularity of an ant-heap; or, since the activity of an ant-heap has some direction, with the automatic accuracy of a decapitated duck. Moreover, he has created what he dissects. He is not only the ‘disembodied and cruel spectator’; he has enough sympathy to show us, at any rate through the eyes of Louis Vechantor, that there were possibilities and varieties among the people of Beckwith which make them momentarily attractive and intermittently pathetic.

But although there are passages of hope, Beckwith does not pass the test; Beckwith is shown up; as Dorothy Vechantor, who is appointed to wind up the spiritual affairs of Beckwith, says, ‘I’ve been thinking whether perhaps Beckwith … that it isn’t altogether a place at all. I mean whether it isn’t a sort of disease’. In saying this she lays her finger not only upon the deficiency of Beckwith, but upon the deficiency which Shops and Houses shares with so many other novels of the intellectual school. Beckwith is proved to be a disease: it has failed to pass any of the tests which Mr Swinnerton so honestly and acutely applies; it is snobbish and vulgar, cruel, stupid, without worth, rhyme, or reason. Nevertheless, with all these proofs of its spiritual bankruptcy before us, we still remain unconvinced. Our lack of conviction is not, as at first sight appears, because of the incredible meanness and insignificance of the crimes cited against the inhabitants, although their minuteness certainly diminishes their power to affect us; we cannot believe that Beckwith is merely a disease because we cannot accept Mr Swinnerton’s view of what constitutes health. Louis Vechantor and Dorothy, the daughter of the grocer, the grocer William, and the grocer’s family are the representatives of sincerity and humanity. They are capable of thought and capable of love. They are the martyrs whom Beckwith half succeeds in pelting to death with its grains of spite; it is to them that we look with confidence to champion the human cause. And it is precisely these characters who fail us. Those scenes which should show us the honesty and energy of life removed from the burden of false convention are the weakest in the book. It is by their failure that we are led to doubt whether honesty and intelligence will really do all that the intellectual novelist claims for them, and whether because of their absence we are entitled to blot a whole suburb from the map. Perhaps there are other qualities, other aims, other desires which make even Miss Lampe of Station Road a little more complex than an agitated ant or a decapitated duck? Perhaps there is more in marriage, love, friendship, beauty than Mr Swinnerton altogether conveys? But, we repeat, it is a great thing that Beckwith should be destroyed; it is a most valuable work.

[Times Literary Supplement, Oct 10, 1918]

[]

Valery Brussof.

[The Republic of the Southern Cross and Other Stories … with an introduction by Stephen Graham (Constable & Co. Ltd, 1918) by Valery Brussof]

If we had no means of knowing that this book was the work of a Russian writer, should we guess from something indefinable in the quality of the writer’s mind, from his style and his point of view, that he was at any rate not English? We think it very doubtful. Valery Brussof is, so Mr Graham tells us, ‘a sort of Mediterraneanised Russian, with greater affinities in France and Italy than in his native land’; and besides, judging from this book of short stories, he is not a great writer: he does not hint at something more than he can state, or imply a whole of which he is only a part. Yet, though one could find his match for power within these islands, he has a quality which distinguishes him from the mass of good story-writers, in that he has a point of view. He has expressed his belief that ‘there is no fixed boundary between the world of reality and that of the imagination, between the dreaming and the waking world, life and fantasy’; and the stories in the present volume all more or less give shape to his notion that the things commonly held to be visionary may be real, while the reality may equally well be a phantom. In England this train of thought is certainly not unknown in fiction; but we are apt to relegate it, a little nervously perhaps, to certain writers who make a study of the supernatural and by divorcing it from normal life envelop it in an atmosphere of emotional mysticism. Brussof’s method is the exact opposite of this. As Mr Graham points out, he ‘is not emotionally convinced of the truth of his writing, but wilfully persistent, affirming unreality intellectually and defending his conception with a sort of masculine impressionism’.

Stated as he states it with hard intellectual power, there is no reason to question the truth of his assertion that the most vivid part of many lives is spent in a region invisible to the eyes of the rest of the world. The little Roman girl Maria, for instance, spent the greater part of her life dreaming that she was a reincarnation of Rhea Silvia, until she believed it so completely that she drowned herself in the Tiber; another woman lives her true life in communication with her own reflection in a mirror; a third endows the pens and papers in a stationer’s shop with the qualities of living creatures, and loves them accordingly. In the literal and urgent way in which Brussof pursues his search through these shades there are signs that remind us that he comes of the race which approaches such subjects with magnificent seriousness and without sentimentality. Rather than invoke a supernatural power or any sensational agency, he explains these queer obsessions on the part of his characters by telling us that they were known to be weak-minded people or were actually confined to lunatic asylums. To doubt whether you are awake or dreaming, to be unable to decide whether you are real or a reflection, to get more pleasure from what you imagine than from what is true, is to be mad. But Brussof saw, of course, that this is no explanation at all. ‘Is not our craziness,’ he makes his Roman lovers ask, ‘better than the reasonable life of other people?’ How does it differ, and who is to decide, after all, which things are real, which are unreal, what constitutes sanity and insanity?

But although it is interesting to find how firmly and even prosaically this creed is held by a mind which is neither emotional nor mystical, the theme has no special artistic merit, and easily becomes a formula which is not more interesting than any other. On the other hand, the stories which deal with the borderland between sanity and insanity are of far greater value, if only because they are more subtly graded and do not end in the convenient cul-de-sac of the mad house. They hint at least at the strange balancing and checking of dreams and realities that goes on in the minds of those who are able only by semi-conscious adjustments to behave in the same way as other people. There is the case of the old tramp who has stolen the bust of a woman’s head because it reminded him of a woman he had once loved. He is asked whether he will not attempt to get an acquittal, and he answers, ‘But why? … isn’t it just the same where I shall think about Nina—in a doss-house or in a prison? … One thing worries me (he adds) What if Nina never existed?’ That is a dilemma which is always being dealt with by the mind: what is reality, and why are we so eager about things that are created for the most part chiefly by our own imaginations? Brussof does no more, and perhaps is unable to do more, than hint at the irrational element which, when we come to examine them, is so profoundly mixed with the most rational desires of ordinary people. But the fact that he has chosen to shift the weight of interest from the beaten track to this obscure and nebulous region of the mind’s territory certainly makes him very well worth reading.

[Times Literary Supplement, Oct 24, 1918]

[]

The Rough Road.

[The Rough Road by William J. Locke (John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1918).]

In Mr W.J. Locke’s The Rough Road the question is, Was Doggie Trevor a ‘pom’ or a mastiff? Appearances were at first sight against him; he played the flute; he was an authority upon wall-papers; he had the finest collection of china dogs in England; and he slept in green silk pyjamas. In his genial way Mr Locke spends his first hundred pages in positively smothering his hero in effeminacies; he is devoted to music; his books are bound in white vellum; lawn tennis tires him; he never drinks; he never swears; he dresses for dinner; his robust cousin Oliver puts the matter in a nutshell when he assures him that he has no idea ‘how men talk to one another in a gale of wind.’ But, according to Mr Locke, almost every one had forgotten that art in the opening years of the twentieth century. ‘We were in danger of perishing from fatty degeneration of the soul. As it was, it took a year or more of war to cure us.’ The great charm of Mr Locke’s work lies in the assurance that is wafted us by innumerable touches of irrepressible good nature that the worse the disease the more certain the cure; the darker the cloud the brighter the lining; the steeper the hill—but Mr Locke puts it at greater length and more persuasively than we can. His difficulty lies always in the first part of the proposition. It is amusing to see how persistently in spite of every effort his faith in human nature keeps breaking in. At Doggie’s worst, ‘be it said that he held his word sacred’; at his most degraded ‘he was always responsive to human kindness.’ Mr Locke can hardly stay his hand until the outbreak of war to begin that process of unveiling and vindication and making good in which he delights so heartily that we can scarcely help enjoying it too.

Soon after the war Doggie found a white feather upon his breakfast table. The shock cracks the shell of his soul, which is born soon afterwards in a very cramped and bedraggled condition upon drinking a glass of whisky and water for the first time. He applies for a commission, which he is forced very soon to resign, and his further experiences as a private are as broken and as painful as Mr Locke has the heart to make them. But in spite of every obstacle he improves steadily. By degrees he gives up music and reading and the rest of his ‘æsthetic superficialities,’ so that the stages of his pilgrimage may be said to be marked by tumblers of whisky and natural outbursts of bad language—the outward signs of his conversion to manliness, good fellowship, and democratic convictions. The liveliness of the narrative is such that even a teetotaller must smile and the misanthropist own himself beaten. To every character in the book the war brings some treasure of sorrow or discipline, so that they end either happier or better than they began, and the only person who is killed is the rough cousin Oliver, who, being originally able to talk to men in a gale of wind, is perhaps incapable of further advancement. Nor is there any need to fear that Doggie will ever take to the habits of a toy dog again. In the first place, he has pledged himself to reconstruct the world after the war; and in the second, he is married to a French wife, who not only ‘personifies the heroic womanhood of France,’ but believes that it is the peculiar mission of women to see that heroes are kept permanently up to the scratch.

[Times Literary Supplement, unsigned, Oct 24, 1918]

[]

‘The Candle of Vision.’

[The Candle of Vision (Macmillan & Co., Ltd, 1918) by A.E., pseudonym of George William Russell]

The reader may perhaps remember the experience of reading Thomas à Kempis, or The Love Letters of a Portuguese Nun precociously before he was of an age to understand either religion or love. He will remember the inarticulate thunder of the words drumming so persistently and remorselessly upon the immature understanding that at length the book was thrown away not so much in boredom as a kind of exasperated humility. Occasionally The Candle of Vision produces the same desperate sense of obtuseness, as it reiterates passionately a belief which remains just beyond the doors of our perception. ‘A.E.’ has constant experience of certain spiritual states which are as remote from the ordinary person as the religious ecstasies of a saint are remote from a child. He is able by the exercise of his will to bring about some mental enlightenment in which perceptions and visions appear to him and dictate a different reading of life and a different relationship with other human beings. In the present book he desires, as he says, ‘to be precise’; to analyse these experiences psychologically, and to induce others to make the same attempt.

All such revelations are at the present time bound to be inconclusive, to be contradictory, to make use of language which is highly metaphorical, and to be almost as unsatisfying as they are rich in suggestions. Where there is no argument and no proof one can only by quotation hint vaguely at the line ‘A.E.’ takes through the crowd of his spiritual experiences. At about the age of sixteen or seventeen ‘the mysterious life quickening within my life’ began for him. Magical lights dawned and faded in him, as they do, he believes, in every one of us. He wished to obtain mastery over them, and for this purpose set himself the task of concentrating his mind upon some mental object, ‘so that not for a moment, not for an instant, would the concentration slacken … Five minutes of this effort will at first leave us trembling as at the close of a laborious day.’ The habit of concentration having been won, he found himself in possession of a power of immense force for good or for evil.

But the ancients who taught us to gain this intensity taught it but as a preliminary to a meditation … The meditation they urged on us has been explained as ‘the inexpressible yearning of the inner man to go out into the infinite’. But the Infinite we would enter is living. It is the ultimate being of us. Meditation is a fiery brooding on that majestical Self. We imagine ourselves into Its vastness. We conceive ourselves as mirroring Its infinitudes, as moving in all things, as living in all beings, in earth, water, air, fire, aether … We have imagined ourselves into this pitiful dream of life. By imagination and will we re-enter true being, becoming that we conceive of. On that path of fiery brooding I entered.

Then there follow the dreams and the visions, the sudden illuminations of the text of a book, the cathedral filled with ancient worshippers, the spectral airship with its crew of prehistoric voyagers, scenes from the unknown lives of strangers—dreams and visions without end, and yet to what purpose? ‘A.E.’ will have it that the professed psychologists have been drawn from the ranks of the naturally unimaginative, and that their visions are caused neither by memories nor by the suppressed impulses and desires to which modern writers so confidently ascribe them. They come from outside, because, to use the inevitable metaphors, our minds are leaky boats upon the deep sea, cloudy panes obscuring the light, imperfect instruments for the conveyance of divine harmony; and step by step we proceed to spin round in the Dervish dance of unintelligible communion with the essential, the divine, the spirit of the universe, or whatever we choose to call it. That dance may be to us unintelligible, but we can witness the gyrations of ‘A.E.’ not only without a smile, but with confidence that for him the ceremony is sacred as well as absorbing.

There lies the value of his book as a record of ardent though stumbling conviction. But ‘A.E.’ does not escape what appears to be the inevitable penalty of any psychic experience, whereby it seems to be better, higher, more enlightened than any other; so that the world must be altered in accordance with it, and other minds must share the same experiences and come to the same conclusions. But let us imagine ourselves in that gaslit office where ‘A.E.’ spent some years of his boyhood, ‘little heaps of paper mounting up before me’ and quick people flitting about with feverish faces and voices. One of his trances would come upon him, and he would find himself on a remote steppe, or exalted into communion with the spirits in a region of clouds and stars. Suppose, however, that this excursion had been not into the remote and invisible, but into the mind of the clerk, with his wrinkled face and blinking eyes, who sat beside him. According to some of us, that would have been a more exalted, difficult and imaginative affair altogether, a method no less true than the other of taking one’s way out ‘into the infinite’. The drawback, as these papers perhaps show, of indulging too unreservedly in contact with the disembodied spirit is that it tends to become a monotonous process, lacking the humour and passion that diversify human intercourse, and too apt to end in a rapture of egotistic exaltation. ‘A.E.’s’ book helps to explain the curious transparency of modern Irish literature. But it is a mistake to read ‘A.E’s’ book as if it were merely literature, and not to recognise the fact that in spite of difficulty and obscurity he has conveyed to us a fresh sense of the illimitable and inexplicable faculties which lie undisciplined and only half realised within the human mind.

[Times Literary Supplement, Oct 31, 1918]

[]

‘Abraham Lincoln.’

[Abraham Lincoln: A Play (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1918) by John Drinkwater]

When upon page 57 of this play, Mr Drinkwater quotes Shakespeare, a curious thing happens—or happened in one particular case. Instead of straining itself to visualise deal tables and top hats the mind begins with alacrity to conjure up cloud-capp’d towers and gorgeous palaces; as if a top hat were harder to imagine than a palace, as if clouds were our natural element. We are not therefore so foolish as to draw the conclusion that Shakespeare is a better dramatist than Mr Drinkwater, but only that Shakespeare’s plays can be read, and we believe that Abraham Lincoln needs to be seen upon the stage to be seen at its best.

The first act represents the parlour of Lincoln’s house at Springfield in the year 1860. Abraham Lincoln comes in wearing a ‘greenish and crumpled top hat’; his pockets are stuffed with documents; a map of the United States hangs upon the wall; there is a cupboard which, when he looks to find a bottle in it, is found choked with papers instead. The mind is uncomfortably split up into perceiving that all this would tell upon the stage, and in realising that for some reason it is an obstacle to imagination upon the printed page. These cupboards and top hats are too real and prominent for their importance, just as we cannot help feeling that the dialogue is too thin and spare for its importance. The realistic dramatist is always faced with the difficulty that he can only allow his characters to say the barest abstract of what is in their minds; and for the dialogue to be further denuded of its scenery, deprived of its actors, and read as we read a book, with a mind hungry for a thousand details and comments which cannot possibly be put into the dialogue, is a test that, perhaps, Ibsen and Tchehov alone of the moderns survive.

Mr Drinkwater is of course too serious and honest a writer for nothing to survive; a readable and interesting statement of the Northern case survives; but it is much like hearing played by one instrument—and that a piano—a piece which demands a whole orchestra of brass and strings. One seems to perceive long empty spaces when the piano keeps on strumming its homely chords in the bass and the melody is absent. President Lincoln comes out speaking good sense, good morality, and tolerable prose, but we wait in vain for any proof that besides the simplicity of genius he also possessed the inspiration. He is shown to be a very homely, uncouth, plain-spoken, sensible man; and when the great moments—such as the pardon of the boy sentry, or the last speech from the box at the theatre—arrive, they read, at least, with marked flatness. ‘There, there; I believe you when you tell me that you couldn’t keep awake. I’m going to trust you and send you back to your regiment.’ That sounds as if Mr Drinkwater were determined to prove that one of the remarkable things about Lincoln was that where smaller men said something striking he said something dull. But in the theatre the cumulative effect of sense, truth, honesty, and courage may have lent these speeches a force which it is impossible to perceive when we read them.

[Times Literary Supplement, Oct 31, 1918]

[]

Mr Howells on Form.

[The Actor-Manager … With an Introduction by W.D. Howells (Hodder & Stoughton, 1918) by Leonard Merrick]

When Mr Howells says that he is not going to define what he means by form in fiction, since it is ‘one of those elusive things which you can feel much better than you can say’, we applaud his wisdom, and accept his decision. There may be truth as well as indolence in the remark that the less we seek to define art the more chance there is that we shall be able to produce it. At any rate let us leave these questions to be settled once in a generation, and meanwhile let us flatter ourselves that by continuing to frame tentative outlines of belief, always shifting and modifying their terms as we read, we are providing material for the great critic to build with when he comes.

Form, Mr Howells goes on to say, is very rare in English fiction, so that the public will probably not understand what he means when he singles out this quality in the novels of Mr Merrick for special praise. ‘Our public might very well enjoy form,’ he adds, ‘if it could once be made to imagine it.’ Here we think he does us some injustice. We need neither persuasion nor force to make us enjoy the form of Pope or Peacock, Jane Austen or Gray; one might go farther and say that half our pleasure in reading the writers of the eighteenth century comes from the delight we take in their sense of form. In the case of the Victorians it is more difficult; in the case of our own generation it is almost impossible to see that such a thing as form exists. But it seems likely that this is in part the result of trying to squeeze our voluminous moderns into the finely shaped mould of The Rape of the Lock, or of the Princesse de Clèves. When we talk of form in the loose fashion confessed above we probably mean more than anything the form not of the Elizabethans but of the eighteenth century. It is very natural. Who, after all, can resist the fascination of their writers or refuse at some time or another to make such sacrifices as may enable him to attempt at least to write what would have satisfied their ears? For perhaps the most striking of their qualities is one that seems to demand some sacrifice: it is their power to omit. Take down, for instance, the letters of Gray, freely written to intimate friends, and you will be struck by the way in which almost nothing is said and almost everything is suggested. He has to write a letter of condolence:

I break in upon you at a moment, when we least of all are permitted to disturb our friends, only to say, that you are daily and hourly present to my thoughts. If the worst be not yet past, you will neglect and pardon me: but if the last struggle be over; if the poor object of your long anxieties be no longer sensible to your kindness, or to her own sufferings, allow me (at least in idea, for what could I do, were I present, more than this?) to sit by you in silence, and pity from my heart not her, who is at rest, but you, who lose her. May He, who made us, the Master of our pleasures and of our pains, preserve and support you! Adieu.

Eloquence might embellish that theme for page upon page and yet in the end the few formal words would still say more. In contemplating them one is led to imagine an art of suggestion, a shorter, denser, richer form of literature refusing to waste itself in repetition or explanation, an art recognising the ludicrous incapacity of words to repeat even a simple emotion exactly, but the magical power of the right words to do more—to abstract and exalt it.

But the sense of form which seems to have prevailed in the eighteenth century may be much more perceptible to us than to them. It may be that they stand at precisely the right degree of distance from us to appear in the light most becoming to their peculiar qualities. The repose, the distinction, the reserve of their manner are precious to us—enviable, almost incredible. Perhaps we endow them with more of substance than really belongs to them; perhaps we admire them partly because we find them so easy to understand, so definite, so assured that their version of life and of art is the right one. Such admiration on our part is a tribute to the completeness with which they triumphed, imposing shape upon the tumult of their material, so that after more than a century their masterpieces appear to us shaped with a flawless simplicity, as if the task had been easier then, the material less complex and stubborn.

But, granting them every grace and perfection of art, did they not perhaps leave out too much, and sacrifice so devoutly at the shrine of form that some very important qualities were excluded along with those that they rightly judged to be superfluous? Perhaps we feel the form of the eighteenth century so sharply because it is not merely beyond our reach but utterly opposed to our temper. When Mr Howells speaks of the neglect or absence of form in modern fiction we should more hopefully assert that it is everywhere scattered about us but that we are as yet unable to see it. Whether this particular quality is ever visible to the generation that is engaged in creating it seems very doubtful. We cannot recognise among ourselves a conception of the art of fiction such as Jane Austen seems to have held so surely and unquestioningly; we are only now beginning to make out with hesitation and difficulty the form concealed in what still appears to many the formlessness of Mr Hardy’s novels. It is not that life is more complex or difficult now than at any other period, but that for each generation the point of interest shifts, the old form puts the emphasis on the wrong places, and in searching out the severed and submerged parts of what to us constitutes form we seem to be throwing fragments together at random and disdaining the very thing that we are trying our best to win from chaos.

[Times Literary Supplement, Nov 14, 1918]

[]

Bad Writers.

[Books in General (Martin Seeker, 1918) by Solomon Eagle.]

Perhaps it is unnecessary to feel a slight pang of commiseration for Solomon Eagle when he talks of papers ‘contributed weekly, without intermission, to the New Statesman since April, 1913’. But it is difficult when a writer hopes that he has produced a book to read in ‘without tedium, for ten minutes before one goes to sleep’ not to feel slightly ashamed of oneself, as a single head of the many-headed beast, for not having gone to sleep hours ago. Here we have kept him at it, flattering us, wheedling us, telling us funny stories, never boring us, or making us think, or making us cry, for five years and a half; and we are still awake, and as exacting and capricious as a pampered Sultan sunk among cushions on a divan. Books of essays somehow have a tendency to make us feel autocratic and oriental. We are conscious of retinues of slaves. Numbers of them have had their heads cut off and been thrown into the moat for failing to please us already; but Solomon Eagle amuses the Sultan; he has made the Sultan laugh; therefore we grant him permission to go on living on condition that he makes us laugh every night before we go to sleep for ever and ever.

Solomon Eagle has made a discovery which bids fair to enable him to fulfil this condition very easily: he has discovered that English literature is funny. On hearing this, the well-read reader runs over the scale from Chaucer to Robert Bridges in the space of a second or two and raps out something about Falstaff or Mrs Gamp. Anyone can do that. But who save Solomon Eagle, can begin the scale with John Lyly and end it with Mrs Barclay? Have you any conception of what he calls ‘the beauties of badness’? Are you aware that ‘peculiar poetic treasures’ lie uncollected and unappreciated in every bookshop in the Charing Cross Road? Do you, in short, know the look of literature the wrong side out? From a brief and increasingly anxious inspection of one’s bookcase the probability seems to be that one knows nothing whatever about it. There are Shakespeare and Shelley and Keats and Matthew Arnold and Gibbon and Walter Pater—a rabbit-run through the ages—a path absolutely dusty with the traffic of culture. The sole possibility of badness is provided by the works of one’s friends, and that hope fades soon enough. Which of them would have the imaginative abandonment to write—

I have found thee there, in a world of rest,

In the fair sweet gardens of sunlit bliss,

Where the sibilant sound of an Angel’s kiss

Is the sanctioned seal of a Holy quest?

Which of them has sufficient passion to make his hero speak thus over the telephone to an unknown lady? ‘Speak to me again,’ he said, ‘you, who spoke to me last night. Speak to me again. What wait I for? I wait for you! Just now—in my utter loneliness, in my empty solitude—I wait for you.’ They lack passion; they lack abandonment.

These are by no means the best of Solomon Eagle’s discoveries; for the best bad writers often take a page at a stride, but even from them you can judge, perhaps, the sort of quality that bad literature possesses. It is the quality of unfettered imagination. Bad books are written in a state of boiling passion, with a complete certainty of inspiration. Language and grammar are impediments which are disregarded if they become troublesome; and thus you get in the best bad writers that sense of quickly following the half-articulate words of nightmare which is so exciting or so bewildering, as the case may be. The process is not one of thought but one of intuition, and as in this they seem to follow such great examples as Scott, if we are afraid to claim Shakespeare also, let us inquire into the reason of their badness. Why do they invariably suggest not only the incoherence but the unreality of nightmare? The bad writer seems to possess a predominance of the day-dreaming power, he lives all day long in that region of artificial light where every factory girl becomes a duchess, where, if the truth be told, most people spend a few moments every day revenging themselves upon reality. The bad books are not the mirrors but the vast distorted shadows of life; they are a refuge, a form of revenge. Should you feel, however, that these reflections are tending to become melancholy or dull, you have only to shuffle Solomon Eagle’s pages and make your choice of something more pleasant to think about. Shall we consider whether Wordsworth, the divine poet, was a dull man? Shall we ask who wrote the worst sentence in the English language? Shall we re-write it in the manner of Henry James, and so dreaming fall asleep?

[Times Literary Supplement, Nov 21, 1918]

[]

Trafficks and Discoveries.

[English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century (Longmans, Green & Co., 1895);
‘The Hakluyt’s Voyages, Travels, and Discoveries of the English Nation’, (5 vols., R.H. Evans, 1809–12)]

Most people have only time to ask whether history is readable, not to seek further whether it is true. But in one sense the most readable histories are also the most true, in so far as their vivid and spirited qualities arise from the force with which the historian himself has believed in his narrative; and perhaps no one can write with fire and conviction unless he has got hold of some form of the truth. It is partly this sense of conviction, partly the great artistic skill with which, having decided upon his interpretation, he shapes his narrative in conformity with it that makes Froude among the most readable of historians. His history was, as he said that it ought to be, ‘as interesting as a novel’. His account of the English seamen of the sixteenth century tells itself rather than is told. The knots of the narrative dissolve in his fingers as he touches them. The figures of the Queen, of Philip of Spain, of Drake, of Medina Sidonia and the rest, stand out as clear-cut in feature and as inevitably placed in relation to each other as if Froude spun the story from his own imagination. It has the force and directness of fiction. He was helped, of course, by those famous prejudices and opinions which colour all his writing. He believed fervently in the English Reformation; he believed that the English seamen were its most sturdy disciples; he believed emphatically that Drake, Hawkins, and their fellows were the best and bravest of mankind; and he came forth not as an apologist for their deeds, but as the champion of heroes who needed a Homer to sing them in strains befitting their merit. For all these reasons the story, as he told it, would have been a good one, had it not been intrinsically one of the best in the world. Nothing is lacking that poet, novelist, or historian could desire. In the first place, there is the sea, washing the shores of unknown lands; then, for adversary, there is the pride of the Spaniard, his mastery still undisputed; the prize itself is virgin land of untold capacity, or caraques heavy with bars of silver and gold; the spirit which inspires the whole is love of religious freedom and love of country; and the catastrophe, as Froude develops it with superb dramatic power, is the complete overthrow of the usurper by a handful of private gentlemen on the threshold of victory. The very titles of his lectures might serve for the books of an epic poem, as grand, so Froude declared, as the Odyssey.

The heroic figures which Froude has extracted and shaped are not, however, in the least visionary. Indeed, in the shaping process they lose inevitably something of the humanity which we discern in them obscurely engaged with their forgotten comrades upon those trafficks and discoveries which are recorded in the volumes of Hakluyt. Their destiny was not always by any means so patently to the glory of God and the confusion of the Spaniard as would appear from the vantage-ground of the historian. They had, as we have, a mixture of motives in their undertakings, among which the desire to justify the Protestant faith was not always to the fore. But what they lose in symmetry, when studied in the rough, they gain in richness, depth and variety. They gain to such an extent, indeed, that it seems worthwhile to exhort those who have not read to read, those who do not possess to buy, the principal navigations, trafficks and discoveries of the English nation made by sea or overland to the remote and farthest distant quarters of the earth, as Richard Hakluyt, preacher and some-time student of Christ Church, in Oxford, collected and set them forth.

As good a starting-place as another is provided by the letter which Hakluyt drew up in the year 1582, and gave to a friend ‘that was sent into Turkey’. Here we have set forth in urgent and eloquent language the great need of establishing a trade between England and the East. The chief English commodity was wool. The English wool is the most fine, most soft, most strong, most durable of any wool in the world, and the least subject of any to the moth, as the old Parliament robes of the king and noble peers plainly testify. If he can find a market for wool, he will give ‘an infinite sort of the poor people occasion to pray’ for him, since through their misery they were forced to crime and ‘daily consumed with the gallows’. Next, the English traveller is to look about him curiously, and, in particular, to make inquiry whether ‘Anile that coloureth blue be a “natural commodity of those parts” … and if it be compounded of an herb to send the same into this realm by seed or by root in barrels of earth, with all the whole order of sowing, setting, planting, replanting, and with the compounding of the same.’ Needless to say, immortal fame would be his if he could discover a method of producing oil in England, since the method of making it from radish seed has failed. He is reminded how the stock of English commodities has been gradually improved by the adventure and generosity of bygone travellers. Dr Linaker, in the time of Henry VII, brought the damask rose, and lately ‘flowers called tulipas’ have been introduced from Austria, to say nothing of bull, cow, sheep, swine, horse, mare, cock, hen, and a thousand other beasts and plants, without which ‘our life were to be said barbarous’. In short, this journey is not only to bring profit to himself, but to increase knowledge, and, in particular, to benefit the poor ‘ready to starve for relief’ more than by building them almshouses or by giving them lands and goods. Many voices at that time were urging the same plea; and nothing more strikes the imagination than the readiness with which some gentleman from the West Country, perhaps, hears the summons, lays his case before the rich men of his acquaintance, fits out his little band of ships, collects his company, and sets sail, ‘having saluted their acquaintance, one his wife, another his children, another his kinsfolk, and another his friends dearer than his kinsfolk’. At Greenwich the courtiers come running out at the news that the ships are in the river; ‘the Privy Council looked out of the windows of the Court … the ships thereupon discharge their ordnance … and the mariners they shouted in such sort that the sky rang again with the noise thereof’. Considering that the ship in which Drake sailed round the world was no bigger than ‘a second-rate yacht of a modern noble lord’, and that the voyage was generally a voyage to an unknown land, over seas made dangerous by hostile Spaniards, Portuguese, and French, the solemn leave-taking is accounted for. Well might the mariners walk upon the hatches, climb the shrouds, stand upon the mainyard to wave their friends a last farewell. Many would come back no more; let alone the risk that a wave would swamp the little ship, as happened to Sir Humfrey Gilbert, or that they might be ‘congealed and frozen to death’, like Sir Hugh Willoughby, or hung up by adverse winds off the coast of Cornwall for a fortnight, until, in their thirst, they licked the muddy water off the deck, as happened to the Earl of Cumberland.

There was also the terror of the supernatural. The spiritual atmosphere was very cloudy, though pierced in a manful way by the sense and piety of the sailors. Sea lions, sea serpents, evaporations of fire and whirlpools that cast ships upon shore, ‘as Richard Chancellor told me that he had heard Sebastian Cabot report’, were at all times possible, and might well be the disguise of the Devil himself. The survivors of some of these early voyages came home to England in such a state that ‘Sir William, his father, and my Lady, his mother, knew him not to be their son, until they found a secret mark, which was a wart upon one of his knees’. Significantly, the articles and orders to be observed by the ships often begin with the injunction to lead a holy life on board, and ‘serve God twice a day’. Encompassed with such perils and obscurities, they might well have cause to call upon Divine help before the voyage was out. The Divinity may be addressed much as if He were a temporal prince scarcely hidden by the clouds; but their piety is real enough. Down they fall upon their knees before doing battle with the Turkish galleys; the owner of the vessel preaches his sermon, bidding them not repine, nor do as ‘the citizens of Bethulia did’; after which drums, flutes, and trumpets sound, and the Three Half Moons engages eight of the enemies’ vessels.

Then stood up one Grove the master, being a comely man, with his sword and target, holding them up in defiance against his enemies … But chiefly the boatswain showed himself valiant above the rest; for he fared among the Turks like a wood lion; for there was none of them that either could nor durst stand in his face, till at the last there came a shot from the Turks, which brake his whistle asunder, and smote him on the breast, so that he fell down, bidding them farewell and to be of good comfort.

For thirteen years John Fox and his companions served in captivity to the Turks, until, being weary thereof, ‘he lift up his bright, shining sword of ten years’ rust,’ and struck his keeper such a blow that his head clave asunder, the sword which did the deed being claimed by the abbot and monks of Gallipoli and hung for a monument upon their convent walls.

But the hopes and expectations of these adventurers more than counterbalanced their sufferings. There was the chance of the North-West Passage, and gold, perhaps, in the commonest black stone. They went not only to dispose of merchandise, but as ambassadors from the Queen of England, taking a present with them to the sovereign of the land, ‘three fair mastiffs’, perhaps, ‘in coats of red cloth’, together with a sonorous letter, ‘the paper whereof did smell most fragrantly of camphor and ambergris, and the ink of perfect musk’ from Elizabeth herself. Strange and splendid were the ceremonies that the English sailors newly landed from their voyage were invited to behold. They saw the Emperor at Moscow ‘sitting in his chair of estate, with his crown on his head and a staff of goldsmith work in his left hand’, and beheld ‘the great Turk where he sumptuously sate alone’. Marvellous was the richness of the earth and the shapes of the creatures seen, as John Locke saw the elephant, ‘not only with my bodily eyes, but much more with the eyes of my mind and spirit’.

So the different companies established themselves in different quarters of the globe, and lonely little groups of Englishmen began doing trade with the natives, bartering their wool and cloth for wax and tallow in Russia, tempting the African savages to give them ivory and gold in exchange for hawks’ bells, horses’ tails, hats, and unwrought iron. The letters of instructions sent by merchants in London to their agents, and the agents’ replies, abounding in detail and preserving the names of many forgotten adventurers, make as good reading as the more heroic passages which have become famous. But to abstract is idle. The only possible course to take with Hakluyt’s voyages, whether you own them in the convenient Everyman edition or in the five quarto volumes published about 1810, is to read them through; to read dedications, ambassages, letters, privileges, discourses, advertisements; for only thus will you become possessed of the unity of the whole. Different people write the book, but they have the same outlook, the same manner of speech. Beauty of phrase, astonishing and scattered impartially, is frequent enough; the average of their writing is full of freedom and melody; but beyond that lies what is more difficult to define, something common to them all—an attitude of mind, large, imaginative, unsated. There is a sort of nobleness about them; seen through their eyes, the world appears fresh and flowing, unexplored, and of infinite richness.

[Times Literary Supplement, Dec 12, 1918]

[]

‘The Three Black Pennys.’

[The Three Black Pennys. A Novel (William Heinemann, 1918) by Joseph Hergesheimer]

The obvious thing to say about Mr Joseph Hergesheimer’s novel The Three Black Pennys is that it possesses form as undoubtedly as a precious stone shaped to fit exactly into a band of gold possesses form. The comparison with something hard, lustrous and concrete is not altogether fanciful. In recollection, the last sentence being read, the reader’s impression of the book as a whole assumes something of the smooth solidity of a well-fashioned gem. When the last sentence is finished nothing vague or superfluous is left to blur the outline; the substance is all neatly packed into the form, rounded off, disposed of, completed. The sense of conclusiveness is so satisfactory, and also so rare, that we could enjoy it separately from any feeling of pity or pleasure aroused by the fortunes of the characters, as a blind man might enjoy the shape of a stone though unable to see its colour.

Mr Hergesheimer’s story, the story of a family owning a great ironworks in Pennsylvania from the middle of the eighteenth century to modern times, had need of this shaping if only to compress it within a volume of moderate size. Each of the Pennys whom he has selected to represent his theme stands out from the rest of his family because the Welsh blood mixed with the English blood centuries ago asserts itself in him. It produces, Howat’s father says, ‘a solitary living, dark lot. Unamenable to influence, reflect their country, I suppose, but lovers of music … it sinks entirely out of sight for two or three and sometimes four generations; and then appears solid, in one individual, as unslacked as the pure, original thing.’ It appears in Howat; in his grandson Jasper; in Jasper’s grandson Howat, the last of the Pennys. The black Pennys did not take to life easily; there was something unmalleable in their composition which stayed unmelted in the common furnace. They did not run into the ordinary social mould. In their obdurate ways of impressing themselves upon other people they more resembled the great hammer at Myrtle Forge, persistently and relentlessly beating out iron, than the iron itself. ‘If the hammer stops,’ Howat told his wife in the eighteenth century, ‘all this, the Pennys, stop, too.’ The last Penny was unable even to make one of those marriages which his ancestors had achieved with so much difficulty; the hammer had stopped in his father’s time; the Pennys made iron no longer.

But the story cannot, as this summary might suggest, be read as a discourse upon heredity with a satiric motive; Mr Hergesheimer is too much of an artist to insist that human life is capable of any such forced solution. If, curiously enough, a certain type of character occurs at intervals in the same family, it occurs as a blue or a green might repeat itself beautifully in a pattern. The beat of the great hammer recurs too; when it stops we know that something more important has ceased; the raccoon hunt repeats itself; for, as we began by saying, Mr Hergesheimer has a strong sense of form, and these are some of the more obvious devices used by him to hold his story together, to secure continuity, to bind his gem in a circle of gold. An attentive reader will discover others less obvious. Whether he has succeeded equally in another direction is more open to doubt. The entrances and exits of the Pennys and of the women allotted them as partners are so carefully timed and regulated that they would tend to be mechanical were they not more obviously pictorial. There is no room here for license or for the larger sweep and expressiveness of human character. Perhaps Mr Hergesheimer is a little hampered in this direction by his keen susceptibility to material objects. He handles, for the concrete term is justified, his blue decanters and cut-glass decanters, holds them to the light, relishes their grain and texture with a gusto which is sometimes excessive. He cannot resist observing. We can remember no novel in which women’s dresses are more frequently and carefully described. This is not done, however, to give atmosphere or local colour, but because the beauty of still life makes part of the writer’s vision. We owe to this individual gift some remarkable scenes at the forge and descriptions of American landscape. It is one of the qualities that make the Black Pennys an unusual novel, to be read slowly, thoughtfully and with a sense of luxury.

[Times Literary Supplement, Dec 12, 1918]

[]

A View of the Russian Revolution.

[Petrograd. The City of Trouble 1914–1918 by Meriel Buchanan. (W. Collins Sons & Co. Ltd, 1918).]

Mr Hugh Walpole in his short foreword to this volume seems to us to be doing its writer rather a disservice than a service. Invoking that blessed word ‘atmosphere’, he sets out a claim which, we think, Miss Buchanan could hardly wish to put forward on her own behalf. ‘I believe,’ says Mr Walpole, ‘that I am speaking without any exaggeration when I say that this book of Miss Buchanan’s is the first attempt of any writer in any language to give to the world a sense of the atmosphere of Russia under the shock and terror of those world-shaking events’, the war and the Revolution. Mr Walpole explains that by ‘atmosphere’ he means in this connection the general outlook upon events of the sort of people whom in English we should refer to as ‘the man in the street’. In our opinion this frank and vivacious diary of ‘Sir Buchanan’s’ daughter cannot claim to represent this outlook. The book sets out to be an account of Petrograd in the last four years as it appeared to a young lady moving in the diplomatic ‘set’, and the result does not pass beyond this modest aim.

At the outbreak of the war Miss Buchanan volunteered as a nurse in one of the Petrograd hospitals; in order to discharge her duties more efficiently she set to work to learn Russian—a study in which, we gather from the few sentences quoted in this book, she is not yet very proficient. The first half of her book describes in vivid fashion the outbreak of the war and Miss Buchanan’s and her friends’ experiences with the wounded, the refugees and their children—‘“Meriel, his head was absolutely alive,” she said, with a little gasp’—and there are also descriptions of the Russian Court and its ceremonies as Miss Buchanan saw them. The following passage is a typical example of her method; it has the merits and defects of descriptions which rest wholly upon shrewd but sympathetic personal observation:

Looking back at my diary, I see that it was this winter also that I met General Polivanov, the new Minister of War. We dined yesterday evening with the Sazonoffs, and I sat next to Polivanov. Politically I know really nothing about him, but personally I immediately took a great sympathy to him. He is one of those grand old Russians, enormously tall, with a wonderfully commanding, imposing presence. A rugged face framed in a short dark beard, and deep-set grey eyes, keen and very bright and yet unspeakably kind. He asked me all about the hospital and my work, and when I said I loved the soldiers beamed on me delightedly, and promised me very soon to come and visit them himself.

Miss Buchanan leads up to the outbreak of the Revolution with one of the more particularly fearsome accounts of Rasputin’s death. After drinking nearly a whole bottle of poisoned wine and eating a dish of poisoned cakes and being shot through the heat, [heart,] the ‘priest’ (as Miss Buchanan inaccurately calls him) still recovers consciousness, hurls himself at Prince Yusupov, and tries to escape through the garden. Three months later Miss Buchanan returned to Petrograd from a holiday just in time for the outbreak of the Revolution. ‘Shut up now in the house and forbidden to go out, I think I spent most of my time that morning sitting on the big staircase of the Embassy, gleaning what information I could from the various people who came and went.’ Her account of the summer and winter of 1917 follows the usual path; like so many other observers, she notices the indiscriminate enthusiasm of the Russian soldiery and peasants for even the most contradictory doctrines, and the facility with which skilful orators were able to manipulate the sympathy of the crowds they addressed. The British Embassy was faced across the river by Lenin’s stronghold, and whenever there was a prospect of a Bolshevist rising the members of the Embassy staff were pressed either to leave the building altogether or to take safety in the more protected part of it. Miss Buchanan’s desire not to miss any of the excitement led to General Knox’s assuring her that she ‘was more trouble than all the Russian Army’. Her descriptions of the Bolshevist émeutes, as seen from the Embassy windows, are the best thing in the book.

It is unfortunate that the writer has allowed herself to enter upon the troubled sea of the Russian revolutionary politics of last year. Certainly she does not profess to be qualified to pass final judgments, but even in the vague outline of events which she gives there are too many traces of gossip accepted as fact. In the Kornilov affair, for example, it is hardly fair to M. Kerensky, for whose intentions Miss Buchanan expresses her admiration, to say that ‘the papers published a telegram of Kerensky’s proclaiming himself Dictator and commanding Kornilov to resign at once’. It was not Kerensky himself, but the Provisional Government which gave him special powers to deal with the liquidation of the Kornilov affair, and he was not thus or otherwise invested with dictatorial powers. When, again, Miss Buchanan says, ‘What seems, however, certain is that, fearing a Bolshevik rising, the Government negotiated with Kornilov to send troops up to Petrograd to quell the insurrection under the command of General Krimov’, she should remember that one of the Government’s main accusations against General Kornilov was not that he sent the troops to Petrograd, but that he sent them, as he had been particularly requested not to do, under the command of General Krimov. When Miss Buchanan assumes that her statement ‘seems certain’, she is unintentionally begging one of the most vexed questions of an intensely complicated business. Unlike personalities, politics cannot always be elucidated by the clever intuition which Miss Buchanan in her purely descriptive chapters shows herself well able to command.

[Times Literary Supplement, Dec 19, 1918]

[]

‘Mummery.’

[Mummery. A Tale of Three Idealists (W. Collins Sons & Co. Ltd, 1918) by Gilbert Cannan. Reprinted: CW.]

Mummery, which is apparently the nineteenth volume from Mr Cannan’s pen, is a clever readable novel, as we have some reason to expect that an author’s nineteenth book should be. Nineteen volumes cannot be brought from start to finish without learning whatever you are capable of learning about writing books; but the risk of learning your lesson so thoroughly is that you may become in the process not an artist, but a professional writer. You may learn to write so easily that writing becomes a habit. Mr Cannan has to tell the story of two men of genius, one a painter, the other a dramatist; both would reform the stage, one by his designs, the other by his plays; but they are both frustrated, so far as the present is concerned, by the British public and by Sir Henry Butcher, the actor-manager, who serves that public faithfully or with only an occasional disloyalty. The theatrical world is very vivaciously and very literally represented by Mr Cannan, so that many of the characters in it seem to belong as much to the actual world as to the world of fiction. But whether or not he has his counterpart in life, Sir Henry Butcher is certainly the most imaginative character in the book. One can believe that actor-managers famed for their sumptuous representations of Shakespeare, as illustrious in society as upon the stage, in whom strangely enough the dramatic genius burns up by fits and starts, are much as Mr Cannan depicts them. The wealthy peer who supports the higher drama, the manager’s wife who regards the theatre ‘as a kind of salon’ and hates any attempt ‘to divert Sir Henry from the social to the professional aspect of the theatre’, the atmosphere of the Imperium behind the scenes and in the boxes, are all done skilfully and with humour.

So long as Mr Cannan is noting down what he has observed he shows himself a shrewd though not a very subtle observer. But when he draws conclusions from what he has seen and becomes the intellectual satirist, he writes as if from habit, repeating what he has learnt by heart from writers of what he calls ‘the Sturm and Drang period’ in whom the intellect was often very keen and the satiric gift very fine. Mr Adnor Rodd is their representative. The name is sufficient to show us that, let alone the distinguished appearance and the abrupt manner. But Mr Adnor Rodd, though he is a very conscientious man and writes plays which no one will produce, is not, so far as our experience goes, a very clever man. ‘Money!’ he exclaims. ‘That is the secret of the whole criminal business. Money controls art. Money rejects art. Money’s a sensitive thing too. It rejects force, spontaneity, originality. It wants repetition, immutability, things calculable. Money …’ He is, in short, what the conventional idea of an artist is supposed to be, ‘demoniac and challenging’; just as Charles Mann, the painter, is the irresponsible and non-moral variety of the same type. Sir Henry Butcher and the Imperium theatre are quite proof against attacks levelled at them by people of this calibre, and deserve to be so. But it is a misfortune from the point of view of the book, in so far as it is a book of criticism and ideas. Mr Cannan has every right to criticise society in his books, but, like everything else in a novel criticism must be the expression of a writer’s own convictions; the conventions of the intellectual are at least as sterile as the conventions of the bourgeois. Mr Cannan seems to be falling into the habit of being intellectual in a perfectly conventional way, so that his criticism is more and more a stereotyped complaint and his remedy more and more a nostrum made up for him by other people. If he had thought out his position afresh and for himself, he would scarcely have spoilt Clara Day by making her half a natural nice woman and half the embodiment of somebody’s theory upon the function of the female sex in human society. ‘Her childish detestation of her womanhood was gone. She accepted it, gloried in it as her instrument, and knew that she could never be lost in it. For ever in her mind that crisis was associated with Kropotkin’s escape from prison […]’ On the advice, no doubt, of some distinguished writer, she saw ‘that being a woman, she must work through a man’s imagination before she could become a person fit to dwell on the earth with her fellows’, and married Rodd; but a marriage so cordially vouched for by the best authorities has no need of our commendation. It is in Mr Cannan’s interest, and not in Mr and Mrs Rodd’s, that we recommend him to find some means of destroying the careful selection of books, including six volumes of Ibsen, which they took with them on their honeymoon.

[Times Literary Supplement, Dec 19, 1918]

[]

‘The Method of Henry James.’

[The Method of Henry James (Yale University Press, 1918) by Joseph Warren Beach]

Henry James is much at present in the air—a portentous figure looming large and undefined in the consciousness of writers, to some an oppression, to others an obsession, but undeniably present to all. In either case, whether you suffer from the consciousness of Henry James or rejoice in it, you can scarcely do better than read what Mr Beach has to say about him. He has seen we will not say the, but certainly a, figure in the carpet, which, considering the width of the fabric and the complexity of the pattern, is something of an achievement. But further and more remarkably, considering his race, it is not to Mr Beach a mere diagram to be committed to memory in order to win the prize, whatever that may be, of accurate culture. You will not come out top through reading Mr Beach, but you will be made to enjoy thinking about Henry James and stimulated to frame theories to account for him; you may in the end find yourself with a pattern of your own.

Mr Beach is far too fruitful and cogent a writer to lend himself to summary, nor can we develop a fraction of the things which tempted us to amplify them as we read; but we may perhaps brood for a moment upon the question in general. It is a commonplace to say that no other writer causes his readers to ask so many questions or has a following more sharply divided among themselves than Henry James. Mr Beach is a Jacobean—that is to say he believes that in The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl Mr James produced ‘the beautiful fruits’ of a method which he had invented and perfected through a long series of failures and experiments. Other admirers cease to admire at or about the year 1889—the year of The Tragic Muse. Both these sects can make out a good case for their beliefs, and are happy in their convictions. But more difficult to define and less enviable is the position of a third group, which cannot accommodate itself to either camp. The trouble with them is that they admire both periods, but with inexplicable lapses, almost unknown in the case of other writers, when from the extreme of admiration they turn to something like contempt. A sudden chill in an atmosphere of cordiality, a hint of callousness beneath the show of affection—by some such figures alone can they describe the insidious sensation which converts them from enthusiasts to outcasts. The worst of it is that they scarcely dare formulate their meaning, since any plain statement seems so grievously an over-statement. If you woke in the night and found yourself saying, ‘Henry James is vulgar—Henry James is a snob’, you would annihilate these words, lest the very darkness should overhear them. In the light of day the utmost you can bring yourself to murmur is that Henry James is an American. He had the American love of old furniture. Why these characteristics should at moments appear capable of such devastating effects is one of those puzzles that so often destroy the peace of mind of the fickle Jacobeans. His characters, so they say, are somehow tainted with the determination not to be vulgar; they are, as exiles tend to be, slightly parasitic; they have an enormous appetite for afternoon tea; their attitude not only to furniture but to life is more that of the appreciative collector than of the undoubting possessor.

But somehow none of this seems of importance compared with the other fact, which becomes increasingly clear, that Henry James, whatever else he may have been, was a great writer—a great artist. A priest of the art of writing in his lifetime, he is now among the saints to whom every writer, in particular every novelist, must do homage. His pursuit of his method was religious in its seriousness, religious in its sacrifices, and productive, as we see from his prefaces and sketches, of a solemn rejoicing such as one can imagine in a priest to whom a vision of the divinity has been vouchsafed at last. A glimpse of the possibilities which in his view gather round every story and stretch away into the distance beyond any sight save his own makes other people’s achievements seem empty and childish. One had almost rather read what he meant to do than read what he actually did do. Merely as the writer who could make words follow his bidding, take his inflection, say what he wished them to say until the limit of what can be expressed seems to be surpassed, he is a source of perpetual wonder and delight. That is one side of him which is of perennial fascination, but perhaps it is not the most important side. The important side is suggested by the design which he made in order to explain his conception of The Awkward Age. He drew on a sheet of paper

the neat figure of a circle consisting of a number of small rounds disposed at equal distances about a central object. The central object was my situation, my subject in itself, to which the thing would owe its title, and the small rounds represented so many distinct lamps, as I liked to call them, the function of each of which would be to light with all due intensity one of its aspects.

One has to look for something like that in the later books—not a plot, or a collection of characters, or a view of life, but something more abstract, more difficult to grasp, the weaving together of many themes into one theme, the making out of a design.

[Times Literary Supplement, Dec 26, 1918]

[]

1919

The War from the Street.

[Our Own History of the War. From a South London View (Arthur G. Stockwell, 1918) by D. Bridgman Metchim.]

Mr Metchim has discovered the very important truth that the history of the war is not and never will be written from our point of view. The suspicion that this applies to wars in the past also has been much increased by living through four years almost entirely composed of what journalists call ‘historic days’. No one who has taken stock of his own impressions since 4 August 1914, can possibly believe that history as it is written closely resembles history as it is lived; but as we are for the most part quiescent, and, if sceptical ourselves, content to believe that the rest of mankind believes, we have no right to complain if we are fobbed off once more with historians’ histories. Less sluggish or less cynical, Mr Metchim here records the history of the war as it appeared to a gentleman living in South London so far as the body is concerned, but populating the whole of England spiritually, constituting, in fact, that anonymous monster the Man in the Street. He is not an individual himself, nor is the anonymous ‘you’ who merges into the gentleman in South London an individual; both together compose a vast, featureless, almost shapeless jelly of human stuff taking the reflection of the things that individuals do, and occasionally wobbling this way or that as some instinct of hate, revenge, or admiration bubbles up beneath it.

They, the individuals, the generals, the statesmen, the people with names, proclaim war.

How and why, date, &c., will be found in any reliable history … You felt frightfully strawlike about that time … You bolted each edition of your paper red-hot as it came out … You saw (the Russians) yourself pass through London … You read several versions of The Truth about Neuve Chapelle, and Real Facts about Neuve Chapelle, and heard many personal tales against people in high positions, and you cursed the Government.

So it goes on. The individuals do the thing, and you in a muddled way reflect what they do in blurred pictures half obliterating each other; little particles of you get somehow broken off and turned into soldiers and sent to France, to reflect rather different things out there, while you, in your vast quivering bulk, remain at home. Soon your mind, if one may distinguish one part of the jelly from another, has had certain inscriptions scored upon it so repeatedly that it believes that it has originated them; and you begin to have violent opinions of your own, which are reinforced by those varieties of you, Jones, Livermore and Algernon Shaw, so that there is a very marked sameness of opinion throughout the jelly. There is a little latitude allowed upon certain points, as, for example, ‘the curious incident of the Angels of Mons … Jones said that probably wreaths of smoke had been mistaken for Angels; Shaw said that the British soldier was not a fanciful man, and would be far more likely to mistake Angels for wreaths of smoke. You were prepared to open your mind on the matter’. But to have opinions is not your business; for four years and more you are nothing but a vast receptacle for the rumours of other people’s opinions and deeds. There has been a great naval battle in the North Sea; they have won; we have won—so at least a friend of somebody’s cook says. Your conviction that nothing is ever going to touch you is profound; it is obviously not in the nature of things that you should be touched. But the quality that distinguishes you from your French or Italian counterpart is your humour; all your feelings come out wearing the same livery. The humour of death is much the same as the humour of the allotment garden. But by this time we are analysing you with admiration, and therefore you are not us; and therefore the history, is, as it is always fated to be, your history, not ours.

[Times Literary Supplement, Jan 9, 1919]

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Small Talk About Meredith.

[George Meredith: His Life and Friends in Relation to his Work … with Forty-One Illustrations (Grant Richards Ltd., 1919) by S.M. Ellis]

The limitations which Mr Ellis has imposed upon himself are such that his work can neither be accepted as the final biography of Meredith, nor again as a study possessing the qualities of a work of art. His aim has been to preserve certain facts, about Meredith’s early life in particular, which are known to him from his relationship to the poet, and to prove how largely the characters and situations of the novels were drawn from living people and actual events. His critical remarks are sparing, and his narrative is often shrunk to ‘biographical links’ connecting quotations from all sorts of sources, including a certain number of letters here published for the first time.

A book is thus produced which may be said to be the prelude or prenatal state of a book rather than a book in being. In one way or another, however, it brings together some facts that have not before been made public or stated with such authority, and has an interest for people who wish to know more about an author than the author himself chose to tell them. To discuss the ethics or the necessity of such publications is none of our business. If it is desirable to know what was the exact social standing of Meredith’s father, why his marriage with Peacock’s daughter turned out unhappily, what caused his estrangement from his son Arthur, what led him to ‘pillory his own relations’ in Evan Harrington and elsewhere, together with facts of a less intimate nature about the position of his lodgings and the aspect of the various rooms in which he slept, ate and wrote, then Mr Ellis is a guide at once authentic and unobtrusive. In justice to him it must be said that, considering the delicate nature of the office he has assumed, we do not often feel ourselves in the position of listeners at a keyhole. If Meredith were to open the door he would find us for the most part devoutly examining the boots and umbrellas in the hall. Our deductions from these objects would probably provide him with some merriment. For the truth is that, though Mr Ellis makes some damaging statements and the book produces as a whole a disparaging impression, it is necessarily an impression and by no means a conviction. Not only is the evidence slight, but the use made of it in interpreting Meredith’s character will differ according to the temperament of the reader and the opportunities he may have had for knowing Meredith in the flesh, or seeing him through the eyes of those intimate with him. For example, it is stated that Meredith refused the request of his first wife to visit her when she lay dying. Mr Ellis, as he has every right to do, puts his own interpretation upon this. ‘He did not go; he had that horror of illness and the circumstances of death which is generally found in a man of imaginative temperament; that is the only excuse that can be offered in mitigation of censure.’ Having no further evidence to go upon, but having read Modern Love, we could neither agree in the censure nor infer from this fact, or any other adduced in the book, that Meredith was a bitter, hard, implacable man, ‘who never forgave what had offended him’. We have in mind, it is true, a very different verdict, passed by those who knew his faults but thought them more than expiated by the depth and passion of the feeling which underlay them. To his friends, we have reason to know, he was a man to be loved, not merely a writer to be admired.

But as to such matters as these Meredith took care that the public should have no evidence to make up their minds upon. Even when, as in the case of his parentage, we have evidence in plenty and know for a certainty that he was born in Portsmouth, the son of a tailor, it is still extremely difficult to decide the chief question of interest—why it was that he was so anxious to conceal the facts. Was it that he was ashamed of them, in which case we must convict him of snobbishness; or that his childhood was unhappy, in which case we must decide where to lay the blame; or, conceivably, that his sense of romance was gratified by the mystery and he was not so eager as Mr Ellis thinks he should have been to correct the rumours of his royal or aristocratic parentage? That Meredith harboured ‘a petty and long-brooded animus against his relatives’ and gave vent to it in the portraits of Mr and Mrs Strike in Evan Harrington, is supported by a suggestion, which is no more than a suggestion, to the effect that Meredith took his uncle’s advice in investing some money, and lost it. When Mr Ellis infers that this may have ‘brought down upon the uncle his nephew’s implacable resentment’ and led him after the lapse of many years to make free with the reputation of the Royal Marines in The Egoist, the impartial reader will feel that more light has been thrown upon the loyalty of Mr Ellis than upon the disposition of George Meredith.

But these approaches to the keyhole are few, and what we hear is easily transformed according to our prejudices. More substantial and less disputable is the evidence which Mr Ellis supplies that Meredith was no exception, as we were inclined to think him, to the rule that great novelists take their characters from life. Not only characters and places, but even actual incidents and names were introduced, his method being to ‘blend the actual traits and facts and names with the entirely imaginary doings of his characters’. Thus a little detective ingenuity shows that Blackburn Tuckham in Beauchamp’s Career is a portrait of Sir William Hardman, who came from the Bury and Blackburn district of Lancashire and was called Tuck for a nickname. In the same way the Romfreys in that novel derive their characteristics and some of their actions from the Berkeley family, and the list of similar correspondences in each of the novels is long and striking. That Tolstoy employed the method is clear enough; we can guess that it was Jane Austen’s; but that Meredith whose characters seem compact of star and sunshine, heroic of stature and inspired of speech, helped himself thus largely from the actual is a little surprising, and suggests that we have only to turn back the pages of history to find Hamlet and Falstaff in the flesh. All depends, of course, upon what you do with your handful of fact. When Meredith was told that George Eliot did not take her characters from life, he replied emphatically, Oh I do; but,’ he added, ‘never till I know them by heart.’ No doubt Meredith’s heart was much in communication with his brain; but whatever the combination, the absence of any mean, spiteful, or ugly realism in his work is very notable. One might maintain that in his later books he went to the opposite extreme and looked upon life too little and made his men and women too frequently masks for his own face. In support of this view there is among the scraps of all kinds swept up by Mr Ellis an interesting statement by Mr Shaw to the effect that ‘owing to leading the literary life in the Surrey hills,’ Meredith became ‘a walking anachronism’ (‘Diana of the Crossways is fifty years behind Our Mutual Friend’), so that Mr Shaw and many others can read ‘nothing of his except the poems and Shagpat’. But as this can be matched by the equally definite assertion by Stevenson that Meredith, at any rate, is among the immortals, the reader who wishes to make up his mind is constrained to do so for himself.

And that, perhaps, is not the least merit of such a book as this. It shows us the wrong side of the carpet and, fascinating though the wrong side of things always is, it is also a little crude, and ultimately breeds a keener desire than we were conscious of before to look upon the right side. All these half-heard words and disconnected fragments, with their suggestion of Meredith talking somewhere behind a curtain, drive us to the true source of Meredith, which is his writing; for, like all great imaginative writers, he reveals himself there with a completeness and subtlety, for good and for bad, which transcend all the facts that we may be told about him. Nobody can have the sense of Diana and The Egoist fresh upon him without feeling convinced that he is the greatest authority upon Meredith in existence. In addition to this, there must be scores of people now alive who combine with their reading of Meredith a memory of his actual voice and presence which, too, acts curiously upon the written word. His manner of speaking, it has often been noted, much resembled his manner of writing, and gave currency to the notion that a marked style is always founded upon a marked speech. The high booming voice addressing a silent and invisible audience could be heard beyond the door. There was not, at least towards the end of his life, much trace of the colloquial, or any possibility, should there have been the desire, for give and take. The pitch was too high and the pace too swift for interruption. People who wish great men to be simple were, it is said, frequently annoyed by what they called his habit of talking for effect. Considering how amply their needs are catered for elsewhere, the demand seems a little exacting; and Meredith certainly did nothing to gratify it. He was in no way simple. His talk passed from metaphor to metaphor, built phrase upon phrase, derided, denounced, and extolled with a vigour and gusto which made it appear that, if such brilliance were not natural, it was at any rate extremely enjoyable to himself. At the same time, granting that great men in their old age tend to be a trifle spectacular, his claim that he read character from the slightest hints and constantly observed it, was shown to be true by tokens difficult to describe, but impossible to mistake. His manner might be artificial, but there was nothing frigid about it: everything was alert, and secretly, one guessed, upon the look out. If this vitality and press of ideas, this intense intellectual activity and the sometimes fantastic shapes which it took, were so singular as to rouse suspicion, it can be recorded that, after leaving Meredith’s presence, the whole world seemed to have fallen under a ban of silence and stupidity. The people in the train looked only half alive; their talk was as primitive as the talk of sheep. Nevertheless Meredith did not talk incessantly. He stopped quite suddenly, as if something had struck him. His mind seemed to pass into another region. He appeared a little relieved that his visitors must catch their train. Waving an affectionate, but already slightly absent-minded farewell, he turned directly to a consideration of his thought, which he seemed to pursue with the greatest intensity pacing slowly in front of his house alone.

[Times Literary Supplement, Feb 13, 1919]

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Lady Ritchie.

The death of Lady Ritchie will lead many people to ask themselves what she has written, or at least which of her books they have read; for she was never, or perhaps only as Miss Thackeray for a few years in the ’sixties and ’seventies of the last century, a popular writer. And, unless we are mistaken, they will find themselves, on taking down The Story of Elizabeth or Old Kensington, faced with one of those curious problems which are more fruitful and more interesting than the questions which admit of only one answer. The first impression of such a reader will be one of surprise, and then, as he reads on, one of growing perplexity. How is it possible, he will ask, that a writer capable of such wit, such fantasy, marked by such a distinct and delightful personality, is not at least as famous as Mrs Gaskell, or as popular as Anthony Trollope? How has she escaped notice all these years? And by what incredible oversight have we allowed passages which can only be matched in the classics of English fiction to be so hidden beneath the modern flood that the sight of them surprises like the flash of a jewel in a dust heap? What are the faults that have neutralised—if they have neutralised—this astonishing bounty of nature?

Some of the reasons at any rate for this neglect are not far to seek, and are to be ascribed more to the fault of the public than to the fault of the writer. Lady Ritchie was incapable of much that appears necessary to ensure popularity. She wrote neither for the busy man who wants to be diverted, nor for the earnest who wishes to be instructed; she offered neither sensation nor impropriety, and her beauty and distinction of manner were as unfailing as they were natural. Such characteristics are not those that appeal to a large public; and, indeed her gifts and her failings were so curiously and so provokingly combined that, while none of her novels can be called a masterpiece, each one is indisputably the work of a writer of genius. But the test of the masterpiece is not, after all, the only test. We can also ask ourselves whether a novelist has created a world which, with all its limitations, is still a habitable place, and a place which but for him would never have come into existence. Now Lady Ritchie’s novels and recollections, although it is only honest to admit that they have their lapses, their unbridged abysses and their tracts of obscurity, offer us a world unlike any other when we are setting out upon one of our voyages of the imagination. We doubt whether since the death of George Eliot in 1880 the same can be said of the work of any other Englishwoman. It is not only still possible to read with enjoyment The Story of Elizabeth, The Village on the Cliff, and Old Kensington, but as we read them we have the sense that there is nothing quite like them in existence. When we remember that they were published in 1866, 1865, and 1873 respectively, we may feel certain that they owe their survival to some real, and to some extremely rare, magic of their own.

We should ascribe it largely to their absolute individuality. Some writers, like Charlotte Brontë, triumph by means of one overwhelming gift; others, like George Borrow, are so queerly adjusted to the world that their vision reveals a new aspect of things; but Lady Ritchie’s genius belonged to neither of these classes. It would be difficult to quote any scene in her books as one of surpassing power, or to claim that the reading of her writing has influenced our view of life one way or the other. On the other hand she possessed indisputably what seems to be as rare a gift as any—the gift of an entirely personal vision of life, of which her books are the more or less complete embodiment. She had her own sense of character, of conduct, of what amused her, of what delighted her eye, of trees and flowers and the beauty of the seasons. She was completely and transparently faithful to her vision. In other words she was a true artist; and when once we have said that of any writer we have to draw back a little and look at his work as a whole, with the understanding that whether great art or lesser art it is a thing unique of its kind.

With every excuse for taking shelter behind the great shield of tradition inherited from her father, nothing impresses one more in Lady Ritchie’s work than the certainty that every stroke proceeded directly from her own hand; a more natural gift than hers never existed. It came to her directly, and owed nothing to discipline or to the painstaking study of other writers. Not many novelists can have assumed as early as she did complete command not only of their own method, but of their own language. The Story of Elizabeth, written in early youth, is as fluent, easy and composed in style as the work of one who has been framing sentences and casting scenes for a lifetime. This early maturity was the result of a great natural gift growing up with all the most polished tools at command in an atmosphere forbidding any but the most sensitive right use of them. Thus endowed, and thus wisely cherished, she rested we will not say indolently, but frankly and simply in her gift. She trusted to her instinct and her instinct served her well. Young writers might do worse than go to Lady Ritchie’s pages for an example of the power of an apparently simple and yet inevitably right sense of the use of language. There is no premeditation, no effort at profundity; her prose appears to swim and float through the air rather than to march firmly with its feet set upon the ground. But every sentence is formed; they cohere together; and invariably at the end of a chapter or paragraph there is a sense that the melody has found its way through one variation and another to its natural close. The impression, it may be of the slightest, has been conveyed to us; the scene, it may be of the most transient, lives with the breath of life. She has, in fact, done exquisitely and exactly what she set out to do.

However this was achieved, and her instinct after all was a highly cultivated instinct, no one can read Old Kensington or The Story of Elizabeth without being aware of a certain spaciousness and composure of manner which are oddly unlike the style of the present time. The style, of course, corresponds to something in the point of view. Her heroes and heroines live in a world of their own, which is not quite our world, but a rather simpler and more dignified place. They do not analyse themselves very much, nor do they complicate their lot by taking upon them the burden of public right and wrong. They are blissfully unconscious even of themselves. Much that a modern writer would dissect into detail is presented to us in the mass. One might suppose that the process of building up such a character as Dolly Vanborough in Old Kensington was a simple one calling only for a few strokes of the brush in comparison with the process by which some of our complex young women are now constructed. And yet Dolly Vanborough lives, and the others for the most part merely serve to tell the time of day like efficient little clocks whose machinery will soon be out of order. Like all true creations, Dolly Vanborough and Elly Gilmour, while they pay homage to the conventions of their time have within them capacities for feelings which are never called forth by the story. We could fancy ourselves at ease today with one of these honest, arch, rather reserved young ladies in spite of the fact that she wears a crinoline and has no sort of desire for a vote. Against all probability, indeed, the thing we should find strange in them is not their sentimentality or their extravagance of feeling, but rather their slight hardness of heart, their determination to keep always well within the bounds of common sense.

Here, indeed, lay one of the paradoxes and fascinations of Lady Ritchie’s art. With all her power of creating an atmosphere of tremulous shadows and opal tinted lights, with all her delight in the idyllic and the rapturous, the shapes of things are quite hard underneath and have, indeed, some surprisingly sharp edges. It would be as superficial to sum her up as a sentimentalist as it was to call her father a cynic. In her case the sentiment is more hopefully and openly expressed, but her sight is singularly clear; the shrewd, witty judgement of a woman of the world smiles constantly upon her own rosy prospects. It is notable that she had neither heroes nor heroines in the accepted sense of those terms; her hero is generally a clumsy, ineffective young man who spends too much and fails to pass his examinations; and the heroine, even the first born of all, has a thousand follies of a natural human kind. Who, after all, had a greater delight than Lady Ritchie in the delineation of a fool—a delight naturally without a trace of cruelty? We need only recall the inimitable Mrs Palmer, whose mother had been an Alderville, ‘and the Aldervilles are all young and beautiful, helpless, stout, and elegantly dressed’. As an example of her vein of humour, here is a little scene from Old Kensington:

‘Hulloh!’ shouted Sir Thomas, as he drove out at the park-gates. ‘Look there, Anley! he is draining Medmere, and there is a new window to the schools. By jove!’

‘Foolish young man!’ said Mr Anley, ‘wasting his substance, draining cottages, and lighting school rooms!’ and he looked out with some interest.

‘Then, Uncle Jonah, you are foolish yourself,’ said Bell.

‘Are you turned philanthropist, Uncle Jonah?’ said Mrs Boswarrick. ‘I wish someone would take me and Alfred up. What have you been doing?’

‘I make it a rule never to do anything at the time that can be put off till the morrow,’ said Mr Anley apologetically. ‘My cottages were tumbling down, my dear, so I was obliged to prop them up.’

‘He bought them from papa,’ said Bell. ‘I can’t think why.’

‘It is all very well for bachelors like you and Raban to amuse yourselves with rebuilding,’ said Sir Thomas, joining in from his box in an aggravated tone; ‘if you were a married man, Anley, with a wife and daughters and milliners’ bills, you would see how much was left at the end of the year for improvements.’

‘To hear the talk, one oughtn’t to exist at all,’ says Mrs Boswarrick, with a laugh.

Or if we want to confute a charge of undue sentimentality we can point to characters like Robert Henley and Rhoda, into whose shallow depths and twisted motives Lady Ritchie’s art strikes like a beam of the sun.

But many fine talents have come to grief over the novel, which demands precisely those qualities of concentration and logical construction in which Lady Ritchie was most naturally or wilfully deficient. We could guess, if we had not good authority for knowing, that in composing her novels ‘she wrote fragments as thoughts struck her and pinned them (with literal not metaphor pins) at parts of her manuscript till it became a chaotic jumble maddening to the printers’. As Leslie Stephen, one of her warmest admirers, wrote of her—

She showed more perception and humour, more delicate and tender and beautiful emotion, than would have made the fortune of a dozen novelists, had she had her faculties more in hand. Had she, for example, had any share of Miss Austen’s gift for clearness, proportion, and neatness, her books would have been much better, as incomparably more successful.

It is true the string does not always unite the pearls; but the pearls are there, in tantalising abundance—descriptions, sketches of character, wise and profound sayings, beyond the reach of any but a few modern writers, and well able to stand the ordeal of printing together in some book of selections.

But the qualities which militated against her success as a novelist did not stand in her way in another branch of literature in which she excelled. The lack of ambition, the childlike candour of mind which had so much rather praise and exalt than weigh and ponder made her singularly happy in her task, or pleasure, of recording the great and small figures of her own past. Here the whimsical and capricious genius has its scope unfettered and exquisitely inspired. We should be inclined to put her at the head of all modern artists in this manner and to claim for her indeed, that she invented an art of her own. For her method is quite unlike the ordinary method. There is no analysis, no criticism, and few good stories—or the stories only become good in the telling. But her skill in suggesting the mood, the spirit, the look of places and people defies any attempt to explain it. How, we ask, from such apparently slight materials are such vivid impressions created? Here is Charlotte Brontë:

My father, who had been walking up and down the room, goes out into the hall to meet his guests; then, after a moment’s delay, the door opens wide, and the two gentlemen come in leading a tiny, delicate, serious, little lady, pale, with fair straight hair and steady eyes. She may be a little over thirty; she is dressed in a little barège dress with a pattern of faint green moss. She enters in mittens, in silence, in seriousness; our hearts are beating with wild excitement.

Trelawny:

Not very long afterwards came a different visitor, still belonging to that same company of people. I had thrown open the dining-room door and come in looking for something, and then I stopped short, for the room was not empty. A striking and somewhat alarming-looking person stood alone by the fireplace with folded arms; a dark impressive looking man, not tall, but broad and brown and weather beaten, gazing with a sort of scowl at his own reflection in the glass. As I entered he turned slowly and looked at me over his shoulder. This was Trelawny, who had come to see my father. He frowned, walked deliberately and slowly from the room, and I saw him no more.

George Sand:

She was a stout middle-aged woman, dressed in a stiff watered-silk dress, with a huge cameo, such as people then wore, at her throat. Her black shiny hair shone like polished ebony, she had a heavy red face, marked brows, great dark eyes; there was something—how shall I say it?—rather fierce, defiant, and set in her appearance, powerful, sulky; she frightened one a little. ‘That is George Sand,’ said Mrs Sartoris, bending her head and making a friendly sign to the lady with her eye-glasses. The figure also bent its head, but I don’t remember any smile or change of that fixed expression.

We feel that we have been in the same room with the people she describes. Very likely the great man has said nothing memorable, perhaps he has not even spoken: occasionally her memory is not of seeing him but of missing him: never mind—there was an ink-pot, perhaps a chair, he stood in this way, he held his hat just so, and miraculously and indubitably there he is before our eyes. Again and again it has happened to us to trace down our conception of one of the great figures of the past not to the stout official biography consecrated to him, but to some little hint or fact or fancy dropped lightly by Lady Ritchie in passing, as a bird alights on a branch, picks off the fruit and leaves the husk for another.

Something of the kind will perhaps be her destiny in the future. She will be the unacknowledged source of much that remains in men’s minds about the Victorian age. She will be the transparent medium through which we behold the dead. We shall see them lit up by her tender and radiant glow. Above all and for ever she will be the companion and interpreter of her father, whose spirit she has made to walk among us not only because she wrote of him, but because even more wonderfully she lived in him. It would have pleased her well to claim no separate lot for herself, but to be merged in the greater light of his memory. Praise of her own work would have seemed to her unnecessary. It would have surprised her, but it would have pleased her, to realise with what a benediction many are today turning to the thought of her, thanking her not only for her work, but thanking her more profoundly for the bountiful and magnanimous nature, in which all tender and enchanting things seemed to grow—a garden, one might call it, where the airs blew sweetly and freely and the bird of the soul raised an unpremeditated song of thanksgiving for the life that it had found so good.

[Times Literary Supplement, Mar 6, 1919]

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‘Sylvia and Michael.’

[Sylvia & Michael. The Later Adventures of Sylvia Scarlett (Martin Seeker, 1919) by Compton MacKenzie.]

The feat that no reviewer of Mr Mackenzie’s books can possibly attempt is to explain even in the most compressed form what happens. In Sylvia and Michael the reader must be content with the assurance that Sylvia Scarlett is, in the familiar phrase, ‘still running’. We leave her, indeed seated upon the shore of a Greek island with her hand in the hand of Michael Fane: but figuratively speaking she is still running as hard as she can; and when the book is shut the eye of imagination sees her whisking over the skyline attended by the usual troupe of chorus girls and nondescript young men doing their best to keep up with her, but more and more hopelessly outdistanced by the speed of her legs and the astonishing volubility of her tongue. The number of volumes still to be run through we guess to be considerable. The race which ends in the Greek island begins in Petrograd and is continued under every condition of discomfort and danger, since not only is she periodically reduced to her last penny, but the European war is blazing and roaring all round her and never ceases to harry her and her companions much as a relentless mowing machine will drive all the small deer of a cornfield into the open.

The gifts which enable Mr Mackenzie to keep so large and various company in such incessant activity, at any rate of the legs, are not negligible, although whether they have anything to do with literature is an open question. They include, to begin with, an astonishing swiftness of eye, so that he has only to be in a room once in order to write a complete inventory of its furniture. And should the room be furnished not only with chairs and tables but with a large and queer assortment of men and women, he will with equal swiftness make an inventory of them too. He rattles off their little distinguishing peculiarities as if his fund were inexhaustible, and the out of the way nature of his discoveries stimulates the imagination to hold itself in readiness for a strange and delightful expedition. So, at an evening party, someone might whisper in your ear, ‘That lady is Mère Gontran, and she keeps owls in a shed, and when her collie barks she thinks it is the voice of her dead husband.’ One looks at Mère Gontran with a access of interest, and before the interest has died out someone else is introduced, who has some different peculiarity or even little trick of the hand such as plaiting four necklaces in a rope until the string breaks and the green shells fall on the floor, and what can be more natural than that the dogs should start fighting in the street at that moment, until someone throws a stone which hits one of them on the hind leg, so that he runs off leaving a trail of blood upon the pavement? Meanwhile, what has become of Mère Gontran? She is no longer there: we may keep on repeating to ourselves, ‘She keeps owls in a shed,’ but the light of that illumination is not everlasting.

But, though we own to have tried, it would be difficult to burlesque the extreme swiftness with which Mr Mackenzie whisks his figures across the stage. For the sake of such vivacity one is ready to pardon a considerable degree of superficiality. But since Sylvia is not whisked across the stage and has developed a habit of soliloquy in the intervals of activity it is difficult to account for our failure to find her when we come to look for her. But the more she talks the less we see her. ‘“This Promethean morality that enchains the world and sets its bureaucratic eagle to gnaw the vitals of humanity,” Sylvia cried, … “No, no it cannot be right to secure the many by debasing the few.”’ That she says many smart things about war and religion and nationality is undeniable: but in the process of saying them she fades out of existence beyond the power of owl or necklace to revive her, and leaves us wondering why so clever a journalist should think it necessary to get himself up as a young woman. But what is it that this queer combination of movement and brilliancy, platitude and vacancy, reminds us of? Not in the least of Greek islands and besieged cities; but rather of an evening party where conversations are always being cut short, where people look queer in their finery, where great vivacity alternates with empty silences, and where it is the fate of some to be pinned in a corner and discoursed to eternally by a bore.

[Times Literary Supplement, Mar 20, 1919]

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Dickens by a Disciple.

[The Secret of Dickens (Chapman and Hall, 1919) by W. Walter Crotch]

Perhaps no one has suffered more than Dickens from the enthusiasm of his admirers, by which he has been made to appear not so much a great writer as an intolerable institution. People read Dickens who boast with truth that they have read nothing else. Others talk of him in the proprietary way that Yorkshiremen talk of Yorkshire. And on this account it is easy enough to believe that you have read Dickens without having opened him since childhood: you have not merely read him, but you have made up your mind that you do not want to read him again. So, from photographs and coloured postcards one has seen all one ever hopes to see of the Taj Mahal or the Bay of Naples. But, happily for the health of the soul, there exist country inns and wet Sundays; there exist on the solitary shelf of the single sitting room only Edna Lyall and Charles Dickens. Faced with the alternative of counting the raindrops, people have been known to declare that they would rather demolish Dickens, and, proceeding sternly enough to do so, they have emerged at the end of four or five hours protesting that no one has ever read Dickens before. It can only be a question whether any other English novelist, save Scott, has a right to be called Shakespearean. Like Shakespeare and like Scott, his faults are so colossal that, had he been guilty of them alone, one might have inferred the prodigious nature of his merits. The extravagance of a first acquaintance wears away; doubts and difficulties arise; the book marker stays wedged in the mass of Nicholas Nickleby for months at a time; the Brothers Cheeryble prove almost insurmountable, and yet the certainty is none the less sure that somehow or other Dickens was a very great man.

Perhaps Mr Crotch is too much of an admirer to help us to interpret this somehow or other more exactly. He has remained rather in the first stage of astonishment when it is natural to speak of Dickens and Shakespeare in the same breath. But, if he is what is called a ‘Dickensian’, it is by no means true to say of him that he has read no one else. He has read widely in English literature, but he has read always, so it seems, to the glory of Charles Dickens. Great men appear to him either as the forerunners or the successors of his hero; and though this is undeniably true in one sense, it is apt to be false in another. Perhaps Mr Crotch does not exaggerate his hero’s debt to the past; though, as is usual in these cases, the links by which Dickens is attached to Richardson and Fielding, the Social Revolution and the battle of Waterloo, the female novelists and the Factory Acts, are of the most elastic description. But what are we to say when he claims that ‘Thackeray was so much the creation of the older writer that, had the latter never come to maturity, it is, to say the least of it, doubtful whether Vanity Fair or Esmond would ever have been given us’? As if it were not enough to make Dickens swallow Thackeray at one gulp, we are bidden to observe how much of Mrs Gaskell, Kingsley, Wilkie Collins, Charles Reade, Bret Harte and Kipling is directly, though spiritually, the work of Dickens. We admit to have thought that Hawthorne was protected both by the Atlantic and by a certain natural distinction of genius from the infection. But it is not so.

It would be a dull man indeed who did not discern the very spirit of the master in the romances of Nathaniel Hawthorne, with their fresh, almost childlike delight in the frank, unconscious charm of unspoilt natures … Not less discernible is Hawthorne’s indebtedness to him in that early sense of horror which comes upon us in the pages of both with a force all the more compelling because of its swift suddenness.

After this example of the creative powers of Dickens we own to have felt some alarm lest it could be proved that his spirit not only crossed the Atlantic but somehow anticipated its appearance in the flesh. We become nervous whenever a new author is introduced lest he shall be shown to be only Dickens in disguise. Is this, then, the secret of Dickens to which Mr Crotch refers in his title? If everybody is, in a way, somebody else, would it not be simpler to call them all Charles Dickens and have done with it?

But it is easy to poke fun at enthusiasts, and the laugh after all remains with them. In his hunt up and down the centuries, in and out of social, philanthropic, and literary currents, Mr Crotch starts a great many hares which are well worth pursuing, whether we catch them or not. There is the fundamental question of morality. Dickens ‘evinced an unique domestic purism undiscoverable anywhere except in England’ and, according to Mr Crotch, indisputably to the advantage of his novels. And yet perhaps there is no single characteristic that so alienates the present generation from Dickens and Thackeray as their insistence upon this same ‘domestic purism undiscoverable anywhere except in England’. It is not only that by so doing they restrict their sphere: it is that their refusal to say things is, after all, equivalent to saying them rather emphatically. Again, there is the question of democracy and literature. The greatness of Dickens, according to Mr Crotch, lies in his ‘quality of looking at life and of judging all institutions from the standpoint of the common man’. On that account both he and Shakespeare are assured of immortality. But Shakespeare’s democracy, we feel, was an extremely expansive society by no means limited to the common man. Nor can we be certain that the ‘average, wholesome, human son of Adam’ appeared to Shakespeare more profound, elemental, and worthy of his study than Lear, who was probably a ‘highbrow’, and certainly a king. But it is not for the quality of his genius that one likens Dickens to Shakespeare, but for its spontaneity and abundance.

[Times Literary Supplement, Mar 17, 1919]

[]

Washington Irving.

[Tales of Washington Irving. Selected and edited with an introduction by Carl van Doren.]

It would be strange to complain of an editor for the excellence of his introduction; yet to find that all one’s own points have been made already, and some, to be honest, that had escaped one’s notice, is to be tempted to sulk in silence. Mr van Doren has said, and said very well, all that there is to be said about Washington Irving. He has pointed out that

he did not find controversy pretty or reform amusing … He was unfailingly humane, but he was not at all speculative … He chose his themes because they pleased and amused him … He would not have admitted that he owed anyone the duty to be stiffly realistic … In the comfortable middle ground which he took he never suffered from the zeal which makes narrative formless and style cloudy and violent.

We were about to remark that all his stories are really essays when we found that we had been frequently anticipated in that remark too.

It is only left us, therefore, to take up the position which Mr van Doren is denied by the accident of birth. We can state the English point of view. In his polite way Mr van Doren is evidently of opinion that the English influence upon his author was by no means to the good. When he wrote about English customs ‘he wrote too often with his eye a little off the object and on the past’; except in ‘The Stout Gentleman’ he never ‘entirely succeeded with a story which had its setting laid in England’. Patriotism in literature is an insidious poison, but we cannot help thinking that Bracebridge Hall has a considerable charm independently of its tribute to our island merits. It is easy, of course, to guess how it strikes an American. Here is a native writer, promising to do credit to his country. He takes ship to England; he sees the ruins; he hears the nightingales; the voices of the Sirens were not more seductive.

Accustomed always to scenes where history was, in a manner, anticipation … there was something inexpressibly touching in the sight of enormous piles of architecture, grey with antiquity and sinking to decay … 1 shall never forget the thrill of ecstasy with which I first saw the lark rise…. The first time that I heard the song of the nightingale I was intoxicated more by the delicious crowd of remembered associations than by the melody of its notes.

Washington Irving is lost to America from that day forwards; and as others, more distinguished, have followed him in varying degrees of desertion, her case, were it not for Walt Whitman, would be hard indeed. Yet the fields of America have, one supposes, their banks of violets, though Shakespeare never saw them; their woods contain at least one bird, the whip-poor-will, though its song never found a path through the sad heart of Ruth. But why the lack of ‘the delicious crowd’ of associations should be so keenly felt by writers when the objects themselves exist is one of the puzzles of literature. On the face of it, no conditions could seem better fitted to stimulate and initiate; and yet, just for the lack of this soft tint of distance, memory, tradition, the buds are withered and the fountains frozen. To judge at least from the nature of the work they produce, it is for the sake of such amenities as these that American writers have turned, physically and spiritually, to England and outdone the English in the emblems of long-founded civilisation, in culture, urbanity, and slow-flowing melodious prose that slips ever so smoothly in the canals cut by the good English writers of the eighteenth century.

The pleasantness of the product is undeniable. For the first ten or even twenty minutes the gentle undulations of Washington Irving’s tales, rippling with his sly sentimental humour, will enchant and even convert a reader from more modern predilections. But the great enemy is only held at bay: our dreams are pleasant, our waking sweet, but it cannot be denied that we have slept. As in conversation, so in literature, excessive politeness that holds everything at arm’s length and allows no familiarity begins by conciliating and ends—wherever refuge is to be found. Irving’s love of ruins ‘grey with antiquity and sinking to decay’, his obsession with the past, his passion for buried treasure, and his enthusiasm for ghosts are all ingredients in the sleeping-draught, though he sought them, we believe, in an instinctive and pathetic attempt to provide his native land with an atmosphere in which literature could be produced. He forces us to consider what our natural endowment of ruins and nightingales amounts to. It amounts, perhaps, to no more than a congenial sense that one is not speaking out into the raw air. There is no need to prove oneself literate, to convert others, or to bother too much about the quality of one’s own style. Or are the nightingales and the ruins more profoundly ingrained in us than we know? However this may be, Washington Irving produced literature that is by no means to be despised. The episode of the stout gentleman is a first-rate specimen of the English essay; his tales are rich in passages of excellent humour and literary charm; but they compel us to repeat what everyone else has said already, that he never wrote a story in his life.

[Times Literary Supplement, Apr 3, 1919]

[]

The Eccentrics.

If, in your more ambitious moments, you have coveted a monument in the Dictionary of National Biography, you have not, perhaps, wished to see inscribed upon it the single word ‘eccentric’. That the efforts and aims of your life, your virtues, learning, and devotion, should be summed up once and for all, briefly and comprehensively, as those of an eccentric does not perhaps seem to you a fitting reward, nor an epitaph to be pointed at with pride by your descendants. Yet considering how small a company it is that comes through the gates of Death wearing this title upon their breasts, and how infinitely more common it appears to be to die a Dean or a Professor, a hero or a Prime Minister, perhaps after all there is something to be said for the eccentrics. If, at the age of forty or thereabouts, other distinctions seem rather to recede than to bestow their brightness on your head, it might be worth while, supposing you are still set upon a title, to see what can be done in the direction of eccentricity. But let us forewarn you of failure.

It is not a profession that can be taken up late in life or practised successfully by the mere will to practise it. You can, of course, walk up and down the Tottenham Court Road wrapped in a towel in imitation of the Greeks; or adopt a panther for a pet; or bury all your gold in a cellar and sit upon the grave. But you will never, we hope, deceive the editor of the Dictionary of National Biography by such trumpery devices as these. The quality which marks all true eccentrics is that never for a moment do they believe themselves to be eccentric. They are persuaded—and who shall say that they are wrong?—that it is the rest of the world who are cramped and malformed and spiritually decrepit, while they alone have lived their lives according to the dictates of nature. It must be owned that in the battle of life, the triumph of civilisation, or whatever we choose to call it, they have invariably been worsted. The Government offices are not for them, nor the Houses of Parliament, nor the Woolsack, nor the Judicial Bench. If they appear in any of these places it is in some menial capacity, to sweep the stairs, or to collect the waste paper on the point of a very long stick; or, occasionally, in the dock itself. Even so they will not be arrested for any such crime as murder or felony; they will only have committed what is called a ‘nuisance’, such as giving away sovereigns in the street or worshipping some peculiar variety of God in the back garden.

For such reasons as these it is extremely rare to find a full and satisfactory biography of an eccentric. His family generally contrives to forget all about him; he only crops up, in our experience, as if by accident in the biographies of his relations, like a weed picked by mistake with the roses, or a dandelion that the wind has wafted to a bed primly sown with prize specimens of the double aster. But it is always worthwhile to make the experiment. Here we will suppose (without too much tasking probability) is the life and letters of some great dignitary in three volumes with an index, bound in blue and stamped upon each volume with some heraldic emblem and a motto protesting loyalty, or tenacity, or integrity to which the hero, as his life convinces us, has more than lived up. But where, then, is his Uncle John with his passion for the baptismal rite, or his Aunt—I forget her name—who knew for certain that the world is shaped like a star-fish? It is no use looking for them in the index; they are not to be found there; but sometimes inadvertently, or perhaps to illustrate some law of heredity or some creditable act of devotion on the part of their nephew, they do stealthily and as if by the back door momentarily creep in. The other day, looking through the life and letters of a famous man who was worshipped with reason and died not only a Canon, but also a Sub-Dean, it was the reward of a wandering attention to light upon the figure of his father, a maker of iron bedsteads in the city of Bristol. As the son was going from good to better and there could be no reason whatever for anxiety about his career, it seemed worthwhile to consider for a moment this maker of iron bedsteads in the city of Bristol. And the reward was instant. All his life he made all their legs of solid iron. It was useless to tell him that science had devised a means of making hollow legs without impairing the virtue of beds; it was useless to prove that his competitors would out-distance him and his family be brought to ruin. It was the state of his soul that he cared for. He could not tolerate hollowness within. The imagination likes to picture him in the decline of his years and the decay of his fortunes, with death only in prospect, repeating over and over the proud boast with which he would front the Recording Angel and claim for himself a superior station in the Heavenly Choir: ‘The legs of all my bedsteads were of solid iron!’

Sometimes, though it happens far too seldom, lives have been written of these singular men and women, or, after they are dead, someone half-shamefacedly has put together their papers. Dr Meryon, for example, wrote the memoirs of Lady Hester Stanhope, thus earning our eternal gratitude; and there are three volumes where we could have done with twenty devoted to the superb memory of Margaret Fuller. Neither of these women would have seen any force in the word eccentric as applied to herself, though it would not have surprised them in the least, could they have woke a century later, to find Temples dedicated to them, religions ascribed to them, and sects of devotees worshipping their divinity. Lady Hester indeed kept her white horse perpetually in readiness for the Messiah in her stable. How often, sitting alone in her castle at the top of Mount Lebanon, now picking a little bit of meat from one of the innumerable saucers, now sharply reproving some sylph for its antics behind the chest of drawers, and all the time puffing blue clouds of smoke from her hookah, did she not see herself riding into Jerusalem by the side of the Lord and enjoy in fancy the consternation with which Lord Palmerston and Queen Victoria received the news! The fancies of Margaret Fuller were not so much different from other people’s fancies; she merely thought herself inspired, married an Italian footman, believed him a Marquis, and perished in shipwreck off the American coast, losing not only son and husband and her life in the waves, but also the manuscripts that were to have made her immortal and—freed the world from death?—proclaimed the truth?—made all men equal and women perhaps a little superior?—or what was it? The waters hold those secrets still. Then there was the friend of Shelley, Elizabeth Hitchener, who left her school to float his little bottles out to sea, and wrote at least one line of an epic,

All, all are men—women and all!

together with some philosophical reflections upon the soul of the horse. And Mrs Grote must not be forgotten, nor can be so long as the English language endures and one has use for the expressive word that was her legacy to the world; or Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, or Mrs Cameron of Freshwater, or Adolphus Blatt, or Caroline Mew, and others innumerable, for they crowd into the memory as one begins to think of Tennyson and the rest, often so dishevelled, in such dishabille from their long obscurity and fantastic behaviour that we are not certain of remembering even their names. Without names and so strangely inspired, leaving behind them now one line, now one word, and now nothing at all, what whim is it that bids us go seeking them round the corners and just beneath the horizons of so many good books devoted to good men? Surely the world has been right in conferring biographies where biographies are due? Surely the shower of titles and honours has not always descended upon the wrong heads? That the world’s estimate has been perverse from the start, and half her great men geese, are themes too vast to be disposed of for ever in one short article. Let a homely figure serve instead of argument. Suppose that you turn on the light in the kitchen when the servants are gone to bed; the beetles slip beneath the carpet, the mice behind the wainscot; nothing remains in the room save the scrubbed deal table and the round white clock. Do you never pause for a moment to wonder where all those nimble lives have gone to and what pranks they are playing beyond your sight, and whether, after all, the solid and the serviceable fulfil every need of the soul?

[Athenaeum, Apr 25, 1919]

[]

‘The Obstinate Lady.’

[The Obstinate Lady (Hutchinson & Co., 1919), by W.E. Norris]

It is probable that if Mr Norris chose to write down the names of all the novels he can lay claim to they would overflow the allotted page. Even if we had not very pleasant memories of some of them we could infer from internal evidence the long and distinguished ancestry of The Obstinate Lady. She has all the marks of maturity: a few, to be frank, of middle age. Mr Norris learnt his craft in the days when a plot was as necessary to a novel as a spring to a mouse-trap; and in these days we have given up catching mice. Yet if it is the plot that teaches this precision and neatness and rightness we need not plume ourselves too much upon our neglect; nor can we deny that a plot of some kind is an admirable device for making us keep our eyes open.

The Obstinate Lady has earned that title because she will not apply for a divorce from the incorrigible drunkard who is her husband. Indeed, when his sins have found him out, she goes to the length of nursing him herself, and to her charge is committed the necessary bottle of morphia. Touched by her conduct, Jack Maddison revokes his will; everything is left to his wife; and next morning his valet finds him dead in his bed. An overdose of morphia is said to be the cause; the widow alone had access to the drug, and the finger of suspicion, though not of blame, must point in her direction. But our sympathies are stirred and enlisted by many other complications. The trap, for it is scarcely a problem, is set down in the middle of a nicely arranged group of English gentle-people. They have a charming house up the river; the only blot upon their circumstances is the unhappy marriage of their daughter and her obstinate refusal to accept her freedom. Nevertheless, they have weekend parties and picnics on the Thames; and they have befriended, a little incongruously, a promising young poet whose verses are said not to rhyme, but that, we suspect, is a concession on Mr Norris’s part to the spirit of the age. We rather believe that the war is another of Mr Norris’s concessions. There was no war in the Stanfields’ England. But it is all so skilfully combined and touched up that the modern additions are almost imperceptible, and the question of Blanche Maddison’s guilt is of moment to a good many people whom we know, not intimately indeed, but well enough to feel concerned. Intimacy, of course, is not in Mr Norris’s line. His characters keep their distance, and thus it is quite possible for a savage bull on the one hand and a savage review on the other to settle the question of Kitty Stanfield’s affections. Grains of sand had no effect upon those rather solid scales. But everything that Mr Norris tells us, whether about a bull or about a review, or about an overdose of morphia has the advantage of being quite possible. That is one of the good results of having proved your skill so often that you know to a hairsbreadth how far it will serve you. And at the right moment, not noisily, or clumsily, or ostentatiously, but quietly and with an appearance of almost humorous ease, the catch is released, and the trap comes down to perfection upon the very tip of the villain’s tail.

[Times Literary Supplement, May 1, 1919]

[]

‘Java Head.’

[Java Head (William Heinemann, 1919) by Joseph Hergesheimer]

The Three Black Pennys was a very good novel; Java Head is a good novel. But, even so, Java Head is quite good enough to deserve that we should bring forward our reasons for judging it decidedly inferior to its predecessor. Every writer, after the first flush of youthful experiment, settles into a manner of his own. It is inevitable; and yet, as the new scene shapes itself after the pattern of the old, as the sentence takes its accustomed curve, some little thrill of foreboding may stay the pen in the air. These easy cadences and facile arrangements are the first grey hairs, the first intimations of senility. There is only one way to remain young: it is to cease doing what you have learnt to do easily and perhaps successfully, and to attempt what you are not certain of being able to do at all. The odious discipline which we should prescribe for Mr Hergesheimer is to write a novel in which there is no furniture, no ladies’ dresses, no still life. He should be forced to write of modern people; he should be required to make them talk. For the comparative failure of Java Head is due to a self-indulgence which eliminates all that Mr Hergesheimer finds difficult or repellent and leaves those problems which he enjoys solving and is certain of solving exquisitely as often as he chooses.

Again we have America some hundred years ago. The scene is laid at Salem. The family of Ammidon, with whom the story is chiefly concerned, is a great shipowning family. They trade with the East, and the beautiful sailing ships laden with picturesque cargoes furl their sails almost under the windows of the substantial dwelling-house which the old sea captain, Jeremy Ammidon, has christened Java Head, after the high black rock which was ‘the symbol of the safe and happy end of an arduous voyage’. One day his son, the sea captain Gerrit, after being given up for lost, sails into the harbour, and along with his casks and bales brings to shore an unknown bride, a Chinese woman of the highest caste. Exposed to the chatter and gossip of Salem society, Taou Yuen remains imperturbable and alien. The love-making of Edward Dunsack, a merchant trading with China, acquainted with the language and demoralised by the smoking of opium, scarcely rouses her. But through him she learns to suspect her husband’s fidelity. He was, she is told, in love with Dunsack’s niece. During her visit to the suspected girl Dunsack breaks into the room, and to escape the horrors pressing round her Taou Yuen snatches his opium pills, swallows one after another, and dies in her sleep.

But as in a picture the eye rests on some tuft of daisies or spray of foliage while conscious of the larger lines, so these details are part of the surrounding landscape. At the same time that Taou Yuen loves and dies, the old sea captain Jeremy faces the fact that the slow-sailing ships of his youth and pride are outdone by the new racing clippers, and dies of the shock of finding that without his knowledge two of the company’s vessels are engaged in the opium trade. Somehow, too, it is not merely jealousy that has killed the Chinese woman, but America, with its ‘unfamiliar circumstances, tradition, emotions’. The presence of a scaffolding of this sort gives Java Head its sobriety and distinction. And, to continue a metaphor which is peculiarly suitable to Mr Hergesheimer, the painting of the little tufts and sprigs is at once loving and precise. Take this, for instance, of the Nautilus coming into harbour: ‘The ship moved more slowly, under her topsails and jibs, in a soundless progress with the ripples falling away in water like dark green glass, liquid and still.’ Or take one of the many descriptions of the apparel of Taou Yuen. She wore

a long gown with wide sleeves of blue-black satin, embroidered in peach-coloured flower petals and innumerable minute sapphire and orange butterflies, a short sleeveless jacket of sage green caught with looped red jade buttons and threaded with silver, and indigo high-soled slippers crusted and tasselled with pearls. Her hair rose from the back in a smooth burnished loop. There were long pins of pink jade carved into blossoms, a quivering decoration of paper-thin gold leaves with moonstones in glistening drops, and a band of coral lotus buds. Pierced stone bracelets

but it is too long to quote in its entirety; worse, it is too detailed to be seen as a whole. Happily Mr Hergesheimer has himself saved us from uttering the priggish comment which keeps breaking in among these pretty things. ‘She is very gorgeous and placid, superior on the surface; but the heart, Gerrit—that isn’t made of jade and ivory and silk.’ No, the heart is neither gorgeous nor placid. It is very difficult to write beautifully about the heart. When Mr Hergesheimer has to describe not what people wear but what they feel, he shows his lack of ease or of interest by becoming either very violent or very stiff. There is no sense of enjoyment in his dialogue.

The origin of this fault-finding, however, is to be found in the fact that Java Head is one of the smaller number of novels which appear to be written by an adult; and therefore we make Mr Hergesheimer responsible for our disappointment instead of saying nothing about it, because it is useless to point out the immaturity of a child. He brings to mind some of the novelists who are undoubtedly mature—Mr Conrad, for example. And one of their peculiarities is that felicities of the kind we have quoted come incidentally on the stretch for something higher and more remote so that we take them in half consciously at the time as part of the general richness, and only in memory go back and distinguish them for their individual beauty. But in Java Head we are led up to them; they are the fruit on the topmost branch; there is nothing beyond them. Nevertheless, Java Head is a good novel.

[Times Literary Supplement, May 29, 1919]

[]

On Some of the Old Actors.

[The Life of Augustin Daly (Macmillan Company, 1917) by Joseph Francis Daly.]

This is one of the primitive biographies, recording every fact, but scarcely attempting composition. It is addressed manifestly to a group of people who have a peculiar relish for old theatre programmes—those ‘lovers of the stage and its traditions’ to whom the book is dedicated. For many readers, therefore, the interest which certainly exists is of an indirect nature. We are interested that other people should be interested. What is it that holds them spellbound in this vast collection of faded programmes thirty or forty years of age? What is this passion for the stage?

Mr Daly makes no attempt to define, and none certainly to justify. Directly the two small brothers, Augustin and Joseph, are conscious of any desire whatever, they know that they wish to own a theatre. Augustin, the leader in the life-long companionship, set up his first theatre in the back-yard of their house in New York. All the fittings were ready and the opening announced, when ‘it suddenly occurred to him that he had no play’. Equally characteristic, though in the circumstances more remarkable, is the fact that ‘he was absolutely without ambition to act.’ He appeared upon the stage only twice, and to judge by the names of his productions his taste in the drama was so casual and catholic that one can easily believe that he sometimes forgot about the play. His passion was to ‘manage the production’. Some desire he had, originally at least, to break with tradition, to eliminate stars, and to found his theatre upon the French model; but this fades into insignificance, if it is not crushed out of existence, by the rapacity of the other appetite. Impelled by this instinct, he possessed two theatres, was building a third, and had three companies to provide for by the time he was thirty-five. The long reel of the names of the forgotten and apparently meretricious dramas with which he kept his companies supplied makes the head spin. Melodrama of the most sensational kind alternated with plays of Shakespeare and Wycherley re-written by Mr Daly so that ‘all the gaiety and charm of the situations’, robbed of their coarseness, remained. Once set in activity, the machine for producing plays could never stop. If one fails, the gorged and capricious public must be tempted by a fly of a brighter tint or a more audacious shape. For all the insight that Mr Daly gives us into his brother’s mind, he might have been one of those men of iron will and instant determination who lead armies to victory or provide a continent with pills.

But a difference, subtle but unmistakable, between this business and other businesses makes itself felt. Mr Daly had no desire to amass a fortune. The gilt and carving—‘the doors were ornamented with wood carving … which none of the general public had time to observe’—the curtains specially embroidered at Milan in silk, the carpets of velvet, the crimson satin drop curtains, the first of their kind in existence, were for the theatre alone. Everything was for the theatre. When, reluctantly and with an air of embarrassment, Mr Daly appeared on the stage in answer to calls, ‘he is generally dusty, and not infrequently there is a big dab of whitewash or some other colour rubbed from the scene upon some part of his clothing’. He was a reserved and rather unpopular man who worked eighteen hours a day in his theatre and insisted that his rule there was absolute. But beyond the gambler’s excitement of throwing gold upon the table and watching it multiply or disappear, we are able to detect now in a name, now in a letter, and now everywhere rather than anywhere in particular what is called ‘the glamour of the stage’. The pen of Mrs John Wood at once transports us to a more generous and richly lighted world. ‘My dear person,’ she writes, ‘nothing shall prevent my seeing you. You leave Victoria Station … arriving here at one o’clock—where you would behold your Peach blossom on the plank.’ She ends her letters, ‘Yours muchly Matilda’, or ‘Yours until we meet and long after’; she signs herself ‘Peachblossom’ or ‘Thalia’. The charm begins to work. We feel, a little prematurely perhaps, admitted behind the scenes; invited into dressing rooms where, among the tinsel and the rouge, the atmosphere is deliciously warm and full of the vibrations of temperament. They talk of ‘plays that would add to the incomparable fame of the great Shakespeare himself’. Miss Avonia Jones declares, ‘I must tell you that my style is passionate. When I love it must be madly … Hate, revenge, despair, sarcasm and resistless love are what I glory in’. Good Miss Jones, Daly calls her, and adds that she enjoys the domestic virtues of a cow. Old Charlotte Cushman, famous in the early part of the century for her representation of Meg Merrilies, complains that ‘the trouble nowadays exists in the actors—they lack respect for the profession.’ And there are vast numbers of young men and women, conscious of inspiration (or, as one of them puts it, ‘I have the volcanic temperature’), who demand that the chief parts shall at once be allotted to them, though, as one lady thinks it necessary to warn Mr Daly, ‘in acting tragic parts my emotion, which is apt to carry me away, may prove perilous to the gentleman who plays with me.’ Indeed, their emotion perpetually carries them away, though it proves perilous rather to them than to others. Faithless as they appear in breaking contracts and deserting to the rival manager, they can always be trusted to flock to the support of any of their number who have fallen upon evil days. This is no uncommon predicament. To judge from the frequency of benefits and bankruptcies, to settle down upon their own land, which is said to be their ambition, is the rarest consummation. ‘The actor,’ said Mr Daly, ‘lives and dies in the present.’ When the money floods in after a successful season they lavish it childishly and ostentatiously. Even Augustin Daly, though personally abstemious, must indulge a mania for ‘extra-illustrating’ such books as Knight’s Shakespeare, which he swells to forty-four volumes with 3,700 plates, or employ an artist to decorate the margins of books with pen-and-ink drawings, or collect first editions of the Waverley novels which, bound in full levant, with gilt tops and uncut, were destined—so one feels—to remain permanently in that condition. When they come up for auction, as periodically happens, they fetch much less than he gave for them.

For the actor, however, it is not merely bankruptcy of coin that has to be dreaded, but bankruptcy of applause. ‘Applause!’ Miss Ada Rehan exclaims. ‘We must have it!’ The public tires or changes its taste. About the year 1894, as Mrs John Wood testifies, the case of the old comic actress, faced with the advent of the problem play, was hard indeed. ‘It is not my fault I’ve not acted,’ she writes, it’s the authors who are to blame. They won’t be funny, and they are driving me to tragedy—I can’t even spell the word, how shall I act it? But what is to become of me?’ Must she really play Emilia in Othello? She need not have been alarmed. Mr Daly’s prediction that ‘musical comedies are destined to be the permanent attraction everywhere’ was fulfilled. In the last of his productions a coach-and-four drove across the stage; and the mounting of The Great Ruby was magnificent beyond precedent. But the strain was too much for him; a lawsuit threatened; the pecuniary situation was difficult, and in the midst of splendours and embarrassments he died worn out.

[Athenaeum, Jun 6, 1919]

[]

Is This Poetry?

[The Critic in Judgment or Belshazzar of Baronscourt (Hogarth Press, 1919) by John Middleton Murry;
Poems (Hogarth Press, 1919) by T.S. Eliot]

There are people who write what they wish to write, though it misses by a thousand words or exceeds by five hundred and fifty the accustomed measure. And, when they write, they have for audience in their mind’s eye—five people, three, nobody at all perhaps. But the invisible audience is the most exacting. The little books issued by the Hogarth Press are, to judge by the present examples, of this uncompromising nature, designed to please no one in particular, addressed to no public save that which has in it the ghosts of Plato and Sir Thomas Browne, and one or two living writers who are certainly unaware of their distinction. Thus it comes about that Mr Murry and Mr Eliot, who have nothing in common save the sincerity of their passion, are issued by the same press and fall to be reviewed on the same day. ‘Reviewed’ is written, but it is scarcely felt. Whether or not it is to be charged to the writer’s merit, the reviewer of these two books must feel himself decidedly more fallible than usual. Perhaps all writing with an honest intention behind it is thus teasing and destructive. Perhaps poetry pays less surface deference to rules than prose.

At any rate, to deal with Mr Murry first, we have to recognise in our own mind as little serenity and certainty as is compatible with what we have done our best to make a thorough understanding of his work. As a first step towards understanding, rub out as many years as divide you from the youth which, stark, stiff, severe, terribly sanguine, has not yet been absorbed into the main activities of the world. Never again is one so serious, so uncompromising and so clear-sighted. That is Mr Murry’s position. He stands upright, surveys the prospect, in which as yet he plays no part, and asks himself, What is the aim of life? What can one believe?

Even he, I say, believed, as I believe,

That we may seek some purpose from our void,

A clew to grope our way by our own wires

Back to the one Unchanging Hand that flings

Us on the stage, and bids us dance a tune,

Though first uncomprehended, comprehensible,

To him that seeks believing.

One after another the forms of Ulysses, Helen, and Plato rise before him and give him their versions of the faith upon which the poet makes his comment—but we will not tread out the steps of the argument. At our age we are inclined to say that the argument does not matter, since most certainly nothing can be proved. Yet as we read the strong, egotistical, sunless poem, such is the force of youth that the argument once more seems to matter. Honesty matters, courage matters,—devil take them! one may add, seeing what a springless jolt over the cobbles they are apt to lead one. But does Mr Murry make the journey worthwhile? Is he, that is to say, what, for convenience sake, we call a poet? Does he give us what after all matters so much more than the end of any journey or the truth of any argument? This, indeed, is what we find it difficult to decide. A healthy glow pervades anyone who takes hard exercise, but that you can get to perfection by mastering an Act of Parliament. Poetry—this of course is an individual experience—suddenly bestows its beauty without solicitation; you possess it before you know what it contains. But in The Critic in Judgment one feels that one has earned every word that one is given; and the payment is exact; there is no suspicion of gratuity. And yet, how is that without these graces and bounties the poem makes us read it? In part, of course, the subtle English logic carries us along. Beyond that, however, there are passages and phrases where the glow and heat that we require appear, giving us not the easy beauty that we are used to call inspiration, but a more difficult variety born of friction which, from the effort that it exacts, makes us ask in the midst of our exaltation, ‘Is this poetry?’

The ‘ordinary man’, the ghostly master or terror of most writers, would certainly ask the same question about Mr Eliot, and answer it with a decided negative.

Polyphiloprogenitive

The sapient sutlers of the Lord

Drift across the window-panes.

In the beginning was the Word.

Thus begins one of Mr Eliot’s poems, provocative of the question and of the jeering laugh which is the easy reaction to anything strange, whether it be a ‘damned foreigner’ or a Post-Impressionist picture. Mr Eliot is certainly damned by his newness and strangeness; but those two qualities, which in most art are completely unimportant, because ephemeral, in him claim the attention of even the serious critic. For they are part of the fabric of his poetry. Mr Eliot is always quite consciously ‘trying for’ something, and something which has grown out of and developed beyond all the poems of all the dead poets. Poetry to him seems to be not so much an art as a science, a vast and noble and amusing body of communal feeling upon which the contemporary poet must take a firm stand and then launch himself into the unknown in search of new discoveries. That is the attitude not of the conventional poet, but of the scientist who with the help of working hypotheses hopes to add something, a theory perhaps or a new microbe, to the corpus of human knowledge. If we accept, provisionally, Mr Eliot’s attitude, we must admit that he comes well equipped to his task. The poetry of the dead is in his bones and at the tips of his fingers: he has the rare gift of being able to weave, delicately and delightfully, an echo or even a line of the past into the pattern of his own poem. And at the same time he is always trying for something new, something which has evolved—one drops instinctively into the scientific terminology—out of the echo or the line, out of the last poem of the last dead poet, something subtly intellectual and spiritual, produced by the careful juxtaposition of words and the even more careful juxtaposition of ideas. The cautious critic, warned by the lamentable record of his tribe, might avoid answering the question: ‘And is this poetry?’ by asking to see a little more of Mr Eliot than is shown in these seven short poems and even ‘Prufrock’. But, to tell the truth, seven poems reveal a great deal of any poet. There is poetry in Mr Eliot, as, for instance, in the stanzas:

The host with someone indistinct

Converses at the door apart,

The nightingales are singing near

The Convent of the Sacred Heart,

And sang within the bloody wood

When Agamemnon cried aloud,

And let their liquid siftings fall

To stain the stiff dishonoured shroud.

Yet the poetry often seems to come in precisely at the moment when the scientist and the science, the method and the newness, go out. A poem like ‘The Hippopotamus’, for all its charm and cleverness and artistry, is perilously near the pit of the jeu d’esprit. And so scientific and scholarly a writer as Mr Eliot might with advantage consider whether this method was not the method of that ‘terrible warning’, P. Papinius Statius. We hope that Mr Eliot will quickly give us more and remove our melancholy suspicion that he is the product of a Silver Age.

[Athenaeum, unsigned, by VW and LW, Jun 20, 1919]

[]

‘The Way of All Flesh.’

[The Way of All Flesh (1903; A.C. Fifield, 1919) by Samuel Butler]

‘… like most of those who come to think for themselves, he was a slow grower’, says Samuel Butler of Ernest, the hero of The Way of All Flesh. The book itself has had the same sort of history, and for much the same reason. For seven years after the first publication in 1903, it sold very slowly. It was reprinted, ‘widely reviewed and highly praised’, but still hung fire. Then, in 1910, the flames caught; twice in that year it was reprinted, and the impression before us is the eleventh of the second edition. A wise author might choose that fate rather than one of more immediate splendour. No reading public is going to be rushed into buying an author who thinks for himself; its instinct of self-preservation protects it from that folly; first it must go through all the processes of inspection and suspicion. But the public is fundamentally sagacious. It makes up its mind after seven years or so as to what is good for it, and when it has made up its mind it sticks to it with dogged fidelity. Therefore, one is not surprised to find that in the year 1915 ‘Butler’s writings had a larger total sale than in any previous year since their publication.’

Satisfactory as this record is, it is also much in keeping with the character of The Way of All Flesh. The book was written very slowly. Butler worked at it intermittently during twelve years. It is thus like a thing that has grown almost imperceptibly, a cactus or a stalactite, becoming a little shapeless, but more and more solid and sturdy year by year. One can imagine that he had grown too fond of it to part with it. Such a work is too uncompromising to make many friends when it first appears. It bears in every part of it the mark of being a home-made hobby rather than the product of high professional skill. All his convictions and prejudices have been found room for; he has never had the public in his mind’s eye. So, just as Butler himself would have appeared in a crowd of fashionable people, The Way of All Flesh appeared among the season’s novels, awkward, opinionated, angular, perverse. Nor, upon re-reading, does it appear that time has softened these qualities, and, to speak the truth, they are not qualities that are admirable in a novel. The note-book which, according to Butler, every one should carry in his waistcoat pocket, has left that secret post of observation and thrust itself forward. Shrewd, didactic passages taken from its pages constantly block the course of the story, or intrude between us and the characters, or insist that Ernest shall deliver them as if they were his own. For this reason Ernest himself remains a sheaf of papers, written all over with the acute and caustic observations of his maker, rather than an independent young man. Such is the penalty that a writer pays for indulging his hobby too far, even though the hobby be, as it was with Butler, the hobby of using his brain. The scene when Ernest attempts the seduction of Miss Maitland is a proof that when Butler’s young men and women stepped beyond the circle illuminated by his keen intelligence they found themselves as thin and faltering as the creations of a tenth-rate hack. They must at once be removed to the more congenial atmosphere of the Law Courts. There are certain scenes, it appears, which must be written a great deal too quickly to allow of the deliberate inspection of a note-book, and viewed with a passion impossible to the disillusioned eyes of the elderly. There is a sense, after all, in which it is a limitation to be an amateur; and Butler, it seems to us, failed to be a great novelist because his novel writing was his hobby.

In every other respect his gifts were such as to produce a novel which differs from most professional novels by being more original, more interesting, and more alive. The elderly and disillusioned mind has this advantage—that it cares nothing what people think of it. Further, its weight of experience makes up for its lack of enthusiasm. Endowed with these formidable qualities and a profound originality which wrought them to the sharpest point, Butler sauntered on unconcernedly until he found a position where he could take up his pitch and deliver his verdict upon life at his ease. The Way of All Flesh, which is the result, is thus much more than a story. It is an attempt to impart all that Butler thought not only about the Pontifexes, but about religion, the family system, heredity, philanthropy, education, duty, happiness, sex. The character of Christina Pontifex is rich and solid, because all the clergymen’s wives whom Butler had ever known were put into her stew. In the same way Dr Skinner has the juice of innumerable headmasters in his veins, and Theobald is compounded of the dust of thousands of middle-class Englishmen. They are representative, but they are, thanks to Butler’s vigorous powers of delineation, distinctly themselves. Christina’s habit of day-dreaming belongs to her individually, and is a stroke of genius—if Butler did not promptly remind us that it is a little silly to talk about strokes of genius. We should not like to say how often in the course of reading The Way of All Flesh we found ourselves thus pulled up. Sometimes we had committed the sin of taking things, like genius, on trust. Then, again, we had fancied that some idea or other was of our own breeding. But here, on the next page, was Butler’s original version, from which our seed had blown. If you want to come up afresh in thousands of minds and books long after you are dead, no doubt the way to do it is to start thinking for yourself. The novels that have been fertilised by The Way of All Flesh must by this time constitute a large library, with well-known names upon their backs.

[Times Literary Supplement, Jun 26, 1919]

[]

Forgotten Benefactors.

[Edward Jerningham and his Friends: A series of Eighteenth-Century Letters. Edited by Lewis Bettany (Chatto & Windus, 1919).]

The claims of stupidity and the rights of the average human being have never, in our opinion, had justice done to them. The light of history strikes duly upon the mountain peaks; but what of the flocks and herds, the little villages, the cottages whose bedroom candles feebly penetrate a yard or two of the dark, which lie in the valleys and just at the foot of the hills? It is seldom that anybody concerns himself with them, or sets forth to write a book about nonentities. This was not Mr Bettany’s intention when he devoted several years of his life (to judge by the extent of his labours) to Edward Jerningham and his friends. He must be at pains to prove that though Jerningham was not a great writer, still he was a writer; that though his friends were not great men, still some of his acquaintances had certainly been in the same room with men who were. But, having thrown this perfunctory sop to the Muse of History, Mr Bettany devotes himself as completely as we could wish to the service of the insignificant and the unknown. The result is charming. Perhaps we do not read quite as Mr Bettany would have us. Perhaps his labours were designed for a more solemn end than we have always put them to. However this may be, Mr Bettany is one of those rare historians who believe in the importance of men and women and in the individuality of their dogs.

It would be unjust to call Edward Jerningham a stupid man, and still less was he an average man. A friend remarked, ‘Mr Jerningham (poor man!) still continues sillier than his sheep,’ but this refers to his books and is written by a fellow-author. His books, we have to confess, are unknown to us, but his character is nicely portrayed in an anecdote told by his niece:

Aug. 12th. Last Thursday my Uncle Ed., who appears very light and thoughtless, considering the present circumstances of things, went up to my Father’s room after dinner (he appeared a little elevated); but, when he saw my Mother, sitting by the bedside suffering with the gout, and his Brother lying as he does, silent and weak, he was suddenly so struck with the melancholy of the scene that he burst into violent and loud weeping. Edward, who was in the outward room with Frederick, rushed in dreadfully alarmed, supposing my Father was gone, and that the screams came from my Mother. He dragged my Uncle out, who was in a perfect hysteric; but after a few minutes and drinking a glass of water, he returned to the library, quite recovered. Nor should I ever have guessed it by his manner.

Uncle Edward, it appears from another extract, was the best of company, and good-natured in the extreme; if he were rich, she feels certain, he would be ‘very generous to us all’; as it is, he is always in difficulties from which he expects her father to extricate him. ‘My Uncle talked to all the people he met,’ she concludes an account of a walk, ‘particularly the children, and gave them halfpence. This is the Jerningham way; I have it quite.’

Edward Jerningham had several affairs of the heart, but never married. He played on the harp; he wrote poetry in the manner of Gray; and it was common for the ladies and gentlemen of his acquaintance, when buried in the country, to entreat him to send them his witty, original letters. But no one ever troubled to keep Edward Jerningham’s letters. He, on the other hand, carefully preserved several bundles addressed to him, partly no doubt because of the very kind things his friends said about his poetry, but also because he attached great importance to his friendships. He was always more or less in love.

The Jerningham family is one of those extremely ancient families which have existed in respectable obscurity upon the same spot of England for centuries, marrying into the aristocracy, but acquiring nothing more than an occasional knighthood or baronetcy for themselves. Practically all Jerningham’s correspondents bore names which still adorn the columns of the Morning Post. The Walpoles, through a marriage with the Fitz-Osberts in the fourteenth century, were his cousins; the Harcourts, the Howards, the Mount Edgcumbes, the Conways, addressed him familiarly as an equal. The pillar-boxes of Mayfair a hundred and fifty years ago are open for our inspection, and the condition of insignificance to which we attach so much importance is almost invariably fulfilled by their contents then, as perhaps we should find it now. Were it not for the astonishing pertinacity of Mr Bettany, some even of the famous names would be gone past recall. Like the population of a deserted graveyard, a Jones would be found beneath a Howard’s tombstone, and small boys would be playing marbles indifferently upon the grave of a marchioness. Even Mr Bettany has to own himself defeated again and again in his work of identification. ‘I cannot explain this reference. I cannot identify this person,’ is the melancholy refrain of many a letter. But he does not easily give up hope. Those dismissed to darkness upon one page sometimes emerge into a faint ray of light upon another. It is proved satisfactorily that Mr Money, who threatened to escape altogether, was at one time occupied at the Tower. But of whose complexion did Mr Jerningham speak disrespectfully in the year 1799? Who was that entertaining lady, la Belle Emilie, and her fair friend ‘too incapable of feeling a passion ever to inspire one’? Who was Major Wilson? And what was the Christian name of Miss Carter? Mr Bettany has no idea. Even of a great lady like Lady Harcourt, daughter of George, first Baron Vernon, by his third wife Martha, ‘little is known, and therefore little can be said. […] But she seems to have possessed sincere religious feeling’. There can be two opinions even about that. And though Mr Bettany guesses discreetly, we cannot always feel sure that his guess is the right one. ‘When I do return home,’ writes Lady Harcourt, ‘I will not tell Patty a word about the letter you have thought of writing to Madame de Biron; as she could never go into my bed again.’ ‘Patty was apparently the Countess’s favourite bitch’ is Mr Bettany’s too rash conjecture. On another occasion, however, his caution seems to us excessive. ‘The only great event that has happened since my arrival here is the accouchement of Madame Cloe: she has produced three puppies.’ ‘Presumably Miss Harland’s favourite bitch,’ Mr Bettany observes. The three puppies, to our mind, put the question beyond presumption, though what position Madame Cloe had in Miss Harland’s affections must remain obscure until the great day of identification dawns, upon which occasion Mr Bettany’s excitement will be pleasant to witness.

But the book is all the better for having these dark places, and leaving us plenty of scope to guess and speculate and peer after the vanished spectres. Lord Harcourt, indeed, vanished in an extremely abrupt and, to him, unpleasant manner, being found ‘in a narrow well, nothing appearing above water but the feet and legs, occasioned, as it is imagined, by his over-reaching himself in order to save the life of a favourite dog, who was found in the well with him, standing on his lordship’s feet’. Surely that end was ordained by a humorous providence for the author of the following sentence. Lord Harcourt had been dining with the Queen, and wrote to Mr Jerningham:

I shall never forget what her Majesty so justly observed of your works, that she was sure the author was a man of worth and merit. I was quite struck with the justness and the propriety of the observation.

From that on an autumn morning he went pompously, considerately, and appropriately to his death. And Lady Mount Edgcumbe. She was known, behind her back, as the ‘Sea Cowcumber’, which phrase, together with her ladyship’s own plethoric and congested style—‘this week, beyond both, came death (probably) … and the suspected character of her daughter, to agonize her heart; herself a most excellent woman and therefore the more shocked’—somehow produce a sense of the voluminous peeress, kind-hearted, censorious, garrulous, indiscreet, such as pages of pure English would fail to convey. And there is war with France, and ‘a Duke of Beaufort blowing about in a tent, and a Lord Uxbridge crammed into a low damp barrack’; Heaven protect the French noblesse, and avert revolution, and send our sons safe home; poor Lady Clarges’ son died a little hero; but the way Lady Jersey is carrying on with the Prince of Wales is a public scandal, and Lady Emily has been brought to bed of a boy, thank Heaven, and a thousand loves, dear Mr Jerningham, and we wish you were here to make one of our party in the warm South Library.

[Athenaeum, Jul 4, 1919]

[]

A Positivist.

[Obiter Scripta. 1918 (Chapman & Hall, 1919) by Frederic Harrison]

‘Alas!’ exclaims Mr Harrison, ‘I wrote an article in the very first number of the Fortnightly, in May, 1865, along with papers by Huxley, Bagehot, Trollope, George Eliot, G.H. Lewes, Lord de Tabley. And soon after came on John Morley, Lecky, Freeman, Swinburne, Meredith, Pater, Leslie Stephen, Herbert Spencer, Mark Pattison, Frederick Myers, Arthur J. Balfour. Ah! we were a poor lot.’ ‘Alas!’ of course, ought to be written ‘Lord be praised!’ and ‘Ah! we were a poor lot’ similarly transposed into ‘Did the civilised world ever see the like of us?’ for selfdepreciation and lack of self-confidence are not the faults of Mr Frederic Harrison. If they had been he would not have contributed, at the age of eighty-seven, these very positive and energetic notes upon current policies and literature to the Fortnightly Review. He would not have given us the impression that somewhere about the middle of the last century Truth opened her lips and spoke her secrets to a little group of which he is now almost the only survivor. With a little more diffidence he might have mitigated some of his sarcasms against the moderns and—who knows?—have read some of their books. As it is, when someone asked him what he found to read in these days he replied, ‘Well! nothing new, unless what deals with the war or standard literature of the old immortals’. Following upon that confession come, as a matter of course, the usual ironies about Cubism and morality and the manners of young women in omnibuses. A less helpful relationship between the generations it would be difficult to conceive.

Such little amenities may pass; but when Mr Harrison delivers himself with his usual vigour upon current questions—the House of Commons, Ireland, Bolshevism, the League of Nations, patriotism, socialism, or whatever it may be—his asperity, combined with his conviction of having been in the right for sixty years or so, gives him the arrogance of a judge rather than the more valuable insight of a fellow sinner. The inevitable result is that although he says much that is sound and much that is trenchant he seems to be talking to someone in the next room, or, more mysteriously, addressing a world that has ceased to exist. Our point will be made clear by quoting him not upon subjects that are controversial, but upon a matter outside controversy—upon the spectacle of London in 1918:—

It shocks, wounds, disgusts me, as if, with the poet, I were in one of the circles of his Inferno. Modern mechanism has brutalized life. And in this rattle and crash and whirl, wild luxury, games, shows, gluttony, and vice work their Vanity Fair with greater recklessness than ever.

We have no wish to be numbered among those who, according to Mr Harrison, pursue the Victorians with cries of ‘Go up, ye Baldheads!’ but we cannot help wondering how long that remarkable generation will neglect certain aspects of its own morality and society for which we find as many epithets and as severe.

But Mr Harrison has been actively interested in the development of modern thought for at least sixty years; and the general reflections of such an observer have far more value than his judgment of particulars:

There is no Victorian era at all. I have lived and observed things from William IV, to George V, and, great as the changes have been, both material and spiritual, there has been little spasmodic in it at any time. From 1789 to 1918 there has been a continuous post-revolutionary stream.

That is the kind of reflection that seems to us to be within the special province of old age. It proceeds from a million observations of which the younger generation can have no experience; and Mr Harrison could substantiate it with first-hand knowledge of almost every one in the nineteenth century who shared in the spiritual and material development of the time. Far from complaining, as Mr Harrison anticipates, of his egotism in dwelling upon what he has seen, heard and felt, we should for our part keenly relish a far more complete record of his experience than we have here. That, we have reason to hope, since Mr Harrison makes mention of a diary, is a pleasure only deferred. In the present volume, though it is for the most part concerned with the events of the moment, there are startling evidences of his extraordinary range over the past. ‘I took down that delightful book, The Crescent and the Cross, 1845, by Eliot Warburton. Well do I recall the delight it gave us when it first appeared with Kinglake’s Eöthen.’ How, after all, can a memory which holds that retain as truly the impressions of the present moment—how refrain from a slighting comparison between them? And then there are the classics. Aeschylus has taken up some of the room that the moderns would allow to Mr Hardy. Sophocles, Virgil, Horace, Rabelais, Jane Austen, Scott have, not so strangely, closed the doors to their descendants. Perhaps this closing of the doors is one of the necessary results of having convictions and refusing to die, as lyric poets according to Mr Harrison’s computation have to die, at the age of fifty-two. Anyhow, part of Mr Harrison’s definition of religion is to enjoy ‘continuous communion of soul with those of a like mind who are working out their duty in the eye and with the help of Providence’. ‘Of a like mind’—there is the stumbling block. The belief that there is one mind about moral and spiritual purposes which is the right one is the mark of Mr Harrison’s generation, but no longer of ours.

[Times Literary Supplement, Jul 17, 1919]

[]

‘The Old Madhouse.’

[The Old Madhouse by W. de Morgan (William Heinemann, 1919).]

Mr de Morgan was not a first-rate novelist, since very few people manage to assemble all the necessary gifts. Yet he had enough to make him appear constantly on the high road to that goal; and many of his readers would say that he possessed in addition a gift difficult to analyse, but productive of a warm feeling of affection and sympathy. The Old Madhouse, his last novel, is rich in all the qualities and peculiarities which we are used to find in his work. It is unfinished; he laid down his pen in the middle of a sentence; but Mrs de Morgan was happily able to explain how the story was to end. A few words of hers throw light also upon the processes of the writer’s mind. ‘When my husband started upon one of his novels,’ she says, ‘he did so without making any definite plot. He created his characters, and then waited for them to act and evolve their own plot. In this way the puppets in the show became real living personalities to him, and he waited, as he expressed it, “to see what they would do next.”’

Her words will confirm what many readers must have suspected for themselves. Mr de Morgan was a story-teller rather than a novelist. He had the story-teller’s freshness and charm, also his diffuseness and lack of form. He lived in his characters, but for that reason had little authority over them. Thus the story of The Old Madhouse easily swells in its unfinished state to 565 pages of close print. The story which provides the skeleton for this rather obese body could be disposed of in a less number of words. Two young men are engaged to marry two young women. They propose to rent and share between them a vast empty house known as the Old Madhouse. But before Fred Carteret can sign his share of the lease his guardian, the Rev. Dr Carteret, must give his consent. Dr Carteret goes to inspect the house, is left alone there for a moment, and is never seen alive again. The mystery broods very effectively over the entire book. Then Miss Fraser breaks off her engagement with Fred Carteret on the ground that his admiration for the other lady, Lucy Hinchcliffe, who is engaged to the other gentleman, Charley Smith, is excessive. Indeed, when Charley and Lucy are married and gone by themselves to live in the Old Madhouse, Fred finds himself passionately in love with his friend’s wife. It is not until they have eloped together that the Doctor is discovered—but we will not lift the veil of that mystery any further.

That is the story; but Mr de Morgan tells it as people who make up stories are apt to tell them. Things come into his head; people start talking; he becomes engrossed; there is always something further to be added, and once you get interested in a story it is difficult not to bring in the dachshund, and the cabman, and the gardener’s boy. There is a good deal that might be said about the furniture too. Yet, rather surprisingly, our interest thrives on this well-nigh suffocating abundance of nourishment. Mr de Morgan liked to go into things so thoroughly because he found them so absorbing. He was garrulous not from infirmity or slackness of mind, but from fecundity. He gives us the impression that he was so intimate with his characters that he talked aloud to them as he made them, and persuaded them to behave better than they would otherwise have done. But, besides being extremely benevolent, his attitude to his world was highly individual. With the mid-Victorian jocosity which shows itself chiefly in his treatment of the lower classes, who are all characters, and christened accordingly Grewbeer or Gorhambury, he had a share, too, of the later subtlety. He is not only humorous and benignant, but he is what we are apt to call ‘interesting.’ There is much of Dickens in him, but there is also a streak of Henry James. But his admirers would insist that he is above everything else William de Morgan. His method had the merit of giving ample opportunity for that quality to show itself. He can switch off from Fred or Charley at any moment and go on in his own proper person. He can play any tricks he chooses with grammar, for he has only to say ‘Excuse style’ and we forgive him everything. Perhaps for the sake of all this one is ready to sacrifice the more purely intellectual or artistic quality for lack of which The Old Madhouse fails to be the first-rate novel that it shows signs of being. Fred and Charley, Lucy and Elbows, and their crises and entanglements, are all human enough and true enough; and yet the sharpness, the creative vigour which would cast them out of Mr de Morgan’s mind and into the world of reality, is absent. A kind of mist swims over the whole.

[Times Literary Supplement, unsigned, Aug 7, 1919]

[]

A Real American.

[Free and Other Stories and Twelve Men (Boni & Liveright, 1918 and 1919) by Theodore Dreiser]

American literature is still terribly apt to excite the snobbish elements in an English critic. It is either feeble with an excess of culture, or forcible with a self-conscious virility. In either case it appears to be influenced by the desire to conciliate or flout the European standards; and such deference not only never attains its object, but, perhaps deservedly, brings its own punishment in the shape of patronage and derision. One cannot help, on such occasions, boasting of the English descent from Shakespeare. At first sight Mr Dreiser appears to be another of those pseudo-Europeans whose productions may pass muster across the Atlantic, but somehow look over here like careful copies from the old masters. There are many stories, we should suppose, neither better nor worse and indeed much resembling ‘Free’ in the current magazines. But what we should expect an English writer to rattle off with some dash and self-confidence, the American writer produces slowly, languidly, with much fumbling for words and groping for subtleties which seem to escape him. The end is apparent long before it is reached, and we come to it in a listless straggling way which makes the whole expedition seem rather pointless. As there is perhaps no more fatiguing form of mental exercise than the reading of short stories told without zest, the prospect of ten more to come descended like a mist upon the horizon. The cloud lifted, however, against all expectation, as a dull day gets finer and finer without one’s seeing exactly where the light comes from. While we were growing more and more conscious that Mr Dreiser lacked all the necessary qualities for a writer of short stories—concentration, penetration, form—unconsciously we were reading on at a great rate and enjoying the book considerably. At a certain point then it was necessary to come to terms with Mr Dreiser and to inform him that, if he would consent to drop his claim to be a writer of short stories, we for our part would renounce our privileges as the lineal descendants of Shakespeare.

And yet what did our pleasure come from? It did not come from the usual sources; it did not come from excitement or shock; it came, as if surreptitiously, from a sense of American fields and American men and women and of America herself, gross, benevolent, and prolific. For some hundreds of years, of course, the existence of America has been a well-known fact; but the lettered classes have kept their country in the background, or presented it in a form suited to European taste. Mr Dreiser, however, appears to be so much of an American that he describes it without being aware that he is doing anything of the kind. In the same way a home-bred child describes the family in which he has been brought up. There is little evidence that Mr Dreiser has been influenced by Europe. He is not perceptibly cultivated. His taste seems to be bad. When he describes an artist, we, on the other hand, see a journalist.

Davies swelled with feeling. The night, the tragedy, the grief, he saw it all. But also with the cruel instinct of the budding artist, that he already was, he was beginning to meditate on the character of story it would make—the colour, the pathos. […] ‘I’ll get it all in!’ he exclaimed, feelingly, if triumphantly, at last. ‘I’ll get it all in!’

Mr Dreiser gets a great deal too much of it in, but, together with the colour and the pathos, there is another quality which excuses his sins of taste, and perhaps explains them. He has genuine vitality. His interest in life, when not impeded by the restrictions of a definite form, bubbles and boils over and produces Twelve Men, a much more interesting work than Free.

Whether we are able to recognise the originals or not, these twelve character sketches are extremely readable. And to an English reader they are, besides, rather strange. With superficial differences, each of these men is of a large, opulent, masterful character. Each is, as Mr Dreiser defines it, ‘free’, with ‘the real spiritual freedom where the mind, as it were, stands up and looks at itself, faces Nature unafraid, is aware of its own weaknesses, its strengths … kicks dogma out of doors, and yet deliberately and of choice holds fast to many, many simple and human things, and rounds out life, or would, in a natural, normal, courageous, healthy way’. One of these men writes songs, another directs companies, a third builds toy engines. They are all busy and engrossed, and in love with life. Yet with all their power they seem childish—childish in their love of fame, in their love of mankind, in their sentimentality and simplicity. One is certain that their songs will be bad ones, their pictures melodramatic, their stories mere journalism. But their animal spirits are superb. Nor are they entirely animal. The abundance of life in their veins overflows into all kinds of fine and friendly relations with their fellows. Mr Dreiser described them with such enthusiasm that his work has a character of its own—an American character. He is not himself by any means a great writer, but he may be the stuff from which, in another hundred years or so, great writers will be born.

[Times Literary Supplement, Aug 21, 1919]

[]

‘Sonia Married.’

[Sonia Married (Hutchinson & Co., 1919) by Stephen McKenna]

If anyone wishes to take the measure of Mr Stephen McKenna’s Sonia Married by the rough method of comparison, let him recall the once famous Dodo of Mr E.F. Benson. Sonia is another of those irresistible chattering up-to-date ladies who compel the most surly to tolerate and even to forgive by talking at dinner parties at the tops of their voices in the following manner: ‘Tell him (her husband) that I shall elope to Sloane Square—I don’t believe anyone’s ever eloped to Sloane Square, but its the handiest place in the world; even the Hounslow and Barking non-stop train stops there—so sweet of them I always think—I shall go there with Peter and live in his flat and star in revue …’ and so on. Remembering that the female dodo implies a male, it is easy to infer that the husband admires his wife’s wit and is a simple-hearted trustful fellow with ideas and aspirations which keep him at home while she dines out. He thinks it very right that other men should admire her, and when the crash comes, he used, if memory serves us, after displaying a gentlemanly toleration, to be killed in the hunting-field. But Mr McKenna is painstakingly modern; and he has done his best to bring his version up to date. David O’Rane has been blinded in the early days of the war, and now believes in social reform, loving one’s neighbour, and trusting one’s wife. He has a habit of sitting on the floor stroking the head of a Saint Bernard dog, while he talks sometimes with ‘cold vibrant passion’, and sometimes with boyish eagerness about the future of England … Its got to stand for a good deal more than it did before the war; we owe it to the fellows who have died and the fellows who are dying now.’

His contribution to the problem is to turn a very large room in his house on the Embankment into what his wife’s family and friends call a ‘casual ward’ or a ‘doss house’. By this they mean that the door is unlocked, and anyone who chooses can come in and eat cake in front of a large fire. It is chiefly used by Members of Parliament and a consumptive pacifist in an orange-coloured tie, who, though extremely voluble, seem highly respectable, and in no particular need of a cake. But on one occasion O’Rane, in his unworldly way, brought home a drunken soldier whom he had found in the street. The man was an officer, the visit lasted only one night, but ‘it was the last straw for Sonia’. She went off with one of the Members of Parliament; and O’Rane, forgetting that he had said on page 78 that if his wife fell in love with another man and ran away with him he would not want to stop her, forgetting, moreover, his own conduct with a lady secretary, behaves as if he had never read a line of Shelley or professed any love for his neighbour. The deplorable truth is that he chases, or believes that he chases, the consumptive pacifist violently about the room. The real malefactor, Mr Grayle, M.P., is soundly drubbed by another elderly politician, who, in telling the story, remarks, ‘His one weak point was the injured knee, and I concentrated my attack on that.’

These unpleasantnesses would no doubt melt into a rose-tinted mist if the boyish charm of O’Rane and the irresistible fascination of Sonia had done their work. Without such an anaesthetic the operation of reading is full of painful little shocks as if one kept on waking up in the middle of having a tooth out. Their conduct, if one looks at it with open eyes, seems alternately frivolous and bestial. But, to do Mr McKenna justice, his concern is not with the conduct of his characters but with their conversation. He manages to keep that going all the time, if not brilliantly, still with remarkable smartness, considering how much they talk and how easily the psychological complexities of the O’Ranes might have been disposed of in half a dozen words. The war is very cleverly rigged up in the background—Mr Asquith resigns; Lord Kitchener is drowned; and the battles of the drawing room are represented with great verisimilitude. One keeps asking oneself ‘Who can the Duchess of Ross be meant for?’ or ‘Which of our peeresses looks like “a lioness that has been rolling in French chalk”?’ This amounts to saying that Sonia Married runs every chance of great popularity; and if we have omitted to praise the skill, deftness, and smartness of the story it must be that we are perhaps a little shocked to find that the dodo is by no means extinct.

[Times Literary Supplement, Aug 28, 1919]

[]

‘September.’

[September (Methuen & Co., 1919), by Frank Swinnerton]

September is a better book than Shops and Houses. It is, indeed, a very able book. With candour and with sincerity Mr Swinnerton has applied his brain to a very difficult task. Here is a woman, Marian Forster by name, aged thirty-eight, no longer in love with her husband, but affectionate and tolerant of his occasional lapses. By no means for the first time she discovers that he is in love, but this time it is with a friend of hers, Cherry Mant, a girl of twenty-two. She takes her husband’s conduct very much for granted; it is the question of the girl that puzzles her. What is her intention? How far is she culpable? What is the relation between them as hostess and guest, mature woman and undeveloped girl, living for the time in the same country house? Later, Nigel Sinclair, a young man nearer Cherry’s age than her own, makes his appearance. He falls in love with Mrs Forster, she with him, yet at the critical moment she stops short. She cannot give herself away; something checks her, and the moment passes. Still in love with him as she is, she realises the presence of an obstacle, undefined at first, later revealed, and once more discovered to be the same girl, Cherry Mant. Believing that his rejection was final, Nigel Sinclair had gone to her and fallen in love with her. But Nigel Sinclair scarcely counts. The relationship between the two women is the theme of the book; and as Mr Swinnerton has been at pains to endow each with character, and to make out from his own insight how such a relation might shape itself, the development is original enough to have an unusual air of truth.

Given a woman close on forty, naturally reserved, intelligent enough to be detached, with an obstinate conviction of the importance of conduct, neither love nor jealousy has free play. She will always be taking them up and passing them before the light of other ideals.

It was insight that Marian craved. She incessantly sought it. She may have been a dull woman, a woman remote from the pursuit of ordinary pleasures; but at least she had this single ideal … She desired nothing but the improvement of the world. She could accept nothing less than the disinterested pursuit of clear and noble ends.

From this standpoint ‘the clear and noble’ thing to be aimed at is not, in the present case, personal happiness. Neither is it the luxury of denunciation. Mrs Forster in pursuing her ideals has to bring about the union of the man she loves with her rival. She has also so to scrutinise her feelings that affection predominates over jealousy in her relations with Cherry Mant. Her own spoils from the contest are neither romantic nor showy, and the conclusion is of an autumnal quality. She achieves nothing for herself but courage and the power to sympathise with others; and Mr Swinnerton caps his work with the sentence that ‘if it is not the first of gifts, it is among those most rarely bestowed upon poor mortals, and is without price.’

Mrs Forster’s figure is finely and logically outlined, because the intellect has had much to do with the shaping of it; and wherever Mr Swinnerton can use his brain he uses it to good effect. But the figure of Cherry Mant is a much more hazardous piece of work. Ideals have no such consistent control over her. The intellect is there, but it is at the mercy of a thousand instincts. Once more we are reminded of the supreme difficulty of transferring the mind of one sex into that of the other. The mental changes which each woman produces in the other are credible for the most part, always interesting and often subtle. Yet it is impossible not to hear, as the close tense narrative proceeds, a sound as of the cutting of steps in ice. Mr Swinnerton is making a little too sure because at heart he is not sure at all. Up we go; firmly we plant our feet, but not without a sense of effort; the atmosphere is dry; the scene a little bare. It is easy enough to mark out the boundaries of Mr Swinnerton’s talent—to say that his is a lucid rather than a beautiful mind, intellectual in its scope, rather than imaginative. But praise ought to have the last word and the weightiest. For among modern novelists very few would choose to make the fruit of the contest something so quiet and, until we give it a second look, so ordinary as the power which Marian Forster retrieved from the wreck of brighter hopes. Few would plan their story so consistently with that end in view. We read with the conviction that we are being asked to attend to a problem worth solving—a conviction so rare as by itself to prove that September is a novel of exceptional merit.

[Times Literary Supplement, Sep 25, 1919]

[]

Mr Gosse and His Friends.

[Some Diversions of a Man of Letters (William Heinemann, 1919) by Edmund Gosse.]

It is a frequent and rather a melancholy reflection that most of our criticism is the work of elderly people. Young people, of course, produce it in any quantity, but being ashamed on re-reading of its violence, or repenting their misplaced enthusiasms, instead of collecting they crumple it up in a ball and toss it behind the grate. Therefore the sort of volume which represents English criticism is a book like this of Mr Gosse’s—sober, discreet, mellow, judicious, the fruit of love, no doubt, but of love which has been familiar with its object for so many years that it is now respectful rather than passionate. In part, this autumnal quality in Mr Gosse’s book is due to the depressing aesthetics of Mr Balfour; and in part to the subjects of which it treats. They tend to be a little snuff-coloured and sedate. It is only natural to approach Catharine Trotter in a mood of modified enthusiasm, since her chief claim to notoriety appears to be that Mr Austin Dobson has never heard of her and that the biographers of Locke have ignored her existence. No one is going to flush and kindle when recording the passage of the Wartons—a pair of staid brethren who heralded incongruously the advent of the romantic movement. The mention of Bulwer-Lytton, again, raises nothing more disturbing than a smile and a vision of embroidered waistcoats, and to be enthusiastic about Lady Dorothy Nevill, or Lord Cromer, or Lord Redesdale would be, undoubtedly, to be foolish.

Nobody wants criticism to be foolish. Cutting capers to attract attention is also tedious in the long run. But now and then one comes across a critic who, with all his learning and discrimination, has yet never lost his youthful capacity for strong and direct emotion. Those are the qualities that make it impossible not to re-read the letters of Edward FitzGerald. How the love of good writing oozes and drips from every page! How fresh and green his pastures remain! But then FitzGerald never took upon himself the office which Mr Gosse is so frequently called upon to discharge. He never delivered an address at the Mansion House. Addresses have to be delivered; centenaries have to be commemorated; and suitable priests have to be appointed for the purpose. Nor is the art of delivering addresses to be despised. These round, sonorous sentences make very pleasant reading, and, far from signifying nothing, signify quite as much as any audience is likely to require. How successful they must have been at the time can be judged from the sense which they produce in quite different surroundings of a ceremony, of rites duly succeeding one another, and of an audience dispersing in content and complacency. The stone has been raised; the turf has been smoothed, and the great man will sleep all the better for another hundred years.

But there is another side to Mr Gosse’s talent which some prefer to his official suavity. The relation between them, perhaps, is closer than appears at first sight, just as a cat’s claws owe something of their sharpness to the velvet in which they are for the most part encased. A touch of malice seems to be implied by the comparison; and, if a quick sense of the oddities and vagaries of other human beings, a delight in the foibles rather than in the passions of mankind is proof of malice, then Mr Gosse must be held guilty. It is not malice, however, but a sudden glowing and quickening of the imagination which lights up the face of Tennyson so vividly in the following phrase:—‘A gaunt, black, touzled man, rough in speech, brooding like an old gipsy over his inch of clay pipe stuffed with shag, and sucking in port-wine with gusto.’ The lady who pressed Mr Gosse to give her ‘one of his portraits’ was, indeed, happily inspired. One can see in fancy the pleasure with which Mr Gosse laid aside his rules and measures and squeezed a bright lump of paint on to his palette. Moreover, in demanding a portrait of Lady Dorothy Nevill, the lady in question chose exactly the right subject for Mr Gosse’s art. The little old lady is exquisitely set down. ‘Her head, slightly sunken into the shoulders, was often poised a little sideways, like a bird’s that contemplates a hemp-seed. She had no quick movements, no gestures; she held herself very still.’ So it goes on. The manner is admirably courteous and discreet; yet at the least tremor or flicker of character in his subject Mr Gosse is at once on the alert. The mouse never has time to get back to its hole; the mouse positively seems to enjoy being caught. Old ladies and traditions, the charm of high civilisation, and the amenities of aristocracy, would seem at first sight to provide Mr Gosse with his most congenial materials. He is notably ill at ease, or unable to put his sitter at her ease, when he attempts to portray Charlotte Brontë. Yet it is that ‘narrowness of vision’ which he is ‘sometimes tempted to find quite distressing’ that alienates Mr Gosse, for genius, in almost any guise save the prudish and the provincial, has the strongest fascination for him. An anecdote in the paper from which we have quoted gives an amusing proof of his breadth of sympathy. At one time he was constantly seeing Verlaine. He was also faithful in his attendance at Charles Street. Lady Dorothy, who liked great men, insisted that he should bring the poet to see her. Naturally, with his habits, this was impossible. ‘It was difficult to find a little French eating-house in Soho where he could be at home. She then said: “Why can’t you take me to see him in this eating-house?” I had to explain that of the alternatives that was really the least possible. She was not pleased.’ Lady Dorothy cannot go to Soho; Verlaine cannot come to Mayfair, but Mr Gosse is equally at home in both. Occasionally there are born such ambassadors between the hostile sections of society, and we cannot be sufficiently thankful when one of them is furnished with a pen.

[Times Literary Supplement, Oct 2, 1919]

[]

‘Madeleine.’

[Madeleine. One of Love’s Jansenists (W. Collins Sons & Co. Ltd., 1919) by Hope Mirrlees]

From her preface to Madeleine, One of Love’s Jansenists, it is evident that Miss Hope Mirrlees is unusually aware both of the difficulties and of the possibilities of the art of fiction. That is at once something gained; to be aware of a difficulty may not mean that you solve it, but it does imply an intelligent choice. To decide, however, what Miss Mirrlees’s choice is, one must, of course, cover the preface with one’s hand and read the book.

It is a story of French life in the middle of the seventeenth century. The family of Troqueville, consisting of Monsieur, Madame, and Madeleine, their only child, aged seventeen, has just left Lyons and settled in Paris. M. Troqueville is a humble and, perhaps, rather shady lawyer. It is only through Madame Troqueville, whose father was a judge, that they have access to the higher ranks of Parisian society. But why should they wish to live in Paris, or to dine with coarse old Madame Pilou? It is due to Madeleine. Everything is due to Madeleine. For behind Paris and through the person of Madame Pilou she has a vision. Even as a child in Lyons she had a vision; but at that time it was one that could be compassed satisfactorily by making her schoolfellows believe that her father was a duke. Growing up, the desire, imagination, or whatever it may be, concentrates upon Mademoiselle de Scudéry; to know Mademoiselle de Scudéry, to be her intimate friend, has become an obsession. It is not a thing that can be confessed, shared, or analysed honestly. ‘… there is something almost indecently intimate in a nervous fear or obsession’. It means internally a thousand times more than it can mean externally.

From this bare statement we can, at any rate, see that Miss Mirrlees has made her choice. It is the inner world that matters. Her analysis is extremely interesting. In the first place we are convinced of the intensity of Madeleine’s feeling; and in the second she is of an unusual temperament, intellectual as well as ardent, instinctive, but also subtle. ‘For her most fantastic superstition she always felt the need of a semi-philosophical basis’; and there is, therefore, a learned strain in the book, an analysis of religion and philosophy, quotations from the Latin, translations from the Greek. Madeleine, a little laboriously perhaps, is both Précieuse and Jansenist; but the labour is justified, since she remains a human being. Perhaps the other characters are inferior to her in that respect. They interest the writer less vividly, and after giving them the right clothes, which are, of course, picturesque, and an oath or a joke in the spirit of the age, she is inclined to let them go as if her duty were discharged.

When Madeleine at length makes the acquaintance of Mademoiselle de Scudéry one is not disappointed by the poignancy of her disillusionment; one is delighted by the subtlety with which the old dream with new threads in it is spun afresh. But the Hôtel de Rambouillet, one cannot help supposing, would have put up more of a fight than Miss Mirrlees allows. Jacques, the lover who has been rejected in favour of Mademoiselle, would not, perhaps, have marched so tamely to the wars. The balance between the outer and the inner is, after all, a terribly precarious business. They depend upon each other with the utmost closeness. If dreams become too widely divorced from truth they develop into an insanity which in literature is generally an evasion on the part of the artist. He has been forced to drop half his holding. But the success of Madeleine, if not complete, is sufficient to show that Miss Mirrlees has grasped her problem with exceptional firmness. The three visits are paid. The illusion is shattered. The divorce between the reality and the imagination is complete. ‘But with hope were cut the cables binding her to reality, and it was out into the void that she danced now.’ The little shock of emotion with which one comes to this conclusion is token that one has been led to it rightly. It is a proof that it is well worthwhile to read this difficult and interesting novel.

[Times Literary Supplement, Oct 9, 1919]

[]

Landor in Little.

[A Day-Book of Landor. Chosen by John Bailey (Clarendon Press, 1919).]

The collected works of Walter Savage Landor occupy at least eight volumes. The question begins to be asked whether he will be allowed to take all that luggage with him on the journey to posterity upon which he set out with such unbounded confidence. It seems not. The critics who decide such matters are already making up neat little parcels and consigning the bulk of him to the great lumber room of oblivion. Why, when so greatly praised and so greatly deserving of praise, such should be his fate one can scarcely tell. ‘His works are bulky, and in every way rather difficult of approach for the ordinary reader,’ says Mr Bailey in his discriminating introduction. Yet Landor’s prose, he goes on to say, ‘not merely frequently, but almost constantly, sounds the insistent and imperative claim to rank as the work of a master, a claim which has never been seriously disputed’. The fatal thing is that it is never, or seldom, seriously debated. He is a master, but one of those solitary potentates who rule over an almost deserted land.

Partly, no doubt, his isolation is due to the difficulty of reading dialogue. The ascent is a great deal steeper than that which the imagination has to climb in order to attack a play. The transition from life to literature is at its most abrupt. Melanchthon is talking to Calvin; Andrew Marvell to Bishop Parker; Tasso to Cornelia. Unless you have in store an unusual amount of imaginative steam, the task of setting these bare bones in action is too severe to be undertaken frequently. We have done it, however, sometimes for the Greeks and sometimes for the French with inspiriting and encouraging results. But the trouble, or at least one of the troubles, with Landor is the trouble which most writers of dialogue share with him—they are always holding dialogues with themselves. As Mr Bailey says, ‘We cannot tell from the style whether it be Southey or Porson, Aesop or Rhodope, who is speaking.’ The one voice which is unmistakable and unfaltering is the voice of Landor himself. The masters of English prose do not readily imperil their mastery by speaking out of their proper person. Yet no one can shut the book in the middle of an imaginary conversation without a regret that is not merely formal, or can see the complete works of Landor on a shelf without a tantalising consciousness of all the beauty there embedded. If he were merely a master of prose whose perfect periods begin by delighting and end by satiating, there would no be pang in our desertion. But single passages stand out in memory as some poetry does, but very little prose; they have that ‘pure, almost unthinking beauty’, as Mr Bailey calls it, which one can neither define nor forget.

There are no fields of amaranth on this side of the grave; there are no voices, O Rhodope, that are not soon mute, however tuneful; there is no name, with whatever emphasis of passionate love repeated, of which the echo is not faint at last.

O my beloved! […] Sad is the day, and worse must follow, when we hear the blackbird in the garden and do not throb with joy.

Our last excess of this nature was nearer the sea, where, when our conversation paused awhile in the stillness of midnight, we heard the distant waves break heavily. Their sound, you remarked, was such as you could imagine the sound of a giant might be, who, coming back from travel into some smooth and level and still and solitary place, with all his armour and all his spoils about him, casts himself slumberously down to rest.

Those and their like are the passages that we cannot surrender, and yet for the most part fail to find. As, however, Mr Bailey implies by making a Day-book of his selections, Landor not only constantly said beautiful things beautifully, but as constantly things that stand the wear and tear of daily life—things one reads over in a second, apparently forgets, and turns up later in the day with a momentary hope that, instead of having read them, one has thought them.

Communicate your happiness freely; confine your discontent within your own bosom. There chastise it; be sure it deserves its chastisement.

Baronets are prouder than anything we see on this side of the Dardanelles, excepting the proctors of universities and the vergers of cathedrals….

Love always makes us better, Religion sometimes, Power never.

Then, again, it is artfully contrived by Mr Bailey that the subject prescribed for a good many days’ meditation is falter Savage Landor himself—the violent old man who jumps up in some of his portraits with all his white hair on end like an infuriated Jack-in-the-box. ‘You, by the favour of a Minister are Marquis of Normanby; I by the grace of God am Walter Savage Landor.’ Even, therefore, if you keep to the minute ration of a few lines which Mr Bailey allows for each day in the year it will be clear from Monday’s reading that Landor was a wise man; from Tuesday’s that he was a man of character; and from Wednesday’s that he was a poet. In what measure these rare qualities are combined, and for what reason they are, if they are, ineffective, can only be decided by attacking the Conversations in their entirety. No doubt the blank page at the end of this charming little book is provided to hold a good resolution—namely, whatever else may happen in nineteen twenty-one, to read Landor through.

[Times Literary Supplement, Oct 16, 1919]

[]

Winged Phrases.

[Avowals (Privately printed, 1919) by George Moore]

No one, perhaps, has ever spent a pleasant evening talking about books without wondering why it is that the things that are said are so much better than the things that are written. One reason will occur to most people; enthusiasm, which is the life-blood of criticism, tells in tone and manner, for or against, rightly or wrongly, with a conviction and sincerity which are unmistakable yet scarcely to be preserved, save by the rare masters of expression, in print. And where there is warmth of feeling, everything else, it seems, easily follows—the nicest discriminations, the most daring conjectures, illuminations and felicities clustering one on top of another like blue and purple soap bubbles at the end of a pipe, and, like bubbles, breaking and vanishing. Mr Moore has a much better phrase for the ardours of conversation when he speaks of Banville ‘throwing winged phrases into the air that, rising with rapid wing-beats, floated, wheeled, and chased each other like birds whose pastime is flying’. But to cut the matter short, here is Mr George Moore talking about books, and giving us the most delightful example of printed talk that we can remember to have met with in English—if, indeed, it be in English. One chapter is actually written in French; the others, as Henry James said of one of Mr Moore’s novels, seem to be translated from that language. Not, of course, that Mr Moore is anything but a master of his own tongue, which is presumably the Irish. It is the thinking, or, more obscurely, the atmosphere, that seems to be in French; and had we not express evidence to the contrary we should imagine that these conversations took place in a Parisian café, at a little round table, with a glass of his favourite chocolate in front of him, rather than in the ‘long narrow slum’ of Ebury Street, or in the Georgian solidity of Regent’s Park.

For the first two conversations are with Mr Gosse, and Mr Moore’s theme is that ‘English prose narrative is the weakest part of our literature.’ A casual remark made somewhere by Mr Gosse that ‘English genius had gone into poetry’ had started Mr Moore upon the toils of composition; when, the door opening and the maid announcing Mr Gosse, he threw himself into the far more congenial task of conversation. Such is the setting. But if anyone will momentarily recall the course of a conversation when both the talkers have the theme by heart, can toss the ball where they like, and return the lightest or wildest flick of the other’s racquet, he will agree that any report by a third person is valueless. Besides, one of the great merits of such conversation is that it proves nothing. Whether Mr Moore proved his case against prose fiction we do not remember. Our impression is that he danced round that stout matron with elfish vivacity, assuring her that her place was at the wash-tub and her demeanour of a plebeian stolidity out of all keeping with the incorrigible triviality of her mind; when, having made her look both flustered and foolish, he suddenly transformed her into a slim and shapely goddess and fell at her feet in an ecstasy of adoration. This is neither a full nor an accurate report. In the course of an undulating dialogue which meanders in and out, round and round the feet of Fielding, Thackeray, Dickens and Trollope, they are all, for one reason or another, found wanting, lacking in breeding, in depth, in seriousness, in sensibility; but suddenly he stops himself short; there is one English novelist whose wine is of the purest—Jane Austen. There is one scene in one of her books where ‘we find the burning human heart in English prose narrative for the first and, alas, for the last time’. The book is Sense and Sensibility; the scene we will not specify, for most people will like nothing better than to find it for themselves, and enjoy nothing more than to hear Mr Moore praise it for them.

Then we rush on, it matters not how, to the question of names, and if you reflect what our novelists are called you will no longer be surprised by the mediocrity of what they have written.

Trollope! Did ever anybody bear a name that predicted a style more trollopy. Anthony, too, in front of it, to make matters worse. And Walter Scott is a jog-trot name, a round-faced name, a snub-nosed, spectacled, pot-bellied name, a placid, beneficent, worthy old bachelor name; a name that evokes all conventional ideas and formulas, a Grub Street name, […] an old oak and Abbotsford name; a name to improvise novels to buy farms with. And Thackeray is a name for a footman, for the syllables clatter like plates, and when we hear it we say, We shall want the carriage at half-past 2, Thackeray.

We have broken a vow which we made not to quote from Mr Moore, and we are now punished; for to interrupt Mr Moore is as barbarous as to silence the nightingale. Mr Gosse alone is able to do it. From time to time Mr Gosse recalls him to the matter in hand, or suggests that the drawing-room window, in front of which they are sitting, had better be closed. But Mr Gosse has his place in the composition. He serves to define Mr Moore. He brings out the fact that we are hearing the voice of a fallible, frivolous, occasionally aggravating, elderly gentleman who will not refrain from poking fun at the Athenaeum Club, or at any other object that takes his fancy. And is it not because the fallible human being is absent in most books of criticism that we learn so little from them? Such is human imperfection that to love one thing you are almost constrained to hate another. Far from suppressing this natural lopsidedness, Mr Moore indulges it, avows it, and carries us away on the breath of his preference. We have not listened long to the brilliant and often beautiful denunciation of English prose narrative before we perceive that our companion, if we may call him so, is heading for some favourite landmark. One scans the horizon for the first sight of it. Can it be in Germany? In France much more probably. But surely he cannot altogether ignore Russia! One tries to remember the date of Mr Moore’s birth. It was Esther Waters, one reflects, that first made one look up and down the bookshelves for another book with the name of George Moore on the back of it. We were always, perhaps, a little disappointed after Esther Waters. The language was abundant and flexible, the rhythm of the most musical fluidity; what was wanting? Concentration or intensity was it? Some power, perhaps, of getting outside himself, or forgetting all about himself? And then George Moore is not a good name for a novelist; and now we recollect that it is above all things a philosophical name. Whatever the reason, nothing came up to Esther Waters, until the autobiographies began; and still they seem to us the very best autobiographies in the Irish language, for the soft cadence in which they are written is Irish and has nothing whatever to do with English. But while we are thus musing, Mr Moore has reached his goal; he is prostrate before his idol; and it is of course, Turgenev. But we must not call him Turgenev.

Ivan Tourguéneff. Hearken, reader, to the musical syllables—Ivan Tourguéneff; repeat them again and again, and before long the Fates coiled in their elusive draperies in the British Museum will begin to rise up before your eyes; the tales of the great Scythian tale-teller are as harmonious as they, and we ask in vain why the Gods should have placed the light of Greece in the hands of a Scythian.

These words are the prelude to a hymn of praise so sincere and so inspiring that, whatever our own view of Turgenev, we feel that we know him better because we have seen him through the eyes of someone who loves him. Yet love which springs from so profound a source almost necessarily brings with it an instinctive jealousy: for unconsciously so much of ourselves is in whatever we love. So Mr Moore, believing that since the world began there have been only two tale-tellers, Balzac and Turgenev, and that Turgenev is the greater of the two, is necessarily and sincerely unjust.

Tolstoy writes with a mind as clear as an electric lamp, a sizzling white light, crude and disagreeable, and Flaubert’s writing is as beautiful as marquetry, or was thought to be so once. Be this as it may, he is no tale-teller; his best books are not novels, but satires. There is Huysmans with En Route, and the Goncourts have written interesting pages, which some future generation may glance at curiously. There have been men of genius who wrote novels, Dostoieffsky, for instance; but vapours and tumult do not make tales, and before we can admire them modern life must wring all the Greek out of us. His farrago is wonderful, but I am not won. Maupassant wrote perfect tales, but they are so very little.

We must find another word than the word ‘unjust’ to describe a judgment which one may think jealous or capricious, but which we cannot deny, urged as it is by a fervid conviction, to be both penetrating and true. Let us read on a little farther in the conversation with Mr Balderston:

I admire Tolstoy; but if I only dared—I beg of you, he interrupted. Well, I continued, Gautier used to boast that the visible world was visible to him, but to no one was it ever so visible as it is to Tolstoy. His eyesight exceeds all eyesight before or since. At this point I paused, and my visitor and I sat looking at each other, myself very much abashed … What is your conclusion? That Tolstoy is not a great psychologist, I answered tremblingly, for when he comes to speak of the soul he is no longer certain; he doesn’t know. But I’m saying something that no one will agree with, that no one has ever said.

That is memorable and stimulating criticism because, even if one had not read the praises of Turgenev which precede and partly inspire it, one would know that it is the fruit not of coldness, but of love. The love of art which is the light that Mr Moore carries with him through all the libraries in the world wavers and flickers, gutters and splutters, but never goes out. The pages, the faces, of Pater and Mallarmé, of Rudyard Kipling and Henry James, are alike lit up—partially, of course, leaving great tracts of them in shadow, but so warmly and brightly that we know that if we cannot see what Mr Moore sees for ourselves, it exists somewhere for him. The faces crowd and cluster, but among them all we see most vividly the engrossed and ardent countenance of the writer himself, hanging absorbed over the pages of others, weaving with infinite delicacy and toil a new page of his own. Truly, we can conjure up no more exhilarating and encouraging spectacle than the spectacle of Mr George Moore, who declares himself an Ishmael and an outcast in England, determining that he will live to the age of ninety in order that he may be able to write English prose ‘nearly as well as I should like to be able to write it.’

[Times Literary Supplement, Oct 30, 1919]

[]

Real Letters.

[Miss Eden’s Letters. Edited by her great-niece Violet Dickinson (Macmillan & Co. Ltd., 1919).]

How, in writing of Miss Eden’s letters, is one to avoid the old commonplace about the penny post and the death of letter writing? From Miss Eden herself, the witty and distinguished lady who wrote The Semi-Detached House and The Semi-Attached Couple one would have expected witty letters. But Pamela FitzGerald, in no way distinguished save as the daughter of Lord Edward and the mother of a very large family, in our opinion surpasses her. She is, perhaps, the more spontaneous and the richer natured of the two. Be this as it may, the memorable thing is that both ladies have the art of letter writing by nature—by which we mean to express our conviction that if either of them saw a large sheet of paper and a quill pen she said, with a smile, ‘Now I’ll write a letter!’ and sat down and filled her paper with the greatest pleasure in the world. Nothing, it seems, could be easier; in our time nothing is more rare. How, one wonders, did these young ladies of little education, though high breeding, hit off, while still in their teens, this happy spirited manner of conveying to each other the amusements, the pleasures, the annoyances of life? There were, it is impossible to doubt, rules well known to them and scrupulously observed. You will not find them rashly confiding, or introspective; their sense of humour is their standby; they would rather laugh than cry; and whatever they think proper for a letter they know how to put into words. But we will let Miss Eden, aged twenty two, speak for herself.

My dearest Sister,—I am going to write you a long letter, and I shall be like a ginger-beer bottle now, if once the cork is drawn. I shall spirtle you all over—not that I have anything to say, but just a few remarks to make. In the first place I am eternally obliged to you for your just and proper appreciation of autumn … I tried some cool admiration of it upon Louisa, but she said she did not like it, as it led to winter and the children wanted new coats, and she must write to Grimes, of Ludgatehill, for patterns of cloth, &c. However, London is a very pretty check to enthusiasm; there are no trees to look brown and yellow, and the autumn air only blows against poor Lord Glengall’s hatchment, and the few people that wander about the streets seem to think it cold and uncomfortable … I enclose you some Fleur d’Orange because it is so genteel. Pray remark, when it is going down, whether your sensations are not remarkably ladylike.

So it runs on, easy, witty, controlled, the young lady knowing how to turn a sentence as, presumably, she knew how to run her needle in and out of the pattern of her embroidery. The pattern of the letters was a gay and variegated one. The young ladies paid their round of country visits to all the great houses, and exchanged their impressions of Longleat and Chatsworth and Bowood. Pamela now takes up the pen. She has been staying with Lord and Lady Bute at Mount Stuart, and sketches their portraits.

My mind is grown much more easy since I have clearly ascertained, weighed, and measured that I don’t like Lord Bute … He is not purse-proud nor personally proud of his looks; but the sheer genuine article, pride, which nowadays one seldom meets with barefaced. He is proud of his ancestors, proud of the red puddle that runs in his veins, proud of being a Stuart, a Bute, and a Dumfries. He apes humility and talks of the honour people do him in a way that sounds like ‘down on your knees’ … She is pleasant enough in a middling way, no particular colour in her ideas. She never moots, or shocks, or pushes one back, but she don’t go any further, content to dwell in decencies for ever. She likes a joke when it is printed and published for her, but I suppose a manuscript joke never occurred to her.

Neither Miss Eden nor Miss FitzGerald, one is refreshed to find, dwells in decencies for ever; they are surprisingly open in their speech. Both of them, too, have a passion for the country, even in its more horrid aspects. ‘One is a better human creature,’ wrote Pamela, ‘when one has seen a mountain, and it does one good.’ ‘I only wish I could see a mountain with you,’ she added, for their devotion was warm and founded upon distinct differences of opinion. Miss Eden, as became Lord Auckland’s sister, was apt to include a little gossip about Ministers and policies in her letters, and was therefore all the better pleased to hear of nothing but children from Lady Campbell. ‘Other people or papers tell public news. What a pleasure it is to have a letter!’

But we cannot give in extracts the more delightful quality which the volume possesses as a whole. It is a story, a drama; the characters marry and change and grow up, and we watch them changing beneath our eyes. The judgment of Miss Dickinson’s selections and the unusual excellence of her materials give the book what we so seldom find in biographies—construction and artistic purpose. Of the figures who make up this amusing and vivacious early nineteenth-century group, none appears to us a more happy conception than Lady Sarah Robinson, as she is bandied to and fro between Emily and Pamela and Lady Theresa Lewis—eccentric, valetudinarian, despotic, the wife of the gentleman who was Prime Minister for five months and then resigned ‘stating that his wife’s health would no longer allow him to remain in office.’ Here we have the family version of her vagaries, as she drives out with the apothecary beside her to feel her pulse, or complains, when the doctor fails to call before two, ‘Physicians, I believe, always neglect their dying patients,’ or forces Mr Robinson to dine in her dressing room that she may check his appetite, or forbids him to visit the stables—

‘Sarah, I wish I might go to the stables?’ ‘No, dearest, I told you before not to go.’ ‘Yes; but I want to see my horses. Mayn’t I go?’ ‘No, darling, you said you would not ask it if I let you out.’ ‘Yes, but one of my horses is sick, and I want to see it.’ ‘Well, then, if Mama will go with you, you may.’

The story of Lady Sarah and Mr Robinson should have been written by Jane Austen. Indeed, Jane Austen seems all the time to be round the corner, nor is she altogether out of sight. Mrs Elton is a household word as early as 1825; already in 1826 Mr Collins is ‘the immortal Collins’. For Miss Eden was as good a judge of books as people who call themselves uneducated and know Boswell by heart generally are; and if Pamela had not had quite so many children or Sir Guy Campbell had ever got that comfortable appointment which was his due—but we must break off upon the verge of reflections which would carry us too far. For, like all good letters, Miss Eden’s letters bring so much of life into view, and hint at so much more than we can see, that far from falling asleep over her pages, as Miss Dickinson predicts, we feel that we have been completely woken up and set gossiping.

[Times Literary Supplement, Nov 6, 1919]

[]

The Limits of Perfection.

[Seven Men (Heinemann, 1919) by Max Beerbohm]

If Mr Beerbohm had never written another word, the reviewer’s task would be simple. Here, he would say, laying down Seven Men with a deep sigh of contentment, is a little masterpiece; so perfect in itself that one need scarcely take account of what it promises. But when a book is not the first, but apparently the seventh, one’s conscience, or it may be one’s vanity, is more exacting. One takes for granted what one can only call Mr Beerbohm’s perfection, and then, as if one could swallow perfection and still keep one’s critical capacity unsated, one looks about for something more.

The truth is perhaps that here and there in Seven Men Mr Beerbohm himself looks about—stands on tiptoe and peeps over the palisade which he has erected round his exquisite plot. Little airs blow in from outside for which Mr Beerbohm is not responsible, which he has not invited, and has not subdued. We admit that we find it difficult to give an example of what we mean. But in the story of James Pethel, the man who lived for the sake of taking risks, one is sorry for his wife; and one feels that one ought either not to be sorry at all or to be much sorrier than one is. She has not accommodated herself to Mr Beerbohm’s world; she remains too much like the women outside. Then there is the brilliant description of the weekend party at Keeb, when the ghost of the author who was not invited haunts the author who was. Again we feel that life has insisted upon breaking in; it is fantastic, it is brilliant, but somehow it is too much like the real thing that real novelists describe. Casting about for some explanation, one hazards this: among the books that Mr Beerbohm has written there ought to be one that is very large and very dull. Of course there is no such thing. He has always done the things that he does best. Yet sometimes, one figures, literature refuses to be pampered and cockered any longer; life comes trickling through some unguarded chink, and the writer who has not run all the risks and broken his pen upon every kind of enterprise is, for once and for a second, at a loss.

If this explanation has any truth in it, we admit that we think it much to Mr Beerbohm’s credit. His mastery over his own method is such that he could, if he chose, keep exactly within its limits. He is not forced to go beyond them; it is the demon of human sympathy that now and then compels him into the outer air. For a second he makes his own perfection look a little small. Quickly he draws back again. Instantly, like some cuttlefish dispersing a silver and crepuscular fluid instead of a dense and a dark, he emits his perfect little disk of fantasy, wit, and satire. The Seven Men here depicted stand almost precisely in the centre of it. They are brilliantly displayed. The silvery yet searching light falls with the utmost exactitude into every crease and wrinkle of their faces. There is a background, too, in due harmony with the figure. The whole of the artistic niceties of the Yellow Book and of the Café Royal are concentrated in the first few pages of Enoch Soames. Soames was a writer. His first book was called ‘Negations’:—

He wore a soft black hat of clerical kind but of Bohemian intention, and a grey waterproof cape which, perhaps, because it was waterproof, failed to be romantic. I decided that ‘dim’ was the mot juste for him. I had already essayed to write, and was immensely keen on the mot juste, that Holy Grail of the period … Seated, he was more self-assertive. He flung back the wings of his cape with a gesture which—had not those wings been waterproof—might have seemed to hurl defiance at things in general. And he ordered an absinthe. ‘Je me tiens toujours fidèle,’ he told Rothenstein, ‘à la sorcière glauque.’

Once you can do that—and Mr Beerbohm goes on doing it till the last line of the ‘Savonarola’ with a subtlety, a precision, a sense of humour which do not disguise the fact that his eye is unwinkingly fastened on a definite object—why, one may ask, do anything else? Why demand that Charles Lamb shall be Charles Dickens? But a critic must be exacting; it is not the doing it that he objects to; it is the going on doing it.

[Times Literary Supplement, Nov 6, 1919]

[]

Maturity and Immaturity.

[Edward Wyndham Tennant: A Memoir (John Lane, 1919) by Pamela Glenconner;
Joyce Kilmer, ed. with a memoir by Robert Cortes Holliday (2 vols., Hodder & Stoughton, 1917).]

On his mother’s side a Wyndham, but on his father’s a Tennant, there is no reason, either in eulogy or in excuse, to call Wyndham Tennant an aristocrat. Yet one finds oneself thinking of him as an aristocrat, and judging that the chief interest of his memoir lies in its revelation of the aristocratic point of view. Perhaps the best answer to the question as to what that may mean is to quote one or two stories:

When his Mother visited among the poorer streets of Westminster, he could only be prevailed on to cross those darkened thresholds by being given a large tin of sweets that he might distribute largesse as he went. He left the children in little throngs and clusters smiling in his wake…. Finally he went no more with her, for his heart suffered and he was too wise to think that either toys, sweets, clothes, kindly interest, or money, would ever gloss over such surroundings.

Again, when he rode a motor-bicycle he was uneasy at the amount of dust that he raised. He wrote therefore, in very large letters, ‘Apologies for the Dust’, tied the placard to the tail of his machine, and then ‘went sweeping through the Southern counties in unparalleled speed’. The impulsiveness, the lack of self-consciousness, the desire that slum children and agitated pedestrians shall smile in his wake, with all that this implies of good fortune, good temper, and the most innocent belief in the goodness of life, are the attractive virtues of an aristocrat. But one has to reflect that it is possible presumably to ride a motor-bicycle slowly, in which case apologies are unnecessary; and that you need not give up the problem of poverty because the sorrows of the poor are not altogether appeased by feeding them on sweets out of a large tin. In a middle-class family certainly the apology, and probably the sweets, would have been judged rather childish than admirable. This is not due to a superior morality, but rather to the fact that middle-class surroundings are not such as to prompt a perpetual effervescence of gratitude and joy. The middle-class attitude is one of reticence and even of suspicion; whereas the bounty and pleasantness of the aristocratic environment produce a natural desire to make other people happy. Wyndham Tennant was always spending his pocket-money upon buying guns for the village boys and silk ties for the housemaids. At the age of three his manners were so good and his self-possession such that he delighted a lady by asking, with his little bow, how her peacocks’ tails were growing. No more demonstrative schoolboy can ever have existed. Most children secretly think their mother the most beautiful of women, and even their uncle the most brilliant of men. But Edward Tennant always thought so, and he thought nothing secretly. He gloried in uttering his beliefs aloud. He would kiss a tree under which he had spent a pleasant afternoon, he would kiss his bed for having taken care of him every night of the term. ‘I am longing for the blessed joy of seeing darling You, and darling Everybody Else. I love them all.’ Those, incredible as it seems, are the words of a schoolboy of eleven. Again, he went to an Advent service:

The sermon was preached by the Bishop of Dorking, who is shortly going to Japan as a missionary. He is a dear man. He was so, so kind to me. He said he is a cousin of Aunt Annie’s. His words were ‘Then we are relations; so shake hands.’

Clearly, no one has ever laughed at him, or snubbed him, and the whole world seems to him, as he journeys from Wiltshire to Scotland and back again to Queen Anne’s Gate, a cordial, appreciative family circle entirely populated by the cousins of Aunt Annie advancing with outstretched hands. He writes a charming little poem, and his uncle George Wyndham at once says ‘in all seriousness that Gray and Tennyson alone give the model for that “tour de force” in solemn verse’.

From his natural confidence spring all those demonstrative ways which are at once so charming and (to be honest) so strangely disconcerting when published in a book. For if, as is likely, one is neither related to Aunt Annie nor has ever heard of her existence, there is something indecent, though childish and disarming, in the amazing aristocratic irreticence which is displayed—the assumption that everybody must know you, and be interested in hearing all about you. One is reminded of the old village woman who insists upon showing one her bad toe. No doubt it is better to display one’s bad toe than to follow the middle-class habit of denying that one has any legs at all. It is better even as a preparation for writing poetry. One must learn to speak of one’s feelings; one must learn to do it beautifully. But the aristocrat appears never to learn anything. He seems condemned to remain a gifted and instinctive child. The delightful talents never mature; the park is mistaken for the world, the family for the human race; and the smiles of the Muse are solicited with a pocket full of sweets. But none of this applies to ‘The Mad Soldier’, a poem suddenly conceived in the vein of Mr Sassoon; and to say what would have been the course of a writer who died at the age of nineteen is obviously out of the question.

Perhaps, if one had not read the memoir of Wyndham Tennant first, one would not have thought of saying that Joyce Kilmer was mature. One would have taken it for granted that a young man who has to earn his living and support a wife and child before he is of age must possess that particular quality or perish. Joyce Kilmer, the American poet, seems to have flourished in every possible way until a shell put an end to him in France. He was a highly successful journalist. He was rapidly increasing in weight. He enjoyed an enormous appetite. When he came down to breakfast he usually asked what there was going to be for dinner. He had a profound admiration for Mr Belloc and for Mr Chesterton. He turned out between four and five thousand words an hour, and spent those hours by choice in walking up and down the family sitting room with the youngest baby screaming on his shoulder. He possessed, in short, that alarming combination which the worst writers always seem to possess—a superb vitality attached to an inferior brain. But, if human beings were divided into the separate sections of a Neapolitan ice, life would be less interesting, though a great deal simpler than it is. It is true that Kilmer’s poetry appears to us exactly the right stuff for the world to cut out and paste in its hat, which, according to Mr Holliday, is what the world has done; but he had the invaluable gift which makes its possessor at once important, though we can only define it vaguely as the gift of maturity. He was interested in a great many things beside himself. He enjoyed almost everything. He was justly proud of the fact that he could use every idea that came to him three times over. He kept a special tail-coat in which to lecture to ‘blue-nosed salons’ upon ‘certain aspects of Victorian verse’; but he knew, one feels, exactly when he put it on, and when he took it off. Thus, though thousands of words issued from his mouth every day, they never seem to have impaired his belief in literature. He believed in Walter Pater, Gerard Hopkins, Scott and Charles Lamb. On the battlefield he read Gray’s ‘Elegy’. And, when the war came, with a vigour that reminds one of a large dog shaking the drops from his coat he shook himself free from his thousands of words and refused to write a line.

To tell the truth. I am not at all interested in writing nowadays (he said). The only sort of book I care to write about the world war is the sort people will read after the war is over—a century after it is over! … It will be episodic—chaotic, perhaps—no glib rale, no newspaper man’s work, but, with God’s help, a work of art.

For, unexpected though it may seem, Joyce Kilmer had become a fervent Catholic, and God’s help played a very large and a very mysterious part in his affairs. The Catholic faith, he said, ‘is more important, more beautiful, more necessary than anything else in life’. One must write to the glory of the Catholic faith.

But into all this there is no space to plunge. Unwillingly, one must break off, for, as so frequently happens in reading a memoir written in good faith, one is interested in the man out of all proportion to what one is told about him. Little facts have a significance which one cannot justify. Why should it seem so characteristic, for example, that he should beg his wife not to call their children by nicknames, and not to say that Carnival was a fine book? Turning over the thought of Joyce Kilmer, one lets him go reluctantly as if one had come to know him much better than one could account for. Does that amount to saying that he was, among other things, remarkably mature?

[Athenaeum, Nov 21, 1919]

[]

Watts-Dunton’s Dilemma.

[Swinburne As I Knew Him. With some unpublished letters from the poet to his cousin the Hon. Lady Henniker Heaton (John Lane, 1919) by Coulson Kernahan]

If Mr Kernahan does not make us feel that he knew Swinburne intimately, that, perhaps, is a contribution to our knowledge of Swinburne. The stories that are told of him are never intimate; they always remain the stories that are told about a poet. No doubt the reason is that his human relations during the later part of his life were limited to such an extent that the greater number of the notes in his scale remained dumb. One or two, such as his passion for Victor Hugo and his passion for Elizabethan plays, are struck over and over again. But the one human relation which survived his conversion to temperance—for Mr Kernahan thinks that we may now allude to the brandy bottle—was that with Watts-Dunton; and the interest of Mr Kernahan’s little book lies in the fact not that he knew Swinburne but that he knew Swinburne’s friend.

What he knew of Watts-Dunton is a little at variance with what we have hitherto been told. There were ups and downs, it appears, even in the smooth surface of life at Putney. Swinburne sometimes made fun of his friend. He was occasionally bored. Watts-Dunton, according to Mr Kernahan, was well aware that certain of Swinburne’s friends were inclined to say unkind things:

They accuse me of jealously seeking to keep him away from them. It is true that I do so keep them away—one dear soul especially, whom he loves, whom I love, and who I am sure loves him…. When that dear soul, whom I love and honour—but who thinks, I fear, unkindly of me—is gone, I have the very deuce of a time in trying to soothe and to quiet him.

Whether this and other of the conversations printed within inverted commas bear any close resemblance to what was actually said, we do not know. The padded and portly style, which Philip Marston shares equally with Swinburne and Watts-Dunton, may have been current in the circle. But the words certainly convey the dilemma in which the sedulous little man, whose leanings, he said, ‘were strongly Nonconformist’, and who, though fond of posing as a gipsy, ‘was in heart in the suburbs with Mrs Grundy’, was placed. He had rescued his poet; there could be no doubt of his devotion; but it becomes apparent that the main instrument of redemption was a benevolent system of falsehood. When he first knew Swinburne the brandy bottle stood by the poet’s bedside. Watts-Dunton induced him to substitute port, on the ground that Tennyson drank port; then Burgundy, for the reason that it was beloved of the Three Musketeers; next claret, on some equally plausible pretext; and, finally, ‘the wine of the country, Shakespeare’s brown October’—in other words, the comparatively harmless bottled beer. Thus his body was rescued; and the stratagem was surely justifiable. But when it came to his mind, Watts-Dunton adopted the same tactics; and that, perhaps, is more questionable. In order to renew Swinburne’s self-confidence, he assured him that the first poem written after convalescence was the best he had ever done. The same thing, for the same reason, had to be repeated next time:

And so, to my shame—I must throw myself on the mercy of my friends and his friends—I got into the way of praising … and, so far as I can see, not until death comes to call the one or the other of us away, and so to deliver me out of the coils into which I have got myself, shall I be set free.

That was Watts-Dunton’s dilemma. A comedy might be written to fit the title; but in the comedy there should be a thread of tragedy. Swinburne, thus lulled and beguiled, was kept prisoner, as if by a spell, at Putney. Evil spirits from the outer world now and again almost succeeded in awaking him. They came and talked. He became ‘extraordinarily excited’; his eyes glittered; his limbs twitched; he spoke faster and faster, more and more brilliantly and beautifully, and also more and more loudly. Up rushed Watts-Dunton in a state of terror. His captive was waking and escaping:

‘For God’s sake, don’t say another word … He must be got to lie down and if possible to sleep, or I shall have him half out of his mind to-night.’

At this apparition the enchanted bird folded his feathers and huddled in a corner of his cage. Sleep descended: he lived to a ripe old age; he preserved his sanity; he became a Conservative; Queen Victoria had no more loyal subject. But undoubtedly, what with the lies, what with the genius, what with the brandy, and what with the friends, Watts-Dunton did have the ‘very deuce of a time’.

[Times Literary Supplement, Dec 11, 1919]

[]

Memories of Meredith.

[Memories of George Meredith O.M. (Constable & Co., 1919) by Lady Butcher, Alice Mary.]

Whether we are well advised in pulling our watches to pieces to see how they are made we do not know. Here is George Meredith, a wonderfully complex and sensitive mechanism, as his books bear witness; and here are we for the twentieth time, perhaps, eagerly searching in Lady Butcher’s book to learn how the machine that produced the novels was constructed. Although her Memories are wholly personal, with scarcely a word of literary criticism, our eagerness is, as usual, partly gratified and partly defeated. We always learn something even from the simplest of observers; but the danger is that we may learn things that are out of the picture. Some little saying or incident jumps at us with its life and veracity, but upon the mind’s picture of Meredith it lies incongruously, as an authentic fragment of his necktie stuck upon the oil paint of Watts’s portrait.

Lady Butcher, born Miss Brandreth, can look back with satisfaction to the most appropriate introduction to Meredith that fate could bestow. As a child of thirteen she was induced by a cousin to throw pebbles upon his bed-room window at dawn, and then to invite him to go with them to the top of Box Hill to see the sunrise. On arrival at the top, fate devised a delightful variation upon the expected theme by prompting her to recite a hymn from Keble’s Christian Year. Meredith ‘gravely listened to the birds singing around us’, and then ‘poured forth the most wonderful prose hymn to Nature, Life, and what he called obligation, by which I understood he meant Duty’. We can assimilate that scene with the greatest ease; and to know that Meredith said that he had trained himself when he walked ‘to observe and not to feel’, is a valuable note to set down in the margin of the ‘Woods of Westermain’. It is less easy to reconcile oneself to the inordinate cracking of stiff little jokes which seem to imply audience and stage and actor arrayed in tights and silk stockings. An elderly professor, for instance, went to a fancy dress ball, and Meredith rejoiced in describing the spectacle. ‘He trips forth as a cavalier of the time of Charles II! His form—his form, dear! is clad in pale mauve satin and lace ruffles!’ Mr Meredith, convulsed with mirth till the tears ran down his cheeks, kept exclaiming between shouts of laughter, ‘His form! Pale mauve satin and lace ruffles! His form!’ But if the satire and the censure seem a little forced in private life, they have their more spiritual counterpart in the novels. From the novels, however, we should scarcely have guessed that he cherished an almost prudish respect for the ceremonies and the conventions. To the women of the novels he granted unusual liberty; but in practice he would not allow a girl to travel a short distance alone, nor walk in the country without a maid beside her. The presence of young women at a French play—‘very funny, but replete with the esprit Gaulois’—spoilt all his pleasure. ‘How can the mothers allow their daughters to remain?’ he kept on murmuring. When someone praised Maupassant’s stories in Miss Brandreth’s presence, he said ‘They are really improper. You had better not read them.’ Then added, ‘I could be funny if I neglected the proprieties as he does!’ The stringency and the puritanism are no doubt also latent in the novels, but the shock of them in actual life affects us, for the moment disagreeably.

But if the sense of the writer stepping out from behind his books and delivering his message in person is abrupt and disturbing in some instances, it is singularly refreshing in others. Compared with most of his contemporaries Meredith left little record of his artistic methods and but few literary judgements. Lady Butcher has preserved one or two examples of both kinds, slight enough, scribbled carelessly in a girl’s diary, but falling freshly from his lips. He picked up one of Charlotte Yonge’s novels and, admiring her control of dialogue, went on ‘to point out his difficulties in making conversation in books natural, and the banal “she said” and “he said”’. One could have guessed at his dilemma, and one would have given much to press him further, for dialogue is one of the crucial problems in fiction, and Meredith provided an original solution; but as it is, that is an excellent lead. That he thought his poems would outlive his novels is, perhaps, well known, but that among his poems he preferred the verse in Vittoria,

Our life is but a little holding, lent

To do a mighty labour,

is characteristic. Characteristic, too, and so far as we know as yet unrecorded, is his disparagement of Jane Austen—

I could not induce him to share, or even tolerate, my eulogies upon her style and presentment of character. Indeed, one day he declared that the heroines of her book were wanting in refinement…. Jane Austen’s heroes he frankly detested, and made us laugh heartily with speeches caricaturing her style, made by priggish young gentlemen to the maidens of their choice.

After reading Lady Butcher one needs to draw back a little with halfclosed eyes to fit the various fragments together; but in a moment or two it will be seen that they merge quite rightly into the figure of the great man.

[Times Literary Supplement, Dec 18, 1919]

[]

‘Gold and Iron.’

[Gold and Iron (William Heinemann, 1919) by Joseph Hergesheimer]

In developing a photograph first one black patch appears on the greyish film and then another. By degrees the square of the picture defines itself; here is the edge of a wall; here, isolated but unmistakable, the outline of a croquet hoop. One rocks the fluid from side to side, and watches anxiously for an increasing thickening and intricacy, or the film will certainly prove either under exposed or over. Thus with the books of Mr Joseph Hergesheimer, now appearing with such frequency, one watches anxiously to see whether the undoubted eminence of his talent in this respect and that will be supported all round by other gifts until the picture covers the whole surface of the film and we are in possession of a complete work of art.

‘Wild Oranges’, the first story in the present book, Gold and Iron, suggests that Mr Hergesheimer is still in process of development. There is no doubt at all that he is mature in certain respects. He wants to describe a ship, a shore, a deserted house, an orange tree, and he does it directly, succinctly, with the assurance of maturity. He gets the essential background with little effort and considerable mastery. But, remembering Java Head, it is with some anxiety that we see a woman’s shape emerging upon the film. For women will talk, and that is where Mr Hergesheimer hitherto has come to grief. Millie Stopes, who has been marooned on the coast of Georgia in company with a homicidal lunatic and a father who fled from Virginia forty years ago because in the Civil War women hung an apron on his door, has every reason to be, like the wild oranges that grew round the house, thick of rind and bitter of flavour. But set her, as she stoops catching fish in her solitude, by the side of some girl in Mr Conrad’s pages, and you feel that here Mr Hergesheimer’s talent ebbs and deserts him. She is a silhouette posed a trifle melodramatically against the sunset; and, as usual, the sunset is more vivid than the woman. There is something set and sterile about her. But just as we are making this point another speck on the film catches our eyes and, developing, changes the picture once more. John Woolfolk, the sailor who has dropped anchor opposite the ruined house, takes Millie for a sail. She is terrified by the open sea. He has to put back to shore again. The yacht anchors in the bay and Millie sits brooding on the deck. ‘“What is it,” she demanded of John Woolfolk, “that lives in our own hearts and betrays our utmost convictions and efforts, and destroys us against all knowledge and desire?” “It may be called heredity,” he replied.’ That perhaps derives from Ibsen, but at any rate we feel a new force blowing through the stiff, still pages. Mr Hergesheimer makes for the open sea with a theme behind him.

The two stories that follow are better composed, but not so interesting as the first. For one thing Mr Hergesheimer goes back to his iron masters and his seaport life of a hundred years ago; and, though the stories display his good qualities, they seem, to recur to the photographic figure, to be arrested in their development. In the act of asserting their passion his figures are stricken with frost; and yet the gesture is always a fine one. Our conclusion, then, must be—but happily we do not feel impelled to come to a conclusion. ‘Wild Oranges’ justifies us in holding our judgement in suspense. Mr Hergesheimer is still in process of development.

[Times Literary Supplement, Dec 25, 1919]

[]

1920

Pictures and Portraits.

[Personalities. Twenty-four drawings (Martin Seeker, 1919) by Edmond X. Kapp]

There are two buildings on the same promontory of pavement, washed by the same incessant tide—the National Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery. In order to enter either it is only necessary to pass through a turnstile, and, on some days of the week, to part with a sixpenny bit. But always, on the paving stone at the doorway, it seems as if the pressure of humanity glued you to its side. As easily might a pilchard leap from the shoal and join the free sport of dolphins as a single individual ascend those steps and enter those doors. The current of the crowd, so swift and deep, the omnibuses swimming bravely on the surface, here a little string of soldiers caught in an eddy, there a hearse, next a pantechnicon van, then the discreet coach of royalty, followed by a black cell upon wheels with a warder at the grating,—all this, floated along in a stream of sound at once continuous and broken up into a kind of rough music, makes it vain to think of pictures. They are too still, too silent.

It would never occur to anyone with a highly developed plastic sense to think of painting as the silent art. Yet that perhaps is at the root of the ordinary English repugnance to pictures. There they hang as if the passage of centuries had left them indifferent. In private stress or public disaster we can wring no message from them. What they see across the room I am not sure: perhaps some gondola in Venice hundreds of years ago. But let who can and will indulge his fancy thus; the little token, the penny bunch of violets brought in from the street, is silently rejected. Our loves, our desires, the moment’s eagerness, the passing problem, receive no sort of sympathy or solution. Under the solemn stare we fade and dwindle and dissolve. Yet it cannot be denied that our resurrection, should it come to pass, is singularly august. We rise, purged and purified; deprived, it is true, of a tongue, but free from the impertinences and solicitations of that too animated and active member. The silence is hollow and vast as that of a cathedral dome. After the first shock and chill those used to deal in words seek out the pictures with the least of language about them—canvases taciturn and congealed like emerald or aquamarine—landscapes hollowed from transparent stone, green hillsides, skies in which the clouds are eternally at rest. Let us wash the roofs of our eyes in colour; let us dive till the deep seas close above our heads. That these sensations are not aesthetic becomes evident soon enough, for, after a prolonged dumb gaze, the very paint on the canvas begins to distil itself into words—sluggish, slow-dropping words that would, if they could, stain the page with colour; not writers’ words. But it is not here our business to define what sort of words they are; we are only concerned to prove our unfitness to review the caricatures of Mr Kapp. His critics are all agreed that he combines the gifts of the artist with those of the caricaturist. We have nothing to say of the artist, but having the National Portrait Gallery in mind, perhaps it may not be presumptuous to approach him from that point of view.

It needs an effort, but scarcely a great one, to enter the National Portrait Gallery. Sometimes indeed an urgent desire to identify one among the dead sends us post haste to its portals. The case we have in mind is that of Mrs John Stuart Mill. Never was there such a paragon among women. Noble, magnanimous, inspired, thinker, reformer, saint, she possessed every gift and every virtue. One thing alone she lacked, and that, no doubt, the National Portrait Gallery could supply. She had no face. But the National Portrait Gallery, interrogated, wished to be satisfied that the inquirer was dependent upon a soldier; pensions they provided, not portraits; and thus set adrift in Trafalgar Square once more the student might reflect upon the paramount importance of faces. Without a face Mrs John Stuart Mill was without a soul. Had her husband spared three lines of eulogy to describe her personal appearance we should hold her in memory. Without eyes or hair, cheeks or lips, her stupendous genius, her consummate virtue, availed her nothing. She is a mist, a wraith, a miasma of anonymous merit. The face is the thing. Therefore we turn eagerly, though we have paused too long about it, to see what faces Mr Kapp provides for the twenty-three gentlemen and the one old lady whom he calls Personalities.

There is very little of the anonymous about any of the twenty-four. There is scarcely a personality, from Mr Bernard Shaw to Mrs Grundy, whom we have not seen in the flesh. We turn the pages, therefore, to see not what their bodies look like, but whether Mr Kapp can add anything to our estimate of their souls. We look, in particular, at the portraits of Lord Morley and of Mr Bernard Shaw. Years ago Lord Morley shook the hand that writes these words. Whether he was Chief Secretary for Ireland or Prime Minister of England was a matter of complete indifference to a child; a child, presumably, was less than nothing whatever to him. But his manner—cordial, genial, quick as if stepping forward from a genuine impulse of friendliness—has never ceased to shed lustre upon every mention of his name. Where is the handshake in Mr Kapp’s portrait? The lean, smoke-dried pedant’s face looks as if scored upon paper by a pen clogged and corroded, as pens are in advertisements, with old ink. It may be so; to Mr Kapp it must be so; the handshake, perhaps, could only be rendered by a wash of sepia, which would have spoiled the picture as a work of art. Then there is Mr Bernard Shaw. Gazing from the gallery of some dismal gas-lit hall, one has seen him, often enough, alert, slight, erect, as if combating in his solitary person the forces of inertia and stupidity massed in a sea upon the floor. On a nearer glance, he appeared much of a knight-errant, candid, indeed innocent of aspect; a Don Quixote born in the Northern mists—shrewd, that is to say, rather than romantic. Mr Kapp has the legendary version—the diabolic. Moustache and eyebrows are twisted into points. The fingers are contorted into stamping hooves. There is no hint of blue in the eye. But again one must remember the limitations of black and white. It is a question of design, texture, handwriting, the relation of this with that, of art in short, which we pass by with our eyes shut. When we know little or nothing about the subject, and thus have no human or literary susceptibilities to placate, the effect is far more satisfactory. That ‘The Politician’ (Mr Masterman) has the long body cut into segments and the round face marked with alarming black bars of the Oak Eggar caterpillar, we find it easy and illuminating to believe. There is something sinister about him; he swarms rapidly across roads; he smudges when crushed; he devours leaf after leaf. ‘The Bishop’ (the Bishop of Norwich) is equally symbolical. His is emitting something sonorous through an oblong slit of a mouth; you can almost hear the heavy particle descending through the upper stories of the elongated countenance until it pops with a hollow click out of the orifice. The Duke of Devonshire for all the world resembles a seal sleek from the sea, his mouth pursed to a button signifying a desire for mackerel. But the mackerel he is offered is not fresh, and, tossing himself wearily backwards, he flops with a yawn into the depths. By what sleight of hand Mr Kapp has conveyed the fact that the golden thread extracted by Sir Henry Wood from the sound of the Queen’s Hall Orchestra is really a hair from his soup we do not know. The truth of the suggestion, however unpleasant, is undeniable. But words, words! How inadequate you are! How weary one gets of you! How you will always be saying too much or too little! Oh to be silent! Oh to be a painter! Oh (in short) to be Mr Kapp!

[Athenaeum, Jan 9, 1920]

[]

An American Poet.

[General William Booth Enters into Heaven and Other Poems. With an introduction by Robert Nichols (Chatto & Windus, 1919) by Nicholas Vachel Lindsay.]

In his introduction to General William Booth, Mr Nichols devotes a good deal of space to a portrait of the poet. He is tall, broad shouldered, has a ruddy complexion, straw-golden hair, eyes of ‘piercing sky-blue’ that shut and re-open with ‘the effect of a blind abruptly shot up in a sunward room’; he hands you his thought ‘struggling and kicking like a puppy with an extraordinary animation of watchfulness as to what you will make of it’. It is a good description; it makes you see not only Mr Lindsay, but also Mr Nichols. You see that Mr Nichols is much impressed by the size, the sunburn, the vitality; this man writes poetry, yet he is much like a farm labourer to look at. The Englishman is disposed to think well of Mr Lindsay’s poems on that account. Then he finds that Mr Lindsay tours the country reciting his poetry for a living, and that has proved to Mr Nichols ‘once and for all that poetry has too long been manufactured and read in the study; that the enmity between poetry and the populace has its origin in print; whereby poetry has lost its “springiness”; has become a thing too much of the eye; a cult of solitude … the refuge of preciosity in those folk who have made of poetry a retreat from life and not an explanation and justification in beauty of life’. There you have the Englishman doing what it is so fatally easy for the English of the present day to do—worshipping vitality, divesting himself of culture, trying to get away, to get back, to forget, to renew.

But we can be generous without being obsequious. There is every reason to believe that America can bring something new to literature; it is high time, we may add, that America did. Nobody is so certain of an enthusiastic welcome in England as a true American poet; directly the figure or the shadow of one appears above the horizon all eyes are shaded and turned in his direction. What hopes are there then, of Nicholas Vachel Lindsay? Naturally, inevitably perhaps, the answer is not a single jubilant hail! but one that takes time and thought to deliver; one of the qualified kind. In the first place, General William Booth does not contain Mr Lindsay’s best work. His best work, according to his own account, is the yet unpublished Golden Book of Springfield; in Mr Nichols’s opinion The Congo is a better book than General William Booth; and of the books we know we prefer The Chinese Nightingale. Nevertheless, both in its goodness and in its badness, General Booth is full of interest. Should you have the habit, to which the reviewer must confess, of reading introductions last, you will have noticed certain qualities in Mr Lindsay’s work before you find them confirmed by what is said of him in the Introduction. The atmosphere is not at all that of the study: it is much more that of the street corner. As you read or recite you imagine a little crowd gathered round a Salvation Army officer, who, mounted on a tub, gesticulates and vociferates, not, perhaps, to the solace of your soul. There is in many of Mr Lindsay’s poems the same earnest insistence upon the obvious which in these street crowds always makes it appear that the message of the preacher is addressed not to you, but to your neighbour. Mr Lindsay is charged with several messages to deliver about Beauty and Temperance and the future of Illinois. One feels that he would sacrifice his poetry rather than his message; and that the fusion of one with the other is not complete. Poetry may run clear for a moment; at the next the gospel clouds it. That the combination is not repulsive—as from our description it certainly should be—is due in the first place to the preacher’s simple-mindedness; and in the second to the poet’s indisputable though debatable gift. You walk on with the tune running in your head. It comes back of its own accord later in the day. Has it not somehow addressed itself to you also? Here are three verses from a short sermon of four:

The dew, the rain, and moonlight

All prove our Father’s mind.

The dew, the rain, and moonlight

Descend to bless mankind.

Come, let us see that all men

Have land to catch the rain,

Have grass to snare the spheres of dew,

And fields spread for the grain.

* * * *

A net to snare the moonlight,

A sod spread to the sun,

A place of toil by daytime,

Of dreams when toil is done.

Or, again, he will beat out his message with incredible pertinacity and simplicity:

The moral,

The conclusion,

The verdict now you know;—

‘The saloon must go,

The saloon must go,

The saloon,

The saloon,

The saloon Must go.’

A fragment separated from the whole gives little idea of the cumulative power which the whole possesses. His gift is rhythmical, one suspects, rather than verbal, until further discoveries make it wise to suspend that judgement for a time. With the rhythm goes, in many of the poems, a queer suggestion of instrumental music. Here, one feels, the cymbals should clash; here sounds the brass; here the tambourines; and here and here should be dancing and swaying in time. The audience should take their measure from the poet, who, as he recites, stands in the centre of a circle with his feet wide apart, so that he may turn on his heel, speaking rapidly, his hands moving, his voice ‘changing in pace, rhythm and volume, but never in tone’. There would be no disrespect in some rhythmical response as Mr Lindsay recites the following:

[Bass drum beaten loudly.]

Booth led boldly with his big bass drum—

(Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?)

The Saints smiled gravely and they said: ‘He’s come.’

(Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?)

Walking lepers followed, rank on rank,

Lurching bravoes from the ditches dank,

Drabs from the alleyways and drug-fiends pale—

Minds still passion-ridden, soul-powers frail—

Vermin-eaten saints with mouldy breath,

Unwashed legions with the ways of Death—

(Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?)

But since we in England do our reading, for reasons of climate, indoors, in solitude generally, and for the most part in silence, we apply other tests to Mr Lindsay’s poetry than those enforced by the open air. The test of language is one of them, and it seems doubtful whether Mr Lindsay is aware that there is such a test. The language is generally too large and loose for the thought; it is often even more banal than the thought—pompous, careless, slack, and conventional. No beating of drums, dancing, or gesture could make the following stanza anything but rhetoric of the feeblest kind:

Too many weary men shed honest tears,

Ground by machines that give the Senate ease.

Too many little babes with bleeding hands

Have heaped the fruits of empire on your knees.

It is indeed difficult, as one copies the above lines, to account for the fact that a book so waterlogged with mediocrity should yet remain buoyant and seaworthy. Much must be attributed to Mr Lindsay’s sincerity. That a poet should be capable of such staring commonplace is disarming. Only youth could be so innocent; only youth could suppose that such truisms are true. Perhaps the undoubted effectiveness of his rhythms is also the result of youth. A sophisticated ear would fight shy of them. They swing and rock and balance, carry you over acres of ploughed field, sweep you, now and then, off your feet. No great strain is laid upon the intellect; the strain is on the emotions. If you stop to examine the lines separately none is specially memorable. But the whole moral of Mr Lindsay’s work, as we understand it, is that single lines should not be memorable. He is the poet of the whole and not of the detail. For this reason it is difficult to represent him fairly in short quotations. Read at length and read aloud, the quality which Mr Nichols calls ‘springiness’ is apparent. If there is none of the minute felicity and none of the intensity of modern English verse, there is a freshness which we could not match among ourselves. The words, careless, gross, or violent as they may be, seem to be leaving the lips of a living man; they have not been dug from a cold mine of thought and laid in minute glittering particles upon the page. Perhaps the reader may see what we mean in the following little poem:

Look you, I’ll go pray,

My shame is crying,

My soul is gray and faint,

My faith is dying.

Look you, I’ll go pray—

‘Sweet Mary make me clean,

Thou rainstorm of the soul,

Thou wine from worlds unseen.’

That may be taken to prove that his moods are not always strenuous and didactic.

But however we rate Mr Lindsay’s worth as a poet, it is impossible, though it may well be unfair, not to seize upon those strains in him which appear to us, rightly or wrongly, the proof of his American birth—his simplicity; his moral earnestness; his primitive love of rhythm; his faculty for using the common speech so that it seems not common but enviably fresh and even exquisite at moments. There are the strains which, in their odd combinations, give him his newness in our eyes. Perhaps we relish his newness too highly; perhaps it distracts us from other qualities that lie more deeply hid. A critic writing of the Chinese Nightingale would have less to say about the American quality of Mr Lindsay’s work. But in writing of General William Booth one can scarcely avoid laying stress upon its rousing nature, its alternate beauty and commonplaceness, and its simply emotional appeal. We look into the bubbling cauldron from which something shapely of a new kind may one of these days emerge.

[Times Literary Supplement, Jan 29, 1920]

[]

Cleverness and Youth.

[Limbo (Chatto & Windus, 1920) by Aldous Huxley]

We know for ourselves that Mr Huxley is very clever; and his publisher informs us that he is young. For both these reasons his reviewers may pay him the compliment, and give themselves the pleasure, of taking him seriously. Instead, that is, of saying that there are seven short stories in Limbo which are all clever, amusing, and well written, and recommending the public to read them, as we can conscientiously do, we are tempted to state, what it is so seldom necessary to state, that short stories can be a great deal more than clever, amusing, and well written. There is another adjective—‘interesting’; that is the adjective we should like to bestow upon Mr Huxley’s short stories, for it is the best worth having.

The difficulty is that in order to be interesting, as we define the word, Mr Huxley would have to forgo, or go beyond, many of the gifts which nature and fortune have put in his way. Merely to skim the quotations in ‘Richard Greenow’ and the rest is to perceive that Mr Huxley is extemely well-read; then he has evidently first-hand knowledge of a great public school, which he calls Aesop; and of an Oxford college, which he calls Canteloup; moreover, whatever the intellectual fad of the metropolis, he is fated to know both its professors and its disciples. His eyes have opened perforce upon the follies of the upper middle classes and the unfortunate physical infirmities of the intelligentsia. This is none of Mr Huxley’s fault, but it is a little his misfortune, and it is better worth attention since so many of the young and the clever of our country are inevitably in the same case. To have named the reading of books as an obstacle to the writing of stories needs some explanation. We hold no brief for the simple peasant. Yet we cannot help thinking that it is well to leave a mind under a counterpane of moderate ignorance; it grows more slowly, but being more slowly exposed it avoids that excessive surface sensibility which wastes the strength of the precocious. Again, to be aware too soon of sophisticated society makes it tempting for a young writer to use his first darts in attack and derision. If he is as dexterous and as straightforward as Mr Huxley the attack is an inspiriting spectacle. Humbug seems to collapse, pretension to be pricked. Here is the portrait of a fellow of Canteloup,

who had had the most dazzling academic career of his generation … Mr Glottenham did not prepossess at a first glance; the furrows of his face were covered with a short grey sordid stubble; his clothes were disgusting with the spilth of many years of dirty feeding; he had the shoulders and long hanging arms of an ape—an ape with a horribly human look about it. When he spoke it was like the sound of a man breaking coke; he spoke incessantly and on every subject. His knowledge was enormous; but he possessed the secret of a strange inverted alchemy—he knew how to turn the richest gold to lead, could make the most interesting topic so intolerably tedious that it was impossible, when he talked, not to loathe it.

There is an equally amusing description of a dinner with the Headmaster of Aesop and Mrs Cravister, a lady of ‘swelling port’ and unexpected utterance, who talks to the bewildered boys now about eschatology, now about Manx cats (‘No tails, no tails, like men. How symbolical everything is!’), now about the unhappy fate of the carrion crow, who mates for life. It is amusing; it is perhaps true; and yet as one reads one cannot help exclaiming that English society is making it impossible to produce English literature. Write about boots, one is inclined to say, about coins, sea anemones, crayfish—but, as you value your life, steer clear of the English upper middle classes. They lie, apparently, so open to attack, they are undoubtedly such an obstacle to vision; but their openness is the openness of the tiger’s jaw which ends by swallowing you whole and leaving no trace. ‘Happily Ever After’ is but another proof of their rapacity. Mr Huxley sets out to kill a great many despicable conventions, and to attack a large and disgusting schoolmaster. But having laughed at the conventions and the schoolmaster, they suddenly turn the tables on him. Now, they seem to say, talk about something that you do believe in—and behold, Mr Huxley can only stammer. Love and death, like damp fireworks, refuse to flare up in such an atmosphere, and as usual the upper middle classes escape unhurt.

But with Mr Huxley it is only necessary to wait a little longer; and we can wait without anxiety. He is not merely clever, well-read, and honest, but when he forgets himself he discovers very charming things. The best story—barring ‘Happy Families’, a play, which, after two readings, we understand insufficiently to pronounce upon—is not a story at all, but a description of an interview in a bookshop. He opens a book of fashion plates.

Beauties in crinolines swam with the amplitude of pavilioned ships across the pages. Their feet were represented as thin and flat and black, like tea-leaves shyly protruding from under their petticoats … And it occurred to me then that if I wanted an emblem to picture the sacredness of marriage and the influence of the home, I could not do better than choose two little black feet like tea-leaves peeping out decorously from under the hem of wide, disguising petticoats. While heels and thoroughbred insteps should figure—oh well, the reverse.

And then he sees a piano—‘the yellow keys grinned at me in the darkness like the teeth of an ancient horse’. Emboldened by our pleasure in such good writing as this, we would admonish Mr Huxley to leave social satire alone, to delete the word ‘incredibly’ from his pages, and to write about interesting things that he likes. Nobody ever takes advice; even so, we hazard the opinion that Mr Huxley’s next book will be not only clever, amusing, and well-written, but interesting into the bargain.

[Times Literary Supplement, Feb 5, 1920]

[]

Mr Norris’s Method.

[The Triumphs of Sara (Hutchinson & Co., 1920) by W.E. Norris.]

After writing novels for forty years, Mr Norris has given us not merely, as we may guess, forty novels, but an additional volume which has upon the back of it for title W.E. Norris. Although we admit to finding this supernumerary volume always among the best of any author’s works, we will at present only extract from it the information that Mr Norris is likely to deprecate enthusiasm as an unnecessary expense of spirit on the part of a reviewer. If we were to offer him incense, he would probably only complain of the smoke. He would point out that above all things he values clearness of sight. It is not due to his fine stock of this commodity that, after forty years of writing, The Triumphs of Sara issues in its turn, firm, competent and kindly, extremely readable, a little cool, and entirely self-possessed?

But clearness of sight is not so common that we can afford to rate its products cheaply. Indeed, we have to own that even with Mr Norris himself dissuading us there was an impulse, halfway through this forty-first novel, of dangerous enthusiasm. Lincolnshire; ratting; the Leppingtons of Storr; Uncle Tom asking questions; Jimmy in the Guards; Peggy playing cricket; Aunt Matilda playing patience; Lady Leppington playing the piano; the pleasant country home; the good breeding, the good temper, the good judgment of everyone concerned, did at last produce that warm appreciative mood in the critic which in the kettle precedes, by some five minutes, the hiss and hubbub of boiling over. How this calamity was averted is only to be explained by remarking that an heiress from Manchester called Sara comes upon the scene, and, at her first appearance among the Leppingtons, is convicted by Mr Norris of killing her rat by a fluke. It is an anxious predicament; for a young woman in a novel by Mr Norris must kill something, and if she kills rats by a fluke the presumption is that she kills men by profession. ‘From beneath her long lashes she shot at him one of those glances which she knew by experience found their mark every time she had recourse to them.’ That is Sara’s form of sport, and, as our quotation shows, Mr Norris is not altogether at his ease in describing it. Yet it is amazing and even instructive to observe how seldom we are allowed to feel any awkwardness. The clear-sighted and unsentimental relationship between Sara and Euan Leppington, who, through marriage and separation and reconciliation, remain good friends, is not only a clever and truthful performance, but a nice example of a novelist’s economy. Mr Norris is not going to waste his time over the impossible. He is not going to be rushed off his own neat strip of indisputable territory. If his characters suffer for it, suffer they must. No one can complain that they are not sensible; and Englishwomen are notoriously cold-hearted. The chief damage that this caution inflicts upon us is that we can rely so implicitly upon a life-belt when the liner is torpedoed that, should the kettle boil in the middle of the chapter, there is no reason to postpone tea. The nuisance of being torpedoed, as Mr Norris points out, is not that you are drowned, but that you are rescued ‘without other belongings than the clothes on your back’. Why we should complain of feeling safe when Mr Norris is so much better fitted to deal with safety than with disaster is puzzling, until, in the crucial scene of the book, we find a reason which justifies our dissatisfaction. Sara Leppington surprises her husband alone with Mrs Furness in a Brighton hotel. Now Mrs Furness loved Euan, and, we submit, had only to say so rather forcibly in order to send the legitimate wife who did not love him skulking home in disgrace. As it is, Mrs Furness is driven off as a small terrier is driven from a large dog’s bone by a horrid outburst of loud meaningless barking. But though a happy ending is assured, and presumably the desired heir to the Leppington estates, the feeling of safety rests upon such false foundations that we are more uneasy than if the whole fabric had been blown sky-high before our eyes.

This conclusion, however, need only be reached if you wish to come to a conclusion, if, that is to say, you stray off Mr Norris’s land on to debatable territory where he makes no pretence to rule. Stay within his precincts and you are still perfectly safe.

[Times Literary Supplement, Mar 4, 1920]

[]

Freudian Fiction.

[An imperfect Mother (W. Collins Sons & Co. Ltd, 1920) by J.D. Beresford]

Mr Beresford is always a conscientious writer, but in An Imperfect Mother one cannot help feeling that conscience can at best play a stepmother’s part in the art of fiction. She can keep things neat and orderly, see that no lies are told, and bring up her stepchildren to lead strenuous and self-respecting lives. But the joys of intimacy are not hers; there is something perfunctory in the relationship. In this case we hazard the opinion that, from the highest motives, Mr Beresford has acted the part of stepfather to some of the very numerous progeny of Dr Freud. The chief characters, Cecilia, Stephen, and Margaret Weatherley, are his children and not Mr Beresford’s. On page 12 there is certain proof of it:

Something within him had inarticulately protested against his conscientious endeavours to submit himself to the idea of this new ambition … He had been harassed, too, by a persistent nightmare, quite new in his experience—a nightmare of being confined in some intolerably dark and restricted place from which he struggled desperately to break out. Sometimes he had succeeded, and waked with a beautiful sense of relief.

After that one expects to find that Stephen is beginning, unconsciously, to fall in love with the schoolmaster’s daughter; nor is one surprised to discover that he is the victim of an unacknowledged passion for his mother. It follows that she returns his affection in the inarticulate manner of those who lived before Freud, and, finding herself supplanted by Margaret Weatherley, decided to run away with Threlfall the organist. This is strictly in accordance with the new psychology, which in the sphere of medicine claims to have achieved positive results of great beneficence. A patient who has never heard a canary sing without falling down in a fit can now walk through an avenue of cages without a twinge of emotion since he has faced the fact that his mother kissed him in his cradle. The triumphs of science are beautifully positive. But for novelists the matter is much more complex; and should they, like Mr Beresford, possess a conscience, the question how far they should allow themselves to be influenced by the discoveries of the psychologists is by no means simple. Happily, that is their affair; our task in reviewing is comparatively easy, although we, too, are conscious of a division of mind which twenty or even ten years ago could hardly have afflicted our predecessors. Stated briefly, our dilemma resolves itself into this. Judged as an essay in morbid psychology, An Imperfect Mother is an interesting document; judged as a novel, it is a failure. All this talk, we find ourselves protesting when Mr Beresford in his able way describes Medboro’, or the building of a factory, is irrelevant to the case. We cannot help adopting the professional manner of a doctor intent upon his diagnosis. A love scene interests us because something bearing significantly upon our patient’s state of mind may emerge. Our attention is rewarded.

She laughed at his deliberation. ‘You are a funny boy,’ she chided him. ‘One might think I was your mother’ … The reference used as a simile finished Stephen. The obscure resistance that he had been fighting to overcome was no longer physical inertia; it had become a positive impulse.

Yes, says the scientific side of the brain, that is interesting; that explains a great deal. No, says the artistic side of the brain, that is dull and has no human significance whatever. Snubbed and discouraged, the artist retreats; and before the end of the book the medical man is left in possession of the field; all the characters have become cases; and our diagnosis is now so assured that a boy of six has scarcely opened his lips before we detect in him unmistakable symptoms of the prevailing disease.

There remains the question whether we are not pandering to some obsolete superstition when we thus decree that certain revelations are of medical significance, others of human; that some are only fit for the columns of the Lancet, others for the pages of fiction. If it is true that our conduct in crucial moments is immensely influenced, if not decided, by some forgotten incident in childhood, then surely it is cowardice on the part of the novelist to persist in ascribing our behaviour to untrue causes. We must protest that we do not wish to debar Mr Beresford from making use of any key that seems to him to fit the human mind. Our complaint is rather that in An Imperfect Mother the new key is a patent key that opens every door. It simplifies rather than complicates, detracts rather than enriches. The door swings open briskly enough, but the apartment to which we are admitted is a bare little room with no outlook whatever. Partly, no doubt, this is to be attributed to the difficulty of adapting ourselves to any new interpretation of human character; but partly, we think, to the fact that, in the ardours of discovery, Mr Beresford has unduly stinted his people of flesh and blood. In becoming cases they have ceased to be individuals.

[Times Literary Supplement, Mar 25, 1920]

[]

‘The Higher Court.’

[The Higher Court by Μ.E.M. Young; Pioneer Players at the Strand Theatre, Apr 11, 1920.]

Pioneers—a subscription performance—Sunday evening—the very name of the play—all conspire to colour one’s preconceptions. We are not going to enjoy ourselves comfortably all over (that is the shade of it); we are going to be wrought into a sharp nervous point. How queer the Strand will look when we come out; how sharp and strange will be our contact with our fellows for the whole of Monday morning and a considerable part of the afternoon! In short, we are going to be scraped and harrowed and precipitated into some surprising outburst of bitterness against—probably the Divorce Laws. On the other hand, there is the new Bastardy Bill, and Dr Freud may very well have discovered something entirely new and completely devastating about children’s toys. What, when you come to think of it, is a Teddy bear?

These remarks are made to explain and to excuse the avidity with which, when the curtain went up upon a family breakfast table in West Kensington, we seized upon the fact that Idalia Pryce-Green was a Roman Catholic. Dr Foster’s visit before breakfast, his proposal to Polly Pryce-Green, Polly’s departure for Paris, the poverty, simplicity, pluck, and unworldliness of the Pryce-Green family were strewn, we felt, lightly upon a sinister concealment. Polly hints at it. ‘Not in the whole of West Kensington could you find a nicer girl than my sister—’ such, or nearly such, are her words. ‘She saves us the price of a general servant and gives you the blouse off her back for the asking. But’—here she winks one eye and her brother Ethelbert whistles in a peculiar manner—‘strike her religion and you strike a stone.’ The door opens and a policeman brings in a stretcher. A man has been run over by a motor-car. He is probably dead, looks like a tramp, is a stranger to all of them, but, as he gave the address of their flat before losing consciousness, will they allow him to stay? Of course, the Pryce-Greens do that. He is a stranger. It is Idalia who dwells upon that word symbolically, and as she does so the scales fall from our eyes. A play where the word ‘stranger’ is rolled upon the tongue with relish is not a play of intellect; it is a play of sentiment, as indeed we might have guessed directly Miss Mary Jerrold stepped upon the stage. There is no sinister concealment about her. In her paper bag she carries hot rolls for her sister’s breakfast, and though we are told that she has been to early Mass, we have only to look at her to see that early Mass is a habit (perhaps the only habit this unselfish little creature allows herself)—a Spartan habit, like having a cold bath every morning all through the year. Inconvenient, perhaps a little ridiculous, but we are not going to be scraped and harrowed by Idalia’s habits. Let her go to her Mass by all means.

Once this is realised, we settle down with some relief to enjoy the story, for a play of sentiment must provide something for people to feel about, and thus, in addition to feelings, which are always interesting, we have a plot which is invariably exciting, so that, though we have not the space to say it, there is much to be said in favour of the play of sentiment.

It is true that the plot was unravelled in the stalls before the first act was over. It was bruited abroad that the stranger was a millionaire, and it was added that the crisis would hinge upon the conflict between love and religion. But then the stalls, presumably, know more about millionaires than West Kensington does, and the Pryce-Greens, one cannot help thinking, were innocent even for West Kensington. ‘Why, you don’t mean to say that you’ve been in a taxi!’ was one of Idalia’s exclamations, and as for a cheque-book—what is a cheque-book? But then the millionaire was also an extreme case of Park Lane. He was, perhaps plausibly, ignorant of the existence of weekly bills, but his sight had been so deranged by his mansion that the bare, dingy flat never ceased, when he limped in from his bedroom, to look to him ‘somehow beautiful’. ‘You see, I have never had a home.’ At this point, and it was made fairly often, he would suppress manly emotion by means of that odd catch in the throat which no woman can hear without wishing that it were still the fashion to carry fans. Need one write it all out? If we refrain it is partly that it went better on the stage than it can possibly do in print. It was not merely the efficiency of the acting. (Both Miss Jerrold and Mr Randle Ayrton gave the impression that they are in the habit of carrying far heavier burdens than these.) Nor was it solely that Miss Young, when she took her eyes off her plot, gave a shrewd glance at her characters which promised better things in future. What shone forth from all the obvious and the inane was that it is impossible to be bored by a play as one is bored by a novel. One saw what was coming, one could not altogether approve of the way it came, but one did not wish to leave the theatre until it was certain that Idalia Pryce-Green had married her millionaire. The only obstacle ahead was the religious obstacle, and that, on our theory, would be overcome when Idalia realised that the habit of taking a cold bath before breakfast was nothing more than a habit. She realised it, if anything, too easily. She gave way. She agreed to a mixed marriage with the millionaire, and in the same breath or the very next, she wanted to know for certain that he had eaten a good dinner. Was that all? Well, at any rate, Idalia was happy, and one does not expect the intellect to put up much resistance in the fourth act of a play of sentiment. But wait—they were still talking. ‘She’s divorced—not dead,’ said the millionaire. ‘Surely you understood that?’ But Idalia had not understood it, and from her expression it was evident that it would take her at least five minutes to understand it. She would, of course, win through, and the curtain would come down rather more conclusively than we had expected upon the defeat of Roman Catholicism by love. But the curtain wavered. The millionaire wavered. We all wavered. Could it be possible? Could she be going to haggle over this? She could. The door slammed—not tragically, but with irritation. He was gone. ‘Good heavens! So you do care more for your cold baths than for millionaires. Well, one had hoped better things of you.’ That is what we said as we trooped into the Strand, irritated and baffled, and feeling that, though it were to save our lives, nothing would have induced Idalia Pryce-Green to walk under a ladder.

[New Statesman, Apr 17, 1920]

[]

An Imperfect Lady.

[Mary Russell Mitford and Her Surroundings. With illustrations by Ellen G. Hill and reproductions of portraits (John Lane, 1920) by Constance Hill.]

Little is known of Sappho, and that little is not wholly to her credit. Lady Jane Grey has merit, but is undeniably obscure. Of George Sand the more we know the less we approve. George Eliot was led into evil ways which not all her philosophy can excuse. The Brontës, however highly we rate their genius, lacked that indefinable something which marks the lady; Harriet Martineau was an atheist; Mrs Browning was a married woman; Jane Austen, Fanny Burney, and Maria Edgeworth have been done already; so that, what with one thing and another, Mary Russell Mitford is the only woman left. This is no vain parade of erudition; we are trying to find out what considerations had weight with Miss Hill when she decided to write Mary Russell Mitford and Her Surroundings. Two emerge from the rest and may be held of paramount importance. In the first place, Miss Mitford was a lady; in the second, she was born in the year 1787.

There is no need to labour the extreme importance of the date when we see the word ‘surroundings’ on the back of a book. Surroundings, as they are called, are invariably eighteenth-century surroundings. When we come, as of course we do, to that phrase which relates how ‘as we looked upon the steps leading down from the upper room, we fancied we saw the tiny figure jumping from step to step’, it would be the grossest outrage upon our sensibilities to be told that those steps were Athenian, Elizabethan, or Parisian. They were, of course, eighteenth-century steps, leading down from the old panelled room into the shady garden, where, tradition has it, William Pitt played marbles, or, if we like to be bold, where on still summer days we can almost fancy that we hear the drums of Bonaparte on the coast of France. Bonaparte is the limit of the imagination on one side, as Monmouth is on the other; it would be fatal if the imagination took to toying with Prince Albert or sporting with King John. But fancy knows her place, and there is no need to labour the point that her place is the eighteenth century. The other point is more obscure. One must be a lady. Yet what that means, and whether we like what it means, may both be doubtful. If we say that Jane Austen was a lady and that Charlotte Brontë was not one, we do as much as need be done in the way of definition, and commit ourselves to neither side.

It is undoubtedly because of their reticence that Miss Hill is on the side of the ladies. They sigh things off and they smile things off, but they never seize the silver table by the legs or dash the teacups on the floor. It is in many ways a great convenience to have a subject who can be trusted to live a long life without once raising her voice. Sixteen years is a considerable stretch of time, but of a lady it is enough to say, ‘Here Mary Mitford passed sixteen years of her life and here she got to know and love not only their own beautiful grounds but also every turn of the surrounding shady lanes.’ Her loves were vegetable, and her lanes were shady. Then, of course, she was educated at the school where Jane Austen and Mrs Sherwood had been educated. She visited Lyme Regis, and there is mention of the Cobb. She saw London from the top of St Paul’s, and London was much smaller then than it is now. She changed from one charming house to another, and several distinguished literary gentlemen paid her compliments and came to tea. When the dining-room ceiling fell down it did not fall on her head, and when she took a ticket in a lottery she did win the prize. If in the foregoing sentences there are any words of more than two syllables, it is our fault and not Miss Hill’s; and to do that writer justice there are not many whole sentences in the book which are neither quoted from Miss Mitford nor supported by the authority of Mr Crissy.

But how dangerous a thing is life! Can one be sure that anything not wholly made of mahogany will to the very end stand empty in the sun? Even cupboards have their secret springs, and when, inadvertently we are sure, Miss Hill touches this one, out, terrible to relate, topples a stout old gentleman. In plain English, Miss Mitford had a father. There is nothing actually improper in that. Many women have had fathers. But Miss Mitford’s father was kept in a cupboard: that is to say, he was not a nice father. Miss Hill even goes so far as to conjecture that when ‘an imposing procession of neighbours and friends’ followed him to the grave, ‘we cannot help thinking that this was more to show sympathy and respect for Miss Mitford than from special respect for him’. Severe as the judgement is, the gluttonous, bibulous, amorous old man did something to deserve it. The less said about him the better. Only, if from your earliest childhood your father has gambled and speculated, first with your mother’s fortune, then with your own, spent your earnings, driven you to earn more, and spent that too; if in old age he has lain upon a sofa and insisted that fresh air is bad for daughters, if, dying at length, he has left debts that can only be paid by selling everything you have or sponging upon the charity of friends—then even a lady sometimes raises her voice. Miss Mitford herself spoke out once. ‘It was grief to go; there I had toiled and striven and tasted as deeply of bitter anxiety, of fear, and of hope as often falls to the lot of woman.’ What language for a lady to use! for a lady, too, who owns a teapot. There is a drawing of the teapot at the bottom of the page. But it is now of no avail; Miss Mitford has smashed it to smithereens. That is the worst of writing about ladies; they have fathers as well as teapots. On the other hand, some pieces of Dr Mitford’s Wedgwood dinner service are still in existence, and a copy of Adam’s Geography, which Mary won as a prize at school, is ‘in our temporary possession’. If there is nothing improper in the suggestion, might not the next book be devoted entirely to them?

[Times Literary Supplement, May 6, 1920]

[]

A Good Daughter.

[Mary Russell Mitford and Her Surroundings. With illustrations by Ellen G. Hill and reproductions of portraits (John Lane, 1920) by Constance Hill.]

Chiefly by means of quotations Miss Hill here presents us with the portrait of an amiable and distinguished lady, who wrote Rienzi and Our Village, won £20,000 in a lottery, supported a spendthrift father, thought him ‘the handsomest and cheerfullest of men’, and had presumably an infinity of feelings which are now only to be guessed at. We can scarcely go wrong if we suppose them to refer in about equal proportions to her father and to her money.

Dr Mitford was one of those splendid and imaginative men who dominate plain daughters, believe themselves to be descended from one of William the Conqueror’s knights, and muddle away their wives’ fortunes and their daughters’ earnings upon buying china, building mansions, and financing the schemes of French marquises. Mary, too, was romantic. If she had had her way she would have deserted the bluebells and the cowslips and written nothing but high tragedy. Rienzi, was a great success; but her father was her prime romance, and tragedy failed to support her father. It is amusing to reflect that the florid gentleman who spreads prosperously across the canvas was maintained for a number of years upon the loves of milkmaids and the frolics of greyhounds.

Miss Mitford was kept hard at work describing Our Village. To be a popular writer in the year 1850 it was necessary to write well. The women writers, in particular, wrote very well. Presumably the ordeal of appearing in print was then so severe that no lady went through it without taking pains with her deportment. Jane Austen, moreover, had set the fashion. ‘Of course, I shall copy as closely as I can Nature and Jane Austen,’ wrote Miss Mitford. The result is that Miss Mitford is still readable—well-preserved, as we say of some trim, hale, old spinster who has never been ravaged by passion or lost her figure in bearing children. That is her public appearance. In private she was evidently a sentimental, conservative, impulsive English lady with a deep respect for conventions, property, the classics, and the Church. ‘… as an establishment, the Church ought to remain; for to say nothing of the frightful precedent of sweeping away property, which would not stop there, the country would be overrun with fanatics.’ Even that is only her drawing-room appearance. For she had a little room to herself up in the roof, and there, alone—for Mrs Mitford was dead and the doctor often engaged at cards—she did her accounts, waited for the door to slam, wrote about her greyhounds, and sighed pretty frequently. ‘There I have toiled and striven and tasted as deeply of bitter anxiety, of fear, and of hope as often falls to the lot of woman.’

When Lord Melbourne gave her a pension of £100 she exclaimed: ‘Is not this very honourable to the kind feelings of our aristocracy?’ and thanked God that there would be a cushion for her father’s white hairs so long as he lived. He lived to the year 1842. She survived him 13 years. But what is the use of scolding her now? It was none of his fault, she said; had all the gold of Peru been poured into her lap she would not have exchanged him for another. Life had been very pleasant; poetry very beautiful, and, as she lay dying, she observed that it is the small things that matter—sparrows, robins, and fine weather.

[Daily Herald, May 26, 1920]

[]

An Old Novel.

[A Lost Love … With a Foreword by the author and a Personal Note by Frances M. Charlton (1855; 3rd ed., John Murray, 1920) by Ashford Owen.]

In the year 1854 Miss Charlotte Ogle, calling herself Ashford Owen, published her first novel, A Lost Love, which she wrote at the age of twenty-two, and which is now offered again to a later generation. Whether she ever wrote a second novel, as, considering that she died only two years ago at the age of eighty-six, she may well have done, we are unable to say. From internal evidence we should guess that A Lost Love was not only a first novel, but a solitary novel. If after sixty-six years we can still listen with sympathy to its frail melancholy note like that of some plaintive old organ in a back street, it is because it is saying with such unmistakable sincerity, ‘I am unhappy.’ When first novels say that and nothing more, they are often very interesting books, but they leave no successors. The stress of feeling which for the time shaped the world into a story dies out; and next year the world is merely a helter-skelter of daily life, and the girl who scribbled on half-sheets of notepaper her passionate version of it now declares that there is nothing left to write about.

One can fancy that Miss Ogle was a little surprised at herself about the year 1856. Wonder mingled with her surprise, for famous people sought her friendship and great men proclaimed her immortality. Yet all she had done had been to steal from the family party in the Northumberland parsonage and write a story about herself. It is not a very good story. Directly her characters step beyond the range of her little bull’s-eye lantern of egotism they became queer and distorted, or faint and awkward. But this egotism, by which we mean being young and unhappy and bewildered and honest, is a startling illuminant, and may well have led Sir Henry Taylor, Air Lecky, Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff, and other distinguished gentlemen to say that they would have given all their tragedies, histories, and leading articles to have written the scene where Georgy Sandon says farewell for the last time to James Erskine. Whatever scene they may have chosen (and we have no authority for saying that they chose any), what they meant was that Miss Charlotte Ogle had a capacity for feeling that left them a little envious; and drew their tears. But where the Victorians cried in 1854 what do we do in 1920? That is one of the questions that we keep asking as we read, and perhaps the pleasure which is still to be had from A Lost Love largely consists in asking such questions, and taking the liberty to supply the answers.

Sir Henry Taylor, who admired the book greatly, probably saw nothing fantastic in James Erskine, and could understand perfectly why Georgy Sandon loved him so passionately. The fascinations of the charming Mrs Everett exercised some sway over him. He thought that there was no alternative for a girl who had lost her lover but to marry the man she had already rejected. When she died in childbed he was profoundly moved, but could not doubt that she had done the right thing. If it is only by imagining Sir Henry Taylor’s pleasure that we get any pleasure, it can scarcely be said that our pleasure is pure. On the other hand, where Sir Henry read on without raising his eyebrows, we not only read but re-read, and yield at times to the temptation of reading aloud. ‘Georgy was on a sofa, in the corner, busily working at a large parrot … Her tears fell fast, and still she did not cease her playing … She knew his footstep without turning her head, and she stopped. “Do you keep your beautiful playing a secret, dear lady?” he asked, and leaned over the pianoforte. There was a sense of mastery somehow expressed in those low, quiet words that could not have been felt better if he had called her by her name.’ Sentences like these, with all that they conjure up of chandeliers and fire-screens, give us much the same fanciful pleasure as Georgy’s embroidered parrot would give us if we saw it in a curiosity shop today. But since in such unmistakable accents A Lost Love says ‘I am unhappy,’ these dusty draperies have not altogether smothered the wearer. Georgy Sandon was unhappy because she discovered that James Erskine loved Constance Everett. Miss Ogle was unhappy because she was young. Being young and unhappy, she felt and can make us feel that the world is not commonplace. It is, rather, shocking and terrible. Things that are said casually in the drawing room make her go upstairs, lean her head against the window-pane, and ask herself, ‘What can be the meaning of this?’ And as she looks out of the window the ‘fine sycamore trees’ in the darkness and the sound of the waves on the beach not far off mix with her thoughts and are there to this day in her writing. But when she had written it all down it did not seem to represent her feelings in the least, as Georgy Sandon explained to James Erskine when they talked about first novels. ‘Writing is very pleasant, but no one can say all they think and feel through it … not even in that wondrous bit of aspiring egotism—a first book.’ James Erskine kindly reassured her, and said, ‘If we know everything we should see, I dare say, that some books are costly to their writers.’ A Lost Love has that quality—it was costly to its writer. We know that this clergyman’s daughter had read all the books in her father’s study. Through the frail body of A Lost Love we see distinctly, to our amusement and even instruction, the skeleton of the traditional form. We should not see it so distinctly in a work of genius, and that is why it is much more easy to trace the course of literature in the little books than in the great.

[Times Literary Supplement, May 27, 1920]

[]

The Wrong Way of Reading.

[Mary Russell Mitford and Her Surroundings. With illustrations by Ellen G. Hill and reproductions of portraits (John Lane, 1920) by Constance Hill.]

Speaking truthfully, Mary Russell Mitford and Her Surroundings is not a good book. It neither enlarges the mind nor purifies the heart. There is nothing in it about Prime Ministers and not very much about Miss Mitford. Yet, as one is setting out to speak the truth, one must own that there are certain books which can be read without the mind and without the heart, but still with considerable enjoyment. To come to the point, the great merit of these scrapbooks, for they can scarcely be called biographies, is that they license mendacity. One cannot believe what Miss Hill says about Miss Mitford, and thus one is free to invent Miss Mitford for oneself. Not for a second do we accuse Miss Hill of telling lies. That infirmity is entirely ours. For example: ‘Alresford was the birthplace of one who loved nature as few have loved her, and whose writings “breathe the air of the hayfields and the scent of the hawthorn boughs”, and seem to waft to us “the sweet breezes that blow over ripened cornfields and daisied meadows”.’ It is perfectly true that Miss Mitford was born at Alresford, and yet, when it is put like that, we doubt whether she was ever born at all. Indeed she was, says Miss Hill; she was born ‘on the 16th December, 1787’. ‘A pleasant house in truth it was’, Miss Mitford writes. ‘The breakfast-room … was a lofty and spacious apartment’. So Miss Mitford was born in the breakfast room about eight-thirty on a snowy morning between the Doctor’s second and third cups of tea. ‘Pardon me,’ said Mrs Mitford, turning a little pale, but not omitting to add the right quantity of cream to her husband’s tea, ‘I feel …’ That is the way in which Mendacity begins. There is something plausible and even ingenious in her approaches. The touch about the cream, for instance, might be called historical, for it is well known that when Mary won £20,000 in the Irish lottery, the Doctor spent it all upon Wedgwood china, the winning number being stamped upon the soup plates in the middle of an Irish harp, the whole being surmounted by the Mitford arms, and encircled by the motto of Sir John Bertram, one of William the Conqueror’s knights, from whom the Mitfords claimed descent. ‘Observe,’ says Mendacity, ‘with what an air the Doctor drinks his tea, and how she, poor lady, contrives to curtsey as she leaves the room.’ Tea? I inquire, for the Doctor, though a fine figure of a man, is already purple and profuse, and foams like a crimson cock over the frill of his fine laced shirt. ‘Since the ladies have left the room,’ Mendacity begins, and goes on to make up a pack of lies with the sole object of proving that Dr Mitford kept a mistress in the purlieus of Reading and paid her money on the pretence that he was investing it in a new method of lighting and heating houses invented by the Marquis de Chavannes. It came to the same thing in the end—to the King’s Bench Prison, that is to say; but instead of allowing us to recall the literary and historical associations of the place, Mendacity wanders off to the window and distracts us again by the platitudinous remark that it is still snowing. There is something very charming in an ancient snowstorm. The weather has varied almost as much in the course of generations as mankind. The snow of those days was more formally shaped and a good deal softer than the snow of ours, just as an eighteenth-century cow was no more like our cows than she was like the florid and fiery cows of Elizabethan pastures. Sufficient attention has scarcely been paid to this aspect of literature, which, it cannot be denied, has its importance. The snow falls heavily. The Portsmouth mail coach has already lost its way; several ships have foundered, and Margate pier has been totally destroyed. At Hatfield Peverel twenty sheep have been buried, and though one supports itself by gnawing wurzels which it has found near it, there is grave reason to fear the French King’s coach has been blocked on the road to Colchester. It is now the 16th of February, 1808.

Poor Mrs Mitford! Twenty-one years ago she left the breakfast-room, and no news has yet been received of her child. Even Mendacity is a little ashamed of itself, and, picking up Mary Russell Mitford and Her Surroundings, announces that everything will come all right if we possess ourselves in patience. The French King’s coach was on its way to Bocking; at Bocking lived Lord and Lady Charles Murray-Aynsley; and Lord Charles was shy. Lord Charles had always been shy. Once, when Mary Mitford was five years old—sixteen years, that is, before the sheep were lost and the French King went to Bocking—Mary ‘threw him into an agony of blushing by running up to his chair in mistake for my papa’. He had indeed to leave the room. Miss Hill, who, somewhat strangely, finds the society of Lord and Lady Charles pleasant, does not wish to quit it without ‘introducing an incident in connection with them which took place in the month of February, 1808’. But is Miss Mitford concerned in it? To some extent; that is to say, Lady Charles was a cousin of the Mitfords; and Lord Charles was shy. Mendacity is quite ready to deal with the ‘incident’ even on these terms, but we have had enough of trifling. Miss Mitford may not be a great woman; for all we know she was not even a good one; but we have certain responsibilities as a reviewer which we are not going to evade.

A sense of the beauty of nature has never been altogether absent from English literature; yet no one can deny that the difference between Pope and Wordsworth in this respect is very considerable. Lyrical Ballads was published in 1798; Miss Mitford’s Our Village first saw the light in 1824. One being in verse and the other in prose, it is not necessary to labour a comparison which contains, however, elements of justice. Like her great predecessor, Miss Mitford much preferred the country to the town; and thus perhaps it may not be inopportune to dwell for a moment upon the King of Saxony, Mary Anning, and the ichthyosaurus. Let alone the fact that Mary Anning and Mary Mitford had a Christian name in common, they are further connected by what can scarcely be called a fact, but may without hazard be called a probability. Mary Mitford was looking for fossils at Lyme Regis only fifteen years before Mary Anning found one. The King of Saxony visited Lyme in 1844, and, seeing the head of an ichthyosaurus in Mary Anning’s window, asked her to drive to Pinny, and explore the rocks. While they were looking for fossils, an old woman seated herself in the King’s coach—was she Mary Mitford? Truth compels us to say that she was not; but there is no doubt that Mary Mitford often expressed a wish that she had known Mary Anning, and it is singularly unfortunate to have to state that she never did. In the year 1844 Mary Mitford was fifty-seven years of age, and so far what we know of her is curiously negative; she had not known Mary Anning, she had not found an ichthyosaurus, she had not been out in the snowstorm, and she had not seen the King of France.

But then, in justice to Miss Hill and her fellow-biographers, what do we know of people? Even in the case of our friends the deposit of certainty is all spun over by a myriad changing shades; what they are depends upon what we are; then there are marriage, separation, the taking of office, and the birth of children; in short, when we come to say what anyone is like we often find ourselves in Miss Hill’s predicament without her excuse and merely reply that an anonymous old woman once sat in the King of Saxony’s coach. If this is so with the living, what can we know about the dead? Surely we can only invent them, and the best biographers are those who have most inventive power, along with an affinity of temperament which easily transmits shocks of love and hatred. Therefore poor Miss Mitford—but how ‘poor’ Miss Mitford if we know nothing about her? The truth is, however vain, trifling, or insipid a biography may be, so long as it makes mention of man or woman, it never fails to stir vibrations of sympathy—account for it how one can. A phrase in a letter, a glance from a portrait, an old name on a tomb, and the mischief is done—we love or we hate. Admitting that the adjective is probably wrong, we go on: Poor Miss Mitford was poor from a variety of reasons. In the first place she was consumed by a passion for her father. Squat, broad, beetle-browed herself, she could never see him in his blue coat and buff waistcoat without feeling that she scarcely deserved to be his daughter. Mrs Mitford was entirely of the same way of thinking, only, as she was wont to say when the two women took counsel together, her case was worse than Mary’s, for she had £3,000 which the Rev. William Harness would not allow her to touch, and besides, Mary was so clever with her pen. ‘If only we had a pony carriage,’ she sighed, for they were now in a small cottage on the Reading Road, and all the china was sold or broken, ‘I could take him for a drive and it might distract his mind’—from dwelling upon schemes for lighting houses, she meant. Mary looked out of the window. As it happened, two dogs were fighting, a beggar-woman was sauntering down the road, and a tinker’s cart stood in front of the wheelwright’s shop. Seizing her pen, she dashed off a description of the scene, and once more won the prize. Our Village went into three editions immediately. ‘My dear father and mother have been out in the pony cart three or four times already, to my great delight,’ she wrote. A pony cart seems a handsome return for looking out of the window, and yet if we consider what it must be like to sit at the same window, year in, year out, hoping that a dog may trip up an old woman, or that the cobbler’s little girl may break the jug in which she is carrying him his beer in order that the Americans may rejoice in the simplicity of rural England, one feels that to smash the window, strangle the doctor, and hamstring all the ponies in Berkshire would, as they say in novels, be the work of a moment. Even Miss Mitford has been known to curse the leveret. Her own taste was for tragedy and the drama. She wanted to write about Rienzi, the friend of Petrarch; about Charles I, and Inez de Castro; but how write plays when your father is ‘addicted to games of chance’? Back to the sitting room went poor Miss Mitford. ‘Not for all the gold of Peru would I exchange him for another!’ she exclaimed, however. For people had a way of pitying her; and that she could not stand.

So one word is by no means enough for Miss Mitford. There are thousands craving to be used of her. Again, consider all the scenes of which she is the centre. Which are we to choose? Her father lay decaying on the sofa. He would not let her leave the room. He slept at last. Putting her fingers to her lips, and undoing the latch without disturbing him, she stepped out on to the common. Her heart rose within her. So safe, so good, so holy it all seemed to her, and the air so sweet. There was a cuckoo and the church bell ringing for service. She thanked God for England. Then old Dr Mitford died. How kind people were—coming to the funeral from miles away! Then she made the acquaintance of Mr James Payn. Then Keren-Happuch found a glow-worm in her bedroom. She was extremely fond of glow-worms. ‘K. said that “now I could not go to them they came to me”.’ Had they come in with the wild woodbine? She liked writing all this in a letter to a literary young man, and he liked to hear her talk of ‘Keats, Wordsworth and myself’ all in the same breath. It was a little awkward when she got upon her father, as she was apt to do, and kindling and quivering said what a patriot, what a martyr he had been, when all the world knew—or did the world know? One never can tell. Anyhow, it was easy to lead her back to her books. Her walls were packed with them. They were strewn on the floor. She would denounce a bad book ‘as though it were a thing of life’. All sorts of books, all sorts of men she would discuss with vehemence, yet with sobriety. ‘But then I suppose I am the least romantic person that ever wrote plays. Do write good English, Mr Payn, and for Heaven’s sake, don’t go and marry for love!’ That was one of the queer things about her, and her cottage was such a commonplace villa, too, standing right on the high road without a creeper to its face. Then, again, though she was undoubtedly dressed, no one could tell what she was dressed in; or know from looking at her as she lay on two chairs which was tiny Miss Mitford and which was rug, quilt, skirt, or dressing-gown. There was no mistaking her face, however—immensely broad, with a ‘deep globular brow’ and two such eyes as Charles Kingsley had never seen in an Englishwoman’s head—glowing and glittering and yet ‘perfectly honest the while’. But now we must stop making up stories about Miss Mitford.

[Athenaeum, May 28, 1920]

[]

‘The Mills of the Gods.’

[The Mills of the Cods and Other Stories (Thornton Butterworth Ltd, 1920) by Elizabeth Robins]

Miss Elizabeth Robins must be used by this time to being told that she writes like a man. What the reviewers mean is that a page of her writing has the kind of bare brevity which marks the talk even of undergraduates. The idea may be commonplace, the knowledge superficial, but it stands unpalliated by superfluous phrases. For this aspect of her art there can be nothing but praise. If you miss a sentence you will not find that a slight variety of the same thing offers you another chance of understanding. You must read even the first story, which is the worst in the book, The Mills of the Gods, with attention. You will find yourself stopping to have another look at the fine hard fabric before passing on.

Therefore, one pays Miss Robins the compliment of formulating one’s case against her; and what is our case against her? Only that she is a prewar writer. At the end of each of the seven series one can pencil a date—any date between 1895 and 1910 will do; the date that is quite out of the question is the date 1920. It was between those years that old English houses were so very old; that strong men went gold digging in the Yukon, and Italian counts of satanic disposition lived upon the tops of mountains with beautiful wives. In those days there were suffrage raids, and butlers, and haunted houses. Houses, indeed, played a very large part in life; and life itself was a great deal more at the mercy of coincidence and mystery than it is now. Life, in short, was somehow different. But that is not true. Life is precisely the same; and our charge against Miss Robins amounts simply to this—that, misled largely by her strong dramatic sense, she has backed certain human qualities which dropped out of the race and neglected others which are still running. So, at least, we define the queer sense we have after being impressed and interested—that all this happened a very long time ago. If there had not been a war we should not have felt this with anything like the same force. The war withered a generation before its time. Yet among the pre-war writers we do not know many who do their job with Miss Robins’s efficiency, or give us the assurance, at all times so comfortable, that, although the story may be of no great concern, the mind behind it is exceptionally robust.

[Times Literary Supplement, Jun 17, 1920]

[]

A Disillusioned Romantic.

[The Rescue. A Romance of the Shallows (J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd, 1910) by Joseph Conrad]

As it is impossible for any writer to remain stationary, a new book always sets the reader a new problem. When the new book comes late in the list of its author’s works we must be ready to grasp some new development wrought out of the stuff of his old achievement. The worst compliment we could pay Mr Conrad would be to talk of The Rescue as if it were an attempt to rewrite Lord Jim twenty years later. But in what direction can we expect Mr Conrad to develop? So we may ask with our finger upon the cover of the new book. It is a difficult question to answer. For Mr Conrad is a romantic writer. Romantic writers die young. It seems at least harder to preserve the romantic attitude to life against the pressure of continued experience than any other. The romantic writer will either cease to write, or his writing will undergo some violent change. It is true that Mr Conrad by the greatness of his talent and the good fortune that kept him on the high seas long after most men are tethered to two or three miles of pavement preserved his youthful beliefs far into maturity. By its artistic completeness Mr Conrad’s work satisfied us of his unbroken good faith. Then, as one novel succeeded another, there were signs that the inevitable changes were taking place. He did not relinquish; there were no signs of disillusionment; but it seemed as if what had been before sufficient were now inadequate; and the perfection of the earlier books became broken and confused. There might be something in this to bewilder, but there was nothing to regret; and it could easily be held that in Chance and Victory Mr Conrad was advancing, not in the sense of improving, but in the sense of attacking a problem that was different from those magnificently solved before. If Mr Conrad was ceasing to be romantic, was it not that he surveyed a wider range of human life and therefore attempted to express in his novels a more complicated philosophy? And now we have The Rescue.

The first part of the book is called by a name that might stand for much of Mr Conrad’s work—‘The Man and the Brig’. The man and the brig—together they represent a noble and romantic conception of the passions and duties of mankind. The brig lies becalmed off one of the islands of the Eastern Archipelago. Her captain, Tom Lingard, a man of about thirty-five, is at once her master and her lover. ‘To him she was always precious—like old love; always desirable—like a strange woman; always tender—like a mother; always faithful—like a favourite daughter of a man’s heart,’ Her qualities, ‘speed, obedience, trustworthiness, endurance, beauty, capacity to do and to suffer’, inspire corresponding qualities in the man. You accept the fact of them lying there alone at sea with complete satisfaction as if apart from the external beauty there was a deep internal harmony which, however strained, must ultimately result in that concord with which a work of art dies upon the ear whether the event is tragic or joyous. Nowhere has Mr Conrad indicated more finely than in these opening chapters the outlines of what we have come to accept as his belief. The world rests upon a few very simple ideas, ‘so simple that they must be as old as the hills’. Lingard is another of those men of simple nature possessed by the greatness of an idea—a man ‘ready for the obvious, no matter how startling, how terrible or menacing, yet defenceless as a child before the shadowy impulses of his own heart’. He was romantic. It matters not how often Mr Conrad tells the story of the man and the brig. Out of the million stories that life offers the novelist, this one is founded upon truth. And it is only Mr Conrad who is able to tell it us.

But if the statement of the theme is extremely fine, we have to admit that the working out of the theme is puzzling; we cannot deny that we are left with a feeling of disappointment. Lingard has committed himself and his brig to espouse the cause of the Rajah Hassim and his sister Immada, to reinstate whom he has come in secret supplied with arms. But, before he is able to land, a rowing boat brings word that an English yacht has gone ashore on a sandbank nearby. Reluctantly he goes to her help. There, sitting on the deck, toying with a fan, he sees the beautiful Mrs Travers, the wife of a distinguished English politician travelling in pursuit of useful information. By her stands d’Alcacer, a man of the same world. Their world is altogether the opposite of Lingard’s world. Nor could the men of that world have deflected him from his purpose for a moment. But the woman, beautiful, schooled in the training of civilisation, is at heart as passionate as Lingard himself. Unlike him, she has as yet found no object worthy of her passion. Her husband, ‘enthusiastically devoted to the nursing of his own career’, has ceased to inspire any feeling whatever; and her days went by ‘without a glimpse of sincerity or true passion, without a single true emotion—not even that of a great sorrow’. Lingard appeared to her as a revelation not only of manhood, but of life itself. In him almost from the first moment she wakes the same ardour; she is the apotheosis of all that he has felt for his ship, for the natives who trust in him, and for their cause. What could be more romantic, one asks, than the encounter and union of two such natures? Yet here, at the moment when she wakes, when he tells her what he has told no one else, hesitation possesses us. Is it not beautifully told? Of course it is. Is there anything in man or woman, scene or setting, unworthy or jarring upon our senses? If anything, the setting is too flawless in its perfection and the characters too fixed in their nobility. Mr Conrad has never striven harder to heap up beauty of scene and romance of circumstance until the slightest movement tells like that of an actor upon the stage. Perhaps the reason of our hesitation is to be found in that sentence. In the earlier part of the book beauty has sprung naturally from the rightness of the central conception. Now beauty seems to be sought with effort, as though to bolster up some deficiency in the central idea. It is as if Mr Conrad’s belief in romance had suddenly flagged and he had tried to revive it by artificial stimulants. Mrs Travers is clothed in beauty from head to foot. Sea, sky, and ship all emphasise the tremendous impressiveness of the spectacle. Mr Conrad describes her with phrase after phrase of noble and stately eloquence, yet as they accumulate it becomes more and more difficult to refer them to the feelings of a living person. The air is thick with romance like a thunderous sky, and we await almost with fear the lightning flash of passion which is to cleave the dark asunder. And then as the long story winds through the involutions of a complicated plot we give up expecting the lightning. Our disappointment centres in the relationship between Lingard and Mrs Travers. In him Mrs Travers was to have found ‘the naked truth of life and passion buried under the growth of centuries’. The moment comes, but they cannot take advantage of it. It seems as if they had lived too long to believe implicitly in romance, and can only act their parts with dignity and do their best to conceal the disillusionment which is in their hearts. We are disillusioned also.

The story is both long and elaborate. It need scarcely be said that Mr Conrad provides out of his great riches all sorts of compensation for what we have called the central deficiency. If he were not Mr Conrad we should sink all cavil in wonder at the bounty of his gift. Here are scenes of the sea and of the land, portraits of savage chiefs and of English sailors, such as no one else can paint. But with Mr Conrad, as with all writers of first-rate power, we seek that which connects the beauty and brilliancy of detail—that central idea which, gathering the multiplicity of incidents together, produces upon our minds a final effect of unity. When Lingard parts from Mrs Travers and is left upon the sandbank alone by the grave of the faithful Jaffir, we should upon our showing be left with a conviction that admits no doubt. As it is, our frame of mind is uncomfortably ambiguous. True, the strength of Mrs Travers’s instincts was impaired by civilisation. True, Lingard was drawn from the sphere where his virtues could have their full effect. And if it is tragedy that we demand what could be more tragic than that a man like Lingard should be betrayed and that a woman like Mrs Travers should have betrayed him? Simplicity has been undone by sophistication, and fidelity and endurance have not availed. The elements of tragedy are present in abundance. If they fail to strike one unmistakable impression upon us, it is, we think, because Mr Conrad has attempted a romantic theme and in the middle his belief in romance has failed him.

[Times Literary Supplement, Jul 1, 1920]

[]

The Pursuit of Beauty.

[Linda Condon (William Heinemann, 1920) by Joseph Hergesheimer]

Among the advantages of having been born three or four centuries ago one cannot help including, perhaps wrongly, the advantage of having no past. The consciousness then was not impeded at every point by the knowledge of what had been said in that book, or painted on that canvas. In particular, writers like Mr Hergesheimer, whose sense of beauty is exceptionally lusty, would have gratified it more simply and fully than is likely to be possible again. Writing now with beauty as one’s theme, how can one avoid taking as symbols of two different ideals two statues, both of extreme antiquity, one the grayish-green image of a squat Chinese god, the other the white figure of the Greek Victory? One would wish to avoid it, because symbols are, unfortunately, apt to impose themselves. Linda Condon and Dodge Pleydon both show signs of the mould. They would not have taken this shape, one feels, unless their maker had been deeply versed in book learning. But then, again, it is largely because Mr Hergesheimer is a sophisticated writer that he is an interesting writer. Let us never discourage the novelist from finding strange elements in the composition of modern life. And after all, though Queen Elizabeth was a model of vigour she was also a dirty old woman, dabbling her fingers in the gravy, and amenable, one supposes, to pains and pleasures only of the most direct kind.

The first years of Linda Condon’s life were presided over by the green Chinese image with the expression of placid and sneering lust. Stella Condon, her mother, had long lived upon the benefactions of anonymous gentlemen in hotels—a sumptuous life, stuffed with eating and drinking and finery and debauchery. Mr Hergesheimer has no prudery about ugliness. It is the complement of his love of beauty. Plush bedrooms, cosmetics, strewn toilet tables and tumbled underlinen, all that makes the iridescence of decay, is truthfully rendered. More remarkable is his success in making us feel that Stella Condon was alive, even sensitive and warm-hearted, in the midst of the garbage. ‘Always remember mamma telling you that the most expensive corsets are the cheapest in the end.’ Such was her life’s philosophy, delivered in rather a thick voice, for she was ‘mussed’ with drink, to her daughter of ten. But, nevertheless, she is the most sympathetic and most imaginative figure in the book. Linda, the daughter of this mother and of a vanished father, the son of old tradition and culture, is, rightly no doubt, denied the directness of her mother’s appeal. She is anything but direct. Considering the variety and strangeness of the qualities that have been shredded into her, it would have been a rare triumph had she glowed with life.

But life, in the usual sense, is the quality purposely denied her, for is she not, mysteriously, beauty rather than life, the spirit rather than the body, at every turn inhibited from the common responses of the usual woman? It is her function to live in the statue and not in the children of her body. Her soul is preserved by the sculptor, Dodge Pleydon, in bronze, for it is through the man that she exists. When, in a belated attempt to feel the ordinary passions of humanity, she comes to live with him she realises that it is not her in the flesh but her in the spirit that he desires. Therefore she leaves him to cherish the beautiful body which, at any rate in the expression that he has given to it, is ultimately enough for her, too.

The story lends itself to fantastic treatment, for the freedom of which we find ourselves occasionally hungering. But Mr Hergesheimer keeps to the solid and the actual. The difficult experiment is hardly successful, though the failure is more marked in Dodge Pleydon than in Linda herself. One would have guessed him, were it not for the name on the title page, a woman’s hero—large, brutal, brilliant, cherishing in a lacquer box a lost glove. The icy finger of theory has chilled him, so that one feels him not fantastic but unreal. That charge might be levelled against Linda herself also, but in a different sense. She is like one of those watches that are made too elaborately to be able to go. Yet, though we hold it the supreme merit of watches to be able to go, as Stella Condon goes, there is great pleasure to be had in these delicate mechanisms. They are well worth picking to pieces.

[Times Literary Supplement, Jul 8, 1920]

[]

Pure English.

[Gammer Gvrtons Nedle by Mr S. Mr of Art, ed. H.F.B. Brett-Smith (Basil Blackwell, 1920).]

Although readers seldom admit it, an irrational element enters into their liking and disliking for books as certainly as it enters their feelings for people. It would never do for a professional aesthete to leave it at that. It scarcely does for a private person. No sooner have we recovered from the shock of feeling anything than we find good reasons for having felt it. Nevertheless, at any rate where the ordinary reader is concerned, it is his feeling, and not the reasons he gives for his feeling, that is of interest. That is genuine; that is the root and motive of the greater part of our reading, the sap which causes books to go on budding from the tree.

Save for the introduction and appearance, both of high excellence, one due to Mr Brett-Smith the other to Mr Blackwell, Gammer Gurton’s Needle had for us little preliminary charm. We will not deny that some old books are better than any new ones, but we will also confess that curled in the heart of the world’s greatest masterpieces we have come upon cankers of the most repulsive description. Age alone is no guarantee of excellence. Indeed, when one considers how much of our pleasure in literature springs, probably wrongly, from our instant identification of our own feelings with those expressed, and how seldom it is that a sixteenth-century poet says much to the point about the soul of a twentieth-century journalist it will be agreed that one source of pleasure is almost certainly dried up. Then again one is probably justified in assuming that what is ‘held to be the first comedy in our language’ owes its perpetuation to curiosity rather than to sensibility. It is a mummy and not a living being, a footprint which has somehow escaped the natural obliteration of time. For such reasons, or prejudices, our greeting to Gammer Gurton may have been respectful, but was certainly lacking in warmth.

But who shall trace how it is that coldness yields to curiosity, and curiosity to warmth, or satisfactorily define what constitutes that relationship between book and reader? For the essence of it is instinctive rather than rational. It is personal, complex, as much composed of the reader’s temperament perhaps as of the writer’s. To make a clean breast of it, hour and season and mood, the day’s brightness or the moment’s despondency, all weigh down the scales. With such impressionable instruments are we provided; of such unstable elements are our judgements compounded. No wonder that a second reading often reverses the verdict of a first. One particular reader then, upon a particular occasion, read Gammer Gurton’s Needle with pleasure. Perhaps one had better say no more about it. After, however, receiving that impression, which momentarily overlays all others, the unplaiting process automatically begins. One wishes to explain to oneself this warm, jovial, contented emotion; to justify it by proving it well founded. ‘Warm, jovial, contented’—these three adjectives after a moment’s reflection prompt the idea that we enjoy Gammer Gurton’s Needle because it is typically English. A Frenchman could only enjoy such a play by an effort. To us it comes straightforwardly, like thinking to oneself.

Many a myle haue I walked, diuers and sundry waies

And many a good mās house haue I bin at in my daies

Many a gossip’s cup in my time haue I tasted,

And many a broche and spyt haue I both turned and basted.

Not by reading but by nature one understands Diccon, the rascally tramp who never knows where he will sleep the night, and filches the bacon and sets the good women by the ears. When one says that one understands him one means that he is thoroughly congenial. This approbation, which may well be a subtle form of self-approbation, applies to Hodge and the Gammer, to Dame Chat and Dr Rat. It applies, more vaguely, to the old village and the muddy fields. The scene is rude enough; the humour of the characters simple, but what an energy there is in it! With what a swing and directness it goes! The spelling trips us now and then, but that is the only obstacle, and a trifling one, to our enjoyment. The story rattles itself off without a hitch. As Gammer Gurton sits mending Hodge’s breeches she saw Gyb the cat half inside the milk pan.

Ah hore, out thefe, she cryed aloud, and swapt the breches downe,

Up went her staffe, and out leapt gyb, at doors into the towne.

In the flurry the precious needle ‘my fayre longe strayght neele that was myne onely treasure’ is lost. Diccon hints that neighbour Chat has stolen it. The two women have at each other in such fashion that the four centuries between us are thin as a paper wall. Every word rings out sharp and clear. The case is tried before the baily; and in the end, owing to a well directed blow of Diccon’s fist, the needle is found sticking in the hinder parts of Hodge. It is a simple tale. Whoever the writer may have been he stuck to his story, and save for the irrepressible outburst of the splendid drinking song—

I can not eat but lytle meate,

My stomacke is not good.

sought no embellishment. But, to return to our analysis of pleasure, his straightforward method serves to release a deep current, first of joy in the English qualities, and then of relish for the plain language, the free manners, to which we have grown so little used. His characters can scarcely open their mouths without saying something which, upon reflection, we must call coarse. But this is an afterthought imposing itself upon a direct judgement that not only is indecency of this kind enjoyable, but it is also wholesome and natural. What, we ask regretfully, has clipped our language and tied our pens? Why should expression be now either so strictly limited or so thickly veiled? Presumably because women are now equally with men readers of the printed page and actors of the drama. There are not wanting signs that education is already bringing a change to pass; but meanwhile for certain kinds of pleasure one must resort to the old writers. Hard upon that, however, comes the reflection that though plain speaking and free acting have an irresistible charm, Gammer Gurton palls before the end through excess of horseplay. The characters are by no means without such rude shaping as befits their parts, but William Stevenson, if we credit him with the work, was no poet. He sang his song in praise of ale with splendid vigour, but for the majority of human pleasures, for the look of things, for love and for death he had no sense at all. At any rate, he makes no explicit mention of them. But when the story is told with such spirit, when so clear before us comes the cottage, with the end of the candle hid in the shoe behind the old brass pan, the cat’s gleaming eyes, the game of cards, poor Hodge’s drudgery in the fields and his desire to appear decently before his mistress on Sunday, the voice of poetry, though still dumb, seems about to burst into song. Here and there one pauses as if to listen for it. No, it is too early; the petals are furled in the buds; the birds hopping among leafless twigs. Of all these things, and of many besides, is our pleasure composed.

[Times Literary Supplement, Jul 15, 1920]

[]

The Plumage Bill.

If I had the money and the time I should, after reading ‘Wayfarer’, in the Nation of 10 July, go to Regent Street, buy an egret plume, and stick it—is it in the back or the front of the hat?—and this in spite of a vow taken in childhood and hitherto religiously observed. The Plumage Bill has been smothered; millions of birds are doomed not only to extinction but to torture; and ‘Wayfarer’s’ comment is, ‘What does one expect? They have to be shot in parenthood for child-bearing women to flaunt the symbols of it, and, as Mr Hudson says, one bird shot for its plumage means ten other deadly wounds and the starvation of the young. But what do women care? Look at Regent Street this morning!’ One can look at Regent Street without leaving one’s room. The lower half of the houses is composed of plate glass. One might string substantives and adjectives together for an hour without naming a tenth part of the dressing bags, silver baskets, boots, guns, flowers, dresses, bracelets and fur coats arrayed behind the glass. Men and women pass incessantly this way and that. Many loiter and perhaps desire, but few are in a position to enter the doors. Most of them merely steal a look and hurry on. And then there comes on foot, so that we may have a good look at her, a lady of a different class altogether. A silver bag swings from her wrist. Her gloves are white. Her shoes lustrous. She holds herself upright. As an object of beauty her figure is incomparably more delightful than any other object in street or window. It is her face that one must discount, for, though discreetly tinted and powdered, it is a stupid face, and the look she sweeps over the shop windows has something of the greedy petulance of a pug-dog’s face at tea-time. When she comes to the display of egret plumes, artfully arranged and centrally placed, she pauses. So do many women. For, after all, what can be more etherially and fantastically lovely? The plumes seem to be the natural adornment of spirited and fastidious life, the very symbols of pride and distinction. The lady of the stupid face and beautiful figure is going tonight to the opera; Clara Butt is singing Orpheus; Princess Mary will be present; a lemon-coloured egret is precisely what she wants to complete her toilet. In she goes; the silver bag disgorges I know not how many notes; and the fashion writers next day say that Lady So-and-So was ‘looking lovely with a lemon-coloured egret in her hair’.

But since we are looking at pictures let us look at another which has the advantage of filling in certain blank spaces in our rough sketch of Regent Street in the morning. Let us imagine a blazing South American landscape. In the foreground a bird with a beautiful plume circles round and round as if lost or giddy. There are red holes in its head where there should be eyes. Another bird, tied to a stake, writhes incessantly, for red ants devour it. Both are decoys. The fact is that before ‘the child-bearing woman can flaunt the symbols of parenthood’ certain acts have to be devised, done, and paid for. It is in the nesting season that the plumes are brightest. So, if we wish to go on making pictures, we must imagine innumerable mouths opening and shutting, opening and shutting, until—as no parent bird comes to feed them—the young birds rot where they sit. Then there are the wounded birds, trailing leg or wing, as they flutter off to droop and falter in the dust. But perhaps the most unpleasant sight that we must make ourselves imagine is the sight of the bird tightly held in one hand while another hand pierces the eyeballs with a feather. But these hands—are they the hands of men or of women? The Plumage Bill supporters say that the hunters ‘are the very scum of mankind’. We may assume that the newspapers would have let us know if any of the other sex had been concerned in it. We may fairly suppose then that the birds are killed by men, starved by men, and tortured by men—not vicariously, but with their own hands. ‘A small band of East End profiteers’ supports the trade; and East End profiteers are apt also to be of the male sex. But now, as ‘Wayfarer’ says, the birds ‘have to be shot in parenthood for child-bearing women to flaunt the symbols of it’.

But what is the nature of this compulsion? Well, men must make their livings, must earn their profits, and must beget children. For though some people say that they can control their passions, the majority maintain that they should be protected from them rather than condemned for them. In other words, it is one thing to desire a woman; quite another to desire an egret plume.

There remains, however, a body of honourable and disinterested men who are neither plume hunters, profiteers, nor women. It is their duty, as it is within their power, to end the murder and torture of the birds, and to make it impossible for a single egret to be robbed of a single plume. The House of Commons took the matter up. The Plumage Bill was sent to Standing Committee C. With one exception each of its sixty-seven members was a man. And on five occasions it was impossible to get a quorum of twenty to attend. The Plumage Bill is for all practical purposes dead. But what do men care? Look wherever you like this morning! Still, one cannot imagine ‘Wayfarer’ putting it like that. ‘They have to be shot for child-begetting men to flaunt the symbols of it … But what do men care? Look at Regent Street this morning!’ Such an outburst about a fishing-rod would be deemed sentimental in the extreme. Yet I suppose that salmon have their feelings.

So far as I know, the above, though much embittered by sex antagonism, is a perfectly true statement. But the interesting point is that in my ardour to confute ‘Wayfarer’, a journalist of admitted humanity, I have said more about his injustice to women than about the sufferings of birds. Can it be that it is a graver sin to be unjust to women than to torture birds?

[Woman’s Leader, Jul 23, 1920]

[]

‘The Cherry Orchard.’

[The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov, Arts Theatre at St Martin’s Theatre, Jul 11 and 12, 1920.]

Although every member of the audience at the Art Theatre last week had probably read Tchekhov’s The Cherry Orchard several times, a large number of them had, perhaps, never seen it acted before. It was no doubt on this account that as the first act proceeded the readers, now transformed into seers, felt themselves shocked and outraged. The beautiful, mad drama which I had staged often enough in the dim recesses of my mind was now hung within a few feet of me, hard, crude, and over-emphatic, like a cheap coloured print of the real thing. But what right had I to call it the real thing? What did I mean by that? Perhaps something like this.

There is nothing in English literature in the least like The Cherry Orchard. It may be that we are more advanced, less advanced, or have advanced in an entirely different direction. At any rate, the English person who finds himself at dawn in the nursery of Madame Ranevskaia feels out of place, like a foreigner brought up with entirely different traditions. But the traditions are not (this, of course, is a transcript of individual experience) so ingrained in one as to prevent one from shedding them not only without pain but with actual relief and abandonment. True, at the end of a long railway journey one is accustomed to say goodnight and go to bed. Yet on this occasion, since everything is so strange, the dawn rising and the birds beginning to sing in the cherry trees, let us gather round the coffee-cups; let us talk about everything in the whole world. We are all in that queer emotional state when thought seems to bubble into words without being spoken. The journey is over and we have reached the end of everything where space seems illimitable and time everlasting. Quite wrongly (since in the production approved by Tchekhov the birds actually sing and the cherries are visible on the trees) I had, on my imaginary stage, tried to give effect to my sense that the human soul is free from all trappings and crossed incessantly by thoughts and emotions which wing their way from here, from there, from the furthest horizons—I had tried to express this by imagining an airy view from the window with ethereal pink cherries and perhaps snow mountains and blue mist behind them. In the room the characters spoke suddenly whatever came into their heads, and yet always vaguely, as if thinking aloud. There was no ‘comedy of manners’; one thought scarcely grazed, let alone struck sparks from, another; there was no conflict of individual wills. At the same time the characters were entirely concrete and without sentimentality. Not for an instant did one suppose that Madame Ranevskaia was wrapping up a mystic allusion to something else when she spoke. Her own emotions were quite enough for her. If what was said seemed symbolical, that was because it was profound enough to illumine much more than an incident in the life of one individual. And, finally, though the leap from one thought to another was so wide as to produce a sense of dangerous dislocation, all the separate speeches and characters combined to create a single impression of an overwhelming kind.

The actors at the Art Theatre destroyed this conception, first, by the unnatural emphasis with which they spoke; next by their determination to make points which brought them into touch with the audience but destroyed their harmony with each other; and, finally, by the consciousness which hung about them of being well-traind English men and women ill at ease in an absurd situation, but determined to make the best of a bad business. One instance of irrepressible British humour struck me with considerable force. It occurred in the middle of Charlotte’s strange speech in the beginning of the second act. ‘I have no proper passport. I don’t know how old I am; I always feel I am still young,’ she begins. She goes on, ‘When I grew up I became a governess. But where I come from and who I am, I haven’t a notion. Who my parents were—very likely they weren’t married—I don’t know.’ At the words I have italicised, Dunyasha bounced away from her to the other end of the bench, with an arch humour which drew the laugh it deserved. Miss Helena Millais seemed to be delighted to have this chance of assuring us that she did not believe a word of this morbid nonsense, and that the old jokes still held good in the world of sanity round the corner. But it was Miss Ethel Irving who showed the steadiest sense of what decency requires of a British matron in extremity. How she did it, since she spoke her part accurately, it is difficult to say, but her mere presence upon the stage was enough to suggest that all the comforts and all the decencies of English upper-class life were at hand, so that at any moment her vigil upon the bench might have been appropriately interrupted by a manservant bearing a silver tray. ‘The Bishop is in the drawing-room, m’lady.’ ‘Thank you, Parker. Tell his Lordship I will come at once.’ In that sort of play, by which I mean a play by Sheridan or Oscar Wilde, both Miss Irving and Miss Millais would charm by their wit, spirit and competent intellectual outfit, Nor, though the quotation I have made scarcely proves it, have we any cause to sneer at English comedy or at the tradition of acting which prevails upon our stage. The only question is whether the same methods are as applicable to The Cherry Orchard as they are to The School for Scandal.

But there are four acts in The Cherry Orchard. How it may have been with the other readers I do not know, but before the second act was over some sort of compromise had been reached between my reader’s version and the actor’s one. Perhaps in reading one had got the whole too vague, too mad, too mystical. Perhaps as they went on the actors forgot how absurd such behaviour would be thought in England. Or perhaps the play itself triumphed over the deficiencies of both parties. At any rate, I felt less and less desire to cavil at the acting in general and more and more appreciation of the acting of Mr Chancellor, Mr Dodd, Mr Pearson and Miss Edith Evans in particular. With every word that Mr Felix Aylmer spoke as Pishchick, one’s own conception of that part plumped itself out like a shrivelled skin miraculously revived. But the play itself—that was what overwhelmed all obstacles, so that though the walls rocked from floor to ceiling when the door was shut, though the sun sank and rose with the energetic decision of the stage carpenter’s fist, though the scenery suggested an advertisement of the Surrey Hills rather than Russia in her wildness, the atmosphere of the play wrapped us round and shut out everything alien to itself. It is, as a rule, when a critic does not wish to commit himself or to trouble himself that he refers to atmosphere. And, given time, something might be said in greater detail of the causes which produced this atmosphere—the strange dislocated sentences, each so erratic and yet cutting out the shape so firmly, of the realism, of the humour, of the artistic unity. But let the word atmosphere be taken literally to mean that Tchekhov has contrived to shed over us a luminous vapour in which life appears as it is, without veils, transparent and visible to the depths. Long before the play was over we seemed to have sunk below the surface of things and to be feeling our way among submerged but recognisable emotions. ‘I have no proper passport. I don’t know how old I am; I always feel I am still young’—how the words go sounding on in one’s mind—how the whole play resounds with such sentences, which reverberate, melt into each other, and pass far away out beyond everything! In short, if it is permissible to use such vague language, I do not know how better to describe the sensation at the end of The Cherry Orchard, than by saying that it sends one into the street feeling like a piano played upon at last, not in the middle only but all over the keyboard and with the lid left open so that the sound goes on.

This being so, and having felt nothing comparable to it from reading the play, one feels inclined to strike out every word of criticism and to implore Madame Donnet to give us the chance of seeing play after play, until to sit at home and read plays is an occupation for the afflicted only, and one to be viewed with pity, as we pity blind men spelling out their Shakespeare with their fingers upon sheets of cardboard.

[New Statesman, Jul 24, 1920]

[]

A Born Writer.

[Esther Waters (1894; William Heinemann Ltd, 1920) by George Moore.]

After many years Esther Waters appears again, entirely revised, and with an introduction which, to our disappointment, has more to say about Irish politics than about English fiction. Whether any critic of those days predicted a long life for the book we know not. At what date it was written and what views the author had in mind we are not told. At any rate in the summer of 1910 it sets out again; and whether for a long voyage and by reason of what qualities it has survived so far the critics of today must make up their minds. That is not easy. For it is a quiet book, and an old-fashioned rather than an old book. About a century ago it was the habit of novelists to produce masterpieces which were known for such from the moment of birth. Waverley, Pickwick, and Jane Eyre are all cases in point. The public applauded and the critics clapped hands with them unanimously. Later, for reasons which it would lead us astray to discuss, the process of recognition was much more gradual and difficult, and far from acclaiming at the outset the public had to be coaxed and even coerced before it would tolerate. But Esther Waters belongs neither to one class nor to the other. It was neither admitted a classic from the start nor has it fought a battle, won a victory, and founded a school. Somehow it has come through the press of the struggle by qualities which are not so easy to define.

Leaving aside such obvious merits as the story, which is varied and interesting, and the style, which, with occasional spaces of melody and charm, is invariably lucid and effortless, it seems as if the book’s virtue lay in a shapeliness which is at once admirable and disconcerting. The novel begins with the sentence, ‘She stood on the platform watching the receding train.’ A few pages before the end the sentence recurs. Esther Waters stands once more on the platform watching the receding train. Once more a servant’s oblong box, painted a reddish brown, is on the seat beside her. Between these two appearances eighteen years have passed,

eighteen years of labour, suffering, and disappointment. A great deal had happened, so much that she could not remember it all. The situations she had been in; her life with that dear, good soul, Miss Rice; then Fred Parsons; then William again! her marriage, the life in the public-house, money lost and money won, heartbreakings, death, everything that could happen had happened to her.’ [her.]

But the recurring scene is not a formal device to reduce the varied incidents of her life to symmetry. All through Mr Moore has curbed himself to this particular ending, renouncing this, insisting upon that, allowing himself few or none of the licences and redundances in which English novelists luxuriate. The life of a servant girl is a long series of sordid drudgeries scattered with scant pleasures; and thus he has presented it, without taking refuge in sentiment or in romance. Throughout the names are insignificant; the places (with the exception of Woodview, and there we are limited to the kitchen and the pantry) without charm; while the fates above preserve blank faces in the discharge of their duties. No one is allowed either sensational reprieve or sensational disaster. A number of writers have outdone Mr Moore in the force with which they depict poverty and misery, but they have failed to penetrate beyond their day because they have always dashed the picture from their hands in an access of indignation or clouded it with tears. They have rarely had his power of maintaining that in art life needs neither condemnation nor justification. The story owes much of its buoyancy and permanency to the fact that we can examine it dispassionately. There it hangs, complete, apart. Yet by this we do not mean that there is no morality to be found in it; for when Mr Moore calls Esther Waters ‘as characteristically English as Don Quixote is Spanish’, he means perhaps that in the person of Esther he has laid bare honesty, fidelity, courage, and has made these, the Saxon virtues, rather than the charms and subtleties of the Latins, the leading qualities in the drama. But he himself remains invisible.

Vivid, truthful, so lightly and yet so firmly constructed as it is, what then prevents us from talking of immortality and greatness? In one word, the quality of the emotion. Although in retrospect there is not a single scene that lacks animation, or a single character clumsily or conventionally portrayed, both scenes and characters are nevertheless curiously flat. The dialogue is always toneless and monotonous. The conception springs from no deep original source, and the execution has that sort of evenness which we see in the work of a highly sensitive student copying on to his canvas the picture of some great master. If that is the reason why Esther Waters does not affect us directly as a more imperfect but more original work is capable of doing, we cannot deny that it holds a very distinguished place in English fiction. Moreover, though the public will always prefer both Shakespeare and Mrs Henry Wood, Esther Waters will go on being read and re-read with peculiar interest by those who attempt the art of novel writing themselves. For, when all is said and done, Mr Moore is a born writer; and, though great novelists are rare, of how many people in a generation can one say truthfully that?

[Times Literary Supplement, Jul 29, 1920]

[]

Gorky on Tolstoy.

[Reminiscences of Leo Nicolayevitch Tolstoi by Maxim Gorky (The Hogarth Press, 1920). Authorised translation … by S.S. Koteliansky]

Sometimes by accident an untouched amateur photograph of a great personage will drop out of an album or of an old drawer, and instantly the etchings, the engravings, the portraits by Watts and Millais seem insipid and lifeless. Such is the effect of Gorky’s Notes upon Tolstoy. However we had come by our portrait of him it now appears conventionalised and dead. And since Gorky is not a photographer but a writer of great penetration and sincerity this untouched picture is not of the body but of the mind, and makes us wish to go straight to the ‘Kreutzer Sonata’ or War and Peace to see whether even our conception of Tolstoy’s books has not been changed by the light shed upon him.

Our imaginary snapshot often gives us a shock at first, because the little figure is so unmistakably like that of other men. It appears that his legs were short, or that he showed a curious lack of taste in his neck-ties, or that the hands clutching the stick were thick and clumsy. So Gorky shocks us at first by showing us that Tolstoy was no different from other men in being sometimes conceited, intolerant, insincere, and in allowing his private fortunes to make him vindictive in his judgements.

I always disliked what he said about women—it was unspeakably ‘vulgar’, and there was in his words something artificial, insincere, and at the same time very personal. It seemed as if he had once been hurt and could neither forget nor forgive.

Beyond everything else Gorky conveys a sense of Tolstoy’s power. He brings us so much nearer to him than before that we feel his force as if it were uncovered. And there is something frightening in contact with such a power when it is malevolent.

In Leo Nicolayevitch there is much which at times roused in me a feeling very like hatred, and this hatred fell upon my soul with crushing weight. His disproportionately overgrown individuality is a monstrous phenomenon, almost ugly, and there is in him, something of Sviatogor, the bogatir, whom the earth can’t hold. Yes, he is great.

But his greatness was a greatness of the whole, in which his special greatness as a writer appears as an accident of no particular importance. Before his eyes, and very close to them, he seems always to be holding human life, scrutinising it, trying to penetrate into it, and accidentally throwing off profound, coarse, wise sayings, as if they were sparks struck out by his mind in collision with some reality which existed only for him.

‘Man survives earthquakes, epidemics, the horrors of disease and all the agonies of the soul, but for all time his most tormenting tragedy has been, is, and will be—the tragedy of the bedroom!’ Saying this he smiled triumphantly: at times he has the broad, calm smile of a man who has overcome something extremely difficult or from whom some sharp, long-gnawing pain has lifted suddenly.

At such times, of course, there was not a pebble on the road or a leaf upon a tree, a drunken woman, a hawk, or two guardsmen walking down the street, whom he did not see once and for all, so that we see them and feel the disgust, delight, excitement or whatever it was that the sight roused in him. But Gorky also conveys very remarkably the sense of the man who lived apart from his sayings, silent, vast and lonely, like someone who has never got caught up in the ordinary round of existence, but appears to others like a pilgrim ‘terribly homeless and alien to all men and things’, or like a person ‘just arrived from some distant country, where people think and feel differently and their relations and language are different’. ‘Though he speaks a great deal and as a duty upon certain subjects his silence is felt to be still greater. Certain things one cannot tell to anyone. Surely he has some thoughts of which he is afraid.’ In that last sentence we have perhaps a clue to very much of Tolstoy.

But even as we choose this and that sentence to show the fascination of Gorky’s book we understand why it is that he writes in his preface to it, ‘And I do not finish it, for somehow or other that is not possible.’ For we have scarcely said that Tolstoy was lonely and withdrawn when we remember how he charmed a room full of different people as if he were ‘a man orchestra’ playing all the different instruments of which he was composed by turn. He seldom talked of literature, and yet we should have to add that he spoke of all writers as though they were his children, and to say that not only his passionate interest in art, but his triumph in his own achievements, sprang out now and again like a flame that has found an outlet. Then our picture of him, small, shrivelled and grey, wearing a peasant’s blouse, must be succeeded by another in which he appears like a creature of the purest blood, noble, dignified, speaking with exquisite point and reserve.

The life of Tolstoy cannot be finished. But Gorky’s picture comes nearer than the others to completeness, because he makes no attempt to include everything, to explain everything, or to sum up all in one consistent whole. Here there is a very bright light, here darkness and emptiness. And perhaps this is the way in which we see people in reality.

[New Statesman, Aug 7, 1920]

[]

A Character Sketch.

[Frederick Locker-Lampson. A Character Sketch. With a small selection from letters addressed to him and bibliographical notes on a few of the books formerly in the Rowfant Library (Constable & Co., 1920). Composed and edited by his son-in-law the Rt Hon. Augustine Birrell]

The respectable union between us and British biography is now dissolved. The golden ring is thrown away and the marriage lines consumed. Our affections are bestowed upon Frederick Locker-Lampson, A Character Sketch, by the Right Honourable Augustine Birrell. Never again shall we take to bed with us the life of Thomas Henry Huxley in two volumes; or Alfred Tennyson by his son; or Coleridge by James Dykes Campbell; or Samuel Barnett by his widow. Mr Birrell has seduced us. The metaphor is of course in the worst of taste. We make use of it only because it happens to express the sense of illicit freedom, of unhoped-for adventure, which this witty quarto volume produces upon a mind long habituated to decorous wedlock with the portly great. One feels that there must be something wrong. Who was Frederick Locker? one asks. And what a relief it is to find that Mr Birrell occasionally writes bad grammar and at least once misquotes a poet! Let us dismiss them both. One is insignificant; the other inaccurate. Where is the life of Lord Kitchener by Sir George Arthur? Where is the fifth, sixth, or seventh volume of Lord Beaconsfield by Mr Moneypenny and Mr Buckle in conjunction? Where, where, where is anything dark, solid, vouched for, and respectable to protect one from this lapse into biographic immorality? They were all within reach, and yet … and yet …

Mr Birrell’s biography reads so queerly because it brings before us a real human being. It is not that he is more profound than others, or that he has a story to tell to which we cannot fail to listen. The secret is one of those obvious secrets, which, so they say, are always the best kept. We all know it—life would be intolerable else. Yet by what name are we to call it? It is that the values of life are quite different from those of biography. There is such a thing as living. We are enmeshed in a texture of incredible fineness. It is character that enchants and colours. Achievement has nothing to do with it—but after all it is not so easy to say what the secret is. Let us ask Mr Birrell to try his hand at a definition:

Life, which in this respect, as indeed in many others, is quite unlike biography, is not a series of episodes, or of sentimental adventures, or of descriptive scenes, or even the drudgery of daily existence, but consists in the passage of Time; of perpetually stepping towards the westering sun. To describe this passage of time, to record the changes wrought by the chiming hours, is beyond the reach of the artist in words …

That may be so, but it is, we maintain, the duty of the biographer to try.

The first necessity is to throw overboard a great deal of ballast. ‘Mr Locker has left his mark for ever upon the annals of the British Admiralty.’ ‘He combined the intellectual vigour of a man with the tenderness of a woman.’ ‘Frugal and even austere to himself, he was generous to a fault where others were concerned. The extent of his benefactions will never be known’—we have looked in vain for these statements in Mr Birrell’s book. Oddly naked, a little indecent, it appears without them. The suspicion gains upon us that Mr Locker was not—is it conceivable?—a great success. He sat in Whitehall and wrote rhymes; he travelled in Italy and bought blue china; occasionally he produced a little poem. By degrees he collected enough books to be worth keeping in a strong-room. He was dyspeptic and moody and inclined to melancholy. Indeed, he thought ‘all he had done, however well done, was contemptible and all he was insignificant’. Even so he kept on the hither side of melancholia. He was never converted on the one hand, or suicidal on the other. He was kindly, it is true, but his kindliness took such fantastic shapes that it is difficult to perorate satisfactorily about that. A bust of Voltaire and a live tortoise—such were the gifts he lugged about with him on a hot summer’s day, thinking to please his friends. As likely as not, half of them laughed at him—such a dandy, such a coxcomb, such a tiny attenuated figure of a man when peeled of his great fur coat; and the rest, much more than the half, though our grammar is spoiled by it, were inordinately fond of him. In short, putting one thing with another, it is abundantly clear that Mr Locker was a character. He would have filled two pages in one of the essays of Elia to perfection. It seems to us a genuine tribute to Mr Birrell’s perspicacity and humanity to find ourselves constantly reminded of that great storehouse of biography. When we observe that Mr Locker was born in 1821 and died in 1895, and thus lived through the heat of the Victorian midday, the feat on both their parts is the more miraculous. How did Mr Locker survive? How did Mr Birrell dare to tell the truth about him?

One of the chief merits of Mr Birrell’s method, which is a peculiar compound of wit and sanity, is that it reduces these nineteenth-century phantoms to human scale. At the end of the book he prints a selection of letters from some of the most mythical—Tennyson and Thackeray, Browning and Ruskin, George Eliot and Matthew Arnold. They wrote much better letters than we do, but otherwise there is nothing to complain of. The monsters were not for ever propagating books and children, and desisting from their labours only to heave a grampus groan and then descend to the yeasty depths again. They were clear, sportive, even graceful and affectionate—to Frederick Locker that is. Thackeray, in particular, inspires the fancy that one could have talked to him as to a human being. Such is the effect of falling into the hands of a chronicler who will not be put upon by airs and graces. Naturally half the credit belongs to Mr Locker himself. It would, one guesses, have been very difficult to impose upon him. When a rare book presented itself he had a measuring rod with which he tested its pretensions to the fraction of an inch. Such was his method with poets and their poetry. His appetite was small, his taste fastidious; he rejected much, modestly blaming his own debility; but the famous people of his day rated the verdict of his rod very highly. It is impossible to mistake the tone in which they write to him. After such flattery as it was their wont to batten on, there was a sharpness in Mr Locker’s judgements that pleased the palate. One after another wrote something affectionate in the first editions of their works which he was apt to produce from his pockets at propitious moments. He did not obtrude his own books unduly (there were only five little volumes), and yet the most unlikely people admired them sincerely. If we wished to ingratiate Mr Locker with the younger generation we should quote not only what Mr Hardy said of his ‘perfect literary taste’, but his praise of Mr Locker’s poetry. We forbear because it strikes us that perhaps Mr Locker would not wish to be ingratiated with the younger generation. He was a man of peculiar temperament—whimsical, indolent, worldly, honest. How it may be with other readers we know not, but with us the test of a good biography is that it leaves us with the impulse to write it all over again. ‘Who can know him,’ we cry out, ‘half so intimately as we do?’ On this occasion echo, with disconcerting rapidity, answers back, ‘Nonsense. Nonsense. Read Mr Birrell. There is no more to be said.’

[Athenaeum, Aug 13, 1920]

[]

John Evelyn.

[The Early Life and Education of John Evelyn 1610–1641. With a commentary by H. Maynard Smith (OUP, 1920),
The Diary of John Evelyn (1818), 2 vols., ed. by J.M. Dentin, 1911.]

Should you wish to make sure that your birthday will be celebrated three hundred years hence, your best course is, undoubtedly, to keep a diary. Yet most of us prefer to put our trust in poems, plays, novels, and histories. One in a generation, perhaps, has the courage to lock his genius in a private book and the humour to gloat over a fame which will be his only in the grave. There can be no doubt that the good diarists are those who write either for themselves or for a posterity so distant that it can safely hear every secret and justly weigh every motive. For such an audience there is no need either of affectation or of restraint. But a diary written to be published in the author’s lifetime is no better than a private version of the newspaper, and often worse. The good opinion of our contemporaries means so much to us that it is well worthwhile to tell them lies.

But though these considerations may be just they are not on this occasion much to the point. Whatever else John Evelyn may have been he was neither introspective nor vindictive. The diary, for whose sake we are remembering his three-hundredth birthday, is sometimes composed like a memoir, sometimes jotted down like a calendar. But he never used its pages to reveal the secrets of his heart, and all he wrote might have been read aloud in the evening to his children. If we wonder, then, why we still trouble to read what we must consider the uninspired work of a good man, we have to confess what everybody knows—that it is impossible to read works of genius all day long. We have to confess that this reading, about which so many fine things have been said, is for the most part mere dreaming and idling; lying in a chair with a book; watching the butterflies on the dahlias; a profitless occupation which no critic has taken the trouble to investigate, and on whose behalf only the moralist can find a good word to say. For he will allow it to be an innocent employment, and happiness, though derived from trivial sources, has probably done more to prevent human beings from changing their religions and killing their kings than either philosophy or the pulpit.

It is indeed well, before reading much further in Evelyn’s books, to decide where it is that our modern view of happiness differs from his. Undoubtedly ignorance is at the bottom of it. No one can read the story of Evelyn’s foreign travels without envying in the first place his simplicity of mind, in the second his activity. To take a simple example of the difference between us. A butterfly will sit motionless on a flower while a wheelbarrow is trundled past it. But touch the tip of its wing with shadow and it is instantly up in the air. Presumably, then, a butterfly has either small sense of sound or none. Here, no doubt, we are much on a par with Evelyn. But as for going into the house to fetch a knife with which to dissect a Red Admiral’s head, no sane person in the twentieth century would entertain such a notion for a second. Individually we may know as little as Evelyn, but collectively we know so much that there is little incentive to make private discoveries. We seek the encyclopædia, not the scissors; and know in ten minutes not only more than was known to Evelyn in his lifetime, but that the mass of knowledge is so vast that it is scarcely worthwhile to possess a crumb. Ignorant, yet justly confident that with his own hands he might advance not merely his private knowledge but the knowledge of mankind, Evelyn dabbled in all the arts and sciences, ran about the Continent for ten years, gazed with unflagging gusto upon hairy women and elephants, magic stones and rational dogs, and drew inferences and framed speculations which are now only to be matched by listening to the talk of old women round the village pump. The moon, they say, is so much larger than usual this autumn that no mushrooms will grow and the carpenter’s wife will be brought to bed of twins. So Evelyn, Fellow of the Royal Society, a gentleman of the highest culture and intelligence, carefully noted all comets and portents, and thought it a sinister omen when a whale came up the Thames. Once before this happened, in the year 1658. ‘That year died Cromwell.’ Nature certainly stimulated the devotion of her seventeenth-century admirers by displays of violence and eccentricity from which she now refrains. There were storms, floods, and droughts; the Thames frozen hard; comets flaring in the sky. If a cat so much as kittened in Evelyn’s bed the kitten was inevitably gifted with eight legs, six ears, two bodies, and two tails.

But to return to happiness. It sometimes appears that if there is an insoluble difference between our ancestors and ourselves it is that we draw our happiness from different sources. We rate the same things at different values. Something of this we may ascribe to their ignorance and our knowledge. But are we to suppose that ignorance alters the nerves and the affections? Are we to believe that it would have been an intolerable penance for us to live familiarly with the Elizabethans? Should we have found it necessary to leave the room because of Shakespeare’s habits, and to have refused Queen Elizabeth’s invitation to dine? Perhaps so. For Evelyn was a sober man of unusual refinement, and yet he pressed into a torture chamber as we crowd to see the lions fed.

… they first bound his wrists with a strong rope or small cable, and one end of it to an iron ring made fast to the wall about four feet from the floor, and then his feet with another cable, fastened about five feet farther than his utmost length to another ring on the floor of the room. Thus suspended, and yet lying but aslant, they slid a horse of wood under the rope which bound his feet, which so exceedingly stiffened it, as severed the fellow’s joints in miserable sort, drawing him out at length in an extraordinary manner, he having only a pair of linen drawers upon his naked body.

And so on. Evelyn watched this to the end, and then remarked that ‘the spectacle was so uncomfortable that I was not able to stay the sight of another’, as we might say that the lions growl so loud and the sight of raw meat is so unpleasant that we will now visit the penguins. Allowing for his discomfort, there is enough discrepancy between his view of pain and ours to make us wonder whether we see any fact with the same eyes, marry any woman from the same motives, or judge any conduct by the same standards. To sit passive when muscles tore and bones cracked, not to flinch when the wooden horse was raised higher and the executioner fetched a horn and poured two buckets of water down the man’s throat, to suffer this iniquity on a suspicion of robbery which the man denied—all this seems to put Evelyn in one of those cages where we still mentally seclude the riff-raff of Whitechapel. Only it is obvious that we have somehow got it wrong. If we could maintain that our susceptibility to suffering and love of justice were proof that all our humane instincts were as highly developed as these, then we could say that the world improves and we with it. But let us get on with the diary.

In 1651, when it seemed that things had settled down unhappily enough, ‘all being entirely in the rebels’ hands’, Evelyn returned to England with his wife of twelve, his Tables of Veins and Arteries, his Venetian glass and the rest of his curiosities, to lead the life of a country gentleman of strong Royalist sympathies at Deptford. What with going to church and going to town, settling his accounts and planting his garden—‘I planted the orchard at Sayes Court; new moon, wind west.’—his time was spent much as ours is. But there was one difference which it is difficult to illustrate by a single quotation because the evidence is scattered all about in little insignificant phrases. The general effect of them is that he used his eyes. The visible world was always close to him. The visible world has receded so far from us that to hear all this talk of buildings and gardens, statues and carving, as if the look of things assailed one out of doors as well as in, and were not confined to a few small canvases hung upon the wall, seems strange. No doubt there are a thousand excuses for us; but hitherto we have been finding excuses for him. Wherever there was a picture to be seen by Julio Romano, Polydore, Guido, Raphael, or Tintoretto, a finely built house, a prospect, or a garden nobly designed, Evelyn stopped his coach to look at it, and opened his diary to record his opinion. On August 27 Evelyn, with Dr Wren and others, was in St Paul’s surveying ‘the general decay of that ancient and venerable church’; held with Dr Wren another judgement from the rest; and had a mind to build it with ‘a noble cupola, a form of church building not as yet known in England but of wonderful grace’ in which Dr Wren concurred. Six days later the Fire of London altered their plans. It was Evelyn again who, walking by himself, chanced to look in at the window of ‘a poor solitary thatched house in a field in our parish’, there saw a young man carving at a crucifix, was overcome with an enthusiasm which does him the utmost credit, and carried Grinling Gibbons and his carving to Court.

Indeed, it is all very well to be scrupulous about the sufferings of worms and sensitive to the dues of servant girls, but how pleasant also if, with shut eyes, one could call up street after street of beautiful houses. A flower is red; the apples rosy-gilt in the afternoon sun; a picture has charm, especially as it displays the character of a grandfather and dignifies a family descended from such a scowl; but these are scattered fragments—little relics of beauty in a world that has grown indescribably drab. To our charge of cruelty Evelyn might well reply by pointing to Bayswater and the purlieus of Clapham; and if he should assert that nothing now has character or conviction, that no farmer in England sleeps with an open coffin at his bedside to remind him of death, we could not retort effectually offhand. True, we like the country. Evelyn never looked at the sky.

But to return. After the Restoration Evelyn emerged in full possession of a variety of accomplishments which in our time of specialists seems remarkable enough. He was employed on public business; he was Secretary to the Royal Society; he wrote plays and poems; he was the first authority upon trees and gardens in England; he submitted a design for the rebuilding of London; he went into the question of smoke and its abatement—the lime trees in St James’s Park being, it is said, the result of his cogitations; he was commissioned to write a history of the Dutch war—in short, he completely outdid the Squire of The Princess, whom in many respects he anticipated

A lord of fat prize oxen and of sheep,

A raiser of huge melons and of pine,

A patron of some thirty charities,

A pamphleteer on guano and on grain,

A quarter sessions chairman abler none.

All that he was, and perhaps shared with Sir Walter another characteristic which Tennyson does not mention. He was, we cannot help suspecting, something of a bore. Or what is this quality, or absence of quality, which checks our sympathy? It is partly that he was better than his neighbours; partly that, though he deplored the vices of his age, he could never keep away from the centre of them. The ‘luxurious dallying and profaneness’ of the Court, the sight of ‘Mrs Nelly’ looking over her garden wall and holding ‘very familiar discourse’ with King Charles on the green walk below, caused him acute disgust; but he could never make up his mind to break with the Court and retire to ‘my poor, but quiet villa’, which was, of course, one of the show places of England. Then, though he loved his daughter Mary, his grief at her death did not prevent him from counting the number of empty coaches drawn by six horses apiece that attended her funeral. His women friends combined virtue with beauty to such an extent that we can hardly credit them with wit into the bargain. Poor Mrs Godolphin, at least, whom he celebrated in a sincere and touching biography, ‘loved to be at the funerals’ and chose habitually the ‘dryest and leanest morsels of meat’, which may be the habits of an angel but do not present her friendship with Evelyn in an alluring light. The whole of our case against Evelyn, however, is summed up in the account of a visit which Pepys paid him on 6 November 1665. First Evelyn showed him some ‘painting in little; then in distemper, in Indian ink, water-colour, graving and, above all, the whole secret of mezzo-tint and the manner of it’. He then read his discourse ‘about gardenage, which will be a most pleasant piece’. Then a play or two of his making, ‘very good, but not as he conceits them I think to be’; then he displayed his Hortus Hyemalis; and finally read aloud, ‘though with too much gusto, some little poems of his own that were not transcendent … among others, one of a lady looking in at a gate and being peeked at by an eagle that was there’. ‘In fine,’ Pepys concluded at the end of the long morning’s entertainment, ‘a most excellent person he is, and must be allowed a little for a little conceitedness; but he may well be so, being a man so much above others.’

Evelyn, as we are bound to remark after dipping into Pepys, was no genius. His writing is opaque rather than transparent. We see no depths through it, nor any very secret movements of mind and heart. He can neither make us hate a regicide nor love Mrs Godolphin beyond reason. But even as we drowse, somehow or other the bygone gentleman sets up, through three centuries, a perceptible tingle of communication, so that without laying stress upon anything in particular we are taking notice all the time. His hypocritical modesty about his own garden is no less evident than his acidity about the gardens of others. The hens at Sayes Court, we may be sure, laid the best eggs in England. When the Tsar drove a wheelbarrow through his holly hedge his cry is that of a man in agony. Editors who wonder at the non-appearance of Mrs Evelyn should reflect that she was chiefly occupied in dusting china and cleaning ink-stains from the carpets. He was constantly asked to act as trustee; discharged his duties punctiliously, and yet grumbled at the waste of his time. Still he had a heart. Though a formal he was a very affectionate man. If paternal egotism probably hastened the death of the little prodigy Richard, he carried the memory of him throughout his life, and sighed deeply, not effusively—for the man with the long-drawn sensitive face was never effusive—when, ‘after evening prayers was my child buried near the rest of his brothers—my very dear children.’ He was not an artist, perhaps; yet as an artistic method this of going on with the day’s story circumstantially, bringing in people who will never be mentioned again, leading up to crises which never take place, has an undoubted merit. On one page we are agog to hear that Evelyn has a mind to visit Sir Thomas Browne. The journey to Norwich in the flying chariot with six horses is precisely described, with the talk by the way. But when at length Evelyn meets Sir Thomas all he has to say of him is that he owns many curiosities; thinks Norfolk a good county for birds; and states that the people of Norwich have lost the art of squaring flints, which, of course, sets Evelyn off upon buildings and flower gardens and Sir Thomas Browne is never mentioned again.

Never to mention people again is a piece of advice that psychological novelists might well lay to heart. All through Evelyn’s pages people are coming into the room and going out. The greater number we scarcely notice; the door shuts upon them and they disappear. But now and then the sight of a vanishing coattail suggests more than a whole figure sitting still in a full light. Perhaps it is that we catch them unawares. Little they think that for three hundred years and more they will be looked at in the act of jumping a gate, or observing, like the old Marquis of Argyle, that the turtle doves in the aviary are owls. There is a certain hot-tempered Captain Wray, for instance, upon whom we linger with unsatisfied affection. We are only told that he was choleric; that he had a dog who killed a goat; that he was for shooting the goat’s owner; that when his horse fell down a precipice he was for shooting the horse; and, finally, that, coming to Geneva, he ‘fell so mightily in love with one of Monsieur Saladine’s daughters that, with much persuasion, he could not be prevailed on to think on his journey into France, the season now coming on extremely hot’. ‘Yet,’ says Evelyn, ‘the ladies of Geneva are not beautiful.’ They have ‘something full throats’. That is all there is about Captain Wray, but it is enough to start us upon speculations too numerous and too little authentic to be given here. And though the dusk has long closed upon Captain Wray and his bride—who, since the captain was choleric, the season hot, and the goitre prevalent, may never have become his bride after all—we are still curious, as is not usual at the end of psychological novels, to know what became of them. Mr Maynard Smith, had he reached that point, might have told us. For his commentary upon the early life and education of John Evelyn is the very book that an idle reader, reading as much with his eye off the page as on, must rejoice in not only because so much of its information is necessary but because so much of it is superfluous. The reason why Evelyn’s father refused a knighthood is illuminating; but it is difficult to see in what respect our knowledge of Evelyn’s father’s beard is improved by knowing that the Tudors wore beards, that Shakespeare mentioned them, and that the Puritans slept with theirs enclosed in cardboard boxes.

Indeed, had we to give an excuse for wasting our time first over Evelyn, then over Mr Smith’s commentary upon Evelyn, which promises and will, we hope, fulfil its promise of exceeding Evelyn himself in length, we could only vaguely and falteringly explain that, whether alive or dead, good or bad, human beings have a hold upon our sympathies. That Evelyn had his faults is true; that we could not have spent an hour in his company without grave disagreement is also probable—though to have been shown over Wotton by the master in his old age when his gardens were flourishing, his grandson doing him credit, his sorrows smoothed out, and the Latin quotations falling pat from his lips, would have been a thing to stick in the memory; but, faults and limitations notwithstanding, he lived for 84 years and kept a record of 55 of them. That is enough for us. For without saying in the old language that he has taught us a lesson or provided an example, we cannot deny that the spectacle of human life on such a scale is full of delight. First we have the oddity of it; then the difference; then as the years go by the sense of coming to know the man better and better. When that is established, the circle in which he moves becomes plain; we see his friends and their doings; so that by degrees it is not one person but a whole society of people whom we watch at their concerns. Fate shepherded them all very straitly. There was no getting out of death or age; nor, though Evelyn protested, could he escape burial in the stone chancel of a church instead of lying in earth with flowers growing over him. All this provokes thought—idle thought, it is true, but of the kind that fills the mind with Evelyn’s presence and brings him back, in the sunshine, to walk among the trees.

[Times Literary Supplement, Oct 28, 1920]

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Postscript or Prelude?

[The Lost Girl (Martin Seeker, 1920) by D.H. Lawrence.]

Perhaps the verdicts of critics would read less preposterously and their opinions would carry greater weight if, in the first place, they bound themselves to declare the standard which they had in mind, and, in the second, confessed the course, bound, in the case of a book read for the first time, to be erratic, by which they reached their final decision. Our standard for Mr Lawrence, then, is a high one. Taking into account the fact, which is so constantly forgotten, that never in the course of the world will there be a second Meredith or a second Hardy, for the sufficient reason that there have already been a Meredith and a Hardy, why, we sometimes asked, should there not be a D.H. Lawrence? By that we meant that we might have to allow him the praise, than which there is none higher, of being himself an original; for such of his work as came our way was disquieting, as the original work of a contemporary writer always is.

This was the standard which we had in mind when we opened The Lost Girl. We now go on to trace the strayings and stumblings of that mind as it came to the conclusion that The Lost Girl is not an original, or a book which touches the high standard which we have named. Together with our belief in Mr Lawrence’s originality went, of course, some sort of forecast as to the direction which that originality was likely to take. We conceived him to be a writer, with an extraordinary sense of the physical world, of the colour and texture and shape of things, for whom the body was alive and the problem of the body insistent and important. It was plain that sex had for him a meaning which it was disquieting to think that we, too, might have to explore. Sex, indeed, was the first red-herring that crossed our path in the new volume. The story is the story of Alvina Houghton, the daughter of a draper in Woodhouse, a mining town in the Midlands. It is all built up of solid fabric. If you want a truthful description of a draper’s shop, evident knowledge of his stock, and a faithful and keen yet not satiric or sentimental description of James Houghton, Mrs Houghton, Miss Frost and Miss Pinnegar, here you have it. Nor does this summary do any kind of justice to the variety of the cast and the number of events in which they play their parts. But, distracted by our preconception of what Mr Lawrence was to give us, we turned many pages of very able writing in search for something else which must be there. Alvina seemed the most likely instrument to transmit Mr Lawrence’s electric shock through the calicos, prints, and miners’ shirts by which she stood surrounded. We watched for signs of her development nervously, for we always dread originality, yet with the sense that once the shock was received we should rise braced and purified. The signs we looked for were not lacking. For example, ‘Married or unmarried, it was the same—the same anguish, realized in all its pain after the age of fifty—the loss in never having been able to relax, to submit.’ Again, ‘She was returning to Woodhouse virgin as she had left it. In a measure she felt herself beaten. Why? Who knows … Fate had been too strong for her and her desires. Fate which was not an external association of forces, but which was integral in her own nature.’ Such phrases taken in conjunction with the fact that Alvina, having refused her first suitor, wilted and pined, and becoming a midwife mysteriously revived in the atmosphere of the Islington Road, confirmed us in our belief that sex was the magnet to which the myriad of separate details would adhere. We were wrong. Details accumulated; the picture of life in Woodhouse was built up; and sex disappeared. This detail, then this realism, must have another meaning that we had given them. Relieved, yet a trifle disappointed, for we want originality as much as we dread it, we adopted a fresh attitude, and read Mr Lawrence as one reads Mr Bennett—for the facts, and for the story. Mr Lawrence shows indeed something of Mr Bennett’s power of displaying by means of immense industry and great ability a section of the hive beneath glass. Like all the other insects, Alvina runs in and out of other people’s lives, and it is the pattern of the whole that interests us rather than the fate of one of the individuals. And then, as we have long ceased to find in reading Mr Bennett, suddenly the method seems to justify itself by a single phrase which we may liken to a glow or to a transparency, since to quote one apart from the context would give no idea of our meaning. In other words, Mr Lawrence occasionally and momentarily achieves that concentration which Tolstoy preserves sometimes for a chapter or more. And then again the laborious process continues of building up a model of life from saying how d’you do, and cutting the loaf, and knocking the cigarette ash into the ash tray, and standing the yellow bicycle against the wall. Little by little Alvina disappears beneath the heap of facts recorded about her, and the only sense in which we feel her to be lost is that we can no longer believe in her existence.

So, though the novel is probably better than any that will appear for the next six months, we are disappointed, and would write Mr Lawrence off as one of the people who have determined to produce seaworthy books were it not for those momentary phrases and for a strong suspicion that the proper way to look at The Lost Girl is as a stepping stone in a writer’s progress. It is either a postscript or a prelude.

[Times Literary Supplement, Dec 2, 1920]

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Pleasant Stories.

[The Happy End (William Heinemann, 1910) by Joseph Hergesheimer.]

When Mr Hergesheimer says, ‘These stories have but one purpose—to give pleasure,’ every reviewer will wish himself a novelist. It is more blessed, that is to say, to give simply and freely than to receive cautiously and questioningly. Of course Mr Hergesheimer gives us pleasure, but so do bright fires, oysters, and clean sheets. It is the dismal office of the reviewer to splinter pleasure into separate pieces which he examines, compares, and judges to be good, better, or best. Excitement, for example—is that the right kind of pleasure or the wrong? About two pages before the end of each of Mr Hergesheimer’s seven stories the hand slips out and lies across the print in order to bar the eye from leaping and galloping to the end. Reviewers are epicures. If we read too quick we know that we shall miss the niceties of this careful, economical, and well-trained craftsman. ‘Below, the water was invisible in the wrap of night. Naples shone like a pale gold net drawn about the sweep of its hills. A glow like a thumb print hung over Vesuvius; the hidden column of smoke smudged the stars.’ The wrap, the net, the thumb-print smudging the stars will each, if you spare the time, yield a little drop of pleasure. Mr Hergesheimer’s pages are always strewn with such felicities. He has a fine sense of matter. Still, even the great masters of material description, as Keats was in ‘The Eve of St Agnes’, always seem to be doing the easy thing when they are doing that. Must we suspect that our pleasure in the ‘gowns by Verlat’ and the pink pearl necklace is a little gross and indolent? That is putting it too harshly. For, as we say, we have to read on. The stories are far too well contrived to smother us in old lace or hypnotise us with pink pearls while down below the bullfighter is challenging the banker to a duel. Indeed, the main source of our pleasure is that so many things happen and happen so quickly, and seem to be happening to such solid people. For though the space is small and the movements to be gone through in that space many and violent, Mr Hergesheimer gives his figures considerable body. They are forcibly cut out with strong, clean strokes. Perhaps the heaviest meal we have ever eaten in fiction occurs in ‘Bread’. As we sit munching solidly through the courses with August Turnbull, we begin to feel that our pleasure is really respectable. The clams, the turtle soup, the thick crimson slices of beef, the ice, the coffee, the long dark roll of oily tobacco, are the right symbols for the man and his life. He will not escape his fate, and his fate will be fitting and satisfactory; and we shall feel that we have been let into a secret about life, which is perhaps the most pleasurable sensation there is. Judge, then, of our disappointment when a melodramatic boat drifts, as if towed invisibly by a cinema man in a tug, ashore at Turnbull’s feet, containing a crew of starved, lead-coloured corpses on top of whom Turnbull of course falls dead, solely, as we feel, to give us an extra dollop of pleasure.

In short, if you look back over these seven stories, you will find that your pleasure has come from things that happen and not from the people to whom they happen. Adequate and lifelike as they are, they are obedient dolls to be disposed of, and will fold their limbs and fit into the box when the play is over. We say this with regret, because many of them have acted their parts vigorously and well. Mr Hergesheimer might rightly urge that, if he had let them dawdle about and get ideas into their heads, nothing would have happened. No box would have held them. Very likely we should have been bored. And are we sure that we should not have sacrificed a certain pleasure for one that is not merely uncertain, but also extremely mixed, compounded of all sorts of sighs, hints, hesitations, nebulous and yet startling, full of horror and illumination? Why think of Tchehov when one is reading Mr Hergesheimer? Why spoil what we have by imagining what we have not? Only because it is, in our opinion, a good thing to take writers seriously; for then perhaps they will think it worth their while to give us not simply pleasure, but a good kind of pleasure—for which our appetite is unbounded.

[Times Literary Supplement, Dec 16, 1920]

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A Flying Lesson.

[And Even Now (William Heinemann, 1910) by Max Beerbohm.]

Are there still to be found reviewers who review Mr Beerbohm—conscientious people who make marks in the margin, note numbers on the flyleaf, and propose to themselves to look up Addison, Lamb, and Hazlitt before they go to bed? Perhaps they still exist, in the remoter wilds of England, and for our part we think of them gratefully, grudge them none of their pleasure, and wish them luck. May they bring him to book! Better is it to play even at being a Judge than to abdicate as we do in London when Mr Beerbohm comes before us, and trail our robes in the gutter, and beg the criminal to have a drink, for which we insist upon paying. No, it is high time to stop this foolery. In this review, at any rate, there shall be no mention of the ‘incomparable Max’.

Must we then look up Addison, Hazlitt, and Lamb before we go to bed, and sharpen a pencil, and wonder which of the sentences on page a hundred and fifty one deserves to have a loop round it, and why, and what it all comes to? Someone on the marches of Wales or on the borders of Scotland is already doing that; his brow is severe, his pencil sharp. Ours has rolled beneath the coal-scuttle. We have an overpowering desire to let it lie. Pencils are in the habit of writing. Ours is capable of saying ‘B writes like a gentleman’ or ‘B—poor B—is a Victorian at heart’. And suppose that Mr Beerbohm should read what the pencil has to say about B? There! The cat is out of the bag; the pencil at the opposite side of the room. The truth is plain. Mr Beerbohm is reviewing us.

No longer attempting to write, and abandoning whatever remains of authority, we proceed then to consider why so strange a thing should have happened. What does it mean? A moment’s thought assures us that any anxiety on our part as to what Mr Beerbohm may think of this sentence or of that is totally uncalled for. Nothing we may say will penetrate to Rapallo (where the preface is written) on the far Riviera di Levante, or if it did, however vigorously it was launched, bitterly envenomed, or charged with sweetness, against his armour it would flutter and fall softly as a feather. It is a curious combination—to be invulnerable oneself and yet to have the power of influencing others. It is not conferred by the Italian climate, nor indeed by the power of writing well. One gains it only by hovering on the borderland of immortality. Mr Beerbohm is neither one thing nor the other—neither alive and struggling nor dead and enskied. There is all the difference in the world between him and a writer like Addison. Addison, so we say as we read him, wrote superbly. But then he had no choice. Some genius draped in white, with the chiselled features of an Abbey statue held his pen and directed it unfalteringly. He could do not other than he did. Not a word could be placed differently—even by him; our efforts to deflect them are wholly vain. But Mr Beerbohm’s page is not yet by any means of the consistency of marble. No classical goddess holds his pen in her white fingers; often we seem to see him mortal, fallible, and striving even as ourselves. That is why we read him almost as if we had written him. Speaking for ourselves (for the presumption may well be personal), the only writers whom we catch ourselves not imitating, or re-writing, but writing, are those ambiguous spirits hovering between the living and the dead. Addison has gone over. Mr Beerbohm hovers between the fields of Asphodel and the flags of Fleet Street. The titles of his essays might well have been the titles of ours. We too might have sat down to luncheon between Swinburne and Watts-Dunton at No. 2, The Pines. But fate this time has called upon Mr Beerbohm. He acquits himself to admiration. Applause is universal as he sits down. But, to be candid, there were several narrow shaves. ‘B. only saved by the skin of his teeth,’ said the pencil. And again, ‘Ice precious thin’; and again, ‘Thank God!’ We have indeed been almost as nervous during the performance as if it had been our own. Never was there a more beautiful subject, and none therefore exposed to a greater variety of disasters. They come flocking to mind even as Mr Beerbohm takes his way smiling through their midst. Reason tempts him to follow her austere maze. The spirit of English prose begs him to turn his sentences smoother and smoother still. Vanity hints that the first person singular would sound nicely here. Sarcasm proffers her sword. Sentiment has her basket of rose-leaves. Common sense pleads that she can cover a bald patch as well as another. Convention and good manners smile and show false teeth. All these temptations are offered; all are put aside, not violently but gently, as if conscious of their wiles and unafraid to look them in the face. At last we come within sight of the end; and who can approach the last hundred words without a leap of the heart? Consider how much is at stake. Swinburne, Watts-Dunton, Mr Beerbohm himself. All these have been brought through the jaws of death into animation and proportion and being. Yet such is the art of writing that a hundred words, particularly if they come at the end, can obliterate five thousand. Would it not be better simply to refrain? The pencil will say with some show of justice, ‘B.’s shirked it’, but far better to shirk it than to shriek or to shout or to stamp, or to sit down suddenly upon nothing at all. But even as we shrink Mr Beerbohm has unfurled his wings, skimmed his abyss, and landed, literally, in Elysium. How was it done? We were not looking. Let him do it again. He does it obligingly twenty times over, and each time it seems that one of these days we too shall fly, not very far, not out of sight, but just over the roofs of the houses. Courage then! Let us try. But the houses are higher than they seem.

[Times Literary Supplement, Dec 3, 1920]

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1921

‘Revolution.’

[Revolution (W. Collins Sons & Co. Ltd., 1921) by J.D. Beresford.]

If the reader finds something amiss with Mr Beresford’s Revolution he will probably blame the subject. He will say that revolutions are not a fit subject for fiction. And there he will be wrong. But, as we should probably allow if we had him in the armchair opposite, we can see what he means. He means that to write a book about what is going to happen in England when Isaac Perry proclaims a general strike and the Army refuses to obey its officers is not a novelist’s business. He feels, and here we agree with him, a little defrauded when a writer like Mr Beresford, who can make you interested in his characters, chooses instead to make you interested in the failure of the Communal milk-cart to arrive at Winston at half-past nine. Yet the fault cannot lie with revolutions. As Tolstoy and Hardy have proved, revolutions are fine things to write about if only they have happened sufficiently long ago. But if you are impelled to invent your own revolution, half your energy will be needed to make sure that it works. A large part of Mr Beresford’s labour in writing Revolution has been spent, we should guess, upon calculations, of which we invent the following example. If the n.u.r. came out on Thursday is it probable that the Transport Workers would follow suit on Monday morning, and, if so, what would be the effect on the Stock Exchange, and how much would the pound sterling have fallen in New York by the following Friday? The calculation is difficult. Moreover, we have observed that when such arguments are seriously discussed the disputants simplify their labours by using letters of the alphabet instead of proper names. It would be untrue to say that the young soldier Paul Learning, his father the merchant, his sister the woman at home, Isaac Perry the trade union leader, Lord Fynemore the aristocrat, are merely letters of the alphabet, but they are far more alphabetical than we like.

We go back, in a digression which the eminence of Mr Beresford’s name perhaps sanctions, to wonder what has happened to the author of Jacob Stahl, the House in Demetrius Road and These Lynnekers, to name three very memorable novels out of a total now amounting to fourteen. We say offhand that he is becoming increasingly intellectual and add, by way of explanation, that we find him more and more inclined to think about life and less and less inclined to feel about it. He now seems impelled to write a new novel by the desire to see whether a theory which works correctly in the study will set human legs and arms in motion and even affect the action of the human heart. He is immune, we feel, from all sorts of distractions and beguilements and grows increasingly accurate, methodical and explicit. Thus in Revolution it is the intellectual efficiency of the work that we admire. Given certain conditions it appears highly probable that events will happen much as Mr Beresford supposes. The interest is very great. Some of the scenes are highly exciting, nor does Mr Beresford’s trained grasp upon the mechanism of behaviour slip or fumble. We feel convinced that a merchant of old Mr Learning’s calibre would continue to mow the field imperturbably under the jeers of the mob. It is he, too, who would be the first to lose his temper at the village council and provoke the leading rebel to shoot him through the head. So far as it goes the psychology is sound and each group of the community is adequately represented by a man or woman of sufficient vitality. But, to tell the truth, the psychology might have been more sketchy than it is without making us uncomfortable. For we are alert to challenge, not the feelings, but the facts. And facts are always disputable. They set one arguing. We find ourselves tempted to suggest alternatives, and seriously wish to draw Mr Beresford’s attention to the importance of the cooperative movement which he appears to overlook. Feelings, on the other hand, admit, or should admit, of no dispute. When Mr Beresford introduces Lady Angela and sets her playing Chopin by the light of the last candle we should be convinced that it is Lady Angela who matters, and not the cooperative movement. If our attention wanders it annoys us, because we feel that human beings are too important to be disregarded, and yet, as Lady Angela plays, we cannot help thinking about a possible policy for the left wing of the Labour Party. We want Mr Beresford to turn his mind to that problem, directly the Chopin is over. In short, we want him to give us facts, not fiction.

[Times Literary Supplement, Jan 27, 1921]

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Mr Norris’s Standard.

[Tony the Exceptional (Hutchinson & Co., 1921) by W.E. Norris.]

Mr Norris has now been writing novels, his publishers tell us, for forty years, and Tony the Exceptional is, we believe, the youngest of a family of fifty, or it may be sixty, for we shall not perjure ourselves by pretending that we have kept strict count, or pretend that we could recite a large proportion of their names offhand. For all that, whenever we meet with one of the short, safe, amiably patronising reviews with which Mr Norris is annually saluted, we want to tell him that we feel, and would, if we could, explain, that he is somehow different from the rest. We may treat him like an old established firm of grocers. We may open the familiar parcel and sniff the contents and say that it is up to sample, a trifle paler, pinker, smaller or rounder than last year’s product, but that is only because the reviewers of novels are the laziest and most perfunctory of mortals, and because, to tell the truth, the task of analysing what we mean when we say that Mr Norris is different from the rest is difficult. One has, in the first place, to strike the right pitch. One must resist the temptation to make a discovery of Mr Norris. He is not so great an artist as Flaubert nor so fine a psychologist as Henry James. No; but having shut off the high-lights with one hand one must be equally quick to shut off the shadows with the other. He has no sort of truck with the obscene creatures of the underworld—the mere manufacturers of stuffing. His station, preserved so long with what has come to appear such patient modesty, is precisely in that mid-region between the obscure and the illustrious, where it is most difficult to distinguish clearly. Let us see what we can make out by the light of Tony the Exceptional.

The publishers having said that the book is ‘well up to Mr Norris’s standard—he tells a fascinating story in a straightforward style’, we feel impelled to say that far too much attention is paid to Mr Norris’s fascinating stories and far too little to the art with which he tells them. The story as it happens is a good one; it mystifies, interests, and works out; but the style is not straightforward if simple, common, or easy to come by is meant by that. Indeed, when one says that Mr Norris is different from the rest, one means largely that he has a gift unfortunately rare among us—a sense of form. No one acquires that sense because he happens to hit upon a good anecdote, or the police-court records would make the best reading in the world. The 280 pages of Tony are the result of innumerable acts of selection; the hand that shaped them was inspired by a definite artistic aim. For purely aesthetic reasons which have nothing to do with the story, now this has been left out, now that has been put in. If we ask what Mr Norris has left out, it is easy to reply hurriedly, ‘Oh, everything interesting.’ He has left out passion, tragedy, philosophy, psychology, and so on. And what has he put in? Again the answer would be hasty—‘Oh, ladies and gentlemen,’ meaning by that manners, the manners of good society.

Tony the Exceptional does, on the face of it, lend some support to this view, inasmuch as everyone concerned in it is either a lady or a gentleman, and therefore of good manners, or an ex-shop assistant, and therefore of bad. Never were heights and contours more plainly marked upon a survey map than are the shades of good and bad breeding in a novel by Mr Norris. The serious charge against a novelist of manners is, of course, that he allows himself to be put off by surface tricks which human beings have adopted to decorate or facilitate the rub of daily life. In another hundred years, one might argue, the code will have changed, and where then will be the point of Mr Norris’s ladies and gentlemen? Have they not already rather the look of Orientals going through mysterious devotions, prostrating themselves before dusty top hats, obsolete dress clothes, and ancient packs of visiting cards? Doris, for example, will not marry the man she loves because he has told her a lie. She does not consider that lies differ, that liars may be pitiable, that characters are complex. No lady marries a liar; that is her code; and to that she adheres. But she has somehow evolved for herself a dispensation which decrees that if a lady has scratched her initials upon a sixpenny-bit she may, upon delivery of the coin at the critical moment, revoke her decision without compromising her honour. Was there ever an idol made more palpably of wood?

But we have overshot the mark by a long way, as it is not difficult to do, indeed, where the marks are so lightly scored. The situation which we have just declared to be absurd is, as a matter of fact, the most interesting in the book, and the one we should certainly select for analysis if we wished to explain our belief that Mr Norris is not a timeserving, mechanical writer, but a writer of art and intuition. Doris and her code and her sixpence are, we say, absurd. Without disputing the matter Mr Norris quietly goes on to persuade us that Doris is much more pitiable than ridiculous. She knows that she is absurd; she is afraid of her own absurdity. She is a self-contained and rigid character. It is not in her nature to talk and analyse. A sixpence with initials scratched upon it is as near as she can come to self-expression. We are not asked to admire her. Why, even her mother, who adores her, says a little later that she herself cannot influence Doris. ‘I don’t say that she’s right, I only say that she’s like that.’ It drips out, as if by chance, that mother and daughter never have much to say to each other. Indeed, the mother is a little afraid of her daughter. Thus we are brought to see that Doris is ‘like that’. But only a true novelist does it in this way—one scene suggesting and confirming another spontaneously, as bubbles froth at the end of a pipe. And each has sprung not from observation of manners but from insight into the human heart.

A skilful critic might from this point go on to determine why it is that Mr Norris never persists but always draws back with a smile from exploring these moments of intuition. It is difficult not to speak as though his discretion were due to that social tact which he finds so admirable in his characters. To know people intimately one must pursue them into the privacy of their rooms. But Mr Norris is never alone with themselves. There is always a dog upon the hearth-rug. Yet we are inclined to think that it is not a modest estimate of his own powers that restrains him. He obeys a mysterious law which, without knowing exactly what we mean, we call the law of form. The demands of a good story probably help to guide his steps. A love of clean language forbids riot or indiscretion in that department. A moderate, or even slightly cynical, view of human nature checks exuberance of another kind. In short, we would as soon read Mr Norris on a railway journey as a good French novelist, and for much the same reasons. But pending the decisions of the skilful critic we may let Mr Norris, in a characteristic sentence, sum up what we feel to be the supporting backbone of all his fiction—‘… when you have a standard you have a standard, and there is no use in arguing about it’.

[Times Literary Supplement, Feb 10, 1921]

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‘Vision and Design.’

[Vision and Design by Roger Fry (Chatto & Windus, 1920).]

Providence, with inscrutable benevolence, has provided that the arms of the ordinary drawing-room chair comfortably support the covers of Vision and Design when spread wide, still leaving room for the human body underneath. Otherwise, we should have to complain, for the first time these six years, that a publisher has given us too much for our money. Indeed, it is a splendid production; for twenty-five shillings an amazing one. I should be wise, perhaps, to say no more, or merely add, for the benefit of intending purchasers, that the book contains 37 plates, 199 pages of letterpress, consists of articles written by Mr Fry during the past twenty years, and is probably the most important art criticism of our time. There I should be wise to stop, since even at the outset I must say ‘probably’ instead of ‘certainly.’ It is true that Nature set in my head at birth two more or less oval balls of jelly-like matter, which have served me to find my way and read my book ever since. But it has seldom struck me to use my eyes to look at pictures, and I hope that I am not guilty of discourtesy if I suppose that most readers of The Woman’s Leader are, to some extent, in the same case. If I write of Mr Fry’s book, therefore, it is simply that I wish to register, and make bold to think that there is some purpose in registering, the effect of his criticism upon the ignorant.

To begin with, it was due to Mr Fry that these spheres of jelly began painfully to concentrate, about the autumn of 1912, upon the canvases of Cézanne. It was not merely that he caused the pictures to be brought across the Channel. It was that by writing, talking, and sometimes pointing a finger, he turned on a light behind the canvas which has burnt ever since. He liberated a stream of pleasure of an entirely unknown kind. The greater part of Vision and Design is an attempt to extract this pleasure (no doubt that is not the right word for it) from works of art of all kinds and of all ages, to differentiate one pleasure from another, and to group them together into something which may become, one of these days, a system of æsthetics. I cannot attempt the most meagre outline of what Mr Fry himself holds to be a changing and provisional theory. Only at certain points my own preconceptions, suggested by literature rather than by painting, thrust themselves across the path. For example, in the profoundly interesting essay on æsthetics, Mr Fry writes: ‘But in our reaction to a work of art there is something more [than disinterested contemplation]; there is the consciousness of purpose, the consciousness of a peculiar relation of sympathy with the man who made the thing in order to arouse precisely the sensations we experience…. We feel that he has expressed something which was latent in us all the time, but which we never realised, that he has revealed us to ourselves in revealing himself … And this recognition of purpose is, I believe, an essential part of the æsthetic judgment proper.’ … But consider ‘Lycidas’. Here, it seems to me, we are conscious of purpose; and yet Milton neither reveals himself, nor reveals us to ourselves—except in so far as he makes us aware of certain capacities for feeling which otherwise we should have ignored. As for a feeling of sympathy with Milton himself, that, in my own case, is practically non-existent. As I read ‘Lycidas’ I have no vision of Milton, old or young, blind or beautiful, irritable or tender. The words might have been written by Anon. Nor do they wake in me any consciousness of personal experience. On the other hand, the ‘Religio Medici’ offers a much more complex case. As I read that I am constantly receiving an impression of Sir Thomas Browne’s character. I make up a figure of him. I intend to read his life directly I have done. I am curious. I compare my own experience with his. Whether these sensations distract me from the æsthetic quality of the writing, or are part of it, I am puzzled to say. But I am certain that many books from which I get the greatest pleasure contain not a word either about ‘himself’ or ‘ourselves.’ At the same time I am highly conscious of what I take to be the writer’s purpose.

I know not how far it is relevant to compare literature with painting. But as I read through Vision and Design I found myself saying that there is to-day no literary critic who does for literature what Mr Fry does for painting. In range and learning, as well as in a peculiar suppleness of mind which absorbs everything, allows nothing to congeal, and keeps the whole rich accumulation perpetually on the bubble, Mr Fry seems to me to excel all now writing about books in England. A picture (if he chooses) is shown to be the final product of influences radiating through many centuries and from many countries; it is the starting point also of vibrations making themselves felt to-day in Paris or Camden Town or Brazil. A broken pot, a negro’s carving, a child’s drawing, a fresco by Giotto, all transmit the thrill. And no convention, no prejudice is allowed for a second to come between his sensibility and his sensation. He is always taking in new matter and throwing it out again in fresh speculation. It is true that an art critic is not thwarted by language. If he wishes to talk about Persian art he is not under the necessity of learning to read Persian. And it is thus that I solace myself for the inferiority of our literary critics. They are comparatively ignorant, but what they lack in breadth and generality they make up for in richness and intensity. There is, it seems, much less to be said about a picture even by a critic of Mr Fry’s sensibility, than there is to be said about a book. Mr Fry will do his best to explain why it is that he admires a fresco of Giotto’s. But if one has read what Coleridge has to say about a poem of Wordsworth’s, or Mr Bradley has to say about Hamlet, one is left with a sense that pictures either hold much less than books, or that the language for expressing what they hold has still to be invented. The last guess is probably the right one, for Mr Fry seems again and again to reach a point where he cannot continue for lack of apparatus. The psychologists have lagged behind; mysticism, into which he will not plunge, looms ahead.

Finally, brushing past innumerable temptations to digress, I ask myself, at the end of the absorbing book, whether criticism has any power to help artists to paint good pictures? Apparently not. Pictures seem to be painted independently of criticism, and scientific discoveries have misled painters rather than helped them. Indeed, referring once more to literature and making use of my own experience, I should imagine that to attempt to write a novel in the midst of a society given up to the discussion of the theory of fiction, would be impossible. And yet, though an artist may not profit directly by the conclusions of a critic, it is evident that without the active interest which criticism implies, his case would be still worse than it is. He would be still further removed from the average person than he is to-day. He would be more lonely, and, unless I am mistaken, more tempted to indulge in displays of virtuosity. Mr Fry’s great importance is, I think, not only that he makes it possible for the ignorant to communicate with the artist, but also, if I dare hazard such profanity, that he makes it possible for the artist to mix with the ignorant. But I have not space to discuss the meaning of this, nor, alas, is there much reason to consider what revolutions would be upon us if, instead of one Roger Fry we had, say, twenty dozen.

[Woman’s Leader, Feb 18, 1921]

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Henley’s Criticism.

[Essays (Macmillan & Co. Ltd., 1920) by William Ernest Henley.]

Five of the essays in the present volume—those on Fielding, Smollett, Hazlitt, and Byron’s world—were written to introduce editions of those writers’ works, and they appeared from nineteen to twenty-five years ago. Separated from the body of the text, and issued to an age which is more distant in temper than in time, they read not quite perhaps as they read in their own place and season. If we were about to read Tom Jones for the first time and wished before beginning to tune ourselves up to the right pitch, undoubtedly Henley’s essay upon Fielding would serve us admirably. We are told who he was, and whom he married, and how he suffered, and what he wrote. More than that we are stirred by the vibration of Henley’s sympathy to feel that, if Fielding himself were to step into the room directly Henley had done talking about him, we should spring up and grasp him warmly by the hand. But Fielding does not step into the room. It is Tobias Smollett who comes next. All our preparations for understanding and discriminating fall therefore a little flat. For though Henley has prepared us admirably to welcome Fielding, he has, somehow, given us little to think about in his absence. He takes it that we are about to read him; not that we wish to sift and consider what we have read. Does he not remark upon the last page but one of an essay packed with various information:

I shall say nothing about the four great books, for the very simple reason that everything there is to say about them has been said …’Tis enough, that, as I think, Harry Fielding was a great and good man; who also, by premeditation and design, laboriously created an art, and created it in such terms, and to such a purpose, that none has practised it since his time but must have worked and written differently if this immortal Master had not written and worked before him.

’Tis enough, according to Henley, to prove that a man is great and good. The labour, meditation, and design, the art which these have produced, and the effect of the art upon all who come later need no mention or can be compared with St Paul’s Cathedral—‘which I esteem the piece of architecture the nearest to perfection these eyes of mine have seen’—or can be found admirably summed up by Gibbon, Gray, Scott, Coleridge, Byron, Thackeray, George Eliot, Leslie Stephen, and Austin Dobson—to name a few who have held opinions, and held different opinions, upon Fielding’s art. As the other essays are influenced to some, though not to the same, extent by this conception of a critic’s duty, it may be worth while to consider for a moment what it amounts to.

Henley was not the only one to hold it. Nor is it the result of complete editions requiring introductions by celebrated hands. Life is to blame for decreeing that immortal works shall proceed from mortal bodies. If Fielding had been a man of property, if Burns had been a faithful husband, if Mrs Byron had not been possessed by sentiments of false delicacy at Byron’s birth, English literature would be very different from what it is. The truth of that is undeniable; and if we are out to unravel the secret of the artist’s achievement, how can we afford to neglect such valuable clues? Critics of Henley’s persuasion are, indeed, inspired by a colossal ambition. First they will know the facts; next they will elicit from them whatever is relevant to their purpose; finally, having created the man, set him in his proper surroundings, supplied him with aunts and uncles, followed his wanderings, named his lodgings, and indicated precisely how far and at what points wine, women, heredity, poverty, disease, and a taste for opium have laid hands upon his art, they will then from this elevation soar above the accidental and the temporal and exhibit his work as it appears in the eye of eternity. They are biographers, psychologists, novelists, and moralists; to crown all they can do the critic’s business—analyse the work to its elements and rate them at their proper worth. Such being the aim it is natural that few live to achieve it.

The essay upon Fielding is an example of the kind of success and of the kind of failure which are apt to attend upon such attempts. Biography, psychology, and criticism are all squeezed together, and it is much to Henley’s credit that they contrive to give off between them so strong an impression that Fielding was a very great man and that St Paul’s is a very fine church. Where so much detail has to be compressed it would be idle to look for some recognition of the fact that literature exists independently of writers, or that life is a much larger affair than the lives of the individuals who live it. The essay upon Burns is more elaborate and of more permanent interest. Indeed, it would be difficult to say what fault we have to find with it, or why, when it is done, we still seek something more or something different. Here is criticism, and here are facts. Dutifully Henley has found space for the names of schoolmasters and the dates of departures. He has sifted evidence and weighed judgements. He is well on his guard against the temptation, to which he says Stevenson succumbed when the material prompted, to write ‘like a novelist’. Yet the writing is picturesque and often brilliant, Henley being, if anything, always a little too much in love with the crisp and the curled. Every page will stand whatever wear and tear you choose to give it. What, then, is lacking? Perhaps that he has failed to present Burns as a whole. He has not found the key-word, the mysterious clue which, once discovered, draws out, smoothly and inevitably, all the rest. The brilliant fragments refuse to coalesce. He lacks the peculiar power which men like Carlyle and Macaulay possess of so absorbing their subject that it grows again outside of them, a real character; utterly different perhaps from the original, but no more to be ignored. You may turn to Henley’s Burns for information, for exact and witty statement, but the figure remains scattered all in little bits within the covers of the book. Yet how persistently we must do battle with Carlyle’s Boswell or with Macaulay’s Warren Hastings before they will let us come by an opinion of our own! True or false, faithfully or malignantly set down, there they stand before us like living men.

Nothing, when the desire is strong upon you to know a writer, comes amiss—facts, fiction, a scrap of manuscript, a cutting from an Inn ledger. But there are times when we would sweep aside all biography and all psychology for the sake of a single song or a single page expounded and analysed phrase by phrase. When Henley uses this method to establish his claim that T.E. Brown was the superior of Browning as a poet, or, even more blasphemously, the equal of Byron as a letter writer, the facts, as we interpret them, seem to throw dust upon his skill. Once more the freakishness of contemporary criticism is proved. Once more we see how powerless taste and learning and insight are against the tug of personal affection and the prejudice of personal predilections. Brown, like Fielding, like Burns, like Byron, was a man after Henley’s heart. And here, perhaps, we come within sight of the true nature of Henley’s gift. It is shown most plainly, we think, in the brilliant biographical sketches which he wrote for an edition of Byron’s letters. The little canvas precisely suits him. His likings and dislikings are there all to the point. He has scope for his vivacity, his wit, his discernment, but he is not called upon for a breadth of view or a sweep of emotion that were denied him. They are full of amusement, full of curiosity, and full to the brim of vitality. That, perhaps, is the quality that Henley admires most in others and possessed most markedly himself. He loved the brisk, the manly—the pugnacious, the athletes, and the prize-fighters. We should find ourselves treading the maze of psychological criticism if we were to try to guess why it was that this admirable virtue of loving life became to the men of Henley’s generation, or rather set, an obsession to which they must testify in season and out. The times perhaps were oppressive. England was at peace. It was more necessary then than now to run no risk of being mistaken for ‘a smug, decent, late Victorian journalist!’ The two foremost apostles of the creed—Stevenson and Henley—were physically incapable of violence. Whatever all this may imply, Henley’s work, as we look back upon it after twenty years, is marked by the vehemence of his belief in virility, by his downright personal preferences, and by something bold and yet restricted in his temper which puts us in mind of a brilliant schoolboy. For, with all a schoolboy’s high spirits, he has also something of a schoolboy’s natural insensibility.

[Times Literary Supplement, Feb 24, 1921]

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A Prince of Prose.

[Notes on Life and Letters (J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd, 1921) by Joseph Conrad.]

What is it that one finds oneself thinking at the end of the first few pages of Mr Conrad’s book? That he is a great writer, a master of prose, a prophet, a man of genius? No. That he is a very sensible man. Let us define our meaning further by asking the reader to imagine himself come out of a hot theatre into the open air. He looks at the sky, and it appears to him refreshingly sensible—almost commonplace indeed; sober, neutral tinted, extremely natural. Something like that is the effect upon us of meeting with what we call literature. At last—why have they kept us waiting so long?—someone begins to talk sense in a natural voice. By the power of his own ease and sincerity he breaks the spell which has held us strained and cramped, and makes us aware that there is nothing in the world we wish more passionately than to uncurl our legs and talk sense. Simply to say straight out what comes into our heads is the most heavenly pleasure of all. To be with those who speak their minds is to be in the only company worth having.

Yet we have scarcely set this down as our first impression upon reading Mr Conrad’s book than it appears to us so inappropriate as to call for instant qualification. Is Mr Conrad simple? Only with the simplicity which comes of great concentration. If he seems to speak straight out, it is because long previous labour and scrupulous sincerity have eliminated the unessential. And he does not say the first thing that comes into his head, but the last, which is the result of all that have come before it. Neither is it easy to read him, and some words that Mr Conrad lets fall in his preface explain partly why this is so. The papers in this book are occasional articles extracted by editors from time to time, rather, it appears, against his will. They conform to editorial standards of length. They were handed in at the right place and at the right moment. Nevertheless he tells us: ‘… I may say that whenever the various periodicals mentioned in this book called on me to come out and blow the trumpet of personal opinions, or strike the pensive lute that speaks of the past, I always tried to pull on my boots first’. He has merely to review a book, and the book is, as books are apt to be, a bad one. Yet he takes his place at the table, dressed, equipped, ready, as it proves, for quite a long journey.

Some of these ephemeral pages have lasted already twenty-three years; and why should they not last as many more, since they have about them the gravity, the finality, of literature? Mr Conrad makes another remark which helps us to qualify them still further. ‘The only thing that will not be found amongst those Figures and Things that have passed away will be Conrad en pantouffles. It is a constitutional inability. Schlafrock und pantoffeln! Not that! Never!’ That expresses precisely something of what we feel when we read Mr Conrad. He is constitutionally unable to appear in undress. He is hampered in the attempt—if he ever tried to make it—by the fact that he is a foreigner by birth. He is using a language which is not his own. That is why, perhaps, he uses it with such respect, handling the words as if they were precious things lent him by the owner who is away. He is always a stranger among us, a prince (to use his own phrase about Anatole France) who has chosen to make his stay with us, and treats us and our belongings with a courtesy which is the perfection of breeding. But he is always reserved. ‘This volume,’ he says, ‘is as near as I shall ever come to déshabillé in public.’ It is our own guilty conscience perhaps that makes us fancy some rebuke to our slipshod manners, our voluble confidences, in this quiet decorum. Seldom sarcastic, and never violent, we are aware that he watches us with the tolerant irony of a man who has given up expecting the impossible. ‘Every gift,’ he says of Turgenev, ‘has been heaped upon his cradle.’ And, after enumerating them, he adds, ‘There’s enough there to ruin the prospects of any writer.’ When our civic magistrates declare their views upon literature, when the censor exercises his rights upon the drama, Mr Conrad watches patiently, even compassionately. And it is only at the very last, when he can bear the sight of our stupidity no longer, that he allows himself to wince—that is to say, he smiles.

But the rebuke is conveyed. Behind his utterance, with all its suavity and courtesy, we feel the weight of profound conviction. The waves heave ever so slightly on the surface, but the waters beneath are unfathomably deep. Happily, Mr Conrad is not always engaged in making us perceive our own deficiencies. The conviction which gives his blame its momentum lends also the same massive weight to his praise. The second essay in the book is devoted to Henry James. It is very short, filling accurately, perhaps, its two columns in the pages of the North American Review. Yet it seems to us that at last something fundamental has been said, something that has always evaded being said, about Henry James. Seeing that many fine minds have applied themselves to the task, and have filled not many columns but many volumes with their observations, it is at first difficult to perceive how it is that Mr Conrad so easily outdistances them. Perhaps the starting point is different. While all the rest have remained industriously picking up scraps and totting up totals on the outside, Mr Conrad has somehow raised the curtain and gone within. What he says is fragmentary; it is capable of infinite development; but it refers not to what is external and accidental, but to what is fundamental and lasting. ‘Mr Henry James is the historian of fine consciences … Nobody has rendered better, perhaps, the tenacity of temper, or known how to drape the robe of spiritual honour about the drooping form of a victor in barren strife.’ These are strokes which lay bare the foundations.

It is, of course, the novelist and not the critic who is speaking. It is the man who has done the thing himself, and who will, therefore, see more into the plan within the writer’s mind and less, perhaps, into the details of achievement. But although Mr Conrad as a novelist must speak with authority, we have still to reckon with the peculiar tone of that authority, with the conviction which is always to be heard in his voice. If the short essays upon Henry James, Maupassant, Turgenev, Anatole France have the weight and unity which belong to literature and not to journalism, it is primarily that they are founded upon certain large and enduring ideas which apply to all fiction and not only to the particular volumes under consideration.

That a sacrifice must be made, that something has to be given up, is the truth engraved in the innermost recesses of the fair temple built for our edification by the masters of fiction. There is no other secret behind the curtain. All adventure, all love, every success is resumed in the supreme energy of an act of renunciation.

This sentence occurs in the paper on Henry James. We turn the page and find that the consummate simplicity of Maupassant’s technique is based, ‘like all the great virtues’, primarily upon self-denial. His conspicuous merit is that he is compassionate, courageous and just. In Anatole France, again, we are bidden to admire a ‘profound and unalterable compassion’. It would be almost true to say that Mr Conrad looks, first, for such qualities of character in a writer as would fit him to become a good sea captain—for courage, compassion, self-denial, fidelity to an ideal; and that he regards the purely literary gifts as temptations and seductions which will ‘pass between the writer and his probity on the blank sheet of paper’. It would be almost, but it would not be quite true. It is easy and satisfactory, especially in a swift survey, to fit together a rigid framework of Mr Conrad’s faith, and if we err in this direction it is he partly who is responsible. He will stress his morality so that the outlines are plain enough, but he will not unveil the secrets of his art or will say disparagingly that ‘to have the gift of words is no such great matter’. The few sentences we quote are enough to remind the reader how splendid and yet how difficult to analyse is the gift at Mr Conrad’s service whenever he takes a pen in hand. It is not from ignorance of the lusts and delights of literature that Mr Conrad judges them so austerely. He, if any man, has been exposed to temptation, and nobly he has conquered his temptations. But he is not altogether victorious. He has won his composure at the cost of something that was precious too.

If we look for light upon a problem which faced us, we remember, after reading The Rescue, we shall find it perhaps in the essay upon Alphonse Daudet. The Rescue we felt was full of splendour, and yet we had never before realised so plainly the marked boundaries within which Mr Conrad practises his art. He flies his standard, we felt, with complete sovereignty over certain territories, but beyond them there is chaos. He never risks himself outside. Our vague figure is expressed more precisely by Mr Conrad himself when he draws a distinction between those emotions which, as an artist, one should take with a grain of salt and those which deserve our most serious homage, if indeed they are not altogether beyond our range. Daudet, he says, was content to

remain below, on the plain, amongst his creations, and take an eager part in those disasters, weaknesses, and joys which are tragic enough in their droll way, but are by no means so momentous and profound as some writers—probably for the sake of Art—would like to make us believe.

The victims ‘struggle drowning in an insignificant pool’. One may, unwittingly, distort his meaning. But as he puts it it appears that the emotions of the sophisticated are of little moment compared with what goes on within the hearts of ‘simple and unknown men’ travelling ‘a path of toilsome silence … with closed lips, or, maybe, whispering their pain softly—only to themselves’. But it is because we are looking through Mr Conrad’s eyes that we see the prospect drawn to this scale. Look through Donne’s eyes, through Racine’s, Molière’s, Jane Austen’s, and the insignificant pool is a deep ocean and the struggles of the victims of enthralling importance. The writer, of course, does not choose what he sees; he only fortifies himself in his belief, and with age, if he is of a certain temperament, comes to hold his belief more rigidly. Mr Conrad, no doubt, would be a greater writer if, besides honouring the quiet deeps of the heart, he felt also its storms and transiencies, if he were dramatic as well as static, instant and direct as well as composed and compassionate. But it is of the essence of his genius that the draught he offers us should have been stood for a moment in the cool. It is the nature of those convictions for which we honour him that they tend to still the unquiet blood.

[Times Literary Supplement, Mar 3, 1921]

[]

George Eliot (1819—1880)

George Eliot was the granddaughter of a carpenter. She made herself, by sheer determination, one of the most learned women—or men—of her time; and at the age of thirty-five became the companion—she could not become the wife—of George Henry Lewes. The facts are notable because they had much influence upon her writing. She had inherited a wide knowledge of farmers, labourers, and country life. She had acquired a mass of book learning. Owing to the prudery of the Victorian age, she lived, after her alliance with Lewes, much cut off from the world.

Her first books—Scenes of Clerical Life, Adam Bede, Mill on the Floss— deal with what she has seen with her own eyes, or heard described by her father. As an artist she is at her best in Silas Marner, the first part of The Mill on the Floss, and Scenes of Clerical Life. Her genius shows itself in broad views of the Midlands, where rat-catchers, business men and farmers have leisure to drink together; and the tragedies and comedies of love, death, and bankruptcy happen as incidents in a large scheme of things.

She is at her richest and freest when she is bringing to life a Mrs Poyser, or a group at the bar of the Rainbow Inn. But those who wish to confine her to village life and lament the book-learned period which produced Middlemarch and Romola neglect a very important aspect of her genius. She was one of the first English novelists to discover that men and women think as well as feel, and the discovery was of great artistic moment. Briefly, it meant that the novel ceased to be solely a love story, an autobiography, or a story of adventure. It became, as it had already become with the Russians, of much wider scope. Because it attempts to include more, Middlemarch, though inferior to Silas Marner in artistic perfection, is one of the most interesting of English novels.

Living much alone and towards the end in an atmosphere of artificial adulation, George Eliot, as Daniel Deronda goes to prove, lost much of her vigour and directness. But it seems likely that she will come through the cloud which obscured her after the publication of her life—a dismal soliloquy—and hold her place permanently among the great English novelists. Anyone who wishes to read her will do well to begin with Scenes of Clerical Life, to go on with The Mill on the Floss, and to end with Middlemarch. An edition of her books was published by Messrs. Blackwood in 1913, at the cost of a shilling a volume. The same publishers now issue the complete works of George Eliot in 17 volumes at 2s. per volume.

[Daily Herald, Mar 9, 1921]

[]

Congreve.

[Love for Love by William Congreve, Phoenix Society at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, Mar 20, 1921.]

I suppose it must happen that gentlemen with cellars come to fight shy of the old bottles in the corner. The labels slung round their necks testify to their age and to their ancestry. But the dust is thick, the wax all cracked, and Heaven knows whether the fluid within is not by this time gone sour and cloudy. So it is with the old books with famous names. The occasion comes for tasting them. We make all ready, poke the fire, adjust the light, rub the glasses, and then gingerly open Love for Love, a Comedy, written by Mr Congreve and first produced on April 30th, 1695, at the New Theatre, in Little Lincoln’s Inn Fields. But it has kept uncommonly well. Try a sip with me. ‘Well, if he be but as great a sea-beast as she is a land-monster, we shall have a most amphibious breed—the progeny will be all otters.’ ‘To your element, fish; be mute, fish, and to sea …’ Don’t you agree that this is infinitely better stuff than they make nowadays? In God’s name, why does one ever read anything else?—so pleasant is it to shake out a good, wholesome laugh now and again. Yet Love for Love is not a jolly play; nor is it a profound play; nor a poetical play; there is nothing that disturbs the social conscience or sends us stumbling up to bed thinking of the sorrows of the world. The nearest we can come to a description of our state at the finish is that we have drunk good wine. We are slightly tipsy. We are about to say something very witty. The maid who brings in the cocoa is about to do something very coarse. Write a letter to make an appointment with the dentist and the sentence, with its two or three round oaths, will be (or will momentarily appear) as beautifully turned as the legs of a Sheraton table.

The truth is that Love for Love is much simpler than the kind of play we write nowadays. That is part of the reason why we seem to breathe sea air and look for miles and miles into the distance. There were then two fit topics for conversation—love and money. Both are frankly talked about with the natural relish of people who are not distracted by other concerns, but have kept a sort of virgin energy for the two prime objects of life. They take them much too seriously to muffle them up in decent ambiguity. Further, it is a very small society, acquainted with each other’s language so that the pellets of repartee which they are for ever discharging fly straight, hit hard, and yet have about them an extraordinary distinction. They have been at this game for so long that they talk as well as noblemen now shoot peasants. Whether this is not better perceived in reading than in acting is, I think, an open question. At the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, last week there were a good many words dropped or fumbled, and Congreve never wrote a speech that did not balance with a kind of tremulous vitality. Knock out a word and the sentence tumbles like a house of cards.

But at the Lyric Theatre things happened rather against expectation. Reading, relishing the wit, getting the effect of the give-and-take of repartee, tend to make for hardness and concentration. It was natural to expect that the same words spoken by living men and women would warm and blossom, and that there would be drawn to the surface other subtleties of character which scarcely come to the top in reading. Yet as the play went on one came to wonder whether the life which was so capably and admirably breathed into figure after figure was the life of the period.

Miss Vivian Rees, for example, acting Angelica, the mother of Peacock’s women, the grandmother of Meredith’s, was charming to look at, charming to hear, but when it came to flaunting Angelica’s philosophy—‘Uncertainty and expectation are the joys of life. Security is an insipid thing; and the overtaking and possessing of a wish discovers the folly of the chase. Never let us know one another better; for the pleasure of a masquerade is done, when we come to shew our faces’—when it came to the wildness and rashness and rakishness of this, Miss Vivian Rees was altogether too demure. If we had been fancying that Scandal somehow represents a kind of chorus, a point of view from which all this heartlessness and brazen morality could be seen shaded and in perspective, Mr Holloway scarcely supported our venture. Indeed the character who came out best was Sir Sampson Legend. To begin with, Mr Roy Byford is a superb figure of a man. To go on with, it seems likely that our natural taste for the burly humour and the florid figures of the past has been nourished, and is even now kept alive by the humour of the music-halls. For the rest, we are too good-hearted or too full-hearted to be witty. Give us wit, and we broaden it into farce.

[New Statesman, Apr 2, 1921]

[]

Ethel Smyth.

[Streaks of Life (Longmans, Green, & Co., 1921) by Ethel Smyth]

The orthodox way to review Miss Smyth would be to cut out a sufficient number of good stories about the Kaiser, Queen Victoria, and the Empress Eugénie, and to stitch them together with a thread of admiring comment. But this would give the reader very little idea of the true interest of Miss Smyth’s book, which consists not in isolated anecdotes but in the current of the narrative—not in what the Kaiser said to Miss Smyth at Count Bülow’s dinner-party, but in the fact that Miss Smyth had been playing golf till 7.15 that evening, had taken the precaution to have her hair done by an expert hairdresser before setting out, had been struggling with obstinate opera singers for hours in the morning: was, in short, Ethel Smyth, a lady of remarkable and original personality and not merely a person to whom things chanced to happen. When we say this we are distinguishing Miss Smyth’s book from the ruck of memoirs and placing it with those which, however they vary in merit, have the lasting and fascinating virtue of bringing us into touch with a living man or woman. When, less than two years ago, Impressions that Remained made its appearance, a figure hitherto almost unknown, or seen for an instant vigorously waving acknowledgements from a concert platform, became one of those whom we carry about in the mind to think of at odd seasons. It was not that Miss Smyth possessed extraordinary literary power, or that she analysed her soul to its essence. Her method appeared to consist of extreme courage and extreme candour. No doubt there were reticences innumerable, but whatever she chose to describe she described wholly, as it appeared to her, without disguise or titivation. This same directness, coupled as it was with an astonishing vitality, had led her into relationships and situations of such variety and intensity that the truthful account of them was of absorbing interest. The present book is less connected, for ‘dealing with modern times, continuity is impossible unless you are prepared either to hurt feelings or to dip your pen in purest solution of rose-coloured amiability’. But it is autobiography; there appears in it again, unmistakably, the figure of the writer. Let us see whether we can put down our impression, drawn from these two sources, of Ethel Smyth.

Miss Smyth may be said to have flourished (so far as these pages are concerned) in the ’nineties of the last century or in the early years of this. The portrait which appears on the cover of the book breathes of that age. Dressed in coat and skirt, tie and collar, Miss Smyth looks the militant, working, professional woman—the woman who had shocked the county by jumping fences both of the field and of the drawing-room, had written operas, was commonly called ‘quite mad’, and had friends among the Empresses and the charwomen. We remember that it was the age of Charles Furse and Sargent and Henley and Stevenson and the Boer War. We are inclined to risk a theory that the prominent artistic figures of that time were racy, slangy, outspoken men and women; very patriotic, very combative, and very warm-hearted: differing in all these respects, not necessarily for the worse, from those who now occupy the stage. But it would be easy to strain the theory and to impute to an age what is, as a matter of fact, true only of one individual. We may guess that wherever Miss Smyth stood, there a circle formed, and the circle took its colour and its speed from her. For the prevailing quality in Miss Smyth is surely her vitality. One might have expected in the chapter which describes life in a country cottage alone with a maid and a dog some vegetable notes and a good many profound reflections. Instead we seem to hear a terrific bombardment of the piano (she was writing an opera); while at any moment the door bursts open, and is it Ford, the wild Devonshire maid, who comes in, or Faulkner, apologetic and sedate, or Marko, the St Bernard, lately banged about the head by the butcher’s boy?—for all these characters have been plainly made known to us. Meals are announced on a sweet-toned hunting-horn. Sometimes she drives off to lunch and talks politics with the Empress Eugénie. Then there are little suppers to celebrate successful concerts to which the Furses come and H.B., the wine being cooled in a well which, at the last moment before dinner, is discovered to be dug next, and slightly beneath, the cesspool. If vitality is the quality which makes the most peaceful stretches of life pelt past and the humblest people stand out prominent, we must hasten to credit Miss Smyth with a more important gift. She is impressionable, but she is very discriminating. In an enthusiastic temperament we are generally ready to pardon a certain amount of gush. But though Miss Smyth can be strident, she is never sentimental. Indeed, she possesses the combination of enthusiasm and shrewdness which fitted her for what, after her music, appears to be the great pursuit of her life—the pursuit of friendship. Carried by her unthinking directness right to the verge of Queen Victoria’s sacred hearthrug, she was not too much abashed to observe, a little later, the astonishing interchange of civilities which took place between Victoria and Eugénie at the open door. Devoted to the Empress as she was, she sets down with complete candour all the contradictions and limitations of a character which for the first time, perhaps, becomes interesting and credible to the reader. Still, it is her tremendous capacity for personal relations that impresses one in the second volume as in the first. How many people, for instance, so value friendship that they would trouble to go ‘home by Copenhagen’ in order to make acquaintance with the friends of a friend? Of course, she was justified, and one of the most valued relations of her life began there. She was always justified in the sense that her fervour took her hither and thither into every sort of surrounding and into intimacies of extreme intensity and interest. Whether it is the enkindling effect of the past, or whether we should praise Miss Smyth’s vivid pen or her warm heart, the men and women of those times appear about five inches taller than those of the present day. One of the pleasures which makes the thought of our own descent into the abyss of age tolerable is that we may read an account of this very year 1921 from the pen of Miss Smyth. Is it even now going on in our midst—this brave, bustling, important, romantic society?

[New Statesman, Apr 23, 1921]

[]

Scott’s Character.

[The Intimate Life of Sir Walter Scott (A. & C. Black Ltd, 1921) by Archibald Stalker.]

The reader will do well not to be put off by the cocksureness of Mr Stalker’s manner or by the singularity of his literary judgements, for his book is shrewd and amusing, outspoken enough to exercise our wits, though not profound enough to convince them. He claims that he has given a new presentation of Scott, a twentieth-century portrait which ‘may be unsatisfactory in the eyes of 2020’, but is certainly different from that which was current in the nineteenth century. In the nineteenth century the Waverley Novels were still taken seriously. Nowadays Scott’s verse is forgotten, and there are two—perhaps more—living novelists who surpass his fiction. These are Mr Stalker’s opinions, for we must avow ourselves either much behind the times or much ahead of them in rating the Scottish novels, however the game of placing may be played, among the permanently great, which are none the less great because they have ceased to influence the living. Still, if you hold that his force as a writer is spent, there remains that elusive thing—his personality; and certainly Mr Stalker has Scott’s own authority for holding that his life was a great deal more important than his books. It is probably true that Scott’s history is known to many who have never read his writings. Like Johnson, or like Socrates, he is a symbol of a type of human nature. Both his gifts and his sufferings are written in huge letters for everyone to read. The inevitable result of this monumental quality is that, like other monuments, he has become, as time goes by, a little weather-beaten, blurred, and sentimentalised. The real Scott, no doubt, was far more sharply featured than the legendary. When we turn to Mr Stalker, then, we do so in the hope that some of the myths may be dissolved and some of the outlines recovered. But our hope is only partially fulfilled. True, the monument is scraped and cleaned, but the jolly Scottish gentleman who stands forth, prosperous and portly, with his horses and his dogs, who practised a little automatic writing before breakfast, is no more the Scott of the novels and the diaries than our weather-worn colossus supporting huge burdens.

The work of restoration is necessarily carried on under difficulties and half in darkness. We have to decide such delicate questions as the question of his heart—was it tough or tender?—which are practically insoluble in the case of our next-door neighbour, and here the evidence is contained in legends and letters more than a hundred years old. No letters remain—none at least have been published—to light up the first and most momentous of Sir Walter’s love affairs. He was gay enough less than a year after Williamina refused him. Thirty-five years later he sat upon a tombstone and was agitated to remember how he had cut the lady’s initials upon the turf. And later he married Charlotte Charpentier, and neither of them pretended to much fine feeling for the other. Still, when the husband writes of his marriage, ‘it was something short of love in all its forms, which I suspect people only feel once in their lives; folk who have been nearly drowned in bathing rarely venturing a second time out of their depths’, one may, if one chooses, credit him with first-hand knowledge of the depths and the dangers. But we will not quarrel with Mr Stalker if he likes to be sure that ‘there was nothing romantic about Scott, except his iron will, his passion for planting, and his healthy storytelling life’, and that if Williamina had been poor and nameless he would not have cared for her at all. With all respect for the divine passion, probably men of great vitality get over the worst attacks, and smother the most prosperous under a hurly-burly of other interests.

But the interest that dominated the immense variety of Scott’s interests was, surely, in one form or another, his passion for literature. If you reduce Scott’s writing to a mechanical scribbling for money, you reduce him to a level of a hearty and manly but entirely normal Scottish gentleman of orthodox conservative views. To take his own words at their face value appears to us a mistake. Many writers, of whom Carlyle is one and Stevenson another, turn against literature now and then and cry out for a life of action, just as the man of action would rather have written the poem than have done the deed which it describes. Scott, no doubt, rated literature very low, as one is apt to rate one’s own possessions, but that is no proof that he was not a confirmed writer, with a prodigious gift for the calling. Anyone who wants to come near the character of Scott, or to analyse the nature of his charm, must give full eight [weight] to the fact that he spent hours every day during the greater part of his life with the creatures of his imagination. The temperament which naturally indulges itself thus is quite distinct from that which has no such bent. Long before it was a question of earning money Scott was living with the kings and barons and ballad-makers of the past. When it came to writing he had merely to turn on the tap and the accumulated resources rushed out. That this is not the way in which the works of Flaubert were produced is certain; but it is also probable that genius of a certain type must work unconsciously, like a natural force which issues unchanged, almost unnoticed by its possessor. To read Scott’s life and not to see that he was perpetually under the sway of this power is to miss the flavour and proportion of the whole. He had no say in the matter. Whether he wrote well or ill, for money or for pleasure, Scott was as much the slave of his imagination as a drunkard is the slave of his dram. What was Abbotsford but the realisation of some romantic dream? Scott presumably never once in his life saw it as it appears to the tourist today—a large, ugly building, stuffed with sham armour, plaster casts, and pompous heraldry. But the tourist must have the soul of a furniture dealer if he cannot at the same time see how to Scott it was all mixed up with Scotland, and the past, and chivalry. It is true—and Mr Stalker puts the case with undeniable force—that scarcely anything can be said in favour of Scott’s politics. He was servile to dukes and hostile to workingmen. But again the pitch is queered by his excessive indulgence in the pleasures of the imagination. The Duke of Buccleugh appeared before him all rayed round with the colours of the past—the living representative of the ‘old Knights of Branxholm’. The weaver who wanted his wages raised was a dangerous vermin nibbling at the fabric of romance. But to do him justice Scott was thoroughly inconsistent in putting his views into practice. Some of his best friends were working-men; his imagination is never so happy as when it lights up the lives of peasants; and if Mr Stalker seeks proof that Scott could withstand the aristocracy, he should ponder the scene one night at Abbotsford when the vulgar Mrs Coutts had arrived and some ladies of title were rude to her. The ‘lovely marchioness’ was beckoned into the armorial hall by Scott, and there talked to, she said, as if she had been his daughter. At any rate, there was no more laughing at Mrs Coutts. And a few days later Lockhart found Sir Walter alone over his whisky and cigar and told him the rumour of Constable’s failure. And Sir Walter took it all very calmly and lit another cigar. And Lockhart found him early next morning helping his little grandson to feed a fleet of ducklings outside Lockhart’s house, for he had been more alarmed than he had let on, had driven all night to see Constable, had proved the rumours false, and after breakfast walked home through his woods ‘leaning on my shoulder all the way, which he seldom as yet did, except with Tom Purdie …’ So it goes on, and each epithet and scene and incident serves to make us more and more sure that we know Sir Walter and are not to be argued out of our knowledge.

[Times Literary Supplement, Apr 28, 1921]

[]

Trousers.

[The Things Which Are Seen (Philip Allan & Co., 1921) by A. Trystan Edwards]

If the readers of the New Statesman will buy Mr Edwards’ book they will hear of something to their advantage. They will learn that though they have always been accustomed to think themselves average men they are, by reason of that very fact, the only judges of art. Not only are they the only judges; they are the only creators. For the average man can cultivate his appearance, and that is the first of the arts; he can behave like a gentleman, and that is the second; he can dress well, and that is the third. The architect, the painter and the sculptor, though admitted among the minor artists, cannot compete with the man or woman who, divinely beautiful, exquisitely tactful, and superbly attired, practises the three major arts to perfection.

But our proficiency in the art of being beautiful is much determined by the accidents of birth. At this point we find Mr Edwards consoling, if not entirely convincing. ‘Noses straight, aquiline or retroussé may so harmoniously be set upon the face that they are neither insignificant nor yet obtrusive … One man may have rather thin legs, and another man rather thick legs, and both may be possessed of a good figure.’ There is only one physical defect which is completely damning, and that is bow legs. ‘Bow legs are an abomination. The reason is that, being arranged in two equal and opposite curves enclosing a space, they create at about the level of the knees where the space is widest a marked focal centre’—in short, the bow-legged are inevitably ill-bred; no one can help looking at their legs, and discord and rebellion result. The parents of the bow-legged, Mr Edwards is of opinion, ‘ought to be visited with a severe penalty’.

Nevertheless, however scurvily Nature may have behaved, you can temper her severity (short of bow legs) by attention to the art of manners. Much can be done by grace of posture. You should be careful not to open the jaws widely, smack the lips, or expose the contents of the mouth in eating. Unless it is to amuse a baby, do not pretend to be a horse, for to walk on all fours ‘without humorous intent’ is to display ‘the ultimate degree of bad manners to which it is possible to attain’.

But the shortest survey of Mr Edwards’ book must not fail to point out that besides laying down the law the author is at great pains to ascertain what that law is. Owing to native obtuseness, no doubt, we have been unable to grasp the grammar of design, although Mr Edwards has been to nature herself to discover it, and is confident that our assent will be complete and instantaneous ‘because the law of mind has an intimate connection with the law of nature, and it is impossible to acknowledge the one without paying an equal deference to the other’. In spite of diagrams of feet, hands, eyes, noses, ships and houses, many of his statements seem to us controversial, and some highly obscure. We will only mention the principle of resolved duality. ‘Nature,’ says Mr Edwards, ‘does not tolerate duality.’ The hands differ; so do the eyes. But when Mr Edwards goes on to assert that trousers, owing to ‘the irremediable effect of duality’, seem ‘to invite disrespect’, we entirely dissent. We go further. We have conceived them in isolation from the jacket, as advised, and still see nothing to laugh at in trousers. As for the final and most striking example of duality resolved, to wit, the Holy Trinity, the questions which Mr Edwards decides are too grave to be touched on in a review. We need only say that the origin of the Holy Ghost, long a subject of dispute among theologians, is now accounted for—quite simply, too.

[New Statesman, Jun 4, 1921]

[]

Fantasy.

[Legends of Smokeover (Hodder & Stoughton, 1921) by L.P. Jacks]

When one reads that very amusing book, Candide, certain sentences strike one’s attention as if the weight behind them had suddenly become prodigious. ‘Travaillons sans raisonner, dit Martin; c’est le seul moyen de rendre la vie supportable.’ The reason appears to be that Voltaire knew his own meaning and shaped it so skilfully that we receive the impact instantly, indelibly, at one blow like the stroke of an unerring swordsman. We drag in Voltaire in the hope that he may help us out of a difficulty. We have to define Mr Jacks’ new book Legends of Smokeover. Perhaps we shall shorten our task if we begin by saying that while Voltaire and Mr Jacks are both satirists, Voltaire was a Frenchman and Mr Jacks is an Englishman; while Voltaire is scathing, wild and witty, Mr Jacks is emotional, fantastic and decorous; while Voltaire writes 100 little pages which we shall remember for the rest of our lives, Professor Jacks writes 300 large ones which we shall have forgotten the day after tomorrow. That is true, as it is true, perhaps, of every book destined to appear this month of December, 1921. But in this case one is sorry that it should be so; it seems more than usually a waste, a pity.

Legends of Smokeover begins by being a satire. The vast smoky town, its wealth, its profiteers, its complete ignorance of ideal or direction, fall under the lash of a sharp intelligent brain endowed with a delightful capacity for speaking its meaning. If Mr Jacks next proceeds to be fantastic, grotesque, and extravagant that is all to the good. The subject demands it. The satirist is a man who judges the prevailing opinions of mankind to be absurd, and brings this home to us by setting up somehow or other his own version of the truth. There are many ways in which he may do this, and one of the most effective is that which Mr Jacks attempts, when he creates in contrast with the prosperous industrial city five eccentric human beings who by the standards of Smokeover are judged to be insane. But the satirist, however he may pile absurdity upon absurdity, must make us feel, by a single phrase, by a single word, that his eye is all the time fixed upon the truth. He must be concentrated and passionate inwardly, however freakish he may appear on the surface. But Professor Jacks is freakish without being passionate. He sees things not as they are but as the symbols and veils of a hidden reality. The veil of Smokeover rolls up; and behind it we see beauty and truth, courage and virtue. He calls them legends.

Now it is an invariable rule in the growth of literature that legends originate at the places of transit where ideal things pass over into actualities. They haunt the bridges between the visible world and its heavenly counterpart; they gather at the fords and ferries which carry the traffic of the eternal values across the River of Forgetfulness into the scene of their temporal manifestations. Two or three of these bridges, all in the very heart of Smokeover, the author was able to find.

After reading that we own that we cannot remember why we dragged in Voltaire. There are so many other people, it seems as one goes on reading, whom one might drag in with greater fitness—Peacock, Mr E.M. Forster and Mrs Hemans, Queen Victoria, Martin Tupper and Samuel Butler. Perhaps it would be simpler to call this queer composite personality, at once so clear and so cloudy, so shrewd and so sentimental, so advanced and so Victorian, Mr Jacks and have done with it.

As we have said there are five figures whose strange adventures are related in the book, Rumbelow the betting man, Hooker the profiteer, Miss Wolfstone the adventuress, Ripplemark the Professor of Virtue, and Mrs Rumbelow, generally called ‘My Lady’. But if we are asked what they stand for, what the gambling establishment signifies, or how we expound the fable of the transfigured mouse, we do not know where to begin. The meanings are so many; the allegories so prolific, the symbolism so incessant that at last we give up looking for a meaning and let the entertainment proceed. All we can vouch for is that everything has a meaning; that significant phrases, witty phrases, suggestive phrases are sprinkled so thick that it is a thousand pities that we should get tired before we have picked them all up. ‘So live that by affirming your own personality you may help others to affirm theirs.’ ‘Throw away the broken umbrella and get a firm grasp on the woman’s arm.’ ‘Finance the moral ideal.’ Why should we get tired of picking up phrases like these? Perhaps because they seem to refer to nothing in particular; there is nothing hard for them to ring against; the real and the unreal have melted together into one many coloured mist. ‘Il faut cultiver notre jardin’ said Voltaire; and the sentence endures, like a diamond.

[Times Literary Supplement, Dec 15, 1921]

[]

1922

A Letter to a Lady in Paraguay.

… And the sun, you say, is almost too hot; the parrots wake you at dawn with their screeching, and it is only at sunset, when the horizon is all on fire with crimson dust, that you feel fresh again and bathe naked in a limpid, tepid, slightly swaying sea. One must believe a woman who has sat upon seven and sixty committees. But in return, how can I describe an English sick-room in February in London—the thermometer, the medicine glass, the bunch of insipid grapes, the six daffodils, and daylight drawing further and further its strip of elongated grey? ‘The worst of it,’ you go on, ‘is that there are no books to read. The ants destroy them; no one has time to read them; and somehow one can’t read a pocket Shakespeare in one’s bedroom.’ I have the better of you there. At a guess I should say that there are twenty-seven books on the table by my bedside—new books, old books, classics, ephemerals, biographies, novels, even poetry. I have tried them all and propose therefore in return for your sunsets and parrots to tell you about Mrs Barclay and Boswell and Princess Bibesco. Only you know what influenza is—how it smears the mind and disturbs the vision so that sometimes I am not sure whether I am reading or making up—whether Mrs Barclay is sitting in the arm-chair opposite or whether, with Princess Bibesco, I am drowsing in amber velvet among the poinsettias. Don’t believe a word I say, and for Heaven’s sake don’t pollute, even the South Americans, with my critical judgements.

I have lifted that phrase about the velvet and the poinsettias from the review of some rather sneering reviewer. Not one of them can take up his honest black pen without making it perfectly plain that amber velvet and poinsettias mean nothing to him; that he has never eaten off golden plate; worn golden slippers, or married a Prince; which, being set down at length, there is only room for a polite sneer at young women of 23 who have committed all these crimes and then have the impertinence to write stories. For my own part I was conscious of little except that the Princess put a hook in my nose and dragged me through some very stale and sultry waters in which I should otherwise have languished; and for this I can’t help thanking her, be the risk what it may. Next time, if the Princess will be guided by me, she will leave out the love-letters, and print her pedigree instead. Stories by the granddaughter of a cobbler are sure, in our democracy, of the warmest welcome.

Mrs Barclay has the same initial as Princess Bibesco, and I turn therefore without more ado to consider her life by an anonymous, very straightforward, very simple-minded daughter. Now it would be easy to laugh at Mrs Barclay, and still easier, it appears (her books sell by the million in China and Japan) to take her seriously. What I want to do is to convey the impression that she was a gigantic humbug and at the same time a woman of genius. The brain was left out, but the driving power remained. She had the energy without the eye. This particular combination is not by any means remarkable—consider Garvice and Miss Corelli and Hall Caine and Ethel Dell and Mrs Wheeler Wilcox. They are the runaway motor-cars, the blazing timber-yards of modern literature, and to watch their speed and splendour and flame and extinction—and, after all, they never singe even a cat’s whiskers—is one of the amusements of the age. But their biographies are better worth reading than their books. Here was Mrs Barclay (I cannot swear that I remember it all accurately), the daughter of one country clergyman and the wife of another. Nature had given her masses of curly hair, a splendid physique, a magnificent contralto voice. If a singer broke down she would take up his song and sing it straight through without a moment’s hesitation until the hall rang with applause. She was utterly without shyness as she was entirely without conceit. Things happened like that—it was none of her doing. Almost automatically the ten village rustics who made up her first audience grew to a million Americans convulsed with one sob. If one had given her a melon seed over night it would have grown, one feels, into three pumpkins by the next morning. It was the same with her books. An attack of influenza, a prolonged convalescence, a half-sheet of notepaper, and The Rosary came into existence. No sooner begun than finished; no sooner finished than bound in purple; no sooner bound in purple than famous; and next year behold! the shores of America were purple in her honour, and reverend bald-headed gentlemen stood on the quayside waving purple banners inscribed with ‘Welcome,’ ‘Barclay,’ and ‘Rosary.’ Her single seed had grown into a million purple pumpkins.

This use of metaphor will not disguise from you the fact that I have not read a single page of any one of her books. Stay—I am exaggerating. One page is reproduced in this biography. The Lady Abbess leans from the convent window and reproaches Lord Hugh—there it ends. But I am sure that she was reproaching Lord Hugh for nothing more serious than the theft of a single rose. The page is a small one—I fancy she used the fly-sheets of her innumerable letters, and wrote as often as not in the train coming home from a meeting—the page is small, but enough to show me that I hate purple pumpkins more than any other of nature’s products. They are squashy and fleshy and tasteless and sugary and tame. They go sour with extreme rapidity. Even the servants can’t abide them after a time, and Heaven knows what finally becomes of them save that nature, I suppose, easily takes back into her bosom what that bosom so easily exudes. Her genius was nature’s genius rather than man’s—the genius which creates the cabbage and the dandelion and smothers all the hedgerows with foaming cow’s parsley in June. But enough of these metaphors. To show you what I mean by calling Mrs Barclay a woman of genius I will tell you two anecdotes as accurately as I can. She had a passion for the poems of Mrs Browning (and parenthetically I may remark how odd it seems to me to think of Browning’s chair or table in Mrs Barclay’s boudoir). At Florence, of course, she sought out the grave of the poetess, and there she sat on a camp stool, took out her fountain pen, and wrote hour after hour, ream after ream. And then, of course, Americans collected. First they stared at Mrs Browning; then they stared at Mrs Barclay. ‘What are you writing, if we may make so bold?’ ‘A novel.’ ‘And may we ask what novels you have written already?’ A moment’s hesitation, a smile, an arch glance, and then out it came: ‘Well one of them was called The Rosary.’ Consternations, exclamations, invitations! Was this really Mrs Barclay? Why, sister Ellen had died blessing her. Multiply this scene by a thousand at least. Set it in railway carriages, and omnibuses and mission-halls. Imagine cab-drivers and peeresses and prostitutes all kindling and stretching out their hands and never ceasing to bless the name of Mrs Barclay—well, what does one call the power that does all this but genius—allowing, of course, that it is genius without the brain. But the second anecdote is far more impressive. Mrs Barclay had only to dip her hand into the waters of Lake Windermere and shoals of minnows attached themselves to her finger-tips. This they did year after year in the presence of witnesses. Call it wizardry, or magnetism, or what you will, that is the power which sways multitudes, leads armies, and alters the destinies of nations. In a narrower sphere it keeps everything within ten miles of it on the boil, curls the hair, fires the eye, wakes up the countryside, and probably wears out its possessor long before Mr Conrad, for example, has written one whole page entirely to his liking.

There is another B on my list—Boswell; and how to connect him with Mrs Barclay on the inch of paper that remains to me I know not. The precipice is too steep, the problem too profound. For if you ask me which I prefer, Barclay or Boswell, life or literature, I shall have to turn on my pillow and think it out.

[Woman’s Leader, May 5, 1922]

[]

1923

Romance and the Heart.

[The Grand Tour (Methuen & Co. Ltd, 1923) by Romer Wilson
Revolving Lights (Duckworth & Co., 1923) by Dorothy M. Richardson.]

Both Miss Wilson and Miss Richardson are serious novelists, and we must therefore put our minds at their service with the consciousness that, though criticise them we must, something of positive value, which that criticism should reveal, remains. And in trying to make out what this gift of theirs amounts to it is not necessary to go with great detail into the particular examples before us. Each writer is mature; each has written many books, and here, again, each is doing her own work in her own way.

Miss Wilson is a romantic. That is the first impression which her vigour and freedom make upon us. While other novelists sit studying the skeleton of humanity and painfully tracing the relations of tiny fibres, Miss Wilson hurls a sponge at the blackboard, takes her way into the forest, flings herself on a couch of amaranth, and revels in the thunder. For her not only the sky, but the soul too, is always thundering and lightening. There are no mouse-coloured virtues; no gradual transitions; all is genius, violence, and rhapsody, and her thick crowded utterance, often eloquent and sometimes exquisite, recalls the stammer of a bird enraptured with life in June. Yet she is not, as this description might imply, sentimentally lyrical, and frequently, if pardonably, absurd. One of the remarkable qualities of her work is that she handles the great explosives with complete good faith. She believes in thunder, violence, genius, and rhapsody. Therefore, no one is going to sneer at her for saying so. Moreover, she constantly renews her sense of the marvellous by touching the earth, if only with the tip of her toe. She can be sardonic and caustic; she can mention the stomach.

Why is it, then, that she fails to convince us of the reality of her romance? It is because her sense of it is more conventional than original. She has taken it from poetry rather than from life, and from minor poetry more frequently than from major. She has not, like Meredith, used her freedom from the ties of realism to reveal something new in the emotions of human beings when they are most roused to excitement. Nor has she gone the other way to work. She has not taken the usual and made it blossom into the extraordinary. When we begin a play by Ibsen we say that there can be nothing romantic about a room with bookcases and upholstered furniture. But in the end we feel that all the forests and nightingales in the world cannot be so romantic as a room with bookcases and upholstered furniture. That is an exaggeration, however; we have overshot the mark. Nightingales and forests are forever romantic, and it is merely cowardice to be afraid of saying so. But writers are afraid, and very naturally afraid, lest their own feeling for such famous things may not be strong enough to persist against the multitude of other people’s feelings. Miss Wilson has no such fear. And thus she has the romantic power of making us feel the stir and tumult of life as a whole. She gives us a general, not a particular, sense of excitement. When at the end of the book Marichaud exclaims: ‘Life is the thing, Paul. Life is to be the thing,’ we feel that at last someone has put into words what we have been feeling for two hundred and fifty pages. And to have made us feel that life is the thing for two hundred and fifty pages is a real achievement.

There is no one word, such as romance or realism, to cover, even roughly, the works of Miss Dorothy Richardson. Their chief characteristic, if an intermittent student be qualified to speak, is one for which we still seek a name. She has invented, or, if she has not invented, developed and applied to her own uses, a sentence which we might call the psychological sentence of the feminine gender. It is of a more elastic fibre than the old, capable of stretching to the extreme, of suspending the frailest particles, of enveloping the vaguest shapes. Other writers of the opposite sex have used sentences of this description and stretched them to the extreme. But there is a difference. Miss Richardson has fashioned her sentence consciously, in order that it may descend to the depths and investigate the crannies of Miriam Henderson’s consciousness. It is a woman’s sentence, but only in the sense that it is used to describe a woman’s mind by a writer who is neither proud nor afraid of anything that she may discover in the psychology of her sex. And therefore we feel that the trophies that Miss Richardson brings to the surface, however we may dispute their size, are undoubtedly genuine. Her discoveries are concerned with states of being and not with states of doing. Miriam is aware of ‘life itself’; of the atmosphere of the table rather than of the table; of the silence rather than of the sound. Therefore she adds an element to her perception of things which has not been noticed before, or, if noticed, has been guiltily suppressed. A man might fall dead at her feet (it is not likely), and Miriam might feel that a violet-coloured ray of light was an important element in her consciousness of the tragedy. If she felt it, she would say it. Therefore, in reading Revolving Lights we are often made uncomfortable by feeling that the accent upon the emotions has shifted. What was emphatic is smoothed away. What was important to Maggie Tulliver no longer matters to Miriam Henderson. At first, we are ready to say that nothing is important to Miriam Henderson. That is the way we generally retaliate when an artist tells us that the heart is not, as we should like it to be, a stationary body, but a body which moves perpetually, and is thus always standing in a new relation to the emotions which are its sun. Chaucer, Donne, Dickens—each if you read him, shows this change of the heart. That is what Miss Richardson is doing on an infinitely smaller scale. Miriam Henderson is pointing to her heart and saying she feels a pain on her right, and not on her left. She points too didactically. Her pain, compared with Maggie Tulliver’s, is a very little pain. But, be that as it may, here we have both Miss Wilson and Miss Richardson proving that the novel is not hung upon a nail and festooned with glory, but, on the contrary, walks the high road, alive and alert, and brushes shoulders with real men and women.

[Nation & Athenaeum, May 19, 1923]

[]

Sir Thomas Browne.

[Religio Medici; Hydrotaphia. Urn Buriat: or a discourse of the sepulchral urns lately found in Norfolk; and of The Garden of Cyrus. Or the Quincuncial lozenge, or network plantation of the ancients artificially, naturally, mystically consider’d (Printed and sold at the Golden Cockerel Press, Waltham St Lawrence, Berkshire, 1923) by Sir Thomas Browne physician of Norwich.]

The only exception which can be taken to the beautiful Golden Cockerel edition of the works of Sir Thomas Browne is a thick black leaf which spots the page too obtrusively for the comfort of the eye and too affectedly for the repose of the spirit. Otherwise the dignity and chastity of the volumes is unmarred. A very occasional misprint reminds us that even at Waltham St Lawrence printers are human, but that, in the circumstances, has its ingratiating side. The ‘great revival of interest in the work of Sir Thomas Browne’, which the publishers discover would, one might have hoped, have justified a less limited edition and a lower price. But why fly in the face of facts? Few people love the writings of Sir Thomas Browne, but those who do are of the salt of the earth.

For the desire to read, like all the other desires which distract our unhappy souls, is capable of analysis. It may be for good books, for bad books, or for indifferent books. But it is always despotic in its demands, and when it appears, at whatever hour of day or night, we must rise and slink off at its heels, only allowing ourselves to ask, as we desert the responsibilities and privileges of active life, one very important question—Why? Why, that is, this sudden passion for Pepys or Rimbaud? Why turn the house upside down to discover Macaulay’s Life and Letters? Why will nothing do except Beckford’s Thoughts on Hunting? Why demand first Disraeli’s novels and then Dr Bentley’s biography? The answer to all these questions, were they forthcoming, would be valuable, for it is when thus beckoned and compelled by the force of a book’s character as a whole that the reader is most capable of speaking the truth about it if he has the mind. What then is the desire that makes us turn instinctively to Sir Thomas Browne? It is the desire to be steeped in imagination. But that is only a snapshot outline of a state of mind which, even as we stand fumbling at the bookcase, can be developed a little more clearly. Locked up in Urn Burial there is a quality of imagination which distinguishes it completely from its companions—as chance has it—The Old Wives’ Tale and A Man of Property. In them the imagination is always occupying itself with particular facts; in him with universal ideas. Their turn will come when we want to look a little more sharply at the passing moment; his when the passing moment is a vanity and a weariness. Then while most fiction, the nine volumes of M. Proust for example, makes us more aware of ourselves as individuals, Urn Burial is a temple which we can only enter by leaving our muddy boots on the threshold. Here it is all a question not of you and me, or him and her, but of human fate and death, of the immensity of the past, of the strangeness which surrounds us on every side. Here, as in no other English prose except the Bible the reader is not left to read alone in his armchair but is made one of a congregation. But here, too, there is a difference; for while the Bible has a gospel to impart, who can be quite sure what Sir Thomas Browne himself believed? The last chapters of Urn Burial beat up on wings of extraordinary sweep and power, yet towards what goal?

But the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy, and deals with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity … Darkness and light divide the course of time, and oblivion shares with memory a great part even of our living beings; we slightly remember our felicities and the smartest strokes of affliction leave but short smart upon us … The Egyptian mummies, which Cambyses or time hath spared, avarice now consumeth. Mummy is become merchandise, Mizraim cures wounds, and Pharaoh is sold for balsams.

Decidedly that is the voice of a strange preacher, of a man filled with doubts and subtleties and suddenly swept away by surprising imaginations. But it is not for the asperities of dogma that we go to Sir Thomas Browne. The words quoted above will revive the old amazement. It is as if from the street we stepped into a cathedral where the organ goes plunging and soaring and indulging in vast and elephantine gambols of awful yet grotesque sublimity. The sound booms and quivers and dies away. But splendour of sound is only one of his attributes. There is, too, his power of bringing the remote and incongruous astonishingly together. A piece of an old boat is cheek by jowl with the funeral pyre of Patroclus. Vast inquiries sweeping in immense circles of ambiguity and doubt are clenched by short sentences rapped out with solemn authority. ‘Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible sun within us.’ The great names of antiquity march in astonishing procession; flowers and trees, spices and gems load the pages with all kinds of colour and substance. The whole is kept fresh by a perpetual movement of rhythm which gives each sentence its relation to the next and yet is of huge and cumulative effect. A bold and prodigious appetite for the drums and tramplings of language is balanced by the most exquisite sense of mysterious affinities between ghosts and roses. But these dissections are futile enough, and indeed by drawing attention to the technical side of Sir Thomas’s art do him some disservice. In books as in people, graces and charms are delightful for the moment but become insipid unless they are felt to be part of some general energy or quality of character. To grasp that is to know them well, but to dally with charms and graces, to appraise them more and more exquisitely, is to be always at the first stage of acquaintance, superficial, polite, and ultimately bored. It is easy to detach the fine passages from their context, but in Urn Burial this character, this quality of the whole, though it expresses itself with all the charm of all the Muses, is yet of a very exalted kind. It is a difficult book to read, it is a book not always to be read with pleasure, and those who get most from it are the well-born souls.

But then, unfortunately, we are not all made entirely of salt. We cannot breathe in these exalted regions for long. We have to admit that we have bodies as well as minds, and the books which cater for both and let one relieve the fatigues of the other are the books that have the longest lease of life. The soul may be exalted in Urn Burial; the body is refreshed in Religio Medici. There we can take our ease and trifle and laugh. There we can indulge in the delicious amusement of feeling, like some psychological spider, from phrase to phrase over the mind and person of Sir Thomas Browne. For the first to talk of himself broaches the subject with immense gusto. I am charitable; I am brave; I am averse from nothing; I am full of feeling for others; I am merciless upon myself; I know six languages, the names of all the constellations, and most of the plants of my country. ‘For my conversation, it is like the sun’s, with all men, and with a friendly aspect to good and bad.’ Elsewhere we learn that his height was moderate, his eyes large and luminous, his skin dark and constantly suffused with blushes. He dressed very plainly. He seldom laughed. He collected coins, kept maggots in boxes, dissected the lungs of frogs, and combined a scientific and sceptical attitude towards most things with a profound piety, and indeed with an unfortunate vein of superstition. ‘I have ever believed, and do now know, that there are witches,’ wrote the most humane of doctors, who in his pursuit of knowledge braved the stench of the spermaceti whale, could tolerate Jews, and had a good word for the deformity of the toad. He was, in short, as we say when we cannot help laughing at the oddities of the people we admire most, a character. We smile in the midst of the solemnities of Urn Burial when he remarks, ‘Afflictions induce callosities’. The smile broadens to laughter as we mouth out the splendid pomposities, the astonishing conjectures, of Religio Medici. Yet it is from the crest of some grotesque flight of fancy that he launches himself upon one of those sentences which yawn like a chasm cut in the earth at our feet. ‘We carry with us the wonders we seek without us: there is all Africa and her prodigies in us.’ For the imagination which has gone such strange journeys among the dead is still exalted when it swings its lantern over the obscurities of the soul. He is in the dark to all the world; he has longed for death; there is a hell within him; who knows whether we may not be asleep in this world, and the conceits of life be but dreams? Steeped in such glooms, his imagination falls with a peculiar tenderness upon the common facts of human life. He turns it gradually upon the flowers and insects and grasses at his feet, so as to disturb nothing in the mysterious processes of their existence. There is a halo of wonder round everything that he sees. He that considers the thicket in the head of a teazle ‘in the house of the solitary maggot may find the Seraglio of Solomon’. The tavern music, the Ave Mary bell, the broken urn that the workman has dug out of the field plunge him into the depths of wonder and lead him, as he stands fixed in amazement, to extraordinary flights of speculation as to what we are, where we go, and the meaning of all things. To read Sir Thomas Browne again is always to be filled with astonishment, to remember the surprises, the despondences, the unlimited curiosities of youth.

[Times Literary Supplement, Jun 28, 1923]

[]

An Impression of Gissing.

[George Gissing: An Appreciation (Manchester University Press, 1922) by May Yates]

Gissing’s work leaves the reader with an impression of incorruptible honesty, strangely combined with something shrinking and fastidious which would have liked to look the other way if Gissing had not sharply jerked its head back into position. Thus Gissing was an imperfect realist. He had been forced by circumstances to pitch his tent in Grub Streets and Nether Worlds, which were far from his native land. Honesty forced him to describe what he saw there, but it is a shrinking, an embittered honesty which glares and stares and is thus not of the finest quality for the purposes of a novelist. Miss Yates (a very conscientious critic) acutely points out the effect of this alien element upon his work. ‘Gissing rarely identifies himself with the suffering he is describing; he is always a little aloof, a little detached from the actual life of the workers…. His attitude shows a curious mixture of pity and contempt.’ Dickens, she proceeds, was not aloof, and therefore of course he gives us a better lighted, a better proportioned world. But Gissing—it is one of the attributes of these imperfect novelists—gives us what of course is not so important as a world, but has its interest, and certainly its intensity—a single figure seen against the world, himself that is. Nor should the admirers of Gissing repudiate this statement as if it were a serious slight upon him. Be yourself with vigour and honesty and uncompromisingly, and it is surprising how you tell upon the landscape. It is arguable that you live almost as long in the manner of Dr Johnson and Samuel Butler as in the other way, which is Shakespeare’s way and Jane Austen’s. A few people domesticate you very intimately in their minds, and break out at odd intervals into articles and dinners and memoirs. Gissing’s fame will be continued largely by posthumous friendship of this sort, because he was to the last fibre of him Gissing, and made a world by virtue of character rather than of creative power.

For all these reasons then it will be well worthwhile one of these days to read New Grub Street or Born in Exile again. But it will be a melancholy experience. The sufferings of the intellectual of 1890 and thereabouts were appalling. Not only was Gissing poor, intelligent, sensitive and pigheaded, but he was cursed with a passion for literature, a craving for fat, and an irresistible desire to marry the first woman he met in the Marylebone Road. The days of the treadmill began on the honeymoon. The intolerable grind was trodden out in Hoxton, and Islington and Lambeth and Camberwell. Children were born; health failed; boilers leaked; doors banged; nerves were exasperated, and, painfully and desperately, in a perpetual effort to pay doctors’ bills and butchers’ bills, pages of the eternal book were wrung from the exhausted but still conscientious brain. Sufferings more sordid and less normal than might have been foretold for a man of his calibre fell to Gissing’s lot and are revealed in the Private Life of Henry Maitland (now reprinted with an appendix). It is not a pleasant book for those who like to believe that the intellect protects people from the meaner miseries and absolves them from the more ignoble temptations of life. Henry Maitland stole an overcoat, complained bitterly of the cooking, and feebly collapsed into marriages which had not even the lure of passion to recommend them. But memory, who can range hither and thither at her will, sets the records of Henry Ryecroft beside this dismal one of Henry Maitland. She recalls the shelf of classics, Greek, Latin, and English, bought with saved sixpences and lugged home volume by volume to a basement off the Tottenham Court Road. Then she remembers how he would start up from stirring the pot with its deep deposits of mutton to extol the wonders of Greek literature. ‘Why, my dear fellow, do you know there are actually miserable men who do not know—who have never even heard of—the minuter differences between Dochmiacs and Antispasts!’ He travelled, she bids us remark; he had his years of respite in Devonshire. And then she concludes, there is a quality in the books as a whole which, though it may be true that he was a novelist against the grain and a scholar with it, must have been a source of enduring self-respect and gratification to its possessor. They are solid books, always of scrupulous workmanship, and often, as the dreary story tells itself, it wraps itself about in a glory of sober prose. One will read the books again partly to recover certain descriptions of Camberwell streets and suburban cemeteries. And finally memory is of opinion that the works of Gissing issued between 1880 and 1906 will live longer than many of their more celebrated contemporaries. For though the angle was sharp and the vision narrow, Gissing beheld with his own eyes the perpetual struggles and sufferings of human beings. You may open his books even now and find yourself figuratively speaking (memory deals much in figures) in the front parlour of a prosaic lodging house. But there is an incongruous flower upon the sideboard; and people actually live here. You will not (and here she glances with obvious malice at these ‘celebrated contemporaries’) find yourself in a public hall, littered with pamphlets, strewn with chairs, decorated with banners, while the badges and umbrellas on the floor testify to the fact that here a great battle of words was fought out and the burning questions of the day decided, which way now scarcely seems to matter.

[New Statesman, Jun 30, 1923]

[]

‘Maud-Evelyn, &c.’ and ‘The Sacred Fount’.

[‘Maud-Evelyn’ … and Other Tales and The Sacred Fount (vols xxviii–xxix, Macmillan & Co., 1923) by Henry James.]

We have heard it said on good authority that Henry James kept framed and glazed in the hall of his house at Rye a publisher’s bill of accounts, crediting him on the yearly or half-yearly sale of his books with the magnificent sum of sixpence. It is certain that for many years one could be sure of picking up copies of his first editions, clean, remaindered, unread, for very small prices. But time has its revenges, and Messrs Macmillan are now issuing a complete edition of the fiction in thirty-five volumes. The important fact about this edition is that the famous prefaces are to be reprinted for the first time, so far as we know, since they appeared in the New York edition. This alone should make the new volumes of particular value to lovers of Henry James.

[Nation & Athenaeum, unsigned, Jul 21, 1923]

[]

‘The Art of Thomas Hardy.’

[The Art of Thomas Hardy by Lionel Johnson (John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1923).]

Lionel Johnson’s book appeared in 1894 when Jude the Obscure was still unfinished. That fact, however, scarcely diminishes its value, and lends, indeed, a freshness to Johnson’s criticism which is absent from the monotonous chorus of praise which salutes an accepted figure. Hardy was still in 1894 ‘maybe of the classics.’ Henry James was beginning to be known for the ‘daintiest trifles.’ Johnson’s book is a piece of fine and stimulating criticism, as anyone may prove by reading it as criticism should be read, in the wake of the books it discusses, and so letting its considered judgments mix with his own direct impressions. But in 1894 Johnson was forced to deal with one side only of Hardy’s genius, for at that time none of the poetry had appeared. To complete the volume, therefore, Mr Barton has added an essay upon Hardy’s poetry which is both sensible and sincere. His sense is displayed in pointing out the folly of demanding ‘messages’ and philosophies from poets. ‘When you extract a poet’s ideas … they cease to be poetic.’ This was worth saying when so many critics are forcing Mr Hardy into philosophical strait-waistcoats of their own devising. If he has a message, it is that he ‘assigns eternal value to great moments of experience.’ That, too, was worth saying for a different reason. It makes us think on for ourselves, and so freshens our desire to read the poems again.

[Nation & Athenaeum, unsigned, Jul 28, 1923]

[]

The Chinese Shoe.

[Lady Henry Somerset (Jonathan Cape, 1923) by Kathleen Fitzpatrick.]

Lady Henry Somerset, her biographer says, ‘came into the world with a far larger share of the joy of being alive’ than is the lot of most. If that were so, no woman was ever more completely defrauded of her rights. The Victorian age was to blame; her mother was to blame; Lord Henry was to blame; even the saintly Mr Watts was forced by fate to take part in the general conspiracy against her. Between them each natural desire of a lively and courageous nature was stunted, until we feel that the old Chinese custom of fitting the foot to the shoe was charitable compared with the mid-Victorian practice of fitting the woman to the system. She was a lively child who enjoyed society. And here is an account of one of the most daring dissipations of her youth: ‘If it is a mild night and you have not the shadow of a cold and you and Annie wrap up like Mummies Hoods over your heads and hats and veils and grebe fur round your throats after your hood is put on and you have the large carriage’, you may, as a very great indulgence, visit the night school and stay a few minutes. They had no education. Their politics, their friendships, their religion, their occupations from morning to night were dictated to them and enforced upon them in letter after letter, and scolding after scolding, by the most beautiful, the most generous, and the most exacting of mothers.

At last Lady Somers’s work was complete, and her two daughters were fit to endure the rigours of English society at its most severe. Lady Isabel, however, had not been quite so effectively trained as her sister. There were corners and crannies still unswept by the harsh broom of convention. She had read Mill’s Liberty in secret. In the American War she had come out, even at Eastnor, on the side of the North. And, during her first season, when an aristocratic party was playing a game in which each had to say truthfully what was the desire of his or her heart, Isabel had the audacity to declare ‘To live in the country and to have fifteen children’—that was what she wanted most. ‘Of all the horrible indecent things for a young girl to say!’ Lady Somers exclaimed when they went up to bed. ‘What do you suppose they will think of the mother who has brought up such an indelicate daughter?’ Isabel cried herself to sleep. Yet everyone had laughed; she had thought herself such a success. And a success she must have been. Her letters are full of royalties and Lady Molesworth’s ball tonight, Marlborough House next week, Lady Westminster’s on Monday, and Lady Wharncliffe’s dinner tomorrow; while in the whole round of gaiety one name recurs again and again—that of Lord Lorne. Lord Lorne was clearly in love with her. One morning Lord Lorne called, and sat watching Mr Watts, who was painting Lady Isabel as he had painted her mother. Lady Isabel said she was tired, and asked to get down; but Mr Watts was obdurate; sit she must. At last, Lord Lorne, seeing no chance of a private talk, took his departure. Nothing had been said. Nothing now could be said. For almost directly, Queen Victoria sent for him, and informed him that she had ‘arranged other plans for his happiness’. It was a bitter blow to Lady Isabel, who refused a great many gentlemen for a great many reasons (one picked the turtle fat off her plate and ate it) before, in her second season, she agreed to marry Lord Henry Somerset. They were married in St George’s, Hanover Square, and she carried a basket of snowdrops picked in his own garden by Lord Tennyson himself.

Perhaps the most amusing pages in the book are three loose sheets written by the Duchess of Beaufort, Lord Henry’s mother, to one of her sons. The eighteenth century was still in full swing at Badminton. Anything might happen because nothing need be seen. When a gentleman fell drunk to the floor at dinner, sweeping the tablecloth and all the china with him, the Duchess never flickered an eyelid. When the Duke had his mistress’s portrait sent down to Badminton, the Duchess observed that it was a fancy portrait, and proposed to hang it in the drawing room. Her family protesting, she hung it in the Duke’s bedroom, remarking that it would ‘be a pleasant surprise for him’. The only moral teaching Lady Henry received from her mother-in-law was to wear white kid gloves ‘at all times in the house’. Soon the famous catastrophe occurred, and Lady Henry was forced to take those proceedings against her husband which are still, Miss Fitzpatrick thinks, sending subterranean rumblings through the suburbs of Bournemouth. The gentleman who wrote charming drawing room songs was accused by his wife of a crime ‘that was only mentioned in the Bible’. For mentioning the sin, which some said she had invented, Lady Henry was cut by a large section of society. Mr Gladstone never invited her to his house again. A man explained that his wife must cease to know her, not because she had been wrong, but because it was impossible for him to explain why she had been right. Thus, at twenty-seven Lady Henry saw herself ‘stranded in a backwater’. Although she met the man she wished to marry she refused to seek a divorce, retired to Eastnor Castle, and for the next seven years lived almost entirely alone. It was in these circumstances that she received her call to undertake that work among the inebriates for which she is chiefly known. But we have left ourselves no space to deal with these activities. Nor, indeed, do they occupy much in her biography. When you fit a woman into a shoe, any number of trifles—happiness, work, children—have to be left out.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Nov 17, 1923]

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1924

‘The Poems, English and Latin, of Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury.’

[The Poems, English and Latin of Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury. Edited by G.C. Moore Smith (OUP, 1923).]

Lord Herbert of Cherbury is, of course, best known as the writer of the famous autobiography. In the present volume Mr Moore Smith has collected his poetry, both English and Latin, which has hitherto appeared only in Professor Churton Collins’s edition of 1881. Professor Collins was remarkable for his zeal rather than for the accuracy of his scholarship, and there was room, therefore, for a new edition. The poems are now carefully edited, provided with notes and commentary, and produced with the invariable distinction of the Clarendon Press. As for their merits, Mr Moore Smith perhaps makes out a case for his view that they have been underestimated, but not many people will agree with him that ‘in poetic feeling and art Edward Herbert soars above his brother George’.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Jan 19, 1924]

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‘Glimpses of Authors.’

[Glimpses of Authors (Werner Laurie, 1924) by Caroline Ticknor]

Miss Ticknor’s grandfather, the well-known Boston publisher, left her a legacy of many literary friends, and the entrée of many interesting houses. Some of the famous men had, provokingly enough, died before she met them; but she saw all the Dickens relics, and went to Earl’s Court with his family. For obvious reasons, she never knew the great Coleridge, but she met Mr Ernest Coleridge under the clock in the British Museum. With Lady Ritchie she lunched, and she had tea with the grand-niece of Jane Austen. Experienced readers of memoirs will be able to forestall the amiable and appreciative comments which these entertainments draw forth. Of first-hand information there is not much; but Dickens, it appears, used blue ink because blue ink dries instantly and he had an antipathy to blotting-paper. He also disliked pencils. Again, Jane Austen had a ring, which Miss Ticknor has seen, made of a single large turquoise, in a simple gold setting. In short, there is nothing scandalous, vulgar, or exciting in this kindly book.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Feb 9, 1924]

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‘Unpublished Letters of Matthew Arnold.’

[Unpublished Letters of Matthew Arnold. Edited by Arnold Whitridge (Yale University Press, 1923).]

Even in these few letters Matthew Arnold stands out like a bust of the best Greek period, restrained, dear cut, aristocratic. It is both a relief and a surprise to come upon somebody who believed in the sovereignty of the intellect, was not afraid to quote Aristotle in his private letters, and remained aloof from the squabbles and scandals of his contemporaries. One or two remarks upon his own poetry are of considerable interest. Writing about 1849, after The Strayed Reveller had appeared, he says: ‘But as I feel rather as a reformer in poetical matters, I am glad of this opposition. If I have health and opportunity to go on, I will shake the present methods until they go down, see if I don’t. More and more I feel bent against the modern English habit (too much encouraged by Wordsworth) of using poetry as a channel for thinking aloud, instead of making anything.’ He travels in France, and reflects: ‘This is the worst of aristocracies, with all their merits—they are inaccessible to ideas … But our people’s strong point is not intellectual coup d’œil any more than our aristocracy’s, and this is our worst chance.’ In short, Matthew Arnold is Matthew Arnold, and that, we cannot help thinking, was a very good thing to be.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Feb 16, 1924]

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‘Arthur Yates: an Autobiography.’

[Arthur Yates Trainer and Gentleman Rider. An Autobiography. Written in collaboration with Bruce Blunt (Grant Richards, 1924).]

‘… his two pet aversions were Bolshevism and motor-traffic’, writes Mr Blunt, in his introduction to Mr Yates’s autobiography. Arthur Yates rode a race with a broken collar-bone, trained Cloister, never betted, roared with laughter when his stable-boys took a toss, dosed them liberally with brandy, bred outlandish beasts in his grounds; and could never help tipping a man down on his luck. The portrait, which is on familiar lines, is very simply drawn, but then Mr Yates was not a very complicated person.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Feb 16, 1924]

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‘Letters and Journals of Anne Chalmers.’

[Letters and Journals of Anne Chalmers. Edited by Her Daughter (Chelsea Publishing Co., 1922).]

The greater part of this book consists of the journal of a tour through England which Anne Chalmers took with her father, the great Dr Chalmers, and her mother in the summer of 1830. She was a sprightly girl, and her observations are full of fun. Now she is tickled to death by the conversation of Mr Bennett, who has circumnavigated the globe and will repeat what the Sandwich Islanders said to him. Next she visits Coleridge and tries, unsuccessfully, to report what he said ‘about the fugacious nature of consciousness and the extraordinary nature of man’. Then she descends into a coal-pit; then she listens to a debate in the House of Commons; and then, quite unexpectedly, Mrs James gives her Lord Byron’s works—all of which events, miraculous to state, take place on a Tuesday! Eventually she married Mr Hanna. But her freedom of spirit seems to have survived, and the book, for those who like such old wives’ tales, is full of amusement.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Feb 13, 1924]

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I was given the opportunity …

I was given the opportunity to see a demonstration of a new colour film process by Mr Friese-Greene. The inventor’s results probably compare favourably with other colour films, but they are very uneven in merit. The quiet-coloured scenes of English country are much the most successful; anything like a bright colour tends immediately to produce an oleographic effect. That is, of course, not peculiar to Mr Friese-Greene’s process. It almost looks as if nature’s brighter colours which harmonise pleasingly when seen in three dimensions acquire an unpleasantly garish quality when represented in two.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Apr 5, 1924]

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Aesthetically speaking, the new aquarium …

Aesthetically speaking, the new aquarium is undoubtedly the most impressive of all the houses at the zoo. Red fish, blue fish, nightmare fish, dapper fish, fish lean as gimlets, fish round and white as soup plates, ceaselessly gyrate in oblong frames of greenish light in the hushed and darkened apartment hollowed out beneath the Mappin terraces. Scientifically, no doubt, the place is a paradise for the ichthyologist; but the poet might equally celebrate the strange beauty of the broad-leaved water plants trembling in the current, or the sinister procession of self-centred sea-beasts forever circling and seeking perhaps some minute prey, perhaps some explanation of a universe which evidently appears to them of inscrutable mystery. Now they knock the glass with their noses; now shoot dartlike to the surface; now eddy slowly and contemplatively down to the sandy bottom. Some are delicately fringed with a fin that vibrates like an electric fan and propels them on; others wear a mail boldly splashed with a design by a Japanese artist. That crude human egotism which supposes that Nature has wrought her best for those who walk the earth is rebuked at the aquarium. Nature seems to have cared more to tint and adorn the fishes who live unseen at the depths of the sea than to ornament our old, familiar friends, the goat, the hog, the sparrow, and the horse.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Apr 19, 1924]

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‘Anatole France, the Man and His Work.’

[Anatole France , The Man and His Work (John Lane, 1924) by James Lewis May.]

It is no easy matter to write a great man’s life and criticise his work when in the first place he is alive, and in the second you are his friend. Mr May’s book, pleasantly and simply written as it is, shows signs of the inevitable constraint. To go deep would be to risk too many embroilments. He give us an outline of the life, and adds, rather gingerly, a discussion of the books. Both need a good deal of amplification at the reader’s hands. But it is convenient to have the biographical facts so conveniently together, and, when it comes to criticism, Mr May provides material for argument. Several interesting and intimate photographs add to the book’s charm.

[Nation & Athenaeum, May 3, 1924]

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The Private View of the Royal Academy …

The Private View of the Royal Academy is not an occasion for passing aesthetic judgements. One thousand five hundred and sixty-three works of art are, it is true, exhibited, but on Friday the second these were sliced into innumerable segments by the moving bodies of perhaps twice that number of well-dressed and distinguished human beings. The mind was perpetually jerked from art to life, and from life back again to the hollyhock, the polar bear, and the death-bed. There is, of course, less division between art and life at Burlington House than elsewhere. H.M. the King, Lord Milner, and the Princess Bibesco, as depicted by Mr Sims, Sir William Orpen, and Mr John, inevitably recall the glories of our blood and State rather than suggest reflections upon form in the abstract. At the Private View one tends to glance at the pictures as one turns the pages of an amplified and highly coloured illustrated newspaper devoted to the celebration of the British Empire in the persons of its generals, admirals, doctors, illustrious dead, inimitable fox-hounds, noblemen in orders, duchesses in jewels, and English squires upon English hacks. As a compliment to ourselves it is magnificent. As a contribution to art it requires a more serious and detailed examination than the private viewer can give.

[Nation & Athenaeum, May 10, 1924]

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Mr Benson’s Memories.

[Memories and Friends (John Murray, 1924) by A.C. Benson.]

In order to appreciate Mr Benson’s memories fully one should have been educated at Eton and Cambridge. One should have a settled income. One should have an armchair. One should have dined well. In this mood, and in these circumstances nothing can be pleasanter than to hear old stories of old dons; how Austen Leigh, for instance, once spat out a glass of wine at a railway station, which reminds us how very queer his pronunciation was; and so dallying to reminisce by the way, we reach the Ο. B., of course, and Stuart Donaldson, and divagate to the Cornishes, about whom we have our own favourite story to tell; praise Lady Ponsonby, most vigorous of old ladies; imitate Henry James; recollect Howard Sturgis; and wind up, when we are pleasantly kindled into mild self-approbation by the excellence of our friends, with a few speculations about Rupert Brooke.

What would Rupert Brooke have become if he had lived? But it is significant of Mr Benson’s methods and tastes that Rupert Brooke shoulders his way out of the golden circle in which the rest of his figures move. Mr Benson is mildly caustic about his poetry: ‘some of the poems are undeniably ugly … some of the love poems are even over-voluptuous’. Worst still, ‘his feet and hands were somewhat large, and set stiffly on their joints; the latter had no expressiveness or grace, and his feet were roughly proportioned and homely’. Mr Benson is far more at his ease in the society of people whose feet are shapely and diminutive, who exist rather than act, who, to quote his own phrase, ‘give to the artistic and beautiful handling of life and its occasions the energy, the richness of perception, and the settled purpose that more directly practical natures reserve for their professional activities’.

The scene that Mr Benson prefers is a large rambling house, filled with ‘kindly unemphatic people’, whose whims and oddities are not pronounced enough to startle, but offer the appreciative observer hours and hours of delightful entertainment. Over it all he pours and pours endless words. The house is described; the servants are described; the dogs and the carriage horses are described; kindly glances, grave and tender tones are recalled; characters are skilfully and courteously adumbrated. Mr Benson is never incisive; the dinner table, or the tea table, or the high table, is always between him and his host to prevent intimacy. But in no other atmosphere could these well-bred, melancholy, distinguished Victorians appear so much at home. As we follow Mr Benson through this long, loitering journey among pleasant places and charming people, we are irresistibly reminded of another of his stories in another of his books—of an old dog of the Bensons which used to roam the fields open-mouthed, and once a woodcock flew in, and he put the bird gently and apologetically out unhurt. So Mr Benson has wandered, and the woodcocks have flown in, and he has put them out unhurt, as befits the son of an archbishop, who was educated at Eton, and lives at Cambridge.

[Nation & Athenaeum, May 10, 1924]

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‘Marie Elizabeth Towneley.’

[Mary Elizabeth Towneley (In religion Sister Marie des Saints Anges) Provincial of the English Province of The Sisters of Notre Dame of Namur. A Memoir. With a Preface by His Lordship the Bishop of Southwark (Burns Oates & Washbourne Ltd., 1924).]

Sister Marie des Anges, in secular life Mary Towneley, was descended from the two ancient and wealthy families of Towneley and Tichborne. The lay reader will probably find the chief interest of this handsome and copiously illustrated biography in the psychological drama of a woman who had great possessions. She was a handsome girl, a keen rider to hounds, whose family legitimately expected her to live a brilliant life in their own brilliant world. Without a trace of the ascetic—for she was benevolent and warm-hearted and a trifle impatient—she left them to lead the life of a religious sister at Namur. There she never had a room to herself or enjoyed the luxury of blind or curtain. She cleaned the knife-machine and made the beds. Of her famous friends she never spoke, and only revealed her passion for riding by an occasional kindness to a horse. The vast wealth which she inherited on her brother’s death she lavished upon buying houses and endowing schools for the benefit of the English province. The story is told simply, if with too much insistence upon coats and arms and noble pedigrees.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Jun 7, 1924]

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What is a Good Novel?

A good novel is any novel that makes one think or feel. It must get its knife in between the joints of the hide with which most of us are covered. It must make us perhaps uneasy, certainly alert. The feeling it gives us must not be purely dramatic and thus apt to disappear directly we know how the story ends. It must be a lasting feeling, about matters which are of importance to us in one way or another. A good novel need not have a plot; need not have a happy ending; need not be about nice or respectable people; need not be in the least like life as we know it. But it must represent some conviction on the writer’s part. It must be written so as to convey the writer’s idea, whether complex or simple, as closely as possible. It must not repeat what is false or faded merely because the public finds it easy to mumble over again what is false and faded.

All this is based upon the novels that have been written in the past. It is impossible to be sure what the characteristics of a good novel will be in the future. Contemporary novels often surprise us by being very unlike what we have learnt to admire, and create a beauty which, because it is different from the old, is much harder to appreciate. But the opposite is also true; some of the best novels have been immediately popular and perfectly easy to understand. The only safe way of deciding whether a novel is good or bad is simply to observe one’s own sensations on reaching the last page. If we are lively, fresh, and full of ideas, then it is good; if jaded, indifferent, and lowered in vitality then it is bad. But to be certain how good a novel is and what kind of goodness it has is an extremely difficult matter. The best way is to read the old and the new side by side, to compare them, and so gradually make out a standard of one’s own.

[Highway; A Journal of Adult Education, Summer 1924]

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‘Unwritten History.’

[Unwritten History. With sixteen illustrations (Hutchinson & Co., 1914) by Cosmo Hamilton]

To sum up this stout, much illustrated volume in one word, it is the kind of book that the late King Edward would have enjoyed in his bath. That was the feat which the World under Mr Hamilton’s editorship satisfactorily accomplished. His book scores the same kind of success. It is dashing, splashing, spirited, a little broad in its humour, very cosmopolitan in its tone, and never for an instant stodgy, solemn, or highbrow. He has done everything that it is possible to do with a pen, and most things that can be done with a knife and fork. The story of his life, which is still in mid-career, reads like a gramophone record of good club talk. The talker has dined well, is in high feather, and reels off story after story. Some perhaps we have heard before. But it is worth letting the whole book run through one’s fingers if only for the sake of one or two undoubted pearls. And the sands flow fast.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Jun 21, 1924]

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‘The Life and Last Words of Wilfrid Ewart.’

[The Life and Last Words of Wilfrid Ewart (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1924) by Stephen Graham.]

The war has made us familiar with the type of book of which Mr Graham’s is a good example. A young man impresses his friends with his powers, writes one novel of great promise, and is killed at the age of thirty. The friends then attempt to record what he was to them, and to adumbrate what he might have been to the world. Those who did not know him follow with sympathy, but necessarily with some bewilderment. Mr Ewart was a brilliant journalist; it is obvious from the quotations here made. He was also one of those reserved and fastidious characters who take long to mature. The book is mainly a record of experiments in the art of growing up. At the end, we do not feel that we know what he would have become, if the stray bullet wandering about Mexico that night had missed him. But it is a vivid record of possibilities, and, as usual, Mr Graham writes with an eager and transparent sentimentality which is very readable.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Jun 21, 1924]

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‘Robert Smith Surtees.’

[Robert Smith Surtees (Creator of ‘Jorrocks’), 1803–1864 by Himself and E.D. Cuming (Blackwood, 1924).]

Very little excuse surely is needed for this life, which is largely an autobiography, of Surtees the famous sporting novelist. Characteristically, for Surtees was pleased to be a landowner and a magistrate with a ‘taste for scribbling’ as he put it, his fragment of autobiography was mixed with notes taken on the bench, and thus escaped notice until Mr Cuming went into his papers. The fragments, incomplete as they are, are all to the good. They tell us how he came to London in 1825; how he hunted in Sussex and France; how he pretended to practise as a solicitor, ‘but did not allow legal pursuits to interfere with his enjoyment of life’; how to beguile the dead winter of 1829, he began to write a semi-sporting novel, which was laughed at by his friends; how he got the New Sporting Magazine to accept him; how he created Jorrocks; inherited Hamsterley Hall, hunted the county at his own expense, stood for Parliament and failed; hated railways, and was in every way the model of that peculiarly British breed, the well-bred, well-read country gentleman, who by some freak of nature conceals a vein of genius in the seams of his mind. Since the words and doings of Jorrocks are still current coin, genius is not too strong a word to use of his creator, of whom we are glad to know what little we can.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Jun 21, 1924]

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The Weekend.

[The Week-End Book. General editors: Vera Mendel, Francis Meynell; Music editor: John Goss (Nonesuch Press, 1924).]

This is a very prettily printed little book, with a gay dust cover, and a dull binding, and a book marker with ‘Have you forgotten the salt?’ on one side, and ‘Have you forgotten the corkscrew?’ on the other, and good poems and bad poems and games and songs and recipes and quips and cranks and blank pages for more games and songs and quips and cranks—in short, the very book to hand to one’s hostess in return for a candlestick on Saturday night with a blessing. Instead of reviewing the book, it may be more to the point to describe simply what fruit that blessing bore on Sunday.

The day was hot; breakfast late. Through the half-open door a woman’s voice could be heard reciting:—

I scarcely believe my love to be so pure

As I had thought it was

—an embarrassing statement (since the book was forgotten), and matters were scarcely mended by the horrid agony of being forced to guess, on entering the room, who wrote it. Happily there was present a retired governor of one of our eastern possessions, who, taking the volume from her hand as she read on, cried out that, whoever wrote it, Donne did not. There was, it seems, an iniquitous misprint on that page; and under cover of his fulminations eating became momentarily feasible. A sunburnt egg might be hooked into proximity with a spoon. But could one eat it? The indefatigable woman was off again reciting Shakespeare, and the bold spirit has yet to be discovered who can crack an egg with intrepidity while Shakespeare is being read aloud. A tentative tapping came from some; others sat mute, bored, upright. However, the day was hot; the window open; the garden wide; escape possible. Roses, peonies, cauliflowers—we need not retail a list of garden produce at this season, nor make apology for that genial and pious spirit which, when the church bells ring to church, bids some of us resign ourselves to sleep. Only, the path was narrow; and people must walk up and down it two abreast. Even in the underworld of dreams it was impossible not to adumbrate some fantastic version of what the noise was all about. It was about poetry. First, that nobody could call that poetry; next, that everybody must admit this. Suddenly—and there the very dead must have wakened to see the wretched little book tossed and torn between a couple of infuriated readers—suddenly the word ‘Emerson’ rent the air. Emerson had been discovered among the laurels; couchant with Shelley and Keats; proclaimed by the anthologists the author of a ‘great poem’—Emerson the American! Emerson the essayist! Worse was to come. A living rhymer, without even the varnish of death or antiquity to excuse the blasphemy, had intruded into the same holy spot. He too wrote ‘great poems’. Since sleep was impossible, the morning might as well be wasted in argument; living against dead; classics against romantics; until the lunch bell rang, and dishevelled and bellicose the guests assembled to find their hostess, who had been to church, returned fresh for the pursuit. We were all to spend the afternoon, she said, playing games. The Week-End Book, of which she had regained possession, recommended Free Association Team Race, the Animal and the Stick Game, Famous People on Paper, Book Reviews, and many others. Moreover, it provided recipes for sandwiches and cocktails. She proposed to take us all for a walk and to wind up, as the kind people suggested, with a little music.

As she ended, animation was to be observed in some quarters. Upon others the shades of night descended. One of those deep and for the most part hidden abysses between man and man had been uncovered. Tempers would soon be lost. Thunder was brewing; satire preparing. The beef was getting cold; the servant maid was jogging people’s elbows, when the old gentleman, who had ruled the East and subdued, no doubt, countless mutinies and hordes of wild elephants, observed that in his experience the race is divided thus: there are the sociables and there are the solitaries. One party, he said, is every bit as good as the other. (Tension relaxed.) Indeed, he said, each is indispensable to the other. (Amenity was restored.) Here we have an instance, he continued, pointing to the book. (Plates circulated.) The sociables, for whom this facetious and altogether well-meaning little book was written, are admirable citizens, people of spirit, adventure, and good will. Let them take their book, sing their songs, play their games, mix their cocktails, admire their poems, in company. Meanwhile the solitaries, to whom he owned that he belonged, will do, he said (and seldom has human face looked so divine), precisely what they like. And what did we like, as we trooped after him out of doors? Everything in the whole world. Pigs and calves; cocks and hens; the smell of beans and the smell of straw; roses and tobacco; but not, we agreed, as we rambled off into the vast and glorious freedom of the universe, that book.

[Times Literary Supplement, Jul 3, 1924]

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Stendhal.

[Stendhal: Journal. Texte établi et annoté par Henry Debrave et Louis Royer. Tome Premier, 1801–1805; Le Rouge et le Noir, two vols; Vie de Rossini. Suivie des Notes d’un Dilettante. Texte établi et annoté avec une introduction historique par Jules Marsan. Préface de Paul Bourget, two vols (Edouard Champion, 1923) by Stendhal]

Stendhal’s fame, since it depends upon a small but enthusiastic band whose attachment is not literary merely, but personal, will probably increase in England rather than lessen, and we do not doubt that this new and finely printed edition of his works will find room on many English shelves. In particular, we welcome the first volume of what the editors hope to make the definitive edition of the Journal. True, the first volume is no fair specimen of the rest. It is filled with a vast number of dry facts, annotations, and enumerations. He records the state of his health and the state of his purse. He is for ever going to the play and seeing so-and-so act. But he is pen-tied, congested, and callow. If he were not Stendhal, we might shirk the labour of adding up so many little facts into one sum total. But then he is Stendhal. He is that dry, scientific, amorous, complex, and strangely fascinating man who even in scraps tastes differently from other people, who even in this first volume forces us to try to fit the pieces of his puzzle together.

The first volume of the diary is kept by a composite human soul who is neither boy nor man, but a mixture of child and schoolmaster. The child writes down his doings day by day; the schoolmaster looks over his shoulder and makes his comment in the margin. In other words, Stendhal was set from the first upon mastering the art of life. With this end in view he takes notes and observes incessantly both what others do and what he does himself. For example, he must cure himself of the habit of blurting out his opinion just as nimbler-witted people are wishing to change the conversation. He has observed that simplicity is always popular; he must aim then at simplicity. In these early pages we seem to see him hard at work in the dim hour before the sun rises, examining the foundations upon which his life is to be built. Again and again he turns to examine the problems of literature. What are the qualities that go to make a first-rate comedy? And what is the difference between tragedy and comedy? And what are the elements of Shakespeare’s greatness? Then life is taken up and turned round between his fingers. By what means can one ensure the greatest possible happiness in life? And which is more powerful—love of glory or love of women? By degrees the familiar features of his character begin to emerge: his ambition; his fastidiousness—‘Je pourrais faire un ouvrage qui ne plairait qu’à moi et qui serait reconnu beau en 2000’—his passionate, yet scientific, research into the nature of love; his indefatigable curiosity as to the constituents of the human soul. ‘C’est la connaissance de ce qu’il y a de plus caché au fond du cœur et de la tête que je veux acquérir.’ Meanwhile, the forerunners of that long procession of women which was to march through his life make their appearance—Adèle, Victorine, Melanie. His pen gathers strength and point as it fleshes itself upon these lovely creatures, who are at once the objects of his passionate love and of his scientific curiosity; he raves, he dissects, he tears them to pieces. Indeed, the process is at times so frank that the publishers have thought best to print certain passages on loose leaves, which can be burnt or bound, according to the wishes of the reader. For our own part Stendhal is Stendhal; and disinfects every page with the pungency of his own personal fascination.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Jul 5, 1924]

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‘Days That Are Gone.’

[Days That Are Gone … Being the Recollections of some Seventy Years of the Life of a very ordinary Gentleman and his Friends in Three Reigns (Hutchinson & Co., 1914) by Colonel B. De Sales La Terrière]

Colonel la Terrière has lived to an age when, having no future, as he says, and very little present, the most congenial occupation is to record the joys of the past. And the Colonel is convinced that the joys of himself and of other ‘very ordinary gentlemen’ like him are over and done with for good. He was educated at Eton and Oxford. ‘What Eton will become under the present radical revolution it is impossible to say.’ Possibly the people will destroy Eton, and then what he takes the liberty of thinking the finest product in the world, the English gentleman, will become extinct. ‘Thank God, we’ve got rid of Lloyd George at last,’ he exclaims, but not before we made ‘the most colossal mistake in history’—for so the Colonel said it was at the time, and so time has proved it to be—the Armistice. The Colonel’s advice was disregarded upon another occasion with disastrous results. King Edward backed the wrong horse. We should have kept in with Germany. ‘I hate the sight of a German, and even to hear anyone speak two words of their beastly language makes me sick, but my detestation of them doesn’t blind me to facts.’ His comments upon the Labour Government are, unfortunately, squeezed into a postscript. As for Kitchener, he was not a man of the world; and as for Oscar Wilde, whom the Colonel encountered at Oxford: ‘“Great wits to madness oft are near allied” seems to hit off the poor chap. R.I.P.’ Let us echo R.I.P.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Jul 5, 1924]

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‘Before the Mast—And After.’

[Before the Mast—And After. The Autobiography of a Sailor and Shipowner (Fisher Unwin, 1924) by Sir Walter Runciman]

The fascination of Sir Walter Runciman’s book may best be conveyed by saying that, if one of Mr Conrad’s sea captains had possessed a gift for writing, this is precisely the book he would have written. Here is a Conrad novel in the rough, before the master has thrown his cloak of many-coloured words over it. Sir Walter was an active seaman in the great days, which he admires and regrets, of the sailing ship. Benevolent legislation had then done little to remove what was removable of a sailor’s hardships. Sir Walter climbed from cabin-boy to captain over the stoniest of roads. He was ‘moulded into manhood under the rule of barely regulated ferocity’. He has gone without food or water, been shot at by mutineers, ridden storms, and seen ships sink by his side, until, worn out by the buffetings of his friend and enemy, he retired, to become a highly successful shipowner. But Sir Walter would probably agree that it was the early life that was the best worth living, not only for its adventures, but for its encounters, for his book is full of various and wonderful men.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Jul 12, 1924]

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‘The Truth at Last.’

[The Truth at Last (Thornton Butterworths Ltd., 1924) by Charles Hawtrey]

Mr Somerset Maugham, who introduces these recollections, says that it struck him as singular that Charles Hawtrey excelled in an art ‘to which after all he was somewhat indifferent’. His real interest, he goes on to say, was not in acting, but in life, particularly in that special department of life which centres in the race-course. Hawtrey made his first bet when he was an Eton boy, and it was the forerunner of a vast progeny. He became an actor as most men become bankers, barristers, or doctors—to make a living. And for the rest of his life the two interests intersect so closely and beat up such a dust of affairs between them that it is difficult to see any particular event very clearly. That is the weakness of much dramatic and sporting literature. It needs a born writer to breathe life into the innumerable details of ancient races and ancient plays. Hawtrey was only a perfunctory recorder—a hurried, good-tempered, rather breathless man setting down notes of what had happened to him and feeling, one can be sure, that all the spice went out of his story as he told it. Now and again he makes a little confidence—‘I am a steadfast believer in the efficacy of prayer’—or tells a vivid story, but for the most part the book is a jumble of old race-cards and old play-bills, among which the reader must be prepared to do a little artful skipping for himself.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Jul 19, 1924]

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Character in Fiction.

It seems to me possible, perhaps desirable, that I may be the only person in this room who has committed the folly of writing, trying to write, or failing to write, a novel. And when I asked myself, as your invitation to speak to you about modern fiction made me ask myself, what demon whispered in my ear and urged me to my doom, a little figure rose before me—the figure of a man, or of a woman, who said, ‘My name is Brown. Catch me if you can.’

Most novelists have the same experience. Some Brown, Smith, or Jones comes before them and says in the most seductive and charming way in the world, ‘Come and catch me if you can.’ And so, led on by this will-o’-the-wisp, they flounder through volume after volume, spending the best years of their lives in the pursuit, and receiving for the most part very little cash in exchange. Few catch the phantom; most have to be content with a scrap of her dress or a wisp of her hair.

My belief that men and women write novels because they are lured on to create some character which has thus imposed itself upon them has the sanction of Mr Arnold Bennett. In an article from which I will quote he says: ‘The foundation of good fiction is character-creating and nothing else … Style counts; plot counts; originality of outlook counts. But none of these counts anything like so much as the convincingness of the characters. If the characters are real the novel will have a chance; if they are not, oblivion will be its portion …’ And he goes on to draw the conclusion that we have no young novelists of first-rate importance at the present moment, because they are unable to create characters that are real, true, and convincing.

These are the questions that I want with greater boldness than discretion to discuss tonight. I want to make out what we mean when we talk about ‘character’ in fiction; to say something about the question of reality which Mr Bennett raises; and to suggest some reasons why the younger novelists fail to create characters, if, as Mr Bennett asserts, it is true that fail they do. This will lead me, I am well aware, to make some very sweeping and some very vague assertions. For the question is an extremely difficult one. Think how little we know about character—think how little we know about art. But, to make a clearance before I begin, I will suggest that we range Edwardians and Georgians into two camps; Mr Wells, Mr Bennett, and Mr Galsworthy I will call the Edwardians; Mr Forster, Mr Lawrence, Mr Strachey, Mr Joyce, and Mr Eliot I will call the Georgians. And if I speak in the first person, with intolerable egotism, I will ask you to excuse me. I do not want to attribute to the world at large the opinions of one solitary, ill-informed, and misguided individual.

My first assertion is one that I think you will grant—that every one in this room is a judge of character. Indeed it would be impossible to live for a year without disaster unless one practised character-reading and had some skill in the art. Our marriages, our friendships depend on it; our business largely depends on it; every day questions arise which can only be solved by its help. And now I will hazard a second assertion, which is more disputable perhaps, to the effect that on or about December 1910 human character changed.

I am not saying that one went out, as one might into a garden, and there saw that a rose had flowered, or that a hen had laid an egg. The change was not sudden and definite like that. But a change there was, nevertheless; and, since one must be arbitrary, let us date it about the year 1910. The first signs of it are recorded in the books of Samuel Butler, in The Way of All Flesh in particular; the plays of Bernard Shaw continue to record it. In life one can see the change, if I may use a homely illustration, in the character of one’s cook. The Victorian cook lived like a leviathan in the lower depths, formidable, silent, obscure, inscrutable; the Georgian cook is a creature of sunshine and fresh air; in and out of the drawing room, now to borrow the Daily Herald, now to ask advice about a hat. Do you ask for more solemn instances of the power of the human race to change? Read the Agamemnon, and see whether, in process of time, your sympathies are not almost entirely with Clytemnestra. Or consider the married life of the Carlyles, and bewail the waste, the futility, for him and for her, of the horrible domestic tradition which made it seemly for a woman of genius to spend her time chasing beetles, scouring saucepans, instead of writing books. All human relations have shifted—those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics and literature. Let us agree to place one of these changes about the year 1910.

I have said that people have to acquire a good deal of skill in character-reading if they are to live a single year of life without disaster. But it is the art of the young. In middle age and in old age the art is practised mostly for its uses, and friendships and other adventures and experiments in the art of reading character are seldom made. But novelists differ from the rest of the world because they do not cease to be interested in character when they have learnt enough about it for practical purposes. They go a step further; they feel that there is something permanently interesting in character in itself. When all the practical business of life has been discharged, there is something about people which continues to seem to them of overwhelming importance, in spite of the fact that it has no bearing whatever upon their happiness, comfort, or income. The study of character becomes to them an absorbing pursuit; to impart character an obsession. And this I find it very difficult to explain: what novelists mean when they talk about character, what the impulse is that urges them so powerfully every now and then to embody their view in writing.

So, if you will allow me, instead of analysing and abstracting, I will tell you a simple story which, however pointless, has the merit of being true, of a journey from Richmond to Waterloo, in the hope that I may show you what I mean by character in itself; that you may realise the different aspects it can wear; and the hideous perils that beset you directly you try to describe it in words.

One night some weeks ago, then, I was late for the train and jumped into the first carriage I came to. As I sat down I had the strange and uncomfortable feeling that I was interrupting a conversation between two people who were already sitting there. Not that they were young or happy. Far from it. They were both elderly, the woman over sixty, the man well over forty. They were sitting opposite each other, and the man, who had been leaning over and talking emphatically to judge by his attitude and the flush on his face, sat back and became silent. I had disturbed him, and he was annoyed. The elderly lady, however, whom I will call Mrs Brown, seemed rather relieved. She was one of those clean, threadbare old ladies whose extreme tidiness—everything buttoned, fastened, tied together, mended and brushed up—suggests more extreme poverty than rags and dirt. There was something pinched about her—a look of suffering, of apprehension, and, in addition, she was extremely small. Her feet, in their clean little boots, scarcely touched the floor. I felt that she had nobody to support her; that she had to make up her mind for herself; that, having been deserted, or left a widow, years ago, she had led an anxious, harried life, bringing up an only son, perhaps, who, as likely as not, was by this time beginning to go to the bad. All this shot through my mind as I sat down, being uncomfortable, like most people, at travelling with fellow passengers unless I have somehow or other accounted for them. Then I looked at the man. He was no relation of Mrs Brown’s I felt sure; he was of a bigger, burlier, less refined type. He was a man of business I imagined, very likely a respectable corn-chandler from the North, dressed in good blue serge with a pocket-knife and a silk handkerchief, and a stout leather bag. Obviously, however, he had an unpleasant business to settle with Mrs Brown; a secret, perhaps sinister business, which they did not intend to discuss in my presence.

‘Yes, the Crofts have had very bad luck with their servants,’ Mr Smith (as I will call him) said in a considering way, going back to some earlier topic, with a view to keeping up appearances.

‘Ah, poor people,’ said Mrs Brown, a trifle condescendingly. ‘My grandmother had a maid who came when she was fifteen and stayed till she was eighty’ (this was said with a kind of hurt and aggressive pride to impress us both perhaps).

‘One doesn’t often come across that sort of thing nowadays,’ said Mr Smith in conciliatory tones.

Then they were silent.

‘It’s odd they don’t start a golf club there—I should have thought one of the young fellows would,’ said Mr Smith, for the silence obviously made him uneasy.

Mrs Brown hardly took the trouble to answer.

‘What changes they’re making in this part of the world,’ said Mr Smith looking out of the window, and looking furtively at me as he did do.

It was plain, from Mrs Brown’s silence, from the uneasy affability with which Mr Smith spoke, that he had some power over her which he was exerting disagreeably. It might have been her son’s downfall, or some painful episode in her past life, or her daughter’s. Perhaps she was going to London to sign some document to make over some property. Obviously against her will she was in Mr Smith’s hands. I was beginning to feel a great deal of pity for her, when she said, suddenly and inconsequently,

‘Can you tell me if an oak tree dies when the leaves have been eaten for two years in succession by caterpillars?’

She spoke quite brightly, and rather precisely, in a cultivated, inquisitive voice.

Mr Smith was startled, but relieved to have a safe topic of conversation given him. He told her a great deal very quickly about plagues of insects. He told her that he had a brother who kept a fruit farm in Kent. He told her what fruit farmers do every year in Kent, and so on, and so on. While he talked a very odd thing happened. Mrs Brown took out her little white handkerchief and began to dab her eyes. She was crying. But she went on listening quite composedly to what he was saying, and he went on talking, a little louder, a little angrily, as if he had seen her cry often before; as if it were a painful habit. At last it got on his nerves. He stopped abruptly, looked out of the window, then leant towards her as he had been doing when I got in, and said in a bullying, menacing way, as if he would not stand any more nonsense,

‘So about that matter we were discussing. It’ll be all right? George will be there on Tuesday?’

‘We shan’t be late,’ said Mrs Brown, gathering herself together with superb dignity.

Mr Smith said nothing. He got up, buttoned his coat, reached his bag down, and jumped out of the train before it had stopped at Clapham Junction. He had got what he wanted, but he was ashamed of himself; he was glad to get out of the old lady’s sight.

Mrs Brown and I were left alone together. She sat in her corner opposite, very clean, very small, rather queer, and suffering intensely. The impression she made was overwhelming. It came pouring out like a draught, like a smell of burning. What was it composed of—that overwhelming and peculiar impression? Myriads of irrelevant and incongruous ideas crowd into one’s head on such occasions; one sees the person, one sees Mrs Brown, in the centre of all sorts of different scenes. I thought of her in a seaside house, among queer ornaments: sea-urchins, models of ships in glass cases. Her husband’s medals were on the mantelpiece. She popped in and out of the room, perching on the edges of chairs, picking meals out of saucers, indulging in long, silent stares. The caterpillars and the oak trees seemed to imply all that. And then, into this fantastic and secluded life, in broke Mr Smith. I saw him blowing in, so to speak, on a windy day. He banged, he slammed. His dripping umbrella made a pool in the hall. They sat closeted together.

And then Mrs Brown faced the dreadful revelation. She took her heroic decision. Early, before dawn, she packed her bag and carried it herself to the station. She would not let Smith touch it. She was wounded in her pride, unmoored from her anchorage; she came of gentle folks who kept servants—but details could wait. The important thing was to realise her character, to steep oneself in her atmosphere. I had no time to explain why I felt it somewhat tragic, heroic, yet with a dash of the flighty, and fantastic, before the train stopped, and I watched her disappear, carrying her bag, into the vast blazing station. She looked very small, very tenacious; at once very frail and very heroic. And I have never seen her again, and I shall never know what became of her.

The story ends without any point to it. But I have not told you this anecdote to illustrate either my own ingenuity or the pleasure of travelling from Richmond to Waterloo. What I want you to see in it is this. Here is a character imposing itself upon another person. Here is Mrs Brown making someone begin almost automatically to write a novel about her. I believe that all novels begin with an old lady in the corner opposite. I believe that all novels, that is to say, deal with character, and that it is to express character—not to preach doctrines, sing songs, or celebrate the glories of the British Empire, that the form of the novel, so clumsy, verbose, and undramatic, so rich, elastic, and alive, has been evolved. To express character, I have said; but you will at once reflect that the very widest interpretation can be put upon those words. For example, old Mrs Brown’s character will strike you very differently according to the age and country in which you happen to be born. It would be easy enough to write three different versions of that incident in the train, an English, a French, and a Russian. The English writer would make the old lady into a ‘character’; he would bring out her oddities and mannerisms; her buttons and wrinkles; her ribbons and warts. Her personality would dominate the book. A French writer would rub out all that; he would sacrifice the individual Mrs Brown to give a more general view of human nature; to make a more abstract, proportioned, and harmonious whole. The Russian would pierce through the flesh; would reveal the soul—the soul alone, wandering out into the Waterloo Road, asking of life some tremendous question which would sound on and on in our ears after the book was finished. And then there is the writer’s temperament to be considered. You see one thing in character, and I another. You say it means this, and I that. And when it comes to writing each makes a further selection on principles of his own. Thus Mrs Brown can be treated in an infinite variety of ways, according to the age, country, and temperament of the writer.

But now I must recall what Mr Arnold Bennett says. He says that it is only if the characters are real that the novel has any chance of surviving. Otherwise, die it must. But, I ask myself, what is reality? And who are the judges of reality? A character may be real to Mr Bennett and quite unreal to me. For instance, in this article he says that Dr Watson in Sherlock Holmes is real to him: to me Dr Watson is a sack stuffed with straw, a dummy, a figure of fun. And so it is with character after character—in book after book. There is nothing that people differ about more than the reality of characters, especially in contemporary books. But if you take a larger view I think that Mr Bennett is perfectly right. If, that is, you think of the novels which seem to you great novels—War and Peace, Vanity Fair, Tristram Shandy, Madame Bovary, Pride and Prejudice, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Villette—if you think of these books, you do at once think of some character who has seemed to you so real (I do not by that mean so lifelike) that it has the power to make you think not merely of it itself, but of all sorts of things through its eyes—of religion, of love, of war, of peace, of family life, of balls in county towns, of sunsets, moonrises, the immortality of the soul. There is hardly any subject of human experience that is left out of War and Peace it seems to me. And in all these novels all these great novelists have brought us to see whatever they wish us to see through some character. Otherwise, they would not be novelists; but poets, historians, or pamphleteers.

But now let us examine what Mr Bennett went on to say—he said that there was no great novelist among the Georgian writers because they cannot create characters who are real, true, and convincing. And there I cannot agree. There are reasons, excuses, possibilities which I think put a different colour upon the case. It seems to me at least, but I am well aware that this is a matter about which I am likely to be prejudiced, sanguine, and near-sighted. I will put my view before you in the hope that you will make it impartial, judicial, and broadminded. Why, then, is it so hard for novelists at present to create characters which seem real, not only to Mr Bennett, but to the world at large? Why, when October comes round, do the publishers always fail to supply us with a masterpiece?

Surely one reason is that the men and women who began writing novels in 1910 or thereabouts had this great difficulty to face—that there was no English novelist living from whom they could learn their business. Mr Conrad is a Pole; which sets him apart, and makes him, however admirable, not very helpful. Mr Hardy has written no novel since 1895. The most prominent and successful novelists in the year 1910 were, I suppose, Mr Wells, Mr Bennett, and Mr Galsworthy. Now it seems to me that to go to these men and ask them to teach you how to write a novel—how to create characters that are real—is precisely like going to a bootmaker and asking him to teach you how to make a watch. Do not let me give you the impression that I do not admire and enjoy their books. They seem to me of great value, and indeed of great necessity. There are seasons when it is more important to have boots than to have watches. To drop metaphor, I think that after the creative activity of the Victorian age it was quite necessary, not only for literature but for life, that someone should write the books that Mr Wells, Mr Bennett, and Mr Galsworthy have written. Yet what odd books they are! Sometimes I wonder if we are right to call them books at all. For they leave one with so strange a feeling of incompleteness and dissatisfaction. In order to complete them it seems necessary to do something—to join a society, or, more desperately, to write a cheque. That done, the restlessness is laid, the book finished; it can be put upon the shelf, and need never be read again. But with the work of other novelists it is different. Tristram Shandy or Pride and Prejudice is complete in itself; it is self-contained; it leaves one with no desire to do anything, except indeed to read the book again, and to understand it better. The difference perhaps is that both Sterne and Jane Austen were interested in things in themselves; in character in itself; in the book in itself. Therefore everything was inside the book, nothing outside. But the Edwardians were never interested in character in itself; or in the book in itself. They were interested in something outside. Their books, then, were incomplete as books, and required that the reader should finish them, actively and practically, for himself.

Perhaps we can make this clearer if we take the liberty of imagining a little party in the railway carriage—Mr Wells, Mr Galsworthy, Mr Bennett are travelling to Waterloo with Mrs Brown. Mrs Brown, I have said, was poorly dressed and very small. She had an anxious, harassed look. I doubt whether she was what you call an educated woman. Seizing upon all these symptoms of the unsatisfactory condition of our primary schools with a rapidity to which I can do no justice, Mr Wells would instantly project upon the window-pane a vision of a better, breezier, jollier, happier, more adventurous and gallant world, where these musty railway carriages and fusty old women do not exist; where miraculous barges bring tropical fruit to Camberwell by eight o’clock in the morning; where there are public nurseries, fountains, and libraries, dining-rooms, drawing-rooms, and marriages; where every citizen is generous and candid, manly and magnificent, and rather like Mr Wells himself. But nobody is in the least like Mrs Brown. There are no Mrs Browns in Utopia. Indeed I do not think that Mr Wells, in his passion to make her what she ought to be, would waste a thought upon her as she is. And what would Mr Galsworthy see? Can we doubt that the walls of Doulton’s factory would take his fancy? There are women in that factory who make twenty-five dozen earthenware pots every day. There are mothers in the Mile End Road who depend upon the farthings which those women earn. But there are employers in Surrey who are even now smoking rich cigars while the nightingale sings. Burning with indignation, stuffed with information, arraigning civilisation, Mr Galsworthy would only see in Mrs Brown a pot broken on the wheel and thrown into the corner.

Mr Bennett, alone of the Edwardians, would keep his eyes in the carriage. He, indeed, would observe every detail with immense care. He would notice the advertisements; the pictures of Swanage and Portsmouth; the way in which the cushion bulged between the buttons; how Mrs Brown wore a brooch which had cost three-and-ten-three at Whitworth’s bazaar; and had mended both gloves—indeed the thumb of the left-hand glove had been replaced. And he would observe, at length, how this was the non-stop train from Windsor which calls at Richmond for the convenience of middle-class residents, who can afford to go to the theatre but have not reached the social rank which can afford motor cars, though it is true, there are occasions (he would tell us what), when they hire them from a company (he would tell us which). And so he would gradually sidle sedately towards Mrs Brown, and would remark how she had been left a little copyhold, not freehold, property at Datchet, which, however, was mortgaged to Mr Bungay the solicitor—but why should I presume to invent Mr Bennett? Does not Mr Bennett write novels himself? I will open the first book that chance puts in my way—Hilda Lessways. Let us see how he makes us feel that Hilda is real, true, and convincing, as a novelist should. She shut the door in a soft, controlled way, which showed the constraint of her relations with her mother. She was fond of reading Maud; she was endowed with the power to feel intensely. So far, so good; in his leisurely, surefooted way Mr Bennett is trying in these first pages, where every touch is important, to show us the kind of girl she was.

But then he begins to describe, not Hilda Lessways, but the view from her bedroom window, the excuse being that Mr Skellorn, the man who collects rents, is coming along that way. Mr Bennett proceeds:

The bailiwick of Turnhill lay behind her; and all the murky district of the Five Towns, of which Turnhill is the northern outpost, lay to the south. At the foot of Chatterley Wood the canal wound in large curves on its way towards the undefiled plains of Cheshire and the sea. On the canal-side, exactly opposite to Hilda’s window, was a flour-mill, that sometimes made nearly as much smoke as the kilns and the chimneys closing the prospect on either hand. From the flour-mill a bricked path, which separated a considerable row of new cottages from their appurtenant gardens, led straight into Lessways Street, in front of Mrs Lessways’ house. By this path Mr Skellorn should have arrived, for he inhabited the farthest of the cottages.

One line of insight would have done more than all those lines of description; but let them pass as the necessary drudgery of the novelist. And now—where is Hilda? Alas. Hilda is still looking out of the window. Passionate and dissatisfied as she was, she was a girl with an eye for houses. She often compared this old Mr Skellorn with the villas she saw from her bedroom window. Therefore the villas must be described. Mr Bennett proceeds:

The row was called Freehold Villas: a consciously proud name in a district where much of the land was copyhold and could only change owners subject to the payment of ‘fines’, and to the feudal consent of a ‘court’ presided over by the agent of a lord of the manor. Most of the dwellings were owned by their occupiers, who, each an absolute monarch of the soil, niggled in his sooty garden of an evening amid the flutter of drying shirts and towels. Freehold Villas symbolised the final triumph of Victorian economics, the apotheosis of the prudent and industrious artisan. It corresponded with a Building Society Secretary’s dream of paradise. And indeed it was a very real achievement. Nevertheless, Hilda’s irrational contempt would not admit this.

Heaven be praised, we cry! At last we are coming to Hilda herself. But not so fast. Hilda may have been this, that, and the other; but Hilda not only looked at houses, and thought of houses; Hilda lived in a house. And what sort of a house did Hilda live in? Mr Bennett proceeds:

It was one of the two middle houses of a detached terrace of four houses built by her grandfather Lessways, the teapot manufacturer; it was the chief of the four, obviously the habitation of the proprietor of the terrace. One of the corner houses comprised a grocer’s shop, and this house had been robbed of its just proportion of garden so that the seigneurial gardenplot might be triflingly larger than the other. The terrace was not a terrace of cottages, but of houses rated at from twenty-six to thirty-six pounds a year; beyond the means of artisans and petty insurance agents and rentcollectors. And further, it was well built, generously built; and its architecture, though debased, showed some faint traces of Georgian amenity. It was admittedly the best row of houses in that newly settled quarter of the town. In coming to it out of Freehold Villas Mr Skellorn obviously came to something superior, wider, more liberal. Suddenly Hilda heard her mother’s voice …

But we cannot hear her mother’s voice, or Hilda’s voice; we can only hear Mr Bennett’s voice telling us facts about rents and freeholds and copyholds and fines. What can Mr Bennett be about? I have formed my own opinion of what Mr Bennett is about—he is trying to make us imagine for him; he is trying to hypnotise us into the belief that, because he has made a house, there must be a person living there. With all his powers of observation, which are marvellous, with all his sympathy and humanity, which are great, Mr Bennett has never once looked at Mrs Brown in her corner. There she sits in the corner of the carriage—that carriage which is travelling, not from Richmond to Waterloo, but from one age of English literature to the next, for Mrs Brown is eternal, Mrs Brown is human nature, Mrs Brown changes only on the surface, it is the novelists who get in and out—there she sits and not one of the Edwardian writers has so much as looked at her. They have looked very powerfully, searchingly, and sympathetically out of the window; at factories, at Utopias, even at the decoration and upholstery of the carriage; but never at her, never at life, never at human nature. And so they have developed a technique of novel-writing which suits their purpose; they have made tools and established conventions which do their business. But those tools are not our tools, and that business is not our business. For us those conventions are ruin, those tools are death.

You may well complain of the vagueness of my language. What is a convention, a tool, you may ask, and what do you mean by saying that Mr Bennett’s and Mr Wells’s and Mr Galsworthy’s conventions are the wrong conventions for the Georgians? The question is difficult: I will attempt a short cut. A convention in writing is not much different from a convention in manners. Both in life and in literature it is necessary to have some means of bridging the gulf between the hostess and her unknown guest on the one hand, the writer and his unknown reader on the other. The hostess bethinks her of the weather, for generations of hostesses have established the fact that this is a subject of universal interest in which we all believe. She begins by saying that we are having a wretched May, and, having thus got into touch with her unknown guest, proceeds to matters of greater interest. So it is in literature. The writer must get into touch with his reader by putting before him something which he recognises, which therefore stimulates his imagination, and makes him willing to co-operate in the far more difficult business of intimacy. And it is of the highest importance that this common meeting-place should be reached easily, almost instinctively, in the dark, with one’s eyes shut. Here is Mr Bennett making use of this common ground in the passage which I have quoted. The problem before him was to make us believe in the reality of Hilda Lessways. So he began, being an Edwardian, by describing accurately and minutely the sort of house Hilda lived in, and the sort of house she saw from the window. House property was the common ground from which the Edwardians found it easy to proceed to intimacy. Indirect as it seems to us, the convention worked admirably, and thousands of Hilda Lessways were launched upon the world by this means. For that age and generation, the convention was a good one.

But now, if you will allow me to pull my own anecdote to pieces, you will see how keenly I felt the lack of a convention, and how serious a matter it is when the tools of one generation are useless for the next. The incident had made a great impression on me. But how was I to transmit it to you? All I could do was to report as accurately as I could what was said, to describe in detail what was worn, to say, despairingly, that all sorts of scenes rushed into my mind, to proceed to tumble them out pell-mell, and to describe this vivid, this overmastering impression by likening it to a draught or a smell of burning. To tell you the truth, I was also strongly tempted to manufacture a three-volume novel about the old lady’s son, and his adventures crossing the Atlantic, and her daughter, and how she kept a milliner’s shop in Westminster, the past life of Smith himself, and his house at Sheffield, though such stories seem to me the most dreary, irrelevant, and humbugging affairs in the world.

But if I had done that I should have escaped the appalling effort of saying what I meant. And to have got at what I meant, I should have had to go back and back and back; to experiment with one thing and another; to try this sentence and that, referring each word to my vision, matching it as exactly as possible, and knowing that somehow I had to find a common ground between us, a convention which would not seem to you too odd, unreal, and far-fetched to believe in. I admit that I shirked that arduous undertaking. I let my Mrs Brown slip through my fingers. I have told you nothing whatever about her. But that is partly the great Edwardians’ fault. I asked them—they are my elders and betters—How shall I begin to describe this woman’s character? And they said, ‘Begin by saying that her father kept a shop in Harrogate. Ascertain the rent. Ascertain the wages of shop assistants in the year 1878. Discover what her mother died of. Describe cancer. Describe calico. Describe—’ But I cried, ‘Stop! Stop!’ and I regret to say that I threw that ugly, that clumsy, that incongruous tool out of the window, for I knew that if I began describing the cancer and the calico, my Mrs Brown, that vision to which I cling though I know no way of imparting it to you, would have been dulled and tarnished and vanished for ever.

That is what I mean by saying that the Edwardian tools are the wrong ones for us to use. They have laid an enormous stress upon the fabric of things. They have given us a house in the hope that we may be able to deduce the human beings who live there. To give them their due, they have made that house much better worth living in. But if you hold that novels are in the first place about people, and only in the second about the houses they live in, that is the wrong way to set about it. Therefore, you see, the Georgian writer had to begin by throwing away the method that was in use at the moment. He was left alone there facing Mrs Brown without any method of conveying her to the reader. But that is inaccurate. A writer is never alone. There is always the public with him—if not on the same seat, at least in the compartment next door. Now the public is a strange travelling companion. In England it is a very suggestible and docile creature, which, once you get it to attend, will believe implicitly what it is told for a certain number of years. If you say to the public with sufficient convinction, ‘All women have tails, and all men humps,’ it will actually learn to see women with tails and men with humps, and will think it very revolutionary and probably improper if you say ‘Nonsense. Monkeys have tails and camels humps. But men and women have brains, and they have hearts; they think and they feel,’—that will seem to it a bad joke, and an improper into the bargain.

But to return. Here is the British public sitting by the writer’s side and saying in its vast and unanimous way, ‘Old women have houses. They have fathers. They have incomes. They have servants. They have hot water bottles. That is how we know that they are old women. Mr Wells and Mr Bennett and Mr Galsworthy have always taught us that this is the way to recognise them. But now with your Mrs Brown—how are we to believe in her? We do not even know whether her villa was called Albert or Balmoral; what she paid for her gloves; or whether her mother died of cancer or of consumption. How can she be alive? No; she is a mere figment of your imagination.’

And old women of course ought to be made of freehold villas and copyhold estates, not of imagination.

The Georgian novelist, therefore, was in an awkward predicament. There was Mrs Brown protesting that she was different, quite different, from what people made out, and luring the novelist to her rescue by the most fascinating if fleeting glimpse of her charms; there were the Edwardians handing out tools appropriate to house building and house breaking; and there was the British public asseverating that they must see the hot water bottle first. Meanwhile the train was rushing to that station where we must all get out.

Such, I think, was the predicament in which the young Georgians found themselves about the year 1910. Many of them—I am thinking of Mr Forster and Mr Lawrence in particular—spoilt their early work because, instead of throwing away those tools, they tried to use them. They tried to compromise. They tried to combine their own direct sense of the oddity and significance of some character with Mr Galsworthy’s knowledge of the Factory Acts, and Mr Bennett’s knowledge of the Five Towns. They tried it, but they had too keen, too overpowering a sense of Mrs Brown and her peculiarities to go on trying it much longer. Something had to be done. At whatever cost of life, limb, and damage to valuable property Mrs Brown must be rescued, expressed, and set in her high relations to the world before the train stopped and she disappeared for ever. And so the smashing and the crashing began. Thus it is that we hear all round us, in poems and novels and biographies, even in newspaper articles and essays, the sound of breaking and falling, crashing and destruction. It is the prevailing sound of the Georgian age—rather a melancholy one if you think what melodious days there have been in the past, if you think of Shakespeare and Milton and Keats or even of Jane Austen and Thackeray and Dickens; if you think of the language, and the heights to which it can soar when free, and see the same eagle captive, bald, and croaking.

In view of these facts, with these sounds in my ears and these fancies in my brain, I am not going to deny that Mr Bennett has some reason when he complains that our Georgian writers are unable to make us believe that our characters are real. I am forced to agree that they do not pour out three immortal masterpieces with Victorian regularity every autumn. But instead of being gloomy, I am sanguine. For this state of things is, I think, inevitable whenever from hoar old age or callow youth the convention ceases to be a means of communication between writer and reader, and becomes instead an obstacle and an impediment. At the present moment we are suffering, not from decay, but from having no code of manners which writers and readers accept as a prelude to the more exciting intercourse of friendship. The literary convention of the time is so artificial—you have to talk about the weather and nothing but the weather throughout the entire visit—that, naturally, the feeble are tempted to outrage, and the strong are led to destroy the very foundations and rules of literary society. Signs of this are everywhere apparent. Grammar is violated; syntax disintegrated, as a boy staying with an aunt for the weekend rolls in the geranium bed out of sheer desperation as the solemnities of the sabbath wear on. The more adult writers do not, of course, indulge in such wanton exhibitions of spleen. Their sincerity is desperate, and their courage tremendous; it is only that they do not know which to use, a fork or their fingers. Thus, if you read Mr Joyce and Mr Eliot you will be struck by the indecency of the one, and the obscurity of the other. Mr Joyce’s indecency in Ulysses seems to me the conscious and calculated indecency of a desperate man who feels that in order to breathe he must break the windows. At moments, when the window is broken, he is magnificent. But what a waste of energy! And, after all, how dull indecency is, when it is not the overflowing of a superabundant energy or savagery, but the determined and public-spirited act of a man who needs fresh air! Again, with the obscurity of Mr Eliot. I think that Mr Eliot has written some of the loveliest lines in modern poetry. But how intolerant he is of the old usages and politenesses of society—respect for the weak, consideration for the dull! As I sun myself upon the intense and ravishing beauty of one of his lines, and reflect that I must make a dizzy and dangerous leap to the next, and so on from line to line, like an acrobat flying precariously from bar to bar, I cry out, I confess, for the old decorums, and envy the indolence of my ancestors who, instead of spinning madly through mid-air, dreamt quietly in the shade with a book. Again in Mr Strachey’s books, Eminent Victorians and Queen Victoria, the effort and strain of writing against the grain and current of the times is visible too. It is much less visible, of course, for not only is he dealing with facts, which are stubborn things, but he has fabricated, chiefly from eighteenth-century material, a very discreet code of manners of his own, which allows him to sit at table with the highest in the land and to say a great many things under cover of that exquisite apparel which, had they gone naked, would have been chased by the men-servants from the room. Still, if you compare Eminent Victorians with some of Lord Macaulay’s essays, though you will feel that Lord Macaulay is always wrong, and Mr Strachey always right, you will also feel a body, a sweep, a richness in Lord Macaulay’s essays which show that his age was behind him; all his strength went straight into his work; none was used for purposes of concealment or of conversion. But Mr Strachey has had to open our eyes before he made us see; he has had to search out and sew together a very artful manner of speech; and the effort, beautifully though it is concealed, has robbed his work of some of the force that should have gone into it, and limited his scope.

For these reasons, then, we must reconcile ourselves to a season of failures and fragments. We must reflect that where so much strength is spent on finding a way of telling the truth the truth itself is bound to reach us in rather an exhausted and chaotic condition. Ulysses, Queen Victoria, Mr Prufrock—to give Mrs Brown some of the names she has made famous lately—is a little pale and dishevelled by the time her rescuers reach her. And it is the sound of their axes that we hear—a vigorous and stimulating sound in my ears—unless of course you wish to sleep, when in the bounty of his concern, Providence has provided a host of writers anxious and able to satisfy your needs.

Thus I have tried, at tedious length, I fear, to answer some of the questions which I began by asking. I have given an account of some of the difficulties which in my view beset the Georgian writer in all his forms. I have sought to excuse him. May I end by venturing to remind you of the duties and responsibilities that are yours as partners in this business of writing books, as companions in the railway carriage, as fellow travellers with Mrs Brown? For she is just as visible to you who remain silent as to us who tell stories about her. In the course of your daily life this past week you have had far stranger and more interesting experiences than the one I have tried to describe. You have overheard scraps of talk that filled you with amazement. You have gone to bed at night bewildered by the complexity of your feelings. In one day thousands of ideas have coursed through your brains; thousands of emotions have met, collided, and disappeared in astonishing disorder. Nevertheless, you allow the writers to palm off upon you a version of all this, an image of Mrs Brown, which has no likeness to that surprising apparition whatsoever. In your modesty you seem to consider that writers are of different blood and bone from yourselves; that they know more of Mrs Brown than you do. Never was there a more fatal mistake. It is this division between reader and writer, this humility on your part, these professional airs and graces on ours, that corrupt and emasculate the books which should be the healthy offspring of a close and equal alliance between us. Hence spring those sleek, smooth novels, those portentous and ridiculous biographies, that milk and watery criticism, those poems melodiously celebrating the innocence of roses and sheep which pass so plausibly for literature at the present time.

Your part is to insist that writers shall come down off their plinths and pedestals, and describe beautifully if possible, truthfully at any rate, our Mrs Brown. You should insist that she is an old lady of unlimited capacity and infinite variety; capable of appearing in any place; wearing any dress; saying anything and doing heaven knows what. But the things she says and the things she does and her eyes and her nose and her speech and her silence have an overwhelming fascination, for she is, of course, the spirit we live by, life itself.

But do not expect just at present a complete and satisfactory presentment of her. Tolerate the spasmodic, the obscure, the fragmentary, the failure. Your help is invoked in a good cause. For I will make one final and surpassingly rash prediction—we are trembling on the verge of one of the great ages of English literature. But it can only be reached if we are determined never, never to desert Mrs Brown.

[Criterion, July 1924]

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Editions-de-Luxe.

[A Midsommer Night’s Dreame. With an introduction by Harley Granville-Barker (Ernest Benn, 1924) by William Shakespeare
Studio Plays: Three Experiments in Dramatic Form. With designs for costumes and one scene by Dorothy Mullock (Palmer, 1924) by Clifford Bax.]

A Midsommer Night’s Dreame is a magnificently printed book, which possesses, in addition, a quality not always found with magnificence, that it is easy, luxurious, and delightful to read. That it is a trifle too broad for the ordinary size of human hands is the only criticism we have to make. The text is a reproduction of that of the first folio of 1623. Mr Newdigate has directed the printing; Mr Paul Nash provided the illustrations; and Mr Granville-Barker has written the introduction. This last is an extremely illuminating document, for in it Mr Granville-Barker, while showing us how the play was probably staged in Shakespeare’s time, deals with some of the problems which beset a producer at the present day. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream Shakespeare was at odds with the mechanism of the modern theatre. He allows only for a little dancing, and for a few simple costumes. If, however, the producer keeps strictly to Shakespeare’s provisions, he may achieve far less effect than the same methods achieved in Shakespeare’s day. To us, whose eyes and ears have grown used to a far more elaborate setting, simplicity may seem bareness, reticence may appear starvation. To add the measure of exaggeration which is right in the circumstances, while keeping in mind the fact that the play is a poetic play, and everything must serve, and nothing compete with, the poetry, is a highly ticklish undertaking. Moreover, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream the music has to be considered, which raises problems of special subtlety, as well as the dress, and the exact shade of meaning which the actors are to be taught to put upon their lines. Following in Mr Barker’s steps, we see that a good producer is called upon to be a learned and sensitive Shakespearean critic in addition to his other qualifications; and his introduction whets our taste for the play in the best way possible by exciting our curiosity and stimulating our intelligence before the curtain rises.

Mr Bax’s three experiments in dramatic form are also produced in a dignified and luxurious style, with wide margins and coloured illustrations. But the splendour of the form makes us ask inevitably whether his simple charm, verging as it so often does upon prettiness and dexterity, is worthy of the setting. By introducing the word ‘experiment’ he has perhaps led us to expect something more drastic than the very mild attempts which he has here made to supplement the conventional dramatic method. But acted simply in a studio with attention to dress and gesture, his three plays will no doubt achieve, what is by no means despicable, a pleasant, tasteful, and well-bred entertainment.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Aug 23, 1924]

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Strangely enough, that engaging acrobat …

Strangely enough, that engaging acrobat the porpoise, whose turn, as he tumbles across the bay in schools, is the delight of seaside visitors every summer, is seldom seen in captivity. Crowds therefore are pressing daily to inspect Peter, the porpoise, which was caught a month or two ago by Brighton fishermen and is deposited in a fine tank at the Aquarium. The inspection is of necessity brief. You take up your station and a grey body of incredible velocity flashes past you. He never stops; he never sleeps; he sways, he gyrates, he oscillates by his own impetus from top to bottom; he snatches, it is said, fourteen pounds of herrings en route, turning a somersault as he goes. What the purpose of this speed may be, we know not; but, as he flashes past, he seems bent with the whole force of body and soul upon some heroic end. That he annoys the flat fish, and disturbs the elderly and rather punctilious crabs, is a matter of indifference to him. On he shoots. As we doze over the summer fireside, our indolence is chastened by the thought that Peter has now completed the ten millionth lap, perhaps, of his eternal race. He is an example, we feel, to us all; but an example of what? We scarcely know.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Sep 13, 1924]

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The cheapening of motor-cars.

The cheapening of motor-cars is another step towards the ruin of the country road. It is already almost impossible to take one’s pleasure walking, and only inevitable necessity impels the owners of children or dogs to venture their limbs upon what is now little better than an unfenced railway track. On the line itself there are at least rails and signals to ensure some kind of safety. But on the high road the procession of vehicles is irregular and chaotic, and the pedestrian has to depend upon the consideration and humanity of the motorist, who is in a position to dispense with both if it suits him. That it does suit him those who have lived on the verge of military operations this summer can testify—the approach of a military car being the signal among walkers and cyclists either to dismount and stand still or risk some perfectly wanton onslaught on the part of the military upon the common amenities of the King’s highway. The English road, moreover, is rapidly losing its old character—its colour, here tawny-red, here pearl-white; its flowery and untidy hedges; its quiet; its ancient and irregular charm. It is becoming, instead, black as cinders, smooth as oilcloth, shaven of wild flowers, straightened of corners, a mere racing-track for the convenience of a population seemingly in perpetual and frantic haste not to be late for dinner.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Sep 27, 1924]

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Appreciations.

[Figures in Modern Literature (John Lane, 1924) by J.B. Priestley]

Mr Priestley is an appreciator, not a critic. He fills an office of great public use in an age oppressed with new books, and stinted of time in which to read them. He helps us to get at what is worth having in our contemporaries, rescues some, like Maurice Hewlett, who have fallen into the background, traces the development of others, like Mr de la Mare, who are still in mid-career, and gives us, by means of apt quotations, the chance of gauging much more rapidly and effectively than we could otherwise have done Mr Saintsbury’s view of criticism, or the main outlines of Mr Jacobs’s fiction. As an appreciator, Mr Priestley has qualities that make him both admirable and trustworthy. He is a patient and careful exponent; he writes fluently and lucidly; he subdues, if he possesses, any wish to cut capers or shoot rockets of his own; and, above all, he is a born admirer.

But there are no revelations in his pages, no surprises, none of those phrases which are, he says, ‘keys to new treasure-chambers of literature’. One may enjoy his very readable essay upon Mr de la Mare with The Veil lying upon the table, and feel no curiosity to re-read the book by its light. Part of this is due, of course, to the inevitable difficulties of digging deep into contemporaries—that one meets them at dinner, that we have only incomplete fragments upon which to base our judgement, and that they stand too close on top of us to be seen in proportion. Then, again, many of these essays have had some not wholly critical purpose in view, which has led Mr Priestley to meander into biography and apology, while, being obviously in the self-conscious stage of authorship, he has wasted a good deal of time doing battle with ‘people’—people who contribute to the ‘Pale Review,’ people, who, if you praise anyone, ‘are ready to think that one has dowered So-and-so with every virtue known to letters’. Yet making allowance for all this we cannot help feeling that Mr Priestley might have grazed a good deal closer to his subjects without doing them violence or losing them readers. He might have been a critic, not merely an appreciator.

For if, as Mr Priestley asserts, his nine figures—Messrs Bennett, de la Mare, Hewlett, Housman, Jacobs, Lynd, Saintsbury, Santayana, and Squire are important (though ‘it must not be understood that I necessarily consider the figures the most important in contemporary literature’), they are worth taking seriously. They have no need to be wrapped in cocoons of cotton-wool. They can hold their own, not merely with their contemporaries, but with the masters in their own lines. But at this point Mr Priestley seems to back out of one half of the business of criticism, which is, as he says, ‘to appreciate and compare’ either with some phrase of disarming modesty, or with some vague statement that ‘such introspection and quaint imagery take us back to Donne and the metaphysicals of the seventeenth century’ which leaves us uncertain whether he means that Mr Squire is as good a poet as Donne, or resembles Donne; and quite in the dark, when the essay is finished, as to where in the ranks of poets Mr Priestley would place him.

The result is, therefore, that though we get a sense of his nine figures in outline, we get no sense of them in detail. They remain unrelated; praised, but praised provisionally. We slip about in uncomfortable uncertainty whether Mr Lynd is a ‘magnificent proseman’ absolutely or comparatively—on a par with Hazlitt, or only infinitely superior to Mr Garvin. Thus, when we come to sample the authors in the quotations which are liberally provided, we find ourselves as often as not at loggerheads with Mr Priestley, yet remaining quite unrepentant. For though he has arranged his matter so as to bring his figures into focus, he has left us to make up our minds about them for ourselves. In short, he has fulfilled the office of an appreciator, which is to stimulate our interest, particularly in our contemporaries, but left unattempted the business of a critic, which is to make us reconsider our opinions and test, if we do not accept, his values.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Sep 27, 1924]

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The Schoolroom Floor.

[A Nineteenth-Century Childhood (William Heinemann, 1924) by Mary MacCarthy]

Of writers there are two kinds: one builds neat architectural sentences, in which brick is placed upon brick, solid and symmetrical; the other flies and smudges with the flat of the thumb or the tip of the little finger; the one makes sentences, the other phrases; and it is to the phrase-makers that Mrs MacCarthy belongs. That orderly and accurate beginning—‘I was born in the eighties into a sheltered, comfortable, upper middle class, religious and literary circle’—does not deceive us. A dozen lines lower down you will find her catching the Poet Laureate himself in her net—‘Lord Tennyson was living a deliciously sheltered life at Farringford, perplexed about immortality on the windy downs’; next, giving chase to her mother and aunts ‘flitting up and down the wide staircase in white muslins, with camellias in their hair and Beethoven scores under their arms’.

For Mrs MacCarthy was the daughter of Mrs—must we call her Kestell?—of Eton, and this little book is an attempt to envelope that dazzling and erratic butterfly and any other queer Victorian insects who may be on the wing in a veil of gauze. Rather tentative, rather apologetic, rather amateurish these sweeps of the net seem to be. It is only when the book is finished that we realize how beautifully with a fling of a phrase the insects have been caught. There they are, fluttering and feasting on their dahlias and their ivy blossoms—Mr Shorthouse asking for a hymn tune, Mr Oscar Browning sipping tea, Mary Coleridge reading Browning aloud, the old Judge disrupting the whole assembly with his cough (‘It is a geyser explosion, a thunderstorm, the collapse of a skylight, something quite unique in the volume of crashing sound’), Herr Joachim taking Mrs Tallboys down to supper, Mr Henry James surveying the ballroom—there they are.

But we must not mislead lovers of memoirs into supposing that Mrs MacCarthy has dished up the eminent Victorians once more. That may be Lord Tennyson’s hat in the hall; those Mr Browning’s boots; through the drawing-room door we may hear the reverberation of Mr Henry James, who, seeing the end of his sentence in the distance, with uplifted hand and rumbling fence of sound wards off intruders. But we are for the schoolroom. We run upstairs into the children’s shabby quarters, where Evelina is making a garden of tattered flowers on the carpet, Mary lying on the floor ‘chaunting idly and looking at things upside down’, while old Nurse ranges about threatening hair-brushes and inciting young ladies to virtuous employment. For it is Mrs MacCarthy’s achievement to throw open the whole house and not merely the sanctuaries of the eminent and grown-up; to make us free of the rambling Victorian dwelling-place with its profusion of coal fires, its legions of starched housemaids, its trays, its cans, its lamps, its candles, its warbling aunts, its scrimmaging schoolboys, and above all its strange mistress, odd, speculative, absent-minded; brilliant, disconcerting, unaccountable—its Mrs Kestell, in short. That elusive figure with the Warden at her side trails and wanders through her daughter’s pages. Now in the middle of her waltz tune she stops to dream; now inhales the sweetness of a peach; now, ignoring the bigwig to whom she should be listening, bears down upon some shy colleger and carries him off to read Sainte-Beuve aloud in the garden: ‘“So fascinating reading to Mr ——,” she says presently reentering the room. “He understands every nuance”’; now, snatching up her pen on the impulse of the moment, greets her little girl at the station with the news that the shepherd of Farringford is dead; quotes Clough; and explains the word ‘fantastic’.

Bulky, vigorous, and voluble, not so very eminent, full of agreeable eccentricities and dashed with a whimsical radiance—such are the Victorians if you lie with Mrs MacCarthy on the schoolroom floor.

[Times Literary Supplement, Oct 2, 1924]

[]

Restoration Comedy.

[Restoration Comedy, 1660–1720 (OUP, 1914) by Bonamy Dobrée
The Life of William Congreve…, 1888, 2nd impression revised and enlarged (Wm Heinemann, 1924) by Edmund Gosse.]

Of Mr Gosse’s book, now enlarged, revised, and containing one poem not yet printed in Congreve’s works, one may say what one may generally say of Mr Gosse’s books; that it is competent, well-informed, and discreet; full of demure fun, pleasant phrases (‘he passed through the literary life of his time as if in felt slippers’), and good sense. The standard, of course, is not the highest. He does not create a character when he writes a biography; he does not penetrate to the depths when he writes a criticism. But his pages are completely free from the extravagance of the creative, or the turbidity of the profound. He enjoys to the full ‘the charming pleasure of easy composition’; and Congreve, of whom little is known, and that mostly to his credit, is a subject well-suited to his urbane and skilful pen.

Mr Dobrée has attempted with marked success a more difficult task. He has tried to give us a general view of comedy in the period from Etherege to Farquhar, and has succeeded in putting forward a variety of suggestive and interesting ideas from which we may proceed to further discovery on our own account. Chief among them are that Restoration comedy expressed ‘not licentiousness, but a deep curiosity, and a desire to try new ways of living’; and that it was ‘of English growth and would have existed substantially the same had Molière never lived’—both sayings which lead us to put our Wycherley and our Congreve to the test of reading afresh. Licentiousness is, of course, a chameleon quality which changes from age to age. Not so very long ago London playgoers had a chance of analysing their own attitude to the matter when The Country Wife was performed. Of that twentieth-century audience few were shocked, but it is safe to say that some were bored. It became plain, indeed, as the favourite topic was harped upon, in scene after scene, joke after joke, that indecency loses its savour sooner, is less fertile and profound, than more normal topics once the shock of novelty has worn off. Yet it was obvious, too, that indecency was as essential a part of Wycherley’s genius as the crust is of the loaf; nor can we agree with Mr Dobrée in making ‘a deep curiosity and a desire to try new ways of living’ the begetter of that peculiarly irresponsible and very English love of bawdry. We doubt, indeed, whether in the matter of indecency there is much to choose between the Elizabethan and Restoration comedy; save that Elizabethan indecency is put away from us and disguised by the poetry, and Restoration indecency brought home and laid bare by the prose.

But the change of subject in Restoration comedy is, of course, undeniable. And here Mr Dobrée makes a subtle distinction. The ‘atmosphere’ remained English; but the ‘life’ owed much to the French. The French civility had penetrated into the English drawing room; the language was more expressive and the manners more refined. But the genius which gave colour and tone to the whole remained English, and far more closely related to the Elizabethan than to the French. No one, indeed, who compares The Plain Dealer with Le Misanthrope can fail to be aware of some of the fundamental differences which separate the two races. Where the French suggest, the English explain; where the French generalise, the English particularise; where the French give us in Alceste a type of man’s disillusionment and the vanity of society, the English give us a burly sea captain who is far better fitted to polish off a Dutchman with his own fists than to stand apart and meditate the worthlessness of mankind.

Etherege, Wycherley, Dryden, Shadwell, Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar are all dealt with in Mr Dobrée’s book with a brevity which is full of point, though some contortions of wit are needed to keep the matter within the space, and we confess to thinking that those antiquated weapons—rapier, singlestick, and bludgeon—as articles of comparison have served their day. But the book has the prime merit of lighting up a corner of the library which had grown, not altogether owing to our own fault, a little dim.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Oct 18, 1924]

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It is strange as one enters the Mansard Gallery …

[21st Exhibition of the London Group, Mansard Gallery, Heal & Son Ltd, 196 Tottenham Court Road, Oct 13–Nov 8, 1924.]

It is strange as one enters the Mansard Gallery today to think that once upon a time the London Group led the van and received into its devoted breast the most pointed arrows of ridicule and criticism. Last week out of a crowd of a hundred private viewers one only, and she elderly and infirm to boot, might be heard to giggle; the rest were able to concentrate their minds not upon their own dignity but upon the pictures—a change marvellous, but welcome. But the Group has not lost its sting in coming of age. It has grown able to practise easily what it once professed selfconsciously. The good pictures are as good as, perhaps better than, ever. There is a very fine example of Mr Sickert; Mr Thornton proves himself an artist to be reckoned with seriously; Mr Mathew Smith follows his own bent rather too pugnaciously, for there is danger that his marked personality may stereotype and confine him; Mlle Lessore is exquisitely witty; Mrs Bell illumines a whole wall, in spite of the drizzle outside, with a flower piece in which every rose seems instinct with brilliant life, yet seized in a moment of intense stillness; in a superb picture of red-hot pokers Mr Grant makes us hope that he has reconciled the diverse gifts which for the last year or two have been tugging him asunder and puzzling his admirers. But the show is curiously unequal. The goodness of the good accentuates the mediocrity of the bad. And there are one or two problems. What is Mr Gertler doing? we ask with the curiosity which that remarkable artist always arouses. What mood of dissatisfaction and experiment has him trapped at the moment? A curious stolidity marks his pictures this year. Considered as an end they are disappointing, as a stage in his progress interesting as usual.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Oct 18, 1924]

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Not the least pitiable victims …

Not the least pitiable victims of the deplorable summer that is dead are the aged men who, being past work in the fields, have been used to pick up a few shillings by scouring fields for mushrooms. The crop, always capricious, has in certain districts failed almost entirely this summer, and it is common to meet the village patriarch who tends the geese and the grandchildren, and sometimes cuts a little wood, listlessly poking in the grass and lamenting either that some smart fellow has been before him, or that the rain, which is favourable in moderation, has flooded the mushrooms out of the fields. Of the habits and nature of mushrooms, he can tell one little. Time out of mind they have grown in this field; never, so long as he can remember, have they been seen in that. Yet the fields appear in every way identical. Further, there are periods in their coming and going, ruled, according to him, by the moon, which has its finger in so many village pies. Two years ago the glut of mushrooms satiated the appetites of every breakfast-table for miles around, but this year a handful is considered fair exchange for a whole hatful of apples. But while the male pursuit of mushroom gathering has failed, the women and children have had a fine harvest of blackberries, for the sexes keep their stations scrupulously distinct—no man picking blackberries, no woman encroaching upon the mushroom preserves.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Oct 18, 1924]

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‘Richard Hakluyt.’

[Richard Hakluyt (The Sheldon Press, 1924) by Foster Watson.]

It is strange that this little volume should be the first devoted entirely to Richard Hakluyt, and stranger still that Hakluyt’s solitary composition (for the great Navigations was of course a compilation), his Discourse concerning Western Planting, written in 1584, should have been left to the Americans to publish in 1877. For Hakluyt was more than the first editor of the English travels; he was the first Secretary of State for the Colonies. It was he who foresaw the benefits of ‘plantations’ for our surplus population, and as a refuge for ‘people forced to flee for the truth of God’s word’; he who endeavoured to train sailors in the arts of navigation, and collected from all sorts of obscure sources, often at great trouble to himself, information useful to travellers. Moreover, he was the first to feel that responsibility for the moral and intellectual welfare of the savage which so many English statesmen have professed since. His aim, as he repeated, was not merely profit, but ‘the saving of the souls of the poor and blinded infidels’, the instilling into them of ‘the sweet and lively liquor of the Gospel’. All this is well brought out in Mr Watson’s little biography, and corrects the too purely literary estimate which sees in him chiefly the man who may have inspired Shakespeare, and who has certainly got together some of the finest stories of sea travel in the language.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Oct 25, 1924]

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‘Smoke Rings and Roundelays.’

[Smoke Rings and Roundelays. Blendings from Prose and Verse Since Raleigh’s Time (Castle, 1924) compiled by Wilfred Partington, with woodcuts by Norman James.]

The best tribute to the worth of Mr Partington’s book is that we found ourselves so entertained by its contents and so spiritually made aware of the soul of tobacco that for a whole hour, engrossed in its pages, we neglected our pipe. The compilation had been made with considerable skill and variety. Poets, historians, memoir writers, and novelists have all contributed the praises or written the life story of the inspired leaf. Thus we learn how it is M. Nicot, French Ambassador to Portugal in 1559, who is immortalised in nicotine; how stealthily the habit first took root under cover, like so many English habits, of its virtues rather than its charms; how ‘a leaf or two being steept o’er night in a little white wine is a vomit that never fails in its operation’; how women smoked anciently as much as men; how the weed was banned in the prudish days of Victoria; how cigarettes were first seen in England about 1860; how Van Klaes of Rotterdam smoked nearly five ounces of tobacco every day, and had his coffin lined with the wood of his old cigar-boxes, and his pipe and matches laid beside him—‘for one never knows what may happen’—and at that point it became necessary to light up, which pipe, and it was the best of the day, we smoked and dedicated to the erudite Mr Partington.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Oct 25, 1924]

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‘Memories of a Militant.’

[Memories of a Militant (Edward Arnold, 1924) by Annie Kenney]

The great age of militancy and the vote is rapidly becoming dim, but it is still within living memory that one of the most picturesque champions of the cause was a factory girl who had actually worn shawl and clogs and was ready to go to prison any number of times. In her autobiography Miss Kenney throws light upon the make-up of a temperament which every revolution seems to create or bring to the surface. For Miss Kenney is not one of the rare thinkers who lead and inspire, but one of the more numerous class who follow and are inspired. ‘I could not have reasoned the point why a cat drinks milk,’ she writes, and she adds that, when she tried to read other books in order to write her own, she found that her ‘clear thought did not flow freely’, and shut them up. Her devotion, it sometimes seems, was rather to Miss Pankhurst than to a cause, and her book gives an account of their personal adventures and escapes rather than a history of the whole movement. But she is a singularly good witness-medium through which to behold those stirring days, because her enthusiasm is so unreflecting and her style so spontaneous. Strangely and incongruously she numbers Voltaire among her heroes.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Nov 8, 1924]

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‘Peggy. The Story of One Score Years and Ten.’

[Peggy. The Story of One Score Years and Ten (Hutchinson & Co., 1924) by Peggy Webling]

The Webling sisters were once little girls who recited at parties and roused the admiration of John Ruskin, who presented Peggy with Johnson’s dictionary, and Rosalind with a complete set of Byron’s works bound in blue morocco. Indeed they met most of the celebrities of the late nineteenth century, and pressed the ‘very warm and unusually soft hands’ of Edward Prince of Wales. But celebrities look a little garish in the homely light which this very friendly and unpretentious and engaging book sheds upon the Webling family. Time’s wheel turns methodically, and brings nonentities to the top and sends the celebrated down. We are tired of the witticisms of Oscar Wilde, but the sayings of Mrs Wilson, the dressmaker, enchant. The pink plush, she said, ‘was so rebukey that it positively broke the needles’. And she said she would not work for ‘any pompshous or precocious person’. The Weblings were neither pompshous nor precocious. Mr Webling sold old silver, and his daughter lived a hand-to-mouth journalistic dramatic existence, in England and in Canada, the story of which is better worth reading, in all its garrulity and slippered ease, than nine novels out of a baker’s dozen.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Nov 8, 1924]

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Can neither war nor peace …

Can neither war nor peace teach the French to translate or even to spell English? Glancing through a catalogue of pictures the other day which was thoughtfully provided with translations into English and German, I came upon ‘Le Dessert’ translated ‘Leavings’, ‘Le torso d’une jeune femme’ translated ‘Young woman’s trunk’, and so on and so on. No English proof-reader would dare pass such misquotations of Racine as we put up with whenever Shakespeare is quoted in French. But there is a charm in the arrogance of French illiteracy, which takes it for granted that all languages save one are the base dialects of savages.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Nov 22, 1924]

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‘These Were the Muses.’

[These Were the Muses (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1924) by Mona Wilson]

There is a fascination in faded women of letters which excuses any number of volumes devoted to the record of their careers, so that Miss Wilson has no need to apologise for resuscitating nine forgotten worthies, beginning with Mrs Centlivre and ending with Sara Coleridge. But facts are stubborn things; they require a little coaxing before they will yield their virtue; and that coaxing Miss Wilson purposely refrains from giving them. The stories are told with singular flatness, doubtless with great accuracy, and with a very liberal allowance of quotation. But this method has been adopted with a particular end in view. It is in order that readers whose appetites are sated with modern fiction may take a helping of Mrs Sheridan, Lady Morgan, or Mrs Trollope. For such readers Miss Wilson’s book may well prove useful; for those who prefer the women to their works it is a little unsatisfying. The music of those particular muses is after all grown a little dim. The ladies themselves, however, as the excellent illustrations prove, were one and all of quite exceptional beauty.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Nov 22, 1924]

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‘The Faithful Shepherdess’ …

[The Faithful Shepherdess, ballet by Sergei Diaghilev, choreographed by Nijinska, music by Michel Pignolet de Montéclair, arr. and orch. by Henri Casadesus.]

‘The Faithful Shepherdess’ was put on last week at the Coliseum, and proves a less popular but more interesting ballet than ‘Cimarosiana’ and ‘Le Train Bleu’. The finest frontispieces of seventeenth-century folios—half-naked gentlemen with feathers on their heads and greaves on their thighs, standing decoratively surrounded by scrolls and flourishes—seemed to come to life in a manner both imposing and agreeable. But however experts may distinguish between one ballet and another, one quality they all have in common—the extreme seriousness of the Russian dancers’ art.

One can understand the remark which was made the other night that there is more religious feeling in a ballet than in most church services. All their flounces and furbelows, their periwigs and flesh-coloured tights are based, for both sexes, upon sober, heelless, drab slippers. However airily they float and spring through the air, their movements are mathematically accurate, punctiliously severe. Not a hint of exertion is allowed to show itself upon the dancers’ faces, which wear for the most part an air of effortless serenity, an exalted composure; but their legs and arms are uncompromisingly muscular. The peculiar pleasure of the ballet arises no doubt from this combination of sensual ecstasy with an extreme severity, having its roots presumably in the religious element which lies at the origin of the dance. Sandwiched between Harry Tate and other characteristically British turns, the seriousness, the religious quality of the Russians is all the more apparent. One, indeed, serves as relish to the other. Harry Tate accentuates Nijinska and Sokolova.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Dec 20, 1924]

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1925

‘Coming Back to London …’

Coming hack to London after some weeks’ absence, I was shocked by a sight for which the papers had not prepared me—a battered cottage, with jagged edges and broken window’s, has replaced the stately and familiar masonry of Devonshire House. At the price of a penny fare, anyone can now sit on the top of an omnibus and see into the very saloons—in which the lovely Duchess received Fox and Burke and Sheridan. Attics and bedrooms are all laid bare, and whatever his politics the spectator can scarcely help a spasm of pity as he pries into the innermost parts of that old house which, though never ornamental, had during the lives of all now living worn the same familiar air of respectability and inscrutable reserve. For close on two hundred years (Devonshire House was built when Berkeley House was burnt down in 1733) wits and beauties, statesmen and politicians, have met and feasted and argued and gambled where there are now ladders and cranes and heaps of old bricks. All the brilliant, all the fair, and many who were neither the one nor the other, have passed in procession up and down the marble stairs, which, for all we know, may already be halfway across the Atlantic. Now the March wind whistles through the ruins, and the ghosts of Duchess Georgiana and her friends must wrap their cloaks about them and toss their guineas for the last time.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Mar 14, 1925]

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‘This for Remembrance.’

[This for Remembrance (Fisher Unwin Ltd, 1925) by Bernard John Seymour Coleridge.]

It is strange to remember how many distinguished lawyers have the blood of the unpunctual and unpractical poet in their veins. Marks of their relationship are indeed to be traced. Gentle, formal, courteous, fond of nature, music, and poetry—the characteristics which Lord Coleridge discerns in his grandfather, Sir John Duke Coleridge, seem more fitted for the man of letters than the lawyer; and have descended, to judge by this modest and simple volume, to his grandson. Far from thrusting his personality upon us, as he accuses himself of doing, he is almost too reticent to win our full attention. He seems to prefer to speak of his grandfather rather than of himself; to eulogise the merits of the past rather than to make any definite claim for the present. The narrative, much of which is devoted to extracts from his grandfather’s diaries, tends to shrink into a succession of little notes upon famous cases, anecdotes, and reflections, which allow the writer to steal away into congenial shades of his library and give us very little chance of seeing him face to face.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Mar 28, 1925]

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The Two Samuel Butlers.

[The Life and Letters of Dr Samuel Butler, headmaster of Shrewsbury School 1798–1836, and afterwards Bishop of Lichfield in so far as they illustrate the scholastic, religious and social life of England 1790—1840 by Samuel Butler (1896; vols x–xi in the Shrewsbury Edition of The Works of Samuel Butler, ed. Henry Festing Jones and A.T. Bartholomew, 20 vols, Jonathan Cape, 1924).]

Among the sumptuous volumes of the Shrewsbury edition of the works of Samuel Butler, two will probably be opened less often than the others. The Life and Letters of Dr Samuel Butler cannot compare for vivacity or interest with The Way of All Flesh or the ‘Note-Books’. The book is open to criticism from many points of view. It is too long; it is too dull; it is too shapeless; for chapters at a time it reads as if a skewer had been run through a bundle of old letters, and the printer had plodded his way doggedly through the file unaided. Though ostensibly devoted to the life of Dr Butler, the figure of the Bishop himself remains transparent; the very buildings of Shrewsbury School stand before us more plainly than the person of their Headmaster. But Samuel Butler the younger had certain qualities which, if they made it impossible for him to write a good biography, made it equally impossible for him to write a dull book. He had the virtues and vices of the crank; he was honest, angular, and egotistical; something of himself enters into whatever he did; whatever he touched, even with the tips of his fingers, he twisted a little this way or that. Hence though his life of his grandfather fails as a biography, as an autobiography it is full of amusement. Without intending any such thing, by his selections and omissions, his humour and his commentary, he has, in these two volumes, written a notable description of himself, added a valuable prelude to The Way of All Flesh.

The salient points of Samuel Butler the younger are his originality, his eye for queer angles, and his love for odd human situations. So we find him lighting upon the story of Dr Butler and Mr Jeudwine, who, being irrevocably bound together at Shrewsbury as headmaster and second master, were so incompatible by temperament, that ‘for seven and thirty years [they | addressed each other by letter. They generally wrote in the third person, and presented their compliments to one another … The two men were reconciled as Mr Jeudwine lay on his death-bed. I have been told, but cannot vouch for it, that they took the Sacrament together—a scene than which I can imagine nothing more full of pathos.’ But has not Butler invented the whole thing? we ask, and was it not his genius that christened Mr Jeudwine, and his imagination that made the two schoolmasters take the Sacrament in the end, after calling each other ‘Dear Sir’ for seven and thirty years? Such is the potency of style that it makes its own whatever it touches, and forbids its victims to live under any other conditions than those which it dictates. Next, stuck in between a sheaf of letters about Aeschylus (and we know Butler’s private opinion of that great man), we come to a far more congenial topic—the disappearance of Owen Parfitt, the bedridden shepherd of Shepton Mallet. One evening ‘between light and dark, when the mowing grass was about’, the old man vanished from his armchair at the cottage door and was never heard of again. The Bishop and the grandson were both profoundly interested in the mystery. The Bishop sent for some derelict bones to examine; but they proved to be those of a young woman. The grandson, long afterwards, went to Shepton Mallet to make inquiries on the spot, and was rewarded by an old woman’s remark that she had heard the story, ‘but whether it was true, or whether it was a miracle, that we shall never know’. ‘I felt,’ said Butler, ‘as one who had stooped to pick up a piece of glass and has found a diamond.’ Again, the quizzical and caustic humour of Butler, after lying submissively dormant beneath heaps of school politics and scholars’ dissertations, flickers round the figure of ‘old Till’, the fishing scholar and parson, that red-faced ‘queer old rogue … who never sees me without uttering imprecations on my head for defrauding him of a beefsteak which he says I have long promised him’. It alights on Porson drinking deep and talking late, and telling an undergraduate the history of his life, and how in his poverty he ‘used to lie awake through the whole night, and wish for a large pearl’. It shows us the Bishop picking up a human rib on the field of Waterloo, and Dr Darwin suspecting that his son Charles has damp blankets on his bed; and Mrs Butler engaging a cook, and an obscure schoolboy making tradesmen and business men believe that he was a millionaire—in short, whenever we are amused or interested, it is because we see the author of The Way of All Flesh grinning from behind his decorous disguise. We are told very little about the Bishop, but a great deal about his acute, uncompromising, opinionated grandson, that king of the cranks, Samuel Butler.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Apr 11, 1925]

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‘Guests and Memories: Annals of a Seaside Villa.’

[Guests and Memories. Annals of a Seaside Villa (OUP, 1924) by Una Taylor]

The works of Henry Taylor are neither acted nor much read nowadays, nevertheless his name is almost bound to be mentioned whenever the Tennysons, or the Victorians, are discussed. He has taken his place permanently, though not prominently, as a member of a circle, and is thus assured of immortality. We are familiar with the knightly-looking old man, and his flowing beard and his flowing robes, who, without our knowing exactly why, is a person of eminence and distinction among the eminent and distinguished. In this affectionate book, an impression rather than a biography, his daughter tells us something more. He was a lonely boy, bred in the North, who, observing the world through a telescope from the roof, once saw a sister greet a brother on his return with joy. This telescope vision ‘was the only phenomenon of human emotion which I had witnessed for three years’, he observed. Later at the Colonial Office, married, after a tempestuous wooing, to Alice Spring-Rice—whose vivacity and spirit are refreshingly unusual in the wives of Victorian poets—he moved of course, among all the luminaries of his time. Mrs Norton, Stevenson, Tennyson, Mrs Cameron, Jowett, Carlyle—that is the circle, and they centred round Bournemouth, which Taylor discovered, a lovely village, and lived to see what it is today.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Apr 11, 1925]

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‘Mainly Victorian.’

[Mainly Victorian. With Sixteen Illustrations (Hutchinson and Co., 1924) by Stewart M. Ellis.]

Mr Ellis is permeated through and through with Victorianism. Not since the great Queen died have we come across the delightful excuse for publishing a book that ‘many friends have desired it’. Only a Victorian, too, could call the London Mercury ‘that super-organ of the youthfully clever’. Genuine admiration has done what time, rather cruelly, accomplished but imperfectly; for all that we can see, Mr Ellis might have been born in 1837 and died in 190J. To his thinking, ‘Victorian’ stands for everything stately and peaceful, good, solid, happy, and ‘typical of English life at its best’. This theme he has illustrated by fifty-eight papers, mainly about minor Victorians—James Grant, Frank Smedley, and Mrs Antrobus are not famous—and one or two outlaws like Tutankhamen, who, though they seem to have mistaken the proper time for being born, rather flagrantly have been forgiven. Mainly Victorian the book certainly is, and for those nimble enough to hop and skip and flit and swing upon the fifty-eight perches provided, entertaining enough. But we cannot commend Mr Ellis as a judge of poetry.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Apr 11, 1925]

[]

John Addington Symonds.

[Out of the Past. With an account of Janet Catherine Symonds by her daughter Mrs Walter Leaf (John Murray, 1925) by Margaret Symonds.]

Symonds’s History of the Italian Renaissance is, of course, a classic. Despite its faults everybody has at some time or other to read it, but for the most part the image which its readers retain of the author is of a sad and troubled man who concentrated in his own person all the spiritual suffering of the age of Clough and Matthew Arnold, to which, in his own case, was added the burden of a sickly body. Mrs Vaughan’s book has the great merit of rolling up this dismal legend in the most authoritative way. She has not attempted another exhaustive inquiry into the state of her father’s soul; she has simply noted down from old letters, diaries, her note-books, and memory an impression of her father in private life. She thus brings to light a fascinating human being, who, delicate as he was, liked nothing better than driving at a hard gallop over an Alpine pass in a snowstorm; and joked with peasants and made friends with gondoliers at the same time that he was writing reams of dismal introspection to Henry Sidgwick and Jowett. Despite ill-health his life was in many ways one of singular good fortune. He married a lady of noble presence and commanding character, who shared his enthusiasm for nature and flowers, and his hatred of convention and the middle classes. He had money enough to indulge his passion for travel, and to gratify the varied whims and caprices of an alert and pleasure-loving temperament. He loved, his daughter tells us, to buy new clothes and socks and silk pocket handkerchiefs and beads and Japanese match-boxes; owls fascinated him and it was one of his ‘frequent wailing worries’ that he could not induce these birds to nest at Davos. More seriously, he was happy above all in being freed from the provincialities of English literary life, and able to spend most of his maturity unhampered by the conventions which he despised. The bourgeoisie was detestable to him. ‘The individuals, when you know them, are magnificent, superb. It is only the way of living that I rail against—what I call the hedgerow scheme of existence.’ His own range of interests effectually freed him from such narrowness; with all his erudition, ‘he was a very shrewd observer of character into the bargain … old ladies consulted him about their wills, young ones about their love-affairs … Clergymen invariably consulted him on every detail concerning the new English church.’ The peasants came to him in their difficulties; some he would persuade to marry; others, after careful consideration, he would start in life with a gift of a carthorse or a fishing boat. They would visit him in the evening and sing their songs in a study crammed with books, where masses of proof sheets and manuscripts were piled in craggy erections which he called ‘precipices’. Though Mrs Vaughan makes mention of these precipices, and has first-hand knowledge of their contents, she does not disturb their dust unduly, and it is as well. For her father was not a great writer; nor indeed was he primarily interested in literature. ‘Nobody,’ he wrote, ‘except some very dry people, ever regarded their art except as a pis aller,’ and the words explain his own comparative failure. ‘Life,’ he held, ‘is more than literature’; so that Mrs Vaughan has done right to make us look past those dusty piles of old manuscripts to the peasants and the flowers and the eccentric and amusing and romantic people who came year after year to the house at Davos and made her own youth a season of unforgettable delight.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Apr 18, 1925]

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‘Further Reminiscences, 1864—1894.’

[Further Reminiscences, 1864–1894 (Bodley Head, 1925) by Sabine Baring-Gould.]

This further instalment of Mr Baring-Gould’s autobiography is too largely composed of letters addressed to ‘My dear G.’, a Mr Gatrill, a clergyman with apparently an insatiable appetite for the details of Continental travel, to be altogether lively reading for those not so endowed. ‘At St Peter’s the service is performed in a side chapel behind glass doors. One may enter and stand against the door and listen to the squalling of the eunuchs, gross creatures. I do not, I cannot, appreciate St Peter’s … I detest the church; every stone in it has cost a human soul … The beds are good, comfortable, and clean. The pension price is 8 francs a day; enough for what one gets.’ In England, especially at Lew Trenchard, his family home, Mr Baring-Gould becomes more succulent, for he had all that zeal for local antiquities, old customs, village characters, and parish gossip which so often distinguishes our English clergy and makes their note-books excellent reading. There were witches in Devonshire in the year 1911. Burnt sacrifices were offered in the year 1879; and though ‘it seems to me that we never get mutton nowadays as we did when I was young’, still the oldest names persist—Kneebone, Suckbitch—and the adventurous may still be bogged on Dartmoor.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Apr 18, 1925]

[]

‘The Letters of Mary Russell Mitford.’

[The Letters of Mary Russell Mitford, selected with an introduction by R. Brimley Johnson (Bodley Head, 1925)]

This handy little selection from the many volumes of Miss Mitford’s letters is done with skill enough to revive our interest in that cultivated old maid, who won a lottery ticket and supported an incompetent father, and wrote excellent prose and knew all the literary gentlemen of her time, and possessed the now extinct art of writing letters which can go straight to the printer without the erasion of a single word. The art of letter-writing is of all arts the most dependent upon circumstances. Had there been a telephone in the days of Cowper and Madame de Sevigné we should have lost some of the most delightful volumes in the world. Nowadays, Miss Mitford’s calm, long, well-considered letters would never have been written at all. The telephone would have received them or the telegraph form. As it was, Sir William Elford received every few weeks long, full pages about the Elizabethan drama, Scott’s novels, and the sunshine, and the flowers and the cats, and anything in short that filled the leisurely life and the well-stocked mind of his friend. She was careful to assure him that she took no pains with her writing, and held literary letters in contempt; but the apology is a little self-conscious. Delightful as they are and entertaining, one would like occasionally to feel that Miss Mitford was in a hurry, or in a temper, or had something very urgent to say. But the telephone never rang; on she wrote imperturbably.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Apr 18, 1925]

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‘What the Bloods of the ’Nineties Used to Say …’

What the bloods of the ’nineties used to say in mockery is now a commonplace of the staid and prosaic—that, if you wish to enjoy your evening and at the same time sample British acting at its best, you must go not to the playhouses, but to the Music Halls. In that free atmosphere of short turns and individual humours the English genius seems to flower most spontaneously, and to appreciate its own flowers most genuinely. At the Coliseum last week, Joe Jackson, the tramp cyclist, rocked a whole house into good humour by hitching up his trousers and scratching his head—that is to say, by something so personal and private to himself that no ordinary farce could fail to extinguish it utterly. The statuesque Flemings looked as noble as marble busts, and proved themselves as supple as eels. In its brazen and lawless way Mr Birmingham’s brass band blared and crashed towards some object—we are not sure what—far off in the future of music; while no one could sit under the torrent of Spanish vociferated to the click of castanets by Spanish dancers in crimson and silver without feeling the Southern sun hot on his checks. But the most notable triumph was that of Madame Lopokova and M. Idzikowski in ‘The Postman’. They have danced in more ambitious pieces, but in none that has so drawn out the marrow of their charm. Credit is due, of course, to Beethoven, to Mr Grant, and to Mr Williams.’ But our heaviest debt is to Madame Lopokova who, as she weaves round the pillar-box all the drama of the letter that was posted, regretted, and retrieved, bewitched the audience almost as much by her dramatic power as by her dancing—if, indeed, dramatic is the word to apply to a performance as effortless and as gay as the tossing of a bunch of spring flowers from the stage to the stalls. Dressed as a bright green postman riding a red bicycle, M. Idzikowski has never coruscated and corkscrewed with greater brilliance or with an appearance of more consummate ease.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Apr 25, 1925]

[]

‘A Player Under Three Reigns.’

[A Player Under Three Reigns (Fisher Unwin Ltd, 1925) by Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson]

One of the first actors of our time, it is surprising to learn, gave up his profession with joy, and filled up all his leisure moments painting pictures. ‘Rarely, very rarely,’ writes Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson, ‘have I enjoyed myself in acting … I am persuaded, as I look back upon my career, that I was not temperamentally suited to my calling.’ Indeed, throughout his modest and charming book he speaks with far more relish of the painters and writers he has known than of his dramatic friends; there is a glamour over his Bohemian days, when he met Rossetti and Swinburne and Millais, which dissolves in the limelight. He lingers over his youth, and recalls with joy that sturdy art student at Heatherly’s who could never get into the Academy and worshipped Handel and Shakespeare, and one day thrust Erewhon into his hand, and the delight with which he was able to tell Butler, ‘Sam, my people say you are a great writer!’ Later we meet Mr Walter Sickert as a lifeboatman volunteering to rescue a distressed ship, but more intent upon the look of the waves than upon his oar. And then the usual tours and triumphs begin, but over all the writer passes quietly and composedly as though he would much rather have painted a picture that looked so like the real thing that the birds pecked his fruit (his standards are not sophisticated), than have been the greatest Hamlet of his time.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Apr 25, 1925]

[]

‘The Tragic Life of Vincent Van Gogh.’

[The Tragic Life of Vincent Van Gogh (John Castle, 1925) by Louis Piérard, trans. Herbert Garland.]

Since the standard life of van Gogh by Meier-Graefe is beyond most pockets, the present translation of M. Piérard’s more modest biography is welcome. Several reproductions of pictures are given, but M. Piérard refrains purposely from aesthetic criticism. He has been able indeed to throw new light upon some obscure places, and the life is strange enough and tragic enough to be worth reading, were there no question of the genius of the artist. For here we have the astonishing spectacle of an entirely uncompromising man. Van Gogh believed what Christ said, and, therefore, he cut up his clothes and gave them to the poor. He thought that picture-dealing was robbery, and, therefore, though he was employed by the firm, he stood up in the middle of Messrs Goupil’s shop and told them so. He gave up being a schoolmaster to preach religion among the working men of London. His expenditure upon Bibles was so great that his father, a Dutch Minister, had to put a stop to it. Whatever he did, ‘his excess of zeal bordered on scandal’. When late in life he settled down to paint pictures, where, perhaps, zeal was less reprehensible, he painted with such intensity that he finished them with incredible quickness and the paint was so thick ‘that it ran off the canvas on to the polished floor’. Again, the authorities were horrified. Soon symptoms of madness showed themselves. He cut off his own ear, and is said to have threatened to kill Gauguin. The peasants of Arles made mock of him, and, at length, having spent his life in ‘a frantic desire for the absolute’, he ended it with his own hands, remarking: ‘Ah, well, my work—I risked my life for it, and my reason has almost foundered.’

[Nation & Athenaeum, May 9, 1925]

[]

Gipsy or Governess?

[Places & Persons (Thornton Butterworth Ltd, 1925) by Margot Asquith.]

There can be no doubt that the same fate awaits Mrs Asquith (if we may still use the familiar name) that has already befallen so many of her sisters in the past. Every age boasts a few of these dominating figures, like Madame du Deffand, the Duchess of Devonshire, Lady Hester Stanhope, who survive not in their works but perhaps more immortally in their charm, their wit, or in some strange combination of opposite qualities which fascinates us against our expectation and out of all proportion to our sense of fitness. That Mrs Asquith’s reign was long and her empire vast is indisputable. Open any memoir of Victorian worthies, the lives of Tennyson, Jowett, Gladstone, Symonds; by all these men Mrs Asquith was lectured, praised, blamed, and petted. Open any volume of social reminiscence; there is Mrs Asquith again, brilliant, outrageous, adored. To all these people she meant something vital, individual; she was unlike anybody else in the world. Nor are we, though of a later generation and kept at arm’s length by the printed page, impervious to the vibration of this extraordinary personality. As we turn the pages of her latest book we find ourselves at the old game of trying to determine of what parts this composite power is composed.

‘A mixture of city clerk or post office woman and a wandering circus girl’—that is her own contribution to the problem. With a gipsy’s love of the open air and bright colours and ‘making love in the sun’, she has a stringent business woman’s dislike of dirt, discomfort, and unpunctuality. There is truth in this, for Mrs Asquith is singularly truthful, but one word could with advantage be changed; Mrs Asquith has more of the governess in her than of the clerk. As we hear her scolding and praising and laying down the law, we feel that we are all once more in the nursery and Mrs Asquith is sending some into the corner, giving others marks for good behaviour, and holding forth, with all the conviction and asperity of a governess whose schoolroom is her world, upon the sins of greed, untidiness, upsetting the inkpot, and being late for prayers. Here is a lecture upon If Winter Comes: ‘If we cared enough … we all have it in us to develop some of Sabre’s qualities, but we must be equally independent of public opinion, equally tolerant, and, above all, equally selfless and loving.’ Or here are a few maxims to be written out five hundred times between tea and bedtime: ‘To stick to an opinion is the privilege of fools … To pursue war after conquest is to invite contempt … There are many signs of the Cross, could we but see them.’ It is with a start that we remember that these are not schoolroom commonplaces, but the opinions and reflections of a woman who has seen as much of the world and known as much of mankind as any woman of her time. But the governess, we must remember is mixed with the gipsy. One may change the quality of a glass of cold water completely by dropping into it one small white pellet. Drop a tabloid of gipsy into a pint of governess and the result is the most exhilarating of potions. Great men drink and are intoxicated, though it is probable that if Jowett had had a lesson in Plato, or Gladstone in politics, or Tennyson in poetry from the governess pure and simple, he would have crushed his hat over his eyes and fled in the opposite direction. But when the governess rode like a bird, dressed like an angel, and had the courage of a hero, the shallowness of her philosophy and the crudity of her criticism could be forgiven.

Vitality of the utmost elasticity and toughness Mrs Asquith undoubtedly possesses. And if she has the defects of that quality—its impatience, its self-assurance, its inability to stop and think, so that of all the characters she has described there is none that is known to us intimately—she has too its courage, its recklessness, its ecstasy in the mere fact of living, which is infectious even in print. ‘I think you have more social courage than anyone I ever saw in my life,’ said her mother. And indeed it needed something more than courage to be Miss Margot Tennant in the year 1891—to dance with her castanets on the deck of a Nile steamer; to gallop over the desert with her skirt pinned up, but ‘showing more ankle than the safety pin had guaranteed’; to have tea with Lord Athlumney in his room; to let Major Lewis kiss your hand and say ‘I was the most wonderful person he had ever met—gay, kind and true, and a delight to be with’; to have a mind of your own on art, religion, politics; to correspond with Mr Asquith, Oscar Wilde, Mr Rodd, Mr Algernon West; to be bitingly frank about your parents and yet remain on the best of terms with them; to burst into the most sacred enclosures of English society with a nose that ‘will always be more of a limb than a feature’ and no ancestors to speak of; to be, in short, as much of a pioneer of woman’s freedom as any educationist or suffragist, and with it all to enjoy life to the core. Irreticent to a degree which makes her irreticence sublime, childishly convinced that the world is interested in all the sayings and doings of her aunts and grandchildren, marching indomitably up to St Peter’s, or Michael Angelo, or Mr Hutchinson, and delivering her verdict, pugnacious, undaunted, irrepressible, Mrs Asquith remains, indeed, as she says of the Tennants, of ‘a race apart’. But the last word is with the gipsies and not with the governesses: ‘They said I would always be young enough to make love and inspire it, and that I was unmercenary and of a kindly disposition.’

[Nation & Athenaeum, May 16, 1925]

[]

‘Celebrities of Our Times.’

[Celebrities of Our Times (Hutchinson and Co., 1925) by Herman Bernstein.]

For fifteen years Mr Bernstein has been in the habit of putting pistol-shots at the heads of great men—What do you think of the future of America? What is your opinion of the Jews? What are the qualities of a work of art?—and the great men have obligingly shouted their answers to these questions through the megaphone of Mr Bernstein’s brain. The present volume is the result. We hear Tolstoy saying that Russia should at once put into practice the views of Henry George; declaring that his artistic works are insignificant; prophesying that Darwinism will be laughed at in two or three hundred years; lamenting that almost all modern writers are ‘full of enormous self-conceit’. Next, Mr Shaw, pressing on Tolstoy’s heels, remarks that What is Art? is a ‘very silly little book … Tolstoy was a prodigious genius … but he was devoid of any humour or fun. That’s why he could not understand me.’ As for America, ‘there is nothing there that can interest me … When America will be a real American nation … when the American’s skin turns red and his forehead recedes, then it will be interesting to go to America.’ Rodin takes up the story. ‘Genius is order personified … Sculpture and architecture belong together … It seems to be a peculiarity of our time to put works of sculpture in the wrong place.’ So they go on, these thirty-two famous men, capping and contradicting each other till we feel that we must seek shelter from the storm of dogma in any simple shelter, if only that of the evening paper.

[Nation & Athenaeum, May 16, 1925]

[]

‘The Tale of Genji.’

[The Tale of the Genji by Lady Murasaki, translated by Arthur Waley (vol. i, George Allen and Unwin Ltd, 1925)]

Our readers will scarcely need to be reminded that it was about the year 991 that Aelfric composed his Homilies, that his treatises upon the Old and New Testament were slightly later in date, and that both works precede that profound, if obscure, convulsion which set Swegen of Denmark upon the throne of England. Perpetually fighting, now men, now swine, now thickets and swamps, it was with fists swollen with toil, minds contracted by danger, eyes stung with smoke and feet that were cold among the rushes that our ancestors applied themselves to the pen, transcribed, translated and chronicled, or burst rudely, and hoarsely into crude spasms of song.

Sumer is icumen in,

Lhude sing cuccu

—such is their sudden harsh cry. Meanwhile, at the same moment, on the other side of the globe the Lady Murasaki was looking out into her garden, and noticing how ‘among the leaves were white flowers with petals half unfolded like the lips of people smiling at their own thoughts’.

While the Aelfrics and the Aelfreds croaked and coughed in England, this court lady, about whom we know nothing, for Mr Waley artfully withholds all information until the six volumes of her novel are before us, was sitting down in her silk dress and trousers with pictures before her and the sound of poetry in her ears, with flowers in her garden and nightingales in the trees, with all day to talk in and all night to dance in—she was sitting down about the year 1000 to tell the story of the life and adventures of Prince Genji. But we must hasten to correct the impression that the Lady Murasaki was in any sense a chronicler. Since her book was read aloud, we may imagine an audience; but her listeners must have been astute, subtle minded, sophisticated men and women. They were grown-up people, who needed no feats of strength to rivet their attention; no catastrophe to surprise them. They were absorbed, on the contrary, in the contemplation of man’s nature; how passionately he desires things that are denied; how his longing for a life of tender intimacy is always thwarted; how the grotesque and the fantastic excite him beyond the simple and straightforward; how beautiful the falling snow is, and how, as he watches it, he longs more than ever for someone to share his solitary joy.

The Lady Murasaki lived, indeed, in one of those seasons which are most propitious for the artist, and, in particular, for an artist of her own sex. The accent of life did not fall upon war; the interests of men did not centre upon politics. Relieved from the violent pressure of these two forces, life expressed itself chiefly in the intricacies of behaviour, in what men said and what women did not quite say, in poems that break the surface of silence with silver fins, in dance and painting, and in that love of the wildness of nature which only comes when people feel themselves perfectly secure. In such an age as this Lady Murasaki, with her hatred of bombast, her humour, her common sense, her passion for the contrasts and curiosities of human nature, for old houses mouldering away among the weeds and the winds, and wild landscapes, and the sound of water falling, and mallets beating, and wild geese screaming, and the red noses of princesses, for beauty indeed, and that incongruity which makes beauty still more beautiful, could bring all her powers into play spontaneously. It was one of those moments (how they were reached in Japan and how destroyed we must wait for Mr Waley to explain) when it was natural for a writer to write of ordinary things beautifully, and to say openly to her public. ‘It is the common that is wonderful, and if you let yourselves be put off by extravagance and rant and what is surprising and momentarily impressive you will be cheated of the most profound of pleasure.’ For there are two kinds of artists, said Murasaki: one who makes trifles to fit the fancy of the passing day, the other who ‘strives to give real beauty to the things which men actually use, and to give to them the shapes which tradition has ordained.’ How easy it is, she said, to impress and surprise; ‘to paint a raging sea monster riding a storm’—any toy maker can do that, and be praised to the skies. ‘But ordinary hills and rivers, just as they are, houses such as you may see anywhere, with all their real beauty and harmony of form—quietly to draw such scenes as this, or to show what lies behind some intimate hedge that is folded away far from the world, and thick trees upon some unheroic hill, and all this with befitting care for composition, proportion, and the like—such works demand the highest master’s utmost skill and must needs draw the common craftsman into a thousand blunders.’

Something of her charm for us is doubtless accidental. It lies in the fact that when she speaks of ‘houses such as you may see anywhere’ we at once conjure up something graceful, fantastic, decorated with cranes and chrysanthemums, a thousand miles removed from Surbiton and the Albert Memorial. We give her, and luxuriate in giving her, all those advantages of background and atmosphere which we are forced to do without in England today. But we should wrong her deeply if, thus seduced, we prettified and sentimentalised an art which, exquisite as it is, is without a touch of decadence, which, for all its sensibility, is fresh and childlike and without a trace of the exaggeration or languor of an outworn civilisation. But the essence of her charm lies deeper far than cranes and chrysanthemums. It lies in the belief which she held so simply—and was, we feel, supported in holding by Emperors and waiting maids, by the air she breathed and the flowers she saw—that the true artist ‘strives to give real beauty to the things which men actually use and to give to them the shapes which tradition has ordained’. On she went, therefore, without hesitation or self-consciousness, effort or agony, to tell the story of the enchanting boy—the Prince who danced ‘The Waves of the Blue Sea’, so beautifully that all the princes and great gentlemen wept aloud; who loved those whom he could not possess; whose libertinage was tempered by the most perfect courtesy; who played enchantingly with children, and preferred, as his women friends knew, that the song should stop before he had heard the end. To light up the many facets of his mind, Lady Murasaki, being herself a woman, naturally chose the medium of other women’s minds. Aoi, Asagao, Fujitsubo, Murasaki, Yugao, Suyetsumuhana, the beautiful, the red-nosed, the cold, the passionate—one after another they turn their clear or freakish light upon the gay young man at the centre, who flies, who pursues, who laughs, who sorrows, bur is always filled with the rush and bubble and chuckle of life.

Unhasting, unresting, with unabated fertility, story after story flows from the brush of Murasaki. Without this gift of invention we might well fear that the tale of Genji would run dry before the six volumes are filled. With it, we need have no such foreboding. We can take our station and watch, through Mr Waley’s beautiful telescope, the new star rise in perfect confidence that it is going to be large and luminous and serene—but not, nevertheless, a star of the first magnitude. No; the lady Murasaki is not going to prove herself the peer of Tolstoy and Cervantes or those other great story-tellers of the Western world whose ancestors were fighting or squatting in their huts while she gazed from her lattice window at flowers which unfold themselves ‘like the lips of people smiling at their own thoughts’. Some element of horror, of terror, or sordidity, some root of experience has been removed from the Eastern world so that crudeness is impossible and coarseness out of the question, but with it too has gone some vigour, some richness, some maturity of the human spirit, failing which the gold is silvered and the wine mixed with water. All comparisons between Murasaki and the great Western writers serve but to bring out her perfection and their force. But it is a beautiful world; the quiet lady with all her breeding, her insight and her fun, is a perfect artist; and for years to come we shall be haunting her groves, watching her moons rise and her snow fall, hearing her wild geese cry and her flutes and lutes and flageolets tinkling and chiming, while the Prince tastes and tries all the queer savours of life and dances so exquisitely that men weep, but never passes the bounds of decorum, or relaxes his search for something different, something finer, something withheld.

[Vogue, late July 1925]

[]

‘Pattledom.’

[Memories and Reflections (Heinemann, 1925) by Lady Troubridge.]

One day in the early years of the nineteenth century a corpse burst the coffin in which it was contained on the deck of an East Indiaman and shot high into the air. The sailors, it is said, had drunk the embalming spirit dry; the widow, it is said, died of the shock. What remains of certainty is that the corpse was the corpse of James Pattle; that his widow was a French lady whose father had been page to Marie Antoinette and was exiled to India after the Revolution; that they left six daughters of surpassing beauty and one daughter of undoubted genius; and that without James Pattle a great many ladies of beauty and charm and wit and character, including Lady Troubridge herself, would never have existed. From how gifted, if eccentric, a stock Lady Troubridge is sprung we are made aware in the first and most amusing chapters of her recollections. For the seven daughters of that indomitable corpse ruled a Victorian empire, and to be a small child in the heart of Pattledom (as Sir Henry Taylor’ christened the sisters’ dominion) was a fascinating if bewildering experience. Half French, half English, they were all excitable, unconventional, extreme in one form or another, all of a distinguished presence, tall, impressive, and gifted with a curious mixture of shrewdness and romance. No domestic detail was too small for their attention, no flight too fantastic for their daring. In the fervour of hospitality—and they could scarcely spend a day without company—a new window would be thrown out in a dark room to cheer an invalid’s fancy; in the fervour of religion a laundry would be set up to wash the surplices of choir and clergy. Now Tennyson would be contradicted at his own table; now chased into his tower by Mrs Cameron, who stood at the bottom of the steps vociferating ‘Coward! Coward!’ until he slunk down and submitted himself to vaccination. Lady Troubridge, the daughter of a Gurney and a Prinsep, was brought up in the very heart of the sisterhood in the Prinseps’ home at Little Holland House. From her childish angle she there beheld innumerable garden parties, and Watts and Tennyson and Meredith and Ellen Ferry, until the rambling old house with its many gables and lawns was cut up into a street of villas, and the Prinseps and their troop of friends and relations departed for Freshwater. It was then that photography added a new element of excitement to their lives. With the enthusiasm of her race, Mrs Cameron quickly became the best amateur photographer of her time, converted hen-houses into dark rooms, and parlourmaids into princesses. Setting sail in old age to visit her sons in Ceylon, she was last seen tipping porters with photographs in default of small change, while her coffin—for she was of opinion that the coffins of Ceylon were undependable—was borne before her stuffed with the family china. ‘They seem to me now,’ writes Lady Troubridge, ‘like grown-up children, with their superabundant energy, their untempered enthusiasms, their stranglehold on life, their passionate loves and hates.’ It is strange to think, she adds, that all this energy and beauty are forgotten; yet something of their vitality remains. For though in the later chapters she has to deal with stirring times and people of importance, they do not compare for fun and vitality with those early years which she spent in the company of the daughters of the indomitable corpse.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Aug 1, 1925]

[]

‘Unknown Essex.’

[Unknown Essex. Being a series of unmethodical Explorations of the County illustrated in line and colour by the Author. (Bodley Head, 1925) by Donald Maxwell.]

The best way to know Essex is to have a yacht and a sketch-book. Your yacht will infallibly stick on a mudbank; you will have to wait many hours for the tide to float you off again; and then if you are Mr Maxwell you pull out your paints and paper and produce one of those charming pictures which, whatever their artistic merits, seem to prove that Essex is a country famous for the height of its mountains and the size of its lakes. It has also vast forests, romantic castles, and houses lately inhabited by famous authors. Getting at last on shore, Mr Maxwell leads us by easy stages in and out of Mucking Flats, to Horning-on-the-Hill and Hockley and Pleshey and Helions Bumpstead, so called after one Tihellus Brito, who held it at the Domesday Survey. Mr Maxwell, in short, without being an enthusiast, puts forward quite good reasons why, if you like marshes, flat country, very old houses, tumbledown castles, scenery which is plain but modest, fine sunsets, and extremely odd names, you should discover Essex. But take a sketch-book and Mr Maxwell with you; the yacht is bound to stick on the mudbank.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Aug 8, 1925]

[]

‘In My Anecdotage.’

[In My Anecdotage (Philip Allan & Co., 1925) by W.G. Elliot.]

Mr Elliot’s book, as his title gives warning, belongs to that marked class of autobiography which scarcely mentions the writer’s life or opinions save as they serve as pegs for innumerable stories. He does not know men and women: he knows anecdotes about them. He does not discuss the stage; he tells stories about actors. As his stories are almost wholly humorous, we bring away an impression that all his life has been gay and all his merriment unspoilt by a single touch of malice, satire, or ill-temper. ‘I do not know any scandalous tales of a blackmailing kind about my friends,’ he says. And it is true. His friends—and he has known actors, painters, sportsmen, men of the world—have been given to practical jokes rather than to more sinister tricks. Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree dressed up as Pierpont Morgan; Mr Grossmith impersonated one of the wax-works in Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors; Mr Elliot himself pulled Mr Allan’s chair from under him—so it goes on, facetious, irrepressible, simple-minded. It is all very readable and laughable; but it does sometimes occur to the reader to wish that Mr Elliot were not so modest, and could believe that a few plain facts about himself would be a relief from this long, varied, sprightly process of good stories about other people.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Aug 8, 1925]

[]

‘Time, Taste, and Furniture.’

[Time, Taste and Furniture (Grant Richards, 1925) by John Gloag, illustrated with drawings by E.J. Warne and reproductions from photographs.]

A third of the ill-temper of the world, Mr Gloag believes, ‘may be set down to unrestful surroundings’. Now in England, with all its conflict of tradition, ‘surroundings’ are very likely to be unrestful. There is Sheraton clashing with Stuart; there is the snob who wants a bare outline, and the fleshly who want padded repose. In short, it is extremely difficult even for the rich to furnish a room so that the artistic and the practical desires are gratified. But Mr Gloag’s admirable book, with its photographs and drawings, should make their lot easier. He is no mere antiquary. He remarks: ‘It is as well to remember that there has been both good and bad work in the past, and that it matters very little if at all, so far as appearance is concerned, whether a piece of furniture is a genuine antique or a faithful reproduction of an old model. The design of the article is the vital point.’ These beliefs lead him to devote much space and many illustrations to twentieth-century furniture—to the work of men who died yesterday or are still with us, so that perhaps for the first time we can compare Gimson with Hepplewhite and Ambrose Heal with those nameless eighteenth-century designers who have absorbed our sympathies, often to the detriment of the living. He boldly states that ‘during the first quarter of the twentieth century we have had at work a group of original designers far more brilliantly inventive than any of the fashion-dominated furniture makers of the long Georgian period’. And accordingly the chapters devoted to the moderns are the best in the book.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Aug 15, 1925]

[]

‘A Brilliant Englishwoman Writes to Me …’

A brilliant Englishwoman writes to me—Would it much affect us, we ask ourselves, if a sea monster erected his horrid head off the coast of Sussex and licked up the entire population of Peacehaven and then sank to the bottom of the sea? Should we mourn them, or wish for their resurrection? No; for none of the qualities for which we love our kind and respect its misfortunes are here revealed; all for which we despise it and suspect it are here displayed. All that is cheap and greedy and meretricious, that is to say, has here come to the surface, and lies like a sore, expressed in gimcrack red houses and raw roads and meaningless decorations and ‘constant hot water’ and ‘inside sanitation’ and ‘superb views of the sea’. We did not know that we had so much evil in us. Here shown up against the background of nature we can weigh it to the last ounce. The road has been turned into a switchback; the cliff into a ‘park’ for motorcars. Human beings bask inside them, dipping alternately into paper bags for peppermints and into newspapers for comic cuts, while the sea and the downs perform for them the same function that the band performs when they eat ices at Lyons’s. Compared with this, Wembley is beautiful, and the Mile End Road respectable, while, when we cut loose at last and turn into open country, we feel inclined to worship the first flock of sheep that we meet and venerate the simplest of shepherds.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Sep 5, 1925]

[]

‘In Any Family Save the Darwins …’

In any family save the Darwins Sir Francis Darwin would have stood out as a very exceptional man. In that most consistently gifted of English families, his rare scientific powers, his disinterestedness, his devotion, might almost be taken for granted. No currency has stood the test of time like the Darwin currency. But if the accumulated fame of the family inevitably overshadowed the individual fame of the three remarkable brothers—George, Frank, and Horace—the figure of Sir Francis remains, even to those who knew him slightly, one of abiding and peculiar charm. There must have been in him a large measure of that simplicity and candour of spirit which drew men’s affection, together with their reverence, towards his father. He seemed a perfect type of the man of science whose constant search for truth, without chilling his human sympathies, permeates his whole being with cleanliness and integrity. No pretension, no insincerity would take root in that soil. His researchers were necessarily remote from interests of ordinary people, but no one could be in his presence without an increased respect for the family whose record he upheld, and for science which breeds so sound and wholesome a race of men.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Sep 26, 1925]

[]

Congreve.

[Comedies by William Congreve ed., with introduction and notes, by Bonamy Dobrée (OUP, 1926).]

None of the Oxford Press reprints is more timely or necessary than this of Congreve’s Comedies, to be followed by a second volume containing the ‘Mourning Bride’ and the Miscellanies. Congreve is, perhaps, the only post-Shakespearean dramatist who still lives outside the walls of the British Museum, and, therefore, a small cheap edition for ordinary hands and ordinary purses (the Nonesuch Press edition was large in size and necessarily, though not correspondingly, large in price) is needed. His vitality depends upon the union of several qualities elsewhere perhaps more highly developed, but nowhere so blended and proportioned. His plays move forward by the kiss and conjunction of beauty and wit. He lives also because, more than Wycherley’s, Vanbrugh’s, or Farquhar’s, his world is our world. There is no need for the modern reader to put himself into a strained attitude in reading him. He need be no more licentious, no more hearty, no more fond of oaths and horse-play than he is by nature. To appreciate Congreve one need not be much different from what one is—only better.

Mr Dobrée’s introduction serves its purpose admirably, if we define it to be the purpose of an introduction to add substantially to our knowledge, to help us to sort out our own emotions when we have read the book, and to leave us convinced that our own reading is the true one.

Mr Dobrée is in wholesome reaction against those critics of the cuttlefish school who suffuse their pages with the many-coloured ink of their own impressions. He is a scientist rather than a cuttlefish, with a handy little hammer with which he taps the page and proves it hard. Thus he breaks up the most famous passages of The Way of the World, and shows us where the stresses fall; how the vowel sounds are disposed; how Congreve when he came to the more delicate passages ‘nearly always closed upon a trochee’. This is refreshingly matter of fact after the vapours of the other set, and Mr Dobrée is not wanting in ardour to point his dryness. But when it comes to analysing Lady Wishfort’s imaginative volubility, to talking of the ‘delicious modelling’ of one phrase, and bidding us mark the sound contrasts between ‘bird-cage’ and ‘starve’, then we begin to feel that in his laudable anxiety to cut things into little bits he has lost the power of seeing them whole. We are driven to read the play again in order to piece the parts together as Congreve wrote them. But that is another way of saying that the introduction has served its purpose.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Oct 17, 1925]

[]

‘Twenty Years of My Life.’

[Twenty Years of My Life. 1867 to 1887 with twenty-eight illustrations (Bodley Head Ltd, 1925) by Louise Jopling.]

The pictures of Mrs Jopling-Rowe are, we may guess, out of fashion nowadays; but this book proves that the lovely ingenuous girls, the roses, the landscapes, the well-bred portraits of well-bred people in full evening-dress kept her successfully afloat through twenty years—1867–1887—which, hard inevitably for a woman artist, were particularly stormy for her. Lightly, jauntily, skipping from grave to gay, printing casually, it seems, the relics of her blotting-book, she skims many adventures and sorrows, and meets, of course, Oscar Wilde and the Prince of Wales. She was almost untaught into the bargain. M. Chaplin, in whose studio she learnt the rudiments of painting in Paris, had just pronounced her (and from him it was the highest compliment) ‘serious’ when family misfortunes drove her back to London, and the task fell upon her of educating her children and keeping a roof above their heads. Cash failed her even to buy brushes and paints, until Mr Shirley Brooks gave her a five-pound note and enabled her to hire a nursemaid and buy materials sufficient at any rate to paint the portrait of a cook, with which she earned her first guineas. Again and again the sale of a picture just staved off distress. But Mrs Jopling-Rowe had one qualification which even M. Chaplin could not procure for her—a face, a figure, a personality which made her as welcome in the dining-room as in the studio. The fact cannot be concealed. Millais’s portrait is there to prove it. And who shall say that the fact is not important where English art patrons are concerned? The English, said M. Chaplin, ‘comprennent absolument rien à l’art’. In beauty, however, they are connoisseurs.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Oct 17, 1925]

[]

Saint Samuel of Fleet Street.

[The Life of Samuel Johnson. By James Boswell. Edited with Notes by Arnold Glover. With an Introduction by Austin Dobson. Illustrated by Herbert Railton (3 vols, Dent, 1925);
The Life of Samuel Johnson. By James Boswell. Newly edited with notes by Roger Ingpen (2 vols, George Bayntun, 1925);
Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Abridged and edited by F.H. Pritchard (Harrap, 1925).]

If this were the age of faith, Dr Johnson would certainly be Saint Samuel, Fleet Street would be full of holy places where he preached his sermons and performed his miracles, and the Boswells, the Thrales, and the Hawkinses would all be exalted to the rank of prophets. Our age has somehow lost the art of making haloes; but a man may fairly be said to be a Saint when cabmen, who can scarcely be said to secrete Rasselas in their pockets, quote Johnson’s sayings or invent Johnson’s sayings on a wet night in the Strand, as a writer in The Times has lately heard them doing. Then, indeed, he has eaten his way into the fabric of life and performs all the functions of the gods, presiding over the fortunes of men, and inspiring, albeit he wears a wig, a snuff-coloured coat, rolls as he walks, and has a gluttonous appetite for dinner. There can be no doubt—these two new editions, this abridgement of the famous biography show it—that Dr Johnson has proved himself of the stuff that Saints are made of, and, if we were to hazard a guess at the reason, it would be that he is one of the very few human beings who love their kind. Every other good quality is to be had in profusion; this alone is rare, as can be proved by counting those who can unanimously be said to possess it. One might begin with Christ and Socrates; add Shakespeare and Montaigne; perhaps Sir Thomas Browne. Then, if we confine our search to the British Isles, whom do we find? Milton is hopelessly out of the running; so are Wycherley, Swift, Pope, Congreve. The names of statesmen and soldiers do not leap to the mind. Pcpys, for all his defects, is a possible candidate; Lamb stands as good a chance as any, but it is Dr Johnson, the coarse, moody, rough-tempered man, who possesses, by virtue perhaps of his coarseness and his moodiness, the peculiar sympathy, the majestic tolerance, the broad humour, which, when he has been in his grave a century and a half, still make the cabmen think of him on a wet night in the Strand.

That this myth-making quality springs from some personal ascendancy, and has little to do with intellect or art, is clear. People who have never read a word of Johnson’s writings are inspired by this power in him to add to the myth from their own stores, by which means alone he is assured of immortality. His figure, at least, will never dry up and dwindle away; always somebody will be dabbing a fresh handful of clay on the surface. Whether the myth thus created will not, in process of time, altogether cease to resemble the actual man remains to be proved. The religion may entirely misinterpret the founder. But in Johnson’s case the test is near at hand and easy to apply. There are his books—The Rambler, The Vanity of Human Wishes, the Tour to the Hebrides, the Lives of the Poets, and it cannot be denied that they fix and refine features which, under the influence of the myth-makers, tend to wobble and to spread. In the first place they make us revise that part of the legend which will have it, for the fun of exaggeration partly, that Johnson laboured always under what Canon Ainger called ‘the Johnsonian incubus’. He was pompous and sententious and Latin. It took all Lamb’s genius to liberate English prose from the thrall. With this in mind we open the Lives of the Poets, and what do we find? A prose which, beside our daily diet of Times leaders and statesmen’s letters, appears brief, pointed, almost elegant; which alights with all its feet neatly together for the most part and exactly upon its meaning; which indulges frequently in a thrust or lunge of phrase of the utmost vigour and vivacity. ‘Among this lagging race of frosty grovellers he might still have risen into eminence,’ and so on. The words occur in that life of Milton which is more often quoted as an example of the perversity of the great critic’s judgement than of the grace and elasticity of his style. And he goes on, warped by one of those prejudices which tend to twist his judgement from the straight, to comment a little censoriously upon ‘a kind of respect, perhaps unconsciously paid to the great man by his biographers; every house in which he resided is historically mentioned, as if it were an injury to neglect naming any place which he honoured by his presence.’ That respect is now far more profusely lavished upon Johnson than upon Milton. Here, prefixed to Mr Glover’s edition, is an article by Austin Dobson carefully, precisely, methodically enumerating each of Johnson’s dwelling-places throughout his life, while in the two large volumes edited by Mr Ingpen these same sacred precincts, together with Johnson in every attitude and Johnson’s friends in all their variety, are illustrated so profusely that the biography becomes a rivulet of words flowing round a ceaseless procession of pictures. Both editions meet different needs. Mr Glover’s, with the notes of Malone, is the handier, the smaller, the more literary; Mr Ingpen’s is a refreshment and stimulus for the eye when it has absorbed as much print as it can deal with. Holding its rather unwieldy volumes, the reader, transformed into a seer, foretells the day when the cinematograph will be the natural accompaniment of the Life and Letters.

Finally, there is the bold, the candid, the adventurous Mr Pritchard. ‘Years are few,’ he says, ‘and books are many.’ Much of Boswell, he confesses, we can well spare. Johnson was a great skipper himself. So let us be frank with ourselves; and away he goes, cutting and slashing, until the whole of Boswell is reduced to a neat textbook for industrious scholars, who, when they have mugged up Boswell, can turn their cramming to account by doing a string of exercises thoughtfully provided at the end. Still, there has to be a beginning to all things, and who knows if the little boy who starts on Pritchard may not prove in years to come, the most hearty Boswellian of them all?

[Nation & Athenaeum, Nov 14, 1925]

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Melba.

[Memories and Melodies (Thornton Butterworth Ltd, 1925) by Nellie Melba.]

It would not be difficult to make Melba’s life into a fairy-story—how there was a poor goose-girl who took a kitchen shovel in her hands and struck open a gold mine in the cabbage patch, and great kings paid her homage, and she lived in silks and finery happily ever afterwards. It is true that the facts are slightly less romantic—Melba’s father was the son of a Scotch farmer, and came to Melbourne with a pound in his pocket and made a fortune. But it is also true that his daughter was so short of funds when she took lessons from Marchesi in Paris that she had only one dress, which she wore week in, week out, in spite of Marchesi’s protests. Then suddenly the mine was discovered—the bottomless gold mine in Melba’s throat. In an incredibly short time she was appearing in Brussels, singing to an incredulous, silent, finally uproarious house, and waking next day to find herself, soberly and solidly, famous throughout Europe. Indeed, every door was open to a woman with that voice; every city in the world clamoured to hear it. But the golden voice was lodged, as such voices often are, in a shrewd, business-like body. She did not penetrate to strange places, nor sing strange songs. ‘Home, Sweet Home’ rang our almost incessantly in the palaces of kings and millionaires. But once at least the prosperous pilgrimage was interrupted, and she stooped over Sarah Bernhardt on her deathbed. The great actress whispered, ‘Ah, Melba … my golden voice needs me no longer, for I am dying!’ and when Melba got out into the street her friend stared at her. Her face was daubed with the dying Bernhardt’s rouge. Melba’s own make-up was always extremely efficient. She brought her father’s business temperament on to the stage. No sacrifice of time or food was too great in the cause of her work, and she prided herself upon singing exactly what the composer wrote. Only once, apparently, did she fail, when she sang Brunhilde in Siegfried. ‘The music was too much for me … I had a sensation almost of suffocation, of battling with some immense monster’—and she never sang Wagner again. But the crown was not without its thorns. She has been accused of having no roof to her mouth, of eating three raw eggs before each set of La Bohème, and finally half London believed that Melba had to give up singing because of her passion for eating mice. The real culprit was a magpie; for birds and beasts, scents and ices have all been named after her; but even so, there are compensations.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Dec 5, 1925]

[]

‘Some of the Smaller Manor Houses of Sussex.’

[Some of the Smaller Manor Houses in Sussex (The Medici Society, 1925) by Viscountess Wolseley.]

Lady Wolseley is not possessed of a light pen, but she is possessed of method and conscience, and a dogged desire to tunnel her way into the heart of her subject. That subject is one of inexhaustible fascination. Scattered about Sussex are innumerable old houses of the lesser sort, small enough to be lived in and used, humble enough to die in harness as barns and pigsties, if fate so wills it, which is perhaps a better lot than to be preserved artificially, like some of our statelier homes, where life is now too costly to be possible. Massetts Place, Wapsbourne, Laughton Place, Halland House, Colin Godman—the names sound sweet in the ear, and recall, perhaps, even to idle tourists, glimpses of the charming old places themselves and envious thoughts, which Lady Wolseley’s admirable photographs revive, cast in their direction. But Lady Wolseley has not been content with envious thoughts. She has got the owners’ permission to make a thorough investigation, has gathered up the local traditions, has searched the parish registers, tramped the fields, examined locks, hinges, and trap doors, and so built up an authentic history stretching back often for many centuries. The history of these lesser houses is often obscure. They have changed hands often, and the hands have been those of obscure men. Nevertheless, Lady Wolseley increases our sense of the close-knit antiquity of Sussex. The same names turn up again and again—now in a Tudor manuscript, now over a modern shop door. The reddest Socialist could scarcely lift a hand against a Dalyngrygge, a Lewknor, or a Keynes.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Dec 5, 1925]

[]

‘From Hall-Boy to House-Steward.’

[From Hall-Boy to House-Steward. With Portrait (Edward Arnold and Co., 1925) by William Lanceley.]

By ability and economy Mr Lanceley, who began as a hall-boy on eight pounds a year, rose to be house-steward to the Duke of Connaught. But the good servant is the last person from whom to expect a racy description of a servant’s life. He becomes the echo of his master; he becomes even more aristocratic than the aristocrat. ‘There is a quotation among old servants,’ he says, which runs:

You may break, you may shatter the vase as you will,

But the scent of the roses will cling to it still

and Mr Lanceley’s book entirely bears out this praise of the rose. They feed you well, they house you well; in addition, they ‘never pass a remark on a servant in the hearing of another’, and so on. Indeed, when Mr Lanceley went into service in the ’seventies, servants never asked for holidays, for the food and comfort they enjoyed at the great house were infinitely superior to what they got at home. They worshipped their master’s goods. He has a story of a housemaid whose boast it was that she had washed the same dinner service for twenty-five years without so much as chipping a single piece. They stayed long in their places. They observed decorous rites as to chairs and benches. But Mr Lanceley was too much of a gentleman to eavesdrop, and so, though he handed a great many dishes to well-known people, he seldom heard a complete story fall from their lips, and, naturally, had no time to listen to Oscar Wilde, though he often helped him off with his coat. His vivacity steadily diminishes as he climbs higher. When he began life the squire swore and drank and dropped the candle-grease about. Nowadays, gentlemen are as exemplary as their butlers. But on the whole, Mr Lanceley makes out a good case for the life of a servant, nor has successful serving by any means blinded him to the problems of the future. He himself keeps servants now, and, to his great credit, for the promoted servant is apt to be a tyrant, they stay with him for years.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Dec 26, 1925]

[]

1926

‘Mary Elizabeth Haldane, a Record of a Hundred Years.’

[Mary Elizabeth Haldane. A Record of a Hundred Years, edited by her daughter (Hodder & Stoughton, 1926).]

Mrs Haldane was publicly famous for two things—the length of her life and the fame of her son. But as many people, whose testimony is worth having, bear witness, she was possessed of a character—serene, judicial, broad-minded—which gave her her own claims to admiration. Yet the century covered by her life was passed in quiet, private living, mostly in the country. In her own autobiographical sketch she depicts a severe and rather dismal upbringing. The terrors of religion were imparted by a governess; cold baths and straw mattresses were the rule; and so Spartan was the discipline that ‘she used to wonder why it was a crime to be a child’. Sometimes she escaped, and saw the first locomotive on one occasion, ‘a curious, grasshopper-looking machine’, at the sight and sound of which her pony bolted. On another she, who was to live through the Great War, saw the first balloon ascend. Her marriage freed her from the misery of adolescence, and she settled down to a life of child-bearing, country pursuits, and neighbourly beneficence, and, though finally bedridden, she became increasingly active-minded. Lord Haldane describes how his mother would read ‘difficult philosophical books’ in extreme old age, and entered with zeal and intelligence into the talk of the soldiers, writers, and divines who came to Cloan and prized, above all, their visits to the aged lady, sitting up, beautifully dressed, animated and interested, in bed.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Jan 30, 1926]

[]

‘Queen Alexandra the Well-Beloved.’

[Queen Alexandra the Well-Beloved (Stanley Paul, 1925) by Elizabeth Villiers.]

There can be no doubt that Queen Alexandra was an exquisitely pretty woman. Even the photographs in the present book put that beyond a doubt. Slim, upright, composed, one beautiful little hand clasped tenderly over a lap dog, the other controlling a perfect parasol, she drives through Rotten Row as, Miss Villiers would have us believe, she drove through the greater part of the nineteenth century. At the same time, she is completely dumb, and Miss Villiers is far too well-bred a courtier to break the Royal reserve. We are told nothing about her in the present little book except such facts as befit a lady with a lap dog. She was fond of sketching and music and children. Perhaps her most valuable contribution to her age was that she raised the standard of comfort for dogs. The kennels at Sandringham were famous, and the Queen attended to her pets with her own hands. Volumes, too, might be devoted to the gifts of chocolate boxes and dressing gowns, which descended from the sky, as if by miracle, upon the heads of ecstatic old men and women. But perhaps Miss Villier’s most valuable contribution to our knowledge of the Royal Family is the story she tells of a workman who found his way through a drain-pipe into Queen Mary’s bedroom. She credits him with loyal motives—he wished to demonstrate, not to eavesdrop—and she recalls, what it is always pleasant to remember, the earlier exploits of the Boy Jones. For in writing the life of Queen Alexandra, it is frequently necessary to talk of something else.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Feb 6, 1926]

[]

‘Paradise in Piccadilly.’

[Paradise in Piccadilly. The Story of Albany. With illustrations from sketches by the author and from photographs (John Lane The Bodley Head Ltd, 1925) by Harry Furniss.]

Paradise in Piccadilly is Albany—Mr Furniss drops the ‘The’. The name of that secluded mansion in the corner of your card is said to do more for you than virtue, rank, or riches, or proves that you are the possessor of them all. It was in 1804 that Mr Copland bought from the Duke of York and Albany the house that had originally belonged to Stephen Fox and had been sold by him to Lord Melbourne in 1770. Mr Copland, anticipating the demand for flats, had the brilliant idea of converting the mansion into sets of apartments for gentlemen. As the law of Albany is that no material change can be made without the consent of all the lodgers, and as, until recent years, all the lodgers were men, the building has remained in spirit and in substance precisely as it was in the year 1804. The place has escaped the historian, as indeed it is apt to escape the sightseer. The truth is that once you have commented upon the beauty of the position and referred to the fact that Byron lived there a short, and Lord Macaulay a long time, there is little to be said. One may add that the oil lamps have been replaced by gas, and that it was due to a hoax by Lord Macaulay’s niece, who warned him that a robbery was planned, that the present iron gates were hastily provided. Mr Furniss has done his best to fill the book with stories of the occupants, and when these ran thin, has filled up pages with copious quotations from references to Albany in fiction. But this is as it should be. The inhabitants, we have no doubt, much prefer to be left alone.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Mar 6, 1926]

[]

‘Reminiscences of Mrs Comyns Carr.’

[Mrs J. Comyns Carr’s Reminiscences. Edited by Eve Adam. With 24 illustrations (Hutchinson & Co. Ltd, 1926).]

Mrs Comyns Carr was born in 1850, and thus lived through that curious age when Bohemia, to which she was proud to belong, was beginning, thanks to Lady Lindsay, Lady Lewis, and Lady Jeune, and others, to be admitted to society. But Mrs Comyns Carr did not particularly enjoy admittance, as her sketch of Mrs Wemyss’s grim entertainment bears witness. She dabbled in the Princes and the beauties, the Oscar Wildes, Mrs Langtrys, and Prince of Waleses; but with charming spontaneity preferred her own circle, where the men wore peg-top trousers, and the women, following her own leadership, refused to be cumbered with bustles and crinolines. This lively and unembarrassed spirit is perceptible throughout her book. She drew all the writers and painters—Burne-Jones, Sargent, Meredith, Henry James—to her circle, though in her early days the bed had to be made up to look the part of dinner table. Eventually she became dress designer to Ellen Terry, thanks to a happy experiment of hers with a muslin frock and a potato steamer. For some years she was always behind the scenes or sitting with the sarcastic and formidable Irving in the stage box, or awaiting in fear the nonarrival of Ellen Terry. She would dash in two minutes before her call and explain airily that she had been to the Minories to see if a begging letter writer were telling the truth. Irving himself never dared to upbraid her. Off she dashed, draped in Mrs Carr’s wondrous gowns of Bohemian silk and beetles’ wings. But the charm of the book does not come from its good stories; it comes from the sense it gives that, however grim and gaunt the stock Victorian figures may have been, another life washed at their feet—a life of good fellowship, good eating, merriment, hard work, and ladies, if the portraits are to be trusted, of exquisite grace and charm.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Mar 20, 1926]

[]

‘The Days of Dickens.’

[The Days of Dickens. A Glance at Some Aspects of Early Victorian Life in London (Routledge and Sons, 1926) by Arthur L. Hayward.]

This very sprightly and entertaining book collects a mass of information about the early and middle years of Victorian life which certainly bears out the publishers’ statement that ‘the days of Dickens and Thackeray seem almost as remote as the days of the Stuarts’. One feeling dominates the reader—a sense of escape. For whatever charges may be brought against the present, we could scarcely tolerate one day lived as our great-grandfathers lived it. Consider travel. Farly one March morning two of the outside passengers on the Bath Mail were found frozen to death, while a third expired soon afterwards. This was only an exaggeration of the miseries ordinarily suffered in cold weather by the outside fares. ‘Postboys were frequently lifted out of their saddles at the point of death.’ Or consider sanitation. The drainage of London until 1860 was based on legislation and plans dating from the reigns of Henry VIII and William and Mary. The River Thames was in so disgusting a state that Members of Parliament could hardly bear the smell in the House of Commons. Seven miles of the river in July, 1858 were reported to be in a state of ‘putrid fermentation’. In factories children were harnessed to trucks like dogs, and scrambled along on all fours. Little boys were driven up chimneys or shoved down head first. As lately as February, 1864, five pirates were hung in a row outside Newgate. It is true that the splendours of the aristocracy were more solid than they are now, the country more profoundly rural, the mail coaches picturesque, and genius, at least in art and science, prolific. But if the reader wishes to heighten the relish of his own hot baths and electric light, he cannot do better than study The Days of Dickens—a book, moreover, stuffed with odds and ends of amusing information.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Mar 10, 1926]

[]

‘The Flurried Years.’

[The Flurried Years. With sixteen illustrations (Hurst and Blackett Ltd, n.d.) by Violet Hunt]

Many people, of course, will complain that Miss Hunt has outraged decency by speaking so frankly of people still alive, and by revealing so poignantly the sorrows of her own heart. But after all, the hardened reader of memoirs is so well supplied with books stuffed with horsehair that he can hardly help welcoming one made out of the tenderer material of flesh and blood. It is true that blood is a messy liquid; tempers are bound to be ruffled and dignities smeared by writers who dabble their fingers in it. Yet, for all its frankness, Miss Hunt’s story is by no means plain sailing. Exactly what happened, and why what happened did so happen, we confess to being still in doubt. ‘Like Miss Flite I have haunted for years the law courts of this as well as those of other countries,’ says Miss Hunt, and she takes it for granted that the reader is as well versed in legal judgements as she is. It does not very much matter. The book is a novelist’s book, and situations are presented as they appear imaginatively, not as they happen prosaically and accurately day by day. Through the glamour and the sordidity (both are well mixed) loom up several of the great Edwardian figures with uncommon brilliancy—Conrad, Hudson, and in particular Henry James. Whether his letters to Miss Hunt have already been published we know not; they are highly and exquisitely characteristic of the unofficial side—the timid, prudish, spinsterly side of that great novelist. Unpleasantness and brilliance are oddly mixed throughout the book, for Miss Hunt has lived her flurried years in the purlieus of letters, and, as we all know, the precincts of genius (but she runs the word to death) are apt to be unsavoury.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Mar 10, 1926]

[]

‘Steeplejacks and Steeplejacking.’

[Steeplejacks and Steeplejacking (Jonathan Cape Ltd, 1926) by William Larkins.]

Mr Larkins’s book is warranted to turn the reader giddy. Often in reading it one has had to cling tightly to the arms of one’s chair. For without any literary artifice, simply by telling how he has stood on the tops of chimneys, felt them rock beneath him, or had the lightning playing about his ears while exposed upon a church steeple, he does what writers often vainly attempt—he communicates his own thrill, and we add to it from our own weakness a giddiness which was never his. For he has very seldom lost his nerve, in spite of experiences which one might expect to haunt his pillow for a lifetime. Employed to repair the Nelson column, for instance, he found on reaching the top that the statue stands upon a platform with a sharp slope outwards. It was greasy with soot, and Mr Larkins’s foot slipped. Next moment his ‘feet and legs hung over the edge … I only saved myself in the nick of time by using elbows as brakes while lying flat on my back.’ Another inch, and he would have been over. The very top of the column serves, he found, as a cemetery for London birds. Further, he is an expert thrower of chimneys, and for a bet will walk along a plank the two ends of which are supported on the two summits of factory chimneys. The moral seems to be that, once you get used to it, climbing a steeple is no whit more dangerous than sitting at a desk. But the reader, being green to the work, will get enough thrills from Mr Larkins’s story to break his neck a dozen times over.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Mar 27, 1926]

[]

Romance and the ’Nineties.

[The Romantic ’90s (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1926) by Richard Le Gallienne]

The reader should not be put off by the apparent discursiveness of Mr le Gallienne’s manner. He himself describes his book as ‘harmless gossip’, but beneath the personalities and the ease and airiness of the style there lies a reasoned and defended point of view. Mr le Gallienne is a profound believer in the importance, to art and letters at least, of the ’nineties. ‘Generally speaking, all our present-day developments amount to little more than pale and exaggerated copying of the ’nineties. The amount of creative revolutionary energy packed into that amazing decade is almost bewildering in its variety,’ he writes. To most of us this will seem a curious overstatement. The figures of Dowson, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, Aubrey Beardsley, and John Davidson scarcely seem to call for such epithets. We have got into the way of thinking of that ‘amazing decade’ as the sophisticated, elongated, tapering tail to the body of the robust lion, the Victorian age. But all these classifications are too vague to be valuable. Mr Wells and Mr Bennett and Mr Yeats and Mr Kipling can all be made to fall within the decade if we choose; and, further, it is a fact that death took one after another of these remarkable people at a very early age. At any rate, Mr le Gallienne’s conviction serves to shape a very good-tempered, light, and vivacious volume. If residence in America has its share in the romance, still Mr le Gallienne makes us feel that it was genuine. When Mrs Morris gave him a pot of her quince jam, he felt as if Helen of Troy had given it him. He hung about Putney and saw Swinburne steal into a public-house for a forbidden bottle of Burgundy. He visited Pater, and found him looking like a Prussian officer. The glamour that he brought from Liverpool still irradiates his pages.

[Νation & Athenaeum, Jul 3, 1926]

[]

Laughter and Tears.

[My Life and Times (Hodder and Stoughton, n.d.) by Jerome K. Jerome]

There is an old fallacy which, however often it is scotched, springs up again to the effect that humorous writers are themselves lighthearted men. The opposite would seem to he true; and Mr Jerome’s autobiography again reminds us that a humorous writer is for the most part a man with such an insight into hardship that he must perforce laugh. So says Mr Jerome, ‘I can see the humorous side of things and enjoy the fun when it comes; but look where I will, there seems to me always to be more sadness than joy in life.’ To this ‘melancholy and brooding disposition’, so much at variance with his appearance (he resembles Lord Oxford, people tell him), a childhood of hardship and poverty contributed. On his first birthday, his father, who had been a preacher in the Black Country, sat down late at night on his wife’s bedside and told her that he was a ruined man. He had lost all his money speculating in coal mines. He set up next as an ironmonger in Limehouse, but the ironmongery failed. One thing after another failed. A few extracts from his wife’s diary tell the melancholy story. ‘Coals have been eight shillings a ton. It is a fearful prospect. I have asked the Lord to remove it.’ ‘Coals have gone down again just as we were at the last. “How much better are ye than many sparrows.”’ But their path remained ‘very cloudy and full of sorrow’. The little boy’s chief consolation was that his season ticket to school at Chalk Farm allowed him to spend all his holidays exploring the remoter parts of London. Though he was born so lately as 1859 they still ‘hunted deer round Highgate’. Hampstead was a pleasant country town. There were real woods and fields and muddy lanes at Walthamstow and Enfield and Edmonton. The future writer learnt more from his season ticket than from his teachers. But his father died, and his mother soon followed, still hoping that coals would go down in price and that their ship would come in. Then began a life of real solitude and hardship; he slept in doss-houses and shared hay-ricks with tramps; he became a clerk at twenty-six pounds a year in the London and North-Western Railway and learnt to drink and smoke, to go to the play, to eat a fried chop with his tea and spend the evening writing. The result Three Men in a Boat made Punch extremely angry. It referred to him invariably as ‘’Arry K. ’Arry’; Henley and Max Beerbohm and the rest of the intelligentsia derided him. The Morning Post said that he ‘was an example of the sad results to be expected from the education of the lower orders’. And with his fame and his success and his introduction to literary circles the interest of the chronicle diminishes. For further extracts from his mother’s diary we would give all the gossip about Mr Wells and Mr Jacobs. But between the lines of perfunctory story-telling we pick up the impression of a robust, downright character, who has championed Negroes, Germans, Peace, from sheer sympathy with the underdog, and, while enjoying all sports and pleasures ardently, is yet of opinion ‘that the one thing certain is that mankind remains a race of low intelligence and evil instincts’.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Oct 16, 1926]

[]

Julia Margaret Cameron.

Julia Margaret Cameron, the third daughter of Janies Pattle of the Bengal Civil Service, was born on June 11, 1815. Her father was a gentleman of marked, but doubtful, reputation, who after living a riotous life and earning the title of ‘the biggest liar in India’, finally drank himself to death and was consigned to a cask of rum to await shipment to England. The cask was stood outside the widow’s bedroom door. In the middle of the night she heard a violent explosion, rushed out, and found her husband, having burst the lid off the coffin, bolt upright menacing her in death as he had menaced her in life. ‘The shock sent her off her head then and there, poor thing, and she died raving.’ It is the father of Miss Ethel Smyth who tells the story (Impressions that Remained), and he goes on to say that, after ‘Jim Blazes’ had been nailed down again and shipped off, the sailors drank the liquor in which the body was preserved, ‘and, by Jove, the rum ran out and got alight and set the ship on fire! And while they were trying to extinguish the flames she ran on a rock, blew up, and drifted ashore just below Hooghly. And what do you think the sailors said? “That Pattle had been such a scamp that the devil wouldn’t let him go out of India!”’

His daughter inherited a strain of that indomitable vitality. If her father was famous for his lies, Mrs Cameron had a gift of ardent speech and picturesque behaviour which has impressed itself upon the calm pages of Victorian biography. But it was from her mother, presumably, that she inherited her love of beauty and her distaste for the cold and formal conventions of English society. For the sensitive lady whom the sight of her husband’s body had killed was a Frenchwoman by birth. She was the daughter of Chevalier Antoine de l’Étang, one of Marie Antoinette’s pages, who had been with the Queen in prison till her death, and was only saved by his own youth from the guillotine. With his wife, who had been one of the Queen’s ladies, he was exiled to India, and it is at Ghazipur, with the miniature that Marie Antoinette gave him laid upon his breast, that he lies buried.

But the de l’Étangs brought from France a gift of greater value than the miniature of the unhappy Queen. Old Madame de l’Étang was extremely handsome. Her daughter, Mrs Pattle, was lovely. Six of Mrs Pattle’s seven daughters were even more lovely than she was. ‘Lady Eastnor is one of the handsomest women I ever saw in any country,’ wrote Henry Greville of the youngest, Virginia. She underwent the usual fate of early Victorian beauty: was mobbed in the streets, celebrated in odes, and even made the subject of a paper in Punch by Thackeray, On a good-looking lady’. It did not matter that the sisters had been brought up by their French grandmother in household lore rather than in book learning. ‘They were artistic in their finger tips, with an appreciation—almost to be called a culte—for beauty.’ In India their conquests were many, and when they married and settled in England, they had the art of making round them, whether at Freshwater or at Little Holland House, a society of their own (‘Pattledom’ it was christened by Sir Henry Taylor), where they could drape and arrange, pull down and build up, and carry on life in a high-handed and adventurous way which painters and writers and even serious men of affairs found much to their liking. ‘Little Holland House, where Mr Watts lived, seemed to me a paradise,’ wrote Ellen Terry, ‘where only beautiful things were allowed to come. All the women were graceful, and all the men were gifted.’ There, in the many rooms of the old Dower House, Mrs Prinsep lodged Watts and Burne-Jones, and entertained innumerable friends among lawns and trees which seemed deep in the country, though the traffic of Hyde Park Corner was only two miles distant. Whatever they did, whether in the cause of religion or of friendship, was done enthusiastically.

Was a room too dark for a friend? Mrs Cameron would have a window built instantly to catch the sun. Was the surplice of the Rev. C. Beanlands only passably clean? Mrs Prinsep would set up a laundry in her own house and wash the entire linen of the clergy of St Michael’s at her own expense. Then when relations interfered, and begged her to control her extravagance, she nodded her head with its coquettish white curls obediently, heaved a sigh of relief as her counsellors left her, and flew to the writing-table to despatch telegram after telegram to her sisters describing the visit. ‘Certainly no one could restrain the Patties but themselves,’ says Lady Troubridge. Once indeed the gentle Mr Watts was known to lose his temper. He found two little girls, the granddaughters of Mrs Prinsep, shouting at each other with their ears stopped so that they could hear no voices but their own. Then he delivered a lecture upon self-will, the vice, he said, which they had inherited from their French ancestress, Madame de l’Étang. ‘You will grow up imperious women,’ he told them, ‘if you are not careful.’ Had they not into the bargain an ancestor who blew the lid off his coffin?

Certainly Julia Margaret Cameron had grown up an imperious woman; but she was without her sisters’ beauty. In the trio where, as they said, Lady Somers was Beauty, and Mrs Prinsep Dash, Mrs Cameron was undoubtedly Talent.

‘She seemed in herself to epitomise all the qualities of a remarkable family,’ wrote Mrs Watts, ‘presenting them in a doubly distilled form. She doubled the generosity of the most generous of the sisters, and the impulsiveness of the most impulsive. If they were enthusiastic, she was so twice over; if they were persuasive, she was invincible. She had remarkably fine eyes, that flashed like her sayings, and grew soft and tender if she was moved …’ But to a child she was a terrifying apparition ‘short and squat, with none of the Pattle grace and beauty about her, though more than her share of their passionate energy and wilfulness. Dressed in dark clothes, stained with chemicals from her photography (and smelling of them too), with a plump eager face and a voice husky, and a little harsh, yet in some way compelling and even charming,’ she dashed out of the studio at Dimbola, attached heavy swans’ wings to the children’s shoulders, and bade them ‘Stand there’ and play the part of the Angels of the Nativity leaning over the ramparts of Heaven.

But the photography and the swans’ wings were still in the far-future. For many years her energy and her creative powers poured themselves into family life and social duties. She had married, in 1838, a very distinguished man, Charles Hay Cameron, ‘a Benthamite jurist and philosopher of great learning and ability’, who held the place, previously filled by Lord Macaulay, of fourth Member of Council at Calcutta. In the absence of the Governor-General’s wife, Mrs Cameron was at the head of European society in India, and it was this, in Sir Henry Taylor’s opinion, that encouraged her in her contempt for the ways of the world when they returned to England. She had little respect, at any rate, for the conventions of Putney. She called her butler peremptorily ‘Man’. Dressed in robes of flowing red velvet, she walked with her friends, stirring a cup of tea as she walked, halfway to the railway station in hot summer weather. There was no eccentricity that she would not have dared on their behalf, no sacrifice that she would not have made to procure a few more minutes of their society. Sir Henry and Lady Taylor suffered the extreme fury of her affection. Indian shawls, turquoise bracelets, inlaid portfolios, ivory elephants, ‘etc.’, showered on their heads. She lavished upon them letters six sheets long ‘all about ourselves’. Rebuffed for a moment, ‘she told Alice [Lady Taylor] that before the year was out she would love her like a sister’, and before the year was out Lady Taylor could hardly imagine what life had been without Mrs Cameron. The Taylors loved her; Aubrey de Vere loved her; Lady Monteagle loved her; and ‘even Lord Monteagle, who likes eccentricity in no other form, likes her’. It was impossible, they found, not to love that ‘genial, ardent, and generous’ woman, who had ‘a power of loving which I have never seen exceeded, and an equal determination to be loved’. If it was impossible to reject her affection, it was even dangerous to reject her shawls. Either she would burn them, she threatened, then and there, or, if the gift were returned, she would sell it, buy with the proceeds a very expensive invalid sofa, and present it to the Putney Hospital for Incurables with an inscription which said, much to the surprise of Lady Taylor, when she chanced upon it, that it was the gift of Lady Taylor herself. It was better, on the whole, to bow the shoulder and submit to the shawl.

Meanwhile she was seeking some more permanent expression of her abundant energies in literature. She translated from the German, wrote poetry, and finished enough of a novel to make Sir Henry Taylor very nervous lest he should be called upon to read the whole of it. Volume after volume was despatched through the penny post. She wrote letters till the postman left, and then she began her postscripts. She sent the gardener after the postman, the gardener’s boy after the gardener, the donkey galloping all the way to Yarmouth after the gardener’s boy. Sitting at Wandsworth Station she wrote page after page to Alfred Tennyson until ‘as I was folding your letter came the screams of the train, and then the yells of the porters with the threat that the train would not wait for me’, so that she had to thrust the document into strange hands and run down the steps. Every day she wrote to Henry Taylor, and every day he answered her.

Very little remains of this enormous daily volubility. The Victorian age killed the art of letter writing by kindness: it was only too easy to catch the post. A lady sitting down at her desk a hundred years before had not only certain ideals of logic and restraint before her, but the knowledge that a letter which cost so much money to send and excited so much interest to receive was worth time and trouble. With Ruskin and Carlyle in power, a penny post to stimulate, a gardener, a gardener’s boy, and a galloping donkey to catch up the overflow of inspiration, restraint was unnecessary and emotion more to a lady’s credit, perhaps, than common sense. Thus to dip into the private letters of the Victorian age is to be immersed in the joys and sorrows of enormous families, to share their whooping coughs and colds and misadventures, day by day, indeed hour by hour. The standard of family affection was very high. Illness elicited showers of enquiries and kindnesses. The weather was watched anxiously to see whether Richard would be wet at Cheltenham, or Jane catch cold at Broadstairs. Grave misdemeanours on the part of the governesses, cooks, and doctors (‘he is guilty of culpable carelessness, profound ignorance’, Mrs Camerson would say of the family physician), were detailed profusely, and the least departure from family morality was vigilantly pounced upon and volubly imparted.

Mrs Cameron’s letters were formed upon this model; she counselled and exhorted and enquired after the health of dearest Emily with the best; but her correspondents were often men of exalted genius to whom she could express the more romantic side of her nature. To Tennyson she dwelt upon the beauty of Mrs Hambro, ‘frolicsome and graceful as a kitten and having the form and eye of an antelope … Then her complexion (or rather her skin) is faultless—it is like the leaf of “that consummate flower” the Magnolia—a flower which is, I think, so mysterious in its beauty as if it were the only thing left unsoiled and unspoiled from the garden of Eden … We had a standard Magnolia tree in our garden at Sheen, and on a still summer night the moon would beam down upon those ripe rich vases, and they used to send forth a scent which made the soul faint with a sense of the luxury of the world of flowers.’ From such sentences it is easy to see why Sir Henry Taylor looked forward to reading her novel with dread. ‘Her genius (of which she has a great deal) is too profuse and redundant, not distinguishing between felicitous and infelicitous,’ he wrote. ‘She lives upon superlatives as upon her daily bread.’

But the zenith of Mrs Cameron’s career was at hand. In 1860 the Camerons bought two or three rose-covered cottages at Freshwater, ran them together, and supplemented them with outhouses to receive the overflow of their hospitality. For at Dimbola—the name was taken from Mr Cameron’s estate in Ceylon—everybody was welcome. ‘Conventionalities had no place in it.’ Mrs Cameron would invite a family met on the steamer to lunch without asking their names, would ask a hatless tourist met on the cliff to come in and choose himself a hat, would adopt an Irish beggar woman and send her child to school with her own children. ‘What will become of her?’ Henry Taylor asked, but comforted himself with the reflection that though Julia Cameron and her sisters ‘have more of hope than of reason’, still ‘the humanities are stronger in them than the sentimentalities’, and they generally brought their eccentric undertakings to a successful end. In fact the Irish beggar child grew up into a beautiful woman, became Mrs Cameron’s parlourmaid, sat for her portrait, was sought in marriage by a rich man’s son, filled the position with dignity and competence, and in 1878 enjoyed an income of two thousand four hundred pounds a year. Gradually the cottages took colour and shape under Mrs Cameron’s hands. A little theatre was built where the young people acted. On fine nights they trapesed up to the Tennysons and danced; if it were stormy, and Mrs Cameron preferred the storm to the calm, she paced the beach and sent for Tennyson to come and pace by her side. The colour of the clothes she wore, the glitter and hospitality of the household she ruled reminded visitors of the East. But if there was an element of ‘feudal familiarity’, there was also a sense of ‘feudal discipline’. Mrs Cameron was extremely outspoken. She could be highly despotic. ‘If ever you fall into temptation,’ she said to a cousin, ‘down on your knees and think of Aunt Julia.’ She was caustic and candid of tongue. She chased Tennyson into his tower vociferating ‘Coward! Coward!’ and thus forced him to be vaccinated. She had her hates as well as her loves, and alternated in spirits ‘between the seventh heaven and the bottomless pit’. There were visitors who found her company agitating, so odd and bold were her methods of conversation, while the variety and brilliance of the society she collected round her caused a certain ‘poor Miss Stephen’ to lament: ‘Is there nobody commonplace?’ as she saw Jowett’s four young men drinking brandy and water, heard Tennyson reciting ‘Maud’, while Mr Cameron wearing a coned hat, a veil, and several coats paced the lawn which his wife in a fit of enthusiasm had created during the night.

In 1865, when she was fifty, her son’s gift of a camera gave her at last an outlet for the energies which she had dissipated in poetry and fiction and doing up houses and concocting curries and entertaining her friends. Now she became a photographer. All her sensibility was expressed, and, what was perhaps more to the purpose, controlled in the new born art. The coal-house was turned into a dark room; the fowl-house was turned into a glass-house. Boatmen were turned into King Arthur; village girls into Queen Guenevere. Tennyson was wrapped in rugs: Sir Henry Taylor was crowned with tinsel. The parlourmaid sat for her portrait and the guest had to answer the bell. ‘I worked fruitlessly but not hopelessly,’ Mrs Cameron wrote of this time. Indeed, she was indefatigable. ‘She used to say that in her photography a hundred negatives were destroyed before she achieved one good result; her object being to overcome realism by diminishing just in the least degree the precision of the focus.’ Like a tigress where her children were concerned, she was as magnificently uncompromising about her art. Brown stains appeared on her hands, and the smell of chemicals mixed with the scent of the sweet briar in the road outside her house. She cared nothing for the miseries of her sitters nor for their rank. The carpenter and the Crown Prince of Prussia alike must sit as still as stones in the attitudes she chose, in the draperies she arranged, for as long as she wished. She cared nothing for her own labours and failures and exhaustion. ‘I longed to arrest all the beauty that came before me, and at length the longing was satisfied,’ she wrote. Painters praised her art; writers marvelled at the character her portraits revealed. She herself blazed up at length into satisfaction with her own creations. ‘It is a sacred blessing which has attended my photography,’ she wrote. ‘It gives pleasure to millions.’ She lavished her photographs upon her friends and relations, hung them in railway waiting-rooms, and offered them, it is said, to porters in default of small change.

Old Mr Cameron meanwhile retired more and more frequently to the comparative privacy of his bedroom. He had no taste for society himself, but endured it, as he endured all his wife’s vagaries, with philosophy and affection. ‘Julia is slicing up Ceylon,’ he would say, when she embarked on another adventure or extravagance. Her hospitalities and the failure of the coffee crop (‘Charles speaks to me of the flower of the coffee plant. I tell him that the eyes of the first grandchild should be more beautiful than any flowers,’ she said) had brought his affairs into a precarious state. But it was not business anxieties alone that made Mrs Cameron wish to visit Ceylon. The old philosopher became more and more obsessed with the desire to return to the East. There was peace; there was warmth; there were the monkeys and the elephants whom he had once lived among ‘as a friend and a brother’. Suddenly, for the secret had been kept from their friends, the Camerons announced that they were going to visit their sons in Ceylon. Their preparations were made and friends went to say good-bye to them at Southampton. Two coffins preceded them on board packed with glass and china, in case coffins should be unprocurable in the East; the old philosopher with his bright fixed eyes and his beard ‘dipt in moonlight’ held in one hand his ivory staff and in the other Lady Tennyson’s parting gift of a pink rose; while Mrs Cameron, ‘grave and valiant,’ vociferated her final injunctions and controlled not only innumerable packages but a cow.

They reached Ceylon safely, and in her gratitude Mrs Cameron raised a subscription to present the Captain with a harmonium. Their house at Kalutara was so surrounded by trees that rabbits and squirrels and minah birds passed in and out while a beautiful tame stag kept guard at the open door. Marianne North, the traveller, visited them there and found old Mr Cameron in a state of perfect happiness, reciting poetry, walking up and down the verandah, with his long white hair flowing over his shoulders, and his ivory staff held in his hand. Within doors Mrs Cameron still photographed. The walls were covered with magnificent pictures which tumbled over the tables and chairs and mixed in picturesque confusion with books and draperies. Mrs Cameron at once made up her mind that she would photograph her visitor and for three days was in a fever of excitement. ‘She made me stand with spiky coconut branches running into my head … and told me to look perfectly natural,’ Miss North remarked. The same methods and ideals ruled in Ceylon that had once ruled in Freshwater. A gardener was kept, though there was no garden and the man had never heard of the existence of such a thing, for the excellent reason that Mrs Cameron thought his back ‘absolutely superb’. And when Miss North incautiously admired a wonderful grass green shawl that Mrs Cameron was wearing, she seized a pair of scissors, and saying: ‘Yes, that would just suit you,’ cut it in half from corner to corner and made her share it. At length, it was time for Miss North to go. But still Mrs Cameron could not bear that her friends should leave her. As at Putney she had gone with them stirring her tea as she walked, so now at Kalutara she and her whole household must escort her guest down the hill to wait for the coach at midnight. Two years later (in 1879) she died. The birds were fluttering in and out of the open door; the photographs were tumbling over the tables; and, lying before a large open window Mrs Cameron saw the stars shining, breathed the one word ‘Beautiful,’ and so died.

[Introduction to Victorian Photographs of Famous Men and Fair Women by Julia Margaret Cameron, Hogarth Press, Nov 1926]

[]

George Eliot.

[The Letters of George Flint. Selected with an Introduction by R. Brimley Johnson (Bodley Head Ltd, 1926).]

George Eliot lies flattened under the tomb that Mr Cross built over her, to all appearances completely dead. No writer of equal vitality as a writer so entirely lacks vitality as a human being. Yet when the solemnity of the tomb is violated, when her letters are broken into fragments and presented in a volume of modest size, they reflect a character full of variety and full of conflict—qualities that sort ill with the calm composure of death. It is true that Mr Cross so pruned the letters of irrelevances and, for aught we know, so edited the life of indiscretions, that the true George Eliot is hopelessly lost; but enough remains, thanks to Mr Brimley Johnson, when sorted and put artfully in contrast, to show that George Eliot far from being the solemn pedant of legend was a woman of flesh and blood who felt to the full the different currents of her life and time. Nobody changed her skin more completely in the course of sixty-one years. She went from arid Evangelicism to broad Agnosticism, from deploring fiction to writing it, from the depths of agricultural society to the hub of Fleet Street, from lamentations over the worldliness of marriage to an open and irregular liaison with a married man.

It would, of course, be untrue to attribute these changes entirely to her own character. Fate had planted her in such surroundings that it was only by breaking the pot itself that she could escape. It needed no unusual violence to revolt against the pastoral placidity of Griff, against Hannah More’s letters, and Doddridge’s sermons, and making jelly, and being scolded for not going to church. To dream of seeing ‘the bread fruit tree, the fan-palm, and the papyrus’, and at last actually to see them at Alton Garden were scarcely enough to fill a life. But there was a strain of impressionability in George Eliot which would have made her uneasy whatever her circumstances. There was something alive and emotional in her which tended to upset the outward solemnity. She had to leave the room overcome with awe when she first saw the beauty of the Sistine Madonna. At one moment she thought that life is a doubtful good and early death to be welcomed; at another she wished to live as long as possible and learn as much as possible. She enjoyed lawn tennis at the age of fifty-eight, and two years after the seemingly fatal blow of Lewes’s death she revived and started life afresh with Mr Cross.

But if these vacillations are brought into relief by the broken glimpses we get in this book, we are reminded that with all her sensibility she was also curiously without the sparkling temperament of the impressionable. She was easily depressed. She suffered far more from blame than she was encouraged by praise. ‘She had little self-assertion,’ Mr Bray said. She was slow and sagacious and inclined to reach out from her own narrow lot towards ‘the historical life of the world’. It was a temperament which, though it impeded her in many ways as a writer, made her expose a greater surface to life than any other woman of her time. ‘Science, history, poetry—I don’t know which draws me most,’ she wrote. She rushed ‘on the slightest pretext to Sophocles’, she filled bottles with zoological wonders on the sea shore; she read philosophy with Mr Lewes; she adored the opera; she dined with Liszt; she discussed the higher education of women with Madame Bodichon. The whole of the nineteenth century seems to be mirrored in the depths of that sensitive and profound mind which lies buried, so far as the life of the body is concerned, under Mr Cross’s tomb.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Oct 30, 1926]

[]

1927

‘Victorian Jottings.’

[Victorian Jottings, From An Old Commonplace Book (Etchells and MacDonald, 1926) by Sir James Crichton-Browne]

It were to be wished that more distinguished men would follow Sir James Crichton-Browne’s habit and keep a commonplace book by their side in which to scribble thoughts, incidents, and speculations as they arrive. The book may be as he said, ‘without cohesion or concinnity’, but for all that it makes excellent mixed reading of a kind that is too rare. Here, indeed, we have the cream of many books. The anecdotes which would have had to be spaced out with dull prose are here offered up cheek by jowl. One can hardly dip into it without finding something to suit one’s taste. If one is unlucky, one need not plod along dismally; one is forced to skip. A common thread, of course, runs through it, for Sir James has thought much about medicine and lived much with nervously affected people. We get, therefore, a good many interesting and curious medical anecdotes. The headings will run, Intermittent Mental Trouble, Lord Hampton, Secret Poisoning, Woolner. Then we skip to Melancholy and Adolescence, Gambling, and Huxley. Next we light upon Delusions, My First Coroner’s Inquest, and Dr John Brown. Nothing is treated at great length, but the mind which has recorded is so vivacious and has had intercourse with so many interesting people, that the skipping and sipping are a refreshing exercise.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Feb 12, 1927]

[]

‘The Immortal Isles.’

[The Immortal Isles (Williams and Norgate, 1926) by Seton Gordon, illustrated by Finlay Mackinnon.]

Mr Gordon is one of those enthusiasts who will wait for hours in a cramped position in order to snap a black-throated diver on her nest. Often the author and his wife ran considerable risks crossing from one island to another in a leaky boat to secure a really fine picture of a bird which supposed itself unobserved. The result is a series of those natural and wild-looking pictures of animals in their own surroundings which are among the greatest trophies of the camera. This passion for birds and beasts lends the book a solidity which otherwise it would hardly possess. For the Outer Hebrides provide sunsets and visions and folk-stories rather than history as it is understood on the mainland. What with the extreme loneliness of the islands and the emigration which has been steadily proceeding, it would seem as if the population consisted of seals and gulls and the history was the story of their matings and fightings, Mr Gordon contrives to spin a charming veil of words, however, about the clouds and the gentians and the scabious and the ghosts, and the camera does its part brilliantly.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Mar 5, 1927]

[]

What Is a Novel?

If there were in England, as there is in France, an Academy of Letters with authority to decide disputed points, one would immediately bring to their notice the chaotic state of fiction.

For three hundred years the human brain has been applying itself with great vigour and fecundity to write novels. Types of the most diverse kinds have come into existence.

Proust, Mr Kipling, Mr de la Mare, Mrs Elinor Glyn, Mr Hardy, Mr Welts are all novelists. But their books differ as the greyhound differs from the bulldog.

So suggestible is the human mind that this repetition of a single word does considerable damage. The reader comes to think that since all these varieties of book have the same name they must have the same nature.

Somewhere at the back of his mind is a vague shape called ‘a novel’ to which, often with great loss of time and temper, he tries to make the specimen before him conform. Often he is extremely unjust.

A notable instance was lately provided by Mr Wells’s William Chissold. It was condemned a thousand times not for this fault or for that, but because it was not ‘a novel’.

It is high time that this imaginary but still highly potent bogey was destroyed.

And since we are without law-givers, let us implore the novelists themselves to come to our help.

When they write a novel let them define it. Let them say that they have written a chronicle, a document, a rhapsody, a fantasy, an argument, a narrative or a dream.

For there is no such thing as ‘a novel’.

[Weekly Dispatch, Mar 27, 1927]

[]

The Governess of Downing Street.

[Lay Sermons (Thornton Butterworth Ltd, 1917) by Margot Asquith.]

Lady Oxford has all the qualities of a first-class finishing governess. She is absolutely direct, completely fearless, perfectly self-assured, and entirely unimaginative. No better instructress could be found for young people up to the ages of seventeen or eighteen. As we listen to these short discourses upon Carelessness, Health, Taste, Fashion, Human Nature, Fame, Politics, Opportunity we seem to be back again in the schoolroom; maps are on the walls; grammars upon the table; we are listening submissively to a severe lady who is preparing us in a clear metallic voice for something which is called ‘the battle of life’. Her theme this morning is Carelessness: ‘… you will find half the troubles, most of the accidents, and many of the catastrophes come from carelessness,’ she tells us. ‘Carelessness is a difficult word to analyse. It belongs to no particular category,’ and so on. Then, seeing a blank look upon her pupils’ faces, she enlivens her discourse by a story about a lady who had a relation who was a professor, and this professor received from a Russian doctor a specimen of the skin of a man who had died from a rare and virulent type of small-pox. The professor placed it in a cardboard box on his mantelpiece. While he was out walking, his wife—looking for something she had left in the room—opened the cardboard box and caught the small-pox. That is the kind of thing that will happen to us if we are careless. The next lesson is on the subject of health. Here Mrs Asquith proves that she is none of those timid suburban spinsters who shirk the disagreeable part of their duties. If spades are spades and primroses are primroses she will call them spades and primroses, and nothing else. ‘In this country,’ she writes, ‘you can write, talk, and speak in public about birth control, unnatural vices, and venereal disease—almost every eschewed subject—but you may not mention constipation.’ Mrs Asquith insists upon mentioning constipation. ‘You may evade, elude, or fight shy of this proposition [that health depends upon keeping the bowels open], but sooner or later you will have to face it.’ What lesson should we draw from the case of the Lord Mayor of Cork? He ate nothing for weeks, yet his doctors had to give him mild aperients. Now, if the intestines of the Lord Mayor of Cork could accumulate poison when he was starving, what, I ask you, is the state of our intestines who have four meals a day? The pupil feels abashed. Ah, adds Mrs Asquith, with that ubiquitous morality which is one of the most valuable assets of a governess, but it is not enough merely to keep your bowels open; you must also forgive your enemies. Open our bowels and forgive our enemies, we murmur; it seems so simple.

But when we come to art and letters it is by no means such plain sailing. The governess wanders; she wobbles; she plunges into the depths and then she scrambles out on to the bank and shakes herself dry as best she may. For example, what is this queer thing Art? ‘The function of art is not to awe, teach, stun, or surprise. It is not meant to make you burst out laughing or melt into tears. It appeals to something more fundamental and enduring than emotion …’ Somehow one does not feel oneself on firm ground here. Still, ‘what I personally find provoking in modern Art is that it is too clever, and lays an insistent emphasis on what is distorted and ugly, which neither the Greeks, Chinese, or Egyptians would have tolerated for a moment’. Did she not once go for a walk with an eminent art critic, and, instead of looking at the sea, did he not look at the pattern on his trousers and talk about the Florentines? Which proves—we scarcely know what.

For the province of a governess is not to reason, but to know; not to persuade, but to dictate. And as the boys and girls sit round the table and listen they will certainly learn that it is better to be good than clever; to play the game; to hunt the fox; to love the beautiful. The little boys will get all the prizes and the little girls will get all the snubs. In the world of the governess little boys are much more satisfactory than little girls; they are so bright, so manly, so chivalrous; above all, they are so amazingly simple. Now a little girl—but Mrs Asquith cannot find anything nice to say about little girls. In this small primitive world, where the rules are so rigid and the rewards are so conventional, little girls are difficult ingredients, apt to elude, to evade, to fight shy. But suddenly we bethink us: this is no schoolroom; this is the great world of politics and power. The boys and girls whom Mrs Asquith addresses are grown men and women; she herself is no governess of limited opportunity, but a woman who has spent her life in the height of luxury at the hub of the universe. This is very strange. Are we to conclude that Downing Street nourishes itself upon copybook maxims that would make a charwoman yawn, that the immortal Souls paid out little platitudes about art and literature which would scarcely ruffle the serenity of a suburban tea-table? Or is Mrs Asquith talking down to us for our good? We do not know. But there remains another fact even stranger. Arid, dogmatic, illogical as these sermons are, they are at the same time irresistible. In every phrase one hears the accent of that penetrating and individual voice which is unlike any other. No one can hear it and remain indifferent. No one can be taught by Mrs Asquith without falling in love with the governess.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Jul 30, 1927]

[]

1928

‘Memories and Notes.’

[Memories and Notes. With a photograph of the author (Hutchinson and Co. Ltd, 1917) by Anthony Hope.]

Mr Anthony Hope’s Memoirs stand out from the ruck by the distinction of their manner and the modesty of their tone. Nature seems to have contrived that he should never settle down and take himself too seriously. First he wished to be an actor; but won a Balliol scholarship and so learnt the classics instead. Then, after leaving Oxford, he went to the Bar, and was just making a comfortable connection there when the slut Fiction, as he ungallantly calls her, induced him to write two or three highly successful novels, and to desert the Bar. That in outline is the story of what he calls ‘an uneventful life’. But it is told with a deftness, a humour, and an economy which make it much more than a mere record, or a mere anecdote. The men he knew he knew well. Some were as famous as Jowett, others as little known but as well remembered as Arthur Llewellyn Davies. Mr Hope brings them before us with quiet skill. When it comes to speaking of himself—and it does not often come to that—he tells us that as a novelist he is ‘inured to long and increasingly long periods of barrenness’, which explains the rarity of his fiction. Also, ‘my mind is intractable and does not readily accept tuition’—in other words, he has a great gift for doing what he likes. He likes reading Jane Harrison—‘a great writer’, he calls her. He likes the study of anthropology and the history of religion. And for our part we should like a second volume of Memories and Notes.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Feb 11, 1928]

[]

‘The Cornish Miner.’

[The Cornish Miner (Allen and Unwin, 1927) by A.K. Hamilton Jenkin.]

It is impossible in a brief notice to give an adequate idea of the deep interest and, indeed, fascination of this book. Mr Jenkin has gone to the original sources, and has produced a book of genuine historical importance upon a theme which is rich in interest both for the student and for the general reader. The history both of the Cornish mines and of the Cornish miners is extremely varied and picturesque. The records go back for two thousand years. The industry has always been subject to extreme fluctuations of fortune. The demand for tin varies as social habits change. When pewter is in demand, the mines flourish; when earthenware comes in they suffer. Even so, the natives of China may take to burning tin leaf before their idols, and so the natives of Cornwall prosper again. Then science steps in, and with the new machinery new seams of copper are discovered, and an age of vast prosperity in the first half of the nineteenth century is inaugurated. The tinners, meanwhile, continue to be a race apart. They look upon the mines as the peasants in other parts of England look upon the great squire and the landlord. They seldom strike. They are the most savage of wreckers, and as time goes on the most devout of Wesleyans. They endure great suffering stoically. For when copper was introduced from abroad, the British industry almost collapsed, and the Cornish mine was known to most tourists as a derelict slag heap rusting to decay. In the past few years, however, tin has once more been found beneath the copper, and, with new methods of mining, it is probable that the industry is entering upon another lease of vigorous prosperity. Mr Jenkins tells the story, whose interest it is impossible to summarise, with great ability and skill.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Feb 25, 1928]

[]

‘Stalky’s Reminiscences.’

[Stalky’s Reminiscences (Jonathan Cape, 1918) by Major-General L.C. Dunsterville]

By far the most interesting part of this book is that devoted to the writer’s schooldays. As everyone knows, General Dunsterville was at Westward Ho with Mr Kipling. He tells us a little about the celebrated author, who had already it seems found his style, for one of his first efforts was called ‘Ave Imperatrix’, and it was written in French class at the end of a French text-book. Kipling, he says, must have been a difficult youth to manage. When the master raged at him, ‘I remember Kipling … merely removing his glasses, polishing them carefully, replacing them on his nose, and gazing with placid bewilderment at the thundering tyrant, with a look that suggested, “There, there. Don’t give way to your little foolish tantrums.”’ There is a very interesting description of the headmaster Cormell Price and his methods.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Apr 7, 1928]

[]

Preferences.

Your request that I should name some books that have interested me during the past winter sets me rummaging through my memory—a proceeding which proves perhaps that I have read nothing which made a very deep impression on me. But I must immediately add that my reading has been neither deep nor wide and, as is always the case with current books, much at the mercy of chance. Thus some of the most admired books of the winter have, for one reason or another, escaped me. I have been constantly advised to read Miss Bowen’s The Hotel, but have not yet come across it. I have heard Mr Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey and Mr Julien Green’s Avarice House discussed whenever books were mentioned. Some critics declare them both to be novels of high and lasting merit; others find in them only skilful imitations of good books. So one waits for the dust to settle. For my own part I would like to praise one novel and one book of short stories, but as both were published at my instance by the Hogarth Press I must refrain. I have also bought and propose to read should my life last long enough the final volumes of Proust’s masterpiece. The advance guard who have been to the journey’s end speak in the highest praise of it, but for such an expedition time and courage are needed.

As I trace the course of my winter’s reading I find it irregular, as it is leading steadily away from fiction in the direction of poetry and biography. The most interesting winter’s biography has been undoubtedly Monsieur Jean-Aubry’s life of Conrad. It is neither a work of art nor a psychological document, but it contains a mass of information from which one can create Conrad for one’s self, and for that one must be grateful. Gertrude Bell’s Letters interested me profoundly. Chance and choice combined to let me read many obscure autobiographies. The most notable are George Sturt’s Small Boy in the Sixties, Lord Ribblesdale’s Memoirs, which have a fine dashing style of their own, Mr Anthony Hope’s Memoirs, a model of modesty and concision, and the first volume of Lord Curzon’s Life. But it is the poets who have given me the greatest pleasure. One is Lady Winchilsea, whose poems are many winters old but have lived in such obscurity that their beauty seems new, and another is Mr Yeats. Mr Yeats improves poetically as he grows older. The Tower contains his best, deepest and most imaginative work. When I say nothing has impressed me deeply I must except that for which alone the winter was memorable.

But as I look through the crowded lists I feel with some distress how likely it is that in the press and scuffle the book I should most have enjoyed has been trampled under foot and will only be found reprinted when ‘I have lain for centuries dead.’

[New York Herald Tribune, Apr 15, 1928]

[]

Mr Yeats.

[The Tower (Macmillan and Co. Ltd, 1928) by W.B. Yeats.]

Did all old men and women, rich and poor.

Who trod upon these rocks or passed this door,

Whether in public or in secret rage

As I do now against old age?

So Mr Yeats asks in one of the poems in The Tower, and the thought of his age and the impediments it brings recurs again and again. Hence perhaps the remarkable vitality of this last book of poems. Instead of the acquiescence of old age we have the exacting self-tormenting mood of a man who resents and fights old age, and instead of yielding to it supinely is spurred by it to greater animation than before. Whatever the cause, Mr Yeats has never written more exactly and more passionately.

So rare is it for the poet to have mastered the art of dealing with everyday emotions, while he yet keeps them remote, that we have got into the habit of turning to the prose writers to express what we feel. But Mr Yeats is at once very close and very aloof. He is able by some supremely difficult combination of art and emotion to speak quite simply and yet in the universal language. Now we seem almost to hear some one talking, the verse runs so nervously, so idiomatically; and now we are given lines all grown together with meaning, massive, and incapable of disintegration. Here he is as vivid as a novelist:

There lurches past, his great eyes without thought,

Under the shadow of striped straw-pale lock,

That insolent fiend Robert Artisson;

and now, in ‘Leda and the Swan’ he carves as remote and impersonal an image of beauty as if we were made of spirit and wanted only loveliness to look at:

How can those terrified vague fingers push

The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?

And how can body, laid in that white rush

But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

And, instead of cutting off his mind and letting language soar, as the English language will do after all these years of teaching almost by itself, his intellect is always active and at work. The reader has to read very cautiously lest he overrun his signals. The poems are difficult, not through obscurity of language, but because the thought lies deep and turns strangely.

Possibly then—the thought has its encouragement—this is an age when poets only become mature when they are old. The poet’s task is harder than it was. He requires an austerity which is difficult for the young; must have felt the lure of language and not yielded to it; and must have said so many things in so many ways that at last—being always vigilant and not self-satisfied—he can use his natural voice in speaking and be still musical. At any rate, years seem to have dried up the Celtic mists, to have braced the nerves and sharpened the senses of this particular poet, so that he reverses the usual order and is a better poet in his age than in his youth.

[Nation & Athenaeum, unsigned, Apr 21, 1928]

[]

‘Behind the Scenes with Cyril Maude.’

[Behind the Scenes with Cyril Maude. By Himself (John Murray, 1928).]

This is a kindly autobiography. It follows amiably in the well-worn footsteps of such works, and tells story after story until we should almost welcome dullness as a relief. And Mr Maude himself gets a little tired of the theatre and its incessant gossip before the end. ‘I hope never to have to play again,’ he writes, ‘but to live my life down in Devon mostly,’ where by a stroke of luck he has found ‘an ideal little country house by the sea’.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Apr 28, 1928]

[]

‘Behind the Brass Plate.’

[Behind the Brass Plate (Sampson Low, 1918) by Dr A.T. Schofield.]

A doctor is in an unrivalled position for observing human life and a doctor who observes shrewdly and can write efficiently is bound to produce a delightful, an amusing, a memorable book. Dr Schofield’s book is all three. And it has the further advantage that it is not the book of a specialist, confined to the treatment of one disease. Dr Schofield has been a general practitioner in life. He was an atheist, and in the twinkling of an eye became the most devout of Christians—but never a solemn one. He was for many years a man of business; but just as his business flourished, certain practices tolerated in business, but not in private life, disgusted him and he threw up his career as his father had done before him. He came thus to medicine with more experiences than fall to the usual lot. For this reason perhaps he seems to have known every sort of person, and to have heard every sort of queer story. No student of Carlyle’s life ought to neglect the very amusing description of Louisa Lady Ashburton as she appeared when she was not perhaps on her best behaviour. We have seldom read a more vivid and accurate account of the vagaries of a great lady of the Victorian age. And at the same time one can see by what spells it was that she captivated the peasant of genius and nearly ruined his life.

[Nation & Athenaeum, May 5, 1928]

[]

‘The Book of Catherine Wells.’

[The Book of Catherine Wells. With an introduction by her husband H.G. Wells (Chatto and Windus, 1928).]

Mrs Wells was herself a writer. But the fact that she was married to a writer of the eminence and popularity of Mr Wells acts upon her as it would act upon a shy and sensitive woman. ‘She sent her work to various periodicals from a different address and through various agents so as not to be identified with me,’ her husband writes. Many of the stories—the Emerald in particular—show that she was genuinely gifted with the writer’s temperament. She was, it is clear, aware of something which she could only express by writing it down. The work is remarkably expressive for an untrained pen, and, what is more remarkable, shows, one would say, no trace of her husband’s influence. But perhaps the chief interest of the stories is that they help to consolidate the very interesting suggestion which Mr Wells makes as to his wife’s peculiar and complex temperament. She had two personalities, one christened Jane, the other Catherine. Jane was practical, an able ‘shopper’; ‘she helped people in difficulties and stood no nonsense from the plumber.’ Catherine was a dreamer, mystical, aloof. Both combined, with many others, to form a personality which was one of singular charm and humanity. The book, indeed, indicates a whole character and outlook in a most attractive way.

[Nation & Athenaeum, May 26, 1928]

[]

‘On the Stage: An Autobiography.’

[On the Stage: An Autobiography (John Murray, 1928) by George Arliss.]

The first chapter of Mr Arliss’s book, which describes Bloomsbury, London, W.C., England, about 1880, is enough to show that Mr Arliss has the picturesque power of a real writer. He isolates a scene and savours its delicious peculiarities. He writes far better than an actor who has been busy in his profession all his life has a call to. In short, if only he had not had to cram in so many stories and changes of scene and facts about this play and that, if he could have let himself go, and stood rather further off from his page, he would have written a real book; as it is he has written a book which vacillates in the strangest manner from an actor’s scrap-book to a genuine autobiography.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Jun 30, 1928]

[]

An Introduction to Mrs Dalloway

It is difficult—perhaps impossible—for a writer to say anything about his own work. All he has to say has been said as fully and as well as he can in the body of the book itself. If he has failed to make his meaning clear there it is scarcely likely that he will succeed in some pages of preface or postscript. And the author’s mind has another peculiarity which is also hostile to introductions. It is as inhospitable to its offspring as the hen sparrow is to hers. Once the young birds can fly, fly they must; and by the time they have fluttered out of the nest the mother bird has begun to think perhaps of another brood. In the same way once a book is printed and published it ceases to be the property of the author; he commits it to the care of other people; all his attention is claimed by some new book which not only thrusts its predecessor from the next but has a way of subtly blackening its character in comparison with its own.

It is true that the author can if he wishes tell us something about himself and his life which is not in the novel; and to this effort we should do all that we can to encourage him. For nothing is more fascinating than to be shown the truth which lies behind those immense façades of fiction—if life is indeed true, and if fiction is indeed fictitious. And probably the connection between the two is highly complicated. Books are the flowers or fruit stuck here and there on a tree which has its roots deep down in the earth of our earliest life, of our first experiences. But here again to tell the reader anything that his own imagination and insight have not already discovered would need not a page or two of preface but a volume or two of autobiography. Slowly and cautiously one would have to go to work, uncovering, laying bare, and even so when everything had been brought to the surface, it would still be for the reader to decide what was relevant and what not. Of Mrs Dalloway then one can only bring to light at the moment a few scraps, of little importance or none perhaps; as that in the first version Septimus, who later is intended to be her double, had no existence; and that Mrs Dalloway was originally to kill herself, or perhaps merely to die at the end of the party. Such scraps are offered humbly to the reader in the hope that like other odds and ends they may come in useful.

But if one has too much respect for the reader pure and simple to point out to him what he has missed, or to suggest to him what he should seek, one may speak more explicitly to the reader who has put off his innocence and become a critic. For though criticism, whether praise or blame, should be accepted in silence as the legitimate comment which the act of publication invites, now and again a statement is made without bearing on the book’s merits or demerits which the writer happens to know to be mistaken. One such statement has been made sufficiently often about Mrs Dalloway to be worth perhaps a word of contradiction. The book, it was said, was the deliberate offspring of a method. The author, it was said, dissatisfied with the form of fiction then in vogue, was determined to beg, borrow, steal or even create another of her own. But, as far as it is possible to be honest about the mysterious process of the mind, the facts are otherwise. Dissatisfied the writer may have been; but her dissatisfaction was primarily with nature for giving an idea, without providing a house for it to live in. The novelists of the preceding generation had done little—after all why should they?—to help. The novel was the obvious lodging, but the novel it seemed was built on the wrong plan. Thus rebuked the idea started as the oyster starts or the snail to secrete a house for itself. And this it did without any conscious direction. The little note-book in which an attempt was made to forecast a plan was soon abandoned, and the book grew day by day, week by week, without any plan at all, except that which was dictated each morning in the act of writing. The other way, to make a house and then inhabit it, to develop a theory and then apply it, as Wordsworth did and Coleridge, is, it need not be said, equally good and much more philosophic. But in the present case it was necessary to write the book first and to invent a theory afterwards.

If, however, one singles out the particular point of the book’s methods for discussion it is for the reason given—that it has been made the subject of comment by critics, not that in itself it deserves notice. On the contrary, the more successful the method, the less it attracts attention. The reader it is to be hoped will not give a thought to the book’s method or to the book’s lack of method. He is concerned only with the effect of the book as a whole on his mind. Of that most important question he is a far better judge than the writer. Indeed, given time and liberty to frame his own opinion he is eventually an infallible judge. To him then the writer commends Mrs Dalloway and leaves the court confident that the verdict whether for instant death or for some years more of life and liberty will in either case be just.

‘London. June 1928’

[Introduction to Mrs Dalloway (1925), Random House, Dec 14, 1928]

[]

‘Clara Butt: Her Life Story.’

[Clara Butt: Her Life Story. With a foreword by Dame Clara Butt, and twenty-four illustrations (George G. Harrap and Co. Ltd, 1928) by Winifred Ponder.]

Miss Butt is six foot two, and her stature is faithfully reflected in her biography. Her biographer makes us feel that Miss Butt is a great deal bigger than the ordinary human being. She writes in a strain of adulation which is fitted for a giantess. And in some respects undoubtedly this is an accurate view of anyone with a voice of the calibre of Miss Butt’s. Ordinary limits cease to have any meaning for them. When her voice boomed out everything went down before it. The middle-class girl—she is descended from Theodore Hook by the way—became the friend of Empresses. She mixed familiarly with Kings and Princes. She seems possessed not only of the height but of the temper of the Gods. Wherever she goes people fall down before her. All her efforts are crowned with success. Yet Miss Ponder writes well enough to give us the impression that Clara Butt is no lay figure. She is obviously a woman of gigantic vitality. She was able to hold her own with conductors and professors long before she had her fame to back her. Nothing annoys her more than the legend that she takes her work easily. Few people could have sung ‘Abide with me’ as she did, with a fly stuck in her throat. But while the book gives a lively and enthusiastic account of Clara Butt, it is strange how seldom music is mentioned. The Empress of Germany is much more important.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Jul 14, 1928]

[]

‘Day In, Day Out.’

[Day In, Day Out with twenty-nine illustrations (John Lane The Bodley Head Ltd, 1928) by Mrs Aubrey Le Blond.]

Mrs Le Blond, who is the author of a well-known book on Italian gardens, was first married to the famous Colonel Burnaby. She is descended from many races. Hence, perhaps, she has had many experiences. Her memories begin with the Prince of Wales’s set and hunting in Ireland. Mrs Le Blond has been very lucky in her sightseeing. She has seen most people of importance in the last fifty years or so, most quarters of the globe, and her luck did not fail her last summer when she was one of the few people who had a perfect view of the eclipse.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Aug 11, 1928]

[]

‘The Diaries of Mary, Countess of Meath.’

[The Diaries of Mary, Countess of Meath. Edited by her Husband. With twenty-eight illustrations (vol. i, 1874—99, Hutchinson and Co. Ltd, 1928).]

This volume of Lady Meath’s diaries is limited to the account of her philanthropic undertakings and travels between the years 1874 and 1900. It cannot therefore be taken as a full record of her life, but it gives nevertheless a very curious account of the charitable life of a Victorian great lady. It was strenuous in the extreme. Lady Meath never ceased to found homes for Epileptic Women; for Aged Ladies; to start schemes for the good of people in workhouses; to improve cottages and to build workmen’s dwellings on her husband’s estate. When she went abroad, she and Lord Meath bought vast numbers of musical boxes—over nine hundred in one shop indeed—and oleographs, which they distributed in hospitals and workhouse infirmaries. Her visits to the houses of other great ladies always included prayer meetings and religious discussions. On the way there and back Lady Ailsa talked to me almost entirely on receiving Christ … Drove over to Maybole … Lady Ailsa goes there once a week to read and pray with some who were drunkards.’ And so it goes on, both in England and in foreign countries. Once she met Lady Russell, who was anxious that her grandson (Lady Amberley’s boy) should ‘turn out all that is nice’. This is perhaps the first reference to Mr Bertrand Russell.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Sep 29, 1928]

[]

Plays and Pictures.

[Cambridge ADC’s small theatre in Park Street, Nov 7, 1928]

Of the three pieces given at the ADC at Cambridge last week, Stravinsky’s ‘The Tale of a Soldier’ is, of course, the most famous, and to those who saw it for the first time the most difficult. Like all highly original work, it begins by destroying one’s conceptions, and only by degrees builds them up again. Therefore the chance which so rarely occurs of seeing and hearing it was unusually welcome. The acting, save that of Madame Lopokova, was amateur, but on the whole that lent a sincerity to the performance which was of advantage to it. There was no suspicion of fatigue, or routine, or conventionality. Mr Redgrave was particularly effective as the Soldier, and Mr Arundell was successful as the reader. But in some ways, the performance of Shakespeare’s ‘A Lover’s Complaint’ (for the first time) was the most interesting of the pieces. The poem seemed to be neither acted nor read aloud, but presented from another angle in another medium. Mr Grant exquisitely emphasised the visual side of the poem by his decorations, and suggested how curiously the sister arts might illustrate each other if they chose. Here Madame Lopokova showed genuine dramatic talent, and her accent was no more foreign than that of the Elizabethans would have been. Indeed, it would be delightful if she would employ her sympathy, imagination, and wit in thus translating for us other famous poems. Finally, Mr Hedley Briggs danced some very witty and fantastic measures. Altogether the evening, if unequal, was one of unusual exhilaration.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Nov 17, 1928]

[]

Memories.

[Shapes That Pass. Memories of Old Days (John Murray, 1928) by Julian Hawthorne]

After living eighty-two years and after writing fifty novels or so, Mr Hawthorne turns from fiction to fact, and summons before us, with all the craft of the experienced writer and the trained eye of a novelist, pictures of real people and scenes from his own life. But no editor could be more ruthless to the manuscripts of the verbose than Mr Hawthorne to the multiplicity of his own memories. He admits in the first place only those that relate to England, and among these he selects and arranges so that instead of the slow pace of a conscientious narrative we have a bird’s-eye view; instead of plodding every foot of the way we circle and skip and alight where fancy chooses. Is not fancy, after all, the only guide? Does not fancy always keep what is worth keeping and drop the rest? We step first into England in the ’fifties; we lodge with Mrs Blodgett in Liverpool, where the beds are four-posters and the candlesticks are of brown metal, and from this vantage ground we survey the world through the eyes of a small American boy whose father the great novelist, is of all strange things, the American Consul at that port. Since Hawthorne is the shyest, and most nocturnal of great writers, it is exciting to catch a glimpse of him as in his office refusing to look at the scar which is offered for his inspection on the old sea-captain’s head; and next as a father telling his little boy stories about General Quattlebum, ‘a powerful magician’, and flying from an infuriated goat. But soon, owing to the caprice of memory, Liverpool and Mrs Blodgett, who fed twenty American sea-captains royally every day more from love of good cheer than from wish to make a living, and the little Major, who had been at Waterloo and swung his sword in the drawing-room to show how with that identical sword he had cut down a trooper on the battlefield, disappear and give place to London in the ’seventies; that is to say, to Mr Hepworth Dixon, to Mrs Langtry, and to Lord Houghton with his alcove of improper books which shocked Henry James; and Mr Procter who had known Lord Byron; and Temple Bar and the antiquated horse omnibus. All this Mr Hawthorne observed with a relish which still tingles, though he must look back fifty years, and it is not the hansom cab that he hears now, but only the Pacific pounding at his doors. And then through the dimness his eyes light upon memorable faces; he sees Lord Leighton ‘in black velvet lounging sack and pearl-grey pantaloons … he was almost too beautiful … He would stroke his sable-silvered beard as he conversed … His eyes … were a trifle too small’; and then in would come Henry James, mild and urbane, ‘watching his ideas develop on the ceiling … his thoughts apparently outpacing his words, as a child’s hoop bowls away from him before the wind … and then there is Browning ‘like a rich banker, a perfected butler’, and Mrs Browning ‘fine as an insect, immense eyes burning through thick black curls; … nervously smiling through a mouth so large that no portrait painter had dared be truthful about it’.

In short, Mr Hawthorne saw everybody in London, and he saw them keenly, ironically, graphically as befits a man who walked to his parties on his own feet all the way from Twickenham and cooled his excitement in the dawn walking back. On one occasion the search for a white tie brought to light twenty-five forgotten sovereigns hoarded in the tie box so that he could take a train. But in those days to walk was practicable and enjoyable. The roads were white; they wound in and out; they led to pleasant quiet places; they were not scourged and scraped by incessant motorcars. Yet though this sentence paves a way for the peroration that is all regret and retrospect, Mr Hawthorne warrants no such lachrymosity. He loves England as she is, here and now; and looking at her from the shores of the Pacific sees ‘John Bull as my kin, and as the incarnation of a great human spirit on earth’. He sees us more flatteringly than we see ourselves, but he sees us very amusingly, very vividly, going about our ways in London in the ’seventies.

[Nation & Athenaeum, Nov 17, 1928]

[]

1929

On Not Knowing French.

[Climats (Bernard Grasset, 1928) by André Maurois.]

One scarcely dare say it, but it is true—nobody knows French but the French themselves. Every second Englishman reads French, and many speak it, and some write it, and there are a few who claim—and who shall deny them?—that it is the language of their dreams. But to know a language one must have forgotten it, and that is a stage that one cannot reach without having absorbed words unconsciously as a child. In reading a language that is not one’s own, consciousness is awake, and keeps us aware of the surface glitter of the words; but it never suffers them to sink into that region of the mind where old habits and instincts roll them round and shape them a body rather different from their faces. Thus a foreigner with what is called a perfect command of English may write grammatical English and musical English—he will, indeed, like Henry James, often write a more elaborate English than the native—but never such unconscious English that we feel the past of the word in it, its associations, its attachments. There is an oddity in every page that Conrad wrote. Right in themselves, the words come together somehow incongruously.

Thus, though the number of French books read every year by English people is probably very large, their version of them, if submitted to the French critics, would often seem strangely out. In the same way, it is always amusing to see what takes the French taste in contemporary English literature, or to receive back from their critics some queer; a little lopsided version of English reputations, some brilliant but fantastic vision of English character. The extreme vivacity of M. Maurois’ lives of Shelley and Disraeli rose in part from the novelty with which he endowed them. And this novelty was the more striking because there was perhaps a grain of truth that custom had overlaid.

It is novelty, and the strangeness, and the very fact that we are conscious and not unconscious that make the habit of reading French books so widely spread among the English; that make French literature so stimulating, so refreshing, so new to our minds. It is a delight, after mumbling over the old stories of our old memoirs in the familiar English atmosphere of joints and butlers and port and Parliament and Queen Victoria on the throne, to flash instantly into the brilliance of Mérimée and the court of Napoleon and the Empress Eugénie. After trudging through muddy lanes and damp shrubberies we seem to tiptoe a little self-consciously upon polished floors under crystal chandeliers. And all our ramblings round and about this figure and that, as we pick our way through the ramifications of French memoirs, are full of surprises and excitements—of terrifying encounters with great ladies more severe than our own, of interviews with dukes and diplomats who seem (such is the prestige of the French) more pompous, more polite than our local nobility. Our ramblings lead us into châteaux that have much more than the formality of our country houses; into villages perched on hillsides with strange swift streams in the valleys and wild boar, or wolves perhaps, in the forests. The priest blesses the hounds. The hunt is different. The very foxes are different. The talk is of incredible distinction. With an awe that is absent from our visits to the court of Charles the Second under the guidance of Pepys, we find ourselves at Versailles waiting with the Duc de Saint Simon for the King to pass. It is a formidable civilisation, more articulate, less homely than our own.

And if it is a delight to have a change of scene, it is also a delight to have a change of tongue. Habit has made English—the ordinary daily English of which most books are made—as colourless, as tasteless as water. French, even the French of daily use, has wine in it; it sparkles; it tingles; it has its savour. Here and there, in Saint Simon, for instance, a curious word, unknown and therefore uncoloured by habit, emerges, so that we can feel it and see it apart from the text, and wonder for a moment what sort of meaning we shall fill it with when we have looked it up in the dictionary. The sentence, too, takes a different curve. The old swing of the wrist, going up and down the page sowing phrases as mechanically as a man sowing seed, is altered. It takes a spirited, unusual pace which makes us wake and attend. With all these advantages and a vocabulary of desirable words—how, for example, one longs to pilfer words like amertume and pierreries, and there are a thousand others—the French, it would seem, can hardly fail to write better than the English.

That they do write better is an illusion perhaps, an illusion born of unfamiliarity and glamour, but it is an illusion that is always winning support. Take Climats, for example, the new novel by M. Maurois. It would be difficult to find a fellow to it in English. One cannot bring to mind at the moment any living English writer so intelligent, so dextrous, so accomplished as M. Maurois. There are, it is true, a dozen with more of one quality—imagination, perhaps, or originality—but the one quality overpowers the rest, so that the result is unequal. We race through half a dozen chapters at top speed; then we yawn. But in Climats the balance is so even, one gift comes so pat to the help of another, that we are supported evenly and lightly from end to end. The predominating quality is, no doubt, intelligence. The book is a study of a man and his relations with two women. In the first part the man gives his own version of his character and his relations with his wife; in the next the mirror is held up at a different angle by his second wife, and the two pictures join with all the neatness of expert carpentry—there is Philippe before us in the round. Nor is it simply as a piece of craftsmanship that the book is admirable. Look into those two pictures and one will find, more particularly in the first, things noticed, perceptions seized, and so subtle a use of suggestion that the presence of the first wife permeates the second part and thus bridges what might, with the change of persons, have been a break in the continuity. But it is over the intelligence that the English reader will ponder, for it is perhaps the rarest quality in our own fiction. Intelligence is not easy to define. It is not brilliance; nor is it intellectual power; it is perhaps the sense that the interest of life does not lie in what people do, nor even in their relations to each other, but largely in the power to communicate with a third party, antagonistic, enigmatic, yet perhaps persuadable, which one may call life in general. That is what makes the people in Climats so reasonable. Isabelle’s words express this relationship. ‘Ce que j’ai compris de très important, depuis un an, c’est que, si l’on aime vraiment, il ne faut pas attacher trop d’importance aux actions des êtres qu’on aime. Nous avons besoin d’eux; eux seuls nous font vivre dans une certaine “atmosphère” (votre amie Hélène dit “un climat” et c’est très juste) dont nous ne pouvons nous passer. Alors, pourvu que nous puissions les garder, les conserver, le reste, mon Dieu, qu’est-ce que cela peut faire? Cette vie est si courte, si difficile.’

The French words, in their lucidity, in their intelligence, seem to break through our island mists and to lie before us serene in sunshine. Yet perhaps the quality which M. Maurois calls ‘un idéalisme de magazine anglo-saxon’ is too stubborn to be persuaded out of existence so easily. Human beings are not reasonable to this extent; nor so exacting, nor so clear-sighted.

‘En apparence, j’ai fait un métier. En fait, ma seule occupation a été de poursuivre un bonheur absolu que je croyais atteindre à travers les femmes et il n’y a pas de poursuite plus vaine.’ This conclusion, which is so aptly rounded by Philippe’s death a few pages later, would have been disturbed, in nine out of ten English novels, by cheerfulness in some form or other breaking in—perhaps an idea, perhaps a sight—something, at any rate, that would have made a mess of the book and given scope for one or other of our English habits—the love of preaching, or the love of poetry.

But the word poetry reminds us of our precarious foothold in these parts. Just as one is secretly persuaded that no Frenchman, Russian, German, has the instinct for English poetry in him—he can acquire everything but that—so confidence fails us when we try our wings in this particular form of flight. In reading poetry, it may be, one reads in phrases, running the words together, so that they must be malleable and flexible all through, whereas in prose each word is taken separately into the mind. The ear, too, collects a thousand hints and suggestions from one’s own tongue which escape it in another. At any rate, in reading French prose even, it is curious how far out one finds one’s self, looking for poetry where poetry is not, finding it absurdly where nothing of the sort was intended. It is enough for Odile to walk in Compiègne for the irrational belief to possess us that Compiègne is not like Richmond, reached by the electric train; it is a forest of infinite charm, in which flowers, earlier and more elegant than our homely violets and primroses, grow in clumps, like those in pictures. And then Odile has only to hold her grey fur to her throat to accentuate to our insular eyes the grace of the Latin, her elegance, her distinction. When we are thus susceptible, when influences and suggestions of this kind have such power over us, who can say how insidiously our critical sense may not be seduced and the object of criticism transformed? The French, we think, are wrong to attribute such importance to Byron and Poe. Our verdicts have been arrived at, perhaps, by the same misunderstandings, and are just as false. But none the less we take our stand on it—Climats is an admirable piece of fiction.

[New Republic, Feb 13, 1929]

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The ‘Censorship’ of Books.

As the law stands at present, a police magistrate has the right to destroy as obscene any book which he thinks likely to corrupt the mind of any reader who is liable to be corrupted. If it is advisable to entrust anyone with such power—of which I am doubtful—obviously the time has come when the nature of what is corrupting and thus destroyable must be more clearly defined. Nor is it difficult to suggest what lines that definition should follow. There can be no doubt that books fall, in respect of indecency, into two classes. There are books written, published and sold with the object of causing pleasure or corruption by means of their indecency. There is no difficulty in finding where they are to be bought, nor in buying them when found. There are others whose indecency is not the object of the book, but incidental to some other purpose—scientific, social, æsthetic—on the writer’s part. The police magistrate’s power should be definitely limited to the suppression of books which are sold as pornography to people who seek out and enjoy pornography. The others should be left alone. Any man or woman of average intelligence and culture knows the difference between the two kinds of book and has no difficulty in distinguishing one from the other.

Nor can any reasonable person doubt, after watching the law as it stands at work, that it causes more harm than it prevents. The average citizen is nowadays certainly a reader and quite frequently a writer. In both these capacities he is injured, annoyed, and possibly corrupted, by the censorship as exercised at present. Nothing can be more insulting to his intelligence and exciting to his curiosity than to be told that there is a book that he must not read because in the opinion of somebody else it would corrupt him to do so. As was amply proved last autumn, prohibition often serves only to stimulate the appetite. Discussion is roused where there would have been indifference; knowledge is sought where there would have been ignorance. The vice in question becomes a topic of conversation, and young people are made to think it attractive because it is fashionable and forbidden.

Even more serious is the effect upon the writer. The police magistrate’s opinion is so incalculable—he lets pass so much that seems noxious and pounces upon so much that seems innocent—that even the writer whose record is hitherto unblemished is uncertain what may or may not be judged obscene, and hesitates in fear and suspicion. What he is about to write may seem to him perfectly innocent—it may be essential to his book; yet, he has to ask himself, what will the police magistrate say? And not only what will the police magistrate say, but what will the printer say and what will the publisher say? For both printer and publisher will be trying, uneasily and anxiously, to anticipate the verdict of the police magistrate and will naturally bring pressure to bear upon the writer to put them beyond the reach of the law. He will be asked to weaken, to soften, to omit. Such hesitation and suspense are fatal to freedom of mind, and freedom of mind is essential to good literature. Moreover, if modern books become so insipid, so blameless, so full of blank spaces and evasions that we cannot read them, we shall be driven to read the classics, where obscenity abounds.

For these reasons I think it desirable that the law should distinguish clearly between books that are written or sold for pornographic purposes and books whose obscenity is an incidental part of them—between Aristotle’s works as they are sold in the rubber goods shops, that is to say, and Aristotle’s works as they are sold in the shops of Messrs Hatchard and Bumpus.

[For a symposium in the Nineteenth Century and After, April 1929]

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1930

Foreword to Recent Paintings by Vanessa Bell

That a woman should hold a show of pictures in Bond Street, I said, pausing upon the threshold of Messrs Cooling’s gallery, is not usual, nor, perhaps, altogether to be commended. For it implies, I fancy, some study of the nude, and while for many ages it has been admitted that women are naked and bring nakedness to birth, it was held, until sixty years ago that for a woman to look upon nakedness with the eye of an artist, and not simply with the eye of mother, wife or mistress was corruptive of her innocency and destructive of her domesticity. Hence the extreme activity of women in philanthropy, society, religion and all pursuits requiring clothing.

Hence again the fact that every Victorian family has in its cupboard the skeleton of an aunt who was driven to convert the native because her father would have died rather than let her look upon a naked man. And so she went to Church; and so she went to China; and so she died unwed; and so there drop out of the cupboard with her bones half a dozen flower pieces done under the shade of a white umbrella in a Surrey garden when Queen Victoria was on the throne.

These reflections are only worth recording because they indicate the vacillations and prevarications (if one is not a painter or a critic of painting) with which one catches at any straw that will put off the evil moment when one must go into the gallery and make up one’s mind about pictures. Were it not that Mrs Bell has a certain reputation and is sometimes the theme of argument at dinner tables, many no doubt would stroll up Bond Street, past Messrs Cooling’s, thinking about morality or politics, about grandfathers or great aunts, about anything but pictures as is the way of the English.

But Mrs Bell has a certain reputation it cannot be denied. She is a woman, it is said, yet she has looked on nakedness with a brush in her hand. She is reported (one has read it in the newspapers) to be ‘the most considerable painter of her own sex now alive’. Berthe Morisot, Marie Laurencin, Vanessa Bell—such is the stereotyped phrase which comes to mind when her name is mentioned and makes one’s predicament in front of her pictures all the more exacting. For whatever the phrase may mean, it must mean that her pictures stand for something, are something and will be something which we shall disregard at our peril. As soon not go to see them as shut the window when the nightingale is singing.

But once inside and surrounded by canvases, this shillyshallying on the threshold seems superfluous. What is there here to intimidate or perplex? Are we not suffused, lit up, caught in a sunny glow? Does there not radiate from the walls a serene yet temperate warmth, comfortable in the extreme after the rigours of the streets? Are we not surrounded by vineyards and olive trees, by naked girls couched on crimson cushions, by naked boys ankle deep in the pale green sea? Even the puritans of the nineteenth century might grant us a moment’s respite from the February murk, a moment’s liberty in this serene and ordered world. But it is not the puritans who move us on. It is Mrs Bell. It is Mrs Bell who is determined that we shall not loll about juggling with pretty words or dallying with delicious sensations. There is something uncompromising about her art. Ninety-nine painters had nature given them her susceptibility, her sense of the lustre of grass and flower, of the glow of rock and tree, would have lured us on by one refinement and felicity after another to stay and look for ever. Ninety-nine painters again had they possessed that sense of satire which seems to flash its laughter for a moment at those women in Dieppe in the eighties, would have caricatured and illustrated; would have drawn our attention to the antics of parrots, the pathos of old umbrellas, the archness of ankles, the eccentricities of noses. Something would have been done to gratify the common, innocent and indeed very valuable gift which has produced in England so rich a library of fiction. But look round the room: the approach to these pictures is not by that means. No stories are told; no insinuations are made. The hill side is bare; the group of women is silent; the little boy stands in the sea saying nothing. If portraits there are, they are pictures of flesh which happens from its texture or its modelling to be æsthetically on an equality with the China pot or the chrysanthemum.

Checked at that point in our approach (and the snub is none the less baffling for the beauty with which it is conveyed) one can perhaps draw close from another angle. Let us see if we can come at some idea of Mrs Bell herself and by thus trespassing, crack the kernel of her art. Certainly it would hardly be possible to read as many novels as there are pictures here without feeling our way psychologically over the features of the writer; and the method, if illicit, has its value. But here, for a second time, we are rebuffed. One says, Anyhow Mrs Bell is a woman; and then half way round the room one says, But she may be a man. One says, She is interested in children; one has to add, But she is equally interested in rocks. One asks, Does she show any special knowledge of clothes? One replies, Stark nakedness seems to please her as well. Is she dainty then, or austere? Does she like riding? Is she red haired or brown eyed? Was she ever at a University? Does she prefer herrings or Brussels sprouts? Is she—for our patience is becoming exhausted—not a woman at all, but a mixture of Goddess and peasant, treading the clouds with her feet and with her hands shelling peas? Any writer so ardently questioned would have yielded something to our curiosity. One defies a novelist to keep his life through twenty-seven volumes of fiction safe from our scrutiny. But Mrs Bell says nothing. Mrs Bell is as silent as the grave. Her pictures do not betray her. Their reticence is inviolable. That is why they intrigue and draw us on; that is why, if it be true that they yield their full meaning only to those who can tunnel their way behind the canvas into masses and passages and relations and values of which we know nothing—if it be true that she is a painter’s painter—still her pictures claim us and make us stop. They give us an emotion. They offer a puzzle.

And the puzzle is that while Mrs Bell’s pictures are immensely expressive, their expressiveness has no truck with words. Her vision excites a strong emotion and yet when we have dramatised it or poetised it or translated it into all the blues and greens, and fines and exquisites and subtles of our vocabulary, the picture itself escapes. It goes on saying something of its own. A good example is to be found in the painting of the Foundling Hospital. Here one says, is the fine old building which has housed a million orphans; here Hogarth painted and kind-hearted Thackeray shed a tear, here Dickens, who lived down the street on the left-hand side, must often have paused in his walk to watch the children at play. And it is all gone, all perished. Housebreakers have been at work, speculators have speculated. It is dust and ashes—but what has Mrs Bell got to say about it? Nothing. There is the picture, serene and sunny, and very still. It represents a fine eighteenth-century house and an equally fine London plane tree. But there are no orphans, no Thackeray, no Dickens, no housebreakers, no speculators, no tears, no sense that this sunny day is perhaps the last. Our emotion has been given the slip.

And yet somehow our emotion has been returned to us. For emotion there is. The room is charged with it. There is emotion in that white urn; in that little girl painting a picture; in the flowers and the bust; in the olive trees; in the provençal vineyard; in the English hills against the sky. Here, we cannot doubt as we look is somebody to whom the visible world has given a shock of emotion every day of the week. And she transmits it and makes us share it; but it is always by her means, in her language, with her susceptibility, and not ours. That is why she is so tantalising, so original, and so satisfying as a painter. One feels that if a canvas of hers hung on the wall it would never lose its lustre. It would never mix itself up with the loquacities and trivialities of daily life. It would go on saying something of its own imperturbably. And perhaps by degrees—who knows?—one would become an inmate of this strange painters’ world, in which mortality does not enter, and psychology is held at bay, and there are no words. But is morality to be found there? That was the very question I was asking myself as I came in.

[Foreword to a catalogue of twenty-seven paintings by Vanessa Bell, Feb 4, 1930]

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Augustine Birrell.

[The Collected Essays & Addresses of the Rt. Hon. Augustine Birrell, 1880–1920 (3 vols, J.M. Dent, 1922).]

‘But it is not bedtime,’ a lady was heard to protest the other night. When assured that the clock had already struck twelve, she murmured that the clock might say what it liked, but that she must finish her book. And what was her book? It was a book by Mr Birrell, a new book, called Et Cetera. And the new book, continuing as it did an old conversation, renewing an old charm, had led her to strew the floor with three robust red volumes containing the collected Essays and Addresses of Augustine Birrell so that she might get the flavour entire. It was the essays of Mr Birrell that she was engaged in sampling; it was these that kept her from her bed when the chimes of midnight were ringing and the voice of duty called.

Such being the truth and nothing more than the truth, it may be worth while to attempt to justify her defiance of discipline: to try to discover what are the qualities that make us slip from the end of one essay by Mr Birrell to the beginning of another and so on through page after page when not only is the hour late but when, to tell the truth, more serious and more learned volumes are shut with a snap on the stroke of eleven. In those words, perhaps, some glimpse of the reason sought for is to be found. One reads Mr Birrell for pleasure. Nobody has ever, in the mercantile sense of the term, read Mr Birrell for profit. It seems doubtful that tutors bent on steering young men into the safe pasturage of scholarships and fellowships have ever counselled them to commit his Obiter Dicta to memory. There is very little talk in Mr Birrell’s pages of schools and influences and origins and developments and how one style grew out of another; no new theory of poetry is advanced; no key to aesthetics warranted to unlock all doors is forged. And since nature has so contrived it that we only feel highly virtuous when we are also feeling slightly uncomfortable, there has been a note of apology in the tones of Mr Birrell’s admirers as if to be found reading Obiter Dicta or Res Judicatae or Men, Women and Books was to be caught drinking champagne in the middle of the morning—a proceeding too pleasant to be right. If, on the other hand, one has muddled one’s wits for an hour by the clock over some philosophical treatise and come to feel that all Shakespeare is a matter of mathematics, then very justly one bruits the fact abroad, claims the esteem of one’s friends, and leaves the book lying about with a marker placed ostentatiously near the end.

So, then, Mr Birrell is no philosophical critic. But once that is said we have to explain why it is that one feels, nevertheless, no lack of substance in his pages—they are not airy flimsy gossip—they are not dainties made to serve up with the soufflé at luncheon parties. They have, on the contrary, a bluffness, a toughness, even a grittiness about them which makes one suspect that if it be true that Mr Birrell has not mined deeply in the darker galleries of thought he has, it may be, done a day’s work in the open air.

There is something of the man of action in his style. He comes in with his hair slightly rumpled and a splash of mud on his boots. If we turn to the first pages of the collected essays, we shall find our surmise confirmed. ‘I became an author,’ he writes, ‘quite by accident. I had never dreamt of such a thing. Some time in 1883, while pursuing in Lincoln’s Inn, after a dimmish but not wholly unremunerative fashion, the now decayed profession of an equity draughtsman and conveyancer, it occurred to me’—that he might perhaps print certain manuscripts which had been read aloud in friendly coteries and put back into the desk. This he did, and the little book—it was the famous Obiter Dicta—had an instant and remarkable success. But though when he had found his way into print he never lost it again, he yet went on, as everybody knows, to pursue the law, to fight cases, to win seats, to sit in Parliament, to enter the cabinet, to rule Ireland, and so to become, in course of time, the Right Honourable Augustine Birrell, after whose name there are many letters in distinguished combination.

Thus the life of letters and the life of action were lived simultaneously, and there can be no doubt that the politician influenced the author, and that the author influenced the politician. With the politician proper we have no concern; it is the author only who comes within our scope. Yet it is plain that the author gained something of great value from his partnership with the man of affairs. In the first place, he gained an unprofessional air, a holiday spirit. To sit down and write an essay was, it seemed, a treat that Mr Birrell had promised himself, not a duty that had to be accomplished. A zest clings to the performance. He would have been, one feels, as much put out at missing a day’s writing as most people are annoyed at losing a day’s sport.

But the advantage of the connection between the man of action and the man of letters goes deeper than that. The substance of Mr Birrell’s essays, the point of view that collects them and makes them however disconnected in subject of one spiritual texture, is the result of knowing the world and of passing judgment upon human life. It is the moral sense, not the literary, that makes a unity of his scattered papers. We know, as we look back, what men Mr Birrell has liked, rather than what books he has admired. And since the moral sense has gone abroad and taken the air whether the sun shone or the rain poured, it is a healthy and active moral sense with blood in its cheeks and light in its eyes, and has none of that sour and leathery constitution which afflicts the moral sense of those who live indoors passing judgment upon their fellows from the sheltered library. There is not a trace of the pedagogue and scarcely a trace of the dictator about him.

It is this elastic and humane quality that has kept his essays, written as he reminds us by a contemporary of the Prince Consort, so much fresher than the mass of their fellows. For it is not uncommon, though highly disagreeable, to be pulled up in the middle of one of the great Victorians by a perverse, provincial, and as it seems to us merely conventional judgment passed in a fit of the spleen upon the conduct of some great man. Thackeray’s judgment on Sterne, Carlyle’s upon Lamb, Matthew Arnold’s upon Shelley, reveal them in their Victorian setting far more certainly than their victims. We see the screens and the curtains that surround them, we peer about in the dark sad light, much that we talk of openly seems to be hidden away, and we feel like children in the presence of a schoolmaster. But when we read Mr Birrell, though he speaks like an elder, he does not speak as a superior. We are not reminded at every turn of his ineffable goodness, of his impeccable morality. We do not feel that he rates himself so much the superior of Sterne and Shelley and Lamb that he can afford to put them in their places. This is the more remarkable when we remember that, as was said, his chief concern is with character and not with art. Man after man, woman after woman, the big, the small, the wise, the foolish he summons before him, and yet in passing judgment his voice never loses its cordiality, his temper is almost consistently unruffled. If, as will happen, a pretentious fool comes his way, he buffets his victim so genially across the stage that even that great goose Hannah More herself must have taken the process in good part.

For this again, credit must be given to politics. Life in the House of Commons, as Mr Birrell says, makes it difficult to maintain aloofness. ‘You hob-nob at luncheon, you grumble together over your dinner, you lament the spread of football clubs and brass bands in your constituencies.’ And so what with lunching here and dining there, it has been very difficult for Mr Birrell to pull a long face over human failings, if at least they are such as proceed from good fellowship or hot-bloodedness or a warm appreciation of the pleasures of life. It is the prigs and the censors and the timid water drinkers whom he wholeheartedly despises, and them he can be trusted to trounce much to our delectation whenever they raise their voices to deplore Lamb’s drunkenness or the sinful extravagance of Sir Walter Scott.

Yet, to be honest, it is somewhere about this point that we become aware of divergence. We begin to catch, now and again, a note of asperity in his voice, to hear some echoes of the sonorous Victorian trumpet. His love of charity, and good sense and good temper lead him on little by little to declaim not only against their opposites, but against speculation and introspection, and all those other vices of the new age which he suspects will lead to the clouding of the clear stream of English literature and to the paralysis of healthy human activity. Already early in the Eighties, he had scented the coming of change. He complained that ‘The ruddy qualities of delightfulness, of pleasantness are all “sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.” The varied elements of life … seem to be fading from literature.’ Indeed even in the Eighties, things had come to such a pass that he was about to make up his mind ‘to look for no more Sir Walters, no more Thackerays, no more Dickenses. The stories have all been told. Plots are exploded. Incident is over’—when, miraculously, Treasure Island appeared and the honour of English literature was saved.

Thus for all his tolerance and catholicity Mr Birrell, it would seem, has his notion of what literature should be, and the fact that he eschews aesthetic criticism by no means implies that he has not a code of his own, and a will of his own, and a taste of his own, which exclude whole tracts of literature, and, we make bold to say, of very good literature into the bargain. He has nothing to say about the great Russians or the great Frenchmen. His essays, though they embrace the years from 1880 to 1930, make no mention of Meredith or Henry James or Hardy or Conrad. For all he tells us to the contrary, one might suppose that English literature had fallen over a precipice about the year 1900 and lay in shattered fragments not worth picking up and examining on the stones beneath.

That perhaps is the weakness of treating books as if they might at any moment turn into people. One detects in them what it is that is antipathetic to one in real life—gloom, self-analysis, morbidity, sexual aberration. And then, if one has let wither the other sense which finds in literature something non-personal, like beauty, or sound, or intellectual originality, and analyses it to feel more keenly, one condemns the book because of the man, and has nothing to say about a work, the fruit of a corrupt society and of an introspective temperament, called La Recherche du Temps Perdu. About this Mr Birrell is perfectly decided. ‘We want Lambs,’ he writes, ‘not Coleridges. The verdict to be striven for is not “Well guessed,” but “Well done.”’ And so with a great sweep of his arm he throws into the waste-paper basket such trifles as The Egoist, and The Wings of the Dove, The Return of the Native, The Possessed, and Lord Jim. That done, he heaves a sigh of relief and takes down one of the many volumes, well worn and well loved, of his Scott.

Thus we must accept the fact that Mr Birrell will neither illumine the present nor acknowledge the future save as something disagreeable which it is the part of wise men not to anticipate. But once that fact is faced—it is a fact that need not surprise us seeing that a politician is in partnership with the writer—there still remain the fine volumes of witty, varied, and most entertaining reading, to which others, we may hope, are still to be added.

Let us for a moment dwell upon the quality which kept our friend so unrepentantly out of bed—the charm, the seductiveness of Mr Birrell’s writing. It is just and right so to pause, for it is perhaps by this quality rather than any other that the books are destined to endure. Yet how are we to define a word that is so easily and sometimes so condescendingly pronounced? ‘It is not easy to define charm, which is not a catalogue of qualities, but a mixture.’ So Mr Birrell says himself; and there is much in the saying that applies to him. Open Mr Birrell’s books where you will and there is this mixture in operation; this blending of many often mutually destructive gifts into one effervescence—irony and feeling; sound sense and fantasy; caustic humour and a sunny good temper. Hence the iridescence, the sparkle, and the varied movement of his prose. It never forms into one great wave that comes crashing down upon our heads; it is forever rippling and dancing, giving and withholding, like a breeze-stirred lake.

And when this is said we have also said by implication that Mr Birrell is a born writer—not one of our great writers, certainly not one of our professional writers, but one of those writers who spring as naturally from our literature as the dog-rose from the hedge and scent it with as true a fragrance. How lightly and easily he casts the line of his sentence! How the images come flocking to his pen and how pleasant and sometimes more than pleasant they are to the ear!—‘gentle as is the breath with which a child disperses a dandelion-clock,’ he says in his preface; or—‘it must have been hard while still in the middle passage of life to scent the night-air’—but to underline what is so natural is to spoil it. And then pervading the wit and the sparkle, there is something pungent as the smell of good tobacco—that profound love of books, which some good critics have lacked, but would have been better critics for possessing. ‘No man of letters knew letters better than he. He knew literature in all its branches—he had read books, he had written books, he had sold books, he had bought books, and he had borrowed them…. He loved a catalogue; he delighted in an index.’ What he says of Johnson we might say of him. Everything about a book from the leather of the binding to the print on the page smells sweet in his nostrils.

So then if one seeks an excuse for reading Mr Birrell—and pleasure is still a little suspect—it is that he makes books seem lovable objects and reading an entrancing occupation. Literature when he writes of it ceases to be an art and a mystery and becomes an assembly of all sorts of interesting people. The books turn into people, and the people turn into books. There are the Waverley novels and Tristram Shandy and the Essays of Elia; there is also Miss Hannah More and Arthur Young and Arthur Young’s little Bobbin. Some of the books are very rare, and some of the people are very obscure. There are many theological volumes among them and a good many lawyers. Then suddenly Mr Browning or Mr Matthew Arnold appears in the flesh, or behold, there is Nathaniel Hawthorne walking along a street in Liverpool in the year 1856.

In short, it is a splendid entertainment to which we are invited, call it what you will. And to have created so varied a prospect, to have brought together out of the dimness so many shapes, the queer and the hunchbacked as well as the stately and the splendid, to have led us up to the great writers in a mood of warmth and happy expectation, yet critically, too, and by no means ready to tolerate fustian or humbug—that is a great task to have accomplished. It tempts us to quote one of Mr Birrell’s sentences, and, indeed, to alter one word without his permission. ‘Even that most extraordinary compound, the rising generation of readers, whose taste in literature is as erratic as it is pronounced, read their Lamb,’ says Mr Birrell—and here we interpose ‘read their Birrell’—and then go on in concert ‘with laughter and with love.’

[Yale Review, June 1930]

[]

1931

George Eliot, 1819–1880.

Sprung from country people but insatiably intellectual, George Eliot’s early novels are the fruit of happy memory; her later of melancholy thought. Isolated by an ambiguous marriage, extravagantly praised, she early lost vitality and her novels suffered. But she stretched the capacity of fiction, and forced it not only to tell a story and reflect manners but to contain the comment and criticism of a large mind brooding over life.

[Picture postcard issued by the National Portrait Gallery, c. May 1931]

[]

1933

London Squares.

Some fortunate people during this hot summer have found a moment’s respite under the shade of the trees in one of the London squares. Many of them will leave town in August and September; but the gates will remain locked and the gardens unused. The sensible and humane suggestion is now made that the squares should be opened during August, and perhaps part of July and September, to some of those who would otherwise have no place to walk or sit in but the streets. The Square Committees have, of course, to give their consent, but it is hard to believe that this will be withheld. And there must be many who would be willing, if the squares were thrown open as suggested, to contribute towards the sum needed for their upkeep. In this belief, at least, may I draw your readers’ attention to the scheme and add that further details can be had from The London Council of Social Service, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, W.C.2?

[New Statesman & Nation, Jun 24, 1933]

[]

1934

Foreword to Catalogue of Recent Paintings by Vanessa Bell

As Keats wrote to Haydon, ‘I have ever been too sensible of the labyrinthian path to eminence in Art … to think I understood the emphasis of Painting.’ Let us leave it to the critics to pursue the exciting adventure which waits them in these rooms; to trace the progress of the artist’s brush beginning, shall we say, with the chocolate-faced nursemaid and the monolithic figures of 1920; to note the birth of other sensibilities; how blues and oranges trembled into life; how this mass mated itself with that; how the line grew taut or slack; how with an infinitude of varied touches the finished picture came into being. For us the experience has its excitement too. A meaning is given to familiar things that makes them strange. Not a word sounds and yet the room is full of conversations. What are the people saying who are not sitting on that sofa? What tune is the child playing on her silent violin? Nobody moves and yet the room is full of intimate relationships. People’s minds have split out of their bodies and become part of their surroundings. Where does the man end and Buddha begin? Character is colour, and colour is china, and china is music. Greens, blues, reds and purples are here seen making love and war and joining in unexpected combinations of exquisite married bliss. A plant bends its leaves in the jar and we feel that we too have visited the depths of the sea.

Cornfields bask in the sun of man’s first summer; the haymakers are primeval men. Everywhere life has been rid of its accidents, shown in its essence. The weight of custom has been lifted from the earth. Hampstead is virginal; Ken Wood ecstatic. The onions and the eggs perform together a solemn music. Flowers toss their heads like proud horses in an Eastern festival. In short, precipitated by the swift strokes of the painter’s brush, we have been blown over the boundary to the world where words talk such nonsense that it is best to silence them. And yet it is a world of glowing serenity and sober truth. Compare it, for example, with Piccadilly Circus or St James’s Square.

[Foreword to a catalogue of thirty-six paintings and twelve designs for plates by Vanessa Bell, c. Mar 7, 1934]

[]

1937

Miss Janet Case: Classical Scholar and Teacher.

The death of Janet Case last Thursday will bring back to many of her old pupils the memory of a rare teacher and of a remarkable woman. She was a classical scholar, educated at Girton, and there must still be some Cambridge men who remember her, a noble Athena, breaking down the tradition that only men acted in the Greek play. When she left Cambridge she settled in London and for many years earned her living by teaching, in schools and private houses, a great variety of pupils, some seriously to pass examinations, others less seriously to read Greek for their own amusement.

Undoubtedly if the pupil were in earnest Janet Case was a highly competent tutor. She was no dilettante; she could edit a Greek play and win praise from the great Verrall himself. But if the pupil were destined to remain an amateur, Janet Case accepted the fact without concealing the drawbacks and made the best of it. The grammar was shut and the play opened. Somehow the masterpieces of Greek drama were stormed, without grammar, without accents, but somehow, under her compulsion, so sane and yet so stimulating, out they shone, if inaccessible still supremely desirable. And then the play was shut, and with her generous tolerance for youth and its egotism she would let herself be drawn into argument, made to discuss modern fiction, since she had said that Euripides reminded her of Meredith; made to thrash out the old problem of artist and teacher, since she had said that Aeschylus reminded her of Wordsworth. And so by transitions, rising naturally from the play, last night’s party was reached, and the frock that was worn and the talk that was talked at last night’s party, until even she could stretch her one hour no farther but must cycle off, with her little bag of text books, to teach another pupil, perhaps in Islington, perhaps in Mayfair.

In a pencilled note written a few days before her death she recalled how Lady D. ‘used to come to her lesson like a nymph scarcely dry from her bath in a gauze wrap … and used to say “My good woman” in an expostulatory tone when I objected to an adjective not agreeing with its noun or some such trifle.’ The words, with their humorous appreciation both of the nymph and the noun serve perhaps to explain why it was that she, who was both so sound a scholar and so fine and dignified a presence, never held any of those posts that might have given her an academic position and saved her from the stress of private teaching. She enjoyed too many things—teaching a real scholar, and teaching a real worldling, going in and out of pupils’ houses, noting their characters, divining their difficulties—she enjoyed them all too much and music and acting and pictures to concentrate upon one ambition.

The little house at Hampstead where her sister taught children, and friends came, and old pupils brought her new problems to solve, made a happier setting for her buoyant and unfettered spirit than any college. Her Greek was connected with many things. It was connected, naturally, seeing that she was the niece of Sir James Stansfeld, the reformer, with the life, with the politics of her day. She found time for committees, for the suffrage, for the Women’s Cooperative Guild, of which her friend Margaret Llewellyn Davies was secretary; for all the causes that were then advanced and in dispute. In her way she was a pioneer; but her way was one that kept her in the background, a counsellor rather than a champion, listening to the theories of others with a little chuckle of merriment, opening her beautiful veiled eyes with a sudden flash of sympathy and laughter, but for herself she wanted no prominence, no publicity. She was contemplative, reticent, withdrawn.

In the last years, after her health had broken down, she ‘retired’; but the word only signified that she had again extended her scope, this time most happily to enjoy with her sister what London had denied her—a country garden, the grass rides and ancient avenues of the New Forest. What have I done, she once asked, standing under a beech tree, to deserve all this? And echo might have answered: ‘You have been yourself.’ In the Forest she lived very quietly; she gave up teaching. When an old pupil reproached her, for were there no other girls to whom Janet Case could teach Greek without grammar? She said that the country left her no time. There was always something to do—a bird to watch; a flower to plant; her sister to talk to; and the forest itself—how could one bear to leave it unseen? But that lesson she had learnt, and to sit by her side when she knew that death was near was to be taught once more a last lesson, in gaiety, courage, and love.

[The Times, unsigned, Jul 22, 1937]

[]

1938

Lady Ottoline Morrell.

The remarkable qualities of Ottoline Morrell—her originality, her courage, the personal ascendancy that created so memorable a society—have already been noted in your columns. Still the desire remains to testify, however imperfectly, to the splendid use she made of those rare gifts of fortune and of character. The great lady who suddenly appeared in the world of artists and writers immediately before the War easily lent herself to caricature. It was impossible not to exclaim in amazement at the strangeness; at the pearls, at the brocades, at the idealisms and exaltations. Again, with what imperious directness, like that of an artist intolerant of the conventional and the humdrum, she singled out the people she admired for qualities that she was often the first to detect and champion, and brought together at Bedford Square and then at Garsington, Prime Ministers and painters, Bishops and freethinkers, the famous and the obscure! Whether she sat at the head of her table against a background of pale yellow and pomegranate, or mused at Garsington with her embroidery on her lap and undergraduates at her feet, or held on her way down the Tottenham Court Road like a Renaissance princess listening to inaudible music while the passers by stared, she created her own world. And it was a world in which conflicts and collisions were inevitable; nor did she escape the ridicule of those whom she befriended.

But beneath this exotic appearance, sometimes so odious to her—‘Look at my hands!’ she once protested. ‘How ugly they are!’—there was a complex nature. She boasted, whether fancifully or not, of a French washerwoman among her ancestresses. Certainly there was a raciness in her refinement; a democratic spirit which led her not only to flout the conventions of the world, but to keep her house bravely open during the War to the unpopular and the friendless. It was that inner freedom, that artist’s vision, that led her past the decorated drawing-room with all its trappings to the actual workshop where the painter had his canvas, and the writer his manuscript. The ‘great hostess’ was very humble in the presence of those who could create beauty; and very generous; and very sincere. For beneath the glamour which she created as inevitably as the lily pours out scent, there was a diffident and shrinking spirit. As the years passed this became more and more apparent. Deafness had grown upon her and she was often ill. She accepted such trials with aristocratic, or, it may be, with devout composure. She made no more efforts to gather the many coloured reins into her own hands; to drive her team with reckless courage through a world that, she felt, was destroying all she cherished. Rather she was content to sit back in the corner of her sofa working at her embroidery still, but no longer presiding. There in the evening, alone, even lovelier in her black than in her brocade, she would talk of the people she had known; of some new poem she had liked; of some unknown poet she had met; and of London, whose beauty she loved; and of that English country that was so dear to her—the country round Welbeck; and of the eccentricities of her forebears; of the old Duke who dug the tunnels; and how she had run through the great rooms as a child discovering pictures; and of the ardours and failures of her life; and of Shelley and Keats—until at last, at last, it was time to go from the room which she had made so beautiful.

[The Times, Apr 28, 1938]

[]

America, which I Have Never Seen …

‘What interests you most in this cosmopolitan world of today?’

That is an enormous question; the world is a very large object, buzzing and humming on every inch of its surface with interesting things. But if we compress and epitomise, this essence and abstract of the world and its interesting things reduces itself undoubtedly to the United States of America. America is the most interesting thing in the world today.

But what—if, like me, you have never been to America—does America mean to you? What does it look like, and the Americans themselves—what are they like?

These are questions that the English, marooned on their island, are always asking of Imagination. And Imagination, unfortunately, is not an altogether accurate reporter; but she has her merits: she travels fast; she travels far. And she is obliging. When the question was put to her the other day, ‘What is America like?’ she gave her wings a shake and said, in her lighthearted way: ‘Sit still on a rock on the coast of Cornwall; and I will fly to America and tell you what America is like.’ So saying, she was off.

‘I have passed fishing boats,’ she began, ‘tramp steamers; the Queen Mary; several airplanes. The sea looks much like any other sea; there is now a shoal of porpoises cutting cart wheels beneath me.

‘But what is that huge grey rock? It appears to be the figure of a giant woman who seems, as I come closer, to be lighted up, whether with electric light or with the light of reason I am not at this moment certain. Behold! It is the Statue of Liberty. Liberty introducing America!

‘Liberty seems clothed in radiant silver. The air here is about a thousand times clearer than the air in England. There is not a shred of mist or a wisp of fog; everything shines bright. The City of New York, over which I am now hovering, looks as if it had been scraped and scrubbed only the night before. It has no houses. It is made of immensely high towers, each pierced with a million holes.

‘Coming closer, I see in every hole—they are windows—a typewriter and a desk. Down below in the streets long ribbons of traffic move steadily, on and on and on. Bells chime; lights flash. Everything is a thousand times quicker yet more orderly than in England. My mind feels speeded up. The blood courses through my veins. The old English words kick up their heels and frisk. A new language is coming to birth—’

‘But look a little closer,’ we interrupt—‘what strikes you about the houses in which people live?’

‘That there is no privacy,’ she resumed. ‘The houses stand open to the road. No walls divide them; there are no gardens in front and no gardens behind. There are no curtains to the windows. You can see right in. The rooms are large and airy. There are no inglenooks or cosy corners. There are no old people drawn up over the fire, reading books. There is no fire.

‘There are no dark family portraits hanging in shadowy recesses. Nor, although it is dinnertime, does a parlourmaid in cap and apron bring in a silver-covered dish. A spring is touched; a refrigerator opens; there is a whole meal ready to be eaten: clams on ice; ducks on ice; iced drinks in tall glasses; ice creams all colours of the rainbow.

‘The Americans never sit down to a square meal. They perch on steel stools and take what they want from a perambulating rail. The Americans have swallowed their dinner by the time it takes us to decide whether the widow of a general takes precedence of the wife of a knight commander of the Star of India.

‘When they have finished their meal the Americans, who are all in the prime of life, mostly clean-shaven if they are men, better built than we are, and extremely well groomed, both men and women, jump into their cars. Everyone has a car: the millionaire has one; the hired man has one; the hobo has one. And their cars go much more quickly than our cars, because the roads are as smooth as billiard balls and very straight. Sixty or seventy cars thus can drive abreast at the same time. Travelling at ninety miles an hour—but it feels like twenty—we are soon out of sight of houses. We are in the country.

‘But the country is not like England, or Italy, or France. It is a primeval country: a country before there were countries. The space is vast; mountains rise; plains spread. Yet at some time, it is clear, people must have picnicked here in these woods; witness that heap of rusty tins; that deserted shed of corrugated iron; that skeleton of an old motorcar. But when the picnic was done they threw away the tins, the sheds, the cars, and on they drove! They never settled down and lived and died and were buried in the same spot.

‘But now we are in the open again. Hold your hat to your head, for that giant man, standing as if he were carved in stone, makes one nervous, remembering The Last of the Mohicans, about one’s scalp. He has a tomahawk in his hand, a blanket round his shoulders; eagle feathers ray out around his head. He is taking aim at some prehistoric extinct monster—surely that was a mammoth behind that rock?

‘But next minute—remember the speed of the car—we are round the bend; we have dropped into a rich and fertile valley, willow-shaded, cow-pastured. From it mounts the mellow lin-lan-lone of church bells. Are we passing through some ancient English village on a Sunday morning? Is it May Day? Are they keeping up the ancient festival?

‘The villagers are dancing round a Maypole; they are singing songs that have a strange familiar sound; we seem to have heard them before, in Shakespeare, in Herrick.

‘This valley is like a cup into which time has dropped and stands clear and still. There is the England of Charles the First, still visible, still living in America. In her broad plains and deep valleys America has room for all ages, for all civilisations. There, just behind the corner, is the past—the red man aims his tomahawk at a bison; here in the car is the present; but what are we reaching now over the crest of the hill? Is it the future?

‘For now we are running along the boulevards of an up-to-date city; the road is laid with blocks of concrete; the loud-speaker is ticking out the latest prices; druggists’ stores are crowded with men in shirt sleeves; shop windows display complete outfits of Parisian clothes.

‘But that immense building which might be a factory or a cathedral—what is that? It occupies a commanding position. In England it would be the King’s palace. But here are no sentries; the doors stand open to all. The walls are made of stainless steel, the shelves of unbreakable glass. And there lie Shakespeare’s folios, Ben Jonson’s manuscripts, Keats’ love letters blazing in the light of the American sun.

‘Down there in the courtyard is a palace lifted bodily from the Grand Canal; now we are in Stratford-upon-Avon; there is an Elizabethan cottage with the moss still growing on its tiles. From this extraordinary combination and collaboration of all cultures, of all civilisations will spring the future—’

‘But,’ we interrupt, ‘tell us about the Americans in the present—the men and women. What are they like now, the inhabitants of this extraordinary land? Are they human beings as we are? Do they love and hate, sometimes feel tired, find it hard to get up in the morning, grumble at their wives?’

‘The Americans themselves,’ replies Imagination, ‘are a most remarkable people. Superficially, they differ little from ourselves. That is to say, they wear petticoats and trousers; marry and bear children. But whether it is that the mountains are so high and may at any moment belch out fire and decimate a town, or that the rivers are so huge and may at any moment roll out their long liquid tongues and swallow up a city, or that the air is decidedly alcoholic so that everyone is always a little tipsy, the Americans are much freer, wilder, more generous, more adventurous, more spontaneous than we are.

‘Look how they battle and punch; hack and hew; tunnel through mountains; erect skyscrapers; are ruined one moment, millionaires the next. In the same span of time we should have earned a modest pension, acquired a villa in Surrey, and decided, after due deliberation, to lop the cherry tree on the lawn.

‘But the best way of illustrating the difference between them and us is to bid you observe that while we have shadows that stalk behind us, they have a light that dances in front of them. That is what makes them the most interesting people in the world—they face the future, not the past.’

So saying, Imagination folded her wings and settled on the Cornish rock again. While she had been to America and back, one old woman had filled her basket half full of dead sticks for her winter’s firing.

But of course, we must remember, Imagination, with all her merits, is not always strictly accurate.

[Hearst’s International, April 1938]

[]

Women Must Weep.

I

One does not like to leave unanswered so remarkable a letter as yours—a letter perhaps unique in the history of human correspondence, since when before has an educated man asked a woman how, in her opinion, can war be prevented? Therefore let us now make the attempt, even if it is doomed to failure.

In the first place let us draw what all letters instinctively draw, a sketch of the person to whom the letter is addressed. Without someone warm and breathing on the other side of the page, letters are worthless. You, then, who ask the question are a little grey on the temples. You have reached the middle years of life not without effort, at the Bar; but on the whole your journey has been prosperous. There is nothing parched, mean, or dissatisfied in your expression. And without wishing to flatter you, your prosperity—wife, children, house—has been deserved. For the rest, you began your education at one of the great public schools and finished it at the University.

It is now that the first difficulty of communication between us appears. Let us rapidly indicate the reason. We both come of what, in this transition age when, though birth is mixed, classes still remain fixed, it is convenient to call the educated class. When we meet in the flesh we speak with the same accent and can keep up a conversation without much difficulty about politics and people, war and peace, barbarism and civilisation—all the questions, indeed, suggested by your letter. Moreover, we both earn our livings. But … those three dots mark a precipice, a gulf so deeply cut between us that I have been sitting on my side of it wondering whether it is any use to try to speak across it.

Here we are only concerned with the obvious fact when it comes to considering this important question—how we are to prevent war—that education makes a difference. Some knowledge of politics, of international relations, of economics, is obviously necessary in order to understand the causes which lead to war. Philosophy, even theology, might come in usefully. Now the uneducated you, as you will agree, the man with an untrained mind, could not possibly deal with such questions satisfactorily. War as the result of impersonal forces is thus beyond the grasp of the uneducated, the untrained mind. But war as the result of human nature is another thing. Had you not believed that human nature, the reasons, the emotions of the ordinary man and woman, lead to war, you would not have written asking for our help.

Happily there is one branch of education that comes under the heading ‘unpaid-for education’—that understanding of human beings and their motives which, if the word is rid of its scientific associations, might be called psychology. But though many instincts are held more or less in common by both sexes, to fight has always been the man’s habit, not the woman’s. Education and practice have developed what may be a psychological difference into what may be a physical difference—a difference in glands, in hormones. However that may be, the fact is indisputable—scarcely a human being in the course of history has fallen to a woman’s rifle; the vast majority of birds and beasts have been killed by you not by us.

How, then, are we to understand your problem, and if we cannot, how can we answer your question, how to prevent war? The answer based upon our experience and our psychology—Why fight?—is not an answer that would be of the least use to you. Obviously there is for you some glory, some necessity, some satisfaction in fighting which we have never felt or enjoyed. Complete understanding could only be achieved by blood transfusion and memory transfusion—a miracle still beyond the reach of science. But we who live now have a substitute for blood transfusion and memory transfusion which must serve at a pinch. There is that marvellous, perpetually renewed, and as yet largely untapped aid to the understanding of human motives which is provided in our age by biography and autobiography and the daily paper. It is to biography, then, that we will turn first, quickly and briefly, in order to understand what war means to you.

First, this from a soldier’s life:

I have had the happiest possible life, and have always been working for war, and have now got into the biggest in the prime of life for a soldier…. Thank God, we are off in an hour. Such a magnificent regiment! Such men, such horses! Within ten days I hope Francis and I will be riding side by side straight at the Germans.

To that let us add this from an airman’s life:

We talked of the League of Nations and the prospects of peace and disarmament. On this subject he was not so much militarist as martial. The difficulty to which he could find no answer was that if permanent peace were ever achieved, the armies and navies ceased to exist, there would be no outlet for the manly qualities which fighting developed, and that human physique and human character would deteriorate.

Here, then, are three reasons which lead your sex to fight: war is a profession; a source of happiness and excitement; and it is also an outlet for manly qualities, without which men would deteriorate. But these feelings and opinions are by no means universally held by your sex; this is proved by the following extract from another biography, the life of a poet who was killed in the war—Wilfred Owen.

Already I have comprehended a light which never will filter into the dogma of any national church: namely, that one of Christ’s essential commands was: Passivity at any price! Suffer dishonour and disgrace, but never resort to arms. Be bullied, be outraged, be killed; but do not kill…. Thus you see how pure Christianity will not fit in with pure patriotism.

And among some notes for poems that he did not live to write are these:

The unnaturalness of weapons … Inhumanity of war … The insupportability of war … Horrible beastliness of war … Foolishness of war.

From these quotations it is obvious that the same sex holds very different opinions about the same thing. But also it is obvious, from to-day’s newspaper, that, however many dissentients there are, the great majority of your sex are to-day in favour of war. They are of opinion that Wilfred Owen was wrong; that it is better to kill than to be killed. Yet, since biography shows that differences of opinion are many, it is plain that there must be some one reason which prevails in order to bring about this overpowering unanimity. Shall we call it, for the sake of brevity, ‘patriotism’? But the educated man’s sister—what does ‘patriotism’ mean to her? Has she the same reasons for being proud of England, for loving England, for defending England? Has she been ‘greatly blessed’ in England?

History and biography, when questioned upon these points, would seem to show that her position in the home of freedom has been distinctly different from her brother’s; and psychology would seem to hint that history is not without its effect upon mind and body. Therefore her interpretation of the word ‘patriotism’ may well differ from his. And the difference may make it extremely difficult for her to understand his definition of patriotism and the duties it imposes. It seems plain that we think differently according as we are born differently; there is the soldier’s and airman’s point of view; a Wilfred Owen point of view; the patriot’s point of view; and the point of view of an educated man’s daughter. Even the clergy, who make morality their profession, give us divided counsel—in some circumstances it is right to fight; in no circumstances is it right to fight.

But besides these pictures of other people’s lives and minds, these biographies and histories, there are also other pictures—pictures of actual facts, photographs. Photographs, of course, are not arguments addressed to reason; they are simply statements of fact addressed to the eye. Let us see, then, whether when we look at the same photographs we feel the same things.

Here on the table before us are photographs. The Spanish Government sends them with patient pertinacity about twice a week! They are not pleasant photographs to look upon. They are photographs of dead bodies, for the most part. This morning’s collection contains one that might be a man’s body, or a woman’s; it is so mutilated that it might, on the other hand, be the body of a pig. But those certainly are dead children, and that undoubtedly is a section of a house. A bomb has torn open the side; there is still a bird cage hanging in what was presumably the sitting room, but the rest of the house looks like nothing so much as a box of matches suspended in mid-air.

Those photographs are not an argument; they are simply a crude statement of fact addressed to the eye. But the eye is connected with the brain, the brain with the nervous system. That system sends its messages in a flash through every past memory and present feeling. When we look at those photographs some fusion takes place within us; however different the education, the traditions, may be behind us, still our sensations are the same. You, Sir, call them ‘horror and disgust.’ We also call them horror and disgust. And the same words rise to our lips. War, you say, is an abomination, a barbarity; war must be stopped at whatever cost. And we echo your words. War is an abomination, a barbarity; war must be stopped. For now at least we are looking at the same picture; we are seeing with you the same dead bodies, the same ruined houses.

That emotion, that very positive emotion, seems to demand something more positive than a name written on a sheet of paper, an hour spent listening to speeches, a cheque written for whatever sum we can afford—say one guinea. Some more energetic, some more active method of expressing our belief that war is barbarous, that war is inhuman,—that war, as Wilfred Owen put it, is insupportable, horrible, and beastly,—seems to be required. But, rhetoric apart, what active method is open to us?

You, of course, could once more take up arms—in Spain, for example—in defence of peace. But that presumably is a method that you have rejected. At any rate that method is not open to us; both the Army and the Navy are closed to our sex. Nor, again, are we allowed to be members of the Stock Exchange. Thus we cannot use either the pressure of force or the pressure of money. We cannot preach sermons or negotiate treaties. Then again, although it is true that we can write articles or send letters to the press, the control of the press—the decision what to print and what not to print—is entirely in the hands of your sex. It is true that for the past twenty years we have been admitted to the Civil Service and to the Bar; but our position there is still very precarious and our authority of the slightest.

Not only are we incomparably weaker than the men of our own class; we are weaker than the women of the working class. If the working women of the country were to say, ‘If you go to war, we will refuse to make munitions or to help in the production of goods,’ the difficulty of war-making would be seriously increased. But if all the daughters of educated men were to down tools tomorrow, nothing essential either to the life or to the war-making of the community would be embarrassed. Our class is the weakest of all classes in the state. We have no weapon with which to enforce our will—no weapons but an illusionary ‘indirect’ influence, the hard-won vote, and one other. For some reason never satisfactorily explained, the right to vote, in itself by no means negligible, was mysteriously connected with another right of such immense value to the daughters of educated men that almost every word in the dictionary has been changed by it, including the word ‘influence.’ You will not think this statement exaggerated if we explain that it refers to the right to earn one’s living.

II

The educated man’s daughter has now at her disposal an influence which is different from any influence that she has possessed before. It is not the influence which the great lady, the Siren, possesses; nor is it the influence which the educated man’s daughter possessed when she had no vote; nor is it the influence which she possessed when she had a vote but was debarred from the right to earn her living. It differs because it is influence from which the charm element has been removed. It differs because it is influence from which the money element has been removed. She need no longer use her charm to procure money from her father or brother. Since it is beyond the power of her family to punish her financially, she can express her own opinions. In place of the admirations and antipathies which were often unconsciously dictated by the need of money she can declare her genuine likes and dislikes. At last she is in possession of an influence that is disinterested. The question that is now to be discussed, therefore, is how can she use this new weapon to help you to prevent war?

Here again the sacred year 1919 comes to our help. Since that year put it into the power of educated men’s daughters in England to earn their livings, they have at last some real influence upon education. They have money to subscribe to causes. Honorary Treasurers invoke their help. And when Honorary Treasurers invoke help, it stands to reason they can be bargained with. To prove it here, opportunely, cheek by jowl with your letter is a letter from one such treasurer, asking for money with which to rebuild a women’s college. This at once gives us the right to say to her, ‘You shall only have our guinea if you will help this gentleman, whose letter also lies before us, to prevent war.’ But what is the meaning of that statement—what terms shall we lay down? What kind of education shall we bargain for? What sort of education will teach the young to hate war? What reason is there to think that a university education makes the educated against war?

Since she is asking for money, and since the giver of money is entitled to dictate terms, let us risk it and draft a letter to the Honorary Treasurer, laying down terms upon which she shall have our money to help her to rebuild her college. Here, then, is an attempt:

‘Your letter, Madam, has been waiting some time without an answer. But certain doubts and questions have arisen. May we put them to you, ignorantly as an outsider must, but frankly as an outsider should when asked to contribute money? You say, then, that you are asking for one hundred thousand pounds with which to rebuild your college. Are you so harassed with the problem of drawing one hundred thousand pounds gracefully from an indifferent public that you can only think of bazaars and ices, of strawberries and cream?

‘Let us then inform you: we are spending three hundred millions annually upon the Army and Navy. For there is, according to a letter that lies cheek by jowl with your own, grave danger of war. How, then, can you seriously ask us to provide you with money with which to rebuild your college? What has your college done to stimulate great manufacturers to endow it? Have you taken a leading part in the invention of the implements of war? How far have your students succeeded in business as capitalists? How, then, can you expect very handsome bequests and donations to come your way?

‘Also consider these photographs: they are pictures of dead bodies and ruined houses. Surely in view of these questions and pictures you must consider very carefully, before you begin to rebuild your college, what is the aim of education; what kind of society, what kind of human being, it should seek to produce. At any rate I will only send you a guinea with which to rebuild your college if you can satisfy me that you will use it to produce the kind of society, the kind of people, that will help to prevent war.

‘Let us, then, discuss as quickly as we can the sort of education that is needed. Now since history and biography—the only evidence available to an outsider—seem to prove that the old education of the colleges breeds neither a particular respect for liberty nor a particular hatred of war, it is clear that you must rebuild your college differently. It is young and poor; let it therefore take advantage of those qualities and be founded on poverty and youth. Obviously, then, it must be an experimental college, an adventurous college. Let it be built on lines of its own. Obviously it must be built, not of carved stone and stained glass, but of some cheap, easily combustible material which does not hoard dust and perpetuate traditions. Do not have chapels. Do not have museums and libraries with chained books and first editions under glass cases. Let the pictures and the books be new and always changing. Let it be decorated afresh by each generation with their own hands cheaply. The work of the living is cheap; often they will give it for the sake of being allowed to do it.

‘Next, what should be taught in the new college, the poor college? Not the arts of dominating other people; not the arts of ruling, of killing, of acquiring land and capital. They require too many overhead expenses: salaries and uniforms and ceremonies. The poor college must teach only the arts that can be taught cheaply and practised by poor people—such as medicine, mathematics, music, painting, and literature. It should teach the arts of human intercourse, the art of understanding other people’s lives and minds, and the little arts of talk, of dress, of cookery, that are allied with them.

‘The aim of the new college, the cheap college, should be not to segregate and specialise, but to combine. It should explore the ways in which mind and body can be made to co-operate, discover what new combinations make good wholes in human life. The teachers should be drawn from the good livers as well as from the good thinkers. There would be no difficulty in attracting such teachers. For there would be none of the barriers of wealth and ceremony, of advertisement and competition, which now make the old and rich universities such uneasy dwelling places—cities of strife, cities where this is locked up and that is chained down, where nobody can walk freely or talk freely for fear of transgressing some chalk mark, of displeasing some dignitary.

‘If the college were poor it would have nothing to offer; competition would be abolished. Life would be open and easy. People who love learning for itself would gladly come there. Musicians, painters, writers, would teach there cheaply, because they would learn. What could be of greater help to a writer, for instance, than to discuss the art of writing with people who were not thinking of examinations or degrees or of what honour or profit they could make literature give them, but of the art itself?

‘And so with the other arts and artists. They would come to the poor college because it would be a place where they could develop their own arts; where society was free, not parcelled out into the miserable distinctions of rich and poor, of clever and stupid, but where all the different degrees and kinds of mind, body, and soul merit cooperation. Let us, then, found this new college, this poor college; in which learning is sought for itself; where advertisement is abolished and there are no degrees, and lectures are not given and sermons are not preached and the old poisoned vanities and parades which breed competition and jealousy …’

The letter broke off there. It was not from lack of things to say; it was because the face on the other side of the page—the face that a letter writer always sees—appeared to be fixed, with a certain melancholy, upon a passage in an important book: ‘Head mistresses of schools therefore prefer a belettered staff, so that the students of Newnham and Girton were at a disadvantage in obtaining employment.’ The Honorary Treasurer of the Rebuilding Fund had her eyes fixed on that. ‘What is the use of thinking how a college can be different,’ she seemed to say, ‘when it must be a place where students are taught to obtain employment?’ ‘Dream your dreams,’ she seemed to add, turning rather wearily to the table which she was arranging for some festival, a bazaar presumably, ‘fire off your theories if it pleases you, but we have to face realities.’

That, then, was the ‘reality’ on which her eyes were fixed: students must be taught to earn their livings. And since that reality meant that she must rebuild her college on the same lines as the others, it followed that the college for the daughters of educated men must also make research produce practical results which will induce bequests and donations from rich men; it must accept degrees and coloured hoods; it must accumulate great wealth; it must exclude other people from a share of its wealth; and therefore in five hundred years or so that college too must ask the same question that you, Sir, are asking now: ‘How in your opinion are we to prevent war?’

An undesirable result that seemed; why, then, subscribe a guinea to procure it?

That question, at any rate, was answered. No guinea of earned money should go to rebuilding the college on the old plan; just as certainly none could be spent upon building a college upon a new plan; therefore the guinea should be earmarked, ‘Rags. Petrol. Matches.’ And this note should be attached to it: ‘Take this guinea and with it burn the college to the ground. Set fire to the old hypocrisies. Let the light of the burning building scare the nightingales and incarnadine the willows. And let the daughters of educated men dance round the fire and heap armful upon armful of dead leaves upon the flames. And let their mothers lean from the upper windows and cry, “Let it blaze! Let it blaze! For we have done with this ‘education’!”’

Such is the rather lame and depressing answer to our question whether we can ask the authorities of the colleges for the daughters of educated men to use their influence through education to prevent war. It appears that we can ask them to do nothing; they must follow the old road to the old end; our own influence as outsiders can only be of the most indirect sort. If we are asked to teach, we can examine very carefully into the aim of such teaching and refuse to teach any art or science that encourages war. Further, we can pour mild scorn upon chapels, upon degrees, and upon the value of examination. We can intimate that a prize poem can still have merit in spite of the fact that it has won a prize. If we are asked to lecture we can refuse to bolster up the vain and vicious system of lecturing by refusing to lecture. And of course, if we are offered honours and degrees for ourselves, we can refuse them—how, indeed, in view of the facts, could we possibly do otherwise?

But there is no blinking the fact that in the present state of things the most effective way in which we can help you through education to prevent war is to subscribe as generously as possible to the colleges for the daughters of educated men. For, to repeat, if those daughters are not going to be educated they are not going to earn their livings; if they are not going to earn their livings they are going once more to be restricted to the education of the private house; and if they are going to be restricted to the education of the private house they are going, once more, to exert all their influence, both consciously and unconsciously, in favour of war.

III

Now that we have given one guinea towards rebuilding a college we must consider whether there is not more we can do to help you to prevent war. Let me place before you another letter, a letter as genuine as your own, a letter that happens to lie beside it on the table.

It is a letter from another Honorary Treasurer, and it is again asking for money. ‘Will you,’ she writes, ‘send a subscription to [a society to help the daughters of educated men to obtain employment in the professions] in order to help us to earn our livings? Failing money,’ she goes on, ‘any gift will be acceptable—books, fruit, or cast-off clothing that can be sold in a bazaar.’ If she is as poor as this letter indicates, then the weapon of independent opinion upon which we have been counting to help you to prevent war is not, to put it mildly, a very powerful weapon. On the other hand, poverty has its advantages; for if she is poor, as poor as she pretends to be, then we can bargain with her as we bargained with her sister at Cambridge, and exercise the right of potential givers to impose terms.

We must rule out, as possible helpers, that large group to whom marriage is a profession, because it is an unpaid profession, and because the spiritual share of half the husband’s salary is not, facts seem to show, an actual share. Therefore if he, as (acts seem to show, is in favour of force, she too will be in favour of force. In the second place, facts seem to prove that the statement ‘To earn £250 a year is quite an achievement even for a highly qualified woman with years of experience’ is not an unmitigated lie, but a highly probable truth. Therefore the influence which the daughters of educated men have at present from their money-earning power cannot be rated very highly. Yet, since it has become more than ever obvious that it is to them we must look for help, for they alone can help us, it is to them we must appeal.

You will remember that we are using our psychological insight (for that is our only qualification) to decide what kind of qualities in human nature are likely to lead to war. And the facts disclosed above are of a kind to make us ask, before we write our cheque, whether, if we encourage the daughters of educated men to enter the professions, we shall not be encouraging the very qualities that we wish to prevent. Shall we not be doing our guinea’s worth to ensure that in two or three centuries not only the educated men in the professions but the educated women in the professions will be asking—oh, of whom? as the poet says—the very question that you are asking now: How can we prevent war? Here, then, is another letter endeavouring to formulate terms to the Honorary Treasurer of a society for helping the daughters of educated men to enter the professions:

‘Madam, I have had a letter from a professional man asking us to help him to prevent war. Also the Spanish Government sends me almost weekly photographs of dead bodies and ruined houses. That is why I am haggling and bargaining over conditions.

‘For the evidence of the letter and of the photographs, when combined with the facts with which history and biography provide us about the professions, seems to throw a certain light—a red light, shall we say—upon those same professions. You make money in them, it is true; but how far is money, in view of those facts, in itself a desirable possession?

‘If extreme wealth is undesirable, and extreme poverty is undesirable, it is arguable that there is some mean between the two which is desirable. What, then, is that mean—how much money is needed to live on to-day? And how should that money be spent? What is the kind of life, the kind of human being, you propose to aim at if you succeed in extracting this guinea?

‘Let us glance rapidly at the lives of professional men who have succeeded in their professions. Here is an extract from the life of a great lawyer: “He went to his chambers about half-past nine…. He took briefs home with him … so that he was lucky if he got to bed about one or two o’clock in the morning.” That explains why most successful barristers are hardly worth sitting next at dinner—they yawn so. Next, here is a quotation from a famous politician’s speech: “Since 1914 I have never seen the pageant of the blossom from the first damson to the last apple—never once have I seen that in Worcestershire since 1914, and if that is not a sacrifice I do not know what is.” A sacrifice indeed, and one that explains the perennial indifference of the government to art—why, cabinet ministers must be as blind as bats.

‘Take the religious profession next. Here is a quotation from the life of a great bishop: “This is an awful mind and soul destroying life. I really do not know how to live it. The arrears of important work accumulate and crush.” That bears out what so many people are saying now about the Church and the nation. Our bishops and deans seem to have no soul with which to preach and no mind with which to write. Listen to any sermon in any church, read the journalism of Dean Alington or Dean Inge in any newspaper.

‘Take the doctor’s profession next. “I have taken a good deal over £13,000 during the year, but this cannot possibly be maintained, and while it lasts it is slavery. What I feel most is being away from Eliza and the children so frequently on Sundays, and again at Christmas.” That is the complaint of a great doctor; and his patient might well echo it, for what Harley Street specialist has time to understand the body, let alone the mind or both in combination, when he is a slave to thirteen thousand a year?

‘But is the life of a professional writer any better? Here is a sample taken from the life of a highly successful journalist: “On another day at this time he wrote a 1600-word article on Nietzsche, a leader of equal length on the Railway Strike for the Standard, 600 words for the Tribune, and in the evening was at Shoe Lane.” That explains, among other things, why the public reads its politics with cynicism, and authors read their reviews with foot rules—it is the advertisement that counts; praise or blame has ceased to have any meaning.

‘These quotations prove nothing that can be checked and verified; they merely cause us to hold opinions. And those opinions cause us to doubt and criticise and question the value of professional life: not its cash value,—that is great,—but its spiritual, its moral, its intellectual value. They make us believe that if people are highly successful in their professions they lose their sight, their sense of proportion; they are prisoners in a cave, blind, crippled; they become so set on moneymaking, honour-getting, that they become competitive, possessive, jealous, combative, and thus, so far as our psychological knowledge is to be trusted, likely to be in favour of war.

‘We, daughters of educated men, are between the devil and the deep sea. Behind us lies the patriarchal system, the private house, with its nullity, its immorality, its hypocrisy, its servility. Before us lies the public world, the professional system, with its possessiveness, its jealousy, its pugnacity, its greed. The one shuts us up like slaves in a harem; the other forces us to circle, like caterpillars head to tail, round and round the mulberry tree, the sacred tree, of property. It is a choice of evils.

‘But another answer may be staring us in the face on the shelves of your own library, once more in the biographies. This time let us turn to the lives, not of men, but of women in the nineteenth century—to the lives of professional women. But there would seem to be a gap in your library, Madam. There are no lives of professional women in the nineteenth century.

‘When Mary Kingsley says, “Being allowed to learn German was all the paid-for education I ever had,” she suggests that she had an unpaid-for education. What, then, was the nature of that “unpaid-for education” which, whether for good or for evil, has been ours for so many centuries? If we mass the lives of the obscure together behind four lives that were not obscure, but were so successful and distinguished that they were actually written,—the lives of Florence Nightingale, Miss Clough, Mary Kingsley, and Gertrude Bell,—it seems undeniable that they were all educated by the same teachers. And those teachers, biography indicates, obliquely and indirectly, but emphatically and indisputably none the less, were poverty, chastity, derision, and—but what word covers “lack of rights and privileges”? Shall we press the old word “freedom” once more into service? “Freedom from unreal loyalties,” then, was the fourth of their teachers—that freedom from loyalty to old schools, old colleges, old churches, old countries, which all those women enjoyed, and which to a great extent we still enjoy.

‘Which of the two educations, which of the two professions, the paid or the unpaid, is the better, we have not time now to consider. Thus biography, when asked the question we have put to it,—how can we enter the professions and yet remain civilised human beings, human beings who discourage war?—seems to reply: If you refuse to be separated from the four great teachers of the daughters of educated men,—poverty, chastity, derision, and freedom from unreal loyalties,—but combine them with some wealth, some knowledge, and some service to real loyalties, then you can enter the professions and escape the risks that make them undesirable.

‘Such being the answer of the oracle, such are the conditions attached to this guinea. You shall have it, to recapitulate, on condition that you help all properly qualified people, of whatever sex, class, or colour, to enter your profession; and further on condition that in the practice of your profession you refuse to be separated from poverty, chastity, derision, and freedom from unreal loyalties.

‘By poverty is meant enough money to live on. That is, you must earn enough to be independent of any other human being and to buy that modicum of health, leisure, knowledge, and so on that is needed for the full development of body and mind. But no more. Not a penny more.

‘By chastity is meant that when you have made enough to live on by your profession you must refuse to sell your brain for the sake of money. That is, you must cease to practise your profession; or practise it for the sake of research and experiment; or, if you are an artist, for the sake of the art; or give the knowledge acquired professionally to those who need it for nothing. But directly the mulberry tree begins to make you circle, break off. Pelt the tree with laughter.

‘By derision—a bad word, but, as has been already remarked, the English language is much in need of new words—is meant that you must refuse all methods of advertising your merit, and hold that ridicule, obscurity, and censure are preferable, for psychological reasons, to fame and praise. Directly badges, orders, or degrees are offered you, fling them back in the giver’s face.

‘By freedom from unreal loyalties is meant that you must do all you can to rid yourself of pride of nationality in the first place; also of religious pride, college pride, school pride, family pride, sex pride, and those unreal loyalties that spring from them. Directly the seducers come with their seductions to bribe you into captivity, tear up the parchments, and refuse to fill up the forms.

‘For if you agree to these terms, then you can join the professions and yet remain uncontaminated by them; you can rid them of their possessiveness, their jealousy, their pugnacity, their greed. You can use them to have a mind and a will of your own. And you can use that mind and will to abolish the inhumanity, the beastliness, the horror, the folly of war. Take this guinea, then, and use it, not to burn the house down, but to make its windows blaze. And let the daughters of uneducated women dance round the new house, the poor house, the house that stands in a narrow street where omnibuses pass and the street hawkers cry their wares, and the voices of ships come in from the river, and let them sing, “We have done with war! We have done with tyranny!” And their mothers will laugh from their graves, “It was for this that we suffered obloquy and contempt! Light up the windows of the new house, daughters! Let them blaze!”

‘Those, then, are the terms upon which I give you this guinea with which to help the daughters of uneducated women to enter the professions. It is a penny candle, no more, but may it help to set light to those photographs of dead bodies and ruined houses and ensure that no other generation shall be forced to see what we have seen.’

Such, Sir, was the letter finally sent to the Honorary Treasurer of the society for helping the daughters of educated men to enter the professions. Those are the conditions upon which she is to have her guinea. They have been framed, so far as possible, to ensure that she shall do all that is in her power to help you to prevent war. As you will see, it was necessary to answer her letter and the letter from the Honorary Treasurer of the college rebuilding fund and to send them both guineas before answering your letter, because unless they are helped, first to educate the daughters of educated men, and then to earn their livings in the professions, those daughters cannot possess an independent and disinterested influence with which to help you prevent war. The causes, it seems, are connected.

Women Must Weep—Or Unite against War

I

In the remarkable letter in which you, as an educated man, ask the daughters of educated men for an opinion as to how to prevent war, you suggest certain practical measures by which we can help you to prevent war. These are, it appears, that we should sign a manifesto pledging ourselves to ‘protect culture and intellectual liberty, and that we should join a certain society, devoted to certain measures whose aim, needless to say, is to preserve peace—which society, like the other societies, is, needless to say, in need of funds.

We have given, so far as we are able, an opinion as to how, by the use of our influence upon education, upon the professions, we can help you to prevent war. Now we must consider how we can help you to prevent war by protecting culture and intellectual liberty, since you assure us that there is a connection between those rather abstract words and these very positive photographs from Spain—the photographs of dead bodies and ruined houses.

But if it was surprising to be asked for an opinion on how to prevent war, it is still more surprising to be asked to help you to protect culture and intellectual liberty. For have not the daughters of educated men paid into their brothers’ education fund from the year 1262 to the year 1870 all the money that was to educate themselves, barring such miserable sums as went to pay the governess, the German teacher, and the dancing master? Yet here comes your letter informing them that the whole of that vast, that fabulous sum—for, whether counted in cash or in things done without, the sum that lies behind their brothers’ education fund is vast—has been wasted or wrongly applied. If the schools and universities, with their great wealth and elaborate machinery for mind training and body training, have failed, what reason is there to think that your society, sponsored though it is by distinguished names, is going to succeed, or that your manifesto, signed though it is by still more distinguished names, is going to convert?

To ask the daughters of educated men who have to earn their livings by reading and writing to sign your manifesto would be of no value to the cause of disinterested culture and intellectual liberty, because, directly they had signed it, they would have to be at the desk writing those books, lectures, and articles by which culture is prostituted and intellectual liberty is sold into slavery.

Thus, Sir, it becomes clear that we must make our appeal only to those daughters of educated men who have enough money to live upon. But what, such a woman may well ask, is meant by this gentleman’s ‘disinterested’ culture, and how am I to protect that and intellectual liberty in practice?

Let us refer her to the tradition which has long been honoured in the private house—the tradition of chastity. ‘We are asking you, Madam, to pledge yourself not to commit adultery of the brain, because it is a much more serious offence than the other.’

‘Adultery of the brain,’ she may reply, ‘means writing what I do not want to write for the sake of money. Therefore you ask me to refuse all publishers, editors, lecture agents, and so on, who bribe me to write or to speak what I do not want to write or speak for the sake of money?’

‘That is so, Madam; and we further ask that if you should receive proposals for such sales you will resent them and expose them as you would resent or expose such proposals for selling your body, both for your own sake and for the sake of others. But we would have you observe that the verb “to adulterate” means, according to the dictionary, “to falsify by admixture of baser ingredients.” Advertisement and publicity are also adulterers. Thus, culture mixed with personal charm and culture mixed with advertisement and publicity are also adulterated forms of culture. We must ask you to abjure them; not to appear on public platforms; not to allow your private face to be published, or details of your private life; not to avail yourself, in short, of any of the forms of brain prostitution which are so insidiously suggested by the pimps and panders of the brain-selling trade. And medals, honours, degrees—all the baubles and labels by which brain merit is advertised and certified—we must ask you to refuse them absolutely, since they are all tokens that culture has been prostituted and intellectual liberty sold into captivity.

‘The private printing press is an actual fact, and not beyond the reach of a moderate income. Typewriters and duplicators are actual facts and even cheaper. By using these cheap and so far unforbidden instruments you can at once rid yourself of the pressure of boards, policies, and editors. They will speak your own mind, in your own words, at your own time, at your own length, at your own bidding. And that, we are agreed, is our definition of “intellectual liberty.”’

‘But,’ she may say, ‘the public? How can that be reached without putting my own mind through the mincing machine and turning it into sausage?’

‘The public, Madam,’ we may assure her, ‘is very like ourselves; it lives in rooms; it walks in streets, and is said, moreover, to be tired of sausage. Fling leaflets down basements; expose them on stalls; trundle them along streets on barrows to be sold for a penny or given away. Find out new ways of approaching the public; single it into separate people instead of massing it into one monster, gross in body, feeble in mind. And then reflect—since you have enough to live on; you have a room, not necessarily “cosy” or “handsome,” but still silent, private; a room where, safe from publicity and its poison, you could, even asking a reasonable fee for the service, speak the truth to artists, to writers, about pictures, music, books, without fear of affecting their sales, which are exiguous, or wounding their vanity, which is notorious. Arc not the best critics people, and is not spoken criticism the only criticism worth having?

‘Those, then, are some of the active ways in which you, as a writer of your own tongue, can put your opinion into practice. But if you are passive,—a reader, not a writer,—then you must adopt not active but passive methods of protecting culture and intellectual liberty.’

‘And what may they be?’ she will ask.

‘To abstain, obviously. Not to subscribe to papers that encourage intellectual slavery; not to attend lectures that prostitute culture; for we are agreed that to write at the command of another what you do not want to write is to be enslaved, and to mix culture with personal charm or advertisement is to prostitute culture. By these active and passive measures you would do all in your power to break the ring, the vicious circle, the dance round and round the mulberry tree—the poison tree of intellectual harlotry.

‘The ring once broken, the captive would be freed. For who can doubt that, once writers had the chance of writing what they enjoy writing, they would find it so much more pleasurable that they would refuse to write on any other terms; and who can doubt that readers, once they had the chance of reading what writers enjoy writing, would find it so much more nourishing than what is written for money that they would refuse to be palmed off with the stale substitute any longer?’

II

Now, Sir, let us consider your final and inevitable request: that we should subscribe to the funds of your society. With your letter before us, we have your assurance that you are fighting with us, not against us. That fact is so inspiring that a celebration seems called for. What could be more fitting, now that we can bury the old word ‘feminist,’ than to write more dead words, corrupt words, obsolete words upon sheets of paper and burn them—the words ‘tyrant,’ ‘dictator,’ for example? Alas, those words are not yet obsolete. We can still see traces of dictatorship revealed in newspapers, still smell a peculiar and unmistakable odour of masculine tyranny in the region of Whitehall and Westminster.

And abroad the Monster has come more openly to the surface. There is no mistaking him there. He has widened his scope. He is interfering now with your liberty; he is dictating how you shall live; he is making distinctions, not merely between the sexes, but between the races. You are feeling in your own persons what your mothers felt when they were shut out, when they were shut up, because they were women. Now you are being shut out, you are being shut up, because you are Jews, because you are democrats, because of race, because of religion.

It is not a photograph that you look upon any longer; there you go, traipsing along in the procession yourselves. And that makes a difference. The whole iniquity of dictatorship, whether in Oxford or Cambridge, in Whitehall or Downing Street, against Jews or against women, in England or in Germany, in Italy or in Spain, is now apparent to you. But now we are fighting together. That fact is so inspiring, even if no celebration is yet possible, that if this guinea you have requested could be multiplied a million times all those guineas should be at your service without any other conditions than those that you have imposed upon yourself. Take this one guinea, then, and use it to assert ‘the rights of all—all men and women—to the respect in their persons of the great principles of Justice and Equality and Liberty.’

Only one further request of yours remains to be considered—it is that we should fill up a form and become members of your society. What can be simpler than to fill up a form and join the society to which this guinea has just been contributed? On the face of it, how easy, how simple; but in the depths, how difficult, how complicated….

Society is far less satisfactory to us women, who have enjoyed, compared with you, so few of its goods, so many of its evils. Inevitably, therefore, we look upon society as an ill-fitting form which distorts the truth, deforms the mind, fetters the will. Inevitably we look upon societies as conspiracies and conglomerations which sink the private brother, whom many of us have reason to respect, and inflate in his stead a monstrous male, loud of voice, hard of fist, childishly intent upon ruling the floor of the earth with chalk marks, going through mystic rites and enjoying the dubious pleasures of power and dominion, while we, ‘his women,’ are firmly locked in the private house within.

For these reasons, which are not pure reason but are part emotion and part memory,—for who shall analyse the complexity of the mind that now holds so deep a reservoir of time past within it?—it seems impossible to fill up your form and join your society. For by so doing we should merely merge ourselves in you; follow and repeat and score deeper the old worn ruts in which society, like a gramophone whose needle has stuck, is grinding out with intolerable unanimity ‘three hundred millions spent upon arms.’

Let us, then, draw rapidly in outline the kind of society which the daughters of educated men might found and join, outside your society, but in co-operation with its ends. In the first place this new society, you will be relieved to learn, would have no Honorary Treasurer, for it would need no funds. It would have no office, no committee, no secretary, no note paper, even. It would call no meetings; it would hold no conferences. If name it must have, it could be called the Outsiders’ Society. It would consist of educated men’s daughters working in their own class—how, indeed, can they work in any other?—and by their own methods for liberty, equality, and peace.

Their first duty, to which they would not bind themselves by oath, would be, of course, not to fight with arms. This is easy for them to observe, for in fact, as the papers inform us, ‘the Army Council have no intention of opening recruiting for any women’s corps.’ Next, they would refuse in the event of war to make munitions or to nurse the wounded. The third duty to which they would pledge themselves is one of considerable difficulty, and calls not only for courage and initiative, but for the special knowledge of the educated man’s daughter. It is, briefly, not to incite their brothers to fight, or to dissuade them, but to maintain an attitude of complete indifference. As fighting clearly is a sex characteristic which the woman cannot share,—the counterpart, some claim, of the maternal instinct which the man cannot share,—so is it an instinct which she cannot judge. The Outsider, therefore, must leave her brother free to deal with this instinct by himself.

But the Outsider will make it her duty to base her indifference not merely upon instinct, but upon reason and facts. And she will enforce it in her own case. As, in most countries, she loses her nationality upon marriage, she will insist that it is, on the whole, an advantage, since any form that brands nationality upon a free person is a stigma—a restriction, rather than a liberation. She will bind herself to take no part in patriotic demonstrations; to assent to no form of national self-praise; to make no part of any claque or audience that encourages war, absenting herself from military displays, tournaments, prize givings, and all such ceremonies as encourage the desire to impose ‘our’ civilisation or ‘our’ dominion upon other people.

III

But there is another way in which the Outsiders can bind themselves to carry out this duty—a more positive, if a still more difficult way. And that is by earning their own livings; by continuing to earn those livings while the war is in progress. History is at hand to assure us that this method has a psychological influence, a strong dissuasive force upon war-makers. In the last war the daughters of workingmen proved it by showing that they could do their brother’s work in his absence. They thus roused his jealousy and his anxiety lest his place should have been filled in his absence, and provided him with a strong incentive to end the war.

It follows that an Outsider must make it her business to press for a living wage in all the professions now open to her sex; further, she must create new professions in which she can earn the right to an independent opinion. Therefore she must bind herself to press for a money wage for the unpaid worker in her own class—the daughters and sisters of educated men who are now paid on the truck system, with food, lodging, and a pittance of forty pounds a year. But above all she must press for a wage to be paid by the State legally to the mothers of educated men. It is the most effective way in which we can ensure that the married woman shall have a mind and a will of her own, with which, if his mind and will are good in her eyes, to support her husband, if bad to resist him—in any case to cease to be ‘his woman,’ and to be herself.

Consider, even at the risk of a digression, what effect this proposed wage for those whose profession is marriage and motherhood would have upon the birth rate, in the very class where the birth rate is falling, in the very class where births are desirable—the educated class. Just as the increase in the pay of soldiers has resulted, the papers say, in additional recruits to the force of arm-bearers, so the same inducement would serve to recruit the child-bearing force, which we can hardly deny to be as necessary and as honourable, but which, because of its poverty and hardships, is now failing to attract recruits. If the State paid your wife a living wage for her work (which, sacred though it is, can scarcely be called more sacred than that of the clergyman; yet, as his work is paid for without derogation, so may hers be)—if this step were taken, your own slavery would be lightened. No longer need you go to the office at nine-thirty and stay there till six. No longer would you be the Saturday caller, the albatross on the neck of society, the sympathy addict, the deflated work slave calling for replenishment; or, as Herr Hitler puts it, the hero requiring recreation, or, as Signor Mussolini puts it, the wounded warrior requiring female dependants to bandage his wounds. But since three hundred millions or so have to be spent upon the arm-bearers, such expenditure for wages to mothers is obviously, to use a convenient word applied by the politicians, ‘impracticable,’ and it is time to return to more feasible projects.

The Outsiders, then, would bind themselves, not only to earn their own livings, but to earn them so expertly that their refusal to earn them would be a matter of concern to the work master. Also, they would bind themselves to remain outside any profession hostile to freedom, such as the making or the improvement of the weapons of war. And they would bind themselves to refuse to take office or honour from any society which, while professing to respect liberty, restricts it, like the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. And in all this, and in much more than we have time to particularise, they would be helped, you will agree, by their position as Outsiders, that freedom from unreal loyalties, that freedom from interested motives, which are at present assured them by the State.

Broadly speaking, the main distinction between us who are outside society and you who are inside society must be that, whereas you will make use of the means provided by your position,—Leagues, Conferences, public campaigns, great names, and all such public measures as your wealth and political influence place within your reach,—we, remaining outside, will experiment, not with public means in public, but with private means in private.

IV

Let us examine three experiments only, in order that we may prove our statement that the Society of Outsiders is in being.

Speaking at a bazaar last week at the Plumstead Common Baptist Church, the mayoress [of Woolwich] said: … ‘I myself would not even do as much as darn a sock to help in a war.’ These remarks are resented by the majority of the Woolwich public, who hold that the mayoress was, to say the least, rather tactless. Some 11,000 Woolwich electors are employed in Woolwich Arsenal on armament making.®

Speaking of the work of the great voluntary associations for the playing of certain games, Miss Clarke [Miss H.R. Clarke of the Board of Education] referred to the women’s organisations for hockey, lacrosse, netball, and cricket, and pointed out that under their rules there could be no cup or award of any kind to a successful team. The ‘gates’ for their matches might be a little smaller than for the men’s games, but their players played the game for the love of it, and they seemed to be proving that cups and awards are not necessary to stimulate interest, for each year the number of players steadily continued to increase.

For our third example let us choose what we may call an experiment in passivity.

A remarkable change in the attitude of young women to the Church was discussed by Canon F.R. Barry, vicar of St. Mary the Virgin [the University Church] at Oxford last night…. The task before the Church, he said, was nothing less than to make civilization moral, and this was a great co-operative task which demanded all that Christians could bring to it. It simply could not be carried through by men alone. For a century, or a couple of centuries, women had predominated in the congregations in roughly the ratio of 75 per cent to 25 per cent. The whole situation was now changing, and what the keen observer would notice in almost any church in England was the paucity of young women…. Among the student population the young women were, on the whole, farther away from the Church of England and the Christian faith than the young men.

It is, as we have said, a passive experiment. For while the first example was an outspoken refusal to knit socks in order to discourage war, and the second was an attempt to stimulate non-competitive interest in games, the third is an attempt to prove what happens if the daughters of educated men absent themselves from church. Without being in itself more valuable than the others, it is of more practical interest because it is obviously the kind of experiment that great numbers of Outsiders can practise with very little difficulty or danger to themselves. (What light this throws upon the power of Outsiders to abolish or modify other institutions of which they disapprove; whether, if they ceased to attend public dinners, public dinners would cease to be eaten; whether, if they refused honours, your sex would refuse them too; whether, if they absented themselves from lectures upon English literature, such lectures would cease and English literature would spring into a new vitality, are questions, frivolous questions, that may well amuse our leisure and stimulate our curiosity.)

The results of one such experiment are positive and they are encouraging: there can be no doubt that the Church is becoming concerned about the attitude to the Church of educated men’s daughters at the universities. There is the report of the Archbishops’ Commission on the Ministry of Women to prove it.

When, in the year 1935, the daughters of educated men said that they wished to have the profession of religion opened to them, the priests of that profession, who correspond roughly to the doctors and barristers in the other professions, were forced to give psychological as well as theological grounds for their refusal to admit women. They therefore called in Professor Grensted, D.D., the Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion in the University of Oxford, and asked him to indicate the psychological grounds for the opinions and recommendations put forward by the Commission, favouring the ‘continuous tradition of male priesthood.’ This was the first fact that he investigated.

It is clearly a fact of the very greatest practical importance that strong feeling is aroused by any suggestion that women should be admitted to the status and functions of the threefold Order of the Ministry. The evidence before the Commission went to show that this feeling is predominantly hostile to such proposals…. This strength of feeling, conjoined with a wide variety of rational explanations, is clear evidence of the presence of powerful and widespread subconscious motive. In the absence of detailed analytical material, of which there seems to be no record in this particular connection, it nevertheless remains clear that infantile fixation plays a predominant part in determining the strong emotion with which this whole subject is commonly approached.

The exact nature of this fixation must necessarily differ with different individuals, and suggestions which can be made as to its origin can only be general in character. But, whatever be the exact value and interpretation of the material upon which theories of the ‘Œdipus complex’ and the ‘castration complex’ have been founded, it is clear that the general acceptance of male dominance, and still more of feminine inferiority, resting upon subconscious ideas of woman as ‘man manqué,’ has its background in infantile conceptions of this type. These commonly, and even usually, survive in the adult, despite the irrationality, and betray their presence, below the level of conscious thought, by the strength of the emotions to which they give rise. It is strongly in support of this view that the admission of women to Holy Orders, and especially to the ministry of the sanctuary, is so commonly regarded as something shameful. This sense of shame cannot be regarded in any other light than as a non-rational sex-taboo.

As Professor Grensted gave his evidence, we, the daughters of educated men, seemed to be watching a surgeon at work—an impartial and scientific operator, who, as he dissected the human mind, by human means laid bare for all to see what cause, what root, lies at the bottom of our fear. It is an egg. Its scientific name is ‘infantile fixation.’ We, being unscientific, have named it wrongly. An egg we called it; a germ. We smelt it in the atmosphere; we detected its presence in Whitehall, in the Universities, in the Church. Now undoubtedly the Professor has defined it and named it and described it so accurately that no daughter of an educated man, however uneducated she may be, can miscall it or misinterpret it in the future. It is possible that she has suspected it for two thousand years at least; but now the familiar feeling is named.

V

Let us examine this ‘infantile fixation’ in order that we may see what bearing it has upon the question you have put us. There are so many cases of infantile fixation, as defined by Professor Grensted, in Victorian biography that we scarcely know which to choose. The case of Mr Barrett of Wimpole Street is perhaps the most famous and the best authenticated. But let us choose one that is less well-known. There is the case of Mr Jex-Blake. Here we have a father who is not confronted with his daughter’s marriage but with his daughter’s wish to earn her living. That wish also would seem to have aroused in the father a very strong emotion, and an emotion which also seems to have its origin in the levels below conscious thought. Again, with your leave, we will call it a case of infantile fixation.

The daughter, Sophia, was offered a small sum for teaching mathematics; and she asked her father’s permission to take it. That permission was instantly and heatedly refused. ‘Dearest, I have only this moment heard that you contemplate being paid for the tutorship. It would be quite beneath you, darling, and I cannot consent to it.’ (The italics are the father’s.) ‘Take the post as one of honour and usefulness, and I shall be glad. But to be paid for the work would be to alter the thing completely and would lower you sadly in the eyes of almost everybody.’

Why was it beneath her, she asked, why should it lower her? Taking money for work did not lower Tom in anybody’s eyes. That, Mr Jex-Blake explained, was quite a different matter: Tom was a man; Tom had a family to support; Tom had therefore taken ‘the plain path of duty.’

Still Sophia was not satisfied. She argued—not only was she poor and wanted the money, but also she felt strongly ‘the honest, and I believe perfectly justifiable, pride of earning.’ Thus pressed, Mr Jex-Blake at last gave, under a semi-transparent cover, the real reason why he objected to her taking money. He offered to give her the money himself if she would refuse to take it from the college. It was plain, therefore, that he did not object to her taking money; what he objected to was her taking money from another man.

We can have no doubt concerning what emotion was at the root of this objection. He wished to keep his daughter in his own power. If she took money from him, she remained in his power; if she took it from another man, not only was she becoming independent of Mr Jex-Blake—she was becoming dependent upon another man. That he wished her to depend upon him, and felt obscurely that this desirable dependence could only be secured by financial dependence, is proved indirectly by another of his veiled statements. ‘If you married to-morrow to my liking—and I don’t believe you would ever marry otherwise—I should give you a good fortune.’ If she became a wage earner, she could dispense with the fortune and marry whom she liked.

The case of Mr Jex-Blake is very easily diagnosed, but it is a very important case because it is a normal, a typical case. Mr Jex-Blake was no monster of Wimpole Street; he was an ordinary father, doing what thousands of other Victorian fathers, whose cases remain unpublished, were doing daily. It is a case, therefore, that explains much that lies at the root of Victorian psychology—that psychology of the sexes which is still, Professor Grensted tells us, so obscure. The daughter’s desire to earn her living rouses two different forms of jealousy. Each is strong separately; together they are very strong. It is further significant that in order to justify this very strong emotion, which has its origin below the levels of conscious thought, Mr Jex-Blake had recourse to one of the commonest of all evasions—the argument which is not an argument, but an appeal to the emotions. He appealed to her womanhood.

There can be no question—the infantile fixation is powerful, even when a mother feels it. But when the father is infected it has a threefold power: he has nature to protect him, he has law to protect him, he has property to protect him. Thus protected, the Reverend Patrick Brontë could cause ‘acute pain’ to his daughter Charlotte for several months by making her promise not to marry when she wished and could steal several months of her short married happiness without incurring any censure from the society in which he practised the profession of a priest of the Church of England; though had he tortured a dog, or stolen a watch, that same society would have unfrocked him and cast him forth. Society, it seems, was a father, and afflicted with the infantile fixation too.

Ignorant as we are of human motives, and ill supplied with words, let us admit that no one word expresses the force which in the nineteenth century opposed itself to the force of the fathers. All we can safely say about that force is that it was a force of tremendous power. It forced open the doors of the private house. It opened Bond Street and Piccadilly; it opened cricket grounds and football grounds; it shrivelled flounces and stays; it made the oldest profession in the world—so it is said, but Whitaker supplies no figures—unprofitable. The fathers, who had triumphed over the strongest emotions of strong men, had to yield.

VI

If that full stop were the end of the story, the final slam of the door, we could turn once more to your letter, Sir, and to the form which you have asked us to fill up. But it was not the end; it was the beginning. Indeed, though we have used the past tense, we shall soon find ourselves using the present. The fathers in private, it is true, yielded; the door was forced open. But the fathers massed together outside, in societies, in professions, were even more subject, it would seem, to the disease of infantile fixation than the fathers in private life. That they were affected by the same disease would appear, if we compare ( the symptoms, to be indisputable.

One motive, the love motive, which is so easily apparent in the cases already quoted and so difficult for the daughters either to fight or to recognise, was absent, it is true. But the disease had acquired another motive which made it still more virulent. For now the fathers had to protect something that lay as deep in them as womanhood, as daughterhood, lay in their daughters: let us call it ‘manhood’ itself and have done with it. A man who could not earn his living had failed in the prime attribute of manliness—the ability to support a wife and family. It was that right which was now challenged. To protect that—and from women—gave and gives rise, it can scarcely be doubted, to an emotion below the levels of conscious thought and of the utmost violence. It is for this reason, to quote Professor Grensted, that ‘the admission of women to Holy Orders’—or indeed to any profession, for they are all Holy Orders—‘is so commonly regarded as something shameful. This sense of shame cannot be regarded in any other light than as a non-rational sex-taboo.’

And if, Sir, pausing in England, we turn on the radio of the daily press, we shall hear what the fathers who are infected with infantile fixation are now saying:

Homes are the real places of the women…. Let them go back to their homes…. The Government should give work to men…. A strong protest is to be made by the Ministry of Labour…. A woman has been appointed…. Women must not rule over men…. There are two worlds, one for women, the other for men…. Women are tired of their freedom…. Let them learn to cook our dinners…. Women have failed…. They have failed at the Bar…. They have failed in medicine…. They have failed…. They have failed…. They have failed….

Why, the clamour, the uproar, that infantile fixation is making at this very moment, Sir, is such that we can hardly hear ourselves speak; it takes the words out of our mouths; it makes us say what we have not said. As we listen to the voices we seem to hear an infant crying in the night, the black night that now covers Europe, and with no language but a cry, ‘Ay, ay, ay, ay …’ But it is not a new cry; it is a very old cry. We are looking at a picture again, the same picture of dead bodies and ruined houses that caused us, at the beginning of this letter, to feel the same emotions. You called them ‘horror and disgust.’ We called them ‘horror and disgust.’

But that picture has changed as this letter proceeded; another picture has formed, as pictures will, on the top of that picture. A figure has imposed itself upon the foreground. It is the figure of a man. Some claim, others deny, that it is Man himself, the quintessence of virility, the perfect type of which all others are imperfect adumbrations. He is a man, certainly; there can be no doubt of that. His eyes are glazed; his eyes glare. His body, which is braced in an unnatural position, is tightly cased in a uniform. Upon the breast of that uniform are sewn several medals and mystic symbols. His hand is upon a sword. He is called, in German or Italian, Führer or Duce—in our own language, Tyrant or Dictator. And behind him lie ruined houses and dead bodies—women and children as well as men.

That is the picture that has imposed itself upon this letter. It would seem that it is the same picture that has imposed itself upon your own letter—the same picture, but looked at inevitably from a different angle. We are both agreed that the picture is the picture of evil; we are both determined to do what we can, you by your methods, we by ours, to destroy the evil which that picture represents. And we may both be wrong, not only in the methods by which we attempt to destroy that evil, but in our judgement.

Many men of the highest education maintain that the picture is a picture, not of evil, but of good. War, it is argued, brings out the noblest qualities of mankind. The Dictator, it is claimed, is neither a menace nor a monster, but, on the contrary, the consummation of manhood. He is the embodiment of the State; the State is supreme; both men and women must obey its commands, whether they are just or unjust. Obedience is all.

On the other hand, some men also of the highest education maintain that the picture is the picture of evil. War is inhuman, horrible, unnatural, beastly. The Dictator is a monster. His commands must be disobeyed. The State is not supreme. The State is made of human beings—of free men and women, who must think for themselves.

What judge is there to decide which opinion is right, which wrong? There is no judge; there is no certainty in heaven above or on earth below. All we can do is to examine that picture as clearly as sex and class allow; to bring to bear upon it such illumination as history, biography, and the daily paper put within our reach; and to examine both reasons and emotions as dispassionately as we can.

That is what we have attempted. The Society of Outsiders—to give it too pompous a name—is the result. The rules—to speak too pedantically—are an attempt to embody the findings of that inquiry. At length, then, we have reached what must serve, temporarily at least, for an answer to your question. Given our sex, our past, our education, our traditions, the best way in which we can help you to prevent war is to keep those rules. The best way in which we can help you to prevent war, as society is at present and as we are at present, is to remain outside your society. I have every confidence, Sir, that you will read those words aright, and therefore will not elaborate them further.

To return, finally, to the form which you have sent and ask us to fill up, we will leave it, for the reasons given above, unsigned. But in order to prove as substantially as possible that our aims are identical with your own, here is the guinea: a free gift, given freely to help you to assert ‘the rights of all—all men and women—to the respect in their persons of the great principles of Justice and Equality and Liberty.’

[Atlantic Monthly, May–June 1938]

[]

1940

Georgiana and Florence.

[Two Generations, ed. Osbert Sitwell (Macmillan, 1940).]

When Georgiana Sitwell (b. 1824) says ‘… we lived in an ideal world and could not see life as it really was …’ we are tempted to agree; but unless we are quite sure that we, in 1940, see life as it really is, perhaps silence is better. Only let us put one question, that a chance remark of Mr Sitwell’s about chrysanthemums suggests: how large ought chrysanthemums to be? At Renishaw, he says, they measured between five and six inches. Is that not perhaps too large? They seem to dwarf the human figure. For a six-inch flower implies a six-foot footman; and footmen imply mansions; mansions imply parks; and parks like the park at Renishaw are too big for men and women of an ordinary size. Physically the Sitwells were a fine grown race. But it would have needed a giant, mentally and spiritually, to stand up to Renishaw. And Georgiana was only an amiable cultivated lady of average size. Her life is lost in the space at Renishaw.

When she revisits her past she wanders down the long corridors vaguely, vainly in search of something. Figures appear in the distance; she sees—she has a sensitive eye—her mother in emerald green; her father in his ruby waistcoat; Agnes in pale grey silk shot with fire colour. Like a flock of gleaming birds they settle in some vast apartment. ‘My mother reposed on the sofa … my father rested after his hunting … we little ones played with the dolls house in the corner’. Once the silence was broken by a roar—‘Water, water, hot water!’ rough Dr Askham roared, for he had swallowed the Gourlard lotion by mistake. And one day when they called on Mrs Foxlowe they found her distracted. Her self-acting piano ‘had played the tune of the Hundredth Psalm from the time of her nine o’clock breakfast till that of our arrival in the late afternoon. She knew not how to stop it, neither did we….’ The spring had to be broken. Silence returned. In that silence, when the doctor had gone and the piano had stopped, Georgiana wandered out, with her pet lambs following her and the deer, into the park, where the violets and the cowslips used to grow (but ‘“the seasons had much altered” old Mrs Margaret Stovin told us children’). One had a wonderful view then for miles, over spires and country seats, to the ridge on which stood Hardwick Hall and the splendid keep of Bolsover. Nothing uglier than a grinding shop spoilt the view. But one never met a soul to speak to—only groups. At Christmas there were the mummers; and there were always the poor—‘The English poor were essentially aristocratic in their tastes’, she says, like the English horses and the English deer. If Lady Sitwell ordered them to have their hair cut, cut it was. So far as anything is visible in this ocean of space, the family features appear to be modelled on just, generous, and kindly lines. ‘My father had the simplest tastes … indeed we often thought he would have made a capital explorer…. My mother had been admirably brought up’. When she took her daily drive—it was always along the same road—she read the memoirs of Napoleon, or the Histoire de Venise. For days on end they drove and drove into the Highlands. But Georgiana cannot people that enormous vacancy. She can only fill it with flowers and furniture. At last she hears a train whistle; a line had been built in the park. Up she flings her thin white hands in despair. Hastily she bethinks her that girls are no longer modest; the poor no longer virtuous; the violets have gone and the cowslips. The end of the world has come. She vanishes; space has engulfed her.

Then the next generation, Florence Sitwell (1858–1930), takes up the pen: ‘Sept. 7th, 1873. At dear old Renishaw again on a still Sunday evening with nothing to be heard but the cawing of the rooks through the open window. Mother and Grace and George have gone to church and left me at home’. Home, owing to money losses, is moved to Scarborough. Space is contracted; and perhaps for that reason we hear what was never audible in Georgiana’s pages—a voice speaking. It says: ‘Mamma has given Algy a sweet little kitten…. Towards the end of January, on a Monday, Grace broke out with the measels…. Tomorrow Mother is going to have a tea party for bad girls in the evening…. We have seen a good deal of the Archdeacon lately…. Pucky has two puppies’. It is as if a child were practising scales in the room above. One scarcely listens. Then some of the notes—puppy, mumps, bad girls, Archdeacon—strike a chord. The tune begins. ‘“There’s the Archdeacon”. And sure enough there he was!’ Next Maggy. ‘I have seen Maggy! My heart really must have jumped into my mouth!’ Then Katy. ‘Katy has arrived!’ Behind this merry little tune, mountains, mists and moons appear. The Sitwells are on the continent. Little figures are seen—young Mr Hobson at the hotel, ‘looking the picture of despair. He has a very odd accent, and told mother that there was one good thing, we should not remain long on this planet’. So back to London, where Aunt Minnie, in love with her native land, ‘seized up the toast … and kissed it’. Other voices join in, for Florence has her hair up and dines out. ‘Mr Dale explained Darwin to me, and we talked a little about Cremation’. As eighteen becomes nineteen, life becomes something not so simple after all. ‘… Aunt Catherine carried me off to the round sofa…. Then asked me what I thought of life’. What she thought was that ‘there is such a thing as worldliness in the world. One had always heard it but never knew it before’. She thought too, for Mrs Foxlowe’s self-acting piano was always gently moaning a hymn in the background, a good deal about the Second Coming of the Lord. ‘So many people think that our Lord’s Second Advent is not far distant. We must all watch and be ready whatever happens …’. In the firelight with their arms twined about each other’s necks Maggy and Florence speculate about the future—‘Maggy expecting a Golden Age to come through Revolution … I, through the Second Coming of Christ’.

So the simple tune runs on. But it is a tune; it has the continuity of the speaking voice; and its reserves. When it stops we are left listening for the next note. Did Cousin Coutty have Delirium Tremens as Aunt Pussy said? How did Marie’s marriage turn out? And what happened after Sept. 30th to Florence herself? There is no answer. She has jumped up and gone. But she is not engulfed, like Georgiana, in space. Florence, with her innocent little chirrup, has vanquished space. She is larger than the chrysanthemum, though whether she saw ‘life as it really is’ must be left an open question.

[Listener, Oct 31, 1940]

[]

A
PASSIONATE
APPRENTICE

The Early Journals
1887–1909

by
Virginia Woolf

published
1990
by
The Hogarth Press

a passionate apprentice

1897

Warboys 1899

1903

Christmas 1904 to May 1905

Cornwall 1905

Giggleswick 1906

Blo’ Norton 1906

Greece 1906

New Forest 1906

Golders Green 1907

Playden 1907

Wells and Manorbier August 1908

Italy 1908

Florence 1909

[]

When I read this book, which I do sometimes on a hot Sunday evening in London, I am struck by the wildness of its statements—the carelessness of its descriptions—the repetition of its adjectives—& in short I pronounce it a very hasty work, but excuse myself by remembering in what circumstances it was written. After a days outing, or when half an hour is vacant, or as a relief from some Greek tragedy—at different times, & in different moods it is written, & I am certain that if I imposed any other conditions upon myself it would never be written at all. Did I not take it to Cornwall at Easter, & determine to note something serviceable—& did I even write my address?

So once more I return to the old method; & protesting merely, that I am conscious of its faults—the protest of vanity.

virginia stephen
August 1908

1897

Sunday 3 January

We have all started to keep a record of the new year—Nessa, Adrian and I. Bicycled with Georgie to Mr Studds but found he was away, and so went on to Battersea Park—

There was a great crowd of bikers and lookers on—Miss Jan [Virginia] rode her new bicycle, whose seat unfortunately, is rather uncomfortable—Thoby was on Geralds, and Adrian on Jacks, which was given him (A.) on Christmas. In the afternoon we did nothing—

After tea Thoby read the Ent[omological]. Soc, a paper upon the History of the Club. Also a retrospect of 1896—It was agreed to send S[tella]. D[uckworth]. and J[ohn]. W[aller]. H[ills]. a letter of congratulations—also that the lectures of the Pres. etc. should not be entered in the book.

Monday 4 January

Met Georgie at the General Post Office at 12, and went with him to Mr Higgs. We were shown round the telegraph place, where all the people (two thousand) were working. But they made such a noise that I could not hear the guide explaining what was happening; so it is impossible to describe any of it to you, my dear diary.

We lunched at Pimms with Mr Higgs. Mr Ives was to have come but did not—After lunch we four bussed back home—A[drian]. and I lay down to rest for the evening. Theodore Davies came to dinner which was at 6.30, and went with us to Drury Lane—The Pantomime was Aladdin and very good Miss Jan thought, more suited to her comprehension than a grown up play. Got home at 11.30 being defrauded of one penny.

Tuesday 5 January

Got up at half past 10, and stayed in and read the whole morning. After luncheon Nessa and Thoby went to the Royal Academy to see Lord Leightons pictures. Adrian Stella and I bussed to Piccadilly circus. Stella left us there and went on to Oxford Street to pay calls. Adrian and I bussed to Sloane St, and there dismounted—A insisted upon buying a luggage carrier for his bicycle for 3/9—which was a piece of great extravagance, Miss Jan thought. We walked back home.

After tea we gave a most striking representation of the tragedy “Clementinas Lovers” by J. T[hoby] S[tephen] in which everyone is killed. The servants—Pauline (who thought we were acting Aladdin) Elizabeth and Florrie, pronounced it most excellent. Finished vol 1 of Three Generations of English Women, and began vol 2.

Wednesday 6 January

Will came in the morning and talked to Stella a great deal, so that we did not get out till late—We went for a short walk in the gardens—Jerry lost his muzzle somehow, and had to be carried home muffled up in Nessas cloak. Luncheon was at 1. Aunt Anny came for lunch, and was most amusing—As soon as she was out of the door after lunch, she said to father in a loud voice—“Oh Leslie what a noble boy Thoby is!” Adrian, Thoby and Father went to Highgate. Aunt Anny and Stella on some private business of their own, and Nessa and I to the National Gallery. We saw everything—old Italians, Dutches, English and a great room full of Turner water colours. Stella and Jack and Gerald went to dine at the Stanleys, to see French plays, and danced afterwards. Georgie away at Canterbury—Pauline found the key of this book so that I am fast[?] locked[?] up.

Thursday 7 January

Yesterday morning we went to Mrs Simpson in Cornwall Gdns with a parcel, and then straight back home, as we thought Georgie was coming—Stella went with Jo to see the place where Jo is to build her [Stella’s] cottages. He stayed for lunch. In the afternoon he took us four to Covent Garden. We walked to Sloane St, and explored the Brompton Oratory. We went to the animal man in Covent Garden, and saw two baby crocodiles—most delightful critturs—Afterwards Jo plunged us down a little back street and so to his office, which is one small room, with a hideous green paper, with yellow peacocks and lions, and with a window looking on to the river. Georgie came home about 5. He started for Paris at a quarter to nine, where he will be for 6 weeks. Finished Three Generations of English Women, and began Froudes Life of Carlyle.

Friday 8 January

Rained all the morning. Thoby and Nessa were taught waltzing in the drawing room by Stella—Thoby dances in the most extraordinary way, galloping round the room as hard as he can go, and at last landing Nessa in the table.

Read most of the morning.

Aunt Mary came after luncheon, and stayed for tea at 4. Herbert [Fisher] also came to tea. Nessa and I drove to Butts in the carriage (which was hired for Aunt Marys benefit) and bought 3 shillings worth of tulips, also a bag of chestnuts for Adrian. He and Thoby roasted them after tea, with rather disastrous effects upon A who could not sleep last night, and had to be moved down to Stellas room, where he was all night. Jack doused Shag with water—poor old beast, and made him choke and snuffle for a long time afterwards. Thobys match not to be played tomorrow.

Saturday 9 January

Rained in the morning. Nessa and Thoby danced in the drawing room. They are progressing satisfactorily, though Thoby is still rather scornful of the time. Hilary Holman Hunt came to luncheon, and he and Thoby went afterwards to the Aquarium. He has grown up in to a proper young gentleman, a little taller than Thoby, and very much older.

Nessa and Adrian and I went to the Polytechnic after they had gone. We went to see the Animatographs, but by some mistake were hustled in to the wrong room, and had a lecture on the Rontgen Rays instead. We were shown photographs of normal hands and diseased hands, a baby, and a puppy—and a lady and gentleman from the audience had their hands photographed—the gent. declared that a piece of needle was in his hand, but the photograph did not discover it. Afterwards we went and had coffee and shortbread in an A.B.C. in Regent St—and bussed home, getting back at 5. Read after tea and finished the 1st vol. of Carlyle—Adrian has gone back into his own room—Thoby is in Georgies.

Sunday 10 January

Read all the morning—got the 2nd vol. of Carlyle, which is to be read slowly; and then I am to reread all the books father has lent me—

After luncheon we thought we should like to go out for a walk but we found it to be raining hard. Then Gerald suggested that we might go to the Albert Hall. We went to the gallery, for which you do not have to pay, and then A. treated us to threepenny reserved seats from which occasional glimpses of the piano and the organ could be had. Thoby left after 3 pieces, unable to stand it any longer, and we came away before the end. We met Will [Vaughan] on the way down the road, and Eustace on the doorstep. Gerald dined with Herbert F at the Savile. It is a week today since I began this diary. How many more weeks has it to live—At any rate it must and shall survive Nessas Collins and [As] Renshaw. It has a key, and beautiful boards, and is much superior.

Monday 11 January

Nessa began her drawing, and Adrian bicycled down with her. Thoby and I started on a long walk at 10.30—We went down to the Embankment, and walked down it city-ways, till we came to the Pensioners garden. Went in and saw a great monument erected to the soldiers who were killed in the Chilianwala(?) Came out again by another gate, and walked along till we came to Ebury Street and thereabouts—Then by some wonderful process we found ourselves again in the Chelsea Gdns where we had been half an hour ago—By my great skill we traced our way through slums of the Southwark description, till we came to the South Kensington Station. Thoby pronounces “Cadogan” ‘Cad gan’ with emphasis on the o—

Stella had spent the morning with Jack looking at her cottages-to-be-and lunched with him somewhere in that region—In the afternoon Thoby, A. and I went to the mechanical part of the S[outh]. K[ensington]. M[useum]. and then came home & Nessa being at her drawing. Thoby went with Gerald to dine at the Savile, where they met Mr Luxmoore and Graves and afterwards to Under the Red Robe.

Tuesday 12 January

Very foggy all the morning, and we did not go out. Stella went to Laura, and was away for luncheon and tea. We lunched at 1, and afterwards went to the Zoo, bussing to Park Lane, and then to Baker St. We saw nothing particular—except a Klippspringer [sic]—a little yellow and black spotted creature—Thoby says renowned for jumping—The Chimpanzee—Daisy—came out of her cage, and sat affectionately in Nessas arms, holding on to her neck tight. There was a beautiful Gibbon which sang most melodiously while we were there—It is supposed to say “Hoolock”—We undergrounded back home from St Johns Wood and got home about tea time.

Jo Fisher came to dinner, Will Vaughan came in afterwards, and so did Roland Vaughan-Williams.

Nessa discovered an extra 10 shillings in our purse, which if Stella pays the 5ss. she owes, will make us have £2(almost) independently of the £2, kept back for Stella’s present—We shall have to be very economical. What with photographs, birthdays etc—Toast[?] to tips.

Wednesday 13 January

Nessa went to drawing. Us three and Stella went to Hyams to buy Thoby a suit and A. Shoes. Went on top of bus to Piccadilly Circus—most icy—dismounted and went to A.B.C. at the corner and had coffee and cakes—Then bussed up to Oxford St. Came home in a fourwheeler, and got back in time for luncheon. After luncheon Nessa went back to her drawing; Stella to the work house, and Father to Wimbledon. Thoby and Adrian took off the top of the old organ, and examined its inside, which was most curious, but were not able to do what they wanted—to take out the broken bit of the handle. Then they tried soldering on by a piece of lead the remains of the proper handle—But this failed also, and the organ in a most dilapidated condition. We went out after these performances into the gardens, and afterwards A. bought a 2lb. pair of dumbells, with which he is going to strengthen his arms! Had dinner at 7.15, and started for the Pr[ince]. of Wales Theatre. Jack, Stella and us four in the landau. The play very amusing—or rather Arthur Roberts very amusing—the play, to me at least, inexplicable. Coming back the carriage window was broken by a loafer[?]—Home at 11.30. Play—the White Silk Dress—

Thursday 14 January

Stella was away all the morning and afternoon at Laura. We four went out to Black about my medicine in the morning, and did nothing else. I was extremely irritable all day, and was perpetually fighting over something—At last, Nessa and I marched out in the afternoon by ourselves. Walked by Kensington Palace—most soothing—Tried to imagine ourselves in the middle of last century—Everything very quiet and old-fashioned—Miss Maria [Vanessa] much struck by the picturesqueness of the red bricks in the winters day. T. and A. had meanwhile walked to the Marble Arch, and had bought chestnuts, which they roasted in the dining room after tea. Gerald away, and Jack out for dinner, so Stella scrubbed A. and T. Finished the 2nd vol. of Carlyle—the first part of his life before he settled in London—Most extraordinary phenomenon—When I was dressing to go to the Play on Wednesday, Pauline declared that one of my shoes was missing. Has not been found or even traced since. Suspicion centres in Jerry—who has taken to paying us visits up here. A. says he must be held innocent till proved guilty.

Friday 15 January

Nessa went to drawing. Got 1st volume of the Carlyles Life in London. Thoby, A., Stella and I, went to the stores; about a clothes basket as far as I could make out—Bussed back. While waiting for our bus at Hyde Park Corner, another one came past, in the corner of which I saw a grinning nodding face—Lisa Hoby—and also Constance. Nothing more than grins and nods could be exchanged happily, and the busses soon carried us apart. In the afternoon Thoby Adrian father and I, went to the S[outh]. K[ensington]. M[useum]. Went in by a new door—near where the Middletons used to live, much shorter than going round to the Brompton Road entrance. Saw the pictures and the manuscripts. Dinner at 7. Went to the Gay Parisienne. Very good indeed—especially the Frenchman and Ruth. Much the same kind of thing as the White Silk dress, only better. Home by 12, or a little before. My shoe miraculously turned up in time to go to the play. Were given little boxes of Cherry Blossom—To be given to Pauline and Lizzie—Terrible snow for the next week—Horrible wind, freezing. Altogether disgusting.

Saturday 16 January

Did not get up till 10.30. Miss Kay came to see Stella. Stella and Nessa and I went to High St. When we got there S. found she had brought no money with her, and decided to go round to Margarets to borrow some. Margaret was in her room. Stella got 6.6. out of her, and we bought buns for the monkeys and Zoo animals whom we were going to visit. After luncheon we—us four—started for the Zoo. Went to St John’s Wood and walked down to the Zoo. Saw much the same creatures as on Tuesday. Almost all got nuts—Went away about 4, and got our trains safely. Adrian and Thoby insisted upon buying manuscript books at Youngs, which was just shutting, which took some time. Then A. bought a lb. of chestnuts at Butts as usual. Read after tea on my sofa in the other room. T. and A. began again on the unfortunate organ—May it never be restored to its old powers!

Florrie stakes her existence (which Lizzie thinks rather impious) on a cold winter. As we came home from the Zoo it was snowing, and the wind most horrible, and cold—Gerald out to dinner. Father reading us Esmond.

Sunday 17 January

Snow over everything. Stayed in all the morning and read most of it—Nessa and Thoby had wonderful games of chasing each other round the table—Gerald went to Oxford for the day. In the afternoon I persuaded the others to take a walk—which was most horrid—round the Serpentine; the wind ferocious and icy; everything slushy and cold and damp—It was not thawing, I think, but the roads managed to become a mass of dirty melting snow. Very glad to get back home and have tea, which was at half past four. Afterwards we sat in the drawing room, and heard General Beadle discourse—till the Vaughans (Emma and Marny) came.

Eustace Hills came to supper, and afterwards Father read poetry—The bath water lukewarm which was most disappointing. Found an old knife, which I have polished and sharpened, and which for the future shall be my knife. The organ again under Ts and As hands. Just as the handle was got well on, and they were going to turn it. everything smashed, and it is hoped that they will give it up.

Monday 18 January

Nessa went to her drawing in the morning. Stella and I meant to go to High St. but she insisted upon putting the books in the nursery tidy, so that it was too late to do anything, but bicycle once or twice up and down the road. Freezing hard—Slippery frozen snow all over the roads and pavements—No wind but horribly cold—Phil Burne-Jones came and sat with us while we had luncheon and afterwards talked to father about some mystery—probably Stellas wedding present—in the study—We four and Stella bussed to Regent St. and went to the Polytechnic to see the animatograph which was very good, and then had some coffee and buns at an A.B.C.

Afterwards A. and S. went to Liberty to buy some stuff, and we three to the New Gallery where Mr Watts is exhibiting his pictures—We got home at tea time. Thoby had a letter from Graves enclosing orders (or whatever they’re called) for four seats—for the White Elephant which Thoby has been to. Gerald is going to get another place, and we shall go tomorrow night—Gerald out at the Digbys where Enid and Sylvia are going. Nessa had a most dismal letter from Lisa Hoby. This diary today beats my 1896 diary—Wonderful creature!

Tuesday 19 January

Thoby and I walked to the Marble Arch and back in the morning. Stella and Nessa and Adrian went out shopping in High Street—Thawing slowly—comparatively warm and comfortable. Stella made me have beef tea for luncheon—most disgusting stuff. After lunch we all (us four S. and father) went to the National Portrait Gallery. It was rather dull, and we spent our time in yawning. Father left us, and we went on to the National Gallery, which neither Thoby or A. has ever seen. But it was four as we got there, and just shutting up. So we paid a visit to our usual shops—corner of Piccadilly Circus, just where the bus starts, and had hot buttered toast. Paid a visit to Aunt Minna on the way home. She mysteriously told Nessa and me that she had a spare “Oak Davenport which she would give us. We accepted it gratefully, not in the least knowing what an Oak Davenport might be. Now Gerald tells us that it is a kind of writing desk—which will be very nice. Dinner at 7.40. Drove to the Comedy, and saw the White Elephant—which was not very good. Home at 11.30. Nessa wrote to ask Lisa Hoby to tea on Saturday.

Finished 1st vol. of Cs Life in London. Got next.

Wednesday 20 January

Nessa went to drawing. The “Oak Davenport” arrived, carried down the street by T. and Maurice. Was put in the night nursery. It is a great writing desk, with drawers and cupboards everywhere. Rather too high to write at, but will do very well for papers and odds and ends. Dated 1690.

We three and Stella went to Gloucester Rd. Station to get A.s ticket and then she went on to see Cousin Mia, and Thoby went for a walk in the gardens, and A. and I home. Freezing, windy and horrible. Nessa did not go to her drawing in the afternoon. Went with S. to the Nat[ional]. Gall[ery]. and afterwards went to Oxford St, where S. had to change some razors. We went into an ABC as usual. When father was reading to us in the evening, Enid MacKenzie in her night gown and Mr M’s fur coat came in. Their servants room had caught fire—Gerald rushed over, and poured pails of water over the place—Then came roaring down the street a fire engine—shouting and halloaing. The men jumped off in a moment and found that the fire had succumbed to pails of water before their arrival. Leaving three of their men, they galloped off again—A crowd had followed them, and stood gaping in the street. Then came four more fire engines—the men swearing at finding nothing to do. Soon they mounted, the crowed yelled and the horses cantered away—So ends the fire—

Thursday 21 January

Adrian went back to school. Thoby, Nessa & I walked to Glucester Rd. station to see about As season ticket, and afterwards went out in to the gardens. The pond all frozen over, except a narrow place round the edge which the Park keepers break.

We had settled to go down to Westminster in the afternoon, to meet A. there and learn whether he would be allowed off early, in which case we were going to have gone together to Bensons in Bond St. to buy Stella and Jack a lamp for their wedding present—but father said he would go with us, and after lunch came Will [Vaughan], who joined us also, so that we could not do it—moreover A. got out no earlier than usual—We walked about in Deans Yd, and Little Deans Yard, round which are built the school houses—Lost ourselves in the odd cloisters and squares, and finally came out by the Abbey door. We went in, and found a service just ending—After it was finished the Abbey was shut and we had to go—Walked back with Father and Will to Hyde Park Corner—met on the way the great Sir William Harcourt—muffled up in a beautiful fur coat, very fat and comfortable—Father went on to tea with Mrs Humphry Ward, and we took the bus home. Somehow Nessa and I escaped paying our fourpence—Met Justine coming up the road. She is much better, and gave back the money Stella had lent her, and a glass of Californian Honey as a present!

Friday 22 January

Nessa went to her drawing. Stewart arrived here at 11, and he and Thoby went to see Lord Leightons pictures. Stella and I went to Soars with a photograph, to Aldous’es for some flowers for Lisas tea party, and to the Gloucester Rd. Station about As season ticket, which is now finally disposed of. Outside the station we met Mr Gibbs, and Stella taking the green bus to go to Cousin Mias, he walked all the way back home with me. It began to snow, and he made me hold his arm, and trot along under his umbrella. He promised to come round on Monday morning—Aunt Mary sent me, as a birthday present, a case of jams—10 pots of jam—four of which I have kept, the rest, being nasty ones, were given to Thoby. It snowed all the afternoon, and Nessa and I did not go out—Thoby and Stewart went to the Animatograph at the Polytechnic, and came back here at 4. Tea for them was at 4.15, and at a quarter to 5, they started for Clifton. Nessa and I had a quiet tea alone, though not allowed to read—After tea, Nessa drew at the “Oak Davenport” which holds all our paper now and is very nice, and I wrote on a table beside her. Florence Maitland came to tea, sobbing for her monkey, which Fred had made her sell—She wished to rebuy it on the way home, but Gerald, who went to the station with her, forbade this—Harry Stephen for dinner. Jack had to go out on business.

Saturday 23 January

Nessa began lessons with father—It is not yet settled whether I am to do any or not this term—Eustace Hills came in the morning and he and Stella went out together—Snowing and blowing hard—Nessa and I went out in the gardens for a short walk, but it was so icy that we came quickly home again—Two or three degrees below freezing. Stella told us that Jack had been having an operation this morning, which will make him stay in bed for three weeks. Not at all a serious one however. Snowed all the afternoon, so that we did not go out. A. came home for lunch, as the snow has made football impossible. Lisa Hoby arrived here about 3, and was shut up talking confidences with Nessa till tea time. A. and I mooned about the house—Everything cold, and uncomfortable. Stella went to see Jack—Found him very well. After tea we told ghost stories, and at last, about 7 o’clock LH declared she must go—Went accordingly. Nessa and she are to go to Mr Watts’s pictures next Saturday morning together—Began the Newcomes. Letter from Georgie for Thoby—Florries cold winter prophesies look as if they were coming true—Stella has made me some beautiful red cuffs, which I have forgotten to put on or I should be writing more legibly.

Sunday 24 January

Stella and us three walked up to Lisa Stillmans in the morning, to say that Jack could not sit to her. Saw her and Effie, and Peggy’s new dog called Bruno. Very cold, but not blowing—Eustace Hills came to lunch. Afterwards he and Stella went to see Jack—Sylvia and Maud [Milman] came in the afternoon with a present for Stella from Mr Milman—Nessa and I resolved to light a fire in the night nursery—We had to make it three times before anything more than the paper would catch—At last a feeble piece of wood began to burn, and by judicious bits of paper and coal every now and then, a most respectable fire was made. This was triumphant, as Pauline had offered to do it for us, being scornful of our methods, and we had refused to allow her to touch it—this being accomplished Nessa sat down at the Davenport to write to Thoby, and I read on the table behind her. I finished the last volume of Carlyles Life in London before the tea bell rang—

After tea Nessa did her lessons, and I wrote, the fire having warmed the hands sufficiently—

After dinner father read Tennyson. A hot bath for the first time these three weeks. Adrian came up at night.

Monday 25 January

My birthday. No presents at breakfast and none til Mr Gibbs came, bearing a great parcel under his arms, which turned out to be a gorgeous Queen Elizabeth—by Dr Creighton. I went out for a walk round the pond after breakfast with father, it being Nessas drawing day. Went out with Stella to Hatchards about some book for Jack, and then to Regent St. for flowers and fruit for him; then to Wimpole St. to see how he had slept, and then to Miss Hill in Marylebone Rd. Jo [Fisher] was there discussing the plans for Stellas new cottages with Miss Hill. All three learnedly argued over them for half an hour, I sitting on a stool by the fire and surveying Miss Hills legs—

Nessa went back to her drawing after lunch, and Stella and I went to Story’s to buy me an arm chair, which is to be Ss present to me—We got a very nice one, and I came straight home, while Stella went on to Wimpole St. Gerald gave me £1, and Adrian a holder for my stylograph—Father is going to give me Lockharts Life of Scott—Cousin Mia gave me a diary and another pocket book. Thoby writes to say that he has ordered films for me. Got Carlyles Reminiscences, which I have read before. Reading four books at once—The Newcomes, Caryle, Old Curiosity Shop, and Queen Elizabeth—

Tuesday 26 January

Stella went to Jack in the morning, and Nessa and I sat over the fire and lounged. We went out into the gardens and met Mr Stapleton and his daughter (or grand daughter?) who said they were going up to the Pond, and so we went with them. Mr Stapleton a chatty old gentleman, talked to Nessa of St Ives, and Haslemere and cricket—The pond is frozen over, but not yet ready for skating—it was only just freezing in the morning, with a strong wind blowing—from the West—but as cold as any East. After lunch Stella went again to Jack, and father, Nessa and I went for a walk in the gardens—Started by the Pond, and then round to the Serpentine and right down to the other end; across the road, and home by the barracks. The Duke of Devonshire passed us father said. Finished my birthday cake for tea, so it has had a very short life, poor thing. Wrote to Thoby and Cousin Mia after tea—Father finished Esmond to us this evening—His present for me came—Ls Life of Scott—in a great brown paper parcel—I expected one huge closely printed book, but instead behold 10 beautiful little blue and brown gilt leathered backs, big print, and altogether luxurious. The nicest present I have had yet.

Wednesday 27 January

Father and I went for a walk after breakfast. Round the Pond, on which men were sliding and one or two skating, though notices were up to forbid bid them—Afterwards I went out with Stella to Wimpole St., where we heard that Jack had had a very good night, and then to Grosvenor St. to see the house which was burnt on Monday night. The windows were all broken, and we saw into black empty rooms; the roof was off, and everything was burnt and blackened. Icicles hung down where the water had been thrown—The house next door was black too, though not actually burnt. There was a crowd standing round, and looking at the house. We went on to Curzon St. to see Flora Baker, and tell her about Jack, and then bussed to High St. to buy S a hat, and home again in time for lunch. N lunched with the Milmans with Marie who was full of the fire; through which however she had slept. A came home about 3, there being no football, and we went to Gloucester Rd. station about an umbrella which he had left in the train. Were told to go to the Lost Property Office at Moorgate St[ation]. We went on up to the Pond, which we found guarded by 6 or 7 park keepers, to prevent the people from going on the ice. One park keeper said that there would be skating tomorrow. It was not freezing when we came away.

Father began the Antiquary to us. Wrote to Marthe who sent me a card. Finished 1st vol. of C[arlyle]s R[eminiscences]

Thursday 28 January

Stella went in the morning to Jack. Nessa and I looked up our skates and went to the Pond to see if there was any skating. It was just above freezing, but a good many people were on the ice, though notices were up forbidding them—After some time we gathered up courage, and slithered about near the edge. Then we joined hands, and got on fairly well—the ice was very bad in parts, and in parts good. My left leg (attributed to the left skate being crooked) was very weak and unhappy, but grew stronger after a time. Nessa most respectable, and able to go comfortably alone. In the afternoon S went to the work house, and father walked with Nessa and me up to the Pond—It was most dreadful ice now—the top thawed, and cracks and holes everywhere. More people were on it, and it was impossible to get a nice skate—It began to snow, and the wind (a west one) rose, so we took off our skates and went back home. I have decided that Jack is to give me skates for a birthday present, though the thaw is sure to set in directly—in fact it looks as though it had already. On Saturday we are to go to Wimbledon with Gerald if the ice will bear—Jack had a very good night. Going on alright—

Friday 29 January

Walked in the morning with father. Went round the Pond as usual. No one skating, and we heard that 40 of yesterday’s crowd had fallen in—and been dosed with “immersion mixture”—It was just freezing. Nessa at her drawing—Stella and I went to Westerton, about a book for Jack, and then bussed from Hyde Park Corner to Victoria St[reet]. We bought skates at the Stores—Jacks present to me. S also bought Nessa a pair. They are screwed on to your boots by 8 screws, and have nothing else—cost 17.6d. Took the Royal Blue from V. station and got out at Oxford St. Went to Wimpole St., and asked after Jack—Miss Daniel said he was remarkably fit, and so we went away again. Bussed home. After Lunch father took me to see Carlyles house in Chelsea—Walked there—Went over the house, with an intelligent old woman who knew father and everything about him—We saw the drawing room, and dining room, and Cs sound proof room, with double walls—His writing table, and his pens, and scraps of his manuscripts—Pictures of him and of her [Jane Welsh Carlyle] everywhere. Took a hansom home—Nessa and I asked the park keeper whether there was skating, were told no, and so came back. We are to go with our new skates to Wimbledon Park tomorrow if it freezes tonight—Thawed most of today—

Saturday 30 January

Woke up to find it thawing hard. Everything dripping, and skating out of the question. Our beautiful skates are put away in their boxes till next winter. Nessa met Lisa Hoby at Sloane St. as they had agreed, and went with her and Constance H. to Mr Watts’s pictures.

Margaret [Marny] Vaughan came just as we (S and I) were going out, so that we had not time to go to Kittie’s as we had meant. Bussed to Bond St. and up to Oxford St. and asked after Jack at Wimpole St.—Stella went up and sat with him for a quarter of an hour. I waited downstairs with Miss Daniel, and several other odd people. When S came down, she said we must post off to Ebury St. to fetch the French Revolution which Jack wanted and which Eustace had promised to send him, but had forgot—Took a hansom there, and sent it off by a messenger. Hansomed back home again. A in for lunch, because of the rain. Jack had said we could easily skate in the afternoon—the ice always safe 4 days after the thaw had set in but father would not hear of this—anyhow the rain made it impossible. Went with Stella to Bond St., she going on to have tea with Jack—She put us in to a four wheeler, the busses being full, and sent us home—Aunt Minna came up here after tea, and examined our rooms—and was satisfied.

Finished the 2nd vol. of C’s Reminiscences—Tomorrow I shall begin my beautiful Lockhart.

Sunday 31 January

Got up very late indeed—about 10 o’clock—Went up to read with father, and then began my beloved Lockhart—which grows more and more beautiful every day—Read all the morning. In the afternoon we (Vanessa, A and I) went for a walk in the gardens—Round the Pond, which is thawing hard, and broken up all round the edges, and by Kensington Palace—Came home at 4.15. Jerry did not accompany us having been washed by Vanessa after luncheon. He later came down to us while we were at tea, and caused great confusion—biscuits thrown under the table, where Nessa rescued them in a marvellous way with her feet—Stella came down and carried the little creature off. After tea Nessa did her lessons, and I wrote the History of Ms. and Js. Grand Tour. Eustace Hills came to supper—and Jo stayed. Long bath room conference with Nessa. Water extremely hot—almost too much so—Have not yet given back Carlyles Reminiscences but I mean to tomorrow. Poor Queen Elizabeth gets on at the rate of 10 pages a day—Old Curiosity Shop always a fair day’s battle[?] drawing to an end thank goodness. Newcomes a supper and odd moment book. Father read Peter Bell.

Monday 1 February

Nessa went to her drawing. Father and I went out—up to Rotten Row, and back again. Afterwards Stella and I went to Dr Seton—He gave me new medicines, but S. forgot to ask him about the cycling or lessons. A terrible idea started that Stella and I should take lodgings at Eastbourne or some such place, where Jack is going next week—Impossible to be alone with those two creatures, yet if I do not go, Stella will not, and Jack particularly wishes her to—The question is, whether Nessa will be allowed to come too—If so it would be better—but goodness knows how we shall come out of this quandary as Vanessa calls it. Walked in the gardens with father in the afternoon—Very misty and quiet—Walked by Kensington Palace—Had a letter from Georgie this morning, offering me an enclosure as a birthday present; unluckily the enclosure was left out—I have been in a dreadful temper all day long, poor creature—and lead Stella and Vanessa a life—Can not protest too strongly against going (though I do) or else S will have to give it up, and her poor young man would be miserable—but think of going! If we go we should start next Monday, and stay away till Saturday. This is a dreadful fix—Poor Miss Jan is bewildered.

Tuesday 2 February

Raining hard. Stella went at 9.30 o’clock to Oxford, and Father at 10 to Cambridge. Nessa and I stayed in and did nothing in the morning. I finished the 1st vol. of Scott, and began the 2nd. Lunched alone together, which was very nice. Mrs Flower had told Nessa that they would go to the Nat[ional]. Por[trait]. Gall[ery]. this afternoon at 2.15. A telegram came to say it was too dark, and so at 3, Nessa, Pauline and I started for Wimpole St. Bussed to Bond St, then to Oxford St, by my skilful piloting reached 29 Wimpole St in safety—First we did a little business with a dressmaker over the way. Jack is on the sofa, looks rather well than otherwise—talked about dogs and the country next week. Told him with great plainness that I could not go with him and St alone—Stayed with him about half an hour, and had some tea; then took Poor Pauline, who had waited patiently downstairs all this time, to an ABC—After a little difficulty—the streets being rather mixed, I found Oxford St., and a bus for Piccadilly again. Successfully got a Red bus, and home to a third tea at 5.30—Adeline and Stella came back just before dinner, father not till afterwards. Lady Emily Lytton engaged to be married. Georgie sent me his enclosure, which is a cheque for a pound. Makes our finances very comfortable. Wrote to him and to Thoby for films he sent me yesterday.

Wednesday 3 February

Thick fog in the early part of the morning, so that father and I did not go for our usual walk—It cleared up perfectly by 10 o’clock—Father and Stella were shut up in the drawing room. Adeline and Marie in the dining room, so I was forced to stay up here and read—Stella and A[deline]. and I went to the Watts pictures. Stella left us and went on to Wimpole St. Adeline and I came home soon in a bus. Adrian for luncheon, as he had to go on to Fairbanks afterwards. I went with him and Stella, and sat in the waiting room reading papers till he was ready. Mr F had only filled his tooth with soft stuff as it has to be taken out. Mr F gave S two tickets for As You Like It, on Friday night—Stella and A[drian] and I went to Hyams about As. boots, and then to an A.B.C. for coffee and hot buttered scones, and then to Buszards for Éclairs for Jacks tea—A and I got into a hansom and went home—S. went on up to Jacks. Eustace Hills came for dinner, and afterwards he and Stella and Adeline went on to the Speakers party. Ida [Milman] has asked us to tea there tomorrow—No way out of it—Nessa has had to answer we are very pleased—

Thursday 4 February

In the morning Nessa Adeline Stella and I went to Walkers the dress maker opposite Jack, about our jackets. Stood and had them tried on, by a horrible fuzzy female—Then Stella paid Jack a visit for a moment, it being 1.30, and we came home. Finished the 2nd vol of Scott, and began the third, also the Old Curiosity Shop—thank goodness. Now poor Queen Elizabeth must be despatched and then I shall be left to Scott and the Newcomes, which will last me some time. In the afternoon Stella and Adeline went to pictures, and Nessa and Father and I went for a walk in the gardens. Came home about 4, and father found a letter from Phil Burne Jones asking for Lisa’s picture—Nessa and I, after much consultation, decided to take it in a hansom to the Grange, to ask there where P[hil]. B[urne]. J[ones]. lived, to take it to his studios, and then to go on to the Milmans. To begin with we did not find the Grange for some time, then we were sent on to 9 St Pauls Studios, which were found with difficulty, and then on to the Grove Boltons. Arrived just at 5, having had to pay the cabby 3s. instead of the 2.6. father had given us. Had a long dreary tea with the Milmans, dances were discussed afterwards, in which Miss Jan did not take much interest—

Friday 5 February

Raining hard, so that I did not go out with father—Adeline, Stella and I went over to look at Lady Laffans house, which Adeline liked—We walked down to St Alban’s Rd with her, as she was going to lunch and go to a concert with the Vaughans, and then come home again. Rained hard after luncheon, and as Stella was going to Wimpole St. and Nessa at her drawing, I stayed in and read—Had two games of billiards with father, both of which he won—Adeline sat with us part of the time at tea, and told us stories of the cabmen and the Vaughans—After tea wrote the Eternal Miss Jan, which has not passed the first day yet, and Nessa did her lessons.

Jack Fisher came here for dinner at 7.15, and they went on to As You Like It, afterwards, with Mr Fairbanks tickets. Kitty [Maxse] came as they were going and sat a little time with father. It is almost settled that we go on Monday to Bognor—Stella Jack Nessa and I, father perhaps coming down for two days from Tuesday to Thursday—Nothing I am afraid seems likely to stop us now—the whole thing most horrible.

Saturday 6 February

Stella Adeline Nessa and I went to Bond St. together in the morning—S. and A. left us there, and went on to Burlington House. Nessa and I bussed to Oxford St. and went to Miss Walker the dressmaker about our jackets. Stood for about 20 minutes in her stuffy little room, while she clipped and stuck pins in to us—Afterwards bought two bath buns, and again 2 shortbreads at an ABC—eat the bath buns driving down Oxford St. on the top of the bus; when we got out in Piccadilly, we ran into S and A. They got out at Sloane St., and we finished our meal (the two shortbreads) coming home. After luncheon Mr Studd and Simon came—Mr Studd is starting tomorrow for Samoa—He will probably be away a year. Stella had to go away and fetch Jack and so left Mr S and us together. Simon was photographed in a fur coat and hat and pipe; but at a second photograph we discovered that our Frend [camera] was broken. We went to South Kensington Museum with A[deline] and saw the pictures. A most drunken walk home up Queens Gate—Came home to find Jack comfortably seated in the drawing room, eating tea cake—Bognor almost settled upon—In a temper all the evening—

Sunday 7 February

Got up about half past 10. Adrian and Nessa and I went out into the gardens, and so did Stella and Jack, but separately—The ice on the pond all thawed, and boats sailing—The dogs have all got their muzzles off by this time—the muzzling order was taken off one day last week. Nessa therefore, lives in constant fear of a dog fight, and a wicked spotted creature followed us all the way down the street, for the pleasure of fighting Shag on the door step—Nessa waved her umbrella wildly and screamed at Shag and the spotted one, till they slunk away in dismay. Eustace Hills and Scamp for luncheon. After lunch, Mrs. Kay and two little Kays came, and the two little Kays examined the bugs, which they are going to collect. Finished the 3rd vol of Scott, and began the fourth, and finished at last Queen Elizabeth—Now the question is what shall become of her—She is far too beautiful to lie about the nursery at the mercy of the ink pot or of Pauline, and far too big to live in any of our bookshelves. Bognor settled on for tomorrow. Two vols. of Scott and the Newcomes shall go with me.

Monday 8 February

Started from Victoria at 10. Gerald came to the station with us, and we were well-supplied with papers. Came here (Bognor) at about 1, and found our lodgings. 4 Cottesmore Crescent. We are the end house of the Crescent, which has never been finished—It was very dismal and cold—looking out on to the sea which is a black and rather inferior sea. We had luncheon, and afterwards went for a walk up the High St., and bought various odds and ends. Jack has lodgings at an hotel near here, but comes always for meals. Bicycled with Nessa once up and down the “Esplanade”, but it was too windy and cold for more. Then Jack and Stella sat in the dining room together, and Nessa and I in the drawing room reading. After tea this was repeated till dinner—of which I partook—and after dinner Stella read the guide book aloud to us, and we went to bed. If all the days are to pass like this, my 2 vols of Scott will have a very quick ending. How I wish at this moment that I could find myself in my comfortable arm chair in the nursery at home! Five more days!

Tuesday 9 February

Walked in the morning on the sands—

Very dull and grey and windy and cold. Came in soon and read. Nessa and Stella went to the station, and to shops. We wrote yesterday to ask Mr Studd whether we might have Simon here for a week—But he did not come by either of the trains. Father came by the 4 o’clock one—We—N and I—walked along the Esplanade as far as possible, and then came home to tea—After tea read again till dinner time—Began and finished “A Deplorable Affair” by W.E. Norris, which S had got from the Library along with Peter Ibbetson and another book—She also bought a pile of pink wool which I am to convert into a petticoat for Peggy [Middleton]. We may be going to Goodwood and to Arundel, both castles near here—It was too windy to bicycle, and altogether very dismal—We are the only people here, apparently; except 3 or four girls schools, which parade up and down outside in the rain—Two bath chairs have also been discovered. Stella slept in Nessas bed, Father being in her room—This diary is written under difficulties.

Wednesday to February

Bicycled on the sands in the morning. They are very hard and level, and bicycling there for the first 20 minutes is very nice, but it is dull afterwards. We soon went in and read, leaving Stella and Jack to wander about arm in arm. It began by being fine but soon changed to drizzling and mist—I finished the 4th vol. of Scott and began the 5th. Stella Jack Nessa and I went out just before luncheon to change a pipe, and buy various things. After lunch we all walked along the Pier, which is very long, and very very dull. Two ladies fishing but otherwise no one else there at all. Stella and Jack made a pretense of walking on with us, but soon turned and went back alone. We—father Nessa and I—marched on solemnly to the very end of the path leading from the Parade, and then discovered that it only led to another muddy uninteresting road, so we resolved to go no farther. Came home over the fields, which are perfectly flat, and covered with thick clay into which you sink at every step. The drizzle developed into rain before we were half way home, and we splashed along in the mud and wet, umbrellaless, most dismally—“Never saw such an ugly country and such bad weather in my life” is fathers remark—to which I agree—

Thursday 11 February

Father went about 10 o’clock. It was raining very steadily, and a mist as usual over everything—Nevertheless, Jack declared that we must get out, so he and Stella went out for a walk, and Nessa and I, with great courage started forth on our adventures. We had no map, no watch, and no knowledge of the country—so that we felt ourselves justified in laying in a stock of biscuits and chocolate in case we were benighted—We found the roads muddier and worse than we have ever ridden on—we were forced to ride on the footpath which in this part of the world is usually a little higher, smoother, and dryer than the road—Soon however we penetrated so far into the country, that footpaths ceased to exist—and therefore we had to plough on as best we might in 6 inches of sticky clay—(Jack declares the country to be a sandy dry one). We had ridden about 3 miles out of Bognor, I suppose, and felt very desperate—The mist blew in our faces, the mud spirted all over us—and behold—here was a school of little boys marching towards us! Their remarks shall not be entered here, Miss Jan says; we pushed on as fast as possible, and at last found ourselves in the respectable High St. of this town. So ends our first bicycle ride. In the afternoon Stella read Med[emoiselle] de Mersac to us, as we refused to go out again—

Friday 12 February

Misting again, though not actually raining. Walked on the sands after breakfast—The Frend [camera] arrived from Becks, in a new box, all rubbed up and beautiful, smelling strongly of Jargonel. We tried shutting Nessa up in the cupboard to put in the films, but there were too many chinks. Then she suggested being covered by her quilt, and everything else that I could lay hands on—She was accordingly, buried in dresses and dressing gowns, till no light could penetrate. Soon she emerged almost stifled having forgotten how to put the film in. I hustled her back again into her burrow, however, and she contrived to manage it—We took 2 photographs of S and J on the sands, but the light was bad and I do not know whether they will come out—We settled to go to Arundel in the afternoon by the 2.25, to see the Castle. We just missed the train, and had to hire a fly—The fly was dragged by a most broken down old horse, all ribs and knock knees. It is 9 miles to Arundel, through very flat uninteresting country—great brown ploughed fields, and ditches and miserable wind blown trees—through this we were drawn first at a trot, which became slower and slower till the creature merely walked—Jack insisted upon something more spirited, but, after a spirt of two minutes, the horse stopped, and refused to move—We got out and walked—The castle shut up and being repaired—Saw a little of the park, only a herd of deer, then tea and home by train. A terrible idea started that S and I should stay here next week—

Saturday 13 February

Walked on the Esplanade in the morning—Drizzling and misty as usual—We came in very soon, and I finished 5th vol. of Scott. Stella read aloud Mad. de Mersac, which I have already read in the Cornhill. After lunch we returned the books to the Library, and bought wild ducks and sprats which Jack wishes to give away. Nessa and Stella packed. I absolutely refused to stay another week in Bognor with Stella, and she, not very much liking the idea either, consented that we should all of us go to London—Thank Goodness! Another week of drizzle in that muddy misty flat utterly stupid Bognor (the name suits it) would have driven me to the end of the pier and into the dirty yellow sea beneath—(Hear hear). So all our clothes were squeezed back into the boxes, we had tea at 4.30—Maginnis carried away the luggage, and, after good byes to Miss Axford, who protested that such weather had never before been seen, we marched away to the Station. We changed at Barnham, and then got a train right through to Victoria which we reached at 8. Gerald was in waiting, and he Nessa and I got in to a four wheeler, and drove home. Found father with his hair and beard cut, and several packages of linen from Mrs Hills. My comfortable arm chair, paper and books—So good bye to that beloved Bognor!

Sunday 14 February

Quite sunshiny and fine. Went out in the morning to the gardens. Stella and Jack went over the bottom house which they may be going to take for 6 months—Adrian found when we came home, that his watch was gone, so we went out again and discovered it and the chain lying in the road, a gentleman just about to pick it up—Gerald out for lunch. After lunch Simon and Augusta appeared. We photographed Simon 6 times—on the chair with a coat and pipe, and lying on the ground—Mr Gibbs came, and wished to know all about Bognor—the great wave and the sea wall—After tea Nessa and I developed in the night nursery. One very good one of Stella and Jack on the sands, the others all dim and under exposed. We took 10 altogether, one having slipped back without being exposed. The Catholic Church came out, but not well, and we thought it too uninteresting to keep. Harry Stephen in bed with influenza. Stella went twice to see him—The batch of films is 1515M.

Monday 15 February

Nessa went to her drawing. Jack was here till about 12, as he had to go and see his doctor—I did two Greek exercises by way of beginning lessons, and then Stella and I went out—We went to the Studio to see Mr [J. Watson] Nichol but he was not there, and then we went on to Harry [Stephen] in a cab—Stella saw Herbert who said he was quite well, and getting up, and so we came home. Nessa went back to her studio after lunch, and Stella and I went to Harvey Nichols to buy stuff for Sophie’s dress, then bussed up to Baker Street, and went to the Leafs. We saw Lotta and the Baby, who is not yet out of his room, and as fat as ever. Came back by underground to High St. and Stella stopped at DeVere Gardens and saw Harry, while I went back home—My old board has been restocked with blotting paper, and made to look youthful once more, and I use it with great joy after tea, so that Mr Gibbs [blotter] has been removed to the day nursery for scrappiness—whence it comes to pass that I am using him now—Adrian had to sit up late with father doing his sums which finally about 9.30 came right.

Tuesday 16 February

Millicent Isham came to see Stella in the morning, stayed talking with her till rather late. We got out at last, however, and went to Madame Walker the dressmaker near Wimpole St about our coats which she made very badly. Stella scolded her thoroughly, but Madame Walker said not a word, and looked so provoking that I would willingly have dug her own scissors into her—or at least cropped off a great part of her horrid fuzzy wig which she tickles your nose with—We had to stand and be tryed [sic] on all over again, so that when Nessa was finished it was so late that she had to go home alone in a hansom, to have her lunch, as Mrs Flower was going to take her to pictures at 2.15. I stayed and was done at great length and then we took a hansom and came home. In the afternoon Stella and I shopped steadily in High St—bought innumerable things with great business-likeness. We met Peggy and Bella in one of the shops and walked with them to their blue bus. Bought among other things large ream of foolscap of which I mean to appropriate some.

Wednesday 17 February

Nessa went to her drawing. Marny turned up early in the morning, and sat with Stella so that I was driven in to the dining room to translate a Hans Andersen story—that is to look out every other word. Afterwards Millicent came, and she and Stella and I went to the studio to see Mr Nichol about Nessa—He said she might come back there at any time to make up her three days—Then Stella and I leaving Millicent and Emma [Vaughan] who had joined us at an Estate Agents, walked home again. When we got to the top of Queens Gate we could not see Shag and Jerry—We came home however, expecting that they would come back soon—Florry after a time was despatched to Queens Gate to search, and came back saying they were nowhere to be seen. So Nessa and I started out, Nessa on her bicycle down Queens Gate, and I in the gardens. Nessa discovered them playing half way down, and I took them home—Ellen was in a dreadful state till her beloved Jerry was safe in her arms again. After this Stella, Father and I went for a walk in the gardens, and after father had gone in, Stella and I went on to shop in High St. Adrian back for tea. Finished 6th vol. of Scott. Began 7th. Father gave me a book Mr Fabre sent him. Justine [Nonon] came.

Thursday 18 February

Very fine and sunny, so we thought we would bicycle down to Cheyne Walk and photograph Simon, the other ones not being good. Arrived at 97, with out any accidents, though once I was forced to dismount in the middle of the road, a van showing a disposition to run at me. We found that the Frend would not work, and were just going out of the garden, when Nessa wound the shutter, and mended it. So we took 8 of the beautiful creature, in a sunny patch at the end of the garden—After lunch Stella went to the workhouse and Nessa and I walked to the studio to get her two sheets of drawing paper, which she wanted to stretch. Home by way of Gloucester Rd. N bought a “sand paper block” from Soars and some note paper—two packets from Lords for 6½ each—The consequence is that I have done nothing but scribble ever since—We developed Simon after tea, two of him are very good, the rest very fair—one has somehow moved, and the dog appears twice on the same plate—I have toned all the other photographs. Jack goes back to his lodging to night.

Friday 19 February

Raining in the morning so that I did not go out with father. Miss [Angela] Kay came, and I did some more Hans Andersen. After she had gone Stella and I started off for Victoria, where Stella wanted to get a character of a woman—However when we found out through what slums we must walk to get to this place, S. said it was impossible; so we turned and fled straight home again. In the afternoon S. and I shopped in High St. and afterwards walked up Campden Hill, to the Stillmans. Found Effie and Lisa in their studio, which is a comfortable little room at the top of a house opposite No. 12. Sat and was talked to by Lisa, till another lady came in. Poor Miss Jan utterly lost her wits dropped her umbrella, answered at random talked nonsense, and grew as red as a turkey cock. Only rescued from this by S. proposing to go away. So we left, I with the conviction that what ever talents Miss Jan may have, she does not possess the one qualifying her to shine in good society—Adrian came home, saying he had left his bag in the train, and messengers were sent over London forthwith. Finally a Greek book was extracted.

Saturday 20 February

Stella went to Oxford with Jack, having luncheon here at 12.30. We went out to post a parcel in Gloucester Rd. I carried it, and lost the letter which was tucked into the string. This was only discovered when we reached the post office, so I posted off home, in the greatest state of merriment, goodness knows why, and found it on the doorstep! Nessas hair came down and she refused to put it up again, saying that as she had looked in the glass before coming out her hair therefore must be allright—Went and sat in the gardens to recover ourselves—The crocuses there coming out—Mrs MacKenzie [neighbour] possesses a snow drop, and my box a squill—Nessa’s box has a few green sprouts; she was so jealous of my flower that she routed the cocoanut fibre off her bulbs, and uncovered one poor little creature, which has not yet been coloured, and will most assuredly perish before its time—In the afternoon we bought some things in Gloucester Rd. and walked through the [South Kensington] Museum—Adrian back for tea—triumphant because of the match which Westminster has won—Oxford beat Cambridge by 2 goals to 1—

Stella and Jack came back from Oxford in time for dinner.

Sunday 21 February

Very fine and sunny again—printed a great many photographs—The last ones of Simon which we took at Chelsea are most beautiful—Read things with father, and went out for a walk in the gardens. Stella and Jack lunched with the Morpeths. Gerald in for lunch. Afterwards we went out again in to the gardens and paid a visit to the little White House—Came home and read till tea time. Adrian developed some of his photographs after tea, but they are not very good—Eustace Hills came to supper, and brought Scamp. Father did not read after dinner. I managed to finish the 7th volume of Scott, to begin and finish the 8th volume and to begin the ninth volume. This is partly explained by the amount of Diary in the 8th, which I have just read, so that I skipped it, but it was a most wonderful feat nevertheless—Eustace has given Stella and Jack a picture of London by Herbert Marshall; Westminster Abbey, I think, from the river, and Jack has bought another of the Thames in winter—a snow covered barge.

Monday 22 February

Nessa went to her drawing. I went out with father early—Afterwards did some history—(beginning Oman again) and some German, and then went with Stella to Curzon St. to enquire after Mrs Baker—who is ill. Stella sat with her and I waited in the dining room—then it was time to go home—After lunch Stella went to see Mariana, a play in which Miss Robins acts, and I went out to meet Peggie in the Park with Lisa. We walked up and down the Broad Walk for some time, and at last she appeared—then we had a game of ball by the Round Pond, and she went home. Lisa marched off round the Row, taking one enormous stride, to my three very respectable ones. She told me stories of Mr Middleton and the Royal Family. She left me at the door and pounded off up Campden Hill. Stella and Jack out to dinner with Mrs Gully—she promised Stella and me tickets for the Ladies Gallery when the Education Bill should become exciting—Nessa is not thought sufficiently intellectual, poor creature.

Tuesday 23 February

Nessa went again to her drawing; as this week she is going to make up for the three days she spent at Bognor. Stella and I took a bus and went to Gracechurch St. to see Georgie in Talbot Court—At Hyde Park Corner we found a great crowd, which ran through the Green Park also; we supposed this to be waiting for the Queen [Victoria]; unluckily we just missed her Majesty—The bus took us all the way to nearly the top of Gracechurch St. and after a little bungling we discovered Talbot Court, and Charles Booth’s offices on the 2nd floor—Here was Georgie correcting proofs—We only saw him for a minute as it was late—Mr Booth and Mr Aves were in the room—We undergrounded back from the Monument—In the afternoon Stella and I went out into High St. and bought a basin; afterwards we sat in the gardens for a time—Nessa had gone out with Mrs Flower [to see] pictures. Georgie came home about 5.30, and showed us all his presents—a medal for Jack, a gorgeous fan for Stella, a cigarette making machine for Gerald, chocs. for father, a fan for Nessa, and portfolio things for Adrian and me—Harry [Stephen] for dinner.

Wednesday 24 February

Nessa went to her drawing. Father and I went out for our walk after breakfast. I finished Scott, and father has given me Essays in Ecclesiastical Biography, which will do for me for some time—Stella and I did a little German, and then Kittie [Maxse] came, and we all went to her [philanthropical] houses together; she left us there and we went on to Mary Coxes to dispose of two tickets for Mariana for this afternoon—But Mary was out—then we went to Margaret Newbolt to offer them to her, but she was engaged, and finally Stella bethought herself of sending Sophia and Elizabeth. Nessa lunched at the Milmans. Stella and I walked through the Park on the way to Curzon St. to see the Queen, but though there was a great crowd, she had not yet come—We took our bus at Sloane St. and went to Marshall and Snelgrove about Ss linen. Then we went to Mrs Baker, and walked back to H[yde]. P[ark]. Corner. The crowd was larger than ever, and we boldly put ourselves in front of it. Suddenly behold the outriders and the crowd falling back on all sides—I caught a glimpse of H.Ms. bonnet bowing to this side and that, but the people surged up and more was impossible—We saw drawing room ladies and hansomed home.

Thursday 25 February

Nessa went to her drawing. Father and I walked round the pond; I was in great discomfort, as, having lost my garter, I had tied a piece of white tape round my stocking. This miserable thing came off as we walked up the street, and the rest of the journey was performed with my stocking right down on my shoe—Afterwards Stella and I went to Miss [Octavia] Hill about the cottages and hansomed from there to Mrs or Miss Garret (Garett?) Anderson—She is a lady doctor, with a great house in Berkeley Street. Stella wanted to see her about Flora Baker, and also about her fidgets. Mrs G.A. kept her a long time, so that we had to take a hansom home. She told Stella to take some medicines, and a pill, and never to have strong tea—As we got out at the Park Gates on this side, the horse slipped, and fell flat down—Stella managed to get out, and I followed her soon—The animal after kicking and struggling for a time got on to his legs, and we went home on foot. In the afternoon, we went over No. 24, and afterwards I went with S to the workhouse, and bussed back alone—Stella and Jack, Georgie and Gerald all out.

Friday 26 February

Nessa went to her drawing. Father and I went out for a walk. Afterwards Stella and I went down to Dr Seton, but he was too busy to see anyone. So we paid a visit to Susan Lushington—She gave me a piece of the Pyramids—so I declare; but said by others to be only a bit of an old jar—at any rate it is 100,000 years old! It is a little green piece of plaster looking stuff, my pyramid, and shall for the future lie in the Davenport. In the afternoon Stella and I bussed to Hyde Park, and walked through the Green Park to the Stores—There was a levee today, and we saw several most beautiful scarlet gentlemen—Stella bought father some shirts, and we bussed home again. I began to do some shorthand for father, and after dinner read a little with him. Arthur Fisher came for dinner, and Susan Lushington came afterwards. This is written just before father calls for me to go out, and I can think of no sentence to fill the blank.

Saturday 27 February

Nessa went to her drawing. Father and I went out for a walk. I spent most of the morning in cutting sticks to keep off the cats from our boxes—Nessa declares now that the sun (in some mysterious way) does not reach her box—at any rate her plants are greatly stunted—Stella and I went to Dr Seton—He says I may do some Latin with Nessa in the mornings, but as far as I can make out, nothing else. We came home in time for lunch. Jack was back early too. After lunch Nessa and I undergrounded to the Monument, where we met Georgie—We then tried to go on the River in a steamer, but none were running—So we took a bus-ride on the other side of the river, through slums, and odd places. We also visited Billingsgate [fish market]—the most smelly place I have ever been to. We had coffee at Hills in Victoria St., and then went to the Abbey, but it was shut. Nessa and I came home on top of a bus—George stopping at the Club—Jack Fisher came to us at tea with 2 tickets for the Geisha. No one wanted to go so they were given to Sophia and Pauline. Adrian came back from Charterhouse about 9. W[estminster]. was beaten by 3 to 1. Imogen Booth may have diptheria [sic]. Father at Oxford.

Sunday 28 February

Nessa and I bicycled up to Lisa—Nessa sat to her for some time; while I read Harpers in a corner—Peggy came in as the sitting was nearly finished, and we sat down on the floor and dabbled with chalks. We had meant to go for a bike ride with Lisa and Bella but they said it was too late—We bicycled home again—Roland Vaughan Williams for lunch, Georgie was out. After lunch Cousin Mia and [illegible] child arrived; the child was brought up to see me—a small MacNamara very shy and uncomfortable—Stella despatched Cousin Mia, and she and Jack went to Rum[?] Beadles to choose the picture which he is going to give them—He was out however, so they came back again—Roland V.W. and Gerald paid calls together; Adrian went for a bicycle ride, and Nessa and I sat in and read—The end of the Newcomes is in sight. We had a long talk with Stella after dinner, which was very nice—Imogen B has not got diptheria [sic].

Monday 1 March

Nessa went to her drawing. Stella and I walked across the gardens, and rambled through the greater part of Bayswater till we came to Kensington Park Gardens, where we enquired after Sylvia Davies and her little boy. We came home by bus. Father came back in time for lunch from Oxford. Stella told me that poor Eustace is chasing Miss Kay—Most interesting to watch—After lunch Stella and I bussed to the Marble Arch and asked after Imogen at Great Cumberland Place—She is quite well apparently—up in the schoolroom, so that the diptheria [sic] was all a scare—Bussed home again, and then Stella took a hansom to the Beadles to choose her picture. She has not settled between one of Billiards Lane with soldiers riding up and one of the island—Stella and Jack were out to dinner at the Bakers. It rained in the afternoon, so that Nessa came home in a hansom—Sylvia [Davies] is coming to lunch on Wednesday. The Ecclesiastical Biography gradually pulling through, poor thing.

Tuesday 2 March
Shrove Tuesday

Nessa at home at last—I did some Livy with her and father for the first time since November. Afterwards I did a little German, and then we went to High St. and bought some stuff for the drawing room chairs at Story’s, also a piece of stuff for Georgie’s writing table which Nessa and I are to give him on Friday—We did not have pancakes for lunch though it is Shrove Tuesday—Adrian says there is to be a tossing of the pancake at Westminster—the boy who catches it gets a guinea. In the afternoon Nessa went to Ford Madox Browns with Mrs Flower. They met Mr Hunt there, and he showed them round, and talked to them, much to their delight. Stella and I only got out at 4.30, as Will [Vaughan] came to talk to father—We walked to Rutland Gate where S. called on Miss Eliot, who was out. Then S got into a bus to go to tea with Mrs Humphry Ward, and I walked home through the gardens. Finished Bracebridge Hall (a hair doing book) and the Newcomes. We had dinner at 7.15 and went to As You Like It—I thought it (Miss Julia Neilson especially) not so good as the other time we saw it—We got home about 12.

Wednesday 3 March

Nessa at her drawing. We got up about 10 o’clock. It rained and snowed and blew so much in the morning, that Stella and I stayed at home. Marny [Vaughan] came about 11, and stayed till 12.30. After she had gone I did some Greek, and then Nessa and Sylvia [Milman] came. Luncheon passed very peaceably and the art students departed soon after it.

Adrian came about 3, and we walked with Stella to Rutland Gate where she called on Mrs Galton who was unfortunately in. Adrian and I walked back through the Park. Dinner was at 7.30 as father had to go to some ethical meeting—Georgie was out to dinner. Extremely irritable all the evening. Pauline becomes more like a cow than ever—She insisted upon trimming the lamps in the night Nursery which has smelt of parrafin [sic] ever since—Gerald gave Stella a wonderful opal and diamond necklace as a sort of first wedding present.

Thursday 4 March

We went to Larkes about a window box for Georgie which we are to give him tomorrow. I did some Livy again this morning—In the afternoon Stella went to Mrs Flower, and Father to Sotherans to buy a book for Georgie. Nessa and I walked up to Hyde Park Corner through the gardens, to see the drawing room ladies, and perhaps the Princess of Wales—It began to rain and blew so hard that we turned tail and scuttled home—We only saw two or three white satin ladies hurrying back. I began to read Felix Holt to Nessa, while she sewed Jack’s curtains, before the tea bell rang. Jack and Gerald out to dinner—After dinner we made cigarettes with Gerald’s machine—Stella went to the Freshfields with Georgie after dinner.

Friday 5 March

In the morning Stella and I went to Mrs Garret Anderson. She did not say anything new—We went on to Cousin Henry in Mortimer St. about some photographs. Then we walked down Regent St. and looked into all the shop windows. Lady Stephen and Katherine came to lunch. Lady Stephen very proper and talkative. Katherine, very massive and intellectual—Tried to talk to father but she was snubbed—She eat, however, an enormous luncheon, almost demolishing a pineapple. Lady Stephen was very full of Miss Walpoles broken off engagement, which Georgie heard of yesterday. “They have ceased to understand each other” she said. After these creatures had gone Stella and I went for a walk in the gardens—the grass is covered with crocuses in some parts, and the Almonds are getting pink. Stella went on to tea with Lady Lyttelton, and I came home—Sylvia [Milman] has lent me three books—Began John Halifax Gentleman.

Saturday 6 March

Stella and Jack went off early in the morning to buy a print. It rained, so that Nessa and I did not go out. Mr and Mrs Watts came about one o’clock—We had to start off for Adelphi Terrace, where we were to meet Adrian and Georgie. We bussed to Adam Street, and made a wonderful crossing, and Nessa guided us down a terrace and to No 9. Here we found a little deaf man with a glass eye who took us into his office, seated us on chairs, and began to address envelopes. Soon we heard some one in the hall who turned out to be Adrian. Georgie came down soon, and we went and had luncheon at Romanos—After that was finished (about 6 courses) we bussed to Victoria, and caught the train to Dulwich. We saw the gallery which I did not think very beautiful—There are some nice pictures, and a Sir Josh—Mrs Siddons. In the middle of the gallery there is a door leading to the Mausoleum of the founders. We walked over and waited for our train—came back to V[ictoria]. and had coffee at an A.B.C.

Father gave me Mr Lowells poems—

Sunday 7 March

In the morning Jack Stella Nessa Georgie Adrian and I went to Mr Watts on a bus. Nessa and I went into the studio, and the others saw Mr Watts. We walked back home—Gerald was out for luncheon—In the afternoon Adrian went out for a bicycle ride, and Nessa and I sat indoors and read. Stella told us this morning that the beauteous Pauline is going! Too hard work for that cow—she wishes to be a ladies maid—So we shall get rid of her—and the question is who shall succeed Pauline the 1st? Now there is a dreadful idea that Stella ought to have bridesmaids, and that Nessa and I ought to be among them—I hope this was squashed after dinner by Eustace [Hills]—but there is still a possibility of half-brides maids. Aunt Minna writes to ask us three to go with her to La Poupee on Saturday perhaps in the evening—Gerald and Georgie out after dinner—

Monday 8 March

Nessa went to the studio—Stella and I went out at 11, to get Stellas future cooks character—We bussed to the West Cromwell Road where the mistress lived, and found Mrs Howard Smith at No. 10—She was a horrid little skinny lady—would not answer for the cook’s honesty—would not say she was dishonest, that would not be right, the old hag said, but we agreed that under such a mistress our tempers and our honesty would be very much tried—so Mary Smith will most likely—with her dreadful temper and her suspicious honesty become cook at No. 24. We came back, and just began our history when Mrs Baker came in, and I was despatched to the Nursery to do some shorthand—Lisa and Bella came to lunch, and went on afterwards to Madame Dubois with Stella to see about some dresses—Stella came back so late that it was impossible possible for us to go and enquire after Mr Payn as we had meant—Thoby has got a star for Latin verses. Everyone in.

Tuesday 9 March

In the morning Nessa and I went to Barkers to buy Peggy [Middleton] a pot of violets—but there being no violets we had to content ourselves with daffodils—These we carried up to Campden Hill Gardens, and left at the door—To day is Peggy’s third birthday. Mrs Flower came for Nessa at 2.15, and father went to look at Effies [Stillman] bust of Mr Bayard. Stella and I paid a visit to Aunt Minna with some anemones which she wanted to paint. Then we took a hansom on to the Stores where we took father’s shirts to be done up. Stella bought herself gloves, and we had the pleasure of seeing Mr Bayard—We came home and found Mrs Hain waiting in the drawing room. Adrian came back with a headache—A chill Stella declares. There is a scare in the Studio of diptheria [sic]—which Maeve has done her best to swell, by reporting gossip to Cousin M[ia]. so that it is doubtful whether Nessa will go back there. Finished Essays in Ecclesiastical Biography.

Wednesday 10 March

Adrian did not go to Westminster, as his temperature was below normal—Nessa went to her drawing. Father and I had our usual walk. We went to Savages about a match box of fathers, and to the Post Office. I told father that the E[ssays]. in E[cclesiastical]. Bio[graphy]. were done with, and most boldly suggest Mr Lowells essays—So I have got Among my Books, which rejoice my heart after my grandpapa. Walked in the gardens with Stella, in the most virtuous way. The Almond trees are just coming out, and there are crocusses (croci—Stella’s young man calls them) all over the grass. A reverend gentleman has written to the Times to record the first hawthorn flower—the earliest that has appeared in the Parish since 1884 when, as will be remembered, there was an uncommonly mild winter, and favourable spring—still I think your readers will agree with me, when I say that it is not an unprecedented phenomenon, this early visitor, etc etc. Hear hear! In the afternoon we planted in the garden, and afterwards went to Regent St., with our watches—The man said that they were so cheap and bad that they could never be made to go properly, so we took them away—Finished John Halifax Gentleman.

Thursday 11 March

Adrian did not go to Westminster—We went to Blades with a prescription for Stella in the morning—Adrian went back home, and Nessa and I took a walk in the gardens. After luncheon Marnie [Vaughan] came to take Nessa and me to the National Portrait Gallery. We went on the top of a bus to Trafalgar Square, and saw all the Watts and George Eliot and Mrs [Elizabeth Barrett] Browning—skilfully missing the proper portraits upstairs. We paid a visit to the Goupil Gallery on our way home, and saw some water colour drawings by a Mr Holloway which Marnie did not like, but which Nessa, and two old art critics who gave their opinions at great length thought very clever—Lotta [Leaf] came to tea with Stella, and brought a shawl from Mrs Symonds, which is not very interesting. Gerald out.

Friday 12 March

In the morning I went out after breakfast for a walk with father. Adrian did not go to school as the Exeat began at 12.30, and his cold was still rather bad. Nessa went to her drawing. Stella, Adrian and I went to Kittys to see whether she would go and choose a dress with Stella in the afternoon, but she was out—Then we went to Margaret [Marny] Vaughans to ask her, but she was out; then Stella took a cab to Campden Hill to secure Lisa, but it was their at home day. Finally Margaret Massingberd was found able to go. In the afternoon Adrian and I went to the Museum, in search of a mythical underground collection of bugs, which Miss Kay declares she saw; instead we discovered a notice directing [us] to an insect room open to students from 10 to 4, which we suppose she meant, but as we did not feel sufficiently student like to enter, we came home—Bookless—

Saturday 13 March

I did Livy in the morning with Nessa. Adrians exeat so that the lazy creature spent his time lolling in the drawing room—We settled to meet Georgie at the Monument Station at a quarter to two—starting from here at one—Nessa and Stella went out in the morning to buy a hat for Nessa to wear if she goes to Geralds and Phil Burne J[ones]s tea at the New Gallery tomorrow. We started for Gloucester Road at one (marvellous to relate) and arrived at the Monument punctual to a minute—We lunched at a little place opposite Talbot Court, and walked afterwards to St Saviour Southwark. The Church looks quite new—though there are a few old tombs—one of a gentleman famous for his pills, another of a crusader. After that we bussed to St Pauls, and saw the mosaics, but a service was just beginning so that we left and paid a visit to Burlington House—as it is the last day of the Leighton exhibition. They were mostly very ugly—We had tea at an ABC and then came home. Madges wedding present arrived—an old looking glass. Finished Among My Books.

Sunday 14 March

Nothing happened all the morning, except that Adrian typewrote, Nessa drew, and I searched the house unsuccessfully for books to read. Stellas and Jacks banns were read for the first time but we did not go to hear them—Father had breakfast early and went to Mr Merediths. It was after a long time decided that Nessa should go to the New Gallery and that I should not—Phil Burne Jones fetched Gerald after lunch—Adrian and I walked to the Marble Arch, which was crowded with meetings. We came home about 5 o’clock. Nessa came back about 6, declaring that such a dull thing as a party was never before invented—However the others said it was a success so many pretty people had never been crowded in a room together—and there were celebrities too—Sir E[dward]. Burne Jones; Sir Ed. Poynter Mr Henry James (whom Aunt Minna stalked, Nessa says) and Mrs Beerbohm Tree—Father came back at 7.

Monday 15 March

Nessa went to her drawing. Father and I walked to Savages about his match box which has come undone—I got “My Study Windows” by Mr Lowell, and gave back “Among My Books”. It began to rain, so that Adrian and I stayed indoors. Adeline Fisher appeared at about 12.30, and told us stories of their dog, and of Tom and Boo till Stella came in. In the afternoon Adrian and I went to the Zoo. We undergrounded to Baker Street, and then with great skill, changed into the St John’s Wood train. We found our way to the gardens, where we bought 6 penny buns to distribute among the animals—There were no new creatures—we saw the lions fed, with difficulty as the house was crowded—We came home by a quarter past five—Stella Jack and Gerald went after dinner to a party to hear Susan Lushington play—When the new woman comes, she is to sleep and live in the Night N.—Nessa will move to S’s room and I to A’s.

Tuesday 16 March

Adrian went back to school today after nearly a week’s holiday. Adeline and Stella went out to dressmaker (Stellas wedding dress) and Nessa and I walked to High St. and bought a fichu for Adeline—In the afternoon Nessa and I went to the South Kensington Museum, and went over for the 20th time the picture gallery—Stella was given a biscuit box by the servants, and the [Carlyle] French Revolution from Lady Cunningham, and a buckle from my dear Contesa [illegible]—who starts for Florence tomorrow—After dinner Stella and Adeline went to the 5 shilling dance—Nessa and I paid them a visit as they were dressing at about 10.30, in our most dilapidated dressing gowns—Jack went with them—Gerald is one of the stewards, and gives a supper—They did not come back till 5 in the morning!

Wednesday 17 March

I went out for a walk with father in the morning. Stella had to go and see Mrs Hills. At about one she, Adeline and I went in to the gardens and looked at the flowers—the almond trees out, the crocusses going over, squills at their best, the other trees just beginning to seed—I shall turn into a country clergyman, and make notes of phenomena in Kensington Gardens, which shall be sent as a challenge to other country clergymen—Adrian came home for lunch, having fainted at Westminister—from the pain in his knee, which he cut playing football yesterday—Stella, Nessa and Adeline went to some plays at the Albert Hall, in which the Miss Gordons were going to act, and I stayed in and read the Cruise upon Wheels to Adrian. Dr Seton came about 5, and said that Adrian was all right, but that his leg must be kept quiet for tomorrow—Adeline went back in the evening to Oxford.

Thursday 18 March

Ethel and Alice Clifford came in the morning, so that we did not get out till late—Adrian did not go to school because of his leg. Stella and Nessa and I went out in the gardens, though it was a most diabolical day—blowing and raining—In the afternoon we went with Stella to the workhouse and were inspected by the old ladies—Most of them were blind, so that they had to feel us over to find out how much we had grown—We bussed back to High Street, and there took a hansom home, as Mrs Hills was to come for tea. Stella and Jack dined out with her. I finished My Study Windows in the evening. Tomorrow I shall get a new book—Read to Nessa The Lifted Veil after tea for it is quite light now till about 6.30. I am reading Tales of Three Cities and Silas Marner—A great arm chair arrived from Herbert [Stephen].

Friday 19 March

In the morning Stella and I went to Libertys to change a screen which Florence [Maitland] gave her as a wedding present—After a long time we decided to wait till another stock of screens should come in—Adrian did not go to school as his leg was still rather bad. We bought some silk to make night gowns, of all things in the world, for Stella. We came back in a hansom—In the afternoon Stella and Father went to Laura, and Adrian and I walked down to Aldous to buy some Italian tulips. It was decided that Adrian should not go to La Poupee in the evening, as he has to go to school tomorrow. Georgie came instead. He and Nessa dined with Aunt Minna at 7.30. The play was a musical one, and very amusing. We got home about a quarter to 12—Father gave me Coleridges Life by Mr Dykes Campbell to read—and I gave back My Study Windows.

Saturday 20 March
The first day of Spring

We did not go out in the morning. Nessa and I undergrounded to the Monument, and met Georgie there; we had luncheon with him at the “Old Grasshopper” the same place at which we lunched last Saturday, and then went back to the Monument where we met Adrian. We settled to go to Hammersmith and see the crews practice. There was a great crowd on the bridge—the river was full of rowing boats and steamers—After waiting some time—a steamer was seen coming up the river, and as it came nearer, we saw a boat alongside it—It was the Oxford Crew who docked under the bridge in fine style—the crowd cheering, and the merry go rounds screaming—Cambridge had already done its work—We were home for tea—The Calendar announces to day as the first day of spring and accordingly a leaf very small and green—has appeared on the chestnut at the top of the road.

Sunday 21 March

In the morning we went out into the gardens. We forgot again till it was too late to go to St Mary Abbotts to hear the Banns read—Next Sunday will be the last time so that we must go. In the afternoon Adrian went for a bicycle ride, and Nessa and I sat in the Night Nursery—I began Wives and Daughters to her for the second time—Gerald gave me the Heart of Princess Osra a kind of going on of the Prisoner of Zenda—Mr Gully came to tea, and were had up to see him—It is as hot and stuffy as a summers day—instead of the second day of Spring—Read Mr Dykes Campbell—tomorrow he shall be finished. Father recited after dinner.

Monday 22 March

Stella dissapeared [sic] early in the morning with Jack to choose some furniture which Flora Baker is going to give them for a wedding present. I went out with father. Afterwards Stella and I walked to Mary Coxes to tell her about a job—cook, and we saw Ella—In the afternoon Stella and I hansomed to the Reform Club, where we met Georgie. We then went together to Strong i’ the arms, which is close by, and chose a ring for Jack which is to have his three whiskered wolf on it. We walked with Georgie to Piccadilly Circus, and ordered Stella’s invitations for the wedding. Georgie left us, and Stella and I walked up Regent St., and took a bus at Oxford St. to take us to Notting Hill, where we were to see a Mrs—who is to let us her house at Brighton. She lived in St Mark’s Road which we could not find so that at last we took a hansom and had a squabble over the fare.

Finished Dykes. Jack out for dinner.

Tuesday 23 March

Nessa and I took a note to Mrs Green after Lily-Marthe Perrière came to see Stella and we also inspected her. She is small and dark, an ugly nose, but on Stella’s authority, pretty eyes—At any rate she talks real French, which is one very good point in her favour, after Pauline’s German English mixture—She is intelligent and willing and talkative, S says, and will most likely come here on the 30th—on which day Pauline will dissapear [sic]—In the afternoon Nessa went to Mrs Flower. Miss Edwards came to luncheon, and stayed till 4 o’clock. She is deafer than ever—one ear stone deaf, the other you must shout into as loud as you can, and perhaps part of what you say will reach her. She went over all the presents, and enjoyed herself. Father luckily, lunched with Mrs Green. When she had gone, Stella and I shopped in High St—We—Stella, Nessa, Jack and I, dined at a place in Sackville St, and went on to St James Hall and heard Nansen lecture—the great man is very like his pictures—talks broken English. It was very hot and rather long, but very good. Home at 10.30.

Wednesday 24 March

Nessa went to her drawing—Father and I walked in the gardens, and he gave me the Life of Sterling to read—I gave back the Coleridge. Stella and I hansomed down to Madame Dubois and Stella was tryed [sic] on her going away dress at great length—After that we walked up to High St and bought various things there—The most fiendish March wind that ever blew. Poor Edith Beadle we met in great discomfort—“the wind has torn my veil off,” the little creature screamed into Stella’s ear, “my hair is coming down, and that dog insists upon pulling the wrong way!” After luncheon I bussed with Stella to the workhouse and came back by myself—Nessa had to walk down to the studio, because of the wind. She brought me back North and South, and a dreadful closely printed historical novel by Edna Lyall—North and South I shall read out aloud to Nessa—I finished the Heart of Princess Osra, which is rather a good book methinks—

Thursday 25 March

In the morning I did Livy with Nessa—Afterwards we went up to Aunt Minna to fetch Stella to go out with us. But a Mrs Giles had appeared down the road, and Stella had to follow and remained shut up with her all the morning. Nessa and I went for a walk down the Row of all places, which was rather crowded. Nothing very exciting happened—The almond trees are all most beautiful—so quoth the Marmot (i.e. Vanessa—Miss Maria). In the afternoon we had to pack off early to the Queens Hall to hear Miss Florence May give a pianoforte recital—She looked like a poor green melancholy poll parrot—she waded through an immense amount of music—We came late, and deserted when she went out of the room in the middle—Bussed home—Marny [Vaughan] came to tea with us, and asked about Stella’s wedding present—to be a photograph or a picture.

Friday 26 March

In the morning I went for a walk with father. As we were coming home, we saw a poor young lady byciclist [sic] run over by a cart—she was coming up Gloucester Rd. with another lady—and tried to turn round to the right, and ran straight into the cart—The cart was coming slowly, and there was nothing else in the road, so I cannot understand how it could have happened—Afterwards Marny and I went with S to Mrs Young and had her going away dress tried on—Margaret M[assingberd]. was there. Marny stayed for luncheon—In the afternoon Nessa and I went to tea with the Milmans. It was better than the other time, though the tea itself was rather uncomfortable—They gave me two books by Mr Lowell. We walked home.

Saturday 27 March

Stella had to dissapear [sic] upon Mrs Giles business—in the morning Adrian came home at 12 and Georgie took us to Addison Rd. Station. We had settled to pick dafodils [sic] in the country—Georgie saying that he knew of some field where they were to be found. We reached St Albans at 1.30, and lunched at the Peahen—a sunny inn, with great oak beams and horses. We saw the cathedral which has all been re-done, but there are still pieces of old work in it. Afterwards we bicycled 5 miles, and dismounted by a river, and picked marsh marigolds and wood anemones—No dafodils [sic] appeared. There was an old tall chimneyed red brick house—nice strong box trees—birds singing—fish darting down the stream—a rabbit hopping about in the wood—We stayed here a long time, and had only 30 minutes to ride 4 miles—on our way back—behold a field covered with ds.—Lost the train at Welwyn.

Sunday 28 March

In the morning we three went to Church at St Mary Abbots! This was the last Sunday on which the banns were to be read, so that we had resolved to go—It began at 11.30, and finished at 1.15—We had rummaged the house for prayer books and hymn books, our search produced two hymn books (tonic sol fa) and one prayer book. This last however was left behind. A little black gentleman showed us into seats at the top of the church. Soon music and singing began, the row in front of us rose, and behind a wheezy old lady began to follow the choristers in a toothless tuneless whistle—so on for the rest of the performance. At certain parts we stood, then sat, and finally knelt—this I refused to do—My neighbour looked so miserable and uncomfortable—In the middle the banns of John Waller Hills and Stella Duckworth along with several others were read, and no one pronounced any reasons why etc. etc. Our prayers and psalms were rather guess work—but the hymns were splendid—We had a sermon from a new pastor—he said we shall never hear the beloved voice again, alluding to the departed vicar—the old ladies snuffled and sobbed—Finished Sterling.

Monday 29 March

Stella and Charlie, who has been here since Monday, went to Brighton early in the morning. I was meant to go, but with the stubbornness of a mule and the ardour of a marmoset (my new title) I refused. The consequence was that the powers had to do without me, to which after some wrangling they consented. I walked down to the Studio with Nessa—bicycling after Miss Shaw Lefevres accident is forbidden—I fetched Nessa back again, and saw some of the Studio celebrities—a Miss Bowyer a Miss Vivian, and a Miss Davies—In the afternoon father and I bussed to St James St.—We had several perilous crossings before we reached the London Library, where father got some books. Then there were more crossings, and we arrived at fathers tailor in Bond St. where father ordered himself a whole new suit for the wedding. He bought some books at Sotherans and then we wandered down the middle of Piccadilly, till we came to a shelter. It is a miracle that I escape to write this. Gave back Sterling and got Pepys diary.

Tuesday 30 March

In the morning Stella, Nessa and I went to Mrs Roberts in Westbourne Grove about our dresses for the wedding. Margaret Massingberd was there. After a great deal of discussion a gray dress was fixed upon—but farther than that I did not penetrate. Adrian came home early after lunch because the governor of the Fiji Islands and old Westminster, had asked a half holiday for them. Nessa went to the Nat[ional]. Gall[ery]. with Mrs Flower. Stella and Adrian and I bussed to Hammersmith and walked on the bridge—which was very crowded, but there was no sign of the crews. Stella took a train to Putney to see Mrs Hunt and A and I bussed home. This morning the beauteous Pauline departed. On Thursday Marie Perrière arrives—for the mean time we have quiet. Stella and Jack out to dinner with Aunt Minna. Stella made a proposal that father should give Nessa an allowance of £40 a year—25 of which I should have. We should buy out of this all our clothes etc; think of the joy of making a pair of boots last a month longer and buying for ourselves books at a 2nd hand bookstall!

Not yet proposed to father.

Wednesday 31 March

I did not go out with father in the morning because he had a cold. About half past 12, I walked down Queens Gate with Stella. She took a cab on to Westminster to take Adrian to Fairbank to have his teeth out—Nessa bicycled down to the studio, and met with no accident. On Friday the studio comes to an end. After lunch Adrian Stella and I bussed to Hyams to buy Adrian clothes for the wedding. We met Mr [Henry] James in Oxford Street. “Most extraordinary coincidence, my dear Stella Duckworth! I was just this moment, this very moment, thinking of you—in fact I had stopped 10 doors back to get you something—now I meet you!” This was carried on at great length with great difficulty in the midst of the crowd. After tea I helped Georgie with the invitations for the presenters and the wedding. The presenters are coming on Saturday. Miss Edwards and a few Southwarkers I think are coming here after the wedding. How delightful. Finished the Antiquary.

Thursday 1 April
April Fools day

In the morning we went to Mrs Roberts in Westbourne Grove—Margaret was not there this time. We had our linings tried on—I was forced to wear certain underclothing for the first time in my life—All the invitations were finished and sent off in the morning—so that theres an end of that job—Only ten days now to the wedding—what will become of us—In the afternoon we shopped in High St.—meaning afterwards to go on to Moorgate St[ation]. about A’s unfortunate umbrella which has lain in the Lost Property office ever since January. But the shopping took too long so that we did not try to go any farther. Stella went to the Workhouse and Nessa and I came home—Marie arrived after tea—Very talkative indeed, and unlike Pauline. She has already given me the history of the Janins, and is willing to tell us anything we like. She talks real French, and we stumble along in our half forgotten language as best we may—However she does not want very many questions to make her talk herself—Harry [Stephen] came to dinner—Began Caesar.

Friday 2 April

In the morning I went for a walk in the gardens with Father. Afterwards Nessa came home and we went to Mrs Youngs in South Audley St, to see her wedding dress tried on. When we got there we were told that Mrs Young could not come for half an hour. Margaret Massingberd was there, and Violet Dickinson, and soon Cousin Mia galumphed into the room with a parcel for my darling Stella from her loving cousin Sheila—which proved to be a horrid little red and gold Browning—Georgie appeared after we had waited some time, and he took Nessa and me with him to choose the wedding cake at Gunters—We ordered a 60 1b. one—to cost 6 or 7 guineas. Afterwards we went back to Mrs Young and found the wedding dress on—Margaret came back to lunch with us, and Nessa went on to have hers at an A.B.C. near the studio, so as to get in as much drawing as possible—Stella and Margaret went to some shop to buy Stella a hat, and I walked to Kensington Square and then to the studio, to fetch Nessa back. Oxford won the sports by 1 thing. Finished 1st vol. of Pepys.

Saturday 3 April

The whole morning was spent in arranging the presents. Marny and Emma [Vaughan] came and helped us. The books and jewels were in the back drawing room, and everything else in the front. At last the presents 170 in number, were all placed somewhere or other, and the rooms made to look tolerably tidy, and decent. A rug from Geralds bedroom covered the deficiencies of the drawing room carpet—At last after 3 or four hours of labour the flowers all put in water, the presents labelled—our dresses changed and a thousand etcs—the company came in—First Helen Holland then Jessie Allen, Aunt Minna—various unknown people—How lovely & that is beautiful! What a wonderful necklace!—this went on unceasingly, and not very much else. There was however a most scrumptious Charbonnel tea in the dining room—with iced coffee—Edith Beadle collared Nessa and told her stories of her own doings for a long time—She was followed by Mrs [Holman] Hunt—Emma sat with me on the sofa and laughed—At seven the whole pack had departed—We went down and had a tea—only about 3 came, while there was room enough and tea enough for 100. Extraordinary.

Sunday 4 April

In the morning we did nothing—Jack stayed away till luncheon, when he and Susan Lushington appeared. In the afternoon the Milmans came to see the presents, which are still left on view—Lady Loch came too, and much the same remarks as yesterday were uttered—Jack had supper out somewhere—this is the last Sunday of Stella Duckworth—next week Mr and Mrs Hills will be at Dover waiting for Monday to cross to France—The drawing rooms are still topsy turvy and will not recover till everything is over—“the beginning of the end” Aunt Minna cheerfully calls this. Indeed it is in danger of becoming very dismal—After dinner father read the Ancient Mariner which was rather a failure—almost ending in the middle furiously. My dear Pepys is the only calm thing in the house—

Monday 5 April

In the morning we went to Mrs Roberts for the 3rd time. Margaret Massingberd was there—Our dresses have developed into respectable grey paduasoys (I hope)—In the afternoon we went to Mrs Youngs to see Stellas wedding dress tried on for the last time. M.M. and Cousin Mia again there—the dress was in much the same state as last time; but after a little battle between Margaret and Cousin Mia about the lace, everything went smoothly and was finished—So we shall not see it again till Saturday—then we shall faint—this time next week—everything will be over once and for all—Good gracious what a week this unfortunate diary will have to contain! We (Nessa and I) have resolved to be calm and most proper behaved, as if Stellas marriage were nothing at all touching us—Cousin Mia shall be entrusted with the task of tear manufacturer for the family—oh dear, I wish it was over—Home by bus—Poor Helen Holland crowded out and had to walk.

Tuesday 6 April

At about 11 Thoby arrived—with out Stewart—He eat an enormous breakfast, and then we went out with Stella and Lizzy [servant] to Marshall & Snelgrove to buy Stella’s dusters etc. for her new house. Then we ordered new bicycling skirts at another shop, and then came home very late for luncheon in a fourwheeler—Stellas presents pouring in very fast now—Today she had a great many silver things—In the afternoon Nessa and Thoby went out to buy the dogs wire muzzles. The muzzling order is on again for ever. £20 fine if they are discovered muzzleless. Thoby went on to fetch Adrian back from Westminster, and Nessa, Stella and I went to tea with Herbert, Harry and Rosamond—Dodo Booth, a Freshfield, Nora Pollock, Susan, Katherine were there. Dear Ros. has become most prosperous and stout with her rest cure. She took a chair by me and talked. We came away soon—meeting Georgie and Thoby just at the door—Jack in for dinner.

Wednesday 7 April

We came down very late for breakfast, and Georgie had it with us. He and Thoby went to the bicycle shop in the morning to see whether they would allow Thoby anything off his old Premier—Stella had offered to give him a new one—We went out with Stella into High St. and she had her hair done as an experiment for next Saturday—Aunt Virginia appeared, but would not stay for lunch—A. came home for lunch—T. had it with Georgie at the Reform. At 3.30, A., N. and I went to Bensons in Bond St. to choose a lamp for Stella and Jack’s wedding present—We met Gerald there—When we had chosen it, I got faint, and came home in a cab—Finished North and South and the 2nd volume of Pepys.

Thursday 8 April

In the morning Nessa, Stella and I went to Mrs Roberts for the last time. Our dresses were tried on in their finished state, and M.M. thought them satisfactory—Afterwards we shopped in High St.—In the afternoon Thoby went for a bicycle ride on his new bicycle, and Nessa and I went with Stella to High St. and afterwards on to Earls Court—there we discovered that she had lost one of her opal rings—the one Jack gave her—So we came back and asked at all the shops whether they had found it—but there were no traces, and it is now given up for lost. After tea we four marched into the drawing room and presented Stella and Jack with the lamp—which they approved of, so they said—Jack was despatched—not to be allowed here till he is a married man—Dear Miss Pitman wrote a most enthusiastic crazy letter to Stella—The presents pouring in—

Friday 9 April

We did nothing all day but arrange presents, and write cards etc—All the morning was spent like this. In the afternoon Stella and Father went to Highgate [cemetry]—At last about 11 o’clock at night things were more or less finished. Mrs Jones arrived with a supply of underclothing. We went to bed—but Stella and Georgie & Gerald stayed up till 2 packing in her room. Jack stayed away all day long—Too much to do to be dismal, though the last evening was in danger of ending unhappily. Remembered however (Nessa and I) our resolve to be calm and collected—

Saturday 10 April
Stella & Jack’s Wedding Day

The morning was still rather a hurly burly—The finishing touches to everything had to be given—Eustace came often to arrange things with Stella—Huge boxes of flowers arrived throughout the morning and had to be arranged—orange flowers had to be mixed with all the Southwark and workhouse favours—great white satin cockades. Adrian did not go to school. At about 12 the Fishers came—and Stella went up to dress. M. Emile the hairdresser did her hair and also Nessa’s—Goodness knows how we got through it all—Certainly it was half a dream, or a nightmare. Stella was almost dreaming I think; but probably hers was a happy one. We went to the church at 2. Jack was there looking quite well and happy. Then at about 2.15 or 30, Stella and father came in—Stella walking in her sleep—her eyes fixed straight in front of her—very white and beautiful—There was a long service—then it was all over—Stella and Jack were married—We went up and saw her change her dress—and said good bye to her. So they went—Mr and Mrs Hills! These are some sentimental tokens of the day. White rose leaves from S’s bouquet and red tulips from ours that Jack gave us—

Sunday 11 April

In the morning we did nothing which was very nice after this last week of doing something. Adrian played with his microscope—a wonderful one which Stella gave him, and Georgie tried to summon up courage to prick himself and examine his blood—Yesterday there was no room to say that Stella and Jack gave Nessa and me two most superior bridesmaids presents—beautiful gold watches the best, Georgie says, that can be made, with our initials on the back, and “From Stella and Jack” inside. These arrived as Stella was dressing on Saturday, and she gave them to us just before we started for the church—Harry Stephen came for luncheon, and the wedding cake was eaten—Afterwards Georgie said we would go to Highgate, and take there some of Stellas white roses, and our carnations—Georgie, Gerald and Thoby bicycled & A., N. and I drove in a victoria—our man raced the bicyclists all the way home which was rather alarming, but they just won—However I was thankful to get home safe at all—Trying hard to finish Pepys before Wednesday, so I may have a new book.

Monday 12 April

In the morning we went to Larkes in High St. to order some flowers for No. 24 [HPG]. Adrian went back to school as usual this morning. After luncheon Thoby went for a bicycle ride to Wimbledon and thereabouts, and Nessa and I paid Kitty Maxse a very long visit. M.M. came in while we were there, and a most extraordinary time we had of it—Kitty begins—Margaret catches her up half way through, and they finish together—We sitting screaming with laughter—to sit and laugh was throughout our part: such a stream of talk and laughter never in my life have I heard—War[?] is silent and dull compared to it. At last at 4.15 we got away—We bought 2 pkts of paper at Lords for 1.3d. which will last me till the summer I should think. Unhappily they are rather smoother than my last 6½ lot—Georgie had the fire lighted in his room, and I sat there and read which was very nice. Finished 3rd vol. Pepys.

Tuesday 13 April

In the morning Nessa and I went to High St. to buy some stuff to trim a hat, and to give A’s watch to have a glass put on—I wrote to Stella, sitting in Georgie’s room which is most comfortable and quiet. In the afternoon Nessa and I bussed to Mrs Young’s, and asked Julia to write a description of the wedding-dress for one of the papers, and we presented her with a piece of wedding cake—The roar of carriages and carts was so dreadful that I forced Nessa, much against her will, to walk into the gardens from Park Lane, and through them home—Thus we escaped the bus and the streets which were in a most fiendish state of uproar. Packing for Brighton began—

I got the 4th & last vol. of Pepys, which has to be finished by tomorrow—Father suggests Macaulay’s History as a good solid work for Brighton!

To bed very furious and tantrumical—

Wednesday 14 April

The morning was spent indoors, finishing our packing. Kitty came and talked to father, and Cousin Mia and Aunt Minna were most affectionate. Adrian came home about 12, and said that he had got his remove—in to the lower fifth, and a silver penny for being top of his class in French—At a quarter to three we started for Victoria—Father, Marie and I in a cab with Jerry—the rest bicycling—The roads up to Victoria were all blocked, and about 200 yards out of the station we came to a standstill—Father was miserable: We had lost the train. It was no good going on—he tried to get out of the cab, but luckily was too much jammed in to move—However at last we got to the platform, and more wonderful still, secured a fairly empty carriage—for the crush was terrible—We got to Brighton at a quarter to 6, I think. Our house is 9. St Aubyns. After tea we walked to 2nd Avenue and saw the Fishers—Everything fairly comfortable. Plenty of books. Began Macaulay’s History.

Thursday 15 April

In the morning we bicycled as far as Shoreham, but it was most dreadfully windy and dusty, and when we got so far, Nessa and I turned back, and left the others to go on—The rest of the morning we spent reading. I gradually plodding through the first volume of Macaulay. I have two vols. here—I shall not read the other; also Wives and Daughters, and Lambs essays—so I manage to keep going—but a fortnight! What is to happen to us—I wish this moment I were sitting in my beloved arm chair, with a nice quiet morning of London in front of me—No such luck—In the afternoon the rest bicycled—Father and Herbert Fisher walked and drove together and N. and I went to Second Avenue and got Emmie to come out with us to buy some cider. We walked on the parade with her and then brought her home to tea with us. After tea we—Georgie, Thoby, N & I walked back with her. G. saw Hervey & N & I sat in the drawing room. Then Emmie walked back to St Aubyns with us, and told us of a certain romance which we knew already. Thoby dined with the Fishers.

Friday 16 April
Good Friday

It was behaving in the most diabolical manner—pouring with rain at intervals, and a wind capable of disturbing Mr [James] Dykes Campbell—nevertheless, Cor[delia]. and Tom [Fisher] came round in the morning, and we all walked back with them—The poor bank holidayers all penned up in their hotels, and nothing to be seen but crazy old shut up flys, and bedraggled four in hands—the top passengers holding on tight, and the poor little horses struggling desperately—We got a flower at the Fishers for Nessa to paint—In the afternoon Nessa and I stayed in—Nessa painting and I reading—Truly such a dismal place was never seen—All the books are poetry—except a few bad novels, which probably have found their way in since the Hon. Roden’s demise; and a sprinkling of terribly religious works—sermons and missionary reports, belonging to the Rev. [David] Macanally. The pictures are religious, or portraits of the Royal Family from the Queen. One or two works by the Princesses themselves. Everything rather gruesome.

Saturday 17 April

Still raining and blowing hard—This is a most disgraceful place—nothing else seems to happen—However Georgie and I and father went out in the morning to order a bed for Thoby, and in the afternoon we played a kind of cricket on a piece of waste ground near the house. But the wind was dreadful, and the game was cut short by a violent shower of drizzle—Herbert & Boo & Tom [Fisher] came back to tea—After tea they played knuckle bones—a game which is Thoby’s chief solace now—Thoby & Georgie dined with Baxter at his hotel, and Adrian & Father dined with the Fishers, so that Nessa & I had a most delicious high tea together—an ommelette [sic] etc.

This is written with one of the Rev Davids quill pens—the result is not beautiful—No—I shall not again desert my beloved Swan [pen].

Sunday 18 April

Fine today for a wonder, after a Brighton fashion—strong sun & strong wind. In the morning we all went for a decorous walk on the sea wall—It was far more crammed than the Church Parade in London—a most disgusting spectacle, though rather amusing—all the third rate actresses turned out in gorgeous clothes—tremendous hats, powder and rouge; and dreadful young men to escort them—We met Gerald bicycling from the Station, and he went on [to] the house, and then came back and met us—In the afternoon he went to the Fishers, and Father went for a walk with Herbert & Will, who came over for the day. We four with Georgie bicycled to Shoreham, and came back through the country—Coming home it was hot and calm, but going the wind was as diabolical as usual—Georgie dined with the Fishers—We walked on the sands after tea.

Monday 19 April
Easter Monday and Primrose Day

In the morning Gerald took us and the Fishers—Emmie Boo Tom and Adeline, to the Pier. There we had the happiness of seeing the execution of Mrs Dyer—unfortunately when about 3 of us had had the treat, the machinery refused to work, and the back of the platform had to be opened, and some thing done to the electricity—afterwards she was hung successfully. In the afternoon we settled with the Fishers—Adeline and Herbert, to train to the Dyke & to bicycle round somewhere & so home—The trains were crowded—but at last we got places with the bicycles in the van—After the train finally moved off for about 100 yds it came to a standstill, and backed us into the station again, where we waited till two trains came back again from the Dyke. When we got to the Dyke, we decided to come home by Bramber. We climbed down the Dyke over the grass, in a most perilous way—when we reached the bottom it began to pour—We arrived after many adventures, which unluckily there is no room here for, at Shoreham thoroughly drenched.

Tuesday 20 April

The rain had dissapeared [sic] by this morning, leaving the roads muddy and bad, it is true; but nevertheless the sky was as blue as Stella’s renowned Italian ones, and the wind which was cold and fresh, was at our backs. We started from this house at 11 and rode through Brighton to the Lewes road—There was one long hill, and a bad piece of muddy ground to begin with, but when we had scaled the hill, which we did comfortably on our feet, behold a beautiful smooth descent of two miles & a ½ lay before us! Georgie, T. & A. flew down this with their feet up, but N. & I were more prudent—it was most exciting and splendid. If I was a poet (which Miss Jan does not claim to be) I should write something upon this way of travelling. This diary is too small to allow of very much prose, and that is quite inadequate—We had twenty minutes to ride three or four miles in if we were to catch the train at Lewes—We rushed through the town and down a very steep narrow road which led to the station; the train was in but we managed to seat ourselves and to see our bikes in the van—We got to Uckfield at 1, where Will [Vaughan] met us—Lunched with them all. After lunch at 3, started with them back to Lewes—Another most beautiful ride. We stopped on the way and picked primroses in a wood. Tea at Lewes. Train back to Brighton at 5.40.

Wednesday 21 April

If rained all the morning, to make up for yesterday. Adrian & Thoby went out on to the beach, but Nessa & I stayed in & read. Georgie had to go to London by an early train. In the afternoon Thoby & Adrian & the Fishers went to see the play on the pier. Father took Nessa and me for a walk along the Parade to the Steine or someplace of that kind—near the Pagoda at the other end of Brighton—I regret to say that various circumstances conspiring to irritate me, I broke my umbrella in half—Father went to tea with the Fishers, and Emmie Tom & Boo came to tea with us. Emmie told us stories of Florence [Maitland] and her animals, which, if we go to Gloucester this summer, we shall have quite enough of—After tea Thoby, Adrian & the Fishers went off somewhere (we never fathom their motions) & Nessa, Emmie & I walked along the Kings Road, where Emmie had to buy some things. Everything however was shut for Wednesday. Letters from Stella; they start to come home on Friday. Finished 1st vol. of Macaulay—

Thursday 22 April

In the morning at about 11, we went to the Fishers to get them to come with us on the Parade. Emmie had promised to come, but she said that business made it impossible. So Adeline came in her stead—nursing a poor half starved mouse of Toms all the time. We saw Joey, who was inaudible, and the South African minstrels, and the Scotch family, who play on violins and flutes and various instruments—Adeline walked back with Nessa & me, and told us of Kittie’s engagement once upon a time to Lord Morpeth—A letter for Georgie from Stella, but nothing very much in it—In the afternoon we trained to the Dyke with father, Tom & Boo, & Charlie & Adeline; we examined the top of the Dyke, which is crowded with switch backs etc. and then started to bicycle home. All the winds that have had a place in this diary, must yield ignominiously to the wind which met us now—Several times was I blown into the hedges, and the bicycles behaved in a most drunk way—lurching from side to side—Home safely after a rather horrible expedition - Began 2nd vol. of Macaulay.

Friday 23 April

At 11 o’clock the riding master came for Nessa & Thoby. Georgie is giving them three 2 hour rides each, to have while they are here. They only rode for one hour today—Father and I went for a walk along the Parade. He told me stories of Macaulay, and various old gentlemen whom he had known—After luncheon Nessa Georgie Father and I went to see the race course. We took a bus to Castle Square, and then walked along the Lewes road—We went into the Churchyard and saw Grannie’s grave—Georgie gave us each a piece of sweet briar from it—Afterwards we walked on to the downs—The wind of yesterday as ferocious as ever—we were forced to take off our hats, and let the wind disport itself at its own free will among our hair. Father surprised us when we were at the bottom of the hill, by disdaining a bus, and hailing a sleeping fly by the sea-wall. This creature carried us back to St Aubyns, which was a long way off—Boo & Tom had tea with us. Letter from Stella for me -

Saturday 24 April

Nessa and Thoby went for a two hours ride at 11—Adrian went to catch lice on the beach with Boo and Tom—a disgusting employment—for the benefit of Boo’s sea anenomies [sic]—Emmie came round here about 12.30, & I walked to 2nd Avenue and back with her. After luncheon Adrian dissapeared [sic] again on some expedition with the Fishers, & Nessa & I sat on the beach—Nessa attempting a picture of the Pier, & I reading Barchester Towers to myself. Father & Thoby went to the Bird Museum. Georgie did his work here. We came back soon, as it was very cold & windy, and the youthful population of Brighton insisted upon watching over Nessa’s shoulder. Gerald came after tea. Adrian dined and had tea with the Fishers—We only saw him for a short time at luncheon. My hot water bottle streamed into my bed; we covered the wet sheets with a towel, fastened down with safety pins, which was rather a wonderful proceeding.

Sunday 25 April

Stayed in all the morning, and read. Adrian & Thoby went as usual to the Fishers, where they spent the morning. After luncheon we all started for a walk—Will Vaughan came round and went with us. At 2nd Avenue, Gerald Nessa Thoby & I separated from the rest & went in search of Uncle Herbert. Meanwhile the others marched on, and left us behind—Gerald stayed to tea with Aunt Mary, & Uncle Herbert. Boo and we three walked on the Parade. We ended by sitting in the Avenue Gardens; opposite the sea—where we met Emmie & Adeline & a Mr Robjohns—an Australian friend of Emmie’s, who met with a bicycle accident outside their door, & was brought in and recovered in their hall—but one ending to such a story! Boo came back to tea—Adrian & Tom spent the afternoon fishing off the pier. They have captured one unfortunate dab and live in hopes of some thing more glorious—but nothing else has bit as yet—Adeline came to dinner & told us stories of her dear Miss Roden—& of her brother Conrad—

Monday 26 April

We started on our famous Arundel expedition at 11.15 this morning. Adeline & Charlie went with us. It was very hot and dusty; for the first time this fortnight the wind was low and stuffy—What there was of it, kept at our backs—We rode most comfortably, dismounting at the hills, and allowing ourselves to look at primroses, and woods, regardless of so many miles an hour. At Worthing we had the pleasure of seeing the Duke of Cambridge opening the water works in the distance, surrounded by a body of guards—We had luncheon at Angmering, at the Horse & Groom—of eggs and bread and butter. A quiet sleepy little place, a swan sitting on its nest—most peaceful after Brighton glare - We reached Arundel at about 3, and saw the castle—We mounted the keep, & were shown Cromwell’s cannon balls, and the Empress Mauds bedstead—together with some ancient stuffed owls. The castle is all being hideously rebuilt—but from the town in the valley the long line of black wall (the Castle) looks very solid & old—trained back from Ford—22 miles. A. M[ary]. talked to us after tea.

Tuesday 27 April

In the morning Nessa & Thoby rode for 2 hours, & Adrian went out shrimping with Tom. Father & I started for a walk along the sea wall. We met Adeline & Boo, who went the rest of the way with us. In the afternoon Emmie turned up, and sat with Nessa and sat with Nessa and me till 4 o’clock—Charlie carried father off to a Public House to play billiards, and Thoby and Adrian went out with Tom & Boo. Emmie told us wonderful stories—my dear Miss Roden was talked of a great deal - Emmie went at 4 to give Hervey his tea, & at 5 Nessa & I followed and had tea for the first and last time this Easter with the Fishers. After tea we turned[?] up letters with Emmie, in the hope of finding some from Granny—but there were none, only two negatives which I have appropriated of her beautiful (attractive rather) head—

Wednesday 28 April

Nessa & Thoby rode for the last time in the morning. Adrian and I did nothing. Adeline came to see if everything was finished in the morning, which most wonderful to say, it was. Thoby, Father & Adrian lunched with the Fishers. Nessa & I alone; after lunch at 2, came a final scramble—the last boxes packed and we set off on bicycles to the station;—Aunt Mary brought father there—we said goodbye & started. On the way I virtuously finished the 2nd vol. of Macaulay. Met at Victoria which we reached at 4.20 by Georgie. Stella in bed with a bad chill on her innards like she had at Christmas. They have a nurse, Dr Seton three times a day—they say she is getting better—but everyone getting miserable. Everything as dismal as it well can be. Oh dear—how is one to live in such a world, which is a Miss Janism, but very much my mind at present. To bed in my new room, which was lonely & dismal too. Dr S. declares her to be much better & going on very well—Somehow things will get straight again—but it is most depressing.

Thursday 29 April

Stella rather better this morning so they said. Nessa went and sat with her all the morning as the Nurse was asleep after last night—I went out with Thoby & Adrian to buy some beef tea in High St. Afterwards came back and sat in the drawing room at No 24—to be there if Nessa should want anything—Nessa lunched there, and Georgie stayed at home for lunch. Afterwards Thoby, A. & father went to the Zoo; Georgie & I bought some things in High St., and then I went back & sat at 24. Stella was worse in the afternoon—the pain was bad—After tea Nessa went back again, & I sat again over those eternal old Graphics and my Macaulay which is the only calm and un-anxious thing in this most agitating time—Dr Seton came after dinner, and was rather frightening. It is Peritonitis—she is to be kept quite quiet—There is to be another nurse, & straw put down on the road. Poor Jack very unhappy. This is one of the most terrible nights so far. No getting rid of the thought—all of these ghastly preparations add to it—the people jar at every possible occasion. I slept with Nessa, as I was unhappy. News that she is better at about 11 o’clock—What shall I write tomorrow?

Friday 30 April

Stella better this morning. Dr Seton came at 10, and was very cheerful. We stayed in and saw the people who came to enquire—Cousin Mia arrived & sat ponderously in the drawing room, telling long stories of Iona Carroll etc. Gerald and Georgie stayed here most of the day, & were most cheering—Everyone seems to think her really better. Dr Seton came again at 2, and was pleased: said she is absolutely safe, & no complications. Nevertheless Jack decided to ask Sir W. Broadbent to come, though it was unnecessary. In the afternoon suddenly Aunt Mary came creeping up to 24—and sat in the kitchen. She had not had G[eorgie’]s good telegram before she started & his letter had frightened her—She was very anxious that they should have another opinion—She went by the 5.40—Thoby & Stewart also went—Thoby had been allowed to see Stella for a moment. Broadbent came at 7—He was not quite so encouraging about her as Seton, but said it was satisfactory, which I suppose must be believed. He comes again tomorrow. Jack came after dinner & said Stella was decidedly better—quite different. Slept with N again.

Saturday 1 May

Stella had a better night than she has had yet; Dr Seton came at 10, & was delighted with her. Nessa & I went for a little walk to Church St. and bought some nails and a postal order for Beck [photographic suppliers]—Came back & spent the rest of the morning at the front drawing room window which has become our chief resort nowadays on the look out for enquirers doctors cabs etc. Cousin Mia came here of course, & went away satisfied. After luncheon Hester & Aunt Anny arrived—Hester went for a walk with us in the gardens; very stiff and exclamatory & proper. Broadbent came at 5, and was much more satisfactory than yesterday. Everything going on as well as possible. Poor Aunt Minna came down having just arrived from the country very much frightened by the straw etc. knowing nothing of Stella’s illness. However the good reports cheered her up—For the first time since Wednesday, I read quietly and happily at my cherished Macaulay. After all books are the greatest help and comfort. I slept in my own room tonight. Better news still late at night.

Sunday 2 May

Dr Seton came at 11, and was perfectly happy about Stella—She has had a good night, no pain—pulse & temperature normal. What more could one want? Georgie & I therefore went out contentedly to hear Father lecture at the Kensington Town Hall upon Pascal. There was a fairly large audience composed of sensible ugly young teachers & middle aged ladies and very strong minded respectable tradespeople in black—The proceedings were enlivened at intervals by songs and music from the gallery. The lecture was very deep rather too deep for the audience; very logical & difficult for the ignorant (i.e. Miss Jan) to follow—Not quite as good as I have heard from him—however it went off comfortably.

In the afternoon Georgie & we three went for a walk in the gardens. Broadbent and Dr S. came at 4. Broadbent quite enthusiastic—Thoroughly good straight forward recovery—absolutely no danger—Jack asked him to come on Tuesday. Jan most jubilant—& went comfortably to bed for the first time. Read Mr. [Henry] James to quiet me, and my beloved Macaulay.

Monday 3 May

Stella had a very good night & no pain—so everyone went happily to their work as usual. Thank goodness this seems to be the beginning of a quiet happy week—Dr Seton was expected at 11, but sent to say that he had caught a chill & could not come—If Jack wished for anyone, to have Broadbent, but it was not in the least necessary—Jack however did sent [sic] for Broadbent. Nessa & I went out in the morning to buy some flowers & grapes for Stella & Dr Seton, and two fresh eggs which S. may now have—In the afternoon we went out shopping in High St. and bought various uninteresting things. Adrian lunched with the Macnamaras, and went afterwards to a play at St James—He also had tea, and I suppose made himself very agreeable as is his custom—declared that the Mac[Namara]s: down to Pat possessed undeniable virtues and a most beautiful kitten—So much the better. Broadbent came at 5.40, and stayed a short time—thinking it I expect rather ridiculous for him to come at all—Everything as good as it could be—Will come again tomorrow if Dr S. is still unwell.

Tuesday 4 May

Nessa went in to see Stella this morning. She was struck by her looks: fatter decidedly than after the wedding & looking altogether better—This is most satisfactory—but I am unreasonable enough to be irritated -

We went out to Barkers on one of our usual uninteresting everyday errands—After luncheon at about 3.30 Broadbent came as Dr S. is still ill. He said she was getting on splendidly etc: So we went out for a walk in the gardens and, to reduce attacks of Peritonitis, had ices (the first of the season) in the white house in the Park. Afterwards we walked down by the Horse Guards and watched the ladies coming back from the drawing room. Such a hideous set of bedecked old frumps I never saw—At tea time a series of visitors came, so that poor Marmot [Vanessa]—had to sit and entertain in the drawing room—Father began Caleb Williams to us by William Godwin. Read in bed as is my usual custom nowadays, and finished off Mr H[enry] J[ames].

Wednesday 5 May

The papers full of the fire at Paris, which happened yesterday afternoon. A bazaar full of people was burned down—they think 200 were killed—Most ghastly details in the Daily Chronicle & the Times. Nessa went to her drawing for the first time this term. Walking as it was raining. Adrian went in and saw Stella who gave him some green sleeve links—We went round to ask after Doctor Seton who is much better. After luncheon I went in and saw Stella for the first time since the wedding. She looks better than I expected, and seemed altogether less ill & weak—She was thinner however than Nessa & Adrian had described her. We sat & talked for about half an hour, & then the nurse said it was time for Mrs Hills to go to sleep, so I went. Adrian & I went out to High St to buy some plates for his Kodac [sic]. When we came in I found a telegram for Georgie which I opened: it was from Vicompte [sic] de Luppe to say that his mother was burnt yesterday in the fire. Also another telegram from M. Bourgain to say that she is safe—Stella gave me a pencil from Paris which I have on my watch chain.

Thursday 6 May

The war was hustled into the back columns of the papers to make room for the fire. The duchesse d’Alencon is dead, besides any amount of other grandees. The papers each with ghastly accounts, but they do not agree as to how the fire was started—In 12 minutes everything was finished—In the morning A. went back to Westminster & Nessa & I after a great fight were let off lessons till Monday. We went & saw Stella who seems fairly well & comfortable—We went out afterwards. We went to High St & bought some braid & something else which I cannot remember—a catalogue of the classes at King’s College—that was it—which I may go to. After lunch I talked to father about it, and decided to begin next autumn if I begin at all. In the afternoon we went to the workhouse—Met the Milmans on the way & walked in the gardens with them. Georgie insisted upon my putting out my light early or I should have finished the 3rd vol. of Macaulay.

Friday 7 May

Nessa went to her studio and Adrian to his lessons so that I was left alone. I went out to High St to buy a diary for Georgie, and then came back & saw Stella, who seemed pretty well. After lunch I went in again and sat with her—before this however, Mrs Green—that wicked old harpy—as for the future I shall call her—came to see Father. I was in my usual position behind the folding doors—nevertheless she saw me & shook hands with me. Then she proceeded to tell Father stories of the Symondses—among others that Catherine Symonds will eventually mark my words Mr Stephen (in a low voice) become a Roman Catholic!—This amused me so much that I repeated it to Stella. Afterwards it turns out that Mrs G. was telling this as a profound secret to father, and that she did not know I was there! I sat with S all the afternoon. At 4.30 I went out with Nessa to High St. Finished 3rd vol. of Macaulay & began 4th.

Saturday 8 May

In the morning Nessa & I and Georgie went to the Bank to get back Stella’s & Jack’s chest of silver. On the way there we saw a hansom overturned in Piccadilly—I saw it in mid air—the horse lifted from its legs, and the driver jumping from the box. Luckily neither horse nor driver suffered though the hansom was broken—Then again, I managed to discover a man in the course of being squashed by an omnibus, but, as we were in the midst of Piccadilly Circus, the details of the accident could not be seen. We brought the chest back in a four wheeler, which, strange to say, carried us home safely. In the afternoon Adrian was carried off by Joe to Kew, & Nessa & Georgie went to the R[oyal] A[cademy]. & then to the Kays for tea. I perambulated less magnificent quarters—Gloucester Rd in fact—I bought some flowers & took them to Miss Totley—Stella getting on well—eating roast chicken etc. Georgie & Joe went to a Bow Music Hall, & Georgie spent the night in the slums.

Sunday 9 May

Georgie away in his slums. Gerald down about 11.30; the rest of us straggled out of bed at various hours—I indeed, was rather early—Nothing happened at all—We sat in the drawing room—Adrian & Gerald playing chess—I reading beloved Macaulay—a very tough 5th volume & Nessa sitting with Stella. This Sunday a most distinct improvement upon last. Then we were not out of the wood (as Broadbent said) Vaguely unhappy.—Cousin Mia a fixture—melancholy and large in the drawing room, and sympathetic enquirers dropping in every now & then—Now that old cow is most ridiculously well & cheerful—hopping about out of bed etc: Thank goodness, nevertheless—In the afternoon Jack kidnapped me, & carried me off to see Stella—where I was examined by Doctor Seton. No lessons—milk and some medicine which I forget. Otherwise exactly the same remarks—long anecdotes—Afterwards we went out into the Gdns and patronised the White house (Kensington Palace). Father recited Sohrab and Rustum after dinner.

Monday 10 May

Nessa went to the drawing. Father & I began our morning pond walks. Afterwards I sat with Stella, & then went out to High St, & bought some grapes (I think—today is rather vague, as I most disgracefully forgot to write for two days). After luncheon [I went back to Stella & sat with her all the afternoon. She went to sleep when I was reading to her, & my creaky shoes made me sit still there till she woke up at 4.30.] (This is all mixed up with Thursday -) I cannot remember at all what happened in the afternoon; but I think I shopped in High St—A most dreadful failure—At any rate in the evening Mr Gibbs came round, & offered to take Nessa & me to Brooks with him on the 22nd, where we could see the Procession beautifully—However Gerald may have a window or a roof top already so we are not sure about it.

Tuesday 11 May

In the morning Nessa & I went round to 24—found Stella most prosperous, & and sat with her for a little. Then we went back here, and mended Georgie’s gloves—of all characteristic employments! Afterwards we went to Gloucester Rd with my prescription, & bought some gardening tools. Father has taken up Doctor Seton’s notion that I should be healthfully employed out of doors—as a lover of nature—& the back garden is to be reclaimed—that will be a truly gigantic work of genius—nevertheless we will try. Accordingly a fork, a spade, a hoe & a rake were ordered for 7/6, & tomorrow I begin operations. We ought to have gone on to Mrs Pixleys, but we were too exhausted. All the afternoon I spent with Stella; Nessa went out with Mrs Flower to the New Gallery. Who should pay us a visit at tea, but dear Edith! She wished one of us to go with her to the Park to see the Queen pass by after the drawing room—She gave us a most animated description of At. M[inna]s. clothing in Spain—her appearance in her night gown etc—

Wednesday 12 May

In the morning Nessa went to the studio. I did not go out with father early. Sat with Stella for a little in the morning, & then went to the Pixleys, whom I neglected yesterday. After ringing three times I was let in, asked after Mrs P’s sister who has Peritonitis—Mrs P herself came to see me in her horrid little drawing room. Then I dissapeared[sic] and had the pleasure of seeing a cart horse fall down—In the afternoon I sat with Stella the whole time. She got up & walked down stairs and lay on the sofa, very comfortably. Dear Nurse Wyllie has gone, & only Nurse Peck remains. Dr Seton came & said if it was fine & warm she might go out tomorrow. Adrian did not come till 7.30, & he spent till 10 doing Algebra with Father—Georgie & Gerald both out.

Thursday 13 May

In the morning we went round as usual to Stella—Afterwards we went out to market in High St—one of our jobs took us to Herbert & Jones to buy some sponge cakes for Stella’s tea—While we were waiting for them—I heard a stampede in the street outside—shouting—as the stampede became more violent—& then a crash. Evidently the runaway had collided. A glimpse out of the door—to which the young ladies all crowded to get a better view—showed one horse on the ground and a second prancing madly above it—a carriage was smashed up & a wagon turned over on to its side. The young ladies were dispersed by the appearance of an infuriated steed at the door—pushing it with its nose; however he was captured in time. As soon as things were quieter we fled—without the sponge cakes—No one hurt. The afternoon spent in gardening.

Friday 14 May

Nessa went to her drawing. At 12.15, Stella went out for the first time (yesterday was too cold) in a bath chair. Just as we had started, we met Adeline and Emmie [Fisher] coming down the street. They are staying with Aunt Virginia. They went out with us into the gardens for a little walk, & then left us. We marched solemnly up & down the Flower walk and then went home. In the afternoon Father & I went out together. When we arrived at the Serpentine we lazily sat down in 2 arm chairs; and lolled there for half an hour, watching the river, & the peacocks on the other banks. These creatures occasionally screamed mournfully, and were answered from afar off by other peacocks—ducks kept up a perpetual quacking—This was most soothing however, after a week of ferocious carriage wheels & accidents—Bought a diary for Nessa from Father. Finished vol. 4 of Macaulay—

Saturday 15 May

In the morning we went to Stella & sat with her for a little, & then came back & gardened. Nessa was valiant, & created another flower bed by the garden wall, but I basely deserted her, when the worms & stones became too numerous, & the heat was too great. We had arranged to go to Westminster, & to see the Lords & Commons cricket match. Georgie was to meet us there—But at luncheon time A. arrived saying that there was only an ordinary match. We had to go to Vincent Sqre nevertheless to meet Georgie at 3.30—He came at about 4. & we stayed till 5 & watched a very dull game between the Masters & Boys. As a refreshment afterwards Georgie took us to Gunters in Sloane Sqre.—Where we had the most gorgeous strawberry ices—Gerald out to dinner. Stella & Jack went for a drive. Began 5th & last vol. of Macaulay.

Sunday 16 May

We went round in the morning & saw Stella. I was extremely gruff & unpleasant, which, however, is to be ascribed to the effect of the hot weather on my nerves—Nothing else! Stella walked up the street with Jack, & in the afternoon went for a drive. We—father G[eorge] H[erbert] D[uckworth] Nessa, A. & I, went out into the gardens & sat under the trees for some time—Georgie went fast asleep. Father went to lecture on Nansen at 7. o’clock, so that dinner was put off till he came in—about a quarter to nine. Georgie, Nessa & I had a long talk in my room about various things—Lesage came to tea—also General Beadle & Mr Gibbs. But I sat upstairs & read. Nessa poured forth Parisian French; & Mr Lesage is going to present her (if father allows) with a book!!

Monday 17 May

Nessa to the studio. I went over to Stella, & sat with her for some time. Then she told me to go down Gloucester Rd. & order a Bath Chair for her that morning, which I did. Afterwards at 12.30 we went out in the gardens (Stella in her bath chair) & sat under the trees, where father joined us. In the afternoon we drove in a Hobbes—terrible ordeal! The horse however proved stolid & as lazy as our Bognor steed: almost breaking down up hill—walking at a funereal pace—But I forgave it its sins, & only wished it could impart some portion of its contented disposition & complacent mind to its brethern. I sat with Stella till tea time. Adrian did not come home till past 8, which was rather alarming—Gerald came back from his party to see whether he had been run over, & everyone was much disturbed. Finished the 5th & last v. of my beloved Macaulay!

Tuesday 18 May

Nessa went out to market in High St. for various things connected with tonight’s feast. Susan Lushington who was to be the lady, could not come. I spent the morning with Stella. Nurse Peck went away. Stella walked up & down the street a little. Aunt Virginia & Adeline appeared at luncheon time & we were interviewed in the drawing room. Afterwards Nessa went to meet Mrs Flower, & I went for my now usual much to be dreaded drive in the Park with Stella. I have now got Carlyle’s French Revolution—the 5th volume of Macaulay being restored to its place. In this way I shall become surfeited with history. Already I am an expert upon William (Hear Hear!) & when I have mastered C’s 2 vols. I shall be eligible for the first B.A. degree—if the ladies succeed. Lesage to dinner. Adeline who was asked did not turn up.

Wednesday 19 May

Nessa went to her drawing. I went over to Stella, & found her still lying in bed. However she soon got up, & went down to the drawing room. Dear Edith Duckworth appeared, & talked till about 1—then we all three marched up the road. Father met us, & he & Stella went out into the gardens together. After luncheon the inquisitive hour—as our usual melancholy trot in the Park is called—took place. Afterwards I sat with Stella till tea time. After tea we again went in to Stella, & gossiped with her till late—Then we dressed for dinner with At. Minna & afterwards the play. Gerald came with us, the dinner was very odd—G & Edith making jokes against At. M. in whispers the whole time, & then we drove to Terrys Theatre & saw the French Maid. A musical, rather vulgar play. Home at a quarter to 12.

Thursday 20 May

Went over to Stella in the morning, & sat with her till 1. Then of all people in the world, Mrs O’Brien appeared—bringing with her photographs of the little O’Bs. (Conor, Harry etc) as hideous as ever, & which Stella found herself incapable of admiring. Then we walked up & down the street, & Stella had luncheon with us—for the first time since the day before her wedding—Afterwards we took the drive in the Park. I wish they would cease to exist! Brer Muddie came to dinner & afterwards went over to Stella. I read in bed as usual, The Scarlet Letter, & was stopped by Georgie & Nessa at 11 o’clock. Gerald out as usual to 2 dances only this time! Nessa bought 13s worth of flowers for the back garden.

Friday 21 May

I went over very late in the morning to Stella, & found At Minna permanently (so it seemed) seated by her side, pouring forth a stream of gossip—questions etc. which, I being in a very bad humour, made me so angry that I turned my back, & made myself generally unpleasant! Stella suffered more though, for she had a headache. We did not go out therefore, but she came round to luncheon. Adrian came back from Westminster early, as he had a half holiday on account of the concert. He spent the afternoon in doing his prep: & in buying white gloves, black trousers & an evening tie (for the concert) with Nessa. I sat with Stella until Mrs Edmund Hills came, & then I came back here & read till teatime. None of us went to the concert; A. came back at 11.30 just as I finished the Scarlet Letter.

Saturday 22 May

The day of our great water party. We—Georgie, Nessa & I started for High St Station at 10. We changed at Reading, & got to Goring at 11.15. We put our clothes, cherries etc. in the drawing room of the Miller of Mansfield (the Inn of the place.) & then we went down to the boat house to see about the boats. There we met Sir Condie Stephen—of all people! We rowed out down the stream, & paddled industriously into the banks—N. & I rowing. At 1.30 we had lunch at the M. of M.—& at 3. we went down to meet the train. Gerald, A. & Lesage & Miss Booth came by it. All the other people we had invited did not turn up—My space is gradually dissapearing [sic], & I cannot say in the shortest way all that we did—However, briefly—we splashed leisurely down the river to Tilehurst—picked buttercups on the way, & eating cherries. At Tilehurst we had tea, & once more rowed on to Reading. This we reached at 8.30, & caught the train earlier than the one we meant. Home about 10.30. Father at Cambridge.

Sunday 23 May

The morning we spent in the garden. This desert place is under our hands, becoming a quite beautiful spot—There is one large round bed, which you see from the drawing room window, & another long one behind it against the wall. Both these we planted liberally with half grown pansies, lobelia, & sweet peas. We are going to buy some grass seeds & cover the bare patch of earth which surrounds our beds. In the afternoon we saw Stella for a little, & then gardened again. Father away at Cambridge. Gerald went out after dinner on a bicycling party—with the Lewises & Grays aa usual to Bow to explore the Catholic Churches.

I began Miss Mitford’s Notes of a Literary Life, as a night book—superseding The Scarlet Letter, by my dearly beloved Hawthorne.

Monday 24 May

In the morning Nessa went to her studio, & I round to Stella. We stayed talking there for some time, & then we went in to the gardens & sat down. She came back to luncheon with us. After lunch Stella & I gossiped till about 4, when we made up our minds to take a walk—at the top of the road we met Nessa coming back from her drawing so we all together went on to the Gardens, & sat on chairs. After tea Nessa & I delved a little in the garden—which grows more & more beautiful, & went round again to Stella. I determined to finish the 1st vol. of the F[rench]. R[evolution]. by night—but when bed time came there were still a good many pages left—in the middle of my nightly forbidden reading, I shut up, thinking G[eorge]. was coming. However it was a false alarm, & the 1st vol. was finished.

Tuesday 25 May

We began our marketings with Mrs [Edmund] Hills for the first time. We walked with her down Gloucester Rd. and bought various things—to be sent to Mrs J.W. Hills. She told us an extraordinary story of her husbands proceedings yesterday night. He came home quite deaf—having suddenly become so in the morning. After an hour or so of shouting at him, they agreed to send for Dr Coates. He came & squirted warm water down one ear, & a piece of wax which had got over the hole dropped out. Now he hears like an ordinary being. He has also bought Stella a jay—a featherless jay. In the afternoon (I had lunch with Stella) we went & sat in the gardens. Nessa did some marketings in High Street. After tea I went in again to see S’s cat—a stray half Persian which comes every evening to have milk. Today its mother sat & watched over it in the garden. The jay arrives tomorrow in a new cage!

Wednesday 26 May

Nessa went to her drawing, though it had begun to drizzle. At 11, when it was comfortably pouring, I ran over to 24, & spent the morning with Stella in arranging her Venetian glass in the china cupboard, & afterwards in reading Punches. She had luncheon with us. After lunch it had cleared up a little. We went down to Childs in a fourwheeler, & ordered a chain for Nessa’s birthday. We were shown some wonderful things in the shop—a locket made out of a sovereign etc. After dinner—(Georgie & Gerald both out) Lisa Stillman came in to hear father recite—Love in a Valley which she could not think beautiful—However she declared her mind changed when it was recited—& we had some others of Mr Merediths—Jacobi (my mouse) visited me at night as usual & eat some of my supper, dear creature!

Thursday 27 May

Showery, & rather cold. We went out into the gardens, & walked about a little, & then came home again. Stella did not lunch with us; as for the future she is only to come every other day. In the afternoon I was dragged to Cocoatina Smart (so named by Kitty) & had my head washed by a beautiful young lady—This operation lasted about an hour, & then we went home again. Stella & Nessa spent the time shopping in High St. Georgie & Gerald in for dinner—but both out afterwards. Gerald told indecent stories, & Father read aloud some ridiculous translations of French by a schoolboy in the P[all] M[all] G[azette], so that we spent a most laughable evening—Thoby’s paints arrived addressed to Miss V.S. so that Nessa opened them.

Friday 28 May

In the morning, I went out by myself—Nessa was at her most —— (to be filled in as desired) studio, & Stella went to Libertys with Gerald to choose an evening dress for G. to give Nessa on her birthday—However they found nothing, so that it had to be put off. I got some pills at Coopers & then went to enquire after Marny, whom Emma thought had the flengs. I saw Emma who said it was not flengs, but measles! They have a nurse, though it is a very slight attack because Emma, not having had flengs herself, cannot nurse Marny. In the afternoon at 3, who should arrive but At. Mary! She & Stella spent the afternoon talking together, & at 4.30, when Nessa came in, she & I went to High St. & bought our present for Stella—2 glass water jugs—2.11. each also some chocolate. Finished the first vol. of Miss Mitford—a most gossipy night book—just fulfills [sic] its part.

Saturday 29 May

It began by being fine, but at 12 the rain came on. We were out with Stella buying shoes flowers etc. & had to take a fourwheeler back—Gerald had settled to call for us at 4, & take us to Mrs Winkworth’s garden party. But the rain grew worse & worse, till at last the whole sky was black, & no gap anywhere. So at four no Gerald appeared. However, at 5, it began to look more cheerful; blue sky actually showed itself, & as we were going down to tea, Gerald came, expecting to find us ready dressed. We changed most speedily, jumped into a cab, & found ourselves at Holly Lodge by 5.30. Here was a band, a crowd of people—Booths, Lewises, Caves, Brer Muddie, Susan [Lushington] etc etc etc. Eat ices (3) & came away.

Sunday 30 May
Stella’s and Nessa’s birthday

Today Stella (Mrs John Waller Hills) is 28, and Nessa (still Miss Stephen thank goodness—but who, I say, can tell what next year is to bring—change of names & otherwise!) is 18. We went over to 24 early, with our present for Stella & she gave Nessa her watch chain—gold with 12 beautiful bits of blue enamel - We lunched with them, & spent the greater part of the afternoon there—They had dinner here, & we had an uproarious evening together. Next for the greatest & most beautiful of either of their presents! Behold! Georgie presents Nessa with a wonderful opal necklace—almost as splendid as Stella’s wedding one. This is my envy & my delight. No room on page for more description of it—Gerald a 5 pound note; and a dress to come—Father books. A.—slippers. T. paints. Jack book. At. M[inna]. blouse (in which N. looked very lovely) but the opal necklace!!!!!!

Monday 31 May

After yesterday’s thunder storm, it was fine; though still hot & uncomfortable, today. In the morning Stella & I went out to see Marny. Before this was reached, Helen Holland came: sat with me alone for some time, & then walked with us through the gardens, & to High St. We bought some canary seed & some oats, which the young man declares will cover our garden with beautiful grass. Then we went to St. Albans Rd: & talked to Emma through a sheet window (for fear of infection). Marney going on all right, has her nurse still. This was rather a terrible walk—horses behaving violently. In the afternoon Stella & I went out in to the gardens, & sat under the trees; as we were going away Mr [Henry] James came up, & walked with us part of the way home—Then we met father & the two went into the gardens again together. Adrian came back from school, feeling unwell, & did not eat any tea. His temp: normal however, though it is possible that he has pleurisy. Much better after dinner & sleep—played whist, & was quite well. Georgie came home. He & Gerald both out to dinner & then to dances.

Tuesday 1 June

It was very rainy & dark in the morning, & we had made up our minds that it was no good going to Miss Kay, as we had settled, to see the bugs. However it cleared up, though rather late, & we set off as fast as we could for Prince’s Gdns. They—Miss Kay, & Rachel (a small 9 year old Kay) were waiting for us. Rachel & I talked together the whole time, in the most affable way, & Miss Kay & Nessa. The bugs were downstairs at the Mu[seum]. Nothing very wonderful. Mrs Flower came for Nessa. Stella & I went into the gdns. & sat & talked to a very nice baby. Adrian came back after tea, having been rather giddy at school, but it is only his liver—Georgie says—I was woke this morning at 4.30, by a flash of lightning, which lit up my room, & was followed by a tremendous thunder storm, & wind & rain. Finished the French R.

Wednesday 2 June
Derby Day Galtee More won

Nessa went to her drawing. I was to have gone out with Stella, but just as we started forth, Mrs Mitchell Ennis & Aunt Minna came & walked S. off to 24. Then Miss [Octavia] Hill came about the cottages, & stayed till 12.30, & then Mrs MacKenzie, about the jubilee & broken windows if not illuminated. So that we did not get out at all. I stayed over here, & began Cromwell, which succeeds the French Revolution. Also Lady Burton’s 2nd volume which came this morning. In the afternoon Stella & I went into High St., & bought an evening cloak for Nessa to wear tonight. High St even more diabolical than usual—the horses in a most wicked & rampant condition. Nessa’s birthday cake for tea. At 7, we (they) dined: little Lesage also—& then went to the opera at Covent Gdn - Gounod’s Faust—to which Lesage treated us. It lasted till 11.30—rather too long, but very nice. We meant to have supper afterwards but Lesage was so much shocked at the idea that we gave it up. Lesage goes to France tomorrow at 9 A.M. Home & to bed at 12.30.

Thursday 3 June

In the morning we three went down to enquire after Marny (who has the measles). We talked with Emma, through the dining room window, & learned that she was going on very well etc.

After luncheon we went out in to the gardens with father, & sat upon chairs near the Pond. After sitting there for some time, we got up & went for a little walk. Stella became suddenly giddy; though only for a moment, so that we went straight home again. Violet Dickinson came to tea with her. We dug in the garden & finished the place that we mean to sow.

The sweet peas are holding their heads up a little, but the pansies have perished rather in the rain. Read Cromwell: harder to get on with than the F[rench] R[evolution] but better than some other works that I have had to devour.

Friday 4 June

Nessa went to her —— drawing. Stella & I sat indoors for some time; Stella doing her sheets with Polly. Then At. Minna came, & afterwards, Evelyn Duckworth, a spectacled Orchard Leigh one, whom I have not seen before. At last however we set out into the gardens, & walked up & down the flower walk, & looked at the flowers, peonies especially. Stella had luncheon with us. Afterwards she, Father & I, went & sat out in the gdns. At 4, Nessa came out to us (Father left to go to the L[ondon]. L[ibrary].) & we walked to Campden Hill—Stella had said that today I would have tea with Peggy. I was shown in to the drawing room, where Bella sat talking to a friend. We had tea together in the drawing room, & afterwards played games, the knife ran away with the spoon, until Nessa came to fetch me. She had had tea with Stella in High St.—They bought some paper which I do not like.

Saturday 5 June

We were to have gone to Oxford—Georgie, Nessa & I, but Georgie came into me before breakfast & told me that Stella had been bad in the night—the pain had come back again. So their plan of going to Clear-water Farm till Wednesday had to be put off, & everything was upset. Dr Seton came at 10.30 & said she was better. Tem. 100, not much pain: He came again at 4, & said she was no worse—She eat 3 cherries which may have made her bad, but they do not quite know what it is. She was sick a great deal, & has 2 nurses. We went into the gdns in the afternoon, rowed on the Serpentine, & had tea in the park. Then we came home & found Adeline here. dr Seton came after dinner, & said she was much better, & the attack will probably be prevented—

Sunday 6 June

Stella had a good night & no pain, which was a comfort. Dr Seton came at 10.30, & was pleased—says he thinks he has stopped it in time. We sent off some telegrams. It was dreadfully hot—a steam rising out of the ground, & everything hazy. Adeline, A. & I went out into the gdns—which were all misty & hot. In the afternoon father went out, & we planted seed in the back garden. This is to produce grass—but whether the sparrows will have left any is a question. As soon as we had left the garden, the horrid little creatures swooped down twittering & made off with the oats etc.—Dr Seton came at 8.30, & was still more satisfied. Says he hopes—he will not be positive, but still he very much hopes that the actual peritonitis has been avoided, & that soon she will be well.

I got up at about 12, seeing them all in the road, & rushed down in my dressing gown—barefooted—However they were only chasing cats!

Monday 7 June
Whit Monday—Bank Holiday

Stella had a good night, & was better in the morning. Dr Seton came at 10.30, & was very much pleased. Adeline, Nessa & I went out in to the gdns, & walked about for some time. Georgie—had a holiday today, because of Whit Monday, & the rest of the world were taking their holidays in the gdns & other places. In the afternoon we wanted to go to Miss [Irene] Noel, with At. M[inna]’s carriage—but her telegram said she was away till tomorrow. So instead we went to Lords & saw a match between Somerset & Surrey (?)—the first day—Nothing very exciting however. Came away at 6, & undergrounded home with a terrible bank holiday lot. Dr Seton came at 7.30, & was most cheerful. In a few days she will be well. But she will have to go away, & not eat cherries or chocs. for some time—

Tuesday 8 June

Stella had a very good night, though she was sick once. Dr Seton came at 10.30 & said she was getting on as well as possible Broadbent will not come till tomorrow or the day after. We went out with Adeline into High St. to buy Nessa an evening dress—or at least a skirt & silk for a body but there was nothing in High St. neither skirt nor stuff. This is to be her wonderful coming out dress to be worn at a party at Cousin Mia’s on the 16th—In the afternoon we went to Harvey & Nicholls [sic] & bought stuff for the dress (silk). Then we took the bus to Notting Hill Gate—another, & another till at last we came to St Marks Rd. at the ends of the earth—touching Worm Wood Scrubbs! [sic] We found dear Frances in, with an Indian uncle of hers—Most delightful—talked & laughed. Then we were shown Miss Baldwin—an emaciated female who plays the piano loudly & badly—quite cosy. No room to say more of this wonderful pair.

Wednesday 9 June

Stella had a very good night, though she was sick once. Nessa went to her drawing. Adeline & I stayed in till about 12—it was pouring: & then when it had stopped, we went out. Today was Georgie’s great Eton Ramblers match against Westminster. We went to South Audley St. walking all the way there & back across the park, & asked whether At. Virginia was in London or abroad. Then home again, & watched the ducks in the Serpentine. After luncheon we (A[deline]. father & I) had settled to go to Vincents Square, but it was raining, so that we thought they would not play. Adeline & I went out together rather aimlessly, & half way down Queens Gate decided to call upon Mr Gibbs—He was out however. Then we went to Rosie Marrable & talked to her for some time—a dry disagreeable little creature: Then we went to Nessa at the studio, & with her on to the Milmans: afterwards to the Vaughans, & at last after all these extraordinary calls, home. Finished 1st vol. of Cromwell.

Thursday 10 June Adeline Fisher engaged to Ralph Vaughan Williams

Stella had a very good night, though she was still sick. Nessa & Adeline were debating about the wonderful dratted never-to-be-finished evening dress—I was reading in the drawing room. Suddenly the front door bell rang, & Ellen announced Mr Vaughan Williams—I escaped by the little room door & went up to tell Adeline (he had asked for Miss Fisher). Adeline descended, & for a little time we heard no more. Then the door went, & we beheld A. & a strange gentlemans back walking up the st together. The back we thought we recognised as Roland VWs. We thought nothing particular about it, though as the morning wore on—they went out about 11—it became suspicious. They did not come back for lunch—not until 3.30—then—Adeline was engaged! Broadbent was with Stella—when he came out he was completely satisfied—amazed at having been sent for—etc. We went out shopping. Miss Noel came to tea—A most exciting afternoon—In the evening A[deline]. & Gerald went to the opera, so the day was finished—Good heavens—what a whirlpool—No room for more!

Friday 11 June

Adeline & I went out in the morning into the gardens, where we sat quietly for a little. Nessa went in to see Stella, whom she thought very well, & bright. At. Mary & Ralph V W came about 12 & sat in the drawing room talking together. A. & Ralph—so for the future he must be called, went out & had luncheon together. At. Mary with us. At. Mary saw Stella also—At. M & A went away—A. to Oxford, & At. M to Brighton at 3. Ralph is a tall stout solemn young gentleman—very stiff & proper at first sight—rather like Roland V.W. Afterwards sat with Stella for about an hour, & thought her looking very well really—only thin. We went in the evening to the Yeoman of the Guard at the Savoy, & there saw a gent—exactly like R.V.W. Came home about 12, N & I alone, keyless. Threw stones gently at Ss window & then went to 24. However roused S at last.

Saturday 12 June

Stella had a good night, & we went in to see her after breakfast. She then irritated me extremely by saying that I should have to go with her when she goes away, which I with great vehemence, declared to be impossible. Georgie suddenly suggested that we should go off to Windsor, & boat to Datchet & look for houses for her there—which we accordingly did. We got to Windsor at about 1.30, & had lunch & strawberry squash at Laytons: then we took a boat & rowed 1 mile or so down to Datchet. It was terribly hot, & so less nice than it might have been. We tramped over Datchet at the bidding of a telegraph boy, but unsuccessfully—no houses to be found. Then we took the boat back to Windsor—waiting by the bank a little to cool. Had ices at Laytons & then the train home. If only this horrible plan were not hanging over my head!

Sunday 13 June

Broiling again. Perfectly breezeless, & the sky blue & misty with the heat—Gerald sits in an arm chair by the open window in his shirt sleeves, Georgie gasps at intervals; Nessa sneezes with hay fever—A. bicycle rides & prints photographs, & I growl at every thing—the effect of nerves doubtless! We struggled out in to the gardens & sat upon chairs, hoping that this was cooler than the house. Then we came home again, & said it was very hot—This is awful—After luncheon father went to Kew—wanting to take us too, but we boldly refused. After tea we sat with Gerald in the gardens. No more heard of the going away plan but my fears are many. No book but Cromwell to read, & that requires a refrigerator. After dinner we planted geraniums in the boxes, lighted by a bedroom candle, & the policeman’s lantern! To bed at 11.30—hot, hot, hot.

Monday 14 June

In the morning I went over & sat with Stella for some time. She is very well, & gets up on to the sofa. Dr Seton even says she may travel on Friday, but as they have found no house, this is doubtful. I went out to Herbert & Jones for Stella, & bought sponge cakes. Nessa at her drawing. I cannot remember what happened to me in the afternoon—I think I went out somewhere but I forget any thing about it. At Minna sent round to ask Nessa to go & make the tea for various ancient females, At Annie amongst them—So she went, & I had tea alone. I began Cowper’s letters as a night book—Finished Miss Mitford some time ago. The grass in the back garden, so long despaired of is already sprouting! Very thin & weakly indeed, but it is a comfort to think that the wretched sparrows did not get it all.

Tuesday 15 June

We went over to Stella in the morning. Afterwards Nessa went to High St to buy odds & ends for her blessed dress (which has to be finished by tomorrow—& which Mrs Dickson is now working on).

I went to Gloucester Rd. with a telegram, & then came home. In the afternoon we went into High St again; Nessa having lost some whalebone, which she bought in the morning. Then we extravagantly had ices in the Park, & then home again at 4. Nessa had to try on the dress—At about 5, who should arrive but Adeline & Ralph V.W.! on their way through London to Brighton. Then on top of them came the Milmans, whom we had invited to tea. We insisted upon A & R having tea alone in the drawing room, which they did. We had tea together downstairs. The Ms. stayed till about 7. Planted flowers after dinner.

Wednesday 16 June

Finished 2nd vol. of Carlyle’s Cromwell. Nessa went to the studio. I sat with Stella. I went out down Gloucester Rd. & bought Marmalade for Georgie’s breakfast—& then came home again. In the afternoon, I walked part of the way down Queens Gate with Nessa—she had to walk to the studio because of the wind—& then bought a basket of strawberries at Aldouses new fruit shop, for Jack’s dinner tonight. This is the 2nd & last day of his exam—poor creature!

After tea Nessa & I went out with Aunt Minna & had ices—very bad—in the Park. Nessa went back early, & to dress for this blessed dinner party. Mrs Dickson & Marie [servant] had been hard at work at it all day, & the last stitch was put, just as she was ready to put it on. She looked most beautiful, so all these fittings & bastings have been worth something after all—she went down with a Senior Wrangler. Her first dinner party.

Thursday 17 June

We went over to Stella in the morning, & discussed the great dinner. It was very long, & rather heavy & dull. Nevertheless the Senior Wrangler a Mr Cowell, behaved decently—did not eat with his fingers, or talk once of Euclid, & as for Nessa’s looks! Crikey!!! They got back about 12—We went out with Emma Vaughan to try & get Jubilee Medals for the workhousers at Porters but could not. After lunch we sat with Stella for some time & talked of Adeline’s engagement. Jack told Stella of this the day before yesterday, but as she thought that one was not supposed to know she could not talk to us of it. Poor Ralph is a very calf—according to her—& also, I am afraid, to us—However they are very much in love, & there is a chance that he has genius. In the afternoon we went down Gloucester Rd to get some oil for Stella, & then came home again. After dinner we planted the East end flowers in the garden—I have a beautiful new box for my bedroom—Began 3rd vol. of Cromwell.

Friday 18 June

Nessa went to the studio. I sat with Stella for some time, & then went out down Gloucester Rd. to get some things for Peggies tea this afternoon. Flying from the Gloucester road horses (a particularly vicious & ferocious race) I went to Queens Gate, & met Nessa coming back, & walked home with her. After luncheon we went over to Stella, who goes down stairs today, & then I stayed here at home, & Nessa bicycled off to her —— studio. Bella & Peggy came about 4, & we had tea at half past. Bella very moral, & severe. Peggy rather naughty & amusing. Played games with her till about 6. Then they went which was rather a relief. A letter from Miss [Frances] Noel to ask us to go to tea there tomorrow, & a letter from Dorothea (the 2nd) to say that she will come here on Wednesday—to stay till Friday or Saturday.

Saturday 19 June

We sat with Stella for some time. Then I went & gardened a little. Nessa put flowers into her boxes, & I read, so that we did not go out. In the afternoon at about 4, we started to get to dear Fanny [Frances Noel]. This was no easy proceeding, but wonderfully we managed it—though the green bus cost 3d. instead of the lawful 1d. We had tea with the delightful creature—a delicious cake, & a remarkable kettle (wh wd not boil). She talked to us, & screamed with laughter—exactly like Madge. We came home again (having had one short glimpse of old Baldwin in the hall). Poor Mrs B. scuttled away into the kitchen when she saw us. We lost our way rather coming back, but found it again. But it is a pilgrimage only to be occasionally undertaken!

Sunday 20 June

We did nothing all the morning. Very hot & thunderous. Gerald away at the Phippses—at Knebworth, & Georgie lunching with the Humphry Wards—Harry Stephen came to lunch with us, which put the house keeping department rather to its wits end—but a leg of mutton was produced from the servants dinner, & things were tided over. Afterwards, at about 4, Georgie came home, & proposed that we should go to the Albert Hall & hear the concert—So we went, & met Susan Lushington coming back—who had just been shouting God Save the Queen with thousands of others, & was, she said overflowing with Loyalty. We came in for the old Hundredth to which we stood up & hats were taken off—various men[?] also & others joining in the hymn. Most exciting—such a crowd of well dressed beings, I never saw. H[arry] went early in the morning to W[estminster]. A[bbey]. service with Edith D[uckworth].

Monday 21 June

Adrian’s exeat began. Nessa went to her drawing. At about 11 A. & I went round to 24, & saw Stella. But she had had a slight attack of pain again in the morning, so that we did not stay more than a minute. I stayed in in case they wanted anything, & A. went to see the camps in the Park. In the afternoon Dr Seton came & Nessa & I went over & talked for a long time to him. He says that she will be well soon; but that they will not be able to go away on Saturday. N. went to High St, & father A. & I sat in the gdns & then came home. Thoby arrived at about 5.30. We had dinner at 7, & at 8, the bus, a red Hammersmith, came round. We drove to the Stanleys in Harley St, & then went through the streets with them. A most wonderful dreamlike sight—the streets as bright as day—crowded—with stands full of people. St James St—hung from side to side with electric lamps, & festoons of stuff. Home about 11.30. The night wd have been most red letter—if it were not for Stella—

Tuesday 22 June
Diamond Jubilee Day

Today was the great Diamond Jubilee Day, very cloudy & still early in the morning, looking almost showery if such a thing dared happen. We got up at 7.30, & had breakfast rather past 8, starting in the carriage Nessa Thoby & I, at 8.30. We got to St Thomas’es Hospital at 9.30, & watched the soldiers & the crowd for some time. There the crowd was not allowed on the [Westminster] bridge, & we had nothing but lazy volunteers to look at. So we strolled in the hospital gardens & had ices: then we waited again. The procession was to pass at 1.30, but—at 12.30 a Captain Ames, & the sailors appeared & then followed troop after troop—one brilliant colour after another. Hussars, & Troopers & Lancers, & all manner of soldiers—then Indian Princes, & at last carriages with the little Princesses & the big ones—Finally the cream coloured ponies were sighted: every one stood up & waved: shook their pocket handkerchiefs, & stamped their feet—the Queen was lying back in her carriage, & the Pss. of Wales had to tell her to look up & bow. Then she smiled & nodded her poor tired head, & the whole thing moved on—But there was a great deal more to come—& it was not over till almost 2.30. Then luncheon & then home at 4.30. So ends the Jubilee day.

Wednesday 23 June

Stella had a very good night, & was better in the morning. Georgie & Thoby & Nessa went in to see her. Thoby went away at 10. Nessa went to her drawing though it was hot enough to boil a lobster, & I had a succession of respectable dull visitors, & answered the invariable “How is Stella?” till I hated poor Stella & her diseases. The heat was really dreadful, & A. & I were too old & exhausted to go farther than the chicken walk. In the afternoon A. & I went down & met Nessa at the studio, & went with her to Davies where we had very delicious ices, & then to Thompsons where we had more ices—finally home. I bought myself a most delightful blotting pad, which I am now using, on the way. Dorothea arrived at about 6.30, as fat as a grampus, & blowing like that animal—terrible in her heat, & perspiration; & general cowlike stout appearance. Father gave me Arnold’s History of Rome. Finished the 3rd & last vol. of Cromwell.

Thursday 24 June

Marie, coming in to call me at a quarter to 8 this morning, gasped for breath & rushed to the window, flung it open, & then apologised for her behaviour. But really your room was so hot, that I could scarcely breathe. So for the rest of the day it remained, relentless, thundery sunless heat—

Adrian took a parcel of 12 books to a 2nd hand bookstall in the Brompton Rd. & got 3s. for them! Nessa & I tried to go for a walk, but paid a visit to At. Minna on our way up the street, & spent the rest of our time there. Seton came in the afternoon, & Nessa had a long & interesting talk with him. Stella going on flourishingly. Then we went out & had tea in the Park—in the midst of which, the heat suddenly burst into a thunder storm, with plentiful drenching rain—the most rejoiceful sight on earth. It sank into the ground almost audibly & the air immediately got cooler. We sat under the trees for a little & then went home—cool for the first time.

Friday 25 June

Nessa went to her drawing; & Adrian went back to school. So I was left alone. Dear Dorothea started off somewhere to buy herself a hat. I went for a solitary walk in the gardens, which were misty & quiet, & then came back again—After lunch Broadbent & Seton came to see Stella. Their report most satisfactory—every thing going on as well as possible. Nessa went to her drawing, & I for another solitary walk in the gardens.

I can hardly write this—that never to be mentioned without anger—Marie having thrown my beautiful pen out of the window on to Dorothea’s balcony—consequently producing severe dislocation of the nibs, & general shock to the system, wh. it will probably never entirely get over. After tea read my Roman History, a terrible plough, & talked to Dear Dorothea. Nothing to fill up this blank with, & therefore out of consideration to the enfeebled powers of my beloved it shall be left empty—

Saturday 26 June

Nessa & father went off early in the morning to Clifton. Dorothea & I, after a virtuous morning spent in reading solid works, went to De Vere Gardens to look for a Spanish Dictionary for Rosamond. We explored the house, which is huge, & deserted, & hideous. Then we went to buy D[orothea] some stays & gloves—This done in High St. we sat in the gardens & talked learnedly, & then came home & had lunch together. Gerald came for me at 2, & we got to Paddington at about 2.30. We got to Windsor at 3—(impossible to write sense or any thing else with this pen) & saw the end of the Eton & Winchester match—Eton beaten by about 50 runs. Then we went into the Chapel, & had tea in Mr Vaughan’s garden—near the river. Then walked up & saw the castle, & looked down on the Thames winding beneath us—oh dear—before this we had narrowly escaped death in a Canadian canoe, which threatened to collapse us in to the water at every movement—After the castle we had dinner at Laytons—then home at 9. This is a very bare record—but no room for more.

Nessa & father got back at 10.30.

Sunday 27 June

In the morning we stayed in & did nothing. It was very hot, & steamy, & disagreeable, & the History of Rome did not prosper. After luncheon we three went out in the gardens where we came across Lady Kay, & Miss Nina Kay. We hurried on to another destination near Kensington Palace! Then Nessa went home, & A. & I took a constitutional round the Serpentine. Came home; Nessa & D discussed “religion & the gospels”, while D. was undressing, & then went & had tea with Jack at 24. After tea I read religiously; & A did his preparation & ran his new engine—Nessa did hers also, & I was the lazy boy of the party. After dinner Father recited as D asked him to—Maud, & the Spanish Armada—Georgie had to work at night, & Gerald went to At. Minnas.

Monday 28 June

Dorothea & I went for a long tramp round the Serpentine—D. talking loudly & vehemently all the way. We came in about 12.30. High St. & the top of our road are all decorated most brilliantly with masts from which hang lines of coloured flags—red bunting & flags & lamps of every colour & description. The schoolchildren were already all crammed into the gardens behind the railings, & a crowd was forming all along the road. Nessa came back at 1, & we took kitchen chairs & placed ourselves by At. Minna, at the top of the road. In a moment, behold the life guards marching down High St—then came the Queen herself passing directly in front of us; & the other Royal Princesses. I have never seen her so close or so well in my life, & that without any fuss or trouble—only mounting a kitchen chair. In the afternoon D & I went to the R[oyal]. A[cademy]. together—terrible—then to an ABC & home in a dreadful crush. Nessa went out to the Lushingtons after dinner. Home 12.30.

Tuesday 29 June

Nessa went with Georgie & Gerald to Mrs Young’s where she is going to have 2 dresses made. D & I took our usual vigorous tramp in the gardens—discussing Ds. poetry which she gave me to read! Then we lost Jerry & had to walk back in the broiling sun to find him. After lunch we went out to buy things in High St, & at 4 the great Dorothea departed—Nessa & I promptly started forth to Thompsons to recover ourselves by eating ices. Nessa went to her first ball—or dance at the Freshfields—They started at 11, & did not get back till 3 A.M. Nessa most triumphant, having danced all the night with George Booth, Fred [Maitland], Dermod [O’Brien] & various others—Looked most beautiful—the envy of all the other fine ladies.

Wednesday 30 June

Nessa went to her drawing—but the rest of the morning is rather vague—I went in to Stella for the first time, & found her very well—then afterwards I may have bought strawberries, or I may have taken a solitary walk in the park, both of them the usual employments of mine nowadays—but this diary has been neglected (owing to the disablement of my pen) & I cannot remember—Anyhow in the afternoon I bought strawbs. at a shop in Church St. where I went with Father—Afterwards we sat in the gardens a little & then home. He lent me 12 vols. of Froude’s History of England, which he has not room for. I am to read ’em some time—at present they have a whole new bookshelf for themselves—Finished 1st vol of Arnold’s Rome.

Thursday 1 July

In the morning we went over to Stella—then we started forth on some of our—Nessa’s—multitudinous shoppings. But Mr Gibbs kidnapped us half way up the road, & we had to go with him to Cornwall Gdns & to take his birthday present to Nessa The Three fates to be farmed at Soars—At last however he let us go, & Nessa trundled off to High St, & I into the gardens. In the afternoon we took 3 large baskets of strawbs. & two packets of sugar to the old ladies at the workhouse—We ladled them all out into equal portions, & left them happily chewing. “The most delicious of fruits” one old creature informed us. My squirrel dear Jacobi is the most delightful creature that ever was. We pursue each other round the room!

Friday 2 July

Nessa to her studio as usual—I went round to Stella, who begins to get up now for luncheon, & then I took my solitary wanderings in the Park. After luncheon, when Nessa & I were sitting with Stella, the nurse was suddenly called away to see Gerald; who had gone to his office rheumatic in the morning, & came back still more so—not able to look up; & all hunched—The nurse rubbed him; & he went back to St James St. I went to Cooper’s for some medicine for him; & to Dr Seton’s. Dr Seton came at 6.30 & gave him more medicine, & said he was to be rubbed etc. Georgie away playing cricket. Reading Shirley—We have taken to walking in the streets after our nightly game of whist—now that it is nice & light. At. Minna went to Scotland for the summer.

Saturday 3 July

In the morning we sat with Stella. Nessa went secretly to Mrs Young’s with Gerald; whose rheumatism was still rather bad. I sat the whole morning with Stella who was very flourishing. After lunch father went to see the match at Westminster, old Ws. v present Ws. Nessa & I went to Baker St. to see the little [Charles] Leaf. Lotta away, so we played with the baby. He has grown very big, & very fat—with a large mouth—very like his papa, though with Lotta’s eyes. Came back & had ices at H[erbert]. & J[ones]s. Adeline [Fisher] came about 7.30, with Adrian, old Ws—beaten. Charlie [Fisher] out first ball. Broadbent & Seton came to Stella. Reported most satisfactory. Georgie back from playing cricket—Gerald away with the Gordons.

Sunday 4 July

We stayed in & did nothing all the morning. I type wrote Dorothea’s poems which arrived last night—very long, watery effusions, with which she is going to invade the magazines. In the afternoon Adeline asked me if I would like to go with her to Lambeth to hear her Ralph’s concert there. I dutifully said yes; & we started at 3, meaning to get there at 4. We waited at Gloucester Rd station for 20 minutes, & no trains came—then Adeline suddenly looked at the clock, * behold it was 3.30, so she said, we cannot go—It takes an hour to get there—where-upon, she burst into tears on the platform, bewailing her fate, cursing the trains, & altogether miserable. Now comes the wonderful part of this history. I felt a practical rush of ideas enter my brain—Let us take a hansom—Let us fly this station. We fled. A hansom to Victoria; another to St Barnabas Church—We arrived at 4—exactly—Thank Heaven gasped Adeline—but it did not begin until 4.30! Heard the music—very good. Home at 7.

Monday 5 July

Nessa went to her studio. Adeline & I went down to St Alban’s Rd; to see Emmie. Here I will tell a little story which properly belongs to last night—Emmie behaved very badly to Adeline, made cutting little remarks to her face, & still cuttinger ones when her back was turned: which made Georgie very wrathful—However the evening passed off calmly enough—father reciting—till it was about 10.30. Then Emmie said that she & Charlie must go home. Georgie tried to prevent her, but she insisted—Then he lost his temper—‘I think you behave very badly indeed to Adeline’: he said; ‘I cannot think how you can do it!’ Upon which Emmie burst into tears (a repetition of yesterday’s platform scene) says ‘beast beast, I hate you!’ etc. etc. etc—All the bawling & squalling & tears & attempts at peace making, & Adeline’s sneers, & Charlies roars of laughter, cannot find room here—But even this morning, Emmie was very dismal, & tearful—I sat in & Ralph came to lunch - Adeline terribly irritating. An unselfish martyr—oh for arrows & stones to throw at her! I sat with Stella most of the afternoon, & had a very nice long talk—Then Nessa & I went out & had ices—Finished 2nd vol of Hist. of Rome.

Tuesday 6 July

Nessa & Adeline went to Mrs Youngs to try on the great dresses. I sat with Stella, & then went into Gloucester Rd. & bought strawberries.

Goodness knows how the rest of the day was spent—I have got into the bad practice of not writing my diary for two or three days, & then I have forgotten what has happened.

So the afternoon must dissapear [sic] unaccounted for.

Began 3rd & last vol. of Rome.

Wednesday 7 July

In the morning Nessa went to the studio, & I went down Gloucester Rd. with Stella’s medicine—In the afternoon I sat with Stella for some time; & talked to her about various things, & Adeline’s anger “So bad for Stella to have Ginia always with her!” & then Nessa & I went out & had ices at Hills. We have tried all the ice selling shops now, & have come to the conclusion that Herbert & Jones is the best. Came home & found Ralph V.W. here. Adeline insisted upon bringing him down to have tea with us, & made every one very uncomfortable. Fred [Maitland] came to dinner. Finished & despatched Dorothea’s poems.

Thursday 8 July

Nessa, Adeline & Georgie went to Mrs Young’s about those terrible dresses. How I wished they were finished once & for all, & never to be mentioned or thought of again! I stayed in all the morning—I sat with Stella for a little; & then came back here. Mia [MacNamara] appeared, & embraced me affectionately three or four times. In the afternoon we went down to Dr Coates with a note from Stella to come & look at Jack’s leg, which has an abscess—This diary has been woefully neglected lately—what with one thing & another—Improvement must be made! (hear hear).

Friday 9 July

Nessa went to her drawing. Adeline departed for Gloucester at 8.30 to meet Ralph at Paddington & travel down with him. I went in to Stella, but before I had been there 5 minutes that old shop keeper Mrs [Edmund] Hills came & turned me out. Then Emmie came with her squirrel—a most unattractive stolid little beast compared to my Jacobi—who escaped, by the bye, last night, & was found on top of the curtains in the morning. In the afternoon Georgie, Nessa & I went to Vincents Square to see the W[estminster] & Charterhouse great match. Found Emmie there. We watched it a little, & then went back to High St. & had ices & bought things. Nessa & Georgie went to the Booths dance—Nessa beautiful in her blessed Mrs Young—. I read & wrote in bed till 1.30.

Saturday 10 July

Went to Lords for the Eton & Harrow. Nessa in her Mrs Youngs dress. We went in to Stella & showed ourselves. Home about 6. Georgie went to stay with Cousin Addie.

(This is where I left off writing my diary—I fill in these days from memory, this afternoon Tuesday July the 27th.)

Sunday 11 July

I was very miserable & achey with rheumatism? We sat out in the gardens in the morning. In the afternoon we did nothing. It was baking hot. I went in to see Stella; she & Jack were having tea together. She lying on the sofa & he in the big chair beside her. I sat at her feet & soon Jack went out of the room & we talked together.

Monday 12 July

I spent the whole day with Stella, as she would not let me go out because of my aches—I sat with her, & we talked of everything—The same in the afternoon—She was sitting up, & very well & happy. I can remember no more of the day.

Tuesday 13 July

In the morning Nessa & I went over to Stella. I was rather worse, & had a little fever—We spent the morning with her. She was in her dressing room, writing letters—In the afternoon father wanted us to go out with him, & she wrote him a letter to say that I was not well enough. Nessa went out shopping & she lay on her bed; I sat in the big chair & tried to go to sleep. I got very hot; & Dr Seton came, & made me go to bed. She sat with me for some time.

Wednesday 14 July

I hardly saw her all the morning; she did not want me to talk, & would not come in to me. But in the afternoon, after Dr Seton had been, she sat by me, & then Nessa came, in her Mrs Young dress she was going to Kittie’s concert—Stella gave me my tea & then she went to give father his. Nessa came back, & we all sat together in my room & talked.

At night I had the fidgets very badly, & she sat with me till 11.30—stroking me till they went.

I slept in Jack’s dressing room, just opposite their bedroom.

Thursday 15 July

She came into me before breakfast in her dressing gown to see how I was. She only stayed a moment; but then she was quite well. She left me, & I never saw her again.

She did not come to me all day long, & I guessed that she was ill. I asked Nessa & she told me that Stella had had a little pain—but they thought the worst was over; & she was already better.

Friday 16 July

Stella was better the nurse said. But it was not true—she was ill all day—Broadbent came & saw both of us, & said she was getting on very well.

She called out to me often through her open door, & asked how I was, & I shouted back.

Saturday 17 July

She was better they thought today. She had hardly any pain. Again she called out to me & said she was very comfortable.

Young Broadbent came to see me—she wd. not let him see her, & said I might be carried across home. I had not been out of bed yet, but Georgie lifted me up, wrapped in Stella’s fur cape. She called out “Goodbye” as I passed her door—

Sunday 18 July

I was put to bed in the spare room opposite Nessa’s with Nurse Carr to look after me—a nurse they had got for Stella but whom she did not like. We heard that Stella had had some sleep.

Williams & Broadbent came in the afternoon—& decided to operate—Dr Seton was ill with sciatica.

They operated on her at about 7 o’clock. At half past we heard that it was successful, & that everything was as satisfactory as possible.

Monday 19 July

At 3 this morning, Georgie & Nessa came to me, & told me that Stella was dead—

That is all we have thought of since; & it is impossible to write of.

Tuesday 20 July

[This page is blank.]

Wednesday 21 July

Stella was buried by mother’s side in Highgate.

None of us went—

Thoby & Adrian are both here, & will stay till we go to Painswick.

Thursday 22 July

I forget what happened. I came downstairs, & went out in to the gardens about this time.

Jack has gone back to his work; he comes every evening when they have gone down to dinner, & later at 10.

So we see a good deal of him. Madge [Symonds] telgraphed to ask if she should come, & we answered yes—

Friday 23 July

Forget what happened. Charlie & Adeline who have been staying at Aunt Minna’s (she has come back from Scotland) went away to Brighton.

Saturday 24 July

Jack took Nessa & me to Highgate to see Stellas grave. We went by bus & tram. The grave is next mother’s—near you as you go in. It was covered with dead flowers—We sat down & talked for a long time, & then came home & had tea with Jack on his balcony. Madge did not come as she might have done.

Sunday 25 July

Georgie found the telegram to Madge in his pocket, so she has heard nothing. We decided after a long time to write & ask her to come either in a week or in September or not at all. Will’s [Vaughan] being at Painswick complicates matters. We looked at Stella’s clothes & jewels, & Jack gave us some.

Monday 26 July

Various people keep on coming, & our time is well taken up in seeing them. Kitty especially has been here; & we find that we never knew her before. Cousin Mia has gallantly held aloof—Alas - others have not been so generous. Helen Holland discusses Religion for hours with Nessa—At. Minna & Mr Gibbs haunt the place—Sally Norton & Flora Baker are here a great deal—It is all very strange.

Tuesday 27 July

Packing going forward in all earnestness. Lizzie almost frantic with strapless boxes, & other nightmares. However at nightfall Sophie is despatched with the greater part of the boxes—Shag into the bargain.

I went for a walk (I insisted on the walk) with Gerald. Dr Seton came & saw me & Adrian & reported very flourishingly on us.

Wednesday 28 July

At last! At a quarter to three our huge omnibus piled inside & out with luggage of every description—Nessa, Father & I squeezed in in the corners, started for Paddington.

We arrived after the usual journey at Stroud at 5.45, & drove in the Painswick Bus (a wonderful conveyance) to the Vicarage, about 3 miles from the station. A large very dear comfortable house, with a really nice flower garden, & lawn, & fountains, & green turf. Looks in to hills & woods.

Thursday 29 July

I woke up to find a hot what in London would be a stuffy sunless day—here there was scorching sun, & no breeze to carry it away & no houses to shelter us. Father proposed walking up to the Maitlands at the Horsepools, so Nessa & I & Georgie went with him. Thoby & Adrian departed on their own private excursions. We started through the churchyard with its 99 yews, then down a steep hill of some length, & up a still steeper & longer one. At the top was the horsepools. We sat with them, & a monkey & 2 dogs, for a time, & then came home again. It was broiling, & the hills were very severe exercise. We stayed at home all the afternoon. I attacked Froude again (I have the 12 vols here!) We played cricket after tea. Georgie & I had a very nice long talk in the garden after dinner.

Friday 30 July

Broiling hot again. Father, Thoby, Adrian & Georgie went for a walk—Nessa & I stayed at home, & I attempted to pick flowers in the gardens, but the sun was so violent that we had to go indoors. In the afternoon we lounged about the place; I botanised with Father, & the rest played tennis. Two letters came for Nessa—one from Helen H[olland]. & Meg Booth—Helen splendid—but I have no room to reproduce her choicest bits. After tea we went for a walk—up on to the top of a hill where there were moths & butterflies. Jane Breed is here. Reading Alton Locke, Villette, Froude, & P[ot]. P[ourri]. from a Surrey Garden.

Saturday 31 July

Another boiling day. Georgie & Thoby went out bugging in the morning, & Father & I went down into the valley, at the bottom of the garden, hunting for plants. Only a few common ones were found, so we came home. Father & Fred [Maitland] went out for a walk after luncheon, Thoby bugged, & at 4 the pony cart came round to take us to Stroud. I can not even attempt to do justice to the said pony cart in this short space—but it might have carried Miss Austen, when the roads were “dirty,” & have excited to remark. We got to Stroud about a quarter to 5, & shopped. The train was an hour late arriving at 6.20—We drove back again after tea at the George, Gerald & Jack biking. Home about 7.40.

Sunday 1 August

Read all the morning. Nessa painted a little down at the bottom of the garden, & Georgie & Gerald played tennis. Adrian mended—or attempted to—his eternal puncture, & Thoby set the Marbled Whites which he caught yesterday. In the afternoon Thoby & A. went out bugging, & the rest of us (except Gerald who went to the Horsepools) walked to Painswick Castle—a Roman camp, on the downs about 2 miles away. Coming back we discovered Mr Bellows, the Quaker—Father & Georgie stopped to talk to him—We came home & found Will [Vaughan] & Fred. Played cricket after tea -

Monday 2 August
Bank Holiday

In the morning Thoby Nessa Jack Georgie & I went to Painswick Castle, a roman camp on the down about 2 miles away to look for mythical Large Blues. Needless to say, they were not forthcoming. However we strolled about, with the bluest of skies above us, & the fir trees—scenting the air strongly. Down in the valley there are gipsies, & blue straight pillars of smoke—One ought to be a poet if one lives in the country—& one is? what—In the afternoon we did nothing. The sun is overwhelming. Father & Fred went out for a walk. Will came & we played cricket after tea. Jack & Gerald went back at 6. We have had one or two nice long talks with Jack. Finished 1st of Froude.

Tuesday 3 August

Broiling again. Father pursued me up to my room—my refuge & hiding place, & took me out for a walk in the valley: where the sun’s rays are concentrated to the utmost of their power. Oh for London & the shade of High St.! In the afternoon (I lost my temper terribly in the morning,) Nessa took me for a walk. We sat in an orchard & talked. Most calming. I can write no more. This pen is terribly infirm.

Wednesday 4 August

Read & lounged about all the morning, which was as usual terribly hot. I began David Copperfield to Nessa—despairing of the novels which this house produces. She is painting from the summer house. In the afternoon Father went to the Horsepools, & I read to Nessa. After tea Thoby & Georgie went to practise cricket, & Nessa & I bought some cotton & things in the town. Baking, baking baking. Madge wrote to say that she will come the first week in September.

Thursday 5 August

Read to Nessa & loafed about in the morning—In the afternoon we went out with Will to the wood on the hill opposite. After a dreadfully long hot walk we got back to find a telegram from Bean to say that he arrives at Stroud at 6!

Thoby had tea quickly & went off to meet him. A red headed conceited youth; very Cliftonian & talkative.

Friday 6 August

Stayed in & read all the morning. It began to rain & was showery off & on all day. In the afternoon the males (we are the only females in the place) went for a walk; & we sat in & read, & then went into the village, where we bought sundries

This pen grows worse & worse—After we developed—The others practised cricket. I talked to father.

Saturday 7 August

I read to Nessa in the morning. In the afternoon we went with father to the cricket ground to see the match between Painswick & Cheltenham—Cheltenham were all out for 9 so that Painswick beat them in the innings. Georgie made nothing. Gerald came.

The Beck things arrived. Here is a list with their prices if we want them again.

Album 6.6. Negative Album 2.6. Byrds printing frames is each. Masks 6. box of Eastman’s solid paper 144 pieces 1.10. The size of our Frend is 3½ x 2 .

Sunday 8 August

The number of Gerald’s bank notes are—

K 33 61914

K 33 61913

K 33 61912

K 33 61911

This wondrous announcement is occasioned by the gift of £20 each which Aunt Minna has just made us. Georgie has to give us £40 more. These are £10 notes.

Rained all day.

Monday 9 August

Forgot what happened.

This poor diary is in a very bad way, but, strange though it may seem, the time is always so filled up here, that I get very little time for diarising—even if I wished to, which I don’t having taken a great dislike to the whole process. But the “great work” goes on steadily, & has received Nessa’s approval. I may read Vanity Fair & Jane Eyre.

Tuesday 10 August

We stayed in all day expecting Florence [Maitland] who came with Will & Georgie at tea time. Thoby & Bean went to Cheltenham. It has been very stuffy, with occasional showers of thundery rain. Wrote four letters, & printed photographs. Froude gradually proceeds. I am in the 3rd volume now.

Wednesday 11 August

Father went for a walk with Fred in the afternoon. We went out to catch a mythical Comma in the valley but no traces of the creature were to be seen, & Nessa & I came back & shopped in the village—After tea the young men (?) went to practice, & Marney & Emma arrived to pay us a visit. We photographed them. We developed after they were gone. Some rather good ones of the bridge etc.

Thursday 12 August

Father went out with Fred again. Georgie had broken his bicycle & wanted to have it mended in Stroud. So Bean Adrian & Nessa & I drove in the pony cart down to Stroud—a wonderful drive—the pony trotting almost all the way: Bean viciously whipping him up. Came back at about 6.

Played cricket after tea; against Thoby Adrian & Bean. They just beat us.

Friday 13 August

It was fine in the morning but rained steadily after luncheon & till tea time. After tea Georgie Nessa Thoby & I went for a bicycle ride—the first since we have been here, along the Cheltenham Road.

Began Adam Bede.

Saturday 14 August

We—Nessa Adrian & I, went down to Stroud in the afternoon in the pony chaise. Thoby bicycled. Georgie & Bean had gone down before to play a match at Stroud. We stopped, & then had a very good hurried tea at a bakers, then met the 5.29—fairly punctual. Brought Sally [Norton] up in the trap—She is very nice very pretty—rather podgy. Jack came also.

He bicycled from Swindon.

Sunday 15 August

In the afternoon we went out for a walk after the rain had stopped to the castle. After tea Jack Nessa & I drove down to Stroud, to get his bag which he had left there.

Solomon [horse] woke up for the first time in his life.

Monday 16 August

In the morning Sally had a telegram to say that Dick arrives in London today—so in the aft. at 3, we drove her down to Stroud in a dogcart from the Falcon. She will come back again.

Jack left early in the morning.

Tuesday 17 August

In the afternoon we went for a walk to an old house which Nessa painted, a house with lions on the gate posts, & a sun dial—Thoby jumped into the moat & floundered about there on the way home.

Adeline & Ralph came & were rather irritating—Such a couple never was seen!

Wednesday 18 August

Alas Alas alas; this diary has been entirely neglected—today, I must confess, is Tuesday the 24th & I utterly forget what has happened on all these days. It has been raining disgracefully & we are alone for a wonder.

Thursday 19 August

The same thing must do for today—Rain goes on raining; I read David Copperfield to Nessa & Froude to myself. I am in the 5th volume.

Friday 20 August

Rain—

Negotiations with Charlie & Cordelia [Fisher]. Finally a telegram to say that Charlie arrives tomorrow by the 2.30.

Saturday 21 August

Adrian went down to Stroud in the morning, & had lunch there, met Charlie & came back with him at about 3.30. We started for Stroud together (Nessa & I) to meet Jack. Had tea there together, & met him & drove up together. He looks better I think, though very thin. We had a long talk this evening, in the summer house; raining hard.

Sunday 22 August

We went out in the afternoon to the opposite hills—

Today is the day on which Stella & Jack were engaged a year ago—

Father stormed to Georgie; which was very unhappy—Things are all in a tangle—One can do nothing but sit & grin. Talked to Jack in the summer house—How different—

Monday 23 August

In the afternoon Charlie Nessa & I drove to Stroud to meet Boo [Cordelia Fisher].

She came by the 5.29.

We had tea in Stroud, & drove up afterwards—

Off with Adrian all the time. Rather mad. Began Father’s life of Fawcett.

Tuesday 24 August

Nessa & I bought 2 penny buns—They looked so beautiful & shiny in the post office window that I could not resist them, & we sat in a large long grassed field & talked—

Boo & Adrian went to Stroud about his bicycle—& did not come back till 8.30.

Nessa & I walked round & round the tennis lawn after dinner (our custom nowadays) & discussed every thing.

It is hopeless & strange.

Wednesday 25 August

The first really fine day we have had since our first week here.—Hot still, & blue sky.

At 2.30 we started for Gloucester. We saw the cathedral there (I have quite forgotten how to write)—& came back about 7.30. Gerald here after his Droitwich—As fat as ever—Dissapointing [sic].

Finished Adam Bede.

Madge writes to say that she will not come as it would mean an extra journey, & they are all coming to London at the end of October—She has not been well also. So after all this letter writing etc. nothing comes of it!

Thursday 26 August

Rained most of the day. In the afternoon we went out for a most grizzly walk. Cordelia discussed family politics at great length—Most perplexing.

Friday 27 August

Rained.

We went out somewhere I think; but I quite forget.

Saturday 28 August

Thoby Georgie & Charlie went to play cricket at Chalford & we meant to join them there. But when we arrived in Stroud it began to pour. We read in the library, had tea, & met Jack. Drove back with him. Rain Rain Rain.

Began 6th vol of Froude.

Sunday 29 August

Forget what happened.

Very rainy as usual.

Monday 30 August

Nessa & I drove down with Jack & Georgie to Stroud before breakfast. Gerald came down after us on his bicycle Georgie having left his bag behind.

Tuesday 31 August

In the afternoon we went down to Charlie Watkins—the bagman in the valley, & behaved disgracefully.

Wednesday 1 September

August over at last thank goodness! Never was there such a long month. If only September too were.

Rained steadily all day long.

Thursday 2 September

The rain it raineth every day—there is no more to be said. Reading Nicholas Nickleby, Froude, the French Revolution, & Letters of Wm Cory.

Charlie & Cordelia went.

Friday 3rd September

Thoby & Gerald went to Symonds Yat; had a most disastrous day—missing trains etc. & finally caught nothing—Jacobi escaped last night. He was seen skipping in the trees this morning but refused to come down. And now he has quite dissapeared [sic].

The first fine day for weeks—showery & very cold, but there is sunshine & blue sky.

We went to the Horsepools with E[rmengard]. & F[redegond].

Saturday 4 September

Blowing hard & icily cold.

Jack bicycled from Swindon & got here about 6.

Sunday 5 September

Rained all day, except for an hour in the afternoon when Nessa & I tramped forth for a long muddy walk.

Monday 6 September

Jack & Gerald went. In the afternoon we went for a long walk with father—We lost Shag & Thoby, & were altogether furious.

Tuesday 7 September

Thoby went to Circencester to meet Harry [Fisher] & bicycle back with him. We drove down to Stroud to get Thoby a present—a knife; & then came back—Harry & Thoby came about 6—Began Jane Eyre.

Wednesday 8 September

Father & Harry went for a walk in the afternoon. We went to Charlie Watkins, but fell into the stream.

Thursday 9 September

We went with Mr Bellows to Birdlip—had lunch there, & afterwards saw a Roman Villa.

Friday 10 September

Thoby went to Stroud with Harry.

We lounged about.

Georgie came.

Harry went.

Saturday 11 September

Nessa & I drove to Stroud to meet Gerald—Bought pocket knifes—

Cashed my first cheque for £1.

I have 19s. left.

Jack arrived at dinner time. The question is “Shall we go to Corby or not?”

A great question.

Sunday 12 September

In the afternoon we went to Painswick camp.

Debated the Corby question, & father gave his consent—So that we must consent to [sic]—I told Jack, after tea, that we had made up our minds to go—He was pleased, I think, so that it was obviously the right thing to do. At any rate it is settled which is a great relief.

But it will be rather a rush—clothes getting etc.

Monday 13 September

They went on the usual early train.

I forgot what happened the rest of the day. Great clothes discussions between Nessa & me—Much alack—What solitary females we be!

Tuesday 14 September

Again I forget—This poor diary is lingering on indeed, but death would be shorter & less painful—Never mind, we will follow the year to its end, & then fling diaries & diarising into the corner—to dust & mice & moths & all creeping crawling eating destroying creatures.

Wednesday 15 September

Nessa & I went to Stroud to get some stuff.

Old G. W. had the pony cart so we had to tramp on our feet. Bought things there, then took the bus back to Painswick.

Thursday 16 September

Forget again what happened. It is fairly fine now, & we have taken a good many photographs.

Friday 17 September

[The Maitlands came to tea. Took photographs of them.]

Reading the 9th vol of Froude—Thackeray, Jane Eyre, Rob Roy. We stayed in all day, & had a fire in Nessas room, over which we sat & toasted. Letter from Margaret M[assingberd]. Wrote a clothes letter. Georgie came.

Saturday 18 September

Nessa & I drove dear Solomon down to Stroud for the last time. The good beast has much improved since we came here—today he beat all records, & trotted with hardly a stop. We have broken him of several walkings up hills, & he is far more sensitive to the whip & the voice. We got there in half an hour. We had tea at our usual shop, & then went & met Gerald & Jack. The William Darwins came down by the same train. We drove back again in wonderful style. Jack looks very well—Gerald terribly fat.

Sunday 19 September

In the afternoon Fred came & went out with father. Georgie, Nessa & I took some photographs of the churchyard & ducks. We saw a kingfisher down on the stream, & a moorhen.

Father dined with the St Clair Baddeleys.

Monday 20 September

They went back as usual. I forget what happened afterwards.

This is most disgracefully kept!

Tuesday 21 September

Thoby went in the afternoon. Nessa & I drove him down to the station—He forgot all his bags—his cheque book & his topper—We had tea in Stroud, & then came back—our last tea & drive with Solomon. The Darwins and Baddeleys came to tea afterwards.

Wednesday 22 September

Raining—drizzly & misty & cold. Packed all the morning—& put back books & rearranged the house generally—then at 2.15 we drove off to Stroud, & departed.

Goodbye to Painswick & all its glories—the beauteous Solomon, the villagers, the churchyard, & all the sights & sounds that we have become used to all this long long eight weeks. Got home about 6—1 think. G & G to meet us at Paddington—

Very strange & unhappy. My room all done up new.

Thursday 23 September

Nessa went to Mrs Young in the morning. Adrian & I bought a stylograph for him in High St., & then walked in the gardens. Everything very hot & stuffy. “The air tastes” as A. says mournfully.

Afterwards when Nessa came in we went to Margaret Ms & she took us to various shops & we bought innumerable clothes. In the afternoon ditto, so that all our buying is finished in one day—

Friday 24 September

In the morning I dragged Nessa & Adrian (I am fearful of Aunt Mary—so I put it in this way to show my utter selfishness) to Regent St. & there with terrible agony & excitement chose a nib for my pen.

When we came home I found it was too fine—oh the despair of that moment! So after lunch Nessa & I planned to go & get another one. We went over to Jacks & he asked us to go with him to Kitty’s to choose papers for 14 V[ictoria]. G[rove]. At 4.30 we got away, bussed to Meeks in the Br[ompton]. Rd & got setting boards—then on to Regent St, where we boldly demanded another nib, & got this most exquisite & delightful one.

Saturday 25 September

We started from Euston at 11.30. Gerald came with us to the station, & saw us provided with papers etc. We had lunch in the train & also tea. We got to Carlisle at 5.30—& then took the train on to Wetheral. We arrived at Corby at about 6. Mrs Hills & Susan Lushington here.

Terrible long dinner. Everything grand & strange. Jack unhappy. Old Hills silly. Mrs Hills talkative & rather unpleasant, Susan talkative and very pleasant—V.S. and A.V.S. silent & miserable.

Sunday 26 September

We walked by the river, which is most beautiful—tearing over stones & splashing & leaping & thoroughly enjoying itself—with Jack in the morning. The rest went to church. Susan & Mrs Hills out for lunch. After lunch we went out again with Jack—everything is miserable & lonely. Why did we ever come—Jack does not very much want us. Susan played after dinner which was nine.

Monday 27 September

We went to Lanercost church in the morning. It is about 10 miles off. Mrs Hills took a wreath for Christopher Howards grave. Why should she do such things? We have heard all about him from her, which S[usan]. does not at all like Oh Mrs Hills Mrs Hills what are you made of? After tea we walked down the river to see Jack & Mr Hills fishing—But they caught nothing. Sugared after dinner & got a mouse & an M.D.

Tuesday 28 September

Went to Gretna Green in the train with Jack, & bicycled back to Corby.

Susan went.

Wednesday 29 September

Went to Carlisle with Mrs Hills.

Thursday 30 September

Went to Gilsland to the Roman wall with Jack.

Friday 1 October

Watched Jack fishing. Went to Tuddenham. Took photos. Lord & Lady Morpeth to dinner. Rather awful.

Saturday 2 October

Came home—Thanks be to the Gods!

This week has been most awful & oppressive. Mrs Hills is—. Mr Hills—. Jack shut up, everything grand & uncomfortable. I am thankful to be back.

Sunday 3 October

We went to see Mr Gibbs who is not well, with Gerald. But he was out.

Monday 4 October to Saturday 9 October

[These pages are blank.]

Sunday 10 October

Adeline & Ralph are being married as I write.

Monday 11 October to Friday 15 October

[These pages are blank.]

Saturday 16 October

Today is Saturday the 13th of November. What a skip! But one day is so like another that I never write about them. Grey cloudy cold days. Jack stays with us till 14 V[ictoria]. G[rove]. is ready.

I go to King’s College, Nessa to her studio.

Life is a hard business—one needs a rhinirocerous [sic] skin—& that one has not got.

Sunday 17 October to Tuesday 9 November

[These pages are blank.]

Wednesday 10 November

Lamoureux

Thursday 11 November

[This page is blank.]

Friday 12 November

Hamlet

Saturday 13 November

[This page is blank.]

Sunday 14 November to Friday 27 November

[No pages were made out for these dates.]

Saturday 28 November

I see that my pages give out—wh. is just as well. But if anything worthy of writing down happens before 1898, it shall be entered in one of the remaining pages.

The Fishers are in France for the winter. Gerald is going, in January, to start a publishing firm of Duckworth & Co.

Maeve M[acNamara]. is to be married in February—a thousand notes of exclamation.

Sunday 29 November to Saturday 11 December

[No pages were made out for these dates.]

Sunday 12 December

My studies have almost come to an end. That great carcase of a Dorothea has been here for a week—ended up with a long discourse upon our duty to our Aunts—ought to stay in Godmanchester—Oh what a remarkable set of heavy pompous worthy & intelligent creatures.

Rains today. Poor Mr Gibbs dying—

Monday 13 December to Friday 31 December

[No pages were made out for these dates, although a note about 25 December was made at the end of the journal (see below).]

Saturday 1 January 1898

I write this morning what would more fitly have been written last night. But my diary has ever been scornful of stated rules! Here then comes the “Finis” What a volume might not be written round that word—& it is even hard to resist the few sentences that naturally cling to it. But I will be stern. Here is a volume of fairly acute life (the first really lived year of my life) ended locked & put away. And another & another & another yet to come. Oh dear they are very long, & I seem cowardly throughout when I look at them. Still, courage & plod on—They must bring something worth the having—& [illegible] they shall. Nessa preaches that our destinies lie in ourselves, & the sermon ought to be taken home by us. Here is life given us each alike, & we must do our best with it: your hand in the sword hilt—& an unuttered fervent vow!

The End of 1897.

Saturday 25 December
Christmas day

Madge came on the 31st December.

Discussed the Universe!

Meeting of Entomological Society.

L[eslie]. S[tephen]. president

G[eorge. H[erbert]. D[uckworth]. Librarian

J[ulian]. T[hoby]. S[tephen]. Larva Groom

A[deline]. V[irginia]. S[tephen]. Secretary Chairman & Treasurer.

A[drian]. L[eslie]. S[tephen]. not on the Committee.

[]

Warboys 1899

warboys summer holidays 1899

Warboys. 4 August 1899. (our first night)

This being our first night, & such a night not occurring again, I must make some mark on paper to represent so auspicious an occasion, tho’ my mark must be frail & somewhat disjointed. However we came here sober [?] & with not much bother of spirit—save that twice we had to change—It must be owned—let us hope that future pages will fully contradict the statement—that the country thro which our train passed was dull in the extreme. A flat expanse of field, cornfield—turnip field &c stretched unbroken on either side, till we gave up looking out of the window. Then we came to Warboys Station, found our primitive Omnibus, & drove off the mile to the Rectory. It had been raining all the afternoon (the first rain I have seen for weeks) & the sky was all clouded & misted as for steady showers. However as we drove along the sun shot a shaft of light down; & we beheld a glorious expanse of sky—this golden gauze streamer lit everything in its light; & far away over the flat fields a spire caught the beam & glittered like a gem in the darkness & wetness of the surrounding countries. Let me remark that the village of Warboys runs along the street for a mile to the gates of the Rectory; there are few shops, but we passed 4 windmills (attractive shaped things) & Nine Public Houses. Room for Dorothea’s band of Hope here! The house & garden I cannot describe now; how we snorted the air with our soot sated nostrils, & revelled in the country damp, cool & quiet. Our sensations were so exquisite, so crowded & so jubilant that music alone could keep pace with them or express a tenth part of their vividness. Black marks on [Text ends here. The following page is missing.]

5 August
The Second day at Warboys.

If I go on at this rate methinks I shall soon have finished this book—but the fever will not last—I know the disease well. Today was blazing hot; & we loafed in the garden all the morning; & glided about the Pond in the Punt. I, with the help of 2 string bags, carted my belongings from the red Butterfly box to my room, & there settled to try & read Greek. Ignominious failure! Three times N. interrupted me, & the last interrruption called me to drive to the Station in the Pony Cart.

P.M. A. & N. held a grand cleaning of the Punt. They lashed it to the bridge, overturned it; filled the bottom with tolerably clean water, scrubbed it round with a duster, & then bailed out the water. In the evening the bottoms were laid with rugs so that someone might lie at full length—others sitting at the ends to use the oars.

Oh dear—the style of this work ought to undergo a radical change. All these details will swamp me in time. I find I write with greater ease than I talk sense or nonsense; writing would stand me in good stead were I struck dumb but being gifted with a tolerably facile speech the gift or possession is hardly to be envied.

The London train at Ramsey Station was late—Bank Holiday on Monday, & it was 7.30 when we started back for Warboys. I shall care little for the tastes of this world if the skies are still so glorious.

Such expanse & majesty & illuminations I have never seen. Pure air for fathoms & fathoms & acres & acres; & then such lavish cloud conglomerations; there is a vast space of blue into which the gods are certainly blowing wondrous cloud bubbles. The God babies methinks are amusing themselves.

The air was cold, & the roads desolate as we patter along home. What a beautiful world we live in!

Sunday 6 August

Somewhere in one of his essays—or letters—Mr. Lowell describes his triumph when his thermometer touched 98 in the shade; the heat was then but a delicious exaggeration of sunshine; but when he met his neighbour, &, mopping brows, he learnt that the rival thermometer had touched 100—then the heat became disgusting & oppressive, & he returned home a broken man. If I lived in the country I should become a weather prophet or something of the same kind. This thermometer rivalry sounds so delightful when one reads the page in a London bedroom, the thermometer a good 96 in the shade. I often wonder whether, if I lived in the country all the year round, I could think as pleasantly as these country writers write. “I love the country best in books.” I can never bring myself to believe in the felicity & simplicity of a country life. These speculations though belong to a cold brained critic in London. I am, at the present moment (the emotion is fleeting I know, so I must chronicle it) in love with a country life; I think that a year or two of such gardens & green fields would infallibly sweeten one & soothe one & simplify one into the kind of Gilbert White old gentleman or Miss Matty old lady that only grew till now for me inside the covers of books. I shd. be writing notes upon the weather, & I shd. turn to my diaries of past years to compare their records—I shd. tell how I ‘bedded out’ certain plants, & record the condition of my rose trees. I shd. perhaps, have seen a swallow on the wing for other climates, or have discovered covered a sleepy martin presumably preparing for his winter sleep. I shd. propound my theories as to migration & hybernation. Alas, tho’, as a Cockney I have no sound country education to go upon. I must blurt out crude ecstasies upon sky & field; which may perchance retain for my eyes a little of their majesty in my awkward words.

7 August

Monotony, so methinks, dwells in these plains. Such melting gray of sky, land & water is the very spirit of monotony. I lay in the punt, which has been padded with rugs & cushions & read a sleepy preaching [?] book; the diary of some ancient Bishop written in flowing ancient English that harmonised with this melancholy melodious monotony (what an awful sentence!) of bank & stream. Activity of mind, I think, is the only thing that keeps one’s life going, unless one has a larger emotional activity of some other kind. Ones mind thats like a restless steamer paddle urging the ship along, tho’ the wind is fallen & the sea is as still as glass. I must now expound another simile that has been rolling itself round in my mind for many days past. This is that I am a Norseman bound on some long voyage. The ship now is frozen in the drift ice; slowly we are drifting towards home. I have taken with me after anxious thought all the provisions for my mind that are necessary during the voyage. The seals & walruses that I shoot during my excursions on the ice (rummaging in the hold) are the books that I discover here & read. It amuses me to carry on the comparison, tho’ I admit that written down it has something absurd about it. What a force a human being is! There are worse solitudes than drift ice, & yet this eternal throbbing heat & energy of ones mind thaws a pathway thro’; & open sea & land shall come in time. Think tho’, what man is midst fields & woods. A solitary creature dependent on winds & tides, & yet somehow suppressing the might of a spark in his brain. What nonsense to write!

This is a melancholy country. I went this afternoon with A. into the church opposite our gates. It is the church of St Mary Magdalene, & it was built in the 14th century. The churchyard is full of sombre tombstones, with queer carvings & angels heads sprawling over date & name & all. There are many graves that are nameless; & I was startled to think that I was walking over some ancient dust forgotten & undistinguished from the hillocks of the field. The graves rise in swelling mounds side by side all along the bottom of the churchyard.

After dinner we sit on our little terrace raised so as to overlook the garden & pond. The Pole star bright over our heads, & long black clouds floating in the pale night sky. A bat swoops down, & circles over our heads. What attractive creatures they are! & a moth suddenly looms across the lamp lit drawing room windows. T. rages [?] & jumps for his net which, having been surreptitiously used by A. to drag the depths of the Pond is naturally not forthcoming.

My pen, I must add, is rather unwell at present, & the aspect of this book distresses me. I cannot write prettily when my pen scratches & all joy in the art is lost to me. I love writing for the sake of writing, but when my pen is enfeebled it becomes a task & bother to me. The domestic Mary “a nice girl, but very empty Miss” investigated the mechanics of my pen before we came away, & something of its divinity has fled since.

Let me supplement this—today the 2nd of September [1899] after many trials writing to London four times over this morning [Text ends.]

8 August

A curate was leaning over the gate while Adrian rode Reshnel [?] around the field. So G[eorge]. ran & asked him to come in; which he did & shook hands all round. N. complained to him of the Huntingdonshire harvest which has robbed us of butter, milk, cream & an extra helping hand. All the women he explained refuse to do anything but work in the fields. They wont go out to service, or stay & mind the home. At 7 or 8 in the morning they start forth in armies, with their huge sun bonnets & cotton aprons; & toil in the corn fields till dusk. This harvest over, there is the autumn harvest of potatoes. All the land that was Fen is now cut up into innumerable cornfields. We beheld the harvesters this afternoon as we rode back from Ramsey. On one side of the road was a corn cutting machine sweeping down the standing corn; & on the other a field where corn lay all cut; & here & there women & boys were all tramping thro’ it heaping the corn into stooks. Even a little child not more than 4 years old was harvesting with its mother. It wore a bright scarlet frock, & trotted behind with a small armful of gleanings. One of the women harvesters was I should think almost 70 with white scanty locks, & a wrinkled sun burnt wind scourged face. There is some picturesque element in this country—harvesters, windmills, golden cornfields. Everything flat with blue haze in the distance, & a vast dome of sky all around. The Nortons came in the afternoon, American to the backbone. Buckets full of talk & talk after dinner till I crept up here & stretched my limbs.

[Undated, 1899]

Ramsey (or Ram’s Island) a market town on the borders of the Fens. Long Street call the Great Whyte runs north, & the other, the High St. runs East & West. The town became infected by the plague in the year 1666 by means of a piece of cloth sent from London to be made into a coat for Oliver Cromwells cousin Colonel Cromwell, who, with the tailor & all his family, also 400 people, died of the plague.

There was once a Benedictine Abbey founded in 969 by Aelwin, Alderman [Ealdorman] of all England & Lord of the East Angles, & dedicated to S.S. Mary & Benedict. The Abbey which had the distinction of being “mitred” stood at the upper end of the town, & occupied a tract of solid ground, 2 miles in length, surrounded by the dense & melancholy marshes & being inaccessible save by water, the beautiful perpendicular gate house & Refectory remain. Queen Isabella was here a fortnight in 1309. At the Dissolution there were 9 monks, & revenues estimated at £1,315; the modern mansion, the seat of Lord de Ramsey D.C.L. Lord of the Manor & Principal Landowner.

Sexton: David Sanders

This interesting observation (the first sentence or two illegible because of the curious ink, which I think of adopting for my permanent ink) is taken from our only guide book to these parts—Kelly’s Huntingdonshire Directory; whose first object is to detail the shopkeepers; a little information however, such as I have written above, is intermixed.

9 August

This afternoon the Curate appeared, & took us over his church. He was rather ignorant, & had to answer “I don’t know” to a good many intelligent American questions. The two things of beauty are the Norman Arch, & the Font; also a third almost hidden though by a modern erection—the ancient windows, whose long brass latches are picturesque though doubtless inefficient. The curate who is the first live specimen I have ever shaken hands with, turned out to be a good fairly lively human being. Evidently his life in this place year’s end to year’s end is not enlivening; he absorbed American stories & finally produced jokes of his own with a delight born of much Parish small beer. He told a few parish stories, which I reproduce because I have nothing else to say. How Arthur Beehive, a parishioner met the Holy Ghost in the churchyard. This he declared saved him; & he told the story afterwards over his beer in the Public House. ‘But ’ow did ’e address you Arthur?’ said one wit. Were it Bee’ive, or Sir, or Harthur?’ Also the Curate said, rather wickedly considering his calling, that his place is strictly a Baptist community. Every Easter children & adults together take total immersion—in the pond near the Station!!

We are to go & see Mrs Noble the baker who is a “character.”

This line ends a verse on a tombstone here—

“He sleeps & all his well—”

The H. partly obliterated by some more lettered clerk or stonemason.

10 or 11 August

We had the Curate to dinner last night, which deserves full mention because I have never sat down to a meal with a curate in my life, nor had one, to my knowledge in the house. My interest was awakened in him very easily; I had a dim idea of mythical curates, dwelling in the pages of novels, & receiving satire at the hands of all wielders of Pens—but the fact that a Black Coated gentleman could be a Human Being & not a Hypocrite (outwardly at least—I cannot answer for the condition of the Curate’s morals on the strength of one dinner party) was quite strange to me. This young man seems to be largely a person of intelligence with a rather peculiar gift of humorous sarcasm. Occasionally his judgments & stories are bitter; but on the whole, he is merely good humoured & muscular. This would all be explicable; or not needing explanation; but the surprising thing is that he is a Clergyman. He is moreover a Ritualist, which I take to be a strict creed; & yet the first 5 minutes of his talk with us he declared that the only thing that made life in the country bearable was rabbit shooting. What a life he must have—here especially. He makes no secret of his dislike to Mrs Way, which he conveys to one in cumbrous irony; this lady evidently rules her husband, & would like to dictate to the Curate; certainly thinks him a most inferior creature—she is a kind of small Mrs Proudie. The young man however not having much in common with Mr Slope their hostility is open—expressed on his acerbic side, I expect, by sarcastic civility; & on Mrs Way’s by nagging [?] pretensions; the young man (I know not how to spell his name) has been here 10 months—nine months too many he says. The people about here are a peculiar race. So imbedded are they in their own delving pursuits, living lonely self contained lives, with a few strong religious opinions that only serve to narrow their minds, that a stranger is in their eyes a most contemptible creature. They are solid conservatives, & resent a stranger or an innovation in their lives. The Schoolmaster, who has been here 25 years, says he still feels out in the cold; they do not look upon him as one of themselves. The curate is a man of humour but humour has a hard battle of it in such surroundings. Nevertheless he told his Curates Recollections with great glee—jumping & jerking in a peculiar way he has when something amuses him.

Well, the state of mind of a man like this must be odd. Better lodging in a London slum than gossiping over here—

I write distractedly. Vanessa is wandering round the room looking for a pair of her most valuable scissors, which she declares were last seen in this room & now have apparently vanished altogether. She insinuates, with some pertinacity that I know where they are, & that I might rouse myself sufficiently from my eternal writing to tell her. I strive vainly to remember the points of the great scissor question & tell her with an assumed briskness & confidence that I placed them in a certain china pot only yesterday. An interval of quiet supervenes—then Oh—Goodness—no scissors forthcoming—Where on Earth can they be—

12 August

Adrian & I have a habit now when the days are so hot, of keeping our exercise till after tea, & then of going out on our bicycles for an hour’s hard riding. Besides picturesque advantages, this country possesses the solid one that all its main roads are excellently made, well hammered, smooth & free from stray stones. This country, too, does not hamper the cyclist by any disturbing Hills; you may ride & ride & ride without ever being forced to dismount & push yr. bicycle up a hill, or without ever having the delight of raising yr. feet & spinning downhill. This evening we went along the road which crosses the railway at the station by a Bridge & then runs as straight as a yard measure for a good 4 miles. These roads have their beauties to the eye of a Fen lover, but a Bicyclist is a mechanical animal. Not until we dismounted did we appreciate the scenery. On both sides it was dead flat—the road was slightly raised in the middle & runs through the plain like a straight white thread. This is the midst of the old Fen country. This solid ground on which we stood was, not many years ago, all swamp & reed; now indeed there is a pathway, & on either side grow potatoes & corn, but the Fen character remains indelible. A broad ditch crosses the Fen, in which there is cold brown water even in this hot summer. Tall rushes & water plants grow from it; & small white moths, the inhabitants of the Fens, were fluttering among them in scores when we were there. I wish that once & for all I could put down in this wretched handwriting how this country impresses me—how great I feel the stony-hard flatness [?] & monotony of the plain. Every time I write in this book I find myself drifting into the attractive but impossible task of describing the Fens—till I grow heartily sick of so much feeble word painting; & long for one expressive quotation that should signify in its solitary compass all the glories of earth air & Heaven. Nevertheless I own it is a joy to me to be set down with such a vast never ending picture to reproduce—reproduction is out of the question—but to gaze at, nibble at & scratch at.

After all we are a world of imitations[;] all the Arts that is to say imitate as far as they can the one great truth that all can see. Such is the eternal instinct in the human beast, to try & reproduce something of that majesty in paint marble or ink. Somehow ink tonight seems to me the least effectual method of all—& music the nearest to truth.

13 August

Tonight & last night we began our Sugar campaign—Thoby rather, the rest of us have rather departed from that profession. Sugaring must be explained; briefly, it means that the trees at intervals are smeared with a decoction which is known as sugar, but which contains other ingredients. Rum, & thick black treacle mixed is one prescription & that most often adopted as being independent of the cooks kindness & the kitchens fire; the other is a compound, beer, & treacle (black), boiled up in some obliging kettle that, preferably, has no other vocation. An innocent reader (I suppose a reader sometimes for the sake of variety when I write; it makes me put on my dress clothes such as they are) having got this far still remains in the dark as the use of such a preparation. This then, is the most scientific way of catching moths. Indeed there is no other, unless you are an eccentric entomologist, & possess lighthouses, & sliding windows & such extravagances. [ ]A flannel rag is soaked in this compound; & then pinned to the rough bark of a tree; cascades & waterfalls of the alluring sticky brown mixture pour down to the grass & emit to the nose of a moth a faint & seductive smell. The moth roaming melancholy thro’ damp woods suddenly snuffs a strange & delicious odour; rum! he follows it & reaches the fountain head, where perhaps he finds a dozen of his cronies already seated. He promptly folds his wings & settles on one of the veins of precious liquid, his proboscis in a second is imbedded in a rich drop, & in a few minutes he is imbibing like an opium eater. This is from the moths point of view—man, the hunter, starts forth in the following procession. Firstly of course the leader of the expedition, the renowned J[ulian]. T[hoby]. S[tephen]. He wears a large felt hat, & muffled round him is a huge brown plaid, which makes his figure striding in the dark most picturesque & brigand like. In his hand he carries a glass jar—of which more anon. 2ndly appears a female form in evening dress, a shawl over her shoulders, & carrying a large stickless net. 3rdly the lantern bearer (none other than the present writer) who lights the paths fitfully with a Bicycle lamp of brilliant but uncertain powers of illumination. Twice this evening was the whole expedition confounded by the sudden extinction of the wick, which when extinct sends odours sufficient to attract or stupefy all the moths in the garden. This lamp when alight sheds an oval disk of light on to the backs of the van & occasionally slides like a will-o’-the wisp to explore the neighbourhood. 4thly Ad[rian]. L[eslie]. S[tephen]. a supernumerary amateur of no calling who takes little interest in the proceedings & is proficient in the art of obscuring the lamp at critical moments; 5thly Gurth the dog member, whose services are unrequired & unrewarded; being the first to investigate the sugar & having been convicted of attempts to catch moths for no entomological purpose whatever. This then, is the procession that starts forth in single file about 9 o’clock in the evening. About six trees have been sugared in a circle round the garden, fronting the “miniature lake” & ending on the tennis lawn. Each tree was examined carefully in this way. The leader, the net carrier & the supernumerary advance in the dark, the lanterns disk of light being for the moment cast on one side. Perhaps it illumines a group of sleepy hens, who feel baffled & perhaps rather silly at the sudden dignity cast upon them. Then the leader calls out—Advance slowly—& the lantern bearer brings the light to bear gradually on the tree to be examined. The lantern generally advances till the full light is brought to bear, & then every cranny in the bark—every blade of grass at the foot is searched for possible occupants. In almost every tree we find one or two moths, drowsy but constantly sucking, who flutter feebly to the ground if disturbed, uttering a slightly tipsy protest at the indignity. The commonest moths—such as Yellow Underwings & Dark Archers—will return night after night the whole season through; so have we perverted the morals of moth land. A temperance preacher would find the text for many sermons here then—the Devil in disguise—with his beer pot empty in one hand—his poison pot in t’other—but let such moralisings be reserved for the preacher’s mouth. The leader, should one of his guests strike his fancy, uncorks his poison pot, gently taps the specimen on the nose—the cork is shut—& the moth, his brain dazed with the delicious fumes of liquor, sinks into an all embracing arm. Death might come more painfully. The other night, as the light cautiously advanced, it was abruptly told to halt by the leader, a Red underwing was on the tree. By the faint glow we could see the huge moth—his wings open, as though in ecstasy, so that the splendid crimson of the underwing could be seen—his eyes burning red, his proboscis plunged into a flowing stream of treacle. We gazed one moment on his splendour, & then uncorked the bottle. I think the whole procession felt some unprofessional regret when, with a last gleam of scarlet eye & scarlet wing, the grand old moth vanished.

[Undated 1899]

I was one day walking in some fields near Warboys when someone called across a hedge to me—‘Can you tell me the right way to Warboys?’ It happened that the road ran at some little distance, & though of course I could point the direction, I found it somewhat difficult to describe accurately the exact path by which it could be reached.

So as I could well shorten my walk & do the wondering voice a good turn, I called back “if you will come over here, I will show you, as I myself am going that way.” The voice seemed to hesitate, & then I heard a creaking of thorns & twigs, as though some body were being thrust relentlessly through a very fine specimen of the hawthorn hedge.

18 August Warboys Distractions

Yesterday we attended a garden party at the de la Prymes, which deserves a page to itself—so stupendous & remarkable an event was it. But I have no time for that; I can only give a short account of todays diversion—our visit to Godmanchester. This has been long planned; innumerable trains correct & incorrect have been delved from the depths of Bradshaw for us by obliging persons; today the great event took place. Our visit was to be made for the purpose of going on a water party down the river with Hester Ritchie & a terrible oppressive gathering of Stephens. The morning dawned cold cloudy & with sudden onslaughts of driving rain. Our first excitement was a narrow escape of a missed train at Warboys. Behold Nessa—whipping the pony frantically—one hand grasping her hat—the wind & the rain in our faces, only 6 minutes in which to cover the half mile to the station. Off blows my hat—halt is called but [illegible] eager to lose no time jumps off & is rolling on his back. However this diversion over soon, & we reached the station in time for the train which was late. We sank into our empty third with a sigh of relief & comfort. All around were gray flat fields with the rain swishing over them & the pollard trees sobbing in the wind. “I believe,” said I “that it is quite impossible for us to miss a train even if we tried to.” As I said this I almost qualified my statement in my uneasy desire to propitiate the Gods at the last moment; but I resolved for once in my life to be bold; & flaunt my good luck in the Gods faces.

Our journey from Warboys to Huntingdon is one of those not infrequent train journeys in this part of the world which are a splendid triumph for the bicycle. You can bicycle with comfort & pleasure into Huntingdon under an hour. It takes just the same to do the 8 miles in the train; & the fares moreover for the return journey of 3 people amount to 7s.6d. There are 2 changes at Somersham & at St Ives; & at the first of these stations we had to wait 10 minutes & at the 2nd 5. The first—Somersham train we waited for & caught comfortably. At St Ives we had to cross various platforms to reach the one which, the guard assured us, was the Huntingdon platform. We had only 5 minutes at this, so that we lost no time in running across & getting into position for our 3rd class carriage. We waited; no train or sign of a train; so we investigated the machinery of a sweet machine, which, proving defective in every branch, we retreated to the weighing machine. So 20 minutes passed; then we became uneasy & captured a paper boy—“When does the Huntingdon train come in?” “Oh at 2.15” said he—No, no, said Vanessa; I know there is a train at 12.43. The paper boy smiled somewhat grimly—The 12.43 has already been gone 20 minutes, Miss, said he—from the other platform.” We then had been intent upon the eccentricities of the sweet machine & the weighing machine while the train came in on the other side of us, took up its passengers & went on its way. It was now about 20 minutes past one. We ought to have arrived at 5 minutes past one—& we should arrive—when? I must say that when our faculties are effectually though rudely aroused by some emergency like this we take a practical view of the case. We spoke little, but decided in a few moments that a horse & cart must be found in St Ives capable of taking us with no delay to our Uncle & cousins at Godmanchester. We went to the County Arms; but this had long ago given up keeping traps we were told; then to the Robin Hood whose trap was just gone out; then to the Ramping Lion Inn, who did not possess a trap, & then to the Fountain—who did possess a trap—which trap could be at our service in 10 minutes. So we sat down in a little parlour which smelt of wine—the Inn keeper came & sat with us to beguile the time. He was a young man, overflowing with good nature & talk. Before long he told us, what I guessed as soon as I saw him, that he was a stranger in these parts, & finds them terribly dull. On Mondays he said, we have a market, & then there’s something doing, but on other days nothing happens ever. There never was such a sleepy place. He asked if we came from London—& when we said we did, he asked us many questions about London weather. Evidently a little change such as this was all the excitement he ever got. (This young man & the chemist are both people who testify to the character of the Fens & the Fen people. They are looked upon as strangers; & they on their side find the country, the people & the life terribly monotonous.) However soon our pony came to the door, & we started hastily. It is 5 miles to Godmanchester & it was now 25 minutes to 2. St Ives as we saw it driving through must just have one exclamation of admiration. It is all built along one winding cobble paved street. The river lies on the left; & St Ives crosses the river over the lengthy & beautiful bridge which has carried the name of St Ives into countries & towns far distant from Huntingdon. The last picture that I saw of it was in the Phillimores drawing room at the wedding party just a week before we came here. The bridge is an old stone bridge; its claim to distinction being that in the middle there is a square tower—for what purpose I do not know. (I will look up the History of St Ives & its bridge in Kelly, & write it on the opposite page.)

We drove our five miles through quaint old villages—such as I have never seen equalled. Everything is old—such antiquity grows depressing after a time; there is only one new house in Godmanchester, so we were told—a new house being a house that does not date back to the 17th century, & this house had to be new because the original old one was burnt down. We reached Godmanchester at 2.15 & found the party on the verge of lunch. To cut matters short we had lunch & then, in a sharp shower of rain, started for the boat.

R[osamund].—who loves the rich, is anxious to imitate their charms & flyaway manners. This, at least, is the explanation we have devised to account for her startling departure from all probabilities laid down by the principles of Heredity & Physiognomy. She is remarkably square, & short; her face is also square & short, with small vivacious eyes, & a nose which might without unkindness be described as ridiculous—so aggressive & impertinent in its squat littleness is it. She was once described by her father as a “winsome frolic.” This is a character that she trys[sic] to deserve. She is, I think tinged strongly with the usual Stephen solidity & cumbersomeness; so that her attempts to be winsome & frolicsome are oddly & ludicrously out of harmony with her appearance. A long course of preaching to the rich & to the youth of Godmanchester has made her manner to those younger than herself dictatorial. As we went down to the river she lectured us on the various objects of interest. I fear I did not profit.

The others are all Stephens without attempting to conceal the fact. They are immensely broad, long & muscular; they move awkwardly, & as though they resented the conventionalities of modern life at every step. They all bring with them the atmosphere of the lecture room; they are severe, caustic & absolutely independent & immoveable [sic]. An ordinary character would be ground to a pulp after a weeks intercourse with them. They are distinct & have more character than most of the world, so for that we will bless them & thank them sincerely. After we had rowed for an hour, the two boats came alongside & it was agreed to land in 10 minutes time. So we duly landed; & some of us sat down to make the kettle boil, & the others went for a dreary walk along the river brink. One remarkable sign of character in this race is that they are able to sit speechless without feeling the slightest discomfort while the whole success of the party they have invited depends on them. They acknowledge that it is drizzling & grey, that their guests are depressed & think the whole party a bore; they can bear the knowledge of these facts & support the discovery without turning a hair. I admire this as I should admire a man who could stand on the line immoveable [sic] while an express train rushed towards him. This kind of heroism however, is not calculated to smooth a tea party.

Picture us uncomfortably seated on a towing path; half the party in a ditch, the other half in long grass—a cold wind blowing, with occasional drops of rain—no glow in east or west—but a grey melancholy vista of sky. Sir Herbert fought wasps & eat bread & jam—then we slowly packed our basket & started back for Godmanchester. I sat in one boat with Lady Stephen, & Adrian & Harry to row. We kept well ahead of the others. The rain fell now with a vengeance. We got back however in time to escape an absolute wet throughness.

So ended a somewhat grim day of pleasure. This has taken me considerably longer to write than the whole day itself: such a relation of details is extraordinarily difficult, dull & unprofitable to read. However there is no end to writing, & each time I hope that I may make better stuff of it.

St Ives was anciently called Slepe & appears under that name in the Domesday book, but acquired its present name from Ivo a Persian bishop who, it is said, travelled thro’ the land preaching & at last came here, where he died about the end of the 6th century.

St Ives has a market every Monday for cattle, sheep & pigs; it was granted by charter of King Edward 1st about the year 1290. A great part of the town was destroyed in 1680 by a fire which broke out at the end of White Hart Lane on the 30 April in that year; the wind being very high, it crossed to the Sheep Market consuming everything in its way down to the waterside & laid in ashes houses belonging to 122 families.

Over the river is a stone bridge of six arches said to have been erected by the Abbots of Ramsey; two of the arches were rebuilt in 1716 by the duke of Manchester; near the centre, over one of the piers is an ancient stone building, the lower part of which was anciently a chapel but which is now used as a dwelling-house. The church of All Saints is an edifice of stone, in the Norman & Perpendicular styles &c. The register of baptisms & marriages dates from 1561, & burials 1563; one of the parish account books contains under date 1634 the signature of Oliver Cromwell then a resident of St. Ives.

Extract from the Huntingdonshire Gazette.
TERRIBLE TRAGEDY IN A DUCKPOND

A terrible tragedy which had its scene in a duck pond has been reported from Warboys. Our special correspondent who was despatched to that village has had unrivaled [sic] opportunities of investigating the details as well as the main facts of the disaster, & these we have a melancholy pleasure in now presenting to the reader. It seems then that three young persons—Miss Emma Vaughan, Miss Virginia Stephen & Mr. Adrian Leslie Stephen, niece, daughter & son respectively to the distinguished author Mr. Leslie Stephen were punting by moonlight on the night of the 23rd inst. The piece of water which has now such an evil reputation, is about a quarter of a mile long, broadening & narrowing considerably in its course. It is covered at all times by a carpet of duckweed—the green shroud alas of three young lives! Mr. Leslie Stephen & his family are staying at the Rectory for 7 weeks & one of the chief attractions of the Rectory garden is this sheet of water, which moreover possesses a Punt. On the evening of the ill fated 23rd of August the aforementioned young people—aged respectively 25, 17, & 15, planned to go for a moonlight punting excursion. That this excursion was undertaken solely for the purposes of pleasure is proved by the fact that 3 arm chairs have been discovered, in all probability the last seats on land or water of the young people so soon to meet their doom. Sounds of revelry & merrymaking are said to have reached the shore; the water was partially illuminated by the light of the moon, but in other places pitch black in the shade of the trees. The house lies at a short distance from the water, but the kitchen premises in which alone were those capable of hearing cries for help, or of answering them, are at the back of the house, so that no sound of revelry or of anguish told of the scene that was being enacted not half a mile away. But we must hasten our unwilling pen to enter in upon the details of the disaster. It is supposed then that the boat (or Punt) was rendered in nautical language, topheavy by the 3 chairs which we have already mentioned, & that an incautious movement on the part of one of the crew caused the whole thing to capsize with deadly swiftness & sureness.

How can we describe the scene that followed? The angry waters of the duck pond rose in their wrath to swallow their prey—& the green caverns of the depths opened—& closed—The cold moonlight silvered the path to death—& perhaps tinged the last thoughts of the unfortunate sufferers with something of its own majestic serenity. We know not if their end was promptly consummated, or if terrible shrieks & agonised struggles for air preceded the merciful rest that soon was theirs. Alone, untended, unsoothed, with no spectator but the silver moon, with no eye to weep, no hand to caress, three young souls were whelmed by the waters of the duck Pond. But why continue this harrowing tale? Let us resume our narration of well authenticated facts—no less harrowing than these indeed, but enacted in a more prosaic atmosphere. It chanced that 10 o’clock was the hour in which Miss Vanessa Stephen & Mr. Thoby Stephen the eldest son & daughter of the house were to return from a country visit that they had been paying. The catastrophe which we have just described took place about 15 minutes before.

The travellers unwittingly entered the Hall; the house was slumbering with no traces of fear or disorder. Calm servants brought coffee—the ordinary facts of the day were discussed; till it entered some one’s head to note the absence of a number of the family. A servant who was called, stated that she thought she had seen them last by the pond; doubtless they were about to embark on the punt.

Such an expedition would have been so ordinary that no further notice was taken for the time. As minute after minute passed & still no sign was made by the lost ones, the family became uneasy; they put on cloaks (for the night was now advanced to the hour of 11) & went into the garden. They shouted “Emma! Virginia!” “Adrian” addressing each by name several times in succession. Their voices echoed thro’ the peaceful scented garden; bats chirped in the hedges; moths flew past them, the stillness was awful in its intensity. The searchers came to the edge of the pond; but the moon had now risen to the summit of the sky & the surface of the water was quite indistinguishable from the fields on the other side. [ ] In the blackness the eye could discern no floating body—no capsized punt. Perhaps the darkness was merciful. Let us hasten on our tale. No one can bear to dwell on such a story as this; but it is one of the most gruesome & heartrending that ever had to weigh down

(This harrowing tale stops abruptly here; but a fuller & improved version will be found somewhere, which I have, with great labour, concocted for the benefit of Emma Vaughan.)

26 August

[We have just come back from an expedition to St Ives. T. N. & I drove there in the pony cart when the fury of the midday sun was over; & came back in the cool of the evening. Such an expedition always has charms for me, though I doubt that any other rational person would understand them could I—which alas is an impossibility—write them down faithfully.]

[Terrible misfortunes with my pen have interfered severely with the progress of this work. I now am forced to resume, but I do so reluctantly; & the next pages (few I trust) will be written with a steel nib!]

3 September A Chapter on Sunsets

A showery day with wind & watery clouds is excellent material for a sunset. A day of unclouded majesty, heat & serenity has a sunset of extraordinary magnificence of light so unapproachable by pen or paint that the author & artist prefer for the sake of their art the more attainable forms of cloud which can be likened by an imaginative person to castles & hills & rocky towns that have their counterpart on earth.

No one—save a poet—can express in words or paint the human significance & pathos of the suns unclouded rain of light—that makes the Heavens a delight & a difficulty to look upon. This land, as I have had occasion to remark before, is a land whose chief attraction is its sky. It is as if you were slung on a flat green board in mid air; with only sky sky sky around & above & beneath you. In this way alone I think that the Fen country deserves to be called one of the most beautiful countries in England. We have this moment come in from a sunset expedition—an account of which I must at once write down, or I shall never attempt it. Nothing methinks is so impossible as to describe a real sunset in pen & ink 3 days after that sunset has faded from the sky.

To begin then. Today has been windy stormy & raining—too great an abundance of water indeed to make a really grand sunset.

[Today] at 6.30 we started along the Huntingdon road, & the sun [was] then just entering the cloud belt on the Horizon. It sank so [slow]ly that we, who reproached G[eorge] for having brought us out [so] early, found ourselves in a minute in the midst of the performance. [So] quickly did the clouds catch the glory, glow, & fade, that our eyes & mind had ample work merely to register the change. The main features were three; a red ball of a sun, first; then a low lying bank of gray cloud, whose upper edges were already feathery & fixed to receive into its arms the impetuous descent of the sun god; thirdly, a group of trees which made our horizon; casting their arms against the sky; then fourthly, a cloud shaped like an angels wing, so—[drawing] The edge of this was [two illegible words] with fire - vivid & glowing in the east like some sword of judgment or vengeance—& yet the intensity of its light melted & faded as it touched the gray sky behind; so that there was no clearly defined outline. This is one observation that I have made from my observation of many sunsets—that no shape of cloud has one line in it in the least sharp or hard—nowhere can you draw a straight line with your pencil & say “This line goes so”. Everything is done by different shades & degrees of light—melting & mixing infinitely—Well may an Artist despair!

This was the central point of the sunset—but when our eyes found an instant to leave it there was another glory, reflected indeed but no less glorious & perfect of its kind than the original, all round. The afternoon had scattered gray clouds pall mall about the sky. Some of these were now conglomerated into one vast cloud field in the east & south—others were sailing like solitary icebergs. All bore on their way the imprint: the dying kiss—of the sun. The icebergs shone glowing pale crimson; the ice fields were broken up into exquisite blocks of crimson lint—a crimson which looked all the more delicate & exquisite that it is besprinkled with soft cold gray.

This was all over in 10 minutes—when we got back home the east & west were rapidly taking on the darkness of night. No gleams of crimson lived to tell that the sun had sunk.

Sept. 3rd AVS

4 September

[The first part of this essay is missing.] richness of the soil. No one unconnected with the labour & cultivation of earth finds a place here. This land is 20 feet below the level of the sea; elaborate pumping machinery & innumerable dykes drain the waters off the fields; it is rumoured that one of these great machines is now going out of order, the landlord who possesses it being unwilling to spare money sufficient for its repair. Should it stop work one day the water would well up over the fields & drown the Fen men. We met a Fen funeral coming back from Warboys, where the dead had been buried. There were about 5 bakers carts & a cart which had been used in carrying the corn, all filled with men & women dressed in deep mourning. They came from the east along the absolutely straight white road. We saw them crawling towards us with the sky heaping clouds & the wind blowing blue spaces around them. As we passed them, a boy looked down at us very sullenly & with the peculiar sodden depressed look that Fen men & women have; they were absolutely silent; & the procession went on to the heart of the Fen. I dreamt most vividly of this last night; how I looked into the womens faces; & the carts passed on & on into the [night?] they were going back to some strange dark land, & they said the only time they saw the light of day was when they came to Warboys to bury their dead. There is a curious feeling in this land of infinite sky: so that you can become a weather prophet lying on yr. back in the Fen, & observing the cloud batallions [sic] floating far away, & blue sky long before its warmth is felt.

Here I must turn round & retrace my steps on the other side of the page. Today is the 4th of September. I have already counted our days several times over, & we have hardly more than a fortnight left. We go back on Thursday the 21st of September.

An Old Curse [?8 September]

Today, for the first time since we have been here we woke to a grey sky & steady downfall of rain. All the morning it rained with short intervals of cessation. Nothing is more melancholy than a day spent indoors in the country, without sun, & on the other hand a day spent out in the rain has charms, which, in a dry summer like this, appeals to one more than an orthodox fine weather outing. So after lunch we three draped ourselves in our worst London clothes & cloaked ourselves to satisfy some mythical God who decreed that what [sic] feet are dangerous, & so set out on bicycles. The little children at the Lodge—terribly bored poor little creatures when their mother forbade them to take their great amusement of swinging on the gate, came to the front door of the cottage & looked at us with a mixture of awe & admiration. They thought we were defying some authority at home & that we should be made to repent afterwards. It was worth defying authorities had such existed, to feel the cool showers of rain trickling over our cheeks, & to smell the exquisite damp refreshed odours that arose from the road & fields. The Roads which are almost always deserted today showed not one single passenger. We had the County of Huntingdon to ourselves; beside an unknown acreage of air & sky. So we rode & rode & rode till the spires of St Ives were seen in the haze at the bottom of the hill. We had ridden over 5 miles in a little over half an hour, which, for such bicyclists as we are, encumbered too with heavy cloaks, & with the muddy road to hold back our wheels, we considered a creditable performance. The business which took us to St Ives was primarily to lay in a supply of an article of confectionery which is not attainable at [page damaged] […] we rode we debated the great question […]

[Page damaged] by a stroke of chance[?], proposed […] would be simplified if each of us bought what we had suggested (each having suggested some present for a joint present which had been promptly scouted by the other parties into agreement.) N. was to buy a bicycle lamp. A. a lens, & I some old books.

I had remarked when we were last in St Ives an old curiosity shop, containing old silver, old china & old furniture, & in a dusty corner seemed tempting bundles of old books. I cannot say what acute pleasure it is to me to buy books; & I shall be more than satisfied if T. has half my delight in his present. We rode straight to the shop, & were asked to wait for the woman to come back by a young girl who was somewhat dumbfounded by my demand to be shown old books in good bindings. While we waited we explored the shop & its treasures. A collection such as this mounts to my head like the fumes of some delicious wine; I long frantically to buy everything I see, & the most ordinary object is possessed with strange fascination for me. There were old candles of Sheffield plate, & delicate old china cups, with a little blooming[?] flower on a white ground & [paper damaged] cracks testifying to their age & worth; there were solid tables of black oak; wonderful inlaid cabinets of the most mellow mahogany; writing tables with endless scrolls of inlaid yellow wood & innumerable drawers, pewter plates & mugs & dishes, & old books. The old books were all bundled away in the background, tied into stacks so that examining them was a work of difficulty. The shop woman when she did come proved to be a thin nervous woman who knew my likes about her wares, but had much belief in their beauty & value. She was very much pleased to find customers, & asked us to take our time in looking over her things. The books she said were worth very little—any of them you can have for twopence, save 4 well kept volumes of Captain Cooks Voyages which attracted me, & which I finally bought as a present for Thoby.

Monday 18 September

Today we had our first fire. Such a statement, coming at the top of innumerable records of one hot moment following another needs some explanation. It must be found in the date that heads this page. Behold we are arrived at the 18th day of September, & in two days time we shall be back in London. This work has undergone so many changes since I last wrote that before proceeding to expatiate upon the 18th of September I must explain briefly the state of the case. The work heretofore was contained in one modest paper book, that fronted the world in a state of nature—naked but not ashamed. Boards it recked not of, now it boasts boards that amount to the dignity of a binding, being ancient tooled calf—the tooling resplendent today as a hundred years ago.

A sudden idea struck me, that it would be original useful & full of memories if I embedded the foregoing pages in the leaves of some worthy & ancient work, the like of which might I knew be bought at St Ives old Curiosity Shop for the sum of 3d. So one day a week or two ago, A. & I drove over there; & demanded old books; the womans husband scours the country for old books & old furniture of all kinds; & the result of his book finds—the modest libraries of country parsonages, sold by the widow to swell her slender purse—& chance outcasts of country gentlemens bookshelves are all bound rudely together like so many bales of wool, & stacked upon each other in dusty corners. This, me-thought, was favourable hunting ground for an acute bookworm; but our minds are not married to that pursuit; we were invited to explore & untie these bales which with some difficulty we did. Truly I think there was not much need of acuteness here![ ] They were almost all books of the last century & in that degree to be reverenced. But such an undesirable [?] [illegible] collection I have scarcely come across. A London Bookseller tries to redeem his eternal sermons in calf clothing all mildewed & ink stained by a few modern flashy novels.

A country book stall I find rakes in this class of work alone; not one book of the dozen I opened & turned down again could possess any interest for book lovers or any other human being. “—— On the World”—“Sermons on the Beauties of Nature translated” an old volume of Cowpers poems, all bescrawled & underlined, otherwise I might have bought it. Montgomery’s—a French grammar—several remnants of family bibles—the title pages torn away from the discretion of a public book shop—&c &c &c. At last I gave up glancing at the title page & confined myself wholly to the outward aspect of the book. I selected one, & A. one also; his indeed was slightly above the average—a good old copy of Xenophon, possessed by three generations of Hoskings, who studied it from the year 1705 at University College, Oxford father & son & grandson. My work—the present volume, attracted my attention firstly because of its size, which fitted my paper—& 2ndly because its back had a certain air of distinction among its brethren. I fear the additional information given on the title page that this is the Logic of the “Late Reverend & Learned Isaac Watts D. D.” was not a third reason why I bought it.

Any other book almost, would have been too sacred to undergo the desecration that I planned; but no one methought could bewail the loss of these pages.

LOGICK:
OR, THE
Right Use of REASON
WITH
A Variety of RULES to Guard Against
ERROR in the AFFAIRS of RELIGION and
HUMAN LIFE as well as in the Sciences
By Isaac Watts d.d.
london
mdcclxxxvi

Wednesday evening, 20 September

The day has come at last of which I have thought so much. It is my habit, on this the last page of the book, to sum up my judgment & deliver my verdict on the summer entire. But I feel that I have left unexpressed one phase of the summer, the last autumnal phase which, before I reach London, I want to write down.

Briefly then a change has come over the country since I last wrote. Then it was summer; now it is autumn. I drove back alone from St Ives on Monday, & felt the change each step of the five miles. Where the corn stood yellow & luxuriant, there are now fields of brown clods, which leave a decided impression on ones eyes when one sees the country spread beneath one. The still days of haze & blue distance are over; a sharp wind comes racing over the plain, & brown coveys of partridges rise from the stubble that yet stands. The summer wealth of cultivation is over; & the earth is preparing for her time of sleep & slow reproduction. The hedges all along the roads are laden with scarlet berries, which if nature shows in this liberality her intention of inflicting on bird & man a hard winter foretell months of ice & snow. The little brown birds rise in a cloud & go twittering high up in the air over the brown fields. There is that mellow clearness in the air, which softens & matures the land & the mens faces who till it. There is a look & feeling of melancholy in everything—that melancholy which is the sweetest tongue of thought.

“The woods decay—the woods decay & fall—

The vapours weep their burden to the ground”

This—if it be a legitimate quotation—expresses the next stage of autumn. At the present moment the change from summer is more exquisite; though as delicious as winter. Brown & ruddy colours have stolen across what was green & gold; a thousand delicate vivid hues have supplanted the prevailing luxuriant green in hedge & grass & leaf & plant. But for me the definite touch that has spelt autumn is the subtle difference in the air. It brings with it odours of burning wood & weeds; & delicious moisture from the shaven earth; it is cleaner & more virile; it is autumn in its youth, before decayed woods & weeping vapours have come to end its substance. We saw, what I always love to see when we bicycled to Ramsey (for the last time) on Saturday, weed burning on the hill. Look at the picture of Sir John Millais of children burning leaves & my theories will be revealed. I cannot attempt to explain in words the charm & melancholy, the colour & the interest, of the picture. We thought the hedge was burning; the wind blew the flames so high & such a distance. At moments there was only a smouldering white smoke, & then of a sudden the flames leapt out & lashed their tongues.

Well, the time has come to have done with Autumn & with everything else. I have spent the evening packing our Red box for its return journey; & now my room is swept bare of books & everything save what I carry in my own bag.

Tomorrow at this hour I shall be in my room in London! The roar of the city will be booming in my ear, which 7 weeks of Warboys will have made as sensitive as any country cousins. I write this down to see if it looks any more credible in pen & ink; but I cannot bring my mind to bear upon the change. I know that we are going on a journey tomorrow, but I cannot realise, though I repeat it to myself all day long, that the journey will end in London -

I add this last of last words in a moment which I have stolen before consigning this work to my bag. I am packing my own precious Goods which are the last to be packed & the first to be unpacked.

Well then farewell Warboys. The summer ranks among our happiest I think; & this land of plain & sky will remain a distinct & lovely picture in my mind were I never to see it again.

Goodbye to Fens & flat fields & windmills & sky domes.

Farewell Manchester
Noble Town, Farewell.
Thursday Morning
September 21st a swans song

Now we have returned to London.

This is written on the 23rd of September [1899]. This was written after spending a whole summer at Warboys.

[]

1903

DIARY
HYDE PARK GATE
1903?

INDEX

A Dance in Queens Gate 1

Thoughts upon Social Success 9

A Garden Dance 16

An Expedition to Hampton Court 23

An Artistic Party 33

The Country in London 37

Earls Court 43

Miss Case 49

An Afternoon with the Pagans 56

Retrospect 61

Netherhampton House 67

Wilton—from Outside the Walls 71

The Water Meadows 76

The Downs 82

Salisbury Cathedral 85

An Evening Service 88

Wilton from Inside 92

The Talk of Sheep 98

Stonehenge 102

The Wilton Carpet Factory 110

Romsey Abbey 117

Life in the Fields 120

Stonehenge Again 122

The Beginning of the Storm 126

Country Reading 127

The Storm 131

Wilton Fair 137

Out of the Window 142

London 144

The Serpentine 149

a dance in queens gate

About two hours ago, when I went to bed, I heard what I took to be signs of merry making in the mews. A violin squeaked, there was a noise of loud voices & laughter. It reminded me how once, as a child, I woke at dead of night: it seemed to me—8 or 9 I suppose really & heard strange & horrible music as of a midnight barrel organ, & was so frightened that I had to crawl to the cot next mine for sympathy. But I am too old for that kind of blind terror; my critical mind when awake enough to think at all about it, decided that the fiddle squeaking &c. was token of a ball—not in our street—but in Queens Gate—the tall row of houses that makes a background to the mews. The music grew so loud, so rhythmic—as the night drew on & the London roar lessened, that I threw up my window, leant out into the cool air, & saw the illuminations which told surely from what house the music came.

Now I have been listening for an hour. The music stops—I hear the chatter, the light laughter of womens voices—the deeper notes of festive males. I can almost see the couples wandering out from the ball rooms to the balconies which are starred with small lamps. They look straight across the mews to me. The music has begun again—oh dear—the swing & the lilt of that waltz makes me almost feel as though I could jump from my bed & dance it too. That is the quality which dance music has—no other: it stirs some barbaric instinct—lulled asleep in our sober lives—you forget centuries of civilisation in a second, & yield to that strange passion which sends you madly whirling round the room—oblivious of everything save that you must keep swaying with the music—in & out, round & round—in the eddies & swirls of the violins. It is as though some swift current of water swept you along with it. It is magic music. Here the bars run low, passionate, regretful, but always in the same pulse. We dance as though we knew the vanity of dancing. We dance to drown our sorrows—but dance, dance—If you stop you are lost. This one night we will be mad—dance lightly—raise our heart as the beat strengthens, grows buoyant—careless, defiant. What matters anything so long as ones step is in time—so long as one’s whole body & mind are dancing too—what shall end it?

Then comes in the very height of the rhythm, some strange, solitary sound—that does not belong to the tune—no violin wails with that voice—nor is it the speech of triumphant trumpet—no—it falls not discordantly—but as though dropped from another world & time—the solitary stroke one.

A church is tolling. It says just this single thing—very deliberately, not raising its voice above the music, but nevertheless it stands out pure, quite distinct. The whirling valse has not drowned it, has no power over it. The dance quickens—towards the end—winds up with a flourish—the dancers are left reeling about—gasping, laughing—all pressing to get out into the cool. I hear their voices clamouring again—some one laughs very loud—the voices reach me quite distinct though I cannot hear the words. Well!—I am sitting out my dances—& I enjoy it.

Behold, I am tired of the noise & the chatter—I lie back on my pillows—turn out my light; I lie in the cool & look out through my open window. In a moment if I choose, I need think no more of the dancers—I am looking into the awful night sky—It is so thick tonight that not a star shows - The same sky stretches round the world, I think—But the music again! Brave little mortals fiddling & dancing beneath it! Besides lying here I see something that pleases me.

There is a great glass skylight under which I suppose the dancers are drinking champagne & devouring quails—At any rate there is a brilliant light behind it—It is like some transparent yellow globe in the night air. And from my bed I see the leaves of a tree outlined against it. I dont know why it is but this incongruity—the artificial lights, the music—the talk—& then the quiet tree standing out there, is fantastic & attracts me considerably.

But the music again! I am getting tired I confess. I can no longer dance in spirit—nor I fancy do the fiddlers fiddle with that gaiety with which they started. After all they are not inspired Gods, calling men to a more joyous & passionate existence, a dance which shall last through life & into eternity—they are pale, perhaps corpulent men, who fiddle thus every night of the week—fiddle till 3 o’clock every morning, & long for their glass of beer & the last dance on the programme. They fiddle every night, & it is part of their business to strike up thus—so courageously & freely—to lash their bows across their strings, as though the God himself were in their veins. The waltz drags a little—the pulse wants vigour—& listen—the church tolls again—one—two—

The clock is in no hurry—it can wait its time—no waltzer will out waltz it—But those fiddlers—my thoughts go back to them. There is something grim in the notion; they fiddle every night—the same tunes probably, but only once for the same dancers. They dont believe much in their fiddling & its wonderful properties. It earns them very little in hard cash, I daresay—& yet night after night they sit in their corner, & set couples dancing in mazes all round them. Send hot thoughts coursing through their brains—make men & women dream of love & freedom & life moving in rhythm & waltz music.

But these fiddlers dont believe a word of it. They look out with weary disillusioned eyes—no need to look at their music—they know that by heart, & the dancers too. Still they must stick to it. As long as people will dance, they must play. They are the only people, save a weary dowager with rheumatism in her back—who are really content when the final note of the dance is sounded, & the whole party falls back from the ecstasies of the waltz into more or less commonplace life. I can see them leaning back in their chairs, & hiding their yawns, which they know to be quite out of keeping with Gods & fumbling with their watches.

The music again! I begin to think someone has wound up this weary waltz & it will go on at intervals all thro’ the night. Nobody is dancing in time to it now I am sure—or they dance as pale phantoms because so long as the music sounds they must dance—no help for them. Surely the music that seemed to ebb before, has gathered strength—it sounds louder & louder—it swings faster & faster—no one can stop dancing now. They are sucked in by the music. And how weary they look—pale men—fainting women—crumpled silks & trampled flowers. They are no longer masters of the dance—it has taken possession of them. And all joy & life has left it, & it is diabolical, a twisting livid serpent, writhing in cold sweat & agony, & crushing the frail dancers in its contortions. What has brought about the change? It is the dawn.

At last I stop writing, & look again at the sky. It is now a quarter to three. I said it was dark & tragic before—now it is more terrible. For the sky is deathly pale—but alive: it is very chaste, & very pure, & the breeze is ice cold, as though it blew off fields the sun has never warmed. The dawn is folding the world in its pure morning kiss of salutation. No lamplight can burn in the radiance of that whiteness—no music can sound in the pause of that awful silence. The Dance is over.

thoughts upon social success
15 July

The ‘season’ dies hard. I calculate that for every one party that we go to, the average young lady goes to five: she has been out every night then both this week & last.

Our parties are rather miscellaneous: it seems to me that I generally dont know my hostess. One night she is an obscure lady in Addison Road—another she lives in Bruton Street, & has a name to correspond. In either case I feel rather strange, & inclined to be absent minded. I look round the room, see nobody there I know, & forget what one says next. Tonight was a very typical entertainment. I can only comfort myself when I think of our social peculiarities by reflecting that we have this in common with the women of the world—we are equally at home everywhere—(not at all, that is to say) & we are confined to no one set in particular. This explains why it is usual for us to come into a room, & after shaking hands with our hostess, sit silent all the rest of the evening. We always seem to be outsiders where everybody else is intimate. This is not really so of course: the truth is that we have not, or have not cultivated, what one calls the ‘social gift’. Now most young women of our way of life have specialised in this branch of learning. Their evenings are more important to them than their mornings—indeed I find it hard to conceive of them in the morning. Do they in truth exist before the clock strikes eight? My private belief is that the dinner bell calls them into existence—they spring up all over the drawing room like hyacinths in June. By daybreak they are faded—a little crumpled perhaps—never mind—they fold themselves in sleep—to wake once more when the sun is set. Now I find this very beautiful & attractive but always a little puzzling. Has she a stalk or a body—is she clothed in silk or gauze or are they flower petals that shine on her? Above all, what does she talk about? I see her lips move—honey drops from between them apparently, but I know that I shall never hear what she says. If I come by she is silent—she folds all her petals closely round her; she might indeed be some flower one brushes past by night. Not a word of this do I write with any but an entirely admiring purpose. [ ] I protest that I do most honestly admire such scraps of society as I have seen—even though I myself take no part in it. Tonight for instance, it is literal truth that our hostess & one gentleman we were introduced to as we left, were the only people we spoke to while we stayed. That seems proof that we are not ‘successful’. I do not know that that success is beyond our reach, if we ever take the trouble to work for it, but at this moment it is certainly very far from us. All the same I can sit by & watch with pure delight those who are adepts at the game. Success is always able to move my admiration; & really no success seems so rounded & complete as that which is won in the drawing room. The game requires infinitely delicate skill, and the prize is of the subtlest possible. [ ] All achievement is coarse beside it. [ ]

To be socially great, I believe, is a really noble ambition—for consider what it means. You have, for a certain space of time to realise as nearly as can be, an ideal. You must consciously try to carry out in your conduct what is implied by your clothes; they are silken—of the very best make—only to be worn with the greatest care, on occasions such as these. They are meant to please the eyes of others—to make you something more brilliant than you are by day. This seems to me a good ideal. You come to a party meaning to give pleasure; therefore you leave your sorrows & worries at home—for the moment, remember, we are all dressed in silk—without sorrow or bother that is—more than that, you must be prepared to be actively happy: if you talk it must be at least to express pleasure at something; better still if you can, say something amusing: seriousness is just as much out of place here as an old serge skirt. For two or three hours a number of people have resolved to show only their silken side to one another: Heaven knows the other may be anything but silk, but tonight it is ignored. Men & women living ordinary lives surely have their share of woes; to look at them though you would never guess it. They bow & touch hands gracefully; their faces all look pleased & animated. The talk is very swift & skimming: it is not part of the game to go deep: that might be dangerous. All this a moralist might say, is very artificial. Major So & So laughs as though he hadn’t a care in the world; we know very well that he cant pay his butchers bill. Mrs Thingemajig is more amusing than ever tonight—didn’t she lose an only son in the war?—& so on—it is easy to conclude that society is hollow—that the men & women who make it are heartless; but I believe there is another side to the picture. It strikes me that that mythical major is a brave man to stand there & laugh at other peoples jokes with his bills (most immorally) all unpaid. He deserves that a grateful country should pay them for him. And the Lady—you may call her heartless, but surely she does more good making the world laugh than by sitting at home & weeping over her own sorrows. The truth is, to be successful socially one wants the courage of a hero—[] There is nothing really so desperately difficult, I am sure, as laughter. The whole pressure of the world is to make you take things seriously.

Most of us think ourselves very virtuous for falling in obediently with its scheme. We go to church, to funerals, to sickbeds &c. &c. far more willingly than to marriages & festivals—It is a luxury to most people to express their emotions. Society is the most bracing antidote for this kind of thing; to be successful I think one must be a Stoic with a heart.

a garden dance
30 June

Last night, I leant out of my window & took part in a dance which was being carried on with great vigour in Queens Gate. I have just come back from a real dance—in which I joined in the orthodox fashion. Honestly, I enjoyed my window dance the most. To begin with, for this dance one had to be properly dressed—& that is a penance—while last night I could lie with my nightgown open & my hair tumbled over my forehead as it is at this moment. I often think of that famous painter who would only work in his court dress—or kept different dresses for different occasions. Though I hate putting on my fine clothes, I know that when they are on I shall have invested myself at the same time with a certain social demeanour—I shall be ready to talk about the floor & the weather & other frivolities, which I consider platitudes in my nightgown. A fine dress makes you artificial—ready for lights & music—ready to accept that artificial view of life which is presented to one in a ballroom—life seen by electric light & washed down by champagne.

The Phillimores who gave the dance, have lately moved into a very spacious house on the top of the Campden Hill. It has one of the largest gardens in London I believe. It is a white roomy house, easily made beautiful or picturesque had one a taste that way. But the Phillimores have aimed rather at comfortable solidity. Their walls are ornate crimson—they are fond of painting over large flat surfaces in distemper of a worthy green. In two of the bedrooms, where we took our cloaks off, I noticed a crucifix nailed at the head of the bed. That is characteristic. But it is of dancing that I am going to write. We had the usual struggle to force ourselves through the doorway; we squeezed a stout ladies [sic] hand. She bade us welcome with a smile which had already spent itself on fifty others & would have to do duty for an hour more to come, & we found ourselves shoved well into a thick knot of human beings. They were all pressing hard against each others backs & fronts—trying to say how d’y do—trying to introduce each other—finally trying to seize arms & waists & hurl each other thus united into the waltzing centre of the room. A small centre only was in a state of circular motion; from a little distance the dancers looked painfully like flies struggling in a dish of sticky liquid. We crossed the room slowly, because we had to move, & reached the windows. Here we stopped & looked about us, with the cynical coolness of youth just a little excited, & determined not to show its agitation. But indeed there was little to agitate the most youthful. No sight in the whole world is so ugly & depressing as a room full of people none of whom you know. You at once conclude that they are remarkably ugly or remarkably dull—or remarkably ill dressed. At any rate you lump them together under some common head. This is just what I did tonight, feeling pleasantly detached, & able to criticise the antics of my fellows from a cool distance.

Well, this didnt last long. Soon a middle aged gentleman, a little stout with an elderly sensible air came up to us. I remembered him with difficulty—& then he suggested as a sensible thing to do that we should walk round the garden. There was no wish on either side to dance, had it been possible. So I followed him out on to the grass. He was a companion who let one take in deliberate impressions without disturbing one to talk or listen. He sauntered along by my side, not, I think, altogether silent, but evidently without exerting himself to think of anything to say. I looked about & talked if something happened to strike me. If it had been a shade warmer, it would have been perfect—but the garden was just too chilly—the grass a little too damp. The graceful ladies held up their dresses rather nervously instead of letting them sweep like peacocks tails. All the same it was a very vague & graceful scene. Chinese lanterns hung in globes of different colours from all the bushes—dotted about promiscuously over the ground. These gave a little light; floods of light, laughter, & dance music of course, poured out of the house. Again I noticed that strange blending of the two lights—the pale light of the sky & the yellow light of lamps & candles both together illuminating green leaves & grass. It makes a curious unreal effect. We strolled sedately all round the garden, then turned back & found ourselves seats near the house. It was characteristic of our tête à tête that we confessedly chose seats from which we could watch the rest of the party. We had so very little to say to each other: what we did say was mostly of an external nature, prompted by the sights & sounds going on round us. I was thoroughly content to lie in an arm chair & watch the Ladies in their light dresses pass and repass—come flowing out of the windows & falling in cascades of lace & silk down the slope. It was like some French painting. All the time there went on a light ripple of talk & voice. Nobody came near enough to bother us with actual words. My companion was a straight forward plain spoken man; exactly what he seemed to be (really Director of the Bank of England I discover) cool silent satisfactory—excellent garden company. At last he said with half a yawn, entirely polite though not in the least courteous, that he must go. He left me safe in the drawing room again. I found myself with Gerald [Duckworth], whose appetite for dancing is no longer keen; he prefers to act the part of benevolent Uncle to the company—which he does not unsuccessfully, & such a character is always popular.

The dancing space was smaller than ever, the contortions of the dancers more laborious. If half the people who had come had chosen to dance, the room would have been a solid block. But the garden received the overflow—the refreshment tables there were already full. Gerald, I discovered, takes a very serious interest still in the supper part of a dance. He became quite energetic when this grand question needed to be settled—where we were to sup, & what we were to eat. He secured two excellent seats & sent waiters flying for quails & champagne, just as though he sat in his usual corner of the Savoy & had his own private waiter to attend to him.

I had fixed one as the limit of our stay—enforcing it all the way in the cab with desperation but not much hope. But to my surprise we had no difficulty in leaving. There was really no inducement to stay.

Our fourwheeler was soon drawn up at the door, & we still left coolly appreciative but nothing more. Now I open my book of astronomy, dream of the stars a little, & so to sleep—

an expedition to hampton court
5 July

Most Londoners have travelled in Italy—Turkey or Greece—they run to Paris or Scotland almost for the week end—but, judging from my experience, the immediate neighbourhood of London itself is an unexplored land. On their map it might be marked blank like certain districts of Africa. It is sober truth that though I have lived my life in London I have only once visited Hampton Court. Kew, Richmond, Hampstead, I know a trifle more familiarly perhaps—Various causes make it easier to go anywhere almost than to the suburbs of London. You have to make a days expedition; no one that I am aware ever sleeps at Kew or Hampton Court. They are essentially places which you visit between trains. You find yourself with a summer afternoon to spare—bethink you that you really ought to know these places a little better, & thus once in a dozen years you find yourself much to your surprise walking in the Orangery at Kew or treading the maze at Hampton Court. I am always surprised—pleasantly surprised to find myself here. Nevertheless I let years slide, & bear me to all quarters of England, before I go there again. The summer afternoon never comes—anyhow you spend it in the Gardens which lie at your gates. This occurs to me because today we have actually achieved the task: we have been to Hampton Court. It is true we planned the journey for a year—twelve perhaps will pass before we set about to plan another—but I write today with absolutely first hand knowledge. My information is crammed from no guide book or travellers tales. I have seen what I describe with my own eyes.

We started, then, at 11. The journey to Hammersmith really presents no scene worthy of description; besides it is comparatively hackneyed ground. It is after one has left Hammersmith that one enters strange land. The street begins to look far more like a village street; the houses are of a far more individual character, & they have space in which to expand. But yet it has marks of belonging—of being a distant though poor connection of a great town. You get an impression that the more respectable classes of London have retired here to pass their old age with greater dignity & peace than they can afford inside London itself. Piety has retired here too; I counted a surprising number of Convents & Sisterhoods as we went along; once or twice to my pleasure I could look down into their cloistered grounds & see the sisters themselves walking there—Once I spied into the garden of an orphanage for Roman Catholic little girls. The children were all ranked in two & two, following a dark sister in some kind of procession, & they all, for what reason I do not know, wore wreaths of white flowers round their heads—an innocent sight truly, as one passes. Then one began to catch glimpses of the river through steep little alleys which opened out of the main road, & once we came upon a whole fleet of barges moored together for the Sunday rest as we past [sic] over the bridge. The picturesque bargeman was removing a weeks cole [sic] grime on deck—his head buried in a basin, & white with lather. This was in Brentford I think, but to tell the truth I have no notion what villages we past [sic] through or in what order they came. They were not separated from each other, though originally as distinct as London from Birmingham. Nevertheless there were very few new buildings. Most must have been 60 or 70 years old I should think, & a common type was the pleasant square Georgian house. This must originally have stood in a space of its own, I am sure; Georgian houses were built for opulent people, who could afford light & air—At any rate the whole road to Hampton Court which it took us an hour & a half to travel, was well worth looking at. At half past one, at last, we reached our journeys end. In a moment we were walking the broad terrace of the Palace Garden. My one visit ten years ago, had not left in my mind any adequate picture of the beauty & space of this old garden. I had forgotten too the richness of the dark red palace itself. At first I felt simply inclined to pace slowly up & down the terrace & let my eye rest first on the smooth turf lit by brilliant flowers, then on the perfectly satisfying shape of the palace. But it was cold, & we were hungry, & somewhat to our surprise, half London apparently had had the same idea of visiting Hampton Court at the same day & hour as we had. The terraces & the turf which I felt ought only to have been peopled by ladies in brocade & gentlemen in kneebreeches & swords, swarmed with a very different class of person—perhaps more moral than their ancestors of Charles 2nds time, but in penalty for it far less ornamental. I could not help regretting the improvement in morality. I wished again & again—so did the whole crowd of us, I daresay, that I could have had those gardens to myself. They are meant for peace & luxurious meditation. We lunched—with our fellows—Everywhere we went it occurred to several dozen others to go too. I must retract what I said to begin with—that Cockneys dont go to Hampton Court. But doing our best to think ourselves alone, we strolled through the quadrangles after lunch. They are, I imagine, perfect of their kind: Oxford & Cambridge can show no better. Absolutely no alteration, no restoration, as far as one can see, has touched these old buildings since the careful hand of the Architect laid stone to stone. The difficulty was—not to imagine Charles & Nell Gwynn idling there with voluptuous Court ladies lounging after them, but to remember that we who walked there were absurdly & monstrously out of place. We paced the galleries. Here indeed the illusion so strong on one in the courts & gardens gave way almost entirely. These beautiful old cedar lined rooms which run all round the quadrangle have had their walls so papered with pictures that their domestic character has disappeared. Some of the paintings indeed are first rate—some bad—but good or bad they make the place into a public gallery where one goes prepared to take in instruction & pleasure, catalogue in hand. The rooms indeed have their old uses inscribed on them—Queens Bedroom—Queens private drawing room—Kings ante-chamber & c—but it is not possible to reconstruct them in your mind as they were then. Yet Henry the 8th walked here—& the little Edward the Sixth was brought here to die, I think, & wits & beauties without end have past [sic] through these rooms, all of which one might have revived in ones mind, if the old chairs & tables had been left in their places.

After we had done our duty here, we spent an hour or so wandering through the gardens again, finding our way down to the lake side where we lay & watched an appropriate pair of anglers. They, like a sundial, are absolutely essential in a picture of this kind; the fish is never caught, the angler dreams away the whole length of the golden hours—that is a pursuit which like the registering of sunbeams, belongs to a less machine driven, & sunnier age than ours.

But we had overstayed our time already. It seemed absurd to be bound by ties made so far away—almost in such a different age, but long ago in London we had promised to come home for tea. That was impossible. If we strolled peacefully back, we should return in time for dinner. Most of our companions had exhausted their interest in Hampton Court. They had had an outing which they had enjoyed energetically, & were now eager to get home again. We had the darkening garden almost to ourselves as we walked across it, but in the dark we could see one or two dignified figures moving up & down the terrace as we passed. It was impossible to mistake them. They were no cockney trippers making the whole place hideous with their noise & Cockney faces; no, these Ladies are part of the palace. They belong to it. It is admirably appropriate I think [ ] that our aged aristocracy which finds no home in the bustling town, should retire to spend its last days in this old Palace full of tradition & ancient splendour—splendour even more beautiful I should think in its mellow age than in its prime. These old Ladies with their great names & bent old bodies stay in my mind as the very spirit of the place, which we surprised haunting the walks by dark. Here they dwindle out their old age, as in some royal almshouse. No retirement could be sweeter or more dignified than to this Palace by the Thames.

I myself anticipate my age in the delight with which I contemplate spending it thus!

an artistic party
1 July

Again we took [a] cab tonight & drove through the populous streets which look their gayest about this hour. We had four large cards for the Academy Soirée—an entertainment unique, I should think, of its kind. The courtyard in which Edward the Black Prince stands was packed with carriages cabs & motor cars. so that it was almost difficult to get in & find one’s way round the edge to the large door.

The Academy is a gloomy great place, even on its festive nights; you take off your cloak in a kind of catacomb, damp, with stone arches. The little urbane President, already looking a trifle bored, pressed our hands perfunctorily & we passed on into the great rooms. This crowd, I say, has a character of its own. Every other person you feel must be distinguished: the men wear a surprising number of decorations—Bath ribbons & stars & all kinds of humbler orders—so we decided when we saw their dress clothes (a rude test of merit!)

The women, as though to atone for their want of definite orders, dress up in the oddest ways. We found some queer specimens. Here was a stuffy black dress, somehow suggestive of high tea & bugles; here the artistic temperament had gone to the other extreme, & left bare a good deal of the person which is usually covered. But the most usual figure was the typical artist, or artists wife—clinging Liberty silks—outlandish ornaments—a strange dusky type of face. Of course there were too others like ourselves, of no particular description. Still I could have been well content to take my evening’s pleasure in observation merely. I was constantly starting at some face well known in photograph or caricature suddenly fronting me in the life. I was constantly wishing to point—with extended forefinger—at some delicious discovery, male or female, till they were too frequent to need remark—

It is not a party at which one talks. The conditions are somehow adverse. The great rooms indeed are full, but you never rid your mind of the public gallery feeling—& certainly the light & space are not becoming. The crowd as a whole looks badly dressed, & moves awkwardly. Its units never seem to dissolve & melt together. We drifted about, gazing at human pictures mostly, with snatches of desultory talk. We looked with admiration at those ladies, who are the high aristocrats of such gatherings as these—who know the President & all the more distinguished academicians. Their demeanour is beautiful. Exquisite in old lace & most refined evening gowns, they know well that they are the Queens of the gathering. What they are, everyone else desires to be—at least this evening. They bear names as famous in the world of art as Russell & Cavendish in the world of fashion. I am always impressed by the splendid superiority of these artist men & women over their Philistine brethren. They are so thoroughly convinced that mankind is divided into two classes, one of which wears amber beads & low evening collars—while the other follows the fashion. Each thanks God that it is not as the other—but the artist is the more intolerant. We must have past [sic] through all the rooms, & we began to get tired of human faces.

A cab home again! Down the brilliant charging Piccadilly, now thoroughly awake, as though it had slept all day. The wood pavement in the heat gets beaten to a shiny hard surface, which at night reflects the lamplight almost as though it were wet.

Home very sleepy, & to bed.

the country in london

I foresee that one day I shall write a book of maxims—like a French-woman. I often think of things that sound to me remarkably like what in English we call ‘Thoughts’. But mine have this drawback—they are very obvious—a little false—& after all where will one sentence lead you? All the thoughts, maxims &c. &c. &c. which we see so laboriously printed & translated from one language to another as though no one literature could be selfish enough to keep these treasures for itself—all, I say, have only one moment of legitimate life. I can imagine that they sound well at a dinner table—go off with an enlivening pop, as of dexterous little crackers. But they wont blow up anything or do much in the way of illumination. I am sorry that I began to write this page—I forget now where it was to lead me, or why I chose this circuitous path.

Well, I say, we are getting ready for Salisbury—Heaven knows what that has to do with maxims! The pleasantest part of going anywhere almost is the thought of it beforehand. I am laying in books. That is what I mean by getting ready. I collect books on all conceivable subjects & sew together paper books like this I write in—thick enough to hold all the maxims in the world. I delight to plan what I shall read this summer—I believe I begin putting aside books in my mind, to read in the summer, about October, Shakespeare for instance & the Bible—Then the time really comes, & I actually take a bit of paper & write Homer, Dante, Burkes Speeches &c. &c. upon it. I feel already as though I had read some way in these books & profited greatly. I get the volumes together—lay them out on my table, & I think exultingly that all that thickness of paper will be passed through my mind. I wish I felt sure it would leave any impression there, but that is a doubt I put far from me, before I begin. It is quite true that I read more during these 8 weeks in the country. than in six London months perhaps. Learning seems natural to the country. I think I could go on browsing & munching steadily through all kinds of books as long as I lived at Salisbury say. The London atmosphere is too hot—too fretful. I read—then I lay down the book & say—what right have I, a woman to read all these things that men have done? They would laugh if they saw me. But I am going to forget all that in the country. This summer holiday has always—almost—been a very happy time—I imagine that it is the nearest kind of thing to happiness that any of us get—not being a very cheerful race.

We settle into a very free out of door life. We are very full of talk & family jokes.

Family life, of a very independent kind, such as suits us four self willed young animals only really flourishes in the country. But this is not what I meant to write.

I read a great deal, I say: all the big books I have read I have read in the country. Besides this I write—with greater ease, at times, than ever in London. But the books are the things that I enjoy—on the whole—most. I feel sometimes for hours together as though the physical stuff of my brain were expanding, larger & larger, throbbing quicker & quicker with new blood—& there is no more delicious sensation than this. I read some history: it is suddenly all alive, branching forwards & backwards & connected with every kind of thing that seemed entirely remote before. I seem to feel Napoleons influence on our quiet evening in the garden for instance—I think I see for a moment how our minds are all threaded together—how any live mind today is of the very same stuff as Plato’s & Euripides. It is only a continuation & development of the same thing. It is this common mind that binds the whole world together; & all the world is mind. Then I read a poem say—& the same thing is repeated. I feel as though I had grasped the central meaning of the world, & all these poets & historians & philosophers were only following out paths branching from that centre in which I stand. And then—some speck of dust gets into my machine I suppose, & the whole thing goes wrong again. I open my Greek book next morning, & feel worlds away from it all—worse than that—the writing is entirely indifferent to me. Then I go out into the country—plodding along as fast as I can go—not much thinking of what I see, or of anything, but the movement in the free air soothes & makes me sensitive at once. As long as one can feel anything—life may lead one where it likes. In London undoubtedly there are too many people—all different—all claiming something or losing something—& they must all be reconciled to the scheme of the universe before you can let yourself think what that scheme is. Of course, people too, if one read them rightly, might illuminate as much as if not more than books. It is probably best therefore in the long run to live in the midst of men & women—to get the light strong in your eyes as it were—not reflected through cool green leaves as it is in books.

But I think of my great box of books all littered about in the wide country room I am to have—with entire joy now—Nine months surely is enough to spend with ones kind!

earls court
22 July

We go once a year to Earls Court. I do not know that I want to go oftener—but I enjoy that one visit. This evening it was a little suddenly decided that the three of us should go. It was a cool evening—again I cannot help thinking just too cold. We raked together the most miscellaneous garments, which had to be evening, & outdoor & water-proof at once. In the end we compromised: our shoes were indoor—our dress evening—now I come to think of it, only our hats could be rightly called out of doors. But it didn’t matter. Earls Court is one of those places where you can wear exactly what you like. The first thing we made for was the Chute. The exhibition is supposed to have something to do with fire engines; but really the name of the show is the only thing that changes; all else remains the same; without any stretch of the imagination one can think oneself in Venice (as given at Earls Court 3 years ago) or Constantinople which was last years name, I think. The chute, you will see, is equally appropriate to either. The Chute is unfailing: I tremble to think what my state of mind will be when I cease to appreciate the Chute. And yet last year I made six descents running without any hesitation, & this year I didn’t mind stopping after the third—But this hardly bears thinking on: Each time we got a front seat—rushed down, with the usual shrieks & blowing hats, plunged into the water, reared up, & then wobbled back to shore—There was some difficulty in deciding what to do after this—but ‘The River of Lava’ written in twinkling lamps attracted Adrian & me so much that we paid our sixpences & took our seats in the boat. It was a horrid fraud; I travelled that river when it was the Styx; when it was a Venetian Canal—& under some other disguise. The point is that you are floated along a kind of drain which is worked by electricity so that the current floats you without oars. The way is variegated with grottos & sunsets & effects of light upon the water—but we all agreed it was a very bad show. “I would have paid a penny to see it” said Nessa deliberately. “On the whole I think it was worth threepence,” said Adrian—but then he had been partly responsible—

And then—it is safe to conclude that we found seats at some little marble table & had ices. I can imagine no condition on which this would not be possible—tho’Earls Court ices must be almost the severest test of ice eating capacity that exists. Nessa had to leave us after this—with the deepest regret of course. Once more we toiled up to that crazy platform hanging over an underground railway—got our front seats & shouted as we went down.

But we were both of opinion that it would now be best to inspect the rest of the Exhibition. We wandered through a most perplexing number of courts all with bands in the centre & outlines of electric light, & crossed bridges & looked at any number of side shows, or their signs, which are perhaps more amusing. The showmen were expounding the merits of their marvels & mysteries in the spirit of the purest philanthropy. I had the greatest difficulty in restraining myself & Adrian from taking advantage of all their offers. We were terribly tempted by Spiders web—which is the sensation of America—by the upside down House, by various magicians & palmists. Adrian however was no longer to be restrained when we came to a tent in which for the paltry sum of sixpence you could enjoy a musical ride upon absolutely real live horses. The flap of the tent swung back artfully, so that you could look in & see the steeds waiting. He mounted: his piebald at the sound of a whistle & the tinkle of a musical box, started pacing round the circle—really no bigger than this room. Half a dozen other drugged looking ponies joined, ridden by a disagreeable shopkeeper & hairdresser who though they stuck to their saddles with some difficulty were always beating their beasts to go faster.

A woman dressed in a scarlet habit—if it can be called by so definite a name—circled round too. A lady in a short black skirt & a blouse jolted at the head of the melancholy procession, but, after cannoning several times with the rider behind, she thought she had had enough of it & dismounted. Meanwhile Adrian plodded steadily round—the most comic sight in the world. I thought the ponies would never have the strength to stop once they had begun—but a whistle sounded & they came to an end, more than anything else, in the middle of their stride. If it hadn’t been so indescribably dingy, & degrading for any live creature, I could have laughed at the sight; I did laugh in fact—but nevertheless it was a depressing side show on the whole. As we left, a man came up & entreated us to laugh a hundred times for sixpence—All we had to do was to pay our sixpence & walk inside. It was such a generous offer that we accepted. Inside we found ourselves in a tent lined with looking glasses, of all conceivable curves & hollows: we grew long—& lop sided & gigantic & dwarfed. Our bodies were twisted every possible way till finally we were represented by a pair of legs only. [ ] When we felt we had secured as many of our 100 laughs as were forthcoming we left. The exhibition closes at ½ past 11 & till then we sat beneath a band & listened to popular tunes. We shall not go to Earls Court again for another year.

miss case

Two days ago I had my Greek lesson from Miss Case. I reflect that it may be my last, after a year & a half’s learning from her—so wish, entirely presumptuously I know, to make a rough sketch, which is at any rate done from life.

When I first saw her one afternoon in the drawing room, she seemed to me exactly what I had expected—tall, classical looking, masterfull [sic]. But I was bored at being taught, & for some time, only did just what was asked from me, & hardly looked up from my book—that is at my teacher. But she was worth looking at. She had fine bright eyes—a curved nose, the teeth too prominent indeed—but her whole aspect was vigorous & wholesome. She taught well too. My varied experience of Greek teachers makes me a good judge of their merits I think. She was more professional than Miss Pater though perhaps not so cultivated—she was more genial than Miss Clay & as good a scholar. [ ] But I am sorry to say—really now a little repentant—that she did not at first attract me. She was too cheerful & muscular. She made me feel ‘contradictious’ as the nurses used to say. After a time I found out her line of teaching, & rather set my back against it—at least I discovered certain opinions which she held very vigorously—& which when contradicted, were worth a good half hours discussion. I contradicted them; advanced life long opinions on the spur of the moment, & to my delight she took me quite seriously—or when I was in a lazy mood, drew her out; gave in at this point, led her on to another—& when she was fairly started on some theory of hers—let my mind stray. I began this system in pure idleness; it relieved the tedium of Greek grammer; & continued it from a genuine interest with a little malice mixed—I found out that she had theories of her own about the Furies; [ ] for six lessons I too had theories about the Furies: [ ]—& so with many other subjects. She was a person of ardent theories & she could expound them fluently. She used three adjectives where I could only lay hands on one—Aeschylus was strenuous, grand, impassioned & so on. But she was no sentimentalist: she had her grammar at her finger tips—she used to pull me up ruthlessly in the middle of some beautiful passage with “Mark the ar”. I read a very lovely description of maidenhood in Euripides (?) for instance [ ]—how the maiden hangs like ripened fruit within the orchard—but the gates ajar, the passer by spies in—& does not hesitate to pluck. That was the sense of it, & at the end I paused with some literary delight in its beauty. Not so Miss Case. “The use of the instrumental genitive in the 3rd line is extremely rare” her comment upon Love! But that is not a fair example; & at any rate I think it really praiseworthy; aesthetic pleasure is so much easier to attain than knowledge of his uses of the genitive—I think it is true that she read with a less purely literary interest in the text than I did; she was not by any means blind to the beauties of Aeschylus and Euripides (her two favourite writers) but she was not happy till she had woven some kind of moral into their plays.[ ]

She was always expounding their ‘teaching’ and their views upon life & Fate, as they can be interpreted by an intelligent reader. I had never attempted anything of this kind before, & though I protested that Miss Case carried it too far, yet I was forced to think more than I had done hitherto—& interested accordingly. It was upon these subjects that she became really eloquent. She would spend a whole lesson in defining the relation of Aeschylus towards Fate—or the religious peculiarities of Euripides. This was the side of the thing that most interested her—& to her great credit, she made me, at least, see her point of view. Then there was our grammar. Many teachers have tried to break me in to that—but with only a passing success. Miss Case went to the root of the evil; she saw that my foundations were rotten—procured a Grammar, & bade me start with the very first exercise—upon the proper use of the article—which I had hitherto used with the greatest impropriety. She never failed to point out, with perfect good humour that my exercises were detestable—‘I haven’t even attempted to correct this one’ she said once—with the cheerful laugh, which spoke of an undaunted courage. I never once made her lose her temper, though I sometimes lost mine sufficiently to wish I could. Now that our lessons are over—for good perhaps—I am amazed at the amount she stood from me-

But in all these ways she was an excellent teacher. I feel besides, that she is a really valiant strong minded woman, in a private capacity. We strayed enough from grammar to let me see this. She talked on many subjects; & on all she showed herself possessed of clear strong views, & more than this she had the rare gift of seeing the other side; she had too, I think, a fine human sympathy which I had reason, once or twice to test-

This, I know is most inadequate testimony to her—but under the circumstances of haste & discomfort, I can do no better.

I vaguely hope too, that our parting is not yet really final-

an afternoon with the pagans

Matthew Arnold, I know, called them ‘the Barbarians’—but that implies a people without a religion; now they—that is the English aristocracy—are in my opinion very strong believers in the Gods—not the Gods of the Christian faith indeed—but of the very picturesque Pagan mythology. They believe in Bacchus, & in Pan,—& Zeus was an aristocrat. Artemis too—wasn’t she a very finely built young Countess? In other words they believe enormously in leading a happy luxurious life—with the best of everything always at their command. They have no reason to doubt; haven’t the Gods provided them excellently well? They shut their eyes & suck down their sugar plum. These at any rate are a few of the superficial impressions which I always receive from the aristocracy—& very pleasant they are too. I would be a pagan—if I could.

Yesterday we spent an afternoon at St Albans where Katie, that divine Giantess has taken a house. Beatrice was there & Lady Robert Cecil We spent the whole afternoon under a tree in the garden. Katie lay stretched on a long couch, in the carelessness of perfect grace. She doesn’t think how she looks—she just flings out her superb limbs—like a child resting after its play. Indeed the whole atmosphere of the place was one of careless ease. [ ] Beatrice flung herself back in her chair, hands behind her head—Lady Robert sat lightly upright glancing round her like some bright bird. Her eyes, poor thing, have to do double work; she is almost quite deaf—she heard nothing of what we said as we talked together, but her large eyes, seeing us laugh, laughed too. It was curiously pathetic. We talked hard. Marriage hasn’t changed Katie; she was a great lady before: the change from the simplicity of her cottage garden at Chesham, to the splendours of the British Residency at Cairo have only developed that side of her; the other is left untouched. She held forth as of old; declaiming her impossible theories in the same half laughing half serious way pouring scorn upon us all—bantering her sister—laying her hands upon Lady Roberts shoulder to shout some intemperate remark into her ear; she was like a great benevolent goddess.

But all the time, one could feel, she was swaying the talk; even at such an informal party as this, she was leading—seeing what ought to be done next—what move would put everybody more at their ease. Nothing, one can well see, can be more perfect than her manner as a Hostess; she is perfectly dignified, but perfectly simple at the same time; one could no more suspect her of ill manners than the Venus of Milo. We talked on & on, always laughing I think—till Katie, after tea, suggested a walk round ‘our domains’ as she called them. She led the way; her step is perfectly stately & free. She took Lady Robert’s arm every now & then in a caressing way—She sent for her chow dog; knelt on the lawn & played with it for ten minutes together; then, she saw a pump handle swinging; like the great child she is she must, despite Beatrice’s chattering, begin to pull it; nothing happened—she pulled more & more vigorously—at last we heard water gushing. “Well Katie—you have had a brilliant idea” shrieked Beatrice, “its the drains”. Katie was quite unconcerned though; gathered up her skirts with her delightful mocking smile, & swept on. Other people, Lady Roberts Husband, came in to tea; but our fly was at the door; Katie took our hands very kindly—“Good bye” she said, in a voice which sounded like a blessing—a half humourous blessing—& we went.

Well, that is a pleasant picture to think of—though we wont see it again for another twelvemonth—

retrospect
30 July

Tonight is the last we shall spend in London for 8 weeks—a crisis to most people not worth talking about—but our family moves with the unwieldiness & extreme deliberation of the 300 year old tortoise at the zoo. [ ] But that tortoise must in reality have anything but an easy time of it—if his weekly excursions in search of cabbage are preluded by any of the flurry & discomfort which are our lot at these seasons. But on this I will not dwell. My precious box is well crammed with books—the family boxes are corded & labelled down stairs—We shall have one final & supreme exertion tomorrow: & by this time tomorrow night we shall all be set down in, I hope, the most peaceful & mellow of country houses some 70 miles or so by train from London—the distance though is not to be measured by miles. I ought now, therefore to write some kind of farewell to London—We close here our London Chapter with regret. Several circumstances, some I hope imaginary, make me feel perfectly callous at the thought of going. For 8 weeks, I shall not miss you, great City; in October we may meet on more friendly terms.

For some reason, partly weather I think, the ‘season’ has come to an end rather lamely: I like to leave London with a final blare of trumpets; sun burning, I mean, pavements heated slabs—trees burnt grass burnt—no shade anywhere. Then one has earned ones wages, & may cool down in the country. Besides it is a little disappointing to miss that sun-roasting which is only to be had once a year—

When we were children the summers were always really hot. [ ] I can remember the smell of the gardens, all burnt up in the sun, the heat odour of the streets; it was all very good then—because it told of the end of the summer—& of St Ives. But now there seems no reason, unless one looks at the calendar, why one should go away now more than at any other time. It isn’t the end of the summer for the summer hasn’t begun—March, April, May (as we understand it in England) have lasted so long, that here we are in August & the summer not yet come. Perhaps it will flame upon us in our flat meadows near Salisbury: that remains to be recorded—I wish for the sake of this book that I had anything more brightly coloured & picturesque to write here; it seems to me that all my events have been of the same temperate rather cold hued description; I haven’t had to use many superlatives. I have sketched faint outlines with a pencil. But the only use of this book is that it shall serve for a sketch book; as an artist fills his pages with scraps & fragments, studies of drapery—legs, arms & noses - useful to him no doubt, but of no meaning to anyone else—so I [ ] take up my pen & trace here whatever shapes I happen to have in my head. [ ]

It is an exercise—training for eye & hand—roughness if it results from an honest desire to put down the truth with whatever materials one has to hand, is not disagreeable—though often I am afraid decidedly uncouth. I have gone on this plan for something over a month now, & propose, Ladies & Gentlemen, to continue it in the country.

There, with good luck, some live figures ought to cross my field of view—& I shall attempt to cast their shadow on the page. But of that, more anon. At present it only remains for me to say farewell to Hyde Park Gate.

Tomorrow I shall open at a new chapter.

NETHERHAMPTON HOUSE,
SALISBURY.
August: 1903

netherhampton house

We have wrenched ourselves free of London. Nessa & I after a titanic struggle in that station [Waterloo], which takes its name appropriately from a battle field, [ ]—accomplished the family transition to Salisbury. Already our boxes are unpacked & we have settled into some kind of order. The house is exactly what I expected—& hoped. The front view—we look on to the road—is of a little gray stone house, too humble to be itself ornate, but evidently dating from an ornate period—& in its humble way an imitation of a genuine great house. There is some kind of architectural device of urns at intervals on the gables; there is a hollowed recess in the wall, meant perhaps, were the thing on a larger scale, to stand a statue in. The garden gate, too, is uncommon—gracefully wrought in blue green iron, & surmounted by a coat of arms & a crest. This house, as a matter of fact, was built in Elizabeths time I think, as dower house to the Pembroke family; the coat of arms, besides various small statelinesses within & without, proclaim [ ] its aristocratic connections; various old countesses & dependent relatives have had their lodging here, after the splendours of Wilton—though at the present time it is no longer used for this purpose. The Furses who have it now have done their decorating &c. in entire sympathy with the character of the place—The wide rooms are furnished not too profusely with dignified old chairs, & solid tables: crimson & white is the scheme of the whole place, with a touch of ruddy old wood. It is, I feel, a very characteristic English country house of the more modest sort; solid & unpretentious, but with a certain quaint dignity of its own, greatly mellowed by time. These little gray old houses are common all over England, but I doubt whether you find them elsewhere—I have not had time to see much of the garden—but it looks in keeping with the house—a walled kitchen garden—broad grass walks—a sundial—all on a small useful scale—kitchen garden teeming with fruit & vegetables—but of a comfortable airy kind. [The next page has been cut out.]

wilton—from outside the walls

Yesterday, or the day before, we set off after breakfast to find out our position in the world. Our garden is really only a bit of the meadow shorn & cut off from the rest of the fields by a sunk fence. The house is very long & low, but the front view gives really no idea of its size; it turns round & makes a square court moreover, & only the face of the house is gray. The rest—& older part—is built of red brick. We had some curiosity to find the river, & the village of Wilton—our difficulty was to decide which of the many streams we met was the river—in time though we came to such a broad & vigorous stream that we decided to name it the Wylye & count the smaller rivulets which cut up the meadows as mere tributaries—trained to flow thus in order to water the fields. Indeed a most elaborate system of canals, & hatches, & little waterfalls is arranged all over the meadows, but the water is now for the most part cut off, & the meadows are dry. We tramped along the road finally, which is on one side walled off by a very high & neatly preserved brick wall. Inside lie the gardens of Wilton—miles & miles of them, I should judge, by the time it took us to trudge this side of their boundaries. At last we turned the corner, & came, very obviously, to the Great Gate of Wilton. It is made in the shape of a Roman Arch—though whether it is surmounted by the figure of a Roman Emperor, or whether one of the Earls of Pembroke has been clad in a toga for the occasion, I can not say.

The other statue, just outside the gates suggests that the modern military uniform at any rate is not the right stuff for bronze: The sculptor, moreover, in respect for the nobility of his sitter has made him at least 3 feet taller than the most gigantic of ordinary mortals. As a work of art therefore, the statue is not convincing; but when one reads the inscription at the base one understands that a very heroic figure was needed. After this we walked through the town. There are moods when the little old South of England town, with its peace & quaintness are entirely refreshing: [ ] there are times when its eternal sameness—its somnolence as of one [ ] that has fallen asleep of a surfeit of roast beef & plum pudding—are depressing. I am craving, I think, for the bareness & warmth & brilliance of a foreign land. But Wilton is particularly apt to excite this kind of discontent; it is more smug & well pleased with itself than the majority of English villages like all those in small hamlets that sit in the shadow of a great house. It has the look of a very faithful old family retainer—as I have no doubt those that live in its cottages are—pensioned off by the great people & unswervingly loyal to them. Its whole world is circled by the ‘Park’; its interest is concerned entirely with ‘Her Ladyship’ & the goings on at the Castle. In almost every street you can trace the influence of the Herbert family. The three inns of course are loyally christened after the various titles of the Pembrokes; their arms, slightly battered by weather hang from all the sign posts: they, in their turn, have [ ] scattered fountains & almshouses all round them, & generally keep the village so tidy & sweet that it makes the most respectable setting for Wilton itself.

We—that is Adrian & I—commented upon all this—in no very friendly spirit. We professed to find the whole country side ‘demoralised’ & clinging to the great man of the place. This I suppose is an exaggeration; at any rate if we had been inside those high brick walls our point of view might have changed—but it is safe to say that the feudal spirit in England is not yet dead.

the water meadows

We are still exploring. Yesterday I took Nessa across the water meadows to a certain romantic looking church—at least that was our intention. This church you see from our croquet lawn across an apparently flat & easily walked breadth of meadow. The church stands just higher among some trees. I had some vague notion that this was George Herberts church; at any rate it was an object to walk to. Nessa, too, was anxious to find the mythical railway, which is to supply the express train in her great Landscape. So we started gaily across the meadows. But before long we had to deviate; little streams just too broad & too deep to jump kept cutting us off; we had to walk sideways to find a bridge—often only a bare plank—sometimes a fence with but one sound rung left. It was a very tortuous & difficult path, but we kept our church in view, & steered for it as best we could. Our position got more serious though when we were both landed in mud up to our ancles [sic]—in which needless to say one of Nessa’s shoes stuck bodily—& this leap only led to something worse—We tried to circumvent the stream—& coasted along it, flattening ourselves under barbed wire—(surely there can be no fear of trespassers here!) & scrambling through hedges. We were brought to a stop by hearing male rustic voices, alarming to pedestrians of the womanly sex—Men were making hay in the adjoining field & not only were they talking but they were talking of us—possibly to us. Seeing us stop, one of them advanced to the gate; we had to move up to hear what he said. He was evidently jocular—& we thought it best to anticipate any remarks he might have to make by asking boldly our way out? “Your fairly lost, you are” he said—[ ] which seemed to tickle him a good deal. ‘Where d’you want to go?’ It seemed idiotic to say nowhere—so I prompted Nessa—‘the Road’ ‘The Road?’ ‘You dont mean to say you’ve lost the road in broad daylight?’ That was an excellent joke too—‘You wont find no road here—better go back the way you come’ And so we turned & went—It was shouted after us that the sleek brown cows feeding at the other end of the field were dangerous—but we took no heed. We were far more troubled by the necessity of repeating all those muddy plunges & wriggles which had served to bring us here. We had immediately to cross the stream where Nessa had embedded her shoe; this experience had happily somewhat shaken her belief in shoes: & she agreed to my suggestion that for the rest of this walk we should be independant [sic] of bridges or lack of bridges—that we should bare our feet, & use them for the purpose—after all—for which they were created. The stream water was numbing cold at first, but the feel of the grass on the bare sole of ones foot is curiously pleasant. If you lay your palm on the grass, it feels very little; but ones foot, always gloved & cased as it is from contact with the earth is exquisitely sensitive to the coarseness of dry ground—the smoothness & coldness of grass—the warmth of those places where the sun beats. It was thus strangely charming to walk barefoot across two or three fields & streams. We found our road—& put on our shoes—only too soon.

Radcliffe (the youngest & most omniscient) gives us this information about the water meadows. As you walk along the main river—the Wylye—you see that wooden shutters are let into its banks at intervals; these, technically called hatches, are at the mouth of a channel in the neighbouring field; they are made with two handles; if you raise a hatch you divert a stream from the main river into the channel behind; & thus the meadows for miles round are irrigated. The system is immensely complicated—worked out more than two hundred years ago, says the omniscient Radcliffe, & still in use: each main channel from the river feeds numbers of lesser channels, till the fields are threaded across & across. In September I think he said, the hatches are raised, but not all at once; each meadow owner is allowed to flow the water through his land for the space of five days. They each take a turn—Then when the land is thoroughly soaked, the water is cut off—the hay grows lusty—is mown—the cattle are turned on to graze off what remains—& this last is the stage that has now been reached.

the downs

We have the custom now every summer of hiring a pony to drive. Most years we have been grossly deceived; our stipulation, made in all simplicity, that the beast shall be ‘quiet’ has led the horse dealers to present us with every quality of broken down & antiquated steed—just capable of drawing an old Ladies garden chair. We are wiser now, & ask simply for a pony—The result is nothing very startling; our beast has the quality of quietness thrown in gratis, but on the whole he is a good willing animal—trotting like a slightly worn out machine till he comes to his stable door, when he stops. But our afternoon drive becomes a necessity. Here one has to keep to the road, which robs the drives of half their charm, and were not our eyes still sensitive to the beauty of grass & cornfields would make the process dreary enough. We had a note today to take to Broad Chalke, about six miles the other side of the race course. We started after tea—& it had turned to a beautiful evening. Somewhere I have read that the sky above the chalkland is of a peculiar pale blue—as though something of the whiteness of the chalk were reflected in it. It was true last night at any rate that the blue was pale-whatever the cause was.

Adrian, with his wonderful faculty for finding something wrong in his immediate circumstances—whatever they are—grumbled the whole time at the dulness [sic] of the country—in which I conceive he is wholly wrong. Such genuine country I conceive can never be dull; even though nature here hasn’t taken much pains apparently with her material. She has kept a charm though which is entirely absent in more obviously interesting places. As we drove along through lanes deeply cut in the chalk, I kept likening the downs to the long curved waves of the sea. It is as though the land here, all molten once, & rolling in vast billows had solidified while the waves were still swollen & on the point of breaking. From a height it looks as though the whole land were flowing. Man, too, has done nothing to change the shape of these breakers. He has planted them to a certain extent, but has mostly left their grass untouched for his flocks. You see a thatched shed or so on the down side where the shepherd lives, but no other human house. The villages have all sunk into the hollows between the waves; & the result is a peculiar smoothness & bareness of outline. This is the bare bone of the earth—

salisbury cathedral

A restless devil lodges somewhere in this ancient gray house—this peaceful garden—even in my wide room. It is perhaps just a little overdone—the age & deep repose of it all. I felt this afternoon as though I must get into some brisker air. It is no fault of the house’s that as I have said is so perfect that I should not know where to lift up my hand to alter, were it possible. But though it was hot, & cushions spread on the lawn, I felt a fretful desire to worry myself. I trudged off down the road, which is powdered with fine white dust, & very hard. I saw the spire of Salisbury in the distance, & made that my object. Three miles of dusty road, I knew lay between us—but that was just the thing I wanted. So I tramped—till my shoes were white too, & I was feeling stretched in the muscles of my legs.

Small red houses have marched out in the van & rear of Salisbury, as of every other town, combining, I imagine their architect to say, the advantages of a Cathedral city with pure country air. Any other combination would be preferable I think. I had made the spire my aim—now I grazed as close it as I could—invaded the sanctuaries of the Close indeed, where motor cars may not penetrate, or butchers carts, unless bearing clerical provisions. The close is the same as all Cathedral closes—very rich, very peaceful—with the air of a very comfortably cushioned Sanctuary from the sins & weariness of the outer world. The old ladies who let their dresses sweep its turf are infected by the atmosphere; they move with extreme leisure & dignity—as though earthly affairs had no longer any power to hurry them. Yet I can well imagine that their precincts cover as much scandal of an innocent sort as any similar space in Mayfair or Belgravia. It is a picturesque but relaxing little haven, I am sure, & the Bishop & Chapter would do much better turned out of their spacious Georgian houses, & made to share the common lot. I should suggest that the close, shut against Butcher carts & motor cars by all means, should remain open to people of a literary disposition—who lodged at their ease in Palace & Deanery, would certainly turn their luxury to account.

The neighbourhood of the Cathedral though is depressing. So much ancient stone however fairly piled, & however rich with the bodies of Saints & famous men, seems to suck the vitality of its humble neighbours. It is like a great forest oak; nothing can grow healthily beneath its shade.

All this is a form of heresy I know. A long walk in the sun, all along the valley too, leaves one little appetite to appreciate the value of the picture from an aesthetic point of view. A bare hilltop would have pleased me better than all the Closes & Cathedrals in England—

an evening service

There is no denying—if you pretend to be a person of culture—that Salisbury Cathedral is beautiful—& culture or not, I honestly feel it to be so. It grows upon one; you find your eye wandering over the landscape to look for it: & when you find it, you keep your eye there for some moments satisfied. We are on a level with Salisbury—& no hills lie between us. I have not yet in my walks passed beyond its range. Sometimes I see the point of its spire—like an extinguisher—sitting on the side of the down. Oftenest I see it across the meadows—the whole church planted firm there—solid, & yet exquisitely light & graceful at once. It takes all kinds of tones—sometimes it is a pale gray—then almost white; today, for some reason it looked as though built of dark brown stone. George & I meant to spend a part of our Sunday appropriately in worship within its walls—but decided that afternoon service, drawn out by sermon &c., was too great an expense of time. So we invented (as it turned out) an Evensong at 7 to suit our purpose, & drove over in time for that. But the first youth we stopped in the Close pointed out our mistake—for some reason, Salisbury Cathedral provides no Evensong. Our only way of worship therefore—& a thoroughly happy one—was to drive slowly round the close. In certain moods I know, this kind of thing is intolerable; I would no more live here than lie myself down tomorrow in a venerable grave in the cloisters; but no place can be more amply satisfactory to spend an hour in—[ ] It is as though you shut thick ivy grown walls between yourself & the world; within them all is ancient loveliness & peace. English Cathedrals have certainly one inestimable advantage over the only foreign ones that I have seen; they stand in a perfect garden of their own, whereas the great French churches open on to the street. Here, for instance the Cathedral is circled by a rich layer of turf—& beyond that, like a zealous bodyguard, stand round all the houses of the close. These harmonise so perfectly with the prevailing spirit of the Cathedral that you hardly notice them individually till you stop especially to do so. They seem to me to act, I say, as a kind of bodyguard: nothing vulgar shall taint the air of the cathedral; they treasure up & absorb the precious incense it gives out. And like the beefeaters, or some other ancient guard, they are eminently picturesque without rivalling the splendour of their monarch. [ ]

We had occasion as it happens to visit one of these very houses—a small one, on the outskirts of the close. Old Miss Fawcett struck me as exactly the benevolent & mildly garrulous old lady one might expect to find in these surroundings. Indeed I should have been shocked had she turned out in any way different. But she was precisely the type I foretold—[ ] & we had no difficulty in carrying on a conversation. How should we—when we had met—in novels I suppose—so often before?

wilton from inside

There is one day—Wednesday—in every week when from the hour of 2 till 5—the public can enter the great gates of Wilton as freely as any Herbert in the land. I have never been over one of our ‘stately homes’ in any capacity, so yesterday I thought I would earn that experience. I expected to find a crowd of wagonettes & bicycles—but as a matter of fact I had to enter modestly behind a solitary party of three—an elderly gentleman, who might be a banker in Salisbury, & his two nieces, who were young ladies from New York—& signed themselves thus in the visitors book. This at any rate was my guess at their relationship to each other; the gentleman was certainly English, for he took upon himself to do the honours of Wilton, & point out the qualities of English scenery, as though he were responsible for both, & had a lawful interest to any credit that might be laid to their account. A massive lodge keeper in livery admitted us, took our shilling, for the benefit of the Herbert Hospital, & forwarded us across the courtyard to the care of a dignified house keeper within the doors. I felt unspeakably ignominious, as though I were admitted by favour of these gorgeous flunkeys, & had to hold myself in an attitude of servile attention to them. The good lady who took charge of us was a typical family servant. She was willing to gratify our awed curiosity as to the Herbert family & their belongings—& at the same time she clearly felt herself to be socially our superior. She did the honours with the condescending air of one to whom Greek statues & Vandykes are a matter of course, but she expected our plebian respect. So we trooped behind her obediently, & were submissively awe-struck. When she [ ] thought I suppose that I was looking about me with too critical an air she enunciated in my ear some high sounding title—as ‘Portrait of Titian—by himself which was to recall me from my impertinence.

There are undoubtedly a great many very good pictures—but a still greater number of worthless ones. I am a person of no discrimination in matters of art—I dont even know what I like—at once that is—& the conditions under which I saw the Wilton pictures were altogether unfavourable. Indeed it was difficult to appreciate the house itself even—ushered as we were from one museum like room to another, & bade admire the proper things as quickly as possible & pass on to the next.

Honestly, I was disappointed in my first view of a great house. I had imagined something more spacious & more harmonious. It was as though they had tried in parts to make an early Victorian style of decoration harmonise with the Vandykes—& had not succeeded. If they had resolved to keep the whole place in the style of one period—if the chairs & tables had been uniformly old instead of all styles & ages—the character of the rooms would have been distinct & beautiful. As it is your eye is distracted by a confusion of chintzes & leather chairs & handsome writing tables which are all out of character with the old chimney pieces & moulded walls.—But, having let a week almost, lapse between this sentence & the last, I can find nothing very profitable to say about the beauties of Wilton. The American young ladies I remember, showed a far more spontaneous interest in the photographs & armchairs of the Herbert family than in the famous Vandykes & Titians—though they did their duty manfully by these too. The Banker uncle produced for them the special privilege of holding the present Earls portrait in their hands: & the housekeeper beamed a condescending approval.

She was so condescending indeed that as we stood in the hall, I was terribly un-easy in my mind what course to take with a certain half crown that lay in my hand. Half a crown was lavish payment I felt; but then it was the smallest coin I had; yet when I looked at the ladys face, the good breeding I saw there made my half crown seem paltry—not to say vulgar—I waited, like a coward, for the banker to decide. If he dared, I dared, & the half crown was doomed; but apparently he had no doubts in his mind. He bade her a hearty good day, & thank you—& left without putting his hand in his pocket.

I still have my doubts as to whether the glance that she cast on us as we left, had not appreciably increased in scorn—but I was soon out of range.

the talk of sheep

Since we came here, for various reasons, I have spent many of my afternoons in solitary walks. My solitude is genuine; I go quite alone—the dogs even refuse to risk a possible ride with Adrian for a certain ramble with me. I dont chase rabbits, & I sit down too much for any real dogs temper. But like Wordsworth—like many distinguished people (it is well to be in good company) I find solitude sufficient, strangely so. I walk generally straight out of the house & on to the downs. They are now stacking & carting the corn in some of the fields; corn I waded through up to my shoulder a fortnight ago. I remember it sighed in the wind like water. But the sheep are more interesting than corn or turnips. I like to get them penned together in dense ranks within a square of hurdles; it is my high ambition to learn to bleat some day so that the whole flock hearing me shall answer. One day, to continue this mild garrulity, Nessa & I stood for five minutes in deep laughter while the flock discoursed. There is a wonderful variety in the bleatings of sheep after all; one is clearly exhorting the rest to save their souls from damnation—another, if I mistake him not, denounced some ovine education bill—a third upholds the rights of the sheep to be considered the intellectual equal of the ram. But as they all talk at once, & pay no sort of attention to their neighbours, I see no reason to suppose that their grievances will ever be attended to. The universal tone of weariness—of hopeless regret which prevails in the babble makes me opine that the sheep themselves are aware why they still remain sheep.

The sheep becomes a picturesque animal only, I think, when collected into flocks & led by dog & man over the hillside. He is then pastoral & innocent instead of merely silly. The shepherd is admirable; scrutiny of his face shows that his whole mind is absorbed by his flocks, & is probably the unconscious recipient of a good many queer secrets of earth & air. He inherits his shepherdhood, handed down from father & son for generations, & probably is the nearest approach to a grazing human animal that we in England can produce. He has received the knowledge which Nature bestows on her children only—but as though in fear that they should blab it to the world, she takes away his power of transmitting it to others, or of understanding how it is unique.

A curious content, which I cannot put into words, comes over me when I reach the top of the down, & lay myself flat on the grass.

stonehenge

Providence has sent a very energetic visitor—if not Providence, some power of benevolent intentions with regard to our education. Hospitality & the motive power of an enthusiastic young man have succeeded in driving us to Salisbury, & into every nook of the Cathedral—& yesterday again sent us as far as Stonehenge. Tomorrow we are to trudge to Romsey: the day before, I forgot to say, thanks to a telegram of permission from Lady Pembroke we explored Wilton House & grounds so thoroughly that our consciences are satisfied. Longford Castle is now really the only ‘Sight’ that remains: Mr. Norman goes on Tuesday—or that, I have no doubt too, would be added to the list of the things we have ‘done’. But Stonehenge was a rare accomplishment: a successful expedition—which is in its way a delightful & rememberable thing.

Nessa & I drove there, 12 miles, all winding beneath the crest of the downs, with the Avon at our feet. It was, to give a most important setting to the scene, a brilliantly clear day; hot in the sun, fresh in the shadow, & the trees & fields looked brisk & vigorous with the light on them, but by no means too hot. At midday therefore we could drive along with no discomfort, & it was a drive which needed open eyes.

I have come to the conclusion that England is a remarkably venerable place; from living in London all the year round one gets to think an old house the rarest of things; [ ] but in the country, the real country, it is just the opposite.

Where there is a large house it is almost certain to be two or three hundred years old—& it is exceptional to find a brand new farm or cottage. Country people, one forgets, have none of the reasons the towndwellers have for pulling down & rebuilding; so the old houses are allowed to stand as a matter of course, with a little patching & thatching, from one century to another. England therefore is now crusted all over with ancient dwellings; which have grown so much into the earth that they seem part of its produce. Every little village we passed through had some house or cottage one wanted to look at; & every hamlet, I doubt not, has its tiny roots deep twisted in to the main root of the land—which would make an infinitely interesting study, I know.

We came at last—for I must pass here a great deal I pondered in my mind as I went—to the sign post, which points to Stonehenge. Our way had been by the river, & enclosed by downs. We now came out on the top of Salisbury plain, & the downs spread without check for miles round us. I suddenly looked ahead, & saw with the start with which one sees in real life what ones eye has always known in pictures, the famous circle of Stonehenge. Pictures give one no idea of size; & I had imagined something on a much larger scale. I had thought that the stones were scattered at intervals over a great space of the plain—so that when we settled to meet the riders at ‘Stonehenge’ I had privately judged the plan to be far too vague. But really it is a tiny compact little place—the stones might be arranged for instance as they are now—in the stalls of St James Hall—But otherwise the pictures had prepared me fairly truthfully—as to shape & position that is; I had not realised though that the stones have such a look of purpose & arrangement; it is a recognisable temple, even now.

We promptly sat down with our backs to the sight we had come to see, & began to eat sandwiches: half an hour afterwards we were ready to make our inspection.

The singular, & intoxicating charm of Stonehenge to me, & to most I think, is that no one in the world can tell you anything about it. There are these great blocks of stone; [ ] & what more? Who piled them there & when, & for what purpose, no one in the world—I like to repeat my boast—can tell.

I felt as though I had run against the stark remains of an age I cannot otherwise conceive; [ ] a piece of wreckage washed up from Oblivion. There are theories I know—without end; & we, naturally, made a great many fresh, & indisputable discoveries of our own. The most attractive, & I suppose most likely, is that some forgotten people [ ] built here a Temple where they worshipped the sun; there is a rugged pillar someway out side the circle whose peak makes exactly that point on the rim of the earth where the sun rises in the summer solstice. And there is a fallen stone in the middle, longer & larger than the other hewn rocks it lies among which may have been an altar—& the moment the sun rose the Priest of that savage people slaughtered his victim here in honour of the Sun God. We certainly saw the dent of his axe in the stone. Set up the pillars though in some other shape, & we have an entirely fresh picture; but the thing that remains in ones mind, whatever one does, is the stupendous mystery of it all. Man has done nothing to change Salisbury plain since these stones were set here; they have seen sunrise & moonrise over those identical swells & ridges for—I know not how many thousand years. I like to think of it; imagine those toiling pagans doing honour to the very sun now in the sky above me, & for some perverse reason I find this a more deeply impressive temple of Religion—block laid to block, & half of them tumbled in ruin so long that the earth almost hides them, than that perfect spire whence prayer & praise is at this very moment ascending.

It is matter for thought surely, if not for irony, that as one stands on the ruins of Stonehenge one can see the spire of Salisbury Cathedral.

the wilton carpet factory

I was up this morning at six—an autobiographical statement which needs, I feel, some explanation. We had over-night allowed ourselves to dwell long on the pleasures of otter hunting, a sport in which none of us had ever taken part—or have yet, for the matter of that. The hounds were to meet at Wilton at 7—We agreed in all the fervour of the night before to rise at 6 this morning, & join them. At a quarter to six a dull thud against my door pulled me by the hair as it were out of all kinds of delicate & elusive dreams. We have no blinds in this house, & the brightness of my room, I suppose, helped to chase away all the doubts & mysteries which night spins over one’s brains; I was awake, & in possession of the facts of the case almost at once. Soon I rose, dressed, & tumbled downstairs to breakfast. A breakfast which has been laid over night is never an exhilarating meal, but we each had a hot cup of tea, & started. Now every time I see what early morning is like I vow it is the rarest & fairest part of the day—in one sense it is certainly the rarest. One feels I suppose abnormally spiritual when one has vanquished ones fleshly longing for sleep, & thus the prize of your struggle—these extra hours of day light—wear a peculiar aetherial aspect which somehow makes you appear creditable in your own eyes. We stepped along the road, as light as stags; as though we had left our gross bodies in bed. [ ] Indeed the early morning is lovely, once in a way: I like to feel that I am in harmony with nature; going forth into the fields when her creatures are waking, & the strange life of the tillers of the ground has already begun. I saw for instance some harvesters working among the corn; they looked at us with the start of wild beasts surprised—they were so entirely one with the spirit of the fields.

But it is of carpet manufactories that I am going to write. The otter hounds, naturally, put off their meet; the first man we met told us the inevitable news: we had to enjoy the morning for 2 hours therefore before breakfast—which was sleeply work. After that we had to go to Wilton house—& having disposed of that, the notion of seeing the Wilton Carpet factory crossed our minds. Providence, or again that power which takes our education to heart, arranged matters in a surprisingly convenient way—Wednesday it chanced was the one day in the week on which the factory is open to visitors. Wilton is the last place one thinks likely to hold a factory; its air tastes unpolluted by any smoke save that of snug domestic hearths, & its streets are surely the oldest in England. But nevertheless there is a factory—of a kind. It has little likeness I imagine to the factories of Birmingham & Manchester. We entered by a door which looked like the entrance to the stables of an ion, & found ourselves in a courtyard, which again looked very much like the courtyard of an old fashioned posting house. The buildings round it are low & ramshackle; there is no hum of machinery, no bustle of workpeople; I expected to be led on to some further, & more imposing buildings. But instead our guide—a wrinkled old countryman—opened a door on the left: we were in the factory. It was a long low room like one of the long rooms in a mill; down the middle there was suspended a wooden cylinder; round which were stretched the strings which make the foundation of a carpet. Girls were seated on one side of this, twisting coloured threads round the strings with most dexterous fingers; they then beat them down on top of the work already done with a metal comb. Above them was pinned the design of the carpet—but I remain quite unable to understand how they carried this out—as they did without hesitation—or how it resulted in the very elaborate pattern which was woven into the finished work. The benches were by no means crowded; but the girls that were there worked hard enough, & in silence. Their faces were not unhappy; but they had all of them—the youngest was twelve I suppose—the pale preoccupied look of people who sit long hours over hard work, from which their attention can never stray, though the depths of the mind are unstirred. We went through two or three rooms of this kind—all of them low & badly lighted, with no modern machinery or furniture. The look of the whole place indeed was dusty & ramshackle, & obsolete; our guide made it clear to us that this is indeed the case: Wilton no longer makes Wilton carpets. Axminster carpets are its principal product—& these it is evident are slowly being superseded. All their work is done by hand—machines were started, but not enough work was demanded to make them pay, & the power room is now shut up.

We left then; nor will the Wilton carpet factories remain open to the public for many years to come.

romsey abbey

The last of the sights within reach has been accomplished—Romsey Abbey, that is.

It is a solid spacious place—only looking too thoroughly scrubbed & scoured to be entirely satisfactory. It is, our guide says, the finest Norman church extant, but it is a jumble of styles: restorers too have laid their cloven hoof upon it; it is a bewildering place to be let loose in, as I was, with an ignorant mind.

First I had an idea that Romsey Abbey was a disused ruin; an image partly painted from Tintern I think, of ivied arches & mossy pillars standing un-roofed in the open air, like the ribs of a wrecked ship, was in my mind, & this perfectly preserved place put me to such confusion at first that I could not collect any other impressions. Then it has the look of a place but recently restored—after the original pattern no doubt; but the stone might have been quarried yesterday. Then, again, the atmosphere of the place is curiously profane. The side aisles have been turned into museums, where wooden models of the original Abbey are shown, & relics—such as a dead nuns hair & a scrap of the old altar cloth—are framed & glazed. There is moreover a singular heap of rubbish, against one of the walls—gargoyles & chippings off pillars & all kinds of fragments—piled there without attempt at arrangement. Nor do I know whence they come or to what use they are to be put. They strike one as somehow irreverent—a rubbish heap of Saints heads, & pious stone, which ought to be given decent burial or put to some proper use.

The church is very bare; there are but one or two monuments in the whole of it, & what stained glass there is is very new & thin in colour. Most of the windows though are plain glass—like those in Salisbury Cathedral—& it is partly this perhaps that gives the church its secular air. You dont want sober daylight in a church; it is too cynical & uncompromising; stained glass, as rich as you can make it, is essential to religion. But sacred or not, Romsey is a fine place; Milton might have written it, in stone.

life in the fields

For some time I have not had occasion it seems to me, to open this book. We have fallen in to the routine of country life, & the days are indistinct. It is in this kind of swoon, in which the body goes through its operations—the mouth takes in food, & the brain to some extent acts—that the country men & women pass their days—the Squire & his Lady I mean. I would fain believe that our lives are somehow regulated by the sun—that we rise near dawn; & sleep in the midday, & toil in the fields all through the light, till dark comes & closes our eyes—But this is a picturesque falsehood. The sun rises & makes all my room bright—but leaves me un-moved—the sun sets—& I am reading the newspaper by lamplight. The inventor of lamps freed us from the tyranny of the sun. But in another sense, we have become absorbed by the spirit of Nature, let us say—a vast quantity of it is distilled by these fields & downs; we inhale it peacefully. We become a great deal more dependent, I observe, upon the shades of heat & cold—of cloudlessness & rain. These accidents now decide our days for us. We spend so much of our time out of doors too, that we become sensitive to the various changes of temperature & aspect which mark the different hours of the day. If I lived here much longer I should get to understand the wonderful rise & swell & fall of the land. It is like some vast living thing, & all its insects & animals, save man, are exquisitely in time with it. If you lie on the earth somewhere you hear a sound like a vast breath, as though it were the very inspiration of earth herself, & all the living things on her.

stonehenge again

We have had singular good fortune in our expeditions; & our two visits to Stonehenge have impressed such pictures on my mind as I never wish to be obliterated.

We made a second expedition today—the 5th of September; but expedition is a hateful word; I would rather call it pilgrimage: because in truth we went in all reverence with a pure desire to enjoy ourselves. A day spent happily in the open air, counts, I am sure ‘whatever Gods there be’ as worship; the air is a Temple in which one is purged of ones sins.

We drove over the Downs, instead of by the road—a straighter, & more interesting way. We saw nobody at all—it was a showery morning—which however, entirely justified the trust we put in it. We passed only those few men & women to whom the openness of the fields is as natural as the enclosure of my room is to me. On the plain itself the only people we passed were shepherds: they drift about in the wide space with their flocks, just as though they were in the Bible; they take advantage of this wet weather too; to add one bold stroke to their appearance which, I as an artist would hesitate to introduce; I should be half afraid of over picturesqueness: they wear long black cloaks reaching down to their heels, & flapping in capes round the shoulders; in one hand too they grasp a real shepherds staff. You may actually see one of these figures lying on his elbow, wrapped in his cloak, his dog lolling out his tongue beside him, & his flock grazing all round.

At the Farm where we put up, we had the rare experience of managing entirely for ourselves—& if you want to feel a fool try to do for yourself what you have always paid a servant to do for you. I have always thought that grooms were an uneducated race—but they might have truthfully laughed at me today. [ ] Everybody ought to know how to unharness a horse—lead him to his stable—fasten him there—& provide him with corn without a moments doubt. Otherwise not only the whole race of grooms but of horses likewise is for the time your superior.

But it was done—& we lunched—& we walked across to Stonehenge, & sat within the Circle. Our choice of a day gave us the whole place to ourselves. The solitary policeman whose strange lot in life it is to mount guard over Stonehenge had taken shelter behind one of his charges. The apoplectic sheep, who can imitate a standing motor car which is still palpitating to perfection, were grazing outside the Circle, & as far as we could see we had not only Stonehenge, but the whole ocean of plain entirely to ourselves. One can imagine why this spot was chosen by the Druids—or whoever they were—for their Temple to the Sun. It lies very naked to the sun. It is a kind of altar made of earth, on which the whole world might do sacrifice.

the beginning of the storm

It is easier to write tonight than to sleep. A wind which has been playing about all day, suddenly goes to work in dead earnest. It is battering at my windows pressing them as tight against the frame as possible, & then swerving aside so that the pane released from pressure rattles loose. The wind has a wonderful compass of voices. You can hear it running up & down the scale as it swells in force & dies away. But this is a very full bodied tempestuous wind, not one of those that sing high & drearily without much change of key.

country reading

It must be confessed that that boast of reading in the country has not been altogether fulfilled. I was not really happy in my choice of books—& I have brought some which no compulsion will drive me to open while we are here. I have read though, one or two that pleased me—Roderick Hudson to begin with—That is a book which reminds me of an infinitely fine pencil drawing; it lacks colour, it lacks outline, but it is full of exquisite drawing, as an artist would say—& the slightest stroke, you see, has its meaning. You dont get any of that spontaneous & unreflecting pleasure out of it that you do out of the great books, [ ] but you get a marvellous amount of reasoned enjoyment. It is the enjoyment of the intellectual palate tickled by something fine & rare—you need be a little of an epicure to see how very fine & rare it is. [ ] But this isn’t an altogether satisfactory style of art.

Next came Hardy—Tess of the D’Urbervilles, which is of a very different type. He has taken a grim subject and stuck to it till the bitter end. It is [ ] written with the purpose of showing how a girl may be as pure as snow, & do things that women may not do—how in spite of her purity, the judgment of a brutal world descends upon her, ruins her life, & sends her to the gallows. All this is set forth with an almost savage insistence; the writer is so sternly determined that we shall see the brutality of certain social conventions that he tends to spoil his novel as a novel. Tess & Clare & D’Urberville have to represent types, & rather lose their individual features. But it is an impressive bit of work—& many things in it are purely admirable—Joan Durbeyfield for instance—the Dairy maids at the Farm, & Hardy is one of the few writers who can bring the fresh air into their books. His country is solid. [ ]

I read here too, Boswells Hebrides—which has fired me to read all I can find of Johnson. What is the receipt I wonder for making such a book as this? Boswell apparently sat up at night—fuddled with wine as likely as not—& wrote down word for word the sayings that had dropped from Johnson’s lips during the day. Many people could do this & have done it—but without success. The result is invariably a succession of bald & disconnected sentiments which might have been dropped by an eagle or a mummy. Boswell somehow manages to cut out a whole chunk of the earth & air & stick it all alive under a glass case for us to come & see.

the storm

I said something about the wind—the night afterwards it rose indeed, till we had the treat of watching a real gale at work. Much though we talk of our weather & its vicissitudes, we seldom get anything really out of the way in England. There are seldom great thunder storms, great deluges, or real gales. But the other night we went beyond our usual limits; it was a storm & no mistake about it. It rose so quickly that before we thought about it our shutters were banging, & in our little drawing room after dinner we felt in a state of siege. The walls were withstanding great pressure; & though we sat inside in still air the strain was perceptible. It was not a gusty wind, that blows & swerves aside; it was a high roaring wind all on the same key, & at the same pitch.

It never loosened its grasp—It would have been impossible for anyone to go out of doors—one thought of those who were on the roads tonight with honest pity. By midnight—we went to bed late knowing that sleep under such conditions would not be easy—one looked out of the window & saw the moon stationary; but all between it & the earth in a state of violent motion—clouds pelting along, & the trees writhing. [ ] The noise all the time was considerable—first the steady rush of the wind itself—then countless bangs & slams & creaks, as though all the doors & windows were being tested, & wrenched open & slammed shut again—& every now & again, there was another sound—a crack audible above the tumult, followed on one occasion by an alarming assault upon our window panes, as though something hard had stricken them. We saw that they were un-broken—fastened our shutters again—& went to bed. This went on through the night—when we woke the storm was passed, & it was bright daylight.

But it had done its work in the night. The whole place looked dishevelled; the front of our house was ripped of its creepers—the road was strewn with branches & leaves—the hedges & the flower beds were beaten flat. But it had done more than this. It had rooted out the very trees. A great sycamore, weighted with foliage had gone down before it & had fallen right across our lawn, crushing a wooden paling beneath it.

That was the first thing we saw—but when we went outside our gates we found that there was ruin everywhere. Fifteen trees nearly round our house were uprooted, & almost every tree had a great gash down its side where a branch had been torn off. The worse damage though was done in the Lombardy Poplar Avenue; this is one of the most beautiful things about here—the trees are very tall, & regular, & silver in stem & silver in leaf as they are, they make a kind of silver arch. Now there were gaps in the perfect succession of the avenue as five of the great trees lay flat bridging the river at their side. For such tall & stately trees they have extraordinarily little grip on the earth: their roots seemed only to be a few feet deep, so that they had fallen over with very little rending of the earth at their base.

All along the Wilton road there were fallen trees—fallen branches—& bricks from the wall. By afternoon men were at work sawing up the larger trees & putting them on carts, while the smaller branches were being plundered by children & old women with wheelbarrows to serve for winter firing—

The newspapers are now in, with a good many columns devoted to the ‘Great Storm’. In truth, it did a good nights work. It smashed Dover pier for instance, & blew away 70,000 pounds worth of good gold—every town almost woke to find some house or spire gone—& many men & women over England never saw the day after that night. Never a storm comes—never do thunder & lightning wake me in the night, but some life, as unwitting as mine, is ended. There are many families today who will never forget—as I shall do so soon—the stormy night of September the tenth.

wilton fair

Had I had time a full account, reaching to several pages of my best script should have preserved my memory of this our last entertainment. Nothing that I have seen since we came here has been so characteristic I feel of this part of the world. But I have let time slip, & must not for the sake of that truth which I make my aim here, attempt much in the way of description.

I remember though that our drive the day before,Friday [September] 11th, took us on the Downs, & we observed an unusual commotion among the population of flocks. They were all attended by shepherds in their best Sunday clothes—& dogs too, who looked more than usually alert. Some were driven into their pens to feed, others were being hounded out—but the greater part of the flocks were marching along the road, all with their noses turned in the same direction. We met drove after drove, so closely packed in the lane that we wondered how on earth we were to pass. The shepherd whistled his dog, shouted something unintelligible to us, but at once understood by the dog, who clove a passage for us in an incredibly short time.

Every now & then we met a drove of calves—& the secret was out when a terrible puffing ahead, as of a goods train going at foots pace, proclaimed a traction engine. There were two of these monsters. Somebodys Steam Circus, it turned out—& these were followed by a whole caravan of gipsies. Next day was Wilton fair—These gipsies travel the country, from fair to fair, all through the summer. They are, we were told, the genuine breed, talkers of Romany & all the rest, who under pretence of earning a livelihood at fairs like the respectable world, live their own gipsy life, which is otherwise impossible. I never see a gipsy cart without longing to be inside it. A house that is rooted to no one spot but can travel as quickly as you change your mind, & is complete in itself is surely the most desirable of houses. Our modern house with its cumbersome walls & its foundations planted deep in the ground is nothing better than a prison; [ ] & more & more prison like does it become the longer we live there & wear fetters of association & sentiment, painful to wear—still more painful to break.

The fair itself is the greatest sheep fair in this part of the Kingdom. It brings the shepherds from their downs—the farmers from their far away farms—& the country folk from all the villages within a days journey. It is thus a remarkable day in the calendar—a day of social meeting as well as of business. You could see here a very curious type of face—that of the shepherd who passes his life with his flocks on the down. He is far more interesting to observe than his sheep. His face is not coarsened; & yet is not the face of a man who has mixed with his fellow men; it is the face of a middle aged man but it has the freshness & simplicity of a childs. The eye is perfectly clear & shrewd; the face is tanned red & brown, & creased with a multitude of fine lines, but it is easy to see that they have come there when the eyes are screwed to observe the weather, or the brow is puckered against the wind—& have nothing whatever to do with any mental perplexity. His best coat is a relic of a more festive age, [ ] & is a rich chestnut, or plum colour, grown mellow with years; he wears corduroy breeches, a large felt hat, & he grasps a staff in his hand high up near the top. A more typically English figure I imagine it would be hard to find than this Wiltshire down shepherd.

out of the windows

The last night here has come—is almost fulfilled. I have but to put my head on the pillow—sleep & wake tomorrow within 3 hours of London. The journey is not to be measured by its miles; it is a very small journey, but one of great actual & traditional importance to us. Of old it meant still more; we ended the summer on that day, & opened the 9 months in London which were to be in some sort months of lessons & restraint. St. Ives was summer & holiday. It can be imagined that this was a very serious anniversary. Now it has lost much of its meaning—I find that time goes swifter as one gets older, & is less liable to fall into cycles according to the place you live in. But still I know that in some sense our summer is over. We leave the country till Easter—that is a really sad thought—for this country is beautiful as any country is, & has a [Next page is missing.]

london

We are back—here I sit in my own room, where I have sat & slept since babyhood almost. It has a new red carpet—otherwise it remains the same, & I would not have it changed.

It is shameful to confess that two obstacles hindered any properly sentimental farewell this morning—one was our lunch, devoured in the train—the other the newspaper which we all read steadily as we eat. There are all manner of excitements—how deep they delve I do not know, but they agitate the surface considerably. Political statements I find are far the hardest to understand, partly I think because the politician as a rule has not studied the art of making his case plain in print. But anyhow there is no need to go into this. What is more to the point here, is that it was a perfect autumn morning—rich & warm & regretful, one of the few hot days this summer. When we got to London the heat which had room to expand in the country, was stuffy merely: the superficial impression of London was that it was in deshabille—sleeping off the fatigues of the season. The people in the street had a curious look of being only passing through: cabs with boxes were more numerous than cabs without. A London house feels undeniably small & stuffed after the country—but we shall shake down. Already Netherhampton fades, but I hope not beyond recall.

London (continued)

London it must be confessed, is like a Lady whom one surprises in her dressing gown; she is not at her best. It is vexatious too, to find that the summer is in full swing; the only compensation for leaving the country at this time of year is the prospect of fires & long dark evenings spent within doors—evenings lightened perhaps by the visits of friends, & anyhow made pleasant in a thousand civilised ways which one misses in the country. But fires today would have been unbearable; in fact we wore our summer clothes. We walked in the gardens—where the trees have come down too. It is not to the credit of the storm to have knocked over these decayed old fogies—whose flesh has turned to a brown spongy substance, while their bark is a mere crust of soot. The earth which they dug up as they fell is barren & dusty looking—evidently not a nourishing soil.

But the worst of the Kensington Gardens are the people. There is a brood which comes out at these between seasons which is mercifully unknown at others. It is not indigenous; these are not cockneys—it is not upper lower or middle class. I can only imagine that September is the month when country people & foreigners choose to visit London. [ ] A small boy trotted up to us & began patting Schusters unresponsive back; we asked if he had a dog? Yes, he answered at once, I have one to my home—“Where was his home?” “In America”—‘naturally’ & he’d been in England 2 months & 14 months in Antwerp—& the astonishing child was prepared to give us his whole family history without hesitation. An English boy of the same age, if addressed by strangers, gazes at you for half a minute with a shy smile, & then trots away to his mother. But it doesn’t seem to occur to him that an answer is expected—This American child, I make no doubt, would have been an appalling bore had one seen much of him—& he had a curiously unchildlike face already—

the serpentine

The evening paper is always prolific in tragedies & tonight’s sheet was unusually so. Four young men all in the prime of life have fallen & killed themselves on Scafell—the average number of husbands have murdered their wives while in drink or out of it, & love sick shop girls & maniacs have rushed to their knives & poison pots with unusual frequency. One might easily have sated one’s horrid curiosity & passed without reading a certain insignificant little paragraph at the bottom of the column. ‘A Suicides pathetic letter’ I think they headed it—& in my idleness I read. It was by no means an out of the way story & the Editor had judged his readers taste judiciously when he allotted his capitals to the Yarmouth murder. This was printed I daresay for lack of something more blood curdling.

But I read it & it has stuck in my memory so that I can write it here. Yesterday morning then, the first Park Keepers saw something afloat in the Serpentine—What it needed little looking to tell. Bodies in the Serpentine are not uncommon in the early morning. They drew it ashore & found that it was a woman who had been drowned, drowned herself presumably some hours before. She was quite dead, & there was nothing to be done but take her to the mortuary & leave her for her relations to identify. Her soaked clothes were taken off, & the pockets searched in case her name or address might be found there. Very few people go out of the world in silence; almost every dead man or woman who is picked up has written some word of apology or farewell or justification. The most friendless knows that some one—if only the coroner—will be curious to learn what drove him to this last step—& it was so in this case. A scrap of paper was found pinned to the inside of her dress as though she had meant to keep it from the water as long as possible. It was blurred but the writing was still legible. Her last message to the world—whatever its import, was short—so short that I can remember it. ‘No father, no mother, no work’ she had written ‘May God forgive me for what I have done tonight’. This was her message & no more; name or dwelling place, friend or relation, she had none apparently. The inquest therefore could do nothing but declare that the body of an unknown woman age about 45 had been found drowned, & that as no relation claimed it it was to have burial at the hands of the parish. Here the newspaper ended—but I could not get the words out of my head. ‘No father, no mother, no work,’ & so she killed herself. Had this been the act & writing of a girl it would have been sad enough—but that a woman of 45 should have written this for testament struck me as infinitely sadder. She had had her trial in life, time enough in 45 years to make test of all human relationships—daughterhood, wifehood, motherhood. Whether she knew these two last we cannot say—happiest for her if she had never known them—for last night she counted them as nothing. It was for her father & mother that this middle aged woman yearned—a father & mother, maybe, who died when she was a child. Perhaps this was so & she grew to womanhood without them, & without needing them. She became a wife without thought of her parents, & a mother with hardly any memory of her own mother. But her husband leaves her for some other woman, & her children die, or desert her. Then of a sudden comes that pang—Without husband or children, I yet had parents. If they were alive now I should not be alone. Whatever my sin my father & mother would have given me protection & comfort. For the first time in her life perhaps she weeps for her parents & for the first time knows all that they were, & her loneliness without them. That sorrow I say is bitter enough in youth with the world before one & its promise; but in middle age one knows that the loss is one that nothing can heal & no fresh tie renew. Your husband may die & you can marry another—your children may die & others may be born to you, but if your father & mother die you have lost something that the longest life can never bring again.

It was something of this perhaps that the nameless woman thought before she made up her mind to kill herself. But there was one thing left which might make life endurable—without father or mother or other relation to care if she lived or died, & that was work. I do not believe that she coupled this word with the sacred names of father & mother in any merely material sense—by work she meant bread & butter, but she also meant something nobler. She had learnt perhaps the self respect & purity that come from work, & the blessed peace with which it deadens sorrow. Before she died then she would try to find work. I do not know where she went in her search; perhaps she came near this very street. But it is very easy to deny a strange woman work, who threatens to kill herself if you refuse. [ ] At any rate she found no work, as one may read in the bitter line which water cannot efface ‘No father, no mother, no work’ What then remained? There was still one scruple—one tie which kept her to life; though she had no home, no friends & no one would give her work, yet had she any right to lift the burden God had set upon her shoulders? She hesitated—but it was very heavy. She gave way, with a last appeal for mercy on her weakness. ‘May God forgive me for what I have done tonight’ Then slipping off the weight that had been too much for her, she sank in the waters. Whoever she is that sleeps tonight in a grave without a name, may she sleep well, as surely the tired have right to sleep.

Chance, who not infrequently decides our lives has decreed, there is no doubting it, that the end of my book shall coincide with our return to London. The first of October, wrote J.K.S. is the natural birth of the year—whatever the calendar says; & so I take it. October begins work & pleasure lifts the curtain on that particular act of our drama which is played in London. Actors may change—their parts may be different but the sameness of scene gives a certain continuity to the whole, & does in fact influence our lives to no little extent.

[]

Christmas 1904 to May 1905

New Forest Christmas 1904

Each blade of grass with a white line of frost on it.

The sunset makes all the air as though of melted amethyst; yellow flakes dissolve from the solid body of amethyst which is the west. Against this, standing as though in an ocean of fine air, the bare trees are deep black lines, as though drawn in Indian ink which has dried dull & indelible. The small branches & twigs make a fringe of infinitely delicate lines, each one distinctly cut against the sky. The highest tips of the branches are russet, & so is the top of the trunk, in the red sun light. The trees stand round in a circle, & in their midst is a kind of little stage of grass & heather-bog where it is greenest in which a pastoral play might be acted. Then the trees close together again, with pathways radiating at intervals to the open space—The trees have green velvet jackets of moss. This the brightest colour in the landscape. A peach bloom of silver & plum colour covers the trees at a little distance. Also a pale green lichen, seaweed like in its shape, covers the bark. The trees very often spread their branches into a symmetrical fan shape as though they had been clipped by a landscape gardener. A river in summer is as though made of plates of translucent glass, the top one of which slides. Mystery of sound reaching one through the trees; the distant music of hounds running. The note of the huntsmans horn, & far away voices of men shouting, all sound as in some distant romantic dream; as though falling through an ocean of waters.

The stone window frames at Kings are iridescent like a butterfly’s wing when the sun shines through the stained glass.

1 January
New Forest

This is at any rate a cheerful New Years day, as though we had turned over a new leaf & swept the sky clean of clouds. It was clear with frost at the turn of the night, when the New Year came in with the new day. T. & A. went out, with rum punch in their hands, to salute 1905; they shouted, & declare that innumerable owls answered them. This may be true, because on soft nights when I lie with my window open, I hear the mellow call of owls repeated again & again at no great distance, & the crude holloa of a baby owl, who has still to learn the call of an owl.

The afternoon was a beautiful specimen of winter light; the air as clear as though sheets of glass had been dissolved into atmosphere & all the colours were lively & delicate.

2 January

A cold silent day: Snowflakes dropping quietly, which by degrees turned to falling rain.

I went out into the forest in the afternoon; found it all still & dun coloured, rain pattering through the leaves, & the ponies standing up against the trees for shelter. All the same, wonderful modulations of colour.

3 January

Bright morning: sad coloured afternoon, in which however we walked, & bogged ourselves, & cursed the mud, & could not look at the trees—which by the way, purple day by day. After screwing out fine-drawn theories about trees for 3 hours, I am not going to make more here. It may be my hopeful imagination—but I decidedly smell spring in the air. The dark doesn’t fall like a knife in the early afternoon—& the spring is youthful & a time of hope & stir in the blood. I feel as though old man winter had a spark in him now.

Read, wrote, cursed, & walked—all as usual.

4 January

Home at 5.30 today. Not a bright day in the forest; so sunless in London, though clear at dusk when we reached Waterloo. Passed over the river, & saw the shores of either side spangled with the lights of London, like a Japanese print.

No letters of interest—nothing but a tune on the pianola, a Watts picture to hang, & an air of great cleanliness & emptiness. J[ulian] T[hoby] S[tephen] walking via Winchester to Hindhead.

5 January

A London day. That is to say only narrow strip of sky to be looked at, no bird noises, no sighings & moanings of trees & green growing things—no splash of water—only the interminable roar & rattle & confusion of wheels & voices. All this neighbourhood has asphalt, which does sensibly increase the noise. But ones mind “grows mouldy in the country”—Here at any rate one has no excuse for a speck of rust. Typewrote, read, & sent off several dull letters.

6 January

A rainy day, for the most part I think, but all the morning I spent making a large paper book for the New Year. May its leaves bear fruit worth having! Then at 12 I dashed out to get a key for my clock, & to negotiate about a handle for my new black stick, bought at Christchurch. This will cost me 5s! Wilful extravagance! Home, to find the silver point press arrived—N. & A. already grimy & deep in mechanism.

Printed our first plates after lunch—& with success, though my book plate needs to be improved. Tea with Miss Sheepshanks, a large kindly & rather able sort of woman. I am to start a girls club at Morley, & talk about books &c!

7 January

Morning rather vague; book plate printing I think, I achieved a passable rose & bud which now adorns my lovely new copy of [Edward] Fitzgerald—Silverpoint is very kind to amateur drawing, & gives tone & depth where there aint any in the original. Today, I think N. & I went to the Academy Watts exhibition which is weak & worthless—almost incredibly so, considering his reputation. Not a single first rate picture there, & many 5th rate. His “ideas” here swamped his art. In the evening to Morley College soirée in the Waterloo Road: where I discussed a class with nice enthusiastic working women who say they love books. These people are refreshing after the educated. G[eorge]. Trevelyan made a dull & raucous speech.

8 January

A white & gray day—the colour of Gurth as we observed when we took him out in the afternoon—All the morning I worked at a death mask of Shakespeare, which is to make a book plate in his works—made something dimly like—elongated & cadaverous. Anyhow, I have stuck it in. A. away with B.R. beagling. T. away at Hindhead; so N. & I improved our solitude by more or less heated arguments, about all kinds of things. Walked in Regents Park in the afternoon, a great gusty wind, tasting of country moors, set all our London petticoats flying. In the evening I worked at copy of a Greek Tanagra figure, for a silver point book plate—a difficult job.

9 January

Began, being Monday, work on the note for Fred M[aitland]: which I mean to do as well as I can, & to which at present I shall give my mornings. Wrote a few pages: difficulties will come later. So far smooth, & delightful writing—It remains to be seen what stuff it is tomorrow morning.

Went down to the London Library this P.M. & consulted C.B. Clarke about the sketches from Cambridge. They do possess a copy, wrongly catalogued. Question of its suppression not settled, but I think a most unlikely story. Windy, watery weather, all gray & turbulent—which I like. T. & A. back. Tea together. Now I dine with Violet [Dickinson]. Finished, thank God, with judicious skipping Mrs Grs. Town life in the 15th Cent., a learned but not masterly book; too many illustrations & not enough continuity to make good reading for any but specialists.

10 January

Found this morning on my plate my first instalment of wages—£2.7.6. for Guardian articles, which gave me great pleasure. Also a book “Women in America” for review, so that means more work, & cheques ultimately. Wrote at the Note for Fred all the morning, bringing it down to 1897: I shall finish sooner than I thought, as I know what I want to say, & have not much difficulty in saying it. I can only hope it will turn out well. Then took some prints from a new plate. Tea with Mrs Crum, to whom I walked. Discussed the Morley College scheme, & settled to get Savages advice first, as to my capabilities of work at present. Otherwise, to wait till October to begin. Mrs. H. Ward, curiously, wrote to suggest Passmore Edwards work to N. & me, but I have a valid excuse!

Worked at Spanish, which is really easy so far, & I expect easy to read, but talking is another matter.

11 January

N. to Cambridge for the day. The somewhat exacting demand of Nun. Wrote at the Note all the morning, not altogether easy—& it expands under my hands, so it will be longer & take longer than I thought at first. No hurry however. Then dashed out into Oxford Street, to the old book shops, which fascinate me; lunch with A: out again to get glass cut for my autograph letters which I mean to frame myself. A poor old woman, blind, trustfully quavering out her song by the roadside in hope of coppers, while the traffic went thundering by. Gerald to tea, brisk, & cheerful. N. in later. Chintz come to our excitement. Spanish &c. much as usual.

12 January

Wrote this morning, much as usual. At 12.30 a motor sent by Margaret came to take us out, so we had to invent errands, & go whizzing through the streets, swinging under horses noses, & swerving round the corners, like a skater doing outside edge—pretty, doubtless, but perilous. A. out to lunch. I took Gurth to Regents Park for a walk; but Regents Park has none of the charm of Kensington Gardens—no good trees, or hidden places—flat open stretches of grass, where you never lose sight of houses. Read my review book, which might have been better. Finished the life of Morris—a very interesting book, & a great man—so much superior as a genius to B. J. but curiously inhuman.

Nessa dining with J[ack]. W[aller]. H[ills].

13 January

Wrote all the morning, rather laboriously. Went out for my usual tramp, which seems to resolve itself into a tramp down to the old book shops, where I look but dont buy anything. After lunch I made some frames for my letters: George Eliot, James Thomson & Lowells verses are done now, & stand on my mantelpiece; rather successfully. Out to my walking stick shop, where I saw it with a lovely silver head, which moved even the old Jew lady to artistic emotions—not yet engraved however. I walked to the Library, asked for Fred’s American books, which aren’t in—got a book about the relations of poetry & music, which may come in useful for my Morley lectures, if I give them. Then to Violets; sat & talked for a time; found her full of ideas & news. Anthony Harte is her own writing! Home: Will [Vaughan] & Gerald to tea. Will on his way through. Read at my review book which I hope to finish tonight.

14 January

Wrote at my review, which is difficult because of the space allowed, only 600 words & many things to put into it. But at 11 to Savage, who was well satisfied, thinks me ‘normal’ & able to return to all my usual ways, going out, work, &c—so that horrible long illness which began in the 2nd week of April last year, is now fairly put away, & I need think no more of it—for which the Lord be praised! I may do my working women once a week, so I must cudgel my brains for a lecture—finished my review. Nessa lunched with G[eorge]. & M[argaret].: Thoby & I went to the International, which is full of cleverness, & affectation, then I went on to Miss Sheepshanks, to tell her I will come on Wednesday. Typewrote some things for Kitty to see, & the evening much as usual. Began After London, by Jeffries [sic], which seems an imaginative & interesting book so far—

15 January
Sunday

Finished typewriting some things to show Kitty this morning, which Nessa took to her. Then began to read Eugenie Grandet, in the IS. paper edition which I bought at Haworth Station, when I wanted to buy Charlotte Brontë! The cover got so torn in my coat pocket that I decided to bind it before reading it: so I cut it up, & sewed it strongly, & gave it a good blue paper cover, & put it in the Press & it is now a nice looking & strongly bound book. Gerald & a youth called Burn Murdoch to lunch: after which I left for the Queens Hall Concert: a stale programme, which did not much interest me. Home; & wrote several dull letters, one long one to Fred, & paid bills, & sent Mrs L[yttelton]. my review, which is carefully done, but too long, as usual. A north wind sweeping the streets, & frost—

16 January
Monday

Wrote all the morning on my “lecture” for the Working women, & chose Prose as my subject, which does not commit me to anything. It amuses me rather to write, as I can say what I like, without fear of criticism, and the subject interests me—but Heaven knows if it will interest them. This day was the coldest of the year, & colder in London, 20 something degrees of frost than elsewhere. The wind was dry & biting, & the streets slippery with sleet. However I went to the walking stick shop, which still hasn’t done my job. A telegram from Kitty to ask me to dine, which I did, driving through white & gleaming streets. Kitty alone—asked me to write for the Nat[ional Review]: on the strength of the things shown her by Nessa—which I shall be very glad to do. Mr Chirol of the Times is reading my things, with a possible view to asking me to write for the T[imes]. [Literary] Supplement. K. very charming.

17 January
Tuesday

Finished my Prose lecture, which must still be written out, as I cant trust myself to speak from memory—& with writing before me I cant go far wrong.

Nessa lunched with Violet. I was seized with a passion for rearranging my bedroom, so I turned the bed round &c: & hung pictures, & now it is fairly straight & to my liking—Madge, by the way, turned up before lunch, & I drove with her to the station, where Thank God, I did not get in to the train. I prowled round book shops in the Charing X road, all the afternoon & saw many things, which, were my purse obliging, I would get. Paston Letters, Rabelais, & James Thomson. If I am taken on by the Times I shall think myself justified—, & I use my books. Adrian to Cambridge: Invitation to dine with Crums to meet B. Richmond of the Times!

18 January

Wrote all the morning at the [Maitland] Note which is within sight of the end. Heard that Mrs Lyttelton likes my review, which is as well. Snow to sit to Nessa, to lunch & by the way to tea. Tisdall [Dentist] at 3—Got books from the L[ondon]. [L[ibrary]. Then had a tooth sawn off in T’s arm chair, preparatory to crowning—d—— it all! Then took Thoby’s watch to Dent—called for my walking stick, which is ready but wont be delivered till I produce the ready money—bother the old Jewess—who cant be an Artist after all, or she would take my cheques on trust. Home to tea—wrote & read after tea till dinner at 7.30—after which drove—10 minutes only it takes in a cab—to Morley, where I waited 15 minutes alone in a great dreary room with tables & chairs & flaring gas jets—meditating how on earth to discuss Sir T[homas]. Browne under these conditions & two women—nice & intelligent—came finally, but were readier to talk than listen.

19 January

Wrote all the morning at the Note—then changed & lunched with Elena Rathbone, where we met a Miss White (artist) & Mrs. Rathbone. We asked Elena to dine before the Booths dance—then our motor (lent by George) came round & we executed a series of brilliantly successful calls—At. Anny—At. Mary. Palgraves, Hunts or Freshfields—all, sans Palgraves who were nice—out—so we force feed those dunning bills. Home, & Violet & Jack to tea. Jack to stand for Durham, where A. Elliott now is—that is if chosen as candidate, which he apparently will be. Elena to dine; Adrian up from Cambridge—At Grosv[enor] Sq having had my hair done by the family & Nessas being done by a hair dresser. We all went on to the Booths, where were gathered the usual representatives of a certain set, who are for the most part amiable but dull. Danced till 2 & then home.

20 January

Up late, but wrote all the morning. I finished the Note, which fills 34 pages of hand writing: it is corrected for typing, which I must now do, & then I shall be better able to judge—After lunch went to Tisdall, who hurt me quite considerably by ramming a gold crown into my gum. To my surprise, I found George in the waiting room—the 1st time I have seen him since his marriage. Our meeting—under the circumstances was difficult—& short. Got my stick & umbrella at last, the old Jewess having the decency to speak civilly of a debt for 6d. that I had to incur but which I have now paid. G. Booth, Radcliffe, Haynes to tea—all—well, men are not so amusing as women. Adrian back to Cambridge after dinner.

21 January

Wrote a lecture—an odd kind of lecture!—upon our journey in Italy, for the working women. This is the kind of thing they really enjoy I know—whether there were fleas in the beds at Venice. I shall have to invent some—& c &c. It is easy, though not instructive to write, & I rattled off 12 pages. Nelly Cecil to be painted, whom I did not see. Katherine Stephen to lunch, very nice & large & sensible as usual, with a low gentle voice—just home from a week in India. Harry & Barbara dont interest me, I am bound to say, but all Stephens must rejoice that one has achieved the feat of marriage. Motor & George in the afternoon, who drove us himself to Richmond, gave us tea at Star & Garter & home.

A book from Mrs Lyttelton which is convenient.

22 January

Up late, to do honour to the Sabbath, which I spend partly in bed, as there are no letters to make me come down to breakfast. Nessa for her Sunday jaunt to Kitty. I typewrote the Note for Fred, which I know to be beastly bad—all cobblestone sentences, brisk & matter of fact, without an atom of beauty or swing about them. And I write about prose! Anyhow they may be useful. Gerald & Marny to lunch. Poor Robert Brough, the painter, dead of the railway accident. This carries out my theory that artists & people of gifts die earlier than the common herd. If he had been a Plumber he would have recovered—as it is—another tragedy, & we have had many lately. To Queen’s Hall with Marny; fair concert: Eroica disappointing—Nessa lunch Mrs. Prothero, & dine Kitty who likes my writing!

23 January

Worked rather intermittently this morning, as Nessa was on the loose, but corrected half the Note which is typewritten. Oh—for some one to tell me whether it is well, very well, or indifferently done. Lunch at 1, as N. went to paint at Alexandra House. At 3.30 I was in Tisdalls chair, & sat there an hour of acute discomfort & some pain having a tooth stopped & that infernal crown jammed into my jaw which was finally done—but it aches like [illegible] at this minute, & spoils my chance of a cheerful dance at the Freshfields tonight, where we are all going. Jack to tea—full of the Durham elections, whose candidate he is now. Russian massacres, & the poor timorous Czar in hiding.

24 January

We were not home till 2.30 last night—this morning rather—as we knew many people, &, on the whole the dance was fun. A great gathering of Fishers, all amicable &c. So we stayed in bed late this morning. & I am ashamed to say that I did very little work; but I am rather at a loose end just now, as the Note is done, & I have not yet read my new Review book—So I cobbled my lecture a little. Tomorrow, q.v., with fresh brains, I shall try & write a pot boiler—as I have time. Nessa & Nelly Cecil & Nun to lunch, as vigorous & thoroughly cautious & in her sober wits as usual. Nessa chose a carpet with her after lunch, & went on a Bus to Hampstead & back, which is a lazy & pleasant way of spending an afternoon, which takes only one hour, there & back. At. Minna to tea. The vigour of these old ladies! Read my Review book after tea, & found it happily amusing.

25 January

Another lazy morning—read however the greater part of my review book, so that will be written tomorrow with luck—& then?—I must turn about for something fresh to do. My birthday, by the way—the 25th but, as usual, it was somehow rather forgotten which one begins to expect at my age—! Violet to lunch, & she did bring a present—a huge china inkpot which holds almost a jar full of ink, & is rather too large to be practicable. I must cultivate a bold hand & a quill pen—Georges motor after lunch, in which we did various long distance jobs—then home, read my review book, & dinner at 7.30 as we went with Gerald to Peter Pan, Barries play—imaginative & witty like all of his, but just too sentimental—However it was a great treat.

26 January

Wrote my review all this morning—save for one very long & damaging interruption—without which I should have finished it. Aunt Anny & Hester, anxious to see over the house—which takes time. However they were enthusiastic, & finally I got a little bit of writing done. Nelly to lunch, so deaf, that to talk across a table is really hard work—but she has a charming alert mind—worth penetrating too. I then took Gurth, on a leash which I bought for him, to the London Library & back, as he must learn to be a street dog if I am to exercise him. I think the variety of street smells make up almost for the Gardens. Mrs Lyttelton to tea, large & healthy, & broad minded, a refreshing & inspiriting woman. Now to dine at the Crums—

27 January

Dinner last night at Crums amusing, ten people, among them M. Lyttelton, Bruce Richmond, & the Italian & English Villari—Taken down by Mrs Crum—however Villari’s Russian experiences had to be discussed; they were interesting; B. Richmond had my MSS in his pocket—but I got no chance to talk as he went off to the Times—However a letter from Kitty this morning to say that he & the great Mr Chirol approve, & I am to come & meet them to discuss—I dont quite know what, but I hope it means that I am to get more work, reviewing I suppose. Finished my Guardian Belle of 50 years ago book, which I hope is sufficiently good—rather too long. A brute of a man spoilt my morning by mending the grate, however I did all I had to—Chintzes & new music came—the chintzes are delightful & make our drawing room bright & furnished looking. Motor this afternoon, did calls, & the French pictures; some of them lovely, one especially of a liquid & flowing sea. To tea with M[ary]. Cone by tube where I played with the children.

28 January

All the morning gone! These are the tribulations of friendship, I suppose, & so to be borne with a willing heart, but I grudge time, I must say. [Nurse] Traill came at 10.15—stayed talking all the morning, being out of work, lunched here, went with me to the L[ondon]. L[ibrary]. after lunch, & then I left her & went on to Violets, where I found Mr. Robinson the gardener, & designer of grates—an interesting man, whom I am to go & see on Wednesday morning. Tea with Violet, & was blown up for my journalism. Promised to translate a bit of tough Greek, as a penance—Home & Moorsom to dine, a strange pompous youth, who dissolved a little under the influence of bridge. I wonder why young people—men especially—have the strange ambition to be like the old. Nessa approves of the [Maitland] Note.

29 January

Soot fell in the night, so we had to breakfast in the study. I made a paper book this morning for my translations. I think I shall begin with Thucydides. Gerald came to lunch, & afterwards Thoby & I went to the Zoo which is beginning to treat its animals with greater attention. A very wombatty wombat, the most delightful creature there; it has a large square head, with brown eyes, & the body is very fat & shapeless & covered with brown fur, & it waddles on very short legs. In short it is all that a wombat should be—The birds naturally attracted Thoby. To the music of Everyman with Nessa at Queens Hall, rather beautiful. T. likes my Note.

30 January

Wrote all the morning at a paper which may, with luck do for Leo [Maxse]. It is about music!—naturally depends more upon the imagination than upon facts. Rather amuses me to write, since I have been ordered not to write for my brains health. Thoby’s approval of the Note gives me great pleasure, as I think he meant it, & I am very glad to have made it good. Lunch with At. Minna, where I found Margaret [Duckworth]. She was very nice, & more get at-able than before. Sent me her motor to come home in, & first I went over [22] Hyde Park Gate—for the first time since last Easter—& saw all the empty rooms, & was glad to find that now the furniture & books are gone; they are not painfully like home. Saw my old room—so strange with the ink splashes & shelves as of old. I could write the history of every mark & scratch in that room, where I lived so long.

31 January

Finished my possible Nat. Review article—about which I am doubtful—Motor to fetch me to Margarets, where I lunched with Lady Burghclere, a small vivacious woman, George & Theodore Davies. Not exciting. To Traill afterwards, & with her to get Thoby’s watch; home & Stebbing to tea—also a telegram from Kitty asking me to dine, which I accepted. Stebbing much as usual; only dined with Kitty & Leo alone, & Kitty discussed the Note which I had sent her, & depressed me by insisting upon many alterations—chiefly omissions, to make it printable—only I dont want it to be printed. But I dont think she approved very highly, which depresses me—Home late—

Wednesday 1 February

Worked at various small jobs this morning which came to an end at 12, as I had to meet Violet at Mr Robinsons in Lincolns Inn Fields, to see his grates. He owns 2 or 3 gardening papers which he edits in this enormous fire proof block of buildings, built by himself. He seems to have a genius for successful inventions. An iron grate is the best & I shall get one. Margaret Lyttelton to lunch, curiously like Angela Kay, only with a less pointed & delicately coloured face—the same difficulty in making easy talk—however we got on fairly. Then I went out to Nelly’s new house, in St John’s Wood—where she has a long low room, with a great window with trees across it, which reminds one of the country. My Girls Club [Morley College] in the evening, 4 girls, talked about Venice & it was rather amusing.

Thursday 2 February

Started my translation of selections from Thucydides. I start with the beginning sketch of old Greece, which is interesting, & then I shall choose out good bits—speeches, I think. This is the first Greek I have done since my illness—since February, that is—almost a year ago. I remember the last morning’s work at Thucydides, & how my brain felt sucked up. I am glad to find that I dont forget Greek & read Thucydides which is tough, as easily as I ever did. I am going to throw my Spanish grammar over board, I think, & start reading—& see how the plan works. I believe it is the only way, I at any rate can learn a language—Grammar is hopelessly dull, & infects the whole language. Snow to lunch: out for a tramp thro’ the street with Gurth. Mary, Jack, Gerald to tea.

Friday 3 February

Went through a whole file of notebooks this morning, & found out what Fred wanted, I hope, about serious books, & wrote him a long letter, which took some time. I then did a little bit of Thucydides till Traill came to lunch. After lunch I took her on the top of a Bus to Hampstead, where it was the clearest & loveliest of days, & from the top we saw blue hills which might have been Yorkshire moors, & heard early birds giving their freshest songs—Spring is—oh well—a platitude! Anyhow Hampstead is a really good expedition. Home & Katherine Horner to tea—a tall lithe goddess, with clear eyes & a pale skin—

Saturday 4 February

Worked at Thucydides all the morning, which does somehow amuse me, & I suppose is better than screwing articles out of my brain. I get nothing but criticism from Violet now—oh d—— it, & this makes me determine to invite no more than is absolutely necessary. I shall send things straight to the editors, whose criticism is important, in future. I should like more steady work at reviews, for the sake of my purse. How I hate criticism, & what waste it is, because I never take it really. Nessa to lunch with Mary Cone. Thoby in. I went out to the British Museum, & tried to get some plan of it into my head, but found nothing that I wanted to, except some painted bodys [sic] of Tanagra figures. It is a Mausoleum. Letter from Fred. Bothered some about the article for Leo, after Violets criticism.

Sunday 5 February

A lovely soft spring day with pillow like clouds, & warm blue spaces in between. Out into the Sunday streets, which always look dusty & dirty. Found out about a concert at Queen’s Hall, to which I want to go. Home, & Gerald to lunch. Thoby out tramping. After lunch I read &c. till tea time when we had an odd succession of callers. First Henry Prinsep: the Indian judge—a nice old boy with clear eyes, & a soft way of speaking like Granny. Harry, he says, is a very lazy judge. Then came Miss Millais, a brisk little bird like creature as usual who never changes. Then name Ozzy Dickinson who with great courage had to pretend to a knowledge of a certain mythical “very charming” Mrs Allan. Then came Victor Marshall, more like an old gray bear than ever-& so it was late when they went. Then we went to a most pompous & dull lecture at the Grafton Gallery: upon impressionism by a Mr. Rutter; when the P.R.A. & other R.A.’s filed across the room.

Monday 6 February

Worked at Thucydides, who stimulates my perverse brain to write original melodrama. However I shall stick at him till I have finished the bit I meant to. Out before lunch to ask the price of a great hooded chair which I covet: but it costs £8.5. & moreover shuts out the light, so I shall look elsewhere. Nessa to draw at Alexandra House, & I went down to the L[ondon]. L[ibrary]. where I got some books about early Xtianity !! because I want to read about that—but these books, I see, dont give me in the least what I want. Then to Farr & Schar with a whole regiment of maimed brooches. As I saw Clara Pater back walking up De Vere G[arden]: I called, found her out, & thus was a brilliant [illegible]. With Nessa to tea with Mrs. Prothero, where were many strange women, Imogen Booth the only known one, who came back to tea, & stayed for some time—a straight fresh creature, like a very nice boy. V[iolet] D[ickinson] to dine.

Tuesday 7 February

Scribbled some pages about Florence for my working women, & did a little bit of Thucydides. Margaret [Duckworth] to lunch, which somehow fails to excite. Mrs L. sent round the Golden Bowl by Henry James, for review, which comes in conveniently. Also it ought to be an interesting book—says she liked my last review.

After lunch I went to a Steinbach—MacCarthy concert at the Queens Hall, which was one of the best concerts I have heard lately—a really good violinist & first rate orchestra & conductor, & they played Beethoven & Brahms. Needless to say, Queens Hall was practically empty, & I had a choice of excellent seats. Home & read my Review book; at 7.30 Gerald came, & I went out to dine at an Indian curry shop with him, which was strange & rather nasty, & then to the Talk of the Town—a silly but amusing comedy.

Wednesday 8 February

Worked at Thucydides all the morning, & did a good bit. After lunch Nessa went on a wild goose chase to Alexandra House—At 4 I went out first to have my specs twisted straight as they are quite crooked & perpetually slipping from my nose; then on to Mrs. Crums, where I found a large tea party going on in various corners, of people I did not know, except Bruce Richmond, who very soon came to business. First told me about the Outlook, which is just starting new, with the Nat. Review man, Garvin as Editor, & an enthusiastic literary man for the literary side. Would I write a review for them? So I said yes, with joy—Then he asked if “we”, The Times, that is, might send on books for review also—So I said yes—& thus my work gets established, & I suppose I shall soon have as much as I can do—which is certainly satisfactory. To my girls [Morley College]: 7—so they increase rapidly.

Thursday 9 February

Finished my job at Thucydides—13 foolscap pages, not an elegant, or very accurate translation naturally—but rather a healthy kind of work, which doesn’t admit of literary refinements! Snow to lunch, rather depressed, in body & mind, like all these vagrant & mildly discontented young women—not enough enthusiasm to carry them through with a swing, & so their existence seems to drag, & lack point rather. Took Gurth out to the L. L. this afternoon—on a leash at first, but at so much risk & botheration, that I let him free on the way home, which was really more successful. The good Ida [Milman] to tea—somehow a trifle middle aged, always has been indeed, with her little characteristic nods & jerks—Then read my Henry James book after tea—which needs reading, & is very closely packed with words—550 pages of small print. Henry James print too, wh. I am to boil into 7 or 800 words! Nessa dines with Crums, & she & T. to dance at Micholls.

Friday 10 February

Read the whole blessed morning, & mornings are blessed—the long drawn out Henry James. I shall have earned the shillings I make by this review at any rate. Traill came & interrupted for 15 minutes, which is an interruption one has to suffer, though I grudge it. After lunch down to buy a pair of shoes with her at Kembers, then to the magnificent Harrods, & then home—Jack to tea, with me, as Nessa was listening to art criticism at the Slade. Then read more Henry James, but my desire to finish today is not likely to be gratified I see—& after all if I can send it off on Monday, I shant be keeping it too late. But all this time given up to reviewing rather bothers me. I bought—I have earned the right to buy occasionally—a stand with 6 little shelves—& a flap on wh. to stand my lamp—

Saturday 11 February

I wrote an article on Essay writing, which will do for the Outlook, or for Mrs L. but Heaven knows whether it is trash or not—anyhow it dont much matter. I want to make a little money to pay for the extravagant little table—which hasn’t come—Jack to lunch, with Kong his rust coloured Chow—with a coat like the thickest of thick carpets. After lunch I went to the L. L. to return a book, stamping on the way innumerable little envelopes which invite people to our great evening party, suddenly decided upon, for the 1st—That sentence strikes me as bearing the impress of Henry James—in which my mind is steeped! Theodore Davies to tea, cheerful & friendly, though Heaven knows why I find it difficult to talk to him. Then, now, to dress, dine early, & see Henry 5th, a plan, actually of Thoby’s.

Sunday 12 February

Play last night was good, & well acted, & of course gorgeously clothed. So we had a little excuse for being late this morning—Nessa & I that is—Thoby was off early to take his working men to look for birds in Surrey—which is somehow pathetic. A steady kind of day, bright & polished, & ice cold. All the morning I wrestled with Henry James, & wrote my usual semi-business letter to Fred, choc full of facts & dates—Nessa meanwhile upholstered a drawing room chair, with a view to our dinner tomorrow. After lunch I typewrote most of my Essay article; then, valiantly, as though plunging into a cold bath, N. & I went off, on top of a bus, to take the air. All the streets swept by the wind & gritty, & curiously empty of carts & full of walkers. Home to tea, & entertained Marny, & Mrs. O’Brien, & a daughter Margaret, who plays hockey—a nice plain vigorous child, with bright eyes—Mrs O’B. as usual—Henry James I hope to finish tonight—the toughest job I have yet had.

Monday 13 February

Wrote my Henry James review all the morning—between, that is, incessant interruptions. Mrs. Prothero wouldnt dine then she would—meanwhile we had got Susan L[ushington]. so in the end I had to propose myself to Violet, as the table wont hold more than 8. However I did get my review done, rather a tough job, & I doubt whether she’ll like it—but never was there such a book to review. Nessa to Alexandra House, where I fetched her, & we drove, or meant to drive to the Horners, but I thought the number was 49—which it wasn’t, & having tried many variations we gave it up, had tea in an ABC with Traill, & so home. I dined with Violet, where I found a dull cousin, & O[zzie]. [Dickinson]. After dinner I came home, & found the Ladies in the drawing room. The dinner a great success. G[eorge]. & M[argaret]; Mr. Tennyson; Mr. & Mrs. Prothero & Susan.

Tuesday 14 February

Wrote a lecture for my working women all the morning. It is about Benvenuto Cellini, as I am at my wits end for a subject, & this has some relation to Florence, which I have been talking about, & there are a great many plums which it is no trouble to pick. But I doubt whether they will like it. Margery & Jill Parker to lunch, very nice & lithe pretty young ladies, which I enjoy. After lunch the Freshfields came, & I bolted, out to my dear book shops, where I knew I could buy nothing, as I had no money with me. I found an interesting shop in a back street which keeps engravings—Some of Whistlers—some of Legro’s. There I shall return with a purse. A note from Mrs L. to say the review is a 3rd too long: oh d—— it all—So I must cut it down, spoil it, & waste I dont know how many hours work, all because the worthy Patronesses want to read about midwives. Dined with Nessa at [Dr] Savages; a large ponderous medical party. Talked to Warrington, Jean & Schuster.

Wednesday 15 February

Worked all the morning at miscellaneous jobs—at my Cellini which I finished. Really I must find some way of doing these lecture jobs at other times—mornings are too precious. Then I tried to get some idea of a Spanish verb into my brain; then I finished my Essay article & typewrote it. Then, going down stairs happily, I found a letter from Mrs. L. enclosing that wretched review, & asking me to cut it down, & send it back as soon as possible. So I set to work with literal & metaphorical scissors & somehow patched it together, having cut out all the plot & a good deal else, so that it wont take more than 800 words & left it at Mrs. L’s. house on my way to lunch with At. Anny [Ritchie] at the Sesame. I know I have spoilt the review as a review, & wasted my work—but it cant be helped. Lunch: Lady Gwendolen Cecil: nice, shabby, & masculine; Lady Humphries,—Hester [Ritchie]. Walked home, read 2 review books sent by the Times—& to my girls club.

Thursday 16 February

Rather a lazy morning, as I didn’t have to write. So I read a bit of Latin the Georgics, instead—stately & melodious; but without the vitality of my dear old Greeks. However, there is a charm in Latin, which haunts one. Even that little bit of Virgil with T. in the summer, when I was hardly able to use my brains, brought a sense of harmony into them, such as for many months they had not known; & therefore I dont forget it. Lunch early & Nessa to Alexandra House. I took Gurth out—he is a load on my conscience—for a walk in Regents Park. This is what he most enjoys. A languid spring day, so I was ready to sit & watch people more energetically walking; & even some little girls playing hockey in a corner. The number of men lounging out of work was astonishing—So I diagnosed them. Home & found Traill waiting who stayed to tea. A letter from Leo: delighted to accept my charming article—which is a load off my mind—To be refused by a friend would have been most uncomfortable, & I had made up my mind to expect it.

Friday 17 February

Toiled away at the Georgics this morning; but it was full of technical words which I had to look out, & this rather spoilt my enjoyment. However Latin is worth a little work. Violet came to lunch, & stayed afterwards & worried me by insisting upon more fresh air—which means I must go back to the old habit which I hated of rushing out for half an hour before lunch. I dont think it a good plan, but I suppose I must agree, & isn’t worth worrying over. To the LL. where I got two Spanish novels! I dont suppose I shall be able to read a word, but I want to try, as it is the only way of learning it. I cant learn out of a grammar. Then Nessa & I went to the Horners, which we found, & we had tea alone. Then came in Mrs. Horner, bright eyed & vivacious & fashionable. Then we went to Katharines room & Cicely came in—an obvious beauty, without charm. K. has twice as much. Back through a lovely blue evening, found a letter from Literature & the Academy asking me to write.

Saturday 18 February

As the Academy & Literature are so sensible as to wish me to write for them, I spent the morning in partly re-writing & polishing the “Plague of Essays” which will now do, I think. It takes me almost as long to rewrite one page, as to write 4 fresh ones—& it is a job I hate—all niggly work, done with a cold brain. However I think I improved it in the end, & it is now ready. Out—as my orders are—& tramped along the Tottenham Court Rd. as usual, & bought a flame coloured azalea. Margery & Mrs. Snow[den] to lunch. Margery, I think, pleased & excited by my Easter scheme, so I hope it will come to pass. Mrs Snow somehow like a homely old housekeeper, with nice manners, prim & “lady like”, as one would say of something not quite the genuine thing. Out on top of a Bus with Nessa. Proofs of Street Music from Leo. So perhaps he means it for March. Thoby at Cambridge.

Sunday 19 February

Down late, as usual & legitimate on Sunday. Then it was a real Spring day, so after a little proof reading—& Leo prints badly—I took Gurth & walked to Violets. Nessa having gone to Kitty. Violet in bed, & I sat & talked, with egoism, I am afraid, of my writing which I had brought in my pouch. She sticks to it that Street Music isn’t good, & that Plague of Essays is much better. This rather bothers me, as the Nat[ional Review].: will be read, & possibly signed. However it cant be helped, & Leo, according to Nessa says it’s just what he wants. Jack to luncheon, after speaking to a large & enthusiastic meeting in the North. Politics in the rough dont much interest me, & seem mostly a waste of time & good English words. To St Pauls after lunch; all gilt & spangled with light & glittering mosaics, & very sweet boys voices. Clara [Pater] did not come; as it showered.

Monday 20 February

Wrote like the little Printers devil I am, all the morning at my Times Review. This has to contrive to review two books without saying a word about them—as indeed they are the productions of a pair of scissors, & I am not a critic of dress making of this kind. Indeed these two dreary manes of little facts & dates, all so carefully sifted & accumulated have cast a gloom into my soul. However I pegged away at my review; as I am allowed 1500 words; of course they wont come—so I had to beat my brains a little. However I finished it in the course of the day, & made it fairly good I hope. Lord knows! A very windy & snowy day—Talk of Spring! Nessa to lunch with Snow, & not back till late tea time. I sent my review off by 7 o’clock Post, to reach tonight if possible. Now I have no work in hand, & I want to read a little Greek. Thoby back from Cambridge.

Tuesday 21 February

I tried to make out a little Spanish this morning, but as I have to look out every other word, & then piece together the meaning of the whole laboriously it cannot be said to be amusing. Then I read a bit of Aristotle, the Poetics, which will fit me for a reviewer! This book, I tried to read at Florence, I remember—& couldn’t! Out for a dash before lunch. A very windy day; a regular March wind which blows, sunshine & then showers. In proof of this a black downy ball of feathers off my hat alighted on the pavement & I had to pocket it. A proof of the ‘Plague of Essays’ from the Academy came after lunch, so I am glad to say they will print it: it is better than the Music I’m afraid. Out to tea at Alexandra House, with Audrey Tolkas [?]—a nice fair plump & simple minded creature—but A. H. is a singularly dreary place—all these poor creatures struggling along to pass exams, on scanty meals. Nessa to dine with Nelly.

Wednesday 22 February

Read the Poetics all the morning—really excellent bit of literary criticism!—laying down so simply & surely the rudiments both of literature & of criticism. I always feel surprised by subtlety in the ancients—but Aristotle said the first & the last words on this subject - in about 50 pages now. Katharine Horner to lunch, who begins to expand a little, & reveal her natural depths, beneath the surface of polite & shy young lady. Off we went after lunch on top of a yellow Bus all the way to Hampstead—my word the wind, it blew, & the sky grinned blue & brisk—& finally we got inside. But we had to wander on the blasted heath for ½ an hour before we dared go in to Cases—& then she was forbidding & fierce—not in the least glad to see us, & in a severely strenuous frame of mind. So our visit was not a success. Home, & found At. Stephen & K[itty] to tea. Adrian up; N. & I to Morley where N. lectured—then they went to a dance at Hobhouses.

Thursday 23 February

The family late & dissipated this morning after last night. They stayed to the end, & were not home till 2.30. Thoby’s last words being that he, at any rate, should leave early. Adrian rushed back to Cambridge directly after breakfast, as he had a lunch party, & Nessa & I determined to have a holiday, & so off & see the Whistlers. On the way, we looked in at my friend John Davis & I bought that long coveted & resisted coal scuttle, all of beaten brass, & she bought a great looking glass, as tall as the Russian giant for the Studio. This was extravagance—So I must write another article. Then to the Whistlers. He is a perfect artist—uses his gifts to the utmost & with the finest discretion, so that all his pictures are perfect in their way—& sometimes it is a very noble way. Oh Lord, the lucid colour—the harmony—the perfect scheme. This is what matters in life. So cold we stayed in doors. At. Minna, E. Coltman, Violet & Ly. Hylton to tea—Ldy. H. a pretty aristocrat.

Friday 24 February

Worked at Aristotle all the morning, who remains singularly interesting & not at all abstruse, & yet going to the root of the matter as one feels, which somehow puzzles me. Nessa to Alexandra House, & if she wrote this diary, the first thing she would have noted would have been the black & damnable fog. I can vanquish all the fogs in London with a penny candle, & produce works of genius unhindered, whereas her day is at the mercy of the sun. Out & bought fire irons of wrought iron, to match my fender, which is a source of real joy to me. Also I bought that great looking glass, which will just fill the space over my writing table, & liven up the room. Out after lunch with Gurth & walked all the way to the L. L. & back—bought James Thomsons poems on the way—also a note book; & got some of Renan, & so home. Gurth wears my life out. N. & T. out to Moorsoms. I put up my looking glass.

Saturday 25 February

Worked all the morning at Aristotle, which draws near an end. I must interrupt it though to write an article for Mrs L. as in view of certain rather heavy expenses, I must add to my quarterly cheque. A letter from Fred this morning which says that my Note is “really beautiful” & he could write a page in praise of it. This I quote, because his is an opinion I value, & it gives me pleasure worth having. Nessa to lunch—as usual with Snow. Late in the day I discovered a Symphony Concert at the Queens Hall, & as my ear craved music I went & had to take a 5s. seat; & listened to a stiff, but on the whole interesting, programme. A long Domestic Symphony by R. Strauss, partly beautiful, partly unintelligible—at least to me on a first hearing. Boo [Cordelia Fisher] to tea, or rather to play the pianola. Pernel Strachey on top of her—whom I was glad to see. She is appointed to Newnham, so our chances of meeting will be few in future.

Sunday 26 February

A Sunday morning; a fact which my unconscious body somehow realises, so that I sleep a good hour later, till all the good Irvingites opposite are on their knees. Sunday is the most melancholy day of the week—because I dont work I suppose. All the morning I frittered away on odd jobs. I had to look through a great quantity of books, as Rosamond [Stephen] wants some—& is welcome to them! Gerald to lunch—very jovial & full off his “business” tells me my Plague of Essays Article is out in The Academy, with Virginia Stephen signed in full, which seems rather indecent publicity. We went with him to call on the Fishers. Saw Aunt Mary, Hervey, & Boo—somehow very much like Fishers. Home, & Marny to tea, valiantly through the rain. The streets are running with liquid & mud. Thoby back from his hunting tonight—which he has enjoyed.

Monday 27 February

Wrote an article on the Value of Laughter for Mrs L., at least the greater part of it—I dont hurry, as I want to take a little more pains. Nessa to Alexandra House after lunch, & I took that extraordinarily ubiquitous dog for a walk. He never leaves me now, but follows me up stairs & down, sits by my desk as I write, all because I may take him out in the afternoon. I walked him right along Oxford Street. Streets I do enjoy more than the dreary Regents Park. I like looking at things. Home—& bought the Academy, with what purports to be my article in it; but my blood as an author boils; name is changed, half is cut out, words are put in & altered, & this hotch potch signed Virginia Stephen. They might have asked me. Dine early & out to A[lexandra]. H[ouse]. party, where they acted—a long entertainment.

Tuesday 28 February

Wrote another page to my Value of Laughter which I finished; & then read some Aristotle, which has taken to the analysis of words, & therefore dont interest me so much. Out for a dash as usual; after lunch I typewrote my Laughter, & then N. & I set forth to work hard at the party, which is now imminent. We had to order cups & saucers; then to travel all the way to Kensington to borrow Marny’s silver kettle, then to buy many small extras, then to Stewarts & finally home for a late tea. Adrian, thank goodness, can come—So we shall meet the invasion four square. After dinner I got my proof from the Times, printed word for word, so I only hope they wont cut out at the last moment—also a cheque for £5 from Leo for my [Street] music, which seems ridiculous overpayment for barely two mornings work, & I wish it were better.

Wednesday 1 March

Worked all the morning—or meant to work all the morning—at Aristotle, but at 12 Kitty came, & stayed an hour—discussing the party. Indeed the party became an anxiety about this house; Adrian arrived & we went to lunch at the Austro Hungarian with him, as the servants must not be hurried. Then to Stewarts. Then back home, & tackled the work of arranging the rooms, putting flowers in water &c. This went on till 5 when we struck work & went out to get tea,—& more flowers. By 6.30 the preparations were made—the rooms as empty as a moonlit sky; & brilliant with light & sweet with flowers. We dined at the Hotel Russell with Jack & Gerald where Nessa upset her coffee over her dress, however it was washed out. Then home & the party began with Violets large collection of ladies, & did not stop till past 12. There were moments of difficulty, but on the whole it was garrulous & successful I think, & all went well.

Thursday 2 March

Finished my Aristotle Poetics this morning, rather lazy after last nights debauch. Adrian left, & I went out to meet Nessa at Nelly’s & lunch there—Lunch over & Nelly drove us down in her motor car to Violets, where we fetched Gurth, & then on home. A terrible stamping & screaming going on in the Studio announced Rosamond, who was tumbling books out of the shelves, & choosing ecclesiastical history. This went on till tea time. She is singularly unattractive; & her manner does not liven her great stupid body. Violet & the clergyman’s wife to tea—who was not—this is too indiscreet. Thoby out to dine; Sydney Turner & Strachey after dinner, & we talked till 12.

Friday 3 March

Began the Oedipus Tyrannus this morning, as a sequel to Aristotle. No books to review, so I may as well grind at Greek for a bit. Nessa painting Nelly, who sits now in her own drawing room, by the window, with a green curtain & Troper [her dog] at her feet. Miserably cold days—& how I loathe the cold—it makes one feel servile. Out after lunch with Gurth to the L. L. where I had to look out the dates of various articles in the Fortnightly for Fred, & found what I wanted. I took a cab back with Gurth, & had a wrangle with the cabman who complained of Gurth’s muddy paws. Wrote to Fred a long letter after tea, telling him not to print my Note. Dine with Thoby at Violets; Nessa at R. Cecils; then to St Loe Stracheys where we met a good many people we know.

Saturday 4 March

Worked at Sophocles all the morning, & found it easier. Out as usual; my morning dash takes me down the Tottenham Court Rd. now, which is far more interesting than the same space of Kensington High Street. There are old furniture shops, & in Oxford Street old book shops. Altogether Bloomsbury is a more interesting quarter than Kensington. The Times sent me Barham of Beltana, Norris’s new novel to review. It will be a very easy job, & I am glad that the Times shows signs of keeping me on to do reviews. We—N[essa]. & I—met six working women on the steps of the National Gallery at 3, & took them laboriously through the Early Italians. What they think about—how far pictures are intelligible to them—I dont know. It is hard work. Marny to tea—Pernel dine.

Sunday 5 March

I ruined my chance of a Sunday sleep, which is the most delightful part of Sunday—by idiotically mistaking 9.30 for 10.30 & leaping from my bed, a good 30 minutes before I need. I had a long discourse at breakfast from T. who went down to Cambridge yesterday for the Greek voting, & there he found that the world was talking of a grand practical joke played by Adrian & 2 others on the Mayor of Cambridge. They pretended to be the Sultan of Zanzibar & party, & were solemnly driven to the Guildhall, welcomed by the Mayor in his chain of office, & shown the sights of Cambridge—while porters & dons raised their hats. When they were shown the Queens statue they all solemnly bowed, as loyal natives. Then instead of taking the London train they leapt into hansoms, drove in to the country & changed. The whole story is in the Daily Mail, without names, & other papers beg for photographs. Greek is still compulsory. Concert this afternoon & a dull & rainy day. Finished my Norris novel.

Monday 6 March

Wrote my review for the Times, which as they only want 500 words it is easy to do. Nothing whatever to be said about the book; so I confined myself to generalities. Then read Sophocles. Nessa lunch with Nelly. I went afterwards to the L. L. where I was told I had 14 books out—What these are, I cant conceive. I couldn’t get what I wanted, which was a book about Greek myths to make a lecture out of for my working women—so I tried to get something 2nd hand. I found a book by a man called St. Clair, who tries to prove the dates of all the myths by astronomy. However I daresay I shall make out what I want. To tea with the Sidney Colvins; a pathetic old pair, somehow. To Mildred Squash [?] after dinner, where people swarmed, & we talked till 12.

Tuesday 7 March

Worked at Sophocles all the morning, who is really not hard, & I have unearthed some gems. Miss Egerton to lunch—who used to frighten me so at Hardwick, a plain rather stiff, but nice creature, with a great under lip, & a cleft chin. Lady Louisa came in to fetch her & roamed about the drawing room. Out to Marshall & Snelgroves afterwards, & did what of all things I loathe. That is choose silk for an evening dress, & sit by while Nessa ordered a coat & skirt. However, clothes are necessary in this world—& at this moment comes a note from old Henry Prinsep to ask us all to go off to a dance there this very night. Somehow, I had rather stay at home, but we must at any rate look in.

Wednesday 8 March

Worked at my evening lecture, which is on Greek myths this time—a subject of which I know nothing. But they are really beautiful, & I should like to try & put them into English—not the dry bones which are preserved in the horrid little primer I bought. I made the experiment of only writing short notes, which I shall put into words on the spur of the moment. Directly I begin to read, their attention wanders. Nessa out to lunch—Nelly’s portrait now nears a close. Margaret [Duckworth] sent round the new motor this afternoon, & we took Violet to pay a series of calls—we of course forgot our cards—To my women, & managed the speaking all right. It is certainly better than reading. Home & found Bell, & we talked the nature of good till almost one!

Thursday 9 March

Read my Sophocles, who nears an end. At one, as I was getting ready to go out, the great Millicent descended from a four wheeler, & settled in an arm chair, prepared for conversation. We waited till ¼ to 2, when a telegram to my dismay from Nessa said she would lunch with Nelly. So I had to make laborious excuses, & still more laborious small talk till 3 when we went together to the Aeolian Hall—a beautiful new Music Hall on Bond Street where Plunket Greene was singing Ralphs songs. A great gathering of Fishers naturally, but I escaped afterwards, & walked home. Two novels to review for the Guardian, who will print my Essay on Laughter. Books always come upon me in a rush. Dined with Violet.

Friday 10 March

Finished my Oedipus Tyrannus which is a fine play. How I wish something would tear away the veil which still separates me from the Greeks—or is it inevitable? Margery [Snowden] to lunch, & she was painted by Nessa afterwards, & I went off with teeth set, to buy a new coat—as I have to lunch out &c. & my old one is shabby. It happened as always: I reviewed twenty coats at Marshall & Snelgroves & decided against them on score of price: went to Peter Robinsons & took the first shown at a price quite ruinous, because I suddenly got bored. However it is a good coat. Nessa likes it, & if I work, I shall also spend. A letter from Richmond to offer me Miss Sichels Catherine de Medici to review—column & a half. I told him I was not learned in Mediaeval French—which is strictly true! Sir Fred P[ollock]. & Meg Booth to tea.

Saturday 11 March

Wrote a most bothering little review of 300 words only upon Miss Barlows book—but the 300 words wouldn’t come—or came wrong—& finally weren’t very good. But a nondescript book like this which really suggests nothing good or bad, is d——d hard work, & I would rather write anything else—except indeed a dutiful letter. At one, in a storm of wind & rain, Nessa & I went out to lunch with Lady Alice Shaw Stewart, really a delightful person, like a tame & combed out Beatrice, but very full of character, & even beauty. O[zzie]. Dickinson there—also Nicholls, the art critic, & Sir Hugh. Not an alarming lunch, & we got on all right. Margaret [Duckworth] fetched us in a carriage & we drove to various places, ending with a grand musical tea party at Cousin Adeline, where half the splendid names in England passed before us—& some very queer figures. Home at last to our native Bloomsbury. Catherine de Medici here, & [illegible] wont work.

Sunday 12 March

Read all the morning, which on Sundays is not a very long one—at my novel—Nancy Stair, which I finished before I had to dress & go out to lunch with the Protheros. It was wild with wind & rain &,—to sum up—I swore. The Bertram [sic] Russells, Mary Spring Rice &c to lunch—which was to some extent amusing. Home, & as the weather was beautifully rough, no one came to tea. I read a good bit of Miss Sichel, & tried to find out something about France of the Reformation from other histories. I find that she is not too learned: I shall be able to criticise on general grounds, & already some things occur to me to say. She is a clever woman, hunting for a style—but I cant correct her facts.

Monday 13 March

Wrote my review of Nancy Stair, which purports to be a true story with names, dates &c. Anyhow it dont read true—I hadn’t much difficulty in writing a review—not that I over flowed my limit. I shant waste words again! Nessa out to lunch, so my day was rather solitary. Out to Hatchards to buy Stevenson & Pater—I want to study them—not to copy, I hope, but to see how the trick’s done. Stevenson is a trick—but Pater something different & beyond. Eleanor Clough & Jack to tea. Eleanor is a great big Freshfield-Ritchie, but the combination is more than usually successful in her case. After dinner to the Freshfields, where a select company heard Tovey play. V[aughan] W[illiams] &c. Tovey rather a fine lean head, with bright eyes.

Tuesday 14 March

Wrote this morning—not for any editor to see, which becomes a relief—I wanted to put down a few ideas about history, as I shall have to generalise on that theme in my Sichel review. But Traill came in at 12 & sat & talked so my morning came to an end. She is between cases, & at a loose end. At 2 Elena Rathbone to lunch, alone with me, as Nessa out as usual. She is a straight beautiful creature, whom I always connect in my mind with some very beautiful Greek statues. Elena stayed late, & we messed about printing her dry points. Aunt Minna & Violet came on top & complicated matters. Out for a dash. Then read my Sichel & wrote a letter or two. Another book from the Times!—a fat novel, I’m sorry to say. They pelt me now.

Wednesday 15 March

Wrote all the morning at an article on Greek—the Magic Greek, I think I shall call it & send it to the Academy. I didn’t finish it, but it amused me rather to do. Lunch early, & Nessa to Alexandra House. It was an impossible day: the sort of day that ought to be improved on. Altogether too barbaric for this eye. I struggled out against wind & rain, to a necessary tailor, & then home, & finished my Sichel book, & the problems of a review remaining to be solved—Dined with Cecils—took down long faced R. Smith, & it was fairly amusing.

Thursday 16 March

Started my Sichel review for the Times, but it was heavy going. It is a satirical fact that when I am allowed ½ a column I can always fill 2, & when I am to have as much space as I like, I cant screw out words at any price. So I laboured—& did two pages, which isn’t half what I must do. It is hard work reviewing when you dont know the subject. At every step I tremble guiltily, & withdraw, to temper my expressions. So it will be dull. Out with N. in the afternoon, & succumbed at Waters to a wedding present for Miss Power. Miss Malone to dine—a silent poor woman. Sydney Turner & Gerald after dinner—the first of our Thursday Evenings!

Friday 17 March

Worked at the beastly review all the morning—& finished it, I suppose—but it’s bad, I suppose, & I expect to have it thrown back in my hands. Lunch early, & Nessa to Alexandra House. Another brutal mediaeval day; & again I had to go to my tailors, & there I stayed a long time, as the man has much the same feeling about his tailoring as I have about my reviewing, only he seems to be more successful. We promised to go to tea with Elena, right down the other side of London, & I fetched Nessa with that purpose, & our courage oozed & we came home to tea alone instead, & I got my review finished, & sent off, though I know I ought to rewrite it. Nessa & Thoby to the Sangers.

Saturday 18 March

Very lazy all the morning, as the review was done, & my head too stupid to tackle fresh writing. So I read a bit of the fat novel, Fortunes of Farthings, which I must review for the Times, but novels dont take much brains. Unless they are Henry James, indeed. I had to stop early in order to travel all the way down to lunch with Aunt Minna—where was Evelyn Duckworth—Somehow these Duckworths are not of a distinguished type—Afterwards I went round to Marnys whom I found at home, & we took a walk—singular to say—in Kensington Gardens, which seems to recall a very different age & called on Clara [Pater], who was out, & so home. All in to dine.

Sunday 19 March

A day which would have done no discredit to June; & besides had all the freshness of spring. So to observe these things better I took Nessa on a yellow bus, branded with a red H, all the way to the top of the Steep Hampstead Rd. & then on to the edge of the Heath, from which we looked miles into a land of green fields, blue distance, & cloudy trees. This did refresh our eyes; & birds sang here as in the country, & it was pitiable to have to turn our backs on such beauty; & descend again into the black pit of London—but we had to. I went & heard Elgar conduct some of his music at the Queens Hall; home & found W. Darwin, Miss Pater & Marny at tea. Margaret Lyttelton had been & gone—

Monday 20 March

Worked at my Magic Greek article this morning, which wanted finishing, & finishing is what I hate. But I did it—typewrote it, & sent it to the Academy. It is a short column, I should think, so I trust they wont excise. Snow & Nessa very late for lunch; after which I went off to Hatchards to look vaguely for travelling books, but without success. Bought some strawberries IS. a basket on the way home. I think this ought to be marked as a record! Violet to tea, & Nessa out to dine with the Booths. T. & I went out at 9.30 by the Gower St. underground to Gloucester Rd. & there we went to the Hilton Youngs &c: evening, which was dress clothes & respectable, & I was very disreputable! Home by 12.

Tuesday 21 March

Worked all the morning at my rather long & lazy task of making notes for Wednesday evening. Greek history this time, for which I have to plough through Bury, try to pick up a fact or two, not wholly dry. But as I doubt whether they know if Greeks or Romans ‘came first’ as the Lady said, I dont expect to make much impression! Jack before lunch, as I was going out: so we walked out together, & J. most opportunely told me about passports, & he took me to Cook, & managed to secure forms, & witness my signature &c; so that is done. Snow to lunch; at 3 the motor came—took us to get Nelly’s picture. Then I went to the tailor, & on to Sylina Stebbing’s workshop, where I had tea. I then spent a long time in a bookshop. A quiet evening.

Wednesday 22 March

Worked again at that interminable Greek history. This will be a dry lecture & no mistake! I did as much as I could—that is brought the beastly thing down to the Peloponnesian War—& there I thought I might without discredit stop. After lunch—& Jack by the way, came to lunch—I went off to Heathers to buy a hat for the voyage—which I did in my usual haphazard fashion. The woman persisting that I should need shade in South Africa! Then to Bumpuses, where I found some really nice little books fit for the pocket, & yet good to read. Home, & finished the novel which I am reading for the Times. Out to my girls, who are in a new room tonight; & were, I think, rather bored by my history & dull maps. I said goodbye to them, & they beg me to lecture steadily at English History next term ‘from the beginning’.

Thursday 23 March

Wrote my review of Fortunes of Farthings this morning, a dull long winded book, incredibly sentimental—all of which had to be watered down for the Times. Finished this, & typewrote it out; & then wrote a little for my own amusement. Adrian turned up for lunch, & we had the true history of the Sultan of Zanzibar from his own mouth. He is still apparently rather nervous, as the Mayor has set detectives to watch. Out to Tisdall in the afternoon, where I was kept waiting. Had my tooth stopped, out of sheer virtue, & it hurt rather. Then on to Violet, who is in bed—her cook just gone to the Hospital with appendicitis—altogether a lively state of things. Nine people came to our evening & stayed till 1.

Friday 24 March

A very lazy morning—but Adrian was up, & Nessa was in spite of great misery, awaiting Mr. Tonks. So I sat in the Studio, & tried to comfort—& did not work whatever. At one Tonks came, a great raw boned man, with a cold bony face, prominent eyes, & a look of mingled severity & boredom. He trained for a doctor, & has more the look of a capable surgeon than of an artist. We talked valiantly, but it was not easy work. He then reviewed the pictures, with a good deal of criticism apparently, but also some praise. Out on various jobs which I must get done before we sail. N. & T. dined with Mrs. Flower. At 10.30 I fetched them, & we went on to Susans [Lushington] evening party, where I talked to G. Lushington, Helen, Miss Malone &c.

Saturday 25 March

Wrote at a kind of sketch of my Morley College proceedings, to amuse myself—& possibly this may be of interest in future terms—so that I may see how I started, & which girls came. N. out to lunch with Snow; & T. & I lunched early as he had to get to Wimbledon as a volunteer. I bought what is called an ‘attaché’ case—a light thin case, which will just hold my books & writing paper, & can lie on my knee in the carriage. To the L. L. where I met Mrs Lyttelton, who asked me to write her articles about my ‘personal experiences’ in Spain; which I suppose I must do. The Academy send back my Magic Greek, which entertained them very much but is “too uncompromisingly opposed to their point of view” to be printed. Rather a bore, but I am amused all the same.

Sunday 26 March

Made a paper book this morning for my Spanish Diary, by means of which I hope to pay some at least of my travelling expenses. It is a Grub St. point of view—but all the same, rather a nice little bit of writing might be made out of the sea & land. Read some of my Spanish history which seems to be consistently disreputable—Snow & Gerald to lunch. Sending in day for the R.A. imminent, & Tonks criticisms have to be carried out, an annual crisis, I suppose. Out to my weekly concert—a singularly empty house, in spite of a good Beethoven—I suppose the fine day is better to many people than fine music. Marny & George to tea.

Monday 27 March

A wretched wet morning of course, as I had to spend it in the occupation of all others that I hate—shopping. But so it was, & I tramped through the mud & had to buy what are called blouses—&c. My room begins to assume the familiar aspect of a city in a state of siege, & I walk guardedly among corpses & all kinds of litter. Work, thus out of the question, so I suppose my Easter holiday has begun, & the plan which A. & I made one September day at Teversal is really to be carried out. Snow to lunch. I had Georges motor, & went to various places—got £25 among other things for the journey. Mary to dine, & to a concert with her—which should have been Richter but wasnt. N. & T. out.

Tuesday 28 March

To day, of course, wholly given over to making ready. The problem as usual, is that of books, what to take, & how to find room,—especially as my little case is to hold all, also writing material. One dress box is all my other luggage. I have taken: Borrows Bible in Spain: Borrows Gipsies of Spain—The House of the Seven Gables—The Scarlet Letter. Richard Feverel—Baedeker. Spanish grammar—1st vol. Greens Conquest of England. I shall try to find room for another book or two in my box, as I know these will come to an end. Having now ascertained that Maud has room for an indefinite number of extra books, I am more happy in my mind. I went to the L. L. to try for books, but without success—then to tea with Violet. Goodbye to her, & home, to finish packing. And now this little book must find a corner, for it is to come too—& I wonder what I shall write next!

Wednesday 29 March

Our start was early, so we had to rush our last packings after breakfast—indeed we left before my last blouse came home, & only had about 5 minutes for train. Gerald met us at Euston—& thus we left at 10.45. Reached Liverpool about 2.30 & went in a Bus to the pier, where a great many people were walking up & down, saying good bye, & preparing to go. A huge steamer, the Oceanic, 2nd largest afloat was black with passengers, just leaving for America. The Anselm came alongside in time, & we embarked. It is all white & clean & luxurious; we each have a cabin to ourself, in wh. I now write on my knees, & the sea is beginning to rise: We walked on the deck & saw all the lights along the Coast of Wales, steamers passing, & our own foam spread like white lace on the dark waters—a very lovely thing is a ship at sea.

Thursday 30 March

A singular day, among the days that I have so far recorded. Woke to find it a bright blue day, the sun glistening on the waters. We went on deck, got ourselves chairs, & settled down to watch the coast of England unrolling itself before us. We saw the Lands End near—& thought how strange it was to see it thus again, from the deck of a steamer. In the afternoon we passed the Lizard which is the last English land we shall see, & now we are standing away across the Channel, towards Havre, where we anchor tomorrow. I read a certain amount, & long to sleep, & then we take a turn, & the old gentlemen tell their old stories, & some one lends a glass & so on—

Friday 31 March

This morning again fine, & perhaps even calmer. Again we sat on deck—as though, A. said, we had died & were gone to live with the blessed. For the moment one can imagine no more blessed existence than this—stretched in the sun, passing slowly through the waters. Shovel board, however, interrupted our paradise, got up by a gentleman who strikes one full face, as a single nose. He is a typical Jew, & initiates everything, & is a friend with everyone. I read most of the day, & shall finish my Borrow. The Ships library, I find, is stored in a certain chest which stands in the dining room, & is useful as a kind of side board. The key to this is lost! Arrive at Havre where we anchored & went on shore.

Saturday 1 April

This morning we breakfasted just before 7, & caught the 8 train to Rouen. With us—or we with them—went the Lloyds & Mr. Booth, & we reached Rouen at 9, I think. There we saw three great churches, a funeral, & a burial ground. Perhaps, in a sentimental way, the most touching thing there is the little corner—of the meat market!—where Jeanne d’Arc was burnt. All the places where she suffered are marked & commemorated; but the statues of her are all worthless & insignificant. We lunched there, & came home at 5.30—A great many new passengers have boarded, & we start tomorrow again, for which I shall be glad. Travelling fills me with restlessness. I want to see the next place.

Sunday 2 April

By nine this morning we were gliding out of the Havre docks, & were soon out to sea—but before long the engines slowly ceased beating, & the ship came to a dead stop. This lasted a good two hours, & all through the day the ships progress has been interrupted. Some part of the machinery gets too hot, apparently, & we have talked of nothing else all day. It is a bore, as a wait here means that we shant get to Oporto early. This partly makes us determine to take the train from Oporto to Lisbon, which will save two days perhaps. However this plan is not settled. In the evening a grand concert was given, when several new artists appeared; it is amusing to watch them, though hardly pleasant always to listen. A fine smooth day, & we pass on without movement.

Monday 3 April

We steamed a certain way this morning, & then our engines gave out again, & for four hours I suppose we rocked & drifted out of sight of land, & very much bored. There is a certain Professor Lee on board, who is something like Sully & C[live]. B[ell]. mixed, & diluted, & this don is inflicted on me, over & over again till I suffer from acute boredom. Books are no protection; he thinks his conversation must be preferable. At night now we sit on deck instead of absorbing the music of Jews. At night we passed Ushant, & saw many lights along the coast.

Tuesday 4 April

In the Bay of Biscay—through which we ploughed all day, out of sight of land. It was a little rough, but nothing to keep up its reputation. Really the dullest day so far, I think; as the people are maddening with their perpetual noise, & The Bore is loose. However we had a fine sunset in the evening, & saw a few porpoises in the distance, & a great many globes of Jelly Fish just beneath the water of all colours. Lay out till 10 on the roof of the engine house, in a large life belt.

Wednesday 5 April

We woke to see the coast of Spain—a very fine coast, romantic, heroic, like a very aquiline nose. We passed along it all day, quite close, so that we could see houses & streams. To our joy the Captain said he expected to reach Oporto in the afternoon, & being a man of his word, he did—& at once we were surrounded by boats & officials. Leshoenis (that is how you pronounce it) is a red roofed, Southern looking town, flashing in the evening sun, behind which there is a steep bank with feathery trees. But we could not land, so this impression is fragmentary. We began at once to take our cargo on board, which consists for the most part of paving stones for Monaco’s harbour. They are going to work all night—& the noise is already sufficient. Our last night on board—& I must pack for an early start tomorrow.

Thursday 6 April

We landed this morning & went through the usual Custom house bothers. Women acted as porters—a touch of the East. Then we took the tram, a long ride to Porto (Oporto) in a broiling sun, an English August sun—& with great difficulty tramped the town & found the Booth Agent who could tell us nothing about our ship. Lunch at the Hotel, with a drove of Tourists. Then with Lloyds to see over the “Lodge” of one of the great port wine merchants, which was a cool scented place. Then took train to Lisbon, A. & I alone for the first time, & reached it at 10.30. Finally got rooms at the Hotel Borges.

Friday 7 April

A really delightful day—the town is spacious & brilliantly white & clean, every street almost with its swift electric tram, which makes sightseeing a delight. We found our way about easily, by this means, & soon got our bearings. We had to see Mr Dawson the Agent, & he promised us berths on the Madeirensa—so that is a mercy. In the afternoon we went up to the English Cemetery, on a hill—by the gardens. This is a most lovely place, sweet with flowers, & so hot & shady & green that we stayed there a long time. We let loose a caged bird that was singing by Fieldings tomb—a pious act! Train by night to Seville.

Saturday 8 April

The night was more comfortable than I expected. We did not undress, but lay in a kind of sofa, with a pillow, which was quite soft. All day we travelled; arriving at Badajoz on the Spanish frontier at 8. And so through Estremadura, & Andalusia—splendid names! But the country is not beautiful; for the most part, flat, & treeless, & the sun was hot. The train stopped at every village on the way. In the afternoon we came to a wilder & more interesting country, & with very few roads & houses, & great views. At 8.30 we reached Seville, drove to Hotel Roma, had a gloomy dinner & to bed.

Sunday 9 April

We began to explore Seville this morning. First to the Cathedral, which looms everywhere. It is vast. That is the first impression. I dont very much care for such elephantine beauty—but it is fine. Service was going on—& so we could not see much. In the afternoon we took a carriage & drove for an hour in the gardens which are lovely, though somewhat faded & out of repair, like everything else. The streets are very narrow, cobbled, with no pavement to walk on. Trams bad & not easy to get. It is a difficult town to find ones way about in—We went to the great hospital & saw the yellow city walls, which easily enclose the city.

Monday 10 April

Woke this morning under my mosquito curtains—which the beasts merely laugh at—to find, firstly the maid carrying on a long & emphatic speech in Spanish—& 2ndly a rain of pure English blood pouring outside. (That sentence by the way may be read 2 ways—but we do not live in the time of the Inquisition.) Out in a clear space to the Giralda, which is the Cathedral Tower, from which we gazed over Seville; a small town it looks from that height, soon dwindling off into fields. White houses with brown roofs for the most part. The rain was such that we sat a long time in the Cathedral—which is not really beautiful, though certainly impressive—in the same way that a steep cliff or a bottomless well is. In the afternoon we ‘did’ Alcázar, a splendid gilt & mosaic Moorish building—a sight again which does not charm me.

Tuesday 11 April

A showery morning again, but not so bad, it turned out, as yesterday. We went out & bought photographs—our solitary extravagance, & then saw the Church of the Carotid, which was not very interesting. The most interesting part of Seville is its streets. After lunch we took a cab & drove to the Casa Pilatos, as it was raining. There are court yards leading to court yards, all of white marble—simpler & more stately than the Alcázar. Also a great many dark long rooms, round the court yards, lined with beautiful tiles, cool & hushed. Then we bought a spirit lamp with great skill, & various necessaries for our 2 meals in the train tomorrow. I shant be sorry to move on, though I have enjoyed this.

Wednesday 12 April

At 7 happily I woke, & we dressed for 7.30 breakfast, & without much regret left the hotel at 8. We travelled all day long, & changed twice. We had to indulge in things called Berliner—coupes for 2, as all the Ists were crowded. But on the whole the journey was more comfortable than last time. We got finally to a wild hilly region—the Sierra Nevadas in the midst of which Granada is set. Here, at 8.15 we arrived & were driven by 4 mules to the top of the high hill on which the Washington Irving stands. There we happily found rooms, dined & to bed.

Thursday 13 April

Out as usual this morning to explore. We find ourselves in the greenest shade, as of great English trees, filtering a Southern sun. We are right above the town, but the Alhambra & the gardens of the Generalife are across the road.

Unhappily, owing to some red tape, we had to tramp all the way to the town to get cards of admission, which took some time. The gardens are worth a good deal. They are very hot & fragrant, all in little inlaid terraces like an Italian garden, with cool summer houses where one may rest & look over the city to the snow mountains beyond. In the afternoon we were taken over the Alhambra by the guide, a gorgeous Moorish palace & within battered yellow walls.

Friday 14 April

This morning we ‘did’ the town, which mainly consists of the Cathedral—a dull florid building, very ornate, containing only one thing that interested me—the tomb of Ferdinand & Isabella. In the afternoon we meant to allow ourselves the luxury of bargaining 25 pesetas’ worth of Granada ware. I bought 2 lace sleeves, & finally after long bargaining an old Spanish gilt frame for Nessa—Really it wasn’t dear, & I like it. But Granada is not tempting in this way—at least we didn’t find the right shops perhaps. After dinner A. & I with two people—father & daughter who have made friends with us—went up to a court of the Alhambra & saw the gipseys [sic] dance—

Saturday 15 April

Rather a lazy morning, but we have paid our respects to most things here, & can afford to be idle this last day. Indeed, you cant spend time better than in idling in the Gardens here—leaning over the sunny old wall, & looking down in to that strange large view beneath. After lunch we went down the hill to the Post Office, where to my disappointment there were no letters, so we must leave Granada without news, & now shall hardly hear again. After dinner the usual accounts & bills, which is not extravagant. Pack once more, which I loathe, & now to bed, as we begin our return journey at 6 to morrow.

Sunday 16 April

At 6.30 this morning we breakfasted, & at 7 left in the Bus. We had a long tiresome journey, as usual, changing &c; at 9 we arrived at a place called Amonhon where we were to sleep. There being, we were told, a ‘good second class hotel’. Making all allowances for Spanish hotels as we did, we were not prepared for a little white cottage, a kind of public house, by the side of a desert & a Moorish castle, where we had to spend the night. There was one room, so we lay in our clothes on the bed, & managed to sleep a little till 5.30 when we had to pay 3 pesetas, & our train started at 6.

Monday 17 April

We travelled till 12.30, & then stopped at Badajoz—where we had to wait 6 hours—a very dreary time, as we were sleepy, & miserable—the town hot & dirty, & we had nothing to do. We tried to find something to look at, & listened to a comic performance in the Cathedral, which I likened to the singing of old country songs by half tipsey [sic] farmers. The Cathedral might perhaps be fine; but they have defaced it with glass. At 7. or so we happily left Badajoz, got an empty first class, which took us without change to Lisbon. We eat some hard boiled eggs & slept fairly well stretched on the seats.

Tuesday 18 April

We were woken by porters at Lisbon, rather to our confusion—so we had to put on our shoes, & scramble out, it being then about 5.30, a cold drizzly morning too, & the usual wait & bother about luggage. We came to the Central Hotel, where we had baths—which were badly wanted—tidied, & at 8 some breakfast. The [Constance and Godfrey] Lloyds came in, & the whole Anselm party are staying here. The Madeirensa is late, of course, & wont start till Thursday—which is a dreadful bore, & means that we shall just have too little money to get home with. I have written to Sophie for some. Mr. Dawson & Miss Dawson came round, & took us sight seeing all the afternoon. In the evening we went to the play, & to bed at last.

Wednesday 19 April

A lazy day, as it had a right to be. The Lloyds were out sightseeing, & we had satisfied our consciences. A walk to the Post Office, unfruitful, was enough for the morning—& a lazy tram drive, which landed us at the top of the Avenida took up the afternoon.

It was rather a wet day, as Mr. Dawson said was likely in Lisbon—two hot days, & then rain.

A dull evening, & to bed.

Thursday 20 April

A morning spent indoors. We packed & made ready for the boat; & felt quite prepared to leave Lisbon, & ready for England again. At 4 the whole party collected in the Black Horse Square, which is the finest square in Lisbon, vast, empty, save for an old statue on horseback, which time has stained green. A boat took us a mile up the river to the Madeirensa, which we found to be a decidedly small boat: I had a room to myself—A. had to share. We started at once, & the sea was rough, & the boat rolled, & we were slightly ill!

Friday 21 April

A monotonous sea day, a little spoilt by our now haunting fear of sea sickness, which however did not return. We are not to stop anywhere, but make straight for Liverpool, which we reach late on Sunday—too late to land—another delay. The party on board is very sea sick, & depressed. The weather cold, & the quarters not over comfortable, & especially infested with smells. We passed through the Bay of Biscay, or at least began to pass & lost sight of Spanish land. I think my dates are wrong.

Saturday 22 April

Sailed all day rather more cheerfully in the Bay, which was calm again however, & we did not suffer.

The voyage is monotonous, when you have once gone through it; however there is no reason to complain:

The party more vigorous, & a grand concert at night.

Sunday 23 April

Our last day. Woke somewhere near Pembrokeshire, & saw a light house, & then a long reach of land.

All day we were in sight of the Welsh Coast, which was familiar looking, & interesting. Towards evening we passed many light houses, & much discussion as usual, as to our where abouts. Took on a pilot at 8 who is to take us to Liverpool.

Some where about 10.30 or 11 we entered dock & anchored.

Monday 24 April

Break fast at 8, & every one eager to get on land & catch trains home. No letter with money. So I had to borrow £1.10 from the Lloyds, which just saw us through. We got the 9.40 train, crowded, & terribly late; however we reached Euston at 3 & went home in a few minutes, which was as usual, a thing worth travelling for. Nessa there—a good lunch—letters &c. & much talk. Thoby at camp at Dover—a cold rather rainy day.

So our journey is over, but it was a good journey.

Tuesday 25 April

A delicious night in a spacious & clean & stationary bed, & comfortable dressing—not to speak of a bath—all of which one appreciates after Spain. A letter by the way, to return as I must do with a vengeance, to journalese from Bruce Richmond, with the unfortunate Sichel review which has been hanging like a stone round my neck, & haunting my nights. It is not “academic” enough—sorry he misled me—an excellent article, but a professed historian is needed—to which I cordially agree, & Sichel goes to the waste paper basket!

Wednesday 26 April

Began work of a kind—an effort to fix some kind of sketch of our journey for Mrs. L.: but as usual the thing wont come—& after struggling 2 hours, I produced one scored page which has nothing to do with the subject. I can only hope for better luck next time. In the afternoon I changed a few pesetas & francs for still fewer silver shillings, wandered aimlessly with N., home at 4.30 for Fred who had much of great interest to say. He is to send his MS. & I am to type write it. Pass book, & my balance better than I expected, so I paid some bills!

Thursday 27 April

A morning devoted to art!—happily successfully. I went off after breakfast to the New Gallery which might or might not have hung the Nelly picture—& to my great relief found it in The Catalogue, & saw it hang fairly in the gallery, which is quite a cheerful beginning. Dashed home, & general rejoicing of a mild description. Went in the afternoon with A. & N. (most unwillingly) to the show again—a Sargent &c: but not a striking lot. Bruce Richmond sends me 3 books about Spain to review!—as I said I had come back from Spain. A general article wanted, wh. means I suppose that I can be as silly & amateurish as I like—but I earn money anyhow.

Friday 28 April

Worked again at my Spanish Sketch—which wont resolve itself into words—however I did a page or two, & I suppose that will make one article—& I try to take pains & be sincere, & typewrite paragraph by paragraph so as to get the hang of the thing. After lunch N. & I to Beatrice [Thynne] at Manchester Sq: we saw her for an hour & a half—unchanged, save that Egypt dyes her more tawny, & she is a little more dishevelled than ever, it seems. We smoked cigarettes!—Home—Both Thoby & Adrian left after dinner—Adrian for Cambridge & Thoby for St Ives!—a journey which makes one jump.

Saturday 29 April

Wrote again at the Spanish Sketch—a fresh one this time, which goes a little better. Jack to lunch, & after that I at last got down to the L. L. & changed some books. I must now solidly drudge through the beginnings of English history, & with this purpose I have got Freeman & more Green, but Green for some reason runs off my mind like water.

C[live]. B[ell]. to tea—a nice garrulous old man, with his odd information oozing out—rather pouring buckets full, so that we sit & are pumped into. Nessa’s first commission from a Mrs. Seton to paint one or both of her children came after tea.

Sunday 30 April

April has a real title to its name—a cryptic sentence, which I am too lazy to unknot. Anyhow it rained, & then was fine—& N. & I sat in the drawing room for 3 hours & discussed the ethics of suicide! a cheerful theme which the thought of [Nurse] Fardell naturally suggests to my mind. Gerald to lunch, & afterwards I went to my familiar concert where we had the Pathetic, a little threadbare now, & ones emotions less volatile. Home, & Fardell to tea, whom I escaped. Jack to dinner.

Monday 1 May

Wrote again very laboriously at my Spanish job. Snow to lunch & to paint out half her Academy pictures.

Out with Gurth to get various things. Gurth disgraced me by barking in the shop, which sounded like a Lion roaring in a Cave.

Read a bit of my history, & some more of the Spanish twaddle—How I wish I could be brave & frank in my reviews, instead of having to spin them out elaborately.

Dine with Beatrice [Thynne].

Tuesday 2 May

Worked again at Spain; Granada this time, but they are dry bones to preserve.

To the R. A. with Nessa after lunch, which is an Exhibition—that is true. The only pictures, Sargents & the one Furse, & the Furse is better than the Sargents to my thinking.

History & typewriting as usual.

Wednesday 3 May

Worked at my Spanish stuff, & finished Granada, & so the three dry little sketches are done, but whether they have any conceivable use, even as wage earners, remains to be seen.

After lunch Violet appeared, & we went with her to the New Gallery where we again confronted the portrait in the balcony. Then to the R. A.—that painted desert, where again the only thing that shone out was the Furse. Sargent gets blasé. Home, & Nelly to tea, & she & Violet left in her motor car.

History & dull review books. Thoby back from St Ives at 8—& much delighted.

Thursday 4 May

Wrote at a fourth & final sketch, Granada this time.

Out after lunch with Gurth to get tickets for the Joachim concert at the Bechstein Hall, where Gurth accompanied a Lalo’s song with a voluntary bass of his own composition & I had to remove him in haste.

Sylvia Milman to lunch, by the way.

No one yet to our Thursdays, which have not really begun.

Friday 5 May

Wrote a thing possibly for the Academy about the Protestant Cemetery at Lisbon—my last bit of ‘copy’—after which I shall settle to sober reviewing, & English history.

Nessa off for the day to a cottage near Reading which Kitty & Leo have taken for a fortnight, & missed her trains both ways, & only got back for a late dinner. I went to the Fishers, dutifully, & had a long solitary talk with Aunty Mary.

Saturday 6 May

Finished my Fielding, & put finishing touches to the other wretched things, which are very bad, & I am doubtful whether to send them. Out to Tonks’ show with N. but found it had not begun, so to the L. L. where we sat & read Magazines for some time.

Home—& no one to tea. So I all but finished the 3rd of my Spanish review books, which is a mercy. So next week I shall write that.

Sunday 7 May

A holiday morning expedition to Hampstead, which, like the Cockney I am, still manages to delight me—There is something fantastic—I mean phantom like—about this little vision of country in the heart of London.

To a dull, & empty concert after lunch.

[Clive] Bell to dinner.

Monday 8 May

Worked all the morning at the review of the Spanish books for the Times; over which as usual I groan & struggle. But I can write without an evil conscience this time.

After lunch all the way down to the Milmans, where we renewed acquaintance with Maud, after many years, in which she has grown into a proper young Lady.

To dine with Adrian at the Robert Cecils & then to the play with L. Robert [Cecil] & Beatrice [Thynne].

Tuesday 9 May

Finished after a fashion my Spanish book review this morning, which is dull reading, I think, though virtuous.

Adrian & Snow to lunch.

After lunch Violet came, & I sat with her in the Square Garden, for some time.

At. Minna to tea—

Adrian back to Cambridge after dinner, having eaten 2 dinners.

Mrs. Lyttelton sends me Miss Robin’s new book to review.

Wednesday 10 May

Began work on my English History lectures for my working women. I have read Green, & Freeman’s first volume, with copious notes; & now boil these down, into something as readable as I can make it. It amuses me, as English History always does, & Freeman is a good manly writer with no nonsense about him.

P.M.—Something dull—a walk.

Meg Booth dines & to a concert for which I had bought the wrong tickets. To my working women—3 this time.

Thursday 11 May

Worked at History again.

P.M: Out with Gurth & met George in a carriage & pair, who asked me to call on Margaret, but she was asleep.

Home.

Our ‘Evening’—Gay, Bell, D. MacCarthy & Gerald—who shocked the cultured.

Friday 12 May

As it must be confessed that I write this on 27th May, it is useless to pretend that I can record what happened on the 12th. I suppose I may safely say that I wrote something, probably touching upon Spanish Sketches in the morning—& went out in the afternoon.

Saturday 13 May

So ominous a silence means—what I recognised before, that my Diary sinks into a premature grave. It is a hopeless attempt: writing an extra page every day, when I write so many of necessity bores me, & the story is dull.

Sunday 14 May [to] Tuesday 30 May

[These pages are blank.]

Wednesday 31 May

We will solemnly renounce this diary, now that we come to an end of the month, & find, happily that the book provides no more pages—for they would assuredly be left blank.

Such an exercise can only be fulfilled when it is voluntary, & words come spontaneously. Directly writing is a task—why, one asks, should one inflict oneself thus? The good is nullified. But there is no need of such reflections. All but six months find some sort of mirror of themselves here; the sight is one that profits or pleases.

Thursday

[This page was undated and blank.]

AVS’s Notes to the 1904-5 Journal

[The following notes by AVS begin at the end of the volume and move forward. Page numbers within brackets have been editorially supplied.]

[Page 1]

30)  170  (5  
150
  20

[Page 2]

books 1905

Jan:

✓ Life of William Morris

✓ Paters Renaissance

✓ Layards Nineveh

Thorpes Northern Mythology

✓ Traills Social England

Galtons Heredity

✓ Greens Townlife in 15th Cent:

✓ Oxford History of Music

Dixons (Canon) works.

✓ W. Morris’es Early works

✓ Defence of Guenevere.

✓ Freemans works. on Towns. Architecture

Mackails Latin Literature

✓ History of Indian Mutiny

✓ Jeffries “After London”

✓ Life of Stone Wall Jackson. Henderson.

Feb.

[Page 3]

✓ Barham of Beltana W.E. Norris.

Catherine de Medici Edith Sichel

✓ Fortunes of Farthings.

Magic Greek.

[Page 4]

work done

Before Xmas 1904

Haworth

Review:

✓ Royal Langbrith

Arrows of Fortune

✓ Next Door Neighbours } Guardian

✓ Feminine Fiction

✓ On a Faithful Friend

Boswell as Letter Writer

1905

Note for Fred

Christchurch

Review: New Forest

✓ Women in America (800)

✓ A Belle of the Fifties (1000 words)

✓ The Golden Bowl. Henry James. (800)

✓ Street Music (National Review)

✓ The Plague of Essays (Academy)

✓ Dickens Country Times

✓ Thackeray Country

✓ Value of Laughter

✓ By Beach & Bogland

✓ Nancy Stair

[Page 5]

Number of words in a foolscap typewriter @ | 450
[Number of words] ” ” page of my MS. book | 400
| 325

[Page 6]

NOTES

Hotels in Madrid

1. Hotel de Rome. Messrs Votti & Co. 9/ to 12 a day
2. Hotel de la Paix. J. Capdevielle 9/ to 14
3. English Pension Hotel. | Miss Briggs
| Calle Major 92.
Train from Lisbon to Madrid leaves the Railroad Station, Lisbon 11-5 a.m. arrives Madrid 8.30 next morning.
fares. first class single | £2.11
return | 3.8
second single | 1.18
return | 2.7.
Passports advisable though not strictly necessary.

[Page 7]

[Here the notebook is turned upside down. AVS begins her notes, in pencil.]

[Edward A.] Freemans History of the Norman Conquest

Vol. 5 [Chapter XXII]

England alone has a Chronicle for 700 years. This & Domesday book the great authorities for Early Eng. Hist. One great object of D[omesday]: was to see that the Danegeld was paid—laid on in the Danish invasion 2 years before. Also W[illiam]. wished to know exactly how he had portioned out land among N[ormans]. & [illegible] D[omesday]: 1st statistical document of modern Europe. Cf. [Charles] Booths Life & Labour ‘a map & picture of England’ a word of Ws. confiscations.

[Page 8]

Chap. 22. F[reeman, Vol. 5]. 653 [sic/ p. 65]

We owe our national unity to Norman Conquest. Only bad result the mixture of tongues. Character of W. Rufus [p.] 72. Affection for his father. Doesnt plunder his fathers churches. W. gladly accepted [p.] 75. revolt of the Normans in favour of Robert—disadvantages of being separated fr. Normandy. Odd leader. Rebellion suppressed by English. W. a great fighter, was ambitious Schemes of foreign conquest. Wishes to have Normandy, [illegible] Roberts weakness. W. brother Norman leaders. [p.] 79. By the help of Eng. W. was safe upon his Throne. 1088 last struggle between 2 races. Ws. oppression.

[Page 9]

(opinion Vol. 1. 56—) Dicey Law & Legal status of women in 18th cent. The married womans property act not yet passed. This the result of Mills’ ‘The Subjection of Women’—also much impetus given by the Princess, appeared in 1856—quoted by Lord Lifford in the House of Lords. Tenigrove [?] suggestion of womens Colleges—put into practice by Miss Clough along with others at Newnham, 1860. Began in Cambridge—Girton?—Spread to Oxford, Lady Margarets. Somerville &c.

[Page 10]

Freeman [Vol.] 5. [p.] 81

| Death of Lanfranc
1090 | Beginning of foreign wars.
| Ws dreams of continental conquest.
| Normandy under Robert in a state of anarchy. Western part made over to Henry. To the interest of Ns to have one King.
[p.] 86  | R craves help from Philip K. of France. beginning of French English wars.
1091 | William goes to Normandy; assigned lands wh. hemmed in N. to N[orth]. & S[outh]. to help R. to recover los provinces. Either prince without child to succeed to the lands of both on the death of one.
| W. & R leagued against Henry.
| Hereditary kingship: Kingship to be bartered to his next of kin by the King. Further disputes between W. & R.
1096 | Beginning of Crusades.
| R. went on pilgrimage.
| Redemption of the Holy Land from its infidel oppressors. R. pledges the Duchy of N[ormandy]. to W. for 10,000 marks. English taxed to produce it.
[p.] 95 | Possessions of N. marks beginning of E[nglish]. & F[rench]. wars. W. supposed to covet crown of France.

[Page 11]

F[reeman]. [Vol.] 5. [p.] 102

1097  | war with France.
1098 | peace with France.
| W. wins Maine.
| Wars in Wales & Scotland.
| Vassalage of Scotland renewed. Wales more effectually subdued than usual.
| Conquest of South Wales.
| Speech in South Wales—Castles.

[]

Cornwall 1905

DIARY
CORNWALL
1905

Carbis Bay 11 August

It was with some feeling of enchantment that we took our places yesterday in the Great Western train. This was the wizard who was to transport us into another world, almost into another age. We would fain have believed that this little corner of England had slept under some enchanters spell since we last set eyes on it ten [eleven] years ago, & that no breath of change had stirred its leaves, or troubled its waters. There too, we should find our past preserved, as though through all this time it had been guarded & treasured for us to come back to one day—it mattered not how far distant. Many were the summers we had spent in St Ives; was it not reasonable to believe that as far away we cherished the memory of them, so here on the spot where we left them we should be able to recover something tangible of their substance?

Ah, how strange it was, then, to watch the familiar shapes of land & sea unroll themselves once more, as though a magicians hand had raised the curtain that hung between us, & to see once more the silent but palpable forms, which for more than ten years we had seen only in dreams, or in the visions of waking hours.

It was dusk when we came, so that there still seemed to be a film between us & the reality. We could fancy that we were but coming home along the high road after some long day’s outing, & that when we reached the gate at Talland House, we should thrust it open, & find ourselves among the familiar sights again. In the dark, indeed, we made bold to humour this fancy of ours further than we had a right to; we passed through the gate, groped stealthily but with sure feet up the carriage drive, mounted the little flight of rough steps, & peered through a chink in the escalonia hedge. There was the house, with its two lighted windows; there on the terrace were the stone urns, against the bank of tall flowers; all, so far as we could see was as though we had but left it in the morning. But yet, as we knew well, we could go no further; if we advanced the spell was broken. The lights were not our lights; the voices were the voices of strangers. [ ] We hung there like ghosts in the shade of the hedge, & at the sound of footsteps we turned away.

From the raised platform of the high road we beheld the curve wh. seemed to enclose a great sweep of bay full tonight of liquid mist, set with silver stars & we traced the promontory of the island, & saw the cluster of lights which nestle in its warm hollow.

The dawn however rose upon that dim twilight & showed us a country of bright hill sides, of cliffs tumbling in a cascade of brown rocks into the sea, &, alas, we saw also not a few solid white mansions where the heather used to spring. They have cut a broad public road too, where we stumbled along a foot path on the side of the moor, & there are signs, as [A.] said, that the whole place has been tidied up since our day. There are differences though, which only strike a very fresh eye, & in two days time we see only the permanent outlines of the moor & island, & the place is in substance & detail unchanged.

Yesterday, for instance, we followed foot paths to Trencrom, which was, 11 years ago, our punctual Sunday walk. The brambles still stretch across it, & the granite blocks in the earth still bring you to your nose. At the corner we came to the Peacock farm, where the dunghill was as large as ever though there was no successor to the proud bird of old days. So, at every turn of the road, we could anticipate some little characteristic—a water trough—or a plank over the stream—which had impressed itself minutely upon our childish minds, & great was our joy when we discovered that our memory was right. To find these details unchanged, indeed, gave us a keener pleasure than to find the big hills in their places.

These trifles testified to the scrupulous exactitude of our observation, & proved how accurately we had known our mistress.

Also it was clear that where such details were untouched we should find no larger change. Indeed every step of our walk might have been taken eleven years ago, & we should have found nothing to surprise our eyes. On the top of Tren Crom indeed, I was considerably surprised to see how large a view of the surrounding country was unfolded; moreover I had no notion that from this point you can see both sides of the coast at once; Hayle Harbour on the North, St Michael’s Mount on the South, & all the long stretch of bay which ends in the Lizard point. But as these features of the landscape have not changed in eleven years, or in eleven hundred, the change must be in my point of view & not in the outlines of the earth.

Monday 14 August

Today we did what we have long promised ourselves to do on the first opportunity, that is we hired a fishing boat & went for a sail in the bay. But the sea was so calm that great stretches of it had a dull surface, & our sail made no attempt to lift the boat. Our boatman, had to take his oars, & for amusement we lay back & watched the tawny sail flapping against the sky, & tried to make the man discourse of the sea. He was induced to tell us how, last winter, he had been capsized in his herring boat; how he had been rescued as by a miracle, as he clung to the keel; how he would be off on the same toil next month, & how he would make one of the crew of the seine boats which lie waiting for pilchards in the bay. At this moment the monotony of our slow progress was relieved by a sudden exclamation of porpoises; & not far distant we saw a shiny black fin performing what looked like a series of marine cartwheels.

We sailed into the midst of a whole school of these gymnasts who came so near that we could hear their gulp for breath before they dived again. Porpoises remarked the boatman, are a sign of pilchards in the bay.

This evening we observed two or three long black boats rowing out beyond the point; later we saw the dotted circle of a net lying on the water between them. This was surprising because the seine boats seldom take up their places before September, & there is rarely any likelihood of a haul before October.

However as circumstances were favourable to an after dinner walk—to tell the truth our water supply has failed, & we had to dine at the Hotel, we strolled up to the little white house on the crest of the hill, where the hewer sits with his eyes on the water below ready to discover the floating cloud of pilchards. The boats lay directly beneath this point, & a little group of people was clustered round the hewers seats talking the delightful vernacular of Cornish fisher folk. They talked of “tucking” & “shooting the seine” & interpreted the shouts of the men in the boats, who were trying it seemed, to drag their nets clear of the rocks. Then we looked towards the island, a vague shape, of neutral tint, & saw a light burn suddenly from the point. This was some signal to the boatmen apparently, which was answered by fresh cries, which had a wild sound in the falling dusk. The good people chatted of last years haul, & the mens wages, & who owned this boat, & who that; & meanwhile exquisite scents of warm escalonia hedges were blown from the wood behind. St Ives from this point & in the dark is divested of detail; you see only the promontory of the island running out in to sea, & the exquisite curve of the bay. The land has lost its opacity, & seems a vague mist like substance starred with lights, & circled by pale & luminous waters which still mirror the light of the west.

The other day as it rained A. & I turned from the main street into the shelter of the Church. We looked for little more, but we found ourselves in a quaint but really beautiful old building, shaped something like a ship, it seemed, with a dark ceiling of oak, & strange old carvings wrought in the black pews & rafters. The sound of the sea might be heard by the congregation & there was something touching in the thought that generations of fisher folk had knelt here within the hearing of its voice & prayed for safety on its waters, & prosperity in their fishing. There is more of quaintness, perhaps, than of beauty; as though the worshippers were poor people who could not afford much more ornament than a slab of graven slate when they died.

As we passed out, we were stopped by some piece of information volunteered by the caretaker; an elderly woman in black who sat near the door. Suddenly she dropped her professional voice, & asked us if we had ever had friends who lived here? We answered naturally, that we had lived here ourselves for some 13 summers; “Ah” she cried & there was what is rare, the thrill of real emotion in her voice, “You are Mr. Stephen. Let me shake you by your hand my dear. Sit down a moment & talk to me.”

We sat & for some half hour or so, she poured forth her memories, her constant remembrance & gratitude, & her joy to see some of the old family at least, once more. ‘It sets the heart beating in my body’ she cried, & wiped away a tear which wept for many sorrows. She had heard of our coming, & had asked every visitor to the church for news of us; even as we came in she was speaking our name to a couple of strange sight seers. She was not, I should guess, a woman of any special refinement but it would be hypercritical not to see that in this instance she was genuinely & deeply touched. To have left so deep an impression on a mind not naturally sensitive to receive it, so that after eleven years tears will start at the thought of all the beauty & charity that are recalled by a name [Julia Stephen] seems to me perhaps the purest tribute which can be paid to the nobility of a life which did not seek for any other fame.[ ]

And as I heard those humble words of the love that one woman felt for another I thought that no acclamation of praise throughout the whole world could sound so sweet, or could mean so much.

It has become the habit for me to spend my afternoons in solitary tramping. A great distance of the surrounding country have I now traversed thus, & the map of the land becomes solid in my brain. Twice these walks were taken in the teeth of heavy rain storms. I walked, it seemed, toward the very front of the torrent, up among grey hills. Both times it swept like driving smoke across the sea, & all the cheerful shapes & colours evaporated. One could just see the hazy outlines of the hills which lifted themselves out of the mist, but the sweep of the bay filled almost instantly with dense vapours.

At Knills monument I had to take my bearings, & repeated “A blinding mist came down & hid the land!” & reflected how easily I might share Lucy’s fate. The delight of the country is that all moods of the air & the earth are natural, & therefore fit & beautiful. There is nothing incongruous about a wet day among the hills, as there is when decent streets & brick houses are exposed to the shock of an uncivilised storm. One may fancy even, a storm rejoicing among these granite hills when the wind & rain beat upon them as though they loved the conflict. But the sunny days give one, after all, a more spontaneous pleasure, the scents of the earth & the budding gorse are sucked out of them by the heat, & all the land glows with a mellow August radiance. The air becomes of a richly luminous quality; you see all things through an amber coloured medium.

Up on the hill today the only sound we heard was the tap tap of the stone breakers as they chipped the granite blocks, & we noticed the curious creamy richness of the stone pit in which they stood; the sun every now & then, making it gleam silver.

Today we set apart as a day of pilgrimage to certain old St Ives people, who in spite of the passage of eleven years, still cherish some faithful memory of us. So at least we were told, though I think we delayed the expedition a little from fear we might find that this statement had been exaggerated. The farmers daughter who used to bring us our chickens & help in the house, the woman who took in our washing, the old man who kept the bathing tents & his wife; these were the people we proposed to visit in their cottages in St Ives.

There was no doubt, at any rate that Jinny Berryman, as she was, did cordially remember & welcome us. It was a pleasure to see the blank respectful face of the woman behind the counter in the eating shop glow with sudden recognition when we spoke our name. We were made to sit down, & hear how we had changed, or had remained the same; whom we were like & whom we in no way resembled, how we climbed the tree in the garden, & how in short, we were much as other children are, but to this woman at least, remarkable in all we did & said.

At Mrs Daniels the same story was repeated, & if possible our greeting was more hearty. She too, must grip our hands fast, & look close in our faces by the light—If one had changed she would have known the other “any where”. We were like, we were unlike, we were, at any rate, the old family come back again, & that seemed a joy that could hardly be put into words.

All kinds of trivial half forgotten memories revived & we did our share of question, & anecdote; we asserted that there was no place like St Ives, & that we had never forgotten its washer woman. Indeed, we were not guilty of insincerity; her portrait had been lying unexposed in some dim recess of our brains, & at the first sight of her face the old picture became clear again, & with it a multitude of slighter impressions which seem to cluster round it. I could see her once more tramping up the drive with her basket of clean clothes, leaning away from her burden, & ready to put it down & talk good humouredly if we stopped her.

She married the squint eyed carpenter, who might be seen on the glass roof of the grape house, filling the crannies with putty.[ ] His temper had grown no sweeter though he came in & shook us by the hand at his wife’s bidding. “John,” she remarked, “is as old fashioned as ever.” We left, luckily, before I had divulged the fact that I took him for her brother; the doubt whether he might not, after all, be her son, kept me silent.

Eleven years have had the effect in St Ives as in other places, of deepening wrinkles, & bleaching the brown hair white, but they have also had the stranger property of uniting the people whom we thought old even then, in marriage.

It seems to be a deliberate action among the poor here, as though it were a step that recommended itself as a precaution against old age. Jinny Berryman, however, was too hasty it seems, even in her long deferred marriage, for after a wedded life of nine days she left her husband, & though they meet in the road they have never spoken to each other since. The man was married before to a woman who on her death bed required of her husband that he should take Jinny as his second wife. There is a curious little plot, or rather psychological study for a novelist.

We went on next to the Pascoes, who still live in one of those delightful cottages beneath the apple trees on the steep hill leading from the beach.

We walked along the narrow cobble stoned passage which leads to their door, & in the shade of their creepers the old people within did not immediately recognise us. We had the usual moment of uncomfortable hesitation, & then the hearty explosion, which by this time was not unexpected.

The old couple had sensibly diminished in size during these eleven years; they were sitting over their tea, a fire in the grate, & a good loaf of bread before them. All the chairs were put at our disposal, & while one received the torrent of Mrs. Pascoes greeting, two others went through the old story with Mr. Pascoe. The men, for the most part, have a less lively recollection of us than the women; they, probably, came more seldom into direct speech with us.

Mr. Pasco however had taken a lively interest in our bathing; he was anxious to tell us the melancholy decline of St Ives bathing since our day; how the tents are run on wheels, & owned by one man “a very selfish fellow”; how the working classes bathe, where only people of good family were wont to use that privilege; this, complicated with some mysterious story of ladies who wished him to help them on with their bathing dresses; (it sounds unlikely I know) had made it necessary for him to retire; which as we made haste to add, must have further hastened the melancholy state of things which we had observed on the beach.

Mr. Pasco, further, had had influenza two years ago; & wore his thumb bound up in a red rag. It is not necessary here to give the details; I will only say in his words that “caustic is poison for tumours”.

He had moreover, like others whom we visited, read his papers for eleven years with an eye for the name of Stephens [sic]; & was thus well versed in the facts of our history, though the papers must have lied in some particulars, or his eyes cannot be as good as they were once. Thus he knew that G[eorge] was married, but insisted that he was still living in Chadwick; he was also of opinion that since his appointment as private Secretary he had gone to China. China, I remember, was one of the places which Mr. Pascoe had seen himself, when he was in the Navy.

Mrs. Pascoe was, I may confess it here, chiefly memorable for some trouble in her ‘pipes’; about which we used to enquire. She is now a little shrivelled woman, with a white fretful face, & very bright eyes. She had talked of us a hundred times in the last week, she assured us; & her intense interest at seeing us was really a little embarrassing. She was mistress of so many forgotten details that her reckoning of the number of thoughts she had spent on us in a weeks time, was probably no over statement. One can imagine that mewed up in the corner of the dark little room, without book or work, her thoughts must feed on slight food. “I cant believe that I see you there before me in the flesh” was a phrase that recurred, as though some persistent phantom had at last taken shape. At the news that G[eorge]. was coming here next week, she gave up her attempt to wrestle with the English language, & covered her face with her hands. A calmer mood followed this excitement, & she enquired into every circumstance of our lives minutely.

She had followed our fortunes without dropping the least link in the chain of evidence available to her; but our attention to the vicissitudes of the Pasco family was by no means of so fine a quality. We cheerfully remembered a daughter, when she was named, but our imagination refused to supply us with any record of Mrs. Pascoes nieces husband; who was responsible for the black dress to which our attention was directed. Nor did we acquit ourselves very creditably when the family history of the Whiteheads was recounted for our benefit. Miss Whitehead, I can at least remember, is now on the continent, recovering from a severe chill in her legs.

As Mrs. Pasco drew a melancholy sigh of self importance, & began to enumerate the many troubles which had visited her of late, we hastily remembered that we had already stayed too long. The catalogue threatened to be exhaustive. The good Pasco presented us each with little bouquets which he had picked from his garden, & offered to “pilot” us, “if I may have my joke” to his daughters house.

The outline of these Bays suggests that nature has a certain meditated felicity on occasion, & she appeals to one with a peculiar force when she thus appears to fashion her materials consciously.

The impetuous sweep of the large bay, curving round so that it half completes the circle, gives one an impression of beautifully curbed vitality; again in hollowing the three smaller bays in the flank of the large one she must, one would think, have had an eye to the fair proportion of the whole. They do not interfere with the single large impression; but they add something original; & unexpected. She seems to have perfect facility in describing these spirited & graceful lines. The third of the bays, Lelant Bay, is in some respects the loveliest of the three. It makes the rounded corner of the large Bay; but the sweep of white sands is intersected by the Hayle river, which draws a blue line down to the sea. At low tide the course of the stream is marked by certain stakes, driven in at irregular intervals. They look curiously bare & desolate for some reason, a perch for white sea birds, & strike the distinct note, it seems, of Lelant bay. At ebb tide in the evening the stretch of the sands here is vast & melancholy; the waves spread themselves one over lapping the other in thin fan shaped layers of water; so shallow that the break of the wave is hardly more than a ripple. The slope of the beach gleams as though laid with a film of mother o’ pearl where the sea has been, & a row of sea gulls sits on the skirts of the repeating wave. The pallor of the sandhills makes the scene yet more ghostly, but the beautiful sights are often melancholy & very lonely.

I thought today on my solitary walk on the scarcity of good roads in Cornwall. In the South you find it difficult to escape from the road; broad & smoothly hammered they drive across the country at all angles. Even the lesser paths are workmanlike & strike directly to their destination. We have here our High Road, which however bears such marks of rusticity that it would be accounted a lane elsewhere. Once you step aside you must trust innumerable little footpaths, as thin as though trodden by rabbits, which lead over hills & through fields in all directions. The Cornish substitute for a gate is simple; in building a wall of granite blocks they let two or three jut out at convenient intervals so as to form steps; you often find these arranged beside a gate which is heavily padlocked, as though the farmer winked one eye at the trespasser. The system of course has its advantages for the native, or for one well acquainted with the lie of the country; it keeps the land fluid, as it were, so that the feet may trace new paths in it at their will; but the stranger must often prefer the cut & dry system of regular high roads.

The secondary roads, moreover, are not only badly preserved, but sometimes after starting out bravely enough they dwindle off into a track across the heather. The pedestrian then should sketch his path with a free hand, & trust that he will find some little trodden line to guide him; for in the course of an afternoon’s tramp he need not strike the road.

There are very few villages in this country, & the little clusters of gray farms which gather among the hills connect themselves with the main road by some roughly worked roadway of their own, leading directly into the farm yard. A traveller who follows the track finds herself at the end of half a mile or so confronted by a lean sheep dog, & a sour looking farmer’s wife who is scouring the milk pails & resents the intrusion. But for the walker who prefers the variety & incident of the open fields to the orthodox precision of the high road, there is no such ground for walking as this.

It was more, perhaps, to fulfil a tradition than for the sake of any actual pleasure that we took the train into St Ives this afternoon, the day of the Regatta. I, it must be confessed, secretly expected some present & not merely retrospective enjoyment from the crowd, the gay flags, & the fitful trumpets of the band. This was the scene I remembered; vaguely joyful & festive, without reference to the swimming or the sailing which we pretended to watch. I remembered the crowd of little boats, the floating flags along the course, & the Committee boat, dressed with lines of bunting, from which naked figures plunged, & guns were fired. A certain distant roll of drums & blare of trumpets, we confessed to each other, never fails where ever we hear it to suggest St Ives Regatta day on such [a] bright afternoon as this. We listen from the beach, safe in a Nurses hand again. The band was playing on the Malakoff, now as then; on close inspection we saw that a venerable clergyman waved the conductor’s staff, although the music that issued from his beat was certainly secular in type. Two or three little booths for the sale of sweets & cakes lined the terrace, & the whole population of St Ives paraded up & down in their reds & greens.

There was the Committee boat, & the little rowing boats, the flags on the water, & the swimmers poised for a moment before the gun sent them shooting into the sea, & the general stir of talk & movement. Reduce it all to a French impressionist picture & the St Ives Regatta is not a sight to be despised.

These are rough notes to serve as land marks. At nine this morning, we sat over our breakfast despondently, the mist deciding us to give up our expedition to Mullion. Suddenly T. threw up the window & shouted “pilchards in the bay”.

We leapt as though we were in the seine boat ourselves, & before half past nine we were out by the Hewers house on the point. It was at once obvious that the news was more than true. Not only were there pilchards but two nets were already out, lying like dark scars in the water in the bay. The gathering of the Hewers was not large as yet, but it was eminently professional. A line of watchers stood on the wall all the way along: some with megaphones, others with globes tied up in white bags. Great was the excitement for the schools of fish were still passing through the bay & all the pilchard boats were in motion like long black insects with rows of legs. Our friend Mr. Hain called us to him & showed us a certain faint purple shadow, passing slowly outside the rocks. That was a shoal he said—the boats were coming round to shoot their seines over it. As they neared the place the megaphones brayed unintelligibly & the white globes were waved emphatically. Answering shouts came from the boats. Finally we saw that two boats had stopped & the rowers were picking up handfuls of net & dropping them over board; as they did this they slowly separated, & made the dotted line of the net spread out in a circle between them; all the time the shouts went on, for the men at the hewers were guiding every movement; they alone could tell the exact position of the fish. The net was then joined & the boat went through various manoeuvres with the low ropes. It was just possible for us now that it was thus circumscribed to see the faint spin of deeper purple within the circle; it looked like one of those sudden ruffles of shade which pass across the sea like blushes.

The crowd was now gathering, & we walked from one point to another vainly trying to interpret the hoarse commands of the megaphone which might, for all we understood of them, have been in Cornish. Mr. Hain came running down again, after a time with the news that another school was sighted round the head land; the boats were not yet on the spot. At the Hewers house an intense excitement prevailed. The shoal having rounded the point was the property apparently of the Carbis Bay boats, which had hitherto remained at anchor. They were now underway, & the Hewer who directed them had clambered on to the roof of the Hewers house to make directions more forcible. The boats came slowly towards the floating shadow which we thought we could detect beyond the Carrack rocks. As they neared it, the megaphones roared like foghorns. A certain dwarf in particular had leapt to the roof & was brandishing the white globes as though they were dumb-bells. The boats began to drop the seine; they had half completed the circle when a storm of abuse broke from the hewers house. Language such as I will not try to reproduce swore at them for a boatload of incompetent monkeys; the school was further to the westward & not a fish would enter the nets. “To the west, west, west,” roared the megaphones & the naked voices took up the word in the agony of excitement. But pilchard boats are unwieldy things, & their motion was slow. The Hewers could actually see the fish slipping past the point & the net cast in empty water. A thousand pounds as we afterwards learnt, was floating out of their reach. No wonder that the excitement was painful. The net finally enclosed a small portion of the school, & the rest fell a prey to the rival boats. Four seines were now shot & we thought it time to take a boat to the first of them which had been slowly drawn close in to shore. We therefore walked round to the harbour & were rowed out to the spot. When we came near we saw that the enclosed school was of a deep & unmistakable purple; little spurts of water were flickering over the surface, & a silver flash leapt into the air for a second. We took up our places by the row of corks & waited; after a time the empty pilchard boats with their baskets drew up & let down a smaller net, called the tucking net, in the centre of the larger one, so that all the fish were gathered in a small compass. Now all the boats made a circle round the inner net, & the two boats who held the net gradually drew it up. The water within seethed with fish. It was packed with iridescent fish, gleaming silver & purple, leaping in the air; lashing their tails, sending up showers of scales.

Then the baskets were lowered & the silver was scooped up & flung into the boats; it was a sight unlike any one has seen elsewhere, hardly to be described or believed. The fishermen shouted & the fish splashed. The baskets were filled, emptied & plunged into the bubbling mass again, again & again. Nothing seemed to lessen the quantities. The little boats took their fill of fish as they liked; the fishermen stopped to pelt the onlookers with fish; the wealth was inexhaustible.

Three seines lie out in the Bay tonight full of fish which cannot be taken in till Monday. The owners watch anxiously, & the wind is high.

The Lands End

We make expeditions, it seems to me, more for the sake of the going & the coming & the delicious meal in the open air, than because there is any special sight of beauty to be found in the spot where we pitch our resting place. I have found, on my walks here a dozen places as I think to which one might fitly go on pilgrimages, but they are sudden, unexpected, secret; no one, perhaps, will step that way for weeks, or will see precisely what I saw for months, or even years. Those are the sights which surprise the solitary walker & linger in the memory. So, as these little visions are not to be evoked at will by any combination of steam & horse, it is safer to fix upon certain recognised spots & to make them the goal of any expedition you choose to undertake.

Such a goal is the Lands End, where the imagination at any rate is infallibly impressed, & one is tolerably sure to find more substantial beauties for the eye. Unfortunately, the pitch of green turf, with the craggy rocks on it, the cliffs, & the romantic line of coast are the property nowadays of a hundred eyes; every ten minutes or so a lumbering brake or a dusty motor car deposits its load of sight seers upon this [ ] little stretch of land.

But though the spot itself is thus made hideous, the land all round is still lonely & very beautiful. On the rim of the horizon the eye may see some rock shaped shadow to which, as the sun sank & made it golden, we gave the name of the Fortunate Isles. When Cornwall was chill in the shade, there was bright daylight over there—perhaps perpetual afternoon.

St Buryans is the landmark for miles, a perfectly unornamented square church tower rising with some suddenness from a stretch of singularly bare country. There was a Cornish cross, somewhat mutilated in the graveyard, but when we tried to enter the church we found the door locked, & no one to give us the key; the only creature about the place was a stone mason, who could be heard chipping a fresh name at the base of an old tombstone.

Today, Sept 14th, we were forced to take our lunch on our backs, & set off at midday to Castle Dinas some five or six miles distant. Lovely are these autumn days on the heath; the gorse is still as smooth as silk, & the air fragrant. I had almost said, regretful, as though there were some tinge of melancholy in its sweetness. All the months are crude experiments out of which the perfect September is made.

It is not unpleasant to leave the sea, & strike inland. The eye tires of the unstable waters. There is a certain austere dignity among these hills although they are not actually beautiful. We were almost at the top of the Castle hill when we bethought us that we needed water. We knocked at a farm door; it was locked, the windows were shut; we could hear no one. The next farm was deserted too, save that some kittens were playing on the flags.

There was nothing for it but to descend the hill once more to a distant farm where a man was working on a corn stack. We entered the little cobble paved garden & found the farmer washing potatoes in a saucepan; a large boned benevolent man, more kindly than shrewd. He would gladly give us water; & his wife came out of the farmhouse on hearing speech. She was the dour one of the two, pale, with dark eyes, which looked at us doubtfully at first. We were invited to sit in the house while water was fetched from the well.

These little visits to the country people in their lonely farms are always a pleasant part of our expedition. I like to get into talk with the old people, & to see the surroundings which they have made for themselves. The kitchen, in these farms, is always a large low room, dark with its thick rafters, & all the family possessions are displayed on the mantel-piece or on the walls. Above the great fire place hung ‘my grandfathers sword’, it was a hundred years old & an old curiosity dealer had offered to buy it some days before. A. took it down and flourished it, like the dragoon who had wielded it once, & the farmer stood in the door and chuckled. An old blue pot was brought out from its safe recess for our inspection; which was called a “puzzle jar” because though full of holes, there was yet a tube up the handle which would carry the water to your lips safely. Meanwhile the woman stood watching us, not unfriendly, but still with some doubtful hesitation in her gaze. And yet nothing could be more hospitable & courteous than their treatment of these four strangers; they brought the water, lifted down cups from the shelf & packed them in a basket, & let us go out as though they had but fulfilled the simplest of duties. So perhaps they had; but it is refreshing to find people who are still sensitive to such commands. That is the great charm of the country people here; perhaps from their contact with wholesome earth or air these natural instincts toward their kind are perfectly frank & trustful; all they say & do seems marked with a certain sincerity.

Castle Dinas itself, though our best castle, is but a fragment; a ruined gateway, perhaps, which has served as a stall for cattle. The hill on which it stands is scarred in the usual way with ditches & ramparts, upon which the turf is smoother & greener than elsewhere.

There are the usual blocks of stone tumbled & half buried in the earth, which once stood high in the air; & from the ruins you behold the same sea & the same hills which this vanished castle tower once looked down upon & which maybe it once held in sway. Far away we could see the glittering line of the Atlantic as it nears the Lands End.

It is a great thing in this little lodging house that we look on the sea from all the large windows. When I wake in the morning I discover first what new ships have come in to the day, all day long these silent voyagers are coming & going, alighting like some travelling birds for a moment & then shaking out their sails again & passing on to new waters. Where do they come from, & whither are they bound? A ship moves in mysterious ways. In the morning we see the luggers starting for their fishing grounds; late in the afternoon they come racing back on the wind, like so many birds swooping on their prey. Most beautiful of all are the great sailing ships, which ply up & down the Channel.

At the sea, especially perhaps this distant Cornish sea, people seem to strip themselves of some of the integuments in which they wrap themselves where the criticism of eyes is to be dreaded. We seem to have come to a common agreement here not to look surprised at bare heads & hands; to accept hair flying in the wind, & bathing towels wrapped round the neck, as the simple & natural things. This unconventionality of dress is reflected in the tanned faces & the free stride of the legs. We are all consciously taking holiday & running wild in the open air. The results are sometimes a little crude, perhaps; ladies, stout & middle aged, conceive themselves under this fresh stimulant in their first youth again; shorten their skirts, throw aside their bonnets, & caper as they walk, consciously, almost defiantly as though they asserted a right which your mild glance of inquiry would deny them.

But the high tide of the summer holidays is over, & the blatant holiday maker has already lost his sunburnt skin in some City office. The remnant are more sedate; they detect an autumnal flavour in the breeze, & huddle in thick cloaks & fur jackets.

August has a certain fiery & sultry quality of her own, which fades before her last days of the month are over. September has mellowed whatever there was of roughness in her heat: the days are more perfect, but less vigorous. The summer in fact is on the wane; peacefully fading like some brilliant spot of light. The colours of the sunset are everywhere.

When the sun sets you may see from this window little sparks of light scattered among the sandhills where no houses themselves are visible; the windows are thus emblazoned by the sun.

It is a mistake to keep rigidly to the coast; strike inland & cross the hills, & then you will sight a broad ribbon of sea beneath you, & ships set like toys about it. The land has been draped in all kinds of strange folds at the edge, so that instead of a sheer cliff you find beautiful little valleys with triangular beaches at the bottom of them. Here we spread our tea, & that finished, walk home again in the dark. Last night it was dusk when we started, but we had to take a long look at the Gurnard’s Head & the misty shapes beyond, through which suddenly there flashed the fitful glare of the St Just lighthouse. It was late then when we turned back, & we resolved to keep safe upon the road. Before that could be reached we had to fight our way through a forest of ferns which bound ones legs together & brought one to ones knees. The road when we reached it was of a vague white mist upon which our feet struck hard, even to our surprise. As. figure stalking ahead was blurred & without outline, & at a hundred yards distance we had to send our voices out after him to make sure that we had not lost him. In this mystification we left the road, & stepped into a vast trackless country, without mark or boundary. Before us dozens of lights were scattered, floating in soft depths of darkness without anchorage on the firm ground. A. trod on unswervingly, clearing aside the mists as though the road lay bright before him. Once in this strange pilgrimage we groped our way through a farm-yard, where the shapes of dim cattle loomed large, & a great lantern swung an unsteady disk of light across our faces. The voice of the farmer bidding us good night recalled us for a moment to the cheerful land of substance, but our path lay on into the darkness again. We stumbled across fields which swam in dusky vapours; we struck the road, & suddenly a great light shone in front of us, & a cart wheel crunched the ground just beyond us as though the sound of its approach had been muffled in the night. Now we had come to the lights in the valley, & we passed lighted windows, scarcely able to irradiate a yard of the blackness that pressed on them, & could just discover long black figures leaning against the walls quiescent. Night was weighing heavily on this little village; all was silent though not asleep. Then we went on, up to the top of a hill, & again beneath us we saw those great swarms of lights which spring up in the dark where by day there is nothing. And so once more we found the road again, & the familiar lamps of homes. But how narrow were those walls, & how intense that light after the vague immensity of the air; we were like creatures lately winged that have been caught & caged.

For three days, it must be confessed, we have fallen under the tyranny of cards. No one can resist the neat packs waiting there on the round table, with the chairs drawn up invitingly. At first we hesitate & trifle with our desire; shuffle the cards meditatively as though the action were some merely idle movement of the fingers, for which the brain was not responsible. Then perhaps we deal out one—two—three; glance at the numbers displayed, comment audibly; how strange, what luck were one playing. Chance sends an audience. [ ] The second pack must be broached, [ ] in case it too will yield a surprise; then some one in the next room detects us, & shouts derision; “Cards after breakfast!” “Cards!” echo several, springing suddenly into life at the sound of this magic word; & all further pretence is dropped. The chairs are drawn close with alacrity; the room is noisy at once; all talk together; the cards fall in dropping showers; at length it is ready & the order to start is given. All heads are bent close to the work; eyes circle feverishly; hands deal out the pack, three by three, turn, & begin again. Aces fall out into space in the middle; then the fury quickens. You must dab your two on to the ace before your neighbour has done scratching the table polish, & then back again in an instant & on with the next. Collisions occur at this point, three two’s fight over the prostrate ace, & all, strange though it may seem, got their first. Meanwhile the swift dab dab dab in the corner warns the disputants that some one is running his cards off by the score—We all fly back to our packs, paralysed at the thought that we are missing chances. Suddenly, on the verge of a ‘run’ which will dispose of at least four more cards, with luck, a yell of “Stop” puts an end to all our schemes. The cards must be counted, & it is lucky if the ten minutes work has not left you some six or seven points less than you were at starting. Hope revives with the freshly shuffled thirteen, although the strange fact is that each new pack is without exception the worst that the player has ever seen. Kings, Queens, & Knaves, the whole royal family, sit absolutely at the top; only the most supreme skill will be able to do something with a thirteen like this. When each player has delivered himself of these the necessary groans & objurgations the signal is given again, & the old process is repeated. I shall not trouble myself to describe it again; although I will willingly act the whole thing a score of times.

Certain circumstances have made me write here less frequently than I meant, so that it comes to pass that I write these words upon the eve of our return. The lights of London will be round me at this time of evening tomorrow, as the lighthouse gleams now. That is a thought which comes with real melancholy, for, besides the actual beauty of this country, to part with it is to part with something which we knew long ago, & may not see again for years. I wish that I had seen more of it while I might. There is in truth, as I thought once in fancy something of our own preserved here from which it is painful to part. Or is it possible that one has come to that age when partings are more serious & meetings less pleasurable? On the whole I prefer to think that there is good reason to regret this departure more than others.

[]

Giggleswick 1906

Itinerary.

Giggleswick. April. 1906.

Blo Norton Hall. Norfolk. August 1906.

New Forest. Xmas. 1906.

The Steps. Playden Sussex. Aug. Sept. 1907.

The Close. Wells. Somerset. Aug: 1908.

Manorbier: Wales. Aug: 1908.

In a placid & matter of fact frame of mind the solitary traveller starts on his journey. If you are one you have so strangely little to think about; your wants are so easily satisfied. So, then, smoothly & unlaboriously I travelled from one end of England to the other today, asked but little information, found trains & carriages, directed my luggage, & deposited everything at Mrs. Turners, in Giggleswick, delightfully late—because it mattered to no one.

It is just that scrupulously clean, prosaic lodging I wished; & so far my solitude has been exquisite, & delightfully amusing. When will I dine? When will I breakfast? I settle precisely according to my own taste, & then the door is shut on me, & I may read for two hours peacefully if I like. The only sound that distracts me is the Northern Express shooting to Edinburgh.

For this is no smug suburban lodging, beneath a park door; the moors rise in waves all round; great crags of rock make a back ground, dimly seen in the April twilight & wild scents of the moor are driven in at the open window.

It [Giggleswick] is a discreet little Northern town, swept clean & simplified, out of all pettiness & vulgarity by the nobility of the country in which it lies.

But Mrs. Turner is locking her door, & jingling the candles outside, & really, as one may gather, nothing profitable is to be looked for in the scratching of a pen tonight.

The second day [13 April] of my solitude opened propitiously with sun & sky. I celebrated the day with a bun, my only sacrifice to the gods, if it could in any way deserve such a name.

With curious reserve not a bell rang to tell the world it was a feast day; holiday was kept vigorously however in the roads. I walked out along one which I christen the Sacred Way, because it leads beneath such tremendous hills, pale with shivered sheets of stone, & met bicycles & motor cars flashing along till walking was hardly pleasant. But I could trace various routes over the hills, to be carried out I hope, if all goes well—that is to say if Gurth is willing. In explanation of this singular clause, I must explain that Gurth ran from me, swiftly & stealthily this afternoon, as though bent on some sudden & criminal errand. He fled back here, cowered in the doorway, & trembled & shrank away when I tried to coax & then to coerce him to rise. What strange wave of fear or boredom came over him I cannot explain to my own satisfaction at all.

So it came about that I walked over High Rigg—(a guess) with W[ill]. & M[adge]. & saw the largest view in the countryside. The moors rise & roll away, for miles on either side, tossing themselves into great promontories like Ingleborough, or in to strange sugar loaf blocks, & then surging on their way again till they reach the Lake. But the mist covered them.

The moors are given up entirely to sheep, & are intersected by stone walls, no tree or hedge grows on them. Here and there you see a bleak stone house on the hill side, in which the shepherd lives. In many ways this land is like Cornwall; but I have not time to determine the differences.

All the sheep had their lambs, & were therefore bold & even defiant.

You find strange fortifications on the moors, fosses & ramparts, so smoothly built & carpeted that either nature was the architect, or some primeval man.

A book of the place becomes necessary.

Again I have accomplished a day of partial solitude; except that I begin to make conversation with Mrs. Turner when she brings me my meal. But she is polite rather than communicative.

The unhappy spell of holiday [Easter] is still upon us: the roads are almost impassable. So, dragging Gurth on a chain, I crossed the road, & took the pathway shown me at the back of the wood, & so on to that high moor, with its pale side of ash gray rock. It was a curious walk. I followed a narrow pathway, on the ridge of the moor, protected by a stone wall, from a sheer drop of I don’t know how many feet. The road wound directly beneath, so that a motor car even might be followed for some distance, squirming back on the white road.

Then I found a less precipitous place, where I might descend from these rather bleak altitudes. But it was not easy walking. The side of the hill, which is sufficiently steep to need an almost sitting posture, is strewn with a thick layer of loose gray stones; some of considerable size. As you walk they slip beneath you & rattle down, in a miniature avalanche, to the bottom. And if one looked down, the sight was a little giddy: so I clambered somehow, unseen happily & caught at trees & bushes till the descent was over. And after that I found me a grass seat beneath a rock, & lay in the sun, looking at that skeleton like hill before me, & others rising grand & tragic behind it & far away into the distance. A walk here, I find, tends to be rather an heroic undertaking. I amused myself with planning the countryside into Bloomsbury & Piccadilly, & setting St James Streets & Marble Arches on all the hills & valleys. Thus my domestic life passes like some very placid hours on a lake without a wave.

All the trees here are red & purple, but not green yet. It is not a country that is very sensitive to changes of the season I imagine. In winter it looked much the same. Two thousand years ago it looked as it did this afternoon; in that continuity lies its singular grandeur & stability perhaps. Two thousand years again may leave it equally unchanged.

A monotonous song has been sung by the wind all day. At night it rises. But the sun was brilliant, & made a fair Easter morning [15 April]. At eleven the Sabbath peace of Giggleswick was broken by military music; the dogmatic tune of Christian soldiers thumped out of brass & drum, & the volunteers marched to church, protesting as it seemed the righteousness of their proceeding at every step. Then there came a procession of clergy & choir; & I had half a mind to see the service, which promised to be instructive; but on the whole decided the other way.

In the afternoon I made the ascent of the Attermaier [Attermire] (how you spell the strange foreign sounding name I know not)—the moor which makes a high background for Settle. It screens all view of the country on the other side. I persevered though the way was steep & deceptive, & gained such a view of all the country round as rested my eyes completely. But it is a strange country. You get into a desolate sea of moors, gray as bone, with but a sprinkling of green on them. These merge into each other, sink & swell again, till one can reach no further. No road or house seems to adventure out there; & the likeness to a barren sea scape is unavoidable. On the other side however, the country is more cultivated; & the plain is set with houses, & threaded by the Ribble [River]. All through Settle there were groups converging, waiting the ‘abatement of the Sabbath.’ Tomorrow, all the furies will be let loose once more, & then, perhaps, peace.

One might almost keep silence over today [Monday, 16 April], for it has been tacit in its quality, uttering nothing memorable in its course.

I walked, & was stopped on the road by an elderly gentleman who had laid a match a minute ago to a train of gunpowder, & was waiting for it to blow a crack in the rock, when “pieces might be flying.” So I waited with him under shelter, & heard a pop, like a toy gun, which was satisfactory & innocent, & went on my way.

It was difficult to beat against the wind, but I made a laborious circuit without much delight in it, & struck the road on the top of Giggleswick hill, & dropped down into the valley.

I saw a hare, & several trains & climbed walls made exactly as walls ought not to be made; high & loose, without any foothold. I generally made a hole, carrying several lumps down in my petticoat. And Gurth has to be pulled by his collar.

After tea we visited a certain master & his wife, nameless even here, for decency’s sake. The wife is fresh from Newnham, & has brought all her crudities to air in this congenial atmosphere. The cottage on a Yorkshire moor is strenuous soil for theories; I imagine the letters she writes home, & her delight in herself as a suitable person in the right place.

It was an ordinary cottage; but ungainly tables, green carpets, & rush chairs have made it self conscious, a cottage with a purpose. The crudity of these young people may be gauged by the fact that they write their creed, in red ink on a strip of brown paper over the hearth—It is a quotation I am told from William Morris; & they have Christened their son after a hero in George Meredith. All wrong—all wrong, I cry with emphatic but ambiguous voice; because I can’t say exactly where the confusion arises, or what it is that makes the combination of literature & life, drawing room & kitchen so disastrous.

Today [Tuesday, 17 April] was memorable at least for a really successful walk, to a place called Feizor—a wizard like name, to be set beside others like Attameier [sic], as something singular, & belonging to no regular system.

We got into a strange vale between two moors; all turf, with flocks & herds feeding there, but no house or human creature. It stretched a long way, sequestered from wind or any blast from the outside world, a dreamlike hollow between gray moors; & finally we looked down upon Feizor, a little village of farm houses, a centre, I suppose for this pasturage land.

I thought what an odd fate it was to live in an old stone house all the days of one’s life in the village of Feizor when the whole of the world lies open to one. The road which joins it to the main line is grown with grass; & as we walked along it, we came upon tinkers of some kind, making a shelter out of the hood of a cart; & ranging their household goods in the ditch—They sprang up & asked us for matches, had I been alone it would have been unpleasant. You could see the elemental look of demand in the mans face; as though it were his natural instinct to ask other people to supply him. The great melancholy moors, sweeping all round us, like some tragic audience, or chorus, mutely attendant, grew black, & veiled with mist. Rain came down, & the country seemed well pleased at this change of mood. Storm & rough weather suit it better than bland & innocent skies. But words! words! You will find nothing to match the picture.

Today the singular & rather pleasant phenomenon was seen of great white flakes of snow falling across a deep blue sky. But they were merely tentative, or decorative, & ceased by midday. In the afternoon however, walking to Lawkland, there was a bright line of white on the top of Ingleborough; which indeed is majestic enough to veil his crown in the clouds occasionally. It was a lovely walk, along the valley. We met a shepherd digging mournfully at a drain which cuts across the road. One of the lambs, apparently, had run into the funnel of this thing, which stretched into the fields; & had gone probably too far to be dug out alive: A tuft of wool on the briar showed where he was lost. The minute & anxious care with which every separate lamb in the flock is watched surprises the stranger; the lambs seem so innumerable, & their destinies so unimportant. But every field, did one know it, is full of these details which are important facts to an experienced eye.

Lawkland is an old Manor House; too small to be restored, & thus a beautiful specimen of simple domestic building, standing just off the road where every one may see it. All its graceful gables, & worn traceries are there untouched; & it is flanked by rough farm houses, of an earlier date still perhaps. You see how neatly self sufficient the old house was—& still, perhaps, remote in the Yorkshire moors as it is, needs all its resources.

The Matrons of Giggleswick sat in conclave this afternoon upon the scheme for boarding out poor children. Substantial squiresses, ruling their broad acres with capable thumb, parsons’ wives, village gossips, &c. &c.; but the Yorkshire type of gentry is distinguished, & decided. They had come driving in from distant Halls & Parsonages, & rattled off again, in dog carts & high gigs.

When one makes a perfectly successful undertaking of any kind, some sort of offering to the Gods seems fitting. And of all undertakings, these short expeditions, which last no more than an hour or so, are those which are most easily finished & made perfect in their round sum of good or ill. If I had any Gods then, or any tribute to lay at their feet, I should make some offering for the gift of three—no two & a half—sweet hours of accomplished happiness, which were bestowed on me this afternoon. With a purpose I make use of words implying some thing handed down to me, as it were, from on high; because the hours seemed so complete in themselves, so little the result of what had gone before or the prelude to that which was to be that one might figure them simply thus—as a gift set down in the course of an ordinary day. But this preface is more than sufficient. I delay in truth, because I shall get no nearer the words by making a direct search for them than by thus dallying upon the outskirts.

In the face of those great moors, even perhaps in their midst, is to be found a country very different from them, united only by its rare beauty. The contrast is part of the charm. You walk upon very gentle downs, which fold themselves into steep hollows, & are fringed with slender groves of trees. It is an undulating, & suave country, lacking the abrupt majesty of the moors, but excelling them in a certain charm; a kind of pathos from its more immediate connection with low human kind. One gray farm, with its walled garden, will do much to humanise a whole sweep of field & down. And by that one means here, perhaps, something by no means cheerful & domestic, but melancholy & appealing rather; for the land remains a half tame thing; with all & wild creatures fearing for freedom in its eyes.

For 2 hours I met no single person; but listened to the queer cries & laments of plovers & curlews, wheeling close above my head, for the afternoon was almost cloudless, & singularly warm.

“A very dark morning Miss” said Mrs Turner; but I confess that I am no judge of the morning’s complexion at 6. am—from lack of material. Indeed, now I think of it, I was surprised to see how much light contrives to shed itself while I am asleep; I thought that the day blossomed as my eyes opened. I will not attempt here the most dreary catalogue that exists: that of a day’s expedition. I shall say only that we found ourselves at the Manchester Zoo at 11.30: or thereabouts: & if that fact does not write its own history in more pertinent figures than I can come by, imagination is a broken winded jade. The Manchester Zoo! How grotesque are these strange little side shows in to which life eddies one on occasion. Had anyone predicted that I should visit Calcutta in the course of the year I should have agreed more readily than to the suggestion that this should be an expedition. You can imagine Cremorne after Pendennis had spent a night there, in the daylight, with the fireworks gone out. You can imagine the ghastly pale grottoes, & exhausted lamps, the gimcrack temples & Pagodas, in which one might still buy a bun; though one passed with horror. And occasionally, more grotesque still, one came on a cage of real lions, & a live Zebra; & a great house full of melancholy monkeys, sick & peevish after their nights debauch. It was almost unkind to visit them at this hour of deshabille; But perhaps the most ghastly touch of all was when a man fired a rocket from the edge of a chilly pond, & the light shot into a pale April morning which seemed to extinguish it instantly by the force of cold common sense. A rocket at 12 midday in the Manchester Zoo! No wonder the hyenas howled; & the hippotamus [sic] wondered if he had sufficient energy to yawn.

[]

Blo’ Norton 1906

Blo Norton Hall 4 August

It is a theory that the newer you are the better you like old things. No one but an American young woman, conscious of crudity as of some scourge of the flesh, would have plunged into such depths of age as we find here. The house is Elizabethan; & it has been too inconsiderable to restore—beyond what is needed to make it a living house; it is too remote & solitary & ancestral for anyone to wish to live here, except Americans who find all these qualities, I suppose, medicinal. Still, it is rather comfortable even for English people, to find that such houses go on unheeded & untended, accumulating quaintness & beauties with every year, all over England; despite the great towns & villas.

And age has a great charm.

Nothing of our own day could reproduce the harmony & exquisite peace of this little old house, as it struck our eyes, yesterday evening. It is so modest, & sound, & solid all through; as tho’ the centuries had only confirmed its original virtues. As you were made honestly, they seem to say, so all time to come shall but prove & establish your virtue.

And such domestic beauty, all small & quaint & even humble as it is, appeals to ones sympathies. It is so good to find that humdrum people should live so respectably; beauty & splendour were then not for the surface alone, but they sank down & down, till all layers of the state were well steeped in them. A self respecting decorous place England must have been then! The American, I began to say, needs a deep bath of antiquity; & few English people, I think, could endure such a dose as Blo’ Norton Hall is prepared to give them, without being drowned in it. We are to begin with 7 miles from a railway; & every mile seems to draw a thicker curtain than the last between you & the world. So that finally, when you are set down at the Hall, no sound what ever reaches your ear; the very light seems to filter through deep layers; & the air circulates slowly, as though it had but to make the circuit of the Hall, & its duties were complete.

Nor have such investigations as we could make today pierced behind the curtain. We seem to be in the middle of what in geography is called an ‘undulating plain’ well cultivated, but, apparently, almost deserted. The corn brims the fields; but no one is there to cut it; the churches hold up broad gray fingers all over the landscape, but no one, save perhaps the dead at their feet, attend to their commands; the windmills sail round & round, but no one trims their sails; it is very characteristic that the only sign of life in the land should be that produced by the wind of Heaven. How sleepy & ancient a people must be, who rely on the free gifts of Heaven still. But the wind seems fairly competent; the sails turn slowly, all day long. This, need I say it, is the kind of rash note an impetuous traveller makes; & it is only made because after all, such notes are the things one thinks before one begins to reason or to know. And like the images of childhood, they stay bright.

A second day [5 August] reveals the fact, as facts go, that the country has possibilities. This morning for instance, we wandered into a lush fen, humming with dragonflies, & scented with meadow sweet. A pale windmill guarded it, stationary today I observe; for though the wind is God’s wind, & will blow in spite of the Sabbath, one must not require it to work for human profit on a Sunday. Or how do the orthodox interpret these symbols? Again in the afternoon, we stepped some four miles out his way with Thoby. We had prudently to keep to the high road, which was flat, but umbrageous & lined with broad strips of green on either side. We passed the temples of three different sects, so that, reckoning by the number we met on the road there must be 10 orthodox Christians, 6 Methodists & 2½ Anabaptists in Hopton. Children count only as halves, because when they grow up they may think for themselves, & swell the number of the hostile sect, or, presumably build a fresh chapel for themselves. The Churches, I tell myself, & this is only a whisper after all—date from that era before the Black death, when sheep farming prospered, & piety throve: but now that the sheep are gone, & Americans live in the Halls of the landowners, how does piety thrive at all? And yet look at the great solid chapels! So thinking, arguing, & expounding we tramped along till we reached a crossroads, where the sign post waved in three different directions. Here was the appropriate place to part; one road led straight to Dalmatia & the wilds of Thessaly; the other back here to this profound seat of solitude, dug, I think, somewhere very near the heart of England. Dont I feel the steady beat of the great Creator as I write; & doesn’t the Church there record its pulse this evening, & for six hundred years of evenings such as these?

The fens almost surround this house. And all the land is very flat, so that the landmarks resolve themselves into churches & windmills. The river, the Little Ouse deserves its diminutive; you may leap it—fall in as I did this afternoon—but all the same it is not a hazardous jump. You are sure of the mud at any rate. And there radiate various minor tributaries, ditches I should call them, did not I know of their relationship with the river, & these are sometimes fenced with barbed wire. Altogether, though a walk in the fen has a singular charm, it is not to be undertaken as a way of getting to places. Windmills have a way of staying absolutely still, or receding, to one who approaches them thus.

However, after leaping & circumnavigating, & brushing through reeds, & scrambling beneath barbed wire, it is pleasant to lie on the turf & try steering by windmills & towers to indicate on the map where you are precisely. Today I found the twin sources of the Waveney & the Little Ouse.

In a very short time unfortunately, it becomes clear how shortsighted was that opinion of mine that Norfolk had no inhabitants. It is not necessary here to go into details, which would be impolite; so I will only make the innocent remark that directly you begin to study the habits of creatures they become astonishingly frequent & well ordered. Here, it seems, one needs only but very little trouble in order to discover a whole net work of society—Squires & Parsons & detached ladies living in cottages, who are all entertaining & paying calls, far more punctually & assiduously than in London.

But it is more to the point to remark that I found the real heath, not a mile from our door. It is a wild place, all sand & bracken, with innumerable rabbits, & great woods running alongside, in to which I plunge; down green drives as shady as any in the New Forest. It is a strange lonely kind of country; a carriage comes bowling over the hill, & you watch it pass & disappear & wonder where it comes from & whither it goes, & who is the lady inside.

Shall I confess, without meaning any kind of confession, that it is possible for one day to be much like another here, & not in the least dull?

I go for my usual walk; which has for me the interest of a discovery, because I go, armed with maps into a strange land. Windmills are my landmarks; & one must not mistake the river for a ditch. The heath attracts me most; because there are no fields. The fen plays you false at every step—I walked through a jungle of reeds & fell up to my nose in mud. And if one foundered here, the weeds would wave & the plover call, & no robin redbreast would bury one!

If this were the time or the place to uphold a paradox, I am half inclined to state that Norfolk is one of the most beautiful of counties. Indeed, let the artifice stand; for so there will be no need to expound it. And truly, it would need a careful & skilful brush to give a picture of this strange, grey green, undulating, dreaming, philosophising & remembering land; where one may walk 10 miles & meet no one; where soft grass paths strike gently over the land; where the roads are many & lonely, & the churches are innumerable, & deserted. There is no use in a closer gaze at present. But it is worth saying that the more you walk here, & become initiated into the domesticities of the place—it is full of them—the more you love it, & know it. And that says as much for a place as for a person. It is so soft, so melancholy, so wild, & yet so willing to be gentle: like some noble untamed woman conscious that she has no beauty to vaunt, that nobody very much wants her. [Page torn out of notebook here.]

It is one of the wilful habits of the brain, let me generalise for the sake of comfort, that it will only work at its own terms.

You bring it directly opposite an object, & bid it discourse; it merely shuts its eye, & turns away. But in one month, or three or seven, suddenly without any bidding, it pours out the whole picture, gratuitously. Some such surprise may be in store for me still; on the heights of the Acropolis the Norfolk fens may swim before me; & I know I shall have to wait many months before I can see Athens. Like the light that reaches you from the stars, it will only shine when some time after it has been shed.

So then, to come to the heart of the discourse, there is no use in presenting here a picture of Norfolk; when the place is directly beneath my eyes. I see at this moment a wall, coloured like an apricot in the sun; with touches of red upon it. The outline & angles of the roof & the tall chimney are completely filled with pure blue sky, as though some gigantic brush had laid a smooth wash of paint across the background. It is the kind of blue for a reason which I can hardly explain, that makes me understand why it should be said to ‘drip’ from the wings of a flying bird.

A certain look of dishevelment in the creepers & shrubs that climb the wall is token that there was a great gale the other morning; which is further borne out by the recumbent posture of an apple tree in the middle of the lawn. It has spilt all its apples in the downfall. And a very keen eye or nose, or both, may detect a look & scent in the trees & the air which, in spite of the sun, hints at September. Without refining & matching words, no one could mistake the day for a summer’s day. Yesterday, I took a bicycle ride to a place called Kenning hall. We will not talk about the bicycle; or there would be no time to deal with the church & the village, & some aesthetic outrage also would be committed upon our senses. Now Kenninghall is famous in the Ordnance map for a Saxon burial ground: & readers of Jefferies will take their chance of a bask upon such smooth turf. But at Kenninghall the Christian church alone was obvious; the curiously moulded tower, with its gilt clock, showed itself most decorously gray against the soft plumage of the trees. Moreover there were gravestones with home made elegies. As for instance the inscription upon Mrs Susan Batt (shall we say) of whom it is written.

She nothing took that plainness could not get

And most abhored [sic] the running into debt

which, I think, has the virtue of drawing a picture of the righteous old lady, albeit the lines are angular. Parenthetically, we may write down another fragment, retrieved from Market Weston:

His superior intellectual attainments

Could only be appreciated by

the Superior Few.

This they did:

But his moral worth

&c &c

This is broken up duly into long lines & short, set with capital letters, & cut deep black into a square sheet of marble. It is an eddy of the eighteenth century formalism; when the superior few were not ashamed to call themselves so.

A very curious & interesting & entertaining article, I observe here (I blush I swear it) might be written upon Epitaphs; because when you have exhausted the surface oddity, there is really a solid lump of truth to be dug out beneath. I mean the attitude is perfectly honest; & so, very characteristic of the age & the people.

However, Mrs Susan Batt was no Saxon; & we must contrast the graves.

So on the authority of the map, we asked a small native for his Saxon burial ground, & were directed by him to the Christian Churchyard; Saxons they may have been to him; &, to the shame of Kenninghall be it spoken, no one there not even the photographer, knew where the Saxons were buried; or indeed had ever heard that there were Saxons. So taking the map’s word for it, we decided to consecrate a mound in some gentleman’s Park; certainly I could see no reason why Saxons should not have been buried there.

But as one had to climb a gate, & walk half a mile, we decided to do our conjectural meditations from a distance; the charm, I own, was not very potent, whether one must blame the distance or the doubt.

The advantages of a bicycle, almost I would say the advantage, is that it gets you to places. Our grandparents never saw Thetford or Diss, unless it was upon the wedding tour, in a high gig; or upon the Christening of the first born, or some other solemn feast, demanding the sanction of the market town.

But I can ride there in an afternoon; to buy postcards or grapes, or merely to look at certain curious old houses.

A very hot August day, a bare road across a moor, fields of corn & stubble—a haze as of wood fire smoke—innumerable pheasants & partridges—white stones—thatched cottages—sign posts—tiny villages—great waggons heaped with corn—sagacious dogs, farmers carts. Compose these all somehow into a picture; I am too lazy to do it.

At any rate after an hour’s riding I dropped down into Thetford, which seemed to me with its girdle of wall & river, & the smooth turf slope outside something like an Italian town. Perhaps the knowledge extracted from the guide book that there was a nunnery here in the Middle Ages helped my imagination. Certainly I saw with my own eyes a Roman Catholic Padre step out of his monastery door, with a biretta on his head, & examine with long ecclesiastical nose the Dahlias in his neighbours garden. The rivers Thet & Ouse (I think) circle Thetford; & which ever way I went, seemed to take me across low stone bridges where anglers lounged, with their rods across the broad stream. Nursemaids were sitting on the rivers banks, leaning on the elbow over a paper novel, while their charges dabbled in the water. No one was ever able to say exactly what does go on in these medieval towns set in the heart of England at about this hour on a Summers afternoon. It is all so picturesque & accidental that to the traveller it seems a pleasant show got up for some benevolent purpose. For when you come upon stalwart men leaning their elbows on a parapet & dreaming of the stream beneath, while the sun is still high in the air, you reconsider what you mean by life. Often in London shall I think of Thetford, & wonder if it is still alive; or whether it has really ceased, peaceably, to exist any longer. No one would notice if the whole town forgot to wake up one morning.

But coming home in the evening through great open spaces of field it was born [sic] in upon the mind that something was alive enough. Call it what you will. For the whole air was rich with energy, & brilliant with colour.

[]

Greece 1906

[The autograph calendar and timetable below head the volume.]

Olympia. September 14th!

It is not worth while wasting ink here upon the journey through Italy. It was hot, it was cold—we missed trains—found Hotels—& passed meanwhile from one end of Italy to the other. The central heat was lodged in Greece; as we drew near, the whole of this little bridge from country to country crumpled up & disappeared. I write bad English I know; but I must state merely that we reached Patras at 6.30 on Thursday morning, & some day I will find the dates. You get a little blasé with much travelling; & after a day spent in looking at soaring hills & remote valleys from the steamer the mind will throb but little faster for the name of Greece. That indeed must sink in legitimately, as it surely does by its own authentic fire.

Patras like most sea ports is cosmopolitan, & very garrulous. We saw men in skirts & gaiters however. Turks, Albanians & Montenegrins scattered about among a humdrum crowd. But in the evening, having heard meanwhile a plaintive Greek song we interpreted the words generously—We left for Olympia in a great first class carriage which we had naturally to ourselves. Now it was evening, & the bloom on the hills shone purple, & the sea turned its innermost heart to the light; it was a heart of the deepest blue. On the other side of us was a screen of hills, sudden & steep & incessant, as though the earth had nothing better to do than throw up impatient little mounds. The look of the place thus is fiery & somewhat fragile, for the lines are all very spare & emphatic. No fat pastures & woods cushion the surface: but on the plain the earth was thick with dwarf vines, stooping with pyramids of fruit. You saw baskets heaped with grapes at the stations: Stafeelé stafeelé—I cried—& brought great bunches to the door.

The stations were many; we stopped that is at sheds where, by the light of a lantern, men were drinking wine, with their horses tied to a stake; as the railway curved the whistle shrieked a continual warning, for the line is like a modest little road, & in truth the train would do no great damage to a flock of goats.

Olympia

So then, at 9 o’clock we jumped out at Olympia, found Thoby & Adrian, heard our own tongue once more, & drove up to the Hotel.

But of Olympia it is difficult to write.

Baedecker [sic] will count the statues; a dozen archaeologists will arrange them in a dozen different ways; but the final work must be done by each fresh mind that sees them. The pediments of the temple line the two sides of the museum; [ ] but we wont write guide book—There is the Apollo. He looks over his shoulder—seems to look across & above the centuries. He is straight & serene but there he has a human mouth & chin, ready to quiver or to smile. So might a Greek boy have looked, stripped, in the sun. And there are other noble fragments, somewhat broadly chiselled, because they stood on a height; the hair is a smooth band of stone; the drapery graved in rigid lines. Ah but the beauty!

Then you come to the separate temple, where the Hermes stands still, so lightly & with such a spring in his step that you expect him to turn & go. There, I think, you have the God; for he looks out & away, as though some serene vistas in the far Heaven drew his gaze.[ ]

So we pile words; but it is a pretence. You must see him, & let the eye spring like a creature set free along those curves & hollows; for it has secretly craved such beauty! You dont know, till you satisfy it, how much it has craved. And the stone—if you call it stone—seems also acquiescent to the sculptors hand: it is almost liquid, of the colour of alabaster, & of the solidity of marble. There is a beautiful polished foot which you may stroke with your own soft flesh. The Germans have supplied plaster legs. Let us note it. If only it had been possible to stand the statue in the air! Cold stone needs that background. The theatre is—once more we might quote the Guidebook: for our purposes it is simply a flat circle of grass, scattered with innumerable fragments of stone. There are broken pillars of all sizes, & tiles, stones, lion heads, inscriptions; it is like, perhaps, a very disorderly pagan graveyard. But you may trace certain temples, & the course of the race ground. Still this is not what the vagrant mind dwells on most; there was thyme growing by the pillars, & fine grass. And there were little hills tufted with delicate green trees all round; & the Alpheus [river] passing on one side.

Olympia and Corinth—

But it was all very clear & orderly & Greek; you trace a certain austerity in the landscape, for all its grace. I cannot lay my hands on any words but those that come uppermost to night, & it is peculiarly purposeless to belabour such a perfect image with ill fitting adjectives. This, I may say, is written at Corinth, & a band of wailing women are singing beneath my window. Do they lament the nations fall, or some private woe, or are they merely celebrating the new restaurant which was opened with fireworks this evening?

Such was the prelude to a night spent in no kind of philosophic or aesthetic meditation. When you rise at 1 at 2 at 3 & at 4 to investigate your bed & find certain round black bodies traversing the sheet, & squash them, & shudder & tie yourself in a silk bag & swathe your head in a net; when you repeat this, I say, hourly till the morning breaks, Whitechapel is the image impressed upon your mind; dirtiness is the only quality the Greeks possess. The Greek world is limited to your bed stead. So I spent the early morning sitting in the drawing room, reading the Christian Herald.

However, in a short time I was ascending the Acro Corinth on a grey pony; you climb a precipice, & bask on the top beneath a Turkish fortification. You see Salamis & some of the most famous lands of the world beneath you. The colour of the country seen thus in great spaces from a height is that of tawny sand; it might be a desert, save for some squares of thin green. And you see Corinth lying by the edge of the gulf. But it was not a day for seeing far, & it was very hot, & I had spent the night in pursuits of another kind. So we drove back again, & I confess that the pleasantest part of the expedition was due to the fact that our coachman was also a vine owner; & as we drove through his land, hospitality & a desire to see how his crop was doing, made him beg us to dismount & taste his produce. And so we had the experience for the first time of sitting on the ground & eating grapes from the tree in the open air. The skins were warmed through, & that made the globe of juice within all the sweeter & more cool. Grapes for nothing! ponderous bunches of blue & white & purple grapes, hanging so close that you must hesitate, like the donkey, before you chose which to eat. Here you realise that nature can be benevolent; & so man becomes generous too.

Athens

There is so much to grasp in Athens that there is no need to attempt any single description. By proceeding quietly looking here & there at leisure, a solid picture slowly composes itself. I will not try to reproduce here the whole of it; but like a free English woman I will deal deliberately with the days adventures, whether they are significant or irrelevant. And after all, every step is on sacred ground.

You come to Athens along the brink of the sea, so that from the train window you look down into little bays where clear waves are breaking; & this peaceful curve of the sea is Salamis, & there, on that height of cliff opposite, Xerxes sat (so we say) two thousand years ago, on a September afternoon like this. It might have been a stretch of the Cornish coast: for the water was as lucid & brilliant as the Atlantic at midsummer; but the hills were mountains, & the whole place seemed chiselled like a statue.

It was too dark when we came to see anything not directly illuminated by electric light; but it was just possible to distinguish a dark ridge above the lamps.

Acropolis

When day broke we all went to our separate windows, & saw that a great crag of rock surged out of the darkness, tawny & cleft with shadows, upon which two groups of columns, one tawny as the rock itself, the other white & fragile, were established. Indeed on the edge of the rock there were more columns, but the dark columns we knew were the Crown & Queen of the place, the Parthenon herself.

When you are close up to them, you see that the Parthenon is far the largest of the temples; & you see also how the surface of the pillars is chipped & scarred. The ravages are terrible, but in spite of them, the Parthenon is still radiant & young. Its columns spring up like fair round limbs, flushed with health. When we saw it first however the light was so fierce that we could hardly raise our eyes to the frieze: & for all the marble scattered at ones feet—slabs of marble, drums of marble, splinters of marble seemed to flash light at us from beneath. So with a numb feeling as though our minds had been struck inarticulate by something too great for them to grasp we cooled ourselves in the museum which lies at the base of the hill. Here there is perhaps the most beautiful thing we have yet seen. The head of the boy, with braided hair which guide books call slightly archaic. But the mouth seemed freshly carved in its soft & sensitive lines only that morning. Stay though: for the stone was also immortal.

Beautiful statues have a look not seen on living faces, or but rarely, as of serene immutability, here is a type that is enduring as the earth, nay will outlast all tangible things, for such beauty is of an essence that is immortal. And this expression on a face that is otherwise young & supple makes you breathe a higher air. It is like the kiss of dawn.

Street of Tombs

In the evening, as the sun was going down & painting all the air in ruddy colour, we drove to the Street of Tombs. It is an untidy little plot of ground, separated from the road by high railings, & the grass grows high, & at every step you stumble on some fragment of pottery or marble. There are not many tombs here, & those that there are have been rudely enclosed in wire cages. There is a child parting from her parents, while her pet dog leaps on its hind legs; there is a woman handling her jewels before she leaves them. These were the tombs that were cut, probably by humble masons, in scores, for all Athenians who could afford them. The richness of Greek earth was shown us here, visibly. The ground was rough & unkempt, as I have said; suddenly we realised that we were stepping on the top of drifts of dust, & that beneath, if you dig, the earth was packed with treasures. Three workmen were hacking at the ground at the far end of the enclosure—& had already laid bare a foundation of stone, the plan of house or street perhaps; an archaeologist was measuring with his rule, & entering statements in a note book. Since that, you feel that all lumps in the earth are but so much ugly dust heaped negligently over some well ordered temple or statue beneath.

Acropolis

We also visited the Acropolis at sunset. And when you speak of ‘the colour’ of the Parthenon you are simply conforming to the exigencies of language; a painter using his craft to speak by, confesses the same limitations. The Temple glows red; the whole west pediment seems kindled, as if for the first time, in the sunset opposite: it rays light & heat, while the other temples burn with a white radiance. No place seems more lusty & alive than this platform of ancient dead stone. The fat Maidens who bear the weight of the Erechtheum on their heads, stand smiling tranquil ease, for their burden is just meet for their strength. They glory in it; one foot just advanced, their hands, one conceives, loosely curled at their sides. And the warm blue sky flows into all the crevices of the marble; yet they detach themselves, & spring in to the air, with crisp edges, unblunted, & still virile & young.

But it is the Parthenon that over comes you; it is so large, & so strong, & so triumphant. You feel warmed through & through, as though you walked by some genial hearth. But perhaps the most lovely picture in it—at least it is the most detachable—is that which you receive when you stand where the great Statue used to stand. She looked straight through the long doorway, made by the curved lines of the columns, & saw a long slice of Attic mountain & sky & plain, & a shining strip of the sea. It is like a panel, let in to the Parthenon to complete its beauty. It is soft, & soon grows dark, though the water still gleams; then you see that the white columns are ashy pale, & the warmth of the parthenon ebbs from her.

A bell rings down below, & once more the Acropolis is left quite alone. We walked home through the clamorous streets.

Eleusis

We drove fourteen miles to Eleusis, following it may be supposed the sacred way. On such days, we know, the people of Athens formed together, garlanded in fine draperies, & marched in procession to their mystic rites which none might know.

Once again, the Ancient Greek had the best of it: we were very belated wayfarers: the shrines are fallen, & the oracles are dumb. You have the feeling very often in Greece—that the pageant has passed long ago, & you are come too late, & it matters very little what you think or feel. The modern Greece is so flimsy & fragile, that it goes to pieces entirely when it is confronted with the roughest fragment of the old. But then there is very little of it; & if you choose you may see exactly what the Greeks of the 5th Century saw. Here are the olive groves, the hills spotted with green on the gray, the white road, the sweep of the Bay, looking to Salamis, the ancient fishponds where the priests caught trout. And at last, after a very hot drive in the trail of that decorous procession—they chanted, & one danced—& before them a stone image was born—at last, I say, we reached Eleusis—some two thousand years after our time.

There is a great deal to tantalise you in these Greek ruins; innumerable fragments & scarcely one whole piece anywhere. The museum, if one may so abuse the clean & simple shed where the more delicate fragments are placed, holds some exquisite things. There is for example a noble victory, headless, wingless & armless: still her draperies & her fair body are enough to stamp once more that supreme Greek image on ones mind. And you find hints & reflections of this in a dozen smaller pieces. Indeed you can never collect a roomful of splinters without including some that are priceless—a fold of drapery, or a foot, or a hand. It sounds, like a true note struck high above the tumult.

Germans and modern Athens

A horde of Teutons invaded us, needless to say; & had the audacity to pose themselves in the midst of the Temple of Pluto; it was a photographers shop to them. Now near by, watching with quick & merry eyes, stood a group of small children, barefoot, carrying babes in their arms. They had asked for pence & had received none, but a gruff refusal; nevertheless they attached themselves to the party & attended the sitting not without a spice of malice, I conceive, in their interest. You can imagine the spurious motives, of sentiment & a kind of jocose arrogance which drove the Germans to this disposition of themselves: “The Past and the Future”—they will call it: it is a joke in thoroughly bad taste. The little Greeks, slender & vivacious who watched the performance, might be read as comment. Indeed it is curious to trace nationality in this cosmopolitan crowd, & one is never, or seldom, out in ones guesses. And you see in the German type but a lump of crude earth, as yet unchiselled by the finger of time. We English come out of the trial tolerably well; the Greeks are spent & attenuated; but the fire when there is any, burns pure.

The modern town of Athens is like most foreign towns, so a British traveller may summarily conclude, for the roofs are of fluted brown tiles, the walls are white, & there are shutters to the windows. And so it follows that the modern town is rather fragile & gimcracky, built to flash in the sun, to bask & to bake. Then there are certain great squares where the people crowd; there are trams & there are official buildings. People chatter & shout a great deal, & jostle each other on the pavement. At noon there is a lull; everybody snores; at 4 we wake again, & begin to chatter. The liveliest scene perhaps is that of the streets at evening, when the sun has just sunk & the boats in the Piraeus have fired their guns.

Acropolis

To say that the scene from the Acropolis is beautiful is an easy way out of the difficulty; all the land is bloomy as a peach, with feathery purple shadows; far off the sea gleams like dull silver; up, in the sky the clouds are trembling across the dome in crimson & gold. Meanwhile the moon is just sharp enough to cleave the blue with its thin silver edge; & one star, hangs near it. The pillars on the height are rosy as dawn; then they turn creamy white & then fade altogether. In the narrow streets which climb almost to the top the lights are flaring, & you walk in a curious soft air, blue with daylight still, though the lamps are pouring yellow into it. It is still quite warm, & the atmosphere has a curiously tangible quality to it; the streets are crowded & people come swarming down them, happy & garrulous, in crowds.

Pentelicus

Athens, as every schoolboy knows, lies in a plain; & the famous mountains stand round her—Hymettus, Lycabettus, Pentelicus—& others I daresay, whose names I have forgotten. They are grey green for the most part; but Pentelicus wears a white scar on her side, where the Greeks used to quarry marble. We started early to climb the height, for although the ascent was to be made by carriage & mule, Pentelicus is after all higher than any English mountain, & thus claimed our respect. An Athenian carriage is a most respectable vehicle, savouring somehow of the undertaker, & not at all of Greece; it is black & shabby, & is drawn by two thin horses. It looks most incongruous upon a country road stuffed with picturesque peasants, & their bags & boxes, & turkeys & goats. Yet you meet it often in this guise “moving house” for some rustic family. It travels slowly, & it was midday when we had bargained for our horses—who were transformed to donkeys—& had dismounted at the monastery, of—I dont know what—at the foot of Pentelicus. The country is for the most part so bare & dry that these little spots, where the firs grow, & great planes, & water gushes, are exquisite—as an idyll by Theocritus. We eat our lunch in the shade of a great tree, while our donkeys grazed, & our guides lay on their elbows watching us. An aged monk came down from the hill side burdened with brushwood; another, tall & melancholy, stood at the monastery door. Then the ascent began, four of us perched on high wooden saddles, in single file, each attended by a boy or man to guide & belabour. We climbed what Murray calls a chimney (I think): that is a little hill in the mountain, which was paved with loose blocks of marble. Soon we had to dismount; the agony of our guides—they curst like lost souls—failed to move our steeds. It was hot & steep, & one had to leap from stone to stone, without the agility of a goat. Then we found that we were directed to a great cave, which was cool as a temple, & had some claim to fame. I forget what. And then it appeared that the guides wished to descend; pretended that they had done their duty—swore they could go no further without food, & turned our donkeys downward. This could be conveyed sufficiently by signs; our expostulations though couched in pure English—cut the air. They answered with a gabble of Greek: so it was not the least of their sins that they would talk Greek.

So English oath and Greek oath beat the air fruitlessly; for the Greek could not understand the Epithet “squint eyed monkey” nor could we interpret the vigour of his language; Greek we reflected is devoid of meaning. Action won the day: we turned our donkeys up the hill, & the Greeks gave in with more of laughter than anger. The Greek boys, in spite of the heat, ran & rolled, & chanted the odd wavering songs of the nation. Meanwhile we climbed, & touched the hill top after 5 hours or so. The view was worth much: directly beneath was Marathon, & Euboea; we could see Salamis, & the outlines of many promontories. The sea flowed everywhere. It was too late to stay, so we stumbled down again, by a path this time, leading through a valley sprinkled with black goats. The goatherd sat in his cloak by the wayside—demanded matches. The valley was sweet with thyme.

Marathon is as flat as a table, brown, with a perfect curve cut out of it by the bay. Small islands white as sand floated in the sea. Euboea is long & prominent, with bays scooped in the side. But there was little space for reflection!

Acropolis

Almost every evening we climb the Acropolis & come in this desultory way, to know its corners sufficiently well. As I foretold, in thought & speech, it is a place that overpowers you like a wave; in time you can ‘take it in’, or rather be borne consciously to its heights, where you breathe & expand. White & blue & tawny red; it is such a picture as you cannot love sufficiently. It is a matter of proportion, we tell each other; at any rate, when you have gazed at the patterned colours of the Parthenon an image of such life is left there that all other buildings seem mean & frigid as tho’ cut out by brainless machines ‘in comparison’. It was worth while glancing down into the streets, at the Palace or the Exhibition just to have that sight instantly corrected—or rather erased altogether—by one look at the Temple. And this medicine will never be at hand again. But the amusement did seem significant because it was so spontaneous; the eye was acted upon unconsciously, as though it had to choose between red & green. This is beauty—that nothing at all. It is the same with the statues.

Modern Greeks

The poorer people of Athens—& all the people seem poor—have a pleasant habit of lounging up here in the evening, when their work is done; just as we stroll in our parks. They sit about on classic marble, chatting & knitting; but they do not vulgarise the place as we Tourists must do; but rather make it human & familiar.

The people of Athens are, of course, no more Athenians than I am. They do not understand Greek of the age of Pericles—when I speak it. Nor are their features more classic than their speech: the Turk & the Albanian & the French—it seems—have produced a common type enough. It is dark & dusky, small of stature, & not well grown. It is true that the streets are dignified by the presence of many rustics, in their Albanian dress; the men wear thick white coats, kilts, much pleated, & long gaiters. But this you may see written in a dozen guide books. I have seen no native women who could be distinguished from an Italian woman; & indeed, you see very few women. The streets are crowded with men drinking & smoking in the open air, even, in the country, sleeping beneath the wall; but the women keep within. You generally see them leading children, or looking from an upper window, where, presumably, they work. But the mind has no difficulty in making brigands.

Nauplia

We travelled down to Nauplia by steamer. And if this steamer had not smelt, & if it had not had the cruel consequences of smelling ships, no voyage could have been more pleasant. The sea was only broken by the leap of the Dolphins; we passed so near the shore that we could see the little villages folded among the hills; now & then we stopped in the harbour of some more important place. The towns built pyramids up the hills; & altogether you had as fair & various a view of the Greek coast as you could wish. There are not many towns, & the land is very bleak & stony. You could not imagine a walk in such country; nor, with the level sun upon it, was it really a beautiful land. It was too fierce, too precipitous; &, in that light, too much of the colour of bare bone. We had a small company on deck who, like most of the poor people who are not inn keepers, seemed courteous & cheerful. There was a small boy for instance who gave us a lemon in return for our egg, & kissed our hands when we left. It was a long journey, for we crossed the gulf, & the dents on the map became deep bays, & we slackened steam, & went slowly on our way till 9.30 when we anchored

Nauplia Tiryns

[in Nauplia. It was dark, & lanterns swung on shore; it was clear from the lights round us that we were lying in the curve of a bay; twisted poles of light lay upon the water. Next morning indeed we found ourselves looking across a smooth bay to a circle of hills; & there were hills behind us, & on every side save one. The water lapped in front of the door, & there were many fishing boats at anchor. Tiryns is the first sight to be done, for it lies only a mile or so along the road. It is simply a pile of old stones, till you come to look closely. But then it has meaning & even beauty. The Greeks chose their sites well; here the palace was built on a flat table land, gazing up into the hills.

With a plan in your hand you can enter by the main gate, trace the servants quarters, & the Lords Castle above; & you can even assert that this was the mens hall, & this the bathroom; here, among the columns, still stands the domestic altar. I looked for an alabaster lining in vain. But there was an arch of huge stones where treasure was stored, & there was hoarded shadow for us still. The Homeric palace hummed with heat. It was enough to impress one more than all guide books; but a foundation, solid, like an English Castle, only ‘pre-historic’]

Epidauros

We are now in the land of ruins & prehistoric remains; there are no statues, & no temples so that a different kind of interest is required. We drove for 20 miles today for instance (& I write, stupidly, with a street in its evening clamour beneath me) to Epidauros. The country when you penetrate within the bare line of the coast, is strange & beautiful. There are long red roads, that pass through red fields rough with stones, & planted with twisted olive trees, or with dwarf vines; there are incessant hills, but inland they are covered with little green bushes, & the high folds among which we drove today reminded us again of Cornwall. Oddly enough the narrow streets of Athens reminded us of St Ives. Three sad jades drew our carriage the 20 miles; We passed many flocks of goats, many sumpter mules, many carts laden with wine skins. But there were only two small villages, & there was no sign of our snug English civilisation. [Epidauros, or rather the Haeron lies again, on flat land beneath a circle of hills.

There is the great theatre, so perfect that we could sit in its upper seats & look down upon the stage & hear the voice of one speaking there as in the best of halls. And the grey seats scooped out of the hillside, with wide air & country all round are as noble a theatre as could be had. Ruins of Roman Houses, Temples of Asclepios—Tholos—are scattered innumerable. It needs learning to see anything but chips of stone. And in the museum chaos is still more chaotic: they are fitting temples together, hammering the old stone into the right shape.

The place is very lovely; although you must leave the ruins for bed. It is so wide & harmonious, & the country is all grouped round decorously.

And there was the drive home—but to write is impossible. This is the worst inn we have struck hitherto; & sleep—if possible—is the best way of cutting it short.]

Mycenae

Such words as I have hastily & barbarously applied to Epidauros are singularly inadequate; & when I consider Mycenae, my next attempt, I might well leave a blank page. Where does the place begin—where stop—what does it not gather on its way? There never was a sight, I think less manageable; it travels through all the chambers of the brain, wakes odd memories & imaginations; forecasts a remote future; retells a remote past. And all the while it is—let me write it down—but a great congeries of ruined houses, on a hill side. So you may see the outline of a wall in an English farmyard, tenanted 60 years ago by a serf; these were built let us say one thousand years before Christ; they have certainly lain in ruins since the year—was it four hundred & sixty? But among these houses, you come across something far more definite; an agora, a tomb, a palace with a flight of steps. The whole hill top is crowded with dead stones; & yet they are not dead. The tracery is too emphatic: the mark is too deeply scored.

The imagination does assert again & again, as you walk, that the place is crowded & compact; it is true there is little to see & nothing to hear. But the tremendous stones are not to be ignored, & the two lions, which guard the gate, do still consciously admit you to something august which is beyond. I tremble to write of the classics, because that might savour of the perfunctory impulse of the guide book; but the taste of Homer was in my mouth. Indeed, this is the pearl of seeing things here; the words of the poets begin to sing & embody themselves. This is no pretence, moreover, as it may so easily be at home, in a London room; it needs no effort; but if statues & marble are solid to the touch, so, simply, are words resonant to the ear.

As far as I could tell—Baedecker [sic] makes short work of archaeology—there was a place of assembly, ringed with upright slabs of stone, in double rows, so as to make a passage, when properly roofed. Then there was a tomb, which they call the tomb of Agamemnon. & here, when the earth was first disturbed, gold gleamed, & amethysts, & beautiful ornaments, which still held the light. Higher, but at a very small distance, was the King’s palace; with his rooms, properly distinguished doubtless, by their separate uses. Then there were more graves on the side; & terraces circled the whole summit, leading to Gates, which presumably admitted & rejected the outer world. As I stumbled I picked up an earthenware handle with its little pattern still brightly stamped on it; & once more it was easy to believe that the whole crest was packed with unbroken litter, of the prehistoric city. The circumference of the town is not large; but then every foots pace of it is set with stone, & it must have been a populous town; so closely occupied because the outer world was vast and lonely. How far history, or mythology, warrants me, I do not know; but I conceived that here was a single spot of intense, & brilliantly painted life, girt in by great wastes of desert land. The people had not come yet. And I conceived that the Kings & people of Mycenae lived a decorous life, strictly ordered, as the town itself is graven in distinct divisions. They were simple & austere, as tho’ conscious that they lived with a great eye upon them, an isolated people, adventuring alone; but in the limits of their town they lived with much ornament & decoration: the king wore purple robes, & his limbs shone with beaten gold. They had many festivals, & when it was summer they marched down the hill side in ceremonial procession, glittering in dyed clothing & ornament & gold, with offerings outstretched in their hands. The valley was kindled by the sun, & they threaded it like bright summer flies. And the thyme smelt sweet as ambrosia. And in the evening they were all gathered in order in their courts, & perhaps a great beacon burnt; in case man or God beheld it.

And yet after all, they may have thought many of our thoughts, & felt many of our passions. Certainly they beheld the same hillside, grey with rock; ominous & melancholy I thought it, in the September light. There is no Spring any more was what I read in it, overlooking Greece, & thinking of her people. Or did I think of the whole world?—but that, really, is a doubtful argument. These lines hint, at least, that Mycenae leaves a great body of confused meaning in the mind; nor will it be possible to spin a coherent tale till I have made sure of the earth & the sky. And then guide books will do the rest. These things were dug up in the year 1885? by Dr Schliemann; that statement will content a mind safely housed in London; with compasses & maps hung upon the walls. We dont realise these things except just for seconds, on the spot; & then it is hopeless to say what you see. There is a force of gravity in the mind which keeps it always safely tied to the earth; or, with Mycenae to waft it, it might circle in vague air for ever.

But I did see, for a second, as through a chink, down, down, for miles beneath my feet. [ ]

When you remember the English countryside there is much to surprise you in the Greek. We should call the hills here ‘sights’ & travel miles to view the picturesque; for while we have our beauties we also have our long level lapses. Now Greece is always in a state of ferment & effervescence; every journey you take seems to lead through beautiful, or majestic or romantic country places. There is no rest; but a perpetual curve & flow, as if the land ran fluid & exuberant as the sea. Take, for instance, the little journey from Corinth to Athens; I say ‘take’ & then stop. For there never was a scene less easy to fit with words, though it is also true that, like all Greek things—poems & temples & statues—there is a certain form & finish even in the landscape that makes separate views of it detach themselves like pictures. I think particularly of the bay of Salamis as we saw it this evening from the train windows. Now the line runs on a ledge along the cliff, so that you look down upon a road which skirts the bay, & so directly in to the water. And this evening the moon was rising before the sun had set; so you had a curious marriage of two lights; the soft silver of the moon, & the ruddiness of the sun; & while the moon lay softly white across the sea, those waters did actually sparkle, blue, pure & tender, & alive beneath it. So that the whole bay was luminous, & warm;[ ] as though filled to the brim with some live fluid at the same time that it became a phantom.

And there were dusky green olive trees standing against the water; & blue islands rising like icebergs on the horizon.

But perhaps the most exquisite thing was the white road “pearl white”, someone would have said, which went so abruptly along the cliff that it needed a parapet by the edge. Here you saw small figures walking, & carts driving: nor could you help believing that they were on their way from Athens & that the road, in spite of the railway, was still the great thoroughfare. It had the look—which is very rare—of a real road; & that will outlast all railways, so long as man has two legs. So the hills grew black & sharp of outline, & the water became paler and paler, till the transition was complete. But there was a wonderful pause.

Certain accidents which are to be attributed—certainly not to us—to clocks to hotel keepers—to streets—in fact to the whole Greek nation—certain accidents, at any rate made us miss our train to Calchis; we had to spend the morning in Athens. Now Athens can be seen the wrong side out; you can walk round & round her without catching sight of the Parthenon, & you may then fairly call her a flashy modern town, deserving of abuse.

At five this morning we stood before the Inn at Calchis waiting for our carriage, while the rain poured. Even so we could see the boats, drifting down the current, & the great steamers gliding among them. In the sun it would have been beautiful; in the mud it was vague & comfortless as a dream. At last our horses came, & we mounted to drive 32 miles to Achmetaga. Now you have to travel along a plain, & to climb a mountain, & to curl like a langorous serpent round the front of the precipice; & then you must descend, as tortuously into the valley, & drive among steep hill sides covered with trees, & the trees cluster thick in the valley, over the dry bed of the stream. We proposed last night to go straight on, driving all night, to reach Achmetaga this morning, but the driver said no: it was dangerous. So we amused ourselves by counting the number of times we should have fallen over the broken parapet, or stepped right in to the great hole in the road, or fallen headlong down the precipice; for surely as we narrowly escaped these dangers by day, we should have been snared for a certainty by night. A Scotch mist was quite dark enough. We baited our horses at an inn on the way, which we might then examine curiously. It was a barn, with a wall separating it into two rooms. One was stable, the other bedroom dining room living room &c. for husband & wife & children. We looked in through the iron grating, & saw the woman in a corner, working her distaff; she sat on a mat. The children played round her; there was a hole in the chimney, & a heap of ashes on the floor, & bread & onions stood on planks. Here was England in the 14th Century; it was dark & probably smelly: tins & plates gleamed in corners. A man like a serf brought us bread & water.

But we pressed on, & at 2 o’clock found ourselves entering a village—almost the first we had passed. There were hovels heaped up in a valley, & a square white house raised among them. Shutters & terraces showed that we had come to our goal; & so we dismounted & found ourselves in an English drawing room. English drawing rooms it is true are generally more richly furnished; There are carpets on the floors, & many chairs. This room suggested that its windows were perpetually open, & as its owners lived out of doors there was not much need for any decoration but what was cool & simple. Still, however open & ricketty, the place had the effect of making you feel that you had come to the genuine living place at last, after skimming a factitious exterior for a long time. Here people lived, not merely stayed. And this impression remains; indeed for the first time Greece becomes an articulate human place, homely & familiar, instead of a splendid surface. We walked out down a lane that might have been in England—for it had a hedge, & was muddy, to see an encampment of Wallachian shepherds. Murray has his paragraph; they are a nomad people, tending sheep, who roam in the mountains all the summer, & pitch their tents, or rather their huts, in the winter. These had just come down; & we were asked—& how good it was to ask & answer easily as in English!—to go inside their huts. They are made of boughs, & the dead leaves serve for lining to the roof. A family of twelve children lived here; brown & sallow, gentle & communicative. They shook hands—the women were weaving cloth, in an outer court; & inside was the sleeping place of the family. They live, presumably, in the open air; we peered round, & tried, not very successfully, to imagine the whole life, built on such a foundation. But this needs more imagination than any other feat of archaeology; for mud huts belong to the dark ages. The people did not look robust or fierce; one or two women had notably fine faces, aquiline & expressive. Then we tramped some way over the estate; & this would be a dull record, [ ] but all the time, somehow—I can’t define it—you felt the place arrange itself in its natural order, & this was something beautiful. Here were the olive groves—here they dug a trench—here come all the village people, trooping home from work with their salutations, prompt & respectful. Miss Noel knew each by name; each spoke to her. Now this seemed to give what was wanting to Greece before; & it is a very essential part of it. The people use the same plough that they did in the days of Homer, says Mrs Noel, & though the races have changed, their lives cannot be much different; the earth changes but little.

Achmetaga stands on a flight of steps, with its garden in terraces; & a view far & wide to distant mountains, framed by tall trees. The garden like the house, is somehow rather ramshackle & bare; a group of women sat this morning picking walnuts from their shells on the lawn. Meanwhile all the government of the village it seemed was transacted in the house. The nurse came for her medicines, the servants for their orders, strange figures kept walking in at the door to ask for treatment or advice. No one seemed to have any precise calling, & yet everyone seemed able & willing to do something. The groom wanted to know what soup we would have for dinner; & also he would lend a hand in the farm. Or that was my impression; the place was full of simple garrulous creatures, eager as children to be directed to their tasks, eager as children to stay & chatter with their mistress.

In the afternoon we set off to dig on a hill which had already yielded an arm or a leg or a pillar of hewn marble. Indeed it did not need an archaeological eye to see that the hill boded something; for it was shaped & buttressed, & might be divided into halls & palaces by an eye that remembered Mycenae. So after a little debate, a trench was cut across the summit; till the pick axes grated on the rock. Many fragments of Greek pottery were thrown up—indeed they lay thick on the surface, but neither statue nor temple. We laid bare the foundation of a wall, further on, also; (I did strike three blows for the glory of Greece) but our excavations were ended by the sunset: soft earth still lay packed above the rock & its treasures.

That there are treasures no one who has seen the place can possibly deny; but the native Greek who wielded a spade, professed a very cynical interest in our activities. Why, he mused, dig up stones when you might be digging up potatoes? & as most landowners agree with him, the chances are that the Temple & town of [blank space] will lie beneath the earth [ ] forever. And it does seem a curious mania, when you are in the heart of the same country & its life to start disturbing all that it keeps buried. This is the healthy influence of real country life for such are not the opinions of a tourist.

When we came down to breakfast this morning we were told that a man had been murdered in the fields near by. That was the first time I ever heard the word used, gravely. We eat our breakfast in melancholy; but if it was sad it was still more strange. He had been at work in his field, when a man came up to him; he was an old enemy, for they had quarrelled last year over a bean field, & there had been threats. “If you move I shoot you,” he cried; the other swung round, & was shot twice in the body. And then the murderer ran, & the peasants working in the field pretended that it was a hare only that had been shot, for they were of the family of the criminal. Then an old woman came by—saw the man groaning, & had him carried up to the village here. Mrs. Noel went for a doctor, but it was some hours before he came, & then he was little better than a peasant, put into coat & trousers. At lunch they said that the man had to die; & as we sat in the wood beyond the village one man after another came past us, striding down from the mountain to see their kinsman before he died. All the peasants are related. Meanwhile telegrams were sent to the ports to stop the runaway; & the gendarmes arrived, a small body of lazy looking little soldiers—‘who come to eat only’ says Mrs. Noel. The murderer has become a fugitive; he will hide in the mountains all day, & come down at night to see his relations who will give him food. Or perhaps he will try to leave the country.

We left all this—but I am wrong if I suggest excitement or tumult—no one seemed much surprised or horrified; & drove to the coast, some five miles distance. The peasants were peacefully working in the fields, & bade us good day as we passed.

The coast is very steep, & gray; like Cornish cliffs; gray rocks stained with yellow lichen stand out in perfectly clear water. And on the horizon there are the delicate outlines of islands. The top of the cliff, was scattered with gray stones; & we did once more & still more undoubtedly, construct a whole village here; courts & doorways, even an altar. No one has ever dug here, nor is there any rumour of a town. That is the charm of this place; the life has gone on naturally for hundreds of years; covering what it chose to cover; & the most enthusiastic must acquiesce. Still, if I had a spade I should like to try my hand up here, for here was the hill top, & the wide sea. And it was all the more beautiful because it was so unknown; such temples there must have been all over Greece; the spirit was not a thing of the surface or as beautiful as those of Athens & Olympia. Here flourished the unknown artists of the soil, working for the delight of their own peasants.

Then the sea shone with that strange luminous glow as though the water were lit from within—& the sun sank & we drove home. It was quite dark by the time we reached the house, & Omar rose & fell with the horses hoofs. There we heard that the wounded man had died, not an hour after we had left, in the middle of the afternoon.

Whether it was arranged by providence or, as seems more likely, by another power, it is certain that we have been seeing a new side of Greek life. And is it not to study sides of all things that we travel? & shall we forfeit our claim to the honourable title of tourist?

Not while there is a pen—a very old one, & a drop of ink—a very dry one. For these as we will explain one day are the philosophers stone. You make a pass in the air with a dirty stump of goose flesh, having first spread a white sheet on your knee. Soon a procession begins to cross it; there is no doubt whatever; here are the bores & the dullards, the cheats & the liars, but their only purpose now is to amuse a leisure hour. So I thank the Lady who has just finished stamping a walz [sic] on the piano, & I forgive the bundle of flesh who takes her nourishment at regular hours next my table. After all they let me draw the following reflections upon Greek domestic life—& that is very valuable.

For this hotel is patronised solely by natives, although I cannot diagnose them further. I conceive that the mother & the daughter who plays are here to buy clothes for the coming season; they may be little officials in Sparta or Nauplia. But in the capital they are ladies—after 11.30 P.M. that is. It is not necessary to speak gently, & smile sweetly in the early morning, any more than it is necessary to lace oneself into silk, & tie bows in ones hair. But sometimes nature rushes out like a pent river. The mother had to lean against the door the other day to support her stout frame while she shrieked Greek like a fish wife. But her face grew white, & her dull grey eyes gleamed like an adders. Now the daughter has still good reason to conciliate the world; so she not only bows & smiles with some graciousness, but directly her meal is finished, she hastens to the drawing room, & there alone—for doesn’t she love music for itself, its own sake—she belabours the small sharp piano with merciless fists. It is to do her bidding, you hear at every stroke; & if it is disobedient, a good blow will teach it to know better next time. Mean while she smiles unperturbed; & gradually the room fills, & she hesitates & yields & has her little triumph.

Perhaps the mother wishes that she had been taught to play Valzs [sic] in her youth; she squints in the glass, draws her boa closer to hide the folds of her neck, & enlarges to the young man from Patras upon the education which is thought necessary for girls nowadays. But the education I should sum up thus: there is no doubt that she can play Valzs: there is no doubt that she can do her hair; but there is no reason to suppose that she can read, write or talk. And although much can be done without those accomplishments, still, if you meet her, sitting by herself in the drawing room, dull, vacant, pallid, & infinitely bored, you can even pity her. Perhaps she can’t read literary Greek; for she never touches a newspaper; perhaps she cant marry into the circle above her own; the young man from Patras may represent the ambition of her life; certainly he makes her smile. So they wait on day after day; punctual at meals, elaborate in dress, silent when they are together, & condescending when they can find some one respectable to talk to them.

There were many stories told us by the Noels which might be copied here. How for instance it is necessary to bribe the best doctor in Athens with the present of a pig before he will sign your nurses certificate—how, in short all classes have their price; how all Greeks lie, how all Greeks are dirty, ignorant, & unstable as water.

And considering that Mr. Noel has lived among them—as he was born among them—for some fifty years not only do his words carry weight, but it is the kind of weight that is absolute. It would have been so easy, in such a length of time with such associations, to have grown to love the people, so that a stranger hinting at their faults would have been driven back “Not a bit of it—I know the people”. But as it is, he does know the people & this is his knowledge.

Like a shifting layer of sand these loosely composed tribes of many different peoples lie across Greece; calling themselves Greek indeed, but bearing the same kind of relation to the old Greek that their tongue does to his. For the language they talk is divided from the language that some few of them can write as widely as that again is divided from the speech of Plato. The spoken language because it has not been fixed by grammar or spelling, twists itself afresh on each tongue. The peasants drop syllables, & slur vowels so that as proficient a speaker as Miss Noel could not undertake to write down the words that ran so swiftly fr. her tongue. Nor could she either read or write the Greek of the newspapers; & still less could she read the Greek of the Classics. So you must look upon Modern Greek as the impure dialect of a nation of peasants, just as you must look upon the modern Greeks as a nation of mongrel element & a rustic beside the classic speech of pure bred races. These are the thoughts that force themselves upon you when you are out of sight of the Parthenon; & I have discovered that you may spend ten days in Athens without once seeing that temple. Early in the morning sometimes I fling open my window & see pillars standing on a great rock which surprise me.

After all, we are in Athens; but Athens means many more things than the Acropolis, & the sanest plan is to separate the quick from the dead, the old from the new, so that the two images shall not vex each other. It is amusing to be able to abuse entirely, just as it is far better to praise enthusiastically.

So I take some pains to put old Greece on my right hand and new Greece on my left & nothing that I say of the one shall apply to the other. The justice of that division has been proved etymologically, & ethnologically,—indeed & I daresay I could go on proving it through all the arts & sciences, but these shall be sufficient.

The reading that you do in a sick room is really not to be called reading any more than the exercise gone through on a railway journey. The book is the anodyne, which will last you till the station is reached or the hour comes for giving the patient her food. You measure such a space on your watch against so many Chapters of print; & so you plod on, grateful for the opiate, that can but blunt the hour of its pang. Yet even so, some books drone in a different key from others; some do even send an occasional thrill of oblivion down your spine, & let you dream that you are free to follow them whither they call.

Now a book I have been reading in this spirit for some days—the Letters of Merimée to an unknown woman—has pierced the dull hide that surrounds the nursing woman more frequently than any of the novels. They were too far & visionary; but Merimée was dealing with a real world in which people were ill & angry, where the rain was wet & the sun was hot, & it was rather agreeable to be told that such things went on outside the bedroom door just as usual.

And then there began to be a mystery, or rather a puzzle which one might piece together idly when the book was shut, & refashion again, with surprising ingenuity, when the book was open. Now the nature of the puzzle was & is—for I have not solved it—something like this: Merimée writes to a young woman who is conceivably half an English-woman, as often & as intimately as though he were her lover, & a clandestine lover at that. For they have to contrive meetings unknown to her family. But now the puzzle begins, for instead of writing as a lover, he writes as a caustic, candid & often indifferent friend, whose interest is of the intellect, or at any rate of the morals, & whose heart is rather repelled than softened. She is called selfish, insincere, vain, & a score of other unpleasant things, in almost every letter; still he writes, sometimes daily, never at any long intervals. To this the reader must make his own reply, for the unknown Lady is engulfed in her title; you do not hear her voice once, throughout the two volumes. When she travels, her destination is marked with an initial only; her friend Lady M is curtailed in the same way. So then she outlived her friend, & ordered the letters to be printed, but wished for certain reasons that her name should be unknown. One reason & a good one was perhaps that she did not care to own her faults in public, & yet with a candour like that of Merimée himself, she desired that the letters should be printed in full. And again, it may be that after two printed volumes of letters, covering some twenty years, had passed between them, after he had died even—the correspondence was still secret. There is no hint that her friendship was shared by brother or sister; for all we know, save for a line dropped early that it was best to meet by stealth—these two knew each other face to face, alone, isolated from their kind. They do not seem to have met often, but they wrote always, till one of them—the man—brought the correspondence to an end two hours before he died.

And what did they write about?

It is here that the natural ingenuity of the reader is taxed or inspired, as the case may be. To read the letters intelligently you must construct a reply; they demand it as imperiously as certain notes struck on the piano demand, & seem to imply their harmonies. So the letter read alone sounds querulous as though reaching after their fellow notes, when all shall be concord.

And your curiosity is the more whet because it must have been such an odd kind of concord; if you could hear these two voices speaking together it would not be a dulcet sound, or a loving sound, or a passionate sound that they would make in unison; but it would be something sharp & curious, something that would ring a new note in the ear, not to be forgotten. This indeed is the puzzle that amuses my vigil; what kind of harmony was there when Merimée & the veiled Lady spoke together?

Before you can make sure of or even guess at the nature of the concord you must draw forth her notes from his, & if you can, induce her to speak some phrase in her proper person. From him you know that she is difficult, not above the arts of the coquette, & except that she uses them to veil a rare mind, & perhaps, a rare nature. About the mind indeed there can be no mistake, for Merimée would not have scrupled to call her a fool had she been ordinarily intelligent; & if he does not often compliment her, he writes to her as easily of all that interests him—literature & archaeology & politics—as though there is no question of a step down between their minds. It is her character that vexes him, particularly that part of it which is concerned in their relationship. She was unstable, & cruel & insincere; sometimes she did not write, or they went for a walk, & she left him in a temper. From such symptoms at the beginning an observer might predict love, only different from vulgar love in that the man held a pen in his hand. His jealousy, & his sensitiveness to trifles, written out clearly in faultless French, are no more than the usual passion, eager & fretful, which in most foams inarticulate. But then it leaves the natural channels; it broadens & becomes slowly both clear & smooth of surface; & the natural channel surely led to the meeting of the streams. But for thirty years these two currents run side by side, so equably that—to continue the metaphor—the same body of water seems to pass always, neither less nor more; & the only change is that the stream runs smoother, & you seem to see to the depths.

The experiment has often been tried, but it has failed so often that this long drawn out success has an interest on that account alone. A man & a woman, then, may come so near, & stay so near, & keep always just so much distance between them, & draw nothing but profit, apparently from the alliance.

Still, whatever the reason, you cannot help feeling that each was a lonely person all the days of his life; & some cowardice entered into the arrangement. Merimée becomes terribly interested in his health by degrees, & we read that he adopted two old Englishwomen, to whom he seldom spoke, in the same way perhaps that he adopted a lizard & a cat. There was some pleasure in tending the lonely creatures, in seeing the warmth come back to their limbs from his own hands, & he could he sure that it would never return in robust measure.

The unknown lady it is clear did not rouse him from these sad & valetudinarian ways. She was even more fastidious than he was. He is always glad to tell her of ridiculous Englishwomen he has seen, because it will make her laugh; & he likes to hint in writing at some broad story because he can imagine the disgust or the blush which he would have seen on her face opposite him.

So, as she was more fastidious, she was also more cynical; for sad as he is often his distrust has much depth in it; whereas the lady we conceive, was repelled too easily to dislike or distrust much more than the surface.

But it is dangerous to draw features within the veil; for you are always baffled by her silence. And when you consider that for thirty years a man was constantly addressing this phantom, you must endow her beyond question with some peculiar power. She was neither a mere coquette, nor a mere blue stocking, although she was vain of her dark eyes, & could read Greek.

Still less was she a commanding woman, of great spiritual height, to lead & inspire. Again, she was not famous, or rich, or aristocratic, the one thing that we know of her for certain is that she suited Prosper Merimée; & so we are led to ask, what was it that Prosper Merimée wanted? To begin with it seems, he needed a correspondent, he needed some one to whom he might write rather than talk, who would receive the deliberate utterances of his mind, & understand them. Then this person must be as incapable of inspiring a false word as of uttering one, meaning by false a defect of taste or judgment. She must be able even to advise upon questions of literature.

But it is more difficult to describe the nature of the personal qualities that were necessary; because these were very subtle, & upon one side they were suppressed, so far as we are concerned. If we are certain that Merimée did not want passion we are confident too that he needed some thing more warm than reasonable agreement to flavour the correspondence.

They were scarcely affectionate, very often; the great bond lay perhaps—outside those many intellectual sympathies—in their common boredom & in their common candour. Some affinity had drawn these two together; they continued the intimacy as much because they agreed in finding others dull as because they found each other amusing; finally they brought it to an end, or submitted to its ending, in a condition as nearly approaching the serenity of love as was possible to the temperament of either. The letters, as I have said, tend always to become simpler & more gentle; as though doubts & plainings ceased altogether.

Whether we rate their affection high or low, we cannot question its integrity. And there lies the singular charm of the letters & of the two characters which they reveal. You feel perfect faith in a man who tells a woman her motives & her faults; who despises democracy, & who predicts, in a low monotonous voice, that his country will go to war.

The unknown, on her side, was also clear sighted; although she did not like improprieties & believed in the Pope. The Roman Catholic Church & the conventions were, however, just the reservations which were necessary to draw all other scales from her eyes.

Conformity in such large matters allows considerable latitude in all else; certain it is that she travelled considerably, like Merimée himself, that she lived somewhere in the Provinces, that she read widely, & that she saw her correspondent Merimée whenever she stayed in Paris.

Naturally, they have much to write about that demands no closer scrutiny than the last letter from Mr. Balfour to Mr. Chamberlain. Merimée knew everyone; & she was an excellent listener.

Still, few letters passed between them that do not suggest some addition to the mystery, or some solution of it.

It is so calm & clear now, you think; they are proved friends & no more.

But the last line of the last letter adds a final shock:

Je vous embrasse.

He had never said that before; & certainly he was never to say it again. For in two hours he was dead.

It is no wonder, were I to write down all the circumstances of the case. Certainly it is not the fault of Greece—that we all cry O to be in England!

It is almost strange how the longing grows & what it desires; it will feed on names, so that the simple word Devon is better than a poem; it will make pictures better than any in Greece out of a wet London street, with lamplight twisted on the pavement. And six lines of description—It was a winter’s night & the stars rose above bare fields—will raise tears, I swear it.

But yet we are not patriotic; indeed it is amusing to read the newspapers & find how little interest it is possible to take in all the frizzling & bubbling that goes on still in our island. George Wyndham does not call anti Imperialists traitors; & so he tells the world, & the world listens gravely. Out here it seems to matter very little what George Wyndham calls anybody; & traitors & imperialists are nothing more than names. The Times loses its stately proportions: it is the private sheet of a small colony of islanders, whose noise is effectually shut up in their prison.

But it is not for the people we crave; it is for the place. That keeps its magic; so strong that it seems to send shocks across the water.

On a flippant afternoon, here in Athens—for the street cut out in clear colours & washed in bright air—has a certain levity—you think of stern Yorkshire moors; cool smells blowing off the heath, stone houses, a light or two in the hollow.

Or you think of a great London square, where the lamps are just lit, & all the windows stand out red for the virtuous evening.

Or you think of clear autumn mornings, with the trail of burnt leaves in the wind, a crisp page on the desk, & a brisk fire in the hearth.

There are many pictures; they come up, one after another, till you must stop thinking for there are many leagues of the inhospitable east to travel first.

England has a sound of everything that is clean & sane, & serious; besides, it is a modest place, full of fresh beauties. Ah yes, we will go home & discover them all; there is no such beauty to be found elsewhere.

When there is a choice of nationality in steamers—French Italian German or Greek—an unprejudiced English mind will incline towards the German; cousins we are, at heart; we have the same ideas of cleanliness, that is. Blood really amounts to that; for beautiful as the French language is, I will not trust my body—no, nor my soul, to a people who know not the tub. Now this is a really valuable confession; had I red ink on board with me, I would underline it, to catch a vagrant eye in future.

We did well, then, to trust to our old congenital instinct; for the Dalmatia, of the Austrian Lloyd service, upon which we embarked yesterday, has shown just those solid sensible virtues which one esteems in an individual & admires beyond all others in a ship. She is only half full; she is clean; she is well served, & her table is sound & sober. So we left the Piraeus, & trod for the last time upon Greek soil. Circumstances again, at which a discreet diary can only hint, gloomily, made it impossible to think one appropriate thought; but then has any one ever thought the thing he had suggested to him?

But I can answer in some sort for belated effort on the part of my own brain. At about 5 o’clock we had our last view of Athens, & its plain, & the famous hills. I have had reason to think of Athens only as a modern town, speaking a barbarous language, peopled by liars & cheats; as though to cancel that impression—to win back a faltering lover, albeit an insignificant one—the place seemed to glow once more in its beautiful old guise; the lights came trembling across the hills, & only the Acropolis was visible, standing high beyond the town. Stalwart & red & significant—alone & apart from all the modern world. To that then & the delicate impetuous hills, I could say farewell; for they are Greece, & so I have known them, & shall always know them. Silence, awful & unbroken, washes over them for ever now, & no human cry shall stir them any more. After all the tumult that frets their base is but ephemeral; & a wise man will hear it no more than the Greeks hear it, who have been dead two thousand years. The sun sank, & single lights opened here & there, upon the mainland of Greece. We doubled Cape Sunium in the night, & all day we have been steaming along the coast of Asia Minor, with an island springing now & then on our left. In the evening we stopped, in a neck of sea, commanded by great guns, where lies the famous town of the Dardanelles. A little further & we came to Abydos in Sestos, with the mound where Xerxes sat; his ghost might watch many strange passengers crossing from shore to shore. Shall we say that the coast of Asia Minor is like many another coast—a faint dark streak, that swells & sinks, & is sprinkled here & there with white houses in clusters? And then you must add, to propitiate somebody or other, that we also passed the plain of Troy. But all that is too finely embedded in my mind to be extracted tonight. The good trustworthy ship plods on her way down the sea of Marmara & lets me write a neat hand, as though I bestrode a soft pacing nag.

When we wake at 5.30 we shall be exposed instantly to all the splendour of Constantinople. But I think of Greece.

And so we were, exposed, almost before our eyes were open. For waking at half past five I saw the land streaming past us, sharp black, with the pale lights of dawn upon the sea. At six I was on deck, & suddenly we found ourselves confronted with the whole of Constantinople; there was St Sophia, like a treble globe of bubbles frozen solid, floating out to meet us. For it is fashioned in the shape of some fine substance, thin as glass, blown in plump curves; save that it is also as substantial as a pyramid. Perhaps that may be its beauty. But then beautiful & evanescent & enduring, to pluck adjectives like black berries—as it is, it is but the fruit of a great garden of flowers. The sun was rising swiftly, opposite the town, & the whole sweep of grey houses piled high & curved freely was picked out lavishly & fantastically with golden windows. And so the colour was of gray houses, & pale golden panels, & dark tufts of green, for all the buildings were spaced with a soft fringe of trees. We passed rapidly before this wonderful sight, which seemed to renew itself afresh before our eyes, each instant, & so came to the crowded pool of the river, where the Golden Horn branches off from the Bosphorus[sic]. But here my point of view was certainly eclipsed; nor do I remember any more, as novelists say, & they have all the best devices—until—well, it would be convenient to say until about 6 o’clock in the evening, when I sat before an open window, & saw the sun set behind the town which had reflected its uprise.

From this position you see over the town, or as much of it as a square window will compass, & that is enough to give you some idea that Constantinople is to begin with a very large town. Remembering Athens, you felt yourself in a metropolis; a place where life was being lived successfully. And that did seem strange, &—if I have time to say so - a little uncomfortable. For you also realised that life was not lived after the European pattern, that it was not even a debased copy of Paris or Berlin or London, & that, you thought was the ambition of towns which could not actually be Paris or any of those inner capitals. As the lights came out in clusters all over the land, & the water was busy with lamps, you knew yourself to be the spectator of a vigorous drama, acting itself out with no thought or need of certain great countries yonder to the west. And in all this opulence there was something ominous, & something ignominious—for an English lady at her bedroom window. At any rate, it was a stirring sight to look upon; & if I may use the shorthand of a hack writer, a most beautiful one into the bargain.

The Golden Horn drives a broad blue wedge between two high banks of houses; so that, as some one says, a battle ship rides at anchor in the street before your door. Then the sunset in long bars of flame & scarlet with a border of chimneys & mosques drawn black upon their lowest margin; the blue waters were lit up & golden lights were sprinkled upon them. Up in the air, & deep down in the earth the lamps burnt; & then the moon, a crescent, swung slowly up the sky, & a pure drop of light, the evening star, turned the innumerable lamps to gold. There are few experiences more exhilarating than the first dive into a new town—Even when your plunge is impeded—as ours was this morning—by a sleek Turkish dragoman. Still, when the driver cracked his whip, & the horses started down the hill, all our obstacles were forgotten. Innumerable pages have been turned in the history of Constantinople, but this, the last, was turned fresh for us. And yet, apart from the chafing of strange sights upon our senses, there was really nothing very memorable in our descent upon Stamboul. A view does not by any means promise beauty of detail; & the streets were insignificant, & the national dress—a fez & a frock coat—is a disappointing compromise. We reached a battered doorway, upon which there was some florid heraldry. ‘The Sublime Porte’ commented our guide, staying the carriage that we might do our homage. Beyond the gates the grass grew in the cobbles & a soldier lounged in a sentry box; imagination had done the work better already. Then at length we reached S. Sophia, by a narrow passage of paving stones, as though we approached by a back door. That little ceremony on the doorstep, when we cased our heretic leather in slippers, had a certain childlike pride in it. Travellers have made so much of the virtues of the change, considered aesthetically, that there is no longer any genuine interest in it. Perhaps it is a little game, kept alive for the amusement of the stranger & the profit of the native. At any rate we paid our tribute to the oriental superstition graciously, & shuffled in through the doors with lively satisfaction in our toes; But then I left half my tribute at an early stage, & defiled the carpet with stout English boots.

Perhaps this digression is artfully intended to reproduce here something of the hesitation which made my mind also waver from the business in hand at this point. Here was St. Sophia; & here was I, with one brain 2 eyes, legs & arms in proportion, set down to appreciate it. Now what ever impression it made was certainly fragmentary & inconsequent; as thus—strange rays of light, octagonal & colourless; windows without stained glass; no screen across the church; & was it a church? No; it was a great hall of business, or learning or law; for it was empty & circular, & the flagged pavement was covered with carpets. There were men in turbans squatting together at one end; they rose & went away, talking loudly, when their conclave was finished. There were many single figures wandering up & down the great open space, reflectively; there were one or two who, seated at the side, rocked their bodies rhythmically to the tune of the Koran spread open upon their knees. Here was a group with white turbans from Bokhara; the guide did not scruple to elbow his way through their devotions, nor did they mind the interruption. Such were the worshippers in the mosque of S. Sophia; nor did their worship seem inappropriate to the place. It is so large, & so secular, so little the precinct of an awful religion that this miscellaneous worship did not offend it. Nor did the great place strike one as ‘beautiful’; for though there are patches of mosaic left upon the arches, the zeal of the Turks has stripped the temple bare of ornament. A Turk may not see the sign of the Cross at his prayer or that prayer fades into mist said our guide, with a wave of his hand; & rather than nullify his devotions the decoration of the whole building had been corrected & erased altogether till it has no virtue or vice left in it. Crosses have become safe patterns without meaning; sacred heads have been obliterated from the wall, & shields of wood proclaim the true faith where Christian angels used to spread their wings. There is a niggardly temper in all this that makes the great mosque not very sympathetic to the stranger; although to qualify my blame, there is much that cannot avoid being uttered in honest admiration.

If it is not a temple of religion as we understand the word it is surely a temple of something; so much you may read in the fanatic nodding of so many turbans, & the earnest drone of so many voices.

Still what exactly it is all about, what is fine in it, & what is puerile—that is a puzzle that I entrust to the consideration of some three more days.

And as I have not yet said anything of the ‘yellow dogs of Constantinople’ I will quickly add that there are many dogs, mostly yellow, that they have neither master nor occupation; that they seem content & respectable, & that they choose to inhabit the centre of the street, with the consent of the population. But a long life of perpetual meditation is bad for the health, & the dogs seem to have little vigour of body or of mind. And they are probably ignorant of the domestic affections. At this moment they see fit to protest against some breach of the immemorial tradition of the road.

The Turks have undoubtedly one valuable gift, which is the gift of names. ‘The Golden Horn’ has whispered sweetly in ears that never left London; & to wake the imagination is half the battle, where places are concerned. Certainly, the actual waters are a little disappointing as the real thing must always be, bends the figure of the thing, for it is almost blasphemous to test any place as crudely as we tested the Golden Horn today. We paid our fare & took a penny steamboat upon its very waters. It is not much different in beauty from other rivers that pass through other towns; certainly the houses on the bank are less regular, & the traffic on the stream is more various & vivacious. Also you have shaven green down for background, which comes running to the waters edge here & there, & the prospect—half closing ones eyes—is perhaps as gay & happy as such sights can be. But on the whole the most splendid thing in Constantinople—this is the verdict of a three day old tourist—is the prospect of the roofs of the town, seen from the high ground of Pera. For in the morning a mist lies like a veil that muffles treasures across all the houses & all the mosques; then as the sun rises, you catch hints of the heaped mass within; then a pinnacle of gold pierces the soft mesh, & you see shapes of precious stuff lumped together. And slowly the mist withdraws, & all the wealth of gleaming houses & rounded mosques lies clear on the solid earth, & the broad waters run bright as day light through their midst. It is such a sight as you can watch at all hours, for it is so large & simple that the eye has always much to speculate upon; & there is no need to compose it with careful forefinger. Nature & art & the air of Heaven are all equably mixed, in vast quantities, with a generous hand. But this is worse than S. Sophia!

As for those observations upon manners or politics with which all travellers should ballast their impressions, I confess I find myself some-what out of pocket today. The truth is that travellers deal far too much in such commodities, & my efforts to rid myself of certain preconceptions have taken my attention from the actual facts. Were we not told for instance, that the female sex was held of such small account in Constantinople—or rather it was so strictly guarded—that a European lady walking unveiled might have her boldness rudely chastised? But the streets are full of single European ladies, who pass unmarked; & that veil which we heard so much of—because it was typical of a different stage of civilisation & so on—is a very frail symbol. Many native women walk bare faced; & the veil when worn is worn casually, & cast aside if the wearer happens to be curious. But it does have so much virtue in it as to suggest that it hides something rare & spotless, so that you gaze all the more at a forbidden face. And then the passionate creature raises her shield for a moment—& you see—a benevolent old spinster, with gold rims to spectacles, trotting out to buy a fowl for dinner. What danger has she got to hide from? Whom would a sight of her face seduce?

The men save for their red caps & an occasional nose like a scimitar, might be citizens of London, save that the breezes of the Bosporus[sic] have tanned their skin & expanded their chests. But their faces are reserved; & that is the real mark of a civilised people. They have something to think about, & you can pass the time without the help of speech. And more over they are courteous to strangers, & will offer you fragments of many different languages in order that you may choose your own.

But when we come to consider the question of the West & the East—then indeed—we lay down the pen, & write no more.

Today more by chance than by design we stumbled—or more strictly shuffled, into the most beautiful mosque in Constantinople. And as the only other mosque that I know is S. Sophia, the audacity of this remark needs all the excuses that I can give it. You raise a great leather curtain, & so admit yourself to a sight that is as strange as it is beautiful. The mosque is none other than a vast empty drawing room; you might dance in silk here, or drink afternoon tea, or merely live a gentle life. For there are great windows of white glass, shedding all the light of a brisk October morning upon rich Turkey carpets, & pillars gay with tiles. The place invites you to come in & sit on the floor at your ease; you will think cheerful thoughts, & they will be thoughts of high wholesome things. For while there is a beautiful glow of colour from window & from floor there is nothing to distract the mind; it is as though you walked inside a great painted bubble. The strong voices of men praying were not unlike the voices of those same men in the market place; & a child ran in fearlessly, clapping his hands & crying aloud, as though he pursued some outdoor game within the temple, & found it as good a playground as any & say no reason to cease his joy. The round pillars are laid with white tiles upon which are painted rich patterns in blue, & there are panels of green & other colours, so that the whole place, based upon glowing carpets of many hues gives forth a radiant tide of light.

Worship then seemed but little dissevered from real life, & the crowd of recumbent figures testified that the mosque called with authoritative voice even amid the clamour of the street. Friends dropped in, saluted each other, & turned as naturally to their devotions as, a few hours before perhaps, they had turned to their ledger.

And the devotion seemed none the less sincere that it could stand the light of the day & the brilliance of silk & mosaic; nor did it seem in any way strange that men should say their prayer to rare carpets & painted tiles, without the figure of a saint or the symbol of a cross to inspire them.

On the third or the fourth day it is well to leave all duties undone, in order that you may lose your way in the unrecorded slums. Here even a stranger & a tourist may stumble upon something that is quite without self consciousness; & then the town for the first time will become a real town of flesh & blood.

That part of the prescription which consists in losing yourself we followed very carefully; & we had the delight of walking streets that led nowhere just because we chanced to find ourselves in their path. Now in the purlieus of Constantinople a great deal of the Gorgeous East still runs warm; a vine was laced across the road, & a various torrent of red fezes, turbans, yashmaks, & European respectability came pouring down it, like a turbulent Highland water. But no one stopped to look at us, & the eccentricities of all our dresses seemed but part of the ordinary composition.

We had to find a Bazaar, the Grand Bazaar indeed, & in time, after mingling with all this busy & happy life, we took refuge in a great honeycomb of little shops, built beneath a single roof & divided into streets & alleys like the ways of a city of dwelling houses. To buy, it is necessary to be possessed of infinite time, & infinite duplicity. The silks were ruinous, they were hideous; in England you might buy them for half the price; still the fact remained explain it how you would that we wished to buy, & were extravagantly prepared to pay the sum of 4 piastres a pique—the English are a great and generous race.

Did he hear aright? Could anyone make such an offer seriously? No, it was an insult to our intelligence to suppose that we could so misjudge the excellence of Broussa silk—An American might be thus ignorant—but in England taste & knowledge surely forbids. And did Monsieur on his part, so grievously misunderstand his own interests as to charge the English more than it was right to pay? There were ladies willing to buy in the hotel; but such a price would amaze them. Something of this kind did get itself translated into French, & interpreted into Turkish, & at intervals of 15 minutes a piastre was dropped from the price; till the process of squeezing could be carried no further without encroaching on that halfpenny worth of profit which alone remained, & without making us still more late for our tea. But I have little doubt that the shop keeper had a right to smile over his plump cigarette.

After two minutes thought it does not seem to me that any law of hospitality binds you either to speak well of your hotel, or keep silence. For though there is something a little callous in the notion of abusing a man beneath his own roof, yet when you are paying liberally for every minute of that shelter, your purse has a right to the first claim on your charity.

This hotel then, to be brutal & candid, is not to be recommended, although it would be scarcely fair to abuse it.

It has a strange likeness to a shabby English public house, of the early days of the nineteenth century. Prince Albert & a fat deer might hang above the side board, & there is the mahogany table all ready for the keepsakes & the bibles. Mild respectable people who wish for a quiet dinner come here & breathe congenial air in the long dismal dining room. There is a great table, spread with cold silver baskets, & laid with accurate covers for the guests who never come. We dine in furtive corners, as though our needs were too modest to require a dinner table, & certainly all our cheer such as it is, is not sufficient to kindle the vaporous room.

The servants of this dusky old place are of a piece with the decorous oak chairs, which have been patched together in the back. They are old, & slow, & full of antiquated gentilities, picked up in the days when they served in private families.

There is a sombre old woman, who crawls about the place like a spasmodic fly; she buzzes into a room, & cannot find her way out again without crawling over your hands & face so to speak, with her unnecessary questions.

She must needs pull all the chairs straight & fold the towels a dozen times because she hopes to convince you that she was once a ‘med’ [maid] & is competent to become one again. In this proud capacity she went to Manchester, where she learnt to spoil English; & her conversation therefore, must be carried on in a tongue that is intelligible to no one. She tells you a story however, from which you may make any tale you choose, sad or gay; today it was about a Greek who had died, & gone down a dark passage opposite the dining room window, & two young ladies who wished to become actresses & a gentleman who had left a bag in the hotel, so that he must certainly be a friend of ours.

She muddles her wits with a contemporary, who squints; & cannot bear to see trouser pockets full of coins. It is a dirty habit he remarks, bowing profoundly; So Sir, I have cleared them all out.

The poor old man honestly lost two gold coins in the process.

So they lean over the stairs together, meddle with innumerable towels,—discuss the great days when they lived with Lords & Ladies in the noble City of Manchester. Can they read English? Let this [page] dry in the open.

[Walking at night—& the dogs are good watchmen, you hear a soft funereal sound, like that which mourns over the graves of soldiers. It is the beat of a muffled drum, rhythmical & regular, which neither sinks nor rises nor passes on its way. Yet it is three o’clock in the morning. Soon a chant rises in the lull between the beats, a priest, you fancy, chanting the dirge over the body that is thus lamented. Again some metallic instrument chimes against the soft thud of the drum.]

The last thing, as it is generally the first, that such superficial travellers as I am should enter in their note books is the state of a people’s religion. Indeed the only remark I can make with any confidence is that no Christian, or even European, can hope to understand the Turkish point of view; you are born Christians or Mahommedans[sic] as surely as you are born black or white. The difference is in the blood that beats in the pulse. And that difference was stated explicitly when we took our seats this evening in the gallery of S. Sophia. We gazed as we might have gazed at creatures behind a cage; only the truth was that these creatures were neither our captives nor our inferiors; they suffered us to watch them, but they would not suffer us to pray with them.

We climbed the long slant that leads to the top of the church, & half way up we heard shrill cries echoing in a great space, like the cries of many children, let out of school. And when we looked down into the church there were troops of children, who played hide & seek among the august pillars, & chattered like monkeys as they ran.

Their voices sounded thin & even plaintive as they floated up through vast depths of yellow air. But no cry could disturb the serenity of that great hall. Rings of hanging light made little islands in the immense gloom; & gradually, as the lamps were lit all round the arches, a soft golden glow shone forth from ceiling & column, till the air seemed warmed to the core. The hall began to fill with dark figures, & the children were hushed, though they flitted in & out like soft bats. And all the while the light grew slowly brighter, till the line of all the stately arches filled in the picture. Meanwhile the people took their places in rows along the mats, & you heard a voice rising & falling, with sacred words. The air was crowded, & yet you could hardly distinguish separate figures; only you had the feeling that at the bottom of this vague amber coloured air multitudes were gathered together, slumped like shadows.

The voice seemed but a thin thread to unite so many bodies; but at certain moments all the long lines rose & fell simultaneously, kissed the floor, & stood upright again, the puppets of an unseen power.

The circles of light were dim, & the whole of this punctual action was carried on in the twilight, silently with only one voice sounding plaintively alone. But simple & melancholy as the ceremony seemed to us, it was also wonderfully beautiful. The subtle lights, which were all woven of burnished golds & soft blacks, poured over all & revealed nothing thin or harsh; [ ] they revealed nothing but suggested more than can be drawn forth. So we watched, a scene which we shall never understand; & heard the true gospels expounded in an unknown tongue.

The mystery of the sight, & the strangeness of the voice, made you feel yourself like one wrapped in a soft curtain; & the worshippers within are quite determined that you shall remain outside.

Of all ceremonies this of saying good bye is the most trying to the spirits; nor is the task any the easier when you bid fare well to a town & not to a person. You should be able to say something that fits the occasion; & if I had a subtler tongue I think I could say a great deal at any rate, whether it hits or misses. Now for instance there is the puzzle of S. Sophia; why is she the most cryptic church in Europe? Why does she grow more beautiful & more mysterious the better you know her—or the shell of her?

You must begin at the beginning & confess that the Turk himself is the riddle; a tough, labyrinthine riddle, by which wise heads—the Times newspaper even—are still constantly confounded. For the first impression is also the last at the end of a week; & if it is superficial it is also vivid. Constantinople is a place of live nerves, & taut muscles; so we read directly we saw the town laid at our feet; but continuing the metaphor we also said that the eyes of this great giantess were veiled.

The streets & bridges are crowded with men & women, horses & carriages; here is an English diplomat & here a lean native, who proposes to start a pilgrimage in a fortnights time for Mecca. A sleek merchant hustles him on his way to his office; but nevertheless he understands; the two may meet on the same praying rug at sundown.

There is faith enough; & business enough; & life enough to keep both eddying swiftly along the stream. No one who has visited the Mosques & the bazaars can doubt the force of the current. But at the same time, no one knows exactly where it tends; a dozen stories of the place show that it can take a subterranean channel, & it was not ten years ago that the Turks & Armenians massacred each other in the streets. So perhaps if it were your lot to spend your life here you might think your station one of some risk—as a resting place beneath a volcano. Happily a traveller need not trouble himself with the intricate roots of all these strange separate flowers that we look at above ground. The strangeness is attractive; & then the town upon which the drama is played is fair enough for any tragedy.

But can we make this plain on a white sheet of paper? You must remember not only the morning veil of mist, & the stately domes that shine through, & all the gold & white & blue of the town at midday, but you must also think of the little streets crowded with live people, you must remember the turbans & the veiled women, the arab horses & the yellow dogs; & finally you must return to the great mosques, & see them filled once more with a dark crowd that kneels & rises & cries its faith aloud.

In the daytime you must see all this, & hear the clamour of the street & the bazaar; in the night when the dogs even are silent, you must hear the muffled beat of a drum, & listen to a voice that neither falls nor rises, but pleads always, in earnest & in confidence, for something that is given to the faithful who spend the night in prayer.

[The following accounts appear at the end of the notebook. Page numbers have been editorially supplied.]

[Page 1]

[Page 2]

[Facing page 3]

[Page 3]

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[Upside down and written presumably at a later date:]

But many of the accounts in this book had afterwards to be corrected. We found that only a very few pieces of our money could be [Unfinished.]

[]

New Forest 1906

The New Forest Christmas

Just now as I wrote these words & saw them dry in juxtaposition it struck me that perhaps their alliance was natural & not accidental; & that I had by chance laid my finger on a clue to an old puzzle. For why does the forest always disappoint me? & why does Christmas disappoint me too? Is it not that they both promise something glittering & ruddy & cheerful, & when you have it you find it not quite as good as you expected? The forest is too benign & complaisant; it gives you all that you can ask; but it hints at no more. There are the long green drives, & the tracery of the branches against the sky; there are wild open spaces when you are tired of symmetry, with their single elm & thorn trees, & their brambles & their bogs. “So wild—so free—so stately—so mediaeval:” Such is the praise that you must give, & give willingly, but there is no residue that remains unexpressed for lack of the fitting word. To be candid the forest is a little sleek & a little tame; it is Saxon without any Celtic mysticism; it is flaxen & florid, stately & ornamental. We have no use for forests now, & yet this one is preserved reverently, when the old spirit has died out of it. So it comes about that there is always something artificial about the place, & its lovers. You will not find the real country man or woman here, anymore than you will find arduous fields that are still turned assiduously. No; the country labourers are wont to pose as characters learned in forest lore; & it is a lore that is consciously picturesque. Much of this attitude is probably inevitable, for the forest is different from any other piece of England, & imposes different customs of necessity. It is easy, for example, or so I have found it, to feel yourself withdrawn from the outer world, & enclosed in a thick girdle of trees. The rolling land is fenced off, & you are forced through narrow ways between trees where ever you turn. Then there is all the peculiar language of the place to be learnt if you stay, & exalted beyond all others. You hunt, the deer & the fox: there is the old colonel of course who never misses a meet & knows his way through the forest better than any of the tufters; such old gentlemen are not unusual, but in other countries surely they have fewer grooves in which to run so smoothly. The forest is an ideal place for the old & conservative; there are so many proprieties to be observed, & they are so decorous & easy of approach. So this is why Christmas is kept so appropriately here. You can almost fancy that the woods have been arranged for the festival, & hung with holly, & sprinkled with snow. Christmas day & the forest seemed to mix & melt indistinguishably; you left the dinner table & its turkey & its crackers, its cake with a jaunty sprig of holly in it—you stepped into a world where these emotions were continued unbrokenly. We walked along a crisp white road, & then beneath dark leaved ever greens. Here were berries glowing red; & all the twigs were iced with snow. Then it grew late & the jolly evening sky lit up—flame coloured, & clear & healthy—with the black trees sharp against it. But O for the dusky roll of some Northern moor, or the melancholy cliffs of Cornwall. There you hear the wind & the sea.

[]

Golders Green 1907

Golders Green & Hampstead July

Last Sunday, the 6th, to be precise I made an expedition which seems to me to deserve commemoration. The Twopenny Tube has now burrowed as far as Golders Green; so that sinking into an earth laid with pavement & houses at one end, you rise to soft green fields at the other; the ashen dark & the chill & the cold glitter of electricity is replaced by the more benignant illumination of daylight. Indeed on Sunday there was a sky & a sun; & the exuberant holiday making of the crowd had some excuse. Well, we all of us got out at Golders Green; which term I take to apply to a dusky triangle between cross roads, which was now occupied by a cluster of idle people sucking like bees at some gaudy & profuse flower. Their little island was a refuge from motor cars which shot past constantly almost shaving slices from the edge, & added a high blast or a low blast, not inappropriately to the tune. Some of us, for I must associate myself with my fellows, saw this too much in the light of melodrama; & chose one of the four roads as our way into the country. But no real country road, as I could not but remember, is raked so persistently by huge barrelled motor cars; nor do strings & knots & couples of brightly dressed people fill all the way, so that you must steer to get past them. But there were fields on either side though one had to violate some instinct which held them forbidden before one crept under the paling. It seems so natural that all open spaces should be hedged off, or only available on payment; & half the people I think kept to the road in obedience to this traditional belief.

My way was across a field of long grass towards a slight mound—O if I could but use the real country names!—& there were occasional tracks, like those a ship leaves on the sea, to show that bold travellers had gone before me. But while I heard the throb of brass I could not count myself free. Now it is hard to describe the view, for it was indeed of a most singular kind. Golders Green is all red brick; huge factories or railway buildings are specially prominent; then to the North (perhaps) there was another separate hamlet, grouped as real villages are up a hill which was pointed by a Church spire. And between them there was this soft land, undulating with long grass & curving into little mounds, & into one sufficiently steep screen just before me. Old lichen crusted palings, & streamlets & fields with cows in them, all seemed ready to prove that they were part of the neglected world, & then the tail of your eye was caught by a line of villas, like a block of childrens bricks set on end. A line of moving heads at a little distance showed me that there was, as I expected, a regular channel up to Hampstead, along which one might legitimately walk. I sat myself down in a corner, where the bushes shut out all sights except the fields, & there eat my luncheon. The walk which I took afterwards through the fields lacked somehow the stimulus of walks through real fields. I fancied dust & fatigue & a thousand annoyances; & found myself gravitating, half sulkily, towards that cut in the land where I should find a real road, & people. What motive it was, I will not determine. It had been but a short time before, a foot path; & the glamour of the afternoon to me was caused by the fact that it led us past a real country farm, with a yard & a dog; I looked in at the window & saw the family at dinner, & there was a stuffed jay in a case.

[]

Playden 1907

THE STEPS
PLAYDEN
SUSSEX

Aug. 8th 1907.
Sept 1907.

Playden

It would need a great deal of time to begin with—then knowledge—then insight—then language to write here of Rye in such a way as to do it justice. When you have lived five hundred years & filled them with the experiences of shall we say five million men & women, you are as complex as a chambered nautilus—as profuse of tentacles as one of those monster sea anemonies [sic] which must live on the food their sweeping arms bring in to them. Besides I have a theory that, better than all insight & knowledge, final & supreme fruit of it, is one single sentence, six words long maybe; & that if you have not this forming at the top of your pen you had better write sedately of other things; accumulating touches. And at present I have neither knowledge nor inspiration; only, I confess, a little weariness of all brick & mortar, that is steeped in history.

It requires more imagination though, not to read history into the land than to see a blank sheet of hill & valley. For Sussex soil has been turned infinitely often, has been smoothed like a coverlet, over graves, over seeds, has been rolled & raked & baked finally into those ripe old houses which are so lavish of their information. And yet we did not come to the country to listen to venerable gossip over tea cups; no; we came to hear certain melancholy birds who have learnt only the one cry, who have only the one comment to utter. We came to see the land that [ ] has kept its own counsel, obeyed its own will, since the day it carved itself thus, before any gave it name or likeness.

Tonight we speculated upon the stars; fancied ourselves moored, one of an innumerable fleet; & saw the earth shrink to the size of a button, its rim just over there where the lighthouse marks the sea. This shrinkage was the result of seeing the moon close at the end of a telescope, like a globe of frosted silver; with strange wrinkles & corrugations on the surface of the metal; & it was, for the first time, a visible token, shining in dead of night, that the sun was still blazing somewhere, in an August sky. You could fancy hard blue & white, on the other side of the world; all the palms flashing, & the drone of heat; people sleeping under umbrellas; great melons, & donkeys with water skins, men lounging within the limits of hard black shadows—while here we walked in the vast darkness, & the tobacco plants gleamed pale & their fine perfume powdered the air with sweetness. A true moon flower. But through the telescope it is no longer moonlight; but the hot sun, striking a frosty shield.

22 August August 1907

Perhaps some day it may be amusing to read here the name Peasmarsh: it may be then so familiar that the surface shell of it will have no existence; or again, it may have broken & gone, like other names that I can now hardly remember.

We came upon the place the other day, as we looked casually for a cottage: the orchard suggests spring evenings, with Apple blossom. But whether the dark dry little house could be made habitable for a summer seems doubtful; when I look at those thick walls, & robust floors. It is a little snails shell of a place, just off the road; in a smooth reach of country, in no way remarkable. Still it would be pleasant—how pleasant I can still imagine—to think of it in certain London days, when all the world seems made of brick; to know that it lies moored there, ready for us to embark upon. I think especially of walking up at night, from Rye, all the vague scents & coolnesses of a country evening washing over one’s body, though things can scarcely be seen in that light: how it will slowly go out; and only lamps will be seen: at last ‘our lamp’; & I shall tramp up the flagged path; and see my chair ready, the table spread, some garrulous old woman, carpenters wife or such like, will attend & tell me the news of the village—how there has been a sale, & someone has had a baby; & the postman is dead. She will apologise for her cooking, but hope I have everything I want; & leave me, lighting her lantern “O I can find my way Miss, & the Moon’s getting up.” Such are the contrasts that one must make, in this world, to strike a balance. But I will not continue this hasty & inadequate writing since the question demands sober treatment.

Last night, as it was fine as gauze, we speculated a little from our terrace, & heard the faint blare of drums & trumpet. A fair? we asked; & set off, for the sake of the walk, & perhaps some happy accident of light & rustic comedy, to follow the sound. We went down to Rye by the road; & met a number of silent passengers, driving or walking, though it was close upon eleven; which gave one an odd notion of the populousness of the country, & all the odd businesses that these people must be following. In Rye itself there was much pale light of street lamps, some lounging figures, but no fair to be seen, band to be heard. We walked back then, by way of the road skirting the marsh, which leads beneath our cliff. The flats glistened beneath the moon, & there were odd smooth barns by the wayside, all dark, like colour shapes in some 18th century water colour. Sportsmen might shoot snipe here in daylight, in long coats; by night there would be the poacher or the highwayman, or the great London coach, baiting its horses at the turn, or paying toll. When we stood silent, a little harmony of noises crowded upon our ears. The dogs bark of course, then the cough of certain sheep, out in the fields, then the cry of some bird. At last a great luminous train, semi transparent, came rattling before us; with a body like some phosphorescent caterpillar, & a curled plume of smoke, all opal & white, issuing from the front of it. Then there was a very dark land with bright bars of moon light across it, so white that our shadows were cut in them. And then our frail little house, which we manage to think so substantial, with its eye of light, like many others; no, we don’t include the world here. We are dotted about on the surface & exclude an infinite number of things.

I have almost I think determined that two things lie outside my province—cant be covered by any skilful casting of words; & the first is the details of an expedition; & the second is the appearance of a great space of English country. So that though there is every temptation tonight to say something of a whole day spent in the open air, of an expedition to Fairlight & back, I don’t see how to attempt it, nor does my conscience goad me to try. I should have to begin by saying when we started, what road we took, the nature of the vehicle, the adventures of the way, & all the time I should have to be painting a scene for this progress, running before with a brush in my hand, hastily filling in the fields & the sky. Something would then have to be written of Fairlight, its history & prospect; & again I must descend to the particular, & drag the cart up that weary hill. And there would be the picnic next—stay though, I leave the pony un-stabled—& a phrase or two of conversation, while the view is somehow introduced, made perhaps the text of the discourse. Then the Church would toll—& it would be time to go: we should stay a little, remembering, in mellow mood, other such expeditions; the shadows would lengthen, & that broad sunlight which befits all return journeys—a skilful pen might hint the parable without spelling it—would be observed now to lie across the land. And so on, & so on; till the beast was in his stable, & we at our tea. A conscientious annalist would not leave till the shoes were taken off, & the hair tidied, & no trace of this long drawn out misery was to be seen.

This is as it should be, if I were younger, or more daring. But no: the things I really choose to remember are these, I think.

When we got to the top of the hill we saw the sea, far below, very flat; so much like blue vapour that the solution into sky was hardly visible. There were rounded green cliffs also; & corn fields which might be laid directly against the blue. Also there was a gigantic stone fabric, planted in the valley; an incongruous & painful sight, as of some brittle excrescence, which had managed to endure, against the natural laws. There was a graveyard; of no antiquity; indeed the church was new, suggesting somehow a place of practical use, rather than of any spiritual significance. It was as weather & water proof as it seemed proof against any of the passions of mankind. Also there was a small boy who carried beer in a rough brown cloth, to the harvesters. He could not measure distances, nor did his mind seem able to get beyond the shadow of the hall. This year he will not pick hops, which is sleepy work; he will, so soon as the harvest is in, undertake a job in Bexhill; since he has left school.

The nut trees promise to bear well; as do the blackberries. “Look at them filberts.” He was agile in mind & body; swift to see all things in hedges, reading signs all the way, invisible to us; brown quick little animal; & you shall become an airdrugged old labourer, with a crick in your back, living to be 80, & picking up in that time only a few habits of birds in this part of Sussex, some knowledge of the signs of the weather, & an animal kinship with the people in your village; perhaps at moments you will have a queer sense that this isn’t all, & that you have had scarcely your rights here. But there will always be beer, & the knowledge that your fathers lived this life for centuries, & found it good enough. After all, one might fare worse; Uncle Bill, for example, went to sea, & never came back again. Ah they do say that there’s fine things overseas; but I guess a man may bide here. ‘Tidy bit’ was his word;

Then there were great horses, stamping up the hill with a waggon of brushwood; where did they cut it—what will be its use—? O the wish to know & to understand [ ] how this toil is organised, how the whole land yields its fruits punctually in the right places. A great imaginative feat it would be to understand the point of view of a Sussex labourer: There is too much of the ‘pathetic fallacy’ in all our novels; tears in a dogs eyes, joy in an old horse.

3 September

The wish to write down some picture of what is now going on here, in the county of Sussex, in the month of September, really vexes me, when ever I take a walk. Yesterday for example we all started along the road to Winchelsea, in a colourless eventide which soon became of a drifting grey tint as the clouds trailed along the wind & sprayed our faces. Winchelsea on its sombre mound grew almost ink black, with those deep liquid shadows (as though composed of many different grades of blackness): there was light towards Rye, but the highest point was the barrel of the windmill, which was gray. The clouds shift, drag apart, & go in tattered sheets hanging down with frayed edges right across the landscape; filling all the air with different lights & glooms, populating it, giving it variety & romance. Our best view is that we take from the hill top here; you see Rye pointed with lights, sombrely massed upon its hill; dark tonight as though the rain had drowned some of those fine points so star clear on other nights. And the land all round was black & turbulent as the sea; while we could still see the clouds changing & travelling in the air; only it seemed as though the air itself was all broken & confused, a shattered medium, no longer a tranquil void for clouds to sail in. The river lay quite pale at the base of the hill; the clearest & most peaceful thing in the landscape.

There is a certain evening hour, when the tides meet I think it is, when walking is the finest treat; even on a chill day such as this. The road is but a blurred grey vapour—& people & things come towards you all distorted & unfamiliar; walking too at a strange quick pace, upon you & past you before you expect it. The light of a carriage lamp cast on the hedge has the effect of some spectral shrouded figure, just about to taper into a point & disappear. Happy ecstasies float the mind out into the vague; spur it & seek not to recall it.

It is beautiful at evening to walk out along the bed of the sea—now all slippery hay coloured grass, with curving dykes, to Camber Castle, the grey trefoil which lies midway between Rye & Winchelsea. The grey of this old stone fuses the landscape, if, writing in haste & in private, I may so outrage—is it sense or sound?—All the view that is has a lovely pallor—whites & silver greens—pale straw colour; the pearl white sheep make the highest light in the landscape; & always on either side there are the two shaded bones of Rye & Winchelsea; Rye; it is true, still bristling with red roofs & chimneys, but Winchelsea all sunk into the dark layers of its foliage. In the background—if we walk upon a stage as it seems, with our faces to the audience of the sea, there are the softly flowing hills, & there behind Winchelsea a high screen of down, with an oblong church on the top of it. It is a view full of charm of a certain transparent lucidity; a little shallow, as though you could see through the tints if the light were just a trifle stronger; but at sunset the depth is exactly right, & luminous.

This morning the sound of a scythe sharpened proclaimed that it was the gardeners day. He comes only twice a week; Mr Gabriel is his name; he stands six foot, but his prodigious stoop must waste at least ten inches. All day long he has been swinging his scythe across the lawn, so regularly that you might fancy him a figure moved by clockwork. Nor did he pause. But when I went to pick roses, & complimented him on the fineness of the crop, he bent willingly, all tremulous & bedewed with his toil. His eyes had pale rings round the pupils as you have seen in the eye of some vague old dog: He settled the degree of heat, ‘the hottest day in the year,’ & answered my remark that Mrs. D[ew]. S[mith]. was a fine gardener with a contemptuous “She studies a bit. Ah, I dessay she knows something about roses—But look at the terrace there—one would have thought it nice to keep it neat. Borders is borders—terraces is terraces—What are the beds for, I ask her—but she will have flowers right there, in among the stone work—untidy it seems to me. But then its her fancy. We made the garden, Miss; made the steps & the beds; ah, it was hard work.”

Let me note the effect at Camber Castle tonight of the grey stone walls against a sky of scarlet plumes. The stones seemed as though blurred, with a rough surface, & the colour was more muffled than usual; with a suffusion of violet tint in it. The ring of castle wall holds in the heat, like a cup brimming with soft vapours.

The grass also within the circle is far softer, & richer, more of the nature of garden turf than the coarse sea-salt grass marsh land outside.

The chimneys of the town, rising in steps, make the outline, at a distance, of the little pyramid, bristle. All might still compress itself as though for safety, within the girdle of one wall; you see, from the East, tall lodging houses leaning back, their sides all ablaze with sheets of glass.

There is a little angle, in the town wall, a ledge with a seat running along it—a railing to save one from the precipice, where the natives of Rye nightly observe the sunset. The sun sets just behind Winchelsea, staining all that steep space of air & chequering the marsh land with liquid yellows, & mellow shadows, before blotting it out once again for another night. The mounds, or cliffs,—you cant call them hills, so sudden & unexpected are they, solidify as evening draws on, & make great soft blots on the landscape, otherwise so wide & simple. And then the sea is still there to the South, hoarding the last blue, & still going about its business, carrying ruddy fishing boats, & all the busy craft of steamers. Now there is a pale yellow light, opening & shutting as some single eye, & a breeze drives the old creatures who are drinking their last dose of sunlight, to shelter. Will they have a lamp, & read some pious gross old book? or the letter from some daughter in service? You meet the same people night after night.

19 September

Here I shall make a short note of an effect last night. I had been half asleep over a wood fire, which with its dry brittle heat & its light clouds of smoke always induces a curious drugged sleep, almost intolerably heavy. Well, drifting about in this for hours as I thought, I got up at last, like a diver rising from depths of water, & went out upon the terrace, where A. was looking at the moon. Then dreadful weariness came over me that we should still be the same people, in the same bodies; wandering not quite alive, nor yet suffered to die, in this pale light. Sleep & night, I thought, should blot us out, for some time; but here we are as circumscribed as ever. This is the effect though of a night which is not night; the process seems continued indefinitely, & infinitely drearily.

September here means that the poles are stripped naked of the garlands of hops. Indeed a hop field is a graceful place, sweetly planted with alleys, & laced across with tender green ribbons; the earth is all flecked yellow & green & you walk beneath shade. Now I say, this has gone, as though beneath the blast of a storm; & the shadows, as it is September, are perceptibly thinner, nor is the coolness they offer grateful after the tempered though cheerful heat of the sun. Often I have observed this to change; the substance, the lushness, is gone out of things; hedges & fields, the sky & the trees—all are fresh & shrivelled a little, before the winter frosts. And yet, on a generous day, no light is lovelier, warmer, more melancholy; as of some perpetual afternoon.

[]

Wells and Manorbier August 1908

Wells 1 to 14 August

When I read this book, which I do sometimes on a hot Sunday evening in London, I am struck by the wildness of its statements—the carelessness of its descriptions—the repetition of its adjectives—& in short I pronounce it a very hasty work, but excuse myself by remembering in what circumstances it was written. After a days outing, or when half an hour is vacant, or as a relief from some Greek tragedy—at different times, & in different moods it is written, & I am certain that if I imposed any other conditions upon myself it would never be written at all. Did I not take it to Cornwall at Easter, & determine to note something serviceable—& did I even write my address?

So once more I return to the old method; & protesting merely, that I am conscious of its faults—the protest of vanity.

I live in these lodgings about as near the sacred precincts as possible. Bells toll, & people shuffle down the Close to prayers. It is exactly the place in which some grey superstition should linger; what breath can ever blow down these crooked alleys, all crusted with medieval stone; a print of Wells in the 17th Century is precisely the same as a photograph of Wells in the 19th. But if Christianity is ever tolerable, it is tolerable in these old sanctuaries; partly because age has robbed it of its power, & you can fondle a senile old creature, when you must strike with all your force at [a] young & lusty parson. [ ] Nevertheless the young minister to the old; there are theological students everywhere, young men lately come from college, who give up their days to studying its laws, & will give up their lives to expounding them. As a matter of fact they will hunt, & fish, & live much the same lives as the smaller country gentry. The Cathedral of course dominates the whole place, & Wells without it is no more than a pleasant country town, with the usual number of antiquities: I believe I wrong it though. Certain night walks have shown me battlements & a moat; & there is a stately square, which, when I first saw it, was crowded with farmers, listening in a circle, to the vociferations of a little old man in a cap & gown; he walked round & round his compound, in the middle of which a boy held his standard—a flaring gas jet. He bade the rustics not envy the rich—He had supple lips, & an infinite succession of phrases, though why he used them, I could not tell. Perhaps the peroration was to celebrate some brand of pills, for he did not look a disinterested servant of truth.

When I came here first, in the evening, I was delighted by the little wave like hills which seemed to form all round me; to culminate in one high mound, upon which stood the oblong of Glastonbury Tor. Daylight shows that the country is full of curves & on one side they rise & continue very high—&, a mile or two outside the town become the Mendips. Somerset farm houses are built of grey stone, are of great age, have a way of backing into some recess at the base of a down, as though to make room for the flat lawn, protected by a wall, which generally lies before them. They are sheltered places.

Mrs. Wall was heard to night holding one of her long gossips with her ‘gentlemen.’ “The Church, she was saying, is like a tree.” And then the metaphor blossomed; & I think ‘Chaplers’ were a blight, & Atheists a canker—She is a Conservative, & distrusts working men who rule—would show them their weaknesses if she were consulted—for she is the staunchest believer in the Church, & the Superior powers of the Gentry, who treat her so kindly. Of course she gets more consideration from them than from her own class, with a glamour over it all.

But she deserves a little closer attention. When I first saw her, wavering about in the passage with clasped hands & bent shoulders, ready to welcome me, but keeping her distance, I said This is exactly what I had imagined of Mrs. Wall. She does not change, but is a subtler study than I expected. She has had this house for 30 years, & the number of students she has had in her charge must be some hundreds. She speaks of them as ‘my gentlemen’ or, when she warms, ‘my boys.’ ‘It hurts me when they go, as though I lost a child.’ She has been intimate with many, not a landlady, but a comfortable old gossip & confidante. It begins with care for their teas & dinners, & she keeps an eye on their punctuality, & would perhaps say something if they missed a lecture, or stayed too late in bed. She knows more than they do—who stay a year & pass on—of rules & characters, & must often put them up to useful information. They in their turn, ask after her rheumatics, & spoil her cat. So far as I know her, she is a woman of patient, deft & indefatigable industry—whose garrulity is checked by the fact that she must be sewing or cleaning; but she begins, I suspect, to allow herself liberties; & the middle aged daughter, who has a kindly pride in the multifarious memories of her mother, eggs her on to waste a little time. But the mother is not to be hoodwinked, & believes that she does her work still better than any younger woman. I can imagine that she is jealous of all the insignia of her office—the keys—& gold—& ordering of provisions, & will not entrust them to any one else.

Indeed, a woman of 75, who has had ten children, placed them & lost them, a widow, who for 30 years has paid her rent, & kept her house going, must have come by a certain insight & tact besides what we call commonly ‘knowledge of the world’. I can imagine shrewd wisdom issuing from her lips, in no weak shape; & a distinct course taken deliberately, through difficult matters.

But in spite of this sharpness, she is not one of the rulers, & dwells with the mildest optimism upon her past & the present round her. Small things occupy her, & her tongue is always ready to tell you a story about the greatness of the Tudway family, or the weather, or the cat, or, of course, she will dwell indefinitely upon her gentlemen. She has a sitting room, where every visitor, I suspect, has to do homage; there are lines of little photographs of young mens heads; there are pictures of Wells, & pictures of Bishops; she has a story for each of them, &, generally, a word of praise & gratitude for his kindness.

Never was there a more amiable, useful old creature than Mrs Wall; & I expect that if we knew all her life we should judge it one of the happiest. She begins to talk, not of retirement, but of death; ‘I tell’em I shant be here next time’—the time she means being the commemoration, which takes place once in four years. ‘Still, she adds, with a contented little smile, I said that last time—& here I am still!”

The Close has filled itself with theological students, & I am not sorry to leave. For they live a healthy life, in & out all day, much conversation, meetings on the stairs, greetings at the gate—till the cheery male voice is as the drone of bluebottles in my ear.

I have moved to a dusky old house in the Green; one of those spacious houses, which are rather shabby & threadbare now, but were built for prosperity. A candle has to burn perpetually in a corner, to illumine the steep stairs; which have bannisters of carved oak & great oaken balls at the landing. A tree, all draped with foliage stands directly in front of the windows, & increases the dimness of the atmosphere within. The Cathedral Green is rather spent by the time it reaches this far corner, & the grass, upon which you may not walk, elsewhere, seems here to lose its sacred character & to become a playground of the children of the neighbouring houses. My house has two children attached to it, & I [am] led to think a good deal about the nature of children. They play all day in front of me. Did I ever play all day when I was a child? I cant remember it. They have no regular games, or hours; but merely tumble about, hit at balls, upset chairs, run into the house & out again, fall & hurt themselves, fly into passions, & talk incessantly. At a certain hour, the smallest child, aged 3, gets tired & runs off to her mother, who puts her to bed; she wakes, & comes out to join the sport again. Now, if they could think on waking, that today was to be like other days, & they would do no more than kick a ball, would they enjoy it? I believe not. The truth is, that each kick is an adventure, that may be entirely unlike anything else; each time they come trolling into the green, they really see something not seen before, or feel some new sensation. To wear a new hat is an immense pleasure, so Audrey, the 3 year old, told me. Or perhaps, it would be more accurate to say that these hours are so full of disconnected incidents that they really never perceive that they do the same things again & again. They never have a theory or could tell you how they spend their time.

This county has to my mind one fatal fault—no sea. Hills really exist solely that you may have a wide view from them of the sea, the horizon, & one or two ships between. Then you get a kind of flow of life round you; you return content to the same fields again. But when you see nothing but land, stationary on all sides, you are conscious of being trapped, on a flat board. Yesterday however, did its best to shroud this fact; all the air was hung with tattered clouds—or watery drifts of air, not rounded into a form; the most beautiful sky there is, perhaps; it is always moving, always letting through different lights & shades on to the land below. It is a wide land, uneasy, like the sea, full of mounds, & high lines into the horizon. When the sun gleamed, great bones of green & brown earth showed in the middle of this scene, which was coloured like some drawing in brown ink. The kingdoms of the world lay before me, a rich domain, teeming in the folds with apples, & meadows, with gray villages snug in hollows, & little steeples. Far away the sea, into which the land may spill its treasure. In Cornwall, I never think of the kingdom, or the population—this view, stands for many I suppose, as a symbol of their mother England—

[August 1908]

Manorbier is as different a place from Wells as I could have chosen. It is a lean country, scarcely inhabited, & the one church which does duty for many miles, is a threadbare place, a grey barn some 5 centuries old, to which a tower has been added at one end. The little bay however, is guarded by an immense mass of ruin, the Castle; it is still foursquare, &, it is dark—you see a red glow in some of the slits & openings, which tells that some one finds it still stout enough to live in. Why anyone found it necessary to build such a fortress here, I cannot remember; & at present the character of the land seems markedly worn & poverty stricken, as though it could not support such a monster; or perhaps lay cowed beneath its feet. However this may be, I like my view of it. I have lodgings in a perfectly genuine cottage, inhabited by a stone mason & his wife. I sit in a room that corresponds to their kitchen, & observe the road. In the evening I walk down to the beach, which I have to myself, & pace a turn or two beside the sea. I like to turn back from looking out along the uneasy & melancholy gray surface, to find a beautiful reflection of it in the gray ruin, & the green & gray sand hills, sprinkled with sheep, which is just colonised by a dozen sky gray cottages. No one will ever make this a watering place, I prophesy; it wants somehow the boldness & self confidence to be a success. I have not walked far, but my investigations tend to show that there is something a little weak in the coast. It is just too low, or too sharp to be impressive. The land within swells into long breakers. I walked through a little village the other day, which seemed to me as deserted as any I had seen. There were cottages splashed with cream coloured wash, out of which came bent old women, of tremendous age; their faces were all white ridges, without any spirit left. Ah, the loneliness of these little distant places! I saw that the pillar box was all discoloured; & there was only one house that tried to be a house—to wear the distinct dress. It had some odd ornament of piled stones in the gateways.

I come down from my room in Mr Barclays house at about half past nine, blowing out my lamp, & leaving my books. Sometimes it is quite calm, & gray outside; but tonight I was fairly whirled round by the wind & the rain. The only guide I had was the crunch of gravel beneath my feet—I could neither see nor hear. Suppose a cart advanced I should embrace the horse before I saw him. However I had but 200 yards to walk, & by moving my legs automatically, I became aware of a shape like the keel of a large boat on one side of me, & the faint refulgence of window. Still other people are on the roads, leading their horses, or driven to turn in at wayside cottages—The wind is really high; it is sensible peace to sit as I do, behind a pane of glass, with a glaring lamp beside me; even so, gusts get at my candle. I can’t read at ease, for the wind is always leaping on to its own back. I hear water too, & the fluttering of a little bush beside my window. Think of the earth given up to this power tonight!

[]

Italy 1908

ITALY.
September. 1908.

milan.
siena.
perugia.

[In the original volume the autograph calendar and timetable below face p. 317.)

Birth.

up bringing.

sensitive

precocious.

honest.

took kind.

college.

Paris.

Separates himself too emphatically.

Considers himself a thing to be polished separately.

Considers his gifts.

Affections.

knows the worth of all his endowments.

Cultivates friendship

Cynicism. self consciousness.

likes his own good manners.

It is important to remember Clive’s birth & education when you consider his character. He is the son of a substantial country family, who are without culture or pretension, but spend their lives in the most sensible occupations, & are perfectly sure of their object. Not one of the arts, even in its baser forms, is suffered to disturb them, so that their views & conduct are of the most direct kind, & have probably a great deal of virtue in them.

When Clive went to public school, he realised that he differed from his relations in certain ways; first, I suppose, he was only conscious that the furniture in their house was oppressive; & he wondered, vaguely, why people should say such solemn things. He began, perhaps, to give himself little airs when he came back for the holidays, & was surprised to find that his rash statements were combated, as though the order of life, which he disliked, were not impregnable. Besides, his boldness, though it was laughed at, came to be expected of him; & he found himself with a reputation for originality. This reception made him precocious; he took to reading; he saw literature first as a long series of triumphs. When you had despatched Hamlet you were ready to attack Browning, & he had the sense in reading every book that he was providing himself with talismans to be used against the cheerful flattering people who teased him & admired him in the holidays. He was puzzled to discover how his knowledge was to be brought into play; & for the most part walked about stuffed up with it, or produced it with the most violent distortions which even his self love could not approve of altogether.

He quoted Shakespeare in a shrill triumphant voice, when there was no occasion for it, & scorned the young lady who asked him for the name of the author. Unfortunately, no one at the family table could carry on the discussion & Clive in a year or two tired of these public triumphs, & wanted some one who would talk to him about history.

When he was about sixteen, & had been carrying on this random intellectual strife for a year or so, it suddenly came over him that he belonged to the select race of people who are called clever. In his case, the discovery led to considerable changes in his point of view; for he determined to specialise. He saw, in a moment, what he had been aiming at, in those crude attempts to impress his sisters, & convert his uncle; & he saw also that the attempt was futile. For his schoolmasters who began to take notice of him, opened up such a view of the intellectual life, impressed him so indelibly with the brilliance of it, & the unlikeness which it had to anything he had ever seen before, that he cherished no more illusions about his home. At the same time he was convinced that he was destined to be a scholar. He made great advances in his work, & was confirmed in his opinion of himself by the distinctions which came to him.

He might have been pardoned if, at this stage in his career he had been more selfish & conceited than boys usually are; but it is much to his credit that he was always gentle at home, & ready to talk, had there been anyone to talk to. Some of his efforts to find sympathy had grotesque results. The first young lady he danced with, at his first ball, had to hear a strange rhapsody—about art, & learning, & the only life worth living. He got into correspondence with the most encouraging of these ladies, who was something over thirty, & sent her the poems which, much to his surprise, he found that he could write quite easily. [Text ends here.]

There are many ways of writing such diaries as these. I begin to distrust description, & even such humorous arrangement as makes a days adventure into a narrative; I should like to write not only with the eye, but with the mind; & discover real things beneath the show. In default of this—& I shall neither have time nor perseverance for much thought, I know, I shall try to be an honest servant, gathering such matter as may serve a more skilled hand later—or suggest finished pictures to the eye.

The fact is, that in these private books, I use a kind of shorthand, & make little confessions, as though I wished to propitiate my own eye, reading later.

Besides I feel (at the moment) great distrust of my own words. Is it worth while to write? As I have had some amusement from reading about Greece, I may as well do what I can with Italy.

There is not much to be said of Milan; unless it be that we entered here into Italian life. We walked out in the busy noisy streets, & felt irresponsible; tramped in the roadway; looked about a great deal without thinking much—understood vaguely that the populace were of the same mood.

There are great flat houses painted some clear colour, & decorated with bright green squares, at intervals. Flower pots make a graceful festoon of leaves on some of the ledges. It is all a little dusty, very dramatic—yellow walls defined against green plumage of parks. You exclaim Oh—& Ah—at the corners—so different from an English town in the provinces. I liken it to a sketch in water colour, by some spirited though not quite excellent master hand. It is much more sincere & sure of itself than we are, in our Brightons & Oxfords, as though done after some design, which the nature of colour & climate suggested.

Coming to Siena late at night, there was a charming landscape, like of course, backgrounds in Early Italian pictures—sharp blue hills, trees in profile against it—the Arno with a grey blue colour in its waters.

Siena itself is on the top of a hill, & all the streets go plunging down, or up, to the Cathedral on the summit.

They are paved with flat sheets of stone & are kept very clean; no raised pavement separates the street. People walk incessantly, burst into song now & again; there are cries, cracking of whips, clatter of hoofs. We visited the Cathedral, on the occasion of some festival. It is striped black & white, with rose colour & blue in the arches; golden knobs; a ceiling of azure; fruits, faces, beasts, carved on every pinnacle or angle. In the chapels there were glittering images, & candles; & the high altar had all its tiers of wax alight. There were gorgeous priests, ministering here, with their backs to us, from which yellow satins gold embroidered, hung in stiff squares. One had a white hat, like the petal of a cyclamen, on his head.

It was the feast of the Virgin, & a large crowd, in their Sunday dress, had come to worship. A strange worship compared with ours! Instead of rank of seats, movements all in order, & a service like a military performance, no single worshipper here knew what his neighbour did or seemed to attend to the clerical commands. The priests themselves were passing & repassing, forming into lines, changing vestments, & rapidly carrying on the ceremonials all the time, as though they were doing a mystic rite, not understood by the people. The people looked, wandered about, sank on their knees, & rose again; their faith seemed warm & private, not to be regulated by any common need. I fancied, however, that this very decorative performance did represent to them the sacred body of their religion; sealed within these yellow & inlaid casks—I supposed that all the glories of the Heavens had this tangible form for them—the more impressive because of all these mysterious weavings & symbols.

They smell the flowers that grew in the holy fields; imagine the Cross risen, & the body upon it; it is all yellow stained, splendid, & remote. Are these priests—or are they not rather people who were present at the scene themselves? The Bishop sat on his carved throne, with his buckled shoes pompously displayed, his hands hid beneath his satin apron, & his face composed into a mask of rosy wax, smooth, & not a little contemptuous of earthly strife.

One little flat case holds all my travelling library. But happily you get the classics now, pressed & light, with decent print, though it lies thinly upon the page, & the paper shines, with only a faint leaden gloss, if you get it in the light. Is Thomas Hardy among the Classics?

I have been reading Two on a Tower, & asking myself that question. Let me see if I can discover an impression of the book & give reasons for it. In the first place, his conceptions are almost always bold, as though he despised mere form. It struck him to contrast the stars with minute human loves. Well, then—he must construct a star to express his meaning. There is a certain gaunt honesty in his way of setting to work. He constructs a tower, puts an astronomer on top of it, & sends a country lady exploring there. At first you see it is the idea of the sky that is uppermost in his mind; he tries to render that—& does, I think, succeed excellently. He can always impress an idea upon your mind because he is perfectly sincere, & reflects certain aspects unflinchingly. They are grim or grotesque for the most part, but true as daylight. So, in his sturdy way, he shoots your mind up among the stars; explains different forms of wonder; notes, grimly enough, the immensity of the sky. His descent is not so successful I think. The loves of the mortals are angular for the most part. Still there are little scenes, like that of the choristers met in Mrs. Martins cottage, which are evidently literal copies, touched with humour. Lady Constantine is the difficulty—the block that wont fuse, & yet must always come into play. The story is too fantastic; she has a husband, absent in Africa, who enjoins her to live in solitude. Hardy, moreover, distrusts ladies who live in drawing rooms; his boots creak & he does not know where to put his hat. They remind me always of Keene drawings, of English women in the 70ties, bunched skirts, straight lines beneath the petticoat, & fingers like tallow candles. The objection however is very much smoothed away, in the course of the story; mainly I think, because Swithin, the astronomer, is understood. His relationship to her—the relationship of a very young, austere boy, with a students arrogance alight in him, making him a simple & perfectly logical figure, shows us what Lady Constantine felt—how she was older, soft, maternal; loved the temper that hurt her. But having established this position, Hardy goes on to complicate the story by means of the most arbitrary conventions. He forces his warm human beings against a wire frame work of plot, as though they could not stand up by themselves. There are all kinds of surprises, & deceptions; & instead of thinking of the stars or human love you think of letters & dates, hidden names & so forth. This, I conceive, is a pity, & hinders Hardy from being among the classics. You almost put him there for the sake of his intense original stare at things; he sees the country with unveiled eyes & sees angles & colours, that have been there from dawn, unnoticed by others. It is natural to him to see things always with a sort of rude honesty upon them, as though, at last, they had a chance to protest against the embellishments of the poets.

We are very leisurely travellers. We dip into one church or gallery in the morning, sit in our shaded rooms till it is time for tea, & the whole of our exercise consists of a gentle walk in the sunset upon the platform of the Fortezza. This lies at the end of the gardens, & meditative pedestrians & peramulators [sic], old ladies with knitting & old gentlemen with newspapers, are the regular occupants. The fashion keeps to the carriage road, & the beggars have the ingenuity to choose their pitch by the wayside. The fortress upon which we walk is a high angular piece of ground, railed on all sides by a parapet; for the wall is a hundred feet or so in depth. If you lean over the edge you see steep vineyards beneath you, sharp ridges of bare earth rise everywhere, sprinkled, but never clothed with vines & olive trees. The earth, in Italian landscape, is always coming through the sparse vegetation. Beyond, there are hills encircling us, which soon grow blue, though they rarely carry much weight of clouds upon them. The trees on our eminence glow, as though some yellow painters-medium were brushed over them. It is infinitely pleasant to sit & let the heat of the day recede, till a breeze springs, & it is time for dinner. There are flowers with voluminous yellow petals, in the gardens, & trees decorated as with red rosettes. They have few leaves to bear such splendour.

This view which I speak of across the vineyards makes no offer of a walk. The earth affords no shelter, no soft places, but every foots space of it is laid bare to the eye. There are single roads, one suspects, leading from village to village. On every eminence a large white or brown villa has perched itself, so that the land, though so wild, is not lonely. No park, or clump of trees hide these naked places. At night as we sit on our terrace we see them lighted at either end; the lights go out very early. You get the impression of an immensely old civilisation; for the land everywhere is under the eyes of the cultivator, & no stretch of it is left alone.

We take our meals in company. A kind of conversation is started by these seasoned guests which has little likeness to any other form of talk. It seems to assert always that it is never going to become intimate; & yet it is kindly, humorous, & incessant. Travel, naturally plays a large part. ‘Have you seen’ & so on. To discuss ideas is hardly legitimate; nor should one ask for a name or profession. Two at least of the guests have the peculiar stamp of the veteran lodger; they look up when a new guest arrives & are ready to place him in the catalogue of lodgers; they have faint pleasure in novelty, for their stories run dry. One old lady in particular, seems to have been sitting there since the early fifties of the last century. She has spent her life, so far as she will reveal it, in travelling & testing the merits of different pensions. She pronounces the table here the best in Italy. At the same time she shows no enthusiasm; the life of a lodger is one of perpetual hostility.

Poor, a spinster, who begins to grow old, to travel is really her most agreeable life. I figure her the Aunt of large families of little country gentry; she has a certain distinction because she can talk of her travels. She professes to find English life lacking in colour, & sets off on these long rambling peregrinations, from one cheap pension to another, never leaving the hackneyed towns, or seeing much in them. She sits all day in a corner of the dining room, knitting, or writing in a fretful hand long letters to old friends; she waits for meals & watches the dish on its way round the table. Certain old gentilities forbid her to gobble openly, & in the pauses between the plates she discharges a vast amount of faded learning, savouring of the 60ties, when she drove over the Apennines in a great sun bonnet. She knows nothing accurately, but arrogates to herself a certain authority because she first saw pictures fifty years ago. She was taught French in Bath by an old gentleman who was page to Marie Antoinette—hints that her education was that of a lady.

Catch her though when she is silent & it is difficult to detect any life in her. You seek it in the eye; it is dull & fitful; her skin is like folds of old leather; creases are in the very flesh. But though the task seems so unnecessary, she will fill this torpid case with food & wine; what purpose they serve, let philanthropists declare.

Now & then, excited by an eddy of life, she ventures out into the full current of general talk—& volunteers some correction or theory of her own—at which we can only be silent, or perhaps, trusting her infirmities, smile in secret; she flounders deep, suspects some hostility, flushes, becomes emphatic—& tries to overawe us with a tremulous flourish, of venerable authorities. Poor old Lady! This venture was unsuccessful, & she retires to mumble peevishly, but her brain sinks into torpor once more. Food consoles her.

We have come on here to Perugia, & exchange the simplicities & familiar meals of Siena for all the comfort of a Grand Hotel. The person of an English clergyman in evening dress dilutes the Italian atmosphere at once, you see it all as a cultivated show, somehow regulated so as to suit the taste of respectable English clerics, & satisfy their aesthetic needs. The scene after dinner is as like that wh. takes place in an English drawing room as possible; here on one sofa the thin, clean old lady reads about the Catholic conference, with her plain daughter by her side, industriously; the pretty one, with great curves of red & white flesh on her bones, leans back to look up into the parsons face, & laugh friendlily when he speaks. Her mood is invariable; she is as simple in her heart as on her lips; The deepest of her plots is to be mistress of a good mans home, & bear him children.

She would blush that you should guess it, but everyone can see that the cheerfulness & sweet temper, which compose her charms & wiles, proceed directly from such ambition; no one could blame them, & there is something so perpetual about them, that it seems as tho’ generation[s] of mothers had found them effective & bequeathed them as sufficient armour to their daughters. Viewed in this light, there is cause for alarm, & even for disgust. Old mother nature is not a skinflint; human beings might soar very high so long as such tools are adequate.

Perugia is circled by two or three roads, one above the other; & our hotel is perched with a few streets & squares, upon the very summit. When I look out of my window I see heads only in motion, & all the secret places on a crowd of roofs; here I see a hole, where the water will come through, unknown to the occupant; there is a servants window ledge with her cracked pots of green plants; here a tile sticks out, & a blue frock is hung to dry from it; the attic, where washing hangs out of the window to dry. But these brown roofs are very closely held in; & the country springs cut free directly beyond them. There are definite hills, ribbed with lines of olive & shaded here & there with trees, which have dark knobs for heads. A single road, laid upon them like an angular piece of tape, can be traced to the summit; in the sun the prospect is too bare to enchant me. In the evening however, when we take our walk along one of these circular roads, the fine blue mist has transformed them, the distant sky has lines upon it, as though faint layers of water colour had been left to dry; & had receded, leaving one distinct edge. The blue is entirely with out vapour.

A strange effect is produced when a whole tableful of live English people review the pictures of the old masters. Their ‘art’ seems a thing called forth from the mists & bade stand out in a continuous line, until it reaches us here in the 20th century. We seem to think each verdict we pass has power to change it; these good people rest cheeks against it, distinguish its virtues, flatter themselves that they have some power over it. When we look at it in another way though, it is more humiliating; for it is the unchanging thing, & shows us up as shadows against it. It bids us reveal ourselves. All the pleasure we take in a picture does not put us in possession of it; our mouthings before it, rearrangements & so on, will be smoothed out in a year or so. The picture has undergone these modulations from a dozen generations without change. It seems strange that painting should still be upholding such insignificant old women as the lady we met at Siena, giving them permission as it seems, to crawl over them for a space, & pretend dominion, representing something in them. She had a thing in her mind which she called her love of art; & assumed that her mind was the point where, for the moment, the arts of all ages met together. By the light in her brain centuries were illuminated. Perugino, Michael Angelo, Mantegna were dark without it.

I read Harry Richmond at Siena. I complain that Meredith fails to satisfy me, at the same time that I recognise a remarkable brain. Instead of supporting his fabric, as Hardy does, with an intricate wire netting, Meredith contents himself, as I think, with flimsy vapour, shot with all the colours of the sunset, but without substance where there should be substance. His mind seems to be so stuffed with conceits that he never allows himself to dispense with them, to look quite frankly, or perhaps, is conscious that his power is not for seeing into things, but for covering them with a light of his own. So, at those times when sharp emotion requires that peoples characters should be distinct, that you may understand their action & feel its force, a fiery rhapsody obscures them completely. Has he really made so sure of his subjects that he can exhibit them in crisis? The temptation is great I imagine to cover them with brilliant generalities; explorers [?] of poetry—epigrams—aphorisms; birthday book compilers will find such pages in Meredith full of treasure. I doubt though that the patient reader takes away one complete character, consistently developed. This failure is due to the intense centralisation of Merediths mind; all its power seems pent up within his own forehead, & turned upon the singular objects to be found there. In his novels, then, we get the shadow of something magnificent, & without likeness; red silhouettes of men, extravagant grotesques, an earth & sky all on fire as in perpetual sunset. It is a world of his own, as one says of the great writers; & so far, he too is a great writer. But now & again, as in Harry & Ottilia’s love scene by the lake, in the adventures of the Priscilla, & the final catastrophe, there is something surely not of Merediths world, or of our world; cardboard mountains have been lifted from the stage, light is made of time; I suppose that supreme cleverness, long underrated, tempts him to such imposition. The public he thinks is too stupid to find out, & by degrees he deceives himself.

A hot afternoon!—the sun strikes straight at me; masons are tapping perpetually at the roofs—however, let me try to grasp some ideas about painting.

I looked at a fresco by Perugino. I conceive that he saw things grouped, contained in certain & invisible forms; expression in faces, action—&c. did not exist; all beauty was contained in the momentary appearance of human beings. He saw it sealed as it were; all its worth in it; not a hint of past or future. His fresco seems to me infinitely silent; as though beauty had swum up to the top, stayed there, above everything else, speech, paths leading on, relation of brain to brain, dont exist.

Each part has a dependence upon the others; they compose one idea in his mind. That idea has nothing to do with anything to be put into words. A group stands without relation to the figure of God. They have come together then because their lines & colours are related, & express some view of beauty in his brain.

As for writing—I want to express beauty too—but beauty (symmetry?) of life & the world, in action. Conflict?—is that it?

If there is action in painting it is only to exhibit lines; but with the end of beauty in view. Isn’t there a different kind of beauty? No conflict.

I attain a different kind of beauty, achieve a symmetry by means of infinite discords, showing all the traces of the minds passage through the world; & achieve in the end, some kind of whole made of shivering fragments; to me this seems the natural process; the flight of the mind. Do they really reach the same thing?

Perugia

When you walk out of the front door here you find yourself apparently upon a parade, with the sea beneath. A blue vapour fills in the spaces between the white columns of the parapet; & the people are leaning & looking over, as they do at the sea side. But in truth it is dry land beneath, dropped down some distance; there are curved vineyards, groves of olives, & the hills which rise against the sky seem about on the level of our heads. At sunset, of course, there is a tremendous display; clouds of flamingo scarlet, & of the shape of curled feathers; spaces of crimson, with bars upon them; hills laid against the furnace so that their little fringe of trees is visible; but I like the foreground best with its soft green & brown, & its highest light the dull white enamel of the road.

After tea, instead of rummaging the streets after the fashion of our compatriots, we choose one of the roads which we can follow from our windows, & descend into the valley. Small paths branch at intervals, & lead between the vineyards. They are stony; lead past little square farms, washed salmon pink. Italian peasants are driving their ploughs through earth which has the appearance of extreme antiquity; it is so brown & dry that all the oil which holds the clods together must have been baked out of it. A pair of oxen, who are unwieldy & much given to contemplation, carry out this clumsy labour, & are of great value, for the sake of their creamy white colour, in the brown & grey landscape.

It is perhaps because I compare Umbrian vineyards with English fields that I am slow to come at any picture of this place. The divisions at first seemed to me perplexing: I found no solitude & no wildness; there were no deep clumps of shade, no fields with long grasses. The ground is singularly bare, & stony; brittle looking granaries of old pink brick, are dotted here & there, & perhaps there is an archway where women sit, handling maize. The snug circle of our farmyard does not exist. But the place is beautiful; the twisted little trees, now green, now black against the sky, are full of lines; lovely are the peaks in the distance, like a great encampment of tents of all sizes; here before us is Perugia on its hill, with all its long towers & square blocks massed in out line; there is no softness, nothing indistinct, but I begin to see that there is a character in this land, with its gnarled little trees, & its sharp outlines, which would soon make all other scenery insipid.

We spent the day at Assisi. It fronts us, on its hill top, some sixteen miles away, & between lies a perfectly flat space, lined with rows of trees, bearing the Tiber upon it. Assisi is another of these pyramid-shaped towns, which ascend with tier upon tier of whitish brown houses, till they culminate in a dome, or a long gallery of arches. Immense bare hills lie behind the town. When we had inspected the church we strolled through the streets. As usual, the houses are very high, & the streets narrow, so that if you laid a strip of roof across the top you would make a deep tunnel. In this instance the houses were rather splendid, with great windows & balconies, door ways fortified with stone, but all the shutters were up, or swung open idly, so that you could fancy great empty rooms within. The streets were deserted, save for a donkey cart, or an old woman squatted against the wall. The hills & the wide stretch of country visible beneath you at the end of every street seem to make these cities a little incongruous. They seem to cling peacefully to their hill top—to offer lodgment for besieged men & women, who no longer require it.

[]

Florence 1909

FLORENCE
April 1909

25 April

It is with great timidity that I write, remembering strictures upon empty & ladylike writing. Browning, by attending to such criticism, mystified all generations. As for me—I write. The instinct wells like sap in a tree. The fault of most of my descriptive writing is that it tends to be too definite.

Florence

Descriptive writing is dangerous & tempting. It is easy, with little expense of brain power, to make something. One seizes some broad aspect, as of water or colour, & makes a note of it. This single quality gives the tone of the piece. As a matter of fact, the subject is probably infinitely subtle, no more amenable to impressionist treatment than the human character. What one records is really the state of ones own mind.

Looking at Florence the other evening I was much impressed by the subtlety of the colour. Of course the roofs are speckled brown—there are white walls, with ledges sticking out from them, & green shutters. The houses vary in size, & have projecting roofs. But the water—the sunset—the pale luminous stream—all rough where it falls over the decline—& the houses on the bank, with the red in their windows—to tell of this would need immense concentration. To make a good passage requires an heroic grinding of the mind—& here am I, half asleep.

Florence seems to me a very happy place. The poorest mother might let her children play among long grass, & wisteria blossoms. There are no dull streets. The smoke is like the trail of burnt leaves. Perfectly pure mud, with a fringe of grass, runs along the Arno. It is spacious, all wind blown, & sun baked, if clamorous, & pungent in smells.

The wisterias are in bloom—strange pale garlands, hanging against green leaves & blue sky. The little villas are set on all the ledges of the hills—gay little places, white & pink or yellow, suggestions of much happiness somehow. Today, as the wind blew, the hills were dusted with a cloud.

I do not think the hills themselves beautiful. The little valleys, up by San Miniato, which shelter nightingales, are beautiful; but these great mounds suggest a stage to my mind. However, the city is lovely—I compare it always to a great basket of white & brown eggs. Even the Duomo has something homely in its appearance. One thinks much of the astonishing beauty of the place—its effect on life—how once, this shell was all aglow. Think of the palaces lit by night, the villas with the lovers in the garden—the streets full of banners & men with striped legs walking in procession.

The discomfort of writing here is intense—constrains my style to be tense, in the form of lapidary inscriptions.

Walking on San Miniato the other evening, it occurred to me that the thing was running into classic prose before my eyes. I positively saw the long smooth sentence running like a ribbon along the road—casting graceful loops round the beggar woman & the dusky child—& curving freely over the bare slopes of the hills. London!

We lunched with Rezia today, met there the Countess & Joseph. The Countess is an Anglo Italian celebrity—a stout, decisive woman, broad, almost squat featured; her cheek dark red, & scarred by a dogs bite; her eye prominent—altogether her appearance is vigorous, imperious, & subtle too at the same time. She watches & springs, but calculations go on forever within the brain.

Look at the conflict of lines on the brow—She is much like a peasant woman; & is a woman of cultivation & race at the same time. Her talk was bold & free, also tentative. I suppose her reputation for learning is not based on the most solid foundations. On the other hand, her judgments of people are perfectly shrewd & unhesitating. A woman one guesses of many passions; with a great fervour for life. How many springs & autumns have found her intent on her game. She has not given an eye to the shapes & colours, perhaps—but in this I wrong her. She fingered Nessa’s jewels like a child.

The Count held me in the window. Agriculture was his topic. A dry elderly man with the skin round his eyes creased & indented, gone yellow in a circle—he talked of irrigation & crops, fitting together laborious sentences in French—a man infinitely bored, colourless, respectable, accustomed to wait patiently while his wife talks, & very glad to find someone to listen to him.

Today we had another experience of society. We had lunch with the art critic & his wife; & tea with Mrs. Ross. In case space should fail me (the candle gutters intolerably, & the ink oozes) I will describe the tea party. The worst of distinguished old ladies, who have known everyone & lived an independent life, is that they become brusque & imperious without sufficient wits to alleviate the manner. Mrs Ross lives in a great villa, is the daughter of distinguished parents; the friend of writers, & the character of the country side. She sells things off her walls. She is emphatic, forcible, fixes you with her straight grey eye as though it were an honour to occupy, even for a moment, its attention. The head is massive, it is held high; the mouth is coarse & the upper lip haired. Such old women like men, & have a number of unreasonable traditions. Pride of birth, I thought I detected; certainly she has that other pride, the pride which comes to those who have lived among the chosen spirits of the time. A word of family, & her wits were at work at once.

I know not why, but this type, which the Countess represents somewhat too, does not much attract me. Only one position is possible if you are a young woman: you must let them adopt queenly airs, with a touch of the maternal. She summons you to sit beside her, lays her hand for a moment on yours—dismisses you the next—to make room for some weakly young man. She has them to stay with her for months—likes them best when they are big & strong but will tolerate weakness for the sake of the sex. She has led a bold life, managing for herself, & an Englishwoman who dictates to peasants is apt to become domineering. However, there can be no question of her spirit—many portraits showed the intent indomitable face, in youth & middle age, it is still the same, beneath white hair. It proved her power that her drawing room filled with guests. She seemed to enjoy sweeping them about, without much ceremony. Parties were bidden to admire the garden; young men were commanded to hand cake. Among the guests was a lean, attenuated woman, who had a face like that of a transfixed hare—the lower part was drawn out in anguish—while the eyes appealed piteously. This was Mrs. Meynell, the writer; who somehow, made one dislike the notion of women who write. She clasped the arm of a chair, & seemed uncomfortably out of place.

This was no atmosphere for chaste expression—there was nothing to lay hold of. She walked with a curious forward spring, which, seeing that the body was spare & bony, encased too in black velvet, had an incongruous air. Once, no doubt, she was a poetess, & trod the fields of Parnassus. It is melancholy to trace even such words as Mrs. Meynells to a lank slightly absurd & altogether insignificant little body, dressed with some attempt at the fashion. Did Mrs Browning look like that too? And yet, poor woman, had the fire of Sappho burnt in her what else could she have done? These gatherings are brutal things. Or is my theory proved—a writer should be the furnace from which his words come—& tepid people, timid & decorous, never coin true words. The poor thing looked furtive, as though found out—run to earth. She had a plain asthmatic daughter. The wine further watered.

Laziness, or some feeling, akin to laziness perhaps, that the task was hard enough to require more thought than I could give it, prevented me from writing any thing more about Florence. Also, I became familiar with the marked aspects; & was on the search for something subtler. The scene is very emphatic in Italy, but I forbear to write of something hidden on the other side of the Alps. It is strange how one begins to hold a globe in ones head; I can travel from Florence to Fitzroy Square on solid land all the time. It would be possible, though, to note something about the people we met. There was for example that morbid young woman, Miss Murray. She was a dark, angular woman, aged perhaps 35. The only notable thing about her was the fixity with which she looked at you. It seemed to show an intense, & perhaps limited spirit. She asked me to have tea with her one night. There was a strange lack of what one may call atmosphere about her. Although I was a stranger, she made no attempt to entertain me. We were soon on the rocks. She told me her history of course; & what feelings ruled her. She has to live in pensions because she has an invalid mother. She would like to teach physical culture in a school. To console herself she has recourse to Indian philosophies, which preach mystic doctrine, as I gathered. She had intuitions, & thought herself very morbid. She could fix her mind, for example, upon a stone, until it included the whole world of flesh & spirit. She was indifferent to death. Her morbidity consisted in the fact that she knew that she was singular, & made efforts to approach other people, always conscious of her unlikeness to them. If she had really believed in her stones, I suppose, she would have understood people by the light of them. Poor young woman! It seemed to me infinitely arid, & out of tune. She was without humour, strained, & slightly elderly, & what imagination she had took this mystic form, which is imagination disembodied. And yet I think she was honest, unselfish, & clever above the average. I am never comfortable with these acute analytical minds. They seem to me to miss the point, & yet light on something which one cant deny.

Then there was Mrs. Campbell. A glance at her told one much, in a second. She is a tall old lady, aged over seventy, with white hair & a cap. She has a delicate face, with a clear cut nose, & expressive wrinkles. Her eyes are dim & kindly. She is clearly refined, cultivated, & by birth & tradition habitually polite. The thing that distinguishes her from other dignified old ladies is that she has a genuine flicker of humour, which lightens her good qualities—gives them point. She gave me the impression of a wavering flame, pale & thin of course, but still undoubtedly alive. I had reason to know, because I sat next her, & we had a charming relationship. It was charming because it was sincere, as far as might be. We played our parts of young woman & old woman. She answered my questions; which I made in as true a spirit as I could, pressing to the verge of impertinence. She saw that I was genuine in my interest, & this flattered her; in return she was playful, tender & affectionate, as one who knows much because she has lived, & can presume upon her knowledge without much acquaintance with individuals. Age gives her the right; besides the attitude which it produces is the most intimate possible between the different ages. When you have brought two daughters into the world, it is possible to take many things for granted in talking to younger women. It amused me to trace her natural conventions & prejudices; to mark how gently but firmly she insisted that she had lived most of her life in Mayfair, & married one daughter to a Member of Parliament who lives in Chesterfield Street, & the other to a soldier in the Lancers. Little facts produced at intervals showed how she wished to build up the figure of a well born Irish woman, educated by all the best masters, most carefully brought up in Belgravia; & she wished me to know these facts because she thought them something to be proud of; because she admired the dignity, kindliness & charity of the type they produce. She was no snob, though doubtless some of her content with her own advantages was not quite rational. She was Irish, & had therefore a faintly mystic turn, showing itself in a love of art & scenery in preference to people, & in a charming piety. She wrote devout books,—had done the life of Father Damien into rhyme. I expect that her writing is graceful, & fresh, with no originality or much power.

[]

THE COMMON READER: FIRST SERIES.

[◉1] Love and Freindship, Chatto and Windus.

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

[◉3] How violent these are two quotations will show. “It [Told by an Idiot] should be read as the Tempest should be read, and as Gulliver’s Travels should be read, for if Miss Macaulay’s poetic gift happens to be less sublime than those of the author of the Tempest, and if her irony happens to be less tremendous than that of the author of Gulliver’s Travels, her justice and wisdom are no less noble than theirs.”—The Daily News.

The next day we read: “For the rest one can only say that if Mr. Eliot had been pleased to write in demotic English The Waste Land might not have been, as it just is to all but anthropologists, and literati, so much waste-paper.”—The Manchester Guardian.

ORLANDO: A BIOGRAPHY.

[◉1] The Captain must have been mistaken, as a reference to any text-book of literature will show; but the mistake was a kindly one, and so we let it stand.

[◉2] These sayings are too well known to require repetition, and besides, they are all to be found in his published works.

A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN.

[◉1] “We are told that we ought to ask for £30,000 at least…. It is not a large sum, considering that there is to be but one college of this sort for Great Britain, Ireland and the Colonies, and considering how easy it is to raise immense sums for boys’ schools. But considering how few people really wish women to be educated, it is a good deal.”—Lady Stephen, Life of Miss Emily Davies.

[◉2] Every penny which could be scraped together was set aside for building, and the amenities had to be postponed.—R. Strachey, The Cause.

[◉3] “‘Men know that women are an overmatch for them, and therefore they choose the weakest or the most ignorant. If they did not think so, they never could be afraid of women knowing as much as themselves.’ … In justice to the sex, I think it but candid to acknowledge that, in a subsequent conversation, he told me that he was serious in what he said.”—Boswell, The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides.

[◉4] The ancient Germans believed that there was something holy in women, and accordingly consulted them as oracles.”—Frazer, Golden Bough.

[◉5] “It remains a strange and almost inexplicable fact that in Athena’s city, where women were kept in almost Oriental suppression as odalisques or drudges, the stage should yet have produced figures like Clytemnestra and Cassandra Atossa and Antigone, Phèdre and Medea, and all the other heroines who dominate play after play of the ‘misogynist’ Euripides. But the paradox of this world where in real life a respectable woman could hardly show her face alone in the street, and yet on the stage woman equals or surpasses man, has never been satisfactorily explained. In modern tragedy the same predominance exists. At all events, a very cursory survey of Shakespeare’s work (similarly with Webster, though not with Marlowe or Jonson) suffices to reveal how this dominance, this initiative of women, persists from Rosalind to Lady Macbeth. So too in Racine; six of his tragedies bear their heroines’ names; and what male characters of his shall we set against Hermione and Andromaque, Bérénice and Roxane, Phèdre and Athalie? So again with Ibsen; what men shall we match with Solveig and Nora, Heda and Hilda Wangel and Rebecca West?”—F.L. Lucas, Tragedy, pp. 114-15.

[◉6] A Survey of Contemporary Music, Cecil Gray, p. 246.

[◉7] See Cassandra, by Florence Nightingale, printed in The Cause, by R. Strachey.

[◉8] Memoir of Jane Austen, by her nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh.

[◉9] [She] has a metaphysical purpose, and that is a dangerous obsession, especially with a woman, for women rarely possess men’s healthy love of rhetoric. It is a strange lack in the sex which is in other things more primitive and more materialistic.”—New Criterion, June 1928.

[◉10] “If, like the reporter, you believe that female novelists should only aspire to excellence by courageously acknowledging the limitations of their sex (Jane Austen [has] demonstrated how gracefully this gesture can be accomplished …).”—Life and Letters, August 1928.

[◉11] The Art of Writing, by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch.

[◉12] A Short History of Women, by John Langdon Davies.

FLUSH: A BIOGRAPHY.

[◉1] “painted fabric”. Miss Barrett says, “I had a transparent blind put up in my open window”. She adds, “papa insults me with the analogy of a back window in a confectioner’s shop, but is obviously moved when the sunshine lights up the castle, notwithstanding”. Some hold that the castle, etc., was painted on a thin metallic substance; others that it was a muslin blind richly embroidered. There seems no certain way of settling the matter.

[◉2] “Mr. Kenyon mumbled slightly because he had lost two front teeth.” There are elements of exaggeration and conjecture here. Miss Mitford is the authority. She is reported to have said in conversation with Mr. Horne, “Our dear friend, you are aware, never sees anybody but the members of her own family, and one or two others. She has a high opinion of the skill in reading as well as the fine taste, of Mr. ——, and she gets him to read her new poems aloud to her…. So Mr. —— stands upon the hearth-rug, and uplifts the MS., and his voice, while our dear friend lies folded up in Indian shawls upon her sofa, with her long black tresses streaming over her bent-down head, all attention. Now, dear Mr. —— has lost a front tooth—not quite a front one, but a side front one—and this, you see, causes a defective utterance … an amiable indistinctness, a vague softening of syllables into each other, so that silence and ilence would really sound very like one another….” There can be little doubt that Mr. —— was Mr. Kenyon; the blank was necessitated by the peculiar delicacy of the Victorians with regard to teeth. But more important questions affecting English literature are involved. Miss Barrett has long been accused of a defective ear. Miss Mitford maintains that Mr. Kenyon should rather be accused of defective teeth. On the other hand, Miss Barrett herself maintained that her rhymes had nothing to do with his lack of teeth or with her lack of ear. “A great deal of attention”, she wrote, “—far more than it would have taken to rhyme with complete accuracy—have I given to the subject of rhymes and have determined in cold blood to hazard some experiments.” Hence she rhymed “angels” with “candles”, “heaven” with “unbelieving”, and “islands” with “silence”—in cold blood. It is of course for the professors to decide; but anybody who has studied Mrs. Browning’s character and her actions will be inclined to take the view that she was a wilful breaker of rules whether of art or of love, and so to convict her of some complicity in the development of modern poetry.

[◉3] “yellow gloves”. It is recorded in Mrs. Orr’s Life of Browning that he wore lemon-coloured gloves. Mrs. Bridell-Fox, meeting him in 1835-6, says, “he was then slim and dark, and very handsome, and—may I hint it—just a trifle of a dandy, addicted to lemon-coloured kid gloves and such things”.

[◉4] “He was stolen.” As a matter of fact, Flush was stolen three times; but the unities seem to require that the three stealings shall be compressed into one. The total sum paid by Miss Barrett to the dog-stealers was £20.

[◉5] “The faces of those men were to come back to her on a sunny balcony in Italy.” Readers of Aurora Leigh—but since such persons are nonexistent it must be explained that Mrs. Browning wrote a poem of this name, one of the most vivid passages in which (though it suffers from distortion natural to an artist who sees the object once only from a four-wheeler, with Wilson tugging at her skirts) is the description of a London slum. Clearly Mrs. Browning possessed a fund of curiosity as to human life which was by no means satisfied by the busts of Homer and Chaucer on the washing-stand in the bedroom.

[◉6] “Lily Wilson fell in love with Signor Righi, the guardsman.” The life of Lily Wilson is extremely obscure and thus cries aloud for the services of a biographer. No human figure in the Browning letters, save the principals, more excites our curiosity and baffles it. Her Christian name was Lily, her surname Wilson. That is all we know of her birth and upbringing. Whether she was the daughter of a farmer in the neighbourhood of Hope End, and became favourably known to the Barrett cook by the decency of her demeanour and the cleanliness of her apron, so much so that when she came up to the great house on some errand, Mrs. Barrett made an excuse to come into the room just then and thought so well of her that she appointed her to be Miss Elizabeth’s maid; or whether she was a Cockney; or whether she was from Scotland—it is impossible to say. At any rate she was in service with Miss Barrett in the year 1846. She was “an expensive servant”—her wages were £16 a year. Since she spoke almost as seldom as Flush, the outlines of her character are little known; and since Miss Barrett never wrote a poem about her, her appearance is far less familiar than his. Yet it is clear from indications in the letters that she was in the beginning one of those demure, almost inhumanly correct British maids who were at that time the glory of the British basement. It is obvious that Wilson was a stickler for rights and ceremonies. Wilson undoubtedly revered “the room”; Wilson would have been the first to insist that under servants must eat their pudding in one place, upper servants in another. All this is implicit in the remark she made when she beat Flush with her hand “because it is right”. Such respect for convention, it need hardly be said, breeds extreme horror of any breach of it; so that when Wilson was confronted with the lower orders in Manning Street she was far more alarmed, and far more certain that the dog-stealers were murderers, than Miss Barrett was. At the same time the heroic way in which she overcame her terror and went with Miss Barrett in the cab shows how deeply the other convention of loyalty to her mistress was ingrained in her. Where Miss Barrett went, Wilson must go too. This principle was triumphantly demonstrated by her conduct at the time of the elopement. Miss Barrett had been doubtful of Wilson’s courage; but her doubts were unfounded. “Wilson”, she wrote—and these were the last words she ever wrote to Mr. Browning as Miss Barrett—“has been perfect to me. And I … calling her ‘timid’ and afraid of her timidity! I begin to think that none are so bold as the timid, when they are fairly roused.” It is worth, parenthetically, dwelling for a second on the extreme precariousness of a servant’s life. If Wilson had not gone with Miss Barrett, she would have been, as Miss Barrett knew, “turned into the street before sunset”, with only a few shillings, presumably, saved from her sixteen pounds a year. And what then would have been her fate? Since English fiction in the ’forties scarcely deals with the lives of ladies’ maids, and biography had not then cast its searchlight so low, the question must remain a question. But Wilson took the plunge. She declared that she would “go anywhere in the world with me”. She left the basement, the room, the whole of that world of Wimpole Street, which to Wilson meant all civilisation, all right thinking and decent living, for the wild debauchery and irreligion of a foreign land. Nothing is more curious than to observe the conflict that took place in Italy between Wilson’s English gentility and her natural passions. She derided the Italian Court; she was shocked by Italian pictures. But, though “she was struck back by the indecency of the Venus”, Wilson, greatly to her credit, seems to have bethought her that women are naked when they take their clothes off. Even I myself, she may have thought, am naked for two or three seconds daily. And so “She thinks she shall try again, and the troublesome modesty may subside, who knows?” That it did subside rapidly is plain. Soon she not merely approved of Italy; she had fallen in love with Signor Righi of the Grand Ducal bodyguard—“all highly respectable and moral men, and some six feet high”—was wearing an engagement ring; was dismissing a London suitor; and was learning to speak Italian. Then the clouds descend again; when they lift they show us Wilson deserted—“the faithless Righi had backed out of his engagement to Wilson”. Suspicion attaches to his brother, a wholesale haberdasher at Prato. When Righi resigned from the Ducal bodyguard, he became, on his brother’s advice, a retail haberdasher at Prato. Whether his position required a knowledge of haberdashery in his wife, whether one of the girls of Prato could supply it, it is certain that he did not write to Wilson as often as he should have done. But what conduct it was on the part of this highly respectable and moral man that led Mrs. Browning to exclaim in 1850, “[Wilson] is over it completely, which does the greatest credit to her good sense and rectitude of character. How could she continue to love such a man?”—why Righi had shrunk to “such a man” in so short a time, it is impossible to say. Deserted by Righi, Wilson became more and more attached to the Browning family. She discharged not only the duties of a lady’s maid, but cooked knead cakes, made dresses, and became a devoted nurse to Penini, the baby; so that in time the baby himself exalted her to the rank of the family, where she justly belonged, and refused to call her anything but Lily. In 1855 Wilson married Romagnoli, the Brownings’ manservant, “a good tender-hearted man”; and for some time the two kept house for the Brownings. But in 1859 Robert Browning “accepted office as Landor’s guardian”, an office of great delicacy and responsibility, for Landor’s habits were difficult; “of restraint he has not a grain”, Mrs. Browning wrote, “and of suspiciousness many grains”. In these circumstances Wilson was appointed “his duenna” with a salary of twenty-two pounds a year “besides what is left of his rations”. Later her wages were increased to thirty pounds, for to act as duenna to “an old lion” who has “the impulses of a tiger”, throws his plate out of the window or dashes it on the ground if he dislikes his dinner, and suspects servants of opening desks, entailed, as Mrs. Browning observed, “certain risks, and I for one would rather not meet them”. But to Wilson, who had known Mr. Barrett and the spirits, a few plates more or less flying out of the window or dashed upon the floor was a matter of little consequence—such risks were all in the day’s work.

That day, so far as it is still visible to us, was certainly a strange one. Whether it began or not in some remote English village, it ended in Venice in the Palazzo Rezzonico. There at least she was still living in the year 1897, a widow, in the house of the little boy whom she had nursed and loved—Mr. Barrett Browning. A very strange day it had been, she may have thought, as she sat in the red Venetian sunset, an old woman, dreaming. Her friends, married to farm hands, still stumbled up the English lanes to fetch a pint of beer. And she had eloped with Miss Barrett to Italy; she had seen all kinds of queer things—revolutions, guardsmen, spirits; Mr. Landor throwing his plate out of the window. Then Mrs. Browning had died—there can have been no lack of thoughts in Wilson’s old head as she sat at the window of the Palazzo Rezzonico in the evening. But nothing can be more vain than to pretend that we can guess what they were, for she was typical of the great army of her kind—the inscrutable, the all-but-silent, the all-but-invisible servant maids of history. “A more honest, true and affectionate heart than Wilson’s cannot be found”—her mistress’s words may serve her for epitaph.

[◉7] “he was scourged by fleas”. It appears that Italy was famous for its fleas in the middle of the nineteenth century. Indeed, they served to break down conventions that were otherwise insurmountable. For example, when Nathaniel Hawthorne went to tea with Miss Bremer in Rome (1858), “we spoke of fleas—insects that, in Rome, come home to everybody’s business and bosom, and are so common and inevitable, that no delicacy is felt about alluding to the sufferings they inflict. Poor little Miss Bremer was tormented with one while turning out our tea….”

[◉8] “Nero had leapt from a top storey window.” Nero (c. 1849-60) was, according to Carlyle, “A little Cuban (Maltese? and otherwise mongrel) shock, mostly white—a most affectionate, lively little dog, otherwise of small merit, and little or no training”. Material for a life of him abounds, but this is not the occasion to make use of it. It is enough to say that he was stolen; that he brought Carlyle a cheque to buy a horse with tied round his neck; that “twice or thrice I flung him into the sea [at Aberdour], which he didn’t at all like”; that in 1850 he sprang from the library window, and, clearing the area spikes, fell “plash” on to the pavement. “It was after breakfast,” Mrs. Carlyle says, “and he had been standing at the open window, watching the birds…. Lying in my bed, I heard thro’ the deal partition Elizabeth scream: Oh God! oh Nero! and rush downstairs like a strong wind out at the street door … then I sprang to meet her in my night-shift…. Mr. C. came down from his bedroom with his chin all over soap and asked, ‘Has anything happened to Nero?’—‘Oh, sir, he must have broken all his legs, he leapt out at your window!’—‘God bless me!’ said Mr. C. and returned to finish his shaving.” No bones were broken, however, and he survived, to be run over by a butcher’s cart, and to die at last from the effects of the accident on 1st February 1860. He is buried at the top of the garden at Cheyne Row under a small stone tablet.

Whether he wished to kill himself, or whether, as Mrs. Carlyle insinuates, he was merely jumping after birds, might be the occasion for an extremely interesting treatise on canine psychology. Some hold that Byron’s dog went mad in sympathy with Byron; others that Nero was driven to desperate melancholy by associating with Mr. Carlyle. The whole question of dogs’ relation to the spirit of the age, whether it is possible to call one dog Elizabethan, another Augustan, another Victorian, together with the influence upon dogs of the poetry and philosophy of their masters, deserves a fuller discussion than can here be given it. For the present, Nero’s motives must remain obscure.

[◉9] “Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton believed himself invisible.” Mrs. Huth Jackson in A Victorian Childhood says: “Lord Arthur Russell told me, many years later, that when a small boy he was taken to Knebworth by his mother. Next morning he was in the big hall having breakfast when a strange-looking old gentleman in a shabby dressing-gown came in and walked slowly round the table staring at each of the guests in turn. He heard his mother’s neighbour whisper to her, ‘Do not take any notice, he thinks he is invisible’. It was Lord Lytton himself” (pp. 17-18).

[◉10] “he was now dead”. It is certain that Flush died; but the date and manner of his death are unknown. The only reference consists in the statement that “Flush lived to a good old age and is buried in the vaults of Casa Guidi”. Mrs. Browning was buried in the English Cemetery at Florence, Robert Browning in Westminster Abbey. Flush still lies, therefore, beneath the house in which, once upon a time, the Brownings lived.

THREE GUINEAS: ONE.

[◉1] The Life of Mary Kingsley, by Stephen Gwynn, p. 15. It is difficult to get exact figures of the sums spent on the education of educated men’s daughters. About £20 or £30 presumably covered the entire cost of Mary Kingsley’s education (b. 1862; d. 1900). A sum of £100 may be taken as about the average in the nineteenth century and even later. The women thus educated often felt the lack of education very keenly. “I always feel the defects of my education most painfully when I go out,” wrote Anne J. Clough, the first Principal of Newnham. (Life of Anne J. Clough, by B. A. Clough, p. 60.) Elizabeth Haldane, who came, like Miss Clough, of a highly literate family, but was educated in much the same way, says that when she grew up, “My first conviction was that I was not educated, and I thought of how this could be put right. I should have loved going to college, but college in those days was unusual for girls, and the idea was not encouraged. It was also expensive. For an only daughter to leave a widowed mother was indeed considered to be out of the question, and no one made the plan seem feasible. There was in those days a new movement for carrying on correspondence classes….” (From One Century to Another, by Elizabeth Haldane, p. 73.) The efforts of such uneducated women to conceal their ignorance were often valiant, but not always successful. “They talked agreeably on current topics, carefully avoiding controversial subjects. What impressed me was their ignorance and indifference concerning anything outside their own circle … no less a personage than the mother of the Speaker of the House of Commons believed that California belonged to us, part of our Empire!” (Distant Fields, by H. A. Vachell, p. 109.) That ignorance was often simulated in the nineteenth century owing to the current belief that educated men enjoyed it is shown by the energy with which Thomas Gisborne, in his instructive work On the Duties of Women (p. 278), rebuked those who recommend women “studiously to refrain from discovering to their partners in marriage the full extent of their abilities and attainments.” “This is not discretion but art. It is dissimulation, it is deliberate imposition…. It could scarcely be practised long without detection.”

But the educated man’s daughter in the nineteenth century was even more ignorant of life than of books. One reason for that ignorance is suggested by the following quotation: “It was supposed that most men were not ‘virtuous,’ that is, that nearly all would be capable of accosting and annoying—or worse—any unaccompanied young woman whom they met.” (“Society and the Season,” by Mary, Countess of Lovelace, in Fifty Years, 1882-1932, p. 37.) She was therefore confined to a very narrow circle; and her “ignorance and indifference” to anything outside it was excusable. The connection between that ignorance and the nineteenth century conception of manhood, which—witness the Victorian hero—made “virtue” and virility incompatible is obvious. In a well-known passage Thackeray complains of the limitations which virtue and virility between them imposed upon his art.

[◉2] Our ideology is still so inveterately anthropocentric that it has been necessary to coin this clumsy term—educated man’s daughter—to describe the class whose fathers have been educated at public schools and universities. Obviously, if the term “bourgeois” fits her brother, it is grossly incorrect to use it of one who differs so profoundly in the two prime characteristics of the bourgeoisie—capital and environment.

[◉3] The number of animals killed in England for sport during the past century must be beyond computation. 1,212 head of game is given as the average for a day’s shooting at Chatsworth in 1909. (Men, Women and Things, by the Duke of Portland, p. 251.) Little mention is made in sporting memoirs of women guns; and their appearance in the hunting field was the cause of much caustic comment. “Skittles,” the famous nineteenth-century horsewoman, was a lady of easy morals. It is highly probable that there was held to be some connection between sport and unchastity in women in the nineteenth century.

[◉4] Francis and Riversdale Grenfell, by John Buchan, pp. 189, 205.

[◉5] Antony (Viscount Knebworth), by the Earl of Lytton, p. 355.

[◉6] The Poems of Wilfred Owen, edited by Edmund Blunden, pp. 25, 41.

[◉7] Lord Hewart, proposing the toast of “England” at the banquet of the Society of St. George at Cardiff.

[◉8] The Daily Telegraph, February 5th, 1937.

[*] Written in the winter of 1936-7.

[◉9] The Daily Telegraph, February 5th, 1937.

[◉10] There is of course one essential that the educated woman can supply: children. And one method by which she can help to prevent war is to refuse to bear children. Thus Mrs. Helena Normanton is of opinion that “The only thing that women in any country can do to prevent war is to stop the supply of ‘cannon fodder.’” (Report of the Annual Council for Equal Citizenship, Daily Telegraph, March 5th, 1937.) Letters in the newspapers frequently support this view. “I can tell Mr. Harry Campbell why women refuse to have children in these times. When men have learnt how to run the lands they govern so that wars shall hit only those who make the quarrels, instead of mowing down those who do not, then women may again feel like having large families. Why should women bring children into such a world as this one is to-day?” (Edith Maturin-Porch, in the Daily Telegraph, September 6th, 1937.) The fact that the birth rate in the educated class is falling would seem to show that educated women are taking Mrs. Normanton’s advice. It was offered them in very similar circumstances over two thousand years ago by Lysistrata.

[◉11] There are of course innumerable kinds of influence besides those specified in the text. It varies from the simple kind described in the following passage: “Three years later … we find her writing to him as Cabinet Minister to solicit his interest on behalf of a favourite parson for a Crown living….” (Henry Chaplin, a Memoir, by Lady Londonderry, p. 57) to the very subtle kind exerted by Lady Macbeth upon her husband. Somewhere between the two lies the influence described by D. H. Lawrence: “It is hopeless for me to try to do anything without I have a woman at the back of me … I daren’t sit in the world without I have a woman behind me…. But a woman that I love sort of keeps me in direct communication with the unknown, in which otherwise I am a bit lost” (Letters of D. H. Lawrence, pp. 93-4), with which we may compare, though the collocation is strange, the famous and very similar definition given by the ex-King Edward VIII upon his abdication. Present political conditions abroad seem to favour a return to the use of interested influence. For example: “A story serves to illustrate the present degree of women’s influence in Vienna. During the past autumn a measure was planned to further diminish women’s professional opportunities. Protests, pleas, letters, all were of no avail. Finally, in desperation, a group of well-known ladies of the city … got together and planned. For the next fortnight, for a certain number of hours per day, several of these ladies got on to the telephone to the Ministers they knew personally, ostensibly to ask them to dinner at their homes. With all the charm of which the Viennese are capable, they kept the Ministers talking, asking about this and that, and finally mentioning the matter that distressed them so much. When the Ministers had been rung up by several ladies, all of whom they did not wish to offend, and kept from urgent State affairs by this manœuvre, they decided on compromise—and so the measure was postponed.” (Women Must Choose, by Hilary Newitt, p. 129.) Similar use of influence was often deliberately made during the battle for the franchise. But women’s influence is said to be impaired by the possession of a vote. Thus Marshal von Bieberstein was of opinion that “Women led men always … but he did not wish them to vote.” (From One Century to Another, by Elizabeth Haldane, p. 258.)

[◉12] English women were much criticized for using force in the battle for the Franchise. When in 1910 Mr. Birrell had his hat “reduced to pulp” and his shins kicked by suffragettes, Sir Almeric Fitzroy commented, “an attack of this character upon a defenceless old man by an organized band of ‘janissaries’ will, it is hoped, convince many people of the insane and anarchical spirit actuating the movement.” (Memoirs of Sir Almeric Fitzroy, Vol. II, p. 425.) These remarks did not apply apparently to the force in the European War. The vote indeed was given to English women largely because of the help they gave to Englishmen in using force in that war. “On 14th August [1916], Mr. Asquith himself gave up his opposition [to the Franchise]. ‘It is true,’ he said, ‘(that women) cannot fight in the sense of going out with rifles and so forth, but … they have aided in the most effective way in the prosecution of the war.’” (“The Cause,” by Ray Strachey, p. 354.) This raises the difficult question whether those who did not aid in the prosecution of the war, but did what they could to hinder the prosecution of the war, ought to use the vote to which they are entitled chiefly because others “aided in the prosecution of the war”? That they are stepdaughters, not full daughters, of England is shown by the fact that they change nationality on marriage. A woman, whether or not she helped to beat the Germans, becomes a German if she marries a German. Her political views must then be entirely reversed, and her filial piety transferred.

[◉13] Sir Ernest Wild, K.C., by Robert J. Blackburn, pp. 174-5.

[◉14] That the right to vote has not proved negligible is shown by the facts published from time to time by the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship. “This publication (What the Vote Has Done) was originally a single-page leaflet; it has now (1927) grown to a six-page pamphlet, and has to be constantly enlarged.” (Josephine Butler, by M. G. Fawcett and E. M. Turner, note, p. 101.)

[◉15] There are no figures available with which to check facts that must have a very important bearing upon the biology and psychology of the sexes. A beginning might be made in this essential but strangely neglected preliminary by chalking on a large-scale map of England property owned by men, red; by women, blue. Then the number of sheep and cattle consumed by each sex must be compared; the hogsheads of wine and beer; the barrels of tobacco; after which we must examine carefully their physical exercises; domestic employments; facilities for sexual intercourse, etc. Historians are of course mainly concerned with war and politics; but sometimes throw light upon human nature. Thus Macaulay, dealing with the English country gentleman in the seventeenth century, says: “His wife and daughter were in tastes and acquirements below a housekeeper or still room maid of the present day. They stitched and spun, brewed gooseberry wine, cured marigolds, and made the crust for the venison pasty.”

Again, “The ladies of the house, whose business it had commonly been to cook the repast, retired as soon as the dishes had been devoured, and left the gentlemen to their ale and tobacco.” (Macaulay, History of England, Chapter Three.) But the gentlemen were still drinking and the ladies were still withdrawing a great deal later. “In my mother’s young days before her marriage, the old hard-drinking habits of the Regency and of the eighteenth century still persisted. At Woburn Abbey it was the custom for the trusted old family butler to make his nightly report to my grandmother in the drawing-room. “The gentlemen have had a good deal to-night; it might be as well for the young ladies to retire,” or, “The gentlemen have had very little to-night,” was announced according to circumstances by this faithful family retainer. Should the young girls be packed off upstairs, they liked standing on an upper gallery of the staircase to watch the shouting, riotous crowd issuing from the dining-room.” (The Days Before Yesterday, by Lord F. Hamilton, p. 322.) It must be left to the scientist of the future to tell us what effect drink and property have had upon chromosomes.

[◉16] The fact that both sexes have a very marked though dissimilar love of dress seems to have escaped the notice of the dominant sex owing largely it must be supposed to the hypnotic power of dominance. Thus the late Mr. Justice MacCardie, in summing up the case of Mrs. Frankau, remarked: “Women cannot be expected to renounce an essential feature of femininity or to abandon one of nature’s solaces for a constant and insuperable physical handicap…. Dress, after all, is one of the chief methods of women’s self-expression…. In matters of dress women often remain children to the end. The psychology of the matter must not be overlooked. But whilst bearing the above matters in mind the law has rightly laid it down that the rule of prudence and proportion must be observed.” The Judge who thus dictated was wearing a scarlet robe, an ermine cape, and a vast wig of artificial curls. Whether he was enjoying “one of nature’s solaces for a constant and insuperable physical handicap,” whether again he was himself observing “the rule of prudence and proportion” must be doubtful. But “the psychology of the matter must not be overlooked”; and the fact that the singularity of his own appearance together with that of Admirals, Generals, Heralds, Life Guards, Peers, Beefeaters, etc., was completely invisible to him so that he was able to lecture the lady without any consciousness of sharing her weakness, raises two questions: how often must an act be performed before it becomes traditional, and therefore venerable; and what degree of social prestige causes blindness to the remarkable nature of one’s own clothes? Singularity of dress, when not associated with office, seldom escapes ridicule.

[◉17] In the New Year’s Honours List for 1937, 147 men accepted honours as against seven women. For obvious reasons this cannot be taken as a measure of their comparative desire for such advertisement. But that it should be easier, psychologically, for a woman to reject honours than for a man seems to be indisputable. For the fact that intellect (roughly speaking) is man’s chief professional asset, and that stars and ribbons are his chief means of advertising intellect, suggests that stars and ribbons are identical with powder and paint, a woman’s chief method of advertising her chief professional asset: beauty. It would therefore be as unreasonable to ask him to refuse a Knighthood as to ask her to refuse a dress. The sum paid for a Knighthood in 1901 would seem to provide a very tolerable dress allowance: “21 April (Sunday)—To see Meynell, who was as usual full of gossip. It appears that the King’s debts have been paid off privately by his friends, one of whom is said to have lent £100,000, and satisfies himself with £25,000 in repayment plus a Knighthood.” (My Diaries, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, Part II, p. 8.)

[◉18] What the precise figures are it is difficult for an outsider to know. But that the incomes are substantial can be conjectured from a delightful review some years ago by Mr. J. M. Keynes in The Nation of a history of Clare College, Cambridge. The book “it is rumoured cost six thousand pounds to produce.” Rumour has it also that a band of students returning at dawn from some festivity about that time saw a cloud in the sky; which as they gazed assumed the shape of a woman; who, being supplicated for a sign, let fall in a shower of radiant hail the one word “Rats.” This was interpreted to signify what from another page of the same number of The Nation would seem to be the truth; that the students of one of the women’s colleges suffered greatly from “cold gloomy ground floor bedrooms overrun with mice.” The apparition, it was supposed, took this means of suggesting that if the gentlemen of Clare wished to do her honour a cheque for £6,000 payable to the Principal of —— would celebrate her better than a book even though “clothed in the finest dress of paper and black buckram….” There is nothing mythical, however, about the fact recorded in the same number of The Nation that “Somerville received with pathetic gratitude the £7,000 which went to it last year from the Jubilee gift and a private bequest.”

[◉19] A great historian has thus described the origin and character of the universities, in one of which he was educated: “The schools of Oxford and Cambridge were founded in a dark age of false and barbarous science; and they are still tainted by the vices of their origin…. The legal incorporation of these societies by the charters of popes and kings had given them a monopoly of public instruction; and the spirit of monopolists is narrow, lazy, and oppressive: their work is more costly and less productive than that of independent artists; and the new improvements so eagerly grasped by the competition of freedom, are admitted with slow and sullen reluctance in those proud corporations, above the fear of a rival, and below the confession of an error. We may scarcely hope that any reformation will be a voluntary act; and so deeply are they rooted in law and prejudice, that even the omnipotence of parliament would shrink from an inquiry into the state and abuses of the two universities.” (Edward Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life and Writings.) “The omnipotence of Parliament” did however institute an inquiry in the middle of the nineteenth century “into the state of the University [of Oxford], its discipline, studies, and revenues. But there was so much passive resistance from the Colleges that the last item had to go by the board. It was ascertained however that out of 542 Fellowships in all the Colleges of Oxford only twenty-two were really open to competition without restrictive conditions of patronage, place or kin…. The Commissioners … found that Gibbon’s indictment had been reasonable….” (Herbert Warren of Magdalen, by Laurie Magnus, pp. 47-49.) Nevertheless the prestige of a university education remained high; and Fellowships were considered highly desirable. When Pusey became a Fellow of Oriel, “The bells of the parish church at Pusey expressed the satisfaction of his father and family.” Again, when Newman was elected a Fellow, “all the bells of the three towers [were] set pealing—at Newman’s expense.” (Oxford Apostles, by Geoffrey Faber, pp. 131, 69.) Yet both Pusey and Newman were men of a distinctly spiritual nature.

[◉20] The Crystal Cabinet, by Mary Butts, p. 138. The sentence in full runs: “For just as I was told that desire for learning in woman was against the will of God, so were many innocent freedoms, innocent delights, denied in the same Name”—a remark which makes it desirable that we should have a biography from the pen of an educated man’s daughter of the Deity in whose Name such atrocities have been committed. The influence of religion upon women’s education, one way or another, can scarcely be overestimated. “If, for example,” says Thomas Gisborne, “the uses of music are explained, let not its effect in heightening devotion be overlooked. If drawing is the subject of remark, let the student be taught habitually to contemplate in the works of creation the power, the wisdom and the goodness of their Author.” (The Duties of the Female Sex, by Thomas Gisborne, p. 85.) The fact that Mr. Gisborne and his like—a numerous band—base their educational theories upon the teaching of St. Paul would seem to hint that the female sex was to be “taught habitually to contemplate in the works of creation, the power and wisdom and the goodness,” not so much of the Deity, but of Mr. Gisborne. And from that we are led to conclude that a biography of the Deity would resolve itself into a Dictionary of Clerical Biography.

[◉21] Mary Astell, by Florence M. Smith. “Unfortunately, the opposition to so new an idea (a college for women) was greater than the interest in it, and came not only from the satirists of the day, who, like the wits of all ages, found the progressive woman a source of laughter and made Mary Astell the subject of stock jokes in comedies of the Femmes Savantes types, but from churchmen, who saw in the plan an attempt to bring back popery. The strongest opponent of the idea was a celebrated bishop, who, as Ballard asserts, prevented a prominent lady from subscribing £10,000 to the plan. Elizabeth Elstob gave to Ballard the name of this celebrated bishop in reply to an inquiry from him. ‘According to Elizabeth Elstob … it was Bishop Burnet that prevented that good design by dissuading that lady from encouraging it.’” (Op. cit., pp. 21-2.) “That lady” may have been Princess Ann, or Lady Elizabeth Hastings; but there seems reason to think that it was the Princess. That the Church swallowed the money is an assumption, but one perhaps justified by the history of the Church.

[◉22] Ode for Music, performed in the Senate House at Cambridge, July 1st, 1769.

[◉23] “I assure you I am not an enemy of women. I am very favourable to their employment as labourers or in other menial capacity. I have, however, doubts as to the likelihood of their succeeding in business as capitalists. I am sure the nerves of most women would break down under the anxiety, and that most of them are utterly destitute of the disciplined reticence necessary to every sort of co-operation. Two thousand years hence you may have changed it all, but the present women will only flirt with men, and quarrel with one another.” Extract from a letter from Walter Bagehot to Emily Davies, who had asked his help in founding Girton.

[◉24] Recollections and Reflections, by Sir J. J. Thomson, pp. 86-7-8, 296-7.

[◉25] “Cambridge University still refuses to admit women to the full rights of membership; it grants them only titular degrees and they have therefore no share in the government of the University.” (Memorandum on the Position of English Women in Relation to that of English Men, by Philippa Strachey, p. 26. (1935.)) Nevertheless, the Government makes a “liberal grant” from public money to Cambridge University.

[◉26] “The total number of students at recognized institutions for the higher education of women who are receiving instruction in the University or working in the University laboratories or museums shall not at any time exceed five hundred.” (The Student’s Handbook to Cambridge, 1934-5, p. 616.) Whitaker informs us that the number of male students who were in residence at Cambridge in October 1935 was 5,328. Nor would there appear to be any limitation.

[◉27] The men’s scholarship list at Cambridge printed in The Times of December 20th, 1937, measures roughly thirty-one inches; the women’s scholarship list at Cambridge measures roughly five inches. There are, however, seventeen colleges for men and the list here measured includes only eleven. The thirty-one inches must therefore be increased. There are only two colleges for women; both are here measured.

[◉28] Until the death of Lady Stanley of Alderley, there was no chapel at Girton. “When it was proposed to build a chapel, she objected, on the ground that all the available funds should be spent on education. ‘So long as I live, there shall be no chapel at Girton,’ I heard her say. The present chapel was built immediately after her death.” (The Amberley Papers, Patricia and Bertrand Russell, Vol. I, p. 17.) Would that her ghost had possessed the same influence as her body! But ghosts, it is said, have no cheque books.

[◉29] “I have also a feeling that girls’ schools have, on the whole, been content to take the general lines of their education from the older-established institutions for my own, the weaker sex. My own feeling is that the problem ought to be attacked by some original genius on quite different lines….” (Things Ancient and Modem, by C. A. Alington, pp. 216-17.) It scarcely needs genius or originality to see that “the lines,” in the first place, must be cheaper. But it would be interesting to know what meaning we are to attach to the word “weaker” in the context. For since Dr. Alington is a former Head Master of Eton he must be aware that his sex has not only acquired, but retained the vast revenues of that ancient foundation—a proof, one would have thought, not of sexual weakness but of sexual strength. That Eton is not “weak”, at least from the material point of view, is shown by the following quotation from Dr. Alington: “Following out the suggestion of one of the Prime Minister’s Committees on Education, the Provost and Fellows in my time decided that all scholarships at Eton should be of a fixed value, capable of being liberally augmented in case of need. So liberal has been this augmentation that there are several boys in College whose parents pay nothing towards either their board or education.” One of the benefactors was the late Lord Rosebery. “He was a generous benefactor to the school,” Dr. Alington informs us, “and endowed a history scholarship, in connection with which a characteristic episode occurred. He asked me whether the endowment was adequate, and I suggested that a further £200 would provide for the payment to the examiner. He sent a cheque for £2,000: his attention was called to the discrepancy, and I have in my scrap book the reply in which he said that he thought a good round sum would be better than a fraction.” (Op. cit., pp. 163, 186.) The entire sum spent at Cheltenham College for Girls in 1854 upon salaries and visiting teachers was £1,300; “and the accounts in December showed a deficit of £400.” (Dorothea Beale of Cheltenham, by Elizabeth Raikes, p. 91.)

[◉30] The words “vain and vicious” require qualification. No one would maintain that all lecturers and all lectures are “vain and vicious”; many subjects can only be taught with diagrams and personal demonstration. The words in the text refer only to the sons and daughters of educated men who lecture their brothers and sisters upon English literature; and for the reasons that it is an obsolete practice dating from the Middle Ages when books were scarce; that it owes its survival to pecuniary motives; or to curiosity; that the publication in book form is sufficient proof of the evil effect of an audience upon the lecturer intellectually; and that psychologically eminence upon a platform encourages vanity and the desire to impose authority. Further, the reduction of English literature to an examination subject must be viewed with suspicion by all who have firsthand knowledge of the difficulty of the art, and therefore of the very superficial value of an examiner’s approval or disapproval; and with profound regret by all who wish to keep one art at least out of the hands of middlemen and free, as long as may be, from all association with competition and money making. Again, the violence with which one school of literature is now opposed to another, the rapidity with which one school of taste succeeds another, may not unreasonably be traced to the power which a mature mind lecturing immature minds has to infect them with strong, if passing, opinions, and to tinge those opinions with personal bias. Nor can it be maintained that the standard of critical or of creative writing has been raised. A lamentable proof of the mental docility to which the young are reduced by lecturers is that the demand for lectures upon English literature steadily increases (as every writer can bear witness) and from the very class which should have learnt to read at home—the educated. If, as is sometimes urged in excuse, what is desired by college literary societies is not knowledge of literature but acquaintance with writers, there are cocktails, and there is sherry; both better unmixed with Proust. None of this applies of course to those whose homes are deficient in books. If the working class finds it easier to assimilate English literature by word of mouth they have a perfect right to ask the educated class to help them thus. But for the sons and daughters of that class after the age of eighteen to continue to sip English literature through a straw, is a habit that seems to deserve the terms vain and vicious; which terms can justly be applied with greater force to those who pander to them.

[◉31] It is difficult to procure exact figures of the sums allowed the daughters of educated men before marriage. Sophia Jex-Blake had an allowance of from £30 to £40 annually; her father was an upper-middle-class man. Lady M. Lascelles, whose father was an Earl, had, it seems, an allowance of about £100 in 1860; Mr. Barrett, a rich merchant, allowed his daughter Elizabeth “from forty to forty-five pounds … every three months, the income tax being first deducted.” But this seems to have been the interest upon £8,000, “or more or less … it is difficult to ask about it,” which she had “in the funds,” “the money being in two different per cents.,” and apparently, though belonging to Elizabeth, under Mr. Barrett’s control. But these were unmarried women. Married women were not allowed to own property until the passing of the Married Woman’s Property Act in 1870. Lady St. Helier records that since her marriage settlements had been drawn up in conformity with the old law, “What money I had was settled on my husband, and no part of it was reserved for my private use … I did not even possess a cheque book, nor was I able to get any money except by asking my husband. He was kind and generous, but he acquiesced in the position then existing that a woman’s property belonged to her husband … he paid all my bills, he kept my bank book, and gave me a small allowance for my personal expenses.” (Memories of Fifty Years, by Lady St. Helier, p. 341.) But she does not say what the exact sum was. The sums allowed to the sons of educated men were considerably larger. An allowance of £200 was considered to be only just sufficient for an undergraduate at Balliol, “which still had traditions of frugality,” about 1880. On that allowance “they could not hunt and they could not gamble…. But with care, and with a home to fall back on in the vacations, they could make this do.” (Anthony Hope and His Books, by Sir C. Mallet, p. 38.) The sum that is now needed is considerably more. ’Gino Watkins “never spent more than the £400 yearly allowance with which he paid all his college and vacation bills.” (Gino Watkins, by J. M. Scott, p. 59.) This was at Cambridge, a few years ago.

[◉32] How incessantly women were ridiculed throughout the nineteenth century for attempting to enter their solitary profession, novel readers know, for those efforts provide half the stock-in-trade of fiction. But biography shows how natural it was, even in the present century, for the most enlightened of men to conceive of all women as spinsters, all desiring marriage. Thus: “‘Oh dear, what is to happen to them?’ he [G. L. Dickinson] once murmured sadly as a stream of aspiring but uninspiring spinsters flowed round the front court of King’s; ‘I don’t know and they don’t know.’ And then in still lower tones as if his bookshelves might overhear him, ‘Oh dear! What they want is a husband!’” (Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, by E. M. Forster, p. 106.) “What they wanted” might have been the Bar, the Stock Exchange or rooms in Gibbs’s Buildings, had the choice been open to them. But it was not; and therefore Mr. Dickinson’s remark was a very natural one.

[◉33] “Now and then, at least in the larger houses, there would be a set party, selected and invited long beforehand, and over these always one idol dominated—the pheasant. Shooting had to be used as a lure. At such times the father of the family was apt to assert himself. If his house was to be filled to bursting, his wines drunk in quantities, and his best shooting provided, then for that shooting he would have the best guns possible. What despair for the mother of daughters to be told that the one guest whom of all others she secretly desired to invite was a bad shot and totally inadmissible!” (“Society and the Season,” by Mary, Countess of Lovelace, in Fifty Years, 1882-1932, p. 29.)

[◉34] Some idea of what men hoped that their wives might say and do, at least in the nineteenth century, may be gathered from the following hints in a letter “addressed to a young lady for whom he had a great regard a short time before her marriage” by John Bowdler. “Above all, avoid everything which has the least tendency to indelicacy or indecorum. Few women have any idea how much men are disgusted at the slightest approach to these in any female, and especially in one to whom they are attached. By attending the nursery, or the sick bed, women are too apt to acquire a habit of conversing on such subjects in language which men of delicacy are shocked at.” (Life of John Bowdler, p. 123.) But though delicacy was essential, it could, after marriage, be disguised. “In the ’seventies of last century, Miss Jex-Blake and her associates were vigorously fighting the battle for admission of women to the medical profession, and the doctors were still more vigorously resisting their entry, alleging that it must be improper and demoralizing for a woman to have to study and deal with delicate and intimate medical questions. At that time, Ernest Hart, the Editor of the British Medical Journal, told me that the majority of the contributions sent to him for publication in the Journal dealing with delicate and intimate medical questions were in the handwriting of the doctors’ wives, to whom they had obviously been dictated. There were no typewriters or stenographers available in those days.” (The Doctor’s Second Thoughts, by Sir J. Crichton-Browne, pp. 73, 74.)

The duplicity of delicacy was observed long before this, however. Thus Mandeville in The Fable of the Bees (1714) says: “… I would have it first consider’d that the Modesty of Women is the result of Custom and Education, by which all unfashionable Denudations and filthy Expressions are render’d frightful and abominable to them, and that notwithstanding this, the most Virtuous Young Woman alive will often, in spite of her Teeth, have Thoughts and confus’d Ideas of Things arise in her Imagination, which she would not reveal to some People for a Thousand Worlds.”

THREE GUINEAS: TWO.

[◉1] To quote the exact words of one such appeal: “This letter is to ask you to set aside for us garments for which you have no further use…. Stockings, of every sort, no matter how worn, are also most acceptable…. The Committee find that by offering these clothes at bargain prices … they are performing a really useful service to women whose professions require that they should have presentable day and evening dresses which they can ill afford to buy.” (Extract from a letter received from the London and National Society for Women’s Service. (1938.))

[◉2] The Testament of Joad, by C. E. M. Joad, pp. 210-11. Since the number of societies run directly or indirectly by Englishwomen in the cause of peace is too long to quote (see The Story of the Disarmament Declaration, p. 15, for a list of the peace activities of professional, business and working-class women) it is unnecessary to take Mr. Joad’s criticism seriously, however illuminating psychologically.

[◉3] Experiment in Autobiography, by H. G. Wells, p. 486. The men’s “movement to resist the practical obliteration of their freedom by Nazis or Fascists” may have been more perceptible. But that it has been more successful is doubtful. “Nazis now control the whole of Austria” (Daily paper, March 12th, 1938).

[◉4] “Women, I think, ought not to sit down to table with men; their presence ruins conversation, tending to make it trivial and genteel, or at best merely clever.” (Under the Fifth Rib, by C. E. M. Joad, p. 58.) This is an admirably outspoken opinion, and if all who share Mr. Joad’s sentiments were to express them as openly, the hostess’s dilemma—whom to ask, whom not to ask—would be lightened and her labour saved. If those who prefer the society of their own sex at table would signify the fact, the men, say, by wearing a red, the women by wearing a white rosette, while those who prefer the sexes mixed wore parti-coloured buttonholes of red and white blended, not only would much inconvenience and misunderstanding be prevented, but it is possible that the honesty of the buttonhole would kill a certain form of social hypocrisy now all too prevalent. Meanwhile Mr. Joad’s candour deserves the highest praise, and his wishes the most implicit observance.

[◉5] According to Mrs. H. M. Swanwick, the W.S.P.U. had “an income from gifts, in the year 1912, of £42,000.” (I Have Been Young, by H. M. Swanwick, p. 189.) The total spent in 1912 by the Women’s Freedom League was £26,772 12s. 9d. (“The Cause,” by Ray Strachey, p. 311.) Thus the joint income of the two societies was £68,772 12s. 9d. But the two societies were, of course, opposed.

[◉6] “But, exceptions apart, the general run of women’s earnings is low, and £250 a year is quite an achievement, even for a highly qualified woman with years of experience.” (Careers and Openings for Women, by Ray Strachey, p. 70.) Nevertheless “The numbers of women doing professional work have increased very fast in the last twenty years, and were about 400,000 in 1931, in addition to those doing secretarial work or employed in the Civil Service.” (Op cit., p. 44.)

[◉7] The income of the Labour Party in 1936 was £50,153. (Daily Telegraph, September 1937.)

[◉8] The British Civil Service. The Public Service, by William A. Robson, p. 16.

Professor Ernest Barker suggests that there should be an alternative Civil Service Examination for “men and women of an older growth” who have spent some years in social work and social service. “Women candidates in particular might benefit. It is only a very small proportion of women students who succeed in the present open competition: indeed very few compete. On the alternative system here suggested it is possible, and indeed probable, that a much larger proportion of women would be candidates. Women have a genius and a capacity for social work and service. The alternative form of competition would give them a chance of showing that genius and that capacity. It might give them a new incentive to compete for entry into the administrative service of the state, in which their gifts and their presence are needed.” (The British Civil Servant. “The Home Civil Service,” by Professor Ernest Barker, p. 41.) But while the home service remains as exacting as it is at present, if [it] is difficult to see how any incentive can make women free to give “their gifts and their presence” to the service of the state, unless the state will undertake the care of elderly parents; or make it a penal offence for elderly people of either sex to require the services of daughters at home.

[*] Since these words were written Mr. Baldwin has ceased to be Prime Minister and become an Earl.

[◉9] Mr. Baldwin, speaking at Downing Street, at a meeting on behalf of Newnham College Building Fund, March 31st, 1936.

[◉10] The effect of a woman in the pulpit is thus defined in Women and the Ministry, Some Considerations on the Report of the Archbishops’ Commission on the Ministry of Women (1936), p. 24. “But we maintain that the ministration of women … will tend to produce a lowering of the spiritual tone of Christian worship, such as is not produced by the ministrations of men before congregations largely or exclusively female. It is a tribute to the quality of Christian womanhood that it is possible to make this statement; but it would appear to be a simple matter of fact that in the thoughts and desires of that sex the natural is more easily made subordinate to the supernatural, the carnal to the spiritual than is the case with men; and that the ministrations of a male priesthood do not normally arouse that side of female human nature which should be quiescent during the times of the adoration of almighty God. We believe, on the other hand, that it would be impossible for the male members of the average Anglican congregation to be present at a service at which a woman ministered without becoming unduly conscious of her sex.”

In the opinion of the Commissioners, therefore, Christian women are more spiritually minded than Christian men—a remarkable, but no doubt adequate, reason for excluding them from the priesthood.

[◉11] Daily Telegraph, January 20th, 1936.

[◉12] Daily Telegraph, 1936.

[◉13] Daily Telegraph, January 22nd, 1936.

[◉14] “There are, so far as I know, no universal rules on this subject [i.e. sexual relations between civil servants]; but civil servants and municipal officers of both sexes are certainly expected to observe the conventional proprieties and to avoid conduct which might find its way into the newspapers and there be described as “scandalous.” Until recently sexual relations between men and women officers of the Post Office were punishable with immediate dismissal of both parties…. The problem of avoiding newspaper publicity is a fairly easy one to solve so far as court proceedings are concerned: but official restriction extends further so as to prevent women civil servants (who usually have to resign on marriage) from cohabiting openly with men if they desire to do so. The matter, therefore, takes on a different complexion.” The British Civil Servant. The Public Service, by William A. Robson, pp. 14, 15.)

[◉15] Most men’s clubs confine women to a special room, or annexe, and exclude them from other apartments, whether on the principle observed at St. Sofia that they are impure, or whether on the principle observed at Pompeii that they are too pure, is matter for speculation.

[◉16] The power of the Press to burke discussion of any undesirable subject was, and still is, very formidable. It was one of the “extraordinary obstacles” against which Josephine Butler had to fight in her campaign against the Contagious Diseases Act. “Early in 1870 the London Press began to adopt that policy of silence with regard to the question, which lasted for many years, and called forth from the Ladies’ Association the famous ‘Remonstrance against the Conspiracy of Silence,’ signed by Harriet Martineau and Josephine E. Butler, which concluded with the following words: ‘Surely, while such a conspiracy of silence is possible and practised among leading journalists, we English greatly exaggerate our privileges as a free people when we profess to encourage a free press, and to possess the right to hear both sides in a momentous question of morality and legislation.’” (Personal Reminiscences of a Great Crusade, by Josephine E. Butler, p. 49.) Again, during the battle for the vote the Press used the boycott with great effect. And so recently as July 1937 Miss Philippa Strachey in a letter headed “A Conspiracy of Silence,” printed (to its honour) by the Spectator almost repeats Mrs. Butler’s words: “Many hundreds and thousands of men and women have been participating in an endeavour to induce the Government to abandon the provision in the new Contributory Pensions Bill for the black-coated workers which for the first time introduces a differential income limit for men and women entrants…. In the course of the last month the Bill has been before the House of Lords, where this particular provision has met with strong and determined opposition from all sides of the Chamber…. These are events one would have supposed to be of sufficient interest to be recorded in the daily Press. But they have been passed over in complete silence by the newspapers from The Times to the Daily Herald…. The differential treatment of women under this Bill has aroused a feeling of resentment among them such as has not been witnessed since the granting of the franchise…. How is one to account for this being completely concealed by the Press?”

[◉17] Flesh wounds were of course inflicted during the battle of Westminster. Indeed the fight for the vote seems to have been more severe than is now recognized. Thus Flora Drummond says: “Whether we won the vote by our agitation, as I believe, or whether we got it for other reasons, as some people say, I think many of the younger generation will find it hard to believe the fury and brutality aroused by our claim for votes for women less than thirty years ago.” (Flora Drummond in the Listener, August 25th, 1937.) The younger generation is presumably so used to the fury and brutality that claims for liberty arouse that they have no emotion available for this particular instance. Moreover, that particular fight has not yet taken its place among the fights which have made England the home, and Englishmen the champions, of liberty. The fight for the vote is still generally referred to in terms of sour deprecation: “… and the women … had not begun that campaign of burning, whipping, and picture-slashing which was finally to prove to both Front Benches their eligibility for the Franchise.” (Reflections and Memories, by Sir John Squire, p. 10.) The younger generation therefore can be excused if they believe that there was nothing heroic about a campaign in which only a few windows were smashed, shins broken, and Sargent’s portrait of Henry James damaged, but not irreparably, with a knife. Burning, whipping and picture-slashing only it would seem become heroic when carried out on a large scale by men with machine-guns.

[◉18] The Life of Sophia Jex-Blake, by Margaret Todd, M.D., p. 72.

[◉19] “Much has lately been said and written of the achievements and accomplishments of Sir Stanley Baldwin during his Premierships and too much would be impossible. Might I be permitted to call attention to what Lady Baldwin has done? When I first joined the committee of this hospital in 1929, analgesics (pain deadeners) for normal maternity cases in the wards were almost unknown, now their use is ordinary routine and they are availed of in practically 100 per cent. of cases, and what is true of this hospital is true virtually for all similar hospitals. This remarkable change in so short a time is due to the inspiration and the tireless efforts and encouragement of Mrs. Stanley Baldwin, as she then was….” (Letter to The Times from C. S. Wentworth Stanley, Chairman House Committee, The City of London Maternity Hospital, 1937.) Since chloroform was first administered to Queen Victoria on the birth of Prince Leopold in April 1853, “normal maternity cases in the wards” have had to wait for seventy-six years and the advocacy of a Prime Minister’s wife to obtain this relief.

[◉20] According to Debrett the Knights and Dames of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire wear a badge consisting of “a cross patonce, enamelled pearl, fimbriated or, surmounted by a gold medallion with a representation of Britannia seated within a circle gules inscribed with the motto ‘For God and the Empire.’” This is one of the few orders open to women, but their subordination is properly marked by the fact that the ribbon in their case is only two inches and one-quarter in breadth; whereas the ribbon of the Knights is three inches and three-quarters in breadth. The stars also differ in size. The motto, however, is the same for both sexes, and must be held to imply that those who thus ticket themselves see some connection between the Deity and the Empire, and hold themselves prepared to defend them. What happens if Britannia seated within a circle gules is opposed (as is conceivable) to the other authority whose seat is not specified on the medallion, Debrett does not say, and the Knights and Dames must themselves decide.

[◉21] Life of Sir Ernest Wild, K.C., by R. J. Rackham, p. 91.

[◉22] Lord Baldwin, speech reported in The Times, April 20th, 1936.

[◉23] Life of Charles Gore, by G. L. Prestige, D.D., pp. 240-1.

[◉24] Life of Sir William Broadbent, K.C.V.O., F.R.S., edited by his daughter, M. E. Broadbent, p. 242.

[◉25] The Lost Historian, a Memoir of Sir Sidney Low, by Desmond Chapman-Huston, p. 198.

[◉26] Thoughts and Adventures, by the Rt. Hon. Winston Churchill, p. 57.

[◉27] Speech at Belfast by Lord Londonderry, reported in The Times, July 11th, 1936.

[◉28] Thoughts and Adventures, by the Rt. Hon. Winston Churchill, p. 279.

[◉29] Daily Herald, February 13th, 1935.

[◉30] Goethe’s Faust, translated by Melian Stawell and G. L. Dickinson.

[◉31] The Life of Charles Tomlinson, by his niece, Mary Tomlinson, p. 30.

[◉32] Miss Weeton, Journal of a Governess, 1807-1811, edited by Edward Hall, pp. 14, xvii.

[◉33] A Memoir of Anne Jemima Clough, by B. A. Clough, p. 32.

[◉34] Personal Reminiscences of a Great Crusade, by Josephine Butler, p. 189.

[◉35] “You and I know that it matters little if we have to be the out-of-sight piers driven deep into the marsh, on which the visible ones are carried, that support the bridge. We do not mind if, hereafter, people forget that there are any low down at all; if some have to be used up in trying experiments, before the best way of building the bridge is discovered. We are quite willing to be among these. The bridge is what we care for, and not our place in it; and we believe that, to the end, it may be kept in remembrance that this is alone to be our object.” (Letter from Octavia Hill to Mrs. N. Senior, September 20th, 1874. The Life of Octavia Hill, by C. Edmund Maurice, pp. 307-8.)

Octavia Hill (1838-1912) initiated the movement for “securing better homes for the poor and open spaces for the public…. The ‘Octavia Hill System’ has been adopted over the whole planned extension of [Amsterdam]. In January 1928 no less than 28,648 dwellings had been built.” (Octavia Hill, from letters edited by Emily S. Maurice, pp. 10-11.)

[◉36] The maid played so important a part in English upper-class life from the earliest times until the year 1914, when the Hon. Monica Grenfell went to nurse wounded soldiers accompanied by a maid [Bright Armour, by Monica Salmond, p. 20], that some recognition of her services seems to be called for. Her duties were peculiar. Thus she had to escort her mistress down Piccadilly “where a few club men might have looked at her out of a window,” but was unnecessary in Whitechapel, “where malefactors were possibly lurking round every corner.” But her office was undoubtedly arduous. Wilson’s part in Elizabeth Barrett’s private life is well known to readers of the famous letters. Later in the century (about 1889-92) Gertrude Bell “went with Lizzie, her maid, to picture exhibitions; she was fetched by Lizzie from dinner parties; she went with Lizzie to see the Settlement in Whitechapel where Mary Talbot was working….” (Early Letters of Gertrude Bell, edited by Lady Richmond.) We have only to consider the hours she waited in cloak rooms, the acres she toiled in picture galleries, the miles she trudged along West End pavements to conclude that if Lizzie’s day is now almost over, it was in its day a long one. Let us hope that the thought that she was putting into practice the commands laid down by St. Paul in his Letters to Titus and the Corinthians, was a support; and the knowledge that she was doing her utmost to deliver her mistress’s body intact to her master a solace. Even so in the weakness of the flesh and in the darkness of the beetle-haunted basement she must sometimes have bitterly reproached St. Paul on the one hand for his chastity, and the gentlemen of Piccadilly on the other for their lust. It is much to be regretted that no lives of maids, from which a more fully documented account could be constructed, are to be found in the Dictionary of National Biography.

[◉37] The Earlier Letters of Gertrude Bell, collected and edited by Elsa Richmond, pp. 217-18.

[◉38] The question of chastity, both of mind and body, is of the greatest interest and complexity. The Victorian, Edwardian and much of the Fifth Georgian conception of chastity was based, to go no further back, upon the words of St. Paul. To understand their meaning we should have to understand his psychology and environment—no light task in view of his frequent obscurity and the lack of biographical material. From internal evidence it seems clear that he was a poet and a prophet, but lacked logical power, and was without that psychological training which forces even the least poetic or prophetic nowadays to subject their personal emotions to scrutiny. Thus his famous pronouncement on the matter of veils, upon which the theory of women’s chastity seems to be based, is susceptible to criticism from several angles. In the Letter to the Corinthians his argument that a woman must be veiled when she prays or prophesies is based upon the assumption that to be unveiled “is one and the same thing as if she were shaven.” That assumption granted, we must ask next: What shame is there in being shaven? Instead of replying, St. Paul proceeds to assert, “For a man indeed ought not to have his head veiled, forasmuch as he is the image and glory of God”: from which it appears that it is not being shaven in itself that is wrong; but to be a woman and to be shaven. It is wrong, it appears, for the woman because “the woman is the glory of the man.” If St. Paul had said openly that he liked the look of women’s long hair many of us would have agreed with him, and thought the better of him for saying so. But other reasons appeared to him preferable, as appears from his next remark: “For the man is not of the woman; but the woman of the man; for neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the man: for this cause ought the woman to have a sign of authority on her head, because of the angels.” What view the angels took of long hair we have no means of knowing; and St. Paul himself seems to have been doubtful of their support or he would not think it necessary to drag in the familiar accomplice nature. “Doth not even nature itself teach you, that, if a man have long hair, it is a dishonour to him? But if a woman have long hair, it is a glory to her: for her hair is given her for a covering. But if any man seemeth to be contentious, we have no such custom, neither the churches of God.” The argument from nature may seem to us susceptible of amendment; nature, when allied with financial advantage, is seldom of divine origin; but if the basis of the argument is shifty, the conclusion is firm. “Let the women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but let them be in subjection, as also saith the law.” Having thus invoked the familiar but always suspect trinity of accomplices, Angels, nature and law, to support his personal opinion, St. Paul reaches the conclusion which has been looming unmistakably ahead of us: “And if they would learn anything, let them ask their own husbands at home: for it is shameful for a woman to speak in the church.” The nature of that “shame,” which is closely connected with chastity has, as the letter proceeds, been considerably alloyed. For it is obviously compounded of certain sexual and personal prejudices. St. Paul, it is obvious, was not only a bachelor (for his relations with Lydia see Renan, Saint Paul, p. 149. “Est-il cependant absolument impossible que Paul ait contracté avec cette sœur une union plus intime? On ne saurait l’affirmer”); and, like many bachelors, suspicious of the other sex; but a poet and like many poets preferred to prophesy himself rather than to listen to the prophecies of others. Also he was of the virile or dominant type, so familiar at present in Germany, for whose gratification a subject race or sex is essential. Chastity then as defined by St. Paul is seen to be a complex conception, based upon the love of long hair; the love of subjection; the love of an audience; the love of laying down the law, and, subconsciously, upon a very strong and natural desire that the woman’s mind and body shall be reserved for the use of one man and one only. Such a conception when supported by the Angels, nature, law, custom and the Church, and enforced by a sex with a strong personal interest to enforce it, and the economic means, was of undoubted power. The grip of its white if skeleton fingers can be found upon whatever page of history we open from St. Paul to Gertrude Bell. Chastity was invoked to prevent her from studying medicine; from painting from the nude; from reading Shakespeare; from playing in orchestras; from walking down Bond Street alone. In 1848 it was “an unpardonable solecism” for the daughters of a gardener to drive down Regent Street in a hansom cab (Paxton and the Bachelor Duke, by Violet Markham, p. 288); that solecism became a crime, of what magnitude theologians must decide, if the flaps were left open. In the beginning of the present century the daughter of an ironmaster (for let us not flout distinctions said to-day to be of prime importance), Sir Hugh Bell, had “reached the age of 27 and married without ever having walked alone down Piccadilly…. Gertrude, of course, would never have dreamt of doing that….” The West End was the contaminated area. “It was one’s own class that was taboo; …” (The Earlier Letters of Gertrude Bell, collected and edited by Elsa Richmond, pp. 217-18.) But the complexities and inconsistencies of chastity were such that the same girl who had to be veiled, i.e. accompanied by a male or a maid, in Piccadilly, could visit Whitechapel, or Seven Dials, then haunts of vice and disease, alone and with her parents’ approval. This anomaly did not altogether escape comment. Thus Charles Kingsley as a boy exclaimed: “… and the girls have their heads crammed full of schools, and district visiting, and baby linen, and penny clubs. Confound!!! and going about among the most abominable scenes of filth and wretchedness, and indecency to visit the poor and read the Bible to them. My own mother says that the places they go into are fit for no girl to see, and that they should not know such things exist.” (Charles Kingsley, by Margaret Farrand Thorp, p. 12.) Mrs. Kingsley, however, was exceptional. Most of the daughters of educated men saw such “abominable scenes,” and knew that such things existed. That they concealed their knowledge, is probable; what effect that concealment had psychologically it is impossible here to inquire. But that chastity, whether real or imposed, was an immense power, whether good or bad, it is impossible to doubt. Even to-day it is probable that a woman has to fight a psychological battle of some severity with the ghost of St. Paul, before she can have intercourse with a man other than her husband. Not only was the social stigma strongly exerted on behalf of chastity, but the Bastardy Act did its utmost to impose chastity by financial pressure. Until women had the vote in 1918, “the Bastardy Act of 1872 fixed the sum of 5s. a week as the maximum which a father, whatever his wealth, could be made to pay towards the maintenance of his child.” (Josephine Butler, by M. G. Fawcett and E. M. Turner, note, p. 101.) Now that St. Paul and many of his apostles have been unveiled themselves by modern science chastity has undergone considerable revision. Yet there is said to be a reaction in favour of some degree of chastity for both sexes. This is partly due to economic causes; the protection of chastity by maids is an expensive item in the bourgeois budget. The psychological argument in favour of chastity is well expressed by Mr. Upton Sinclair: “Nowadays we hear a great deal about mental troubles caused by sex repression; it is the mood of the moment. We do not hear anything about the complexes which may be caused by sex indulgence. But my observation has been that those who permit themselves to follow every sexual impulse are quite as miserable as those who repress every sexual impulse. I remember a class-mate in College; I said to him: ‘Did it ever occur to you to stop and look at your own mind? Everything that comes to you is turned into sex.’ He looked surprised, and I saw that it was a new idea to him; he thought it over, and said: ‘I guess you are right.” (Candid Reminiscences, by Upton Sinclair, p. 63.) Further illustration is supplied by the following anecdote: “In the splendid library of Columbia University were treasures of beauty, costly volumes of engravings, and in my usual greedy fashion I went at these, intending to learn all there was to know about Renaissance art in a week or two. But I found myself overwhelmed by this mass of nakedness; my senses reeled, and I had to quit.” (Op. cit., pp. 62-3.)

[◉39] The translation here used is by Sir Richard Jebb (Sophocles, the Plays and Fragments, with critical notes, commentary and translation in English prose.) It is impossible to judge any book from a translation, yet even when thus read The Antigone is clearly one of the great masterpieces of dramatic literature. Nevertheless, it could undoubtedly be made, if necessary, into anti-Fascist propaganda. Antigone herself could be transformed either into Mrs. Pankhurst, who broke a window and was imprisoned in Holloway; or into Frau Pommer, the wife of a Prussian mines official at Essen, who said: “‘The thorn of hatred has been driven deep enough into the people by the religious conflicts, and it is high time that the men of to-day disappeared.’ … She has been arrested and is to be tried on a charge of insulting and slandering the State and the Nazi movement.” (The Times, August 12th, 1935.) Antigone’s crime was of much the same nature and was punished in much the same way. Her words, “See what I suffer, and from whom, because I feared to cast away the fear of heaven! … And what law of heaven have I transgressed? Why, hapless one, should I look to the gods any more—what ally should I invoke—when by piety I have earned the name of impious?” could be spoken either by Mrs. Pankhurst, or by Frau Pommer; and are certainly topical. Creon, again, who “thrust the children of the sunlight to the shades, and ruthlessly lodged a living soul in the grave”; who held that “disobedience is the worst of evils,” and that “whomsoever the city may appoint, that man must be obeyed, in little things and great, in just things and unjust” is typical of certain politicians in the past, and of Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini in the present. But though it is easy to squeeze these characters into up-to-date dress, it is impossible to keep them there. They suggest too much; when the curtain falls we sympathize, it may be noted, even with Creon himself. This result, to the propagandist undesirable, would seem to be due to the fact that Sophocles (even in a translation) uses freely all the faculties that can be possessed by a writer; and suggests, therefore, that if we use art to propagate political opinions, we must force the artist to clip and cabin his gift to do us a cheap and passing service. Literature will suffer the same mutilation that the mule has suffered; and there will be no more horses.

[◉40] The five words of Antigone are: Οὓτοι συνέχθειν ἅλλα συμϕιλειν ἕϕυν. ’Tis not my nature to join in hating, but in loving. (Antigone, line 523 (Jebb).) To which Creon replied: “Pass, then, to the world of the dead, and, if thou must needs love, love them. While I live, no woman shall rule me.”

[◉41] Even at a time of great political stress like the present it is remarkable how much criticism is still bestowed upon women. The announcement, “A shrewd, witty and provocative study of modern woman,” appears on an average three times yearly in publishers’ lists. The author, often a doctor of letters, is invariably of the male sex; and “to mere man,” as the blurb puts it (see Times Lit. Sup., March 12th, 1938), “this book will be an eye-opener.”

THREE GUINEAS: THREE.

[◉1] It is to be hoped that some methodical person has made a collection of the various manifestos and questionnaires issued broadcast during the years 1936-7. Private people of no political training were invited to sign appeals asking their own and foreign governments to change their policy; artists were asked to fill up forms stating the proper relations of the artist to the State, to religion, to morality; pledges were required that the writer should use English grammatically and avoid vulgar expressions; and dreamers were invited to analyse their dreams. By way of inducement it was generally proposed to publish the results in the daily or weekly Press. What effect this inquisition has had upon governments it is for the politician to say. Upon literature, since the output of books is unstaunched, and grammar would seem to be neither better nor worse, the effect is problematical. But the inquisition is of great psychological and social interest. Presumably it originated in the state of mind suggested by Dean Inge (The Rickman Godlee Lecture, reported in The Times, November 23rd, 1937), “whether in our own interests we were moving in the right direction. If we went on as we were doing now, would the man of the future be superior to us or not? … Thoughtful people were beginning to realize that before congratulating ourselves on moving fast we ought to have some idea where we were moving to”: a general self-dissatisfaction and desire “to live differently.” It also points, indirectly, to the death of the Siren, that much ridiculed and often upper-class lady who by keeping open house for the aristocracy, plutocracy, intelligentsia, ignorantsia, etc., tried to provide all classes with a talking-ground or scratching-post where they could rub up minds, manners and morals more privately, and perhaps as usefully. The part that the Siren played in promoting culture and intellectual liberty in the eighteenth century is held by historians to be of some importance. Even in our own day she had her uses. Witness W. B. Yeats—“How often I have wished that he (Synge) might live long enough to enjoy that communion with idle, charming cultivated women which Balzac in one of his dedications calls ‘the chief consolation of genius’!” (Dramatis Personae, W. B. Yeats, p. 127.) Lady St. Helier who, as Lady Jeune, preserved the eighteenth-century tradition, informs us, however, that “Plovers” eggs at 2s. 6d. apiece, forced strawberries, early asparagus, petits poussins … are now considered almost a necessity by anyone aspiring to give a good dinner” (1909); and her remark that the reception day was “very fatiguing … how exhausted I felt when half-past seven came, and how gladly at eight o’clock I sat down to a peaceful tête-à-tête dinner with my husband!” (Memories of Fifty Years, by Lady St. Helier, pp. 3, 5, 182) may explain why such houses are shut, why such hostesses are dead, and why therefore the intelligentsia, the ignorantsia, the aristocracy, the bureaucracy, the bourgeoisie, etc., are driven (unless somebody will revive that society on an economic basis) to do their talking in public. But in view of the multitude of manifestos and questionnaires now in circulation it would be foolish to suggest another into the minds and motives of the Inquisitors.

[◉2] “He did begin however on May 13th (1844) to lecture weekly at Queen’s College which Maurice and other professors at King’s had established a year before, primarily for the examination and training of governesses. Kingsley was ready to share in this unpopular task because he believed in the higher education of women.” (Charles Kingsley, by Margaret Farrand Thorp, p. 65.)

[◉3] The French, as the above quotation shows, are as active as the English in issuing manifestos. That the French, who refuse to allow the women of France to vote, and still inflict upon them laws whose almost medieval severity can be studied in The Position of Women in Contemporary France, by Frances Clark, should appeal to English women to help them to protect liberty and culture must cause surprise.

[◉4] Strict accuracy, here slightly in conflict with rhythm and euphony, requires the word “port.” A photograph in the daily Press of “Dons in a Senior Common Room after dinner” (1937) shows “a railed trolley in which the port decanter travels across a gap between diners at the fireplace, and thus continues its round without passing against the sun.” Another picture shows the “sconce” cup in use. “This old Oxford custom ordains that mention of certain subjects in Hall shall be punished by the offender drinking three pints of beer at one draught….” Such examples are by themselves enough to prove how impossible it is for a woman’s pen to describe life at a man’s college without committing some unpardonable solecism. But the gentlemen whose customs are often, it is to be feared, travestied, will extend their indulgence when they reflect that the female novelist, however reverent in intention, works under grave physical drawbacks. Should she wish, for example, to describe a Feast at Trinity, Cambridge, she has to “listen through the peephole in the room of Mrs. Butler (the Master’s wife) to the speeches taking place at the Feast which was held in Trinity College.” Miss Haldane’s observation was made in 1907, when she reflected that “The whole surroundings seemed mediæval.” (From One Century to Another, by E. Haldane, p. 235.)

[◉5] According to Whitaker there is a Royal Society of Literature and also the British Academy, both presumably, since they have offices and officers, official bodies, but what their powers are it is impossible to say, since if Whitaker had not vouched for their existence it would scarcely have been suspected.

[◉6] Women were apparently excluded from the British Museum Reading-Room in the eighteenth century. Thus: “Miss Chudleigh solicits permission to be received into the reading-room. The only female student who as yet has honoured us was Mrs. Macaulay; and your Lordship may recollect what an untoward event offended her delicacy.” (Daniel Wray to Lord Harwicke, October 22nd, 1768. Nichols, Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century, Vol. I, p. 137.) The editor adds in a footnote: “This alludes to the indelicacy of a gentleman there, in Mrs. Macaulay’s presence; of which the particulars will not bear to be repeated.”

[◉7] The Autobiography and Letters of Mrs. M. O. W. Oliphant, arranged and edited by Mrs. Harry Coghill. Mrs. Oliphant (1825-97) “lived in perpetual embarrassment owing to her undertaking education and maintenance of her widowed brother’s children in addition to her own two sons …” (Dictionary of National Biography.)

[◉8] Macaulay’s History of England, Vol. III, p. 278 (standard edition).

[◉9] Mr. Littlewood, until recently dramatic critic of the Morning Post, described the condition of Journalism at Present at a dinner given in his honour, December 6th, 1937. Mr. Littlewood said: “that he had in season and out of season fought for more space for the theatre in the columns of the London daily papers. It was Fleet Street where, between eleven and half-past twelve, not to mention before and after, thousands of beautiful words and thoughts were systematically massacred. It had been his lot for at least two out of his four decades to return to that shambles every night with the sure and certain prospect of being told that the paper was already full with important news, and that there was no room for any sanguinary stuff about the theatre. It had been his luck to wake up the next morning to find himself answerable for the mangled remains of what was once a good notice…. It was not the fault of the men in the office. Some of them put the blue pencil through with tears in their eyes. The real culprit was that huge public who knew nothing about the theatre and could not be expected to care.” The Times, December 6th, 1937.

Mr. Douglas Jerrold describes the treatment of politics in the Press. “In those few brief years [between 1928-33] truth had fled from Fleet Street. You could never tell all the truth all the time. You never will be able to do so. But you used at least to be able to tell the truth about other countries. By 1933, you did it at your peril. In 1928 there was no direct political pressure from advertisers. To-day it is not only direct but effective.”

Literary criticism would seem to be in much the same case and for the same reason: “There are no critics in whom the public have any more confidence. They trust, if at all, to the different Book Societies, and the selections of individual newspapers, and on the whole they are wise…. The Book Society are frankly book sellers, and the great national newspapers cannot afford to puzzle their readers. They must all choose books which have, at the prevailing level of public taste, a potentially large sale.” (Georgian Adventure, by Douglas Jerrold, pp. 282, 283, 298.)

[◉10] While it is obvious that under the conditions of journalism at present the criticism of literature must be unsatisfactory, it is also obvious that no change can be made, without changing the economic structure of society and the psychological structure of the artist. Economically, it is necessary that the reviewer should herald the publication of a new book with his town-crier’s shout “O yez, O yez, O yez, such and such a book has been published; its subject is this, that or the other.” Psychologically, vanity and the desire for “recognition” are still so strong among artists that to starve them of advertisement and to deny them frequent if contrasted shocks of praise and blame would be as rash as the introduction of rabbits into Australia: the balance of nature would be upset and the consequences might well be disastrous. The suggestion in the text is not to abolish public criticism; but to supplement it by a new service based on the example of the medical profession. A panel of critics recruited from reviewers (many of whom are potential critics of genuine taste and learning) would practise like doctors and in strictest privacy. Publicity removed, it follows that most of the distractions and corruptions which inevitably make contemporary criticism worthless to the writer would be abolished; all inducement to praise or blame for personal reasons would be destroyed; neither sales nor vanity would be affected; the author could attend to criticism without considering the effect upon public or friends; the critic could criticize without considering the editor’s blue pencil or the public taste. Since criticism is much desired by the living, as the constant demand for it proves, and since fresh books are as essential for the critic’s mind as fresh meat for his body, each would gain; literature even might benefit. The advantages of the present system of public criticism are mainly economic; the evil effects psychologically are shown by the two famous Quarterly reviews of Keats and Tennyson. Keats was deeply wounded; and “the effect … upon Tennyson himself was penetrating and prolonged. His first act was at once to withdraw from the press The Lover’s Tale…. We find him thinking of leaving England altogether, of living abroad.” (Tennyson, by Harold Nicolson, p. 118.) The effect of Mr. Churton Collins upon Sir Edmund Gosse was much the same: “His self-confidence was undermined, his personality reduced … was not everyone watching his struggles and regarding him as doomed? … His own account of his sensations was that he went about feeling that he had been flayed alive.” (The Life and Letters of Sir Edmund Gosse, by Evan Charteris, p. 196.)

[◉11] “A-ring-the-bell-and-run-away-man.” This word has been coined in order to define those who make use of words with the desire to hurt but at the same time to escape detection. In a transitional age when many qualities are changing their value, new words to express new values are much to be desired. Vanity, for example, which would seem to lead to severe complications of cruelty and tyranny, judging from evidence supplied abroad, is still masked by a name with trivial associations. A supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary is indicated.

[◉12] Memoir of Anne J. Clough, by B. A. Clough, pp. 38, 67.

“The Sparrow’s Nest,” by William Wordsworth.

[◉13] In the nineteenth century much valuable work was done for the working class by educated men’s daughters in the only way that was then open to them. But now that some of them at least have received an expensive education, it is arguable that they can work much more effectively by remaining in their own class and using the methods of that class to improve a class which stands much in need of improvement. If on the other hand the educated (as so often happens) renounce the very qualities which education should have bought—reason, tolerance, knowledge—and play at belonging to the working class and adopting its cause, they merely expose that cause to the ridicule of the educated class, and do nothing to improve their own. But the number of books written by the educated about the working class would seem to show that the glamour of the working class and the emotional relief afforded by adopting its cause, are to-day as irresistible to the middle class as the glamour of the aristocracy was twenty years ago (see A La Recherche du Temps Perdu). Meanwhile it would be interesting to know what the true-born working man or woman thinks of the playboys and playgirls of the educated class who adopt the working-class cause without sacrificing middle-class capital, or sharing working-class experience. “The average housewife,” according to Mrs. Murphy, Home Service Director of the British Commercial Gas Association” washed an acre of dirty dishes, a mile of glass and three miles of clothes and scrubbed five miles of floor yearly.” (Daily Telegraph, September 29th, 1937). For a more detailed account of working-class life, see Life as We Have Known It, by Co-operative working women, edited by Margaret Llewelyn Davies. The Life of Joseph Wright also gives a remarkable account of working class life at first hand and not through pro-proletarian spectacles.

[◉14] “It was stated yesterday at the War Office that the Army Council have no intention of opening recruiting for any women’s corps.” (The Times, October 22nd, 1937.) This marks a prime distinction between the sexes. Pacifism is enforced upon women. Men are still allowed liberty of choice.

[◉15] The following quotation shows, however, that if sanctioned the fighting instinct easily develops. “The eyes deeply sunk into the sockets, the features acute, the amazon keeps herself very straight on the stirrups at the head of her squadron…. Five English parlementaries look at this woman with the respectful and a bit restless admiration one feels for a ‘fauve’ of an unknown species….

—Come nearer Amalia—orders the commandant. She pushes her horse towards us and salutes her chief with the sword.

—Sergeant Amalia Bonilla—continues the chief of the squadron—how old are you?—Thirty-six—Where were you born?—In Granada—Why have you joined the army—My two daughters were militiawomen. The younger has been killed in the Alto de Leon. I thought I had to supersede her and to avenge her.—And how many enemies have you killed to avenge her?—You know it, commandant, five. The sixth is not sure.—No, but you have taken his horse. The amazon Amalia rides in fact a magnificent dapple-grey horse, with glossy hair, which flatters like a parade horse…. This woman who has killed five men—but who feels not sure about the sixth—was for the envoys of the House of Commons an excellent introducer to the Spanish war.” (The Martyrdom of Madrid, Inedited Witnesses, by Louis Delaprée, pp. 34, 5, 6. Madrid, 1937.)

[◉16] By way of proof, an attempt may be made to elucidate the reasons given by various Cabinet Ministers in various Parliaments from about 1870 to 1918 for opposing the Suffrage Bill. An able effort has been made by Mrs. Oliver Strachey (see chapter “The Deceitfulness of Politics” in her “The Cause”).

[◉17] “We have had women’s civil and political status before the League only since 1935.” From reports sent in as to the position of the woman as wife, mother and home maker, “the sorry fact was discovered that her economic position in many countries (including Great Britain) was unstable. She is entitled neither to salary nor wages and has definite duties to perform. In England, though she may have devoted her whole life to husband and children, her husband, no matter how wealthy, can leave her destitute at his death and she has no legal redress. We must alter this—by legislation….” (Linda P. Littlejohn, reported in the Listener, November 10th, 1937.)

[◉18] This particular definition of woman’s task comes not from an Italian but from a German source. There are so many versions and all are so much alike that it seems unnecessary to verify each separately. But it is curious to find how easy it is to cap them from English sources. Mr. Gerhardi for example writes: “Never yet have I committed the error of looking on women writers as serious fellow artists. I enjoy them rather as spiritual helpers who, endowed with a sensitive capacity for appreciation, may help the few of us afflicted with genius to bear our cross with good grace. Their true role, therefore, is rather to hold out the sponge to us, cool our brow, while we bleed. If their sympathetic understanding may indeed be put to a more romantic use, how we cherish them for it!” (Memoirs of a Polyglot, by William Gerhardi, pp. 320, 321.) This conception of woman’s role tallies almost exactly with that quoted above.

[◉19] To speak accurately, “a large silver plaque in the form of the Reich eagle … was created by President Hindenburg for scientists and other distinguished civilians…. It may not be worn. It is usually placed on the writing-desk of the recipient.” (Daily paper, April 21st, 1936.)

[◉20] “It is a common thing to see the business girl contenting herself with a bun or a sandwich for her midday meal; and though there are theories that this is from choice … the truth is that they often cannot afford to eat properly.” (Careers and Openings for Women, by Ray Strachey, p. 74.) Compare also Miss E. Turner: “… many offices had been wondering why they were unable to get through their work as smoothly as formerly. It had been found that junior typists were fagged out in the afternoons because they could afford only an apple and a sandwich for lunch. Employers should meet the increased cost of living by increased salaries.” (The Times, March 28th, 1938.)

[◉21] The Mayoress of Woolwich (Mrs. Kathleen Rance) speaking at a bazaar, reported in Evening Standard, December 20th, 1937.

[◉22] Miss E. R. Clarke, reported in The Times, September 24th, 1937.

[◉23] Reported in Daily Herald, August 15th, 1936.

[◉24] Canon F. R. Barry, speaking at conference arranged by Anglican Group at Oxford, reported in The Times, January 10th, 1933.

[◉25] The Ministry of Women. Report of the Archbishops’ Commission. VII. Secondary Schools and Universities, p. 65.

[◉26] “Miss D. Carruthers, Head Mistress of the Green School, Isleworth, said there was a ‘very grave dissatisfaction’ among older schoolgirls at the way in which organized religion was carried on. The Churches seem somehow to be failing to supply the spiritual needs of young people,’ she said. ‘It is a fault that seems common to all churches.’” (Sunday Times, November 21st, 1937.)

[◉27] Life of Charles Gore, by G. L. Prestige, D.D., p. 353.

[◉28] The Ministry of Women. Report of the Archbishops’ Commission, passim.

[◉29] Whether or not the gift of prophecy and the gift of poetry were originally the same, a distinction has been made between those gifts and professions for many centuries. But the fact that the Song of Songs, the work of a poet, is included among the sacred books, and that propagandist poems and novels, the works of prophets, are included among the secular, points to some confusion. Lovers of English literature can scarcely be too thankful that Shakespeare lived too late to be canonized by the Church. Had the plays been ranked among the sacred books they must have received the same treatment as the Old and the New Testaments; we should have had them doled out on Sundays from the mouths of priests in snatches; now a soliloquy from Hamlet; now a corrupt passage from the pen of some drowsy reporter; now a bawdy song; now half a page from Antony and Cleopatra, as the Old and New Testaments have been sliced up and interspersed with hymns in the Church of England service; and Shakespeare would have been as unreadable as the Bible. Yet those who have not been forced from childhood to hear it thus dismembered weekly assert that the Bible is a work of the greatest interest, much beauty, and deep meaning.

[◉30] The Ministry of Women, Appendix I. “Certain Psychological and Physiological Considerations,” by Professor Grensted, D.D., pp. 79-87.

[◉31] “At present a married priest is able to fulfil the requirements of the ordination service, ‘to forsake and set aside all worldly cares and studies,’ largely because his wife can undertake the care of the household and the family….” (The Ministry of Women, p. 32.)

The Commissioners are here stating and approving a principle which is frequently stated and approved by the dictators. Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini have both often in very similar words expressed the opinion that “There are two worlds in the life of the nation, the world of men and the world of women”; and proceeded to much the same definition of the duties. The effect which this division has had upon the woman; the petty and personal nature of her interests; her absorption in the practical; her apparent incapacity for the poetical and adventurous—all this has been made the staple of so many novels, the target for so much satire, has confirmed so many theorists in the theory that by the law of nature the woman is less spiritual than the man, that nothing more need be said to prove that she has carried out, willingly or unwillingly, her share of the contract. But very little attention has yet been paid to the intellectual and spiritual effect of this division of duties upon those who are enabled by it “to forsake all worldly cares and studies.” Yet there can be no doubt that we owe to this segregation the immense elaboration of modern instruments and methods of war; the astonishing complexities of theology; the vast deposit of notes at the bottom of Greek, Latin and even English texts; the innumerable carvings, chasings and unnecessary ornamentations of our common furniture and crockery; the myriad distinctions of Debrett and Burke; and all those meaningless but highly ingenious turnings and twistings into which the intellect ties itself when rid of “the cares of the household and the family.” The emphasis which both priests and dictators place upon the necessity for two worlds is enough to prove that it is essential to their domination.

[◉32] Evidence of the complex nature of satisfaction of dominance is provided by the following quotation: “My husband insists that I call him ‘Sir,’” said a woman at the Bristol Police Court yesterday, when she applied for a maintenance order. “To keep the peace I have complied with his request,” she added. “I also have to clean his boots, fetch his razor when he shaves, and speak up promptly when he asks me questions.” In the same issue of the same paper Sir E. F. Fletcher is reported to have “urged the House of Commons to stand up to dictators.” (Daily Herald, August 1st, 1936.) This would seem to show that the common consciousness which includes husband, wife and House of Commons is feeling at one and the same moment the desire to dominate, the need to comply in order to keep the peace, and the necessity of dominating the desire for dominance—a psychological conflict which serves to explain much that appears inconsistent and turbulent in contemporary opinion. The pleasure of dominance is of course further complicated by the fact that it is still, in the educated class, closely allied with the pleasures of wealth, social and professional prestige. Its distinction from the comparatively simple pleasures—e.g. the pleasure of a country walk—is proved by the fear of ridicule which great psychologists, like Sophocles, detect in the dominator; who is also peculiarly susceptible according to the same authority either to ridicule or defiance on the part of the female sex. An essential element in this pleasure therefore would seem to be derived not from the feeling itself but from the reflection of other people’s feelings, and it would follow that it can be influenced by a change in those feelings. Laughter as an antidote to dominance is perhaps indicated.

[◉33] The Life of Charlotte Brontë, by Mrs. Gaskell.

[◉34] The Life of Sophia Jex-Blake, by Margaret Todd, pp. 67-9, 70-1, 72.

[◉35] External observation would suggest that a man still feels it a peculiar insult to be taunted with cowardice by a woman in much the same way that a woman feels it a peculiar insult to be taunted with unchastity by a man. The following quotation supports this view. Mr. Bernard Shaw writes: “I am not forgetting the gratification that war gives to the instinct of pugnacity and admiration of courage that are so strong in women…. In England on the outbreak of war civilized young women rush about handing white feathers to all young men who are not in uniform. This,” he continues, “like other survivals from savagery is quite natural,” and he points out that “in old days a woman’s life and that of her children depended on the courage and killing capacity of her mate.” Since vast numbers of young men did their work all through the war in offices without any such adornment, and the number of “civilized young women” who stuck feathers in coats must have been infinitesimal compared with those who did nothing of the kind, Mr. Shaw’s exaggeration is sufficient proof of the immense psychological impression that fifty or sixty feathers (no actual statistics are available) can still make. This would seem to show that the male still preserves an abnormal susceptibility to such taunts; therefore that courage and pugnacity are still among the prime attributes of manliness; therefore that he still wishes to be admired for possessing them; therefore that any derision of such qualities would have a proportionate effect. That “the manhood emotion” is also connected with economic independence seems probable. “We have never known a man who was not, openly or secretly, proud of being able to support women; whether they were his sisters or his mistresses. We have never known a woman who did not regard the change from economic independence on an employer to economic dependence on a man, as an honourable promotion. What is the good of men and women lying to each other about these things? It is not we that have made them”—(A. H. Orage, by Philip Mairet, vii)—an interesting statement, attributed by G. K. Chesterton to A. H. Orage.

[◉36] Until the beginning of the ’eighties, according to Miss Haldane, the sister of R. B. Haldane, no lady could work. “I should, of course, have liked to study for a profession, but that was an impossible idea unless one were in the sad position of ‘having to work for one’s bread’ and that would have been a terrible state of affairs. Even a brother wrote of the melancholy fact after he had been to see Mrs. Langtry act. ‘She was a lady and acted like a lady, but what a sad thing it was that she should have to do so!” (From One Century to Another, by Elizabeth Haldane, pp. 73-4.) Harriet Martineau earlier in the century was delighted when her family lost its money, for thus she lost her “gentility” and was allowed to work.

[◉37] Life of Sophia Jex-Blake, by Margaret Todd, pp. 69, 70.

[◉38] For an account of Mr. Leigh Smith, see The Life of Emily Davies, by Barbara Stephen. Barbara Leigh Smith became Madame Bodichon.

[◉39] How nominal that opening was is shown by the following account of the actual conditions under which women worked in the R.A. Schools about 1900. “Why the female of the species should never be given the same advantages as the male it is difficult to understand. At the R.A. Schools we women had to compete against men for all the prizes and medals that were given each year, and we were only allowed half the amount of tuition and less than half their opportunities for study…. No nude model was allowed to be posed in the women’s painting room at the R.A. Schools…. The male students not only worked from nude models, both male and female, during the day, but they were given an evening class as well, at which they could make studies from the figure, the visiting R.A. instructing.” This seemed to the women students “very unfair indeed”; Miss Collyer had the courage and the social standing necessary to beard first Mr. Frank Dicksee, who argued that since girls marry, money spent on their teaching is money wasted; next Lord Leighton; and at length the thin edge of the wedge, that is the undraped figure, was allowed. But “the advantages of the night class we never did succeed in obtaining….” The women students therefore clubbed together and hired a photographer’s studio in Baker Street. “The money that we, as the committee, had to find, reduced our meals to near starvation diet.” (Life of an Artist, by Margaret Collyer, pp. 79-81, 82.) The same rule was in force at the Nottingham Art School in the twentieth century. “Women were not allowed to draw from the nude. If the men worked from the living figure I had to go into the Antique Room … the hatred of those plaster figures stays with me till this day. I never got any benefit out of their study.” (Oil Paint and Grease Paint, by Dame Laura Knight, p. 47.) But the profession of art is not the only profession that is thus nominally open. The profession of medicine is “open,” but “… nearly all the Schools attached to London Hospitals are barred to women students, whose training in London is mainly carried on at the London School of Medicine.” (Memorandum on the Position of English Women in Relation to that of English Men, by Philippa Strachey (1935), p. 26.) “Some of the girl ‘medicals’ at Cambridge University have formed themselves into a group to ventilate the grievance.” (Evening News, March 25th, 1937.) In 1922 women students were admitted to the Royal Veterinary College, Camden Town. “… since then the profession has attracted so many women that the number has recently been restricted to 50.” (Daily Telegraph, October 1st, 1937.)

[◉40] The Life of Mary Kingsley, by Stephen Gwyn, pp. 18, 26. In a fragment of a letter Mary Kingsley writes: “I am useful occasionally, but that is all—very useful a few months ago when on calling on a friend she asked me to go up to her bedroom and see her new hat—a suggestion that staggered me, I knowing her opinion of mine in such matters.” “The letter,” says Mr. Gwyn, “did not complete this adventure of an unauthorised fiancé, but I am sure she got him off the roof and enjoyed the experience riotously.”

[◉41] The Life of Mary Kingsley, by Stephen Gwyn, p. 26.

[◉42] According to Antigone there are two kinds of law, the written and the unwritten, and Mrs. Drummond maintains that it may sometimes be necessary to improve the written law by breaking it. But the many and varied activities of the educated man’s daughter in the nineteenth century were clearly not simply or even mainly directed towards breaking the laws. They were, on the contrary, endeavours of an experimental kind to discover what are the unwritten laws; that is the private laws that should regulate certain instincts, passions, mental and physical desires. That such laws exist, and are observed by civilized people, is fairly generally allowed; but it is beginning to be agreed that they were not laid down by “God,” who is now very generally held to be a conception, of patriarchal origin, valid only for certain races, at certain stages and times; nor by nature, who is now known to vary greatly in her commands and to be largely under control; but have to be discovered afresh by successive generations, largely by their own efforts of reason and imagination. Since, however, reason and imagination are to some extent the product of our bodies, and there are two kinds of body, male and female, and since these two bodies have been proved within the past few years to differ fundamentally, it is clear that the laws that they perceive and respect must be differently interpreted. Thus Professor Julian Huxley says: “… from the moment of fertilization onwards, man and woman differ in every cell of their body in regard to the number of their chromosomes—those bodies which, for all the world’s unfamiliarity, have been shown by the last decade’s work to be the bearers of heredity, the determiners of our characters and qualities.” In spite of the fact, therefore, that “the superstructure of intellectual and practical life is potentially the same in both sexes,” and that “The recent Board of Education Report of the Committee on the Differentiation of the Curriculum for Boys and Girls in Secondary Schools (London, 1923), has established that the intellectual differences between the sexes are very much slighter than popular belief allows,” (Essays in Popular Science, by Julian Huxley, pp. 62-3), it is clear that the sexes now differ and will always differ. If it were possible not only for each sex to ascertain what laws hold good in its own case, and to respect each other’s laws; but also to share the results of those discoveries, it might be possible for each sex to develop fully and improve in quality without surrendering its special characteristics. The old conception that one sex must “dominate” another would then become not only obsolete, but so odious that if it were necessary for practical purposes that a dominant power should decide certain matters, the repulsive task of coercion and dominion would be relegated to an inferior and secret society, much as the flogging and execution of criminals is now carried out by masked beings in profound obscurity. But this is to anticipate.

[◉43] From The Times obituary notice of H. W. Greene, fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, familiarly called “Grugger,” February 6th, 1933.

[◉44] “In 1747 the quarterly court (of the Middlesex Hospital) decided to set apart some of the beds for lying-in cases under rules which precluded any woman from acting as midwife. The exclusion of women has remained the traditional attitude. In 1861 Miss Garrett, afterwards Dr. Garrett Anderson, obtained permission to attend classes … and was permitted to visit the wards with the resident officers, but the students protested and the medical officers gave way. The Board declined an offer from her to endow a scholarship for women students.” The Times, May 17th, 1935.

[◉45] “There is, in the modern world, a great body of well-attested knowledge … but as soon as any strong passion intervenes to warp the expert’s judgment he becomes unreliable, whatever scientific equipment he may possess.” (The Scientific Outlook, by Bertrand Russell, p. 17.)

[◉46] One of the record-breakers, however, gave a reason for record-breaking which must compel respect: “Then, too, there was my belief that now and then women should do for themselves what men have already done—and occasionally what men have not done—thereby establishing themselves as persons, and perhaps encouraging other women towards greater independence of thought and action…. When they fail, their failure must be a challenge to others.” (The Last Flight, by Amelia Earhart, pp. 21, 65.)

[◉47] “In point of fact this process [childbirth] actually disables women only for a very small fraction in most of their lives—even a woman who has six children is only necessarily laid up for twelve months out of her whole lifetime.” (Careers and Openings for Women, by Ray Strachey, pp. 47-8.) At present, however, she is necessarily occupied for much longer. The bold suggestion has been made that the occupation is not exclusively maternal, but could be shared by both parents to the common good.

[◉48] The nature of manhood and the nature of womanhood are frequently defined both by Italian and German dictators. Both repeatedly insist that it is the nature of man and indeed the essence of manhood to fight. Hitler, for example, draws a distinction between “a nation of pacifists and a nation of men.” Both repeatedly insist that it is the nature of womanhood to heal the wounds of the fighter. Nevertheless a very strong movement is on foot towards emancipating man from the old “natural and eternal law” that man is essentially a fighter; witness the growth of pacifism among the male sex to-day. Compare further Lord Knebworth’s statement “that if permanent peace were ever achieved, and armies and navies ceased to exist, there would be no outlet for the manly qualities which fighting developed,” with the following statement by another young man of the same social caste a few months ago: “… it is not true to say that every boy at heart longs for war. It is only other people who teach it us by giving us swords and guns, soldiers and uniforms to play with.” (Conquest of the Past, by Prince Hubertus Loewenstein, p. 215.) It is possible that the Fascist States by revealing to the younger generation at least the need for emancipation from the old conception of virility are doing for the male sex what the Crimean and the European wars did for their sisters. Professor Huxley, however, warns us that “any considerable alteration of the hereditary constitution is an affair of millennia, not of decades.” On the other hand, as science also assures us that our life on earth is “an affair of millennia, not of decades,” some alteration in the hereditary constitution may be worth attempting.

[◉49] Coleridge however expresses the views and aims of the outsiders with some accuracy in the following passage: “Man must be free or to what purpose was he made a Spirit of Reason, and not a Machine of Instinct? Man must obey; or wherefore has he a conscience? The powers, which create this difficulty, contain its solution likewise; for their service is perfect freedom. And whatever law or system of law compels any other service, disennobles our nature, leagues itself with the animal against the godlike, kills in us the very principle of joyous well-doing, and fights against humanity…. If therefore society is to be under a rightful constitution of government, and one that can impose on rational Beings a true and moral obligation to obey it, it must be framed on such principles that every individual follows his own Reason, while he obeys the laws of the constitution, and performs the will of the state while he follows the dictates of his own Reason. This is expressly asserted by Rousseau, who states the problem of a perfect constitution of government in the following words: Trouver une forme d’Association—par laquelle chacun s’unisant a tous, n’obeisse pourtant qu’à lui même, et reste aussi libre qu’auparavant, i.e. To find a form of society according to which each one uniting with the whole shall yet obey himself only and remain as free as before.” (The Friend, by S. T. Coleridge, Vol. I, pp. 333, 334, 335, edition 1818.) To which may be added a quotation from Walt Whitman:

“Of Equality—as if it harm’d me, giving others the same chances and rights as myself—as if it were not indispensable to my own rights that others possess the same.”

And finally the words of a half-forgotten novelist, George Sand, are worth considering:

“Toutes les existences sont solidaires les unes des autres, et tout être humain qui présenterait la sienne isolément, sans la rattacher à celle de ses semblables, n’offrirait qu’une énigme à débrouiller…. Cette individualité n’a par elle seule ni signification ni importance aucune. Elle ne prend un sens quelconque qu’en devenant une parcelle de la vie générale, en se fondant avec l’individualité de chacun de mes semblables, et c’est par là qu’elle devient de l’histoire.” (Histoire de ma Vie, par George Sand, pp. 240-1.)

ROGER FRY.

[◉1] No. 6 The Grove. Later Sir Edward took No. 5, next door.

[◉2] Portsmouth Fry, after a brilliant youth, contracted an illness which made him a lifelong invalid.

[◉3] The Life of J. Pierpont Morgan, by John Kennedy Winkler.

[◉4] Pierpont Morgan wished to keep it for his own collection.

[◉5] Helen Fry died in the Retreat at York in 1937. After her death the cause of her illness was found to be an incurable thickening of the bone of the skull.

[◉6] In these passages and those that follow Roger Fry’s French has been allowed to stand as he wrote it.

[◉7] The manuscript was stolen, probably under some misapprehension, by a luggage thief in Paris. But it rose from its ashes at St Rémy.

[◉8] Lao Tzü said: “L’homme naturel resiste à la nature des choses, celui qui connaît le Lao coule par les interstices”.

[◉9] In 1928 he contributed an essay, “Words Wanted in Connexion with the Arts”, to Needed Words, by Logan Pearsall Smith. S.P.E. Tract No. XXXI.

[◉10] E. M. Forster. Roger Fry: an obituary note.

THE DEATH OF THE MOTH.

[◉1] Coleridge the Talker. Edited by Richard W. Armour and Raymond F. Howes.

[◉2] Keepaway is the name of a preparation used to distract the male dog from the female at certain seasons.

THE MOMENT.

[◉] The following letter by Virginia Woolf appears in The Nation of September 12, 1925.

Sir,

Fear of a sudden death very naturally distracted Kappa’s mind from my article on David Copperfield or he would, I think, have taken my meaning. That nobody can remember reading David Copperfield for the first time is a proof not, as he infers, that the reading makes so little impression that it slips off the mind unremembered, but that David Copperfield takes such rank among our classics and is a book of such astonishing vividness that parents will read it aloud to their children before they can quite distinguish fact from fiction, and they will never in later life be able to recall the first time they read it. Grimm’s Fairy Tales and Robinson Crusoe are for many people in the same case.

Questions of affection are of course always disputable. I can only reiterate that while I would cheerfully become Shakespeare’s cat, Scott’s pig, or Keats’s canary, if by so doing I could share the society of these great men, I would not cross the road (reasons of curiosity apart) to dine with Wordsworth, Byron, or Dickens. Yet I venerate their genius; and my tears would certainly help to swell the “unparalleled flow of popular grief” at their deaths. It only means that writers have characters apart from their books, which are sympathetic to some, antipathetic to others. And I maintain that if it could be put to the vote, Which do you prefer as man, Shakespeare, Scott, or Dickens? Shakespeare would be first, Scott second, and Dickens nowhere at all.

Yours, etc.,

Virginia Woolf]

THE CAPTAIN’S DEATH BED.

[◉1] The Citizen of the World and The Bee, By Oliver Goldsmith. Introduction by Richard Church.

[◉2] Hary-O, The Letters of Lady Harriet Cavendish, 1796–1809. Edited by her grandson, Sir George Leveson-Gower, K.B.E., and his daughter, Iris Palmer.

[◉3] The New Statesman, April, 1939.

[◉4] The Daily Telegraph, March, 1939.

GRANITE AND RAINBOW.

[◉1] George Meredith: A Study of his Works and Personality, by J. H. E. Crees.

[◉2] Materials and Methods of Fiction, by Clayton Hamilton. With an Introduction by Brander Matthews.

[◉3] The Tale of Terror: A Study of the Gothic Romance, by Edith Birkhead.

[◉4] The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction, by Dorothy Scarborough.

[◉5] Vignettes of Memory, by Lady Violet Greville, 1927.

[◉6] Recollections of Lady Georgiana Peel. Compiled by her daughter Ethel Peel.

[◉7] Victorian Recollections, by John A. Bridges.

[◉8] The Manners of My Time, by C. L. H. Dempster.

[◉9] Sporting Reminiscences, by Dorothea Conyers.

[◉10] John Porter of Kingsclere. An anthology written in collaboration with Edward Monkhouse.

[◉11] The Life and Times of Lawrence Sterne, Wilbur L. Cross.

[◉12] Supplement to the Letters of Horace Walpole, fourth Earl of Orford. Chronologically arranged and edited with notes and indices by Paget Toynbee. Two volumes.

[◉13] Giuseppe Baretti and his Friends by Lacy Collison-Morley.

[◉14] The Life of Thomas Couts, Banker, by Ernest Hartley Coleridge.

[◉15] Marie Corelli: The Life & Death of a Best-Seller, by George Bullock.

[◉16] Poe’s Helen, by Caroline Ticknor.

[◉17] Visits to Walt Whitman in 1890–91, by J. Johnston and J. W. Wallace.

Index.

Stories,
in chronological order.

Stories,
in alphabetical order.

Essays,
in chronological order.

Essays,
in alphabetical order.

Essays,
in the order of authors reviewed.

[]

Stories,
in chronological order.

[]

Phyllis and Rosamond.

The Mysterious Case of Miss V.

The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn.

A Dialogue upon Mount Pentelicus.

Memoirs of a Novelist.

Kew Gardens.

The Mark on the Wall.

The Evening Party.

Sympathy.

Solid Objects.

An Unwritten Novel.

A Society.

A Haunted House.

Monday or Tuesday.

The String Quartet.

Blue & Green.

A Woman’s College from Outside.

In the Orchard.

Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street.

Nurse Lugton’s Curtain.

The Widow and the Parrot.

The New Dress.

Happiness.

Ancestors.

Together and Apart.

The Introduction.

The Man who Loved his Kind.

A Simple Melody.

A Summing Up.

Moments of Being.

The Fascination of the Pool.

The Lady in the Looking-Glass.

Three Pictures.

Scenes From the Life of a British Naval Officer.

Miss Pryme.

Ode Written Partly in Prose on Seeing the Name of Cutbush above a Butcher’s Shop in Pentonville.

Portraits.

Uncle Vanya.

The Duchess and the Jeweller.

Lappin and Lapinova.

The Shooting Party.

The Searchlight.

The Legacy.

Gipsy, the Mongrel.

The Symbol.

The Watering Place.

[]

Stories,
in alphabetical order.

[]

Ancestors.

Blue & Green.

Dialogue upon Mount Pentelicus, A.

Duchess and the Jeweller, The.

Evening Party, The.

Fascination of the Pool, The.

Gipsy, the Mongrel.

Happiness.

Haunted House, A.

In the Orchard.

Introduction, The.

Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn, The.

Kew Gardens.

Lady in the Looking-Glass, The.

Lappin and Lapinova.

Legacy, The.

Man who Loved his Kind, The.

Mark on the Wall, The.

Memoirs of a Novelist.

Miss Pryme.

Moments of Being.

Monday or Tuesday.

Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street.

Mysterious Case of Miss V., The.

New Dress, The.

Nurse Lugton’s Curtain.

Ode Written Partly in Prose on Seeing the Name of Cutbush above a Butcher’s Shop in Pentonville.

Phyllis and Rosamond.

Portraits.

Scenes From the Life of a British Naval Officer.

Searchlight, The.

Shooting Party, The.

Simple Melody, A.

Society, A.

Solid Objects.

String Quartet, The.

Summing Up, A.

Symbol, The.

Sympathy.

Three Pictures.

Together and Apart.

Uncle Vanya.

Unwritten Novel, An.

Watering Place, The.

Widow and the Parrot, The.

Woman’s College from Outside, A.

[]

Essays,
in chronological order.

[]

’04    ’05    ’06    ’07    ’08    ’09    ’10    ’11

’12    ’13    ’16    ’17    ’18    ’19    ’20    ’21

’22    ’23    ’24    ’25    ’26    ’27    ’28    ’29

’30    ’31    ’32    ’33    ’34    ’35    ’36    ’37

’38    ’39    ’40    ’41

[1904]

‘The Son of Royal Langbrith.’

Haworth, November 1904.

[]

[1905]

‘Next-Door Neighbours.’

On a Faithful Friend.

The Feminine Note in Fiction.

‘A Belle of the Fifties.’

Mr Henry James’s Latest Novel.

The Decay of Essay-Writing.

Street Music.

Literary Geography.

‘Barham of Beltana.’

‘By Beach and Bogland.’

‘The Fortunes of Farthings.’

‘Nancy Stair.’

‘Arrows of Fortune.’

‘A Dark Lantern.’

Journeys in Spain.

The American Woman.

‘Rose of Lone Farm.’

An Andalusian Inn.

A Priory Church.

The Letters of Jane Welsh Carlyle.

The Value of Laughter.

Their Passing Hour.

‘The Letter Killeth.’

‘Lone Marie.’

‘The Devil’s Due.’

‘The House of Mirth.’

‘The Debtor.’

‘A Flood Tide.’

‘The Making of Michael.’

A Description of the Desert.

‘The Brown House and Cordelia.’

‘Delta.’

Two Irish Novels.

‘The Tower of Siloam.’

A Walk By Night.

[]

[1906]

A Nineteenth-Century Critic.

‘After His Kind.’

The Sister of Frederic the Great.

‘The Scholar’s Daughter.’

‘A Supreme Moment.’

‘The House of Shadows.’

‘Blanche Esmead.’

‘The Face of Clay.’

The Poetic Drama.

Poets’ Letters.

Wordsworth and the Lakes.

‘The Compromise.’

‘Mrs Grundy’s Crucifix.’

The Bluest of the Blue.

‘Coniston.’

‘The Author’s Progress.’

Sweetness—Long Drawn Out.

Trafficks and Discoveries.

‘The English Mail Coach.’

Portraits of Places.

‘Chippinge.’

‘Occasion’s Forelock.’

‘Abbots Verney.’

Impressions of Sir Leslie Stephen.

[]

[1907]

‘The Lonely Lady of Grosvenor Square.’

‘Memoirs of a Person of Quality.’

‘The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft.’

‘Temptation.’

‘Disciples.’

‘Carlyle and the London Library.’

Old Hampshire Vignettes.’

Mary Christie.

‘The Wingless Victory.’

Lady Huntingdon.

‘In Playtime.’

Some Poetic Plays.

The Call of the East.

‘The Longest Journey.’

‘Fräulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther.’

Mrs Sellar’s Recollections.

‘Letters of a Betrothed.’

‘The Glen o’ Weeping.’

Philip Sidney.

Venice.

‘A Mirror of Shalott.’

‘The Feast of Bacchus.’

‘The Red Sphinx.’

Lady Fanshawe’s Memoirs.

‘Love the Judge.’

‘The New Religion.

‘Tales of Two People.’

‘Mam Linda.’

‘The Weavers.’

‘The Square Peg.’

‘Outrageous Fortune.’

‘A Swan and Her Friends.’

‘The Desert Venture.’

‘The Forest Playfellow.’

‘The Northern Iron.’

William Allingham.

Reminiscences.

[]

[1908]

Some Poetical Plays.

Rachel Gurney of the Grove.

‘The Sentimental Traveller.’

Thomas Hood.

The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt.

‘Father Alphonsus.’

‘Colonel Kate.’

‘The Inward Light.’

Shelley and Elizabeth Hitchener.

‘The Ways of Rebellion.’

‘The Wolf.’

The Memoirs of Lady Dorothy Nevill.

Wordsworth Letters.

‘The Sword Decides.’

‘The Red Neighbour.’

‘Destinies.’

‘Marotz.’

‘Between the Twilights.’

John Delane.

The Diary of a Lady in Waiting.

The Stranger in London.

‘A Week In The White House.’

Scottish Women.

Louise de La Vallière.

‘A Room with a View.’

‘Château and Country Life.’

Letters of Christina Rossetti.

‘Blackstick Papers.’

Elizabeth Lady Holland.

A Vanished Generation.

[]

[1909]

‘Venice.’

The Genius of Boswell.

‘One Immortality.’

More Carlyle Letters.

‘Gentlemen Errant.’

Caroline Emelia Stephen.

The Opera.

A Friend of Johnson.

Art and Life.

Sterne.

Impressions at Bayreuth.

Oliver Wendell Holmes.

‘Masques and Phases.’

A Cookery Book.

Sheridan.

Maria Edgeworth and Her Circle.

The Girlhood of Queen Elizabeth.

[]

[1910]

Lady Hester Stanhope.

Modes and Manners of the Nineteenth Century.

Emerson’s Journals.

Mrs Gaskell.

Lysistrata.

[]

[1911]

The Duke and Duchess of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne.

‘Rachel.’

‘The Post-Impressionists.’

[]

[1912]

The Novels of George Gissing.

‘Frances Willard.’

[]

[1913]

Chinese Stories.

Jane Austen.

A Friend of the Great Duke.

‘Women of the Country.’

‘Les Copains.’

[]

[1916]

Queen Adelaide.

A Scribbling Dame.

Charlotte Brontë

‘Past and Present at the English Lakes.’

A Man With a View.

Heard on the Downs: The Genesis of Myth.

‘The Park Wall.’

Butterflies and Moths: Insects in September.

The Fighting Nineties.

Among the Poets.

‘London Revisited.’

In a Library.

Hours in a Library.

Old and Young.

‘Social Life in England.’

Mr Symons’s Essays.

[]

[1917]

‘Romance.’

Tolstoy’s ‘The Cossacks’.

Melodious Meditations.

More Dostoevsky.

‘Before Midnight.’

Parodies.

Sir Walter Raleigh.

‘The House of Lyme.’

Poe’s Helen.

A Talker.

‘In Good Company.’

A Cambridge v.a.d.

The Perfect Language.

Mr Sassoon’s Poems.

‘Creative Criticism.’

‘South Wind.’

‘Books and Persons.’

Thoreau.

‘Lord Jim.’

‘John Davidson.’

A Victorian Echo.

Mr Galsworthy’s Novel.

To Read Or Not To Read.

Mr Conrad’s ‘Youth’.

Flumina Amem Silvasque.

A Minor Dostoevsky.

Henry James: 2. The Old Order.

‘Hearts of Controversy.’

A Russian Schoolboy.

Stopford Brooke.

Mr Gladstone’s Daughter.

‘Charlotte Brontë.’

‘Rebels and Reformers.’

Sunset Reflections.

The New Crusade.

[]

[1918]

Visits to Walt Whitman.

Philosophy in Fiction.

A Book of Essays.

‘The Green Mirror.’

The Supernatural in Fiction.

Coleridge as Critic.

Mr Conrad’s Crisis.

Swinburne Letters.

Papers on Pepys.

‘Second Marriage.’

Two Irish Poets.

Tchehov’s Questions.

Imitative Essays.

Moments of Vision.

Dreams and Realities.

The Claim of the Living.

Loud Laughter.

A Victorian Socialist.

Mr Merrick’s Novels.

Two Soldier-Poets.

On Rereading Meredith.

Rupert Brooke.

A Practical Utopia.

‘The Sad Years.’

The ‘Movie’ Novel.

War in the Village.

The Rights of Youth.

Mr Hudson’s Childhood.

Caution and Criticism.

Adventurers All.

Honest Fiction.

Women Novelists.

Valery Brussof.

The Rough Road.

‘The Candle of Vision.’

‘Abraham Lincoln.’

Mr Howells on Form.

Bad Writers.

Trafficks and Discoveries.

‘The Three Black Pennys.’

A View of the Russian Revolution.

The Russian Point of View.

‘Mummery.’

‘The Method of Henry James.’

[]

[1919]

The War from the Street.

Small Talk About Meredith.

Dorothy Richardson: 1. The Tunnel.

Lady Ritchie.

‘Sylvia and Michael.’

Henry James: 1. Within the Rim.

Dickens by a Disciple.

Washington Irving.

The Eccentrics.

‘The Obstinate Lady.’

The Anatomy of Fiction.

‘Java Head.’

On Some of the Old Actors.

Is This Poetry?

‘The Way of All Flesh.’

Forgotten Benefactors.

A Positivist.

Horace Walpole.

These are the Plans.

Herman Melville.

‘The Old Madhouse.’

The Russian Background.

A Real American.

The Fleeting Portrait: 2. The Royal Academy.

‘Sonia Married.’

Wilcoxiana.

‘September.’

Mr Gosse and His Friends.

‘Madeleine.’

Landor in Little.

Dostoevsky in Cranford.

Winged Phrases.

Real Letters.

The Limits of Perfection.

George Eliot.

Maturity and Immaturity.

Watts-Dunton’s Dilemma.

The Intellectual Imagination.

Memories of Meredith.

‘Gold and Iron.’

Reading.

[]

[1920]

Pictures and Portraits.

An American Poet.

English Prose.

Cleverness and Youth.

Mr Norris’s Method.

A Talk about Memoirs.

Money and Love.

Men and Women.

Freudian Fiction.

Henry James: 3. The Letters of Henry James.

‘The Higher Court.’

An Imperfect Lady.

A Good Daughter.

An Old Novel.

The Wrong Way of Reading.

Body and Brain.

‘The Mills of the Gods.’

A Disillusioned Romantic.

The Pursuit of Beauty.

Pure English.

Mr Kipling’s Notebook.

The Intellectual Status of Women.

The Plumage Bill.

‘The Cherry Orchard.’

A Born Writer.

Gorky on Tolstoy.

A Character Sketch.

John Evelyn.

Jane Austen and the Geese.

22 Hyde Park Gate.

Postscript or Prelude?

Pleasant Stories.

A Flying Lesson.

[]

[1921]

‘Revolution.’

Mr Norris’s Standard.

‘Vision and Design.’

Henley’s Criticism.

A Prince of Prose.

George Eliot (1819—1880)

Congreve.

Ethel Smyth.

Scott’s Character.

Gothic Romance.

Patmore’s Criticism.

Trousers.

A Glance at Turgenev.

Fantasy.

Henry James’s Ghost Stories.

Old Bloomsbury.

[]

[1922]

Dostoevsky the Father.

A Letter to a Lady in Paraguay.

Jane Austen Practising.

On Re-reading Novels.

Eliza and Sterne.

[]

[1923]

How it Strikes a Contemporary.

To Spain.

Romance and the Heart.

Sir Thomas Browne.

An Impression of Gissing.

‘Maud-Evelyn, &c.’ and ‘The Sacred Fount’.

‘The Art of Thomas Hardy.’

Mr. Conrad: A Conversation.

The Compromise.

Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.

The Chinese Shoe.

[]

[1924]

‘The Poems, English and Latin, of Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury.’

Montaigne.

The Lives of the Obscure.

‘Glimpses of Authors.’

‘Unpublished Letters of Matthew Arnold.’

‘Arthur Yates: an Autobiography.’

‘Letters and Journals of Anne Chalmers.’

The Enchanted Organ : Anne Thackeray.

I was given the opportunity …

The Patron and the Crocus.

Aesthetically speaking, the new aquarium …

‘Anatole France, the Man and His Work.’

The Private View of the Royal Academy …

Mr Benson’s Memories.

‘Marie Elizabeth Towneley.’

What is a Good Novel?

‘Unwritten History.’

‘The Life and Last Words of Wilfrid Ewart.’

‘Robert Smith Surtees.’

Thunder at Wembley.

The Weekend.

Stendhal.

‘Days That Are Gone.’

‘Before the Mast—And After.’

‘The Truth at Last.’

Character in Fiction.

Joseph Conrad.

Editions-de-Luxe.

Strangely enough, that engaging acrobat …

The cheapening of motor-cars.

Appreciations.

The Schoolroom Floor.

Restoration Comedy.

It is strange as one enters the Mansard Gallery …

Not the least pitiable victims …

‘Richard Hakluyt.’

‘Smoke Rings and Roundelays.’

‘Memories of a Militant.’

‘Peggy. The Story of One Score Years and Ten.’

Sir Walter Scott, II. “The Antiquary”.

Can neither war nor peace …

‘These Were the Muses.’

Indiscretions.

‘The Faithful Shepherdess’ …

[]

[1925]

Notes on an Elizabethan Play.

‘Coming Back to London…’

Olive Schreiner.

‘This for Remembrance.’

The Two Samuel Butlers.

‘Guests and Memories: Annals of a Seaside Villa.’

‘Mainly Victorian.’

John Addington Symonds.

‘Further Reminiscences, 1864—1894.’

‘The Letters of Mary Russell Mitford.’

The Common Reader.

The Pastons and Chaucer.

On Not Knowing Greek.

The Elizabethan Lumber Room.

The Duchess of Newcastle.

Rambling Round Evelyn.

Defoe.

Addison.

Modern Fiction.

“Jane Eyre” And “Wuthering Heights”.

Outlines.

The Modern Essay.

Pictures.

‘What the Bloods of the ’Nineties Used to Say …’

‘A Player Under Three Reigns.’

‘The Tragic Life of Vincent Van Gogh.’

Gipsy or Governess?

‘Celebrities of Our Times.’

Harriette Wilson.

George Moore.

‘The Tale of Genji.’

American Fiction.

‘Pattledom.’

‘Unknown Essex.’

‘In My Anecdotage.’

‘Time, Taste, and Furniture.’

“David Copperfield”.

‘A Brilliant Englishwoman Writes to Me …’

‘In Any Family Save the Darwins …’

Swift’s “Journal to Stella”.

Congreve.

‘Twenty Years of My Life.’

Sterne’s Ghost.

Saint Samuel of Fleet Street.

Melba.

‘Some of the Smaller Manor Houses of Sussex.’

‘From Hall-Boy to House-Steward.’

[]

[1926]

On Being Ill.

‘Mary Elizabeth Haldane, a Record of a Hundred Years.’

“Robinson Crusoe”.

‘Queen Alexandra the Well-Beloved.’

‘Paradise in Piccadilly.’

‘Reminiscences of Mrs Comyns Carr.’

‘The Days of Dickens.’

‘The Flurried Years.’

‘Steeplejacks and Steeple jacking.’

Walter Raleigh.

The Cinema.

Jones and Wilkinson.

Romance and the ’Nineties.

Impassioned Prose.

The Cosmos.

Laughter and Tears.

Julia Margaret Cameron.

George Eliot.

How Should One Read a Book?

Life and the Novelist.

Genius : R.B. Haydon.

[]

[1927]

‘Victorian Jottings.’

George Gissing.

‘The Immortal Isles.’

What Is a Novel?

A Giant with Very Small Thumbs.

Two Women : Emily Davies and Lady Augusta Stanley.

The Governess of Downing Street.

The Narrow Bridge of Art.

Life Itself.

A Terribly Sensitive Mind.

An Essay in Criticism.

The Art of Fiction.

“Not One of Us”.

The New Biography.

Street Haunting: A London Adventure.

The Novels of E.M. Forster.

Praeterita.

The Death of the Moth.

[]

[1928]

The Novels of Thomas Hardy.

The Sun and the Fish.

The Novels of George Meredith.

‘Memories and Notes.’

‘The Cornish Miner.’

‘Stalky’s Reminiscences.’

The Fleeting Portrait: 1. Waxworks at the Abbey.

Preferences.

Mr Yeats.

‘Behind the Scenes with Cyril Maude.’

‘Behind the Brass Plate.’

‘The Book of Catherine Wells.’

‘On the Stage: An Autobiography.’

An Introduction to Mrs Dalloway.

‘Clara Butt: Her Life Story.’

‘Day In, Day Out.’

‘The Diaries of Mary, Countess of Meath.’

Dorothy Osborne’s “Letters”.

The Niece of an Earl.

Plays and Pictures.

Memories.

Half of Thomas Hardy.

Lady Strachey.

Ruskin.

Flying over London.

[]

[1929]

On Not Knowing French.

Geraldine and Jane.

Women and Fiction.

The ‘Censorship’ of Books.

Phases of Fiction.

Dr. Burney’s Evening Party.

Four Figures.

Women and Leisure.

A Room of One’s Own.

Gas.

[]

[1930]

Foreword to Recent Paintings by Vanessa Bell.

Augustine Birrell.

Fanny Burney’s Half-Sister.

William Hazlitt.

Memories of a Working Women’s Guild.

“I Am Christina Rossetti”.

Evening Over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor Car.

Modern Letters.

[]

[1931]

All about Books.

Lockhart’s Criticism.

George Eliot, 1819-1880.

Edmund Gosse.

“Aurora Leigh”.

The Docks of London.

Notes on D.H. Lawrence.

[]

[1932]

Oxford Street Tide.

The Rev William Cole.

Great Men’s Houses.

Abbeys and Cathedrals.

A Letter to a Young Poet.

“This is the House of Commons”.

The Strange Elizabethans.

Donne After Three Centuries.

“The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia”.

The “Sentimental Journey”.

Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to His Son.

Two Parsons.

Jack Mytton.

De Quincey’s Autobiography.

Leslie Stephen.

Portrait of a Londoner.

Old Mrs. Grey.

Middlebrow.

[]

[1933]

London Squares.

“Twelfth Night” at the Old Vic.

The Novels of Turgenev.

Professions for Women.

Crabbe.

[]

[1934]

Oliver Goldsmith.

Foreword to Catalogue of Recent Paintings by Vanessa Bell.

Why?

Walter Sickert.

Royalty [I].

[]

[1935]

Roger Fry.

The Captain’s Death Bed.

“The Faery Queen”.

[]

[1936]

The Artist and Politics.

Am I a Snob?

[]

[1937]

The Historian and “The Gibbon”.

Craftsmanship.

Reflections at Sheffield Place.

Miss Janet Case: Classical Scholar and Teacher.

Congreve’s Comedies.

Fishing.

[]

[1938]

Three Guineas.

A Sketch of the Past.

The Moment: Summer’s Night.

[]

[1939]

Lady Ottoline Morrell.

America, which I Have Never Seen …

Women Must Weep.

Two Antiquaries: Walpole and Cole.

The Art of Biography.

White’s Selborne.

Reviewing.

Lewis Carroll.

Madame de Sévigné.

Royalty [II].

[]

[1940]

Sir Walter Scott, I. Gas at Abbotsford.

The Dream.

The Humane Art.

Selina Trimmer.

The Man at the Gate.

Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid.

Sara Coleridge.

Georgiana and Florence.

The Leaning Tower.

[]

[1941]

Ellen Terry.

Mrs. Thrale.

[]

[no date]

Personalities.

[]

Essays,
in alphabetical order.

[]

A – B    C – D    E – G

H – I    J – L    M    N – O

P – R    S    T – U    V – W

[A – B]

22 Hyde Park Gate.

Abbeys and Cathedrals.

‘Abbots Verney.’

‘Abraham Lincoln.’

Addison.

Adventurers All.

Aesthetically speaking, the new aquarium …

‘After His Kind.’

All about Books.

Am I a Snob?

America, which I Have Never Seen …

American Fiction.

American Poet, An.

American Woman, The.

Among the Poets.

‘Anatole France, the Man and His Work.’

Anatomy of Fiction, The.

Andalusian Inn, An.

Appreciations.

‘Arrows of Fortune.’

Art and Life.

Art of Biography, The.

Art of Fiction, The.

‘Art of Thomas Hardy, The.’

‘Arthur Yates: an Autobiography.’

Artist and Politics, The.

Augustine Birrell.

“Aurora Leigh”.

‘Author’s Progress, The.’

Bad Writers.

‘Barham of Beltana.’

‘Before Midnight.’

‘Before the Mast—And After.’

‘Behind the Brass Plate.’

‘Behind the Scenes with Cyril Maude.’

‘Belle of the Fifties, A.’

‘Between the Twilights.’

‘Blackstick Papers.’

‘Blanche Esmead.’

Bluest of the Blue, The.

Body and Brain.

‘Book of Catherine Wells, The.’

Book of Essays, A.

‘Books and Persons.’

Born Writer, A.

‘Brilliant Englishwoman Writes to Me …, A’

‘Brown House and Cordelia, The.’

Butterflies and Moths: Insects in September.

‘By Beach and Bogland.’

[]

[C – D]

Call of the East, The.

Cambridge v.a.d, A.

Can neither war nor peace …

‘Candle of Vision, The.’

Captain’s Death Bed, The.

‘Carlyle and the London Library.’

Caroline Emelia Stephen.

Caution and Criticism.

‘Celebrities of Our Times.’

‘Censorship’ of Books, The.

Character in Fiction.

Character Sketch, A.

Charlotte Brontë. [1916]

‘Charlotte Brontë.’ [1917]

‘Château and Country Life.’

Cheapening of Motor-cars, The.

‘Cherry Orchard, The.’

Chinese Shoe, The.

Chinese Stories.

‘Chippinge.’

Cinema, The.

Claim of the Living, The.

‘Clara Butt: Her Life Story.’

Cleverness and Youth.

Coleridge as Critic.

‘Colonel Kate.’

‘Coming Back to London…’

Common Reader, The.

‘Compromise, The.’ [1906]

Compromise, The. [1923]

Congreve. [1921]

Congreve. [1925]

Congreve’s Comedies.

‘Coniston.’

Cookery Book, A.

‘Cornish Miner, The.’

Cosmos, The.

“Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, The”.

Crabbe.

Craftsmanship.

‘Creative Criticism.’

‘Dark Lantern, A.’

“David Copperfield”.

‘Day In, Day Out.’

‘Days of Dickens, The.’

‘Days That Are Gone.’

De Quincey’s Autobiography.

Death of the Moth, The.

‘Debtor, The.’

Decay of Essay-Writing, The.

Defoe.

‘Delta.’

Description of the Desert, A.

‘Desert Venture, The.’

‘Destinies.’

‘Devil’s Due, The.’

‘Diaries of Mary, Countess of Meath, The.’

Diary of a Lady in Waiting, The.

Dickens by a Disciple.

‘Disciples.’

Disillusioned Romantic, A.

Docks of London, The.

Donne After Three Centuries.

Dorothy Osborne’s “Letters”.

Dorothy Richardson: 1. The Tunnel.

Dostoevsky in Cranford.

Dostoevsky the Father.

Dr. Burney’s Evening Party.

Dream, The.

Dreams and Realities.

Duchess of Newcastle, The.

Duke and Duchess of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, The.

[]

[E – G]

Eccentrics, The.

Editions-de-Luxe.

Edmund Gosse.

Eliza and Sterne.

Elizabeth Lady Holland.

Elizabethan Lumber Room, The.

Ellen Terry.

Emerson’s Journals.

Enchanted Organ : Anne Thackeray, The.

‘English Mail Coach, The.’

English Prose.

Essay in Criticism, An.

Ethel Smyth.

Evening Over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor Car.

‘Face of Clay, The.’

“Faery Queen, The”.

‘Faithful Shepherdess, The’

Fanny Burney’s Half-Sister.

Fantasy.

‘Father Alphonsus.’

‘Feast of Bacchus, The.’

Feminine Note in Fiction, The.

Fighting Nineties, The.

Fishing.

Fleeting Portrait, The: 1. Waxworks at the Abbey.

Fleeting Portrait, The: 2. The Royal Academy.

‘Flood Tide, A.’

Flumina Amem Silvasque.

‘Flurried Years, The.’

Flying Lesson, A.

Flying over London.

‘Forest Playfellow, The.’

Foreword to Catalogue of Recent Paintings by Vanessa Bell.

Foreword to Recent Paintings by Vanessa Bell.

Forgotten Benefactors.

‘Fortunes of Farthings, The.’

Four Figures.

‘Frances Willard.’

‘Fräulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther.’

Freudian Fiction.

Friend of Johnson, A.

Friend of the Great Duke, A.

‘From Hall-Boy to House-Steward.’

‘Further Reminiscences, 1864–1894.’

Gas.

Genius : R.B. Haydon.

Genius of Boswell, The.

‘Gentlemen Errant.’

George Eliot. [1925]

George Eliot. [1926]

George Eliot (1819–1880) [1921]

George Eliot, 1819-1880. [1931]

George Gissing.

George Moore.

Georgiana and Florence.

Geraldine and Jane.

Giant with Very Small Thumbs, A.

Gipsy or Governess?

Girlhood of Queen Elizabeth, The.

Glance at Turgenev, A.

‘Glen o’ Weeping, The.’

‘Glimpses of Authors.’

‘Gold and Iron.’

Good Daughter, A.

Gorky on Tolstoy.

Gothic Romance.

Governess of Downing Street, The.

Great Men’s Houses.

‘Green Mirror, The.’

‘Guests and Memories: Annals of a Seaside Villa.’

[]

[H – I]

Half of Thomas Hardy.

Harriette Wilson.

Haworth, November 1904.

Heard on the Downs: The Genesis of Myth.

‘Hearts of Controversy.’

Henley’s Criticism.

Henry James: 1. Within the Rim.

Henry James: 2. The Old Order.

Henry James: 3. The Letters of Henry James.

Henry James’s Ghost Stories.

Herman Melville.

‘Higher Court, The.’

Historian and “The Gibbon”, The.

Honest Fiction.

Horace Walpole.

Hours in a Library.

‘House of Lyme, The.’

‘House of Mirth, The.’

‘House of Shadows, The.’

How it Strikes a Contemporary.

How Should One Read a Book?

Humane Art, The.

“I Am Christina Rossetti”.

I was given the opportunity …

Imitative Essays.

‘Immortal Isles, The.’

Impassioned Prose.

Imperfect Lady, An.

Impression of Gissing, An.

Impressions at Bayreuth.

Impressions of Sir Leslie Stephen.

In a Library.

‘In Any Family Save the Darwins …’

‘In Good Company.’

‘In My Anecdotage.’

‘In Playtime.’

Indiscretions.

Intellectual Imagination, The.

Intellectual Status of Women, The.

Introduction to Mrs Dalloway, An.

‘Inward Light, The.’

Is This Poetry?

It is strange as one enters the Mansard Gallery …

[]

[J – L]

Jack Mytton.

Jane Austen and the Geese.

Jane Austen Practising.

Jane Austen.

“Jane Eyre” And “Wuthering Heights”.

‘Java Head.’

John Addington Symonds.

‘John Davidson.’

John Delane.

John Evelyn.

Jones and Wilkinson.

Joseph Conrad.

Journeys in Spain.

Julia Margaret Cameron.

Lady Fanshawe’s Memoirs.

Lady Hester Stanhope.

Lady Huntingdon.

Lady Ottoline Morrell.

Lady Ritchie.

Lady Strachey.

Landor in Little.

Laughter and Tears.

Leaning Tower, The.

‘Les Copains.’

Leslie Stephen.

‘Letter Killeth, The.’

Letter to a Lady in Paraguay, A.

Letter to a Young Poet, A.

‘Letters and Journals of Anne Chalmers.’

‘Letters of a Betrothed.’

Letters of Christina Rossetti.

Letters of Jane Welsh Carlyle, The.

‘Letters of Mary Russell Mitford, The.’

Lewis Carroll.

‘Life and Last Words of Wilfrid Ewart, The.’

Life and the Novelist.

Life Itself.

Limits of Perfection, The.

Literary Geography.

Lives of the Obscure, The.

Lockhart’s Criticism.

‘London Revisited.’

London Squares.

‘Lone Marie.’

‘Lonely Lady of Grosvenor Square, The.’

‘Longest Journey, The.’

Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to His Son.

‘Lord Jim.’

Loud Laughter.

Louise de La Vallière.

‘Love the Judge.’

Lysistrata.

[]

[M]

Madame de Sévigné.

‘Madeleine.’

‘Mainly Victorian.’

‘Making of Michael, The.’

‘Mam Linda.’

Man at the Gate, The.

Man With a View, A.

Maria Edgeworth and Her Circle.

‘Marie Elizabeth Towneley.’

‘Marotz.’

Mary Christie.

‘Mary Elizabeth Haldane, a Record of a Hundred Years.’

‘Masques and Phases.’

Maturity and Immaturity.

‘Maud-Evelyn, &c.’ and ‘The Sacred Fount’.

Melba.

Melodious Meditations.

‘Memoirs of a Person of Quality.’

Memoirs of Lady Dorothy Nevill, The.

Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt, The.

Memories.

‘Memories and Notes.’

‘Memories of a Militant.’

Memories of a Working Women’s Guild.

Memories of Meredith.

Men and Women.

‘Method of Henry James, The.’

Middlebrow.

‘Mills of the Gods, The.’

Minor Dostoevsky, A.

‘Mirror of Shalott, A.’

Miss Janet Case: Classical Scholar and Teacher.

Modern Essay, The.

Modern Fiction.

Modern Letters.

Modes and Manners of the Nineteenth Century.

Moment: Summer’s Night, The.

Moments of Vision.

Money and Love.

Montaigne.

More Carlyle Letters.

More Dostoevsky.

‘Movie’ Novel, The.

Mr Benson’s Memories.

Mr Conrad’s ‘Youth’.

Mr Conrad’s Crisis.

Mr Galsworthy’s Novel.

Mr Gladstone’s Daughter.

Mr Gosse and His Friends.

Mr Henry James’s Latest Novel.

Mr Howells on Form.

Mr Hudson’s Childhood.

Mr Kipling’s Notebook.

Mr Merrick’s Novels.

Mr Norris’s Method.

Mr Norris’s Standard.

Mr Sassoon’s Poems.

Mr Symons’s Essays.

Mr Yeats.

Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.

Mr. Conrad: A Conversation.

Mrs Gaskell.

‘Mrs Grundy’s Crucifix.’

Mrs Sellar’s Recollections.

Mrs. Thrale.

‘Mummery.’

[]

[N – O]

‘Nancy Stair.’

Narrow Bridge of Art, The.

New Biography, The.

New Crusade, The.

‘New Religion, The.

‘Next-Door Neighbours.’

Niece of an Earl, The.

Nineteenth-Century Critic, A.

‘Northern Iron, The.’

“Not One of Us”.

Not the least pitiable victims …

Notes on an Elizabethan Play.

Notes on D.H. Lawrence.

Novels of E.M. Forster, The.

Novels of George Gissing, The.

Novels of George Meredith, The.

Novels of Thomas Hardy, The.

Novels of Turgenev, The.

‘Obstinate Lady, The.’

‘Occasion’s Forelock.’

Old and Young.

Old Bloomsbury.

Old Hampshire Vignettes.’

‘Old Madhouse, The.’

Old Mrs. Grey.

Old Novel, An.

Olive Schreiner.

Oliver Goldsmith.

Oliver Wendell Holmes.

On a Faithful Friend.

On Being Ill.

On Not Knowing French.

On Not Knowing Greek.

On Rereading Meredith.

On Re-reading Novels.

On Some of the Old Actors.

‘On the Stage: An Autobiography.’

‘One Immortality.’

Opera, The.

Outlines.

‘Outrageous Fortune.’

Oxford Street Tide.

[]

[P – R]

Papers on Pepys.

‘Paradise in Piccadilly.’

‘Park Wall, The.’

Parodies.

‘Past and Present at the English Lakes.’

Pastons and Chaucer, The.

Patmore’s Criticism.

Patron and the Crocus, The.

‘Pattledom.’

‘Peggy. The Story of One Score Years and Ten.’

Perfect Language, The.

Personalities.

Phases of Fiction.

Philip Sidney.

Philosophy in Fiction.

Pictures and Portraits.

Pictures.

‘Player Under Three Reigns, A.’

Plays and Pictures.

Pleasant Stories.

Plumage Bill, The.

Poe’s Helen.

‘Poems, English and Latin, of Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, The.’

Poetic Drama, The.

Poets’ Letters.

Portrait of a Londoner.

Portraits of Places.

Positivist, A.

‘Post-Impressionists, The.’

Postscript or Prelude?

Practical Utopia, A.

Praeterita.

Preferences.

Prince of Prose, A.

Priory Church, A.

‘Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, The.’

Private View of the Royal Academy …, The

Professions for Women.

Pure English.

Pursuit of Beauty, The.

Queen Adelaide.

‘Queen Alexandra the Well-Beloved.’

‘Rachel.’

Rachel Gurney of the Grove.

Rambling Round Evelyn.

Reading.

Real American, A.

Real Letters.

‘Rebels and Reformers.’

‘Red Neighbour, The.’

‘Red Sphinx, The.’

Reflections at Sheffield Place.

‘Reminiscences of Mrs Comyns Carr.’

Reminiscences.

Restoration Comedy.

Rev William Cole, The.

Reviewing.

‘Revolution.’

‘Richard Hakluyt.’

Rights of Youth, The.

‘Robert Smith Surtees.’

“Robinson Crusoe”.

Roger Fry.

‘Romance.’

Romance and the ’Nineties.

Romance and the Heart.

Room of One’s Own, A.

‘Room with a View, A.’

‘Rose of Lone Farm.’

Rough Road, The.

Royalty [I].

Royalty [II].

Rupert Brooke.

Ruskin.

Russian Background, The.

Russian Point of View, The.

Russian Schoolboy, A.

[]

[S]

‘Sad Years, The.’

Saint Samuel of Fleet Street.

Sara Coleridge.

‘Scholar’s Daughter, The.’

Schoolroom Floor, The.

Scott’s Character.

Scottish Women.

Scribbling Dame, A.

‘Second Marriage.’

Selina Trimmer.

“Sentimental Journey”, The.

‘Sentimental Traveller, The.’

‘September.’

Shelley and Elizabeth Hitchener.

Sheridan.

Sir Thomas Browne.

Sir Walter Raleigh.

Sir Walter Scott, I. Gas at Abbotsford.

Sir Walter Scott, II. “The Antiquary”.

Sister of Frederic the Great, The.

Sketch of the Past, A.

Small Talk About Meredith.

‘Smoke Rings and Roundelays.’

‘Social Life in England.’

‘Some of the Smaller Manor Houses of Sussex.’

Some Poetic Plays.

Some Poetical Plays.

‘Son of Royal Langbrith, The.’

‘Sonia Married.’

‘South Wind.’

‘Square Peg, The.’

‘Stalky’s Reminiscences.’

‘Steeplejacks and Steeple jacking.’

Stendhal.

Sterne.

Sterne’s Ghost.

Stopford Brooke.

Strange Elizabethans, The.

Strangely enough, that engaging acrobat …

Stranger in London, The.

Street Haunting: A London Adventure.

Street Music.

Sun and the Fish, The.

Sunset Reflections.

Supernatural in Fiction, The.

‘Supreme Moment, A.’

‘Swan and Her Friends, A.’

Sweetness—Long Drawn Out.

Swift’s “Journal to Stella”.

Swinburne Letters.

‘Sword Decides, The.’

‘Sylvia and Michael.’

[]

[T – U]

‘Tale of Genji, The.’

‘Tales of Two People.’

Talk about Memoirs, A.

Talker, A.

Tchehov’s Questions.

‘Temptation.’

Terribly Sensitive Mind, A.

Their Passing Hour.

These are the Plans.

‘These Were the Muses.’

‘This for Remembrance.’

“This is the House of Commons”.

Thomas Hood.

Thoreau.

Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid.

‘Three Black Pennys, The.’

Three Guineas.

Thunder at Wembley.

‘Time, Taste, and Furniture.’

To Read Or Not To Read.

To Spain.

Tolstoy’s ‘The Cossacks’.

‘Tower of Siloam, The.’

Trafficks and Discoveries. [1906]

Trafficks and Discoveries. [1918]

‘Tragic Life of Vincent Van Gogh, The.’

Trousers.

‘Truth at Last, The.’

“Twelfth Night” at the Old Vic.

‘Twenty Years of My Life.’

Two Antiquaries: Walpole and Cole.

Two Irish Novels.

Two Irish Poets.

Two Parsons.

Two Samuel Butlers, The.

Two Soldier-Poets.

Two Women : Emily Davies and Lady Augusta Stanley.

‘Unknown Essex.’

‘Unpublished Letters of Matthew Arnold.’

‘Unwritten History.’

[]

[V – W]

Valery Brussof.

Value of Laughter, The.

Vanished Generation, A.

Venice. [1907]

‘Venice.’ [1909]

Victorian Echo, A.

‘Victorian Jottings.’

Victorian Socialist, A.

View of the Russian Revolution, A.

‘Vision and Design.’

Visits to Walt Whitman.

Walk By Night, A.

Walter Raleigh.

Walter Sickert.

War from the Street, The.

War in the Village.

Washington Irving.

Watts-Dunton’s Dilemma.

‘Way of All Flesh, The.’

‘Ways of Rebellion, The.’

‘Weavers, The.’

‘Week In The White House, A.’

Weekend, The.

What is a Good Novel?

What Is a Novel?

‘What the Bloods of the ’Nineties Used to Say …’

White’s Selborne.

Why?

Wilcoxiana.

William Allingham.

William Hazlitt.

Winged Phrases.

‘Wingless Victory, The.’

‘Wolf, The.’

Women and Fiction.

Women and Leisure.

Women Must Weep.

Women Novelists.

‘Women of the Country.’

Wordsworth and the Lakes.

Wordsworth Letters.

Wrong Way of Reading, The.

[]

Essays,
in the order of authors reviewed.

[A – B]    [C – D]    [E – G]

[H]    [I – L]    [M – N]

[O – R]    [S]    [T – Y]

[]

[A – B]

Addison, Joseph

Adelaide, Queen

Ainger, Canon Alfred

Aksakoff, Serge

Allingham, William

Aristophanes

Arliss, George

Arnold, Matthew

Asquith, Margot    [2]

Austen, Jane    [2]    [3]

Austen-Leigh, Mary Augusta

Ayscough, John

Bagot, Richard

Baireuth, Wilhelmina Margravine of

Bak

Baretti, Giuseppe

Baring, Maurice

Baring-Gould, Sabine

Barlow, Jane

Barrett Browning, Elizabeth    [2]

Bax, Clifford

Bayard Hale, William

Beach, Joseph Warren

Beerbohm, Max    [2]

Belfort Bax, Ernest

Bell, Vanessa    [2]

Bennett, Arnold    [2]    [3]

Benson, A.C.

Benson, Robert Hugh

Bentley, Dr

Beresford, J.D.    [2]

Bernhardt, Sarah

Bernstein, Herman

Besier, Rudolf

Birkhead, Edith

Birmingham, G.A.

Birrell, Augustine

Blake, Mrs Warenne

Bone, Gertrude

Booth, Margaret

Boswell, James    [2]

Bowen, Marjorie    [2]

Bridgman Metchim, D.

Brimley Johnson, R.

Brinsley Sheridan, Richard

Brontë, Charlotte    [2]    [3]

Brontë, Emily    [2]    [3]

Brontë Sisters

Brooke, Rupert    [2]

Brooke, Stopford

Brown Burgin, George

Brown, Vincent

Browne, Sir Thomas

Browning, Robert

Brummell, Beau

Brussof, Valery

Buchanan, Meriel

Buckrose, J.E.

Bullock, George

Bullock, Shan F.

Burney, Fanny    [2]

Bury, Lady Charlotte

Butcher, Lady

Butler, Samuel    [2]    [3]

Butt, Clara

[]

[C – D]

Cameron, Julia Margaret

Cannan, Gilbert

Carey, Wymond

Carlyle, Jane

Carlyle, Thomas    [2]

Carroll, Lewis

Carter, Elizabeth

Case, Miss Janet

Chadwick, Ellis H.

Chalmers, Anne

Chaucer, Geoffrey

Cherbury, Lord Herbert of

Chesterfield, Lord

Chorley Fanshawe, George Augustus Frederick

Christian, Bertram

Christie, Mary

Churchill, Winston

Clark of Tillypronie, Lady

Clifford, James L.

Cobden-Sanderson, Thomas James

Cole, Rev. William

Coleridge, Bernard John Seymour

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

Coleridge, Sara

Coleridge, Stephen

Comyns Carr, Mrs

Congreve, William    [2]    [3]    [4]

Conrad, Joseph    [2]    [3]    [4]    [5]    [6]    [7]

Corelli, Marie

Cortes Holliday, Robert

Courtney, W.L.

Couts, Thomas

Coutts, Francis

Cowper, William

Crabbe, George

Crichton-Browne, Sir James

Crosbie, Mary

Crotch, W. Walter

Cruso, H.A.A.

Cunnick, A.

Cust, Mrs Henry

Cuthell, Edith E.

Daly, Augustin

Daly, Joseph Francis

Darwin, Sir Francis

Davies, Emily

Dawson, A.J.

de la Mare, Walter    [2]

de la Pasture, Mrs Henry

de La Vallière, Louise

de Morgan, W.

De Quincey, Thomas    [2]    [3]

De Sales La Terrière, Colonel B.

de Sélincourt, Beryl

de Sélincourt, E.

de Sévigné, Madame

Dearmer, Geoffrey

Debenham, Mary H.

Defoe, Daniel    [2]

Delane, John Thadeus

Diaghilev, Sergei

Dickens, Charles    [2]    [3]

Dillon, Arthur    [2]

Dobrée, Bonamy

Domett, Alfred

Donne, John

Dostoevsky, Aimée

Dostoevsky, Fyodor    [2]    [3]    [4]    [5]

Douglas, Norman

Dreiser, Theodore

Drinkwater, John    [2]

Dunsterville, Major-General L.C.

[]

[E – G]

Eagle, Solomon

Eccleston Harper, S.

Eccott, W.J.

Eden, Miss

Edgeworth, Maria

Edwards, A. Trystan

Eliot, George    [2]    [3]    [4]

Eliot, T.S.

Elizabeth, Queen

Elliot, W.G.

Ellis, S.M.

Ellis, Stewart M.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Evelyn, John    [2]

Ewart, Wilfrid

Fanshawe, Ann Lady

Farrer, R.J.

Farrer, Reginald

Fielding Hall, Harold    [2]

Fineman, Hayim

Fischel, Oskar

Fitzpatrick, Kathleen

Foakes Jackson, F.J.

Forster, E.M.    [2]    [3]    [4]

Fox, Archibald Douglas

France, Anatole

Friese-Greene, Mr

Fry, Roger    [2]

Fulke Greville, Sir

Fuller Maitland, Mrs

Furniss, Harry

Fyvie, John

Galsworthy, John

Gaskell, Mrs

Gaussen, Alice C.C.

George, W.L.

Gerard, Dorothea

Gibbon, Edward    [2]

Gissing, Algernon

Gissing, George    [2]    [3]    [4]

Glenconner, Pamela

Gloag, John

Goldsmith, Oliver

Gordon Hake, Thomas

Gordon, Seton

Gorky, Maxim

Gosse, Edmund    [2]    [3]

Graham, Harry

Graham, Mrs Henry

Graham, Stephen

Granville Barker, H.

Gribble, Francis

[]

[H]

Hakluyt, Richard    [2]

Haldane, Mary Elizabeth

Hallward, Reginald Francis

Hamilton Jenkin, A.K.

Hamilton Sorley, Charles

Hamilton Synge, Mrs

Hamilton, Clayton

Hamilton, Cosmo

Harben, Will. N.

Harberton, Viscount

Hardy, Thomas    [2]    [3]

Harraden, Beatrice

Harris, John F.

Harrison, Frederic

Hartley Coleridge, Ernest

Hawker, Mary Elizabeth

Hawthorne, Julian

Hawtrey, Charles

Hay, Marie

Hayden, Eleanor G.

Haydon., R.B.

Hayward, Arthur L.

Haywood, Mrs Eliza

Hazlitt, William

Hemingway, Ernest

Henham, Ernest G.

Henley, William Ernest

Hergesheimer, Joseph    [2]    [3]    [4]    [5]

Hewlett, Maurice

Hill, Constance    [2]    [3]    [4]

Hind, C. Lewis

Hinkson, H.A.

Hitchener, Elizabeth

Holland, Elizabeth Lady

Hood, Thomas

Hookham, Paul

Hope, Anthony    [2]

Housman, Laurence

Howard, Newman

Howells W.D.    [2]

Huard, Charles

Hudson, W.H.    [2]

Hunt, Violet

Huntingdon, Lady

Huxley, Aldous    [2]

[]

[I – L]

Irving, Washington

Isabella, Anne

Jacks, L.P.    [2]

James, Henry    [2]    [3]    [4]    [5]    [6]    [7]    [8]

Jerningham, Edward

Jerome, Jerome K.

Jerrold, Walter

Jewsbury, Geraldine

Johnson, Lionel

Johnson, Samuel

Johnston Forbes-Robertson, Sir

Johnston, Mary

Jones, E.B.C.

Jopling, Louise

Joyce, James

Kapp, Edmond X.

Kenney, Annie

Kenny, Louise

Kernahan, Coulson    [2]

Kilmer, Joyce

King Waddington, Mary

Kipling, Rudyard

Kitton, F.G.

Lair, J.

Lanceley, William

Larkins, William

Lawrence, D.H.    [2]

Le Blond, Mrs Aubrey

Le Gallienne, Richard

Leacock, Stephen

Ledwidge, Francis

Lee, Vernon    [2]

Lewis May, James

Lindsay, Nicholas Vachel

Locke, William J.

Locker-Lampson, Frederick

Lockhart, J.G.

London, Jack

Longueville, Thomas

Lorimer, Adam

Lorrimer, Charlotte

Lubbock, Percy

Lucas, E.V.    [2]

Lynch Piozzi, Hester

Lynd, Robert

[]

[M – N]

M. Richardson, Dorothy

Maartens, Marten

Macaulay, R.

MacCarthy, Mary

MacCartney Lane, Elinor

Mackenzie, Compton

MacKenzie, Compton

Mansfield, Katherine

March-Phillipps, Leslie

Martin, E.M.

Masters, Edgar Lee

Maude, Cyril

Maurois, André

Maxwell, Donald

McCracken, Elizabeth

McKenna, Stephen

Meath, Mary Countess of

Melba, Nellie

Melville, Herman

Melville, Lewis

Meredith, George    [2]    [3]    [4]

Merrick, Leonard    [2]

Meynell, Alice

Meynell, Viola

Middleton Murry, John

Mirrlees, Hope

Moir, David Macbeth

Molmenti, Pompeo

Montaigne, Michel de

Montgomery, K.L.

Moore, George    [2]

Moore, George

Moore, Spencer

Mordaunt, Elinor    [2]

Morrell, Lady Ottoline

Mumby, Frank A.

Murasaki, Lady

Mytton, Jack

Nevill, Lady Dorothy    [2]

Newcastle, Duchess of

Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, Duke and Duchess of

Newton, Lady

Normanby, Henry

Norris, W.E.    [2]    [3]    [4]    [5]    [6]

[]

[O – R]

Onions, Oliver

Osborne, Dorothy

Owen, Ashford

Paget, Stephen

Parker, Sir Gilbert

Partington, Wilfred

Paston, John

Patmore, Coventry

Paton, W.R.

Pearsall Jacks, Lawrence

Pearsall Smith, Logan    [2]

Pease, Sir Alfred E.

Peck, Walter Edwin

Peel, Lady Georgiana

Penrose Trevelyan, Janet

Pepys, Samuel

Pett Ridge, W.

Piérard, Louis

Ponder, Winifred

Ponsonby, Arthur and Dorothea

Priestley, J.B.

Queen Alexandra

Raleigh, Professor Walter

Raleigh, Sir Walter    [2]    [3]

Rawnsley, Rev. H.D.    [2]

Reynolds, Mrs Fred

Rhys, Ernest

Richardson, Dorothy

Ritchie, Lady

Robins Pennell, Elizabeth    [2]    [3]

Romains, Jules

Roosevelt, Theodore    [2]

Roscoe Thayer, William

Ross, Robert

Rossetti, Christina    [2]

Roumania, Marie Queen of

Roundell, Mrs Charles

Runciman, Sir Walter

Ruskin, John    [2]

Russell Mitford, Mary    [2]    [3]    [4]    [5]

Russell, George William

[]

[S]

S. Mr of Art, Mr

Sandars, Mary F.

Sanders, E.K.

Sanders, Lloyd

Sassoon, Siegfried    [2]

Savage Landor, Walter

Savile, Frank

Scarborough, Dorothy

Scarlett, Sylvia    [2]

Schofield, Dr A.T.

Schreiner, Olive

Scott, Sir Walter    [2]    [3]

Sedgwick, Henry Dwight

Sellar, E.M.    [2]

Shakespeare, William    [2]

Shelley, Frances Lady

Shelley, Percy Bysshe    [2]

Sichel, Walter    [2]

Sidney, Sir Philip    [2]

Sigerson, Dora

Simpson, Violet A.

Sitwell, Edith

Sitwell, Florence

Sitwell, Georgiana

Skinner, Rev. John

Smith Surtees, Robert

Smith, H. Maynard

Smyth, Ethel

Somerset, Lady Henry

Sorabji, Cornelia

Soulié, George

Spearing, E.M.

Spenser, Edmund

Spingarn, J.E.

Squire, J.C.    [2]

Stalker, Archibald

Stanhope, Lady Hester

Stanley, Lady Augusta

Stendhal

Stephen, Caroline Emelia

Stephen, Sir Leslie    [2]

Stephens, James

Sterling, Ada

Sterne, Laurence    [2]    [3]    [4]

Strachey, Lady

Strachey, Lytton

Strachey, Ray

Stuart, Muriel

Sturge Hen, May

Sturge Henderson, M.

Swift, Jonathan

Swinburne, Algernon Charles    [2]

Swinnerton, Frank    [2]

Symonds, John Addington

Symonds, Margaret

Symons, Arthur

[]

[T – Y]

Taylor Coleridge, Samuel

Taylor, Una

Tchehov, Anton    [2]    [3]    [4]

Terry, Ellen

Thackeray, Anne

Thackeray, William Makepeace

Thirlmere, Rowland

Thomas, Edward

Thoreau, Henry David

Ticknor, Caroline    [2]

Tolstoi, Leo Nicolayevitch    [2]    [3]

Towneley, Marie Elizabeth

Travers, Rosalind

Trimmer, Selina

Troubridge, Lady

Turgenev, Ivan    [2]    [3]

Tytler, Sarah

Uffington Valentine, Edward

Upson, Arthur

Vachell, H.A.

Van Gogh, Vincent

Villard, Léonie

Villiers, Elizabeth

von Arnim, Elizabeth

von Boehn, Max

von Grävenitz, Wilhelmine

von Herder, Alexandra

von Rutari, A.

Wagner, Richard

Walpole, Horace    [2]    [3]

Walpole, Hugh

Ward, Mrs Humphry

Watson, Foster

Watson, Gilbert

Webling, Peggy

Wells, Catherine

Wells, H.G.    [2]

Welsh Carlyle, Jane    [2]

Wendell Holmes, Oliver

Weyman, Stanley J.

Wharton, Edith

Wheeler Wilcox, Ella

Whicher, George F.

White, Gilbert

Whitman, Walt

Wilkins, Mary E.

Wilkinson, Tate

Willard, Frances

Willcocks, Mary Patricia

Williams, A.R.

Williams, Harold

Wilson, Harriette

Wilson, Mona

Wilson, Romer

Wollstonecraft, Mary

Wolseley, Viscountess

Woodforde, James    [2]

Woolf, Virginia

Wordsworth, Dorothy

Wordsworth, William    [2]

Wyndham Tennant, Edward

Yarmolinsky, Avrahm

Yates, Arthur

Yates, May

Yeats, W.B.    [2]

Young, Μ.E.M.

[]